Chapter 12
In the first week after the men left, Victoria closed all her factories.
She had no one to run them. The other mill owners were in the same situation she was.
The only blessing was that it was August, and things always slowed down in the summer.
In France, all forms of industry, and even craftsmanship and commerce, always closed for the month of August. The big dilemma for Victoria was that she had no idea when she could open again.
With smaller mills, some of them could manage with the older men who were too old to go to war, and the younger men with health problems, and decrease their production accordingly.
They would be less profitable that way during the war, and the owners all agreed that they would have to hire women for some jobs.
But with eight factories, Victoria had a much bigger problem.
And after days of wracking her brain and worrying about it, she decided to give in and make some major changes.
She needed more than a few women, she needed an army of them.
She designed a poster herself offering jobs and on-the-job training to women.
She made a point of saying that no experience was required, and after careful thought, she added childcare for children below school age, for women who had no one to care for their children.
It hadn’t occurred to her at first, since she didn’t have children of her own.
Mrs. Kelly had suggested it. Victoria promised a fair wage, and had the posters tacked to trees in parks and delivered to schools, churches, butcher shops and bakeries, hospitals, libraries, hair salons, dress shops—anywhere that women congregated, even restaurants and bars.
The posters were all over Manchester, in neighboring counties like Cheshire, all the way to Yorkshire, and in all the towns in the vicinity of Manchester: Trafford, Stockport, Tameside, Oldham, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, Wigan, and Wilmslow.
Victoria wanted to move quickly so she’d get the best of the women, before the other mill owners started hiring. She needed more women than anyone else.
There were nine female secretaries in the office, and Victoria appointed them as the employment team to interview women and hire them.
There were sixty-four men who were over the age limit to go to war, or had health issues that made them ineligible, which gave her eight men at each factory.
She was going to use them to train the women and act as foremen.
The factories needed far more than that, and Victoria decided to promote the women as foremen as soon as they were capable.
The men who worked for Victoria had worked at mills for all their lives and had extensive knowledge of what was needed.
The women she would be hiring would have no experience whatsoever.
They would be coming from their kitchens and bedrooms at home, with no skills at all except how to take care of children, cook, and run a home, but they could learn.
Victoria was counting on their being adaptable to do whatever they had to in order to take care of their families in the absence of their men.
Some of those men would never come home, and the women would have to be responsible for themselves and their children forever or for a very long time.
Victoria had a dozen of the remaining male employees come to her office to talk about how long it would take to train the women they hired to do a proper job.
The oldest of the group looked at her and said, “Oh, somewhere between ten and twenty years,” and everyone laughed.
After considerable discussion, they agreed on a three-week training course for the minor jobs, and six weeks for the more complicated ones.
It meant that the mills wouldn’t be fully operative for a month and a half, even if they started hiring quickly.
But by sometime in September, they should be up and running, not as efficiently as they had performed before, but Victoria was hoping the women would learn quickly.
They would need the jobs, and would apply themselves just as any man would, and some would be smarter than others.
It was an ambitious plan, but the older foremen were impressed by what she was doing.
They’d heard that other mills were closing, overwhelmed by the problem, and Victoria refused to be beaten by it.
She had faith in her own sex to be equal to the task at hand.
She wondered what Bert would have thought of her plans, and she had a feeling he would have liked them.
After three days, the applicants started trickling in, shyly at first, and at the end of the first week, dozens of women were lining up for interviews.
At the end of the second week, there were several hundred women lining up every day.
Word had spread like wildfire that the Banning factories were offering training and jobs.
The ones the interviewers liked they hired on the spot.
Victoria had set a minimum age of sixteen, because there was heavy machinery involved, but she put no limit at the other end.
No one was too old to be hired, there would always be something they could do.
She conducted interviews herself, and hired a spunky eighty-year-old woman to head up the nursery they would be providing.
She had nine children of her own, fifteen grandchildren, and plenty of experience.
The woman said she didn’t care how late she worked if they had night shifts, and Victoria enlisted her help to interview others for childcare jobs in the nursery.
She had already figured out where she would put them.
She was going to use one of the empty warehouses as the childcare center.
Conducting the interviews was a massive operation, with women coming from all the surrounding counties.
They often came in groups of friends, and signed up as five or six at once.
By the end of three weeks, Victoria had hired two thousand, nine hundred women, having interviewed many of them herself, and was constantly impressed by them.
For the most part, they were smart, scared, resourceful, and willing to do whatever it would take to keep their families together while their husbands were at war.
Many were excited about having a job and admitted to having wanted to work for years to provide additional income, but their husbands wouldn’t let them.
Now they had the chance to actually do something. They were proud of their new jobs.
Victoria was offering to pay them more than the standard female scale for jobs performed by women at the time.
The salaries were lower than what men were paid for the same jobs, considerably lower, but on the female pay scale, she was offering a good wage, although it always irked her that women were paid less.
But in most cases, the women were happy with whatever they got.
They all needed jobs now, and Victoria needed workers.
It was a blessing for both sides. And at other factories, the owners were paying women as little as they could get away with, and had fewer applicants.
Women stood in line for hours at the Banning factories, hoping for a job there, with better pay, free childcare, and good working conditions.
Victoria had made their jobs more appealing than the male-owned mills and factories.
With fewer than three thousand workers, she was still shorthanded, but women were continuing to apply, and by mid-September, Victoria had filled every job previously held by a man.
It was a battalion of novices, but all were willing to learn, and the training courses run by the older foremen were working well.
The new trainees were making fewer mistakes than their teachers had feared.
“I swear they’re smarter than we are, and they work harder,” one of the foremen said to an old friend at the pub after work one night.
“Don’t let anyone hear you say that, or we’ll all be out of work after the war.
What’s going to happen to them when our boys come home?
” It was a question the men had been asking themselves and the women didn’t have time to, working all day and taking care of their children at night.
They were just happy to have jobs now, which would give them some sense of security.
Women were also being hired to work in munitions factories, but Victoria had moved faster than anyone to hire the workers she needed, in good conditions at a fair wage.
And munitions factories were liable to get bombed by the Germans, which made it a high-risk job, and working in the mills wasn’t, which made a difference to the women too.
They couldn’t afford to leave their children motherless now, and fatherless too.
No one else hiring in the area was providing childcare for infants and preschool-age children.
Victoria had covered all the bases, and women were still flocking to apply for jobs.
They were at full complement for factory workers by October, and all had had up to six weeks of training.
The one constant irritant she encountered was Ed Wheaton.
Due to a minor heart murmur he’d had all his life, he was exempt from the military, and had nothing better to do than pursue the women in his social set, who didn’t need to work, and were bored without their husbands.
He was more than willing to entertain them and have brief affairs.
The war was proving to be a social bonanza for him.
He still had time to show up at Victoria’s office from time to time, to renew his offer to marry her, but she was too busy to waste her time talking to him.
One afternoon he managed to waylay her, leaving her office after lunch.
She was rushing to Yorkshire for a meeting at their wool operation.