THE GAS INDUSTRY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18583, 2 June 1930, Page 6

THE GAS INDUSTRY

IMPORTANCE TO LABOUR

VALUE TO WORKERS IN THE HOME.

A speech delivered by Mr Arthur Hayday, M.P. (Vice-President, National Union of General and Municipal Workers), at the 18th Annual Conference of the British Commercial Gas Association at Eastbourne, October 28, 29, and 30, 1929. It i 3 a great pleasure to me to have the opportunity of addressing this conference of one of the great organisations of the Gas Industry, as I hope I may claim a first-hand knowledge of what I want to talk about, and I regard it as important at this Juncture in our national history to say what I am going to say. My subject is the Gas Industry from the workman’s point of view. I am a trade union official. I have been an organiser of manual and other weekly wage earners all my life. I was born in West Ham not so very far from the largest gas works in the world, and in the very midst of the largest population of working people in England. About 42 years ago, I was assisting in the erection of one of the large gas holders at Beckton. I started work at nine years of age. Things have changed a great deal since then. I believe that one of the roads built over the market gardens in which I started work as a boy is now called after my name. My working me has included what is still, I suppose, the most strenuous job open to any man in the fuel of any other industry—l have been a trimmer in the stoke-hole of a tramp steamer. I know therefore something of the practical side of the application of heat to industrial processes! I was for years a member of one of the few Labour Local Authorities in England. My memories go back to the day of the great dock strike and I have seen and taken part in the vast changes in the status and outlook of the rank and file of the industrial workers of Great Britain which have revolutionised the outlook of that great mass of unorganised, so-called unskilled workers—men often casually employed, often unemployed; men most of whom never had the chance to learn a trade by day, and were usually too tired and dispirited to learn anything else when work was over at night. And I know well how great an improvement has taken place and how much work it took to win it and build up the great workers’ organisations of to-day—know it too well to believe in risking short cuts to the millennium. What Gas Has Done for Labour. Now I want to talk to you to-day first of all about what gas has done for the worker in this industry, for the worker in other industries, and for all workers in their homes—and I regard is as a duty to do so at this particular time because there is in my opinion a great tendency to-day to overlook those great services. All too many folk are prone to forget the older established gas industry, and all that it has done for Labour, and to favour and foster the new baby electricity, just because It is new. There is also no doubt that the fact that here is something mysterious and marvellous about electricity makes some people think there is no limit to its possibilities. They are inclined to imagine that there is some magic virtue in doing a thing by electrictiy even if it can be done just as well or better by some other means and at less cost. Now r those of us who know the facts want to clear the air of that idea —which may well cost the nation deal if it is allowed to run riot, and may well put out of employment thousand? of workers with no corresponding advantage to anyone else. Electricity is only one form of the energy in the coal which is our great source of energy in this almost waterless (i.e., water-power-less) country. There is every whit as much romance and wonder in the conversion of the coal formed millions of years ago out of the primeval forests into the drugs, dyes, disinfectants, fertilisers, oils and motor spirit, and scores of fine chemicals, as well as into gas and coke which represent 75 per cent, of the coal’s heat energy, as there is in getting only 20 per cent, of the heat energy out of it in the form of electricity and losing all the rest and the chemical wealth as well.

The Romance of the Gas Works. The romance of the gas works is at least as interesting as that of the electric generating station—and three or four times as economically efficient. Electricity has performed and is performing wonderful services for mankind, and no one wants to decry or belittle them for one minute —but don’t let us get into the way of talking as if it was “the only pebble on the beach” and as if gas had done and was doing nothing for mankind, seeing that its record is what it is, and its power for service to the great masses of our working population is what we know to be. Driving Out Dirt and iJilidgery. Gas has driven dirt and drudgery and danger out of millions of working men’s homes and out of the factories in which they labour: it has diminished disease amongst the young and the aged and has given a chance of healthy and cheerful existence to the teeming populations of our towns and cities by halving the smcJke and doubling the sunshine. It has helped in many a home to save the man from wasting time, money and health in the public-house, by helping the woman to give him well cooked food in a clean and well-lighted house. Breakfast Time—Then and Now. The most notable change in these home conditions is perhaps to be seen at breakfast time. Probably those so fortunately placed that they have never known what it means to be unable to get even a hot drink first thing in the morning, fail to understand what it meant when first the working man’s wife was able by turning a tap and lighting a match to be able to make a cup of tea or cocoa, and to fry a bit of bacon in a few minutes. For the early shift such a start for the day, before the rest of the world is stirring from bed. means all the difference immediately between misery and comfort, and also ultimately between good health and ill-health. The gas ring and the gas cooker have Seen the greatest factors in abolishing the early morning “tot of rum” at the factory gates, and have been amongst the’ real builders of health and strength which are the foundation both of factory efficiency and household happiness. The simplicity of the whole business of cooking by gas means that if his wife is ill the man himself can cook his own breakfast—for “even a man can cook by gas” to use one of your owi\ slogans. And many a man whose father went off cold and cheerless to his job, now sets out well fortified for the day by a substantial warm meal, even it be has to leave by six or seven

o’clock; he has, moreover, been able when his wife is laid by to take her a cup of tea in bed before he leaves. In any case if he works on early shifts he can fend for himself if all is put ready over-night, and his wife can get up later and see the children off to school and prepare their breakfast in reasonable peace and comfort after the father has gone to work Again, no one who knows what he or she is talking about, believes thai any woman wants her house to be . dirty or dark or the food to be unfit !to eat—but cleanliness means hard 1 work, very hard work when the coal fire and the coal-heated copper is all that mother has to her hand, and cooking is no easy task when the fire J depends upon a domestic stoker. The Boon of the Slot Meter. Because electricity is the newest thing in the line of cooking and heating, some people talk as if the working woman was still living in the dark ages of the coal range, or worse still the little open ‘“register” coal fire with its hob, and nothing more for a kettle or frying pan. They ignore entirely the wonderful revolution the slot meter has brought about in the working home, even if that home is only a lodging. Gas has already made possible what the advocates of “electricity for all” can merely promise; and at a price the poor can afford to pay. I read : a few days ago an article on which ! can be done with a pennyworth of gas. It surprised me; but I expect it was j just ABC to most thrifty wives. The Cheap Light. I The truth is that 45 million penny-in-the-slot meters that have been put in the homes of our workers during the past generation—since about 1895 —have simply revolutionised life for our women folk in the matter of their cooking; in addition to which the incandescent burner has proved an enorbous boon in giving a light by which girls can do home lessons, and father can read his paper, and in giving with the light a modicum of warmth that is worth a good deal of cash; the gasi fired wash-copper is taking the horror i out of Monday in thousands of homes; and the gas fire is making the parlour useful as well as ornamental . The Safe Light. Moreover, the gas burner has wiped out the cheap lamp accident. The total deaths from accidents due to the use of gas from all causes is to-day much less than the number by which deaths from lamp accidents have decreased i since the slot gas meter became general. The Threat of Unemployment. I Are all these boons and blessings i which gas has brought at very small | cost to the worker and his family in j his home, and the enormous improvel ment wrought by gas working condi- ' tions when heat processes are employ- : ed in industry—plus the boon of works i canteens made possible by gas appli- ! ances—are all these to be forgotten or overlooked, and are the hundred thousand workers engaged in the gas industry and the many thousands employed in ancillary trades to be thrown on the scrap-heap, in order that the same services shall be rendered by electricity—at greater cost, with a huge waste of coal and chemicals and with a smaller amount of labour employed? To ask the question is to answer it i —but the trouble is that no one outside the gas industry seems to know the facts or, if they do, to think seriously about them and their inferences.

The Gas Industry Wants Fair Play. It is quite tiresome and futile for either the electrician or gas engineer to claim to be the one and only cure for all ills in the home or factory. Where there are technical advantages for one or the other, let them and the consumer, not the politician, decide. For my own part, I believe the actual practical result will be that every up-to-date firm and probably eventually every house, will use both. Gas works are often large consumers of electricity, and there are probably few pieces of electrical apparatus manufactured without the aid of gas. As long as the question is fairly decided on technical and economic grounds, well and good, but the scales must no longer be weighted as they have been to our disadvantage simply because some people think electricity is fashionable and “the coming thing.” On this point it may surprise some people to know that in the last five years in spite of the rapid growth of electricity under national protection and stimulation, the rate of growth of j the gas industry has been 50 per cent, 'faster; for every two extra units de- | livered lo the consumer by the electrician, the gas engineer has been called upon to deliver three. I repeat that nothing I have said is in any way said to depreciate the invaluable services rendered, and to be rendered, by the electrical industry, but only to correct the one-sided and extravagant assertions of some of its incautious devotees which may have a serious and unfair effect by influencing Government and public action to the detriment of an equally important and far larger public service. I appeal to all my colleagues in Parliament and elsewhere to look into this matter very carefully and thoroughly, and not to let rank injustice be done to a great body of workers in this old but ever young and progressive indus- / try. Let us have a sense of proportion and of the fitness of things and not run madly after what may easily prove I a “Will o’ the Wisp.” Now I should like to say something about the Gas Industry from the very [ broadest point of view, from that of j the community as a whole and not only of the workers engaged in it. Out-of-Date Restrictions. This is not the place to talk politics I and I and a large part of this audi--1 ence may perhaps agree to differ on I many economic points. But we can at least agree upon this, that whatever restrictions and regulations may be imposed upon any industry, they should be practical and for the public benefit, and not just meaningless remnants of obsolete legal prejudice and precedents, which rather remind one I of the human appendix survivals I which can’t do any good and sorae- ! times become really dartgerous unless I they are removed. [ I think since the War everyone, inl ternationally and nationally, has bei gun to realise that the time has passed for restrictions which make it dif(ficult for large-minded views to be i taken of industry as a whole. Obvious- ' iy, there are dangers in huge amalgamations and widespread “under- . standings,” and these must be provided against. But every intelligent perI son appreciates nowadays that large | scale concerns and large scale minds ; are necessary if we are to hold our | own. I am not a lawyer, but I know

As a chap grows older many things he formerly prized lose their appeal. But there’s one thing he rarely tires of—his pipe. Indeed, as a rule, the older a man grows, the more indispensable his pipe becomes to him. Of course, non-smokers will laugh. But what does the man who doesn’t smoke (usually because he can’t) know of the joys of smoking? Tobacco is often condemned, yet it is harmless enough so long as it is not loaded with nicotine, as the imported brands mostly are. Is there any really pure tobacco? Yes! The New Zealand are renowned for their purity. You see they are all toasted. Hence their wonderful flavour and delightful aroma. And toasting does more than that. It gets rid of the nicotine in the leaf and renders the tobacco perfectly harmless—something that cannot be said of any imported brand. There are several varieties of these fine tobaccos—all of them “best sellers”—special favourites being Riverhead Gold, Cavendish, Cut Plug No. 10, and Navy Cut