Ace History Desk – For nine days in 1926 the United Kingdom was gripped by the first and only general strike in its history. Between 4-12 May more than two million workers downed tools in sympathy with members of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), who were threatened with reduced wages and longer hours, as the general council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) faced off against Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government.

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How the General Strike Changed Britain

The result, despite an overwhelming show of solidarity from the workers themselves, was total collapse. The strike was called off unconditionally, without any serious attempt by the TUC to gain concessions, or even guarantees against the victimisation of strikers by employers. The miners continued their own strike for another seven months, but they too were eventually defeated. Mining wages were reduced to the level of 1914, and in Scotland to that of 1888. In 1927 the Conservatives passed the Trade Union Act, outlawing sympathy strikes. By 1928 TUC membership had fallen by almost half a million.

The core issue of the mines was both simple and insoluble. Some 73 per cent of coal mined in 1925 was extracted at a loss. The mine owners wanted to cut wages or extend hours, or both. Meanwhile the slogan of the MFGB leader, A.J. Cook, was ‘not a penny off the pay or a minute on the day’. The failure of these two sides to compromise precipitated the crisis, but what turned it into a national strike was the perception that larger issues were at stake. The mine owners advocated general retrenchment: the cost of transporting coal should be reduced by cutting railway and dock workers’ wages, for example. The government appeared to support this position. In 1925 chancellor of the exchequer Winston Churchill had returned Britain to the Gold Standard, which overvalued the pound and pushed up export costs. Then, in July, Baldwin told a MFGB deputation that ‘all the workers in this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet’. Trade unionists across the UK had good cause to regard the miners’ fight as their own.

The TUC had agreed to the idea of a general strike as early as July 1925. Between September 1925 and May 1926 there was an uneasy truce, as the government subsidised miners’ wages while a royal commission under Sir Herbert Samuel looked into the industry. This led the TUC to believe that the government might act as a neutral arbitrator. In truth, Baldwin, while never dismissing the possibility of an agreement, used this time to prepare to meet and defeat a strike. The TUC made no comparable preparations. The appearance of the royal commission’s report seemed at first to offer a way forward, suggesting reorganisation of the industry and rejecting most of the owners’ proposals on wages and working hours. But no agreement could be reached. On 29 April the miners gave the TUC full power to take over negotiations, now with both the mine owners and the government. On 30 April, as the subsidy ended, the mine owners began a coordinated lockout. On 2 May, with negotiations stalling, the TUC sent telegrams to its members to prepare for a strike. That night, printing compositors working for the Daily Mailrefused to set a provocative leading article which called on the country to support the government. This incident was seized by the hawks in the cabinet as an excuse to break off negotiations under the premise that the freedom of the press was threatened. The TUC took this as a declaration of war; the strike began the following day.

The nine days are remembered as a period of peace and good humour on the part of both strikers and the authorities. Although there was certainly violence, rioting, and intimidation, there were no deaths and very few arrests: the country, concluded home secretary William Joynson-Hicks, had been ‘extraordinarily well behaved’. In comparison with events elsewhere in Europe, Britain was virtually tranquil. Two days after the British strike ended, a general strike by socialists in Poland played a key part in the success of a coup in which hundreds were killed. But the British General Strike was still the greatest domestic crisis Britain experienced between the wars. In crisis there is danger, but also opportunity. How did Britain’s politicians, virtually none of whom wanted it to happen, respond?

‘Safety first’

The 1920s were a period of transition for British politics, as the Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald steadily eclipsed the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives. While Labour was building its core vote and organisation, the Liberals were split between followers of the two wartime prime ministers, H.H. Asquith, the party’s nominal leader, and David Lloyd George; although they reunited in 1923, there was little love lost between the two camps. In 1924 the Liberals slumped to 40 seats in the Commons, with Asquith defeated, while Labour won 151 and Baldwin’s Conservatives a commanding 412.

The former manager of the family ironworks, Stanley Baldwin was a conscientious, ruminative, and unassuming man with experience of industrial disputes. He vocally disdained the ‘hard faced’ businessmen who had profited during the Great War (he had donated most of his war profits to charity) and he did not particularly like the mine owners, whose extreme views he believed would alienate the public. He was popular among Labour MPs because he treated them as equals. ‘Safety first’ was Baldwin’s motto, and during the strike he projected an image of calm determination, most famously during his BBC radio broadcast to the nation. He set an informal tone by lighting his pipe close to the microphone. ‘I am longing and working and praying for peace’, he told listeners between puffs: ‘Cannot you trust me to ensure a square deal [and] even justice between man and man?’ The Conservatives and the country alike were fortunate that he, and not one of his hard-line colleagues, was in power when the strike came.

But this is not to say that Baldwin’s language was mild. The Conservatives regarded the strike as an attempted revolution and usually referred to it as such. Baldwin’s first public statement, on 5 May, set the tone: ‘Constitutional government is being attacked … The General Strike is a challenge to Parliament and is the road to anarchy and ruin.’ The prime minister had a point: this was no ordinary industrial struggle. If the strike meant anything, it was an attempt to change government policy via extra-parliamentary coercion. But it was not revolutionary in any meaningful sense. At most, the TUC leaders hoped to force a general election, and certainly none of them were syndicalists. In truth, the TUC was in a bind: it was as unwilling to take the step forward into the constitutional question as it was to prepare its members for an orderly retreat.

Baldwin’s wider political goal in the 1920s was to prevent the return of Lloyd George to Downing Street. As such he had an interest in easing the way for Labour to supplant the Liberals, but he wanted to make sure that the Labour Party that emerged was committed to the parliamentary system. He and his private secretary, J.C.C. Davidson, were therefore determined not to do anything to provoke the strikers, and in this respect their greatest challenge was maintaining order within the cabinet. According to Davidson, the hawks, notably Churchill and secretary of state for India Lord Birkenhead, regarded the strikers as ‘an enemy to be destroyed’, advocating the deployment of tanks and machine guns on the streets. Baldwin and Davidson expended much time and effort in convincing their colleagues that the strikers were neither communists nor violent. As Davidson later wrote:

At times one became rather sad because it was so difficult to make some people understand that the Communist who fired a revolver or threw a bomb from within the ranks of the strikers against the police or for pure mischief would have ended his days most painfully at the hands of the strikers long before he could have been rescued.

The most dangerous moment for Baldwin came towards the end of the strike, when the cabinet discussed proposed legislation to severely limit the powers of trade unions. Recognising that this would give the strikers a grievance and rallying cry, Baldwin had the Conservative whips bring evidence that a majority of the parliamentary party was against the idea, and the proposal was quickly dropped. Managing both the strike and the cabinet put Baldwin under enormous strain, although he was able to escape on occasion: on 9 May, in an attempt to give him a break, the first lord of the admiralty took him to the zoo for the afternoon.

Other than Baldwin, the most prominent Conservative figure of the strike was, inevitably, Churchill. Although his abilities were highly rated, his judgement was deeply distrusted by many of his colleagues. The question of how to keep him safely occupied was answered by the disappearance of the London press, when print workers (but not the National Union of Journalists) walked out. In response, Churchill was given editorial control of the specially created government newspaper, the British Gazette, which traded blows with the TUC’s British Worker. The Gazette, which was set up by Davidson in the offices of the Conservative Morning Post, was one of the sensations of the nine days, although due to the railway strike  its influence was mostly felt in London. ‘Winston is enjoying himself in editing the British Gazette’, wrote the solicitor general: ‘His budget of 820 million no longer interests him very much.’

Notwithstanding interpersonal tensions, morale in the cabinet remained high throughout the nine days. The government knew that the TUC did not want a strike, let alone a revolution. The cabinet never doubted that their resources were adequate to face the danger, and always believed that they were negotiating from a position of strength. This, more than anything else, doomed the strike to failure: the government believed in their cause, while the general council of the TUC did not.

Liberal crisis

The strike appeared to offer significant opportunities to the Liberals. While the Conservatives and Labour were both closely linked to one side or the other, the Liberal Party was in a position to act as an honest broker. To an extent it had already done so, as three of the four members of the royal commission on the mines – Samuel himself, William Beveridge, and Kenneth Lee – were progressive Liberals. In the event, however, the strike initiated the party’s greatest crisis since the reunion of 1923.

For Asquith the strike was futile, counterproductive, ‘anti-social’, and an attempt to overthrow parliamentary democracy. This view was supported by Sir John Simon, a former Liberal attorney general, who insisted the strike was illegal. Churchill made great use of both men’s opinions in the Gazette, and to many there appeared to be little difference between the Asquithian and Conservative position. Lloyd George, by contrast, had enormous experience with industrial disputes and was much better placed to understand the TUC. He was also much more determined to strike an independent Liberal position. While he thought the strike a mistake, he strongly defended the TUC from accusations of revolution. As the strike progressed, he skirmished with Churchill in the Commons over the editorial line of the British Gazette (condemned by Lloyd George as ‘third-rate journalism but a first-rate indiscretion’) and by the closing days he was attempting to set up a Liberal paper of his own to counterbalance the Gazette and Worker. Then, on 10 May, he refused to attend a Liberal shadow cabinet meeting in protest at Asquith’s statements. The resulting quarrel left the party divided and rudderless at the very moment it might have been able to make the most impact. Bickering continued for months before Asquith admitted defeat and resigned in October, drawing to a close his 18 years at the head of the party. By forcing Liberals to ‘take sides’, the General Strike pushed many to the conclusion that the party could not hope to compete with the Labour/Conservative duopoly. Liberal defections to those two parties, already significant, increased in the months and years following the strike.

For Ramsay MacDonald the General Strike was an extremely uncomfortable period. He had no formal influence with the TUC and was essentially a spectator. While he recognised the government as the ‘chief criminal’, he was frustrated by the immovable position of A.J. Cook, whom MacDonald thought had precipitated the strike to save his own skin: ‘The election of this fool as miners’ secretary looks as though it would be the most calamitous thing that ever happened to the TU movement’, he wrote in his diary. MacDonald believed that the TUC should have supported the miners with funds and resources to face the lockout. His foremost concern was to ‘protect the political party from the same crowd rush of emotion which has brought [the TUC] to this sorry pass’. His attempts to build bridges between the TUC and the government were rebuffed, and he was refused permission to broadcast a message on the BBC, a decision which probably worked in his favour, so conciliatory was his proposed speech. It was only in the aftermath that MacDonald was able to regain the initiative, reasserting his moderate credentials and putting pressure on the government to minimise victimisation against strikers.

Rising stars

As the strike ended the cabinet was jubilant. The ‘revolution’ had been defeated. Lord Birkenhead added the trade unions to the list of enemies – popes, Stuarts, Napoleon, and Prussia – which ‘old England’ had overcome. The government looked on with delight as the Labour and Liberal parties fell to infighting while Baldwin reigned supreme. ‘The most remarkable fact in the present situation is the enormous prestige of the Prime Minister’, wrote Davidson: 

I believe myself that if the Government go forward with a quiet, constructive policy and make no fundamental mistakes, the Prime Minister can be in office as long as he wants and as long as he lasts physically.

But beyond the Palace of Westminster, a rather different picture was emerging. While the strike sidelined the Labour Party’s leadership, it provided freedom and opportunity to junior members in the rest of the country. In Tredegar, for instance, an obscure local councillor, Aneurin Bevan, made his name chairing the Tredegar Council of Action. He exercised considerable control over the town, sidelining local authorities and blocking the export of coal and the import of unsympathetic newspapers. For Bevan the strike was a crucial political lesson and turning point: ‘The defeat of the miners ended a phase’, he later reflected: 

and from then on the pendulum swung sharply to political action. It seemed to us that we must try to regain in parliament what we had lost on the industrial battlefield. 

Bevan himself would not stand for Parliament until 1929. Instead it fell to another junior Labour politician to strike the first blow: Sir Oswald Mosley.

An aristocrat and former Conservative MP, Mosley and his wife Lady Cynthia had joined Labour in 1924, embracing socialism with the fervour of converts. In the 1924 election Mosley fought the Birmingham constituency of Ladywood, held by Neville Chamberlain, who survived the contest by 77 votes. Mosley’s demagogic and populist style, ‘hectoring and bullying’ as an embittered Chamberlain put it, was already a core part of his personality. Despite the loss the Mosleys, both still in their twenties, had established themselves as rising Labour radicals in the West Midlands. Cynthia was soon adopted as a prospective Labour candidate in Stoke-on-Trent. Mosley himself was the star of Birmingham Labour’s 1926 May Day parade. It was in this period that he began to develop the demagoguery which would become his trademark: ‘The workers would fight’, he declared to the assembled trade unionists, ‘and the workers would be right.’

Like MacDonald, Mosley did not agree with the decision to call a strike. But he realised that it was a perfect opportunity to ‘awaken the working class’, as well as to boost himself and his wife. When the strike began the couple threw themselves into the fray, joining the Birmingham Strike Committee and financing the city’s strike bulletin, which Mosley co-edited. Birmingham City Council, run by Conservatives, was well prepared for the strike, and organised volunteers, rationed coal, and maintained essential services. Ironically, in view of their future direction, among the Mosleys’ bitterest enemies was Birmingham’s active fascist group, which had volunteered its services to the council. As the strike progressed, the local authorities grew in confidence, and Mosley was fortunate to avoid arrest on 10 May when the rest of the Committee was detained by police after the bulletin published a false report of a government defeat in Parliament; the couple had been speaking at an event in Stoke at the time.

But it was in the strike’s aftermath that the Mosleys truly made their mark. While other Labour politicians had to deal with the fallout, the Mosleys were free to embrace the cause of the miners, touring the country and using their substantial personal wealth to make lavish donations to local strike funds, starting with a £500 donation from Cynthia to the Stoke-on-Trent MFGB branch. Then, in November, a golden opportunity fell into Mosley’s lap: the Labour MP for the Birmingham constituency of Smethwick resigned, and Mosley, to the dismay of many in both the Labour and Conservative leaderships, was quickly selected as the Labour candidate. The by-election which followed was rancorous, occasionally violent, and deeply personal. Mosley’s Conservative father attacked his son in the Daily Express, while Baldwin’s socialist son Oliver travelled to Smethwick to speak for Mosley, who also had the aggressive backing of local communists. By the end of the campaign, when MacDonald himself came to speak, the by-election had come to be seen as the beginning of the Labour fightback after the disaster of the strike. Mosley, with typical hyperbole, had framed it as such from the start: 

In this by-election we carry the fight from the industrial to the political field, and we will strike a blow which will shake the Government to its foundations. 

When he was elected on 21 December with a substantially increased majority, he declared to his supporters: ‘I believe you have introduced a new era for British democracy.’ The Conservatives were naturally depressed by the result, although Austen Chamberlain, foreign secretary and brother of Neville, found a silver lining in the fact that the ‘cad’ Mosley would now be shifting his attention to Westminster. ‘In for Smethwick’, he sighed, ‘but thank goodness! out of Birmingham.’

Labour strikes back

The General Strike transformed Mosley: as well as giving him his reputation and his seat, it also provided a power base in the grateful MFGB, which elected him to the national executive of the Labour Party three times later in the decade. But Mosley’s success was not unique. Across the country, Labour was on the rise. In Birmingham the party made ten gains in the November 1926 municipal elections, with three strike committee leaders elected, while in Tredegar it took control of the council for the first time in 1928. In the long-run the failure of the General Strike destroyed much of the remaining Conservative support in working-class constituencies, while at the same time demonstrating the ineffectiveness of direct action as compared to a gradualist, electoral approach. In the general election of 1929 Labour won the most MPs for the first time – the Mosleys and Bevan among them – and tied with the Conservatives on vote share. Lloyd George’s Liberals increased their seat tally by only 19, despite winning more than five million votes on a radical progressive platform. Baldwin’s ‘safety first’ approach suddenly did not seem quite so safe after all.

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