GMB @ Work

GMB at Work Jacket_Layout 1 19/04/2012 19:36 Page 1

a ca mpaigning union Forged in the furnaces of the Beckton Gasworks, it has represented its members since 1889; through peace and war, in times of plenty and hardship, and with and without the help of government.

He is the author of nine books on history and politics, including Change the World.The Official History of Amicus the Union, and The Art of Revolution, which was produced in association with GMB, and which explores the evolution of the political poster over the course of the twentieth century.

This book has been produced by GMB in conjunction with the Marx Memorial Library with the help and expertise of TU ink and Evans Mitchell Books

Lay led, highly democratic and fiercely protective of its members’ rights; the union has tackled – when no one else would – the roots of inequality and iniquity contained within private equity companies and venture capital.

GMB is the product of the most ordinary, and yet extraordinary, people; who proved themselves to be stronger when they worked together, in common

Marx Memorial Library

cause, rather than apart.What united them all was the belief that things cannot stay as they are, and that our tomorrows have to be – and indeed will be – far better than today.

Proud of its past, GMB is charting a bold vision of a finer and fairer future for us all.

EVANS MITCHELL BOOKS

GMB@

Work The story behind the union

We fear no employer or politician. We exist to support and fight for the rights of working people and our communities and the vulnerable in our society. What we do is

fight for justice,

a decent and fair society.

That is why I say that I believe that these years of rebuilding this organisation has now made us

fit for the purpose

Will Thorne

that and those that went before us set in place, that is, not just to create social change but to challenge those who would destroy

Tom Sawyer

former General Secretary of the Labour Party

ISBN 978-1-901268-61-4 £25.00 UK

“ This great union of ours is growing.

By John Callow

www.gmb.org.uk www.marx-memorial-library.org www.embooks.co.uk www.tuink.co.uk

It exists for you – to protect you – to represent you – and to make life better for you and your family.

This is the story of Britain’s General Union, how it started out and how it developed: from its early days under Will Thorne, when lockouts and street fights were common place, to the Hunger Marches, the Blitz and beyond to today’s resurgent GMB, which has grown in strength and confidence, since 2005, bucking the trend for union decline and giving voice to working people who otherwise would be silenced, sidelined and forgotten.

$40.00 US

John Callow is Director of Archives at the Marx Memorial Library.

This trade union history is the story of a great trade union fighting over centuries for its members.

It is the most visually exciting and beautifully illustrated trade union history that has ever been produced.

Members of the union will be proud of such an achievement I hope it will be widely read.

The story behind the union

GMB is first and foremost

1889-2012

our society”

Paul Kenny 7 June 2011

EVANS MITCHELL BOOKS

By John Callow

GMB@

1889-2012

Work The story behind the union

This book has been produced by GMB union in conjunction with the Marx Memorial Library with the help and expertise of TU ink and Evans Mitchell Books

Marx Memorial Library

EVANS MITCHELL BOOKS

GMB @ Work – The story behind the union Copyright © 2012 GMB Text Copyright © 2012 Dr John Callow Dr John Callow has asserted his rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Evans Mitchell Books, 86 Gloucester Place, London W1U 6HP, United Kingdom www.embooks.co.uk and co-published by GMB, GMB National Office 22 Stephenson Way, Euston, London NW1 2HD, United Kingdom www.gmb.org.uk Written by Dr John Callow Proofreading by Elaine Koster Design by Darren Westlake, TU ink Ltd, London Printed by TU ink Ltd, London www.tuink.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A CIP record of this book is available on request from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-901268-61-4 Printed in the United Kingdom

GMB@

1889-2012

Work The story behind the union

By John Callow

contents

the Battle on the Bridge 18 y l Kenn u a P from gmB

gmB

gmB

6 12 14

founding the union 40

16

the years of achievement 74

the lion in winter 118

changing the guard on shifting sands 176 an estate of the realm 212

recessional 262 the gmB@worK 342

new realism, new laBour – new challenges 302

further re ading & index

4 22

410

foreWord

your union your history

e

xactly a century ago, Will Thorne – the founder of today’s GMB union – gained the Presidency of the TUC. It was a landmark moment for our union, marking the recognition by the older craft-based trades unions that the general workers, and those in the lowest paid sectors of the economy, had at last come into their own. They had proved their ability to mobilise; to change the face of politics by creating a party to represent the interests of Labour, steeped in Socialist values, and had come to realise their own power to transform society, for the benefit of the many rather than the few. Thorne had inherited nothing – he created – and the union he had fashioned had come to stay.

Yet, in his hour of triumph, Thorne was under few illusions about the challenges that lay ahead, and did not shirk from discussing unpopular topics or difficult themes. Inequality bred conflict, but the battle when it came should always be joined and never shirked or avoided. “Labour unrest cannot cease”, he told his audience, until radical measures were adopted “and the present social inequalities removed”. “Freedom”, from want, discrimination, and injustice, “will mean struggle and sacrifice, which, though hard for the few to sustain, will be light enough for each when all are ready and willing to share it.

The workers know this already, and it now remains to be acted upon”.

What has held many of our people back is fear; fear of losing a job, of being derided, blacklisted or marked out as troublesome in the workplace. Fear divides and fear restricts, it prevents working people from realising their full potential and it narrows their horizons.

It silences their voice. By way of contrast, the union should be something that you can always rely upon, and that will always be there for you. It gives you courage. Who else speaks up for you in your life? Or exists to challenge the powerful, the greedy and the downright corrupt? It is the power of your voice, amplified a thousand or even a million times.

to challenge and to change The GMB exists to challenge and to change the existing order. It is there to expose injustices and unfairness; and the conduct of the rich, with their tax breaks and offshore accounts, who seek to criticise those on benefits but pay no tax themselves. It is there to call a halt to the private equity firms and asset strippers, who would hollow out British firms and leave the rest of us to pick up the bill and to salvage something from out of the ruins of our industries, many of which used to be publicly owned. We need to clear out the irresponsible gamblers who brought about the recession and to lay the blame for it where it really lies; not with the public sector workers, who are scapegoated and made to suffer the pain but with the city speculators, those darlings of the free market, whose crimes are hidden and whose only responsibility lies in the lining of their own pockets.

GMB marches for the alternative: London, March 2011

7

October 2009, GMB and Unison sponsor the Refuse to be Beat benefit gig at the O2 Academy to support the 600 striking cleaning workers.

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We need stable employment, new jobs, affordable housing and to protect our health and education services. We need protection for us all from the financial buccaneers of monetarist excess, the spivs of the banking world, gambling with money they simply do not have, piling up incredible levels of debt and then pretending, in the silken words of David Cameron that we are somehow ‘all in this together’.Yet, the resulting collapse has hit those at the bottom, rather than those who sit on top. GMB members have been hit hard. Redundancies and short-time working, coupled with higher energy bills, pile the pressure disproportionately on working people, and not the elites.

Our aim is to leave no one in any doubt, that our members’ jobs, families, and futures are our prime concern, and that we believe in fairness for pensioners, better schools and hospitals, fairer taxation and controls over rogue employers. We are going to be fighting for those beliefs against the most ruthless government we have seen since the darkest days of Thatcherism.

It is not a case of “if ” we fight Cameron and his friends in the City, but of when and how.

Some politicians and media pundits do not like GMB’s confrontational approach to employers when they mistreat GMB members. But we all know that unless employers fear a confrontational reaction from the union, they will think that they can treat our members any which way they like and be able to get away with it. GMB’s lack of tolerance to attacks on its members is no different to others defending what they value most, regardless of who likes it or not. The union’s job is to make sure that employers do not get away with

foreWord

attacking our members. If employers go after GMB members’ pay, conditions and trade union rights, then they have to expect to have an enormous fight on their hands.

In this respect, today’s GMB is far closer to Thorne’s vision that at any point in the last century. It certainly bears little resemblance to the union of the 1950s and ’60s which had lost its way amid the corridors of power and had become top-heavy and comfortable, afraid to trust in its members and afraid to rock the boat. The bleak years of Thatcherism changed all of that as, to quote from one of Thorne’s greatest heroes, “all that was solid melted into air”, or else was beaten down amid recession and constant attack.

We have come full circle. The union is now fully controlled and driven by its lay membership and is both accountable and powerful, for the first time since its pioneer days.

In the following pages you will see how the union started out and developed. How it was the product of the most ordinary, and yet extraordinary, people; who proved themselves to be stronger when they worked together, in common cause, than apart. What united them all was the belief that things cannot stay as they are, and that our tomorrows have to be better than today.

We have come a long way since those heroic times in March 1889, at the Beckton Gasworks, where our story began, but we hold true to exactly the same values and vision, just as the mighty oak tree carries with it the essence of the acorn from which it grew.

Of course, the struggle is all about the collective as opposed to the individual. Today’s GMB works because it is a strong team and I could not have taken the union forward, since 2005, without the help, the support, and the comradeship of the Senior Management Team, the regions and all the members who have served on the CEC in that time.

Above all, ours is a story to be proud of, and this is a union to be proud of. It has been my honour to lead it, to gain a few more battle honours and to write a few more chapters in its history along the way. There is much more to be done, but GMB will be there on every step of the road, whenever needed by its members to fight, counsel, and to guide.

Left: “Although many people could be thanked here, on a personal note I would like to thank Allan Garley for his inestimable contribution and unstinting personal support he gave me”.

Paul Kenny Below: Dave Prentis and Paul Kenny, Leeds, 2009

Paul Kenny 1 May 2012

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10

11

GMB faMily tree National Union of Tailors & Garment Workers 1931

When the unions formed and how they united Though GMB rightly dates its foundation to Sunday 31st March 1889; its roots go even further back, to the 1830s, through the numerous small craft unions that have subsequently found a home within its ranks.

Though nowdays some of the trades have disappeared completely, or – like the wonderfully named “Amalgamated Society of Drillers and Hole Cutters” – may seem curious or even archaic; their sheer diversity and their pride in shared labour demonstrate the scope of GMB’s grasp of, and commitment to, the world of work.

United Garment Workers Union 1912 At least nine small organisations

Amal. Soc. of Boilermakers, Blacksmiths, Shipwrights & Structural Workers 1963

United Society of Boilermakers, Shipbuilders & Structural Workers 1952

Ship Constructive & Shipwrights Association 1910

United Society of Boilermakers & Iron & Steel Shipbuilders 1852

Scottish Society of Boilermakers 1830s

United Friendly Boilermakers Society 1845

Reproduced with kind permission from Trade Union Ancestors www.unionancestors.co.uk

Associated Blacksmiths, Forge & Smithy Workers Union

Ship Constructive Association

Amalgamated Society of Drillers & Hole Cutters 1896

National Society of Drillers

Numerous local & small national organisations

Amicable & Provident Society of Journeymen Boilermakers of Great Britain 1849

Society of Friendly Boilermakers 1834

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United Ladies Tailors (London) & Waterproof Garment Workers Union

Associated Society of Shipwrights 1872

General, Municipal & Boilermakers Union (GMB) 1982

Furniture, Timber & Allied Trades Union 1971

Amalgamated Society of Woodworking Machinists

National Union of Furniture Trade Operatives 1947

Alliance Cabinet Makers Association 1872

United Operative Cabinet & Chairmakers Society of Scotland

National Union of General & Municipal Workers 1924

United Rubber, Plastic & Allied Workers of Great Britain

Amalgamated Union of Upholsterers

Scottish Professional Footballers Association

Union of Salt, Chemical & Industrial General Workers

Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical & Computer Staff 1962 Clerical & Administrative Workers Union 1940

National Union of Waterworks’ Employees Association of Women Clerks & Secretaries S. Durham & N. Yorkshire Salt Makers’ Union 1889

National Union of Clerks & Administrative Workers National Union of Clerks 1890

Coopers & Allied Workers’ Federation of Great Britain

National Union of General Workers 1916

National Union of Gasworkers & General Labourers 1889

National Federation of Women Workers 1906

Municipal Employees Association 1894

National Amalgamated Union of Labour 1889

LCC Employees’ Protection Society 1888

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GMB structure

the union is the Voice of the MeMBershiP all GMB members belong to a branch, which can be workplace or industry based, and is the bedrock of the union’s organisation and democracy. each branch is located in one of the union’s nine regions. as well as being part of a region and local branch structure, GMB members also belong to one of the three industrial sections of the union, which were established in 2006. These are:

1 commercial services This is sub-divided into the Professional and Service sector; Energy and Utilities; and Food and Leisure.

2 Public services This section, of roughly 300,000 members, accounts for almost 50% of GMB’s entire membership. It includes refuse collectors, cleaners, school support staff, ambulance drivers, public transport and the NHS. 3 Manufacturing This is sub-divided into Clothing and Textiles; Construction, Furniture, Timber and Allied Trades; Engineering; and Process workers.

The Central Executive Council is the governing body of the union. It meets every two months and normally consists

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of roughly 55 members of the union.

It is elected by secret ballot of all GMB members every four years.

The CEC is headed by GMB’s lay member President, Mary Turner, from London Region; and by its Vice-President, Malcolm Sage, from the Midland and East Coast Region.

Through their branches and workplace organisations, GMB members formulate the union’s policy decisions by submitting motions to the union’s annual Congress.

Every second GMB Congress is a “rule amendment Congress”, which means that grassroots GMB members can seek to change the union’s rules via amendments sent in by their branches.

Congress, itself, is held annually and is where the lay member ruling body of the union decides GMB policy on all issues.

Regional Secretaries

APPOINT

ELECT

M 9 Regional Councils Meet twice a year One per 1,000 members 10% extra reserved for women Two seats reserved for BME members of Regional Equality Forums

M

M

M Branch Committee Branch Secretary Branch President Branch Auditors Equality Officer Youth Officer CLP & TUC Delegates

ELECT MEMBERS EVERY FOUR YEARS

M

ELECT DELEGATES EVERY YEAR

M

conGress

Supreme policy-making body Meet twice a year One delegate per 1,500 members

ELECT MEMBERS EVERY FOUR YEARS

M ELECTS PRESIDENT & VICE PRESIDENT EVERY FOUR YEARS

M

ELECT EVERY FIVE YEARS

M

M

M

MM M

M ELECT MEMBERS EVERY FOUR YEARS

M

M

M

M

MeMBers

Regional Committees Meet monthly

ELECT WITHIN FIVE YEARS

Workplace representatives Shop Stewards Staff Representatives Safety Representatives Union Learning Representatives

ELECT

ELECT

M

M

M ADVISE

ELECT DELEGATES

ADVISE

M Central Executive Council Meet bi-monthly General & Section seats per region One reserved women’s seat per region Five national reserved race seats

M

M

M

MEMBER OF APPOINTS

General Secretary & Treasurer

M

ADVISE

M

M

M

M

National Advisory Bodies Section Conferences & Committees Delegate Conferences Equality Conferences & Committees Young Members Conferences & Committees

Regional Officers

M

M

ADVISE

M

M

running the union at regional & national level

M

Regional Advisory Bodies Section Conferences & Committees Delegate Conferences Equality Conferences & Committees Young Members Conferences & Committees

running the union at local level

M

advising the union

National Secretaries National Officers

15

GMB reGions

GMB’s regional structures, and high levels of regional autonomy, originated in the early, spontaneous days of the union’s growth and spread in the 1890s.

16

a

s a result, by 1924, there were twelve regional districts which varied dramatically in membership from 87,000, in the largest, to just 7,000 in the smallest. A reorganisation undertaken by Charles Dukes, in 1937, saw the districts reduced to ten, with some amalgamated and others sub-divided, in order to bring some sort of balance to their respective membership rolls.

These ten districts, later re-branded as regions, remained largely unchanged and unchallenged until the decision of the Central Executive Council, in 2006, to establish a new North West and Irish Region, and to overhaul the administration and redraw the boundaries of several others. The once powerful Lancashire Region was broken up in the move from ten to nine regions, which came into force on 1 January 2007, and merged with the majority of the old Liverpool, North Wales and Irish Region in order to create the new territory.

Today, there are more than 300 full-time regional organisers at work for GMB. Each region possesses its own regional secretary, administration, and council. The Regional Councils are comprised of lay members of the union, who are elected every four

years. The regions also elect delegates for GMB’s annual Congress, as well as for the union’s national and regional committees.

The diffusion of power from the centre, and its concentration in what often amounted to regional fiefdoms, especially in the 1930s-60s, was long held to be one of GMB’s major weaknesses. However, the democratisation of the union after 2005, the ceding of some powers back to the centre, the integration of the regional secretaries within an over-arching GMB structure and the increasing role of lay membership, changed all of that.

The regions, attuned to the traditions and industrial composition of their membership, as well as providing help and support to members, representatives and branches, also oversee the payment of benefits and provide a range of professional services covering legal, health and safety concerns, pensions, issues of equality, and the rights of both young and retired members.

Thus, the autonomy of the regions and the federative nature of the union, which came close to breaking the union at the beginning of the 21st Century, now forms one of its greatest strengths.

GMB Scotland

GMB Northern Region

GMB Yorkshire & North Derbyshire Region

GMB Midland & East Coast Region

GMB North West & Irish Region

GMB Wales & South West Region

GMB Birmingham & West Midlands Region

GMB London Region

GMB Southern Region

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chaPter 1

the Battle

18

a storm in the night

a

horse reared-up, throwing its rider, the police commander of the advance guard fell under a shower of missiles and a strike-breaker went down, clutching his bloodied scalp. The police lines shuddered as the dark outlines of hundreds of strikers, their families and their neighbours, scrambled over the sides of the embankment and crashed into their lines. Batons were swung and sabres drawn; the two black hansom cabs containing the mayor and aldermen jolted to a sudden halt; top-hatted and bewhiskered faces pushed through windows, hot and confused, barking out orders to the riding and running officers who were now heedless of their entreaties and struggling to face-down the panic that was beginning to spread through the men.

By this time, the strikers and their supporters had also gained vantage points on top of the houses on either side of the road and, having “provided themselves with similar ammunition” wrought a terrible toll upon the fraying column. The guards and the guarded, wrote the leader of the strike, were now “completely at the mercy of the crowd and many casualties took place amongst them”. Falling under “so dangerous a shower”, soldiers, constables and “knobsticks” – as the strike-breakers were called – “were felled to the ground, [as] hats and broken helmets were sent flying in all directions”1.

High atop the scrubbing tower of the New Wortley gasworks, a reporter from The Leeds Mercury had been watching the situation unfold. He had been transfixed by the sight of the red coats of the Carabineers, their white horses pushing through the gloom and by the gleam and sparkle of their burnished helmets, as they were caught by the last rays of the sun. Indeed, so intent was his gaze that he did not notice the outbreak of the fight at all, only jolting his binoculars away when the sound of shouting and the breaking of glass, from the street below, reached his ears. He watched in disbelief as the column was enveloped, staggered and broke; with a jumble of strike-breakers and police abandoning their positions and running in headlong, heedless flight, like so many startled hares, towards the gates of the works.

When the strike was over, the Leeds Times published a special “Battle on the Bridge”, edition, published 19 July 1890.

19

Will Thorne – young, bold and brave.

This portrait, commemorating the founding of the union, is based on the first known photograph of him.

20

Inside the compound, Superintendent Dalton of the local constabulary had had what he felt, until then, to have been an easy day. The crowds of protestors had been concentrated around the town hall and, save for a handful of sentries, he had stood most of his men down. When the trouble broke out, they were to be found chatting or rested, scattered in little knots of two or three across the works yard. Dalton checked his pocket watch, noting that it was a little after a quarter past eight, barked a command and formed his men into two ranks, one on each side of the road, in order to allow the fleeing men to come in.

The reporter later wrote that “when the gas works gates were opened and the advance guard had gone past the entrance and so made room for the men in the procession to pour into the yard with a wild rush, we flattered ourselves that the object had been obtained and attained in a very satisfactory manner. We were immediately undeceived; before the rush was over we saw that some rough brutal stuff had been done en route. Not a few of the men, on reaching the yard were holding their hands to their heads and with blood trickling down their cheeks. A York Constable was brought in seriously wounded in the head, a cavalry man also had to be assisted into the yard. He provided the most pitiable spectacle of all. He had lost his helmet and sword, he was covered with mud, his breast was covered with blood, and his head and face badly cut were bandaged

the Battle on the BridGe chaPter 1

with a pocket handkerchief ”2.

Every approach to the works was now cut off by thousands of people. Fighting still raged underneath the railway bridge, with women well to the fore in the struggle with the police. It was probably at this point that Thomas Pitt, a 53 year old blacksmith from Leeds, and a twelve year old boy, fell under a flurry of police batons and the crowd plucked another soldier from out of his saddle. Dismounted troopers clubbed with their rifles, cursed their lack of bayonets and appealed to their officers to be allowed to open fire. Fingers fumbled for ammunition in bandoliers and pouches, and rifle bolts sprang back in readiness. Only the presence of mind and common sense of their commanders prevented Leeds from becoming another name to be ranked with Llanelli, Croke Park, Amritsar and Derry among the British army’s darkest “battle honours”.

As the stragglers made for the gate, with the strikers in hot pursuit, the Carabineers wheeled about and formed a protective screen to secure the entrance to the works and bar the way of the protestors. However, as the gates swung open hundreds of people “shouting and hooting” rushed past them and swarmed into the works yard. In the first charge, many of the strike-breakers simply bolted for the back wall and disappeared over it, running off into the night. Others sheltered behind the reformed police lines as Superintendent Dalton brought his truncheon down, left

and right, in an attempt to break through the surging crowd. Just a few yards away, a slight figure was seen urging on the strikers, leading from the front – and easily identifiable by dint of his red neckerchief and sturdy navvy’s boots – sending soldiers and police reeling under the force of his bare fists. For a moment it looked as if the battle was won, as Dalton was swept aside and the police lines buckled under force of numbers. The melee broke up into individual contests of strength, fought out across the yard, as the strikers’ leader cleared a path towards the centre of the square.

Yet discipline and training counted in the end, as reinforcements in scarlet and blue funnelled into the yard and launched a counter-charge that threw the strikers back upon the gates. Raw courage and bruised knuckles could not compete with the crack of a baton or the downward slice of a sabre, and the leader of the strike “went down like a bullock” to a truncheon blow on the back of his neck3.

When he came to, and his eyes cleared of dust and from the impact of the weapon, Will Thorne saw that many of his comrades had also fallen in the charge and that tussles were still going on as the strikers were trying to disengage from the fight, and get their wounded clear of the yard. Scrambling up, he brushed past the fugitives and fought his own retreat back out onto the highway.

He was just in time to see the Carabineers spur their mounts forward into the crowd outside the gates, beating them with the flat

“ Raw courage and bruised knuckles

could not compete with the crack of a baton or the

downward slice of a sabre

”

21

The crowd threw railway sleepers and lumps of coal onto the ranks of the soldiers massed below.

of their swords back along the length of the street, clearing both the embankment and railway bridge of protestors, before swinging back the way they came, and mounting a further charge that brought them back, smiling and ebullient, with blown horses and more than one bloodied sabre, to the gates of the gasworks. It was in that charge that Henry Chambers, a 22 year old butcher, had his fingers lacerated by a sabre cut; Fanny Shaw, a 38 year old tailoress, suffered scalp wounds from a sword blow; and Thomas Fitzpatrick, a 17 year old bricklayer, was also ridden down and cut about the head4.

Yet, the soldiers did not return to a scene of victory. Instead, devastation and demoralisation greeted them at Wortley’s gates. The pavements were strewn with hats, caps and policemen’s helmets, and almost every window of the manager’s house – which was being used as both a temporary field station for the casualties and also as the headquarters building for the police – had

22

been stoved-in5. Superintendent McWilliams, who had been the first to be struck down underneath the bridge, limped past supported by two other officers, while one elderly strike-breaker “came in staggering as if intoxicated. He too had been roughly handled. A younger man, with a wound on the head, fell into the arms of the constables and fainted. Others were in a like predicament. Those who were the worst injured, were taken into the Manager’s house. Most of the workmen [i.e. strikebreakers] seemed very excited and exhausted; as seated on retorts or standing in groups, they gave vent to their indignation.

They declared that adequate measure had not been taken for their protection. Why, they asked in excited tones, had not the railway bridge – from which the stones, lumps of coal and other missiles were thrown with such terrible effect – been cleared before the procession had passed? …

They declared that such a thing could not have happened in Manchester from whence they had come and it was evident that they had formed no high opinion of the Leeds police”. Two of the wounded strike-breakers complained bitterly that they had been trampled under the soldiers’ horses after they had fallen and a local councillor rounded upon the cavalrymen, shouting at their officers that their charge had taken them far away from the scene of the fight and that they had abandoned both the police and strike-breakers to their fate.

Amid the insults and recriminations

the Battle on the BridGe chaPter 1

flying inside the yard, it soon became clear that while the cavalry had been drawn away, a large number of the strikers and protestors had rallied, under Thorne’s command, and began to steal back towards the gasworks.

Once there, pickets had shinned-up the walls or climbed on top of the street lights and called down to the strike-breakers, trying to reason with them and call them over to their side. “Presently”, according to the report published in The Leeds Mercury, “a number moved towards the wall which they were invited to scale. Others followed, the strikers cheered and immediately it was seen that the battle, so far as the gas committee was concerned, was lost. The men were swarming over the wall by the dozen, and in a few minutes, half the number had been welcomed by the jubilant strikers. Those who remained were still more disheartened by the retreat of their fellows and it is not surprising that they too, soon afterwards, took to the walls and quitted the works”6. By the next morning there were only 76 strike-breakers left in the works of the 300 who had arrived, to be feted by the council the previous day.

Many of those who had fled had been welcomed by Thorne at the union’s offices in the city, and had spent the night there, if not in great comfort then at least in safety.

He saw that the union paid their fares home and saw them off, on Wednesday 2 July, on the 1pm train to Manchester, with a firm handshake and an understanding that they should not return. Many promised “never

to take work again when a strike was [being fought]”. As the crowded engine steamed away from the platform, Will Thorne began to feel that in “the worst struggle in my career”, the union had not only held but won7.

The leeds Gas strike The success of the London gasworkers in establishing the union, in March 1889, combined with the news of their fight for the Eight Hour Day, and the local victories won by the newly organised Leeds building labourers, in June 1889, inspired the foundation of a branch of the Gasworkers and General Labourers Union, in the city, in October 1889. It was greatly assisted, in its early months, by local activists of the Socialist League – a small Marxist Party, which had seceded from the SDF and claimed William Morris as one of its leading lights – and by a dedicated core of organisers, including Will Cockayne, Tom Maguire, Walt Wood and Tom Paylor.

They were an eclectic, as well as a highly talented, group. All were young and ambitious, in 1889, though fate would deal them very different hands. Tom Paylor and Will Cockayne, the local secretaries, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Thorne during the most difficult days of the strike and were to enjoy long careers within the union’s ranks. Walt Wood, a free-thinker, interested in the esoteric – of the same individualistic stamp as Jim Connell – has been somewhat unfairly dismissed as “a

23

The archetype of the industrial city: terraced houses, the new gasworks, chapel, railway and docks reveal the forces that forged new unionism.

24

happy pagan”, but proved his bravery on countless occasions during the dispute and distinguished himself as one of the most able leaders of the Gasworkers’ Union in Yorkshire. By way of contrast, Tom Maguire – an atheist from an Irish Roman Catholic background – who had worked as a photographer’s apprentice but who found himself more often out of work than in, was more properly thought of as a politician

and writer than a union man. The Yorkshire Factory Times recorded the breakneck speed of his work: “Three lectures each Sunday, and two, and occasionally three, in the course of the week, in addition to articles, poems, and letters to the press” seems to have been his staple fare8. The sense of unfulfilled promise, coupled to an early death of pneumonia in 1895 – when aged only 29 – would ensure his virtual

the Battle on the BridGe chaPter 1

canonisation by the New Left in the 1960s9.

Together and within the space of a few short weeks, they were able to forge a membership of some 3,000 in Leeds and the West Riding that, besides the gasworkers, also included maltsters, draymen, dyers and general labourers.

They immediately petitioned the bosses for redress of their grievances and, timing their demands to coincide with the cold winter months and the peak demand for heating and light, won sweeping and spectacular gains. With singular bad grace, the Leeds Gas Committee agreed to “a reduction of hours from twelve to eight for stokers and wheelers, and the making of a new class (firemen) with eight hours per day and 5 [shillings] wages”. All workers were to receive payments of time-and-a-half for Sunday work. The wheelers received an advance to 4 shillings per day, and the yardmen and purifiers, who had still to work 54 hours per week, received 2 shillings per week in advance in wages.

At this point, the union appears to have misunderstood the motivations of the Gas Committee and the Liberal Councillors who held power in the municipality. With remarkable foresight, though perhaps little bargaining ability, Leeds Council had bought the city’s Gaslight Company, in 1870. It paid over the odds for a company which had done little to modernise its works and, as a result, at the time of the dispute, the Leeds gasworks were extremely labour intensive and somewhat out-dated. Nonetheless, gas

lighting the streets was seen as a symbol of social progress and political reform, and municipal – as opposed to private – control of amenities was welcomed by both the early Socialists and the Liberal Councillors, who comprised the Gas sub-committee, as a means of extending civic prestige and power 10.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that, in the 1880s, the working class vote still went to the Liberal Party and – outside of the small, if influential Marxist groupings of the SDF and Socialist League – had no distinct political voice of its own. Indeed, Alderman Peter Gilston, who would become one of the most implacable foes of the union in Leeds, had previously positioned himself as the “friend of the working man”. The Gasworkers, therefore, put their trust in the outward show of paternalism made by the Liberal Councillors. They trusted in their promises of good faith and believed that a municipal Gas Committee would be far more reasonable and even handed than a private concern. However, in this they were to be proved very wrong. The free market was an integral part of Liberal philosophy and trade unions were an anathema. Thus, the Gas Committee felt shamed by its defeat and determined to strike back, removing all its concessions given in the winter of 1889. Alderman Gilston told his colleagues on the Gas Committee, in no uncertain terms, that their time would come again “in the summer” when these tactical withdrawals could be reversed, an element of revenge could be gained,

25

and a lasting settlement concluded.

For its part, the union could not understand why its requests for further talks were ignored and why it was being kept firmly at arm’s length by the councillors.

The feeling of betrayal was, therefore, exacerbated when – as soon as the demand for gas began to slacken, as spring came and the weather turned warmer – the Gas Committee launched a counter-attack.

The first sign of trouble came in April 1890, when the Committee refused to pay double-time – as previously agreed – for Good Friday and withdrew its recognition of the union and all its representatives. All further negotiation was ruled out by the employers, as the Liberal council men began to relish their authority and the prospect of settling scores with working men who had suddenly got “beyond themselves”.

New four month contracts were issued with the explicit intent to destroy the union.

It was, therefore, hardly surprising that the language of Maguire and Cockayne, at public meetings and rallies, became increasingly bitter towards Liberalism and more conscious of the need to establish, and build, a mass working class party.

Yet, worse was to come for the union.

At the beginning of June 1890, new rules were posted-up at the gasworks which would come into effect on 1 July, and effectively restore the 12 hour day, just as soon as the men were forced to sign their new four month contracts, covering the winter months. The union advised its

26

members not to sign-up to the new rules and withdrew the yardmen from the works as, unlike their comrades, they had no notice to serve on their contracts11. This had the immediate effect of putting a break on the stockpiles of gas supply and forced managers at the New Wortley and Meadow Hall Lane works to use every means at their disposal in order to bring in coal for the stokers before the 1 July cut-off. If the logistics of supply were made more difficult and demanding for the employers, then the union also sought to win over public opinion to its cause. Mass meetings were held, numbering anything from 12-14,000 people, at which the Gasworkers were careful to appear both reasonable and restrained. Their only aim was to defend existing agreements, including the key right to union recognition, and for their members to continue work as usual. Will Cockayne told the multitude that the coming dispute “had nothing to complain about with the existing conditions, which, on their part, they were not attempting to alter … They were not asking for more money, as had been asserted by their enemies. They were simply trying to retain what they got last October”12.

Despite this, the Gas Committee proved intractable, determining to break any strike that might be raised against them by placing advertisements in the national press for replacement labour to fill the places of anyone who did not sign the new terms of employment. A company, Messrs. Swan

the Battle on the BridGe chaPter 1

and Leach, were given a contract to recruit scab labour and Thorne later expressed his personal conviction that the gas managers were conspiring, on a national scale, to strangle the union while it was still in its infancy13. At their meeting on 16 June, the Leeds Gas Committee had heard from Alderman Gilston that a notice had been “put up in the retort houses requesting that such workmen as desired to continue in the employment of the Committee, under the new rules, would give in their names to the respective managers before Friday, the 13th inst.” but that to date there had “been no response” from any of the workforce.

Therefore, the Gas Committee resolved “that fourteen days’ notice to dispense with their services be given forthwith to all stokers and firemen employed by the Committee”14. The 1 July deadline came and went, and the workforce – having refused, to the last man, to sign the now hated contracts – were all sacked. They walked off their last shift, straight into the dispute.

The Gas Committee had, thus, made no secret of their plans to dispense with their existing workforce and to bring in strikebreakers, or “strangers” as they were called, from outside the city. They recruited, mainly, from Manchester and London, and the first real flash-point for the conflict came when a crowd attempted to tear down the large marquees being built to house the strike-breakers on their arrival. With the large numbers of women and children

swelling by the hour at the gates of the New Wortley and Meadow Hall Lane works, and the strike-breakers’ billets effectively wrecked, the Gas Committee and, by extension, the municipal council had a major logistical problem on their hands. Within a matter of hours they had to be ready to receive upwards of 700 men who were travelling to Leeds by specially chartered trains from Manchester and London. They had to be fed, housed and safely convoyed into work. The nearest stations to the works were already, effectively, in the hands of the strikers and their supporters and it was judged too risky to attempt to clear the platforms, or to detrain the strike-breakers there. Worse still for the councillors, they had unexpectedly lost

Faces of labour: working people rarely featured in photographs or prints. These men were from two gangs of stokers who worked at the Stepney gasworks, c.1900.

27

the support not just of the working classes, and small tradesmen, but also of a substantial number of well-to-do rate payers who had been horrified by their mishandling of a typhoid epidemic the previous summer – which had struck down rich and poor alike – and who were now appalled at the remarkably highhanded tactics being used against working people who seemed altogether modest in their demands15.

However, amid the gothic grandeur and municipal opulence of the Town Hall, things looked very different. Attitudes hardened and it was decided that if the city could not be held down by its own police force, then external powers would need to be called upon. Reinforcements for the police were drafted in from as far away as Bradford, York, Huddersfield and across the rural West Riding; while troops were placed on standby, infantry were loaded onto rail trucks and cavalry was requested as a first, as opposed to a last, resort to deal with the protestors. The city was, thus, virtually brought under military control.

The fortunes of War With less fanfare, the rail network served another purpose; as Will Thorne arrived from London by train and took over the leadership of the strike committee, running the show from the union’s cramped offices in Kirkgate. It was a bold endeavour, as the Gasworkers – after their initial successes – had been forced onto the defensive and been defeated in a number of recent

28

disputes. Strike pay had severely depleted the union’s funds but the General Secretary had been supported by his Executive in his decision to stand and fight at Leeds, which voted him its last £300 to that end. On his arrival, he found that the Gas Committee had overturned its previous practice of laying-off the last men to be hired in the busy season, and had decided instead to give all the men working in the retorts the sack.

This left him in no doubt that the employer was determined never to seek a compromise solution and desired only to break the union. The sound of furious hammering from inside the gasworks alerted him to the fact that “accommodation for the blacklegs” was being built and he determined that it would soon have to come down16.

Yet, while Thorne was poring over detailed street maps and listening to reports from Cockayne, Paylor and Wood; the Gas Committee experienced two unforeseen turns of fate – one working to its advantage, one against – upon which the dispute would ultimately hinge.

In the first case, the weather and the transport system had their part to play.

A constant drizzle had driven many of the women and children away from the gates of the Meadow Hall Lane works, in search of shelter. This, combined with the late running of the London train – which arrived in the early hours of the morning – ensured that the protestors were wrongfooted and the strike-breakers rushed to the Meadow Hall Lane works without

the Battle on the BridGe chaPter 1

incident. If the London contingent had fared well, then things were more difficult for the men from Manchester.

Tom Paylor heard a rumour “that a number of blacklegs was to arrive at the New Wortley Station at three o’clock in the morning” and busied himself chalking the information on the pavements of all the major thoroughfares, in every district, of the city17. By this means, the news passed like wildfire from mouth to mouth and ensured that by the time the train approached its destination, a crowd of several hundred intent “that no blackleg would go into the works without a fight” was ranged against a phalanx of police. With no way through without risking a messy running battle along the platforms, Chief Constable Webb took the decision to re-route the train to Leeds Central. Thorne and the pickets were left standing as the train flashed past and could do little to catch-up with the strikebreakers and their new police escort as they quickly formed their ranks and doubled-off into the night.

However, with the road to New Wortley still blocked by Thorne’s union men, and the earlier destruction of the tents that were to have housed the strike-breakers ensuring that there was nowhere for them to camp once they reached their destination, the Chief Constable was ordered to bring them to the Town Hall for the night. It was the only municipal building large enough to house them at short notice, and possessed strong walls, an uncanny resemblance to a

castle and hot and cold running water.

In short, everything needed for tired and footsore men expecting a protracted siege.

Webb was subsequently congratulated for “getting a Manchester contingent of new hands convoyed to the Town Hall almost unnoticed” by the strikers; but the problem still remained of how to get the men moved safely to their posts at the gasworks. As the correspondent of The Leeds Mercury noted at the time: “It was a difficult nut to crack and many expressed the opinion that a grave mistake had been made in not perfecting the task at an early hour in the morning. There can be no doubt that with every hour that passed the situation became more complicated”.Yet, to be fair to Chief Constable Webb, it was not the initial decision to march to the Town Hall that was to cost the authorities dear but the subsequent delays in marshalling the military. The strike-breakers found themselves hastily billeted in the crypt of the Town Hall but it was boredom as opposed to discomfort that, initially, proved to be their greatest source of complaint.

Despite the best efforts of the council, theirs was a difficult and tedious wait through the early hours and much of the following day while preparations were made to assemble the military escort deemed necessary to protect them on the march.

Copious amounts of beer and sandwiches were provided for them, not just for breakfast but also on into the afternoon, in order to keep them full and compliant.

Frederick T. Webb, Chief Constable of the Leeds police force. The frogging on his coat gave him an altogether military appearance. During the strike he proved a far abler tactician than either the councillors or the army officers.

29

The police go in hard with their truncheons, while a carabineer swings his sabre and a street light shatters.

30

Yet, the result was to make some of them drunk and many more gripped with the melancholy and bellicosity that comes as the first flush of alcohol wears off. An organist was brought in and struck up rousing tunes for their entertainment, while Councillor John Hunt sang for them a medley of popular and patriotic songs, from a makeshift stage, climaxing with a ragged – and according to his detractors boozy – rendition of “Rule Britannia” that did little to hearten his audience and drew sniggers from the Town Hall staff. Outside, a picket shinned his way up the guttering and pressed his face in at the windows, making faces, and provoking a barrage of complaints and cat-calls from the strike-breakers who felt that they were now in danger of having their identities recorded and of being recognised by the growing crowd in the square below.

The intention had been to muster an overwhelming show of force; dismounted cavalrymen with Martini Henry rifles; Carabineers who looked like they had just stepped out of a uniform book on the Napoleonic Wars, with their spiked helmets and bright coats; and hundreds of police constables, both mounted and on foot.

Dispositions for the escort were made with hurried excitement in the council chamber and it was planned to begin the march before the afternoon shift clocked-off from factories across Leeds and swelled the protestors numbers. The strike-breakers were to be brought from the Town Hall

and marshalled in rows four abreast. The police and infantrymen would be formed in double rows on either side, on the outside of them, while the carabineers and mounted police would protect the flanks.

The remainder of the cavalry and police formed a van and rear guard, with the hansom cabs containing the Mayor and the other Magistrates – who were determined to be in on the action – were placed at the head of the last detachment of cavalry.

It was in the transfer of these plans from written orders to actual dispositions on the ground, that the authorities suffered the second unforeseen occurrence of the day.

For reasons never fully explained, the arrival of the mounted escort of Carabineers was delayed by several hours. In the meantime, the crowd swelled, the factories emptied, and the strike-breakers drank ever deeper and grew restless. Councillor Hunt left off his soprano and became somnolent.

Victory is ours!

More than three hours later than planned, at twenty minutes to eight in the evening, the Carabineers arrived on the square and the crowd gave way before them. At the same time, a strong body of police emerged from the central police station, divided themselves into two wings and completed the work of clearing the street of people.

According to The Leeds Mercury, the appearance of the horsemen in “Victoria Square like that of the police called forth a stream of booing … and vigorous hooting

the Battle on the BridGe chaPter 1

… from the immense crowd there assembled. There was a good deal of horseplay but good humour was maintained by the gathering,” which was now estimated to number upwards of 10,000 souls.

This apparent “good humour” was attributed, with more than an element of truth, to the fact that the strikers themselves, and their families, were not present in the square but were arrayed instead along the approach roads to the gasworks. Thousands followed the convoy but there was no disturbance until the gas works had nearly been reached. It was then that the leading horsemen saw a large number of protestors hurrying over the railway bridge and heard cries of “they’re coming, they’re coming!”, as the crowd took possession of a Midland railways train, loaded with coal, and proceeded to arm themselves18.

It was then that Will Thorne chose to launch his ambush from the embankment.

Yet, at precisely the same time, a secondary battle was raging around the gates of the Meadow Hall Lane works. The strikers had attempted to force their entry but were beaten back by a concerted police charge, which briefly carried all before it. However, just as soon as the constables had returned to their positions inside the works; the crowd surged back up to the walls. Attempts were made to scale the perimeter and, with more success, appeals were made for the strike-breakers to change sides. As at New Wortley, morale inside the gasworks suddenly collapsed with dozens of strike-

breakers stampeding over the back walls, disappearing altogether down a maze of alleyways, or throwing themselves upon the mercy of the protestors.

The dawn brought with it a rough reckoning. Three policemen, two Carabineers and five blacklegs had been badly injured; and dozens more suffered bruises and scratches. Casualties among the pickets and their supporters had been higher, mainly on account of the cavalry charge and the use of sabres, but theirs had, nevertheless, been the victory. Only a handful of strike-breakers remained to work a half-hearted shift and most of these were complaining bitterly that they had been enticed into coming to Leeds under false pretences and wanted no more to do with the Gas Company. A number demanded that the council should immediately pay them their fare home and let them be gone.

Few, if any, were accustomed to the work and many were found to be incapable of performing their tasks over the course of long and physically taxing shifts. As a result, though the Riot Act was read in the city for a second day and a squadron of the 10th Hussars joined the Carabineers in patrolling the streets, the gas supply faltered and failed; bringing businesses to a standstill and plunging middle class homes into darkness and cold, as soon as evening drew on19.

Thousands of other workers, whose labour depended upon gas light and power, went to bed that night in the knowledge that, come the morning, they would be laid-off

31

a Boy Without a childhood

1857 -1946

The ma n who created our u nion had no adva nta ges of birt h, edu cat ion, or pat ron age.

32

h

is self-reliance and singlemindedness were initially his greatest strengths, and enabled him to survive the physical blows, personal tragedies and political set-backs that would have finished a lesser man. He gives us few clues in his autobiography as to who nurtured his talents as a child, or what – aside from experience – set him on the road to Socialism.

Will Thorne was born in Hockley, a working class suburb of Birmingham, on the morning of 8 October 1857. Both of his parents worked, seasonally, in the brickfields.

During the winter months, his father, Thomas, was also hired-in as a stoker at the Saltley Gasworks in the city. His son remembered him as a good worker “but very fond of drink” and “somewhat of a terror” on account of his constant, alcohol fuelled, brawling. He was killed, in 1864, as the result of a senseless fight with a horse dealer, and his family forced back upon Poor Law Relief.

By that time, Will – as the eldest of four children, by Emma his father’s second wife – had already been at work for the better part of a year. Shortly after his sixth birthday, he was put to work “turning a wheel for a rope and twine spinner” and also helped

Though Thorne’s birthplace was knocked down long ago and the site has been redeveloped several times, he was honoured by a blue plaque that is now in the keeping of the union.

out at his uncle’s barber shop “lathering the customers faces” amid “filthy and unsanitary conditions”.

Sacked from the rope works after a wage reduction provoked an abortive strike, he took jobs carrying bricks, watching the fires in the kilns and, by the age of nine, had progressed to being a plumber’s mate. In 1871, with the Franco-Prussian War filling British order books,Will Thorne went to work in a munitions factory. “The first work that I was given”, he later recalled, “was pulling metal strips from the great rollers to the annealing furnaces, and filling a deep crucible with scrap metal that was melted and made into ingots. The roar and rattle, the steam and the heat of that inferno remains vivid in my memory, and [even more than half a century later] many times I have dreamt of the place, waking up in

a cold sweat of fear. I have other reminders of this brutalising work, for my hands today still shows the scars I received when I was engaged on another job in this works: this was taking the annealed bars to the pickling tubs, where a strong vitriol solution was used for cleaning and pickling the metal.

The biting acid would splash my hands and eat the flesh to the very bone … My clothes suffered badly from this solution: boots, trousers and shirts were attacked and eaten and … looked as though they had been the target for a dozen shot guns, so riddled with holes were they”.

In between blows from the foreman, a thought about the nature of capitalism struck the adolescent Thorne, “it was gruesome to think that the metal we were handling was for making cartridge cases for both French and Germans to kill each other with”.

“I was only fifteen”, he wrote, “working at the metal-rolling mills, when I swore that I would do everything in my power to help prevent other children going through the 33

same hardships, misery, and suffering that I had to go through”. However, exactly how he was going to change the system and the reasons behind inequality still eluded him.

“The economic and industrial system of capitalism, in which production was for the purpose of profits, and not for use, was a mystery of which we [in the factory] knew nothing”. There were few accessible Socialist books to learn from and no ready made organisation around which unskilled workers could rally.

Outside work, Will Thorne taught himself to swim in Birmingham’s canals, took up hiking and long-distance running, joined a boxing club, and fought bare knuckle bouts for money.Yet, his honesty and openness cost him dear in an environment that valued neither trait.

“I seemed very unlucky about my wages”, he wrote, “or people seemed to take advantage of me”.

He had been involved in no less than five strikes before his eighteenth birthday, worked as a manual labourer, with little or no education, and been the victim of gangs of strike-breakers brought in by the bosses. His mother’s remarriage, in 1875, ironically to another violent drunk, caused him to leave home and 34

sent him “out on the tramp” for work.

After the heat of the furnaces, Thorne enjoyed a spell working with a navvy gang building the Burton and Derby Railway.

He liked the outdoors, went on poaching expeditions with his new friends and found them to be quite unlike the browbeaten and stunted fellows he had known in the factory and forge, but “big-hearted, carefree men” of “an independent type, with the spark of rebellion growing bright within them”.

It is conceivable that in conversations around the campfires, in the navvies’ tented cities, he first came to hear of the struggle for Irish independence, which he would later espouse.

He took seasonal work, like his father had before him, in the Saltley Gasworks, wheeling the carriages full of coke drawn from the retort, in the winter, and working in the tile and brick factories of Middlesex over the summer. In February 1879, he married his childhood sweetheart, Harriet Hallam, whose father worked alongside him at the gasworks. Neither of the couple could read or write and so simply scrawled a mark in the register of St. Anne’s Church, Aston.

If he found himself to be truly at the margins of society, then Thorne determined

to improve his condition and that of his fellows by forming a union at Saltley. He called a meeting of the stokers but found it hard to move men to action who were so choked with fear of their overseers, the sack, and even of their own shadows. Establishing himself as their spokesman, he was able to argue successfully for an end to Sunday working but the unions he attempted to found were stillborn and the strikes he organised were broken. He was targeted by the management as an agitator and eventually sacked.

This led him to set out to walk to London, in November 1881, with two friends. He took winter work at the gasworks on the Old Kent Road but was dismissed as soon as the weather improved again. Briefly returning to the Saltley works, he led a further unsuccessful strike, which effectively ended any chance of him obtaining further employment in Birmingham, and threw him and his growing family back on the road to London.

With few other options available to him, Will took a job as a stoker at the Beckton Gasworks, despite the meagre wages and the fact that the retort house had been cheaply and awkwardly built, ensuring that he had to work in harder and hotter conditions

a Boy Without a childhood

than he had hitherto experienced in the industry. However, his whole life – and indeed the history of the British Labour Movement – was to turn upon his arrival at the gates of the Beckton works, in 1882.

Thorne settled his family in lodgings in Canning Town and, having signed the temperance pledge as part of a firm rejection of his father’s lifestyle, he took an even bigger step in joining the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), in 1884, the first recognisably Marxist political party in Britain.

At that point, Thorne – as an unskilled industrial worker – was a distinctive and unusual recruit to the ranks. The party,

despite its promise and best intentions, had made few inroads into the working class and tended to be rather dismissive of the trade unions, then still dominated by the old craft-based organisations, as being hopelessly reformist, purely defensive, and dominated by the Liberals. This said, despite its relatively small membership – perhaps as few as 580 paying full dues in the 1880s and most of these based in London – the SDF provided a powerhouse of ideas and ideals.

For Thorne it provided the answers to the big questions he had always asked and brought him into contact with a major group of activists, writers and heavyweight political thinkers – Henry Mayers Hyndman, Harry Quelch, Edward Aveling, Tom Mann and, even, George Bernard Shaw – whom he would never otherwise have had chance to meet. It was a liberating experience, which threw open whole new horizons of thought and action.

More importantly, it was a two way process.

He befriended Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, who spent long hours teaching him to read and write; but at the same time she and her comrades learned about industrial struggles, the concerns of the workers, and ways and means to organise effectively, from Thorne’s own raw experiences. It was the perfect blending of theory and practice; and both Will Thorne and Eleanor Marx were bright enough to understand that fact and to act upon it in order to change the world.

As a consequence,Thorne’s stature within the Labour Movement began to grow.

He became Secretary of the Canning Town branch of the SDF and it was in this role that W.S. Sanders saw him at a meeting, “slight and fine drawn through the heavy labour of his arduous calling. He came to the platform straight from the retort house with the murk of that fiery place burnt into his features.

Round his eyes were dark rings of coalgrime, and his hands were… gnarled and knotted by the handling of the charging tools.

His voice … was not strong, and his words were not eloquent, but his obvious sincerity was more convincing than fine phrases”.

A young Marxist, he appeared as a fiery prophet, dragged from the underworld, armed and ready for the coming fight.

35

dropped. Much later, Alf Mattison remembered that “it was a sight to see the leaders of the union telling the members off to duty, arranging picketing work, and getting the men who had been deceived by someone for the corporation away from the police and off home”21.

The Gas Committee found itself a laughing stock in the town and increasingly blamed for the loss of trade occasioned by the blackout. Four successive nights in darkness and a bill that spiralled to £20,000 in losses, damages and policing bills brought them to their knees22.

J.R. Clynes later recalled of the fight: “Women flung themselves against the flattened sabres; children stood on the outskirts of the whirling battle and hurled stones into it at every gleam of a red jacket”.

36

as production in the factories, mills and workshops wound down and came to a grinding halt. They felt that they knew exactly who was to blame and it was not the union, but the Gas Committee, the soldiers, and the strangers who “had come to their town”.

In the meantime, Will Thorne received a visit from “an inspector of the police, who threatened to arrest me if I did not clear out. I defied him, however, and declared my right to fight for the men. From then on, wherever I went, I was shadowed and watched by several policemen, and I was amongst a large number summoned for rioting”20. In the event, amid protests that stretched from the chapel to street corner to the factory gates, all the charges were

all of a sudden, they wanted to talk Negotiations began on Wednesday, 2 July, at the Chamber of Commerce, while the Carabineers remained to garrison the New Wortley works and further clashes raged about them, in the surrounding streets, as police patrols came under renewed attacks from stone throwing crowds and fought running battles with the pickets and protestors. During the afternoon, a dozen pickets scrambled over the roof-tops in order to gain a vantage point over the works yard, but were rapidly cleared by the police using firehoses23. Large areas of the city had slipped from the authorities’ control and the presence of ever greater numbers of troops on the ground had seemed to have no success in bringing the protests to an end; in fact, the imposition of what was coming close to resembling martial law only served to make matters worse and further

the Battle on the BridGe chaPter 1

inflame the crowd.

The Gas Committee, led by Alderman Gilston as its chair, attempted to change tack and were quick to claim that there had been far more men employed in the gasworks, at the start of the dispute, than were really required for the work at that time of year.

Therefore, even if there was to be a settlement, not all of them could be taken back. However, neither Cockayne – who as the Leeds Secretary led the face-to-face negotiations – or Thorne were prepared to be sidetracked, or duped. Instead, the union delegation won praise from even the hostile local press reporters present for the “dispassionate” manner in which its members conducted themselves. They chose to appear moderate, while the Gas Committee remained bellicose and even, at times, stupidly facetious. After more than three hours of discussion, on Thursday 3 July, initially with the councillors and union representatives sitting in separate meeting rooms and communicating only through impartial intermediaries, the seven members of the Gas Committee finally gave way. It was a humiliating climb down. The gasworkers were to be given their old jobs back, the union would be recognised, the strike-breakers dismissed and the hated new contracts withdrawn. The union made some compromises; the men were to give their employers a month’s notice as opposed to two weeks, and there were guarantees of increased production, with the stokers undertaking to carbonise 60 cilo-watts

of coal per shift, as opposed to 55 cilo-watts, as had been the case before the strike.

However, these were largely face-saving measures for the Gas Committee. No one was in any doubt who had won.

Upon agreement, Will Cockayne expressed “his conviction that where a body of workmen like themselves stated their case fairly, and only asked what was just, not attempting to take any advantage, they would sooner or later obtain all they wanted ... they might congratulate themselves that

37

they had reached the end of this difficult business” and told the councillors that he would ask the men “to go back and work hard for themselves and their masters”24.

Now, the only stumbling block for the authorities was what to do with the strikebreakers themselves. Some had been promised three, six or twelve month contracts, which the Council could not now fulfil. The Gas Committee was, thus, forced to negotiate separately with the handful of remaining strike-breakers from the two bands based at the New Wortley and Meadow Hall Lane works, over their removal from the city and the amounts of compensation they were entitled to.

They were now welcome to none in Leeds.

Some of the men, who had recently been sacked after an unsuccessful gas strike in Manchester, probably rued the day they had left the union and now had no one left to fight, to speak, for them. They demanded, but did not receive, a full month’s wages and shouted that they had been cheated by their employers and thoroughly misled25.

On Thursday 3 July, a measure of agreement was reached, with the County Council agreeing to grant the “strangers” a nominal payment for the loss of their employment and to meet the cost of their expenses back home26. On this last point, they were probably shamed into action by the union’s generosity in buying train tickets for the departing strike-breakers. The few remaining strike-breakers were quietly taken to the station, by covered wagon, and troubled the

38

union and the city no more. Sixteen, who had left earlier, were noticed as their train jolted through the points at Pontefract, shivering with the cold of the night, with only a few coppers left in their pockets and muttering bitterly about the misfortunes that had overwhelmed them27.

Inside the union offices at Kirkgate, Will Thorne, Will Cockayne and Tom Paylor presided over any entirely different, and far more crowded, meeting. Thorne explained to his men the proposals brought to them by the Gas Committee and advised them to consider them thoroughly before coming to any decision “as they must have no grumbling and growling afterwards”.

The vote was unanimous for acceptance28.

As soon as the shifts came off work, the union men were to return to work. In the negotiations, Will Cockayne had feared that due to their injuries sustained in the fighting that had marred the last few days, some of the workers would not be fit enough to go straight back to the retorts and had undertaken, on behalf of the union, that: “their places would be filled by others until they were able to resume duty”. In the end, he need not have worried. The police withdrew from the gasworks, the cavalry returned to their barracks, and as both shifts arrived in the evening, all but one worker was present.

The union is secured The attempt to break the union, with all the forces available to the state and organs of

the Battle on the BridGe chaPter 1

a powerful local government, had proved an abject failure. Thorne had been in no doubt as to what had been at stake: “If, after the defeats at Manchester and South London, the Leeds men gave way, it would be the signal for the managers of gas works in all the neighbouring towns to make reprisals on all their men”, which would spell “the complete downfall of the Gasworkers’ Union”29. For the union, the dispute represented a real trial of strength from which it had emerged triumphant, despite the odds ranged against it. Unions had been formed before to protect gas and general workers but, after a brief period of expansion, they had always previously been tamed and broken.Viewed in this way, the formation of Will Thorne’s union, in March 1889, had not been so remarkable; that it had survived all the assaults made upon it and continued to grow, certainly was.

It was a fighting union, capable of defending its members in the bad times as well as the good, and a force that, after the street fighting at Leeds, was one to be reckoned with. Moreover, in the minds of many the strike had vindicated the union’s political strategy: the Liberals had betrayed people working and it was now time for those who created the wealth of the nation to create a party of their own and to secure their own political power.

On his arrival home, in West Ham, Will Thorne unlaced his big boots and unwrapped a parcel sent to him by Frederick Engels. The old war horse, who

had sighted the guns and braved the firing line during the European revolutions of 1848-49, had watched the unfolding of events in Leeds with great interest. On 30 July 1890, he wrote to Laura Lafargue – Karl Marx’s second daughter – that he had heard “the splendid news about the two fights in Leeds where young Will Thorne proved himself a leader in battle, of both courage and ability” adding that “this mode of lawful resistance is very much to be approved of, especially here in England – and it succeeded”. Thorne carefully examined his present, which turned out to be the first two published volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital, inscribed: “To Will Thorne, the victor of the Leeds battle, with fraternal greetings from Frederick Engels”. Thorne prized them “very highly, both as a remembrance of the dispute and in memory of the great collaborator with Karl Marx that gave it to me”30. He had a right to them, and to the kind words of the great revolutionary: he was young, able, a proven fighter and commander, and the man who had forged a mighty union.

The victory at Leeds ensured that the union would not be smashed. Its flame was not extinguished and continues to burn brightly to the present day.

chaPter 2

the union

40

Music, banners and collecting buckets

B

y removing “competition in every branch of production and distribution”, he told them – reworking the words of John Burns – “Socialism proposes to abolish the system of wage slavery, and establish instead governmental, municipal co-operation, securing to every honest worker the full value of his labour, partly in personal remuneration, and partly in social and public benefits, such as education and recreation, sustenance and care in old age”.

Sometimes the men listened, sometimes they did not; the engineer dismissed it all as “foolish rubbish” but Will Thorne did not give up.

“During my spare time”, he later recalled, “between drawing and charging the retorts … I used to talk to the men – in the lobby, in the mess room, or wherever opportunity permitted. I knew that without a trade union the workers could do little; that we would be compelled to submit to any kind of tyranny, or any conditions that the engineer chose to force upon us through the foreman. I was anxious to get a union formed, so that our grievances – and they were many – could be rectified”1. Covertly, over the following weeks, he sounded out all the men on his shift about the possibility of founding just such a union.

He raised a petition to ask for a week’s annual leave, and attempted to build both the momentum for further demands and raise the confidence of his fellow workers. “Labour leaders can testify that often their hardest work is not in fighting the employers”, he wrote, “but in driving the fear out of their own men. They will tell you … that their hardest kicks and greatest abuse come from those they are trying to help and serve … I feared that my pals might not stand behind me; there were no trade unions and no finances to back up the workers or to watch their interests”2.

Yet, this time when the moment came, the men followed him. Thorne called a public meeting on Sunday 31st March 1889, to coincide with the ending of the long shift at the gasworks, which had stretched back some eighteen hours into the previous afternoon.

Many of the men came straight from the retorts to Canning Town, where a tradesman’s old van had been commandeered as a makeshift platform for the speakers, and hung with hand painted posters and colourful Socialist banners which flapped in the breeze. Thorne thought it “a lovely sunny day” and marched with the contingent from his own shift from Barking, accompanied by a little brass band he had hired from his own pocket. A large and enthusiastic crowd, containing both the curious and the committed, had gathered as he mounted the platform alongside Harry Hobart, an SDF activist, and Ben Tillett, who had already seen success in organising unskilled workers in the London docks. His fellow gasworkers, Jack Walsh, George Angle and Dick Mansfield had also been deputed to speak

Founding the union at Beckton, 31 March 1889.

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The builders working on the construction of a new retort house at the Beckton Gasworks, 1890.

for the men and backed him to the hilt when he made the opening address to the assembly, telling them that: “All … can be altered if you will join together and form a powerful union, not only for gasworkers, but one that will embrace all kinds of general labourers …

Stand together this time; forget the past efforts we have made to form you into a union, when we failed only because you did not respond to our call. Some of you were afraid of your own shadows, but this morning I want you to swear and declare that you mean business and that nothing will deter you from your aim … The way you have been treated at your work for many years is scandalous, brutal and inhuman. I pledge my word that, if you will stand firm and don’t waver, within six months we will claim and win the eighthour day, a six-day week, and the abolition of the present slave-driving methods in vogue not only at the Beckton Gas Works, but all over the country”3.

Looking out over the nodding and bobbing heads, catching their expressions of approval and reading their body language; Thorne judged that the moment was right to ask them: “Now, will you do this?”

According to his memoirs, “There was one loud roar of ‘We will!’ That yell”, he thought, signified “the last birth pang of the union. I knew that the men meant business”4.

More than 800 pushed forward to join the union, on that first morning, and had

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foundinG the union chaPter 2

their names recorded in a ledger when they paid their one shilling subscription. As yet, no membership cards had been printed, the union lacked a name, and the buckets used to collect donations had to be quickly borrowed from neighbouring businesses.

These soon overflowed with coin and, with the meeting over, the new organising or “provisional committee” – as they styled themselves – retired to draft a set of rules.

George Angle had been elected secretary of the committee, and would later become the first branch secretary of the union; while William Byford, who had previous administrative experience in a union, as the Secretary of the Yorkshire Glass Bottle Workers’ Association, was chosen to act as treasurer. The other two key figures, at this stage, were Ben Tillett and Will Thorne. If anything, Tillett – though lacking Thorne’s knowledge of, and day-to-day contact with the workforce – was certainly the better known figure in the Labour Movement and probably considered himself the senior partner in forming the union. A former sailor, he was widely travelled and largely self-educated, with a reputation – despite having a stammer – for eloquence, sincerity and the ability to move vast crowds. He had founded the Tea Operatives’ and General Labourers’ Association, on the wharves where he had worked shifting chests of tea, and was committed to the task of spreading the combination of workers throughout the London docks5. He, too, was committed to bringing unskilled into the trade union fold

and to the creation of a general union – with the possibility of bringing the dockers into a single combination alongside the gasworkers – but his politics rendered him something of an odd man out in the union’s leadership. He was not, himself, a gas worker and was closely associated with the old alliance between labouring men and the Liberal Party, rather than the avowedly Marxist SDF, of which Thorne was a member and many of his closest friends at Beckton were active supporters.

In any case, there was much to be done and events began to take on a logic of their own, propelling the union’s leaders on, through a hectic schedule of meetings and street corner agitation, at breakneck speed.

As soon as their twelve or eighteen hour shifts were over, they plunged straight back into the task of building the union, with little thought of leisure, sleep, or family life.

If today the trade union movement feels dispirited, after thirty years of cumulative assaults and defeats, then it still possesses enormous financial reserves, banks of dedicated and highly professional staff, access to the press and media and the almost unrestricted power of the internet. In 1889, Will Thorne and his comrades had buckets full of coppers, little in the way of legal protection, or time to conduct their business, no fixed premises and a sorry record of broken unions behind them.

Unemployment and seasonal underemployment were common to them all.

If they were injured at work, or became

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“ Thorne’s particular insight was rooted in his own

experiences of work

”

“too old at 40” to sustain the strain of shift work at the retorts, then there was no NHS or social services to support them and there was no other relief besides the Poor Law Guardians and the work house to keep them from starvation. It was not easy to persuade men to find 2-and-a-half-pence out of their meagre weekly wage – which worked out at 17s 10d for 58 hour week for a forge worker – to meet their union subscription. And yet they did. They were able to build a union because what they did possess in abundance was the power of their convictions and a will to act in the principled pursuit of them, no matter the cost.

As Thorne put it, “news of the initial meeting spread like wildfire; in the public houses, factories and works in Canning Town, Barking, East and West Ham everyone was talking about the union … the men were solid, enthusiastic, and

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anxious to get all their mates enrolled”6.

After initially considering reviving the name of an earlier combination, and styling their union after the short-lived Amalgamated Association of Gasworkers of the United Kingdom, the provisional committee finally settled upon The National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers of Great Britain and Ireland. This was a significant signal of intent and may be thought to reflect Thorne’s influence and his vision for the union. The name settled an identity upon the fledgling organisation. Had the committee chosen the first name, they would have committed themselves to an “association” – harking back to the older craft-based combinations – rather than a foreword looking union; and also to a body that based itself within one industry.

As it was, Thorne was far more ambitious, arguing for a general union for unskilled workers and one which, through the nuances of its title, reflected his own awareness of the tensions within the British state and the on-going fight for freedom in Ireland. Though still a localised organisation, the union’s founders saw it as acting upon the national stage, adopted the campaigning call for a universal eight-hour day – which had first been advanced by North American Socialists and trade unionists – and adopted the motto: “One Man, One Ticket and Every Man with a Ticket”.

From the outset, it was a union with a highly distinctive programme. It was intended to be a fighting union, based upon

foundinG the union chaPter 2

industrial militancy – its initial range of demands looked to raise the wages bill across the industry by about a third – an explicitly Socialist platform, and upon an insistence, from the outset, upon a very low level of membership contributions. Thorne felt very strongly about the matter and “pleaded for 2d a week”, though “others [and presumably by this he meant Tillett and some of the Liberals] pleaded for more”. It was extremely fortunate that, in the hours immediately following the meeting at Canning Town, he won the argument and had his way. If not, then the union would have taken on a very different complexion, probably would not have survived past its first year, and probably would not have exerted the enormous appeal for previously un-unionised men that enabled its spectacular growth over a matter of a just a few weeks.

Will Thorne’s particular insight was rooted in his own experiences of work, as an unskilled or semi-skilled labourer, and in his thorough understanding of industrial politics within the gas industry. He realised that most of the existing unions serviced relatively well paid workers and took contributions of up to a shilling a week, sometimes even more, in order to provide their members with old age, sickness, and unemployment benefits. The gas stokers, an elite within the industry, could conceivably have afforded a similar union of their own and had, indeed, tried to establish just such a combination in the past. However, this

would have meant limiting union membership at the gasworks to just themselves, and would have meant the exclusion of their fellow workers who simply could not have afforded the higher rate of subscriptions. The stokers, themselves, were primarily recruited from among the lower paid yard labourers.

Now, had this large and important sector of the workforce been prevented from participating in the union’s affairs, they then would be forced – out of an understandable self-interest – to identify themselves in opposition to those above them and potentially seek to replace them by providing the employer with a ready-andwaiting source of blackleg labour in the event of any dispute. By keeping membership fees low, the yard labourers could be brought into the union and working class unity, as opposed to division, established as a funding principle.

Yet, one more problem remained. The men’s grievances had come to a head in the spring, when the weather was improving and the existing yard labourers were being laid off in large numbers, in expectation of the summer months and the seasonal reduction in demand. As Thorne knew from personal experience, they would then go in search of other labouring jobs in the neighbouring factories or brick works. For roughly half the year they would be lost to membership, had Thorne and his comrades not hit upon the solution: to expand the union’s remit to become

45

The SDF, Britain’s first Marxist political party, provided the early inspiration for the Gasworkers’ Union. Here John Burns is arrested at the “Bloody Sunday” demonstration in Trafalgar Square, 8 November 1887. Will Thorne was in the fight that day.

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a general labourers’ union which would support their members across the whole range of their seasonal engagement with work. Moreover, by determining to pay only one benefit – strike pay – and dispensing with all the other costly welfare provisions, the union both highlighted its acknowledgement that every gain from the employers would have to be bitterly fought for, and also brought the unskilled

foundinG the union chaPter 2

and the general labourer firmly within its ranks.

The revolutionary nature of these innovations, in attempting to organise among sectors of the workforce which had never previously been considered suitable for recruitment into trade unions, though perhaps not immediately apparent to us today, was certainly not lost on Thorne’s contemporaries or on the men of all grades at the Beckton works, who now staked all that they had on the future of the new union. For them even the most cursory glance at the industry and the previous attempts at organising trade unions within it, sounded warning bells and few who tossed their hard-earned coppers into Thorne’s collecting buckets at Canning Town could have been under any illusions about the dangers and hardships that lay ahead.

The forerunners of the union The growth of the gas industry mirrored the rapid expansion of Britain’s towns and cities under the impact of the Industrial Revolution. The credit for first applying gas commercially belongs to William Murdoch, who succeeded in lighting his office in Redruth, Cornwall, in 1792, and who had established permanent gas lighting at his Soho engineering works by 1803. Liverpool would possess two rival gaslight companies by 1818, while Manchester had begun to manufacture gas for use in the municipality only a year earlier. By 1829 there were about 200 public gas companies in existence

but the days of cut-throat competition were short-lived as the majority were quickly swallowed up by private monopolies or, more often, by municipal providers – as at Leeds – which controlled the supply to one designated town or region. Perceived as a public utility, and not yet challenged by the introduction of electricity for commercial and domestic purposes, there was little in the way of competition to trouble shareholders; labour costs were low and profits were extremely high. Accompanying technical innovations also extended the industry’s reach; with domestic gas stoves appearing on the market by 1824, though they only become truly popular by 1850s; and the invention of the power in the slot – pre-payment meter – in 1889, helping to bring gas light to the masses, who could not have previously afforded the quarterly bills7.

The new industry created, in its wake, a whole new range of jobs – from stokers, coal hewers and gas engineers, to appliance makers, pipe layers and white collar workers – who were needed in order for gas to be manufactured and supplied.

Yet, social justice did not accompany industrial progress. When the London Gas Light & Coke Company received its royal charter, in 1812, the Napoleonic Wars were still raging, any form of political dissent was clamped-down upon and trade unionism was illegal. The repeal of the hated Combination Acts, in 1825, unleashed a dam that had built up of political and industrial grievances over more than three

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decades. Wage claims were pressed by both artisans and the nascent working class, whose pay had been artificially depressed by the wartime legislation. When employers proved obdurate, they were faced by a wave of strikes which saw a number of London gasworkers arrested in the disturbances, alongside other labourers and tradesmen.

An attempt to form a gasworkers’ union was broken almost before it began, when, in March 1834, the employers struck first.

They recruited fresh hands from the countryside around London, areas which were suffering badly from want and underemployment, and sacked out-of-hand all 35 men who had had the temerity to join the union at the Imperial Gasworks. As police swamped the plant, it was reported that the men “seemed much astonished” and “quietly left the premises”8. A few days later, 80 men at the Horseferry Road works in Westminster joined the union, demanded a 7d per week pay rise, and came out in their support. As before, instant dismissal awaited them and the company drafted in large numbers of police to handle the situation, turning the union members out into the street.

More insidious measures were employed by the gas companies, in 1859, when they were again faced with calls for higher wages. The so-called “Document”, a new set of terms and conditions was placed before the workforce, which declared: “I am not now and will not while in the service of the company be a member of, or in any way

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belong to, any trade union or association having for its object the reduction of the hours of labour or the restriction or limitation of work”9. Refusal was met by dismissal and by blacklisting across the industry. Matters were not helped by the lack of interest shown by the mainstream trade union movement towards the plight of the semi- and unskilled worker. Unions still tended to exist to serve relatively small combinations of skilled workers who were keen to obtain the highest possible wages for their members, often to the exclusion of others. This attitude was neatly summed up by the “Defence, not Defiance” motto of the London trade societies, which largely failed to offer support to the gasworkers in their hour of need.

However, the continued expansion of the industry offered fresh opportunities for the establishment of trade unionism. In 1861, there were some 14,000 gasworkers in Great Britain; yet by 1871 there were over 20,000; and by 1891, there were over 45,000. It was, therefore, clear that there was far greater scope for founding a union in 1889 than there had been twenty years earlier. As gasworks grew to serve the expansion of the urban areas, the bleak and largely virgin marsh lands around Galleons Reach, on the Thames, were cleared, in 1870, by the Gas Light and Coke Company for the building of what would become the Beckton Gasworks. Many of the work force for the new plant were, however, drawn from the established inner-

foundinG the union chaPter 2

London gasworks and these men carried the tradition of trade unionism with them into Beckton.

In all fairness, the London gas companies were not the harshest of employers. Theirs was a “benevolent despotism” which offered welfare schemes for core workers, which included sick pay, a gratuity on retirement and even a week’s paid annual holiday. At one of the works the men received a joint of meat at Christmas, while at others this seasonal brand of paternalism, tied to a much older conception of the ritual year, would see them receive oatmeal or even a jug of port from their employers. The problem was that, save for the provision of Christmas charity, the welfare schemes did not provide for the seasonal workers, who comprised the majority of the workforce, and who were sacked every spring. Moreover, the contracts of employment for gasworkers were issued on a monthly, or even in some cases a weekly basis, so that strike action might appear to be a clear “breach of contract” and could conceivably result in a term of imprisonment.

This barrier to unionism was thrown into stark focus by the attempts of the men to combine at Beckton in the late summer of 1872.

The men decided to form a union and elected Thomas Dilley as their “delegate”; with roughly the same brief as that of a modern shop steward. However, he too was swiftly sacked by the company, together with his opposite number, the leading union organiser at the Fulham gasworks. Stokers

across London called a strike in their support, marching through the city to Trafalgar Square singing the “Marseillaise” as they went, and holding mass meetings on Clerkenwell Green and at the Bell and Bull pub in Finsbury. It was at the latter venue that Dilley and the other “delegates” were read a roll call of: “Beckton; 500 out, no blacklegs; Stepney, 150 out, 15 blacklegs; Hackney, 300 out, 2 blacklegs; Rotherhithe, 90 out, no blacklegs …”. The strike appeared firm and more than 2,400 stokers had downed tools and walked out in solidarity with their victimised fellow workers.

The union’s early account book, signed off by Ben Gardner and Edward Aveling, 7 August 1896. Postage costs and legal fees then, as now, were major concerns.

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Feeding the retorts at the Beckton Gasworks: note the makeshift nature of the men’s protective clothing.

50

However, the companies fought back with a single-minded savagery. Recalling both the “Document” and a little used clause buried within the Masters and Servants Acts, they had 500 summonses for breach of contract issued by Woolwich Police Court against the strikers. These were initially used

selectively, to target perceived “ring-leaders” and to remove the union’s most able organisers at the outset of the dispute. At the same time, the Metropolitan Police were ordered to scour London’s streets in order to send every available labourer they could find to Beckton. The watermen were paid 6d a

foundinG the union chaPter 2

head for every man they could bring across the Thames, while the companies’ agents, with the help of generous bounties, visited factories across the metropolis and Home Counties in order to recruit strike breakers “to defeat this monstrous attempt to inflict a plague of darkness” upon the capital10.

Outside the capital, other localised strikes were broken, one-by-one, by the importation of blacklegs drawn from a vast supply of surplus labour that had been created by the policy of casual hiring, and firing, by the managements. Thus, the strike in Bristol was broken by men brought in from the South West and Liverpool; and the Halifax strike was broken by labourers drawn from as far away as London, Burnley and York11. The union, to its credit, held out until December 1872, but with its appeals for arbitration rejected, its organisation smashed, and many of its activists in jail, it finally capitulated in a vain attempt to seek reinstatement for its sacked members.

500 stokers were refused reinstatement in Beckton, alone, and the works was re-staffed with non-union labour.

Yet, behind the headline figures, it is worth examining the human cost of a strike that the Gas Light and Coke Company, alone, had spent £15,900 in breaking.

Eighteen stokers from the Beckton Works and four employees of the Commercial Gas Company in Stepney were tried under Masters and Servants Acts, with all but one being convicted and sentenced to six weeks hard labour at Maidstone Gaol. Five more

Beckton men were tried for criminal conspiracy and sentenced for a year’s imprisonment at Maidstone gaol. Though they were eventually released early, as a result of union agitation and public sympathy, all five subsequently “found the greatest difficulty in obtaining even a days work”. Robert Wilson, John Bunn and Edward Jones were supported by their defence committee, and public donations, until they eventually secured other employment. However, the other two, George Ray and Tom Dilley were so thoroughly blacklisted by the employers that they were unable to secure any meaningful employment and finally begged the committee to grant them sufficient sums so that they could emigrate to the United States of America. In the words of the historian of the Beckton works, they were thus “lost to the British Labour Movement”12.

However, theirs was not the harshest fate. John Pearch, who had been Chairman of the Stokers’ Union, served three months imprisonment in Coldbath Fields Prison in Clerkenwell. Hard labour broke his health and he spent much of the time in the prison infirmary “with disease of the throat and chest”. He came home a brutalised wreck, “his voice gone, till his best effort [produced] only a very inarticulate whisper”. Three Rotherhithe strikers – who between them had fifteen children to support – came home bitterly complaining, ever afterwards, “of the cold; being used to

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the great heat of the gas retorts and, on leaving work, to plenty of flannels and mufflers. The cold draughts of the prison having ruined them for life. They were on the treadwheel in the daytime, [and] at night [were put to work] picking oakum.”

One 53 year old employee of the Pimlico Gasworks, who had not actually belonged to the union but had followed his friends out on strike, found himself jobless for weeks on end and although he had six children to support, he was refused outdoor relief by the Parish officials. “With absolute starvation staring him the face” as the police witness claimed at the subsequent inquest, he went home and slit his throat13.

The draconian sentences handed down to peaceful strikers galvanised public opinion against the further use of the Masters and Servants Acts in resolving industrial disputes, questions were raised in Parliament, and calls for reform led to the passage of the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act, in 1875, which made further politically motivated prosecutions of this type, initiated at the employers behest, impossible in the future. This said, the legislation had already done its damage, the Gas Stokers’ Union was no more and its membership scattered and thoroughly demoralised. By the time Will Thorne arrived at the Beckton Gasworks, the men who had made the strike solid more than a decade before were all long gone. The lessons would have to be learned afresh, but the grievances were still plentiful and real enough.

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The iron Man With no union to press wage claims, labour costs across the industry remained so cheap that there was little incentive for the gas companies to innovate or mechanise production. As a result, the manufacture of gas remained an extremely labour intensive process. Coal was the basic raw material and was brought into the works yard on carts, before being wheeled by barrows or small trucks to the retort house. Manual labour was then also required in the making and stoking of fires to heat the retorts, to carbonise the coal, and three man teams worked to feed the furnaces, spread the coal and draw the coke either with shovels or by large scoops, that needed considerable dexterity to wield14. Charles Dickens, in an article on The Genii of the Lamps, reminded his largely comfortable and upwardly mobile mid-Victorian audience of the harsh realities that underpinned the apparently effortless provision of domestic heat and lighting, at the turning of a tap and the striking of a match. “The manufacture of gas”, he wrote, “is not on the whole, a sightly operation … and decidedly savours of pandemonium. There are huge caverns of red-hot coke, and a row of roaring fiery ovens which sooty men are constantly feeding with coal thrust in out of long iron scoops. The lids of these ovens, or retorts, are generally heated to a white heat, and the men who lift them off and put them on, have their hands protected with thick gauntlet gloves. After the coal has been

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distilled … the red-hot coke is raked out, either into coke-vaults, or iron barrows.

The spirit of coal rises up black pipes, leading from each oven to a tube, running the whole length of the retort house”15.

It was an incredibly arduous process in the glow and heat of the retort house, and required a workforce of strong, steady and healthy men, in order to maintain the steady temperature required to produce the gas.

Will Thorne remembered that: “The retort houses are exceedingly hot, for both behind and in front of the stoker are the burning eyes of the furnaces; amidst the roaring of the heat hungry retorts a breeze as of hell fans me”16. Smoke fogged the eyes and clogged the lungs. The men could not

venture up close to the doors of the furnaces and even five paces from the retorts temperatures soared to 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Blow-backs from the furnaces could result in scaldings, sometimes even in death, while the intensity of the fires could often burn deep into the retina, resulting in a blindness that could take years to take effect.

More than a generation after the establishment of the union, Doug Jones, a Plymouth gas worker, would experience working conditions that were very little changed from those of the 1880s, when he started work as a stoker. “Due to the excessive heat”, he recalled in his old age, “normal footwear did not last long in a retort house. The company issued men with clogs … Worn on the iron deck of the retort house you would slip all over the place. They were removed and replaced with a rubber tap and a heel cut off on an old steam wagon tyre. The wood base was an inch thick, the rubber taps two inches thick, so overall you had an extra three inches of height when they were on. Socks wore out in no time at all, so the asbestos gauntlets of an old pair of stokers’ gloves were cut to shape and inserted inside. Then an old Persian sack cut up, washed and wrapped round the feet. Then an old pair of trousers … an old shirt or blouse belonging to a mother, sister or friend and a felt hat, like the wide-brimmed ones of the old days.

Turn the brim up all the way round to catch the hot embers or dust from going

The backbone of the union: general labourers from a cast set of doors, formerly at Endsleigh Gardens and now at GMB’s Head Office, Euston.

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in your hair; and you have a complete picture of the stoker in the old days”17. If health and safety was conspicuously lacking at the Plymouth gasworks of the 1930s-40s, then how much more primitive were conditions at Beckton, in Thorne’s day, when there were no asbestos gloves or clogs to be issued by the company, and the men often appeared in rags, wearing blankets as cowls to protect their heads and shoulders from the sparks or stripped to the waist, in an attempt to preserve the good clothes they had or to make the scorching heat a little more bearable. In a single shift the men would sweat-out pounds of their body weight and emerge from the works thoroughly dehydrated. This resulted in many cases, naturally enough, in a stampede to the public house and to large quantities of beer becoming an integral part, if not the necessity, of the stoker’s life. Alcoholism was rife, making Will Thorne’s signing of the temperance pledge, in September 1885, all the more remarkable a rejection of the lifestyle of his father and step-father, and a clear signal of his formidable resolve to improve his own lot.

If life was not hard enough, then two new developments in the industry combined to destabilise the rhythms of the men’s working day, to increase the misery and weight of toil they were compelled to suffer and to hasten their radicalisation. Both “innovations” stemmed from increased competition between the more than 500 statutory gas companies – as electricity

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The Beckton Gasworks was a huge, sprawling industrial site, almost a city in its own right.

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Stepney gasworkers with the large scooped shovels and lumps of coke that were integral to their trade.

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began to make an impact upon the market for power – and the price of coal rose, over the course of the 1880s. The response of the management was to attempt to increase production by finding ways of getting more work out of the gasworkers for the same time and money. In the first case, they did this through raising the tempo of the men’s labour, by “speeding up” production. Much larger retorts were built and far more work was needed to fill them. Scoops were lengthened and widened, with the result that instead of carrying 1 cwt. of coal, as before, they now carried 1.25 cwt. The men were used to working in two twelve hour shifts, every day of the week. However, it was acknowledged to be physically impossible to work all the way through each twelve hour stretch. Drawing and charging the retorts were done in intervals, with teams coming off and on, in order to share the work and to prevent utter exhaustion. Thus, the men effectively worked one hour on and one hour off during their shifts. “Speeding up” meant that the precarious balance between work and rest was threatened, the men were pushed to the limits of their endurance, and the pace of the job fell out of kilter.

Secondly, an element of mechanisation was introduced through the hated “Iron Man”, a stoking machine which operated by compressing air and which, in theory at least, should have dramatically raised productivity. However, there were political as well as purely economic reasons behind

foundinG the union chaPter 2

its adoption across the industry as John Somerville, the engineer in the Dublin gasworks make plain: “For several years past, machinery for drawing and charging retorts in gas works has been receiving the attention of gas engineers and managers of gas works as a substitute for manual labour, which has become somewhat unreliable and unmanageable, the men from time to time forcing up the price of their labour by means of strikes, combinations, [and] working shorter hours”18. The Iron Man had been initially brought to Beckton in the wake of the strikes of 1872, but the totality of the union’s defeat and the continuation of cheap labour costs had removed the prime rationale for its introduction; and it was quickly mothballed on the site and forgotten. Competition, rather than combination, led to its re-introduction in 1889.

The new machine succeeded in greatly increasing the rate of carbonisation, to the extent that the number of stokers on each shift could be roughly halved. There was anger at men being suddenly thrown out of work, and resentment among those that remained at the fact that the Iron Man heated the retort houses to an even greater extent than was thought humanly possible, and frequently broke down. The job of repair fell, in the first case, to the stokers and the time lost had to be made up by them, on shifts that were running at 50% their former strength and which were expected to fulfil double the productivity target.

Worse still, the machine – when it worked – was incessant. The men could no longer work in their own way, to their own rhythms and within the limits of their physical endurance. They could no longer lean on their shovels, when fatigue threatened, take breaks for food and much needed liquids, or duck out of the retorts for more than a moment to escape the fumes and gulp down breaths of fresh air.

Unlike most of the Beckton men, Will Thorne had already experienced the Iron Man, when he was working at the Saltley Works in Birmingham, and knew what to expect. He had seen: “A new furnace … installed. It was the invention of a German, and was like a great mouth organ. The hot air used to pass through the many passages and generate a terrific heat, that would carbonise about 4 cwt. of coal in about four hours. This was a saving of at least two hours on the old retorts. The new furnace made working conditions even more unbearable than the old one. It was almost impossible to stand for long on the floor in front of it. The working day consisted of twelve hours, and every day in the week was worked … The terrible twenty-four hour shifts at the time of the change-over could not be altered; they were the result of Sunday work”19. He argued that the manning arrangements overloaded the men and the other stokers agreed with him.

As we have already seen the existing shift pattern was 12 hours long, making for an average working week of 72 hours. This

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was far longer than the average for other labourers at that time, which averaged somewhere between 54 and 60 hours. This served to nullify the slightly higher wage rates of the stokers, compared to other unskilled workers, and became iniquitous when meal and rest breaks were severely curtailed by the impact of the Iron Man. However, the final straw at the Beckton Gasworks was the introduction of an 18 hour shift for some of the men which would also cover Sunday morning, in order to service the new machinery. It was this which galvanised the workforce and brought them, marching in their hundreds, that Sunday morning in March 1889, to converge on the waste ground at Canning Town and to call for a union that would represent them all.

Issued by the union branch at the Beckton Gasworks in 1955, the workforce chose to record their own history in this pamphlet.

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The Waking Giant The management at Beckton were initially sceptical about the long term survival of the union, sniffily informing its leadership that: “Your union will be like many others that have sprung up like a mushroom over night, and then the members have dropped away like leaves in autumn”20. But this time

things were very different, there was a new sense of optimism in the air and, instead of withering away, the membership expanded in spontaneous and in almost an exponential fashion.Yet, even swift success does not come by mere chance, but by planning and sustained hard work. “Sunday after Sunday”, all through March, Thorne wrote “we would start out from 144 Barking Road, our headquarters, to encourage the men at other gas works. As many as twenty brake loads [i.e. horse drawn wagons] of workers would go out on these Sunday morning crusades. The idea caught on; enthusiasm was at fever pitch, and within two weeks we had over 3,000 members”21. Separate unions were formed in Birmingham and Bristol, though the Bristol workers soon merged with the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers. Branches sprang up in the North-East, Lancashire, Nottingham, Norwich, Derby, Bath, Swansea, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Seemingly only the Potteries, Monmouthshire and East Glamorgan remained immune to the appeal of the union and failed to organise.

By the summer of 1889, there were over 60 branches of the union, 44 of which were in London, and a figure approaching 20,000 members. The Dublin gasworkers inquired about the possibility of founding branches in Ireland and the reach of the union was soon seen to be spreading outside the gas industry, already fulfilling its remit as a general union, through recruitment among the riverside and factory workers in

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London, based around Jack Jones’s stronghold in Silvertown.

At this point, the union’s infrastructure and regional development was greatly assisted by the branch structures of both the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League. These were relatively small bands of pioneer Marxists and Socialists, whose commitment, local knowledge and organisational ability certainly offset their lack of numbers and a tendency towards internecine, sectarian strife. Without their help, political guidance and expertise in campaigning, it is hard to envisage the London based union uniting so quickly and effectively with similar pockets of radicalised workers in Lancashire,Yorkshire and Bristol.

Founded shortly before the death of Karl Marx and transformed into Britain’s first recognisably Marxist political party in 1884, the SDF had initially been sceptical about the role of the trade unions in creating revolutionary change. Henry Meyers Hyndman, the party’s frequently outspoken and intemperate leader, saw the unions not as the tribunes of the working class but as an aristocracy of labour, which worked hand-in-glove with the Liberal party to buttress capitalism and to maintain the status quo. In the early 1880s this was still arguably the case, as trade union members still represented only a minority of the higher skilled, and better paid workers. Certainly, when he joined the party, in 1884, Will Thorne as a semi-skilled labourer with Marxist views was something of an anomaly,

and a curiosity, within both the wider British Labour Movement and inside the SDF, itself.

This said, Thorne’s engagement with Marxism and, more particularly the Marxist variant espoused by Hyndman and the SDF, transformed his life and widened his horizons. Indeed, the eight points of the party’s programme: 1 The public provision of low cost housing 2 Free compulsory education with free school meals 3 An Eight Hour Day 4 Progressive income tax 5 Nationalisation of the railways 6 Nationalisation of the banks 7 The extinction of the national debt 8 Land nationalisation ... proved to be heady stuff for a young man in search of practical, coherent and swift remedies for the ills he saw everywhere visited about him. It is not surprising that the call for the Eight Hour Day would become the cornerstone of the Gasworkers’ early campaigns, or that Thorne would come to see the union as working for more than an increase in wages, but as a vehicle by which the lives of every man, woman and child in Great Britain and Ireland might be bettered in every sphere of their existence.

Furthermore, the notion that the exploitation of labour was not incidental to the capitalist system, but was actually built into its very fabric and was essential to the

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survival of the system, as it stemmed from the private ownership of production and distribution, came as a revelation to him.

Though Marx, himself, was still known mainly as an economist, rather than as a revolutionary philosopher; that few of his works – outside the first volume of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto – were widely available in English; and that his ideas were often vulgarised, not least in the hands of Hyndman; the world view offered by his writings gave Thorne a vocabulary, a rationale for his actions, and a sense of purpose that never really left him. Society was not seen as static but as subject to eternal change, creative conflict, and to a theory of historical development whereby the working class would come to increasingly assert both its political and economic dominance. Marxism, for Thorne, supplied an analysis of the dynamics of capitalist society and also a method which could be applied to fight and overturn those inequalities that the system bred. Perhaps most importantly of all, it provided a theory of surplus value which explained the roots of exploitation as being in the struggle between capitalist and worker over the use to which the worker’s labour power could be directed. Thus, if the factory – or for that matter, gas – worker, laboured for the first four hours of his shift to cover the cost of his subsistence wage; and the second four hours to create a product or service of equal value; then the final four hours of the twelve hour day generated a surplus value,

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independent of either human need or commercial expediency. This surplus of wealth could be used, in a Socialist society, to enrich and to help the lives of the whole people – through, in the case of the SDF, realising any of its eight key demands – or, in a capitalist society, this wealth might be channelled away from those who had actually created it, into the private pockets of the rich and the greedy, who owned or controlled the levers of production: the factory and share owners, bankers, landlords and venture capitalists.

Thorne, therefore, perceived the need to ally the union’s claims to recognition, pay, and conditions, to a wider demand for a universal Eight Hour Day and a means of developing the political wing of the union, alongside the industrial. The campaign owed its inspiration to the writings of Karl Marx, who had advocated its introduction in the first volume of Das Kapital, published in England in 1867. However, it did not begin to gain momentum in Britain until the SDF popularised its aims and included it, as we have already seen, within its party programme in 1886. Though it was rejected by the craft unions at the TUC Congress in 1887, by a large majority, its further adoption by the Gasworkers and many of the other “New” unions, serving unskilled men and women, after 1889, proved a watershed in the development of the Labour Movement and permitted Will Thorne and his comrades to clearly define what they stood for, and against. The

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reduction of the working day to a uniform eight hours was not only judged to be economically possible – empirical evidence drawn from the operation of the factory acts seemed to suggest that the cost of treating the workforce well was not at all prohibitive and that production might even rise as a result – but also desirable as a means of redistributing wealth to those who were actually responsible, through their labour, for its generation. The lessening of hours would also create additional employment, ending at a stroke the pattern of casualisation and underemployment that had bedevilled the lives of working men in the gas industry. Jobs would become stable, and leisure and family life a real possibility. A welcome by-product of these moves would be an increase in wages across the board, as a reduction in hours worked would equate to a diminution in the supply of day labour, without, necessarily, any cut in the amount of work to be done. If demand for labour was to remain the same, then wages must inevitably rise. As a consequence, for the first time, the men and not the masters could have a say in bargaining for their wage value and importance within the labour market. Moral and economic good sense went together22. Thus, the adoption of the call for the Eight Hour Day by the Gasworkers’ Union served as a single, attainable, and potentially revolutionary demand, which acted as an umbrella for a series of inter-related campaigns for higher

A leaflet advertising the recruitment of union members in Leeds, in September 1889. Thorne was still relatively unknown and the printers got his name wrong!

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“tussy” the union’s first Wo

1856 -1898

The brillia nt spe ake r, org a nise r a nd fe min ist the orist beh ind the recruitm ent of wom en to the u nion.

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Man’s orGaniser

t

hough largely air-brushed out of the earlier histories of GMB, Eleanor Marx was one of the seminal figures in the union’s foundation and early development. She provided Will Thorne with a strong administrative base on which to build and with a clear Marxist strategy and theoretical rationale to support his instinctive hatred of the Capitalist system.

She taught him not only to read and write, but also to what end he fought.

Born in Dean Street, in 1855, in the chaotically impoverished surroundings of Marx family’s lodgings, Eleanor was described

by Wilhelm Liebknecht as “a merry little thing, as round as a bell and like cream and roses”. She soon earned the pet-name “Tussy” – or “Tusschen” – which was probably rhymed with “pussy cat” by her parents and siblings, and stayed with her throughout her life.

A Prussian police agent, sent to spy on Karl Marx, left the following report of family life in Dean Street: “As father and husband, Marx, in spite of his wild and restless character, is the gentlest and mildest of men.

Marx lives in one of the worst, therefore one of the cheapest, quarters of London.

He occupies two rooms … In the whole apartment there is not one clean and solid

piece of furniture. A seller of second-hand goods would be ashamed to give away such a remarkable collection of odds and ends.

When you enter Marx’s room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water so much that for a moment you seem to be groping about in a cavern, but gradually, as you grow accustomed to the fog, you can make out certain objects which distinguish themselves from the surrounding haze …

Here is a chair with only three legs, on another the children are playing at cooking – this chair happens to have four legs. This one is the one which is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away; and if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers”.

As Marx’s youngest child, Eleanor was a favourite with the family; possessing vitality, spirit, considerable intelligence and charm. As a ten year old, playing the popular parlour game of the period – “Confession” – she replied to the question, “what is your idea of happiness?”, with the single word “Champagne”.

Fascinated in roughly equal parts by theatre, the arts, and revolutionary politics, she trained as an actress and, in her early twenties, toured the country performing and giving lectures on Shakespeare. She translated Ibsen

Water Crane drew this cartoon, after Eleanor’s death in 1898, to celebrate her many achievements. Land reform, the abolition of child labour and internationalism are prominent.

The illustration, which appeared in the May Day supplement to Justice, captures something of the romance of her life and the vivacity of her nature.

All this made the tragedy of her end far more difficult to bear. Her funeral cortège was laden down with floral tributes from Socialist parties from around the world, but the Gasworkers’ wreath was given pride of place.

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Twenty years on there were still many survivors from the Paris Commune, exiled in London.

Will Thorne was in the audience for this lecture, when he heard Eleanor Marx, William Morris and Prince Kropotkin speak.

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and a history of the Commune – by her then fiancé, Lissagaray – into English, and taught at Mrs. Bircham’s school in Kensington. In 1877, she was instrumental in unmasking a group of spiritualists and fraudulent mediums, who were preying upon the vulnerable poor.

She accompanied her father during his spells of convalescence in the Isle of Wight and Algiers, and after his death, in 1883, acted – alongside Frederick Engels, whom she adored – as the custodian and literary executor of his estate. Due to her efforts many of Marx’s unpublished manuscripts and letters were sorted and saved. Indeed, she would later assist Samuel Moore and Engels in producing the first English language edition of Das Kapital.

A significant political figure in her own right, she consistently fought for both economic and sexual equality, and was the joint author of an influential study of The Woman Question. But it was as a revolutionary Socialist, and an organiser of the SDF, that she first met Will Thorne.

Theirs was to be a lifelong friendship based upon shared ideals and practical common goals. But though Eleanor would become Thorne’s most significant political mentor, arming the early union with a profoundly Marxist analysis of society and

the function of labour, she was also a highly effective activist and an able administrator.

At the first conference of the Gasworkers’ Union, in May 1890, Eleanor Marx was elected, alongside Will Thorne, as one of the two Conference Secretaries and, though the General Secretary gave the address, it was largely drafted under her hand. She was also responsible for writing the union’s first rule book, and was able to imbibe it with strong progressive sentiments putting into words what Thorne and his members thought and felt. creating the union Unanimously elected to the union’s Executive, Eleanor attended every meeting without fail and took on a punishing speaking schedule, talking to branches and public meetings up-and-down the land. She had formed the first women’s branch of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers, in Silvertown – Jack Jones’ later stomping ground – in October 1889, acting thereafter as its secretary.

While a particularly low sleight of hand, on behalf of the Right wing of the old craft unions, kept her from taking her seat as a delegate, at the 1890 TUC Congress in Liverpool, she was still able to attend as a member of the press.These were undoubtedly

“tussy” the union’s first WoMan’s orGaniser

the happiest and most fulfilling years of her life – she enjoyed the full confidence and respect of the rank-and-file of the union – and saw her revolutionary ideals and calls for social justice put into action.

She helped organise strikes at Northampton and Silvertown, in 1891, as the employers attempted to claw back the workers’ earlier gains, and successfully established a branch of women workers at Chatham, in the June of that year, recruiting twenty women at the inaugural meeting and twelve more in the following week. She was at the forefront of the campaign for the Eight Hour Day and spoke forcefully at the first, enormous, May Day march to Hyde Park, in 1890. It was, perhaps, not surprising that Engels could joke, in December 1891, that:“Tussy enjoys the not wholly unjustified reputation of being in charge of the Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers”.

Yet, her private life proved her undoing.

By nature, passionate and loving she had settled her affections upon Edward Aveling – a pioneer Socialist and influential writer – who was, otherwise, an unworthy object for her love. A bigamist, he traded upon her fame as the daughter of Karl Marx, and stole money from the Labour Movement. It was, indeed, fortunate that while he acted as an

The young Eleanor: Will Thorne wanted to name his daughter, in her honour and always cherished her memory.

auditor for the Gasworkers’ Union, he was denied any access to the funds by a wary Executive.

In June 1895, shortly before Frederick Engels died, Eleanor resigned from the Executive of the union, for largely personal reasons. As a considerable beneficiary of Engels’ will, she had gained a measure of economic freedom and was able to move out to the Kent countryside.Will Thorne often took his family to see her at her new home at Green Street Green. However, despite Thorne’s continuing friendship, she found herself increasingly politically and personally isolated.

Feeling herself betrayed by Aveling, who had embarked upon an affair and was mired in fresh allegations of corruption, Eleanor committed suicide on 31 March 1898, in circumstances that are still far from clear.

Will Thorne thought that broken by Aveling’s deceits, “she went home, stripped herself of her

day clothes, and, dressed in white, laid herself out on a bed and took prussic acid”.

It was a terrible end for one of the Labour Movement’s most able and attractive personalities.

Her death devastated the Labour Movement and left a yawning theoretical gap at the heart of the union that could not easily be filled.Thorne broke down, publicly weeping and scarcely able to finish his speech, at her funeral at the grim Necropolis building at Waterloo Station. He chose to keep “a rocking chair and a copper kettle” that had belonged to her, but more than that, he always cherished her memory and never let any one of his colleagues forget the debt the union owed to her.

“But for this tragedy”, he wrote in later life, when the union had moved away from its early Marxist roots and it might have been politically expedient to down-play her role, “I believe that Eleanor would have … been a greater woman’s leader than the greatest of contemporary women”. She was, he thought, simply the brightest and best woman he had ever known.

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wages, better working conditions, and the attainment of dignity for the working people of Great Britain and Ireland.

In retrospect, the sudden capitulation of many of the gas companies in the face of the union’s demand for the Eight Hour Day, over the summer of 1889, appeared miraculous but in fact it was based upon a hard-headed calculation on behalf of the Gasworkers’ leaders. They understood that while their members had few resources, in terms of education, finances and powerful patrons; what they did hold was the power of their labour. That realisation, coupled with the rapid development over the spring and summer of an organisation that was willing to harness its previously latent force, changed everything. The stikers and firemen could disrupt or stop construction whenever they wanted, as the whole process of carbonisation depended upon their teams. Even the slightest reduction in their efforts would see the lighting power of gas drop below the required levels and result in the dimming of lights across the urban areas, or even in a pall of total darkness. As the President of the North British Society of Gas Managers put it: “The gas-stoker is a skilled labourer – it may be a very elementary kind of skill, but it is such that it cannot be acquired at any moment, as some imagine [the men needed to be strong, and accustomed to the nature of the work, a process which even for the adept could take two to three weeks of training]…

Dissatisfied stokers have unfortunately ample

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means of making the works suffer … [by] wasting coals or continuing to do their work in an insubordinate manner”23.

Moreover, it was an industry which, in its headlong drive to maximise profits, worked without a margin. The men worked at fullstretch, all the time, and when they did not the whole process of production threatened to stall and grind to a shuddering halt.

The insight of the new Gasworkers’ Union was to create the means to fully exploit the employers’ fundamental weakness, and they soon found the Achilles Heel.

While the old craft unions were able to rely upon the skills base of their membership as the crucial bargaining weapon in their armoury, the new unions were – even in times of prosperity – subject to the pressures of an overstocked labour market. The Gasworkers were extremely fortunate in the timing of the foundation, as 1889 was a boom year for British industry, with high levels of employment.

The potential for recruiting strikebreakers, to which the union was always vulnerable, was therefore considerably lessened.

However, it was the willingness to utilise and direct the technique of mass picketing – rarely used or even considered by the skilled workers – that presented the new union with its most formidable weapon.

Its success would be tested to the limits, and validated – as we have already seen – in the Leeds Gas Strike of 1890. But for the moment, the union needed militancy and boldness, expressed through confrontation

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The classic image of the dockworkers strike of 1889. Here Stevedores and casual dock labourers flood the East End. They carry both union banners and the red ensigns of the merchant navy in their procession.

with employers and direct action, in order to conquer the multitude of obstacles placed before it. Luckily, the youthful Will Thorne possessed these qualities in abundance.

Victories, counter-attacks and consolidation In the meantime, the administration of the union was taking shape in a form that would serve, rather than hinder, its ambitious political objectives. A meeting of union delegates was called, in May 1889, and both Will Thorne and Ben Tillett were nominated for the post of General Secretary.

Tillett ran on a ticket that stressed his proven administrative ability, while Thorne

fretted that his lack of education might make him unsuitable for high office and campaigned on the strength of his personal knowledge of the men and the industry.

In the event, he need not have worried, as he gained 2,296 votes to Tillett’s meagre 69. Tillett’s reasons for standing have never been adequately explained and it is not clear whether he believed he had a realistic chance of gaining victory. Thorne, who knew most of his membership by name, was certainly the grass-roots candidate and enjoyed the backing of the local SDF organisation and its press. Though he somewhat glided over the incident in his memoirs, he certainly felt that Tillett’s

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challenge was an unwelcome intrusion into his own organisation and an act of bad faith.

Bad blood persisted between them for some time, with Thorne backing a rival union on the docks to his own, a few months later; deriding him as a Liberal; and joining in the sentiment generally expressed by the SDF that the dockers would have to “show a little of the pluck displayed by the Gas Stokers” if they were to form a successful union of their own24. Certainly, it is an interesting “what might have been”, if Tillett – who proved himself something of a political and religious chameleon – and not the more forceful Thorne had taken the ballot and become the union’s first General Secretary.

In the event, Thorne took up his post on 1 July 1889 and initially combined his duties as General Secretary with those as the Secretary for London District. At the same time, Mark Hutchins, another worker from Beckton, was confirmed as the union’s first President; and William Byford’s appointment as Treasurer relieved Thorne of many of the most immediate and onerous tasks of administration, for which he was not as yet wholly suited, and freed him to concentrate upon what he was best at and most needed for: the recruitment and organisation of new members. To this end, he toured the country and “was glad to accept any hospitality that was offered, and I have slept in cellars, Will Thorne’s sash of office as General Secretary of the Gasworkers’ Union.

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garrets and various strange places”25. As the summer progressed the spread of the union was extremely rapid, leading in due course to the creation of ten separate districts and offices, with success leading to further success. Although still based around the nucleus of London gasworkers, the union was soon joined by general workers – both men and women – from many diverse trades. H.A. Clegg, in his study of the union, charted the rise of the Leeds branch, which serves as an example for many others.

Within six weeks of its foundation, the corporation had granted the Eight Hour Day, and after the success of the gas strike of 1890, branches sprang up in Halifax, Huddersfield, Dewsbury and Wakefield.

From there, other workers sought to organise themselves upon the same model and branches servicing the “sanitary engineers” of Leeds and Halifax; and the unskilled dyeing workers in the woollen industry of the West Riding. The Jewish clothing makers in Leeds also flocked to join the union, setting up their own specialised branches for slipper makers, tailors and machinists26. Thus, from the outset the union reflected the richness of wider society, and provided a home for many different trades, traditions and faith groups.Yet, everything – then as now – depended upon the union’s ability to protect and fight for the rights of its membership.

One after another, when faced with the prospects of petitions, strikes and mass

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pickets, the major gas companies fell like rows of dominoes and conceded the Eight Hour Day to their workforces.

Unsurprisingly, the Beckton works was the first to crumble, the South Metropolitan Gas Company followed suit in June 1889 and by early August all of the rest of the London companies had given way, together with the municipal authorities in Birmingham, Bradford and Glasgow.

Worried by growing competition from electricity and finding that monopolies tended to be unpopular at the polls, the big civic authorities were concerned not to alienate those male workers, newly enfranchised by the Representation of the People Act of 1884, and so chose to recognise – rather than fight – their unions.

Theory, for once, appeared to be keeping pace with practice, as the introduction of the Eight Hour day led to the employment of thousands of additional men, engaged in supplying the same quantities of gas. Sydney Webb, the Fabian authority on trade unionism, overheard a conversation about the Beckton stokers who, having won the concession, “took out of pawn the black cloth coats in which they had been married, but which they had not, with the Twelve Hour Day, had much opportunity to wear”27. Significantly, the gas companies seemed more than able to weather the rising labour costs, with many still returning end of year accounts that registered significant profits. Indeed the Gas Light and Coke Company, which operated the

1889, “theInstruggle was fresh, exciting and all encompassing

”

Beckton works, even registered an increase in dividends for its shareholders up from 11% to 13% over the summer months of 1889, at precisely the time when the rise in wages took place28.

Inspired, in part, by the success of the Gasworkers’ Union, the London dockers attempted to form a union upon a similar model and went out on strike. Several thousand members of the Gasworkers’ Union, organised primarily around the riverside wharves and factories of Jack Jones’s fiefdom in Silvertown, were also caught up in the dispute and were locked out of work by their employers. Large numbers of casual dock workers also took seasonal jobs in the gas industry and Will Thorne had tended to look upon them with an air of paternalism. Indeed, it was Thorne who ignited the dispute by addressing a factory gates meeting at the South Dock, with his friend, Tom McCarthy, an Irish stevedore. The docks

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May Day demonstration in Hyde Park, 1891. Eleanor Marx is reading her notes, while Aveling addresses the crowds on behalf of the union.

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provided a grey area of recruitment between the gasworkers and the dockers unions and, in later years, Thorne may have had cause to rue that he did not try to encompass the dock workers as one wing of his own union. There were certainly opportunities but it is probably fair to conclude that the work of forming and providing the leadership for the gasworkers would have consumed the time and efforts of a small army of trade union organisers, rather than just a single man. For the time being, Will Thorne had more than enough on his hands. This probably explains why he was keen not to over-extend the reach of the union before it had put down solid roots and the wisdom of this policy was soon brought home to him by the six week strike on the docks. The dispute placed the Gasworkers’ Union in an invidious position as it was only six months old, while under their rules the men had to have paid 27 weeks worth of contributions before they were eligible to receive strike pay. Thorne, by his own admission, held rigidly to his own rule book, refusing to pay the lockedout men and watching as the Stevedores Union, which did pay strike benefits, collapsed into insolvency29. Instead, private donations were appealed for, to keep the dockers and their families from going hungry, through street collections and subscriptions. Thorne spoke at numerous meetings throughout the course of the strike, and got himself embroiled in a short if brutal fight with a gang of strike-breakers

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at the Customs House. For the most part, however, he seems to have confined his activities to the South Bank of the Thames, where his own union organisation was strongest, and was prepared to play a supportive role to Ben Tillett, John Burns, and Tom Mann, who provided the core leadership for the dispute. It was Mann’s genius to compress the strikers many grievances into one single demand for the “dockers’ tanner”, which became for them as effective a rallying cry as the Eight Hour Day had been for the gasworkers.

The success of the dispute – which garnered enormous levels of public support and won over both the Lord Mayor of London and Cardinal Manning to what they saw as a pressing humanitarian cause – confirmed the rise of the unskilled labourers and signalled the beginnings of the transformation of the Labour Movement, as Gladstonian Liberalism was displaced by Socialism as its guiding inspiration. Liberalism, with its roots in religious nonconformity and beliefs in the free market, no longer possessed a language capable of moving the multitudes. Instead, it was the language of class and the idea of surplus value that – to a greater or lesser degree – would now inform the practice of trade unionism and capture the imagination of one, underemployed, Irish house painter, whose Ragged Trousered Philanthropists would embody all those ideals in compelling and influential prose30.

By association, the Gasworkers’ Union

emerged from the dispute much stronger but, as the autumn approached it was pitched into the first of a series of vicious conflicts – culminating a year later on the streets of Leeds – with employers who were determined to reverse all of their earlier concessions. Taken back by the rapidity and resolve of the union’s organisation, they had bided their time until they judged it prudent to fight back, setting aside war chests, preparing to recruit strike-breaking labour, and looking for ways to challenge the legal existence of the union. The first significant blow fell in Bristol, in October 1889, when union men were paid off and strike-breakers brought in to fill in their places, many in commandeered taxi cabs.

Unsurprisingly, the mood on the picket lines soon turned ugly and there were many arrests and prosecutions. However, the strike held firm, and the works were placed under a state of virtual siege until coal stocks ran low, the gasometers emptied and the company finally settled in an attempt to prevent Bristol being plunged into a sea of darkness. This pyrrhic victory for the union was followed by an avalanche of hammer-blows from the employers. A dispute which began at a rubber works in Silvertown, and which was led in part by Eleanor Marx, was broken after 63 days; the directors of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, in November 1889, suddenly restored the twelve hour day and – as was becoming the established pattern – brought in blacklegs, in December, in order to break

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the resulting strike. Over the bitter winter months, the union hit upon a novel way to raise money for the strike fund after a city tea merchant had presented a large chest of Indian tea to the gasworkers. The tea was sold and the profits divided among the strikers. And, as the merchant was prepared to continue his philanthropy, the union extended its remit to the selling of tea and sugar, finally opening a shop of its own near its head office in Canning Town. Further success followed with the union launching its own bakery which sold bread far more cheaply than its rivals, and donated all of its profits to the political fund. Though the progressive businesses thrived, as forerunners of today’s fair-trade co-operatives, the strike sadly did not. It was broken by February 1890 and was quickly followed by defeats for the union in both Manchester and Salford. Suddenly, the Gasworkers’ Union looked to be in jeopardy and it was only with the victory at Leeds that the employers counter-attack was finally halted, the workers rallied, and an element of momentum was regained.

While the union hung onto recognition agreements in roughly 50 major British and Irish towns, the overturning of so many pledges to honour the Eight Hour Day led the Gasworkers to begin to consider the best means of turning the weapon of the law The works of Karl Marx (1818-1883) provided the theoretical underpinning for the first generation of the union’s leadership.

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foundinG the union chaPter 2

back upon the employers, and to seek to place them under permanent legal sanction.

However, to do this, the union would first have to gain parliamentary influence and this it soon set about with relish.

The original leadership of the union – Will Thorne, Mark Hutchins, Pete Curran, George Angle and Will Cockayne – rose from the ranks of the working class, pushing their way to the fore unaided by any other circumstances or forces than those which the union, and their own group solidarity, had provided. They became leaders through the force of their own characters and were both shaped and inspired by contact with the people whose needs they served. They identified themselves with the unorganised mass of general labour and saw in the union a collective reflection of the totality of their own working experience. In 1889, the struggle was fresh, exciting and all encompassing. Every day brought a large post to a still makeshift head office, from men and women the length and breadth of the country who needed advice, help and the know-how to establish local union branches of their own. Everything suddenly seemed to be possible and there was precious little room for cynicism or place-seeking.

The real business of the union, as the founders defined it, was the fight for better working conditions, wages and hours until such time as a tipping point was reached and the working people gained control of the state apparatus in order to achieve Socialism. Nothing else would do.

The forge, the factory and the shipyard provided the impetus to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the new trade unions: together they made Britain “the workshop of the world”.

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the years of

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union’s first congress

t

he blending of the heavy, painted trade union banners with the red silk standards of the SDF was a potent symbol of the rise of the new unions. Moreover, the organising committee responsible for the celebration had been dominated by the representatives of the Gasworkers, together with Frederick Engels and a number of East End working men’s clubs. It was this alliance of forces that gave London’s first May Days their avowedly political purpose, their imagery, and their markedly Socialist expression. A quick sketch, made at the following year’s event, shows the same line-up of speakers and there is little reason to imagine that the scene would have been much different in 1890. Eleanor Marx, slight and finefeatured, is wrapped in the folds of a thick Spanish cloak, peering intently at her notes through the lenses of her pince-nez, while Edward Aveling, pulling himself up to his full height, addresses the sea of humanity on behalf of the union. Behind him, Frederick Engels – the tallest man on the platform, still straight and soldierly after all these years – regards the crowd, who seem overwhelmingly male, decked out in their Sunday best, wearing stove-pipe and bowler hats, some with their union tickets tucked into the brim. Engels described this gathering, in 1890, “around the seven speakers’ stands of the Central Committee one could see a thick endless stream of people arriving with music and banners; over 100,000 people were marching in columns and were joined by as many coming on their own; everywhere there was unanimity and excitement and at the same time complete order and organisation”. He concluded his account with a flourish, declaring that: “I consider the fact that on May 4 1890 the English proletariat woke from its 40 year hibernation to rejoin its class movement … the great international army, to be the most important and wonderful outcome of the May Day Holiday … The grandchildren of the old Chartists are joining the militant columns”1.

Many of the gasworkers’ contingent, that marched that day, would take their places as delegates at the Vauxhall Conference, where one journalist commentated upon the blend of regional accents he heard rising and falling amid the hubbub of the congress floor.

“The soft, pretty burr of the South and West, the broad, hard dialect of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the curious slow sing-song of Wales, the broadest of broad Scotch … and every variety of Irish brogue” reached his ears2. This, in itself, was a tribute to the

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Pete Curran (1860-1910) National Organiser for the Gasworkers’ Union, 1890-1910 and M.P. 1907-1910.

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organising ability of a union that was still largely London based. It was not content with parochialism but determined from the first to represent all of those it served, weighting its first Congress to reflect the regional spread of its membership. These districts had grown somewhat haphazardly, with their growth depending crucially – in these early years – upon the ability, energy and personal charisma of the district secretary. As a consequence, Sam Lakin – a former builder’s labourer – drove forward the union in the Birmingham and Western District for more than twenty years, organising initially around men within his own industry, before expanding by 1890 to include brickmakers, polishers and grinders.

By way of contrast, the Midland District was solidly comprised of gasworkers, brought together by networks of friends and contacts forged by Thorne from the time he was employed at the Saltley works, onwards.

Similarly, the branches in North Wales seem to have been formed under the direct impulse of Thorne’s visit to Swansea, in November 1889, though the union’s reach quickly spread through local organisers to encompass the Llanelly gas and the Gowerton steel works. The Belfast branch of the union had only just been formed by the time of the first Congress, but already numbered some 204 members. Lancashire was far more turbulent, with the district’s first organiser, Will Horrocks – known as “Old Bill” – combining a refreshingly cavalier attitude towards paperwork with

a fiery brand of radical oratory, that would have sat well with a non-conformist field preacher. Charles Dukes thought that his motto was always “it’s the fight that maters” and recalled that his comrades “loved him for his sincerity, but his methods were too heroic for his generation”3. He rushed into an ill-prepared strike of the Lancashire gasworkers in the spring of 1889 and saw both his own influence and the dispute, itself, broken. His replacement, Pat Connor – yet another of the first generation Irish immigrants who made the union – was simply not forceful enough to make his mark amid the rough and tumble of industrial struggles and was replaced after only a few months, in 1890, by J.R. Clynes, who thereafter dominated the development of the union in the North West.

Unsurprisingly, as union organisation often turned upon a strike won, or lost, districts rapidly appeared then disappeared and those which had existed at Belfast, Dublin, Plymouth and Sittingbourne, in the early 1890s, had all vanished by the middle of the decade. The districts possessed an enormous, and at times bewildering, level of autonomy.

They often possessed different terms of federation and had different constitutional arrangements, which were tailored to serve particular trade groups or purely local industrial traditions. Most significant of all, they were financially independent. Districts would only pay 5% of their revenue to head office, which in turn drew the vast majority of its funding from direct contributions

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made by the London branches. Such arrangements, if combined with a strong and charismatic secretary, laid the foundations for the creation of the powerful regional fiefdoms that were to be both a strength and also a source of major weakness in the union as it developed.

The union’s administration was small and, for the most part, ad hoc. For Thorne, personally, it was a torture. He had to learn techniques for book-keeping, writing reports, minutes and delivering financial summaries; while at the same time he sat up for lessons in reading, writing and “general knowledge” from Eleanor Marx. In time, he would develop an impressive head for figures and while his handwriting would always be problematic – with, at times, the words slanting downwards and threatening to drop off the edge of the page – he developed an effective literary style that could, when required, produce succinct and informative reports alongside the rich and evocative prose of his memoirs. Branches sent in funds to head office together with details of monies spent, remittances, benefits and local charges.Yet, without any recognisable system of filing, they “were simply strewn everywhere about the office … bills of every imaginable shape and size, written on all kinds of paper … a large proportion of them almost undecipherable”4.

A hectic day and night shift spent trying to fashion a coherent balance sheet from out of the chaos did thankfully produce results but it also convinced Thorne of the need

Another detail from the magnificent mural commissioned for the Boilermakers’ union in the 1980s, showing the pride inherent in manufacture.

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The banner of the Bristol District No.1 Branch of the Gasworkers’ Union, painted

by Walter Crane, c.1892, revolution and fraternity are the orders of the day.

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for administrative expertise. Initially, this was provided by his friends who had been in the SDF and, in particular, Eleanor Marx and her common law husband Edward Aveling. They moved wholeheartedly from the realm of politics, and at times fairly narrow sectarian politics at that, into the realm of trade union activity; gaining in the process a practical grounding in industrial struggle that won them respect and also enabled them to get to know the working people whom other agitators had just talked about. For the first six years of the union’s existence,Thorne, Marx and Aveling were identified in the wider movement as the three leading and at times almost interchangeable figures that drove the union forward. They were so close that at the wedding breakfast to celebrate Thorne’s second marriage – to Emily Byford, the daughter of the union’s treasurer – Eleanor and Aveling were the guests of honour.

Friendship aside, this partnership – which until the mid-1890s appeared seamless – was nowhere more important than in the formulation of wider policies for the new union and in the organisational underpinning of its subsequent growth.

It was Eleanor who acted as joint secretary – alongside Thorne – of the first Congress, drawing-up the reports, issuing credentials, and drafting both the agenda and the majority of the General Secretary’s Report. Most importantly of all, she was largely responsible for the new union’s rule book, which provided a blueprint for all of

those that followed and also serves as a permanent monument to her, at the heart of the union. After 1891, Aveling acted, together with the Rev. William Morris – a Christian Socialist, not to be confused with the designer, artist and writer – as the union’s first auditors. This might have been problematic or even disastrous, as Aveling despite his talents as a writer and Socialist proselytizer was utterly unscrupulous and rapacious in his pursuit of money.

However, in this case he does appear to have discharged his duties to the Gasworkers faithfully and worked long and hard in their cause. Indeed, though usually scathing of him,Yvonne Kapp concluded that so long as he did not actually catch sight of the money, Aveling proved himself to be an “uncommonly good” auditor5.

The Congress was opened by Mark Hutchins, the President of the Union, who served as conference chair.Yet, his hesitant, laissez faire, approach to chairmanship often resulted in sessions dissolving into a near chaotic free-for-all, as delegates struggled

“ the Gasworkers were at the forefront of moves

for women’s equality and . . . the union would be far more than a simple mechanism for bargaining over wages

”

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the Man Who Wrote the red

1852 -1929 HOPEFULLY A MUGSHOT PIC TO BE SUPPLIED FOR HERE?

He gave words to fit our stru ggle a nd the son g that clos es eve ry GM B Con gre ss.

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flaG

a

fifteen minute train journey between Charing Cross and New Cross stations, changed the world. As the carriage bumped along the points through a smoky and darkening city, the words of the chorus and the first two stanzas of The Red Flag formed in the mind of Jim Connell. His imagination had been fired by hearing a speech that night by the SDF leader, Herbert Burrows, and by recent political events culminating in the trial of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago, and the recent dock and gas strikes in London.

He quickly jotted the words down and completed the song the next day. Setting the verses to the tune of an old Jacobite song, The White Cockade, he despatched them to the offices of Justice, the SDF journal, and saw them published in the Christmas edition of the paper. The Red Flag proved to be an immediate hit and within a matter of days it was being sung at Labour meetings in Liverpool, London and Glasgow.

Jim Connell had been born at Kilskyre, County Meath, in the wake of the Great Famine, the son of a tenant farmer who – along with thousands of others – was eventually forced off his land. Against the backdrop of the Irish Land War, Jim grew

Keeping the Red Flag Flying: GMB President Mary Turner unveils the monument to Jim Connell, County Meath, 1998.

to hate “the greed of the covetous Lord, who fenced out the weak and the poor” and was taught to poach, as a child, by the local police constable, Mr Brennan.

Poaching would become one of the consuming passions of his life. In it, he saw a means of overthrowing the unjust game laws; a way of striking back at the landlords; and of practically feeding both himself and the poor. Often he would capture far more hares that he knew what to do with and found that “a spare one, judiciously bestowed, always imparted joy to a poor family in a … slum”.

His bestselling book, The Confessions of a Poacher, published in 1901, provides one of the most gripping and well-crafted accounts of the pursuit, and in later years, when asked by Who’s Who, Connell described himself as: “Educated under a hedge for a few weeks, has been a sheep farmer, dock labourer, navvy, railway man, draper, journalist, lawyer – of a sort – and all the time a poacher”. He even founded a poacher’s union, which used membership subscriptions in order to pay their court fines.

After his father’s death, in 1867, his 81

family moved to Dublin, it was there that he first encountered Socialism when he met John Landye of the Free Literary Union, who formed discussion groups and took his pupils on long Sunday rambles through the hills above the city. In fact, Connell’s love of a Socialism embodied in the countryside, and ecology, strikes us today as being remarkably modern.

Having been blacklisted on the Dublin docks for attempting to unionise the workplace, Connell emigrated to London in 1875 joining the Marxist SDF and founding a branch of the Irish Land League in Poplar.

Powerfully built and flamboyantly dressed, he cut an imposing figure and the Times described him as The centrepiece to the new monument, raised in part, due to contributions from GMB.

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“a familiar figure in the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane and Fleet Street … a big man with a cheery face and heavily upturned moustaches, wearing a huge sombrero and a flowing tie … bright red”.

He went to work as a staff journalist on Keir Hardie’s The Labour Leader and wrote verses and articles for Justice and The Daily Herald, before becoming the Secretary of the Workmen’s Legal Friendly Society which was created in order to fight for compensation for those injured at work.

There were many disabled men and women who owed their relief, and a more comfortable old age, to Connell’s tireless efforts. In the 1890 election, he stood as the SDF candidate for East Finchley and argued for cheap public transport and the democratic control of gas supply and other utilities. Ironically,

as a free thinker, he failed to secure the Irish vote and braved a series of noisy and exceptionally acrimonious hustings.

Yet, it was The Red Flag that won him lasting fame. Tom Mann thought that his song had “inspired thousands, possibly millions” of workers across the world and, in 1922, the new Soviet government decorated him for his work. However, he disliked his chosen tune being subsequently changed for Tannenbaum, which he disparaged as an old German hymn, and held – against the weight of popular opinion – that The White Cockade was the only true accompaniment to The Red Flag.

Worse was to come. Ramsay MacDonald thought the song too rousing, and, claiming it was “outdated”, ran a competition in the Daily Herald in 1925 to replace it with a new “great Labour song”. Connell told his friends that he would be heartbroken if his work was discarded and was understandably delighted when, despite 300 entries to the competition, none were found to be better than his original. It remained, while MacDonald went, and today is sung at the end of every GMB conference as a tribute to a great pioneer of the Labour Movement and to all of those who have fought for a better future for us all.

the Man Who Wrote the red flaG

In 1996, members of the Meath County Council and Irish trade unions met Paul Kenny – then GMB’s London Regional Secretary – and Steve Pryle from the Workers Beer Company, with a view to raising a memorial to Connell in Eire.

A year later, on St. Patrick’s Day, the GMB delegation visited Jim Connell’s birthplace and a campaign was launched, which resulted in the unveiling of a monument in bronze and stone, on 26 April 1998.

Mary Turner, the Irish born GMB President, unveiled the bust, together with Peter Cassells, General Secretary of the ICTU, in the knowledge that the “memorial belongs to the working people of Ireland and to the Labour Movement internationally”.

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Frederick Engels (1820-1895) ensured that Marx’s work would not be forgotten.

Will Thorne was often his house guest.

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to be heard and to be recognised by the platform. This contributed to Hutchins’ fall from office, at the end of the sessions, as he lost the ballot for the presidency to Will Watkinson, of the Barking Branch. William Byford, in spite of his own reluctance, was persuaded by Thorne to stand again and was returned as Treasurer. Will Thorne was unanimously re-elected as General Secretary, while Eleanor Marx was voted onto the 15 strong Executive by such loud and universal acclaim from the floor that no vote was deemed necessary in her case. A post of Assistant Secretary was created, specifically in order to lessen the by now vast administrative workload placed upon Thorne and Byford; and William Ward “a big hearted Irishman” from the Greenwich gasworks was duly appointed. His acumen and largely unseen organisational work enabled Thorne to make the running in the union, and to become its leading force and personality.

Congress accepted Thorne’s concept of a fighting union, which only offered strike and lock out pay, offered modest legal protection to members engaged in struggle, and was “not encumbered by all sorts of benevolent benefits”. Ironically, in view of the union’s later development, Thorne sought to define the Gasworkers against what had gone before with the craft based unions and declared that he “did not believe in funeral benefits and in making the union a burial society” on the grounds that “if we spent most of our union money on burying

our members it would not be possible to improve the material conditions of the living”6. During the rules debate, it was agreed that there would be no age limit for membership, since an unskilled union needed to reflect a world of work where thousands of boys aged 14-16 were employed in the brickfields and factories.

A significant motion was moved from the floor – almost certainly at the behest of Eleanor Marx – by Mrs. Burgess from Norwich and Mr. Nicol from Bristol, which argued that women should be paid the same wage for the same work as any man. It was carried and incorporated as one of the union’s key objects ensuring that the Gasworkers were at the forefront of moves for women’s equality and that the union would be far more than a simple mechanism for bargaining over wages, but would seek progressive change in wider society7. The members “benefits” would be the results of political resolve and required the membership to be activists rather than the passive recipients of friendly society style payments in case of adversity. The latter approach accepted inequality and sought merely to ameliorate its worst effects; the former approach – and the one sought by the Gasworkers – challenged the very nature of inequality, itself.

Thorne, in an address that was probably composed together with Eleanor, explored major themes – that were almost entirely lost in later years – when he told delegates that the “immediate objects of the union

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were to improve the material conditions of its members; the raising of their status from mere beasts of burden to human beings; to make brighter and happier the home of every worker; the saving of little children from the degrading, hard and bitter lot to which many of them were condemned; a more equitable division amongst all men and women of the tears and laughter, the joys and sorrows, and the labour and leisure of the world”. If the union “kept these aims clearly before them they would march steadily and irresistibly towards the emancipation of the working class”. To this aim, Congress pledged itself “to use every effort to place upon the statutes of the country a legal eight hours day” and to use every means at its disposal to ensure that “the workers should do their utmost to obtain direct representation on all governing bodies, Parliamentary and local”8. At this stage the union’s political strategy was fired by the ideas of Karl Marx, as honed by Thorne through his friendships with Marx’s daughter, and Frederick Engels. No British trade union leader was so close to the founding figures of Marxism, shared so much in their trust and counsels, and was so thoroughly immersed in the spirit of internationalism, in this period, as Will Thorne. ideals without borders Through Eleanor, Thorne met her brotherin-law, Paul Lafargue – a veteran of the Paris Commune – and took pleasure in playing with Karl Marx’s baby grandson, Jean

Longuet – a future French Senator – upon his knee. He met August Bebel and Paul Singer for the first time, as he called in at her flat in order to escape from the enveloping London fog, celebrated Engels’ birthdays in the company of the man, himself, and was found, on 1 July 1894, sharing beer and stories with Wilhelm Liebknecht and Edward Bernstein, at Engels’ home, while they waited anxiously for news of the success of the German Social Democrats in the elections to the Reichstag9. He added both Karl Kautsky – who was seen for a time as the heir to Marx’s mantle – and the great French Socialist leader, Jean Jaures, to his list of friends, and would travel to the Zurich Congress of the International in the company of George Bernard Shaw.

Unsurprisingly, the Gasworkers began to correspond and co-operate with other trade unions – primarily in France, Belgium and the U.S.A. – and established links with the French Socialist Parti Ouvrier.

Monies were raised to support Russian and Polish revolutionaries, members of the Jewish bund seeking refuge from the Tsarist pogroms, and for the hardy survivors of the Paris Commune who still eked out their exile in the attic rooms of Soho. The Gasworkers sent delegations to the congresses of the Second International, from 1891 onwards until the outbreak of the First World War, and it was at the Brussels Congress that Eleanor Marx delivered the report from the British

Edward Aveling (1849-1898) was one of the first great popularisers of Marx and a major figure in the early years of the union. Unfortunately, he also possessed major character flaws.

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section which largely followed the position of the union. The Gasworkers, she said, clearly recognised “that today there are only two classes, the producing working class, and the possessing master class. The interests of these two classes are opposed to each other. The masters have known this a long time; the workers are beginning to see it … They are beginning to understand that their only hope lies in themselves, and that from their masters, as a class, they can expect no help”. The organisation of women by the union was, she admitted, “perhaps more difficult … especially in London … Even the working man for the most part still looks upon the woman of the household as domestic animals, more or less his personal property … And the woman herself … earning a wage that even in the more skilled kinds of labour generally means starvation … or where she is a widow, or unmarried mother with children dependent upon her, or even when she is alone in the world … what time could she have – even if she had the desire – for attending meetings or for organising?”.

Her words sounded like a clarion call to the Labour Movement in 1891, more than a century later and despite many real advances, her final question to the hall strikes as much resonance today as then10.

The membership certificate of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers. Alongside images of work the campaign for the legal Eight Hour Day is central, together with the parable of unity.

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In January 1891, Eleanor and Thorne went further, penning a joint letter to Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labour, in New York, which they hoped would result in the consolidation of the International. They felt that the “time had come to bring about a close and organised relation between the labour parties of the different countries.

The most immediate question is that of preventing the introduction from one country to another of unfair labour, i.e. of workers who not knowing the conditions of labour-struggle in a particular country, are imported into that country by the Capitalists in order to reduce wages, or lengthen the hours of labour, or both. The most practical way of carrying this out appears to be the appointing in each country of an International Secretary, who shall be in communication with all the other International Secretaries”. “Thus”, they continued, “the moment any difficulty between capitalists and labourers occurs in any country, the International Labour Secretaries of all the other countries should be communicated with, and will make it their business to try to prevent the exportation from their particular country of any labourers to take place on unfair terms, of those locked-out or on strike in the country where the difficulty has occurred”. In conclusion, they made known their determination to “in every way facilitate the interchange of ideas on

all questions between the workers of every nation that is becoming every day and every hour the most pressing necessity of the working class movement”11. In the age of the steam ship and telegraph, this was an exceptionally ambitious undertaking but one which was born from a desire to make internationalist slogans a reality and to combat the ability of capitalism to shift reserve armies of labour and commodities across continents, if judged necessary.

This letter, in particular, would seem to bear the imprint of Engels’ thinking and appears to have evolved from a three-way conversation held between himself, Eleanor Marx and Will Thorne. In his latter years, Engels had watched capitalism mutate through the growth of joint stock companies, the continued concentration and centralisation of the means of production, and the emergence of monopolies in the form of cartels or trusts.

“The freedom of competition”, he wrote in a particularly prescient passage, “changes into its very opposite – into monopoly”, while surplus capital was exported and new markets gained through the agency of the great European empires that had already swallowed up much of Asia and were now busily engaged carving up Africa between themselves. There could only be one outcome, Engels warned, a major clash between these rival empires that would have to be fought out in mainland Europe and which, once ignited, could hardly be checked.

By the mid-1890s, Thorne still had the rugged looks of a labourer, though his position of General Secretary ensured that he had begun to dress formally when he posed for his official photographs.

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George Angle was a great friend of Thorne’s and one of the founder members of the union.

By the time this photograph was taken, in the 1920s, he was in charge of the union’s Approved Society paying out benefits to members.

The union’s own Party The exchange of ideas was not simply one way. Though Thorne received his grounding in political thought – together with a general education – from Eleanor and, to a lesser extent, from Aveling and Engels, he also gave to them a grasp of industrial politics – as actually enacted in the first shock centre of the Industrial Revolution – that they would never otherwise have been able to grasp. Moreover, he perceived the political impact of the new unions in a manner that Hyndman had completely failed to appreciate. Thus, the editorial in Commonweal, at the beginning of July 1889, which had spoken of the SDF’s endeavours “to organise the unskilled labourers in all branches of industry … since the aristocrats of labour take no steps in organising them” was the product of Thorne’s own efforts on the ground which forced the pace of change and compelled Hyndman to take the trade unions seriously as potential agents of revolutionary change12. Engels, a far shrewder and wiser operator, had been alive to the opportunity far earlier and

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appreciated that “these new Trade Unions of unskilled working men and women are completely different from the old organisations of the labour aristocracy” and declared, to Marx’s elder surviving daughter, Laura, that “I see them as the true beginnings of the movement here”. Even more fulsome was his praise to Natalie Liebknecht of these “quite splendid fellows” and his belief that “these gasworkers and their union [are] far more progressive than any of the others”. It seemed certain to him that a mass Socialist political party would soon emerge and communicated as much to Will Thorne and Pete Curran on their visits to see him at his home overlooking Regents’ Park. Though he was dismissive of the sectarianism of the SDF and of Hyndman’s rather mechanistic approach to Marxism, which appeared at times to resemble “a collection of dogmas to be learnt by heart and recited like a conjuror’s formula”, Engels could readily appreciate the attraction of the party’s programme for his young disciples.

Whatever its failings, the SDF genuinely believed in Parliament and in the possibility of using it in order to win reforms, even though the host society remained intrinsically capitalist. After the defeats it had suffered in 1890, the Gasworkers were – as we have already seen – far more aware of the value of placing legal limits on the working day and of seeking Parliamentary power to overturn anti-union legislation and to combat the immiseration of the

the years of achieVeMent chaPter 3

working class. This fitted the English system particularly well, as after the passage of the second and third reform bills, in 1867 and 1884 respectively, democratic rights had been granted to working men. It was reasonable, after all, to conclude that once they had the vote, working men would wish to vote for candidates that represented their own interests. Generations of Left wing activists since have scratched their heads in frustration as contrary to all expectations a substantial section of the British working classes have preferred to define themselves in other terms, whether through nationalism – as in 1914-18 and the Falklands Conflict – or through the pursuit of naked selfinterest – as charted by Randolph Churchill’s brand of Tory populism, and put into practice by the Macmillan and Thatcher governments. However, in the 1890s, this tendency was far from clear and hope was still young. The working class bastions of Silvertown and West Ham appeared ripe for Socialism.

At the Brussels Congress of the International, in 1891, Eleanor Marx chose to examine the nature of the strike as an industrial weapon and related her findings directly to the cases of her own women’s branch in Silvertown and the gasworkers employed by the South Metropolitan Company, who had recently suffered debilitating defeats. “A strike won”, she thought, “is not always a pure gain, nor an unsuccessful strike of necessity a pure loss.

Sometimes … ‘it is better to have fought

and lost than never to have fought at all’, and that all the hundreds of large and small strikes … point the same moral and adorn the same tale – that Trade Unionism and strikes alone will not emancipate the working class, whose economic freedom can only be attained through the taking hold of political power in the interests of their own class”13. Back in Leeds, Tom Maguire who had helped to found the union’s first branch in the city, wrote that: “Nothing short of complete capture of Parliamentary and municipal government will content the new party, and those paramount forces must be worked to advance the cause of labour in every conceivable direction. Trade Unionism must be helped by them as in the past the employers have used them to destroy it. Monopolies must be nationalised and municipalised, and the people trained to initiate and manage their own work without the assistance of intermediary fleecers. By such means a tangible hold on the industries of the nation would gradually be obtained, and any depression which might occur in the process of transition would be deprived of serious consequences by prompt attention being paid to the unemployed and useful work allotted them”14. It was an analysis that captured the imagination of the union’s early leaders and was to form the cornerstone of its policies until the outbreak of the First World War. If the municipalities had to be conquered for Socialism, then Will Thorne was one of the first into the fray, contesting

H. M. Hyndman speaking at Trafalgar Square, the Gasworkers’ banner is just in shot.

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The reverse of the Bristol No.1 Branch banner showing scenes of the industry that shaped members’ lives.

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and winning a West Ham Council seat for the SDF, in November 1891. Securing a substantial majority over the Conservative candidate, a factory owner from Silvertown, he success was accounted in part – by the local newspaper, the West Ham Herald – to his reputation as “one of the most earnest, straight-forward, reliable common sense men in the Labour Movement … a man whom the workers love and are proud of, a man who never back-bites another, and a man who works solely for the Movement”15. However, just as important was his manifesto, which promised his constituents the Eight Hour Day, public transport in the form of a low cost municipal tram service, libraries, proper sanitation and the building of public baths and wash houses across the borough. At the council meeting held in January 1892 – the first at which he could effectively make his point – he proved as good as his word, demanding that all municipal employees should work no more than an eight hour day and be guaranteed payment of a minimum wage. Subsequently, as trade depression bit, he argued for those thrown out of work to be given paid work as opposed to being forced into the humiliation of charity, through outdoor poor relief16. When, in 1894, it looked as if he was about to be outflanked over wage cuts for council workmen and the slashing of the budget for the unemployed, Thorne had no hesitation in organising direct action, organising his union members,

the SDF, ILP, a local trades council, to rush the chamber, occupy the public gallery, and send Pete Curran to hoist the red flag above the assembly. It was the first time the red flag had flown above a British town hall, but it would not be the last17.

Thorne was serious about building his base on the Council and, by November 1898, he had secured a majority in the municipal elections for a fairly heterogeneous Labour Group, which included two other members of his union, Jack Jones and Arthur Hayday. This was the first time that a recognisable “Labour Party” had gained control of municipal government and all other Labour successes in local government were made possible by this initial victory. The problem was that even for a man of such prodigious energies as Thorne, he could not be everywhere at once. In the early days of the union he had been permanently on the move and insisted on visiting every new branch after it was formed. As his political career began to gather momentum, first as a local councillor

and a Marxist “As bya woman both genetics and political belief,

Eleanor Marx represented the sum of all their fears

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and later as an M.P., he could not possibly hope to devote the same amount of time and care to the running of the union. Of course, the political and the industrial were seen as being the two sides of the same coin and Thorne’s wider agenda could only be achieved by the marriage of the two.

However, changes within the core of the union, itself, began to ensure that while the strategy of the union remained set, its political vision began to narrow significantly. In part, this was to do with the union becoming a victim of its own success – with its M.P.s being drawn from its chief officers – in part, it was the result of the passage of the leadership’s youth and the concomitant mellowing that often comes with middle age, but most significantly of all, it was rooted in Thorne’s own limitations as a leader, in plain bad luck and in an unexpected tragedy. trials both Personal and Political None of this could, however, have been foreseen when, in 1890, the Gasworkers took the TUC by storm. Held that year at Liverpool, the TUC was the largest yet held, swelled for the first time by the ranks of the New Unions, including as Thorne later described not just the dockers and Gasworkers but also “gold beaters and match makers, book folders and … chain makers, scissor grinders, and shirt and collar makers”, who were now unionised and able to contribute to the debates. Instead of 171 delegates there were now 211, representing

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approximately a million and a half workers, an increase of more than 585,000 members since the last TUC18. Most of these recruits came from the ranks of the unskilled. The Eight Hour Day provided the catalyst for the most controversial and heated debates and drew the battle lines between the old, skilled and predominantly Liberal dominated unions, and those that were new, unskilled, and increasingly orientated towards Socialism. With their historic majority on the conference floor suddenly threatened, the old craft unions were prepared to fight with any means at their disposal; including challenging the credentials of first time delegates. As a woman and a Marxist, by both genetics and political belief, Eleanor Marx represented the sum of all their fears. She had been chosen as one of the nine Gasworkers delegates at their congress in May, but upon her arrival at the TUC, on 1 September, she was refused entrance on account of the supposed fact that she was not “a working woman”. Infuriated, Eleanor wrote a letter to the People’s Press challenging the decision of George Shipton – who had already barred her once before, in his capacity of secretary of the London Trades Council – the credentials committee, when Lady Dilke and the privately wealthy Clementina Black had already been admitted without question. After all these years, it is impossible not to sense her indignation or to feel that sparks must have flown from the keys as she sat up typing away at the letter she would

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send out to the newspapers in the morning.

“Now to begin with”, she wrote, “I am a working woman – I work a type-writer; and secondly it is surely preposterous for anyone except the Congress to declare who shall sit and who shall not. As the friends who elected me may not know why I am not at Liverpool as their delegate, they may think I am shirking their work. Miss Black,

The first photograph of the National Executive of the Gasworkers’ Union: (top row L to R) H. Leach, F. Westmacott, J. Gray, J. Ward, W. Blackwood & T. Camp. (middle row) G. Edwards, J. R. Clynes, H. Brabbam, H. Lynas, A. P. Borgia, S. Lakin, S. J. Wright & W. Burrows. (bottom row, seated) A. Hayday, G. Angle, H Pickard, W. Thorne, P. Curran, W. Byford & M. Hutchins.

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Regional growth was key to the union’s success.

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who has never done a day’s manual labour is admitted. I am boycotted! Thorne did all he could, but to no good”19.

Thinking quickly and laterally, she dashed off a number of telegrams to her friends at Sozial Democrat, Neue Zeit, Time and Volksblatt, and returned to the TUC hall with no less than four press cards.

She was under no illusions that the Gasworkers were there “chiefly to push the Legal Eight Hours League, and because many very important meetings are to be held and much important work has to be done”20. On the floor of Congress, John Burns had a rough ride when he tried to argue for the Eight Hours Day but, amid howling and cat calls, the crucial vote was won and the TUC committed to the campaign.

The victory cleared the way for a concerted push on Parliament and signalled that the power within the TUC had begun to shift away from the craft unions and towards the New Unions, led by the Gasworkers and the dockers.

However, employers’ challenges to the union continued to try to undermine its essence. The most serious threat to the survival of the Gasworkers, after the lock-outs of the spring and summer of 1890, spiralled out of a comparatively minor dispute at the Plymouth dockyards involving Pete Curran, the new District Secretary. Curran had been born in

a Glasgow slum, in 1860, the child of a poor Irish immigrant family. When Will Thorne first met him, “he was driving a steam hammer at Woolwich Arsenal” and was going out to organise the men on strike at Silvertown in the early hours of the morning. He had already helped to found the South Woolwich branch of the Gasworkers union, but was swiftly sacked from his job at the Arsenal after an abortive dispute. He arrived in Plymouth as the District Secretary and attempted to forge a tri-partite alliance, with the Gasworkers, dockers and South Wales General Labourers union, to try to enforce a closed shop at the naval dockyards. Incurring the wrath of the Coal Merchants Association, union men faced intimidation on a daily basis but when Curran threatened a strike in retaliation, he found himself arrested and brought to trial under the terms of the 1875 Conspiracy Laws. Though he mounted a marvellously spirited defence of his actions in the courtroom, Curran was nevertheless convicted and sentenced to six weeks hard labour, or a £25 fine, which he was unable to pay. The union immediately realised the threat and entrusted his defence, on appeal, to W. Thompson, founder of the famous Labour Movement lawyers and editor of the Reynolds News. In 1891, the Queen’s Bench decided that a charge of intimidation could be brought, provided that the threatened action – if actually carried out – was already a criminal offence. However, the High Court overturned the previous verdicts and

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upheld the right of trade unionists to strike in order to secure and protect the closed shop. This was to be the last favourable court decision in support of trade union freedoms for almost fifty years21. Had Curran not been successfully defended, then darkness would have fallen much earlier on the Labour Movement and the fundamental right to strike would have been effectively criminalised, in intent as well as practice.

However, while the union had successfully weathered the employers’ counter-offensives it had emerged with seriously weakened financial reserves. At the time that Curran was appealing his jail sentence, the union had only £227 and 4 shillings to bring forward into the new financial year of 1891. This, in part, explains the union’s greater caution in calling strikes but it was the onset of the trade depression, in the mid-1890s, that prompted Thorne, in particular, as a shrewd tactician to retreat from a policy of outright confrontation.

He was successfully developing the union’s political strength and looking to secure the founding of a single, united party to represent the voice of labour. The strategy was in place but just at the time it was coming close to its realisation, Thorne’s closest political collaborators, who had always provided the theory and rationale to back his instincts, left the stage in quick succession. It was little surprise when

P. J. Tevenan (1857-1943) was General Secretary of the Municipal Employees’ Association 1913-1924 and Assistant General Secretary of the GMWU 1924-1933.

Frederick Engels, who had been ill for some time, succumbed to throat cancer in his 75th year but within three years of his death both Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, who had rowed his ashes out to be scattered upon the waves off Eastbourne, were also dead and gone. Eleanor’s suicide deprived Thorne of his closest political collaborator, and the one who had done so much to breathe the spirit of Socialism into the nascent union. She had provided a direct link with the leading Marxist theoreticians of the day and had always been on hand for both practical counsel and much deeper strategical advice over the adoption, or rejection, of policy and theory. She was irreplaceable and Thorne knew it.Years later, Harold Laski recalled of Thorne that: “For Engels he obviously had deep affection; he spoke many times of Engels’ cheerfulness, his modesty, his varied enthusiasms. But I think that, in the circle of the German exiles, his heart went out most to Eleanor Marx … ‘she was like a flame’, he once said”22.

By the same token, Aveling’s conduct in either driving his common-law wife to suicide, or perhaps failing to go through

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with his side of a suicide pact, rendered him a pariah in the Labour Movement. It would seem that Will Thorne so thoroughly wiped him from his mind that when he came to write his autobiography, he could neither recall the date of his death – in fact, he followed Eleanor to the grave within six months, as opposed to three years – or the circumstance of his end. Thorne believed that he had also committed suicide, when in fact he succumbed to long-standing kidney disease after having run through the majority of Eleanor’s fortune in a matter of only a few weeks. Perhaps Thorne simply wanted to ascribe to him a fitting end, in any case his passing occasioned little in the way of comment or grief and not one of the six mourners who followed his coffin were neither family nor members of the Labour Movement.

However unlamented it may have been, Aveling’s death, in August 1898, broke the last of the organic links that had placed Thorne at the centre of the international Marxist movement. Although he would be at the great congresses in Paris in 1900, Amsterdam in 1904, Stuttgart in 1907, and Copenhagen in 1910, they seem to have made a diminishing impact upon him.

By way of contrast, his first holiday to the United States, in 1900, thrilled him with excitement as every experience and sight appeared to be bigger and better than the Working people would save up for weeks to buy their union’s certificate to hang proudly at home.

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last. There were reporters to talk to, skyscrapers to marvel at, and lavish banquets to attend23. Though Fordism had not yet made its impact, the sense of space, of plenty, and of a different balance within industrial relations, in what was after all a liberal, democratic republic, might well have made him question some of his most cherished assumptions about class conflict.

Though he seems to have been close to Jean Jaures and certainly greatly admired him, without Eleanor Marx at his side – as both translator and political interpreter – it is difficult to judge just how much of value he now derived from going to the Congresses of the International and how much he appreciated the wider nuances of debate. The inspiration behind his Marxism now became almost entirely rooted in the domineering personality and, at times, idiosyncratic, politics of H.M. Hyndman. It was Hyndman’s increasing jingoism – which bordered upon xenophobia – that greatly influenced Thorne’s pro-war stance in 1914, declaring that the SDF must stand against both “Capitalism and Kaiserism”. Perhaps even more seriously, it was his inability to build alliances for the SDF within the trade unions that left the road open for both the Independent Labour Party and, later, the Labour Party itself to steal his thunder and to fashion the political party of which he, Thorne and Eleanor Marx had long dreamed, along reformist as opposed to revolutionary lines.

founding the labour Party Until the rise of the new unions, there was no real possibility of founding a political party as an expression of the labour power of the working class. In 1887, Keir Hardie had been relegated to the fringes of the TUC on account of his Socialism and had secured only a modest vote when he challenged at New Lanark for the labour interest. The success of the Gasworkers and the dockers’ unions changed all of that and, by 1893, a significant number of TUC affiliates had moved leftwards in order to enable Hardie to found the Labour Representation Committee in Bradford, in 1893. Out of this meeting grew the Independent Labour Party. Thorne and the Gasworkers knew Hardie well, having supported his successful candidature for the West Ham South seat in 1892, and many of the younger union members – and in particular, Pete Curran and J.R. Clynes – tended to be attracted to the new ILP platform, rather than that of the Hyndman dominated SDF. Keir Hardie sounded Will Thorne out about the possibility of joining the new party and standing as a candidate, but Thorne – governed by his loyalty to the SDF – refused. Though the ILP M.P.s were defeated in the General Election of 1895 – with Pete Curran being heavily defeated at Barrow-in-Furness after deciding to run against both Liberal and Conservative candidates – the TUC, at its Plymouth Congress in 1899, was at last won over to a position of inviting “the co-operation of

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the MP for silVertoWn

1873 -1941

The Ga swo rke rs’ very own M.P.; pra gm atic a nd prin cipled: the Ho use of Com mo ns did n’t kno w what had hit it...

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B

orn in county Tipperary, Ireland, Jack Jones would come to describe himself as an “Irishman with a Welsh name and an English constituency”. After the early death of his father, his family knew desperate poverty and sought an escape through emigrating to Liverpool. There, the eleven-year-old Jack went to work in the shop of an old welsh draper, working from 8am to 8pm, before taking service as a page boy in the city’s prestigious Shaftesbury Hotel.

In 1896, he got a job on the docks and “having become a cotton porter … joined my first union, the Gas Workers and General Labourers’ Union”. It was at this point that he first met Will Thorne and discovered that his wages, as a casual worker, were not enough to subsist upon without applying for Poor Law Relief.

He began to make a name for himself as a firm union man, who spoke well at meetings and enjoyed the confidence of his fellows. Short and stocky, he rarely shied away from a fight. This was just as well, as he soon discovered that when disputes broke out “rioting was the order of the day, and the police of those days seemed to think it their duty to smash heads to begin with, and to enquire into the reasons for

crowds collecting afterwards”. He took part in big strikes and had trudged home, after their defeat, to an empty home, having pawned all of his furniture in order to put food in front of his family and to keep the bailiffs from the door.

Blacklisted on the docks, he left Liverpool and took a job in the engine works at Harwich, only to be swiftly sacked for “agitating” for the union. Back in the North West, in 1897, he was employed as a labourer in the engine sheds at Wigan but was on the move again after being arrested for his part in organising a meeting of the SDF in Nelson that had already been banned by the authorities.

Jack Jones (left), on the campaign trail in Poplar, election day 1910.

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Jack Jones was a cartoonist’s dream.

This image captures something of his energy and brusqueness and suggests that he was singularily unimpressed by the Temperence Movement.

In the winter of 1897, he journeyed to London at Thorne’s behest and took a job with the union, working “night and day in those years to further Trades Unionism in West Ham” and serving, from 1911, as National Industrial Officer.

Socialism and trade unionism were far from popular topics in the 1890s, and on the election trail for SDF he found himself “chased out of villages by a misguided lot of labourers who had been told by the squire’s agents that I was a revolutionary anxious to ‘bathe the land in blood’”. In the 1906 general election, he and Thorne had to fight their way out of a hustings at Camborne Market Place, when a Conservative mob turned upon them. Despite this, he noted ruefully that his election posters were always like “the frogs … in Pharaoh’s Palace – the more they were destroyed the more others arose to take their places”.

Though defeated in the general elections, at Camborne in 1906 and Poplar 100

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in 1910, he immersed himself in local government and was elected as a West Ham councillor in 1904, subsequently serving as an alderman, member of the Board of Guardians and as Mayor in 1923-24.

His rationale was simple, as he explained, his union was “political because when we are denied justice over and over and over again by employers we had to come to Parliament – the Supreme Court of the British people – to obtain it, and we are getting it, bit by bit”.

The union M.P. Electoral success did come for both Jones and his union, and – in 1918 – he was elected for the newly formed Silvertown constituency, which bordered West Ham. He took the Labour Party whip in the following year.Yet, he found Parliament and parliamentary procedure something of a culture shock; a rarefied club of “hard faced” men, as described by A.G. Gardiner, “who looked as if they had done terribly well out of the [First World] War”.

Jones thought that “the average age of members in that Parliament was certainly high – the youngsters still lay unburied in the fields of France, and those who came back had not had time to scrape the mud

from their feet”. Against this rather staid and over-privileged backdrop, he cut a florid, at times intemperate but always passionate figure.

He championed growing educational opportunities for the working class; damned the sort of “private enterprise” that condemned so many of his constituents to slum housing and high child mortality; and spoke out forcibly against British intervention in the Russian Civil War and the use of government sponsored terrorism – in the form of the “Black and Tans” – in Ireland. Frequently thrown out of the Chamber as the result of his righteous indignation, and strong invectives, he famously told the Speaker not to “assume too much power, guv’nor”, during a debate in February 1919.

Like his friend, Will Thorne, his early militancy was somewhat mitigated in later years by a sense of achievement and fulfilment. “We have constituted”, he wrote in 1924, “a much jeered-at minority in meetings, have been a much worsened party at the polls, and have suffered the … illomened croakers who … have declared, ‘Never, never, should labour fill place or wield power’ … [this] has given place to equality of status around the conference table, and our recognition as humans is

now beyond dispute”.

Ill-health compelled his retirement from Parliament in 1940 and he moved to Leigh in Lancashire, in a belated attempt to restore his health. He died there, on 21 November 1941, and despite his – at times – knockabout debating style in Parliament, which tended to diminish the impact and seriousness of his message, he was remembered fondly as a “shrewd, humorous and forceful” politician and union leader, who always wore the silver badge of the General Workers’ Union in his buttonhole, and was determined that he would “not want to rise from the ranks, but with the ranks”.

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The Associated Blacksmiths’ Society is believed to have been set up in 1857; originally based in Scotland, it was soon established in England and became part of GMB when the Boilermakers merged to create it in 1982.

all the Co-operative, Socialists, Trade Unions, and other working organizations to jointly co-operate … in convening a special congress of representatives … to devise ways and means for securing the return of an increased number of Labour members to the next Parliament”24. Thorne, who already sat on the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee, was influential in backing the move which resulted in the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee, in February 1900, and was in no doubt that trade unionism should be harnessed as a weapon in overthrowing the whole capitalist system.

This was the body that created the modern Labour Party. Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald represented the ILP on the committee, alongside Harry Quelch from the SDF and George Bernard Shaw for the Fabians. Many of the larger unions did not join it straight away, with the result that the Gasworkers and General Labourers Union was initially the second largest affiliate, after the Railway Servants union. Unsurprisingly, the Gasworkers were prominent in its affairs with Pete Curran sitting on the first Executive and being joined, in 1904, by J.R. Clynes. Today’s GMB can, therefore, proudly claim to have been instrumental in the forging, and the funding, of the Labour

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Party from its earliest days.

Almost unnoticed, at first, members of the Gasworkers began to follow the lead of the union’s caucus in West Ham and take positions in local government as councillors, justices of the peace, aldermen and – eventually – as mayors. Will Thorne, himself, began to look further, expanding his sight from local to national politics and set his eye upon a Parliamentary seat. The SDF was undoubtedly stronger in West Ham than the ILP and it was this consideration that led Keir Hardie to look elsewhere for election, after 1895, giving way to Thorne’s own candidature. At the 1900 general election, Thorne stood for the West Ham South seat as the “Labour and Socialist” candidate on a manifesto that owed its direct inspiration to the SDF. The legally enforced Eight Hour Day was once again the key demand, and he also argued for the provision of state pensions, improved health and safety legislation in the factories and the nationalisation of the means of production and distribution. Surprisingly, this time, his once formidable local SDF organisation appears to have let him down and he was narrowly defeated, polling 4,419 votes against 5,615 cast for the Conservative and Unionist candidate25. For reasons that are not entirely clear, there was little active canvassing by either the union or the SDF in their own stronghold and the few activists who did turn out appear to have been hampered by using out-of-date electoral rolls.

It should be noted that throughout the early years of the Labour Party’s history, the Gasworkers sat on what would later be described as the “hard Left” of its conferences and Thorne’s consistently Marxist approach to politics did not exactly endear him to the leadership. His position was, however, seriously weakened when the SDF – which had been entitled to two places on the Party Executive – disaffiliated itself in 1901. This seriously weakened the Marxist Left within the Labour and rendered Thorne vulnerable to attack from the Right, though he remained in the party due to his union’s affiliation. At the 1903 Labour Party Conference, Jack Jones, one of the union’s SDF veterans from West Ham, moved a resolution which would have committed the party to Socialist principles and a policy of nationalisation and redistribution. It was only just defeated

by Ramsay MacDonald and the party’s Fabian grandees, much to Thorne’s consternation. “The time has come”, he thundered, in the immediate aftermath of the defeat, “when we [i.e. The Gasworkers] ought to form a Socialist and Labour Party of our own”. Though this pledge came to nothing, probably due to the fear of splitting his own union and a realisation that the SDF was no longer in a position to rally the Movement, Thorne and Jones were right in viewing the 1903 Conference as a watershed for the Labour Party, with Socialism being forced off the immediate agenda.

Thorne’s own candidature was

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Will Thorne with his union colleagues c.1912.

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imperilled by his resolve to continue to run for election as both the “Labour and Socialist� representative, which neatly summed up his twin allegiances to both the LRC and the SDF. This was akin to literally waving the red flag in the faces of the Labour Party leadership and attempts were made to block him. Eventually, J.R. Clynes brokered a compromise agreement using the good offices of the union to overcome SDF resistance in the constituency party and to

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persuade Thorne to take the simple mantle of “Labour” candidate, as directed by the LRC. It was a significant move as without formal LRC backing, Thorne would have been excluded from the deal brokered by MacDonald and Campbell-Bannerman that ensured that the Liberals would not field candidates against Labour. Thus, in the 1906 general election, Thorne was able to issue a militant, avowedly Socialist manifesto which openly spoke of “class war” while at the same time – in the absence of Liberal opposition – garnering the support of both the Roman Catholic, nationalist community in Canning Town, represented by the United Irish League, alongside the Protestant nonconformists of the Temperance Party and the Free Church Council26.

On election day, the Countess of Warwick – an enthusiastic and genuine convert to Socialism, who effectively ran through her fortune in selfless support for the Labour Movement – put a fleet of four shiny new motor cars at Thorne’s disposal, which were used to run voters to the polls.

In the course of the campaign, Thorne had not pulled his punches in describing J. Nutting, his Conservative and Unionist opponent, as “a rich man and a huntsman” and an “insult” to a working class constituency27. This time, the union, the SDF and the Labour Party activists had done their work well, and Thorne scored a landmark victory, polling 10,210 votes for Labour to the Conservatives’ paltry 4,973.

It was the beginning of a parliamentary

career that would last for almost forty years, but more importantly the 1906 election would mark the emergence of the Labour Party, with some 29 M.P.s, that would give constructive support to CampbellBannerman’s genuinely progressive Liberal Government.

Though Will Thorne was the only candidate sponsored by the Gasworkers to be elected to office, Pete Curran with the union’s backing had challenged the status quo – and the terms of the Lib-Lab pact – only to be defeated by the Liberals at Jarrow. J.R. Clynes, who significantly was not sponsored by the Gasworkers but by the ILP, triumphed in Manchester North-East winning 5,386 votes against 2,954 for the Conservative candidate. In addition, James Parker, a member of the Gasworkers union who had also been sponsored by the ILP, won one of the two seats at Halifax28. With Pete Curran subsequently winning a byeelection at Jarrow, in July 1907 – taking the seat at the second attempt – the Gasworkers could claim to be the strongest trade union group in the House of Commons, after the Miners. Moreover, until the miners union shifted their allegiance from Liberal to Labour in 1909, the Gasworkers remained the strongest constituent union within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). For his own part, Thorne during this period remained on the Left of the party. He caused uproar in the Commons when he opposed the state visit of the Tsar to Britain, pointing out the murders and

The TUC Congress Report for 1912, when Will Thorne was in the chair.

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tortures of trade unionists for which his regime had been responsible; he was one of the few Labour M.P.s to oppose the projected national health insurance scheme on the grounds that it should be free to working people at the point of delivery; and he supported George Lansbury’s resignation from the PLP and decision to run as an independent Socialist on the principle of guaranteeing votes for women. The union’s M.P.s played their part in shaping the social reforms passed under the Liberal Government and, significantly, backed Lloyd George’s changes to the provision of welfare and the old age pension, which dismantled the Poor Law and effectively decriminalised poverty for the first time. To his great credit, Lloyd George – the “Welsh Wizard” – fought to have pensions paid at the nationwide system of post offices and not at the workhouse gate. In one simple gesture, he removed the stigma and humiliation that had attached themselves to old age and infirmity.

Yet radical reform is hardly ever popular with vested interests and two general elections were fought-out in 1910 as a result of Lloyd George’s budget and the controversy concerning the powers of the House of Lords in trying to overrule an elected government. Thorne, Clynes and Parker retained their seats on both occasions but Curran was defeated in the first election, and died very shortly afterwards.

He was one of the union’s pioneers, a force for progress as both the Chairman of the General Federation of Trade Unions and as

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a member of the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC. A tenacious campaigner and capable organiser, his premature death was a great loss to the union and it was unsurprising that Will Thorne chose to honour his friend, before all others, during the celebrations to mark the union’s fortieth anniversary29. As one of the Gasworkers’ first four Members of Parliament he helped to set the course, and to blaze the trail, for the union’s politics which would lead it to success and influence within the councils of state. The union had made the party and increasingly would come to rely upon its political muscle in order to weather slumps in trade and rising unemployment, and to hold on to its hard-won gains. Moreover, it would be an exceptionally successful and mutually beneficial partnership which would hold true for the best part of a century, until one of the partner’s grew too proud, forgot its roots, and attempted to dominate the other.Yet, that was still far in the future as the first contingent of Gasworkers’ M.P.s took their seats in Parliament and sought to defend and advance their union against the fresh assaults of employers and a grim economic climate.

The regions and the centre The trade depression that gripped the British economy during the mid-1890s had dramatic and wide-ranging effects for the Gasworkers’ union. It saw membership tumble from approximately 60,000 in 1890 to a mere 24,000 in 1896; the geographical

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The Society of Brushmakers claimed to be the oldest British trade union. This certificate printed in 1839 acknowledges the Society’s base on the London docks and its reliance upon imports of boar skins from Russia, for its raw materials. It amalgamated with FTAT in 1983 and joined GMB in 1994.

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The Amalgamated Society of Tailors attempted to give themselves a lineage that went right the way back to Adam and Eve, after they were expelled from Eden, and to the court of King Solomon.

In fact, the Society was formed in 1866 and through NUTGW joined GMB in 1991.

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centre of the union shift from the centre to the regions; the industrial composition of the union diversified out of sheer necessity; and the uncompromising militancy of the early years gave way to an altogether more pragmatic approach to industrial relations especially after the Taff Vale Judgment of 1901, which made unions liable for any losses to businesses occurred by strike action.

The union had been born in London and it was this district, which covered the south coast and part of the Midlands, that initially accounted for more than half of the Gasworkers’ total membership. By 1896, it was still standing proud as the largest single district, with approximately 8,556 members; while Birmingham came second with 6,024 members; and Leeds third with 4,580.

Largely due to the energy and dedication of J.R. Clynes, now at the height of his powers as District Secretary, Lancashire District grew rapidly, passing Leeds, Birmingham and then, finally, London, to become the largest and most powerful district in 1907, comprising more than 20% of the union’s total membership. At the same time, the Northern District, based on Tyneside, was also gaining in status and membership through the hard work of its own Secretary, Hugh Lynas, who had taken office in 1896, when the union had barely 2,000 members under his jurisdiction. The first branch in the district had been founded in Sunderland, in 1889, with others formed thereafter in North and South Shields,

Jarrow, Stockton, Middlesborough and Durham. If these were areas of growth, then London – with a new Midlands District, based around Nottingham and accounting for almost 50% of its membership, carved out of its territory – had unsurprisingly fallen into fourth place, after the reorganisation of 1908.

The recession of the mid-1890s had also served to make the union far more heterogeneous and weakened the dominance of the gasworkers over its industrial culture. If the union was to survive, rather than to wither on the vine, it needed to refashion itself as a truly general union. The Birmingham District had been able to almost double its membership to some 8,000 members, in 1893, by devoting their energies overwhelmingly in the direction of recruitment from among building labourers.

London District, under S.J. Wright, followed suit and by 1899 there were up to as many as 6,000 members located in building labourer’s branches across the capital.

In Lancashire, Clynes built his membership upon the less-skilled grades in the engineering factories that flourished in the south of the county and, by 1904, the district reported that its largest single branch at Accrington was “composed of men at a large engineering works”. Charles Dukes later summed up the period, when the union changed from being an occupational to a general union, as “men passed from the stoke-hole, the brick-bank or the forge to

The TUC badge for 1912 bearing Will Thorne’s name as Chairman.

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The delegates to the Gasworkers’ union 1912 Congress, held at Sunderland.

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[the] office and the platform, and became [through the union] leaders of men”. In 1906, Fleming Eccles – then only 35 – was appointed as assistant to Clynes, taking an increasingly large role in district affairs as Clynes’ parliamentary career flourished, and eventually succeeding him as District Secretary, at the height of the First World War. “Fleming”, thought Dukes, “was moulded by the high pressure epoch of the ten years preceding the war. No man was more true to his type. The work of the union demanded his whole energy, and he gave himself without reserve. He had no secondary interest in life; no one to off-set his work. He lived to serve and wore himself out prematurely” dying in 192530.

Leeds District would similarly diversify, with the gasworkers, dyers and engineers being joined by flour millers, workers in cocoa and chocolate factories, screw and bolt makers, and wire spinners. The

Gasworkers had founded a Scottish district at the turn of the century and, at first, it went from strength-to-strength, recruiting both gasworkers and municipal employers.

It even branched out to organise women laundry workers. However, it was hit hard by the trade depression and inter-union competition, and went into sharp decline after 1902, recording only 35 members in 1908 and flickering out of existence shortly afterwards. It was not until 1913 that the District was refounded with the help of Arthur Hayday, then the Midland District Secretary, and a more modest District Council set up under the chairmanship of John Addison, who was appointed as organiser and distinguished himself as a leading propagator of Marxism, and as a writer with the Forward journal. By 1894, the Irish area – then a separate district until it fell under the wing of Liverpool – spread to include most the major towns in the north, with Belfast having no less than 7 branches. Growth was slower outside Ulster, though Dublin was organised, and total membership over the first five years of the union’s was maximised at a comparatively modest 1,833. Liverpool saw only slow and halting growth, with membership concentrated in some 14 branches, on the Mersey, servicing 1,300 members by 190531.

It would take the second wave of union militancy and the upsurge in trade, after 1911, to see the union spread out of the gas industry and into the chemical industry, tanneries and match works. On the eve of

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the First World War, it would have gained inroads into the seed crushing and sugar industries, had succeeded in obtaining the eight hour day for its members and, most importantly of all, had established a code of practice, including guarantees of health and safety, for workers in the scaling and ship repair industries on the Mersey estuary.

After 1908, the economy recovered rapidly, with rising levels of employment, and with industry experiencing a boom between 1911 and 1914, the union experienced matching growth and a return to militancy. In 1910, the union’s membership stood at roughly 32,000 yet

by June 1914 it had risen astronomically to approximately 132,000, as the union broke out of its traditional base in the gas industry and organised among a myriad of general trades. A national railway dispute in 1911 was followed by docks strikes in 1911 and 1912, and the greatest strike that the nation had yet seen, as a national coal stoppage brought more than a million miners out on strike for seven weeks in 1912; while at that year’s TUC Will Thorne took the presidency and confirmed the dominance of the New Unions.

The banner of the Norwich Branch of the National Union of General Workers c.1920.

The Presidency of the tuc and the rise and fall of syndicalism For the first time, Thorne faced being out-flanked on the Left as syndicalist ideas began to take hold in the Labour Movement and to threaten the basis of his union’s parliamentary strategy. The

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Demonstration by members of the National Federation of Women Workers c.1910. They hold the Labour Party paper and suggest that their disadvantaged sisters write directly to Mary MacArthur.

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syndicalists, led by Tom Mann, held that parliamentary struggle could not on its own bring about thoroughgoing progressive changes in society. What was needed was political revolution triggered by a general strike and the first duty of the trade unions was to lay the foundations for this final confrontation; all else was really secondary and to effect the revolution the unions should consolidate their power, through amalgamations, so that only one union should exist to represent each major industry. However, the unions’ job would not finish with the accomplishment of the revolution as they would be called upon to take the running of industry into their own hands. The railwaymen and the miners, in particular, became influenced by these new ideas and it is conceivable that had Thorne been exposed to them in his youth he might have been an enthusiastic convert.

Yet, he was now approaching his sixtieth birthday – a time when many successful leaders contemplated retirement – and could, perhaps, be forgiven for becoming a little set in his ways. He had led his union through the trade depression and was now confronted by a fresh period of exhilarating, almost exponential, growth.

He had not retreated from industrial militancy but believed in the opportune moment for sustained, but controlled, aggression in order to bring a recalcitrant employer to his knees. A general strike appeared a too grandiose, and too random a weapon to be unleashed without sufficient

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thought and preparation. It threatened to break the union he had so painstakingly created, not to strengthen it, and to topple hundreds of thousands of highly organised workers out of work and into the misery of long term unemployment. It also required the abandonment of the parliamentary road to Socialism that Thorne had committed himself wholeheartedly to and which had began to present real dividends in terms of power and influence. Worse still, for Thorne, it seemed to reveal a basic mistrust of democracy and to necessitate an armed revolution for which the British and Irish proletariats seemed singularly unprepared.

Thus, in a far cry from his own gut instincts in 1903, he was able to use his prestige at the union’s 1912 – by then – biennial Congress to easily defeat the call made by London District to pull the union’s M.P.s out of the Labour Party and to let them stand, or fall, on their own merits as independent Socialist candidates; shifting the union’s priorities from parliamentary to direct action. “My old colleague, Tom Mann”, he told Congress, “is now trying to persuade the wage earners not to have anything to do with Parliamentary action.

I have always been in favour of direct action on Trade Union lines, because the immediate grievances of the wage earners can be dealt with, but at the same time I am not prepared to allow the employing classes to keep and have control over the political machinery; the combined forces of Labour, and the political working-class

movement, marching forward together, can, in my opinion, do a great deal more for the wage earners of the country than can be done if we only concentrate on direct action”32.

As the union grew, so too did its organisation and a tension – clearly discernable by 1910 between its lay members and salaried officials. A resurgent London District, identified together with Birmingham, as representing the radical Left-wing of the union, consistently called for a return to an entirely lay member Executive and for curbs on the power of appointed officers. In February 1913, the two districts combined to inflict a rare defeat on the leadership at Congress and checked the power of the District Secretaries to swamp the Executive’s organisational subcommittee – which controlled much of the union’s business – by ensuring that rather than comprising the General Secretary and five district secretaries, it would henceforth consist of a chair, a secretary, two district secretaries and two lay representatives. Though, in practice, the chair and the secretary would always be A cartoon from the GMWU Journal, mid-1920s.

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J. D. S. Higham, Yorkshire District Secretary GMWU, 1925-1951.

officers, stopping short of ever granting the lay members a majority, it was still a move to greater grass-roots participation in a union that, increasingly, had become controlled from the top down by District Secretaries, who had begun to act like minor potentates33.

London and Birmingham found their antithesis in Lancashire, which appeared not only as the largest District but also the most moderate and hierarchical. However, it was this district which created the post of fulltime salaried branch secretary, which later spread throughout the union. Initially, it served as an expedient to provide a living for Charles Dukes, whose reputation as a troublesome, revolutionary agitator had effectively rendered him unemployable in the county. Thus, in 1911, he became fulltime secretary of the Warrington branch, taking a weekly commission of 8 shillings, which he himself raised to 20 shillings a year later. Monetary matters aside, the professionalisation of the officer corps appeared to produce results with the branch swelling to some 3,000 members, by 1914, and employing three full-time organisers

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including Dukes34. Its usefulness as a model for growing the union appeal was not lost on J.R. Clynes who was increasingly absent from the district on parliamentary business and who, in turn, pushed a measure aimed at creating large branches, under the control of a paid full-time secretary, through the 1912 union Congress. Lancashire then proceeded to build up, from scratch or by amalgamation, a number of large superbranches based around the manufacturing towns, with several other districts quickly following suit. At the same time, Clynes took the role of Chairman of the Executive – after the sudden death of J.E. Smith – becoming the paid President of the union, a newly created post, in 1914. Henceforth, the union would increasingly come to be run as a partnership between Clynes and Thorne, which for the most part worked to effectively extend the remit of the Gasworkers’ political influence, despite their contrasting temperaments and at the cost of a growing bureaucratisation of the union’s culture.

The complexion of the union was clearly changing. However, Will Thorne was at the apex of his power and prestige.

The crowning moment came for him, in 1912, when he took office as the President of the TUC. He was the best-known British trade unionist of his generation, a veteran with a reputation that was second-to-none for fighting spirit and heroism, following his early triumphs at Beckton and Leeds.

He had founded his own union, assisted in

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the creation of the Labour Party and had entered Parliament on a popular landslide. When he spoke, other trade union leaders listened. He used his year at the head of the TUC to continue to press for the Eight Hour Day through both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary action, which culminated in a number of mass protests; and pressed for unemployment relief and the nationalisation of the railways in his talks with Herbert Asquith, who had succeeded as Liberal Prime Minister after Campbell-Bannerman’s premature death.

At the TUC Congress, held at Newport in September 1912, Thorne offered his support for the striking miners and dock workers, and was uncompromising in his support for Irish Home Rule and belief that the people of Ireland should be free to “develop their own national resources and work out their economic and industrial salvation”. For a Labour Movement that was still far from concerned about the plight of Ireland, and a union like the Gasworkers’ which had a strong Ulster Protestant component, this was indeed stirring and challenging material. Furthermore, Thorne was concerned to set out his own Socialist credo for the Labour Movement, the object of which should always be: “the collective ownership of the land, railways, and the means of production and transit. The sooner society takes over these essential things, the

Charles Dukes as Lancashire District Secretary, 1925-1934.

The Executive and Officials of the National Amalgamated Union of Labour, 1898.

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sooner they will come into the possession of those to whom they justly belong.

Individual ownership of the means of livelihood has resulted in the economic enslavement of a large portion of society – the working class. It has given to the [capitalist] classes the power to exploit the labour force of the masses; it has also made them masters of political power by means of which they maintain the system and perpetuate the domination of their fellows.

I … recognise the hugeness of their task.

But the workers have the power if they have the will … If the sting of present poverty, with the dread of worse poverty in the near future, and recollections of it in the past cannot rouse the workers to action: pen and tongue will not do it. Freedom will mean struggle and sacrifice, which, though hard for the few to sustain, will be light enough for each when all are ready and willing to share it. The workers know this already, and it now remains to be acted upon”35.

Amid the crescendo of cheers that greeted his speech, Thorne could reflect with pride upon the achievements of his union since 1889, whereby: “New Unionism … changed the whole face of the British Trade Union Movement, a movement that had mainly consisted of reformist, liberal-minded craftsmen Canning Town Hall was built on the site of the founding meeting of the Gasworkers’ Union. When Thorne spoke there on 31 March 1889 it was simply waste ground and union members stood on carts.

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the years of achieVeMent chaPter 3

and skilled unionists. The growth and development of our union and the dockers and others that followed us brought to the Trade Union Congress a new force, clear-sighted and virile. It rejuvenated the industrial trade union movement. It established on a firm footing the political Labour Movement; gave it an impetus that has carried it to its present strength and power in the land, and brought about the harmonious co-operation between the two that has never been severed”36. However, amid his triumph, Thorne had forgotten the warnings made long ago by Engels about capitalism’s need for war. Competing nationalisms, dynastic rivalries and expansionist empires would soon plunge the continent into a total war of blood and wire, emptying the factories and pitting worker against worker in a mechanised slaughter, where railway timetables and industrial output would often mean the difference between defeat and victory. All talk of syndicalist revolution and a better tomorrow was lost amid the rhetoric of patriotic speeches and the tramp of marching feet. If the young Thorne, working in a Birmingham munitions factory had seen the tragedy of war waged for profit, then the mature union leader was suddenly blind to the nature of a conflict waged in pursuit of markets and an increasingly anachronistic sense of glory.

His eye slipped from the prize, his urge “to act” for the workers was sublimated by the symbols of nationhood and he became complicit in the coming horror.

On the eve of the First World War Will Thorne had already served as General Secretary of his union for 25 years.

This certificate honoured his achievement. Few could have known then that he would continue in his post for another 19 years.

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chaPter 4

the

J.B. Priestley, Lost Empires 118

to the Greenfields Beyond?

l

ooking back, Charles Dukes lamented that: “The war disappointed those who were hopeful that our Internationals would have created a mind against which militarism would have broken. The war dispelled many illusions …”1. Despite his professed pacifism, Dukes had been drafted into a line regiment and suffered routine humiliation at the hands of his fellows. When he disobeyed orders, he was court-martialled and sentenced to military prison, where he saw out the war. In a way he was lucky, in Flanders men had been shot for far less. The First War not only shattered his faith in international Socialism, it caused him to question the ideological foundations that his union was based upon and came to place his hope in industrial co-operation, rather than conflict, in the hope that another war could be averted.

Other leading comrades in the Gasworkers’ union saw things very differently. Will Thorne had no doubt as to the necessity of fighting what he saw as German militarism and, together with J.R. Clynes and Jack Jones, urged his members to enlist or to do everything in their power to assist the war effort. The spectacle of the former revolutionary internationalist accepting a commission, delighting in uniforms and going far further than any of his colleagues – save for Clynes – in arguing for the necessity of conscription, saw him break with many of his former comrades, with a grim finality, and draw a withering criticism from those on the Left of both his own Executive and constituency party. As war weariness and opposition to conscription grew in 1917,

GMWU banners painted onto silk by George Tutill’s famous factory, c.1924.

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Women gasworkers employed at Beckton during the Great War.

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a special conference called by the trade union and socialist society affiliates to the Labour Party in West Ham deselected him as their parliamentary candidate for the next election. Though he was quickly and successfully adopted by the neighbouring seat of Plaistow, his reputation was tarnished by the war and his, hitherto, unquestioned authority in the Labour Movement badly compromised by his recruiting tours and his intelligence service sponsored trip to revolutionary Russia. It was at this period that Philip Snowden sneered at Thorne’s “unlettered ignorance and unfitness for Parliament” in an attack that, coming from a Labour Party colleague, seems to have wounded Thorne more grievously than any other in his career. He dwelled on it

at length, remarked on it in his memoirs and brooded upon what he felt to be his major weakness, his own lack of formal education2. It was a cheap shot from a privileged individual and one who, when Ramsay MacDonald split the ranks of Labour in 1931, forsook the party and sought office with the National Government. The union’s Executive was not blind to the pain of its leader and wrote a spirited rebuttal to Snowden, urging that “you ought to sympathise with and sustain men who as boys had to work at hard labour when for years they should have been at school … against the polish of … your paragraphs, we set the splendid pioneer work of Mr. Thorne as an educationalist agitator to secure for every working lad the schooling advantages of which he was deprived3. Too bluff, too emotionally and uncritically wedded to the patriotic cause, he appeared intractable towards his former friends and all too pliable in the eyes of his former foes, who used him for tireless propaganda while keeping him firmly away from the corridors of power. No ministerial briefs or responsibility for policy formulation came his way, as his parliamentary career stalled for good on the back benches.

By way of contrast, the First World War made J.R. Clynes. His Manchester Platting constituency stood unquestioningly behind him and his time in government established his reputation for quiet efficiency and an ability to deliver results. Appreciating the nature of total war in a way that Asquith

the lion in Winter chaPter 4

never could, Lloyd George subordinated the whole economy – and the free market profiteers – to the needs of supplying munitions to the front, and keeping the British people fed at home. Clynes toured the Western Front and on his return “toured the smoking factories of the Midlands, and told the facts as [I] had seen them … of working class men serving guns in Flanders, who were dying because their own class at home followed wrong advice and took part in stoppages; and at the same time I made it my business in Parliament, to … plead for a fairer distribution of the money paid for munitions, to remove the causes of industrial unrest. Production was stimulated, and something was done to mitigate munition profiteering; and it was satisfactory to feel that many a soldier out there in the mud and wire was given extra protection as a result of our tour”4. He wrote laconically of the execution of hundreds of French mutineers who had pulled their regiments out of the line and hoisted the Red flag over the depot at Coeuvres and enthusiastically of Kitchener the “rescuing angel … impatient of all control by civilians, fighting ceaselessly and splendidly on behalf of the common soldiers, who trusted him blindly, and went to their death without trying to puzzle out the reason, taking as their whole creed the words: ‘Kitchener Needs You!’”5.

As the U-Boats attempted to blockade the nation and starve it into surrender, Lloyd George had promised to improve

the distribution of foodstuffs. A Ministry of Food was established in 1917, but Lord Devonport – the first Food Controller, as the Minister was styled – proved himself inadequate to the task and was replaced, within less than six months, by Lord Rhondda who chose Clynes to act as his assistant with the rank of Parliamentary Secretary. He was immediately pitched into a series of crises: “In February, March and April 1917, the enemy had sunk nearly 50,000 tons of sugar … British meat supplies had shrunk practically to zero.

Meat ships had suffered terribly crossing the long vistas of sea from Australia and

Women workers clearing the retorts at Beckton, c.1917. Ironically, the legal Eight Hour Day was finally conceded as a response to war time pressures on production.

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Will thorne: throuGh War a

1857 -1946

Tho ugh he support ed the Gre at Wa r, he also cele brated the ach ieve me nt of the Ru ssia n Revolut ion.

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and reVolution

t

he outbreak of the First World War shattered Socialist unity. Workers who had sworn a fraternity that would stretch across all borders and vowed to launch a general strike, in the event of a military mobilisation, were suddenly caught up in the intoxicating spectacle of patriotism: colourful flags and bunting, parades and the last flowering of gaudy comic opera uniforms, before the wire and khaki claimed them.

The Second International fractured between those Socialists who embraced nationalism and threw themselves wholeheartedly behind the war effort, such as Henry Mayers Hyndman and J.R. Clynes; those, like Keir Hardie, Charles Dukes, and Alex Gossip, who wished for neutrality; and a much smaller third grouping, led by James Connolly in Ireland and Lenin in Russia, who were utterly opposed to the war, but saw in it an opportunity to realise the revolution they had always desired.

Will Thorne threw himself, wholeheartedly, into the first camp. He had already proven himself no stranger to controversy when, in 1908, he had infuriated the pacifist wing of the Labour Party by his attempt to introduce a Citizen’s

Army Bill to Parliament, accepting the inevitability of a major European war and holding that the working class should be thoroughly drilled in the use of arms in expectation of that conflict. He was commissioned as a Lieutenant Colonel in the West Ham Volunteer Force, took great pride in being measured for his uniform.

Together with Clynes, he went on recruiting drives, across the country, and he found himself charmed by Lord Kitchener when the old warhorse took him into his confidence over shortages in manpower and munitions at the front.

Despite drawing sustained criticism from delegates from his own union, at the 1916 Biennial Conference, he urged industrial peace in the name of the war effort and declared himself “certain that not one member of the union would do anything to prevent our gallant soldiers from being fully supplied with the necessary equipment”. He urged conscription, in the belief that it was an egalitarian measure, sending the middle classes to the front alongside the workers, in an echo of his failed 1908 Bill, and refused to even countenance peace talks until every German soldier had been swept out of France and Belgium.

How are we to account for Thorne’s

apparent conversion to jingoism? Patriotism – as opposed to Nationalism – was certainly seen as a working class virtue; but though both emotional and instinctual, Thorne’s pro-war stance was also fired by the intellectual embers of Hyndman’s increasingly intemperate politics. Since the deaths of Frederick Engels and Eleanor Marx, H.M. Hyndman had increasingly come to provide the theoretical rationale that underpinned Thorne’s own political thought. The problem was that Hyndman – much to Engels’ horror, the great English populariser of Marx – was virulently antiGerman, associating a whole people with “militarism and Junkerdom”, and railing against the “treacherous and ruffianly attack upon neutral little Belgium”.

It was Britain’s choice of allies, rather than necessarily the entry into the war itself, that troubled many Liberals and those on the Left. Tsarist Russia had long been reviled as a tyrannous police state, with neither democracy nor a free press, that indiscriminately used the Cossacks and Black Hundreds – an extreme, proto-fascist organisation – to bring murder and terror to the Jewish minority through pogroms. Will Thorne had consistently spoken out against the Tsar. He had supported the 1905 123

Petrograd 1917: Will Thorne (to the left of British trade union delegation) with the first soldiers who refused the Tsar’s orders to fire at the people.

Revolution and raised funds for the families of the workers shot down by the Tsar’s troops when they tried to found a union on the Lena goldfields. As he knew many of the Russian revolutionaries, personally or through their writings, during their years of exile; he seemed an ideal choice for the British Government to send to Russia, following the Revolution of February 1917, in order to assess the strength of the Provisional Government, its continuing commitment to the Allied war effort and the nature of the changes taking place in the state, itself.

Thorne had cheered the February Revolution to the rafters and had nothing but contempt for the “absolute neglect” shown by the Tsar to the common soldiers, who had died in their thousands for him.

Newly promoted to the rank of Colonel, he sailed through U-Boat infested waters from Aberdeen to Stockholm, in April 1917, and 124

journeyed overland to Petrograd, Minsk and Moscow, as part of an official British “Labour Delegation”. He witnessed the Soviets in action, visited the Duma, and spent May Day in Moscow in the midst of a vast demonstration.Yet, he was unimpressed by the posturing and demagoguery of Alexander Kerensky, who led the Provisional Government, judging him well-meaning but fundamentally weak.

More to his liking was his meeting with the garrison soldiers of Petrograd and the “long conversation [he had] with the officer and soldier who marked the beginning of the Revolution by their action in refusing to shoot down the people. This action was as a signal to the whole of the army, the navy and the workers”.

What concerned Thorne was the growing tide of anti-war sentiments among both the newly enfranchised citizens and the soldiery. “I found out”, he wrote, “that

the German and Russian soldiers were fraternising together on the frontier, and that twenty battalions from the German Army had been transferred to some other front. There was not much fighting in consequence. About two days afterwards, in the Russian newspapers, mention was made that these same twenty battalions had given our soldiers at Passchendaele a rough time”.

It was this feeling of betrayal, that somehow the Russian workers – and by extension the Bolsheviks who were the most active in pursuit of peace – had not been prepared to pull their weight that defined Thorne’s attitudes towards the Revolution of October 1917. His eldest son, also called Will – with whom he had always had a difficult and troubled relationship – had joined the Essex Regiment as “a brave high spirited lad” and had been killed at the battle of Ypres in 1917. It is hard not to read into Thorne’s

Will thorne: throuGh War and reVolution

account of the switch of the twenty fresh battalions from the Eastern to the Western fronts without recalling his own loss.

Thorne’s opposition to Bolshevism also stemmed from purely sectarian divisions on the Left. The Russian revolutionaries that he had met at meetings of the International, or in their exile, had mainly followed the Mensheviks when the party split in 1903, and these men and women carried with them his friendship, hopes and sympathies. Their fall from power after the October Revolution was occasioned by their Bolshevik rivals, a dedicated band of professional revolutionaries, whom Thorne associated with social collapse and disorder that bordered upon anarchy. This explains his most intemperate and sectarian work – an introduction to a polemical pamphlet on Bolshevism: A Curse and Danger to the Workers, published in 1919 – and his preparedness, as someone who still considered himself a Marxist, to institute increasingly anticommunist statutes within his own union.

Yet, if Thorne came to view the spread of Communism in Britain as a potentially dangerous and destabilising development; then his attitudes towards Lenin and the USSR became more measured, verging upon the positive, once the chaotic Civil

War had been won. By the late 1920s, Thorne was writing of October 1917 – as opposed to February – as marking the “real” Russian Revolution, and credited Lenin for providing “a stable and suitable form of Government for Russia … guided by the masses”. It was a contradiction that spoke volumes for Thorne’s own political thought, as he drifted further from the sources of his original inspiration.

The Left has, at times, a self-destructive obsession with purity and seeks to bestow the aura of infallibility upon those heroes it admits to its pantheon. As a result, many of those who are lionised – for example John Lilburne, James Maxton and Tom Maguire – either never held effective power or else died young before they could properly taste it. Those who achieved it – such as Oliver Cromwell, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin – are often excluded, on the grounds that they compromised while making policy or made serious mistakes. Will Thorne falls squarely within this second grouping. Had he perished at any time between 1889 and 1914, he would have been remembered as the greatest Marxist trade union leader Britain ever produced.

Books would have been written lamenting his lost promise and speculating what he

might have gone on to achieve had he lived. As it was, he had the good fortune to survive to enjoy a ripe and comfortable old age. If we accept what he was, rather than what we might have wished him to have been, then Thorne emerges as a flawed but far more human, engaging and intriguing figure. Historians – and particularly Labour Movement historians – have a tendency to ask far too much of their subjects, and too little of themselves. Will Thorne, for all his failings would have known better than that, and would have understood full well Marx’s judgement that: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves”.

Though he had embraced war, he also knew the true face of revolution when he saw it, imprinted in the stares of the young men who, amid the snows, strikes and bread queues of 1917, had refused the Tsar’s orders to fire upon their fellows.

It was this action that he celebrated and hung on to, long afterwards, when much else began to seem unfamiliar, clouded by doubts and no longer guided by the same clear moral and political imperatives that had guided him through a meteoric rise and a brilliant youth.

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the Argentine; and home-grown cattle had been killed off, almost to vanishing point, some months earlier, because it had become almost impossible to produce milk at a profit … A food mission was rushed off to New York, with considerable powers, to purchase meat of any available description.

About £200,000,000 worth of ham and bacon was bought and shipped at once to England. Famine was averted … Our work of saving food was pursued of bitter necessity … It became an offence to throw rice at weddings. Starch for laundry work was restricted. London’s pigeons were rationed. The price of sweets was controlled.

All stray dogs had to be destroyed …

A man who fed his pigs with bread-crusts, discarded by navvies building a new aerodrome was fined £50 … Milk was controlled. A law was passed making it possible to inflict a fine of £400 on anyone found hoarding food”6.

When his chief, Lord Rhondda, died in 1918, Clynes was appointed Food Controller, in his own right, establishing a good working relationship with Lloyd George and coming to view himself as the nation’s “house keeper”. He, thus, established himself as a trusted national figure, working in a vitally important area, and was widely credited with saving the nation from starvation, in 1917-18.

Furthermore, his own union’s members – as some of the lowest paid in the country – were those disproportionately hit by fluctuations in food supply or by the

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depredations of speculators. They could not afford to hoard, to bribe, or to haggle.

Consequently, even though rationing was not introduced as an egalitarian measure, as it was to be in the Second World War, Clynes’ efforts in regulating food supply and eliminating corruption had a direct and highly positive effect on the lives of his own membership. Although his work at the heart of government effectively prevented him from taking up an active role until the Armistice had been signed, he was the natural choice to be created the union’s first paid President, in 1916, and he was an influential force in many of the fundamental changes that transformed the union over the war years. Indeed, if Thorne had been the single force in the union’s early years, the First World War proved to be a watershed in the union’s affairs, with the leadership henceforth divided between him and Clynes, as – for the most part – a relatively harmonious partnership.

The first metamorphosis involved the changing of the union’s name. Since 1889, it had been the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers but under the pressure of wartime its composition had altered rapidly, taking it further away from its early concentration in the gas industry and diluting its membership among the general trades. Accordingly, at the union’s biennial Congress in 1916, the union altered its constitution and became the General Workers’ Union. The central problem for Lloyd George – both as

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A group shot of Beckton’s new woman workers c.1917.

Minister of Munitions and later as Prime Minister – was ensuring that an adequate and regular supply of shells and cartridges reached the front. In the early years of the war, this was almost exclusively seen by the government as a matter of avoiding strikes and “diluting” skilled labour by substituting unskilled workers and women, to replace men away at the front, in order to maintain and increase production. The participation of the unions was key to this process. An agreement was reached between Lloyd George and all the major unions, in March 1915, and was passed into law as the Munitions Act four months later. This declared that strikes on all forms of munitions work would henceforth be illegal and that disputes were to be submitted for compulsory arbitration. The government

was given the authority to enforce the dilution of skills across all areas of munitions work, though certain safeguards were offered and a limit placed upon private profits in the armaments industry. The opening of the floodgates for unskilled workers to take up engineering posts presented an enormous opportunity for a general union and it was one that was not lost on Thorne and his colleagues, as their membership rolls began to expand at a dramatic rate.

At the end of 1915, membership of the union stood at 133,000 – almost exactly where it had been before the outbreak of the war – but by December 1916 the total had risen to 152,000 and by the end of 1917 to more than 256,000. The most marked area of growth was among women

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The laundry women’s strike of 1920.

workers, who had suffered from endemic unemployment immediately prior to August 1914, and had been refused membership by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE). This gave the general unions a free run at their recruitment, but unfortunately – to begin with at least – the Gasworkers were hardly more enlightened than their brothers in the ASE. Will Thorne had openly despaired of the possibility of organising women workers before the outbreak of war and the majority of the Gasworkers’ districts had not even settled upon their rates of pay. It was against this background that the National Federation of Women Workers, led by Mary MacArthur and Margaret Bondfield – and established more than a decade earlier by women who despaired of their successful organisation in unions dominated by men – truly came into its own. MacArthur, in particular, proved an inspiration, linking together the campaigns for women’s rights and wages. In January

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1917, she wrote in The Times, that “I unhesitatingly assert that there are thousands of women to whom no protection has as yet been accorded by statutory orders fixing wages” and in Women in the Labour Party, published a year later, she castigated “the attitude adopted by some other men Trade Unionists, who while admitting women to membership of their Union and accepting contributions from them, have at the same time used the organisation to which the women belonged – without consultation with the women who were members – to declare that under no circumstances whatever should women continue to be employed in their trade after the war”7.

It was largely due to her tenacity and that of her sisters in the National Federation of Women Workers, backed-up by the General Workers’ Union, that an amendment to the Munitions Act was passed which obliged employers to pay the appropriate men’s rates to women employed on men’s work and established a special tribunal to settle women’s rates for women’s work. Seizing the initiative, in order to strengthen the bargaining position of all women, Mary MacArthur joined forces with the General Workers’ Union in order to form the Joint Committee on Women’s Wages and Working Conditions, in June 1917. She took on the role of chair, with Margaret Bondfield coming to increasing prominence within its ranks. Unions triumph in compelling the government to pay the “rate for the job” served to put the heart

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into other industries, outside munitions, and soon the Co-operative Employees, the NUJ and the transport unions were also pressing claims for women in war work.

At the same time, the National Union of General Workers secured an agreement from the Committee of Production, in August 1917, which laid down the framework for a minimum war wage in Manchester and the other industrial centres of Lancashire.

Local bargaining arrangements on behalf of unskilled and semi-skilled workers had already broken down in the face of inflation rates that rapidly stripped away any modest increment in wages and led to appeals by Thorne and Clynes to the Cabinet, which eventually led, in March 1917, to the first ever national flat rate increase; which offered proportionately greater benefits to the low paid. Further gains were won, in October 1917, when Thorne threatened to ballot his members on calling a national dispute if the unskilled were not comprehended within the pay claim for skilled workers. He was aided in this by the rise of a militant shop-stewards movement that often ran ahead of the union’s leadership and divided it over tactics.

Clynes, who had joined the Whitley Committee on Joint Industrial Councils, upon its formation by the coalition government in 1916, saw the unions eventually working in harness with the state. Partnership would replace confrontation – as both unions and employers had a stake in the nation –

and understandings could be reached over pay and conditions through a network of industrial councils. Thorne, on the other hand, was not persuaded that the “lamb could ever lie down with the lion”, and

The union’s Officers on a safety inspection of a shipyard, c.1924.

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forGinG another linK on the

1880 -1921

She bro ught trad e u nion ism to ma ny of the poo rest a nd mo st vul nera ble wom en a nd bettere d the ir live s.

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chain

M

ary MacArthur was the daughter of a prosperous Glasgow draper, and wanted for nothing in her early life. Erudite, well educated and possessing a powerful will to succeed; at fifteen she was keeping the accounts for the family firm and, in her spare time, writing articles for local newspapers and magazines.

Yet, on one occasion, in 1901, she got far more than she had bargained for, when, in her own words: “I went to a meeting [of the Shop Assistants Union] to write a skit on the proceedings. Going to scoff, I remained to pray. I became impressed with the truth and the meaning of the Labour Movement”.

Mary was soon ensconced as Chair of the Ayr branch of the union and enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence, initially, as the protégé of Margaret Bondfield. She was elected to the Executive of the Shop Assistants Union, in 1902, and to the post of General Secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, in 1903.

The Women’s Trade Union League had been founded in 1874, originally as a purely protective organisation which came, under Mary MacArthur’s leadership, to effectively promote trade unionism for women. She possessed considerable charisma and the

ability to inspire an audience, and those that met her and heard her speak – “the Dundee jute workers, the Paisley thread girls, the London tailoresses and telephonists” – were said to have “felt her passage like the breathe of a hopeful life”. She chose to explain the ethos behind trade unionism simply but graphically to the readership of her own monthly paper, The Woman Worker, in 1907; in terms of the metaphor of an old woman carrying a bundle of firewood.

“Each stick”, she wrote, “could easily have been broken separately, but united together the sticks protected each other and could not be broken. A trade union is like a bundle of sticks. The workers are bound together and have the strength of unity.

No employer can do as he likes with them.

They have the power of resistance. They can ask for an advance without fear. A worker who is not in a union is like a single stick.

She can easily be broken or bent to the will of her employer … She dare not ask for a ‘rise’. If she does she will be told, ‘Your place is outside the gate; there are plenty to take your place’. An employer can do without one worker. He cannot do without all his workers. If all the workers united in a union – as strong as the bundle of sticks – complain or ask for improved conditions,

the employer is bound to listen”.

Mary was convinced that the low level of wages was both the cause and the consequence of women’s lack of organisation in the workplace. One of the main problems then, as now, was continuity of membership but she became inspired by the example of the New Unions, in the 1890s, and saw a clear parallel between the success of the Gasworkers in recruiting unskilled and previously unorganised workers and her own campaign to unionise women working from home and in the “sweated trades”. The Women’s Trade Union League operated throughout different organisations, and recruited from different professions, trades and classes of worker.

However, in cutting across the recruiting grounds of other, established, unions it was denied affiliation to the TUC. a General union for Women Workers As a result, in 1906, she forged a number of struggling local unions into the National Federation of Women Workers; a general union that was “open to all women in unorganised trades or who were not admitted to their appropriate trade union”.

She became its President, in that year, and from 1908-21 served as General Secretary 131

of the union, spearheading a campaign to introduce a national minimum wage, that would apply equally to men and women.

It was this demand, made by some 400 women chain makers in Cradley Heath, that resulted in a lock-out by the management which precipitated the ten week strike in 1910 that gained Mary MacArthur her lasting fame.

She galvanised the workforce, organising daily marches past the works – which frequently culminated in the singing of the Marseillaise, then known as much as a revolutionary song as the French national anthem – co-ordinated boycotts that hit the bosses’ pockets and a publicity campaign in the local press that swung public sympathy round to support this marginal group of disenfranchised, and largely illiterate women, who worked a fifty-four hour week for less than a fifth of the average wage of their male counterparts. The strike ended in complete victory, with the granting of the minimum wage to the chain makers, and membership of the union at Cradley Heath swelled from the original Mary MacArthur before a meeting in September 1908. Spiritualism and Socialism were both working class pursuits, though with very different aims.

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forGinG another linK on the chain

core of 400, in August, to more than 1,700, in October. Men, as well as women, were inspired by the success of the strike, with boilermakers and ship builders following the path blazed by the chain makers in the following months.

The amalgamation & Promise unfulfilled The impact of the First World War shattered the unity of the Labour Movement and forced hard choices upon its leaders. Mary MacArthur was resolutely opposed to the conflict but, amid the vast changes in the employment market wrought by the war, – whereby women workers flooded into traditional male preserves – she felt it to be her duty to protect their rights at work.

She was appointed Secretary of the Ministry of Labour’s central committee on women’s employment, energetically organised women in the armaments industry, helped to improve conditions at the munitions works and consistently fought for “equal pay for equal work”.

However, after the armistice, her opposition to the waging of the war was held against her and was largely responsible for her defeat as the Labour Party candidate for Stourbridge, in the general election of December 1919.

The war had also changed the face of trade unionism, and placed new strains – born largely of success – upon the National Federation of Women Workers. Mary MacArthur had built up a strong nucleus of experienced women trade union officers to service the membership but the union itself suffered from competition from other combinations with members in the same categories of trades. As a consequence, she sought an amalgamation with the GMWU as a similar general union, that already had a large female membership, and was prepared to guarantee the “special machinery for the organisation of women and for the expression of their point of view as women trade unionists”.

The sudden death of her husband, William C. Anderson – who had been a considerable figure in his own right, as a Sheffield M.P. and Chairman of the Labour Party – hit Mary hard and deprived her of support when she needed it most. The historic merger with the GMWU, and the transformation of the Women’s Trade Union League into the Women’s Department of the TUC were both negotiated against the background of her battle with cancer. It was intended that she would take up the newly created position of Chief Woman Officer of

the GMWU after amalgamation with the National Federation of Women Workers but her cancer had already taken too fast a hold and she died at the turn of the new year, 1921. Her friend and colleague, Margaret Bondfield, considered that the amalgamation with the GMWU provided a fine and fitting coda to her career; for though dying young before she had chance to reach her full potential, she had proven herself a consistent and principled champion of women’s rights, who helped to give voice to the poorest and most disadvantaged of her sisters who, previously, had had none.

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while he was at times unnerved by the younger generation of radical shop stewards, he continued to see them as a more authentic expression of trade unionism than groups of appointed bureaucrats tucked away in industrial cabals. Wisely, he kept his own options – and those of his union – open.

When writing an earlier history of the union, H.A. Clegg considered that: “The end of the war thus found the general unions in a most favourable position. Far bigger than ever before, they had shown the greatest rate of growth of any unions during the war period. They had consolidated their positions in engineering, and to make good any loss of members which they might suffer in munitions they could rely on the new system of national bargaining now being developed over a wide range of peace-time industries and services”8.

However that was only part of the story.

The union may have grown numerically and financially, it may have won recognition from the state, organised greater numbers of women than ever before, gained a measure of sexual equality and secured modest rises in status and pay for unskilled workers on the ground: but it did not do so in a vacuum. It did so against a war that had destroyed vast numbers of the organised working class, conscripted to feed the meat A union demonstration in Bristol, in 1920, suddenly turned violent when demonstrators tried to storm the town hall.

grinder of the Western Front. Almost 900,000 had been killed and there were more than a million and a half seriously wounded, who would be a visible reminder – through blind ex-servicemen selling matches on street corners, or groups of amputees busking in ad hoc brass bands – for more than a generation of the cost of war. Will Thorne was approached to build a memorial to his union’s members who had joined the services and been killed in action, but his daughter, Edna, remembered: “What they had in mind was a stone monument but my father thought that the best way to honour the dead was to help the living. So he linked up with Leonard Lyle from the Sugar refinery and they put the money towards a hospital instead”9.

W. Shilleto, the District organiser for Leeds, expressed a greater disenchantment when he asked in the union’s journal: “When will a country fit for heroes arrive?

It was promised with all the eloquence that man could command … Men were called upon to sacrifice their positions, their work, their wives, families and homes, in order to have a better England and a brighter life to come back to. Many thousands lost their lives in this great sacrifice and many thousands have been crippled for life, but where … is the brighter and happier life for all the suffering and agony mankind has gone through. Every time … one has to pass the Employment Exchange, no matter where it is … one can always see large crowds of men and women queuing

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outside, but this is not the worst, for to see human poverty, misery and despair, one should go into any of our colliery areas. Here you will find it in its worst form.Young men in their thirties with hair growing grey, children without boots or shoes, half fed and half clothed. The women having to suffer, distracted as to how to make the miserable pittance called wages go the furthest … Why is it allowed to go on?

The reason is that finance and capitalism are

the governing factors in our industrial and social and political life”10. The Joint Industrial Committees had failed to deliver, many women workers were forced out of their jobs as soon as the conscripts were demobilised, and returning soldiers found that after all the sacrifices very little had changed on the shop floor.

The Great amalgamation Since its Congress in 1905, the Gasworkers’ had always stated that it wished to see all of the general unions amalgamated together in one body. It was a sensible objective but one which was never aggressively pursued until the impact of the war, the collapse in world trade after 1920, and the dissolution of the powerful “Triple Alliance” – between the miners, the railwaymen and transport unions – combined to force the general unions to begin again to act in concert. As the membership began to contract once more, the General Workers pursued two paths towards amalgamation; the first sought to pursue a merger with the powerful London dockers’ union; while the second sought amalgamation with the National Amalgamated Union of Labour and the Municipal Employers’ Association.

An alliance between the General Workers and the London dockers made enormous sense and promised much, as both unions had grown out of the New The first Labour Government of 1924: Ramsay MacDonald tips his hat, Will Thorne is at his right hand.

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the lion in Winter chaPter 4

Union movement of 1889-90, and possessed similar rule books and traditions. Moreover, their membership already worked side-byside, in the docks and in transport, and an amalgamation would give the new union it created an enormously strong bargaining hand across a range of inter-connecting industries. In short, it would become a dominant player at the TUC and be able to exercise real industrial power in the land.

A working agreement was established in 1919 but, with Ben Tillett looking to retire and the General Workers still possessing larger membership, it was clear that Thorne would have the upper hand, continue as General Secretary post-merger, and possess both a majority on the new Executive and control of the officer posts. Unsurprisingly, this did not sit well with Ernest Bevin, who had worked as the dockers’ National Organiser since 1914 and was widely considered as Tillett’s natural successor at the head of the union. If Thorne was by now the old lion of the trade union movement, then Bevin was its rising star – very bright, charismatic and an exceptionally able negotiator – who would soon eclipse his would-be master. It is hard to imagine these two conflicting egos working together and inhabiting the same political space; but it was to the detriment of the whole trade union movement that its two most brilliant sons – with the exception of Tom Mann – could not make common cause when it counted. In the event, Bevin dug in with his heels and did everything in his power

to derail the merger ballot. Thus, while the General Workers voted by a vast majority to accept the amalgamation, 59% of the dockers ended up abstaining from the vote, invalidating the legal basis for the merger.

In the Bristol district, which served as Bevin’s own fiefdom, voting was even lower with a meagre 27% turnout, and seemed to serve to support Clynes’ suspicions that the ballot had been deliberately scuppered.

Thorne failed to disguise his bitterness in his 1920 Congress Report when he wrote that the union’s time and energy had been thoroughly wasted in the venture and held Bevin to blame11. Within eighteen months, his rival had successfully welded together the Transport and General Workers’ Union out of the National Union of Dock Labourers and the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers’ Union, and kicked Tillett out of the way. Although the name would come from the inspiration of Jim Larkin – the leading Irish trade unionist – the TGWU would be very much Ernest Bevin’s creation and would come to dominate the face of British trade unionism for the rest of the century12. The clearness of the union’s vision, its powerful political machine and industrial identity would, in many respects, steal the thunder of both the General Workers’ Union and its successor, the GMWU. The cutting edge of trade unionism – and the representation of the semi-skilled – had slipped from Thorne’s grasp and would not be recovered by his union for many years to come. Ironically,

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though the old man would never have admitted it, Bevin had far more claim to have been Thorne’s successor – in terms of approach, vision, sheer guts and nerve – than Dukes and Williamson who eventually followed him.

If the amalgamation with the dockers had come to naught, then the General Workers still proved an attractive home for many of the smaller unions servicing unskilled and women workers. The Birmingham gasworkers Union, which for the thirty years of its existence had struck an independent path – and had advised electoral support for the Liberals – entered into negotiations with the General Workers and concluded an amalgamation in December 1920, which brought 40,000 new members into the union. Overnight, its membership served to dramatically increase the influence of Birmingham district within the General Workers and brought an additional M.P., Eldred Hallas – who had previously supported Lloyd George’s rump of the Liberal party – into both the union and the Labour fold13. The merger terms were generous, with the local union being promised it would keep its structures and benefits, unchanged, for at least a decade.

December 1920 was an auspicious month in the union’s history, as the National Federation of Women Workers also chose to amalgamate with the General Workers. The trebling of the number of unionized women over the war years – rising from approximately 433,679 in 1914

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to something in the region of 1,209,278 in 1918 – had seemed to render a separate women’s trade union obsolete. Just as significant, though, seems to have been the change in composition of the union’s officer corps during wartime, which saw a large number of working class women taking official positions for the first time and clashing with their middle class sisters who had founded and always assumed that they would lead the organisation. Even Mary MacArthur appears to have come under attack and she initiated merger talks with the General Workers Union largely, it seems, because of her close friendship with J.R. Clynes. Margaret Bondfield – still associated in the popular mind with her work with the Shop Assistants Union – was better equipped to weather the storms and the sense of inverted snobbery that held back MacArthur, who was undoubtedly a far more able and far-sighted leader. As a result, it was Bondfield who was the first woman to take a seat on the General Council of the TUC, as both Gertrude Tuckwell and Violet Markham were sidelined, and Mary MacArthur – who it seems had come to distrust Bondfield’s marked ambition – fell victim to cancer14. The amalgamation sadly proved to be her last great success and her premature death deprived the union that resulted of a brilliant fighter for women’s rights, who might not have sat so easily within Thorne’s Executive or have let the Women’s National Committee dwindle away to nothing after 1927. Without

knowing it, James Joseph Mallon – of the Anti-Sweating League – had written her epitaph, in 1906, when he described her “habit of passing everything through heroic moulds. She shares in historic councils and earthshaking debates, and sees world movements come to birth. Breathlessness is her dominant characteristic. She is always at top speed. She whirls from meeting to meeting, strike to strike, congress to congress; the street shouting behind the dust and rattle of her car”15.

Under the terms of the amalgamation that she had worked out, her union was promised a separate women’s “district” with its own elected committee, its own national women’s officer – a post which fell to Margaret Bondfield after her death – and its own team of women organisers. The committee was empowered “to consider wage questions, propaganda service and all matters affecting the interests of women, and to make recommendations … if necessary to the General Council of the Union”16. Though the union would continue to make great play of its commitment to women’s rights, the women’s section never seemed to fulfil its deeply progressive potential. This was in part due to its declining membership – as women workers were hit even harder than their male counterparts by unemployment as the 1920s wore on – and in part to the success of Margaret Bondfield’s parliamentary career, which effectively removed her from the affairs of the union for much of the

“ The energy

the lion in Winter chaPter 4

which has too often been spent by the seperate unions

in striving against each other will be employed to the advantage of all

”

time. As a consequence, the special women’s “district” and branches were integrated into the union’s existing geographical districts and the women’s committee, itself, was disbanded – as we have already seen – in 1927. Only Bondfield’s threat to resign from the union prompted the union’s Executive to rethink their position and confirm her authority over all matters touching women.

While this study in brinkmanship ceded more power to Bondfield, it only served to bolster her own authority without helping to further the opportunities of women, in general, throughout the union. Though, as Margaret Bondfield wrote, “our union is unique in its special provisions to enable the women members to retain their membership after marriage”, used the Joint Industrial Councils to maintain wages at 100% above their pre-war levels and resisted attempts of employers to raise the threshold for an adult wage from 18 to 21: Mary MacArthur’s vision of a major programme of educational and political work among industrial women seems to

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have been lost somewhere along the way17.

What training there was appears to have been of a fairly low and functional level.

This said, there were remarkable successes – based largely upon individual initiatives – with Mrs. Cohen, a union stalwart, being elected as district organiser in Leeds in the face of male competition.

The main impetus towards amalgamation between the general unions continued to come from falling membership rolls. Thorne’s General Workers’ Union lost 55% of its membership – falling from 490,000 to 221,000 – in the three years from 1920-23.

Unemployment had risen to 20% of the insured population by the end of April 1921, prices tumbled and wages followed them in a downward spiral. At the same time, the payment of unemployment benefit to members was threatening to ruin the union’s finances. In stark contrast to the union’s founding spirit, a whole range of membership benefits – including sickness, burial and unemployment – had been adopted since the early 1900s, as a means of competing with other unions and attracting new members. However, this proved to be something of a poisoned chalice as, by 1921, total income was running at £476,000 per annum but unemployment benefit alone was costing the union more than £524,000 a year. The situation could not be allowed to continue without bankrupting the union and as a result the payments were suspended at a special Congress18.

Other general unions were similarly

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driven to the brink. In the same period, the Municipal Employees’ Association fell from 65,000 members to 41,000 – a 37% loss – and the National Amalgamated Union of Labour saw a fall from 143,000 to just 53,000, a reduction of 63%. The Workers’ Union – which had enjoyed rapid growth in the munitions industries during the Great War – suffered worst of all, falling from 450,000 members to just 140,000, registering a crippling loss of 69%19. If general unionism was to survive at all, then it needed to combine its forces during a period of enormous strain.Yet, the four-way merger – though it produced significant results – was not destined to run smoothly. In part, this was due to the

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different dominant cultures within the constituent unions but also it was heavily conditioned by their responses to the recession, and their ability to retain and service membership.

The Workers’ Union came into the merger talks with roughly the same levels of membership, but continued to hemorrhage its membership as the talks wore on. Its structure was top heavy with a large number of well-salaried officers and its policies orientated towards providing generous benefits to its members in their time of difficulty. Unlike the General Workers’ Union, power was heavily centralised and the regions largely subordinated to the policy decisions of

Charles Duncan, its General Secretary, and John Beard, its President. If this did not make for an easy fit with Thorne’s union, then its ethos clashed fundamentally with that of the National Amalgamated Union of Labour (NAUL).

The NAUL had originally been regionally based, drawing its membership from semi-skilled shipyard workers in Tyneside, Sunderland and Hartlepool. By the early 1900s it had expanded into the docks along the Clyde, Mersey and Lagan and had recruited well among the surface workers of the Yorkshire coalfield. It expanded rapidly during the war years but then experienced the same story of similarly rapid contraction post-1920 as the other general unions. However, unlike the Workers’ Union, it was lay member and activist led, and deeply suspicious of career officers of the stamp of Duncan and Beard.

Worse still, J.N. Bell – its General Secretary – openly accused the Workers’ Union of having attempted to poach his membership.

The Municipal Employees’ Association (MEA) was also regionally based, having been formed from a number of small London unions, which had grown up since the mid-1880s.The union was founded in 1894 and was confined wholly to the capital until 1900, when its membership numbered no more than 3,000. However, a drive for expansion led to the appointment of Richard Davies, Albert Winfield and Peter Tevenan as organisers in order to grow the union throughout the provinces. Despite

Mass meeting of miners and surface workers, General Strike, May 1926.

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the BoilerMaKer

1890 -1960

De scribed as the “fle sh and blood of the British workin g cla ss�, he was the greatest lead er of the Com mu nist Party and a firm trad e unionist.

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h

arry Pollitt was born in the village of Droylsden, outside Manchester, in November 1890. He was the son of a blacksmith and a cotton weaver, who was raised with stories of the Chartists told around the fireside. His little sister, Winnie, a beautiful child and family favourite died, aged only two, and this shattering tragedy was always attributed

by Harry to the poor conditions in which they lived.

He started work, at a cotton mill, at the age of twelve, but through the influence of his uncle – William Kidd, a veteran trade unionist who had joined the boilermakers’ society as far back as 1844 – he was apprenticed as a plater and “determined to become as good a craftsman as possible”.

Later, he would come to describe his initiation into the Boilermakers’ Society as one of the defining “rites of passage” that made his life worthwhile. Union membership was a privilege as well as a right, and then meant far more than just the possession of a plastic membership card.

“The youngster”, he wrote, “feeling rather awed and overcome, being taken in and introduced by one of the older skilled men, who had ‘fathered’ him in the factory, and hearing the official welcome of the trade

union branch read out to him by the Chairman, and feeling that he was now one with all the men who were strong and skilled, that in future he would stand sideby-side with them in their life at the branch”.

In November 1912, Harry completed his apprenticeship and found work at the Gorton locomotive works, in Manchester, and subsequently in the Barrow shipyards.

He led a major strike in the Southampton shipyard, in 1915, which saw him gain the reputation as an industrial militant and the gift of a silver watch, proudly inscribed

Harry Pollitt (second from right) with his school pals from Droylsden.

with the thanks of his members, which he kept proudly until his dying day.

Yet, his life turned upon the Russian Revolution. His first reaction to the fall of the Tsar was: “The workers have done it at last!”. He “pounced on everything that dealt with the Russian Revolution, and the knowledge that workers like me and all those around me had won power, had defeated the boss class, kept me in a 143

growing state of enthusiasm”. Those were heady and empowering days for a young man who had read Marx but never seen before his ideas put into practical action.

He was union organiser in the Thames basin, in 1918-19, and was elected as London District Secretary of the Boilermakers’ Society, taking office on 1 January 1919.

By then, he had transferred to the No.11 London Boilermakers Branch, with which he remained for the rest of his career, and was immediately pitched into a bitter five week strike of London shipyard workers.

As civil war raged in Russia, and the Western powers sent in their own armies in order to dismember an already weakened state, Pollitt became the National Organiser of the Hands off Russia movement and was sacked for refusing to load munitions destined for the Polish military. “We became frantic”, he recalled, “with the thought that we were letting our Russian comrades down” and, as tanks, guns and aeroplanes mounted up on the dockside, in May 1920, he led the London dockers in rendering a key supply ship, The Jolly George, unseaworthy. The coal hewers, thanks to Pollitt’s direct appeals, joined with the dockers and, after just five days of direct action, the entire government strategy 144

for the rearmament of Poland and the destruction of the young Soviet state, lay in tatters. The ships were unloaded but Harry moved fast to ensure that his victory was consolidated, spurring both the TUC and the Labour Party to adopt a resolution, passed on 9 August 1920, that “warns the Government that the whole industrial power of the organised workers will be used to defeat this war”. The government, faced by a united Labour Movement and fearing the spread of industrial unrest at home, backed down and the tide of the war began to turn in favour of the first workers’ state.

Arrested for incitement to mutiny, along with almost every other leader of the Communist Party before the outbreak of the General Strike, he expressed his agony in sitting inactive “in Wandsworth prison while millions of workers were on the streets in the greatest demonstrations of working class solidarity this country has ever seen”. This pre-emptive move by the authorities removed a whole tier of organisation and expertise that, while it could not have reversed the course of the strike on its own, would have certainly ensured that it would have been fought with far greater resolution and thought.

Throughout this period, Harry was

elected, by large majorities, to represent the Boilermakers’ Society as a delegate to every Labour Party Conference and at TUC Congress between 1921-27, and consistently campaigned for the affiliation of the Communists to the Labour Party. In this, he found himself strongly opposed by trade union leaders such as J.R. Clynes, Charles Dukes and Margaret Bondfield; and it was they who won the day.

At the same time, his own union was seeking ways to contain his growing political influence and popularity among the rank-and-file. A well-funded campaign to prevent his election as a delegate to the 1927 National Conference failed and so, in February 1928, the Right-wing Executive of the Boilermakers’ Society brought in bans and proscriptions in order to prevent Communists from standing for election as delegates to the Labour Party and the TUC. This was followed by a raft of measures aimed at banning known Communists from holding office in the union.

Although Pollitt was the intended victim and the most prominent casualty of these stratagems, he chose to refuse two options that now presented themselves to him. He was offered “high office” in the unions and a “great future” in the Labour Party, if only

the BoilerMaKer

he would renounce his membership of the Communist Party. Conversely, his own comrades counselled him to resign the membership of his own union and to concentrate on forming a rival body, within the Red International of trade unions.

In declining both opportunist routes to easy advancement, he demonstrated his integrity and commitment to the core values of trade unionism. These, he believed, stemmed from “generations of craftsmanship, intelligence, initiative and organising ability”, and from men and women who came “from the same stock as the Chartists, those who were the first in the world to win the vote, to strike, to speak freely and to publish their own literature.

They were the first to form trade unions and their own political and co-operative organisations”.

After acting as part of the honour guard at Lenin’s funeral, in 1924, he served as the General Secretary of the trade union National Minority Movement until 1929, when he became General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Even then, he felt he “was looked upon more as a militant trade unionist than as a Communist”.Yet, his tenure as General Secretary, from 1929-56, marked the zenith

of Communist Party influence in the industrial, political and cultural life of Britain. Its successes owed more than a little to his own ability as an orator and organiser, his bluff good humour and his clear-sighted appraisal of the art of politics.

After his death, in 1960, his role in blockading The Jolly George, was recognised by the Soviet government which named a freighter in his honour. However, what meant most to him – beyond all honours – was the belief that when: “Socialism and Socialist understanding are married to the mass Labour Movement, when theory is wed with practice, then the British Labour Movement will prove invincible”.

“This”, he wrote, “is the dream and the aim which all the pioneers of our Labour Movement have struggled to make real. This is the ‘gleam’ which … has inspired them to go to the street corners and market places to speak to the mere handful, has given them eloquence and burning fire to talk to their mates in the workshops and homes, and the certainty which has enabled them to endure crushing poverty and victimisation and made persecution easier to bear, which has steeled them to break down barrier after barrier and build up working class organisation and power”.

Pollitt addressing the crowds in Trafalgar Square at the high point of the Communist Party’s electoral success in the 1940s.

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The General Strike, May 1926, as painted by Cliff Rowe. This superlative mural was commissioned by Walter Stevens, for the ETU, then the most progressive post-war union.

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what seem to have been bitter internal disagreements and infighting, Richard Davies eventually triumphed as General Secretary, in 1906, only to step down five years later in order to pursue a promising business career. Peter Tevenan won the election to succeed him and, despite feeling disadvantaged by his rudimentary education, proved a tenacious and highly competent leader, who had seen membership of his union peak post-war at just under 70,000. As there were few strikes in local government during this period, the union could afford to keep its subscriptions low but it clashed with both the NAUL and Gasworkers and General Workers’ Union over recruitment, and even disaffiliated from both the TUC and Labour Party over the issue.

The amalgamation hinged upon the composition of the new Executive Council;

with the Workers’ Union insisting upon an allocation of appointed places based on proportional representation, and the NAUL demanding that the supreme authority should be an elective Congress. Thorne and the General Workers’ decided, when the vote was called, to back the NAUL’s far more open and democratic position but it was not this which proved to be the dealbreaker for the Workers’ Union. Rather, it was the union’s collapsing membership that caused Duncan and Beard to rethink their position within the merger. They had entered the talks as a roughly equal partner but by the end of 1921 were faced with the position of being very junior partners.

Had their calls for proportional representation been accepted, their position on the Executive would have been even more humiliating. They pulled out of talks in February 1922, though the other three parties resolved to continue their negotiations without them.

Ballot papers were sent out to the members of the General Workers, NAUL, and MEA in the autumn of 1922, together with a statement from the joint Executives which urged acceptance of the merger on the grounds that: “Each union has a power of its own, but the merging of the three unions into one will increase that power.

It is the natural development of the principles of organisation upon which each union is founded. Economy, both of effort and expense, will follow amalgamation. The energy which has too often been spent by

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the separate unions in striving against each other will be employed to the advantage of all”20. The last sentence, in particular, struck home among beleaguered trade unionists who wished to conserve all that they had so recently gained and consequently substantial majorities were gained across each of the three unions concerned.

The new union came into being on 1 July 1924 under the title of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (GMWU), after Peter Tevenan insisted upon the inclusion of “Municipal” as a pre-condition to merger.Yet, if Thorne and his colleagues gave on this issue, they yielded precious little else. Without the counterbalance of the Workers’ Union, as originally envisaged, the General Workers dwarfed their merger partners. It was clear from the outset that Thorne and Clynes would retain their positions as, respectively, General Secretary and President; and the only possible rival to their authority, J.N. Bell of the NAUL was no longer able to influence affairs, having died in December 1922, just a few weeks after he had won the seat of Newcastle East, in the general election. The division of power in the regions was similarly one-sided. There were to be twelve districts, which for the most part following the boundaries of the old districts laid out by the Gasworkers and General Workers’ union. Ireland proved uncontentious as Thorne’s union had made few inroads there after 1890 and lost many of its gains in Cork and Dublin after the

partition of 1922. By way of contrast, the NAUL had organised strongly in Belfast, which it considered to be one of its major centres, and so its existing official delegate, Sam Bradley, continued in office. In Sheffield, the NAUL was also far stronger than the General Workers and so A. J. Bailey remained in charge of a district that he had worked long and hard to develop. In Lancashire, however, there was a real fight for control, as the elder Thomas Williamson – the NAUL official delegate – attempted to carve out his own Liverpool district from Lancashire. Unsurprisingly, this enraged Fleming Eccles, the district secretary of the General Workers’ Union, who was otherwise all-powerful within his Lancashire district. In the end, the matter was settled by a ballot of the Liverpool branches which resulted in a strong showing for the NAUL and saw Liverpool confirmed as a separate district, with Williamson in charge.

The nine remaining district secretaries all came from the ranks of the General Workers’ Union. Even though the North East was traditionally the home of the National Amalgamated Union of Labour, its membership – outside the shipyards – was now swamped by the Northern District of the General Workers’ Union, which numbered more than 20,000. As a consequence and, perhaps, a little unexpectedly, the post of secretary went to Thorne’s man, Hugh Lynas, who enjoyed a considerable reputation as an organiser.

In similar fashion, John McKenzie – who

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had been sent to recruit in Scotland 13 years before – was the undisputed choice for the Amalgamated Scottish district, while Tom Hurley remained in charge of Birmingham; Arthur Hayday held the Midlands; S.J. Wright continued in London; W.E. Hopkins in South Wales; Walter Wood in Leeds; Fleming Eccles in a smaller Lancashire district; and R.H. Farrer on the East Coast.

As can be judged, the Municipal Employees appeared to have fared badly through this arrangement. With their membership widely spread across the country they had no claim for a majority in even one district, and they could do little but attempt to preserve an element of autonomy within the new union, which they did through the continued presence of Peter Tevenan as an Assistant General Secretary in the GMWU, until his retirement in 1933. All three national officers of the General Workers’ Union – Will Sherwood, Jack Jones and Margaret Bondfield – retained their posts after the amalgamation – while the remaining officers of the three unions were now reduced to a total of 114, by successive economy campaigns and were classed as district organisers or temporary organisers, attached to the twelve districts.

In terms of its rule book and structure, the new GMWU also closely resembled the old General Workers’ Union. Authority was vested in a biennial Congress – which after 1945 would become annual once again –

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while between Congresses a General Council would be chosen to run the union, comprising a lay member majority, as a concession to the NAUL. The General Council elected a committee of five district secretaries and five lay representatives, who served alongside the General Secretary and President as an Executive. As a consequence, by 1924, the union had a form of governance that would survive – relatively untouched and unchallenged – to lay the foundations of the constitution of the modern GMB. from Marx to the Market One of the side-effects of the amalgamations of the early 1920s was to further remove the union from the early radicalism of the Gasworkers, through the influx of members who, especially in the case of the Birmingham union and the MEA, hailed from very different political backgrounds. This explains, in part, why the first British union to be Marxist led, in 1889, was actively anti-Communist, by 1927, when bans and proscriptions began to be introduced with the specific aim of prohibiting party members from standing for union office.

Opposition to the party began to coalesce after the establishment of the National Minority Movement, in 1923, which had been intended to act as the British section of the Red International of Labour Unions. Though the Minority Movement had comparatively little success

aPril 1928

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ten Ways to in april 1928 the union journal published this small article. in many ways, the traits it lists are as applicable now as then: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10

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in winning control of trade unions – with only two small breakaway unions, the Mineworkers of Scotland, based around the Fife coalfield, and the United Clothing Workers, based predominantly in the East End among the thriving Jewish community, following its lead – it possessed a charismatic secretary, in the form of the Boilermakers’ Harry Pollitt, and was a true grassroots organisation, popular among young militants inspired by the Russian Revolution.

Its growing influence inside the GMWU was checked at the union’s Congress, in 1926, when a leadership sponsored motion against the Minority Movement was carried by a crushing margin of 85 votes to 8.

Thereafter, the union’s journal began running virulently anti-Communist articles on a regular basis and it was made increasingly clear that party membership was not conducive to aspirations of any kind of career as a union official21. Though London district remained a bastion of the Left, with the old SDF influence having given away almost entirely to the Communist Party after the early 1920s, Thorne’s attitude towards it was at best ambivalent – with something of the air of a disapproving uncle, who had witnessed and grown out of such behaviour long ago – and at worst openly hostile. At the height of the Russian Civil War, when workers on Clydeside under John MacLean and Willie Gallacher had sought to found their own Soviets and machine gun nests had been set up by the army in order to bring Glasgow

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back to heel, Thorne had written an introduction to a scaremongering pamphlet decrying Lenin’s “anarchical creed”. It was, perhaps, the most intemperate column that he ever produced warning trade unionists that: “The leading men of the Bolshevik movement in this country are out for the overthrow of things as they are, by physical force, as soon as they feel confident that they have a good number of the rank and file of the wage earners behind them.

I want to warn the wage earners – men and women of my own class – against being associated with such people, because I know that their tactics cannot remedy the economic and industrial injustices under which the industrial workers are suffering. They can be rectified by Social-Democratic education, scientific organisation in the trade union movement, and by using political powers to that end”22.

Yet, unlike Clynes, Bondfield and Dukes, he was not an unthinking, knee-jerk antiCommunist. Thorne was keen at this time to establish himself as an anti-Bolshevik Marxist but as the USSR stabilised itself, in the wake of the Civil War, he seems to have moderated his opinions – particularly about Lenin who he had briefly met in 1917 – and had come to admire the spirit of the Red Army, when it entered the Second World War as Britain’s ally in 1941.

This said, while Communism may have come to resemble in his eyes a viable and indeed progressive system of governance for the Russians; it certainly would not do

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for him at home. Initially, he had ignored the growth of Communism in the London district but when he began to equate it with dissent aimed at his own authority and at redrawing the political orientation of his own union – and by now he did regard it as his own union – he acted decisively to root it out.

Thus, at the amalgamation conference of the GMWU, A.P. Borgia – one of London district’s founder members, who had stood

by Thorne through thick and thin – was permitted to table a series of motions that would have committed the union to joining the new Red International of trade unions.

In February 1925, the union’s Executive were still prepared to back calls for the affiliation of the Communist Party to the Labour Party. However, towards the end of 1925 circulars were sent out from Head Office, canvassing the District Secretaries on their opinions about the Minority Movement, and its affiliation to local trades councils, and asking them to report back their findings to the National Executive.

Thorne had already made his own view clear that: “The methods adopted by the unauthorised shop stewards movement in the different parts of the country must be rigorously suppressed, and the properly appointed shop stewards and works committees in all factories and workshops must be elected instead. By that method industrial and economic improvements can be brought about with the greatest benefit and the least harm to all”23. As a result GMWU branches were instructed to

disaffiliate from any trades council that recognised the Minority Movement and not to support Communist candidates at municipal or parliamentary elections.

However, the Glasgow No.23 branch chose to protest at the decision and a number of branches continued to lend their support to the Glasgow Trades Council. The Executive was in no mood to be challenged and stepped in to assert its authority, breaking the previously unwritten code guaranteeing

Margaret Bondfield (on the far right of the picture) with her women colleagues on the Labour benches.

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branch autonomy, and making it clear that in the future individual branches would have no right to take independent action.

What appears to have further hardened attitudes on the Executive was the temerity of London district, and by extension the Minority Movement, to stand a candidate to challenge for the posts of general secretary and president in 1926. Thorne took it as an act of lese-majesty, while Clynes – who in the event was returned to office by an overwhelming margin of 204,257 votes, to just 22,770 for his challenger, C.J. Moody from London district – was incandescent. “It was”, he declared, “the first time in more than thirty-five years service that the General Secretary and President had been opposed” and considered that, in the aftermath of the General Strike, it was part of a new and deplorable “tendency to organise opposition to existing officials on grounds other than those relative to their duties and the general discharge of them”24.

The first part of his statement was simply not true, as stalking horse candidates had stood against both himself and Thorne on several occasions since the 1890s, the last being in 1922 during the run-up to the great amalgamation. The difference this time, as acknowledged in the second part of his speech to Congress, was that dissent at the behaviour of powerful and increasingly unaccountable officers was now open, organised and Communist led. The simple solution, Clynes decided – in what with the benefit of hindsight looks like a massive

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overreaction – was to prevent further elections in the union and then to ban the Communist Party altogether.

Accordingly, the Leeds district moved a motion at the 1926 Congress that promised to give officers permanent tenure once elected, and after they had fulfilled a brief probationary period. This was carried on the floor of Congress by a margin of 62 votes for, to 23 against. Those looking for a career in the union now had the prospect of a job for life and the measure had the effect of transforming the whole culture of the union and of, eventually, during the 1940s60s bleeding it dry of democracy. Moreover, while the General Secretary and President had previously to stand for re-election every two years – though this had been no more than a formality – they were now effectively confirmed in office until death or retirement overtook them. Even H.A. Clegg, the union’s official historian under Tom Williamson and Jack Cooper, was unimpressed and wrote that “the consequence was that, if they gave two years’ satisfactory service, ‘temporary’ or ‘appointed’ officers were allowed to run for a permanent post. The branches could, if they wished, nominate other members for the job, but so great is the advantage of the official candidate that not one has lost an election held under this system; and today [i.e. 1964] the elections are more and more left uncontested”25.

However, London district and a number of Glasgow branches, rooted in “Red

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Shipbuilding was at the core of national prosperity in the inter-war years.

The merger between the GMWU and Boilermakers, in 1982, would eventually bring the two halves of the industrial workforce together.

Clydeside”, remained troublesome. In November 1927, the union forbade its members from attending meetings organised by the Minority Movement and demanded that a number of officers from London district who had attended just such a conference should swear an oath renouncing involvement with the Communist Party and pledging their “loyalty to the Union and its policies”. On the General Council only C.J. Moody voted against the decision and, unsurprisingly, found himself isolated and living on borrowed time in the union. In

February 1928, several London branches disobeyed the ruling and elected delegates to attend a Minority Movement conference and the Executive struck, suspending five branches, their branch officers, and disqualifying six members of the district council, including Moody himself. The Lancashire district – now under the control of Charles Dukes after the death of Fleming Eccles – followed where the leadership led, initiating a purge and moving a successful motion to compel all district council members to sign a document denying

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Women increasingly filled the ranks of general labourers, but often with poorer conditions and pay than their male counterparts.

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membership of both the Communist Party and its allied Minority Movement. The success and virulence of the clampdown in Lancashire was, according to Henry Pelling, largely attributable to the strength of Irish Roman Catholicism within the membership. Henceforth, though members “had the right to be a member of the Communist Party or the National Minority Movement and also a member of the Union … such person could not hold any

official position in the Organisation”26.

Unsurprisingly, by the time of the 1928 Congress the remaining Communist Party members in the union were beleaguered and isolated, permitting Charles Dukes to crow that: “The most outstanding feature of the decisions [of that Congress] was the unanimity with which the inspired resolutions of the Communist and Minority influences were either withdrawn or defeated”27. While a fraternal delegate from the German social Democrat Party chose to ignore the rise of fascism in his homeland and confined himself to condemning the growth of Communism in the unions; Congress decided that it was “to be in the best interest of the Union that the Communist Party, National Minority and associated bodies should have no scope within the Union to pursue a policy which would injure the organisation” and that “a member of the Communist Party, owing allegiance to that body, cannot honestly represent the Union and must not be allowed to use a branch for other than Union service”28.

Nature, however, abhors a vacuum and if the union was prepared to jettison its tradition of industrial struggle new attitudes towards trade unionism had to fill its place.

On the face of things, the union’s political strategy was yielding remarkable results.

By 1929, GMWU members sat on 24 County Councils, 158 municipal corporations, 52 Boards of Guardians – to administer the Poor Law – and 91 rural

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district councils. Its electoral strength was largely concentrated in London, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool and Birmingham, with a total of 325 union members serving as elected representatives in local government, with one serving mayor, seven former mayors and three former lord mayors29.

At the apex of its political structure, the union could boast six sitting M.P.s, namely: Will Thorne for Plaistow; J.R. Clynes for Miles Platting in Manchester; Jack Jones for Silvertown; Arthur Hayday for West Nottingham; Charles Dukes for Warrington; and Margaret Bondfield for Wallsend. In addition, the union had stood two unsuccessful candidates that year,W.Windsor in North-East Bethnal Green and J.Williams in Macclesfield.

Clynes had briefly led the Labour Party, after the First World War, and was effectively the party’s deputy leader throughout the 1920s; while Margaret Bondfield had become the first woman cabinet minister in the 1924 Labour Government.

The path to legislative change and working class political power, laid out by Thorne, Hyndman and Eleanor Marx back in the early 1890s, had born extraordinary fruit. The “Party of Labour” that they had dreamed of was a reality; the mechanisms were in place, and the unions had been won over to Socialism to a degree that would have seemed inconceivable when the Gasworkers’ first organised in the face of the craft unions and Labour-Liberal pacts.

However, while the form had been achieved, the original substance had not. The party was

reformist, rather than revolutionary, and its overtly Marxist elements had been diluted or discarded early on. The same was increasingly true of the GMWU, which in the days of the Gasworkers union had been making the political running and shaping the parameters of debate, but which now was now taking a passive role, content to confine itself to “bread and butter” issues while leaving policy to the Parliamentary Labour Party.

It fitted with an organisation that was increasingly run on a top down model, from both the regions and the centre and where, after 1926, enthusiasm and initiative – on the part of both individual members and branches – were increasingly to be feared and distrusted. Thorne’s own politics had atrophied – which was perhaps not too surprising or deserving of censure when we consider that he was now in his early seventies – but Clynes and Bondfield, and more surprisingly Dukes – considering his youthful attachment to pacifism and forms of direct action that verged on anarchism – all had the makings of machine politicians. Not overly blessed with imagination, all three embraced “moderation”, compromise and the search for political consensus, which sprang from their involvement with Whitley’s wartime Joint Industrial Committees and found its expression through a movement known as Mondism – taking its name from the wealthy industrialist Sir Alfred Mond, who brokered talks with the TUC in 1928-29 – that in many ways prefigured the Blairite

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the leader of the laBour Par

1869 -1949

From La nca shire mill ha nd to Mi nist er, at the hea rt of the British Em pire in Wh iteh all, he was a lea din g force in the u nion for alm ost six decade s...

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ty

t

hough perhaps not a household name today, J.R. Clynes was President of the union from 1912-37, Leader of the Labour Party 1921-22, and Deputy Leader 1918-21 and 1922-31.

Like many of the union’s early leadership, Clynes came from an Irish background. His father having been evicted from the tenancy of his farm, in 1851, and driven off the land, swelled the ranks of Lancashire proletariat, taking work as a labourer for Oldham Council.

His son – John Robert, always known as “J.R.” – was born in Oldham, one of seven children, and came to consider himself “half Irish and wholly Lancastrian”. A slight, frail figure, on account of being undernourished as a child, he started work in a cotton mill shortly after his tenth birthday as a half-time “piecer”, repairing the broken threads under the looms. He left school two years later, with very few regrets and a lasting dislike of the parish priest who regularly beat him.

Working full-time at the mill, though “very, very young then”, he found “the noise, the bustle, and the mystery of the machinery constituted all that was brightest in my life”.

Almost entirely self-educated, through

the local Co-operative Society Library, he became politicised through contact with the Irish National League and greatly influenced by Fenianism, he organised and campaigned for home rule for Ireland.

Under the guise of “Piecer”, he also started writing letters to, and later a column for, the Oldham newspapers. Homespun but

Clynes is centre stage as President of the Union c.1936, flanked by Charles Dukes and George Lansbury. Margaret Bondfield is on the left of the picture. Will Thorne still aims to be the power behind the throne.

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On a workplace inspection: the Home Secretary inspects the dangerous chimneys of a halfbuilt Battersea Power Station.

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nevertheless incisive, his articles won him a local following which served as a useful platform when he moved to found a branch of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers in the town.

By that time, his Fenianism had been overlaid – complemented rather than supplanted – by the Marxism of the SDF. Will Thorne quickly came to hear of his endeavours “as an active and very willing voluntary worker for our cause, long before he became a paid official of the union”.

However, Thorne was surprised by their first encounter, in 1891, at a street corner meeting in Bolton. “There was a crowd all right”, Thorne later wrote, “but to my amazement it was gathered about a mere slip of a chap who seemed hardly more than a school boy … I … pushed my way into the inner ring, with the intention of whiling away time listening to the youngster until ‘Piecer’ might put in his appearance. Having come to be mildly amused, I remained to be amazed, when, after three-quarters of an hour’s dissertation from the stripling, I was just deciding to myself that he knew even more about Lancashire’s industrial troubles than I did myself – a big enough concession for the Will Thorne of those days, I can assure you

the leader of the laBour Party

– the cheers of the crowd disclosed to me the speaker’s identity and saved for me the last remnant of my vanity”.

Thorne immediately offered him a position as an organiser for the union, which at a stroke transformed his life and opportunities, and afforded him the financial stability to wed his long-time sweetheart. “I had no office or staff, and did all the work myself ”, Clynes later recalled, “I addressed meetings which I had previously organised, distributed handbills at street corners, went all over the country speaking to builders, , umbrella stick makers and others. In each case, I had to study their trade thoroughly before speaking, as they were very quick to detect the weaknesses of an orator who did not know the technique of the trade whose members he was addressing”.

The trade union-labour Party link By 1895, he was serving as the secretary of the Lancashire area, laying many of the foundations of its later strength, and was elected President of the union in 1912.

Yet, parliamentary politics would increasingly come to dominate his horizons.

He attended the foundation conference of the Independent Labour Party in 1893; was

a delegate to the Congress of the Second International in Zurich later in that year, alongside Thorne, and attended the foundation meeting of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. He would serve on the Labour Party’s National Executive from 1904-1939; and was elected M.P. for Manchester North-East in 1906 and held the seat (which by that time had become Miles Platting) until 1931, and then again from 1935 until his retirement in 1945.

Clynes was one of the few senior Independent Labour Party figures who whole-heartedly supported the First World War, joining the Munition Workers’ Health Committee, in 1915, before taking charge of food regulation from 1917-18. In this capacity, he did much to prevent starvation in Britain during the war years and clamped down upon corruption and speculation of foodstuffs.

After the 1918 general election, he became deputy leader of the Labour Party and served as Party leader from 1921-22.

He led Labour in the 1922 general election, organising the campaign, and seeing the party gain 67 seats, bringing its total at Westminster to 142. This proved to be the breakthrough the party had long sought, confirming it as the major opposition to the Conservatives

and a serious contender for power.

However, in the subsequent leadership election, he was narrowly defeated by Ramsay MacDonald, by 56 votes to 61.

This must have come as a bitter and unexpected blow. Nonetheless, he served under MacDonald as Vice Chairman from 1922-1931.

In the first Labour Government of 1924, Clynes served as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Leader of the Commons. He was Home Secretary in the second Labour Government of 1929-31, and focused his attentions upon reforming the prison service, and improving health and safety at work, and factory conditions.

He was urged to stand for the leadership again, after MacDonald’s defection in 1935, but declined, correctly holding that the torch should pass to a new generation.

His wife’s injuries, sustained during in air raid in the Second World War, necessitated his gradual withdrawal from public life.

Able, quietly authoritative, always considered and increasingly cautious; his move from revolutionary socialism to a brand of reformist Social Democracy, both accurately mirrored and consistently informed the development of the whole union through the inter-war years.

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Workers’ playtime: the May Day issue of the union’s Journal, 1933.

“third way” to partnership and an end to confrontation between the unions and business. National, as opposed to class, interests was now judged to be the order of the day.

Clynes and Dukes gave their enthusiastic backing for the “Peace in Industry Conference” and, at the union’s own Congress in Keswick, in 1928, Clynes outlined his new vision that: “Industrial peace, consistent with industrial righteousness and justice, would be a blessing to the wage earners of Britain.

It is the business of Trade Union leaders to reconcile rival claims and adjust recurring differences in a manner to avert conflicts which usually involve both sides in some form of loss”30. It was now, he added, “the business of Trade Union leaders to reconcile rival claims and adjust recurring differences

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in a manner to avert conflicts which usually involve both sides in some form of loss.

To arrange peace terms, conference is indispensable”31. Thorne, to his credit, was far more sceptical about the idea of industrial peace and saw the union’s embrace of Mondism as a disastrous development as it meant negotiating from a position of abject weakness32. However, he confined his criticism to a few gruff comments from the sidelines and seemed now to lack the energy or a suitably robust alternative to prevent Clynes and Dukes from making the running on matters of policy. The desire for compromise, the embrace of market economics and the relative industrial quiescence demanded

by Mondism was clearly a product of the defeat suffered by trade unionism in the General Strike and by the realisation of the Movement’s leaders of the limitations of their power.Yet, the GMWU had shown exactly how far it had moved away from its early days as a fighting union, prepared to engage in civil disobedience and direct action, in order to overthrow the existing political and economic system. When the General Strike broke out, the union’s leadership seemed like so many rabbits caught in the headlights of an oncoming juggernaut driven by the state, seeking to place limits on the militancy of the rankand-file, and doing all they could to find the swiftest possible resolution to the dispute, even if it was not to their own advantage.

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The General strike The GMWU would not have been so unprepared for the fight if it had accepted Ernest Bevin’s plans for a new industrial alliance, in 1924. This would have created a basis for unity and for the coming fight, replacing the old “Triple Alliance” with a new force – including the general, engineering and electrical unions alongside the railwaymen, miners and transport workers – that was capable of bringing the country to a complete standstill in the event of a show-down with government.

Once action was called, the Executive of the alliance was to be given total authority for the waging and winning of the strike.

This produced significant results when, on “Red Friday”- 31st July 1925 – the date of a projected general strike, the government capitulated and offered concessions to the mining unions. However, on this occasion the GMWU had not chosen to lend its strength to back its fellow unionists, refusing to join the industrial alliance as it meant ceding some powers away from its own Executive in the event of a strike and fearing a direct clash with the state would prove ruinous. Undoubtedly, the memory of the failed merger with the dockers and Bevin’s role in the invalidating of the ballot also played its part in activating their opposition. If it was not prepared to fight, then the GMWU would lobby and negotiate. Rather than seeking industrial action, Thorne and Clynes urged that the union should concentrate on their

relationship with the Labour Party, instead.

This did produce some modest results when the party was in power but once out of office, and facing a resurgent Conservative Party under Stanley Baldwin, the union suddenly found itself standing alone.

If the miners had played an astute game of brinkmanship the year before, then in the spring of 1926 they found the cards stacked heavily against them. Their nine months’ subsidy – granted to them after “Red Friday” – had come to an end and the Samuel Commission, in which the TUC had vested so much faith – despite the fact that no Labour politician or trade unionist sat upon the board – returned its findings which accepted the inevitability of pay cuts across the industry. The mine owners had taken this as their signal to renegotiate contracts, cutting wages and raising hours, and as A.J. Cook – the new left-wing leader of the Miners’ Federation – famously refused to negotiate “not a minute on the day, not a penny off the pay”, the miners were locked out of work from 30 April onwards. With the TUC pledged to calling a General Strike, for which it had done nothing to prepare, King George V proclaimed a national state of emergency, thousands of special constables – the majority from privileged backgrounds – enrolled in order to break the strike, and Hyde Park was closed to the public and converted for use as a military camp and food distribution centre. J.R. Clynes watched as “armoured cars and tanks began

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to rumble into London, Southampton, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and other great cities. Troops in full war-kit with tin hats and rifles tramped through the streets, Aldershot hummed like a beehive”33. In the Clyde estuary, the Warspite, the Comus and the Hood – then the world’s largest battleship – trained their guns upon Glasgow; while three more warships anchored along the Mersey, glowering at the working class districts of Liverpool; and destroyers steamed into the harbours of Portsmouth, Harwich, Middlesborough and Cardiff.

With the country placed on a war footing and many in the propertied classes fearing revolution, Baldwin used the refusal of the compositors on the Daily Mail to set-up a hate-filled article about the miners, which branded them as little more than traitors to the nation, as a pretext to break off all negotiations. Twenty four hours before the General Strike was due to begin, Clynes and the TUC delegation “sought an interview about midnight with the Prime Minister and his colleagues in a last minute effort to show that the compositor’s strike was unofficial, without our approval, and to plead almost on our knees, for a less cruel arbitrament than he was now forcing upon us – an open fight between the workers and the Cabinet”34. Pleading almost on your knees was not a good starting point if you intend actually to win a dispute and a strange sense of bewilderment and trepidation fell over the leadership of the GMWU even as their

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members left work and answered the strike call, on Monday 3 May 1926. It was almost as if, having come to consider their union as a legitimate part of the state they could not conceive of their political opponents viewing them in any other way. If the interests of workers and employers were identical, they reasoned, why would the Conservative Government act in such a partisan way to manufacture a conflict that could on result in suffering and lost profits?

The young Thorne, Jones and Angle would have had no difficulty in answering, but now they appeared prisoners of their own subverted and thoroughly decaffeinated logic. Thorne seemed surprised when he reported that: “It is perfectly evident to all of us that the Government, including the House of Lords, have thrown their whole weight into the scales against the coalminers” and unable to fully comprehend why “this present Government have time after time deliberately declared and signified their support to the mineowners, which is significant of the class they represent, instead of exploring the possibilities of an honourable settlement, meting out equity to all concerned, which is certainly not outside the realms of possibility, and which would have made for a lasting peace, alone will be an incentive to the workers to continue their unselfish support”35.

In the first few hours, all the workers were called out from the railways, road, sea and air transport; and in solidarity the building, printing, iron, steel, gas and

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electricity industries came to a complete standstill. At the headquarters of the strike, Clynes “found that the British workmen had come out shoulder to shoulder, quiet, humorous, but deadly stubborn” adding that he was “much moved by the deep and unselfish loyalty of the millions of workpeople who conducted the 1926 stoppage”36.Yet, careful government planning soon ensured that, in London, the gas and power stations were commandeered by naval ratings, stokers from battleships were ferried up the Thames and used to feed the gas retorts, and the docks were manned by soldiers and strike breakers, protected by rings of barbed wire and machine gun posts. Clynes saw: “A convoy of food lorries, stretching for over two miles… escorted towards the City by sixteen armoured cars with their guns manned, and the better part of a regiment of Guards in fighting kit”, though he noted that “the theatrical effect of this gesture was somewhat spoiled by the incessant shout of laughter from the crowds which watched the convoy pass between knots of astounded dockers at the gates”37. That, in profound contrast to the Leeds Gas strike of 1890, they were allowed to pass through the crowds at all, braving only cat-calls as opposed to stones, slates and brick-bats, is telling in itself. Clynes, in an attempt to diffuse all signs of tension, refused to make speeches to the strikers and advised his colleagues in the GMWU from holding mass meetings. Writing a few years later,

he chose to dwell upon the good nature and sense of “fair play” that characterised a quintessentially English dispute, with football matches held between strikers and local police, and stories of the “strikers’ pickets [who] shared strong tea and gossip with the special constables who were supposed to be preventing them from acts of aggression”38. Not everyone saw it that way. The London district of the GMWU could only just be held in check, C.J. Moody demanded direct action as opposed to the largely passive picketing and Jim Connell advised Wal Hannington – of the National Minority Movement – to form roaving poaching squads to reclaim the land and feed the families of the strikers.

In Lancashire, Charles Dukes spent the first day of the dispute “occupied with telephone communications to branches. It is no exaggeration to state that for a period of eight hours I never left the telephone. When we come to realise how suddenly we were plunged into a general stoppage without any form of preparation it is amazing that general chaos did not ensue. The district was divided into sub-areas, and an official put in charge of each. We thereby established a point of contact as between the district office and certain well-defined localities. Generally speaking, we had to depend upon the adaptability of branch officials to establish machinery for the conduct of the dispute”. A system of messengers was used to establish contact between the district office and

The union’s Journal reflected the members’ aspirations, as well as their reality.

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As depression hit, the unemployment queues swelled and the National Government offered cold comfort.

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the remote corners of the district but in an increasingly rigid union it was fear of growing radicalism and of losing control of the situation that worried him, rather than making life difficult for the authorities.

He voiced his concern to limit the dispute to the terms of the TUC instructions and noted that in “several towns the local Trades Councils established Disputes Committees, and we experienced considerable difficulty in preventing these semi-official bodies from assuming authority which could only be exercised by union Executives”. Though the strike was only to last for nine days, he felt that “every day the strike proceeded the control and authority of that dispute was passing out of the hands of responsible Executives into the hands of men who had no authority, no control, no responsibility, and was wrecking the movement from one end to the other”. Had he shown the same spirit in fighting Conservatives, as he did in witch-hunting Communists, the story of his union and of the dispute in Lancashire might have been very different39.

By 4th May some 82,000 of the GMWU’s members, many of them surface workers on the coalfields, were out on strike; a figure that would more than double by the 12th May. Clynes wrote at the time of the enormous difficulties in honouring the union’s obligations to its striking and locked-out members, estimating that: “more than 12,000 of our members have from various causes claims upon our funds.

Numerous cases of hardship and instances

of special distress exist among our members which we would like to relieve. The National Executive has, therefore, agreed to send a general appeal through all the branches in order that collections may be made to contribute something to support those who still remain out. Moneys collected should be sent to the respective district offices, and will be administered within the district … While our members have supported appeals for the miners, we owe a duty to our own members, and we trust that those who are in work will respond to support those who are out”40.

Dukes continued to be worried by the fracturing of centralised authority as “during the last two or three days of the dispute, feeling ran very high, and there was an increasing disposition on the part of the local Strike Committees to assume responsibility. Had the dispute continued, we would undoubtedly have been confronted with the need for more stringent union control … Hundreds of men found themselves on committees who were unaccustomed to Executive work. It was difficult to make them understand that the interpretation of the Trades Union Congress policy was entirely the prerogative of the union Executives … In the Public Services, feeling ran high.

We had considerable difficulty in keeping the men at work, particularly in the big industrial centres where they were influenced by propaganda. It was, of course, to be expected that where attempts to stop

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the trams working were not wholly successful, the next move being an attempt to cut off the electric power, and if that failed pressure would be brought to bear on gasworkers to cease work. Whilst the instructions of the TUC were very definite and understandable to the trained official, it was not so apparent to the ordinary workman. He saw his workmates being defeated by improvised services and quite naturally wanted to make common cause with his comrades in dispute”41.

On 12 May 1926, after little more than a week, the TUC General Council, which included Thorne, Bondfield and Hayday, decided to call off the strike. Clynes, lukewarm from the start, had already told members that the “strike would be a national disaster, and a fatal step to union prestige … A national strike, if complete,

At the height of the depression, union members are reduced to beachcombing and collecting pebbles on the shoreline.

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The textile industry provided a key area of recruitment for the union in the industrial North.

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would inflict starvation first and most on the poorest of the population. Riot or disorder could not feed them, and any appeal to force would inevitably be answered by superior force. How could such an action benefit the working classes?”42. Now, Ernest Bevin watched with incredulity as the strike was called off as a prelude to talks, rather than as the result of them. As the Labour Movement split apart, with the Miners Federation continuing the struggle on their own, Clynes arrived at Downing Street with the TUC delegation to present their terms.

At the door to No.10 they found their way barred by Sir Horace Wilson, the Permanent Secretary to the Minister of Labour, who told them that they were not to be admitted to the Prime Minister’s presence unless they would first confirm their surrender. At the back of the delegation, Bevin – who may, or may not have been there in an official capacity – snarled a warning that: “For Christ’s sake let’s call it on again if this is the position”43. No one was listening. The tribunes of the British working class meekly filed in to meet Baldwin and gave their capitulation without ever once thinking to bargain for their members to be able to return to work without victimisation, or for the withdrawal of the mineowners’ lock-outs. It was, quite simply, the darkest day ever experienced by the British Labour Movement and the unions would take decades to recover their sense of power, purpose and self-respect.

For the GMWU, the dispute did not end

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on 12 May 1926. 10,000 of its members – 8,000 of whom were surface workers – remained out on strike for another seven months alongside the miners. The Northern and South Wales districts of the union were devastated, as thousands of members were thrown out of work and had their contributions excused44. In the immediate aftermath of the General Strike, Head Office raised a collection to help “the miners [in] their magnificent fight … for a special daily contribution of not less than one penny from every one of its members for every day such member is at work until the dispute is settled”45. In addition, 127,000 GMWU members were either out of work, or on short time due to the strike and some £240,000 had been paid out in dispute benefits. In the winter of 1926, Thorne wrote to his members counting the cost of the strike and confiding that “our Union has been faced with tremendous financial responsibilities, and notwithstanding that the number of our members still in receipt of Dispute Benefit has shown a steady decrease, we are still paying over £6,000 per week to those of our members still locked out. Without exception, every one of the our members entitled has received full Dispute Benefit throughout the whole of the 27 weeks of the dispute, and the aggregate amount paid to date approaches the quarter of a million mark. There seems no immediate prospect of a settlement, and our financial liabilities towards our members are immeasurable”46. It is clear that the

union prided itself in its financial payments paid out to its members and Clynes certainly felt that the GMWU had done much to take the bite out of the dispute, as “had there been no strike pay to keep the men’s wives and families from famine, terror and revolution might well have stalked the land. Starving men would have been violent”47. However, it is much more difficult to reconstruct Thorne’s ideas and movements during those crucial nine days in May. Unlike many of his colleagues, he never left an account of the General Strike, though his daughter recalled it being open house in West Ham, where “my mother used to make bread pudding and give it away to hungry people when they came around. They knew they could always call at our house for help”48. He confined himself to terse, business-like statements on the union’s balance sheets and membership rolls, rarely venturing into debates on either policy or politics. As a result, as his voice faded from the forefront of the union, it was Clynes and Dukes who came to the fore and sought to redefine both the terms of the strike and the nature of the union, itself.

Clynes was left to deliver the postmortem on the General Strike, which he felt was “mainly due to the fact that the ground is shifted from a struggle between employers and Trade Unions to a fight between masses of men on the one hand and on the other the Government claiming to act for the nation and backed by unlimited resources of every financial and

Branches of the National Union of Waterworks Employees, which later amalgamated with GMB, fielded their own football teams to play for this stunning trophy in the 1920s.

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In the early 1930s, the union’s Journal benefited from beautiful graphics and design.

material kind. A national strike can never be complete. If all the workers suddenly ceased to labour, a few hours would see the country without food or the means to transport it. Such an instantaneous shock would inflict starvation first and most upon the poorest of the population who have no reserves. Riot or disorder would not feed them, and even in a country governed through democratic institutions, an appeal to force would be effectively answered by superior force. A national strike alters the whole material and mental position of the people. Considerable groups of workers are soon detached from the main body, and can be induced or compelled to serve on the side of a Government. Speedily there develops the worst of all forms of class war; namely war between sections of the

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working class, itself. Manifestations of solidarity are admirable, but solidarity without wisdom becomes worthless, and the heroics of the first days’ fighting fade into the scared and subdued murmurs of defeated and distracted men”49. He went even further at the TUC, declaring that: “Undoubtedly the national strike was an unparalleled manifestation of ardent sympathy with [the] miners, who are among the most deserving of the workingclasses of Britain. The strike was a signal proof of laudable sacrifice and of readiness to stand together in resisting the coalowners’ attack, but it has raised new questions of Trade Union method and policy which must be faced with wisdom and courage. Statesmanship does not consist in the utterance of fiery language or in flinging slang at those who are termed the ‘Boss Class’. Nor does it consist in telling the world months or years beforehand what someday you are going to do. The best guidance of working men is not to be found in mere praise of the proletariat or in treating economic facts as though they could be erased by passing resolutions”50.

Henceforth, the union would be run along different lines, with an accent upon benefits, self-improvement, and a level of support for the Labour Party that verged upon the unquestioning. Class conflict was to be played down and Thorne increasingly became an isolated, discordant figure who appeared to some as an unwelcome reminder of earlier and more heroic times.

dropping the Pilot It came as no surprise that, in the wake of the failure of the General Strike, the Conservative Party introduced the Trades Disputes and Trade Union Act, which Clynes described in Parliament as “the worst piece of vindictive and spiteful class legislation which our country has ever known”51. It aimed to make secondary actions illegal, to prevent civil servants from joining trade unions that were affiliated to the TUC, and to outlaw any attempt by the unions to “coerce the government either directly or by inflicting hardship on the community”. Will Thorne helped to organise mass rallies and factory meetings against the Bill, seeing in the political section of the bill a direct attack on the political funding of the Labour Party. If the link between the party and the unions was ever shattered, he felt that all he had worked for would be lost. “The social reforms so urgently needed can only reach maturity through the ballot box”, he wrote, “because so long as landlords and employers hold sway by a huge majority in the Houses of Parliament, then they will continue to legislate for their own interests at the expense of the workers, and resist any efforts made to safeguard the worker and elevate his standard of life”52. Union members, if they wished to continue paying into the political fund, had to “contract in” to the scheme. This involved signing a declaration of intent, whereas previously it was up to the individual involved to opt-out by

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These young women workers are being taken to jail after their arrest on the picket line , during the 1935 Textile Strike.

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declining to pay. It was intended – as was the Thatcherite legislation that mirrored it 50 years later – to destroy the financial base of the Labour Party. In fact, it turned passive union members into active ones, as Thorne threw himself into a last whirlwind of activity touring the country to press the importance of signing the “contracting in” declarations. By December 1927, he could report to the Executive that nationally over 80% of the membership had signed their cards. His intervention was undoubtedly decisive but it was also backed up by an administrative incentive, for he also saw to it that branch officers received a commission for every signature gained. However, while the political fund was maintained in this manner, the other provisions of the act severely limited the union’s scope for action until the repeal of the legislation by Attlee’s first majority Labour Government in 1945.

Arguably repeal should have come much earlier. The second Labour Government of 1929-31 – though sustained by the Liberals – promised much, not least for the GMWU which now had a caucus of 6 directly sponsored M.P.s, two of whom became senior cabinet members: J.R. Clynes as Home Secretary and Margaret Bondfield as the Minister of Labour. However, the collapse of the Wall Street stock market, in October 1929, sent its ripples out across the globe, plunging the West into depression and throwing 2 million Britons out of work. The union was forced further onto the defensive, desperately trying to balance

its books and service a benefits package that now ironically included payments of £36,023 per annum on funeral benefits, alone53. Plans to build an imposing modernistic office block, to serve as the union’s headquarters in London, were shelved with a quiet finality as Thorne, Jones and Hayday attempted to shore up Labour’s commitments to providing work and welfare. Thorne, in particular, though a party loyalist through and through began to make increasingly less-veiled criticisms of his parliamentary and union colleagues, as they diluted progressive bills on the coal industry and pension rights to the extent that they became meaningless in the eyes of working people.Yet, it was the cuts to unemployment benefit – demanded by the Liberal coalition partners but entertained by the Labour leadership – that drew his fire. In particular, he criticised the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance – on which Bondfield sat as Minister of Labour – telling his members that: “To operate the proposals of this Report, by reducing rate of benefit paid to the unemployed would mean cutting down to the very bone the food supplies of hundreds and thousands of the workers and their dependants, who are the innocent victims of the vicious capitalist system, and thereby seriously impair their physical and mental efficiency”54. His old union comrade, Arthur Hayday – in his role as President of that year’s TUC – led a line of resistance, together with Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine, that confronted Ramsay

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MacDonald and his Chancellor Philip Snowden over the cuts and fought them to a stalemate. Rather than give in, MacDonald resigned as Prime Minister and attempted to form a National Government, to effect the austerity measures, with Liberal and Tory support. He had hoped to carry the majority of the PLP with him, but the majority of Labour M.P.s at that time were still organically tied to both the unions and the communities that they served, and remained loyal. MacDonald and Snowden, expelled from the Labour Party, clung on to office and extracted their revenge at the general election of 1931, which saw Labour’s vote collapse and the PLP reduced to a rump of no more than 50 M.P.s.

Clynes, Hayday, Bondfield, and Dukes all lost their seats, falling back upon the union for succour in their hour of need; while Jack Jones and Will Thorne – who had never, it seems, had much time for Ramsay MacDonald and regarded him as “a great mistake” held on to their seats, though with reduced majorities55. This, in theory, should have strengthened Thorne’s hand in the union but he no longer had the energy, the will, or the ready answers, to embark on fresh battles. He had made no effort to pitch a fresh offer of amalgamation to the Workers’ Union when, in 1927, it was hit by a fresh financial crisis and was desperate to seek a partner on almost any terms; with the result that it successfully merged with the T&G. And for a younger generation of trade union activists, it was hard to resist making

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unflattering comparisons between Thorne’s increasingly jaded GMWU and Bevin’s vibrant and assertive T&G. While the GMWU lost more than 26,000 members in the space of just twelve months, in 1931-32, the T&G had gone from strength to strength over the same period gaining in excess of 100,000 more members. Though the depression effectively ensured that there were comparatively few strikes between 1928-33, the GMWU’s expenditure rose over the period from 80% of contributions to 102%56. It was clear that the union was eating into its financial reserves but Thorne had no solutions to the mounting problems.

Some form of rationalisation was inevitable as there was a wide variation in the costs between the districts; with the large regions – London, Lancashire and Northern – maintaining their membership and remaining solvent, while Wales, Ireland and the smaller districts saw both their membership and finances bleed dry.

Yet the obvious decision to merge together the failing districts with their stronger neighbours was no longer politically expedient for Thorne. He could not carry the necessary number of district secretaries and district committees with him in this, and no other options presented themselves.

There was still undoubtedly fire in his belly. He wrote a blistering letter to Walter Citrine when he got some of his biographical details wrong in a TUC yearbook; and was not unaware of his own failings and that things were going badly

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wrong, commenting on the “many of the bitter things said about our union” in an article of January 192857. When he was invited back to the Saltley Gasworks in Birmingham, in 1929, “to inspect the new plant and vertical retorts”, he showed the management that he had not mellowed and – as the union’s journal reported – though “no doubt some of the work is higher [paced] than it used to be … there are many arduous and exhausting jobs, and Brother Thorne expressed himself freely on some things which should be done in the men’s interests”58.

What Thorne could not control – and what none of us can hope to control – was the simple, inexorable passage and ravages of time. The union had been founded by young men, often in their early twenties, and with the stability that they had created, it matured and aged along with them. There was no compulsory retirement age for officers and while they could take their pensions on reaching 60, few of them chose to do so. Clynes was sixty-four and had been serving as a full-time officer for more than four decades, and seven of the twelve district secretaries – S.J. Wright, Hugh Lynas, Thomas Williamson, Sam Bradley, Arthur Hayday, A.J. Bailey and Tom Hurley – were either in their late 60s or early 70s; Margaret Bondfield and Jack Jones, regarded as two of the most active members of the officer corps, had just turned sixty. The union journal in the 1930s and, indeed, on into the early 1940s, was crammed full of

of its heart “...something left the Union

as the old man closed his office door for the last time...

”

photographs of elderly men still sporting the winged collars, fob watches and elaborately waxed moustaches that had been the height of fashion in their youth. As late as February 1942, the GMWU was to be found celebrating the fiftieth year of William Cook’s secretaryship of Selly Oak No.1 Branch, in Birmingham. It was clear that Cook had no intention of stepping down and that his was far from being an exceptional case of long service59. The union looked and felt tired.

Thorne, who had been walking with the aid of a stick since the late 1920s, had by 1933 been General Secretary of the union that he had founded for an astounding 44 years. No one in the GMWU had known another leader or a time when there had been any other authority than Thorne. But the birthday greetings that seemed so effusive at the time of his 71st birthday in 1928, appeared to pale and become formulaic as they were repeated every successive year in the union’s press60.

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The union commissioned this portrait in 1934, to commemorate Will Thorne’s retirement.

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There were, apparently, only so many landmarks that could be passed in the course of a career before they became tiresome.

In 1929, the Executive presented him with a motor car to celebrate a lifetime’s achievement and with hopes that it would make his twilight years all the more enjoyable and comfortable. It was a thinly veiled hint that his colleagues expected him to retire but Thorne who had always responded not to soft words but to deeds, played deaf to the fears of his colleagues and clung resolutely to power for four more years. Finally, in September 1933, the Leeds district – through a lay member of the Executive – announced that it intended to raise the question of the general secretaryship at the next meeting. Rather than face a coup that clearly had wide support, Thorne chose to make a dignified exit and at the October 1933 Executive announced his decision to retire. Fittingly, in his last column written as General Secretary for the union journal, he warned his members of the threat of fascism and the murderous fate overtaking Austrian trade unionists61. At the end, as in the beginning, he remained both prescient and something of an Internationalist. The union he had fashioned would, of course, never be the same. His departure had ensured that it could deal with its most pressing financial and organisational problems, but something of its heart left the union as the old man closed his office door for the last time, and it would be many years before it could be fully recovered.

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chaPter 5

on shiftinG sands

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reorganisation and recruitment

a

t 52, Dukes seemed comparatively youthful, came from the original Gasworkers’ union and had more than 21 years service under his belt as an officer. Backed by the powerful Lancashire district, he seemed to many like a breath of fresh air with his less confrontational approach to industrial politics and a reputation for “new thinking” that was largely based around his first-hand experience of labour struggles in the U.S.A. and the rise of Fordist models of production. Though kept off the General Council of the TUC by the presence of so many of the GMWU’s old guard, he was, by the late 1920s, firmly established as the union’s main industrial spokesman. His columns dominated the union journal and his quotes tended to find their way into the newspapers whenever there was a conference or a dispute. Therefore, it came as no surprise when it was announced, on 23 February 1934, that he had received 158,393 votes to a mere 4,183 for the nearest of his challengers1.

Change was in the air and expected from the moment that Will Thorne had stood down. However, even though he possessed an overwhelming mandate and time appeared to be a pressing enemy, Dukes seemed curiously unwilling to act. Even a writer, who knew and was generally sympathetic to him and to his aims, could not help but inject a note of veiled criticism for his overriding sense of caution, as he was: “convinced that proposals for reform, whether in the union, at the Trades Union Congress or in the Labour Party, must above all be practical. When an enthusiast revealed his latest scheme for radical change to the union’s Congress or its General Council, Dukes could be relied upon to tell him where and when it had been tried before, and with what unfortunate results”2. This was perhaps felt nowhere more keenly than over the two most pressing areas of reform facing the union; over the question of implementing a retirement programme for aged officers, and for reorganising the

The Jarrow marchers take a break on the long road to London, 1936.

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a founder of the united nati General secretary 1934-1946

1881 -1948

Jailed for pacifis m in the Gre at Wa r, he led the u nion thro ugh the Second Wo rld Wa r a nd left the U.N. as his end urin g leg acy.

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ons

G

ood looking, assured, sharplydressed and possessing a commanding presence, Charles Dukes was the second general secretary of the union; who led it through the dark days of the depression and the Second World War, to the advent of the welfare state, peace in Europe and the first majority Labour Government.

Born in Stourbridge, in 1881, he was – like Will Thorne and most of the union’s early leadership – largely self-educated.

Having left school before his twelfth birthday, he worked as an errand boy, before taking a series of casual, semi-skilled, jobs as a forge worker, navvy and builder’s labourer.

Dukes was elected secretary of the Warrington Branch of the Gasworkers’ Union in 1909 and became a District Organiser in 1913. As a member of the Executive committee of the British Socialist Party, he was strongly opposed to the outbreak of the First World War, which would pit worker against worker; and as a life-long pacifist, he campaigned against conscription and refused his call-up papers.

As a result, he incurred the undying hatred of the “king and country” mobs and served a substantial jail sentence as a

conscientious objector, from 1916-18.

After the Armistice, he was able to return to his trade union duties and was elected District Secretary for Leeds in 1924, before taking up the position as Lancashire District Secretary, a year later, which would make his name.

He contested and won Warrington for the Labour Party in the general election of 1923, but lost the seat a year later the amid red scares, centring on the “Zinoviev Letter”, which were fabricated by rightwing Russian émigrés and circulated by the Conservative Party, the Daily Mail

Charles Dukes leads the union for this formal portrait at Congress while Margaret Bondfield looks admiringly on. Thorne and Clynes stare straight down the camera.

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Despite the ravages of the depression, the union still maintained a generous benefits package for its workers, so that seaside holidays were within the reach of many working people and their families.

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and senior officials at the Foreign Office.

He was re-elected M.P. for Warrington at the general election of May 1929, and divided his time between union and parliamentary duties until a further defeat at the polls, in 1931, when the Labour Party was almost wiped out. Although he remained as the official Labour candidate for Warrington for some years afterwards, this effectively ended his political ambitions and served to channel his energies back into the GMWU. In the meantime, the set backs experienced by the Labour Movement, since 1921, had seen Dukes move steadily to the Right and he would increasingly come to stress the need for practical, as opposed to theoretical, solutions to the political and economic problems faced by the union.

As a consequence, he – together with J.R. Clynes – embraced Mondism, in a manner unthinkable to Will Thorne or to even Jack Jones, and anathema to Jim Connell and Harry Pollitt.

This trend towards emphasising the national interest, and industrial co-operation rather than conflict, was accelerated by his visit to the United States, in 1932, as the TUC’s fraternal delegate to the Convention of the American Federation of Labour.

Indeed, many of his former comrades in the BSP watched with wry disappointment, or outright horror, as he led the putsch against Communists in his own union, in the 1920s, and made the case for bans against them from holding office in the 1930s and ’40s.

From the late 1920s onwards, he was acknowledged as being the strongest and most likely successor to Will Thorne.Yet, Thorne’s abundant charisma combined with his marked unwillingness to countenance the idea of retirement, ensured that Dukes would be in his early fifties and already rather set in his ways before he became General Secretary. Moreover, he would find it difficult to stamp the mark of his own personality on a union that for the forty-five years of its existence had known only one leader. His attempts to assert his authority and own particular claims to vision and insight, as embodied in the pages of the union journal – and such articles as Charles Dukes – A Study in Leadership, published in July 1936 – appear to us today as being both curiously leaden in style and utterly overblown in terms of flattery and the use of superlative.

The problem for Dukes was that they probably struck his own members, in the

a founder of the united nations

1930s, in precisely the same way.

This said, he did much to rebuild the union membership and structures after they had been shattered by the Great Depression and proved himself a far more effective, energetic, and thoughtful, General Secretary than either of his immediate successors.

The union would have to wait till the advent of David Basnett’s leadership, in 1973, before there would be anything amounting to substantive change or innovation.

Dukes’ pacifism ill-equipped him to move onto the national stage, in May 1940, and his wartime editorials and speeches to union members were decidedly lacklustre; more concerned with securing an honourable peace for the German people – even at the time of Britain’s greatest peril – than with highlighting the nature of fascism or revealing the horrors of the death camps.

Having reached the upper-age limit for office, and served as TUC President, in 1946, he retired as General Secretary and accepted a peerage as Lord Dukeston of Warrington, in 1947. The last years of his life, saw him devoting much of his time to the United Nations and he played his part in the framing of the UN Charter of Human Rights. This was, perhaps, his most lasting achievement and the one that

revealed a continuity of thought that linked the young conscientious objector, a reviled penniless outsider, with the retired statesman and member of the House of Lords, whose acceptance of a C.B.E. had appeared to place him firmly within the ranks of the establishment.

In one his last articles written as General Secretary, in March 1946, he name-checked his early heroes – William Morris, John Ruskin and Edward Carpenter – who he felt had stood against militarism, and reminded his members that: “Peace must become positive; it must be planned for or it will not last … Armies there will have to be, but let us make that a worthwhile profession. Just as today we police our villages, our towns, and our cities as a restraint upon crime, so let us police the world to ensure our safety against aggression”. Though they do not know it, today’s United Nations Peacekeepers, whether in Kosovo, Darfur or the Sudan, carry with them an important element of Charles Dukes’ vision of inalienable human rights and dignity.

Young members take matters into their own hands and the treacherous Ramsay MacDonald ends up as Guy Fawkes on bonfire night 1932.

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The Modernist design of the union Journal lent itself perfectly to the rhythms of the factory age.

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districts along more cost effective and representative lines.

With the good will of the union behind him and seemingly a groundswell of support among lay activists, Dukes could have tackled both problems head on at his first biennial Congress in charge, later in 1934.

As it was, he deferred both discussions until 1936 and did not envisage the planned changes to take effect until 1938, at the earliest. In the case of implementing a retirement policy, he appears to have reacted to events rather than shaping them. At the 1930 Congress, London district had moved a motion for compulsory retirement at 65, but this was heavily defeated on the floor, while a similar motion – put forward in 1932 – was also lost, though it garnered

39 votes to the leadership’s 58. In both cases, the moves were viewed with suspicion by the platform as a means of removing Will Thorne from office and the votes acted, to a degree, as votes of confidence in his leadership. When drawn, Charles Dukes declared that “you cannot dogmatize about age” and probably opposed the measures not only out of a sense of loyalty but also with a view to extending his own tenure at the head of the union. After waiting in the wings for so long, it was probably more than a little galling to think that his own office was to be circumscribed by regulations that had not applied to his predecessor. Thus, it was pressure from the grassroots at the 1934 Congress, who tabled no less than 26 resolutions about compulsory retirement and voted down attempts to have the question referred back to the Standing Orders Committee, that effectively forced the issue onto the agenda.

In particular, criticism was levelled at the advanced age of the union’s recruiting officers who often no longer had the stamina for the job or an understanding of contemporary legislation and workers’ concerns. In the end, it all came down to generational conflict and a changing world which few organisers, who had come to the union before the turn of the twentieth century, had any great feel for.

The leadership had attempted to argue that to pension off so many members of staff would be ruinous and might even have imperilled the superannuation scheme itself,

chanGinG the Guard on shiftinG sands chaPter 5

but Congress remained unimpressed and eventually a compromise was reached whereby “a retirement age of sixty-five be fixed and an assurance … given to Congress that in the two-year period up to the 1938 Congress everyone over that age shall definitely be retired”, while conceding the leadership some room to manoeuvre as “the National Executive be empowered to devise and put into effect such plans of reorganisation as may be deemed expedient”3.

The provisions, passed at the Swansea Congress in 1936, were therefore nothing if not dramatic in reshaping the union. Save for the General Secretary, himself, every single National Officer would be obliged to retire within the two-year window. The compulsory retirement of Peter Tevenan and W.R. Spence removed both assistant general secretaries and the post was, henceforth, abolished, while all of the other national officers – Will Sherwood, Jack Jones, G.P. Dean and Margaret Bondfield – would all have reached the upper age limit. They were to be succeeded by four National Industrial Officers – H.L. Bullock, Harry Harrison, Mark Hewitson and Tom Williamson, the younger – all of whom had already held office in the union and whose ages ranged from 40, in the case of Hewitson and Williamson at the time of their appointments, to 52 in the case of Bullock and 53 with Harrison. All were close to Dukes, both personally and politically, with Bullock having been a full-time branch secretary in Bristol and Harrison having been a close

companion since their days together in the Warrington branch. Hewitson had spent the previous five years as a district officer but harboured political ambitions, while though personally unremarkable, Williamson had risen largely due to the patronage of his uncle. Each was given their own department and the remit for several of the principle trades represented by the union, together with a cluster of lesser industries.

It was far from a seismic shift in demography and, if anything, had the effect – as we shall see – of embedding a number of familial and regional interest groups within the structure of the union.

The wholesale retirements and the virtual wipe-out of the Labour Party at the polls, in 1931, had the unforeseen effect of leaving Will Thorne and Jack Jones – though officially superannuated and off the union’s books – as the GMWU’s only two parliamentary representatives. Though it would be unfair to see them as “lame ducks”, they were certainly veteran backbenchers, capable of point-scoring and asking telling questions in the Commons, but removed from the levers of the power within the PLP and simply too old to entertain hope of securing ministerial briefs in a future Labour Government.

Furthermore, the union, itself, was becoming wary of the time and energy expended in maintaining its presence in national and local government. To reassure his Executive, Charles Dukes agreed to

The delegates’ guide to the union’s 1936 Congress at Swansea.

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1936 Congress: the Mayor and Mayoress of Swansea with Clynes, Dukes and delegates.

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abandon his parliamentary career and informed his Warrington constituency party that he would not stand again at the next general election, in order to properly fulfil his union duties. The implied criticism of Thorne, and his parliamentary strategy, was clear.Yet, if Dukes was to act as a full-time General Secretary then there was felt to be no need any longer for a full-time President. Consequently, upon the retirement of J.R. Clynes – who also went in 1937, under compulsory notice – the post was abolished and replaced by a Chairman, who was to be elected at each biennial Congress.

Perhaps the most significant change brought on by a retirement was in the Women’s Department, which had been experiencing decline for some time. In 1927, the Northern district had reported that it was unable to find a suitable candidate to fill its women’s seat on the General Council and a year later the Leeds district had moved a motion at Congress to end the special representation of women, which was won by a large majority. The remnants of Mary MacArthur’s National Federation of Women Workers were thus swept away by this measure and with Margaret Bondfield often absent on parliamentary business, the work of maintaining a voice for women within the union fell to her deputy, Dorothy Elliott.

Upon Bondfield’s retirement, she was finally appointed Chief Woman Officer only to find her remit was increasingly limited and that her General Secretary was far less

enlightened about women’s rights than his predecessor. Ironically, the rugged and forceful Thorne – due to his friendship with Eleanor Marx – had always espoused genuinely progressive attitudes over gender, while the suave and erudite Dukes publicly articulated views that, even in the 1930s, must have seemed patronising at best. At the 1938 Congress, he blocked a motion calling for equal pay for women officers, claiming that women officers “had an entirely different job” to men and could not handle “the rough and tumble work”. Amid raised voices, his parting shot was needlessly savage: “If you say here that a woman carrying full domestic responsibilities is as free to do her job as a man is to do it, I won’t object, because you had better look the facts straight in the face; it is one thing in the Congress to exalt sentiment, and another thing on an Executive body.

Face up to realities”4. The “sentiment” of equality, between the sexes, would have to wait until 1945 when the General Council decided to affirm it in advance of a number of motions submitted to Congress; but by then Dorothy Elliott was preparing to leave to take up a post at the TUC sponsored National Institute of Houseworkers. The Women’s department was, in any case, pretty much a dead letter and, by 1954, the union could only boast two women officers within its ranks5.

Between June 1936 and June 1938, ten district organisers, seven full-time branch secretaries and, most dramatically of all,

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seven district secretaries – namely: A.J. Bailey from Sheffield, Sam Bradley from the Irish district, Arthur Hayday from Midland, Tom Hurley from Birmingham, Hugh Lynas from Northern, Thomas Williamson, the elder, from Liverpool and S.J. Wright from London – out of the twelve, retired.

With such a rapid turnover of personnel, the question remained of how best to fill the vacancies thus created. However, in a marvellous piece of double-think, the leadership put the case that: “We are a democratic organisation and consistently apply the method of free election both in respect to official and representative positions, but we could not, in this instance, afford the risk of the haphazard chances of election whereby an unqualified individual might have been successful. Without in any sense decrying or disparaging the merits of lay members, it cannot be contended that men totally inexperienced and without official service could have been permitted to become candidates for these major positions”6. Such statements; broadly dismissive of the membership, concerned with keeping tight control of the administration, and betraying an inflated belief in the “professionalisation” of fulltime officials and their qualities, showed just how far the leadership had moved away from its origins in the Movement, and how far they relied on appointments to selfperpetuate the system of governance in the union. As a consequence, in 1936; E.V. Watering was appointed in London;

Tom Cochrane in Southern district; Jack Yarwood in Northern district; J.C. Mason in Birmingham and West Midlands; and Andrew Basnett Liverpool, North Wales and Irish district. J.D.S. Highman, the Secretary of the former Leeds district took control of the new Yorkshire and North Derbyshire district, while T.W. Kerry who had been Secretary of the former East Coast district became Secretary of the reconstituted Midland-East Coast district.

One side-effect of the sweeping use of appointments, in the reorganisation of 1936-38, was to confirm particular family groups as being central to the union’s affairs.

District secretaries had always had control of the appointment of their own office staffs and several of them, over the years, had chosen to appoint sons or other close relatives to clerical posts within their patronage. This began to cause problems as the union entered its second generation of leadership and positions of authority passed from father to son, or from uncle to nephew. However, where the founders of the union had invariably been unskilled, or semi-skilled, labourers, their successors almost invariably came from a minor clerical or administrative background, A group shot of delegates at a social and had often known no to mark the union’s 1936 Congress.

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the first WoMan caBinet Min

1873 -1953

Wh eth er in the u nion, as a n M.P. or as a Ca bin et min iste r, she devote d her long career to adva nci ng wom en's righ ts.

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ister

M

argaret Bondfield was born in Somerset, in March 1873, the tenth of eleven children of a lace worker. In sharp contrast to many of the Gasworkers early leaders – who came from an Irish, Roman Catholic background – her formative years were shaped by a tradition of English religious nonconformity that stretched all the way back, through Chartism to the Civil Wars.

Indeed, until supplanted by Socialism, the local Congregationalist Church provided the backdrop to her life and the moral rationale for her critique of the inequalities to be found between the rich and poor, and between men and women.

She left school at thirteen, and worked for the next two years as a supply teacher at a local school. By fifteen, she was working as an assistant in a draper’s shop, in Brighton, and it was there that she began to take an active interest in the women’s movement. Moving to London, she learned “the bitterness of a hopeless search for work” and spent the next eleven years working long hours for low wages.

However, in 1894, she took a step that changed her life for the better.

As she later wrote, “I join a trade union: A small thing led me to [an] adventure of

faith. I was hungry and I went to … buy a penn’orth of fish and a ha’p’orth of chips, served to me in a newspaper; munching my feast, I strolled around Fitzroy Square reading the paper, in which was a letter from James Macpherson, Secretary of the National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks, urging shop assistants to join together to fight against the wretched conditions of employment.

I was working about sixty-five hours a week for between £15 and £25 per annum, living in [this was a pernicious practice …]. Here I felt was the right thing

The national banner of the Federation of Women Workers carried proudly by members in 1923. Three years after the union had merged with the GMWU, the women’s section still maintained its own identity.

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to do, and at once I joined up”.

Bright and efficient, she was chosen, in 1896, as the union’s first woman delegate to its conference. From 1898, until she stepped down in 1908, she served as the union’s Assistant General Secretary. In a life of many “firsts”, she was to be the first woman to sit upon the General Council of the TUC, in 1917, and its first woman Chair, in 1923-24.

In 1902, she met Mary MacArthur who captivated her and provided, if not – as has been argued – the unrequited “romance” of her life; then certainly a source of colour and vivacity which would, otherwise, have been entirely lacking. When MacArthur founded the National Federation of Women Workers, in 1906, Bondfield devoted herself to building up its organisation.

Through James Macpherson, Margaret Bondfield had been introduced to the leadership of the SDF, and though a member of the party for a time, it would not seem that her acquaintance with Marxism was particularly deep. She soon found a more conducive home within the Labour Party, preferring a course of reform to revolution, and having a mistrust of theory over the practicalities of politics.

This said, she bravely opposed Britain’s involvement in the First World War, 188

performing great services for the Union of Democratic Control, which was founded in 1914 in order to try to make the military more accountable to civil society.

Wartime saw an enormous increase in women in the workplace, particularly in the manufacture of munitions, with trade union membership rising from 433,000 in 1913 to 1,326,000 in 1919. There was a feeling – rightly or wrongly – that this expansion had rendered a separate trade union for women obsolete. It was certainly true that the National Federation of Women Workers was struggling, with limited resources, to represent its membership across all sectors of the workforce and, with the bulk of its membership based in unskilled jobs, MacArthur and Bondfield looked to merge with the GMWU as soon as the war ended.

It was Mary MacArthur who was largely responsible, even in failing health, for the successful merger which guaranteed a separate women’s “district” or more properly a section, with its own national officer and organisers. However, her death, in 1920, ensured that it was Margaret Bondfield who took up the position of first women’s national officer in the GMWU. Thereafter, Bondfield, alongside Thorne and Clynes, came to represent

the public face of the union.

However, her rise to prominence in the union coincided with the beginnings of her parliamentary career and, in her on words, “during the next eighteen years the National Union of General and Municipal Workers gave me all the liberty I needed to carry on the work for the Labour Movement in the larger areas of service”.

She was elected M.P. for Northampton in 1923 but lost the seat in the following year’s general election. This still gave her time, however, to become the first woman to join the Cabinet, as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Labour, in 1924. Returned to Parliament for Wallsend, at a bye-election in 1926, she went on to become Minister of Labour in 1929-31 and was made a Privy Councillor in 1929. Like so many union sponsored M.P.s, she lost her seat in the rout of the Labour Party in the 1931 general election but, unlike J.R. Clynes, failed to return to Parliament in 1935.

She offered only lukewarm support to the General Strike, in 1926, and urged an early settlement regardless of the consequences. Moreover, she also backed Ramsay Macdonald’s swingeing cut-backs in public expenditure, as the depression set in. Increasingly, the union became the

the first WoMan caBinet Minister

vehicle for her wider political career and it is notable that in her autobiography, published in 1949 – a year after she had been created a Companion of Honour by the new Labour Government – the union is rarely mentioned. Perhaps more significant still was her silence in her memoirs about Will Thorne as a trade union leader, and her rather disparaging comments about his early work as an SDF branch member in West Ham. He – for his part – in My Life’s Battles, was equally quiet but rather more charitable about her role in the GMWU. This said, she seems to have found Charles Dukes’ leadership more conducive and remained as Women’s National Officer until 1938, though much of the day-to-day work and administration fell to her deputies Miss Weaver and Miss Elliott.

As well as taking office in positions previously occupied solely by men, and by a constant demonstration of her equal competence as a woman, Margaret Bondfield’s lasting contribution to the GMWU was her single-minded pressure for trade union organisation and representation within traditionally female industries, ensuring that they became an integral part of the wider Labour Movement and that they enjoyed exactly the same rights as men.

Margaret Bondfield on the campaign trail for the Northampton by-election, 24 March 1920, with Mr. McCurdy as her driver. Many of the cars used by the union, in its early days, were provided by the Countess of Warwick, an enthusiastic convert to Socialism.

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other employer, subtly shifting the culture of the union. Thus, Tom Williamson was the nephew of Thomas Williamson, the former Liverpool district secretary; and Jack Eccles, who was appointed as a national officer in 1960, was the son of Tom Eccles who had been Lancashire district Secretary from 1943-58, and the grandson of Fleming Eccles, also a Lancashire district Secretary, holding office between 1917 and his death in 1925. Arthur Hayday’s son, Fred, was appointed as a district officer in 1934 and became a national officer in 1946; while S.J. Wright’s son took over his father’s former role as London district secretary in 1950. Charles Dukes found a role for his favourite nephew, Jack Cooper – a brusque, bruising anti-Communist – in the union, which saw him rising from the position of a clerk, in 1928, to the post of district officer in 1933. By 1942, he had become a national officer and by 1944, while his uncle was still in office, he had taken over responsibility as Secretary for Southern district7. The union had begun to look, to the uninitiated at least, like an oligarchy.

Alongside the overhaul of personnel, came the reorganisation of the districts, cutting their numbers from twelve to ten.

The existing districts were often unwieldy, created ad hoc, regardless of political or county boundaries, and often with wild disparities in their membership; with London – the largest – having upwards of 70,000 members, in 1936, while the Irish district – the smallest – had barely 6,000.

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As a result, boundaries were redrawn and membership shifted, sometimes fairly arbitrarily, in order to equalise the districts.

Thus, London district – which had extended from the Wash in the East to the Devon and Cornwall in the South West – was now divided into two districts; with the area north of the Thames retaining the title of London district, while the area south of the Thames became the Southern district.

The Sheffield and West Yorkshire districts were merged into one as Yorkshire and North Derbyshire; while the Midland and East Coast districts were combined under the new designation of the Midland-East Coast district. The Irish district was merged with Liverpool under the title the Liverpool, North Wales and Irish district; with the flagging South Wales district being subsumed in a new South Western district that bolstered membership through the addition of branches from the Bristol area.

Significantly, the Lancashire, Northern and Scottish districts were left unchanged and – with London dismembered – Lancashire was re-established as the union’s leading district with 43,000 members, with the majority of districts fluctuating around the 30,000 level, and the smallest now being South Western with 19,000. The effect was again to strengthen Duke’s hand as his Lancashire power base, under his replacement – Arthur Seabury – had remained untouched by either the political or geographical reforms and could be counted upon to deliver him a substantial

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GMWU members recall the Tolpuddle Martyrs, to mark the Centenary of their struggle for trade union rights.

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...articles took “ an increasingly progressive stance warning of the rise of Fascism...”

and frequently decisive block of votes at Congress. Midland-East Coast, Liverpool, and Yorkshire and North Derbyshire were almost invariably loyal, while only London – which had now had its wings clipped – and Scotland gave him cause for concern.

At the end of the process, in 1938, Dukes told his Congress that reorganisation had been necessary “for three reasons, the first being efficiency, effectiveness in service to members, and expansion; the second, economy in administration; and the third: that not every district, prior to reorganisation, was able to meet its proper obligation to the Central Fund”. In his own terms, the reforms had been a great success, transferring power to a new generation of union officers and rendering all of the districts financially viable. Just as importantly, they had allowed him to

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concentrate the efforts of his officials and the resources of his union to a programme of planned growth.

In particular, Dukes created a grade of “recruitment officer” in the districts, to be “drawn from the younger element below forty years of age”, in order to both rebuild the membership and to provide a means of promotion through the ranks, that in time would deliver a fresh generation of leaders for the union. This was one major attempt to centralise the administration of the GMWU, as the 77 officers who were appointed under the scheme were answerable only to the General Secretary and not to the districts in which they operated. In terms of the balance sheet: local autonomy over the creation and retention of membership was certainly challenged, albeit briefly; the initiative did provide an effective career ladder for the select band – which saw 40 of the new grade of officers rising to become district officers – and membership rose dramatically over the period of its operation. However, on closer examination it would seem that membership was rising, at the same time, across all of the unions as the economy stabilised again after the mid-1930s. From a low point of 241,000 in 1933, the union had risen back up to 467,000 in 1939; but this was still outstripped by the performance of its nearest rival the T&G which would soon become the first British trade union to exceed one million members. This said, the new initiative ended a period of stagnation

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and inertia when it came to recruiting and put growth at the forefront of the union’s agenda. Its boldness, in cutting the ground from the district secretaries, was however to prove its downfall. Unsurprisingly, there was resistance and the recruitment officers often found themselves blocked or sidelined by entrenched interests, the centre had no real power to command and Dukes fought shy of direct intervention, with the result that by 1942 – when wartime expansion was ensuring growth by other routes – the initiative had largely run out of steam and was abandoned.

If building the membership by direct recruitment was one strand to growing the union, then the other was through a strategy for amalgamation. The GMWU had successfully merged with the Cleveland Ironstone Quarrymen and Miners’ Association, in 1933, with the former President, H. Dack, and General Secretary, W. Mansfield taking positions as officials in the Northern district. This was quickly followed by a merger with the Amalgamated National Union of Quarrymen and Settmakers at the start of 1934, which was largely facilitated by the impending retirement of that union’s president and general secretary, who made no demands for office or sectional rights.

The Quarrymen were not a large union but they were strong in the midlands and North Wales, and possessed an extremely healthy balance sheet. Their example led the Welsh Artisans’ Association – another small but

financially stable union – based in the South of the principality, to amalgamate with the GMWU in November 1935, and was followed in April 1936 by another regional union, this time based in Yorkshire, the National Society of Woolcombers. On 1 January 1936 the formal amalgamation with the Tyne Watermen’s Association – one of the oldest trade unions – was concluded.

The Association had originated among Newcastle’s Keelmen servicing the seaborne coal trade in the mid-seventeenth century and had certainly been organised by 1822 when attempts were made to break a strike, with an improvised steam engine fitted to a tugboat enabling inexperienced blacklegs – heavily guarded onboard by red coated soldiers – to navigate the Tyne. By 1866, the combination was known as the Tyne Watermen’s Association and in 1894 they fought a year long strike with the shipping owners, which was resolved by the arbitration of the city fathers. The merchants – perhaps unsurprisingly – found in favour of the shipowners, and showing that deference still underlay their discontent the men of the Association accepted the decision in its entirety and went back to work on the barges8. These amalgamations, while not greatly adding to membership, did succeed in gaining the GMWU local dominance in particular trades and brought in additional financial funds that helped to tide the union through the worst years of the depression. However, it is arguable that many of these initiatives had already

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A recruiting pamphlet aimed at women workers, late 1930s.

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been brokered by Thorne before Dukes had come to office and, in any case, the merger strategy was not pursued after the mid-1930s.

Dukes always seems to have suffered by comparison to Will Thorne and it was difficult for the union, with such a proud heritage behind it, to re-orientate its identity to suit the realities of the 1930s.

One area of real success was the GMWU journal, which flourished from January 1930 to March 1936; having been redesigned to include striking modernistic graphics, cartoons, topical articles and historical stories that were designed to inculcate a sense of pride and belonging in the British Labour Movement. Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain were the perennial butts of fun, while the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the protestors at Peterloo and the soldiers of Cromwell’s New Model Army were celebrated as the heroic forerunners of the trade unionists of the 1930s. The quality of the journalism was high and – though the composition of the editorial board was never cited – articles took an increasingly progressive stance, warning of the rise of fascism, Mussolini’s use of poison gas against the tribal warriors of Ethiopia, and the tactics of Moseley’s blackshirts on London’s streets. It is surprising, therefore, that the journal was completely overhauled in the late spring of 1936 and it was claimed “completely revised and modernised in respect to the general quality of its printing, size and

general make-up”9. What this actually meant was that it was shrunk in size, so that it could be easily tucked into a workingman’s pockets, the paper became glossier and the photomontages and graphics were replaced by tourist postcard views of the English countryside. The political bite was sucked out of its articles and the text became so anodyne that it is no exaggeration to say that the casual reader would have been forgiven for not noticing, at the height of the blitz, that a war was even taking place.

It was a missed opportunity and one that saw the leadership attempting to downplay the more radical purposes and nature of trade unionism, in favour of producing a “parish pump” style publication that emphasised the benefits available to members and the social occasions attended by officials.

It further hampered Dukes, whose attempts at image building were remarkably ham-fisted. It would seem that he was struggling to maintain his authority by the summer of 1936, as his closest associates were rushing in to print in order to justify his abilities and record. Most of it was terribly overblown but a flavour of his own priorities and the prevalent union culture can be gathered from an article on Charles Dukes: A Study in Leadership, that appeared in July 1936. “It should be obvious to anyone who considers the matter”, the article begins, “that whatever personal ambition Mr. Dukes may cherish its realisation will depend absolutely upon his ability to build up an organisation capable

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of almost infinite development in stability, mobility, efficiency and in numerical strength. The triumph of Mr. Dukes must be, can only be, commensurate with the success of the Union. The realisation of his personal ambition is, therefore, bound up with and conditioned by the progress and expansion of the organisation”. Then the article goes into hyperbole, alleging that: “The unique military genius of Napoleon would have been of little avail had he not had under his command what for years was the finest fighting force in the world, and without an increasingly powerful organisation behind him, all the ability, all the determination, all the mental and physical vigour he may possess will not avail Mr. Dukes to reach his heart’s desire.

For the complete success of schemes, as vast and as intricate as those he has in mind, it is necessary that Mr. Dukes should have the loyalty, the wholehearted co-operation and, above all, the confidence of his colleagues near and remote, and that vested interest should not be allowed to prevent, nor even delay, the advancement of merit”10.

What the cotton spinners, stokers, refuse collectors, colliery men and piece workers who comprised the union’s membership made of these claims can only be guessed at. They certainly put a gulf between their own experiences and the attitudes of their leadership, and appeared to have a brittleness about them that betrayed a deep sense of unease, rather than the calculated confidence that Dukes had hoped to exude.

ill fares the land: Where Wealth accumulates & Men decay The GMWU did well to weather the worst of the depression, which brought mass unemployment on a hitherto unknown scale, and the shame and humiliation of the Means Test, to immiserate the working class.

Children with rickets, soup kitchens and bands of women scratching to uncover shards of coal to use as fuel amid the spoil heaps, became common place. The fate of Jarrow became emblematic of a wider suffering. As J.R. Drummond of Northern district explained: “Rationalisation removed the chemical works, tube works faded out, the blast furnaces and steel works followed the paper mill in the post-war depression, leaving only the shipyard and the engineering works” – then the shipyards, themselves, went leaving nothing behind to support the town11. Almost overnight, and out of a skilled workforce of 8,000 only 100 remained in employment. To make matters worse, most of those were only retained on temporary schemes and reduced wages.

Ellen Wilkinson, the local MP, would later record something of the spirit of those days in The Town that was Murdered, which was

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published by the Left Book Club in 1939, and wrote of the innumerable meetings and torchlight processions “of Tynesiders tramping for seven miles in a bitter wind in a demonstration against the meanness of the Means Test” and of the miners of Durham and South Wales singing “the Internationale in memory of those who had greeted me [while visiting the International Brigades] last May and who were now lying deep in Aragon”. Here the political and economic issues that dominated the 1930s were conjoined in a struggle against fascism and

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unemployment. At the beginning of October 1936, 300 men – including members of the GMWU – set out from the town to march to London on what was to become known as the “Jarrow Crusade”.

Ellen accompanied them on their way, speaking at their evening meetings and described their entry to London, amid a torrential downpour, at the end of the month as looking “so ramshackle and weary that the waiting press men dubbed us the picture of a walking distressed area”.

She presented the case of the marchers to that year’s Labour Party Conference and told delegates that “you cannot expect men trapped in the distressed areas to stay there and starve because it is not convenient in having them come to London … The march of Jarrow is a great folk movement.

What propaganda speech is equal to that vast object lesson of the town that was murdered in the interests of the Stock Exchange and rationalisation? … The Party must put itself at the head of a great movement of moral indignation … If we cannot do this, what use is the Labour Movement?”. Shortly before, the GMWU took a leading part in a demonstration that drew approximately 24,000 men and women from all over the country to Trafalgar Square to protest against the Means Test, an invasive method of prying into the savings of ordinary families before benefits could even begin to be assessed.

Dukes took his place on a platform organised by the Labour Party and the

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London Trades Council, and rose to deliver the most effective speech of his career. “The Means Test”, he considered, was “Capitalism in the raw … The [Conservative] Government through the Means Test, transfers a State liability to the families of those unfortunate workers who are unable to secure employment. Economic privation is thereby used to compel the worker to accept employment at any rate of wages rather than that he should remain dependent upon members of his family”.

As he began to warm to his theme, he declared that: “Capitalist Governments will never legislate for the maintenance of the unemployed. Low wage standards mean that scales of relief for the unemployed cannot be fixed at a maintenance level. Every improvement in the status of the unemployed has been conceded reluctantly

by Capitalist Governments under the constant pressure of organised Labour.

The most effective method of dealing with this problem is to secure 100% trade union organisation, and to make the members of trade unions politically minded”12.

This theme of 100% trade union membership in the workplace had been picked up by Margaret Bondfield when she had addressed the South Shields No.1 Branch on “new developments” in trade unionism. Though impressed by the possibilities offered by Mondism, she balanced the pros and cons of scientific and technical development, telling the branch that: “An enormous gain in the status of the

worker had been achieved by trade union effort [since the 1890s] … There is power in that status, to control events and mould policy … That is the task of the new trade unionism. Control and direction of national policy must be bent to the abolition of unemployment. We must share work and leisure together. Each fresh scientific discovery makes possible an ever higher standard of life for the worker”, before “quietly leading” her audience “to consider the great changes which have taken place in industry and the new problems which have

The Jarrow marchers arrive in London, October 1936.

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In 1936, Cromwell – as the saviour of parliament – is evoked to fight fascism.

to be solved. The growth of international competition for markets, the science-created revolution in the shape of new machines, displacing more and more labour, day by day”13. Progress suddenly appeared to be doubled edged and it seemed to Bondfield as if the unions needed partnership with employers and a niche within the state in order to survive and better serve their members. Mondism appeared to fit with the reality of weakened and more quiescent trade unions, that were unable at times of soaring unemployment to call or successfully prosecute disputes against the worst of the employers. As a result, the period from 1927-38 was a time of relative industrial peace, although the GMWU was called upon to take a lead in disputes in the collieries of South Wales, and strikes involving the Nut and Bolt workers at

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Atherton, Lancashire, building workers in Derry, Clay workers in Devon and dock workers in Hull. The most serious was the Lancashire Cotton Trades dispute of 1929, that saw the employers return to the tactic of locking-out their workforce, and understandably resulted in lasting bitterness among those who had been victimized and lost their jobs. However, for the most part those strikes that did flare-up – such as the dyeing dispute that stretched right across Ireland- were conducted at a fairly low level of intensity, and saw the union playing an essentially defensive and measured role.

Yet, there were some areas in which the union could not sit idly by and in striving to mobilise its members against the threat of fascism, the GMWU conducted some splendid work. When Moseley’s homegrown fascists began attempt to terrorise the Jewish communities in London’s East End, J.R. Clynes made one of his most effective interventions on the subject of racism and the rise of the Blackshirts that stands to this day as a rallying call and a declaration of firm adherence to trade union principle, even as the shadows lengthened over much of the European continent. “Racial abuse”, he began, “is perhaps the most provoking and improper of all. It arouses passions deeper than class or party criticism can, no matter how sharp that criticism may be … If I may take my own case to illustrate it further, I would remain unmoved … if I am denounced for being a Socialist, but if I were denounced for being an Irishman,

chanGinG the Guard on shiftinG sands chaPter 5

I would regard that as an attack upon my parentage and not upon my politics. I would face the one with complete indifference, but the other … would enrage even me …

Our rights, therefore, must have relation to the rights of others. We have in this land a group of law-abiding and serviceable British subjects who are Jews, who have suffered in past years a great deal of insult, abuse and censure … Many Jews have fought for this country. Some of them have worked peacefully for its advantage, and some of them have in the highest spheres of artistic, commercial and scientific service conferred great benefits upon our people. As a race and as a class they ought to be protected against the malicious attacks which [a] certain political organisation [ie. Moseley’s British Union of Fascists, has] recently directed against them. It is a contemptible thing that any political group should exploit racial prejudice for political ends”14. To his credit, Charles Dukes made the link between home-grown and foreign fascism and castigated the Conservative Government for its policy of appeasement, sitting idly by, pretending neutrality, while Hitler and Mussolini tipped the scales in the Spanish Civil War by sending aircraft, heavy artillery and tanks to re-supply Franco’s Nationalists. “If fascist countries are supplying the rebels with the implements of war”, Dukes wrote, “we in our country should be prepared to supply an equal amount of ammunition to the constitutional Government of Spain”15. For once, he was

far outstripping the position of the leadership of the Labour Party, which was still attempting to equivocate over the anti-fascist nature of the war. Dukes the convinced pacifist could see – where Chamberlain, Halifax and even Lansbury could not – that you could not seek to negotiate with fascism, you could only stand your ground and prepare to fight.

Thorne, rising to speak in the Commons, was at his best, serving notice that through their appeasement: “The Tories have smashed the League of Nations. They have swept away its authority … and for what reason? Are they afraid of Mussolini, or are they courting the principles of Fascism? Almost in a tone of apology for carrying out the Covenant of the League they offer to Italy the friendship of the British people in an endeavour to obtain a Four-Power Pact … On Thursday 18 June [1936], the House was crowded to receive the statement of the Foreign Secretary that we were beaten, and never in the 30 years that I have been a Member have I witnessed such a scene of humiliation. The evident joy of the anti-League Tories and fury of the Opposition will live in my memory for a very long time … the Parliamentary Labour Party are to move a vote of censure on the Government, which reads as follows – ‘That His Majesty’s Government, by their lack of a resolute and straightforward Foreign policy, have lowered the prestige of this country, weakened the League of Nations, imperilled peace, and thereby

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the storMy Petrel General secretary nafta 1906-1940

1862 -1952

A skilled craf tsm a n, he sha ped the Furn iture Ma kers’ into one of the mo st prog ress ive u nion s in the cou ntry.

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t

he son of a gardener, working on the estate of the Earl of Glasgow, Alex Gossip was apprenticed to a cabinet maker as a fourteen year old boy, and at once joined the United Operative Cabinet and Chairmakers’ Society of Scotland in 1876, only a year after its foundation. It was the beginning of a lifetime’s involvement with the Labour Movement, which took him from a small Scottish workshop, amid the wood shavings, varnishes and hand lathes, to street corner oratory in Fulham, and international trade union congresses at the political heart of the new Soviet Union.

Yet, it was his thirst for education and his love of children that initially made him a national figure, through his work with the Socialist Sunday School Movement.

He organised picnics, walks in the woods, nature trails and Christmas parties, for his young charges; many of whom would not otherwise have had the means to experience them. However, it was as a storyteller and as a man of extraordinary kindness that he was to be remembered. In the November 1902 edition of The Young Socialist – the movement’s journal – he retold the story of King Midas, drawing out a more immediate parable. “We Socialists”, he wrote, “want

many of the nice things that King Midas had but we cannot afford to pay the price that he did for his golden touch … The happy joyous life has gone out of thousands upon thousands of our little boys and girls and left in its place something hard and unlovely, just like the King’s daughter after her father’s touch, all because a few men and women are not content with an abundance of good things, but must have more, regardless of the cost in misery and unhappiness to others … We, dear children, are working for the day when our country will be full of beautiful sweet-scented flowers and the hearts of the grown-ups will be gladdened by the sight of happy, romping boys and girls, and if the King Midases of today do not learn their lessons, you and I, dear Comrades, will have to teach them”.

The children’s friend The National Council of Socialist Sunday Schools was founded at Easter 1909 and Gossip was its first President, holding the post until he resigned in 1911, under the pressure of his union work.

He served as part-time secretary of the Cabinet and Chairmakers’ Society, was forced into a long and vicious dispute at Beith, in Ayrshire, in 1880, and won a

formidable reputation as a union organiser during the Scottish lock-outs of 1898, when the employers determined to smash unionism once and for all. Emerging victorious, despite the difficulties of recruiting and sustaining a membership based in predominantly in small workshops, Alex Gossip moved to Fulham in 1902 and became General Secretary of the newly established National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association (NAFTA) in 1906.

A further attempt by the wholesale furniture companies to destroy the union, using the trade depression as a pretext for raising hours and lowering conditions, led to lock-outs in Manchester, Nottingham and Liverpool, in 1912. However, once again the union – now numbering approximately 16,000 members – held firm under Gossip’s leadership and won the day.

Then, in November 1913, signs went up in some thirty firms across Buckinghamshire warning the furniture makers to: “Appear before us before 12 o’clock on November 29th and tear up your union cards, then you are safe” from dismissal. Some 2,000 workers showed their resolve, giving their response by walking out of their factories and workshops and beginning the bitterest 201

dispute in the union’s history. Fought out over the worst of the winter weather, with picket-lines maintained in freezing temperatures, the strike lasted for 91 days.

The NAFTA, led on the ground by Fred Bramley, scored a triumph when the employers unexpectedly capitulated in the face of a determined union membership, the leadership of Gossip who was prepared to back the grass roots to the hilt, and the haemorrhaging of public support.

The union took the education of the young to heart and sought secular, state education for all. Walter Crane drew this for the Ipswich branch of the Gasworkers.

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leader of craftsmen A pioneer Socialist, Gossip was a close friend and comrade of James Keir Hardie, he had always argued that workers should have their own political political party and seek representation in Parliament.

He become a founder member of the Independent Labour Party in 1893 and attended every Labour Party Conference, as a union sponsored delegate, until his retirement in 1940.Yet, it was a powerful sense of internationalism that fired his oratory and political passions. The union supported their French and German counterparts, when they were engaged in disputes, and raised funds to support Russian Social Democratic candidates in the 1907 elections to the Tsarist Duma.

He was one of the few leading trade union leaders to stand firmly against the First World War throughout the conflict and watched with horror as Keir Hardie died, broken hearted, on account of a conflict that he could not prevent. He opposed conscription and wrote that: “It is horrible to think that those German trade unionists who so nobly responded to the call for assistance during the Swedish National Lock-out and later in our struggle in Nottingham, Manchester and Liverpool, should be forced to fight with their fellow trade unionists from other countries … even now some unscrupulous employers are coolly calculating on our weakened positions, and their much vaunted patriotism will count for nothing … [they] talk about foreign ‘baby killers’ [manufactured stories of German atrocities during the 1914 invasion of Belgium] but they are here in this country in the shape of ship owners, coal owners, landlords and other sharks of our own race and nationality, lining their pockets at the expense of the physical and moral degradation, and deterioration, of our class including the children”. “They will”, he concluded, “prove themselves far greater enemies to us than 100 foreign tyrants unless

the storMy Petrel

we keep our Trade Union flag flying”.

Amid the slaughter and ruin of the war years, the Russian Revolution of October 1917 stood out as a shining and hopeful beacon, and he took a leading role in the “Hands Off Russia Movement”, during the Civil War of 1918-22. He went to Moscow, in November 1923, as a fraternal delegate to attend the All-Russian Woodworkers Trade Union Conference, and the Executive of the NAFTA sent its fulsome condolences to the Soviet people on the death of Lenin, in January 1924. anti-fascist activist He denounced the General Council of the TUC’s capitulation, on 13 May 1926, became a prominent member of the National Minority Movement, alongside Harry Pollitt and Wal Hannington, and was a dedicated opponent of Mondism. That attempt to “reform” the trade union movement combined two of the elements he most hated and feared during the inter-war years: class collaboration – foreshadowing Blairite ideas about “partnership” by more than sixty years – and the growth of fascism. He wrote in his union’s journal to “remind the membership as to who Sir Alfred Mond is and what he stands for … In his recent visit to Italy, he is

reported as stating ‘I admire Fascism because it is successful in bringing about social police … Fascism is tending towards the realisation of my political ideals, namely, to make all classes collaborate loyally’”.

Gossip increasingly devoted his energies to opposing the spread of fascism. He supported the establishment of the Popular Front, campaigned for the release of Dimitrov and Thaelmann from Nazi prisons and raised funds to support the international Brigade in the struggle to support Spanish democracy. He attended the European AntiFascist Conference held in Paris, in 1933, and led a campaign to oppose asylum laws that were actively preventing Jewish refugees seeking safety in Britain. At the same time, he was actively involved in the League Against Imperialism, castigating the second Labour government for maintaining colonial rule, and permitting “bombing, murdering, imprisonment and all kinds of foul and wicked things to be perpetuated against our brothers and sisters in India”.

He remained an energetic campaigner on into his 70s, retiring from his post as General Secretary of the NAFTA only when illness overtook him in 1940, after some 34 years in office. In that time, he had created a proud and thoroughly progressive trade union that

blazed a trail in its pursuit of internationalism and opposition to racism, that found its home and continuation in GMB after the amalgamation of 1993.

Alex Gossip was instrumental in the foundation of the Marx Memorial Library, in 1933, and served as its first chair and – during his retirement – as its President. The death of his wife, Isabella, shortly after their golden wedding anniversary was a blow from which he never really recovered, though he would reach his 90th year. He was remembered by his many friends and comrades for his kindness, straight-talking and steadfast opposition to fascism at a time when even those in the Labour Party and TUC preferred to look the other way.

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forfeited the confidence of this House’ – I am confident that the vote of censure will be backed by the people of this country against a Government that has not only fooled them, but also started the world on a short cut to war and the collapse of civilisation”16. The Italian air wings that strafed Ethiopian villages would soon be turned on the British and Commonwealth garrison of Tobruk, and the Nazi bombers of the Condor Legion that rained down death upon the inhabitants of Guernica would, within three short years, be emptying their bomb loads upon Manchester, Liverpool, London and Coventry. If the GMWU sometimes made mistakes; seeming at times hesitant, slightly behind the times, and unduly quiescent in the industrial struggles of the 1930s; then it always cherished the concepts of true democracy and equality. It had no truck with a racism born out of fascism, and when many others chose to bury their heads in the sand, as Hitler and Mussolini butchered their own peoples and attempted to carve up the map of Europe between them, the union saw through them and consistently stood proud against their threats. Ready to be counted, the union throughout this period offered gritty, determined resistance and took little satisfaction from being right when the iron gaze of fascism finally settled upon the British Isles and its hammer blows Mosely and his Blackshirts are exposed and ridiculed by the union in December 1936.

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began to fall upon its factories, villages, playgrounds and streets. As ever, it was the working people who answered the call to arms and shouldered the greater part of the load in order to ensure that a final victory against fascism could be won. In this life and death struggle, Dukes was right to say that the “Trade Union Movement could claim to be playing no mean part”.

The anti-fascist War, 1939-45 With the coming of war, the munitions industries once again expanded rapidly, with most of the recruits to the factories being women or young, and less skilled male workers. With government policies actually assisting in union recruitment, in order to enhance productivity, membership rose from approximately 480,000 – including slightly more than 70,000 women – to nearly 600,000, including some 162,000 women workers. These figures are, however, a little misleading as many thousands of union members joined the forces, leaving work but maintaining their cards, which were left open for them with their subscriptions reduced or deferred17. Undoubtedly, recruitment would have been even stronger had not the AEU – in marked contrast to the policy of the engineering unions in the 1914-18 war – chosen, in 1942, to admit women alongside less skilled workers to its ranks. This said, the union made enormous gains during the war years, not least through the presence of the PLP under Clement Attlee within the war time coalition, from

chanGinG the Guard on shiftinG sands chaPter 5

May 1940 onwards, and the appointment of the T&G’s Ernest Bevin as the Minister of Labour, in the same month. With trade unionists in the cabinet, the profiteering that had characterised the First World War was immediately curtailed, rationing, food subsidies and prices controls were introduced, and an equitable wages policy negotiated between the government and unions that, together with higher rates of income tax for the rich, prevented hyperinflation. Conscription had been accepted before the outbreak of hostilities and the schedule for reserved occupations – exempting those highly skilled workers from conscription, whose absence would otherwise seriously impair production – was agreed without difficulty.

It was clear that private enterprise, if left to its own devices, could not hope to meet the production demands for modern munitions and that free market profiteering would derail rather than serve the war effort. Consequently, the Churchill Government assumed control of all but the non-essential industries with the result that, henceforth, whether directly or indirectly the state controlled pretty much everything required for the waging of total war. A Minister of Production was appointed, who then established a National Production Board and, under that, a network of regional production boards which consisted equally of trade union officers and representatives of the employers. The boards also existed to detect and correct the poor organisation

The Battle of Cable Street, in October 1936, marked a major defeat for the Blackshirts at the hand of the people of the East End.

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The terror of Fascism, unchecked in Spain or Czechoslovakia, visits destruction on a British factory at the height of the Blitz in 1940.

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and misuse of labour; and served to identify and change inefficient plant, ensuring the effective distribution and use of machine tools. Joint Production Works Committees were established, again with an element of worker participation, and worked to impressive effect in the vital aircraft industry.

The GMWU participated in a scheme with the Ministry of Food for establishing works canteens and in securing special rations for

men – such as the quarrymen – whose nature and location of work precluded the establishment of regular mess halls. Initially, the union obtained dispensation for special rations of tea, bread and cheese for the quarry workers, in the Northern and South Western districts, but later devised a system of packed lunches that were delivered straight to them on shift18.

In return for concessions and the ability to organise in the workplace, the union was willing to accept the Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order, which although banning strikes also prohibited lock-outs by the employers, and established a National Arbitration Tribunal to resolve all outstanding disputes. Though the union tended to feel that it gave the benefit of the doubt to the management, the Tribunal did at least claim impartiality and had the power to make its decisions legally binding on even the most recalcitrant of employers. Charles Dukes wrote to his members to express his belief that he “doubted whether in the history of our country, relationships between the two sides of industry, had ever been more cordial. Obviously, there were differences of opinion, but these were generally ironed out, for the reason that both sides were dominated by the supreme purpose – to see the present job through to the bitter end, no matter how long or painful the road was likely to be … [for] in total warfare none could be exempt, no matter how high or low they were in the so-called social scale”.

chanGinG the Guard on shiftinG sands chaPter 5

He took the view “very strongly, that every woman in the country who was not doing a first class domestic job, must play her part.

He knew that meant going back on many of the things they had stood for all their lives. It meant putting many of their strongly held principles into cold storage – they had to accept working conditions, and longer working hours, which strained the endurance of their members” but concluded that the “manner in which the women of the country had so far responded, was nothing short of miraculous, but they had got to respond as women, and not as a class. There was to be no question of the ‘picked jobs’ being reserved for those who happened to have been born in the ‘right homes’ … they were all trying to make democracy work”. Dukes “knew the problems from the industrial side, they would see them through with their usual exercise of the right to grouse – the workers would grumble, but afterwards they would put their shoulder to the wheel, to ensure that the country produced the maximum effort, so that no man in the firing line would ever be able to look back and say that any individual had been sacrificed through the lack of those things with which industry could have supplied them”19.

There was grumbling a-plenty, but resolve and good humour too at one factory in the union’s Northern District, whose rhythms were recorded at the time by one anonymous member who wrote that: “Through odd chinks in the black-out

gear the early sun shot thin shafts of light into the machine shops, paling the electric lamps. It was the last grisly hour of the night shift. Spirits were at a low ebb, and nobody pretended enthusiasm for the job. Another weary night, precisely like those passed, was ending. Tonight, it would be the same, and tomorrow night and – we were beginning to feel – all the nights for evermore; work, weariness, and hope deferred. Then came a whisper, nobody knew whence, that something big was ‘in the wind’. We had felt this tenseness before, and more often than not, it heralded bad, black … ‘I know!’ shouted somebody, his eyes blazing with excitement. ‘I’ll bet the invasion of France has started’ … Somehow we knew our mate was right. Eyes brightened, cheeks flushed, nervous excitement drove away weariness.

Then the night manager announced over the loudspeaker system: ‘British and American forces have landed in Normandy’. No, it wasn’t an anticlimax. We cheered … Men shook hands and women hugged one another.You would almost have thought the fighting was over. Later in the morning, I was in our District Office telling one of the organisers that there was now no need to fear trouble that had been threatened in one of the shops. As we talked, the office ‘re-diffusion’ speakers began to emit the first news of the fighting. Our lads were ashore and established, with small losses. The Americans had run into hot opposition; but were making good progress. ‘Thank God for that’, said the organiser, an old

Private Dennis Donnini (1925 – 1945) the union’s holder of the Victoria Cross.

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soldier, softly.’It’s the beginning of the end’”20.

The liberation of France and push through the Low Countries found one young union member in the advance guard in the battle for the Roer and Mass Rivers.

Dennis Donnini was the son of an Italian born father, who owned an ice cream parlour in the village of Easington, and a mother from the North East of England.

He attended Corby Grammar School in Sunderland before leaving school at 16 and working as a junior packer in the Durham Cable Company’s factory. It was there that he joined the GMWU and became an active member of the Birtley Branch,

As in the First World War, women swelled the workforce and the union, 1939-1945.

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County Durham. Called up for active service in 1944, he joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers and, on 18 January 1945, found himself in the thick of a firefight for control of the little village of Stein, on the border between Holland and Germany. Having cleared 30 yards of open ground, under heavy fire, he cleared a farm house of the enemy, before returning to rescue a wounded comrade. As fresh German gunfire raked his position, he continued to man his Bren gun until killed when an incoming round exploded one of the grenades that he was carrying. At 19, he was the youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross, with his citation recalling “the dash, determination, and magnificent courage of Fusilier Donnini [which] enabled his companions to overcome an entrenched enemy twice their own strength”21.

J.R. Clynes spoke for many when he wrote that: “I think we now know not only what we are fighting against, but what we are fighting for … Every declaration on our after-war system of life puts working class education in a foremost place. This will not avail without the industrial security and economic equality which have been impossible where the main means of social life are in private hands … [this] is the first time in history that Labour standards and the right of freedom from fear or want have been proclaimed as a foremost object of a great war … The fight now is to retain our personal freedom and democratic institutions. The political fight will begin

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Unionised labour aiding the workforce in aircraft factories...

after the present war ends. The power to insist upon change will rest with the workers themselves. They need not in later years fight or die to get the things they desire and deserve. They need only vote for them”22. Expectation ran high for a better post-war world, with the Chairman of the union, Fred Marshall, reminding the 1945

Congress of the union’s achievements “in the gas industry and the public services – [keeping] the life lines of the nation [open] – they had manned their posts under the most terrifying blitzes and had done their job; forty or fifty thousand members had gone into the armed services and were presently to return home to resume

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...and in the shipyards.

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membership of the Union and ready to assist the Union to make a worthy contribution to the solution of the gigantic tasks of peace”23.

Foremost of these was the election of a majority Labour Government, capable of realising war time promises of social justice, greater equality, opportunity, and common ownership. Out of a war-ravaged, bankrupted country, Attlee’s first administration surged ahead – after May 1945 – with plans for a National Health Service, the nationalisation of the Bank of England, the mines, and the electricity and gas industries. The hated Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act of 1927 was wiped from the statute book, together with other anti-trade union legislation, guaranteeing basic freedoms to combine and organise that had long been denied. The way ahead seemed clear, as T.W. Kerry told GMWU delegates after the election victory that “the opportunity for which our Movement had worked from the foundation of the Labour Party at the beginning of the century had now been realised … and … that the only Party in the state capable of government in a modern world is the Labour Party”. Kerry thought that: “We will live to see great changes. The social services of the country will be developed; our policy of full employment will be unfolded, but its success depends primarily upon the attitude of the trade unionists towards this economic revolution through which we are passing”24. Clynes and Dukes

chApter 6

An of the

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The Strike at the Savoy

I

n 1945, the catering and hotel industry was one of the last unorganised sectors of the workforce, with recruitment rendered difficult by hostile employers, short-term contracts, seasonal work and the reliance upon discretionary tips to supplement fairly meagre basic wages. In addition, many of those employed were drawn from new immigrants to Britain – predominantly the Italians and French, but also Greeks and Asians – who were often vulnerable, initially lacked language skills and could expect to experience a relatively high turnover of jobs in a short time. The major London hotels, which threw the class divisions and enormous inequalities of wealth that separated guests from staff into particularly stark relief, provided high profile targets for union recruitment among workers whom it seems had been radicalised by their experiences during the war years. This was certainly true of the Savoy, which had been briefly occupied by seventy families from London’s East End at the height of the Blitz, in 1940. Outraged by spending the nights in makeshift refuges or in the squalid and cramped conditions of the Tilbury shelter, where thousands took cover during the raids, they made a point of occupying the private shelters for individual guests that had been excavated and expensively reinforced under the hotel. To their amazement the new squatters – predominantly young mothers and their children – discovered that these were opulently decorated, with matching wallpapers, armchairs and bedding, and that the guests had their own private nurses on standby in case of a mishap. While the management called in plain clothes policemen, the waiters passed around water and provisions for the children and negotiated a price for tea and buns for their new “guests” with Phil Piratin, the leader of the protest, who would later become the post-war M.P. for Stepney. Piratin recalled that: “Three or four of the waiters went into a huddle, with one in particular doing the talking.

He was evidently convincing the others. How they convinced the chef and management, I do not know, but within a few minutes, along came the trollies and the silver trays laden with pots of tea and bread and butter. The waiters were having the time of their lives.

They were obviously neglecting their duties, standing around, chuckling and playing

Arthur Lewis leads the striking Savoy workers alongside his wife, Lucy, and Francesco Piazza.

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The march to support the Savoy Strike even drew in members of the Royal Household, October 1946.

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with the children”1. It seems likely that this experience of direct action served to put heart into the Savoy staff, cut at deference, and provided a point of contact for them with Labour Movement activists – such as Piratin, Solly Kaye and “Tubby” Rosen – who had wide experience of grassroots campaigns.

However, it was Arthur Lewis – newly elected to Parliament in May 1945 as Labour M.P. for the Upton division of West Ham and district organiser for the GMWU – who held the brief for organising among the catering sector and who deserves the credit for the union’s success among the hotel workers. He signed the first trade union agreement in the catering industry and had built a membership of approximately 13,000 members in the sector by March 1947, from a base of only 500 in the previous August. In a union which had not had an assertive culture of recruitment for many years, this was a major development and a tribute to the tenacity of Lewis and his colleagues in London District who pioneered the campaign.

The main flashpoint occurred at the Savoy Hotel, in October 1946, when the management refused union recognition and threatened to sack all of those who took part in what was, initially, an unofficial strike that quickly spread to other London hotels. Two days into the strike, on 10 October, journalists watched as strikers sang “Money is the root of all evil” outside the windows, saving the worst of their ire for the manager, Lee de

An eStAte of the reAlm chApter 6

Costa, who was spotted preening in his immaculate morning coat, and trying to block the arrival of the laundry vans. A middle aged well-wisher crossed the road, pressed a card into the hands of the pickets and with it “a cheque with an almost indecipherable signature for £100”2. By then, the strike had spread to Park Lane – where waiters and waitresses set down their trays and walked off the job in the middle of serving lunch – and to Claridges, where luncheon had to be served cold to the Duchess of Kent, the Duke of Alba – a prominent supporter of General Franco – and the self-styled King Peter of Yugoslavia.

The kitchens in the Ritz shut, and groups of strikers went to Smithfield and Covent Garden markets to appeal to the workers to refuse to handle fruit, vegetables and meat intended for the hotels affected by the dispute. Though the Ministry of Labour could not seem to draw a response from the hotel owners, in order to establish a basis for talks, the pickets had effectively cut off supplies to the Savoy, by 11 October, taking particular pride in turning back scores of crates of beer and in initiating secondary actions by the Fishmongers at Billingsgate – who refused to supply the hotels – and the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers came out in their support, withdrawing their maintenance men and carpenters.

Staff at Buckingham Palace sent messages of support, argued for their own representation and reported that meat stocks were running low. Arthur Lewis thought, at this point,

that: “Our greatest difficulty was to control the enthusiasm of every section of the catering industry, because I was approached by workers in tea shops, cafés and Lyons’ Corner Houses, to grant permission to them to join the dispute”3. While all ten employees at the Maison de France restaurant joined the strike, at the same time, the managements of the Holborn, Frascati, Potomac and Prince’s restaurants all sued for peace and agreed to grant union recognition to their workers; prompting a delighted Lewis to proclaim that that “this is the first rift in the wall of anti-trade unionism”4.

Within hours, however, he and the other strike leaders – Joseph Ravera, the secretary of the London catering branch, and Francesco Piazza, the head picket at the Savoy – had been served with an injunction barring them from the scene of the strike on account of their “inciting men and women to join an illegal strike”. Arthur Lewis, who had been in continual motion between the various picket lines, put his wife Lucy at the head of the strike; while an angry editorial in support of the strikers made it plain that the “action by the Savoy Hotel means that private employers are able to make use of an emergency law for their own private benefit against the workers”5.

A march from the doors of the Savoy, via the Piccadilly hotels, to a rally in Hyde Park brought some 2,000 strikers and supporters onto the streets and Arthur Long, reporting for the Daily Worker

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captured the scene: “On their home-made banners was the earliest and most elementary demand of trade unionists – We Want Trade Union Recognition. No practised demonstrators, these, though they marched well. The mass of these men and women were marching on the streets for the first time in their lives – cooks, waiters, waitresses, men and women from the kitchens, girls, Irish many of them, hardly out of their teens, with tired faces.

For the sympathetic crowds of Londoners who watched from the pavements this was

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a revelation. The quiet, deferential men and the nimble women who had waited on them at table, were marching proudly, heads up, demanding their rights”6.

The electrician’s union, the ETU – then one of the most progressive union’s – had by then thrown its weight behind the strike, together with the AEU, and with more than 500 support workers taking part in secondary action – allied to the spectacle of women in fox furs and jewels having to run the gauntlet of picket lines to leave the hotel lobby – the hotel owners felt compelled to talk. At a four hour meeting held at the Ministry of Labour agreement was reached between the employers and a union delegation, comprising Arthur Lewis, Charles Dukes, E.V. Watering – secretary of London District – and Tom Cochrane, national officer, that seemed to grant the strikers total victory. In return for an immediate resumption of work, the hotel and restaurant owners agreed to grant full trade union recognition and gave an undertaking that they would not victimise or intimidate any of the strike leaders.

John Ravera was jubilant, declaring that “we have waited twenty-five years for this day!” and Harry Gold dashed off a quick tune for his dance band, in honour of the dispute, called Striking at the Savoy7. A wornlooking Charles Dukes paused to have his photograph taken on the steps of the Ministry of Labour, after announcing the victory, while Arthur Lewis gave his fullest praise to the previously unorganised

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waitresses and cleaners who had thrown themselves so magnificently into the thick of the fight. “One of the most remarkable things about this dispute”, he thought, “was the fact that almost every race, colour, class and creed were united in solidarity with one another during this strike. On the picket line at the Savoy, we found Chinese, Indian, Austrian, German, Italian, French, Jewish and English workers all taking active part in the dispute, which proves to me that the old slogan – ‘Workers of the world, unite.You have nothing to lose but your chains’ is as true today as when the slogan was first initiated”8. In order to fully capitalise on the success, he left to conduct a recruiting tour along the South Coast and pushed agreements aimed at organising in the popular chain of Lyons teashops.

The union was successful, had reestablished a national profile in the press and newsreels as a force to be reckoned with, and had fought for its membership in a manner not known for many years.

London District was buoyant and enthusiasm coursed through the veins of the organisers in a way not experienced since the heyday of the Gasworkers. Perhaps more importantly, the union had re-engaged with its core constituency of marginal, low paid and semi-skilled workers. It should have been a time of growth and celebration, especially as the way was now open to recruit across the burgeoning service sector.

However, the leadership did not see it that way. Dukes, tired, disillusioned, and coming

to the end of his mandatory term of office, was even at the time of the Savoy dispute preparing to hand over to the reins to his successor. Tom Williamson – whose path to the general secretaryship had largely been cleared by the disqualification from office of his nearest rivals – was certainly less

The Savoy Strike: Lady Astor crosses the picket line (facing page), while the kitchen hands and waiters convene an impromptu union meeting at the back of the Mayfair Hotel, London (this page).

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The hotel workers march for better pay and conditions, October 1946, was routed through the affluent heart of the City.

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forthright and hectoring in committee, but he was also the first general secretary of the union who came from outside the Marxist tradition and was a virulent anti-communist even before the onset of the Cold War. If Dukes had used one of his last union addresses to condemn unofficial strikes as representing “industrial anarchy”, then Williamson targeted his first message to the membership, after his election, to urge greater responsibility and discipline among the membership, attacking the Communist led branches within the union – though he did not do so by name – and to stress the authority of the Executive9. Significantly, the rule book was overhauled before Congress and the “old Marxist address of 1889 withdrawn” on the grounds that it bore “no relationship to present day conditions”10. A growing London District – seen with some justification as the most radical and militant within the union – was viewed with a deep suspicion that was not helped by the hubris with which E.V. Watering celebrated his expanding membership roll or the hopeful reports of activists who had seen Socialism being built in a newly liberated Czechoslovakia11. The success of London in organising the caterers and hotel workers was similarly frowned upon as an example of activist enthusiasm that had had very little direction or sanction by the leadership. Even while Tom Cunningham was writing cheerfully of the sector establishing “national and district machinery to cover England, Scotland and

Wales”, over the winter of 1946-47, going on to announce that “National and District Joint Industrial Councils will follow in due course” and that “the last bulwarks against trade unionism in this country should and can rapidly be thrust aside”; the ground was already being cut from under his feet12.

Humiliated in the previous October, the Hotel owners’ association and the management of the Savoy had not been idle. In particular, in breach of their agreements, they singled out Francesco Piazza for special treatment as a “known troublemaker”. He was alleged to have committed a number of misdemeanours, which an employment tribunal decided amounted to a “technical breach of

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contract” which merited no more than a fortnight’s suspension from work. However, while negotiations were still continuing over his future, in March 1947, the Savoy management simply sacked him. This, in the eyes of E.V. Watering, amounted to breaking the terms of the National Arbitration Tribunal and rendering its future workings meaningless. As attempts at arbitration dragged on, the membership in the Savoy group of hotels were balloted for action and a strike date set for 6 November 1947.

This was put back at the last minute, when management finally agreed to come to the table, but it was too little too late and roughly half of the hotel’s 1,300 workers came out on unofficial strike on the

original date. The good humour that had accompanied the original dispute had completely evaporated with the management threatening to sack any one who had failed to return to work by 8 November 1947.

This time, in order to avoid intimidation the strikers used volunteer pickets drawn from London District but scuffles still broke out with police after the pickets lay down in the middle of the road to prevent oil lorries gaining access to the hotel. The savagery of the encounter, with the police repeatedly charging, cracking skulls with their batons and beating protestors in the backs of their vans, must have been extreme even by the standards of the 1940s as the official report on Metropolitan Police brutality remains under embargo in the Public Records Office until 2024.

Tensions were heightened as the strike was fought out against the backdrop of the 1947 royal wedding between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, when three kings, four queens and “a crush of princes, princesses and grand dukes” were ensconced in the hotels dotted along the Strand. In the cabinet, Ernest Bevin – who like Dukes had moved to the Right since the 1920s – ruminated about a wild Communistinspired plot to derail the royal nuptials and humiliate the motley crew of titled exiles, former White Guards and erstwhile collaborators with fascism who were now checking in to their luxurious suites, while strikers protested outside in the street13.

Thirty pickets, including Arthur Lewis,

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The image of postwar consensus: the centrepiece of the unions’ mural stresses negotiation as opposed to conflict and radiates the optimism and self-confidence generated by the achievement of the Welfare State.

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had been arrested in the disturbances and a smear campaign was launched, seemingly with approval at cabinet level, against Francesco Piazza, who despite growing up in Catford was claimed to have been interned during the war on account of his Italian parentage. A waiter, whose job was to carry dirty plates and cutlery from the tables at the Savoy Grill to be washed in the kitchens, his life had been wholly unremarkable up until the autumn of 1946 and all that could be actually be alleged against him was that he was an active trade unionist, and GMWU member, who stood up for his fellows.

London District determined to fight for

him, but the General Secretary had other ideas. Shortly after his arrest, Arthur Lewis was relieved of his responsibilities for both the sector and the organising of the strike by the Executive of the union. London District took the news with an incredulity that soon turned to undiluted fury, expressed in a resolution “disapproving of the action of the National Executive and expressing profound disgust at the terms of the settlement”14. The settlement alluded to was, in fact, a climb down by the leadership of the union which had brokered a compromise above the heads of the district and the strikers, with the Savoy management. Francesco Piazza’s dismissal was approved but he was to be offered work at another restaurant in the West End. With Piazza removed from the scene, they hoped that the fight would go out of the Savoy branch and ordered their members to return immediately to work. However, not for the first time or the last, Williamson elected to attack his own activists with a savagery he had been reluctant to unleash upon the hotel owners. The Executive clamped down upon dissent, responding to the motion by suspending the entire district committee and sending out a circular expressing the opinion that “the district committee had exercised no restraint over the strike and had far exceeded the bounds of their authority”. Three prominent London members – J. Leslie,V. Fox and J. Blair, who had all lent their active support to the strike – were banned from holding office within

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the union, Arthur Lewis – despite his sterling work as an organiser – was dismissed and later expelled from the GMWU, and E.V. Watering, the London District secretary, was subject to heavy censure and forced to take voluntary retirement15. Jack Cooper – Duke’s nephew, a proven anti-communist and leadership loyalist – was temporarily transferred from the Southern district as troubleshooter to take control of London District and instituted the nearest the union came to a McCarthyite purge of the branch officials.

Though the later strikes at Pilkington’s and Grunwick would often be referred to by those on the Left as “betrayals” of the membership; the Savoy Strike is far more deserving to be remembered for the contrast between the fine union principles expressed at the grass-roots level and the almost total absence of the same by a national leadership that lacked both political vision and any real feel for the very people it was elected to serve. education, Buildings and Benefits The upsurge in unofficial strikes, culminating in the Savoy dispute, at the end of the 1940s had made the leadership of the GMWU profoundly wary of the shop stewards’ movement and of their own activists. In order to counter grassroots aspirations and strengthen control from the top down, Williamson moved to institute an educational programme that would

“equip trade unionists for the discharge of [their] responsibilities”16. This was to be delivered, in the first place, as a means of competency training administered through external technical colleges. In addition, a number of trade union scholarships to the USA were established shortly after the end of the war, targeting in particular young members, who it was hoped would be impressed by the American – seemingly classless – dream of prosperity and opportunity17. The union already possessed a Research Department and Dukes had at one point, in the mid-1930s, toyed with the idea of expanding it into a major educational centre.

However, due to cost and the fact that Ruskin College, in Oxford, already delivered precisely what was desired and to a high level, the matter The union leadership celebrated its 60th anniversary in some style with a dinner, dance and entertainment at the Dorchester Hotel. It was all a long way from the grime and the fires of Beckton.

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the lASt hurrAh GenerAl SecretAry 1889-1933

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No long er Gen eral Secreta ry, he con tinu ed to insp ire the union, as its hea rt and sou l, never missing a Con gre ss.

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r

etirement did not sit easily with Will Thorne. He had never sought it and, after a massive 44 years spent as General Secretary of the union, he may not have believed that the day would ever come. Those who followed him had known no other leader and struggled to fill the void created by his departure from the Executive. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the undimmed force of his personality coupled to his heroic reputation in the Movement ensured that he continued to overshadow the younger generation of union officers, and Dukes and Williamson, in particular.

He continued to write his parliamentary column for the union journal and retained a considerable level of prestige and authority within the union’s counsels. Moreover, though Thorne had given up his seat on the TUC General Council at the same time as he had retired from the leadership of the union, he remained as an active constituency M.P. for West Ham. Indeed, his role as a union sponsored M.P. actually grew following his retirement from the GMWU.This was the result of the destruction of the Labour Party at the polls, in the general election of 1931, which left him and Jack Jones as the only two GMWU M.P.s who were returned to

Westminster, from the dozen who had represented the union beforehand.

Thorne continued to press the union’s position in parliament, styling Neville Chamberlain as a “man with the kind of outlook that made the dockers come out [on strike] fifty years ago”. However, while he remained the union’s leading force at Westminster, he had no longer had any say in the formulation of its policies.

His remarkable constitution saw him approaching his ninth decade with the same natural instincts, pride and gusto, as an agitator and organiser, that he had honed more than forty years before. In April 1936, he wrote to his old comrade Tom Mann, that: “This year I reach my 79th birthday, and I am pleased to say that during the summer months I carry on outdoor propaganda meetings at the corner of Beckton Road, in my rough and ready manner. I expound the principles of Social Democracy, on behalf of the West Ham Branch of the Social Democratic Federation, of which I am a fully paid up member”.

He continued to live in the same house, 1 Lawrence Road in West Ham, that he had occupied for more than forty years; sharing it now with his fourth wife, Beatrice – who he had surprised even his closest friends by marrying in April 1930 – and his unmarried,

youngest daughter.

The rooms were stacked full with books, pamphlets and journals, his own papers and archives, and with the many gifts and honours bestowed upon him, both nationally and internationally, during his long career. The two volumes of Das Kapital sent to him by Frederick Engels, more than half a century before, were still in pride of place on his bookshelves even as the blitz rattled the window panes and lit-up the night sky outside.

As one who had consistently and constantly warned about the rise of fascism, the outbreak of the Second World War did not hold any great surprise.West Ham and the neighbouring docks suffered badly in the bombing in 1940 but despite entreaties that, on account of age and increasing infirmity, he should be evacuated to the safety of the countryside, he refused and stayed amongst 223

his constituents sharing both their hardships and endeavours.

Though he still rose, like clockwork at 7.30 in the morning and retired promptly at 10.30 at night – joking at his 87th birthday party that he intended to see in his century – old age suddenly began to hit him hard.

In the autumn of 1943, he lost the circulation in both feet and spent more than eight weeks bedridden. It was probably his loss of mobility that prompted his decision, taken a year later, that he would not stand again at the next general election. It was certainly one of the hardest decisions he had ever taken and his final appearance in the Commons, at the dissolution of Parliament on 15 June 1945, was charged with emotion.

However, he rejoiced at the return of the first majority Labour Government and was thrilled by the rendition of Jim Connell’s The Red Flag sung by the Socialist M.P.s on taking their seats. It could not but have stirred within him a cavalcade of proud memories; of strikes and street fights, May Day rallies long past, of the smoke and fire of the retort houses, of congresses of the International, of hopes of a union for all general workers fulfilled and dreams of achieving Socialism still to be realised. He was made a Privy Councillor after the election and 224

on seeing Harold Laski, the Chairman of the Labour Party, he gave his congratulations on the achievement of power and told him that all that now mattered was the creation of the Welfare State and to see that, by so doing, “the children get their chance”.

The end, when it came, was mercifully swift. He died of a heart attack on 2 January 1946 and was buried in the East London Cemetery eight days later. The banner of the West Ham branch led the cortège, followed by hundreds of ordinary union members.

The service was delivered by the bishops of Chelmsford and Barking, reflecting the religious influence of his wife Beatrice, and his attendance at Anglican services over the last few years of his life.Thorne’s two surviving sons and six daughters were present, alongside his widow, as Charles Dukes delivered a strangely muted and lacklustre oration at the graveside on behalf of the union.

Thorne’s fire, passion and politics were now to be dumbed-down and thoroughly sanitised. He had, Dukes said, “brought hope

into the lives of those of no special training, and possessed of no craft, and gave to them a status” but while this was true, it was not particularly inspiring and was only one part of his enormous achievement. Indeed, it would only be under John Edmonds and Paul Kenny that GMB would begin again to re-evaluate and celebrate his leadership. All that was good in the union, as well as one or two things that were not, stemmed directly from Will Thorne.

If he stayed in power too long, or lost his way towards the end, he was not unaware of his own limitations, and stayed true to his own ideals, in his own fashion.Thus, although

the lASt hurrAh

he sat as a Labour M.P. he never gave up his membership of the SDF, or sought to distance himself from the deeds and beliefs of his youth. He was entitled to his pride, in old age, in all that he had built and in the success of the union that he had created, shaped and inspired.

A shrewd negotiator, a courageous leader of men, and an inspiring organiser; he brought unskilled men and women into the heart of the trade union movement, and did as much as anyone to ensure that the New Unions would be Socialist, rather than Liberal, in character. Only Ernest Bevin, Tom Mann, and Jack Jones of the T&G, can be said to have matched, or surpassed, his achievements.

Today’s GMB, more than ever, is a fighting, organising union of the type he would have immediately recognised and taken pride in.

His instincts about social justice and the corrosive, ruinous nature of capitalism, are our instincts. Then, as now, people are placed before profit in all of the union’s calculations and campaigns.Yet, we remember that it is collective rather than individual action that built the union and the wider Labour Movement and that we all stand on the shoulders of giants from an earlier age: there are no shoulders broader, or more solid, on which for today’s GMB to take its stand than those of Will Thorne.

A Marxist to the end: Will Thorne at Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery for the annual oration organised by the Marx Library. The SDF, Polish Socialist exiles and the British Communist Party have all left tributes.

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The revised rule book, approved

by Congress, September 1965.

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was quietly dropped. Pragmatically, the union affiliated to both the Workers’ Educational Trade Union and the National College of Labour, while choosing to fund a single scholarship to Ruskin. As a consequence, the Research Department was to remain, in effect, a solitary office at headquarters where newspaper clippings and articles were collected and duly filed away in case of need for reference.

Williamson increased both the numbers of the staff and their remit, which now stretched to cover the new training schemes for officers and shop stewards, the responsibilities of a political office and National Insurance payments.

An inordinate amount of energy seems to have been devoted, in the late 1940s, to the question of productivity within the workforce, presumably as a result of the beginning of the erosion of Britain’s industrial dominance within world trade, and time and motion studies were run across many districts, which culminated in a month-long training course on the subject, held at Birmingham Central Technical College, in 1949. In 1951, a congress resolution ceded the Executive almost unlimited powers in order to develop “education of trade union members in modern industrial techniques”. For a union that predominantly served semi- or unskilled workers, this was a significant departure and one that showed the aspirations of the leadership for the GMWU to exist as a vehicle for self-improvement and the

acquiring of those skills previously lacking.

This was a laudable aim but, in practice, what seems to have happened was that courses were developed with training, as opposed to education, in mind, which were tailored in order to suit branch officials and officers rather than the wider membership.

They provided the leadership with loyal cadres, capable of conducting administrative duties and familiar with labour law; but they did not extend too far beyond those remits.

Where “political education” was provided it was conducted solely within the context of explaining the policies and programmes of the Labour Party and, in this, the union was extremely successful at delivering its members votes at election after election to the party that it had helped to create, and a career ladder for those members who wished to play a role in local government.

The union’s own political strategy had shifted dramatically from its early days and there was now widespread opposition that its leadership should perform dual functions, within the GMWU and the PLP at the same time. Indeed, as the result of congress resolutions, Charles Dukes, Tom Williamson and Jack Cooper would all have to shelve promising parliamentary careers; though probably only Cooper could have realistically hoped to obtain a high position in cabinet.

Instead, political patronage was exercised and cultivated in an entirely different matter, through the reward of peerages for retiring general secretaries. This process was established by Charles Dukes, who on leaving

the employment of the union was ennobled as Lord Dukeston; and continued by Williamson, Cooper, and Basnett, all of whom took seats in the House of Lords.

No other union sought, or gained, so many life peerages for its leaders and, in the postwar consensus, the GMWU/ GMBATU was virtually co-opted as an integral part of the state apparatus. It went without saying that the union leadership was highly prized by the PLP as a moderating force at both the TUC and Labour Party conferences, invariably holding the middle ground and delivering supportive block votes on behalf of successive Labour leaders, from Attlee and Gaitskill, through to Wilson, Callaghan, Foot and Kinnock. It was an interesting development for a union that existed for the most disadvantaged sections of the workforce. When Jack Cooper took his peerage – as Lord Cooper of Stockton Heath – while still general secretary of the union, in 1966, few of the bin men, park keepers or women factory workers holding GMWU cards were probably convinced by his claim that he accepted the ermine “on behalf of the membership”. When he first arrived at the House of Lords, he met with the Garter King of Arms – the Herald who drew up coats of arms for the newly ennobled – but baulked at the price. “Even a black and white shield”, Cooper said, “would have cost me 250 quid, so I explained I would not need it, as I was only a life peer”. However, the royal herald remained unabashed, telling his new lordship that he was only doing his job

The union member and his family – as part of the affluent society.

The Socialist pamphlet is still tucked into his pocket but his children are bound for grammar school.

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and that: “We have been told to treat you all alike”18.

If the union leadership was increasingly looking to unelected representation in the Lords as a fitting culmination of their careers, then the union’s parliamentary wing was in decline. Indeed, in 1942, the Labour Party had been so worried about the union’s lack of participation that its Executive appealed to the GMWU to allow some of its officers to stand again for Parliament, in order – when the time came – to replace the elderly Thorne and Jones.

In the event, ten official union candidates were selected – Tom Williamson, Mark Hewitson, Arthur Lewis, Fred Marshall, E. Porter, J. Gibbins, S. Lavers, R. Ewart, W. Perrins, and O.G. Willey – and all were successfully elected in the Labour landslide of 1945. Although on the face of it the GMWU had a greater level of parliamentary representation than ever before; that was also within the context of a far larger PLP, which had expanded from 154 seats to 353, and a changing relationship between the union and the party. The union had been at the forefront of the political movement that had led to the creation of the Labour Party, Clynes had briefly led it, and he and Bondfield had held senior ministerial briefs within its pre-war cabinets. Post-1945, though Cooper held a junior secretaryship, the union saw none of its officials attaining positions of influence within government and acted as the conduit for implementing policy rather than the

crucible that forged it. Those union officers, such as Giles Radice or Larry Whitty, who did attain ministerial posts in more recent years did so after they had left the union’s employ, and had no direct brief for it once in government. The separation of powers was clear, the party provided the guiding ideology while the union offered the financial and organisational support that underpinned its support at the polls.

However, the rightward drift of the union – as the Cold War gathered momentum – led the GMWU into some surprising positions for a body that had benefited enormously through the nationalisation of major utilities, and gas and electricity in particular; and was not always accepted unquestioningly by a membership that was becoming increasingly distanced from its self-perpetuating leadership. To his credit, Charles Dukes had immediately understood the symbolism and massive opportunities afforded by nationalisation, writing that it would guarantee higher efficiency, better conditions of employment, and benefit the whole of society.Yet as early as 1948, Tom Williamson was proclaiming that “one feels that it would be both unwise and untimely to widen the scope of nationalised industry. Above all... we must tackle now in real earnest the task of bringing the administration and management of socialised industry into conformity with democratic principles and aims.” This was to be done by extending “the organisation of joint production

Above: Tom Williamson on the election platform with Clement Attlee, c.1950.

Opposite page: Williamson’s tenure saw the union embarking on major building schemes. Almost every district began to lay the foundations for new offices.

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committees and other forms of joint consultation at workshop level” and recreating a form of Whitleyism, rather than a more radical brand of industrial democracy. “We must” he felt, “put our own house in order or take the risk of consequential action which would destroy the democratic methods which we have fought so hard to build up. Therefore I think we must turn our attention to some form of machinery which, while preserving the present system of voluntary collective bargaining, would provide for a responsible, impartial and properly constituted wage authority or Commission with authority to examine agreements... and advise how such agreements can be given effect to, having regard to all the relevant circumstances of the industrial and national situation”. The Labour Government, he felt, had gone as far as it could and it was now prudent to retrench before a Conservative reaction could sweep away all of its gains.

A compulsory arbitration service and statutory wage councils were the best that could be hoped for; control of the commanding heights of the economy would just have to wait. It is notable that, even at the height of the Labour administration’s popularity, all of Williamson’s editorials were dour, cautious and anxious to proclaim their moderation and reasonableness. He – and by extension the union, itself – appeared frightened: fearful of change, of challenge and of its own grassroots.

When the government asked the

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unions and employers to put wage restraints in place, early in 1948, and then – after Stafford Cripps’ devaluation of 1949 – to impose a wage freeze, the union complied willingly on both occasions.

The membership, however, repeatedly voted down the policies at successive conferences but to no avail, as Williamson continued to support the wage freeze even after the TUC, in September 1950, turned against it and its foundations began to crumble to dust. After the defeat of the Labour Party, in October 1951, Williamson offered his unquestioning support for the Gaitskillite, Right-wing of the party in its struggles against the Bevanite Left. He voted unsuccessfully for the removal of Clause IV – aiming at social ownership – from the constitution of the Labour Party; sided with Gaitskell in attempts to remove the union block vote from conference; and pressed his union amid heated congress exchanges to accept the rearmament of Western Germany, based around U.S. hardware and money, and an officer corps that in many cases only just emerged from prison and had only superficially repented their Nazi past. The irony was that the same block vote was deployed – and never challenged in the same way – by the leadership to work its will within the GMWU, itself. Opposition was never concerted, and outside London and Glasgow the Left was never strong.Yet questions and even mild dissent continued to be taken as marks of rank disloyalty, disruptiveness and political irresponsibility.

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Staff at the opening of the new London District Office, 25 August 1942.

District Secretary E. V. Watering is kneeling on the right of the picture.

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Birkenhead branch at the May Day celebrations, 1947. The galleon had been borrowed, for the day, from the showroom of Cammel Lairds shipyard.

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The leadership never looked like losing control of power during this period and rarely faced defeat on policy at Congress.

On the one occasion it suffered an unexpected and embarrassing defeat, it moved heaven and earth to overturn and nullify the vote.

The election of Frank Cousins, as General Secretary of the T&G in 1956, broke the formidable Right-wing block vote – founded on an alliance between the GMWU, NUM and T&G – that had held the Movement in thrall since the 1940s. In one sense, it marginalised Williamson, as the

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last of the Right-wing grandees on the General Council of the TUC; in another, it made his role even more vital in terms of shoring up the position of Hugh Gaitskell at the Labour Party Conference.

Cousins, catching the spirit of the times, had reversed the T&G’s policy on maintaining nuclear weapons and put disarmament back on the political agenda. Having lost roughly a million votes – cast as a single block at the Labour Party Conference – Gaitskell could not afford to lose another 700,000 through a reversal at the GMWU. There seemed little danger in the union’s Congress, held in June 1959, causing any ripples even though Len McNamee, a Lancashire delegate, had tabled a motion “that the next Labour Government should take unilateral action in ceasing to manufacture nuclear weapons, and in prohibiting the use of all such weapons from British territories”19. The problem lay in the structure of the Congress, itself, whereby political motions were often guillotined or quickly pushed through the last day’s agenda. On this occasion, many delegates who could have been counted upon to vote with the leadership and against the motion had already gone home, were sunning themselves on the seafront or – as some whispered – were still in the pub, when the vote was called. In the chair, Jack Cooper could not be sure which way the hall had gone on a show of votes and so called for a card vote, which resulted in the motion being sensationally carried by 150 votes to 126. Suddenly, the GMWU

found itself committed to a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

At the following TUC Congress and Labour Party NEC, the union’s representatives simply ignored the resolution and – to the fury of the Lancashire and Birmingham districts – voted as they always had. Tom Williamson attempted to justify their actions on the grounds that “the three and a half line motion … carried at our last Congress dealt with only one factor in the matter, that of banning nuclear weapons, and under no stretch of the imagination could the Union’s comprehensive policy of defence and disarmament, built up by Congress over the years, be considered as abrogated by the single decision in June”20. It would have been funny if it hadn’t have risked the annihilation of the entire human race, for the sake of keeping face with Hugh Gaitskell. A special recall Congress was hastily convened in August 1959 and this time no one was allowed to leave the hall, resulting in the motion being overturned by a margin of 194 votes to 139.

Indeed, so strongly did the union leadership feel over the matter that when the Labour Party began to reach out towards CND in 1960, Tom Williamson threatened that if it adopted unilateralism it would put its links with the union in serious jeopardy.

The resistance of the regions to the activities of the centrally appointed

The Beckton branch continued to be a bastion of the Communist Party, even at the height of the Cold War.

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L. G. Wright, London District Secretary, leads the recruitment drive in the 1950s. Flip-charts and time and motion studies were rapidly becoming the order of the day.

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organisers, in the 1930s- early ’40s, coupled with the destruction of the shop stewards’ movement after the Savoy Strike, left the GMWU unable to compete with the T&G when it came to recruitment. The union certainly grew in this period, but still barely kept pace with the growth of the labour force and it could be argued that at a time of enormous potential the GMWU should have made even greater gains. It did innovate in some areas, with Southern district buying a mobile cine unit in order

to show films at outdoor meetings but, for the most part, its efforts were concentrated on belatedly enforcing the closed shop in areas in which it was already organised through a “100% Campaign”21. Where Williamson was keen to project the union’s power was through bricks and mortar: through the purchase of properties and ambitious building projects. Thus, the union’s headquarters at Endsleigh Gardens in central London was comprehensively remodelled, with ranges of existing buildings – in the main converted Victorian town houses – demolished, and new modernistic offices and conference halls purpose built with no expense spared. This process was paralleled in the districts, where almost every existing office was rebuilt or moved to grander surroundings and a host of “Thorne”, “Dukes” and “Williamson” houses were dedicated across the country.

This was an age when marble could be used for atriums, fish ponds could be stocked and sunken gardens dug, and general secretaries sat to be painted in oils in the manner of captains of industry or the country gentlemen of old. The working man wanted to feel that he – and it was invariably a “he” – had arrived and could be treated with similar respect to the business men, with whom they now mixed socially as well as meeting round the negotiating table.

The problem was one of cultural and political values and to what degree trade unionists could maintain a degree of separation and retain their own sense

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Tom Williamson and his Executive at Congress.

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A plAce At the top tABle GenerAl SecretAry 1946-1961

1897 -1983

A stro ng La bou r Party loya list, who pra ctically ma de the u nion a n aux ilia ry of the stat e.

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B

orn in St. Helen’s, in 1897, Tom Williamson spent his entire working life as a trade union official. As a nine year old, he was taken by his father, a glass-blower, to hear Tom Mann speak and this experience served to enthuse him with a love of the Labour Movement which never really left him.

He started out as an office boy working for the Amalgamated Union of Labour, his father’s union, and took night school classes in order to make good his lack of formal education. As soon as he was old enough, at the age of sixteen, he joined both the Labour Party and the National Amalgamated Union of Labour, which would subsequently amalgamate with the GMWU in 1924.

Thus, unlike the first generation of the union’s leaders, his political experience was entirely forged within the established Labour Party, and he had no direct contact with – understanding of, or sympathy for – any of the explicitly Marxist groupings which had flourished a generation earlier.

During the Great War, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, saw active service on the Western Front, and rose to become a non-commissioned officer.

He returned home to an administrative

job, initially in the union’s London District, rising to the position of chief clerk. His career benefited greatly from the patronage of his uncle – another Thomas Williamson – a veteran official with the NAUL who served as Liverpool District Secretary for the GMWU between 1924-37. Even so, he had to wait until his uncle had retired before he was confirmed, in 1937, in his post as district industrial officer after an unopposed election.

If his rise through the ranks of the union was, thus, relatively sedate, then his accompanying and – at this point – complementary advancement by the

Tom Williamson with the union Executive on the steps of head office, Endsleigh Gardens, 1 June 1954. Jack Cooper, then National Chairman, stands on his right.

Labour Party was faster and seemingly more promising. He was a member of Liverpool City Council from 1929-35 and a member of the National Executive of the Labour Party from 1940-47.

In the 1945 election, he was elected M.P. for Brigg but with Charles Dukes’ imminent retirement, he was forced to choose between a parliamentary or a trade 237

union career. He chose the latter and, having won the subsequent election for the post of general secretary, in October 1946, he sought to contrast the “almost fanatical zeal and courage” of the union’s founders with the moderation, “high stature and responsibility” of the current leadership.

He told his membership that: “Many industrial leaders have filled, and are filling, high political offices with great credit and advantage to the country”, but, by 1948, he had discovered – unlike Will Thorne – that the workload of a General Secretary was incompatible with the duties of an M.P., however high his ambitions might be. His decision to stand down from parliament, in 1948, was also influenced by an executive which was becoming increasingly concerned that the union’s officers were becoming entirely subsumed within the Labour Party machine, and were spending little or no time on their day-today case loads on behalf of the membership.

Though a natural administrator, Williamson was a poor public speaker and lacked both the panache and the fighting spirit of his predecessors. He was happiest working behind the scenes and within a political course charted by others. Closely identified with the Right-wing of the 238

Labour Movement, he imbibed the spirit of the Cold War, supporting German rearmament and doing everything in his power to derail the decision of the union’s conference, in 1959, to support a ban on nuclear weapons at home. Indeed, his hawkishness on foreign policy matters contrasted strongly with Charles Dukes’ hatred for military expansionism and swagger.

Elected to the General Council of the TUC, in 1947, he became Chair of the TUC in 1956 and was knighted in the same year, after passing a series of resolutions that were bitterly critical of the Soviet Union.

As a firm supporter of Hugh Gaitskell, and of the first attempts to jettison the aspiration of public ownership from the Labour platform, he consistently deployed the massive block vote of the GMWU at party conferences to block the Tribunite Left and the progressive measures advocated

by Aneurin Bevan.

Alongside Arthur Deakin, of the T&G, and Will Lawther, of the Miners’ Federation, he formed part of a formidable power block within both the TUC and Labour Party, which came to dominate the Labour Movement in the 1950s. However, he was very much the junior partner in the

triumvirate and the death of Deakin, in 1955, coupled with the ascendancy of Frank Cousins and a recognisable Broad Left within the T&G, had effectively sidelined Williamson by the close of the decade.

Within the GMWU, his legacy was mixed. He presided over the post-war boom in trade union membership, with favourable economic conditions, full-employment and rising living standards for working people, resulting in swelling coffers and greater national influence than ever before.Yet, while he carefully husbanded the union’s resources and delivered real results in terms of benefits and new opportunities for the membership, it could be argued that he consistently put the interests of a section of the parliamentary Labour Party before that of his own union and did not fully realise the opportunities open to the GMWU to consolidate its position within the state before changing times would ensure that the political winds blew cold again against trade unionism.

The tenor of his approach to industrial relations can be gauged from his welcome at Cambridge University, when he received an honorary degree in 1959, and his description as “a union leader devoted to industrial harmony and to increasing

A plAce At the top tABle

Tom Williamson sat for this oil painting on the eve of his retirement. The leather chair is remarkably plush, the reading material is worryingly slender.

productivity rather than to perpetuating the struggle in which the unions emerged”.

He was bitterly opposed to the calling of unofficial strikes, and convened a TUC inquiry into their causes and effects, which was unsurprisingly highly critical of tactics that Williamson believed were “holding the country to ransom”.

Having reached the end of his maximum term of office, he retired from the GMWU in 1961 and was created a Life Peer, with the title Baron Williamson of Eccleston.

His latter years were both congenial and rewarding, as he continued to sit on the Iron and Steel Board until 1974, served on the board of the Independent Television Authority, from 1961-64, and took a directorship with Securicor – the private security firm – in 1964. Outside of his family, his chief sense of pride probably lay in his founding of the British Productivity Council, which combined his interests in promoting new managerial strategies with a broadly technocratic approach to labour relations.

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This banner commemorating a landmark in the union’s history is now preserved at GMB’s Wimbledon office.

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of identity. There was nothing wrong in wishing to celebrate their own success, or to enjoy the good things in life; but when status began to be expressed through the membership of exclusive golf or gentleman’s clubs, the ownership of flash cars and the acquiring of offices that resembled country estates, there was a real danger that the tribunes of the people had become indistinguishable from the business men and financiers they had been elected to replace. To quote The Who, from a 1971 single, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

If Williamson had sought to define his tenure of office in terms of what he could build, then his successor, Jack Cooper, aimed to make the union driven by the types of benefits it could provide for the membership. However, this would cost money and necessitate enormous change.

Williamson, having reached the age for compulsory retirement, stepped down at the end of 1961, and an election was fought which proved to be the closest to date.

The vote was by branch – with the winner taking the entire block of votes – rather than by individual ballot paper; and this accounts for the apparently large turnout, the comparatively neat breakdown of figures and the more worrying realization that, as with Williamson’s election, there were a large number of branches that simply didn’t send in their returns, either because they were moribund, with only a paper membership, or were so jaded that they

An eStAte of the reAlm chApter 6

simply didn’t bother to endorse any of the candidates. Four candidates stood for election; three district secretaries and one national officer. This time there was no lay challenger, which probably reflected the relative collapse in Communist influence in the union, as the party had previously fielded “stalking horse” candidates from the grassroots in order to lay down a marker in elections. Reg Cook, the South Western district secretary; and Harry Crane, the Midland and East Coast district secretary, both took just short of 50,000 votes, but while Crane subsequently remained in post, Cook’s temerity in challenging for the leadership appears to have cost him dear, as he was pensioned-off early in 1963.

The two heavyweight contenders were Jack Cooper, secretary of Southern district and chairman of the union – whose family ties lent him the added support of the strong Lancashire district – and Fred Hayday, the son of the former Midland district secretary, who though he was only 49, had been a National Industrial Officer at the heart of the administration for more than fifteen years. In the end, Cooper’s higher profile and more wide-ranging connections delivered him the victory: realising 305,647 votes to Hayday’s 206,654.

Cooper, thus, took up his post as General Secretary at the beginning of 1962 and initiated a number of ambitious and energetic programmes that transformed the face of the union. With the benefit of hindsight, and changing attitudes towards

gender equality, some of these now appear to verge on the patronizing, or the downright sexist; but when judged in their own terms and in their own day, they at least proved that the union had moved away from the passivity and complacency of the 1950s, and was now prepared to engage with both the changes in society and patterns of employment that were increasingly impinging upon the work of the GMWU. Trials in television and newspaper advertising had already taken place and the Executive decided to launch a recruitment drive, in 1962, directed at women. A firm of marketing consultants was hired to advise and direct the campaign and six “personality girls” were chosen from among the women membership to act as archetypes and aspirational figures in a series of new adverts. The practical work, however, was conducted by seven temporary women organisers who toured the districts, together with three – permanent – male “mobile” recruitment officers, in a bus covered with union posters, distributing leaflets and playing short cine films in the factory canteens. When they moved on, potential recruits were passed on to the existing district officers, thus removing the antagonism between the centre and the regions that had been created by “outside” recruitment in the 1930s. As with many trade union initiatives, the problem was that the programme was never really developed.

It was conducted, produced some results – with women’s membership rising by

“ Jack Cooper

aimed to make the union

driven by the types of benefits

”

it could provide for the membership

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General Election 1961: the union makes plain its views on Harold MacMillan.

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5,000 in 1962, to the highest figure since wartime, despite an overall fall in the union’s roll – but then allowed to fade away after the initial funding ran dry and it did not produce a panacea for all the union’s woes.

Had the initiative been continued, through good times and bad, then the union may well have produced solid – if not exactly headline grabbing – achievements. In any case, if the union didn’t exactly swing in the 1960s, then at least it had begun to sway gently from side to side.

Jack Cooper’s main idea was to develop a “package deal” of new benefits for members; which saw funeral benefit rise from £10 to £ 30, fatal accident benefits rising to £2 per week for dependents, and disablement grants rising from £100 to £25022. Of course, these new provisions would have to be paid for and the only practical way was through a rise in contributions; in this case from the fairly low level of 1 shilling and sixpence to 2 shillings, an increase of 60%. It was tribute to Cooper’s skill as a politician that he was successfully able to chart the contributions hike through three successive union congresses – raising expenditure in funeral benefits from £58,983 in 1963 to £83,211 in 1964; fatal accident benefit from £14,451 to £28,197 in the same period, and initiating new payments for weekly accident benefits that totalled £29,000 from July to September 1964 – without meeting significant opposition, or experiencing a concomitant fall in membership and

finances. In fact membership remained static, around the 718,000 figure, while total funds, bolstered by the increase in contributions, rose – despite the new claims set against them – from £5, 624, 200 in September 1963 to £6,497,500 in September 196423. Further expenditure was set aside to buy and redevelop the sprawling country estate of Ruxley Towers, near Claygate in Surrey, in the summer of 1964, clearing away the wartime Nissen huts and air raid shelters, and turning a former Victorian conservatory into a heated swimming pool. The development was said “to reflect the forward looking nature of the union” but its location – marooned in the countryside, physically remote by public transport – tended to move the leadership even further away from their members24.

One senior member of today’s GMB can recall the horror with which a group of shop stewards, who had been attending a training course at the nearby Woodstock College – another recent purchase – were regarded on their arrival. They had hiked across country to reach Ruxley Towers in the hope of spending the evening in the union’s bar, but were quickly turfed out and informed that the facilities were for the use of staff only, and certainly “not for the likes of them”. The staff concerned were predominantly drawn from the daughters of the surrounding stockbroker belt, rather than from the ranks of the union itself, and had politics formed by dances at the local Conservative Club rather than the factory

An eStAte of the reAlm chApter 6

floor. It was a strange situation and one that left the bedraggled group of shop stewards thoroughly bemused as they went back to Woodstock the way they came, over the fields and through the rain.

After all the expense and effort of rebuilding the offices at Endsleigh Square, after a few short years, the buildings were sold off to a property developer and the administration of the union moved out to Ruxley Towers in August 1964. If Endsleigh Square had been intended to serve as a monument to Tom Williamson, then Ruxley Towers were to serve as Jack Cooper’s statement of intent in an optimistic new age, when it seemed that the development of science and technology under Harold Wilson’s government would improve living standards across the board for the British people and greatly improve the quality and nature of work, itself, through the application of the “White Heat” of technology.

The Wilson Government After “13 years of Conservative misrule”, the Labour Government carried with it enormous expectations and a specific brief to develop hi-tech industries, as an alternative to the old manufacturing base that was rapidly losing markets. Jack Cooper fully understood what was at stake and attempted to put his union at the heart of moves to re-skill the workforce. He had noted, early on, the societal changes that were gradually eroding an old union culture, telling the TUC that “there are

Campaigning techniques had moved on a little by 1965 as the union goes on the road for Harold Wilson.

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Jack Cooper listens while Brother Weston, a veteran of Midlands District, speaks.

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elderly trade unionists alive today who will say that the good attendance at trade union and political meetings 50 years ago was partly due to the fact that at that time the average working class home was a good place to get away from. Nowdays, the working class home is palatial by comparison. Moreover, the interests and activities open to working people have been vastly expanded by the development of communications. Television is the obvious example … Within living memory, ‘travel’ was a luxury enjoyed by a privileged few; the worker had to make do with a day at the sea – if he could save up and pay for it.

Today, many working people go abroad for

their holidays. The youngsters have their motor cycles; many have cars. Good luck to them. But this widening of interests and activities, good and desirable as it is, militates against the development of the very organisation which exists to achieve better standards of living for working people …

In the affluent society which trade unionism has helped to create, however, working people do not feel any compulsion to combine. Given a relatively high standard of living and the welfare state, the workers’ own assessment of their needs is undergoing a change: there is less emphasis on collective improvement and more on individual advancement. This confronts us with two tasks: (1) we have to communicate with increasing effectiveness the fact that the protection and improvement of the individual’s standard of living depends upon effective trade union organisation; (2) we have to find new ways of providing services to the individual which are outside the scope of existing welfare provisions.

Certain aspects of these developments entail departure from traditional ways …

But our position in the changing society of the twentieth century requires us to think in twentieth century terms – to think fast and to think big”25.

Thinking big, in this case, was outlined in the pages of a Special Report on Technological Change that was presented to the union’s Congress, in May 1965. This sought to define the GMWU’s purpose as maximising “the benefits of change for our members;

An eStAte of the reAlm chApter 6

and to minimise its hardships. The latter will involve little that is not already widely accepted in principle by the State, unions and employers, the three instruments through which the principle objective must be realised … Economic and manpower planning will be essential. Unions, employers and the Government in the interests of planning the future will be obligated to enter into a closer working relationship and assume new obligations and responsibilities at all levels of activity”26.

Automation, based on the North American model, was to be enthusiastically embraced, though there were the risks of job losses as it spread to include medium and small firms – in chemicals, steel, gas, brick manufacture, cement, brewing, the laundries and food and drink manufacture – where there were large numbers of GMWU members. The union was particularly fearful of machines replacing unskilled human labour, and while “the proportion of unskilled workers will fall at different rates according to industries …[and] Although the demand for skilled workers will generally increase, particularly for skilled maintenance workers, some workers with highly specialised skills will find their jobs disappearing. Administrative and clerical employment, despite the prospects of increasing computerisation and mechanisation, can be expected to increase. In general the proportion of workers directly engaged in productive processes will fall further and employment in the service industries will continue to

increase, probably at a more rapid rate”27.

The union considered, in conclusion that: “A more rapid rate of technological change within the next few years is unavoidable [but] because its potential benefits outweigh any disadvantages, we should welcome technological progress. We should not underestimate its challenges. Technological change could mean serious employment

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Even at the peak of the postwar boom, women were still being employed on manual production lines at a fraction of the rate of their male counterparts.

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problems unless extensive measures are adopted to avoid them. The avoidance of serious employment problems depends upon the maintenance of economic expansion and the implementation of manpower policies which will facilitate the swift transfer of redundant workers to other jobs … Some hardship and anxiety among

workers will be unavoidable. The State and industry should adequately compensate workers for any hardships suffered. The adjustments demanded by technological change will place great strains on labourmanagement relations. Unions and employers must enlarge the area of cooperation between them at all levels, but particularly at the level of the firm where the main human problems will arise. The need for trade union and workplace organisation and joint consultative machinery will be enhanced. At national and industrial level, the State, unions and employers must co-operate to create the economic framework which will enable technological progress to occur with the minimum of disruption”28. Together with industrial partnership, and state support to assist those disadvantaged by change, re-training and the acquiring of skills appeared to be the answer.

As the GMWU made plain to the Royal Commission on Trade Unions, in 1966, “the next few years will see the greatest increase in functional training in the history of the union’s programme … expenditure on training and education is one of the union’s best investments. This is axiomatic; for it is undeniable that trained leadership at all levels is the key to efficiency which the organisation must have to give service to all its members”29. What is noticeable, however, is that the emphasis on training was targeted once more at the level of the officials, as opposed to the shop floor, as had originally

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been intimated to Congress. By 1965, the union had built a further extension on to Woodstock College, provided a number of scholarships for VIth formers to attend the Atlantic College in Glamorgan, increased its number of bursaries to attend Ruskin College and was offering several bursaries to allow the sons and daughters of members to attend university30. The union was particularly proud of its research department, led by Giles Radice, which by 1970 had expanded to include seven fulltime graduate staff, which would include a future deputy governor at the Bank of England and a leading member of Rupert Murdoch’s staff at The Times. Radice – who himself had gone to Winchester Public school, and served in the Coldstream Guards before studying under A.J.P. Taylor at Magdalen College, Oxford – was said to have been more interested in his choice of appointments to the department “in ability than class”31.Yet, this rather missed the point and highlighted a major flaw – replicated across the Labour Movement from the Communist Party to the TUC and the EETPU – in associating a university education and a good degree with academic impartiality and political sympathy. It didn’t matter if those hired were middle class or working class – after all both Karl and Eleanor Marx had come from a relatively privileged bourgeois background, while Norman Tebbit hailed from far more modest stock and Margaret Thatcher was famously the daughter of a Grantham

grocer – what did matter was that they had the political orientation, sense of injustice and fighting spirit to aid the union in its aims and objectives. Later developments tended to suggest that many of the “bright young things” that came into union jobs fresh from university – as that sector expanded in the Wilson years – would use the organisation to advance them up the career ladder before jumping ship, to better paid and frequently ideologically opposed

Alvin Christie came from Kingston, Jamaica, to work for the war effort. He stayed on at his tank factory after 1945 and was one of the first generation of Black GMWU members.

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the WhIte heAt of technolo GenerAl SecretAry 1962-1973

1908 -1988

He saw the u nion rea ch the heig ht of its politica l infl uen ce, but cou ld he have pus hed harder a nd furt her ?

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Gy

J

ack Cooper was fortunate to inherit the union when it possessed strong finances and a growing membership; and to lead it through a period dominated by Labour Governments, when trade union influence was at its height and access to ministers and to the corridors of power was taken for granted. He was astute enough to grasp that the nature of British industry was changing, embraced the idea of new technologies, and increased the range and scope of benefits available to his members, particularly in the fields of training and education.

He was born on 7 June 1908, in Stockton Heath, Cheshire, the son of a bricklayer. A bright and forceful boy, he won a scholarship to the local grammar school and made his mark as a gifted and enthusiastic player on the rugby field. His relatively privileged education, albeit one obtained through meritocracy, clearly set him apart from the largely self-educated founders of the union.

This said, he did not stay on at school past 16 and immediately went to work as an invoice clerk at Crosfield’s soap works in Warrington. However, he was fortunate to have Charles Dukes as his uncle and family ties, as opposed to strong political

Harold Wilson tees off on the golf course at Ruxley Towers. Jack Cooper keeps his eye on the ball.

convictions, brought him into the union.

He was appointed as legal officer in the union’s Manchester office, before taking up a post as a Lancashire District official, in 1933, at the age of twenty-five. An abler man than Tom Williamson, he found advancement to be swift. He was appointed National Industrial Officer in 1942, working at head office, and became the Southern District Secretary in 1944, taking

up a position on the union’s National Executive Commitee.

At this point, the GMWU appeared almost as an adjunct to the Labour Party and, for a time, Cooper ran his political and trade union careers in tandem. He served on Manchester City Council between 1936-42 and in the general election of 1950, when Labour was again returned to office, though with a lessened majority, he was elected 249

Nothing is too good for the workers: the Prime Minister and the General Secretary inspect the new swimming pool at Ruxley Towers, 1967

M.P. for Deptford. He was quickly promoted private parliamentary secretary to Patrick Gordon, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations but, at this point – without the protection of his uncle – he was forced to choose, by an understandably anxious union executive, between his parliamentary and trade union ambitions.

In the event, he chose the union.

Resigning his seat but finding a place on the Labour Party Executive from 1952-57.

He was elected Chairman of the GMWU in 1952, continuing in his paid post as Southern District Secretary until 1961.

As Chair of the union, with a strong regional power base behind him, Jack Cooper was well-placed to run for the general secretaryship, following Tom 250

Williamson’s retirement. Significantly, his major opponent, Fred Hayday, came from a similar background; being the National Officer for the gas industry and the son of Arthur Hayday, the former Midland District Secretary. In the event, Cooper won the election by 305,647 votes to 206,654, and took up his appointment at the beginning of 1962.

He sought to further strengthen the union’s finances and at the 1963 conference of the GMWU successfully argued for an enormous 60% increase in membership contributions. In 1964, he sold-off the union’s central London offices, that had only been built a few years before, and bought Ruxley Towers, an imposing old manor set amidst the Surrey countryside refitted with

modern offices, and complete with a swimming pool and golf course. This base, together with the nearby Woodstock College, a residential training centre, became the visible symbols of his rule and a source of great personal pride.

At the same time, he greatly expanded the union’s education and research departments and brought such figures as David Basnett, John Edmonds, Derek Gladwin and Giles Radice to positions of authority in the union.

Described by his own press office as “independent but not unreasonable, original but not intemperate”, Jack Cooper was first and foremost a Labour Party loyalist; a moderate who successfully positioned the GMWU in the centre ground, between

the WhIte heAt of technoloGy

Frank Chapple and the electricians, on the hard Right wing of the Movement, and Frank Cousins, of the T&G, on the resurgent Left. towards the promised land Harold Wilson’s election victory, in 1964, changed the political landscape after 13 grim years of Conservative rule, immediately re-invigorated the trade union movement and ushered in a sense of optimism and progress that soon expressed itself in everything from politics, to fashion, music and popular culture.

In this atmosphere, Cooper threw his weight behind the government’s attempts to introduce an incomes policy, which he believed would help lower paid workers, while – at the same time – advocating the re-skilling of the labour force, which he believed would lead his members to better paid and more secure jobs.

He certainly practiced what he preached, taking extension courses at Manchester University and a scholarship that took him to the USA, for three months, in order to study their unions and system of labour relations.Yet, it was Sweden with its strong tradition of Social Democracy and industrial partnership

between unions and employers that provided him with his inspiration.

“What is vital”, he wrote, was for the trade unions “to behave in a manner that will help the national economy. We must reconcile our trade union aspirations with the rate of growth of productivity. The hope of the unions, and the hope of the nation, lies in a more efficient British industry, which can only be achieved by planning and co-operation”.

He, almost alone among the Labour Movement leaders of the 1960s, embraced the idea of the Common Market and European Union, holding that full membership would result in more jobs for British workers and in greater political and economic influence for the British state.

It would take more than twenty years for the majority of the TUC to come round to his way of thinking.

Ennobled as a life peer – as Lord Cooper of Stockton Heath – in 1966, he used the House of Lords to argue for the reform of industrial relations and compulsory arbitration.Yet, during his tenure, the membership of the GMWU began to stagnate and even to fall, during a time of great industrial promise when both the T&G and AUEW continued to gain

strongly in numbers. This was due, in part, to the increasingly staid image of the union, but also to its inability to effectively represent its members in the workplace.

The bitterness invoked – and, indeed, directed against Cooper personally, as “the Little Lord” who continually hunted for “Reds under the bed” – by the Pilkingtons’ Dispute, in 1970, was one aspect of a growing division between the union’s grassroots and what was perceived to be an increasingly corporate and remote leadership.

Worse still, practically alone among union leaders, he had supported Barbara Castle’s White Paper, In Place of Strife, in 1969, which threatened to significantly curb trade union power; and as the Chairman of the TUC, in 1970-71, he was prepared to be manoeuvred into supporting calls for trade union registration, devised by the then Conservative Government, and fundamentally opposed by the vast majority of trade union membership.

Having retired as General Secretary, in 1973, he continued to pursue his interest in education as both a Governor of Ruskin College Oxford and a Trustee of the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, which he – in part – had helped to devise in 1956.

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A recruiting leaflet from the mid-1960s rings the changes.

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positions with industry or the media. This said, Cooper and David Basnett, his eventual successor, did make some significant and well chosen appointments to their staff.

Giles Radice would certainly have obtained a ministerial portfolio if it had not been his misfortune that his parliamentary career – which began with the GMWU nomination for the Chester-le-Street constituency – had almost exactly coincided with the Labour Party’s long exile from office. Larry Whitty – the future General Secretary of the Labour Party – succeeded Radice in the Research Office, and held the post for more than a decade, focusing particularly upon health and safety issues at work. Though both Radice and Whitty left the union to pursue the careers that made their names in the field of politics and would eventually take their seats in the House of Lords; John Edmonds, the other notable university graduate appointed during this period, chose to remain with the union and tellingly declined a peerage when it was offered.

If fresh blood was coursing through the union’s veins, then it was also time to say goodbye to some familiar faces. Officials continued to have extremely long and full careers in the union’s service and Charles Moody, who retired from the union in August 1970, had worked as an officer for more than half a century, having served his first term on the union general council in 1926 and famously challenged Will Thorne for the leadership, on behalf of the National Minority Movement32. The decade

undoubtedly began for the union with a sense of optimism. Membership peaked at a twenty year high, in June 1970, at 821,598 and Tony Benn, as Minister of Technology, spelled out a radical and innovative role for the trade union movement, where: “Apart from its traditional concern for education and health and welfare, it now expects to be consulted, and must increasingly be consulted, about the investment and development strategies followed by industry and about the whole range of Government policies that affect industry. To this we must add the growing demand at the shop floor level for the beginnings of a real industrial democracy”33. If workers’ participation was not at the forefront of the GMWU’s agenda – and the union was attracting fierce criticism during this period for its backing of Barbara Castle’s White Paper, In Place of Strife, that sought to limit trade union freedoms – then it was exploring methods of growth in other, no less controversial, ways. Jack – now Lord – Cooper had met with Frank Chapple of the EETPU to explore the possibility of a merger between the two unions, uniting their membership in the gas and electricity industries, and creating a new union that would have had almost 2 million members and have formed a formidable Right-wing block at the TUC and Labour Party Conference34.

That this came to nothing was probably viewed with some relief by the rank-andfile membership of the GMWU, whose blue collar backgrounds – signified by the

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adoption of the recruitment slogan of the “GMW, the union which … above all others [is] dedicated to the defence of the bottom dog” – would have clashed with the high wage, labour aristocracy of the electricians, long before the political divisions became apparent35. In any case, both unions soon had more pressing concerns to worry about.

Against all expectations, the election of June 1970 resulted in a narrow victory for the Conservatives which ushered Edward Heath into Downing Street, together with a raft of monetarist policies that very quickly wrought havoc upon the public sector as government expenditure was slashed, almost overnight. Council workers went out on strikes that were national, selective and largely spontaneous in nature. Derek Gladwin, then a National Officer – and later Southern regional secretary, as the old “district” titles were phased out – co-ordinated the action on behalf of the GMWU. Despite the Heath Government threatening to send in the troops to clear the rubbish bins, in an echo of events in Ulster, popular support remained strongly in favour of low paid workers and more than 70 local councils opted to settle straight away for a rise of 55 shillings a week for the bin men, who were predominantly represented by the GMWU. The union could take pride in its handling of the dispute but a roughly contemporaneous dispute, in its traditional Lancashire heartland, was to spiral out of control and

throw the policies, practices and assumptions of the union’s leadership into a particularly revealing and unfavourable light. In many ways, the dispute at the Pilkingtons’ Glass Factory would mark the beginning of the end for the union’s post-war consensus and things would never be the same again.

A house of Glass The unofficial strike, which stretched on for seven long weeks in the spring of 1970, had

A union lobby of Parliament at the turn of the 1970s argues for an end to pay restraints and for more generous pensions.

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The Research Department of the GMWU at Ruxley Towers, in the early 1970s, with Giles Radice in charge.

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its origins in the wildcat action called by a group of glass carriers in the Sheet Glass works at St. Helens, over a miscalculation in their wage packets. In a “company town” dominated by the Pilkingtons’ factories, where 36% of adults in employment worked in the glass industry, some 8,500 employees immediately answered the call to strike, a figure which grew to some 11,000 within 48 hours, as another six plants heard news of the walk-out and followed suit36. The outbreak of the dispute and the passions of the strikers, which ran extremely high,

caught both the employer and the union entirely by surprise. Indeed, the inability of both official parties to understand the motivations and deep resentments expressed by the workforce was one of the factors that fuelled the dispute and gave it its sense of enmity and abiding tragedy. Pilkingtons, a family firm guided by Liberal, nonconformist politics, felt itself to be a paternalistic employer; while the union officials on the ground honestly believed that they were doing a good job in representing their members. However, the workforce had a deep-seated antipathy towards an employer whose economic power dominated the labour market in the town and a union that seemed distant, technocratic and utterly irrelevant in serving as a channel for their own cares and concerns.

One of the main problems lay in the branch structure in Lancashire, which was largely unchanged since Charles Dukes had pioneered the creation of super-branches in the wake of the First World War. All 7,400 GMWU members at Pilkingtons belonged to just one branch, where there was little hope of forming close personal contacts with the secretary in charge or in even holding meetings that could hope to include everyone. As a result, communication between officials and members was weak and extremely distant; there was little or no involvement of the rank-and-file in the running of the branch; and few of the workers had any kind of knowledge of – let alone relationship with – the officials

An eStAte of the reAlm chApter 6

that were supposed to be representing them.

To make matters worse, the destruction of the network of the largely Communistcontrolled shop stewards’ movement during the Cold War, had eroded the sense of activism on the factory floor and replaced it with little more than a series of impersonal dictates and directions that came down – more or less randomly – from above. The vacuum was filled by a vague sense of unease and the distinct impression that the GMWU was a “bosses’ union”.

The somewhat belated drive towards the closed shop and the 100% campaign, allied to the stress placed upon industrial partnership by Williamson and Cooper, had led to the signing of a series of single-union agreements with management. In return for the closed shop, the GMWU had promised to oppose any unofficial action by the membership, and to restrain – where possible – any sign of militancy among its members. By 1966, the union had signed 315 of these agreements with employers and, in the case of Ilford’s – a firm of photographic suppliers – the union had even agreed to terms that included the company’s right to sack unofficial strikers37.

In the case of Pilkingtons, the agreement signed in 1964, made membership of the GMWU a condition of employment at their factories, which may have led to a sense of complacency on the part of the union and contributed to a feeling that it regarded “its members as clients rather than as participants”38.

Though the strikers struggled to articulate a list of particular grievances, they quickly moved from an argument over the payroll office to demanding a £10 increase on the basic rate of pay, and a £5 interim settlement before they would even consider a return to work. For the first ten days of the dispute, Pilkingtons seemed willing to negotiate a settlement around those terms provided that there was a return to work.

The national leadership of the union thought this reasonable, but then effectively hamstrung the local officials by refusing to

The union is on the march in Sheffield, 1971.

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the lIfe of An ActIvISt

keepSAkeS

Oft en we see the u nion from the top dow n, thro ugh his eye s we see it as it was , viewed from the gra ssro ots.

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o

ften in union histories the actual membership have only walk-on parts and then, usually, as an anonymous mass to give their voice to assent or their shoulder to the charge.

Perhaps here, then, we can pause to consider the life of one GMB member whose story might stand for many, in terms of its integrity, consistency and devotion to the union and the values that it stands for. We would not know about its details at all had not Walter Vincent had the presence of mind to set down his recollections and Paul Kenny not been moved by them and thought to preserve them for London District.

The small package that came through the post contained the mementoes of a union career – a badge, a letter from the Chair of the TUC, a menu from a celebratory dinner – that defined a life and a distinct political and industrial culture, stretching across more than sixty years.

In July 1912, Walter Vincent called in at the Canning Town Branch to join the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers.

He was a twenty year old working at a Tate and Lyle Sugar warehouse in London’s East End, but it was not long before he “first knew what it was like to be locked out because we would not work with non-union men”.

After a four week dispute, he refused to return on reduced conditions and, after a number of jobs building a railway in Hertfordshire and working on the wharf at Wapping, he settled in Southend-on-Sea. After working as a plasterer’s labourer, in 1914, he took a job in the sewerage works run by the local corporation.

Volunteering for the Middlesex Regiment, in February 1915, he saw considerable service on the Western Front, fought bravely, and was wounded several times. At the end of 1915, he was “shot through the face and sent home to Blighty” to recuperate. However, he was back in Flanders and was hit again – this time in the hand – in July 1916, before being captured in a trench raid in the spring of 1918. After seven months in a German prison camp, he finally returned home to Southend in February 1919, and “after a short holiday I was back at work and a regular member at the meetings that were held at that time in a top room at the Royal Stores” in the town. In 1924, he was recommended by his members to be the card steward for his branch, collecting and checking their dues, and taking an obvious pride in their trust.

He remained in this role for 17 years and was honoured for recruiting ten new members to the union. Retiring from work with Southend

Corporation in June 1954, after forty years’ service, Walter Vincent enjoyed “a very happy retirement” and treasured a certificate of long service “and loyalty to the trade union movement” signed

by L.G. Wright, his District Secretary, Tom Williamson, the General Secretary, and Jack Cooper, the National Chairman.

Yet, in the long hot summer of 1976, “having just come back from a visit to the General and Municipal Workers’ Union branch, which I do four times a year to pay my subscription”, he packed away his little treasures into an envelope and posted them off to the offices of London District in the hope that they might be safeguarded and inform posterity. GMB – his union – was the essence of his identity and invested his life with a meaning and a dignity that radiates through the faded and folded pages of his letter. Working people lack the glamour and

Mementoes of a life devoted to the union.

exposure of the media, their words, thoughts and deeds often go unrecorded or are so easily lost as lofts are cleared and families move away.

Yet, figures great and small have contributed in equal measure to the survival and the success of the union and letters such as that penned by Walter Vincent, thrown into the time stream, if rescued and preserved can illuminate the past just as surely as they can inform and inspire our present with a simple, undeclarative sense of loyalty and love.

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Left: In 1970 the union was making the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Below: Women’s conference, 1972.

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acknowledge their requests that the strike should be declared official. As a result, the union’s representatives at Pilkingtons lost a measure of their authority at the outset and were further hampered by the frequent pronouncements by head office – that grew in intensity as the dispute wore on – that sought to suggest that the strike was being directed by “political subversives” and “power-hungry demagogues”, and sought no more than to establish the “anarchic rule of the mob”. The shop stewards’ meeting,

held three days into the strike, recommended an acceptance of the offer but when they tried to put the motion to two separate meetings of the strikers, held at different plants in the town just a few hours apart, they were overwhelmingly defeated by a show of hands in both cases. By the following day, 6 April 1970, the strike had spread beyond the bounds of St. Helens, drawing in the workforces of seven more plants from North Wales, to Glasgow, to Birmingham, London and Kent. The car industry was already reporting shortages of windscreen glass and, as the dispute wore on, only Ford’s managed to find a suitable replacement supplier, with the raw materials being imported at great expense from mainland Europe. As factory gates meetings became uncontrollable, with David Basnett – the union’s Industrial Officer with responsibility for Glass and Chemicals – being heckled at one and deluged by a flurry of paper darts at another – the union called for a postal ballot but never cared to publish the result once the votes were counted. Presumably it recorded an embarrassingly large majority in favour of continuing the strike action.

At this point, the unofficial Rank and File Strike Committee (RFSC) had succeeded in almost completely replacing the GMWU’s direction of events with its own; while the bemused management of Pilkingtons had been rendered almost irrelevant by the turn of events, and watched from the sidelines as the dispute

An eStAte of the reAlm chApter 6

seemed to mutate into a protracted struggle for authority between the grass-roots membership and the union’s leaders.

Although a heterogeneous collection of political activists – Communists; members of the International Marxist Group, the forerunner of today’s SWP; anarchosyndicalists; and a scattering of Maoists – all gave help and support to the RFSC, it seems that they were far from dominating

its proceedings. Indeed, had any one of those groupings given the workforce direction then it might have been easier to predict its aims and objectives, and thereby broker some sort of compromise. As it was, the instincts of strikers described by two of their main supporters as largely “unpolitical”, were extremely difficult to gauge and reduced the GMWU’s team of negotiators to a state of impotent frustration. The

The GMWU delegation to the Labour Party Conference, Blackpool, 1970.

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David Basnett with the staff at Ruxley Towers. The picture captures something of his diffident nature.

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situation became aggravated after 20 April, when a deal hammered out between the union and Pilkingtons that offered an interim settlement of an increase of £3 per week on gross pay – which even the RFSC thought would be accepted – was put before the strikers. Though the seven factories outside St. Helens all elected to approve the package and return to work; the workers at Pilkingtons rejected the deal on two separate occasions. Though the RFSC was just as wrong-footed by these decisions as the union’s official negotiators, it was appalled by the GMWU’s subsequent refusal to accept the votes at face value and instructions that the strikers should obey an order to return to work. It marked a parting of the ways, as strikers began to picket the union’s offices as well as the Pilkingtons factories, and carried a symbolic coffin painted with the GMWU moniker as part of the May Day demonstration in St. Helens, as a piece of grim street theatre.

Ironically, the union was still paying out strike pay in an unofficial dispute, largely due to ’s sense of basic decency, even as its striking membership was turning its

back on the GMWU and loading its senior officers with opprobrium.

Finally, the dispute was brought to a conclusion when Vic Feather and the TUC intervened, on 22 May 1970, to secure a deal – little better than the one offered by the GMWU a month before – that guaranteed a return to work. However, the workforce at Pilkingtons held the union, rather than the employer, to be largely culpable for its troubles. After an initial attempt to join the T&G was rebuffed, 3,500 of them broke with the GMWU and attempted to form a breakaway union, the Glass and General Workers’ Union, in June 1970. Attacked by the management of Pilkingtons, on one flank, and by the GMWU on the other, the new union found its assets seized by the courts in September

An eStAte of the reAlm chApter 6

1970.Yet its eventual destruction was not so important as the fact of its creation.

Despite its large membership, plentiful resources and apparently powerful infrastructure, the GMWU was revealed to have only a tenuous connection to its membership, which could be snapped at seemingly any moment by relatively minor tremors of discontent from the rank-andfile. Like the elm tree, hollowed out by disease, the union looked superficially impressive but on closer inspection was so rotten that it could be swayed by the faintest breeze and might threaten to collapse at any moment. David , whose whole life had been shaped by the union, had been profoundly shaken by his experience of the Pilkingtons strike and realised just how much the reality of the situation diverged from more than twenty years of rhetoric. Without substantial change, starting with the reform of the branch structure, understood that the GMWU would be utterly incapable of offering meaningful representation to its membership, let alone proving itself equal to meeting the wider economic and political challenges that lay ahead. In many respects, it was probably fortunate that he did not know just how serious those challenges were to be, as Labour – viewed under Wilson as the natural party of government – was out of office for almost a generation and trade unions were attacked as never before by the most ideologically driven government that Britain had ever seen.

His was not destined to be a time of

harvest, but survival of the union through those dangerous and dismal days was owed, in large measure, to David ’s quiet tenacity, willingness to dispense with the hubris and posturing of the past, and courage in facing the onslaught of Thatcherism with courage, wry humour, and the belief that a better future could still be won for us all.

Opposite page: A young John Cope sports an ICI jersey in July 1964; while Jack Ashley M.P.(left) goes to the Palace with his wife Pauline and their daughter Caroline, to receive his medal as Companion of Honour, 13 February 1975.

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chApter 7

262

The union turns outwards

I

n January 1973, the membership of the GMWU was concentrated in six main areas – namely, engineering and metal working; food, drink and tobacco; gas; chemicals; electricity and local government. It also had a presence in the water industry, in textiles, the NHS, and latterly in catering and distribution. It was strongest in the North of England and had a comfortable, safe and perhaps somewhat staid image as a moderate union, a loyal member of the TUC, with a hierarchical and technocratic approach to the conduct of business. It possessed enormous financial reserves, which had risen from £5 million in the mid-1960s to almost £13 million in 1974, as under the leadership of Lord Cooper the union had focused on securing its own financial base, in order to deliver benefit packages, rather than implementing a growth strategy. The closed shop and the wages councils encouraged a sense of complacency over existing membership and a marked passivity in matters of recruitment. Despite the great expansion of the unions in the 1960s and early ’70s, the GMWU had not expanded as quickly as its fellows into the major growth areas of local government and the health service.

Moreover, members – or potential members – who threatened to cost more than they contributed in terms of their subscriptions were not particularly welcome to the union.

As a result, while the T&G grew 28.6% from 1965 to 1975, the GMWU only rose by 10.9% in the same period1.

If recruitment was not a matter of pressing concern, then the union set great store in offering low-priced holidays for members and their families at its chalet park in Devon; the award of four university scholarships for their teenage children; its provision of a lump sum of £500 in case of permanent disability; £3 a week for a maximum of 30 weeks’ sick pay; official strike pay of £7 per week; and £45 towards funeral costs. By the early 1970s, 4% of the union’s total expenditure was devoted to education and training, delivered primarily though the union’s two colleges – Woodstock in Surrey, and Hale in Manchester – but behind the heady claims of increasing student rolls, all was not as rosy as it seemed. A report to the 1971 Congress revealed that only a third of full-time officials had ever set foot inside the National College, for even a one day course, while of the 4,000 new shop stewards appointed each year – and 80% of them were directly appointed – less than 1,000 of them ever attended a course in the regions2.

The Pilkingtons’ Strike had, as we have already seen, deeply shaken Basnett and convinced him of the need to reform and re-orientate the union. Though he consistently occupied the centre ground of both the TUC General Council and Labour Party NEC; his support was never taken for granted or unthinking. Furthermore, the very fact that

Boots, hotpants and banners: by the early 1970s the union was beginning to march in step with the “permissive society”.

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Above: Delegates to the 1972 Congress, including a young John Edmonds studying his report in the front row.

Above right: The 50th Congress held by the GMWU, in 1974, was an occassion for celebration and pride in shared values.

The union’s imagery was still based very largely around its leaders in a way that was taken for granted then but which would seem suprising and even domineering today.

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Basnett was rapidly able to move the GMWU from the splendid – and at times, not so splendid – isolation it had enjoyed under Cooper, on the Right-wing of the Labour Movement, to an engagement with the mainstream, was a considerable achievement and one conducted without undue fuss or conflict. Under Williamson and Cooper, the membership were treated as clients, who were expected to pay their contributions, receive their entitlements and, for the rest of the time, remain silent.

Yet, Basnett began – quietly, slowly and in typically undeclarative fashion – to challenge and sweep away these attitudes.

He told one interviewer that he had precious little time for “passive organisations that do not fight for their members’ interests … [who] make sweetheart agreements with companies to impose an artificial industrial

peace”. Trade unions, he believed, were “one of the principal democratic elements in our society … a counter-balance and check on arbitrary actions” by employers3.

At his first Congress, as General Secretary, he saw through a new raft of policies that radically changed the union’s outlook and looked for expansion through a policy of mergers and organic growth. His avowed aim was to achieve a membership mark of a million and, had he started a decade earlier or not been hamstrung by the Thatcherite recession, he might just have achieved it.

It was becoming clear, even in the mid1970s, that the continuing commitment to providing high levels of financial benefit was unsustainable for a union that primarily served some of the most disadvantaged members of the workforce, in an

increasingly harsh economic environment, where they were particularly vulnerable to unemployment. In 1967, the union had spent a mere £17,746 on strike pay out of a total benefit bill of £756,595; but by 1973 this had shifted to an expenditure of £348,431 on strike pay out of total payments of £1,310,039. The union was moving from passive to active, as legal test cases were successfully pursued by the union over hearing loss through excessive noise at work and siderosis – known as “welders’ lung” – due to the effects of fumes. Greater activity, combined with high benefits, put a strain on finances with contribution levels becoming a major source of concern, as they had not kept pace with rises in the average rate of male manual earnings over the past two decades.

Despite a rise in union contributions every year between 1977 and 1983 the slide in proportion, and the level of relative financial decline, was not reversed. As a consequence, Basnett attempted to launch a recruitment campaign through the expedient of creating a new grade of district officer, in 1974, which would be primarily responsible for gaining new membership, and as the brief defined it – in the gendered language of the day – “will provide regular and direct contact between the branch and the union.

He will be their first line of access to its services. Although the District objectives must be to encourage them to become as self-reliant as possible in the handling of their own industrial relations problems”4.

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Above: The young Prince of Wales is greeted by David Basnett on the steps of Ruxley Towers. A firm handshake is one thing, but overenthusiastic help from a well-wisher was seen as a breach of etiquette by the Prince’s bodyguard.

Below: MATSA, the union’s white collar section, had a markedly different culture from the rest of the GMWU. While others wore badges, they sported tie-pins.

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The new district officers targeted areas of growth within the union; in particular the white collar membership – of whom much was expected – and who had been granted their own MATSA (Managerial, Administrative, Technical and Supervisory Association) section in 1972; and hotels and catering, which again were rewarded – though rather more belatedly – with the HCWU (the Hotel and Catering Workers’ Union) in 1980. Thus, the union was simultaneously attempting to recruit from amongst both the upwardly mobile clerical grades and service sector workers who, particularly in hotels, were among the lowest paid in the country. Recruitment on any level required a change in the union’s culture and progress was initially slow, with Derek Gladwin the Southern Region

Secretary, being able to tell one researcher, in 1978, that he could do his job “perfectly well without ever meeting a member”5.

This said, the union did begin to reap the rewards from membership growth between 1975-79 but suffered a steep fall thereafter, as manufacturing collapsed, that was only halted through the accompanying merger strategy.

At this critical point, Basnett’s twin track approach to growth appeared particularly far sighted. He viewed mergers as a means to expand the union into new industrial territories and to gain membership; rather than as a means to consolidate existing influence and market share. By the same token, mergers were never intended to result in the creation of a new amalgamated union, to alter the existing balance of power within the GMWU/GMBATU, or to threaten the system of regional governance.

There was certainly no question that the General Secretary’s position would be challenged or that the union would be anything other than the dominant partner in any projected merger. As a consequence, the merger talks with the Right-wing EETPU faltered in 1973, though in any case it is hard to imagine the urbane, rather academic Basnett standing shoulder-toshoulder with a street-fighter like Frank Chapple, who took a delight in his rather gangster-like popular image. In order to become a more attractive merger partner, the union began to edge towards constitutional changes that were designed

receSSIonAl chApter 7

to facilitate a trade group structure with vertical and horizontal patterns of integration into the framework of the GMWU. Few unions were likely to negotiate if they simply faced being dismembered by the regions, so the establishment of regular industrial conferences, beginning in 1969, for the major industrial sectors within the union was seen as an enabling development, while the old “district” designations were reclassified as “regions” after 1970. Further reforms followed, under Basnett, with the role of lay activists in developing policy receiving gentle encouragement, in 1975, and the former two-tier system of a General Council and a National Executive being abolished, a year later, in favour of an enlarged Central Executive Council (CEC) that acted as the ruling body of the union between congresses. The new CEC comprised of an elected Chair, the General Secretary, ten Regional Secretaries and two members drawn from each of the ten regions, elected by the regional councils.

Initially, however, the reforms stopped short of providing either specialised industrial representation on the council or reserved places for women. Between 1974-75, the role of the industrial conferences was strengthened with up to 18 separate sectoral meetings being projected and the recognition that they should be used as forums for negotiation and as sounding boards for lay reaction to developments within their industries. As a result, a basis for increased

participation and successful mergers was established which would bear fruit over the next decade.

The merger with the Boilermakers The GMWU had already approached the Boilermakers for a merger in the mid1970s, but were finally successful in 1982.

The merger which created the GMBATU (the General Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union) from the GMWU and the ASBSBSW (the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers), though essentially a defensive measure, represented a significant break with the past that laid the foundation for the modern GMB. David Basnett’s union

David Basnett at the opening of the union’s new office in Hull.

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Some of uS Are lIonS

1933 -2010

The heroic sym bol of the Gru nw ick Stri ke; she put race a nd the rights of new wom en imm igra nts firm ly on the u nion age nda .

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Dan Jones produced this lively print to commemorate the Grunwick Dispute.

I

n the 1970s, the unions were slow to recognise the profound industrial and social changes that were sweeping away an older world. Mrs. Desai, an instantly recognisable figure, on account of her diminutive stature and colourful saris, was a potent symbol of change as she confronted towering ranks of policemen on the picket lines and campaigned for trade unionism and social justice to be extended to the most vulnerable sectors of the workforce, new to these shores.

Jayaben Desai was born, in April 1933, in Gujarat, India. Her early life was shaped, to an extent, by the struggle for Indian independence and she was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s thought and doctrine of peaceful resistance. At the height of the Grunwick dispute she demonstrated this when she told a reporter “that all this industrialisation is still only materialistic. It brings happiness, yes, but it brings misery too”.

Her gift for the use of language, that bordered upon the lyrical, and the quickness of her wits, were qualities that would later distinguish her leadership of the strike and bring her to the attention of the national media.

After her marriage to Suryakant Desai, in 1955, she moved to Tanganyika where he managed a large tyre factory.They enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle but one which came

to an abrupt end with the “Africanisation” movement which swept through many newly independent states, in the 1960s-70s, and sought to target the largely middle class Asian communities – who had acted as a commercial and administrative strata – with the policies of the discredited former imperial power.

Expelled from Tanzania, the Desais fled to Britain, in 1969, taking with them little more than that which they could carry. This collapse in their social status forced Suryakant to seek work as an unskilled labourer in an engineering firm at Wembley, while Jayaben took a job as a machinist in a Harlesden sweatshop.

Having raised their two children, Jayaben returned to full-time work at the Grunwick photo processing plant in September 1974.

The business was highly successful but the manner in which its largely Indian women workers – newly arrived from East Africa – were treated was disgraceful. Pay and factory conditions were poor, the hours were long, and what we would nowadays describe as institutional racism was rife. But it was the expectation of compulsory overtime, with little or no warning, and the climate of fear engendered by the frequent sacking of anyone who expressed even the most mildest form of dissent, that really grated with Mrs. Desai and her workmates.

Tensions came to a head during the long hot summer of 1976, when a young student – taken on in his holidays during a period of peak demand – was sacked for failing to work quickly enough and his three friends walked out in solidarity. In the meantime, Jayaben Desai was engaged in an argument with Malcolm Alden, the most brutish and charmless of the managers, about a new demand for compulsory overtime, and informed him in no uncertain terms that: “What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. But in a zoo there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your finger tips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are the lions, Mr. Manager”.

So far, no one had thought about trade union involvement. There had been an earlier attempt to organise a T&G branch at Grunwick, in January 1973, but management had had wind of it and sacked the five workers behind the attempt. Now, as Mrs. Desai discussed their plight with the four angry students at the factory gates, she thought about a constructive means of protest and the words “trade union” formed in her mind.

A phone call to the TUC resulted in APEX being recommended as the most suitable union for her to join and, with a spontaneous protest at the gates, almost the 269

entire workforce at the mail order department signed a petition asking for union recognition.

Sixty workers joined APEX immediately, and 137 walked out before the management could identify and sack all of those who had signed the demand.

At this point, the local leadership of APEX played a pivotal and quite exceptional role, perceiving the iniquities that lay behind the dispute and urging their National Executive to recognise the strike.With the dispute made official – and the company having refused to countenance a union presence and sacked all of those who had gone on strike – the battle lines were firmly drawn.

For the workforce, the act of the walk out seemed to serve, in itself, as a cathartic and a liberating act. After years of abuse and being downtrodden, they found a common cause in struggle.Yet, the picket lines proved a hard school of knocks, with daily confrontation, frequent arrests and both Mrs. Desai and a supporter being knocked down, in separate incidents, in September 1976, by cars driven by the management.

Mass protests became common place, with the largest, on 11 July 1977, seeing 20,000 people take to the streets. ACAS found in favour of the strikers and recommended that the union be recognised and a government 270

inquiry was launched, under Lord Scarman, and after wading through thousands of pages of evidence, also found in favour of the strikers’ demand for trade union rights.

The judgment was simply ignored by the Company, which was now being supported financially by the shadowy, hard-right National Freedom Association and by favourable media “sound-bites” from Margaret Thatcher, then the leader of the opposition.Thus, while the new monetarist Right-wing was being ruthless in its pursuit of its objectives and power, the Left still sought conciliation.The rules of the game had changed, but no one in the TUC seemed to have noticed.

Thus, the political consensus that had guided British politics since 1945 foundered at Grunwick.The employer, George Ward, was utterly intransigent and unprepared to bow to considerations of basic human decency; or to withering public condemnation from ACAS, Lord Scarman, and even Jim Prior, the Conservative shadow employment minister.

Ranged against him, Len Murray at the TUC and Roy Grantham, for APEX, were unable to see that they were now engaged in an ideological struggle, rather than just another run-of-the-mill industrial dispute.

Embarrassed by the passions of the strikers they were unwilling to countenance the broadening of the dispute, to bring in the GMWU,T&G, and EETPU, in order to cut off the factory from the outside world and thereby bring the company to its knees.

Worse still, the solidarity action of postmen at the local sorting office, who had refused to handle the company’s mail, was successfully challenged in the courts.

As a result, the momentum of the strike began to dissipate as Jayaben Desai and her comrades prepared to spend a second bitterly cold winter on the picket line. APEX seemed far less committed than it had once been and, with the TUC appearing to distance itself from their cause, Mrs. Desai and three fellow strikers went on a hunger strike on the ice-bound steps of Congress House, in a last ditch attempt to win its unequivocal support.When asked why she did not hold her demonstration outside George Ward’s factory, she replied it was because he “would let us starve to death”.

In one of the darkest days for the GMB family of trade unions, APEX reacted by suspending all four from membership.

Thereafter, the writing was on the wall and the strike was finally called off on 14 July 1978.

Some of uS Are lIonS

The shape of things to come: the police charge the picket lines at Grunwick.

She told the final strike meeting that, while they had lost: “We have shown that workers like us, new to these shores, will never accept being treated without dignity or respect.We have shown that white workers will support us”.

In the years following the dispute, her health declined noticeably with her hunger strike doing little to improve upon a longstanding gall-bladder complaint. A job as a seamstress led to a teaching post with the Brent Indian Association and, in its turn, to her establishing an Asian dressmaking course at Harrow College: work which, at last, she could delight in.When the Gate Gourmet dispute broke out, in August 2005, which in some ways mirrored Grunwick, she sent a message of support to the sacked workers, together with a generous donation to the strike fund.

She was honoured by GMB with the award of a Gold Badge at its Brighton Congress, in 2007, and received a standing ovation from the hall. After her death, in December 2010, Paul Kenny spoke of her “presence and passion”, her courage and her example; “for a small woman she was a giant among men”.

A point to make: Mrs Desai confronts the police outside the Grunwick plant. The disparity of physical size is more than made up for by the power of union principle.

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Union people: (top left) Tommmy Thomas from Merthyr,(top right) Mrs A. E. Barber from Ramsgate, (centre left) J. MacArthy from Liverpool,(centre right) Aelwyn Bevan from Wales and (bottom) young members at the 1977 GMWU Congress.

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had not experienced a major amalgamation since its creation in 1924, so the success of the negotiations and subsequent integration of the Boilermakers represented a real achievement for all concerned.

The Boilermakers had been suffering from a decline in their industry, a collapse in their finances, and a debilitating internal power struggle for the better part of a decade. Any one of these factors would have been difficult to resolve but probably surmountable; but when taken together they placed an incredible strain on a once powerful craft union that traced its lineage right back to 1834. It had sought to merge with other unions, most notably the AEU and the NUSMW (the sheetmetal workers union), but was under few illusions at the loss of autonomy and identity that would have resulted in either case. The leadership had resolved to hold on to the union’s independence until the last, but since 1977 it had been failing to cover its expenditure from income subscription and was drawing down from investments in order to meet the shortfall. At the same time, there had been attempts to narrow the deficit through the usual expedients of staff cuts, retrenchment and restructuring but finally there was nothing left to cut and nowhere else to go. By the beginning of 1982, its executive was divided between the leadership and the Broad Left grouping; it had exhausted its cash reserves and was in dire financial difficulties6. The amalgamation promised to deliver David Basnett’s long term ambition

of delivering a million strong union; as on paper the GMWU had 860,000 members and the Boilermakers had 120,000; and would enable the new union to claim to cover all grades of manual, craft and white collar workers in the key areas of private and public industry; particularly in shipbuilding, engineering, steel, chemicals and construction. Both partners expected growth to result, and avenues were left open “to further amalgamation approaches” and also “to the negotiation of single union agreements to cover craft, manual and staff, in a range of industries that would be attractive to many companies – especially those overseas companies, who wish to set up new plants in the United Kingdom”7.

The GMWU’s regional structure was retained – with the Executive Council, Regional Councils, and Regional Committees remaining at the same numerical strength – and the Branch officer structure would remain similarly unchanged.

However, there would be a new Central Executive Council formed by the GMWU and Boilermakers’ executives, with reserved places set aside for the latter section. In addition, in a real break with the past, the Boilermakers were promised autonomy and kept their own rule book with only very minor alterations. Though officers would share the same services and pay the same rates, the two sections would negotiate their respective industrial matters separately.

The merger was certainly calculated to ease problems across the electricity industry.

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In the past, the Boilermakers had not been part of the major negotiating machinery and rivalry, between the unions, at the Ferrybridge Power Station had recently led to legal action.

The ballot result among the membership had never seriously been in doubt, with approximately 3-1 among the GMWU

membership in favour of amalgamation (263,752 for; 86,800 against with 2,213 spoilt papers) and 2-1 among the Boilermakers (17,753 for and 8,262 against, with 42 spoilt papers)8. Though the sector was admittedly in marked decline, it did add a craft dimension to the union that had been previously absent; with the

Another detail from the Boilermakers’ mural which shows the transition in their industry from steam and coal to oil, electric and nuclear power.

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At the time of the Callaghan Government there was still faith in the future and the union’s target to reach a million members by the mid-1980s appeared realistic. Little did they know what was in store ...

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Boilermakers adding skilled workers in shipbuilding, construction, and the engineering industries to the GMWU’s base among the semi- and unskilled.

Though agreed in August 1982, the formal date of the amalgamation was brought forward, in a rush, from 1 January 1983 to 1 December 1982. However, despite the optimistic projections it would seem that only a fraction of the declared membership of the Boilermakers ever found their way on to the GMBATU rolls and it may reasonably be supposed that many of the union’s branches had existed in name only for many years9. Set against that, and the steadily increasing costs of servicing the sector, the merger did succeed in injecting a recognisable craft ethos into the new union, opening up the prospect of new amalgamations – particularly among the white collar and skilled sectors previously denied to the GMWU – which cut across traditional boundaries; and proving beyond a shadow of doubt that the new union was capable of both concluding and sustaining a merger conducted on a large scale. One other effect, largely unforeseen at the time, was to render the new title – which had been intended to echo the names of the constituent bodies – intelligible mainly as

a set of initials. (GMBATU was officially shortened in 1989 to GMB, and for the sake of clarity we will refer to the union as GMB from now on). The use of initials also served to render the union somewhat nondescript, removing direct reference to trade groups and denying old stereotypes the space to settle upon the new organisation. This might enable a depoliticisation of the union, especially as the trend towards “new realism” grew in pace after the mid-1980s, and at certain points this might have actually been effected. What it certainly did was to create a shifting sense of the union’s identity which could be forged afresh, or if necessary entirely dispensed with in case of a future amalgamation with a much stronger partner.

The merger with the Boilermakers gave impetus to other negotiations and was followed, shortly afterwards, by an amalgamation with the small but solvent Scottish Lace and Textile Workers’ Union; whose 1,100 members returned a vote of 92% in favour to join GMB in the autumn of 1983.Yet, though the union would be defined by the mergers concluded in that year it would also be shaped by the result of the 1983 general election, which confirmed the Thatcherite counter-revolution, threatened the eclipse of the Labour Party and dealt a series of profound hammerblows to the trade union movement from which it is still struggling to recover.

Gotterdammerung

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GMB delegation to the Labour Party Conference, in the mid-1970s, with Larry Whitty (front row, far left of picture), Derek Gladwin (fourth from left), and John Edmonds seated at the back.

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The Winter of Discontent, in 1978-79, saw council workers out on strike and the rubbish piling up in the streets.

“Caring makes

common sense

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”

The Conservative Government, elected in 1979, was quick to launch a rolling campaign against the trade unions that was unprecedented in terms of its scope, singlemindedness and dedication to achieving its ends. The next 15 years saw the reversal of a century’s worth of hard won concessions and progressive legislation, and permitted far more legal intrusions into the internal affairs of a sovereign body than in any other organisation, operating in any other democracy. In a rude awakening, the unions were excluded from the corridors of power and had to come to terms with the brutal realities that stemmed from a loss of influence, falling membership and financial crises. They had to rediscover the techniques of opposition and the means by which they could fight.

David Basnett had been a key member of Trade Unions for a Labour Victory (TULV) in both 1979 and 1983, “more at home arguing in private with ministers and civil servants than declaiming from

the public platform”10. He had seen the plans for the social contract destroyed and his local government members tipped into the series of pay disputes that came to be known as the “Winter of Discontent”, and helped pave the way for the election of the first Thatcher Government in 1979.Yet, he did all that he could to refinance the Labour Party in the run-up to the 1983 election, counselling unity and standing firm against the SDP – a clique of disappointed and opportunistic career politicians – which aimed to rip apart the PLP. He chaired the key Bishop’s Stortford conference 6 January 1982 between the party and unions, which attempted to co-ordinate the electoral machine to target constituencies and saw off a potentially disastrous challenge to Michael Foot’s leadership. In 1982 alone, the union donated £800,000 to the Labour Party in order to make sure that it was in a position to contest, let alone win, the coming election and pleaded with both the Left and Right wings of the PLP that “the selfmutilation of internal conflict must cease … the bitterness, the personality clashes and, above all, the sheer irrelevance of most of the arguments over the past two years must be put behind us … the Labour Party must be a campaigning organisation but it also has to be an efficient electoral machine … and mundane things like money, administration and expertise do matter”11.

He was particularly critical, at this juncture, of the Bennite Left which he thought was far too close to Militant Tendency and the

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The shock effect of monetarism saw the destruction of Britain’s manufacturing base, with thousands of factories like this one lying deserted for purely ideological reasons.

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As the 1970s wore on the issue of combating racial discrimination began to appear more strongly on the union’s agenda. Here, David Basnett addresses a special conference on racism held by the union’s MATSA section.

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union went so far as to back Michael Cocks in preference to Tony Benn for the candidacy of the Bristol South constituency. Moreover, he was faced with the uncomfortable spectre of the SDP splitting the Labour vote and warned that “we are faced with a large number of trade unionists [who are] now beginning to waiver in their commitment to the Labour Party”12.

He did all that he could. The union’s journal featured a stark front page election plea – “You want a future? Vote Labour!”

– and the timing of the poll, on 9 June 1983, necessitated the curtailment of the union conference at Scarborough, which was scaled back from the customary five days to two. In his editorial, Basnett wrote that: “June the ninth will decide the destiny of this country for the next five years.

But the choice is much starker than that.

We have the opportunity on that day of deciding in which way we wish to see our country run for the rest of this century. Mrs. Thatcher is right in one sense. There is a simple choice for the electorate. The Tories accept that 3½, 4 and 5 million on the dole are an inevitable feature of our society at the end of this century, that the Welfare State be dismantled and that private profit-seeking enterprise be given free rein in a return for values of the past. Mrs. Thatcher also calls for a return to ‘freedom’. The most obvious freedom of the past was the freedom of the few to exploit the many. It is that freedom that the Tories are aiming to restore. But Labour stands for real freedom … Freedom

that having a good secure job with decent pay will give to workers and their families; Freedom from fear and want and from sickness; Freedom that is defended by a strong and effective conventional defence”13.

His sentiments were echoed by Jack Ashley, GMB sponsored veteran MP and campaigner for the deaf, who pushed home the point that: “When Tory candidates talk of freedom, they mean the freedom of the wealthy to become even wealthier … When they speak of justice, they mean weighing the scales more heavily against workers and their trade unions. When they preach about Victorian virtues, they mean that the poor should keep to their proper and humble status. If the Labour Party is to win, it must demonstrate clearly that greed and selfishness have no place in their philosophy … It

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should express its pride in its trade unionists, its concern for the underdog and its commitment to the noble aspirations of its pioneers”14. Those same arguments about real and apparent freedoms, centring around “choice”, when that choice is really entirely dependent on the ability to pay are still key to the political debates raging today. What Thatcher’s counter-revolution permitted, even at this early stage, was the widespread growth of the belief – as John Edmonds sadly points out – that “success” is purely defined in terms of personal wealth15.

At every level the collective ethos, that underpinned everything from trade unions to co-operatives and from sports clubs to the Women’s Institute, was under attack by an aggressive assertion of the rights of the individual to do pretty much whatever he,

or she, wished. In the midst of recession, Basnett attempted to offer another vision, one where: “Caring makes common sense … If you build a hospital, you take care of sick people, you create jobs for health service workers, you stimulate the construction, the engineering, the building materials and the equipment industries.

And you do the same if you build houses for the homeless, schools for our children, roads and electrified railways for our industrial infrastructure”16.

The result, however, was a disaster for a Labour Party that was simply outclassed by a well-oiled Conservative electoral machine, boosted by the recent victory in the Falkland’s War, well-funded and honed by a modern advertising campaign. GMB saw three of its sponsored M.P.s – Michael English, Frank White and Neil Carmichael – lose their seats after boundary changes; and Jimmy Johnson, the veteran M.P. for Kingston-upon-Hull, retire from the Commons before the election. Perhaps most sadly of all, Arthur Lewis who had held his seat since 1945, had clung on to office too long and lost touch with his constituency.

He was deselected as a candidate by his local party and replaced by a young Left-wing firebrand – Tony Banks, the future Sports minister – after a bitter internal dispute surrounding allegations of the Militant Tendency packing branches with its members. It was a tragic end to the career of one of GMB’s heroes, who had done sterling service in the immediate post-war

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The union sponsored float during the health service dispute, 1981.

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years only to have had his union career destroyed through the jealousy and suspicion of the leadership. His subsequent rightward drift into disillusion and intransigence should not obscure his triumph at the Savoy and the bravery of the stand he took for the rights of immigrants and the low paid. While marginal seats together with many previously-thought safe tumbled, the industrial bastions of the Labour Party held and the SDP, against media expectation, did not make a significant breakthrough in terms of the number of M.P.s gained.

In the North-East, Jack Cunningham, Giles Radice, Don Dixon and Bob Brown were all returned as GMB sponsored M.P.s; while Pat Duffy won in Sheffield, Attercliffe; Betty Boothroyd in West Bromwich; and George Robertson fought off both Tory and Nationalist challenges in Scotland. GMB losses were somewhat offset by the addition of John Smith and Gerald Kaufman, formerly sponsored by the Boilermakers union, to the parliamentary group, and by the inclusion of four GMB sponsored M.P.s in the fifteen strong shadow cabinet. Thus, Michael Cocks retained his position as Chief Whip; Gerald Kaufman was appointed shadow Home Secretary; John Smith was the shadow minister for Employment; and Giles Radice, took the brief for Education.

In addition, two figures who would go on to hold leading cabinet posts in the Blair governments gained the first rungs on the ministerial ladders, with George Robertson becoming a front bench spokesman on

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foreign affairs and Jack Cunningham taking over as shadow Secretary of State for the Environment.

Jack Ashley, in the immediate aftermath of the election detected the chill winds of change blowing through Westminster and saw in the leading political casualties drawn from across the political spectrum – from Michael Foot and Dennis Healey, on the Left; to the turncoat Roy Jenkins; and Francis Pym on the Right – the end of one era, and the beginning of a new and altogether harsher one. He could also have added that the election had, temporarily at least, removed Tony Benn from the scene.

Despite boundary changes that had hived off large sections of the Labour vote from his constituency, Benn had felt honour bound to defend his Bristol East seat and suffered a defeat at the polls that ruled him out of the subsequent contest for the Labour leadership. It was a critical juncture for the party and one in which GMB played a full part. In the hours after the declaration of the election result, David Basnett heard of the decision of John Silkin – a centrist figure, whom the union might have backed – not to stand. Under the lights of a television studio, Basnett weighed into the debate, voicing his opinion that the party needed to “skip a generation” and throwing his weight decisively behind the candidature of Neil Kinnock, who had already been appearing on GMB platforms for more than a year17. monetarism and the market

If Kinnock appeared as a youthful and unifying force, then there was still no disguising the cataclysm that had engulfed the party. David Basnett presented a simple, unvarnished statement of fact when he told his members that “we lost very badly”18.

The unions were now in for the long haul and GMB pledged that the “major concentration of trade union activity must now be on defending our members and

Wandsworth Branch fights against the cuts to public services.

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In SeArch of conSenSuS GenerAl SecretAry 1973-1985

1923 -1989

The archite ct of the successfu l me rge r wit h the Boilerm ake rs, he cha mp ion ed u nity a nd pro ved a high ly effe ctive lea der.

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I

f his immediate predecessors had possessed enormous opportunities for growing the union, David Basnett came to office at time of growing austerity, economic recession and political reaction.

He faced enormous challenges in reorientating the union towards an unexpectedly hostile climate, and a collapse of political and industrial influence. Quiet, dignified, and thoughtful, he restored the union’s ability to fight and think for itself, began a strategy of mergers which, in part, offset decline by creating GMB as we know it today, and helped to set the Labour Party back on the road to government.

David Basnett was born in Liverpool, in November 1924, the son of Andrew Basnett; a firm union member, who subsequently served as District Officer 1933-36, and as Liverpool, North Wales and Irish District Secretary from 1936-51.Two of his uncles were local branch secretaries and a large number of his cousins were shop stewards. He was thus, as Geoffrey Goodman pointed out, “brought up in an atmosphere of trade union discussion and struggle”.

David won a scholarship to the prestigious Quarry Bank High School, which would also produce the Labour minister Peter Shore and the Beatles.

During the Second World War, he served with RAF Coastal Command, piloting Sunderland flying boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. After the war, he briefly worked in a bank before joining the GMWU as an official in 1948. In 1954, he moved to London as the union’s first education officer and, in 1960, was appointed Industrial Officer with the brief for the chemicals and glass industries.

It was in this role that he found himself catapulted into the maelstrom of emotions, claim and counter-claim, occasioned by the dispute at Pilkingtons’ Glass in 1970. The

David Basnett’s leadership was greeted with renewed hope and high expectations. The union, at its 1973 Congress, exuded self-confidence and pride in its achievements.

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strike shook him profoundly and, in its wake, he sought to repair the damage inflicted upon the union and to rebuild new workplace structures at the firm, which would later serve as models throughout the GMWU. Though he had never held elective office, he stood for the post of General Secretary, after Jack Cooper’s retirement in 1973, and – to the surprise of many – won a comfortable majority. Pitched, immediately, into a gas strike; he fought and won the dispute, carefully husbanding his resources and waging a campaign of disruption that did not compromise safety or breach the agreed national incomes policy. Skilled as both a politician and industrial negotiator, he enjoyed considerable influence in the Labour Governments of 1974-78 and was key to the formation of the National Enterprise Board, on which he served from 1975-79.

As General Secretary of the GMWU, David Basnett sought to forge the Social

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Contract between the unions and the Labour Party. He would later reflect that: “We were beginning to find a way of bargaining with Government. It needed more time. But we were hit by adverse economic circumstances and we could not adjust our policies and attitudes quickly enough. Nonetheless, the lessons of the Social Contract are lessons the whole Labour Movement have to recognise and develop in future”.

Basnett was Chairman of the TUC, in 1977-78, and was the leading figure in Trades Unions for a Labour Victory (TULV). As such, he had intended the 1978 TUC Congress to act as the launch pad for the Labour Party’s General Election campaign. Jim Callaghan’s unexpected refusal to take the opportunity and announce a snap election was, Basnett felt, a fatal error and one which visited disastrous consequences upon the Labour Movement from which it has never really recovered.

Suddenly, against the tide Despite Basnett’s attempts at moderation, the GMWU had been tipped into striking during the “Winter of Discontent”, and saw the political environment it had inhabited, since 1945, ripped asunder by the election of the first Thatcher Government, in 1979. To his credit, Basnett realised sooner than most trade union leaders that there had been a profound sea-change in their affairs, and that the consensus he had striven for had been irrevocably shattered by the unflinching impact of Monetarism.

With his political project foundering, he urged the need for unity in a Labour Party that seemed intent on ripping itself apart, tried to persuade Jim Callaghan to stay on at the helm, and opposed both Tony Benn’s campaign for the leadership and the rise of the Militant Tendency. He used the union’s considerable resources to stabilise the Labour Party’s parlous financial

In SeArch of conSenSuS

The 1970s, perhaps far more than the 1960s, were times of enormous social and cultural change in Britain. The traditional base of the union also shifted, with town gas phased out and sweatshops making an unwelcome return, often exploiting the labour of ethnic minorities.

situation, but could do nothing to prevent the election defeat in 1983, which he saw as a further “catastrophe” for both the unions and the British people as a whole.

In 1982, he masterminded the successful merger with the Boilermakers’ Society – the first major amalgamation since 1924 – which created the modern GMB union, and finally delivered a single union for the shipbuilding industry. These, in turn, formed the blueprint for the later merger with APEX, that saw GMB attempt to make a play for white collar members.

He gave enormous support to Neil Kinnock, as Labour leader, and continued to stress the need for GMB to act as a major financier of the party. He vigorously opposed the new raft of Conservative employment acts but voiced his concerns that it would take far more than a single victory at the polls in order to address the fundamental problems that were reshaping the British economy.

His retirement, in 1985, was hastened, in part, by the serious injuries suffered by his son, Ian, on the rugby field. Greatly respected by his colleagues in the union, he was created a Life Peer in 1987, as Baron Basnett, delivering his maiden speech – appropriately enough – on trade union rights, and making his last contribution to the Lords in an impassioned debate on planned Conservative cut-backs to services for the mentally ill, in May 1988. By that time, he was suffering from an incurable cancer.

Though his leadership of GMB was clearly divided by the political and social gap created by the rise of Thatcherism, in 1979, he did his utmost to mitigate the worst of its hammer blows and to restore both his own union and the Labour Party to prominence. His, as The Guardian recalled at the time of his death, in January 1989, was a life spent in “honest endeavour for better things”.

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defending our organisations against a new four-year onslaught of Thatcherism and building up the Labour Party for the next election”19. The massive Conservative majority removed the last elements of restraint upon Thatcher, who was able to purge figures like Pym and Whitelaw – who adhered to the idea of “one nation” and had some form of social conscience – from the Tory front bench; and prepared the ground for an onslaught upon the unions.

A succession of ever more draconian employment acts, beginning in 1980, extended in 1982, and running through the high water mark of Thatcherism in 1988, to its ebb in 1990, and beyond, into the supposedly less ideological territory of John Major’s administration in 1993, followed. Secondary action was banned and mandatory strike ballots were imposed, undermining the fighting capacity of the unions and threatening them with swingeing legal penalties and financial sequestrations if they embarked upon industrial action without fulfilling complex and highly detailed statutory procedures.

Unions were now required by law to repudiate unofficial actions if they were not to face prosecution. This put an enormous legal onus on unions to ensure that every strike they supported conformed precisely to both the letter and the spirit of the law.

The 1984 trade union act attempted to regulate and proscribe the internal workings of the unions – in this sphere, at least, Thatcherism chose to be highly

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interventionist – while in 1988 a Commissioner for the Rights of Trade Union Members was established with considerable investigative and executive powers, and imposed upon the unions in order to act as their self-styled “ombudsman”. A welter of new laws were now imposed upon the unions that were to be enforced through recourse to the courts and the Commissioner. There were statutory controls placed upon the admission, discipline and expulsion of members; and unions were forbidden from taking action against strike-breakers. The organisation of membership and the collection of union dues were made procedurally more complex and expensive, by requiring workers to give their written permission every three years for employers to deduct union subscriptions directly from their wages.

GMB’s Jim Morrell, saw clearer than most that the fight against anti-union laws was “about survival. If we do not succeed in defeating these proposals, then they will defeat this trade union movement. If we do not succeed in this fight, the trade union movement, as we know it, will die”. Trade union rights he concluded “are not ours to give away; we are merely the custodians of these rights and it is essential that we pass them on to our successors”20. The trouble was that a union which had for three generations sought to occupy the middle ground and achieve consensus had nowhere to go once that ground was cut away and governments abandoned any

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Mary Turner with the Brent Dinner Ladies who turned out to feed all those who took part in the Peoples’ March for Jobs, May 1981.

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APEX brought a new white collar emphasis into GMB, after its amalgamation in 1989. The trend in the 1970s and ’80s was for union banners to be increasingly simple, dispensing with the earlier elaborate imagery and replacing names that reflected trades or occupations with simple acronyms.

pretence of impartiality in balancing the interests of employers and employees. Thus, when Giles Radice argued that “even managers believed [the new anti-union laws] will prove damaging to industrial relations” he was missing the point. The rules of the game had shifted and that the government no longer cared21. In the wake of the 1983 general election, with the knowledge that a future Labour Government was only a distant prospect, David Basnett had attempted conciliation “in a modern democracy”, he wrote, “elected

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Governments and free trade unions have to co-exist. It is not the job of Governments to eliminate free trade unions any more than it is the job of trade unions to overthrow democratically elected Governments. The issue is not whether we co-exist but how; not whether we talk to Government, but on what subjects and on what conditions … If Governments – even this Government – genuinely want constructive dialogue, then the trade union movement will respond”22. The problem was that the unions after more than a generation of

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calling the shots over the economy, had now had their power broken and no one – least of all the Thatcher Government – is forced to come to the negotiating table when they are still winning. A new economic order was being established and the Left, forced onto the defensive, had few ideas big and attractive enough to challenge it.

“Neoliberalism”, the – at times, almost mystical – belief by Thatcher and her supporters in the City of London that markets, by themselves, could resolve all economic and social problems would hold sway throughout the 1980s. These ideas, stemming from the writings of the Scottish, eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith, found their most virulent expression in “Monetarism” – which aimed to cut government expenditure, to strictly control the supply of money and to deregulate financial markets – and saw the operation of the “invisible hand” of the market, as opposed to the state, being key to a vibrant and healthy economy. Ironically, Smith, himself, had been rather more subtle in his approach and never sought to deny that there was any such thing as society, or that there were some areas – such as administration, defence and social welfare – that the state would always have to administer. However, it was a very selective reading of his work that forged the ideological spearhead of Thatcherism.

Suddenly, government was seen as existing simply in order to better facilitate the operation of the free market. This is strange

as, of course, a market is simply a tool by which items are commodified and exchanged. It has no a priori existence outside of nature, or any intrinsic morality, save for that which human beings – of their own volition – settle upon it. Thus, a market can be “free”, in as much as it is entirely devoted to capitalism, the acquisition of money and other resources for narrow, private, gain; or it can be Socialist in nature, providing benefits – in terms of better education, healthcare and jobs – for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. It is a matter of whether the market should serve humanity, or whether humanity only exists in order to serve the requirements of the market.

The trouble was that the market was, and still is – since the advent of the similarly ideologically driven Cameron government – seen as being a law unto itself. The full force of the monetarist experiment came to be felt in Great Britain and the USA, where fiscal austerity actually served to deepen the impact of the worldwide recession and to collapse employment in manufacturing industry, where trade unions had traditionally been at their strongest.

The prolonged economic crises of the 1970s, born out of the spiralling cost of oil resulted in rising inflation and economic stagnation, when combined with rising levels of international competition, particularly for electrical goods and automobiles, with Japan and other emergent economies across Asia, had already led to

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As the 1980s wore on the union became increasingly accustomed to the techniques of protest. Here, the Liverpool branches of the GMWU take to the streets.

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the erosion of Britain’s manufacturing base.

Of course, it was not just Britain but every one of the industrial nations in Western Europe that was affected in this manner.

It was not a matter of a particular “British disease” or of a high wage, high welfare culture – “paying ourselves far too much for far too long” – finally succumbing to market realities; but rather part of a general crisis of Western industry based upon skyrocketing fuel costs and created by dependence upon the internal combustion engine. Every Western government was

forced to respond and to reorganise production, but there was an enormous difference between the responses of the Nordic countries – which sought to maintain the welfare model and develop their own hitech industries – France and West Germany – which offered enormous subsidies to both agriculture and manufacturing in order to help them weather the storm – and Britain, which turned to the service and finance sectors, while letting its established industries go to the wall, for largely ideological reasons.

The argument was that higher wages,

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which led to inflation and, by extension, unemployment as workers effectively priced themselves out of the labour market, were maintained, and raised to artificial levels, solely by the activities of the unions. A precondition for prosperity was, therefore, to reduce the wage bill, thus increasing the demand for labour and bringing more people into the job market, ending unemployment at a stroke. The major barrier to this initiative was – according to the owners of capital – the union movement, itself. As a consequence, the Monetarist theorists – who acted as the architects for Conservative policy after 1979 – determined, from the outset, that the unions would have to be destroyed. It was an unavoidable, “collateral damage” that while lower wages might lead some firms to hire a handful of new staff, lower wages and the accompanying casualisation of employment would create widespread misery. Ironically, such shock therapy did not produce the expected windfall of a return to prosperity and full employment.

Inflation certainly was brought under control, but this was achieved at a horrendous cost which was manifested in high levels of unemployment, cuts in welfare and the shredding of the nation’s manufacturing base, and resulted in a low growth rate and rising levels of inequality.

Unemployment, which had run at less than 4% of the total workforce between 196580, increased to more than 9% between 1980-95. This process was accompanied by

a major redistribution of wealth, from public to private hands, which failed to produce – as had been confidently predicted – a “share-owning democracy” and, instead, concentrated the control of the nation’s wealth and natural resources in the hands of a few multi-national conglomerates.

Whether or not privately run industries were any more efficient than state owned ones, it is certainly true that once privatised the new enterprises were far more effective at exploiting their position as monopolies, brooking no opposition in their bid for commercial dominance on both a national and, later, global scale. Alan Budd, an economic advisor to Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, rather gave the game away when he concluded that: “What was engineered [under the cover of the drive to bring down inflation] … was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour, and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since”23.

Decision 84 David Basnett was in no doubt that Monetarism was “morally deplorable and economic nonsense”; as it was based upon the idea that “unemployment can only be cured by workers accepting lower and lower wages: the argument that you can ‘underprice yourself into a job’”24.Yet this system has effectively formed the base for the economic policies of the Thatcher, Major and Cameron governments, and was operated in a milder form under Blair and

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Brown. Unsurprisingly, for a general union which often found itself serving those in marginal employment, the results were disastrous. Almost 100,000 members were lost in the first bite of recession, which coincided with the first Thatcher government. These were the effects of closures and redundancies in the most solidly organised factories in the private sector, and the results of swingeing expenditure and staff cuts in local government and the health service. Basnett concluded, in December 1981, that “the past two years of the union’s history have been the most depressing since the 1930s”25.

At the same time, the Tory government sanctioned a massive rise in gas prices – which doubled between 1980-82 – as another means to support the costs of high unemployment and as a means of making nationalised industry appear inefficient and unpopular. The change, from the 1960s onwards, from town to natural gas, had already seen the sector in decline but creeping privatisation put another nail in the coffin of the industry that had originally formed the backbone of the union. The Gas Showrooms were to have been privatised in July 1981 but a national campaign led by the GMWU, a “token” one day strike and threatened indefinite action in the new year, caused the government to back down, for the time being. However, the advent of the second Thatcher administration placed privatisation firmly back on the agenda and the nationalised gas industry was

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broken up and parcelled off to speculators, in 1986, accompanied by further rationalisations and large scale job losses.

Yet the union, having dispensed with the deference and quietism of the Williamson and Cooper periods, was now active at the heart of the Labour Movement and capable of achieving considerable successes in the most hostile of climates. It mobilised for the Day of Action, on 22 September 1982, when some 120,000 protestors rallied at Hyde Park. Though largely geared around pay claims in the NHS, gas workers in London, the South and North East staged a 24 hour stoppage to coincide with the rally and MANWEB workers in the North West also went out on strike. The union was able to skilfully deploy its financial reserves in order to underpin the Water Workers’ dispute, which resulted in total victory in the early months of 1983; while a group of dinner ladies from Brent – led by the flamehaired Mary Turner – moved heaven and earth to feed 300 youngsters marching on the “Jobs Express”. Suddenly the union had a pubic profile and a membership that was being forced off the back foot to learn the art of protest. Sometime, however, these protests had a decidedly comic outcome, which served to draw out the absurdity of the government’s logic. Thus, when 750 union members drawn from seven hospitals in the Epsom area, sought to protest against the withdrawal of their London weighting allowance; the Home Secretary banned their projected march through the town

on the grounds that it was taking place in the London area. The irony was not lost on Paul Maloney, the Branch Secretary, who told reporters that: “On the one hand they say we can’t have London weighting because we aren’t in London; on the other hand we can’t hold a march because we’re in London”26.

The union was also changing in other progressive ways, realising that its demographic

and racial mix was altering radically and that this needed to be recognised within its structure. In May 1981, the GMWU Race Relations Conference had decided “to establish a permanent system of Race Relations Conferences at Regional and National levels; to develop GMWU positive action programmes at the workplace”27.

Each region was, henceforth, to hold its own conference, with the stated “purpose

The union continued to invest all its hopes in the campaign for the re-election of a Labour Government.

David Basnett and Larry Whitty lead the ovation at Conference.

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of these Conferences will be to open up problems experienced by our ethnic minority members, both at the workplace and within the Union, and to look for ways of tackling such problems at the local level.

It is hoped the Conferences will also look at the question of community relations and how Union Branches can be of help”28.

The union now acknowledged that it had previously had a problem in treating ethnic minorities as if they were somehow in transit. From now on, the union recognised that “they are not – they are here to stay” and became far more alive and attuned to both the pitfalls and the potentialities involved in organising within the Black and Asian workforce29. However hesitatingly, the union was coming to represent – and actually look like – those it served and, increasingly, these were women and members of the ethnic minorities.

By September 1985, membership stood at 833,731 of which 256,359 (roughly 30%) were women; and covered almost every industry and occupation, from engineering to language schools, from dustmen to head chefs; approximately 35% was based in the public sector and it was amongst this section of the workforce that the cuts were striking with greatest severity. If changes in the numbers and composition of the membership was forcing the pace of change; then so too was the pace of legislation pushed through by the Conservative Government in order to curtail trade union freedoms. Following the passage of the Trade Union Act of 1984,

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GMB was compelled to change its electoral procedures dramatically in order to comply with the new legislation; with the union’s rules being amended in order to allow regional secretaries to stand for election to the CEC; the post of General Secretary to be contested every five years; and stoppages at work to be actioned though the ballot box.

GMB permitted the circulation of election addresses for the first time, though there was still a ban on direct canvassing. The Conservatives had hoped that by extending the scope of the franchise within the unions, the membership would overturn their existing leaders and elect increasingly passive, Right-wing or thoroughly de-politicised replacements. Ironically, the same demands – though made for very different ends – had been made by various contending Trotskyite groups since the 1960s. Unexpectedly, the result was to strengthen – or reintroduce – the principles of membership-led decision making across the Labour Movement. In the short term it produced neither a new generation of moderates – save for, perhaps accelerating the rise of Bill Jordan in the engineers – or a fresh cadre of Militant Tendency or SWP leaders at the head of the unions. Traditional leaderships – both Left and Right wing – tended to weather the storm, giving way after the turn of the Millennium to a new generation of general secretaries, drawn from a broad section of the Left in the Labour Movement, who benefited from – and caught the spirit of – a re-energised rank-and-file agenda.

Foremost among these were Bob Crow at the RMT, Derek Simpson at Amicus, Billy Hayes at the CWU, and Paul Kenny at GMB. It would seem that, initially at least, the traditional reliance and trust placed by members and activists in their union leaderships was wholly unaffected by the new balloting legislation. This was certainly true in GMB where Militant had failed to make any substantial inroads and where discontent was largely expressed through existing democratic channels30. Thus, while the General Secretary was re-elected to office in both 1988 and 1992 and all ten existing Regional Secretaries were returned to the CEC without significant difficulty, the only unexpected upset of the period – the defeat of the incumbent National Chairman, Derek Gladwin, at the hands of Dick Pickering – had occurred before the passage of legislation, at the May 1982 Congress in Eastbourne.

Even then, it did not betoken a political change of course, as the Centre Left candidate – Billy Milne, the Chair of the London Region – was also heavily defeated; and the politics of the two leading contenders could both be easily comprehended within the union’s tradition of middle ground, Labour Party loyalism.

If Basnett and his colleagues were able to foster a more healthy political climate within the union, maintaining their office but now permitting a measure of discussion and open debate over policy; then what they could not control was the wider economic climate that bit into their

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The NUTGW responded to changes in the demographic of the workforce by recruiting among a wide range of ethnic minority groupings. On this march in Hackney, Asian and Turkish workers marched side-by-side.

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membership base and, consequently, corroded the union’s finances. Total funds and assets had first registered steep falls in the 1970s, as the oil crisis bit, and had nose-dived at the height of the recession of 1979-81. Thereafter both membership and finances continued to decline, albeit more slowly, between 1983-84. Every hike in membership subscriptions – particularly those designed to protect the generous pension fund – had the effect of deterring poorer and more marginal workers from retaining their union card, or even from joining in the first place. Thus, retention of membership became an increasing problem. Those new members who joined GMB in the 1980s tended to be teenagers or part-time workers, located overwhelmingly in the lower subscription categories, while those retiring from work

or facing redundancy were those employed at higher grades, on better terms and conditions, and better able to meet the higher contribution rates. Moreover, where GMB was increasingly organising as the decade wore on – among part-time workers and women, who were regularly one and the same – these members often did not have bank accounts and hence could not pay by direct debit, or be incorporated within the check-off system. Thus, in 1987 the union would gain 10,000 low subscription members but lose more than 21,000 Grade 1 high rate subscription payers31.

Unsurprisingly, this pattern of loss and high turnover among a different type of membership hit the union’s income drastically.

However, due to the high level of reserves built up over some forty years of prudence and some adroit management of resources, the union remained solvent throughout the decade, save for the exception of 1980.

Yet, Basnett could see that with expenditure remaining extremely high and income continuing to fall something would eventually have to give; especially as GMB – unlike the Boilermakers – was reluctant to adopt the practice of living off its investment income. His answer was to commission a report, presented to Congress under the faintly ominous title Decision 84; which sought to focus on the maintenance of adequate income, examine methods of cost control and better recruitment, and deliver a clear management structure within

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the union. This entailed dramatic cost reductions as the previously large levels of benefit were either cut or phased out; officer and staff wages were to be reduced through a redundancy programme; and a cap was to be placed on regional operating costs with a plan for greater flexibility of officers, who could now be moved between the regions when needed. Specialist services, such as education, legal, pensions, and health and safety were all to be retained but the provision of training was to be consolidated at one site, at Manchester, with Woodstock College being closed down and put on the open market. The union had already started a process of computerisation of membership and contribution records, both at a national and regional level, but it was felt that further economies and efficiencies could be made if this process were extended further. Key to the whole report was an implicit critique of the existing regional structure of GMB and

the sense that both political and economic reforms, shifting power to the centre and cutting down on the duplication of services, could be achieved through a rebalancing of powers. It is significant that the leadership chose to think of its own administration, staff and procedures as being unusually bureaucratic, and labour and cost intensive, when in fact the union was still registering modest surpluses and was paying out far less in management and overheads than many of its fellow unions. Regional structures made for an easy target for critics looking for a single target to explain away all of the union’s woes and while the diffusion of power to the regions did entail additional costs – especially in terms of staff – it also had the advantage of making the union, in theory at least, more democratic, accountable and able to be highly responsive to the needs of individual members on the ground32. The problem did not lie so much

By the mid-1980s the traditional heartlands of the British textile industry were already experiencing decline with many jobs migrating overseas.

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Not every battle in the 1980s was lost. Here, water workers mount a picket during the protracted strike, of 1985.

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in the performance of the regions but in the manner by which the union’s income was harvested and divided. As late as 1988, 17.5% of total income was remitted to branches as commission for recruitment and the union’s leadership had no say in how it was spent. Some 50% of total income remained with the regions and head office only had effective control over 36.5% of total dues. The result was that any centralised budget was hard, if not impossible, to control and that the role of the General Secretary was really that of a first among equals at the CEC, balancing the demands and requirements of the regions with those of the centre. Successful leaders, like Basnett, Edmonds and Kenny understood this implicitly, Kevin Curran did not.

Decision 84 was duly adopted at GMB’s 1984 Congress and, on paper at least, should have entailed the major restructuring of the union with a substantial downgrading of the financial power and autonomy of the regional secretaries. However, two factors acted as a brake upon this. The first was the discursive nature of the document itself, which obscured its real objectives amid the detail and, therefore, lacked a readily appreciable set of core aims that could be quickly delivered. This was probably intentional, as Basnett’s style was always quiet, non-confrontational and unassuming.

However, the second reason that checked its implementation was that Basnett, himself, was not there to see through its recommendations. He was nearing

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retirement, but the injury of his son in a tragic sporting accident convinced him of the need to leave early. Three candidates subsequently came forward to challenge for the leadership; John Edmonds, Tom Burlison, and David Warburton. Basnett probably would have preferred to have handed the union on to David Warburton, who had worked as a National Officer in the Chemicals sector and whose experience was rooted in the private sector where the union was attempting to target new membership. However, it was John Edmonds who won the branch vote by a landslide. He had benefited from a high profile in the union, having moved briefs regularly – from Energy to responsibility for Local Authority manual workers and the NHS – thereby getting to know a far higher proportion of the membership located, predominantly, in the public sector. He was also regarded as the Left-wing candidate for the post and drew considerable strength both from the sense that he would be a breath of fresh air in the union and his pledge not to cut the number of regions – as proposed under the terms of Decision 84 – if he was elected. Consequently, he carried with him both the Left-wing activist base of the union and those regional barons – whose politics tended to the Right, or the centrist – who did not relish the prospect of having their territories abolished and their wings clipped. While his vote on the Left held firm, the traditional Right-wing vote splintered between Warbuton and

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Burlinson, who was seen by many as a stalking horse candidate designed to weaken Basnett’s chosen successor. Be that as it may, the triumph of the centre-Left was real enough. At 41, Edmonds was young, energetic and seen as representing a break with the union’s rather stuffy and dated image. Coming of age in the 1960s, he understood counter-cultural influences, and was not only unthreatened by calls for gender equality and for reserved seats for women and ethnic minorities, but positively supported and embraced them.

Politically and culturally, the union had come a long way in little more than a decade but for the moment, at least, its progress was put on hold as Basnett instituted a long handover period, which did not see Edmonds assume office until 1985, almost a year later. Even now, one can sense how this debilitating interregnum must have rankled with John Edmonds as he was charged with chairing talks between the trade unions and the Militant leadership of Liverpool City Council, in attempt to head off their attempts to set an illegal budget. The task was as thankless as it was unrewarding, with trade union representation on the committee gradually dwindling away as it became clear that the Militant councillors would do nothing to avert a showdown with central government that they could not hope to win. Though Edmonds was impressed by their commitment to the building of social housing, there seemed little else to recommend either Militant

Tendency or the better part of a wasted year to him. In the meantime, the union exhibited the unmistakeable signs of drift at the centre. To be fair to him, David Basnett’s whole life had been devoted to the union and, as retirement neared, the prospect of no longer having an active role to fulfil within it almost certainly became too much to bear. His decision to accept a peerage was also probably conditioned by this need to seek a continuing role in industrial and political affairs, though in the end fate conspired to deny him even this.

As Thatcherism tightened its grip upon the intellectual and economic landscape, horizons narrowed, and the pursuit of private greed and gain was signalled everywhere, from a deregulated stock market to the neon signs that fizzed and sparked above the city streets. Money and the arrogance that often accompanied it, expressed through brick-like mobile phones, red braces, a profusion of filofaxes and wide-shouldered suit jackets – that sought to ape the style of commodity traders – were the order of the day. Even language became debased; as freedom was equated with deregulation and privatisation; radicalism with the free market; and the forces of social conservatism with Socialism and the trade unions. Night became day, and day became night. For GMB millenarian hopes would have to be pushed on to the back burner, survival – pure and simple – was now the order of the day.

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modernising the union

f

ear is part of the explanation. There is meant to be a law in this country that says you cannot be sacked for joining a trade union. But that does not stop the threats. ‘Try starting a trade union here and your feet won’t touch the ground’.

But when the opinion pollsters ask people why they do not join, another answer comes top of the list. Most people say they have not joined a union because they have never been asked … a hefty proportion give a revealing answer. ‘Trade unions are not really for people like me’. For many people our image is wrong. Trade unions are still associated with the traditional industries and services … [but] employment has moved out of many of the traditional industries and unfortunately unions have not followed the workers into their new jobs”1. These sentiments were echoed, in a way, from the other end of the political spectrum by David Hunt, who was the Conservative Employment Secretary in 1994. He considered that: “The future of trade unions lies in their own hands. They can no longer appeal to old allegiances when recruiting or retaining members. Union members of the future will be motivated by pragmatic considerations when joining a union … Value for money will be uppermost in their minds and belonging to a union is the same as purchasing any other service. Rhetoric about the oppressed masses might whip up the old frenzy among activists at seaside conferences, but it sounds ridiculous outside”2. The search for a new image, and a new role that would re-engage with working people would focus much of Edmonds’ attention during his term of office.

The defeat of the Miners had coincided with the start of his general secretaryship and many of the surface workers, sacked, victimised or returning to work heavily indebted after almost a year on strike, were GMB members. It tore the heart out of communities and out of the trade unions, where the NUM had always been accorded a place of honour as the “shock troops” of the movement. Morale was at its lowest, a recourse to industrial militancy in the hope of effecting political change was now almost impossible, and in Edmonds’ words Margaret Thatcher’s “policies and prejudices” were at the peak of their power and popular appeal3.

Edmonds saw the potential of GMB as a general union, reaching where the T&G could not; into the public sector. He wanted to target,

The colourful GMB National Banner was designed by Dan Jones and shows many of the trades and industries which employed its members during the 1980s.

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Alongside purely industrial struggles, the union was also increasingly involved in community issues. Members of Southern Region demonstrate in Hackney, on the GLC-organised “Democracy Day of Action” in an attempt to save local play centres and amenities.

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in particular, a spread of new and scarcely organised membership across the non-civil service public and private sectors, and to focus upon women workers whom he felt no other union was then striving to represent on their own terms.Yet, he felt hampered by a “union structure that was fantastically old fashioned” – despite Basnett’s attempts at reform – and which was straining under the pressure of the Boilermakers and, in particular, the shipbuilding section, who after amalgamation were struggling to retain their industrial identity in a regionally based union. The

Executive was “tiny” giving the Regional Secretaries a great deal of sway but also offering a potential for control if the centre as strong enough. Women members were clearly under represented, with only one dedicated officer in the entire union, holding few individual seats on the Executive and regional councils, and having access to “a sort of conference” which he didn’t feel amounted to much. To make matters worse, the union did not seem to have a full-time communications department that was professional enough to keep pace with the increasingly slick media of the 1980s; though in fairness it has to be said that the union’s journal had improved greatly since the early 1970s, dropping much of the “parish pump” flavour for serious journalism and the very thoughtful, and interesting, opinion pieces written

by Jack Ashley. It in time expanded to an impressive broadsheet, printed in full colour and well designed that – together with the establishment of the union’s own magazine dedicated to female members, Working Women – won numerous awards for the TUC’s best union journal. However, when it did try to run topical, pop-culture pieces, the union often found itself running against a tide of social and sexual conservatism among an aging membership. Howls of outraged complaint greeted comparatively mild articles on the satirical Spitting Image TV show – which regularly lambasted Thatcher – and a Madonna stadium tour, that was almost certainly more risqué than

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the reporting and accompanying photographs suggested. It was a balancing act and one that GMB was, by and large, getting increasingly right. In contrast to his predecessors, Edmonds came across well in television interviews, understood the media, and gained a large amount of coverage for the union through his interventions at the TUC and Labour Party Conferences. A recruitment campaign fronted by Susan Tully, an actress then famous for her role in Eastenders, came complete with its own video tape for use in branches as well as accompanying printed material, and managed to combine gentle humour with a subtle political undertone.

It was popular without being populist. The extension of new technologies afforded the union a wider reach than ever before, through the phenomenal growth of the internet. The GMB website went online, on 6 November 2000, and the union recorded its first internet recruit – Bruce Moodley – a week later4.

He would be the first of many as the internet became a prime recruiting and campaigning tool, with congress reports, CEC minutes and decisions, all being made available – later on during Paul Kenny’s tenure – for members to view online; reducing the costs of printing and improving the sense of democracy and openness within the union.

The union’s name was officially shortened to GMB, in a move away from the clunky and almost unpronounceable GMBATU, and outside consultants were brought in to devise a new logo and slogan, which the

General Secretary specified had to appeal predominantly to a female audience. The result, a stylised man and woman holding hands, above a mission statement of “Working Together” fitted perfectly the union’s new remit to place the emphasis firmly on female, white collar and service sector employment and to present a friendly and supportive, rather than a combative image. Unsurprisingly, it was not to everyone’s liking, there were interminable meetings of focus groups and the CEC, before the logos were approved and signs of wider resistance to the union’s drift, in the 1990s, were externalised by the decision of the Yorkshire Region to start using an altogether more strident symbol of an eagle’s wings to frame the official image which was otherwise seen as too anodyne.

The reality, however, was that by the start of the 1990s women accounted for roughly 38% of the total membership and that in 2002, for the first time, GMB recruited more women than men to its ranks. Slowly but surely, a series of equalities policies and briefing documents – covering gender politics, race issues, and gay and lesbian rights – were stitched together, which if they look a little dated by today’s standards were certainly bold and innovatory twenty years ago5. Finding that women’s representation in the union was muted, John Edmonds introduced a system of reserved seats for them at the CEC and regional councils

As London Regional Secretary, John Cope broke the established mould in union politics and proved himself a popular and forceful speaker at the TUC.

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In 1984, the Thatcher Government forbade workers at the GCHQ Listening Station at Cheltenham from joining, or remaining in, a trade union. FTAT and NUTGW branches demonstrated side-byside outside the government complex.

The pipe band came down from Glasgow to Cheltenham for the day.

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which increased representation dramatically.

This was followed, shortly afterwards, by a similar attempt to raise the numbers of Black and ethnic minority members on the union’s governing bodies. A number of reserved places were secured, though Edmonds found it to be a technically more difficult process as the matter hinged upon “how members chose to define themselves”, but in the end he took as his blueprint the reports of the parliamentary Race Relations Committee6. In 1994, Aurellia Martins – a catering manager and GMB member – became the first Black woman to receive a TUC Gold badge for her services to trade unionism. She had come to Britain from Nigeria in 1962, joining both the union and the Labour Party in 1970, after she began

working at Oakfield House, an old people’s home on Wimbledon Common. The management had refused to provide safe transport for women colleagues working anti-social hours, even after one of her female colleagues was raped walking home, and she felt that she had to take a stand.

“I received their [i.e. the union’s] help not because I was a woman or black”, she said, “but because I wanted to get involved”7.

A branch secretary since 1988, she went on to become a member of Southern Regional Council and is a regular participant at GMB’s congresses.

It was apparent to all that the nature of the union and the types of work it represented were changing almost beyond recognition, with full-time and relatively secure jobs being replaced by part-time work, on the basis of short-term contracts.

Since 1979, the balance of GMB membership had shifted away from private sector manufacturing into private service employment; while public service membership together with that in the privatised utilities dropped leaving their relative strength in the union almost unchanged. Thus, in 1979, nearly two thirds of the union worked in manufacturing industries with less than 30% spread across the service sector; while by 2000 more than half of GMB membership lay in service industries, with manufacturing down to 43%.

The metal working industries of London and Birmingham had largely withered away by the end of the 1980s, while the break up of

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the British Gas monopoly over supply – which saw the gas market opened up to full competition by 1998 – together with VAT on fuel; saw approximately 20,000 jobs losses across the sector in 1992-95, at a time when GMB had a total of 80,000 British Gas members. Indeed, by 1992 the redundancy rate among GMB members was running at a staggering 1,000 per week resulting in the union recording an operating loss of £41,000 in 1992.

However, while GMB remained very much a manual trade union, with 5 out of every 6 of its members employed in this area, the leadership believed – with some good reason at the time – that its long term future might be best secured through seeking merger partners and attempting to expand into the white collar sector. mergers and Super-unions The amalgamation with the Boilermakers had demonstrated that GMB could be an attractive merger partner and one that was capable of delivering on its promises.

Furthermore, amalgamation – along the lines already charted by Basnett – offered the prospect of arresting decline through the transfer of membership and the acquisition of property portfolios that could then either be redeveloped, for use by GMB, or sold for profit. Given the brief that the union was attempting to divest itself of its predominantly blue collar image, and recruit far more strongly among women and the aspiring middle classes, then merger

talks with the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staffs (APEX) seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up on.

APEX had good claim to being the oldest of the white collar unions, having been founded in 1890 as the National Union of Clerks. It merged with the Women Clerks’ and Secretaries Association in 1920,

Sweated labour and piecework were sadly the norms, rather than the exception, for garment workers. This banner preserved by GMB London Region, mixes old and new imagery. The scrolls hark back to the 1880s, the slogan to the French Revolution, but the weary seamstress is very much the product of the female emancipation of the late 1920s.

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Ancient and modern combine in this FTAT banner, with modern graphics underscored by the pride in the Welsh nation expressed through the Prince of Wales’ feathers.

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before undergoing two changes of title; becoming the Clerical and Administrative Workers’ Union in 1941, before finally settling upon the acronym APEX in 1972.

Roughly two thirds of the membership had been concentrated within the administrative and clerical grades of the engineering industry, though latterly it had branched out to include clerical staff in the textile industry, civil air transport, and food industry, concentrated mainly in the confectionery giants Rowntree, Fry and Cadbury. It was known as a small union, which prided itself on offering a staff representative for

every twenty-five members, and which sought to occupy the centre ground of the Labour Movement. Roy Grantham, its General Secretary since 1970, had enjoyed a meteoric rise having been first appointed as a union organiser, in Birmingham, at the age of only twenty-two, and was keen to maintain the moderate political character of his union, which was “low profile … most of the time”8. As a result, he fought shy of amalgamation with ASTMS, the major white collar union, partly through sectoral rivalry but also on account of their own merger with Ken Gill’s TASS, one of the most progressive and Left-wing unions of its day. Similarly, talks with the aggressively Right-wing EETPU broke down even before that union’s expulsion from the TUC in 1987. GMB, therefore, with its own impeccably centrist credentials and a spread across industry that appeared to complement the strengths of APEX, seemed to offer a far better fit.

This was a somewhat ironic turn of affairs given that the union was probably best known in the public mind for its support of the Grunwick workers in 1976-77, and for fighting a strike of enormous intensity and significance for the wider trade union movement, under the full blaze of media scrutiny. For a moderate union of rather modest means, what was remarkable about its approach to the strike was not so much its frantic attempts to disengage itself from the struggle, and from the 54 remaining strikers, once the dispute began to unravel;

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but that it had committed itself to the fight in the first place, offering strike pay from day one, when none of those involved had been a member of the union – or had even heard of APEX – before they walked out of work on 20 August 19769. Moreover, it was testament to the union’s officers and activists that, mistakes and misunderstandings aside, APEX which primarily served white and comparatively well-to-do men, was prepared to stand up and fight for a group of marginal, predominantly women Asian immigrants, who represented some of the most disadvantaged workers in the land. At a time when racism was far more open and ingrained in our society – manifesting itself in everything from advertising to Terry and June sit-coms, and the march of many unionised London dock workers in support of Enoch Powell – it is easy to forget the fact that APEX in supporting Mrs. Desai and her comrades was prepared to tread an uncharted and by no means universally popular path in British industrial relations.

Furthermore, within London District and the Home Counties, the union also possessed a radical political tradition that ran against the dominant grain. The Communist Party had enjoyed considerable influence within the union in the 1940s and early 1950s; and unlike GMB still possessed a recognisable – if small – Broad Left caucus in the 1970s-80s10. Indeed, Richard Ascough – the future GMB Southern Region Secretary – would come out of this tradition, having cut his teeth in the active

Despite the tacit support offered to the Botha regime in South Africa, Britain – and the British trade union movement – in many ways led the international solidarity campaigns against apartheid, during the 1980s. GMB Pension Fund Trustees held a conference on banning investment in South Africa, September 1987.

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Richard Ascough, GMB Southern Region Secretary, hailed from the APEX Section of the union, whose badge is pictured below.

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Heathrow Branch of the Civil Air Transport section and led a week-long strike at British Airways over the introduction of the Shuttle service. However, APEX had always been overshadowed by ASTMS, just as Grantham had been in the media and at the TUC by the more florid Clive Jenkins; with the result that it never recruited hard or fast enough when it had the chance. When British engineering collapsed under the Thatcher Government, the progress chasers and pay clerks who formed the majority of APEX’s membership went as well. As a consequence, the union’s roll fell from 150,000 in 1979 to approximately 75,000 in 1989, on published figures, a 50% decline over the decade; the real level was probably more dramatic still. There were attempts to manage the decline, with steady increases in membership contributions, the nonreplacement of staff and packages aimed at encouraging early retirement; but all of this proved inadequate to stem the tide and was not helped by a hefty £30,000 fine to pay libel damages to George Ward, the owner of the Grunwick plant; adding further insult to the injury wrought by the dispute11.

As in the case of the Boilermakers, APEX was free to negotiate on any terms that it liked with GMB save for the issue of financial autonomy, and it was clear from the outset that its funds and property portfolio would be ceded to GMB. Nevertheless, for a small union, in financial difficulties, it was offered a lifeline that appeared extremely advantageous. Under

the terms of the amalgamation, registered on 1 March 1989 – but actually worked out over the two previous years by the senior representatives of both unions – APEX was able to retain much of its identity and even its name, which was only slightly modified to the APEX Partnership, within GMB white collar and administrative section.

With approximately 50% of the entire white collar membership located within that area, APEX was guaranteed the leading role as organiser for the whole of MATSA and offered the prospects of funding for recruitment that it could previously have only dreamed. It was also promised – or rather thought that it had been promised – that it “would form part of a reformed union with a more federative structure”12.

Herein lay the rub, GMB expected great things of the APEX Partnership, while the latter tended to feel that it was being submerged in something of an alien workplace culture. Thus, the smallest areas of APEX strength, in the North, were subsumed into the largest GMB regions and tended to feel that the distinctiveness of their voice was being lost. Far more seriously the projected rise of the new white collar trade unionist – outside the teaching and public service unions – never really took hold. There were undoubtedly niggles over non-manual workers being serviced by officers from a predominantly blue collar background, and far fewer than the 75,000 members officially promised ever made it on to GMB books, but it was the impending merger

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of NALGO, COHSE and NUPE into UNISON, creating what was then the largest British trade union, that shook GMB’s leadership and put the writing on the wall for the APEX Partnership.

Consequently, at the 1992 GMB Congress, it was agreed to establish a Public Services Section which might hope to counterbalance the influence of the new super-union. With important areas of MATSA hived-off in this manner, and with most of its old leadership having retired – Rita Stephen in 1991 and Roy Grantham in 1992 – by 1994, GMB reviewed its organisation and opted for an industrially based structure and relocated the majority of its white collar membership to their appropriate industrial sections. With a remaining membership of around 30,000, after only five years of its existence within the merged union, the APEX Partnership was renamed as GMB’s Commercial Section13. This new section had responsibility for the AA, the Security, Trade Union and Political staffs; but it was a far cry from what the both GMB and APEX leaderships had in mind for it at the time of amalgamation, and Richard Ascough certainly felt that “it was never used for its full potential”14.

As late as 1993, the union was still talking confidently about anticipating one new merger a year for the next five years. GMB had successfully brought in the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers (NUTGW) in 1991, and the Furniture Timber and Allied Trade Union (FTAT)

in 1993. The NUTGW was, itself, the product of a large number of mergers – including the Amalgamated Society of Journeymen Tailors, the Amalgamated Jewish Tailors, Pressers and Machinists Trade Union and the United Ladies’ Tailors Union – and had been at the forefront of the struggle against sweatshop conditions in the late nineteenth century. The London Tailors’, one of its constituent parts, had fought a protracted five month dispute in 1867 against their appalling conditions, which saw the union’s leaders tried for conspiracy, and extremely harsh treatment meted out to the strikers; some 200 of whom chose to emigrate rather than slink back to work under even further reduced conditions15. Many of the unions that subsequently amalgamated with it were small and regionally based, with a concentration in the capital as a centre of fashion. The Tsar’s pogroms forced many Jewish tailors to flee for their lives, with many settling and setting up businesses in London’s East End. Arriving in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, Jacob Fine – the future General Secretary of the United Ladies’ Tailors and Mantlemakers’ Union – wandered the streets with a small bundle of possessions tucked under his arm, unable to make himself understood until a friendly policeman sat him down with a lump of bread and a cup of cocoa and gave him directions to Bethnal Green16. His political and trade union culture was one where meetings were regularly conducted in Yiddish, and where

John Edmonds listens to opinions of delegates at the “Women in the GMB” Workshop at the National College, Manchester, November 1989.

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the “union’s centenary was marked by a march by union members and activists commemorating

Will Thorne’s epic ten day hike from Birmingham to London

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”

Orthodox Judaism and Marxism rubbed shoulders in the cutting room. By 1935, he was a Labour Party Councillor in Stepney who – together with younger men in the tailor’s unions, such as the Communist Party activist, Mick Mindel – were at the forefront of attempts to halt the reign of terror instigated by Moseley and his Blackshirts in the East End17. As a consequence, the NUTGW inherited radical and religious traditions that embedded with it a strong sense of feeling for the underdog. Moreover, its ability to organise among new immigrant communities, and in small scale, sweated workshops, carried a resonance with the employment conditions faced by many union recruiters in the 1990s. Indeed, one of the first publications of the section on its amalgamation with GMB was an attempt to improve conditions for a new generation of Eastern European immigrants, exploited by the clothing industry, after the fall of the Berlin Wall18. The union, numbering around 70,000 in 1991, was compelled to seek an amalgamation with GMB due to long-term membership decline, a trend which unfortunately continued postmerger, but it proved a particularly attractive partner as it brought with it a healthy financial reserve of approximately £40 million.

FTAT membership proved more durable after merger with GMB and, in tracing its origins back to the National Society of Brushmakers and General Workers which was founded in 1747,

it could lay claim to being the oldest trade union in the world. It could claim Alex Gossip as one of its leading lights and had a strong craft ethos which added diversity and new scope to GMB’s membership base.

Despite the onset of the Cold War, FTAT and its immediate predecessors had maintained a relatively progressive course and enjoyed good relations with their sister unions in the Socialist East of Europe.

However, its core membership had been badly hit by mechanisation and by the increasing trend for handmade and bespoke furniture to become the preserve of only the very rich. Nonetheless, both FTAT and the NUTGW maintained a high degree

neW reAlISm, neW lABour – neW chAllenGeS chApter 8

of autonomy after amalgamation, which continued into the new millennium, and preserved their own identities within the GMB family. Moreover, the idea that the regional structure of GMB has been a barrier to progress and efficiency can be overstated. Indeed, the success of GMB’s mergers – particularly in the case of FTAT and the NUTGW – can be seen as a counterblast to the charge that the regional system is inflexible or hidebound. Of the nine regional secretaries in post at the end of 2011, five came into the union as the result of the merger process, namely: Richard Ascough (APEX), Tommy Brennan (Boilermakers), Harry Donaldson (Scottish Metal Workers’ Union), Allan Garley (Tailors and Garment Workers), and Joe Morgan (Furniture, Timber & Allied Trades). The union was able to expand into new territories in an organic fashion, working within and adapting existing structures, and permitting the distinctive voices of the constituent unions to have their say at local, regional and national levels.

Yet despite this relative success, the leadership of GMB became increasingly dissatisfied with the results of its merger strategy in the mid-1990s and, in a major sea change, abandoned it altogether for a time until disaster threatened to engulf the union in 2002-05. In essence, the policy foundered upon two rocks. The first was the failure of the merger partners – and the white collar sections in particular – to break into new areas of recruitment as quickly

Opposite page: Aurellia Martins speaks at the TUC Congress held in Blackpool in September 1990.

Left: GMB delegates listening to the debate at the 1989 TUC Congress.

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as had been expected, leaving GMB as still predominantly a manual, working class orientated union; as opposed to an increasingly skilled and middle class one, as had been hoped. The second, and more dramatic, was the failure to conclude a major project for amalgamation with the T&G leviathan.

The emergence in 1993 of UNISON, as the public services giant, and the AEEU in the private sector as the result of a merger between the electricians and engineers, had left GMB on the defensive and it turned to its erstwhile rival, the T&G, for support.

The projected amalgamation was, therefore, primarily driven by the desire to protect their common sectional interests against encroachment by these new super-unions.

Yet it was also seen as a means of cornering “market share” through the creation of a similar – and rival – super-union; as a response to the end of much of heavy industry, the anti-trade union laws and to falling membership rolls. John Edmonds, at the time, wrote that: “The old industrial landmarks are disappearing. Instead we have bits and pieces; economy-service industries, small workplaces and short-term employment.

Our problem is that we have a trade union movement that operates most comfortably in one world, while over half the people of Britain now work in an entirely different world – a world where trade unionism is scarcely ever mentioned”19. It therefore seemed to make sense to eliminate interunion competition and to strengthen the

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joint-union’s base in local councils, the health service and energy utilities. Both unions possessed a similar rule book, were grounded in the ethos of the “general union”, and appeared to be politically compatible.

Bill Morris and John Edmonds hailed from similar political backgrounds, on the centre-Left of the Movement, were dedicated to preserving the link between the trade unions and the Labour Party, and had been generally supportive of the “modernisation” of the party’s constitution and organisation that had taken place under Neil Kinnock and John Smith. Moreover, both unions organised across both the public services and the private sector and GMB and T&G negotiators envisaged a combined membership of more than 1.8 million members; which would have represented 1 in 12 workers, accounted for a quarter of the votes at the TUC, and for approximately 20% of all women enrolled in trade unions.

John Edmonds thought that it was: “Not an amalgamation for its own sake.

Not bolting together two super-unions into one mega-union and just hoping for the best. What we aim for is a union that will be the flagship of the Labour Movement – modern, relevant and just as successful in recruiting the workforce in the 1990s as we used to be in recruiting the workforce of the ‘60s and ‘70s”20. As a consequence, the merger with the T&G was recommended to the 1993 GMB Congress by the CEC; although John Edmonds cautioned that

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it would still be “several years away from creating Britain’s biggest union of two million members … we are talking here about the greatest enterprise in the trade union movement since the 1920s”. A “more formal” proposal was to be placed before the next conference, but London region moved to hedge the merger negotiations around a federal structure for the new union that was to last for five years before any final merger could take place. While this was voted down by the delegates to Congress, with the backing of the CEC, it nonetheless was a signal of wider misgivings among GMB membership. The two unions had very different organisational forms and traditions – despite their similar origins in the explosion of New Unionism – and this was particularly apparent in the strong regional nature of GMB, and in the differing compositions of their Executives, with the T&G Executive being a lay body, while GMB’s was a mixture of both full-time and lay officials. Bill Morris highlighted the areas of resistance at the biennial T&G Conference in Bournemouth, in 1993, where he chose to view the merger as being driven by grass roots activists within both of the unions, and seeing the contrast between the T&G – where lay member democracy was seen as non-negotiable – and the obstacles placed in its way on account of “too many full time officials [who] sat on the [GMB] Executive”21.

GMB’s own grassroots may have begged to disagree with this analysis as there was cause

John Edmonds with Bill Morris at the TUC.

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the moDernISer GenerAl SecretAry 1986-2003

b.1944

A prim e mo ver in the “Ne w Un ioni sm” of the 1990s, he pro ved a tru e frie nd but not u ncritical support er of the La bou r Party.

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t

he election of John Edmonds, as General Secretary of GMB, marked a generational change at the top of the union, ushered in a new awareness of changes within the workforce – in terms of skills, gender and ethnicity – and paved the way for the equalities policies that are at the heart of GMB’s agenda, today.

Edmonds was born in January 1944, to a family steeped in the ethos of trade unionism, and grew up in South London, in an atmosphere of optimism and expanding opportunity created by the post-war Labour Government. His father, Walter, was a shop steward for the T&G, and worked at a flour mill; while his mother – also a union activist – made manila envelopes by hand. Both his grandfather and his uncle were Father’s of the Chapel – the effective heads of local branches – in the print unions, and he was raised within the general ethos of trade unionism.

His academic ability at school was recognised early on by his teachers and he won a series of scholarships that took him, first, to the exclusive Christ’s Hospital School, in London, and then on to Oriel College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. If the snobbery and conformity of a minor public school had sharpened his politics and sense of self; then his studies at Oxford provided him

In October 1985, GMB members were prominent in an anti-racism march in Manchester.

with an analytical approach to economic and political problems that he would carry with him into his subsequent trade union work.

From the age of 16 onwards it was his ambition to work for the unions but, after leaving university, there seemed to be few openings available to him in the field. As a result, he spent a year working for the Knightsbridge Provision Company which, despite its name, was based in Kennington, being promoted in that time to supervisor and gaining some experience as a T&G activist.

At that point, he saw an advert for a post in the GMWU for which he successfully applied.

John Edmonds started work for the GMWU in 1966, as a research assistant at National Office handling briefs for the

officials and preparing the paperwork for members’ wage claims. With his “toe in the door”, he applied – almost immediately – for a post as a field officer, or organiser, and thereafter “badgered everyone in sight for an officer post”.

He succeeded in his goal, after several attempts, being appointed as a Regional Officer for the Southern Region in 1970, and initially handled the gas and local government workers in Sussex and Kent.

His success in this role ensured his promotion as the union’s youngest National Officer – following the retirement of Sir Fred Hayday – and his return to Head Office, in 1972, at the age of 28.

At this point, he was able to gain a measure of security for the gasworkers under his control, through a series of disputes, as the move from town to natural gas threatened to leave them out on a limb. However, he was keen to ensure that pay rises were accompanied by provisions for redeployment and retraining.

At David Basnett’s suggestion, he combined 317

responsibility for both gas and electricity workers and subsequently moved to represent union members in local government. There he encountered, and tried to remedy, the disparity between male and female rates of pay and sought to improve the pay and conditions of care workers “who received next to nothing”.

Elected General Secretary in August 1985, with the support of the Broad Left within the union, he took office on 1 January 1986 and was subsequently re-elected unopposed, on two occasions. Looking back, he considered that: “The Thatcherite years were a time of misery for trade unionists. Almost always on the defensive, we clung on for survival, struggling to protect the fabric of our union against a tide of political hostility rarely seen in a western democracy. Our strategy in those years was to survive through a vigorous policy of amalgamations”, starting with the Greater London Staff Association, then Apex, the National Union of Labour Organisers, then the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers, then the Furniture, Timber & Allied Trades Union, followed by the Gas Managers Association and finally the MPO. In order to make itself a more attractive amalgamation partner, GMB altered its own internal structure, creating industrial sections 318

that – cutting across regional boundaries – strengthened his own powers as general secretary. Moreover, the highly regionalised GMB decisions over whether or not to call a ballot and whether or not to proceed with industrial action were generally removed from intermediary bodies and drawn back to the centre of the union. At the same time, the Executive began to play an increasing role in the appointment of the regional secretaries in the later 1980s. However, while he was successful in his introduction of women only and race reserved seats at both local and national levels, the industrial sections never really became alternative sources of power and served largely in an advisory capacity.

Towards the end of the Thatcher era and throughout the Major Government, the union increasingly won victories against the tide by relying heavily upon European legislation, and Edmonds recalled one particular success when after “working as a cook at Cammel Laird’s Shipyard, Julie Hayward gained equal pay after we fought a seven-year battle through the courts”. The EU Acquired Rights Directive was used to protect members pushed out of the public sector to work for contractors and it soon became apparent that lobbying in Brussels was proving to be a far more effective

stratagem than trying to change Government policy in Whitehall. As a result, GMB became the first union to set up a permanent office in Brussels.

After the Major Government saw a second recession tear further jobs out of manufacturing, and fresh anti-union legislation continued to harass union activists, much had been expected following Tony Blair’s landslide victory in the 1997 general election.

However, Edmonds’ own relationship with both the Prime Minister and the New Labour machine that he had created was difficult and often strained. At the TUC Congress in 2001, Blair and his spin doctors had aimed to provoke a showdown with the GMB leader, who was chairing proceedings with the T&G’s Bill Morris. However, the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York changed everything. Edmonds heard the news first, having been recording a separate interview in a television studio, and found the Labour leader’s own media pundits in a state of abject confusion. They were preparing to turn tail and head straight back from Brighton to London before issuing a statement on the attacks. Edmonds felt this would be an enormous mistake and with some difficulty persuaded Blair and his entourage to take full advantage of the media gathered at the

the moDernISer

By the mid-1990s, partnership agreements between trade unions and business were becoming the order of the day.

TUC in order to address the nation.

Towards the end of his time in office, John Edmonds was offered a peerage by the Labour Government but chose to turn it down, in the course of an unintentionally comic and accident prone meeting with Jon Cruddas at Downing Street, during which their deliberations were interrupted by a group of American tourists. As a result, Edmonds would become the first general secretary of the union since Will Thorne not to have accepted a peerage. This decision marked another milestone in GMB’s gradual disengagement from the nexus of power and patronage that had held it in thrall for almost sixty years. A common political culture which had bound party and union people together was withering away with nothing to replace it, and the two sides were increasingly struggling to find a shared vocabulary and sense of purpose.

John Edmonds retired from office on 18 May 2003 and chose to concentrate on

those areas of social policy – particularly the NSPCC and the campaign for Comprehensive Education – that were closest to his heart. He also continues to chair a number of historical seminar groups at the University of London, and while resisting the temptation to pen his own memoirs has nonetheless written a number of academic articles on the nature of Thatcherism.

Though his directness of approach and university background did not make him universally popular in the union, he was certainly one of the brightest and most astute trade union leaders of his generation.

He succeeded in modernising the union – particularly in terms of its attitudes towards race, gender and sexuality – and continued the policy initiated by David Basnett of anchoring the union firmly at the centre of the TUC. The main political priority of the union throughout the period remained the election and subsequent return of a Labour Government but though the union

accomplished this terrific feat after 18 long years, the party that returned from opposition was transformed beyond all recognition.

New Labour tended to view GMB – along with all the other members of the TUC – not as natural allies but as the unpredictable and potentially troublesome sources of revenue: something to be defined against rather than with. The union was there to be tolerated, and thanked when it paid handsomely into party coffers, but was to be denied any meaningful political influence. This was hardly the fault of either Edmonds or GMB, who had consistently delivered through the hard times through conviction rather than the expectation of place or honours.

However, the GMB that Edmonds left behind him was deeply troubled, riven by internal strife and on the cusp of insolvency.

The organising campaign had been enormously expensive and had not delivered as expected, while the drive towards merger had left the door open to an amalgamation with Amicus and the T&G which, in the hands of his successor, threatened to expunge GMB from the industrial map.

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Neil Kinnock speaks at the Beckton event organised by GMB to commemorate the union’s Centenary, April 1989.

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among activists as well as officers to fear that GMB might be swallowed up whole by the T&G machine. The nature of negotiations also gave some cause for concern as most of the areas that actually were explored were political; covering membership, collective bargaining, TUC representation, the Labour party and Parliament. The second projected strand to the talks was to be based around membership recruitment, while a third would have covered internal government and administration. If the talks really had been fuelled by the grassroots, then one might have reasonably thought that this order would have been reversed. There was also a central misunderstanding based on slightly different union cultures, in that

when John Edmonds explained his difficulties in delivering the merger, Bill Morris tended to think that this was the product of a skilful negotiating ploy which aimed at drawing further concessions from the T&G, rather than the product of regional opposition – at both high and low levels – in GMB. As a consequence, the T&G was somewhat taken aback when the talks were abandoned unilaterally by GMB, after its CEC withdrew its support for the amalgamation. It is notable that almost all mention of a merger taken for granted a year before was omitted from the annual GMB congress reports in 1994, bringing the major cycle of amalgamations initiated more than a decade earlier to an abrupt end.

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The perils of partnership Throughout the period, the union understandably looked to the election of a Labour Government to ameliorate the worst of its problems. 1989 had seen the union’s centenary and was marked by a march by union members and activists commemorating Will Thorne’s epic ten day hike from the site of the Saltley gas works in Birmingham to the Beckton gas works in London. It should have been a joyful celebration of all that was best in British trade unionism and a showcase for GMB, in particular, but in the event Neil Kinnock effectively upstaged both John Edmonds and the group of apprentices who had made a plaque to commemorate Thorne’s founding of the union. Kinnock used the arrival of the marchers at Beckton as a platform for his own agenda on the future of trade unionism, the “New Realism” beginning at the TUC which would, within less than a decade give rise to “New Labour” in the PLP. He thought that the unions “could not exist in a cocoon of industrial obsession” and argued that their members’ interests went on outside the workplace. “It is a proper function … for trade unionists to go beyond the confined idea that, as a system of values and organisation, it stops at the gates of the factory or the doors of the office … [members were not just workers] but citizens, consumers, parents, people, who want choices and chances”. In this was the germ of much of the later Blairite elevation

of consumerism and of “choice” as a cloak for creeping privatisation and Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes. Of course choice is fine if it is freely available to all, but within this context it almost invariably depended upon the ability to pay. “Any knowledge of the men and women who built British trade unionism”, he concluded, “will demonstrate that in every age they had to show new realism because they could never afford the luxury or the illusions of the old unrealism and the sentimental and invented history that tends to go with it”22.Yet that very “sentimentality”

The marchers who arrived at Beckton had retraced Will Thorne’s 120 mile walk from Birmingham to London. Neil Kinnock, Norman Willis and John Edmonds were there to accompany them for the last steps along the way.

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The Politics Workshop at an equal rights conference held by GMB at its National College, Manchester, in November 1989. If only reality had mirrored the sentiments on the homemade flip-chart ...

– or rather a respect for a heroic tradition – was precisely what was being celebrated that day. More pernicious was the concept of an “invented history” of the Labour Movement. There are few things more troubling to the New Labour politician, or to the post-modernist in academia, than reminders of struggle, collective action and self-sacrifice. Everything has to be constructed, or more properly re-constructed, as a valueless narrative; where everything is a fiction and relative; and where there is consequently no right or wrong, just an exercise in “playful discourse”. Of course,

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if you believe that the individual has the power to “self-create”, then there is no longer a need to acknowledge social class or any sort of collective action. Such thoughts, so comforting to the rulers of the earth, so deliciously intoxicating to today’s brand of academic sophist; while not capable of fooling a single GMB member, went on to underpin a large amount of New Labour’s approach to policy and still persists within the PLP even in opposition, when it is confronted by an exceptionally ideologically driven government, led by a cabinet of millionaires and multi-millionaires, who are

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determined to forward the interests of their own class at every opportunity. Passivity, despair and an almost infinite “flexibility” over terms and conditions were to be the virtues of the “new” worker under the cultural assault launched by New Labour, and its antecedents, upon the core tenets of the Labour Movement. If Thorne’s achievements could be stripped away, his virtues mocked, and pride in the accomplishment on behalf of the collective rather than the individual were now to be ranked as sins, then there was little for the union to rally around amid the tempests unleashed by Thatcherism.

The trouble was that GMB took much of this to heart. The union was at the forefront of attempts to use management techniques in the administration of trade union affairs, often uncritically importing the language of big business and management consultants. Thus, John Edmonds explained that: “The new union of the 1990s must be efficiently managed. New unionism must be open to all, high paid and low paid, fulltime and part-time. So we must never allow our contribution rates to rise above levels where trade unionism is priced out of the reach of people who need support and dignity of union membership, every pound must be carefully spent, every service economically delivered and every initiative properly controlled.Very often trade unions have combined good intentions with sloppy administration. The New Unionism developed by GMB must be a byword for

professionalism”23. Members were now regularly surveyed on issues such as contributions, benefits and union image by external consultants and annual business plans and “attainment targets” were brought in for officers. Tom Burlison, GMB Northern Region Secretary and Deputy General Secretary, considered that: “People these days don’t expect unions to be highly political like they have been in the past.

They want unions to care for them and that is why the GMB has an advantage – we are not seen as a hard-headed organisation but have consensus and mediation built in. This is the area we have to emphasise and work on in coming years”24. Furthermore, John Edmonds told a North American audience in March 1994 that: “A revolution has swept away all the old certainties and left most employees and many employers bemused and unsure about the future. The optimists believe we now have a great opportunity to try out new ideas and that Britain could become the laboratory where a modern philosophy of employee relations is developed.

Most people observe a country so stunned by the pace of change it has lost the energy to build a new system to meet the needs of an advanced economy”25.The logical corollary appeared to be the adoption of industrial partnership.

On the face of it, partnership operated on a very basic level as an appeal to common sense. After all, what employee would seek strife for its own sake; would not want to work for a successful, rather than failing,

expected that, “ It was once the Labour Party

was back in office,

the adoption of partnership agreements would allow

unions to regain some of the initiative and

rebuild their shattered institutional base

within British society

”

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David Williams and his staff at Thorne House, the headquarters of GMB Northern Region, October 1996.

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employer; to earn more rather than less; and to hope for secure rather than insecure terms of employment? Furthermore, it relied upon the similarly straightforward observation that firms were more successful when employers, managers and employees all worked together. So far, so good; but it seemed that it was entirely up to the unions to bring this harmonious state of affairs about. Rather more troublingly, the Labour Party was increasingly tending to mix high sounding sentiments and reasonable observations, with very questionable

diagnoses and solutions to the problems at hand. Thus, it recognised that traditional “confrontational” approaches appeared to have failed, and that, accordingly, the unions’ only hope for survival lay in their ability to persuade employers of their utility and legitimacy in regulating certain aspects of human resources, within the labour market.

The future of the unions would, henceforth, lie in consultation, rather than in negotiation; while the role of the state would be limited to facilitating that partnership and providing, in Tony Blair’s telling words, “a very minimum infrastructure of decency and fairness around people in the workplace”26.

It was expected that, once the Labour Party was back in office, the adoption of partnership agreements with employers at national, industrial, and workplace level, would allow unions to regain some of the initiative and to rebuild their shattered institutional base within British society, through the shedding of their – by now – traditionally negative image as irresponsible, militant and obstructive bodies. They were now to be refashioned in order that they might willingly co-operate alongside employers in achieving the objectives of commerce. This type of “business unionism” was intended to provide members with services and to help firms to become more competitive. As a consequence, John Edmonds for GMB, Garfield Davies for USDAW and Bill Jordan for AEEU supported the Involvement and Partnership Association which pushed agreements and institutions centred on acceptance of unions, consultation,

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The Timex Strike ran against the grain of widespread industrial peace in the early 1990s.

The workers caught up in the dispute received the full backing of their union.

employee involvement “sharing the success of enterprise” and working towards the “common goals of management and trade unions”. In 1992, Edmonds and Alan Tuffin of the UCW produced a manifesto, A New Agenda which stressed the potential for delivering job enrichment, better training, enhanced employee involvement and the exchange of flexibility for job security.

It rather played down the negative side of intensifying workloads, redundancies and the marginalisation of workplace union

organisations. By then, however, GMB had become a leading exponent of “industrial partnership”, supporting single union deals on Greenfield sites as the best option for both union and employer, and developing its own model agreements with the provision for the training of employees, a consultative committee, which promised flexibility but provided the right to go to arbitration in case of disputes. In 1989 GMB already claimed to have 36 such agreements in force; was involved in joint

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The Poll Tax finally brought down Margaret Thatcher. The GMB contingent at the demonstration held in London on 31 March 1990 still carry a much earlier banner from their union’s history.

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ventures with employers in bidding for newly privatised services and was attempting to recruit the self-employed.

Increasingly, it would come to support individual employment rights in sectors where collective bargaining was unlikely to be achieved and used novel forms of charity sponsorship in order to attract young people into membership.

Everything, of course, hinged upon the hope that unions and employers would enjoy mutual trust and respect; and it would certainly seem that British business was drawing, over this period, considerable

benefits from its association with the union and the hard work of its members. However, by accepting partnership agreements GMB had surrendered its power to mobilise the workforce – in effect, the very essence of union power, itself – in return for little more than the hope of goodwill, photo opportunities and a few words of thanks accompanied by handshakes from business leaders. In organising around employers, as opposed to members, unions could make swift and dramatic gains in attaining recognition but this was achieved at the price of sacrificing their ability to effectively

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represent their members’ interests. Worse still, many single union agreements saw very low levels of union membership on the factory floor. When research was undertaken, it demonstrated that there was no link to be found between partnership agreements and rising union density. This seems to have been the case from the outset of the project, with high levels of dissatisfaction and disillusion with the union registered at many of the workplaces polled. Naturally, the fallout was that the more it co-operated with business and was keen to help in the implementation of job cuts, or switches to part-time working, the union lost credibility with its own members.

This malaise, which pitched the partnership agenda against policies which put the membership first, was picked up on in the text of a resolution – actually defeated on the congress floor in 2001 – from the Whittington Services Branch, London Region, noting “the enthusiastic adoption of the partnership agenda within the GMB … [AND] that during the long period of membership decline, the union has promised us that various external factors will pull us through. At various times we have been told that employment law, the possibility of a Labour Government and the introduction of an increasing range of financial and membership services will halt our decline and reverse our fortunes … [partnership just latest stage] where we are now promised that the employers will be the ones to solve our problems of decline

... the answer to membership decline lies where it always has – in the effective leadership and mobilisation of our existing members and stewards to recruit and organise where they work.We further believe the union should adopt a programme of organising and recruitment campaigns which stress the independence of GMB from the employers of its members. Partnership with employers should be pursued as a means of better representing and servicing existing members – but only from a position of strength”27. The trouble was that – as the motion respectfully hinted – even under a Labour Government, the union was operated under conditions of profound weakness. organising for power No union had worked harder than the GMB for the return of a Labour Government in 1997. Indeed, in financial terms alone, between 1979 and 1996 the T&G and GMB had poured more than £40 million into the Labour Party.Yet, the experience of defeat had changed it dramatically from the organisation known to David Basnett and James Callaghan.

John Edmonds had experienced an at times strained relationship with Neil Kinnock, not least over the question of nuclear disarmament and his refusal to back a policy that aimed for full employment.

Nevertheless, he delivered a thumping 89% vote among his membership for the retention of the union’s Political Fund for

Dick Pickering at the rostrum of the Labour Party Conference in 1995. He put in sterling work in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s-80s, when it was a far from fashionable cause.

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the Labour Party in 1985 and was subsequently to repeat the feat a decade later, when the majority was still a highly impressive 85%28.

In the wake of the 1985 vote, and the rout of Militant at the Labour Party Conference, Edmonds had felt that the “Political Fund Ballot results showed that union members want a voice in political decisions. Our greatest task in the coming years is to prove to all working people that the Labour Party have the commitment, vision, and good sense to grapple with and solve the problems of a decaying Britain … [which] cannot afford another five years of this terrible Government … The Britain of the 1980s is dirty, uncaring and uncivilised.

Our sense of compassion is so blunted that unemployment, poverty, and ill-health now warrant little more than a shrug of the shoulders. National assets are sold off, vital industry crumbles, and our public services struggle for survival. Only North Sea Oil has saved us from a greater disaster. And from 1986 the oil revenues begin to decline”29. By that time, GMB had eleven sponsored M.P.s, all of them drawn from the centre or right of the PLP. Setting aside the veteran Jack Ashley; George Robertson, Jack Cunningham and Gerald Kaufman would all hold cabinet office in the Blair Governments, while Betty Boothroyd would go on to be a universally respected Speaker of the Commons; and John Smith GMB celebrates a Labour Government and the restoration of full trade union rights at GCHQ, 1997.

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would lead the party between 1992-94.

During this period, Edmonds felt that GMB leadership was attempting to build and develop a distinctive trade union voice, through both the TUC and PLP, but that it often fell short of its promise on account of other unions which failed to hold their own appointed representatives to account30.Yet, there was reason to feel that some of the readjustments to the balance of power between the constituency parties and the trade unions were entirely reasonable, and he and Smith certainly enjoyed a real rapport and shared a mutual respect. Smith, who had been helped towards office by Edmonds’ generous endorsement after the 1992 election, was rooted in the traditions of the Scottish Labour Party and had a feel for both the wider political agenda and the continuing need to reflect the priorities of ordinary union members and their families.

Moreover, though Smith was very hard to convince about anything, once he had been won over to the argument – as in the case of Employment Rights – he could be counted upon to lend solid support and never waiver or backstab. If Smith was thought of as a “safe pair of hands” then what the GMB leader felt was particularly destabilising, at that point, were the activities of Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown who, he felt, were desperate to engineer a “show down” with the unions in order to prove just how far the party had moved from its traditional base. While GMB was prepared, in theory, to go along with

proposals for One Member One Vote (OMOV) which watered down the power of the union block vote at conference, conflict arose over plans to go further and curtail the union sponsored vote in the constituencies, cutting at the ability to select M.P.s who were sympathetic to trade unionism and the wider Movement. This cut across a previously agreed decision at conference to preserve the union-Labour link in the constituencies, but Mandelson and Brown – and to a lesser extent Blair, who was still the junior partner in the troika – were determined to force a trial of strength, leaning heavily on Smith to weigh in against the unions. At the 1993 Labour Party Conference, GMB tabled a motion that would have given the unions a third of the vote in the selection of parliamentary candidates, but was defeated by a margin of 53% to 44% in the vote. With an election in sight and unwilling to rock the boat, it was the unions who blinked. Edmonds had felt that he had put together a solid coalition among the trade unions that would have stopped OMOV in its tracks but, at the last moment, Roger Lyons of the MSF and Rodney Bickerstaffe of UNISON broke ranks and permitted the Labour leadership to have its way. At the time Edmonds gave his verdict on OMOV, when he wrote that: “The little bit you see above the surface looks benign. It even flashes in the sunshine. But it is the nasty bit below the surface that does the damage”.

There was no joy for the union in the

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debate, as: “John Smith is a member of our union. We voted for him … last year. But on this issue, John, you ask too much of us.

GMB members put money into the party as levy payers. They are affiliated members of the party and they have the right to a vote on the important decisions in this party”31.

The effects were far reaching, as the measure severed the organic links that bound Labour M.P.s to the Movement that they served, made the imposition of candidates by the party leadership possible, and acted very swiftly to introduce a fresh generation of parliamentary candidates who knew or cared little for the trade unions. The future was to be slick, suited and upwardly mobile.

Manual workers need not apply.

The growing gulf that separated the PLP and the unions was highlighted by the fact that John Smith was, himself, a GMB sponsored M.P. and Edmonds felt, justifiably, betrayed by his union comrades. The debate over OMOV – and his principled stand – had gained him a personal popularity with GMB grassroots at congress that had not always come easily and defeat had been a bitter pill to have to swallow. The very fact that the union was in any kind of opposition to the Labour leadership would have come as a great surprise to GMB in the past, but worse was to follow. The unexpected death of John Smith, in May 1994, ensured that the leadership of the Labour Party would pass to a new generation for which Edmonds and GMB had no real feel. The union would probably

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have supported Robin Cook in the contest but he shrugged off the suggestion saying he was “too ugly” to win elections in a media dominated age in which the whiteness of your teeth, rather than what came out of your mouth was all that counted. In the end, GMB supported the candidature of Margaret Beckett but it was Tony Blair who swept the board by almost universal acclaim.

GMB, the loyalist of the loyal, was now in danger of joining the minority of discontents.Yet, it was not the union that began to pull away from the party, but the party that began to distance itself from GMB and, indeed, every other union.

A complex game of brinkmanship was to be played out, whereby Blair would set up the traditions and symbols of the party for destruction, in an attempt to call the unions’ bluff. They could inflict a defeat on him over a point of principle but risk the charge of disloyalty and permitting the Conservatives to win a record fifth term in office. It was not a chance that the unions, still blamed in the public mind for the defeat at the polls in 1979, were prepared to take.

Consequently, GMB voted with the party leadership over the scrapping of Clause IV which had committed Labour to a policy of nationalisation and the redistribution of wealth. There was some anger from the CEC at the decision, echoed in John Diamond’s article “Whiteout at Walworth Rd” which appeared in the union journal but for the most part open criticism was

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The union campaigned for the implementation of a legal national minimum wage. Though the Labour Government gave them less than they asked for, they nevertheless made the pledge the cornerstone of their Election Manifesto in May 1997.

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John Edmonds, Dick Pickering, Mary Turner and Jackie Ingley at the Labour Party Conference, in 1995.

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muted32. From the podium, Larry Whitty – the former GMB official and Chair of the PLP – lambasted Sidney and Beatrice Webb as the “middle class” authors of the policy.

Ironically, as leading Fabians they had previously been considered as moderates and, in their lifetimes, had stood well to the Right of Will Thorne. As Labour moved away from any form of Socialism, their reputation, like that of so many others, seemed to become more radical – perhaps even dangerously revolutionary – by simply standing still. Their crime was not really the temerity of being wealthy when trying to speak up for the rights of working people – after all Clause IV was being scrapped in order to appeal to the middle class vote – but that they were safely dead and could be attacked with impunity by the new iconoclasts who ultimately believed in nothing save themselves.

The realpolitik was that the unions would by now swallow almost any indignity in order to secure the return of a Labour Government. Blair knew full well that their loyalty was not in doubt and calculated, correctly, that they had nowhere else to go.

He could therefore seek to prove his own authority and ability to govern through offering a series of rebukes and challenges to the trade unions. At the 1995 GMB Congress, Blair made it plain that there would be no repeal of anti-trade union laws and told delegates that unions faced “a new world of work where less than half the workforce had full-time jobs, half were

women, and millions worked part-time …

Security today is adaptability. It is about equipping people so they have the skills and the opportunity to move from one job to another, to work part-time or full-time and to cope with change”33. No one could say that they had been misled, or that they hadn’t been warned. Where the unions miscalculated was in believing that their humiliation was designed just for show, as a tactic to win over undecided voters in the run up to a general election and that once a victory had been achieved life would return to normal, with their seat guaranteed at the table. This had been thought likely as, from the mid-1990s onwards, the business community had recognised the likelihood of an incoming Labour Government and had been prepared to make concessions to both the party and the union movement, in order to forestall more radical changes to the balance of power and workplace representation. The willingness of the

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Blair administration to accept a Neoliberal critique of economics and to jettison, and decry, its natural supporters in the unions, had taken business by surprise and enormously emboldened them as the century turned. By way of contrast, the unions found themselves abandoned and had to begin a long and painful process of readjustment to the new conditions in which they now found themselves.

They did not see – and indeed were reluctant to acknowledge over the course of the next fifteen years – that the rules of the game had changed for good and that New Labour not only did not understand them, it profoundly feared and despised everything they stood for. Where Edmonds had had an amicable working relationship with Neil Kinnock, despite personal differences, and a warm personal and political rapport with John Smith, he found with Blair that the personal was political. He felt that Blair made “pals”, dealing not in terms of policies or ideological principles but in

personalities. As a result, he had difficulty with comprehending an abstract argument and was thoroughly disconnected from the trade unions, expressing his surprise at a photo shoot organised by GMB at a building site in Derbyshire that the members he met were concerned to talk to him about workplace related issues.

Edmonds saw him as unable to comprehend the mechanisms of representative democracy and as utterly incapable of brooking any kind of dissent or anyone who had the temerity to say “no” to him. Of course, Edmonds – not to mention Jimmy Knapp and Rodney Bickerstaffe – did eventually say “no” and “life from then on became very difficult”34.

Things had started brightly enough, after the election victory of May 1997 the GMB national banner was carried in to congress hall in triumph to the strains of William Blake’s Jerusalem. Mary Turner opened her first union Congress, after being elected as GMB President, telling delegates that: “We’ve won. For 18 years we have waited for it to happen – and when it came, it came as a landslide”. Labour had moved to restore trade union rights to workers at the government listening station at GCHQ; the first act of Robin Cook – as foreign secretary, in the first weekend of the Labour Government – had been to sign the European Social Chapter delivering new rights to British workers; trade union recognition was to become a legal right; and a National Minimum Wage was to be

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Labour people: John Smith with John Edmonds. The Labour leader was a GMB sponsored M.P.. His premature death robbed the party and the British people of a potentially great leader.

His intuitive feel for the culture of the union’s and Labour’s own history was not replicated during the Blair years, when GMB and the PLP drifted apart.

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introduced. GMB delegates could look forward to improved maternity rights, the creation of over a million jobs, and the promise of a statutory code which the unions had argued for that aimed to eliminate a twotier workforce. David Blunkett addressed the Congress, expressing his hope that: “We are celebrating a new beginning – a beginning leading to the regenerated

Britain. We are prepared to work with you for a common cause and a common endeavour. We can be critical friends laying the foundations for a different Britain”35.

The trouble was that critical friendship can disguise a wide variety of approaches from creative discussion to thinly veiled abuse.

To its credit, GMB was realistic about what the New Labour Government could achieve for the unions, and even its congress report that year carried the prescient headline “Friends can’t do any more for us than we can win ourselves”. The message was clear: the union could not rely upon a Labour Government to build a successful future for GMB. The old alliances and sense of deference felt towards the decisions of the PLP were weakening and, if it wished to survive at all, the union would have to shift for itself.

Other expedients were attempted.

GMB had been one of the few unions to wholeheartedly embrace the European ideal and the Common Market, from the late 1960s onwards, and at the high point of Thatcherism the union – together with the TUC – had sought to extend their involvement in the EU as a means of securing better working rights. Despite an increasingly rigid adherence to the free market, the EU did offer a raft of genuinely progressive social legislation that could be used by the trade unions as a counterbalance to the erosion of their members’ rights. GMB had established permanent offices in Brussels in the early 1990s, in

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order to promote and defend the “social dimension” through the lobbying of the European Parliament and the European Commission, and maintains its presence there to this day. However, while the union supported the Single European Currency for sectoral reasons, particularly over the threat to manufacturing jobs posed by an unfavourable exchange rate between sterling and the Euro, Edmonds remained critical of the Neoliberal direction of European integration.

The decline of union power had not been mirrored by a proportionate decline in the intensity of passions that drove industrial disputes. The difference was that it had now become highly unfashionable to report industrial struggles in the mainstream media. There were still successes even under Conservative rule and when Harbarry’s, a Lancashire clothing manufacturer went out of business in the autumn of 1994, GMB was able to gain members a further £1,000 on top of earlier severance payments, as the receiver had broken legislation over the issuing of the redundancy notice. Graham Wells, the Bolton branch secretary, wryly noted that “100 non-union members, hearing about the settlement, have been ringing up the GMB office pretending to be members so they can share in the pay-out!”36. Strikes, on the other hand, still had the power to brutalise and be hard fought. A dispute flared at Burnsall Ltd., a small metal finishing company based in Smethwick, in June 1996, when 26 out

of 29 workers were sacked after demanding trade union rights. They were predominantly drawn from the Punjabi Sikh community, most were women, and they were being paid on average £20-30 less than their male counterparts. Overtime was expected at little or no notice, with refusal ruled out as an option, and the women employed in cleaning components were seen as occupying the bottom rung of an industry that ended with luxury cars rolling off production lines.

The owner, Terry O’ Neill and his management, took the view that “the organising of labour is firstly a domestic matter”. Such ideas had been current since the days of George Ward and become quite respectable under Thatcher.Yet, the parallels with Grunwick did not end there. The eloquence and bravery displayed by the striking GMB members, over more than 32 weeks at Smethwick, equalled those of their brothers and sisters during the earlier dispute, the shame lay in the fact that twenty years on some of the same abuses were being perpetrated by employers. All that seemed to have changed was that there were now no longer television crews or ranks of journalists to record life on the picket lines of the 1990s. In a postmodern age, if an image of an event was not burned onto a flickering screen then it never really seemed to have happened. The rumble of low intensity disputes hardly registered on the consciousness of the media – save for in the pages of the Morning Star or Socialist Worker – and the sacrifices of the women

I do not expect “ every Labour politician to love us, but, sure as hell, after

everything the trade unions

have done for the Party,

they should treat the trade unions

with respect”

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The First World meets the Third. In one of the first of its new style of agit-prop demonstrations, GMB members highlight the plight of Haitian workers employed in sweatshops to make the toys sold at high cost on the British high street, 1997.

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and men at Burnsall’s were unfairly overlooked.

Even the massive one day strikes in August and September 2000, that saw GMB, T&G and UNISON lead 83,000 predominantly public service workers out on strike rated little more than a cursory mention; though what could not be ignored was probably the largest ever strike involving women workers in Britain, with the unions claiming 750,000 strikers, on 17 July 2002, drawn from both blueand white-collar local government workers.

With privatisation stalking council services, John Edmonds told the media “some people in Downing Street have been telling Tony Blair he needs to have his own Miners’ Strike and it would seem that ministers have picked local government”37. By then, even moderate unions had become disillusioned by a second term of New Labour and it was apparent that Edmonds and his senior colleagues could not reconcile themselves with a party leadership that they now saw as

being ideologically wedded to privatisation.

The fissures were widening into cracks as Stephen Byers, as Secretary of State for Local Government and Transport, was the first to describe the unions as “wreckers” in a swipe which, Mary Turner believed, was directed particularly at GMB, during the Labour Party Spring Conference in 2002. “Tony Blair was simply Little Sir Echo on that occasion”, she added38. A year later, John Edmonds addressed the increasing propensity of New Labour to avoid contact with the PLP and to work with non-elected consultants. “I get very angry when Labour’s spin doctors feel free to rubbish trade union policies”, he told GMB congress delegates.

“These so-called political advisers, and the ministers for whom they work, should remember that it was the trade unions who held this Party together in the 1980s when so many Labour politicians were rushing off to join the Social Democrats. It was the trade unions who kept the Party afloat when all those millionaire friends, which the government have recently discovered, wouldn’t have donated a used bus ticket to Labour Party funds. I do not expect every Labour politician to love us, but, sure as hell, after everything the trade unions have done for the Party, they should treat the trade unions with respect”39.

He was followed later in the debates

by Paul Kenny, the London Regional Secretary, who laid down a marker for the future of the union: “We need to make clear to people that our loyalty is to our

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membership. Our vested interest is to produce for them the best that we can, in the workplace and in Parliament. No one should ever be confused, our role is to promote the vested interest of our members and their role in society ... [the Labour Party was formed] to raise the political voice of working people using parliamentary pressure instead of civil disobedience, as straightforward as that.These were the only ways to do it and we chose to go through the parliamentary process and put our organisation and our money into a political process. Our objectives on social policy, fighting racism, healthcare, rights at work, are not based on our personal greed, our personal advantages, or any boardroom bonuses we may get out of it, we do it because it is right. It is right for our members. It is right for our society.

It is right for our country”40.

Underpinning this shifting political landscape was the abandonment of the union’s merger policy and a growing dissatisfaction with partnership accords.

GMB had to seek another strategy for survival and consequently chose to import the recruiting model pioneered by Andy Stern and the SEIU in the United States, as a means of achieving “organic growth” for the union. This organising agenda had yielded remarkable results, especially among the Latino immigrant communities and sweatshop workers, and went on to achieve its greatest success to date in the victory of the UPS strikers in 1997. At that year’s GMB Congress Stern had received the

warmest reception from delegates and had taken to the stage with a glowing endorsement from John Edmonds41. There was a genuine desire to empower members and at a time of great pressure on union numbers there was an attempt to direct resources into individual workplaces. This first manifested itself through GMB’s Health Check Process, in the mid-1990s, which set out to underline the importance of grassroots structures and workplace branches, and was co-ordinated by John Edmonds, Dick Pickering and Paul Kenny.

In retrospect, Edmonds felt that the initiative required far more funding than was to hand for improving and in some cases overhauling the union’s structures.

The union had begun to consciously target peripheral workers in the service industries, and in small unrecognised workplaces, who often frequently changed their jobs, working part-time or on short-term contracts and attempted to tailor their service to meet their needs.The trouble was, according to some, that campaigns were mounted and then dropped; as in the case of the attempts to organise young members employed at B&Q, which was pursued energetically for more than a year before being quietly sidelined. The results were certainly mixed across the regions, as some offered only lukewarm support and Scotland registered very poor returns at a time of rapidly escalating unemployment. It was London region, under Kenny, that really seemed to take the organising agenda to heart and later

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The magnificant Victorian facade of GMB National College, Manchester.

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mainlined some of the ideas and energies generated into the strategy that became GMB@WORK. The union felt that it was time to “to change our culture so that organisation and recruitment work is the top priority of everyone in the GMB” and after a detailed analysis of changing composition of the union’s membership resources were diverted to those areas of recruitment which promised the best success rates. Congress heard that: “The CEC set out a nine-point plan to involve everyone from frontline activists to backroom staff. A special session of Congress launched our new programme.

Our objective was simply stated. After the troubles of the Thatcher years we intended to rebuild the membership of the GMB. The decision was courageous because at that time we had no legal support for our recruitment efforts. The closed shop had been abolished, there was no right to recognition or representation, and the Government was seeking to destroy the check-off system. So we adopted the tactic of consolidation – devoting our energies to increasing membership in workplaces where we had already won recognition and representation rights. We developed the Workplace Health Check to identify the best targets for consolidation and we changed our working practices to release time for recruitment. In those difficult days recruitment on Greenfield sites had to wait. Instead we concentrated on the task of recruiting non-members in organised

establishments”42. Such an approach was confirmed as official policy when the 1999 Congress voted to accept an ambitious recruitment strategy Organize for 2000 but by that time the apparent solution appeared to be adding to the union’s escalating series of problems, not least due to the high costs of implementation43. There was a sense, not only confined to the general secretary’s detractors, that the union was now going for broke in devoting ever greater resources to trying to reverse decline through the implementation of a hastily thrown together programme that might not, at the end of the day, achieve the results that were desired.

A target of 1,000 new members per month was set for every region in order that the union survive and grow but even where the recruits began to flow in this was far outweighed by a net loss44. As Steve Pickering, the Deputy General Secretary, pointed out at the 2001 Conference: “Each and every year the GMB loses about 16% of its membership and each and every year our activists and officers have to recruit 16% new members just to stand still … We have lost members through company closures, cut backs, retirement … A thousand ways to leave the GMB, only one way to join”45. crisis after consolidation The problem was also that a number of moves designed to cut costs and effect organisational change, in order that a measure of power was moved away from the regions to the CEC and branch, had resulted in

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unforeseen expenses and growing resentment.

If the regional secretaries had seen their powers gradually eroded, then the remit of the national officers had grown in direct proportion and appeared almost poised to eclipse them.The amalgamations had greatly increased the numbers of national officers on the pay roll, who joined from the other unions, were already entrenched within senior positions, and caused a blockage on the promotion’s ladder which played poorly among the junior grades within GMB. A head office IT package costing £1.9 million, purchased in an attempt to cope with extra government legislation and changes to the check-off system, simply did not work and had to be abandoned46.

However, far worse was the climate of mistrust that seemed to be eating away at the union from within. This expressed itself through accusations of bullying and harassment flying thick and fast, and with a swathe of industrial tribunal cases being brought against the union by its own employees47. Birmingham and West Midlands Region were called to account and overhauled three times, in 1991, 1998 and 2000, over recruitment, finances and ongoing tribunals48. It is conceivable that these cases might actually have arisen as the result of the adoption of better codes of conduct on behalf of the union and because of the rising expectation of good treatment on the part of staff; after all Thorne’s union had been a tough and rumbustious place, and the tenures of Williamson and Cooper

The private security sector was a growing area for GMB recruitment in the 1990s. John Edmonds takes time out from the Labour Party Conference, held in Brighton in 1995, to be photographed with GMB members guarding the event.

had not been characterised by any great sense of nicety in dealing with signals of dissent. Be that as it may, the fact remained that for an organisation that existed only to make the world of work better, safer and more secure for all; the treatment of its own staff appeared little short of scandalous. The press, naturally, embarked on a feeding frenzy.

Claim and counterclaim wracked head office, after the sacking of Tom Condon, the union’s Director of Communications. Staff threatened

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industrial action in his support, while Steve Pryle, an able member of the media office found himself threatened, and Warren Glover – who had been appointed barely two months earlier to advise on bullying in the workplace – was dismissed after similarly standing up to be counted. Ed Blissett the union’s regional industrial organiser wrote to the general secretary alleging an “appallingly low level” of staff morale and warning of a large number of tribunals, dismissals, resignations and complaints of unfair treatment49.

Much of the animosity stemmed from the decision, taken some years previously, to demolish the old APEX London office and to build a new GMB head office on its site in Wimbledon. To accomplish this, together with making a substantial profit, Ruxley Towers was finally to be sold off. The plan, devised by Alan Donnelly, then head of GMB finances – and later leader of the Labour Party at the European Parliament – was to capitalise on the 10 acres of parkland surrounding the old union offices for the building of luxury homes. Unfortunately, on closer examination, the land had been gradually hived off over many years in order to meet the union’s running costs and there were only 3 acres left that could reasonably be developed. In addition, the property was sold – as part of a two stage deal – at the height of the property boom in 1988.

The subsequent collapse of the property market left GMB in the position of having sold the greater part of the property for the lesser amount of money and the buyers,

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Cadogan Securities, going into liquidation, having sold the estate on but without ever having made the second payment of £6 million50. The remains of the estate, stripped of its golf course and stately home, lay derelict for more than twelve years, with The Guardian describing the former training centre as “an eyesore; a derelict and boarded up four storey concrete and glass 1970s office block [that] is not the best view for anybody. It is great for bored teenagers to practise midnight skids in the empty car park, and for the occasional homeless person to seek shelter in. But for owners of £600,000 detached houses or £1m apartments in the Surrey stockbroker belt overlooking the property, it is an outrage”51.

In order to make good some of the shortfall and to ensure that there were sufficient funds to finish the building project at Wimbledon, the transfer of £2.5 million from the union’s pension fund was authorised in to attempt to shore up the collapsing property deal.

It was this move which sparked the trouble at head office and seems to have lost Condon his job when he started to press for an independent inquiry52. At the time, Paul Kenny spoke for many when he identified the source of concern: “It was done in secret. People were hostile when questions were asked. It is only recently that the general members of the union have heard of this problem and the size of the loss which has been incurred”53.

The union appeared particularly vulnerable with falling membership,

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the abandonment of the merger strategy, a commitment to a very costly but so far unproductive organising campaign, and an increasingly large financial crisis gnawing away at its heart. To make matters worse, John Edmonds opted to take early retirement, planning a swift transition to his successor to avoid the pitfalls that he had experienced through David Basnett’s reluctance to stand down. Word of his decision was greeted by New Labour with a sigh of relief. He had chosen to cut donations to the Labour Party and his vigorous campaigning against the government’s privatisation programmes had brought him new members to GMB but had curried few plaudits in Downing Street.

The Guardian impishly described him as breaking “surface regularly like a lugubrious walrus to lament the government’s many domestic failings, and come to that its international ones too”.Yet, GMB would remember him as the General Secretary who firmly moved the union away from its old Right-wing agenda, helped forge a whole set of innovative policies that promoted the place of women and ethnic minorities in the union, and greatly centralised its administration. He took pride in having modernised the union but also in leaving it with its head office structure, regional divisions, and training college intact just as he had inherited them. The difficulty in losing such a formidable political figure, in 2003, lay in the timing. It seemed that his talents and experience might not easily be replaced and created at vacuum at the head

of the organisation just as it seemed to be on the point of unravelling. Moreover, it was feared that his most likely successor would quickly reach an accommodation with the Blairites in cabinet and resurrect the plans for merger that risked dissolving GMB altogether and reconstituting its constituent parts within the fabric of a new super-union. Suddenly, it seemed like everything was under threat and GMB was being forced to re-examine its own priorities in order to decide whether or not it was really prepared to fight for its survival.

The Private Finance Initiative, seen by the unions as a means to introduce the creeping privatisation of public assets – including schools and the NHS – was opposed from the outset by GMB members as expensive, inequitable and ultimately uneconomic. At the 2001 TUC Congress in Brighton, John Edmonds made his own feelings apparent.

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chApter 9

the GmB

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Work

to the brink and back again

A

t the time of the election it was claimed that: “As a modernising general secretary, he had appealed to members over the heads of the [regional] barons” and only a few on the Left publicly voiced concerns that while Kenny had gained far more branch nominations in the run-up to the ballot and secured the support of a majority of the regions, his vote of 32,954 had been eclipsed by Curran’s 60,5901. Dubbed perhaps unfairly as a “Blairite Moderniser” – as he had not voted for Blair in the leadership election – he was certainly a close ally of Gordon Brown and in declaring that he disliked “too much rhetoric” and eschewed an overly Left-wing tag, as “I don’t call myself anything.

I’m just who I am”, he caught the shifting, nebulous political mood of the times2. Postmodernity had settled, at last, upon the GMB. This said, he had strongly opposed the Iraq war – as being “fundamentally wrong in international law … and a huge mistake”, at a time when the union was still temporising upon the issue – and had worked his own way through the ranks of GMB before coming to prominence. Born in Stepney, in 1954, he had worked as a welder installing boilers in power stations across the country before becoming Branch Secretary in Penge, in 1978, and a regional health and safety officer for London from 1988-90. He studied at the London School of Economics, as a mature student on a trade union bursary, but found himself effectively blacklisted by his employers after his graduation and spent eight months without a job. Thereafter, the union became his career, as he rose to become a regional organiser in the Southern Region in 1990, and Northern Regional Secretary from 1997 until his election in 2003. During this time he worked with government ministers in the DTI and sat on a joint TUC-CBI committee on productivity and competition. However, his most significant achievement was in forming the North-East Maritime Group, shortly after taking over as Northern Regional Secretary, and managing – through lobbying Westminster and New Labour M.P.’s, many of whom had constituencies in the area – to reinvigorate shipbuilding along the Tyne. Like Edmonds before him, Curran was heavily in favour of the adoption of the Euro as the:

GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny declares the strike at the Lindsey Oil Refinery official, to a mass meeting held in June 2009.

900 workers had been sacked by a sub-contractor but were later reinstated after union action.

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Kevin Curran, GMB General Secretary 2003-2005, speaking at a fringe meeting at the Brighton TUC Congress, September 2004.

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“failure to become part of the Eurozone has not only cost us influence in Europe, it has cost us investment, trade and most important of all, jobs” and pushed for many of the same measures as the Amicus union, urging direct government intervention in support of manufacturing. “It’s time”, he wrote, “for two new departments – one for regulation and one for innovation …

We need a dedicated minister whose role is to champion and promote British manufacturing”3.

All of this was solid enough, but Curran received a rude awakening when he took over at the head of GMB. He was told

by GMB’s bankers, the Co-operative and Unity Trust that the union was in serious financial difficulties, and had taken out £8.3 million in loans. Curran immediately sold £1 million of union shares just to pay staff salaries and bills for a month, while a further £17.5 million loan was negotiated in order to pay off the mounting interest and debts. He then embarked on a controversial round of staff cuts and the sale of union assets in order to attempt to rein in the finances. GMB head office – the building of which had caused so many problems for John Edmonds – was sold for £10.2 million and leased back to the union, while the pension scheme which was in serious trouble was scaled down.

The National College had closed its doors in February 2004 but thereafter lay fallow for three years, without a buyer until Paul Kenny secured a healthy price from a

wealthy Islamic association funded by the Kuwaiti government4. However, the 150 redundancy packages concluded with the departing staff placed a further drain upon GMB’s diminishing assets. Private Eye was left to crow that “the days of the GMB appear to be numbered” as the union “suffers from a poverty of ideas, as well as cash … with the most likely outcome being takeover by another union, such as the T&G”. The internal legacy of non-cooperation between regions and across the federal structures, which saw the central administration having comparatively little control over how budgets were spent certainly did not help matters and the union, itself, later came to view the arrangement as “creating a climate of suspicion and secrecy” at the heart of GMB5.

The 2003 Congress had pledged that the union’s budget would not be centralised but finances had loomed large in its proceedings, with an operating deficit of £2 million admitted to, though this may actually have been far higher6. Only London and Southern regions were growing, and some of the others appeared to be either stagnating or were in virtual free fall. There was some annoyance that the first action of the incoming General Secretary had been to announce an increase in subscriptions7.

However, in his view “we are not in a crisis, we are in a situation that was not managed properly”, which appeared to be a thinly veiled attempt to blame John Edmonds for all of the union’s ills8. Money had to be

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found and quickly, but it seemed to be at the expense of democracy. There was a strong sentiment among the leadership that an annual Congress was a “luxury” which GMB could simply not afford, which increasingly clashed with the feeling at the grassroots that an annual, rather than biannual Congress as proposed, was the best way to reclaim and reinvigorate their union.

As one delegate pointed out, in a debate on the proposed “reforms”, the “Rules revisions will take place at every other Congress, and ‘every other Congress’ means every fourth year; not every second year … That is a long time between democratic events …”9. Change could, therefore, be effected at Executive level without members having any real say and Congress risked becoming no more than a rubber stamp.

Ironically, in view of the election result, London Region was one of the few that had consistently met its income and expenditure targets but as Paul Kenny told an earlier session of the CEC that “expenditure across the Union had been well controlled over the years and was not the main problem, but declining income was the real cause of budget problems”10.

He was right, managing decline offered no long term answer. The simple fact of the matter was that in 2003 GMB had an income of £43 million but was spending £61 million. The shortfall could not indefinitely be met through the expedient of selling off investments and properties, and at some point there would be

nothing left to cut.

The easiest solution, and one that guaranteed the positions of the remaining officials, was amalgamation. GMB had spent much of the 1980s and ’90s repositioning itself as a potential merger partner and, as the organising strategy burned itself out, the pendulum swung back in favour of talks with the other major unions. Discussions had been opened between the “big four” – Amicus, the T&G, GMB and UNISON – as to the best way forward. However, while UNISON had refrained from committing itself any further, the other three felt that they had established enough common ground to contemplate joining together to form a giant superunion that had the capacity to dominate both the political and industrial landscape.

Tony Woodley, the General Secretary of the T&G, set out his vision for the new union in the pages of the Morning Star, seeing it “as the product of optimism – the belief that workers united can take control of their lives at work and in the wider world in a way that workers separately never could …

Imagine – Tom Mann, Ben Tillett and Will Thorne [the three giants of the Labour Movement who founded each of the three unions] in one union. The divisions in the working class rooted in 19th century conditions finally overcome in the 21st …

Future generations will look back at this initiative as a landmark for the working class of our countries”11. The plans for the new union promised much. In theory, it would

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Mary Turner, Union President, with GMB members at the TUC rally and lobby of Parliament against the cuts, October 2010.

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have over 2.5 million members, with 80% of them concentrated in the private sector, and with combined assets approaching £200 million. It offered the prospect of a parliamentary group of some 300 Labour M.P.s, and it would be, by far, the largest affiliate to the TUC and Labour Party. The organisation pledged to invest 10% of its membership income, amounting to some £20 million per annum, in organising and recruiting campaigns honed by the T&G, while its undoubted economic strength appeared to offer GMB the opportunity to solve all of its problems at a single stroke.

Had the projected merger been simply between GMB and the T&G, then it is probable – though not certain – that an amalgamation deal might have been swiftly concluded in 2004-05. After all, the two unions had explored the possibility a decade earlier, had a complementary membership, common traditions and a very similar rule book. However, Amicus – with a markedly different industrial culture, that spoke primarily to highly skilled workers, and a track record for acquisition – was an altogether different proposition. Derek Simpson, by dint of his sensational election victory, had broken five decades of Rightwing control, and had a team behind him that included Graham Goddard, who enjoyed genuine popularity, and Steve Davison who delivered much of the politics.Yet, many of the old hands remained and, just as dangerously, those who had migrated from

Left to Right and back again, whose mohair fitted all to well and whose eyes, weakly glinting through the lenses of their spectacles focused on what they valued at that moment as a prize.The GMB negotiators were, thus, more wary of their Amicus partners than the T&G, but also understood that while those two unions had no pressing financial imperative, and proceeded largely on the grounds of shared political conviction, GMB was being driven to seek terms for an amalgamation primarily on the grounds of its worsening finances and falling membership rolls. This served to place the union at a marked disadvantage when dealing with its larger, and far more stable,

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fellows. Furthermore, there was a feeling on the GMB Executive that the other unions were forcing the tempo of change and that they were operating on the premise that the smaller union had nowhere else to go and had no other option but to acquiesce in the merger plan.

There were other reasons to worry.

GMB had – as we have already seen – run into its serious financial difficulties over an ambitious recruitment campaign, based upon the model evolved by Andy Stern’s SEIU, which now formed the cornerstone of T&G policy, and was wary of being sucked into making the same mistake twice. In addition, at first sight the Amicus model

for a federal structure, increased political influence and financial stability appeared both exciting and seductive but it was unclear to the GMB Executive if it would actually translate into offering more power to its members on the ground. There was a fear that the two bigger unions were seeking to grow their base simply through acquisition and that GMB – as a general union with a less clearly defined role and character than either of its fellows – would just be assimilated into their core.

It is never a good policy to negotiate from a position of weakness, but GMB in 2004 seemed to be stripped of ideas and the power to act in the interests of its members, while its leadership appeared to be sleepwalking – just as Private Eye had foretold – into an amalgamation that would have seen it disappear forever from the industrial landscape. Evidence of a wider malaise in the union was provided, in the winter of 2004, when workers at ASDA’s distribution centre in Washington, Tyne and Wear, dramatically voted against recognition of GMB. The firm – backed by the new parent company Wal-Mart – had launched a hard hitting public relations campaign against the excesses of union officials, and in particular the Scottish secretary, Robert Parker12. It was an enormous blow to the union’s prestige and suddenly GMB appeared to have precious few answers to its problems and little to attract new members even within its traditional heartlands, such as the solidly Labour North-East.

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crisis lay “in catharsis;

the last vestiges of the hierarchical, post-war union began to peel away

forced to think”

as the union ran out of money and we were

In the meantime, there were attempts to change the nature of the union. Kevin Curran had established a grandly entitled Commission 2004, which consisted of 14 hand-picked members, not all of whom were even members of the union; and an accompanying “Task Group” from the CEC, led by the General Secretary and the senior officers – Mary Turner, the President, Malcolm Savage, the Vice-President, and Debbie Coulter the Deputy General Secretary – in order to examine the national, sectional, regional and financial structures of GMB. A fresh financial restructuring review “to identify and examine unproductive areas of expenditure” was also launched, which largely revisited the old knee-jerk reactions of staff cutbacks and retrenchment, and was in the end largely overtaken by outside events13. At the time, this was seen – probably correctly – as a means of circumventing his own Executive which had had the temerity to oppose him in its very first meeting after his election. Soon the pre-meetings held by what, officially,

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were no more than advisory committees began to overrun into the times allotted for the deliberations of the CEC and caused them to be pushed further and further back on the agenda, further alienating the elected members charged with the union’s governance.

Moreover, by creating multiple centres of power, decisions could be taken and policies formulated without ever coming before Congress or the CEC, overturning the existing channels of democracy within the union and centralising authority in the person of the General Secretary.

The problem was that even if this had been desirable, Curran was not the person capable of achieving it. Neither bad nor foolish, he was simply the wrong man for the top job and failed to perceive, from the outset, either the nature of the role or to what extent his powers actually stretched.

His own hesitancy and lack of confidence in his own abilities tended to manifest itself through the appearance of an autocratic style of leadership that sat uneasily with the basically collegiate nature of GMB. In winning the election, he thought that he had been handed the final say in the direction of the union’s affairs when, in reality, the true power of the General Secretary of GMB lay as the chair of a committee of equals. It was an altogether more subtle and demanding role and it is conceivable that as the General Secretary of a union like the T&G or Amicus, Kevin Curran might have met with far more success. As it was, he possessed few leadership

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skills that might have endeared him to his own Executive and was not strong, or crafty, enough to cultivate a base within the union and to prevent the warring regional factions from fighting one another. Instead, he took his lead from a fairly superficial reading of John Edmonds’ skill in holding the union together. Paul Kenny, for one, thought that Curran had been groomed by Edmonds as his potential successor; had been parachuted into the Northern Region by the hierarchy and even then been largely out of his depth; and had taken his erstwhile patron as the model for his own brand of leadership. But where Edmonds had been a consummate politician, balancing interest groups, and using persuasion to build consensus and the broadest coalition of support across the union in order to further his aims; Curran tended to see only the outward show of power and the ability to command.

In securing the election, Curran had garnered support from the Southern Region, where he had first established himself in the union; large tracts of Scotland; Lancashire – which he had brought on board, by fair means or foul, after its own candidate Bobby Parker had been prevented from running – and Northern, which according to his detractors, was only too glad to see the back of him. The problem he

faced was that while he was initially successful in moving against some figures in the administration – such as Steve Pryle who “fell on his own sword”, Allan Wylie and Andy Worth – who might conceivably have proved obstacles to him, he was unable to enforce his will upon the regions and saw his own candidates defeated. Thus, when Derek Hunter – his former supporter, who had rapidly grown distanced and disenchanted – chose to retire from the secretaryship of Southern Region, in 2004, Curran’s favoured candidate, Alistair McLean, was unexpectedly beaten by Richard Ascough, leaving the heartland of the resistance to Paul Kenny now in the control of one of his supporters. In similar fashion,Tommy Brennan took over in Northern Region, and Scotland and Yorkshire realigned themselves to give Kenny a majority among the regional secretaries that was as sudden as it was unexpected.

An isolated General Secretary now increasingly fell back upon his unelected advisors, and his outside financial consultant, after an attempt to rally the support of the regional secretaries – through overturning his election promise to cut the number of regions – failed. However, the deals cut in order to gain

A beleagured Kevin Curran. Often in poor health, he struggled to balance the union’s books and to find solutions to falling membership.

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Curran his election suddenly began to unravel once he failed to deliver upon his promises and Lancashire Region started to crack open from the top down, amid a flurry of allegations and counterclaims14.

Rumours began to circulate in the autumn and winter of 2004 that Kevin Curran had received funding from various organisations to bankroll his election campaign and, just

The National GMB banner is carried into the hall at the start of the union’s 2010 Congress in Southport. The union’s historic banners crowd the gallery.

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before the October CEC meeting, Mary Turner received a dossier “alleging serious misconduct of individuals during the election of the General Secretary”15. An independent inquiry was launched at the December meeting in order to examine “serious allegations of breaches of the union’s rules … in the 2003 election of the General Secretary and also the 2004 Deputy

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General Secretary Election” amid further allegations that Curran supporters had completed thousands of ballot papers in the names of dead or lapsed members16. The task of holding the union together fell increasingly to Mary Turner but it was a difficult task made all the more thankless by the press stories that began to appear, in an attempt to undermine both the work of the inquiry and the union, itself. As Mary explained, “I had months of harassment and interference in the process and bullying to the point that I had to put it in writing that it had to stop but it did not”17.

Matters came to a head at a highly charged CEC meeting, held on 15 March 2005, when allegations were made that Curran had attempted to make contact with the barrister leading the inquiry, John Hand. The Independent had published a letter which it believed had been sent by Curran to Hand’s clerk stating that he was “the only person in the union authorised to conduct the correspondence of the union and to incur legal costs in matters such as this”.

The CEC demanded an apology but when he refused and turned down the offer of taking leave he was suspended on full pay until the end of the inquiry18. Debbie Coulter, the Deputy General Secretary, agreed to step in to cover his duties despite the threat of an injunction from Curran’s lawyers. In the game of brinkmanship, it was Curran who quickly backed down, opting to resign and take early retirement rather than to wait for the conclusions of

the Hand Inquiry to be made public19.

It was as well that he did, for the findings when they came were damning, supporting the charge that there was a “breach of the union’s rules and by-laws”; that “there is clear evidence that one candidate (Kevin Curran) had financial and other support from external organisations”; that the election addresses had not been uniformly produced – Curran’s had been professionally set, while Kenny’s had been cribbed and cramped – and that “officers and staff felt under extreme pressure and / or undue influence to carry out the instructions of their line manager(s) in support of Kevin Curran”, and that this was particularly strongly felt in Lancashire region20. Moreover, it was plain that a commercial concern had put its call-centre at the disposal of Curran, provided “staff to fold material, stuff envelopes and pay the postage on at least 2,000 items of post”, and permitted union “officers to telephone activists and members about the forthcoming election”21.

This should have been the union’s darkest hour; with its General Secretary dishonoured and stripped of his position; his remaining supporters seeking to secede several regions from GMB and set up a rival union; an empty treasury; and many senior officials openly countenancing merger as the only means of redeeming anything at all from the wreckage22.Yet, in crisis lay catharsis; the last vestiges of the hierarchical, post-war union began to peel away as the “union ran out of money and we were forced to think”23.

New blood: by the time of the Brighton Congress, in 2011, 38% of GMB delegates were attending for the first time.

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The Bridge to the future Within eight days of Curran’s suspension, Paul Kenny had been appointed as GMB’s Acting General Secretary, and set about preparing for a Congress less than two months away that had the potential to either make or break the union. Steve Pryle, having returned to the colours, set about organising the venue in Newcastle-uponTyne and pulling together a shattered organisation with a vengeance. The great industrial iron bridges that spanned the river provided a dramatic backdrop to the proceedings and, in her opening address, Mary Turner chose to conjure up their image telling delegates that: “this Congress needs to become a bridge to the GMB’s future”. As she explained, “the CEC’s priority has been to restore stability to this great union … There will be opportunities this week for Congress to hold the CEC to account for its stewardship of GMB affairs over the past two years … [but] the days are good days, I sincerely believe”24. It was a reaffirmation of the union’s ability to stand upon its own two feet and struck just the right note – measured, reassuring, cautiously optimistic – that the beleaguered membership needed to hear at the outset of proceedings. At this point, Kenny remained in the background not forcing the pace of issue and waiting until his position as Acting General Secretary was voted upon and approved, without a single abstention, on the first afternoon. Taking the floor, he brushed aside the media attacks and the

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scurrilous anonymous letters circulated to delegates in favour of the fallen leadership before addressing the question of merger, picking up upon the hostility to the plans from the lay members in the hall, telling both the delegates and those “across the Movement – if anybody thinks the GMB can be rolled over, that we are somebody’s breakfast, then you had better think again”.

He had already streamlined the negotiating team charged with overseeing any possible merger to himself, Mary Turner, Andy Worth, Sheila Bearcroft and Debbie Coulter, and laid out a set of criteria that the T&G and Amicus might have trouble delivering “principles such as a lay member executive, no centralisation of power, strong branch rule book rights and strong regional structures”25.

This said, he appealed to Congress to withdraw all motions either for or against the amalgamation in order to give the negotiating team a freer hand, and more significantly to buy the union time in order to put its own house in order.

“The GMB has not”, he told the delegates, “been punching its weight for a bit. We have been distracted”. It would now stop turning inwards, as “our union lives and breathes because it is made up of people”, and turn out towards existing members and “reach … the millions of workers who just do not have the opportunity or the confidence to join a trade union”.

The previously dominant culture of the union – alive to buzz words, ideas about industrial partnership, and faintly apologetic

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The turning point for the GMB. Congress broke, on 9 June 2005, in order to attend a picket outside the AA call centre in Newcastle to protest against 431 job cuts and the sacking of a large number of disabled staff.

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our preSIDent GmB preSIDent 1997 to the preSent DAy

b.1938

The hea rt a nd sou l of the mod ern GM B, Ma ry has cha mp ion ed the ca mpaig n for free sch ool me als.

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B

orn in 1938, Mary Turner moved from her home in Tipperary, Eire, to live with relatives in the North of England, in 1947, before settling in Kilburn, London. The first thing her father asked her when she started work, at sixteen, was “have you joined the union yet?”.

She had, and never looked back.

Working in Jackson’s the Tailors on Oxford Street, she joined the Tailor and Garment Workers’ Union, which fittingly is now part of the GMB family of amalgamated unions, before working in the print trade and being elected as Mother of the Chapel. In the meantime, she had met and married her husband, Dennis, within six weeks of their first meeting; flying in the face of sectarian convention as she was a Roman Catholic and he was a Protestant. When her children, Denise and John, were born, Mary determined that they would not be “latchkey kids”and gave up full-time work; returning part-time in 1970 as a dinner lady, at Salisbury Road School in Brent, to fit in with their routines and holidays.

Already an experienced trade unionist, she noticed that the workforce – comprising mainly young Irish girls – received no training for the job, being expected to know already how to cook,

and no protective clothing or gloves. The management would visit the kitchens once a week, on a Monday, but would studiously ignore the dinner ladies; and Mary noted both this and the stigma that attached to the children who qualified for free school meals who were forced to queue up separately.

Having determined to challenge this state of affairs, she began to recruit her 9 workmates to the GMWU and, when confronted by management who demanded to know who she thought she was, replied laconically “I’m their representative”.

After being elected shop steward, she

Mary takes her campaign for decent school meals to the heart of Local Government.

was nominated to go onto the Joint Works Committee, managing to win over the local council, extending the fight to include pension rights – previously denied to dinner ladies – and gaining access to college training “though all of my members were initially terrified of it”. She remembers those days fondly as “fun as well as damn hard work”and took pride in her friends’ growing sense of confidence. During the 1978 local government strike, Mary was 355

able to recruit 200 dinner ladies to the union at a single mass meeting held at Pound Lane School, and – despite the popular mythology surrounding the “Winter of Discontent”– does “not regret the dispute for one moment”, as it brought the biggest pay rise to date to women who had previously been treated appallingly by management and had had a pay freeze for the previous three years.

The Thatcherite onslaught on public services and the props that supported local government ensured that the school dinner ladies, together with the caretakers who had by then had made common cause with them, became no strangers to the picket line. The first group to be privatised were the school cleaners, who received a letter by recorded delivery on Saturday morning informing them that their hours were to be halved, their pay dramatically cut, and their holidays, pensions and sick benefits cut.

“To this day”, Mary reflects with both an edge and a catch in her voice, “I will never forget or forgive”.

Together with her members, she was heavily involved in the 1980 Steel Strike and the nurses’ disputes that broke out in the following year. By 1981, Mary was the branch secretary of the Hendon (General) 356

Branch, North London, and was instrumental in organising the feeding of the contingent of 600 young people during the Peoples’ March for Jobs. “The union did brilliantly”, she considered, “and the women did brilliantly”in finding supplies for the marchers after Labour Councillors were banned from using council facilities for the purpose. In 1983, the exercise was repeated for the Jobs Express but on that occasion the National Front chose to target the large number of Black youngsters on the march and, on their arrival in Kilburn, Mary and Barbara Benham found themselves desperately wedging a set of doors closed in order to keep out a gang of skinheads and to keep their own people in. After a demonstration called to protest at the abolition of the GLC, she and Barbara somehow managed to miss the coach back home and spent the next couple of hours navigating the London Region banner on and off a series of London busses.

Mary was still working as a Cook Supervisor when, in 1983, she was elected to the District Committee and became the first woman lay executive member for London. At this point, she was fortunate to have come under the wing of John Cope whose help and support did much to

shield her from the jealousy and suspicion of the union hierarchy. Her high profile in campaigns against the privatisation of national assets and amenities helped ensure her subsequent election to the union Executive, where she found herself to be the only woman among a body of 40 members, and where office was often seen as a commodity to be conferred as patronage rather than to be earned upon merit. As a result, she was seen as having “taken someone else’s seat”and was bluntly informed that she could not expect to serve longer than the single, two year, term of office that she had won.

Three factors operated against her.

The first was that she was perceived as something of an outsider in a union where much still depended on vested interests and familial or sectional groupings. Secondly, she was a woman in a union which still only employed one woman National Officer, Pat Turner; and lastly, she had caused problems for David Basnett at Congress by supporting a motion that was critical of the infamous “Gang of Four”Labour – and soon to be SDP – M.P.s, which had “rocked the boat”with the party and earned her the displeasure of the leadership.

What she did have going for her,

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however, was charisma, integrity and extremely quick wits. Furthermore, in London Region – under John Cope and later the young Paul Kenny – she possessed an increasingly formidable power base at the heart of the union which was bucking the trend towards membership decline and political stagnation. As a result, she not only held on to her seat on the Executive but swiftly established herself as one of the most recognisable and highly respected members of the union; setting out to increase the representation of women on its bodies “as women still had no voice in the union and you needed someone to bring out that voice for them”.

Her work in campaigning for decent school meals had already led her to record a party political broadcast for Labour, which was broadcast on television before the council elections in May 1982. In it, she had told audiences that “all school meals should be free and it could be done and should be as in Scandinavian countries – a balanced nutritional meal for all”. Rather than just being a dietary matter or one of child development, she saw school meals as being part of a holistic approach to education that sought to encourage parental involvement and to act as a democratising and liberating 358

Mary and her husband, Dennis, at Buckingham Palace to receive her M.B.E. in 2010.

process. Schemes were pioneered that sought to teach youngsters excluded from mainstream schools catering and hotel skills, that would equip them with the chance of gaining a job, and Cash Cafeterias were established in order to remove the shame and division occasioned by free meal tickets.

Long before Jamie Oliver grabbed the media spotlight, before moving on again, a Healthy Eating programme had been established across Brent that was available to all. Having seen children begin to arrive in the playground as early as 7am breakfast clubs were also established by Mary across the borough.

Unfortunately, the trouble was that throughout the period comprehensive school education and local authority governance were coming under sustained attack, with grammar schools and later academies being favoured by successive Conservative and New Labour

Governments, with the market ethos – of cutting costs and corners – and with schools being awarded their own budgets, leading to a drive to the bottom in terms of standards for meals and general upkeep.

This was replicated in the provision of Meals on Wheels for the elderly, another of Mary’s passionate concerns, whereby nutritional standards were downgraded and up to two weeks’ worth of ready made meals were delivered at once to the elderly, to be reheated when required. This certainly saved transportation costs but it removed daily contact with some of the most vulnerable in our communities, who were increasingly marooned in their own homes.

As Mary sought to make clear “the GMB doesn’t just care about one group of people it cares for all … as long as you have the principles of caring that’s all that matters”.

She brought these principles to bear in the fight to win the competitive tender for the provision of school meals across Brent and, after much hard work in 1994, Mary and her colleagues won the tender for school meals against three companies, including an international consortium.

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However, within a matter of days this decision was overturned by the September meeting of the Education Committee and the tender was awarded, instead, to the second-placed commercial interest. The dinner ladies were understandably devastated but, rather than accepting the decision, they began a four year battle that saw practically every shop in the borough – and even the local bingo hall – carrying a petition against the council. The dinner ladies packed the town hall and the chief executive’s office, disrupting every council meeting in the manner of Pete Curran and the union’s founders at West Ham almost exactly a century before. Perhaps inevitably, Mary Turner and Barbara Benham found themselves made redundant, in 1995, but if anything the plan backfired. As they took their case to arbitration and through employment tribunals, Mary felt that she “saw far more of the chief executive of Brent than I ever did when I was still at work”. She vowed to overturn the council and saw that a dozen councillors fell at the next election. However, “it was all a sad reflection of the society that we have gone back to, where public service sector workers are attacked and worker is set against worker”.

At the GMB Congress in 1997, Mary was elected as the President of the union and has been re-elected to that position every year since. In 2003, Linda Lord – one of the delegates – captured the essence of her ability and style in chairing Congress: “Mary very quietly welcomes them to the rostrum, assuring them that she has been there, knows how they feel and says, ‘Please, just take your time’. Calm then descends like a protective cloak. There is another side to this red-headed, Irish, Gemini … Mary Turner, President of the GMB, can point out the error of their ways to Congress delegates who should know better. They are told in a very measured, no-nonsense, humorous way that clearly says, ‘Don’t push it’”.

At the point where it seemed that GMB might just have dissolved into infighting, following the ballot rigging allegations made against Kevin Curran’s leadership, it was Mary Turner who possessed the authority to anchor the union, though this was achieved at considerable personal cost. In December 2004, an independent inquiry was launched against Curran and, in Mary’s words, “from that moment my life was hell”under the weight of the attacks by supporters of the

suspended General Secretary.Yet, by June 2005 and the Newcastle Congress a watershed had been reached in the union’s affairs and stability was effectively restored, with GMB moving to reject merger proposals and being set firmly on its present course. Mary is in little doubt that the “union will go from strength to strength, both regionally and nationally”, over the next few years, and considers that “to see Paul Kenny elected as General Secretary was the proudest day in my life”as the GMB was at last returned to the grassroots.

Having already served as Chair of the Labour Party, in 2004, and been a long time member of the party’s National Executive; she was honoured with an M.B.E. for her services to trade unionism in the New Year’s Honours List in 2010. Few have contributed so much to the union, or have possessed the force of character to remould an organisation into something altogether finer, more democratic and combative in pursuit of its members’ rights. Furthermore, the close partnership between Mary Turner, as President, and Paul Kenny, as General Secretary is one of the distinctive features of today’s GMB, and lends the union much of its colour, purpose, sense of proportion and basic decency.

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GMB takes the battle to the enemy.

Members demonstrate for “jobs, growth and justice”, in opposition to the coalition Government’s cuts to public services and pensions, at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2011.

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for existing at all when faced-down by New Labour – was swept away in plain language that the grassroots could identify with. “I am sick”, he said, “of people … trying to camouflage what we are about.

We are a vested interest and proud to be one. Our vested interest is the working people of this country, the people who have no other voice than the trade union movement … I do not go to parties and introduce myself as an ‘industrial relations expert’ or a ‘purveyor of partnerships’. I am proud of what we do, who we are and where we have come from … The fact that there is decent pay, or a pension scheme, or proper health and safety, or respect from the management is down to union organisation”.

GMB would “ensure that everyone who works for the union will get the respect they are entitled to. We will not judge others as bad employers without holding ourselves up as models”26. But then, no one should be in the slightest doubt, that the union would carry the fight to bad employers.

Top of that list, in 2004, was the AA. The company had previously been a friendly-mutual society, with a paternalistic management that had frequently been praised by the union in the 1990s as a model employer but all of that had changed when it was taken over by “serious hardnosed capitalists”, who quickly began to asset strip. Disabled workers and those who had gone sick were targeted for severance packages that were well below their redundancy entitlement, while the numbers of call-centre and breakdown staff were slashed and the owners paid themselves a £500 million bonus. To add a further edge, GMB had been derecognised by the AA, and the firm had gone on to establish a breakaway organisation – the AA Democratic Union – in February 2004, under two prominent Curran supporters.

Ian Allen, who had been based in Southern Region, and Alistair McLean, who had been the union’s senior organiser until January 2004, took with them some 4,000 members to form the “company union” and, understandably, became something of a bête noire for GMB. The union feared that the ambitions unleashed might encourage other disappointed place seekers to attempt – with or without employers’ money behind them – to carve out their own private fiefdoms in a similar fashion, slicing off whole industrial groups or possibly even regions, and leaving only a stump behind. However, the Newcastle Congress presented an opportunity for

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building unity and also for an exercise in political theatre that would serve to underscore GMB’s wider change of direction. Consequently, it was decided that instead of being merely passive – with delegates sitting in the hall to vote, or making and listening to the speeches – they should also recognise that they were, by their very nature, activists rather than apparatchiks.

Congress was adjourned on the Thursday morning and tour busses were laid on for the delegates to take them to picket the AA call centre in Newcastle and to launch the campaign to “fight for our union”; to win back the lost members and to call for GMB recognition. Some delegates took more readily than others to donning the specially printed Ethical Threads t-shirts emblazoned with their demands to the company; or to standing on the barriers waving placards under the noses of bemused AA management and distributing leaflets to their erstwhile colleagues.

Yet, for others it was a liberating experience that demonstrated through actions, as well as words, that the union was changing and that it was prepared to wage war upon any employer – or traitor from its own camp – who was prepared to step out of line.

The union was welcoming in new areas of membership; from leisure, hotels, gaming and private hire, to holiday staff, fast food distribution, the security industry, private hire and tattooists. There was nowhere that the union was afraid to go. Over the course of Congress, there were undertakings that the rule book would be rewritten in “plain

English”, that the ratio of funding between the regions and the centre would be reexamined, and that the number of industrial sections would be reduced to just three: public services, commercial services and manufacturing, which would each hold their own sectional conferences. Just as significant was the pledge that there would be “no sacred cows” and that henceforth everything would be up for discussion.

In June 2006, GMB demonstrates with coach and horses outside the office of 24/7 employment agency which the union believed was illegally collaborating with ASDA Wal-Mart to break forthcoming strikes.

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Remploy workers were also at the foreforont of demonstrations at the Conservative Party Conference in 2011.

Naturally, given the collapse of the former leadership grouping around the General Secretary, and the legal requirements for replacing him and appointing a successor, a large amount of time was spent on constitutional arrangements but this was balanced by the action surrounding the AA picket, and the sense – that became more palpable as the week progressed – that the union was gaining in purpose and was becoming an altogether more healthy and worthwhile place to be.

Most of the initiatives launched by Curran and the various “task groups” withered away with him, and some simply became the butt of Congress jokes. A proposal that the motto of the union should be changed to “Recruit, Organise, and Train” met with no support at all from delegates, a situation that was hardly helped when one wit realised that the acronym for it would have been “ROT”27. Andy Worth, Regional Secretary for Midlands and the East Coast, was of the opinion that a consultative document A Framework for the Future prepared by the CEC and placed before delegates, established clear principles upon which GMB could now take its stand and, if needs be,

fight. He saw it, probably in an entirely different way to those who had originally commissioned the report as “actually an antidote to merger … [for] I believe that the GMB has no need to merge and can remain independent”. Even if a future Congress opted to pursue an amalgamation policy, he believed that it still had value in establishing a core set of criteria for the kind of union that GMB wished to become and should serve as “a blueprint for the discussions on a new union”28.

There were large challenges ahead, not least to stop the haemorrhaging of funds from the union’s coffers and to put an end to the slide in membership; from 2003-05 despite all the fuss made about the “organising agenda”, recruitment had fallen from 100,000 to 75,000 per annum. With approximately 80,000 leaving the union each year, through retirement, redundancy, loss of work or basic dissatisfaction, this was clearly not good enough. However, Paul Kenny had successfully put forward an agenda for the “GMB based on what unites us, our beliefs, our passion to fight injustice and our commitment to the members”, while Mary Turner captured the essence of the Congress when she expressed her pride “that the GMB [had] turned a corner that it should have turned a long time ago”29. What remained was for GMB to find a coherent strategy and a political language that was capable of delivering the gains in membership and financial stability that was necessary to underpin

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the positive sentiments expressed and owned by the Newcastle Congress.

Fortunately for the union, this was not long in coming.

The union finds its voice The roots of GMB’s recovery were located in the tentative steps towards new recruitment strategies charted by John Edmonds’ clunkily entitled Health Check Process in the 1990s. These, as we have seen, were most fully embraced and developed during that time by London Region.

However, by the late 1990s it was clear that although large numbers of new members had been recruited through these initiatives they often drifted away again in a matter of months, rather than years, leaving the organisers frustrated and the union expending an enormous amount of effort for precious little long term gain. Furthermore, while London Region had had far more success than most, it was becoming clear that Paul Kenny in his role as Secretary did not have enough hours in the day to take on the additional role as head of organising, and needed to delegate authority to a team capable of building membership rather than just recruiting numbers that might – or might not – stay. He had already met Martin Smith through his involvement with the Workers Beer Company but the two really established contact at the TUC, held in the Winter Gardens at Blackpool in 1997.

Kenny had been impressed with his work alongside Frances O’Grady in the TUC

Organising Academy, and in his views on the types of new union strategies that appeared to be growing the trade union movement in both Australia and North America. Consequently, a year later, Martin joined the staff of the London Region of GMB and began to evolve a coherent strategy to build the base of the union that, much later, became known as the GMB@WORK. It was natural that many of the London Region materials were carried over into the national union following the success of the 2005 Congress and that the first meeting of a National Organising Team, should be convened at Derby shortly

GMB members protest as the Emir of Qatar travels past Windsor Castle during a State visit, in October 2010.

The protest is over sky-high rents charged at Southern Cross care homes for the elderly in which the Qatari Investment Authority is a major partner.

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after Paul Kenny became Acting General Secretary. This meeting debated the philosophy that underpinned organising but also the mechanics of how to achieve its aims in practice (see box below).

2005 onWArDS

the GmB

Work

By June 2006, five core principles had been established as the basis for the programme: 1 2 3 4 5

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These continue to form the basic strategy for GMB’s growth and evolution to this day and, when instituted, swept away much of the thinking that had proceeded them in the union – which had tended to oscillate wildly between organising campaigns and plans for merger – and provided a clear, well thought out, and highly practical guide for action. If it was mildly expressed, then in terms of its implications for the way that GMB was run and viewed itself and its objectives, it was nothing short of revolutionary.

Martin Smith set out the GMB@WORK agenda at the time and his speech to Congress, in 2006, bears quoting at length as so much of the rationale behind it continues to provide the theory behind a very successful practice that underpins the union. “It is at work”, he believed, “where our members have the power to improve their working conditions and it is at work where members look to the GMB to make a difference. Radio advertising … and leafleting festivals will raise the profile of the union. Community organising and political campaigning are part of what we do, but it is at work where we either make or lose members. Secondly, at work, it is what we have to say about the problems workers face and their boss that makes the difference whether they join or not. We know that only a small percentage of new GMB members say they join us because of the personal and financial services and benefits we offer, but we need to build the union in every workplace, not

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GMB trade union members strike against Enfield NCP for union recognition and an end to harassment, Central London February 2007.

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AA worker Richard Donald, from Somerset, was the first to take a stand against the company after his sacking and effectively launched the campaign against job cuts and union derecognition that galvanised GMB in 2005.

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sell it on the high street. The point is that when we try to compete with the Prudential Assurance Company we start to look and sound like the Prudential Assurance Company, more than we look and sound like the GMB. Neither should we separate recruitment from representation and retention. They are part of the same thing.

Bringing all three together and using workplace issues is the key to membership growth in the workplace. Involving people in the solutions to the problems they face, not doing it for them and expecting them to join the union later out of gratitude, is the way forward”30.

He continued by setting out “the test for each and every campaign [which] is how far we can put the boss on the back foot, forced to respond every day to our members’ agenda; respect and decent treatment, so that our members can get on with their jobs, better pay and pensions; so that our members have a future to plan; shorter and more flexible hours, so that our members’ kids get to see them once in a while and this is … why we recruit and organise and why we make our union as strong as it can be in every workplace where we have members … Put simply, we all know that if a branch recruits 50 new members in 50 new workplaces, it may well have made the union weaker but if a branch recruits 50 new members into existing workplaces we will have begun to make the union stronger.

For now, existing workplaces should be more important to us than green field sites.

It is in these workplaces that thousands of potential members meet our organisation every day, and it is where our reps. can and do make the most difference”31.

GMB had, at last, found a coherent and distinctive programme by which to shape its development, it was still faced with a crippling financial crisis.Yet, here too, the new leadership appeared undaunted by the scale of the problem and possessed sufficient energy and moral authority, in the eyes of the regions, to move quickly in order to address the underlying problems. Ironically, many of the measures undertaken by the CEC since 2003 – such as the closure and sale of the ruinously expensive National College, which had seemed to benefit the Labour Party far more than it ever did the union – had begun to work through the system, stabilising the books. However, what followed was altogether bolder and more radical. Though at times painful and difficult, a system was established to share regional information across the union ensuring co-accountability between the regions, enabling them to be held accountable to their peers. At the same time, tens of thousands of “ghost” members were removed from the membership lists ensuring a far more accurate picture of the relative strength, and weaknesses, of the union could be allowed to emerge. A senior management team was established and regional autonomy was gradually replaced by a sense of collective responsibility to the whole of GMB, regardless of local fiefdoms or the accident

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GMB Regional Delegates to the 2010 Congress held at the Floral Hall in Southport.

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GMB members at work ...

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of geography. Thus, Robert Badlan was able within a very short time to save the union hundreds of thousands of pounds through moving GMB onto a single, centralised, purchasing system for the likes of utilities bills, office furniture, IT systems and stationery. As Allan Wylie, the union’s Director of Finance – who had returned to prominence in the union following Curran’s departure – put it, suddenly “instead of people pulling in different directions they were making common cause in order to solve the union’s most pressing problems”32. It was his feeling that the right financial structures were already in place but that there had been neither the political will nor the ability to make use of them, “at no time before 2005”, he considers, “were we ever able to get ahead of the game in order to properly tackle the deficit”. The centralisation of finances and campaigning – with the General Secretary knowing the total recruitment figures for every region by the first day of every month – was possible because the regional secretaries, by and large, understood and trusted him. Whereas Curran had ordered the secretaries and national officers about, Kenny consulted and took advice, aiming at achieving consensus at both the CEC and Congress, and knew the power of persuasion.

Ironically, centralisation was being carried out through broad agreement in the name of preserving the rights of the individual regions. It was a paradox but one that worked as soon as true collective

responsibility was established among the union’s senior officials. Problems were focused upon on a day-to-day basis, and delivery – on targets, budgets, promises, and political results – was what now counted. But, at the base of everything it was membership that counted. The collapse in 2003-04 had precipitated the financial crisis but as membership began to be clawed back so too were the finances turned around.

The officer corps were cut back, amid retrenchments, while the union spent less on and asked more of its Workplace Organisers. An end was made to officials and the regions competing against one another to hit arbitrary “sales” targets and they refocused on to building the power of their members in their workplace and in their industry, instead. A consultation process involving all officials, staff and senior Workplace Organisers sent back a message that the union “should stop chasing rainbows – the endless search for the easy top down bureaucratic or political solution to membership decline.We came to understand that partnership organising had failed us and confused our members over what the union stood for, and that government funded schemes like Union Learning would never deliver growth … Despite years of blaming governments, employers, the media and the state of the economy for our troubles, we have eventually developed an understanding that we got ourselves into our own membership crisis and so it is down to us and us alone to get ourselves out of it.

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No one out there will help us or ever has.

Our future is about choice not chance”33.

Furthermore, the union ended its reliance upon external trainers and brought provision in-house using GMB’s own materials, delivered by its own officers and organisers.

Independence and self-reliance were the orders of the day.

The figures began to speak for themselves, with membership rising from approximately 571,690,000 in 2004-05 to 575,105,000 in 2005-06. At the same time, the union nudged its way into a modest but significant surplus, effectively changing the political landscape. By deferring the vote on merger by twelve months the union had bought itself a breathing space but this was to prove decisive only because that time was used wisely by Wylie, Kenny and the finance department to rebuild the union’s shattered finances; and by the Workplace Organisers, regions and officers went out into the field to grow the union. Their successes gave GMB the space and the freedom it needed to think and act in its own interests after times when it felt like it was being railroaded into merger. Indeed, the crucial steps towards that process had been played out against the backdrop of Curran’s dramatic fall from power. On 15 March 2005, Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley had been scheduled to deliver a joint address to the GMB Executive about the projected merger34.

However, this was exactly the same meeting that took the decision to suspend Curran from office and, understandably, with

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emotions running high the pitch for amalgamation was overtaken by events and largely scrubbed from the agenda35.

To an outside observer, the union may have appeared to be easy meat, weighed down with debts and imploding at its leadership level, but this was not allowed to be the case primarily because of the decisions taken and policies implemented after the March meeting of the CEC. These internal difficulties, though certainly marking a major break of continuity within the union, did not directly impact upon the question of the merger, itself.

Indeed, the impact made by a change of personnel at the top – reflecting very different styles of leadership – can be greatly overstated. Certainly, Derek Simpson thought at the time that “the involvement of the GMB was unaffected by the departure of Kevin Curran”, while Paul Kenny considers that the decisive role was played out by the combined efforts of the elected Executive rather than by any one individual36. Even though Kevin Curran appeared to have been more amenable towards amalgamation in general, and the culture of the T&G in particular, than his successor, it seems fair to suggest that he would still have had to face a hard and protracted battle in order to fully convince his own lay members on the Executive of the benefits of a merger. Both Curran and Kenny had to work within the bounds set by their own Executive and membership and there is no sense in which the change

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more thAn JuStA lucky Gener GenerAl SecretAry 2005 to the preSent DAy

b.1949

A Gen era l Sec reta ry by cha nce, as mu ch as by des ign, he inh erit ed the uni on at its lowest ebb a nd gave it bac k its sen se of prid e a nd purpos e.

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r Al

p

aul Kenny was born in London, on Halloween, 1949, the son of an Irish father, who worked as a painter and decorator, and an English mother. He was raised very much “in the school of hard knocks” and had soon enough to prove himself a “handy little scrapper”.Yet, at the same time he benefited from long stays away from the family home, with a loving grandmother, and felt himself no more or no less disadvantaged than any of his friends: the blows and scorn were simply part and parcel of growing up, and such was the way of the world.

He recalls standing with his grandmother on the kerbside in order to catch a glance of a smiling Yuri Gagarin, as he raced past in his motorcade, during his visit to London in July 1961, and the sense of wonderment and pride in witnessing the first man to fly into outer space.Today, we are almost jaded by the pace of technological progress and space travel holds little excitement but back then it was inspiring and magical; and was well worth the risk of being run over by the less than sympathetic British police escort, whose motorbikes came within an inch or two of clearing both the boy and the old lady from off the road and into the nearest hospital ward.

If Kenny thrilled to stories of Cosmonauts and learned something of London-Irish

culture, with its rebel songs and halfremembered tales of Parnell, Connolly and Pearse; then he did not enjoy school at all. It bored him and he determined to have as little to do with it as possible. During his summer holidays, he had always helped his father out on the building sites but, just before his fourteenth birthday, his school closed down and rather than move to a new one, he simply stayed away and got the first of many jobs on Portobello Road. Over the next year, he worked as a kitchen hand, as a casual labourer at Olympia, and as a barrow-boy and trader in Shepherds Bush market.

London Region became increasingly effective at recruiting, representing and fighting for members of the ethic minorities in the 1970s and ’80s. The Chix Dispute, at Slough, in 1979-1980 (above) saw a significant victory in the battle for union recognition.

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At last the system finally caught up with him and dragged him back to the classroom, but by that time he was only a couple of weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday and freedom was already in sight. He went to live, permanently, with his grandmother, and got a job at Fullers’ Brewery, which paid well and allowed him to save enough to buy the latest fashionable clothes. Suitably attired and with a close circle of friends, he thoroughly enjoyed himself in a sixties London that, by 1964-65, had just started to reverberate to the sounds of the Stones and The Who. After seven months at the brewery, he left As London Regional Secretary, Paul Kenny was proud to sponsor Fulham FC.

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to take up an apprenticeship in the gas industry but didn’t really take to the work, leaving for casual factory jobs and drifting into construction, as a scaffolder and painter, even working for a time at the BBC studios.

For the most part, these were “boring repetitive jobs and none of them really held my attention”. He had attempted to start union branches, on behalf of the T&G at that point, on the construction sites and at a factory on Latimer Road; but the initiatives eventually fizzled-out and he found himself, by that time married to Pat and with a young son, facing a bad winter on the construction sites on only half-pay. For the sake of his family, it was clear that he needed full-time and more permanent work and thought, for a time at least, that he had found an ideal job as a postman at Acton.

Unfortunately, after barely a fortnight, on 20 January 1971, the post office union was pitched into its first ever national strike and Paul experienced a gruelling seven week dispute which ended in failure. After that, he felt that his heart was no longer in the work and he left to drift once again until, quite by chance, he took a temporary five month summer job as a Park Keeper in Hammersmith.

To his surprise, he found that he liked the post and that the fresh air and relative autonomy

agreed with him. The short term contract turned into a permanent position and within the month Paul was elected Shop Steward, as the GMWU Convenor for Hammersmith Borough. By 1978, he was the branch Secretary at Fulham and, in the following year, he was called out in a public services dispute that he ensured spread borough-wide for the first time but which ultimately turned upon the role of key workers – the council drivers and plant attendants – without whom the whole business of local government would quickly grind to a halt. After the bitter experience of the postal strike, this success convinced him of the utility of his stratagem that “ensured maximum damage to the employers and the minimum to us”. The scalpel was a far more successful weapon than the bludgeon.

By that point, his union activities had brought him to the attention of management, who attempted to isolate him. He was detailed to answer the telephone in the park hut, which he now manned alone, and was expected to be available to take calls from 7am onwards with the only permitted breaks being to go to the nearest public toilet which, as chance would have it, was located in the neighbouring Library on Hammersmith Broadway. Paul’s answer was to borrow arm loads of books

more thAn JuSt A lucky GenerAl

from the library and to begin to plough his way through all that he could find on Irish history, the trade unions, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and labour law. He quickly discovered several things through his endeavours. Namely, that he was effectively being paid by the council to read; that it was a far from onerous task as winter set in and the snow began to settle on the lawns outside; and that – most importantly of all – knowledge really did equal power.

This approach began to pay dividends in his union negotiations as often he found that just by quoting legal precedent at employers they suddenly became far more willing to settle and, sometimes, folded completely. What really did surprise him was the “poor quality of the opposition” once you got over the polished manners and pretence of education; it was an empowering discovery to find that you were not only sharper than your opponent but also knew far more than they did about history or industrial relations, and Paul Kenny

certainly took the lesson to heart.

He was a “big fish in a small pond” and by 1979 was virtually on full-time release for his union work, when the post of district officer for West London became available, Paul doubted that he was capable of fulfilling the role but Pat pushed him to apply and he was successful.The union was changing and had to change, when faced by the single-minded ruthlessness of Thatcherism, but Kenny was lucky in that John Cope had broken the mould when he had won the regional secretaryship and that he had then determined to build a team of people around him – such as Paul Kenny and Mary Turner – who were capable “of ensuring that the mould will stay broken”.

The London Region lost most of its manufacturing base in the 1980s, as industry retreated from the Thames basin, and it was probably the first in GMB to sense the change in the air. By the time that Paul was appointed as Cope’s successor as London Regional Secretary, in 1991, he had come to realise that GMB was no longer a “big battalions” union and that, in order to survive, it needed to become adept at servicing ordinary members who worked in pockets of 20 or 50, rather than in the hundreds or thousands.The beginnings of a campaigning and organising agenda were already there to be seen at the

beginning of 1982, when Kenny held a special recruitment conference for lay activists in West London which surprised many – though not Paul, himself – by confounding the received wisdom that apathy was growing in the union when 80 applications came in for just 30 places. He enjoyed great success in organising among the Sri Lankan community in the capital, and was alive to the possibilities of modern advertising – not least through the sponsorship of his beloved Fulham Football Club – and also the necessity to balance recruitment strategies with the retention of the existing membership.Thus, by 1993 London Region had half-price entry to games for union members and had the union’s logo emblazoned on the Fulham team kit. In 2001, Brentford was sponsored under a similar arrangement and the District was also actively supporting the Workers Beer Company, which crewed the beer tents at Glastonbury, Reading and other major music festivals with young volunteers, and saw that the wages and profits went to a whole host of charities and Labour movement campaigns. Sponsorship was also provided for Billy Bragg’s 1999 and 2000 tours and Billy – whose grandfather had been one of the founders of the union at Beckton – returned the good deed by taking to the stage at the GMB Congress in 2007.

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Above all, Paul Kenny possessed the common touch and could inspire his membership because he came from amongst them and instinctively understood the nature of their concerns and fears. He could read people well and, more importantly cared what happened to them.

As a Shop Steward, he had “seen the union melting away in the workplace” and in his time in charge of London Region he had completed John Cope’s work in taking an area that had once been in steep decline and making it one of the most powerful and vibrant in the union.

However, he did not always sit easily in a new union culture that seemed to be increasingly dominated by university graduates, careerists, and consultancy firms.

Too outspoken, too popular, and too working class, he saw the irony in how far the union had drifted from the fiery convictions and radical politics of its founders. It was telling that in one of his early Congress speeches as General Secretary he rounded on his detractors – who by 2007 had largely been sidelined from the positions of authority in the union – and advised them to “go and choke on your defeatist, failed, academic outof-date claptrap”.Years of resentment at the ruination of the union and the debasement of its values, at the hands of a professional class 376

of managers and consultants, who could never love GMB as he did welled up in that moment. Unfortunately, in the meantime, he had to bide his time until he was able to shoulder his way onto the centre of the stage, and was placed at a distinct disadvantage as he had no interest in being – or aptitude for a career as – a courtier.

He had initially approved of, and supported, John Edmonds as “the best person at the time for the GMB”, who had instituted a decent equalities agenda for the union and taken training seriously as an integral component in sustaining industrial growth. However, he also felt that Edmonds had been too prepared to play the district secretaries off against each other, rather than directly facing them over issues that were central to the union’s survival.

Moreover, he profoundly disagreed with his attempts to move away from Congress as the union’s supreme authority and towards a situation whereby consultative industrial groups held the balance of power and reported directly to the General Secretary.

An attempt to move against Kenny, in October 1999, quickly fizzled out as the union’s leadership became more concerned to stem hostile press reports of GMB’s financial crisis, than to either repair the roots of the damage or to pursue a vendetta against

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Paul Kenny speaking at the Leeds Academy, October 2009, in support of striking workers.

a genuinely popular District Secretary, who appeared to many of the membership as one of the union’s few remaining positive assets.

Rather, it was hoped that ill-health or – if they could hold off the election long enough – the prospect of early retirement, might gift the succession to one of the younger generation of officers who might be more easily moulded.

In the event, though, what was indicative was not that Paul Kenny lost by a mile what had seemed a very closely fought election battle to Kevin Curran, for the general secretaryship in 2003, but that he was to be found back at his desk the next day, chiding his closest

supporters for their despair and planning a fresh campaign to save the union.

One of his closest comrades once described him as always being a “lucky general”. It was certainly a combination of happy circumstances that had served to establish him in the union, in the first place, and a catalogue of his opponents’ errors and duplicity that imploded their powerbase and unexpectedly ushered him into office as acting General Secretary of GMB, in March 2005.Yet, it was sheer ability that kept him there and permitted him to turn an ailing union, a few months away from amalgamation or financial collapse,

into a totally different organisation, with balanced books, internal stability, and a growing membership that guaranteed its independence. The bright and the creative have always fashioned their own luck.

The practical, no-nonsense, family-like atmosphere of today’s GMB, where healthy debate and increased lay democracy are positively encouraged rather than frowned upon, is largely the product of his own personality as well as the policies that he sought to adopt. Perhaps, at times, he might feel that there is not enough time to get everything done, or that the reforms he initiated have not gone far enough, but he would never shirk a fight, look to count the cost, or doubt the eventual victory of his union and his class.

A century on, after Will Thorne took the helm as President of the TUC, the union has swung full-circle and been entrusted once again to one of its own. Passion, pride and a truly progressive vision – now as then – are very much the order of the day; a blueprint for success has been established and the road ahead, though undoubtedly long and arduous, is clear to wherever the membership may wish to take it.

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Central Executive Council, Plymouth 2008.

of personalities at the top fundamentally altered the union’s basic attitude to either the T&G or Amicus. Congress in 2005 had grumbled and murmured whenever the names of the other two unions were mentioned and despite having a less obvious identity than the T&G and the engineering and electrical sections of Amicus; GMB membership proved surprisingly tenacious in their defence of a union that they clearly loved and took a great pride in. The thought of taking down the reproduction banners from the Gasworkers, the Boilermakers, and the Furniture and Garment Makers that hung down from the galleries above the congress hall, for one last time and folding them quietly away was clearly for some too much to bear. In times of grave crisis, the symbols of unity and past struggle often take on a whole new lease of life and are the only things left to cling to. That is why the traditions and heroes of the Communist Party were pushed aside and “debunked” in the

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1980s as a prelude to its collapse, and why the Labour Party chose to abandon its own history rooted in the trade union movement in order to become “New” in the 1990s.

However, the standards still flew above the delegates to GMB’s Newcastle Congress and Will Thorne and his comrades were still remembered as giants. Why, so the reasoning ran, could they create a union from out of nothing only to allow us – with far greater access to resources and campaigning techniques – to grind it into the dust.

What had changed, between 2003-2005, with the arrival of a bright and ebullient figure such as Paul Kenny, was the fresh approach to strategy and a pressing desire to set GMB’s own house in order, above all other considerations. For the first time since Will Thorne, the union was in the hands of one of its own, who had risen as an unskilled labourer from the ranks of the membership to lead the union. There could be little doubt of his pride in GMB or in his

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desire to prove what could be done. Further meetings had been planned, in the summer of 2005, between Simpson, Kenny and Woodley and discussions were initiated as to the respective size and composition of the negotiating teams. However, progress was somewhat halting and the mood was decidedly muted as the GMB team temporised and sought to take soundings from its own membership. The delays and the interregnum within his own union had bought Paul Kenny precisely the time he needed in order to restore GMB’s morale and to reorganise its finances and structures.

His first problem had been to face down several disaffected regions where moves were afoot to secede from the union in support of his defeated rival, Kevin Curran, and to crush moves among membership bases within the AA, DHL and health service to lead a stampede towards disaffiliation and the creation of rival, management friendly, organisations. With this done, and order restored at the cost of remarkably little bloodshed or long-term ill feeling, he was able to convene a recall Congress in March 2006 that resolved the remaining issues surrounding the Curran affair and set in train a process of nominating new candidates for the vacant post of General Secretary.

With no other nominations received, Kenny was declared elected as General Secretary, unopposed by law, by the CEC when it met on 8 May 2006. But he did not formally assume office until his position was approved by Congress, to general

“ Deference was dead,

the idea of partnership with the bosses was dead,

and the merger was dead.

What was alive was GMB”

acclamation, in June. Even then it took some getting used to as the President had to keep gently reminding the union’s new leader to stop referring to himself anymore as the “Acting” General Secretary. The days of doubt and disunity had now passed and the union was fast setting its own house in order.

The skilfully spun out merger negotiations had permitted a new leadership – based around, as opposed to outside the CEC – to come to the fore, and allowed the reforms and a new recruitment strategy to take effect. Though infuriating to their opposite numbers in Amicus and the T&G, GMB’s delaying tactics won their grudging respect, with Derek Simpson wryly confiding to Paul Kenny that he “would have done exactly the same” had he been in that position and had his own union been experiencing similar troubles. In the end, everything turned upon the issue of lay member democracy. Tripartite negotiations had resumed and, by the summer of 2006, both Amicus and the

The picket line at the Chemilines pharmaceuticals company, December 2008.

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Seventy GMB members, mainly African migrant workers, accuse NCP of fixing daily targets for parking fines and bullying and harassing staff to penalise London motorists to meet targets.

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T&G – though not GMB – had drawn up a draft instrument for amalgamation and submitted reports in order to satisfy due diligence in the eyes of the government’s Certification Officer. However, the core issue that could not be resolved between the two big unions and their smaller partner was over the nature of the new rule book.

While Amicus and the T&G were pursuing the organisational aspects of the merger ahead of any constitutional considerations, the Executive of GMB was adamant that it wanted to see the text of the rule book well in advance of taking the final decision to merge. To the new GMB leadership, this looked like putting far too much on trust and began to resemble a deal struck between prospective lovers and predicated upon the promise: “Of course, I’ll still love and respect you in the morning”37.

Suddenly, the process had begun – rightly or wrongly – to feel more like a takeover rather than a merger.

As a result, the CEC issued a statement to Congress, when it met in Blackpool in June 2006, that put its own position on record as being that: “The creation of a new union through the merger with TGWU, Amicus and GMB has been under consideration by the union for the last year.

The merger working party and others who have been involved in this process have sought, through the sharing of information, to develop a blueprint of how a new union could be developed …

However, the CEC after consultation with

the regions, regional councils and branches, do not believe that continuing on with the merger process would command the support of the wider membership. The CEC recommends to Congress that GMB continues to develop a new union in line with the CEC task group recommendations but this we do independently at this time”38. The GMB@WORK strategy had already been unveiled before delegates and the preliminary results of its implementation in the regions were now in, what Paul Kenny now made plain to the hall was that: “Frankly, colleagues, it is make our mind up time. We started off last year with the prospect of thinking about a new union.

I think that when we first voiced that phrase, it was pretty clear that we were thinking about ourselves [and not the merger] … given our vision of the future and the quite clear massive hunger that there was in GMB for change and success, we entered into this process … We … wanted to be clear in our minds that the new union would do better than we could on our own in the workplaces. The consultation exercise has told us that our members believe that the answer is ‘no’”39.

Speaker after speaker – from Southern, Northern, London, Liverpool, North Wales & Irish regions – backed the report that the union should reject the merger and stand alone. It was carried by an overwhelming 98% majority and, far from the restrained lacklustre days of the old rubber stamping congresses, emotion

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washed over the hall, with every fresh declaration of support greeted with cheering and table thumping. By the time of the actual vote, some delegates had clambered up on top of the tables, themselves, and the crescendo of applause that greeted the result ushered in the rebirth of GMB as an independent, campaigning union, that had come full-circle and was now seeking to reclaim those radical instincts held by the men of Beckton more than a century before.

Deference was dead, the idea of partnership with the bosses was dead, and the merger was dead. What was alive was GMB, stripped of its management consultants, pseudo-academics and New Labour dissemblings about responsibility and the end of class struggle. It had reaffirmed its founding traditions, discovered a new sense of collective identity, and was now in a position to give its members a distinctive voice in the Labour Movement, as it sought to reach out to those rapidly growing, and extremely fluid, service sectors where unions had to date failed to gain a sufficient footing. Moreover, while the T&G and Amicus would go on to form Unite, in 2007, GMB’s new independence did not prevent it from joining the super-union that had been created in attempting to shore up the Labour government and to attempt to rescue it from its narrow and debilitating neo-liberal agenda. On the ground, GMB and Unite members would find common cause and win a resounding victory, in the spring of 2009, at Lindsey and on the picket

lines outside Britain’s other oil refineries in one of the most dramatic and far-reaching industrial disputes of recent times.

Everything else flowed from the decision of Congress not to amalgamate.That decision, coming hard on the heels of the ratification of the GMB@WORK strategy consolidated a union that now possessed a clear sense of direction and policy, and with every small, incremental success, the frustrations and

The protests outside the Lindsey Oil Refinery, in June 2009, soon became national news.

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rivalries built up between individuals and regions over decades began to fall away like so much unwanted baggage, as confidence among the members grew. The union with one of the least secure toeholds in the labour market, and a comparatively weak sense of identity and imagery – especially when compared with the might of the T&G, or the EETPU and AEEU – had affirmed its own cause and had outlasted them all; building amongst the dispossessed, women, part-time workers and new immigrants, who could see the purpose in a union that was prepared to fight for them when no one else would or even could. A different and more exciting world lay ahead.

The fight to Save remploy Even if it had chosen to stay still, GMB would have to all intents and purposes have been seen to have moved Left, as New Labour embarked on a protracted love affair with the free market. Trade unionists and the PLP no longer spoke the same language, hailed from a common culture or class, or held the same concerns. When Tony Blair addressed the union’s Congress, in 2006, as the first Labour Prime Minister to do so since Harold Wilson, exactly forty years before; he did so out of a sense of grudging obligation, and displaying little in the way of affection or fellow feeling with his audience. Some in the hall thought it significant that it had taken him almost ten years, and three terms of his government, to put in an appearance.

Despite paying the party’s bills and maintaining

its own parliamentary group, the union had no real say in the direction of economic and industrial policy; with the result that for much of the time between 2005 and the fall of the Brown Government in May 2010, the union was picking up the wreckage left by policies that benefited big business rather than the British people, and which sought to continue the Thatcherite drive towards privatisation of national assets and services.

The assault upon the Remploy factories and their disabled workforce was perhaps the most emotive and insidious of these.

Remploy was an independent company

Opposite page: Remploy workers march in Manchester, October 2011. Their banner echoes the words of Marx and Engels and brings the union back to its roots in the Labour Movement.

Above: When Remploy closed down its factory in York, GMB helped to establish a co-operative to assist disabled workers.

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Above: Brian Davies puts the case for Remploy to Congress, at Brighton 2011.

Opposite page: GMB was keen to impress upon Government that Remploy could be run efficiently and that the costs of closing the factories would be far greater in the long run than if they were kept open and run as a going concern.

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that, amid the optimism of the post-war Labour Government had been incorporated, in 1945, within state provision to provide training and employment for severely disabled people under special conditions, and opened its first factory – with many machines tailor-made to suit the individual needs of disabled workers – in North Wales, in 1946. Subsequently, many more factories were opened across the country offering an unprecedented level of dignity and independence to those “who are willing and able to work, but who are unable or unlikely to obtain employment in open industry because of the nature or degree of their disability”40. The idea was to provide in each and every factory a bespoke programme which would encompass

employees of all ages, provide jobs which would suit a workforce with a wide range of skills and abilities, while simultaneously accommodating the widest possible forms of disability. The problem was that while Remploy was tasked with operating “effectively and efficiently as an industrial organisation”, its other provisions were extremely costly, not least because they were to be supported by an on-site doctor.

Initially the factories were to provide those returning soldiers, sailors and airmen who had lost limbs, or their sight, during the Second World War. However, by the late 1960s most of the original workforce had retired and the remit of the business altered to fit patterns of disability caused by disease, industrial accident or trauma at birth.

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Consequently, by the turn of the new century, the largest section of the workforce had suffered from learning difficulties, followed by those suffering from debilitating illnesses, limb and spinal injuries, ear defects and epilepsy. Other significant categories among the employees included diseases of the nervous system, thalidomide victims, sufferers of arthritis and rheumatism, and diseases of the heart and respiratory system41. However, as the union noted, few severely disabled workers can produce items at the same rate as their able-bodied counterparts and that fact ensured that despite a relatively high degree of commercial success, there was usually an annual excess of expenditure over income.

The shortfall was traditionally met by a subsidy from central government, while a large percentage of the company’s orders were contracted with Government, local authorities and the remaining nationalised industries, for which Remploy tendered on a commercial basis.

The Conservative ethos, enshrining dog-eat-dog competition, seeking a small state apparatus and denying the reality of a society wider than individual impulses and desires, saw Remploy increasingly surrounded. However, it was Michael Portillo who launched the first significant attack upon the company, in 1994, using European legislation aimed at encouraging the free market to attempt to remove the government contracts and to, effectively, close Remploy down. The subsequent

policy document presented to the House of Commons in June 1995, by Peter Thurnham, a Conservative M.P., was as ideologically loaded as any to have come out of John Major’s administration. It claimed that “Remploy could be more successful commercially, but in order to achieve that, it needs freedom from the Government and exposure to private sector disciplines and innovation. One flexible solution lies in contracting out and divesting Remploy’s business”. Gradually bits of the company would be hived off to the private sector, sweetened with grants from the taxpayer, starting with the most profitable first and leaving the remaining contracts to be “tailored to meet the needs of each business area and in the longer term [government] could leave open the possibility of Remploy employees joining the host company’s own workforce”42.

GMB was, thus, propelled into the fight to protect some of the most vulnerable workers in society, and initially drew solid support from decent, public spirited managers – like Len Boulton, Sandra Knowles and Ray Fletcher – who cared about their employees and espoused the ethos that had underpinned the company for more than five decades.

Unfortunately, the advent of a New Labour Government did nothing to alleviate Remploy’s plight and, through the removal of the old management team, and its replacement by a new chief executive, Bob Warner, who sought to cut jobs wherever

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possible, the situation became progressively worse. Until 2002, GMB had worked virtually in partnership with the company in order to make the business a success; but with the arrival of Warner, the number of disabled workers began to fall and the number of able-bodied managers climbed dramatically. By 2005, GMB was wondering why, despite the provision of extra funding from central government, the company was costing £20 million more to administer per annum that it had three years previously and why more than 900 jobs had been lost over that period, through natural retirements, ill health and dismissals. There had certainly been industrial changes that worked against the company, with the almost total disappearance of the furniture trade in Britain and with many of the remaining companies, such as Silent Night, choosing to relocate their factories offshore, in parts of the developing world. However, the company’s management made matters worse by outsourcing orders, when they should have been kept in-house for the benefit of the disabled workforce, and turned down an initiative by GMB sponsored firm Ethical Threads to increase their orders.

Temporary contracts increasingly became the norm, removing one of the few planks of stability that many of the employees had in their lives, while GMB felt that the “Remploy board are encouraging a more aggressive and bullying style in dealing with employees and trade unions”, while at the same time increasing “the number of non-

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disabled people across the company who gain their living off of the backs of disabled people”43. In most cases, the union thought that the managers on site “understand what needs to be done to employ more disabled people inside the factory network but the factory managers work in fear and are not allowed to manage and cannot make decisions. The senior managers in Remploy who have the power to make decisions are a very large group of elite management … [and] are throwing away the profits earned by the disabled”44.

One of the more disreputable techniques used increasingly throughout the period was the offering of a lump sum redundancy.

Many Remploy workers, who tended to live hand to mouth, had never dreamed of having so much money in their bank accounts at any one time and anxiously grasped at it without realising they would probably never be in a position to work again and that once the money was gone, they would have to adjust to existing on long term benefits. Just as cynical and infinitely more cloying was the argument often used by liberal commentators – useful to both Right-wing free marketers and New Labour, alike – that Remploy somehow “segregated” its workforce from the wider world and acted as a brake on their integration and advancement in mainstream employment. GMB returned fire: “to say that Remploy is segregationist is to make the condescending assumption that all people with disabilities have the

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same employment aspirations and needs.

It is patronising to suggest that work in supported employment is demeaning and segregationist when thousands of Remploy workers have showed over and over again that they love their jobs and want to keep them”45.

Instead of overhauling the bloated top echelon of management, New Labour preferred to issue an Audit Office Report, in late 2005, which was of the view that many of Remploy’s factories were unsustainable and would have to close. On 16 March 2006, John Hutton, the Secretary of State, ordered an “independent” review of the company that, it subsequently transpired, would be conducted by the consultants PriceWaterhouseCoopers and a team led

by Julie Mellor. In response, GMB formed its own group of senior shop stewards – Phil Brannan,Tony Gledhill, Steve Sargent, and Les Woodward – who were led by Phil Davies, and tasked with producing counter proposals to ensure the company’s survival.

They were, unsurprisingly, critical of the board of directors with the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive holding other sinecures, consultancies and posts on quangos.

They objected to the means used to calculate the “value for money provision” of the Audit Office Report – which disguised management costs – and sought to reestablish the case for government and local authorities to use Remploy in order to fill their order books. Government, however, proved disinterested and gave a lucrative – and for Remploy job saving – contract for NHS

In February 2007, GMB holds six international demonstrations – in London, Paris, Strasburg, New York, Chicago and Las Vegas – on St Valentine’s Day. The union was protesting against threatened redundancies of Burberry workers, at the Treorchy factory in Wales and the exporting of the lost jobs to China.

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wheel chairs to a Chinese company, instead.

Large demonstrations were organised outside successive Labour Party Conferences and the TUC Congress, and Mary Turner – a member of the Labour Party’s NEC – vowed that “the Labour Government in 1945 opened the Remploy factories and I will be damned if a Labour Government of 2005 allows them to shut”46.

The union pressed the Blair Government for a review and Phil Davies told GMB Congress that “these are Remploy disabled people helping and sharing the good and bad times together. No other group of workers can offer this level of support to each other.

No other group of workers are more loyal to the GMB trade union. We will not accept factory closures. Our General Secretary and Central Executive Council fully support our fight to change Remploy for the better. This is not a fight against Remploy but a fight for Remploy and our disabled members”. He concluded that, “someone’s mother, father, son or daughter will need Remploy factories in the near future to work in. We owe it to those disabled workers who built up Remploy and we owe it to those disabled people who are yet to come into a Remploy factory … [that] on the first announcement of the first factory to close we will occupy … We are going to get up personal and close to our M.P.s. They are going to feel our breath on their necks”47. private equity and the venture capitalists Remploy was one of a number of struggles

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waged concurrently by the resurgent GMB. The Kenny leadership was fearless and there were no “no go areas”, with a variety of carnival-like protests – involving camels, both real and of the pantomime variety; donkeys, and members dressed up in animal costumes to eat symbolic chicken feed – as a means of raising a smile from the public and to name and shame the bosses of big corporations who normally hid behind the anonymity of their tax exile or offshore investment funds. The General Secretary was not particularly phased by the threat of an injunction from one multi-millionaire, who disliked placard carrying, and often

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costumed, union members traipsing up and down the public footpath that ran across his estate to access a small chapel. Even the barristers at the High Court were forced to acknowledge that it just might be that union members were a more than normally religious lot. The protests and colourful stunts did have a more serious side to them and, while the press office under Steve Pryle reflected Paul Kenny’s reticence about appearing continually on Newsnight to provide vox pops which would be of comparatively little interest to the membership; it was highly attuned to getting hundreds of stories carried every year in the pages of local newspapers across the land.

As Paul Kenny told his members, “those who would push our members around, or try to push our union around, let them have a clear understanding that the GMB now pushes back”48. Thus, when Professor Paul Sparrow of Lancaster University shortlisted the AA Human Resources Team for the Personnel Today magazine’s Awards for Excellence in Business Partnering, in November 2007, GMB were on hand to picket both the awards and his workplace.

Sparrow had praised the team because of their work in raising profits for the AA from £100 million to £300 million, largely through the expedient of sacking staff and roadside breakdown teams. At the time, Paul Maloney, a GMB National Officer explained that: “Professor Sparrow’s HR Centre is sponsored by McDonalds and he has now shortlisted the AA for what deserves to be known as the ‘Mc HR Award’ for corporate bullying. It is a thundering disgrace that a so-called independent professor endorses the greed of the private equity elite and their asset stripping ways which include sacking disabled workers”.

Famously, GMB activists also visited the church where Damon Buffini – the chairman of the private equity company Permira that had bought and stripped out the AA – worshipped. They sat outside with a camel, which seemed quite content to nibble at the grass verges, and an oversized needle, to see if Buffini – one of the richest of men – really thought that he had a chance of entering the kingdom of God.

The union protests outside the “Personnel Today Awards” in November 2007 over the short listing of the AA for an HR award, when they had just sacked disabled staff.

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Threading a rich man through the eye of a needle ... GMB members Paul Maloney and Paul Grafton lead the protest outside the Holy Trinity Church, Clapham, where Damon Buffini worshipped, May 2006. It was the first of many such direct actions.

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Since the picketing of the AA offices in Newcastle, GMB had recovered lost ground in its membership and successfully fought off the encroachments of the management’s own staff association. This association had, after all, done nothing to prevent the sacking of 3,400 of the 10,000 employees or the cutting of the wages of call centre staff in Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff and Newcastle, even while the price of the services offered to the customer were

being raised, and as the AA withdrew night time patrols and fell down the league tables for service to motorists. By September 2007, the company was left saddled with debts of more than £4.8 billion – a debt of over £400,000 per employee – while the top five members of the board of the owners, the private equity company CVC were paid £50 million each for a year’s work. At the bottom of the pile, GMB members were offered £18,000 to leave quietly without making complaint or be “performance managed” out of their jobs.

Taking on the cases of these workers, many of whom were older or disabled staff, GMB won a series of awards for damages at employment tribunals.

ASDA Wal-Mart had, as we have already seen, been in the process of derecognising GMB but the days when the corporation could win such ballots had been brought to an end by the union’s clampdown on internal corruption after 2005, signalled by the decision to dissolve the whole of the Lancashire Region, where the worst abuses had been found and to amalgamate it into the new North-West and Irish Region. As employers could no longer throw mud at the union and as its dedicated team of Workplace Organisers operated at grassroots level to deliver results – often coming in well below a company’s radar – the ballots for recognition began to swing the other way. In the case of ASDA this was achieved by a ratio of 9-1; in stark contrast to the debacle at Tyne and Wear

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just two years previously. Now the depots at Washington were pushing again to reclaim their union rights. One ASDA worker – who wished to remain anonymous in order to protect their job, told the press why GMB was necessary. The company “don’t want to pay you a lot above the minimum wage – I get over £7 an hour – and if you meet your target of, say, picking 1,400 items, they award you with a crate of beer or soft drinks rather than a bonus”. Another joined in to the debate and added that: “What you get really depends on your local manager.

Some can be really good, others need training in man management. The company has a system of consultation known as the colleague circle, which meets to discuss problems and negotiates pay levels. But often pay varies from depot to depot depending on whether there is union agreement. The union can go to independent arbitration to dispute the rise – and can end up getting better pay and conditions for doing the same work. This is why the GMB has been pushing for national collective bargaining”49. The company attempted, Wal-Mart U.S. style, to persuade the workforce to cut-out GMB and called in Portland Public Relations – a lobbying company run by Tim Allen, the former deputy to Alastair Campbell at Downing Street – to prepare campaigns to persuade them to vote against union recognition. It threatened “a return to dark days of 1970s style union militancy” if the union won and gave a glowing

contrast with the “modern alternative” where there were no bargaining rights but staff were compensated with better conditions. This time, the PR offensive fell on stony ground. GMB now enjoyed the trust of its members and proved that it could deliver for them. Having refused to recognise the union, ASDA found itself at an employment tribunal which backed GMB members, found that the company had broken the law, and ordered it to pay £850,000 in compensation to some 340 ASDA workers. Following the decision, GMB pushed onwards to establish national negotiating rights and, when it met with opposition from the employer, won a further ballot for strike action. However, at this point, ASDA suddenly capitulated under threat of industrial action and conceded both recognition and national pay bargaining to the union. No one had needed a toothless union, but one which thought and fought for its members was of vital and immediate import.

Gary Smith, GMB National Secretary for ASDA said, “GMB has won an almost unanimous vote to be the recognised union at the Lymedale depot in the West Midlands which is the tenth ballot we have won.

These votes in ASDA Wal-Mart give the lie to the claim that workers do not want to be in trade unions. Instead they prove that when workers are given a free choice on the matter they are almost unanimous in their demand for trade union rights”.

Behind everything, at every twist and

Steve Pryle, Chair of the trade union owned Workers Beer Company, nails his colours to the festival mast. Starting from a single beer tent on Wandsworth Common in 1980, the Workers Beer Company now crews most of the major rock festivals in the country.

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turn, were the entirely unregulated activities of the Private Equity and Venture Capital industries; and it was GMB that worked this out in advance of most. The elite group of multi-millionaires – sometimes oligarchic billionaires – who control Private Equity Funds (PEFs) like to portray themselves, as does the mainstream media, as striking, unconventional and entrepreneurial innovators, who create wealth and jobs, and are in large measure responsible for sustaining the British economy. The truth, however, could not be further removed.

The harsh reality is that they operate as little more than asset strippers, who are responsible for at least £2 billion of liabilities from now insolvent British and Irish pension funds. When a PEF takes over a company, not only the ownership but the status and structure of the firm change, allowing the new owners to ignore existing collective bargaining arrangements and – as in the case of the AA, Little Chef, and Birds Eye – derecognise the union as a prelude to job cuts, changes to pay and conditions, and a “restructuring” of the existing pension fund. The PEFs operate primarily in order to unlock the value in the companies that they acquire in order to redistribute those profits to their own investors. In order to guarantee high rates of return, they quickly sell off or borrow against the assets of the newly acquired company. The money acquired is then distributed back to the investors in the PEF leaving the company, by now divested of its most profitable assets, in massive debt

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and struggling to make good upon exorbitant interest payments. While the investors, who had simply put up the initial outlay of capital, reap a vast return, the process spells redundancies and the lowering of pay and conditions on the factory, or shop, floor. Industrial relations or considerations about the long term survival or growth of a company will never register, because the PEFs operate in a brief window of opportunity, to “smash and grab” assets, before moving on again to a new victim.

This is essentially a parasitic process, where the value of an individual’s labour, dedication and hard work is exploited on a vast scale.

Complex layers of debt, saddled upon the unwitting host companies as they are being stripped, are offset against any tax bill with the result that many of these consortia pay comparatively little or no tax at all.

Unfortunately, the British Government under both Blair and Brown seemed particularly enamoured with venture capital, and provided in the words of GMB “the most friendly environment for private equity funds in Europe, and this has encouraged a massive growth in the numbers of PEFs that choose to invest here”50. In the words of Josh Kosman – the business reporter for the New York Post – “nowhere has the influence of American private equity firms been more notable than in England … By 2008, private equity was more pervasive in England than in America, and had expanded to the rest of Europe [using Britain as the jumping-off point]. Now the companies

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Striking GMB members and their families chose to make their case outside the doors of the Marble Arch branch of Marks & Spencer.

they bought are facing the same huge debt burdens and likely defaults as those looming in the United States”51. This process was actively encouraged when Gordon Brown, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, cut capital gains tax from 40% to just 10%, ensuring a windfall for anyone wishing to buy or sell a business. Just as government in North America was looking to close off loopholes in tax and company law, Britain it seemed had opened up for speculation, and peculation.As North American firms rushed to open British offices, and David Rubenstein – one of the main players in private equity – hired the former Prime Minister, John Major, in order to better target those British businesses he wished to buy; some $22.5 billion was allocated for what amounted to the wholesale purchase and stripping of British industry and

services. In 2008, PEFs owned 349 British companies, employing some 1.2 million workers across almost 20% of the private sector. GMB was worried, but neither John Major – ensconced as Rubenstein’s chairman of European operations – nor, apparently, the Chancellor seemed particularly concerned. After a political career spent draping himself in the union flag, Major was now reaping vast financial rewards for dismembering the British economy. Patriotism is sometimes the first, rather than the last resort of a rogue. But Brown as an economist should have known better; and realised that the primary power of the nation state is its ability to tax efficiently and effectively. Without that it is nothing, and it is difficult to provide an easy explanation as to why he should have allowed private equity investors to establish

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GMB people: Congress 2011

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themselves as being above and beyond the reach of the state. Moreover, as a Labour Chancellor he should have instinctively sought not only to tax efficiently but also equitably. That he chose to do neither widened the breach between himself and Paul Kenny – who had already been curiously styled as a “rabid trade unionist”

by Brown’s sidekick Shriti Vadera – and contributed to the explosive scenes between the two men that culminated at the TUC in Brighton in September 2007. Brown whose temper was always quick thought of himself as a big man, and didn’t like or expect

it when someone chose to push back.

On another occasion, he had told Kenny that private equity was good for British management as it “shook them up”. Kenny, however, was singularly unimpressed with a group of people who “were paying less money in tax than the cleaners they employed”.

You should concentrate, he told the Prime Minister, on regulation and on distinguishing the financiers in “white hats” from those who wore the darkest “black” ones.

Furthermore, they were responsible – as GMB pointed out in June 2007 – for roughly 10% of all those pension schemes

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in Britain that had fallen into insolvency.

Paul Kenny clearly saw that: “Private investors, hidden under a cloak of secrecy and pretending to be interested in building up the UK economy, are taking the taxpayer for a ride, while destroying jobs and leaving in their wake thousands of workers who saved for their pensions without a pension, and dependent upon the state”52. If parliamentary and media support was lacking over the buyout of the AA – and Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, for one, thought that GMB’s campaign on private equity was only really a sophisticated way of “banker bashing” – then the attempt by large U.S. private equity firms to launch a £10 billion takeover of the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain and a £10.6 billion bid for Boots the Chemist certainly did rate as news. Westminster took an interest as Jon Cruddas and Alan Johnson, who were both jockeying to succeed John Prescott as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, suddenly prepared to echo GMB’s views at the Treasury Select Committee hearings on private equity. GMB submitted to the Select Committee that: “the Treasury needs to urgently consider the economic impact of the massive amounts of tax that are being legally avoided by PEFs and their investors, the advantage this gives them over stock exchange listed companies, the cost to the public purse, and the amount of value being stripped out of British companies”.

The union “called for the introduction of a Regulatory Authority to oversee the

private equity industry, and stated that the Treasury should also remove the economic advantages for short term investors; equalise the balance between private and publicly listed companies so that taxpayers are not subsidising private equity” and suggested that the government look at what might befall the British economy and labour market in the event of a rise in interest rates causing scores of companies taken over by PEFs to default upon their debt repayments53. No one could say that New Labour had not been warned in advance of the financial crash of 2008. The Select Committee hearings saw Damon Buffini unable to say how much money his company paid in taxation, while Peter Taylor revealed that despite Focus DIY stores being slashed by 20%, unable to pay its mountain of newly accumulated debt, and sold-on to another management company for a nominal sum of £1; his own investment of slightly less than 300 million euros had returned 800 million within less than two years. That the deal had also occasioned massive jobs losses and forced a profitable chain into insolvency – as part of a clearly articulated strategy – seemed to bother no one in the private equity industry. It was just “good” business sense.

Despite a rash of unfavourable headlines, Parliament provided for only a voluntary code, drafted by the PEF industry’s own senior adviser Sir David Walker, but in the event only 32 of 200 companies specialising in venture capital signed up even to this.

GMB National Equality Conference 2009.

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Colin Breed, a Liberal Democrat member on the Treasury Select Committee confided to Josh Kosman that he believed “very strongly in professional regulation”, and though the tax levy on what were effectively windfall profits was raised from 10% to 18%, the PEFs remained free from outside scrutiny and were allowed to continue devouring what was left of British business.

The subsequent collapse of the Southern Cross chain of nursing homes, in autumn 2011, due to a PEF scandal, left 31,000 vulnerable and elderly people in danger of losing both their carers and the roof above their heads. The union had been warning for more than three years that the business model used in the private care sector was unsustainable and had been exacerbated by floatation of Southern Cross on the London Stock Exchange, in 2006, with the rest homes sold and leased back to the parent company, a U.S. PEF company Blackstone.

GMB had already established that £100 million per annum of mainly public money, intended to pay for the care of the elderly, was being siphoned off to pay for the spiralling costs of rents. Furthermore, union members heard constant complaints from the families of pensioners about the poor levels of care, while they themselves were denied sick pay or paid breaks and often had to provide the biscuits that went with the elderly patients’ tea54. Paul Kenny wrote that: “What happened at Southern Cross must inform not only Labour Movement policy towards social care and health care

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but also our approach to economic policy and the role of the state. Never again should trade unionists be lectured by people either inside our Movement or by the greedy and gullible outside it about the necessity of rolling back the state and letting the market rip … Southern Cross should serve as a warning of what happens when we forget our basic approach”. And, he concluded by rounding on New Labour’s economic mismanagement and hubris: “The promise by new Labour to end boom and bust was foolish … It was new Labour’s economic policy that let the country down not the Labour Movement’s traditional economic policy”55.

Without GMB, the depredations of venture capitalists would probably never have been brought to public knowledge.

As a result it was natural that it should extend its reach to also embrace within its membership tied tenants in pubs, who were primary victims of a new rentier class of offshore bond holders, who now controlled many of the major pub chains. The trouble was that GMB’s political arm – which had always been the Labour Party and which should have been the last piece of the jigsaw – failed to act because it could simply no longer see the flaws that were inherent in capitalism. The old certainties and political alignments were no longer firmly rooted and, in recovering its pride and sense of radicalism, GMB was rushing fast into new, exciting but wholly uncharted territories.

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GMB Delegates at the National Equality Conference, Manchester, 2009

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We only Want the earth GMB had long been the Labour Party’s firmest supporter at the TUC, it had rarely deviated from the leadership line and had given selflessly to fill the party’s coffers and to campaign for the return of a Labour government.Yet fighting modern elections was becoming a more and more expensive business and the union began to feel that it was seeing precious little return for all its efforts. In 2000-2001, the Labour Party had needed £23 million each year just in order to service its costs, and estimated that the forthcoming general election would cost an extra £20 million. In reality, this meant that the party would have to find £63 million in order to meet its commitments over just two years and estimated over that there would be £12 million deficit in the budget that could realistically be met through the help of the unions. In 2000, GMB set aside £2.65 million and promised that the surplus of £500,000 from what remained available from the union’s political fund would also be pledged to the party over the next two years56. It is inconceivable that the unbroken run of electoral success enjoyed by the Blair governments could ever have been achieved without the help and support of unions like GMB and their members.

There was no doubt that the 1997 election had marked a new beginning for Britain and that the Labour government had delivered on constitutional reform, regional government and a raft of broadly progressive social policies. Foremost among

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these were the national minimum wage and the provision of massive additional funding for the National Health Service. In its early days, it had returned full trade union rights to civil servants working at the GCHQ listening station and had promised that unions would have a legal right to be represented in the workplace. Though the expectations of union activists always ran ahead of what the PLP believed to be possible, and the commitments given to union leaders at Warwick I and II had been watered down to the point that they were little more than statements of goodwill, Tony Blair enjoyed an unprecedented degree of popularity and a remarkable run of political good luck until he decided to match domestic success with a foreign policy triumph. The resulting decision to go to war in Iraq did much to tarnish his personal image and served to expose many of the flaws and tensions at the heart of the New Labour project. Discontent was already growing within GMB, John Edmonds had already moved to scale back union funding of the party, provoking the ire of the New Labour hierarchy and probably prompting their decision to offer him a peerage in the hope that it would remove him from the union scene and, at the same time, help to fill one of the large number of life peerages that it had just created. Edmonds’ refusal had been galling but what should have been truly worrying to the party leadership was the report, at the beginning of 2000, that some Lancashire

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GMB branches were choosing not to affiliate to their local constituency Labour parties and that in “Lancashire Region no money would be donated to the Labour Party unless the Party demonstrated support for members”57. Furthermore, even if Paul Kenny did not fit conveniently into the media stereotype of the “awkward squad” of the new generation of trade union leaders which was held to include Bob Crow, Andy Gilchrist, Mick Rix, Tony Woodley and, for a time, Derek Simpson – he was in many ways an even less comfortable figure to deal with than Edmonds. GMB members were genuinely angry about the effects of government policies which had led to rising oil prices, less progressive forms of taxation, a lack of social housing and the looting of pension funds and sacking of workers occasioned by the refusal to clampdown upon the private equity industry. If this was not bad enough, then the decision to close Remploy factories had prompted a major GMB campaign aimed at overturning government policy, and had enraged many previously loyal Labour supporters within the union.

In the spring of 2008, proposals for the reform of political funding, which could give New Labour greater control over the political funds of affiliated unions, sparked another conflict between GMB and Party.

This forced GMB’s hand and raised the question of disaffiliation, which gained headlines across the national press.Yet, the union still sought to fight its corner inside,

as opposed to outside, the Labour Party tent and proposed a series of measures to challenge the party leadership, while instituting practical measures to ensure a greater say for the hundreds of thousands of GMB members who paid their political levy and as such were actively supporting Labour in power. As a result, at the GMB Congress in 2008, the union pledged itself to monitor the performance of the 108 M.P.s in its parliamentary group and promised that it would withdraw its funding from any one of them who failed to support

Putting the case to the media ...

GMB Hull members locked out of work by their employers take their case to the company in London.

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A picture paints a thousand words ... Southport 2010.

Though GMB have been critical of New Labour, it is nevertheless supportive of the many progressive measures introduced by Labour Governments between 1997-2010. Foremost among these were the National Minimum Wage, offering more protection for the lowest paid, and its commitments to tackle Gangmasters and to regulate corporate takeovers.

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GMB policies or refused to work with the loyal branches. Though GMB refused to contemplate disaffiliation from the party that it had created and was still providing funding to the tune of £1.2 million per year, it was no longer prepared to fund M.P.s who treated workers with contempt.

Paul Kenny chose to fire a warning shot across the government’s bows when he told them that the union “cannot be immune to the fact that many of our members do not vote Labour. There is a great level of frustration about the government’s failure to deal with simple, day-to-day, bread and butter issues that affect workers. In particular, alongside the Remploy scandal,

GMB members could not comprehend why a Labour government at both national and local levels should choose to sanction the use of workers on poor temporary contracts or agency workers instead of employing properly trained full-time workers. As Brian Strutton, a GMB National Secretary put it, the amount of money being spent by councils on temporary staff was an “horrific abuse of the public purse. The point is”, he continued, “that this is more than just filling in gaps. On this scale, it is a deliberate scam. Too many councils are using cheap temps when they should be recruiting permanent staff who can be properly trained and given the experience that is necessary to provide quality local staff to the public”. The union advised its own councillors to “get a grip” on the funds being spent upon temporary and agency workers and railed against the refusal of the British government to sign directives on working hours and the employment rights of agency staff. The answer seemed to be to hit New Labour where it hurt most; in the purse. Some 30 Labour M.P.s and their constituency parties who has supported the worst of the Blairite free market policies, were targeted for censure and served notice that their funding – amounting to up to £20,000 each – would be terminated if they continued to pursue policies that hurt working people. Amongst this number were a Minister at the Foreign Office, the Vice Chair of the Labour Party, and four parliamentary private secretaries. The

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money saved was to be ploughed back into encouraging individual GMB members to get involved in their own constituencies and to support those M.P.s who showed dedication to their constituents and were prepared to support campaigns led by GMB. In the 2007 contest for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party the voting power of the unions had been dispersed among a number of candidates. Unite funded Jon Cruddas; UNISON backed the Blairite Alan Johnson, who held few hopes for securing union friendly policies; and GMB together with ASLEF, UCATT, NUM and BFAWU backed Peter Hain who they felt “stands for real partnership with working people and their unions and [the] retention of the unions’ conference rights”58. However, within a matter of weeks Hain was engulfed by a scandal about the nature of the funding of his campaign, which knocked him out of the race, and Harriet Harman – who had lacked a major constituency within the unions – was able to win election without their significant patronage.

The lesson was plain, that in pursuing their own ends the unions had fatally diluted their influence within the PLP. But fortunately, they were in a mood to learn and within less than two years entirely reversed their position during the Labour leadership elections, making common cause and turning weakness into a remarkable display of strength. Through making common cause GMB, together with UNITE and some of their smaller fellows, did

achieve an enormous and largely unforeseen success, in September 2010, when it ensured the victory of Ed Miliband over his Blairite brother in the contest for the Labour party leadership. The unions had not exerted their power in such decisive fashion for more than a generation and in working together had effectively put down a barrier to the continuation of the Blairite, neoliberal project by another name. Two years later, the GMB’s General Secretary provided a stark warning to those Labour M.P.s who had still not adjusted themselves to their loss of office, or to the simple truth that the first duty of an opposition is actually to oppose: “for all those who hanker after a return to New Labour, you forget it. The brand is as politically toxic as Nick Clegg. Those in the Shadow Cabinet who dream of days gone by had better wake up and realise the stark truth, five million people stopped voting New Labour. They rejected you and so do we. The GMB vision of social housing, transaction tax, controls on banks and private equity, an end to our public services being sold off, that is the programme that this union is going to fight for inside the TUC, the Labour Party, and the country; growth, a future”59.

All the prospective candidates for the Labour leadership had appeared at hustings at the GMB Congress, held in Southport 2010. The contest was notable for the failure of the Left-wing candidate, John McDonnell, to receive enough nominations to be able to stand from the parliamentary party – a

“GMB has emerged

rough opponent

in recent years as a bit of a

to go in the ring with,

as politicians, multinationals, and private equities found out

”

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A ‘rogues gallery’ of private equity chiefs assembled by the union at the Glastonbury Festival.

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clear indication of the weakness of the radical Left in the PLP – and also for Mary Turner’s put down of the then front runner, David Miliband. A very telling question had been posed from the floor of Congress by an ordinary GMB member who asked the prospective Labour leaders what their first job had been. Save for McDonnell and Andy Burnham, all of the other candidates appeared distinctly uncomfortable and at something of a loss to provide a straightforward answer, David Miliband offered that as a little boy, he had always wanted to be a bus conductor, and did not really grasp the irony when quick as a flash, Mary Turner reminded him of his good fortune in not realising his ambition “as now you would be out of a job”.

As the country fell under the grip of an ideologically loaded coalition government, led by David Cameron, that was intent upon going further and faster with its agenda in 13 months than the New Labour government had ever dared in 13 years, the political

culture of the union also began to shift in subtle and perhaps unexpected ways.

In appearing before GMB’s 2011 Congress, Vince Cable, a leading minister in the coalition government, had been careful to play upon sentiments and expressions of automatic loyalty to a tradition that meant little or nothing to a new generation of union activists, too young to remember the Callaghan government or even the tragic death of John Smith. Thus, Cable’s attempt to establish empathy through stories of his Labour Party membership in the 1970s and his good working relationship with Smith failed to strike a chord with the audience, while his none too subtle attempt to threaten the union with further legal restraint should it choose to step out of line was greeted by gasps, jeers and catcalls that profoundly shook him. He, like many other members of the political classes had failed to register that the rules of the game had changed and that GMB was no longer to be led by blind political expediency but by the needs and

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wishes of its membership. In future, the union would seek to deploy its patronage behind those politicians who would forward its own agenda and seek to support its own values.

GMB was also in the process of redefining itself as an urban services union – covering such areas as transport, education, retail, hospitals, recreation, including parks services, and utilities – none of which can be outsourced to Asia, or other parts of the developing world, as its delivery is rooted in a particular locality. It retains a hold on some areas of manufacturing industry – food, building materials, specialist hi-tech engineering and has a presence in construction – but the traditional metal working trades such as the Boilermakers have been forced into the background, as the sector has declined. It is a well balanced union and truly a “general” one; in that it is no longer dominated by any one particular trade grouping, and is equally strong in both the public and private sectors. It has a large presence in utilities, as that is where the union and its constituent parts were formed, has a significant concentration of members in the nuclear power industry at Sellafield, and in retail – where it has won the battle for recognition – in ASDA and Wilkinsons, with a smattering of membership at Marks and Spencers’ stores. In the field of transport, the main union is mainly represented in security staff at airports, and enjoys a strong presence in the wider security industry, working in concerts, clubs, swimming pools and parks.

In terms of environmental services, it

represents the layers below management in health service, such as the cleaners, caterers, auxiliary staff and hospital porters. Some branches like the tattooists will never be big, on account of the small-scale artisanlike nature of their profession while the sex workers found a home in GMB primarily because no other union wanted to help them. Similarly, the union’s fast growing sector of membership among language workers and classroom assistants has developed inside GMB because the NUT refused them, in order to protect the higher strata of its own teachers who felt threatened. In every case, GMB has overseen a transition to a broadbased services union where two thirds of the working population are employed in services as opposed to manufacturing industry. The union, which has a roughly equal split between female and male members, and high levels of membership among ethnic minorities and new immigrant communities, has not developed in that direction in order to meet targets or to suit particular demographic theories. It simply resembles and reflects wider society, and those people who actually do the work.

Thus, GMB formed a coalition with the Polish trade union Solidarnosc in order to ensure that Polish workers coming to Britain knew their individual employment rights, as well as providing language training, job training and work placements, in a scheme pioneered by Southern Region. The Polish consul was a guest at the union’s 2008 Congress and it made both

This tower at the Glastonbury festival was built by GMB members from the Appledore Shipyard in Devon. Its rotating beacon serves as a symbol of hope for organised labour across the globe.

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GMB energy workers lobby Parliament against proposed pension cuts.

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good moral and economic sense from the union’s own point of view that new immigrants from the East of Europe could not be exploited by unscrupulous businesses or be cynically used by employers to undercut existing wages and conditions in Britain. Similarly, in February 2012, in echoes of Grunwick; the largely female workforce drawn from the Goan community in Swindon began a protracted dispute that stemmed from Government use of PFI and private equity companies, and focused on the appalling treatment of the workforce under these conditions. Support workers at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital launched an 18 day strike, after

more than 100 staff signed a grievance form alleging a culture of bullying among management. At the root of the malpractice was the private contractor and PEF specialist, Carillion which had been given contracts at the heart of the NHS and employed more than 200 cleaners, caterers, porters, and theatre technicians at the hospital.

Three-quarters of them were GMB members, which balloted staff on strike action in January 2012 and recorded a vote 97% in favour of taking industrial action, on a 84% turn out among the workforce.

Carole Vallelly, GMB Southern Regional Organiser, said that her members were reluctantly forced into taking action: “But they don’t see any other way of getting Carillon to treat them with respect at work. There is no place for bullying in the modern workplace. There is certainly no place for bullying in the NHS”60.

Noisy, colourful and generally good humoured demonstrations followed, not least outside Carillon’s office block at Euston Square, as the union showed its resolve to pursue the often faceless outlets and holding companies that sought to control its members lives; getting to the bottom of often extremely complex patterns of ownership and bringing to book exploitative company directors, giving them faces, names and nowhere to hide.

Other campaigns are still being waged.

The coalition government was quick to target the remaining 54 Remploy factories for closure, moving to cut off all their state

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funding by 2013 and hiving off profitable sections – like the Remploy Healthcare Group – through privatisation. Despite being described in the press as the “government’s most callous step yet” hundreds of the disabled workers affected, having overwhelmingly won a ballot for strike action, began to pursue direct actions across London; bringing traffic in London’s Regent Street to a halt, in January 2012, through a wheelchair protest. As the GMB’s Remploy Convenor, Les Woodward, explained: “You don’t get a capitalist investing in something out the goodness of their hearts.

These skilled workers make specialist orthotics for shoes. And workers at the sites are being put on inferior contracts”, he thought that the struggle would be long and hard but noted that “the support we have received from M.P.s, the local community and trades council has been brilliant”61.

All of this has been made possible due to the union’s growth, which has risen by some 20% in real terms over just seven years – to approximately 610,000 members – since the adoption of the GMB@WORK strategy in 2005. Decades of financial and membership losses have been brought to an end and turned around; and it is no mere coincidence that this process occurred at the same time that the union was returned to full lay control. The union has been fundamentally changed for the better, with four out of every five members now working in the service sector, almost half the membership being women – as we have

already seen – officials being no longer permitted to sit upon the CEC, a reduction from eight industrial sections to just three, and a return to an annual Congress. All these developments focus “on the core truth – that a growing union delivers for its members while a shrinking union lets members down”62.

Furthermore, GMB has been remarkably clear in its approach to industrial issues and to government. It understands that power concedes nothing without a demand; and that every advance is predicated upon struggle. As the union tells its Workplace Organisers: “Our members never got anything at work from their governor that they didn’t have to struggle for. Some of you are in workplaces where you fought and won your own battles to get the power to be here today. Some of you are enjoying the benefits of other peoples’ fights in your workplace from years ago. But no one got here without a fight. Because overall, there are only two sources of industrial and economic power in the world: organised people and organised money. And money is very well organised indeed”63. The task for the union, is to be just as organised and just as combative in pursuit of its own members’ rights as finance capital is in pursuit of individual greed. But then old ways of operating, politically and industrially, will not deliver that for GMB and its membership. As illustrated by the case of private equity, the union set and led the agenda with the media – including the

GMB Regional Secretaries: (top row) Tommy Brennan, Northern; Harry Donaldson, Scotland and Allan Garley, Wales & South West. (middle row) Paul Hayes, London; Paul McCarthy, North West & Irish and Paul Maloney, Southern. (bottom row) Joe Morgan, Birmingham & West Midlands; Tim Roache, Yorkshire & North Derbyshire and Andy Worth, Midland & East Coast.

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A new bronze of GMB President Mary Turner kept in pride of place in Thorne House, London Region.

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Financial Times, not normally a bastion of the Left – coming to it for information and analysis.Yet, when it came to securing the parliamentary knock-out blow against a particularly corrupt sector, its representatives at Westminster failed to deliver upon regulation, despite a clear majority in both the Commons and the select committees.

Thus it came as no surprise when, in February 2012, the “Executive noted that over a quarter of motions to GMB Congress from branches across the whole of the UK relate to the political stance of the union.

The Executive determined that the union’s relations with the Labour Party and what GMB members expect and want from the Party will form a major plank in the debate at GMB Congress in Brighton in June [2012].

The Executive expressed concern and disappointment with recent statements made by senior Party officials and registered their growing frustration at the lack of a cohesive policy to protect working people from the ravages of the Tory-led coalition government”64. Despite the Labour Movement putting 2 million people on the streets, which included an enormous GMB contingent, to protest against cuts and services, in March 2011; the Labour Party still sought to distance itself from the industrial culture of working people and placed the question of the union’s continued role in funding the party back on the agenda65. With the prospect of further legislation aimed to further erode trade union freedoms and to curtail the right to

strike, GMB was conscious that its future lay firmly in its own hands, to build or to throw away. Experience had taught that survival would come not through managed decline or mergers, but from every workplace in the land. If survival can be secured through mass civil disobedience, or direct actions, then that is what it will have to take to bring home to a rapacious and utterly ruthless Cameron Government that the spirit of working people cannot be broken or bought. A union that recognises its own traditions should realise that direct action was what built the union in the first place – at Leeds, at Beckton, at Canning Town and West Ham – Thorne, Angle, Pete Curran, Eleanor Marx and Will Cockayne, were engaged in just that, fully accepted the risks, and aimed at nothing less than – to paraphrase James Connolly’s words – achieving the common ownership of the earth, itself. It is one thing to nod towards a heroic past, but it is quite another to realise that the present can be invested with its own heroisms, big and small, played out every day in workplaces across the country wherever working people choose to stand together against injustice. Today’s GMB both understands its past and has swept back to reclaim its founding inspiration; that society is going to have to change, that one of the major roles of the union is political struggle – whether it takes parliamentary or extra-parliamentary form – and that its central core aims and values are more than enough to change the world for the better

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of all. In Paul Kenny’s words, it is about “articulating all that was proper, true and right”66.

Addressing his membership, in the summer of 2011, Kenny outlined precisely what GMB stood for and why it was needed to inform everyday lives and to provide a distinctive voice, and representation for its people. He began with a statement of fact: “This great union of ours is growing.

We fear no employer or politician. We exist to support and fight for the rights of working people and our communities and the vulnerable in our society. The GMB has emerged in recent years as a bit of a rough opponent to go in the ring with, as politicians, multinationals, and private equities found out. What we do is fight for justice, a decent and fair society. We are against exploitation.

We demand respect for pensioners and a

decent pension for all. We will not tolerate discrimination whether it is the colour of your skin, your gender, your age, disability, your sexuality, or any other reason.We believe in the right to decent housing, social housing, council housing, and if politicians put a fraction of that money into that instead of lining the pockets of private landlords with housing benefit cheques … then not only would the country be richer, but tens of thousands of families would have a decent home to live in … We believe in the right to good, free, high-quality healthcare. We believe in the right for all to have access to work. We believe that unemployment is a scourge. We believe young people have a right to education, to work, to respect, and we believe that one million young people denied those basic rights is a scandal and a waste … We believe that instead of

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Paul Kenny addresses union members during the Lindsey Oil Refinery Dispute.

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demonising those receiving welfare or social benefits, a decent society, a fair society, should target the tax dodgers, the multinationals, the City and private equity … We believe that good public services are a hallmark of a decent modern society and we believe that those who deliver those services should be respected and valued”.

Above all, GMB stands for the many not the few: “What we stand up for is help for the needy … We will not be bullied and we will not stay silent … we do not fear anything for ourselves. We fear for the damage this Government is and will do to our citizens and our communities, and to Cameron and Clegg … I give you this promise from the GMB, you try to stifle the basic fundamental rights of working people to go on strike and we will give you the biggest civil disobedience campaign [you] … can ever be involved in … That is why I say that I believe that these years of rebuilding this

organisation has now made us fit for the purpose that Will Thorne and those that went before us set in place, that is, not just to create social change but to challenge those who would destroy our society”67.

Amid desperate cuts, rapidly growing unemployment, decaying public services and an ever widening gulf between the rich and the poor; the union stands proud once more, for social cohesion, social justice, fairness and dignity at work, and the sense that those who do the most to create a nation’s wealth should have a share and a say in its distribution. GMB stands for socialism not the barbarism of the free market, for better, more productive and decent lives for its hundreds of thousands of members ranged across the land, and for economic and political power to be relocated in the many and not the few.

By these core values, GMB has, and forever will, take its stand.

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further reADInG AnD BIBlIoGr

The story of the GmB does not, of course, begin or end with this book. The union is fortunate to have been the subject of a number of fulllength studies and most of its earlier leadership left behind substantial memoirs or had later biographies written about them. Sometimes there are both.

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t

he starting point is Will Thorne’s autobiography, My Life’s Battles, a book that every member of the GMB should treasure. For a man who only learned to read and write comparatively late in life, Thorne possessed real literary talent and a gift for self expression and reflection that is scarcely equalled in the work of any other leader of the British Labour Movement. Certainly Bondfield, Clynes and Jones never came close. He does not seek to justify himself, refrains from settling old scores and succeeds in fashioning a narrative that moves along at a rattling pace full of incident, life, and at times, high adventure. It is, therefore unsurprising that all of his subsequent biographers have to a greater or lesser extent, been indebted to it.

The best modern, scholarly biography of Thorne is by a French author, Francois Bedarida, though unfortunately, despite being published in 1987, it has not yet found an English translator. There is also the standard biography, Will Thorne: Constructive Militant, written for the union by Giles & Lisanne Radice, in 1974. Well researched, incisive and considered, it not only supplements Thorne’s autobiography but also provides an excellent, concise account

of the union’s foundation and early years.

In addition, there is a play, Will of Iron, written for young adults in 1983, that seeks to dramatise his bleak childhood and early life. Now somewhat dated, it manages to capture the pathos of all those whose lives were crushed by the industrial revolution but never comes close to exploring the roots of his courage, his engagement with Marxism or the nature of his triumph.

The union has always been proud of its achievements and produced three attractive souvenir brochures to commemorate, respectively, its 40th, 50th and 60th anniversaries. As well as being a mine of information on the regions, they also provide a good guide to the dominant personalities within the union at a given point. Shifts in emphasis and iconography do much to highlight the changing political and economic concerns of the leadership, as well as demonstrating just how far the union had moved from its origins.

It is significant that by the time of the union’s 70th anniversary, in 1959, the tradition of issuing handsomely produced celebrations of the union’s history and traditions had been discontinued. Instead, the union chose to commission H. A. Clegg, a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, to

Aphy

write both a scholarly analysis of the GMW’s administrative structure, which appeared in 1954, and a more popular narrative history of a General Union in a Changing Society, which was published a decade later. The latter work, in particular, is a mine of biographical information about the union’s officer corps and also provides a good snapshot of Jack Cooper’s vision for the union.

A later union-sponsored history,Yvonne Kapp’s The Air of Freedom, published to mark the centenary of the GMB in 1989, deals with the early years of the Gasworkers within the context of the rise of new unionism and provides an easy and well illustrated introduction to major themes.

While most studies of the union have been written from the top-down, there are two wonderful accounts of branch life, written from the perspective of grass-roots members. The first, Beckton’s Struggles, was written in 1955, and provides a radical history of the first trade unionists to organise in the gas works from 1870 through to the consolidation of Thorne’s victory twenty years later. Stoking up the Past, published by the GMB’s Southern Region in 1989, and based largely upon oral sources, set out to provide “a sketchbook” of both the industry and

the union in Plymouth from 1889 to the late 1970s.

That none of the union’s later leadership has been, to date, the subject of a biography and that the union’s story has never been written beyond 1964, it is a sad reflection of the decline in interest in the trade unions on the part of mainstream political commentators and the media. As power and self confidence begin to ebb away, there is less impetus to study, preserve and record.

It is precisely this gap that the present book was intended by today’s resurgent GMB, to fill.

It has been written with the union’s own membership very much in mind, in the knowledge that in many branches, attics, and regional offices there are still many banners,

minute books, and faded photographs to be found that speak to us of our shared endeavours and our proud past.

Yet, there is nothing more forlorn, than an old standard, cut off behind a glass case, with no one left to bear it on a demonstration, a picket, or a mayday march.

The sources contained over the next few pages provide an apparatus for any reader who wishes to further explore the themes and issues raised by this book; it is entirely up to the reader and our unions membership, to decide what to use or to discard, what to fight for and what to create for all our futures.

John callow 2 April 2012 411

A

c

Anon., From Factory to Forum.Will Thorne’s Birthday – Stories of a Romantic Career, 3 pp. manuscript, (GMWU, 7 October 1921).

Anon., Fifty Years of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, (National Union of General and Municipal Workers, London, 1939).

Anon., Will Thorne, unpublished 5pp. manuscript, (GMWU, London, 1968).

Anon., May Day: A Hundred Year History, (Novosti Press Agency, Moscow, 1990).

Callow J., Change the World.The History of Amicus: A Union of a New Type, 2002-2007, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 2011).

A. Campbell, The Blair Years, ed. A. Campbell & R. Stott, (Hutchinson, London, 2007).

Clegg, H.A., General Union. A Study of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1954).

Clegg, H.A., General Union in a Changing Society, (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1964).

Collins, H., ‘The Marxism of the Social Democratic Federation’ in: Briggs, A., & Saville, J., (eds.), Essays in Labour History, 1886-1923, (Macmillan, London & Basingstoke, 1971), pp.47-69.

Connell, J., The King of the Poachers, (Tideline Books, Rhyl, 1983).

Cooper, J., Jack Cooper – Writes and Speaks,Vol.I, (GMWU, Manchester, 1965).

Cooper, J., Jack Cooper – Writes and Speaks,Vol.II, (GMWU, Manchester, 1967).

Crick, M, The History of the Social Democratic Federation, (Keele University Press, Bodmin, 1994).

Cummings, D.C., A Historical Survey of the Boiler Makers’ and Iron and Steel Ship Builders’ Society, from August 1834 to August 1904, (R. Robinson & Co. Ltd., Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1905).

B Barnsley, T., Breaking their Chains. Mary Macarthur and the Chainmakers’ Strike of 1910, (Bookmarks Publications, London, 2010 rpt. 2011).

Barty-King, H., New Flame. How Gas changed the Commercial, Domestic and Industrial Life of Britain between 1813 and 1984, (Graphmitre Limited, Tavistock, 1984).

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415

enDnoteS

chapter 1 1

2 3 4 5

6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

416

W. Thorne, My Life’s Battles, (London, George Newnes Ltd., London, 1926), p.130; The Leeds Mercury, (2 July 1890), p.8; The Leeds Mercury,(3 July 1890), p.8; The Leeds Mercury – Saturday Weekly Supplement, (5 July 1890), p.3; The Yorkshire Post, (2 July 1890), p.5: & H. Hendrick, ‘The Leeds Gas Strike, 1890’, Publications of the Thoresby Society. Miscellany, (1974),Vol. LIV Part 2, p.88.

The Leeds Mercury – Saturday Weekly Supplement, (5 July 1890), p.3.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.130.

The Leeds Mercury, (3 July 1890), p.8.

Borough of Leeds, ‘Proceedings of Committees from 27th August 1890 to 23rd September 1890, both inclusive’, p.21; in: Borough of Leeds, Council Proceedings, 1889-1892, (Leeds City Council, 1892), Part 1.

The Leeds Mercury – Saturday Weekly Supplement, (5 July 1890), p.3.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, pp.128 & 131.

Quoted by E.P. Thompson, ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’ in: E.P. Thompson, Persons & Polemics, (Merlin Press, London, 1994), p.37; Hendrick, ‘Leeds Gas Strike’, p.79; & “B.F.” [i.e. Isabella Ford] (ed.), Tom Maguire. A Remembrance, (Labour Press Society Ltd., Manchester, 1895), p.xv.

Thompson, ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’, pp.33-43 & 52-54.

A. Briggs, Victorian Cities, (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1963 rpt. 1968), pp.217 & 219.

Hendrick, ‘Leeds Gas Strike’, p.81.

Leeds Evening Express, (30 June 1890) quoted in: Hendrick, ‘Leeds Gas Strike’, p.81.

Hendrick, ‘Leeds Gas Strike’, p.89.

Borough of Leeds, ‘Proceedings from 28th May 1890 to 24th June 1890, both inclusive’ in: Council Proceedings, p.22, Hendrick, ‘Leeds Gas Strike’, pp.82-83.

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, pp.128-129.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.129.

The Leeds Mercury, (2 July 1890), p.8.

The Leeds Mercury, (3 July 1890), p.8.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.131.

Hendrick, ‘Leeds Gas Strike’, p.93.

For the costs to the rates payer, incurred by the Gas Committee alone, see: Borough of Leeds, ‘Proceedings of Committees from 30th July 1890 to 26th August 1890, both inclusive’, in Council Proceedings, pp.22-23.

The Leeds Mercury, (4 July 1890), p.8.

The Leeds Mercury, (5 July 1890), p.7.

The Leeds Mercury, (5 July 1890), p.7.

The Yorkshire Post, (4 July 1890), p.5.

The Leeds Mercury, (3 July 1890), p.8.

The Leeds Mercury, (4 July 1890), p.8; & The Yorkshire Post, (4 July 1890), p.5.

Hendrick, ‘Leeds Gas Strike’, p.95.

K. Marx & F. Engels, Collected Works, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 2001),Vol.48 p.519; & Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.132.

chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, pp.62-63.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, pp.37 & 40.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, pp.68-69.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.69.

J. Schneer, Ben Tillett. Portrait of a Labour Leader, (Croom Helm, London & Canberra, 1982), pp.32-33, 35-36 & 39-40.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.70.

W.H. Chaloner, People and Industries, (Frank Cass & Company Ltd., London, 1963), pp.126-130; & T.I. Williams,

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26

A History of the British Gas Industry, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981), pp.8-10.

B. Grant, Beckton’s Struggles, (Beckton Gas Works Branch CPGB, London, 1955), p.2.

Williams, History of the British Gas Industry, p.48; & Grant, Beckton’s Struggles, p.3.

Grant, Beckton’s Struggles, pp.6-7.

Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, pp.161-162.

Grant, Beckton’s Struggles, p.14.

Grant, Beckton’s Struggles, p.14.

A. Bird & H. Nabb, Stoking up the Past, (British Gas / GMB Southern Region, Plymouth, 1989), p.3; & E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men. Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1964 rpt. 1979), pp.159-160.

H. Barty-King, New Flame, (Graphmitre Ltd., Tavistock, 1984), p.257.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.37.

Bird & H. Nabb, Stoking up the Past, pp.52 & 54.

Grant, Beckton’s Struggles, p.15.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.37.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.74.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.71.

See: S. Webb & H. Cox, The Eight Hours Day, (Walter Scott, London, 1891).

Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, p.169.

Schneer, Ben Tillett, p.40; Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.73; & Y. Kapp, The Air of Freedom:The Birth of New Unionism, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1989), p.55.

Thorne, W., et al, Souvenir History of the National Union of General& Municipal Workers. Forty Years, 1889-1929, (Co-operative Printing Society, London, 1929, p.5; & Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.80.

H.A. Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society. A Short History of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, 1889-1964, (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1964), p.13.

27 Kapp, Air of Freedom, p.58.

28 Grant, Beckton’s Struggles, p.25.

29 Thorne, My Life’s Battles, pp.86-87; & E.A. & G.H. Radice, Will Thorne: Constructive Militant, (George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1974), pp.35-36.

30 See: R. Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1955 rpt. 2002). The original, heavily abridged edition, was published in 1914.

chapter 3 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Anon., May Day: A Hundred Year History, (Novosti Press Agency, Moscow, 1990), p.24.

Y. Kapp, Eleanor Marx,Volume II The Crowded Years, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1976), pp.382-383.

W. Thorne et al, Souvenir History of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers; Forty Years, 1889-1929, (GMWU, London, 1929), p.25.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.99.

Kapp, Eleanor Marx,Volume II, p.383 f.n.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.126.

Kapp, Eleanor Marx,Volume II, p.383.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.126; & Kapp, Eleanor Marx, Volume II, pp.383-384.

Marx & Engels, Collected Works,Vol.50 p.533; & Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.47.

Kapp, Eleanor Marx,Volume II, pp.484-485.

Marx & Engels, Collected Works,Vol.50 p.558.

Commonweal, (6 July 1889).

Kapp, Eleanor Marx,Volume II, p.486.

B.F. (ed.), Tom Maguire, pp.127-128.

Marx & Engels, Collected Works,Vol.50 p.300; & Radice, Will Thorne, p.50.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.51; & D. McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

a Borough, 1886-1936. The Story of West Ham, (County Borough of West Ham, London, 1936), pp.21-23.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.53; & McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years, pp.22-23.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.133; & Kapp, Eleanor Marx, Volume II, p.396.

Kapp, Eleanor Marx,Volume II, p.394.

Kapp, Eleanor Marx,Volume II, p.395.

Thorne et al, Souvenir History, p.5; & Bird & Nabb, Stoking up the Past, pp.6-7.

GMWU Journal, (February 1946), pp.52-53.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, pp.162-165 & 168.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.55.

C. Tsuzuki, H.M. Hyndman and British Socialism, (Oxford University Press, London, 1961), p.160.

Tsuzuki, Hyndman, p.160.

Tsuzuki, Hyndman, p.160.

H.A. Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1964), p.57.

Thorne et al, Souvenir History, pp.5-6.

Thorne et al, Souvenir History, p.26.

GMWU, Fifty Years of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, (GMWU, London, 1939), p.14.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.67; & Clegg, General Union, p.69.

Clegg, General Union, p.74.

Clegg, General Union, p.75.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.69.

Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.76.

chapter 4 1 2

GMWU Journal, (September 1929), p.312.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.73; & Thorne, My Life’s Battles, p.219.

3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

Radice, Will Thorne, p.73.

J.R. Clynes, Memoirs, 1869-1924,Vol.I (Hutchinson & Co., London, 1937), p.198.

Clynes, Memoirs,Vol.I pp.201 & 205.

Clynes, Memoirs,Vol.I pp.218-220.

S. Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions. An Outline History of Women in the British Trade Union Movement, (Ernest Benn Ltd., London & Tonbridge, 1977), pp.152 & 155.

Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, p.89.

GMB Direct, issue 26, (May-June 1996), p.2.

W. Shilleto, ‘A Country Fit for Heroes’, GMWU Journal, (March 1929), pp.234-235.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.91; & Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, pp.98-99.

M. Stephens, Ernest Bevin. Unskilled Labourer and World Statesman, (TGWU, London, 1981), pp.49-52 & 55.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.91; & Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, pp.99-100.

Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions, pp.161 & 175.

Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions, p.174.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.92.

M. Bondfield, ‘Women in the Union’ in: Thorne et al, Souvenir History, pp.60-61.

Thorne et al, Souvenir History, pp.17-18.

Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, p.103.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.98.

GMWU Journal, (October 1928), p.156; & GMWU Journal, (December 1928), p.191.

Will Thorne, foreword to: H.W. Lee, Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers, (Twentieth Century Press, London, 1919), p.3.

Thorne, foreword to Lee, Bolshevism, p.3.

Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, p.123.

Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, pp.123-124.

Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, p.122; H. Pelling,

417

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

418

A History of British Trade Unionism, 3rd edition, (Macmillan, London & Basingstoke, 1963 rpt. 1976), p.208; & Radice, Will Thorne, p.106.

GMWU Journal, (July 1928), p.97.

GMWU Journal, (July 1928), p.103.

Thorne et al, Souvenir History, p.44.

GMWU Journal, (August 1928), p.124.

Radice, Will Thorne, p.108.

GMWU Journal, (March 1927), p.23.

J.R. Clynes, Memoirs,Vol.II p.75.

Clynes, Memoirs,Vol.II p.78.

W. Thorne, ‘The Coal Lock-out and its Cost’, GMWU Journal, (July-August 1926), p.17; & W. Thorne, ‘General Secretary’s Notes’, GMWU Journal, (November-December 1926), p.20.

Clynes, Memoirs,Vol.II pp.82-83.

Clynes, Memoirs,Vol.II p.87.

Clynes, Memoirs,Vol.II p.81.

C. Dukes, ‘General Strike – Lancashire District’, GMWU Journal, (July-August 1926), p.18.

J.R. Clynes, ‘Levy for Members and Support for Miners’, GMWU Journal, (May-June 1926), p.7.

Dukes, ‘General Strike – Lancashire District’, p.19.

Quoted in: Radice, Will Thorne, p.105.

Stephens, Ernest Bevin, p.71.

Thorne et al, Souvenir History, p.33.

W. Thorne, ‘Miners’ Dispute’, GMWU Journal, (November-December 1926), p.3.

Thorne, ‘General Secretary’s Notes’, (Nov.-Dec. 1926), p.20.

See also: GMWU Journal, (January to February 1927), p.2.

Clynes, Memoirs,Vol.II p.81.

GMB Direct, issue 26, (May-June 1996), p.2.

Clynes, ‘Lock-Out and Strike’, p.4.

J.R. Clynes, ‘The Lock-Out and Strike’, GMWU Journal, (May-June 1926), p.3.

51 Radice, Will Thorne, p.107.

52 Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, p.189; & Radice, Will Thorne, p.107.

53 GMWU Journal, (December 1928), p.179.

54 Quoted in: Radice, Will Thorne, p.113.

55 GMWU Journal, (February 1946), p.53.

56 Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, p.134.

57 GMWU Journal, (January 1928), p.1.

58 W. Thorne to W. Citrine, (23 September 1931), 1 f.; & GMWU Journal, (January 1929), p.207.

59 GMWU Journal, (February 1942), p.51.

60 GMWU Journal, (November 1928), p.169; & GMWU Journal, (May-June 1929), p.267.

61 W. Thorne, ‘General Secretary’s Notes’, GMWU Journal, (March 1934), p.66.

chapter 5 1 2 3

GMWU Journal, (March 1934), p.70.

Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, p.139.

GMWU, Fifty Years of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, (GMWU, London, 1939), p.79; & H.A. Clegg, General Union. A Study of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1954), p.72.

4 Clegg, General Union. A Study, p.86.

5 Clegg, General Union. A Study, pp.86-87.

6 GMWU, Fifty Years, p.83.

7 Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, pp.141-142 & 211-217.

8 C. Dukes, ‘Another Amalgamation – The Tyne Watermen’s Association (An Ancient Body)’, GMWU Journal, (March 1936), pp.68-9.

9 GMWU, Fifty Years, p.81.

10 T. Swan, ‘Charles Dukes: A Study in Leadership’,

GMWU Journal, (July 1936), pp.217-218.

11 J.R. Drummond, ‘Jarrow’s Crusade’, GMWU Journal, (December 1936), pp.366-367.

12 GMWU Journal, (September 1936), p.268.

13 M. Bondfield, ‘A Call for New Unionism’, GMWU Journal, (March 1936), pp.81-82.

14 J.R. Clynes, ‘Fascist Shirts and Shouts’, GMWU Journal, (December 1936), pp.380-381.

15 GMWU Journal, (September 1936), p.268.

16 W. Thorne, ‘Parliamentary Notes’, GMWU Journal, (July 1936), p.215.

17 GMWU, Sixty Years of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, 1889-1949, (GMWU, London, 1949), p.77.

18 W.Poulton (ed.), Souvenir to Commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (Northern District), (GMWU, Northern District, no place given, 1949), p.14.

19 GMWU Journal, (February 1942), pp.51-52.

20 Poulton (ed.), Souvenir, p.16.

21 Poulton (ed.), Souvenir, pp.20-21.

22 J.R. Clynes, ‘What is the Fight For?’, GMWU Journal, (May 1942), p.181.

23 GMWU, Sixty Years, p.80.

24 GMWU, Sixty Years, pp.84-85.

chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5

P. Piratin, Our Flag Stays Red, intro. J. Callow, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1948 rev. edition 2006), pp.73-74.

Anon., ‘Hotels: Complete Victory is Near’, Daily Worker, (10 October 1946), p.1.

GMWU Journal, (December 1946), p.388.

Daily Worker, (11 October 1946), pp.3 & 6.

G. Sinfield, ‘M.P.’s Wife is Ready to Lead Hotel Strikers’,

enDnoteS

6 7 8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Daily Worker, late edition, (12 October 1946), p.6.

A. Long, ‘Strikers March through London’, Daily Worker, (14 October 1946), p.1.

G. Sinfield, ‘Hotel Strikers Win Complete Victory’, Daily Worker, late edition, (16 October 1946), p.1.

A. Lewis, ‘The London Catering Workers’ Dispute’, GMWU Journal, (December 1946), pp.388-389.

C. Dukes, ‘Unofficial Strikes and the Closed Shop’, GMWU Journal, (October 1946), pp.336-338; & T. Williamson, ‘A Message from the General Secretary’, GMWU Journal, (December 1946), p.405.

Clegg, General Union. A Study, p.137.

E.V. Watering, ‘London Notes’, GMWU Journal, (April 1947), p.129; & ‘Brother’ Savage, ‘A Visit to Czechoslovakia’, GMWU Journal, (July 1947), pp.208-209.

T. Cochrane, ‘Negotiations in the Catering Industry’, GMWU Journal, (May 1947), pp.138-139. See also: E.V. Watering, ‘London Notes’, GMWU Journal, (August 1947), pp.262-263.

P. Day, ‘1947 Savoy Strike blamed on Russians’, Daily Telegraph, (1 June 2006).

Clegg, General Union. A Study, pp.127-128.

Clegg, General Union. A Study, pp.128-130; & Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, pp.176-177.

Anon., ‘Workers’ Education’, GMWU Journal, (August 1948), p.229.

GMWU Journal, (June 1946), p.190.

GMWU Journal, (May 1970), p.4.

Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, p.204.

Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, p.205.

GMWU Journal, (October 1946), p.339; & Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, pp.183-185 .

Clegg, General Union in a Changing Society, p.201.

GMWU, Higher Dues Cause No Loss to Members, Press Release, (GMWU, Claygate, Surrey, 9 December 1964), f.1.

24 GMWU, Ruxley Towers, Headquarters of the General and Municipal Workers Union, intro. J. Cooper, (GMWU, London, 1967), p.iv.

25 J. Cooper, Jack Cooper - Writes and Speaks, (GMWU, Manchester, 1965),Vol.I pp.5-6.

26 GMWU, ‘Special Report on Technological Change presented to Annual Congress, May 1965’, in Appendix 5: Evidence to the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers Associations, (GMWU, Esher, Surrey, c.1966), p.65.

27 GMWU, ‘Special Report’, p.73.

28 GMWU, ‘Special Report’, pp.88-89.

29 GMWU, Evidence to the Royal Commission, p.63.

30 GMWU, Training and Education. Special Report to the Annual Congress, (GMWU, London, May 1966), pp.16 & 19-22. See also: GMWU, Evidence to the Royal Commission, pp.59-60; & GMWU, Training and Education, (GMWU, Esher, Surrey, 1968), passim.

31 Lord Lipsey, ‘Giles Radice’, in: G. Rosen, Dictionary of Labour Biography, (Politico’s Publishing, London, 2001), p.476.

32 GMWU Journal, (August 1970), pp.10-11.

33 GMWU Journal, (April 1970), p.19.

34 GMWU Journal, (January 1970), pp.4-5.

35 GMWU Journal, (April 1970), p.11.

36 T. Lane & K. Roberts, Strike at Pilkingtons, (Collins/Fontana, London, 1971), pp.11, 17, 29-30 & 45.

37 Lane & Roberts, Strike at Pilkingtons, pp.54 & 251.

38 Lane & Roberts, Strike at Pilkingtons, p.55.

chapter 7 1

2

P. Willman, T. Morris, & B. Aston, Union Business:Trade Union Organisation and Financial Reform in the Thatcher Years, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993), p.140.

Anon., ‘Number Three Keeps the Kid Gloves On’, The Sun, (18 June 1975), p.19; & R. Taylor, The Fifth Estate.

Britain’s Unions in the Modern World, (Pan Books, London

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

& Sydney, 1978 rpt. 1980), p.331.

Taylor, Fifth Estate, pp.327-328.

Taylor, Fifth Estate, pp.335-336.

Taylor, Fifth Estate, p.335.

J.E. Mortimer, History of the Boilermakers’ Society,Vol.III, (London & New York, 1994), pp.359-361.

GMWU Journal, (Aug.-Sept. 1982), p.2; & GMW Journal, (Oct.-Nov. 1982), p.1.

GMWU Journal, (Oct-Nov. 1982), p.1.

Willman et al, Union Business, p.142.

Taylor, Fifth Estate, p.327.

GMWU Journal, (Oct.-Nov. 1981), p.3.

GMWU Journal, (Jan.-Feb. 1982), p.2.

GMB Journal, (May-June 1983), p.2.

GMB Journal, (May-June 1983), p.14.

John Edmonds, interview with the present author, 22 March 2012.

‘Scottish TUC Conference, Rothesay, April 1983’, Supplement in GMB Journal, (May-June 1983), p.1.

GMB Journal, (June-July 1983), p.14: & GMWU Journal, (July-Aug. 1982), p.7.

GMB Journal, (June-July 1983), p.2.

GMB Journal, (June-July 1983), p.2.

GMWU Journal Scottish TUC Conference Report, (April 1982), p.3.

GMWU Journal, (Jul-Aug. 1982), p.4.

GMB Journal, (July-Aug. 1983), p.2.

Alan Budd quoted in: D. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 2000), p.7.

GMWU Journal, (July-Aug. 1982), p.2.

GMWU Campaign Report, (December 1981), p.1.

GMWU Journal, (Oct.-Nov. 1981), p.3.

GMWU Journal, (Dec. 1981), p.6.

GMWU Journal, (Dec. 1981), p.6.

GMWU Journal, (May-June 1982), p.11.

419

30 Militant Tendency, Militant GMU Review 1978, (Militant Tendency, London, 1978).

31 Willman et al, Union Business, p.143.

32 Willman et al, Union Business, p.150.

chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16

420

GMB Direct, issue 12, (Jan.-Feb. 1992), p.2.

GMB Direct, issue 13, (May-June 1994), p.24.

John Edmonds, interview with the present author, 5 March 2012.

GMB, CEC Minutes, (10 September 2000), p.50; & GMB, Report of Congress 2001, (GMB, London, 2001), p.157.

GMB, Out at Work. Lesbian and Gay Workers’ Rights, (GMB, London, 1992).

John Edmonds, interview with the present author, 5 March 2012.

The Union. Magazine of GMB Southern Region, issue 20, (Winter 1994), p.2.

Taylor, Fifth Estate, p.378.

A. Marsh & V. Ryan, The Clerks. A History of APEX, 1890-1989, (Malthouse Publishing, Oxford, 1997), pp.208-210 & 220-223; & Richard Ascough, interview with the present author, 13 March 2012.

F. Hughes, By Hand & Brain.The Story of the Clerical & Administrative Workers Union, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1953), pp.100-101, 106, 108, 111, 120, 124-125, 128 & 135.

Marsh & Ryan, Clerks, p.227.

Marsh & Ryan, Clerks, p.238.

Marsh & Ryan, Clerks, pp.239-240.

Richard Ascough, interview with the present author, 13 March 2012.

M. Stewart & L. Hunter, The Needle is Threaded.

‘The History of an Industry’, (Heinemann/Newman Neame, Southampton, 1964), pp. 89-107.

Stewart & Hunter, The Needle is Threaded, p.130.

17 A.J. Kershen, Uniting the Tailors.Trade Unionism amongst the Tailoring Workers of London and Leeds, 1870-1939, (Frank Cass, Ilford, Essex, 1995), p.177.

18 GMB, Measuring Up. A New Agenda for Clothing and Textiles, (GMB, London, 1992).

19 GMB Direct, issue 9, (July-Aug. 1993), p.8.

20 Anon., ‘Shaping Up for a Mega-Union’, Labour Research Department, (September 1993), p.7.

21 GMB Direct, issue 10, (Sept.-Oct. 1993), p.13.

22 S. Beavis, ‘Kinnock urges Unions to face New Realism’, The Guardian, (1 April 1989); M. Whitfield, ‘Kinnock Defends Trade Union Reformers’, Daily Telegraph, (1 April 1989); & J. Hulme, ‘GMB Marks Centenary’, Morning Star, (1 April 1989).

23 Willman et al, Union Business, p.152.

24 GMB Direct, issue 26, (May-June 1996), p.13.

25 Taylor, Future of Trade Unions, p.36.

26 T. Blair quoted in: C. Howell, The Unions and the State, (Princeton & Oxford, 2005), p.177.

27 GMB, Report of Congress 2001, (GMB, London, 2001), p.190.

28 GMB, The Wider Role of the GMB, (Southern Region GMB, Chessington, Surrey, 1985), p.7; & GMB Direct, issue 18, (Jan.-Feb. 1995), p.3.

29 GMB, Wider Role of the GMB, p.3.

30 John Edmonds, interview with the present author, 5 March 2012.

31 GMB Direct, issue 11, (Nov.-Dec. 1993), p.11.

32 GMB Direct, issue 21, (July-Aug,. 1995), p.23.

33 GMB Direct, issue 21, (July-Aug. 1995), p.7.

34 John Edmonds, interview with the present author, 5 March 2012.

35 GMB Direct, issue 32, (July-Aug. 1997), p.9.

36 GMB Direct, issue 17, (Nov.-Dec. 1994), p.3.

37 Daniels & McIlroy, Trade Unions in a Neoliberal World, p.321.

38 Mary Turner in: GMB, Report of Congress 2003, (GMB, London, 2003), p.4.

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

53

John Edmonds in: GMB, Report of Congress 2003, pp.47-48.

Paul Kenny in: GMB, Report of Congress 2003, p.190.

GMB Direct, issue 32, (July-Aug. 1997), p.2.

John Edmonds in GMB, Report of Congress 2003, pp.43-44.

Undy, Trade Union Merger Strategies, p.52.

GMB, CEC Minutes, (22 February 2000), p.3.

GMB, Report of Congress 2001, (GMB, London, 2001), p.99.

GMB Direct, issue 15, (July-Aug. 1994), p.17.

GMB, Report of Congress 2003, p.713.

GMB, CEC Minutes, (24 April 2001), pp.104-105.

Anon., ‘I’m Part of the Union’, Financial Times, (16 February 1999).

J. Carr-Brown & S. Higgins, ‘GMB Boss Probed on Property Deal’, The Sunday Times, (21 February 1999).

D. Hencke & R. Evans, ‘A Monumental £6m Mistake’, The Guardian, (10 February 2003), p.12. The car park and disused office block would remain derelict long after Edmonds and Curran had both departed the union, and would be finally sold on for an equitable £2.25 million under Paul Kenny.

B. Clement, ‘Union Dogged by Bullying and Harassment Allegations as Leadership Battle lines are Drawn’, The Independent, (10 February 2003).

Hencke & Evans, ‘Monumental 6m Mistake’, p.12.

chapter 9 1

2 3 4

D. Hencke, ‘Union had run out of Cash, claims Former GMB Chief ’, The Guardian, (20 June 2005), p.10; & Anon., ‘Establishment Candidate Wins GMB Election’, Solidarity, no.3 vol.28, (17 April 2003).

J. Ashley, ‘Tough, yes, but at least he is not in the Awkward Squad’, The Guardian, (28 April 2003).

D. Coysh, ‘GMB Votes in Favour of Euro Campaign’, Morning Star, (10 June 2003), p.4.

C. Osuh, ‘Developers Queue up to take Over GMB

enDnoteS

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19

20 21 22

College’, Manchester Metro News, (26 March 2004), p.11.

Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, GMB – Developing our Management Structures, (GMB, London, December 2010), p.11.

Kevin Curran in: GMB, Report of Congress 2003, p.683.

Arthur Moss in: GMB, Report of Congress 2003, p.680.

Kevin Curran in: GMB, Report of Congress 2003, p.681.

T. Baillie in: GMB, Report of Congress 2003, p.704.

GMB, CEC Minutes, (22 February 2000), p.5.

T.Woodley, ‘Historic Opportunity’, Morning Star, (5 February 2005), p.7.

‘Blackleg’,‘TUC News’, Private Eye, (10 November 2004), p.7.

GMB, Special Report. A Framework for the Future, (GMB, London, 2005), p.8.

GMB, Report for the CEC of the GMB of the Internal Investigation into the 2003 Election of the General Secretary & 2004 Election of the Deputy General Secretary, (GMB, 10 February 2006), pp.5 & 107.

GMB, Report of Congress 2005, (GMB, London, 2005), p.3.

Anon., ‘Allegations Fly as Union Suspends General Secretary’, Labour Research, (April 2005), p.7. See also: Anon., ‘GMB told to re-run Ballot’, Labour Research, (2003), p.8.

GMB Report of Congress, 2005, (GMB, London, 2005), pp.3 & 56.

GMB, CEC Minutes, (15 March 2005).

GMB, CEC Minutes, (19 April 2005). Paul Barnsley, Director of Operations and External Relations, who was deeply compromised by the CEC investigation report, also resigned at the same time but otherwise the transition was relatively bloodless. Curran agreed to formally stand down as General Secretary on 6 May 2005, “his employment with the union ending by agreement on the same day”. See also: GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, p.53.

GMB, Report for the CEC, pp.107-112.

GMB, Report for the CEC, p.109.

D. Cockburn, Annual Report of the Certification Officer 2004-2005, (Certification Officer for Trade Unions

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

& Employers’ Associations, London, 2005), pp.60-61.

Mary Turner in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, p.3.

Mary Turner in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, p.3.

Paul Kenny in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, p.83.

Paul Kenny in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, pp.84-85.

GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, p.29.

Andy Worth in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, p.42.

Mary Turner in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, p.132.

Martin Smith in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2006, (GMB, London, 2006), p.57.

Martin Smith in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2006, p.57.

Allan Wylie, interview with the present author, 24 January 2012.

GMB, GMB@WORK: Growth, Accountability and Democracy in GMB, (GMB, London, 2012), pp.1-2.

Amicus GPFC Minutes (1 March 2005).

Amicus NEC Minutes (16 March 2005).

Amicus GPFC Minutes (19 April 2005); & Paul Kenny, interview with the present author, 13 February 2009.

Paul Kenny, interview with the present author, 13 February 2009.

GMB, Report of Congress, 2006, p.420.

Paul Kenny in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2006, p.420.

P. Davies, A New Future for Remploy – Or No Future for Remploy? The Trade Union Side Response to Peter Thurnham’s Proposals, (GMB, Remploy Consortium, London, 1995), p.2.

Davies, A New Future for Remploy, p.3.

Peter Thurnham quoted in: Davies, A New Future for Remploy, p.7.

GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, pp.252-253.

GMB, Report of Congress, 2006, pp.82 & 84.

Davies, A New Future for Remploy, p.20.

Mary Turner in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2005, p.263.

Phil Davies in; GMB, Report of Congress, 2006, pp.75-76.

GMB, Report of Congress, 2007, (GMB, London, 2007), p.483.

49 D. Hencke, ‘Good Shop, Bad Shop?’, The Guardian, Work Supplement, (1 July 2006), p.3.

50 GMB, CEC Statement on Private Equity and Venture Capitalists, (GMB, London, 2007), p.1.

51 J. Kosman, The Buyout of America. How Private Equity is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy, (Portfolio/Penguin, New York, 2009 rpt. 2010), p.155.

52 Kosman, Buyout of America, pp.159-160.

53 GMB, Statement on Private Equity, pp.4-5.

54 GMB, Southern Cross:The Cross we Have to Bear, the Greedy and the Gullible, (GMB, London, 2011), p.1.

55 P. Kenny, ‘No More Lectures from the Greedy and Gullible’, Morning Star, (12 September 2011), p.17.

56 GMB, CEC Minutes, (11 April 2000), pp.24-25.

57 GMB, CEC Minutes, (22 February 2000), p.6.

58 G. Davies & J. McIlroy (eds.), Trade Unions in a Neoliberal World, p.191.

59 Paul Kenny in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2011, (GMB, London, 2011), Tuesday 7 June 2011, p.202.

60 R. MacKinnon, ‘Strikers take on Bully-Boy Bosses’, Morning Star, (15 February 2012), p.1.

61 T. Patey, ‘Activists Fight back to stop Cuts-mad Coalition’, Morning Star, (12 April 2012), p.5; & J. Millington, ‘Remploy Staff Strike over Sale’, Morning Star, (27 January 2012), p.2.

62 Martin Smith in: GMB, GMB@WORK: Growth, Accountability and Democracy in the GMB, (GMB, London, 2012), p.2.

63 GMB, Organising and the Recession, (GMB, London, 2009), p.1.

64 Anon., ‘GMB Debates Labour Link after Branches air Concerns’, Morning Star, (15 February 2012), p.2.

65 A. Johnson, ‘The Union Delusion’, The Guardian, (18 January 2012), p.30.

66 Paul Kenny to the present author, 21 February 2012.

67 Paul Kenny in: GMB, Report of Congress, 2011, Tuesday 7 June 2011, pp.201-203.

421

InDex

A Addison, John 110 Allen, Ian 360 Anderson, William C. 133 Angle, George 41, 43, 73, 88, 162, 211, 406 Ascough, Richard 309-311, 313, 349 Ashley, Jack 261, 278, 281, 304, 328 Asquith, Herbert 115, 120 Attlee, Clement 125, 171, 204, 210, 227, 229 Aveling, Edward 35, 49, 65, 70, 75, 79, 85, 88, 95, 96

B Badlan, Robert Bailey, A. J. Baldwin, Stanley Banks, Tony Basnett, Andrew Basnett, David

369 147, 173, 185 161, 162, 166 279 185, 283 181, 227, 250-252, 258, 260-267, 272, 275, 276, 278, 279, 281-285, 288, 291, 292, 293, 295, 296, 299-301, 304, 307, 317, 319, 327, 341, 356 Bearcroft, Sheila 352 Beard, John 141, 146 Bebel, August 85 Beckett, Margaret 330 Bell, J. N. 141, 147 Benham, Barbara 356, 359 Benn, Tony 252, 278, 281, 284 Bernstein, Edward 85 Bevan, Aneurin 238 Bevin, Ernest 125, 137, 138, 161, 166, 171, 172, 205, 219, 225

422

Bickerstaffe, Rodney 329, 333 Black, Clementina 92, 93 Blair, J. 220 Blair, Tony 280, 292, 302, 318, 324, 328-330, 332, 333-334 336, 343, 383, 388, 392, 398 Blairites 155, 321, 341, 400, 401 Blake, William 333 Blissett, Ed 340 Blunkett, David 334 Bondfield, Margaret 128, 131, 133, 138, 139, 144, 148, 150-151 155, 157, 165, 171-173, 179, 183, 184, 186-189, 197, 198, 229 Borgia, A. P. 93, 151 Boulton, Les 385 Bradley, Sam 147, 173, 185 Bragg, Billy 375 Bramley, Fred 202 Brannan, Phil 387 Breed, Colin 396 Brennan, Constable 81 Brennan, Tommy 313, 349, 405 Brown, Gordon 292, 329, 343, 383, 392-394 Budd, Alan 291 Buffini, Damon 389, 390, 395 Bullock, H. L. 183 Bunn, John 51 Burgess, Mrs 84 Burlison, Tom 300, 323 Burnham, Andy 402 Burns, John 41, 46, 71, 94 Burrows, Herbert 81 Byers, Stephen 336

Byford, Emily (later Thorne) Byford, William

79 43, 68, 84, 93

c Cable,Vince 402 Callaghan, Jim 227, 274, 284, 327, 402 Cameron, David 8, 289, 291, 402, 406, 408 Campbell, Alistair 391 Campbell-Bannerman, Henry 105, 115 Carmichael, Neil 279 Carpenter, Edward 181 Cassells, Peter 83 Castle, Barbara 251, 252 Chamberlain, Neville 194, 199, 223 Chambers, Henry 22 Chapple, Frank 251, 252, 266 Chartists 75, 143, 145, 187 Churchill, Randolph 89 Churchill, Winston Spencer 205 Citrine, Walter 171, 172 Clegg, H. A. 68, 135, 152 Clegg, Nick 401, 408 Clynes, J. R. 36, 76, 93, 97, 102, 104-106, 109, 110, 114, 119-121, 123, 126, 129, 137-138, 144, 147, 150, 152, 155-169, 171-173, 179, 180, 184, 188, 198, 199, 208-210, 229 CND 233 Cochrane, Tom 185, 216 Cockayne, Will 23, 26, 28, 37, 38, 73, 406 Cocks, Michael 278, 280 Cohen, Mrs 140

Communist Party of Great Britain

142, 144, 145, 150-154, 180, 218-219, 225, 233, 241, 247, 255, 259, 309, 312, 378 Condon, Tom 339, 340 Connell, Jim 23, 80-83, 163, 180, 224 Connolly, James 123, 373, 406 Connor, Pat 76 Cook, A. J. 161 Cook, Reg 241 Cook, Robin 330, 333 Cook, William 173 Cooper. Lord Jack 152, 190, 221, 226, 227, 229, 233, 237, 240-244, 248-252, 255, 257, 263, 264, 284, 292, 339 Cope, John 261, 305, 356, 358, 375, 376 Costa, Lee de 214, 215 Coulter, Debbie 348, 351, 352 Cousins, Frank 232-233, 238, 251 Crane, Harry 241 Crane, Walter 63, 78, 202 Cripps, Stafford 230 Cromwell, Oliver 125, 194, 198 Crow, Bob 295, 399 Cruddas, Jon MP 319, 395, 401 Cunningham, Jack 280, 281, 328 Cunningham, Tom 218 Curran, Kevin 299, 342-344, 348-352, 359, 360, 362, 369, 370, 377, 379 Curran, Pete 73, 88, 91, 94, 95, 97, 102, 105, 359, 406

D Dack, H. 193 Dalton, Superintendent 20, 21 Davies, Brian 384 Davies, Garfield 324 Davies, Phil 387, 388 Davies, Richard 141, 146 Davison, Steve 346 Deakin, Arthur 238 Desai, Jayaben 268-271, 309 Desai, Suryakant 269 Devonport, Lord 121 Diamond, John 330 Dickens, Charles 52 Dilke, Lady 92 Dilley, Thomas 49, 51 Dimitrov, Georgi 203 Donaldson, Harry 313, 405 Donnelly, Alan 340 Donnini, Pte. Dennis,V. C. 207, 208 Drummond, J. R. 195 Dukes, Charles 12, 76, 109, 110, 114, 115, 119, 123, 138, 150, 153-155, 157, 160, 163, 164, 167, 172, 176-184, 189, 190, 192-196, 199, 205-207, 210, 216-219, 221, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229, 234, 237, 238, 249, 254 Duncan, Charles 141, 146

e Eccles, Fleming

110, 148, 153, 190

Eccles, Tom 190 Edmonds, John 224, 250, 252, 264, 275, 279, 299, 300, 302-303, 305-306, 311, 314-321, 323-325, 327-330, 332-337, 339, 341, 343-344, 349, 363, 376, 398, 399 Edmonds, Walter 317 Elliott, Dorothy 184, 189 Engels, Frederick 39, 64, 65, 75, 84, 85, 87, 88, 95, 117, 123, 223 English, Michael 279 Ethical Threads 361, 386 Ewart, R. 229

Gill, Ken Gilston, Peter Gladstone, W. E. Gladwin, Derek Gledhill, Tony Glover, Warren Goddard, Graham Gold, Harry Gompers, Samuel Goodman, Geoffrey Gordon, Patrick Gossip, Alex Gossip, Isabella Grantham, Roy

308 25, 27, 37 71 250, 253, 266, 275, 295 387 340 346 216 87 283 250 123, 200-202 203 270, 308, 310-311

f Farrer, R. H. Feather,Vic Fine, Jacob Fitzpatrick, Thomas Fletcher, Ray Foot, Michael Fox,V.

148 260 311, 312 22 385 227, 276, 281 220

G Gaitshill, Hugh Gallacher, Willie Gardiner, A.G. Gardner, Ben Garley, Allan George V, King Gibbins, J. Gilchrist, Andy

227, 230, 233, 238 150 101 49 313 161 229 399

h Hain, Peter Halifax, Lord Hallas, Eldred Hand, John Hannington, Wal Hardie, James Keir Harman, Harriet Harrison, Harry Hayday, Arthur Hayday, Sir Fred Hayday, Tom Hayes, Billy Hayward, Julie Healey, Dennis Heath, Edward

401 199 138 351 163, 203 82, 97, 102, 123, 202 401 183 91, 110, 148, 155, 171-173, 185, 190, 250 317 190, 241, 250 295 318 281 253

423

Hewitson, Mark 183, 229 Higham, J. D. S. 185 Hitler, Adolf 199, 204 Hobart, Harry 41 Hopkins, W. E. 148 Horrocks, Will 76 Hunt, David 303 Hunt, Cllr John 30 Hunter, Derek 349 Hurley, Tom 148, 173, 185 Hutchins, Mark 68, 73, 79, 84, 211 Hutton, John 387 Hyndman, Henry Mayers 35, 59, 60, 88, 89, 97, 123, 155

I Independent Labour Party

91, 97, 105, 202

J Jaures, Jean Jenkins, Clive Jenkins, Roy Johnson, Alan Johnson, Jimmy Jones, Doug Jones, Edward Jones, Jack

85, 97 310 281 395, 401 279 53 51 59, 64, 69, 91, 98-101, 103, 119, 148, 155, 162, 171-173, 180, 183, 223, 229 Jones, Jack (Gen. Sec. T&G) 225 Jordan, Bill 295, 325

424

k Kapp,Yvonne 79 Kaufman, Gerald 280, 328 Kautsky, Karl 85 Kaye, Solly 214 Kenny, Pat 374, 375 Kenny, Paul 7-9, 83, 224, 256, 271, 295, 299, 305, 336-338, 340, 342-345, 349, 351-353, 358-360, 362-364, 369, 370, 372-380, 388, 389, 394-396, 399-400, 407-408 Kerensky, Alexander 124 Kerry, T. W. 185, 210 Kidd, William 143 Kinnock, Neil 227, 281, 284, 314, 320-322, 333 Kipling, Rudyard 40 Kitchener, General 121, 123 Knapp, Jimmy 333 Knowles, Sandra 385 Kosman, Josh 392, 396 Kropotkin, Prince 64

l Labour Party

97, 101-106, 115, 120, 133, 144, 151, 155, 157, 159, 161, 169, 171, 172, 177, 179, 180, 183, 188, 202, 203, 210, 211, 223-227, 229, 230, 233, 237, 238, 249, 250, 262, 263, 276, 278-281, 283-286, 288, 305, 314, 319, 321-324, 327-330, 332-334, 336, 337, 341, 358,

360, 366, 378, 386-388, 395, 398-402, 406 Lafargue, Laura (nee Marx) 39, 88 Lafargue, Paul 85 Lakin, Sam 76 Landye, John 82 Lansbury, George 106, 157, 199 Larkin, Jim 137 Laski, Harold 95, 224 Lavers, S. 229 Lawther, Will 238 Lenin,V. I. 123, 125, 150, 203 Leslie, J. 220 Lewis, Arthur 214-217, 219-221, 229, 279, 280 Liebknecht, Natalie 88 Liebknecht, Wilhelm 63, 85 Lilburne, John 125 Lissagaray, Prosper 64 Lloyd-George, David 106, 121, 126, 127, 138 Long, Arthur 215, 216 Longuet, Jean 85 Lord, Linda 359 Lynas, Hugh 109, 147, 173, 185 Lyons, Roger 329

m MacArthur, Mary MacDonald, Ramsay

MacLean, John

128, 130-133, 138, 139, 184, 188 82, 102, 103, 105, 120, 136, 159, 172, 181, 188, 194 150

InDex

MacMillan, Harold MacPherson, James McCarthy, Tom McCurdy, Mr McDonnell, John McKenzie, John McLean, Alistair McNamee, Len McWilliams, Superintendant

89, 242 187, 188 69 189 401-402 148 349, 360 233 22

Maguire, Tom 23, 24, 26, 89, 125 Major, John 286, 291, 318, 385, 393 Mallon, James Joseph 139 Maloney, Paul 293, 389 Mandelson, Peter 329 Mann, Tom 35, 71, 82, 112, 113, 137, 223, 225, 237, 345 Manning, Cardinal 71 Mansfield, Dick 41 Mansfield, W. 193 Markham,Violet 138 Marshall, Fred 209, 229 Martins, Aurellia 306, 312 Marx, Karl 35, 39, 59, 60, 63-65, 72, 85, 125, 144, 148, 225, 247 Marx, Eleanor 35, 62-65, 70, 71, 75, 76, 84-87, 89, 92, 93, 95-97, 123, 155, 184, 247, 406 Marx Memorial Library 203, 225 Mason, J. C. 185 Mattison, Alf 36 Maxton, James 125 Mellor, Julie 387 Miliband, David 401, 402

Miliband, Ed Militant Tendency

401 278, 279, 284, 295, 300, 301, 328 Milne, Billy 295 Mindel, Mick 312 Mond, Sir Alfred/Mondism 155, 160, 180, 197, 198, 203 Moodley, Bruce 305 Moody, Charles 252 Moody, C. J. 152, 153, 163 Moore, Samuel 64 Morgan, Joe 313 Morrell, Jim 286 Morris, Bill 314, 315, 318, 320 Morris, William 23, 64, 181 Morris, William (Rev) 79 Moseley, Oswald 194, 198, 199, 204, 312 Murdoch, Rupert 347, 395 Murdoch, William 47 Murray, Len 270 Mussolini 194, 199, 204

n Nicholas II, Tsar Nicol, Mr Nutting J.

105, 106, 123, 124, 143 84 105

o O’Grady, Frances

363

p Parker, James Parker, Robert Paylor, Tom

105, 106 347 23, 28, 29, 38, 211

Pelling, Henry Perrins, W. Piazza, Joseph Pickering, Dick Pickering, Steve Piratin, Phil Pitt, Thomas Pollitt, Harry Pollitt, Winnie Porter, E. Portillo, Michael Powell, Enoch Priestley, J. B. Prior, Jim Pryle, Steve Pym, John

154 229 215, 218-220 295, 327, 332, 337 338 213, 214 21 142-145, 150, 180, 203 143 229 385 309 118 270 83, 340, 349, 352, 389, 391 281, 286

Q Quelch, Harry

35, 102

r Radice, Giles 229, 247, 250, 252, 254, 280, 288 Ravera, Joseph 215, 216 Ray, George 51 Rhondda, Lord 126 Rix, Mick 399 Robertson, George 280, 281, 328 Rosen, “Tubby” 214 Rowe, Cliff 146 Ruskin, John 181

S Sanders, W. W. Sargent, Steve

35 387

Savage, Malcolm SDP SDF

348 276, 278, 280, 336, 356 25, 35, 41, 43, 46, 59, 60, 64, 67, 68, 75, 79, 82, 88, 91, 97, 99, 100, 103-105, 150, 158, 188, 189, 225 Seabury, Arthur 190 Shaw, Fanny 22 Shaw, George Bernard 35, 85, 102 Sherwood, Will 148, 183 Shilleto, W. 135, 136 Shipton, George 92 Shore, Peter 283 Silkin, John 281 Simpson, Derek 295, 346, 370, 379, 399 Singer, Paul 85 Smith, Adam 289 Smith, Gary 391 Smith, J. E. 114 Smith, John 280, 314, 328-329, 330, 333-334, 402 Smith, Martin 363, 364 Snowden, Philip 120, 172 Socialist League 23, 25 Somerville, John 57 Sparrow, Prof, Paul 389 Spence, W. R. 183 Stern, Andy 337, 347 Stephen, Rita 311 Stevens, Walter 146 Strutton, Brian 400 SWP 259, 295

425

t Taylor, A. J. P. Tebbit, Norman Tevenan, Peter Thaelmann Thatcherism Thatcher, Margaret

247 247 141, 146-148, 183 203 8, 9, 171 89, 247, 261, 264, 270, 274, 276, 278, 284-286, 289, 291-293, 301, 303, 318, 319, 323, 335, 338, 356, 375, 383 Thompson, W. 94 Thorne, Edna 135, 167 Thorne, Emma 33, 34 Thorne, Harriet (nee Hallam) 34 Thorne, Will 7, 9, 20, 21, 23, 28, 29, 31, 32-39, 41-47, 52-54, 57-60, 63-65, 67-70, 73, 76-79, 84, 85, 87-89, 91, 92, 95-97, 99-106, 109, 111-117, 119, 120, 122-129, 135-138, 140, 147, 150-152, 155, 157-162, 165-169, 171-175, 177, 180, 182-184, 188, 189, 193, 194, 199, 211, 222-225, 229, 234, 238, 252, 312, 319, 321, 323-324, 332, 339, 345, 377, 378, 406, 408 Thorne Will (son) 124 Thurnham, Peter 385 Tillett, Ben 41, 43, 67, 68, 71, 137, 345 Tolpuddle Martyrs 191, 194, 375 TUC 7, 60, 64, 92, 94, 97, 102, 105, 106, 111, 114-117, 137, 144, 164-166, 169, 171, 172,

426

177, 180, 181, 184, 188, 223, 230, 233, 238, 239, 243, 247, 251, 256, 263, 284, 305, 306, 308, 318, 319, 321, 329, 388 Tuckwell, Gertrude 138 Tuffin, Alan 325 Tully, Susan 305 Turner, Dennis 355, 358 Turner, Mary 81, 83, 287, 292, 332-333, 336, 346, 348, 350, 351, 352, 354-359, 362, 375, 388, 402, 406 Turner, Pat 356 Tutill, George 119

u United Nations

181

v Vadera, Shriti Vallelly, Carole Vincent, Walter

394 404 256, 257

W Walsh, Jack Warburton, David Ward, William Warner, Bob Warwick, Countess Watering, E.V.

41 300 84 386 105, 189 185, 216, 218, 219, 221, 231 Watkinson, Will 84 Weaner, Miss 189 Webb, Beatrice 332 Webb, Frederick T., Chief Constable 29 Webb, Sydney 69, 332

Wells, Graham 335 Weston, Bro. 244 White, Frank 279 Whitelaw, Willie 286 Whitley 129, 155, 230 Whitty, Larry 229, 252, 275, 332 Wilkinson, Ellen 195, 196 Willey, O. G. 229 Williams, J. 155 Williamson, Lord Tom 138, 152, 183, 190, 190, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 226, 229, 230, 232-240, 243, 249, 255, 257, 264, 293, 339 Williamson, Tom (Uncle) 147, 173, 183, 185, 190, 237 Wilson, Harold 227, 243, 247, 249-251, 261, 383 Wilson, Sir Horace 166 Wilson, Robert 51 Windsor, W. 155 Winfield, Albert 141 Wood, Walt 23, 28, 148 Woodley, Tony 345, 370, 379, 399 Woodward, Les 387, 405 Workers Beer Company 83, 363, 375, 391 Worth, Andy 349, 352, 362, 405 Wright, L. G. 190, 234, 257 Wright, S. J. 109, 148, 173, 185, 190 Wylie, Allan 349, 369, 370

y Yarwood, Jack

185

InDex & pIcture creDItS

picture credits All images are from GMB Collections, except: Richard Ascough

80

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery John Callow

78, 90

58, 105, 109, 233, 414

Marx Memorial Library

62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 70, 72, 83, 84, 85, 89, 142, 143, 145, 146, 170, 200, 202, 225, 270, 271 (left), 310, 373 (top)

Peoples’ History Museum, Manchester 224 TUC Library

Andrew Wiard

160, 163, 164, 168, 169, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 194, 195, 198 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 268, 271 (left), 315, 327, 328, 331, 332-333, 334, 339, 341, 342, 343, 344 346-347, 349, 350, 351, 353, 354, 357, 360, 361, 365, 367, 368, 371, 372, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 387, 388-389, 390, 393, 394, 395, 397, 399, 400, 404, 405, 407, 408, 409

Working Class Movement Library

80

427

AcknoWleDGementS

Some books are better starred and more enjoyable to work on than others. fortunately, this has been one of the happy ones largely due to the help, support and comradeship of the “GmB family”.

I

n the office, Barbara Casher, Rose Conroy, Ida Clemo, Steve Short and Charlotte Gregory were of enormous assistance in suggesting avenues of inquiry, sourcing images and digging out old congress reports and journals. Pat Kenny was a great help and support at Hendon; while Kevin Panton was able to make all the union banners and artefacts held at Wimbledon available to be photographed. Just as importantly, he knew exactly where they were!

Paul Kenny and Mary Turner gave generously of their time for interviews; and I hope that something of their passionate commitment to the union, good humour, and insight shines through in these pages. Many of the illustrations and artefacts used to illustrate the book come from the collection that Paul assembled during his time as London Regional Secretary.

In similar fashion, Allan Wylie, Martin Smith and Steve Pryle gave unstintingly of their time and were always on hand to provide help, advice, and to share their experiences of a union that has changed almost beyond 428

recognition since 2005.

At short notice, John Edmonds cleared his diary to meet over coffee and, over three separate interviews, warmed to his subject and provided extremely valuable insights into his own career and the development of the union from the late 1960s onwards, which this book would have been far poorer without.

Richard Ascough kindly made books and photographs available to the author from his own collection, and shared his memories of APEX and the Grunwick Dispute; while Robert Badlan suggested new avenues of inquiry for the history of the Tailor and Garment Workers and his rare combination of good cheer and excellent organisational skills have made GMB Congresses a pleasure to attend since my first, in Plymouth, in 2008.

In similarly practical terms, Chris Coates and James Goddard at the TUC Library, and Lynette Cawthra at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, have been of enormous assistance in making their splendid collections on Labour Movement history available to me.

Phil Dunn at the Peoples’ History Museum, in Manchester, and Amber Druce at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, located images of the union’s early banners quickly and efficiently, and are great credits to their respective institutions.

Andrew Wiard, who has a wonderful

eye for a telling image, provided most of the modern images used in this book and shot many of the new photographs of the GMB’s banners and paintings that appear in this book for the first time.To him, and to Darren Westlake – the Senior Design Partner at TU ink – I owe an enormous debt for their great professional skill, ability to work to tight deadlines and friendship. Elaine Koster did a wonderful job on proof reading the text often at very short notice.

Jane Powell, Ann Mildwater, Sheelagh Macdonald and Jesse Sullivan kept the Marx Library on an even keel and shouldered an enormous amount of work during the time that I was away from the office on GMB business, writing and researching the book, and ensured that it remained true to the high ideals of its founding figures. In so many ways, they and the volunteers who are gathered about them are the heart, soul and conscience of an institution that is so much more than a tower of old books.

To Phil Katz, a true comrade and friend, I owe debts of gratitude and respect; and last but not least my love goes to Tania – who saw her living room and garden shed disappear under a flurry of GMB books and papers – and to Kit, already a GMB Congress veteran, who I hope with all my heart carries the value of this great union with him through life.

chanGinG the Guard on shiftinG sands chaPter 5

had committed themselves to establishing a measure of worker’s control on the board’s of the newly nationalised industries, and pressed for a 50% share of the seats to be created. The union was larger, richer and more powerful than ever before, it was blessed by the existence of a vigorous Labour Government that was prepared to deliver on every one of its major expectations, and was guaranteed influence in the councils of state. All that the union needed to do was show a similar resolve and the future once only dreamed about by Will Thorne, Tom Paylor, George Angle and Mark Hutchins was theirs for the taking.

1945: Swords into ploughshares. Northern District worked hard on converting Sherman tanks, purchased on lease lend from the USA, into tractors for British agriculture.

211