THE General Strike, which took place over nine hectic days a century ago this month, was precipitated by a deepening crisis in the British coal industry. One government commission, in 1919, had advised nationalisation; another, in 1926, rejected nationalisation and the continuation of state subsidies while also deprecating a lowering of wages. Neither made any difference: the mine owners were not listening. In fact, they were spoiling for a fight — and the miners themselves were increasingly martial.
The dispute was soon crystallised by a famous slogan: “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.” The Trades Union Congress (TUC) assured the miners of wider support — and this they duly got. On 3 May, a General Strike across many but not all industries began in earnest. It was, at once, a national crisis. Yet, in just nine days, the will of the TUC crumbled, and the General Strike was over. The dispute in the mines would still go on for months. For many miners, it would end miserably in near-destitution.
The General Strike broke at a time when Christian social thought and activity in Britain was at a very peak of its power across the Churches at large. In 1924, Christians of all kinds had come to Birmingham for the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC). This was certainly a great moment, and its 12 reports sought to inform Christians about the issues of public life, while providing a picture how they might participate.
WHAT would happen now? In a speech in the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, deplored the strike, but turned squarely to the Government for intervention. When Davidson produced an “Appeal from the Churches”, he found that he enjoyed enough support among them. But Lord Reith would not allow him to broadcast it.
It was the first indication that the political Establishment was closing ranks. Davidson, an adept oligarch, arguably looked too hopefully to the realm of private conversation in Parliament and Government to achieve acceptable ends. But he got nothing for his pains, and was increasingly convinced by what he heard there. Moreover, his position looked increasingly awkward: when he was invited to endorse an appeal for money to support mining families, he felt that he could not.
Meanwhile, church opinion at large was divided. The Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson, saw the nation itself to be in danger and was wholly supportive of the Government. Cardinal Bourne castigated the strike as “a sin against the obedience which we owe to God”. Bishops William Temple (Manchester) and John Kempthorne (Lichfield) set up, largely on their own account, a Standing Conference of the Christian Churches on the Coal Dispute.
This was no insignificant improvisation, but a weighty ecumenical enterprise. When the Standing Conference suggested that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners might now give up their mining royalties, duly calculated at an income of £300,000 a year, Davidson saw that this would affect clergy stipends.
Now the strains were beginning to show. When the Standing Committee tried to mediate between the parties in July, it collided with the far more promising work of another committee, chaired by Seebohm Rowntree, who complained that this sudden intervention had not shortened but protracted the mining dispute. When a deputation visited the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, in Downing Street, it was put firmly in its place. A new statement, drafted by the Standing Committee, was repudiated sharply by Davidson and smothered. Meanwhile, the bishops were under sustained attack in the columns of The Times. It was not only the TUC and the miners who were defeated in the summer of 1926.
WHAT lessons were drawn from it all? The suggestion that the Churches had no real place or power in such a world of politics was often heard: they could only exasperate those hardy practitioners of political life, who were bargaining and manoeuvring as only they knew how. But Christians had seen that, while confining themselves to broad eirenic moral generalities might be much respected, hand-wringing lamentations were given very short shrift indeed. It would take some courage to return to such a field.
But the General Strike certainly cemented the electoral affinities of Stanley Baldwin, the presiding genius of a new centrist appeal to national unity, and Christian opinion at large. Here, Free Church people who had once admired the progressive strains of David Lloyd George’s new Liberalism now found themselves keeping company with the Anglicans. They became a chapter of what John Raymond would later call, in the title of his 1960 book, The Baldwin Age.
There is reason, no doubt, to forget it all: Britain is no longer an industrial society and, arguably, not even as much of a democracy as it was in 1926. There is not much talk of class antagonism; the old contests of Left and Right have died or assumed new forms. British politics looks increasingly defined by managerialism, insistent on technology and short of constructive ideas and hard cash, and by a compensatory populism that parades as politics while seeking to thrive on public incomprehension and alienation.
Whatever might be said of the Churches in 1926, it can at least be shown that they were present in the turmoil, sought to play their part as best they could, and became a part of its history. Today, we may well respect these things more highly than once we did — not least because we can no longer take them for granted.
Dr Andrew Chandler is Professor in Modern History at the University of Chichester.