This is taken from our archives 100 years ago.

One side only of the national shipyard fiasco has been emphasised. There is another, more serious.

It is doubtless of grave national concern that millions sterling should be thrown away in the mud of the Wye.

What is of more vital moment is that the whole ill-directed and misconceived policy of national shipyards should have alienated as it did both ship building employers and shipyard trade unions at a time when their utmost obtainable co-operation with the Admiralty was urgently necessary for the production of merchant tonnage.

The four or five million sterling wasted at Chepstow is little to the capital value of the merchant tonnage for the non-production of which in private yards the national shipyard policy was directly and dominantly responsible.

So far as the shipbuilding employers are concerned the matter is simple.

They resented and had ever right to resent the establishment of national shipyards in competition with them.

For extensions, labour, materials, the private yards, not on paper, but in fact, were entitled to priority from the very first as a national business proposition.

Most employers, through old workmen working as soldiers knew and properly distrusted the methods it was proposed to extend to Chepstow.

Important members of their staff were by some mysterious agency approached with a view to entering the service of the national yards.

Shipyard workers in the Army instead of returned to private yards were being diverted to Richborough which was to serve as a gathering ground for labour for the national yards.

The first bulk demand for labour after the Admiralty assumed responsibility for shipbuilding was earmarked for national yards.

When all this transpired the shipbuilding employers justly and emphatically protested.

As a result the demand was hurriedly allotted to the private yards.

Under this sort of treatment, a small sample of the general regime, could it be supposed by anyone having the least acquaintance with shipbuilding that employers either could, if they would or would, if they could, use their whole-hearted efforts to turn out tonnage?

Germans still plundering.

German troops have been persistently bombarding villages all along the Posen front, killing and wounding the civil population and plundering and pillaging Polish property.

The Archbishop of Posen has issued a patriarchal letter in which he gives detailed particulars of the outrages the Germans have committed among the Polish clergy, one of whom was brutally murdered, while other shave been forcibly carried off from their parish and have not been permitted to return.

The Germans steadily refuse to release the Polish hostages and other prisoners.

The Germans plea that all this is being done by insubordinate frontier guards is counted by the Poles, who point out that German authorities are paying their troops 30 and even 30 marks pieces per day with a bonus of 50 marks each day fighting take place.

The Poles say that if these payments were stopped the action of German soldiers would cease.