The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  121. Savile, 1848, pp. 166–9; Fyson, ‘The Transported Chartist’, p. 80; Chase, Chartism, pp. 322–6. For Cufay’s biography see Chase, Chartism, pp. 303–11.

  122. Ibid., pp. 332–3.

  123. For example, Savile, 1848, inclines to the former view and Haraszti, Chartism, to the later. Goodway, London Chartism, strongly supports Savile’s view: ‘It was in 1848 that the English ruling class regarded Chartism as a serious threat for the first time [italics mine].’

  124. Quoted in John Belchem, Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1996), pp. 93–4.

  125. Thompson, Chartists, pp. 237–70; R. N. Soffer, ‘Attitudes and Allegiances in the Unskilled North, 1830–1850’, International Review of Social History, 10 (1965), pp. 429–54; D. J. Rowe, ‘The London Working Men’s Association and the “People’s Charter”’, PP 36 (1967), pp. 73–86.

  126. Savile, 1848, p. 227; Henry Weisser, ‘Chartism in 1848: Reflections on a Non-Revolution’, Albion, 13 (1981), pp. 12–26.

  127. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, p. 153–4. See also Pickering, ‘The Chartist Rites of Passage Commemorating Feargus O’Connor’, in P. A. Pickering and A. Tyrell, eds, Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 116–17; L. M. Geary, ‘O’Connorite Bedlam’, Medical History, 34 (1990), pp. 125–43.

  128. Goodway, London Chartism, p. 40.

  129. Plummer, Bronterre. See also Ben Maw, ‘The Democratic Anti-Capitalism of Bronterre O’Brien’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 13 (2008), pp. 201–26.

  130. Pickering and Roberts, ‘Pills, Pamphlets and Politics’.

  131. There is a huge volume of material on Harney in R. M. Black, The Harney Papers (1969). For his time in the USA see Schoyen, Chartist Challenge, p. 268; Holyoake, Bygones Worth Remembering, p. 111; Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839–1900 (Manchester, 1971), p.33. Harney was always the most internationally minded of the Chartists. See Iorwerth Prothero, ‘Chartists and Political Refugees’, in Sabine Freitas, ed., Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England (2003), pp. 209–33.

  132. Taylor, Ernest Jones, pp. 20–1, 116–28.

  133. Ibid., pp. 137–255.

  134. Ibid., p. 258.

  135. A. Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718–1789 (Baton Rouge, 1979), pp. 63–4.

  136. For the army in 1789 see Samuel F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution: The Role and Development of the Line Army, 1787–1793 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 60–1. For the difference between Paris and London in 1848 see C. J. Calhoun, ‘Classical Social Theory and the French Revolution of 1848’, Sociological Theory, 7 (1989), pp. 210–25.

  137. This is a view argued for in Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion, pp. 332–4.

  138. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1882 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 178.

  139. G. Rudé, ‘Why Was There No Revolution in England in 1830 or 1848?’ in Harvey J. Kaye, ed., The Face of the Crowd: Selected Essays of George Rudé (1988), pp. 148–63.

  140. Justin McCarthy, 7 vols, A History of Our Own Times (1887), i, p. 242.

  141. Savile, 1848, p. 207.

  142. Mather, ‘Government’.

  143. W. H. Maehl, ed., The Reform Bill of 1832: Why not Revolution? (NY, 1967), pp. 71–6.

  144. Mather, ‘Government’, p. 399.

  145. John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (1974), pp. 243–6; N. Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism (Urbana, Ill., 1985).

  146. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861), i, p. 20.

  147. G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (1913), p. 185.

  148. This is the idea elaborated in C. J. Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, 1982). The one criticism one can make of the otherwise excellent The Making of the English Working Class (1963) by E. P. Thompson is that it assumes a homogeneous monolithic identity of the proletariat and thus comes close to Marx’s Hegel-influenced mythical view of the proletariat as ‘class for itself’. Perhaps it is significant that Thompson’s study ends in 1832, before the Chartists.

  149. D. Williams, The Rebecca Riots (Cardiff, 1955), pp. 150–1, 212–13, 265–93.

  150. Goodway, London Chartism, p. 125.

  151. Savile, 1848, p. 121.

  152. Thompson, Chartism, p. 338.

  153. E. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (1983), p. 412.

  154. Norman Gash, Aristocracy and the People: Britain, 1815–1865 (1979), p. 3.

  155. P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (1980); Joyce, ‘The Factory Politics of Lancashire in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 18 (1975), pp. 525–33; Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990); Jonathan Sperber, ‘Reforms, Movements for Reforms and Possibilities of Reforms: Comparing Britain and Continental Europe’, in Arthur Burnes and Joanna Innes, eds, Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 312–30; Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995).

  156. There are numerous excellent surveys of Gramsci’s thought in English: T. Bottomore, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (1983), pp. 201–3; Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, pp. 963–88; James Joll, Gramsci (1977). For a wide-ranging discussion of ‘hegemony’ see Francis Hearn, Domination, Legitimation and Resistance (1978).

  157. Epstein and Thompson, The Chartist Experience, p. 285.

  158. T. S. Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution and Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815–1871 (Princeton, 1983), pp. 4–6.

  159. A ‘grand slam’ argument, uniting ‘hegemony’ with the ‘aristocracy of labour’ has been provided for France in 1848: M. Trangoff, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of Working Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of 1848 (Princeton, 1985).

  160. D. G. Wright, Democracy and Reform, 1815–1885 (1991), p. 105.

  161. Ben Brierley, Home Memories and Out of Work, ed. Roy Westall, (Bramhall, 2002), p. 23.

  162. D. Vincent, ed., Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians, 1790–1885 (1977), pp. 141, 211.

  163. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, pp. 5, 147–51.

  12 The General Strike: Prelude

  1. Phil H. Goodstein, The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland (NY, 1984), pp. 2–3.

  2. H. G. Wells, An Outline of History (1920), pp. 225–6.

  3. Milovad M. Drakhovic, The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864–1943 (Stanford, 1966) pp. 81–3.

  4. D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur, vol. 3, Triumph and Disaster, 1945–1964 (Boston, 1985), pp. 177–83.

  5. Iorwerth Prothero, ‘William Benbow and the Origins of the General Strike’, PP 63 (1974), pp. 132–71.

  6. For detail on the specific issue of the Chartists and the General Strike see Julian West, A History of Chartism (Boston, 1920), pp. 53–4, 92–4, 153–69; R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement (NY, 1969), pp. 105–9, 127–30, 144–57; J. T. Ward, Chartism (NY, 1973), pp. 113–19, 129–32, 161–73. For Robert Owen see G. D. H. Cole, The Life of Robert Owen (1966), pp. 22–31, 253–70.

  7. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (1920), pp. 415–17.

  8. Engels to Friedrich Sorge, 18 April 1891, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, 42 vols (Berlin, 1968), vol. 38, p. 81.

  9. Engels, Correspondence, 3 vols (Moscow, 1959), ii, p. 306.

  10. T. McCarthy, The Great Dock Strike, 1889 (1988). See also Ben Tillett, Memories and Reflections (1931).

  11. For Lenin on the General Strike, see V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 45 vols (Moscow, 1974), vol. 10, pp. 139–42; 2, pp. 113–15, 213–23; 13, pp. 100–8.

  12. Goodstein, Theory of the General Strike, pp. 120–1.

  13. Marx and Engels,
Selected Works, 3 vols (Moscow, 1969), pp. 187–207.

  14. For Bernstein’s thinking on the General Strike see Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (NY, 1962), pp. 237–9.

  15. For the many doctrinal twists and turns of Guesde and his followers see Goodstein, Theory of the General Strike, pp. 57–60, 64–5, 139–40.

  16. Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike and the Junius Movement (NY, 1971).

  17. Paul Frohlich, Rosa Luxemburg, Ideas in Action (1994), p. 41.

  18. Milovad Drakhovich, The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864–1963 (Stanford, 1966) pp. 99–100.

  19. There is considerable dramatic irony here. The government hard liners in the 1926 General Strike – Joynson-Hicks, Churchill, F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead) – were in the mid-1920s admirers of fascism (it has often been observed that Churchill’s anti-fascist credentials are really only anti-Nazi ones) yet the most famous ideologue of the General Strike was Sorel, himself admired by Mussolini.

  20. Sorel has attracted a lot of attention. See Richard Humphrey, Georges Sorel (NY, 1974); Jeremy Jennings, Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of His Thought (NY, 1985); James H. Meisel, Georges Sorel (1985).

  21. For this see Irving L. Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason (Carbondale, Ill., 1961), pp. 1–95.

  22. Georges Sorel, Matériaux d’une théorie du prolétariat (Paris, 1919), p. 170.

  23. Ibid., pp. 70, 184. Perhaps curiously for a revolutionary, Sorel valued the family unit, condemned free love and promiscuity and preached sexual restraint and chastity. Ibid., p. 199.

  24. For anarcho-syndicalism in its various manifestations see Eugene Pyziur, The Doctrine of Anarchy of Michael Bakunin (Marquette, Milwaukee, 1955); F. F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France (Cambridge, 1970); David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979).

  25. See especially Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1908), Ch. 4.

  26. Sorel, Matériaux, pp. 59–60.

  27. Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, 2 vols (1997), i, pp. 301–28.

  28. Jack J. Roth, The Cult of Violence: Sorel and the Sorelians (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 1–82.

  29. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 494.

  30. For Tom Mann (1856–1941) see Donna Torr, Tom Mann and His Times (1956).

  31. This is a repeated motif in Leon Trotsky, 1905 (NY, 1971).

  32. Leon Trotsky, Where is Britain Going? (1926), p. 82.

  33. The Times (10 March 1925).

  34. Trotsky, Where is Britain Going?, pp. vii, 85.

  35. Ronald V. Sires, ‘Labour Unrest in England, 1910–1914’, Journal of Economic History, 15 (1955), pp. 246–66.

  36. Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin (2002), p. 10.

  37. Joe White, ‘1910–1914 Revisited’, in J. Cronin and J. Schneer, eds, Social Conflict and Political Order in Modern Britain (1982), pp. 73–95 (at p. 75).

  38. Bob Holton, British Syndicalism, 1900–1914: Myths and Realities (1976); R. Douglas, ‘Labour in Decline, 1910–1914’, in K. D. Browne, ed., Essays in Anti-Labour History (1974), pp. 116–23; cf. Keith Laybourne, ed., Modern Britain since 1906: A Reader (1999).

  39. White, ‘1910–1914 Revisited’, p. 80.

  40. This classic thesis was set out in George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910–1914 (1936). See also S. Meecham, ‘The Sense of an Impending Clash: English Working-Class Unrest Before the First World War’, AHR, 77 (1972), pp. 1343–64.

  41. For an attempt to refute the notion that the three internal crises were interconnected see R. Pelling, Politics and Society in Later Victorian Britain (1968). White, ‘1910–1914 Revisited’, convincingly demolishes this (see esp. p. 89). For the international ‘general crisis’ see Leonard H. Haimson and Charles Tilly, eds, Strikes, Wars and Revolutions in an International Context: Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, 1989).

  42. For the geographical spread and heterogeneity of the phenomenon the following are indicative: W. Corpi and M. Shalev, ‘Strikes, Industrial Relations and Class Conflict in Capitalist Societies’, British Journal of Sociology, 30 (1979), pp. 164–87; J. E. Cronin, ‘Strikes and Power in Britain, 1870–1920’, International Review of Social History, 32 (1987), pp. 144–67; Charles Wrigley, A History of British Industrial Relations, 1875–1914 (Brighton, 1982); William Kenefik and Arthur McIvor, eds, Roots of Red Clydeside, 1910–1914 (Edinburgh, 1996); J. L. White, The Limits of Trade Union Militancy: The Lancashire Textile Workers, 1910–1914 (1978); Roy Gregory, The Miners in British Politics, 1906–1914 (Oxford, 1969).

  43. G. Dilmot, The Story of Scotland Yard (1926), pp. 130–48.

  44. Chris Howell, ‘Constructing British Industrial Relations’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2 (2000), pp. 205–36.

  45. Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diaries, 3 vols (1969), i, pp. 97–103.

  46. Margaret I. Cole, ed., The Diaries of Beatrice Webb, 1912–24 (1952), pp. 167–9.

  47. Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920–1924: The Beginning of Modern British Politics (Cambridge, 1971).

  48. Walter Citrine, Men and Work (1964), pp. 130–2.

  49. G. D. H. Cole, Labour in the Coal-Mining Industry (Oxford, 1923), pp. 162–3.

  50. W. M. Kirby, The British Coalmining Industry, 1870–1946. A Political and Economic History (1977), pp. 12–13, 67.

  51. J. T. Murphy, The Political Meaning of the Great Strike (1924), p. 38.

  52. Patrick Renshaw, The General Strike (1975), p. 41.

  53. D. G. Butler, Twentieth-Century Political Facts (2000)

  54. For the rise of the Triple Alliance see R. P. Arnot, The Miners: Years of Struggle: A History of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (1953); R. A. S. Redmayne, Men, Mines and Memories (1942).

  55. The miners’ representatives were Smillie, Hodges and Herbert Smith, then president of the Yorkshire Miners’ Federation. The three industrialists were Sir Arthur Balfour, Sir Thomas Royden and Sir Arthur Dukham. Leo Chiozza Money (1870–1944) was later involved in two sexual scandals. In the first, which involved a ‘conversation’ with a secretary, Miss Irene Savidge, in Hyde Park in 1928, Money and Savidge were acquitted at a trial for indecency, questions were raised in the House of Commons and the police were criticised for excessive zeal by a tribunal of inquiry. In the second, in 1933, Money was not so lucky. Another ‘conversation’ ensued, this time in a railway carriage, and this time Money was found guilty of public indecency. A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (1965), p. 261.

  56. C. L. Mowat, Britain between the Wars (1955), pp. 31–5.

  57. Jones, Whitehall Diaries, ii, 1926–1930, p. 19.

  58. Cole, Labour in the Coal-Mining Industry, p. 217.

  59. Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, p. 125.

  60. For a broad survey see A. Campbell, N. Fishman and D. Howell, eds, Miners, Unions and Politics (Aldershot, 1996).

  61. Cole, Labour in the Coal-Mining Industry, pp. 212–13. The comment on civil war is from Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, p. 121.

  62. Philip Gibbs, Middle of the Road (1923), p. 132.

  63. For a survey of Hodges’s career see Chris Williams, ‘The Odyssey of Frank Hodges’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1998), pp. 110–30.

  64. Quoted in David Howell, MacDonald’s Party: Labour Identities and Crisis, 1922–1931 (Oxford, 2002), p. 116.

  65. Frank Hodges, Nationalisation of the Mines (1920); My Adventures as a Labour Leader (1924); cf. Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation (Oxford, 1982).

  66. John Paton, Left Turn (1936), p. 101.

  67. Quoted in Anne Perkins, The General Strike: A Very British Strike (2007), p. 69.

  68. Taylor, English History, p. 240.

  69. Ibid., p. 120.

  70. David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (1977), pp. 378–81.

  71. H. A. Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889, vol. ii, 1911–1
933 (Oxford, 1985), p. 568.

  72. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (1967), pp. 175–6.

  73. Barry Supple, The History of the British Coal Industry (Oxford, 1987), p. 223.

  74. Citrine, Men and Work, p. 132.

  75. Perkins, General Strike, p. 23.

  76. Bullock, Ernest Bevin, p. 252.

  77. For Montagu Norman see Philip Williamson, ‘Norman, Montagu Collet, Baron Norman (1871–1950)’, ODNB (Oxford, 2004), 41, pp. 18–21. For his appalling behaviour over the Czech gold see David Blaazer, ‘Finance and the End of Appeasement: The Bank of England, the National Government and the Czech Gold’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40 (2005), pp. 25–39. For the treatment by Jung see Frank McLynn, C. G. Jung (1996), p. 214. For the more general context in which the British financial establishment played footsie with the Nazis see Neil Forbes, Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain’s Economic and Financial Relations with Germany, 1931–1939 (2000).

  78. Bernard Attard, The Bank of England and the Origins of the Niemeyer Mission, 1921–1930 (1989).

  79. For the trio of Norman, Niemeyer and Bradbury and the context in which they operated see Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: 1929, the Great Depression and the Bankers Who Broke the World (2009).

  80. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937 (1992), p. 203.

  81. Ibid., p. 188.

  82. See the entire volume dealing with the genesis of the pamphlet in Donald Moggridge, ed., The Collected Papers of John Maynard Keynes, 19 (Cambridge, 1981), i, pp. 357–453.

  83. For the entire argument see Donald Moggridge, The Return to Gold, 1925 (Cambridge, 1969).

  84. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, p. 188.

  85. John L. Halstead, ‘The Return to Gold: A Moment of Truth’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 21 (1970), pp. 35–40; Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, p. 207.

  86. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, pp. 187–207 (esp. pp. 203–4, 206). For a dissenting view see K. C. P. Matthews, ‘Was Sterling Overvalued in 1925?’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 31 (1986), pp. 572–87. For some other views see Barry J. Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton, 2008); Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (NY, 1995).