by Roy Jenkins
They were confronted by mining communities which were close-knit, isolated, well-organized, and intensely internally loyal. Only in the Midlands, where the methods were more modern and the communities less separate, was there some doubt about the solidarity of the miners. Elsewhere, in South Wales, in Durham, in Yorkshire, in Scotland, they were the best-trained, most battle-scarred fighting troops of organized labour. As a huge union they were powerful in the Trades Union Congress. Many of the most influential other union leaders, Thomas from the right wing, Bevin from the left-centre (which was his position in those days), might have considerable doubt about the tactical skill of the miners’ leaders. But they had no doubt about the emotional hold of the miners over the Labour movement. The miners occupied the central sector of the industrial battlefront. Baldwin’s task, if he wanted peace, was to prevent this sector from flaring into conflict. If he wanted victory, it was to separate the miners from their half-reluctant allies.
Which did he want? The answer, as was often the case with Baldwin, was that he did not quite know. But this indeter-minedness was neither unique nor wholly surprising. He wanted, from his own point of view, as much as he could get of the best of both worlds. He wanted peace, provided it was compatible with the superiority of the state and the then accepted view of that somewhat shifting concept, the sanctity of private property. If peace was not obtainable on these terms, then of course he wanted victory, and he wanted to know before he started the battle that he could be certain of gaining it. But he also wanted the battle to be as bloodless as possible. He knew he would have to live afterwards with the vanquished. He did not wish to make a desert and call it peace. What he did wish was to emasculate his opponents, and then to pretend they were coming together as equals.
Where he was intellectually confused was that he failed to see any close connection between the economic stance of his Government and its industrial problems. He once shone a surprising shaft of original light on to the economic scene. In 1924 he spoke in the House of Commons of the need to reduce exports. The general view was that this was a slip of the tongue for ‘imports’, but Baldwin when questioned persisted in his first statement. What he meant was that, with the terms of trade running strongly in Britain’s favour and with a substantial underuse of resources, the economy was too much directed towards the depressed export trades—coal, steel, shipbuilding and cotton—and not enough towards newer industries which would mainly supply an enlarged home market. It was a fumbling towards the shift of men and activity from South Wales to the Slough Trading Estate or from Scotland to the Ford factory at Dagenham which symbolized the economic geography of the later period of his power. But it was one thing to want to see some medium-term alteration of the shape of British industry. It was another—particularly if you were supposedly seeking industrial peace with a full recognition of the crucial position of coal—to pursue an exchange-rate policy which would be certain to make as difficult as possible the transition period for this and other traditional export trades. Yet this is precisely what Baldwin did.
Despite this basic contradiction, he began with a notable act of conciliation. Most Conservative opinion had long been opposed to the system whereby a trade union could contribute to the Labour Party a proportion of each member’s subscription, unless the member specially contracted out. They wished to change the rules and require the politically committed members to contract in. For obvious reasons the difference in practice would be substantial. A private member’s bill to effect this change was brought forward in late February, 1925. Although there was some division of Conservative opinion, it appeared that a majority both of the Cabinet and of the backbenchers favoured either the acceptance of the bill or a Government measure doing roughly the same job in its place.
Baldwin treated the matter with the utmost seriousness. He made a lot of soundings, appointed a special Cabinet committee to go into the subject, and held a special Cabinet to receive its report. At the special Cabinet, and curiously for a Prime Minister who wishes to get his own way when his colleagues are at best perplexed, he invited everyone else to give their own views before himself intervening. He then delivered what was certainly his most effective Cabinet intervention until that date, and probably his most effective ever. Birkenhead, the chairman of the committee, which had produced rather limp conclusions, is reported to have broken an awed silence to announce that if the Prime Minister spoke to the House as he had just spoken to the Cabinet he would do so with unanimous support and triumphant outcome. Austen Chamberlain was equally enthusiastic at the time, but later put the occasion into somewhat more critical perspective by saying that it was the only time in fourteen years that he had ever known Baldwin to influence a Cabinet decision.4
Baldwin’s speech to the House came a week later on a Friday morning. It was the normal time for a private member’s bill, but it was certainly not the normal time for a major Prime Ministerial oration. However, he had no difficulty in securing a large and attentive House. His speech lasted about an hour. It was quiet, reminiscent, a little sententious. Its two most memorable passages were, first, a somewhat rose-tinted picture of industrial life in the heyday of his family company (’It was a place where nobody ever got the sack and where … a number of old gentlemen used to spend their days sitting on the handles of wheelbarrows smoking their pipes. Oddly enough, it was not an inefficient community’); and, second, a small peace-offering not so much across the floor of the House as across the gulf of industry:
I want my party today to make a gesture to the country…. We have our majority. We believe in the justice of the bill…. But we are going to withdraw our hand. We are not going to push our political advantage home at a moment like this…. We, at any rate, are not going to fire the first shot. We stand for peace. We stand for the removal of suspicion in the country. We want to create a new atmosphere, a new atmosphere in a new Parliament for a new age, in which the people can come together…. We abandon what we have laid our hands to. We know we may be called cowards for doing it…. But we believe we know what at this moment the country wants, and we believe it is for us in our strength to do what no other party can do at this moment and to say that we at any rate stand for peace. … I have confidence in my fellow-countrymen throughout the whole of Great Britain. Although I know there are those who work for different ends from most of us in this House, yet there are many in all ranks and all parties who will re-echo my prayer: ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord.’3
The speech killed the bill. It gave Baldwin a position of exceptional strength. His colleagues nearly all wrote letters of glowing congratulation. The press was equally warm. The general verdict was that he had secured his leadership for years to come. The Labour Party was emotionally confused. Haldane wrote that he had ‘lifted public affairs to a higher level’. A less judicial member of the Party came up to him in the lobby only half-convinced, but with tears of emotion running down his cheeks. Another,5 not without judgment or character, wrote nearly fifteen years later, when Baldwin’s reputation was at its lowest, to compare the speech with the Gettysburg oration.
It was all a little hyperbolic, but it did mean that when, four months later, the issue shifted from the soft abstractions of industrial good will in general to the hard reality of reducing wages in the coal industry, the Prime Minister started with a store of self-confidence. The miners, having refused to accept new agreements with reduced wages, were threatened with a lock-out from 31 July. The TUC, and particularly the other members of the Triple Alliance,6 offered them full support. ‘Black Friday’ of 1921, when the alliance collapsed in weakness and recrimination, might be revenged. The prospect of an imminent General Strike seemed real. An intensive period of negotiation began. First Bridgeman (both personally and as First Lord of the Admiralty a very surprising choice), and then Baldwin himself were brought in to sustain Steel-Maitland. But the negotiations were not in Downing Street. Baldwin would go to the Ministry of Labour and there meet both the unions and the owners. Eventually
he decided on a temporary surrender. The Government would pay to maintain the status quo for nine months. The industry received a subsidy, optimistically calculated at £10 million, but in fact costing £23 million, to keep wages and profits at their existing level. The Prime Minister, very peripatetic in this crisis, went through to 11 Downing Street at 9 o’clock one morning to persuade the Chancellor that it was necessary. He did not have great difficulty with Churchill. He had much more with the press, and somewhat more with the House of Commons. But there was no significant Conservative revolt. Most backbenchers probably appreciated the force of the argument which at that stage had to remain unspoken ‘… we were not ready [for a General Strikel,’ he subsequently told G. M. Young.4 Somewhat less laconically, he wrote to the Viceroy in 1927: ‘I still think we were right in buying off the strike in 1925, though it proved once more the cost of teaching democracy. Democracy has arrived at a gallop in England and I fear all the time it is a race for life. Can we educate them before the crash comes?’5
Part of the arrangement was that there should be an inquiry into the coal industry during the nine months. After discussion of several other names, Sir Herbert Samuel, Asquith’s last Home Secretary, was asked to undertake it. This arranged, the Prime Minister went off to Aix. He returned on 16 September, telling Tom Jones that he now knew what Roosevelt meant when he said he felt like a ‘bull moose’.7 It was his best holiday since before 1914. He read no papers beyond glancing at The Times headlines. If he could keep his physical vigour through the session he ‘might get something done’.6
The main thing he got done was to defeat the General Strike. Whether it was his intention to provoke the battle it is almost impossible to decide. Certainly the Government used the nine months of respite to ensure that there was no question of again being unready. Careful plans were laid for an effective national strike-breaking organization. This was no more than common prudence. Baldwin could not retreat again on the subsidy, and the prospect of finding a solution without it was dismal.
The Samuel Commission reported on 11 March. It proposed longer-term measures for the reorganization of the industry, including the nationalization of mining royalties, amalgamations and some closures, Government aid for research and improved marketing, and a gradual extension of welfare services into family allowances, holidays, improved housing and some degree of profit-sharing, which were anathema to the owners and unwelcome to the Government. It rejected, in somewhat scathing terms, the owners’ proposals for a combination of longer hours and lower wages. Longer hours, indeed, would merely mean more unsold coal. But the report was adamant that, with the retention of the seven-hour day, wages must immediately come down.
After some hesitation the Government announced that they would reluctantly accept the report. Then, during late March and April, they made rather half-hearted and dilatory attempts to get agreement on this basis. Steel-Maitland, Birkenhead and Baldwin himself were the principal intermediaries. The strength of their position, which they did not sufficiently exploit, was that the majority of the TUC, upon whose support the miners depended, preferred the report to a General Strike. The weakness, then and subsequently, was that Baldwin and the others did not really believe in the report. Baldwin was cautious about the longer-term measures, and was constantly attracted by a lengthening of hours in order to assuage the sharpness of the wages conflict.
The miners’ leaders were not easy to deal with. A. J. Cook, the dedicated firebrand from South Wales, and Herbert Smith, a dour, uncompromising and sometimes uncomprehending Yorkshireman, made a difficult pair. The TUC found them nearly as awkward as did the Government. But their determination was representative and not merely personal. Nor were they always as intransigent as was implied by Cook’s famous slogan ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’. There was a psychological moment when they might have accepted the report. But Baldwin let it pass. He was too attracted by postponing difficult decisions and too unwilling to coerce the owners. He also made the mistake of trying to frighten the miners with the consequence of sticking to existing conditions. Did Mr Smith appreciate that this might mean 200,000 or more miners being thrown out of work? Yes, Mr Smith did, and he was prepared to face this rather than accept a worsening of conditions. In any event, the shrinkage of the industry was already taking place.
On Friday 23 April Baldwin saw a small delegation of the owners. Tom Jones, devoted though he was to Baldwin, made a revealing comment on the meeting:
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 with the former, they are friends 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. The majority clearly wanted a strike…. The P.M. said very little throughout beyond posing an occasional question. He smoked all the time and at the end asked me to walk with him in the Park. I told him that I thought he was much too gentle in his handling of the miners and the owners, and especially the latter, and that there were a lot of things he ought to have said.7
The next day, Baldwin, having shocked Hankey by insisting on retiring to Chequers for the weekend, again sought the solace of Jones’s chiding but comforting company. He was summoned down on the Saturday evening and his presence at least had the effect of giving us a vignette of Baldwin’s behaviour on the eve of what was likely to be the most testing week of his premiership. When Jones arrived, about seven, he found the Prime Minister reading a novel. Baldwin at once began to talk about the walk they would have the following morning, and suggested that they should eschew the subject of coal for the evening. He failed to live up to this amiable recipe, however, and there was considerable discussion of the issue, discursive rather than purposeful, before dinner. Dinner was a family party of six. As soon as it was over Baldwin went to his wife’s room and sat and talked with her until an early bed. Next morning, after a 9.15 breakfast, he discussed with Jones his ideas for a speech he had to make in a few weeks’ time at a Literary Fund dinner. At eleven they set off on the heralded and substantial walk. In the course of it there was serious coal discussion. Jones tried to put before him the possible alternative courses of action. Then he suggested that they might get Arthur Pugh, the moderate leader of the steelworkers who was that year’s chairman of the TUC, to come down to Chequers for tea and an exploratory talk. The Prime Minister changed the subject for a few minutes and then agreed.
Before lunch Jones made the necessary arrangements and they both glanced at the Sunday newspapers, apparently for the first time. After lunch Baldwin retreated to his room. Pugh arrived with Sir Horace Wilson, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Labour. Baldwin showed them some of the curiosities of the house and gave them tea in the Long Gallery, which he described with more pride than accuracy as ‘the finest room in England’. Then he took them to his study for a more serious talk. After an hour Jones and Wilson disappeared and he stayed alone with Pugh and glasses of whisky. Later he pronounced the talk ‘invaluable’ and retired to Mrs Baldwin’s room for a pre-dinner chat. After dinner he played patience and made it clear that ‘he had had enough of coal for the day’.8
On the Monday morning there was breakfast at 7.45 before departure for London, with no newspapers but with Baldwin full of familiar gossip about his favourite subject, the (Lloyd George) Coalition Government.
We motored to Wendover. He booked his own tickets. … L.G. would have left such a detail to a secretary but S.B. likes to write his own cheques and address his own envelopes. The P.M. bought The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Morning Post, and a picture paper for Mrs Baldwin. I suggested he should, with a coal crisis on, have bought the Daily Herald, which I did. We had a reserved compartment. He read the leading articles in less than five minutes, noticed the news of a friend’s death, and then settled down to solve a crossword puzzle in the D
aily Telegraph, which he finished just as we steamed into Baker Street.9
That day he had three crucial meetings, one with the miners in the morning, a second with the owners in the early evening, and a third with the TUC after dinner. He did not accomplish much, beyond making it clear to the owners that, in return for their agreement to a national minimum, he would abandon Samuel and give them the eight-hour day; but he was thought to have acquitted himself well.
There was a continuing round of meetings, but no serious approach to a formula of settlement until late on the following Saturday night. Baldwin, accompanied by Birkenhead and Steel-Maitland, then met four representatives of the TUC at 11 p.m. By 1.15 a loose formula for the withdrawal of the strike notices, the continuation of the subsidy for a fortnight and a settlement ‘on the lines of the [Samuel] Report’ within this period had been worked out. J. H. Thomas, at least, went home that night convinced that agreement was in sight and the strike was off. The TUC representatives were to consult both their General Council and the miners the next morning. As the formula clearly involved some reduction in wages, this was much more than a formality. But Thomas’s confidence was not foolish. He knew the mood of the TUC, his own prowess at wheedling persuasion, and the need of the miners for outside support.