The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  Yet, partly because Cook was more intelligent than Herbert Smith, he was loathed and detested by virtually all sides in 1926: by the government, the right-wing members of the TUC and the Labour intelligentsia. He was the central figure in the demonology of the newspapers during 1926. He makes a fascinating psychological study, much more interesting than men on whom vast tomes have been expended. A soldier’s son, he was given a basic education in army schools before starting work as a farmhand in Somerset at the age of twelve. He was originally an Anglican, but the combination of a narrow-minded vicar and a sympathetic employer made him a Baptist. Attracted to radical ideas from an early age, at sixteen he was horsewhipped for his views by an irascible local grandee. When his employer fell on hard times and could no longer pay him a living wage, he migrated to the South Wales coalfields and worked in the pits. He experienced all the trials and tribulations of life as a miner and learned the craft of oratory from the preachers of the Welsh Revival of 1904–5.49 With a thirst for learning, he borrowed £50 to enrol at Ruskin College, Oxford, but was diverted into the breakaway movement that founded the Central Labour College in Earls Court. During his year there his most memorable encounter was with the famous novelist and socialist Jack London, then in England’s capital to research his book The People of the Abyss.50 Cook was an eyewitness to London’s well-known fistic prowess in rough-house brawls. Cook abandoned his studies after a year and returned to the pits, where he continued to make his name in the Labour movement. Expelled from the pits for his work as a union organiser (‘agitator’ to the owners), he took part in the Tonypandy riots of 1910–11, where the calculated brutality of the police disgusted him, as it disgusted Keir Hardie (who raised the issue in Parliament). The hatred of the police was so intense that a saying became common in the coalfields: ‘When a copper dies, he’s so low in the fiery pit that he has to climb up a ladder to get into Hell. Even then he’s not welcome.’51 In 1912 Cook wrote a syndicalist pamphlet as a member of the Miners’ Unofficial Reform Committee and the same year was made a delegate for the South Wales miners during the 1912 national coal strike. A pacifist in World War One, he was imprisoned for sedition for three months in 1918 under the Defence of the Realm Act. Yet it was his incarceration in 1921 for incitement and unlawful assembly that most embittered him. He told Walter Citrine that the memory of being handcuffed and then led in chains from one end of a train to the other, both on boarding in Swansea and alighting in Cardiff had been seared into him.52 The experience led him into brief membership of the Communist Party, but he quit by the end of the year, unable to accept the party’s discipline. He had also realised that membership would preclude his becoming general secretary of the miners’ union, on which his ambitions were now fixed. When Frank Hodges’s moderate stance proved unacceptable to the MFGB, Cook’s chance came and he was elected to the position. This caused alarm in the TUC. Fred Bramley, the right-winger said to Citrine: ‘Have you seen who has been elected secretary of the Miners’ Federation? Cook, a raving, tearing Communist. Now the miners are in for a bad time.’53

  The canard that Cook was a crypto-communist was embraced with avidity by the media and his legion of enemies but has no substance. Like many on the Left, Cook inevitably found himself at one with the communists on certain issues, but he had no interest in abstract Marxism and disliked the whole notion of the party line. The CP, for its part, always disliked and distrusted Cook; the communist hierarchy was prepared to exploit him when useful but generally classed him as one of the ‘useful idiots’, to use Lenin’s phrase.54 Yet there was no question but that Cook was intemperate and he seemed almost to go out of his way to earn himself a bad press. In August 1925 he declared: ‘I don’t give a hang for any government, or Army or Navy. They can come along with their bayonets. Bayonets don’t cut coal. We have already beaten, not only the employers, but the strongest government in modern times.’55 When, in the great period of crisis in 1925–6, King George V expressed anxiety about where the nation was heading and asked to see Cook at Buckingham Palace, the miners’ secretary made a point of snubbing the invitation: ‘Why the hell should I go to see the king? … I’ll show them that they have a different man from Frank Hodges to deal with now.’56 Yet in private Cook was tactful, courteous, diplomatic, reasonable and pragmatic; he was the classic case of the bark being worse than the bite, or, to put it another way, ‘a calculator of feasibilities more judicious than his platform rhetoric might suggest’.57 The truth was that Cook was a man of the utmost integrity who could articulate the hopes, fears and aspirations of the miners better than any other man. Completely sincere, as general secretary he did not take the line beloved of so many political leaders, that they are representatives, not delegates, and therefore can do whatever they like, regardless of the wishes of those who voted them into office. Cook saw his role as doing what pithead resolutions bound him to do.58 His greatest strength was his rhetoric. The 1920s was an era of great orators, invariably political outsiders with limited access to the mass media – James Maxton, Oswald Mosley – but arguably the greatest of them was A. J. Cook. He was a total master of the craft of platform oratory, beloved of the miners. No figure in the history of the Labour movement, not even Keir Hardie, ever inspired such passionate partisanship. Testimonies to his rhetorical power are legion, so a few must suffice. The radical politician David Kirkwood, one of the great figures of ‘Red Clydeside’, had this to say: ‘Mr Arthur Cook, who talked from a platform like a Salvation Army preacher, had swept over the industrial districts like a hurricane … He was utterly sincere, in deadly earnest and wore himself out in the agitation.’59 Arthur Horner, Cook’s deputy and a former South Wales communist, said that Cook represented ‘a time for new ideas – an agitator, a man with a sense of adventure’. Even when tired, Cook on the platform could electrify a meeting. Horner wondered why he could not achieve the same effects himself, until he realised that he was speaking to the miners but Cook was speaking for them: ‘He was the burning expression of their anger.’60 Lest it be thought that Cook’s powers as an orator could sway only impressionable miners or socialists already converted to the sermon being preached, it is worth remembering that Lord Sankey, he of the Sankey Commission, once listened to one of Cook’s speeches about the plight of the miners and found himself in tears at the end of it.61

  None of this impressed the panjandrums of the Labour Party or socialist intellectuals of the Fabian variety. Beatrice Webb, who basically despised everyone not of Oxbridge provenance or similar, recorded the following impressions of Cook:

  He is a loosely-built, ugly-featured man – looks low-caste – not at all the skilled artisan type, more the agricultural labourer. He is oddly remarkable in appearance because of his excitability of gesture, mobility of expression in his large-lipped mouth, glittering china-blue eyes, set close together in a narrow head with lanky yellow hair – altogether a man you watch with a certain admiring curiosity … it is clear that he has no intellect and not much intelligence – he is a quivering mass of emotions, a mediumistic magnetic sort of creature – not without personal attractiveness – an inspired idiot, drunk with his own words, dominated by his slogans. I doubt whether he even knows what he is going to say or what he has just said.62

  And on the eve of the General Strike Kingsley Martin entered the following in his diary:

  Cook made a most interesting study – worn out, strung on wires, carried in the rush of the tidal wave, afraid of the struggle, afraid, above all, though, of betraying his cause and showing signs of weakness. He’ll break down for certain, but I fear not in time. He’s not big enough, and in an awful muddle about everything. Poor devil and poor England. A man more unable to conduct a negotiation I never saw. Many Trade Union leaders are letting the men down; he won’t, but he’ll lose. And socialism in England will be right back again.63

  But this was mild stuff alongside the positive hatred Ramsay MacDonald felt for Cook. He would later accuse Cook of incompetence and, when Cook challenged this, reite
rated: ‘In all my experience of trade union leadership, I have never known one so incompetent as yourself.’ Cook replied that the only ‘incompetence’ that could be demonstrated was that the MFGB would now allow a reduction in the living standards of its members. Moreover, MacDonald’s personalising of complex issues was simplistic, since the entire Miners’ Committee and Conference endorsed the policy Cook, as general secretary, carried out, including some of MacDonald’s own colleagues, who must therefore presumably also be incompetent. ‘I think it abominable that leaders of the Labour Party should attack trade union representatives who did nothing more than protect their members.’64 In some ways the most balanced view of Cook comes not from the ‘Guilty Men’ of the Labour Party or the impassioned advocates in the South Wales valleys but from a middle-of-the-road bureaucrat, Walter Citrine, longtime general secretary of the TUC. Citrine thought Cook unstable, over-emotional and too close to the Communist Party, but was very fond of him at a personal level and found him to be man of absolute integrity. Citrine was only acting secretary of the TUC until confirmed in September 1926 and, despite earlier promises of support from Ernest Bevin and Cook, thought he would not get the job in the aftermath of the general bitterness in 1926; in particular, that Cook would be constrained by the miners, who regarded Citrine and the TUC as traitors. But Cook proved most loyal and delivered his support as promised. Cook’s main blemishes, for Citrine, were that he was not good in committee rooms or in the detailed negotiations in smoke-filled rooms. So often his spellbinding oratory, so effective on the miners, was used on the TUC to nil effect, and he tended to lose his audience with his rhetorical tropes. Moreover, he was emotional to a high degree and liable to pour out a cascade of words, almost as though his brain worked too fast for his tongue to do justice to it. Cook often ‘worked himself up into a state bordering on hysterics, his face was flushed and tears were standing in his eyes while he was speaking. He apologised for coming so repeatedly to the Trade Union movement for support. It was not the fault of the miners, it was the fault of a derelict industry, ruined by private enterprise.’65

  By 1926 Cook and Smith were isolated figures within the general trade union movement. Red Friday marked the high point of leftist influence in the TUC. Hopes among rank-and-file workers that they might finally be getting leaders who reflected their views rose with the simultaneous prominence of three figures thought to be on the Left, Alfred Purcell of the Furniture Workers Union, George Hicks of the Building Trade Workers and Alonzo Swales of the powerful Amalgamated Engineering Union. Purcell was Chairman of the TUC General Council in 1924 and Swales in 1925. The acme of their influence was at the TUC Congress in Scarborough in September 1925, where Swales made a powerful fighting speech and motions were passed condemning both the Dawes Plan and the British Empire.66 Yet already by 1926 this trio was on the wane and the newer breed of bureaucratic, pragmatic, compromising leader on the rise. Long-term the most significant new face was Ernest Bevin, in his mid-forties and general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, founded in 1922. An administrator of very high talent, he made his name as an organiser in Bristol and was originally deputy to the legendary trade unionist Ben Tillett. He soon became the driving force and the power in the union, while the venerable Tillett, still retaining his seat on the TUC General Council until 1932, was ‘kicked upstairs’ to hold the post of international and political secretary of the TGWU.67 Squared-jawed, swarthy of countenance, with the shoulders and chest of a heavyweight all-in wrestler, Bevin made a formidable physical impact, as befitted a natural fighter. He proved his mettle in the unofficial dock strike of 1923 and had proved his credentials by getting tough with Ramsay MacDonald when he was prime minister in 1924, refusing to call off strikes in the name of ‘labour solidarity’.68 Bevin had a strong West Country accent which flummoxed many of his listeners (a bottle of Nuits St George, for example, became ‘Newts Saint George’) but, more significantly, he had an inordinate estimate of his own abilities. His favourite method of blunting views contrary to his own was a curt: ‘I’ve ’eard different.’ Some day a study should be made to discover why the early leaders of the Labour Party all had such a hypertrophied view of their own abilities, for MacDonald, Snowden, Herbert Morrison, Bevin and J. H. Thomas all shared this trait. Bevin despised intellectuals and, even more so, Ramsay MacDonald and his coterie of political trimmers.69 It has sometimes been said that Bevin approached the General Strike as a lukewarm supporter. It is true that he had misgivings about the miners’ inflexible approach, but his record was a creditable one and there is no reason to dissent from his own opinion that he gave his all for the cause. What he did not believe in was the General Strike as a revolutionary opportunity, and he condemned all talk of taking up arms to form a labour defence corps against fascism. Armed revolt, he thought, would play Baldwin’s game and give the government the excuse they needed to smash the Labour movement: ‘Resorting to physical force is the way to set the clock back half a century.’70 At the same time he thought the attitudes of Ramsay MacDonald and his acolytes were so treacherous that the trade union movement might have to detach itself from the Labour Party and go its own way.71 He particularly despised J. H. Thomas, and the feeling was reciprocated with the hatred Thomas felt for anyone in the movement he suspected might be his intellectual or moral superior (unfortunately for him their name was legion). Citrine, always a meticulous observer, noted several occasions when Thomas’s attitude to Bevin simply had to be set down to pure jealousy.72

  The figure in the higher echelons closest to Bevin in outlook and ideology, though they were never personally close, was Walter Citrine, who became one of the enduring monuments of the TUC. Born in poverty to a nurse and an alcoholic sailor, he left school at twelve and, incredibly, had a position as a full-time union official by the age of fifteen. Beatrice Webb described him as follows with her typical snob-bishness: ‘Tall, broad-shouldered, with the manners and clothes and way of speaking of a superior bank clerk, black hair growing low on his forehead, large pointed ears, bright grey eyes set close together, big nose, long chin and tiny, rather “pretty”, mouth, it is difficult to say whether or not he is good looking. In profile he is; in full face he is not.’ He came across as loquacious, disputatious, vain and self-conscious. Webb went on to say he had ‘the integrity and loyalty of the better type of British mechanic’, but that his main flaw was that he ‘expects too much relative to his faculties’.73 La Webb did not care for Citrine, but it should be borne in mind that she was piqued because he did not show her the deference she expected and put his feet up on her window seat. Some of her portrait of Citrine is accurate. He was inordinately ambitious and was the nearest thing to Cromwell’s Puritans in the twentieth-century Labour movement. He had no ‘silly pleasures’, did not believe in small talk, neither drank nor smoked, ate slowly and always plain food, took a daily cold bath, slept with the windows open, and was still exercising at eighty. His sole interest outside his trade union duties was devouring books or, as he put it in his inimitable self-congratulatory way in his autobiography: ‘Hobbies? Practically none except reading. My work has been my hobby since my early trade union days.’74 Webb described him as the first intellectual in the Labour movement, but in reality he despised intellectuals and abstract theories. He described Sir Stafford Cripps’s leftist ideas as ‘drivel’ and took a de haut en bas attitude to the Labour intellectuals G. D. H. Cole, R. H. Tawney, Kingsley Martin and Harold Laski, while admitting that at a pinch he preferred Laski to Cole.75 Citrine was a familiar type in politics, the dispassionate lover of power, privilege and the company of the powerful. His overweening personal vanity and conceit may have derived, as Webb suggested, from mixing too much on a daily basis with the uneducated, but some of it seems to be the familiar 1920s Labour Party arrogance already noted; certainly he was witheringly contemptuous in 1926 not just of the miners but of his own colleagues in the TUC. Originally an electrician, Citrine had made his name in the Electrical Trades Unions (ETU) befor
e beginning his ascendancy at the TUC.76 Essentially a careerist, he was regarded on the Left as an Establishment stooge, and in 1935 Low attacked him in an Evening Standard cartoon as a capitalist toady.77 A more unlikely candidate to foment a social revolution it is difficult to imagine; his presence at the centre of the TUC alone refutes the absurd canard that the 1926 General Strike had revolutionary aims. Hobnobbing with the great and the good was Citrine’s idea of the purpose of life. Like J. H. Thomas, he spent a lot of his career travelling the world on expenses-paid trips, none of which seem in any way essential to his duties.78 Citrine’s most congenial bedfellows were his comrades on the centre-right. Although he could see through J. H. Thomas, he was always prepared to enter special pleading on his behalf. His most natural ally was Bevin, but he and Citrine were essentially in competition for the same space. Their personal relations were always distant and formal, even when they were at one on many issues: as for instance, on the absurdity of a trade union movement providing the Labour Party with the bulk of its funds while being systematically ignored and swatted aside by the party hierarchy. Occasionally, though, Citrine could not resist sideswipes at the man who would go further than him in the Labour movement. Bevin, he said, was ill-read and intellectually incurious, but he had greater energy, drive and ruthlessness. He infuriated Citrine by always, as it were, playing the man rather than the ball, consistently arguing ad hominem instead of addressing the issue.79