Newsletter April 2022
Nurses Ejected from Wards in 1922 Strike Battle April 12th 2022 marks the centenary of ‘perhaps the most sensational strike of modern times’ which took place at Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital.1 The strike, led by female nurses, was a protest against proposals by Nottinghamshire County Council to increase hours and decrease wages. After a four-hour battle the nurses were ejected. Sixty-six staff were sacked that day; the authorities insisted their actions demonstrated ‘insubordination’ and ‘misconduct’.2 Proposals for a longer working week and wage cuts were put forward by the hospital’s Committee of Visitors, a subgroup of Nottinghamshire county councillors with responsibility for managing the institution. Their duties stemmed from the Lunacy and County Asylums Acts of 1845 which compelled local authorities to make institutional provision for ‘paupers’ suffering from mental illnesses. Visiting Committees oversaw the work of those running institutions, notably the Medical Superintendent, Clerk and Steward, Matron, and Head Male Attendant, and sent reports to their county councils on matters concerning patient admissions and discharges, staff changes, finances and maintenance. The 1845 Acts also created a national Commission in Lunacy under the remit of the Home Office, to conduct regular asylum inspections. The Commissioners’ reports highlighted issues that needed addressing; their duties were transferred to a Board of Control in 1913. This system of
1 2
‘Amazing and sensational scenes at Radcliffe asylum’, Nottingham Journal, April 15, 1922. ‘Notts Asylum Dispute’. “Insubordination by female staff”. Nottingham Guardian, April 12, 1922.
governance, common to all public asylums, remained in place until the National Health Service brought in much needed reforms following its introduction in 1948. Nottinghamshire County Asylum’s Committee of Visitors, none of whom were medically qualified, included wealthy landowners, old Etonians and farmers; they were predominantly Conservatives. Viscount Galway, for instance, a Nottinghamshire Committee of Visitors member for many years, had been an aide de camp to Queen Victoria and a Conservative MP. The asylum they governed was located at Saxondale, near Radcliffe on Trent; it opened in 1902 with beds for 450 patients. It was renamed Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital in 1919 when responsibilities for mental health care were transferred from the Home Office to the Ministry of Health. From the outset the institution aimed to practise an enlightened approach to its patients by supporting their leisure activities, encouraging contact with the local community and granting home visits where appropriate. However, overcrowding, infectious diseases and staff shortages, which were common problems in asylums during the early 20th century, hindered consistent application of this approach. Nottinghamshire County Asylum’s nurses, like their counterparts in asylums and mental hospitals across the UK, worked long hours for poor pay in difficult and frequently challenging situations. They had a poor public image and were considered inferior to nurses in general hospitals; they were excluded from the General Nursing Registers when the Registers became official in 1919.3 Female nurses in mental hospitals were especially oppressed. They were expected to set a moral example to their patients, restricted indoors in wards, laundries and kitchens, and were paid less than men for doing equivalent work. They were not entitled to staff cottages and had to leave if they wanted to marry. Female nurses at Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital generally came from similar working-class backgrounds to their patients. They were often employed far from their homes coming from places such as Ireland, Wales and Tyneside. Male nurses, known at this time as attendants, were more likely to come from Nottinghamshire; several were ex-servicemen. Nurses and attendants had little in common with the Committee of Visitors and none of their class advantages; the two groups were socially, politically and culturally distinct. The National Asylum Workers Union (NAWU), established in 1910, protected workers’ rights and advocated reforms. In the 1920s, for instance, it campaigned for the state registration of mental hospitals and the abolition of visiting committees.4 The Union became heavily
3 4
Nolan, Peter (1993), pp 69–70, A History of Mental Health Nursing, London: Chapman & Hall. NAWU Magazine, Vol 13, No 8, August 1924, p 14
2
involved from 1918 onwards with its members in several hospitals who were engaging in strike action over pay and hours. For a short time it appeared that strike action led to improvements. A Joint Conciliation Committee, set up in 1920 with a newly formed Mental Hospitals Association, representing employers, and the National Asylum Workers Union, representing workers, increased pay and reduced hours to sixty per week. The Nottinghamshire Committee of Visitors became members of the Mental Hospitals Association and upheld the Joint Conciliation Committee’s agreements over pay and hours until 1922. The state of the national economy in the early 1920s resulted in the government putting pressure on local authorities to reduce their spending. Wage cuts were soon being planned for employees in the public sector. In February 1922 the Committee of Visitors, having insisted they were only subscribing members of the Joint Conciliation Committee and did not have to abide by its decisions, announced pay reductions and increased hours on notices posted round Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital. After weeks of staff agitation, which included a peaceful strike for four days at the beginning of March and several meetings with the NAWU, the Committee sacked its male and female nurses on 27 March. They were given new contracts to sign if they wished to continue their employment, to be returned within eight days. The new contracts reduced wages by 10%, increased hours from sixty to sixty-six and cut leave from four to three days a fortnight. The nurses had already agreed to accept a reduction in wages but rejected the proposal to increase their hours. Only four of the forty-two female nurses signed the new contracts but around half of the thirty-four male nurses did sign; several were married, lived in staff cottages and would have been fearful of losing their homes as well as their jobs. Threats by hospital officials accompanied demands to sign. On April 11 the female nurses, supported by the NAWU, went on strike. Thirty-eight nurses barricaded themselves in wards with their patients and nine kitchen staff who were supporting the strike. The patients were well cared for and the day passed peacefully. A meeting took place that evening attended by male nurses and union officials; some of the men decided to join the strike the following morning. The 12 April began with female nurses and patients still locked in their wards with tables and chairs piled up against the doors. Fourteen male nurses barricaded themselves in three of the men’s wards. The men resisted eviction but were soon overpowered by a large evicting force. The Committee of Visitors met during the morning and sacked all the strikers, together with five union members whom they had previously suspended. Female blacklegs hired by the Committee of Visitors were bussed in and waited in the recreation hall, ready to take over once the authorities gained control. The strike breaking force then prepared to deal with the women; it included around sixty-three policemen, twenty-five bailiffs and twenty-two hospital ground staff. The attacking force went into action at 1 o’clock when the bailiffs began breaking into the wards. This physical attack by a large group of men armed with hammers and crowbars was a blatant exercise of male power, authorised and encouraged by the Committee of Visitors. Seven female patients were ill with typhoid and an eighth patient was dying in one of the barricaded wards. The attackers carried on regardless. The nurses and house staff fought back and turned water hoses on their attackers before the supply was turned off. A male striker, interviewed many years later by researchers at the University of Warwick, said: “The patients were all sympathetic to us and on the female side they fought the police. One policeman had his hand bit. When a policeman put his hand on the nurse, the patient went for him. Louie Burley, the charge nurse, she weighed about
3
fourteen stone and gave a policeman an uppercut, and by remarkable timing knocked him out. There were various incidents like this. They smashed windows; the patients tore legs off chairs … In some of the wards there was no glass at all left in the windows.”5 After four hours the strikers were forced out and held in the nurses’ sitting room, where they sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and other songs while waiting for the Union to escort them from the hospital. Their patients were left to be looked after by blacklegs. Although the patients would probably have not understood the reasons behind the strike, their loyalty and fierce determination to protect the nurses indicates that there was a strong bond between them. The strike received extensive press coverage locally, nationally and internationally. Reports described it as ‘sensational’ because the governing body had ordered an attack on its staff, patients had rushed to protect their nurses, and hospital property was destroyed in the process. The National Asylum Workers Union regarded the incident as being in the vanguard of a general attack on workers’ rights in mental hospitals, which would be followed by a return to pre-war conditions. They were right: the Joint Conciliation Committee failed to maintain its agreement and the sixty-six-hour week was re-introduced in all mental hospitals run by local authorities in June 1922.6 The Committee of Visitors completed their authoritarian actions on 13 April by sacking a further six nurses and a housemaid. None had participated in the strike but were probably union members. From the Committee’s point of view, the outcome of the strike was a ‘triumph’: they remained in charge and had, in their opinion, ‘crushed the union’.7 The seventy-three sacked workers were given financial support from the NAWU: a lump sum grant of £100 for the seven married men involved and a maintenance grant of £1.50 a week, plus £5 when they obtained employment, for the remaining ex-employees. In May 1922 the NAWU magazine reported that the Committee of Visitors had circulated a blacklist of strikers’ names to other asylums, urging superintendents not to employ them. However, the July 1922 issue told readers ‘We are glad to state that the Radcliffe committee’s attempt to institute a boycott of the strikers has been a failure, as the majority of our Radcliffe evicted members have now been placed in employment most of them in institutional service’. It also noted that several hospitals had contacted the union
5
See ‘Herbert Hough, mental nurse interviewed in 1979’, www.warwick.ac.uk MSS.229/6/C/CO/7/12. NAWU Magazine, Vol 11, No 7, July 1922 7 ‘From Our Correspondent, Nottingham 31’, The Times April 16 1922. 6
4
to say they would ignore the blacklist.8 In the September 1922 issue, the NAWU announced that only twelve members were still receiving strike pay; the remainder had secured jobs.9 The strike at Nottinghamshire County Mental Hospital was a fundamental challenge to an institution characterised by an authoritarian system of governance. In protesting against proposals which were deleterious to their working conditions, the female nurses demonstrated women’s commitment to achieving change through radical actions as well as giving ‘a lesson in militancy and collective determination to the men’.10 The centenary of the strike is a time to remember and commend their actions. Rosemary Collins
8
NAWU Magazine, Vol 11, No 7, July 1922, p 12 NAWU Magazine, Vol 11, No 9, September 1922, p 12 10 Carpenter, M, 1988 p 84. Working for Health. London: Lawrence and Wishart. 9
5
The Roots of Discord? The 1918 Labour Party Conference at the Albert Hall in Nottingham On the 20th of August 2015 Jeremy Corbyn spoke to a packed meeting at the Albert Hall in Nottingham as part of his campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party. His subsequent victory opened fundamental cleavages within the party. The mobilisation of a mass membership, and a movement taking to the streets in support of social justice, clashed with MPs committed to Parliamentary action and a membership used principally for door knocking in election campaigns. The ensuing period of Corbyn’s leadership not only saw division over the nature of party membership and between parliamentary and direct action, but also on the role of the trade unions within the Party, the influence of the mass media and perhaps the very position of the Labour, or radical parties of the left, in democratic politics under capitalism. This was not the first time that the Albert Hall had hosted the Labour Party where these divisions in politics were precipitated through the airing of fundamental differences in ideology. Almost a century before, in 1918, the Albert Hall was the venue for the Seventeenth Annual Conference whose main business was to agree a revised Labour Party Constitution, the revision which introduced Clause Four as the distillation of the party’s object. While clause four was held by many members as the very distillation of faith, controversially removed eighty years later under Tony Blair’s leadership, the central ideas of ‘common ownership’ and other objectives were deliberately ambiguous.11 Perhaps representing a symptom of this division, the constitution was not agreed at Nottingham but in London a month later. And, because of the changes in rule, and the turbulence of 1918, there was to be another conference in June. So, effectively, there were three Labour Party Conferences in 1918: January in Nottingham; February at Westminster Hall in London; and in June at the Palladium, a newly built ‘picture palace’, in Stockport in Lancashire. Until 1918 the Labour Party had been based on an affiliation of trade unions and a number of socialist societies: principally the British Socialist Party (BSP), the Fabian Society, and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). The main justification for the changes to the constitution was to bring in individual membership to accommodate the passing of the Representation of the People Act of 1918 which was to triple the size of the electorate, from 7.7 million to 21.4 million, vastly extending working class representation and including
See e.g., Edmund Dell, A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain, First Edition (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 23. 11
6
women’s franchise – at least those over 30 - for the first time.12 The Women’s Labour League had already been formally incorporated into the Party. In welcoming the Act the Labour Chair, and architect of the party’s constitutional reforms, Arthur Henderson MP stating that it was “a triumph for organised labour, who had fought so long for the recognition of the rights of citizenship for their women folk”, seems to have missed the significance. Many Labour speakers seemed to miss the spirit of this reform, almost all the speakers presented the labour movement as essentially male, with the changes presented by some as a chance for members to bring their “women folk” to party meetings. The change to the constitution was to:
“Bring into the ranks of the Party those large sections of the public who for various reasons have neither the necessity or opportunity of joining Trade Unions on the one hand, or, on the other, who are not prepared to associate with Socialist organisations already affiliated with the Party.”13 The introduction of the new constitution meant the establishment of local party organisation, already established in some constituencies. Sometimes this role had been carried out by Trades Councils. While the expansion of the franchise constituted the motive for the change in the constitution, a central reason for the urgency of a change to establish individual membership and local branches was to recruit and mobilise ground troops for canvassing in what was felt to be an imminent post-war election. In 1918 there were already deep divisions within the party. All the conferences were held before the armistice in November so not only were there divisions between ‘patriotic’ and ‘pacifist’ wings but divisions on the nature of the war, war aims, and means to seek a halt to the war. One of the fringe meetings held in Nottingham before the conference debated the socialist attempts at forging an Allied treaty with the Axis powers. Camille Huysmans, Secretary of the International Socialist Bureau, and organiser of a peace conference in Stockholm was brought together with Grigory Zinoviev, the Bolshevik ‘ambassador’ in the UK to speak about the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk (The Times 22nd & 24th January 1918). Called in January, the conference was in the wake of revolutionary change in Russia, one of the allied powers. The Romanovs had been overthrown, the constitutional assembly established, the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers Deputies seemed to be the national authority, a body welcomed and imitated in Britain by the Leeds Convention called in June 1917,14 the conference in January therefore was barely a month after the Bolsheviks had taken power. The nature of the socialist movement was being reshaped by the unfolding of these events, and it was far from clear who represented socialism let alone the national polity with factions in the Labour Party allying with different groups and organisations in Russia.
12 Chris Wrigley, ‘The Labour Party and the Impact of the 1918 Reform Act’, Parliamentary History 37, no. 1 (2018): 64–80, https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-0206.12338. 13 Labour Party, Report of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Labour Party, 19. 14 British Labour and the Russian Revolution: The Leeds Convention (a Report from the Daily Herald), Documents on Socialist History 1 (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, n.d.)
7
There had been a political truce between the main political parties in Britain since the beginning of the war, with a deferment of any general election and no contesting of any necessary by-elections. With the establishment of a coalition Arthur Henderson, the Party Leader, became the first Labour politician to enter government. The British delegation to the Stockholm Conference had been refused visas by the government prompting Henderson to resign his Ministry and withdraw his support in the wartime political truce.15 The relationship between the Labour Party and the wartime coalition government was to be a prominent issue in debates of 1918 with many calls for the end of this political truce, a truce which seemed already to be crumbling. Another meeting convened at the Albert Hall, immediately prior to the Party Conference, was called to organise a subscription to establish a war monument. This was proposed to take the form of joint offices to be built in London to accommodate both the Labour Party and the TUC – “to commemorate the heroic deeds and unselfish devotion of those members of British Trade Unions and other Labour Organisations who were killed in action or died of wounds, or who were incapacitated by any form of service in the War, we recommend the Trade Union and Labour Movement to institute a permanent Memorial of Freedom and Peace.”16 Despite the pre-conference claim by The Times (January 21st, 1918) that “the party has recognized its responsibility, … responsibility to the nation and to the national interests,” there was not this unity. The Labour Party consisted of political groups with very different perspectives, not only on pressing and immediate issues such as on the war and possible terms for an armistice, but also fundamental differences on broader perspectives masked by the language of the party. Calls for ‘nationalisation’ or even for ‘workers’ control’ could mean different things to each section. The socialist organisations – the ILP and the BSP - formed a very small proportion of the membership, but constituted most of the activists, and tended also to be the left of the party, more sympathetic to direct action and revolutionary change. The ILP also provided the majority of the Labour MPs. The ILP and BSP membership were also more likely to be anti-war. The Fabian Society, and particularly Sidney and Beatrice Webb, its most prominent members, were the party’s most prolific authors of policy documents and could capture the atmosphere into the ambiguity of their promotion of moderate social democratic reform. Division was also apparent within the trade unions. While some unions could be described as “wages and hours types”17, supporting gradual improvement through collective bargaining there was widespread support for direct action as a political weapon for revolutionary change. There remained a strong syndicalism in general and industrial unionism and particularly within the shop stewards’ movement which gained importance during wartime employment relations. Another issue brought forward into the Nottingham Conference was the deportation of David Kirkwood and other Glasgow shop stewards under regulations
‘Labour War Aims’, The Times, 25 February 1918 TUC and the Labour Party, ‘National Labour Memorial of Freedom and Peace (Leaflet)’, January 1918, Labour Party Library, https://mrc-catalogue.warwick.ac.uk/records/MSX/1161. https://mrccatalogue.warwick.ac.uk/records/MSX/1161 17 Arthur Gleason, What the Workers Want; a Study of British Labor (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920) 15 16
8
established by the Defence 0f the Realm Act (DORA) 1914. Kirkwood and the stewards had been accused of organising a strike by munitions workers and, without any formal charge, been deported to Edinburgh. Philip Henderson, the Labour Party leader had also been accused of involvement. A special Labour Party investigation had been established which reported to the Nottingham Conference.18 This found that the strikes had been spontaneous and not provoked by the stewards or other outsiders. However, there was interest from the investigation in the political perspective of the stewards, specifically around their attitude to direct action and workers’ control. However, the investigators also dismissed a claim that some workers had demanded “complete control of the Munitions Factories” but that “the leading representatives of the Clyde Workers’ Committee and their organ The Worker advocated that labour should be allowed to share in the administration and control of workshop arrangements.”19 While there was a context and some mood of revolution strongly impacting on the Labour Party there were also strong forces of restraint and mood of wartime patriotism. The Times (21st January 1918), noted the recognition of the ‘national interest’ at a time of war, with the political truce between parties. Likely they were pushing a nationalist line as this truce was to be a main topic of debate. Arthur Henderson, leader of the Labour Party, in a sign of the frailty of the truce, had recently resigned his cabinet post in Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet, the first Labour member to hold a cabinet position, following argument about involvement in the Stockholm peace negotiations. The Presidential address to the conference, by William Purdy of the Miners Federation, was heckled with “satirical cries and interruptions” from a “small but noisy group” attacking the peace attempts, arguing “we must fight on” (The Times 24th January 1918). Change was still heralded. He argued to “hasten the day when we can control the machinery of state” but this was being brought about by the Representation of the People Act which “will effect a revolution in the methods of all political parties.”20 A Conference document, Labour and the New Social Order, authored by a party subcommittee but principally attributable to Sidney Webb, seemed to capture a revolutionary mood, posed the very “death-blow” of:
“the individualist system of capitalist production, based on the private ownership and competitive administration of land and capital, with its reckless ‘profiteering’ and wage-slavery; with its glorification of the unhampered struggle for the means of life and its hypocritical pretence of the ‘survival of the fittest’; with the monstrous inequality of circumstances which it produces and the degradation and brutalisation, both moral and spiritual.”21
18 The summary is Appendix III of Labour Party (Great Britain), Report of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Labour Party, 146–49 following the new constitution and standing orders. 19 Labour Party (Great Britain), 148 emphasis in the original. 20 Presidents Address in Labour Party (Great Britain), 96. 21 Labour Party, Labour and The New Social Order: A Report on Reconstruction, 4–5.
9
It continues with discussion of the nature of the society that a Labour Government could build, “a new social order…based not on fighting but on fraternity - not on the competitive struggle for the means of bare life, but on a deliberately planned cooperation in production and distribution for the benefit of all who participate by hand or by brain - not on the utmost possible inequality of riches, but on a systematic approach towards a healthy equality of material circumstances for every person born into the world - not on an enforced dominion over subject nations, subject races, subject Colonies, subject classes, or a subject sex, but, in industry as well as in government, on that equal freedom, that general consciousness of consent, and that widest possible participation in power, both economic and political, which is characteristic of Democracy.”
However, while there were these radical proposals, the time horizon was not revolutionary: “We do not … pretend that it is possible … to build society anew in a year or two of feverish Reconstruction”. The document pulls away from the imminence of the changes with a note of gradualism, “that each brick that it helps to lay shall go to erect the structure that it intends, and no other.” The building metaphor leaves ambiguous the nature of the very structure, which is to be constructed and, a real issue in construction, how and when this will be completed. The primary step was the election of Labour MPs in the forthcoming election. Some argued that there were two Labour Parties in the House of Commons, MP supporters of the government and those in the opposition. Central to this was the establishment, in 1916, of the British Workers’ League with the support of fifteen Labour MPs. The organisation was ‘ultra-patriotic’, supporters of country and Empire, with a reputation for attacking anti-war meetings, many organised by the Independent Labour Party. The BWL was rumoured to be selecting candidates to stand against official Labour candidates who opposed the war.22 Who would the opening of membership to individuals attract? James Sexton, from the Dock Labourers Union, indicated a range of tensions and “avenues enough open to any man (sic) wishing to join the Labour Party.” If the affiliated parties and trade unions were not enough “there was still the brains of the movement in the Fabian Society.” Going on to attack, he labelled “the cranks” members of the anti-war Union of Democratic Control and the Council of Civil Liberties “avowedly opposing the policy of the Labour Party.”23 Despite differences, or perhaps because of them, discussion of the new constitution and party organisation didn’t progress in Nottingham, still less the Labour Party vision of postwar reconstruction. The documentation for the conference: the new constitution, its ideological foundation, and new party arrangements, had been circulated in November. Comments and amendments had been collected in December. However, Robert Smillie for the Miners’ Federation and the Triple Alliance, proposed that the question be referred to
Roy Douglas, ‘The National Democratic Party and the British Workers’ League’, The Historical Journal 15, no. 3 (1972): 533–52, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x00002818. 23 Labour Party (Great Britain), Report of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Labour Party, 102. 22
10
“a Conference … called at an early date formally to consider issue.”24 He claimed that, because of “strenuous times”, there had not been adequate time to fully consider them. Perhaps driven by the patronising of her brothers in the labour movement, Mrs Fawcett from the Federation of Women Workers suggested that “she was rather surprised to find an intelligent organisation like the Miners’ Federation having to admit that they had not yet considered the recommendations of the Executive. That was not the fault of the Conference or of the Executive.” She told the conference. Continuing that:
“The Executive had stated that a great issue was at stake, in as much as an election might come at any moment. Her Trade Union had not only been educated on Trade Union matters, they had also been educated on political matters. They had not just merely made their Trade Union a Union where they dropped in a penny and expected to pick out a shilling! They had been trying to show their womenfolk that political action must go hand in hand with industrial action. Mr. Henderson had said that the women would be influenced by their husbands. She hoped they would not. She hoped the women would lead them into something more business-like, something bigger and greater and more uplifting for the whole of humanity than the men had done in the past.”25 Adjournment of the debate on the constitution was carried by a slim margin. It was proposed that the conference would reconvene at Westminster Hall in London in February. With debate on the new constitution delayed, the Nottingham conference moved to discussion of the political truce, and particularly, since no general election had been held during the war, how this impacted on the capacity to run opposition candidates in by-elections on the loss of a sitting MP. This raised further concerns at membership of the BWL of some Labour MPs, as well as of anti-war MPs affiliation to the UDC and CCL. In the international report a central concern was around the list of ‘war aims’ agreed at a joint Labour Party/TUC conference the previous year, also raising divisions between the anti-war and the ‘patriots’. After some discussion of the report on deportation of the Clydeside shop stewards, the final day of the conference saw a formal motion proposed to end the truce and for Labour members to withdraw from the coalition. A delegate from Manchester and Salford proposed that: “it is contrary to the interests of the working classes for Labour Members of Parliament to remain members of the Coalition Government or any subsequent capitalist Government.”26 Suggesting that:
Labour Party (Great Britain), 101 some text unclear in original. Labour Party (Great Britain), 104 Mrs Fawcett appeared to be the NE organiser of the FWW and not a unrelated to Millicent Fawcett. 26 Labour Party (Great Britain), 116. 24 25
11
“it had been argued that it was to the interest of the workers that Labour Ministers should enter the Coalition Government because they would permeate the Government Departments with Labour ideals. We would venture to say that the reverse had happened. Instead of permeating the Departments the capitalist Government had permeated the Labour men. The speeches of some of the Labour Ministers were filled with militarism and jingoism.”27 Nottingham’s place in forging the new shape of the Labour Party was effectively ended. On 26th February, exactly a month after adjournment at the Albert Hall, the Conference was reconvened at Central Hall, Westminster, after the Miners’ Federation held a caucus of their delegates at the Grafton Hotel to decide how to use their 700,000 votes (The Times 25th February 1918). The party executive had reviewed proposed amendments and two central issues remained contentious. With the constitution opening Labour to individual membership and for the establishment of local party organisation how was this to be represented on the party executive? Relatedly, how was this to impact on the position of the existing affiliates to the party? The trade unions provided the bulk of the funding for the party, as well as the vast majority of the membership. However, the activists came from the ILP, who also provided most of the Members of Parliament, as well as the Socialist Party and the “intellectual proletariat” (The Times 27th February 1918) of the Fabian Society. Also, what was to be the relative voting strength of the individual members against the ‘block votes’ of the trade unions? Appearing to influence much of the debate was the anticipation of a snap election with the possibly imminent end of the war. The Labour Party, while talking about achieving Socialism, however that might be defined,28 the immediate essential concern was with winning an election. As The Times leader (February 25th, 1918) was to comment: “the national leaders are satisfied that the delegates attending the conference, will have received a mandate from their societies to support the scheme, which will transform the party into a militant organization able to challenge the orthodox parties on their own ground." It’s not known if the great organ at the Albert Hall greeted delegates in Nottingham, but as they gathered for conference at the Palladium a new ‘picture palace’ and ‘palace of varieties’ in Stockport “a large modem building with a red-glowing interior, which seated delegates on the main floor, and over five hundred visitors in the gallery. … A local musician sat at the great organ and filled the building with his music from the Offenbach Barcarolle and from Italian opera, submerging us in deep chords.”29 A consequence of the
27
The motion appears lost, but the original report is faded at this point. This is also likely because the issue was returned to at the conference in June. 28 Left a relatively open question in Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The Principles of the Labour Party (London: Labour Party, 1918), http://webbs.library.lse.ac.uk/416/ another document prepared by the Webb's in 1918. 29 Gleason, What the Workers Want; a Study of British Labor, 84.
12
new constitution was that the Nineteenth Annual Conference was held, not in January 1919 but in June 1918, when divisions could re-emerge in the party. According to reports there had been “incessant sniping” between the Parliamentary wing and those, principally the ILP and BSP, dubbed ‘the Bolshies’ (The Times 24th June 1918). War seemed to have broken out in the Party between the Executive and the local parties, some of whom had selected their own candidates challenging the officially authorised candidate. The Executive was forced to make a main item for the conference a motion supporting an end to the political truce. However, they stressed this was only to be seen as applying to by-elections. A small party of visitors to the conference was noticed to gather at one side of the platform. While Camille Huysmans was recognised from previous appearances at the Labour Conference:
“Beside him stood a quiet, grave looking man still, so far as could be judged, comparatively young. Slight of build, cleanshaven, unduly pale of countenance, he had in his appearance something of the intellectual and studious and something, perhaps, of the ascetic. More than any other feature his eyes gave one the impression. of a tense and burning spirit, for they had a piercing brightness which seemed almost unnatural. Irresistibly one recognized in the stranger a man of quick thought and fierce energy.” (The Times 27th June 1918) To cheers, and some calls for Lenin and Trotsky, Kerensky the deposed Russsian Prime Minister was announced as the visitor. The conference returned to the issue of the political truce with the motion for the withdrawal, proposed by the executive, finally passing with 1,704,000 in favour and 951,000 against. To an extent this division was seen as one between Socialists and trade unionists in the Party. Rumours circulated that Havelock Wilson of the Merchant Seaman’s Union, a onetime Liberal MP and also involved with the BWL,30 was planning to form a new, trade union, political party cutting the link with the socialist organisations. Such feelings were not universal for other trade unionists. Some were feeling the restrictions of Parliamentary politics and the boundaries being constructed on legitimate action. According to American observer, Arthur Gleason, in his introduction to the conference, the chair, John McGurk from Miners Union argued that:
“A movement is already afoot to employ the strike weapon for political purposes. This would be an innovation in this country which few responsible leaders would welcome. . . We are either constitutionalists or we are not constitutionalists. If we are constitutionalists, if we believe in the efficacy of the political weapon (and we do, or why do we have a labour party), then it is both unwise and undemocratic because we fail to get a majority at the polls to turn round and demand that we should substitute industrial action. ... It appears to me to be less likely that they will be ready to give their adhesion to industrial action to enforce political demands and ideas. It would therefore be a misfortune if the
30
Douglas, ‘The National Democratic Party and the British Workers’ League’.
13
movement were to be torn asunder by efforts to force the adoption of the strike policy for political aims.31 Some trade unionists were recognising that the electoral strategy, with legitimate political action limited to the ballot box, was curtailing the use of direct action. Robert Smillie, for instance, reflected on industrial action being taken against conscription, especially when it was being used against intervention in Russia.32 Collective action of the strike was being replaced with individual action of the vote, workplace organisation replaced by the local constituency. An election was called for 14th December, a month after the end of hostilities. Candidates supporting the wartime coalition gained a landslide victory with some anti-war MPs, such as the Labour leader and ILP member Arthur Henderson, losing their seats. At the election of 1924, while the Conservatives gained the most seats, Labour formed its first government with Liberal support. This was, however, short lived. Another further election was called and, on 25th October 1924, four days before election day, the Daily Mail, under the headline “Civil War Plot by Socialist Masters” published a story that a letter supposedly from Grigory Zinoviev, chair of the Communist International, showed a conspiracy of Bolshevik supporters within the Labour Party to bring about revolution in Britain. The election gave the Conservatives a majority of over 200 seats in Parliament, and the Labour Party was not to form a government again until 1945. Ironically the ‘bolshies’ within the Labour Party had largely departed. The BSP and some membership of the ILP involved in the establishment of the Communist Party in Britain which maintained its industrial base in part through the shop stewards movement, itself in decline because of economic insecurity and growing unemployment. Alan Tuckman Nottingham: from insurrection to arbitration In the first half of the 19th century Nottingham was renowned for a radicalism that at times became nearly insurrectionist. By the 1860s it had become the centre of arbitration and conciliation that, at the level of rhetoric at least, preached a doctrine of harmony between workers and masters. There are several components that made that transition possible. The hand frame stockingers who had been the artisan main stay of Luddism and Chartism were in decline. The move from workers to employees in factories was slow. Lace went into factories early in the east Midlands but much was hand rather than steam powered. Hosiery in 1861 was often domestic. The finishing – seaming and stitching – was almost entirely done by out-workers. (Raphael Samuel, The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain, History Workshop issue 3 1977 p.19) But by 1871 the important hosier A.J. Mundella explained to the Truck Commission the transition:
31 32
cited in Gleason, What the Workers Want; a Study of British Labor, 85. Gleason, 88.
14
“The new machinery gives good wages and is driving out hand power… Few frames are now built. Old frames cost to repair and he has 400 frames that he would sell for 30s. each but most are broken up… Hosiery is mainly made in factories”. (Nottinghamshire Guardian 13 January 1871) The largest Hosiery firm belonged to Samuel Morley. He had seven factories in the Midland counties: two in Nottingham and one each in Loughborough, Leicester, Heanor, Daybrook and Sutton-in- Ashfield, the last two being centres of hand worked frames. There were 3,000 direct employees and 8,000 outworkers. (Edwin Hodder, The Life of Samuel Morley, London, 1887 pp. 187-9) The majority of outworkers were women and children who finished the stockings. The radicalism, often driven by extreme need, of the artisan stockingers became tempered in the factory workers who had slightly more security and better wages. The repressive power of the state had grown. Railways and the electric telegraph enabled quick movements of the army and police. Police forces became larger and more organised. The quasi insurrectionary politics of the early 19th century became less feasible. From around 1780 average wages had flat lined but there was a growth in average wages from the 1850’s onwards. There was also a series of partial reforms that made life for working people easier. Into this changed political landscape, Nottingham industrialists A.J. Mundella and Samuel Morley intervened to preach a message of Arbitration and Conciliation and to help mould the Trade Unions into agencies of social harmony. Mundella was apprenticed to a hosier in Leicester. At the age of 15 he attended Chartist meetings and enrolled as a Chartist, becoming a friend of the Chartist leader Thomas Cooper. In 1848 Mundella moved to Nottingham and became a partner of Joseph Hine who was anxious to build a hosiery factory. In 1854 Mundella and Barton patented a new machine that produced fully fashioned stockings a hundred times faster than the hand frame. (W.H.G. Armytage, A. J. Mundella 1825-1897, London, 1951 pp.16-22) The very wealthy Morley had a more distanced attitude to Chartism and wrote in 1848: “While everything tending to a breach of the peace must be put down, and the violence of misguided men met by force… I am far removed from being a Chartist, but I have the deepest sympathy with the working classes, who are suffering an amount of misery which deserves more consideration than it has met at the hands of the Government...” (Edwin Hodder, op.cit. p.109) Both were hosiery manufacturers with a continuing sympathy for the working class. Morley paid above average wages and achieved quality products but there were limits to this sympathy. Both employed outworking hand framework knitters and both opposed the ending of frame rent that bore so heavily on those stockingers. In 1856 Mundella was elected as a Liberal Town Councillor for Park Ward. He became vice chair of the local Liberal Party and chief wirepuller in No. 30, the room where the Liberal
15
leaders met. He then became chairman of the Nottingham Chamber of Commerce. (W.H.G. Armytage op.cit. pp.28-31) There was an early clash on the Council between Mundella and the Chartist James Sweet. Sweet suspected that the Lord Chancellor had turned down an Alderman Cullen for the position of a magistrate on political grounds as Cullen was seen as being connected to the Chartists. Sweet put down a motion supporting the fitness of Cullen to be appointed which was narrowly carried. Mundella opposed the motion and, after it was carried, wanted members of the Council to enter their protest against the motion. The purpose was to oppose an unwarranted interference with the duty of the Lord Chancellor. (NG 5 February 1857) This was perhaps a sign that Mundella regretted his previous radicalism and wished to send a notice to national politicians. The framework knitters went on strike in 1860. Some employers were in favour of a general lock out but Mundella opposed this: “It meant throwing the whole population on the streets. We should have a dreadful state of commotion.” Mundella believed that the condition of the working class should be improved but, like Morley, also believed that social disruption and violence must not be allowed. He thought that the unions and employers could achieve harmony through arbitration and conciliation machinery. In September 1860 he organised a meeting between employers and workers. Mundella said that the Sutton strike should be amicably settled since it could spread to the county and to Nottingham. One thousand men were on strike and being supported by the rotary and circular hands in the factories. The men were no longer being paid the higher prices. “If the conference did not find a solution the hosiers would take whatever steps they felt to be necessary for their own defence, and to put an end to the strike. He would be very sorry to see thousands of men thrown out of employment, and walking the streets of Nottingham...” (NG 20 September 1860) Mundella proposed to the meeting that a board of arbitration be set up “to whom all questions relating to the rates of labour in the hosiery trade shall be referred.” In December 1860, with six employer and six employee representatives, an Arbitration and Conciliation Board was formed and Mundella was elected president. The concept rapidly became popular. Vic Allen wrote “By 1875 there was barely a trade where trade unions existed which did not have either a standing joint committee of employers and workmen to settle disputes, with provision for arbitration, or the experience of settling disputes through arbitration on an ad hoc basis…” (cited in Chris Wrigley, A History of British Industrial Relations 1875-1914, Brighton, 1982 p.xii) The early unions in Nottingham were often not much more than a mass meeting that elected a temporary committee. In 1813, Gravenor Henson set up a Frameworkers’ Union with proper structures, subscriptions and an Executive Committee. It was so successful that the Combination Acts were invoked and committee members imprisoned, a stop was put to the collection of money and the membership lists were seized. The union retreated into a shadowy underground existence. By the 1850’s the craft unions had become increasingly organised with regular subscriptions, branches, rule books and full time officers. They were in limbo as far as their legal existence was concerned and could not even legally protect their finances. The new Boards not only legitimised the unions themselves but they gave status to the full time officials in the eyes of rank and file union members. (Van Gore, Rank and File Dissent in Wrigley op.cit. p.48) The lace trade in Nottingham then formed an Arbitration Board. But if the idea of respectable involvement in such Boards appealed to the craft union leaders and social peace to employers, the
16
actual role of the Boards was less satisfactory and may have more often lowered wages than raised them. The Hosiery Board fell into disuse and was abolished in 1884. (Van Gore op. cit. p.55) The record of Arbitration Boards in Nottingham was mixed, and often lead to a stalemate or the recommendation to lower wages. In 1870 there was a proposal that the price of stockings be cut. The Board, with Mundella in the chair, was split equally and an arbitrator was appointed who agreed to the cut. This decision was denounced by the unions but a mass meeting agreed not to resist the cut. An indication of the goodwill shown to Mundella was that the Hucknall knitters also gave thanks to “Mr Mundella MP for his manly and upright conduct as President of the Board of Arbitration.” (Nottingham and Midland Counties Daily Express 5 March 1870, NG 20 May 1870) Sometimes striking brought better results than the Arbitration Board. In 1871 a ten week lace strike ended when the employer left the Masters Society and accepted the union demands. The Masters Association had been subsidising him at £4 per week per machine kept idle and offered to refer the dispute to the arbitration of Mr Mundella. The men “flatly refused the offer; nor would they trust the Board of Arbitration.” (NG 14 April 1871) It seemed at times, that the union leaders were more supportive of Arbitration Boards than the rank and file members. Sometimes the required spirit of harmony required by Mundella and Morley did not percolate down to the manager on the floor. During the strike of 1872 Morley’s agents refused to allow a worker representative to attend the Arbitration Board. The strike was financially supported from unions in Sheffield and Staffordshire. Morley ensured that the delegate could attend and a settlement was reached. (NMCDE 6 June 1872) The Board managed to settle many disputes but on frame rents the two sides were too far apart. By 1872 the hand frame knitters had had enough. They had tried to work through the Arbitration Board but now they would strike and gain assistance from other trades: it was agreed that “none of us touch work again on a Monday morning unless the system of frame rent and charges be totally abolished…” (NMCDE 7 May 1872) After four weeks the Hosiers gave way and agreed to drop frame rent and other charges but would lower their prices paid for stockings. (NMCDE 10 June 1872) Some Hosiers continued to apply the frame rent. Eventually Parliament moved and passed the Hosiery Manufacture (Wages) Act 1874. This stated that: “All contracts to stop wages, and all contracts for frame rents and charges, between employer and artificers, shall be and are hereby declared to be illegal, null and void.” (NG 21 Aug 1874) Even this did not totally stop frame rents and the Arbitration Board was lethargic in supporting the legislation. The Union went to court to force implementation of the Act by individual employers. The lawyer David Heath who had been one of the leaders of Nottingham Chartism prosecuted on behalf of the union in what was a decisive case. A bag hosier was charged with deducting frame-rent and charges. It appeared that this was with the acquiescence of the Hosiery employers Messrs Warner and Cartwright. Heath
17
said that Black “had been put up to fight the battle of Messrs Warner and Cartwright.” That firm, according to Black, had said that “the union could not hurt them.” Heath won and the bag hosier was fined £35. (NMCDE 16 March and 20 March 1875) Frame rent was finally dead despite the impotence of the Arbitration Board and the opposition of Mundella and Morley. Mundella had actually talked out a Tory Bill that would have ended frame rent. He and Morley proposed merely that charges be made as a percentage of the wage earned but that was shelved for that session. (NG 11 August 1871) Morley and Mundella achieved a national political presence. Both were elected as Liberal MPs in the 1868 election; Morley in Bristol and Mundella in Sheffield. When Mundella returned to Nottingham Station the Liberal NMCDE estimated the crowd of well-wishers: “there could not have been far short of 20,000 present.” The Tory NG was less exuberant but gave more detail. He arrived in the early afternoon to be met by three to four thousand of his employees who cheered him whilst a Sax-Tuba band played “See the Conquering Hero comes”. Mundella was driven to his factory and was given a laudatory address by his workers. He replied: “You cannot imagine how much I feel affected by the splendid reception which you have unexpectedly given me…I go to represent Sheffield; but if I know myself, I shall with all my heart and soul, and energy, represent the working men of England. (Loud cheers) Labour, I trust, will have in me one true and honest advocate (hear, hear); not labour to the exclusion of capital, but as a principle, and as far as the equal rights of both.” The factory girls, perhaps not totally “unexpectedly”, wore Liberal party yellow ribbons. The Town Council offered Mundella the prize of being an Alderman. Like Caesar with the kingship, Mundella initially refused; but was then was prevailed upon to accept. The workers of Morley were as devoted to cause of their employer. Under the leadership of their manager Mr Hill they turned up in both Mansfield and Hucknall to stone the Tory candidate. (NMCDE 20 November 1868, NG 27 November 1868) Mundella and Morley were friends to the trade unions; although, admittedly they were determined to steer the unions towards a stance of peace between the working and employing classes. The unions desperately needed allies. In 1867 the Queen’s Court gave a judgement which threatened the legal existence of unions and gave no protection to their funds. Mundella presented a Bill that protected union funds in 1869 but only a temporary Act was introduced to protect union funds and it lapsed at the end of 1870. The new Act gave the unions the right to combine for legal objects but a Criminal Law Amendment Act gave a three year prison sentence for intimidation and molestation. This was so loosely drawn that the right to picket came under threat. Morley came out for the repeal of the CLAA whereas Mundella stood for a more cautious approach of amendment. In January 1872 the TUC met in Nottingham with 77 delegates representing 255,710 members. Mr George Potter, editor of The Beehive took the chair. This paper was the most important labour movement journal and was financed by Morley. Mundella addressed Congress on child labour and his proposed factory act and truck act. He stressed the necessity for a close alliance between capital and labour. The Mayor organised a dinner for TUC delegates. Amongst those present were, S. Morley MP and A.J. Mundella MP. George Odger, secretary of the London Trades Council and President of the First International, spoke in reply to the welcoming speech of the Mayor. He was pleased with the advance of the 9 hours movement. He believed in lifting up not
18
pulling down and there was no desire to destroy property. “…a new epoch was dawning, and that the day star was Mr Mundella…The day star of what? Why of conciliation – (hear) – and when necessary, of arbitration.” Odger then proposed “Success to Boards of Arbitration, and the future harmony between capital and labour, coupled the name of A.J. Mundella…” Mundella replied. He remembered “when trades-union books were burnt in the field, and when to be a trade unionist was to be a ‘conspirator’. “In those days there were “our regiments of foot and one of horse in this town, protecting the property of capitalists, and to put down the trade outrages complained of. In those days, too, there was not a savings bank in this town, nor an institution of any kind in which the working men accumulated their savings.” The way forward was by arbitration and conciliation. (NMCDE 9 January 1872) Mundella was very pleased with the TUC. He wrote: “The Trade Union Congress falls very heavily on me but I am doing my duty and marvellously good is the apparent result. Much more forbearance and moderation characterise all their proceedings…I wish you had been at the breakfast, given by Morley (and) myself… The kindly tone that prevailed at the gathering was excellent. It is very pleasant to have such evidence of the usefulness of one’s labours.” (Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists, London, 1994, p.38) Mundella played an important role in pushing for trade union rights in Parliament. Morley supported attempts to improve working class housing gave assistance to the unionisation of agricultural workers and became a member of the “Consulting Committee” of Joseph Arch’s agricultural labourers’ union. (Jonathan Spain, Trade unionists, Gladstonian Liberals and the labour law reforms of 1875, Eugene F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid eds. Currents of radicalism, Cambridge 1991 p.113) He also funded labour movement papers such as the Beehive and Commonwealth. He was a major funder of the Reform League which stood for manhood suffrage and the ballot. Marx claimed, at least initially, the founding of the Reform League was an important success for the International with 6 members on the General Committee and 7 out of 10 on its executive. (Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement, London 1965 pp.63/4) Morley set up a “special fund” of the League and collaborated with the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC in paying agents to help in the return of Radicals to Parliament. (Royden Harrison op.cit. pp150-151) Marx and Engels became far more critical of Mundella and Morley, whose cosy relationship with the trade union leaders was seen as entangling the latter in the Liberal Party. Engels wrote that Morley does not mind spending a couple of thousand pounds “to be able to act as the commanding general of this sham labour general staff…” The trade union leaders “are in the pay of the bourgeoisie, as an agitator for the ‘great Liberal party’.” The Beehive did not uncover this despite the antagonism of the editor Potter for the Junta of union leaders because he had a relationship with Morley who paid him money. Marx believed that the Beehive was “sold to Sam Morley”. (ibid pp.191-3) Indeed Morley had such a controlling interest that he was able to appoint a tepidly political Rev. Henry Solly as the editor. This was too much for Engels and the International severed all relations with the paper. (Collins and Abramsky, op.cit. p.175) The series of structural and political changes ushered in during the second half of the 19th century were the major factors taming the insurrectionary timbre of Nottingham working class politics. The influence of Mundella and Morley on the trade union leaders was also a factor and it was not just an issue of the cash nexus. Their help had protected union
19
finances, the right to picket and enabled unions to have a real, albeit precarious, legal existence. The presence of union full timers on Arbitration Boards buttressed not merely the legitimacy of the unions but also that of the union leaders from rank and file criticism. Their impact in Nottingham was immense but was merely a small part of the factors that anchored the skilled unions to the Liberals Julian Atkinson
Some experiences of the post-1985 coal industry in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Beynon and Hudson’s book The Shadow of the Mine set out vividly the experiences of mining communities in Durham and South Wales. After the end of the Miners’ Strike in 1985, miners in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire had very similar experiences too. Following nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947, it had been run by the National Coal Board, whose management was traditionally made up of men who themselves had backgrounds in the industry. Ian MacGregor was hired as NCB Chairman in1983 by Margaret Thatcher following what might politely be termed his vigorous changes to British Steel. Arriving with a track record of union-busting in the US, he ensured that Coal Board managers adopted a radically different approach to the treatment of their workforce. Here are some experiences from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire that illustrate the treatment of miners in the harsh new world of the coal industry after the 1984-5 Strike. During the Strike divisions within the NUM had been fostered by Government, the mass media and by Thatcher’s semi-secret envoy David Hart. He travelled the coalfields, contacting miners who were labelled as scabs by the poverty-stricken NUM loyalist strikers. Sums of money, from unnamed sources, were scattered around the coalfields. Of course, none of this money ever found its way to strikers. These manufactured divisions were an important factor in the break-up of the NUM, with the legal certification in 1985 of a breakaway organisation initially called the Democratic Union of Mineworkers, the DUM. Its members were termed Dummies by NUM members, so the name was quickly changed to Union of Democratic Mineworkers, or UDM. The NUM by that time had been refused recognition at pits in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, so NUM members did not have a union to which management would talk. The UDM was therefore in a powerful position. This point forms an important part of the context in which the following experiences took place. The leper colony “There’s no such thing as an ex-miner, just a miner who’s doing another job” is the firm view of John Dobb. He was one of the minority of miners in Nottinghamshire who went out on strike in 1984-5, supporting their union for the whole year. They proudly labelled themselves “Loyal to the Last”. In fact, John and another Hucknall miner stayed out beyond the nationally-determined day of the return to work. “We couldn’t bear to go back while there were still lads who’d been sacked and lads who were in prison.”
20
After a fortnight, the union man told them that management would sack them unless they went back, so they were forced to return. When John turned up for his first shift on nights at Hucknall’s “Bottom Pit”, none of the other miners would speak to him because they had not been on strike. Underground, poor relationships can be dangerous because they can threaten safety. In that fraught situation the overman was not sure what to do with him, so: “He put me on a button in the middle of nowhere”. On that first shift, then, John saw nobody. Being a “button man”, whose job underground was to press a button at certain times, was a low-status job within the underground workforce. John had previously done a much higher-status job as a shearer driver, a faceworker and chargeman who drove the machine that cut coal. On John’s second shift, the overman said he had put together a scratch team for care and maintenance work on the Thirty Ones seam that was to be kept for emergency use in case of breakdown on other seams. Would John do him a favour by driving for him on Thirty Ones? Most members of that team had been strikers. Later, someone named this team the Leper Colony and the name stuck. All the ex-strikers ignored that name. “A lot of the scabs were more curious about us than anything. Most men at Hucknall wanted to talk to the strikers. A lot of the scabs on my shift were just sheep”. When the Thirty Ones face shut, John was invited onto another team until Bottom Pit was shut with almost no notice. The men were told to make a list of other pits where they would like to work. All his team, except for John, were moved to Thoresby, but those who had been on strike were not allowed into Thoresby. John said he would like to go to Ollerton, but one of the managers said he himself was moving to Ollerton, and “There’s too many of your sort there already.” That jibe referred only to John’s status as one of the few “Loyal to the Last” strikers in 1984-5. He had also been elected NUM Branch President when the NUM branch was reformed following the UDM breakaway. “I ended up at Sherwood.” Life there was very tough for NUM members, who were in a minority. Denied all workplace union facilities, they were forced to conduct an NUM ballot in a lad’s front room because they were not allowed to do this at the pit. “Some men were sacked just for talking in the canteen – they were accused of having a union meeting in there, which wasn’t true. I was attacked in’t pit yard by a scab, so I flattened him. I only got a final written warning for that – don’t know why I wasn’t sacked.”
21
John would not say this, but he was known to others as a hard-working miner, so perhaps that was why he was not dismissed. Working at Sherwood until it too closed, John remembers bitterly “There was no justice – it was the Wild West.” This point is illustrated by the experiences of a Derbyshire miner, too. No time to say goodbye In the early 1990’s, several years after the end of the strike, Dennis Clayton went to work at Bolsover Colliery in Derbyshire one Monday morning to find a letter with his check. Checks were the tokens that miners showed in order to draw their pay. They were also carried underground, so in case of accident each man could be identified. This letter instructed Dennis to see a Mr Wallace from Personnel, who then told him it was time to take redundancy. “I didn’t go on strike for a year so I could take redundancy now”, Dennis protested. He was shocked by Mr Wallace’s response. “Management want rid of union activists like you. You’d do better to take redundancy, with its payment, because they’ll do anything to sack you, then you’d have nothing. Why not go home and talk it over with your wife, then come back and let me know what you decide?” So Dennis talked to his wife Rita. He didn’t want to give up his job, but life at the pit had been a lot worse since the end of the Strike. He was having to work with UDM members who had scabbed. After a serious talk with Rita “I decided to go for it. If management really wanted rid of me, they’d be able to get away with any excuse for sacking me, then I’d have nothing.” Back in Mr Wallace’s office next day, he had only one bargaining tool. “I did twelve years at Williamthorpe, but it’s not on my record, so my redundancy pay wouldn’t include those years of service. I won’t take redundancy unless those years are put on my record.” Mr Wallace agreed that the record would be adjusted, so Dennis won his point. The Coal Board agreed to pay the five rest days he had left. After confirming his willingness to take redundancy, then signing a document, he expected to be given the usual two weeks of notice. To his amazement, he was told that his employment had just ended. “My head was spinning. I’d no time to get used to the idea of never going back down the pit, no chance to say goodbye to my workmates.” Dennis was told he could keep his checks, then he must leave the premises immediately. “I’d been a chargeman and done a lot of overtime. Sometimes I’d worked a double shift. I couldn’t get used to not being at work. One morning I got up early, as I’d always done,
22
then headed off to work at Bolsover. I got as far as Arkwright, then I remembered, so I went into Chesterfield for a cup of tea in a cafe. Without my job, it was totally different way of life. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d just wander around the house. Melvin, another ex-miner, encouraged me to volunteer at the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centre. I enjoyed it, I made friends. It still brings it home, though, when you talk about it.” This was the harsh new world of British industrial relations that grew from the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike. Hilary Cave
Book Reviews In the Shadow of the Mine “In the Shadow of the Mine – Coal and the End of Industrial Britain” is based on the authors’, Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson’s deep and extensive knowledge of the South Wales and Durham Coalfields. This knowledge, they write: “brought home to us the need for a sympathetic historical account of how life has changed in these communities. Our aim is to explain why Britain’s coalfields, once significant centres of industrial production and political influence, became marginalised, and to explore the ways in which the state has played a central role in their declining fortunes”. Whilst the book is very much a detailed history of the Durham and South Wales mining communities there is a great deal in it which will be of interest to those from, or familiar with, any coal mining community. Many of the issues discussed are of relevance nationally. Nationalisation and government policy over the years, for example, is looked at in detail, as is the legacy of the rapid closure programme after the 1984/5 miners’ strike. “Within the broader process of British industrial decline,” the authors write, “the toppling of King Coal was a significant moment. Coal had powered the first industrial revolution and laid the basis for successive economic transformations spanning two centuries, employing over a million workers at its peak. Its decline was not quite so gradual, and the denouement of the 1980s and 1990s was a dramatic one. In this book we have outlined some of the traumatic consequences of this decline, along with their broader political and social significance.” Gwyneth Francis
23
Good News for Labour Historians! Verso Books have recently created an excellent web site dedicated to the works of Dorothy and E.P. Thompson. It’s already a comprehensive list, bristling with many, hard to find, active links. John Merrick, an editor at Verso, (johnphilipmerrick@gmail.com / john@verso.co.uk) has curated the site and is hoping to add to it over the coming months. However, if you can spot anything missing, particularly secondary literature on either of them, then please let him know. The site can be found at: https://www.versobooks.com/pg/ep-and-dorothy-thompson Mike Hamlin
North East History (Vol 52 2021) Published at the end of 2021, this is the latest Journal of the North East Labour History Society. The Society has published an annual journal every year since 1967 and past issues from 2005 onwards are available, free to view online at http://nelh.net A hard copy of this edition can be obtained from the Society for £5 (+£2 P&P). The Society’s membership currently runs at 173 with a further 117 on its mailing list. Apart from the journal, 14 mailings were produced during the year and regular monthly discussion meetings were held over Zoom. NELH also hosts a lively public Facebook page on www.facebook.com/groups/165234246904048 with some 1.2k members. The current journal is a handsome publication, incorporating 272 pages, 12 articles, 9 reviews plus a number of reports and appreciations. The quality of the articles is high. I particularly enjoyed the varied pieces on: o
o
o
24
Black lives in Tyneside during the 1940s by Hannah Kent. Here Hannah writes about the extent to which a Black community existed in Tyneside during and immediately after WW2. She focuses on the role of the Colonial Office in setting up two hostels, one in Newcastle the other in North Shields, to house colonial war workers. Child labour in Newcastle’s iron and glass industry during the mid 19thcentury by Mike Greatbatch. Here Mike shows how much our attitudes to child labour have changed by exploring the lived experience of child workers in Newcastle between the 1830s and 50s. Paul Robeson and the NE by Brian Bennison. Brian writes about the singer and internationalist who although the object of much vilification in his own country, generated a warm welcome in the North East. Brian also offers an appreciation of NELH founder member Archie Potts who died during the year.
o
o
o
o o
1956 remembered by Archie Potts is a personal political memoir written by Archie just a month before he died. The Labour Party in post-war Newcastle by John Charlton. Here John charts the politics of the Labour Party in Newcastle who, on the back of the General Election win in November 1945 were able to gain control of the Newcastle City council, only to lose it again in 1949 due, largely to its inability to resolve acute housing shortages. John also contributes an initial obituary to Nigel Todd, a major figure in NE Labour politics, a local councillor for over 40 years and another founder member of NELH. He was also the father of the well known social historian and feminist Selina Todd. A major part of next year’s NE Journal will be dedicated to commemorating the important life of Nigel Todd. Two pieces on trades union education by Steve Grinter and John Stirling. Steve and John both write well about their experiences as teachers of trade unionism. Steve working for the TUC and John for Northumbria University. Janet Allan describes her memorable experiences working as a newly qualified solicitor in Newcastle during the 1984 miners’ strike. And finally, Judith Green chronicles to story of mining in Scotswood as a detailed case study in deindustrialization.
Hopefully, we will be able to pick up and publicise other publications from local labour history societies in future NDLHS newsletters. Mike Hamlin
George Julian Harney – The Man and the Movement This event, initially scheduled for January, will now take place on 21st May 2022. Saturday 21st May 2022, 10.00 – 12.00 St.Paul’s Church Hall, Seale Street Derby, DE1 3RT The Chartist movement was still in its early stages in 1839 but was being taken up enthusiastically by working men and women. The debate was whether their aims, political reform based on the six points of the Peoples’ Charter, would be achieved by ‘moral persuasion’ or physical force’. George Julian Harney was a young radical and an advocate of ‘physical force’ when he spoke to a crowd of 5,000 people on Chester Green in Derby in January 1939. Associate Professor Richard Gaunt’s talk will explore the national and local context of Harney’s speech, followed by opportunities for questions and discussion, lunch and an afternoon of entertainment including a re-enactment of Harney’s speech, an address by Jeremy Corbyn and music from Nottingham Clarion Choir.
25
Note from the Editors As you can see from this newsletter, the Word programme doesn’t distinguish between authors when numbering footnotes. It also causes big gaps between articles. Formatting is very much easier if you embed the references within the text. Thank you for your consideration. Julian & Helen
Pamphlets published by NDLHS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
“Volunteers for Liberty: Notts and Derbys Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War” “Who Dips in the Tin? The Butty System in Notts Coalfield”, Barry Johnson, £2.50 “Women in British Coal Mining”, Chris Wrigley, £2.00 “Bravery and Deception: The Pentrich Revolt of 1817”, Julian Atkinson, £2.00 “Luddism in the East Midlands”, Julian Atkinson and Roger Tanner, £3.00 “Florence Paton M.P.”, Val Wood, £2.50 “Chartism in Nottingham”, Julian Atkinson and Roger Tanner, £5.00
NDLHS Members and Supporters books/pamphlets from other publishers: 1. “Rebel's Way”, Gwyneth Francis, £5 2. “Glossop's Oldest Textile Trade Unionist”, Joe Doyle’s interview with Mr E Watts pub. ‘The Wheatsheaf’ Co-op paper, February 1926, £2 3. “The Co-operative Movement in Nottingham”, Christopher Richardson, £3 4. “Remembering the 1968 Revolts: Voices from Nottingham”, Various, £4.99 5. “Nine Days That Shook Mansfield”, Barry Johnson, £3 6. “Nottingham Miners Do Strike”, Keith Stanley, £7 7. “The Lost Missionary”, Chris Richardson, £2 8. “Nottingham and the Pentrich Rising of 1817”, Roger Tanner, £5 9. “Pentrich to Peterloo”, Ed. Richard Gaunt, £8 10. “Kettling the Unions”, Alan Tuckman, £14.99 11. “How Glossop Supported the Miners”, Gwyneth Francis, £3 12. “Changing Derbyshire NUM”, Malcolm Ball, £5 13. “The Air of Freedom: the story of the striking boot and shoemakers in Eyam and Stoney Middleton 1918 – 1920” - Steve Bond and Philip Taylor £6
If you wish to buy one, please send the name or number of the pamphlet plus your name and postal address together with a cheque made out to NDLHS to: Roger Tanner, 35, Compton Road, Sherwood, Nottingham NG5 2NH Alternatively, email your order to: rogerntanner@yahoo.co.uk and pay by BACS transfer to the NDLHS Santander Account No. 29032134, sort code 09-01-29 with your surname as reference.
26
27