The Goat, Honest Stan and Ramshackle Mac: An Interwar History of Britain

[morbidteaparty]

Chapter One​

A Reformist Revolution? Industrial unrest, Bolshevist fears and the ‘Red Year’ of 1919​

‘What is our task? To make Britain a fit county for heroes to live in.’
David Lloyd George, 23 November 1918​

‘It was the end of sorrow lies. The rail stations were dead, flowing like bees stung from honeysuckle. The people hung back and watched the ocean, animals flew in and out of focus. The time had come. Yet king dogs never grow old – they stay young and fit, and someday they might come to the beach and have a few drinks, a few laughs, and get on with it. But not now. The time had come; we all knew it. But who would go first?’

Andre Breton and Philippie Soupault, The Magnetic Fields (1920)​

Britain, in the aftermath of the armistice that ended the war against Germany in 1918 was not the country that gone to war with the patriotic fervour of the summer of 1914. Britain’s national debt had spiralled from £706m in 1914, equivalent to twenty-six percent of GDP to £7,481m and one-hundred and twenty eight percent[1], with public finances in a state of deep dislocation. The economic situation was exacerbated by the government’s limited room for political manoeuvre, with the need to balance the increasing demands of organised labour with those of the industrial and commercial classes who denounced the post-war burden they were expected to carry on the “profligate waste that was funnelled towards educating and housing those who have not strived for it.”[2]

The tensions between the reform-minded, populist flair of Lloyd George and his more cautious colleagues within the cabinet would come to define much of the often confused legislative agenda tabled to the House of Commons – the National Liberals wanted the loosening of the public purse to fund the house building and infrastructure programme pursued in their manifesto, while many of the Conservative parliamentarians quietly despaired that such measures would both further destabilise the currency and splinter their traditional party support. The increased political power of the industrial worker also caused a degree of unease – while the more phlegmatic amongst the Tories in government viewed the rabid denunciations of workers’ marches in the industrial heartlands of Scotland as “overheated drawing room rhetoric”, many in the party saw Lloyd George’s moves to introduce greater health insurance and expand the social character of the state[3] as opening a door to the ‘rotting spectre of Bolshevism.’[4]

This unease, characteristic of many debates and editorials of the period was not merely confined to the political sphere, with class anxieties expressed, as they had been in the Edwardian period, in the pages of popular literature, magazines and theatre, as well as the old entertainment of music hall and the variety show. These anxieties were not solely limited to fears of a working class uprising – the encroachment of women into the traditional male sphere of industrial work and politics had long been a latent fear during the Edwardian period, and with women now both represented in the workforce and the House of Commons, the old certainties of a division of labour between the sexes seemed to be crumbling, despite the best efforts of the government to get women to return to their traditional realm of domestic service and work in the ‘sweated industries’. The opening of the universities and professional classes to women through the passing of the 1919 Sex Disqualification Act caused further consternation, with the expansion of the education system seeing an increase in both women teachers and undergraduates, with many of those women gaining positions in the civil service, perhaps more than Whitehall, a bastion of English masculinity.[5]

This unease was reflected in the labour movement as well – for all the revolutionary Marxist rhetoric, the labour marches of 1919 were motivated by inherently conservative concerns, namely the protection of jobs from the threat of women and foreign workers.[6] These concerns were of course nothing new – race riots had erupted from the tensions between white and black sailors in Cardiff in the 1900s, while there had been several antisemitic campaigns against Russian Jews working in the East End from the 1890s to the outbreak of the war, while women workers had frequently been demonised by the unions up until the need for labour during the war itself. What differentiated the marches in 1919, is that the unions themselves were broadly united in their aims – the demand for a forty-hour week and the protection of jobs for returning servicemen, both of which had been co-opted in electoral campaigning by both the Independent Labour Party and the British Socialist Party.[7] The rally organised by the Scottish TUC and the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC) in George’s Square[8], descended into violence when police baton charged[9] the protestors, including CWC leaders David Kirkwood and Manny Shinwell, both of whom were arrested alongside Willie Gallacher, whose trial for ‘incitement of a riotous mob’ would become a cause celebre for the left later that year.

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Figure 1 - A police officer uses his baton on a striker during the general strike in Glasgow​

The violence, and the retreat of the outnumbered police following the baton charge, caused a sense of general panic amongst the government, with Robert Munro, the Liberal Scottish Secretary decrying the demonstration as a “Bolshevist uprising” in a War Cabinet meeting, convened after troops from Northern England and Southern Scotland[10] had arrived in Glasgow at the request of the Sheriff of Lanarkshire to maintain order, though by the time of their arrival, calm had returned to the streets of Glasgow, leaving a slightly surreal scene of tanks and machine gun encampments in the cattle market, while the rest of the city continued as normal. The surreal scenes of tanks guarding the city centre were perhaps the overriding memory of events for most of the general public – the strikers gave up their demands for the forty-hour week, resulting in the previously agreed forty-seven-hour week, which had been negotiated in the early days of 1918 coming into force.

For all the discussion around the threat of Bolshevist uprisings in Britain’s industrial heartlands, the strikes which periodically marched throughout 1919 followed a similar pattern to the events of Glasgow, with only the threat of a mutiny by Royal Navy servicemen at Southampton in the last days of spring, brining anywhere near a comparable scale of violence. The portrayal in the leftist and sympathetic press of the marches as harbouring a shift to a genuine workers revolution, much like the rightist fears that workers marches heralded such a step, were in many ways a form of wish fulfilment. For many on the radical left, the events of George Square came to be seen as a missed opportunity, as Willie Gallacher remarked in the aftermath:

‘Had there been an experienced revolutionary leadership, instead of a march to Glasgow Green there would have been a march to the city's Maryhill Barracks. There we could easily have persuaded the soldiers to come out, and Glasgow would have been in our hands.’[11]

Gallacher’s views on George Square would largely be accepted as gospel amongst the Marxist influenced circles which would form the Communist Party and were largely accepted at face value in much of the contemporary historiography of the Red Clyde period. It is however wishful thinking – while the strike had much broad support within the city, it was a reformist union approach to an industrial dispute rather than a popular uprising of revolutionary fervour. The anarchy into which the strike descended was less the result of a concerted revolt and more the government’s panic and maladroit policing, a combination which would sadly come to define much of the experiences of the labour movement during the interwar period.

The aftermath of the strike was eerily calm for many observers, as the predicted second wave of violence and disillusionment expected by both the government and the conservative press failed to materialise. Siegfried Sassoon’s account of Glasgow rather ruefully reflected this, focusing instead on the weather and derision he received from a local woman over his lack of Marxist credentials.[12] There is something slightly comical in the undercurrent of disappointment that can be detected in much press coverage of the strike’s aftermath – a mix of mild prurience and disapproval against the class currents underpinning most press on the events themselves.

The government’s own response was muted, for while there was widespread relief that the marches had not degenerated into the violence that had riven Russia, there remained a deeply held mistrust of the potential power of the mass politics of organised labour within the more right-leaning elements of the Conservative partners in government. Nevertheless, the general view that social reform could hold organised labour’s power in check, as held before the war maintained a steady hold over both the Liberal and Conservative parties – it was more a question of the degree and scale of reform itself, one that will be investigated further in the coming chapters.

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[1] The balance of payments would become one of the long-running issues for successive governments of the 1920s and 30s.

[2] From a letter to the editor of the Daily Mail dated 22 March 1919 by retired army colonel Henry James Maxwell – the letter would later be satirised by PG Wodehouse in his 1923 novel The Comrades of Camberley Hall

[3] Referred to as a British variant of the ‘Bismarckian State Socialism’ introduced in Imperial Germany during the 1880s by the eminent Swedish historian of the European labour movement, M. Johansson, historiography of the period has tended to view the British government’s moves to expand the remit of state power and social security within the wider context of the European experience of the aftermath of the Great War.

[4] The quote has often been misattributed to Winston Churchill – it was instead from a satirical cartoon in the magazine Punch.

[5] Women would by the mid-1930s make up around thirty-five percent of the overall civil service workforce, though almost three-quarters of the roles they filled were junior clerical or administrative positions. Of these women, only around one-in-ten was married, reflecting a broader trend amongst the female experience of work during the period.

[6] Predominantly non-white workers (largely colonial but also including Chinese labourers brought from the mainland to work in the shipyards) and European refugees from the violence in Central and Eastern Europe, including a significant Jewish minority, which has been linked to the upshot of anti-Semitic violence in the early part of the decade.

[7] The BSP were the largest of the disparate left-wing groups which eventually coalesced in 1920 to form the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the descendent of the somewhat quixotic Social Democratic Federation led by Henry Hyndman from the 1880s.

[8] Estimates of the number of workers present at the rally have varied wildly from 20,000 to 90,000 – current estimates based on contemporary reporting put the total number between 20-25,000.

[9]Accounts, both contemporary and secondary, have not determined whether the marchers or the police initiated the violence, but the scenes of running battles between strikers and the raising of the Red Flag over the square would become ingrained in both right and left responses to the union movement during both 1919 and 1920 when the Communist Party would eventually form.

[10] Troops within Glasgow were confined to barracks at the request of the government for fear that they would side with the strikers.

[11] D. Maclean, A Road Less Travelled: A Biography of Willie Gallacher, (Cambridge University Press, 1954) p.29

[12] Wilson, J. M., Radicalisation and Repulsion: Assessing the Post-War Lives of the War Poets, (University of London, 1978) p.204