Text 1: The robots and me, by Saoirse Kinsella

An original contemporary magazine feature.

The body shop at the Kesterton car plant is the size of four cathedrals and almost silent, except for the hiss and snap of welding. Along the line, three hundred orange robots bow and twist over the half-built cars in perfect unison, like a choir that never needs to breathe. In the time it takes me to write that sentence, they have made sixty welds.

Twenty years ago, about four hundred people worked in this hall. Today there are twenty-six, and Shona Lennox is one of them. She started here at eighteen, welding by hand in a mask and leather apron, ‘sparks down my neck, ears ringing for an hour after every shift’. When the robots arrived, she assumed she would be out of a job. Instead the company trained her to programme them.

Now she spends her days at a laptop on a trolley, teaching the machines new movements a few millimetres at a time. ‘They’re brilliant and they’re stupid,’ she says. ‘A robot will make the same weld ten thousand times without a mistake. But move the car two centimetres and it’ll weld thin air quite happily until somebody stops it.’ That somebody is usually Shona.

She is fond of them, in a way. Each robot has a number, but the team have given most of them names, and Shona talks about them as if they were difficult pupils. Number 214, known as Big Derek, has a habit of stopping for no reason on Monday mornings.

Not everyone she started with made the change. Some retired; some went to warehouses or drove taxis. She still sees a few of them in the pub, and they still call the robots ‘the things that took our jobs’. Shona does not argue. ‘They’re right,’ she says. ‘And they’re wrong. The jobs went. But nobody here has lost a finger in ten years.’

At the end of the line a finished car body rolls past, gleaming, and nobody has touched it. Shona watches it go with an expression I can only describe as pride.

Text 2: A day at the locomotive works, by A Special Correspondent

An original newspaper feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper feature, written in 1871, a journalist describes a visit to a railway company’s locomotive works.

To pass through the gates of the Company’s locomotive works at Wexley is to enter a town within a town, where four thousand men and boys labour at the making of engines, and where the noise is such that a visitor must abandon all hope of conversation within the first five minutes.

In the smithy, a hundred forges glow in long rows, and the great hammer, driven by steam, rises and falls upon a mass of white-hot iron with blows that shake the very floor beneath one’s feet. The hammerman, a giant of a fellow with his sleeves rolled to the shoulder, governs it by a single lever, and with such judgement that the iron head descends now with a crash like thunder and now as gently as a man setting down a cup.

In the boiler shop the din is worse. Here the boilers are riveted together by hand, and inside each boiler, holding up the rivet with a heavy iron bar while the men outside strike it, crouches a boy. I was permitted to put my head inside one. The sound is beyond description; it is like being shut up inside a bell while a dozen men beat upon it. The boy, who could not have been more than fourteen, grinned at me. Many of the older boilermakers, I was told, are quite deaf.

Yet there is an order in all this tumult which is wonderful to observe. Every man knows his task. The wheels come from one shop, the frames from another, the cylinders from a third, and in the erecting shop they meet, and an engine grows in a few weeks from a heap of parts into a creature that will draw a train at sixty miles an hour.

At six o’clock the hooter sounded, and the whole army poured out of the gates in a black flood, with their tin cans and their pipes, cheerful and filthy. I came away with my ears ringing and the conviction that I had seen the true greatness of our nation, which lies not in its palaces but in its workshops.

Both of these texts are about factories where machines are built.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the work and the workers
• how the writers present the workers and the machines

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