It was Churchill, a man who in Perkins's memorable phrase "thought consensus was for the common people". Arthur Scargill remembered Cook's rhetoric but forgot his tactical ineptitude.Īlthough I was wrong about the hero of the general strike, I always correctly identified the slightly comic villain. That is only one of the parallels between 19 which the perceptive Perkins identifies. Ramsay Macdonald feared that "there will be a general strike to save Arthur Cook's face". As Perkins makes clear, without resorting to the crude device of actually saying so, Cook - all rhetoric and no strategy - undermined the prospects of the claim which he supported at least as effectively as did Jimmy Thomas, the NUR general secretary who was officially designated a traitor. I was brought up in the belief that AJ Cook, the secretary of the Miners' Federation, was the hero of 1926. The claim that the miners could win was a cruel deception. That meant that a national settlement with "not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day" was a heroic but unattainable aspiration. Greedy owners combined with fearful miners to oppose closures. Thanks to the debilitated condition of the economy - exacerbated by Winston Churchill's decision to return to the gold standard - many pits were near to bankruptcy. But the real problem was the state of the industry. Much blame was heaped on those trade unionists who either fought with the miners half-heartedly or refused to fight at all. Her comprehensive account of how it progressed shows that the miners' cause was doomed from the start. Nine months later, the subsidy ended, and it is clear from Perkins's incisive analysis how the general strike came about. That notion comes in the category of romantic but wrong. The union celebrated Red Friday in the belief that, as long as the workers were united, they were invincible. have to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet", he capitulated with the announcement that the government would pay the difference between the owners' offer and the miners' demands until the commission of inquiry into the industry reported. Within days of the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, announcing that "all workers. On May 1 1925, the miners - having swallowed their pride and allowed the TUC to join in the negotiations - won a spectacular victory. "The railwaymen deserted us in 1921."īlack Friday was redeemed. When I got home the account of my activities was interrupted by my mother, as soon as Higgins was mentioned.
When, in 1950, I canvassed in a general election for the first time, one of my companions was Les Higgins, a railway guard. In my experience the resentment was more specific. This "was branded on the souls of all good trade unionists as the moment when the timid leadership sacrificed the miners". On that day, the leaders of the transport and rail unions refused to strike in support of their allies, the miners. In A Very British Strike, Anne Perkins writes of Black Friday, April 15 1921. It has helped to create the esprit de corps which, combined with a courage that their trade demanded, made them fight on long after their industrial battles had been lost. Miners and those who support their causes have always had long, but selective, memories.
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