Not all councilors were as enthused as Bevin or Cook. Jimmy Thomas, the former engine driver and general secretary of the National Union of Railway Workers (NUR), opposed the strike from the beginning and worked to resolve it. The TUC then entered the strike with a current of opposition within it. This was widespread in the upper echelons of many trade unions, but also in the Labour Party and the labor movement. Still, the majority of the leadership supported the call for action with a reluctance — in sharp contrast to the rank and file, where support for the strike was overwhelming.
The council’s plan was to bring the unions out in waves, upping pressure on the government with each wave. The first day the council called out the “big battalions,” the most powerful unions — transportation workers, printers, iron and steel workers, metal workers, chemical workers, and building workers, except hospital and housing work. That meant no trains, no bus service, no newspapers, no building, and no power workers.
Nowhere were there significant sections of the class that defied the call; rather, there were millions of trade-union members who waited anxiously to be called out.
The second wave — general engineering, textiles, and telephones, plus the workers in the shipyards of the Clyde, the Tyne, the Wear, Hull, and Belfast — brought out another half million, so that at its high point, a million and a half million workers were on strike, with additional waves held back.
It was a magnificent display of solidarity. Nowhere were there significant sections of the class that defied the call; rather, there were millions of trade-union members who waited anxiously to be called out. And there were hundreds of thousands of unorganized itching to join in, despite the high levels of unemployment and deep poverty in industrial cities.
Against this, the government had mobilized the police and put in place a militia of special constables, volunteers to maintain order in the street. Then the army. The government’s appeals to patriotism brought out thousands of middle-class volunteers, individuals who were held up as the true heroes in the conflict. Their efforts are celebrated to this day: the university men who attempted to drive buses and work on the docks (“the 400 Cambridge undergrads”) or the aristocratic women (such as Lady Astor) who took on an array of charitable initiatives.
This was of little importance in comparison to the spectacle of the workers, in their millions. More important were the tens of thousands of police and the army — the police were ubiquitous; the army’s presence seen in the tanks that lumbered along cobblestone streets and the machine gun nests that guarded factory gates. This the government made clear was also the face of “the country.”
Cultural historians have emphasized the peacefulness of the strike, even the passivity of strikers. It was an “English strike.” There is some truth in this: the strike was not an insurrection. It was not the mass strike Rosa Luxemburg celebrated. But it was felt in every city and town in Britain.
The strike began with silence: no roar from the great mills; buses sat quietly in their yards. The train stations were empty, free of the clamor of travelers and no clouds of choking morning smoke. Subways were not in service, newspaper stalls were bare, and there were no hawking daily papers. The London docks and the East End of London were quiet.
The picket lines were generally orderly; the strike was well-organized in the localities and strikers did play football with the police. The General Council wanted it this way, advising strike leaders: “Our task is to keep the strike steady and quiet. We must not be provocative, our line is to be dignified, calm in our own strength to make our statements forcibly but with moderation of language.”
The unions’ leaders, national and local, were committed to law and order and the Constitution. The communists, relatively few in number, did little to challenge the strike leaders. So there was no real strategy on the ground where the strikers were; they could be militant and often were, mainly in defiance of union officers from the General Council on down.
On day one of the strike, Laybourn reports that crowds of strikers blocked the Blackwall Tunnel, the connection between East London and Greenwich, stopping traffic and forcing drivers to walk. The police had to make baton charges to open the tunnel, leading to casualties on both sides and dozens taken to Poplar Hospital. Canning Town in East London saw disturbances as crowds stopped cars and smashed engines.
All this became not so unusual. And a survey of “disturbances” produces a somewhat different picture of the strike from below. The docks of London and Liverpool were scenes of intense picketing and police violence from the start. There were tremendous battles in Southwark where young people would wait on rooftops of tenement buildings along the New Kent Road for an opportunity to rain stones and bottles down on the heads of the specials.
The trains were targeted in railway centers throughout the country. In Crewe and York, shots were fired at passing trains. The Flying Scotsman, the wonder of British rail and its most important express, was derailed. Along the south coast, there were “riots” (the term riot was used to describe any place where strikers fought to defend their picket lines) in Southsea, Portsmouth, and Swansea.
In Yorkshire and the Northeast, centers of the miners’ strike, iron and steel in Sheffield were idled, as well as in Middlesbrough. In Newcastle, where for centuries coal had been shipped out, the Tyne was quiet. Strikers stopped buses in Leeds and Bradford and threw rocks at the police who tried to protect them. In Doncaster, crowds as large as a thousand blocked traffic, effectively shutting down the city center.
At the local level, the strikers in their communities showed creativity and solidarity. But the leaders had no strategy to make use of this.
The Home secretary reported 1,500 arrests under the Emergency Regulations Acts — not a large number but significant in the working-class centers where they were not acceptable. In Edinburgh and Glasgow, the police stations were the scenes of regular, angry protest. At York, a crowd tried to release a prisoner. And in Preston, a crowd of five thousand tried to storm the police station, only to be beaten back by repeated charges of baton-swinging police.
On days seven and eight of the strike, there were no reports of it being broken, of back-to-work movements, or a decline in picket-line militancy. On the contrary, strike activity seemed on the uptick. In London alone, a dozen places a day were marked by street battles between police and strikers. As far as can be judged, wrote Cole, “there was no reasonable doubt that the efficiency and effectiveness of the strike were steadily increasing right up to the very end.”
Yet on day nine, the General Council ordered the strikers back to work. And now one of the great strikes of the time is mostly remembered as a catastrophe. “Nothing whatever had been secured by the greatest effort the British workers had ever made.”