On Friday week at Cardiff Mr. Lloyd George spoke in
a thoroughly frank and practical manner to employers and workers in the engineering and metal trades of South Wales. There was a shortage of shells, and he appealed for the want to be supplied. They were the people who could do it. In France private workshops had been turned into arsenals months ago. The results were seen in the last forward move of the French. That was the example to follow. There were three possible methods of procedure (1) the Yorkshire plan of establishing two or three national shell factories, and requisitioning machinery for them from other workshops ; (2) the Lancashire plan of utilizing existing workshops, with the addition of special machinery; (3) a combination of these plane, so that great central factories would be established and supplied with machinery offered voluntarily by private work- shops or requisitioned from them, while private workshops would still produce all the shells they could. This was the plan he had come to recommend. Among manufacturers there must be equality of sacrifice and contribution. He ended with rousing phrases which left the audience in tremendous enthusiasm: "Plant the flag in your workshops. Every lathe you have, recruit it. Convert your machinery into battalions."
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