How the General Strike ground Bristol to a halt - and left a divided city
100 years ago the country came to a halt as unions walked out in the biggest strike in British history, while middle class volunteers became bus drivers and dockers. This is full story of how the General Strike came to Bristol - and what happened next
The emergency edition of the Western Daily Press, published on the morning of Wednesday, May 5, 1926, ran to four pages instead of the usual ten or more, even though there was plenty of news.
The coverage should have been more extensive, but on pages 2 and 3 there were just classified ads, some cricket results, a long round-up of agricultural news, and even a column of bad jokes – obvious filler material.
The clue was in a notice in large type on page 1 informing readers that the Bristol Evening News (also owned by the Western Daily) was smaller than usual due to a strike by the linotype operators, the men who set the metal type which was used to print the newspaper pages.
But then it wasn’t just the linotype operators who had walked out. So had millions – the exact number is unclear – of other workers across the country. Britain was grinding to a complete halt as a result of the biggest strike in its history.
The great General Strike of 1926 was an extraordinary moment, one of the high-water marks of class struggle in the UK. It pitted workers against the establishment in a fight against what the unions saw as a monstrous injustice, while middle-class volunteers came forward to try to keep the country running in the face of what they saw as the threat of a Soviet-style revolution.
The back story to the strike, though, was not revolution or counter-revolution, but the harsh lives of Britain’s coal miners at a time when coal was the principal source of energy. Coal heated people’s homes, ran railway engines and factory machines. It generated electricity and gas, too. The economy of the 1920s could not survive for a moment without coal.
Britain had plenty of it, but the problem was that other countries did too, and theirs was now cheaper.
Coal production in Britain peaked in 1913, and much of it had been exported. Because it was so important, the government had taken control of the industry in 1917 to ensure supplies. Many miners who had enlisted in the armed forces were discharged and sent back to the pits, even though the army was desperately short of manpower.
The flow of coal was secured, and miners, whose lives were precarious at the best of times, were provided with stable pay and working conditions through government subsidies.
But when control of the mines was fully returned to their private owners after the war’s end, the world had changed. Export markets had disappeared and other countries had opened up or developed coalfields of their own.
To add to the problem, Britain returned to the gold standard in 1925. This was an attempt to stabilise the pound and return London to its former pre-eminence as the world’s financial hub by pledging to convert paper money to gold. Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill allowed himself to be persuaded that this was a good move, though he would later describe it as one of the greatest mistakes of his political career.
The gold standard pegged the value of the pound at $4.86, the pre-war rate, ignoring the reality of America’s new economic clout. The pound was overvalued, making exports more expensive. The result was deflation and economic stagnation.
The mine owners’ response was to demand that miners work longer hours for less money.
The principal miners’ union, the Mining Federation of Great Britain, was understandably outraged. “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day!” became its slogan.
At first, Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government sought compromise and, in 1925, it provided a subsidy to maintain miners’ wages. A royal commission, chaired by Sir Herbert Samuel, was set up to investigate the industry.
The government knew that a showdown was inevitable and started to make preparations. At the same time, a right-wing volunteer group, the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS), was set up with branches around the country. Many of its members were explicitly politically motivated, determined to fight what they saw as an attempted communist takeover of the country.
Some establishment figures refused to have anything to do with the OMS, seeing in it shades of fascism. Indeed, many members of Britain’s fledgling fascist parties signed up, including those of the “British Fascisti”, a party more farcical than sinister, founded by Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a dairy farmer from Langford in Somerset.
Everyone could see that the confrontation was coming, but it seems that the government and its right-wing volunteers were making more active preparations than the unions.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC), representing millions of workers across a range of industries, had a problem. What improvements in working conditions that had been won since the late 19th century had been hard won, and it was an article of faith among trade unionists that the only way that things would get any better would be if they all stuck together and supported one another.
Besides, the coal industry was much bigger than many people now realise. There were mines in north Somerset, and the Bristol coalfield had once been extensive. However, by the time the strike started, there were only four pits left: Coalpit Heath, Speedwell, Speedwell Deep Pit and Parkfield. The South Liberty pit at Ashton had closed in 1925, while the one at Hanham had actually closed just a few weeks before the strike began.
While unemployment in Bristol was not as bad as it had been a few years previously, it was still high, particularly with the closure of the Great Western Cotton Factory at Barton Hill in 1925.
The Samuel Commission delivered its report in March 1926, and while it recommended certain reorganisations of the mining industry, it also said that wages should be cut and working hours extended. The mine owners flatly refused any reorganisation and declared that wage cuts and working hours increases would start on May 1. In the Bristol coalfield, wages were going to be cut by around a quarter.
The miners were equally determined, and the labour movement started to organise across the country.
In Bristol, on March 31, the Bristol Trades Council had held a large meeting at the Colston Hall with A J Cook, the General Secretary of the MFGB, as the keynote speaker. Other speakers emphasised the need for solidarity with the miners.
The issue was, for many union leaders, simply a matter of justice for the miners and, by extension, workers everywhere. TUC General Secretary Walter Citrine later said, “We had no intention of challenging the Constitution. Our purpose was purely industrial.”
Nonetheless, there were certainly other activists who saw the strike as the crucial step on the way to wholesale revolution.
Bristol Labour activist Herbert Rogers (1896–1992), interviewed by the Post many decades later, recalled: “What did we want from the General Strike? We wanted the workers to take control of the country. I’ve never known such a mood of solidarity among working people.
“Everyone stood shoulder to shoulder in support of the strike, but there weren’t the leaders to carry the thing through.”
A meeting at the YMCA hall in St James’s Square in Bristol on May 1, 1926, was told of the plans for the strike. It was so packed that many had to stand outside.
“Deppy” Despres, the French-born Seamen’s Union officer who was president of Bristol Trades Council, said: “Whatever the outcome of the crisis, if the miners go down, all other workers will go down with them.”
The TUC resolved not to abandon the miners and, on May 3 called a general strike, ordering workers in key industries to down tools.
At midnight on May 3, tens of thousands of Bristol workers stopped work and the city’s industries largely ground to a halt.
Herbert Rogers, then 29, and fellow activists helped organise the Bristol efforts from Labour Party headquarters in Church Road, St George.
The establishment in Bristol “kept their heads down, pretty much”, according to Mr Rogers. “They had help from students and Tories to provide blackleg labour.”
The government had prepared for the confrontation. Emergency powers were invoked and the running of essential services organised.
The OMS and other volunteers, mostly drawn from the middle and upper classes, played an important role. University students, professionals and retired military officers stepped forward to drive buses, deliver food and run power stations.
There was a running joke that students and middle-aged men who had always dreamed of being train drivers now had their chance.
The conflict between working classes and the volunteers laid bare the class tensions at the heart of the strike. To them, the volunteers represented the privileged section of society determined to maintain its privilege and keep the working classes in their place. And while many of the volunteers doubtless held rabid right-wing views and admired Mussolini, others simply saw themselves as patriots who did not want to see the country paralysed.
Earl Stanhope, who had been appointed Civil Commissioner for Bristol and the surrounding area, called for volunteers to run essential services, and almost 7,000 enrolled, signing on at the Central Library.
“This is not a strike-breaking organisation,” he said.
“Our object, and our sole object, is to ensure the necessities of life to the community and so mitigate, as far as possible, the evil effects of this crisis.”
He also wanted men aged 21–55 to step forward as special constables so that the full-time police could concentrate on law and order and leave minor duties to others. More than 300 became “specials”.
The Bristol Tramways Company had banned union membership a few years previously, and so the trams continued to run, but rail services were severely disrupted, and there were frequent power cuts affecting the city.
Mass pickets watched Bristol University students and other volunteers move into the City Docks and Avonmouth docks to unload ships carrying food supplies.
Herbert Rogers said: “Despite the blacklegging, there was very little violence. Just an isolated incident or two.”
Two incidents involved assaults on brewery draymen. One of the men jailed had also thrown mud at a policeman. There were violent incidents in some other cities, but on the whole the strike was mostly peaceful across the country. And unlike some other places, the army does not seem to have been on the streets of Bristol with tanks and armoured cars.
Both sides were engaged in a parallel struggle for public opinion. With much of the press shut down due to the strike, the government published its own newspaper, the British Gazette, edited by Winston Churchill. Its pages framed the strike as a challenge to the British constitution.
The TUC responded with the British Worker, putting the union case and trying to maintain strikers’ morale while urging them to keep things disciplined and peaceful.
Most Bristol workers seem to have joined the strike quite willingly, although some, such as workers at Spillers bakery, did not – a meeting there decided by 102 votes to 12 to continue working.
“It was rock-solid, the strike. I don’t think today’s trade unionists could hold a demonstration like that because there isn’t the feeling today,” Herbert Rogers remembered.
The General Strike ended messily and badly for the unions. The TUC was not prepared for a prolonged confrontation, and its constituent unions certainly couldn’t provide their members with an adequate level of strike pay for very long. Meanwhile, the government and its volunteers were just about managing to keep things going.
There was also the threat from the government of taking over the unions’ funds.
The TUC felt it had no choice but to negotiate. On 12 May, after nine days, it called off the strike, though the miners’ wages were still going to be cut.
The announcement came as a shock to many workers, particularly in the coalfields. For miners, the struggle continued alone for several more months before they were eventually forced to accept reduced wages and longer hours.
Bristol’s Strike Committee called for everyone to return to work after nine days and asked trade unionists to go back “in an orderly fashion”.
Some didn’t. The railwaymen were furious at the agreement, and it took several days before Temple Meads and other local stations could offer anything like a normal service.
Even more vociferous were the dockers, angered at alterations in work practices imposed by management while they were out on strike – and the insistence that management be allowed to retain the services of some of the best men who volunteered to work on the docks during the action.
In the end, Ernest Bevin, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, had to be called in to help clear up the mess.
The former Bristol union leader happened to be passing through the city days after the strike, and local dockers asked him to step in and negotiate on their behalf. The strike was settled after ten hours of talks.
While Stanley Baldwin made conciliatory noises and congratulated himself and the British people that it had all passed off peacefully, the strike left a legacy of bitterness and class division which many would remember for the rest of their lives. At the same time, it made clear the strengths and limits of union power, fostering the growth of the labour movement.
Many in Bristol remained bitterly disappointed. Herbert Rogers said: “We had a great opportunity, but we were let down by our leaders. And the miners were still on strike, weren’t they? They stayed on strike until November.”
- The Bristol Radical History Group has produced a series of booklets about aspects of the General Strike in Bristol and neighbouring areas. Click here for details.
- The Museum of Bath at Work is holding an exhibition on the strike which opens on May 2. Click here for details.