Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  Nineteen-twenty also saw the revival of the Triple Alliance – miners, dockers and railwaymen – and the threat of concerted action by all three, which had the potential to bring the country to a standstill. It saw too the strengthening of the central organization of the unions, the Trades Union Congress, with its own General Council and permanent General Secretary. The TUC had already, before the First World War, been the key player in the creation of the Labour Party, and up to the 1990s union leaders looked on the Labour Party as an errant younger brother, and on Labour politicians as grubby chaps who had occasional uses. The real work of the working class, they believed, was done in union offices.

  There was a revolutionary spirit around in 1920, born of wild postwar optimism and a determination never to go back to the old, unfair prewar society. There were many – as there were again in the 1970s – who believed that trade unionism was far more than a means of protecting wages, working conditions and jobs: it could be an instrument for the creation of a better and fairer society.

  It was the year in which the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was founded. One day in the summer of 1920, 160 revolutionary socialists from several previously warring little groups came together at the Cannon Street Hotel near St Paul’s Cathedral. Encouraged by emissaries and money from the father of world revolution himself, Vladimir Lenin, they agreed to bury their differences and join together to found the CPGB. The Labour-supporting Daily Herald commented: ‘The founders of the new Party believe – as most competent observers are coming to believe – that the capitalist system is collapsing.’

  It was two and a half years since the Russian revolution of 1917, and the mood of the times seemed to be with them. In a nation that had fought and won the most terrible and destructive war in history, limbless ex-servicemen were reduced to begging and selling matches on the streets of the cities. The Conservative-dominated government under David Lloyd George which had won the snap election after the war – the ‘khaki election’ – seemed only interested in returning to the old, unfair and class-ridden prewar society. When there is a strong mood for change, and there seems no hope of change in the democratic process, then revolutionary talk catches on. And the lives of the generation of 1920 were indelibly scarred by the war. Some had opposed it, had been assaulted daily by men and handed white feathers by women, and thrown into jail. Others had seen in the trenches things that no one should ever see, had lost nearly all their male friends, and had never quite got over the sense of guilt that they had somehow survived. It seemed a betrayal of their dead friends to accept the injustices they found when they returned. Had their friends died so that their wives and children should be starved and exploited?

  The new political and industrial militancy, born out of the First World War, and the vast gap between conspicuous wealth and grinding poverty, which had been accepted as the natural order of things before the war, made a mix which many people believed meant revolution.

  Support for the Russian revolution, as well as a determination to emulate it in Britain, was a key part of the new party’s thinking, and it went well beyond CPGB members. The Party’s influence, in 1920 as again in 1984, extended well beyond the relatively small number of people who were actually paid-up members. Thus it was that a young Communist firebrand called Harry Pollitt, who was to become the CPGB’s most important leader in its entire history, was able in 1920 to lead the London dockers, through their trade union, to refuse to load arms on to a ship, the Jolly George, because the arms were to be used against the Bolsheviks in Russia. And thus it was that, though its formal membership never amounted to much, the Communist Party was a key player in key events for the next sixty years – until the end of the great miners’strike of 1984–5.

  Strikes were frequent in 1920, and frequently successful, because unions were well supported. Union leaders became national figures, another tradition that lasted until the 1984–5 miners’ strike and then ceased abruptly. From 1920 to 1984, the great union leaders were household names ranking alongside top politicians: Ernest Bevin, Walter Citrine, Arthur Cook, Frank Cousins, Hugh Scanlon, Jack Jones, Lawrence Daly, Len Murray, Arthur Scargill.

  Some of the harshest living and working conditions in the country were to be found in mining communities. They had poverty pay and tied housing that was often not fit for human habitation. Their tiny, basic terraced homes were packed into small spaces in areas where there was no alternative employment. They had outdoor lavatories: ‘You had to go out the back, go up the steps and walk about fifteen or twenty yards and carry a bucket of water with you,’ recalled one veteran, years later.2

  These homes were normally rented from the mine owner, who would sometimes sell a miner his home, if the miner’s wife was also working and they could raise the money. Aneurin Bevan, who, a quarter of a century later, was to be the creator of the National Health Service, was the son of a South Wales miner, and his parents bought their home from the mine owner. His mother was up before 5 a.m. to get her husband to the mine and her eight children out to school so that she could start work as a seamstress. By that means they scraped together the money to buy their tiny four-room terraced cottage, only to find that the pit underneath the cottage caused subsidence and they had to spend their evenings propping up the roof. Bevan said years later that the mine owner, Lord Tredegar, ‘having taken out the kernel, the coal, wanted to sell the shell.’3

  But coal was a vital resource, and employed nearly a million miners, who potentially had great industrial muscle. They believed that they did not need to live in squalor: they could fight for something better. That was what their union and their socialist faith told them. Anne Perkins writes: ‘The importance of solidarity for survival in the pits, the shared danger at work and hardship at home, the stark division between labour and capital, and the lack of anything else to do made God and socialism popular and often overlapping sources of solace.’4

  The mines, nationalized during the First World War, were denationalized immediately afterwards, much to the disappointment of the miners, who with some justice blamed the mine owners’ greed and lack of enterprise for the unnecessary harshness of their lives. Renationalization was top of the list of demands put to the government by the MFGB, along with reductions in hours and an increase in pay.

  But the Conservative-dominated government under David Lloyd George was determined to disentangle itself from its wartime involvement with mining. The coal owners saw their dividends shrinking as they failed to compete with foreign coal, and resorted to the simple formula of cutting the cost of production by cutting the miners’ wages and increasing their hours. The Triple Alliance was invoked, and a dockers’, miners’ and railwaymen’s strike called for 21 April 1921, but the dockers and railwaymen refused in the end to come out with the miners. They thought the MFGB should have negotiated a compromise.

  So the miners went on strike alone. They held out until June and returned to work with pay not just reduced but, in many districts, halved. In the increased poverty and squalor in which they lived, they nursed a deep sense of grievance against the fellow trade unionists who they believed had betrayed them.

  Industrial action having failed, for the moment, to produce the goods, they focused their hopes on political action through the Labour Party. They had some right to do so. The unions had created the Labour Party. In fact, until 1918 the Labour Party did not even recruit individual members. You could only become a member by being in an affiliated trade union or a socialist society like the Fabians.

  In January 1924 Labour’s first-ever Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, took office. That day, David Kirkwood, a newly elected left-wing Labour MP, told his cheering supporters as his London-bound train pulled out of Glasgow station: ‘When we come back, all this will belong to the people.’ But as he was speaking, MacDonald was apologizing to King George V for the behaviour of Labour supporters at their victory rally: ‘They had got into the way of singing “The Red Flag” ... By degrees he hoped to break down this habit.’5


  Less than a year later, MacDonald’s government fell. The Communist paper, Workers Weekly, published an ‘Open Letter to the Fighting Forces’ calling on soldiers to ‘let it be known that, neither in the class war nor in a military war, will you turn your guns on your fellow workers’. The editor, Johnny Campbell, was charged with incitement to mutiny, but the charge was withdrawn by the Labour Attorney General, Sir Patrick Hastings, and the resulting row brought down the government – which did not have an overall parliamentary majority and could only survive with Liberal support. The Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin won the resulting general election by a landslide.

  Labour had achieved virtually none of its aims. Left-wing Labour MP James Maxton said that the fall of the government would not be a tragedy; in fact ‘the sooner they were out the better, as every day they were leading us further from socialism.’6 So the baton passed back to the unions. Frank Hodges, the MFGB General Secretary who, three years earlier, had tried to do a deal with the government as the other unions wanted, and had been prevented by his National Executive, was voted out of office in 1924, edged aside by a young militant called Arthur Cook. The son of a soldier from Somerset, himself a Baptist preacher, Cook speedily became an iconic figure among the miners, who admired him and followed him.

  By all the rules he should have been a poor speaker, for he had a high voice, and his speeches were not held together by a logical structure, but they were emotional, and had an evangelical rhythm, and he was saying what the miners wanted to hear. He would take off his jacket and intone passionately the views he wished his audience to adopt, and he was loved and admired in mining communities, much as Arthur Scargill was sixty years later. Scargill is said to have modelled himself on Arthur Cook, and there are superficial similarities, but the two men were fundamentally different characters.

  Cook became General Secretary under a Labour government, but had to deal with its Conservative successor, whose huge majority – 419 seats to Labour’s 159 – made it very powerful. One of its first actions was to return to the Gold Standard, a decision which was to store up much trouble for Labour later, but which the conventional economists of the time considered inevitable. It seemed to the less conventional economist John Maynard Keynes that it was done for the benefit of city financiers, at the expense of the workers – especially miners. For a time Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, seemed to agree, with words that might years later have stood as a rebuke to Margaret Thatcher: ‘I would rather see finance less proud and industry more content.’7 But in the end he bowed to conventional advice.

  The decision contributed to reduced profits in the mining industry, and in the summer of 1925 the coal owners announced their intention to cut miners’ pay. They argued that they were now losing £1m a month; the miners retorted that in the previous four years the owners had made profits of £58.4m. If they had shown any inclination to share the proceeds of the fat years with their workers, their workers might have been more sympathetic when the lean years came.

  Arthur Cook tramped the country with a slogan that was to become famous: ‘Not a minute on the day, not a penny off the pay.’ And the government capitulated. It set up an enquiry under Sir Herbert Samuel, and meanwhile mine owners would get a subsidy sufficient to pay the miners.

  It was a great victory for the unions. But the subsidy was to run out on 1 May 1926. What would happen then? Scotland Yard’s Special Branch predicted bloody revolution orchestrated from Moscow. There were excitable voices in the unions and the Labour Party predicting not just victory for the miners but a better world. Ernest Bevin, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and Britain’s leading trade unionist, tried hard to insist that, if it came to a general strike, it would be solely an industrial matter, not a political one, but few people on either side believed him.

  The Samuel Report, when it appeared, solved nothing – but it had bought the government a year in which to prepare for the general strike that most people now considered inevitable. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made it clear that the subsidy would not be extended, and the mine owners said that without the subsidy there would be pay cuts and longer hours. Baldwin’s last-minute attempt at compromise was rejected by the Cabinet.

  The day the subsidy ran out, a meeting of the executives of every trade union affiliated to the TUC voted almost unanimously to support the miners with a general strike, to begin at midnight on 3 May.

  The Conservative Party saw the general strike as an attempt to overthrow the state, and was intent on a showdown which would put the working class in its place for a generation. This attitude was reflected in the government’s newspaper for the strike, run by Churchill and called the British Gazette. Its attacks on the TUC were extreme and unrestrained, in keeping with Churchill’s belief that the strike was an attempt at revolution. The TUC’s answer was the British Worker. It had just four pages – the Gazette had nearly all the newsprint available – and was run with nothing like the same flair. Where the government was well prepared and well organized, the TUC was faltering and inefficient.

  The TUC knew that abandoning the miners as they had done in 1921 would split the unions and the Labour Party, probably for ever, and destroy their political and industrial effectiveness. But TUC leaders feared the perception that this was a political struggle, not an industrial one, for most union leaders, then as now, were not at all revolutionary.

  As it was to show again in 1984, the British government, when it feels the need, can operate efficiently to defeat a threat to the established order, even if it means adopting measures that in peaceable times it would consider dangerously socialistic. Churchill was allowed to confiscate newsprint in order to produce the British Gazette. The BBC was effectively commandeered as an instrument of the state: it refused to broadcast anything from the unions or the Labour Party. Churchill emphasized the supposed threat to the state by making the army highly visible. Army and navy leave was dramatically cancelled. Britain’s leading Communists, including Harry Pollitt, were sent to prison for ‘seditious libel and incitement to mutiny’, probably because the government massively overestimated the organizing ability of the infant Communist Party and believed it capable of turning the general strike into a revolution.

  TUC leaders, privately horrified, searched for a way out, and grabbed like drowning men at the chance of negotiations through the medium of the enquiry chairman, Sir Herbert Samuel. The return-to-work formula they agreed on 12 May, against the wishes of the miners’ leadership, was effectively a capitulation. Cook made one last appeal to the TUC General Council: ‘Gentlemen, I know the sacrifice you have made. You do not want to bring the miners down. Gentlemen, don’t do it.’ But they did.

  The TUC capitulated on the basis of a vague assurance by Sir Herbert Samuel that, provided the general strike was called off, negotiations on miners’ pay and conditions would resume – an assurance that was soon afterwards disowned by the Prime Minister. ‘Surrender!’ was the triumphant banner headline in the British Gazette.

  Many trade unions were left on the edge of bankruptcy, and their membership plummeted. Employers took advantage of their weakness to cut wages, and high unemployment meant that workers had no choice but to accept those wages. Their leaders began openly to attack the MFGB leaders who they believed had brought these troubles upon them, and Cook in particular.

  The miners stayed out for another seven months, resenting the other unions for abandoning them, bitterly angry with those miners who had worked – had ‘scabbed’ on the dispute – and impotently angry at the growing triumphalism of the mine owners, who extracted a terrible price from their defeated workforce. The government no longer felt under threat, and put through a Bill requiring the miners to work eight-hour shifts. Arthur Cook tried to get the railway unions not to handle coal, but was abruptly turned down.

  Cook saw the way things were going and desperately sought a way out, in order to lessen the sacrifice he had to demand of his members. He me
t Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin on 31 May. This is one of the most startling differences between him and Scargill, who sometimes liked to consider himself Cook’s natural successor: Scargill never contemplated such a course, and took care to distance himself from the TUC leaders who, at a similar stage in 1985, met Margaret Thatcher. No doubt Scargill wished to avoid being outflanked on the left, which is what happened to Cook.

  Cook was not only attacked by his old friends in the Communist Party: he also faced the wrath of an angry young miners’ activist from South Wales called Aneurin Bevan, who told him: ‘We say there are possibilities and probabilities of more favourable terms in the near future.’ But Cook knew there were not, and wrote in a press statement in June: ‘Is it not time, I ask, to declare an armistice?’ A settlement could be conducted after an end to the dispute had been declared: ‘Such a scheme could be worked out, while the men are working, in a spirit of fair play.’ So it could – but only if the government felt like showing magnanimity to a defeated opponent, and it did not.

  Cook told a special MFGB conference on 30 July: ‘I don’t like the Samuel Report – I hate it – but it is not a question of likes and dislikes. It is a question of determining how strong we are to get what we want ... Is it leadership to sit still and drift, drift to disaster?’ Later he told miners in Porth: ‘It is not cowardice to face the facts of a situation, and I say that a leader who leads men blindly when he knows different is not only a traitor to himself and his own conscience, but he is betraying the men he is leading.’ Cook even entered into secret negotiations, which, when they were revealed two years later, got him into serious trouble with his union.8