The House | “Packed with glorious detail”: Baroness Andrews reviews ‘The Edge of Revolution’

10 May 1926: Troops in armoured cars on the streets of London | Image by: World Image Archive / Alamy

4 min read19 min

In this erudite and engaging study of the nine-day General Strike, in May 1926, David Torrance reveals a much more nuanced political history in place of the usual comic-strip class war between the toffs and the trade unionists.

But while it certainly shook the nation, did it bring it to the ‘edge of revolution’? It certainly raised constitutional questions, but was it a constitutional crisis?

As Torrance’s meticulous research reveals, at its heart was the vexed history of the coal industry compounded by decades of deadlock over miners’ wages in a country where coal was still king but coal owners had the power. Miners had the nation’s sympathy but it still took raw courage for other trade unionists to put their own jobs at risk. The ‘Triple Alliance’ they formed in 1926 – comprising miners, railwaymen and transport workers – had already failed miserably in an earlier attempt at a general strike in 1921.

In the end, not even that remarkable generation of trade union leaders – Ernest Bevin (Transport and General Workers Union), Jimmy Thomas (National Union of Rail) and Arthur Cook (Miners Federation of Great Britain) – could maintain the necessary solidarity.

These were, therefore, hardly revolutionary men or conditions. Yet, in those febrile post-war days haunted by the bloody memory of the 1917 Russian Revolution, they felt like revolutionary times to many, fed by political paranoia about the power of trade unions. In 1920, these fears were recognised in the Emergency Powers Act, passed by the coalition government led by David Lloyd George.

In this context, although the trade unions in 1926 acknowledged that they were hopelessly unprepared, they were incapable of halting the drift into a general strike. On 16 April, after protracted negotiations over miners’ wages had broken down, the mine owners (“the stupidest men in Britain” according to the Conservative politician Lord Birkenhead) posted lockout notices.

On 11 May, the strike ended in total surrender and confusion. The miners got nothing

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The drift might have continued had it not been for the printers at the Daily Mail refusing to run a leading article declaring a general strike a revolutionary moment rather than an industrial dispute. This was the justification the Cabinet needed to invoke the Emergency Powers Act and the General Strike started at one minute to midnight on 3 May 1926.

Many people volunteered to step into vacant roles and what followed for some, who had once only dreamed of driving trains, was the prospect (if voluntary) of “new and exciting jobs”. Some things went on as normal – namely cricket at Lords – proving to some that the nation still stood firm if divided.

While Hugh Gaitskell distributed the British Worker (the TUC’s antidote to the government’s British Gazette, edited by Winston Churchill, the chancellor of the exchequer), Chips Channon signed up “for England” as a special constable.

In a chapter packed with glorious detail, many people found inventive ways to get to work – by penny farthing or roller skates. For others however, there were no larks – only riots, arrests, hunger and even railway fatalities.

The political establishment also weighed in. King George V and church leaders urged reconciliation. Parliament sat day and night. The legality of the strike was a moot issue. Not surprisingly, Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin seized on Liberal MP Sir John Simon’s singular interpretation that the strike was utterly illegal because it involved more than one trade union.

The end to the strike was even more muddled than the beginning, with Jimmy Thomas in particular desperate for resolution. Independent of the Miners’ Federation, judged to be too intransigent, separate negotiations for an end to the strike were informally brokered with the general council of the TUC by Liberal MP, Sir Herbert Samuel. On 11 May, the strike ended in total surrender and confusion. The miners got nothing.

What did it all add up to? Had the leader of the opposition been allowed, like Conservative leaders, to broadcast to the nation, Labour’s Ramsay Macdonald would have been emphatic: “It never entered into the mind of the Trades Union Council to challenge the government… It is not a political strike nor has it in any sense a revolutionary significance.” Yet, as Torrance rightly concludes, ‘Who governs Britain?’ was to be a question which would challenge successive generations.

Baroness Andrews is a Labour peer

The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike that Shook Britain

By: David Torrance

Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum