Part 8 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER VI.

BIG GUNS, SMALL-ARMS, AND AMMUNITION.

Woolwich a.r.s.enal--Enfield Small-arms Factory--Lord Armstrong and the Elswick Works--Testing Guns at s...o...b..ryness--Hiram S. Maxim and the Maxim Machine Gun--The Colt Automatic Gun--Ironclads--Submarine Boats.

WOOLWICH a.r.s.eNAL.

Since early days, Woolwich has been an important centre for wars.h.i.+ps and war-material. Here s.h.i.+ps were built and launched when England first began to have a navy of specially constructed men-of-war, for Henry VIII. established the Woolwich dockyard, and also appointed Commissioners of the navy, and formed the Navy Office. Some of the earliest three-deckers, or, as we may almost call them, five-deckers, were built at this dockyard; and of these the most famous was the _Great Harry_, so named after the king, which was launched here in 1514. For the period, the s.h.i.+p was a large one, being of a thousand tons burden; though we should not think much of her size now, when we have ironclads of over eleven thousand tons. There are models of her in the Greenwich Naval Museum, which is not far from Woolwich; and a curious lofty wooden castle she is, rising far up above the water-line, and offering a fair target, if the cannon of those days had any accuracy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The _Great Harry_.]

On June 3, 1559, Queen Elizabeth came down to Woolwich to witness the launch of a large s.h.i.+p called after her name. In 1637 a s.h.i.+p half as large again as the _Great Harry_ was launched at Woolwich. She was the marvel of her days, and though named the _Royal Sovereign_, was more often called the _Golden Devil_, from the amount of mischief she wrought in the Dutch fleet. Her guns were probably of small size; but she carried enough of them on her three flush-decks, her forecastle, her half-deck, her quarter-deck, and in her round-house; for in her lower tier were sixty ports; in the middle, thirty; in the third, twenty-six; in her forecastle were twelve; in her half-deck were fourteen. She was decorated in the emblematical style of the time with gilding and carvings; and these designs were the work of one Thomas Haywood, an actor, who has left us an account of the s.h.i.+p which he adorned, in a quarto volume published the same year in which she was launched. We can imagine what she looked like, with her lofty forecastle and p.o.o.p, the latter provided with five lanterns, one of which, we are told, was large enough to contain ten persons.

Old Samuel Pepys gives us many references to Woolwich in his famous _Diary_. He paid frequent visits to the dockyard on his duties as Secretary to the Admiralty, and seems to have looked after his business well. For instance, on June 3, 1662, he writes: 'Povy and Sir W. Batten and I by water to Woolwich; and there saw an experiment made of Sir R.

Ford's Holland yarn, about which we have lately had so much stir; and I have much concerned myself for our rope-maker, Mr Hughes, who represented it so bad; and we found it to be very bad, and broke sooner than, upon a fair trial, five threads of that against four of Riga yarn; and also that some of it had old stuff that had been tarred, covered over with new hemp, which is such a cheat as hath not been heard of.'

The next month he is looking after the hemp again, and writes: 'To Woolwich to the rope-yard, and there looked over several sorts of hemp, and did fall upon my great survey of seeing the working and experiments of the strength and charge in the dressing of every sort; and I do think have brought it to so great a certainty, as I have done the king some service in it, and do purpose to get it ready against the Duke's coming to town to present to him.' He adds pathetically: 'I see it is impossible for the king to have things done as cheap as other men.'

Of as early date probably as the dockyard, was the 'Warren,' the name by which the a.r.s.enal was formerly called. This establishment seems to have begun as a cannon-foundry, and such, indeed, it chiefly continues to be.

Moreover, in other days when the dockyard flourished, stores of s.h.i.+ps'

cannon were kept here, ready to be placed on s.h.i.+ps as soon as commissioned. But now that the dockyard is a thing of the past, and now that the large building-slips, workshops, and ropewalk are empty, the cannon at the a.r.s.enal are chiefly those for the royal artillery and for forts. The dockyard has been closed since 1869; its broad roads are deserted, its workshops are silent, and its large sheds are only used for stores; but the a.r.s.enal has increased in magnitude; and the 'Warren,' in which, before the establishment of the Plumstead magazines, powder was proved ('before the princ.i.p.al engineers and officers of the Board of Ordnance, to which many of the n.o.bility and gentry were often invited, and afterwards sumptuously entertained by them'), has now become an enormous establishment, covering acres of ground, and containing workshops provided with the most complicated machinery, and foundries of enormous size. It is round this a.r.s.enal that we propose to take the reader.

Having gained admittance, the visitor is put in charge of a guide. The tapping of the great furnace is a remarkable sight. A stream of molten steel runs into a huge tank which can contain four or five tons of metal, and this tank is dragged off by some score of men to fill the various moulds. It is remarkable, also, to see a huge steam-hammer of some forty tons' force welding a ma.s.s of metal at white-heat.

The a.r.s.enal is divided into four departments--the Laboratory, the Gun Factory, the Gun-carriage Department, and the Stores; and of these four divisions, the first two contain the chief things not to be found in very many other places.

The Gun-carriage Department has workshops both for metal and wood work, and each branch contains many subdivisions. There is nothing, however, in this department which is peculiar to the a.r.s.enal, with the exception, of course, of the special articles which are manufactured; that is to say, forging, steam-carpentering, wheel-making, and so on, are carried out as they would be executed elsewhere. The guides always make a point of showing the wheel-shoeing pit, as it is called, in which the tyre is put on a gun-wheel. The machinery in this department is very complete, especially in the carpenters' shops, where the lathes which work automatically, and turn wheel-spokes and such things according to a given pattern, and the steam-saws for cutting dovetails for sides of boxes, and other machinery, are all constructed on highly ingenious principles. With regard to the articles constructed, the trail of a gun may be followed in all stages of its construction until it appears complete with its wheels, and ready for the gun to be placed on it.

Here, too, may be seen the ingenious Moncrieff gun-carriage, by which the gun is only raised above a fortification at the moment when it is fired, the 'sighting' being done from below by an arrangement of mirrors.

The Stores, again, are remarkable only for the quant.i.ty of material stowed away ready for use. For instance, there are ten thousand complete sets of harness for guns and baggage wagons always kept in stock. But when the visitor has just walked once through these storehouses, he will probably have seen all that he cares to see there.

It is, however, when we come to the Gun Factory that the special interest of the a.r.s.enal begins. Imagine a huge ma.s.s of steel welded--for casting would not give sufficient strength--into the form of the trunk of a large fir-tree, and you have the first stage of a gun's existence.

This solid ma.s.s is to form the tube of a cannon, and the solid core has to be removed by ingenious and powerful machinery. It takes a week or two to bore the interior of some of the larger guns. Some of the machines are constructed to bore a hole which is continually enlarged by successive tools; while others actually cut out a round solid ma.s.s from the interior. The tube has also to be subjected to the process of being turned both within and without, and it is then fit for the next process, which is that of cutting the grooves within it which give the required spin to the projectile, commonly called rifling. This is a delicate and intricate process, for the utility of the gun of course depends largely on the accuracy with which the grooves are made. The actual cutting is performed by a machine which travels up the tube at the required spiral; but as the work proceeds, the man in charge carefully examines the grooves along their whole length with the aid of a candle fixed at the end of a long rod which he pushes up the tube.

But when the tube has been bored, turned, and rifled, the gun is by no means finished. The tube by itself would be far too delicate for the large charges of powder employed; and, consequently, it has to be fitted at the breech end with two or three outer cases or jackets, the outside one of which bears the trunnions on which the gun rests. At last the gun is completed; and the next thing is to subject it to a severe test by firing from it a charge of powder proportioned to its size. For this purpose, it has to be taken to Plumstead Marshes, a portion of which forms the testing-ground and powder-magazines connected with the a.r.s.enal. Lines of railway run down to the marshes, and the gun is mounted on a truck and dragged off by a locomotive to the place appointed for its trial. It may be mentioned that lines of railway run in all directions through the a.r.s.enal, one of narrow gauge being introduced into most of the workshops, so that the visitor has to keep a lookout lest a tiny locomotive with a train of what may almost be called toy trucks should bear down upon him as he is walking along.--But to return to the gun. When it has been finally tested, cleaned, polished, and stamped, it is coated with a particular varnish, and is fit for service.

The next most interesting place to the Gun Factory is the Laboratory, where sh.e.l.ls and bullets are manufactured. Sh.e.l.ls are cast rough, and then finished off in a lathe. A band of copper now usually takes the place of the copper studs which were formerly inserted to enable the sh.e.l.l to fit into the rifled grooves. This band is expanded by the force of the explosion when the gun is fired, and fills up the grooves, so as to give the necessary spin to the sh.e.l.ls. Sh.e.l.ls are charged with their interior bullets at the Laboratory; but the powder is added down at the marshes. A sh.e.l.l when completed has become a very expensive article, especially if it is a large one. Some of those projectiles are so heavy that the guns from which they have to be fired are provided with small cranes for lifting them up to the breech. The sh.e.l.ls are, like the guns, beautifully finished off and varnished, and then sent off to the stores.

Perhaps the most interesting place in the Laboratory department is the Pattern Room, which is a sort of museum where shot and sh.e.l.ls of all sorts are to be seen, from the old-fas.h.i.+oned chain-shot, made of round b.a.l.l.s fastened together, to the most perfect specimens of modern sh.e.l.ls.

Here, also, are to be seen those strange weapons of modern warfare called torpedoes, amongst them the famous 'fish torpedo,' which with its complicated mechanism may be almost described as an under-water s.h.i.+p. It is so constructed that it finds its way unseen and unheard, with its terrible charge of dynamite, to the side of a hostile vessel.

THE ENFIELD SMALL-ARMS FACTORY.

It is at Enfield, on the river Lea, some twelve miles down the Great Eastern Railway, that small-arms are manufactured, almost entirely, as required by our army.

Enfield Factory has not, like Woolwich a.r.s.enal, an ancient history of its own. In the days of Henry VIII. and of Elizabeth, of the Duke of York and his faithful secretary, Samuel Pepys, Woolwich was famous for the production both of s.h.i.+ps and of guns; but the small-arms factory on the borders of Ess.e.x dates only from the early part of this century. Its site seems to have been chosen regardless of any peculiar advantages for manufacturing purposes. It is simply a collection of workshops built in the flat meadows through which run the various branches, natural and artificial, of the lazy Lea; and the nearest town, about a mile and a half distant, is quiet and remote little Waltham, chiefly known for its Abbey Church, the burial-place of King Harold, which rises in its midst.