‘The Edge of Revolution’, ‘Britain’s Revolutionary Summer’, and ‘Nine Days in May’ review

In 1976, on its 50th anniversary, the General Strike of May 1926 could still be understood as a staging post in the growth of trade union power with which the reading public was then very familiar. The miners’ strike of 1972 led to power blackouts and some exceptional outbreaks of violence. The miners’ strike of 1974 inflicted more power cuts and a three-day working week, and ultimately consolidated Labour’s majority in the second election of that year. The Ulster Workers’ Strike of 1974 paralysed Northern Ireland and led to direct rule from Westminster. In these circumstances the General Strike of 1926, also precipitated by the miners, was readily comprehensible in terms of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm described as ‘the forward march of labour’. And yet Hobsbawm concluded that the ‘forward march’ had been halted, a verdict delivered in a lecture as early as 1978, even before Margaret Thatcher’s electoral victory in 1979 and before her decisive victory over the miners in the strike of 1984-85. In Hobsbawm’s view, the fragmentation of the working class and the rise of new identity categories including gender had reduced the potential for trade union power to represent ‘the people’ against the state.

How then to tell the story of the General Strike on its centenary today, 50 years on, as, commendably, three historians have sought to do? One option is to tell the same rollicking good story as ever, rich in anecdote and tension, without needing to place it in a long-term historical trajectory. This is essentially David Torrance’s strategy. Building on his lively account of the first Labour government of 1924, The Wild Men (2024), Torrance is primarily interested in narrating the various 3-D chess games that seemed to determine the outbreak and course of the strike. A new set of ‘wild men’, led by the home secretary ‘Jix’ (William Joynson-Hicks, or ‘Mussolini Minor’ to his critics) and the chancellor Winston Churchill (making a good fist of playing ‘Mussolini Major’), sought even before the strike broke out to gird their more timid Conservative cabinet colleagues for a winner-takes-all struggle against the labour movement. At the same time, in Eccleston Square, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) headquarters, another chess game was under way. The miners’ leaders A.J. Cook and Herbert Smith were egging on their comrades to support a national sympathy strike, viewed with trepidation by moderate leaders such as the railwaymen’s Jimmy Thomas. The idea of a ‘national strike’ in sympathy with the miners was ultimately accepted as inevitable by the TUC majority and masterfully coordinated in difficult conditions by the transport workers’ leader Ernest Bevin, the only person whose long-term reputation was enhanced by the strike.

Other elite players appear on Torrance’s stage: churchmen who sought to mediate, press lords who cheered on the government (even while their presses fell silent), and at the end a few Liberal statesmen, such as John Simon and Herbert Samuel, who devised a ‘compromise’ that represented near total victory for the government. Such a quick exit was seized upon by union leaders including Thomas who had been apprehensive from the start and were scared silly by the prospect of the breakdown of law and order in the nine days that the strike lasted. Torrance also gives plenty of room to the colourful stories that proliferated then and since, especially those concerning strike-breaking volunteers: Oxbridge students in their college scarves driving trams and buses, duchesses ladling out milk and soup at relief camps pitched in Hyde Park, clubmen reporting as special constables on the streets of London. As one story had it, an aristocratic special constable volunteering for portering duties at Paddington Station was turned away because ‘they only take earls’. In fact most strikebreakers weren’t gents but clerks, the unemployed, and non-union working men.

Astonishingly, Torrance tells us that his ‘high politics and middle-class emphasis’ is ‘largely unavoidable’ because politicians and volunteers leave better records than working men, as if labour historians haven’t for 60 years been digging up new sources and reading old ones ‘against the grain’ to get at a much wider range of perspectives. But such an approach comes naturally to Torrance, a biographer and a Parliamentary clerk who has had recent success with a book about high politics in 1924. For those other perspectives we must turn to Edd Mustill, a trade unionist and labour historian, who has no trouble finding sources for how the strike played out around the country – everywhere except Northern Ireland – and how trade unionists at local as well as national level managed the tricky business of pressuring the government without harming the people, trying to ensure the flow of essential goods (especially foodstuffs) while shutting down businesses, transport, and trade. Mustill makes particularly good use of the local press, regional histories of the strike, and trade union records at the Modern Records Centre in Warwick, with which, to judge from his footnotes, Torrance has only the most glancing familiarity.

At certain junctures Mustill’s partisanship gets in the way of the story. In the span of a few pages he describes the cuts to wages proposed by the mine owners that triggered the strike as ‘savage’, ‘brutal’, harsh’, and ‘draconian’ without spelling out what they meant either in terms of absolute living standards or wages relative to miners’ previous rates or other workers’ rates. Similarly he is too ready to equate unionised workers with ‘the whole working class’ at a time when millions of workers were unionised but millions were not, and a working-class identity was, while still in formation, a fragile thing. But overall his treatment is more balanced than Torrance’s, with his careful attention to local trades councils and ‘Councils of Action’ which bore the burden of organising the strike and mitigating its ill effects, vividly documented in some local strike bulletins preserved at Warwick, without neglecting the role of strikebreakers, special constables, and other volunteers. He does so without losing sight of the main outlines of the ‘chess games’ being played in Downing Street and Eccleston Square.

So far as one can tell from their bibliographies and footnotes, neither Torrance nor Mustill have familiarised themselves with Barry Supple’s definitive History of the British Coal Industry, 1913-1946 (1987), without which the centrality of coal, the precariousness of the industry, and the true significance of wage cuts (and hours worked) cannot be appreciated. Jonathan Schneer’s Nine Days in May, the longest but also the most readable and convincing of these three books, makes good use of Supple and devotes nearly 100 pages to explaining just why coal mattered so much and why so many people were willing to make sacrifices for the miners. Granted, even Supple found it difficult to navigate the complexities of coal’s position. It wasn’t one industry but many, from miserable, narrow seams in idyllic rural locations to seemingly inexhaustible pickings miles out to sea off the Durham coast, often reached only after an hour of unpaid trekking through low, fetid tunnels. It served multiple markets, home and foreign, with surprisingly disparate price scales. It was intrinsically difficult to bargain for nationally. Costs and profits fluctuated wildly; so did wages.

Supple himself had to guess at the scale of those ‘draconian’ cuts but he did what a good historian does: made his best guesses on the basis of the most evidence. After some gains in wartime, real earnings were cut by a third after 1921 and remained low through the early 1930s, such that for many household earnings were ‘below adequate subsistence levels’, even without taking into account the dangers (miners were killed in underground accidents at a rate of three every day), terrible housing, and those hours of unpaid work. Schneer does his best to present these indigestible facts to a general audience, and also does the good historian’s work in weighing up – not just wage rates, but also the motives and actions of all the parties involved, drawing on Torrance’s elite sources and Mustill’s trade union sources while adding many more of his own. ‘Probably’ is one of his favourite words, and he is as certain as anyone should be about events so contested and now so distant.

‘Probably’ may be the best answer to the two most contested questions surrounding the strike: must it have broken out in the first place and must it have ended so ignominiously for the miners? Schneer has one rabbit in his hat: evidence that Jimmy Thomas had bet against the success of the strike in the stock market, but although he shows it to us he doesn’t flourish it. Like Torrance and Mustill he knows that the unions were handicapped by their own unwillingness to consider the ‘unconstitutional’ – or, insurrectionist – measures that might have won the strike; the three authors differ on whether this was a good or a bad thing. None of them tells the longer-term story by which working people (miners included) won most of their demands by ‘constitutional’ means that did not require running the risks of insurrection or posing a minority of unionised workers against an electoral majority. That was why it became possible for Hobsbawm to see a ‘forward march’ across the 20th century, only halted when confusions arose again over whether the unionised working class was ‘the people’ or even represented them. At their best, though, these three books give an account of the events of May 1926 that make sense in terms that contemporaries would have understood while endowing them with significance that present-day readers can recognise: a world we have lost but that remains meaningful.

• The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike That Shook Britain 
  David Torrance
  Bloomsbury, 320pp, £20
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• Britain’s Revolutionary Summer: The General Strike of 1926 
  Edd Mustill
  Oneworld, 336pp, £16.99
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• Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926
  Jonathan Schneer
  Oxford University Press, 432pp, £25
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Peter Mandler is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.