MOTORS FOR ’PLANES

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 51, Issue 3153, 5 August 1942, Page 6

MOTORS FOR ’PLANES

BRITAIN’S ENGINE WORKERS YEAR’S PRODUCTION IN WEEK (By Jack McLaren) LONDON, May 14 Labelled with an identity badge, I stepped into a vast factory where thousands of men and women are producing Rolls-Royce Merlin engines for Spitfires, Hurricanes, Wellingtons. Halifaxes, Beaufighters and other famous British war planes.

Because of the isolation of the factory, many of these employees have to make long journeys to their work. Jean Ross, a- Churchill machine toolminder, rises daily at a quarter to five in the morning and walks two and a half miles to a bus, and by the time she arrives hoine again at 9.45 p.m. she has travelled 40 miles.

Women comprise 33 per cent of the staff. The manufacture of Merlin motors —the 12-cylinder, liquid-cooled, best aero-engines in the world —calls for such accuracy that some of the parts must be correct to a quarter oi a thousandth of an inch, and it is women who carry out most of the delicate inspection of the parts. In the interests of increased production the staff works 12 hours a day, many on Sundays also. There has never been a major stoppage of work at this factory, and absenteeism is rare.

As elsewhere among British -war workers, there are complaints about not enough coupons for work-clothes. Because of so much oil, shoes weal out particularly quickly. Most complaints in fact reveal their eagerness to get on with their jobs. When certain factory supplies have failed to arrive on time —perhaps because of the sinking of ships bringing them from the United States—work people have complained of not having enough to do, and of production being held up

More Merlins are now made in a week than were turned out in a year for the'expansion of the firm’s productive activity. Some of the machine tools are lease-lend, but most of them are British, and work people are proud of theii* being British, just as they are proud of the Merljfris themselves,

At the lunch-time dance in the vasi canteen theatre, one of the watching crowd, William Millar, a valve welder told me proudly, as though he himself had been responsible for the whole achievement, how the horsepower of the Merlin XK had been increased from 890 in 1936 to 1260 today, with its famous altitude performance constantly being bettered, yet all with a weight increase of only 8.5 per cent.

Both the people and the factory itself are as important military objectives as any in this war. If Hitlei ‘•o’lld only get at them!