Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  The President of the MFGB, Herbert Smith, took a more intractable position, and may have made a settlement impossible. Cook was the miners’ only full-time official and, unlike Arthur Scargill sixty years later, was not able to share out the work of detailed negotiation and presentation and leave himself free to fulfil the very heavy public speaking programme he took on. The huge rallies Cook addressed every day took a heavy toll on his voice and strength. He collapsed a couple of times, and seems never to have recovered his health fully. An anti-strike demonstrator kicked him in Chelmsford, causing an old mining injury to flare up, but he refused to stop work to get it treated, with the result that five years later, in 1931, the leg had to be amputated.

  His health was not helped by his insistence on sharing his members’ sacrifices. He refused to take his salary, accepting only the lockout pay that his members were getting. ‘Part of his brain told Cook that the miners would be beaten,’ writes his most recent biographer. ‘The rest of his body, particularly his heart and guts, told him they must fight.’9

  He created a newspaper, The Miner, which was an instant success in the coalfields, the first issue selling 60,000, the second 80,000 and the third 110,000. In the first issue he wrote: ‘Shall the miners be beaten by starvation?... The weapon of the capitalists is starvation. Shall the cry of a child for food break the hearts of Britain’s strongest men?’10 But his union’s funds were near exhaustion. The Soviet miners’ union secretly sent huge sums of money, as they were to do in 1984–5 – about two thirds of all the money available to the MFGB – which, whatever evils are attributed to Moscow gold, undoubtedly saved the lives of many starving British children whose own government was prepared calmly to watch their suffering.

  Another sombre precursor of the 1984–5 strike came in November. Nottinghamshire miners’ leader George Spencer had been expelled from the MFGB for advocating surrender, and set up a breakaway union, the Nottinghamshire Miners’ Industrial Union. Now Spencer began local negotiations for an end to the strike, and the drift back to work in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire became a torrent. Only South Wales, Yorkshire and Durham stayed out, and they went back by the end of the month, on harsh conditions imposed by vengeful coal owners.

  It was, as Cook feared, the near starvation of their wives and children that at last forced the miners back to work, on lower wages and with longer hours. By the time they went back, the rest of the country had started to forget. But miners never forgot. Thirty years later, in 1956, the members of the miners’ club in Goldthorpe, South Yorkshire, voted by 90 votes to 36 not to re-admit men who had ‘scabbed’ on the 1926 strike.11

  Cook knew that he had been defeated and had to rebuild his union, and put renewed activity into the Labour Party, ignoring as best he could the studied insults of Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, and producing a manifesto together with James Maxton, the leader of the Independent Labour Party.

  The most active union men were not allowed to go back to work. Their union could not protect them from this victimization, and, with high unemployment, their families starved, though again many of them were saved by Soviet gold. There was widespread destitution and malnutrition in pit villages. When starving men turned up in the union’s London offices, and the union had nothing to offer them, Cook gave them money he could not afford from his own pocket.

  At the 1929 general election, Baldwin’s government went down to defeat and Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister for the second time, but still without an overall parliamentary majority. Cook now knew that a Labour government represented the only realistic way for him to get a better deal for his members. He had no more time for Ramsay MacDonald than did the Communist Party or the Independent Labour Party, which now formed the left-wing opposition to MacDonald in Parliament. He thought, as they did, that MacDonald was a weak, vain man, and the working class had little to hope for from him. But MacDonald headed a Labour government pledged to repeal the eight hours act, and getting action on that pledge was the only hope Cook could see. If the price was buttering up the hated MacDonald, it was a price he was prepared to pay. He even agreed to speak for the Labour leader against his Communist opponent Harry Pollitt in MacDonald’s own constituency, forgetting all the sneers MacDonald had heaped on him. For his pains, Cook was branded a renegade by his old friends in the Communist Party. His reward for humbling himself was a Bill for a seven-and-a-half-hour day, which was almost completely wrecked by the House of Lords and never properly implemented, and the enmity of some of his oldest friends on the left. He died two years later.

  But he was realistic and right. Not only had his union been decisively defeated, but unions are always in a poor bargaining position when there is high unemployment. New employment was located mostly in the south of England. In the old industrial heartlands of South Wales, the West of Scotland, Lancashire, Tyneside and West Yorkshire, unemployment never fell below a million in the 1920s and remained at between 40 per cent and 60 per cent, sometimes even 80 per cent, during the 1930s, made worse by the great crash that hit Wall Street in 1929 and arrived in London in force in 1931. This also produced a decline in trade union membership, from around six and a half million in 1920 to its lowest point in the interwar years of three and a quarter million in 1933, after which it started slowly to rise again.

  The 1931 financial crisis brought down the Labour government, but MacDonald left the Labour Party to become Prime Minister of a National government which was, in effect, a Conservative government in which Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin was the key figure – and four years later Baldwin replaced MacDonald in Downing Street.

  In September 1934, the Gresford pit in Denbighshire suffered an explosion which took the lives of 265 men and boys. As a result the MFGB was able to get a Royal Commission on mine safety, at a time when mine accidents were increasing fast: in the mid-1930s there were 134 deaths per 100,000 miners. The resulting discontent produced a huge vote for strike action in November 1935 which brought about some pay improvements.

  The MFGB was strengthened by the discovery that wages were lowest in Nottinghamshire, heart of George Spencer’s breakaway union, the only union now recognized in Nottinghamshire. In 1936 miners at Harworth colliery in Nottinghamshire who were members of the MFGB came out on strike for recognition. It lasted for six months and was one of the bitterest strikes in even the miners’ bitter history, with furious clashes between miners and police. The MFGB Branch President, Mick Kane, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Eleven miners and one miner’s wife were given sentences ranging from four to fifteen months’ jail with hard labour. But it weakened the hold of the Spencer union, which agreed to open negotiations on returning to the MFGB. At first, acrimony was so great that the deal was rejected in a ballot of MFGB members, but in 1937 the Spencer union returned to the fold. The merger terms allowed George Spencer to become President of the Nottinghamshire miners within the MFGB.

  This might sound like a good thing for the miners’ union, but that is not how the miners’ union sees it today. There is now, once again, a breakaway union in Nottinghamshire, the legacy of the 1984–5 strike; and the union’s own official account of its history blames the defeat of the 1984–5 miners’ strike on the return to the fold of the Spencer union in 1937. It brought back, says the website, ‘both the perspective and apparatus which had engineered disastrous division in 1926. The nature of Spencerism thus re-entered the body politic of the MFGB, where it would remain in later years as part of the National Union ofMineworkers.’

  It sounds, as in its worst moments the miners’ union often does, as though it has taken to heart the phrase often (wrongly) attributed to Lenin: ‘Fewer but better Russians.’ However, the NUM version of events as the Second World War started cannot seriously be challenged. ‘The outbreak of war’, they say, ‘exposed the coal owners’ callous treatment of the vital energy source under their control. Indiscriminate colliery closures, investment starvation, safety standards ignored �
� these were the hallmarks of private ownership. Consequently, when with the onset of war the Government needed a dramatic increase in coal production, the privately held industry had been ill-equipped to meet demand.’12

  Miners were asked to strain every sinew to put this right for the war effort, and to teach the ‘Bevin boys’ – young men conscripted to work down the mines in the same way as other young men were conscripted as soldiers. They did what was asked of them, with very little disruption except for a strike in 1944 which obtained a national minimum wage; but they made it clear that they expected their reward to be nationalization after the war.

  The same year as the strike, long and careful negotiations between the regions that made up the MFGB resulted in amalgamation of the autonomous unions into one national union. The founding conference of the National Union of Mineworkers was held, ironically perhaps, in Nottingham.

  The NUM’s first great victory was to ensure that the Labour Party went into the 1945 election pledged to nationalize the mines. The 1945–51 Labour government under Clement Attlee was the only great reforming government the Labour Party has ever produced, and every part of the Attlee settlement improved the lives of miners, despite the grim economic circumstances. It took its agenda from the 1942 Beveridge Report, in which Sir William Beveridge called for a serious assault on the ‘five giants’ – Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness; and it believed in a strong public sector, with essential services like coal and rail in public ownership.

  Aneurin Bevan, the son of a South Wales miner, the young man who had condemned Arthur Cook for preparing to settle in 1926, was the man Attlee chose to slay Disease and Squalor: the housing minister who built millions of council houses, and the health minister who created the National Health Service. Under the NHS, men and women from mining communities no longer had to dread being unable to pay for the medical care they needed when they fell ill.

  The 1944 Education Act was implemented in full, so that every citizen had the right to free schooling until they were fifteen, which within a generation more or less eliminated illiteracy in mining communities. Under the National Insurance Act and the Industrial Injuries Act, both of them the responsibility of another minister from a Welsh mining family, Jim Griffiths, a man no longer had to fear actual starvation for his family if he lost his job or could not work because of injury. Nationalization of the mines was accompanied by nationalization of the railways, electricity, gas, inland waterways, steel and the Bank of England.

  The Coal Industry Nationalization Act was one of the Attlee government’s first acts. It was not easy to frame it and turn it into legislation, and a lesser government than Attlee’s might have given up the struggle. Fuel and power minister Emanuel Shinwell complained that despite having talked about it for years, Labour had not given serious thought to how it was to be done. A scheme had to be devised from scratch, and Shinwell was given one of the brightest of the new generation of Labour MPs to help him, Hugh Gaitskell. It was Gaitskell who steered it through Parliament, with infinite care and patience, becoming the unlikely hero of nationalization.

  On 1 January 1947, all the rights, assets and liabilities of the industry were transferred from the coal owners to the new National Coal Board. It was one of those gala days that mining communities did so well. Miners and their families marched behind banners and colliery bands to the pitheads, cheering, shouting, weeping. Plaques proclaimed: ‘This colliery is now managed by the National Coal Board on behalf of the people.’ They cheered and wept as the blue and white flag of the NCB was unfurled above them. They had waited a long time for this moment, and saw it as their time of liberation from a sort of slavery, and from domination of their industry by bosses whom they considered both greedy and lazy. Now they would be treated properly, and they would be happier in their work, for they knew they would be working for the common good. As though to reassure them that this would indeed happen, two trade union leaders were appointed to the NCB, Walter Citrine of the TUC and Ebby Edwards of the NUM.

  Coal, as Peter Hennessy puts it, had ‘never lost its symbolic, almost romantic place in the Labour movement as the industry where the excesses of capitalism had left blood in the seams.’13 Its nationalization was, the miners believed, the dawn of a new world, freer, fresher, fairer; a world in which men would no longer have to fear that their pittance of a wage would not keep their families; where people, not profits, would matter.

  The investment-starved industry saw new capital. The NCB’s duty now was to provide Britain with adequate supplies of fuel, not to make higher profits than a competitor. For most miners, nationalization, at first at any rate, did what it said on the tin. Miners could start planning for all the things they had once only been able to dream of, and the NUM’s Miners’ Charter called for modernization, the sinking of new pits, training, safety laws, compensation payments for industrial injury and disease, a five-day week without loss of pay, pensions at the age of fifty-five, and construction of new towns and villages with good housing in mining areas.

  They were living at last in a world where all these things seemed possible, and they started to get them. A 1947 agreement gave miners the five-day week they had sought for so long, and their wages began, at last, to go up steadily, until by 1950 they were at the top of the industrial wages league, giving miners’ families for the first time a standard of living to match that of other industrial workers.

  There were those in the NUM who regretted that the managers in the NCB were often the same people who had managed the privately owned mines; who complained that private ownership had been replaced by state rather than common ownership; and who felt bitter that compensation had been paid to the former owners who had exploited the miners for decades. There were those, both in the NUM and the NCB, who felt that the government shackled the home-grown mining industry unfairly. Many miners felt the terms of nationalization left the NCB competing with one hand tied behind its back. They complained that the profitable ancillary industries – distribution, the manufacture and supply of equipment and machinery – were left in private hands.

  But in the immediate aftermath of nationalization, these voices were lost in the general euphoria. The NUM even agreed – as it would never have done for the private coal owners – that, with the country desperate for coal, miners would work a sixth shift voluntarily on a Saturday, even though a five-day week had been agreed. There was unhappiness among the miners about it, but, as Britain went into the freezing winter of 1947 with a looming economic crisis, they could see the need for it. Shinwell and food minister John Strachey were the targets of a popular Conservative slogan that year: ‘Starve with Strachey and shiver with Shinwell.’

  Nationalization had been so long hoped for that it was unlikely to bear the weight of expectation it aroused. And as oil from the Middle East started to become a realistic alternative energy source, and nuclear energy started to look like a long-term possibility, the government initiated pit closure programmes, and the miners’ goodwill began to dissipate. In the ten years after nationalization there were several local strikes, and unease grew through the 1950s as the nation, for the first time, started to become less reliant on coal; the Conservative government under Winston Churchill which displaced Attlee’s government in 1951 talked increasingly of moving away from coal and towards oil and nuclear power. By 1956, to its cost, the government was relying heavily on oil from the Middle East. Scotland, South Wales, Northumberland and Durham all lost about a third of their pits.

  Still, the miners were better paid than their fathers had been, and governments of both political parties carefully cultivated their leaders. The return of Churchill as Prime Minister revived memories of the harsh Home Secretary in 1910 who had ordered the army to fire on striking miners, and the authoritarian Chancellor in 1926 who had run the British Gazette, but Churchill in 1951 was in no mood to seek confrontation with the unions. ‘I’ve settled with the miners,’ he once told his Chancellor, R.A. Butler. ‘Really, Prime Minister?’ said
Butler. ‘On whose terms?’ ‘Theirs, of course,’ replied Churchill. ‘Dammit, one must have electric light.’

  So the battle with the government, predicted by Arthur Horner, the NUM’s Communist General Secretary until 1959, never materialized. Instead the miners’ President, Sir William Lawther, knighted by Attlee and a far more emollient figure than Horner, outraged his members by attending Churchill’s birthday celebrations and denouncing industrial action for political ends as ‘a great evil’.

  In the Harold Macmillan years, from 1957 until 1964,264 collieries closed and the number of miners in Britain fell by nearly a third, while their wages gradually slipped behind inflation. This caused far less trouble than might have been expected, partly because the Macmillan government took care to ensure that redundancy was achieved with some care for the lives of the men whose jobs were lost, and in close consultation with the union. With a Thatcher in Downing Street and a Scargill at the head of the NUM, things might have been very different, but, like Churchill before him, Macmillan had no desire to fall out with the unions, which he thought a valid component of a democratic state, even if in practice he looked down on them in a patrician and rather snobbish way. He confided with amusement to his diary that, when they came to see him, TUC leaders ‘all behaved beautifully and were so respectable, with their dark blue suits and bowlers, that they looked like a lot of undertakers’. He ‘distributed various “secret” documents to them – which they seemed to like’. He sent them away happy, presumably patting them kindly on their heads and giving them each a shiny new sixpence.