The Road Not Taken
Page 55
The psychology and intentions of the enigmatic and devious Baldwin still arouse controversy. Was he really, as he insinuated, a man of peace, with only Steel-Maitland on his side, surrounded by the ring of fire that was Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Joynson-Hicks, Bridgeman and Amery, and suffering grievously from the late defection of Birkenhead, who was a dove in 1925 but now, on the very eve of the strike, had turned ultra-hawkish? Was he genuinely looking for a way out even at this late hour? Or, in his pious hopes of trans-class collaboration in ‘one nation’, was he systematically deceptive and even self-deceiving? The reasons he gave for breaking off negotiations do not inspire confidence in his good faith. The letter he handed the TUC negotiating committee in the small hours of 3 May explained his apparent disgust: ‘It has come to the knowledge of the Government not only that specific instructions have been sent … directing their members … to carry out a general strike on Tuesday next, but that overt acts have already taken place, including gross interference with the freedom of the press.’41 The first point was nonsense: the same call for a general strike had preceded Red Friday, but Baldwin, so far from declaring it a revolutionary and unconstitutional act, had climbed down. What was the qualitative difference this time? It was doubtless Tom Jones’s fury at Lloyd George’s impeccable logic on this point that led him to dismiss the House of Commons speech by ‘the goat’ as ‘bad’. As for ‘overt acts’, there was only one act: the refusal of NATSOPA to print the provocative editorial in the Daily Mail. This hardly constituted ‘gross interference in the freedom of the press’ – a phrase that would have characterised the complete shutdown of Fleet Street. Moreover, this was a unilateral action by NATSOPA which the General Council, that body allegedly chock-full of howling revolutionaries, had instantly repudiated. Furthermore, this statement had been prepared before the NATSOPA men took their action.42 Additionally, circumstantial evidence favours a conspiracy or ‘set-up’. It was Thomas Marlowe who had effectively brought down the Labour government in 1924 by publishing the famous ‘Zinoviev letter’ which purported to show the MacDonald administration as Soviet stooges. The only possible defence for Baldwin is that he issued the statement when tired and exhausted and that the alleged ‘issue’ on which he fought was ‘a triviality, ludicrous if its consequences were not so serious’.43 Baldwin sometimes hinted that he had been ‘ambushed’ by the ‘hard men’ on the evening of 2 May, but this is not really any more convincing than his constant lament to Tom Jones that the entire crisis over the coal industry was a bed of nails bequeathed to him by the incompetence and cowardice of Lloyd George.44 The charitable view on Baldwin has been expressed thus: ‘At a late hour a silly argument may sound as good as a sane one, and on one of those points where tired and irritated men dig in their toes – points of pride, of supposed principle, of constitutional rights – the “wild men” were able to stand and win.’45 This view of the prime minister as ‘peacemaker’ ignored the fact that Baldwin, as an ideologically pure man of business, would never have browbeaten the mine owners, so all hopes of a peace were a priori vain. In the end even wishful thinkers like Citrine, who really wanted to believe in Baldwin, had to give up. ‘I sometimes wonder whether Baldwin is as honest, plain and straightforward as he appears to be, or whether he is a hypocrite and a humbug. When in personal contact with him he conveys feelings of sincerity, but his subsequent actions can only be justified by the assumption that he is dominated by his cabinet.’46 Citrine was too genteel to draw the entailment if he was not dominated by his cabinet but simply using them as a shield in an elaborate ‘good cop, bad cop’ charade.
Any million-to-one hopes of a last-minute miracle were dashed when Arthur Henderson and Ramsay MacDonald went to Number 10 on the evening of the 3 May; they attended, since Baldwin had already branded the negotiating committee disingenuous revolutionaries. Citrine had been tipped off by Sir Horace Wilson and Tom Jones that Baldwin still entertained a glimmer of hope that a deal could be stitched together, though this was almost certainly Baldwin in another of his moods of self-deception. To use modern terminology, it often seems that Baldwin was ‘in denial’ about his own actions. When MacDonald and Henderson arrived, they were confronted by Baldwin, Churchill and Steel-Maitland. A tense and sometimes turbulent meeting ensued. Churchill was in gung-ho mood or, as Kingsley Martin put it, ‘Churchill revelled in the chance to smash what he considered as an incipient revolution.’47 ‘You [meaning the Left],’ Churchill said, ‘tried it in Italy and failed, and you are not going to be successful in Great Britain.’ Steel-Maitland, too, was in aggressive form: ‘It’s about time you [the Labour movement] were put in your places.’ Henderson managed a cutting jibe at Churchill, referring to his over-the-top hyper-belligerent personal appearance at an anarchist siege in 1911: ‘It seems to me, Winston, that you are trying to give us a dose of Sidney Street.’48 The meeting proved an utter waste of time, and in any case by this time attitudes were hardening on both sides. On the Left were those joyful and jubilant that the gradualist, stalling tactics of the TUC were at an end and they could finally engage with the Great Beast, Capital. One of them said, in delighted stupefaction: ‘It is like asking for an elephant or dragon. And, lo, here it is, walking up the garden path.’49 The labour leader David Kirkwood said: ‘I was heartily in favour of the General Strike. I believed we should see such an uprising of the people that the government would be forced to grant our demands.’50 But the more reflective and moderate Labour Party supporters could see only disaster looming ahead. Beatrice Webb thought that a general strike was intrinsically revolutionary and to be deplored, no matter how justified the demands of the strikers. All governments, even a Labour one, would have to fight tooth and nail against it: ‘A General Strike aims at coercing the whole community and is only successful if it does so and in so far as it does. Further, if it succeded in coercing the whole community it would mean that a militant minority were starving the majority into submission to their will, and that would be the end of democracy, industrial as well as political.’51 She deprecated the rhetoric of the left-wingers, inevitably working demon-king Cook into her equation: ‘A. J. Cook on behalf of the T. U. C. Left, and Maxton and Wheately on account of the Clyde, talk about immediate revolution – whilst George Lansbury thunders threats of the immediate dissolution of “capitalist civilisation”.’52
And so the minutes ticked away, midnight, 3 May came, and the General Strike was finally a reality. On Tuesday morning there was an eerie stillness and silence all over the land, with the docks at a standstill, few trains running and virtually no buses. As the day wore on, the hum of traffic increased as thousands of cars, taxis and bi cycles took to the road, producing spectacular jams and gridlocks in urban areas, especially London.53 The government’s preparations had been well laid. Its main aims were to provide volunteer labour, especially drivers for trains and buses, to ensure food supplies and to maintain law and order. The Emergency Powers Act allowed it to requisition whatever it liked and to use the police in any capacity without a warrant. Unlike the TUC, it had access to all the latest technology, had a system of intelligence and information far in advance of the unions’, quite apart from basking in the aplomb natural to a class ‘born to rule’. Sir John Anderson, the permanent secretary at the Home Office charged with nationwide preparations had done his job well, eventually whittling down the areas under Civil Commissioners to just ten. The military were on standby, with warships anchored in the Mersey, Tyne, Clyde, Humber and at Cardiff, Swansea, Barrow, Middlesbrough and Harwich. There was a particular show of force on Merseyside, with the battleships Ramillies and Barham, recalled from the Atlantic fleet, training their guns menacingly on Liverpool. Two battalions of infantry landed from a troopship and paraded ominously through the city, in full kit, with steel helmets and rifles at the ready.54 The government’s call for volunteers had been successful, even if more in the quantity than quality of the recruits it attracted. Exact statistics are difficult to come by, but estimates range from a low of 300
,000 to a high of 500,000 – mainly elderly and middle-aged people of right-wing persuasion, employees in small businesses with paternalistic employers, blacklegs and students. Most of these became special constables, of whom there were 51,807 in London and more than 200,000 elsewhere in England and Wales.55 Undergraduates from the older universities became notorious as strike-breakers. Cambridge University alumni were employed as follows: 137 on the London Tube, 100 on the buses, 36 on trams, 99 as car and lorry drivers, 63 as railway workers, 64 in the Air Ministry, 460 as dockworkers, 710 special constables in London and 308 employed as ‘general labour’.56
Many hilarious stories were told about the incompetence of the volunteers and the sheer amateurism of their method of recruitment. Admiral Lord Jellicoe, who had commanded the fleet at Jutland in 1916, went to a police station to volunteer, where the following conversation took place:
‘Name?’
‘Jellicoe.’
‘Ever done anything?’
‘I commanded the Grand Fleet.’
‘Fleet of what?’57
The one big government failure was the much-touted OMS. Only 30,000 volunteers were raised under its auspices, and most of these were rabid extremists. The government, rightly fearing an outbreak of fascism, used very few of them.58
The TUC, on the other hand, put up a dismal showing throughout the strike. It was a classic instance of the British working class being prepared to make sacrifices for a better world only to be betrayed by its leaders. Citrine, a natural pessimist, was taken aback by the sheer solidity of the strike and the unexpected solidarity of the workers. The loyalty of the working class in 1926 closed the gap between revolutionary fantasy and reality, for the proletariat on this occasion closely resembled the mythical ‘class for itself’ that had so exercised Marx.59 One million striking miners were joined by another 1.5 million in the railways, docks, road transport, iron and steel, chemical, building and power industries. Of 15,062 London, Midland and Scottish railway engine drivers, only 207 reported for work on the first day of the strike; of 14,143 firemen only 62; of 9,979 train guards, only 153. The LMS railway ran only 3.8 per cent of its normal passenger service on the first day of the strike, though nine days later this was up to 12.2 per cent with the aid of volunteer crews. Altogether at the beginning of the strike only 3–5 per cent of passenger trains and 2–3 per cent of goods trains were running.60 Because of the expertise required, volunteer labour was a total failure on the railways (though the government tried to ‘spin’ the facts otherwise). In London not one of the General Omnibus Company’s 3,293 buses left the garage, though by 11 May 526 of them were on the road. Nothing at all was unloaded at the docks for the first four days of the strike.61 For obvious reasons, it was more difficult for the strikers to interdict Tube trains, so that by Saturday 8 May 71 out of 315 trains on the London Underground were running. The General Strike was, however, as has often been remarked, a very British affair in that almost the only trains running were bringing milk to the towns and cities. The unions communicated with their districts in the usual way and drew money for strike pay from the banks. In general, strike-breaking lorries were not attacked.62 Yet the overwhelming impression left by the first day of the strike was the chaotic organisation of the TUC, especially when contrasted with the government’s meticulous preparations. The members of the General Council had entered the strike with extreme reluctance, relying on the threat of a national strike as a deterrent, and, like most deterrents, not supposed to be actually used. They were now terrified of the genie they had released from the bottle. In a curious paradox, whereas the government did not really believe the strike was a revolutionary threat to the constitution, but said so repeatedly for propaganda effect, many members of the General Council thought, with more insight, that a genuinely revolutionary situation was objectively present. As one student of the strike has commented: ‘[they were] feebly timid; they hoped for the collaboration of their opponents and never wholly trusted the mass of their supporters; they feared the consequences of complete victory more than those of a negotiated defeat.’63
The errors of the General Council were legion. In a panic that no real preparations for a general strike had ever been made, they allowed Bevin, their best administrator to improvise with the Strike Organisation Committee – essentially a retreading of the old Ways and Means Committee – but drew the line at making him the strike supremo; J. H. Thomas was particularly insistent that his great rival not be given such powers and, as usual, Thomas got his way.64 Bevin then took the disastrous decision not to go for an all-out, no holds barred, nationwide stoppage but to call out the workers in waves. The first wave consisted of the transport, railway, iron and steel, building, chemical and power workers – to which was absurdly added the printers, which meant that the government could print propaganda but none of the usual newspapers could rebut it. Even pro-strike newspapers like the Manchester Guardian were affected and, despite the pleading from that organ’s editor, the TUC remained adamant.65 The second wave, to be brought out a week later, comprised the Post Office, engineering, textiles and shipbuilding workers; the seamen were outside the TUC’s ambit, as their union was the only significant one to refuse to heed the strike call.66 Bevin’s thinking was deeply flawed: given the exiguous strike funds available to the TUC, he had go for a ‘quick kill’. The idea of increasing the power and severity of the strike week by week made sense only if the General Council had amassed a six-month strike fund. Even Thomas and Citrine disagreed with Bevin’s strategy, but lacked the commitment or killer instinct to come up with an alternative.67 Bevin’s thinking was that the strike would be a long-drawn-out affair that would last at least a month, and that the ‘two-front’ approach he favoured would be an incentive to the government to be reasonable and come to terms; after all, a truly revolutionary strike would undoubtedly go for the jugular from day one.
Bevin’s mistake was to assume that Baldwin wanted compromise rather than the crushing victory he sought in reality. For all that, Bevin was the only TUC grandee to emerge from the strike with his reputation enhanced.68 Yet the decision to go for a two-stage strike was only the most cardinal of the TUC’s errors. There was no real mind overseeing the entire operation. The chaotic management of the General Council found expression in the unsatisfactory division of power between TUC and individual unions, and within unions at local and national levels, and the overlapping functions of many trade union committees. The General Council was anxious to maintain the supply of food and power, to prove conclusively that they did not have revolutionary aims, and so initiated a system of permits and licences exempting certain entities from blockades and picketing. It was decreed that the movement of ‘essential’ goods be permitted, but nobody understood what was essential and what inessential. What, for example, was the meaning of calling out ‘all workers on buildings except such as are employed definitely on housing and hospital work’?69 Power workers continued to supply electricity since the TUC never issued an explicit order to all power workers; how was an electrician supposed to differentiate between lighting and power?70 Different unions drew different conclusions from the selfsame instructions, and there was chaos at TUC headquarters in Eccleston Square as officials tried to make sense of the instructions or reconcile orders that cancelled each other out. Moreover, the TUC had laid no general plans for the strike or thought through its implications at any level, whether these were administrative, financial or constitutional. Individual unions were left to organise strike pay, picketing and food distribution on a local level, and meanwhile a flood of puzzled enquiries about how best to proceed threatened to inundate Eccleston Square. For example, it became clear that moving food around the country effectively would end up with the return to work of 75 per cent of the railwaymen.71 As for supporting the miners, the General Strike, unless it was to be a revolutionary one, was too blunt an instrument to support them, always assuming that was the General Council’s real intention. The mine owners had stockpiled vast quantities of co
al and had contingency plans to buy from the USA and elsewhere. The General Council (and the SIC) might have been better advised to order a general embargo on the movement of coal by the dockers and railwaymen. But the truth was that the top TUC grandees had blundered into a crisis they never imagined they would have to confront. Terrified of devolving power to local strike committees, which might have returned genuinely democratic decisions, they preferred to play dog-in-the-manger, reserving for themselves direction of the strike while doing nothing significant to promote it.72