Making Munitions

CHAPTER FIVE Making Munitions

When he and Ethel began contemplating marriage, George felt he should get a better paid job. He arranged an interview with Aikman & Co., a general engineering firm in Geelong and was offered a position with a ‘big lift’ in pay. George moved to Geelong where he lived at the Bush Inn in Corio Street until he was married.

Aikman & Co. was a long-established engineering firm. At that time, it was run by a father and son team and it is still in business today as Aikman’s Engineering Pty Ltd. The firm undertook a wide range of work – ‘whatever needed fixing they would have a go at it.’ They did maintenance work on the machinery in woollen mills and other factories in Geelong, repaired windmills, ships’ pumps and occasionally even ships' engines, as well as building up an automotive repair business.

Soon after beginning with Aikman’s, George passed the exam to become an “A” grade mechanic at the nearby Gordon Institute of Technology. After qualifying George was asked to teach aspiring motor mechanics in evening classes at the Gordon. This involved much preparation work but George was eager for more money and experience so he was glad to take it on. In order to further develop his skills, he also went to evening courses in oxyacetylene and arc welding at Commonwealth Industrial Gases in Footscray.

Following their marriage in April 1938 George and Ethel shared half a house with a middleaged couple in East Geelong. This was a fifteen-minute bicycle ride to George’s work or to Geelong Station. George and Ethel enjoyed going to the races, watching VFL football matches at Corio Oval, playing cards with friends and going for Sunday drives. George joined a local Freemasons’ lodge, where he met ‘a complete cross section of the local commercial world’ and did ‘much watching and listening’.

At this stage of his life George ‘had no specific aims or ambitions apart from a general urge to secure a future other than on the workshop floor’. He felt that the chances of promotion at Aikman’s were slight, as senior positions were a family preserve, and thought seriously of pursuing a teaching career at the Gordon Institute as he had enjoyed his part-time work there. However, as with so many people, these sorts of decisions were taken away from him and the course of his life greatly changed by the Second World War.

On 3 September 1939 at 9.15 p.m. George and Ethel Alexander were among the millions of Australians who sat by their radios to hear the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, announce that Australia was at war with Germany. George recalled that ‘in the next few days the able-bodied were made to feel that they should enlist [because] the mother country needed us’ and he decided to volunteer for the navy. He never had a head for heights, so he hoped his card would be marked ‘not to be sent aloft’. However, his application to join up was rejected because he did not have a birth certificate. Soon after, the government introduced regulations preventing people in essential industries from enlisting and George found that he was in a ‘reserved occupation’, unable to move employment without permission.

Aikman’s Engineering soon began to get contracts for war work, although some of them led George to wonder about the efficiency of the war effort. In order to gain one contract, the firm had to have a welder with an aircraft-welding certificate, so George upgraded his qualifications and Aikman’s got the job. George had visions of working on the Wirraway project or some other crucial war work. The plans and materials for the job arrived, with demands for meticulous accuracy and precise welding. George found that he was constructing steel tripods, on which were mounted bearings, a shaft to carry a large steel reel, a ratchet wheel, a pawl to stop the reel reversing and a handle to wind with. He was gravely disappointed to find that his careful work was not for some secret weapon or some vital aircraft component, but for winding in the cables used to pull target drogues for aerial gunnery practice – there was absolutely no need for them to be built to aircraft standards. Other war contracts were equally unsatisfying, and George began to make enquiries about other employment.

Meanwhile he continued his after-hours work at the Gordon Institute, where he taught automotive engineering, machine shop theory and practice, mathematics and science. He also enrolled in several courses in foremanship and management and soon found himself teaching in these areas as well.

Through contacts he made at the Gordon, George learnt that an engineering company in Footscray was looking for a manager for a new munitions’ annexe. He went to meet the factory owner, a Mr Glover, and was offered the job, again at a greatly increased salary. George gave notice at Aikman’s and soon began work at Footscray. The Alexanders were still living in Geelong, so he had to leave home in time to catch the 6.00a.m. train to Melbourne. In the evenings he caught the 5.15 p.m. train to get him home in time for a quick snack before cycling into the Gordon for his classes.

Soon after starting at the munitions’ annexe, George ran into a problem that could have had far-reaching repercussions. His move from Aikman’s had not been properly cleared with the manpower authorities and the Footscray manpower office wanted to send him to the Maribyrnong munitions factory to work as a capstan lathe operator. George went to see ‘a mousy little man with a most objectionable brusque manner’, but he could not sway him, even though George was highly qualified in other areas and knew nothing about operating a capstan lathe. It was not until one of the departmental heads at RMIT intervened, that the manpower authorities relented, and George was able to remain at the munitions annexe.

The annexe was a ‘repetition engineering factory’, making a variety of products for the war effort, including the brass base of the primer for artillery shells. It was crucial that these products were made to the most exacting standards and there was an on-site government inspector responsible for ensuring this. There were two offices overlooking the work area, one for the secretary and the other for the manager – it was the first time George had his own office, even if it was only 10 x 10 feet. When George started there were almost 30 staff – 7 men and over 20 women. He was very much on his own as the owner of the business only called in once a week to see how things were going.

George recalled that when he started, morale among the workers was low. Their union was strongly communist and, until Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, it was opposed to the war. The workers at the annexe had several strategies to avoid working.

I soon found out that some of the younger women did not take their job seriously ... one or two would deliberately create a fault in their machine just to get me back to fix it, then indulge me with their loneliness problems...

More serious were the frequent blown fuses that would cause production delays of three to four hours. Nobody could work out why this happened so frequently until one morning George was in a position where he could see most of the workers and saw

The girls at their machines standing at the ready, hands on the starting buttons or levers, staring at the clock on the office wall. [In] the other workshop too the men had their eyes on the clock. All were watching the second hand ticking off the seconds, then in one combined movement they switched on. Result – a loud explosion out at the street pole. Giggling the women took off to the sanctuary of the lunchroom and the men tried to look surprised. One or two had the decency to look sheepish when I assembled all in front of the office and told them just what I thought of their efforts to help their boyfriends, husbands and mates overseas.

After removing some of the worst troublemakers, George gradually built up morale, largely by improving production methods and redesigning machinery to make it easier to use, while after June 1941 the union suddenly supported the war effort. However, George recalled the irony of teaching management skills at night, while he was having great trouble putting them into practice during the day.

George found that the tooling as supplied by the Directorate of Ordnance Production was poor and he worked hard to improve it. He recalled:

boasting to Glover how much I had improved their tooling and what rubbish it was. I couldn’t understand how a big government organization could release such tools. Some little time later I went through the same spiel with Frank Syers’ secretary, only to be told that Glover had been seconded as an ex-Rolls Royce tool maker to the directorate and they were all his designs. He never let on.

Production figures at the munitions annexe steadily improved, but he was still surprised when he was asked to become a director of the company that owned the business. At the same time his annual salary was increased from £800 to £1000. George was excited that he was finally a ‘thousand pounds a year man’ and he rushed home and told his wife that ‘I’ve cracked it!’, to which Ethel replied in doleful tones, ‘Oh! George, what have you cracked?’

By this time George was finding the constant travel and the evening classes at the Gordon were ‘getting beyond a joke’. He and Ethel moved to 26 Moorhouse St, East Camberwell, where they rented a downstairs flat in an old two-storied house. Although he still went to Geelong one night a week to teach a class on foremanship, the move to Melbourne saved many hours of travel.

The Moorhouse Street house saw George’s first move into buying and selling property. After they had lived there for a few years their flat came up for sale and George bought it for £3000. In 1956 he sold it for £7000 and bought a house at 143 Wattle Valley Rd, Camberwell, where he and Ethel lived until they moved to Queensland in the 1970s. Soon after moving to Melbourne, George transferred from the Gordon, where he had started a foremanship course, to enrol in a part-time course at what was then called the Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT University).13 He studied Industrial Management I and II in 1943 and 1944 and Executive Training in 1945. For his final thesis, George received the John Storey award of 25 guineas for the best thesis on industrial management. As at the Gordon, as soon as he had finished his course he was asked to teach, which he did for three or four years. Most of his students were older than him, but he frequently had to correct their English as well as teach the subject. By the end of the war George had obtained great experience in practical engineering as well as valuable academic qualifications.

12 Note to the author, January 2006.

13 RMIT has had numerous name changes since its foundation in 1887. Originally known as the Working Men’s College, it became the Melbourne Technical College in 1934, to which was added a ‘Royal’ moniker in 1954. In 1960 the name was changed to the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, which became a university in 1992.