A century later and the definite article is still used. The confrontation between the government and the unions that began on May 4, 1926 remains THE General Strike, the only one Britain has seen. Perhaps this is her main legacy. The complete defeat of the strike, the capitulation of the union leaders after nine days, left such a bitter taste that there was a reluctance to repeat the experience. “It was as if a beast long spoken of for its ferocity had come forth for an hour, scented danger, and plunged back into its lair,” Evelyn Waugh wrote 20 years later, in. Brideshead Revisited.
Fictional portrayal of the Strike in Head of the bride AND Up Down Tell it as a story of fashionable youths in plus fours who volunteered to drive buses and trucks, and that remains largely the popular memory of the event. Although this has faded in recent years – there was no description in it at all Downton AbbeyFor example – it has not been replaced by anything from the other side, that of the attackers. Instead, the most common image of the working class in the interwar period comes from a few years later with the pathetic dignity of the unemployed Jarrow marchers, victims of circumstance, not active participants in events. All this gives a somewhat distorted picture of this turbulent period in British history, a moment of genuine revolutionary temper.
The outbreak of World War I had come at a time of industrial upheaval. Union membership was growing rapidly, the number of disputes was increasing, and so was the conviction in establishment quarters that things were going badly. “This coal strike is the beginning of a revolution,” warned Edward Grey, the foreign secretary in 1912; “The power is passing from the House of Commons to the trade unions”. Union militancy was effectively suspended during the conflict, but returned after the armistice with renewed vigor. Millions of men came home from active service to find mass unemployment and dire economic conditions. Many still had arms because demobilization was a chaotic business, and some were inspired by the Russian Revolution and then the Irish War of Independence, sensing that the power of the British state was at a low ebb.
These were uncertain times. In 1919 there were riots and strikes and serious unrest throughout the country. Tanks were called in to restore peace in Glasgow, a battleship was sent to the Mersey to quell riots in Liverpool, and Cabinet Minister Winston Churchill, still a Liberal at the time, warned that there were groups who wished “to provoke an outbreak in the form of a rebellion or general strike, or possibly both, in the hope that a general upheaval of society may result”.
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He was thinking particularly of the National Union of Ex-Servicemen (NUX), a radical group that called not only for better pensions for veterans, but also for land nationalisation, Irish independence and an end to militarism. “Instead of being the means to save capitalism, organized ex-servicemen will now be the means to destroy it,” declared the general secretary, Ernest Mander, and membership rose to 300,000. Mainly to counter the perceived threat of NUX the Firearms Act 1920 was passed – introducing gun licenses – and the British Legion founded the following year, as a safe channel for ex-servicemen’s complaints.
The NUX did not survive competition from the Legion, but the fear of militancy remained, now centered in the Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in 1920. Although the CPGB’s membership did not go much beyond 5,000 in its early years, there was a widespread belief that, acting on instructions from Moscow, it exerted a covert influence on the Labor Party. This idea appeared in the popular fiction of the time – in novels by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, and in Sapper’s stories about Bulldog Drummond – and it was a press campaign against Labour’s alleged links with the CPGB that brought down the party’s first government in 1924 and then, with its renewed forgery, secured it. “Moscow gives orders to British communists,” he claimed Daily Mail“The British communists, for their part, give orders to the socialist government, which it obeys calmly and humbly.”
It was all fantasy, but it was taken seriously enough that, in late 1925, 12 leading members of the CPGB were jailed for sedition and incitement to insurrection in what amounted to a political trial. The prosecution’s case was that communism itself was seditious, as it sought to overthrow the government by violence. Even more worryingly, the ambition, if not the means, seemed to be shared far beyond the CPGB. The Trade Union Congress Conference in September 1925 affirmed, in the words of the TUC-owned Daily Herald“that its aim, in cooperation with the workers’ party, was to work for the overthrow of capitalism”.
The broader picture was that of economic decline. There had been a major recession in 1921 and recovery was slow for the rest of the decade, with the sharpest impact felt in mining. Coal exports – hit by the growth of rivals such as Poland and then by high exchange rates – never returned to pre-war levels, prices fell and even after a wage cut imposed after a 1921 strike failed, mine owners struggled to operate profitably.
Another round of wage cuts and hour increases was announced in 1925, to which the national union, the Federation of Mineworkers, responded with the slogan: “Not a penny’s wages, not a minute’s a day.” A strike was narrowly avoided in July of that year when Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government offered a ten-month subsidy to industry to allow wages to remain where they were. The Labor leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was outraged, believing that the prime minister “had sided with the most savage Bolshevik”, but Baldwin was sharper than that; he was postponing the inevitable conflict only because, as he later said, “We weren’t ready.”
When the subsidies ran out and the owners renewed their demands, the miners duly called a strike and the TUC, which had repeatedly promised solidarity action without delivering, this time called on transport workers – road, rail and docks – and in printing, iron and steel to come out in support. About two million joined millions of miners in the General Strike. A state of emergency was declared and the government’s plans, carefully prepared over the previous months, went into action. Factories were put on short hours to conserve coal, Hyde Park was turned into a supply depot, troops were mobilized, special constables were sworn in, drivers were recruited.
The TUC, on the contrary, did not have such an organization ready, having no basic lines of communication. “A strike is a protest,” wrote John Maynard Keynes; “It’s inarticulate, illogical, miscalculated.” The result was that, although devastating, the action had far less impact than expected. Food supplies were not interrupted, and even public transport – the most obvious casualty – began to return, especially in London and the South East, where the number of volunteers was greatest. There were clashes between strikers on one side, strikers and police on the other, and there were four deaths in railway accidents, but the whole thing was remarkably peaceful.
And after nine days, with no sign of government weakness, let alone concessions, the TUC surrendered. Solidarity action was abandoned and the miners were again left to fight alone. By the end of November, their strike was also called off and wage cuts and longer hours were imposed. In the accusations that followed, criticism was directed at the leadership of KHP and the Labor Party for their lack of commitment and readiness. What should have been a decisive showdown, a culmination of two decades of union struggle, was instead a wet scratch. Union membership and industrial action fell dramatically, anti-union legislation was passed. The latter would be abolished under Clement Attlee and the trade union movement recovered, but there were lasting consequences.
Talk of the “overthrow of capitalism” disappeared from the agenda, and the balance within the labor movement between industrial and political activity shifted decisively in favor of the latter. Meanwhile, the public perception of Communism that was eroding Labour’s heartland faded, paving the way for the party’s victory in the general election of 1929. The resulting government collapsed and key members – Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Jimmy Thomas, all of whom had opposed the strike – were expelled from Labor for forming a coalition with the Conservatives and Liberals. But by then, the critical moment had passed. The militant workers of the 1920s had become the Jarrow Marchers.
(Further reading: Real working class work)
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