'It’s a funny country...'
Charles Ferrall & Dougal McNeill, Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics
Cambridge University Press, 236pp, £55.00, ISBN 9781107100039
reviewed by David Renton
The General Strike of 1926 has entered collective memory as a decisive moment in British industrial history. It was the the turning point when the two great strike waves which sit on either side of the first world war came to an end. After periods of ruling-class concession and then hostility it was the occasion when it became clear that there was not going to be a British counterpart to the Russian Revolution of 1917. All this history is often summarised in the one fact that everyone knows about the General Strike: that the strikers, far from rioting, played football with the police.
Now in Plymouth, it may be true, some impromptu games were organised along these lines but elsewhere there was no pretence that the events of 1926 were peaceful. The government sent volunteers to the Tyne to unload food at the docks. The existing stevedores, organised in the General and Municipal Workers’ Union and with their leadership’s consent to work given the vital nature of their duties, refused to continue working alongside non-union labour and struck. The government, panicked by this local escalation, sent destroyers and a submarine to force the dockers back to work. Instead, they stayed out and the government had to back down. Two battleships and three destroyers were sent to the Mersey, and there was fighting between strikers and scabs at Liverpool’s tram and bus depots.
Across Britain, the government side was solidly organised. Hundreds of thousands of people volunteered as strike-breakers, cementing an anti-socialist consciousness that would dominate the middle class for the next 20 years. The various protests that took place during the nine days of the strike, and their policing, culminated in jail terms for some 400 members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The strike ended in union defeat but where workers were called out on strike, they struck solidly. It was the leaders, not the men, who sued for peace. And their compromise came at a price: the miners remaining out on strike for a further six months until they were starved – literally starved – back to work. More than 60 years had to pass until strike figures again fellow to the nadir they reached in 1927.
Charles Ferrall and Douglal McNeill’s impressive book studies the accounts of the strike that appeared in contemporary fiction, ranging from the jolly escapades of middle-class strikebreakers attacking pro-strike marches that can be found in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), to the vision of working-class engagement and female independence that the socialist MP, Ellen Wilkinson, portrayed in her novel Clash (1929). Other significant authors whose accounts of 1926 are studied in this book include Henry Williamson, HG Wells, GK Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, C. Day Lewis and Storm Jameson.
Not all of these writers were sympathetic to the strike or to its working class protagonists. Even some of those you might have expected to identify with the strike show, on careful reading, to have played a different part. In one of the most compelling sections, Ferrall and McNeill read carefully Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.’ The conventional approach to MacDiarmid is to label him a Marxist, based on his three-decades long membership of the Communist Party. But even if we see him principally as a political writer, his approach was considerably more complex than his avowed Communism suggests. Also an admirer of Mussolini, MacDiarmid hoped on the outbreak of war in 1939 for an Axis victory, and his decision to join the Communists Ferrall and McNeill portray as a step right given the political milieu into which he had been born. MacDiarmid’s response to 1926 was to write into ‘A Drunk Man’ a ‘Ballad of the General Strike.’ This section of the poem is a highly abstract account of a rose growing and blooming, only then to wither. Ferrall and McNeill read MacDiarmid’s poem as an individualist, elitist and racialised mourning not for the defeat of the strike, but for its failure to create a cadre of authoritarian revolutionaries.
Immediately following their treatment of MacDiarmid, Ferrall and McNeill offer a much more positive reading of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's three-novel trilogy, A Scots Quair, which they present as perhaps the single most sophisticated work of literature to engage with 1926. ‘Dialogical, exploratory and playful,’ they relish the books' modernism, its distrust of empty political answers, and its willingness to raise or sink its character's ambitions in a series of personal traumas spinning out from May 1926.
The best-known novel to be shaped by the strike is DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Lawrence was in Italy at the start of the year but returned in July and was in Nottingham between August and September 1926. In his correspondence, Lawrence predicted that the miners’ bitterness towards the owners would lead to further struggle and in due course some kind of uprising: ‘For the first time, the iron seems to be entering the soul – or consciousness – of the workers ... It’s a funny country – so safe, and so kindly. And yet, way down, a certain ruthlessness.’ He left the county before the miners were driven forced back, and began work on Lady Chatterley a month later, with the miners isolated but not yet finally defeated. The book was to some extent de-politicised through successive drafts; in the first, the prototype for Mellors is a prominent Communist. Ferrall and McNeill suggest that Lawrence’s bitterness towards the betrayal of the strike interacted with his own declining ill health to create the bleak novel we know.
1926 left behind no celebrated work of proletarian advance, no Germinal, no Les Misérables, no Grapes of Wrath. But it has left its mark on history. The maps of the general election we have just lived through show Labour retreating to its two core constituencies, London and the former mining villages. In Scotland, we have witnessed the most one-sided election in British history, with the Scottish National Party winning 56 of the 59 seats available. Its leader Nicola Sturgeon was asked, mid-election, to name her favourite novel. She chose Gibbon's A Scots Quair.
Now in Plymouth, it may be true, some impromptu games were organised along these lines but elsewhere there was no pretence that the events of 1926 were peaceful. The government sent volunteers to the Tyne to unload food at the docks. The existing stevedores, organised in the General and Municipal Workers’ Union and with their leadership’s consent to work given the vital nature of their duties, refused to continue working alongside non-union labour and struck. The government, panicked by this local escalation, sent destroyers and a submarine to force the dockers back to work. Instead, they stayed out and the government had to back down. Two battleships and three destroyers were sent to the Mersey, and there was fighting between strikers and scabs at Liverpool’s tram and bus depots.
Across Britain, the government side was solidly organised. Hundreds of thousands of people volunteered as strike-breakers, cementing an anti-socialist consciousness that would dominate the middle class for the next 20 years. The various protests that took place during the nine days of the strike, and their policing, culminated in jail terms for some 400 members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The strike ended in union defeat but where workers were called out on strike, they struck solidly. It was the leaders, not the men, who sued for peace. And their compromise came at a price: the miners remaining out on strike for a further six months until they were starved – literally starved – back to work. More than 60 years had to pass until strike figures again fellow to the nadir they reached in 1927.
Charles Ferrall and Douglal McNeill’s impressive book studies the accounts of the strike that appeared in contemporary fiction, ranging from the jolly escapades of middle-class strikebreakers attacking pro-strike marches that can be found in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), to the vision of working-class engagement and female independence that the socialist MP, Ellen Wilkinson, portrayed in her novel Clash (1929). Other significant authors whose accounts of 1926 are studied in this book include Henry Williamson, HG Wells, GK Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, C. Day Lewis and Storm Jameson.
Not all of these writers were sympathetic to the strike or to its working class protagonists. Even some of those you might have expected to identify with the strike show, on careful reading, to have played a different part. In one of the most compelling sections, Ferrall and McNeill read carefully Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.’ The conventional approach to MacDiarmid is to label him a Marxist, based on his three-decades long membership of the Communist Party. But even if we see him principally as a political writer, his approach was considerably more complex than his avowed Communism suggests. Also an admirer of Mussolini, MacDiarmid hoped on the outbreak of war in 1939 for an Axis victory, and his decision to join the Communists Ferrall and McNeill portray as a step right given the political milieu into which he had been born. MacDiarmid’s response to 1926 was to write into ‘A Drunk Man’ a ‘Ballad of the General Strike.’ This section of the poem is a highly abstract account of a rose growing and blooming, only then to wither. Ferrall and McNeill read MacDiarmid’s poem as an individualist, elitist and racialised mourning not for the defeat of the strike, but for its failure to create a cadre of authoritarian revolutionaries.
Immediately following their treatment of MacDiarmid, Ferrall and McNeill offer a much more positive reading of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's three-novel trilogy, A Scots Quair, which they present as perhaps the single most sophisticated work of literature to engage with 1926. ‘Dialogical, exploratory and playful,’ they relish the books' modernism, its distrust of empty political answers, and its willingness to raise or sink its character's ambitions in a series of personal traumas spinning out from May 1926.
The best-known novel to be shaped by the strike is DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Lawrence was in Italy at the start of the year but returned in July and was in Nottingham between August and September 1926. In his correspondence, Lawrence predicted that the miners’ bitterness towards the owners would lead to further struggle and in due course some kind of uprising: ‘For the first time, the iron seems to be entering the soul – or consciousness – of the workers ... It’s a funny country – so safe, and so kindly. And yet, way down, a certain ruthlessness.’ He left the county before the miners were driven forced back, and began work on Lady Chatterley a month later, with the miners isolated but not yet finally defeated. The book was to some extent de-politicised through successive drafts; in the first, the prototype for Mellors is a prominent Communist. Ferrall and McNeill suggest that Lawrence’s bitterness towards the betrayal of the strike interacted with his own declining ill health to create the bleak novel we know.
1926 left behind no celebrated work of proletarian advance, no Germinal, no Les Misérables, no Grapes of Wrath. But it has left its mark on history. The maps of the general election we have just lived through show Labour retreating to its two core constituencies, London and the former mining villages. In Scotland, we have witnessed the most one-sided election in British history, with the Scottish National Party winning 56 of the 59 seats available. Its leader Nicola Sturgeon was asked, mid-election, to name her favourite novel. She chose Gibbon's A Scots Quair.