7. ‘By similar methods as adopted by the English railway companies’: materials and working practices on the western front, 1916–18

Prior to wielding the spending ‘axe’ that bore his name in the early 1920s, Sir Eric Geddes had gained a reputation for being an ‘improvident spender’ of public money.¹ His approach was contrasted to the policies hitherto pursued in the War Office by Brigadier-General Richard Montagu Stuart-Wortley just a week after the directorate-general of military railways had been established. In a letter to Henry Wilson, the DOM emphasized that the civilianization of the War Office had been accompanied by pledges of financial support that had never been extended to the soldiers. Departments that had previously been staffed by small groups of officers were ‘largely increased’ and the incumbent departmental heads promoted to higher grades to reflect their expanding responsibilities. ‘The way they waste money’, Stuart-Wortley observed, ‘is awful’.² Drawing upon his experiences of GHQ when the directorate-general of transportation was created, Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds took much the same line after the war. In the official history’s volume on transportation, he recorded that Geddes employed a ‘very large staff of civilian engineers and officials’ at the directorate’s headquarters. Edmonds’s observation was followed immediately by an unattributed quotation, which claimed that ‘“It has been said that at the outset the D.G.T. employed double the staff really needed for the work to be done, but that he did so in order to obtain 30 per cent increased output”, and in this he was successful’.³ Even soldiers with whom Geddes had fostered a strong working relationship before and during the conflict, such as Henry Mance, acknowledged that the civilians had operated with a liberty that had not been extended to the professional soldier. In the discussion that followed a lecture delivered at the Royal United Services Institution in 1921, Mance described how Sir Henry Maybury had ‘ransacked England and [taken] away all the skilled men and rollers and everything else connected with the roads and quarries that he could lay his hands on’ upon becoming the BEF’s director of roads.⁴

That a vast expansion in the size and capacity of the BEF’s transportation services occurred in the second half of the war is beyond doubt. Prior to the establishment of the directorate-general of transportation, the existing railway and IWT units in France comprised 17,500 men of all ranks. Geddes’s initial estimate of the personnel required to man his new light railways organization alone numbered 25,000, and by 1 January 1917 the DGT had his sights set on the deployment of 66,000 men (including those already in France) on transport duties behind the western front. Fresh proposals, which increased the paper strength of the directorate-general by a further 42 per cent, had been submitted to the War Office for sanction within four months.⁵

The composition of the human and material resources ‘ransacked’ from Britain and the empire, and the methods by which they were applied to the challenges of industrial warfare, are the subjects of this chapter. The acquisition of the resources necessary to increase the BEF’s transport capacity from 1917 onwards owed much to Geddes’s dual position, his contacts within the British government and the railway industry, and an acknowledgement among French and British leaders of the inapplicability of the pre-war arrangements made between the coalition partners. The transportation crisis of 1916–17 provided the catalyst for manpower and materials provided by Britain to become a far more integral component of the infrastructure and services operated in France than had been the case earlier in the war. The effective use of those resources drew upon the methods and expertise latent within the operations of an industrial economy. The provision of men and materials in quantities far above what had been made available to the military previously may have bred a resentment among officers that pervaded the post-war analysis of Britain’s war effort. However, it also laid the foundations for the material-intensive warfare that helped bring the conflict to a successful conclusion.

The provision of British resources on the western front

The directorate-general of transportation acquired responsibility for the coordination of all aspects of the BEF’s transport infrastructure over a vast area. Geddes took over the roads, railways and waterways from the Channel ports up to a point – known as the DGT line – that was ‘roughly defined as the rear of the area under fire of the enemy’s medium artillery’, and beyond which authority devolved upon the armies and corps occupying the space.⁶ The impact of industrial warfare upon the extant communications in France was stark on both sides of the DGT line in 1916. The munitions that Britain’s transport experts had helped to produce in time for the battle of the Somme created a ‘destroyed zone’ of some three to six miles, which had to be traversed by the troops responsible for supplying their colleagues in the attack.⁷ As the offensive ground on into autumn, the destructive power of the artillery was augmented by the deteriorating weather to produce a quagmire on the roads either side of the front line. Already by 5 October 1916, Haig recorded that the road between Montauban-de-Picardie and Guillemont had been closed ‘owing to its breaking up … The rain of the last few days has been very hard on the roads’.⁸ A month later the ‘soft state of the roads’ made it impossible for lorries to carry the 1,400-pound shells fired by the 15-inch howitzers, leading Haig to observe that the BEF was ‘fighting under the same conditions as in October 1914, i.e., with rifle and machine-gun only, because bombs and mortar ammunition cannot be carried forward as the roads are so bad’.⁹

Matters were no better on the roads maintained by the French army during the battle. During the entire Somme campaign over two million men and 371,000 tons of goods passed along the Amiens–Proyart road through Villers-Bretonneux on their way to the front. The road was essential to the supply of the French Sixth and Tenth armies in the vicinity of the Somme, and on 30 September alone it carried 38,000 men and 3,700 tons of material eastbound – twice as much as had passed along the fabled voie sacrée that sustained the defenders of Verdun. As the Somme drew to an inconclusive end, the smaller roads that branched off the Amiens–Proyart road lay broken up by the constant pounding of the ceaseless traffic. As winter set in both the French and British lacked the manpower and resources necessary to maintain all but the major traffic arteries behind their armies.¹⁰ By November 1916 the Reserve Army’s chief engineer admitted to Geddes that ‘with three successive wet days motor lorry traffic must be discontinued’.¹¹

Table 7.1. Principal road plant available in France, 1916–17.

Following his investigations in the summer, Geddes doubted the BEF’s ability to successfully maintain the road network during active operations, regardless of the weather. He told Lloyd George that the labour detailed to road repairs was inefficiently handled and the equipment available to the engineers was ‘not the most suitable’ for the task.¹² Maybury, as director of roads, was charged with rectifying these deficiencies. As he ‘ransacked’ England of vast quantities of road plant following his appointment (see Table 7.1), he became responsible for the upkeep of ‘all roads of any military importance on the lines of communication’.¹³ Progress was swift. By the end of April 1917 Haig felt assured enough by Maybury’s efforts to record in his diary that the ‘10,000 workmen, road engineers, quarry men’ and modern equipment procured by the director of roads meant he ‘need have no further anxiety as regards roads on the western front’.¹⁴

Maybury’s accumulation of manpower and equipment was a response to the BEF’s progressive increase in responsibilities for road maintenance as the war continued. As with the pre-war agreement regarding the provision of stevedores to unload British vessels at the ports, the Franco-British arrangements for road maintenance collapsed under the pressures of industrial warfare. Throughout 1917 Maybury’s directorate was immersed in a vast programme of road-building and upkeep that saw it construct, reconstruct or resurface almost thirteen million square yards of ‘cours’ by the end of the year – across a network that grew to comprise 3,267 miles of French roads.¹⁵ However, despite the use of 2,340,000 tons of road stone in 1917 alone, ‘demands for additional roads continue[d] to be received’ at GHQ over the winter of 1917–18 as the BEF sought to solidify its position ahead of an anticipated German offensive in the spring. In January 1918 Haig was forced to issue a memorandum to his armies, warning that ‘the available road stone is barely sufficient to maintain existing roads, and the present output cannot be increased to any considerable extent’.¹⁶ GHQ’s solution to the challenges of the war’s final winter will be discussed further in chapter nine, but it is striking at this point to highlight that – just as Geddes had noted in September 1916 – limited quantities of crucial resources continued to constrain the development of the BEF’s transport infrastructure in early 1918.

Attempts to relieve the pressure on the road network by the use of other means of transport were at an immature stage when Geddes had undertaken his mission to France. The DGT believed that a combination of ‘intelligent organization, labour saving devices, and light railway’ were required to economize labour on the road network and increase the speed with which the supply services maintained links to the troops on the far side of the ‘destroyed zone’. He wrote to Lloyd George that ‘plant must be secured from this country and the organization [to operate light railways] has to be created. We have little enough time to do it if it is to be ready by the spring and I am of the opinion that the matter should be taken in hand promptly and efficiently with executive authority, without one day’s delay’.¹⁷ Geddes was not the first man to recognize the potential value of light railways to the BEF. A policy for the operation of the isolated and disconnected systems behind the front line was first advanced in December 1915 by the QMG, Sir Ronald Maxwell, and a month later Haig mused in his diary that light railways could be used to ‘save the roads’ from excess wear over the winter months.¹⁸ As British units had taken over portions of the front line from French troops over the spring of 1916 the ‘usefulness’ of the light railway systems constructed by the French ‘quickly became apparent’.¹⁹ In August Haig decided to ‘inaugurate a complete system of light railways, and combine the systems already in existence under definite policy and control’.²⁰ However, discussions with individual armies over the form that policy should take led nowhere before Geddes arrived on the western front as DGT.

A lack of strong central coordination of the discussions from GHQ – Haig placed the DRT, Brigadier-General John Twiss, in charge – and the fact that the backdrop of the Somme overshadowed the light railways question led to stagnation. For individual army commanders the consideration of light railways was yet another intrusion upon the day-to-day business of running their armies. A month after he had received Haig’s instructions, Twiss was unable to report any progress on the development of a universal policy for the employment of light railways on the western front.²¹ Time, as both Geddes and the deputy QMG recognized, was not on the BEF’s side. It was ‘necessary’, Colonel Woodroffe asserted, ‘to apply all our efforts to developing a 60-centimetre system at the greatest possible speed in order to ensure that as much of the front area as possible is served by this means before the winter sets in’.²²

Thanks to his involvement in the procurement of materials and the establishment of the directorate that oversaw its operations, the light railway network that emerged on the western front has come to represent Geddes’s work as DGT. After both hearing Haig’s views on the subject and inspecting the French light railways, the civilian recommended ‘the purchase of a considerable mileage of track, viz. 1,000 miles; some 800 steam locomotives, 200 electric tractors, and some 3,000 wagons’. He stressed that ‘no further time should be lost’ in the procurement of the materials, and the equipment had been ordered even before he accepted the post of DGT.²³ However, light railway locomotives and tractors had a long lead time – which had combined with the lack of priority afforded to the medium by the BEF to retard the development of a coherent, widespread light railway policy in France. The records of Robert Hudson (a light railway equipment supplier in Leeds) from October 1914 to May 1916 show that nine of the eighteen engines built by the firm during the first half of the war were despatched to Mesopotamia, while the War Office discovered that other British manufacturers were fulfilling orders for French artillery railways. In September 1915 an indent for ten locomotives and 200 wagons had been sent home from GHQ, for equipment that was expected to form a useful reserve but not considered urgent – an order based on the indent was not placed until January 1916. Two months later the original order was supplemented by a request for fifty more locomotives, 1,200 wagons and fifty miles of track, and the War Office decreed that British army orders should take precedence over any other orders placed with British manufacturers. However, deliveries of the materials requested before Geddes arrived in France were not completed until June 1917.²⁴ Consequently, when Sapper W. J. Hill, in peacetime an employee of the LNWR, arrived at Marœuil with the 19th Light Railway Operating Company early in 1917 he and his comrades found ‘no motive power of any description, and only a few bogie wagons of French design’.²⁵

Table 7.2. Light railway construction in France and Flanders, 1917–18.

Source: History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, ed. H. L. Pritchard (11 vols., Chatham, 1952), v. 665.

Units like Hill’s, formed to oversee the operation and maintenance of the network, witnessed a remarkable growth in motive power, carrying capacity and track mileage over the course of the year. Geddes’s decision to order 1,000 miles of track and abundant quantities of locomotives, tractors and rolling stock in September 1916 – coupled with his ability to ensure sufficient attention was afforded to their provision – permitted the rapid expansion of the BEF’s light railways organization. Before Geddes’s arrival the BEF possessed just eighty miles of operable light railways. By April 1917 this had risen to over 200 miles, and before the end of 1917 the British had constructed over 1,000 miles of light railway track behind the front (see Table 7.2). Before the end of 1917, Hill reflected, the depot at Fosseux where he was employed on wagon repairs resembled ‘an English railway yard … on, of course, a small scale’.²⁶ The yard contained British-built locomotive and wagon sheds for the repair and maintenance of largely British-supplied equipment, and the drivers were detailed for duty through a time office run ‘by similar methods as adopted by the English railway companies’.²⁷

Without light railways the bombardments of unprecedented ferocity that characterized the BEF’s offensive operations in 1917 could not have been sustained at anything like the same intensity for the same duration. In September ‘no less than 7,000 tons of ammunition were being carried daily’ by light railways in support of the operations around Ypres,²⁸ on a network that was almost exclusively conceived, constructed and operated by Britain’s transport experts. The BEF’s light railways relied upon skills developed on imperial and global engineering projects alongside working methods pioneered on some of the nation’s largest railways. However, in terms of one of its principal duties – that of providing relief to the overburdened French road network – the light railway organization created in 1917 was a failure.²⁹ In fact, despite the vast increase in the tonnage conveyed by light railways as the year unfolded (see Figure 7.1), demands for stone to repair and construct roads continued to grow. In January 1917 General Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army received 405 lorry-loads of road stone. By July the same army required 1,000 lorry-loads, even though its light railways carried an average of 60,000 tons of stone (the equivalent of 1,350 lorries) each week.³⁰ Light railways, rather than removing the need for motorized transport entirely, merely shifted the traffic to new locations that – particularly in the form of marshalling yards and access roads – created their own considerable demands for new road-building. As will be seen, over the winter of 1917– 18 this development had significant implications for BEF’s transportation policies beyond the railhead.

Behind the railhead, British resources also became increasingly important in the second half of the war. Geddes’s arrival coincided with the final abandonment of the pre-war Franco-British arrangements regarding the BEF’s supply needs on the French main line railways. As the BEF had expanded in 1915 and 1916 the French authorities had ‘urged repeatedly that more rolling stock should be imported’ from Britain to help carry the growing volume of British traffic,³¹ and the twin pressures of Verdun and the Somme encouraged further modifications of British responsibilities on the western front. As early as 2 March 1916 Maxwell wrote to Sir John Cowans to advise his counterpart at the War Office that broad-gauge rolling stock ‘in large quantities [was] urgently required in France’. Alongside the immediate placing of further large orders in Canada and the United States, the BEF’s hosts ‘demanded wagons from England’ to ease the pressure on French resources.³² By April orders for 13,000 wagons had been placed, but inter-allied conferences over the summer failed to reach a mutually acceptable conclusion as to the quantity of rolling stock required from British sources to fulfil the coalition’s traffic requirements. In early October 1916 General Joffre submitted a formal request to GHQ for ‘a large measure of assistance’ in the maintenance and improvement of the Chemins de Fer du Nord.³³ The pre-war agreement, which had been tweaked and adapted in response to the changing conditions of the war, was ‘considered at an end’ by both armies following the receipt of Joffre’s letter. Consequently, in addition to the various materials and labour-saving devices that Geddes had identified as crucial to the efficient operation of the BEF’s transport services, the DGT also inherited responsibility for the provision of locomotives, rolling stock and personnel for the operation of trains on the French main lines. Furthermore, as ‘it soon transpired that the railway situation [in France] was worse than the British had understood it to be’, the French requested that the rolling stock delivery schedule agreed over the spring and summer of 1916 be expedited to sustain the network over the winter months.

Figure 7.1. Route miles operated and average tonnage conveyed per week by the British Expeditionary Force’s light railways, 1917–18.

Source: TNA, WO 158/852, director general of transport: history of light railways, 1916–1918, p. 19.

The periodic nature of the French requests for British material support before October 1916 illustrate both the gradual erosion of the pre-war agreement in the wake of France’s hammering in the first half of the war and the creeping increase in Britain’s involvement in the transport infrastructure on the western front. The French had lost over 43,000 units of rolling stock during the initial German invasion – almost 12 per cent of the pre-war number of wagons in use on the French railways – while the withdrawal of railwaymen to replace losses in combat units had hindered the construction of replacements and maintenance of the remaining stock.³⁴ By November 1915 the British ambassador in Paris reported that a further 9,000 wagons were unavailable for service due to the absence of sufficient labour to affect the necessary repairs.³⁵ After the battles of Verdun and the Somme had taken a further toll on France’s human and material resources, the railway network ‘had fallen into very bad condition’.³⁶ As with light railway equipment, orders placed for new standard gauge rolling stock had a long lead time; the first wagons from the orders placed in March 1915 had taken thirteen months to arrive on the western front.³⁷ Faced with an impending crisis over the winter of 1916–17, Geddes recognized that the transport infrastructure could not withstand a prolonged delay while new orders were placed with – and fulfilled by – companies in Britain and North America whose productive capacity was already full. In early 1915 the ROD had commenced work in France with just seven engines loaned from the SECR and ‘five or six machines which [Cecil Paget] had begged, borrowed or stolen’ from the Midland Railway.³⁸ Eighteen months later the British railways were called upon to provide a far more substantial contribution to the BEF’s material requirements.

To facilitate the delivery of railway equipment Geddes called upon his most prominent military and industrial contacts. On 19 November 1916 Sir Douglas Haig wrote to Sir Herbert Walker, the acting chairman of the REC, to request ‘very large supplies of railway material, rolling stock, locomotives and personnel’ from the British railways. Haig acknowledged the implications for the home railways of such an appeal, but felt that his demands could be

Sir Guy Granet supplemented Haig’s statement at a REC meeting on 28 November, where he impressed upon his colleagues the magnitude of the situation faced by the BEF. However, as he was unable to furnish the committee with details of the precise nature of the aid required in France,⁴⁰ a delegation of REC members crossed the Channel to explore the matter with the DGT. The party left London on Saturday 9 December, discussed Geddes’s estimates for the transport effort required to support the BEF’s planned offensives in 1917, and lunched with the commander-in-chief at GHQ prior to their return home.⁴¹ Over lunch, Haig took the opportunity to reiterate ‘the very great importance of efficient railways in modern war and our need for locomotives, wagons, cranes and personnel’ to his guests. ‘All agreed that they could help us and might do more for us than we had asked’, Haig recorded later in his diary, ‘the only thing required was an order from the government authorizing the railway companies to provide the material’.⁴²

The combination of military and civilian expertise proved to be fruitful. Haig’s personal intervention, coupled with the support of Geddes and Granet, helped clear an impasse that had existed between the Ministry of Munitions and the REC since the summer. In June 1916 the War Office had notified the latter that the ROD could soon require ‘a considerable number of locomotives’ to be despatched from Britain for service on the continent. Yet at the same time the railway workshops’ focus on the production of warlike stores had reduced the output of locomotives in Britain, while the Ministry of Munitions was stressing the ‘vital importance’ of the companies being prepared to deal with increased volumes of traffic on the British railways. At a meeting between representatives of the ministry and the REC on 17 August the government promised to obtain the raw materials necessary for the LNWR to construct seventy locomotives.⁴³ However, by 11 November ‘no tangible assistance whatever had been rendered to the companies’ to permit the supply of locomotives to the BEF. Following the receipt of Haig’s letter on 28 November the goods managers and superintendents of the line of Britain’s major railway companies took matters into their own hands. Rather than await an allocation of raw materials, they identified locations in Britain where services could be reduced to free up stock for service overseas, and by 1 December Geddes could report to Haig that the companies had agreed to send 350 locomotives, 20,000 wagons and 320,000 sleepers to the western front.⁴⁴

Following the REC’s visit to France the export of British materials to the fighting fronts increased rapidly. Sixty-two locomotives from British sources were in traffic behind the western front by the end of 1916. A year later, 450 locomotives lifted direct from British railways provided the majority of the total of 753 locomotives available to haul supplies for the BEF.⁴⁵ By the end of the war the ROD possessed a fleet that was ‘representative of almost every railway in England’, and of which over one-third had been received direct from service on the British railways.⁴⁶ The supply capacities of the expeditionary forces further afield were also augmented by the receipt of British vehicles. The BSF had received nineteen locomotives from England by early 1918, and by March of that year the British advance in Egypt and Palestine was supplied by a pool of vehicles that included twenty-six locomotives from the LSWR, twenty-five from the LNWR and three petrol engines from the Manning-Wardle Locomotive Company in Leeds.⁴⁷ According to The Times, the LSWR engines in Egypt operated ‘with loads as heavy as they would have hauled between Southampton Docks and Nine Elms’, and ran ‘without cessation night and day, week in, week out’.⁴⁸

The British railways’ response to the army’s demands had a significant impact upon the domestic railways. The withdrawal of locomotives, over 29,000 wagons and hundreds of miles of track engendered a series of measures designed to improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary travel in Britain as the material implications of industrial war became manifest in the second half of the war. Piecemeal actions that had been taken by individual railways before 1917 – such as the removal of dining cars, the slowing down of express services to conserve coal and the suspension of suburban services – were replaced by a comprehensive, nationwide effort to economize railway transport from 1 January 1917. Around 400 stations in Britain were closed, Sunday services were further reduced and fares were increased by 50 per cent to discourage non-essential journeys. In recognition of the pressures on precious raw materials the prime minister made a ‘personal appeal’ to the travelling public to ‘cut down unnecessary travelling’ in February, where he underlined that all the steel conserved by Britain’s railway passengers could be directed into shipbuilding to meet the German submarine menace.⁴⁹ In the war’s final two years, much of the REC’s attentions were diverted into the question of reducing goods and passenger traffic not directly linked to the war effort.⁵⁰

The import of railway equipment on a hitherto unprecedented scale after 1916 was mirrored by the improvement of transport facilities that took place at the BEF’s Channel ports. As the entry point to the western front for the majority of the BEF’s supplies, the effective operation of the ports was fundamental to the maintenance of fluidity in the force’s distribution network. Geddes’s initial enquiries ascertained that the ports had to deal with ‘roughly 190,000 tons per week’ to cover the BEF’s requirements, and needed additional space on the shore to deal with the disembarkation of personnel, animals and the usual accoutrements that accompanied divisional formations.⁵¹ On 14 September 1916 the IGC, Sir Frederick Clayton, had produced a statement that detailed how 198,000 tons per week could be handled by the ports. However, Clayton’s projections provided no contingency for unpredictable occurrences such as the irregular arrival of ships, the closure of the ports for naval reasons or even poor weather. ‘Experience has shown’, Geddes wrote in November 1916, ‘that we ought to be able to deal with each week’s traffic in five days so as to provide a proper and safe margin, and in considering port capacity the average tonnage to be dealt with should not be more than 80 per cent of the maximum capacity’.⁵² In Clayton’s statement only Boulogne had been allocated a tonnage that met Geddes’s criteria in its existing condition, while Dunkirk had been allocated a tonnage that exceeded the port’s maximum capacity by 43 per cent (see Table 7.3).

It was not until the nature of the war effort required to dislodge the German army from French soil had revealed itself, and Britain’s transport experts had taken a direct role in the organization necessary to sustain that effort, that the provision of equipment to boost the maximum capacity of the BEF’s ports substantially increased. Shortly after the establishment of the directorate-general of transportation, Geddes complained both that the directorate inherited ‘an insufficiency of shore gear, trays, skids, and other minor, but very essential equipment’ and that the cranes in situ at the ports appeared ‘to be somewhat below modern docks standards’.⁵³ To meet the requirements of the docks programme finalized by Geddes in March 1917,⁵⁴ the BEF increased the number of onshore cranes available to discharge goods from arriving vessels from 121 to 314. Only seven of the additional units were provided by the French, the rest were obtained from British sources.⁵⁵ By December 1918 the BEF also possessed thirty-six floating cranes for light lifts, three large floating cranes operated by the Royal Navy, two floating electric power stations and six floating grain elevators.⁵⁶ The introduction of new equipment contributed to the achievement of an average daily import figure during 1917 and 1918 of 25,000 deadweight tons per day. The docks directorate dealt with 4,178,000 tons of ammunition alone in the final two years of the war, providing the ingredients with which the BEF’s artillery commanders concocted the firepower mixtures unleashed upon the German lines in the pursuit of victory.⁵⁷

Table 7.3. Projected traffic allocations for the British Expeditionary Force’s Channel ports, November 1916.

However, the provision of modern equipment alone was not a panacea to the challenges of port operation during the First World War. As Commander Underwood noted in a report on the use of so-called labour-saving devices at Boulogne, mechanical contrivances were not always applicable to conditions on the Channel coast. Following an examination of the Bassin Loubet, he stated that the port was not well suited for the employment of an automatic discharge and stacking appliance for use on grain ships for three reasons. First, the Bassin Loubet was a ‘rather small dock’ in which to operate such a large piece of machinery. Second, the tidal and meteorological conditions at Boulogne militated against the use of a floating grain elevator. Underwood explained that ‘one of the disadvantages at this port for floating elevators is the rise and fall of the tide, which at its maximum is 27 feet. The height of any floating elevators would have to be so great, that in the high winds of winter there would be danger of craft capsizing. The wind here at times is so great that the cranes have to stop working’. Finally, he concluded, ‘the length of time it would take to erect’ the appliance and ‘the inconvenience which would be caused during its erection’ would not be offset by the potential benefits of the equipment’s use.⁵⁸

Underwood’s report demonstrates that the British army, even before Geddes’s arrival on the western front, considered the possibilities of mechanization behind the lines as well as at the front. The relative importance to the BEF’s combat methodology of innovations such as the tank, poison gas and sound-ranging equipment have been debated by historians throughout the post-war period. Discussions over the extent to which the First World War armies utilized these tools effectively has overshadowed considerations of the provision of adequate quantities of mundane, civilian technologies such as locomotives, wagons, steam rollers and cranes to service those armies’ demands. Geddes did not view such expansion as ‘extravagance’, but merely the logical corollary of the fact that the British were asked to take on a far larger share of the BEF’s transport burden from October 1916 onwards. Without a sufficient transport infrastructure, founded upon the machinery that underpinned Europe’s industrial economies, the weapons of the industrial war could not have been transported across the continent in the quantities required to create the firestorm that took place between 1914 and 1918. However, the provision of new equipment alone cannot explain the BEF’s increased ability to supply the material war that emerged on the western front. As Geddes himself acknowledged from the moment he arrived in France, alongside new tools the force’s fighting capabilities depended upon the efficiency with which those tools were utilized.⁵⁹ Britain’s transport experts’ influence stretched beyond the provision of roads and rails to the organizational systems that sustained the conflict.

The application of business methods on the western front

During the summer of 1917 the BEF attained its peak strength of just over two million troops. From that moment until the conflict’s end the following autumn, the British contribution to the main European theatre of war gradually declined in numerical terms. That the BEF responded to this reduction in strength through the more effective deployment of the available manpower, and a higher dependence upon the machines of war, has been central to the so-called learning curve theory of British military improvement after the nadir of 1 July 1916.⁶⁰ Following the United States’ entry into the war in particular, Britain’s desire to win the war and the subsequent peace while incurring the lowest possible cost had to be reframed as a determination to secure victory before the costs became so great that Britain was unable to exert sufficient influence at the post-war bargaining table.⁶¹ To do so, the British government had to ensure that the nation’s dwindling manpower resources were employed – regardless of the character of their contribution – in the most efficient manner possible.⁶² On the western front, Lloyd George emphasized in a meeting of civilian and military authorities in January 1918 that, ‘in view of the difficulties that were arising … in regard to the question of Man-Power, it was essential that there should be no idle men’.⁶³

The effective coordination and supervision of men and equipment dispersed across a vast geographical area was critical to the economical use of the BEF’s resources during the First World War. The speed with which roads were repaired, railway tracks laid, trains moved from depot to railhead and wagons unloaded for return to depot directly affected the pace and intensity with which the fighting troops were able to concentrate their force against the enemy lines. The battle of the Somme illuminated the shortcomings in the BEF’s logistical foundations in the summer and autumn of 1916. As Ian M. Brown has demonstrated, the shortages of ammunition noted by commanders early in the battle were the result of longstanding tactical delivery problems rather than insufficient production levels – issues that were exacerbated by the voluminous increase in supplies from Britain once the offensive was under way.⁶⁴ Three potential solutions existed to remove the supply bottleneck that reduced fluidity on the western front. The first option, proposed by the IGC in August 1916, was for ships to be sent from Britain at a slower rate, thereby synchronizing their arrivals with the discharge rates at the docks and the railway network’s ability to remove goods from the ports.⁶⁵ The second, reported to Lloyd George by Geddes the following month, was ‘that the factories must slow down!’ Both were impracticable. The scaling back of munitions production was a ‘moral and physical impossibility’ in a nation increasingly geared towards a more total form of warfare,⁶⁶ while a reduction in the frequency of deliveries to France would simply shift the storage problem to Britain’s ports – where Geddes had already recognized pressure on the available space before the Somme offensive commenced.⁶⁷

To permit the BEF to undertake offensive operations that consumed munitions at a greater rate than had proven possible at the Somme, but without overloading the capacity of the transport network, that network had to be operated more efficiently. The labour force attached to the directorate-general of transportation, employed on duties across France and Flanders – and numbering 89,000 men by November 1918 – played a key role in the maintenance and improvement of the BEF’s supply chain in the second half of the war. Yet the constant, direct visual observation of such a large-scale, dispersed workforce from the directorate’s headquarters was impossible. Therefore, the implementation of managerial tools that stimulated improvement and the application of operating procedures that promoted fluidity throughout the transport network became important facets of the British approach to material-intensive warfare.

To Britain’s transport experts the control of a large workforce employed on tasks beyond the direct oversight of senior managerial figures was a familiar challenge. The growth of large-scale businesses during the second half of the nineteenth century had created a series of unprecedented difficulties for the employers of labour to solve. By virtue of being executives of the first companies to experience such growth, railway managers were by necessity the forerunners in addressing the problems associated with handling ‘large amounts of men, money, and materials within a single business unit’.⁶⁸ Unlike even the largest factories of the day, which could be observed in their totality within a relatively brief period of time, the major railways were operated by units that were spread over hundreds of miles and engaged on a wide variety of activities.⁶⁹

Geddes appreciated from the outset that the efficiency of the human and material resources under the DGT’s command could be assessed and improved through the application of business methods deployed by civilian industries to manage their peacetime endeavours. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in BEF’s light railway operations from 1917 onwards. Alongside the locomotives, wagons and personnel necessary to meet the BEF’s increased demands for transport capacity in the second half of the First World War, Britain’s transport experts provided the management tools designed to squeeze the maximum fluidity out of the network. As Figure 7.2 illustrates, during 1917 the component parts of the BEF’s light railway network – managed by individual operating companies – grew into a complex system. To ensure the maintenance of fluidity across the expanding network required the coordination of train movements, just as took place on the main line railways that connected the BEF to the Channel ports. However, unlike on the main lines – managed according to rules and regulations laid down by the French rail authorities – the light railway network presented the directorate-general of transportation with an opportunity to introduce working practices adapted from the latest innovations conceived by Britain’s transport experts.

Auckland Geddes later suggested that his brother had taken the inspiration for the BEF’s light railway operations from the Powayan Steam Tramway in India that Eric had helped run in the early 1900s.⁷⁰ However, the origins of the BEF’s traffic management procedures could be found much closer to home. Before the outbreak of the First World War, operating methods were the subject of intense experimentation among Britain’s competitive railway companies. The maintenance of fluidity and efficiency upon individual companies’ networks demanded that traffic officers possessed a thorough understanding of the location and movements of the trains that circulated around the system, and major advances in the companies’ surveillance capacities had taken place before 1914.⁷¹ By the time Geddes became DGT both the Midland Railway and the Lancashire and Yorkshire had installed centralized control systems to help coordinate their main line operations,⁷² and it was from the former that the BEF’s light railway directorate drew its inspiration.

The primary motivations for the Midland Railway’s institution of a centralized train control system in 1909 – efficiency, flexibility, the economic use of rolling stock and the acquisition of timely information on the whereabouts of the company’s resources – mirrored the BEF’s priorities in 1917. The similarities between military and civilian railway operations did not stop there, either. The reliability of the Edwardian railway industry had created a logistical environment in Britain that encouraged firms to reduce their stock levels on-hand, confident that goods would be delivered swiftly by rail when required. This approach created concerns that any prolonged dislocation to railway services, whether the result of congestion or industrial action, would quickly starve manufacturers of raw materials and consumers of staples such as bread and milk. As Lloyd George, the then president of the Board of Trade, acknowledged in 1907, ‘there was hardly a country in the world … which depends so much upon the absolute promptitude with which goods are delivered’.⁷³ The military practice during the First World War was to ensure that stores were placed far enough away from the front line to reduce their susceptibility either to hostile artillery or capture in the event of a surprise enemy advance. Therefore, the BEF’s customers at the front line were also wholly dependent upon an effective transport network that delivered the goods reliably and frequently. A cut in supply, whether by enemy action, mismanagement or the withdrawal of labour, would produce the same results.

Figure 7.2. The growth of the light railway system operated by the 5 New Zealand Light Railway Operating Company, 1917.

Source: TNA, WO 95/4061/7, lines of communication troops. 5 New Zealand Light Railway Operating Company. Map drawn by Cath D’Alton.

Congestion, which had brought about the near paralysis of the BEF’s transportation network during the battle of the Somme, had been a significant problem for the Midland in the early part of the century. The use of railway sidings as makeshift depots had created difficulties for those tasked with unloading freight wagons on the Midland’s lines, which increased the time required to unload individual trains and led to widespread delays to traffic across the network. The unpredictable nature of the traffic meant that engine crews were frequently forced to work shifts of fifteen hours or more, as replacement crews were allotted according to the timetables rather than the actual locations of the trains. A Board of Trade enquiry into the working hours of 18,354 engine drivers in Britain uncovered that the majority worked for between sixty and sixty-two hours each week in 1907, while 3,689 of those examined worked for more than sixty-six hours per week.⁷⁴ On the Midland alone a total of 24,760 cases of extended duty were recorded in the first six months of 1907, a situation that contributed to numerous cases of illness-induced staff absences and inspired the company to amend its operating procedures.

The impressive results obtained by the Midland – coupled with the fact that its chief architect, Cecil Paget, was already in France at the head of the ROD – make Geddes’s decision to adopt the train control system developed after 1907 for the BEF’s light railway network unsurprising. The system involved the creation of district offices throughout the Midland’s network, each linked by telephone to a central control office in Derby. The central office received regular updates on the whereabouts and composition of the trains on the system, which allowed traffic controllers to identify stations where trains were detained for unnecessarily long periods in order to focus improvements on the area.⁷⁵ Following successful trials on sections of the line, Paget, the railway’s general superintendent, authorized the extension of the train control system to cover the entire 1,400-mile network despite the reservations of many within the railway industry. ‘Quite a number of able railway men’, the company recalled, suggested that the existing methods of control in the industry could not be improved upon and expected the system – based upon the creation of a real-time record of all traffic on the network within a central control office – to fail.⁷⁶ However, between 1907 and 1913 Paget’s system proved remarkably successful. As Figure 7.3 illustrates, the weekly average hours of traffic delays on the Midland fell by more than 64 per cent despite a 10 per cent increase in the tonnage of goods conveyed over the same period. From well in excess of 20,000 cases of men working for excessively long hours in early 1907, four years later there were none.⁷⁷

As the BEF inherited relatively few operable light railways from the French the installation of a new operating procedure was relatively straightforward. The French practice of working a section of line – typically between twenty and thirty miles in length – using the box-to-box system, was not particularly well established among British troops. Under the box-to-box system orders for light railway were issued direct from the department that required the transport, rather than from a central office with access to the most up-to-date information on the army’s priorities.⁷⁸ The retention of such uncoordinated methods was impracticable once the BEF’s light railways grew into an interconnected network. The threat of ‘friendly generals’ impairing the system’s efficiency through the forceful imposition of their personal priorities, without due appreciation of the wider army’s requirements, encouraged the creation of a centralized administration through which all transport requests could be filtered. Therefore, the new lines in the British areas were constructed with the central control system in place from the start, while extant lines were gradually converted from the box-to-box system. In August 1917 the 31st Light Railway Operating Company recorded that the central control system, to which they had been recently converted, was ‘working quite satisfactorily’.⁷⁹ However, with the susceptibility of the telephone connections to artillery fire in mind, the box-to-box equipment was retained in place to act as a back-up during periods when the telephone network was inoperable.⁸⁰

As on the Midland Railway, the control offices became a fundamental component of the BEF’s light railway operations during the second half of the war. Each of the BEF’s five armies were served by a self-contained central control office based upon the Midland’s template, at which requests for light railway transport from each corps were collated and prioritized. Large schematic diagrams were set up in each office, which displayed the army’s portion of the light railway network and indicated the location of all motive power and rolling stock under the army’s command. Information on the whereabouts of the army’s resources was frequently updated by reports telephoned from numerous district offices, situated at the marshalling yards from which individual trains were made up for their journeys to the front. Within each district several stations or dumping points also contained reporting facilities that permitted local officers to keep the district offices informed of events out on the lines.

Figure 7.3. Delays to freight traffic on the Midland Railway, average weekly hours, 1907–13.

Source: R. Edwards, Instruments of Control, Measures of Output: Contending Approaches to the Practice of ‘Scientific’ Management on Britain’s Railways in the Early Twentieth Century (Southampton, 2000), p. 19.

The ‘ceaseless’ surveillance from the army’s central office produced an almost instant overview of the network’s assets, which ensured the light railways organization could respond quickly to the demands of industrial warfare and fostered a more efficient use of the BEF’s limited resources. Daily conferences among the technical staff allowed the officers responsible for allocating the available locomotives and rolling stock to do so according to the army’s most recent priorities, minimizing the prospect of a district being left with insufficient stock on hand to service its daily traffic. In addition, central control ordered the movement of wagons around the system as necessary. On 31 July 1917 such a transfer of resources took place on the portion of line worked by the 12th Light Railway Operating Company. Based in Romarin, near Armentières on the French-Belgian border, the company received orders to ‘transfer as many bogie wagons as could be put together quickly for ammunition work’ to assist colleagues engaged on supplying the third battle of Ypres further north.⁸¹

Alongside creating flexibility over the allocation of resources, the central control system provided the BEF’s light railways organization with the data to identify where rolling stock was being held under load for abnormally long periods. As on the peacetime railways, wagons left in sidings represented a reduction in the BEF’s overall transport capacity and indicated the presence of uneconomical working practices. Every day the central control office produced a wagon register, which recorded the location of every piece of rolling stock in the BEF’s possession and was drawn from the contents of train and engine shunting journals compiled in each district.⁸² The journals contained information on every train that passed over the light railway network, ‘often compiled in huts or dugouts under artillery fire’ and forwarded to the district offices by telephone.⁸³ The data produced through this process became a core component of the comprehensive series of statistics used by the light railways directorate to improve working practices among the widely dispersed units under its command. The close observation of unloading methods between March and September 1917 brought about a reduction in the average turnaround time for a light railway wagon from 1.7 days to around 0.7 days, which – combined with a 200 per cent increase in the number of wagons in traffic during the same period – vastly increased the light railways’ carrying capacity on the western front. From an average weekly traffic of 25,315 tons in March, by September the BEF’s light railways carried an average weekly traffic of 210,808 tons to the front.⁸⁴

A comprehensive system of data capture and statistical analysis lay at the heart of the directorate-general of transportation’s supervisory practices, one similar to that described as an ‘information infrastructure’ by Lisa Bud-Frierman in her examination of business administration methods in the late nineteenth century.⁸⁵ In an interview with the American journalist Isaac Marcosson following his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty, Geddes emphasized his belief in the utility of statistics as a managerial tool. When Marcosson asked him ‘what single rule had been of most service to him’ during the war, Geddes responded: ‘The use of statistics. I statistise [sic] everything. Knowledge is power and statistics are the throttle valve of every business’.⁸⁶

Geddes’s appreciation of statistics provides a further example of the North-Eastern Railway’s managerial culture’s influence on his approach to the war. Sir George Gibb’s progressive response to the challenging operating conditions in the turn-of-the-century railway industry inspired the business techniques that Geddes applied to the management of the directorate-general of transportation. Following a month-long tour of the United States in 1900, Gibb was convinced that the extensive collection and examination of statistical data could greatly improve the efficiency of work undertaken on the British railways. Throughout the pre-war period, within the trade press, to parliamentary committees and even in the discussion of papers delivered before the Royal Statistical Society,⁸⁷ Gibb passionately advocated the use of statistics for allowing

Statistical information, disseminated throughout the company, was used to ‘found judgments, to make policy decisions and to establish standards which … enable[d] officials to watch and control the effects of the steps being taken to improve working methods’ on the North-Eastern.⁸⁹ In collaboration with the statistician George Paish, Gibb oversaw the establishment of a traffic statistics office in York in 1902 to ‘pioneer and promulgate the use of new statistical concepts for operational measurement, control and efficiency’.⁹⁰

The data-gathering system used by the BEF’s transportation services was the brainchild of Geddes’s assistant from the North-Eastern, J. George Beharrell. Shortly after the war he explained his procedures in an address to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. At the outset of the lecture Beharrell directly responded to claims that ‘the success of transportation in France was largely due to the fact that money was of no account and it was spent like water’.⁹¹ He pointed out that shortages of manpower and materials on the western front compelled the DGT to ruthlessly pursue efficiencies throughout the organization. Drawing upon his own professional career at the North-Eastern Railway – where Geddes had given his abilities to collect, prepare and disseminate information from a variety of sources ‘full play’ within the goods department – Beharrell created bespoke, elaborate reporting systems for each of the departments under the DGT’s command.⁹² The statistics that were generated, Beharrell explained, ‘told each responsible officer what he was doing, whether he was going back or forward, and how he compared with his opposite number in other places’.⁹³ In the IWT directorate ‘the statistical and movements sections … [were] provided [with] an efficient system whereby the work being performed by both personnel and craft could be carefully gauged, and immediate steps taken when necessary to speed up the work in sections where the best results were not being obtained’.⁹⁴ ‘Without statistics’, Beharrell claimed, it was ‘impossible to know with any certainty that there ha[d] been any improvement’ in the operations behind the front line upon which the fighting troops depended throughout the war. It was certainly impossible, he concluded, to accurately measure any such improvement.⁹⁵

The constant flow of data from the DGT’s workshops to its boardroom played a vital role in permitting administrative officers to ascertain the output levels that could be expected from units assigned to each task, and assisted them in the identification of inefficiencies across the western front. The potential value of metrics had been recognized within the railway industry before the war, as the major companies grappled with the challenge of supervising and maintaining the productivity of a dispersed workforce. As George Boag advised in his Manual of Railway Statistics, ‘by training the staff in the use of statistics an intelligent interest is aroused, and the figures will have already served their purpose if they have drawn the attention of the operating officers to the results of their own work’.⁹⁶ The knowledge that senior officers were liable to closely investigate sustained periods of inadequate performance acted as a stimulus for supervising officers to take a close interest in their men’s working methods, to ensure that standards were rigorously maintained and improved, and to reflect upon their own contributions to the directorate’s progress. Major-General John W. Stewart – a Scottish-born railwayman who had made a career building railways in Canada prior to the war – became infamous among the light railway construction units behind the western front for his ‘unannounced and unexpected’ site visits in 1917, undertaken to encourage the troops and their supervisors to build new lines as swiftly as possible.⁹⁷

The existence of a pool of numerate administrators was critical to the maintenance of the directorate’s programme. The ‘rapid expansion of the clerical workforce’ in Britain during the sixty years before the First World War provided the skilled labour required to convert Beharrell’s concept into a reality. By 1914 over 5 per cent of occupied males in the British workforce were clerks, a larger middle-class occupational group than any other aside from employers and proprietors.⁹⁸ The complexities of administration in the twentieth century had been addressed by the state and a larger number of companies in Britain than in any other European nation before the war.⁹⁹ The so-called ‘nation of shopkeepers’ was short neither of ‘numerical nous’ nor the tools with which to harness, manipulate and analyse complex operational data as a foundation for decision-making. The pre-war British economy had embraced the ‘quantifying spirit’,¹⁰⁰ and the directorate-general of transportation applied the same ethos to the BEF’s operations.

From 1917 onwards the BEF’s workforce was relentlessly subjected to measurement in the pursuit of efficiency and economy. At the docks ‘the rate of handling per man per hour was closely watched, each port being compared with its previous performance on similar cargoes’. Through a combination of ‘better supervision and equipment’, Beharrell recorded, in a year the tonnage handled per man per hour increased by 24 per cent across all the ports operated by the BEF. Behind the headline improvement lay a process of observation, measurement, comparison, adjustment and repetition – presented through an unambiguous, accessible comparison tool that helped identify ‘the most suitable form of work’ for each of the myriad units employed under the director of docks.¹⁰¹ The tool Beharrell chose was the graph, which had ‘exploded’ into widespread use in the latter part of the nineteenth century.¹⁰²

Plotting units’ results alongside one another clearly illustrated the varied performance levels of individual groups within the category being measured, an activity that allowed busy commanders to distinguish at a glance where output was satisfactory and where causes for concern existed. Rather than pore over the raw data provided by each unit, senior officers received a visual depiction of the department’s progress that could also be disseminated throughout the organization to help companies chart their own development. As the author of a report on the Chinese Labour Corps’ work explained:

This quote demonstrates how statistics were used to encourage workers as well as managers during the war. The tasks upon which those employed by the DGT laboured from 1917 onwards lacked a readily identifiable link to the BEF’s overall goal of victory, and the newly created units did not possess a folklore of regimental histories upon which to draw for the inspiration of new recruits. Furthermore, many of the units under the DGT’s charge were forced to accept the descriptor ‘unskilled’, a ‘negative qualification’ unlikely to engender a sense of pride and commitment within those to whom it was attached.¹⁰⁴ When assigned to the unskilled labour of road-making duties, Richard Smith has noted, ‘men of all ranks in the British West Indian Regiment were keen to shed the stigma attached with labour’ and stressed their commitment to martial customs.¹⁰⁵

Through the concentration on targets, encouraged by the proliferation of easily understood graphs, the abstract notion that building a road or unloading lorries was fundamental to the prosecution of the war effort was superseded by the immediately recognizable, attainable benchmarks that were naturally created by daily, weekly and monthly records of achievement. The raw data have since been destroyed, but the surviving war diaries of units such as the 12th Light Railway Operating Company illustrate the unit’s pride when it surpassed previous performances: ‘The ammunition tonnage handled today – highest on record – 2,250 tons. Every man doing splendidly and the system working perfectly’,¹⁰⁶ the company’s diarist recorded on 11 June 1917. During the same week the diary noted several instances of German shelling, which caused damage to the company’s yard and camp. Clearly, the act of recording respectable statistics despite the enemy’s best efforts played a significant role in motivating the company’s troops.

Individual units created targets, both for the unit themselves to beat in subsequent periods and to demonstrate their abilities in comparison to neighbouring companies and departments. As John Starling and Ivor Lee discussed in their account of British military labour during the war:

The diary extract quoted by Starling and Lee emphasizes the dual purpose of statistics as a management tool. First, the data provided senior officers located far from Martainville with quantitative evidence of the unit’s output. Second, the generation of numerical indicators of the unit’s work provided a stimulus for groups of men from diverse backgrounds to contribute to the war effort of a nation to whom many of the labourers possessed no patriotic attachment. For the different tribes represented within the South African Native Labour Corps, the war was less about defeating the German empire and more about proving their strength, fitness and stamina in a friendly competition with their fellow tribesmen.

However, competition created temptations to subvert the measurement process and distort the information collected by the directorate. As Brigadier-General John Charteris observed in early 1918:

Charteris’s somewhat light-hearted remark reveals the key limitation regarding the implementation of a data capture and performance monitoring system within the BEF during the First World War. The generation of accurate records relied upon accurate measurement, which was not always forthcoming. As the rumoured system-gaming activities of the light railway operating companies demonstrates, not all of those who participated in the BEF’s information-gathering network were entirely honest or willing contributors.

The competence and good faith of those who participated in Beharrell’s data-gathering system were fundamental to its success. However, examples of both incompetence and deception can be ascertained from the surviving records. In the first instance, even an educated man like the philosopher and academic Alexander Lindsay – who spent much of 1917 engaged in the accumulation of data and production of graphs – struggled to attain the precision required to submit accurate returns, and recorded his battles to master the intricacies of the process in a series of letters to his wife.¹⁰⁹ Elsewhere, among professional officers concerned with self-preservation and their future career prospects, the urge to ‘present the best aspect’ of a company’s work in the official records rather than an honest and accurate account of its performance was an ever present temptation.¹¹⁰ One unnamed ‘old colonel’, described by Lindsay as ‘the bad sort of army man’, was more interested in ensuring that his back was covered in case things went wrong than in using statistics to guide improvements in his unit’s performance.¹¹¹

Furthermore, Beharrell’s system had to contend with the hostility of individuals unwilling to engage with the bureaucracy that it generated. While the conflict acted as what Lindsay referred to as a laboratory for an ‘elaborate experiment in the organization of labour’,¹¹² to many of those charged with accumulating the raw data for the ‘carefully planned … forms [and] graphs’, Beharrell’s time-consuming approach was considered an unnecessary additional burden in a war of unprecedented intensity.¹¹³ Lieutenant-Colonel Bryan Fairfax, commander of the Chinese Labour Corps and ultimately responsible for a workforce of almost 100,000 men, was one such officer. A dugout who had been recalled from the reserve list in August 1914, Fairfax had served in China during the Boxer Uprising and as inspector of Chinese labourers in the Transvaal. Although a far cry from the ‘Oxford men’ like Lindsay who found themselves employed on administrative duties,¹¹⁴ Fairfax was by no means the stereotypically insular and obstinate soldier. In South Africa he was described as ‘an efficient and conscientious and trustworthy’ officer who possessed ‘in a high degree the quality of tact, so necessary in handling men’ by the superintendent of the foreign labour department in Johannesburg, while his application for the post of king’s messenger in 1914 was supported by a host of character references that underlined his aptitudes.¹¹⁵

For Fairfax, ‘the war … was not an exercise in scientific labour management, but a life and death struggle in which men must be exploited regardless in order to secure victory’. He was, according to Nicholas Griffin, ‘a production-oriented traditionalist who preferred only to see the “bottom line” without dwelling on the means of reaching it’, and he condemned the ‘repeated requests for graphs demonstrating job performance’ that he received as ‘irksome’ and ‘futile’.¹¹⁶ So long as the work required ‘got done’, Fairfax argued, the accumulation and assessment of data that recorded the precise nature of his units’ performance were a waste of time. He was unwilling to countenance the potential benefits of attempts to coordinate and distribute the BEF’s resources in the most efficient and systematic manner, and instead was preoccupied by the ‘paper-mongering’ that Beharrell’s methods demanded. Even Lindsay, who was relatively open-minded with regards to the benefits of constant measurement, admitted that the administrative requirements of the system were incredibly bloated and generated data that was not necessarily consulted by busy senior officers. He wrote in April 1917 that he was ‘waging a great war on unnecessary or rather meaningless forms but I am not sure that I shall win. Some people like returns as such even though they never mean to act on them’.¹¹⁷

However, others liked statistical returns so much that they became reluctant to engage with alternative sources of information on their working practices. In the directorate of docks, the plethora of quantitative data generated by the relentless measurement of the troops under Ralph Wedgwood’s command created an image of remarkable progress. The twin pressures of the German submarine campaign and, from mid 1917 onwards, of the need to apportion shipping capacity for the transport of American troops exacerbated the need for the docks under Wedgwood’s control to be operated with the maximum efficiency. The returns compiled within the directorate indicated that it had responded to the challenge remarkably well. Between January and September 1917 the volumes discharged from vessels at the ports under the directorate’s authority rose from 12.5 tons per hour in port to 25.8 tons per hour. In the first half of 1918 the figures ‘showed a continuous increase’, which reached a peak of 34.4 tons per hour in port in July. Over an eighteen-month period Wedgwood oversaw a 175.2 per cent increase in the docks directorate’s discharge rate, which contributed to a significant decrease in the number of ship-days lost by vessels awaiting a berth. From a peak of 100 days per week in February 1917, by March 1918 just 5.8 ship-days per week were lost at the Channel ports.¹¹⁸

Behind the numbers a different story emerged, thanks to the investigative efforts of officers under the controller of labour, Colonel Edmund Wace.¹¹⁹ As British manpower resources became increasingly stretched in the second half of the war – and the number of tasks devolved upon the British that had hitherto been the responsibility of the French grew – the demand for so-called ‘unskilled’ labour to dig, load, carry and build for the BEF outstripped supply. By November 1918 the labour controller’s office was responsible for administering 385,000 men on the western front, and a core component of Wace’s job was to flag up areas of the British war effort that were being run inefficiently. Under the terms of reference issued to the labour organization upon its establishment, Wace’s officers provided a consultancy role rather than an executive function. They were unable to directly intervene to address examples of what they considered to be inefficient working practices. Instead, they recorded their observations and submitted them to the department or directorate responsible for employing the labour under investigation.¹²⁰ Over the summer of 1918 Wedgwood’s directorate was the subject of a series of scathing memoranda, written by men with ‘practical experience of dock labour in civil life’ who had been drafted into the Labour Corps thanks to their specialist knowledge.¹²¹ In July, when the directorate recorded its highest discharge rates of the war, the assistant controller of labour submitted the following observation of a morning’s work at the port of Boulogne:

Two days earlier an even more stark example of inefficiency had been recorded at the same port: roughly ninety Chinese labourers were discovered ‘lying asleep awaiting their turn to work’ by Labour Corps observers.¹²³ The memoranda were forwarded to the QMG with the recommendation that labour control should be removed from the directorate of docks. However, Wedgwood categorically refused to accept a proposal that the allocation of labour at the ports should be transferred away from his jurisdiction.

The Labour Corps’ observations illuminated the key challenge of labour organization, which the BEF failed to adequately rectify over the course of the war. The actual labour needs of individual services, such as the directorate of docks, varied from day to day (and, indeed, from hour to hour). However, the various departments within which unskilled labour was employed ‘wanted as much labour as [they] could get’ throughout the conflict – ensuring that their individual requirements were met at all times was paramount, according to Lindsay. Therefore, even during periods where their own demands for labour were not so pronounced, the departments proved ‘very reluctant’ to release unskilled labour for employment elsewhere on the western front.¹²⁴ Whereas in a civilian business during a period of slack the wage costs of unproductive workers compelled employers to lay off unnecessary employees to protect profit levels, the absence of a profit margin in the BEF gave individual officers little inclination to willingly surrender labourers for service in other departments. The fear that they would not receive ‘their’ labour back when required appeared to supersede all other considerations.

As demonstrated earlier in the war with regards to individual units’ reluctance to embrace canal transport to relieve pressure on the overburdened railway network, departmental desires to retain unskilled labour eclipsed considerations of the BEF’s priorities as a whole. Consequently, the acceptance of any downgrade – however temporary – in the allocation of manpower was something to be fiercely resisted and combatted by the submission of ‘extravagant’ demands for labour. As Lindsay recalled after the war:

Individual departments essentially competed with one another for the finite resources available, rather than accepting a number of labourers allocated according to the BEF’s needs. There was, noted Brigadier-General Lawson in a report into the number of men employed behind the lines, ‘not one army but many armies’ – for whom mutual help was anathema.¹²⁶

Far from being alleviated by the influx of civilians into positions of authority, the entrenched attitudes of individual departments were heavily reinforced. Ralph Wedgwood had been specifically appointed as director of docks because of his working knowledge of port operations, honed by years of experience at the North-Eastern Railway. Unsurprisingly, he felt little compulsion to consult labour officers over the employment of men at the docks, and was unwilling to surrender control over the manpower that he considered integral to the continued functioning of his directorate. In October 1918 Wedgwood did agree to the constitution of a committee that comprised himself, the controller of labour (Wace), a representative of the QMG’s office and the principal naval transport officer, who was responsible for the naval aspects of operations at the docks. However, the committee’s terms of reference explicitly stated that no ‘fundamental changes’ to labour allocation at the ports were to be considered, which meant that Wedgwood would retain overall control of labour distribution within the docks regardless of the committee’s deliberations. Ultimately, the committee provided a platform for representatives of the various departments engaged at the docks to air their views and resulted in: the institution of weekly meetings at which issues could be discussed; an acceptance from the navy that labour could be released for service away from the ports in quiet periods; and an agreement that statistics compiled by each department would be made available to the others for consultation.¹²⁷ The agreement, Wace acknowledged – particularly in terms of the establishment of weekly meetings – did ‘undoubted good’ in what remained of the war.¹²⁸

Wedgwood’s protectionist attitude towards his authority over the directorate of docks’ work demonstrates that the introduction of Britain’s transport experts into positions of seniority within the BEF brought its own complications. The fact that there appears to have been a degree of confidentiality attached to the circulation of statistics between departments illustrates the continued existence of compartmentalized thinking within the BEF during the First World War. Lindsay ascribed this in part to the ‘bad competitive habits’ of the ‘capitalists’ drawn into the BEF following Geddes’s appointment as DGT.¹²⁹ Wedgwood’s conception of his own duties and the extent of his own jurisdiction made him resistant to accepting criticism of the working practices for which he was ultimately responsible, particularly when those working practices had helped contribute to an unambiguously vast improvement in the discharge rates achieved at the ports under the BEF’s control. The result, Wace noted pointedly after the war, was that ‘the attitude assumed’ within Wedgwood’s directorate ‘appeared to be that so long as the quick turnaround of ships was secured, no other consideration had any weight’.¹³⁰

Wedgwood’s actions in the latter part of the war undermined Lloyd George’s ‘rhetoric that the great feats of wartime organization were achieved by civilian experts’, unaided if not actively hindered by insular and self-preserving soldiers.¹³¹ Civilianization was not a panacea to the organizational difficulties faced by the BEF that Lloyd George later proclaimed it to have been. The treatment of individual departments as personal fiefdoms was not an accusation that could be levelled solely at the military professionals. Both Fairfax and Wedgwood, the career soldier and the civilian specialist, pointed to their results to justify their approaches to the tasks for which they were responsible. Yet while the former saw the encroachment of civilian business methods as an unnecessary distraction from his duties, the latter drew upon the unequivocal message of progress that emerged from the quantitative analysis of his work to bolster his position and defend the utility of his methods.

Conclusion

Without access to the raw data it is impossible to assess the extent to which the directorate-general of transportation’s data-gathering and analysis methods provided the catalyst for the operational improvements charted over the course of 1917 and 1918. The surviving records certainly demonstrate that the esprit de corps generated by the achievement of strong results provided a boon to productivity among the units under the directorate’s control, while the unequivocal clarity of numerical representations of work done made the identification of inefficiencies easier. However, it is unclear how much of the increases made in, for example, the discharge rates at the ports were due to better working and supervisory practices enacted by Ralph Wedgwood and how much was the result of practice-based improvements and the introduction of new equipment to augment the existing capacity of the docks. As Theodore Stewart recognized after the war, men engaged on the tasks that underpinned the BEF’s transport infrastructure simply got better at their jobs the more they did them. Stewart noted that men for whom the duties of road making and repairing were ‘entirely new’ in July 1916 had, through repetition and training, ‘gained quite a reputation’ for the work within six months.¹³² As the general principle within the BEF was to retain men on the same class of work to help improve their skills and efficiency, it is unsurprising to see that they became more efficient as the war progressed.

Eric Geddes’s powerful dual roles of DGT in France and DGMR in London, coupled with the unequivocal support he received from his superiors, insulated him from the constraints under which the BEF’s professional soldiers had operated before the battle of the Somme. As Henniker reflected in the official history:

The evolving understanding among Britain’s military and political leadership of the character of industrial, material-intensive warfare – and of the implications for the transport infrastructure upon which the conduct of colossal operations depended – weakened the constraints that Henniker recalled bitterly after the war. Geddes operated outside the previously rigid hierarchies that had subordinated the BEF’s transport requirements on the western front to those of the artillery, the infantry and the needs of domestic industry. However, the freedom he and his colleagues enjoyed within the BEF was not limitless. Over the final two years of the war, Britain’s transport experts were exposed to the constraints and compromises necessary for the successful prosecution of a global, coalition war effort.

______________

¹ P. K. Cline, ‘Eric Geddes and the “experiment” with businessmen in government, 1915– 22’, in Essays in Anti-Labour History, ed. K. D. Brown (London, 1974), pp. 74–104, at pp. 80, 99.

² IWM, Wilson papers, HHW 2/84/68, Stuart-Wortley to Wilson, 25 Oct. 1916.

³ Edmonds’s introduction in A. M. Henniker, History of the Great War: Transportation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London, 1937), p. xiv.

⁴ Quoted in M. G. Taylor, ‘Land transportation in the late war’, Royal United Services Institution. Journal, lxvi (1921), 699–722, at p. 715.

⁵ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 222. The directorate-general’s ultimate strength of 94,000 men was not achieved before the armistice.

⁶ History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, ed. H. L. Pritchard (11 vols., Chatham, 1952), v. 616.

⁷ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/4, Geddes to Lloyd George, 15 Sept. 1916, p. 5.

⁸ NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/108, diary entry, 5 Oct. 1916.

⁹ NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/109, diary entries, 7 and 8 Nov. 1916.

¹⁰ W. Philpott, Bloody Victory: the Sacrifice on the Somme (London, 2009), pp. 389–90.

¹¹ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/102, memorandum by Geddes, p. 21.

¹² UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/4, Geddes to Lloyd George, 15 Sept. 1916, p. 5.

¹³ ‘Railways and roads on the western front’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 21–9, at p. 26.

¹⁴ NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/112, diary entry, 28 Apr. 1917.

¹⁵ TNA, WO 107/296, report of British armies, p. 26.

¹⁶ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 344.

¹⁷ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/4, Geddes to Lloyd George, 15 Sept. 1916, pp. 5–6.

¹⁸ TNA, WO 107/69, work of the QMG’s branch, p. 20; NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/104, diary entry, 4 Jan. 1916.

¹⁹ W. J. K. Davies, Light Railways of the First World War: a History of Tactical Rail Communications on the British Fronts, 1914–18 (Newton Abbot, 1967), p. 25.

²⁰ TNA, WO 107/69, work of the QMG’s branch, p. 20.

²¹ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/4, Geddes to Lloyd George, 15 Sept. 1916, p. 3.

²² IWM, Woodroffe papers, 3/38/1/2, 60 cm railways, 9 Sept. 1916.

²³ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/4, Geddes to Lloyd George, 15 Sept. 1916, p. 3.

²⁴ Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 68–9; Davies, Light Railways of the First World War, pp. 29–30.

²⁵ BLSC, Liddle collection, papers of Sapper W. J. Hill, LIDDLE/WW1/GS0767, recollections of France and the LRs during the Great War, 1914–1919, p. 10.

²⁶ BLSC, Hill papers, LIDDLE/WW1/GS0767, recollections of France, p. 22.

²⁷ BLSC, Hill papers, LIDDLE/WW1/GS0767, recollections of France, pp. 32–3.

²⁸ Davies, Light Railways of the First World War, p. 72.

²⁹ TNA, WO 158/852, director general of transport: history of light railways, 1916–1918, p. 3.

³⁰ Davies, Light Railways of the First World War, p. 68.

³¹ Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 170–1, 245. The first request for support from the French, made in March 1915, asked the British to supply between 2,000 and 3,000 wagons towards the projected ultimate requirements for the BEF’s traffic of between 5,000 and 6,000 wagons.

³² TNA, WO 107/15, IGC, general correspondence, Maxwell to Cowans, 2 March 1916.

³³ Unless otherwise stated, all quotations in this passage are taken from Henniker, History of the Great War, pp. 246–7.

³⁴ Les armées françaises dans la grande guerre: la direction de l’arrière (Paris, 1937), pp. 29– 30; J. H. F. Le Hénaff and H. Bornecque, Les chemins de fer français et la guerre (Paris, 1922), pp. 173–4.

³⁵ E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War: Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (2 vols., London, 1921), ii. 643.

³⁶ TNA, WO 107/69, work of the QMG’s branch, p. 2.

³⁷ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, v. 598.

³⁸ TNA, WO 107/69, work of the QMG’s branch, p. 16; L. S. Simpson, ‘Railway operating in France’, Journal of the Institution of Locomotive Engineers, xii (1922), 697–728, at p. 699.

³⁹ Haig to Walker, 19 Nov. 1916, quoted in Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 652.

⁴⁰ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/4/39, Butterworth to Geddes, 30 Nov. 1916.

⁴¹ A. J. Mullay, ‘Letter from the Somme: the Railway Executive Committee and the military in World War I’, BackTrack, xxii (2008), 220–3; Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 653–4. The delegation consisted of (general managers of their respective companies unless otherwise stated): John Aspinall, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway; Sir Alexander Kaye Butterworth, North-Eastern Railway; Guy Calthrop, LNWR; Charles Dent, Great Northern Railway; Donald Matheson, Caledonian Railway; Henry Thornton, Great Eastern Railway; Sir Robert Turnbull, an LNWR director; Arthur Watson, superintendent of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway; and Major Gilbert Szlumper, the REC’s secretary.

⁴² NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/109, diary entry, 12 Dec. 1916.

⁴³ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/69, Appendix D – Memorandum on transport facilities in the various theatres of war, 28 Oct. 1916, pp. 6–7.

⁴⁴ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 643–46; NLS, Haig papers, Acc. 3155/109, diary entry, 1 Dec. 1916.

⁴⁵ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, v. 621–2.

⁴⁶ TNA, WO 107/69, work of the QMG’s branch, p. 17; J. A. B. Hamilton, Britain’s Railways in World War I (London, 1947), p. 171.

⁴⁷ ‘Railways and the Salonica campaign’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 110–18, at p. 117; ‘The Palestine campaign’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 119–28, at p. 126.

⁴⁸ Quoted in Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, ii. 666.

⁴⁹ ‘Premier’s appeal to the travelling public’, Railway Gazette, 9 Feb. 1917, p. 174.

⁵⁰ On Britain’s railways during the First World War, see Hamilton, Britain’s Railways in World War I.

⁵¹ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/69, Appendix D, p. 2. Geddes’s estimates from this period are reproduced in Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 187.

⁵² UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/102, memorandum by Geddes, pp. 4–5.

⁵³ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/102, memorandum by Geddes, pp. 7–8.

⁵⁴ I. M. Brown, British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919 (London, 1998), p. 156.

⁵⁵ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 236.

⁵⁶ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, v. 621.

⁵⁷ Pritchard, History of the Royal Engineers, v. 664.

⁵⁸ TNA, WO 95/3970, IGC war diary, Underwood to Clayton, 12 Aug. 1916.

⁵⁹ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/4, Geddes to Lloyd George, 15 Sept. 1916; IWM, Woodroffe papers, 3/38/1/2, notes and reports, 25 Aug. 1916.

⁶⁰ D. Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London, 2011), pp. 170–243; S. Bidwell and D. Graham, Fire-Power: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904–1945 (Barnsley, 2004); G. Sheffield, Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities (London, 2001).

⁶¹ D. French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford, 1995), p. 291.

⁶² Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall, pp. 259–63.

⁶³ TNA, CAB 24/39/101, Chinese labour in France. Report of meeting held, Friday 18 Jan. 1918, p. 2.

⁶⁴ Brown, British Logistics, pp. 123–4.

⁶⁵ TNA, WO 95/3970, IGC war diary, Clayton to Lloyd George, 2 Aug. 1916.

⁶⁶ UWMRC, Granet papers, MSS. 191/3/3/4, Geddes to Lloyd George, 15 Sept. 1916, p. 9.

⁶⁷ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/D/5/2/4, memorandum on filling for week ending 10 June 1916, 17 June 1916, pp. 7–8.

⁶⁸ A. D. Chandler, ‘The railroads: pioneers in modern corporate management’, Business History Review, xxxix (1965), 16–40, at p. 16.

⁶⁹ Chandler, ‘The railroads’, p. 19.

⁷⁰ A. C. Geddes, The Forging of a Family: a Family Story Studied in its Genetical, Cultural and Spiritual Aspects and a Testament of Personal Belief Founded Thereon (London, 1952), p. 238.

⁷¹ R. Edwards, Instruments of Control, Measures of Output: Contending Approaches to the Practice of ‘Scientific’ Management on Britain’s Railways in the Early Twentieth Century (Southampton, 2000); C. A. Williams, Police Control Systems in Britain, 1775–1975: from Parish Constable to National Computer (Manchester, 2014), p. 153.

⁷² TNA, RAIL 491/815, train control office at Derby, 1914; J. A. F. Aspinall, Train Control Arrangements: a Survey of the Comprehensive Control System Operating on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (Manchester, 1915).

⁷³ TNA, RAIL 1053/258, railway dispute: conference between David Lloyd George, president of the Board of Trade, and representatives of the railway companies, 25 Oct. 1907, p. 6.

⁷⁴ Earnings and hours enquiry. Report of an enquiry by the Board of Trade into the earnings and hours of labour of workpeople of the United Kingdom. VII. Railway service in 1907 (Parl. Papers 1912 [Cd. 6053], cviii), pp. 188–9.

⁷⁵ On the early development of train control systems on the British railways, see P. Burtt, Control on the Railways: a Study in Methods (London, 1926), pp. 95–101.

⁷⁶ TNA, ZLIB 29/620, the train control system of the Midland Railway (reprinted from Railway Gazette), 1921.

⁷⁷ C. Hamilton Ellis, The Midland Railway (London, 1953), pp. 150–2.

⁷⁸ TNA, WO 158/852, history of light railways, p. 19.

⁷⁹ TNA, WO 95/4056/2, lines of communication troops. 31 Light Railway Operating Company Royal Engineers, diary entry, 16 Aug. 1917.

⁸⁰ BLSC, Hill papers, LIDDLE/WW1/GS0767, recollections, p. 51.

⁸¹ TNA, WO 95/4056, lines of communication troops. 12 Light Railway Operating Company Royal Engineers, diary entry, 31 July 1917.

⁸² TNA, WO 158/852, history of light railways, p. 20.

⁸³ J. G. Beharrell, ‘The value of full and accurate statistics: as shown under emergency conditions in the transportation service in France’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, pp. 37–9, at p. 39.

⁸⁴ TNA, WO 158/852, history of light railways, p. 20; Davies, Light Railways of the First World War, pp. 73–4.

⁸⁵ L. Bud-Frierman, ‘Information acumen’, in Information Acumen: the Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, ed. L. Bud-Frierman (London, 1994), pp. 7–25, at pp. 7–8.

⁸⁶ I. F. Marcosson, The Business of War (New York, 1918), p. 283.

⁸⁷ W. M. Acworth, ‘English railway statistics’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, lxv (1902), 613–64, at pp. 652–4.

⁸⁸ W. W. Tomlinson, The North Eastern Railway: its Rise and Development (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1915), p. 732.

⁸⁹ R. J. Irving, The North Eastern Railway Company, 1870–1914: an Economic History (Leicester, 1976), pp. 218–19.

⁹⁰ R. J. Irving, ‘Gibb, Sir George Stegmann (1850–1925)’, in Dictionary of Business Biography: a Biographical Dictionary of Business Leaders Active in Britain in the Period 1860– 1980, ed. D. J. Jeremy (5 vols., London, 1984), ii. 543–5, at p. 545.

⁹¹ Beharrell, ‘The value of full and accurate statistics’, p. 37.

⁹² R. Bell, Twenty-Five Years of the North Eastern Railway, 1898–1922 (London, 1951), p. 39.

⁹³ Beharrell, ‘The value of full and accurate statistics’, p. 37.

⁹⁴ TNA, WO 158/851, history of IWT, p. 22.

⁹⁵ Beharrell, ‘The value of full and accurate statistics’, p. 37.

⁹⁶ G. L. Boag, Manual of Railway Statistics (London, 1912), p. 42.

⁹⁷ G. W. Taylor, The Railway Contractors: the Story of John W. Stewart, His Enterprises and Associates (Victoria, BC, 1988), pp. 113–14.

⁹⁸ P. Scott and J. T. Walker, ‘Demonstrating distinction at “the lowest edge of the black-coated class”: the family expenditures of Edwardian railway clerks’, Centre for International Business History, 2014 <https://assets.henley.ac.uk/legacyUploads/pdf/research/papers-publications/IBH-2014-04%20Scott%20and%20Walker.pdf?mtime=20170410170907> [accessed 8 Dec. 2014], p. 2.

⁹⁹ E. Higgs, The Information State in England: the Central Collection of Information on Citizens since 1500 (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 99–132; Y. Cassis, ‘Big business in Britain and France, 1890–1990’, in Management and Business in Britain and France: the Age of the Corporate Economy, ed. Y. Cassis, F. Crouzet and T. R. Gourvish (Oxford, 1995), pp. 214–26, at p. 216.

¹⁰⁰ J. Thompson, ‘Printed statistics and the public sphere: numeracy, electoral politics, and the visual culture of numbers, 1880–1914’, in Statistics and the Public Sphere: Numbers and the People in Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000, ed. T. Crook and G. O’Hara (Abingdon, 2011), pp. 121–43, at pp. 135–6.

¹⁰¹ Beharrell, ‘The value of full and accurate statistics’, pp. 37–8.

¹⁰² J. Thompson, ‘Printed statistics and the public sphere’, pp. 123–4.

¹⁰³ TNA, WO 106/33, the Chinese Labour Corps – recruitment and organisation – history of the corps, Chinese labour in France, p. 15.

¹⁰⁴ TNA, WO 107/37, work of the labour force during the war: report, 1919, p. 6.

¹⁰⁵ R. Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness (Manchester, 2004), pp. 87–8.

¹⁰⁶ TNA, WO 95/4056/12, Light Railway Operating Company war diary, diary entry, 11 June 1917.

¹⁰⁷ J. Starling and I. Lee, No Labour, No Battle: Military Labour during the First World War (Stroud, 2009), p. 231.

¹⁰⁸ J. Charteris, At G.H.Q. (London, 1931), p. 283.

¹⁰⁹ Keele University Special Collections and Archives (KUSCA), papers of A. D. Lindsay, LIN 149, Lindsay to Erica Lindsay, 22 Jan. 1917; 28 Feb. 1917; 5 and 14 March 1917.

¹¹⁰ TNA, CAB 24/58/73, report upon an enquiry into the management of labour and the control of works in the British army zone in France, 12 June 1918, pp. 3–4.

¹¹¹ KUSCA: Lindsay papers, LIN 149, Lindsay to Erica Lindsay, 15 Aug. 1917.

¹¹² A. D. Lindsay, ‘The organisation of labour in the army in France during the war and its lessons’, Econ. Jour., xxxiv (1924), 69–82, at p. 69.

¹¹³ N. J. Griffin, ‘Scientific management in the direction of Britain’s military labour establishment during World War I’, Military Affairs, xlii (1978), 197–201, at p. 198.

¹¹⁴ ‘G.S.O.’, G.H.Q. (Montreuil-Sur-Mer) (London, 1920), p. 168.

¹¹⁵ BLSC, Yorkshire Archaeological and Historical Society collection, Personal file of Captain Bryan Fairfax, YAS/MD335/10/1, Jamieson to private secretary to H.E. The Lt. Governor, Pretoria, 25 Sept. 1905; Jamieson to the attorney general, 1 June 1908. The testimonies written in support of Fairfax’s application to the post of king’s messenger in 1914 emphasized his ‘good character’, ‘judgment and tact’, ‘good manner’, ‘leadership qualities’, ‘methodical’ approach, and ‘common sense’. See, e.g., testimonies written by Heath, 12 May 1914; Lyttleton, 12 May 1914; McMahon, 12 May 1914; Paget, 13 May 1914; Pratt, 14 May 1914; Scarborough, 15 May 1914.

¹¹⁶ Griffin, ‘Scientific management’, p. 199.

¹¹⁷ KUSCA: Lindsay papers, LIN 149, Lindsay to Erica Lindsay, 17 Apr. 1917.

¹¹⁸ TNA, WO 107/296, report of British armies, pp. 16–17.

¹¹⁹ On the work of the various labour organizations established on the western front, see TNA, WO 107/37, labour force report; Starling and Lee, No Labour, No Battle, pp. 77–162.

¹²⁰ TNA, WO 107/37, labour force report, pp. 96–7.

¹²¹ TNA, WO 107/37, labour force report, p. 99.

¹²² TNA, WO 107/37, labour force report, pp. 99–100.

¹²³ TNA, WO 107/37, labour force report, p. 100.

¹²⁴ Lindsay, ‘The organisation of labour in the army’, p. 72.

¹²⁵ Lindsay, ‘The organisation of labour in the army’, p. 72.

¹²⁶ TNA, WO 106/362, physical categories and number of men employed out of the fighting area in France; Report by Lt. Gen. H. M. Lawson CB, 16 Jan. 1917, p. 19.

¹²⁷ TNA, WO 107/37, labour force report, Appendix Z, 2 Oct. 1918.

¹²⁸ TNA, WO 107/37, labour force report, p. 104.

¹²⁹ Lindsay, ‘The organisation of labour in the army’, pp. 78–9.

¹³⁰ TNA, WO 107/37, labour force report, p. 99.

¹³¹ K. Grieves, ‘The transportation mission to GHQ, 1916’, in ‘Look to Your Front!’ Studies in the First World War by the British Commission for Military History, ed. B. Bond et al. (Staplehurst, 1999), pp. 63–78, at p. 74.

¹³² T. Stewart, ‘With the Labour Corps in France’, Royal United Services Institution. Journal, lxxiv (1929), 567–71, at p. 567.

¹³³ Henniker, History of the Great War, p. 226.