How comparable is Labour’s defeat of 2019 to that of 1935?

The electoral facts have shown that, at the end of 2019, the Labour Party in Britain suffered its worst defeat since 1935, yet those who led the Party to this are still refusing to accept responsibility for the debacle. They tell us that, had it not been for ‘Brexit’, they would have persuaded the British electorate to back Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘marvellous manifesto’ stuffed full of uncosted radical policies which would have transformed Britain, including widespread nationalisation without compensation, massive tax increases for private companies and entrepreneurs, and trillions of additional expenditure. Watching the daily parade of uncosted spending pledges, I was reminded of the tactics of the Militant-controlled Liverpool Council in the 1980s which followed the Leninist tactic of making impossible ‘transitional demands’ in order to take over the public agenda and sow the seeds of continual chaos. However, as a historian of the inter-war period, I’ve been re-discovering the parallels between Labour’s current crisis and the one it had to claw its way out of from 1931-36 and the ‘devils’ are ‘legion’.

Francis Beckett, a fellow historian of the Labour movement, has just published an article in the ‘New European’ pointing to a curious figure from the left’s past who seems to have inspired the party’s calamitous current state. He argues that the cause of the calamity was not Brexit, nor even the incompetence of Corbyn, McDonnell and the ‘Shadow Cabinet’, but the sectarianism of those who advised Corbyn, principally Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, who are the modern equivalents of one of the strangest figures in Labour movement history, Rajani Palme Dutt. Beckett continues:

Dutt was the leading theoretician (that was the word they used) of Britain’s Communist Party, from the 1920s until he died in 1974. In the 1930s Dutt … pioneered a Moscow-inspired policy called ‘Class against Class’ which required communists to reserve their first and most deadly fire for their rivals on the left, who would divert the working class from the true path of socialism. … In the 1980s Murray and Milne ran Straight Left, the monthly journal associated with the ‘Stalinist’, pro-Soviet, anti-Eurocommunist faction of the Communist Party. This group was ruthlessly and bitterly sectarian, in the spirit of Class against Class. After the miners’ strike of 1984-5, they reserved their bitterest abuse for anyone on the left who criticised Arthur Scargill (disclosure: I was the target of some of this).

This author had a similar, albeit local, experience to this when, after teaching in a Lancashire comprehensive, I tried to re-join the Labour Party in Coventry in 1986. By then, the ‘Militant Tendency’ and the ‘hard Left’ had taken control of the constituency party my grandparents had helped to found. Even the testimony of the local councillor my grandmother had worked alongside for half a century wasn’t enough to guarantee me entry. Apparently, I was in the wrong teachers’ union, although I discovered later there was no such rule about belonging to a TUC-affiliated union. They had obviously spotted that I might be a threat to their hegemony and weren’t interested in Labour heritage. The following year, two of the Militant/ hard-Left group, David Nellist and John Hughes were elected as two of the three Coventry MPs, but they only survived one term before they were expelled from the party. Though they were replaced by ‘mainstream’ parliamentary candidates, Labour lost its fourth general election in succession in 1992, largely because it still seemed to be rent with divisions, at least until John Smith took charge. I went into self-imposed exile in Hungary, then undergoing its transition to democracy. There I learnt what ‘revolutionary socialism’ had really been about; Hungarians told me that they had really experienced Orwell’s dystopia in real life at exactly the time he had been writing about it in his Hebridean hermitage. Five years later, I returned to Britain just in time to witness a ‘Social-Democratic’ Labour Party finally win power in 1997, holding onto it until 2010 and achieving much in the first twelve of those thirteen years.

The Drive to Municipal Socialism in Coventry:

In order to understand the relationship between Socialism and the recovery of the Labour Party in Britain between the wars, we need to understand the growth of the local parties in municipalities like Coventry and their rise to power in the Thirties. What happened to the constituency parties in Coventry in the 1980s was largely a reaction of the ‘revolutionary socialists’ to the dominance of municipal socialism as the Party’s main creed since the mid-1930s. In some ways, it appears strange that it took Labour until 1937 to gain power in so working-class a city, and this may be the result of the party’s concentration on gaining and sustaining representation in parliament through what was, after all, a coalition of national and regional political groups, unions and societies. At the local level, the ‘shopocracy’ was left to preside over Coventry’s industrial and social revolution long after its social base had ceased to be dominant. The ‘shopocracy’ was an uneasy coalition of different forces, seldom able to achieve united and disciplined action. Yet it succeeded in holding up the Labour advance for decades. Finally, in 1937, Labour gained power almost by default.

In its drive for municipal power, Labour was in a fight not with the big companies that controlled the economic life of the city and its workers, but with a political anachronism that remained in power until it was virtually exhausted. The political expression of the ‘shopocracy’ were the Liberal and Conservative parties. In the late 1920s, they had come together to form a coalition. Of all its councillors and aldermen whose occupations can be identified in the inter-war period, one third were dealers or retailers, mostly shopkeepers. Only just over a fifth were manufacturers, mostly associated with the older-established trades such as watchmaking, silk-weaving and clothing manufacture. A further fifth was from the professions, including lawyers and doctors, alongside builders, publicans and commercial agents. Only a very small number were associated with big engineering companies, including a few senior managers, who did not stay politically active for very long.

Throughout the inter-war years, almost all the figures on comparative expenditure by county boroughs show Coventry lagging behind the majority, in particular on libraries, houses, schools and poor relief. Consequently, Coventry was low on in the list of rates levied per head. This may have encouraged more industrial concerns to move into the city, but the extension of the city and lower than average rates of unemployment allowed a policy of inactivity to survive. With a gradual improvement in the Labour vote in the 1930s, it was clear to the Coalition that its days were numbered unless drastic action was taken. It decided on a new initiative, therefore, and launched the ‘Progressive Party’. There were two reasons for this change; one was to improve organisation, and the other was to draw in support from Coventry industrialists. For years, the Coalition had won elections because of the weakness of the Labour Party rather than because of its own strength. An editorial in the Midland Daily Telegraph complained of the fact that the Labour Party had a central organisation, did political work throughout the year, had developed a policy for the city, whereas the Coalition had done none of this.

In 1935, when the City Council agreed to promote a Parliamentary Bill to extend its powers, Labour saw this as a victory for socialism. The Bill was necessary in order to deal with the new lands that the City had taken over in view of its expansion. It sought to acquire powers to drill water wells, acquire land for roads, set out an airport and parks, and close private slaughterhouses.  It was not controversial and George Hodgkinson, Labour leader on the Council declared at the meeting which agreed to it, We are all socialists now. He made it clear that Labour was supporting the Bill because it was a socialist measure. There were opponents, still wedded to a policy of non-intervention, who were uneasy about the growth in the authority of city departments. Coalition parsimony tended to encourage Labour to overemphasise the collectivist aspect of extending local government services. Certainly, these services had to be planned, and this was the worst charge that Labour could throw at the Coalition, that it had failed to plan municipal enterprises.

The early failures of the trade unions in the industrial struggle pushed the Coventry Labour Party into seeking its salvation in the municipal strategy. Labour projected itself as the party of ‘planning’ in which municipal enterprise would combine with co-operative ideals to create socialism. Many of Labour’s local leaders were also active in the co-operative movement which embraced the whole city, including the new working-class suburbs. Their vision of socialism – large, generous and undefined, included public ownership which, if properly handled, could provide the key to realising that vision. This was a very different vision of socialist values than that held by many in the trade union movement, expressed through the Trades and Labour Council which had been established a full decade before the Labour Party in the City. It had been founded before the First World War and besides co-ordinating support for major strikes at the local level, it also took up local issues on behalf of the trades unions.

What is of interest in Coventry is that for a number of years the number of people voting Labour greatly outnumbered the number of people joining trade unions. Increasingly, the unions were concerned with money, while Labour was concerned with social justice for all. The irony, of course, was that the decision by Labour to concentrate on municipal politics made it more likely that workplace politics, in turn, would become narrower in focus. From about 1934 onwards, trade union membership began to improve, very slowly at first but speeding-up from 1937.  The vehicle and aircraft industries did well for most of the Thirties, with higher pay for pieceworkers, and this stimulated many craft workers to re-join their unions to try to overtake the pieceworkers. As elsewhere in the country, the trade union revival offered scope for radical politics and the hardening of the divide between workplace politics and municipal politics, which once again made it possible for the Communist Party (CPGB) to spread its influence. It had survived the ‘lean’ years by going through a period of decline and sectarianism, which characterised its role and activities for the remainder of the decade.

But the inter-war period as a whole had seen a shift from socialism based on workshop power in Coventry to socialism as a municipal enterprise. A key factor in this shift was the existence of two distinct ruling groups within the City, the manufacturers and the ‘shopocracy’. The Coalition, with its hands growing increasingly shaky on the economic and social levers of power, and with its narrow-minded neglect of municipal duties, was an obvious target for the Labour Party. This concentration on attacking the Coalition meant that it had comparatively weak links with the trade union movement, and perhaps an over-emphasis on the road to socialism through municipal planning. But the emphasis on ‘planning’ was clearly needed to overcome the financial problems which could follow from the increase in municipal enterprises. Some traditional working-class members of the early Labour Party had a horror of borrowing instilled in them; T. J. Harris, the first Labour Mayor of Coventry could seldom be restrained from preaching against its evils, though his views were not altogether shared by some of his younger party colleagues. Nevertheless, he remained a major influence on the party throughout the inter-war period, as did the values of ‘thrift’. Fear of getting into serious debt remained a great handicap to a Council that needed to spend money. Labour hoped that the modern language of ‘planning’ and ‘intervention’ could get round the problem.

Of course, the danger of a local study, however brief, is that it might lead to an overemphasis on special local conditions and the playing down of national politics. Throughout most of the inter-war years, despite some notable ‘hiccups’, Labour succeeded in establishing itself as a major Parliamentary force, and for a few years, as a party of government. The habit of voting Labour gradually spread among working people and no doubt national developments affected voting patterns in Coventry in a similar way as they did in other parts of the country. Even before Labour came to power in Coventry, George Hodgkinson was urging the Council to look forward to the day when … property would be required by the Corporation for laying out the centre of the city on the lines followed by continental cities. Such planning was not just for a better city in the near future; it was a long-term investment that would yield funds for social spending beyond current horizons.

Planning for the People:

Coventry had quickly become a city whose economic life was dominated by large factories, and factory life was also important to shaping social and cultural activities in the city. Labour policies had little impact on factory experiences; its appeal was based on the improvement of living conditions, and the standard and the general quality of life rather than on people’s working lives. Working people were beginning to measure this, especially in Coventry, by the extent of their access to leisure activities and facilities. The local Labour approach was to take the political passivity of the working class as a given. Labour developed a socialist programme that meant acting on behalf of working people rather than bringing them into power. Its retreat from the workshops, necessary in order to clearly establish its own identity, left a gulf in working-class politics that the Communist Party sought, in vain, to fill. The Labour Party both nationally and locally was still fully committed to the replacement of capitalism with Socialism. But in 1935 it lacked a strategy for working-class power at a national level. It saw its programme of municipal socialism in Coventry and other corporations as a means of securing a broader victory.

In retrospect, A. J. P. Taylor (1970) saw the Thirties as a period of paradox with politicians attempting to strengthen the weakened and declining remnants of industrial greatness, while the more prosperous part of the population was buying the ‘new’ industrial products. This, he argued, was a good example of a ‘disconnect’ between politicians and the people. Taylor wrote that September 1931 marked ‘the watershed’ of English history between the wars. He defined this by reference to a number of events and longer-term developments. The end of the gold standard on 21 September was the most obvious and immediate of these. Until that point, governments were hoping to restore the unregulated capitalist economy which had existed (or was thought to have existed) before 1914. After that day, they had to face their responsibility to provide conscious direction at least as far as the banks and money markets were concerned. Taylor went on to highlight the key themes of the Thirties compared with the preceding decade:

Planning was the key word of thirties; planned economy, plan for peace, planned families, plan for holidays. The standard was Utopia. …

Politicians strove to revive the depressed areas; the inhabitants left them. Public policy concentrated on the staple industries and on exports. Capital and labour developed new industries which provided goods for the home market. … The individual spent his money on domestic comforts – indeed with the growth of hire-purchase, spent other people’s money also. … the English people were ‘more planned against than planning’. …

The nineteen-thirties have been called the black years, the devil’s decade. It popular image can be expressed in two phrases; mass unemployment and ‘appeasement’. No set of political leaders have been judged so contemptuously since the days of Lord North. … The members of the National Government … would hesitate at nothing to save the country, to save the pound. The result of their courage was that the children of the unemployed had less margarine on their bread. After this resolute decision, ministers dispersed to their warm, comfortable homes and ate substantial meals. Such was ‘equality of sacrifice’. 

Yet, at the same time, as Taylor himself also pointed out, most English people were enjoying a richer lifestyle than any they had previously known: longer holidays, shorter hours and higher real wages. They also had motor cars, radio sets and other electrical appliances (many of them made at the GEC in Coventry). This other aspect of the Thirties, less dramatic than the narrative of the ‘depressed areas’ and the hunger marches, has no place in song and story. But standards of living were actually rising in that black decade. In the Thirties, if you had a job, and particularly one in the new light industries, you were not badly off, and your parents’ way of life could seem dismally restricted and archaic. Except for the trough of the economic crisis which, unfortunately for Labour, coincided with their time in government, from October 1929 to September 1931, it was only the old-fashioned heavy basic industries, the ones which had made Britain’s fortune, which were now derelict: in the new industries based on electricity or petrol instead of steam, and consumer goods rather than iron and steel, there was a genuine and rising prosperity.

It was the mass unemployment of ‘the Slump’, more than anything else, which gave the Thirties their distorted image as a ‘long weekend’. Britain’s exports were almost halved between 1929 and 1931 and not only did the depressed industries of the Twenties now have to face, according to Cook and Stevenson (1977) an economic blizzard of unprecedented severity, but the slump also affected every branch of industry and business. Unemployment continued to rise through the winter of 1931-32, reaching a peak in the third quarter of 1932 when there were almost three million people out of work in Great Britain. The National Government’s response was to implement further economy measures, including cuts in unemployment benefit. Financial orthodoxy and economic conservatism remained the dominant features of its strategy to cope with the slump.

Pomp & Pageantry – A Monarch for the Masses:

George V photographed circa 1935.

The mass of the people, middle class and working class, who had fought in the war and still hoped for a ‘Merrie England’, lined up solidly behind the Pageant of History’s living representatives, the Royal family. George V commanded massive popularity. He was gruff, solid and sensible. He made sensible remarks, and his Christmas radio broadcasts in which, after a round-up of voices from all over the Empire, he spoke with great simplicity to his people, made him a father figure. His image was greatly enhanced by the fact that his Hanoverian origins had given him a classless accent. Of a member of MacDonald’s Government with whom he became friendly, he said If I’d had that man’s childhood I should feel exactly as he does. The King’s relations with MacDonald and the other Labour ministers formed an important chapter in his Kingship. According to Churchill, he was determined from the outset to show absolute impartiality to all parties in the Constitution and the workings of Parliamentary Government, irrespective of their creed or doctrine, who could obtain a majority in the House of Commons. Indeed, if the balance were to be swayed at all, it must be on the side of newcomers to power, who needed help and favour by the Crown. Never, Churchill wrote, did he need fear the British Democracy:

He reconciled the new forces of Labour and Socialism to the Constitution and the Monarchy. This enormous process of assimilating and rallying the spokesmen of left-out millions will be intently studied by historians of the future. … the spectacle was seen of the King and Emperor working in the utmost ease and unaffected cordiality with politicians whose theories at any rate seemed to menace all existing institutions, …

In 1935, George V had been on the throne for twenty-five years and the nation decided to give him a party. The Jubilee celebrations were marked by a genuine warmth of feeling, which came as a surprise to the King himself. When they toured the poorer parts of the capital, the King and Queen received an overwhelmingly affectionate and enthusiastic welcome. He is supposed to have said, I am beginning to think they must like me for myself. In the photo above, vast crowds cheer the procession as it returns to the Palace. The King wrote later that this was the greatest number of people in the streets that I have ever seen in my life. 

Below: A Jubilee street party in May 1935. All over Britain, workers decorated their houses and streets, and made the most of the occasion with a spirit that must have dismayed ‘true socialists’. In his speech, the King made reference to the unemployed, saying ‘I grieve to think of the numbers of my people who are without work’.  The Stockport Chamber of Trade recommended a public holiday to mark the Jubilee but left it to the employers to decide whether or not to pay their workers.  As a result, only one mill gave the day off with pay, so that thousands of workers celebrated the Jubilee with a reduced pay packet.

Below: Earlier in the Jubilee year, Alderman F. Bowler, the leader of the local Labour Party, had led a protest march to the Town Hall (on 6 March) to fight inside the Council against the rate reduction of threepence in the pound, and for more jobs. The Labour group put down a motion urging the Council to ‘respond to the Prince Of Wales’ appeal to employers to engage an extra one per cent of men on permanent employment’. The photograph shows protesting men forming a cordon around the Town Hall. 

Why did so many workers vote Tory in December 1935?

Besides producing a different kind of factory worker, the new industries greatly augmented the middle class at its lower-paid end; it was these people, together with the old middle class of independent shopkeepers and small tradesmen and small businessmen, with the professional upper-middle class, the new financial and managerial upper class and the remnants of the land-owning aristocracy, who could have been expected to vote solidly for the National Government and stability. In the event, they were joined by at least half the old working classes who were in such dire straits, and this was a straight vote for tradition: ‘in the crisis’ they thought, as was often the case with British workers, that we shall be saved, if at all, by those who are used to ruling and governing according to well-tried formulae which in the past have put us on top. That was the reason for the huge parliamentary majorities for MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain. René Cutforth summed up the British attitude as follows:

Put lucidly the proposition before the British nation in the 1930s would run something like this:

“In the last war nearly a million British men, in the younger half of the population, laid down their lives for King and Country/ Civilisation/ Freedom. Take your pick. Since we are not at this moment, as we sometimes feared we would be, a bankrupt German province, it can be said that their sacrifice saved us. We are now in the position of having to be saved again. It seems that the sacrifice required this time is that a further one and a half million, the permanently unemployed, lay down their lives, not abruptly and in violence like the soldiers: they will not even have to stop breathing, but ‘lives’ in the sense in which we want to preserve them in these islands, they cannot have. If this is what has to be, amen.”

Put like that, I don’t believe the proposition would have won a single vote, but in fact that is the way we voted and that is what happened. 

At the beginning of October 1935, Harold Nicolson, career diplomat and diarist, was offered a ‘safe’ seat in the National Labour interest at Leicester West in the November General Election. He jumped at the offer since he had been regarded as ‘damaged goods’ since his ill-starred flirtations with Beaverbrook and Mosley earlier in the decade. He was certainly not a socialist in any meaningful sense of the word, admitting himself that such socialism as he owned was ‘purely cerebral’ and that he did ‘not like the masses in the flesh’. So of course, Real Labour was out of the question, and Nicolson really saw himself as an Asquithian Liberal, but they were now extinct as a parliamentary organism. He had, therefore, wandered aimlessly along the political spectrum, from the New Party to National Labour, stopping off along the way to check out the Conservatives or the Liberals, without ever ideologically coming to rest at any one particular point. In his attempt to identify this point in public, he wrote a pamphlet for National Labour which took the form of an imaginary conversation between himself and a fellow passenger on a train journey between London and Leicester, published as Politics in the Train. He told his sceptical companion that how much he disliked sectional parties and bureaucrats, those that place their own interests or theories above the interests of the country as a whole. 

Although he favoured the concept of an organic state, he did not believe in rendering Britain a totalitarian State; in fact, he abhorred all forms of ‘isms’ and ‘dictatorships’. National Labour, he argued, represented ‘the future point of view’: it would base its policy on ‘Internal Reorganisation’ and ‘External Peace’. He believed in National Labour because he believed ‘in reality’ and Labour because he believed ‘in idealism’. He sympathised completely with the plight of the poor and thought of himself as belonging to a ‘progressive left-wing’. Although he considered Eton ‘the most perfect education system in all the world’, he deplored the class system in education and the division between public and council schools. Favouring equal education for all, he wanted people of any class to enjoy the privileges of the capitalist class, aiming at bringing Eton to the masses. These views were perhaps not so far removed from those emerging from George Orwell’s pen. But when Nicolson was writing in his diaries, he stated that while he had ‘always been on the side of the underdog’, he had also always believed in the hereditary principle. Once he sensed that his aristocratic values were under threat, he revealed his true colours.

But, knowing little of domestic politics and having nothing in common with the middle-class and working-class voters he sought to win over, he flinched from the cut and thrust of electioneering. The hustings held no appeal for him, especially when having to face working men and women lowing in disgust and hatred. He wrote in his diary after a campaign meeting in the constituency that he loathed every moment of the Election. His mood was not improved by the Liberals deciding at the last moment to enter a candidate, making it a much closer-run race.  When voting took place on 14 November, the contest could not have been more tightly fought.  After a recount, Nicolson sneaked in with a majority of just eighty-seven, much to the delight of his supporters. As he told his wife Vita later, I put all my philosophy of life into that Election. Yet it was a philosophy expressed by an Asquithian Liberal disguised as a National Labourite, propping up a National  Government controlled by the Conservatives led by Baldwin with the rump of National Labour trailing behind, led by an ailing Ramsay MacDonald, its eight members swallowed up in another huge Tory majority. MacDonald offered him a job as his Parliamentary Private Secretary, but he refused, explaining to Vita that:

… I fear that Ramsay is a vain and slightly vindictive old man … somewhat like King Charles I addressing the Cavaliers from the Whitehall scaffold. ‘You eight people … are at the seed-bed of seminal ideas. The young Tories are on your side. Work hard; think hard; and you will create a classless England.’ 

MacDonald also championed the idea of a ‘Tory Socialism’ which  Harold Nicolson must have considered to be almost as absurd as the notion of ‘a classless England’. It was fortunate for him that foreign affairs came to dominate the new Parliament as well as public opinion. On these matters, he was able to speak with authority and from experience not given to many MPs. His first opportunity to do so came sooner than he planned. On 19 December 1935, he rose from the backbenches to deliver his maiden speech at a dramatic moment, just after the Foreign Secretary, Samuel Hoare, had resigned over his role in the Hoare-Laval Pact which was designed to end the Ethiopian war which had been raging since October. The war in Abyssinia had already cost the Labour opposition its leader.

Despite the overwhelming victory of the ‘National Government’ at the General Election of November 1935, though now essentially a Conservative one, the recovery of the Labour Party under Clement Attlee’s leadership was evident in it gaining 154 seats, making it the major party of opposition to the Tories. George Lansbury, a committed pacifist, had resigned as the Leader of the Labour Party at the 1935 Party Conference on 8 October, after delegates voted in favour of sanctions against Italy for its aggression against Abyssinia. Lansbury had strongly opposed the policy and felt unable to continue leading the party. Taking advantage of the disarray in the Labour Party, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who had replaced MacDonald as PM in June of that year, announced on 19 October that a general election would be held on 14 November. With no time for a leadership contest, the party agreed that Attlee, as Deputy, should serve as interim leader, on the understanding that a leadership election would be held after the general election. Attlee, therefore, led Labour through the 1935 election, which saw the party stage a partial comeback from its disastrous 1931 performance, winning 38 per cent of the vote, the highest share Labour had won up to that point. Although numerically the result can be compared with the result of the 2019 Election, that is where the similarity ends. In historical terms, Labour was back on the road to its 1945 victory. Contemporaries also saw the result as a harbinger of things to come for Labour, as the letter written by the Liberal Marquess of Lothian to Lloyd George shortly after the election shows:

The Labour Party … is the party of the future; it proclaims that Socialism is the central issue of the century as democracy was of the last, and individual rights of earlier times, and has a vague, and largely unpractical programme of reform; it has behind it the interests of the Trade Unions and the co-operative movement reinforced by a steadily growing body of young intellectual Socialists. … The practical choice is between letting the Liberal Party die and encouraging liberally-minded people to join the other two parties in order to liberalise them and compel them both to be faithful to essential liberal tradition.

The Liberals won only twenty-one seats, losing eleven seats to Labour and four to the Tories. In fact, though, both the (by then) main parties benefited from the Liberal decline and, given the Conservative dominance after 1931, it was perhaps the Right rather than the Left which gained most in the long-term. More importantly, perhaps, the 1935 Election set the pattern for the post-war political system as a two-party rather than a multi-party democracy, especially in terms of governments.

Attlee Arrives, two Kings Depart. …

Attlee (pictured above in 1935) stood in the subsequent leadership election, held soon after, in which he was opposed by Herbert Morrison, who had just re-entered parliament in the recent election, and Arthur Greenwood: Morrison was seen as the favourite, but was distrusted by many sections of the party, especially the left-wing. Arthur Greenwood meanwhile was a popular figure in the party. Attlee was able to come across as a competent and unifying figure, particularly having already led the party through a general election. He went on to come first in both the first and second ballots, formally being elected Leader of the Labour Party on 3 December 1935. Writing in 1954, S. Haffner was clear about the significance of his two victories in Attlee’s career:

... As a statesman, Attlee’s formative period undoubtedly began in 1935. His party had been crushed at the 1931 election after the MacDonald ‘betrayal’; and Lansbury had proved quite ineffective as a parliamentary leader. So Attlee – one of the few Labour candidates to have survived the landslide – was told to act as leader until after the next election.

The Labour Party was in an almost hopeless mess – utterly defeated, and divided into quarrelling factions. Attlee, loyal, modest, impartial, clear-headed, capable of decision, and with the courage of his personal detachment, had precisely the qualities needed. In reuniting his broken party he added to those qualities a volume of experience in political management – so that he has quietly led the party ever since. It was at this time that the loyal Attlee learned to stomach disloyal colleagues. …

In his Memoirs (1964), the Earl of Kilmuir wrote that no-one could underestimate the strength of Attlee’s leadership. His contemporaries had tended to write him down as an amiable little man, but the Conservative peer regarded him as a shrewd, reasonable, and practical man … closer to the aspirations and difficulties of ordinary people than contemporary political leaders.

At five minutes to midnight on 20 January 1936, King George died at Sandringham in Norfolk. The public had been well prepared for the death of the King and a few hours earlier the BBC’s chief announcer had told the country; The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close. He was sincerely mourned as the representative of tradition, stability and ‘the good old days’. At the end of January, vast crowds once more stood on the streets of London, some having waited all night to watch the King’s funeral procession.

The new King, Edward VIII had a very different image from his father’s and already, as Prince of Wales, he had become something of a hero among the unemployed in his role as patron of the National Council of Social Service. Having already toured the depressed areas in 1928, he had already irritated Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister and other members of his cabinet, who at the beginning of 1936 were now in charge of the National Government. Later in the year, on touring the South Wales Coalfield once more, now as monarch, he had been heard to utter Dreadful! Something will be done about this! which was misreported as Something must be done! The first phrase might have been regarded as a promise of a re-doubling of efforts by charitable agencies, but the Government took umbrage at a time when Baldwin and the King were already protagonists in the abdication crisis. With that one misreported utterance, his reputation among ministers as ‘irresponsible’ was sealed together with his fate as King. Little wonder then that there were rumours of a march to London of South Wales miners to restore him as King, following his forced abdication.

The Radical Writers on the Left:

Another growing class in the Thirties was ‘a strange and disorderly mob’ according to René Cutforth. The Left referred to it as the ‘intelligentsia’, made up of intellectuals and artists and included a fair number of the rich and fashionable and their ‘hangers-on’. Cutforth commented that in the Thirties this layer of the population went violently Red almost overnight. This new mood was born at Oxford University and led by its young poets, Wyston Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and, a little later, Louis MacNeice. They were called the ‘Auden Group’ but all they had in common was a frame of mind – outrage at the plight of the poor and the ‘smugness’ of the rest. They launched the revolutionary movement which was to create the most characteristic intellectual climate of the time, and from the start, Auden’s was the voice of the decade. What they were after was a Bolshevik-style revolution. It was to arrive with ‘the death of the Old Gang, the death of us’. Auden always sounded as if ten thousand revolutionaries were fighting to snatch his words from the press as they appeared. In fact, the audience was so small that it often seemed that these poets were writing for each other.

It was just possible in the early Thirties to believe that social justice was flowering in the Soviet Union and that mankind was on its way to the millennium via Moscow, but even then only to addicts of Communist belief who were the Thirties’ most characteristic academic product. For these, the Soviet Union was the sacred cow, and any word of criticism of it was no mere disagreement or even heresy, but rank blasphemy. Most of the intellectuals on the Left were far too ‘committed’ to bother to get the facts right, and later plenty of them dismissed Stalin’s terror brightly as ‘necessary for the creation of the new order’. The Thirties was the great age of illusion in which intellectuals could believe anything they wanted, regardless of the available evidence to the contrary, and frequently did.

The Marxists expected the Revolution ‘any week now’. Capitalism was supposed to be on its last legs, to have at most a few tottering years to run. One good push would topple it over, and then the road to socialism would be found out of the ensuing chaos and catastrophe. C. Day Lewis wrote:

Drug nor isolation will cure this cancer.

It is now or never the hour of the knife,

The break with the past, the major operation. 

In many ways, he was speaking for his time. The idea of the ‘necessary chaos’ was the notion underlying all the art of the Thirties. The revolution was seen by Auden as making the artist’s private sensibility an irrelevance; the revolutionary poet should remain absolutely detached, like a surgeon or a scientist. He believed, therefore, that poetry should reflect this by being classical and austere:

Financier, leaving your little room

Where the money is made but not spent, …

The game is up for you and the others,

Who, thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns

Of College Quad or Cathedral Close, …

Seekers after happiness, all who follow

The convulsions of your simple wish,

It is later than you think.

The last line of Auden’s poem might well have been an apt motto of his whole ‘group’. Throughout the decade, however, George Orwell maintained a critical view of the group in particular and the orthodox Soviet-worshippers in general, whom he regarded as divorced from humanity: they had never met anyone outside their own social class, he said, annoying them greatly because they knew he was right. Even if they were intellectually exciting and were genuine poets, they were most genuine when least political, and their political achievements were very limited. Far more effective politically was Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, established in May 1936 with forty thousand readers who each received a book a month, chosen by Gollancz and two other Marxist intellectuals, John Strachey and Stafford Cripps, to revitalise and educate the ‘British Left’. It was not necessary to be either a Marxist or even a Socialist to be on ‘the Left’ in the Thirties. There was also a large, somewhat vague area of opinion which called itself ‘anti-fascist’, and it was to those of this opinion that the Left Book Club addressed itself. The use of the word ‘Left’ was known from the nineteenth century due to the adversarial nature of parliamentary seating according to the Speaker’s position in the Commons, but it was not ‘common’ as a general description before the 1920s. The Left Book Club helped to make it a synonym for ‘Socialist’ since it became a key left-wing institution of the late 1930s and the 1940s, with over sixty thousand readers. According to Cutforth, the Left Book Club exerted a strong influence on the mind of the decade.

‘The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales’, London: Gollancz, 1939.

Perhaps this is best exemplified by its best-known book, written in 1936 and published the following year, written by the most influential author of the Thirties and Forties, if not the century. Three days after the King’s funeral at the end of January 1936, George Orwell left London by train on the beginning of a journey of journalism, investigation and self-discovery. Victor Gollancz had commissioned him to write a book on Britain’s ravaged industrial north, and for this purpose, Orwell wanted to see the effects of unemployment and experience the British working class ‘at close quarters’. At that time, he was a contributor to the left-wing literary journal, The Adelphi. George Orwell was the first writer to travel to the north to report on the horrors of poverty and deprivation to be found there. J. B. Priestley had already journeyed around Britain in the Autumn of 1933, and his best-seller, English Journey, had drawn attention to the awful conditions to towns in the Midlands and the North. Priestley, the bestselling novelist and playwright, used his journalistic skills to write a travelogue about his ‘sojourns’ in various towns and cities in the previous year. It seems to describe England in accurate, realistic terms, contrasted with Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier of a year later, which was written with the main aim of filling the English middle classes with guilt and so exaggerated some of the evidence gathered to gain that effect. The spectre of Bolshevism which he also used to great effect, later became one of the facets of the mythology of the Thirties, and Priestley provided a useful corrective to a view which, as Orwell later admitted, emphasised the worst rather than the improving features of British society. Orwell’s view was as bleakly pessimistic as it could be; Priestley was ever the optimist.

There was also a growing sense, felt especially keenly on the left, that while much was known about the British Empire, the experience of the working classes at home had been hidden for too long. To put this right a number of groundbreaking novels were published on the subject, one or two of them written by working-class authors. The most successful of these was Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, a moving account of an unemployed family in Salford, where the author grew up. It was a best-seller, later made into a play (in which this author played a leading role in the early eighties) and a film. Left-wing film-makers, led by the pioneering producer John Grierson, were using the new medium of the documentary film in the hope of creating a new perspective on a Britain, in which at least two nations existed in parallel realities.

At the beginning of 1936, Britain was still a class-bound and divided nation, split between a rapidly modernising and growing ‘south’ and the impoverished peripheral regions of south Wales, northern England and central Scotland.  For Priestley, the ‘two nations’ view of the Thirties was greatly oversimplified. There was certainly depression and appalling human suffering but it was localised rather than general as the Thirties progressed. Equally, in parts of the Midlands, there were ‘blackspots’ of high unemployment among the generally prosperous  ‘new industry towns’ as Orwell had also noted in his diary on his journey, partly on foot, through the Midlands from Coventry to Birmingham to Cheshire before taking the train to Manchester. Priestley wrote of how he had seen England:

I had seen a lot of Englands. How many? At once, three disengaged themselves from the shifting mass. There was first, Old England, the country of cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and inns, of Parson and Squire, guidebook and quaint highways and byways England … But we all know this England, which at best cannot be improved upon in the world. …

Then, I decided, there is the nineteenth-century England, the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways, of thousands of rows of little houses all alike, sham Gothic churches, square-faced chapels, Town Halls, Mechanics’ Institutes, mills, foundries, warehouses, refined watering-places, Pier Pavilions, Family and Commercial Hotels, … This England makes up the larger part of the Midlands and the North and exists everywhere; but it is not being added to and has no new life poured into it. To the more fortunate people it was not a bad England at all, very solid and comfortable. …

The third England, I concluded, was the new post-war England, belonging far more to the age itself than to this island. … This is theEngland of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibiting buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafés,  … You could almost accept Woolworth’s as its symbol. … In this England, for the first time in history, Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their master and mistress. … Most of the work  … is rapidly becoming standardised in this new England, and its leisure is being handed over to standardisation too. …

Here then were the three Englands I had seen, the Old, the Nineteenth-Century and the New; and as I looked back on my journey I saw how these three were variously and most fascinatingly mingled in every part of the country I had visited. …. 

North of Manchester:

George Orwell was just one of a host of journalists, economists, sociologists, medical experts and nutritionists who produced reports in 1936 that were to be seminal in the envisioning and formation of the welfare state in the next decade. But Orwell was different. He scorned journalist such as Priestley for their ‘middle-class writing’. He didn’t wish to study the poor and then go off to a comfortable hotel to rest and recuperate. He wanted to plunge into people’s lives, albeit briefly, and experience working-class life at first hand. In his desire to immerse himself in poverty and discomfort an urge for self-punishment and a degree of voyeurism, a tradition in English literature of slum-visiting that went back to Mayhew and Dickens. Orwell had first become familiar with the world of poverty (of a different kind) by becoming a tramp in order to describe this world in Down and Out in Paris and London. Denys Blakeway has recently written of the impact on him of his journey north:

Orwell, the former Imperial policeman who had served in Burma, had never been to the North of England before; he had never seen the smoking chimneys and satanic mills of the industrial areas that had given rise to to Britain’s wealth and that were home to its worst oppression. Like a latter-day Engels, he experienced an epiphany, as what he saw changed him from a sceptical liberal into an unorthodox but nevertheless committed socialist, ready later in the year to fight for the cause in Spain.   

Arriving in Manchester, Orwell was put in touch with Jerry Kennan, an activist and unemployed coal miner in Wigan who took him to the town’s market square, where every weekend a series of political meetings took place. These were attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to engage workers in radical action, much of which took place outside of the sterile world of the coalition government in Westminster. According to Kennan, that Saturday afternoon there were several meetings going on in the square, held by the ILP, the Communist Party, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and various religious bodies. The NUWM was much mistrusted by the authorities as a Communist front, but by the jobless, it was widely regarded as the most effective organisation working on their behalf. It had been responsible for many hunger marches and protests against the Means Test that had helped to raise awareness of the suffering of unemployment through the years of depression. Kennan and his guest headed for the NUWM shelter, a dreadful, ramshackle place, he wrote, although he acknowledged that it was warm and welcoming. When the men there learned about his mission, they immediately offered help with finding information and, more importantly, lodgings. To his discomfort, however, his southern origins and background could not be hidden, and the men insisted on calling him ‘Sir’. In 1936, his class could not be easily disguised, and Orwell’s public school accent would have been unmistakable, however scruffy he may have appeared after days and nights spent on the road to Wigan.

On the first evening in Wigan, Orwell went as a guest of the NUWM to Wigan’s Co-operative Hall to hear Wal Hannington, a veteran activist, one of Gollancz’s authors, and the leader of the Movement. He was also one of the founding members of the CPGB, which made him an object of state suspicion and police surveillance. Stanley Baldwin saw activists such as Hannington as real dangers to the security of the realm. The CPGB and the NUWM had been behind numerous strikes, sit-ins and hunger marches during the previous five years, and within the establishment, there was genuine fear of revolution. Orwell dismissed Hannington as a ‘poor speaker’ who used all ‘the padding and clichés of the socialist orator’, but was impressed by the audience’s response and ‘surprised by the amount of Communist feeling’. At the time, the CPGB had only 11,500 members in Britain compared with the 400,000 members of the Labour Party, but its popularity and influence extended far beyond its membership. When Hannington told his audience that, in a war between Britain and the USSR, the latter would win, he was greeted with ‘loud cheers’. The Soviet Union under Stalin was revered by many, from founding members of the Labour Party, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation; like H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw; like the young Oxbridge intellectuals mentioned above and like the ‘working-class radicals’. such as B L Coombes (see his book cover above).

George Bernard Shaw, the other ‘ancient’, was still writing, though he had nothing much to contribute in the Thirties. He enjoyed showing off in the newspapers and, together with Wells, both of them committed socialists, made a trip to Moscow and came back with a rose-tinted view of Soviet life. Bertrand Russell meanwhile, committed to the pursuit of the truth, also went to the Soviet capital and reported that Stalin was indeed a cruel man and that life in Russia was indeed Red but far from rosy. But most intellectuals were still more influenced by ‘Victorian’ liberal writers, like W. B. Yeats, one of whose verses from ‘The Second Coming’ seemed to fit the times and was always being quoted:

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

As 1936 progressed, the call for action for Priestley’s nineteenth-century Britain to have new life poured into it, for something to be done, became stronger. As L. J. Williams (1971), the economic historian, pointed out, although the size and nature of the unemployment problem changed comparatively little over the two decades of the inter-war period, there was, with the flood of writing, research and social heart-searching on the topic, a much greater awareness of the basically localised and structural nature of the unemployment problem. With the publication of Keynes’ General Theory, 1936 became the key year for advancing (but not implementing) modern economic solutions to the problem of unemployment. By this time, it was clear that the British economy had recovered from its low point at the beginning of 1932, and was growing rapidly compared with its European rivals, and even compared with the USA. At the same time, to the government’s great embarrassment, a number of studies of unemployment and poverty were revealing the causal link with poor health. Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, commissioned one of these studies from the Medical Officer of Health for Stockton-on-Tees, whose research showed that an appalling ninety-four per cent of children in County Durham schools had signs of rickets as a result of poor diet. In March, the future PM and Conservative MP for Stockton,  Harold Macmillan, published Sir John Boyd Orr’s massive study, Food, Health and Income. This was an act of rebellion by a Conservative MP representing a northern industrial constituency. The government had done its best to suppress the study, which revealed the devastating fact that:

… one third of the population of this country, including all the unemployed, were unable, after paying rent, to purchase sufficient of the more expensive foods to give them an adequate diet.

Moreover, Boyd Orr calculated that that half the population did not eat ‘up to the modern health standard’. Rural poverty was also shown to be rising rapidly. Ted Willis, a young socialist in 1936, recalled how his mother used to go out and buy four pennyworths of scrag end of lamb and with that, she would make a big stew which would last us two or three days. On one occasion, he came home to find his mother putting a lid on the stew and taking it out of the house.  When he protested at her taking it to a neighbour’s house, his mother slapped his face, saying You’re hungry, but they’re starving!  In 1934 a National Assistance Board had been created, which set a uniform rate for ‘unemployment assistance throughout the country.’ In general, benefits to the unemployed were cut by about ten per cent in the 1930s. In South Wales, Central Scotland and the North of England, unemployed people were much more reliant on means-tested and discretionary benefits than insurance. This was because periods of unemployment in these areas were longer, forcing unemployed workers onto ‘the dole’ when their insurance benefits ran out. This fuelled the sense of shame and anger among the unemployed and their families. René Cutforth commented on the continuing plight of the unemployed throughout the decade:

To the end of the decade about a million and a half workers were relegated to limbo and their lives laid waste. But not without a struggle. 

Fighting back; Marching on …

The unemployed ‘struggled’ against their condition by marching, organising rallies and engaging in rent strikes. Led by Wal Hannington of the CPGB, the NUWM had around twenty thousand members by 1932, with the active support of at least twice that number. Their most famous actions were the ‘Hunger Marches’ of 1932, 1934 and 1936. There were also protest marches against the introduction and operation of the means test, particularly from Scotland and South Wales. The photographs below show Wal Hannington and Harry McShane leading the Scottish marchers and contingents from Teeside and Sunderland crossing the Tyne Bridge in 1932.

The pictures of the 1934 March on the left below are two of those taken of the women’s column which marched to London from Derby. They capture the feeling of comradeship and purpose that existed between the marchers on their wintry trek to London. The shots of the first aid treatment of blistered feet demonstrate the determination of the women, either unemployed themselves or having out-of-work husbands. The marchers all depended on the goodwill of local labour organisations to provide nightly accommodation during the journey. The picture on the right shows heads turning in the crowd that gathered in Trafalgar Square on 3rd March, as they watched the approach of the marchers. 

The picture of Trafalgar Square shows all heads turned as as section of the audience see the approach of the marchers.

The March Council had requested a meeting with the PM, Ramsay MacDonald in a letter supported by a number of Labour MPs, but they did not succeed in putting their case to the House of Commons, though they had the support of a large number of MPs including Sir Herbert Samuel, leader of the Liberal opposition. Clement Attlee also spoke up for the marchers, saying that they were …

… fair representatives of the unemployed. The injustice from which these men and women suffer is very widely known in all parts of the House and the feeling in the country is now tremendous … there is no reason why these men should be refused a hearing by the cabinet.

The marchers sent a delegation to Downing Street, led by two ILP MPs, Maxton and McGovern, and the two Communist leaders of the NUWM, Hannington and McShane. He was ‘not at home’, but, in an outburst in the Commons, asked, …

… Has anybody who cares to come to London, either on foot or in first-class carriages, the constitutional right to demand to see me, to take up my time whether I like it or not? I say he has nothing of the kind! 

However, the most successful march was not organised by the NUWM and in fact, eschewed any involvement from it and other sectarian organisations. In fact, ‘The Jarrow Crusade’ of October 1936 owed that success to the determinedly non-political and cross-party organisation of its leaders, most notably that of the town’s Labour (and ILP) MP, Ellen Wilkinson with the official support of Jarrow’s Mayor, Bill Thompson, who was a Labour man, but insisted that it should have the backing of all parties. It was an entirely bipartisan, peaceful march for jobs, approved by the whole Council, which also enjoyed the support of many local and regional Church leaders, including the Bishop of Sheffield, though (infamously) not the Bishop of Durham. It involved two hundred carefully-chosen, relatively fit unemployed men. Jarrow was one of the worst-hit areas in England, largely because of the closure of its shipyard, with eighty per cent of its workers on the dole. The ‘crusaders’ carried over eighty thousand signatures to Parliament, asking the House of Commons to realise the urgent need that work should be provided without delay. They achieved little in the short-term by way of economic relief but did draw widespread public attention to the plight of the unemployed ‘left behind’ in the older industrial areas as the economy as a whole recovered in 1936, due to the expansion of newer industries and the beginnings of rearmament.

The Labour Party, together with the TUC, was fearful of the taint of Communism that went with hunger marches and instructed local branches to reject requests for help from the crusaders as they passed. Some delegates at the Party conference in Edinburgh that October attacked Ellen Wilkinson directly. One of them, Lucy Middleton, criticised her for sending hungry and ill-clad men on a march to London, advocating the making of propaganda films about the distressed areas instead. This ‘stab in the back’ from her own party was one which would rankle for years to come. Though hailing from one of the poorer areas of Coming from metropolitan Manchester herself, Wilkinson soon discovered that, in a tight-knit community such as Jarrow, where almost all were workless, the highly-skilled man, the ambitious young foreman, the keenest trade-unionists provided the leadership for the unemployed. One such man was David Riley, the Council leader, a hefty Irishman with an iron will. He volunteered to lead them on the road to London and it was he who insisted that this would be a ‘crusade’, not another hunger march. An appeal for signatures for the petition and funds was made under the Mayor’s name and Thompson used his civic position to gain the support of the many Conservative town councils along the route south. Paradoxically, it was the Conservative councils who most often held out the hand of friendship to the crusaders. Following Thompson’s request, and joint letters from the Conservative and Labour agents, they offered food and lodging at every Tory-controlled town and village through which the men passed, including Harrogate, Leeds and Sheffield.

Ellen Wilkinson (pictured above, leading the Crusade) had described herself, on more than one occasion, as a ‘revolutionary socialist’, and had needed a great deal of persuasion not to raise the issues of party politics during the Crusade. She was the moving spirit in Jarrow, a small, slight, red-haired ball of fire, the year before, during the General Election campaign, she had led a march to ‘beard’ Ramsay MacDonald in his constituency of Seaham, fifteen miles away. In the event, all that march achieved was a bleating admonition from the cornered statesman:

Ellen, why don’t you go out and preach Socialism, which is the only remedy for all this?

On 5 October, the two hundred men set out under a banner, ‘Jarrow Crusade’ to march to London, three hundred miles away, as an official delegation to Parliament. Everybody turned out to watch them go. The Mayor and Mayoress led them for the first twelve miles and, after that, Ellen Wilkinson. David Riley insisted on the removal of any socialist banners that appeared with sympathisers along the route. One marcher was sent home for expressing ‘communistic beliefs’ and another was threatened with expulsion. It was an effective policy since other marches were ignored, whereas the Crusade received widespread friendly attention from the press, and the march became a long-running national story. The government became alarmed by its popularity, as the Manchester Guardian reported that there could be no doubt that the march was an abounding success – the organisation seems well-nigh perfect. The Cabinet issued a statement in a parliamentary democracy, processions to London cannot claim to have any constitutional influence on policy.  No deputations would be received by ministers.

This response might have been expected, but the crusaders’ reception by the Labour town council in Chesterfield was surprising, considering the welcome they had just received from the Sheffield Tories. The pleas for assistance were turned down, forcing the marchers to rely on the charity of local businessmen, mainly Tories, for food and blankets. Ellen Wilkinson recalled how they weighed in with hot meals and a place to sleep. A clear pattern was emerging, with the Conservatives welcoming and Labour shunning, a pattern which continued to the end of the trek, to the enduring bitterness of all the crusaders. In Leicester, however, the Co-op worked all night mending their boots. Bedford, in the suspect south, rallied to their support. They arrived in London in a cloudburst with their mouth-organ band playing ‘The Minstrel Boy’. On their final evening in London, they had hoped to be addressed by the London Labour leader, Herbert Morrison, together with an audience of influential Londoners. In the event, he did not show up, probably on the orders of the national leadership, and had to be replaced by Canon Dick Sheppard as the keynote speaker (pictured below).

The next morning the crusaders went to the House of Commons, dressed in smart suits specially bought for the occasion with funds raised during the march. They were expecting to deliver the petition, but Stanley Baldwin, with the support of Neville Chamberlain (pictured above) refused to allow the men to come to the bar of the House to deliver the petition in person. To avoid any ugly scenes, Ellen Wilkinson gave them a guided tour of Westminster and then packed the majority of the men onto a River Thames pleasure-boat for a sightseeing cruise. It was a deception cooked up with Sir John Jarvis, a Surrey MP with longstanding charitable connections to Jarrow. Only a few of the men were allowed to watch from the Strangers’ Gallery while Wilkinson went through the solemn procedure of presenting the petition to the Speaker. She spoke tearfully of their plight, but Runciman, who had said earlier that Jarrow must work out its own salvation, refused to answer a question because it was not on the order paper, although he did say that his information was that the situation in Jarrow was improving. Baldwin refused to say anything, and that was it. When they arrived back in Jarrow by train, the speakers at the Town Hall put a brave face on the obvious failure of the crusade. The goal of the march was to get the National Government to overturn the decision to close down the shipyard, not to put up a new steelworks, as Jarvis had proposed at the last minute, looking like a ‘fairy-godfather’, but in reality, simply trying to help save the Conservative Party from an electoral wipe-out in a region devastated by economic malaise.

Nevertheless, the crusaders had aroused a sympathy throughout the country which compels the Government to act, as David Riley told them. By rejecting class-based politics and appealing to broader social sympathies, the Jarrow Crusade had touched the hearts of many for whom talk of the distressed areas had meant nothing until they saw it in person or on the newsreels. With its military discipline, and containing in its ranks many veterans of the First World War, it harked back to that conflict, evoking in the onlooker feelings of compassion and guilt. The Crusade was also one of the foundations of a new consensus that was emerging and would solidify after the Second World War. The country came to agree almost unanimously that such extremes of poverty should never be allowed to return. A new, very British idea of social justice was emerging and a collective opinion-forming that would eventually give rise to the welfare state. Jarrow was the classic march, but even while it was going on, other marches were in progress. Four hundred Scotsmen from Glasgow, for instance, were marching south to join up with other contingents from South Wales and elsewhere to protest against the means test, as seen in the photos below. Marching became an epidemic in the Thirties in Britain.

The NUWM had no difficulty in raising a Welsh contingent of eight hundred men and contingents of women for the biggest and most united of the hunger marches against the means test in November 1936. The two postcard-size photographs below came from South Wales. When the eight hundred marchers, carrying their Keir Hardie banner from Aberdare, reached Slough, they were greeted by eleven thousand compatriots, because by that time Slough had become known as ‘little Wales’ peopled by migrants from the valleys. 

The photograph below shows some of the Welsh marchers lining up outside Cater Street School, Camberwell, where they were to spend the night, prior to the march to the Hyde Park rally. Among the speakers were Aneurin Bevan MP and Clement Attlee. The former said that ‘The hunger marchers have achieved one thing. They have for the first time in the history of the labour movement achieved a united platform. Communists, ILPers, Socialists, members of the Labour Party and Co-operators for the first time have joined hands together and we are not going to unclasp them.’ The latter moved the resolution that ‘the scales (of unemployment benefit) are insufficient to meet the bare physical needs of the unemployed. …’

From the Threat of Revolution to the Promise of Reform:

Politicians of all the parliamentary parties began to fear a revolution by the end of 1936, not least because there were Fascists as well as Communists marching. The Church became involved with William Temple, the Christian Socialist Archbishop of York commissioning a scientific inquiry into long-term unemployment, Men Without Work, based on the experiences of the jobless for twelve months up to November 1936 as its evidence. Researchers were sent out across Britain as a whole to immerse themselves in the areas of greatest poverty, staying in the households of the workless. Besides being a national survey, those sent by Archbishop Temple were experts, unlike Orwell. They were economists, psychologists and social scientists, funded by the Pilgrim Trust and supervised by the Director of the London School of Economics, Sir William Beveridge, who advised them to study in detail the lives of a thousand long-term unemployed men, and their families; their health, living conditions and physical environment. Beveridge was able, from 1942, to use their findings to provide the evidential basis for the creation of the post-war Welfare State.

One of these researchers was a young Jewish refugee, Hans Singer. A brilliant economist, he had moved to Britain to study under his hero, John Maynard Keynes. Having escaped from Nazi Germany, Singer found him himself the victim of anti-Semitic abuse as a professor at Istanbul and moved to Cambridge. After two years, Keynes recommended him to Temple because of his interest in unemployment. His detailed research papers, archived at the LSE, are essential sources for social historians of the period. Many of these, along with the Pilgrim Trust Report in full, were not published until 1937, by which time the argument for ‘Planning’ had already been won. But the devil still remained in the detail of the implementation, in which the Labour Party had little if any official responsibility, except on a local basis. However, together with a more united and progressive Left, they did have increasing influence over public opinion nationally and regionally.

Sources:

René Cutforth (1976), Later Than We Thought: A Portrait of the Thirties. Newton Abbott: David & Charles.

Norman Rose (2005), Harold Nicolson. London: Pimlico.

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (ed.) (n.d.), Life & Labour in a Twentieth-Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry (University of Warwick): The Cryfield Press.

Richard Brown & Christopher Daniels (1982), Documents & Debates: Twentieth-Century Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.

Denys Blakeway (2011), The Last Dance: 1936 – The Year Our Lives Changed. London: John Murray (Publishers).

Michael Clark & Peter Teed (eds.) (1972), Portraits & Documents: Twentieth Century, 1906-1960. London: Hutchinson Educational.

John Gorman (1980), To Build Jerusalem: A Photographic Remembrance of British Working Class Life, 1875-1950. London: Scorpion Publications.

Joanna Bourke et. al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

 

Individualism & Collectivism:

According to the eminent ‘man of letters’ of the twentieth century, Raymond Williams (1983), the term ‘Socialist’ emerged as a philosophical description in the early nineteenth century. In that century and beyond, it could be used in two ways, which have had profound effects on the use of the term by radically different political tendencies. Of course, social was the merely descriptive term for a society in its now predominant sense of the system of common life; a social reformer wished to reform this system. But ‘social’ was also …

… an emphatic and distinguishing term, explicitly contrasted with ‘individual’ and ‘individualist’ theories of society.

Naturally, there has always been a great deal of interaction and overlap between these two meanings, but their varying effect can be seen in the beginning in the formation of the term. In the first sense, it was viewed as an extension of ‘liberalism’ as it referred to radical political reform of the social order, to develop, extend and secure the main liberal values for all members of society; political freedom, the ending of privileges and formal inequalities, social justice (conceived as ‘equity’ between different individuals and groups). In the second sense, it was seen as the ‘enemy’ of competitive, individualist forms of society, specifically industrial capitalism with its system of wage-labour. Truly social forms depended on practical co-operation and mutuality, which in turn could not be achieved while there was still private (individual) ownership of the means of production. Real freedom could not be achieved, basic equalities could not be ended, social justice (conceived as a just social order rather than simply ‘equity’ between individuals) could not be established unless a society based on private property was replaced by one based on social ownership and control.

Yet, also in this period, movements describing themselves as ‘socialist’, for example, the English Fabians, powerfully revived what was really a variant sense in which ‘socialism’ was seen as necessary to complete liberalism, rather than as an alternative theory of society. To George Bernard Shaw and others in Britain and Ireland, socialism was the economic side of the democratic ideal (Fabian Essays, 33) and its achievement was an inevitable prolongation of the earlier tendencies which Liberalism had represented. Opposing this view, and emphasising the resistance of the capitalist economic system to such ‘inevitable’ development, William Morris used the word communism. Engels, in his Preface of 1888, looking back to the Communist Manifesto which he and Marx had written in 1848, observed:

We could not have called it a ‘Socialist’ manifesto. In 1847, Socialism was a middle-class movement. Socialism was, on the continent at least, respectable; Communism was the very opposite.

Marx & Engels at work at the time of publishing The Communist Manifesto.

For a time, the stresses between employers and employees led to the worldwide dissemination of the very harsh and elementary form of communism which is associated with Karl Marx in particular. However, we need to view Marx’s political economy in its proper context as an integral shift in thinking about how to interpret the new industrial world which had grown up ‘like Topsy’ around the common man. It was only as the nineteenth century developed, according to H. G. Wells, that:

… men began to realise that property was not one simple thing but  a great complex of ownerships of different values and consequences … that there is a very great range of things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens, pleasure-boats, for example, which need each to be considered very particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it may come under private ownership, and how far it falls into the public domain and may be administered and let out by the state in the collective interest.   

Wells, writing his well-known book in 1922, A Short History of the World, expressed the dichotomy in the following terms:

On the one hand are the individualists, who would protect and enlarge our present freedoms with what we possess, and on the other hand the socialists, who would pool our ownerships and restrain our proprietary acts. In practice one will find every graduation between the extreme individualist, who will scarcely tolerate a tax of any sort to support a government, and the communist, who would deny any possessions at all.

The ordinary socialist of today is what is called a collectivist; he would allow a considerable amount of private property, but put such affairs as education, transport, mines, land-owning, most mass production of staple articles, and the like, into the hands of a highly organised state. Nowadays there does seem to be a gradual convergence of reasonable men towards a scientifically studied and planned socialism.

Without such a programme, Engels had realised, there could not be a united Socialist Party permanently, and every attempt to found one would fail. Indeed, the political independence of the nascent Labour Party from the Liberal Party was always in doubt until in 1918 it accepted a Socialist constitution.

Socialism as a Matter of ‘Faith’ – Methodist or Marxist?:

British Socialists possessed a ‘faith’ in the righteousness and ultimate victory of their cause which acted as a powerful driving force. This faith owed as much to Methodism as to Marxism, being based both on Christian principles and the analysis of contemporary society first presented by Marx and Engels. Much of this analysis was modified, however, by Hyndman and the Fabians, by Morris and Blatchford, though it still had a comprehensive reality for those who accepted it. To its working-class adherents, like my own grandparents who founded and campaigned for it in Coventry, it gave a sense of purpose and pride in class consciousness; to middle-class philanthropists, it afforded the consolation that they were working in solidarity with a range of tendencies of social change and progress. As Pelling concluded in his seminal work, the history of the world had often shown the dynamic qualities of a faith devoutly held, like that of the early Christians, the Calvinist reformers and the millenarian sects of the seventeenth century. Faith may feed on illusions, but it is capable of conquering reality.

The fact was that the British working class as a whole had no use for the conception of violent revolution. Any leader who failed to recognise this could not expect to win widespread support. Economic grievances could temporarily arouse bitter discontent as they had done in the early years of the industrial revolution. But dislocations of this type were for the most part transitory: a permanent political organization of the working class needed to disavow the use of violence. Only those who recognised this could effectively set in motion the movement to form a Labour Party. At the time Keir Hardie (right) retired from the chairmanship of the ILP in 1900, it had captured trade-union support, with the ultimate objective of tapping trade union funds for the attainment of political power.

But soon the ILP was deeply in debt and was only saved from bankruptcy by the generosity of wealthy supporters such as George Cadbury, who, as a Quaker, appreciated its stance against the Boer War. With Hardie’s re-election to Parliament, and the reaction against imperialism, the ILP’s position steadily improved, and it began to build itself up again and gained fresh recruits. By 1906 it was as strong as it had not yet the full force of the Socialist revival of that time. The Labour Representation Committee was a pressure group founded in 1900 as an alliance of socialist organisations and trade unions, aimed at increasing representation for labour interests in the Parliament. The Socialists were a minority force within it, and even after the formation of the Labour Party and its adoption of Socialism as its political creed in 1918, many within the party were hostile to it as an ideology.  There is little doubt that most of the non-Socialist trade-union leaders would have been happy to stay in the Liberal Party, which most of them had belonged to in the past if the Liberals had made arrangements for a larger representation of the working classes among their Parliamentary candidates.

All along, there was little doubt that most of the non-Socialist trade-union leaders would have been happy to stay in the Liberal Party if that party had made arrangements for a larger representation of the working class among their Parliamentary candidates. Again and again, it was the fault of the official Liberal Party constituency caucuses that this did not happen; and it was the behaviour of these that set many of the workers’ leaders thinking in terms of a separate party. Even Keir Hardie’s revolt at Mid-Lanark in 1888 had been directed, not against Gladstone’s policies, but against the system by which the local association chose its candidate. The subsequent success of the ILP was largely due to the failure of its rivals, the Labour Electoral Association, to make any satisfactory terms with the Liberal Party for the fuller representation of Labour. Its leader, Threlfall, had been forced to admit the complete failure of its policy in 1894:

It is a curious commentary upon this ‘ideal system’ that of the thirteen Labour members representing England and Wales in the present House, four ran in opposition to, or without recognising the existence of the caucus, five represent constituencies where the miners absolutely dominate the position … and only four either captured the caucus or out-generalled it. It is … a waste of time to advise the working classes to attend … they regard it as a middle-class machine; they have neither the time nor the inclination to compete with the wire-pullers who work it, and they have a decided objection to being made the puppets of anyone. It has served its purpose, and it has carried the people through one state of its development: but as it exists today it is too narrow and too much hampered with class prejudice to be a reflex of the expanding democratic and labour sentiment.

Herbert Gladstone, later to become the Liberal Chief Whip, also recognised that the constituencies, for social, financial and trade reasons are extremely slow to adopt Labour candidates. The Fabians also found that their attempts to ‘permeate’ the associations with potential candidates were met with the refusal of the moneyed men to finance the caucus. The principal reason why money was required was that there was no system for the payment of MPs. This was a reform that the Liberal leaders might have taken up much earlier than they did, thus removing a motivating factor in the support given by smaller unions to the idea of a separate Labour Party. As early as 1897, E. Cowey, a prominent Lib-Lab leader of the Yorkshire Miners moved a resolution at the 1897 TUC in favour of State payment of MPs, saying that:

… money was still the golden key that opened the door to a seat in the House of Commons. Only large and powerful societies could … afford to keep their representatives in such a responsible and expensive position. … The payment of members was absolutely necessary to the success of the Labour movement.

But it was not until 1911, after the Osborne Judgement, that the Liberal Party gave this priority and passed it into law; in the meantime, the smaller unions had already wedded themselves to the idea of a separate Labour Party. For these reasons, it is not difficult to see why the Liberal Party failed to retain the popularity that it had once enjoyed among the ‘responsible’ leaders of the trade unions. As Ramsay MacDonald observed to Herbert Samuel, We didn’t leave the Liberals: They kicked us out and slammed the door in our faces. As the LEA faded away after 1895-96, the ILP steadily asserted itself as the hope of the working-class for parliamentary representation. Thus, the early components of the Labour Party formed a curious mixture of political idealists and hard-headed trade unionists: of convinced Socialists and loyal, but disheartened Gladstonian Liberals.

The Establishment of the Parliamentary Labour Party:

The great difficulty the LRC had to face was the maintenance of an independent political line by all its members. Richard Bell, one of the only two MPs representing it in 1900 Parliament, saw no need to hold himself aloof from the Liberals, and in 1904-5, when he refused to sign the Labour Party constitution, he had to be expelled. There was similar trouble with the three Labour MPs elected at by-elections before 1906: two of them, Shackleton and Henderson were reprimanded in 1904 for appearing in support of a Liberal by-election candidate. It was only in 1906, with the election of a substantial group of thirty MPs who drew a regular salary from the LRC, that the Labour Party was established as a genuine parliamentary party. Part of the problem had been the financial weakness of the Socialist societies as compared with the trade unions. Even in 1901, before many of the big trade unions switched their allegiance, the societies made up less than one-sixteenth of the total affiliated party membership. They were further weakened by the secession of the SDF and by the Fabian Society losing respect over its support for jingoism; the ILP was also, once more, on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1906, it contributed to the LRC based on a nominal sixteen thousand members, and the Socialist societies’ proportion of the LRC’s contributing membership had sunk to one-fiftieth.

Above: A Liberal Party rally during the 1906 General Election. Though often rowdy, rallies were vital in mobilising voters. As the early twentieth century progressed, political parties made increasing use of the new forms of mass media: radio and newsreel, in addition to newspapers and journals.

Furthermore, many of the political difficulties of the Labour Party’s early years arose from the fact that the ILP, although committed to the line of independence, was nevertheless sympathetic to the Liberal Party in policy terms. It favoured Free Trade over Chamberlain’s policy of Protection and was fiercely opposed the Education Act of 1902, which established state-controlled elementary schools, as did most Nonconformist supporters of both Liberal and Labour causes. Sidney Webb had had a role in the design of this act, but the Manchester Guardian was able to say of the 1901 ILP Conference that: What must strike a Liberal … is … how much of the proceedings are devoted to the advocacy of traditional Liberal principles.

After Champion was finally discredited, the former Liberals had it all their own way in the ILP’s leadership. Ramsay MacDonald, whom Hardie described as the party’s greatest intellectual asset, sided with the Liberals against the Fabian Socialists on almost every immediate issue of the time; and Hardie, who had been much more friendly to the Radicals since the outbreak of the South African War, in October 1901, publicly advocated a frank, open and above-board agreement … for well-defined purposes with the anti-war Liberals. Eighteen months later Hardie was apparently prepared to connive at MacDonald’s secret electoral understanding with the Liberal whips. With both the leaders and the rank-and-file of the Socialist wing showing little enthusiasm for the pacifist stance of MacDonald and Hardie, the non-Socialist elements gravitated further towards an alliance with the anti-war Liberals. Between 1903 and 1906 the new party machine had been brought into existence, and whatever the political views of its officers, it soon began to build up among them a vested interest in its maintenance, which has continued through to the present day, despite immense strains at times.

The officials of the great trade unions had made up their minds in favour of having a distinct party of Labour, and so long as their industrial strength continued to grow, the strength of the political organisation would also increase. In the pre-war years which followed, however, there were doubts about the value of political action, and the new industrial unions absorbed ‘syndicalist’ ideas from across the continent and the USA. These were often born out of a traditional distrust of ‘leaders’ within the movement which was often stoked by personal feuds between them as well as disagreements on policy; there were also stresses and strains arising out of wars, rumours of war and revolutions in Europe. Some of the unions, especially the Miners’ Federation, ‘the Fed’, suffered from the peaks and troughs of the international trade cycle, resulting in further radicalisation. Others among the ‘new unions’ of 1889 became more moderate as they became more established. In the thirty years of its life, the new party increased its aggregate poll and share of the vote in every General Election it fought. Despite the persistence of its plurality of ideas and interests, or perhaps because of it, the essential unity of the party remained intact. As Pelling concluded:

The association of Socialist faith and trade-union interest, of hope for an ideal future and fear for an endangered present, seemed on the point of disruption at times: yet it survived, for a variety of reasons … because in the years before the party’s birth there had been men and women who believed that the unity of the working-class movement, both in industry and politics, was an object to be striven for, just as now most of their successors regard it as an achievement to be maintained.

In British politics as a whole, the electoral system underwent profound changes over the early twentieth century. In 1900, only seven out of ten adult men (and no women) were qualified to vote. Four million men were excluded from the franchise and there were nearly half a million plural voters, including around two thousand men with four or more votes. Despite the continued restrictions on the franchise,  the SDF continued to field independent socialist candidates. The picture above was taken during the Haggerston by-election of July 1908 and shows a suffragette, ‘Miss Maloney’ speaking from a Clarion Van in the cause of the SDF candidate, Herbert Burrows. During the five-day campaign in the safe Liberal seat, the van was parked outside the Liberal Party HQ. Burrows was a popular figure in East London, where he had helped Annie Besant organise the 1888 matchgirls’ strike at Bryant and May’s factory. The issue of female suffrage was a strong factor in the campaign, and the Liberal candidate, Warren, had the support of Mary MacArthur’s National Union of Women Workers. However, many notable suffragettes, including the Pankhursts, were opposed to his candidature, because he was a supporter of Asquith. The result brought a victory for the Tory, Rupert Guinness, the brewer, with Burrows finishing in third place with half the votes gained by Warren.

After the ‘Landslide’, Erosion & the Rise of Labour:

Above: The Bethnal Green by-election of 1914. Door-to-door canvassing was, at it still remains, an important aspect of electioneering. Though women did not get the vote until 1918, this candidate seeks support on the doorstep from a female shopkeeper. His attention is an early indication of the growing importance of women at election-time.

The Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith had initiated, between 1906 and 1914, a series of social and political reforms of a far-reaching character. But the emphasis here is placed upon the period 1914-22 in identifying the role of the Labour Party concerning Liberal decline. Whether Dangerfield’s idea of the ‘strange death of Liberal England’ between 1910 and 1914 is a valid thesis is still strongly debated among historians. Its significance lies in its identification of the basic strains upon Liberalism caused by the political and industrial crises. Liberalism was, and still is (at least to some extent), an ideology of individual and social conscience. It was the 1914-18 War which tested that conscience rather than the earlier threats. The War also brought about an independent Labour representation in Parliament, a result of the breakdown of the Gladstone-MacDonald Pact of 1903. The nature of ‘total war’ brought many basic Liberal principles into question. It led to the leadership of Asquith being challenged first with the creation of a more broadly based coalition in May 1915 and then being superseded following the split with Lloyd George in December 1916. For the Liberal Party, this meant a rift, never to be healed, between Asquithian and Coalition Liberals.

Universal male suffrage was achieved in 1918, when, after a long struggle, women over the age of thirty were also permitted to vote. In 1928, the age limit was lowered to twenty-one, equal with men. The principle of single-member, equal-sized constituencies was accepted in 1885, though it was not completely achieved until 1948. Voting behaviour also changed significantly. Most obviously, Labour replaced the Liberals as one of the two major political parties after 1918. The beginnings of this change, which took effect on a largely local and regional basis, can be seen in the map of the 1918 General Election, shown below. In 1918, British politics was based upon the relationship between the Liberal and Conservative parties. They were, in many ways, sides of the same coin. They accepted both the logic of consensus politics and the benefits of a capitalist society.

John Buchan, the Conservative politician and writer, described the 1918 General Election as a ‘blunder’.  He claimed that Statesmen, who had criticised soldiers harshly for their blindness, were now in their own province to be no less myopic. The instinct which led to the election was right, but its conduct was disastrous. For the sitting members, the test of patriotism was a solitary division in the House of Commons in the preceding May on a criticism of the Government by a distinguished staff-officer, one which was neither factious or unfair. Those who had remained ‘docile’ were given ‘coupons’ to fight the election on behalf of the Coalition Government, but the ‘malcontents’ were outlawed. The coupon candidates swept the board, giving the Government a huge working majority with 484 members; Labour returned fifty-nine members, and the non-coalition Liberals were reduced to little more than a score of seats. But although this was a landslide for Lloyd George, that victory for ‘the man who won the war’ should not blind us to the poor performance of the Asquithian Liberals, the vulnerability of many of the Coalition Liberals with their seats in industrial working-class areas to Labour advance and the 22.2 per cent of the total vote received by the Labour Party. ‘Fusion’ between Coalition Liberals and Conservatives seemed possible in 1919-20, the creation of a ‘centre’ party to counter the reactionary right and the revolutionary left, but Lloyd George did not grasp this opportunity and by 1921 it was too late.

The result of the ‘coupon election’ was one of the least representative parliaments in British history. A batch of leaderless trade unionists constituted the official Opposition; the rest was, in Lloyd George’s words, ‘a chamber of commerce’. It was an assembly of well-to-do mediocrities. The election created impatience in many classes, in returning soldiers, in munitions workers and in Labour circles in general. It gravely weakened the prestige of Parliament, which had been largely in abeyance during the war, and which could not afford any decline in its status at a time when many minds were turning away from constitutionalism. Above all, it weakened the authority of Britain in the coming peace councils. Lloyd George went to these councils bound by extravagant election pledges. Overall, the first three decades of the century witnessed the development of class-based voting, with the Labour support concentrated in areas of heavy industry in Wales, the Midlands and North of England and Central Scotland, while the Conservatives held a near-monopoly of seats in the rural South of England, and the Liberals held on to the more sparsely-populated constituencies in the ‘Celtic fringes’ of Wales and Scotland and, to begin with, the more rural areas of East Anglia, Yorkshire and the North-East of England. This set the voting patterns for the rest of the century. In her diary for 1918, Beatrice Webb made a ‘prophetic’ statement:

The Liberal Party which had for years governed the Empire has been reduced to an insignificant fraction with all its leaders without exception at the bottom of the poll. … Lloyd George with his conservative phalanx is apparently in complete command of the situation; as the only alternative Government there stands the Labour Party with its completely Socialist programme and its utopia of the equalitarian state.

Syndicalists & Socialist ‘Heroes’ of the Unemployed.

Outside Parliament, the Socialists kept up their agitation for ‘Work, not charity’ relentlessly during the first decade of the century, the SDF leading the unemployed on regular sorties into the heart of Mayfair. The photograph below of Westminster unemployed, printed from an SDF lantern slide, gives a vivid picture of the strength of the demonstrators as they ‘invaded’ Berkeley Square in November 1905. The Central Workers’ Committee had organised a vast demonstration of the unemployed. Assembling on the morning of 20 November on the Embankment, contingents marched from all parts of the capital. From Islington, Shoreditch, Hackney and Bethnal Green, unemployed men were led by Dick Greenwood of the SDF and Parson Brooks, the ‘socialist chaplain’. Two thousand walked from Hammersmith and Fulham, stopping on the way in Eaton Square to eat sandwiches provided by the SDF. The Woolwich men, two-hundred-strong, tramped to Greenwich, crossing the river by steamboat. Fifteen hundred arrived from Poplar, organised by the Labour Representation Committee and led by George Lansbury and two of his aldermen. The trade unions supporting the demonstration unfurled their magnificent silk banner with colours of crimson and gold, green and silver, bearing the names of the organised working class; the Gasworkers, Riggers, Coal Porters, French Polishers, Machine Rulers and many more.

As the march moved away from the Embankment, they were led by the banner of the Westminster Unemployed, as seen in the photograph, with the slogan by heavens our rights are worth fighting for. Curse your charity, we want work was the theme as the SDF with trade union support swept towards the homes of the wealthy. Twenty thousand roared approval at a Hyde Park rally after the ‘incursion’; as Jack Williams told them, you have starved too long. … come out and parade the West End every day. He read a telegram from Keir Hardie urging them not to hide in the slums, but to come out and back us in fighting to win the right to work. Like Hardie, Williams was born into poverty and escaped from the workhouse at the age of ten, climbing the walls of the Hornsey Union to freedom. The other speakers at the rally included the trade union leaders Margaret Bondfield and Harry Gosling, but it was the fiery passion of Jack Williams that had the crowd roaring support. He led the workless to the doors of the rich, marching them on one occasion down Bond Street as policemen stood purposefully with their backs to the jewellers’ windows. On another ‘invasion day’, they marched to Belgrave Square, and caused consternation as a red carpet laid across the pavement for a society wedding was torn to shreds by the boots of the unemployed.

Earlier in the year, London had seen the arrival of two marches from the Midlands. The first was from Raunds of Northampton, members of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, going in a body to the War Office to protest against cheap labour policy of the department in purchasing service boots at prices below an agreed tariff. Once again, the organiser of the march was a prominent member of the SDF, James Gribble, who had worked in the boot and shoe trade since he was twelve years old. He organised the march on military lines, selecting only the fittest men from hundreds of volunteers and appointing three ‘officers’ to take command of his men who were divided into six companies. With bicycle outriders and a horse-drawn ambulance, General Gribble, as he was dubbed, took no risks of his army falling by the wayside.

Another procession to London to be commemorated by a series of postcards was the march of four hundred unemployed from Leicester, representing two thousand men and their families. Negatives of the original cards, including the one above, were sent to Leicester Museum by an old socialist, Robert Barnes, who produced the photographs, including that shown above, from those in the possession of the organising secretary of the march, George White. Their journey was arduous and miserable, the men trampling through driving continuous rain, shoes leaking, with topcoats made from sacks and living on bread, cheese and cocoa. The march was supposed to be welcomed in London by the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party at a mass meeting in Hyde Park in support of the Unemployed Bill, which was opposed by many trade unions because it provided that the unemployed under local authority assistance should work at less than the union rate for the public works they undertook. Along the way, the marchers learned that the King had refused their request for an audience and it was a tired, ragged and soddened army that was given shelter and a meat tea by the Salvation Army at Edgware and asked by Ramsay MacDonald to sign the pledge! On Whit Monday the weather brightened and so did the men, marching cheerfully to Parliament Hill Fields (shown above), where MacDonald addressed a crowd on more than six thousand on behalf of the ILP. Keir Hardie also sent a telegram describing their march as ‘heroic’.

An unusual postcard was that shown above, depicting the SDF agitator Ernest Marklew dressed in broad-arrowed prison clothes, picking oakum, published in 1906. The card is one of a small of socialist commemorative cards that belonged to a pioneer member of the ILP. It is a reminder of the long years of struggle by early socialists to establish the right of free speech in public places. The SDF had long been harassed by police while holding open-air meetings and heavy fines and imprisonment with hard labour had been imposed by middle-class magistrates on socialists accused of obstruction and refusal to pay fines. At Nelson in Lancashire, as well as in other towns and cities including the capital, socialists persisted in speaking at regular ‘pitches’ despite repeated harassment. As one speaker was arrested, another one would take his place, and thousands would turn out every Sunday, some from curiosity, others to lend support, as police fought their way through crowds to drag away speaker after speaker. The secretary of the Nelson branch of the SDF, Bryan Chapman, was also imprisoned during the free speech fight there. Marklew was sent to prison for fourteen days and Chapman got seven days. Arrests and battles followed each Sunday for months and the usual attendance of hundreds for an SDF open-air meeting swelled to thousands. The photograph of Marklew (above) was posted in a studio and sold by the SDF to raise money for the socialist cause.

In 1908, the Manchester unemployed tried a new tactic to draw public attention to their plight. On Sunday, 14 September, following a meeting of about five hundred workless men, they were urged to march on Manchester Cathedral and the photograph above shows them pouring into the cathedral during worship, watched by the mostly middle-class communicants. The Dean, Bishop Weldon, appeared and agreed to speak on unemployment if they could come back during the afternoon. That afternoon nearly three thousand men assembled in Stevenson Square. About fifteen hundred then marched to the cathedral where the bishop welcomed them but said it wasn’t the province of the church to organise work but, if it was necessary to raise a special fund, many of us will willingly deprive ourselves to aid what is being done. The vicar of Rochdale preached a sermon in which he offered sympathy on behalf of the Church. When the men interrupted, the Dean had to declare the service over. After the service, the leader of the unemployed, a man named Freewood, read the prayer that he had intended to read in the cathedral, ending with…

O Lord we beseech thee to move thy servant Bishop Knox (Archbishop of Canterbury) to see that something more than sympathy is needed and that his influence brought to bear on our Parliament might bear some fruit.

The rising militancy of the trade unions and the determination of the government to meet the militancy with armed force if necessary was shown first during the Cambrian Combine strike in 1910 in the Rhondda Valleys which led to serious rioting in Tonypandy and clashes with police leading to the death of one miner. Winston Churchill, then Liberal Home Secretary, deployed both cavalry and infantry units, the latter drawing bayonets on picketing miners. I have written about in detail elsewhere on this site. The picture above (top) shows miners waiting to go into a mass ‘Federation’ meeting at the Empire Theatre, Tonypandy in November 1910. Below it, Trehafod miners are pictured picking coal from the slag-heaps during the dispute, which continued into 1911.

Above: A soup kitchen during the Cambrian Combine strike, 1910-11.

Tom Mann, one of the leaders of the great dock strike of 1889, founder of the militant Workers’ Union, first secretary of the ILP and first secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, arrived back in England in May 1910, after eight years of trade union activity in Australia. By that time, he was a labour leader of international renown with a capacity for appearing at the centre of a struggle, as a catalyst for action. He returned from his years abroad as an advocate for syndicalism, or ‘industrial unionism’, as a means of winning working-class power. Within eight weeks of arriving home, he had launched a small publication, The Industrial Syndicalist. He wrote,

… What is called for? What will have to be the essential conditions for the success of any such movement? That it should be avowedly and clearly revolutionary in aim and method. We therefore most certainly favour strikes and we will always do our best to help strikers.

He was not to have to wait long before leading one of the fiercest strikes of the decade. Following his ideas of industrial unionism, by November he had formed the thirty-six unions organising transport into the National Transport Federation. After winning the first stage of the battle against the International Shipping Federation for union recognition, the lesson of solidarity was clear in Liverpool on 28 June 1911, when four thousand dockers came out demanding recognition of the National Union of Dock Labourers. Churchill drafted troops into Liverpool and sent two gunboats up the Mersey with their guns trained on the port. Cavalry and infantry with fixed bayonets were deployed and hundreds of long, stout staves were ordered for the police. Mann answered this by telling the Liverpool strikers:

Let Churchill do his utmost, his best or his worst, let him order ten times more troops to Liverpool, not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can take the vessels out of the docks to sea.

On 24 August, with all their demands conceded, the strike was called off. The success of the dockers and the railwaymen, during the first national railway stoppage, seemed to inspire a revolt of women workers in the area of London’s dockland during a heatwave in August. The photograph above showing the distribution of loaves of bread outside the Labour Institute in Bermondsey survives as a relic of an uprising of the unorganised. Women and girls walked out of jam, biscuit and pickle factories and marched around Bermondsey calling on other women in the food factories to join them in claiming an increase in their incredibly low wages. Out came the women and girls from the factories with household names; Spillers’, Pearce Duffs’, Hartley’s and Lipton’s, where they worked for as little as seven shillings a week. Laughing, singing, welcoming the escape from the stifling factories, they were joined by Labour leaders including Ben Tillett, the Dockers’ leader (pictured below), Mary MacArthur, Herbert Burrows and Dr Salter addressing fifteen thousand of their fellow strikers in Southwark Park. Within three weeks, increases had been won at eighteen of the twenty-one factories where the women had struck.

It is doubtful whether British society has ever been so beset with contradictions as it was in 1914. A Liberal Government was in power, though only just; it depended on the votes of Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs. A vast programme of social reform lay behind it, but a vast agenda of social unrest awaited it every day. There was widespread working-class unrest; beginning in 1910, there had been a wave of strikes, conducted with extreme bitterness on all sides, sweeping through the country, with every prospect of a final confrontation in the autumn of 1914. Ben Tillett, looking back on these years in 1931, called them:

A strange, hectic period of our economic history! It was a great upsurge of elemental forces. It seemed as if the dispossessed and disinherited class in various parts of the country were all simultaneously moved to assert their claims upon society.

‘Memories and Refections’, 1931.

The Disunited Kingdom at the Outbreak of War:

It was to a disunited kingdom, with a militant Suffragette movement ‘alongside’ militant trade unionism in Britain, the Army in Ireland in a state of mutiny and Ulster on the verge of civil war over ‘Home Rule’, that war came in August. At once another contradiction was exposed. The ruling Liberal Party was strongly tinged with pacifism, yet it was also the Party which had carried through, under Lord Haldane, the most effective military reforms in British history. The people as a whole were largely unaware of them; indeed it was almost completely unaware of its Army, except when war was actually in progress, or when disagreeable occurrences like the Curragh Mutiny reached the headlines and was the cause of ‘wild delight’ on the opposition Conservative benches in the House of Commons. A powerful counter-note to this was struck by a Labour MP, Colonel Ward, which would nevertheless have been considered dangerous had it been uttered outside the protection of privilege that the House provided. In ringing tones, he warned the Tories that, if they wanted a Civil War, they could have it: If there was to be a mutiny in the Army, it would a mutiny of the working class. Britain was a naval power, much admired around the world as the shield of British democracy, but the Army, characterised in Rudyard Kipling’s poem Tommy, was viewed with far less respect, particularly by the lower middle class and the ‘respectable working class’ and especially in the ‘chapel-going’ areas of Wales and the rural Midlands and ‘West Country’ of England, where ‘red-coats’ were seen as ‘scum’.

For socialists, although not all pacifists, the war was a negation of internationalism, splitting the movement as workers from one country hastened to shoot down the workers of another. On 2 August 1914, just two days before the declaration of war, a huge anti-war meeting was held in Trafalgar Square. Called by the British section of the International Socialist Bureau, a manifesto, whose signatories included Keir Hardie and Arthur Henderson, was read to the gathering, it ended with the words down with the class rule, down with the rule of brute force, down with war, up with the peaceful rule of the people. Speakers included Will Thorne, Mary MacArthur, Margaret Bondfield, Herbert Burrows and Keir Hardie. Three days later, the Labour Party supported the war. H. G. Wells proclaimed the sword had been drawn for peace. Labour and trade union leaders joined in recruiting campaigns and Will Thorne became a Lieutenant Colonel in the West Ham Volunteers. Workers enlisted in their hundreds of thousands and it was left to the pacifist section of the labour movement together with a handful of true internationalists to preserve the socialist conscience. The ILP published an anti-war manifesto that declared:

Out of the darkness and the depth we hail our working class comrades of every land. Across the roar of guns we send sympathy and greetings to the German socialists. …

This was truly a cry out of the darkness.  The slogans on the posters in the recruiting photograph on the right attest to the prevailing jingoism of the times.  In his own constituency of Aberdare, Keir Hardie, the apostle of British socialism was booed as he declared he was going to oppose this war in the interests of civilisation and the class to which he belonged.

These words were brave and sincere, but also soon lost in the vortex of hate which soon flowed from the outbreak of war, and a tired and saddened Hardie slowly died as the workers rushed in their hundreds of thousands to join the recruiting queues to enlist for the bloodiest slaughter in the history of mankind to date. The same British workers who had been hailing their German proletarian comrades just days before, now saw them as enemies and aggressors, crying out Down with Germany!

The dominant mood, in the early August days of 1914, was one of euphoria, as can be seen on the faces in the photograph above, taken outside the recruiting office.

The weather seemed to have a lot to do with it.  A mood of national unity was suddenly reborn, one which leading figures in the Labour movement found difficult to resist and remain in leadership. When Ramsay MacDonald (pictured below) resigned as Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party because of his own opposition to the war, Henderson was ready to take his place.

But resignation in these circumstances did not come cheaply either. One contemporary who had met him once before 1914 and had failed to be impressed,  except by his remarkable good looks. M. A. Hamilton had also heard him speak after this and had been considerably impressed. But what had ‘thrilled’ his observers in 1914 was his going out into the wilderness:

We accepted the legend of rejected office, and gloried in it, as in the courage of his assault on Edward Grey. Meeting him in those days at 44 Bedford Square, one could not but admire an aloof dignity in which there was no hint of self-conscious pomp. This admiration steadily mounted, as MacDonald was singled out for attack. He was assailed, incessantly, as a pro-German pacifist who cared nothing for his country. He got all the brick-bats; they were numerous and edgy, and he minded them, a lot.

Arthur Henderson was, according to E. A. Jenkins in his biography, From Foundry to Foreign Office (1944), a typical Northcountryman, who liked to talk about religious or political ‘topics of the hour’. Henderson became a Methodist in 1879 (having previously been a Congregationalist) and became a local lay-preacher. Henderson worked at Robert Stephenson and Sons’ General Foundry Works from the age of twelve. After finishing his apprenticeship there aged seventeen, he moved to Southampton for a year and then returned to work as an iron moulder (a type of foundryman) in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After he lost his job in 1884, he concentrated on preaching. In 1892, Henderson entered the complex world of trade union politics when he was elected as a paid organiser for the Friendly Society of Iron Founders and its representative on the North East Conciliation Board. Henderson believed that strikes caused more harm than they were worth and tried to avoid them whenever he could. For this reason, he opposed the formation of the General Federation of Trade Unions, as he was convinced that it would lead to more strikes.

In 1900, Henderson (shown on the left in the photo from 1906, with other leading figures in the party), was one of the 129 trade union and socialist delegates who passed Keir Hardie’s motion to create the Labour Representation Committee (LRC). In 1903, he was elected Treasurer of the LRC and was also elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Barnard Castle at a by-election.

In 1906, the LRC changed its name to the Labour Party and won 29 seats at the general election. In 1908, when Hardie resigned as Leader of the Labour Party, Henderson was elected to replace him. He remained Leader until his own resignation two years later, in 1910. In 1915, following Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s decision to create a coalition government, Henderson became the first member of the Labour Party to become a member of the Cabinet, as President of the Board of Education.

‘Total War’ – the Views of Working-class Men & Women:

Despite the vitriolic attacks on pacifist politicians like MacDonald at home, there was a more satirical tone expressed in the voice of the Army in its marching songs as it arrived in the fields of Flanders and northern France. This was the Regular Army, the sardonic, unemotional, matter-of-fact voice of the widely-despised ‘Tommy Atkins’ who, as usual, was being expected to do the dirty work, was quite prepared to do it and was not sentimental about it. It had few illusions and its attitudes, had they been aware of them, would have further shocked their fellow-countrymen. In contrast to the general public mood, it was not fuelled by hatred of Germany but, in true mercenary spirit, it would have been equally ready to fight the French. Its motto was, We’ll do it. What is it? Sixty per cent of the men in the ranks of the 1914 British Expeditionary Force were reservists, called back to the colours. For many of them, their return to Army life was a distressing uprooting from their homes and occupations. Yet theirs was also an odd satisfaction in obeying the call.

But the Regular Army, even with its reservists, was simply not large enough for the needs of continental war. There would need to be something else, and this need was quickly perceived by Lord Kitchener, the new Secretary of State for War. Out of this perception came the ‘Kitchener Armies’ or ‘New Army’, an extraordinary manifestation of patriotism which brought over 2.25 million volunteers into the colours in the first fourteen months of the war. As the Front-line war dragged on over the next three years, the endless casualty lists recorded the toll of human life; the physical destruction mounted day by day. It was not surprising that nerves frayed and revulsion mounted among those who had to endure all these sufferings. To make them endurable, the soldiers invented a class-conscious vocabulary and style of humour all of their own, closely modelled upon that of the ‘old Regulars’, as demonstrated in the following anonymous parody of the parable of the sower:

Some fell by the wayside, and the Sergeant-Majors sprang up and choked them. 

Making shells

The demand of the generals for more and more young men for the muddy walk to mutilation and death on the Western Front inevitably resulted in the depletion of labour available for industry and the increase in opportunities for women to replace them at home. Of course, there were problems and a degree of resistance especially from male workers in skilled industries such as engineering. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers, an all-male union with a long tradition of craft skill, saw the introduction of lower-paid unskilled labour as a threat to post-war job security and wage-rates. The answer was the ‘Shells and Fuses Agreement’ whereby the unions would accept ‘dilution of labour’ for the duration of the war. In effect, the trade unions were asked to accept the introduction of a twelve-hour working day, the unlimited subdivision of jobs, the scrapping of apprenticeship agreements and the introduction of unskilled labour to produce the hardware of war. Safeguards and rights painstakingly fought for by trades unionists over half a century or more were set aside until the end of the war. No similar sacrifice was to be asked of the employers who were enabled to make rich profits by speeding up production and introducing unrestricted unskilled labour at cheap wage-rates.

Above: Oxide breaking at Beckton Gas Works.

The doubts of trade unionists about the large-scale introduction of female labour into industries were expressed in a composite resolution at the 1915 Trades Union Congress from two craft unions asking for committees to be set up to ensure the replacement of women at the close of the war by more suitable male labour. The real threat, however, was the inequality of pay between men and women and, to their credit, many trade union leaders insisted on equal pay for women doing equal work, achieving some limited success. The government sided firmly with employers against the unions and in June 1915 the new coalition government dropped all pretence at negotiation on the question of existing industrial practices and introduced a Munitions of War Bill to force dilution of labour by unskilled men and women on the unions. The war opened many industries to women and there is no shortage of propaganda-style photographs like the one above, showing women in ‘unladylike’ work, cleaning railway engines, filling shells, and humping coal sacks. Although of an official nature, they do represent women at the kind of heavy industrial work that would not have been readily open to them before the outbreak of the war.

It was the mass participation of women in the War effort – in industry, in the Civil Service, and in the Forces – which produced the result so deeply desired and defiantly demanded by the pre-war Suffragette Movement. In March 1917, the House of Commons passed the Women’s Suffrage Bill by 341 votes to 62, setting out a scheme for electoral reform to come into operation at the end of the War. The motion was moved by Asquith, who, according to The Times’ Michael McDonagh, gave a fine speech recanted the stout opposition which he gave to votes for women before the War. Women, he said, had worked out their own salvation in the War. But, even in the latter stages of the war, women’s participation was not greeted with universal enthusiasm by their menfolk at the Front, nor did they admire how it was sometimes ‘forcibly’ obtained. One soldier’s letter to his wife which was censored from May 1918 was quite threatening on the subject, also perhaps revealing the social conservatism which existed in working-class homes:

Well, I am afraid there will be trouble if they try to take married women into the WAAC. We men can stand a lot, but they are nearing the danger zone when they wish to force our wives into service. Goodness, the damned infernal impudence of wanting our wives! Why, if anyone came for you while I was at home, I’d slit his throat open. I’m not bragging; I’m saying what I mean. How little they understand us, they are running up against trouble with a vengeance; they will find they have signed their death warrant.

Lloyd George’s Visit to Clydeside & Labour’s Socialist Programme:

While many trade union and Labour leaders who supported the war acquiesced in the increased exploitation of industrial workers, other sections began a wave of resistance, demanding payment of the proper rate for the job where new workers were introduced, controls on company profits and a guarantee that the men away at the front would have jobs waiting for them when they returned after the war. The strongest opposition was led by the Clyde Workers’ Committee, a group of shop stewards elected directly from the shop floor under the chairmanship of Willie Gallacher. The Clyde workers had already conducted a strike for higher pay in February 1915, and the newly formed committee was more than ready for Lloyd George (above) when he travelled to the Clyde at Christmas of that year as Minister of Munitions to plead the case for dilution as a patriotic duty. Against the advice of his officials, Lloyd George was obliged to meet with the shop stewards and hear out their case for workers’ control of the factories. At a meeting in St. Andrew’s Hall held on Christmas Day, he had the experience of having to stand on the platform while the entire audience got to their feet and sang The Red Flag.

The effect of the protests on the Clyde and the continuing agitation by women trade unionists did result in 1916 in an amendment to the Munitions Act which gave statutory force in ‘the rate for the job’ where women did the same skilled work as men. Unions recruited the new women workers and by 1918 the membership of those affiliated to the TUC had risen by well over two million since the outbreak of war, totalling two and a half million. Women and girls who had been unorganised domestic servants, and/ or working-class housewives had been introduced to a range of jobs never before open to them and most importantly, they had been brought into the organised trade union movement for the first time. Even before the end of the war, however, the growing divisions in British society, later to be signalled by the General Strike of 1926, were already widening. In January 1916, the government had arrested Gallacher, Johnny Muir and Walter Bell, the leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, on charges of attempting to cause mutiny, sedition or disaffection among the civilian population. Ernest Bevin, speaking in the Leeds Coliseum on 3 June 1917, joined in the radical trade union war of words with the Coalition Government:

We all know that in the industrial world the capitalists would give us peace tomorrow if we would surrender. But I am not going to surrender. I am not going to be a pacifist in the industrial movement. I believe that even in our own country there will have to be the shedding of blood to attain the freedom we require …

In 1916, David Lloyd George forced Asquith to resign and replaced him as Prime Minister. Arthur Henderson became a member of the small War Cabinet with the post of Minister without Portfolio. (The other Labour representatives who joined Henderson in Lloyd George’s coalition government were John Hodge, who became Minister of Labour, and George Barnes, who became Minister of Pensions.) Henderson resigned in August 1917 after his proposal for an international conference on the war was rejected by the rest of the Cabinet. He then turned his attention to building a strong constituency-based support network for the Labour Party. Previously, it had little national organisation, based largely on branches of unions and socialist societies. Working with Ramsay MacDonald and Sidney Webb, Henderson in 1918 established a national network of constituency organisations. They operated separately from the trade unions and the National Executive Committee and were open to everyone sympathetic to the party’s policies. Henderson lost his seat in the ‘Coupon Election’ of 14 December 1918 but returned to Parliament in 1919 after winning a by-election in Widnes. He then secured the adoption of a comprehensive statement of party policies, as drafted by Sidney Webb. Entitled “Labour and the New Social Order,” it remained the basic Labour platform until 1950. It proclaimed a socialist party whose principles included a guaranteed minimum standard of living for everyone, nationalisation of industry, and heavy taxation of large incomes and of wealth.

Bevin’s ‘Docker’s Breakfast’, Poverty & ‘Poplarism’:

There were mutinies in the armed forces which continued during the period of demobilisation into 1919, reminding the upper classes rather uncomfortably of the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent revolutions on the continent. They were followed by a series of strikes which led The Times (27 September 1919) to proclaim that this war, like the war with Germany, must be a fight to the finish. The civil strife which had arisen towards the end of the war continued principally among the miners, shipbuilders, railwaymen and farm workers, that is, in the declining sections of the economy. Ernest Bevin, pictured below, the national organiser of the Dockers’ Union, used his own experience of poverty and his deep knowledge of and feeling for the dockworkers in presenting the case for higher wages to the Shaw inquiry of 1920. The potatoes are peeled into a chipped enamel bowl, while the little girl watching is wearing boots that must have come from her brother.

‘The Dockers’ KC’ was an appreciative title won by Ernest Bevin when he argued the case for a sixteen shillings a day minimum wage and de-casualisation of their labour at the Shaw Inquiry in 1920. Bevin, a thirty-nine-year-old national organiser of the Dockers’ Union was given the task of putting the case for the Transport Federation. His performance was brilliant. Though lacking in formal education, he spoke for eleven hours, vividly describing the history, work, poverty, danger of a docker’s life and scoring heavily in exchanges with the Chairman of the Port of London Authority, the wealthy Lord Devonport, an old enemy of dock workers. While the two sides were involved in academic arguments as to whether or not a docker and his family could live on the employers’ proposed wage of three pounds thirteen shillings and sixpence a week, Bevin went shopping in Camden Town. That evening he prepared a ‘docker’s breakfast’ (shown above) and took the plates into court.

When Professor Bowley, the employers’ expert witness, went into the witness box, calculating the precise number of calories on which a man could live and work, Bevin pushed scraps of bacon, bread and fish he had prepared before him and asked the Cambridge professor if that was sufficient for a man who had to carry heavy sacks of grain all day. The witness protested. You have never carried 2cwt bags on your back continuously for eight hours? Bevin fired. The professor answered that he hadn’t, and Bevin then produced a menu from the Savoy Hotel and asked him to calculate the calories in a shipowners’ lunch! The outcome of the Inquiry was a triumph for Bevin, and the court condemned the system of casual labour, awarding a national minimum wage of sixteen shillings a day for a forty-four hour week. Bevin went on, of course, to become a leading figure in the trade union and Labour movement over the next four decades.

Historians often date Britain’s ‘hungry years’ as beginning in 1929 with the ‘Great Depression’, but for many workers, they never had a beginning, since the depression, unemployment and hunger were a permanent condition of their lives and one from which they received only occasional relief. In March 1921, Poplar, a borough in London’s East End, blighted with mass unemployment, casual dock labour, rotten housing and slum landlords, reached a breaking point. It was hardly equitable that a rich borough such as a Westminster, where a penny rate raised more than thirty thousand pounds, maintained only eleven hundred on outdoor relief, while Poplar, where a penny rate raised only three thousand pounds had to maintain forty-four thousand. The East End of London as a whole, with only a quarter of the paying capacity of the West End, had seventeen times the liability. Faced with a massive increase in the rate, a burden the poor could not carry, the Council refused to cut the level of relief to the unemployed and decided not to pay the quarter of a million pounds due to the central authority, the London County Council, carrying a rate of four shillings and fourpence in the pound, to meet the needs of the Council and the Board of Guardians.

This was the essence of the conflict that was to lead to the imprisonment of the mayor and the majority of the socialist members of the Council and the introduction of a new word into the English language, ‘Poplarism’. Summoned to appear at the High Court on 29 July the Council marched in procession from Bow with the mace bearer at their head, the mayor wearing his chain of office and all beneath a banner saying ‘Poplar Borough Council marching to the High Court and possibly to prison’. Following the councillors, who included Edgar Lansbury and his father, the ‘uncrowned King of the East End’, the kindly George Lansbury, came the people of Poplar. The court ordered payment, the councillors refused and in September, nearly the whole of the Council was sent to prison for contempt. Fifteen thousand marched to Holloway, many of the women carrying babies (as shown in the photo above) where Minnie Lansbury and four other women were taken. While Herbert Morrison deplored their actions and J. H. Thomas called the councillors ‘wastrels’, the fight continued even inside the prison.

A council meeting was held in Brixton Prison, the women being brought from Holloway to attend. Outside, ten thousand enrolled in the Tenants’ Defence League and pledged to refuse to pay rent if the councillors asked. The High Court released the councillors in October so that they could attend a conference to discuss the whole matter. The result was a victory for Poplar. The Council had made their first charge the care of the sick, orphaned, aged, widowed, workless and homeless and forced the introduction of a Bill equalising rate burdens between the rich and poor. The two photographs of Poplar residents and councillors are taken from an album presented to one of the councillors at a Council meeting the following year. The caption to the picture of the Poplar women carrying the loaves given by the Guardians is entitled ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ while the photograph of the councillors features Alderman Hopwood with his pipe, ‘surrounded by his bodyguard’.

The photograph above shows the outing of Norland Ward Women’s Group of the North Kensington Labour Party. The woman on the left in the front row is carrying the Party’s red flag and most of the group are wearing red rosettes. The substantial-looking Labour Club proclaims ‘Socialism’ and ‘Recreation’ and the women in their prettiest dresses have no doubt earned their break from the shop, factory, housework and local canvassing for the party. Charabanc day trips were a popular working-class leisure activity during the 1920s and the elected representatives of the Labour and trade union movement enjoyed them as much as the membership. Charabanc pictures from the early twenties are common and include those of the annual outings of workers from scores of factories on jaunts to Dartmoor and Epping Forest. The charabancs chugged along at a maximum of twelve miles per hour.

(to be continued…)

 

Imperial theorist J. A. Hobson. Photograph: Elliott & Fry/Getty Images

Introduction – The Clash of World Views:

This May Day morning, another row erupted within the British Labour Party over the proximity of its leader’s ‘world-view’ to those of radical anti-Semites in the party since its beginnings. An article by Danny Finkelstein (pictured above) has drawn attention to the foreword to a recent republication of J A Hobson’s influential 1902 ‘Imperialism’, written by Jeremy Corbyn which, apparently, lauded Hobson’s radical critique of imperialism, while failing to acknowledge the problems it raised and continues to raise in respect of anti-Semitism. Hobson argued in the book that global finance was controlled in Europe by “men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience”, who were “in a unique position to control the policy”. By contrast with Corbyn’s 2011 preface, books written by historians Bernard Porter (1984) and Niall Ferguson on imperialism have drawn attention to these problems in the context in which Hobson himself was writing. I have given some examples below, which I first wrote about in an article on the Cecil Rhodes controversy at Oxford elsewhere on my website.

 

Extracts from Niall Ferguson’s (2003), Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World:

So close was Rhodes’s relationship with the Rothschilds that he even entrusted the execution of his will to Lord Rothschild, specifying that his estate should be used to fund an imperialist equivalent of the Jesuit order – the original intention of the Rhodes Scholarships. This would be ‘a society of the elect for the good of the Empire’… Rothschild, in turn, assured;

‘Our first and foremost wish in connection with South African matters is that you should remain at the head of affairs in that Colony and that you should be able to carry out that great Imperial policy which has been the dream of your life’.

Not only was imperialism immoral, argued the critics, but, according to these ‘Radicals’, it was also a rip-off: paid for by British taxpayers, fought for by British soldiers, but benefiting only a tiny elite of fat-cat millionaires, the likes of Rhodes and Rothschild. That was the thrust of J. A. Hobson’s profoundly influential ‘Imperialism: A Study’, published in 1902. ‘Every great political act’ argued Hobson,

‘must receive the sanction and the practical aid of this little group of financial kings… They have the largest definite stake in the business of Imperialism, and the amplest means of forcing their will upon the policy of nations… Finance is the governor of the imperial engine, directing the energy and determining the work.’

H. N. Brailsford, another contemporary radical, took Hobson’s argument further in his ‘The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of the Armed Peace’, (written in 1910, but not published until 1914). ‘In the heroic age,’ Brailsford wrote,

‘Helen’s was the face that launched a thousand ships. In our golden age the face wears more often the shrewd features of some Hebrew financier. To defend the interests of Lord Rothschild and his fellow bondholders, Egypt was first occupied and then practically annexed by Great Britain… The extremest case of all is, perhaps, our own South African War.’

Was it not obvious that the war had been fought to ensure that the gold mines of the Transvaal remained securely in the hands of their capitalist owners? Was not Rhodes merely, in the words of the Radical MP Henry Labouchere, an…

‘… Empire jerry-builder who had always been a mere vulgar promoter masquerading as a patriot, and the figurehead of a gang of astute Hebrew financiers with whom he divides the profits?’

Like those modern conspiracy theories which explain every war in terms of the control of oil reserves, the Radical critique of imperialism was an over-simplification (Hobson and Brailsford little knew what a liability Rhodes had been during the siege of Kimberley.) And like those other modern theories that attribute sinister power to certain financial institutions, some anti-imperialism conveyed more than a hint of anti-Semitism. (283-4)

The ‘Crux’ of the Issue:

Above: Image from a map of the world in 1900, showing the extent of the British Empire.

In this last comment by Niall Ferguson, we reach the crux of the issue. Certainly, Rhodes was a colonialist and imperialist, as were most leading figures of his day, not just within the British Empire, but within all the European empires. In Africa, as noted here, the French were equally aggressive in their pursuit of land and resources, and the Belgians and subsequently the Italians also used what, even within the terms of this ‘scramble’ were excessive means against the native African populations. That is not to justify the actions that Rhodes was involved in, but just to place them in a broader context. It also needs to be noticed that his while his strategy for developing Rhodesia was a classical colonialist one, through the control of trading companies, his involvement in the Transvaal and later in the relief of Kimberley was concerned with achieving British supremacy over a white race, the Boers and that, if anything, his attitudes towards the original natives were far more liberal than those of the Afrikaners, certainly than those of Kruger. There is also evidence that, as a businessman, he retained a practical antipathy for everyday racial discrimination. On this question, he should not be judged by today’s standards, but as living at a time when theories of racial hierarchy and paternalism were dominant throughout Britain and Europe.

These theories are certainly evident in the architecture of Oxford, Bristol, Liverpool, London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and other cities which grew rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. If every surviving reminder of slavers, colonialists and imperialists were to be torn down, the city-scapes of Britain would look radically different, and greatly impoverished. More importantly, much of modern human history has been about the replacement of one great ‘construct’ with another, whether in economics, politics, or art and architecture. As Niall Ferguson has pointed out in more recent and specific publications on the issue, the liberal imperialism of the late Victorian period was criticised by Radicals who revealed themselves as overtly anti-Semitic. The new empires of fascists and communists which characterised the 1930s and 1940s were far more universally destructive than the old ones, yet we do not seek to remove every trace of them. Finally, far from being an ‘architect of apartheid’, as recently asserted in the Oxford student debates over the potential removal of his statue there, there is a fundamental ‘disconnect’ between the imperialism of Rhodes and his contemporaries in Africa and the post-1948 racist regimes in Southern Africa. They drew their inspiration from a heretical view of sectarian Calvinism which was very far removed from the Victorian ‘Anglican’ paternalism of ‘the white man’s burden’ to which Rhodes subscribed.

In an article in ‘The Guardian’ (1 May 2019) another academic historian has pointed out how deeply Hobson’s hatred of all forms of imperialism ran, and his book is certainly a compelling read, an essential one for all undergraduates studying the dominant themes and events of the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor, a professor in modern history at the University of York, wrote in his article that:

“He understood the terrible consequences of European conquest overseas like no one before. He described how jingoism and support for empire inveigled its way into popular culture at home via the media and populist politicians. It remains a signature text and influenced Lenin, the philosopher Karl Kautsky, the political economist Joseph Schumpeter and other classics of the anticolonial canon. Hobson himself went on to become an éminence grise within the Labour party after the first world war, helping draft its economic policy as it entered government for the first time in 1924. He was later tipped for a peerage.

“However, his antisemitism is inseparable from his attack on imperialism. Only alluded to once in the book to which Jeremy Corbyn added his thoughts, Hobson’s virulent assault on Jews is a recurrent theme of another book that first brought him fame and acclaim, 1900’s The War in South Africa. Sent out to cover the Boer war for this newspaper when it was known as the Manchester Guardian, Hobson let rip his racism. Reporting on his visits to Pretoria and Johannesburg towards the end of 1899, he mocked Judaism, described the control of the gambling and liquor industries by Jews, and their behind-the-scenes influence over the warmongering newspapers. Indeed, “the Jewish factor” received an index entry all of its own in this book. Without The War in South Africa, and its antisemitism, Hobson would not have shocked his way into the public eye and received the commission for his most famous work of all.”

Today the Labour Party seeks to draw a line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that few would have understood a hundred years ago. The Radical anti-imperialists like Hobson had a direct influence on the development of the early Labour Party’s foreign policy. By the mid-twenties, there were those within the Labour Party, like the Fabian Beatrice Webb, who began to question the aims of the Zionist movement:

… I admire Jews and dislike Arabs. But the Zionist movement seems to me a gross violation of the right of the native to remain where he was born and his father and grandfather were born – if there is such a right. To talk about the return of the Jew to the land of his inheritance after an absence of two thousand years seems to me sheer… hypocritical nonsense. From whom were descended those Russian and Polish Jews?

The principle which is really being asserted is the principle of selecting races for particular territories according to some ‘peculiar needs or particular fitness’. Or it may be some ideal of communal life to be realised by subsidised migration. But this process of artificially creating new communities of immigrants, brought from many parts of the world, is rather hard on the indigenous natives!

In other statements, Beatrice Webb (seen on the right with husband Sidney) was also quite open about her antipathy for Zionism. In 1929, the new Labour government in Britain appeared to repudiate the Balfour Declaration. Beatrice’s husband, Sidney Webb, by then Lord Passfield and Colonial Secretary, published a white paper which threatened to restrict Jewish immigration and the sale of Palestinian lands to Jews. This was viewed as a provocative act, and was greeted by a furore of protests from Zionists worldwide, from Conservative imperialists in Britain and from some Labour MPs. This enabled the Zionists to sweep away this hurdle; the British government quailed beneath the storm and gave way. This was a crucial decision because, although afterwards pro-Zionist feeling in Britain was never again as strong, control of migration was taken out of Britain’s hands. The Jewish population of Palestine more than doubled in the five years between 1931 and 1936.

What determined the outcome in Palestine, the creation of the state of Israel on the left bank of the Jordan in 1948, and its subsequent expansion into Arab territory, was the balance of strength on the ground between the two populations, which had changed in favour of the Zionist settlers by 1936. Between the wars, however, Palestine had to remain a British mandated territory. The British were unable to delegate their responsibilities to the Zionist organisation, as many wanted them to do. It remained in the same state as the ‘dependent’ territories within the British empire, a colony ruled directly from London, like Kenya.

Right: Sidney Webb (Lord Passfield)

What emerges from these portraits and documents concerning Zionism, imperialism and Palestine in the period 1916-36 is that there was no imperialist conspiracy to create the state of Israel as it existed after 1948. Certainly, there were good relations between leading Zionists and imperialist politicians in Britain, including those in Attlee’s government, but it was the confusion of competing claims and rights in Palestine itself, together with the inability to control the flow of migrants and refugees under the terms of the British mandate which led to the development of the country through settlement into the self-governing state of Israel following the handover of the mandate to the United Nations in 1948. It is difficult to imagine how the outcome of these events could have been any different, especially given the refugee crisis created by the war. The idea that the state of Israel was an artificial creation, a ‘mistake’ as Ken Livingstone has called it in his more recent interview on Arabic TV, does not match the reality of the emerging patterns of the population on the ground in inter-war Palestine. There was no rational alternative to the decisions that were made and no other alternative humanitarian solution.

The Labour Party needs to accept the burden that history has given it to bear from the past hundred years. Either it continues to support the creation of the state of Israel, as Ernest Bevin and Clement Attlee finally did in 1949, or call for its dismantling and destruction, by one means or another, which is what the current leadership of the Labour Party, in the Fabian tradition of the Webbs, wants to do. The continuing tropes about global capitalist conspiracies with Israel and Jewish individuals/ organisations (like Georges Soros and ‘Open Society) at the centre of them have been shared among populist leaders from Viktor Orbán’s extreme right-wing government in Hungary to Corbyn’s hard- left supporters. Even if they wanted to, their opportunism and ideologies (respectively) would not allow them to jettison these anti-Semitic tropes.

The Debate Continues in ‘The Jewish News’, 3 May 2019:

While a spokesman said this week Corbyn “completely rejects the antisemitic elements in his analysis”, the veteran MP made no mention of this in his lengthy endorsement. Instead, the Labour leader described Hobson’s book as “a great tome”, and praised the writer’s “brilliant, and very controversial at the time” analysis of the “pressures” behind western, and in particular British, imperialism at the turn of the 20th century.

After the Board of Deputies wrote to him to demand an explanation, Corbyn responded yesterday to say he was “deeply saddened” that the…

…“mischievous representation of my foreward will have caused real stress within the Jewish community” and rounded on the “false accusation that I endorsed the antisemitic content of this 1902 text”.

“While writing the foreword, I reserved praise for some of the broad themes of Hobson’s century-old classic study of imperialism in Africa and Asia. As with many book written in this era, the work contains highly offensive references and observations. I totally deplore the language used in that book to describe Jews and people from colonised countries.

“The accusation is the latest in a series of equally ill-founded accusations of anti-Jewish racism that Labour’s political opponents have made against me. I note that the Hobson story was written by a Conservative Party peer in a newspaper whose editorial policy, and owner, have long been hostile to Labour. At a time when Jewish communities in the UK, and throughout Europe, feel under attack, it is a matter of great regret that the issue of antisemitism is often politicised in this way.”

Board of Deputies president Marie van der Zyl wrote to Corbyn, telling him that the …

… “community is entitled to an apology for this failure to speak out against prejudice against our community when confronted with racism.

“There is ‘an impression that you either do not care whether your actions, inadvertently or deliberately, signal support for racist attitudes or behaviours” …

“Whilst you, quite correctly, explicitly commended Hobson’s criticism of caricatures of African and Asian people, there is a failure to make even a passing reference to the blatant antisemitism in the book that you enthusiastically endorse.”

“In your letter, you claim only to have ‘reserved praise for some of the broad themes’ of Hobson’s book and that you ‘totally deplore’ the antisemitism that was commonplace in ‘this era.

“However, we note that your lengthy and detailed foreword of over 3500 words, variously describes Hobson’s work as “great”, “remarkable”, “interesting”, “brilliant”, “painstaking”, “very powerful”, “attractive”, “valid”, “correct”, “prescient” and “very prescient”, without any qualification referring to the antisemitism within it.”

The Jewish Labour Movement has submitted an official complaint to the party over this week’s revelation and asked the EHRC to include Corbyn’s endorsement of Hobson’s book in any investigation of the party for institutional antisemitism. “A fish rots from the head”, it said in a strongly-worded statement, adding that any other Labour member would have been suspended and calling on Corbyn to consider his position.

Conclusion – More Tropes & Conspiracy Theories:

Corbyn’s ‘foreword’, written well before he became Labour leader was not a critical appraisal of Hobson’s work, which would have been scholarly and circumspect, but an uncritical and ahistorical whitewashing of a text which not only criticises the ‘Liberal’ imperialism of the time, but also contains anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories which dominated the thinking of many Left-wing theorists within the Labour Party in the early part of the twentieth century. It helped to create a popular intellectual climate which led directly to the persecution of Jews throughout Europe in the years that followed. In this context, Corbyn should explain himself and/or apologise for his slipshod and shoddy writing, which has caused considerable offence to the Jewish Community.

Cold Shoulder or Warm Handshake?

On 29 March 2019, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will leave the European Union after forty-six years of membership, since it joined the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973 on the same day and hour as the Republic of Ireland. Yet in 1999, it looked as if the long-standing debate over Britain’s membership had been resolved. The Maastricht Treaty establishing the European Union had been signed by all the member states of the preceding European Community in February 1992 and was succeeded by a further treaty, signed in Amsterdam in 1999. What, then, has happened in the space of twenty years to so fundamentally change the ‘settled’ view of the British Parliament and people, bearing in mind that both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU, while England and Wales both voted to leave? At the time of writing, the manner of our going has not yet been determined, but the invocation of ‘article fifty’ by the Westminster Parliament and the UK government means that the date has been set. So either we will have to leave without a deal, turning a cold shoulder to our erstwhile friends and allies on the continent, or we will finally ratify the deal agreed between the EU Commission, on behalf of the twenty-seven remaining member states, and leave with a warm handshake and most of our trading and cultural relations intact.

As yet, the possibility of a second referendum – or third, if we take into account the 1975 referendum, called by Harold Wilson (above) which was also a binary leave/ remain decision – seems remote. In any event, it is quite likely that the result would be the same and would kill off any opportunity of the UK returning to EU membership for at least another generation. As Ian Fleming’s James Bond tells us, ‘you only live twice’. That certainly seems to be the mood in Brussels too. I was too young to vote in 1975 by just five days, and another membership referendum would be unlikely to occur in my lifetime. So much has been said about following ‘the will of the people’, or at least 52% of them, that it would be a foolish government, in an age of rampant populism, that chose to revoke article fifty, even if Westminster voted for this. At the same time, and in that same populist age, we know from recent experience that in politics and international relations, nothing is inevitable…

One of the major factors in the 2016 Referendum Campaign was the country’s public spending priorities, compared with those of the European Union. The ‘Leave’ campaign sent a double-decker bus around England stating that by ending the UK’s payments into the EU, more than 350 million pounds per week could be redirected to the National Health Service (NHS).

A British Icon Revived – The NHS under New Labour:

To understand the power of this statement, it is important to recognise that the NHS is unique in Europe in that it is wholly funded from direct taxation, and not via National Insurance, as in many other European countries. As a service created in 1948 to be ‘free at the point of delivery’, it is seen as a ‘British icon’ and funding has been a central issue in national election campaigns since 2001, when Tony Blair was confronted by an irate voter, Sharon Storer, outside a hospital. In its first election manifesto of 1997, ‘New Labour’ promised to safeguard the basic principles of the NHS, which we founded. The ‘we’ here was the post-war Labour government, whose socialist Health Minister, Aneurin Bevan, had established the service in the teeth of considerable opposition from within both parliament and the medical profession. ‘New Labour’ protested that under the Tories there had been fifty thousand fewer nurses but a rise of no fewer than twenty thousand managers – red tape which Labour would pull away and burn. Though critical of the internal markets the Tories had introduced, Blair promised to keep a split between those who commissioned health services and those who provided them.

Under Frank Dobson, Labour’s new Health Secretary, there was little reform of the NHS but there was, year by year, just enough extra money to stave off the winter crises. But then a series of tragic individual cases hit the headlines, and one of them came from a Labour peer and well-known medical scientist and fertility expert, Professor Robert Winston, who was greatly admired by Tony Blair. He launched a furious denunciation of the government over the treatment of his elderly mother. Far from upholding the NHS’s iconic status, Winston said that Britain’s health service was the worst in Europe and was getting worse under the New Labour government, which was being deceitful about the true picture. Labour’s polling on the issue showed that Winston was, in general terms, correct in his assessment in the view of the country as a whole. In January 2000, therefore, Blair announced directly to it that he would bring Britain’s health spending up to the European average within five years. That was a huge promise because it meant spending a third as much again in real terms, and his ‘prudent’ Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, was unhappy that Blair had not spoken enough on television about the need for health service reform to accompany the money, and had also ‘stolen’ his budget announcements. On Budget day itself, Brown announced that until 2004 health spending would rise at above six per cent beyond inflation every year, …

… by far the largest sustained increase in NHS funding in any period in its fifty-year history … half as much again for health care for every family in this country.       

The tilt away from Brown’s sharp spending controls during the first three years of the New Labour government had begun by the first spring of the new millennium, and there was more to come. With a general election looming in 2001, Brown also announced a review of the NHS and its future by a former banker. As soon as the election was over, broad hints about necessary tax rises were dropped. When the Wanless Report was finally published, it confirmed much that the winter crisis of 1999-2000 had exposed. The NHS was not, whatever Britons fondly believed, better than health systems in other developed countries, and it needed a lot more money. ‘Wanless’ also rejected a radical change in funding, such as a switch to insurance-based or semi-private health care. Brown immediately used this as objective proof that taxes had to rise in order to save the NHS. In his next budget of 2002, Brown broke with a political convention that which had reigned since the mid-eighties, that direct taxes would not be raised again. He raised a special one per cent national insurance levy, equivalent to a penny on income tax, to fund the huge reinvestment in Britain’s health.

Public spending shot up with this commitment and, in some ways, it paid off, since by 2006 there were around 300,000 extra NHS staff compared to 1997. That included more than ten thousand extra senior hospital doctors (about a quarter more) and 85,000 more nurses. But there were also nearly forty thousand managers, twice as many as Blair and Brown had ridiculed the Tory government for hiring. An ambitious computer project for the whole NHS became an expensive catastrophe. Meanwhile, the health service budget rose from thirty-seven billion to more than ninety-two billion a year. But the investment produced results, with waiting lists, a source of great public anger from the mid-nineties, falling by 200,000. By 2005, Blair was able to talk of the best waiting list figures since 1988. Hardly anyone was left waiting for an inpatient appointment for more than six months. Death rates from cancer for people under the age of seventy-five fell by 15.7 per cent between 1996 and 2006 and death rates from heart disease fell by just under thirty-six per cent. Meanwhile, the public finance initiative meant that new hospitals were being built around the country. But, unfortunately for New Labour, that was not the whole story of the Health Service under their stewardship. As Andrew Marr has attested,

…’Czars’, quangos, agencies, commissions, access teams and planners hunched over the NHS as Whitehall, having promised to devolve power, now imposed a new round of mind-dazing control.

By the autumn of 2004 hospitals were subject to more than a hundred inspections. War broke out between Brown and the Treasury and the ‘Blairite’ Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, about the basic principles of running the hospitals. Milburn wanted more competition between them, but Brown didn’t see how this was possible when most people had only one major local hospital. Polling suggested that he was making a popular point. Most people simply wanted better hospitals, not more choice. A truce was eventually declared with the establishment of a small number of independent, ‘foundation’ hospitals. By the 2005 general election, Michael Howard’s Conservatives were attacking Labour for wasting money and allowing people’s lives to be put at risk in dirty, badly run hospitals. Just like Labour once had, they were promising to cut bureaucracy and the number of organisations within the NHS. By the summer of 2006, despite the huge injection of funds, the Service was facing a cash crisis. Although the shortfall was not huge as a percentage of the total budget, trusts in some of the most vulnerable parts of the country were on the edge of bankruptcy, from Hartlepool to Cornwall and across to London. Throughout Britain, seven thousand jobs had gone and the Royal College of Nursing, the professional association to which most nurses belonged, was predicting thirteen thousand more would go soon. Many newly and expensively qualified doctors and even specialist consultants could not find work. It seemed that wage costs, expensive new drugs, poor management and the money poured into endless bureaucratic reforms had resulted in a still inadequate service. Bupa, the leading private operator, had been covering some 2.3 million people in 1999. Six years later, the figure was more than eight million. This partly reflected greater affluence, but it was also hardly a resounding vote of confidence in Labour’s management of the NHS.

Public Spending, Declining Regions & Economic Development:

As public spending had begun to flow during the second Blair administration, vast amounts of money had gone in pay rises, new bureaucracies and on bills for outside consultants. Ministries had been unused to spending again, after the initial period of ‘prudence’, and did not always do it well. Brown and his Treasury team resorted to double and triple counting of early spending increases in order to give the impression they were doing more for hospitals, schools and transport than they actually could. As Marr has pointed out, …

… In trying to achieve better policing, more effective planning, healthier school food, prettier town centres and a hundred other hopes, the centre of government ordered and cajoled, hassled and harangued, always high-minded, always speaking for ‘the people’.  

The railways, after yet another disaster, were shaken up again. In very controversial circumstances Railtrack, the once-profitable monopoly company operating the lines, was driven to bankruptcy and a new system of Whitehall control was imposed. At one point, Tony Blair boasted of having five hundred targets for the public sector. Parish councils, small businesses and charities found that they were loaded with directives. Schools and hospitals had many more. Marr has commented, …

The interference was always well-meant but it clogged up the arteries of free decision-taking and frustrated responsible public life. 

Throughout the New Labour years, with steady growth and low inflation, most of the country grew richer. Growth since 1997, at 2.8 per cent per year, was above the post-war average, GDP per head was above that of France and Germany and the country had the second lowest jobless figures in the EU. The number of people in work increased by 2.4 million. Incomes grew, in real terms, by about a fifth. Pensions were in trouble, but house price inflation soured, so the owners found their properties more than doubling in value and came to think of themselves as prosperous. By 2006 analysts were assessing the disposable wealth of the British at forty thousand pounds per household. However, the wealth was not spread geographically, averaging sixty-eight thousand in the south-east of England, but a little over thirty thousand in Wales and north-east England (see map above). But even in the historically poorer parts of the UK house prices had risen fast, so much so that government plans to bulldoze worthless northern terraces had to be abandoned when they started to regain value. Cheap mortgages, easy borrowing and high property prices meant that millions of people felt far better off, despite the overall rise in the tax burden. Cheap air travel gave the British opportunities for easy travel both to traditional resorts and also to every part of the European continent. British expatriates were able to buy properties across the French countryside and in southern Spain. Some even began to commute weekly to jobs in London or Manchester from Mediterranean villas, and regional airports boomed as a result.

The internet, also known as the ‘World-Wide Web’, which was ‘invented’ by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at the end of 1989 (pictured right in 2014), was advancing from the colleges and institutions into everyday life by the mid- ‘noughties’. It first began to attract popular interest in the mid-nineties: Britain’s first internet café and magazine, reviewing a few hundred early websites, were both launched in 1994. The following year saw the beginning of internet shopping as a major pastime, with both ‘eBay’ and ‘Amazon’ arriving, though to begin with they only attracted tiny numbers of people.

But the introduction of new forms of mail-order and ‘click and collect’ shopping quickly attracted significant adherents from different ‘demographics’.  The growth of the internet led to a feeling of optimism, despite warnings that the whole digital world would collapse because of the inability of computers to cope with the last two digits in the year ‘2000’, which were taken seriously at the time. In fact, the ‘dot-com’ bubble was burst by its own excessive expansion, as with any bubble, and following a pause and a lot of ruined dreams, the ‘new economy’ roared on again. By 2000, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), around forty per cent of Britons had accessed the internet at some time. Three years later, nearly half of British homes were ‘online’. By 2004, the spread of ‘broadband’ connections had brought a new mass market in ‘downloading’ music and video. By 2006, three-quarters of British children had internet access at home.

Simultaneously, the rich of America, Europe and Russia began buying up parts of London, and then other ‘attractive’ parts of the country, including Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, Yorkshire and Cornwall. ‘Executive housing’ with pebbled driveways, brick facing and dormer windows, was growing across farmland and by rivers with no thought of flood-plain constraints. Parts of the country far from London, such as the English south-west and Yorkshire, enjoyed a ripple of wealth that pushed their house prices to unheard-of levels. From Leith to Gateshead, Belfast to Cardiff Bay, once-derelict shorefront areas were transformed. The nineteenth-century buildings in the Albert Dock in Liverpool (above) now house a maritime museum, an art gallery, shopping centre and television studio. It has also become a tourist attraction. For all the problems and disappointments, and the longer-term problems with their financing, new schools and public buildings sprang up – new museums, galleries, vast shopping complexes (see below), corporate headquarters in a biomorphic architecture of glass and steel, more imaginative and better-looking than their predecessors from the dreary age of concrete.

Supermarket chains exercised huge market power, offering cheap meat and dairy products into almost everyone’s budgets. Factory-made ready-meals were transported and imported by the new global air freight market and refrigerated trucks and lorries moving freely across a Europe shorn of internal barriers. Out-of-season fruit and vegetables, fish from the Pacific, exotic foods of all kinds and freshly cut flowers appeared in superstores everywhere. Hardly anyone was out of reach of a ‘Tesco’, a ‘Morrison’s’, a ‘Sainsbury’s’ or an ‘Asda’. By the mid-noughties, the four supermarket giants owned more than 1,500 superstores throughout the UK. They spread the consumption of goods that in the eighties and nineties had seemed like luxuries. Students had to take out loans in order to go to university but were far more likely to do so than previous generations, as well as to travel more widely on a ‘gap’ year, not just to study or work abroad.

Those ‘Left Behind’ – Poverty, Pensions & Public Order:

Materially, for the majority of people, this was, to use Marr’s term, a ‘golden age’, which perhaps helps to explain both why earlier real anger about earlier pension decisions and stealth taxes did not translate into anti-Labour voting in successive general elections. The irony is that in pleasing ‘Middle Englanders’, the Blair-Brown government lost contact with traditional Labour voters, especially in the North of Britain, who did not benefit from these ‘golden years’ to the same extent. Gordon Brown, from the first, made much of New Labour’s anti-poverty agenda, and especially child poverty. Since the launch of the Child Poverty Action Group, this latter problem had become particularly emotive. Labour policies took a million children out of relative poverty between 1997 and 2004, though the numbers rose again later. Brown’s emphasis was on the working poor and the virtue of work. So his major innovations were the national minimum wage, the ‘New Deal’ for the young unemployed, and the working families’ tax credit, as well as tax credits aimed at children. There was also a minimum income guarantee and a later pension credit, for poorer pensioners.

The minimum wage was first set at three pounds sixty an hour, rising year by year. In 2006 it was 5.35 an hour. Because the figures were low, it did not destroy the two million jobs as the Tories claimed it would. Neither did it produce higher inflation; employment continued to grow while inflation remained low. It even seemed to have cut red tape. By the mid-noughties, the minimum wage covered two million people, the majority of them women. Because it was updated ahead of rises in inflation rates, the wages of the poor also rose faster. It was so successful that even the Tories were forced to embrace it ahead of the 2005 election. The New Deal was funded by a windfall tax on privatised utility companies, and by 2000 Blair said it had helped a quarter of a million young people back into work, and it was being claimed as a major factor in lower rates of unemployment as late as 2005. But the National Audit Office, looking back on its effect in the first parliament, reckoned the number of under twenty-five-year-olds helped into real jobs was as low as 25,000, at a cost per person of eight thousand pounds. A second initiative was targeted at the babies and toddlers of the most deprived families. ‘Sure Start’ was meant to bring mothers together in family centres across Britain – 3,500 were planned for 2010, ten years after the scheme had been launched – and to help them to become more effective parents. However, some of the most deprived families failed to show up. As Andrew Marr wrote, back in 2007:

Poverty is hard to define, easy to smell. In a country like Britain, it is mostly relative. Though there are a few thousand people living rough or who genuinely do not have enough to keep them decently alive, and many more pensioners frightened of how they will pay for heating, the greater number of poor are those left behind the general material improvement in life. This is measured by income compared to the average and by this yardstick in 1997 there were three to four million children living in households of relative poverty, triple the number in 1979. This does not mean they were physically worse off than the children of the late seventies, since the country generally became much richer. But human happiness relates to how we see ourselves relative to those around us, so it was certainly real. 

The Tories, now under new management in the shape of a media-marketing executive and old Etonian, David Cameron, also declared that they believed in this concept of relative poverty. After all, it was on their watch, during the Thatcher and Major governments, that it had tripled, which is why it was only towards the end of the New Labour governments that they could accept the definition of the left-of-centre Guardian columnist, Polly Toynbee. A world of ‘black economy’ work also remained below the minimum wage, in private care homes, where migrant servants were exploited, and in other nooks and crannies. Some 336,000 jobs remained on ‘poverty pay’ rates. Yet ‘redistribution of wealth’, a socialist phrase which had become unfashionable under New Labour lest it should scare away middle Englanders, was stronger in Brown’s Britain than in other major industrialised nations. Despite the growth of the super-rich, many of whom were immigrants anyway, overall equality increased in these years. One factor in this was the return to the means-testing of benefits, particularly for pensioners and through the working families’ tax credit, subsequently divided into a child tax credit and a working tax credit. This was a U-turn by Gordon Brown, who had opposed means-testing when in Opposition. As Chancellor, he concluded that if he was to direct scarce resources at those in real poverty, he had little choice.

Apart from the demoralising effect it had on pensioners, the other drawback to means-testing was that a huge bureaucracy was needed to track people’s earnings and to try to establish exactly what they should be getting in benefits. Billions were overpaid and as people did better and earned more from more stable employment, they then found themselves facing huge demands to hand back the money they had already spent. Thousands of extra civil servants were needed to deal with the subsequent complaints and the scheme became extremely expensive to administer. There were also controversial drives to oblige more disabled people back to work, and the ‘socially excluded’ were confronted by a range of initiatives designed to make them more middle class. Compared with Mrs Thatcher’s Victorian Values and Mr Major’s Back to Basics campaigns, Labour was supposed to be non-judgemental about individual behaviour. But a form of moralism did begin to reassert itself. Parenting classes were sometimes mandated through the courts and for the minority who made life hell for their neighbours on housing estates, Labour introduced the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (‘Asbo’). These were first given out in 1998, granted by magistrates to either the police or the local council. It became a criminal offence to break the curfew or other sanction, which could be highly specific. Asbos could be given out for swearing at others in the street, harassing passers-by, vandalism, making too much noise, graffiti, organising ‘raves’, flyposting, taking drugs, sniffing glue, joyriding, prostitution, hitting people and drinking in public.

Although they served a useful purpose in many cases, there were fears that for the really rough elements in society and their tough children they became a badge of honour. Since breaking an Asbo could result in an automatic prison sentence, people were sent to jail for crimes that had not warranted this before. But as they were refined in use and strengthened, they became more effective and routine. By 2007, seven and a half thousand had been given out in England and Wales alone and Scotland had introduced its own version in 2004. Some civil liberties campaigners saw this development as part of a wider authoritarian and surveillance agenda which also led to the widespread use of CCTV (Closed Circuit Television) cameras by the police and private security guards, especially in town centres (see above). Also in 2007, it was estimated that the British were being observed and recorded by 4.2 million such cameras. That amounted to one camera for every fourteen people, a higher ratio than for any other country in the world, with the possible exception of China. In addition, the number of mobile phones was already equivalent to the number of people in Britain. With global satellite positioning chips (GPS) these could show exactly where their users were and the use of such systems in cars and even out on the moors meant that Britons were losing their age-old prowess for map-reading.

The ‘Seven Seven’ Bombings – The Home-grown ‘Jihadis’:

Despite these increasing means of mass surveillance, Britain’s cities have remained vulnerable to terrorist attacks, more recently by so-called ‘Islamic terrorists’ rather than by the Provisional IRA, who abandoned their bombing campaign in 1998. On 7 July 2005, at rush-hour, four young Muslim men from West Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire, murdered fifty-two people and injured 770 others by blowing themselves up on London Underground trains and on a London bus. The report into this worst such attack in Britain later concluded that they were not part of an al Qaeda cell, though two of them had visited camps in Pakistan, and that the rucksack bombs had been constructed at the cost of a few hundred pounds. Despite the government’s insistence that the war in Iraq had not made Britain more of a target for terrorism, the Home Office investigation asserted that the four had been motivated, in part at least, by ‘British foreign policy’.

They had picked up the information they needed for the attack from the internet. It was a particularly grotesque attack, because of the terrifying and bloody conditions in the underground tunnels and it vividly reminded the country that it was as much a target as the United States or Spain. Indeed, the long-standing and intimate relationship between Great Britain and Pakistan, with constant and heavy air traffic between them, provoked fears that the British would prove uniquely vulnerable. Tony Blair heard of the attack at the most poignant time, just following London’s great success in winning the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games (see above). The ‘Seven Seven’ bombings are unlikely to have been stopped by CCTV surveillance, of which there was plenty at the tube stations, nor by ID cards (which had recently been under discussion), since the killers were British subjects, nor by financial surveillance, since little money was involved and the materials were paid for in cash. Even better intelligence might have helped, but the Security Services, both ‘MI5’ and ‘MI6’ as they are known, were already in receipt of huge increases in their budgets, as they were in the process of tracking down other murderous cells. In 2005, police arrested suspects in Birmingham, High Wycombe and Walthamstow, in east London, believing there was a plot to blow up as many as ten passenger aircraft over the Atlantic.

After many years of allowing dissident clerics and activists from the Middle East asylum in London, Britain had more than its share of inflammatory and dangerous extremists, who admired al Qaeda and preached violent jihad. Once 11 September 2001 had changed the climate, new laws were introduced to allow the detention without trial of foreigners suspected of being involved in supporting or fomenting terrorism. They could not be deported because human rights legislation forbade sending back anyone to countries where they might face torture. Seventeen were picked up and held at Belmarsh high-security prison. But in December 2004, the House of Lords ruled that these detentions were discriminatory and disproportionate, and therefore illegal. Five weeks later, the Home Secretary Charles Clarke hit back with ‘control orders’ to limit the movement of men he could not prosecute or deport. These orders would also be used against home-grown terror suspects. A month later, in February 2005, sixty Labour MPs rebelled against these powers too, and the government only narrowly survived the vote. In April 2006 a judge ruled that the control orders were an affront to justice because they gave the Home Secretary, a politician, too much power. Two months later, the same judge ruled that curfew orders of eighteen hours per day on six Iraqis were a deprivation of liberty and also illegal. The new Home Secretary, John Reid, lost his appeal and had to loosen the orders.

Britain found itself in a struggle between its old laws and liberties and a new, borderless world in which the hallowed principles of ‘habeas corpus’, free speech, a presumption of innocence, asylum, the right of British subjects to travel freely in their own country without identifying papers, and the sanctity of homes in which the law-abiding lived were all coming under increasing jeopardy. The new political powers seemed to government ministers the least that they needed to deal with a threat that might last for another thirty years in order, paradoxically, to secure Britain’s liberties for the long-term beyond that. They were sure that most British people agreed, and that the judiciary, media, civil rights campaigners and elected politicians who protested were an ultra-liberal minority. Tony Blair, John Reid and Jack Straw were emphatic about this, and it was left to liberal Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to mount the barricades in defence of civil liberties. Andrew Marr conceded at the time that the New Labour ministers were ‘probably right’. With the benefit of hindsight, others will probably agree. As Gordon Brown eyed the premiership, his rhetoric was similarly tough, but as Blair was forced to turn to the ‘war on terror’ and Iraq, he failed to concentrate enough on domestic policy. By 2005, neither of them could be bothered to disguise their mutual enmity, as pictured above. A gap seemed to open up between Blair’s enthusiasm for market ideas in the reform of health and schools, and Brown’s determination to deliver better lives for the working poor. Brown was also keen on bringing private capital into public services, but there was a difference in emphasis which both men played up. Blair claimed that the New Labour government was best when we are at our boldest. But Brown retorted that it was best when we are Labour. 

Tony Blair’s legacy continued to be paraded on the streets of Britain,

here blaming him and George Bush for the rise of ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq.

Asylum Seekers, EU ‘Guest’ Workers & Immigrants:

One result of the long Iraqi conflict, which President Bush finally declared to be over on 1 May 2003, was the arrival of many Iraqi asylum-seekers in Britain; Kurds, as well as Shiites and Sunnis. This attracted little comment at the time because there had been both Iraqi and Iranian refugees in Britain since the 1970s, especially as students and the fresh influx were only a small part of a much larger migration into the country which changed it fundamentally during the Blair years. This was a multi-lingual migration, including many Poles, some Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans whose countries had joined the EU and its single market in 2004. When the EU expanded Britain decided that, unlike France or Germany, it would not try to delay opening the country to migrant workers. The accession treaties gave nationals from these countries the right to freedom of movement and settlement, and with average earnings three times higher in the UK, this was a benefit which the Eastern Europeans were keen to take advantage of. Some member states, however, exercised their right to ‘derogation’ from the treaties, whereby they would only permit migrant workers to be employed if employers were unable to find a local candidate. In terms of European Union legislation, a derogation or that a member state has opted not to enforce a specific provision in a treaty due to internal circumstances (typically a state of emergency), and to delay full implementation of the treaty for five years. The UK decided not to exercise this option.

There were also sizeable inflows of western Europeans, though these were mostly students, who (somewhat controversially) were also counted in the immigration statistics, and young professionals with multi-national companies. At the same time, there was continued immigration from Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as from Russia, Australia, South Africa and North America. In 2005, according to the Office for National Statistics, ‘immigrants’ were arriving to live in Britain at the rate of 1,500 a day. Since Tony Blair had been in power, more than 1.3 million had arrived. By the mid-2000s, English was no longer the first language of half the primary school children in London, and the capital had more than 350 different first languages. Five years later, the same could be said of many towns in Kent and other Eastern counties of England.

The poorer of the new migrant groups were almost entirely unrepresented in politics, but radically changed the sights, sounds and scents of urban Britain, and even some of its market towns. The veiled women of the Muslim world or its more traditionalist Arab, Afghan and Pakistani quarters became common sights on the streets, from Kent to Scotland and across to South Wales. Polish tradesmen, fruit-pickers and factory workers were soon followed by shops owned by Poles or stocking Polish and East European delicacies and selling Polish newspapers and magazines. Even road signs appeared in Polish, though in Kent these were mainly put in place along trucking routes used by Polish drivers, where for many years signs had been in French and German, a recognition of the employment changes in the long-distance haulage industry. Even as far north as Cheshire (see below), these were put in place to help monolingual truckers using trunk roads, rather than local Polish residents, most of whom had enough English to understand such signs either upon arrival or shortly afterwards. Although specialist classes in English had to be laid on in schools and community centres, there was little evidence that the impact of multi-lingual migrants had a long-term impact on local children and wider communities. In fact, schools were soon reporting a positive impact in terms of their attitudes toward learning and in improving general educational standards.

Problems were posed, however, by the operations of people smugglers and criminal gangs. Chinese villagers were involved in a particular tragedy when nineteen of them were caught while cockle-picking in Morecambe Bay by the notorious tides and drowned. Many more were working for ‘gang-masters’ as virtual, in some cases actual ‘slaves’. Russian voices became common on the London Underground, and among prostitutes on the streets. The British Isles found themselves to be ‘islands in the stream’ of international migration, the chosen ‘sceptred isle’ destinations of millions of newcomers. Unlike Germany, Britain was no longer a dominant manufacturing country but had rather become, by the late twentieth century, a popular place to develop digital and financial products and services. Together with the United States and against the Soviet Union, it was determined to preserve a system of representative democracy and the free market. Within the EU, Britain maintained its earlier determination to resist the Franco-German federalist model, with its ‘social chapter’ involving ever tighter controls over international corporations and ever closer political union. Britain had always gone out into the world. Now, increasingly, the world came to Britain, whether poor immigrants, rich corporations or Chinese manufacturers.

Multilingual & Multicultural Britain:

Immigration had always been a constant factor in British life, now it was also a fact of life which Europe and the whole world had to come to terms with. Earlier post-war migrations to Britain had provoked a racialist backlash, riots, the rise of extreme right-wing organisations and a series of new laws aimed at controlling it. New laws had been passed to control both immigration from the Commonwealth and the backlash to it. The later migrations were controversial in different ways. The ‘Windrush’ arrivals from the Caribbean and those from the Indian subcontinent were people who looked different but who spoke the same language and in many ways had had a similar education to that of the ‘native’ British. Many of the later migrants from Eastern Europe looked similar to the white British but shared little by way of a common linguistic and cultural background. However, it’s not entirely true to suggest, as Andrew Marr seems to, that they did not have a shared history. Certainly, through no fault of their own, the Eastern Europeans had been cut off from their western counterparts by their absorption into the Soviet Russian Empire after the Second World War, but in the first half of the century, Poland had helped the British Empire to subdue its greatest rival, Germany, as had most of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. Even during the Soviet ‘occupation’ of these countries, many of their citizens had found refuge in Britain.

Moreover, by the early 1990s, Britain had already become both a multilingual nation. In 1991, Safder Alladina and Viv Edwards published a book for the Longman Linguistics Library which detailed the Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian and Yiddish speech communities of previous generations. Growing up in Birmingham, I certainly heard many Polish, Yiddish, Yugoslav and Greek accents among my neighbours and parents of school friends, at least as often as I heard Welsh, Irish, Caribbean, Indian and Pakistani accents. The Longman book begins with a foreword by Debi Prasanna Pattanayak in which she stated that the Language Census of 1987 had shown that there were 172 different languages spoken by children in the schools of the Inner London Education Authority. In an interesting precursor of the controversy to come, she related how the reaction in many quarters was stunned disbelief, and how one British educationalist had told her that England had become a third world country. She commented:

After believing in the supremacy of English as the universal language, it was difficult to acknowledge that the UK was now one of the greatest immigrant nations of the modern world. It was also hard to see that the current plurality is based on a continuity of heritage. … Britain is on the crossroads. It can take an isolationist stance in relation to its internal cultural environment. It can create a resilient society by trusting its citizens to be British not only in political but in cultural terms. The first road will mean severing dialogue with the many heritages which have made the country fertile. The second road would be working together with cultural harmony for the betterment of the country. Sharing and participation would ensure not only political but cultural democracy. The choice is between mediocrity and creativity.

Language and dialect in the British Isles, showing the linguistic diversity in many English cities by 1991 as a result of Commonwealth immigration as well as the survival and revival of many of the older Celtic languages and dialects of English.

Such ‘liberal’, ‘multi-cultural’ views may be unfashionable now, more than a quarter of a century later, but it is perhaps worth stopping to look back on that cultural crossroads, and on whether we are now back at that same crossroads, or have arrived at another one. By the 1990s, the multilingual setting in which new Englishes evolved had become far more diverse than it had been in the 1940s, due to immigration from the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, the Far East, and West and East Africa. The largest of the ‘community languages’ was Punjabi, with over half a million speakers, but there were also substantial communities of Gujurati speakers (perhaps a third of a million) and a hundred thousand Bengali speakers. In some areas, such as East London, public signs and notices recognise this (see below). Bengali-speaking children formed the most recent and largest linguistic minority within the ILEA and because the majority of them had been born in Bangladesh, they were inevitably in the greatest need of language support within the schools. A new level of linguistic and cultural diversity was introduced through Commonwealth immigration.

Birmingham’s booming postwar economy attracted West Indian settlers from Jamaica, Barbados and St Kitts in the 1950s. By 1971, the South Asian and West Indian populations were equal in size and concentrated in the inner city wards of North and Central Birmingham (see the map above).  After the hostility towards New Commonwealth immigrants in some sections of the local White populations in the 1960s and ’70s, they had become more established in cities like Birmingham, where places of worship, ethnic groceries, butchers and, perhaps most significantly, ‘balti’ restaurants, began to proliferate in the 1980s and ’90s. The settlers materially changed the cultural and social life of the city, most of the ‘white’ population believing that these changes were for the better. By 1991, Pakistanis had overtaken West Indians and Indians to become the largest single ethnic minority in Birmingham. The concentration of West Indian and South Asian British people in the inner city areas changed little by the end of the century, though there was an evident flight to the suburbs by Indians. As well as being poorly-paid, the factory work available to South Asian immigrants like the man in a Bradford textile factory below, was unskilled. By the early nineties, the decline of the textile industry over the previous two decades had let to high long-term unemployment in the immigrant communities in the Northern towns, leading to serious social problems.

Nor is it entirely true to suggest that, as referred to above, Caribbean arrivals in Britain faced few linguistic obstacles integrating themselves into British life from the late 1940s to the late 1980s. By the end of these forty years, the British West Indian community had developed its own “patois”, which had a special place as a token of identity. One Jamaican schoolgirl living in London in the late eighties explained the social pressures that frowned on Jamaican English in Jamaica, but which made it almost obligatory in London. She wasn’t allowed to speak Jamaican Creole in front of her parents in Jamaica. When she arrived in Britain and went to school, she naturally tried to fit in by speaking the same patois, but some of her British Caribbean classmates told her that, as a “foreigner”, she should not try to be like them, and should speak only English. But she persevered with the patois and lost her British accent after a year and was accepted by her classmates. But for many Caribbean visitors to Britain, the patois of Brixton and Notting Hill was a stylized form that was not truly Jamaican, not least because British West Indians had come from all parts of the Caribbean. When another British West Indian girl, born in Britain, was taken to visit Jamaica, she found herself being teased about her London patois and told to speak English.

The predicament that still faced the ‘Black British’ in the late eighties and into the nineties was that, for all the rhetoric, they were still not fully accepted by the established ‘White community’. Racism was still an everyday reality for large numbers of British people. There was plenty of evidence of the ways in which Black people were systematically denied access to employment in all sections of the job market.  The fact that a racist calamity like the murder in London of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence could happen in 1993 was a testimony to how little had changed in British society’s inability to face up to racism since the 1950s. As a result, the British-Caribbean population could still not feel itself to be neither fully British. This was the poignant outcome of what the British Black writer Caryl Phillips has called “The Final Passage”, the title of his novel which is narrated in Standard English with the direct speech by the characters rendered in Creole. Phillips migrated to Britain as a baby with his parents in the 1950s, and sums up his linguistic and cultural experience as follows:

“The paradox of my situation is that where most immigrants have to learn a new language, Caribbean immigrants have to learn a new form of the same language. It induces linguistic shizophrenia – you have an identity that mirrors the larger cultural confusion.”

One of his older characters in The Final Passage characterises “England” as a “college for the West Indian”, and, as Philipps himself put it, that is “symptomatic of the colonial situation; the language is divided as well”.  As the “Windrush Scandal”, involving the deportation of British West Indians from the UK has recently shown, this post-colonial “cultural confusion” still ‘colours’ political and institutional attitudes twenty-five years after the death of Stephen Lawrence, leading to discriminatory judgements by officials. This example shows how difficult it is to arrive at some kind of chronological classification of migrations to Britain into the period of economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s; the asylum-seekers of the 1970s and 1980s; and the EU expansion and integration in the 1990s and the first decades of the 2000s. This approach assumed stereotypical patterns of settlement for the different groups, whereas the reality was much more diverse. Most South Asians, for example, arrived in Britain in the post-war period but they were joining a migration ‘chain’ which had been established at the beginning of the twentieth century. Similarly, most Eastern European migrants arrived in Britain in several quite distinct waves of population movement. This led the authors of the Longman Linguistics book to organise it into geolinguistic areas, as shown in the figure below:

The Poles and Ukrainians of the immediate post-war period, the Hungarians in the 1950s, the Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and the Tamils in the 1980s, sought asylum in Britain as refugees. In contrast, settlers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Caribbean, had, in the main come from areas of high unemployment and/or low wages, for economic reasons. It was not possible, even then, to make a simple split between political and economic migrants since, even within the same group, motivations differed through time. The Eastern Europeans who had arrived in Britain since the Second World War had come for a variety of reasons; in many cases, they were joining earlier settlers trying either to escape poverty in the home country or to better their lot. A further important factor in the discussion about the various minority communities in Britain was the pattern of settlement. Some groups were concentrated into a relatively small geographical area which made it possible to develop and maintain strong social networks; others were more dispersed and so found it more difficult to maintain a sense of community. Most Spaniards, Turks and Greeks were found in London, whereas Ukrainians and Poles were scattered throughout the country. In the case of the Poles, the communities outside London were sufficiently large to be able to sustain an active community life; in the case of Ukrainians, however, the small numbers and the dispersed nature of the community made the task of forging a separate linguistic and cultural identity a great deal more difficult.

Groups who had little contact with the home country also faced very real difficulties in retaining their distinct identities. Until 1992, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians and Estonians were unable to travel freely to their country of origin; neither could they receive visits from family members left behind; until the mid-noughties, there was no possibility of new immigration which would have the effect of revitalizing these communities in Britain. Nonetheless, they showed great resilience in maintaining their ethnic minority, not only through community involvement in the UK but by building links with similar groups in Europe and even in North America. The inevitable consequence of settlement in Britain was a shift from the mother tongue to English. The extent of this shift varied according to individual factors such as the degree of identification with the mother tongue culture; it also depended on group factors such as the size of the community, its degree of self-organisation and the length of time it had been established in Britain. For more recently arrived communities such as the Bangladeshis, the acquisition of English was clearly a more urgent priority than the maintenance of the mother tongue, whereas, for the settled Eastern Europeans, the shift to English was so complete that mother tongue teaching was often a more urgent community priority. There were reports of British-born Ukrainians and Yiddish-speaking Jews who were brought up in predominantly English-speaking homes who were striving to produce an environment in which their children could acquire their ‘heritage’ language.

Blair’s Open Door Policy & EU Freedom of Movement:

During the 1980s and ’90s, under the ‘rubric’ of multiculturalism, a steady stream of immigration into Britain continued, especially from the Indian subcontinent. But an unspoken consensus existed whereby immigration, while always gradually increasing, was controlled. What happened after the Labour Party’s landslide victory in 1997 was a breaking of that consensus, according to Douglas Murray, the author of the recent (2017) book, The Strange Death of Europe. He argues that once in power, Tony Blair’s government oversaw an opening of the borders on a scale unparalleled even in the post-war decades. His government abolished the ‘primary purpose rule’, which had been used as a filter out bogus marriage applications. The borders were opened to anyone deemed essential to the British economy, a definition so broad that it included restaurant workers as ‘skilled labourers’. And as well as opening the door to the rest of the world, they opened the door to the new EU member states after 2004. It was the effects of all of this, and more, that created the picture of the country which was eventually revealed in the 2011 Census, published at the end of 2012.

The numbers of non-EU nationals moving to settle in Britain were expected only to increase from 100,000 a year in 1997 to 170,000 in 2004. In fact, the government’s predictions for the number of new arrivals over the five years 1999-2004 were out by almost a million people. It also failed to anticipate that the UK might also be an attractive destination for people with significantly lower average income levels or without a minimum wage. For these reasons, the number of Eastern European migrants living in Britain rose from 170,000 in 2004 to 1.24 million in 2013. Whether the surge in migration went unnoticed or was officially approved, successive governments did not attempt to restrict it until after the 2015 election, by which time it was too late.

(to be continued)

Labour – Dropping the Donkey Jacket:

From 1980 to 1983, Michael Foot’s leadership had saved the Labour Party from splitting into two, but in all other respects, it was a disaster. He was too old, too decent, too gentle to take on the hard left or to modernise his party. Foot’s policies were those of a would-be parliamentary revolutionary detained in the second-hand bookshops in Hay-on-Wye. I enjoyed this experience myself in 1982, with a minibus full of bookish ‘revolutionaries’ from Cardiff, who went up there, as it happened, via Foot’s constituency. When roused, which was often, his Cromwellian hair would flap across a face contorted with passion, his hands would whip around excitedly and denunciations would pour forth from him with a fluency ‘old Noll’ would have envied. During his time as leader, he was in his late sixties, and would have been PM at seventy, had he won the 1983 General Election, which, of course, was never a remote possibility. Unlike Thatcher, he was contemptuous of the shallow presentational tricks demanded by television, and he could look dishevelled, being famously denounced for wearing a ‘donkey jacket’, in reality, a Burberry-style woollen coat, at the Remembrance Service at the Cenotaph. But he was more skilled than anyone I saw then or have seen since, in whipping up the socialist faithful in public meetings, or in finger-stabbing attacks on the Tory government in the House of Commons, both in open debates and questions to the PM. He would have been happier communing with Jonathan Swift and my Gulliver forbears in Banbury than attempting to operate in a political system which depended on television performances, ruthless organisation and managerial discipline. He was a political poet in an age of prose.

Nobody in the early eighties could have reined in its wilder members; Foot did his best but led the party to its worst defeat in modern times, on the basis of a hard-left, anti-Europe, anti-nuclear, pro-nationalisation manifest famously described by Gerald Kaufman as the longest suicide note in history. Kaufman had also urged Foot to stand down before the election. It was a measure of the affection felt for him that his ‘swift’ retirement after the defeat was greeted with little recrimination. Yet it also meant that when Neil Kinnock won the subsequent leadership election he had a mandate for change no previous Labour leader had enjoyed. He won with seventy-one per cent of the electoral college votes, against nineteen per cent for Roy Hattersley. Tony Benn was out of Parliament, having lost his Bristol seat, and so could not stand as the standard-bearer of the hard left. Kinnock had been elected after a series of blistering campaign speeches, a Tribunite left-winger who, like Foot, advocated the unilateral abandonment of all Britain’s nuclear weapons, believed in nationalisation and planning and wanted Britain to withdraw from the European Community. A South Wales MP from the same Bevanite stock as Foot, he also supported the abolition of private medicine and the repeal of the Tory trade union reforms. To begin with, the only fights he picked with the Bennites were over the campaign to force Labour MPs to undergo mandatory reselection, which handed a noose to local Militant activists. Yet after the chaos of the 1983 Campaign, he was also sure that the party was in need of radical remedies.

To win power, Labour needed to present itself better in the age of the modern mass media. Patricia Hewitt (pictured above), known for her campaigning on civil liberties, joined Kinnock’s new team. She was chosen to fight Leicester East in the 1983 Election but was unsuccessful. In her new role, she began trying to control interviews and placing the leader in more flattering settings than those Foot had found himself in. Kinnock knew how unsightly ‘old’ Labour had looked to the rest of the country and was prepared to be groomed. He gathered around him a ‘Pontypool front row’ of tough, aggressive heavy-weights, including Charles Clarke, the former communist NUS leader; John Reid, another former communist and Glaswegian backbench bruiser. Hewitt herself and Peter Mandelson, grandson of Herbert Morrison and Labour’s side-stepping future director of communications, led the three-quarter line with Kinnock himself as the able scrum-half. Kinnock was the first to flirt with the once-abhorred world of advertising and to seek out the support of pro-Labour pop artists such as Tracy Ullman and Billy Bragg. In this, he was drawing on a long tradition on the Welsh left, from Paul Robeson to the Hennesseys. He smartened up his own style, curtailing the informal mateyness which had made him popular among the ‘boyos’ and introduced a new code of discipline in the shadow cabinet.

Neil Kinnock attacking the Militant Tendency at the party conference in 1985.

In the Commons, he tried hard to discomfit Thatcher at her awesome best, which was difficult and mostly unsuccessful. The mutual loathing between them was clear for all to see, and as Thatcher’s popularity began to decline in 1984, Labour’s poll ratings slowly began to improve. But the party harboured a vocal minority of revolutionaries of one kind or another. They included not only the long-term supporters of Tony Benn, like Jeremy Corbyn, but also Arthur Scargill and his brand of insurrectionary syndicalism; the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, a front for the Revolutionary Socialist League, which had been steadily infiltrating the party since the sixties; and assorted hard-left local councillors, like Derek Hatton in Liverpool, a Militant member who were determined to defy Thatcher’s government, no matter how big its democratic mandate, by various ‘ultra-vires’ and illegal stratagems. Kinnock dealt with them all. Had he not done so New Labour would never have happened, yet he himself was a passionate democratic socialist whose own politics were well to the left of the country.

Neil Kinnock was beginning a tough journey towards the centre-ground of British politics, which meant leaving behind people who sounded much like his younger self. On this journey, much of his natural wit and rhetoric would be silenced. He had created his leadership team as if it were a rugby team, involved in a confrontational contact sport against opponents who were fellow enthusiasts, but with their own alternative strategy. He found that political leadership was more serious, drearier and nastier than rugby. And week after week, he was also confronting someone in Thatcher someone whose principles had been set firm long before and whose politics clearly and consistently expressed those principles on the field of play. Yet, like a Welsh scrum-half, he was always on the move, always having to shadow and shade, to side-step and shimmy, playing the ball back into the scrum or sideways to his three-quarters rather than kicking it forward. The press soon dubbed him ‘the Welsh windbag’, due to his long, discursive answers in interviews.

The first and toughest example of what he was up against came with the miners’ strike. Neil Kinnock and Arthur Scargill (above) had already shown their loathing for each other over the mainstream leadership’s battles with the Bennites. The NUM President was probably the only person on the planet that Kinnock hated more than Thatcher. He distrusted Scargill’s aims, despised his tactics and realised early on that he was certain to fail. In this, he was sharing the views of the South Wales NUM who had already forced a U-turn on closures from an unprepared Thatcher in 1981. Yet they, and he had to remain true to their own traditions and heritage. They both found themselves in an embarrassing situation, but more importantly, they realised that like it or not, they were in an existential struggle. As the violence spread, the Conservatives in the Commons and their press continually goaded and hounded him to denounce the use of ‘flying pickets’ and to praise the police. He simply could not do so, as so many on his own side had experienced the violence of the police, or heard about it from those who had. For him to attack the embattled trade union would be seen as the ultimate betrayal by a Labour leader. He was caught between the rock of Thatcher and hard place of Scargill. In the coalfields, even in South Wales, he was shunned on the picket lines as the miner’s son too “frit” in Thatcher’s favourite phrase, to come to the support of the miners in their hour of need. Secretly, however, there was some sympathy for his impossible situation among the leadership of the South Wales NUM. Kinnock at least managed to avoid fusing Labour and the NUM in the mind of many Labour voters, ensuring that Scargill’s ultimate, utter defeat was his alone. But this lost year destroyed his early momentum and stole his hwyl, his Welsh well-spring of ‘evangelical’ socialist spirit.

The Enemy Within?:

Above: Striking Yorkshire miners barrack moderate union leaders in Sheffield.

The first Thatcher government was had been dominated by the Falklands War; the second was dominated by the miners’ strike. Spurred on by ‘the spirit of the Falklands’, the government took a more confrontational attitude towards the trade unions after the 1983 General Election. This year-long battle, 1984-5, was the longest strike in British history, the most bitter, bloody and tragic industrial dispute since the General Strike and six-month Miners’ Lock-out of 1926. The strike was eventually defeated, amid scenes of mass picketing and running battles between the police and the miners. It resulted in the total defeat of the miners followed by the end of deep coal-mining in Britain. In reality, the strike simply accelerated the continuing severe contraction in the industry which had begun in the early eighties and which the South Wales NUM had successfully resisted in what turned out, however, to be a Pyrrhic victory. By 1984, the government had both the resources, the popular mandate and the dogged determination to withstand the miners’ demands. The industry had all but vanished from Kent, while in Durham two-thirds of the pits were closed. They were the only real source of employment to local communities, so the social impact of closures proved devastating. In the Durham pit villages, the entire local economy was crippled and the miners’ housing estates gradually became the ghost areas they remain today.

The government had little interest in ensuring the survival of the industry, with its troublesome and well-organised union which had already won a national strike against the Heath government a decade earlier. For the Thatcher government, the closures resulting from the defeat of the strike were a price it was willing to pay in order to teach bigger lessons. Later, the Prime Minister of the time reflected on these:

What the strike’s defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left. Marxists wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics. They failed and in doing so demonstrated just how mutually dependent the free economy and a free society really are.

It was a confrontation which was soaked in history on all sides. For the Tories, it was essential revenge for Heath’s humiliation, a score they had long been eager to settle; Margaret Thatcher spoke of Arthur Scargill and the miners’ leaders as ‘the enemy within’, as compared to Galtieri, the enemy without. For thousands of traditionally ‘militant’ miners, it was their last chance to end decades of pit closures and save their communities, which were under mortal threat. For their leader Arthur Scargill, it was an attempt to follow Mick McGahey in pulling down the government and winning a class war. He was no more interested than the government, as at least the other former, more moderate leaders had been, in the details of pay packets, or in a pit-by-pit review to determine which pits were truly uneconomic. He was determined to force the government, in Thatcher’s contemptuous phrase, to pay for mud to be mined rather than see a single job lost.

The Thatcher government had prepared more carefully than Scargill. Following the settlement with the South Wales NUM, the National Coal Board (NCB) had spent the intervening two years working with the Energy Secretary, Nigel Lawson, to pile up supplies of coal at the power stations; stocks had steadily grown, while consumption and production both fell. Following the riots in Toxteth and Brixton, the police had been retrained and equipped with full riot gear without which, ministers later confessed, they would have been unable to beat the pickets. Meanwhile, Thatcher had appointed a Scottish-born Australian, Ian MacGregor, to run the NCB. He had a fierce reputation as a union-buster in the US and had been brought back to Britain to run British Steel where closures and 65,000 job cuts had won him the title ‘Mac the Knife’. Margaret Thatcher admired him as a tough, no-nonsense man, a refreshing change from her cabinet, though she later turned against him for his lack of political nous. His plan was to cut the workforce of 202,000 by 44,000 in two years, then take another twenty thousand jobs out. Twenty pits would be closed, to begin with. When he turned up to visit mines, he was abused, pelted with flour bombs and, on one occasion, knocked to the ground.

Arthur Scargill was now relishing the coming fight as much as Thatcher. In the miners’ confrontation with Heath, Scargill had led the flying pickets at the gates of the Saltley coke depot outside Birmingham. Some sense of both his revolutionary ‘purity’, combined with characteristic Yorkshire bluntness, comes from an exchange he had with Dai Francis, the Welsh Miners’ leader at that time. He had called Francis to ask for Welsh pickets to go to Birmingham and help at the depot. Francis asked when they were needed and Scargill replied:

“Tomorrow, Saturday.”

“But Wales are playing Scotland at Cardiff Arms Park.”

“But Dai, the working class are playing the ruling class at Saltley.”

Many found Scargill inspiring; many others found him scary. Like Francis, he had been a Communist, but unlike Dai (pictured above, behind the poster, during the 1972 strike), he retained hard-line Marxist views and a penchant for denouncing anyone who disagreed with him. Kim Howells, also a former Communist and an officer of the South Wales NUM, gained a sense of Scargill’s megalomania when, just prior the 1984-5 strike, he visited his HQ in Barnsley, already known as ‘Arthur’s Castle’. Howells, a historian of the Welsh Labour movement, later becoming an MP and New Labour minister, was taken aback to find him sitting at this Mussolini desk with a great space in front of it. Behind him was a huge painting of himself on the back of a lorry, posed like Lenin, urging picketing workers in London to overthrow the ruling class. Howells thought anyone who could put up a painting like that was nuts and returned to Pontypridd to express his fears to the Welsh miners:

And of course the South Wales executive almost to a man agreed with me. But then they said, “He’s the only one we’ve got, see, boy.  The Left has decided.”

Scargill had indeed been elected by a huge margin and had set about turning the NUM’s once moderate executive, led by Joe Gormley, into a militant group. The Scottish Miners’ leader, Mick McGahey, although older and wiser than his President, was his Vice-President. Scargill had been ramping up the rhetoric for some time. He had told the NUM Conference in 1982, …

If we do not save our pits from closure then all our other struggles will become meaningless … Protection of the industry is my first priority because without jobs all our other claims lack substance and become mere shadows. Without jobs, our members are nothing …

Given what was about to happen to his members’ jobs as a result of his uncompromising position in the strike, there is a black irony in those words. By insisting that no pits should be closed on economic grounds, even if the coal was exhausted, and that more investment would always find more coal, from his point of view the losses were irrelevant. He made sure that confrontation would not be avoided. An alternative strategy put forward by researchers for the South Wales NUM was that it was the NCB’s economic arguments that needed to be exposed, along with the fact that it was using the Miners’ Pension Fund to invest in the production of cheap coal in Poland and South Africa. It’s definition of what was ‘economic’ in Britain rested on the comparative cost of importing this coal from overseas. If the NCB had invested these funds at home, the pits in Britain would not be viewed as being as ‘uneconomic’ as they claimed. But Scargill was either not clever enough to deploy these arguments or too determined to pursue the purity of his brand of revolutionary syndicalism, or both.

The NUM votes which allowed the strike to start covered both pay and closures, but from the start Scargill emphasised the closures. To strike to protect jobs, particularly other people’s jobs, in other people’s villages and other countries’ pits, gave the confrontation an air of nobility and sacrifice which a mere wages dispute would not have enjoyed. But national wage disputes had, for more than sixty years, been about arguments over the ‘price of coal’ and the relative difficulties of extracting it from a variety of seams in very different depths across the various coalfields. Neil Kinnock, the son and grandson of Welsh miners, found it impossible to condemn Scargill’s strategy without alienating support for Labour in its heartlands. He did his best to argue the economics of the miners’ case, and to condemn the harshness of the Tory attitude towards them, but these simply ran parallel to polarised arguments which were soon dividing the nation.

Moreover, like Kinnock, Scargill was a formidable organiser and conference-hall speaker, though there was little economic analysis to back up his rhetoric. Yet not even he would be able to persuade every part of the industry to strike. Earlier ballots had shown consistent majorities against striking. In Nottinghamshire, seventy-two per cent of the areas 32,000 voted against striking. The small coalfields of South Derbyshire and Leicestershire were also against. Even in South Wales, half of the NUM lodges failed to vote for a strike. Overall, of the seventy thousand miners who were balloted in the run-up to the dispute, fifty thousand had voted to keep working. Scargill knew he could not win a national ballot, so he decided on a rolling series of locally called strikes, coalfield by coalfield, beginning in Yorkshire, then Scotland, followed by Derbyshire and South Wales. These strikes would merely be approved by the national union. It was a domino strategy; the regional strikes would add up to a national strike, but without a national ballot.

But Scargill needed to be sure the dominoes would fall. He used the famous flying pickets from militant areas to shut down less militant ones. Angry miners were sent in coaches and convoys of cars to close working pits and the coke depots, vital hubs of the coal economy. Without the pickets, who to begin with rarely needed to use violence to achieve their end, far fewer pits would have come out. But after scenes of physical confrontation around Britain, by April 1984 four miners in five were on strike. There were huge set-piece confrontations with riot-equipped police bused up from London or down from Scotland, Yorkshire to Kent and Wales to Yorkshire, generally used outside their own areas in order to avoid mixed loyalties. As Andrew Marr has written, …

It was as if the country had been taken over by historical re-enactments of civil war battles, the Sealed Knot Society run rampant. Aggressive picketing was built into the fabric of the strike. Old country and regional rivalries flared up, Lancashire men against Yorkshire men, South Wales miners in Nottinghamshire.

The Nottinghamshire miners turned out to be critical since without them the power stations, even with the mix of nuclear and oil, supplemented by careful stockpiling, might have begun to run short and the government would have been in deep trouble. To Scargill’s disdain, however, other unions also refused to come out in sympathy, thus robbing him of the prospect of a General Strike, and it soon became clear that the NUM had made other errors in their historical re-enactments. Many miners were baffled from the beginning as to why Scargill had opted to strike in the spring when the demand for energy was relatively low and the stocks at the power stations were not running down at anything like the rate which the NUM needed in order to make their action effective. This was confirmed by confidential briefings from the power workers, and it seemed that the government just had to sit out the strike.

In this civil war, the police had the cavalry, while the miners were limited to the late twentieth-century equivalent of Oakey’s dragoons at Naseby, their flying pickets, supporting their poor bloody infantry, albeit well-drilled and organised. Using horses, baton charges and techniques learned in the aftermath of the street battles at Toxteth and Brixton, the police defended working miners with a determination which delighted the Tories and alarmed many others, not just the agitators for civil rights. An event which soon became known as the Battle of Orgreave (in South Yorkshire) was particularly brutal, involving ‘Ironside’ charges by mounted police in lobster-pot style helmets into thousands of miners with home-made pikes and pick-axe handles.

The NUM could count on almost fanatical loyalty in coalfield towns and villages across Britain. Miners gave up their cars, sold their furniture, saw their wives and children suffer and lost all they had in the cause of solidarity. Food parcels arrived from other parts of Britain, from France and most famously, from Soviet Russia. But there was a gritty courage and selflessness in mining communities which, even after more than seventy years of struggle, most of the rest of Britain could barely understand. But an uglier side to this particularly desperate struggle also emerged when a taxi-driver was killed taking a working miner to work in Wales. A block of concrete was dropped from a pedestrian bridge onto his cab, an act swiftly condemned by the South Wales NUM.

In Durham, the buses taking other ‘scabs’ to work in the pits were barraged with rocks and stones, as later portrayed in the film Billy Elliot. The windows had to be protected with metal grills. There were murderous threats made to strike-breaking miners and their families, and even trade union ‘allies’ were abused. Norman Willis, the amiable general secretary of the TUC, had a noose dangled over his head when he spoke at one miners’ meeting. This violence was relayed to the rest of the country on the nightly news at a time when the whole nation still watched together. I remember the sense of helplessness I felt watching the desperation of the Welsh miners from my ‘exile’ in Lancashire, having failed to find a teaching post in the depressed Rhondda in 1983. My Lancastrian colleagues were as divided as the rest of the country over the strike, often within themselves as well as from others. In the end, we found it impossible to talk about the news, no matter how much it affected us.

Eventually, threatened by legal action on the part of the Yorkshire miners claiming they had been denied a ballot, the NUM was forced onto the back foot. The South Wales NUM led the calls from within for a national ballot to decide on whether the strike should continue. Scargill’s decision to accept a donation from Colonel Gaddafi of Libya found him slithering from any moral ground he had once occupied. As with Galtieri, Thatcher was lucky in the enemies ‘chosen’ for her. Slowly, month by month, the strike began to crumble and miners began to trail back to work. A vote to strike by pit safety officers and overseers, which would have shut down the working pits, was narrowly avoided by the government. By January 1985, ten months after they had first been brought out, strikers were returning to work at the rate of 2,500 a week, and by the end of February, more than half the NUM’s membership was back at work. In some cases, especially in South Wales, they marched back proudly behind brass bands.

Above: ‘No way out!’ – picketing miners caught and handcuffed to a lamp-post by police.

Scargill’s gamble had gone catastrophically wrong. He has been compared to a First World War general, a donkey sending lions to the slaughter, though at Orgreave and elsewhere, he had stood with them too. But the political forces engaged against the miners in 1984 were entirely superior in strength to those at the disposal of the ill-prepared Heath administration of ten years earlier. A shrewder, non-revolutionary leader would not have chosen to take on Thatcher’s government at the time Scargill did, or having done so, would have found a compromise after the first months of the dispute. Today, there are only a few thousand miners left of the two hundred thousand who went on strike. An industry which had once made Britain into a great industrial power, but was always dangerous, disease-causing, dirty and polluting, finally lay down and died. For the Conservatives and perhaps for, by the end of the strike, the majority of the moderate British people, Scargill and his lieutenants were fighting parliamentary democracy and were, therefore, an enemy which had to be defeated. But the miners of Durham, Derbyshire, Kent, Fife, Yorkshire, Wales and Lancashire were nobody’s enemy. They were abnormally hard-working, traditional people justifiably worried about losing their jobs and loyal to their union, if not to the stubborn syndicalists in its national leadership.

Out with the Old Industries; in with the New:

In Tyneside and Merseyside, a more general deindustrialisation accompanied the colliery closures. Whole sections of industry, not only coal but also steel and shipbuilding, virtually vanished from many of their traditional areas.  Of all the areas of Britain, Northern Ireland suffered the highest level of unemployment, partly because the continuing sectarian violence discouraged investment. In February 1986, there were officially over 3.4 million unemployed, although statistics were manipulated for political reasons and the real figure is a matter of speculation. The socially corrosive effects were felt nationally, manifested in further inner-city rioting in 1985. Inner London was just as vulnerable as Liverpool, a crucial contributory factor being the number of young men of Asian and Caribbean origin who saw no hope of ever entering employment: opportunities were minimal and they felt particularly discriminated against. The term ‘underclass’ was increasingly used to describe those who felt themselves to be completely excluded from the benefits of prosperity.

Prosperity there certainly was, for those who found alternative employment in the service industries. Between 1983 and 1987, about 1.5 million new jobs were created. Most of these were for women, and part-time vacancies predominated. The total number of men in full-time employment fell still further, and many who left the manufacturing for the service sector earned much-reduced incomes. The economic recovery that led to the growth of this new employment was based mainly on finance, banking and credit. Little was invested in British manufacturing. Far more was invested overseas; British foreign investments rose from 2.7 billion in 1975 to a staggering 90 billion in 1985. At the same time, there was a certain amount of re-industrialisation in the South East, where new industries employing the most advanced technology grew. In fact, many industries shed a large proportion of their workforce but, using new technology, maintained or improved their output.

These new industries were not confined to the South East of England: Nissan built the most productive car plant in Europe at Sunderland. After an extensive review, Sunderland was chosen for its skilled workforce and its location near major ports. The plant was completed in 1986 as the subsidiary Nissan Motor Manufacturing (UK) Ltd. Siemens established a microchip plant at Wallsend on Tyneside in which it invested 1.1 billion. But such industries tended not to be large-scale employers of local workers. Siemens only employed about 1,800. Traditional regionally-based industries continued to suffer a dramatic decline during this period. Coal-mining, for example, was decimated in the years following the 1984-5 strike, not least because of the shift of the electricity generation of the industry towards alternative energy sources, especially gas. During 1984-7 the coal industry shed 170,000 workers.

The North-South Divide – a Political Complex?:

By the late 1980s, the north-south divide in Britain seemed as intractable as it had all century, with high unemployment particularly concentrated in the declining extractive and manufacturing industries of the North of England, Scotland and Wales. That the north-south divide increasingly had a political as well as an economic complexion was borne out by the outcome of the 1987 General Election. While Margaret Thatcher was swept back to power for the third time, her healthy Conservative majority largely based on the voters of the South and East of England. North of a line roughly between the Severn and the Humber, the long decline of the Tories, especially in Scotland, where they were reduced to ten seats, was increasingly apparent. At the same time, the national two-party system seemed to be breaking down. South of the Severn-Humber line, where Labour seats were now very rare outside London, the Liberal-SDP Alliance were the main challengers to the Conservatives in many constituencies.

The Labour Party continued to pay a heavy price for its internal divisions, as well as for the bitterness engendered by the miners’ strike. It is hardly Neil Kinnock’s fault that he is remembered for his imprecise long-windedness, the product of self-critical and painful political readjustment. His admirers recall his great platform speeches, the saw-edged wit and air-punching passion. There was one occasion, however, when Kinnock spoke so well that he united most of the political world in admiration. This happened at the Labour conference in Bournemouth in October 1985. A few days before the conference, Liverpool City Council, formally Labour-run but in fact controlled by the Revolutionary Socialist League, had sent out redundancy notices to its thirty-one thousand staff. The revolutionaries, known by the name of their newspaper, Militant, were a party-within-a-party, a parasitic body within Labour. They had some five thousand members who paid a proportion of their incomes to the RSL so that the Militant Tendency had a hundred and forty full-time workers, more than the staff of the Social Democrats and Liberals combined. They had a presence all around Britain, but Liverpool was their great stronghold. There they practised Trotsky’s politics of the transitional demand, the tactic of making impossible demands for more spending and higher wages so that when the ‘capitalist lackeys’ refused these demands, they could push on to the next stage, leading to collapse and revolution.

In Liverpool, where they were building thousands of new council houses, this strategy meant setting an illegal council budget and cheerfully bankrupting the city. Sending out the redundancy notices to the council’s entire staff was supposed to show Thatcher they would not back down, or shrink from the resulting chaos. Like Scargill, Militant’s leaders thought they could destroy the Tories on the streets. Kinnock had thought of taking them on a year earlier but had decided that the miners’ strike made that impossible. The Liverpool mayhem gave him his chance, so in the middle of his speech at Bournemouth, he struck. It was time, he said, for Labour to show the public that it was serious. Implausible promises would not bring political victory:

I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

By now he had whipped himself into real anger, a peak of righteous indignation, but he remained in control. His enemies were in front of him, and all the pent-up frustrations of the past year were being released. The hall came alive. Militant leaders like Derek Hatton stood up and yelled ‘lies!’ Boos came from the hard left, and some of their MPs walked out, but Kinnock was applauded by the majority in the hall, including his mainstream left supporters. Kinnock went on with a defiant glare at his opponents:

I’m telling you, and you’ll listen, you can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services, or with their homes. … The people will not, cannot abide posturing. They cannot respect the gesture-generals or the tendency tacticians.

Most of those interviewed in the hall and many watching live on television, claimed it was the most courageous speech they had ever heard from a Labour leader, though the hard left remained venomously hostile. By the end of the following month, Liverpool District Labour Party, from which Militant drew its power, was suspended and an inquiry was set up. By the spring of 1986, the leaders of Militant had been identified and charged with behaving in a way which was incompatible with Labour membership. The process of expelling them was noisy, legally fraught and time-consuming, though more than a hundred of them were eventually expelled. There was a strong tide towards Kinnock across the rest of the party, with many left-wingers cutting their ties to the Militant Tendency. There were many battles with the hard left to come, and several pro-Militant MPs were elected in the 1987 Election. These included two Coventry MPs, Dave Nellist and John Hughes, ‘representing’ my own constituency, whose sole significant, though memorable ‘contribution’ in the House of Commons was to interrupt prayers. Yet by standing up openly to the Trotskyist menace, as Wilson, Callaghan and Foot had patently failed to do, Kinnock gave his party a fresh start. It began to draw away from the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the polls and did better in local elections. It was the moment when the New Labour project became possible.

A Third Victory and a Turning of the Tide:

Yet neither this internal victory nor the sharper management that Kinnock introduced, would bring the party much good against Thatcher in the following general election. Labour was still behind the public mood. Despite mass unemployment, Thatcher’s free-market optimism was winning through, and Labour was still committed to re-nationalisation, planning, a National Investment Bank and unilateral nuclear disarmament, a personal cause of both Neil and his wife, Glenys, over the previous twenty years. The Cold War was thawing and it was not a time for the old certainties, but for the Kinnocks support for CND was fundamental to their political make-up. So he stuck to the policy, even as he came to realise how damaging it was to Labour’s image among swing voters. Under Labour, all the British and US nuclear bases would be closed, the Trident nuclear submarine force cancelled, all existing missiles scrapped and the UK would no longer expect any nuclear protection from the US in time of war. Instead, more money would be spent on tanks and conventional warships. All of this did them a lot of good among many traditional Labour supporters; Glenys turned up at the women’s protest camp at Greenham Common. But it was derided in the press and helped the SDP to garner support from the ‘middle England’ people Labour needed to win back. In the 1987 General Election campaign, Kinnock’s explanation about why Britain would not simply surrender if threatened by a Soviet nuclear attack sounded as if he was advocating some kind of Home Guard guerrilla campaign once the Russians had arrived. With policies like this, he was unlikely to put Thatcher under serious pressure.

When the 1987 election campaign began, Thatcher had a clear idea about what her third administration would do. She wanted more choice for the users of state services. There would be independent state schools outside the control of local councillors, called grant-maintained schools.  In the health services, though it was barely mentioned in the manifesto, she wanted money to follow the patient. Tenants would be given more rights. The basic rate of income tax would be cut and she would finally sort out local government, ending the ‘rates’ and bringing in a new tax. On paper, the programme seemed coherent, which was more than could be said for the Tory campaign itself. Just as Kinnock’s team had achieved a rare harmony and discipline, Conservative Central Office was riven by conflict between politicians and ad-men. The Labour Party closed the gap to just four points and Mrs Thatcher’s personal ratings also fell as Kinnock’s climbed. He was seen surrounded by admiring crowds, young people, nurses, waving and smiling, little worried by the hostile press. In the event, the Conservatives didn’t need to worry. Despite a last-minute poll suggesting a hung parliament, and the late surge in Labour’s self-confidence, the Tories romped home with an overall majority of 101 seats, almost exactly the share, forty-two per cent, they had won in 1983. Labour made just twenty net gains, and Kinnock, at home in Bedwellty, was inconsolable. Not even the plaudits his team had won from the press for the brilliance, verve and professionalism of their campaign would lift his mood.

The SDP-Liberal Alliance had been floundering in the polls for some time, caught between Labour’s modest revival and Thatcher’s basic and continuing popularity with a large section of voters. The rumours of the death of Labour had been greatly exaggerated, and the ‘beauty contest’ between the two Davids, Steel and Owen, had been the butt of much media mockery. Owen’s SDP had its parliamentary presence cut from eight MPs to five, losing Roy Jenkins in the process. While most of the party merged with the Liberals, an Owenite rump limped on for a while. Good PR, packaging and labelling were not good enough for either Labour or the SDP. In 1987, Thatcher had not yet created the country she dreamed of, but she could argue that she had won a third consecutive victory, not on the strength of military triumph, but on the basis of her ideas for transforming Britain. She also wanted to transform the European Community into a free-trade area extending to the Baltic, the Carpathians and the Balkans. In that, she was opposed from just across the Channel and from within her own cabinet.

In the late eighties, Thatcher’s economic revolution overreached itself. The inflationary boom happened due to the expansion of credit and a belief among ministers that, somehow, the old laws of economics had been abolished; Britain was now supposed to be on a continual upward spiral of prosperity. But then, on 27 October 1986, the London Stock Exchange ceased to exist as the institution had formerly done. Its physical floor, once heaving with life, was replaced by dealing done by computer and phone. The volume of trading was fifteen times greater than it had been in the early eighties. This became known as ‘the Big Bang’ and a country which had exported two billion pounds-worth of financial services per year before it was soon exporting twelve times that amount. The effect of this on ordinary Britons was to take the brake off mortgage lending, turning traditional building societies into banks which started to thrust credit at the British public. Borrowing suddenly became a good thing to do and mortgages were extended rather than being paid off. The old rules about the maximum multiple of income began to dissolve. From being two and a half times the homeowner’s annual salary, four times became acceptable in many cases. House prices began to rise accordingly and a more general High Street splurge was fuelled by the extra credit now freely available. During 1986-88 a borrowing frenzy gripped the country, egged on by swaggering speeches about Britain’s ‘economic miracle’ from the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and the Prime Minister. Lawson later acknowledged:

My real mistake as Chancellor was to create a climate of optimism that, in the end, encouraged borrowers to borrow more than they should.

In politics, the freeing up and deregulation of the City of London gave Margaret Thatcher and her ministers an entirely loyal and secure base of rich, articulate supporters who helped see her through some tough battles. The banks spread the get-rich-quick prospect to millions of British people through privatisation share issues and the country, for a time, came closer to the share-owning democracy that Thatcher dreamed of.

The year after the election, 1988, was the real year of hubris. The Thatcher government began an attack on independent institutions and bullying the professions. Senior judges came under tighter political control and University lecturers lost the academic tenure they had enjoyed since the Middle Ages. In Kenneth Baker’s Great Education Reform Bill (‘Gerbil’) of that year, Whitehall grabbed direct control over the running of the school curriculum, creating a vast new state bureaucracy to dictate what should be taught, when and how, and then to monitor the results. Teachers could do nothing. The cabinet debated the detail of maths courses; Mrs Thatcher spent much of her time worrying about the teaching of history. Working with history teachers, I well remember the frustration felt by them at being forced to return to issues of factual content rather than being able to continue to enthuse young people with a love for exploring sources and discovering evidence for themselves. Mrs Thatcher preferred arbitrary rules of knowledge to the development of know-how. She was at her happiest when dividing up the past into packages of ‘history’ and ‘current affairs’. For example, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was, she said, part of history, whereas the 1968 Prague Spring was, twenty years on, still part of ‘current affairs’ and so should not appear in the history curriculum, despite the obvious connections between the two events. It happened at a time when education ministers were complaining bitterly about the lack of talent, not among teachers, but among civil servants, the same people they were handing more power to. A Hungarian history teacher, visiting our advisory service in Birmingham, expressed his discomfort, having visited a secondary school in London where no-one in a Humanities’ class could tell him where, geographically, his country was.

At that time, my mother was coming to the end of a long career in NHS administration as Secretary of the Community Health Council (‘The Patients’ Friend’) in Coventry which, as elsewhere, had brought together local elected councillors, health service practitioners and managers, and patients’ groups to oversee the local hospitals and clinics and to deal with complaints. But the government did not trust local representatives and professionals to work together to improve the health service, so the Treasury seized control of budgets and contracts. To administer the new system, five hundred NHS ‘trusts’ were formed, and any involvement by elected local representatives was brutally terminated. As with Thatcher’s education reforms, the effect of these reforms was to create a new bureaucracy overseeing a regiment of quangos (quasi/ non-governmental organisations). She later wrote:

We wanted all hospitals to have greater responsibility for their affairs.  … the self-governing hospitals to be virtually independent.

In reality, ‘deregulation’ of care and ‘privatisation’ of services were the orders of the day. Every detail of the ‘internal market’ contracts was set down from the centre, from pay to borrowing to staffing. The rhetoric of choice in practice meant an incompetent dictatorship of bills, contracts and instructions. Those who were able to vote with their chequebooks did so. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of people covered by the private health insurance Bupa nearly doubled, from 3.5 million to a little under seven million. Hubris about what the State could and could not do was to be found everywhere. In housing, 1988 saw the establishment of unelected Housing Action Trusts to take over the old responsibility of local authorities for providing what is now known as ‘affordable housing’. Mrs Thatcher claimed that she was trying to pull the State off people’s backs. In her memoirs, she wrote of her third government,

… the root cause of our contemporary social problems … was that the State had been doing too much.

Yet her government was intervening in public services more and more. The more self-assured she became, the less she trusted others to make the necessary changes to these. That meant accruing more power to the central state. The institutions most heart in this process were local councils and authorities. Under the British constitution, local government is defenceless against a ‘Big Sister’ PM, with a secure parliamentary majority and a loyal cabinet. So it could easily be hacked away, but sooner or later alternative centres of power, both at a local and national level, would be required to replace it and, in so doing, overthrew the overbearing leader.

Sources:

Andrew Marr (2008), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan.

Peter Catterall, Roger Middleton & John Swift (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

 

 

 

Margaret’s Marvellous Medicine:

Ten years ago, nearly thirty years after Mrs Thatcher’s first general election as Tory leader, Andrew Marr wrote:

Margaret Thatcher … was shrewd, manipulative and bold, verging on the reckless. She was also extremely lucky. Had Labour not been busy disembowelling itself and had a corrupt, desperate dictatorship in South America not taken a nationalistic gamble with some island sheep-farmers, her government would probably have been destroyed after a single term. Had the majority in her cabinet who disagreed with her about the economy  been prepared to say boo to a goose, she might have been forced out even before that. In either case, her principles, ‘Thatcherism’, would be a half-forgotten doctrine, mumbled about by historians instead of being the single most potent medicine ever spooned down the gagging post-war British.

The one economic medicine so bitter that no minister in the seventies had thought of trying it – mass unemployment – was soon uncorked and poured onto the spoon. Inflation, not unemployment, was seen as public enemy number one, and harsh measures seemed justified. Indeed, as wage-rises were seen as the as the main source of inflation, heavy unemployment, it was sometimes argued, would weaken trade unions and was a price worth paying. An economic squeeze was introduced, involving heavy tax increases and a reduction in public borrowing to deflate the economy, thus reducing demand and employment. In the 1980s, two million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The socially corrosive effects of mass unemployment were manifested nationwide in the inner-city rioting which broke out in 1981. The post-war consensus was well and truly broken. After his defeat in the General Election of 1979, James Callaghan stumbled on as Labour leader until October 1980 after which Denis Healey fought a desperate rearguard action against the left, as his party did its best to commit suicide in public. What exactly was ‘the left’ and how was it composed?

Labour’s ‘Disembowelment’:

By the late 1970s, the Communist Party of Great Britain had almost collapsed. What was left of it had become ‘Eurocommunist’, like the parties in France and elsewhere had become following the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. The world’s first elected Marxist leader, Salvador Allende had been deposed in a coup in 1973 and thousands of his supporters became refugees in Britain. Where I lived in 1979-80, Swansea, there was a community of about fifty families, many of them studying at the University. For many of them, Castro’s Cuba was still a beacon of hope, and there were other Marxist movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador which re-focused the outlook of the ‘broad left’ in Britain. But there was widespread disillusionment with the Soviet system to which the CPGB had previously pledged its undying and largely uncritical obedience. The final nails in the coffin were driven in by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, and the crushing of ‘Solidarity’ in Poland the following year. Further to the left were a bewildering number of Trotskyist and Maoist groups, all hostile to the Soviet Union, all claiming to be the true party of Lenin, all denouncing one another over ideological and tactical detail. They tended to be dour and puritanical, though the Socialist Workers’ Party attracted a significant among students following through their setting up of the Anti-Nazi League.

The Militant Tendency had descended from earlier groups which had first organised in Britain in the forties. ‘Militant’ caused a huge convulsion in the Labour Party from the early to mid-eighties. Harold Wilson was the first Labour leader to complain a lot about ‘Trots’ trying to take the party over, but in the seventies, he was largely ignored and Militant was allowed to build up strong local bases, particularly in Liverpool, but also in other traditional Labour strongholds in the Midlands which had been very much in ‘the mainstream’ of the Party, like Coventry, where it had taken control of the City Council as early as 1937, and had continually returned high-profile MPs such as Richard Crossman and Maurice Edelman after 1945. The SWP, supporting strikes and campaigning against racism and other ‘single issues’, sold their distinctive newspaper on the streets and their clenched fist logo and dramatic slogans appear in the background to countless industrial and political marches, pickets and marches. In South Wales in 1980, they organised ‘the people’s march for jobs’, a 1930s-style ‘hunger march’. By this time, mass unemployment had already arrived in Britain, especially among young people who had just left school and, as ever, the SWP seized their opportunity. Beyond Militant and the SWP, other far-left groups inside and outside the Labour Party would achieve brief notoriety because they were supported by a famous actress, such as Vanessa Redgrave of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party, or through influence in a local party or borough. Eventually, the ‘loony left’ would come to the boil, enjoying enough support, particularly in London, to shred Labour’s credibility.

In the late seventies and early eighties, however, the influence of ‘hard left’ socialists within the party was far more significant than those working for secretive Marxist parties. Like those on the right, including Callaghan by 1979, they believed the old consensus politics was failing. Some of their thinking was also shared by the Tory right – they were hostile to the European Community, opposed to Welsh and Scottish nationalism, and hostile to the Anglo-American alliance. But that was where the similarities ended. The Labour left wanted to deal with world economic chaos by pulling up the drawbridge, imposing strict controls on what was imported and taking control of major industries, as well as of ‘the City’. The left thought that ‘Planning’ was too weak, and therefore that it should be dramatically expanded. Any extreme political view tends to develop a conspiracy theory. The Labour left believed that Wilson, Callaghan and Healey had been captured by international capitalism. So the ‘siege economy’ and the Alternative Economic Strategy became the main shibboleths of the left, and Tony Benn became the leader of Labour’s peasants’ revolt. He was on the side of strikers who had brought much of the country to a halt in 1979 and Arthur Scargill, elected leader of the NUM soon after, told Benn that he could be the next Labour leader himself.

But within five years, both the NUM and their fellow unions would lose almost half their membership and any political influence they had briefly enjoyed. The ‘high-water’ mark for the left was reached when Benn himself came within a hair’s breadth of winning the deputy leadership against Denis Healey, during the middle of a vicious and deeply damaging Labour civil war. These were the turbulent years of ‘Bennism’ within the party, long before he became a kind of revered national grandfather with a white beard to go with his pipe. During his bid to become deputy, I heard him speak to a packed and transfixed audience at the Brangwyn Hall in Swansea in 1980, careful and convincing in his critique of NATO, nuclear weapons and market capitalism, if not in his advocacy of the Alternative Economic Strategy. In the NUS, David Aaronovitch spoke in favour of the AES in a debate in Blackpool on the economy which he admitted afterwards had disappointed him for its lack of new thinking. Speaking to the NUS Wales Conference a few weeks later on the same issue, I adapted a headline from The Guardian:

When England catches a cold, Wales gets influenza: When England gets influenza, Wales develops pneumonia.

Wales: A View from the Abyss:

In 1979-80, Wales was in need of a stronger and better alternative medicine than could be provided by old-fashioned Keynesianism.

Above: The UCMC (NUS Wales) Executive at the Autumn 1979 Conference

in Llandrindod Wells (the author is in the centre right).

In April 1979, just before the general election, I was elected ‘Cadeirydd’ (‘Chairholder’) of the National Union of Students in Wales (UCMC), working full-time from an office in Swansea. A month later, I began to wish I had declined the nomination, as an abyss seemed to open up below me. In the General Election, Wales located itself firmly within The South of Britain. At a time of heavy swings towards the Conservatives elsewhere, the heaviest swing of all, outside London, was in Wales. The Tory tide swept irresistibly through rural west Wales in particular. It was the real force which unseated the veteran Plaid Cymru President, Gwynfor Evans, in Carmarthen, to Labour’s benefit. The Tories took Brecon and Radnor, Montgomery and Anglesey, the last with a swing of twelve per cent. Apart from the three-way marginal of Carmarthen, Labour was driven back into the valleys of south Wales, though even there its massive majorities were significantly eaten into. Nevertheless, Labour remained by far the biggest party in Wales, with twenty-one seats out of thirty-six and forty-seven per cent of the votes. But the Conservatives, with eleven seats and thirty-two per cent, had reached a high point they had last held fifty years before. They swept through non-industrial Wales, obliterating political landmarks which had been familiar for generations. For Labour, there was a whiff of 1931 in the air and the elimination of Welsh peculiarities strongly suggested an integration into Britain more total than anything yet experienced.

One paradoxical effect of this abrupt reversal of two hundred years of history was the isolation of the Welsh intelligentsia from its people. In this generation, in sharp contrast to the last, creative writers in Welsh and in English started to draw together. Professor Gwyn Williams (above), my mentor at University College Cardiff, was one of those who articulated English-speaking Wales within national and international contexts, and his work was lauded equally widely. As younger Welsh writers began to move out of the kind of universe which the work of the Saunders Lewis school of Welsh-language writers, younger writers in English (‘sons of the miners’) started to adopt a more firmly nationalist position. In general, the younger Anglo-Welsh poets avoided the sort of polemic which assumed a Welsh national identity. As Tony Curtis wrote in 1986, there was no unquestionable Wales, rather they must work from the immediate context, the known. Emyr Humphries wrote of:

… the sense of disorientation prevailing among the majority who have been deprived of the language and the opportunity of inheriting the history and traditions that go with it.

John Ormond’s My Grandfather and his Apple-tree is the most successful of “character” poems. In concentrating on the life of one man the poet summarised the whole broad sweep of social change in South Wales from a predominantly rural economy to the accelerating expansion of industrial communities in the coal valleys that created a “Klondike” in Wales. John Ormond’s poem works effectively at several levels: as an historical poem; as a family remembrance it is an allegorical treatment of the life of a man as a social, economic and religious animal; the whole is a brilliantly sustained metaphor with a strong narrative structure. Ormond’s reputation by the time he was in his fifties in 1979 was notable, as was his influence on younger poets. One of these, Gillian Clarke, had first published in 1970, and by 1979 was established as a leading Welsh poet following the publication of her first full-length collection, The Sundial, which became the most successful book of poetry from a Welsh publisher. Living in suburban Cardiff, she was spiritually inhabiting a more rural, Welsh-speaking world to the west. In the seventies, the concern for voicing Welsh issues and proclaiming a specific Welsh identity provided a receptive ground for Gillian Clarke’s growth as a writer. In addition to poetry, major efforts went into drama and a whole range of arts; twin academies and a writers’ association came into being, and the Welsh Arts Council became more active. One of these miners’ sons, Dai Smith was critical of what he called …

… the production of Wales that was proceeding apace in the Cymricising suburbs of Cardiff, in academic and journalistic circles on the subsidised pages of a Welsh-language press and on the air-waves had no real need to take account of those who did not fit into the picture.

The votes of 1979 dramatically registered the end of the epoch of the ‘old’ Welsh intelligentsia. While the ideologies of technical, managerial and administrative leaders remained opaque and without any specific Welsh identity, the most visible and creative elders of educated opinion among the Welsh had been rejected by their people. The task of transmitting a fresh, iconoclastic reappraisal of Wales to the Welsh fell to historians like Gwyn A. Williams, Dai Smith, Kenneth O. Morgan and D. Hywel Davies, among others. I was fortunate enough to be an apprentice in this task, though more concerned, like my fellow-researcher William D. Jones, with the history of the Welsh outside Wales and their images of the home country. As Tony Curtis observed:

Wales is not what we assumed it to be . Simplistic assumptions of “national pride”, a self-regarding “national” identity, are not to be allowed to go unquestioned… In the contemporary context writers face a harder task than even those raised by the ferment of the language campaign and the Devolution Vote, issues which served to focus much recent writing and to justify its polemic.

Almost Immediately Wales was fully exposed to the Conservative crusade and the radically restructuring of an increasingly multinational capitalism in Britain. The Welsh working population reached a peak in 1979, when 1,002,000 people were at work, fifty-five per cent of them in the service sector and forty-two per cent of them women in the core industries. The run-down of the coal industry continued and was followed by a sharp reduction in steel. Between June 1980 and June 1982, the official working population fell by no fewer than 106,000. The most catastrophic losses were in steel which lost half its workers and plummeted to 38,000. Public administration, however, lost fewer, around three thousand, while a whole range of services in insurance, banking, entertainment and educational and medical services actually gained over four thousand workers. In consequence, more men than women lost jobs at first, particularly in 1980-81, though much women’s work was part-time. During 1982 unemployment was heavier among women, but the overall result, in terms of number, was by June 1983 to increase the proportion of women at work within the central areas of the economy to forty-five per cent. By that time, the official working population of Wales had fallen to 882,000, its lowest level in the century. There was a high level of unemployment and particularly serious was the wasting of a whole generation of young people.

The entire Welsh working population was beginning to take on the character of an informal, casual, unstructured labour force, an intimation of what was going to become a general experience in Britain to come. In the mid-1980s, Dai Smith commented that,

The crisis that would in the 1980s affect the vast majority of Welsh people was an economic, social and political crisis. … The ‘Condition of Wales Question’ is not for most of the Welsh about Welshness at all, it is about unemployment and jobs, about bad architecture, about bureaucracy and political participation, about dead-ends and opportunities. But nothing in Wales is subsidized more than ‘culture’. 

The Wales TUC was weakened and losing both numbers and funds, seemingly incapable of responding to the crisis. In reality, its autonomy was strictly limited in any case. Out of an income of thirty-three thousand pounds in 1980, nearly twenty thousand was a grant from the British TUC. In that year, its affiliated membership totalled over 580,000, nearly sixty per cent of the working population. But the response to the evident transformation of the working population varied among the unions, with NUPE being the most rapid and adaptable. Overall, the organised workers’ movement seemed encased in a perception of a ‘working class’ which had become a myth. The People’s March for Jobs and other demonstrations were not as significant in Wales as elsewhere in Britain, despite being led by veteran miners’ leader, Will Paynter, for part of the way through south Wales. But in 1982, the South Wales NUM did force a dramatic U-turn from the Thatcher government over proposed regional pit closures. We celebrated, but also asked the question, Have the Miners Really Won? Another former miners’ leader, Dai Francis, had his doubts, which later turned out to be justified. Thatcher would be ready next time.

The student movement was in much the same position as the trade unions, though in 1980 NUS Wales succeeded in prizing greater resources out of NUS UK by its university unions paying directly into a Welsh affiliation fund, rather than sending the money direct to London. By the end of my year in office in August 1980, it had also established a more federal constitution, which helped to win back support from a number of disillusioned and disgruntled Welsh-speaking students in the North and West. The University of Wales had also accepted our proposal for a central board to coordinate the development of Welsh-medium teaching throughout all the university colleges, rather than simply concentrating it in Aberystwyth and Bangor. In other areas, we won support from HRH the Prince of Wales, as Chancellor of the University, for our concerns about the government’s introduction of full-cost fees for overseas students and confronted the Welsh Rugby Union over its support for the unofficial tour of the South African Barbarians. This South Wales Campaign Against Racism in Sport introduced Peter Hain to Wales.

UCMC also campaigned successfully to prevent the Labour-controlled local authorities from imposing projected cuts on part-time students. The rise of the Left within the Labour Party was matched by a leftward shift in Plaid Cymru, which wrote a socialist state into its programme for Wales and a ‘broad left’ was formed with the Welsh Labour left and former Communist Party members. In the student movement, a distinctively Welsh socialist group emerged out of the remnants of the old Broad Left, which had been replaced by the Left Alliance within NUS UK, now including the Union of Liberal Students. Socialist students in Wales decided that a better strategy to manufacturing alliances was to reclaim the university unions and develop unions in other colleges through socialist education and organisation at a more grass-roots level.

There seemed to be a limited response from a population readily accepting the values and arguments of ‘Thatcherism’ as they developed. The most radical political action went into the multiplying women’s groups, ecological movements and above all CND which acquired much more weight and spirit in the valleys and into west Wales than any other political body.  On 23rd February 1982, all the Welsh local authorities came together to declare Wales a Nuclear Free Zone, refusing to distribute the government’s infamous Protect and Survive pamphlets. The historian and lifelong CND campaigner, E. P. Thompson came to Carmarthen later in the year to address a mass rally. The protest camp at Greenham Common missile base was started by a march of women from Cardiff.

The turmoil continued around the language issue. The census of 1981 revealed that the proportion of Welsh-speakers had slipped back to 18.9 per cent, but that the decline in the use of the language overall had slowed dramatically over the decade and seemed to be coming to a halt. There were marginal increases in the numbers of Welsh-speakers in the most English-speaking areas such as Gwent and Glamorgan, probably due to the migration of Welsh-speakers to fill new jobs in the media in the capital and the increase in the number of Welsh learners in those counties, particularly among students in the arts and young journalists. As one of the enumerators, I found people who declared themselves as Welsh-speakers in some of the most unlikely districts of Cardiff.  Most serious, however, was the continued decline in the heartlands of the language, notably in south-west Wales, where the fall was six per cent. But the retrenchment in Welsh-speaking was noticeable in Ceredigion (Cardiganshire) and parts of Gwynedd and there were signs that the crusading of the past decade had begun to take effect among young people in these heartlands, especially where Welsh-medium or ‘bilingual’ schools had been set up.

Overall, out of a population of 2,790,00, around 550,000 were Welsh-speakers. In the west and north-west, particular districts, villages and even individual pubs created a linguistic map almost as tribally complicated as a cultural map of Northern Ireland. The continuing threat to the heartlands, y Fro Gymraeg, had led to the creation of a new cultural nationalist group, Adfer (‘Restore’), by the mid-seventies, whose intellectual supporters had been dedicated to the creation of a Welsh Gaeltacht, an ethnically pure economy and society on the basis of Welsh self-sufficiency. In Bangor, led by theology students, they had succeeded in creating a breakaway, Undeb Cymraeg (UCMB), a Welsh-speaking student union in 1977. The movement tended to see only the native Welsh-speaking Cymry as truly Welsh. The remainder, the vast majority throughout Wales, were described as Cymreig (‘culturally Welsh’) or at ‘best’, Cymry di-Gymraeg (‘non-Welsh-speaking Welsh’), the other face of the coin to the anti-Welsh-language British chauvinism which was prevalent in many Labour areas in the south, not least on the Left. Between the two groups of chauvinists, the proposal for a national assembly was easily defeated in the referendum of 1978, exposing Wales to economic pneumonia and the onset of Thatcherism, until its narrow reversal in the referendum of 1998.

In the early eighties, the divisions over the language were clear for all to see and were exacerbated by a major campaign of arson against holiday homes in northern and western Wales. In a major police action, Operation Tán (Fire) produced a chorus of complaint about violations of civil-rights, telephone-tapping, and the use of provocateurs. The NUS office phones were by now so routinely tapped that we could almost talk directly to Special Branch. On one occasion they contacted us directly to gather information about the beating up of Iraqi dissidents on the streets of South Wales by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist henchmen, the only students wearing suits and carrying rolled umbrellas! In the winter of 1980, driving out of Snowdonia following a meeting in Bangor, together with other members of the National Executive of NUS Wales, the North Wales Police stopped and searched the union’s fleet-hire hatch-back for flammable materials. They didn’t book us for speeding but joked about how wealthy Welsh students must be to be driving around in a brand-new car. They had obviously spotted the familiar dragons’ tongue Cymdeithas yr Iaith (Welsh Language Society) sticker in the back window.

Later in the year, John Jenkins, one of the bombers behind the botched attempt to blow a hole in the walls of Caernarfon Castle, in which two bombers accidentally blew themselves up and a little child was badly mutilated, before the 1969 Investiture of the Prince of Wales, was released from jail. Whilst there, where he had studied for an Open University degree. Having been initially accepted to study for a postgraduate diploma in social work, he was then rejected by University College Swansea without explanation. As our campaign to get the University to admit Jenkins gathered pace and hit the headlines, both in Welsh and English, both inside and outside Wales, we received a telephone message from ‘friends’ in high places in the university that Jenkins was still, somehow, a threat. That ‘somehow’ was never explained.

Our protests at the University of Wales Court meeting, held at Swansea, went ahead, but all the student representatives, ex-officio sabbatical officers of the constituent college unions, were forced to withdraw when the Jenkins case came up. As an NUS employee, I was initially allowed to stay in the meeting until the registrar of my own university college, Cardiff, pointed out that I was still registered as a student there. I was asked to withdraw, which meant we were prevented from reading our statement on the case, or even from having it read on our behalf by another Court member following my withdrawal. I, therefore, refused to leave, and the case was not discussed. Jenkins was not admitted, and we never found out what ‘good reason’ the college had for rejecting his application.  Soon after I received a message from my own university college, Cardiff, that I would not be allowed to extend my sabbatical at the Swansea NUS HQ for a further year and remain as a registered student, which would mean I had to leave the university permanently. I dutifully obeyed and returned to my PhD research in Cardiff in September 1980. Julie Barton was elected to replace me, becoming the first woman President of a more autonomous UCMC (NUS Wales), holding the post until 1982.

By then, the growth of the academic study of modern Welsh history became a major intellectual force which helped to bridge some of these divisions. The journal Llafur (Labour), the organ of the Welsh Labour History Society, of which I was a member, successfully married academics and workers. I returned to Swansea in the autumn of 1980, to do some research into the history of the mining valleys in the 1930s at the South Wales Miners’ Library, set up by the South Wales NUM in co-operation with University College Swansea, managed by Hywel Francis, son of the former miners’ leader.  It had rescued what was left of the magnificent miners’ institute libraries and created a centre for adult education, active research and a memorial to the fallen of the Spanish Civil War, many of those who joined the International Brigade having been South Wales miners. Soon after, however, the University College was forced into making financial cuts and proposed to lop off the Miners’ Library. In an effort to save it, the miners themselves became the major protagonists.

By 1982, Wales had its own Welsh-medium fourth television channel, a Welsh-medium teaching Board within the still federal University of Wales, and a quasi-official, ubiquitous bilingualism in public life. ‘Superted’ had been launched into orbit from S4C’s new offices in Canton, Cardiff. However, the task still remained of voicing the concerns of the eighty per cent who were outside the ‘orbit’ of the language and who, for a complexity of reasons, had turned their backs on the chance of Devolution, but still felt a deep sense of being “Welsh”.

The Grocer’s Daughter:

Looking back from over thirty-five years later, the epic events of 1979-83 seem to have a clear pattern. Powerful ideas challenged the post-war consensus and, following a nail-biting struggle, defeated its adherents. But from the perspective of those who lived through these events, especially in traditionally ‘left-wing’ areas of Britain, there was remotely inevitable about this ‘victory’. As student leaders, for example, we really thought that we could defeat the Tories on the issue of full-cost fees for overseas students. Even HRH the Prince of Wales, following our Lampeter meeting with him in 1980, expressed his concerns in one of his now famous hand-written missives to the government about the likely effects of these being introduced on Britain’s relations with the Commonwealth and on Britain’s new technical universities, which were dependent on the recruitment of overseas students. Almost the entire University Sector in Britain and its overseas offshoots, was publicly against the government on this, though many vice-chancellors were secretly rubbing its hands with the prospect of attracting more oil-rich Saudis and Baathists from Iraq and Syria, rather than poor South American, African and Middle-Eastern ‘refugees’.

It was also unclear what sort of Britain Margaret Roberts, the grocer’s daughter and devout Lincolnshire Christian, hoped to create. She did not believe in privatising industries or defeating inflation merely for economic reasons. She wanted to remoralize society, creating a nation whose ‘Victorian Values’ were expressed through secure marriages, like her own, self-help and thrift, moderation in all things, good neighbourliness and hard work. Though much attacked by church leaders like her arch nemesis, David Jenkins, the Bishop of Durham, she talked of God and morality incessantly from the moment she apparently quoted Francis of Assisi at the door of Number Ten on the morning following her May 1979 Election victory. In fact, it was a Victorian re-working of the well-known prayer. Later, it was endlessly used to show what a hypocrite she was. But for the people she had determined to govern on behalf of, the inflation-ravaged middle-classes who had despaired of Britain’s future, believing that the unions could never be tamed by the State, she brought both faith and hope. She claimed that she was in politics because of the conflict between good and evil. Yet Thatcherism heralded an age of unparalleled consumption, credit, show-off wealth, quick bucks and sexual libertinism. The Thatcher years did not bring harmony to the lives of most of the Queen’s subjects, but further social and economic division. When politicians determine to free people, they can never be sure what they are freeing them for. In reality, the lady in Lincoln green turned out to be the antithetical mirror image of its legendary hero, like the Robin Hood character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Steals from the poor, gives to the rich,

Silly bitch!

Perhaps, as a Wesleyan, she had too generous a view of human nature, especially (and ironically) contrasted with her Calvinistic Baptist predecessor, who believed that people are essentially selfish and need to be moderated and regulated by the state for the common good to prevail. John Wesley’s famous mantra was: Work all you can, earn all you can, give all you can. Unfortunately, it took most of her period in power for her and the country to realise her theological error, that the sin of omission lay in respect of the third part of this triplet, and by that time much of Britain’s wealth and many of its assets had been stripped and shipped abroad. For the first four years of her leadership, the Tories were continuing to talk about a wages policy and the importance of consulting with the trade unions, perhaps on the German model. There was also talk of the need to control the money supply and offer council tenants the right to buy their homes. But other privatization measures barely featured. As to unemployment, Mrs Thatcher herself had been vigorously attacking the Callaghan government for its failure to tackle the dole queues. One of the Tories’ most successful election posters had portrayed an ever-lengthening queue with the slogan Labour isn’t working. I remember seeing it on an Easter visit home, dominating Chamberlain Square in Birmingham. With unemployment still around a million, the message she was giving out while still in opposition was:

We would have been drummed out of office if we’d had this level of unemployment.

If the British public had studied their new Prime Minister a little more closely they would have noticed a more abrasive edge to her personality, especially when she talked of the failure of the three previous administrations, including that of Ted Heath, to control the trade unions. She would point aggressively across the House of Commons and declare, Never forget how near this country came to government by picket. She had also received the nickname, The Iron Lady as an insult from the Soviet leadership for her rabidly anti-communist speech in 1977. It was only much later that it became a badge of honour for her. Moreover, the cabinet full of Tory squires and former Heath supporters hardly looked like a revolutionary cabal. Denis Healy memorably compared being attacked by the Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, to being savaged by a dead sheep. But Mrs Thatcher herself was a far more determined woman than most people realised. The single most important influence throughout her life seems to have come from her father, Alderman Alfred Roberts, a self-made, austere Methodist and hard-working owner of a grocer’s shop on the main road north at Grantham. Although he stood for the council as an independent, Roberts was of Tory instincts. He became mayor in 1945 and chaired local charities, the Workers’ Educational Association, and acted as a director of a local bank. He was independent-minded and taught his daughter to speak her mind and to argue. In this, he was extremely successful, since her governments effectively devastated everything he had stood for in terms of local politics.

Unlike Wilson, who used his Yorkshire accent as a badge of identity, she lost her Lincolnshire ‘burr’ somewhere on her way down the A1. As her biographer, Hugo Young put it, she was born a northerner but became a southerner, the quintessence of a Home Counties politician. She was elected for the well-off middle-class seat of Finchley in 1959, her politics having been formed by the experience of post-war Labour austerity. Seen from above, the socialist experiment in planning and ‘fair shares for all’ might have looked noble, she concluded, but from below it was a maze of deprivation, shortage and envy. She later reflected that…

No one who lived through austerity, who can remember snoek, spam and utility clothing, could mistake the petty jealousies, minor tyrannies, ill-neighbourliness and sheer sourness of those years for idealism and equality.

During the 1979 election, using all the skills of her new image-makers and advertising agency, and with a shrewd understanding of the importance of television, she was still trailing Callaghan in the personal popularity stakes by a full nineteen points. It was Labour’s unpopularity with the electorate which cost the party power, not Margaret Thatcher’s allure. Yet without her, the Tory government of 1979-83 would have been entirely different. Without her confrontational style and determination not to be beaten, Britain would have been stuck with a pay policy and high public spending. The crucial issue for her on being elected was to get a grip of inflation. To the Thatcherites, this meant monetarism, the basic proposition of which was that inflation is directly related to the amount of money in the economy. Where the Thatcherite monetarists diverged from Keynesian economics was in the argument that the paramount role of government in economic management was to control the money supply, which could be scientifically measured and calibrated. The other issues, unemployment and productivity included, would eventually resolve themselves. All the government needed to do was to hold firm to the principle, get the money supply down, and it would succeed.

The Thatcher government, in reality, could have restricted the money supply by raising taxes, but it was committed to cutting most taxes. Almost immediately, Howe cut the basic rate of income tax from thirty-three to thirty per cent and the top rate from eighty-three to sixty per cent. Spending cuts were agreed too, but to make up the difference a huge rise in value-added tax (VAT), doubling to fifteen per cent, was brought in. Money was being redistributed from the masses, paying more for food, clothes and other essential items, to higher rate taxpayers. In industrial policy, one of the ‘moderates’, Jim Prior, made good on the manifesto promise and unveiled a trade union reform bill designed to end closed shops, providing public funds for strike ballots and outlawing secondary picketing of the kind which had been widely seen during ‘the winter of discontent’. These measures would have been radical under any other government, but Thatcher complained that they did not go far enough. She wanted an end to all secondary action. She castigated him as a ‘false squire’, one of a class of Tories who…

… have all the outward show of a John Bull – ruddy face, white hair, bluff manner – but inwardly they are political calculators who see the task of Conservatives as retreating gracefully before the Left’s inevitable advance.

In frustration, Thatcher suddenly announced that strikers would in future be assumed to be getting union strike pay and so would not qualify for social security. The battle lines were being clearly drawn.

Howe’s second budget in 1980 set out a Medium-Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) which contained detailed predictions about the growth of the money supply. But with inflation raging, a recession biting and credit restrictions loosened, it was impossible to enforce. The money supply was supposed to be growing at around eight per cent, but it actually grew at a rate of nineteen per cent. The monetarists were beginning to look foolish. Strike-ravaged, unproductive British Leyland came begging for yet more money but instead of closing it down or selling it off, Thatcher gave way, just as Heath had done when Rolls-Royce had tested his resolve not to give bail-outs. But whereas the latter had eventually thrived again, BL died. There was also a steel strike and though the government talked tough and stood firm, the eventual settlement was high and the unions were certainly not humiliated. By the second half of the year, unemployment was up by more than 800,000 and hundreds of manufacturing businesses were going bust, throttled by the rising exchange rate. Industrialists, who had looked to the Tories with great hope, now began to despair once more. Prices were up by twenty-two per cent in a year and wages by a fifth. At the Tory Conference of 1980, the dissidents within the cabinet and the Tory ‘left’ in Parliament who called for a ‘U-turn’ on the economy were dismissed by Thatcher in a phrase coined by the playwright Ronald Millar:

You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning!

The word ‘wet’ was a public schoolboy term of abuse describing a fellow pupil who was ‘soppy’ or weak. It was now being applied by monetarist Tories to their Heathite opponents. In the great Thatcher cabinet battles of the eighties, it was appropriated to refer particularly to the senior ministers who did not agree with her – Jim Prior, Francis Pym, Sir Ian Gilmour, Mark Carlisle, Norman St John Stevas, Peter Walker, Christopher Soames and (later) Michael Heseltine. Most of them were ‘wet’ in another sense – despite being in the majority, they were never prepared to act together to face her down, or even to resign individually on points of principle. The great confrontation would have come in 1981, with unemployment headed towards three million, new bankruptcies reported every day and the biggest collapse in manufacturing production in a single year since 1921. Howe planned to take another four billion out of the economy through a combination of swingeing cuts and rises in taxes. Thatcher told Alan Walters, her new economic adviser, that they may get rid of me for this but that it would be worth it for doing the right thing. On the streets, rioting seemed to be confirming all the worst fears of those who had predicted that monetarism would tear the country apart. But in ringing terms, Thatcher told the Tory Party faithful to stay calm and strong:

This is the road I am resolved to follow. This is the path I must go. I ask all who have spirit – the bold, the steadfast and the young at heart – to stand and join with me.

In April 1981, riots broke out in Brixton. Shops were burned and looted, streets barricaded and more than two hundred people, most of them police, were injured. Mrs Thatcher’s response was to pity the shopkeepers. Lord Scaman was asked to hold a public inquiry; but in the first week of July, trouble began again, this time in the heavily Asian west London suburb of Southall, with petrol-bombs, arson attacks and widespread pelting of the police. Then Toxteth in Liverpool erupted and the rioting there continued for two weeks. Black youths, then whites, petrol-bombed the police, waved guns and burned both cars and buildings. The police responded with CS gas, the first time it had been used on the streets of mainland Britain, and with baton charges. As in London, hundreds were injured and one man was killed. Toxteth was followed by outbreaks of looting and arson in Manchester’s Moss Side. With unemployment reaching sixty per cent among young blacks, and both Liverpool and Manchester having suffered badly from recent factory closures, many saw this a clearly linked to Thatcherite economics, what Denis Healey, now in opposition, was now calling ‘sado-monetarism’. Michael Heseltine went to Liverpool and came back calling for government money to bring in private investment, job creation schemes and a minister for Liverpool. He stuck with Liverpool for a year, helping to bring renovation projects and a morale-boosting garden festival which was attended by three million people. Thatcher herself drew very different conclusions from her visit to Liverpool:

I had been told that some of the young people involved got into trouble through boredom and not having enough to do. But you only had to look at the grounds of these houses with the grass untended, some of it almost waist-high, and the litter, to see this was a false analysis. They had plenty of constructive things to do if they wanted. Instead, I asked myself how people could live in such circumstances without trying to clear up the mess.

The problem, she claimed, was lack of initiative and self-reliance created by years of dependency on the State, and compounded by the media. It was nothing whatsoever to do with monetarist policies. Her views remained unaltered as she then went on into full-scale battle with ‘the wets’. Howe planned another tight Budget for 1982, and, for the first time, there was something approximating a full-scale cabinet revolt. Heseltine warned of despair and electoral meltdown. Even monetarist true believers seemed to be deserting. Thatcher herself called it one of the bitterest arguments in a cabinet in her time. Drawing the meeting to a close, she decided to counter-attack. Four ministers were sacked, and Jim Prior was sent to Northern Ireland. She intervened to stop other ministers settling with public sector workers, even when it would have been cheaper to do so. She had kept the trade union leaders locked out. Len Murray (above), the impeccably moderate TUC chairman who had spent half the Wilson and Callaghan years sitting around the table with them, was allowed into Downing Street just three times in Mrs Thatcher’s first five years.

In the summer of 1981, most of ‘England and Wales’ allowed itself to be distracted by the dramatic reversal in their Cricket team’s fortunes in the Home ‘Ashes’ series against Australia. A belligerent Ian Botham helped them to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat at Headingley, and we all began picking up bats and balls again. In 1982, I enjoyed a brief interlude as ‘the Ian Botham of Grangetown’ in my pub team, more for my inconsistency as an all-rounder, though I did get to make match-winning contributions on the practice pitches at Sophia Gardens.

Above: In an interview with BBC correspondent, John Simpson

The best evidence of Mrs Thatcher’s belligerent style to date had been the struggle with the other European leaders to reclaim roughly a billion pounds a year of net British payments to the Community. In ‘Thatcher speak’, getting our money back involved an undiplomatic brawl that went on from Dublin to Luxembourg to Brussels. She would not shut up, or back down. Diplomats from all sides suggested interesting side-deals, trade-offs, honourable compromises, but she brushed them all aside. Ultimately, she got three-quarters of what she had first demanded, but, astonishingly, she then said ‘no’. It was only when all her entire cabinet were in favour of the settlement that she grudgingly agreed. The press and the country were beginning to notice her tenacity. Her ‘Bothamesque’ innings in Brussels was to come back to haunt her when she was ‘savaged’ by Geoffrey Howe’s cricketing metaphors in 1990, but until then, the civil war within the Labour Party had helped protect her from the electoral consequences of her shift from the centre-ground. The Tories might be hated, but Labour was unelectable.

(to be continued…)

The Decade of Extremes – Punks, Skinheads & Hooligans:

The 1970s was an extreme decade; the extreme left and extreme right were reflected even in its music. Much of what happened in British music and fashion during the seventies was driven by the straightforward need to adopt and then outpace what had happened the day before. The ‘Mods’ and ‘Hippies’ of the sixties and early seventies were replaced by the first ‘skinheads’, though in the course there were ‘Ziggy Stardust’ followers of David Bowie who would bring androgyny and excess to the pavements and even to the playground. Leather-bound punks found a way of offending the older rockers; New Romantics with eye-liner and quiffs challenged the ‘Goths’. Flared jeans and then baggy trousers were suddenly ‘in’ and then just as quickly disappeared. Shoes, shirts, haircuts, mutated and competed. For much of this time, the game didn’t mean anything outside its own rhetoric. One minute it was there, the next it had gone. Exactly the same can be said of musical fads, the way that Soul was picked up in Northern clubs from Wigan to Blackpool to Manchester, the struggle between the concept albums of the art-house bands and the arrival of punkier noises from New York in the mid-seventies, the dance crazes that came and went. Like fashion, musical styles began to break up and head in many directions in the period, coexisting as rival subcultures across the country. Rock and roll was not dead, as Don McLean suggested in American Pie, when heavy metal and punk-rock arrived, nor was Motown, when reggae and ska arrived. The Rolling Stones and Yes carried on oblivious to the arrivals of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. 

In this stylistic and musical chaos, running from the early seventies to the ‘noughties’, there were moments and themes which stuck out. Yet from 1974 until the end of 1978, living standards, which had doubled since the fifties, actually went into decline. The long boom for the working-classes was over. British pop had been invented during the optimistic years of 1958-68 when the economy was most of the time buoyant and evolving at its fastest and most creative spirit. The mood had turned in the years 1968-73, towards fantasy and escapism, as unemployment arrived and the world seemed bleaker and more confusing. This second phase involved the sci-fi glamour of David Bowie and the gothic mysticism of the ‘heavy metal’ bad-boy bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. The picture below shows Robert Plant and Jimmy Page on stage in Chicago during their 1977 North American tour (Page is playing the double-neck Gibson used for their classic song, Stairway to Heaven).

The years 1974-79 were a period of deep political disillusion, with strains that seemed to tear at the unity of the United Kingdom: First there was Irish terrorism on the mainland, when in October two IRA bombs exploded in Guildford, followed by two more in Birmingham. Like many others, I will never forget the horrendous scenes in England’s second city the day after the Tavern in the Town was blasted. This was followed by a rise in racial tension and widespread industrial mayhem. The optimism which had helped to fuel the flowering of popular culture in the sixties was suddenly exhausted, so it is perhaps not a coincidence that this period was a darker time in music and fashion, a nightmare inversion of the sixties dream. In sport, the mid-seventies saw the invention of the ‘football hooligan’.

This led on to serious problems for football grounds around the country, as the government introduced the 1975 Safety of Sports Grounds Act. The home of Wolverhampton Wanderers, ‘Molineux’, had remained virtually unchanged since 1939, apart from the Molineux Street Stand, which had been made all-seater. But this distinctive seven-gabled stand (seen in the picture above) was deemed unsafe according to the act’s regulations and therefore had to be replaced. Architects were commissioned to replace the old stand, with its unique shape, with a new stand. To do this, the club had to purchase the remaining late Victorian terraced houses in Molineux Street and North Street which pre-dated the football ground, and all seventy-one of them were demolished to clear space for the new two million pound stand to be built at the rear of the old stand. The ‘new’ stand, with its 9,348 seats and forty-two executive boxes, was officially opened on 25 August 1979. Once the debris of the old stand was moved away, the front row of seats were almost a hundred feet from the pitch. From the back row, the game was so far away that it had to be reported by rumour! Also, throughout this period, the team needed strengthening.

In the 1974-75 season, Wolves won the League Cup, beating star-studded Manchester City 2-1 at Wembley, and nearly reversed a 4-1  deficit against FC Porto in the UEFA Cup with an exciting 3-1 home victory. Wolves finished in a respectable twelfth place in the League. But at the end of the season, the team’s talisman centre-forward, Belfast-born Derek Dougan, decided to retire. He had joined the club in 1967, becoming an instant hit with the Wolves fans when he scored a hat-trick on his home debut, and netting nine times in eleven games to help Wolves win promotion that season. He was a charismatic man, a thrilling player and one of the best headers of the ball ever seen. He also held the office of Chairman of the PFA (Professional Football Association) and in 1971/72 forged a highly successful striking partnership with John Richards. Their first season together produced a forty League and UEFA Cup goals, twenty-four the Doog and sixteen for Richards. In 1972/73, they shared fifty-three goals in all competitions, Richards getting thirty-six and Dougan seventeen. In two and a half seasons of their partnership, the duo scored a total of 125 goals in 127 games. Derek Dougan signed off at Molineux on Saturday, 26th April 1975. In his nine years at Wolves, Dougan made 323 appearances and scored 123 goals, including five hat-tricks. He also won 43 caps for Northern Ireland, many of them alongside the great George Best, who himself had been a Wolves fan as a teenager.

Above: Derek Dougan in 1974/75, the season he retired.

Wolves had always been considered ‘too good to go down’ after their 1967 promotion but following the departure of ‘the Doog’ they embarked on a run to obscurity, finishing twentieth at the end of the 1975/76 season, resulting in their relegation to the second tier of English football. Worse still, early in 1976, Wolves’ fabulously speedy left-winger, Dave Wagstaffe, was transferred to Blackburn Rovers. In his twelve years at Molineux, ‘Waggy’ had scored thirty-one goals, including a ‘screamer’ in a 5-1 defeat of Arsenal, in over four hundred appearances. In time-honoured fashion, the majority of fans wanted money to be spent on new players, not on a stand of such huge proportions. Although Wolves returned to the League’s top flight at the end of the next season, they were still not good enough to finish in the top half of the division. More departures of longstanding stalwarts followed, including that of captain Mike Bailey, Frank Munro and goalkeeper Phil Parkes. The East Midlands clubs took over in the spotlight, first Derby County and then Nottingham Forest, who won the European Cup in 1979, to make Brian Clough’s dream a reality. Before the 1979-80 season kicked off, Wolves’ manager John Barnwell produced a stroke of genius by signing Emlyn Hughes from Liverpool to be his captain. Then he sold Steve Daley to Manchester City for close to 1.5 million pounds, and three days later signed Andy Gray from Aston Villa for a similar amount. Daley (pictured below in action against FC Porto) was a versatile, attacking midfielder who played in 218 senior games for Wolves, scoring a total of forty-three goals. Andy Gray scored on his debut for Wolves and went on to get another eleven League goals, one behind John Richards. He also scored in the League Cup Final in March to give Wolves a 1-0 victory over Nottingham Forest, and a place in the next season’s UEFA Cup.

John Richards continued to play on into the 1980s for Wolves. According to John Shipley, he was a true Wolves legend, a player who would have graced any of Wolves’ Championship-winning teams. He was also a true gentleman, in the Billy Wright mould. He had signed for Wolves in 1967, turning professional two years later. I remember seeing him make his first-team debut at the Hawthorns against West Bromwich Albion on 28 February 1970, scoring alongside Derek Dougan in a 3-3 draw. They both played and scored in the 3-1 away victory against Fiorentina the following May. Richards went on to score 194 goals in 486 appearances, a goalscoring record which stood for ten years. He won only one full England cap, due mainly to injury.

Like me, the entertainer Frank Skinner grew up on the fictional cartoon comic strip hero, Roy of the Rovers. Of course, when – as in his case – you support a real-life team that never wins anything, like West Bromwich Albion, it’s nice to follow a fictional team that scoops the lot. Melchester Rovers were his mythical alternative, and following them came with none of the attendant guilt that comes with slyly supporting another club, say Liverpool in the seventies. They were his ‘dream team’ with a cabinet of silverware and a true superstar-striker as player-manager. The 1970s were a time when both life and the beautiful game seemed far less complicated for teenagers. Watching it on TV, we would frequently hear a commentator say “this is real Roy of the Rovers Stuff”. What they usually meant was that there was one player on the pitch was doing something remarkable, unbelievable or against all odds. But even in the fictional pages, Roy had to confront the dark realities of hooligans among his own fans, and do battle with it in his own way, as the following frames show:

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren turned from creating beatnik jumpers to the ripped T-shirts and bondage gear of punk: the Sex Pistols portrayed themselves as a kind of anti-Beatles. Westwood was in many ways the perfect inheritor of Quant’s role of a dozen years earlier. Like Quant, she was brought up to make her own clothes and came through art college. She was similarly interested in the liberating power of clothes, setting herself up in a Kings Road shop which first needed to be braved before it could be patronised. Yet she was also very different from Quant, in that she had first mixed and matched to create a style of her own at the Manchester branch of C&A and claimed that her work was rooted in English tailoring. Her vision of fashion was anything but simple and uncluttered. According to Andrew Marr, it was a magpie, rip-it-up and make it new assault on the history of coiture, postmodern by contrast with straightforward thoroughly modern designs of Quant. The latter’s vision had been essentially optimistic – easy to wear, clean-looking clothes for free and liberated women. Westwood’s vision was darker and more pessimistic. Her clothes were to be worn like armour in a street battle with authority and repression, in an England of flashers and perverts. Malcolm McLaren formed the Sex Pistols in December 1975, with Steve Jones, Paul Cook, John Lydon and Glen Matlock making up a foursome which was anything but ‘fab’. Pockmarked, sneering, spitting, spikey-haired and exuding violence, they dutifully performed the essential duty of shocking a nation which was still too easily shocked. The handful of good songs they recorded have a leaping energy which did take the rock establishment by storm, but their juvenile antics soon became embarrassing. They played a series of increasingly wild gigs and made juvenile political attacks in songs such as ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and, in the year of the Silver Jubilee (1977), ‘God Save the Queen. Jim Callaghan could be accused of many things, but presiding over a ‘fascist régime’ was surely not one of them.

On the other side of the political divide was an eruption of racist, skinhead rock, and an interest in the far right. Among the rock stars who seemed to flirt with these ideas was Eric Clapton. On 5th August 1976, I went, with a group of friends, to his concert at the Odeon in Birmingham. He came on stage an hour late, obviously stoned and drunk, and stated, to a mixed audience, that Enoch Powell was the only bloke who’s telling the truth, for the good of the country. In his autobiography, Clapton apologised for his behaviour and his outburst. He was not alone in his ‘flirting’ with racist views. David Bowie spoke of Hitler as being the first superstar, musing that he might make a good Hitler himself. Though the Sex Pistols liked to see themselves as vaguely on the anarchist left, their enthusiasm for shocking, nihilistic and amoral lyrics left room for ambiguity, particularly after ‘Sid Vicious’ joined them. McLaren and Westwood produced clothing with swastikas and other Nazi emblems if only to outrage people, while Vicious’s dubious contribution to political discourse can be summed up by his lyrics,

Belsen was a gas, I read the other day, about the open graves, where the Jews all lay …

Reacting to the surrounding mood, Rock Against Racism was formed in August 1976. My diary for 1976 records that I attended four anti-Fascist and anti-racist meetings in Birmingham that summer. These concerts and meetings led to the creation of the Anti-Nazi League a year later. Punk bands were at the forefront of the RAR movement, above all the Clash, whose lead singer Joe Strummer became more influential and admired than Johnny Rotten and the rest of the Sex Pistols, and bands such as the Jam. Black music – reggae, ska and soul – was popular enough among white youth like my friends for it to have a real influence in turning the fashion in street culture decisively against racism. Ska revival bands such as the Specials and the reggae-influenced Police and UB40. The latter lived in the same terraced street as my brother in Moseley, Birmingham, and came together as unemployed men whose name was drawn from the unemployment benefit claim form. They had an effect which went beyond the odd memorable song. The seventies produced, in the middle of visions of social breakdown, this musical revival produced a more upbeat atmosphere, especially on the Liberal-Left, as well as the Hard-Left. The racist skinhead bands soon found themselves in a violent and uncomfortable ghetto. As one cultural critic of the time put it, …

A lifestyle – urban , mixed, music-loving, modern and creative – had survived, despite being under threat from the NF.

The NF had been founded in 1967 after the original British National Party and the old League of Empire Loyalists joined together. Electorally it was struggling, though Martin Webster, its leader, polled sixteen per cent in the West Bromwich by-election of May 1973 and in the two 1974 general elections the NF put up first fifty-four and then ninety candidates, entitling them to a television broadcast. More important to their strategy were the street confrontations, engineered by marching through Bangladeshi or Pakistani areas in Leeds, Birmingham and London with Union Jacks and anti-immigrant slogans. A more extreme offshoot of the original skinheads attached themselves to the NF’s racialist politics and by the mid-seventies, they too were on the march. Throughout the summer of 1976, broad-based anti-Fascist meetings took place in Dudley and Birmingham, involving Young Liberals, Labour Party members and more left-wing socialists. There were also national anti-racist conferences in London. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party determined to organise street politics of their own to bring things to a halt, forming the Anti-Nazi League in 1977. The ANL brought in tens of thousands of young people who had no interest in Leninism or Trotskyism, but who saw the NF as a genuine threat to immigrants. They flooded to the ANL rallies, marches and confrontations, during which there were two deaths as police weighed in to protect the NF’s right to march.

This was a youth lifestyle which also provided an alternative to the drift to the right more generally in British society and the establishment of ‘Thatcherism’ as the dominant ideology of the late seventies and eighties. But to understand what this ideology was, and how it was able to gain its hold on society, we need first to examine the parliamentary politics of the mid to late seventies.

The Callaghan Years:

Jim Callaghan (right) was the Home Secretary who sent British troops into Northern Ireland, for which, at the time, he was hailed as a hero. He was not such a hero among reformers in the Labour Party, however, when he scuppered the chances of Wilson and Castle of finally curbing the power of the trade union ‘barons’. In the spring of 1976, he finally entered Number Ten after a series of votes by Labour MPs shaved off his rivals – Denis Healey, Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins on the right, and Michael Foot and Tony Benn on the left. After three ballots, he defeated Foot by 176 votes to 137 and replaced Wilson as Prime Minister. For the next three turbulent years, he ran a government with no overall majority in Parliament, kept going by a series of deals and pacts, and in an atmosphere of almost constant crisis. He was, already, on becoming PM, in Andrew Marr’s description,

… a familiar and reassuring figure in Britain, tall, ruddy, no-nonsense, robust and, by comparison with Wilson, straightforward.

He had held all three great offices of state and, at sixty-five, he was one of the most experienced politicians to become Prime Minister. After Heath and Wilson, he was the third and last of the centrist consensus-seekers between hard left and hard right, though he was instinctively looking to the right in the ethos of the mid to late seventies. Churchill apart, all his post-war predecessors had been Oxbridge men, whereas Callaghan had never been to university at all. He was the son of a Royal Navy chief petty officer who had died young, and a devout Baptist mother from Portsmouth. He had known real poverty and had clawed his way up as a young clerk working for the Inland Revenue, then becoming a union official before wartime and national service. As one of the 1945 generation of MPs, he was a young rebel who had drifted to the right as he mellowed and matured, though he always held firm to his pro-trade union instincts. He was a social conservative, uneasy about divorce, homosexuality and vehemently pro-police, pro-monarchy and pro-armed forces, though he was anti-hanging and strongly anti-racialist. As Home Secretary, he had announced that the ‘Permissive Society’ of the sixties had gone too far. As PM, he initiated a debate on ‘trendy teaching’ in schools, calling for an inquiry into teaching methods, standards, discipline and the case for a national curriculum.

Callaghan’s first few days as Prime Minister in April 1976 must have brought back some grim memories. A dozen years earlier, as Chancellor, he had been confronted with awful economic news which nearly crushed him and ended in the forced devaluation of the pound. Now, on the first day of his premiership, he was told that the pound was falling fast, no longer ‘floating’, the euphemism used since the Heath years. A devaluation by sterling holders was likely. The Chancellor, Denis Healey, had negotiated a six-pound pay limit and this would feed through to much lower wage increases and eventually to lower inflation. Cash limits on public spending brought in by Healey under Wilson would also radically cut public expenditure. But in the spring of 1976 inflation was still rampant and unemployment was rising fast. Healey now told Callaghan that due to the billions spent by the Bank of England supporting sterling in the first few months of the year, a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) looked essential. In June, standby credits were arranged with the IMF and countries such as the US, Germany, Japan and Switzerland.

Healey had imposed tough cuts in the summer but by its end, the pound was under immense pressure again. On 27th September, Healey was meant to fly out to a Commonwealth finance ministers’ conference in Hong Kong with the Governor of the Bank of England. But the crisis was so great and the markets so panicked that he decided he could not afford to be out of touch for the seventeen hours’ flying time. In full view of the television cameras, he turned around at Heathrow airport and went back to the Treasury. There he decided to apply to the IMF for a conditional loan, one which gave authority to the international banking officials above Britain’s elected leaders. With exquisite timing, the Ford workers began a major strike. Healey, for the first and last time in his life, he later said, was close to demoralization. Against Callaghan’s initial advice, Healey decided to dash to the Labour conference in Blackpool and made his case to an anguished and angry party. At the time, there was there was a powerful mood for a siege economy, telling the IMF to ‘get lost’, cutting imports and nationalising swathes of industry. Given just five minutes to speak from the conference floor due to the absurdities of Labour Party rules, the Chancellor warned the party that this would mean a trade war, mass unemployment and the return of a Tory government. But, he shouted against a rising hubbub, emulating his younger self as Major Healey speaking at the 1945 conference, in full battle dress, he was speaking to them from the battlefront again. He would negotiate with the IMF and that would mean…

… things we do not like as well as things we do like. It means sticking to the very painful cuts in public expenditure … it means sticking to the pay policy.

As Healey ruefully recorded in his autobiography, he had begun with a background of modest cheers against a rumble of booing. When he sat down, both the cheering and the booing were a lot louder. Benn called the speech vulgar and abusive, but Healey was one of British politics greatest showmen. Meanwhile, Callaghan had become steadily more convinced, during the crisis, by the monetarists on his right. He told the stunned 1976 Labour conference that the Keynesian doctrines of governments spending their way out of recession, cutting taxes and boosting investment, had had their day …

I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists and that insofar as it ever did exist, it worked by injecting inflation into the economy … Higher inflation, followed by higher unemployment. That is the history of the last twenty years.

So, with the cabinet nervously watching, the negotiations with the IMF started. Callaghan and Healey tried to limit as far as possible the cuts being imposed on them. The IMF, with the US Treasury standing behind them, was under pressure to squeeze ever harder. The British side was in a horribly weak position. The government was riven by argument and threats of resignation, including from Healey himself. In secret talks, Callaghan warned the IMF’s chief negotiator bitterly that British democracy itself would be imperilled by mass unemployment. When the tense haggling came to an end, the IMF was still calling for an extra billion pounds’ worth of cuts and it was only when Healey, without telling Callaghan, threatened the international bankers with yet another Who runs Britain? election, that they gave way. The final package of cuts was announced in Healey’s budget, severe but not as grim as had been feared, and greeted with headlines about Britain’s shame. But the whole package was unnecessary from the start, since the cash limits Healey had already imposed on Whitehall would cut spending far more effectively than anyone realised. Moreover, the public spending statistics, on which the cuts were based, were wrong. Public finances were stronger than they had appeared to be. The Treasury estimate for public borrowing in 1974-5 had been too low by four thousand million, a mistake greater than any tax changes ever made by a British Chancellor; but the 1976 estimate was twice as high as it should have been. The IMF-directed cuts were, therefore, more savage than they needed to have been.

When Britain’s spending was defined in the same way as other countries’, and at market prices, the figure was forty-six per cent of national wealth, not the sixty per cent mistakenly stated in a government white paper of early 1976. By the time Labour left office, it was forty-two per cent, about the same as West Germany’s and well below that of the social democratic Scandinavian countries. Britain’s balance of payments came back into balance long before the IMF cuts could take effect and Healey reflected later that if he had been given accurate forecasts in 1976, he would never have needed to go to the IMF at all. In the end, only half the loan was used, all of which was repaid by the time Labour left office. Only half the standby credit was used and it was untouched from August 1977 onwards. Healey had talked about ‘Sod Off Day’ when he and Britain would finally be free from outside control. That day came far sooner than he had expected, but at the time nobody knew that Britain’s finances were far stronger than they had seemed.

Yet in the national memory, the Callaghan administration soon became associated with failure and remained in that category throughout the Thatcher years, used repeatedly as clinching evidence of its bankruptcy. All of this could have been avoided if only the Tories had been in power, it was argued. The initial drama of the crisis imprinted itself on Britain’s memory – the rush back from Heathrow, the dramatic scenes at the Labour conference, the humiliating arrival of the IMF hard men, backed by Wall Street, a political thriller which destroyed Labour’s self-confidence for more than a decade. But that was only the start of Labour’s woes. It was the prospect of ever greater cuts in public spending, inflation out of control, and the economy in the hands of in the hands of outsiders that helped break the Labour Party into warring factions and gave the hard left its first great opportunity. Healey and the Treasury were operating in a new economic world of ‘floating’ exchange rates, huge capital flows and speculation still little understood. It made him highly critical of monetarism, however, and all academic theories which depended on accurate measurement and forecasting of the money supply. Healey was bitter, though, about the Treasury’s mistakes over the true scale of public spending which so hobbled his hopes of becoming a successful Chancellor. He said later that he could not forgive them for this ‘sin’:

I cannot help suspecting that Treasury officials deliberately overstated public spending in order to put pressure on the governments which were reluctant to cut it. Such dishonesty for political purposes is contrary to all the proclaimed traditions of the British civil service.

After the humiliating, cap-in-hand begging for help from the International Monetary Fund, there was the soaring inflation and high interest rates, and finally the piled-up rubbish, strike meetings and unburied dead of the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent. But the true narrative of the Callaghan-Healey years, for the two must be seen together, is also a story of comparative success before its Shakespearean tragic final act. His defenders point out that Callaghan actually presided over a relatively popular and successful government for more than half of his time in power, some twenty out of thirty-seven months. Following the IMF affair, the pound recovered strongly, the markets recovered, inflation fell, eventually to single figures, and unemployment fell too. By the middle of 1977, the Silver Jubilee year, North Sea Oil was coming ashore to the extent of more than half a million barrels a day, a third of the country’s needs. Britain would be self-sufficient in oil by 1980 and was already so in gas. The pay restraint agreed earlier with Healey was still holding, though only just. Besides their success in getting inflation down, they also got the best deals with international bankers that could be done.

Callaghan also succeeded in purging the left from his cabinet, sidelining Michael Foot, sacking Barbara Castle, and constructing the most right-wing Labour cabinet since the war, including Bill Rodgers, David Owen and Shirley Williams. All would later join Roy Jenkins, for now European Commissioner in Brussels, in forming the breakaway Social Democratic Party. Callaghan’s newly found faith in monetarism and his increasingly aggressive attitude to high wage demands also put him to the right of Wilson and Healey. In the late seventies, Callaghan was, for the first time, getting a good press while the Tory opposition under Margaret Thatcher seemed to be struggling. After having to rely on an odd mixture of nationalist MPs for its precarious Commons majority, Labour entered a deal with David Steel’s Liberals from March 1977 to August of the following year, giving Callaghan a secure parliamentary position for the first time. The Lib-Lab Pact gave the smaller party, with only thirteen MPs, rights only to be consulted, plus vague promises on possible changes to the voting system: it was far more helpful to Labour, who gained a modest majority over the Tories in the opinion polls and the prospect of Callaghan being returned to rule well into the eighties. It did not look like a dying government, much less the end of an era.

The Labour left believed that Callaghan and Healey had been captured by international capitalism, as had many MPs. Their answer was to make the MPs accountable to ‘ordinary people’, as the obsessive activists of Labour politics innocently believed themselves to be. So the siege economy, or Alternative Economic Strategy as it became known by 1978, following the publication of a book by Sam Aaronovitch, a Marxist economist, and the mandatory reselection of MPs became the two main planks of the left. The AES was soon abandoned by many on the broad left, however, who, following the fall of the Callaghan government, tired of Keynesian solutions involving Labour governments spending their way out of crises. But Tony Benn (pictured below) persisted in his enthusiasm for workers’ cooperatives and nationalisation. He became increasingly detached from his cabinet colleagues in the Callaghan government, including the remaining left-wingers, like Michael Foot. He came close to leaving it over his opposition to Labour’s deal with the Liberals. His general attitude to the party is well expressed in his diary entry for 15 January 1978:

The whole Labour leadership now is totally demoralised and all the growth on the left is going to come up from the outside and underneath. This is the death of the Labour Party. It believes in nothing any more, except staying in power.

Benn was still a senior member of the government when he wrote this, attending intimate meetings at Chequers, hearing deep military and security secrets, while at the same time becoming an ‘inside-outsider’.

The Winter of Their Discontent:

The ‘winter of discontent’, a Shakespearean phrase, was used by James Callaghan himself to describe the industrial and social chaos of 1978-9. It has stuck in the popular memory as few events have since because schools were closed, ports were blockaded, rubbish was rotting in the streets and the dead were unburied. Left-wing union leaders and activists whipped up the disputes for their own purposes. Right-wing newspapers, desperate to see the end of Labour, exaggerated the effects and rammed home the picture of a country which had become ungovernable.

It came an explosion of resentment, largely by poorly paid public employees, against a public incomes policy they felt was discriminatory. In the picture above, rubbish is left piled up in London’s Leicester Square in February 1979. Such scenes provided convincing propaganda for the Conservatives in the subsequent general election. Callaghan himself had been part of the problem, since his failure to understand the threat posed by the union challenge to the elected power, and his earlier lack of interest in radical economic ideas, came home to haunt him as the incumbent of Number Ten. But it was not just that he had opposed the legal restrictions on union power pleaded for by Wilson and Castle, and then fought for vainly by Heath. Nor was it even that he and Healey, acting in good faith, had imposed a more drastic squeeze on public funding and thus on the poorest families than was economically necessary. It was also that by trying to impose an unreasonably tough new pay limit on the country, and then dithering about the date of the election, he destroyed the fragile calm he had so greatly enjoyed.

Most people, including most of the cabinet, had assumed that Callaghan would call a general election in the autumn of 1978. The economic news was still good and Labour was ahead in the polls. Two dates in October had been pencilled in, though 12th October had been ruled out because it was Margaret Thatcher’s birthday. But Callaghan did not trust the polls and during the summer he decided that he would ‘soldier on’ until the spring. But he didn’t tell anyone until, at the TUC conference in September, he sang a verse from an old music hall song:

There was I waiting at the church, waiting at the church,

When I found he’d left me in the lurch, Lor’ how it did upset me.

All at once he sent me round a note, here’s the very note, this is what he wrote,

Can’t get away to marry you today: My wife won’t let me!

While it was a popular song in its day, fondly remembered by many in his audience, it was hardly a clear message to Britain as a whole. Was the jilted bride supposed to be Mrs Thatcher? The trade union movement? Callaghan’s intention was to suggest that he was delaying the election, but many trade union leaders, journalists and even cabinet ministers were confused. When he finally told the cabinet, they were genuinely shocked. The decision to delay might not have mattered so much had Callaghan not also promised a new five per cent pay limit to bring inflation down further. Because of the 1974-5 cash limit on pay rises at a time of high inflation, take-home pay for most people had been falling. Public sector workers, in particular, were having a tough time. The union leaders and many ministers thought that a further period of pay limits would be impossible to sell, while a five per cent limit, which seemed arbitrary on Callaghan’s part, was considered to be ridiculously tough. But had Callaghan gone to the country in October then the promise of further pay restraint might have helped boost Labour’s popularity still further, while the trade union leaders could believe that the five per cent ceiling was designed to appease rightward-drifting middle-class voters. By not going to the country in the autumn, Callaghan ensured that his five per cent ceiling would, instead, be tested in Britain’s increasingly impatient and dangerous industrial relations market.

Almost as soon as Callaghan had finished his music-hall turn, the Transport & General Workers’ Union smashed it by calling for the 57,000 car workers employed by Ford, the US giant, to receive a thirty per cent wage increase, citing the huge profits being made by the company and the eighty per cent pay rise just awarded to Ford’s chairman. Callaghan was sorely embarrassed, not least because his son worked for the company. After five weeks of lost production, Ford eventually settled for seventeen per cent, convincing Callaghan that he would now lose the coming election. Oil tanker drivers, also in the T&GWU, came out for forty per cent, followed by road haulage drivers, then workers at nationalised British Leyland. They were followed by public sector workers in water and sewerage. BBC electricians threatened a black-out of Christmas television. The docks were picketed and closed down, blazing braziers, surrounded by huddled figures with snow whirling around them, were shown nightly on the television news. Hull, virtually cut off by the action, became known as the ‘second Stalingrad’. In the middle of all this, Callaghan went off for an international summit in the Caribbean, staying on for a sightseeing holiday in Barbados. Pictures of him swimming and sunning himself did not improve the national mood. When he returned to Heathrow, confronted by news reporters asking about the industrial crisis, he replied blandly:

I don’t think other people in the world will share the view that there is mounting chaos.

This was famously translated by the Daily Mail and the Sun into the headline, Crisis? What Crisis. As the railwaymen prepared to join the strikes, the worst blow for the government came when the public sector union NUPE called out more than a million school caretakers, cooks, ambulance men and refuse collectors on ‘random stoppages’ for a sixty pound guaranteed minimum wage. Now the public was being hit directly, and the most vulnerable were being hit the hardest. Children’s hospitals, old people’s homes and schools were all plunged into turmoil. The most notorious action was taken by the Liverpool Parks and Cemeteries Branch of the General & Municipal Workers’ Union refused to bury dead bodies, leaving more than three hundred to pile up in a cold storage depot and a disused factory. Liverpool Council discussed emergency plans to dispose of some of the corpses at sea. Funeral cortéges were met at some cemeteries by pickets and forced to turn back. Strikers were confronted with violence in local pubs. Of course, most of those striking were woefully badly paid and living in relative poverty. Moreover, many had no history of industrial militancy. Nor was the crisis quite as bad as some of the papers and politicians represented it. As with Heath’s three-day week, many people enjoyed the enforced holiday from their poorly paid jobs and tough working conditions. Contrary to rumour, no-one was proved to have died in hospital as a result of union action, there were no food shortages and there was, besides the odd punch-up in the pubs, there was no violence and troops were never used. If it was a ‘revolt’, it was a very British one. It was chaos and a direct, coordinated challenge to the authority of the government, but it was not an attempt to overthrow it, as the 1974 Miners’ Strike had been. This was not a revolution.

Nevertheless, in London (above) and other cities, rotting rubbish piled up, overrun by rats and posing a serious health hazard. The effects of isolated incidents and images were revolutionary, ushering in not socialism, but Thatcherism. Inside government, ordinary work had almost ground to a halt. Eventually, a St Valentine’s Day concordat was reached between the government and the TUC, talking of annual assessments and guidance, targeting long-term inflation and virtually admitting, on the government’s part, that the five per cent wage ceiling had been a mistake. By March most of the industrial action had ended and various generous settlements had been reached, or inquiries had been set up which would lead to them. But in the Commons, the government was running out of allies, spirit and hope.

Spring ‘Awakening’:

The failure of the referenda on Scottish and Welsh devolution gave the nationalists no reason to continue supporting Labour. A bizarre amendment to the Bill had meant that, although the Scots voted in favour, the ‘absences’ of dead people and those who had left but were still registered, were counted against, so the act had to be repealed. In Wales, the measure was in any case defeated by four to one of those voting, in a tidal-wave shift to the right across North Wales and an anti-Nationalist and anti-establishment surge in the valleys. This was led by Neil Kinnock and the Labour left against the leaders of their own party, including Callaghan, himself a Cardiff MP, the Wales TUC and the allegedly corrupt Labour leaders of local authorities. The political division of Wales was confirmed soon after the St David’s Day ‘massacre’ when, as broad left student leaders we witnessed, with horror, the Young Conservatives take control of half the six University College unions in Wales (Bangor, Aberystwyth and UWIST in Cardiff), a sure sign of a sea-change which was soon confirmed at the general election. After the devolution debácle, the nationalists, especially in Scotland, would never trust Labour again.

The Liberals, facing the highly embarrassing trial of Jeremy Thorpe for conspiracy to murder, had their own reasons for wanting a spring election. In the frenetic atmosphere of an exhausted Parliament, in which dying MPs had been carried through the lobbies to vote in order to keep the government afloat, final attempts were made by Michael Foot and the Labour whips to find some kind of majority with the help of whatever support they could muster from a motley crew of Ulster Unionists, Irish Nationalists (SDLP) and renegade Scots. But by now, Callaghan himself was in a calmly fatalistic mood. He did not want to struggle on through another chaotic summer and early autumn. His famous and much-quoted remark to an aide, just as Labour was losing power in 1979, that the country was going through a once-in-thirty-years sea change, suggested that he half-accepted that the years of consensus had failed:

There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher during the 1979 General Election campaign.

Finally, on 28th March 1979, the game ended when the government was defeated by a single vote, brought down at last by a ragged coalition of Tories, Liberals, Scottish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists. Callaghan was the first Prime Minister since 1924 to have to go to Buckingham Palace and ask for a dissolution of Parliament because he had lost a vote in the House of Commons. The five-week election campaign started with the IRA’s assassination of Mrs Thatcher’s campaign manager, Airey Neave, on his way into the underground car-park at Westminster. On the Labour side, it was dominated by Callaghan, still more popular than his party, emphasising stable prices and his ‘deal’ with the unions. On the Tory side, Thatcher showed a clever use of the media, working with television news teams and taking advice from her advertising ‘gurus’, the Saatchis. Callaghan was soundly beaten, as he himself had suspected he would be, with the Conservatives taking sixty-one seats directly from Labour, gaining nearly forty-three per cent of the vote and a substantial majority with 339 seats.

Sources:

Andrew Marr (2008), A History of Modern Britain. London: Macmillan.

Roger Middleton & John Swift, et.al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British and Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

John Shipley (2003), Wolves Against the World: European Nights, 1953-80. Stroud: Tempus Publishing.

Frank Skinner (Foreword) (2009), Roy of the Rovers: The 1970s. London: Titan Books.

Sexual Freedom & Women’s Liberation:

The ‘cultural revolution’ had a profound effect on sexual behaviour in general, and on women in particular. Sex before marriage became less taboo (one-third of young women were pregnant when they married), and there was a general feeling of increasing sexual freedom at various levels in society, which was made a reality through the advent and growing availability of the contraceptive pill from 1962. Women’s liberation also took off, leading to the victory of the Equal Pay Act in 1970. Until that, equal rights and feminism only really touched the surface. There was still a long road to travel on this, however. Too many workplaces were utterly unwelcoming of women wanting work. Too many memoirs recount the gross sexism of the new rock stars, not to mention the abuse of young women and children by a small number of prominent pop celebrities, more recently uncovered in police investigations. ‘The Pill’ might have arrived, and the Abortion Act became law in 1967, but this was still a time of ‘unwanted’ pregnancies, ‘unmarried’ mothers and gross domestic violence being administered by drunken men. Yet the philosophical principles of egalitarianism were gradually weaving their way into social change. Traditions of submission and obedience, together with hierarchies of class and gender based on medieval property rights, industrial capital and imperial administration, began to wobble and dissolve into a society which was more dilute and porous. This was not so much because ‘revolutionaries’ ushered in an age of personal freedom, but more generally because it suited a new economic system based on consumer choices.

In domestic life, two-thirds of families acquired labour-saving devices such as refrigerators and washing-machines. There was a growing ‘snappiness’ and lightness of design, in everything from the cut of clothing to the shape of cars, an aesthetic escape from the gravitas of the post-war period of austerity. But among the population as a whole this was a gradual transformation, experienced in a continuum, not as a revolution. The process was somewhat accelerated among the younger generation.  The real earnings of young manual workers had grown rapidly in the early sixties, creating a generation who had money to spend on leisure and ‘luxury’ goods. The average British teenager was spending eight pounds a week on clothes, cosmetics, records and cigarettes. In London, King’s Road and Carnaby Street became the haunts of this generation. Their attitude is summed up by the designer Mary Quant, whose shop Bazaar in King’s Road, provided clothes…

… that allowed people to run, to jump, to leap, to retain their precious freedom. 

Quant had been cutting up lengths of cloth bought over the counter and selling them at Bazaar since the mid-fifties. Her iconoclastic style involved drawing, slicing and sewing up a uniform that parodied the pleated, padded, extravagant clothes of the Old New Look designers. In doing so, she was taking on the fashion industry of Paris and the West End from her bedsit and tiny shop. Quant’s shockingly short mini-skirts, named after the car she loved, were offensive enough for the occasional brick to be lobbed at her window. She always claimed that she was trying to free women to be able to run for a bus. But it was the sexual allure that shocked. Michael Caine later recalled taking his mother down the King’s Road to see what all the fuss was about:

I said, “here’s one now”, and this girl walks by with a mini up to here. She goes by and my mother looked at her. So, we walk on a bit. She never said a word. So I said, what do you think, mum? She said: “If it’s not for sale, you shouldn’t put it in the window.”

Clothes became the outward symbols of the ‘Chelsea Set’ of which Caine was a fully paid-up member, as was Quant. But Quant’s fashions were as exclusively priced as the ‘Set’ itself. ‘Biba’, an iconic symbol, promised liberation for women and girls, but liberation through spending. Its founder, Barbara Hulanicki was a girl from an exiled family, born before the war, brought up in British-controlled Palestine and then raised by a ‘bohemian’ aunt in Brighton, before going to art school. She then launched a mail order company with her husband. Biba, named after her younger sister, aimed to offer glamorous clothing at cheap prices. She had been mesmerised by Audrey Hepburn (above and below), her shape; long neck, small head, practically jointless, and her first top-selling design was a pink gingham dress like the one worn by Brigitte Bardot at her wedding.

Her succession of boutiques were dark, chaotic spaces in which customers could lose themselves, pick up and try on, discard and collect, and sometimes steal, a great gush of new designs which seemed to change every week. The clothes were run up at high-speed in the East End and ferried to the boutique (below) several times a week. Turnover was spectacular and soon celebrities were beating a path its door, mixing with shorthand typists and schoolgirls to buy Biba designs – Mia Farrow, Yoko Ono, Princess Anne, Raquel Welch and even Bardot herself. As one Biba admirer said, it was helping to create the concept of shopping as an experience, a leisure activity for the young. George Melley, jazz singer, writer and professional flamboyant called it a democratic version of Mary Quant. Hulancki herself said that she always wanted to get prices down, down, down, to the bare minimum. The cheapness and disposability of the clothes was shocking to an older Britain in which millions of families had been used to make do and mend, followed by making their own clothes, buying patterns from Woolworth’s and sewing them by hand, or using a new electric sewing machine, or knitting woollen dresses and jerseys. Biba was the beginning of the throw-away consumer culture applied to clothing, and though it would present moral dilemma later, in the sixties it simply provided freedom for millions of young single women, career girls about town, who, as yet, had not been shaped by motherhood.

Pop Music and Popular Culture:

Another symbol was popular music. Before ‘pop’ the dominant popular music styles produced low profits. Most public music was live; piano and banjo players on music-hall stages, the star singers and then eventually the big bands of the dance halls and the smoky subculture of ‘jazz’. Sheet-music made big money for talented composers like Ivor Novello and stage stars like Harry Lauder. Gramophone record sales had kicked off with recordings of early twentieth-century opera stars but the invention of the modern microphone in the twenties had then changed popular singing, allowing intimacy and variety of a new kind. The recording industry brought Louis Armstrong, the Ink Spots, Vera Lynn and the crooners of many West End musicals to millions of homes before pop. By the end of the fifties there were four major British recording companies: EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips. Most of their profits came from classical music or comic recordings, like those of Flanders and Swann. It was with the spread of seven-inch forty-fives that records had become something that teenagers could afford to buy. Though first produced in the US as early as 1948, for working-class British youngsters they were still formidably expensive by the late fifties.

The other essential technological changes arrived at around the same time. First, loud electric guitars, invented by radio repairman Leo Fender in 1948. Then transistor radios, originally invented in the mid-fifties to help Americans keep in touch after the coming nuclear war with Russia, and becoming popular for other purposes at the end of the decade. Without the mike, the electric guitar and the seventh-inch record, rock and pop would not have happened. Without the radio, the vital cross-cultural currents would have been unheard. The post-austerity economic boom was putting money in the pockets of teenagers and young workers, and the post-war baby-boom had increased their numbers. Better nutrition meant that they reached puberty earlier, and the mechanisms for the mass-marketing were already in place. By the early sixties, all the essential ingredients of the new market for this were also in place.

Most histories of golden-age sixties rock groups begin with a similar narrative, with the kids discovering Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley under their bedclothes, covertly listening on frequency 208 on their transistor radio to Radio Luxembourg, which broadcast to the UK from 7.00 p.m. onwards every night. They then go on to describe the formation of a ‘skiffle’ band, like that of Lonnie Donegan, using simple chords and home-made instruments like washboards or slatted wardrobe doors, mouth organs and ‘kazoos’. Then the coffee bar or burger bar would make an appearance, a place where teenagers could go to socialize and listen to jukeboxes. The local art college would also, often, be part of this formative, group experience. Many of these were associated with local technical colleges, which before the university expansion of the seventies was where bright, imaginative and often rebellious teenagers would end up after leaving ‘academia’ behind at fifteen. The art schools were the true factories of popular culture, for musicians, painters and sculptors.

By the later fifties, art students were not only listening to skiffle, but the US rock ‘n’ roll stars, and also to British ‘Elvis copies’ like first Tommy Steel, then Harry Webb, ‘reincarnated’ as Cliff Richard, then Tom Jones. John Lennon went to Liverpool Art College, while Ray Davies, who formed The Kinks attended Hornsey, Keith Richard of The Rolling Stones went to Sidcup, and Pete Townsend of The Who went to Ealing Art College. The RAF-style roundels and bold black arrows which appeared on the band’s clothes and became part of the Mods’ insignia, had been swiped from graphic designers and pop painters. Of course, no band was more important in the sixties, and arguably since, than The Beatles. They expressed both youthful rebellion and commercialism, providing British teenagers with an identity that cut across the barriers of class, accent and region. The Beatles had been formed, originally as The Quarrymen, in July 1957 and in 1962 Love Me Do reached #17 in the charts. But it wasn’t until April 1963, that From Me to You became their first number one hit single.

‘Beatlemania’ & the Radio Revolution:

The key to their initial breakthrough, and their continued success, was not studio recordings, but radio performances. Between 1957 and 1970 they performed live in eighty-four different venues in England, fifteen in Scotland, six in Wales and two in Ireland. Many people in the establishment regarded ‘pop’ music with disdain. The BBC held a monopoly over the radio waves and, in a deal with the Musicians’ Union and record manufacturers, ensured that popular music was not given airtime. The Beatles, however, were too popular for the BBC to resist, and between March 1962 and June 1965, no fewer than 275 unique musical performances were recorded in their studios and broadcast throughout the UK. The group played eighty-eight different songs on national radio, some recorded many times. As well as their own songs, these recordings also included rock ‘n’ roll numbers by Chuck Berry and Little Richard. They worked like dogs, once recording eighteen songs in one day on 16 July 1963. Derek Taylor has written about how …

… they became our cheeky chappies, our Elvis, took up residence on the front page, and in the zeitgeist of the age, helped to establish the booming creative potential of provincial England.

The Beatles gave us a continuing soundtrack of unparalleled charm and reassurance. As long as they kept on delivering fresh songs along with the morning milk, everything was right in our optimistic world. Quite quickly, the Beatles became an institution all of their own, with all sorts of attendants – fanatics and detractors, revisionists and archivists, accountants and lawyers, scribes and Pharisees.

That the Beatles were woven into the fabric of British life was due in large part to the regularity of their attention to good habits – the Christmas message to the fans, the package tours, the visits home to Liverpool families, an honest paying of all the expected dues and in no small measure to the BBC, who provided that unparalleled broadcasting expertise to keep the nation in touch with ‘the boys’ through fifty-three broadcasts. Radio allowed them to ‘be themselves’ and that was always enough for the Beatles and their followers.

The Beatles’ frequent access to the BBC’s studios and airwaves was the consequence of an age of wireless innocence. Although millions were hungry for rock ‘n’ roll, on the radio it was severely rationed. When you tuned in during the day, there was only the choice of the BBC’s three national networks and, of those, only the Light Programme might occasionally allow Elvis or Buddy Holly into your house. There was no local radio or commercial radio. The only alternative was a crackling, phasing Radio Luxembourg beamed across Europe at night. When ‘the Light’ did feature ‘pop’, due to the Musicians’ Union restriction, records were frequently side-lined by emasculated renditions of hits from dance orchestras. But without competition, BBC radio programmes were guaranteed huge audiences. The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, had understood this opportunity and sent an application for a radio audition to the BBC’s Manchester outpost early in 1962. Producer Peter Pilbeam had auditioned them and, despite his note on his report about the singers – John Lennon, yes; Paul McCartney, no – both had featured on their BBC debut in front of an audience at Manchester Playhouse in March 1962. This regional radio breakthrough had come seven months before the release of their first single on ‘Parlophone’, Love Me Do, and no recording exists of the concert or any of their other three broadcasts of 1962. It remains ‘pre-history’ in terms of the Beatlemania years, especially when compared to their ‘meteoric’ rise to fame in 1963.

At the beginning of 1963, Britain was experiencing its worst winter weather since 1947. The country shivered through freezing temperatures at a time when few houses had the luxury of central heating. Most of the land was covered in deep snow making transport difficult. Undaunted, The Beatles spent many hours during those cold early months of 1963 in a van driven by a friend, journeying up and down the country to appear onstage at theatres and ballrooms and to perform in radio and TV studios. Before this breakthrough year, the group had worked hard at their craft, including hundreds of hours spent entertaining the rowdy clientele of a Hamburg nightclub and the friendly regulars at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, enabling the development of an extensive and varied repertoire. Their musical expertise combined with discipline and stamina proved to be an unbeatable formula.

Though the stories of British rock and pop bands follow a predictable trajectory, the stories of the earlier bands are more interesting simply because the story had not occurred before. Though pop was a business it was also narrative about class and morality; almost every band’s story described the tension between the marketing of the music and the attempt by the band to stay in some way ‘authentic’, true to themselves. Many never tried to be authentic in the first place, but the groundbreaking ones did but didn’t find it easy. The Kinks were four north London boys who affected a camp look and played rough, hard pop were put into the most extraordinary pink hunting jackets, ruffs and thigh-high suede boots. The Beatles were bullied and cajoled by Epstein into ditching the rough jeans and leather Luftwaffe jackets they had learned in Hamburg. To get their first recording contract with EMI, the Beatles were told to stop smoking on stage, stop swearing, turning up late, and making spontaneous decisions about which songs they would play at their gigs. They also had to learn to bow smartly to the audience, all together, after every song. They agreed. It was only later in their successful sixties that they felt they could tell their managers where to get off.

The BBC’s Saturday Club presenter, Brian Matthew (above), commented, following their appearance on his show on 26th January 1963:

At the moment, the majority of ‘The Beatles’ fans are in their home town of Liverpool and I have a very strong suspicion it won’t be long before they’re all over the country.

Brian Matthew’s belief was quickly confirmed. From ten o’clock to twelve noon every Saturday, the show reached an enormous audience of around ten to twelve million. The Beatles were featured ten times on the programme and quickly established a rapport with Matthew and producer Bernie Andrews, who supervised the music sessions.  Six numbers were recorded in sessions lasting no more than three and a half hours; sometimes as short as ninety minutes. Throughout 1963 number one records followed in quick succession: Please Please Me, From me to You, She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand. The debut album, Please Please Me, the Twist and Shout EP, and the With the Beatles LP were also released within that year. While those releases kept them high in the charts, the pressure of The Beatles schedule never eased for a moment, but they were match-fit. They performed music in thirty-nine radio shows in 1963 and, most importantly, fifteen of those programmes were editions of their own radio series Pop Go the Beatles which the BBC invited them to host during the summer of 1963. Tuesday evening became an essential date with the radio for millions of fans. They were encouraged by the presenter to let their humour shine between the songs, and producer Terry Henebery remembers this ‘zaniness’ not being confined to the recorded speech links:

They’d come to the studio and horse about. You had to crack the whip and get on the loudspeaker talk-back key quite a lot and say “Come on, chaps!” They’d be lying all over the floor, giggling. And I can remember afternoons down at the Paris Cinema studio, where you were just looking at the clock, throwing your hands up in horror and thinking, ‘will they ever settle down?’ I mean, people would go and get locked in the toilets and fool about. But you were, at the end of the day, getting some nice material out of them.

No one would have predicted it in 1963, but the songs The Beatles chose to perform for their radio series constitute the most fascinating aspect of their music sessions for the BBC. The New Musical Express reported that R-and-B material will be strongly featured. The shows certainly lived up to that promise. Required to record six songs for every show, to avoid undue repetition, the group would often romp through an old favourite or work on a new number. As Ringo observed:

It was fine when doing the repertoire we knew, but some weeks it’d be real hard. We’d rehearse two or three songs in the lunch break and then go and record them in the afternoon.

For some groups, a series that demanded six new recordings every weeknight might have been daunting; but it allowed The Beatles to air their influences and try out some new favourites. They performed fifty-six new songs in all, twenty-five of which had not and would not be released on any of their records. The choice of material in these and other programmes clearly reveals the artists who had inspired the group. They recorded nine cover versions of Chuck Berry songs which, except for Roll Over Beethoven were all belted out by John. In addition, they covered six Carl Perkins and four Elvis Presley songs, while the four Little Richard rockers were the exclusive vocal property of Paul and his throat-ripping ‘whoops’ and ‘hollers’. In gentler moments, Paul sang A Taste of Honey and Till There Was You, but his most unusual ballad was The Honeymoon Song. John produced a real gem in Ann-Margret’s I Just Don’t Understand. The four were adept at digging out unusual material, often beating rival Liverpool groups to sought-after American records and learning the B-side. As Paul commented in 2013,

You will find stuff in our repertoire that came off little odd-ball records. We had started off going onstage and playing songs that we liked, but then we would find that on the same bill as us in the Liverpool clubs, there might be another band that would play exactly the same songs. If they were on before us, it made us look a bit silly. We started to look further afield, study the American charts and see what was there. We’d listen to radio a lot and find out if there was anything up and coming. We would also flip records and listen to the B-sides; see if we could find anything that way. In fact, that’s what started John and I writing, because this was the only foolproof way that other bands couldn’t have our songs. There was no great artistic muse that came out of the heavens and said, ‘Ye shall be a songwriting partnership!’ It was really just we had better do this or everyone is going to have our act. …

In addition to the night-time broadcasts of Radio Luxembourg, the other sources for rock ‘n’ roll music on discs were coffee-bar jukeboxes, fairgrounds and record shops. Fortunately, this era was a golden era for record stores. Hundreds of family-run concerns, like Brian Epstein’s NEMS in Liverpool, would take pride in stocking at least one copy of everything released. Many Liverpool musicians spent hours in listening booths at NEMS while records were played to them. Occasionally, they might even buy one! At the time of their BBC sessions, The Beatles were seeking out the latest Rhythm and Blues records from the States. Although many of these by groups such as The Miracles did not, at first, make the British charts, they were a key influence on The Beatles. Again, Paul McCartney explains:

With our manager Brian Epstein having a record shop – NEMS – we did have the opportunity to look around a bit more than the casual buyer. …

Ringo would get stuff from the sailors. … he happened to have a few mates who’d been to New Orleans or New York and had picked up some nice blues or country and western. … But it was really a question of looking harder than the next guy. We made it our full-time job to research all these things; to go for the road less travelled.

These records, and those by The Shirelles, who did have some UK hits, had sophisticated vocal, string and horn parts. Rearranging them for a four-piece line-up helped to create the Beatle sound just as much as the earlier singles by the rock ‘n’ roll pioneers. Current R&B records were not easy to get hold of or hear in Britain. But in 1963, records released on the Tamla and Motown labels were distributed in the UK by Oriole. Radio Luxembourg also featured the latest records by Mary Wells, The Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Martha & the Vandellas and Little Stevie Wonder. Although none of them was a hit at the time, The Beatles’ love of the records from Detroit was demonstrated when they included three Motown songs on With the Beatles. Their devotion to black soul music proved crucial to its wider acceptance.

The significance of The Beatles’ BBC radio sessions also stems from the way the sound of the group was captured for their broadcasts. At that time, artists were not given large amounts of studio time. At EMI studios, on 11th February 1963, The Beatles had to record ten songs for their debut album, Please Please Me. The fact that this was achieved in under ten hours subsequently became regarded as a remarkable achievement. This was seen as especially true when the quality of the tracks was considered. It was common practice in 1963 to complete a minimum of two songs in a standard three-hour session. As Paul has pointed out,

It was just the rate people worked at. … Looking at it now, it seems so fast, but then it seemed very sensible.

At the BBC, the work-rate was even higher. Apart from when they were performing in front of an audience for a broadcast, The Beatles had to record five or six songs in a short session so they were not fazed by this requirement. The recordings were made onto a four-track tape machine at EMI in October 1963, but multi-tracking did not begin at the BBC until a decade later. This meant that the mono recordings could not be edited, except by editing different takes of a song onto the same tape. Otherwise, there was the option to ‘overdub’ by copying the first recording to another tape, while at the same time adding more instruments or vocals. Both of these processes could be very time-consuming, so what we hear on the BBC tapes is the sound of the group performing ‘live’, direct to tape, as if to an immediate audience, but without the noisy hysteria which accompanied their public concerts. The pop songs of the early Beatles were not neatly produced commodities as all pop songs later became. You can hear the fun involved in their creation.

When Pop Go The Beatles finished its run, they were once more at the top of the charts with She Loves You. From that point on, things went crazy and pretty much stayed that way. Their unassailable popularity was reflected by the press who applied the epithet Beatlemania to the hysteria that surrounded their every move. In February 1964, the States surrendered to the magic and Brian Epstein’s bold boast that his group would be ‘bigger than Elvis’ proved to be true. Having ‘hit the business jackpot’, as Brian Matthew expressed it in Saturday Club, the number of times The Beatles came to the BBC was greatly reduced; compared to the thirty-four programmes recorded in 1963, from October 1963 to June 1965 there were just fifteen specially recorded sessions. Having once been prepared to rush from one end of the country to the other for a radio show, global success now made the group less available. Their last BBC radio performance was the solitary one of 1965, on Whit Monday, entitled The Beatles Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride. It was understandable that they now had real need of this particular kind of radio exposure. But most of the sessions at the BBC had been exciting and fun. DJ Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman worked with the Beatles in 1964. He remembered that:

Their music and persona freed me from middle age … because the things that were coming from The Beatles made me feel like a ten-year-old! They made us all feel tremendously happy.

Just before The Beatles made their last BBC recording, at Easter 1964 the first illegal ‘pirate’ radio station, Radio Caroline, began broadcasting from a ship just off the Sussex coast. Within months, millions of young people were listening to Radio Caroline North and Radio Caroline South, Radio London and other pirate stations that sprung up. Not only did they broadcast popular music records, but they also reminded their listeners that any attempt to silence them would constitute a direct ‘attack on youth’. With the advent of these radio stations, the BBC monopoly on airtime was broken, and bands were able to get heard beyond their concerts. Eventually, the Government acted to bring an end to its cold war with the British record industry. The BBC set up Radio One to broadcast popular records and in August 1967, the Marine Offences Act outlawed the pirate ships.

The Rock Generation:

In the early days of pop and rock, it was not always quite as obvious that money would always trump vitality. There were still battles to be fought between the two. The Who (pictured below) were a west London band which had, like so many others, emerged from skiffle, and had been kick-started by the early successes of The Beatles. They were encouraged by their manager, Peter Meadon, to dress stylishly and address themselves to the new audience of ‘Mods’. Their first single, I Can’t Explain was self-consciously derivative of The Kinks, and was released in January 1965. It made it to #8 in the charts, but it was their second single, My Generation which really caught the mood of the times and the imaginations of pop fans, later became the first British rock ‘anthem’. It was recorded at the Pye Studios in London in October 1965 and released as a single on 5th November. Just before its release, Roger Daltry was fired from the band for fighting with the other members, but he was quickly reinstated when it reached #2. The fighting and onstage antics continued throughout their early career, though, including the smashing up of guitars by the band’s leader, Pete Townsend. While delighting their live audiences, their guitar-smashing kept them away from mainstream venues.

A string of top ten hits followed in 1965-67, from Substitute to Pictures of Lily and I Can See for Miles. Pete was disappointed that the last of these only reached #10 in the UK charts compared with #9 in the US, commenting shortly afterwards that to him, that was the ultimate Who record yet it didn’t sell and I spat on the British record buyer. Throughout a stellar career during which some think, with their concept albums, eclipsed The Beatles after the break-up of the ‘fab four’, The Who, though, far from revolutionary in politics, were never properly ‘tamed’.  Nor were The Kinks, whose song-writing genius Ray Davies became involved in a punch-up with an American television union official who had called them a bunch of commie wimps. That altercation got them banned from the States for four crucial years.

The big battle lines, however, were drawn over the content of the songs, which quickly moved beyond the easy American boy-meets-girl themes of Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. By 1968, rock was beginning to escape from the urban and suburban Britain of its young consumers. For most of them, their teenage years would end in a more conventional working life and marriage, which was (perhaps somewhat conversely) more popular than ever in the late sixties, with marriage rates peaking in 1972. But drugs, mysticism, gangs and sexual experimentation were some of the alternatives celebrated by pop culture, much to the discomfort of record companies, the BBC, politicians and the newspapers. Songs such as Lola by The Kinks and I’m a Boy by The Who challenged existing sexual stereotypes, and there was a ‘libertine’ element in The Rolling Stones songs which shocked those parents who could follow the lyrics.

Above all, the rate of experimentation and change in sixties pop itself was astonishing, as a new sound, instrument, length of song and sexually explicit album cover image seemed to come along every few weeks in 1966-68. It was a classic, market-driven competition between the top bands and artists, measured by sales of records. Lennon and McCartney remained at the forefront of this experimentation, feeding back discoveries about tape loops, modern composers and Bach into the music of The Beatles, retreating more and more into their Abbey Road studio to produce more complex sounds. The Stones’ blues-rock challenged the ‘Mersey Beat’ and the ‘Mods’ began to produce early versions of the ‘heavy metal’ genre, followed by Led Zeppelin at the end of 1968, who made it their own. But, at this stage, The Beatles were still seen as the pioneers, the first big stars to fall for Indian mysticism, sitars, or the next drug craze, and the first to break up under the strain. Their trajectory, like their output, seemed impossible to beat. As Andrew Marr concludes,

A band’s success was based on its members’ skills but also on their authentic claim to be the kids from the streets whose anger, enthusiasm, boredom and wit reflected the actual Britain all around them, the lives of the people who would save up and buy their songs. Pop was music from below or it was nothing. Yet the successful musicians would be cut off from the world they came from by the money and the security needed to keep fans at bay until they were fated to sound introspective and irrelevant.  

By 1968, other forms of music were receding before the ear-splitting tidal advance of rock and pop, driven by radio. In painting, pop art and the pleasure principle were on the attack. Simpler and more digestible art forms, suitable for mass market consumption, were replacing élite art which assumed an educated and concentrated viewer, listener or reader. Throughout these years there were self-conscious moves to create new élites, to keep the masses out. They came from the portentous theories of modern art or the avowedly difficult atonal Classical music arriving from France and America, but these were eddies against the main cultural current.  Similarly, when Mary Quant set up her shop she was a rotten businesswoman. The fun was in the clothes. No business with so little grasp of cash could afford to be cynical. Of course, the King’s Road was a foreign country to most Britons in the mid-sixties. The majority of those who lived through that period have personal memories of rather conventional and suburban lives. Most working-class people were still living in Edwardian and Victorian red-brick terraces in the English and Welsh industrial cities, and in tenements in Glasgow, Dundee and other Scottish towns.

For this vast majority, the early sixties were experienced as a continuation of the fifties, not as a break with that decade. Britain remained an industrial society, though more prosperous, whose future was believed still to depend on factories producing cars, engines, washing machines and electrical goods, both for the ‘domestic’ market and for export. The older generation of authority figures – teachers, judges and above all parents – still derived their clothes and morality from their wartime experience, and were the butt of widespread mockery, especially by the cartoonist Giles of The Daily Express (commemorated by the statue shown above, located in Ipswich town centre) and on TV by David Frost. Television also gave further mass exposure to the pop industry, with regular editions of  ‘Jukebox Jury’, ‘Ready, Steady, Go’, and ‘Top of the Pops’ attracting huge young audiences. The radio, TV and magazine publicity machine was up and going. The equipment was in every second home, radios and record players turned out by Britain’s booming electronics industry. But the men with moustaches and ‘short back and sides’ haircuts were visibly still in power. As Andrew Marr has written,

The Britain which proudly displayed volumes of Churchill’s war memoirs on bookshelves, and stood up in cinemas for the national anthem, did not disappear when Ringo Starr grew his first luxuriant moustache.   

Swinging London and its New Celebrities:

The new culture was far from elitist; it was meritocratic, but it could be just as exclusive as the older forms. It was shaped by upper-working-class and lower-middle-class people who had never enjoyed this level of cultural influence before. The northern cities of England, especially Liverpool, but also Newcastle and Manchester, that were sending their sons and daughters south to conquer, even if it was only on radio and television shows. The older Britain with its regimental traditions, its racism and clear divisions in terms of class, geography and dialect. The ‘scouse’ voices of The Beatles and the ‘Geordie’ accents of the Animals had been rarely heard on the radio before 1963, and for many metropolitan and Home Counties listeners, they came as something of a shock. By the summer of 1965, however, what was called Swinging London, or the Scene, was a small number of restaurants, shops and clubs where a small number of people were repeatedly photographed and written about. In Chelsea, Biba, ‘Granny Takes a Trip’, ‘Bazaar’ and ‘Hung on You’ were honeypots for the fashionable. They spent their evenings and nights at clubs like ‘Annabel’s’, ‘Showboat’ and ‘Talk of the Town’.

There were perhaps no more than twenty ‘celebrities’ at the heart of Swinging London. They included The Beatles and Mick Jagger, among eight pop singers, the model Jean Shrimpton, the designer Mary Quant, painter David Hockney, actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, and photographers Lord Snowdon, David Bailey and Terence Donovan. The ‘list’ compiled and published by Private Eye journalist Christopher Booker in 1969, also included an interior decorator, a creative advertiser, a film producer, a discotheque manager, a ballet dancer and the Kray brothers from the East End who could only be described as connected with the underworld. These New Aristocrats, as Christopher Booker called them, were all concerned with the creation of images. Following the Profumo affair of a few years earlier, old money, big business, the traditional arts and politics were being marginalised and replaced by working-class ‘upstarts’. Among the photographers, Bailey was a tailor’s son and Donovan a lorry driver’s son, both from the East End. Michael Caine was a Billingsgate fish porter’s son and Stamp the son of a tug-boat captain. The female aristocrats included Lesley Hornby of Neasden, better known as ‘Twiggy’, a carpenter’s daughter, and Priscilla White, better known as ‘Cilla Black’, another (originally) ‘scruffy Scouser’. A few were there entirely because of their looks, like ‘supermodel’ Jean Shrimpton, a description first used in 1968. Very few of these men and women would have made it in the London of previous decades. The intertwining of this aristocracy of pop was as sinuous as the old Tory cliques of the fifties. But their significance was that they represented the increased mobility of talented people from working-class backgrounds.

These ‘celebrities’ were joined by footballers, who in 1966-68 were raised from tradesmen and servants to the level of golden gods, sometimes behaving badly too. England’s victory in the 1966 World Cup, with its dramatic finale at Wembley and the team’s 4-2 defeat of West Germany was the stuff that dreams are made of, leading to ritual disappointed expectations every four years ever since. Despite reaching the semi-finals on two occasions since, in 1990 and 2018, the nation has not yet been able to repeat the dressing up and dancing in the streets that went on then, with every English man, woman and child joining in. Alf Ramsey, the English team manager, had been part of the team who had lost 3-6 to Hungary at Wembley in 1953. Now he and his lions had brought football home at last. The three ‘Eastenders’, West Ham’s Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and Geoff Hurst outshone the Charlton brothers on this occasion, but Bobby Charlton was himself part of Manchester United’s ‘home’ international trio together with George Best and Denis Law who won the European Cup, beating Eusebio and Benfica 4-1 in 1968. This was a remarkable achievement, coming just a decade after Busby’s ‘babes’ were all but wiped out in the Munich air disaster of 1958. Glasgow Celtic had been the first British team to win the European Cup in the previous year, under the management of Jock Stein in 1967. Some of these soccer celebrities, like George Best, were later to struggle with the limelight, but for now they could do no wrong as far as the British public were concerned. The articles and photos below are from a facsimile of the Sunday Mirror from 31 July 1966:

The new celebrities were not just fascinated by images, but quickly colonised the entire new media of pop music, radio, television, fashion, advertising, colour magazines, and hairdressing. These were not the property of the City or of old money. Linguistic diversity was as important as imagery in this democratisation of society and culture. It was the breakthrough lead given by Lennon and McCartney in singing their own material that persuaded scores of other British bands to follow suit. Others chose to mimic the accents and vocabulary of the American rockers who had inspired them, even when producing their own compositions. There are few songs in the ‘transatlantic’ repertoire of The Rolling Stones which sound particularly English, unlike those of other iconic London bands such as The Kinks and The Who. Banned from the US while others were breaking into the American market, Ray Davies turned back to local subjects. He had always written pop songs about everything from the death of the dance-halls to the joys of an autumn sunset over Waterloo Bridge, but The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society of 1968 was on an entirely different scale. As Ray Davies commented himself:

While everybody else thought the hip thing to do was to drop acid, take as many drugs as possible and listen to music in a coma, the Kinks were singing songs about lost friends, draught beer, motorbike riders, wicked witches and flying cats.

The title song of their album calls for the ‘preservation’ of Desperate Dan, strawberry jam, the George Cross, the ‘Sherlock Holmes English-speaking vernacular’, little shops, china cups, virginity, Tudor houses and antique tables while attacking the new skyscrapers and office blocks. The album, which sold in tiny numbers compared with Sergeant Pepper, with its equally nostalgic Liverpudlian and Lancastrian-themed lyrics, confused contemporary critics who could not decide whether the group were being serious or satirical. The simple answer, with the benefit of a critical hindsight which regards the disc as one of the greatest achievements of British pop in the sixties, “both”. The band showed that it was possible to write inspiring rock music about what was around you, rather than posturing as a boy from Alabama or pretending to be an Afro-American. On the other hand, in listening to Dusty Springfield, who had one of the ‘purest’, most spell-binding voices of the decade, you could be forgiven for thinking she was from Detroit or Paris. Few of the songs she sang, if any, had British themes and British English vocabulary. But then, ‘son of a preacher man’ scans better! The English folk-song revival of the early sixties also played into this democratic, eclectic mix, with the founding of Fairport Convention in 1967, named after the house in which they practised in North London. Their folk-rock genre took themes and dialects from all parts of the British Isles. By 1968, regional accents had become commonplace in radio and television programmes, especially the perennial ‘soap operas’, though it took much longer for the provincial presenters of news, views and features to be accepted onto the national broadcasts of the BBC, not to mention those from ethnic minorities. This reflected the slow progress in British society in general towards genuine devolution, diversity and gender equality.

Despite the dramatic increase in wealth, coupled with the emergence of distinctive subcultures, technological advances (including television) and unprecedented shifts in popular culture, by the end of the sixties, there was a general sense of dissatisfaction and disillusionment with society and politics in Britain. In the early seventies, when John Lennon was asked to assess the impact of The Beatles by Rolling Stone magazine, he commented that…

Nothing happened, except we all dressed up. The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it’s exactly the same.

Conclusion: A Real Counter-cultural Revolution?

The counter-cultural ‘revolution’ in Britain had no organisation and no practical agenda. It was largely middle class in its amorphous leadership, without any real or effective links to the working-class socialists who wanted higher wages and perhaps even workers’ cooperatives, but were less keen on long-haired students taking drugs, or indeed on angry black people. The counter-cultural currents influenced pop and rock music, but it did not immediately create an indigenous, autonomous British movement. It was dependent on passing American fads and voices, like that of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. Like both Dylan and John Lennon in the early seventies, The Who questioned revolutionary values and violent methods in their second great ‘anthem’, Won’t Get Fooled Again, written by Pete Townsend in 1970 and recorded and released the next year. It ends with the line, Meet the new boss; he’s the same as the old boss! Townsend wrote,

It’s really a bit of a weird song. The first verse sounds like a revolution song and the second like somebody getting tired of it. It’s an anti-establishment song. It’s ‘anti’ people who are negative. A song against the revolution because … a revolution is not going to change anything at all in the long run, and a lot of people are going to get hurt.

Symbolically, perhaps, the group has usually played the full eight-and-a-half minute version of the song at the end of its concert. More than any other song, it sums up the relationship between pop music and sixties’ counter-culture.

Sources:

Joanna Bourke, Shompa Lahiri, et. al. (eds.) (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

Andrew Marr (2007), A History of Modern Britain. London: Macmillan.

Kevin Howlett (2014), The Beatles: The BBC Archives, 1962-1970.

 

Chapter Six: Motherhood, Domesticity & Recreation.

Between the wars, high maternal mortality and infant mortality rates continued to disfigure most industrial districts in Britain. While deaths in childbirth affected all classes of women, Hans Singer showed in his 1937 reports for the Pilgrim Trust that there was a clear relationship between poverty and maternal mortality rates (I have written about this in the previous series of articles). The high rate of maternal was a national disgrace. It was the result of numerous causes, including a moral attitude to women and conception that contributed to their suffering. In England and Wales, four women in every thousand lost their lives in childbirth every year. As we have seen in an earlier chapter in this series, the rate was seven per thousand in the distressed areas of South Wales, a fact masked by the continuing high birth-rate in the area throughout the inter-war period. In January 1936, the Prime Minister announced that a bill to establish a national midwives’ service would be put before Parliament. Under the Act, all maternity cases would, from July 1937, be conducted by a properly qualified midwife, whether working under a local authority or a voluntary service. With the agreement of the Chancellor, the service, costing half a million pounds, was to be funded by central government. Conservatives responded to the call of their leader and his wife, while Labour MPs welcomed the establishment of a national medical service in tune with their party’s pledge to provide a universal national health service. One of them, Arthur Greenwood, author of the play Love on the Dole, referred to the eugenic advantages of improving the maternity care of mothers:

… what this nation may in future lack in numbers, it ought to be the aim of statesmanship to make up in quality. That has a very distinct bearing upon the problem of maternal well-being.

As Susan Williams has pointed out, it was the first time that the principles of a state medical service had been put into effect, scotching the myth that the NHS sprang to life fully formed in 1948 as the brainchild of Aneurin Bevan (see the caption above). Nevertheless, the relationship between poverty and infant mortality was even clearer. In Coventry, although the rate of infant deaths at the beginning of the interwar period, 92 per thousand, was lower than in many other major West Midland towns and cities, it was still far too high. The vital statistics taken from an average of the seven years ending 1931 showed an overall death-rate of 12.1 for England and Wales as a whole, compared with 11.6 for Birmingham and 6.5 for Bournville, Cadbury’s ‘model village’ area of the second city. Infant mortality rates for England and Wales over the same period were 69, for Birmingham 72 and for Bournville 56. In the earliest of these years, the heights and weights of Bournville children were compared with one of the children of one of the more deprived areas of Birmingham, and the Bournville children were found to be between two to four inches taller and between four and nine pounds heavier.

More than a decade later, a survey carried out on behalf of the Birmingham Social Survey Committee in 1939 was concerned with the relationship between poverty and the size of families on a new housing estate in one of the city’s poorest suburbs, Kingstanding. It found that, at a time when the volume of both employment and earnings were higher than ever before in Birmingham’s history, fourteen percent of the 5,300 families with dependent children on the estate had insufficient income to buy the minimum diet prescribed by the British Medical Association (B.M.A.). This meant that one-third of the children on the estate were living in poverty. The investigators separated these families into groups according to the number of dependent children they had. They found that whilst only five percent of the families with one or two children under fourteen were in poverty, forty percent of the families with three or more dependent children were below the minimum line.

Across the country as a whole, although contraception was not readily available, it was becoming widespread, thanks to the work of the Marie Stopes clinics. Many married couples across Britain were using some method to prevent pregnancy. As a result, families were declining in size, leading to widespread fears of a shrinking population. Eugenicists warned of a decline in the country’s ‘human stock’, as the families with many children tended to be from the poorer working class. One of the motivations behind Marie Stopes’ publicising of the effects of the benefits of contraception was the eugenicist belief in the necessity of limiting the ‘poor quality’ offspring of this class. Despite Stopes’s efforts, there were still large families in solidly working-class towns and poorer districts of London and cities such as Birmingham and Coventry. Margery Spring-Rice, the pioneering social reformer, studied the lives of 1,250 mothers in these districts for her book, Working-Class Wives. Alongside the poverty and hardship, she drew attention to the number of pregnancies the women endured. Nearly five was the average, but a third of those she studied had six or more confinements, which led to large families, despite the high rates of infant mortality. In 1936, for every thousand births, fifty-six babies were dead before the age of one, compared with fewer than five per thousand today. Only half of the poorer families Margery Spring-Rice researched used any form of birth control.

Oral evidence for Coventry reveals how a group of self-organised working-class women determined to combat this ‘social ill’ through their practical involvement with mothers and children in its poorer, but growing suburbs. Six members of the Women’s Cooperative Guild were elected to the City Council between the wars, lobbying powerfully for the expansion of Maternity and Child Welfare clinics. Cooperative guilds-women also became voluntary workers in these clinics as they were established by independent committees in the expanding city. A daughter of one of these women, interviewed in the mid-1980s, had fond memories of her mother’s work in a voluntary clinic. She recalled that, as a twelve-year-old, she had helped her mother tear old sheets into strips to make the ‘belly bindings’ which had formed parts of the contents of maternity bags issued to mothers in need. In 1935, Alderman Mrs Hughes spoke to Lower Stoke Branch of the wonderful way our guilds-women have taken to the Maternity and Child Welfare work, a new clinic having been opened at Radford, staffed with guilds-women. 

Right up until the reorganisation of health services into the NHS in 1948, voluntary workers played a large part in Maternity and Child Welfare work in the city. During this period there was only one clinic administered by the City Council, although after the 1929 Local Government Act it did provide medical and nursing staff for the voluntary clinics. Statistics showing the number of children attending clinics (above) provide evidence of the extent of the voluntary commitment. Proximity was probably the biggest factor in the popularity of the voluntary clinics for they were held in church halls and similar buildings in residential areas, whereas the municipal clinic was held in the city centre. The attitude of the volunteers at the clinics may also have been important. As well as being deterred by personal difficulties such as the inability to afford to pay the fare to a centre or to attend at awkward hours, ‘poor people’ may also have been put off by a harsh or wooden administration or unacceptable personnel. These problems could be overcome by the use of voluntary workers who had both a genuine concern for the mothers and a thorough understanding of their problems.

Ivy Cowdrill was involved both in the establishment and the day-to-day administration of a clinic which was opened in Tile Hill in 1937. Her account of her work shows that when voluntary workers were part of the community in which a clinic was established they had a shared experience which helped them to understand the mother’s problems. She begins with an explanation of the circumstances in which her local clinic was opened:

… they were starting to build up here … and the people used to come along the lane here … it was all fields then … They (the mothers) used to go down with the prams all the way to Gulson Road (the municipal clinic in the city centre) to get the cheap food … I used to feel sorry for them. Well, we all did. And Pearl Hyde talked to us about it and asked if we’d help her. We certainly would! … There were several of us in … the Coop Guild … We talked about it at the Guild but it was when Pearl started to come round that we got to talk about it more.

Pearl Hyde was the Labour Party candidate for the ward. Although she did not win the seat in the 1937 municipal elections in which the Party won control of the Council, she was successful shortly afterwards in a by-election in another ward. Due to her local government commitments and her work with the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, Pearl Hyde’s practical involvement with the clinic soon ceased but the enthusiasm of her followers remained and many of those originally involved were inspired to carry on until 1941 when ‘the (Ministry of) Health’ took over. Ivy Cowdrill’s testimony conveyed the enthusiasm and energy of the women involved:

We got talking about it and they all said they’d help … we used to go out every day. My daughter used to go with me, knocking on doors, enquiring … to see how many babies and who would come.

With the approval of the Ministry of Health and with professional personnel provided by the city council the clinic was opened in October 1937. Ivy Cowdrill went on to give a detailed description of activities at the clinic and the duties of voluntary workers:

We bought aluminium bowls and we used to put a clean piece of tissue paper in the bowl … to put the babies’ clothes in, by the side of every chair. We used to go early and do that before the clinic opened. And put everything ready and the scales … One would be weighing the toddlers this side and one the other side weighing the tiny babies. And we had a couple of nurses (health visitors) and a doctor. We had a doctor’s room. We used to take it in turns or it wouldn’t be fair or someone would have the dirty jobs all the while, washing the aluminium bowls out, washing the cups and saucers.

From the evidence in the local Medical Officer of Health reports it appears that the majority of voluntary clinics were organised in this way. The volunteers administered the clinics and were ancillary workers whilst the councils provided the health visitors and doctors. A criticism of voluntary clinics in this era was that voluntary workers were inclined to usurp the duties of the health visitors but there is no evidence that Coventry volunteers took over any of the health visitors’ educational or advisory duties. Indeed, they did not receive training in such matters. What many of them did have, however, was the experience of being mothers and that would qualify them as experts on baby matters in the eyes of many of the young mothers who attended the clinics. In this capacity, they passed on common sense advice and words of encouragement as they handled the babies. Not only were many of them experienced mothers, but most of them had experienced a similar lifestyle to the women who attended, and they spoke the same colloquial language.

The usual image of a voluntary worker is of a middle class ‘lady bountiful’, but in the thirties working class helpers were fairly common in baby clinics, in Coventry and elsewhere. They often had part-time jobs in the factories or in local hospitals as, for example, laundry workers. Although they might be more financially secure than many of the young mothers, many of them had endured periods of hardship themselves in younger days. Apart from the weighing of babies, the main tasks of a voluntary worker at a child welfare clinic centred around the sale of baby foods and food supplements. Here too their knowledge of working-class life was useful, as they were immediately aware when some of the mothers needed flexible arrangements regarding payment:

We used to sell Bemax, Marmite, Ovaltine and every food there was until the National Food came out; orange juice, vitamin pills, the lot … It was very big welfare. You can tell by the money we took ’cause the food was … very cheap … And the Ovaltine was only about a shilling … If anyone said, “I’ve no money”, I’d say, “We’ll get it”. I’d lend them the money and they’d bring it back here … And I’ve come home like a packed mule ’cause the soldiers’ wives used to have their money on a Monday and the clinic wasn’t till Thursday, so … they’d no money come Thursday … I used to bring the food home and they used to come here for it here … My husband used to shout “Shop!”

The volunteers were also aware of other needs among their clients. The concept of ‘welfare’ was extended and clinic attendance was made into a social occasion by the provision of tea and biscuits. Special social events, including day trips, were organised, and Cadbury’s donated bars of chocolate for the children for Christmas parties. The Coventry clinic seems to have been the sort of centre which could have developed into the type of women’s club advocated by Margery Spring-Rice of the Women’s Health Enquiry Committee in 1939. Such a centre would enable women to meet their fellows … form social ties … talk and laugh and eat food which they had not cooked themselves. The efforts made in this direction by the Tile Hill volunteers were appreciated by the women of the district throughout the thirties and early forties. Not only were the volunteers deeply committed to the work, but they also gained a great deal of satisfaction from what was, in effect, an extension of the traditional female role of nurturer within the private domain of the family. Ivy Cowdrill’s recollection typified this:

It was great. I loved it. Thursday was my day out … and I just lived for Thursday every week. You know it was so great to be involved in it … It wasn’t only working at the welfare, we was interested in the life of the children altogether. You seem to live for them really. You got so interested in it, it seemed to occupy your mind all the while.

Volunteers like Ivy Cowdrill made their mark by transferring the caring values of the private domain into the public one of the clinic and putting a human face on what was otherwise an impersonal service. The people who flooded into Coventry during the thirties, attracted by jobs in the new factories, were mainly young people. The proportion of the population aged over forty-five in the City was lower than almost anywhere else in Britain. The people had more consistent and better-remunerated work than in most other industrial areas and yet infant mortality remained high and old vested interests resisted the modernisation of medical services. The women of the Coop Guild, with little help from the State, set about tackling this problem and confronted it with zeal and zest until the onset of war and then the foundation of the National Health Service prepared the way for the bureaucratization of health care. Many of the ‘clinic activists’ gave up their positions with reluctance having hoped for a role for their voluntary work within the healthcare schemes devised by the state.

Oral testimony is also a crucial source of information about attitudes towards family life in the past. In many respects, Coventry interviewees might be speaking for members of working-class families of any industrial town in Britain. Peter Lynam’s article on Domestic Life in Coventry 1920-39 draws material from a wider study of Coventry car workers based on sixty interviews with couples from three generations. Most of the evidence was drawn from talking with the women who, apart from relatively short periods at work either just before marriage or during the second world war, spent most of their time on the domestic front. Many of those interviewed, although resident in Coventry for many decades, had spent their formative years in other towns and regions. Even those proud to have been born in the City were children of at least one parent who had come from outside. Marjorie Clark remarked of her own parents, for example:

Mother was a cook in service in Cheshire, and dad was an engineer, a toolroom man, in Altrincham … Dad came first, got a job in Coventry and got lodgings. Then mother followed and, of course, being in Coventry, as cook-housekeeper. And they got married in Coventry and stayed afterwards … They must have come to Coventry about 1906-1907, married about 1909 …

June Bream came as a very young child to Coventry in the early twenties. Her background displayed the peculiar characteristic shared by the families of tradesmen working in the motor industry at an early stage of its development:

I was born in Liverpool, in Wavertree, West Derby … My grandma had a boarding house in Southport and before I was born my father worked in Scotland … My father was an old coach-builder and in those days they had to travel to where the work was. So they had a big tool box and the man was known by his tool box whether he was a tradesman or not. And then after I was born my father moved down to Coventry, looking … for work. … after he’d been here a couple of years … the family moved down with him.

 

Housing was always a problem for working people but the flood of migrants into Coventry produced a housing shortage which lasted almost thirty years. Moreover, most of the housing was small and lacking in modern conveniences, prompting frequent attempts to find something better. It was unusual for those born in one house still to be living there a decade later. The family would move from rented accommodation according to the price charged for it and the space provided, taking into account added children or those leaving home on marriage, thus making payment for unused space an extravagance. Irregular employment or unforeseen adversity could prompt a move to more restricted but cheaper living space. Marjorie Clark described her family’s mid-thirties move to a ‘nicer house’:

We lived in a house in Kingston Road without a bathroom, just a two up, two down. Mother and dad wanted a house with a bathroom and we had a chance to move into a slightly larger house. That was the reason we moved into Queensland Avenue.

‘Two up, two down’ was the most common form of accommodation, even though many families had more than two children. Some older people lived in the old weavers’ or watchmakers’ houses with large windows and an extra floor that was one large room, originally a workshop. The Midland Daily Telegraph had been calling for three-bedroom houses to be built since 1919, as young families would grow and need more space. As it was, families with a number of children slept several to a bed in the back bedroom, with curtains dividing boys from girls, while parents slept in the front bedroom with the baby in the cot when required. Very large families would have older boys and girls sleeping in the downstairs back living room. In many homes, the front room would still be kept for special occasions. The usual furniture consisted of a large crockery cupboard, a dining table and set of chairs. By the mid-thirties, most families would also have a radio, and there might be a piano in the front room.

The home was ‘mother’s domain’. She did the cooking, washing and mending. Sometimes other family members – especially daughters – helped with the cooking and cleaning. Younger children were often assigned domestic tasks like swilling out the yard, polishing the fireplace, dusting mantelpieces, or polishing the ‘lino’ in the hall. A woman’s work was particularly laborious. Without washing machines, an exception in the thirties, washing clothes would take the best part of a day. Preparing meals also took time, and traditional mid-day dinner times for men and young workers in the family often involved them returning home from workplaces to eat cooked ‘dinners’, along with children of school age who were not entitled to free school meals. They would not be long out of the house before their evening meal was having to be planned and prepared. June Bream had to miss most of her last school year when she was thirteen because her mother was confined to bed after losing a baby. She had to look after her mother ill in bed, her father and two brothers and a sister. She went to school in the mornings one week, and the afternoons the next week, fitting her domestic duties in as best she could. When her father came home on a Friday night, wages night, she put her clean ‘piny’ on so that he could throw his wages in it. He told her, you’re the mother of the house … till your mother’s well now.

Although June missed some schooling due to her domestic responsibilities, an experience which was far from unique for girls of her age, the notion of the woman’s place being in the home was strongly reinforced by the education given to girls. June would normally have had lessons in sewing, cooking, and laundry, and in the senior, there was a specialist ‘housewifery’ teacher:

She used to teach you to be a housewife, a mother. They used to have this part (of the school) where it used to be like a house and you used to have old grates in it … and gas stoves where they were all black-leaded, and of course you had to do all that. … you had special times, and it was either cookery or washing and ironing … or housework. … you had to go in every room; you had a kitchen and a living room and a bedroom. And if you were doing cookery … you had to cook the meal in the morning and then the teacher and the rest of the class … used to stop for dinner and you used to have to wait on table. They showed you how to set the table.

Since most women stopped paid employment on marriage, the home became the focus for most women by their mid-twenties. Imelda Wintle remembered her mother’s working hours with appreciation:

She used to describe herself as a “poor old slave” … I mean she was on the go all the time. She used to do her own decorating and things like that, and cutting down clothes … and making do.

When money was tight, housewives would also take in washing, which they would also press and iron. Many Coventry housewives would also have a locally made Singer sewing machine, often received as a wedding gift, with which she would mend clothes as well as making clothes for the children. Most clothes were either made at home or by a local dressmaker or tailor. Many of the dressmakers would be ordinary housewives with a skill in dressmaking.

Sunday (afternoon) dinner was the best meal of the week, with the mother going personally to the butcher’s shop, knowing exactly what she was looking for. The week’s meals then followed a set pattern, with variations according to income. Kath Smith recalled:

Sundays we had roast, always … and of course we had the cold meat on Monday. And we always had … meat and potato pie on Tuesday. I suppose it could have been sausage, or something, on Wednesday or Thursday.  It was always fish on Friday and … a makeshift dinner on Saturday. It may be sometimes on a Saturday we would have fish ‘n’ chips instead of faggots and peas. … fish ‘n’ chips was thre’pence , tu’penny fish and a penny worth of chips … and on Sunday for tea we’d always have salmon and fruit and cream … a tin of salmon was eleven pence ha’penny and a tin of pineapple was five pence ha’penny …

The pattern was determined by other domestic tasks, like Tuesday being washday which meant the stew could be left to cook slowly and then finished off with pastry. Pay-day was usually on a Thursday or Friday, so the mid-week days often required ingenuity to keep the family going on shrinking resources. Feeding the breadwinner was the top priority, next came the children. The housewife often ate very little at these meals. Eva Shilton commented:

I’ve seen her eat bread and mustard, and she’d eat a sandwich of cabbage and things like that. Since, later on in life, I’ve mentioned it to her and she said, “Well, I couldn’t see you lot go without”. And she’d make do, she was a typical mother …heart and soul for her children … She didn’t like cooking but she would always cook for my dad because he liked the things we didn’t … I think with him having so much ill-health, when he was well she would look after him to keep him well.

The death of a parent was a dreadful experience for young children especially. A father’s death also meant the loss of the breadwinner. The family was in deep trouble unless older children were in employment, still single and part of the parental household. It often necessitated a move to cheaper accommodation and the mother’s quest for employment, at least cleaning work or taking in washing, or at best factory work, which was not well-paid where women were concerned because most female workers were young, single and cheap. The loss of a mother had its emotional impact and needed older members of the family to ‘rally round’. Vera Langford’s fiance was confronted with this situation when his mother died, having to return to Coventry from London to look after the younger children in a large family. It took him, his father and his elder brother to bring them up between them.

Industrial injury or recurrent illness suffered by a male breadwinner also led to a wife’s search for paid employment. Although fathers were ultimately responsible for disciplining children who misbehaved, mothers were usually responsible for nurturing ‘respectability’ and protecting the family’s reputation:

Well, we always classed ourselves as being respectable. “And don’t bring trouble home” and that kind of thing. I think if we had’ve done we would never have been able to enter the house again … my mother was like that … she meant it. She just wanted us all to be happy and respectable and live a decent life … and that was what we did; no one ever brought trouble to her …

In an immigrant family, relatives were not likely to be near at hand. In such circumstances, a family wedding was a major event. For native Coventrians, however, the city’s growth provided little reason to move and find work elsewhere, so local extended families gathered easily for wedding celebrations. Marriage was approached in a practical fashion. Vera Langford recalled her wedding at the Registry Office:

We hadn’t got any money for a big ‘do’. What we had got we kept, … we sort of spent on necessities … Just family.

Many couples started married life in inauspicious circumstances. The city’s motor industry provided many with a living, as many as it provided with spells of unemployment. Together with a number of other women, Marjorie Clark was made redundant from Standard Motors just six weeks before her wedding. Nonetheless, preparations for it had been going on for some time, so she was determined to go ahead with the celebrations:

We got engaged on New Year’s Day in 1937 and got married on New Year’s Day, 1938 … We saved enough for the deposit on the house, that was fifty pounds, … a lot of money then! … mother helped me in a lot of ways, even if it was only with a bottom drawer, that sort of thing. And for the year that I was engaged she had no money from me for my keep. I kept all my money … and saved every penny of it for the wedding and everything like that … It was a white wedding at an Anglican church and… it was bitterly cold … It was a very happy wedding … There was no reception, no photographer, no honeymoon because I was out of work and my husband was on short time … So my mother saved the turkey from Christmas, cooked it and we had that for the reception … at home. 

By 1939, Coventry car ownership was surpassed only by that of London. This increased mobility opened up new possibilities for travel. Cycles, motorcycles and sidecars were used particularly by young workers for some distance from the city with boyfriends or girlfriends. On the other hand, most women confined themselves to the home after marriage and some mothers rarely went out when the children were young. Mothers spent recreation time in the evening either sewing, knitting, making clothes, listening to the radio or reading. All this went on in the living room, keeping an eye on the children not yet in bed. Public houses in Coventry had long been the ‘marketplace of the working class’ and when work was erratic the companionship found in them might lead to information about which firms were hiring at their factory gates.  The dominance of engineering topics in pub discourse was the reason given by the head porter of J. B. Priestley’s hotel, during his stay in Coventry in 1933, for avoiding the city’s pubs:

You go into one of these pubs … All right. What do you hear? All about gears and magnetos and such-like. Honest. That’s right. They can’t talk about anything else here. Got motor cars on the brain, they have. I hardly ever go into a pub. I go home and have a read.

Matt Nelson, from a North-east mining community, remembered that it was taboo for a woman to enter a pub ‘up there’, as was also the case with pubs ‘down there’ in south Wales. In Coventry, however, wives might respectably join husbands in pubs or clubs, meeting others from the locality. However, for many from chapel-going working-class families who regarded themselves as ‘respectable’, they shared the views of the workers from the depressed areas, regarding pubs as ‘low dives’, not the sort of places that either they or their daughters should be found in. Priestley made a brief visit to the bar of his hotel, where a barmaid with an enormous bust and a wig was busy exchanging badinage with four friends, two male (drinking ‘Bass’) and two female (drinking Guinness):

“He did, didn’t he, Joe?”

“‘S ri’, ”

“Cor, he didn’t ever,”

“Well, you ask Florrie,”

“I don’t mean what you mean,”

” ‘s ri’ ”

“‘Ere, Joe you tell ‘er.”

Men and women would also go to the cinemas and theatres together and mothers sometimes went to ‘matinée’ film shows with female friends. Social circles were sometimes organised through local churches providing companions for women otherwise tied to the home, but mothers seemed to have little time to themselves: their ‘recreation’, such as it was, was often home-based and spent with the family, making clothes, baking cakes, and so on.

Although a number of the city’s firms had established recreation clubs by the late thirties which attracted large numbers of employees, very few women seemed to take up these opportunities. The Secretary of the Alfred Herbert Recreation Club, E. Thomas, observed in 1939 that a relatively small number of women were involved in club activities. The nature of women’s recreation at this period is not clear. Certainly, they constituted at least half of dancers, a large part, even a majority of cinema-goers and, at least in inner-city areas, a sizeable proportion of pub-goers. However, in addition to the domestic roles of married women, the practice of leaving work on marriage, either through a ‘marriage bar’ operated by the company they worked for, or through a choice made under familial and cultural pressure, excluded them from works’ clubs unless they were in the company of a husband who worked for the company. Married women were occasionally referred to in works magazines in recreational contexts, but it is not clear whether they were widows or were challenging the convention of ceasing to work after marriage. The involvement of unmarried women in works’ activities also presented something of an issue for employers like Courtaulds and London Laundry for whom recruitment and moral discipline among female employees was central to business efficiency.

When women workers did participate in works’ recreational activities, they were rarely given any control over their use of leisure facilities. The Alfred Herbert Recreation Club had no female members on its management committee until 1940 and the Magnet Club committee welcomed women only as representatives of all women’s sections such as women’s hockey. In part, this reflected the lack of women as foremen and skilled workers in these firms because it was from the ranks of these that the committee personnel were usually drawn. It is particularly noticeable that women were never chosen to represent activities that were evenly mixed, such as cycling and swimming. Firms’ magazines were always patronising towards women, and cartoons, jokes and pen-portraits cast them in subservient roles. Women’s pages were purely domestic in focus and rarely successful. For the most part, they did not celebrate the achievements of individual women workers, nor their collective activities. Therefore, they lacked the appeal that team news had for male workers.

Firms and clubs showed intermittent bursts of enthusiasm for encouraging women’s participation. In particular, many firms tried to capitalise on the keep-fit craze from the mid-thirties on , often under the auspices of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, mentioned in chapter one, since it had the attraction of providing women employees  with discipline and exercise at the same time, at little cost and in large numbers. Instructresses pointed out how it helped girls to enjoy life and work much better than before and that it was consistent with the belief that the success of the mass depends entirely on the individual. There is, however, no evidence that the League’s eugenic beliefs in the achievement of racial health and beauty by natural means were ever treated with any degree of seriousness in Coventry. Indeed, such initiatives met with varying success. The London Laundry branch of the Everywoman’s Health Movement folded after just over a year in 1939 through lack of support. It had never achieved a membership of more than twenty-five. The GEC Ladies’ Physical Culture Club, affiliated to the League of Health and Beauty, had over two hundred members in 1937 in two classes, but despite displays in Coventry, Birmingham and London, it experienced declining enthusiasm and finished after the outbreak of war.

Not all women’s recreational activities were doomed to failure, however, and there are several examples of autonomous women’s sections and activities providing sociability for employees over long periods. Women’s sports, even women’s soccer, common during the First World War, continued until the ending of munitions work and the dispersal of the hostel labour force in 1918-19. By 1930, the Magnet Club ran two women’s cricket teams and several departmental teams, although these came in for a certain amount of ridicule in The Loudspeaker. In 1932, there was the first of series of women’s cycling camps. The fashion for departmental outings had meant that trips such as that of the coil-winders and the assembly section at GEC were virtually all-women affairs, and women began holding their own annual dinners as early as 1928. It is not apparent, however, how such occasions related to women’s prospects of advancement at work or their status within the company, unlike the complex rituals of competitive displays at full staff dances.

The relationship between works social clubs and the recreation of the city as a whole was at its closest, and most beneficial to both parties, in the regular dances which were held on factory premises. Dances were already being put on by some of the city’s chief companies in 1921. There were only two commercial ballrooms, the Gaumont and the Rialto, in Coventry, so the factories provided the main alternative to church hall dances, and their dancehalls and ballrooms were far grander. They also had the specially sprung floors which were favoured by dancing enthusiasts. The dance craze was most popular among skilled manual workers and clerical staff, people who had served time and could afford to pay 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. for admission. For them, the refined, formalised ritual of the dance halls provided an appropriate setting for courtship and social aspiration.The halls banned drink, although men would go to the pubs first, and the doors were closed at 9.30 in order to exclude those who had drunk too much. Young women, who therefore arrived first, at about 8 p.m., would not tolerate men whose breath revealed that they had spent too much of the intervening time in the pub. Men were also expected to carry a second handkerchief for their right hand so that they didn’t soil their partner’s dresses, or inadvertently touch any exposed skin.

Dancing was enjoyed most by the young women, who spent time at home and work trying out the latest steps with sisters and friends, often to the radio or gramophone. The complexity of the dances of the thirties – foxtrots, waltzes, quicksteps and tangos, required tuition, and men needed to be confident of their dancing before they could be among the first to venture out onto the floor. Ability to dance was, therefore, an asset in successful courtship, and while many learnt from their sisters or other female acquaintances, others went to one of the city’s many dancing schools. There were beginners’ nights at the major ballrooms. The dance halls also offered camaraderie. Groups from different areas of town would rendezvous at set pitches in each dance hall, but courtship no doubt provided the basic motivation. Male toolroom employees met few women at work because they were segregated by skill and they rarely met the office and shop girls they aspired to marry. Courting couples were left to other areas of the dance floor where they would try to be lost to the group.

No doubt, there were some for whom the attraction of a particular hall lay in its resident dance band. The biggest firms’ hall, which most effectively escaped the canteen atmosphere and rivalled purpose-built commercial halls, was the GEC ballroom (shown below), often referred to as ‘The Connor’. Attendances were large, averaging over six hundred by 1936. Special occasions, in particular, the New Year’s Eve dances, drew massive audiences, as many as 1,350 in 1930. Attendances thereafter were limited to eight hundred, and in 1937 a second dance was organised for New Year’s Day, to accommodate the 750 dancers who had been unable to get tickets for the previous night.

 

This ‘new leisure’ was the subject of many contemporary social investigations and surveys conducted by organisations such as the Pilgrim Trust and the NCSS. Following his visit to Coventry in January 1939, Sir William Deedes wrote to its local Employment Exchange Officer, Philip Handley, to express his alarm at what he referred to as a lack of social and recreational provision in the form of community centres, boys’ clubs, churches and hostels. His distaste for working class preferences in leisure activities is clear from the following extract from his subsequent report, which he attached to his letter:

Cinemas are thronged and on a Saturday afternoon queues ‘a quarter-mile-long’ and mainly of young people are to be seen. I was informed that on Saturday and Sunday nights also Road Houses within a twenty-mile radius of Coventry are full of young people dancing and entertaining themselves. The night I was there a small road house four miles out of Coventry had fifty cars and four charabancs outside and some three hundred persons inside dancing. A football match the same afternoon was attended by thirty thousand to forty thousand people and ‘the Dogs’, I am told, never fail to draw large numbers… Is it proper to ask oneself whether, if there were better facilities for playing games, both out and indoor, use would be made of them? An answer to the question cannot be given in Coventry because the facilities are not there!

Handley might have replied that Deedes seemed to have ignored the facilities provided by local firms in making this assertion, but we do not have such a letter. Deedes may have had in mind the ‘model’ which Bournville in Birmingham provided in terms of recreational provision. J. B. Priestley, who visited Cadbury’s Birmingham ‘village’ in 1933, pointed out that they had long been in the top class of the school of benevolent and paternal employers. Their workers had been provided with magnificent recreation grounds and sports pavilions, with a large concert hall in the factory itself, where midday concerts are given, with dining-rooms, recreation-rooms, and drama facilities. The factory was almost as busy in the evenings as it was in the daytime, with games, music, lectures, classes, plays, hobbies, conferences all keeping the place in full swing. The membership of the various clubs and societies ran to several thousand for whom no form of self-improvement, except those that have their base in some extreme form of economic revolution, was denied. The only form of pastime which was precluded was the ancient one of getting drunk. The factory had all the facilities for leading a full and happy life and, he asserted, what progressive people all over the world are demanding for humanity was what the Cadbury workers already had. Those in charge insisted that the firm used no compulsion whatever and never moved to provide anything until it knew that there was a real demand for it. He added his conviction that…

 … whether all this is right or wrong, the employers themselves have acted in good faith … Is it right or wrong? … It is easy for some academic person, who has never spent an hour in a factory and does not really know how people live, to condemn it on philosophical grounds … Now there is no getting away from the fact that here, owing to this system of paternal employment, are factory workers who have better conditions, more security, and infinitely better chances leading a decent and happy life, than nearly all such factory workers elsewhere … who worked in bad conditions, who had no security, and whose employers did not care a rap if their people drink themselves silly in their leisure … No factory workers in Europe have ever been better off than these people. 

Despite this accolade, however, Priestley has his doubts as to whether, taking a longer view, it was good for people to see the factory where they worked as the centre of their whole lives, even if it offered them so much. A worker whose whole life was centred on the factory might, he suggested, enjoy many unusual luxuries, but one obvious ‘luxury’ they could not enjoy was a spirit of independence. Pensions and bonuses, works councils, factory publications, entertainments and dinners,  garden-parties and outings, all organised by the firm, were all very well, but they could easily create an atmosphere injurious to the personal growth and ‘self-help’ of the men and women working for the firm. Although he conceded that workers in such places as Bournville had so many solid benefits conferred upon them that they were better placed than the ordinary factory worker, who is probably not so content at either work or play, …

On the other hand, I for one would infinitely prefer to see workers combining to provide these benefits, or a reasonable proportion of them, for themselves, to see them forming associations far removed from the factory, to see them using their leisure, and demanding its increase, not as favoured employees but as citizens, free men and women.   

In reality, the ‘new leisure’ cut across class and regional demarcations, especially in Coventry, where it mixed, mingled and blended with older forms of leisure, some of which had migrated with their adherents from the older industrial areas. There were, evidently, many in key positions within the social service movement in both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ industrial areas, who regarded the development of mass, commercial forms of entertainment  as undermining their patronage, and when these critics wrote of the lack of leisure provision or of the absence of a communal ethos, they were writing from an ‘establishment’ perspective. Meanwhile, the Coventrian workers themselves, whether newcomers or ‘established’ citizens, both at work and at play, were re-modelling and re-making their city in their own image and shaking off the bonds of both patronage and paternalism.

The reactions of the migrants themselves to the social life of the new industry areas, documented in previous chapters, are more relevant in comprehending the wider cultural factors at work within the processes of migration and settlement. In Coventry, the streets themselves, the neighbourhoods and districts reflected the migration of labour. Some areas were completely cosmopolitan in this respect, with neighbours from all parts of the Midlands and North of England, Scotland and Ireland. In other neighbourhoods, there were concentrations of certain nationalities, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. Certainly, from the mid-1930s on, Coventry was a stronghold of the affluent worker. The roast every Sunday, the buying of your own house, early TV and car ownership all bear witness to rising living standards. Not everyone experienced the improvement in quite the same way or to the same degree, but enough did for it to constitute a trend. From the late thirties onwards, and especially with the onset of war and after, married women found that they had jobs to go to. Women began, increasingly, to have dual roles, providing the family with two wage packets, allowing many to enjoy a short period of affluence before the privations of war and the Blitz hit home.

Women at War in Coventry:

While the main onslaught of the ‘Blitz’ of the autumn of 1940 was directed at the capital, other ports and cities were subjected to severe attacks over short, concentrated periods, or to single raids. The ten-hour incendiary and explosive blitz upon Coventry caused tremendous damage, overnight, in November 1940 (I have written more extensively about this elsewhere on this site). Most of the ‘inner’ city’s factories sustained some damage, with the Daimler factory, the GEC and British Thomson Houston being badly hit. In 1981, Muriel Jones, then a young worker in the city, recalled her experience of that night:

 The night of the November Blitz, I was on day shift with my sister and two friends. Just as we left work the siren sounded so we ran as fast as we could, hoping to get to our digs or a shelter. One of my friends stopped along the road to say goodbye to her sailor boyfriend; it was their last goodbye, they were never seen again. We made it to one of the four shelters, and ours was the only one that escaped the bombs, all the other occupants were killed. About sixty people. After the raid we had to dig ourselves out as best we could, to face all the damage. Around us our digs were gone along with a lot more houses. Our landlady and husband with them, although they were in a garden shelter.

 Coventry,  14 November 1940

“Those of us who lost everything in the war will never forget. We don’t need anniversaries and war films and books, we just remember … everything seemed so vast, so much happened, we thought that nothing more could happen. We often believed that things would never come right again.”

– Two elderly ladies who had survived the blitz, interviewed by The Coventry Standard on the twentieth anniversary of the raid.

“Please don’t let it die Coventry. We managed to survive then when all the odds were against us. We can do it now if we try.”

 – A ‘young lady’ interviewed by The Coventry Evening Telegraph in 1980, about the previous evening’s television documentary.

 

Sources:

Denys Blakeway (2010), The Last Dance: 1936: The Year Our Lives Changed. London: John Murray.

Mark Abrams (1945), The Condition of the British People, 1911-1945: A Study prepared for The Fabian Society. London: Victor Gollancz.

J. B. Priestley (1938), English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933. Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (eds.) (1986), Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry: Cryfield Press.

John Gorman (1980), To Build Jerusalem: A Photographic Remembrance of British Working Class Life, 1875-1950. London: Scorpion Publications.

Asa Briggs, et.al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

René Cutforth (1976),  Later Than We Thought: A Portrait of the Thirties. Newton Abbott: David & Charles.

Andrew J. Chandler (1988), ‘The Re-Making of a Working Class: Migration from the South Wales Coalfield to the New Industry Areas of the Midlands, c. 1920-40. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cardiff.