Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

BRITAIN AT WORK. CAULKING SHIP’S SHELL WITH PNEUMATIC CAULKER. {Photo supplied by Messrs. Gray & Co., Ltd., West Hartlepool.) desired—a ship to carry a great deal on very little tonnage and to make respectable head- way with the least possible consumption of coal—one may go farther than the North- Eastern District and fare worse. The cheaper class of cargo boat is not unknown, of course, on the Clyde, but the East Coast has the art matured of building the type expeditiously and well. To the untrained eye all shipyards are, no doubt, alike, and the operation of putting one boat together is very like the operation of building another. To a certain extent the impression is right, for experience is necessary to distinguish the variations of type. But if the casual observer fails to see beneath the surface of things it would have profited him more to spend the day elsewhere. The whole vast establishment may seem to be in irretrievable confusion ; and amidst the rattle of hammers, the roar of machinery, and the shouts of men no controlling force may be discernible. Over in the sheds frame squads and platers toil and sweat in the ruddy glow of furnaces ; in the smithy brawny blacksmiths twist and hammer shapeless masses of incandescent metal; in the shops joiners work wood in an aimless sort of way, and engineers dream beside machine-tools which run for hours at a stretch ; and down towards the river the “ black squad ” are riveting the keels, and shells, and decks of leviathans that are to be. No order seems to be anywhere ; everything proceeds in a happy- go-lucky way. Yet there is absolute order from boundary wall to boundary wall, from gatehouse to water’s edge ; and every man of the 7,000 on the pay-roll is working as closely to a general plan as if his duty had been defined and typewritten for him in the grey of the early morn. Shipbuilding would be unremunerative otherwise, and Britain would not be “ the country of cheapest production of ocean steamships.” When specifications are issued for a steamer of any size, every firm which fills them in sees the whole process of construc- tion clearly before it des- patches its tender. All the steel and other materials that will be needed are ordered provisionally at a quoted price, so that if a tender is successful there will be no rising market to eat into the estimated profit. Some concerns — Harland and Wolff particularly — merely charge material and labour—“ time and lime ” is the inapt description of this system—plus not a certain percentage as profit, but the rule is, as I have stated, to quote a price in- cluding profit. A brief spell of abnormal activity in the drawing office succeeds the formal acceptance of a tender, and then the whole operation of building the ship begins—not tentatively, be it noted, or half-heartedly, but definitely, and all, as it were, at once. Working drawings are got out, and the “lines” of the projected vessel are laid down in full on the great floor of the moulding loft, to be transferred in part at a later stage to the scrieve board in the frame shed. If the practice were to build one ship at a time or six ships simultaneously, there would of necessity be a certain order of employment, and the strain would be on one department after another. You rarely find, however, even two ships at the same stage of construc- tion. In most yards there will likely be vessels on the stocks at various stages—the