A general strike took place in the United Kingdom from 4 to 12 May 1926 in an attempt to prevent wage reductions and worsening conditions for 1.2 million locked-out coal miners
On 4 May 1926 the British people woke to a strange quiet. Trains, trams, and buses remained in their depots. The great factory chimneys that usually belched smoke into the air above the nation’s industrial towns were idle. The general strike had begun. For the next nine days, more than 2 million workers – dockers, railwaymen, bus drivers, printers, and factory workers – downed tools. They joined the country’s one million coalminers, who’d been locked out of their pits after refusing to accept swingeing wage cuts.
Britain’s coal owners were a motley collection of aristocrats and businessmen – described by one government minister as ‘the stupidest men in England’. Unwilling to invest in their industry, when times were hard, pay cuts were their solution. British coal was getting less competitive – made worse when Chancellor Winston Churchill returned the pound to the gold standard.
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The miners lived hard lives, powering the Empire for little thanks. They wanted pits to be modernised and nationalised. Their leaders included Herbert Smith, a no-nonsense Yorkshireman, who started working in the mines aged ten, and A.J. Cook, a radical firebrand and self-confessed follower of Lenin. Smith saw a friend die underground at 15, while Cook carried a man’s lifeless body home after an accident on his first ever shift. Determined to protect hard-won rights, they coined the slogan ‘not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day’.
In the summer of 1925 things reached a head. The miners rejected pay cuts and appealed to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) for help. The TUC agreed to embargo the movement of coal if the miners were locked out. The government caved in, granting a temporary subsidy to keep miners’ wages level. And a Royal Commission chaired by Sir Herbert Samuel would examine the problems in the coal industry.
This temporary victory was dubbed ‘Red Friday’. “You have done it over my blood-stained corpse,” an exasperated Churchill told Cook. The subsidy would only run until the end of April 1926. The stage was set for massive confrontation.
Stanley Baldwin’s Tory government prepared for the clash. Since the Russian revolution of 1917 the establishment had feared communism, reasoning that a national strike could be exploited by revolutionaries to gain power. Hardline Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks asked: “Is England to be governed by Parliament and the Cabinet or by a handful of trade union leaders?”
But moderate leaders of the TUC and Labour Party were similarly scared of revolution. Jimmy Thomas, the railwaymen’s leader and Labour MP, worked hard to avert the conflict, begging the government to extend negotiations on the eve of the strike. In the early hours of 3 May, printers at the Daily Mail refused to set type for an inflammatory anti-union lead article, giving government hardliners an excuse to break off negotiations. Baldwin shook the hand of TUC secretary Walter Citrine, saying: “I believe if we live we shall meet again to settle it…if we live.” The strike was on.
With print workers joining the strike, a propaganda war ensued between the unions and the government. Each produced their own daily newspaper. The British Worker pushed the TUC’s line that the strike was a dispute over wages, posing no threat to the constitution. The government’s British Gazette slammed the strike as a revolutionary plot against Britain’s hallowed institutions.
The BBC, then four years old, played a crucial role during the strike, when newspapers were hard to find. Thousands bought wirelesses, to tune into news bulletins. The BBC claimed neutrality, but its information mostly came from government sources. John Reith, its director, even allowed Prime Minister Baldwin to broadcast to the nation from his study. Baldwin said: “I am a man of peace. I am longing and working and praying for peace, but I will not surrender the safety and security of the British Constitution.”
By contrast, when the Archbishop of Canterbury and Opposition party leaders asked to address the public with a compromise proposal, under government pressure, Reith refused. And the BBC and Gazette reported Cardinal Bourne’s sermon decrying the strike as ‘a sin against the obedience which we owe to God.’
On the ground the strike was more solid than anyone had hoped – or feared. Activists remarked their biggest challenge was keeping those who had not been called out at work. On the third day, a London union official observed: “All the flunkeys in the whole West End of London could blow out all their teeth without getting a ghost of a response from a taxi driver.”
A battle for control commenced between striking workers and the government and its army of middle class volunteers. Strike committees issued permits for the moving of essential supplies. Lorries carried food with signs stating ‘By permission of the TUC’.
Swathes of volunteers signed up to help the government break the strike. Despite high unemployment, hardly any were manual workers, who overwhelmingly supported the unions. Instead, Oxbridge students, encouraged by their colleges, worked on Dover’s docks and drove buses in Hull. At least four passengers and one volunteer were killed due to railway accidents caused by lack of experience. The gentlemen’s clubs of Piccadilly provided units of special constables to help the police. Some volunteers were billeted in bus depots or docked ships, to avoid picket lines. London’s Hyde Park became a giant logistics depot, where society ladies peeled potatoes and made tea for strike-breaking lorry drivers.
As the days passed and more volunteers replaced strikers, ugly scenes erupted. At Tilbury dock, convoys were attacked with stones. In Plymouth, on the day that a team of strikers beat the police 2-1 in a friendly football match, a crowd rioted and attacked trams. Working buses had tyres slashed and engines sabotaged. Most infamously, on 10 May the Flying Scotsman was derailed after a group of miners removed a rail. Remarkably, there was only one injury.
State repression stepped up. Thousands were arrested under emergency regulations giving police sweeping powers. By the strike’s second week, Churchill was readying a paramilitary force, the Civil Constabulary Reserve, to unleash on picket lines.
Union leaders were as worried as the government about the situation spiraling out of control. Almost as soon as the strike began, they explored backchannels for talks – finding a friend in Sir Herbert Samuel, who met Thomas at the London home of a mutual friend. They hammered out a compromise that was enough for the TUC to call off the strike.
At noon on 12 May union leaders attended Downing Street to surrender. Immediately, Baldwin made it clear Samuel had been acting alone. The government was not bound to his compromise and had no intention of negotiating. It was too late. The workers were going back. Thousands were victimised. Some could not find work for years.
The miners were left to fight alone for seven long and bitter months. Cook praised the solidarity shown by the workers, but denounced the TUC at a rally 10 days after the strike, saying: “Never have we been bullied by the employers or the Government to the extent that we were bullied by certain trade union leaders to accept a reduction in wages.”
The strike came to be seen as a collective bout of madness – ‘the Nine Days Wonder’ – after which everything returned to normal. Recent pop culture set in the 1920s has either, like Downton Abbey , ignored the strike altogether, or, like Peaky Blinders , reduced the organised working class to a sort of feral gang.
But in the mining areas the strike lived long in people’s memories. Churchill was reportedly still booed in cinemas when he appeared on newsreels, even after the war. A century later, it remains a powerful example, both of working class solidarity and of the lengths to which the establishment will go to protect its power and privilege.
*Britain’s Revolutionary Summer by Edd Mustill – a trade unionist and Labour historian based in Sheffield – is published by Oneworld, priced £16.99.
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