The Great War - Shell Scandal

The pre-war Royal Laboratory at Woolwich

For the first eighteen months of the Great War, nearly all of the army's gun ammunition was filled at Woolwich, yet at the start of 1914 the Arsenal employed only half as many men as it had in 1901. At the start of the battle of Neuve Chapelle on 10th March 1915, the army would fire more shells in the opening barrage than had been fired in the whole of the Boer War. The Arsenal could not meet this scale of demand on its own, even with the men working 96 hours a week with just one day off every four weeks.

The army's acute shortage of shells in the Spring of 1915 led to a political scandal - the Shell Scandal. The Prime Minister, Asquith, was forced into coalition government, and control of the Royal Ordnance Factories was transferred from Kitchener's War Office to a new Ministry of Munitions under Lloyd-George. He soon realised that only the mass employment of unskilled men and women in the factories could meet the army's needs. This "Dilution" of skill was negotiated with the trade unions, and from October 1915 the first women to work in the Arsenal since the previous century started their shifts.By the end of 1917 nearly 26,000 women - 35% of the Ordnance Factory workforce - worked in the Arsenal, mostly in shell filling and fuze and gaine assembly.

Munitions work offered "respectable" employment at a time when only a few other occupations, like nursing, did so. Nationally, about 1.6m women entered the workforce, 900,000 of them working in munitions. While many were married women who had been "housewives" before, or girls who were working for the first time, around 400,000 gave up the drudge of domestic service to take up well-paid munitions work. Any expectation that society would return to the peace time status quo ante was ill-founded.

Early in the war, TNT was introduced as a shell explosive to replace Picric acid. The poisonous effects of TNT were not realised. The effects were noticed first on the Arsenal's boy workers in August 1915, although the first two deaths from TNT poisoning did not occur until March 1916. One in four workers were going absent from work in the shell filling plants- either from illness, or, more often, from fear. The effect on the war effort led to government censorship under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). From the end of 1916 safety rules were introduced that effectively cut the death toll.

Press Bureau notice D483, supressing all articles and correspondence on TNT poisoning in the British Press, was issued in November 1916.

The Arsenal started in the war employing a few thousands and filling 100% of the army's shells. By 1917, more than ten times as many were employed, but the Arsenal filled only 7%-8% of Britain's shells. The new National Factories, set up by Lloyd-George, had taken over. The scale of war production had almost bankrupted the nation, and left Britain with a foreign debt that was still being paid off in 1963. The use of national resources was staggering; the Arsenal's workers alone made over 3.3 million fuzes like the one on the left during the war.