The Great Silence (13 page)

The general election of December 1918 straddled the first peacetime Christmas, with polling on the 14th and the count made on the 28th. The election was known as ‘The Coupon Election’ after the Liberal Lloyd George and the Conservative Bonar Law had made an agreement (or issued a ‘coupon’) with all the Liberals who had been part of the wartime Coalition Government. One hundred and fifty-nine Liberal candidates were assured that no Conservative would challenge their seats and that the arrangement should be reciprocal. There was therefore no chance of one Coalition candidate competing against another. In effect the election was rigged.

The Coupon election carried with it a new and powerful significance. The revolutionary circumstances brought about by the war, in particular the employment of women in the war effort, had nudged the country towards something like democratic equality. Previously marginalised sections of society were gaining an unprecedented self-confidence through their newly acquired voices. The Government recognised that returning soldiers, many of whom had not previously qualified for the vote, would feel the urgency in voting for a new government of a country they had fought to save. The Representation of the People Act passed in February 1918 thus abolished several of the restrictive property-owning conditions and millions of men aged 21 and women aged 30 and over, as well as graduates of British universities, were now eligible to vote for the first time. The electorate had trebled from 7.7 million to 21.4 million.

The Labour party had put up 350 candidates, and several women were proposed as potential members, including the suffragette Miss Christabel Pankhurst and a leader of the Women’s Trade Union League, Miss Mary Macarthur.

Lloyd George had outlined his five campaign points. It would be the Government’s main business to get the soldier home as quickly as possible; to give fair treatment to the returned serviceman; to conduct the trial and punishment of the Kaiser; to punish those individuals and countries found guilty of atrocities; and to secure better social and working conditions for the people of Britain. Four of these points were retrospective and dealt with
the war; only one examined the circumstances of a new post-war Britain.

The count of 28 December had returned the Coalition Government to power with the Liberal Lloyd George remaining as Prime Minster and Andrew Bonar Law as the Conservative coalition leader with a combined vote of under five million. Between them they won 478 of the 707 seats. Herbert Asquith, the former prime minister who had led a breakaway group of Liberals, found himself out of Parliament altogether. One woman was elected, Constance Markievicz, who was returned for the seat of St Patrick’s, Dublin. On the extreme wing of Irish politics, representing Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican party, she refused to take the parliamentary oath of loyalty to the Crown, and was thus denied her place on the green benches. But the other seventy-two Irish seats had also been won by Sinn Fein, proving that 47 per cent of the Irish electorate had made clear their wish for Ireland’s independence from Great Britain. One of the new Members of Parliament was a romantic idealist called Michael Collins. He had voiced his determination to see through the establishment of Ireland as a republic and his powerful popularity was of growing concern to the British Government who feared a further interruption to the hard-won peace.

The Labour party under the leadership of William Adamson, a former Scottish miner from Fife, had increased its vote from half a million to two and a half million, netting the party sixty-three seats and making them the official party of opposition. This new level of support for the Labour party showed the increasing strength of socialist sympathies. After the war the party had met in an emergency conference, pulling its members out from the unity of the Coalition back into its own party-political group. At the same time the party called for ‘the fullest recognition and utmost extension of trade unionism’ and gave its full support to the Trades Union Congress whose membership now numbered four and a half million – almost double that of five years earlier.

Labour’s goals included the immediate nationalisation and democratic control of vital public services, including mining, shipping, armaments, the railways and the electricity industry. The party made clear its support for the unions by outlining plans to
deal with unemployment, the universal right to work, factory conditions, working hours, safety, and women’s remuneration and compensation.

On 5 January the deepening anger at not being allowed home broke through disciplinary restraint. Eighteen thousand military men marching from army camps at Shoreham and Southwick in West Sussex arrived at the town hall in Brighton at 11.00 a.m. A spokesman for the group, a man wearing two wound stripes, voiced the frustration felt by so many men with nothing to do. What sort of a world tolerated a position in which the men who had fought to save their country filled their time ‘doing physical jerks’? Did it make sense for soldiers to be employed ‘washing up pans and dishes and generally doing women’s work’? Surely, he argued, they would be more useful at home. In order to press the point a handful of demobbed soldiers dressed up in crinolines and feathered bonnets, bringing a music hall atmosphere to the otherwise grim scenes in the streets.

Some demobs were kept waiting for other reasons. Ten thousand soldiers being held at Folkestone had refused to embark on ships reserved to take them to swell the numbers of British troops supporting the White Army in Russia. They marched to the town hall demanding the immediate issue of release papers. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, was fearful. ‘We are sitting on top of a mine which may go up at any minute.’ Mutiny, legally terminated by the death penalty, was rife and going unpunished.

On 7 January Lloyd George stepped into Whitehall to be confronted in person by three thousand soldiers who had marched into the capital and gathered in Horse Guards Parade just outside the entrance to Downing Street, ready to protest at the chaotic ineptitude of the disbanding process. The Prime Minister knew he faced a potential threat from whole battalions. Once again he explained that it was necessary to keep an army in place on the Rhine and in France and for emergency purposes at home. He turned to Winston Churchill, newly appointed Secretary of State for War and Air, to devise a way out of this deadlock. Churchill came up with a solution. He suggested that the reserve army should be made up of those who had joined late in the war. Three men out of four would be
released and the Government would pay the fourth man double wages, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘to finish the job’. The Government was relieved to find that most soldiers responded to Churchill’s leadership with at least an outer show of calm.

But patience among demobbed servicemen had entirely evaporated. They returned home to find that pensions had collapsed and unemployment was already endemic in some communities. The cost of living had risen while for the poorest paid workers wages remained little higher than their pre-war level. Even then work was hard to come by, and a steady income never guaranteed. As Maude Onions had begun to conclude, it seemed that ‘war cannot bring peace’.

In Ireland a separate parliament had been established by the Sinn Fein candidates who had been victorious in the 1918 election. The Dáil Éireann ignored the protests coming from Whitehall about its illegal status and began running the country’s affairs as if its fully authorised independence had been won.

Within the mining community disaffection was widespread. During the war the Government had taken over management of the mines but after the Armistice ownership reverted to hundreds of individual landowners united in their opposition to nationalisation. The financial rewards of the industry were enormous: unless you were a miner. Discrepancies in wages and conditions were endemic.

Shorter hours, better working conditions and increased wages became the workers’ main objectives. The noise at the bottom of the cramped lift shaft, where the cage thumped and crashed on to the pit floor as it reached the bottom, was thunderous. Dozens of hewers, stone men, putters and electricians streamed out into the cramped passages as they made their way to the engine room, the canteen and the ambulance office. The din only receded during what was sometimes a two- to three-hour underground walk into the claustrophobic centre of the hill to reach the coalface, where men might remain on anything up to a seven-hour shift. The many dangers underground, including poisonous gas and collapsing walls, had resulted in 1918 in the deaths of 1,300 miners and injury to a further 160,000. If mine owners would not listen to the desperate outcry and the Government also failed to respond, the miners had no option but to take action themselves.

In the second week of January 1919 there were eighteen separate coalminers’ strikes, and a week later a further twenty as heavy snow began to fall in the north of the country. A total of 34,969 days were lost in strikes as compared with just under six thousand the year before. During these strikes the canaries, whose song would only be interrupted by the presence of methane and would thus alert the miners to the presence of poisonous gas, were brought to the top of the pit. Suddenly they were able to sing freely in the open air. The much loved pit ponies who pulled the coal wagons along the restricted corridors between the face and the lift shaft, whose eyes had not seen unrestrained daylight for many months, were likewise brought up to the outside world during the strikes. But instead of finding comfort in the experience of sun on their faces as many soldiers blinded by gas had done, they were confused and frightened by the intensity of light and eye shields were rapidly wrapped round their eyes by their masters to calm them.

But the consideration given to the welfare of the ponies was not extended to the coordination of strike action itself, and pits were closed on an ad hoc basis, diffusing the potential power of centralised action. Striking members of the dockers’ and railwaymen’s unions, who together with the miners formed the sometimes erratically managed Triple Alliance, failed to make their solidarity evident. A strike in the Clyde shipyards in Glasgow that lasted from 27 January to 11 February, when the Red Flag was raised, took place in a vacuum.

Amid this confusion consumers’ needs and the financial stability of the country remained, in the view of the right-wing press, more of a priority than the welfare of the miners. An editorial in the
Spectator
magazine of 25 January emphasised that over 99 per cent of British industry relied on coal, including the exporting of cotton, iron and steel. The magazine had spoken to a Professor Cobb of Leeds University who ‘gives good reasons for discounting the popular faith in electricity’ as a possible alternative to coal, based on the wastage level of heat. Gas might be preferable, the magazine argued, but the capital cost of transferring the running of industries to that alternative source of energy would come to ‘a very large amount’. The miners, the magazine insisted, must be made to go back to work.

Soon strikes began to damage the industrial muscle of the country, stretching productivity in other coal-reliant industries to snapping point. The Prime Minister, ever an advocate of conciliation rather than confrontation, was anxious to contain the spread of the strikes and prevent a national coal stoppage. Officials from the collieries stepped in as volunteers, and naval ratings recently returned from the war were drafted in to help keep the coalface operating.

The Cabinet was nervous that the strikes might be the prelude to something more lasting and profound. In Glasgow the city was brought to a standstill on 27 January and troops rather than policemen were sent in to restore order. The army had been playing the domestic peacekeeping role for several months and Lloyd George was determined that there should not be a repetition of the policemen’s strikes of the preceding August. A policeman was often paid less than a munitions factory worker and the same fixed rate as a street sweeper. Almost the entire Metropolitan force of 12,000 men had marched down Whitehall demanding pay increases and a war pension for policemen’s widows.

By the end of February the cumulative effect of the miners’ stoppages had reduced London to its final three days’ supply of coal. And the disruption was beginning to be infectious. In February operators of the London underground stopped working and drivers of the Metropolitan Railway joined them. And the railway workers’ union leader, James Thomas, angrily addressed a conference of industrialists demanding a share of the profit from a post-war boom that he felt confident was on the way. He threatened strike action unless something was done.

The potential for a national crisis suddenly become acute as the miners’ union at last began coordinating its efforts with the railway and transport unions.
The Spectator of 22
February remained unsym-patheric. The magazine asked how miners themselves would feel if ‘the doctors would not attend them or their families if they were ill, if the chemists would not supply them with drugs, if the tobacconists would not sell them tobacco, the publicans beer, the butchers meat, or the farmers milk and eggs and vegetables?’

Lloyd George made a proposition to the President of the Miners’ Federation. Robert Smillie was a tough 62-year-old ex-coalminer
with a passion for the writing of Robert Burns and Ruskin, and, so a colleague observed, ‘a face and voice so terribly full of conviction’. The Prime Minister told Smillie that he would listen to his men’s grievances if they would return to work. If they would not, the Government would send in the troops. The fear of bloodshed on top of so much bloodshed, and the threat of the authorised use of weapons against an exhausted volunteer army recently demobbed, was enough to get Smillie to back down. Knowing the volatile and unpredictable mood of the ex-soldiers, Smillie could not be certain of preventing retaliation. Within a month all the miners and their ponies went back to the darkness of the pits.

But these grievances still remained unresolved while others began to make themselves felt. Lloyd George had promised those who elected him to a new term of government that he would ‘secure better social conditions’. The consequences of irregular employment went beyond the failure to bring home a dependable wage. The shortage of housing and the quantity of unreliable tenants prompted landlords to ask for references, but with no workplace to supply the references many house hunters were blocked from solving the problem of where to live.