by Frank McLynn
By far the most controversial personality in the entire apparatus of top TUC officialdom was the secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, J. H. (‘Jimmy’) Thomas. He did all in all as Ramsay MacDonald did, perhaps not surprisingly, as both men were born illegitimate and thus, as Celts, doubly ‘outsiders’. Their abiding ambition was to be the most insiderish of insiders, to be accepted by the Establishment and appear in polite society. Their natural home was the Conservative Party – to which they would eventually gravitate (in 1931) under the guise of a National Government. But since the Conservative Party of the early twentieth century would not have accepted such ‘low lives’ in their ranks, their only option was to use the trade union movement and the Labour Party as ladders for their entirely personal ambitions. Part of the problem with both MacDonald and Thomas was that they were self-deluding: even as they betrayed their ‘brothers’, in their own minds they were doing (in that tiresome modern mantra) ‘nothing wrong’ but were acting as genuine friends of the proletariat.80 Born in 1874 as John Henry Thomas, the Welshman was educated at an elementary school and became an engine driver (by all accounts not a very good one) on the Great Western Railway. In 1917 he became general secretary of the NUR – a post he retained for forty years. He was already a member of parliament, having been elected for Derby in 1910. He was colonial secretary in MacDonald’s 1924 cabinet. Everything about Thomas was inauthentic, starting with his accent. Although he was a Welshman, he acquired a Cockney accent and, when asked who would be the first prime minister, inaccurately forecast: ‘Me or ’Enderson.’81 His accent occasioned even more levity than Bevin’s. F. E. Smith (Birkenhead) and he were on exceptionally friendly terms and addressed each other as ‘Jimmy and Freddy’. Although Birkenhead admired him, he was distressed by his unrefined accent and, being F. E. Smith, sometimes allowed his penchant for wit to transcend his friendship. On one occasion Thomas complained in the Garrick Club that he had an ‘’orrible ’eadache’. Birkenhead at once riposted: ‘Why not try a couple of aspirates?’82 Nirvana for Thomas was a dinner in London’s clubland or a reception at Buckingham Palace. Low the cartoonist, habitually referred to ‘champagne and cigars’ Thomas as ‘The Right Honourable Dress Shirt, MP’.83 His political ally Philip Snowden disapproved of Thomas’s hedonism and relish for the fleshpots. He claimed that Thomas in an average year attended 150 high society lunches and dinners, smoked 320 cigars and drank 9 gallons of champagne, as well as running up a laundry bill of £18 a year just for starched shirts.84 ‘Jimmy’ disgusted even some of the Establishment figures who should have been his staunchest allies. Lord Sankey (of the 1919 Sankey Commission) commented: ‘He would like to appear at a dinner in trousers and coat made out of a Union Jack and shout for Empire.’ Even his latter-day apologists find it hard to make out a convincing case for him. Here is one (charitable) assessment: ‘His negotiating skills had always been flavoured with sentimentality and showmanship.’85 His fellow Welshmen could see right through him. Lloyd George remarked caustically in 1921, even when Thomas was effectively doing the government’s work for him by his stance on Black Friday: ‘He wants no revolution. He wants to be Prime Minister. He does not want to be a commissary for Bevin … I have complete confidence in Thomas’s selfishness.’86
Thomas was one of the earliest recorded practitioners of the (now tiresomely ubiquitous) habit of rejecting another person’s ideas vehemently, only to serve them up a week later as original insights of his own. Citrine recorded an allied Thomas tactic. Not only would he arrive late for meetings of the TUC General Council and start blathering about matters that were not on the agenda or irrelevant but, when this was pointed out, would adopt the following tactic: ‘Thomas would look pityingly at the interrupter for a second or so and then observe, “Isn’t that exactly what I am telling you?” Everyone would fall into a stupefied silence, with Thomas immediately changing his line of argument.’87 Thomas also frequently wearied the General Council with his boasting about the royal receptions he had attended and his aristocratic connections. He and MacDonald particularly treasured their entrée to the social circle at Londonderry House on Park Lane. This was the ancestral home of Charles, Marquess of Londonderry, both a well-known Rightist and later Nazi sympathiser and the most celebrated society host in the country. His wife Edith enjoyed a close friendship with Ramsay MacDonald which, even though platonic, caused scandal.88 Another connection was with Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, Conservative politician and renowned anti-American (albeit born in Chicago to an Anglo-American family), though this was complicated by Channon’s visceral loathing for MacDonald.89 Thomas’s history of opposition to trade union militancy was no secret. He confessed that he always regretted the Triple Alliance had ever come into being. He told American reporters after Red Friday that he was unhappy about the miners’ victory. He tried to ensure that the NUR was not involved in a national strike, only to be overruled by his own executive. He was frequently on record as saying that he was vehemently opposed to the mere idea of a general strike. He tried to get the miners’ dispute stifled by involving the Labour Party in anti-union legislation in the House of Commons.90 That such a man should not only have had access to the inner councils of the TUC but had even been appointed their de facto chief negotiator with the government seems well-nigh incredible. It was as though Baldwin had had an agent of the Soviet government in his cabinet in the period 1925–6. Much of Trotsky’s analysis of politics in the 1920s and 1930s was inaccurate, but on J. H. Thomas he hit the nail on the head. The only way the attitude of the mainstream Labour movement to the looming general strike was explicable was on the assumption that Ramsay MacDonald, J. H. Thomas and their ilk were systematically counter-revolutionary. In other words, pace Sorel, their aim was not to paralyse the bourgeois state with a general strike but to paralyse the General Strike with the help of the bourgeois state. Trotsky shrewdly pointed out that for Thomas and MacDonald to dress up in court regalia and other finery while posing as representatives of the working class was as if Cromwell and the Roundheads had suddenly decided to ape the Cavaliers. Not surprisingly, much of Trotsky’s prime invective was reserved for Thomas personally. After pointing out that Thomas was the classic historical avatar of reformism – ‘the labour representative who is always in his place when it is necessary for someone to make a gesture of lackeyism’ – he characterised Thomas as ‘this absolutely unprecedented lackey’ and concluded: ‘Men who did not wish for the General Strike, who deny the political character of 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.’91
It is hardly surprising that between A. J. Cook, avid for a general strike as the means of gaining the miners’ demands, and Thomas, equally keen to see a national strike fail, there should have existed the most bitter and rancorous relations. This was partly ideological difference, partly personal distaste, but it should be remembered that the miners had detested Thomas ever since Black Friday, long before they elected Cook as their general secretary, and that Thomas was already a byword for a betrayer and seller-out.92 This is scarcely to be wondered at in the light of Thomas’s many hostile comments. Typical was this when the Samuel Commission’s report was published: ‘Never mind what the miners or anybody else say, we [the TUC] accept it.’93 The almost continual clashes between Cook and Thomas in themselves point to the weakness of the Left vis-à-vis the government; there are no similar reports of clashes between Baldwin and, say, Sir Adam Nimmo. Some of the passages of arms between the two were mild, as when Cook urged the TUC to lay in emergency provisions against a protracted strike. ‘My own mother-in-law has been taking in an extra tin of salmon for weeks past,’ Cook remarked ingenuously. ‘My God, a British revolution based on a tin of salmon,’ Thomas shot back.94 Most of the passages of arms were, however, more vicious. In January 1926 Thomas wrote a letter to the Daily Herald, regretting that ‘
a great organisation like the Miners’ Federation should day after day have its case ruined by the childish outbursts of its secretary’. Cook replied that he could not
claim to be a leader of fashion, especially of the evening dress variety, but I do claim to be a class conscious fighter for the workers … It is true I do not possess a dress suit, and I do not attend dinners and banquets given by enemies of the working class and make alleged witty after-dinner speeches there. Thomas may think that comes within the province of a trade union leader, but if it is one of the ‘elemental’ principles of leadership, I am not going to adopt it. Thomas is giving vent to his personal spite because I have remained true to the cause of the workers. Along with other noble lords, dukes and gentlemen, he has long wished me in a warm place.95
Cook despised Thomas both for his cosy relationship with Britain’s oligarchy – he lived on the Astor estate and often shared Lord Derby’s box on Grand National day – and for his humbug. Thomas was notorious for having announced, at a lavish banquet given by railway magnates, that his soul belonged, not to the working class but to the ‘truth’.96 The animosity between Thomas and Cook really requires a lengthy study. It is tempting to see Thomas’s animadversions as the product of a guilty conscience. A son of South Wales, he had abandoned its cause for life with the rich and famous, while Cook, an adopted son of the coalfields, had remained loyal and four square. Needless to say, as in so many cases when a right-wing figure is confronted with home truths by a leftist, Thomas described Cook as ‘mad’ – the epithet always applied to difficult radicals.97
That Thomas was the evil genius of the Labour movement in 1926 becomes clear once we examine the attitude of the TUC towards likely future conflict with the government after Red Friday. While Baldwin and his cabinet made active preparations for the next round in the struggle, the TUC did virtually nothing. ‘This failure has never been satisfactorily explained,’ one student of 1926 has written.98 Actually the riddle of the TUC’s inertia can be explained by reference to J. H. Thomas, but then another riddle replaces it: why did the egregious ‘Jimmy’ have so much power and influence? Essentially the TUC never wanted a general strike, thought it could be avoided, pinned most of its hopes on the Samuel Commission, was committed to the miners only very reluctantly, and seemed almost to go out of its way to make sure that any contingency plans of its own were inept.99 Also, one needs an awareness of month-by-month chronology, for the TUC of the 1925 Scarborough Conference was a very different animal from the one in existence when the Samuel Commission reported. The seeming leftward drift of 1925 was abruptly reversed in late 1925 when Arthur Pugh replaced Alonzo Swales as chairman of the TUC General Council and the right-wing figures Thomas, Bevin and Margaret Bondfield were elected to it; in October 1925, additionally, Citrine took over as general secretary. The hopes that had earlier been reposed in the supposedly leftist triumvirate of Purcell, Hicks and Swales swiftly evaporated. After late 1925 only Swales held on to a leftward course, while Hicks and Purcell became tame creatures of the Citrine/Thomas axis.100 The key TUC body in 1925–6 was the Special Industrial Committee (SIC), charged with finding ways to assist the miners in their struggle against Baldwin and the mine owners. The original membership of the SIC was Swales, Citrine, Ben Tillett, Hicks, John Bromley, secretary of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), John Marchbank of the NUR, Edward Poulton of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives (NUBSO), Arthur Hayday of the National Union of General Workers and Alexander Walkden, general secretary of the Railway Clerks Association – supposedly a cross-section of the entire union movement.101 But at the end of 1925 three crucial changes occurred. Arthur Pugh, a right-winger from the Steelworkers’ Union replaced Swales as chairman, Poulton and Marchbank were dropped and J. H. Thomas came in. This gave the Right a vital majority on the all-important SIC. Although the SIC’s remit was to find ways to support the miners, the astonishing upshot was that between the Scarborough Conference and 27 April 1926 it never discussed the mining crisis once. As has been well remarked: ‘The inactivity of the SIC during the period between July 1925 and May 1926 is quite remarkable, and of course stands in marked contrast to the preparations made on the government side.’102 Bromley, Pugh and Thomas utterly dominated proceedings and spent most of their time criticising Cook, Herbert Smith and the MFGB, complaining about how the TUC was being ‘blackmailed’ by the miners.103
J. H. Thomas’s influence on the SIC during the four crucial months of January–April 1926 was entirely negative and destructive. A conspiracy theorist might well use the term ‘sabotage’, except that that would imply something clandestine. The astonishing thing about ‘Jimmy’ was that his opposition to and dislike of the miners was overt, yet he was the prime figure in a body supposed to be doing its utmost for them. The real riddle about the TUC was not so much their lack of any real preparations for a confrontation with the government as their supine and almost deferential attitude to Thomas. Writing up his accounts of the SIC, Citrine often says simply that Thomas opposed something and that was an end of it. Did he have much greater ambition and energy than his colleagues? Or were they simply irremediably defeatist from Day One? Can any apology be offered for the TUC? Their inert posture did contain some elements of rationality. The General Council was torn between a morbid terror of a revolutionary general strike and scepticism about the utility of a national sympathy strike. To an extent history was on their side in the latter case. The Swedish general strike of 1909, a classic of a reformist national strike, was a failure because the unions were too timid in their dealings with blacklegs, were overawed by an aggressive employers’ lockout and their tactic of bringing agrarian workers into the city as strike-breakers, to say nothing of the lack of support from Labour elsewhere in Europe.104 The debacle in Sweden led many orthodox Marxists, like Karl Kautsky, to argue that the general strike had no future as a revolutionary weapon and should be abandoned in favour of a long-term campaign of attrition against bourgeois society. It was true that national strikes in Belgium in 1893 and Holland in 1903 had been successful, but only because the governments had been taken by surprise. In the mildest of reformist national strikes, in Belgium in 1913, to achieve universal suffrage and genuine one man, one vote, the railways and public services had continued to function during the strike, so the result was fiasco.105 The TUC was very impressed by the argument that if you announced the intention of a general strike ahead of time, the government had ample time to prepare countermeasures (as Baldwin was then doing) so that it was a foregone conclusion that the strike would fail. As Herbert Morrison put it, you should never start anything you could not finish, and a general strike was a demonstration of weakness not strength.106 There was also the awful example of France where Prime Minister Aristide Briand, himself a one-time revolutionary, had dealt with a national rail strike by conscripting all striking workers, thus in effect placing them under martial law.107 In other words the corollary was that a national organisation like the TUC would have to be densely layered and cell-like so that a government could not stymie it simply by arresting the leaders, yet the TUC was almost laughably transparent and open. More sophisticated arguments, with which Citrine was sympathetic, were that ideally the TUC should lay in a year’s provisions and a year’s worth of funds, so that the workers could not be starved into submission, but this would require resources well beyond the TUC’s capacity. Moreover, a successful general strike, capable of beating a government in a long-drawn-out battle, would require the organisation of the entire working class at a pitch of implausible efficiency. If such a capability existed, by definition the unions would already be in lotus-land and could get all they required from the government without any strikes at all. Yet Thomas and his acolytes were impatient even with such down-to-earth speculations. One of the SIC members told Citrine: ‘Walter, you are too logical. You look too far ahead. Don’t worry. Let things develop.’108
To reiterate, if all this was the rational side of the TUC, the irr
ational side was the way Thomas was given carte blanche. Citrine proved totally incapable of dealing with him. At the very beginning of the SIC deliberations Citrine sought clarification on the TUC’s attitude to continuing the subsidy to the mining industry, but Thomas successfully inveigled the committee onto a different tack. Next Citrine proposed coopting miners’ representatives onto the SIC, which was the only sensible way forward given that the committee was supposed to be discussing how best to help them. Again Thomas objected, this time with a rhetorical (and totally irrelevant) flourish: ‘Had they reached a stage when an industrial dispute affecting the largest union in the country was now handed over to someone else [ignoring the obvious fact that the MFGB had done precisely that by co-opting the TUC]. If the SIC was dealing with the rail situation, he would decide it was time he cleared out.’109 Instead, Thomas encouraged the grousing of John Bromley and joined him in bitter criticism of the MFGB leadership; he agreed with Bromley that the miners should be told to ‘pull their weight’ (whatever that meant). The other members of the SIC seemed either too much under Thomas’s thumb or too lethargic to oppose his many interventions. Citrine next raised the issue of the Cooperative Union, which wanted to know what would happen in the event of a national stoppage. Many local co-operative societies had still not recovered from the miners money they had advanced as loans during the 1921 dispute. The Cooperative Union wanted the TUC to guarantee them against further losses or to suggest some way of collaboration. The SIC turned down the suggestion that the TUC should guarantee loans but made no suggestions of its own.110 Despite Citrine’s efforts, the SIC did nothing to organise general union support for the miners or prepare any contingency plans for a national strike; once again Thomas was the culprit.111 Thomas and Bromley made determined efforts to uncouple the TUC from its commitment to the miners; Bromley indeed said he would be quite happy to accept wage reductions for the miners. It was not surprising that when the SIC finally deigned to hold a meeting with the MFGB on 26 February 1926, tempers rose. Thomas declared that no statement should be made to the press assuring the miners of TUC backing, but A. J. Cook pointed out, correctly, that such a statement had already been issued. There followed a heated verbal collision between Cook and Thomas, which ended with Cook calling Thomas a gutless wonder.112 At the next meeting between the miners and the SIC (on 11 March) Thomas tried a new disingenuous refinement. This time he stated that the SIC could not get involved in any discussions with Herbert Samuel and his Royal Commission on the grounds that the committee were mere amateurs in the intricacies of the coal industry; only the miners themselves were competent to do that.113
