The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  The second day of the strike (5 May) found the working class as solid as ever. Meanwhile there was an increasing perception of Baldwin as a ‘flaky’ personality, by no means the bluff, honest man he pretended to be. In the House of Commons J. H. Thomas forced him to admit that he had (on the evening of 2 May) instituted his own personal ‘lockout’ when he went to bed while the negotiating committee was still talking to the miners.73 According to Tom Jones, Baldwin was behaving oddly and displaying a strange turn of mind, at one moment lucidly and correctly identifying Bevin as the most able man in the TUC and then immediately branching off into a kind of academic speculation, in which he dubbed Ramsay MacDonald the ‘Kerensky’ of the Labour movement but without identifying a Lenin and then, by a kind of weird association of ideas, wondering if Bevin would emerge as the ‘Napoleon’ of industrial relations.74 Beatrice Webb, who loathed left-wing politics, trade unions and communism and thought the General Strike a catastrophic mistake for the Labour movement, nonetheless saw clearly that Baldwin’s failure to bring the coal owners to heel was the root cause of the strike. Writing on 3 May she declared: ‘It is that mean wriggling of the Baldwin Cabinet, to some extent justified by the wriggles of the Liberal Commission of Herbert Samuel and Beveridge – typical Liberals – that has brought about the General Strike of tonight.’75 Yet even though emotion and reason inclined Webb against the government, she was always more comfortable adopting a position of superiority towards the trade unions and soon she found a new excuse for her lofty attitudinising: the allegedly unhealthy lifestyle of the General Council.

  Those fifty or sixty men who were directing the General Council were living a thoroughly unwholesome life – smoking, drinking, eating wrong meals at wrong times, rushing about in motor-cars, getting little or no sleep and talking aimlessly one with another … sitting in groups singing songs and telling stories, soothed and enlightened by a plentiful supply of tobacco and alcohol … After a Council meeting some of the members would adjourn to a neighbouring public house and discuss matters at the bar with reporters present.76

  Webb always found experience of mundane living and quotidian lives tiresome, but the General Council members at least understood everyday reality, as Webb did not. Her attitude is most reminiscent of Churchill’s, who, as his wife Clementine pointed out, lived largely in a wonderland of his own imagination. ‘He knows nothing of the life of the ordinary people. He’s never been on a bus, and only once on the Underground. This was during the General Strike, when I deposited him at South Kensington. He went round and round (on the Circle Line) not knowing where to get out and had to be rescued eventually.’77

  Wednesday 5 May also saw the appearance of a government newspaper, the British Gazette, an organ of the most hysterical and mendacious propaganda, ‘edited’ by Winston Churchill. Baldwin decided that he would never win the battle for public opinion if the facts and arguments concerning the General Strike were published objectively and dispassionately; in a word, he would have to go for the big lie. After importing newsprint from Holland and commandeering the offices of the Morning Post, the government made its appearance in the media world on the second day of the strike. 232,000 copies of its newspaper were printed, with the kind of blatantly over-the-top affirmations that were to become the Gazette’s hallmark. ‘The General Strike is … a direct challenge to ordered government … an effort to force upon some 42,000,000 British citizens the will of less than 4,000,000 others.’ Baldwin himself entered the fray next day with this: ‘Constitutional government is being attacked … Stand behind the government … The laws are in your keeping. You have made Parliament your guardian. The General Strike is a challenge to Parliament and is the road to anarchy and ruin.’78 Government propaganda liked to concentrate on the idea that public transport had not been impeded and that there had been a steady drift back to work by the strikers. Both assertions were untrue: only 3 per cent of railwaymen returned to work before the end of the strike. On 6 May the Gazette claimed that 200 buses were running in London when the true figure was 86 – actually a dismal performance by the government, for almost anyone could drive a vehicle, as against the difficulties of being a train driver.79 The lies of the British Gazette were so poisonous that even moderates like Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson were led to vociferous protest in the House of Commons. The sole consolation for the TUC and the strikers was that the Gazette was widely regarded as an embarrassment. Thousands of copies were dumped, jettisoned or even ejected from aeroplanes; almost nobody read it. Yet it was a sinister and dangerous excrescence in political life. It openly supported fascism and by falsely preaching imminent red revolution it came perilously close to self-fulfilling prophecy, whipping up passions to the kind of fever pitch where extremists on both sides actually would turn to revolution.80 Lloyd George viewed the British Gazette as ‘a first-class indiscretion clothed in the tawdry garb of third rate-journalism’, while the New Statesman described it as ‘a disgrace alike to the British government and to British journalism … it made no pretence of impartiality; it exaggerated, distorted and suppressed news, speeches and opinions for propagandist purposes’.81

  Quite the most disgraceful aspect of the British Gazette was the light it shed on the personality of its editor Winston Churchill. As Churchill’s own books on the Second World War would demonstrate, he was no respecter of truth, which he always seemed to regard as an optional extra. Such a trait can be defended in a peerless wartime leader, where image and propaganda must necessarily triumph over objective fact, but in 1926 this attribute was undesirable, irresponsible and dangerous. One of the problems was that Baldwin had given Churchill the job to absorb his energies, to keep him quiet and shut him up. As he later boasted: ‘Don’t forget the cleverest thing I ever did. I put Winston in a corner and told him to edit the British Gazette.’82 A notoriously bad editor, more yellow than W. R. Hearst’s yellow press, Churchill was at odds with everyone: other editors, journalists, printers, politicians, churchmen, even the king himself, although the impressionable George V was worked up by the Gazette’s sensational reporting of the ‘intimidation’ employed by pickets.83 Churchill’s critics dubbed him ‘the British Mussolini’ and it was widely remarked that Winston on the crest of a wave was the stuff of which tyrants were made.84 Lloyd George said his actions were ‘like a chauffeur who is apparently perfectly sane and drives with great skill for months but … suddenly takes you over a precipice’.85 Hamilton Fyfe, the editor of the official Trade Union organ, British Worker, remarked of his opposite number: ‘He sees the whole affair as a film producer would see it, with this difference. Film producers do not act; Winston intends to appear as the hero of the story himself.’86 Yet Churchill’s activities were not confined to lying propaganda of the most grotesque kind. By restricting the supply of newsprint, he also threw the entire newspaper industry into turmoil. Only forty of 1,870 national, regional and local newsapers were unaffected. Most provincial newspapers were reduced to turning out editions on roneo’d sheets. The Times was given government protection and rewarded Baldwin with nuanced support. The Rothermere press was also a ‘teacher’s pet’, since it abandoned its earlier reservations and praised Baldwin as the hero of the hour. The Daily Mail was printed in Paris and flown over.87 Yet even the favoured publications had to appear in truncated editions as Churchill commandeered all supplies of paper, both at the docks and in the paper mills. Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, was furious about this, but Churchill told him that the Gazette had to have priority as it was ‘defending civilisation’.88 Newspapers were also affected by the sometimes hostile attitude of printers though in one such case, that of the Manchester Guardian, the organ had only itself to blame. Supposedly sympathetic to the Left, the Guardian announced on 5 May that it could not understand what the TUC’s objectives in the strike were.89 Yet the government’s main target was always the TUC’s publication, the British Worker, edited by Hamilton Fyfe, a far superior product to the Gazette. Although Fyfe was driven to distraction by
the permanent presence of a team of TUC censors, neurotically anxious to prevent the appearance of anything that could be construed as communist or revolutionary, he did a very good job of counter-propaganda, in particular hammering away at the theme that ‘the nation’ did not simply mean the non-striking middle class.90 Churchill especially targeted the British Worker, requisitioning newsprint to make it difficult, if not impossible, for the Worker to be published. The TUC newspaper got smaller and smaller, eventually ending up as a four-page publication, but it struggled through until 16 May. Fyfe got his revenge for Churchill’s vindictiveness by ridiculing him for his defence of ‘freedom’, in particular pointing to the contradiction between a government which had supposedly started a strike on the issue of freedom of the press (the Daily Mail incident) but was now trying to stifle the press freedom of the opposition.91 The issue of the press was always acrimonious and came close to generating violence, especially when anti-government demonstrators tried to torch the offices of The Times.92 In the provinces the editor of the Birmingham Worker, a communist news-sheet, was arrested and the journalist John Strachey (ironically later to become a right-wing apologist) was threatened with a trial for treason.93 Yet the incident that left the nastiest taste in TUC mouths was Baldwin’s attempt (on 5 May) to close down the pro-TUC Daily Herald – an attempt only thwarted when the attorney-general advised Baldwin that the proposed action was illegal.94

  By day three of the strike the general public was becoming used to the new routine and was relieved to find that life went on much as usual, with food in the shops and people managing to get to work by driving cars and thumbing lifts. The only departure from normality was the absence of some of the newspapers and the closure of some rail stations such as Victoria.95 The Oxbridge undergraduates were enjoying the sheer ‘lark’ of their time as strike-breakers – it seemed an even better jape than their ‘silly ass’ drinking parties – though the more serious, intelligent and high-minded students and dons tended to sympathise with the strikers: typical were such men as the 20-year-old A. J. P. Taylor, the 21-year-old Hugh Gaitskell, A. D. Lindsay, the master of Balliol, and the libertine and dilettante, Tom Driberg.96 On the TUC side Jimmy Thomas continued to play the gadfly, irritating Herbert Smith with his would-be role as conciliator and his tendency to promise Baldwin far more than he could deliver. Butterfly as well as gadfly, Thomas, who had previously prophesied confidently that the entire General Council would be arrested, now backtracked and declared this unlikely. As usual, he amused himself by hobnobbing with cabinet ministers. He breezily accosted Jix only to find the home secretary in no mood for Thomas’s levity. When he told Jimmy that he was seriously worried, Thomas riposted: ‘Yes – and you see where your Mussolini is driving you.’ At this obvious hit at Churchill, Joynson-Hicks simply shook his head dolefully.97 Thomas continued his usual policy of running with both the hare and the hounds, at one time bizarrely asking Baldwin for police protection – but whether from the government or his own colleagues he did not say.98 Amid the general atmosphere of stasis if not opéra bouffe observable on General Strike day three, there were two significant developments. Sir John Simon announced in the House of Commons that the strike was illegal, using the following legalistic casuistry: ‘A strike was a strike against employers to compel employers to do something. A general strike was a strike against the general public to make the public, Parliament and government do something.’ All taking part in such a stoppage were therefore engaged in illegal activity and could be sued for damages. The protection of the 1906 Trade Disputes Act was, he argued, made null and void by a general strike and ‘every trade union leader who has advised and promoted that course of action is liable in damages to the utmost farthing of his personal possessions’.99 A few days later (10 May) Mr Justice Astbury concurred with Simon. Giving judgement in a case brought by Havelock Ellis, general secretary of the National Sailors and Firemen Union to prevent any of his members being called out by the TUC, Ellis argued that it was against his union’s rules to strike if no ballot had been held to decide the issue, and there had been no ballot. Astbury granted the injunction but then took it upon himself to declare that the General Strike was illegal on the grounds that it was not an industrial dispute and therefore did not fall within the terms of the 1906 Trade Disputes Act.100 The former Labour Attorney-General Sir Henry Slesser subjected Astbury’s claims to withering criticism, citing ample authorities that sympathetic strikes were legal and therefore gave immunity to financial damages. Yet for a while the combined onslaught of Simon and Astbury put the TUC on the back foot. Simon was essentially an overpromoted nonentity who liked to put himself on a footing of legal equality with Birkenhead, seemingly on the basis that both had been at Wadham College, Oxford, and were both lawyers. Deeply unpopular and widely despised, Simon was an object of particular contempt for Lloyd George who remarked: ‘He has sat so long on the fence, the iron has entered his soul.’101 As for his legal expertise, his arguments were soon taken apart in devastating fashion by A. L. Goodhart, then editor of the Law Quarterly Review and later professor of jurisprudence at Oxford. A far superior lawyer to Simon, Goodhart demonstrated that the General Strike was a sympathy strike, that pressure on a third party was implicit in such a strike, and the fact that the government was the third party was irrelevant. To prove that the TUC was acting against the State and the constitution, one would have to prove that its leaders were guilty of treason, felony, seditious libel or seditious conspiracy, which was clearly ‘idiotic’.102 Baldwin’s government later tacitly conceded that Simon and Astbury were hopelessly wrong by bringing in a new act of Parliament in 1927 explicitly to outlaw sympathetic strikes – which by definition they would not have needed to do if the General Strike had in fact been illegal.103

  The other salient development was the re-entry of Herbert Samuel into the fray. Disgusted at Baldwin’s response to his hard work and statesmanship (as he saw it) on the Royal Commission, Samuel washed his hands of the government before the strike and took himself off to his villa on Lake Como in northern Italy, where he lolled by the pool and read his beloved Pliny the Younger. Stirred by various informal appeals, Samuel decided when the strike broke out that his place was back in England. He harnessed his considerable financial muscle to getting himself back through France and across the Channel at speed. On the early afternoon of 6 May he arrived at Folkestone, where he was met by the famous racing driver Major Henry Segrave in a powerful Sunbeam. Segrave took just one hour and ten minutes to whisk Samuel from Folkestone harbour to the Reform Club in Pall Mall, driving with speed and skill. Since the roads in Kent were almost clear of traffic because of the strike, Segrave often touched 85 mph on the open road, but was more cautious in villages and the suburbs.104 Once in London Samuel gathered his contacts for a conference, buoyed by his golden dream of being the peacemaker and determined to have the last word after Baldwin’s insouciant and cavalier treatment of his commission. His arrival was greeted by neutral observers as being the proverbial breath of fresh air.105 The venue for the talks was the house of Samuel’s friend Sir Abe Bailey, the South African magnate, in Bryanston Square. Almost inevitably, his principal transmission belt to the TUC General Council was the egregious Jimmy Thomas, who heartily agreed with Samuel that three points were cardinal: there must be nationally agreed wages, not district rates, and a national wages board; the lockout notices must be withdrawn; and the subsidy should be temporarily extended. Thomas was glad to be once more the focus of attention; he was piqued at being dislodged from pole position at the TUC by Bevin and Alf Purcell, who formed a kind of duumvirate, running the strike on quasi-military lines.106 But Samuel was brought bumpily down to earth at his first meeting with Steel-Maitland, who impressed on him that he would be merely a private negotiator on his own initiative and the government would not be bound by one of the accords he concluded with the TUC. Samuel thought that the response was churlish, ungrateful and lacking in any form of statesmanship.107 For a couple of days he concentrated on
the miners. At a personal level he liked Herbert Smith, and they established a kind of intimacy jokingly based on the fact that they shared the same first name. But he admitted that Smith, not Cook, was the real barrier to a breakthrough on the union side and described Smith as ‘a burly Yorkshireman full of courage … when his mind was made up he was not to be moved. Three hours of argument in our conference left Herbert Smith’s attitude on every point precisely what it had been at the beginning.’108 Samuel then switched back to Baldwin. He found him just as adamantly determined as ever not to pressurise the mine owners but seemingly more accommodating in principle.109 The truth was that Baldwin found Samuel’s return deeply embarrassing and inconvenient. Having, as he thought, snubbed him into retirement to Italy, the turbulent Samuel had reappeared, once again putting him on the spot. He dared not be too distant lest he undo all the propaganda advantage he had secured in middle-class minds.110 He therefore made some encouraging sounds to Samuel and various ideas were kicked around and memoranda presented, whether with much sincerity on the prime minister’s part is doubtful.111 But even if he had wanted to make concessions he had two main problems. If he conceded anything that could have been conceded before the strike, he would be accused of being responsible for an unnecessary strike. And even if he had wanted to give ground, the hard liners in his cabinet – Joynson-Hicks, Neville Chamberlain, Steel-Maitland and Birkenhead – would not have allowed him.112 The worst problem of all was Churchill. Tom Jones tried to talk him round to a more moderate position, but made the mistake of saying that Arthur Pugh and Thomas were just as loyal to the constitution as he (Churchill) was. At this there was a veritable explosion from Churchill. ‘This infuriated him,’ wrote Jones, ‘and he broke out into a fresh tempest in the corridor, and I felt tossed about like a small boat in an angry sea.’113