The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  Friday 7 May found the TUC still dithering and uncertain about what to do next. Bevin proposed, and the General Council accepted, that no minutes should thenceforth be kept of their proceedings, which would prevent the government charging them with conspiracy and treason; clearly John Simon’s threats had had an effect. Citrine noted that Bevin seemed to be receding in forcefulness while Thomas increased in self-satisfaction and, as a corollary, that Thomas was becoming increasingly pessimistic and Bevin, in compensation, was more optimistic. The bad blood between the two continued but, since Thomas continually boasted of his contacts with the Lords Londonderry and Mansfield (vice-president of the Federation of British Industry) the General Council let him have his head rather than admit that it was totally at a loss.114 That afternoon Thomas and the negotiating committee met Samuel and, after the meeting, Thomas announced that he was now totally committed to the Samuel Commission as the way forward towards a settlement.115 Citrine continued to be bemused by ‘Jimmy’s’ Machiavellian ways, finding him naturally secretive and more a figure in an Alexandre Dumas intrigue than a trade union negotiator: he was ‘always discovering new situations, with mysterious side glances and knowing looks, endowed with facile entry into the innermost circles of government. If only we knew what he knew!’116 And now it turned out that Baldwin had been right to fear Samuel’s return to the arena, for influential centrist and liberal figures began to take up the idea that Samuel’s tripartite solution – the immediate cessation of the strike, a temporary renewal of the mining subsidy and the acceptance of a national wages agreement simultaneously and concurrently – was the only conceivable solution. Samuel’s idea was backed by Ramsay MacDonald, Maynard Keynes, Lloyd George and many other people of middle-range opinion. Even the novelist Arnold Bennett, who opposed the strike, signed an appeal to Baldwin couched in these terms.117 It was a promising bid for compromise but there was one major obstacle. Baldwin absolutely refused to countenance this tripartite solution. It meant he would have to dragoon the mine owners, which he had always declined to do, it would alienate the hawks in his cabinet and most of all it let the miners off the hook, since they did not have to agree to immediate wage cuts. Baldwin’s position was that the miners had to accept wage cuts before anything else could even be talked about and he was prepared to tough matters out even in defiance of public opinion, which, it was clear, would have welcomed such a solution.118 Besides, he was beginning to scent the possibility of a devastating victory over the unions without having to make any concessions. The longer the strike went on, the more hard line Baldwin became.

  The issue soon sucked in the British Broadcasting Corporation, which had tried to remain aloof from the conflict. On 7 May Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called for a settlement on the basis of Samuel’s three points and demanded the right to broadcast on the BBC, setting out his thoughts.119 This was instantly denied him by the young Director-General of the BBC, John Reith. To make sense of this development we have to retrace our steps to the period immediately before the outbreak of the strike. Realising the importance of the media in the moulding of public opinion, Baldwin had ordered the BBC to be turned into an auditory version of the British Gazette, pumping out pro-government and anti-union propaganda. His principal agent of control was J. C. C. Davidson, deputy civil commissioner, a veritable Pooh bear of the intellect who thought that the Gazette was a better newspaper than all mainstream newspapers.120 The calibre of Davidson’s mind may perhaps be gauged from his eulogy of Baldwin: ‘[He] had complete faith in the common sense and sanity of the working classes. Many of the talks we used to have during the coal strike and the months which preceded the General Strike always resulted in our agreement that the British would reject dictatorship, whether from the right or the left.’121 Evidently Davidson considered Neville Chamberlain, Birkenhead, Joynson-Hicks and Churchill were moderates. He and Baldwin ordered Reith to come to heel and turn the BBC into a government puppet on pain of being taken over and ‘commandeered’. A genuinely courageous man might have resisted or resigned, but that was not Reith’s way. On the Saturday before the strike he collaborated with Baldwin in an embarrassing charade. Baldwin planned to ‘make over’ the public with a series of ‘fireside chats’ in which he would pose as an avuncular peacemaker beset by wild extremists. To set the scene Reith himself came on the air incognito, with consequences described by Beatrice Webb:

  Then in a stentorian voice some other person [i.e. not the announcer] gave this message, two or three times, each time with louder and more pompous emphasis ‘Be steady, be steady’ – pause – ‘Remember that peace on earth comes to men of good will.’ Perhaps if Baldwin himself, in his kindly and common sense accent, had spoken his own words the effect would have been different. But in the emissary’s melodramatic shout it sounded not a little absurd. What is wanted is to face the facts with knowledge and determination. Goodness – i.e. diffused sympathy – is beside the mark. In a great crisis these sloppy emotions rouse irritation or contempt in the listeners to wireless – even to a far greater extent than readers – there is no contagious enthusiasm at the end of the ’phone; you listen coldly and critically to all that comes, and bathos is easily detected in the silence of your own sitting-room.122

  Webb’s critique was almost universally endorsed by intelligent listeners. The novelist Virginia Woolf complained that the BBC broadcast only absurdity, nonsense or trivia.123

  When the strike began, Baldwin became a regular fixture on the airwaves. He told the nation that the strike was a revolutionary threat to the constitution and distinguished sharply between the miners’ strike, which was legitimate if misguided, and the General Strike, which was illegal and unconstitutional: ‘I am a man of peace … but I will not surrender the dignity of the constitution.’124 Reith had always made much of the supposed independence of the BBC, from which it followed that the views of the other side should have been heard. Yet not only were the TUC and the miners denied airspace but so were middle-of-the-roaders and liberals such as Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald.125 The greatest scandal arose over the Archbishop of Canterbury on 7 May. It was Davidson who told Reith that the archbishop’s appeal could not be broadcast and ordered that there was to be no mention of it in the British Gazette.126 The archbishop was angry and sent off an irate letter to Reith: ‘Are we to understand that if the Churches desire to put something forth, their grave utterance must be subject to the approval of its wording by the Broadcasting Committee?’127 The two Davidsons cordially loathed and despised each other, so that it is not surprising that the commissioner scoffed at his namesake’s attempt to be ‘statesmanlike’, considered him a political meddler and described the archbishop’s proposed broadcast message as ‘weak and waffly.’128 This was supremely disingenuous, since if the prelate’s words really were so pathetic and inadequate, the smart move by the government would have been to give him the go-ahead so that he could discredit himself. The truth was that Archbishop Davidson’s broadcast was supremely just, poised and rational, and it was just this which Baldwin and his henchmen could not abide. When Lloyd George raised the issue in the House of Commons and asked why the words of the leading cleric of the Church of England had not even been deemed worthy of inclusion in the British Gazette, Churchill replied to general guffaws that this was due to shortage of newsprint.129 The real casualty from the incident was Reith. Although he swore up and down that he had done his best to be neutral and impartial during the strike, the reality was that he had bowed his head and done Baldwin’s bidding. He was a frighteningly ambitious man, who had already set his sights on becoming viceroy of India, and there are those who have suggested that Baldwin encouraged him to think that such a reward might be his if he toed the line. In the privacy of his diaries Reith complained bitterly that Commissioner Davidson made all the decisions on censorship and he then had to carry them out and take the flak. He particularly objected to being the ‘bad guy’ when it was hawks like Churchill who would not allow him to be impartial
.130 He took his revenge by writing privately to Archbishop Davidson to tell him that he personally would have welcomed the broadcast but he was under orders from Commissioner Davidson. In the end, he ruefully admitted to his diary that he would have done better to let the BBC be ‘commandeered’.131 Reith received little gratitude from Baldwin. In return for writing and editing Baldwin’s speeches, advising him on microphone technique and much else, he suffered the indignity of having Churchill unleashed on him, together with Baldwin’s admonition that he should strive to make the BBC as much like the British Gazette as possible. When Reith demurred at this final indignity, Churchill suggested that an old war wound (in Reith’s head) was affecting his reason.132 Yet Reith cannot be absolved of all guilt for the poor showing of the BBC during the General Strike. As has been pointed out: ‘In the privacy of his diary Reith railed against the bind he was in, without acknowledging that he had conspired with the government to achieve it.’133 He also tried to justify his stance by saying he was unable to be more sympathetic to the strikers since the High Court had declared the strike illegal, but omitted to mention that this declaration did not come until the penultimate day of the strike.134

  The entire Randall Davidson episode did far more harm, short-term, to the BBC’s reputation than many historians have been prepared to admit. Even those Christians who thought the strikers mistaken thought them honest and sincere and were scandalised at the shabby treatment of the archbishop. Lord Astor told all who would listen that it was a grievous mistake to gag churchmen, since the government would need their full support in the anticipated future struggles with Mussolini and Stalin.135 Even some sections of the Tory press became to grow disillusioned with Baldwin and his intransigence after the BBC affair.136 There was a volume of middle-class protest, and the disgust evinced by Virginia Woolf in her diaries was an accurate barometer of intellectual opinion.137 The cartoonist Low produced a memorable satire on the government, showing his contempt for the BBC’s coverage with the following caption, burlesquing a BBC news broadcast: ‘Mr Baldwin has eaten a good lunch and is hopeful … it is denied that the Albert Memorial has been wrecked. There will be several trains and the other six million of you can walk.’138 Modern authorities have been just as severe on Reith and the network over which he presided. Here is Asa Briggs, doyen of broadcasting history: ‘the low-water mark of the power and influence of the BBC’. And this is A. J. P. Taylor: ‘The vaunted independence of the BBC was secure so long as it was not exercised.’139 So appalled have most historians been by the bullying by Baldwin, Davidson and Churchill and the supine attitude of Reith that there has been, perhaps by a kind of compensation, a tendency to overplay the role of radio in the General Strike. It is often said that it was the second most crucial technological factor in 1926, after the motor car. This attitude may perhaps be traced to Beatrice Webb, who remarked on the first day of the strike that ‘the sensation of a General Strike … centres round the headphones of the general set … One reiterated communication over the wireless is a solemn undertaking by the cabinet that all who return to work or accept work in these days of the community’s peril will be permanently “protected and secured” in their employment – which implies “at the expense of the strikers”.’140 What can be safely said is that for those with radios the General Strike was the first major event in British history to make a real impact over the airwaves. But to make it a salient factor or in any way to attribute Baldwin’s eventual victory to his skill (anticipating Franklin Roosevelt) at cosy ‘one nation’ chats is to overstate the influence of this medium at this juncture in British history. For one thing, only 2 million wireless sets existed in a population of 43 million.

  15

  Revolution’s Last Chance

  SATURDAY 8 MAY was the day when the government gained the upper hand in the strike. Already on the back foot from the legal threat announced by John Simon and the hostility of the BBC, the TUC was dealt a hammer blow when Baldwin deployed the army to break the four-day blockade of the London docks. All that week the government had been massing troops. Observers reported the roads and country lanes of Surrey choked with military vehicles, and there was a particular concentration in Hyde Park, which had been an unofficial army camp since the beginning of the strike. At 4.30 a.m. the operation to secure the London docks began. Baldwin claimed he had to order the operation as there were food shortages in London, with only forty-eight hours’ supply of flour left, but the unions saw the action as gross provocation and an intimidating display of armed force.1 A hundred and five army lorries sped to the Victoria Docks in the East End, all of them full of grenadier guards who had been issued with 150 rounds each. Accompanying them were twenty armoured cars. Once at the docks, the grenadiers dismounted to form a defence in depth while the lorries were loaded with food. By 7 a.m. the dock gates were secured and by 11.30 the entire convoy was on its way back to Hyde Park, which was converted into a gigantic food storage depot.2 That afternoon a much larger convoy of 170 lorries made the same trip, and next day the entire docklands area was opened up by 267 trucks loaded with troops in an armed demonstration. There was no resistance from the pickets or the locals except for jeering and booing. Churchill exacerbated the situation by announcing that the military now had enough artillery assembled to kill every living soul in every single street in the capital and that troops had carte blanche to open fire; in effect they would have a licence to kill.3 It was through his influence that the soldiers at the dockside trained machine guns on the watching crowd. This was too much for George V, who protested to Baldwin. Churchill was quietly reprimanded, and word went out that there were no ‘shoot to kill’ orders.4 Nevertheless, the smashing of the blockade of the docks convinced many that the TUC was a paper tiger. Members of the General Council were despondent. It was now obvious that the ‘short, sharp shock’ strategy of a brief strike had failed, and that the TUC would have to settle in for a protracted struggle. This they manifestly lacked both the stomach and the necessary funds to undertake. Not only did morale sag badly over the weekend, but there were clear signs that the strike, if prolonged, might soon turn very ugly indeed.5 The General Council did make a few lame attempts to respond to the government’s coup de main. Electricians cut off all power to the London docks on Monday 10 May, imperilling both frozen meat and the water level in the docks, but after just twenty minutes power had been restored, being generated by batteries of six interconnected submarines.6 Trotsky exulted that the unions’ defeat at the docks was a classic of bourgeois perfidy. The restraint of the TUC, and their repeated demonstration that they did not have revolutionary aims, simply encouraged the government to act in a brutal way redolent of the role of the State as portrayed in the most far-fetched Red propaganda. Baldwin had made a poor requital for the General Council’s moderation and showed that he would stop at nothing, and use any methods, to win the struggle.7

  However, that Saturday was not without its lighter moments. How committed J. H. Thomas was to the cause of the Left was clearly shown by the lavish lunch party he attended at Wimborne House on 8 May, along with Osbert Sitwell, Lord Londonderry, Lord Gainsford (the Chairman of the BBC), ex-Viceroy Lord Reading and Philip Snowden’s wife Ethel, whose activities so incensed Trotsky. According to Sitwell, the talk was so reactionary and inflammatory that the guests had to ask the servants to leave the room.8 Meanwhile those members of the General Council who had chosen to remain at their desks prided themselves on taking decisive action when they turned down an offer of £26,247 from the trade unions of the Soviet Union, the first tranche in payments that were expected to reach £300,000. Their motive was obvious: to accept would be to hand the Tories a wonderful propaganda weapon and would allow the British Gazette to portray them as revolutionaries.9 The serious aspect of this was that, as part of their general crackdown, the government had used its powers under emergency regulations to interrupt bank transfers by organisations deemed to be a danger to the constitution. This meant blocking cheques to the TUC. Lloyds Bank told
Citrine that morning that £100,000 paid in by its supporters could not be credited.10 If this was a grave development, the next item the General Council dealt with was closer to farce. Its members had earlier been approached by an army veteran who, for a payment of £1,000, offered to raise 100 armed men, all disgruntled veterans like himself, who would storm the cabinet rooms and assassinate all the cabinet. Pugh had at once dismissed the man as an obvious lunatic. It later transpired that he was a well-known fraudster and conman, specialising in getting money advances on wild promises.11 Yet another incident that day seemed to some to take the General Strike closer to the world of opéra bouffe. In Plymouth a football match was arranged between strikers and police, which the strikers won 2–1. A French socialist reacted to the news in disgust: ‘The British are not a nation – they are a circus.’12 It is interesting that both sides in the conflict regarded the football match – reminiscent of the fraternisation of German and British troops in the trenches at Christmas 1914 – as a mistake. Churchill thought it undermined the Gazette’s daily message about fighting revolutionary forces and refused to print a report of the match. On the Left there was a feeling that such antics ran the risk of turning the struggle into farce or a Bank Holiday Punch and Judy show. The Labourite David Kirkwood thought that ‘mateyness’ of the police–striker kind insidiously weakened any notion of class struggle. ‘A trifling inconvenience is resented because it usually only affects a few, but the dislocation caused by the General Strike was so universal that people laughed at each other’s difficulties and their own. When I saw car-loads of girls driving through the streets of London looking upon the experience as if it were a picnic, I knew that we were beaten.’13