The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  The effects of the return to gold were dramatic, and exactly as Keynes had predicted. Although in 1921–4 the miners had clawed back some of their losses because of the serendipity of the French occupation of the Ruhr and the 1922 coal strike in the USA, they now collided with the bankers’ ramp. On 30 June 1925 the mine owners announced that they were terminating all previous agreements and henceforth would pay only the standard wage, with no profit-related additions. This, it was clear, would produce savage pay cuts in the industry, in some cases as high as 50 per cent. Additionally the employers demanded a return to an eight-hour day. The MFGB hit back with some biting statistics, showing that mine owners’ profits between 1921 and March 1925 had been £58.4 million, while shift-working miners were earning only between 9s 4d and 12s 8d (45–60p) a day. Moreover, in the years 1913–25 the total profits in mining amounted to £259 millions and, in addition, the owners paid out £6 million a year in royalties to the owners of the subsoil rights.87 A hastily convened tribunal, the Macmillan Court of Inquiry, found in July that this was unacceptable treatment of the miners. Baldwin and his government now hoped that the mine owners would withdraw their proposals for lower wages and ‘protected’ (i.e. not shared with the workforce) profits, but, to their consternation and Baldwin’s fury, they refused. The TUC then intervened and announced a total embargo on coal from 31 July, when the employers’ new rules were supposed to come into force. By this time the TUC had a leftward tinge, since many of the leading right-wing unionists had abandoned their posts for office during the Labour government of 1924, especially Alonzo Swales and J. H. Thomas. The TUC let it be known that the obvious way forward was a subsidy to delay any wages cuts until there was a complete review of the mining industry; when Baldwin refused these terms, they let him know that the coal embargo would continue indefinitely. With the other unions apparently solidly behind the miners, the stage was set for a general strike but, at the last moment, just twenty-six hours before the employers were due to begin their lockout of the miners, Baldwin climbed down and announced a subsidy of £10 million (in the event it grew to £23 million). He saved face by saying that this did not mean that in the future the miners might not have to accept cuts and announced to the House of Commons that he had ‘bought peace at the price of a subsidy of £10 million’.88 The employers were arm-twisted by the government into withdrawing the lockout notices.

  This was the so-called ‘Red Friday’ when revolutionary socialism was supposed to have beaten the government to its knees. In fact it was just a breathing space, as both sides realised. Herbert Smith, now president of the MFGB, announced: ‘we have no need to glorify [sic] about victory. It is only an armistice. The recent crisis was an affair of outposts. It was a mere skirmish. The main battle has still to be fought and won.’89 Right-wing and centrist opinion was largely appalled by the settlement. Churchill took it better than most, telling A. J. Cook, general secretary of the MFGB: ‘It’s a good job it’s over but you have done it over my bloodstained corpse. I have got to find the money for it now.’90 But Lloyd George, who liked to think of himself as a radical, characterised the climdown as ‘cowardice in the face of A. J. Cook’.91 Ramsay MacDonald, the ex-Labour prime minister, believed the settlement would strengthen the hands of the revolutionaries and extremists in the Labour movement and claimed that Baldwin ‘has sided with the wildest Bolsheviks’.92 Ernest Bevin, the organisational genius of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, quite rightly scouted such extreme reactions as nonsense; TUC support for the miners was a purely sympathetic action and talk of revolution was an irrelevance introduced by right-wing propagandists.93 Right-wingers tended towards incandescent rage. Lord Salisbury argued that if the subsidy was to continue until the complete reorganisation of the mining industry, knowing the difficulties and the obstructionism of both sides in the dispute, the process would drag on so long that Baldwin might just as well proceed to nationalisation now.94 There was much talk in the press about how the miners had been unfairly subsidised – why not other workers, was the predictable cry, and this was just a cushion or a crutch to enable the miners to escape reality. This view did not make much impression for, as has been pointed out: ‘The subsidy has usually been described as a subsidy in aid of wages, it was just as much a subsidy in aid of profits.95 In fact, on a cold, utilitarian calculation, the chief beneficiaries may have been overseas buyers, since the subsidy was used to finance competitive price reductions by exporters.96 Red Friday probably did the Labour movement a disservice also. It did nothing to create the conditions for success in the long run – in this sense Herbert Smith was quite right – it encouraged an undue faith in last-minute ‘quick-draw’ action by the TUC, and it seemed to create a precedent whereby the miners, if not quite able to dictate policy to the TUC, were justified in making all the running.

  The general feeling was that Baldwin had backed away from conflict because the government was not yet ready to deal with the consequences of a national strike. Some say he was a ruthless operator, now more than ever determined to settle accounts with the miners but at a time and in conditions of his own choosing. Others say that he was a ditherer, a Micawberish figure who believed in ‘wait and see’, who somehow imagined that the mining crisis, if postponed, might not recur. The most convincing interpretation is, not that he was unready, but that he was nervous because he did not yet have public opinion on his side. The Macmillan Court of Inquiry seemed to indicate that all neutral and middle-of-the-road opinion favoured the miners. If Baldwin wanted to defeat them, he would somehow have to contrive it so that he and his government stood for common sense, rationality and moderation while the TUC and the miners were dangerous revolutionaries bent on confrontation.97 Meanwhile he played for time in the tradition-hallowed manner by appointing a royal commission. He was determined to avoid Lloyd George’s mistakes with the Hankey Commission, one of which, in Baldwin’s view, was to allow a pro-miner consensus to emerge. He therefore elected not just for a ‘safe pair of hands’ but a quartet of the same, making sure they were all pro-Establishment figures. One was Kenneth Lee, a Lancashire cotton manufacturer who had a certain reputation in Manchester commercial circles but no national profile. Another cautious choice was General Sir Herbert Lawrence (1861–1943), a soldier-banker. Lawrence was a fast-track Sandhurst product groomed for top military roles. He served in South Africa with the infamous Douglas Haig, but left the army when Haig was preferred for promotion instead of him and made a successful career in banking. In World War One he served in Gallipoli, Palestine and (1917–18) on the Western Front, where fate contrived to make him Haig’s Chief of Staff. He then returned to the City and became chairman of Vickers in 1926. Sir William Beveridge, the third appointee, was director of the London School of Economics and still two decades away from his greatest fame as author of the wartime Beveridge Report, establishing the post-1945 welfare state. Heading the commission was Herbert (later Viscount) Samuel (1870–1963), who was not, however, Baldwin’s first choice. That had been Viscount Grey of Falloden (formerly Sir Edward Grey, 1862–1933), who turned the job down on grounds of ill health. For this very reason, and because the appointment was widely perceived as a poisoned chalice, Samuel was initially reluctant to take up the challenge.98 Samuel was in many ways a very odd fish: the waspish Lloyd George remarked that when his Jewish elders circumcised him, they threw the wrong piece away.99 A liberal of eclectic leanings, he was another of the statesmen-cum-amateur philosophers in which the 1920s abounded – others of the breed were A. J. (Earl) Balfour, Lord Haldane and General J. C. Smuts. An ardent Zionist, Samuel had been controversially appointed high commissioner of the mandated territory of Palestine in 1920, in a move seemingly calculated to insult the Arabs. Samuel tried hard to be fair to both sides but, as so often happens in such cases, ended up by alienating and disappointing both sides.100 Now, faced with entirely new problems, he leaned heavily on the expertise of Beveridge, but the truth was that none of the four Commissioners really knew anything significant
about the coal industry (and perhaps Baldwin had designed things that way).101 Certainly Baldwin had made it a point of principle that no representatives of miners or mine owners should serve on the commission as part of his quest for ‘new minds’. A. J. Cook, the secretary of the MFGB, was particularly scathing about the amateurism of those who would decide the fate of his members: ‘What would they say if I appointed a commission on the Stock Exchange out of a plate-layer, a shop assistant and an engine driver?’102

  Despite the misgivings on all sides, Samuel and his colleagues went to work with gusto. Samuel described the royal commission as ‘the most strenuous six months’ work I have ever done’.103 The principal fact he had to deal with was that, between 1914 and 1926, coal exports had fallen by 25 per cent but the numbers of miners had increased by 10 per cent. Immensely complicating his task were not just the implications of the return to the gold standard but the recently adopted Dawes Plan, allowing Germany to export ‘free coal’ to France and Italy as part of her wartime reparations package.104 The commission examined 76 witnesses in 33 public settings, read a mass of written evidence and visited 25 mines, even going underground in some of them, as well as commissioning HM Inspector of Mines to report on another 40. The most arduous task for Samuel was to chair the public proceedings, for when miners and owners testified together, the predictable result was ‘a dogfight’. There were particularly ferocious clashes between Herbert Smith and A. J. Cook on the one hand and Evan Williams, most reactionary of the mine owners, on the other. Cook was in his element and proved he could have been an outstanding barrister, subjecting the Duke of Northumberland, representing the royalty owners, to a relentless cross-examination.105 Tempers rose so high that one of the moderate mine owners, David Davies, told Samuel in private that he deplored the truculent attitude of his fellow employers. The four chief issues Samuel and his comrades had to resolve were the level of wage cuts (for all agreed there would have to be some), the constitution of a national wages council to end the anomaly of the multitudinous local agreements, the repeal of the Seven Hours Act, and whether to nationalise the industry. After six months a 300-page report was ready. To general surprise it became a bestseller: 100,000 copies were sold, making it the most widely read and purchased report of a royal commission ever, only to be eclipsed in 1943 by the Beveridge Report.106 While rejecting outright nationalisation of the industry, the commission agreed to the public ownership of subsoil rights and royalties. Samuel and confrères repudiated the idea of longer hours but stressed that there had to be wage cuts. Above all, the structure of the industry had to be changed, and it behoved the government to adopt a reform programme with urgency; the pill of wage cuts could thus be sweetened. Once again, as in Palestine, Samuel found that a liberal, middle-of-the road solution satisfied no one. Herbert Smith and A. J. Cook said they would go over the report line by line, not ruling anything in or out, though Smith could not resist the taunt that the commission’s findings were smug conclusions by prosperous individuals who had never known a day’s hard work in their lives.107 Cook, who had more of a public reputation as a firebrand (unjustifiably), was more conciliatory; he remarked that the the report gave the miners three-quarters of what they wanted. For the employers Sir Adam Nimmo said that the report was totally negative and unsympathetic.108 On the government side the secretary for mines, G. R. Lane-Fox urged Baldwin to accept the report in its entirety, but he was ignored. Baldwin was particularly reluctant to give a categorical assurance that reorganisation of the industry would take place immediately and alongside the wage cuts. Eventually, realising that he was losing the battle for public opinion and thus in a corner, Baldwin grudgingly declared that he would accept the report provided there were no quibbles from either side.109 The TUC said that it accepted the commission’s findings but would back the miners if they found them unacceptable. This gave Baldwin his opportunity. By not accepting the report wholeheartedly, he tacitly invited both sides to the dispute to veto Samuel. Whereas progress would have been possible if he had declared unequivocally that restructuring of the mining industry would take place pari passu with temporary wage cuts, it was evident that he wanted to appease the employers by getting the pay cuts accepted and then stalling on the rest of the deal. Faced with this intransigence, A. J. Cook repeated his famous mantra: ‘Not a minute on the day, not a penny off the pay.’ On 15 April the mine owners showed their contempt for Samuel by posting lockout notices, to come into operation at the end of the month, as well as requiring an eight-hour day and reduction of wages to 1921 levels – far lower than the Samuel Commission had recommended. Even Baldwin declared that this was ‘not an offer but an ultimatum’.110 With the mine owners intransigent, Baldwin’s government unwilling to restrain them, and the TUC committed, albeit reluctantly, to back the miners through thick and thin, the spectre of a general strike now loomed as an inevitability.

  13

  The General Strike and Its Enemies

  MUCH OF WHAT happened in the General Strike of 1926 is unintelligible without an understanding of the human personalities involved. Social historians and sociologists dislike interpretations which lay stress on individuals, preferring instead to explain key revolutionary moments in terms of grand socio-economic causes, religious and ideological conflicts, population increases and all the other non-human historical agencies. Yet in the final analysis what determines whether historical process takes one fork in the road rather than another depends on individual actors. The classic case is that of Lenin, who in early 1917 said that, judged by all objective factors, the revolution was many years away yet contrived it himself in the very same year. 1926 in Britain was a time when most of the objective building blocks constituting a revolutionary moment were present, yet the human actors determined that this was not the path that would be followed. The conflict in 1926 was not even that between Left and Right but between the forces of reason and moderate gradualism on one side and right-wing extremism on the other. That the forces of extremism were able, so to speak, to steal the clothes of the other side, can be attributed to the political skills of one man: Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who was yet another demonstration that the most successful politicians are rarely gifted intellectually but have an overplus of peasant cunning. Baldwin always liked to pose as a simple country gentleman, interested only in pig farming. In fact he was systematically two-faced, a serpentine political operator rated by Lloyd George as his most formidable antagonist. Baldwin was a wealthy ironmaster with literary connections (Rudyard Kipling was his first cousin).1 His basic personality was that of an old-fashioned patriarch and paternalist, but he liked to appear as the pipe-smoking and kindly uncle. The first clear political master of the radio ‘fireside chat’, he invited the public to trust him on the basis that he was the custodian of ‘one nation’ Britain.2 What he neglected to say was that this was strictly on the understanding that Labour should come to heel and obey the dictates of capital. Moreover, the reality was that Baldwin in his own quiet way was just as much a prima donna as the more obviously histrionic Churchill or Lloyd George. In Washington in 1922–3 to discuss Britain’s war debts, he had foolishly agreed to repay UK debt to the USA without securing as a corollary debt payment to the United Kingdom from her European allies. Baldwin not only accepted Washington’s harsh terms but did so without consulting the cabinet and then used the threat of a split in the government to force the prime minister, Bonar Law, to yield to the fait accompli.3 Some observers thought his laziness and fecklessness (‘fatal inertia’) when in office recalled the similar posture of Sir Robert Walpole in the eighteenth century. Others thought his dislike of hard work meant he had chosen the wrong career,4 but his wiliness as a politican made up for any lack of energy or statesmanship. It was said of him that he displayed real attack on only two occasions: during the General Strike and later when forcing the abdication of Edward VIII. He has also been judged one of the ‘guilty men’ who failed to discern the Nazi threat in the 1930s and did not rearm in time.5 Baldwin a
lso displayed traces of paranoia, most notably in his permanent obsession with and hatred of Lloyd George.6

  All these facets of Baldwin’s psychology can be observed during the critical period 1925–6. His explanation for the climbdown at ‘Red Friday’ and the granting of the subsidy was: ‘We were not ready.’7 This has usually been interpreted to mean that his government had not yet assembled the necessary administrative machinery for dealing with a national strike, but it is more likely to mean that Baldwin refused to be rushed into a snap decision, that he needed time, as a good chess-player, to ponder all the options and to work through counterfactual scenarios on a step-by-step ‘what if?’ basis. The financial repercussions of an immediate strike were far from obvious, in a year already fraught with economic menace. Moreover, public opinion was still running strongly in favour of the miners. And Baldwin felt that he had been ‘bounced’ by the employers’ sudden announcement of a lockout; for this reason he had tried in vain to convene a joint meeting of management and labour on 24 July 1925.8 His decision to grant a subsidy had been bitterly fought in cabinet, principally by Lord Salisbury, Sir William Joynson-Hicks and W. C. Bridgeman, but he prevailed, partly by unveiling his ideas for national organisation to combat the threat of a national strike next time around. Moreover, a cabinet split so early in the government and a return to the country would mean that the Conservatives had formed a circular firing squad. The general election in 1924 had produced 419 Tory MPs out of 615 members, even though the Conservatives secured only 48.3 per cent of the vote (the ludicrous inequities of the British electoral system are, sadly, still with us).9 For almost a year Baldwin ran true to form, displaying no statesmanship whatever while the Samuel Commission sat, but immediately making difficulties once Samuel had presented his report. Baldwin liked the fact that Samuel had disapproved of the subsidy and had pointed out that three-quarters of the coal produced in the last quarter of 1925 cost more to extract than it would fetch on the open market. He could even agree that the mine owners’ demand for an eight-hour day was an absurdity, as supply of coal was already exceeding demand. But he was unhappy with Samuel’s recommendation of pit closures, amalgamations and general reorganisation of the mining industry. And he particularly disliked the call to nationalise mineral rights as this offended his feeling that private property was sacred; his loathing of socialism was always pronounced. Even some of the firebrand members of his cabinet were prepared to concede on this, as the situation was obviously anomalous. Owners of the land on which these subsoil rights existed had to be paid a royalty regardless of the profitability of the pit concerned. For example, the Duke of Northumberland received an annual royalty of £73,000 – which Churchill described as like having an allotment.10 To abolish royalties was too rich for the blood of one of the most right-wing governments of the century, but Baldwin would have been prepared to concede this if all parts of the commission’s report were accepted by all sides. His essentially reactionary nature emerged with his insistence that the miners would have to accept pay cuts before he would proceed with reorganisation of the industry – but with no guarantees, of course. The disingenuousness of this fooled nobody. Baldwin would not even budge on this point when the liberal industrialist Sir Alfred Mond, founder of ICI, begged him to intervene and conciliate the two sides. Yet for all his slipperiness, Baldwin had given hostages to fortune, as indeed had the TUC. When Baldwin said the mining dispute was nothing to do with the government, he ex hypothesi accepted the TUC case that a general strike was not a revolutionary act but simply a sympathy action. By the same token, the TUC’s demand that the government intervene in the dispute was, in the days before Harold Wilson and beer and sandwiches at Number 10, when governments tried not to involve themselves in industrial relations, also an attempt to make the dispute political.11