In
1925 the mine-owners announced that they intended to reduce the miner's
wages. The General Council of the Trade Union
Congress responded to this news by promising to support the miners
in their dispute with their employers. The Conservative
Government, decided to intervene, and supplied
the necessary money to bring the miners' wages back to their previous
level. This event became known as Red
Friday because it was seen as a victory for working class solidarity.
The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, stated
that this subsidy to the miners' wages would only last 9 months. In
the meantime, the government set up a Royal Commission under the chairmanship
of Sir Herbert Samuel, to look into the
problems of the Mining Industry. The Samuel Commission published its
report in March 1926. It recognised that the industry needed to be
reorganised but rejected the suggestion of nationalization. The report
also recommended that the Government subsidy should be withdrawn and
the miners' wages should be reduced.
The
Subsidised Mineowner - Poor Beggar!
Trade Union Unity Magazine (1925)
The month
in which the report was issued also saw the mine-owners publishing
new terms of employment. These new procedures included an extension
of the seven-hour working day, district wage-agreements, and a reduction
in the wages of all miners. Depending on a variety of factors, the
wages would be cut by between 10% and 25%. The mine-owners announced
that if the miners did not accept their new terms of employment
then from the first day of May they would be locked out of the pits.
A Conference of Trade Union Congress met
on 1st May 1926, and afterwards announced that a General Strike
"in defence of miners' wages and hours" was to begin two
days later. The leaders of both the Trade Union
Council and the Labour Party were
unhappy about the proposed General Strike, and during the next two
days frantic efforts were made to reach an agreement with the Conservative
Government and the mine-owners.
The Trade Union Congress called the General
Strike on the understanding that they would then take over the negotiations
from the Miners' Federation.
The main figure involved in these negotiations was Jimmy
Thomas. Talks went on until late on Sunday night, and according
to Thomas, they were close to agreement when Stanley
Baldwin broke off negotiations. The reason for his action was
that printers at the Daily Mail had
refused to print a leading article attacking the proposed General
Strike. The TUC negotiators apologized for the printers' behaviour,
but Baldwin refused to continue with the talks. The General Strike
began the next day.
The Trade Union Congress adopted the following
plan of action. To begin with they would bring out workers in the
key industries - railwaymen, transport workers, dockers, printers,
builders, iron and steel workers - a total of 3 million men (a fifth
of the adult male population). Only later would other trade unionists,
like the engineers and shipyard workers, be called out on strike.
On the 7th May, Sir Herbert Samuel, Chairman
of the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry, approached the Trade
Union Congress and offered to help bring the strike to an end.
Without telling the miners, the TUC negotiating committee met Samuel
and worked out a set of proposals to end the General Strike. These
included: (1) a National Wages Board with an independent chairman;
(2) a minimum wage for all colliery workers; (3) workers displaced
by pit closures to be given alternative employment; (4) the wages
subsidy to be renewed while negotiations continued. However, Samuel
warned that subsequent negotiations would probably mean a reduction
in wages. These terms were accepted by the TUC negotiating committee,
but were rejected by the executive of the Miners'
Federation.
On the 11th May, at a
meeting of the Trade Union Congress General
Committee, it was decided to accept the terms proposed by Herbert
Samuel and to call off the General Strike. The following day,
the TUC General Council visited 10 Downing Street to announce to
the British Government that the General Strike was over. At the
same meeting the TUC attempted to persuade the Government to support
the Samuel proposals and to offer a guarantee that there would be
no victimization of strikers. This the Government refused to do.
As Lord Birkenhead,
a member of the Government was to write later, the TUC's surrender
was "so humiliating that some instinctive breeding made one
unwilling even to look at them."
On 21st June 1926, the British Government introduced a Bill into
the House of Commons that suspended the
miners' Seven Hours Act for five years - thus permitting a return
to an 8 hour day for miners. In July the mine-owners announced new
terms of employment for miners based on the 8 hour day. The miners
were furious about what had happened although the General Strike
was over, the miners' strike continued.
For several months the miners held out, but by October 1926 hardship
forced men to begin to drift back to the mines. By the end of November
most miners had reported back to work. However, many were victimized
and remained unemployed for many years. Those that were employed
were forced to accept longer hours, lower wages and
district agreement.
In 1927 the British Government passed the Trade
Disputes and Trade Union Act.
This act made all sympathetic strikes illegal, ensured the trade
union members had to voluntarily 'contract in' to pay the political
levy, forbade Civil Service unions to affiliate to the TUC, and
made mass picketing illegal.
Bernard Partridge, Punch
Magazine (19th May 1926)
(1)
Kingsley Martin first
met Winston Churchill while teaching
at the London School of Economics. Martin
wrote about Churchill and the General Strike
in his book, Father Figures (1966)
The
General Strike of 1926 was an unmitigated disaster. Not merely for
Labour but for England. Churchill and other militants in the cabinet
were eager for a strike, knowing that they had built a national organisation
in the six months' grace won by the subsidy to the mining industry.
Churchill himself told me this on the first occasion I met him in
person. I asked Winston what he thought of the Samuel Coal Commission.
When Winston said that the subsidy had been granted to enable the
Government to smash the unions, unless the miners had given way in
the meantime, my picture of Winston was confirmed.
(2)
Philip Snowden, An Autobiography
(1934)
During
the nine days of the strike I remained silent. From one point of view
I was not sorry that this experiment had been tried. The Trade Unions
needed a lesson of the futility and foolishness of such a trial of
strength. A general strike could in no circumstances be successful.
A general strike is an attempt to hold up the community, and against
such an attempt the community will mobilize all its resources. There
is no country in the world which has proportionally such a large middle-class
population as Great Britain. They with the help of governmental organisation,
with a million motor-cars at their service, could defeat any strike
on a large scale which threatened the vital services.
(3)
Kingsley Martin saw
A. J. Cook, the leader of the miners, make a speech on 26th April,
1926. That night he wrote about Cook in his diary.
26th April, 1926: Cook made a most interesting study - worn-out, strung
on wires, carried in the rush of the tidal wave, afraid of the struggle,
afraid, above all, though, of betraying his cause and showing signs
of weakness. He'll break down for certain, but I fear not in time.
He's not big enough, and in an awful muddle about everything. Poor
devil and poor England. A man more unable to conduct a negotiation
I never saw. Many Trade Union leaders are letting the men down; he
won't, but he'll lose. And Socialism in England will be right back
again.
(4)
Jennie Lee, was a student at Edinburgh University
when her father, a miner, was involved in the General Strike.
Although the General Strike lasted only ten days the miners held out
from April until December. Until the June examinations were over I
was chained to my books, but I worked with a darkness around me. What
was happening in the coalfield? How were they managing? Once I was
free to go home to Lochgelly my spirits rose. When you are in the
thick of a fight there is a certain exhilaration that keeps you going.
Stanley Baldwin promised that there would be no victimization when
the miners went back to work. That was one more piece of deliberate
deception. My father was not reinstated - from four months he trudged
from pit to pit, turned away everywhere. Uncle Michael was also victimized,
and so sadly he came to the decision that the only thing to do was
to go off to America.
(5)
Margaret Cole gave her full support to the
miners during the 1926 General Strike.
Some members of the Labour Club formed a University Strike Committee,
which set itself three main jobs; to act as liaison between Oxford
and Eccleston Square, then the headquarters of the TUC and the Labour
Party, to get out strike bulletins and propaganda leaflets for the
local committees, and to spread them and knowledge of the issues through
the University and the nearby villages. My job was to be liaison officer,
and half-a-dozen times during those nine days I was driven up to London
by Hugh Gaitskill or John Dugdale to Eccleston Square, to collect
supplies of the British Worker, any other news or instructions
that were going, and while we were there to have a look at the centre
of things; and to transport anyone who happened to require transport
about the city.
The Government had made up its mind that "direct action"
must be scotched once and for all, and, that being so, the Unions
had no choice between surrendering and going on to civil war and revolution,
which was the last thing they had envisaged or desired. They surrendered,
ingloriously, but with the ranks unbroken; and though the immediate
outcome was, naturally, a falling-off of membership, and a good deal
of angry recrimination, the absence of any real revanche, any
sacking of the leaders who had patently failed to lead, showed that
the movement, when it had time to think things over, realised that
it had in effect made a challenge to the basis of British society
which it was not prepared to see through and that, therefore, post-mortems
on who was to blame was unprofitable.
The industrial workers forgave their leaders. But they did not so
easily forgive their enemies, particularly when the Government, to
punish them for their insubordination, rushed through the 1927 Trade
Union Act. This was a piece of political folly; it did not (because
it could not) prevent strikes; what it did was to make it more easy
to victimize local strike-leaders and also to put obstacles in the
way of the Unions contributing to the funds of their own political
Party.
(6)
Henry Hamilton Fyfe, editor of the Daily
Herald, wrote about the General Strike in his autobiography,
My Seven Selves (1935)
It is still frequently asserted, and perhaps by many believed, that
this abortive attempt by Trade Unionists to assist their comrades,
the miners, was an attack on the Constitution, a blow aimed at the
State, a revolutionary act. It is natural enough for opponents of
Labour, whether political or industrial, to misrepresent the General
Strike in that way, but a number of writers of books have erred through
ignorance.
No one who was acquainted with the Trade Union leaders at that period,
no one who watched from inside the day-to-day development of the affair,
can think of this assertion with anything but amusement. There was
not a single member of the General Council of the Trade Union Congress
who would not have shrunk with horror from the idea of overturning
the established order - if it had occurred to him. I am certain there
was no one to whom it did occur. They decided on the strike in desperation.
They had promised support to the miners, and they did not know what
else to do.
(7)
David
Kirkwood,
My Life of Revolt (1935)
The purpose of the General
Strike was to obtain justice for the miners. The method was to hold
the Government and the nation up to ransom. We hoped to prove that
the nation could not get on without the workers. We believed that
the
people were behind us. We knew that the country had been stirred by
our campaign on behalf of the miners.
Mr Arthur Cook, who talked
from a platform like a Salvation Army preacher, had swept over the
industrial districts like a hurricane. He was an agitator, pure and
simple. He had no ideas about legislation or administration. He was
a flame. Ramsay MacDonald called him a guttersnipe. That he certainly
was not. He was utterly sincere, in deadly earnest, and burnt himself
out in the agitation.
I was heartily in favour
of the General Strike. I believed we should see such an uprising of
the people that the Government would be forced to grant our demands.
Ramsay MacDonald was in favour of it. Philip Snowden was in favour
of it. J. H. Thomas was in favour of it. When it came, it was so tremendous
that there was no one big enough to control it.
(8)
Henry Hamilton Fyfe helped to edit the Daily
Worker during the General Strike.
The Government organ was called the British Gazette. We named
ours the British Worker. Churchill ran theirs in his flamboyant
style. We kept ours moderate in statement and strictly matter-of-fact.
The Times paid us this tribute: "Although frankly propagandist,
the British Worker has on the whole been a straightforward
and moderate influence."
The TUC appointed censors to sit in the office and read the proofs.
But these were easily managed. Our real difficulty was lack of paper.
We were printing numbers far in excess of the Herald circulation.
We went up actually to seven hundred and fifty thousand copies. Even
then a cry arose from many parts of the country: "Give us more:
we can sell them."
In the hope of shutting us down, or at any rate lowering our circulation.
Baldwin meanly interfered with our paper supplies. I learned during
the strike and the events which led to it how deceptive was the appearance
of good humour and honest frankness which this adroit politician maintained.
(9)
Herbert
Morrison, An
Autobiography (1960)
The story of the strike has been told so often that it
is unnecessary to
repeat it here. Suffice it to say that in Hackney, as in every working-class
area, there was great sympathy for the miners, who had been treated
abominably, and there was a universal and reasonably justified feeling
that the mineowners were a wicked lot. But there was also some feeling
among the basically law-abiding and sensible working people of our
country that political power could not, and should not, be won by
industrial action. However, the strike call met with a loyal response.
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