A GIANT COBBLER’S SHOP
The biggest cobbler’s shop in the world is at one of the British Army’s bases in France. It mends the boots of about as many persons as live in Liverpool or Glasgow. But nearly all the persons whose boots it mends are adult men living in the open, most of them using their feet on wet or rough ground for the greatest part of each day. So it has to mend 2,800 boots a day.
The Worn Boots’ Departure.
It would be too much to ask that, after the mending, every man should get his own boots back. Even if that could be done, he would have to wear strange boots meanwhile; for, unlike the soldiers of some other countries, the British soldier does not bring two pairs of boots into the field, and does not want to, having enough weight to carry without. So, when his boots need repair, he hands them in to his company quartermaster-sergeant and sees them no more.
They depart from him into the general stock of still serviceable, though not new, army clothing, just as his shirt does when he comes out of trenches, has a hot shower-bath, and puts on somebody else’s shirt which has been disinfected and washed at the Divisional Laundry.
The Receiving Room.
The damaged boots go, higgledy-piggledy, into a sack, with others. The sack goes to the rail-head, with or without the help of a battalion transport cart and a divisional motor lorry. From the rail-head the sack goes, without trans-shipment, to a siding outside the back door of the base repair depôt, and the boots are emptied out on the floor of what may be called the receiving room.
Here they are first roughly sorted out and cleaned of the mud which often encases them. This is done by women. Thence they are passed on to an expert shoemaker, to be tried for their life. He does nothing but diagnose the condition of boot after boot. He picks up each boot, looks it over for a couple of seconds with a swift, judicial glance at sole, heel, uppers and welt, and throws it down on his right or on his left.
Bootlaces.
The boots thrown on his right are not worth repair. But even they are worth something. They go to another room where women cut out of each boot two round pieces of the leather over ankle bone on each side. The women do this all day. Everybody here does some one special thing all day. These discs of leather are passed on to another sub-workshop, full of women, who lay each disc on a board, stick a kind of awl through its middle, put a very sharp knife to its edge, and then make it revolve round the awl in such a way that the knife cuts an excellent bootlace—a quite straight one, too, strange to see—out of the circle of leather, paring it down and down till nothing of it is left.
Nothing Wasted.
Of what remains of the boot itself the softer parts are combined with other ingredients to form a useful manure. The more intractable and less succulent heel is carried to the furnace room where the power needed for the machinery is generated. A boot heel has been found to make excellent fuel, a large furnace not being particular about its food. Thus no part, even of the most decrepit boots, goes to waste. It is like the drowned man in the Tempest—
From the judgment chamber those boots which are not despaired of pass to a place where another body of experts assess the amount of repair required by each boot. To each boot one of them attaches the kind and quantity of leather required to mend it—perhaps a new sole, or a sole and a heel, or what not. The boot, together with this allowance of material, is then placed in a pigeon hole, one out of a great case of pigeon holes. From this it is taken, in its turn, by another shoemaker—a soldier in khaki, like all the other men here—who goes to work on it.
Division of Labour.
But he does not do the whole job. One man pares down the new sole or heel to the dimensions of the particular boot in hand. Another man, or woman, holds the boot and the sole in contact with a machine which sews on the sole in about the time in which you could sprint 100 yards. Another person and another machine drive in nails all round the sole almost as fast as you could draw your finger along the line of nail-heads that they trace.
It would be tedious to go through all the other stages of repair. But one may hark back to mention one which was forgotten in its place. Just after leaving the seat of judgment where, as it were, the sheep were separated from the goats, each boot to be mended was handed over to an expert who put it on a last and simply banged it back, with a heavy hammer, into the original shape of a new boot.
The effect of this skilful violence seems miraculous to the layman. Boots which for months have been taking a heavy list to port or starboard emerge from the ordeal, to all appearance, absolutely upright, although anyone who has worn a boot down to one side until the lower part of the upper is in contact on one side with the ground knows how incorrigible the deformity seems.
Return of the Renewed Boots.
The end of it all is that the boots, completely mended and re-shod with iron heels, go to a woman who bathes them in oil till the leather has drunk its fill. Thus they are both softened and re-armed against the wet. They are now ready for reissue to troops. They go again into a sack, are carried back to the railway siding and make the return journey to the Front, where the sack will be opened by some quartermaster-sergeant, and an order will go round some company for any men in need of new boots to report at the quartermaster’s stores.
The Employees.
Of the 2,400 persons employed in this huge cobbler’s shop, 1,500 are women and girls, all French. It thus helps to absorb the labour displaced in France by the derangement of the cotton, linen and woollen industries at and near the seat of war in the North. The women and girls earn higher wages than they did before the war. They are extremely cheerful workers, sing most of the time, and look up at the occasional British visitors to the place with amused curiosity. To each group of them there is assigned as a friend and adviser some educated and motherly Englishwoman, a volunteer.
A Model Organisation.
The workmen are all British and shoemakers by trade. They have either enlisted specially for the work or been combed out of ordinary battalions on account of their special usefulness here. The officers were experts in boot trade management before joining the New Army. The whole place is a model of industrial organisation. There is nowhere in it any trace of the makeshift and rough-and-ready methods for which the difficulties of war are sometimes made an excuse elsewhere. The minute economies that are practised in all the processes of repair are enough to put to shame any visitor who has not done his very utmost to save his country money.
The place described is not the only one of its kind at the British bases in France. Great as it is, it could not mend all the boots of more than two million men. But in each of the Army’s giant cobbler’s shops the same methods prevail.