Baldwin (15 page)

That day he had three crucial meetings, one with the miners in the morning, a second with the owners in the early evening, and a third with the TUC after dinner. He did not accomplish much, beyond making it clear to the owners that, in return for their agreement to a national minimum, he would abandon Samuel and give them the eight-hour day; but he was thought to have acquitted himself well.

There was a continuing round of meetings, but no serious approach to a formula of settlement until late on the following Saturday night. Baldwin, accompanied by Birkenhead and Steel-Maitland, then met four representatives of the TUC at 11
p.m. By 1.15 a loose formula for the withdrawal of the strike notices, the continuation of the subsidy for a fortnight and a settlement ‘on the lines of the [Samuel] Report’ within this period had been worked out. J. H. Thomas, at least, went home that night convinced that agreement was in sight and the strike was off. The TUC representatives were to consult both their General Council and the miners the next morning. As the formula clearly involved some reduction in wages, this was much more than a formality. But Thomas’s confidence was not foolish. He knew the mood of the TUC, his own prowess at wheedling persuasion, and the need of the miners for outside support.

What he did not know was that the Government, by the next day, would be anxious to retreat from the formula, and that the miners’ executive, having dispersed itself from London, would give them all day in which to do so. Baldwin slept badly and briefly, uncertain about the wisdom or precision of his nocturnal negotiations. When he emerged the next morning he found not uncertainty but widespread consternation. His own staff were dismayed. The Chief Whip thought the party would revolt. Steel-Maitland regretted his share in the discussions. When the Cabinet met at noon, Baldwin found himself sharing a defensive corner with Birkenhead. Hankey told Tom Jones that he had never before witnessed a Cabinet scene like it. ‘All who were not present when [the formula] was agreed reacted in the same way against it, and felt that it would be read by the whole country as a capitulation on the part of the Government to the threat of a General Strike.’
¹⁰

The Cabinet met twice again before dinner time, and on each occasion moved themselves into a harder position. By the time that Baldwin again met the TUC representatives, at 9 p.m., he was, by the will of the Cabinet, a long way back from the position of the previous night, and embarrassed by the movement. To extricate himself he had to fasten on the strike notices which the TUC had sent out and demand their unconditional withdrawal as a prelude to further negotiations. By the time
the miners arrived at 11.30, there was nothing urgent to discuss with them. Then came the news that the
Daily Mail
compositors had refused to set an offending leading article. Joynson-Hicks announced this to the Cabinet as though it were the end of constitutional government. The Cabinet in turn chose to treat it as the beginning of the General Strike.
⁸
At 1.15 a.m. (becoming a favourite time) Baldwin again saw the TUC and ‘with great regret’ in effect dismissed them.

The next day there were only perfunctory contacts. Baldwin spoke in the House of Commons in the afternoon, conciliatory in form, firm in substance. The strike was a challenge to constitutional government. As such it must be resolutely resisted. It began on Tuesday morning, 4 May. The Prime Minister greeted the day in a much calmer mood than he had forty-eight hours before. He had got himself into a difficult position and had escaped with more luck than dignity. He had not avoided a strike, which was half his inclination, but he had preserved a reasonably favourable position, both for himself and for resistance.

The General Strike lasted eight days. Baldwin’s main rôle was to keep his colleagues and the country as calm as possible. Churchill was the principal firebrand. Baldwin shunted him to the editorship of the official
British Gazette,
’to stop him doing worse things’, but at the same time kept control over what was published by the remarkable feat of giving Davidson, a junior minister at the Admiralty, some real power of censorship over what the Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote. He declined to take the Home Secretary’s advice to close down the
Daily Herald,
and declined also to allow Churchill to take over the BBC. This was an act of the most palpable commonsense, for John Reith,
^•
the Manager, was willing to give the cloak of
independence to everything that the Government wanted. He even postponed, on his own responsibility, a proposal for a mediatory broadcast by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Randall Davidson), which the Government itself would have found very difficult to forbid. On at least one issue, however, Baldwin failed to give any firm moderate lead. This was the proposal to rush punitive trade union legislation through Parliament while the strike was in progress. The Cabinet came very near to such a decision. Jones, although supported by most official opinion, failed for once to influence Baldwin directly. Eventually, a combination of the King and Conservative backbench opinion, both more cautious than the Prime Minister, secured a deflection. The legislation was postponed for nearly a year.

In his own direct wireless appeal to the public Baldwin applied more characteristic tactics. He did not broadcast himself until the Saturday evening (8 May), and then used much less provocative language than most of his colleagues would have chosen. The end even reads rather plaintively, but was no doubt saved by his resonant broadcasting voice:

I am a man of peace. I am longing, and looking and praying for peace. But I will not surrender the safety and the security of the British Constitution. It placed me in power eighteen months ago by the largest majority accorded to any party for many, many years. Have I done anything to forfeit that confidence? Cannot you trust me to ensure a square deal and to ensure even justice between man and man?

He stressed throughout the difference between the coal strike, which was industrial and could be negotiated, and the General Strike, which was aimed at the constitution and must be defeated unconditionally. But he interpreted defeat in a quiet way. ‘We must wait for the strike to wear itself out,’ was his private summary of his tactics.
¹¹
He did not have to wait very long. At midday on Wednesday, 12 May, the TUC surrendered. Baldwin said, ‘I thank God for your decision,’ and
applied himself to mediating in the coal dispute which continued independently.

At first he showed some energy, but as recalcitrance persisted on both sides this quickly exhausted itself. By the end of May he could see no way forward. Then he put through a bill to suspend for five years the Seven Hours Act, which had restricted maximum daily hours for the coal industry since 1919, following the Eight Hours Act of 1908. It was no solution (as well as being contrary to Samuel) and brought the miners no nearer to working any hours at all. But it gave the owners an unfortunate concession for the future. The Government, while proclaiming itself doctrinally reluctant to impose a settlement upon the industry, had caused Parliament to pronounce upon a major issue in the dispute. Although in return the Yorkshire owners were privately pushed off a proposal for a more grasping division of profits and wages, the Government refrained from balancing the bill by any enforcement of minimum wages or national arbitration.

By the second week in July Baldwin felt able to say nothing more constructive about the ten-week-old lock-out than ‘Leave it alone–we are all so tired.’ On 10 August Neville Chamberlain noted: ‘S.B. has suffered most from the strike; he too is worn out and has no spirit left, but he remains the one with the greatest influence in the country.’
¹²
On the latter point the King felt the same confidence, although less reluctantly, and reacted to it with some lack of consideration by more or less commanding Baldwin not to leave the country for his annual expedition to Aix. It was a pointless ‘command’, for Baldwin was on the edge of nervous collapse, irritable, complaining and, in the closer judgment of Jones, “entirely without resource”. The Downing Street secretaries circumvented the King by getting an haphazardly chosen doctor
⁹
(they had
previously tried fourteen others, all of whom were away) to come in and certify that the Prime Minister had to go. Baldwin left for Aix on 22 August, and stayed away until 15 September.

During this period Churchill took over the coal negotiations and displayed a vigour for settlement which had been entirely lacking in the Prime Minister. Also, and in sharp contrast with his attitude during the General Strike, he exhibited considerable sympathy for the miners. As his series of meetings progressed, some at Chartwell, some in London, there was even fear on the part of Jones and Davidson that he might get a settlement in the absence of the Prime Minister and thus damage Baldwin’s position. The fear was misplaced. Obduracy was too great. The Cabinet was stubborn as well as the owners. They both felt, rightly, that the miners were close to being starved into submission and saw little reason to interfere with this elegant process. The last possible moment for a negotiated settlement was in the third week of September. Churchill then wanted to coerce the owners into a national agreement and statutory arbitration. Baldwin was half with him, but was ‘suffering from sciatica and obviously did not know which way to turn in the midst of his conflicting advisers’.
¹³
The Cabinet turned them both down and decided to do nothing. Birkenhead said it was the most difficult decision since the evacuation of the Dardanelles, but that did not help much. The decision would probably have gone the other way had 100,000 men not already been back at work, mainly in the more prosperous East and West Midland areas.

The policy of inactivity had to be defended in the House of Commons in the following week. Baldwin did so flatly and uncomfortably. Churchill put a bolder and more sympathetic face upon his speech: ‘During the brilliant performance the P.M.’s face was turned towards the Official Gallery, and covered with one of his hands. He looked utterly wretched, much as Ramsay does when L.G. is on his legs.’
¹⁴
Thus, according to Jones, did Baldwin both reap the harvest of inactivity and exhibit an unusual burst of jealousy.

In October the Nottinghamshire miners formed a breakaway union and went back to work. In November the strike finally collapsed. In December the majority of the men were back at work, with lower wages, an eight-hour day, and with a substantial minority condemned to permanent unemployment. They were cowed and bitter, with the Miners’ Federation weakened for a decade. The national cost had been heavy. At a time when the national income was little more than £2 billion
¹⁰
a coal production loss of nearly £100 million and a total loss of nearly £250 million had been incurred. Whole communities were alienated and impoverished; a large part of the nation was left with a feeling halfway between guilt and unease; and Baldwin’s reputation as a statesman of sagacious moderation was badly dented. The General Strike was one thing. That he was widely felt to have handled well. He had calmly upheld the supremacy of the state. The coal strike was another. In dealing with that he failed to show sustained energy, or to make effective and impartial use of the authority of the state, the importance of which he had so insistently proclaimed in May.

On the other hand, at a heavy price, he had secured a substantial victory for the conservative forces in British life. He had decisively taken the edge off trade union power. The days lost in strikes rapidly fell to a much lower level than at any time since 1918. At the 1928 Trades Union Congress Cook and the other left-wing members were defeated by a majority of more than two to one. The so-called Mond-Turner talks, leading to little in themselves, but symbolizing a more cooperative approach, became possible. The transition to the trades unionism of the 1930s, to the Bevin-Citrine era of involvement in the processes of government, had begun. The trouble was that Baldwin did it by the methods he had foresworn and that his words and his style of appeal had become alienated from his actions. He went on talking of peace, but he had become a man who had allowed Britain’s major industry to be decimated and embittered.

Nineteen twenty-nine was necessarily an election year. The Cabinet had a full discussion of the date as early as October 1928, but left unresolved the issue of summer or autumn. Baldwin inclined to the earlier date, mainly because he always sustained himself throughout the wearisomeness of the political year by looking forward to a relaxed August and September. ‘We should be campaigning all through the holidays after a hard session,’ he commented gloomily on the October proposal.
¹
The winter and early spring brought bad by-election results from the Conservatives, but the earlier date was nevertheless decided upon. Polling day was 30 May.

Baldwin firmly believed that he would win. He realized that he was short on programme, but thought that his reputation as a moderate statesman, calmly if slowly steering the country in the right direction, would overcome that. The Liberals were strongest on policy. The Keynesian Yellow Book, fortified by a sharp and confident pamphlet,
We Can Conquer Unemployment,
gave them that. The Labour Party had Ramsay MacDonald’s voice and presence, the loyalty of much of the bunkered working class, and a manifesto which avoided both the advantages and disadvantages of precision. Baldwin had accepted the slogan of ‘Safety first’, made familiar by a Ministry of Transport motoring campaign and proposed to the Conservative Central Office by an advertising agency. With unemployment at 10 per cent it was hardly inspired. And he had to spend a good part of the campaign explaining that it meant caution and not complacency.
Nevertheless the campaign strengthened his optimism. He was very well received in his speaking expeditions, particularly in Lancashire, and he returned confidently to Downing Street to await the results.