The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ of dismayed sailors outside my cabin door, each brandishing a sheet of paper covered with elaborate and meticulous calculations, which were explained to me in the utmost detail, each interview concluding, “You see, Sir, I can’t possibly manage on this; what am I going to do?”’

      In the canteens, which were for the lower orders only, discontent was growing: Len Wincott, an Able Seaman aboard the cruiser HMS Norfolk, jumped on a table and called for a strike ‘like the miners’, but since setting out on a march to London didn’t make any sense, it would have to be passive resistance, a sit-down strike. Seamen had long been denied any effective channels of complaint such as a trade union, and were forbidden to communicate directly with their MP to express any grievances about the navy that they might have. But of course any mass resistance by His Majesty’s Forces was mutiny — though none of the sailors used that word — in this case ‘mutiny not accompanied by violence’, but mutiny nevertheless, for which the punishment was death. If the seamen were anxious not to label their actions mutiny, nor was the Admiralty: the Royal Navy was the symbol of Britain’s prestige around the world, and rarely had that prestige been more at risk, with an acute financial crisis, a run on gold, and foreign anxieties about the stability and resolve of the British government. The words used were ‘disturbance’ and ‘unrest’. The National Government approached newspaper editors requesting them not to mention Invergordon at this sensitive time for the country. But Ritchie Calder, then a young journalist on the Daily Herald, did not feel constrained by such discretion, and the Herald ran the story.

      On Tuesday, 15 September at 8 a.m. most of the stokers on the battleship HMS Valiant refused the order to sail from Invergordon on the edge of the Cromarty Firth to take part in exercises in the North Sea, and the crews aboard the battleships Rodney and Nelson and the battle cruiser Hood followed suit, all refusing to move. Over the following thirty-six hours most of the 12,000 men on the twelve ships at Invergordon refused orders.

      The Admiralty appeared to be completely out of touch with the situation, taking hours to reply to any communications from the officers, reiterating that in effect every man must do his duty, and it was not until mid-afternoon on Wednesday, 16 September that the order came that ships were to return to their home ports and cases of hardship would be looked into. The strikers’ resolve began to crumble, and by that night the ships started to put to sea. The nearest Britain ever came to a Battleship Potemkin moment in modern times was over. There were those in the Admiralty, and indeed some naval officers, who portrayed the strike as a mutiny and put it down to ‘Bolshevik agitators’ — a charge that was perhaps easier to sustain when Able Seaman Wincott, discharged from the navy, joined a front organisation of the Communist Party which capitalised on the ‘mutiny’ and his claims to have ‘led’ it. Another leader, Fred Copeman, who was not a member of the Communist Party at the time, became a fellow traveller and active in the unemployed movement and later in Spain. But although twenty-four ratings were discharged — though not until after the 1931 general election — the Admiralty was unable to establish that the events were anything more than the spontaneous actions of a large number of deeply disaffected men, denied any legitimate channels of complaint or redress and faced with a seemingly uncomprehending, unsympathetic and unresponsive Admiralty Board. On 21 September 1931, the same day Britain came off the Gold Standard, the government announced that there would be no pay cuts of more than 10 per cent.

      Like the previous national marches and many of the local demonstrations that preceded it, the fourth national march which got underway on 26 September 1932, when a contingent of 250 unemployed men left Glasgow, had been organised by the NUWM, which had been set up in 1921 to mobilise unemployed discontent. There was little competition. The Labour Party largely accepted the view, even after 1931, that the government was doing its best in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, while the TUC (whose membership had fallen from 5.5 million in 1925 to under 4.5 million by 1932) was essentially concerned with the interests of the employed, resisting pay cuts and short-time working. The unions’ contribution in the early 1930s was confined to mouthing statements ‘strongly’ condemning cuts in benefit payments and making ‘emphatic (verbal) protests’ at government inaction. ‘Their line was “No illegality, wait, vote for the Labour Party,”’ recalled an unemployed Kirkcaldy man, ‘and Pat Devine … who was a real agitator … says “What is the workers supposed to do? Starve until we get a Labour Government?”’

      In 1932, after more than a decade of high unemployment, the TUC began to consider a scheme for ‘unemployed associations’. By 1934 such associations numbered 123, with a total membership of around 5,000, but they were essentially local initiatives, with no national TUC guidance or support until 1935, when the TUC offered to pay the expenses of union officials who were prepared to visit associations within their areas ‘to stimulate and advise them’.

      The NUWM had been established initially as an umbrella group to bring together various district councils for the unemployed which had been active in protests against post-war unemployment, the cessation of the ex-servicemen’s ‘donation’ and what were considered other iniquities. Wal Hannington, the national organiser, was a skilled toolmaker who had been a prominent member of the shop stewards’ movement in the engineering trade during the First World War, and Harry McShane, the NUWM leader in Scotland, was also an engineer. Both were founder members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), as were many of the activists in the movement. While the NUWM’s slogan was ‘Work or Full Maintenance at Trade Union Rates of Pay’ (which meant in practice thirty-six shillings a week for an unemployed man and his wife; five shillings for each child up to the age of sixteen; a rent allowance of up to fifteen shillings a week plus one hundredweight of coal or its equivalent in gas; thirty shillings for a single person over eighteen, or fifteen shillings if they were aged sixteen to eighteen), all members were required to take an oath ‘never to cease from active strife until capitalism is abolished’.

      Although a member of the CPGB himself, Wal Hannington was always anxious to distance the movement from the Communist Party and insist on its autonomy. On occasion resolutions would be passed at the NUWM’s national conference reaffirming this, and repudiating any notion that the NUWM was in any way an auxiliary of the CP — though there was some substance in the labour movement’s charge that any links with the Communists were concealed so as not to alienate Labour and TUC support. Moreover, however much the Communist Party might hope that the unemployed would provide, if not the vanguard for revolution, then its footsoldiers, the vast majority of those who went on the marches did so for tangible, short-term aims: to get a better deal for the unemployed from the existing state.

      It is hard to get accurate figures for how many joined the NUWM, since most records come either from the movement itself or from the CPGB: some historians claim that it mobilised ‘hundreds of thousands of people’, while others dismiss it as remaining ‘a minority movement’. One of those who helped organise the Scottish contingent on the march in 1932, and went himself in 1934, Finlay Hart, an unemployed shipbuilder, recalled, ‘It was as natural as being at work and being a trade unionist, being unemployed and being in the NUWM … At the time of the ’32 march to London the membership of the Clydebank branch of the NUWM would be in hundreds. There were collectors that stood at the Labour Exchange … There were regular meetings outside the Labour Exchange. Members were recruited there.’

      The unemployed signed on on Wednesday and were paid on Friday. So Harry McShane and his comrades ‘went always on a Wednesday or a Friday to the Labour Exchange. And we could get a good crowd at the Labour Exchange and hold a meeting on top o’ a chair. And from there we organised all our marches and activities.’ ‘Being a member of the NUWM wasn’t a necessary qualification for going on the March,’ but Finlay Hart ‘couldn’t imagine any being on the March that wouldnae had been a member of the NUWM’. Yet in fact nine or ten of the Clydebank contingent of forty-two were not members of the NUWM. Isa Porte, who went on several marches in Scotland, ‘wasn’t a member myself of the NUWM but I think a lot of the people I marched with would be in it. I wouldnae think there were very many of them in political parties. There would be some in the Communist party, and then there would be Labour СКАЧАТЬ