Pioneer girls and flappers

Talk by Katie Wood, PhD Candidate in history at La Trobe University and Senior Archivist at the University of Melbourne Archives.

Pioneer girls and flappers, episode 6 of the podcast series Look history in the eye looks at the women who worked in Footscray’s munitions factory during World War One, and earlier. This talk was originally given as an online presentation for International Women’s Day 2022.

Presented by Public Record Office Victoria.

This podcast is produced by Public Record Office Victoria the archive of the state government of Victoria. To view the podcast homepage and all episodes, and to view records related to this episode go to https://prov.vic.gov.au/look-history-eye-podcast

Transcript

Note: the below transcript doesn't include the introduction.

Katie Wood

It was a fine September morning in 1897 and in the little valley on the banks of the Saltwater River behind the Flemington Racecourse where the huts of the Colonial Ammunition Company were located, 50 young women had been at work for an hour and a half when their quiet seclusion was shattered. 

Some heard a small report, the sound of a cartridge exploding, before the roof of the hut known as number 1 filling room was lifted high into the air by a tremendous explosion. The rest of the day was a chaotic mess of fires, debris and scattered cartridges, as firemen, doctors and representatives from various state bureaucracies accompanied by a growing crowd of local residents as news spread of the disaster.

At the heart of it all were the three young women who had been filling cartridges in the hut. 19 year old Alice McLeod died immediately, as it was her capping machine that had held the cartridge that exploded. 19 year old Lizzie Greenham and 17 year old Ettie Fitzpatrick were carried to the offices and died there later in the day from the horrific burns they’d received.

McLeod and Fitzpatrick were buried on the same day, their funeral processions met outside the Royal Hotel in Barkly Street, and from there to Melbourne General Cemetery the way was lined with people – the Leader estimated the procession to extend half a mile in length.

The response to the explosion and the deaths of these young women speaks to the importance that this seemingly small female workforce had and was to have on the working class community around Footscray for the next five decades. 

Because of the media interest and the coronial inquest, we know something more of these women than most who worked at the Colonial Ammunition Company (CAC) at the time. The fathers of all three were deceased, as was Alice McLeod’s mother. She lived with her grandmother, a brother and four sisters, one of whom also worked at CAC. Elizabeth Greenham’s brothers worked at a slaughterhouse and tallowhouse, in the ‘noxious trades’ for which the West was known at the time. 

If we can take the commonalities in the situation of these women as somewhat indicative of the workforce as a whole it is very clear that they were central to the family economies within their households. Beyond their households, they had an important role to play in the politics and union organisation of the area too, in stark contradiction to the sorts of biases and stereotypes of women at the time – making this story pertinent to the themes of IWD this year. 

The coronial inquest has been very helpfully digitised by the Public Records Office and all 61 pages are available free of charge online. The Inspector of Explosives Cecil Hake had long experience with the CAC management trying to dodge the more onerous regulations of the Explosives Act. In 1890 the company even claimed that it couldn’t abide by the Act because the women who worked there would refuse to wear the woollen serge dressed required. The Melbourne Punch published a pretty horrifying comment on the situation, “Lovely woman is never more heroic than when she endangers her life to look pretty.”

In the inquest, Hake comes very close to explicitly blaming management for the explosion – as evidence of their reusing powder that had been spilled in the production process came to light. Such powder had the potential to introduce foreign substances, particularly metals, that may cause explosions if they mix with the powder and then pressure is applied. 

Another aspect of the explosion that comes through in the inquest file is how little the women were trained in the functioning of the machines they used. None of the women were trained to maintain the machines, and only rudimentary safety notices were made available and then largely ignored. This ignorance of the overall process – and thus of best-practice safety precautions – is a common theme in the history of women’s employment in formerly male occupations. Women were usually introduced into an industry of work process as soon as it was mechanised. This mechanisation allowed the work to be both sped up and broken down into small, discreet processes thus requiring less knowledge and training (and therefore less pay) than when it had previously been done by the hands of better trained male workers. 

I discovered that this was explicitly stated by the company in my research in the National Archives Melbourne records accessed through the Archives centre reading room, but I also found there other rationales.

In the 1880s the colonial governments became concerned about the supply of small arms ammunition, which had previously been shipped from the UK. In 1886 the UK Chilworth Gunpowder Company suggested to the Victorian government that they allow the use of Chinese labour in production, to which the Minister for Defence quickly replied that the suggestion would be “extremely unpopular” and it was dropped. The following year the NSW and Victorian governments began negotiations with the CAC, who had already set up a small arms ammunition factory in New Zealand.

The NSW government suggested somewhere like Echuca or Albury, but the Victorian government warned that in the event of a strike they would not be able to replace the strikes (ie find scabs). The Shearers Union had formed the previous year and already had 9000 members. The CAC was also keen to use female labour, as it had done in NZ, and wrote that paying men for the same work would leave them at a financial loss. 

Footscray and its surrounds seemed to tick all the boxes - it was on a river that allowed easy, safe transport of the ammunition, and was close to centres of allied metal trades. Also, since the 1840s it had become home to many working class families, including many women who would look for work in the area. Historian John Lack quotes a local newspaper reporting that the new works would employ supposedly hundreds of women that it “sent a glow through the ranks of servant-girlhood, while it depressed Mrs Schild of the servants’ registry and panicked local matrons.”

So Footscray seemed to be the place to find white, female, ununionized labour. The CAC got two out of three, but almost from the outset, the women set about organising to improve the relatively good but still measly pay and onerous conditions they experienced. 

The first recorded indication of this happened just one year after work began– in 1892 a deputation of women visited the Minister for Defence in protest at the lack of work because of a dispute with management about the applicability of the Explosives Act and the quality of the product. The Minister replied to the women that they should be happy to become domestic servants because at least then they’d be learning the skills needed once they were married. One reported reply came “Become domestic servants! No Fear. We wouldn’t be our own mistresses then, nor knock off work at a fixed time.” The newspaper reports also noted that many of the women were breadwinners – it’s important to return to that point because it shows just how erroneous is the idea that working class women’s wages were seen as just supplementary to men’s. That belief was central to decades of vastly unequal pay for women that contributed to their unequal status at home and in spheres of life outside the factory because it prevented women from achieving economic independence. 

It may well have been the case that that deputation was arranged by the company, but it was a tactic the women quickly turned on their employers too. Deputations were one of the most immediate means by which women could organise themselves to improve their conditions. In the 1880s the tailoresses had shown Melbourne in a momentous strike that women in industrial employment could organise their own unions and their own strikes, but it was still hard – and particularly in industries that were either brand new or traditionally male because the existing unions tended to do what they could to undermine the employment and organisation of women as they feared competition from lower wages. 

In 1895 the local health officer received a complaint about the working conditions at the factory and in the following year the Footscray Independent received a letter from “A Most Disgusted Employee  described the situation in which women worked from 7.25am to 5.15pm with only a 5 minute break at 10 and 3 and an hours lunch break. The disgusted employee may have been perhaps Charlotte Crew, Alice White or Susan Gallagher, who made up a deputation to the Trades Hall Council in December, complaining of heat, poor wages and preferential treatment for some women. 

It was in that context that the explosion occurred. Perhaps encouraged by the community response seen at the funeral, in December (3 months after the explosion) an open-air meeting was held on a vacant lot in Nicholson St, Footscray. It was presided over by John Robert Davies, the local leader of the Knights of Labor. This was a sort of radical organisation somewhere between a union and a political party, introduced from the United States who had established a branch in Yarraville. The complaints now included fines for talking and other frivolous matters, and low wages. 

Things went quiet for a few years – perhaps another consequence of the explosion – but they returned in style six years later in 1903. The reporter for the Independent newspaper wrote in October 

“The sight of a number of girls and young women playing cricket in the immediate vicinity of the Colonial Ammunition Coy’s Works… on Wednesday morning, at a time when they are usually busily engaged at work, indicated that something out of the ordinary was taking place. Enquiries elicited the information that the lasses had thrown down the implements of trade and were in the midst of a strike against the proposal to reduce the piece work rates for the making and packing of cartridges… The girls say that it is quite hard enough to make a decent wage, as wages for females go, at 1s 31 per thousand, and therefore they struck. 

Negotiations were entered into during the morning, the management gradually giving way until they reached 1s 2d per thousand, which they announced as the maximum they would pay, and which the strikers, having concluded their cricket match, decided to accept. So the strike ended, and once more the employees of the company are working harmoniously together.”

The reporter might have been too hasty in their assumption that harmony had been restored because the strike instantly became a cause celebre. By this time, the Political Labor Council (the local branch of what would become the federal ALP) had taken over from the Knights of Labor as the main political organisation amongst workers around Footscray. They held a well-attended meeting at the Foostcray Mechanics Institute but both that organisation and the executive of the PLC unfortunately lost the minutes from that year! We do know that prominent Labor politicians spoke and the women present voted to form a union.

It would take another 10 years to come to fruition. Finally, in 1913 the Ammunition and Cordite Workers’ Union was affiliated to Trades hall and in 1915 it was registered federally. The union’s secretary was Richard Bell, who was also president of the Footscray branch of the Political Labor League. A membership register for the CAC works records 279 women members and quite a few male members. In 1918 the Footscray union merged with the Small Arms Factory Employees and Workers Association to become the Arms, Explosives and Munition Workers’ Federation of Australia. The federal union was dominated by the male union leaders from the Lithgow small arms factory, although it did have at least one female Victorian state president.

The formation of the union might have been spurred by the increasing numbers of employees at the factory, as countries around the globe prepared for war. It was certainly the case that Australia did not experience the immense, revolutionary changes in production and the gendered division of labour that was seen in the UK, Europe and the US. For one thing, Australia did not manufacture anywhere near the number of large munitions which demanded the employment of hundreds of thousands of women in the countries central to the war. Whilst those changes would have an absolutely profound effect on women’s employment everywhere, they were felt in Australia more as an echo (that changed in WW2, which Peter will describe). 

Nonetheless, their production was central to the Australian war effort – every .303 cartridge used by the Australian army in the war was made by the women in Footscray. The Munition Workers Union and the women it represented straddled a delicate line in the debates around the war and conscription that rocked Australian politics and the union movement. 

The CAC women were reliant on the war for their work – the female workforce reached a peak of 1000 in 1916 and were given a prominent place in the annual labour day parade. In 1915, 21 women marched in the parade and were given a concert in their honour. In 1916, 300 women marched, under a banner reading “Australia Defends Itself”. The report from the Herald was effusive “Nothing could exceed the neatness of their appearance. The lithe swing of their movements as they kept in time to the music of the band in front, and their strident enthusiasm for Empire and for Labor, made their portion of the procession the show piece of the day.”

But their experience of the war, like so many working class people in Australia, was one of price rises, increased workloads and hours and of course, loss and devastation of loved ones for an increasingly dubious purpose. And despite their showy patriotism, anti-conscription activist Adela Pankhurst of the famous suffragist family, was invited by the women to speak on the question during the factory lunch break at least once. 

At the peak of the war effort, there was a lot of press interest in the factory and the women, described as “pioneer girls”, often with the same sort of jovial tone that accompanies reports of women’s work that seems to suggest there is something novel and bemusing about it. 

A full-page report on a visit in 1916: “They sit, rows upon rows of them, feeding machines fitted with revolving circular discs punched with small cavities… The noise is deafening, but this does not seem to disturb the girls in the least, and occasionally above the din one hears them trying to carry on a friendly conversation. One young girl rolling cylinders as if they were so many cigarettes, uses her left hand as deftly as the right. This small person looks very important manipulating huge revolving rollers, a piece of mechanism to be left in charge of which would cause terror to the average woman. A certain amount of nerve is necessary for women in charge of machines, for by presence of mind in an emergency they can often avert serious financial loss… As they bent over the machines one could not help noting how well groomed all their heads were.”

But despite the glowing descriptions of the girls, their work, their patriotism and their appearance, nothing could save them from harsher realities of a society which saw their livelihoods as merely supplementary.

By July 1917, as the allies were clearly winning the war, government contracts for small arms ammunition had begun to dry up and CAC laid off 700 women. Conveniently, press reports also began to change tone, as more and more articles described with concern women who had taken liberty in the new-found independence they had won through backbreaking, dangerous and long labour in the munitions works in the UK and elsewhere. This was echoed in the Australian press. A mocking piece in the Benalla Standard described the “munition girl”; “a heftier, brawnier person never wore shoe-leather.” The Herald enquired, “The war gave us our ‘flappers’ as we know them; can peace return us the schoolgirls as we would have them?”

The union organised a protest meeting in which representatives pleaded that the women were often breadwinners, and one spoke for “the woman who had made munitions her trade”. The month after the mass sacking, 100 unemployed women munition workers met with the Prime Minister, although he walked out on the meeting after tempers flared. 

The union was isolated as the movement as a whole demanded jobs for returned servicemen. The plight of hundreds of recently sacked women was largely ignored. Further layoffs occurred in 1918 and the number of women working in the factory fell to 279. As the federal government increased its control over munitions production, the CAC plunged into financial trouble. In 1921 it leased the works to the government. Public employment had often been more male-dominated, especially in munitions and this proved to be the case when the government took over the works. By 1923 there were only 37 women working at the factory. It would take another world war to bring them back.