A Very British Revolt
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Britain’s Revolutionary Summer: The General Strike of 1926, Edd Mustill, Oneworld Publications, 2026, 336 pages, £16.99
The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026, Callum Cant & Matthew Lee, Verso Books, 2026, 160 pages, £11.99
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The British, we often hear, are a peaceable lot. Pragmatic where others are prone to fits of Mediterranean hot-headedness or Gallic zeal, placid where others are dyspeptic, we are a deferential, know-your-place kind of people. Ours, we are told, is an old nation – the oldest, perhaps – with a history marked by continuity and gradual, incremental change. Not for us is the mass march or revolutionary bid for power; our native traditions are those of freedom and equipoise, deference and liberty. Britain, whoever is in power, is a small-c conservative place.
This view may have shifted somewhat after the convulsions of recent years (Brexit, a succession of unstable and inept governments, the rise of the populist right), but not much; there’s still something distinctly un-English, for instance, in the tens of thousands of Union Jack-draped revellers marching (and drinking and pissing) for Tommy Robinson, stomping past Trafalgar Square to hear American-style evangelical rock and anti-Islam rants from European rabble-rousers. Equally, there have been moments in our national story that have unsettled this conservative vision: suffragettes breaking windows and chaining themselves to railings; teenage Teddy Boys rioting through the streets of West London; football hooligans tearing up Paris and Marseille. But even these have been more or less successfully metabolised into a rather more even-tempered story: either minor turbulence in the otherwise smooth ascent, or the work of thugs and agitators external to the national body proper.
One act in the national drama that has the power to truly upset this, however, is more often than not simply forgotten: the 1926 General Strike. While the other great industrial dispute of Britain’s twentieth century, the Miners’ Strike of the mid-1980s, has become the stuff of folk legend – a key moment in a relatively even-keeled social-democratic counter narrative of Britain’s past – the General Strike, it seems, is best left in the history books to gather dust. If it is remembered at all, then it is usually done so as a thoroughly orderly event, conducted with all the menace of a village cricket match. Looming far larger in recent memory than the nearly three million workers who walked off their jobs and took to the picket lines are the tens of thousands of volunteers, mostly middle-class men and women – ‘posh students, full of vim’, in the words of Edd Mustill in Britain’s Revolutionary Summer – ‘making fools of themselves playing at driving buses.’
Nor is this framing merely a contemporary issue. Very quickly a narrative of inevitability settled over the strike: that a crisis had failed to happen, and that this failure revealed the true and sensible nature of the British people. ‘The failure of the General Strike shows what a sane people the British are’, the Fabian Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary towards the end of May 1926, as the dust had yet to settle. ‘If only our revolutionaries would realise the hopelessness of their attempt to turn the British workman into a Russian Red and the British businessman and country gentleman into an Italian Fascist! The British are hopelessly good-natured and [full of] common sense.’
Even this year, the hundredth anniversary of the strike, has done little to restore the events of those nine days in May when the world seemed, however briefly, to have turned upside down. We now have a suite of excellent books, fodder for the Waterstones dads, and a few desultory tweets from the TUC, but little else besides.
This is a shame, not least because it trivialises the struggles of those millions of ordinary men and women who took part in Britain’s largest ever industrial action. But also because, as Callum Cant and Matthew Lee write in their short but powerful book on the strike and its afterlives, 1926 may have been ‘a turning point at which history failed to turn, but that outcome wasn’t inevitable.’ To acknowledge this is to see Britain and its history in a very different light.
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The immediate cause of the events of May 1926 was a long-running industrial dispute in the coal industry. In the early decades of the twentieth century, coal was king. On the eve of the First World War, nearly three hundred million tonnes was mined in Britain, over a third of which was exported. This hard, glossy black or brown rock, the product of dense vegetation millions of years old pressed deep into the earth, was the original fuel of the global fossil economy and powered the industrial revolution. In turn it helped Britain to become the Victorian ‘workshop of the world’. The work of getting to it, though, was dangerous and poorly paid; fatalities in the underground tunnels were as high as three a day during this period.
By the 1920s, maintaining this elevated global position meant that Britain was heavily reliant on the strength of its exports. This was threatened by the return of the European nations into the global economy, in competition with British products. When, in a bid to solidify the City of London’s dominance in the global financial system, the chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Churchill, made the decision to restore the gold standard, those exports appeared to be endangered even further. Returning the pound to pre-war parity with the dollar overvalued the currency on international markets, thus making export commodities like coal, cotton and steel less competitive and threatening the country’s balance of trade.
If the pound made exports more expensive, something else would have to give. That was wages. To keep Britain afloat, those who worked long and gruelling hours bent double in dark, dangerous and suffocating conditions to dig ‘King Coal’ out of the earth would have to accept a pay cut. Already, miners had taken a significant cut in their earnings, which had declined to around a third in real terms after 1921. Yet more was expected; as Cant and Lee write, ‘the whole economic policy of the country now hinged on breaking the miners.’
In the mining villages and industrial towns of England and Wales, meanwhile, something else was stirring. From the late 1800s, the strength of the country’s trade union movement had been growing. The militancy of the trade unions would peak in the years before 1914. Between 1910 and the start of the First World War some eighty million working days were lost to strike action, to which the government responded with the frequent deployment of the army and the repressive force of the police. This would come to be known as the ‘Great Unrest’.
It would soon be followed by an event of even greater significance, the Great War. As millions of men signed up to join the army, and a patriotic fervour hit much of the nation, an ‘industrial truce’ was signed in March 1915, in which the trade unions agreed to give up some of their independence in return for a set of reforms and their incorporation as a legitimate part of the political system. In the relative industrial peace that followed, wages for many in industrial occupations began to fall. In response, a movement of trade union militants emerged, and in October 1917, these militants were given additional impetus by events in Russia. The world, it seemed to many, was on the brink of a communist revolution, with the workers’ paradise in Britain just around the corner.
The atmosphere throughout the early 1920s was febrile, and industrial tensions simmered. When mine owners announced their intention to further reduce wages, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), backed by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), rejected their terms. Fearing unrest, Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin intervened, declaring a nine-month subsidy to maintain the miners’ wages. Yet by the beginning of May 1926, the subsidy was coming to an end and still no agreement was in place. Negotiations continued, but both sides expected a showdown. On one side of the table were the mine owners and the representatives of the state, fronted by Baldwin and backed by the ‘hardliners’ in his government: men like the outspoken and puritanical home secretary William Joynson-Hicks (Jix, or ‘Mussolini Minor’, as his critics knew him), with his ‘unabashed appeal to the most illiberal prejudices of popular Conservatism’ in the words of one biographer, and the chancellor, Winston Churchill, a man long hated in the labour movement for sending troops against striking miners in Tonypandy, in the Rhondda Valley, in 1911.
On the other side sat the trade union leaders. Based in the TUC’s headquarters in Eccleston Square, Pimlico, the miners’ leaders A. J. Cook and Herbert Smith had spent weeks trying to persuade their more timid comrades, men like Ernest Bevin of the transport workers’ union and Jimmy Thomas of the railwaymen, to commit to a nationwide sympathy strike.
When talks broke down on the 2 May and the seemingly inevitable came, the TUC approached it in an almost lackadaisical manner. Their preparations for a national call-out had only begun at the end of April. The state, on the other hand, had been preparing for years, and stood ready and waiting. Two organisations would be key to their response: the Supply and Trade Organisation (STO), set up after the strikes of 1919–1921, which would be responsible for running operations in power plants, gasworks, transport and elsewhere; and the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS), founded in September 1925 by a group of private citizens, including former diplomats and officers, whose purpose would be to provide volunteer labour to break the strike. When the government proclaimed a state of emergency on Friday the 30 April, it was almost immediately leaked to the OMS who quickly had a poster made up asking for volunteers.
Not only did the state have the years of preparation behind them, and a complex and sophisticated strikebreaking operation in place, but the state of emergency also granted them, in the words of the historian Jonathan Schneer in his book Nine Days in May, ‘practically unlimited powers’. These included the ability to arrest or fine anyone, even for crimes such as ‘using extreme language’ or displaying literature that did, enter properties without a warrant, control the economy and direct both the police and the armed forces. Added to this was the formation during the strike of the Civil Constabulary Reserve, special constables who would act in effect as a paramilitary force against the striking workers.
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‘Today we might wonder’, writes Edd Mustill, ‘why over a million people would give up their pay, risk their jobs, and go out on strike at the command of the TUC.’ The reason he gives to why so many risked so much was that ‘a worker in the 1920s knew the value of discipline and unity.’ Which rather presupposes far more than it explains.
Of course, many did. The union movement, compared to today, was strong and the militants within it well placed. But not everyone in the working class was united. Millions of members of the working class were organised in trade unions, but millions, too, were not. Far from the images of ragtag undergraduates in their college scarves driving buses and aristocratic ladies mashing potatoes, in reality most strikebreakers were either unemployed or non-unionised men.
Even so, the ability to organise so many so quickly is remarkable. On the 7 May, just four days after the general strike had been called, ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson, the Labour MP for Middlesborough, who was touring the country galvanising support for the strikers, arrived in Crewe, in South Cheshire. Crewe was, at the time, a company town organised around the vast complex of railway works to the west of the town centre. ‘Position extraordinary,’ Ellen wrote in a report back to Eccleston Square. ‘Procession over a mile long, streets lined 8 deep. Huge meeting on football ground. Both ground and stands completely filled with people. Local strike paper being published. Strikers hungry for news. Paralysis complete. Public opinion against Government.’
If the striking workers in Crewe were hungry for news, that’s hardly surprising. The immediate precipitating cause of the general strike was a walk out in the print room of the Daily Mail after workers refused to print an anti-union editorial, which gave Baldwin the excuse he needed to induce the strike, and throughout the nine days print workers were on the picket lines. Due to this, the regular daily newspapers were unable to be produced, producing a vacuum of information that the government feared would be filled by rumours and plots. The government therefore responded with their own propaganda sheet, the British Gazette. Edited by one of the hardliners, Churchill, its main purpose, according to Mustill, was ‘to delegitimise the strike altogether by hammering home the idea that it was a revolutionary plot.’ To this the TUC responded with their own paper, the British Worker. Indeed, the propaganda war was one of the many fascinating subplots of the strike.
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A week and a half after the strike was called it would end in defeat for the TUC. While the trade unions began the strike with some optimism, they were met with a refusal on the part of the mine owners and the government to return to the negotiating table. By the first weekend of the strike, the union leaders were getting nervous and began to look for a way out. On the 12 May, the union leaders emerged from Downing Street disconsolate, with Baldwin’s government victorious.
Despite government propaganda and fearmongering, not even the left-wing members of the TUC General Committee saw the strike as the road to a British revolution. In fact, according to Mustill, none could see further than a negotiated settlement for the miners’ dispute. ‘From their perspective,’ he writes, ‘they had been forced into using the most radical means possible to pursue a moderate, even meagre, aim.’ The miners’ leaders, however, stuck firm to their slogan: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.’ They stayed out on strike until November, enduring another eight gruelling months of hardship and struggle, before hunger forced them back to work.
As Mustill, Cant and Lee all emphasise, however, the rank and file of the union members were, like the miners themselves, not as willing to accept defeat as their leaders. The 13 May, the day after the strike officially ended, saw more workers on strike than any day previously. In Crewe, on the 14 May, a mass meeting was held which ‘decided that no man or woman resumes work until the railway companies dispense with renewal of service forms and every man or woman is allowed to take up his or her work as he or she left it without prejudice to anyone or any victimisation or any loss of privileges or violation of agreements’ – a scene replicated across the country.
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Of course, in the century since the general strike, not everyone has acquiesced quite so easily to the idea that the events of May 1926 confirmed the thoroughly rational and sane nature of the British people. For the novelist Christopher Isherwood, writing in Lions and Shadows some two decades later, the strike was in fact a triumph of ‘the Poshocracy’. The poshocrats, he said, ‘had won, as [they] always did win, in a thoroughly gentlemanly manner’, and so total was this victory that they could now ‘pretend that nothing more serious had taken place than, so to speak, a jolly sham fight with pats of butter.’ This was not a victory of sense and common decency but one of class. It is a lesson in the politics of history, where what is at issue is the depth and power of Britain’s class society, and who can and does write our national story.
These books will, I hope, do something to rectify the whitewashing of British history. But there are other lessons in them, too. As Cant and Lee sit in a pub in the former pit village of Bedlinog in the Welsh valleys, a site of intense struggle during the general strike, they begin talking to a group of locals. They quickly discover that much of the memory of the strike has been erased, even here. Gone too, it seems, is any sense of hope; growing up in Bedlinog, the locals say, means having three choices: ‘join the army, get a trade, or do drugs.’ For those who do find work, the choices aren’t a huge amount better. Many work far from the village, either requiring long commutes or travelling back home only on weekends. In the place of the once dominant pits is a fragmented landscape of insecure work and bogus self-employment.
If the pits produced a village that was one of South Wales’s ‘Little Moscows’, red enclaves in the valleys, now new political forces are at play: the rise of Reform UK. Politics has failed many in the village, and in Nigel Farage’s right populist outfit they see a possibility of destroying Westminster and all it stands for. Farage ‘promises to turn back time’, Cant and Lee write, ‘reopen the coal mines, build new blast furnaces, take things back to how they used to be.’
Reading this, I’m struck by how familiar it all sounds. My hometown, Crewe, where ‘Red Ellen’ saw a glimpse of a new world in those extraordinary scenes, and where thousands of workers downed tools in support of their comrades they had never met and likely never would, has like Bedlinog suffered deeply over recent decades. Long gone are the railway works, and with them the stable jobs that came with it. In its place today are clusters of red-brick new-build houses backing on to a decaying high street filled with vape shops and takeaways, if anything at all.
Yet, even here, hope remains. As Cant and Lee write, ‘Bedlinog and Port Talbot’, the latter a nearby town that was until recently dominated by a giant steel mill, ‘were shaped by the needs of capital.’ But not only that. Though ‘their history is littered with stories of poverty, defeat, addiction, and victimisation’, it also contains other stories, and people who ‘took the materials they had to hand and began to create a different kind of place and a different kind of society, one based on working-class self-organisation.’ That they failed is less important than their trying.
History, unlike the comforting tales told by the poshocracy, is not a straight and smooth line bending upwards. Nothing is pre-ordained. Things in the past could have been different. We can see, if we look hard enough, diverging strands, alternative futures. And things can be different again today.
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John Merrick is the deputy editor of The BREAK–DOWN.
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