Foreign News: Guy Fawkes Club

Britons learned for the first time last week of the Guy Fawkes Club (officially, the Westminster Munitions Unit). For more than two years some 150 wives of Ministers, M.P.s, clerks of the Lords and Commons, cleaners, custodians and councilors have been making weapons of war in the massive vaults beneath the Houses of Parliament, where in 1605 Guy Fawkes was caught among the 36 gunpowder kegs with which he planned to blow up Britain’s lawmakers. From 9 in the morning till 9 at night the air-conditioned dungeon hums to the sound of precision machines. Last year the volunteers, garbed in white knee-length coats of a royal ordnance factory, worked 74,000 manhours. This year they plan to work at least as much on secret submarine devices for use against the Japanese.

After three months’ apprenticeship, novice munitions workers become full-fledged members of the Guy Fawkes Club, eligible to wear the club badge: a gilt portcullis on a field of blue, above a crossed hammer and spanner bearing the motto: “With Which We Work” over the red rose of England.