Page:EB1922 - Volume 32.djvu/782

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756
TRAINING CAMPS, MILITARY

delegates were arrested and held in prison some time before they were indicted. In Dec. 1918 those who had not been released were allowed to give bond. In the winter of 1917-8 local secretaries ol the I.W.W. at various places were tarred and feathered. In Tulsa, Okla., II members had this treatment. At Red Lodge, Mont., two members were tortured in the basement of the courthouse.

As organized in 1905 the I.W.W. had 13 industrial divisions, each composed of a group of allied industries grouped together for ad- ministrative purposes; also certain locals of mixed occupation. Boundaries of jurisdiction are by industry, not craft. The organiza- tion is centralized in a General Executive Board, with power to call strikes and a referendum on agreements between local unions and employers. All acts of the Board may be appealed to the General Convention, and decisions of the Convention are subject to a refer- endum of the general membership. Local matters are to be settled locally. As amended at the tenth convention, in 1916, the unit of organization became the industrial union instead of the local union; each industrial union to have its own by-laws. Five or more branches in any locality form an industrial union district council. Industrial departments are also provided for by the constitution. There is also the general recruiting union, which takes in the workers from any industry not yet sufficiently organized to have its own industrial union. The only national officers provided by the constitution are the general secretary-treasurer and a general executive board of seven members. Each industrial union has a secretary-treasurer and an executive board of five members. Only wage-earners are eligible to membership in the unions. No officer of the I.W.W. may run for political office without a referendum vote of the entire membership. Since 1919 no officer may hold his position for two consecutive years, but must return to his industrial work after one year of office.

AUTHORITIES. P. F. Brissenden, Tlte I.W.W. (1919); Budish and Soule, The New Unionism (1920); J. H. Cohen, Law and Order in Industry (1916); J. R. Commons, Trade Unionism and Labor Problems (Second Series, 1921); S. Gompers, Labor in Europe and America (1910); G. G. Groat, Organized Labor in America (1916); R. F. Hoxie, Trade Unionism in the United States (1917) ; William R. Bassett, When the Workmen Help You Manage (1920); Daniel Bloomfield, Labor Maintenance (1920); H. L. Gantt, Industrial Leadership (1916); Carleton Parker, The Casual Laborer and Other Essays (1920) ; Sumner Slichter, The Turnover of Factory Labor (1919); Ordway Tead, Personnel Administration (1920); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletins; American Labor Year-Book (Rand School) ; Government reports, especially that of Industrial Relations Commission, 1914-6. (J. R. Co.)


TRAINING CAMPS, MILITARY. I. UNITED KINGDOM One of the lessons learnt from the Crimean War was the necessity for having troops of all arms quartered in close proximity to one another, and to some open area of ground where they could be trained, both separately and in combination, in military exercises. Two such training centres were then chosen, one at Aldershot in England, the other at the Curragh (Kildare) in Ireland. At these two places in 1855 arrangements were started for the construction of training camps. At Aldershot a scheme was also carried out for permanent barracks for one cavalry brigade, one infantry brigade (of three battalions) and for three batteries each of horse and field artillery. These barracks were afterwards known as Wellington Lines. Besides these per- manent barracks, the scheme provided for two hutted camps, known as North and South Camps, accommodating each four battalions or their equivalent. The total accommodation, therefore, in the Aldershot of the period was one cavalry and three infantry brigades, with a proportionate number of artillery, engineers and departmental corps, about 10,000 men at most. The work begun in 1855 was finished in 1858-9.

At the Curragh the camp was designed for 10,000 men in 10 squares, each intended at first for two battalions of 500 each. The squares each consisted of a double row of huts grouped round a common parade ground, the men's quarters being at the sides in huts holding 25 men each, the officers being quartered at a third side in huts holding eight officers in each, and the fourth side of the square being taken up with regi- mental accessory buildings. This was the original plan, but it was very soon found that it would be better to have each square allotted to a whole battalion and to use the spare huts as married soldiers' quarters, and for increased accessory accommodation. The quartering of two regiments together in the same square, especially if these were of Irish militia, for even a short period of training, was not entirely free from disciplinary trouble.

There was a good deal of misgiving at the time as to the wisdom of providing temporary huts such as these and not permanent barracks. The embodiment of the militia, during the Crimean War, pressed for a larger amount of accommodation than the barracks existing in the country could provide, and the need of training units of troops together was also an urgent matter. Tents, no doubt, were thought of, but the view pre- vailed that these would be insufficient to provide shelter in the climate of the British Isles for any lengthy period. The difficulty of obtaining materials of a permanent nature, and of getting! the quarters erected with sufficient rapidity, except by the use of temporary materials, were, no doubt, the military considera-! tions which led to the decision to build huts, and these coincided i with the natural desire on the part of the Treasury authorities < to get the work done cheaply. At the time, it was not expected ! that the huts would last for more than a few years, though as a matter of fact some > were in occupation 50 years afterwards. There were other similar -hutments on a small scale at Shorn- cliffe and Colchester, on exactly the same lines as those at the Curragh and Aldershot.

The huts themselves were built of wooden framing, resting ; upon dwarf walls of brick, longitudinally and transversely, j They were roofed with boarding, covered with tarred felt. The walls were of wooden weather boarding painted, and the lining of the huts was plain boarding, or (in the case of officers' huts) rough canvas papered. The lighting was by windows, ! much smaller than would now be considered sanitary, and after ! dark oil lamps were used. Small stoves burning coal were used to heat the buildings, the stovepipes passing through the felted roofs. The water supply, in the case of the Curragh, and of the South Camp at Aldershot, was obtained from wells and i reservoirs on War Department land. It was led to open ablution [ sheds, and as these were fairly near the barracks, the men had i no greater difficulty than in a tented camp, in their ablutions. But anything in the shape of baths or hot water was unknown. The latrines were at first on the bucket principle, but very soon after the camps were taken into use, trough latrines with water flushing were adopted. The sewage was treated in a sewage farm at a little distance from the camp, both at Aider- shot and the Curragh, the drains leading to it being brick cul- verts of a type now condemned.

It is of course very easy with our modern knowledge to criticize all this, but the main points of the policy were sound, viz., proximity to open manoeuvre ground, and to rifle ranges, the grouping of units and the accommodation of those units in small buildings, both because a small building is more easily adapted to some other use than a large one, (when change of policy necessitates reappropriation) and also because it is more easily isolated in case of fire or infectious disease. In this respect the same policy was continued in the great hutting programme of 1914-6 in England, as opposed to the American plan of having large two-storey huts containing each upwards of 100 men.

No hutted camps were built in England again until the S. African War of 1899-1902. Some demands came from S. Africa for hutting material, and huts of corrugated iron roofs and walls, lined with boarding, were accordingly designed and sent to that country. Similar huts were built at several of the new stations at home, which had come into being with the increases to the army authorized in 1899, e.g. Deepcut, Blackdown, Bordon, Longmoor and Ewshott in the Aldershot area, Bulford on Salisbury Plain, Kildare in Ireland, and regular summer camps such as Okehampton, Glen Imaal, Kilbride, etc.

When the World War broke out in 1914, a demand arose once more for training centres, and the problem of hutments had again to be dealt with. The types of huts adopted are described in the article BARRACKS AND HUTMENTS: it is here proposed to deal with (A) the principles on which sites were selected; (B) the system of grouping the typical designs so as to form suitable unit hutments; (C) the grouping together of various unit hutments, and (D) the accessory services incidental to such groups of hutments.