by Frank McLynn
The real Baldwin was hard line and uncompromising right through 1925–6. When Keynes proposed that sacrifices in a recession had to be equally shared by all strata of society and that Baldwin should introduce a 5 per cent levy on all income plus a 1s increase in income tax, this was pointedly ignored. Even industrialists got short shrift from Baldwin, who listened only to the City. Keynes made his contempt clear: ‘There was an attraction at first that Mr Baldwin should not be clever. But when he forever sentimentalises about his own stupidity, the charm is broken.’12 Yet Baldwin was a wily enough politician to know that to pursue overtly reactionary policies would not play with the voting public, so he liked to pose as the man of moderation surrounded in his cabinet by foaming crackpots. While his own self-assigned credentials might be suspect, he was right about his colleagues, for the Conservative government of 1924–9 was one of the most right-wing on record. As a Christian who prayed daily and someone who held himself out as a man of the people, Baldwin attracted a lot of contempt in his own party and in his own cabinet; he was referred to out of earshot as ‘the little dud’.13 Among his critics was Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose reactionary posture on everything from Ireland to India was well known. Indeed his inclusion in the cabinet was something of a mystery, for he had characterised Baldwin’s 1924 government as ‘brainless, spineless and dangerous’. In a pre-echo of Lyndon Johnson’s famous explanation (though in more refined language), Baldwin explained that ‘he would be more under control inside than out’.14 Other notorious right-wingers were Lord Salisbury, Lord Privy Seal, and Leo Amery, the Colonial Secretary, an imperialist who did all in all as Churchill did.15 Neville Chamberlain, Minister of Health, and William Clive Bridgeman, First Lord of the Admiralty, had opposed both the 1925 subsidy and the setting up of the Samuel Commission.16 Sir Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State for Air, would become well-known in the 1930s as a notorious appeaser of the fascist dictators, while Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, Minister of Labour, and another vehement opponent of trade unions, was widely regarded as unimpressive and incompetent. Here is a charitable assessment of him by a later historian: ‘A tall, athletic-looking dark man who came into the house with a tremendous reputation and promise which he never fulfilled.’17 Yet Tom Jones, Baldwin’s indispensable cabinet secretary, assessed him more harshly: ‘the total impression is one of weakness and cloudiness’.18 Yet another right-wing ultra was F. E. Smith, Ist Earl of Birkenhead, whom Baldwin had appointed as Secretary of State for India. Widely (though inaccurately) hailed as ‘the cleverest man in England’, Birkenhead was yet another of Churchill’s cronies, and he shared his reactionary views on Ireland. Smith was a rich and successful barrister with a reputation for forensic brilliance and wit, legendarily exercised at the expense of mediocre judges and dishonest litigants. Smith was a friend, college chum and legal rival of the future Home Secretary Sir John Simon, who sailed under liberal colours until he finally threw off the mask and joined Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government of 1931. Smith was also a notorious alcoholic, who became steadily more right-wing as he grew older, and died in 1930 at the age of fifty-eight from cirrhosis of the liver.19 Even at the bureaucratic level the colour was true blue. The influential permanent secretary at the Ministry of Labour was Sir Horace Wilson, later an ill-starred appeaser of dictators and collaborator with Neville Chamberlain. An arch-manipulator, Wilson was finally forced to admit at the end of his career that he was out of his depth when dealing with the Nazis.20
Yet the worst of all Baldwin’s reactionaries was the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, affectionately known to his cronies as ‘Jix’ but to his many critics and enemies as ‘Mussolini minor’. Jix’s purblind fanaticism made him little more than a crank. To crack down on unlicensed drinking and drug dealing was one thing, but to prosecute D. H. Lawrence for ‘obscene’ paintings and to lead a fervent campaign against the Book of Common Prayer suggests a man not quite in command of his faculties.21 Habitually discovering Reds under the bed, Jix also wanted to outlaw the Communist Party, but liberal opinion found him more of a menace than any Marxist ever could be, as he was ‘the gravest of existing menaces to law and order. For many months the rather scrubby little cause of British Communism had had no such public crier to advertise it as he.’22 While absurdly lenient on the growing menace of fascist hooliganism, Jix brought the full force of the law down even on abstract advocacy of the doctrines of Marx and Lenin.23 In October 1925 twelve members of the Communist Party were found guilty of sedition at his urging. Even though the Communist Party was an entirely legal organisation, a tame judge sentenced Marx’s twelve apostles to six to twelve months in jail, but added that they could walk free if they there and then resigned from the party. Nothing like that had been seen since the Romans required the early Christians to recant their beliefs. Even Ramsay MacDonald, whose reflex action was to back the Establishment at all points, spoke out, calling the prosecution a political trial with directly political aims which was both fatuous and self-defeating as it would play into the hands of the communists.24 Jix was also close to the British fascists and to the more ultramontane elements in the British intelligence services, where paranoia and tall stories about Red revolution were a daily staple. From this arose the later canard that ‘Mussolini minor’ sympathised with the Nazi doctrines on racial purity and the Jews; this was a bridge too far, but Jix had only himself to blame for the inference.25 To keep Jix quiet while the Samuel Commission did its work, Baldwin put him in charge of a major aspect of contingency preparations for a national strike and set up the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS), designed to provide alternative manpower and transport if the worst came to the worst. Intended to train volunteer labour, OMS soon became notorious for recruiting fascists and right-wing cranks, and its extremist colouring meant that even chief constables of the more responsible kind held it at arm’s length.26 Nevertheless, by early 1926 Jix was able to report that he had requisitioned 25,000 lorries and had also recruited drivers for the vehicles. The administrative side of government preparations was put in the hands of J. C. C. Davidson, who held the title chief civil commissioner. He divided the country into sixteen regions (later reduced to twelve), each with a deputy civil commissioner (usually an ex-general or brigadier) responsible for running transport, distributing food and ensuring the maintenance of light and power.27 The scheme was criticised as inherently undemocratic. Whereas in the shires the deputy civil commissoners might reflect the political complexion of elected local government, in the industrial heartlands of the country they certainly did not. On 22 April 1926 Jix reported to the cabinet that his Supply and Transport Committee had approved 98 volunteer service sub-committees, 147 haulage committees, and 331 local food offices. He boasted that arrangements for food convoys, maintenance of London’s milk supply and emergency electricity generation were at or near completion.28
Yet criticism of the commissioners was always mild alongside the invective expended on OMS. So bad was its reputation that it could not raise the funds it needed even from putative allies, for most industrial firms, bankers, manufacturers and shipping companies refused to contribute.29 Ramsay MacDonald was led to protest about some of OMS’s activities: ‘Private enterprise is being entrusted to maintain order in such a way as to make a breach of order inevitable.’30 Even the BBC under John Reith, in this era excessively fearful of upsetting government, refused to broadcast an inflammatory speech by an OMS representative on the grounds that it would ruin its reputation for being non-political.31 It seemed to sober, middle-of-the-road opinion that OMS was inflaming the very passions Baldwin claimed to be dousing down. It is hard to recapture the virulence of anti-communist feeling in right-wing circles in 1925–6, always rationalised as hatred of a creed that was subservient to Soviet Russia, and which aimed to expropriate all private property. It was also, its critics said (truthfully), atheistic and (not just falsely but absurdly so) aimed at ‘nationalising women for sexual purposes’.32 Alongside right-wing
loathing of communism, there was also discernible that distaste for trade unionism that has characterised so many political radicals in England, from Richard Cobden to Enoch Powell; Cobden was alleged to have said that he would rather live under the rule of the Bey of Algiers than under the thumb of trade unionists.33 Moderate trade unionists reacted to all this with scorn. Bevin commented on the government’s energetic preparations for a showdown: ‘If it had shown anything like the same initiative in approaching the problems of the coal industry, the emergency need never have arisen.’ It was indicative of the poor and supine showing of the Labour Party during the entire crisis that for this very mild criticism of Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald riposted by calling Bevin ‘a swine’.34 So, far from being concerned about the living standards of miners and the working class in general, MacDonald and his followers were much more concerned with maintaining their cosy relationship with the Establishment. Hand in hand with this went a contempt for left-wing thought and intellectuals in general. It is an authentic curiosity that the men of the Labour Right between the wars genuinely thought that their political stance was the only rational one and that opposition to it must come from ignorance. It was the old either/or: either Leftists were stupid or they were evil, morally vicious or crypto-communists. The long roll-call of right-wing Labourites in this era reveals the same syndrome: cocksure arrogance, a pretension to omniscience and a conviction that they knew better than experts or thinkers. Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Herbert Morrison, Emanuel Shinwell – the list is potentially endless – of those who dispensed truisms and bromides about national strikes while suggesting no concrete proposals in return which might alleviate the plight of the social groups they were supposed to be representing.35 It is hard not to see all this as guilty conscience. There was truth in Trotsky’s observation: ‘Men who did not wish for the General Strike, who fear nothing so much as the consequences of a victorious strike, must inevitably direct all their efforts towards keeping the strike within the scope of a political half-strike, i.e. depriving it of power.’36
If the Conservative government of 1924–9 was the most right-wing ever, even they seemed like bien-pensant liberals alongside the mine owners. As F. E. Smith (Birkenhead) expressed it: ‘It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners’ leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners.’37 Smith was right: the employers were blockheads, but unfortunately blockheads with power and influence. One of them told the Samuel Commission, in all seriousness, that all miners spent ten shillings a week going to the cinema.38 Their leading lights were Lord Gainsford, a Durham coal owner who in 1927–8 became president of the Federation of British Industries, Arthur Balfour – not to be confused with Earl (A. J. ) Balfour – later Lord Riverdale, a Sheffield steelmaker and Chairman of the National Federation of Iron and Steel Manufacturers, Sir Allan Smith, director of the Engineering Employers’ Federation and, especially Evan Williams and Sir Adam Nimmo, lay preacher, boss of the Fife Coal Company and Chairman of the Scottish Coal Owners Association.39 Here is Nimmo in action at the National Liberal Club in 1925: ‘The wages of those engaged in industry cannot permanently rest upon considerations of the cost of living or what the men may call a living wage … British coal has to compete with coal produced in other countries … It is of no avail to suggest that the wages received do not permit of miners having a proper standard of living.’40 Nimmo did not explain how miners were supposed to summon the physical strength to hew coal if they were not paid a living wage. His comments and those of other owners sound more like extracts from Zola’s Germinal than from people living in the twentieth century. Needless to say, whenever these worthies were cross-examined before the Samuel Commission by A. J. Cook and others and asked to reveal details of their own income, they blustered and bellowed about ‘impertinence’ and ‘irrelevance’. Baldwin’s aide Tom Jones, who probably saw the owners at close quarters more often than most, was full of contempt for them.41 Williams and Nimmo were particularly hawkish and hard line. Jones noted in his diary: ‘Evan Williams … has not made a single positive contribution towards the solution of the problem. One would feel inclined to dissociate oneself officially and in every other way from the vapourings of these people.’42 The greatest criticism of Baldwin is that he consistently allowed the mine owners a veto on any proposal not to their liking; it was almost as though he was afraid of them. Or perhaps the truth is that the real Baldwin was at heart every bit as reactionary as the fire-eaters (Birkenhead, Churchill, Jix, etc) he claimed to be restraining. When the influential industrialist Sir Alfred Mond wrote to him asking him to repudiate the ultramontanes like Evan Williams, to bring real pressure to bear on them and get their agreement to settle on the basis of the Samuel Report, Baldwin did not deign to answer. When those interested in a solution pressed him to do something about the intransigence of Nimmo and Evan Williams, Baldwin abruptly changed the subject and switched the conversation to cricket.43
Faced with such attitudes from the owners, the miners’ representatives became super-obstinate in turn. The two dominant figures in the MFGB in 1925–6 were its president, Herbert Smith, and its secretary, Arthur Cook. The two became anathema to the Labour Party, right-wing unionists, the government and even so-called socialist intellectuals. Beatrice Webb, from her self-assigned lofty perch as the doyenne of Fabian socialism, despised them both: ‘It is a tragedy to think that this inspired idiot [Cook], coupled with poor old Herbert Smith, with his senile obstinacy, are the dominant figures in so great and powerful and organisation as the Miners Federation.’44 A wartime patriot, and the kind of blunt-spoken working-class man invariably referred to by contemporaries as ‘the salt of the earth’, Herbert Smith, in his sixties, was almost the stereotypical Yorkshireman whose utterances became legendary in the 1920s. Deriding the timidity of the TUC and its reluctance to back the miners to the hilt, Smith exhorted them thus: ‘Get on t’field. That’s t’place.’45 His response of ‘nowt’ when asked what concessions the MFGB was prepared to make likewise placed him as an almost Old Testament figure in his righteousness and inflexibility. ‘Nowt. Nowt doin’. We’ve nowt to offer,’ became almost a mantra from Smith’s lips. When Baldwin urged him to accept the report of the Samuel Commission in its entirety, Smith hit back at once that he needed to go through the report line by line: ‘I want to see the horse I’m going to mount.’46 Walter Citrine, the TUC general secretary was inordinately fond of him – ‘straight as a die. I liked his calm way of looking at things. Always cool and steady, he never got flustered.’ But Citrine was always inclined to patronise Smith and, fatally, to underrate him and his tenacity. ‘There he sat in his blue suit and soft collar, with his little moustache turning grey and his high balding forehead, with his spectacles resting on the end of his nose.’47 It sounds like the portrait of a doddery old uncle, but Smithy was really adamantine steel. The received opinion early in 1926 was that Arthur Cook was the demon agitator, irrational, crazed, a communist stooge and that Smith was the old-fashioned unionist, perhaps slightly out of his depth. But by the end of the year most observers had seen the truth. The alleged demon, Cook, turned out to be moderate and accommodating, but Smith was a rock that the elements could not shake. One by one the sophisticated commentators changed their mind and concluded that, on the union side, Smith, not Cook, was the real obstacle to peace in the coalfields. Acknowledging that he had been wrong in identifying Cook as the problem instead of Smith, Ramsay MacDonald remarked: ‘If Cook is a feather, Smith is a monolith.’ His apostasy was the signal for a general about-turn by Labour intellectuals, with even Beatrice Webb falling into line.48
