Odd People

by Basil Thomson

  There were two cross-currents in this rapid development of the Labour movement: on the one side a tendency towards the amalgamation of unions, as in the case of the National Transport Workers’ Federation and the Triple Alliance and on the other, the tendency of the rank and file in the unions to break away from their leaders.

  The declaration of war shattered all the hopes of the International at a blow. Its promoters had forgotten human nature. In 1907 the Second International had passed a resolution binding the workers of all countries to compel their governments to make peace even if war were declared, and as late as 1 August 1914 Messrs Arthur Henderson and Keir Hardie issued a ‘Manifesto to the British People’ in the sense of the resolution of 1907. On 2 August there was a demonstration in Trafalgar Square to support it. So little knew the leaders the temper of the people they had been chosen to represent! On 6 August the war Emergency Workers’ National Committee was formed and within three weeks the great mass of Labour was taking part in the recruiting campaign. In September the Trade Union Congress endorsed their patriotic attitude.

  There followed an industrial truce; strikes were abandoned and the railwaymen dropped their national programme; the Triple Alliance was suspended. This situation might have lasted throughout the war but for the rise in the cost of living and certain flagrant examples of profiteering. Conscription gave a great impetus to the revolutionary Pacifists and the Workers’ Committees, under the name of the Shop Stewards’ Movement, seized upon their opportunity.

  The International was, in fact, trampled to death by the rapid march of events. On 31 July 1914 Jean Jaurès had been assassinated in Paris and the French socialists had lost their most trusted leader. This was rapidly followed by the invasion of Belgium and by the voting of the war credits by German socialists. What was now to become of the doctrine, ‘Should war break out it is the duty of socialists to intervene to bring it promptly to an end … to rouse the populace and hasten the fall of the capitalist domination’?

  The conversion of British Labour leaders was very rapid. On 7 August Messrs W. C. Anderson and Arthur Henderson, for the Executive Committee of the Labour Party, stated that while the party condemned the diplomacy which had made war possible, it advised all its members to relieve the destitution and suffering which must inevitably ensue, but on that very day the Labour Party allowed the vote of credit to pass and Mr Ramsay MacDonald resigned in consequence. The left wing, which followed Mr MacDonald, issued a manifesto on 13 August, in which it sent ‘Sympathy and greeting to German socialists across the roar of the guns … They are no enemies of ours, but faithful friends,’ but on 20 August the Labour Party definitely joined in the campaign to strengthen the British Army and even Mr Keir Hardie wrote, ‘Any war of oppression against the rights and liberties of my country I will persist against to the last drop of my blood.’

  We are inclined now to imagine that open violence began only at the beginning of the war. We have forgotten the part played by foreign anarchists three or four years before – the Houndsditch murders, the siege of Sydney Street, the outrages of Tottenham. There has been nothing like these since the Armistice.

  We date most of our social troubles from August 1914, as if politically England was Utopia before the war. I was reminded by a friend the other day that during the summer of 1913, in a conversation about Labour unrest, I had said that unless there were a European war to divert the current, we were heading for something very like revolution. That was before the railway strike of 1913. I suppose that the dock strike, the growth of bodies like the Anarchists and the Industrial Workers of the World and the unrest that had set in even among disciplined bodies like the police and prison warders, in all civilised countries, had induced this unwonted pessimism. Yet there was a section among our own people who talked glibly about European war producing revolution and therefore one cannot blame the Germans for counting us out of the war. Even during the war itself I can remember several periods when the outlook among our own people was darker than it is now.

  With the Independent Labour Party stood the Union of Democratic Control and Pacifist Societies, such as the No-Conscription Fellowship, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the National Council for Civil Liberties, began to spring up like toadstools. Internal dissensions increased to such an extent that at last the loyal Labour and socialist group formed themselves, in April 1915, into a body known as the Socialist Nationalist Defence Committee, to defend themselves from internal persecution. This committee contributed largely to the patriotic reception of the Conscription Act. As the time went on the committee became the British Workers’ League and by July 1918, the League had over 220 branches. Patriotic Labour leaders suffered acutely at this time. Through pressure exerted by his trade union one after another was forced to resign from the League.

  There is a rapid evolution in political unrest. Subversive societies are like the geysers in a volcanic field. After preliminary gurgling they spout forth masses of boiling mud and then subside, while another chasm forms at a distance and becomes suddenly active. I have described how the Militant Suffragettes subsided on the day war was declared. The country was so much preoccupied with the war during 1915 that no new geyser had a chance of boiling up. It was not until 1916 that the Pacifist became active.

  The Union of Democratic Control was founded in the early days of the war by a small group, of which Mr E. D. Morel, Mr Charles Trevelyan, Mr J. Ramsay MacDonald, Mr Arthur Ponsonby and Mr Ralph Norman Angell Lane, generally known as Norman Angell, were the most prominent. Its four cardinal points of policy were that no province should be transferred without the consent of the population, that Parliament should control all Treaties, that our foreign policy should be directed towards the setting up of a League of Nations, then called an International Council and that England should propose a reduction of armaments. The public mind was to be permeated with the idea that war was a criminal absurdity and of course the union had strong things to say about the Foreign Office. The Diplomatic Service was to be completely reformed, Treaties were to be periodically submitted to a Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons and a ‘real European partnership’ was to be substituted for ‘groupings and alliances and a precarious equipoise’. In 1916 the Union of Democratic Control added to the articles of its programme, ‘to prevent the humiliation of the defeated nation’, from which it may be inferred that the members of the executive already felt confident that the Allies would win the war. It will be seen that the main points for which the union stood are in process of realisation.

  The Union of Democratic Control grew rapidly and within less than a year it had founded sixty-one branches. A branch was also in process of being formed in Paris. Naturally, the union became the rallying point for most of the Pacifists in the country and though the union itself disclaimed any desire to hinder the prosecution of the war, it could not be said to have done anything to support it. One rather prominent member set himself to palliate the German disregard for treaties and international usages. But while the union included people whose attitude is always pro-anybody except pro-British, there were others who would have deeply resented any imputation of a lack of patriotism. Its speakers encountered a good deal of opposition by bodies such as the No-Conscription Fellowship and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The Union of Democratic Control was an academic body: the No-Conscription Fellowship speedily came within the reach of the law. Compulsory service was bound to provoke resistance and, as all those who have sat on tribunals are aware, the conscientious objectors included men of very different character. Perhaps the smallest class had real conscientious scruples. Many of the others mistook for conscience a natural bent for resisting any kind of compulsion and there was, besides, the class of young man whose personal vanity was hypertrophied and who courted martyrdom for the sake of its advertisement. One would have said he was peculiar to England if the same type had not appeared in Holland and America. Looking back on this period, I am very doubtful whether conscription could have been safe
ly introduced at an earlier date. The country had been drained of its best men and the pity of it was that the finest material for the officers who were so badly needed later in the war was sacrificed in the trenches. But it was this very sacrifice that prepared men’s minds for conscription and neutralised the strong opposition to compulsion. As seemed to be inevitable, the Germans were our best friends in this matter. By the outrages in Belgium, by the callousness of submarine commanders, by the sinking of the Lusitania and hospital ships, the Germans kept up our own war spirit and themselves neutralised the danger of pacifism.

  The pacifist societies had marshalled quite a respectable little army of conscientious objectors. These, while they gave great trouble to government officials, from the tribunals down to the prison warders, were really of very little importance while such tremendous events were proceeding. Public opinion ran strongly against them and even in Princetown, Dartmoor, where the population had been accustomed to see nothing but the worst class of felon, murmurs were heard that it was time to send back the old convicts who knew how to behave themselves instead of the dreadful people with long hair and curious clothing who infested the single street.

  All through 1916 the Ministry of Munitions had a separate little branch for keeping themselves informed about labour unrest that was likely to interfere with the output of munitions. In December 1916 they came to the conclusion that the work would be more efficiently and more cheaply done by professionals and I was called upon to take over the service with my own trained men. Pacifism, anti-conscription and revolution were now inseparably mixed. The same individuals took part in all three movements. The real object of most of these people, though it may have been subconscious, appeared to be the ruin of their own country. This is no new thing in English history. There were pro-Bonapartists in the Waterloo time and pro-Boers eighty-five years later and though this modern brand were not perhaps strictly pro-enemy in sentiment, they acted as if they were. Does not Maitland record how, when Napoleon Bonaparte was leaving Plymouth on his last voyage to St Helena, an attempt was made by his friends in London to serve a subpoena on him in the hope of delaying his departure?

  The Unofficial Reform movement was first heard of in south Wales in 1911, where it opposed the policy of conciliation of the South Wales Miners’ Federation. Probably it resulted from Mr Tom Mann’s Syndicalist campaign in 1910. The Miners’ Next Step, published in 1912, set forth its programme, which was the first attempt on the part of declared revolutionaries to attack trade unionism. This book demanded one union to cover all mines and quarries in order to be in a position to call a simultaneous strike throughout the country.

  Out of this grew the Rank and File Movement, which covered that extreme body, the Clyde Workers’ Committee and, in common with the British Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party, it had sympathetic relations with the Industrial Workers of the World. It had a definite policy of the Russian Bolshevik type, arrived at quite independently, which was, through the Workers’ Committee, to overthrow trade unions and reorganise all workers in a single union with a committee vested with full power to seize all workshops and factories and thus bring about the Social Revolution. There were special reasons in 1916 why the Rank and File Movement should become popular. The industrial truce of the trade unions, arrived at for the successful prosecution of the war, had weakened the influence of the executives. Most of the agitators were strong pacifists and it was easy for them to represent the trade union leaders as having betrayed the cause of the workers by abandoning their hard-won rights in order to support a capitalist war. Any improvement in working conditions which tended to allay discontent was opposed by the Workers’ Committees because it set back the day when any ill-feeling between capital and labour would make it impossible for employers to carry on their business. A better understanding between employers and employed was to them a propping up of the capitalist system of society. While the Rank and File Movement was not identical with the Shop Stewards’ Movement, the revolutionary element secured so many posts as shop stewards that the two became confused. Gradually the shop stewards developed into a useful institution. As the elected representatives of labour in our factories they could make the views of the workmen clear to the foreman and the employer and so save a great deal of friction. Unfortunately, at first, the movement had fallen into the hands of persons with revolutionary views, who decided to use the shop stewards as a means of ousting the regular trade union leaders. It was to be a ‘Rank and File’ Movement and the power to call a strike, vested nominally in the rank and file, was really to be exercised by an Association of Shop Stewards, all of revolutionary views. What they wanted was an excuse for sudden action and the excuse came with dilution and with conscription.

  On 5 May 1917 began the most serious strike of the war. It broke out at Rochdale on a pottery dispute in which the employer was in the wrong. He had applied the dilution scheme to civilian work that had nothing to do with the war. The shop stewards among the engineers at once held a secret meeting at Manchester and determined to call a national strike. Two days later the Rochdale men went back to work, but by that time the engineers were out at Manchester, Coventry and Sheffield and within a week a bus strike was preventing munitions workers from getting to Woolwich. The excuse given was the proposal to ‘comb out’ the young unskilled men and it was curious to find south Wales, the Clyde and Leeds standing firm at a moment when a national strike was in the air. On 16 May the strike spread to Southampton, Ipswich and Chelmsford. Important work on large howitzer shells and range-finders, all urgently needed, was held up and the country was faced with the gravest danger that it had had to meet since the beginning of the war. We knew all the men who had brought about the strike and the only question was whether they should be prosecuted. There was, of course, the risk that their arrest might precipitate a general strike, but as that seemed likely to come in any case, the risk seemed worth while taking. I felt pretty sure that as soon as a few arrests were made the strike would collapse.

  The government had always said that it was ready to meet the strikers with their official executive, but the official leaders hitherto had declined to deal with men who had flouted their authority. They consented only after several arrests had been made and on 19 May the strike was called off on condition that there should be no more arrests but that the prosecution of the men already arrested should be proceeded with. The bus strike had collapsed on the previous day. Nine men appeared at Bow Street and gave an undertaking that they would not again do anything to obstruct the output of munitions and as the strike was at an end they were released.

  It must not be judged from the extent of the Labour disturbances of 1916 that the Workers’ Committees of Shop Stewards had really captured the body of Labour. It must be remembered that the people at home, as well as the soldiers in the trenches, were suffering from war strain. Probably at no time have men ever so much needed a holiday. This was shown by the behaviour of those who went on strike. So far from collecting at street corners and listening to pacifist harangues, the Lancashire men took advantage of the fine weather at Blackpool, or were found quietly working in their allotments.

  All the cherished trade union principles had been surrendered one by one. The men had submitted to dilution and even to dilution with women, to an increase in hours of labour and in output and to the exposure of their pet fallacy that engineering is so highly skilled a trade that an apprenticeship of several years is necessary before even a moderate efficiency is acquired.

  The damage caused by industrial disturbances to our national prosperity was enormous. In 1918 there were 1,252 strikes, involving a loss of 6,237,000 working days. In 1919 there were 1,413 strikes, involving a loss of 34,483,000 working days and the persons involved in these disputes numbered 2,581,000.

  I suppose that England has always been divided between the unreasoning optimists and the unreasoning pessimists and that public opinion oscillates between the two. In 1919 the word ‘revolution’ was on every lip,
as it was in 1793, 1830 and 1848: in 1922 you will hear that the British working man is too staid and sensible a person ever to think of revolution except through the ballot-box. And in a few months the pendulum will have swung the other way and people will again be in a flutter. The optimists of 1922 are right, but they forget what determined minorities can do with an irresolute mass. A single fox will clear out a hen-roost while it is cackling its indignation to the skies. If Louis XV I had mounted his horse and charged the mob there might have been no Thermidor: if Louis Philippe had spoken two words to his soldiers there would have been no 1830. In Paris a street riot became a revolution and street riots unchecked were formidable affairs in those days. Who now remembers what happened in London in 1780? Yet William Beckford writes from Antwerp on Midsummer Day, 1780:

  This characteristic stillness was the more pleasing when I looked back upon those scenes of outcry and horror which filled London but a week or two ago when danger haunted our streets at mid-day. Here I could wander – without beholding a sky red and portentous with the light of houses on fire, or hearing the confusion of shouts and groans mingled with the reports of artillery.

  Until six months after the Armistice there were several independent organisations for furnishing information. Every new ministry created during the war almost inevitably formed an ‘Intelligence Section’. It is true that nearly all these co-operated closely with one another, but there was overlapping and waste of energy, to say nothing of the inevitable waste of money. Moreover, it was nobody’s business to act upon the information with reasonable dispatch. By the time it reached a particular minister it was generally too late for action. This applied particularly to civil intelligence at a time when the Russian government was financing subversive organisations in this country. It was decided, therefore, to co-ordinate all this kind of information under a single head who would be responsible to a minister for any action that ought to be taken.