by Frank McLynn
On Friday 30 April the SIC went to the House of Commons and kicked their collective heels all morning, waiting for the result of Baldwin’s talks with the coal owners. At last word arrived of the owners’ latest offer. They wanted a 13 per cent cut in wage rates, an eight-hour day, guaranteed until 1929 and no significant reorganisation until that date. The only concession they were prepared to make was to accept a national wages board. This ‘generous’ offer was clearly always going to be unacceptable to the MFGB. The mine owners were delivering impossible terms impossibly late.5 Again Baldwin made an excuse to delay detailed talks, and it was 7 p.m. before both sides got down to serious business. Swales, Thomas and Pugh were the chief SIC negotiators, with Baldwin, Birkenhead and Steel-Maitland facing them, and Citrine and Sir Horace Wilson taking minutes. The meeting soon bogged down in an impasse about reform of the mining industry, with Baldwin steadfastly refusing to go beyond a pledge to ‘initiate’ restructuring. The SIC delegates became more and more impatient, increasingly convinced that Baldwin had no serious intention of implementing the Samuel Report, even if Herbert Smith and A. J. Cook could be brought to accept it. Baldwin was uncomfortable, not daring to admit to the union men that Birkenhead and Steel-Maitland had threatened a cabinet revolt if he made any concessions. Eventually Thomas produced a bombshell in the form of a poster printed by Odhams Press in which the government announced a state of emergency. What was the meaning of this, he asked sharply. Baldwin shuffled uneasily in his chair and said it was merely part of the government’s contingency plans and the poster had not yet been printed. Citrine described the atmosphere: ‘The silence was ominous. Every one of us concluded that we had been badly tricked. We felt we could no longer trust either Baldwin or anyone else and that they were simply playing for time to complete the arrangements which the Government had in hand.’6 Citrine accused Baldwin of bad faith, and Thomas weighed in to say that the government seemed unaware of the dangerous, revolutionary situation which now existed. Baldwin was being disingenuous. That very day the government had sent Circular 99 out to the local authorities, in effect implementing the emergency procedures which had been planned since the previous November. The duplicity of the government could scarcely be denied, as the entire communication was published in the press next day.7 The SIC went through the formality of consulting the miners once again about their position and returned to meet Baldwin at 9.45 p.m. How seriously the government took their efforts can perhaps be gauged from the sequel. They found Baldwin with Steel-Maitland (Birkenhead had departed), but present also were Neville Chamberlain, Lord Salisbury, Bridgeman and Lane-Fox, all in dinner jackets. The SIC men delivered another of Herbert Smith’s ‘Nowt doin’ messages and took their leave. Just outside Baldwin’s room Thomas ran into Churchill, who said: ‘Is it over?’ When Thomas nodded, Churchill went on: ‘Well, it is over as far as we are concerned. I have given you twenty-four millions, and that is all you are going to get. You can’t have another bob.’8 By 11 p.m. all parties to the farce were on their way home.
May 1st was the most gloomy May Day Citrine could remember. At the special TUC conference a roll-call of all unions present was held. The miners confirmed (or seemed to) that they would hand over the dispute entirely to the General Council provided they could be present at any negotiations. The SIC was reappointed as a negotiating committee. Further evidence that Baldwin was determined on a showdown seemed to come from the revelation that just before he had met the SIC the previous evening, Baldwin had been at Buckingham Palace for a meeting of the Privy Council, with George V present. This had arranged for the proclamation of a state of emergency under the Emergency Powers Act, even though it was still conceivable that there would be no General Strike and, in particular, that the NUR would defect at the last moment and produce another Black Friday. Given that the only actual emergency on 30 April was the expiration of the mine owners’ notices to their workers and the beginning of their lockout, this and Baldwin’s other actions looked more and more like deliberate provocation.9 Depending on their political hue, trade unionists prepared for the coming struggle with despondency or elation. The General Council announced some vague plans for food distribution but left it to the individual unions to call out their members, contenting itself with setting the exact time for a national strike: 11.59 p.m. on Monday 3 May.10 Meanwhile Citrine sent a letter to Baldwin saying that, despite the critical pass events had reached, the General Council was still available for last-minute talks. This received an immediate reply: Baldwin’s secretary came on the phone to arrange a meeting for 8.45 p.m. that evening. Talks continued until 1 a.m. and, though neither side gave ground, Baldwin was sufficiently encouraged to set out a ‘formula’ which ran as follows: ‘The Prime Minister has satisfied himself as a result of the conversations … that if negotiations are continued (it being understood that the notices cease to operate) the representatives of the TUC are confident that a settlement can be reached on the lines of the Report within a fortnight.’11 Some government ministers seriously thought this was the end of the threatened General Strike. Steel-Maitland passed Birkenhead a slip of paper on which he had written the words: ‘A taper had been lit this day in England.’ The irrepressible F. E. scribbled back: ‘If it’s a taper without a wages agreement, not even God’s help will enable it to be put out.’12 Next day, Sunday 2 May, the General Council met at its headquarters in Eccleston Square. Now it was A. J. Cook’s turn to be alarmed. He had heard about the talks and was surprised by them, scenting a sell-out. He joined the General Council in its deliberations but, when asked for the miners’ response to it, replied that all members of the miners’ executive had already left London for their various coalfields – naturally, since the coal strike had already begun. Cook, rightly, said he could take no responsibility for any meaningful reply to the formula until the hastily recalled delegates were back in London, which would not be until some time on Monday.13 Painful combing through the small print of Herbert Smith’s statements to the TUC conference on 28–9 April, and the caveats and qualifications Cook had urged him to make, revealed that the MFGB had not, after all, given the TUC carte blanche but only a provisional mandate to manage their affairs vis-à-vis the government, and that they retained the right to a veto; incredibly, this cardinal issue had never been cleared up unequivocally. The TUC was now in an impossible situation: on the one hand they had signed up to Baldwin’s ‘formula’ as men of honour; on the other, they were also committed by honour to the miners and could not ditch them, for yet another Black Friday might destroy the TUC’s credibility for all time.14
While Cook cabled his colleagues to return to London, the General Council took its eye off the ball and forgot to inform Baldwin of the latest developments. Baldwin had called a cabinet meeting for noon, expecting to hear back from the General Council around 1 p.m. at the latest. When nothing happened, and there was no sign of the negotiating committee nor any telephone message, the cabinet members (‘naturally disgruntled and perhaps a few of them inwardly elated’)15 dispersed, after agreeing to keep in touch so that they could hurriedly reassemble. It was 7 p.m. before Citrine rang 10 Downing Street and by this time, the mood among Baldwin’s cabinet was black: ‘they did not seem particularly anxious to see us,’ as Citrine put it mildly.16 The cabinet had remet and had adjourned a second time, and the hard liners particularly were in no mood to rush their dinners and hasten back to the conference table. There were even rumours that the ‘hawks’ were so disgusted with the TUC that they were planning a coup against the prime minister himself. This would replace Baldwin with an interim triumvirate of Churchill, Birkenhead and Neville Chamberlain; all talks with the TUC would then cease forthwith.17 Finally a meeting was organised for 9 p.m. This time the negotiating committee was joined by Ramsay MacDonald and ‘Uncle’ Henderson, with Baldwin, Birkenhead and Steel-Maitland as the principal spokesmen for the government. Birkenhead said in his best charmless manner (in which he could excel) that a very unfavourable impression had been left in the gove
rnment’s mind at the General Council’s inability to recall the miners’ delegates after a gap of nearly twenty-four hours. Citrine apologised profusely, and this seemed to soften Baldwin at least. Birkenhead then announced that he had devised what he called the ‘Samuel formula’, which read as follows: ‘We will urge the miners to authorise us to enter upon a discussion with the understanding that they and we accept the Report as a basis for settlement, and we approach it with the knowledge that it may involve some reduction in wages.’18 Both sides then agreed that two weeks was too short a time in which to reach a settlement: even Birkenhead conceded that the pestiferous owners were so difficult that they would require every one of their ‘paltry pits’ considered individually and separately. The negotiating committee then asked leave to withdraw and confer among themselves. They went next door to 11 Downing Street through an upstairs connecting door. Some inconclusive debate about the Birkenhead formula then ensued, with Thomas declaring that he was going to accept it, and was indifferent to the miners’ attitude.19 Suddenly it was announced that the Miners’ Executive had arrived. By now it was almost midnight. Herbert Smith reminded his ‘brothers’ that the miners were now locked out and scouted the notion that any settlement could be cobbled together in a fortnight. Before any really serious horse-trading could begin, a message was brought from Baldwin that he wanted to see the negotiating committee. Pugh, Swales, Citrine and Thomas went through to Number 10 and down, leaving the miners behind.20 Seeing Tom Jones, Baldwin’s éminence grise, at the door, Thomas could not resist a hit at A. J. Cook, telling Jones that Cook was ‘a bloody swine’.21 When they encountered Baldwin, his face was described as either ashen or thunderous, depending on the eyewitness. He handed the committee a formal note and then spoke as follows: ‘The task of the peacemakers is hard. Since we were here an hour ago an incident has happened which the British Cabinet takes such a serious view upon that they have instructed me to break off negotiations and convey their decision in this letter which I now hand to you. But I felt, having regard to all that you gentlemen have done to try and effect an honourable peace, courtesy demanded that I should tell you personally. Goodbye. This is the end.’22
What had happened? It seems that the hawks did not trust Baldwin not to appear as the deus ex machina last-minute peacemaker and hatched a plot to force him to throw in the towel and accept a general strike and its consequences. Their stalking horse was Thomas Marlowe, right-wing editor of the Daily Mail.23 He knew that the printers were not hard-line left-wingers – after all they had printed the government’s state of emergency notices – so devised something that was bound to provoke them. On this fateful evening he prepared a leader which read: ‘A general strike is not an industrial dispute. It is a revolutionary move which can only succeed by destroying the government and subverting the rights and liberties of the people.’24 This was blatant nonsense, and Marlowe knew it, but he was prepared to do the bidding of the conspirators. Who were they exactly, and who was the true author of the Daily Mail incident? Fingers have been pointed variously at Churchill, Birkenhead and Joynson-Hicks, but the most ingenious suggestion is that Jimmy Thomas was playing an elaborate game. He had already shown that he was a master of duplicity, at once frightening his comrades with lurid tales of fascist atrocities to come and terrifying Baldwin by telling him that if a settlement was not reached short of a national strike, the rank and file of the proletariat, much further to the left than their leaders in the union movement, would quickly get out of hand and foment red revolution.25 Kingsley Martin, the left-wing intellectual, directly accused Thomas of ‘winding up’ Baldwin so that he would object to the Daily Mail affair with outrage.26 Certainly there was something very odd about Thomas’s behaviour that night. Citrine recorded that after the final breakdown of talks Thomas lost his head. When Baldwin’s letter was read to the full General Council, Purcell said he was glad it had come to a fight but Thomas rounded furiously on him. ‘Some of those who have been talking have now got their will … We should inform the government that we regret any incidents that have happened and which have rendered the task of the peacemakers more difficult, but we cannot accept responsibility for them. You must control this thing, you who are on top, or you will not be able to control it at all. You won’t have the opportunity to issue instructions very long, I know.’ When he repeated these words, some of those present smiled but, in Citrine’s words, ‘Thomas turned viciously on them.’27 The obvious reading is that he was piqued because his much-trumpeted prophecy that there would be a settlement had turned out to be wrong, but it may be that he was playing an even more devious game.28 Baldwin’s duplicity was soon afterwards accidentally revealed when it was learned that he had sent his letter of ‘shocked disillusionment’ about the Daily Mail incident before his very first meeting with the negotiating committee that day.29 Certainly by this time even moderates in the Labour movement were beginning to get the measure of Baldwin. When the meeting of the Privy Council at Buckingham Palace announced the state of emergency, Bevin remarked that the proclamation was ‘equal in stupidity to the actions of the well-remembered Lord North and George III combined’.30 Always suspicious of Thomas, he surmised that he and Baldwin might be colluding and that the four-man committee was making unjustified promises to Baldwin and concealing things from the General Council. He proposed, sensibly, that the General Council simply disown the action at the Daily Mail by the NATSOPA operatives and send a letter of apology to the government. This was done, and the trade union leaders returned to the conference room only to find that all the lights were out and Baldwin had gone to bed, almost as though he had anticipated the General Council’s next move and trumped it with his non-availability.31 Bevin always believed a settlement of the Daily Mail affair could have been reached, but the villain in his demonology was Churchill.32 It is interesting that George V, never happy with Baldwin’s conduct of industrial affairs and his indulgence of the hard liners in his own cabinet and the mining industry, repudiated Thomas Marlowe’s analysis of the General Strike, and said of the Daily Mail article and its attitude to the miners: ‘Try living on their wages before you judge them.’33
Monday 3 May was a day of forlorn hopes and eyebrow-raising rationalisations. Desperate to avoid accusations that the TUC had sat on its hands until the strike officially began at 11.59. p.m., the negotiating committee again met Ramsay MacDonald (and the Labour Party Executive) to see if there was any way out of the imbroglio. Pugh suggested a mining board, with equal representation for employers and unions but MacDonald objected that Baldwin would ‘spin’ this as the Board ‘giving laws’ to an elected government.34 MacDonald’s behaviour both during the General Strike and in the few days previous was odd. In his diary for 2 May he noted: ‘It really looks tonight as though there is to be a general strike to save Mr Cook’s face. Important man! The election of this fool as miners’ secretary looks as though it might be the most calamitous thing that has ever happened to the trade union movement.’35 This fatuous statement ignored the fact that Cook had never been on the SIC or the negotiating committee, had expressed pragmatic moderation if only the mine owners would meet him halfway (they would not) and acted entirely correctly (as even MacDonald conceded) when he said he could take no decisions on his own but would have to recall the mining delegates. The idea that the strike took place to save the miners’ faces was a travesty of events but, even if total culpability could be laid at the door of the MFGB, the unbudgeable mule of the piece was Herbert Smith, not A. J. Cook. MacDonald’s talents as an observer of the events of 2 May have been seriously questioned by scholars, as when he claimed that Bevin had tried to ‘bully’ Herbert Smith, and his description of Pugh’s bored and offhand manner.36 There was not a breath of criticism of Jimmy Thomas (always something of a sacred cow in MacDonald’s eyes) for his erratic antics or of the General Council for their woeful failure to make contingency plans for the General Strike. Much shrewder was Trotsky’s comment that the so-called British Left was so only as long as it
had to accept no practical obligations. Even ‘leftists’ on the General Council like Alonzo Swales were disposed ‘either to direct betrayal or compromise, or else to a policy of wait and see with reference to compromises and complaints against traitors’.37 While MacDonald doused any faint embers in the TUC’s fire, his future collaborator in government, Stanley Baldwin, was giving another of his ‘appalling frankness’ speeches in the House of Commons. He expressed disappointment and disillusionment that his hopes for peace had come to nothing and said he looked forward to the time when ‘the angel of peace with healing in his wings will be among us again’. He reiterated that the General Strike was a revolutionary threat to the constitution.38 Curiously, his faithful acolyte Tom Jones saw nothing amiss in Baldwin’s clichéd gush, but instead criticised the speeches by Ramsay MacDonald (which was generally conceded to be lame), Lloyd George (in which he accurately nailed the lie that the strike was the work of revolutionaries) and J. H. Thomas, who colluded with Baldwin in the myth of revolutionary intent: ‘I have never disguised,’ said Thomas, ‘that in a challenge to the constitution, God help us unless the government won.’39 Even neutral observers were unconvinced by Baldwin’s effusions. The Manchester Guardian commented: ‘Mr Baldwin spoke his piece, but one had the feeling that the militants in his cabinet had taught it to him.’40
