With the end of the war, discipline in the allied armies broke down very quickly. Mutinies had broken out at a number of army camps, where military police had been shot and soldiers’ committees formed on the lines of the Russian and German soviets. On the home front industrial militancy flared up, with the Clydeside once again at the epicentre of workers’ struggles. The ruling class was increasingly terrified at the developing pre-revolutionary situation in Britain throughout 1919. “This country was nearer to Bolshevism that day than at any time since”, stated the wily old fox, Lloyd George.
In January, a successful army mutiny in Calais was quickly followed by another at Folkestone, with the refusal of 3,000 war-weary troops to board trains for France. Instead the troops decided to march on Whitehall and then on Parliament, demanding to be immediately demobbed. They were only stopped when they were surrounded and forced to surrender by a regiment of Household Guards and Grenadiers, bayonets at the ready. Incredibly, over the following two weeks almost fifty mutinies took place in the British armed forces. Britain was on the brink of revolution.
This revolutionary groundswell affecting the armed forces placed in jeopardy the use of troops against industrial disputes on the home front. To determine which troops could be used for strike-breaking, the War Office sent out a secret circular to Commanding Officers (later leaked to the Daily Herald) demanding weekly reports on key matters including:
Will troops in various areas respond for assistance to preserve the public peace? Will they assist in strike breaking? Will they parade for draft overseas, especially to Russia? Have any soldiers’ councils been formed?
Results of the circular were directly reported to Winston Churchill and demonstrated the real mood in the armed forces:
Troops… deprecate being used in strike-breaking and the general feeling is that it would not be fair to ask troops to do what they would themselves consider blacklegging work… Troops will parade for draft overseas with the exception of Russia.
The British Cabinet was forced to repeatedly discuss this serious situation. Following these deliberations, the Cabinet Secretary noted in his diary: “Red Revolution and blood and war at home.” Churchill then informed the Cabinet: “By going gently at first we should get the support we wanted from the nation and then the troops could be used more effectively.” Bonar Law was keen on the idea and urged the enrolment of volunteers, particularly stockbrokers, to supplement the armed forces! The Cabinet then discussed recalling troops from abroad to deal with the situation at home, in which the War Secretary intervened to report, “We need 18 battalions to hold London.” During the discussions, the Foreign Secretary baulked at the thought of bringing troops home from Silesia, but he drew a strong rebuke from Chamberlain: “I am for holding the British coalfields rather than the Silesian ones!”[1]
The real tragedy of this revolutionary movement in the armed forces was the abject failure of the leaders of the labour movement to give it any support and political direction. At the same time as the workers in uniform were forming soldiers’ councils and challenging the authority of the officer caste, industrial workers in Britain were engaged in titanic battles with their employers. Industrial strife was unfolding with particular bitterness among the shipyard and engineering workers in Belfast and on revolutionary Clydeside. Unfortunately, there was no attempt to link up these struggles or direct them to a common purpose.
John MacLean in Glasgow, suffering stretches in prison, tried his best to rally the workers on the lines of Revolutionary Russia.
“We witness today what all Marxists naturally expected,” stated John MacLean, “the capitalist class of the world and their governments joined together in a most vigorously active attempt to crush Bolshevism in Russia and Spartacism in Germany. Bolshevism, by the way, is socialism triumphant, and Spartacism is socialism in the process of achieving triumph. This is the class war on an international scale, a class war that must and will be fought out to the logical conclusion – the extinction of capitalism everywhere.”[2]
At the end of January 1919, a strike movement on the Clyde reached general strike proportions. Under the leadership of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, engineering workers, shipyard workers and other sections struck for a 40-hour week. This was no ordinary strike however. Under existing conditions, with Britain in pre-revolutionary turmoil, it posed a serious threat to the country’s social fabric. As indicated in the Cabinet papers, there was an open fear of revolution in government circles. Accordingly, the government dispatched 10,000 troops to Glasgow from different parts of the country, while local troops were confined to barracks to prevent fraternisation. Menacingly, armoured tanks were stationed in George Square, Glasgow, after a battle between strikers and police.
Unfortunately the strike, with its overt revolutionary overtones, was isolated by national trade union officials, who went to great lengths to discipline local officials for their involvement (the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, for example, suspended its district officials on the Clyde), and the strike came to an end within a fortnight. The militants who led the Clyde Workers’ Committee, as well as the national shop stewards body, were deeply influenced by the Bolshevik Revolution, but had no clear understanding of how to take the movement forward. This led Willie Gallacher, the chairman of the CWC, to comment much later, “we were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution.” He continued, our “failure to realise the need of continuous and consistent leadership embracing all phases of activity represented a fatal weakness that was to lead to our complete eclipse.” Their experience of revolutionary syndicalism, nevertheless, increasingly pushed them in a revolutionary direction, and the politics embodied by the newly established Communist International.
“Many of the principal figures in the Communist Party, which emerged in 1920 and 1921, were men whose experiences and ideas had been formed on Clydeside”, noted the historian LJ Macfarlane. “MacManus, Bell and Gallacher all played leading parts in opposing the war and shared with the Bolsheviks a bitter contempt for the British trade union and Labour Party leaders who had betrayed the cause of international working class solidarity.”[3]
During the Clyde events, the 800,000-strong Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) had resolved to press home their demands for a 30 per cent wage increase, a six-hour working day, and the nationalisation of the mines under workers’ control. When, as was to be expected, the government – which had taken over control of the coal industry in 1916 – rejected these demands, a strike ballot was issued resulting in a big majority for industrial action. With coal stocks at famine levels (London had only three days supply), and the other members of the Triple Alliance simultaneously pushing their own demands, Lloyd George found himself in extreme difficulties, with a general strike implicit in the whole situation.
In these precarious circumstances, the main objective of the government was to avoid provoking a general strike at all costs. Lloyd George attempted to defuse the industrial situation by playing for time. He was a very astute and crafty bourgeois politician, and knew how to manipulate a situation to his advantage. He realised fully that British industry needed to reduce costs, particularly wage costs, and that organised labour needed to be defeated to achieve this aim. But given the revolutionary mood in the working class, they had to tread carefully and act with due caution. It was not a question of the interests of this or that capitalist, but the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. After all, “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”, to quote Marx. Lloyd George knew exactly what was at stake. The government was forced to undertake – having sized up the attitude of the trade union leadership – a gigantic manoeuvre. It was a typical stick and carrot approach. Firstly, they attempted to intimidate the union leaders by threatening the use of force against strikes. Secondly, out of the goodness of their hearts they agreed to set up a Royal Commission, a ploy used to dupe workers on many occasions, to investigate the mining industry, and whose findings would be binding on the government (or so they claimed).
Within seventeen days, the Commission, under the chairmanship of Sir John Sankey, rushed out an interim report on 20 March 1919, recommending higher wages, the seven-hour day, and a prospect of a six-hour day to follow. It stated that
“the present system of ownership and working in the coal industry stands condemned and that some other system must be substituted for it, either nationalisation or a method of unification by national purchase and/or by joint control.”
The question of ownership of the industry was however left until a later report. This was an astute move, which suitably impressed the union leaders. Fearing pithead violence and an open clash with the state, both Robert Smillie, the Federation’s president and Frank Hodges, the secretary, persuaded a special miners’ conference – despite the colossal advantage in their hands – to accept the government’s offer. The government gave out an audible sigh of relief. It was clear that a miners’ strike could have rapidly escalated into a general strike, which the trade union leaders – both right and left – were not prepared to contemplate. “We had no right to force conditions on the nation because of our strength…” remarked Smillie. In the event, this only served to postpone the battle.