EVERY THREE SECONDS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 20804, 6 June 1942, Page 5

EVERY THREE SECONDS

GARMENT FOR SERVICES TAILOR’S OUTPUT LONDON, May 29. Army great coats use up 40 miles of cloth and lining a week in a single Leeds factory where one garment is completed every three seconds. This workshop and another which has turned out 320,000 battledresses a week are using every week enough cotton to go three times round the Equator. These are only two of the 250 tailoring firms who were given the largest single clothing order ever placed for 5,000,000 battledress blouses and 6,000,000 trousers. That meant 9000 miles of cloth, absorbing 10,000 tons of wool; 9000 miles of lining, and 200,000,000 brass buttons. A week later, 1,150,000 army great coats were ordered, calling for 7,000,000 yards of the heavy milled waterproofed cloth specially produced for the purpose by the Yorkshire mills, who blend six different colours of wool to make the perfect khaki. In six months the overcoats produced from Yorkshire cloth would have provided 25 years’ supply in normal times. These huge mass-producing factories can undertake gigantic contracts like half a million battledresses or overcoats because they are equipped with the most modern of labour-saving machines and in peace time produce huge quantities of men’s suits and coats. Little adaptation is required to turn the machines over to war production, which includes not only the standard army uniform but tropical kit of drill for troops serving overseas, heavy woollen goods in Royal Navy and air force blue, as well as slacks, tunics and skirts for the girls on gun sites and bomber stations.

All this war work means that only a fraction of the British clothing industry can work on “civvy” wear, now standardised as utility suits.