Ahead of a talk with author Edd Mustill next week, Richard Price explores how the 1926 General Strike affected his local area.

The broad outlines of the General Strike have remained largely unchanged in the last one hundred years. Nothing has rehabilitated the abject surrender of the TUC General Council or the treachery of Ramsay MacDonald, who confided to his diary on May 2^nd 1926 – the day before the strike began – “The Government has woefully mismanaged the whole business … But the TUs have been equally blameworthy.” He described the election of charismatic miners’ leader A.J. Cook as “the most calamitous thing that ever happened to the T.U. movement.”

How the General Strike played out in the towns and cities of Britain has been the subject of dozens of local studies. Many of them, necessarily, have focussed on the major flashpoints – in London’s docklands, in the coalfields and in port cities. But how did it pan out in one of London’s late Victorian suburbs?

Researching the Nine Days in my own area of Leyton has been far from straightforward. Very few Labour Party, trade union or trades council records have survived. There are a tiny number of memoirs or diaries. Local papers were hostile to both unions and the Labour Party, and the main one was strikebound.

Leyton was, as its long time MP Reg Sorensen said approvingly, “an ordinary place”. Fenner Brockway described it in the late 1920s as “two thirds working class, one third middle class”. But its growth as a suburb had been extraordinary. In 1851, Leyton and Leytonstone were two Essex villages with a combined population of 3,901. Two generations later in 1911, their population had grown to 124,735. Leyton, Willesden, Tottenham and West Ham were the four fastest growing areas in Britain. Two main groups of people moved into the nascent suburb – those moving in from Essex and East Anglia, escaping rural poverty in search of better opportunities; and those moving out from the cramped and frequently squalid old East End.

Along with lots of builders building at astonishing speed, the first main occupational group living in Leyton were clerks. Lower middle class in contemporary status, many earned less than skilled workers. George Bernard Shaw recovered from smallpox at his doctor uncle’s in Leyton in 1881. His uncle, used to having the country gentry as his patients, complained about the area being taken over by “rows of little brick boxes inhabited by clerks in tall hats supporting families on fifteen shillings a week.”

So Leyton was quite different to the industrial centres and docklands that lay to its south. Industrial development was much slower, although manufacturing did develop over time. By the 1920s Leyton had one large enterprise – the London Electric Wire Company in Church Road, which employed 1,300 workers – and lots of small scale manufacturing from marmalade and sweets to shoes and church organs. The Co-op had begun to expand, both as a retailer and a manufacturer.

Leyton didn’t have the big battalions of dockers, seamen and railway and gas workers who had formed the backbone of New Unionism in the 1890s, although a significant number of Leytonians worked at the giant railway works in Stratford. The largest group of organised workers were probably transport workers on buses, trams and railways.

Leytonstone, which had been a small village before the railway arrived in 1856, was specifically developed as a middle class enclave for City gents higher up the feeding chain than the clerks of Leyton. Lower Leytonstone, however, had some of the poorest parts of the district.

There were social and cultural differences with neighbouring areas. Unlike Stratford, Leyton’s Irish community was quite small. It had one Catholic church and an array of different non-conformist churches that influenced both Liberalism and the emerging Labour politics. Before the First World War, Leyton’s largest migrant community was German.

It also developed distinct politics. The Social Democratic Federation and syndicalism had had some impact in Walthamstow, and the SDF had a base in West Ham. But neither the SDF nor syndicalism gained a foothold in Leyton, where the main socialist grouping was the Independent Labour Party. Compared to West Ham, where the council had a socialist and Labour majority by 1888-89, and which elected Keir Hardie as its MP in 1892, Leyton didn’t elect its first trade union or Labour councillor until mid-way through during the first world war.

But the war had a radicalising effect, and between 1918 and the General Strike a period of closely balanced three-party politics opened up. Taking account of its rapid population growth, two parliamentary seats – Leyton West and Leyton East – were created in 1918. Leyton West elected a Tory in 1918, who died almost immediately; a Liberal in 1919; a Tory in 1922, and its first Labour MP in 1929. Leyton East elected the erratic Lt Colonel Cecil L’Estrange Malone as a right wing Coalition Liberal in 1918, only for him to become converted to the cause of Soviet Russia, join the British Socialist Party, and become Britain’s first Communist MP, drifting out in the same Parliament to sit as a Labour MP. He was replaced by a Tory in 1922, who then lost to Labour in 1923. The seat was retaken by the Tories in 1924 and recaptured by Labour in 1929.

By the mid-1920s, these types of suburban area were on the front line of rapid and closely contested political change, with Labour on a generally upward path. Part of Labour’s growing strength lay in its pyramid of affiliated or Labour-adjacent civil society organisations – unions, rapidly growing women’s sections and the Women’s Co-operative Guild among them.

One striking measure of how this local labour movement responded to the strike call is that, whatever MacDonald’s cowardly equivocations, all Labour councillors appear to have seen their duty as assisting the dispute. They spoke alongside trade unionists at a pre-strike rally. They served on central strike committees which organised effective picketing in both Leyton and Walthamstow, and supported cutting off the locally managed electricity supply. An occupational breakdown of the background of Labour local government candidates in 1926 shows them to be almost entirely manual or office workers.

This cooperation between the industrial and the political wings helps explain why the strike in Leyton was very solid, with all buses, trams and trains out, and most significant workplaces on strike. And because of this strength, there were no significant clashes, and no arrests directly connected with the strike. The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) had significantly fewer volunteer scabs in Leyton than the London average. A big crowd watched the Australian tourists smash the Essex bowling all over the place at Leyton cricket ground – cricket having gone ahead with the agreement of the MCC and the trade unions. A delegation of women successfully pressured the council to give milk to women with children.

There is a photograph of what are almost certainly typists and secretaries waiting at the Bakers Arms for a lift in a charabanc driven by a strike-breaking volunteer to the City of London. But was it all peaceful? The fact that there were no arrests may reflect that police numbers were depleted by extra numbers being sent to docklands, where troops were introduced. The main local paper, then as now, the Guardian, got one single duplicated sheet out during the strike that said that “good order has been maintained”. But in its first post-strike issue on May 12^th it claimed that a “state of terrorism” had existed in Leyton during the strike, with general intimidation from its first day, private buses surrounded at the Bakers Arms, charabancs overturned, and lorries carrying people to work “subject to brutal insults by the crowds of hooligans.”

This latter is almost certainly lurid, vengeful exaggeration, at a time when victimisation was happening on the railways. But I have come across several examples of what you might call civil disobedience – two teenagers bound over after having been caught trying to disable a signal box on the line between Loughton and Woodford; two lads arrested for trying to block the traffic near Gants Hill; and a group of women council tenants who blocked the line to Liverpool Street at Highams Park.

The TUC’s capitulation was followed by a fall in trade union membership and a retreat in the face of an employers’ offensive. It also swung the pendulum back towards political action, and in Leyton the Labour Party shifted leftwards. Fenner Brockway, who had edited the TUC’s British Worker during the General Strike, went to work with his brother-in-law Reg Sorensen in Leyton. Both were left-wing members of the ILP and both were adopted as prospective Labour candidates – Sorensen for Leyton West and Brockway for Leyton East. They launched a local left wing paper, the Leyton and Leytonstone Pioneer, which was delivered to thousands of addresses. It spearheaded their joint victories at the 1929 general election. Theirs was a strongly moral socialism of right versus wrong (with an obvious non-conformist component) but it was also pioneering in its anti-colonialism. Both Sorensen and Brockway were involved in the League Against Imperialism in its early stages, and many years later they were the first MPs to move a Race Relations bill in the House of Commons.

In any discussion of the General Strike, the question of whether it was a revolutionary situation inevitably arises. In the revolutionary corner, supporters point to the building strength of the strike during and even after the nine days; that it was – as MacDonald feared – a direct constitutional challenge to the state; that embryonic forms of dual power emerged in the Councils of Action; that workers in many parts of Britain had effective control of the supply of food, power and transport; that it “posed the question of power”, and that “all that was lacking was a revolutionary leadership”, with the Trotskyist tradition laying particular stress on the conciliatory Anglo-Russian Committee and the fatal weakness of the left-wing members of the General Council.

Sceptics point to the lack of any political plan on the part of the trade union leadership, and to the lack of a widespread revolutionary consciousness among workers; that there was a miss-match between its militant trade unionism and its still-emerging political consciousness. Clearly the General Council could have escalated and continued the dispute, and its decision to abandon the miners was taken voluntarily.

Whether a situation was revolutionary or not is not simply a yes or no answer. Trotsky himself on occasion criticised revolutionaries who mistook the first month of pregnancy for the ninth. No Council of Action existed in Leyton, although the Central Strike Committee presumably performed similar functions. But this was dual power only at a very embryonic level. There were no red guards. Many workers were army veterans, but few had guns and they were unlikely to obtain many without a highly improbable mutiny in the army.

Workers were undoubtedly aware that a general strike meant a confrontation with the state. With the strike almost universally supported, the next stage would inevitably involve political confrontation. But there are very few accounts indicating that workers discussed what that would look like.

Ramsay MacDonald was right about one thing – that the unions had no plan. Of course, the last thing Ramsay MacDonald wanted would been for the unions to have had a plan to confront state power. But he was right that they had no plan. Tories, Liberals and MacDonald’s allies had no problem identifying the constitutional implications of the mass strike. Only the union leaders saw it as only a trade union dispute.

The Communist Party’s line both leading up to, and during, the General Strike has been widely criticised as tail-ending that of the General Council. In Ken Loach’s Days Of Hope, a young Communist sees through the party line and leaves in disgust. But that fictional character had hardly any real life equivalents. There was scarcely a ripple of opposition within the CPGB at a time when it was still possible to debate the party’s strategy and tactics internally. In fact, the CPGB gained credit for its activism during the General Strike, and its membership more than doubled to 11,000 during 1926. But it was still a tiny force compared to Labour’s more than 5 million voters.

Decades ago, many of us were swept away with the idea that revolutions had failed to come to fruition because “all that was lacking was revolutionary leadership”. These days I’m warier of this kind of all-purpose, circular and tautological argument. Why was it lacking? Usually, the explanation is in the form of the subjective failures of assorted Labour leaders and trade union bureaucrats. But why did the membership of the revolutionary wing of the movement number only 7,000 in mid-1926? Among the reasons for the small size of the British ‘vanguard’ when compared to most other European countries must be the unitary nature of the British labour movement, and in particular, the Labour-trade union link.

Without pre-empting any more of my talk, these are some of the themes I will be exploring in an on-line meeting on Leyton and the General Strike on Sunday May 10^th at 2.30 pm. Also speaking will be Edd Mustill, author of the recently published book Britain’s Revolutionary Summer: The General Strike of 1926, reviewed on Labour Hub here.

Register for the meeting here.

Richard Price is a political activist in Leyton.