The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  What Thomas most feared was that Ernest Bevin, with his proven powers of military-style organisation, would be drafted onto the SIC and would lick it into shape as a proper body. Once again, in retrospect it seems incredible that the TUC should have sidelined their most brilliant administrative talent, but Bevin was well known to be critical of the gradualists, like Thomas and Ramsay MacDonald, whom he criticised bitterly for failing to raise the mining issue in the House of Commons. The absence of Bevin from the SIC was, so to speak, the elephant in the room in early 1926.114 Thomas loathed A. J. Cook for his integrity but what he hated about Bevin was the man’s manifest intellectual superiority. He played on the big man’s weaknesses, knowing him to be a ‘short fuse’ individual who could be gulled into storming out of meetings if provoked sufficiently, and therefore deployed the full range of sarcasm on him. Bevin usually took the bait, on one occasion erupting and charging from the room ‘to the accompaniment of rude noises from Jimmy Thomas’, as Citrine recorded the scene.115 Meanwhile Thomas encouraged the Labour Party’s intellectuals to hold meetings with Cook and Herbert Smith, hoping they would provide him with propaganda ammunition on the ‘hopelessness’ of the miners. They duly obliged. R. H. Tawney said of Herbert Smith that he suffered from tunnel vision: he seemed to see England as ‘a coal-pit with some grass growing on top’.116 Beveridge dined with Cook and Smith and was distinctly unimpressed: ‘Herbert Smith’s mind was granite. Cook’s mind … [had] the motions of a drunken dragon-fly.’117 With strong support from chairman Arthur Pugh and John Bromley, Thomas had a virtually free run on the SIC until April. In his memoirs Citrine dealt very mildly with Thomas, but to have revealed the full extent of his Machiavellianism would have been a self-indictment for his (Citrine’s) own weakness. As the dutiful committee man he produced lengthy position papers and memoranda for the SIC but did nothing to impede Thomas.118 The TUC General Council, for its part, seems to have adopted a ‘wait and see’ approach, hoping in Micawberish fashion that something would turn up. Citrine described the atmosphere on the council: ‘Swales beams over his glasses, but looks doubtful about Jimmy. Poulton looks sad but resolute, and Maggie Bondfield calmly goes on with her knitting.’119 Even simple matters like the exact definition of the respective powers of the MFGB and the TUC in the event of a national strike – which Citrine repeatedly tried to resolve – were pushed aside on the mañana principle. There was a curious feeling abroad that a general strike would never happen, that the government would cave in at the last moment, as it had done on Red Friday. Even if it did not, many TUC officials took the line that the strength of trade unionism was not in negotiation, compromise and arbitration (the Citrine path), but in surprise, ambuscade and blitzkrieg. They had bluffed Baldwin once and they could do it again. As Bevin wryly commented: ‘As usual there was a lot of talk on the General Council by people who thought they were not going to be involved.’120 Some, absurdly, put their bets on intervention by the monarch, despite the fact that such a scenario would have triggered a constitutional crisis. George V was known to be unhappy with Baldwin’s hard line and had actually made a speech from the throne in the House of Lords in February, urging moderation and conciliation on both sides.121 Disappointed by Cook’s refusal to come to Buckingham Palace to talk to him, the king, thinking Baldwin not conciliatory enough, urged restraint on him, but received the same contemptuous response.122

  Hoping that the Samuel Commission would provide the desired deus ex machina, the TUC continued to let J. H. Thomas have a free run on the SIC. His stranglehold there was complete. Only Swales and (on the rare occasions when he was co-opted as an ex officio member) Ben Tillett spoke up for the miners. Hicks was by this time completely at one with Pugh, Thomas and Bromley, with Bromley continuing to be vociferous on the theme that the miners had the SIC ‘over a barrel’.123 Any pretence that the SIC had the miners’ interests at heart had to be abandoned when the Samuel Commission published its report on 10 March, and those who wanted to bow their heads to Baldwin were flushed out. Predictably, Thomas, Pugh, Ramsay MacDonald and Frank Hodges declared that the Samuel Report provided an acceptable basis for settlement as it stood. Pugh thought the miners should at once accept the report unconditionally: ‘It was a profound mistake to think that the whole trade union movement could be brought out to support a subsidy.’ He wanted the TUC to back the miners only if Baldwin rejected the Samuel Report and tried to impose a pro-owners’ deal.124 Baldwin, characteristically, made an evasive reply to Samuel on 24 March, then did nothing for a month. On the same day the SIC managed to secure an interview with the prime minister, who promptly ducked his responsibility and said that the entire affair was the responsibility of the miners and the owners. Next day the SIC met to discuss the implications of this meeting. Tillett saw at once the gravity of the situation and suggested that the TUC General Council should be alerted to how serious the crisis had now become; above all, the respective powers of the MFGB and the TUC to negotiate with Baldwin and the mine owners had to be defined. This did not suit Jimmy Thomas; once again he got his way and no action was taken, even though Citrine, for once bestirring himself, pointed out that Pugh and Thomas were now working directly against the declared policy of the TUC. He added, waspishly, that if the Pugh/Thomas line was now official policy, the MFGB should be so informed, as they were unaware of it.125 April 1926 was certainly the cruellest month, for there was little sign of compromise from Baldwin and the TUC was in disarray. Bevin, deliberately kept in the dark by Thomas, was reduced to contacting A. J. Cook to enquire what exactly was going on. His analysis of the mining industry was sound. It was abundantly clear that the mining industry would never be able to pay a proper wage until it had been thoroughly reorganised, with the closure of pits and the reduction in the total number of miners employed.126 The key to the entire mess was a commitment from Baldwin to oblige the owners to accept a mandatory reorganisation of the industry, including a national wages council, as the quid pro quo for wages cuts. Yet the owners made it quite clear they wanted no reorganisation; in particular they objected to a national wages council and insisted on wage negotiations purely at the local level.127 Even Thomas and Pugh drew back when faced with this level of intransigence. The spectre of a general strike drew nearer. At all levels there was impasse: the government would not accept the Samuel Commission’s report unconditionally; the mine owners would not accept reorganisation; and the miners would not accept pay cuts. The only glimmer of hope came from A. J. Cook. Despite his famous slogan, he told the government that the miners would accept some pay cuts provided reorganisation of the industry had already got under way.128 They would not accept Baldwin’s selective response to the report, which was that wage cuts should be immediate but the reforms postponed to the future. Even Samuel himself agreed with this: a vague promise of future reorganisation was simply ‘sometime or perhaps never’ as he put it.129 The general atmosphere of chaos in April 1926 was well conveyed by a trivial incident in the world of the media. The well-known Catholic apologist Monsignor Ronald Knox, anticipating Orson Welles’s ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast in the USA twelve years later, put out a radio programme on 16 April which purported to be live coverage of a riot of the unemployed in central London. Even though the ‘live report’ contained the sensational item of a well-known philanthropist being roasted alive, and was thus an obvious spoof, more than 2,000 people phoned the BBC in alarm.130

  On 15 April the mine owners gave notice that existing wage contracts would be terminated on 30 April and wage cuts implemented the following day. The proposed wage scales were far lower than those recommended by the Samuel Commission and in some pits in South Wales had the effect of reducing miners’ pay packets by 50 per cent.131 The TUC was thus in a position where, unless it was to lose all credibility, it had to support the miners. A general strike loomed in two weeks, and the spectre which everyone hoped would never materialise had now done so. Both the government and the TUC were in danger of becoming a laughing stock unless prompt evas
ive action was taken. Baldwin, who had buried his head in the sand for a month ever since the Samuel Commission reported, reluctantly bestirred himself. On 21 April he called a meeting with the owners to see if there was any chance of compromise, but they remained adamant: the wage cuts must not be made contingent on reforms in the industry and, in particular, there must be no national wages council; all wage bargaining must be at local level. They were quite happy with the prospect of a strike, and greeted Baldwin’s warnings with an insouciance that dismayed the prime minister’s fidus Achates, assistant secretary Tom Jones.132 The owners thus effectively torpedoed Thomas’s strategy of sapping the TUC from inside; even he and Pugh were forced to concede that in the face of such intransigence there would have to be a national strike. Even with such dire and unpredictable consequences looming, Baldwin refused to put any pressure on the owners. The Tory Party of Peel, Disraeli and Salisbury would not have been so weak, but by 1926 the Conservatives had swung sharply right and were effectively in thrall to business, with no moderating influence from the old land-owning aristocracy. In the entire cabinet only Bridgeman was a county landowner and the rest were businessmen or their backers.133 Baldwin’s pusillanimous behaviour was disastrous for, by rolling over before the mine owners, he lost any chance of being able to persuade the miners’ leaders to compromise. Once Herbert Smith realised that Baldwin intended to bring no pressure at all to bear on the owners, he gently rebuked A. J. Cook for his overtures linking some pay cuts with industry reorganisation, stressing instead that all members of the MFGB were mandated by their district association.134 In the TUC meanwhile all was confusion. Citrine and the other centrist unionists had all along accepted Thomas’s assurances that he had the social contacts and political clout to avoid disaster and to prevent the TUC from being sucked into a general strike. Now it became obvious that he had miscalculated. Even worse, trusting this emperor in his new clothes, they had given him carte blanche to pursue his sabotage on the SIC, with the consequence that that body emerged from all its deliberations with nothing accomplished. ‘Six months had elapsed since the 1925 Trades Union Congress and a week remained before lockout notices took effect, yet the SIC did not know what its policy was!’135 The committee had neither worked out a TUC policy on the coal industry nor made any preparations for the nationwide stoppage which now loomed. In alarm at the SIC’s hopeless record of achievement, a Ways and Means Sub-Committee was set up by the General Council on 27 April, with a remit to improvise hurriedly. The unkindest cut of all for Thomas was that this would be headed by the man he most disliked (as a manifestly superior talent), Ernest Bevin.136

  Baldwin’s next step was to call a joint meeting of mine owners and the MFGB on 23 April, though what he hoped to achieve from this is unclear, unless it was the propaganda advantage that Herbert Smith unwittingly handed him. The meeting of men like Evan Williams and Herbert Smith was always likely to be a dialogue of the deaf, and so it proved. Baldwin appalled the miners by having so little grasp of the Samuel Commission that he suggested longer hours, already expressly rejected by the commission.137 Herbert Smith chided him with having no knowledge whatsoever of the working class and the conditions they lived and worked in, and it is true that 1925 marked the very first time Baldwin had even seen a slum (in Dundee).138 This vision had somehow given Baldwin an idea of himself as a godlike figure, above class and party faction, guided only by the Almighty or, as he put it: ‘The longing to help the bewildered multitude of common folk is the only motive power to make me face the things I loathe so much. And the longing only comes from love and pity.’139 How he squared this with his overwhelming partiality for the mine owners he did not reveal. The miners pressed him to implement the desired reforms and reorganisation in the industry, after which they would discuss pay cuts, but Baldwin insisted the cuts had to come first and the reorganisation later (but how much later?) Even J. H. Thomas’s biographer was moved to protest: ‘In other words the miners must give up their aces before the card game could begin.’140 The fact that the miners would have accepted some pay cuts if Baldwin had committed irrevocably to reorganisation was a point that was lost in the repeated mantra of ‘Nowt doin’ from Herbert Smith, which allowed Baldwin, successfully, to portray the miners as intransigent hard liners and all other parties to the dispute as paragons of sweetness and light. Herbert Smith’s correct strategy would have been for the MFGB to commit openly and unequivocally to the Samuel Commission report, somehow ride out the pay cuts Samuel recommended (far less harsh than those the owners were now committed to a lockout to achieve), and thus put Baldwin on the spot. If he in turn did not then accept the report, thus committing himself to reorganisation, he would be publicly revealed as a fraud and hypocrite. In the heat of the moment Smith and Cook could not see where their best interests lay and let Baldwin off the hook.141 Baldwin reiterated that he would implement the commission’s findings if all parties signed up to them, but he was being disingenuous as he knew the mine owners would not agree to this, and therefore neither would the miners’ leaders. In retrospect it is clear that he always wanted a strike, a decisive confrontation with Labour, so that he could smash it once and for all. Yet the media colluded with his version of events, presenting a scenario where only the miners’ incredible obduracy prevented a settlement.142

  Baldwin was well aware of the reluctance of the TUC to be sucked into a general strike and dithered between trying to manoeuvre them into a showdown alongside the miners, so as to drag down the wide Labour movement, and a countervailing desire to pull off another Black Friday by detaching the other unions from the MFGB. Accordingly, his next move, on 25 April was to summon Arthur Pugh for a private meeting. Baldwin always had a soft spot for Pugh, a countryman from Herefordshire who had become a steelworker and who, off duty, could be a genial companion, his incompetence as chairman of the SIC notwithstanding.143 Sufficiently encouraged by Pugh, Baldwin then met the full complement of the SIC, but lost interest once he realised the SIC had absolutely no influence on the miners. However he did agree to the setting up of a negotiating committee, much derided by A. J. Cook on the grounds that there was nothing to negotiate given the government’s stance. On the TUC side this consisted of Pugh, Thomas, Citrine and Swales and on the government side of Baldwin, Birkenhead, Steel-Maitland and Horace Wilson. It was thus a meeting of moderates on one side and right-wingers on the other, with the Left unrepresented (except for Swales, who was ineffective). There was particular matiness between old friends F. E. Smith (Birkenhead) and Jimmy Thomas. When Swales mentioned that Herbert Smith had been a prize-fighter in his younger days, Birkenhead chimed in with his pet theme that mining and fighting went together; he claimed to have a great-grandfather who was both.144 Horace Wilson tended to act as the go-between for Baldwin and the TUC men when they were not meeting together. Citrine noticed that Thomas on such occasions liked to be rude to Horace Wilson; doubtless as a power-worshipper he calculated that Smith, a mere civil servant, did not have to be deferred to and could therefore be kicked.145 Baldwin was asked why, if he was now so opposed to a subsidy for the mining industry, he had granted one in 1925. Baldwin declared that he was frightened of encouraging fascism if class tensions were ratcheted up too tightly.146 Inferring from this that Baldwin was now unconcerned about the threat from the extreme Right, Thomas tried to frighten his colleagues by lurid scenarios about fascist thugs on shooting rampages.147 While using the right-wing bogeyman to scare his comrades, Thomas simultaneously tried to use a left-wing bugbear on Baldwin and his cabinet, insinuating that the proletariat was now in a revolutionary fever pitch, and that only the valiant efforts of the TUC were holding them in check.148 Yet events were by this time evolving beyond the ambit of Thomas’s scheming. A delegate conference of miners’ leaders was held on 28 April, which backed Cook and Smith and reiterated ‘no surrender’. Perhaps more significantly, on Thursday 29 April a conference of trade union leaders met and stayed in session at the Memorial Hall in Faringdon Street until Friday, constantly
adjourning, remeeting and readjourning as they awaited the latest developments. 1,300 representatives of 141 unions were expected to hand plenipotentiary powers to the TUC. Ernest Bevin was the star of the day. He told the delegates that a titanic struggle was coming in twenty-four hours and that all unions would have to become one union to counter the threat. His message of ‘all power to the TUC General Council’ was heeded. All 141 unions voted to cede full powers to the TUC.149 It seemed now that a general strike was inevitable. Yet there were still optimists who thought that Baldwin, Thomas or the full negotiating committee could pull an eleventh-hour rabbit out of the hat. The last two days of the month were to be both action-packed and crucial.

  14

  Towards the Abyss

  AFTER HIS TORTOISE-LIKE performance until the last week of April, Baldwin was now involved in negotiations at white heat. The tourbillon of events began at 5.45 p.m. on 29 April when the SIC, flushed with the rousing endorsement just given to the TUC in the Memorial Hall, went to 10 Downing Street. There was a tripartite meeting with Baldwin and the miners’ leaders, which began with a long, embarrassed silence. Finally Herbert Smith broke the deadlock. ‘Are you waiting for us to speak, Mr Prime Minister? Do you think our people are likely to go back to longer hours? Ah don’t think you can expect us to do it, and we’re not going to.’1 Baldwin replied to this by adjourning the meeting until 10.30 p.m. when he expected the coal owners to join them. While they waited, Jimmy Thomas tried more of his scare tactics on Citrine. He asserted in all seriousness that the country was honeycombed with Reds, that Baldwin was bent on a showdown and there would soon be bloodshed. He expected the entire General Council to be arrested and the strikers to be mown down by gunfire, not from the military but from the fascists, whom the government were secretly encouraging but who were ‘deniable’. Thomas went on to say that from Baldwin’s perspective such violence would be understandable: ‘Who is this strike against? It is not against the coal-owners, it must be against the State. The money is not in the industry, so the strike is against the State. Well, Baldwin says that the State must be supreme, and he is right. Churchill is the man who will play the big part in all this.’2 Citrine then spoke to Swales and said what had often been said before, that Thomas was a born scaremonger whose true metier was as a fireside teller of ghost stories. When he reported the gist of Thomas’s remarks, Swales said defiantly: ‘I hope they do arrest us. It will be just the thing for our movement.’ At this point Pugh, who had been listening to the conversation, expressed the reservations entertained towards ‘Jimmy’ even by right-wing unionists: ‘You know, Thomas is an enigma. I can’t make him out.’3 The evening came to a dismal end when Baldwin’s aide came to tell them that there would, after all, be no further talks that night. The SIC members traipsed back to the Memorial Hall to find the delegates singing folk songs. They reported that Baldwin had preferred an early night to getting down to serious business – and there was truth in this. Thomas melodramatically claimed that he ‘never begged and pleaded like I begged and pleaded today’.4 Herbert Smith told his friends that the stumbling block was that Baldwin would not commit to reforms before wage cuts were imposed, but merely stated in a vague way that they would be ‘initiated’ (whatever that meant).