by Frank McLynn
Among the proletariat the news that the strike had been called off was greeted with stupefaction, incredulity and then anger. The broadcast information that strikers should stay out until their individual unions told them to return to work also had people scratching their heads. The truth was that the TUC was so keen to end the strike on any terms that it had made no contingency plans for a resumption of working, sketched out no administrative plans for the post-strike period or indeed sent out any instructions whatsoever. That evening telegrams flooded into Citrine’s office asking to know the terms of the settlement. Citrine could not tell them that there were none so opted for being incommunicado.91 The General Council disingenuously implied that it had secured terms from the government and nowhere admitted that the miners had rejected the Samuel memorandum, which might have alerted the nation’s labour force to what was really going on. That Thomas and his colleagues should have capitulated unconditionally seemed so incredible that at first such an idea was discounted. After all, the strike was still rock solid, with little signs of the drift back to work claimed both by the government and Thomas and his henchmen.92 Gradually it was realised that the TUC had betrayed not just the miners but the entire body of strikers. The result was what has sometimes been called ‘the second general strike’, beginning on 13 May, when working-class anger manifested itself in a second round of stoppages, including ones by people who had not previously been on strike: 100,000 more employees were on strike than had been out during the ‘Nine Days’ themselves.93 For a day or two the possibility of civil war or revolution was probably higher than it had ever been. Baldwin’s government, like the Bourbons, seemed to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Onto this tinder box they heaped petrol, in the form of a long food convoy sent through the streets of London on the 13th, flanked by armoured cars and soldiers. That evening in Poplar the police went one better by breaking up a peaceful protest meeting with savage baton charges.94 For two or three days the strike was resumed under the direction of local strike committees. The Cardiff committee cabled the General Council to call the strike back on but received the ludicrous general statement: ‘Stand together’ – whatever that meant in the present context, and despite the fact that this was precisely what the General Council had not done.95 Citrine contented himself with bromides – the General Strike had been ‘the most magnificent effort of rank-and-file solidarity that the British movement has ever displayed’ – and tried to put all the blame on the miners. He disingenuously implied that the TUC had negotiated a cancellation of the lockout notices but that the miners had refused to accept the deal Samuel proposed, so it was not after all the case that the General Council had sustained a terrible defeat. From now on, he averred, any large-scale stoppage would have to be conducted by the TUC without the veto power the miners had claimed in this one.96 A moment’s consideration ought to have told him that, after the debacle of the Nine Days, no credible union would ever be able to trust the TUC again.
The extent of the General Council’s failure can scarcely be exaggerated. Its members were involved in a double betrayal, for while the council betrayed the working class, Jimmy Thomas betrayed them. As one writer summed the situation up: ‘The strikers numbered among themselves several mules and fools but only one traitor.’97 There was at every level in the TUC a quite staggering inability to think through the implications of a general strike. The General Council seemed to rely wholly on a mixture of bluff and primitive deterrence theory. As in all such theories, the weapons were not supposed to be used but, whereas the theory might work in a context of mutually assured destruction, what was supposed to be the Armageddon the government was terrified of? Since the TUC went out of its way to reiterate that it had no revolutionary aims, it should never have become involved in a collective action whose logic pointed remorselessly in that direction. Herbert Morrison summed up the situation in a way Trotsky might have approved (save for his concluding seventeen words):
A General Strike beginning as an industrial struggle, if carried to the bitter end, and if it is to be successful, must become a physical force, revolutionary struggle aiming at the forcible overthrow of the constitutional government and the seizing of power by the General Council of the TUC. Nobody believes that the General Council contemplated or wished any such thing, and nobody with half a brain believes that in Great Britain such a policy could be successful.98
A general strike’s best chance of victory over a modern government lay in the paralysing of all transport. Twenty years earlier such a strategy might have worked, but the advent of the automobile meant that transport was not dependent merely on public, union-controlled modalities like the railways and buses. The motor car was Baldwin’s secret weapon, and, given its existence an intelligent General Council should have seen that not even a non-revolutionary ‘national strike’ (to use the TUC’s preferred nomenclature) would be able to bring the government to its knees. No such thinking went on and insofar as there was risk assessment, the General Council all seemed bewitched by the myth of Red Friday and to regard it as a shibboleth. As Beatrice Webb scathingly remarked: ‘They play at revolution and they run away from the consequences with equal alacrity.’99 Moreover, the TUC repudiated its own ‘inflexible’ resolution of 1 May that there would be no victimisation or, as the wording of their communiqué ran: ‘in the event of any action being taken and Trade Union agreeements being placed in jeopardy, it will be definitely agreed that there will be no general resumption of work until those agreeements are fully recognised’.100 The irony of Jimmy Thomas’s betrayal over victimisation was that, the miners excepted, the railwaymen bore the brunt of employers’ post-strike vindictive actions. The stoppage of trains was the most successful part of the General Strike, which was both why it routinely attracted grotesque lies from the British Gazette about the number of trains running and why the owners were so vindictive when the railwaymen returned to work. Despite its boast that it could keep services running with volunteers, the Great Western Railway never managed to use more than 40 per cent of its amateur recruits (most of these company pensioners or managerial staff ) and these usually proved incompetent.101 Almost all dockers and railway workers were forced to concede in writing that the strike had been illegal before being re-employed and then had to take pay reductions. Nearly a quarter of the NUR members had still not gone back to work by October. By autumn 1926 45,000 striking railwaymen had still not been re-employed and normality would not be restored on the railways until 1931. Thomas lost caste with his own NUR and eroded his own power base by his absurd boast that he had secured assurances from the government about his members’ jobs. The real flavour of the man was conveyed by his response in the immediate aftermath of the strike. Instead of staying to fight things out with the employers, he departed on a tropical cruise.102
The plight of the miners was even more horrendous. Baldwin once again proved unwilling to exert maximum pressure on the mine owners. He tried to introduce some of the milder reforms recommended by the Samuel Commission only to be sharply rebuffed. The owners declared that the Samuel proposals for reorganisation were a monstrous impertinence and charged Baldwin with making it impossible for them to run the industry in the true manner of private enterprise; why were they singled out for special government interference and why could they not have the freedom enjoyed by other industries? Baldwin replied sharply that he regretted this uncompromising attitude; as for ‘government interference’ this had occurred only because of the egregious incompetence of the owners who, unlike other industries, had proved incapable of putting their own house in order.103 This was brave talk, but talk was all Baldwin seemed capable of with the owners. So far from being singled out for interference, they were allowed far more rope than any middle-of-the-road government would have permitted them; only the ultra-right government of 1924–9 with its massive parliamentary majority could have been so indulgent. With the miners there was no such indulgence. In June 1926 Baldwin passed legislation ending the seven-hour day and allow
ing an eight-hour one, ‘equipping the owners with knuckle-dusters’, as Ramsay MacDonald put it.104 They proved supremely ungrateful. In July a deputation of Christian divines led by William Temple went to see Baldwin to try to press for a four-month subsidy while the mining industry was reorganised.105 Baldwin predictably turned the subsidy idea down flat and said the owners and the miners had to get together between themselves to sort out the mess. Taking up this cue, A. J. Cook wrote to Churchill to ask him to convene a meeting of the MFGB and the owners. Churchill was willing and asked to see the owners. At a meeting with them on 6 September Evan Williams told Churchill not only that the Mining Association would not enter into any national negotiations but claimed it was illegal for it to do so, as all power was vested in the district associations. Churchill lost his temper at this and told the owners that if the government had been aware of the depth of their intransigence, it would never have humoured them by suspending the seven-hour day.106 Baldwin returned to the fray using parliamentary privilege, denouncing the owners in the House of Commons as ‘discourteous and stupid’.107 But to Labour’s queries about what he intended to do about it, the predictable answer was as usual: nothing. Faced with Baldwin’s refusal to turn the screws on the owners, the miners for their part refused to make any sacrifices. Even when both Cook and Herbert Smith declared that the time had come to negotiate, the national delegate conference in August refused to endorse this, albeit by a narrow majority.108 With money dwindling and hunger in miners’ families increasing, the adamant attitude of the delegates’ conference was eventually overborne by individual miners voting with their feet and drifting back to work. The drift back was particularly noticeable in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, always the mining unions’ weak spot (as would be shown again in the 1984 miners’ strike). Finally realising the need to legitimise a fait accompli, another delegates’ conference in November agreed that miners could conclude agreements with the owners in each district. Between 29 November and 23 December a multiplicity of such agreements was concluded and the men all returned to work. The six-month struggle had been heroic but had yielded no concrete results. The terms of the return to work varied but usually included an eight-hour day and the wage conditions as at 1921 rather than 1924. The owners scored a total victory. The miners had to work longer hours for lower wages (in 1927 an average of 7d loss per shift).109
Nobody, apart from the strikers themselves, emerged from the General Strike with much credit. Bevin and Thomas seemed to the workers to have added to their ‘traitorous’ credentials when they refused to impose a coal-handling embargo during the last six months of 1926 when the miners stayed out. Nor would the TUC agree to raise additional funds for their struggling ‘brothers’ through an ad hoc compulsory levy. Baldwin gained much kudos in the immediate aftermath of the strike but threw all this political capital and goodwill away when, in 1927, in reponse to pressure from his hawks, he brought in the Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act. This banned sympathetic strikes, restricted the areas and occupations where unionism was permitted and required trade unionists to ‘contract in’ to the unions’ political levy paid to the Labour Party, instead of having expressly to ‘contract out’ as previously.110 This unnecessary legislation (its clauses banning sympathetic or general strikes were never invoked) caused great and continuing bitterness on the Left111 – it was habitually regarded as both stupid and egregiously wicked – and would be triumphantly revoked by the Attlee government in 1946. From having been at the top of the popularity poll in 1926, Baldwin and his reputation slumped disastrously as a result of this folly. In public perception the strikers were finally proved right in their assertion that Baldwin had waged class war on them in 1926 and this perception was instrumental in securing the Labour Party its electoral victory in 1929.112 Yet it cannot be denied that the Labour movement suffered also in the years after 1926. Trade union membership fell from around 5.5 million in 1925 to 4.8 million in 1928; the TGWU lost one-tenth of its members. Total cash reserves of all unions fell from around £12.5 million to £8.5 million. Strike pay alone cost the NUR and the TGWU one million pounds apiece.113 These sums were dwarfed by the hits sustained by the nation (in lost trade) and the government itself. Lost coal production alone amounted to £97 million plus a further £42 million on imports of coal, but the overall trade loss amounted to some £400 million.114 In addition the government spent an extra £80 million on troop movements, the organisation of food supplies, extra policing, special constables, enhanced intelligence activity and much else. So embarrassed was Baldwin by government expenditure that he had Birkenhead compile a set of bogus figures totting the bill up to no more than £30 million, but few were taken in.115 It would have made far more sense to renew the £23 million subsidy to the coal industry, especially since the government had to pay £26 million out of public funds on poor relief to families of strikers. Baldwin thus took a net loss of £3 million for obstinately refusing to renew the subsidy, and that for purely doctrinaire, ideological reasons.116 The only consolation the Conservative government could draw from the entire episode was that it heralded an era of relative industrial peace. In the years before 1926 strikes involved an average of more than a million workers a year, but in 1926–36 the average was never more than 300,000. The contrast between 1921 and 1927 was particularly striking, for whereas in the former year 85,872,000 working days had been lost, the figure for 1927 was only 1,174,000.117 Additionally, productivity in the mines increased from 200 tons per miner in 1925 to 300 tons by 1939.118
The General Strike also lit a fuse that would eventually detonate the Labour Party in the 1930s. Although in the short term Baldwin’s vindictiveness handed the party the narrow electoral victory that would enable it to form the minority government of 1929, the traumatic events of 1931, when MacDonald, Thomas and Philip Snowden dumped it for the spurious solution of a National Government, were already adumbrated by the trio’s right-wing attitudes in 1926. Whereas MacDonald’s and Thomas’s reactionary form was fully exposed, Snowden played a very clever hand and kept his head down; Churchill scathingly commented that he had been ‘as mum as a mouse’.119 Snowden was secretly just as hostile to the strike as MacDonald and Thomas but kept his thoughts for his diary: ‘If the Trade Unionists had fully realised the forces that would be ranged against them, they would never have embarked upon the strike.’120 By common consent his finest hour came in 1927 when he denounced the Trade Disputes Bill in a ninety-minute speech in the House that Lloyd George considered easily his best ever. The absurdities of the bill, Snowden pointed out, were manifold. Outlawing general strikes made no sense for only time would tell whether the strikers were in tune with the rest of the country or out of it; if enough people wanted a general stoppage, fifty acts of Parliament could not stop it and, in any case, how do you bring 5 million people before the courts? Moreover, the act was ‘so ridiculously worded that nobody understands it. No lawyer in the House of Commons will venture an opinion as to what it means.’121 Curiously, the greatest casualty of the General Strike was probably the Liberal Party, for the long-standing strife between old rivals Herbert Asquith and Lloyd George finally tore the stricken party apart.122 Asquith, backed by John Simon and other right-wing Liberals, vehemently denounced the General Strike on many occasions, most notably in the House of Commons on 4 May. On that occasion he underlined the contradiction between a nation supposedly striving for international disarmament at the very time it was waging a civil war, and said it was a conflict in which only the innocent suffered. He differentiated between the miners’ dispute, which was legitimate, and the General Strike, which was ‘an offence of the gravest kind against both law and morals. It was an attempt to coerce the whole community and to substitute for the authority of Parliament that of a class dictatorship.’123 After the strike he reinforced this view: ‘There is a tendency, I regret to see, to look back upon the General Strike as a trivial and transient incident – a shortlived and more or less picturesque adventure. There could not be a worse example of d
istorted political perspective.’124 Lloyd George considered this view wholly erroneous. He thought he knew all about the coal industry, having published his own proposals for reorganisation in Coal and Power (1924) and thought the government should implement them. It followed that for him the Samuel Commission was a waste of time since he himself had already ‘solved’ the problems. As one close student of the period has written: ‘Lloyd George’s pose of moderation during the General Strike is one of those things, like the première of an Ibsen play, which aroused in contemporaries a degree of shock and outrage incomprehensible fifty years later.’125 Matters came to a head with a speech Lloyd George made in Cambridge on 1 May, where he vehemently attacked the idea that the threatened strike had anything to do with revolution. ‘It has nothing to do with Zinoviev or Bolshevism. It is an honest trade dispute where the parties have been unable to come to an agreement.’126
