Britain's nearly revolution
Notes from the Underground with David Aaronovitch
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Britain's nearly revolution<br>The General Strike of 1926
David Aaronovitch<br>Jul 18, 2026
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At the Communist party events that my parents used to take me to in the 1960s — usually a rally in support of some cause or other — I often noticed a small elderly man wearing a woollen jacket and an old-fashioned smoking cap, who reminded me of Mole in The Wind in the Willows.
Forty years earlier, Robin Page Arnot, then recently released from Wandsworth prison after a short sentence for sedition, had been sent by the small British Communist party north to Northumberland to help organise the imminent general strike. Several pages in Jonathan Schneer’s Nine Days in May detail Arnot’s extraordinary impact on the area. It was Arnot who put together a plan, persuading almost all the trade unions, trade councils and Labour Party activists to agree to the formation of a council of action based in Newcastle, and to local satellites in towns and villages. The objective was, in effect, to take over the running of the area for the duration of the 1926 general strike.<br>He almost succeeded. That’s just two degrees of separation. Yet those nine days a century ago, which Schneer describes as “a titanic struggle between the world’s most powerful and best organized labour movement and Europe’s most effective and self-confident government”, are barely recalled today.<br>Compare, for example, what most people know about the general strike with what they know about the abdication crisis of 1936, and we can ask why the emotional self-indulgence of a spoiled royal has counted for so much more than a confrontation between the government of that same prime minister — Stanley Baldwin — and the organised working class of Britain. In Britain’s Revolutionary Summer , Edd Mustill complains that the events of 1926 have “vanished from the national story we tell ourselves”. He notes that the interwar saga of Downton Abbey managed to end abruptly on New Year’s Day 1926, with the film sequels then resuming in 1927. This discretion has spared us a storyline in which Matthew Crawley volunteers for some strikebreaking fun, such as that enjoyed by “Boy” Mulcaster in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited — Upstairs Downstairs reimagined as class struggle. Perhaps the problem is that our writers and filmmakers can no longer even imagine the proletarian world of the 1920s and the days when millions worked in the ironworks, on the docks, on the railways — in the 1920s there were 23,500 route miles of track in Britain, today it’s less than 10,000 — and, above all, the coal mines.
At the outbreak of the first world war, more than a million men were employed in the coal industry. Though poorly paid, a miner still earned more than other industrial workers, Schneer points out. Their hours and conditions were another matter. Depending on the mine (and mines varied enormously in size, depth and ease of extraction), miners could be paid for a seven-hour shift but not the two hours it took to travel to the coalface and back. Some deep mines were so hot that miners worked naked, wearing only knee pads as they pulled coal trolleys along narrow passages on all fours. And it was dangerous. An average of three miners a day died in accidents in the early 1920s. But by the end of the war, the British coal industry was in trouble. In 1926, writes Schneer, “more than 1,400 separate companies owned nearly 2,500 collieries, but 613 of them produced nearly 95 per cent of the country’s coal.”<br>Mines varied hugely in profitability, but all paid the same wages according to national agreement. After the war, the industry faced domestic competition from oil and electricity; its export business was challenged by cheaper coal from the US and Germany. Demand fell and so did employment and profitability. The answer from the employers, organised into the Mining Association of Great Britain (MAGB), was always the same: cut wages and lengthen working hours. “It is of no avail to suggest that the wages received do not permit of the miners having a proper standard of living,” pronounced one MAGB vice-president in 1925. Naturally, the miners’ union, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, vehemently disagreed. For years it had fought incrementally and painfully to improve conditions for its members.<br>Something would have to give and everyone knew it. Numerous official inquiries into the industry were held, recommending variously nationalisation (which eventually happened in 1947) and other measures, and the strike of 1926 took place just weeks after the latest commission, led by the Liberal grandee Sir Herbert Samuel, had reported. On May 3, up to 2.7mn workers downed tools. The trains and buses stopped, the docks went quiet, the furnaces were banked down But while the Conservative government pondered Samuel’s conclusions, which included pit amalgamation and modernisation, the MAGB — who...