Double podcast episode about the Trinidad general strike of 1937, in conversation with Ryan Cecil Jobson.

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You can listen to our podcast on the below links, or on any major podcast app. Links to a few below.

  • Part 1: The background of British colonialism on the island, the conditions of the working class and poor, racial divisions, and the beginnings of unemployed and worker agitation in the 1930s

E75: Trinidad general strike, part 1 – Working Class History

  • Part 2: The general strike itself, the repression, the aftermath, its consequences and lessons for us today

E76: Trinidad general strike, part 2 – Working Class History

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Ryan Cecil Jobson

Sources

Sources used by WCH over the course of these episodes.

Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.
  • Episode graphic: public domain.
  • Edited by Jesse French
  • Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.

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Transcript

Part 1

In 1937, as part of a wave of protest sweeping the Caribbean, workers in Trinidad rose up against the most powerful empire in the world. Domestic workers, oil workers, agricultural workers, landless peasants and unemployed people defied their employers, the police, British colonial troops and even their own union and political leaders in a self organised mass strike. This is Working Class History.

[Intro music]

Before we get started, just a reminder 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, free and discounted merchandise and other content. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

This week we’re going to be talking about the workers’ rebellion in Trinidad and Tobago in 1937. Trinidad is the largest island in the Caribbean country, which is where most of our story today takes place.

Joining us is Ryan Jobson, academic and author of a forthcoming book on the oil industry and its workers in Trinidad and Tobago.

Ryan Jobson: I’m an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. A bit about my academic background: I actually completed my PhD in African American studies and anthropology from Yale University in 2017. While I was there, I wrote a dissertation on the history and politics of fossil fuels and postcolonial state development in Trinidad and Tobago that also has formed the basis of my first book manuscript which is currently in progress. I’ve conducted research intermittently in Trinidad since 2010. That’s when I first ventured to Trinidad for my undergraduate thesis research but I lived in Trinidad from 2014 to 2015 when I conducted the bulk of my research on both national and trade union archives and also ethnographic research on oil and gas technocrats and also clusters of popular protests around state-led infrastructure projects that were funded by oil and gas revenue like highways and aluminium smelters chief among them. On a more personal note, I grew up in Woodstock, New York which is upstate New York and has its own radical history which perhaps we could delve into on another day. I have a father who hails from Saint Elizabeth in West Jamaica and a mother from Brooklyn who is both of Caribbean and African American heritage. I should add that my paternal family worked in the bauxite industry in Jamaica which laid the foundation for my interest in labour extractive industries and also just the long history of capital in the Caribbean. So certainly, these topics are very close to me.

Before getting onto the 1930s, let’s start off, as we usually do, with a bit of historical background. Trinidad was inhabited by numerous Indigenous Taíno and Carib peoples, including the Nepoya, Seppoya, and Yao, until the island was colonised by Spain after the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Spanish colonists established a sugar colony there, and before long most of the Indigenous people had either been killed, worked to death, or driven into exile.

The colony switched hands a few times between different European powers, including France and Britain, and was eventually officially ceded to Britain. After the genocide of the Indigenous peoples, colonial authorities imported enslaved Africans to work on the plantations.

Slavery was eventually officially abolished in Britain’s Caribbean colonies in 1834. Apologists for the British Empire often point to this as being a great benevolent act, however, the reality is that Britain was forced to abolish slavery in the region following huge uprisings of enslaved people in Guyana and Jamaica in the 1820s and 30s. Furthermore, although they claimed to abolish slavery in 1834, they actually forced enslaved people to continue to work without pay for their former enslavers for 45 hours per week for the next four years.

And rather than pay compensation to the enslaved people, the British government paid an enormous sum to the enslavers, to compensate them for the loss of their “property”. This payout was £20 million at the time, or 40% of the entire British government budget that year. For a bit of a comparison, 40% of the UK government budget for 2021 was over £400 billion. The debt the government incurred as a result was only eventually paid off in 2015, and lots of rich and powerful people in the UK today can trace their wealth back to this payout, including the former Conservative prime minister David Cameron and his wife.

Outside the Caribbean, slavery continued in other colonies and British-controlled areas for many years. For example, in the 1960s, Labour and Conservative governments sent troops to defend the sultan of Oman, where slavery was legal until 1970.

Anyway, that’s a slight digression, but that’s something I always think is worth pointing out, both in terms of what the British Empire was actually like, and also in terms of responding to anyone claiming that the government doesn’t have money to pay for any public services, as it does show that the government can basically get its hands on any amount of money it likes at any time, as long as it actually wants to.

So this was the general historical background of Trinidad, but for the purposes of saving time we’re going to skip forwards about 100 years and see what the situation was for working class people in the colony then.

I guess there’s a way to introduce Trinidad in the 1930s. What defines the decade as Trinidad enters the ‘30s is, of course, depression. Like much of the world, Trinidad enters the decade in the throes of depression but I think it might be helpful to step back a little bit to also point out that the 1930s in Trinidad is just approaching the centennial of emancipation in the British West Indies which, of course, is between 1834 and 1838 where slavery comes to a formal end. Also, Trinidad is just over a decade removed from the end of the indenture system which is what followed emancipation and brought predominantly South Asian labourers to work on sugar plantations until that system ended in 1970. Just as an anecdote, the Kala Pani was the name they gave the parallel to Middle Passage that brought, again, indentured labourers from India, often for a time, they used the very same slave ships that carried African people to the Americas. So there were very clear parallels about the fact that that new racialised labouring ethic was going to be defined, in many respects, by the same infrastructures as the previous. Trinidad, though, was sort of exceptional in that it had a very short period of intensified plantation slavery before emancipation in 1934. First, under Spanish rule, there were mostly French planters that came to the island at the invitation of the Spanish Crown which was due to the Cedula de Poblacion of 1783 and then it is only after Britain seizes the island from the Spanish in 1797 that you see the arrival also of British planters from what they called the ‘old islands’; so from Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and from other parts of the Eastern Caribbean. So Trinidad has a very short period of plantation slavery compared to, say, Barbados or Jamaica. Much of what we understand to be the working class in Trinidad in 1937 actually had their immediate or recent origins elsewhere. We can think about, again, descendants of indentured labourers from South Asia but also predominantly migrant labourers of African descent from elsewhere in the Caribbean who were seeking opportunities for work after the decline of West Indian sugar, particularly because of the advent of beet sugar in Europe which displaced their market. When we talk about the working class in Trinidad in 1937, you can barely call it a national working class. This was a profoundly regional and you could even say a transoceanic and certainly circum-Caribbean labour movement. They all had their origins in many different places.

As far as the economic basis for the primary industries in Trinidad in the 1930s, I would say it was more heavy industry and agriculture. Particularly in the latter half of the decade, we start to see Trinidad emerge out of the depression as the oil industry expands, particularly due to the British Navy converting its fleet from coal to oil. Actually, that was Winston Churchill, prior to becoming the Prime Minister, who embarked on that shift for the Navy and also anticipated the outbreak of war in Europe. So in ’37, Trinidad is the single largest supplier of oil to Great Britain. There had been a commercial oil industry since 1908. In agriculture, sugar continued to decline but there was still a large contingent of sugar estate workers who were predominantly South Asian and who remained in Trinidad. Other industries that were significant at this time were especially cocoa but also coffee, limes, bananas as well as asphalt from Lake Asphalt coming from the naturally occurring Pitch Lake in La Brea which was also exported to metropolitan locations, especially to pave roads. That’s the working class that entered the scene in the 1930s in Trinidad.

So there was a large population of South Asian people working in agriculture, and a more international Black working class in heavy industry, as well as a significant number of landless peasants. As across the rest of the British Caribbean, there were high levels of poverty and discontent.

. I mean problems certainly abounded in the 1930s in Trinidad. This is why a lot of historians have referred to it as the turbulent ‘30s. I would say if we look to the workers themselves and what they were articulating, the primary problems they faced were depressed wages, unemployment and inflation. We can think about the primary causes of this: the global economic depression, the decline of West India sugar and also a kind of broader condition of ‘imperial neglect’ as my colleague, Chris Taylor, has put it and their work on the 19th century Caribbean. There’s this sort of understanding of being British subjects but also being neglected by the empire: they are not being protected and not receiving their basic means of survival. Another set of problems that confronted workers in this period was also environmental conditions. We often think about climate change and natural disasters as a more contemporary issue but Trinidad actually had a particularly tough time in the 1930s. Trinidad actually sits outside of the Caribbean hurricane belt. It’s the southernmost island in the Eastern Caribbean chain, just seven miles from the Venezuelan mainland at the closest point. But in 1933, a rare hurricane does strike Trinidad which destroys crops and farmland across much of South Trinidad and Central Trinidad. We also see then a drought that persists through the early 1930s which really imperiled sugar estate workers in particular. As food prices went up as a result of inflation, workers would often plant these unsanctioned plots of provisions to subsist on as a way to navigate the crisis but literally, the environmental conditions made it very difficult to carry that forward successfully. The environmental problems affected, again, both Black and South Asian workers alike. I guess the last set of problems that you see articulated by workers are around conditions of housing, malnutrition and disease. We see that both on sugar estates as well in the oil company towns that begin to emerge around the oilfields, particularly in South Trinidad. I would say if there’s one word that would encapsulate all of this above all else and one that consistently is on the mouths of workers at this time, it would be hunger. Not only were the workers literally hungry, like I said, because of all of these crises that affected their means of subsistence, but they also organised explicitly on the basis of hunger.

Workers responded to this hunger with protest.

Throughout the 1930s, we see a number of spontaneous uprisings first of Indian sugar workers from the Caroni sugar estate and other estates in Central Trinidad and later by the predominantly Black but not exclusively oilfield workers and unemployed people from South Trinidad. They collectively would organise what they called ‘hunger marches.’ They would basically march the entirety of the island up to the colonial government in Port of Spain and also they would confront the estate wardens in Chaguanas and Caroni. Here, they actually articulated some pretty radical demands and it’s kind of striking in the archive when they’re demanding things like a jobs guarantee, food services or even things like a universal wage for the unemployed which, again, is something that we think of as a very contemporary idea but is already being floated by the workers themselves at this time. So certainly, hunger defines especially that first half of the 1930s or really as a sort of central prelude to the outbreak of the general strike in 1937.

As is usually the case, researching people’s history, ordinary people often don’t have the ability to keep records which get preserved for historians themselves, so while it’s not possible to see exactly how workers organised these protests, you can still piece bits together from official archives.

For example, one key organiser of these early protests was Elma Francois, a labour organiser from St Vincent. She was particular active agitating amongst employed and unemployed workers of African descent, and she had a regular public speaking spot in Woodford Square in the capital, Port of Spain. Francois was arrested by the British and tried for sedition, apparently the first woman on the island to face such charges, but she defended herself in court and was acquitted.

In some ways, that’s a quandary of the colonial archive in that we don’t get insights into how they organised themselves. What I can say is that they did so without any formal organisation assisting them most often. These things emerged, again, spontaneously. You see it, especially if you look at the archives of colonial officials that are actually housed up in Kew in West London. You see that they’re shocked by these uprisings and that they’re unexpected. They want to enquire into the causes of these disturbances even though, in some ways, you would think that the causes like drought and hunger were fairly palpable and obvious. I think what’s so interesting about this is precisely the fact that over the long period of the 1930s, you see workers agitating on their own in a much different way than they had in prior decades. There were general strikes and spontaneous uprisings like the waterfront strike in 1919 but they often maintain close ties to either a trade union bureaucracy or the Working Men’s Association which functioned in that capacity at the time. So again, in 1934, when sugar estate workers are on the march from Caroni, this is shocking for colonial officials and, again, that same sort of model is taken up by oilfield workers who are predominantly of African descent in South Trinidad and really are demonstrating their ability to take the reins themselves of what you might call a labour movement but to them was really just agitating for basic rights and provisions.

There was a hunger march on Port of Spain in June 1933, a large unemployed protest in 1934, a riot by plantation workers in July 1934, who were complaining of a lack of work. We have lots of these protests browsable on our people’s history Map, at map.workingclasshistory.com, and on our timeline of Trinidad and Tobago history in our Stories app at stories.workingclasshistory.com, links in the show notes.

Now, while these protests were largely self-organised by working class people themselves, there was an established left and trade union officialdom which considered itself representative of the working class.

Certainly, as I mentioned, you had a trade union bureaucracy or what then they would call labour leaders in North Trinidad, particularly in Port of Spain, the capital city, and again the most cosmopolitan city. Although, I guess that’s a troubling word because, again, South Trinidad was deeply cosmopolitan and had many languages and sites of national origin but it was perceived as more cosmopolitan. I think, actually, that is the key here. In Port of Spain, you had organisations like the Trinidad Labour Party which emerged out of the Trinidad Working Men’s Association and was led by Arthur Cipriani. Of course, Cipriani was famously known as the Champion of the Barefoot Man. He was a white Corsican creole. He was born in Trinidad, he was Trinidadian and he was a veteran of World War I or the Great War in the West India Regiment where he famously clamoured for self-government in the West Indies. Of course, CLR James writes one of his most earliest manuscripts called The Life of Captain Cipriani which is also published as an abridged pamphlet called The Case for West Indian Self-Government.

We at WCH are big fans of CLR James, a Trinidadian socialist historian, anti-colonial activist, journalist and cricket aficionado. We’ve got a number of his works available in our online store, link in the show notes.

So the working class in this period adored Cirpriani in the aftermath, particularly, of the 1919 waterfront strike. He sort of represents the vanguard of the Trinidad Labour Party. You also have organisations like the Negro Welfare, Cultural and Social Association which was led by Black communists like Elma Francois and Jim Headley but again, both were based in the urban area in Port of Spain in the North of the island. As the ’30s proceeds, we see that the trade union bureaucracy begins to be more distant from the sites of working-class agitation. Cipriani, in particular, at this point, has cemented himself on the colonial Legislative Council. He moves from agitation in the West India Regiment and with the Working Men’s Association to be part of the political class. When workers were staging these hunger marches spontaneously, Cipriani would often call for their patience and restraint. He seemed to be more interested, at this point, in preserving colonial order and the proper channels of redress that, for him, would be his organisation, the Trinidad Labour Party.

We see that the location of the workers’ insurgency shifted. The Negro Welfare, Cultural and Social Association, which I mentioned, did develop closer ties with the workers in South Trinidad. They also end up becoming a kind of competitor to the TLT (Trinidad Labour Party) at this time but certainly, the hunger marches demonstrated the capacity of workers to organise and move independently of the trade union vanguard. In that way, they were taking on the British colonial empire, the labour leaders and the trade union bureaucracy alike.

In addition to hunger marches, demanding change from authorities, working class and poor people in Trinidad also took more direct action to improve their situation themselves. One crucial example of this was land takeovers, or squatting.

Well, what I will say is that squatting was a key strategy of survival during this period. So again, you do have sugar estate workers who are embarking on these hunger marches. You have oilfield workers but in the broadest sense, they’re also being joined by the unemployed. They’re being joined by those who were being abandoned by these industries, who can’t find gainful employment and who are rendered redundant, again, by the decline of the West India sugar. On this point about squatting and independent cultivation, I should say that I’m deeply indebted to the work of Bukka Rennie who was a trade unionist in the 1970s in Trinidad and was a part of the New Beginning Movement which was a Left libertarian movement and influenced by CLR James formation. He also wrote this book called The History of the Working Class in Trinidad and Tobago which, if you can find a copy, is just incredible both in terms of the way that he charts, again, the capture of insurgent labour politics by the middle-class bureaucracy both in the 1930s and later in the independence period in the 1960s. He assembled a lot of his insights from oral histories with the veterans of the strikes of the 1930s because he was doing that research in the 1970s. What he makes clear, and I think so also borne out by archival evidence that I’ve assembled, is that oil failed to absorb the masses of Caribbean labourers who were coming to Trinidad in search of work. Again, they’re coming from Grenada, Barbados, Saint Vincent and Curaçao and if you go to Trinidad today, you’ll notice that most people will talk about a grandparent or a great-grandparent who is from some other island. There’s this sense that this is a very recent movement that leads to the formation of the Trinidad and Tobago working class.

The oil industry expanded and it was very lucrative during this period but it wasn’t especially labour-intensive. So when work did arrive, it was usually in these sorts of intermittent cast gangs who would be hired temporarily to complete what they called ‘shovel and fork work’; so to clear brush and dig roads for the oil wells to be able to carry the supply out to the port. When that work disappeared, they would return to these very familiar survival strategies of squatting and cultivating crops on Crown lands as well as company estates. So when Uriah Butler, who we’ll talk about as the charismatic figurehead of the workers in South Trinidad, began to organise in the oil belt, the cry of ‘land for the people’ became critical to his evangelism. If the workers couldn’t find opportunities in oil, what they were demanding was land. ‘Give us land to cultivate so we can support ourselves.’ I really want to underscore here the generational expertise that these workers held. We’re talking about less than a hundred years after the arrival of full emancipation in 1838. This is a deeply-skilled workforce. They’re coming from the so-called ‘old islands’ and centuries of plantation slavery as well as indenture but they have this profound expertise in the cultivation of crops. They know agriculture. They particularly know how to cultivate their own crops and they know what they need for their means of subsistence. I can share one anecdote from a pretty profound archival find where it becomes very clear that what the workers, at this moment, desired above all else, I would argue, was a life beyond the fruitless work of the plantation. The plantation is degrading and a site of trauma, particularly associated with these systems of labour bondage. They were looking for an exit from the plantation. Some of them looked to oil for this and as it turned out, oil was quite degrading as well, even if it was slightly more lucrative. Even when they were turned away from the oilfields and then there were opportunities to work on nearby cocoa plantations, they often refused to work in cocoa and just opted for unemployment, squatting and subsistence cultivation. You actually see this in the meetings of planters at the time from the Siparia Planters’ Association of mostly cocoa plantation owners. They can’t understand or wrap their heads around why workers won’t come to accept their wages. Sometimes, they’re offering higher wages than the oilfields and still, there’s even one fragment in the archive where you see one former cocoa estate worker and the quote directly from him is ‘my days of working in cocoa are over.’ That’s it [laughter]. It didn’t matter, again, whether the opportunities surfaced in the oilfields. It was very clear that they had rejected the plantation as such and they were out in search of dignity, not necessarily oil as such but they thought of oil as potentially one of the ways that they could arrive at this more dignified life.

On the oilfields, one of the issues which contributed to worker discontent was racism. Because while most of the rank-and-file workers were Black, most of the supervisors were white.

The majority of the management is either English by origin or actually white South African. In the Forster Report, which is the Commission of Enquiry report into the disturbances of 1937, they mention that the particular anti-Black vitriol of theseSouth African overseers on the oilfields was actually one of the points of contention that led to the general strike.

 Again, I’ve mentioned that the workers were out in pursuit of dignity, yet they were facing profound indignities on a daily basis even in oilfield work. Think about the moment that we’re in. We’re on the cusp of war in Europe. There’s the Spanish Civil War. There’s also the Italian invasion of Abyssinia or Ethiopia. That was certainly on the minds of workers at the time. They talk about the way that the Abyssinian support movement almost fueled the racial consciousness among the workers. I don’t know if I would call it hilarious but there’s a particular anecdote where one of the overseers in the archive tells a Black worker with a beard to shave off his beard because he’s not Haile Selassie. There’s a sense that this is the context that has charged the moment of 1937 but certainly, it was a very racially-stratified context and there were persistent racial antagonisms that led to the strike.

Haile Selassie was the Emperor of Ethiopia, and when fascist Italy invaded the country, which was just about the only African nation which had not been colonised, there was outrage in Black communities all around the world, and lots of Black people volunteered to go fight against the invaders.

At this time in the UK, there was a lot of talk about the threat of fascism and war. But for colonial subjects, it would be pretty hard for British authorities to condemn fascism or present it as a threat without by implication criticising themselves. Trinidad and Tobago, for example was effectively a racialised dictatorship. While there were nominal elections, these could only elect seven people of the total of 25 on the Legislative Council. And voting rights were hugely restricted. Only people who spoke English, owning large amounts of property, or paying very high rents, were able to vote. And anyone who had received poor relief in the previous six months was disqualified from voting. Candidates could only stand for election if they owned property worth over $12,000, a huge amount at the time.

So, in 1933 for example, fewer than 5000 people voted in the election, out of a total population of well over 400,000.

This blatant hypocrisy was used by organisers on the ground.

The workers in Trinidad kind of latch on to the threat of fascism on two different fronts. One, they’re sort of emphasizing how critical they are as a labour force should Europe break out into war; that they are the principal supplier of crude oil to the British Royal Navy. So they know how important they are in that respect. Uriah Butler, again, is constantly talking about this in his speeches at the time but I think, as you’re alluding to, there’s also an effort to implicate the British themselves as complicit in the very fascism that they seek to condemn. You see Uriah Butler will often, again in his speeches, condemn the fascist, capitalist, imperialist threat. He uses that sort of compound phrase often in reference to the British Empire, despite the fact that he remains a staunch British subject. He’s actually calling their bluff in some way. He’s saying, ‘You are abdicating your responsibility of the empire that you proclaim to uphold.’ There’s one other archival anecdote here. There’s a really interesting quote where, also out of this context, you see them say that ‘there are many Mussolinis to be found in the oilfields of South Trinidad.’ They’re very aware, again, of the machinations of fascism in Europe and they clearly see the resonances and identify those resonances in the ordinary ground around them.

Uriah Butler is someone who we are going to hear more about as we get to the mass strike, so it’s worth learning a bit more about him and his background.

Uriah Butler is a fascinating figure and I’m actually glad that we waited until this moment to talk about who Butler is because I think sometimes, he actually overdetermines this story; that it all becomes about how Butler, this charismatic figurehead, manages to rally the colonial labourers in 1937. But Butler is fascinating. Butler is Grendian by birth. He’s also, like Cipriani, a veteran of the Great War in the West India Regiment.

The British West Indies Regiment (BWIR) was a division of the British Army, consisting of over 15,000 people from the Caribbean, which served in World War I. Many members had been encouraged to volunteer by activists like Marcus Garvey, who argued that Black people showing loyalty to the king would show that they deserve to be treated as equals with whites.

BWIR troops were treated terribly. All of their commanding officers were white, hundreds of them got frostbite on the way to England, and as a result just got sacked without compensation. And they weren’t allowed to fight, they were given menial tasks, like cleaning the toilets for white soldiers.

Eventually, in Italy after the war ended, in December 1918, the 9th and 10th battalions of the regiment mutinied and went on strike. Other British soldiers were sent to suppress the mutiny, who killed one mutineer. Another mutineer was executed and others jailed for periods of 3 to 20 years. Many veterans of the rebellion resolved to fight against British colonialism when they returned home, and lots of them took part in a strike wave in the Caribbean after the war.

So this was the background to the military service of people like Butler and Cipriani.

He comes to Trinidad to work in the oilfields in the 1920s and then he’s injured in a workplace accident. He’s unable to work in the oilfields after this and he walks with a noticeable limp for the rest of his life. He also acted as a kind of evangelical preacher in the Spiritual Baptist or Shouter Baptist tradition of Trinidad. I think he calls his own church the Moravian Baptist Church. He would walk around and conduct these revival meetings across the oil belt, carrying a Bible always and often speaking in these very fanciful terms about himself as Moses and leading the workers of Trinidad out of the oil belt to the promised land. I should say that this resonated with a broad swathe of the working people who would attend his revival meetings. A lot of them also adhered to these religious and faith traditions. He would open these political meetings with a hymn; whereas, the Trinidad Labour Party would open with the Internationale. In some ways, that represented the fact that he understood that workers’ agitation took place through the grammar that they were familiar with. That was very effective.

Butler was also involved in some key disputes before the 1937 general strike.

In 1935, a year after the Caroni sugar workers marched to Port of Spain, we see a strike break out on the Apex oilfield in Fyzabad. Butler, at this time, was actually the head of the local Trinidad Labour Party branch in Fyzabad. That’s his formal position. He is part of the Trinidad Labour Party and he’s a regional branch head under Cipriani. Cipriani actually ventures South during the strike to meet with the workers where he makes this speech and bloviates about the TLP’s support for the strike but it’s very abstract. Butler, again, confronts Cipriani directly and he dresses him down, demanding that he do more than just talk and make these platitudes but back that up with material support for the striking workers. Cipriani takes this very personally. Firstly, Butler is expelled from the meeting but then he’s carried back in by his supporter. Cipriani goes back to Port of Spain with his tail between his legs, so to speak, and it seems, probably out of some sort of jealousy or embarrassment, he refuses to send any material support to the strikers after this. That’s really the moment where Butler, as well as the workers around Butler, make a formal break from the Labour Party vanguard. That strike is diffused fairly quickly because they expected it to have support from the Labour Party before it was withdrawn but it really emboldens them to think about what their capacity as ordinary workers in South Trinidad is.

So from 1935 until 1937, Butler continues to hold these rallies across the South now for what he’s calling the very ill-worded British Empire Citizens’ and Workers’ Home Rule Party. Usually, they’re just called Homerulers or Butlerites. This is really where the workers build momentum for the planned general strike in June of ’37. Throughout these intervening years, workers are constantly agitating in sit-down strikes or go-slows where they’re engaging in petty workplace sabotage.

That brings us to the end of part 1 of this double episode about the Trinidad general strike of 1937. In part 2, we talk about how the strike began, how it ended, and its consequences and lessons. Our patreon supporters can listen to that right now. For everyone else, it will be out in the next week or two. [for public version only]

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As always, we’ve got more information, sources and links in the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes.

Find out more about Ryan’s work on his website, ryanceciljobson.com, and give him a follow on Twitter at @ryanceciljobson, links in the show notes.

Thanks again to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Thanks to all of you for listening. Catch you next time.

Part 2

Hi and welcome back to part 2 of our double podcast episode about the Trinidad general strike of 1937. If you haven’t heard part 1 yet, I would go back and listen to that first.

[Intro music]

Before we get started, just a reminder 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, free and discounted merchandise and other content. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

Where we left off last week, Ryan Jobson had told us about several years of agitation in Trinidad by employed and unemployed workers, and landless peasants.

Strikes and protests escalated, many of them by supporters of Uriah Butler, a disabled former oil worker and union leader, who also advocated the end of direct British colonial rule over the country. And eventually, Butler decided to step up the struggle another level.

In June of 1937, there is a dispatch from Butler that begins to circulate around the region calling for a general strike on Tuesday, June 22nd. That was the plan for Butler but these workers are really ready and primed for this strike action and so we actually see the strike begin ahead of schedule, so to speak, on Saturday, June 19th 1937. Firstly, it begins spontaneously on the leaseholders’ Forest Reserve oilfield. The graveyard shift workers walk out around 7.00 am and they meet the morning shift workers at the proverbial gates of the estate. They also instruct them to follow them in walking off the job. From Forest Reserve, they march to Fyzabad Junction which is the nearby town and they’re also joined by workers from neighbouring oilfields. There is bustling Saturday traffic and this is often payday for the workers and so there are large gatherings in public around shops and storefronts.

From there, the strike began to grow.

By the following afternoon, the remaining employees of Forest Reserve as well as several other oilfields like La Brea, [42:01 – unclear] also left the estates. Again, they gathered at rum shops and this crowd of nearly 500 men and women gather in front of the yard of a local proprietor and Butler joins them and gives an impassioned address in his typical revival fashion. Here, they clash with the police. They march through the crowd and attempt to arrest Butler. They’re trying to read the warrant but are being drowned out by all of these workers who are shouting and pelting the policemen with stones and bottles. Two of the inspectors retreat and they leave one infamous inspector, Charlie King, alone in this melee. He tries to go alone and take Butler into custody but he is pushed back by the workers and he runs into a nearby shop where he attempts to hide. He’s actually followed by a group of women who were supporters of Butler. I should add, and I can talk about later, the fact that women comprised a very substantial base of the Butlerite movement. They actually beat Charlie King. They corner him, expel him from a second-floor window and then he is soaked in gasoline and set on fire. So Charlie King is this infamous figure in the calypsos of the time and in Trinidad folk culture. They call that junction, in Fyzabad, Charlie King Junction to this day. That’s where Charlie King suffered the fate of the workers’ ire. I should say that as the workers disbanded that evening, they also saw smoke billowing from the Apex oilfield because the workers began to set fire to pump jacks and engage in industrial sabotage. Just to round out this story of the strike, it continues on Monday morning. The refinery workers, just a few miles north in Pointe-à-Pierre as well as sugar estates workers, joined the strike and also the unemployed continued to participate in all of these processions and marches that happened spontaneously as workers leave both the refinery and the oilfield estates. They’re looting goods and shops along the procession. Reportedly, they would sing, ‘We ain’t working nowhere.’ This is the rallying cry of the general strike. They’re shutting down, basically, all places of work as they proceed toward San Fernando which is the largest urban centre in South Trinidad where they also shut down the power station and cut the telephone wires to disrupt communications between the South and the colonial government in the North. By Wednesday, the day after the original date of the proposed strike, the general strike has pervaded the whole island and parts of Tobago as well. The strike spreads to harbour scheme workers, estate labourers, bus drivers, longshoremen, scavengers, lightermen and market vendors. Basically, the entire island is engaged in a general strike. So even when we talk about this as the oil strikes of 1937, really it goes much further, again, to workers in all sectors and especially the unemployed that played a very key role as they continued to rub shoulders with their comrades who were working in these adjacent industries.

Scavengers, mentioned just here, are refuse collectors. So the strike was bringing together both private and public sector workers.

As with many other mass strikes of this sort, which spread quite organically, the strike didn’t have fixed, concrete demands which were agreed in advance.

They didn’t articulate specific demands during that period but, again, we can intuit from earlier circulars from Butlers’ Home Rule Party and from the reports of the hunger marchers that essentially, they were agitating for food, work, other kinds of economic protection, universal wages as well as a food depot for the unemployed. I think there was also a discussion about the fact that they wanted a safe environment for market vendors to peddle their wares. In Fyzabad Junction, essentially, it was quite unsanitary. The market vendors basically had to put their foodstuffs on the ground and this was something that upset them quite a lot. They wanted to have the colonial government step in on a number of these measures. I think also the broader question that I’ve been putting out here is about their desire for dignity and it can take the shape of all these different proposals and policy recommendations but principally, that’s what they were in search of. We saw that was shared clearly across the entire Trinidad and Tobago working class at this moment because of their willingness to join in the general strike.

Also like with other strikes of this type, even when the majority of wage workers involved were in male professions, women pretty much always play crucial roles in the disputes.

Again, women played a very prominent role in the earliest moments of the strike which I think is important to underscore and to dispel the idea that this was simply limited to oilfield workers who were almost exclusively men and the idea that seems to persist that they were the vanguard of this movement. In general, in this period, women and especially domestic servants, who were working in the overseers’ houses and the agricultural estates, formed a really crucial basis of the Butler movement as it grew in South Trinidad. We see that in the reports of that time of Home Rule meetings leading up to the strike in 1937. We see that, of course, in the iconic scene of Charlie King’s death at Fyzabad Junction at the hand of this mob of women Butlerites. I think it’s unfortunate that there isn’t even greater archival depth to provide insight into a lot of these women and who they were and what they desired out of this. Certainly, the role of women in the early workers’ movement has actually been documented very extensively by the great, the unparalleled, Rhoda Reddock who is a Professor of Gender, Social Change and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies and St Augustine. Her book, Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago is just an undisputed classic. The scope of her book is not limited to the 1930s but she takes a very broad view of the activity of prominent women like Elma Francois who I have mentioned. She also wrote a short biography of Elma Francois but also all of these nameless women who toiled in agricultural work, peasant cultivation and as seamstresses, midwives, domestics or sex workers. Even if oil was dominated by this masculinist workforce, the strikes themselves didn’t proceed exclusively on the backs of male workers. Rhoda does point out, quite astutely, that there is a presence of male chauvinism within the Butler movement. There are women who are agitating and who want their voices to be heard but she puts it quite bluntly that women never achieve full equality with men in their organising or the platform to dictate the direction of the Home Rule or the Butlerite movement. I think also here we can think about, again, the way that Butler himself enjoyed this charismatic, masculine authority that women, at the same time, were not privy to. I think what we should emphasise is that women played a crucial role in this period, an unheralded role in some ways, that’s actually betrayed by the masculinist force or masculinist image that’s adopted by latter-day trade union formations. I think we see that a lot of that history is obscured behind the image of charismatic male figures like Butler.

So, while the working class was in a state of revolt, what about those organisations which purported to represent the working class?

So paralleling the earlier clash at the Apex oilfield strike, the Labour Party and Cipriani, in particular, really missed the boat entirely. I say that quite literally. Cipriani was actually on a boat in the Atlantic at the time on the return leg from the coronation at Buckingham Palace, believe it or not. That’s where he catches wind of the strike and he immediately sends a telegram, in absentia, calling for restraint and self-control on the part of the strikers to not engage in violence. He says nothing of supporting the strikers’ demands. I think that Cipriani really encapsulates the Labour Party’s position. Again, this seems to follow my impression that Cipriani is a member of the colonial legislature as a distinguished guest of the Crown. He’s much more preoccupied in this period with the preservation of order. He certainly believes in labour rights and agitation but only through the proper channels and, of course, the proper channels inevitably mean him and his Labour Party.

So, while the official left was calling for restraint and moderation, as many of our listeners will probably notice is a theme running through a lot of our episodes, British authorities responded, again, as they usually did, with violence and repression.

Again, likewise, the colonial government seeks immediately to put down the strike with the full arsenal of state violence or colonial violence. We see that first, again, with the attempt to deploy police like Charlie King and others who are sent from Port of Spain down to San Fernando and other sites of clashes in South Trinidad. We only see the strike fully diffused with the arrival of British Marines or Blue Jackets. The colonial governor, Murchison Fletcher, summons these two warships that then arrive in Trinidad. HMS Ajax and HMS Exeter land in Trinidad and they are successful in essentially diffusing at least that initial wave of the strike. Butler himself goes into hiding at this point. There are all these rumours about where Butler goes during this time. One of the prominent ones was that he was hiding in Venezuela and that he had crossed the channel and was hiding out for a time. He only resurfaces when he’s actually summoned to give testimony to the Commission of Enquiry on the labour disturbances. That’s basically when that moment of the strike ends but, again, it demonstrates the capacity of the workers at this time. It demonstrates what they desired and it also demonstrates what they understood their power to be.

While the strikers may not have had particular set demands, one feeling which was pretty common was the desire for Home Rule.

In one sense, Butler has his own designs through the Home Rule Party and I think it is telling and this is something that we can’t fully know. The fact that workers begin the strike spontaneously ahead of the set date perhaps suggests that they had their own understanding of what they hoped to happen and that, perhaps, is what we can’t know. Now, Butler, we know a lot about; what he wanted and what his political programme was for the Home Rule Party. I should clarify what he meant by Home Rule. Butler, like many of the workers at this time, and it’s quite explicit, understood himself to be a British subject. So his agitation for Home Rule, at least at this moment, seemed to be for Home Rule or self-government under the Union Jack; so really an end to Crown colony rule rather than the kind of flag independence that Trinidad and Jamaica would achieve in 1962. I actually think, in this way, Butler was very prescient. He understood that this was more a matter of material conditions rather than simply just the appearance of sovereignty. He wasn’t clamouring just for a flag and a national anthem. He was clamouring for distinct material conditions and I would say not just Home Rule but a kind of workers’ self-management. He was opposed to middle management that was racially stratified. He was opposed to Crown colony rule. So there is this question of what would it mean for working people in Trinidad to govern themselves at this moment. As I mentioned before, they made radical demands beyond just wage increases, the jobs guarantee, a universal wage for the unemployed and public control of industries and utilities; so all enterprises and schemes I think is the term that they used. This was, indeed, about anti-colonialism in terms of it being an end to colonial abuse and neglect but the material demands prevailed above all else. They wanted land. They wanted dignified work. They wanted Home Rule. So this was not just about the appearance of independence [01:01:17 – unclear] a lot of what would follow throughout the rest of the 20th century in Trinidad and throughout the former British West Indies.

This was something which I didn’t have a proper understanding of beforehand, as my understanding of “Home Rule” was that I thought it meant full independence from Britain, so it’s very interesting to learn its more nuanced meaning to people like Butler at the time. Especially given what happened across much of the British Empire, where colonialism nominally ended, only to be replaced by neocolonialism, with a brutal extractive capitalism which left many working class and poor people in a similar situation to how they were before.

Despite this lack of particular demands before the strike, and despite the fact that it was ultimately suppressed by British troops, that doesn’t mean that it didn’t achieve concrete improvements. Indeed, this is something which occurs repeatedly in mass strikes, where groups of workers walk out one after the other, and often make their own local demands and have local negotiations before returning to work.

Sure. I guess one of the things that we see emerging out of the strike is that workers do achieve very clear material gains, particularly like the expansion of collective bargaining rights and the proliferation of trade unions including the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union which is, to this day, the largest active trade union in Trinidad and Tobago. That was founded by Butler and an Indian barrister named Adrian Cola Rienzi. That was a name that he took on. He was born Krishna Deonarine and actually, there’s a new book about Rienzi specifically by Brinsley Samaroo who, again, is an eminent historian at the University of the West Indies. Certainly, check that out if you’re interested more in the details of Rienzi’s life.

In addition to improvements on-the-job, and an improved situation for workers’ rights, the rebellion had far-reaching consequences both in Trinidad and Tobago, and across the region.

I think it can be said that the shocks and disturbances throughout the 1930s did set the English-speaking Caribbean on this road to independence. After Trinidad, of course, Barbados erupts in a general strike in the same month of June 1937. The following year, Jamaica follows suit in May and June of 1938. Again, this is understood to be a moment of regional ferment. CLR James, later, would say in his speech very poetically, ‘As a fire runs up a forest, it went from Trinidad, island to island, and ended up right up the islands to Jamaica.’ Even as the strike ended, it served as this spark that continued to fuel agitation elsewhere and set the Caribbean on this path toward self-government and independence. I would also recommend to anyone who has a chance to look at the interview conducted by David Scott for the Small Axe journal with George Flemming. He talks about being a young person at this moment in Barbados and just how crucial that memory of the strike was to his sense of self and to his political consciousness. Clearly, this has all sorts of effects beyond the strike itself. Although, as I said, it set the British Caribbean on the road to independence, I think we could say that the course that independence took resembled more the kind of middle-class aspirations of Cipriani than the insurgent demands of Butler and his comrades. This happens both because Butler is in prison after offering his testimony on sedition charges and the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) continues in his absence. We watch Rienzi trace much the same path that Cipriani did beforehand as a trade union bureaucrat.

Butler had gone into hiding after the strike, but he handed himself in in September 1937. He was cleared of sedition, but convicted of incitement to riot and jailed for two years. But his supporters tried to keep up their activities.

At the same time, Butler writes to the rank-and-file working class and especially women to continue to rally in Butler’s absence. They’re going from village to village, from estate to estate and from oilfield to oilfield organising the rank and file into a mass party. When Butler is released for the first time, Rienzi tries to incorporate him back into the union in this sort of ceremonial role but Rienzi and Butler clash much like Cipriani and Butler did years before. Again, there’s a strike that breaks out at the Trinidad Lake Asphalt Company in La Brea. This is a wildcat strike without union authorisation. Butler supports the strike, Rienzi does not support the strike and as a result, Butler is then expelled from the union he created, the OWTU, to start his own union. I should say there’s a really telling quote that I want to read out from Butler himself where he says ‘men like Rienzi, Blades, Rojas and Moses (other executive members of the OWTU) are men that you should be afraid of because they term themselves as members of the executive committee and go about fooling the people and taking away their money, telling people they have a union to support them when there are strikes and when they are out of work.’ This is Butler’s take on the situation. Shortly after this, Butler is actually reimprisoned under these wartime defence regulations and he remains in prison on Nelson Island just offshore of Trinidad until the conclusion of World War Two in 1945. I would say that, in some ways, the defeat of the groundswell of the Butlerite movement came at the hands of both the wartime British Empire and the trade union leadership again. We see that collaboration which is what comes together to defeat the groundswell of workers.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 was a justification for heavy repression across the British Empire, and a rationale for demanding patriotic loyalty, as opposed to people fighting to better their own conditions.

So while improvements to conditions had been won with the struggles through the 1930s, British government policy in general was largely unchanged, and the major demands, for better unemployment benefits and land redistribution, went unmet.

I would say very little in terms of explicit policy change, especially with reference to the unemployed. What we see though, again, I think is the persistence of this demand for land for the people. Workers continued to take these matters into their own hands in the intervening decades leading up to independence.

Despite the Trinidad mass strike being a long time ago, Ryan still thinks there are important lessons workers can learn from it today.

One thing I’ll say is that my commitment to telling this story is in part because I’m certainly an acolyte of CLR James and if you go through the James’ archives, he’s constantly referencing 1937 and Uriah Butler but then he’ll often trail off and just say, ‘Someone will have to tell that story one day.’ But he sees it as crucial to understanding, again, the insurgent capacity of workers in the Caribbean and of just ordinary people in general. He’s not in Trinidad during 1937. He’s already gone up to England to engage in his cricket reporting and other kinds of political agitation but I think that his anti-vanguardist politics… he also finds that reflected in his birthplace. He sees that in Trinidad. He can map that onto Butler and his clashes with Cipriani who, again, James idolised as a young person. I think that, if anything, the lessons that we can draw from this and that James is often saying in his speeches is that there has to be a preparation for this insurgent moment. Rather than being a vanguard like the TLP imagined itself and dictating or directing the working class, we have to be ready for when the working class does move. I think this was borne out again in the summer of 2020.

Here, Ryan is of course referring to the Black Lives Matter movement which exploded around the world following the racist police murders of George Floyd and other Black people in the US.

 I think a lot of us watched this happen where the radical intelligentsia, the trade union and the labour bureaucracy were completely caught off-guard because we’ve been told for decades now that ordinary people don’t care about revolutionary politics and they’re not willing to put themselves on the line but we see it happen time and time again. James gives the same speech to a group of students at Howard University at the beginning of 1970. He’s talking about the impending confrontation. They’re like, ‘What is it with James? He’s a Communist. He’s always talking about the impending confrontation.’ Of course, a week later, you see the Black Power uprising of February 1970 in Trinidad and they run over to James and the students say, ‘Look, look! The confrontation is happening!’ I think, in some ways, this is a reminder, again, in moments where that seems to be so far from our political reality and moments where workers themselves only seem to be intelligible even to self-proclaimed radical intellectuals as a mob, we need to both appreciate and be ready to facilitate that insurgent capacity, to not stop the strike and to lend ourselves to the strike rather than to endeavour to put it down or map our own desires onto it. That is the lesson that I would leave people with and that’s precisely the kind of legacy of Jamesian political philosophy that I hope to do justice to both with this story and with the book

Ryan uses the word “mob” in his book chapter about the strike, and we use it too in quite a few of our historical stories, which you can browse on our new Stories app, at stories.workingclasshistory.com, link in the show notes. And this can be controversial, in that some people criticise us for it, and say that the word “mob” is a right-wing slur.

I do think I used the word ‘mob’ once and that was to refer to the mob of women who surrounded Charlie King. I’ve debated this quite a lot about how to use the term ‘mob’ in my book manuscript and whether it’s a fitting term to describe workers of the time. I think it also fits in with debates around the crowd and crowd theory and whether crowds can have political consciousness but a mob is sort of tinged with a different tenor or disdain. I think what I’ve settled on is that it’s certainly accurate that, as you mentioned, the colonial government and the trade union leaders would view the hunger marchers, the oilfield workers or the Butlerites as this kind of unruly mob; that they’re disorganized, they’re undisciplined and they’re not going through the proper channels of redress. I choose to indulge the language of mob, not because they actually were any of these things. I think it’s more of a challenge to the so-called Left today. What do they regard as a mere mob? In the same way as the Labour Party of the time as unintelligible and as this unruly multitude that actually has the capacity to represent the vanguard of insurgent, labour radical politics today. I experimented with this a lot as I wrote this chapter and actually, as I sifted through my archival materials, I stumbled on this quote that I missed in my earlier drafts from The Port of Spain Gazette at the time when one of the Labour Party secretaries named Vivian Henry admonished Butler and the strikers and I quote ‘for their endeavour to institute mob rule in Trinidad.’ It was at that moment I realised that I had to follow through and rise to the defence of the mob.

Opponents of democracy, or the participation of ordinary people in political life, have always warned of the dangers of “mob rule”. But the “mob” has always been an important way that we, as ordinary people, have been able to actually have agency and make the changes we want to see in the world. One particular UK example of this was during the Gordon riots of 1780. While they began as anti-catholic riots, they quickly developed a working class and radical component. The rebels attacked the Bank of England, and the notorious Newgate prison. The attack on Newgate incidentally involved a good number of Black participants, including Black Americans, like John Glover, who told the guards: “Damn you, open the gate or we will burn you down and have everybody out.” Hundreds of prisoners were freed, and the prison set on fire. According to rumour, rioters painted on the walls that the prisoners had been freed on the authority of “His Majesty, King Mob”.

I should say here and caution here that, of course, a mob doesn’t imply a specific politics. A mob can be reactionary too but in this case, the language of the mob was being deployed explicitly as a counterinsurgent discourse by the Labour elites and the colonial government. The mob is also where these nameless women are relegated to history as followers of Butler rather than a source of unrelenting workers’ agitation and genius unto themselves. In a very cheeky way, I’ll follow another son of Trinidad, ASAP Ferg, when I choose to ride with the mob of Butler and the working people of South Trinidad instead of the self-appointed Labour leaders and politicians. If anything, I think we can learn from this obstructive case.

[Outro music]

That brings us to the end of this episode about the Trinidad mass strike of 1937. As always, we’ve got more information, sources and links in the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes.

Find out more about Ryan’s work on his website, ryanceciljobson.com, and give him a follow on Twitter at @ryanceciljobson, links in the show notes.

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This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Thanks to all of you for listening. Catch you next time.

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