Nine days that shook the establishment to its core
This week the TUC marks its 150th anniversary at its annual congress. Since its founding in Manchester in 1868 the Trades Union Congress has backed workers and fought attempts to undermine rights and pay. Today it represents five million people. The Mirror looks back at some critical points in its remarkable history.
Tanks rumbled on streets and the BBC turned into a Biased Broadcasting Corporation as a Tory Government ruthlessly crushed the greatest demonstration of working-class solidarity in UK history.
The momentous General Strike of May 1926 shook the country to its core as trade unions tasted power over nine fraught days before spectacularly collapsing amid brutal accusations of bitter betrayal.
Buses and trains had been halted. Ships were left unloaded in docks. Power blackouts shut factories. Steel mills fell silent. And Fleet Street presses ceased running.
Strikers clashed with soldiers, police, special constables and Hooray Henry scabs – officially labelled “volunteers” recruited by an uncompromising Government to resume public transport and move food supplies.
The Flying Scotsman was derailed by saboteurs in Northumberland and there was a hint of class war, one strike sympathiser spotting toffs in Eton ties doing jobs of porters they’d otherwise ignore at London’s Waterloo station.
Britain had seen nothing like this. Before or since. Up to two million workers taking industrial action in support of a million coal miners locked out by greedy pit owners was a magnificent demonstration of unity.
Until, that is, the TUC leadership suddenly and spectacularly surrendered to PM Stanley Baldwin.
He proved vindictive in victory, unforgiven to this day for the misery inflicted by self-defeating vicious austerity – echoed in cuts since 2010 – to the welfare state and public services.
Labour MP Dennis Skinner’s dad Edward was a Derbyshire miner during the strike.
His son, who spent 22 years down the pit before Bolsover elected him to Parliament, was born six years after a seismic dispute that cast its shadow over his family.
“Dad was blacklisted for his role in the strike, branded a troublemaker by bosses who wouldn’t let him do his job,” Skinner once told me, the injustice still burning fiercely nine decades later.
“Word was sent around the pits in the area not to employ him and he wasn’t allowed to go back down and earn a wage packet until they needed energy to rearm against Hitler and they couldn’t discriminate against him any longer.
“He was a union man and like every miner and striker, he was a grafter who wanted to be paid and treated properly but owners wanted to exploit them and grind them down.”
The strike started one minute to midnight on May 3 before ending on May 12. It was a reaction to pit owners insisting miners work longer for less.
Under the slogan “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day” the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain led by Arthur J Cook – the Arthur Scargill of his day – fought off an onslaught the year before by threatening strikes in a Triple Alliance with rail and transport unions. Baldwin temporarily subsidised mine owners and set up an Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies to take on the workers. The General Strike was triggered soon after the million colliers were shut out of pits for rejecting a 13% cut in breadline rates and an extra hour on the day. A boom after the
Great War faded and the economy was battered by Winston Churchill, a union-basher and incompetent Chancellor who made it expensive to export coal and other goods by shackling sterling to the price of gold.
TUC leaders nervous of calling the strike opposed by Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald were bounced into action by an army of workers rallying to the miners’ cause.
Coalfield poverty was a life-ruining blight. Even King George V said: “Try living on their wages before you judge them.” Baldwin portrayed the mass walkouts as a revolutionary plot in an era when the Russian Revolution haunted the British Establishment
Churchill set himself up as editor of the British Gazette, which was stuffed with lies. The TUC newspaper, British Worker, countered: “We are not making war on the people.”
The fledgling BBC failed its first independence test and became a propaganda arm of the Government.
Founding father John, later Lord, Reith cleared “news” reports with government censors and gave a platform only to strike critics.
Jumpy TUC leaders pulled the plug on the General Strike instead of escalating it, reflecting their own qualified commitment from the start.
The miners were left to battle on alone until November when they were starved back without concessions, a defeated union divided with members already working in Nottingham a foretaste of the 1984-85 split.
Yorkshire miner’s son Harry Leslie Smith was three at the time and is one of a few living threads to the strike. The Barnsley-born 95-year-old campaigner said: “During the strike we were skint, hungry and desperate and one day my dad took me to the pickets outside the pit where he had slaved all his adult life. Afterwards, when the Depression had broken our family and my dad was swept beneath the waves of poverty, I asked my mum why my dad took me that day to the picket line.
“She said it was so I would always remember that the spirit of a miner can never be broken by the lash of the owners.”
Baldwin took his revenge with a 1927 Trades Disputes Act banning sympathy strike action. The law was repealed in 1946 then reintroduced by Margaret Thatcher in the 80s. It is still in place. Labour won the 1929 election to form a minority government. Historian and former pitman David Douglass said: “The miners were left alone to fight it out in the most bitter of conditions and starvation, finally surrendering in November. They were then hit by a wave of closures, victimisations and harsh treatment.
“My dad and grandad, were both locked out during the action and near starved to death. They were not much better off when they returned to work than they had been scavenging for berries and wild plants on strike. “The legacy of ’26 lasted well into future mining generations. Many of the scenes at that time were to be revisited upon us in 1984-85, although nothing was as bad as in 1926.”