The Bryant and May strike was described by Engels as the “light jostle needed for the entire avalanche to move”. The lessons of the strike were not lost on workers. It certainly provided the spark; the blaze was to follow in the magnificent struggle of the gasworkers and dockworkers, and was to culminate in the explosion of New Unionism.
In early 1889, the young SDF branch secretary and gasworker, Will Thorne, began to organise a union at the Beckton Gas Works near East Ham.
“The news of the meeting spread like wildfire,” Thorne wrote later, “in the public houses, factories and works in Canning Town, Barking, West Ham, everyone was talking about the union… Sunday after Sunday we would start off from 144 Barking Road, our headquarters, to encourage the men at other gasworks. As many as twenty brake loads of workers would go out on these Sunday morning crusades. The idea caught on; enthusiasm was at a high pitch, and within two weeks we had over 3,000 men in the union. Never before had men responded like they did. For months London was ablaze. The newspapers throughout the country were giving good reports of our activities. They were curious to know what we wanted and what we were going to do. I knew what we were going to do. I kept in mind all the time my pledge to the men at the first meeting. To work and fight for the Eight-Hour Day – that was my first objective, soon to be won.”[4]
Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor, her husband Edward Aveling, and other SDF members Tom Mann, John Burns and Ben Tillett closely assisted Thorne. The union spread rapidly given the unrest amongst the workforce, and within four months 20,000 had joined up. Strike notices were handed in demanding an eight-hour shift, a twelve day fortnight, and pay of a shilling (five pence) an hour. The Company, fearing a strike, conceded all the demands, except that the wages were less than they demanded, two-and-a-half new pence an hour instead of five pence. This was the victory, stated Tom Mann, which “put older and larger trade unions to shame.”
Will Thorne, a committed Marxist who was personally acquainted with Engels, became the first general secretary of the 60,000 strong National Union of Gasworkers & General Workers (today’s GMB) and Eleanor Marx was unanimously elected to its executive committee, drew up its rules, and became secretary of the first women’s branch of the union.
“Eleanor Marx-Aveling took a leading part in the strike”, recalls Thorne. “An eloquent speaker, fluent in several languages she did good service both among the men and women, and formed a women’s branch of the union at Silvertown, of which she became the secretary. She sat as delegate from this branch at all our delegate meetings, and was elected to the committee of the union when the rules were altered to permit women to be seated on the committee.”[5]
In fact she also helped Thorne with his reading and writing, which he says “was very bad at the time.”
Under these stormy conditions, the first May Day in Britain in 1890, proved to be a massive affair, exceeding even the most ambitious expectations. There were nearly 200,000 people in London’s Hyde Park.
“At last the English proletariat seems to be coming into the movement in its masses”, wrote Engels proudly. “I consider this the grandest and most important part of the whole May Day Festival, that on 4 May 1890, the English proletariat, newly awakened from its forty years’ winter sleep, again entered the movement of its class… And that is an epoch-making fact… The grandchildren of the old Chartists are entering the line of battle.”[6]
The links between the gasworkers and dockers were always very strong. Within a short space of time, the dockers, overwhelmingly a pool of casual workers at the lower levels of the proletariat and ruthlessly exploited by the owners, were now also rising up off their knees. Crowds of men, desperate for work, would line up every day in all weathers at the dock gates hoping to be hired for a day’s labour. Now, dockers demanding action against their inhuman conditions besieged the young Ben Tillett. He drew in Tom Mann, John Burns, Tom McCartney of the Stevedores, and of course, Eleanor Marx (who became the secretary of the strike committee), to help organise the men. Dockers, when they managed to get work, were earning five and a half old pennies an hour – the same wages as in 1802! Now, in 1889, they launched a massive union drive and a strike for a wage rise to sixpence an hour (the dockers’ tanner), with meetings and processions throughout east London. Faced with blackleg labour, on Mann’s initiative, they decided to call for a general strike of all London trades.
In a fine display of working class solidarity and internationalism, London dockers received massive assistance from dockers as far away as Australia. They collected and sent over aid amounting to a gigantic £30,000, which served to strengthen the strike and eventually helped to bring the employers to their knees. Once the workers’ main demands were conceded, the union was established on a permanent basis, with Ben Tillett as the secretary and Tom Mann as its president. By the end of November 1889 it claimed 30,000 members, and became the forerunner of today’s giant Transport and General Workers’ Union. It was during this strike that John Connell composed the working class anthem the Red Flag, with the stirring words “though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the Red Flag flying here!”
A new militant spirit of trade unionism was abroad. The dockers’ success resulted in the biggest upsurge in trade union organisation since the pioneering days of Robert Owen’s Grand National Consolidated Trade Union. The Dockers’ Union covering London spread to other provincial ports. The gasworkers union also organised general labourers throughout the provinces. New unions were then formed on the railways. The General Railway Workers’ Union (later the NUR, then the RMT), in a clear rejection of the “model” unions of the past, passed a resolution at its first conference, stating, “that the union shall remain a fighting one, and shall not be encumbered with any sick or accident fund”. The Miners’ Federation, formed in 1888 with 36,000 members, had mushroomed by 1893 to over 200,000. In the printing industry, the workers formed their own union that became NATSOPA (the forerunner of today’s GPMU). Given the eruption of trade union organisation, between 1889 and 1891 over 60 new Trades Councils were established throughout the country, drawing the various unions together on a town and city-wide basis.
Despite all claims to the contrary, this example clearly shows the important influence that Marxism played in the development of the modern Labour movement. Marxist activists were to make a vital and lasting contribution to the building of the British trade unions. This role grew out of the changed objective situation that had arisen from Britain’s decline as a world power. With little room for manoeuvre, the working class was forced to struggle in this new environment. At the time, the Marxists not only recognised the change, but strived to put themselves at its head, to organise and generalise the struggle. Mann, Burns, Tillett were the catalyst for the new movement, nothing more. But without such determined leaders, the movement could have been dissipated or at least remained still shackled to the old set-up. The experience showed once again the importance of the subjective factor, the importance of leadership, in the class struggle.
This movement, born out of the “stagnant pool” of London’s East End, was
“far more important… even than the actual progress socialism has made in England generally”, wrote Engels, for “the new unions were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were socialists, either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited respectable bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated ‘old’ unionists. And thus we see now these unions taking the lead of the working class movement generally, and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud ‘old’ unions… And for all the faults committed in past, present and future, the revival of the East End of London remains one of the greatest and most fruitful facts of this fin de siécle [end of the century], and glad and proud I am to have lived to see it.”