A century
ago this month, more than two million British workers walked off their jobs,
either miners or unions in solidarity with them, over conditions already
desperate and dangerous underground and only worsened by mine owners and the
Conservative government. After nine days,
the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was forced to call off the General Strike,
yielding their demands but not bitterness over what one striker called “the
boil that needed lancing.”
I first
became aware of this tumultuous event in British labor history while reading
the first volume of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill,
The Last Lion.
As
Chancellor of the Exchequer, often considered the second most powerful figure
in His Majesty’s government, Churchill was heavily responsible for hardening
opposition to the TUC in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin
and, once the work stoppage began, mounting the government’s propaganda effort
against it.
For the
rest of his career, union workers and their sympathizers did not regard this as
Churchill’s finest hour, to say the least. In the immediate aftermath, for
instance, an editorial in the progressive political and cultural magazine The
New Statesman was titled, “Should We Hang Mr. Churchill or Not?”
What
animated Churchill and other Conservatives in Baldwin’s Cabinet was a British
equivalent of the Russian Revolution of nine years before. They feared the
tumult similar to that resulting from the Bolshevik takeover: property owners
dispossessed, churches closed, the royal family executed, and even the overthrow of the new,
more liberal government of Alexander Kerensky.
Britain
represented an even more tempting target for Communists bent on international
expansion. Churchill had engaged in a poorly planned, unsuccessful 1919 Allied
effort to invade Russia to, as he put it, “strangle Bolshevism at its birth,"
but he was determined not to allow chaos to metastasize at home.
Mining was
a particular pressure point for British employment and the economy. With coal
required to fuel the ships, power stations, coke ovens, home use and industry
to make munitions, the government nationalized the industry during World War I.
After the armistice, the Mine workers union wanted to keep the 18.5% wage
increase they won during the conflict.
But in March
1921, Prime Minister David Lloyd George returned the mines to private owners. By
spring 1926, they had locked one million of their employees—a tenth of the
British male workforce—out of their workplaces, demanding longer hours but less
money.
Even many
of the Conservatives in Parliament and Baldwin’s Cabinet felt that the mine
owners dealt unjustly with the workers; it’s just that they feared the Marxist
bogeyman more.
In the
latest issue of the British publication The Literary Review, Richard Vinen explained why another issue—safety—only added to workers’ grievances:
“About a
thousand a year died in accidents. Of the three most important leaders of the
miners in 1926, two had lost their fathers in accidents underground. There were
many injuries. [Historian Jonathan] Schneer cites the case of Thomas Baker of
Sheffield, who received ten shillings a week as compensation for having lost a
leg at the age of seventeen….The life of a miner was unimaginable to most
people. Driving trains or buses might, for a time, seem amusing – which is why
so many young men volunteered to do it in 1926. No one would have volunteered
to be a miner, which is why men had to be conscripted to dig coal during the
Second World War.”
Altogether
it was, according to the late Welsh actor and film producer Stanley Baker,
whose father lost a leg in a cave-in, “a place where death and poverty are
daily threats.”
In back of
it all was the restoration of the gold standard that Churchill pushed through
in 1925. The result, explains Lawrence Reed, writing for the Foundation for Economic Education, in June 2023, was “a series of destructive results. British
export industries suffered hugely, especially coal, leading to strikes and
slowdowns.” John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of just this eventuality, in The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, went unheeded.
As the
miners union felt increasingly pushed towards striking, they were joined by
workers from other sectors walking out in sympathy, including transport and
dock employees, as well as those employed in gas and electricity, printing,
iron, steel and chemical jobs.
But the
owners and the government were making their own preparations months in advance
to stave off what Baldwin called “the road to anarchy and ruin.” A nine-month
subsidy to owners to keep wages stable gave him time to:
* coordinate
food and fuel availability through the Organisation for the Maintenance of
Supplies;
* use the
Emergency Powers Act of 1920 to issue regulations maintaining order; and
*
establish a commission headed by Sir Herbert Samuel, which issued a report
that, though critical of the mine owners, also recommended the reduction of
miners’ wages.
Central to
the effort, exactly where he wanted to be, was Churchill, who throughout the
strike edited a four-page daily newspaper, the British Gazette. A
blatant tool of government propaganda, it falsely assailed the TUC for
attacking the constitution and threatening order while simultaneously jeering that the effort
was for nought.
More
crucial, Baldwin had also mobilized the army and volunteers to protect
transportation services. Many volunteers who assumed the strikers’ roles may
have felt they were engaging in what the American philosopher William James
called “the moral equivalent of war”—the discipline engendered by armed
conflict. Keeping Britain functioning called for reserves of idealism that the
past brutal conflict had vastly reduced.
Considering
the bitter emotions involved, it was surprising that casualties were
comparatively limited during the strike: 41 people treated for injuries at the
hands of baton-wielding mounted police. But it would be a mistake to say there
was no damage.
Several
train crashes occurred, with nonprofessional drivers—volunteers to fill
vacancies left by those out in sympathy with the strikers—at the helm. One such
accident at the Edinburgh Waverley station—a train hitting wagons in the
tunnel—left three people dead.
Though Baldwin
called for no reprisals—and the General Strike was over in little
more than a week, with no concessions won by the strikers—the miners whose
desperate plight sparked this epic owner-union capitalist tried to tough it out
for another half year, when they were forced to yield to their bosses’
implacable demand: longer hours, less pay.
The hard
heel on their necks was reinforced by government action in 1927 in the form of
the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act, which outlawed sympathy strikes—legislation so seemingly
successful that to this day, Britain has experienced no other general strike.
By 1928, TUC membership had plummeted to half a million, and to maintain future
electoral viability, the Labour Party felt forced—at least for a while—to
moderate its more militant elements.
It took
more than a decade, but British sympathy for the strikers increased markedly by
the end of World War II, as reflected in the books (and film adaptations) The
Stars Look Down by A.J. Cronin and How Green Was My Valley by
Richard Llewellyn.
