Old England My Eye! A Middle Westerner's View

by ARTHUR KUDNER

1

IT HAD been nearly ten years since I was last in England. I carried with me, besides the fifty-five pounds of baggage allowed on the Clipper, some notions of Britain that probably would have checked pretty closely with your own. You know: the old lion at bay, game, gallant, but creaking in every imperial joint, head “bloody but unbowed,” and all that.

Three or four days after landing, was my imagination red!

The first sight to dispel any such notion is the look on the faces of the people. That pulls your gaze from the blitz-scarred background in a hurry. It’s no spent, martyred, or dogged look, let alone a desperate one. It’s a young, confident, eagerly cheerful look. These people are more cheerful than we are. The only other look vying with cheerfulness in their faces is one of kindly solicitude for you.

This is no mere facial mask. It runs through their pulses and right down to their heels. Your ears verify it. You hear it in the brisker cadence of their step. If they strolled or strode at an average seventy-five or so to the minute in the old days, they must be clicking off an easy hundred or better now. They’re going somewhere, on business. They have things to do, every one. They know what those things are, and how to do them.

This is not to say that the people of Britain have brushed off the memory of the blitz with a gay “so what. ” No people could do that. No people of spirit could want to.

What seems to have happened is that recollection of the agonies and anxieties they have borne — before Dunkirk and after, through the bombings and fires, during the long aching time they stood alone — comes filtered to them now through recollection also of “their finest hour.” They took all there was to take. Braced to the crisis, they withstood it. They struck bottom. There was nowhere to go but up. They enjoy going up, and are delighted at having company on the way.

There are other things than memory to remind them. There are the battered, scorched, pitted facades of the buildings, mile after drab mile of them. There are the windowless walls, and the emptinesses where buildings once stood. There are the tidied-up wastes and rubble, the blast walls, shorings, sandbags, the “static water” stored in cellars open to the sky. There is the great bleak area — a setting big as Akron, say — where St. Paul’s stands vast in lonely splendor; a setting now nothing but gritty ruin, hammered level to ruddy dust. There are the maimed and the dead.

But the people stand out from all this like a bright penny in a grimy hand. In uniform or out, in village, city, or countryside, they and their purposeful activities feature and dominate the scene. They have had more than their faces lifted in recent months. They have had their hearts lifted. Perhaps being thirty miles from the enemy instead of three thousand, and getting steadily closer, has had something to do with that. Whatever it is, these British folks are putting their backs into the war with a single-mindedness and competence not even dimly comprehended by most of us here at home.

I had a chance to see this firsthand. On my own, and at times of my own selection, I made inspection visits to a string of British munitions factories and shipyards. Out of the variety of impressions gained from this kibitzing, four high-lighted themselves as of special interest.

The first I have already mentioned: the undistracted wholeheartedness with which the British people are devoting themselves to the needs, tasks, and duties of the war.

The second is that, in a measure not hitherto remarked, the widespread utilization of unskilled and untrained workers, and particularly of “green” female workers, hangs on American manufacturing techniques stemming from our type of machine production.

The third is that the morale of British workers, male and female, and of the people of the plant towns generally, is well into the “second wind” stage and, barring catastrophe, doubtless will continue both cheerful and lasting.

The fourth is that, in British thinking and doing, this is indeed a “people’s war,” and it is plain that in the almost universal training being given boys and girls, not only in producing war materials but in mercantile pursuits, Britain is accumulating as a by-product an asset of incalculable value for the years to come.

2

THE plants I picked out to visit varied sharply in size, kind, and method. Some were representative of the most modern techniques. Some were working new automatic machines alongside reconditioned or adapted old ones. Some were specialized plants recently built, designed solely for their current purpose. Some were small “family firms” typical of thousands in the country.

Others were converted plants, and showed it, their production lines cluttered and cramped by special need, their sweep choked, and their supervision complicated by interior blast walls. Some were so-called “shadow plants”; some were “dispersal plants.” Some worked thousands, some only a few score hands. Despite such variations, all contributed to the impressions I have cited.

No one can visit these factories, see the mood of the people in them, and miss the feeling of settled, confident purpose, the not-to-be-altered resolve, the sense of dedication that pervades them all. These men and women are working to win. They are set to win and expect to win. They waste no energy on speculating when the war will end; their whole concern is to make sure how it will end. Even so, there was almost a “home stretch” buoyance to be detected in the air.

This is not the “ patient endurance ” of which Vice President Wallace speaks, in linking British indomitability with what he described as the courage and intelligence of the Russians and the military might of the United States. This is a fresh dynamism, new to England. I suspect it flows from the new strain and segment of workers, the so-called “green” help, particularly women, who are turning in so remarkable a job.

Much has been said of the great work these factory women and girls are doing. Yet far more remains to be said and needs saying. They rise in the dark in their chill, plain rooms, line up in the dark for their transport, spend as much as two hours in the dark during winter days getting to and from work, mind the machines or the testing or inspect ion benches all day long under artificial light, emerge again in the dark, and yet find it in their hearts to smile and sing at their tasks.

They’re young, most of them, in their early twenties or below. You see them in training, far younger some of them, along with the younger boys, many of whom stand perched on boxes to reach up to the machines. And the factories are by no means the only area of effort fed and quickened by their deft hands and nimble brains.

An old business friend, head of one of the largest retail food chains in Britain, gave me this light on the picture. “Each of our stores,” he said, “averages some tens of thousands of transactions every week. What with the combing out of manpower, we now have only one older man in each store — a man unfit for industrial or military use. The real job is done by the kids. They’ve taken over, and what they’ve done has amazed us. They handle all the details of the business, the complications of the point rationing system and all that, and never miss a trick.”

That’s the way it is. You can multiply the instances indefinitely. Girls on the assembly lines, boys in the planes, girls in the buses and lorries, boys manning the ships, girls on the land, boys serving the guns, girls in the home guards, boys running the shops. Old England my eye!

It seems clear that the tremendous contribution the women of Britain are now able to make to munitions production is in great part made possible by the spread of American manufacturing techniques. The key to this is, of course, the breaking down of the job into small components suitable for machines to handle.

Unskilled operatives can be quickly and adequately trained for this specialized work, and the narrower the specialization the simpler the training. It is a long task to make an all-round mechanic — too long for the pace and urgency of modern war. But the “small piece” technique makes it possible to recruit raw help in great numbers and to get it quickly into productive activity. Relatively few hands need longer training as fitters, tool setters, and such.

I am told women like the machine job. Certainly those I saw seemed to. They are well adapted temperamentally, their foremen say, to the work. They like, rather than resent, the repetitive unvarying action the machine imposes. The men operatives are different. They chafe under the routine, like to shift operations and to wander about the plant occasionally.

We have a general conviction on this side that British men workers have no instinct for our type of machine operation — “no mechanical sense” is the accustomed phrase. How accurate that is I cannot judge. But it is clear that British girls and women are introducing an unanticipated factor which may one day compel our consideration. That is the “newcomer enthusiasm” they bring to the machine and its possibilities — a production stimulant we have largely lost.

3

THE youth, the deftness, the will, the earnestness these folks pour into their country’s endeavor, are helped along by many an example of catch-as-catchcan psychology. The veteran superintendent of a big ordnance works making naval cannon was saying how much and how swiftly his personnel had had to be expanded to meet the demands of the war. Once he knew his men as he knew his own family; it is different now.

“ But as we walked through the plant,” I said, “ it seemed to me these people knew you, felt a common aim with you. If most of these folks are new, how did you manage that?”

His eyes twinkled. “Ah, that took some doing,” he said. “I worried a lot about us all feeling strange. So one morning I cut the biggest rose I could find in my garden and brought it in. I showed it to two or three of the old hands and offered to bet that no one around the works could grow as fine a rose as that.

“‘Can’t we now!’ they came back. And next morning they showed up each with a bigger rose. The morning after, a couple of dozen chaps showed up with prize roses, some of them new men. The story soon got around that a lot of the boys had taken the old man’s measure on rose growing. We weren’t so much strangers after that.”

Again, a peacetime maker of gramophone motors who is now breaking production records on antiaircraft shells and getting the kick of his life out of it offered this one. His plant is a slapdash affair, steel roofs and paper walls. He employs about 85 per cent girls. The whole place was pulsing like a conga band, but his machines glistened like clean watches, and his parts rejections were down almost to zero.

“Our first plant was in London,” he said, “and during the bombings we got somewhat cuffed about. Naturally, our folks got jittery and kept to the shelters a lot. I couldn’t blame them, even though production went ‘way down. But I had a son at school in Wales, in a pretty safe area, so I asked him to come home. The next time things started popping, I walked into the shelter and told our people about it. I said I didn’t know what they were going to do, but that my son and I were going back to work in the plant, blitz or no blitz.

“ Well, they told me off all right. They said I certainly wasn’t going back alone, and nearly knocked me over hustling back to their places. Soon after that the plant got one direct and was demolished. I wangled together a lot of trucks and buses, moved the whole bunch up here, got ‘em quartered, and found a building — not much good, but good enough. Here we are, hot at it.” I learned later that this makeshift layout is one of the most efficient in Britain.

It takes other turns, this impulse for teamwork in the interest of getting things done. I was prowling around on some night tours, talking with secondshift workers. In this, a converted motorcar plant, the shelters were under the floors. I looked into a couple of them and asked one of the workmen if they used them much.

“Not any more,” he said. “We used to get down there with every alarm. But we found we couldn’t get any production that way, starting and stopping. So we proposed that we elect some of our own fellows to do the roof-watching — fellows we knew and trusted. They’re up there now. If Jerry comes over, we pay no attention. The sirens can go and the guns can go; we keep working. But if he does come close enough to put us in danger, our boys will send us out of reach in time. That’s between us; management and the government have nothing to do with it.”

This arrangement, I am told, prevails throughout Britain. It is a single sample of the attitude by which the rank and file of people are making this in truth their war. There are many such indications. They touch everything from production to food, from “ austerity,” which has to do with all the things you can do without, to “security,” which has to do with all the things you might know but mustn’t say.

The pressure in these matters comes less from the government than from the people themselves. They know what the score is, good or bad. It’s their show; they do the working and the paying and the dying, and they realize it. So they project, ponder, protest, adjust, and support the official programs, understanding them to be in their interest and behalf.

Food is a good example. For more than a century Britain has imported most of what she eats. That costs lives and ships on the sea, these days, not to mention what it would cost on land if the supplies failed to come through. So rationing is rigid and exact. The people are all for this. They know the necessity. They applaud the good administration the program has had, and cooperate with it. They turn in with stern satisfaction the wasters or the careless, and the courts do the rest. The papers carry many a story like that of the man fined for feeding his dog a spare slice of bread, or of the woman fined for scattering crumbs to birds.

4

THEY’RE not fooling, the people of Britain. They re dead serious about their war. So if a factory hand repeatedly reports late, or is needlessly absent, or coasts indifferently on the job, his mates, feeling he is letting them down, handle that, and turn him in, too. The same with the use of cars or petrol. Necessity is the yardstick. And if a man stops off at a movie, and to do so drives seventy yards off his specified route to get to a parking lot, he gets a summons and a fine — or the newspaper in which I read that was misinformed.

The result is, Britain is doing a formidable much with what by our accustomed standards would be a disquieting little. Production is high, the quality of output good. Morale is steady and cheerful, well founded on works instead of words. Food is not scarce. The most and best of what is available goes to factory canteens or to like places for the workers who need it most. It is plentiful for all nutritional needs. To my taste, some foods are even too plentiful. Brussels sprouts, for example, fall squarely in that category.

Detectable everywhere is a marrow-deep yearning, past prayer and not yet daring to be hope, to be one with the people of America in understanding and aspiration, in comradeship without end. They are profoundly grateful for what is. They have a heart felt sense of what might be.

I suppose no American with all his buttons likes to think of his country in the role of Santa Claus or a patsy to the others. Uncle Sap — the gibe hurts to the quick. Like most of us, I knew little more about Lend-Lease and its operations than the powder-puff and false-teeth feature yarns in the papers, and they weren’t reassuring. Of course we had to pull our weight in what was everybody’s scuffle, but the suspicion hovered that the arrangement resembled that of the promoter who proposed a trip to Europe, he to furnish the ocean and the other fellow the ship.

You don’t have to be in England long to feel contrite about thoughts like that. You can’t talk to our fellows who work with the British on the needs of our troops or airmen and not wish you had never thought like that at all. When they tell you the kind of coöperation they get, night and day, in the air or on the ground, in whatever quarter asked, at whatever inconvenience or sacrifice, you get ashamed that all of us are not more informed and less voluble.

This reciprocal aid was greatest when the need was most acute. As our production rises, as shipping facilities expand, as the full tide of our warmaking comes to flood, this ratio will of course go down. Let us not then forget that when the going was toughest, Britain did her first-rate utmost alike by Russia and by us, and that it was out of all proportion to her relative productive power and her own requirements.

5

ONE day this war will end. What will become then of the vast energies now enmeshed, the purposes now pooled, the duties now shared, the hopes now joined between this up-and-coming England and our own unprecedentedly powerful land? Certainly I don’t know. But if future peace in the world depends upon collaborative action chiefly between these two peoples, I think I do know one or two things.

One is that epithets like “ isolationist” and “ interventionist” are meaningless, and have nothing to do with the question. Another is that when, with peace, the let-down comes, it will be too late to supply any effective answer. Another is that attempts to cement the two peoples together simply by talk and good intentions will fail. Another is that only an undertaking of a size and character to excite the imagination, the moral perception, and the practical sense of the two peoples can get anywhere.

Ortega y Gasset has a sage comment on this. He has pointed out that groups come together and stay together for definite reasons. “They have a community of intentions, of desires, of great common usefulness. They do not live together in order to be together. They live together in order to do something together.”

What, conceivably, do the people of America and the people of England want to do together? That’s easy; they want to win this war and to erase the threat of the next one. They want to profit from the lesson of the last peace, which is that after the war you cannot “go back” to where you were and yet escape the consequences of repeating the conditions which brought war on.

After all, what’s wrong with going ahead? It means believing in the future, certainly. I must confess I do believe in it, especially since it is the only parcel of time left to us. And I believe that if as a people we so will, we shall stand at the war’s end in a time as clearly marking the past from a wellnigh boundless future as the day on which Columbus sailed from Genoa.

Much of the promise of this future lies within our own borders. More of it lies outside, if we want to lift our sights. There’s plenty to be done, in whatever quarter of the world you care to name. Where you find that, you find also the great chance for the serviceable, the diligent, and the bold.

Suppose, to go adventuring for a moment, Britain and the United States set; about making common cause with China in her aims for development. It need not be China; it could be South America or Russia, or wherever humankind has aspirations, wherever exposure to the possibilities of better and happier living would create wants and the need to create the means of satisfying them.

Britain and America could work together in such a field to mutual benefit, and keep on working together. In the main the talents of the two countries are less competitive than complementary. British genius is for the development of export markets, American for the development of domestic. Each has much to learn from the other for the service of a world in which there can be ample room for all.

Britain lives by export. We talk spaciously about our own international trade. It is a mouthfilling subject, but in discussing it we often forget one thing. That is, in peacetime the average annual volume of our week-end motor tourist business, our hot-dog industry so to speak, runs more than twice the average annual volume of our exports as recorded over a considerable period of years.

Coming back to our prospect in China, if there is where it turns out to be. We might jointly supply, scrupulously on a pay-out and not on a gouge-out basis, the engineering, funds, technicians, equipment, supervisors, training, to help her help herself. Her great east-to-west rivers from time immemorial have periodically jumped their banks, bringing famine, waste, and death to her people. Why should she not throw great hydroelectric dams across these truant rivers, use the power to operate needed transportation lines north and south, opening her great ore reserves to feed the heavy industries her possibilities and security demand?

The long-range objective would be to lift not only the incomes and living standards of China’s millions, but in their turn those of the additional millions of other people in the Asiatic area that she might one day serve. That is no little undertaking, but surely the time for little undertakings is past. Even partial accomplishment would pretty well dispose of worries about future markets, or capacity employment, for everyone concerned. It would provide new frontiers founded on desires and needs, far less limited than any founded on geography.

You fear we can’t compete in such markets? Perhaps not. If we can’t, we had better face that now. We had better get ourselves technologically hot and bothered and think our way to a plane of efficiency where we can. Ultimately we can’t get by on any other basis.

You may say all this oversimplifies the matter. Of course it does. All consequential projects have to be oversimplified at the outset — whether you contemplate revolution, matrimony, going in business for yourself, or an epochal invention. The point remains: if you want constructive collaboration between our people and the people of Britain, give them some task of challenging magnitude like this to do and they’ll work together, advance together, stay together.

They will then make real what has been called the century of the common man and, what is equally important, of the uncommon man also. Without the latter and his works the common man won’t get far. Beat your breast about him all you like; he never has.

In the old West, in the days when the fidelity of a comrade might well mean life or death on the trail, the plainsmen had a saying about the man who did not falter before peril. They said simply, “He’ll do to take along.”

We are fighting a grievous and terrible war alongside Britain and have every chance now to see just how she measures up. Judging by what I saw in England, she can be counted on to do her full part with magnificent vigor and valor. Assuming that we do not wish to stand alone amid the shifting forces and hazards of an unpredictable world in times to come, we ought to ask ourselves if she will do to take along. We must settle now if she is our kind of partner.

Do you know of a better one?