Great Britain moves towards Total War
The Munitions of War Bill was submitted to Parliament this week. Its proposed powers were for the duration of the war only, but they nevertheless represented what amounted to a nationalisation of whole swathes of the country’s industry. For a liberal country used to minimal government interference it was to be a staggering transformation. The driving force was, of course, David Lloyd George and the purpose of the bill was to convert Britain from a country of ‘business as usual’ into a state of total war. The government already had powers to take control of any establishments which were needed ‘in the national interest’, but the new act put several powers onto the statute book which had been negotiated with owners and trade unions earlier in the year. Strikes and lockouts in the ‘controlled establishments‘ were made illegal. Unresolved industrial disputes had to be referred to binding arbitration. Workers were not allowed to move freely from companies on war work. Instead they were required to obtain a ’leaving certificate’ which was in practice difficult to obtain. The levels of company profits were defined and restricted by the bill. Any excess went directly to the national Exchequer. There was one glaring omission from all of this government control. Service in the armed forces was still voluntary. The government had not yet taken the step to ‘nationalise its male workforce’. At the start of the war conscription was politically unacceptable, but it’s time was coming and many people were beginning to sense it. making to the many men who lacked mechanical experience and had time available to gain the skills which engineering shops required. A third item concerned Rev. W S Weddell, a minister in the Rhodes Street Wesleyan Circuit, who had offered his services as chaplain but had not been required. In order to help the war effort he turned to his former trade as a turner going back to John Stirk’s of Ovenden for the time being. There will certainly be less swearing at Stirk’s from now on! English soil. One interesting point is the use of Hartlepool as the town name and ‘the Hartlepools’ as the dockland area where several cruisers and a submarine were moored at the time of the battle. but Cyril was in luck, the winner withdrew leaving him in first place! The Bentley family had a good day out – along with everybody else of course. ny Vale one pleasant afternoon were confused to hear several members of the public speaking in a foreign language. The confusion was well founded but there was nothing suspicious as they were members of the Halifax Esperanto Society. The report of the outing to Sunny Vale may be a bit tongue in cheek – we shall never know – “judging from the look of astonishment on the other pleasure-hunters faces, one might have thought that Esperanto was an absolutely unknown factor in Sunny Vale”. Esperanto was founded by Linguist LL Zamenhof in 1887. His aim was to create an easyto-learn, politically neutral language. He hoped it would foster peace and international understanding between people with different languages. Interestingly the autonomous region of Neutral Moresnet (3.4 sq.km) which existed as a condominium from 1816 to 1920 (ruled jointly by Germany and Belgium but not owned outright by either), had a sizable proportion of Esperanto speakers amongst its small population. The Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War declared Neutral Moresnet part of Belgium, but Esperanto still survives today in several parts of the world.