Merv Lewis: Battle that put heavy industry in the front line

The killing fields of the Somme were a testimony to the power of modern industry to manufacture war machines of ferocious destruction. Military commanders demanded increasing quantities of heavy high explosive shells to batter the German trenches. The nation that could produce the most, and endure the longest, would in all probability win in the end.

The Great War was fought by a dual army, one in the fields of France and Flanders, and one in the workshops of British industry. On the home front, the men and women of Yorkshire laboured in munitions factories to feed the voracious appetite of the industrial battlefield.

National shell factories were constructed by the Ministry of Munitions at Barnsley, Bradford, Huddersfield, Keighley, Leeds, Rotherham and Hull, producing by the time of the Somme 715,000 shells. Their purpose was to assemble shell components, supplied by an army of local firms who had no previous experience of manufacturing war goods. They were operated by management boards, comprised of unpaid local industrial leaders, who installed the machinery, recruited and trained workers, and issued contracts to engineering firms.

Leeds had three national shell factories employing 4,447 men and 3,730 women. In the “gallery”, shell parts were assembled by an all-women workforce of 532. Women became a regiment of the “dual army”, substituting for men called to the front line.

They travelled in regimental style by train to the workshops, and were “of a superior working class”, recruited mainly from the households of skilled artisans.

The working day was intense: until 1917 the factories worked a three-shift system, but then reverted to two shifts, a realisation of the huge physical workload imposed on women.

Sheffield was the home of two large national projectile factories, churning out heavy shell, and managed by Thomas Firth & Co. and Hadfield’s Ltd.

The Firth Factory at Templeborough occupied a 13 acres site, built at a cost of £800,000 and employing 5,500 workers, mainly women. Hadfield’s factory at Tinsley occupied 10 acres, costing £900,000, and employing 4,000 workers. Building the factories was a huge task, requiring thousands of machines and the construction of railways. By mid-1917, these two factories had produced 570,000 heavy shells.

Yorkshire engineering firms were organised by local munitions boards. By early 1916, nearly 500 workshops in Leeds had converted to munitions factories, making shells, gun castings, machine gun mountings, rifles, and cartridges.

The Sheffield Munitions Committee organised the local manufacture of war goods, from fuses, primers, friction tubes, gauges, trench mortars, steel helmets, ammunition boxes, grenades to gun forgings. War contractors varied from makers of lawn mowers to producers of high-speed steel, from motor vehicle makers to cutlery manufacturers, and even the University of Sheffield’s Applied Science Department became a munitions contractor.

But what of the Leeds Pals who attacked on the industrial battlefield of the Somme on July 1, 1916? It was a short life – 530 casualties out of 750 attacking, and of these, 230 were killed.

Despite the destructive power launched against German forces, they did not buckle. The Leeds Pals attacked into no man’s land only to face machine guns and artillery, a result of the failure of the British bombardment.

On the Somme, the British were still relatively short of heavy artillery and high explosive shell, and Germany’s industrial war machine was superior in heavy guns. At the same time, 25 to 30 per cent of the shells fired during the preliminary bombardment were duds.

Yet the scale of the bombardment on the Somme was a sharp reminder to German commanders that they faced a formidable industrial power, and by the late summer of 1918 Germany felt the full blast of Britain’s dual army.

By that stage, British artillery had far more heavy guns, and in late September had sufficient stocks to fire some 2.5 million shells in three days alone.

In total, British artillery launched 168 million shells, a reminder that the Great War was fought between the workers of Britain and Germany as much as by the brave soldiers on both sides who faced the horrors of the industrial battlefield.

• Dr Merv Lewis is a principal lecturer in history at Sheffield Hallam University. He is co-author of a book Arming the Western Front: Business and the State, 1900-1920 which will be published later this year.