The General Strike of 1926 has previously been presented as a rather calm, gentlemanly affair. Robert Taylor reveals new evidence that the state came precipitously close to provoking a bloody struggle

For nine days in May 1926, Britain experienced the most dramatic industrial dispute in its history. Nearly two million workers took part in the General Strike, and a further four million were preparing to join them when the action was called off. Trains did not run. Buses and trams remained in their depots. Cargoes piled up in the docks, and little mail was delivered. Much of industry was threatened. Shipyards and engineering firms faced shutdown. The strikers were acting in solidarity with the million miners locked out by the coal owners for refusing wage cuts and longer working hours to save an industry in crisis. It was an epic event that reached its 80th uncelebrated anniversary this year.

In the years since 1926, the General Strike has become the stuff of myth and legend. The British establishment has always seen the confrontation as a subversive threat to the constitution and the rule of law. The Conservative prime minister of the time, Stanley Baldwin, denounced it as "a challenge to parliament and the road to anarchy and ruin". Many saw the hand of Moscow behind the struggle and feared a revolution was being planned.

The far left believed that the strike's end with the TUC's unconditional surrender amounted to a terrible betrayal of the working class. But most in the labour movement, then and since, have argued that the General Strike was never political, but a purely industrial affair, an unprecedented act of self-sacrifice by rank-and-file members in sympathy with the downtrodden miners. It seemed to reveal the limits of industrial militancy to achieve political and social change.

Some have been comforted over the years by the idea that the strike was a relatively calm affair, symbolised by strikers playing football with the police in Plymouth, where the city's lady mayoress kicked off a match that the strikers won. It is true nobody was killed over the nine days. Violent incidents were few. And yet, recently discovered sources suggest that the strike came close to turning into a bloody struggle that would have scarred British society for many years. Moreover, the new evidence reveals that the threat to democratic values and the rule of law came not from belligerent union leaders or a militant rank and file under communist influence, but from the mobilisation of a ruthless, provocative state intent on total victory over the labour movement.

The most startling manifestation of state power came on the morning of Saturday 8 May, the fifth day of the strike, when the government ordered a show of military strength in London. A two-mile-long convoy of over a hundred lorries, escorted by more than 20 armoured cars manned by uniformed guardsmen, was sent through the streets of the capital, from the army camp set up by the government in Hyde Park to the docks to unload cargo boats. Despite the keenness of certain ministers to provoke an incident so they could use force to crush the strikers, the exercise passed off peacefully - though it indicated what Baldwin's government was prepared to do in order to win.

In her recent history of the strike, the journalist Anne Perkins has made good use of intelligence reports that reveal the extra-ordinary degree of wire tapping, mail opening and surveillance that was carried out by the secret state of supposed militants and Communist Party leaders in the build-up to and during the dispute. MI5 told its frightened political masters that Britain was facing revolution through the ruthless misuse of industrial power by trade unions.

Union leaders were well aware of the state's great fear. The TUC general secretary of the time, Walter Citrine, did not convey much of that hysteria in his published memoirs written over 30 years later, but his uncensored diaries of the strike reveal the genuine anxieties among union leaders about the threat of violence from the state rather than the far left. A recently discovered draft typescript account of the General Strike from Walter Milne-Bailey, the TUC's research secretary, mostly written within four months of the end of the dispute, confirms those feelings.

Milne-Bailey revealed the extent of military preparation for aggressive action to defeat the strike. Troops were deployed to working-class areas to face down trouble, while Royal Navy battleships and destroyers were despatched to the Clyde, the Tyne and the Mersey. The state gave troops the freedom to use any force they deemed necessary to maintain law and order. In his diary, Citrine records the reports that reached the TUC about the threat of mutinies at army barracks around the country, as soldiers in the Welsh Guards and the Bedfordshire and East Lancashire regiments said they would disobey orders to put down strikers. The state also mobilised eager young middle-class men as volunteer reserves and blacklegs.

This mobilisation of military and police was aimed at deterring the trade unions, but it also represented a genuine threat to their position, and reflected a deep class-based antagonism towards them among the political elite and their employer allies which has been downplayed to this day. The basic conflict between the forces of labour and capital in a society divided by class, wealth and power remained for the most part below the surface during the inter-war years, but the crisis of 1926 exposed its dangerous fracture lines.

On the morning of 12 May 1926, soon after he and his colleagues had informed Baldwin and his cabinet that the TUC was calling off the strike without conditions, Citrine wrote in his diary: "I looked at them with very mixed feelings - bitterness - when I reflected that one of them at least would have butchered our people without compunction on any pretext which offered. I thought to myself what an anomaly it was that there should be such a thing as a governing class and I comforted myself with the reflection that some day that would be all altered."

Four days earlier, Citrine and the other TUC leaders had sat together in the home of the capitalist Sir Abe Bailey in their plaintive search for a settlement. "I could feel a certain despondency settling on the members who were with us," he recorded. "Here we were, sitting in the house of a South African millionaire, beautiful furnished rooms, refreshments in plenty, gilt chairs and thick, soft carpets - deliberating on the National Strike. Rather a strange position for men supposed to be aiming at undermining the constitution."

In another entry, Citrine described an occasion when the TUC leaders went to the government seeking help to resolve the crisis. The ministers "were in dinner jackets, no doubt they had been hastily called away from their dinner. It seemed very incongruous to me to see these well-fed men complacently listening while we were pleading against a lowering of the standard of life of men forced to toil underground."

The intransigent attitude of the government comes across sharply in the new sources. Thanks to estab-lishment historians, Baldwin has long enjoyed a reputation as an avuncular, pipe-smoking Conservative. He liked to portray himself as a man of peace who wanted to ensure that the miners secured a "square deal". But the cumulative evidence suggests otherwise. It is now clear that Baldwin backed the coal owners to the hilt throughout the dispute, from the moment the miners' were locked out until, nine months later, they were driven back to work in despair.

As Baldwin's close adviser Tom Jones noted on the eve of the strike in his published diary: "It is impossible not to feel the contrast between the reception which ministers give to a body of owners and a body of miners. Ministers are at ease at once with the former, they are friends jointly exploring a situation. There was hardly any indication of opposition or censure. It was rather a joint discussion of whether it was better to precipitate a strike or the unemployment which would result from continuing the present terms."

There is no doubt at all that Baldwin and his colleagues provoked conflict at the very moment when they knew a compromise settlement was possible to avert the strike. The pretext was the unofficial decision by Daily Mail print workers to stop the presses in protest at an inflammatory call in their paper for volunteers to act as strike breakers. Baldwin abruptly broke off the talks. "There was a general feeling that the government had forced war upon us and that there would be no drawing back on the part of our people," wrote Citrine.

With the support of the director general of the BBC, Sir John Reith, Baldwin used the BBC to control the flow of information about the strike to the public. The Labour Party was denied access to the airwaves. The corporation even vetoed the broadcast of a plea for peace from the Archbishop of Canterbury and other church leaders in the early days of the strike.

The new sources also confirm the fear and uncertainty among union leaders and their followers. Citrine's diaries provide a graphic picture of a hopeless TUC general council under strain. The divided leaders were as confused about their tactics as they were uncertain about their strategy. The confidence and fighting spirit displayed by the TUC in the early 1920s had evaporated with the arrival of mass unemployment and declining union memberships. Now it was on the defensive, and worried by sectional divisions, inter-union rivalries and clashing personalities that threatened to weaken it still further. Citrine reveals a deep distrust, even dislike, among his colleagues towards the leaders of the Miners' Federation, especially its fiery general secretary, Arthur Cook.

Citrine himself never wanted a general strike, though he offered no alternative way forward. The only man who seemed aware of the magnitude of the events was Jimmy Thomas, secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen. Usually portrayed as a buffoon who betrayed the labour movement with Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, Thomas feared violence and the suppression of unions, with his own members at the forefront of the struggle. In an unpublished diary entry, Citrine recalls Thomas's outburst to Baldwin:

Whether all of us will be alive this day week or this day fortnight the problem in the coalfields will remain and will be aggravated. I shall leave this room tonight with the feeling that the gravest crisis, wrought with even more far-reaching consequences than that of 1 August 1914, has come upon us. You know the resources and responsibilities of the state and I know the spirit and determination of the trade unionists. If a vote was taken in this country on the issue of whether there should be a revolution I do not believe that 1 per cent of the people would vote for it. But equally the people who would scorn the idea of revolution have a certain psychology on things such as this. My membership, my drivers, guards, plate-layers, all feel it is their duty to help the miners. Your side feel that your duty is to feed the people, run the mails and all the rest. In the exercise of these functions of the state you perhaps put troops on the trains etc. The man who votes anti-revolution, who thinks of his children and his wife, will forget the consequences and the results and the rails will come

up because he sees that his job is being taken by another man and he cannot but feel that man is serving the state. That same decent citizen then creates a revolutionary state of affairs. I have pictured this, I have dreamed of this, it has been a nightmare to me and I have striven to avoid those possibilities.

The TUC went to great lengths to mitigate the impact of the strike. It said it would never hit essential services such as hospitals and schools, gas and electricity or water and sanitation. It even offered to help the government safeguard the movement of food and other vital supplies (an offer Baldwin angrily rejected). The civil service unions were not called out either, despite many of their members being used to break the strike. The TUC instructed workers to act in an exemplary manner and "not to give any opportunity" for the forces of law and order to intervene. The unions in effect restricted their own capacity to paralyse the economy; they ran the strike with their hands tied behind their backs.

The TUC was always seeking a way out of the impasse. At no stage did it threaten the state with violence. It had blundered into a showdown with a government that was intent on bringing about its humiliation and surrender. According to Milne-Bailey, after nine days the general council reached the unanimous conclusion that "the government could hold out longer than the workers", perhaps for months. Moreover, the danger of civil strife grew as long as the strike continued.

And yet local evidence reveals the emergence of an impressive network of voluntary self-help through strike committees and food relief centres. Indeed, the self-discipline and stoicism of the strikers took both the government and the TUC by surprise. As Milne-Bailey testifies: "There was a very deep and widespread sympathy felt by all classes of labour with the miners in their desperate fight against impending disaster. This was the supreme and perhaps the only motive of the majority of trade unionists." It was this that made the strike, in Milne- Bailey's words, a "brilliant failure". The General Strike, he concluded, "must rank as one of the most remarkable and impressive events in world labour history. There has never been a more amazing display of labour solidarity and the effect of such a demonstration must inevitably be deep and enduring. Workers have learnt a new sense of their oneness and their power." It is a lesson that trade unionists, employers and the government would do well to remember today.

Robert Taylor is research associate at LSE's Centre for Economic Performance. This article is partly drawn from his paper "Citrine's Unexpurgated Diaries, 1925-1926: the mining crisis and the national strike", Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, No 20, Autumn 2005

Dates to remember

1 July 1925

Coal owners announce intention to cut wages

25 July 1925

TUC decides to embargo all coal movements if a lockout of miners is imposed

31 July 1925

Government agrees to a nine-month state subsidy to coal owners if they withdraw lockout notices

10 March 1926

Royal Commission calls for an end to subsidies, reorganisation, nationalisation of royalties and wage cuts, but no longer hours

14-30 April 1926

Coal owners announce pay cuts of up to 28 per cent and longer hours

29 April-1 May 1926

TUC votes for a general strike to support miners. Government announces state of emergency

3 May 1926

General Strike begins

12 May 1926

TUC calls off strike. Miners reject TUC position

26 November-23 December 1926

Miners go back to work defeated

Suggested further reading

A Nation on Strike, Walter Milne-Bailey, unpublished typescript, 1926, TUC Library, London Metropolitan University

A Very British Strike, Anne Perkins, Macmillan, 2006

Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout: the struggle for dignity, J McIlroy, A Campbell and K Gildart, University of Wales Press, 2004

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