This meant taking steel tubes and attaching bayonets to the ends of them. But the War Office saw Churchill's words and thought, 'Huh. The pike, specifically, is an unwieldy type of spear not used since the early 1700s.
Churchill was not literally urging people to seek out maces and pikes like LARPers with delusions of grandeur. With that last part, he was speaking poetically about the need for readiness, and he was also urging the manufacture of more arms - the Home Guard currently had only enough guns for roughly half its members.
