'The Edge of Revolution' by David Torrance

A hundred years ago, in the first half of May 1926, about two million British workers went out on strike together at the same time. Several industries were brought to a near-complete stop by this short-lived but highly consequential General Strike, including much of the press. AAs one of very few people who really enjoys reading archive editions of the Times Literary Supplement, I can attest that two weekly editions are missing from May 1926 thanks to the strike. Mines stopped operating, public transport ceased and no food or anything else was unloaded at the docks. Had it continued longer who knows what might have happened, but it ended after less than two working weeks. The TUC backed down in the face of pretty implacable government resolve.

The title of this centenary anniversary account suggests that Britain was, during those nine days, close to a Russian-style socialist revolution, but that is misleading. Ministers, of course, talked up that possibility in order to garner public support, but aside from some very left-wing communist types, supporters of the strike wanted no such thing. The principal aim was to prevent mine owners from carrying out their threat of reducing miners' pay while increasing their hours of work. And as so often when strikes take place - as is very much the case today - most people agreed with the aim, but not the means being used to pursue it. They stood in favour of parliamentary democracy and the principle that elected governments should determine what happens in the country, and not organised pressure groups. Three years later the Labour Party won a general election, thus ensuring that this principle remained intact.

This book is well-researched and interesting to read, but it is very much a top-down account. There are short passages about what was happening on the ground, but not many and the most entertaining of these concerns the response of the posher element, notably university students who got involved on one side or the other to no great effect. The contemporaneous diaries that are quoted tend to be those of elite figures such as Beatrice Webb, Virginia Woolf and John Reith of the BBC.

For me, the value here is really in the excellent pen portraits that David Torrance gives his readers of all the key players, many of whom were colourful characters. The Prime Minister, steady Stanley Baldwin handled it all pretty calmly and effectively and was ably supported in his approach by King George V, but other ministers were far more gung-ho and radical, notably Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, who took responsibility for editing the British Gazette propaganda sheet, William Joynson-Hicks (Jix), the radical populist Home Secretary, Attorney General Douglas Hogg and Lord Birkenhead. Leo Amery was in the cabinet too, and helpfully for posterity kept a diary. On the other side were the union leaders, including Ernest Bevin, Labour MPs who were rather lukewarm about the whole thing and the extraordinary figure of Shapurji Saklatvala, communist MP for Battersea, who spent the duration of the strike behind bars for advocating sedition. Church leaders got involved too, including Archbishop of Canterbury Randall Davison who was in office for an astonishingly long period from 1903 until he finally retired in 1928.

All the high politics is explained here concisely and clearly. But there is no attempt to include much by way of social or economic history. It is all about national institutions and the men in charge of them, so not really a full, general account of this extraordinary episode.