A century on and still the definite article is used. The confrontation between the government and the trade unions that began on 4 May 1926 remains the General Strike, the only one Britain has seen. Perhaps that is its major legacy. The complete defeat of the strike, the capitulation of the union leaders after nine days, left a taste so bitter than there was a reluctance to repeat the experience. “It was as though a beast long fabled for its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger, and slunk back to its lair,” wrote Evelyn Waugh 20 years later, in Brideshead Revisited.
Fictional portrayal of the Strike in Brideshead and Upstairs Downstairs tell it as a stories of posh chaps in plus fours volunteering to drive buses and lorries, and that largely remains the popular memory of the event. Even if this has faded in recent years – there was no depiction at all in Downton Abbey, for example – it has not been replaced by anything from the other side, that of the strikers. Instead, the most common image of the working class in the interwar period comes from a few years later with the pathetic dignity of the unemployed Jarrow Marchers, victims of circumstance, not active participants in events. All of which gives a somewhat distorted view of this turbulent period in British history, a moment of genuine revolutionary temper.
The outbreak of the First World War had come at a time of industrial unrest. Membership of trade unions was rising fast, the number of disputes was increasing, and so too was the conviction in establishment quarters that things were going badly wrong. “This coal strike is the beginning of a revolution,” warned Edward Grey, the foreign secretary in 1912; “power is passing from the House of Commons to the trade unions”. Union militancy was effectively suspended during the conflict, but returned following the Armistice, with renewed force. Millions of men came home from active service to find mass unemployment and harsh economic conditions. Many still had weapons, for demobilisation was a chaotic business, and some were inspired by the Russian Revolution and then by the Irish War of Independence, sensing that the power of the British state was at a low ebb.
These were unsettled times. In 1919 there were riots and strikes and serious disorder right across the country. Tanks were called in to restore peace in Glasgow, a battleship was sent up the Mersey to quell rioting in Liverpool, and Cabinet minister Winston Churchill, still then a Liberal, warned that there were groups who wished “to provoke an outbreak in the form of a mutiny or general strike, or preferably both together, in the hope that a general smash and overthrow of society may result”.
He was thinking particularly of the National Union of Ex-Servicemen (NUX), a radical group who called not only for better pensions for veterans, but also for the nationalisation of land, for Irish independence and for an end to militarism. “Instead of being the means of saving capitalism, the organised ex-servicemen will now be the means of destroying it,” declared the general secretary, Ernest Mander, and the membership swelled to 300,000. It was primarily to counter the perceived threat of the NUX that the Firearms Act 1920 was passed – introducing gun licences – and the British Legion established the following year, as a safe conduit for the grievances of ex-servicemen.
The NUX did not survive competition from the Legion, but the fear of militancy remained, now focused on the Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in 1920. Although membership of the CPGB didn’t get much beyond 5,000 in the early years, there was a widespread belief that, acting on instructions from Moscow, it exerted a covert influence on the Labour Party. That idea turned up in the popular fiction of the time – in the novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, and in Sapper’s tales of Bulldog Drummond – and it was a press campaign against Labour’s supposed links with the CPGB that brought down the party’s first government in 1924 and then, with the forgery of the Zinoviev Letter, ensured it wasn’t re-elected. “Moscow issues orders to the British Communists,” claimed the Daily Mail, “the British Communists in turn give orders to the Socialist government, which it tamely and humbly obeys.”
It was all fantasy, but it was taken seriously enough that, at the end of 1925, 12 leading members of the CPGB were jailed for sedition and incitement to mutiny in what amounted to a political trial. The prosecution case was that communism itself was seditious, since it sought to overthrow the government by force. More concerning still, the ambition, if not the means, seemed to be shared far beyond the CPGB. The conference of the Trades Union Congress in September 1925, affirmed, in the words of the TUC-owned Daily Herald, “that its aim, in conjunction with the party of the workers, was to work for the overthrow of capitalism”.
The wider picture was one of economic decline. There had been a major recession in 1921, and recovery was sluggish for the rest of the decade, with the most acute impact felt in mining. Coal exports – hit by the rise of rivals, such as Poland, and then by high exchange rates – never returned to pre-war levels, prices fell, and even after a pay-cut imposed after the failure of a 1921 strike, mine owners struggled to operate profitably.
A further round of pay-cuts and increased hours was announced in 1925, to which the national union, the Miners’ Federation, responded with the slogan: “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.” A strike was narrowly averted in July that year when the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin offered a ten-month subsidy to the industry to allow wages to remain as they were. The Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald was outraged, believing that the prime minister had “sided with the wildest Bolshevik”, but Baldwin was sharper than that; he was postponing the inevitable conflict only because, as he later said, “We were not ready.”
When the subsidies ended, and the owners renewed their demands, the miners duly called a strike, and the TUC, which had repeatedly promised solidarity action without delivering, this time called on workers in transport – road, rail and docks – and in printing, iron and steel to come out in support. Around two million joined the million miners in the General Strike. A state of emergency was declared, and the government’s plans, carefully prepared over the preceding months, swung into action. Factories were put on short hours to conserve coal, Hyde Park was turned into a supply depot, troops were mobilised, special constables sworn in, motorists recruited.
The TUC, by contrast, had no such organisation ready, lacking even basic lines of communication. “The strike is a protest,” wrote John Maynard Keynes; “it is inarticulate, unlogical, ill calculated.” The result was that, though disruptive, the action made far less impact than anticipated. Food supplies were not interrupted, and even public transport – the most noticeable casualty – began to return, particularly in London and the south-east, where the number of volunteers was greatest. There were clashes between strikers on the one side, strike-breakers and police on the other, and there were four deaths in railway accidents, but the whole thing was conducted remarkably peacefully.
And after nine days, with no sign of government weakness, let alone concessions, the TUC surrendered. The solidarity action was abandoned and the miners again left to fight alone. By the end of November, their strike too was called off, and the pay cuts and longer hours were imposed. In the recriminations that followed, criticism was directed at the leadership of the TUC and the Labour Party for their lack of commitment and preparedness. What should have been a decisive showdown, a culmination of two decades of union struggle, was instead a damp squib. Union membership and industrial action fell dramatically, anti-union legislation was passed. The latter was to be repealed under Clement Attlee, and the trade union movement recovered, but there were lasting consequences.
Talk of “the overthrow of capitalism” disappeared from the agenda, and the balance within the labour movement between industrial and political activity shifted decisively in favour of the latter. Meanwhile, the public perception of communism gnawing at the heart of Labour faded, paving the way for the party’s victory in the 1929 general election. The ensuing government collapsed, and leading members – Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Jimmy Thomas, all of whom had opposed the strike – were expelled from Labour for forming a coalition with the Tories and Liberals. But by then, the critical moment had passed. The militant workers of the 1920s had become the Jarrow Marchers.
[Further reading: The real work of the working class]
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