1926, 1984 . . . And All That!

Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout: the Struggle for Dignity, ed. John McIlroy, Alan Campbell and Keith Gildart, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2004; 330 pp.; £45.00; ISBN 0-7083-1820-7

My interest in this book is personal and professional. The miners’ life is familiar to me from my own family. My grandfather Richard Booth was a miner at Featherstone, Yorkshire, as was mother's brother John. I remember sitting on John's kitchen floor when I was very young, watching with amazement as he stripped an onion to make a sandwich, which he then ate. I asked John about his strange behaviour and received my first instruction in the realities of life underground: he took onion – the stronger the better – sandwiches to work for his ‘snap’, because they got the coal-dust out of the eyes. The taste acquired underground had long been transported above ground! John's two brothers did not go down the pit: everyone knew it was an occupation to be avoided. My father's sister married a miner: Tommy Whitlam was a deputy at Woolley Edge colliery when the young Arthur Scargill started work there and became the National Union of Miners (NUM) delegate in the early 1960s.

To these personal and family connections I can add a labour of love, teaching miners for three decades after 1965, including classes which we continued during the 1984–5 dispute. Miners were among my very good friends as well as my students during my long career as a teacher in adult education. A total of some two and a half thousand union activists passed through these courses of whom I knew several hundred.¹ My first class at Sheffield included Dave Douglass, well known to History Workshop after he went to Ruskin and was strongly influenced by Raphael Samuel.² Two others deserve mention. In the 1980s, after the strike, a class of Yorkshire miners included Stephen Houghton and John Chapman. Stephen became the leader of Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council. John attended Sheffield University after his redundancy, completed a doctorate and now works at Northern College.³ My main reason for recalling these two students is that they initiated a move within the Yorkshire Area NUM after the strike to make the NUM– then still largely a federation – into a truly national union. It was not due to any failings on their part that the move didn't succeed; but the failure reminds us of the recurring tensions between regional identities and national loyalties, which ran through the NUM and its predecessor, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) and form an important theme in the book under review.

It is remarkable that, despite British mineworkers having the richest historiography of almost any occupational group, and the mining lockout of 1926 being one of the twentieth century's most significant industrial conflicts, the lockout has thus far escaped sustained and systematic attention. The only previous book, Gerard Noel's The Great Lockout of 1926 (1976) is essentially a journalistic account. The seven-month lockout is typically treated as a coda to the nine-day General Strike, waged in unsuccessful support of the miners. Consequently, the firm focus of this volume on the lockout rather than the strike is path-breaking. The terms people use are important: ‘lockout’ clearly pins responsibility on employers and government while ‘strike’ implies events were initiated either by workers or their unions. The book shows very clearly that there was a determined policy on the part of the coal-owners, aided by a sympathetic government, to abolish the national bargaining framework which had emerged in wartime circumstances. Yet whether the lockout was a conspiracy, or merely a cock-up, remains a matter for debate.

The issue arises particularly in relation to the theme and title of John Foster's first chapter, which serves as a prologue to the lock-out: ‘What kind of crisis? What kind of ruling class?’ A related way of putting the matter might be: What kind of decision? What kind of understanding? These questions are particularly important in relation to the economics of the affair, including the decision to return sterling to the gold standard in 1925. From a class-analysis point of view, the issue is whether there is any purchase in the idea that it was a distinct fraction of the ruling class – financial capital – that was driving events rather than another fraction – industrial capital. Foster does not appear to see anything in this distinction and writes of class in quite homogeneous terms: finance and industrial capital were at one, notwithstanding the primary role of the Bank of England and the Treasury in creating conditions for the return to gold. The central theme that the Bank and the Treasury were from 1916 allied in pursuit of the return to gold is not new of course: it emerged from Montagu Norman's biography and from Moggridge's account of the proceedings of the Bradbury Committee after the Great War. Nonetheless, Foster's account is particularly valuable for his elucidation of the part played by Sir Charles Addis, which has not been well known. Foster's treatment of this aspect provides further vindication for the notion of the lock-out being forced by a kind of conspiracy.

Foster also allows some place for the notion of cock-up: ‘The general strike and lockout had been no part of the original strategy. Its occurrence was entirely incidental: a last minute but much deplored economic necessity after the reverses of 1925’ (p. 40). But in so far as ‘economic necessity’ in the guise of the impact of 1925 on the price of British coal exports forced the lock-out, was it avoidable? The answer turns on the distinction between return to a fixed rate for sterling and the particular parity at which it would be stabilized against the dollar and/or other currencies. What strikes the modern observer as remarkable is that neither the Bank nor the Treasury, nor any independent economist such as Keynes, clearly distinguished, at any crucial moment in the decision-making process, between putting sterling back into a fixed exchange-rate system (actually not a return to gold in the pre-1914 sense, but to a gold exchange standard which operated on the basis of the gold holdings in Fort Knox and the pre-eminent financial position of the United States) and the question of the parity. Keynes's later argument in The Consequences of Mr Churchill, which pointed to a ten per cent overvaluation against the dollar, was mere hindsight.⁴ Yet we now know that the sterling rate against the dollar was only one aspect of the matter. The overvaluation, in terms of a basket of currencies, which is the more appropriate comparator given the destination of British coal exports – and in which the United States did not feature – was greater. So in so far as this overvaluation was a critical factor in the genesis of 1926 and what followed, and whatever the degree of ruling-class malevolence and coal-owner obduracy and hard-heartedness to the miners, sheer intellectual confusion played a prominent role. Now while social groups cannot be expected to deal in intellectual clarity, key individuals ought to be able to, and Foster's allowance for cock-up could be strengthened.

The second chapter, ‘Fighting the legions of hell’, by John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, provides a central analytical and narrative account: it is key to the volume. In particular, the authors make a major contribution to our understanding of the complexities of relations within the MFGB and the strategy of the government. There is some familiar territory here, but the authors are to be congratulated on their clear and novel synthesis of high politics and rich history from below. Topics set out with admirable clarity include the intricacies of calculating miners’ wages after 1919, and the limited but important framework of ‘national agreements’; the complex federal structure of the MFGB and the personnel of its first and second tiers of government; the uneven economic situation of the various coalfields; and the responses of the different actors to the Samuel Commission's recommendation of wage reductions. Events on the ground, in pit communities across Britain, are also described, using a wide range of sources.

The central section of this chapter carefully analyses the strategies of the miners, owners and government, the arguments used in negotiations, and the tactics of mobilization, and provides a sober assessment of the limited possibilities, if not of actual victory for the miners, at least for the mitigation of defeat. While the odds were certainly stacked against them, their ‘long-term strategy’ might have dictated ‘an unequal and in all probability losing battle’ which nevertheless would impose ‘high costs on opponents … . For the costs the miners inflicted were very high, even as defeat became inevitable. There is much here that is new and stimulating: for example, the reasons why the tactic was not adopted of flooding the mines, as had been done to devastating effect in the 1921 lockout; the problems of picketing and the failure to embargo the movement of coal; the quantities of coal imported; and the varying extent and nature of the return to work: for example, in the West Midlands by early September, before the better known breakaway in Nottinghamshire. This leads to what is perhaps the essay's most important conclusion: that defeat ‘and the question of why the stoppage faltered in some districts after sixteen weeks, collapsed after twenty and was terminated nationally after seven months’ has attracted the attention of recent historians, when ‘a more obvious question is why it lasted so long’. It is a question explored in the remainder of the collection.

One of the ornaments of this volume is Quentin Outram's pioneering chapter on the coal-owners. The division between labour history and business history, with the former focusing on the union side of industry and the latter on management, has been deplorable. Attempts to bridge the divide have too often been blocked by the originators or controllers of records. Gaining access is difficult unless one is seen as a ‘trusty’; many records have been destroyed or were never kept properly in the first place. Captains of Industry have tended to be most sensitive about their reputations and anxious to avoid criticism. In an innovative prosopography, Outram demonstrates that the coal-owners were not as stupid as Lord Birkenhead's famous statement – that ‘it would be possible to say the miners’ leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not had frequent occasion to meet the owners’ – would lead one to believe; or, rather, that the intransigence they exhibited, especially that of their leader Evan Williams, ‘was not a personal trait but a calculated tactic’. Outram's successful deployment of biographical information demonstrates the existence of two groups among the owners: a dominant, intransigent faction on the Mining Association's Central Committee, led by Williams, and a minority group around Sir Alfred Mond. The latter, a temporary coalition of progressive capitalists and paternalistic owners, proposed a long-term strategy of rationalization, but this had little impact on the 1926 conflict.

The second part of the book shifts attention to the regions. There are case studies of South Wales (by McIlroy), North Wales (by Keith Gildart), Scotland (by Campbell), Lancashire (by Stephen Catterall) and Nottinghamshire (by McIlroy). These shorter accounts provide impressionistic snapshots of the highly-varied situation on the ground in some of the major and one of the minor coalfields. South Wales, an exporting region with the most to lose, was the bedrock of opposition to retreat or surrender and had the lowest rate of strikebreaking. McIlroy's account imaginatively employs poetry and oral recollection to assist in an excellent portrayal of the mechanisms and networks of collective support in the valleys. In contrast, Gildart's account of the neglected North Wales area depicts a fractured solidarity, which laid foundations for a ‘non-political’ union in the dispute's aftermath. Scotland's four coalfields presented a spectrum, militancy at one end, weakness at the other. This area witnessed some of the most violent disorders, but also displayed acute political and religious divisions. In Lancashire, too, the union was riven by factionalism, as a leadership loyal to the MFGB came under assault from pro-settlement officials responding to local returns to work. In Nottinghamshire, traditionally portrayed as the weak link in 1926, McIlroy qualifies interpretations of the coalfield's return to work based on structural factors, such as community patterns or the butty system. His focus is less the lockout's collapse than its longevity in a prosperous coalfield, where the miners supported the stoppage for little potential gain. Unlike in 1984–5, and as had been the case in 1921, Nottinghamshire was initially, and for three months, in solid support of the national leadership.

Rich as these studies are, they are not comprehensive and a beneficial outcome of the volume's publication may be stimulation of further research in other coalfields – Yorkshire, Northumberland and Durham are obvious candidates, but so, too, are the not insignificant West Midlands. And comparative studies of localities, of the kind rigorously pursued elsewhere by Campbell in his work on the Lanarkshire and Scottish miners,⁵ could illuminate further the complex patterns of the dispute. Valuable though David Gilbert's study of contrasting communities in the polar cases of Nottinghamshire and South Wales is,⁶ more sophisticated conclusions might be drawn from a comparison of communities around the boundaries of south Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. These places often shared similar labour processes and settlement structures, but differed radically in union policies and politics.

Part three of the book contains three thematic chapters. The first is an indispensable chapter by Sue Bruley, which looks at the role of women in the dispute in the context of a valuable study of South Wales. Women have always been more central to mining disputes than the traditional focus on the dramatic actions of men has allowed. In 1926, if women were relieved of the debilitating chore of servicing large families of working miners, the hardship of feeding the locked-out men and their children, while maintaining everyone's morale, was even more challenging. Yet in contrast to 1984, the longer-term impact on gender relations was much more limited. Catterall's account of policing the dispute highlights the enormous powers granted by the emergency regulations which continued during the lockout and the massive intervention by the state to protect working miners. If police forces lacked the sophistication of 1984, the portents, in the form of mutual reinforcement and greater mobility of motorized units, were already there.

This book does not, as is so often the case, neglect the miners as Labour Party supporters, but gives their political allegiance proper weight. The militants and the revolutionaries were a minority, however prominent as individual activists. They were, despite appearances to the contrary, revolutionaries in a non-revolutionary situation: not inadequately revolutionary figures facing a revolutionary situation. McIlroy's chapter on ‘Revolutionaries’ is one of the strengths of the book and his use of the Russian sources now available is an excellent feature. Henceforth, let there be no discussion of British communism or the ‘left’ without due attention to the international context and foreign source material. Insularity in the writing of British history should now be taken as a mark of inadequacy.

The volume achieves a greater cohesion than most edited collections for three reasons. First is the focus on one event, in all its complexity. The second is methodological. Throughout the book, albeit to varying degrees, there is a concentration on the actors at all levels: from Baldwin, Churchill, Arthur Cook, Herbert Smith and Evan Williams down to local activists who played the crucial role of sustaining morale, organizing pickets and feeding children. If only Outram's chapter is explicitly prosopographical, the others, too, are packed with vignettes illustrating the real lives and personalities caught up in historical forces they sought to influence but could not control: in Scotland, Willie Allan, a Communist of Lithuanian extraction, a young blood destined to lead a ‘red’ miners’ union, locked in conflict with the ageing Robert Smillie, former MFGB president and the most gifted union leader of his generation; or George Spencer in Nottinghamshire, immersed in the paternalistic ethos of his county, who founded the non-political union there and is depicted on a platform, bending to talk with a coal-owner while a voice in the crowd shouts ‘Kiss him, Judas!’; and George Hardy, a veteran syndicalist who in 1926 was a leading force in the Minority Movement and who, to the obvious distaste of the puritanical Bob Stewart, acting secretary of the Communist Party, had impregnated the wife of a young Communist. She worked at party headquarters and according to Stewart's report to the Comintern, as she had ‘complete knowledge of our most secret work, it makes for a dangerous situation’. The pair were despatched to Moscow as the lockout ended.

A third unifying sub-theme in the volume is provided by the links, parallels and contrasts between 1926 and 1984–5. The connection is shown to be biographical, as in Campbell's enumeration of ‘genealogies of victimization and radicalism’ arising from 1926 in Scotland, pointing to the family traditions of militancy which their fathers, sacked after the lockout, passed down to Lawrence Daly, Mick McGahey, George Bolton and Frank Watters, sons who realized this patrimony in the famous victories of 1972 and 1974. In other places it is chronological, as in McIlroy's ‘Finale: a View from a New Century’, which surveys the landscape of British mining history over the remainder of the twentieth century. This survey is conducted with economy, and I was impressed by its telling insights into generational shifts and its proper sense of tradition.

Reference to 1984–5 recurs throughout the text and now, twenty years after, the similarities and differences between the two events deserve comment here. If the causes of 1926 were a combination of conspiracy and cock-up as already discussed, Foster is categorical that 1984 was definitely political and planned. A final judgement must await examination of the state, Coal-Board and union documents which are just starting to be released. It will be difficult be sure, of course, that what is eventually available will provide us with a full, still less complete or true account of events; but an interim verdict must be, on the basis of circumstantial evidence – much of it laid out in John Saville's 1986 essay in Socialist Register – that 1984 was an engineered conflict.

Industrial Politics provides detailed and measured analysis of the miners’ leadership in 1926 in the context of the structural constraints of the return to gold and loss of markets. This latter factor was also relevant in 1984 and closures had been a permanent fixture of the landscape, particularly from the 1960s. The leadership problem was not how to halt closures but how to avoid catastrophic shipwreck and slow the pace of decline. This was not in Scargill's temperament or political platform. The 1926 leadership, in contrast, was prepared to bargain away jobs for pay. However, Scargill did not provoke the strike: it blew up under his feet and ran away with him, although he was desperate to keep up and did not allow calls for a national ballot to get in his way. In intriguing contrast, the book emphasizes that the issue of a national ballot scarcely figured in 1926. Although many miners were on strike, as distinct from locked-out, calls from press and politicians had little resonance in the coalfields.

This book suggests there is little merit in Beatrice Webb's characterization of Cook as ‘an inspired idiot’. Under the rhetoric he searched for a solution in a way Scargill apparently rejected. It is fascinating to ponder whether there was more chance of an acceptable, organized retreat in the autumn of 1984 than there was in relation to the proposals of church leaders in August 1926, which sought to entice the miners back to work on the basis of earlier terms, subsidy renewal and renewed negotiations over a national agreement. Had Scotland voted on the proposals there would almost certainly have been a majority in favour. Yet their rejection by the government and the owners despite acceptance by Cook and Smith destroyed them as a basis for settlement. In 1926 and 1984 there were openings and possibilities for different denouements, but as McIlroy and Campbell persuasively conclude: ‘It is difficult to discern in the NUM of 1984 or the MFGB of 1926 the social forces capable of delivering a different strategy. For all the personalization of Scargill, he was supported by the NUM Executive … ’ (p. 98). Scargill might have made a difference. But then he would have not have been Scargill if he had!

The issue of solidarity action was important in both confrontations. In 1926 the possibilities had been exhausted by the general strike. In 1984 solidarity was constrained by the defeats trade unionists had suffered since 1979, unemployment, an unfavourable political situation and the Trade Union Congress's embrace of ‘new realism’. The TUC leaders had no intention of calling for solidarity whatever Congress resolved. Structure, ideology and context explain this – and the same goes for the Labour Party. The behaviour of the Labour leadership in 1926 and 1984 had little to do with ‘betrayal’. Leaders whose personalities differed from those of MacDonald or Kinnock might have found greater or less space for manoeuvre to defend the miners: but the constraints of parliamentary democracy were paramount.

There were differences between the miners of 1926 and those of 1984. The 1926 lockout was trench warfare. The role that the men of 1926 had already played on the battlefields of France is commemorated in Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong and was recalled in 1984 by Harold MacMillan: they knew how to fight and how to endure, despite the defeats of the early 1920s. In contrast, the miners who fought Thatcher – more confident and aggressive, better educated, nurtured on the successes of the 1970s – plunged straight into a war of offence. In both cases Nottinghamshire proved an Achilles’ heel and hardship developed. In both cases women and families came into their own. And if active solidarity was not forthcoming, financial sustenance from trade unions in Britain and abroad appeared in abundance, although the main locus of moral panic shifted south from Moscow to Tripoli. The role of the state, the mobilization of the law, the police, the secret as well as the coercive state, was more marked in 1984. But perhaps it was simply more necessary in 1984, for as Industrial Politics demonstrates the 1926 lockout was far from a picnic.

The tragedy of 1926 is marvellously evoked in this meticulously researched, well-written collection. What we now need is a comparable text on 1984–5. In the end it was even more significant than 1926. In securing neo-liberalism, Thatcher secured the final crushing defeat of Britain's miners and a whole way of life. We don't need onion sandwiches to weep over that.