In his War Memoirs, David Lloyd George recorded a visit paid by King George V to a Sheffield shell factory in late September 1915 during one of his tours of arms factories. The king exchanged words with some of the workers, among them an ex-naval colleague, with whom he reminisced about old times. Afterwards, the king’s attention was drawn by a man working with particular effort. Having observed the man’s labours, the king told the unnamed worker, ‘I am glad you realise the importance of the work in hand. Without an adequate supply of shells we cannot expect to win.’1 This was a lesson which had already been impressed upon the country; earlier in the year a shortage of shells on the western front had led to the formation of a coalition government, and facilitated the further rise of David Lloyd George, not as a radical leader, but as a war leader. By the end of the war Britain’s economy had been re-organised to supply the mass armies it was putting into the field, a process which required massive government intervention in private industry, the organisation of labour and capital, and the employment of large numbers of women in industries where they had previously been a negligible presence. The commercial and political talent of the country was yoked to the goal of supplying the growing British armies. New factories and even towns were constructed as the country became aware, to quote one contemporary commentator, ‘that the Herculean struggle was not merely a conflict between armies and navies, but between British chemists and German chemists, between British workshops and the Workshops of Germany.’