AT THE HEART OF THE ROAD TRANSPORT INDUSTRY.

Call our Sales Team on 0208 912 2120

Our "Campaign Comforts" Fund.

29th October 1914
Page 1
Page 2
Page 1, 29th October 1914 — Our "Campaign Comforts" Fund.
Close
Noticed an error?
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.

Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

Last Week's Request for Assistance Meets with Auspicious Support.

We devote space in another part of this issue to publishing the position to date of support in cash or kind for our " Campaign Comforts " Fund. We also deal further with the objects of the scheme. It is it a Christmas-gift plan, but a programme for the whole period of the winter which lies ahead of us and tile men with the wagons. It is a scheme which, to ensure its being carried out properly, will call for personal attention by the writer and his staff for many months to come. That attention shall be given with the utmost application and pleasure.

We are gratified to find that our announcement of last week has been cordially received, but we do not seek to add materially to the already large demands for war-fund contributions upon individuals, firms and companies. Many owners and manufacturers have cheerfully accepted the duty of doing much in their own immediate circles or neighbourhoods, and we shall be the last to press anybody who pleads that a sufficiency of effort has been put forth in their case. We none the less feel that our appeal for the benefit of drivers and their mates at the Front. is of a nature which merits a willing response.

Nobody except ourselves has yet made it their peculiar charge to look after these men in respect of those little extras which count for so much during the rigours of a winter campaign. One reads in the daily papers, all over the country, letters in which the cause of this or that regiment is pleaded effectively, but we have yet to read a plea, other than our own, which has its objective confined to the claims of the A.S.C., Mechanical Transport Sections. These men, surely, have claims of common fellowship as well as common occupation upon hundreds of our readers.

It will be observed, in the course of the references elsewhere in this issue to the progress of our "Campaign Comforts" Fund, that one London supporter of THE COMMERCIAL MOTOR has generously instituted a weekly collection in his works, and we have included there the text of that notice. We trust it may be adopted as a model in principle for other works in which machining, repairing and other like jobs are in hand for the industry. As to the larger works, in which heavy vehicles are turned out in numbers, we Imow that not a few of them have in existence weekly collections for war-relief purposes. Our hope, in regard to them, is that at least one week's collection may be ear-marked for our fund. If that course be proposed to the committee of management of any such works funds, as we ask it may be, we believe that the merits of the proposals which we are developing will immediately command endorsement of such a proportion in favour of "THE COMMERCIAL MOTOR Campaign Comforts Fund."

The importance of making advance arrangements to get the gifts to the men is appreciated by us to the full. We are in communication with officers in command of transport columns in France and Belgium, many of them personal friends of the Editorial staff of this journal, in order to make sure that no essential step is overlooked by us. Proper d7stribution of the gifts is even more important than their purchase and despatch. That these comforts will duly get to the men for whom they are intended will be assured in every possible way, and not least of all by the fact that the A.S.C. drivers and their mates will be interested parties. They will have the incentive both to seek out the packages and to load them.

The proprietors of this journal have given £10 10s. to the fund as a first donation. We shall welcome amounts from one shilling upwards. If second, third and fourth donations are found to be needed according to the demands and information from the Front, we shall be as ready to respond as we have the confidence to feel will be many of those whose names so far appear in our list of donors.

It is clear, from some of the letters which have reached us, thilt a. measure of hesitancy exists in regard to appropriate sums for contribution, and especially has this been the case with some of our leading makers. We consider, having ourselves started the fund with a reasonable sum in cash, that a first donation of, say, £10 10s. is all that can be expected from individual members of the industry, unless from certain of the makers who have a very high proportion of vehicles of their make in France and Belgium. It is not the amount with which we are so much concerned, as the spirit in which any donation is sent, and of that we are happily completely assured by the results which_are shown to date.

" One hundred and twenty 4.7 shells exploded as a result of this man's carelessness during the hour which followed." So we read in a letter from a French soldier to a friend in the North of London. The " carelessness " which is thus put on record is stated to have been the lighting of a pipe by an exLondon bus-driver whilst he was filling the petrol tank of his ammunition wagon. One would have thought that an open petrol tank and a cargo of 120 live shells would have been enough to have warned a driver of the danger he was running by smoking. But all those who have at some period of their lives had to run grave risks know full well that, unfortunately, familiarity with danger very often breeds contempt of possible consequences. That is, however, not toe particular point which we desire to emphasize in this connection.

We learn from another source—indeed, from the pen of one of our own reliable correspondents—that when first such large numbers of motorbus and motorlorry drivers were enlisted and packed off straight to the seat of war they took somewhat unkindly to the discipline of Army life, and it was not to be wondered at. Fortunately, the officers of the numerous columns engaged in transport and supply work, many of whom, as a matter of fact, are personally known to us, were not unprepared for this difficulty, because of their association with that particular class of man during several years of manceuvre exercises in which hired motor vehicles and their civilian drivers played a very large part. As a consequence, we learn that by very considerable tact, and yet with a proper amount of firmness, these men, so many of them impatient of rigorous control, have been gradually brought to realize that discipline is all-important in military life. We suppose that no lesson could have been of a more drastic nature than the disaster which caused the destruction of that ammunition wagon, if indeed it be a true tale. There is no necessity, perhaps, further to pillory a driver who will imperil his comrades' safety in such a wa,y than by recording its happening in this instance. We all realize how hard it is for a man to come straight from the comparative laxity of civilian employment, from jobs in which all too frequently it is possible to resent correction in no uncertain measure, into a period of hard campaigning where an order has to be obeyed, without question and promptly. Implicit obedience, according to the military standpoint, is one of the hardest lessons which these suddenly-made soldiers of ours will have had to learn, hut the majority of them will be quick to do so, we feel confident. We trust that the knowledge that rank misbehaviour of the kind which resulted in the wreckage of that ammunition wagon and its load will be known to those at home will act as an additional incentive to ex-civilian drivers and others to became soldiers in spirit as much as in name. We are proud of their enlistment. We want to be proud of their behaviour.

The man who will smoke while he is filling his petrol tank, here at home in civilian days, is a fool ; the man who will behave similarly on active serviee is something worse. We are confident that disobedience to orders will not be a, lasting criticism of the many hundreds of men who have gone out as. volunteers with the A.S.C., M.T. A wagon load ,of 4.7 shells behind him will in future be a sufficient deterrent, we should imagine, but we hope and trust that a somewhat saner interpretation of the conditions will prompt the men in whom we have such special interest quickly to adopt the proper military spirit, and to forget that once it might have been the possible thing to have cheeked the foreman or to have dared the manager. The officers, who are their substitutes, will, we feel confident, not make it hard to do so. As we have written elsewhere, evidence is forthcoming that they, as a rule, are fully alive to the difficulty, and are making allowances. One of the side effects of the present boom in the commercial-vehicle industry is the rush to secure additional draughtsmen. _inspection of the "Situations Vacant" columns in any of the recognized engineering journals reveals a number of requests for such specialized assistance. In particular have we noticed recently offers of employment, by firms who so far know little of the commercial-vehicle industry, to men who can help them in their new-found desire to manufacture lorry and wagon chassis.

In all such cases particularly do we remark that a demand is made that applicants shall be able to furnish proof of first-class experience in connection with the design of commercial-motor vehicles, or, it may be, of internal-cgmbustion engines and other components suitable for such chassis. In other words, it is clear that there are not a few instances where manufacturing concerns expect to rely for the production of an entirely-new class of machine, which will enable them to tide over slackness in other departments, upon the hardly-acquired knowledge of a man to whom they will perhaps offer 50s. a week.

. We have on previous occasions stated our conviction that this particular class of employee is not paid proportionately to his skill. Not every draughtsman is worth 50s.—some of whom we know are not worth 50 pence—but a draughtsman who is worth engaging with a view to his having a definite say as to the design of a new model should in common honesty be paid a lot more than the first-named sum. As a rule, he is a man who has been through the shops and has spent a lot of time and not a little money in technical study. He is supposed to know something of pattern-making, coachbuilding, painting and upholstery, machining, jig-designing, foundry work, and to have a working knowledge of applied mechanics and machine design and construction, chemistry, metallurgy, mathematics up to a considerable stage, and above all he must have initiative and originality : he has to be a specialist in possession also of a vast store of general information. Although not dignified by the name of designer, he often has to be solely responsible for the designs, or at any rate for part of them. He it is who has to initiate what the factory will make, and to scheme so that it can be produced with the most rigid economy. What he produces is the straw with which the factory makes the bricks that the sales department has to persuade the public to buy. And very often he gets 50s. a week for doing it.

Ths, trouble is, that the wrong sort of man is very often enticed into that particular line of business, so that the more-qualified and properly-trained mast suffers by association. The profession of a draughtsman is, in hundreds of cases, used as a satisfactory stepping-stone by young engineers who inevitably ga ahead to other and more-responsible posts. Recognition of this fact would do the industry in which we are interested real good. Not only are the draughtsman's wages poor when his qualifications are taken into consideration, but in many instances he is not even guaranteed continuity of employment. He is sacked as is the ordinary workman when work becomes slack. One of our biggest commercial-vehicle-manufacturing . concerns is notorious for the heartless way in which it thus treats this deserving body of "non-producers," to use a description with which their claims are not infrequently dismissed by works managers. A draughtsman with " a first-class knowledge of commercial. vehicle design" is worth not less than £5 a week— especially at the present time.

Thanks in advance for— The trifle you are going to send to our "Campaign Comforts" Fund.

Tags

Locations: London

comments powered by Disqus