The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Britain’s million-plus miners had a very good case. They were paid atrocious wages and treated little better than medieval serfs. The industry was badly run, out of date and archaic in its structure. This meant that, when the German coal of the Ruhr returned to the international market at below British prices, owners could only think of cutting wages and lengthening hours to stay in business. The government had long since handed the mines back to their private owners and was trying to keep out of the dispute. This was ludicrous: Britain ran on coal, and with the TUC involved in stopping all movements of coal to help the miners, the country would soon judder to a halt. Faced with the obvious, in July 1925 the Baldwin government gave in. A nine-month subsidy and a Royal Commission to investigate the industry bought time. But when it reported in March 1926 insisting that wages must be cut, there was nothing for the TUC to do but support the miners as had been promised. ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day,’ said the miners’ leaders. The owners replied that wages would be cut and, if this was not accepted, the miners would be locked out from 1 May 1926. The TUC responded by calling a General Strike two days later. And how, this time, could the government pretend not to be involved?

  The fight between the miners and the mine owners had become one between the TUC and Baldwin’s government. Matters of pennies, shillings, pithead baths and company amalgamations became issues of power and the authority of the state. It was not a revolutionary strike, or meant as one. It was not meant to bring down the elected government, or to depose Parliament as the source of all political power. Yet it could not possibly succeed unless the elected government was humiliated; unless Parliament bowed to strike action; unless, in short, there was a revolutionary situation. Since the strikers’ leaders did not want that, they were bound to fail. The last chance for a peaceful resolution was ended by printers, who refused to allow the national edition of the Daily Mail to be published. Its editorial, headed ‘For King and Country’, contained the sentiment ‘A General Strike is not an industrial dispute. It is a revolutionary movement which can only succeed by destroying the Government and subverting the rights and liberties of the people.’ Since one of those liberties has been taken to be freedom of the press, it might be thought that the printers had shot themselves in the foot, or at least confirmed the Mail leader-writer’s point. At any rate, this led to the Baldwin government, with Churchill in the vanguard, breaking off negotiations. Baldwin’s private secretary excitedly telephoned the King’s private secretary at Windsor Castle late at night to say: ‘The Daily Mail has ceased to function. Tell his Majesty so that he should not go off at the deep end,’ only to be rebuked: ‘We don’t take the Daily Mail.’110 The TUC manifesto said: ‘The trade unions disclaim all responsibility for the calamity which now threatens.’ Action was directed not at the public but at the mine owners and the ministers. Baldwin responded in the Commons by saying the trade unions were imperilling ‘the freedom of our very constitution’ while Churchill, more briskly, accused them of trying to overthrow the government.

  Behind the scenes there were already tensions in the cabinet. Churchill was forging ahead with his own newspaper, the government’s mouthpiece, to be called the British Gazette. Since he was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, this was hardly in his remit. In fact, the job of dealing with propaganda was in the hands of J. C. C. Davidson, a Tory close to Baldwin, who recorded that the prime minister wanted Churchill to turn editor to ‘keep him busy, stop him doing worse things’. Baldwin added: ‘I’m terrified of what Winston is going to be like.’ Davidson responded that if ‘Winston tries to turn the men into an army of Bolsheviks [roughly speaking, Churchill’s view] I shall resist that’ – to which Baldwin replied, ‘That’s absolutely right, of course you will.’111 Churchill, though kept vaguely in check by Davidson, had a lovely time. He commandeered the newsprint of all the main papers, and the presses of the right-wing Morning Post, where he charged about changing commas. The British Gazette demanded unconditional surrender and Churchill provocatively insisted on food supplies into London being escorted by tanks and soldiers with machine guns. Davidson plaintively complained to Baldwin that Churchill now thought he was Napoleon.

  The government’s preparations were effective and fast. Around 1.75 million workers came out on strike in support of the million miners. With the buses mainly stopped, the railways silent and the Underground closed, those not striking walked to work: there were confrontations with pickets and some violence, mostly in east London. Using the old wartime emergency powers, the government recruited middle-class volunteers to run buses and even trains, to patrol as special constables and to carry food supplies round the country using that new technology, the lorry. Thousands volunteered, including around 450 Cambridge undergraduates who came to London and Dover to break the strike in the docks in the spirit of what one called ‘hurrah-patriotismus’. Sailors were pressed into service unloading ships and City gents worked to shovel coal at gasworks. Submarines were moored with their engines running to keep warehouses refrigerated. The Ranelagh Polo Club patrolled central London on their polo ponies and titled ladies turned up in leather greatcoats to organize food supplies. Within three days there were half a million volunteers available: something like the spirit of August 1914, though without the danger, had infected the middle classes. There was sporadic violence. Buses and trams were stopped by pickets, overturned and burned. To protect their amateur drivers, some were cocooned in barbed wire. A train was derailed. In Aberdeen, Middlesbrough, Glasgow and Edinburgh there were confrontations and stone-throwing, baton charges and arrests. There were also small signs of revolutionary agitation. It is reckoned that at least half of the British Communist Party’s 5,000 members were arrested, including the Indian Communist MP for Battersea, Shapurji Saklatava, who was charged for saying the Union Jack had only protected fools and rogues, and for telling the army not to fire on strikers. Britain’s small band of fascists responded with hysterical racist abuse.

  On the fifth day of the strike the government made its decisive move. London was going short of flour and bread: at 4 o’clock on the morning of 8 May a convoy of more than a hundred lorries, escorted by twenty armoured cars, went to the docks, to where strike-breakers had been quietly ferried on the Thames to avoid the pickets. Food was loaded and returned to a new depot in Hyde Park; the crowds watched but did not interfere. This was probably the psychological turning point, though the TUC and government continued to trade propaganda blows, and reports began piling up of accidents caused by volunteer drivers. Almost inevitably, and with echoes of the first winter on the Western Front, strikers and police were soon playing football matches. There were some dangerous incidents still to come, including the derailing of the Flying Scotsman and further disturbances in Plymouth, Hull, Doncaster, Cardiff and Newcastle. But with food being effectively moved around the country, and increasing rail and tram services, the TUC general council began to lose heart. The strikers had been disciplined and peaceful, and perhaps that was the problem: it quickly became a competition about organization, one the government was bound to win. Baldwin, who was being relentlessly reasonable in tone, finally heard from Arthur Pugh, a steel miller who chaired the general council, just after noon on 12 May that the strike was to be ‘terminated forthwith’. Receiving the TUC men in Downing Street he checked: ‘That is, the strike is to be called off forthwith?’ Pugh replied in almost Monty Pythonesque terms: ‘Forthwith. That means immediately,’ and Baldwin exclaimed, ‘I thank God for your decision.’

  Despite brave words from the TUC’s answer to Churchill’s paper, the British Worker, this was a straightforward, unequivocal and humiliating defeat for the trade unions. They had done their worst but, being essentially law-abiding and respectable democrats, their worst was not very scary. Middle-class paranoia about Bolshevism at home now had its answer. Many thousands of men who had obeyed instructions to strike were victimized, being demoted or even losing their jobs. The TUC’s leadership was badly damaged for year
s to come. Above all it was a terrible blow for the miners, whose dispute would go on for another six months until they were effectively starved back to work in November 1926. Longer hours and smaller wages were imposed in south Wales, Scotland and the north-east of England. However, the union movement, which lost members, but not in dramatic numbers, and faced some new legal curbs rather than a full repressive crackdown, survived and grew again. Churchill, having been a leading hawk, tried hard to get compromises from the mine owners, entertaining them and leading Labour figures, including MacDonald, to endless lunches and dinners where the champagne flowed and the oyster shells were emptied. The miners’ leaders, to their credit, refused to have anything to do with champagne diplomacy and in the end the owners were as unmoved by Churchill’s hospitality as they had been by the miners’ strike.

  Britain did not have a revolutionary temper, despite the harshness with which the miners had been treated. Moderation frustrated real reform in the inter-war years, and meant that Britain would fight the next war as very much the same unfair, class-divided, economically and politically old-fashioned country she had been in 1914. But moderation also meant that Britain never experienced the violent politics, street-gang murders and coups that ravaged the continent. Was MacDonald’s timidity, one shared by most Labour people, a failure or a blessing? For him, the answer was clear. Unlike other crisis prime ministers he was leading a minority government, depending on the wary Liberals for daily support. He had by then undoubtedly been seduced by the delights of high-society life and in his loneliness had been patronized and flattered. As we shall see, when he took the decision to join hands with Tories and Liberals to form the anti-socialist National Government he came close to destroying the party he had once built. For his pains he would be largely forgotten (except by Labour people, who would use his name as a kind of swear word). And in truth, by the time he finally left public life, he had become an embarrassing figure. Yet it should never be forgotten that after 1926 he was leading a movement that had had its unity and self-confidence shattered, with no clear agenda for parliamentary power.

  Air Magic

  Long before it was technically possible to throw and catch sound with radio waves, broadcasting had been fantasized about. When the telephone first became popular, many people assumed it would be used to play live music, and drama, and that ‘using the telephone’ would mean sitting with headphones and enjoying a dance band. After the turn of the century the British government decided broadcasting might be useful in war to hold together the Empire, and it took control of wireless telegraphy. The real originating genius of broadcasting was a half-Italian, half-Irish gentleman scientist, Guglielmo Marconi, who had been granted in Britain the world’s first patent for wireless telegraphy in 1896. He had demonstrated the new system, still used to send code rather than words or sounds, at Salisbury Plain and by 1899 had achieved wireless communications between France and England before building permanent stations along the south coast. Though he built on the work of many others, Marconi’s rate of invention and his entrepreneurial enthusiasm set him apart. Had the BBC never been formed, in all probability the most famous name in British broadcasting would have been Marconi’s. Soon broadcasting became a sport for eccentrics and home-taught boffins, with hundreds of licence-holding amateurs broadcasting or receiving in small areas, every man his own BBC. As soon as the Great War started, they were all closed down, while technical developments leapt ahead as the armies developed wireless communications. When it ended, licences were issued again.

  Britain’s first regular broadcasts were planned and prepared in the Cock and Bell public house in Writtle, a pretty little village near Chelmsford, the county town of Essex, some thirty miles north of London. The broadcasts aired each Tuesday lunchtime from 1922 under the enthusiastic guidance of an ex-RAF engineer and natural show-off called Peter Eckersley, who on one occasion offered radio listeners a ‘night of grand opera’ – sung entirely by himself. Down the road from the pub was a long, low wooden ex-army hut owned by the Marconi Company, which had just received permission to make regular broadcasts again, though only for half an hour a week, and interrupted every seven minutes by three minutes’ silence when the engineers were supposed to listen out for military signals. In June 1920 Marconi had already broadcast a limited one-off entertainment from their Chelmsford offices, encouraged by Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, when the great opera star Dame Nellie Melba had arrived in a makeshift studio and warbled ‘Home Sweet Home’ and other saccharine hits into a microphone cobbled together from a telephone mouthpiece and a cigar-box. Dame Nellie had done the same thing in Paris, and even in Newfoundland. But it was the Cock and Bell boys of Writtle who introduced regular broadcasts to this country.

  Their call-sign ‘Two-Emma-Toc’ (for 2MT, the station identifier) became quite well-known during 1922–3 as Eckersley and his small band chose records, read out plays and sang their own satirical theme-tune. They were followed by another Marconi station in the centre of London, 2LO, which began with a live commentary of a boxing match and had an audience in 1922 of about 50,000, and then by Metropolitan-Vickers’ 2ZY station in Manchester and Western Electric’s 5IT in Birmingham. The companies were all backed by money from America, where a vibrant if chaotic ‘radio boom’ was already in progress. So why did British broadcasting not develop into a vigorous competition between rival firms, raucous and free? There were two reasons. The American radio boom had produced so many struggling competitors that the quality of the broadcast sound was often terrible; it was also funded by advertising. British politicians and civil servants thought that, in a much smaller country, the problem would be much worse. They also wondered whether broadcasting was not too important, too grand, to be funded by sponsorship.

  The government committee overseeing wireless was dominated by military chiefs, the Treasury, the Foreign Office, the Board of Trade and other nervous, unimaginative patriots. But MPs quickly realized that nothing would happen without the support of the wireless amateurs and the companies making the sets they were using. A British compromise was agreed. The rival commercial enterprises making wireless sets would get together and form one company, working under the Post Office. The new company would not be allowed to broadcast advertising, but would get a share of the licence fee paid to the Post Office by everyone buying a set. The companies knew a tempting-looking monopoly when they saw one, and duly gathered together to form the new broadcaster, which came out of government regulation but would not itself be part of government. Based at the electrical engineers’ headquarters at Savoy Hill, off London’s Strand, it would be called simply the British Broadcasting Company, or BBC. Its first broadcast took place at 6 p.m. on 14 November 1922 – a news summary, followed the next day by the first election results. The short age of commercial-only broadcasting was over.

  Enter, stage right, a tall, balding Scot with a long scar running down one cheek and a most alarming manner. To call John Reith, who was the real founder of the BBC, odd would be a wild understatement. The youngest son of a charismatic Presbyterian minister in Glasgow, he had grown up in a family whose siblings tended to dislike one another and were shaken by terrible rages. Reith himself was almost perpetually furious with someone, one of the great haters of modern British history. An engineer, he became a transport officer in the war, famous for picking even more fights with his superiors than with the Germans. Badly wounded in the face, he went to America to supervise arms contracts before returning to find himself, after the Armistice, very bored and quite sure that the Almighty had special plans for him. Through most of his early adult life, Reith had been deeply in love. The object of his affections was a schoolboy, Charlie Bowser, whose picture he carried next to him in the trenches and whom he bombarded with ardent daily letters, pressed flowers and presents. As Charles grew to adulthood, he and Reith went on holidays together, liked to sleep together, enjoyed naked swimming and even bought a home together. Yet he was entirely open about the relationship, including to his intensely r
eligious and conservative-minded parents. This was probably a relationship which was not sexually consummated but was perhaps even more intense because of that, a kind of love which our more genitally fixated culture has obliterated; a way of living killed off by Sigmund Freud. Reith married; but when Charlie did the same Reith’s jealousy was so extreme it kept him in a semi-constant rage for a decade or more. This was the man in whose hands broadcasting was now to be placed.

  Here is how it happened. The thirty-two-year-old engineer was unemployed, living in a London club while he wondered what to do with his life – perhaps a job in Bombay, or working for a South American railway, or even going into politics? One evening he visited his local London church in Regent Square, where he heard the minister preaching from the Book of Ezekiel about the corruption of Jerusalem. The preacher told the congregation that there might be, that very evening, some person in the church who would save this country from heathendom, immorality and love of money. Reith went back to his club in a very excited mood, hoping that ‘the blood of Christ’ would help him, writing in his diary that ‘I still believe there is some high work for me in the world’.112 The following day he saw an advert for the job of general manager for the new British Broadcasting Company. Despite the amateur world of wireless taking shape around him, Reith did not actually know what broadcasting was. Nevertheless, he wrote off for the job, fishing the letter back and changing it when he realized the chairman was from Aberdeen, and asserting that he was too. Two months of silence passed. Reith spent the time dabbling in coalition Liberal and Tory politics. When he was finally called for an interview, he admitted later, he still ‘hadn’t the remotest idea as to what broadcasting was. I hadn’t troubled to find out.’ He was offered the job. He wrote in his diary that he was ‘properly grateful to God’ for arranging it. At the offices of the new company he installed himself in a cubbyhole, appointing Eckersley of the Cock and Bell as his chief engineer, and set to work.