Historical image from the 1926 General Strike, featuring an overturned car on the street with a police officer standing nearby and a crowd in the background.

Three-part miniseries about the UK’s 1926 general strike, which saw one and three-quarter million workers walk out in the biggest single work stoppage in British history. In collaboration with the General Strike 100 project and told using interviews with striking workers themselves.

Our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. Supporters also get access to two exclusive podcast series: Fireside Chats and Radical Reads. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory
You can listen to our podcast on the links below, or on any major podcast app. Links to a few below.

Episodes

Part 1

E118: 1926 general strike, part 1 – Working Class History

  • The social context: war, revolution, and capitalist crisis; conditions in the mining industry; ‘Red Friday’; build up to the general strike.

Part 2

E119: 1926 general strike, part 2 – Working Class History

  • The strike begins; clashes with scabs and police; wide scale of organisation by local Councils of Action; enthusiasm for the strike among the rank and file.

Part 3

E120: 1926 general strike, part 3 – Working Class History

  • State repression: arrests, police violence, and use of military to break picketing; machinations of TUC leaders; general strike called off; employers smell blood; effects of defeat on miners and broader labour movement.

Bonus episodes

E120.1: [TEASER] 1926 general strike, bonus episode – Working Class History

  • Part 3.1 (Bonus): More discussion with strike participants Betty Harrison and Harry Watson about their lives and work around the time of the general strike as well as their thoughts about various aspects of union politics.

Participants

For this series, we were able to use interviews conducted by historian, Margaret Morris, in the 1970s with participants in the general strike:

  • Abe Moffat: a miner and Communist Party activist in the Fife coalfields, Scotland
  • Harry Watson: a lighterman working on the East London docks
  • Betty Harrison: a textile worker and member of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford, Yorkshire
  • CS Hollis: a member of the National Union of Railwaymen in Chesterfield

Many thanks to the staff at the TUC Library Archives at London Metropolitan University for their help accessing these interviews.

We were also able to interview Judy Cox, co-author of Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When Workers Were Ready To Dare.

More info

  • Find out about events to commemorate the strike in your area (and beyond!) on the General Strike 100 website
    • You will also find dozens of stories about incidents which took place during the strike in cities, towns, and villages across the UK
  • Get a copy of Judy Cox’s Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When Workers Were Ready To Dare
  • Recommended further reading on the 1926 general strike:
    • The General Strike, May 1926: Trades Councils in Action – Emile Burns
    • The General Strike – Margaret Morris
    • The General Strike – Julian Symons

Images

A large crowd of people, mostly men in hats and coats, gathered outside a historic building with ornate architecture, possibly a hall or event venue, during the early 20th century.
1 May, 1926: People wait outside a meeting of TUC leaders for news about a vote on the upcoming general strike. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Historic photograph of armored military vehicles driving in a city square, with buildings in the background.
Armoured military vehicles in London. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A historical black-and-white photograph of a long line of men dressed in suits and hats, standing on a street outside a building.
Line outside the Foreign Office in London of volunteers to break the strike. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A historic black and white photograph showing an overturned car on cobblestone streets, with a crowd of onlookers and a police officer nearby, set in a busy urban environment.
Car overturned in London during the general strike. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A vintage double-decker bus parked on a street corner, featuring advertisements on its sides, with a crowd of people in early 20th-century attire observing nearby.
Burnt out double decker bus, London. Strike supporters forced bus to stop and set it on fire after passengers had disembarked. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Historic street scene featuring a group of people gathered outside a building with advertisements for ice and rail services, early 20th century.
Strikers attempt to prevent a truck delivering fish from unloading, London. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
A large crowd of people gathered on a city street, with police on horseback overseeing the scene. Historic buildings and street lamps are visible in the background.
Strikers and their supporters in the Poplar district around the East London docks (where Harry Watson, one of the speakers in our podcast series, was on strike). Credit: Wikimedia Commons
A historical street scene featuring a crowd of people gathered along the sidewalk, with men in hats and coats, and a horse-drawn carriage in the foreground. Police officers on horseback are patrolling, while a man on a bicycle rides past. Buildings from the early 20th century line the street.
Police escort lorry of petrol being transported through East London as workers look on. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A historical black and white image of a large crowd gathered at a rally, holding banners, including one for the Communist Party, set in an urban environment with buildings and trees in the background.
Rally in Hyde Park, London. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A historical black and white photograph showing a large group of people celebrating on top of a vehicle, holding flags, including a Union Jack, in front of an ornate building. Many individuals are raising their arms in excitement, while a crowd watches from below.
British fascists, placing themselves at the service of the government, drive around London to intervene in the event of disturbances. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Sources

Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands and Fellow Worker.
  • Episode graphic: car overturned in London during the general strike. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
  • Our theme tune for this episode is Montaigne’s version of ‘When the Coal Comes from the Rhonda’, a folk song originating from Welsh miners in the early twentieth century and sung during the general strike. Download the song here. More from Montaigne: website, Instagram, YouTube.
  • Edited by Jesse French

Subscribe

Listen and subscribe to WCH in the following ways: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Castbox | Youtube | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Radio Public | RSS | TuneIn 

Transcript

Part 1

Matt: At precisely one minute to midnight on 3 May 1926, around one and three quarter million workers in Britain walked out as part of a nationwide general strike in solidarity with over a million miners who had been locked out by their employers. The strength of the action took government, bosses, and union leaders by surprise, and the decision to call off the strike after just nine days was a calamity that set the labour movement back decades. This is Working Class History.

[Intro music]

Matt: Before we get started, we just wanted to remind you that our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work and, in return, get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, free and discounted merchandise and other content. So our supporters can listen to all three parts of this miniseries now, as well as an exclusive bonus episode with more information and context. So if you can, please join us and help us preserve and promote our history of collective struggle. Sign up and listen today at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

[ad break]

This year marks the 100 year anniversary of the 1926 general strike. To commemorate the centenary, we’ve teamed up with a number of other organisations, museums, and history groups to coordinate and promote the various events taking place around the country to make sure this hugely significant moment in our history is remembered. If you want to check out events happening in your town and beyond, go to generalstrike100.com, where you’ll find a map with talks, exhibitions and other events all across the UK. The map will also show you dozens of historical markers, highlighting specific locations in cities, towns, and villages where actual events during the strike took place.

Over these episodes, we’ll look at the events of the strike itself, how broad and significant its effects were around the country, and how it came to an end. We’re also really pleased to be able to tell this story using the words of working-class people who actually took part in the strike. These interviews, recorded by the historian Margaret Morris over half a century ago, have been preserved in the TUC Library Collections at London Metropolitan University, so we’re really grateful to all the staff there whose work means that we’re now able to bring these first-hand testimonies to a wider audience.

But anyway, to get started with the episode, in order to understand the general strike it’s important first to understand what Britain was like at the time.

Judy Cox: In the spring of 1926, when the strike happened, Britain was still deeply, deeply scarred by the horrors of the trenches. Many people involved in the trade union movement had been at war or had lost family in the war. So, the kind of idea of a collectively shell-shocked nation is, I think, a very powerful one. 

Matt: This is Judy Cox, co-author of Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When Workers Were Ready to Dare. We’ll include a link to buy the book on the webpage for this series. Link in the show notes.

Judy Cox: I think, as well as the experience of the horrors of the war, there was the revolutionary wave that came afterwards. Now, obviously, that terrified some people and inspired and delighted others but the prospect of the revolution, which began in Russia in February 1917 and then was completed in October 1917, created huge waves of working-class semi-insurrectionary struggles right across Europe, from Hungary to Germany and even in rather stodgy old Britain. The idea that revolution was kind of in the air was on the agenda.

Matt: This context of coming out of a world war and into a period of international revolution gave rise to another issue: anxiety around the position of the British Empire. 

Judy Cox: The British Empire had been unrivalled really but the First World War was itself a product of inter-imperialist rivalry and exacerbated that rivalry with the growth of the German and American economies. You have figures, like Winston Churchill, who are particularly identified with the drive to maintain a kind of British imperial presence in the world. That really lay behind Churchill, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, bringing Britain back into the Gold Standard, which had been abandoned during the war in April 1925.

Matt: The Gold Standard was a system where a country’s currency was linked to a fixed amount of gold. Under this system, a government guaranteed that a specific amount of its currency could be converted into a specific weight of gold, and this allowed for fixed exchange rates between different countries’ currencies. The Gold Standard was finally abandoned in the 1970s.

Judy Cox: He did this to shore up the pound as the currency of the Commonwealth and the British Empire but he pegged the pound way too high, so it ended up having a disastrous effect on the British economy but particularly on mining because the mining exports were so important and they became hideously expensive. John Maynard Keynes, the economist, warned Churchill at the time that the miners would pay the price for returning to the Gold Standard in this way. Obviously, Churchill wasn’t too concerned about the plight of the British miners and was more concerned about empire.

Matt: As is pretty much always the case when capitalism finds itself in any kind of economic difficulty, the cost of dealing with that difficulty is passed onto the working class. In this case, pegging the pound to the price of gold hurt the export of British coal, and so coal owners wanted to pass the price of that onto miners by making them work longer for less. However, miners were already living and working under extremely tough conditions, and had been doing so for a long time, on low pay and frequently being injured or even killed because of unsafe conditions. One of the many miners who experienced such an injury was Abe Moffat, a Scottish communist active in the Fife coalfields. Abe would later go on to become President of the National Union of Scottish Mineworkers, having started  work down the pits at the age of just 14.

Abe Moffat: Oh, 14. In the year 1910. There was no other employment in the mining villages at that time and miner’s son, more or less, automatically followed his father. It’s not like that today.

As a matter of fact, I am one of 14 with seven brothers and seven sisters. All of us went in the mine. And my father and my mother worked in the pit head. My grandmother worked in the pit head and even my wife worked in the pit head. It was a small mining village. We used to call it Little Moscow [laughter] and rightly so, I think.

Matt: ‘Little Moscow’ was a term used to describe areas of the UK where the Communist Party had particularly high levels of support. Other areas included parts of South Wales, and the village of Chopwell in the North East of England, where even today there still exists a road called ‘Marx & Lenin Terrace’. Not coincidentally, these ‘Little Moscows’ were often found around mining communities.

Abe Moffat: The pit was in the village, so the village was part of the pit and the pit was part of the village. You were working beside the same people who you lived beside. I wasn’t long in the pit when I had an accident. It was almost six weeks I was working in the pit and a big stone came down from the roof. And fortunate for me, it didn’t strike my body, it only struck my foot. At that time, there was no first aid and my older brother had to carry me home on his back into a miner’s house. You can imagine the face of my mother when she saw her young son, only six weeks working in the pit, being carried home on her other son’s back. That was my experience.

Matt: Despite being so young, Abe was well steeped in the militant culture of Britain’s miners.

Abe Moffat: At that time, it was the custom for your parents to join the union the first day you went down the pit. I would say that about them that the miners’ fathers and mothers, at that time, were very loyal to the trade union movement. The first thing they did when you went down the pit was to join you to the union and become a member of the trade union.

And then I wasn’t long in the pit when we had the first strike in the British coalfields to establish a minimum wage. The miners had no minimum wage at that time and even the minimum wage that was achieved was very small. Nevertheless, it was a very important strike because it was the first strike in Britain to establish a minimum wage for the miners at that time. As I say, the minimum wage was very small and although it was a victory, it was only a six shilling a day minimum wage.

Matt: The strike to establish a minimum wage in the mining industry that Abe mentions here was the 1912 national coal strike. Miners held out for over a month, forcing the government to pass the Coal Mines Act, which legislated a minimum wage in the mining industry. However, as Abe says, even this victory was hardly one which allowed miners to live in comfort. Unsurprisingly, there were subsequent disputes: a successful 1919 strike ballot led to the Sankey Commission being set up, which gave miners a pay rise of two shillings a day (so the equivalent of just over £3, or about $4.50, in today’s money). It also limited the working day to seven hours.

However, in 1921, mine owners suddenly announced sweeping wage cuts and a lockout starting at the end of March. Miners called for support from rail and transport workers’ unions who issued a call for strike action. Meanwhile, the government declared a State of Emergency and sent troops to mining villages around the country. But the day before the strike was due to begin, negotiations took place which resulted in it being called off despite winning nothing for the miners’ cause. These negotiations were so disastrous, that the day they were announced subsequently became known as ‘Black Friday’.

One of the key negotiators of this disaster was James Thomas, leader of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR). The historian, Julian Symons, describes Thomas at length as, 

the greatest buffoon the labour movement has ever known, a man who dropped his aitches as eagerly as he put on a dinner jacket, the personification of the beery, cheery, plain-speaking man that music hall comedians felt the British working man to be; an image of this imaginary working man, also, for the employers with whom he dined and negotiated so zestfully, and for the aristocrats who enjoyed his frank and unabashable social climbing […] In 1921, his role was that of a peacemaker, of a man who felt that any kind of settlement was preferable to a transport strike.

We’ll come back to Thomas later in these episodes as he’s an important character for how the 1926 general strike would play out. But for now, it’s important to note that the mining industry had long been an area of industrial conflict and militancy; and, at the same time, workers in other industries were becoming more assertive and beginning to learn the lessons of the past. This was most obvious in what became known as the ‘Red Friday’ of 1925, itself a reference to the disastrous ‘Black Friday’ four years earlier.

Judy Cox: You’ve got a working-class movement which is quite confident and had a number of experiences, particularly in July 1925 on Red Friday, where an alliance of miners, railworkers and transport workers came together and really forced the government to back down and rather humiliated the government by forcing them to subsidise pay for the miners. In August 1925, you have a massive textile strike which is quite strong around where I’m speaking from in West Yorkshire. Something like 150,000 workers came out. It’s a bit of a hidden strike. They got solidarity from other workers and you’ve got this potential clash of a ruling class wanting to impose its will and a working class feeling rather confident in its methods of struggle.

Matt: We talk a little more about this 1925 textile strike (including an interview with Betty Harrison, a textile worker who took part in it) in our bonus episode, available for our Patreon supporters. Red Friday, meanwhile, showed that the trade union movement had learned the lesson from 1921 and managed to stick together at a moment when the bosses were trying to push through a whole host of attacks on the miners.

Judy Cox: Trade unions forced the government to agree to subsidise the mining industry. The mining industry had been the backbone of the English revolution and miners occupied this special role as these sorts of heroic workers who kept the economy going and so on. The lack of investment in the mines and the falling profitability of mining exports meant that the mineowners were constantly trying to impose wage cuts and lengthen the working day. The trade unions had forced the government to step in and give the mineowners a subsidy.

Matt: The position of the miners and mineowners were exactly opposed to each other: for the mineowners, coal exports were collapsing and, as a result, so was the price of coal, which meant miners needed to work more for less money. For the miners, however, the volatile economics of coal were due to “the general crisis of the capitalist world” which necessitated the wholesale nationalisation of the industry. But, in the first instance, miners argued that their pay and conditions must be “untouchable [as] The present wage is not a living wage.”

As July 1925 wore on with no agreement between miners and mineowners on the horizon, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, took their case to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (the TUC). The General Council agreed to put a complete embargo on the movement of coal starting from 31 July, affecting railways, docks, waterways and roads.

On the evening of Thursday 30 July, Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, called a meeting with the miners’ union. Despite saying earlier that very day that there could be no government subsidy for the mining industry, this was precisely what he agreed, with the government subsidising miners’ wages to the tune of £23 million (the equivalent of just under £1.8 billion, or $2.4 billion, in today’s money).

But this subsidy only bought a temporary peace; scheduled to run out at the end of April 1926, at which point hostilities between miners and bosses resumed.

Judy Cox: So, the mineowners came back in demanding drastic pay cuts and, crucially, an extra hour on the day. The extra hour on the day was seen as incredibly important because this was an industry in which the levels of accidents were absolutely appalling. Many miners were disabled by the age of 40, not just with lung disease but with accidents and amputations. Many accidents happened in the last hour of the day when people got tired and when people were exhausted from a long shift. So, imposing an extra hour was really consigning hundreds of miners to lose limbs and have their lives and their health destroyed. That’s why it was such a flashpoint. The immediate negotiations went on between the miners, the Trade Union Council and the government, which was led by Stanley Baldwin. He pulled out of negotiations at a crucial point because he said that he was being challenged by an alternative government. He upped the stakes really to say that by fighting against wage cuts and this extra hour on the day, the working-class movement and the labour movement were seeking to overthrow a democratically elected government and impose a tyranny. That’s the kind of language they used. They wanted revenge for the year before. They wanted to humiliate the working-class movement. They wanted to put workers back in their boxes really. It became a general strike partly because the trade unions had said, ‘An attack on one union will be an attack on all of us,’ but also, I think that was propelled forward by a developing class consciousness. The nationalism that had been central to the war effort back in 1914/15 had given way during the war to a much more bitter critique of the idea of a national interest and that ‘we’re all in it together.’ There was that sense that we’re not all in it together and we’re not going to be disciplined by saying there’s some threat of revolution. I think the General Strike was a product both of the formal agreements at the top of the unions and this growing sense that, together, working-class people could push back the bosses’ offensive and could win something more for themselves.

Matt: However, after Red Friday, the government spent the next nine months preparing for the eventuality of a general strike once the subsidy for the mining industry ran out.

Judy Cox: In April ’25, the government was humiliated. They immediately launched a big propaganda campaign saying that the trade unions were in bed with the Reds and were threatening the whole of society. Perhaps more importantly, they began to organise, particularly people like Churchill and another character called Joynson-Hicks, known as Jix and also known as Mussolini Minor because he was such a hardline right-winger. They began to organise groups for a future confrontation. They were on the ball and they organised something called the Supply and Transport Committee which was ready to call in volunteers, i.e. scabs, to break any future strike. In September ’25, they also set up the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) which became a bit notorious because this was where Joynson-Hicks (Jix) called up for volunteers to sign up to smash the General Strike. They were fed with this propaganda that they had to do their duty to keep the country safe from revolution and defeat this communist conspiracy that was going to bring down democracy. 

Matt: We’ll be right back after these messages. If you want to listen to our podcast without ads, join us on Patreon, where you can listen to all parts of this miniseries now, as well as an additional bonus episode. Support from our listeners on Patreon is the only way were able to devote the time and money it takes to make this podcast. Learn more and join us at patreon.com/WorkingClassHistory. Link in the show notes.

[ad break]

Matt: It’s estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 volunteers had been recruited in preparation for the strike, either to serve as scab replacement workers or be sworn in as special constables to reinforce police numbers. The government set up a scheme to keep food and transport going, in which England and Wales were split into ten divisions, each with their own commissioner tasked with maintaining law and order in their area, most of which seem to have recruited at least 20,000 volunteers. How many of these were used is another question: for instance, by 11 May, 114,000 volunteers had been recruited in London, but only about 9500 were actually given work.

Nonetheless, the government made serious preparations for class conflict. On the trade union side, however, things could not have been more different.

Judy Cox: In contrast, the Trade Union Council did absolutely nothing. It did nothing at all to prepare. It’s almost like they were playing by this set of rules which didn’t apply to their opponents and it only applied to them; that they went back to trade unionism, building up their organisations, collecting their memberships and subs and seeing themselves as mediators between a ruling class that didn’t want any mediation and wanted to smash them and a working class that was frustrated and angry about attempts to impose wage cuts. The ruling class and the government got really organised and the labour movement, sadly, was let down by its leaders who did not.

I think they kind of kept hoping that the government would mediate, negotiate and conciliate because that was what they saw their role as being, so they were completely flummoxed when it didn’t happen.

Matt: This position was echoed by Abe Moffat during his interview in the 1970s.

Abe Moffat: It wasn’t a victory because of the failure of the leadership. They didn’t use the next nine months to prepare the miners, never mind any other body. We realised it at the time but the leadership didn’t realise it and whether they realised it or not, they didn’t do anything about it. If they had prepared that nine months and the TUC had really used that nine months then it might have been a different situation.

Matt: As Abe says, the TUC didn’t use any of the preceding nine months to prepare for the strike, neither with the miners nor any other union body.

A conference of TUC leaders met on Thursday 29 April. No plans for a national strike had been made until Tuesday of that week, literally days before the government subsidy was due to expire. Union leaders were worried that any such plans would be considered ‘provocative’ (the government and employers, meanwhile, had no such worries).

Better late than never, the TUC drew up a plan to call workers out in stages: the first wave was to include all forms of transport, printing and construction trades, as well as iron, steel, metal, heavy chemical, electricity, and gas workers.

However, it still left out a number of key industries like postal and telephone service workers, as well as electricians, engineers and woodworkers. There was also some confusion among those who were supposed to be striking: for instance, building trades were called out except those employed on housing and hospital work, while electricity and gas workers were to cease supplying power, but not light. 

There was also confusion about what the TUC’s instructions would mean in practice: for instance, it instructed that other than essentials, no goods were to be transported by road or rail. But particularly in the case of road transport, it was unclear whether this simply meant that union members should refrain from such work, or if the TUC was asking for hard pickets stopping traffic to check vehicles. With plans only being drawn up with literal days before the strike was due to begin, this sort of confusion was inevitable.

In contrast to the equivocations from union leaders, the government was very much preparing for battle: all army and navy leave was cancelled. Two battalions of infantry landed in Liverpool and marched through the city with their rifles while battleships anchored in the River Mersey. Other naval vessels were sent to ports around the country against a backdrop of cries in the media about revolution and the threat to the constitution.

Yet despite this show of strength from the government – and despite the haphazard last-minute organisation of trade union leaders – the response from rank-and-file workers surprised everyone from the government to the employers, and even the trade union leaders themselves. 

Judy Cox: What’s extraordinary is that for all of their lack of preparation – their lack of ideological preparation or physical organisational preparation – the response of rank-and-file workers was extraordinary. The militancy, the unity and the kind of energy and dynamism with which people answered the call for a general strike, I think, caught the trade union leaders and the government on the hop. If you read any of the accounts at the time, everybody says that when they woke up on the morning of 4th May, they woke up to silence. It was the first time, if you lived in East London, that you’d ever woken up and there weren’t docks, there weren’t trains, there weren’t trams, there weren’t cars and there weren’t building works. They woke up to this extraordinary silence. A lot of the trade union activists at the time report that the problem was that the TUC called out certain groups of workers and their problem was not getting those groups of workers out but stopping groups who hadn’t been called out wanting to join the strike. The trade union leaders didn’t want that to happen because they wanted to keep control of who was out. They wanted to make sure that they were dictating terms and this wasn’t being swept away in some kind of mass rank-and-file revolt. So, there was this extraordinary response from trade unionists and the communities that supported them. They began to organise. Although this strike only lasted for nine days, you can see glimpses of how workers could begin to organise in different ways and many of them establish what they call Councils of Action. Some of these grew out of trades councils and some were set up by Communist organisations, like the British Communist Party. They exercised a huge power in some cities. They decided who was going to get food and which transport was going to be allowed through. They kept the police out of some working-class areas. They really did give a glimpse of working-class people beginning to run some aspects of their society.

Matt: Workers from across the country stood by the call to support the miners.

Harry Watson: In the branch, we were told that the decision had been to give support to the miners and everybody welcomed it and was quite happy with the policy of doing everything we could for the miners because we had a very strong feeling of… that kind of bond with miners. Their work was of a kind where we understood how dirty, dangerous and low-paid it was by comparison with what they should have been getting.

Matt: This is Harry Watson who, at the time of the general strike, was in the fourth year of a five-year apprenticeship as a lighterman on the docks in Poplar, East London. While regular dockers were primarily engaged in loading and discharging cargo on or off vessels, the lighterman’s role was quite different. 

Harry Watson: Lightermen superintend the loading of their craft in the sense that is now they do. When I first started, lightermen used to have to get in the barge with the docker or the stevedore and with the corn porters and help to load the barge himself with them. He used to be one of the gang.

He works on barges and self-propelled vessels and navigating up and down the river taking barges from one place to another place. When I was first afloat, of course, we had to do it under oars and rowed barges about with oars to wherever we had to go which meant, of course, you had to understand the navigational aspects of things and taking into account the wind, the state of the tide and the particular geographical position of the place you were coming away from so that you could get out into the tideway without mishap and where you were going to. You had to be very certain of how to shape your barge up to make a fetch where you were going because you’ve got no breaks afloat. You had to measure the job that you had to do with your eye on the wind, the tide and where the wharf or the ship was fast so that your barge could come alongside under your navigation or knowhow without doing any damage.

Matt: Harry was a member of the Poplar branch of the National Amalgamated Stevedores, Lightermen, Watermen and Dockers’ Union, which he had joined after his first year as an apprentice. Opinion in the branch was solidly behind the miners.

Harry Watson: The branch at that time had about 500 members in the Poplar branch and when the decision was taken, as a result of the lockout, that there would be a national strike in support of the miners against the government and the coal owners, everybody was very happy with that situation.

I think it was also in the minds of the older men and more experienced men that the implications of the coal owners’ behaviour, supported as it was by the government, was that if they got away with it with the miners, then obviously everybody else in the working class was going to feel the backwash of the events as far as the miners’ wages and conditions were concerned. Of course, when it was reported to us that not only were they being asked to accept a reduced rate of pay I think they were going to have their working day lengthened. The indignation that we felt at this contemptuous attitude towards men of the calibre of miners was so open and shut that there was no question or doubt in anybody’s mind that our position was one where we could do nothing else other than help to win this particular issue that the miners were involved with.

My way of looking at it, I suppose, was a very simple way because I wasn’t all that sophisticated in my thinking. It was either right or it was wrong. As far as I was concerned, the miners were right in asking for higher wages and for shorter hours and the coal owners were wrong to deny it because I had a fair idea of the kind of work that the men did and the kinds of rewards that I would be looking for if I was doing that job which would have been far in excess of what the miners were asking for.

Even then, in my way of thinking, I couldn’t even understand why it was that the coal owners and the government were taking such an intransigent attitude towards the miners and their claims. It was open and shut to me. They were an important section of the community. We depended on them for everything because coal, in those days… I mean, take the river alone, we used to transport hundreds of thousands of tons of coal a week to the power stations up and down the river and canals. Coal was the power fuel of that day to the degree that nothing else was. Not even lorries were all that much in existence in those days. We used to have steam traction engines pulling freights about the roads in that time. Coal, from our point of view, was an essential and if we wanted to ensure that the supplies of it were going to come through, the only way we could guarantee that, as we saw it, was that the miners were paid for the work and the conditions that we would expect.

Matt: As was mentioned earlier, many workers weren’t included in the initial phase of the TUC’s strike plan; and very often, they were not well pleased with the situation.

Betty Harrison: The textile workers were not called out and quite possibly, if the strike had lasted much longer, they would have been but, as you know, it only lasted nine days.

Matt: This is Betty Harrison who, at the time of the general strike, was a branch committee member of the Textile Workers’ Union and a member of the Independent Labour Party. In 1926, she was working in Bradford in the north of England as a burler-mender, which was a kind of skilled textile worker.

Betty Harrison: When you’re weaving cloth, there is a warp and then the shuttle goes through the warp to make the [unclear] the weft. The weft is on the shuttle. Sometimes, it fluffs up and makes a burl or it breaks and a knot has to be made. Sometimes, it breaks and goes a long way before they notice it’s broken either as a pick, which is what the shuttle makes, or as a warp which is coming through and makes the ends down, as it were. That breaks and sometimes, it used to go through a whole piece before they noticed. It was a very fine thing. A burler-mender takes out the bits of fluff, takes out the knots without letting it run back and make a hole and sews the ends and the picks. Sometimes, it snarled up and made a real mess with both picks and ends. A burler-mender would sort that out and mend that. It was hard on the eyes but, of course, I was very young and very little. 

Incidentally, I must tell you this because it has a bearing on the future. My father, as a miner, was very keen on the trade unions and he said I must join the union straight away when I started working. The first day I came home, he said, ‘Have you joined the union yet?’ I said, ‘No, I couldn’t find the man today.’ Remember: I was only 13 and a tiny little thing. I’ve never been very tall. He said, ‘Remember, don’t forget tomorrow.’ My mother said, ‘Give her a chance. She’s only been one day.’ I found the union man and I joined the union. It was a penny a week for we youngsters. 

That first week, I was a union member. I was not in the same union all the time but I was a union member all of the 47 years I worked after being in the first week. I didn’t really become very active until I was about 19 when my father died and I had to begin things. Incidentally, I went to night school straight away when I started because I wanted to learn something else and try and get a better job. I took the usual things that one took in those days like shorthand, typing and book-keeping. I wasn’t very good The book-keeping I managed. I didn’t do anything with it because I stayed in the textile industry for 21 years as a burler-mender.

Matt: Betty had been involved in trade unions for a couple of years before the general strike, including the 1925 textile strikes that Judy mentioned earlier in this episode. We’ll include some of Betty’s memories of that 1925 strike in our bonus episode for this series, available exclusively on Patreon.

However, being an active trade unionist, Betty was not pleased about textile workers not being included in the strike call.

Betty Harrison: Not everybody was called out which was a great mistake. Of course, one talks now and this is the unfortunate part about it. One talks with hindsight so that one’s impressions at that time were not quite the same as one can feel now. Some of us, who were young and militant, wanted the textile workers to come out and we went with a deputation but we were told the reasons.

I was working, at that time, in a small shop and we were only about 50 people. It was a purely burling and mending establishment. It wasn’t actually a factory I was in at that particular moment but there were shops like this where they just took in burling and mending from factories that didn’t have burlers and menders themselves. They’d take them from a group of small factories that sent all their burlers and menders to them. I was working in one of those shops. I was collecting for the union at this place. We got this notice to tell our members that we weren’t out and a meeting was called for the branch committee. 

I was on the branch committee and all the people who were collecting and branch secretaries were there. Not all the collectors but the branch secretaries were on the branch committee. At this meeting, some of us felt that we ought to approach the Executive to ask why we shouldn’t be on strike. If I remember correctly, we got the answer that we were the second line of troops and if it went on any length of time, we should be called out. There was no idea of how long it would go on or what the length of time would be before the second line of action was called for.

Matt: So, while Betty and workers like her were told to stand by, others were told to begin the general strike. 

[Outro music]

That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. If you’d like to listen to Part 2 now, without ads, then do support us on Patreon, which is how our work is funded. There we’ll talk about the action of the general strike itself, including more first-hand accounts of the strike and the clashes that took place between police, scabs, and strikers. You’ll also get access to a bonus episode in which two of the participants in the strike, Betty Harrison and Harry Watson, talk more about their life and work around the time of the strike, as well as union politics more generally.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes. 

And if you can’t spare the cash, no worries. Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

Also, be sure to check out generalstrike100.com to find out more about events commemorating the general strike in your area and beyond. You’ll also find a ton of historical markers highlighting the locations of specific incidents that took place in cities, towns, and villages around the UK during the strike itself.

And, if you’d like to get a copy of Judy’s book, Revisiting the General Strike of 1926, you can find a link to buy a copy on the webpage for this episode. On the webpage, you’ll also find more information, including further reading, images, and sources. Link in the show notes.

Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible and a special thanks to Jazz Hands.

Our theme tune for this episode is Montaigne’s version of ‘When the Coal Comes from the Rhondda’, a folk song originating from Welsh miners in the early twentieth century and sung during the general strike. The song is performed by Montaigne and mixed by Wave Racer. You can find a link to download the song on our website. For more from Montaigne, check the links on the webpage for this episode.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 2

Hi, welcome back to part two of our miniseries about the British general strike of 1926. If you haven’t listened to part one, I would go back and listen to that first.

[Intro music]

Matt: Our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work and, in return, get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, free and discounted merchandise and other content. So our supporters can listen to all three parts of this miniseries now, as well as an exclusive bonus episode with more information and context. So if you can, please join us and help us preserve and promote our history of collective struggle. Sign up and listen today at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

[ad break]

The strike was scheduled to begin at 11:59pm on Monday 3 May. However, unofficial action in some areas was already beginning over the weekend: on Sunday, printers at the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper refused to print an editorial which claimed the general strike aimed to inflict pain on innocent people in the community. On Monday, printers at the Star, the Evening Standard, and the Evening News took similar action against similarly worded editorials in those newspapers. And on Tuesday, the Times and Telegraph newspapers were also affected, even though the general strike hadn’t officially started at the time they were supposed to be printed.

Once the strike officially got going, the response was overwhelming. Ministry of Labour figures put the number of strikers at between one and a half and one and three-quarter million. On top of this were around a million miners who were locked out. This was out of a total population of only around 40 million (whereas today the UK population is closer to 70 million). Workers had brought the UK to an almost complete standstill.

Harry Watson was asked about whether there were many scabs on the East London docks.

Harry Watson: No, not a soul. They brought in the Navy. The Navy was introduced and we knew that things like that were happening from the fact that many of the blokes who were going around… not picketing as such because it was a solid strike. Nevertheless, chaps were going around to see what kind of reaction they were meeting with from various shipping bosses and port bosses. They saw some tugs underway and were rather astonished. They went to make a closer investigation and found that they were manned by Navy personnel. I didn’t know anything about this at the time but I do know that when we did return to work, there were crates of empty beer bottles aboard and quite a lot of them, so they must have taken great care of their need for liquid refreshment, if nothing else.

Mainly, the Strike Committee was made up of the more senior men. We were carrying messages here and there because we could move faster. Some of us had bikes and some were on foot.

Matt: On many occasions, police would try to disrupt strikers’ meetings.

Harry Watson: I was attending meetings at Beckton Road, particularly. There was a meeting there on the fourth day which was a very big meeting – well attended and well orderly – and the speakers were giving reports of the situation up and down the country. Suddenly, from out of the blue, dozens of mounted police drove in amongst the lot of us. My cousin, who was with me at the time, got knocked down and as he got knocked down, he was in such a temper at what had happened that he jumped up and knocked the policeman off his horse. Of course, that led to more trouble in that sense that seeing one bloke get pulled off his horse, they were trying to knock everybody else off their horses. That was a real shambles and went on for 20 minutes to half an hour. The platform went over. I don’t know what became of the speakers but they certainly busted that meeting up and that was quite a peaceable meeting.

Matt: Rail workers were similarly solid. Among members of ASLEF (the train drivers’ union), it was said that “not 50 out of 50,000 members […] failed to answer the call.” And among the National Union of Railwaymen, more took part in the 1926 strike for the miners than for their own strike in 1919. 

CS Hollis: The Chesterfield branch secretary of the NUR came round to the station and said that the strike was starting on a certain date and explained the circumstances and we should all expect to stay out.

Matt: This is CS Hollis, a member of the National Union of Railwaymen in Chesterfield.

CS Hollis: Well, I was on at 5 o’clock on the morning of the day that the strike started. I had made my mind up that I wasn’t going and I didn’t go. I think, as far as what I recollect now, most of the staff went on at 5 o’clock just to see what was happening but they came out. So we all reported to what was then the NUR Headquarters at Chesterfield which was the old Marquis of Hartington in Soresby Street… a public house. That was the strike headquarters. Of course, we gathered there and we heard what news there was. There wasn’t the transport, etcetera, that there is today and different chaps volunteered to cycle between different branches to check the shifts. I mean branch secretaries weren’t fitted up with telephones as they were in latter days. It meant, in effect, what we called runners who used to run from one NUR branch to the other to find out what the position of things was, you see.

I was a good trade unionist. I’ve been in since I was 15 when I started on the railway and as soon as the branch secretary came down and said, ‘The strike starts at midnight,’ I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t go to work and I thought the miners had got a good case. With regard to the economic conditions of the working class, generally, everybody had a very good case.

Matt: While Chesterfield rail workers were mostly solid, some local buses with low levels of union organisation were still running.

CS Hollis: What is now the East Midland Bus Company was run by a firm known as Underwoods in those days. They hadn’t a very good reputation, as far as I remember, as employers. It was a non-union firm and we were getting a bit concerned locally that these buses were running about and giving a service. One night, the NUR branch meeting asked whether we were prepared to go down and try and stop the first bus going out. So, I was young and enthusiastic at that time – 21 years old – and we went down. We arranged to be down there at 5 o’clock. There were quite a number of volunteers to go down. They were full of enthusiasm overnight to go down the next morning. 

Finally, about five of us turned up down at Underwoods, as it was then. We said, ‘What are we going to do lads?’ We thought the best strategy to do was to link hands and stand stretched across the road so that when the first bus came out, he’d see us there and he’d stop. Anyway, he’d got other ideas. He put his foot down. He came through the gate and he put his foot down and, of course, he put our feet down on the other side of the road, so he got through. So, we found out that there was no question of peaceful picketing. Those who wanted to work just came out with the rush.

Matt: The situation in Chesterfield in the first few days of the strike was fairly reflective of what was going on nationally: despite the huge numbers of volunteers, ultimately, very few were able to do the skilled jobs which kept the railways going, leading to rail traffic being almost completely stopped in the first two days of the strike. Most rail companies were only running as little as 4 or 5% of their usual volume while freight trains weren’t even hitting 1%.

Local buses and trams, often being less organised and requiring fewer specialist skills, were able to run some semblance of a service, though significantly reduced. For instance, out of approximately 2000 trams, the London General Omnibus Company was unable to run a single one on the first day of the strike and, by the next day, they only managed 86.

The use of untrained volunteers on rail and transport often resulted in entirely predictable consequences with regard to public safety, as Hollis notes from his experience in Chesterfield.

CS Hollis: Anybody who was considered suitable to drive a train, they were allowed to do so. Going through level-crossing gates was a regular feature with some of these amateur drivers. The level-crossing gates at Beighton were fetched down once or twice because one old chap was a bit of [unclear]. I think some of these amateur drivers or these volunteer drivers… I think they had a new set of gates for every train.

Matt: While Hollis was able to poke fun at the “amateur drivers” he saw driving through level-crossing gates, this kind of ineptitude was seriously dangerous and, in some cases, fatally so. For instance, on 10 May in Edinburgh, a collision between trains killed three and hospitalised 13 while in Bishop’s Stortford (just north of London), another collision killed one and injured three.

Ironically, these took place on the same day as the infamous Flying Scotsman incident where striking miners removed a section of track to stop trains, but the inexperienced scab driver of the Flying Scotsman train continued anyway, leading to its derailment.

Despite only causing one injury (and, thankfully, no deaths), the story of the Flying Scotsman is often repeated as an example supposed ‘union thuggery’ putting the public at risk, while the other two incidents (caused by inept scab labour and leading to four deaths in a single day) have largely been forgotten. 

In the end, Hollis and his colleagues found out the hard way that scabs wouldn’t be put off by a few strikers getting in their way. In fact, the aggressive behaviour of scabs had likely been emboldened by the state’s preparations for an almost literal war with the unions.

In other areas, however, strikers and their supporters were more assertive in their disruption of strikebreaking.

Betty Harrison: The Trades Council, like all trades councils, had set up a committee which some of us thought was a soviet. It wasn’t but at least we thought it was. 

Matt: As a reminder, this is Betty Harrison, who we heard from in Part 1 and was a textile worker at the time of the strike. The word “soviet” is another name for a workers’ council, a body established by workers to coordinate struggles, which could potentially take over the management of society, as had happened in Russia in the early days of the 1917 revolution.

Betty Harrison: Some of us went along but we didn’t go officially from the Textile Workers Union because we weren’t on strike. We went along to help at this committee and to run errands. I was only 22 then, wasn’t I? I was really full of revolution and a member of the Independent Labour Party. We went along to help, and students came and that sort of thing. Some people were blacklegs and tried to run the trams, so some of the students and we young ones went along and turned over the trams.

Matt: The term ‘blackleg’ that Betty uses here is an old word meaning ‘scab’ or ‘strikebreaker’. Interestingly, in many (possibly most) places around the country, students actually formed one of the core groups providing scab labour, with recruitment taking place directly at universities themselves, sometimes with the active cooperation of the university administrations. But Betty says that in Bradford many students actually supported the strike because they were attending the technical college and were from working-class backgrounds themselves.

With regards to the turning over of trams, Betty answered as to whether she was involved.

Betty Harrison: I think I can say so after all these years, can’t I? I couldn’t say so for years because it was illegal [laughter]. We did things like that. We made everybody get out, of course. But you know they ran on rails? If there were sufficient of you and you rocked it and rocked it, then it fell over. You pushed it over because it was on rails anyway. It wasn’t just on the road, so you just toppled it over. It sounds easy and, of course, then it blocked the whole way for a long time.

After we’d done it a few times, they couldn’t get the blacklegs to run the trams because the blacklegs then thought they were going to get into trouble. The students made no bones about it, they just pulled them off the trams and knocked the tram over. The blacklegs were lucky they didn’t get hurt because the students were furious at them.

You’ll always get scabs whenever there’s a strike. I don’t think there were all that many. I can’t remember how many there were and, as I say, after a few trams had been turned over, there were less [laughter].

The first day, if I remember correctly, they ran about a quarter of the service and then the second day, it was less… and then it petered out altogether. People walked to work or cycled to work, those who were working like the textile workers. They just had to walk to work.

Matt: Around the East London docks, further clashes between workers and security forces kept taking place.

Harry Watson: Meetings were being held and Beckton Road in Canning Town was one of the places where speakers used to be every Sunday. It was like a noted place for speakers on the corner of Beckton Road by Barking Road, opposite Trinity Church. Of course, Blackwall Tunnel, outside the main gate of the East India Dock was another noted place for mass meetings at the time. While they were taking place, there was plenty of police, mounted police and foot police, but nobody took any notice. It was quite a peaceable affair until, one morning, we heard that there were troops in the docks unloading ships and lorries were coming up the Victoria Dock Road manned by the troops. Of course, as a result of that, everybody turned out to see just what substance there was to this report that we’d been given. 

Sure enough, when we got to the Barking Road outside Canning Town station, which was facing Victoria Dock Road, up came the lorries with barbed wire all around the lorries’ canopies with troops with guns sitting behind the barbed wire. The people were jeering and booing but that was the extent of the feelings of the people. 

For some reason, and I don’t know why, where I was standing, there was plenty of shouting and booing but certainly nothing in the way of physical reaction or anything of that kind. There was still a degree of good humour about it but the police started pushing from behind. Instead of being in front of us, they were behind and they kept pushing and pushing and pushing. We were being pushed further and further into the road and it led to arguments. Before we knew it, the police were laying about us with their truncheons and that caused more anger. It was a real explosion there for about half an hour. It was a question of hitting back to defend ourselves from what the police were trying to do to us and were succeeding in doing to quite a lot of us. There were a few broken arms as a result of the blows that we were subjected to.

Matt: However, the dockers made sure they were better prepared the following day.

Harry Watson: The following day, before they went up to the main road, hundreds of the men walked along the side streets and, in those days, the houses used to have a very low wall in front of them about two feet high and they had railings that embedded in the walls for about a further two feet. You had spiked iron railings in the small walls and the men just ripped the iron railings out of the walls and took them along with them up to Barking Road. 

When I got there, there were several lorries already that had been turned over. They weren’t lorries that had troops on them but lorries of private contractors and whoever was driving them had been forced out of their wagon and the men and women were turning the lorries over. As I say, there were three or four of them already laying on their side. Up from Victoria Dock Road came the lorries with the troops on them and then, again, the police lined up. Some were in front of us but most of them were at the back of us. Before they could start anything, the crowd turned on the police and started laying about with their iron bars on the police. Of course, the casualties were in reverse ratio to the previous day.

Matt: We’ll be right back after these messages. If you want to listen to our podcast without ads, join us on Patreon, where you can listen to all parts of this miniseries now, as well as an additional bonus episode. Support from our listeners on Patreon is the only way we’re able to devote the time and money it takes to make this podcast. Learn more and join us at patreon.com/WorkingClassHistory. Link in the show notes.

[ad break]

Matt: These kinds of clashes were taking place all over the East End.

Harry Watson: We heard subsequently that what had happened to us in Canning Town was also, at the same time almost, taking place in Poplar. In some respects, there was a far more vicious situation there where the mounted police rode in among the strikers and rode some of them down. When they were running up side streets, the police were chasing them in the side streets into the doorways and houses. Although ours was bad enough and was exciting enough in that sense, theirs was even worse. I don’t know why that was but that’s how it was at the time. 

However, that went on to the point where instead of soldiers just merely being outriders, as it were, on the vans or riding shotgun, as they call it, on these vans coming up from the docks, they brought in… I’m not sure whether they call it a regiment, platoon or whatever it is but they marched troops through Barking Road. When they got to Canning Town Station, they halted and then there was some pompous little twit of an officer in the front who gave somebody an order. They pulled out fixed bayonets or something of that kind. They fixed their bayonets and then they started marching along the main road, both sides of which were swamped with workers and their wives. Of course, they began to intimidate the workers from attempting anything similar to what had taken place the previous day when they set about the police.

Matt: In some areas, workers’ set up self-defence corps to resist police interference with pickets. Some of these could be quite large: in the town of Methil, on the Fife coast, it could sometimes involve up to 700 workers armed with sticks to face down police.

Formally organised self-defence like this was mostly uncommon outside the Fife coalfields. However, Emile Burns’ excellent survey for the Labour Research Department found that about a dozen other local trades councils around the UK had also set up similar types of self-defence organisation.

Historian Keith Laybourn also notes that there were riots in a number of cities including Plymouth, Hull, Middlesbrough, Edinburgh, Preston, Crewe, Nottingham and Swansea, with the worst clashes taking place in London, Doncaster and Glasgow (with the clashes in Glasgow alone leading to 200 arrests).

All this stood in stark contrast to the instructions from Trades Union Congress leaders to “Stand Firm and Keep Order”.

Judy Cox: The TUC, the trade union leaders did make a concerted effort to appear moderate and to be moderate. They told people to be quiet, keep smiling, go home and play with the wife and kiddies in a rather patronising way. 

Matt: As a reminder, this is Judy Cox, co-author of Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When Workers Were Ready to Dare. 

Judy Cox: You have got this image of the strike as a sort of British strike; a strike where cloth-capped workers had games of footie with genial smiling Bobbies on the street and it was just a kind of community outing and sport event rather than a militant class confrontation.

Matt: ‘Bobby’ is a British term for police officer, derived from the name of Robert Peel, who set up London’s Metropolitan police in the early 19th century.

Judy Cox: One of the important things about the research that we’ve been doing is just how far many strikers went beyond peaceful picketing. They didn’t go home. They didn’t just go and play football with the Bobbies. They used all the means at their disposal to stop scabs and to fight back against the police who defended the scabs. There were very, very militant confrontations during the strikes. There were people dragged out of taxis and dragged off buses. There were trains derailed. There was the deployment of troops that marched with fixed bayonets down the Barking Road to Poplar because there had been quite a lot of confrontations in the East London docks. There were riots in Hackney. There were riots in Glasgow. I mean, these were not stoic British workers accepting the moderate line of the TUC. They were stoning scabs. They were threatening people with physical violence and, indeed, smashing up shop windows. In one instance, in Glasgow, a scab was thrown through a shop window. These were people who were fighting for their lives and they were not going to stick to some kind of peaceful, moderate narrative. They were going to fight with every means at their disposal. 

I think exposing that level of violence is important but not because anybody wants to revel in violence. We all want to focus on the great liberatory effects of the strike but it showed that British working-class people will fight tooth and nail just as militantly as any other working-class group when they have that collective sense of strike and struggle to buoy them up. It was, at times, a very violent strike for the reasons that people were fighting for their lives.

Matt: It’s thought there were at least 500 councils of action or similar bodies around the country organising the strike. And though the TUC’s last-minute planning meant most trades councils had been left waiting until late in the day to prepare, they still managed to pull off an impressive feat of organisation: councils of action set up various subcommittees, issued permits for goods which were allowed to be moved, organised picket duty at sites around their local areas, distributed hardship relief to members, made arrangements with local consumer co-ops, arranged speakers for what were sometimes huge open-air meetings, and organised recreational activities like sports and concerts.

There were also around 70 local bulletins, which would be distributed by the thousands to update people on both local and national developments in the strike. It should be said that these local bulletins went beyond the orders of TUC leaders who wanted to control all union communication on the strike and, on 10 May, ordered that all local bulletins should cease publication.

All of this is not to suggest that local councils of action were hotbeds of radicalism (though obviously there were areas where radicals played leading roles). Rather, they were disciplined trade unionists, which in some ways was actually a double-edged sword: once they received their instructions from the TUC, local trades councils faithfully put them into action (to the extent that the instructions themselves were actually clear). But this didn’t just mean calling members out on strike, but also ensuring that those who weren’t called out stayed at work. A report from York Trades Council was fairly typical in this regard: “Our greatest difficulty is to keep the men at work who should remain there, they all feel that they should be out helping in the struggle.”

While the TUC had completely failed in terms of its preparation, this was made up for by its members’ enthusiasm and willingness to support the strike.

Betty Harrison I wasn’t living in the centre of Bradford; I was living quite a good distance away… a mile and a half from the centre. To go down to the meetings, I had to walk a mile and a half but I didn’t mind walking. I ran most of the way anyway to get there [laughter] because of the strike and if there was something going on. Where I was, as there was no strike in the textile industry, there was nothing going on. It was quiet as quiet. It was just normal, except the fans weren’t running. As soon as I left work, I was rushing down and running a mile and a half to get there and to try and help this Trades Council Committee.

There was only one other girl in my shop who went with me. It was too far for them to go they said. A lot of them were married woman anyway and weren’t all youngsters like us. It was only we youngsters who were able to go down and some of us couldn’t stay all the time because some of them were like me. I was in the position that I had an invalid mother and only me to look after her. My father died in ’23. My mother and I were living together and I couldn’t leave her too long. 

From our Bradford Committee, I think about five or six of us were the only ones who were able to go and give any help. We were full of enthusiasm, although there wasn’t a right lot we could do in nine days and working during the day and just doing in the evenings. 

They got out a little sheet which was like a strike bulletin which gave us the information about what was happening in other parts of the country. That was one of the things which we used to do and go around helping to deliver them. There was no transport to send them out and the boys used to go on bikes. We girls borrowed bikes and we went too and gave them to certain people who were secretaries in factories. We gave them a number of these so that they could distribute them inside their factories.

Matt: This enthusiasm was shared also by Harry Watson who remembers how resolute East London dock workers were in supporting the strike.

Harry Watson: No, no, we didn’t get any strike pay. I wasn’t even looking for any because we were used to doing without in those days. I don’t think it worried us to that extent. It didn’t worry me anyway. It wasn’t anything fearful to us to be out of work, whether you were on strike or whether you were just out of work at the employer’s behest. We saw more dinner times than dinners. That was part of the way of life.

I don’t think the impact was all that different in the strike period as compared to any other period. It was never what you could say was more of a hand-to-mouth at any time. It wasn’t all that different in our standard of living, as it were. It didn’t alter all that much but that there was a strike on.

Matt: One way in which workers like Harry were able to continue during the strike while getting no pay was via a system that some union branches had set up with local shops.

Harry Watson: We got some tokens that we used to take along to where shops had agreed to supply us with food and the score was settled after the strike was over. Our branches were paying out cash to the various shopkeepers for goods that they’d supplied. They made sure that we had food tokens to get certain foods.

Matt: These tokens would be given to local shopkeepers who would be paid by the union on their members’ behalf, and then afterwards the member would pay back the union.

Of course, because the General Council of the TUC had left all its planning to the very last minute, arrangements like this were entirely local, which meant that the ability to get food to striking workers differed greatly from place to place. This was particularly stark in relation to the Cooperative Wholesale Society, which was a federation of consumer cooperatives rooted largely in working-class communities (and was the forerunner to the supermarket chain currently known as the ‘Co-op’). 

In some areas, local CWS coops helped trades councils significantly: in some places, they gave striking coop members credit up to the value of their usual shop (or some other fixed sum) and, in Coventry, the Cooperative Society even gave the trades council the use of a car (which is quite incredible given how rare cars were back in those days). However, in other areas, relationships were less friendly, particularly where unions were blocking the transport of Cooperative Society goods. As Emile Burns wrote in his Labour Research Department survey, “The General Council’s failure to develop its policy to meet the special needs of the Co-operatives, or to outline any plan for utilising them, was keenly felt by the [Trades] Councils during the General Strike.”

As mentioned earlier, numerous heavy clashes between strikers and police took place during the strike. This was part of a wider campaign of repression.

Judy Cox: The British ruling class had an Emergency Powers Act from 1920 which they’d invoked to suppress the Bolshies under the bed and so on after the big upswing in struggle in 1919. 

Matt: By “Bolshies under the bed”, Judy is referring to the paranoia around supporters of the Bolsheviks, the Russian communist party who came to power following the 1917 revolution, who the British ruling classes suspected of using the general strike to bring about revolution in Britain. This spectre of communism was used as an excuse for the state to try to clamp down and crush the strike, but workers were prepared to meet them head on.

[outro music]

Matt: That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. If you’d like to listen to Part 3 now, without ads, then do support us on Patreon, which is how our work is funded. There we’ll talk about how the strike was defeated through repression, the organisation of strike breakers, and the capitulation of the TUC leadership. You’ll also get access to a bonus episode in which two of the participants we’ve heard from in these episodes, Betty Harrison and Harry Watson, talk more about their life and work around the time of the strike, as well as union politics more generally.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes. 

And if you can’t spare the cash, no worries. Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

Also, be sure to check out generalstrike100.com to find out more about events commemorating the general strike in your area and beyond. You’ll also find a ton of historical markers highlighting the locations of specific incidents that took place in cities, towns, and villages around the UK during the strike itself.

Also, if you’d like to get a copy of Judy’s book, Revisiting the General Strike of 1926, you can find a link to buy a copy on the webpage for this episode. On the webpage, you’ll also find more information, including further reading, images, and sources. Link in the show notes.

Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible and a special thanks to Jazz Hands.

Our theme tune for this episode is Montaigne’s version of ‘When the Coal Comes from the Rhonda’, a folk song originating from Welsh miners in the early twentieth century and sung during the general strike. The song is performed by Montaigne, and mixed by Wave Racer. Download the song on our website. For more from Montaigne, check the links on the webpage for this episode. 

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 3

Matt: Welcome back to the final instalment of our miniseries about the British general strike of 1926. If you haven’t listened to parts one or two yet, I would go back and listen to those first.

[Intro music]

Matt: Our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work and, in return, get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, free and discounted merchandise and other content. So, as well as getting early access to all three parts of this miniseries, our supporters can also listen to an exclusive Patreon-only bonus episode with more information and context. So if you can, please join us and help us preserve and promote our history of collective struggle. Sign up and listen today at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

Where we left off last time, the strike was causing havoc around the country, and the British state tried to use all legal powers at its disposal to break the strike. The most crucial of these was the Emergency Powers Act, a law passed in 1920, which allowed for a state of emergency to be declared in the event of an action taken or threatened “on so extensive a scale as to be calculated, by interfering with the supply and distribution of food, water, fuel, or light, or with the means of locomotion”. This basically meant any big strike could result in a state of emergency being called and any disobedience punished with prison, hard labour, a fine, the seizure of goods, or any combination of all of them.

Judy Cox: They could use this to really harass the Left and to harass any oppositional voices during the strike. They invaded the Communist Party headquarters. They arrested Communists for sedition. I think well over a thousand Communist Party members were arrested during the strike which some people say is about a quarter of their whole membership.

Matt: This is Judy Cox, co-author of Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When Workers Were Ready to Dare.

Judy Cox: I think there was something like 9000 arrests altogether, so a large number of people were arrested. Some were obviously arrested during confrontations with the police but many Communists were arrested for sedition which was simply asking troops not to fire on workers, talking about international solidarity and those sorts of questions. The sitting MP for Battersea, who was a Communist MP, Shapurji Saklatvala, was arrested and sentenced to two months’ hard labour. They were very repressive and they were very prepared to use the power of the state to crush not only strikers but Communists who might be arguing for striking to go further. I think the organisation of the strike fed from the seeds of class fear that had been sown and this idea that if we don’t fight this battle, it will be the end of civilisation or the Communists are taking over.

Matt: The state cracked down severely on the Communist Party, with 374 communists being arrested on 10 May alone. And even before the strike had begun, in October 1925, twelve Communist Party leaders were arrested and charged under the Incitement to Mutiny Act from 1797. The majority of those twelve were still in prison during the general strike itself.

One Communist Party member who was arrested during the general strike was Abe Moffat, a miner in Scotland’s Fife coalfields. Unfortunately, the audio quality of this section from Abe’s interview was quite poor and might be difficult for some listeners to understand, but I’ll go over the main points afterwards and there’ll also soon be a full transcript on the webpage for this episode. Link in the show notes.

Abe Moffat: Our sentences during the ’26 strike were more for leading a riotous mob. As a matter of fact, my young brother, Alex, and another young lad, Jim Watt his name was but he got two months under that act. They got two months each under that act for leading a riotous mob.

It was mostly after the General Strike, although we got a lot of miners arrested during the General Strike; for example, for stopping the traffic on the main road, the high road to Culross. I had another brother and he was jailed during the General Strike along with another six for stopping the traffic. He was acting under the instruction of the Trades Council. At that time, you had to have a permit from the Trades Council to go up the Great North Road.

My younger brother and I were arrested for that, just at the end of the strike. It was very near the end. The strike was almost finished. There was a big mass demonstration up to this pit against the blacklegs

Matt: So, to summarise: Abe, two of his brothers, and another miner named Jim Watt all got arrested and sentenced to two months in prison for leading a riotous mob. This also happened to a number of other miners around the Fife coalfields who were arrested for stopping traffic. These traffic stops were done under the instructions of the local Trades Council, to check that vehicles had the proper permits for the goods they were carrying (and, in the event they did not, workers would refuse to allow them to continue their journey).

As for Harry Watson on the East London docks, he felt that the police were getting increasingly heavy-handed as the strike wore on.

Harry Watson: The police were becoming more and more not only truculent, as they were in the beginning, but vicious. When they were attacking the workers, they didn’t discriminate whether you were a man or a woman, whether you were a boy or a girl. If you were one of the people who were massing there, then you were fair game for their truncheons and they used to bring them down and all.

Matt: And Harry was in no uncertainty about whether those police attacks were spontaneous or premeditated.

Harry Watson: Oh no, they were under orders. It was organised. There is no question about that. Someone was giving them a signal. I don’t know who it was but it was obvious that they moved when they were told to move. They were told to move in a certain fashion and they did just that. Someone was giving them the orders. I mean we were unsuspecting of anything like that. We were there without any question or doubt in our mind about who was going to win. What did we have to do anything about it for other than stand firm, our action of being on strike and refusing to go to work? 

In a situation like that, when suddenly from behind you, you get a whack on the neck or a whack on the shoulder or the arm, your temper immediately flares. It’s an unprovoked attack whichever way you look at it, particularly in a situation like that where there’s not just one of them but dozens and dozens of them laying about them. When you see women getting hit as well, your blood boils a bloomin’ sight more. You become as vicious as they do in the finish and get down to their level in order to make them understand that they’re nothing anyway. What right and authority have they got to come barging into people like that and laying about them in the fashion that they did? Blood was being spilt everywhere as a result of it. 

No, they were being instructed. It was an organised assault on the public wherever the public was gathering at the time.

Matt: Harry’s views of state violence during the strike was no doubt informed by the lengths the government went to break the picketing of the East London docks. No more than 40 out of 14,000 dock workers were available for work, so the government had to bring scabs in by boat along the river (even using the Navy, as Harry mentioned in the last episode).

But even using strikebreakers was itself useless while East London’s docks were picketed and its surrounding streets filled with strikers. To deal with this, on Saturday 8 May, the government sent twenty armoured cars manned by soldiers to the East India Docks to escort lorries transporting goods. To top it off, a machine gun placed at the dock gates was trained on the strikers to discourage any attempts to interfere with the convoy.

Despite this, strikers across the country remained resolute. For the most part, workers continued to respect the strike and clashes even continued in numerous places around the UK while more workers were gearing up to be called out as part of the ‘second line’ of the strike. By contrast, however, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress was seeking ways to bring the strike to an end.

Judy Cox: This is one of the most criminal, inexplicable capitulations. When you read the accounts of how the strike was getting stronger and how people were still coming out on strike and yet the trade union leaders, at some point, begin to fear that they’re going to lose control and that more workers are going to come out on strike. So, they begin to move from saying, ‘We’re going to stand by the miners. We’re not going to let the miners fight alone,’ because this whole strike is about solidarity with the miners. It’s not about people fighting for their own pay rise. It’s all about standing by the miners. They begin to say, ‘The miners are living in a fool’s paradise if they don’t think they’re going to accept wage cuts.’ There’s the carving out of the miners and their leaders and these negotiations begin.

Matt: Much of these negotiations were based around the report of the Samuel Commission, named after its chairman, Sir Herbert Samuel, the former High Commissioner of British colonial Palestine. The report was published in March 1926 and recommended a number of reforms to the mining industry. However, those reforms most beneficial to the miners (like amalgamating smaller mines into larger, more efficient ones) were to be postponed for the future. Meanwhile, the immediate reforms it suggested were around the reduction of wages either through increased hours or straightforward pay cuts. The report also stopped short of calling for nationalisation.

Unsurprisingly, the miners’ union rejected this, but other leaders on the TUC’s General Council insisted on pushing through an agreement based on the Samuel report. They met multiple times with Samuel during the strike and lobbied him to encourage the government that the strike could be brought to an end on the basis of his report. However, the government repeatedly rejected Samuel’s offer of mediation and underlined that no negotiations could take place until the strike had been completely called off. As the strike wore on and the TUC’s desperation to call off the strike became increasingly obvious, the position of the government hardened.

But among the rank and file, workers were still standing by the strike, despite the claims of union leaders to the contrary.

Judy Cox: They start rumours that the strike is crumbling. One of their biggest tactics is to say, ‘Really, it’s crumbling,’ and people are saying, ‘That’s strange because it’s not crumbling around here.’ But there’s no national network where people can exchange alternative views. They start these rumours that the strike is crumbling and the truth is they’re fearful of losing control of it. One of the people involved, a rank-and-file worker, says in a brilliant quote, ‘They were more afraid of winning than they were of losing.’ They couldn’t envisage that. It was better for them to lose and to leave the miners to fight on alone.

Matt: As an example of this, Ben Turner, the Textile Workers’ Union representative at the TUC, claimed that workers were abandoning the strike, particularly in the railway centres. Similarly, John Bromley, leader of ASLEF, the train divers’ union, also claimed his members were going back to work.

But as the government’s own statistics show, the percentage of railway workers still out on the final day of the strike was mostly 90% or more (with engine drivers, fire and motormen in particular being closer to 98%). The main exception to this were clerical and supervisory workers, most of whom were unable to drive trains anyway. And according to the TUC’s own internal intelligence report on the morning of 12 May, “reports coming into this office do not confirm or explain the government’s claims [that large numbers of rail workers were returning to work]”.

On Wednesday 12 May 1926, what the TUC had referred to as the ‘second line’ of workers were due to be called out to join the general strike. But instead, at midday, a delegation from the TUC arrived at 10 Downing Street to meet the Prime Minister and were only let in once they’d confirmed they were there to call off the strike. Despite hopes this would allow for negotiations around a “satisfactory settlement” to the dispute, TUC leaders left without having the chance to discuss either their members’ return to work or what would happen to the miners and the Samuel Memorandum that they’d pinned their hopes on.

Shortly after one o’clock, the BBC announced that the TUC’s first and only general strike was over. For many workers, this could only have meant one thing.

Harry Watson: When the news came through that the strike was over, we were overjoyed. We’d won. It never dawned on us that the strike had been called off in that situation. We thought the only reason it would be called off was because we’d won. It wasn’t until some hours afterwards when it came through that it had been called off and it had been a capitulation by the trade union leaders of that time. Of course, when that came through, it was terrifyingly… I think there was more resentment and more signs then of spontaneous violence from the men and women, in the East End, at the sell out than they had ever been right the way through up until then in the strike itself. That’s what caused the eruptions. 

As I say, it was such a transformation from being happy, singing and everybody dancing at the end of the strike and presupposing that it had been won. There was all kinds of gaiety and it was some hours later when we did find out and it was hard to believe to begin with. 

When it was established and we understood that it was a betrayal or nothing short of a betrayal, I might say that the trade union leadership, as such, was… in my opinion, the cause of a lot of the disgust that was shown by the men in leaving trade unions and ceasing membership of trade unions after that. That was their way of showing their disgust with people who were supposed in positions of trust and authority and supposed to be giving leadership and guidance… generals supposed to be leading the army in battle, as it were, abandoning winning positions and turning tail and leaving the army, as it were, to clear up the mess afterwards. That was a terrible experience really. It was one I never forgot or forgave either.

Matt: We’ll be right back after these messages. If you want to listen to our podcast without ads, join us on Patreon, where as well as early access to episodes, you can also listen to an additional Patreon-only bonus episode for our general strike miniseries. Support from our listeners on Patreon is the only way were able to devote the time and money it takes to make this podcast. Learn more and join us at patreon.com/WorkingClassHistory. Link in the show notes.

[ad break]

Matt: For Betty Harrison, a textile worker who was due to be called out as part of the ‘second line’ of strikers, the betrayal was not a big surprise.

Betty Harrison: We just said rude words because the working-class people never did trust Baldwin or any of those people, particularly those of us who came from mining families. I don’t think anyone in the working-class movement, in the Bradford area, believed Baldwin. We thought he was on their side and we thought he was just giving us nice words to calm down the workers and, of course, it proved to be true that he was just making nice sounds to try and get the workers to sell out. The nice sounds apparently convinced the TUC and they gave up the strike in a very short time.

Judy Cox: They kind of went crawling back to Downing Street and said, ‘We accept these conditions.’ Of course, the government and the mineowners, who stood behind them, smelt blood and they said, ‘No: no negotiations, no conditions. You come back. It’s a complete and utter surrender.’ The trade union leaders said, ‘Okay, hands up. It’s a complete and utter surrender.’ They went back with no guarantees that workers wouldn’t be victimised and no guarantees at all, having won absolutely nothing.

So, they span it. They said, ‘We’ve shown that the miners won’t fight alone. We’ve shown this great solidarity.’ They pretended it wasn’t a huge defeat but it absolutely was. There was a huge, huge rage amongst the millions of people who had been out on strike in solidarity with the miners.

If you read any of the memoirs and accounts, people said, ‘We heard the news and we didn’t believe it.’ People were crying and people refused to accept that this was what had happened. A deluge of telegrams was sent to the TUC leaders saying, ‘Why? We’re furious. We can’t believe this. We’re still out.’ Many people testified to the fact that there were more people out the day after the strike was called off than the day that the trade union leaders said it was crumbling because people were furious. There were people who went back to work, were humiliated and walked out again. There was this great groundswell of fury from people but, of course, it had nowhere to go. There was no national rank-and-file network that was capable of saying, ‘Let’s not go back. Let’s forge a different path. Let’s keep fighting.’ Had there been such a thing, the result could have been different because there was no way the strike was crumbling.

Matt: Betty was in no uncertainty about who workers were most angry with at the end of the strike.

Betty Harrison: The TUC. Most of the workers, at that time in Britain, expected the employers to be backed up by the government and we didn’t expect anything but methods of any kind and every kind to push us back and to keep us down. When the TUC looked as if it was going to do something at last by welding the workers together to fight this opposition of government and employers, which we classed as one, then there was a high hope tinged with apprehension. Now I come to think of it, we were never quite sure whether it was going to come off or not [laughter]. The bitterness was with the TUC to a large extent.

I think, to some extent, we were not surprised when they called it off… if I can cast my mind back as far as that. We were furious, we were upset and we were disgusted but I think, in our hearts, we weren’t surprised because we didn’t think that they were the kind of people who were prepared to face the deeper issues of such a thing. The General Strike didn’t set out to be a revolutionary movement nor was it ever revolutionary in content as far as the TUC were concerned. It was a revolution in the fact that there had never been a general strike before and never been as much cooperation between the unions to work together for a common end. We hadn’t all that much confidence in that TUC. 

As I say, I don’t think we were really very surprised when it didn’t last very long, although we were hoping that it would develop and the workers would get something out of it. The failure of the General Strike was the end of hopes for advancement for the workers for many years and the bitterness… which I don’t think has ever gone. I think even the younger ones, who are now in their 20s and 30s, when they hear or read of the General Strike, feel something of the bitterness that we felt at the time.

Matt: Ultimately, the strike was called off just as it was about to be extended because the leaders on the TUC’s General Council had simply never wanted (or even expected) to go on strike in the first place (as was clear from the complete lack of preparation until literally the days before). Rail union leader, James Thomas, was probably the most exaggerated (and, at times, ridiculous) example of this: before the strike had even begun, he was worried that members of the General Council would be shot by Britain’s nascent fascist movement. And when miners’ union leaders asked him for assurances that the government would accept the Samuel proposals, Thomas replied, “You may not trust my word, but will you accept the word of a British Gentleman who has been the Governor of Palestine?”

What really scared TUC leaders was hinted at in another passage from the intelligence report mentioned previously. Specifically, where it said: 

many reports show that the strike is extending and that factories and workshops not directly involved are slowing down or shutting down […] The situation is one in which we are holding our own. But the Government’s organisation is improving, and its policy is gradually becoming more aggressive. Every day the intensity of the struggle will increase.

Two things were increasingly becoming clear: first, that in order to win, TUC leaders would have to match the intensity of a struggle they never wanted in the first place. And, second, that in the absence of direction from the centre, local trades councils were taking the initiative themselves. The attitude of the TUC to this local initiative was best summed up by Thomas himself in a speech to parliament the day after the strike was called off: “what I dreaded about this strike more than anything else was this: if by any chance it should have got out of the hands of those who would be able to exercise some control, every sane man knows what would have happened. I thank God it never did.”

We spoke earlier about the myriad of tasks taken on by local councils of action during the strike. But to really get an idea for how well they responded, there is no better text than Emile Burns’ excellent survey for the Labour Research Department called General Strike: Trades Councils in Action. As Burns explains, local trades councils were 

suddenly asked to take on a new and urgent task, without any but the vaguest suggestion of how they should carry it out. […] With very few exceptions indeed the councils displayed an energy and initiative to an extent that astonished all who had known them in the preceding period. […] Councils […] became the real expression of the local movement.

It was this energy and initiative which so terrified union leaders like Thomas. Ultimately, however, this level of initiative was not enough to resist the call back to work. And with the strike called off, the government and employers soon took advantage.

Judy Cox: It was heartbreaking because, for a few days, people held off and Stanley Baldwin said, ‘We want responsible trade unionism. We don’t want to destroy the unions. We want these institutions that we can negotiate with.’ Within a few weeks, once the first wave of fury at the sellout had died down, the bosses absolutely went on the offensive. There was huge victimization and bitterness that lasted for years and years. The miners fought on until November when they, too, had to admit defeat with terrible wage cuts and attacks on working conditions. 

In 1927, the government passes the Trade Union Dispute Act which outlaws solidarity strikes. You have employers victimising militants and, indeed, anybody who has been on strike and then you have the employers imposing an open shop instead of the closed shop that the trade unionists had fought for. You could only come to work if you renounced the union and then you have the government legislating against solidarity strikes in the trade union disputes. 

The combination of the employers and the government meant they were going to make sure, as far as they could, that this would never happen again. Never again would you have two million workers out in support of another million miners in our country. 

Matt: When the TUC called off the strike, they released a message telling members returning to work to not accept any changes to their conditions from before the strike. Desperate to demonstrate its respectability, the message continued: 

our whole duty is to forget all recrimination, let employers act with generosity and workers give their whole hearts loyally to their work […] It is of utmost importance that the whole of the British people should not look backward but forward and resume work in a spirit of co-operation and good will, putting behind them all malice and vindictiveness.

Employers, however, were not so willing to put that malice and vindictiveness behind them, as Chesterfield rail worker and member of the National Union of Railwaymen, CS Hollis, remembers.

CS Hollis: The General Council of the TUC ordered a general return to work on 12th May but the railwaymen continued on strike for another two days because the railway company would not, at first, promise a general reinstatement of the strikers. Even after an improved settlement that had been negotiated on 14th May, many men were employed only on a part-time basis until April 1927. 

Matt: The agreement that Hollis mentions here was the one reached by the railway companies with the three rail unions. As part of the agreement, rail companies agreed to take workers back on the basis of seniority, but only as and when work could be found for them. The unions were also forced to admit the strike was a wrongful act and undertake to ensure that no similar action would ever happen again. As a result of this agreement, 45,000 rail workers remained out of work for some time, and meanwhile, employers would come back to take away the guaranteed work week as well.

CS Hollis: So, as I say, it was this which not only affected me but it affected one or two more men. One man, in particular, was a release signalman and another one who was then known as a relief porter which covered a variety of grades other than portering. They were all men with lengthy railway service but it was junior in that particular grade. The result was that there were three of us, the other two chaps I mentioned and myself, who didn’t get to start for six weeks.

Quite honestly, we got a bit despondent. I’d lost my father in 1925 and my mother didn’t get a widow’s pension because I was over 16. At that time, if you’d got a son over 16, you didn’t get one because it was regarded then as a fortune, I suppose. So, there was my mother and myself here and for six weeks, we managed on 24 bob a week. That was the NUR strike pay. 

Matt: ‘Bob’ here was another word for a shilling. In today’s money, Hollis and his mum spent a month and a half living off what would now be the equivalent of about £36, or $48, a week.

CS Hollis: We used to go and grab this strike pay once a week and, obviously, we got very, very despondent. As I say, there was just us particular three out. Along the railways, although we weren’t started at all, the guaranteed week was suspended in order to allow men to work because they said there wasn’t the work for them. So, the unions agreed to suspend the guaranteed week and chaps were working four days a week. Eventually, after six weeks, we got back and we got back on to four days a week. Some weeks were four weeks and some weeks, we only got three days and then you went a full week. As I say, of course, until 1927 when things started to get a bit more settled up, that was the position. They came out on strike and, as I say, it was a general strike but we gained absolutely nothing from it… nothing at all. I don’t think there’s much more I can tell you really.

Matt: This experience on the railways was fairly general throughout the UK. On 15 May, employers in the printing trades came to an agreement with the printers’ union that allowed workers to be rehired, but only as and when they were required. The agreement also accepted short time work, and allowed no holidays to those who’d walked out with no notice. The following day, London newspaper workers were told management could hire and fire staff as they wished, and that union meetings could no longer be held during working hours. Around 1900 bus and transport workers never got their jobs back at all.

And, of course, in all this, over a million miners were still locked out, having refused to return to work after the strike was called off.

Judy Cox: The miners had these incredible traditions and many of them were influenced by Communist Party politics. They were seen as the vanguard of the working class, to use that phrase. They fought on and were determined to fight on. They experienced terrible hardship but also that sense of collective power and a little bit of that glimpse of liberation that we talked about earlier. They did have to organise collectively. They dug their gardens and they made use of everything. The miners’ wives turned sour milk into cheese. It was, basically, a huge community effort.

Matt: The importance of miners’ wives to the struggles of their husbands was something that continued for decades after the general strike. In our episodes 108 and 109, we cover the involvement of miners’ wives during the 1984-85 miners’ strike in the UK.

The miners even got support from the Soviet Union, whose trade unions sent a substantial sum of money, as did groups of workers elsewhere as well.

Judy Cox: And they got lots and lots of support from other workers, both in this country and abroad. Organisations associated with the Communist International did a lot of fundraising in support, including among German miners in the Ruhr. Again, that’s a wonderful thing when you think that only eight years earlier, people had been fighting each other with bayonets and now there was international solidarity of people giving money to the Welsh miners. There were a lot of flashpoints, again, with the police and miners, particularly miners’ wives surrounding Poor Relief centres that refused to pay up. They tried to change all the laws so that miners and their families couldn’t get Poor Relief which they were entitled to.

So, there was already a contentious aspect to Poor Relief. There was a legal case at the end of the 19th century which stipulated that miners’ families were entitled to Poor Relief. The ruling suggested it could also be claimed by striking miners’ families but not miners themselves. There was this debate about whether people’s families should be entitled to it. The local ratepayers didn’t like this because they thought they were subsidising strikers by supporting strikers’ families and helping workers to stay out longer. There was a big contestation about whether Poor Relief should be paid to miners and they said, ‘If we give it to miners’ families, what are they going to do? They’re going to share it with the striking miners, so we can’t do that.’ There were a lot of arguments from the national government against local government because in the mining areas, the Poor Law guardians were likely to be miners, ex-miners or related to miners and tended to treat them more sympathetically than the ratepayers and the national government wanted.

Matt: This pressure from national government to stop providing miners’ families with Poor Relief meant that some local Boards of Guardians began to cut them off entirely. One such place was in Westbury-on-Severn in the south west of England where, in response to being cut off from Poor Relief, 300 miners’ wives and their children occupied the local workhouse.

Women also played a role in confronting scabs including, in some places, through the practice of something called ‘white-shirting’.

Judy Cox: In a lot of the mining communities, white-shirting had been used as a way of humiliating women who stepped out of line and were ‘immoral’ or who were scolds. They’d be forced to wear a white dress, strapped in a wheelbarrow and paraded around the town. But during the miners’ lockout, this was reversed. Women would get scabs, they would strip them, put them in a white shirt, tie them into a wheelbarrow and wheel them around town to accordion music.

The other thing they would do was hang a pole with women’s underwear on outside their bedroom window so that when they woke up in the morning, what they would see is a pair of women’s pants being waved at them on a stick as a threat that they were going to be white-shirted. I love the fact that women took on what was a deeply misogynistic tradition and turned it into an expression of class vengeance against the scabs who were breaking the strike.

Matt: Ultimately, after seven months locked out from the mines, the miners were starved back to work. In the final settlement, everything the miners had fought for over the years was torn away from them: where they’d sought a national agreement for conditions, they were forced to accept settlements on a district by district basis. The hours they worked were longer than they’d been before the strike and their pay, in many cases, was now lower than what they had earned when they’d worked those shorter hours. It was a defeat whose effects were felt for many years.

Abe Moffat: Well, it had a demoralising effect on the movement. There’s no doubts on that. It had a demoralising effect on the miners. I’m talking about the period after ’26. There’s no doubts about it. They were demoralised and they only began to revive a bit in the ‘30s when the Miners’ Federation, at that time, decided to make a claim for an increase of two shillings a shift. It’s not much but it was something at that time.

Matt: While Abe notes that the demoralisation of the miners lasted well into the thirties, the effects of the strike’s defeat were felt far beyond the UK’s mining villages. A year after the general strike, the government passed the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act, which made solidarity strikes illegal and placed restrictions on picketing so vague, yet also so severe, that it basically made any kind of picketing liable to prosecution. That year also saw union membership fall by hundreds of thousands to a low not seen since 1916. And the two years following the general strike saw the number of workers involved in industrial disputes drop to little more than 100,000, the lowest number since 1905.

During the 1926 dispute, as well as the months leading up to it, the general strike was absurdly portrayed in the media as part of a Bolshevik conspiracy to overthrow the British state. In the aftermath, however, it became important to downplay its seriousness and portray the strike as essentially a non-event. From being a revolutionary threat to the rule of law, it supposedly became a ‘Very British Strike’ marked by good cheer and fair play on all sides.

Yet, as these episodes show, the strike and its aftermath were marked by bitter struggle, clashes between police and strikers across the country, and the military mobilised against its own population. And despite its defeat, the general strike and subsequent miners’ lockout cost British trade around £400 million, the equivalent of over £21 billion today.

Ultimately, the strike was probably lost long before the General Council’s humiliating capitulation. As is often said, battles are won or lost before they are fought. In the case of the general strike, it was arguably lost when, after Red Friday, the government began planning for a showdown with the unions while union leaders sat on their hands and did nothing until the very last minute. Workers showed their willingness to respect the call to walk out, but the nuts and bolts of how to conduct the strike, how to ensure strikers could be fed, and how to share information (whether locally between strike committees, regionally between trades councils, or nationally with union leaders) was all left to be worked out on the fly. Even the idea of the TUC publishing its own newspaper, the British Worker, only came about once the strike had already started, almost as an afterthought.

It took a full decade after the strike for union membership to recover. And, while still generally lower than the years before the general strike, the numbers of workers involved in industrial disputes continued to grow as well (even during the war when strikes were actually illegal). And once the war was over, miners engaged in a wave of wildcat strikes, which were still illegal under those wartime laws, against the recently-elected Labour government’s policy of wage restraint (it should be noted, that the General Council of the TUC sided with the government’s wage restraint policy and against its own members).

Soon, after decades upon decades of struggle, Britain’s coal mines were nationalised and a nationwide system of collective bargaining instituted alongside a host of other social democratic reforms, like the National Health Service.

However, while the postwar era began to lay some of the ghosts of the general strike to rest, there nonetheless remained a great regret for many participants for what might have been.

Harry Watson: ‘Bastards!’ I used to think to myself… ‘They’re stringing us along again with a lot of bleedin’ old twaddle.’ Even if they hadn’t have won, if they’d have had a go or one could sense that they were having a go. Alright, you can get beat. Nobody is critical of that. We all get beat sometimes but you learn lessons from being beaten. To avoid that one again the next time… alright, you could be beaten again on something different but you learn from that. Each time, the chances of getting beaten get less with each time. That’s if you’re sincere about what it is that you’re involving yourself with. You go into this thing to learn, and learn to win.

[outro music]

Matt: That’s it for our miniseries on the 1926 general strike. If you enjoyed that and want to hear more from two of the strike’s participants, we also have a bonus episode with Betty Harrison and Harry Watson exclusively on Patreon in which they talk more about their life and work around the time of the strike, as well as union politics more generally.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes. 

And if you can’t spare the cash, no worries. Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

Also, be sure to check out generalstrike100.com to find out more about events commemorating the general strike in your area and beyond. You’ll also find a ton of historical markers highlighting the locations of specific incidents that took place in cities, towns, and villages around the UK during the strike itself.

Also, if you’d like to get a copy of Judy’s book, Revisiting the General Strike of 1926, you can find a link to buy a copy on the webpage for this episode. On the webpage, you’ll also find more information, including further reading, images, and sources. Link in the show notes.

Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible and a special thanks to Jazz Hands.

Our theme tune for this episode is Montaigne’s version of ‘When the Coal Comes from the Rhondda’, a folk song originating from Welsh miners in the early twentieth century and sung during the general strike. The song is performed by Montaigne and mixed by Wave Racer. You can find a link to download the song on our website: all proceeds going to Medical Aid for Palestinians. For more from Montaigne, check the links on the webpage for this episode. 

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

If you value our work please take a second to support Working Class History on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

Published by Working Class History

History isn't made by kings or politicians, it is made by us: billions of ordinary people.