Exploring Literary Responses to the 1926 General Strike

Discussion episode looking at the literary texts that were produced in response to the 1926 general strike, both from established authors of the middle/upper classes and emerging working-class writers. In conversation with Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill, authors of the excellent book, Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics.

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Episode

In our discussion, Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill explain why they wrote their book, Writing the 1926 General Strike, and the ways in which the strike was “a literary event.”

We also discuss the works of a number of different working-class authors responding to the strike, not to mention those of more famous authors that were also affected by the strike, in particular Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) by DH Lawrence and To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all 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. Download the song here: all proceeds go to Medical Aid for Palestinians. More from Montaigne: website, Instagram, YouTube.
Edited by Jesse French

Transcript

Matt: For nine days in May 1926, a general strike brought the UK to a standstill in what still remains the nation’s largest ever work stoppage. Among the participants in this moment of bitter class conflict were many of Britain’s authors, whether in support of the strike or against it. The result was that the general strike left an indelible, though often forgotten, mark on the literary production of at least the next decade. This is Working Class Literature.

[intro music]

Matt: Before we start, a quick note to say that we’re only able to continue making these podcasts – both Working Class History and Working Class Literature – because of the support of our listeners on Patreon. If you like what we do and want to help us with our work, join us on patreon.com/workingclasshistory where you can get benefits like early access to episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted books, merch and more. For instance, Patreon supporters got early access to this episode without ads, and they also get exclusive access to our two Patreon-only podcast series, Radical Reads and Fireside Chat. Link in the show notes.

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Matt: With this being the centenary year of the 1926 general strike in the UK, we recently produced a three-part series on the dispute, which saw 1.75 million workers walk out in solidarity with a million miners who had been locked out by their employers. If you want to learn more about the general strike, we highly recommend you go and listen to those episodes, which include first-hand accounts from workers across the country who had been involved in the strike.

However, while the strike is often talked about as a political event, one thing that’s less frequently discussed is the extent to which the strike was also a literary event. We discuss what we mean by this in more detail later in the episode, but just some of the ways that the strike can be thought of as a literary event was, firstly, just because so many writers were actually involved in it (either on the side of the workers or as so-called ‘volunteer’ scab labour) and, secondly, because it subsequently affected or inspired so many literary texts, not least those of working-class writers who were involved in the strike and would come to prominence in the 1930s.

To discuss this literary aspect of the strike, we sat down with Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill, authors of the excellent book, Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics. The book goes through a whole host of literary works that deal with the general strike, from those by upper-class conservatives to others by communist coal miners. In this episode, we only manage to cover a fraction of the texts discussed in the book, so if you’d like to get a copy, we’ll include a link to buy it in the show notes. We’ll also include a reading list of some of the texts we discuss on the webpage for this episode; link in the show notes.

Dougal McNeill: My name is Dougal McNeill and I co-wrote this book with Charles called Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics. I teach in the English Literature’s and Creative Communication Programme at Te Herenga Waka in Victoria University. I’ve also been active for over 15 years now in the Tertiary Education Union which is the equivalent of the Union and College Union (UCU) in Britain and I’ve been on the Socialist Left in New Zealand and Australia for coming up to 25-30 years.

Charles Ferrall: I’m Charles Ferrall from where Dougal has just said. We teach in the same programme. I have specialised a bit in modernist literature. In fact, Dougal and I have written another book on modernism or edited another book on modernism. That’s basically my background. Cultural history, partly British but also New Zealand and Australian cultural history, is something that I’m pretty interested in.

What actually happened was I started a little bit before Dougal and then asked him to co-write it with me. He kindly accepted that which was great and just Googling around and seeing that the General Strike was cropping up everywhere in lots of primary texts but also secondary texts seemed to be absolutely crucial to that particular period but nothing had actually been written on it from the literary point of view.

Dougal McNeill: We quote a line from Leonard Wolf at the start of the book with this question of ‘what did you do in the General Strike?’ We decided that this was going to be a way that the generations in the future were going to think about their ancestors. Where did you stand? The amazing thing about working on the book was that the strike was kind of hiding in plain sight. It’s absolutely central to the politics and the culture of all the nations of Britain in 1926. It shapes so much of the politics that come after. It has this kind of intergenerational significance. There are families, particularly locked-out mining families in Wales and elsewhere, who are paying off debts and are settling bills with the cooperative a decade after the strike like the sons and daughters in 1972 or in 1984. It’s the way that these memories get replayed across the culture and stories get replayed across the culture. That’s everywhere and there’s this abundance of material.

As Charles mentions, there’s also an abundance of material on the way that a whole lot of really famous writers and canonical writers, like DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf but also lesser known writers, all responded to the strike and yet all those threads hadn’t been brought together. I guess what the book is… it’s not an exhaustive account. It’s an attempt to try and bring together this question of what was going on in literature, what was going on in the culture and politics. It was to bring them together and give readers a chance to see the kind of ferment that was generated, both in the middle class and that real crisis of loyalty that it generated in a whole load of middle-class writers and then also a crisis inside the minds of a whole load of working-class writers. They were both being pulled into solidarity and action to support the strike but also by their writing and by the opportunity not to be at work, that the strike represented, and to see a different way of living being pulled out of forms of life that they’d been combined with. This chance to sit with those stories and keep those stories in memory was part of the inspiration for us and the writing of the text.

Charles Ferrall: A lot of writers wrote books even during the Strike, or partly during the Strike, but also afterwards and some of them come back to the strike much later on. It’s layered in some ways. It’s memories about memories, about memories. All the time, at least for the writers on the Left and the working-class writers anyway, it is a memory of a defeat… a very bitter memory of a defeat. I think one of these writers even said 1926 was Year Zero but also the beginning of something, so it looks in two directions at the same time, at least for those on the Left. For those on the Right, it tends to be more an exercise in nostalgia when they got to drive trains for the first time and stuff like that.

Dougal McNeill: Talking about memories that Charles brings up, there are these beautiful lines which we quote from Idris Davies that make that question of memory. It’s this kind of necessity where he writes:

Do you remember 1926? That summer of soups and speeches,
The sunlight on the idle wheels, and the deserted crossings,
And the laughter, and the cursing in the moonlit streets?
Do you remember 1926? The slogans and the penny concerts,
The jazz bands and the moorland picnics,
And the slanderous tongues of famous cities?
Do you remember 1926? The great dream and the swift disaster…?

It goes on for a couple of lines to then end…

We do remember 1926 and we shall remember 1926 until our blood is dry.

I think that kind of tension in those lines, you know, the “great dream and the swift disaster,” the “jazz bands” and the suffering, is also part of what we were trying to capture and evoke in the book.

Charles Ferrall: Those memories have been… not by the working-class people who were involved in the strike or whose fathers, mothers or even grandparents were, that hasn’t been forgotten but for general cultural history, I think, to some extent, it has been. It is remembered as a great lark, as a revival of the war spirit, as a revolution averted and so forth but for working-class writers and working-class people, it wasn’t that at all. Their memories, I think, have largely been forgotten.

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Matt: As we mentioned at the start of this episode, Charles and Dougal argue that the 1926 general strike was a literary event from its inception, that it came into being already steeped in the meanings, structures, and representations of literature.

We discuss the various ways they see this to be the case in the following section. But one obvious example was simply the amount of writers who were involved in it: Charles mentions the Auden generation, a group of British and Irish authors who came to prominence in the thirties and were mostly still students at the time of the strike. Many of them (like the poet Louis MacNeice who Charles will mention here) sided with their class and the government, but others supported the strike, not least WH Auden himself who became a driver for the Trades Union Congress (listeners might also remember that Auden gets a brief mention in our Working Class Literature episodes 12 and 13 as a fan of working-class author, Jack Hilton, who Auden described as “the finest writer of them all”).

Other literary figures who were more established at the time were also involved: for instance, Leonard Woolf, who Dougal mentioned earlier, was the author and husband of Virginia Woolf, and spent the strike trying to broker a compromise between the unions and the government. We’ll also get onto Virginia Woolf’s literary response to the strike later in this episode.

And all this is without mentioning the many working-class writers who, having not started their writing careers yet, were variously on strike or locked out by their employers.

Charles Ferrall: So many writers were involved in it, in some way or another and, obviously, working-class writers, particularly from Wales because it was centred in the South of Wales and the Rhondda Valley. Also, upper-class people – the Auden Generation, MacNeice and Isherwood – were all strikebreakers.

Christopher Isherwood, the writer, who comes to prominence in the 1930s and is probably best known for Goodbye to Berlin. He’d just come down from Oxford and so many of the Oxford undergraduates were involved. He, I think, drove trains or was somehow involved but I can’t remember now. In his book Lions and Shadows, even though he was involved, effectively, in strikebreaking, he writes, ‘From the first moment, I loathed and longed for it to end. It wasn’t that I seriously expected street-fighting or civil war but war was in the air. One heard it in the boisterous, defiant laughter of the amateur bus drivers. One glimpsed it in the alert, sexual glances of the women. This was a dress rehearsal of the test,’ which he talks about elsewhere, as does Auden. ‘It found me utterly unprepared. For the first time, I knew that I detested my own class. I hated myself too for being neutral.’ He says he was neutral but, effectively, he wasn’t.

It was a moment of perhaps consciousness-raising for that generation, I think. Stephen Spender famously says that it was during the 1930s that young writers became interested in politics. Actually, I think it happens a little bit before that and, in some ways, the literary reaction to the 1926 strike anticipates what is going to happen in the 1930s. That’s just for the middle-class writers. As for the working-class writers, it was obviously far more immediate and far more awful.

Dougal McNeill: I think this idea that it’s literary right from the get-go is also if you think about the ways that we remember history as a story. We think about things having beginnings, middles and ends and it’s very, very convenient to kind of bookend the 1930s as the period when you’ve got the Spanish Revolution and the rise of fascism.

Actually, I think why focusing on 1926 is really useful is that it reminds us that this interwar period is a really extended period of ferment where capitalism is under challenge in Europe. You’ve got the German revolution ending the First World War and years of instability as class rule gets reestablished. You’ve got a revolutionary war in Ireland and the ending of British colonial rule in most of the island of Ireland. You’ve got really significant industrial disruption in Liverpool and elsewhere at the immediate end of the war. One of the reasons why I think the General Strike is literary from the get-go is, actually, it both kind of encapsulates a whole lot that’s gone beforehand and also then a memory, for those who are young at the time – like Charles says – that anticipates what’s about to come. So, it sits at this moment there.

I hope I’m not stating the obvious here but it’s something that I’ve thought about after the book has come out. I think we have to remember how much more the printed word is central to everyday experience back then in newspapers and pamphlets. Later on, when WH Auden writes the poem Spain for the Republic, he talks about ‘the flat, ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting,’ this is the main way that things are getting circulated. By the time you come to the miners’ strike and Thatcherism, for a lot of us, the cultural legacy of the anti-Thatcher struggle was television and comedy for people who were around at the time. For those of us who were young children and came of age later, it was pop music. It was in recorded music that a whole lot of the anti-Thatcher energies presented themselves, like Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Clash or even Pulp and ‘Last Day of the Miners’ Strike’. The written word, in 1926, and the newspaper are still so much more dominant but there’s not recording that’s available of that kind. Cinema is still very new and the BBC is very new, which plays an important role in the strike in a Conservative and pro-government way. I think that’s a point that sometimes is so obvious that I forget it. It’s a literary event because print was king and print didn’t have the kind of generic challenges that emerge in the second half of the 20^th century.

Charles Ferrall: It’s interesting because I had the same thought, actually, Dougal [laughter]. I now wish we’d talked about it before. Paul Fussell, a historian of the First World War, describes it, at one point, as a very literary war. It was a very literary war for a very, very simple reason that everyone was reading and a lot of people were also writing as well. The cinema hadn’t really come to the same level. We’ve got almost something approaching a hundred percent literacy in Britain during this period. In fact, from the end of the 19^th century to the early 20^th century, it hasn’t been dubbed that yet but it was the great epoch of literacy. After the Education Acts of 1870, you’ve got working-class children being educated to the age of 14 and there’s an explosion of newspapers of varying standards on the Left, the Right and nowhere in particular. It was a world that was saturated with the written word.

Matt: I think what you say about print being king and the significance of reading and writing to popular culture at the time is actually really interesting because one of the things that I’ve found in my research, for the episodes about the strike itself, was looking into some of the local bulletins and newsletters that were published during the General Strike to share information. A lot of them had poetry in them as a way of entertaining readers or satirising the government news and claims. It’s interesting that that’s the form that they would do it in because it, itself, implies that literature and poetry is something of importance to working-class people as writers but also as readers. It’s something that people engage with and they’re writing these poems with quite tight, rhyming couplets. You can see that it’s not just that we’re just going to write facts or just do a documentary about what’s happening. We’re also going to use poetry as a way to entertain, satirise and inform our readers which I think is really telling.

Charles Ferrall: People from the working classes read a lot of what became later as light verse and satirical verse, for example, as has been pointed out, was published across the board. Poetry still didn’t have the marginal aspect that it perhaps has now.

Matt: We’ve touched a bit on historical memory and what you guys said about the multi-layered nature of memory. One of the things that you write in the book is that the memory of the strike is both multi-directional and competitive. I wondered if you could maybe explain what you mean by that but also how it plays out in relation to general strike literature.

Dougal McNeill: I think competitive in the way that every political memory is contested and that every attempt to record the past inside the workers’ and socialist movement is also a way to try and think about how we change the world in the present. There are contests around what this means.

Clearly, for the Labour Party tradition in Britain, there’s a lesson here about the state and the impossibility of challenging the state. There’s a certain way that the strike is presented as a kind of salutary lesson and a warning. The Communist Party have their own evasions around the strike and a desire in Communist circles, from the 1920s all the way through to the 1970s, both to kind of remember and honour party members who were involved but their own equivocations at the time getting written out. You kind of think about the official history of the Communist Party of Great Britain as this sort of elaborate exercise in evasion that goes on there. There’s this contest that’s happening but I also think the multi-directional… we can also think of as layered whereby the strike is always being re-remembered through other strikes. It’s particularly true with mining history and in 1972 and the periods when Arthur Scargill is first coming into prominence is living memory. That’s less than 50 years ago, so there are people around who can actually debate and discuss these issues and think about these issues. By the time 1984 comes around, that’s another lesson that’s been put on top of it. I think when we’re dealing with literature but actually just when we’re dealing with political conversation generally, we’re never just talking about the one strike. 1926 has always been put into a kind of prism of debates, previous lessons, perspectives and so on.

There is obviously also the historical context. Trotsky writes about the lessons of 1926 and that gets circulated in Britain. Ellen Wilkinson, who we treat in our book as a novelist, goes on also to be a Labour MP and an activist in the Labour Party. It’s impossible to separate out the threads of literary writing or historical writing just about the strike from these wider questions of people’s political affiliations, their involvements in later struggles and so on. Every time that the 1926 General Strike comes up in memory in a literary text, it’s also an intervention. It’s an intervention into that text’s present.

Charles Ferrall: It’s interesting in that respect that when James Hanley, the Irish writer who lived in Liverpool, writes about the strike in The Furys, which is a great novel, it’s unclear which strike he’s talking about. We argue he’s clearly talking about 1926. I think he intends our readers to also identify with at least two earlier strikes as well that happened in Liverpool, one in 1911. I think the conflation that he’s got there has been deliberate in that it’s memories of strike, built on memories of strike, built on memories of strike and, at the same time, looking forward.

Dougal McNeill: We’re a little bit cheeky calling it a 1926 book because you could reposition it. A couple of reviewers pointed out that there are these other details that point more towards 1911 but that idea of the layering and the building that Charles talks about is one of the ways that I think that novel works so powerfully to give the sense of tradition as something almost washing over us or tradition as something revisiting us and this struggle that’s renewed perpetually.

Matt: It’s funny that you mention that because I was literally about to speak about James Hanley’s novel when you were talking about bringing the two strikes into conversation with each other. The Furys is obviously the beginning of a series and I haven’t read the others in the series but The Furys as a standalone novel is probably one of my favourites from that interwar period. I think what you say is right. He is intentionally bringing those two strikes into conversation with each other. I think you two write in your book that if you look at the book in the series of the novels, then it’s clearly the 1911 strike but then, at the same time, he’s making references to things like the miners who weren’t involved in the 1911 strike. He’s not just forgotten there were no miners involved; he’s doing it because he wants to upset the straightforward idea of when something happened and, in so doing, bring those lessons together from the different strikes. The Furys is one of the standout texts for me from that period.

Charles Ferrall: I agree with you, Matt. One of the reasons I think it is a standout text is that it’s a highly realist novel but it’s also modernist at the same time.

Matt: So, within literature, realism and modernism are generally thought of as two distinct – even opposing – approaches to literary form. Realism has its origins in the 18th century novel, and is usually associated with techniques that emphasise descriptions of the external world ‘as it is’ (so Dickens would be a classic example from English literature, or – as Charles will mention in a second – Emile Zola or Honore de Balzac would be famous examples of French realism). Modernism, by contrast, is associated with early twentieth-century avant-garde writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. In contrast to the realist emphasis on a supposedly objective, external world, modernists focused more on the internal, psychological worlds of their characters, often foregrounding themes of fragmentation and subjectivity. According to Charles, The Furys combines both of these approaches.

Charles Ferrall: What it’s doing with history is neither what canonical modernism does, which sometimes forgets it (although that’s debatable) but it’s not doing obviously what a Zola or a Balzac novel is doing either. There are other writers like that. In particular, Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Gibbon, the great Scottish writer, has a trilogy series which are clearly realist novels in that sort of tradition but, of course, what he does with it, particularly with the second person, is new, innovative and, in many ways, quite puzzling.

The idea that we’ve got a period of modernism during the ‘20s that’s replaced, to some extent, anyway during the 1930s with realist and more committed writing is, in some ways, just proved by what comes immediately out of the strike, even if it’s not written or published until later in the 1930s. The 1930s is still, very definitely, a moment of modernism while, of course, Spender is right that writers became more involved in politics during the ‘30s. In some ways, the 1926 strike does, in fact, look forward to the 1930s while, at the same time, it’s also bringing up previous industrial action and strikes as well. It’s looking in both directions; realist and modernist.

Dougal McNeill: This is another point that might seem almost too obvious to need mentioning but I think is really important here as well is that these are artworks. We’re not reading them as documentary texts but that we’re reading them as sophisticated literary works. In terms of the comments that you both just made about Hanley, this is a sophisticated, complex meditation on time, on history, on representation, on class struggle.

The modernist realism, or the realist modernism, or whatever we want to call it at the time, it’s extraordinary to look at that record of Gibbon, Hanley, and even writers that don’t go on to have primarily literary careers. Charles and I, in the book, talk about the Labour activist, Ellen Wilkinson, and her novel Clash and we make a case for it being a novel that should be remembered. I think it’s really important for us to stress here that, just like with the middle-class writers on a different register, there was an intellectual ferment inside the committed working class and there were debates happening in the Left Review, the education associations and the trade union and training groups around what’s the art that’s adequate to the moment? How do we represent history? How do we get access to a moment like this? In the nations of Britain of well, how do we think about this in Scotland? How do we think about this in Wales? How do we think about this in the regions of England? These are fascinating, knotty, difficult, aesthetic questions.

In terms of your earlier comment about the proliferation of poetry in the labour journals and in the newspapers, part of what we’re trying to do in this book is to pay tribute to some really, really interesting and amazing writers and artists as artists. Charles and I, our training is as literary critics and scholars of modernism. I’m drawn to this topic because I’m a trade unionist and I’m on the Socialist Left but my contribution here is not as an historian but rather as a literary critic to say that this is amazing art. Amazing art got produced as a result of this crisis and these books deserved to be remembered as that being part of their contribution as well.

Matt: Again, mentioning Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair and The Furys, these are probably my two favourite working-class texts from the 1930s. I think his work is really one of those things where he’s produced a really complex kind of work of art that, for me, does what the historical novel is supposed to do. A Scots Quair tracks the development of capitalism, basically, via the old semi-feudal Scottish crofting society and then all the way up to the highly-developed capitalism of the 1930s. The way that he follows it through this central female protagonist, for me, does that kind of historical novel work while also being so deeply modernist in so many ways.

And I think the way that people like Gibbon and Hanley deal with crowds and how to do depictions of mass politics through the novel, which is usually more focused on individuals, is some of the most impressive stuff that I’ve read. I see it as quite distinct from Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash. Maybe we’ll get on to that but what I really find amazing is how both Gibbon and Hanley create these complex and contradictory working-class characters who have these competing, overlapping and clashing individualities but then none of this is to say that mass collective working-class politics is impossible or that this person is daft and this person is the real revolutionary. There’s a sort of cumulative effect of that collectivity.

Charles Ferrall: Now you mention it, something that I think we probably should have dealt with a little bit more are the representations of crowds by Hanley. They’re absolutely stunning. Part of the reason for that is that crowds are no longer what they would have been called in the 19^th century or before which was ‘the mob.’ The famous book on this is by Gustave Le Bon, a French guy who was related to Freud incidentally. In Freud’s essay on crowds, he talks about crowds being a violent and disturbing emanation of the unconscious in some kinds of ways. There is that tradition of thinking about crowds from the Right but Hanley takes it up and we’ve got crowds which are anonymous to some extent, almost by definition, but at the same time, what happens in them is that there are people in these crowds. They are characters who are very important and their whole reaction to the crowds during demonstrations is most interesting. I think that’s one of the great achievements of Hanley to change the way in which crowds are talked about.

Dougal McNeill: Someone whose work is very important to me is the critic Elinor Taylor who wrote a really brilliant book about the Popular Front. She writes really well about John Sommerfield, and May Day, and some texts slightly later but also continues this work of trying to think about crowds, and those quite fine distinctions between a crowd, a mass, a mob, a collective and how different texts work with them.

Matt: John Sommerfield was a communist author and activist from London. His 1936 novel, May Day, was probably his most famous work and depicted the outbreak of a fictional general strike in the mid-1930s. One thing that’s particularly interesting about May Day is that it’s an example of an explicitly communist novel using the techniques of modernism to depict the mass nature of capitalism and class struggle, despite modernism having been denounced at the Soviet Writers’ Congress just a couple of years before. The Bolshevik leader, Karl Radek, even described James Joyce’s famous modernist novel, Ulysses, as “a heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope.”

But to come back to our discussion, we also agree with Dougal’s opinion of Elinor Taylor’s book, The Popular Front Novel in Britain, which includes an excellent reading of May Day. We’ll include a link to buy it on the webpage for the episode; link in the show notes.

Dougal McNeill: Elinor Taylor’s work is really, really good on that. To add, thinking with her work helped me here. Something that’s so exciting about Gibbon, to add to the conversation, is he’s also unafraid of the stuff of political life coming from the crowds into the domestic and back out again. Actually, in terms of Chris Guthrie and Tavendale, the decisions around political militancy that the texts shows us the need to commit to can also have some very bad consequences in the way that a certain kind of harshly Communist affiliation is not actually good for the movement or the family relations.

In Gibbon’s work, crowds are places where intellectual work is happening, where people are making decisions and where debates are occurring against that right-wing notion of ‘the mob’ or as the unreasoning crowd. There’s actually the sense of collective deliberation occurring and that deliberation being something that art can be about which is breaking one of the great liberal rules that the substance of politics is dull or dulls down when it should be about personal masses. I think Gibbon shows that it’s not true because there are such exciting texts to engage with and to see that thinking happening both to the characters but also the thinking happening on the page. He’s so young when he’s writing and he’s moving so quickly. He’s moving a million miles an hour intellectually and politically himself. He’s whirring through all of these ideas and the novels just capture that kind of manic-whirring energy and excitement.

Charles Ferrall: The other thing to say about Gibbon is that the three novels are centred around a woman as well. It’s very female-centred. Another point is that the most radical of the novels is the last one, Grey Granite. In that the main protagonist is a Communist at this point, I think, and our sympathies are with him with this radicalisation, but at the same time, he comes across as a somewhat cold or ruthless figure. There’s a kind of division within Gibbon that’s extremely interesting. He, most certainly, radicalised during the ‘20s and the ‘30s but he was also one of the main antagonists of what he calls ‘Bolshevik Blah’ at one point. It’s not dissimilar to what Bakhtin talks about with the novels of Dostoevsky as having two different voices. It’s polyphonic.

Matt: In that final novel, Grey Granite, I also think the other thing that Gibbon does in that novel is that he also shows that politics happens outside of the big characters of politics. Even if it was a socialist realist novel, Ewan Tavendale would be the hero and that would be the beginning, middle and end of it.

In Gibbon’s novel, there’s one passage where, again, he’s writing in the second person but the person who’s speaking is just an anonymous working-class person who is, first of all, watching an unemployed demonstration, then finds themself caught up in it, then finds themself fighting police in it and also criticising one of the Communist leaders for being ‘no better than those Labour bleeders scared for his face,’ or something like that. The central figure of militancy isn’t the named or famous, historical (in this case fictional-historical) person but an anonymous working-class person in the struggle.

In Working Class History, when we think about how mass movements and how politics works and how history is made, history is made by thousands and even millions of anonymous, unnamed individuals. I feel like that’s something that Gibbon is doing with the novels by showing how these unnamed individuals are part of these historical processes. I think there’s a guy who grasses on Ewan Tavendale and I think that Ewan Tavendale gets arrested at some point but then later, that person who’s grassed him up runs off to the army. We then get a little paragraph where he’s giving a rousing speech to some of his fellow soldiers in a way that is indicative of some sort of revolutionary upheaval or revolutionary turn in himself. Again, it’s this idea that these individuals and characters are complex and contradictory and that individuals in history don’t always work in the way that an ideology might want them to or think that they will.

Charles Ferrall: As far as I’m aware, it’s really not remarked upon very much but the Gibbon novels are the greatest novel is about gossip that I’ve ever read [laughter]. They’re pretty damned serious. Admittedly, it’s about a small rural community but it probably works the same way in the big cities and towns as well. Gossip has this dual aspect to it. It produces a kind of solidarity and connections between people but, at the same time, it’s highly destructive as well.

We have been talking a fair bit about Hanley, who is from Liverpool, and also Gibbon, who is from Scotland. One other thing I think that’s pretty important about the history – not so much about how we write the history – is it’s not London-based. Obviously, it’s taking place in the South of Wales as well as it across the country. The importance of Scottish and Welsh writers, and writers from the Midlands as well, is very important and that can be lost as well. The strike was a regional phenomenon in some ways.

Matt: To my shame, I have not read any of the Welsh general strike novels but I wondered if you could speak to any of those.

Charles: I think, to some extent, some of them would fit into the category of proletarian literature which became pretty prominent during the 1930s and not necessarily that great, although there are, of course, great Welsh writers from that period that sometimes seen. They’ve, accordingly, been forgotten because they’re propagandistic or perceived as being propagandistic… highly realist novels as well; naturalistic in some ways or almost documentary texts. There’s certainly a lot to be recuperated from there that’s really good nevertheless. Maybe, Dougal, if you can talk about what’s great about the Welsh novels, in particular which, as you say Matt, have been largely forgotten.

Dougal McNeill: There’s a few different things going on, aren’t there? They’re not forgotten in Wales where we’ve got this very strong labour history tradition and national history tradition where a figure like Lewis Jones is thought about and debated over. It needs saying, just for the record, that neither Charles nor I read Welsh. These are English language texts that we’re talking about and that we know about.

Amongst the English language texts, the one thing that’s interesting is that idea of multi-directional memory. The strike, the lockout, the disasters and the presence of the mines and mining politics is so much more a part of the literary culture generally that it’s much more difficult to define what counts as a strike novel and what doesn’t because the strike is bubbling up in all kinds of unexpected places. Jones is a really, really interesting figure. You could say, in one sense, that he works himself to death in the service of the cause and collapses. He writes very, very directly out of this experience of mining and organising, so there’s a lot to think about there. The writer who I think stands up as a novelist and I know, in Wales, is read as a novelist still but maybe isn’t read outside of Wales as much as a novelist as he should be is Raymond Williams.

Matt: Raymond Williams was a Welsh Marxist literary critic and cultural theorist. The son of a railway worker, Williams got a place at Cambridge University and went on to become a hugely influential thinker within the British New Left from the sixties onwards.

Dougal McNeill: For me, Williams’ Border Country is an extraordinary novel, not just for how it deals with the strike but also for how it deals with this really ongoing question of what happens when we move away geographically but also when education, location and other things can actually put us between our own lives and community and continuity of struggle. Williams writes another novel just before dies. He dies in 1988 or 1989 and he publishes a novel called Loyalties at the end of his life which is the multi-generational story of the British Left and of multiple loyalties and betrayals: betrayals of Stalinism, betrayals of the state, betrayals of friends and family.

The strike is there in that novel not as a prominent topic but hovering around so much of this. Why I think Raymond Williams might be of interest to your listeners is that that those two novels, I think, really touch on so much that is relevant today around this question of what do we do with traditions when so many of the links tethering us to those traditions have been snapped? What do we do with tradition when so many of the ways in, whether it’s our unions, our political parties and our places, our actual locations, have been broken and are being rebuilt by future generations and the whole issue in Britain over the last ten years of the question of the Labour Party as the mass vehicle, the moves of younger people into institutional politics?

Williams’ thinking about the general strike is thinking about those questions only for his generation and what happens to the legacy of the strike for someone who goes away to Cambridge, gets educated and who is in this other space. That, I think, is another kind of lasting literacy legacy of the strike for us.

Matt: We’re going to take a little ad break now. If you want to listen to our podcast without ads, join us on Patreon, where you can get early access to all our episodes plus access to exclusive Patreon-only content like our Radical Reads and Fireside Chat series. 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]

[transition music]

Matt: As Charles and Dougal explained, there were many writers involved in the general strike, on one side or the other, and particularly in the case of working-class writers, their experiences informed the texts they would go on to write (particularly during the 1930s). However, there were also a number of famous writers whose novels were in progress as the general strike began, two of which we discuss here.

The first is Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence, which tells the story of an extra-marital affair between an upper-class woman and the gamekeeper of her husband’s estate (there’s also an extra link to the general strike here in that Lawrence had grown up in a mining family himself). Meanwhile, the other book we talk about is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which depicts the Ramsay family as they host guests at their holiday home on the Isle of Skye.

Both of these would become among the most celebrated English-language novels of the twentieth century, and the general strike would have a significant effect on how they both turned out.

Charles Ferrall: D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel which he started writing when he returned to Nottingham. For most of his adulthood, Lawrence was moving around the world mainly because of his TB and for other reasons as well. In the process, he became declassed to some extent. He returns to his roots, as it were, while the strike is happening and during that, he revises Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I think there are three different versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, usually, what critics think is, there’s a sort of consensus that Lawrence’s rewriting of the novel shifted its emphasis from politics, history and class towards sex and myth. We disagree with that. It’s partially true but when you read the change from the different versions, you can find that the sex (which is Lawrence’s great panacea for everything) is imbued with more class aspects, particularly between the gamekeeper, Mellors, and Lady Chatterley. Alternatively, what happens is that, in some ways, the politics of it get written out a little bit but only in superficial ways. In other ways, they become intensified. The sex and the politics intensify at the same time within that.

In terms of To The Lighthouse, its about an upper-middle-class family who sort of represent the intelligentsia. They’re at their holiday home which is somewhere up in Scotland; although, in reality, I think it was down near Cornwall.

They’re there and there’s a friend who is a writer, a poet, a botanist and others who are there. Amongst all of these people is a painter called Lily Briscoe who is the one with whom we finish at the end of the novel. Lily Briscoe has a vision and it’s a sort of epiphany which finishes the novel in that kind of way. But she can’t finish her painting because she’s interiorised the voice of this character called Charles Tansley who says “women can’t write, women can’t paint”. That’s part of her crisis so she has to overcome that.

Charles Tansley is very much a minor character and yet absolutely central because he’s the kind of blocking character in the novel that holds up the comic resolution at the end. Charles Tansley is an interesting character because he’s the son of a chemist. He’s a scholarship boy who goes to Oxbridge. We’re not sure which and he’s a doctoral student at the time under Mr Ramsey, the father who is a famous philosopher. Crucially, of course, the children don’t like him and called him ‘the Atheist’. They think he’s cynical and always pushing his own ego and so on. Although he’s not a working-class character, he’s only second generation lower middle class.

What happens when Virginia Woolf revises the novel is that he becomes a more sympathetic character to being the kind of outsider and almost scapegoat figure, at one point. I think Mrs Ramsey says that Mr Ramsey, her husband, needed him to be sacrificed in some ways so that the community of these upper-middle-class people can be brought together and integrated. It’s left vague at the end and even Mrs Ramsey finds something to like in him. It’s very much, I think, Woolf struggling with her aversion to the lower middle class. As we know, she was highly active in working-class women’s politics. That was okay for Virginia Woolf and she writes about that very well but it’s the next class up which is the one the modernists, in general, have problems with. Virginia Woolf is really struggling, I think, with her own prejudices in that novel and trying to overcome them.

Her husband, Leonard Woolf, was very much involved in the 1926 strike but she kept a more distant perspective and she is often thought of as being apolitical and above politics but in that particular novel, you sense that she’s very much trying to overcome her own class prejudices. Accordingly, To The Lighthouse is a somewhat different novel than it would have been if the 1926 strike hadn’t occurred and it’s the same, I think, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Matt: I think Charles Tansley is a really interesting character because, initially, he is so unsympathetic. He’s a misogynist, arrogant and he seems like he’s picking fights. You then saw his insecurities come out and as the novel goes on, you develop your sympathy for him as someone who has these insecurities because of his lower-middle-class background amongst these upper-middle classes.

He’s also, in some way, associated with the workers’ movement in the sense that he is always talking about working people ‘doing good by our class.’ I think you guys write in your book, as you said, about Woolf trying to work through her own prejudices. I think you write that she doesn’t really mention the strike in her diary until towards the end or after it’s finished where she’s horrified by what’s going to happen to the working class. Once the working class is safely defeated, you can now feel sorry for them rather than the slightly scarier prospect that they might win. I think there’s something there happening. It feels like she’s creating some space for Tansley in a way that is maybe more acceptable to her upper-middle-class sensibilities.

I feel like you get that in other parts of the novel as well. I think it’s the ‘Time Passes’ section which is the middle bit of the novel where, basically, all the disasters hit the family and is the bit that she was writing while the General Strike was on. I think it’s quite interesting because that is also the only bit in the novel where you can actually see the working-class people who keep the house running while disaster is happening to the Ramsey family. It’s these working-class women who are holding things together and you’re seeing the labour that actually underpins the house.

Charles Ferrall: Yeah, very definitely. I would say that in the ‘Time Passes’ which is sometimes described as a chapter which has no characters, but, as you point out: not true. It’s got the housekeeper, whose name escapes me now, and her son who does some of the gardening and the lawns. They’re very much there but thought of as Dickensian caricatures, I think, to some extent. It only goes so far with Virginia Woolf. I think she’s definitely trying to say, ‘Look, this house where all this fine talk happens is only made possible by the labour of others.’ At the same time, she can only present them – not quite but almost – as caricatures at the same time.

Dougal McNeill: I think I want to go in to bat for Virginia Woolf here, actually. There’s absolutely that but I think we’ve also got to be alive to the combination of an intellectual bravery with a willed emotional vulnerability that allows these prejudices to be explored on the page. I’m looking at the entries of the journal from 13^th May which says, ‘I suppose all pages devoted to the Strike will be skipped when I read over the book. Oh, that dull, old chapter, I shall say. Excitements about what are called real things are always unutterably transitory.’ That’s actually quite a self-lacerating thing to write in a journal. This is Woolf’s brilliance that she’s thinking herself into the kind of character that she imagines herself to be and thinking about how the Strike will then be dismissed and its transitory nature. She is not actually endorsing that and this, of course, is in a private journal not for publication. She’s not endorsing that as a statement and then similar with some of the comments around… ‘Leonard wants to talk about this. I’m more concerned with buying the dress.’

The figure of Leonard as the tub-thumper, which is what she calls him in one of the journal entries… she sets up this really quite tense dialogue between these two figures. I think that the work that goes on in To The Lighthouse, that we’ve just been talking about, is also… the Woolfs are such fascinating figures because they’re actually at the heart of some very, very serious politics and involved with Keynes, anti-colonial figures and the work that’s going on with the press. These are very, very serious thinkers and engaged in some quite radical ideas but also not prepared to pretend that the class contradictions don’t exist and so actually prepared to put those under quite considerable artistic and intellectual pressure in the text. I think that’s what gives it its aliveness.

Matt: I think the thing that always really struck me, which is why I felt it was really important how she included the working-class characters in ‘Time Passes’ even though they’re not fully fleshed out in the same way as the other characters are… there’s a bit in the first chapter where one of the guests is talking about how much he loves Mrs Ramsey’s dinner and how amazing it was that she’d prepared this dinner that was so excellent. How had she done it? It’s incredible! etc etc What’s funny about it is that, obviously, she hasn’t cooked it. In ‘Time Passes’, they mention the cook and they don’t really go into who she is or anything like that but it sort of feels like she’s saying, ‘How did Mrs Ramsey do it? Well, she has this really good cook.’ [Laughter] Maybe it’s showing to a largely middle-class or upper-middle-class readership, who would have been high on their own supply following their victory over the General Strike… and saying, ‘Well, actually, there are these working people who keep our society running.’

Actually, what’s really interesting is that, in some ways, it’s quite different from Lady Chatterley’s Lover because it’s almost like Virginia Woolf is creating space for working-class people within a British class society. She wants to say they should be included or acknowledged within British class society rather than just trampled down like in the wake of the General Strike. What you have with Lady Chatterley is, in some ways, a really radical, utopian, anti-capitalist vision from DH Lawrence where he talks of this world of iron and coal and he’s really scathing about capitalist modernity and industrial society. At the same time, DH Lawrence is also pretty scathing about the working class and, actually, the workers’ movement.

Dougal McNeill: I’m not sure if it’s taking things off topic in ways that’s not helpful but I think the other issue here is that I don’t want to connect it solely to the Strike. But from 1927 until her death, Woolf is involved in a process of radicalisation in the Three Guineas with the thinking about the rise of fascism and the theorising around the place of history. There’s a very good Canadian literary critic, Gabrielle McIntire, who’s written really finely on Woolf and views of history. I’m not saying that’s related directly to the Strike but just to all the conversation that we’re having about some of these tensions around a personal class location and how that’s expressed in the novel, she then goes on to put that under increasing pressure in her non-fiction writing and thinking about the whole structure of militarism, British society in general and capitalist patriarchy. There’s some really hard thinking going on as the 1930s progress in Woolf.

Lawrence is different because of health reasons and where he is but I think that’s another distinction. Lawrence’s novels are interesting but I can’t take Lawrence seriously as a thinker. There’s nothing there in the thinking for us; whereas, Woolf is a brilliant novelist but is also someone who pays really serious thought as a political thinker, as a theorist and a strategist in a whole lot of ways around how we’re going to stop war and how we’re going to face these kinds of crises that are coming from inequality. That’s another thing about the trajectories that I just think is worth noting.

Matt: I think with DH Lawrence, his novels are quite amazing because it’s like someone fictionalising their own therapy sessions where they are both the therapist and the client [laughter]. It’s quite amazing to see that someone who seems to grasp their own internal emotional functioning but he’s not working through it necessarily. He’s just displaying it [laughter].

Charles Ferrall: He does work through it. I think you’re right and that’s where Lawrence is a great writer. I’ve just been having a look at Fantasia of the Unconscious which begins as a refutation of Freud. It’s quite a moving and powerful refutation of Freudianism and psychoanalysis but, at the same time, Lawrence never mentions the words Oedipus complex [laughter]. By the time that was written, everyone knew about it and he certainly did as well.

Matt: I feel like part of the suggestion that is being made is it’s Sons and Lovers, is very clearly the son in conflict with the father for the affection and love of the mother which is classic Oedipal complex stuff. It’s really funny that if he’s talking about Freud and he’s not mentioning it, he’s showing us all the workings but it’s almost like he’s not able to do it.

Charles Ferrall: No, he’s doing it before Freud. Most people in the UK wouldn’t have read Freud by this stage but, how do you describe it, Matt? Ongoing therapy I think is a nice way of reading Lawrence.

It’s interesting that the one thing about Lawrence is that he’s never lost his women readers. Kate Millett takes him to task in Sexual Politics which was published in 1968 I think. It’s a book which I’ve re-read or re-read parts of it and it still seems quite contemporary. She takes on Lawrence. There still remain women who read Lawrence and who might say, ‘Yeah, this is speaking to me in some sort of way,’ but not in the way that Gibbon does. Gibbon is leagues ahead there, I think.

[transition music]

Matt: In their book, Charles and Dougal draw a distinction between middle-class writers ‘looking in’ and working-class writers ‘looking out’. As Charles and Dougal note themselves, it’s not always a perfect categorisation: DH Lawrence, for example, is grouped alongside the middle-class writers despite coming from a mining family himself (though, as Charles mentioned earlier, he had been largely ‘declassed’ through his writing career). But despite this exception, it still remains a useful way for thinking about how writers from different classes were responding to the strike.

Dougal McNeill: The looking-out image is quite a practical one in the sense of writing takes time and there’s a reason why there aren’t as many working-class novels because the novel takes a lot of time to get written. Shorter works, poems and plays can be put on more quickly. The Strike involved people talking to each other by being out of work, being out of the mine for much longer with the lockouts and, actually, trying to look out to a wider world of networks and solidarity or it’s generalised to get works in circulation by joining labour colleges and so on. The idea of the working-class writer looking out from a particular situation, a particular union, a particular mine or a particular area to this wider sense of ‘can we generalise?’ Can we have a class experience? Can we learn and strategise from one another? Can we think about this in universal terms and then even to go further with that international connection and networks of writers around the Third International and Communist networks. That’s part of what happens with being on the inside looking out. Being on the inside looking out can also mean looking out for a wider readership, a cross-class readership and connections that go on there and the role of memoire and so on.

In terms of being on the outside looking in, for a number of upper-middle-class writers like WH Auden, the poet, there was a genuine interest in the lives of workers and there was a genuine interest in and sense of sympathy for the plight that workers found themselves in or there was a kind of retrospective sense of bad conscience amongst figures who’d been strikebreakers when they were younger and then actually trying to looking into this world that they’d not known. Like our conversation about Woolf, it’s a genuine attempt to form a meaningful intellectual relationship with an event that was outside of the sphere of personal experience. I think that’s the distinction.

With the poet Auden, he becomes more conservative later in life and goes to great lengths to try and play down the seriousness of his commitment. He says that he always dreamed of riding a bus. He did this just to annoy his family and was surprised when he got shown out of the relative’s house when he said that he was helping the Trades Union Congress (TUC). I’m not a hundred percent sure I believe him because the other thing that we see through Auden’s early years is this absolute fascination with working-class experience. It’s kind of sexualised. He goes to Berlin and working-class people are eroticised for him there but also, very clearly, he’s someone with genuine social interests and interests in politics and concerns of a world that is experientially different to Oxford. It’s experientially different to anything in his upbringing that he is being prepared for. So, he is, quite literally, on the outside looking in, trying to imagine himself into this world and making sorties into that world. That distinction was partly an organising distinction for us in order for us to think about ways to group these writers. I think it actually helps you to think about two ways that writers approached the Strike and writing about the Strike.

Charles Ferrall: That said, though, for the working-class writers, there wasn’t a lot of conflict between them or division between them and how they viewed the Strike, I don’t think. I think they viewed it largely as a betrayal and certainly as a defeat which it was. Of course, that brought them in conflict with the TUC, the trade union leadership and so on. Amongst them, there seems to be a degree of consensus about what happened; whereas, of course, for the upper middle classes, it’s division and conflict. They can’t really make up their minds but not so, I think, for the working-class writers.

[transition music]

Matt: When it comes to working-class novels that engage with the general strike, there are so many that we simply didn’t have time to discuss them all. But one novel, which Dougal mentioned in passing earlier in the episode, is often held up as one of the most important literary engagements with the strike. I felt it was worth coming back to that novel, as in my opinion it’s a text that really brings out some of the contradictions around the Labour Party, the trade unions, trade union leaders, and even local trade union activists during the general strike.

Matt: I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on this one particular book. But Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash is probably my least favourite of the General Strike novels in the sense that it is very much a strike told from the perspective of a full-time union official and not just in the sense that the main character, Joan Craig, is a full-time union official but also in terms of the way that it affects the narrative. I often feel like rank-and-file workers in the novel get pushed to the edges of the novel in the sense that I think only once the Strike is over and once she’s in the mine villages helping with relief for coal miners who are locked out, it’s only that last part of the novel where any rank-and-file workers get names. Before that, they’re just these plural nouns who cheer for her from the edges. She writes things like, ‘The engineers cheered for Joan,’ or ‘The men said, “Yeah, let’s go out.”’ I always felt like it’s all focalised through the perspective of this full-time union official. Maybe downstream from that, you also end up with this thing where her understanding of the Strike and what went wrong with the Strike seems to not have been the case. I forget if it’s Joan or if it’s maybe the union official who is her mentor but he talks about the lack of discipline ‘because we didn’t have a strong, powerful centre that could control everything,’ and that’s why the Strike fell apart. For me, doing research into the Strike, it feels like there was a very powerful centre and the powerful centre said, ‘Get back to work!’

Dougal McNeill: Too powerful.

Matt: Yeah [laughter]. You guys talk about the ‘complex modes of forgetting’ that you get in a lot of the reflections on the Strike from various people. I almost feel like Ellen Wilkinson’s novel is, in itself, a kind of complex mode of forgetting. Especially for someone like her, who has her Communist past but then has to park that somewhere else because now she’s a left-wing Labour MP and I guess maybe she wants to criticise the TUC but then also, she doesn’t want to seem like the Communists either. She’s doing this kind of balancing act where, for me, the politics doesn’t really make sense and then also the narrative effect of having this union official as the central character meant that individual rank-and-file workers just existed to cheer her on from big crowds. I thought that was quite distinct from, say, Gibbon or Hanley.

Dougal McNeill: I think the criticism is fair dinkum and I think for me, as a literary historian, it’s a really fascinating example though of this being a political contest taking place by way of narrative. We said earlier, and I think it’s largely true, that there’s not a whole lot of contest from the writers affiliated to the workers’ movement about that overwhelming sense of defeat.

As you pointed out, there are these strands forming and this is the dominant Labour Party claim that solidifies and hegemonises through the ‘20s and the ‘30s. Don’t challenge the state. Look to the political rather than the economic and strictly demarcate the political and the economic. Privilege the political and build these institutions and so on. I wouldn’t necessarily want to dispute the political characterisation you’ve given of the text. What I find fascinating about it though and why I would encourage your listeners still to look at it and think with it is what a world away we are from the current day when you can think, ‘One of the ways I need to do that is to write a romance.’ The way that she mobilises this kind of popular literary form to make a series of reformist political arguments… there’s an odd generic disjuncture going on there.

You’re right that perhaps the work of politics is reduced to these walk-on parts but then you’re also left with what for us now is this very strange document whereby the romance elements of the text and the popular fiction adventure of the text are also about this mass working-class struggle. That, I think, stays weird, fun, unusual and exciting as an historical document and as a remnant. You’re quite right that part of what it’s also doing is it’s Labour Party politics from above and it’s organisation from above. Whenever you hear union officials talking about discipline, it means don’t get out of line and don’t have rank-and-file debates. There’s a political intervention going on, absolutely.

[outro music]

Matt: That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. If you want to learn more about some of the works mentioned in this discussion, check out the webpage for this episode where you’ll find a list of further reading as well as links to buy some of the books we’ve mentioned. Link in the show notes.

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. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

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

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. We’ll include a link to download the song on the webpage for this episode along with more links for following Montaigne’s music. Link in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

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

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WCL15: Literature of the 1926 General Strike

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WCL15: Literature of the 1926 General Strike – Working Class History

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Acknowledgements

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WCL15: Literature of the 1926 General Strike

Episode

WCL15: Literature of the 1926 General Strike – Working Class History

Further reading

Acknowledgements

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Transcript

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Published by Working Class History