by Frank McLynn
Yet in general the weekend saw the strike enter a new phase, with a much more hawkish attitude from the government in evidence and the TUC, partly as a consequence, flustered and at sea. It is one of the great, consoling myths of the General Strike that it was a peaceful affair. It is true that there was no loss of life but, from 8 May onwards, there were almost continual clashes between strikers and police. In the working-class ghettos of London, Glasgow and Edinburgh there was vicious and sustained rioting. In London the first major clash came at the Elephant and Castle, but there were ferocious riots in the East End. The police drew batons and charged on two successive nights in Poplar and Canning Town and at the Blackwall Tunnel. On Saturday 8 May there were baton charges in Battersea, Lambeth, Deptford, Paddington and Camden Town. At New Cross tram depot a vast crowd gathered to prevent the running of blackleg trams, and the demonstration was so successful that the would-be drivers never got onto the tracks. At Hammersmith there was a running battle between strikers and fascists.14 In some ways the violence in the provinces and Scotland was even more dramatic. In Edinburgh and Glasgow there were violent scenes for five nights with hundreds of arrests; Aberdeen also saw trouble. The north-east was another black spot, with serious riots in Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Darlington, Gateshead, York (where the crowd tried to release a prisoner), Leeds (an ugly confrontation between police and 5,000 rioters) and Hull. Other outbreaks occurred in Barnsley, Burnley, Wolverhampton, Ipswich, Plymouth (perhaps significantly, on the very day of the famous police v. strikers’ football match), Southsea, Swansea, Cardiff, Newark, Mansfield and Nottingham. In Preston 5,000 people charged the police station to release an arrested striker and were beaten back only after repeated baton charges. In Doncaster a thousand-strong crowd took to stopping the traffic and had to be cleared away by a baton charge.15 The attempt to run buses caused a lot of trouble from stone-throwing mobs, though such incidents were inevitably written up by government propaganda. Virginia Woolf took a bus journey, expecting the experience to resemble travelling by stage coach in the frontier period of the Wild West, but was disappointed to find that it passed without incident.16 Shots were fired at a train at Crewe, and on the line between Durham and Newcastle there occurred the only act of sabotage when the locomotive Merry Hampton, drawing the Flying Scotsman train service, was derailed. The British Gazette, sensing a propaganda coup, took advantage of the confusion between the Flying Scotsman service and the famous record-breaking locomotive of that name, and claimed that it was the loco, a national treasure, that had been crippled.17 In general, government disinformation liked to stress that the increasing incidence of train crashes, the natural consequence of the inexperience of the engine drivers, was always due to sabotage. In light of Merseyside’s reputation for industrial unrest, it is perhaps curious that Liverpool had a poor record of militancy during the strike, but this was mainly a consequence of the dominant seamen’s union’s having refused to join the action.18
The violence that occurred was largely (though not exclusively) caused by the government crackdown, beginning on the weekend on 8–9 May, occasioned by the (correct) belief that the Baldwin administration was winning the struggle. The government could draw on almost infinite powers under the Emergency Powers Act. Although the Orders in Council, especially the notorious Order 13A denying the unions access to their own money, had to be given parliamentary approval, this was a formality with the government’s huge majority. The result was that Baldwin and his cabinet could do all of the following: seize land, buildings and food; commandeer all vehicles and issue special licences to allow buses and trains to be driven by volunteer labour; take over the docks, railways, shipping, mines, power stations, petrol; control the supply of electricity, gas and water; prohibit public meetings; declare any overtures to police and soldiers by the strikers ipso facto criminal acts; undertake the most sweeping searches and seizures.19 In effect the rule of law had broken down: the definition of legality was whatever the government said it was, and this was in a context where judges and lawyers were still solemnly giving particular reasons as to why the General Strike was illegal. The rationale for all this was supposed to be that the TUC was mounting a revolutionary threat to the constitution; the palpable falsity of this was such that even pro-government newspapers started deriding the claim as nonsense.20 Yet the government by the weekend had the bit between its teeth and seemed to be going out of its way to produce the very revolutionary situation it was denouncing. There was talk among the hawks that the best thing to do was to engineer the ascendancy of the hard Left and the eclipse of Thomas, Citrine, Bevin and the other right-wing unionists so that armed force could be used to crush the ‘revolution’ decisively. Recruitment of the Special Constabulary rocketed from 98,000 at the beginning of the strike to 226,000 by the end.21 Joynson-Hicks made a broadcast appealing for another 50,000 special constables, then produced a sabre-rattling exhortation in the British Gazette: ‘Protection is the one thing which will kill the strike and restore England to its normal life … Give the government enough Special Constables to enable me to allot two to every vehicle … thus releasing the regular police for perhaps sterner work. Give us men in numbers that we may have mobile forces of young and vigorous Special Constables available in any London area where trouble is anticipated.’22 A new paramilitary body, the Civil Constabulary Reserve (CCS), was recruited, with 18,000 steel-helmeted members. OMS instructions gave its recruits to understand that any deaths they meted out in the course of their duties would be regarded as ‘justifiable homicide’. Jix was prepared to pay all his myrmidons – whether special constables, CCS or (yet another body of irregulars) the Metropolitan Emergency Constables – 5s a day as a constable and 10s a day as an officer, a sum well above the daily pay for a miner even in the pre-cuts halcyon days.23
Without question policing became noticeably more heavy-handed from 8 May onwards, in contrast to the first four days of the strike, when such tension as there was between constables and strikers was largely engineered by police brought in from the outside and thus new to a locality and its folkways. In the early days it was frequently asserted that the shared experience in the trenches in 1914–18 enabled police and unionists tacitly to make common cause, and ex-servicemen wearing medals was said to be a shibboleth, protecting them from any possibility of police brutality.24 This was no longer the case after the weekend of 8–9 May, when the police seemed to go out of their way to be harsh and provocative. Part of the problem was that weak and indecisive regional commissioners tended to call them in at the first sign of difficulty instead of sorting out the problem themselves. The correct way to proceed was demonstrated in Lincoln, where the sympathetic chief constable refused the help of troops or mounted police and cooperated with the strike committee, which provided all the special constables.25 This of course infuriated the hard liners in Baldwin’s cabinet, as in their minds such cooperation implied that the government had lost control and the TUC was running things. The more usual pattern was that evinced in Brighton and Edinburgh, where the chief constables were outrageously provocative.26 Sometimes well-meaning but inept commissioners began by acting dovishly, and then switched to asperity when things did not work out as they had planned. In Northumberland and Durham the communist strike committee organiser Robin Page Arnot initially worked in a friendly, harmonious way with Sir Kingsley Wood, a protégé of Neville Chamberlain and the region’s special commissioner (later to be a chancellor of the exchequer).27 However, Wood soon lost control of the situation, largely because he would not accede to the strikers’ demand that he refrain from using blackleg labour. There was also the complication of lack of liaison between civil and military authorities. The Royal Navy (whether or not at the government’s behest is not clear) had decided to station two destroyers and submarines in the Tyne, and the unions declared that in no circumstances would they unload ships, even if the blacklegs were removed, unless the warships put to sea. Affronted, Wood worked himself into a lather and unleashed calculated police b
rutality, intending to show Arnot that what he could not get by consensus he would get by force.28 Naturally strikers did not take kindly to this high-handed attitude by the police, struck back, and as a consequence swelled the growing number of arrests. Altogether around 4,000 arrests were made out of 3 million strikers, 1,000 of the arrests being of communists. There were daily raids on ‘Reds’, either at the Communist Party’s headquarters in King Street or at private addresses. The first arrest of a member of parliament occurred when the communist Shapurji Saklatvala refused to be bound over to keep the peace and was sentenced to two months in Wormwood Scrubs for sedition.29 There were 3,149 prosecutions for incitement to sedition, violence and incitement to violence, though the flimsy nature of the charges contrasted with the cavalier attitude displayed by the authorities to the rule of law, with 604 of the 4,000 arrests being made without a warrant. In Glasgow some 230 men were arrested for ‘impeding traffic’ and 100 of them sentenced to an average of three months’ imprisonment.30 Arrests and sentencing tended to be particularly draconian in the trouble spots of Scotland and north-eastern England, which accounted for 1,760 of the 4,000 arrests.31 But there was rough justice everywhere. The disturbances at Doncaster were little more than a brawl, yet 84 brawlers got three-month sentences. In Birmingham the entire strike committee was arrested, while in Aberavon three men were jailed for two months simply for having communist literature in their possession.32
The upper hand gained by the government over the weekend was all the more pronounced since the General Council continued to turn in its usual lacklustre performance, playing dog in the manger, doing little except wring its hands at the police crackdown, but being much more exercised by the possible loss of its own powers in the localities as its credibility with the workers lessened. It was the besetting fault of all Labour Party executives and all bureaucratised Labour institutions: obsession with the far Left at the expense of collaboration against the common enemy. Jimmy Thomas characteristically identified 400 trade councils where he feared communist influence; particular attention was drawn to the 5 communists on the 12-strong executive of the London Trades Council.33 Unwilling to allow Bevin to act as strike supremo – for that might imply that the TUC was an enthusiastic rather than a reluctant participant in the strike – the General Council fussed neurotically over ‘Red’ influence while local strike committees got on with the real work of organising the strike. Another problem was the multiplicity of committees, some of them overlapping. Nomenclature was considered important. Fifty-four towns boasted councils of action; seventy-seven others had strike committees or emergency committees. These were usually complex organisations embracing the local trade council executive committees, representatives of the various unions and members of the Labour Party, with the detailed work of issuing permits, picketing, arranging publicity, a courier service and liaison with London devolved to subcommittees.34 The most important task of the strike committees was issuing permits for the movement of food and other essential items, and to the fury of government supporters in the regions lorries and cars were driven around with ‘By Permission of the TUC’ prominently displayed where modern vehicles would exhibit a tax disc. The General Council’s decision to grant permits for essential services was controversial, as it was too dependent on subjective perception. Granting food permits to delivery drivers was a prized perk, but there was an obvious opportunity for corruption.35 Moreover, there were no checks on the transport of goods once the permits were granted, so that many of those granted the necessary licence transported luxury and inessential items instead.36 Instead of clarifying matters, the General Council further muddied the waters by deciding (on 7 May) to revoke the permits. Their decree to this effect was widely disregarded, and in any event it exacerbated the already dreadful relations between the TUC and the Cooperative Wholesale Society. On the eve of the strike the CWS had urged its retail societies to withhold credit from the miners because of their previous debts but, like all centrally issued decrees in 1926, this one was widely disregarded. Those local coops which had collaborated with the strikers by providing credit vouchers for food or advancing ‘subs’ in advance of strike pay felt that the General Council had slapped them in the face.37
Although the received opinion is that the General Strike was all a bit of a lark, that it showed the British inability to take anything seriously and that the would-be general stoppage was nothing more than, in Beatrice Webb’s words, ‘a cricket match … a batch of compulsory Bank Holidays without any opportunity for recreation and a lot of dreary walking to and fro’,38 it seems clear that by the weekend of 8–9 May something like a pre-revolutionary situation had been reached. The threat of major violence and loss of life hung heavily in the air, a consequence both of the government crackdown and the lack of leadership by the General Council. Lunching at the Reform Club and sounding the opinions of members, Arnold Bennett reported: ‘General opinion that fight will be short but violent. Bloodshed anticipated next week.’39 J. H. Thomas told his TUC colleagues with a kind of grim satisfaction that the hotheads were going to have their way and there would soon be blood on the streets. He painted an apocalyptic scenario, with a serious police–striker clash going badly wrong, the TUC totally losing control of the situation, troops being called in, strikers machine-gunned, union leaders imprisoned, punitive legislation, expropriation of trade-union assets and, with the General Council all in jail, leaderless workers generating spontaneous risings in the provinces.40 Thomas was disregarded because he had cried wolf so often before, but this did not mean his analysis was necessarily wrong. Some observers thought that sheer boredom and frustration would lead the workers to find some way to arm themselves. Another factor was that the knock-on effects of the strike were causing unemployment even in small industries and businesses supposedly unconcerned with the strike; by 10 May unemployment had risen in the city of York from 1,363 to 4,301 in just a week among non-strikers.41 Dissatisfaction with TUC leadership was certainly general, with water and electricity workers threatening to join the strike whatever the General Council ordered. Worries about spontaneous combustion were entertained on both sides of the divide. Churchill’s deputy Ronald McNeil, financial secretary to the Treasury, said the country was nearer to civil war than for centuries.42 Harold Laski was certain that serious violence with loss of life would be an inevitable concomitant once the second wave of strikers was called out.43 The deliberate escalation of police activity was a very risky, and even reckless, strategy on Baldwin’s part. And what would happen if soldiers took seriously Churchill’s words that they had a licence to kill? Would not any loss of life from military gunfire in itself ignite a major conflagration? Conversely, what would happen if troops were ordered to open fire but refused to execute their kith and kin? The possibility of an army mutiny was the government’s ultimate nightmare. The real danger in the General Strike was that nobody had a real grip on the situation and there was no real mind at work on either side, thinking five or six steps ahead in a counterfactual way. Most thoughtful obervers took an ‘a plague on both your houses’ attitude to both the TUC and the government, viewing them as equally responsible for the mess the country was in after almost a week of the strike. Yaffle of the Daily Mail summed up a general attitude of contempt for the General Council on all sides when he remarked scathingly that Britain would never have a revolution for, as soon as Baldwin said the strike was illegal, the TUC folded its tents and went home.44 The influential Catholic journalist and writer G. K. Chesterton, always plugging his pet notion of distributism, a third way between capitalism and socialism, put the blame for the General Strike entirely at Baldwin’s door and accused him of being deliberately confrontational.45 His The Return of Don Quixote dealt with the strike allegorically, but in his publication Chesterton’s Weekly he named Baldwin as the guilty man. In Quixote he portrayed Baldwin witheringly as Michael Herne and said of him: ‘Everything is too simple to him … He will succeed … a new sort of history will have begun … (with) a sword tha
t divides. It is not England.’46
The world looked on in amazement as Britain seemed paralysed, deadlocked between the irresistible force of Baldwin’s government demanding unconditional surrender and the immovable object of the miners, with their slogan ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’. In France the General Strike swamped all other international news and most national reporting as well. Whereas French correspondents based in Britain were remarkably impartial in their copy, opinion in France itself was more critical, with financiers particularly upset about the tumbling value of the franc as the run on sterling manifested ‘spin-off’ effects, and government sources solemnly declaring that this was the most dangerous crisis for Europe since the Great War.47 German trade unions pointedly offered their British brethren no help – a move generally interpreted as tit-for-tat, as the TUC had remained inactive when the French invaded the Ruhr in 1923. The Italians were more jubilant. Mussolini announced that the strike meant the end not just for that sham creation, parliamentary democracy, but for the British Empire itself, which would soon be supplanted by an Italian one.48 American newspaper reporting tended towards the sensational with (inaccurate) headlines such as these: ‘Dictator Rule in Britain in Strike’ and ‘Martial Law Status Proclaimed in Britain’. Insofar as the strike was taken seriously, it was taken to be a sign of the inevitable decline of the deeply unpopular British Empire. Eyebrows were raised at the closing of so many British offices and the departure of their middle-class employees for continental holidays, evincing a most unPuritan work ethic. The New York Times backed Baldwin 100 per cent, claiming that Wall Street was alarmed by the declining value of sterling on the markets.49 Intriguingly, the British media seemed increasingly to lose interest even as the strike reached crisis point. Attention was diverted to other big news of the day: the touring Australian cricketers, in England to win the Ashes (they lost), had matches against Essex, Surrey and Hampshire during the nine days of the strike. But the most fascinating non-strike news story was Amundsen’s flight in the airship Norge from Spitzbergen to Alaska on 10–13 May, making Amundsen the first man to have reached both North and South Poles.50 Back at home, Sunday 9 May was a typical British Sunday, with little attempt made by anyone except the indefatigable Herbert Samuel to find a solution to the strike. Baldwin visited the zoo in Regent’s Park, which was thought by some to show contempt for the strikers and to denote a frivolous attitude to his responsibilities.51 Yet the truly sensational development was the sermon delivered in Westminster Cathedral by the leader of the Catholic Church in Britain, Cardinal Francis Bourne, Archbishop of Westminster. Bourne, who had been elevated to the purple at the age of fifty in 1911 and enjoyed a 32-year reign over the archdiocese of Westminster was a protégé of Pope Pius XI (1922–39), who had a reputation as a reactionary pope.52 The truth is more complex. It is true that he signed the concordat with Mussolini in the 1929 Lateran treaties, but in 1937 he would issue a blistering condemnation of Nazism in his encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge. Attempting to steer a middle course between the great competing ideologies, in his famous encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931) Pius denounced both Marxism and revolutionary socialism on one hand and unbridled capitalism on the other. Unfortunately Bourne, and his acolyte Bishop Peter Amigo of Southwark, were far more right-wing than the pope (Amigo was a notorious supporter of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War), ignored his strictures on capitalism, but took up with relish Pius’s statement that no one could be both a Catholic and a socialist (as opposed to a social democrat). In a truly shameful effusion from the pulpit Bourne announced that the current strike was ‘a sin against the obedience which we owe to God’ and that Baldwin’s government was ‘the lawfully constituted authority of the country and represents … in its own appointed sphere the authority of God himself’.53 Needless to say, these remarks were reported in full in the British Gazette and on the BBC. The contrast with the treatment meted out to the Archbishop of Canterbury could hardly have been more glaring.
