The miners were central to two key moments of 20th century British history. For nine days in May 1926 almost three million workers struck in their support, backing their opposition to pay cuts and longer hours at work; “not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day”.
Though the Trades Union Congress (TUC) ordered their members back to work on the basis of the possibility of compromise, the miners stayed out for another six months. Despite this defeat, their struggle raised huge questions for British society that were partly answered by nationalisation of the industry after 1945.
Between 1984 and 1985 the miners struck again, this time without the possibility of a general stoppage in their support and went down to an even greater defeat.
It is impossible to understand the grotesque spectacle of British politics today, where frauds such as Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson can pose as authentic defenders of working-class interests, without examining the legacy of these two strikes.
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Jonathan Schneer has written a lively, readable account of the 1926 general strike, which, though it wears its scholarship lightly, is based on immersion in archival sources. While Geoff Andrews devotes a chapter to the general strike, his study is a wider examination of how the working class have been “central to the British radical tradition”.
The reaction of the British establishment to the strike and their determination to crush it is impossible to understand without the wider postwar view, of which Ireland was a part
Ireland features only occasionally in both accounts. But in 1926 thousands of workers in the Free State and Northern Ireland belonged to many of the same unions which were on strike. During the 1913 Lockout, when British trade unionists had donated £150,000 to the Dublin workers (£11 million in today’s currency), the Miners’ Federation alone had sent £1,000 a week.
It was such a reputation for solidarity that helped make other workers so willing to support the miners in 1926. Their strike was a product of a determined effort by the mine owners to claw back gains the miners had made during the Great War. Schneer recounts in detail the social chasm that existed between these men and their employees. He also describes vividly the conditions in which the miners toiled and the real everyday likelihood of death and injury in their work.
The reality of their lives is thrown into sharp relief when considered alongside his depictions of the half million or so who volunteered to break the strike. The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) included large numbers of “varsity men”, “bright young things” from the upper classes who “costumed themselves” in workers’ uniforms and attempted to drive buses and trains. They also included fascists eager to battle against Bolshevism.
It is easy to imagine Farage as an OMS volunteer, pretending that he could drive a train, or Robinson strutting about as a special constable. Fittingly, British fascism’s first martyr was a scab, “acting as a fireman on a cattle train from Norwich to London ... killed when he looked out of the engine and his head struck a bridge”.
Contrary to the mythology of a peaceful ‘very British strike’, Schneer shows that there were numerous clashes between the police, strikebreakers and workers. Indeed, his chapters on strikebreaking illustrate the depth of fear of the working class among sections of British society, often coated with layers of racism and anti-Semitism.
Interestingly the term sometimes used by strikers to describe the Special Constables was “Black and Tans”. The reaction of the British establishment to the strike and their determination to crush it is impossible to understand without the wider postwar view, of which Ireland was a part. Schneer notes the fear of Bolshevism that permeated British middle- and upper-class society. It was only seven years previously that Lloyd George had noted how “the whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution ... the whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end ... to the other” .
This moment had not entirely passed by 1926, though the general strike was seen, not least by Joseph Stalin, as marking its end. Part of the postwar reordering had seen upheaval in Ireland and elsewhere and Sir Henry Wilson had warned how the “Irish question will be so complicated with the Labour question (that) it will become insoluble” and “would mean the loss of Ireland to begin with; the loss of the Empire in the second place; and the loss of England itself to finish up with”.
Many of those who rallied to groups such as the British Fascists in 1926 were those for whom Ireland’s “loss” had seemed the first step towards the “loss of England itself”. What Schneer illustrates very well is that the British ruling class took the possibility of losing the strike very seriously and made every effort to avoid this. In contrast, the TUC leadership entered the battle reluctantly and had no desire to win.
While the comforting left-wing myth that rank-and-file workers are always more militant than their leaders is often untrue, it does appear to have been the case in 1926. The solidarity and enthusiasm with which huge numbers entered into the strike was remarkable. Schneer succeeds in telling their story and those of their opponents in a most accessible account.
An exception among the general anti-strike movement among students in 1926 was Jennie Lee, then studying at Edinburgh University. Lee, the daughter of a Fife miner, would go on to found the Open University while minister for the arts in Harold Wilson’s Labour government. The commitment of Lee and others to working-class education forms a large part of Andrews’s study. He is concerned that despite the centrality of the working class to British culture, they have become “marginal to political discourse” as well as a “declining minority in the parliamentary party founded to represent their interests”.
When the working class is discussed it is always as a “seemingly backward force” who haven’t moved on, are stuck in “nowhere” places, and whose views, culture and traditions count for little in the age of so-called “identity politics”. Rather than presenting them as “inherently virtuous” or patronising working-class people as “hopeless victims”, Andrews seeks to illustrate how there have always been “heterogeneous, multilayered, working classes with different aptitudes, strengths, weaknesses and occupational and regional variations”.
He explains this through looking at the impact of, among others, the 19th century autodidact Thomas Wright, writers Jack Common, Jack Hilton and George Orwell, Salford-Irish playwright Shelagh Delaney and Mayo-born Bill Naughton. It is his contention that the working classes were not only central to British society as trade unionists and politicians but also as “writers, adult educators, dramatists and feminists”.
A rich exploration of various strands of working-class culture, this account is by no means entirely comprehensive or uncontentious. Andrews is keen to include writers and educators from middle-class backgrounds who contributed to working-class education and contends that British Labour’s successes have always depended on this alliance. He argues that British working-class radicalism has generally been hostile to rigid doctrines or ideological orthodoxies.
But he still devotes much attention to the thinkers who emerged from the Communist Party tradition, such as historians EP Thompson and Raphael Samuel. The number of significant historians who emerged from that milieu is indeed remarkable, though most of them ultimately rejected the sterility of orthodox communist politics.
In contrast, it its clear Andrews is uncomfortable with those strands of the middle-class left who have adopted “identity politics”. Britain’s status as ruler of a colonial empire and the way this inevitably shaped all its people, including its working class, is touched on, but not really emphasised. But he does not ignore race or gender. Indeed he lauds Delaney’s work, which featured working-class, mixed-race relationships along with gay people during the 1950s, prefiguring many of the debates of later decades.
Andrews argues strongly for the importance of the Women’s Liberation Movement in challenging orthodoxies during the 1960s. Against those who dismissed feminism as a middle-class concern, he notes how the “raising of women’s consciousness took place in the factory canteen, the supermarket, on the streets, in the chapel and in the home”, with the equal pay strike at Ford’s Dagenham plant during 1968 particularly significant. As feminist Shelia Rowbotham pointed out, “revolutions are about little things. Little things which happen to you all the time, every day, wherever you go, all your life”.
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In an overview of the rise and decline of industrial conflict during the 1970s, Andrews notes the importance of another strike, at Grunwicks during 1977, in breaking down barriers. That dispute saw a largely female, Asian workforce, draw support from across the trade union movement. Elsewhere, Mick O’Farrell, then a young building worker and in his own words, a “typical Sun reader”, has recalled the Grunwick picket line as “exhilarating”, with the experience of fighting alongside the Asian women “basically lifting me and shaking all the crap out of me ... it was Saul on the road to Damascus”.
That many activists such as O’Farrell were at the core of movements like the Anti-Nazi League is not discussed by Andrews, but these experiences also impacted on working-class consciousness. In his conclusion Andrews does not hide his distaste for New Labour and its “special advisers ... barely graduated from student politics”. For the last two decades, Labour’s working-class support was “taken for granted on the basis that they had nowhere else to go”.
Unfortunately, as has been the case across Europe, there are some obvious places that this support can go. But Andrews appears to have the same contempt for what he sees as the equally middle-class supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, whose commitment to what Orwell termed ‘transferred nationalism’ was much greater than their understanding of class. For him, both Corbynites and their opponents “inhabited a world increasingly removed from the ethos which had first inspired the labour movement”. This is an engrossing and broad-ranging study which should provoke debate.
Dr Brian Hanley is an assistant history professor at Trinity College Dublin
