Major William Ivory’s Proposed Ordnance Workshop Company, 1931.

In October 1931, Major William Ivory, RNZA, proposed forming an Ordnance Workshop Company in Wellington. Ivory held the combined appointments of Inspecting Ordnance Officer and Ordnance Mechanical Engineer. His proposal addressed a practical weakness in New Zealand’s defence arrangements: the New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps (NZAOC) had no Territorial element from which it could draw trained technical personnel on mobilisation.[1]

The company was never formally raised. Nevertheless, the proposal reveals how Ordnance officers understood the problem of technical mobilisation in the inter-war period. Weapons, vehicles, instruments and other equipment could be held in store, but their serviceability depended on trained artificers, fitters and tradesmen. Those skills could not be created quickly after mobilisation.

A trained base for mobilisation

Before the Second World War, New Zealand did not maintain a standing field force ready for immediate overseas deployment. The Territorial Army existed principally to provide a trained base for mobilisation. In war, it would expand into the force required for national defence or overseas service.

The New Zealand Army Service Corps (NZASC) reflected this model. It was essentially a reserve force, prepared to provide the supply and transport services a mobilised Army required. These responsibilities included rations, forage, fuel and ammunition, together with the transport needed to move them. A smaller permanent NZASC element provided continuity, administration, training and specialist expertise.

The NZAOC had no equivalent Territorial structure. The 1931 reorganisation sharpened the problem. The Corps’ uniformed establishment fell from 120 personnel in 1930 to only 21 in 1931. The reduction did not remove the work of maintaining mobilisation equipment, workshops and stores. Instead, it created a hybrid organisation: a small military cadre, with officers and artificers retained in uniform, working alongside a substantially civilian staff.[2]

Civilianisation preserved much practical knowledge, but it did not create a reserve of trained soldiers who could be called up as technical reinforcements. The Corps therefore retained specialist expertise while losing much of its uniformed depth. Ivory’s workshop-company proposal sought to address that gap.

The proposed company

The proposed company was to be based at Wellington and composed of men with relevant civilian technical skills. Ivory specifically identified the potential value of tinsmiths, coppersmiths and motor mechanics, while also seeing value in drawing on experienced engineers in civilian employment.

It was not intended to be a second permanent workshop. Rather, it would create a body of technically skilled men with a connection to military service and enough familiarity with military requirements to be useful without delay on mobilisation.

Ivory argued that the Ordnance Workshops would immediately have to function “at high pressure” in war. Their work would include overhauling and conditioning equipment, as well as instructing the artificers and fitters needed by forces raised in New Zealand or sent overseas. If skilled personnel had to be recruited only after mobilisation, valuable time would be lost, not only in technical training but also in teaching the elementary principles of military life and procedure.[3]

That was the central problem. Civilian New Zealand had technical skill, but the NZAOC had no formal Territorial mechanism to connect that skill to military mobilisation.

Peacetime utility, wartime purpose

Ivory did not claim that the proposed company would transform workshop capacity immediately. He accepted that its value in the first years might be limited. Once established, however, it could assist with peacetime work. He suggested, for example, that it might support the annual overhaul of camp motor vehicles after other units’ training periods.

This was useful, but it was not the decisive argument. The proposal focused primarily on mobilisation. A workshop company would provide a trained base of men who could expand the permanent workshops, undertake technical tasks, and help preserve the serviceability of the equipment on which a mobilised force would depend.

The proposal therefore applied the Territorial principle to an area in which the NZAOC was particularly exposed. The Corps could not afford a large permanent technical organisation, but neither could it expect to recruit and train all the specialist personnel it needed after war had begun.

The 1939 NZAOC Reserve proposal

The same issue remained unresolved in 1939. In August, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Director of Ordnance Services proposed an NZAOC Reserve based on apprentices from the New Zealand Railways Workshops. The concept was to give groups of six prospective Armament Artificers and six Armourers three months of specialist training.[4]

New Zealand Railways accepted the proposal in principle. It was prepared to release up to twelve apprentice fitters at a time, provided they had completed at least three years of apprenticeship and were between seventeen and twenty years of age. The apprentices would receive leave without pay from Railways for the training period, while the Army would select suitable volunteers and pay their wages.[5]

This was a practical way to build the technical mobilisation base Ivory had envisaged eight years earlier. Instead of maintaining a full Territorial Ordnance organisation, the Army would establish a pipeline from a major civilian technical employer.

War overtakes the scheme

The outbreak of war prevented the plan from maturing. By late September 1939, the Ordnance Workshops could not spare the instructors or time necessary to train a reserve. The immediate priority was to recruit fitter and turner tradesmen directly into the Special Force and train them as rapidly as possible on the equipment they would have to support.

The Ordnance Mechanical Engineer recommended that the NZAOC Reserve question be held in abeyance.  Army Headquarters subsequently advised New Zealand Railways that, although it appreciated the department’s agreement, the expanded duties resulting from war prevented the scheme from being implemented at that time.[6][7]

The proposal had not failed because its rationale was unsound. The very emergency it was designed to address overtook it.

Significance

Major Ivory’s proposed Ordnance Workshop Company was an early attempt to give the NZAOC a trained technical base for mobilisation. It recognised that operational equipment required more than stocks, buildings and plans. It required skilled people who could repair, maintain, modify and return equipment to service.

The NZASC already had a reserve base from which its wartime supply and transport functions could expand. The NZAOC did not. Civilianisation in 1931 helped retain workshop and depot knowledge, but it also underlined the distinction between holding technical expertise within the Defence Department and possessing trained military personnel available to expand on mobilisation.

The 1931 workshop-company proposal, followed by the 1939 Railway apprentice scheme, sought to bridge that divide. Neither produced a recognised Territorial Ordnance unit before war began. Both, however, demonstrate that the NZAOC had identified the central challenge correctly: technical capability could not be summoned instantly on mobilisation. It had to be developed in peace through people, trades, training and durable relationships with civilian industry.

Notes

[1]“Ordnance Workshop Company,” memorandum from Ordnance Workshops, Trentham, to the Director of Ordnance Services, 8 October 1931, in Ordnance Workshops 1928 to 1940, p. 46; New Zealand Defence Department, “Military: Annual Report,” Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1933, H-19.

[2]New Zealand Defence Department, “Military: Annual Report,” Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1931, H-19, 2; G. J. Clayton, The New Zealand Army: A History from the 1840s to the 1990s (Wellington: New Zealand Army, 1990), 105–6; J. S. Bolton, A History of the Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps (Trentham: Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps, 1992), 84.

[3]“Ordnance Workshop Company,” 8 October 1931.

[4]Director of Ordnance Services to Deputy Quartermaster-General, “N.Z.A.O.C. Reserve,” 8 August 1939, in Ordnance Workshops 1928 to 1940, p. 336.

[5]General Manager, New Zealand Government Railways, to Army Secretary, “N.Z.A.O.C. Reserve,” 1 September 1939, in Ordnance Workshops 1928 to 1940, p. 347.

[6]Ordnance Mechanical Engineer to Director of Ordnance Services, “Re – N.Z.A.O.C. Reserve,” 23 September 1939, in Ordnance Workshops 1928 to 1940, p. 348.

[7]Army Secretary to General Manager, New Zealand Railways, “Re: N.Z.A.O.C. Reserve,” October 1939, in Ordnance Workshops 1928 to 1940, p. 354.