Black Diamonds (36 page)

Leading society ladies had queued up to volunteer. ‘I was in despair as it was so difficult to get a job,’ wrote Lady Bentinck, who, like so many women of her class, had rarely, if ever, cooked a meal or done a day’s paid work in her life. ‘There were 3 eager females for every job! At last I got into a newspaper office which has been commandeered for the
British Gazette
– it was next to the
Herald
office where the
Worker
was being printed and we had police on the roof with revolvers as it was thought the strikers might come in and wreck our machinery! But nothing occurred, everybody was far too orderly. I was busy frying bacon and eggs for volunteers, who luckily were hungry otherwise they couldn’t have faced the horrors I produced.’

Debutantes, whose presentation at Court had been postponed by the General Strike, were drafted to marquees in the London parks where they worked around the clock, washing dishes and serving meals. ‘
Instead of me
, it was the workers of England who came out,’ recalled Lady Mary Clive in her memoirs.

For eight ecstatic days I enjoyed the privilege of spending the evenings in a canteen in Hyde Park. My cousin Imogen and I were allowed to walk there together, seen off by dubious parents, torn between the obvious duty of sacrificing their young on the Nation’s altar, and fear that their young might get their looks ruined by a passing brickbat. We served in a large marquee near the Park Lane edge, and our patrons were chiefly the men out of the lorries which were parked from Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner. I think they slept in their lorries. They certainly looked very grimy.

The lorry drivers were volunteers, working-class men who were opposed to the General Strike and whom the Government had deployed to deliver milk and other essential goods. ‘When they were not eating they sat as good as gold in corners, poring over disintegrating copies of the
Tatler
and
Bystander
which somebody had thoughtfully sent to bolster up the supporters of capitalism.’ An eccentric blend of hymns, sermons, dance music, grand opera and French lessons blared from loudspeakers that had been put up in the tent as a further bolster to morale. Flirtation, as Lady Mary Clive remembered, was encouraged. ‘It was of course a positive duty for us in this hour of National Crisis to keep on good terms with the Nation’s toughs, and every time we got off with one we felt we were helping to avert the Revolution. There was no false modesty or coyness about our response to their advances. We met them more than half-way.’ But ‘half-way’, as she pointed out, was quite enough. ‘Our triumph was sometimes tempered by waves of panic that we had gone too far, and that they really would try to take us to the cinema or escort us home or otherwise impinge upon our private lives.’ Some of the girls, finding the work too taxing, coaxed their servants to come and help in the tents. ‘
The washing water
was like minestrone and the drying cloths, which one would otherwise have relied on to clean the plates, were always soaking wet in spite of the labours of somebody’s footman who had got into the park by climbing over the railings and who was made to stand the whole afternoon in front of the oil stove as a sort of human towel-horse.’

An element of burlesque was also to be found among those drafted to more serious duties.

On Monday 3 May, Lady Sybil Middleton, who was staying with her in-laws at Lowood in Scotland, travelled south with her son, Henry, and one-year-old baby, Molly, to be near her husband, Lambert, who had volunteered as a Special Constable. ‘As soon as Lambert enrolled, I came up to bind his broken head if need be,’ she wrote to Lady Halifax. ‘We came by the last night train and I put Molly in my suitcase in which she travelled and slept comfortably.’ Lambert Middleton was one of eighty volunteers attached to the CID unit at Scotland Yard responsible for rounding up Communist subversives. Lady Sybil told Lady Halifax,

He spent one very lengthy day, from 9.30 to 7.30 standing outside a Communist office watching it and trying to capture a badly wanted Communist. His hat was well pulled over his eyes (I made him leave his eyeglass at home so that under no circumstances should he be tempted to use it) and eating peas spitting [
sic
] the skins in the gutter – a thing he said he had never done in London before. By the middle of the afternoon he was so tired that he asked to sit on the pavement and started drawing coloured pictures. They did end by arresting a young man called George Miles who is one of the youngest and most fiery of the Communist leaders. They talked to him for half an hour. Lambert said he was such a good-looking boy very well educated and talking perfect English without any accent at all. This boy said that the failure of the General Strike was the best thing that could happen to the Communist Party as the strikers would be so disgusted with their leaders that they would go in their 1,000s to the Communist Party. Perhaps he is right. The detective who was with Lambert thought not. The last day he was on duty, he was sent in the pouring rain to mingle in the crowd in the East End at a Communist Meeting. He did not get back till 1 a.m. and he brought back the detective he was working under to stay and have breakfast here, and it turned out to be a Sergeant Dew, the son of the detective who arrested Crippen. So you see we have been moving in high criminal circles.

‘The position as a whole is still one of deadlock,’ the BBC reported in the ten o’clock bulletin on the morning of 12 May. Two short hours later came the noon bulletin: ‘General Strike ceases today.’

Lady Mary Clive was in Selfridges watching the ticker-tape machines with a crowd of people when the news came through. ‘
The shop girls
fell into each other’s arms as unanimously as though they had been drilled,’ she later wrote, ‘and we all grinned and laughed insanely. We were as good as saved. Nothing was going to happen. Everything was going to be just as it had always been.’

The TUC had caved in. As Thomas Jones, the Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, observed, ‘The General Strike could not succeed because some of those who led it did not wholly believe in it and because few, if any, were prepared to go through with it to its logical conclusion – violence and revolution.’ The General Council of the TUC had opted for a compromise. In the days leading up to 12 May, it had held secret negotiations with Sir Herbert Samuel, the man who had been in charge of the Government inquiry that had triggered the strike. Samuel’s report had concluded that the miners’ wages should be cut, but it had also recommended widespread reform of the coal industry. After meeting Sir Herbert, the General Council judged that he could be used as an intermediary to persuade the Prime Minister to make the reductions in the miners’ wages contingent on reform: specifically, nationalization of the mineral royalties and the introduction of better working conditions. This was the argument the General Council presented to the MFGB, the miners’ trade union: ultimately though, its heart was not in the strike.

While the trades unions sought radical change to the social, political and economic fabric of the country, they unequivocally rejected the use of violence as a means to this end. So too did their membership. During the nine days the strike lasted, not a shot was fired, nor a single person killed.
A total of 4,000
people were arrested in sporadic outbreaks of violence and hooliganism. But this was a trivial number given the millions of strikers. At no stage was there an indication of the Bolshevist-inspired revolution that, for almost a decade, the Establishment had so feared. The extent of Communist activity was negligible. An MI5 report, published after the strike, reveals that just 192 men were prosecuted for sedition. Of these, 121 were arrested on a probability – for making a speech or for possessing seditious documents ‘likely to cause disaffection’ – rather than for a flagrantly seditious act.

It was the final tally in a dispute which both Baldwin and Churchill at first feared would threaten to subvert the State. Yet, the 3 million men who came out in support of the miners had made no demands for themselves. They had not sought to challenge the Government, still less to overthrow the constitution. They had simply wanted the miners to have a living wage. It was a paradox that the leading politicians of the day failed to recognize. Instead, they chose to interpret its outcome as a victory in what they believed to be the ongoing class war. ‘The result of the GS altogether delights one; for it shows that this old England of ours retains its spirit unimpaired,’ wrote Lord Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India, to his friend Lord Irwin.

Everyone is asking why this GS collapsed so quickly. Fifty contributory explanations are available, but I recall the lines of Edgar Allan Poe:

A wind blew out of the sea,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee,
My beautiful Annabel Lee.

A wind blew from the whole of England, chilling and killing the spirits and the pretensions of those who were challenging constitutional government and Parliamentary institutions. More and more they became conscious how numerous were their enemies, how few and in many cases how unwilling were their friends. The collapse was very sudden. I was one of the few Ministers who received the ultimate Trades Unionists’ surrender. It was so humiliating that some instinctive breeding made one unwilling even to look at them. I thought of the Burghers of Calais approaching their interview with Edward III, haltered on the neck.

The day after the General Strike ended, the miners voted to strike on. One million men in the coalfields refused to concede defeat. Taking their dependants into account, millions more were caught up in the dispute. ‘
This coal trouble
is more serious than the strike proper, I think,’ reported Lady Henry Bentinck to Lady Halifax, ‘however everyone seems to take it very lightly and dance every night and are busy with Ascot clothes!’

The coal strike that followed the General Strike would transform Britain beyond recognition. ‘Everything was going to be just as it had always been,’ Lady Mary Clive had written gleefully when the TUC had caved in. Only time would reveal this, but it was Britain’s historic ruling class that was about to be ‘haltered on the neck’. After the coal strike – destined to last almost until Christmas 1926 – nothing would ever be the same again.

‘We are not prepared to have our wages reduced under present conditions,’ Herbert Smith, President of the MFGB, told the Prime Minister at a meeting at Downing Street the day the General Strike collapsed. ‘I am compelled to say this,’ he added, ‘because my people are down.’

Between 1921 and April 1926, a miner’s average earnings had fallen from 19 shillings and 2d a day to 9 shillings and 4d
^*
; the average length of his working week, from six days to four. Britain’s colliers were, in the words of the Labour MP for Pontypridd, George Hall, at ‘rock bottom’. ‘The level of wages is such,’ he continued, ‘that it is almost impossible for our people to live.’ It was not Communist propaganda. What he said was true. Harold Macmillan, the future Conservative Prime Minister, in a letter to Winston Churchill, written from Stockton in April 1926, wrote of ‘the appalling conditions’ in his constituency, which lay in the heart of the Durham coalfields.

The ‘appalling conditions’ in the North-East were replicated in mining communities across the country. In the spring of 1926, Miss Brodigan, the Warden of a London-based Charitable Trust and a staunch Conservative, visited the district of Blaina and Nantyglo in South Wales.
Writing to
the Prime Minister, she described the ‘desperate plight of the place’, submitting a detailed account of the conditions in the district in the hope that he would take action to alleviate the distress:

Blaina and Nantyglo form an urban area of 16,700 inhabitants in the Ebbw Valley, South Wales. There are no local industries whatever except mining. Up to 1921 there were 11 pits working, employing 4,500 men. In that year, 7 were closed down because they were not paying, and a further 3 in the years up to 1924. One only, a modern one, with good electrical machinery was kept going. Up to last December, however, it could only work on 2 and sometimes 3 days a week and out of the 4,500 Blaina miners, it could only employ 1,500. About 900 found work in the various pits down the Valley towards Newport, some having as much as 2 hours’ walk to and from their work.

A few men emigrated to Australia and a few to America, but owing to the long coal strike there, came back to Blaina. About 1,500 remained permanently unemployed: some struggled on, gradually using up their savings, a large number turned to the Poor Law Guardians for help.

Housing conditions became worse and worse. The local Council issued orders for repairs to property but none of the owners had the wherewithal to carry them out. An outbreak of typhoid in one group of houses revealed a condition of things in that particular area which the County Medical Officer of Health described as ‘worse than the black hole of Calcutta’. Quite two thirds of the straggling town from Blaina to Nantyglo consist of desperately dilapidated old cottages with bulging and cracked walls and only too often with cracked and leaking roofs as well.

The doctor says the clothing of the children, especially their under-clothing, is in a very bad condition and is in some cases almost non-existent. She is very much concerned about the nursing and expectant mothers whom she sees at the Welfare Clinic and says the women do not let the children suffer but are thoroughly underfed themselves. The same suggestion of continuous under-feeding came from the Hospital. The House Surgeon, a Sligo man, compared the district to Connemara in the old days and the Matron told me that the patients come in so much under par that after one or two unfortunate experiences they now keep them for two or three days’ good feeding before putting them under an operation.