'Nine Days in May' by Jonathan Schneer

This is another history of the General Strike of May 1926 that has been published to coincide with the centenary. Personally I found it to be rather more satisfactory in most respects than the book by David Torrance, but in truth the two accounts are setting out to achieve very different things, so it is not really fair to compare them directly.

Jonathan Schneer is an American professor who is not so well known for writing about British society. But he has done an excellent job here of writing a pretty straight narrative history of the strike starting with its antecedents and ending with its legacy. It is extraordinarily well-researched and also very well-written. I enjoyed reading it very much indeed, particularly having finished the Torrance book with questions lingering in my head that this account, in large part, answered.

There is much more here about the strike itself as it was experienced on the ground. The leading figures (Baldwin, Samuel, Thomas, Bevin, Churchill, Citine, Joynson-Hicks etc) make plenty of appearances, but the focus is less on them and more on what happened day by day as the strike was called, reached its apogee and then quite rapidly dissolved half way into its second week.

Jonathan Schneer makes little attempt to conceal his sympathy for the strikers, but is also pretty critical of the tactics and strategy of the unions who ended up achieving very little, if anything, from their decision to call a general strike in support of the miners who were entirely reasonably resisting pay cuts and a requirement to work longer hours. He draws on a huge range of original source material, but focuses principally on what can be gleaned from the trade union archives. The book is thus in the main written from that perspective.

Schneer, like Torrance in his book, is pretty dismissive of the notion that the strike was in any serious way used by communists and communist sympathisers to replicate in Britain anything resembling the Russian revolution of 1917. But he explores some of the similarities, notably the way that local 'councils of action' (which is what the term 'soviet' means) sought in some places to control how much food and power was distributed and to whom. That of course was an attempt to replace legitimate government with some form of supervision by unelected bodies, and was something that was always doomed to fail in the British context:

The country's government was not morally bankrupt, as the Russian Tsar's had been in 1917. Baldwin had not presided over a terrible defeat in war; had not lost control of the armed forces; did not confront diverse, well-armed, highly motivated revolutionary bodies - in fact, before the General Strike, his government had no difficulty maintaining law and order at all. It had no trouble feeding its people either. It had not failed to control hyperinflation or plague. It most certainly had not lost the will to govern. Most Britons did not hate and despise it, as most Russians had hated and despised the tsar's government in 1917. Rather, they had given Baldwin's Conservatives 46.8% of the popular vote at the last general election - and Labour 33.3%, and the Liberals 17.8%. Seventy-seven percent of eligible voters had turned out.

While this reality made any possibility of a communist revolution in Britain a fantasy, it was also turned out more generally to to be the ultimate reason that the strike failed. There was simply nothing like enough popular backing for it - sympathy for the miners, yes absolutely - but support for a project which ultimately sought to challenge the right of an elected government to govern was never sufficiently widespread.

A further important point made here is that almost all Liberal MPs opposed the strike, while a good number of Labour people were very lukewarm about it too, being committed to Parliamentary politics and totally focused on winning the next general election (as indeed they did).

Moreover, of course, the government was able to call on vastly more resources than the trade union side could ever dream of:

Even aside from the police and armed forces, even aside from the law as propounded by John Simon, the government had at its command a vast, honed apparatus for defeating the General Strike. It was the smoothly functioning Rolls Royce, competing with the rough and ready pickup truck of the TUC. Every evening the Rolls Royce dashboard, with its gauges, clocks, odometers, speedometers, thermometers, and the like, revealed to the government the real balance of forces, the real temperature of the country, the real road conditions, in the form of summaries compiled by Whitehall clerks of reports from the country's dozen civil commissioners earlier that day.

Another area that Jonathan Schneer discusses really effectively were the contingency plans that the Home Office had drawn up well ahead of time that could rapidly swing into action the moment a general strike was called. Hyde Park was requisitioned and heavily guarded from day one and became the base from which food and milk were distributed by volunteer truck drivers, trained there for the purpose and accompanied by armed guards. The army and navy were on standby to protect docks (although not really needed in the end), and as a result, food and power supplies were not particularly badly disrupted during the strike. There was minor violence - stones thrown at trains and trucks etc - but for the most part, with one or two notable exceptions, it was avoided.

I was interested to read here that the strike enjoyed most support in Newcastle and the North East, and that it was there that there was most disruption to food supplies and most confrontation between strikers, volunteers and the police. The suburb of Gosforth is specifically mentioned as a place where road blocks were established to prevent the distribution of food from the docks to the general population. Both my maternal grandparents were living there at that time and would not, I am certain, have been supporters of the strike. Rumour has it that my grandfather, then a twenty-one year old medical student drove a train. If so, this book suggests it would have been a dangerous thing to do in more ways than one.

The book though, makes it clear that the north east was the only area of the country where this kind of serious, violent / semi-violent activity took place during the strike. Elsewhere things proceeded much more peaceably, football matches between police and strikers' teams being organised in some places.

Defeat for the unions was thus probably inevitable, the question really always being whether the government's victory would be total or partial (ie; some kind of compromise that the unions could live with). The result was a situation in which the unions were continually trying to negotiate from a position of weakness. They were bluffing most of the time, and the government knew it. There would be no compromises:

As Baldwin wrote to Cavendish-Bentick: 'There is no government which could possibly surrender to a general strike without grave danger to our Parliamentary institutions, and without losing the confidence and support of the nation at large'. That would not happen on his watch.

I know that further books on the strike, in addition to those by Schneer and Torrance have been published this year. I think though that I have had my fill for the time being. This one is surely going to be recognised as being the standard account for some time now. Very impressive and enjoyable too.