The 1910-14 ‘Great Unrest’ in Britain

Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14

By Ralph Darlington

Published by Pluto Press, 2023, £19.99

Reviewed by Iain Dalton

In the years 1910-14 Britain experienced its biggest wave of strikes by trade unions up to that point – 3,000, with 1,200 strikes in 1913 alone. These included national strikes amongst rail workers and miners, as well as many large regional and local strikes. Many of these strikes were not officially called by trade unions, but were unofficial strikes started from below.

Trade union membership grew by 62%, from 2.5 million in 1910 to 4.1 million in 1914. Workplace trade union density increased from 14.6% to 23%. This was a period in which some elements of social benefits – old age pensions and unemployment assurance – were introduced. The latter could be administered through trade unions, helping further to recruit workers to them. The introduction of these benefits were a reaction to the growing and obvious wealth disparities on show in Edwardian society, and the creation of the Labour Party by the trade unions.

But it was also a period in which big movements took place for home rule in Ireland, and for the right of women to vote in parliamentary elections. Internationally there were rising tensions between the imperialist powers, including multiple wars in the Balkans, and strike waves in other countries such as in Russia.

In some ways this period was a perfect storm of crisis for British capitalism, one that only temporarily stabilised with the outbreak of the first world war, to then go onto a new level of unrest in the post-war period following the 1917 Russian revolution, culminating in Britain in the 1926 general strike.

Darlington deals in detail with a number of disputes he categorises as major – including the strike of the Cradley Heath women chain makers in 1910; the Cambrian Combine miners’ strike in South Wales in 1910-11; the Waterside transport workers’ strike in 1911; the London dockers’ strike; the strike of the Liverpool General Transport workers, which spread into a national rail strike in 1912; and a national miners’ strike and London dockers’ strike, both also in 1912. In 1913 he highlights the metal workers’ strike in the Midlands and the Dubin lockout and concludes with the London builders lockout in 1914.

And that’s before listing a further ten disputes under the heading ‘Some Notable Strikes 1911-13’ as well as eight significant strikes of women workers, and the children’s strikes of 1911.

Frustratingly, these are described separately, rather than in a fashion which draws out the new features, trends and innovations across these and the many other strikes of this period which aren’t mentioned.

One of the key innovations of the ‘Great Unrest’ was the sympathetic strike: workers who were not part of the initial strike action would come out in solidarity, raising their own demands on their employers but pledging not to go back until all the workers’ demands had been settled.

Mass meetings and elected strike committees were a feature of many of these disputes, giving rank-and-file members of the unions control over the process of their strike action. In the course of a number of disputes, strike committees began issuing permits to allow the movement of goods within a city – for things like supplies for hospitals etc, something that was taken up again during the 1926 general strike.

But there were other innovations during the strike wave that are not included in the thirty or so disputes Darlington picks out. For example, in the midst of a printers strike in 1910-11 the workers produced a daily strike bulletin, which was renamed as the Daily Herald, and at the conclusion of the strike it was launched as a national newspaper and served as an unofficial strike bulletin for other disputes as well.

In 1913 the locked-out textile workers in Yeadon, near Leeds, started ‘hunger marches’, as groups of unemployed workers had done, marching to parliament. But the textile workers marched to other textile towns to ask for support for their dispute, raise funds and compare pay and conditions. This wasn’t a completely new invention, but the extensive use of these hunger marches was taken up on a bigger scale by the National Unemployed Workers Movement in the post-first world war period, as well as the more famous Jarrow Crusade in 1936.

It was not only the workers who innovated in the course of the strike wave, so did the bosses. The Liberal government played an active role in combatting the strikes – first and foremost by trying to push workers back into the conciliation schemes that had been set up previously, dispatching George Askwith, an official in the Board of Trade. An Industrial Council, with Askwith as chair, was set up in 1911 to draw the TUC leaders into these structures, but it was disregarded as disputes continued without reference to it.

When that approach failed, they resorted to other more repressive methods. These included using the armed might of the state machine to affect the course of events, such as sending warships up the Mersey during the Liverpool transport strike in 1911, when troops shot dead two strikers, and dispatching hussars, a form of cavalry, to Tonypandy during the Cambrian Combine strike, resulting in one striker being killed and 500 injured. Six hundred troops were also sent to Llanelli during the national rail strike, killing two strikers.

In other areas strike-breaking volunteers were recruited. In Leeds around one third of students at the recently established University of Leeds were recruited to scab on the 1913-14 corporation workers’ strike.

Fuelling the strikes was the growth of a new movement in Britain, syndicalism. Syndicalist ideas originally developed in France, and at root were a form of anarchism – rejecting the idea of the need for workers to organise in a political party, instead centering on industrial struggle and the idea of a general strike leading to workers’ control of industry.

Organisations such as Tom Mann’s Industrial Syndicalist Education League linked militants together with a programme to transform the fragmented union movement into industrial trade unions. In order to achieve this, ‘amalgamation committees’ or ‘reform committees’ were formed in particular industries. This led to the creation of the Transport Workers’ Federation in 1910, bringing together unions representing dockers, seamen, tramwaymen and road transport workers and later forming much of the basis for the amalgamation of unions in the 1920s – including the Transport and General Workers Union, now Unite. The three main all-grades railway trade unions were brought together in 1913 to form the National Union of Railwaymen, now the RMT. The Triple Alliance was formed in April 1914 comprised of the three biggest unions – the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, the National Union of Railwaymen and the National Transport Workers’ Federation – pledging to come to each other’s mutual aid, although it was only fully tested after the first world war.

The movement also sought to influence the unions’ rulebooks and objectives. In 1912 the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants adopted the objective of workers’ control of industry.  The Miner’s Next Step, an important pamphlet produced by the Unofficial Reform Committee of the South Wales Miners, called for lay member control of the union, and voting on pay and other issues rather than these just being decided by union officials. The Unofficial Reform Committee stood and elected candidates onto the executive of the South Wales Miners Federation.

Darlington, like other members of the Socialist Workers Party, and many other academics, poses the syndicalist movement of the time as being opposed to participation in elections. Syndicalists did believe that industrial struggle was key, but that didn’t mean they all rejected electoral struggle. The Miner’s Next Step political programme stated: “That the organisation shall engage in political action, both local and national, on the basis of complete independence of, and hostility to all capitalist parties, with an avowed policy of wresting whatever advantage it can for the working class”.

In the Constitution section it goes on to say that: “On all proposed labour legislation conferences shall be called to discuss the same and instruct our MPs”, and that “any Member of Parliament, as such under the auspices of the organisation, shall at once vacate his seat if a ballot vote of the membership so decides”. This is a programme for the accountability of workers’ representatives in parliament on an independent working-class basis – not a rejection of the idea of elections.

Docker’s leader Ben Tillet famously wrote a pamphlet in 1908 asking the question, Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a failure? This question is taken by Labour historians generally, and Darlington specifically, in far too black and white a manner – either wanting to set out a triumphal path for the Labour Party emerging to become a plank of the two-party system that dominated much of 21st century Britain, or wanting to write off the idea of independent working class political representation reflecting a step forward in working class consciousness and organisation.

Whilst not made clear in the book itself, Darlington falls into the latter camp, unsurprisingly given his membership of the Socialist Workers Party. In their book The Labour Party – A Marxist History, SWP founder Tony Cliff and his son Donny Gluckstein argue that “the Labour Party was born of bureaucratic manoeuvres at the TUC, of a step backward in the class struggle”.

The Labour Representation Committee had only been founded in 1900, following a vote at the TUC, but with only a minority of trade unions then participating. So by the time of the Great Unrest, it was barely a decade old. Labour was then a bourgeois workers’ party – with a leadership at the top reflecting the demands of capitalism but with a broad socialistic ideological foundation and a structure through which workers could move to pursue their interests. Cliff and Gluckstein’s conception of a party which “defends the interests of capitalism (particularly when in government) but has the mass support of workers” reduces workers to passive participants in the Labour Party, rather than being actively involved in a struggle within the party  – as they were until Tony Blair’s counter-revolution in the 1990s transformed Labour into another bourgeois party and blocked off the democratic channels for workers’ to exert their influence on the leadership. Following the accidental ‘Corbyn interregnum’, this is how the party is once more under Keir Starmer

The contradictions of the party in the early twentieth century made the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party opponents of militant strike action during the Great Unrest. Following the lead of the Liberal government, four Labour MPs tabled a motion in parliament calling for strikes to be illegal unless they had first gone to a Board of Conciliation. This was however discarded after a motion of censure was passed at the TUC in 1911.

Darlington fixates on the undoubtedly rotten role of the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party but presents this course in a fatalist manner – as if this was the only one possibility and could not face serious challenge. Rather than a static organisation, we instead see a dialectical interplay determined by the outcome of struggle.

But what of the left? Much of the left at the time operated as propagandist organisations, with the Independent Labour Party, formed in 1893, affiliated to Labour but exercising no real control over its leaders. In fact, when at its conference in 1909 an attempt at this was made, its leading quartet – Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Bruce Glasier and Philip Snowden – threatened to resign unless they got their way.

Other parties, formally based on Marxism, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Socialist Labour Party, had both rejected an orientation to the Labour Party for different reasons. The SDF, later merging with some ILP branches to form the British Socialist Party (in 1911), was generally fairly electorally focused in its propaganda, whereas the Socialist Labour Party was more concerned with political education amongst workers.

Whilst members of both played a prominent role in some of the strikes during the Great Unrest, this was mostly as individuals, occasionally as whole branches, rather than as part of a collective organised effort by a party that was vying for the workers to take political power.

The lack of a consciously organised revolutionary party undoubtedly contributed to the limitations of workers’ struggles during the Great Unrest. An organised Marxist force that could have co-ordinated the strikes and drawn the political lessons of the struggle, could have prepared the way – in the manner of the Bolsheviks in the strike wave in Russia preceding the first world war – for the workers’ taking political power in the stormy events of post-war Britain.