Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/132

124 That he could not “ha’ while” to tell me just then; and, with a polite intimation that I had better go to some ’factory” and see for myself, the old fellow thrust his hands into the very depths of a pair of greasy, drooping trousers’ pockets, and sauntered off.

That was three years ago. There had been similar calamities before; there have been since. And though two special Acts of Parliament have been passed to prevent it, the old tragedy will be enacted yet again, if there be not a third passed to make the other two operative. Of the justice of this remark, I think the reader will be convinced, if he will only adopt the suggestion of my laconic old friend, and visit with me one of these Birmingham percussion-cap manufactories.

We shall find the object of our search in one of the most densely populated parts of the town; and to reach it we shall have to thread a maze of streets, paved with those excruciating kidney-stones, which, for the benefit of starving chiropodists, the corporation of Birmingham—if there be one—kindly lays down and renews from time to time. The manufactory itself—an ancient three-story dwellinghouse, enlarged from time to time by the addition of surrounding buildings of all sorts and sizes, and in all stages of repair—looks, externally, for all the world like a band of tipsy tenements hugging each other; and, internally, is a complete structural puzzle. To pass from one room to another, even on the same floor, you have to go up flights of stairs here, and down flights of stairs there, and through dark passages, and along crazy out-door galleries, until you become perfectly bewildered; and in the effort to get from one floor to another, you would most assuredly be lost, unless piloted up and down by old hands, whom long service has familiarised with the odd intricacies of the place. With a competent topographical guide, however, the task is tolerably easy, and, with an intelligent one, highly interesting. So, we will suppose, if you please, that we have fallen into the hands of a phenomenon combining both these qualities, and proceed.

Our guide is the light porter of the establishment—a good-natured looking old man, weighing about eighteen stone. We tell him that our object is to see every process in the manufacture of a percussion-cap; and, in order that we may complain of no lack of courtesy on his part, he at once conducts us into a large cellar, where thousands of oblong sheets of thin metal, resembling brass, are being stored away. This metal, he tells us, is that of which the cap is made; and he adds, by way of explanation, that it is neither brass nor copper, but a mixture of both, the one being too brittle, and the other too dear for the purpose. Thence he takes us through an engine room—where three bright pistons are for ever plunging down to get strength, and leaping up to expend it on a labyrinth of leathern bands that turn thousands of wheels all over the manufactory, up-stairs and down—to an apartment where a score or two of queer-looking iron machines seem to be quietly chewing up, in a score or two pairs of gigantic jaws, the metal we have seen below. A sheet of this metal is put into a pair of the jaws for our special information, and, in a twinkling, it is almost noiselessly crunched into hundreds of little crosses of St. George—of a handful of which we possess ourselves, and pass on.

A series of passages and corridors and flights of steps, leading through packing-rooms and warehouses, brings us out into a long, narrow apartment on the second floor, resounding with a clatter of machinery that just succeeds in making itself heard above the hum of sixty or seventy gossiping girls and young women. “Come, come,” says our guide, in the loudest of tones, and the gentlest of accents, “do be a bit quiet for once, gals;” and in an instant nothing is heard but the sharp clicking of iron against iron. Adown the centre and along both sides of the room run long oaken benches, to which are affixed, at equal distances, a number of iron contrivances that look like patent turnip-cutters in miniature; and in front of each of these stands a girl with a constantly decreasing heap of the crosses of St. George on one side of her, and a constantly increasing heap of what appear to be percussion caps on the other. The light porter explains that the room is the “press room,” the girls the “press girls,” and the miniature turnip-cutters the “presses;” and to show that they are rightly named, he bids us produce a few of the crosses of St. George that were chewed out of the jaws down-stairs. Taking one of these, he holds it against a little round hole in the press with his left hand; gives a twist to a lever with his right; and, before you can say “Jack Robinson,” the cross has been driven into the hole on the head of a punch, and is rolling down in front of you a perfect cup, of which the centre of the cross has formed the bottom, and the four limbs the sides; and, to hide the joints and give a better hold of it, it has been crimped all round. Another and another follow with equal rapidity, and, picking them up, you carry them into another room, where they are thrown, with a few thousand others, into a box containing emery dust, which box is closed, well shaken, and opened again, and there are your little cups turned into bright brazen shell caps, ready for loading.

This loading involves several processes, all of which, by reason of the explosiveness of the material used, are frightfully dangerous. That little cake of hard, whitey-brown matter, which you hardly notice in the bottom of the cap as you hurriedly fix it to the nipple of your gun on the moors or at the rifle-range, has passed through seven stages of preparation, and at almost every stage the life of the preparer was jeopardised—and not only so, but the lives of all the workpeople we have seen on our way through the manufactory, and others besides. During the last three years between thirty and forty lives have been sacrificed in Birmingham alone to this one branch of the manufacture, and at least a hundred engaged in it have been maimed—some for life, and others for weeks or months, as the case may be. How? we shall see as we go on. It would be of no use now to ask our guide, however courteous he might be, to show us these processes. He would tell us that, being dangerous, they were carried on away from the manufactory, and that we could not be allowed to see them. Four or