Black Diamonds (38 page)

In some districts, whole families resorted to picking through the sewage tips in search of any lumps of coal that had been thrown into the midden trenches.

As the strike dragged on, conditions became desperate in the Yorkshire coalfields and in other mining regions across the country. The government estimated that 1.7 million families were affected by the coal strike. ‘It was clog and boot time if you like, not much to wear, no money at all,’ Ernest Kaye, a miner from Birdwell, near Barnsley, remembered. ‘We went to school as normal, some were worse than me, wearing just one shoe, with big holes in their jumpers.’ ‘I can remember the 1926 strike,’ Jack Parkin, a miner from Carlton, a colliery village near Wentworth, recalled. ‘One word sums up the village at the time: bloody destitute.’

The miners at New Stubbin and Elsecar collieries were better off than most. In the last week of August, Billy Fitzwilliam made an extraordinary announcement: instead of giving their children one meal a week, all 2,500 of them were to be fed every day.

In London, negotiations between the Government, the miners’ leaders and the coal owners were deadlocked. The strike had two more months to run.

‘
The owners
are fighting Socialism,’ wrote Lord Londonderry, one of the wealthiest coal owners in the north of England, in a letter to Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the fifth month of the strike. ‘The Federation [the miners’ union] is nothing but a Communist Central Office. We want a victory over the strongest Communistic force in the country. You will have to fight Socialism in the very near future,’ he warned the Chancellor, ‘and the Miners’ Federation is one of the powerful army corps in the field against us.’

The tragedy of the coal strike lay not simply in the hardship suffered by the miners but the fact that the Government allowed it to be hijacked by the warriors of class war.

During the eight months it lasted, it was the coal owners who were the most belligerent. In the years between the Great War and the Second World War, the Conservative and Liberal share of the electoral vote did not fall below 60 per cent; the Communist Party’s share averaged 0.3 per cent. At the time Lord Londonderry was writing, in September 1926, while a number of the miners’ union leaders were Communists, there was no evidence to support the theory that the men they represented were bent on overthrowing parliamentary democracy and forcing a revolutionary Communist Government into power. On the contrary, their docile conduct during the coal dispute, like that of the 3 million-plus men who had come out in sympathetic protest with them in the General Strike, ought to have shown that, far from posing a challenge to the constitution, the majority of miners were fighting solely for the principle of a living wage.

From the outset, the coal owners – the men who owned and operated Britain’s collieries – were determined not to give ground. ‘It would be possible to say without exaggeration of the miners’ leaders that they were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners,’ Lord Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India, and a member of the Coal Committee appointed by the Prime Minister to resolve the dispute, remarked to his friend Lord Irwin in May 1926.

During the negotiations to end the strike, the coal owners were represented by their association, the Mining Association of Great Britain (MAGB). In contrast to the aristocratic, often flamboyant, super-rich mineral royalty owners – the men who owned the land from which the coal was mined – the coal owners were a shadowy, provincial body of men. Their strongholds were the dour granite buildings, stained by dirt and damp, the civic megaliths to the industrial revolution that crowded the centre of the ‘new’ towns in the Black Country, the Yorkshire coalfields and at the heads of the Welsh valleys.
Coal, iron and steel
represented the whole of their lives; as Dr Outram concluded in his study of the forty-four men who in 1926 made up the Central Committee of the MAGB, ‘their status in society, and in their communities depended entirely on coal; if it failed their moderate wealth and power was at stake. They had nothing else.’

Of the forty-four members on the MAGB’s central committee, nearly half were JPs; twelve had served at one time as county or urban district councillors; seven were Deputy Lieutenants of their county. With the exception of one, their public activities were confined to their county and their industry, a record that fell far short of many of the wealthy northern manufacturers. Despite an average fortune of £112,000 each,
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few, if any, of the committee members had followed the contemporary practice of dedicating parks or buildings to their localities. While the majority had inherited their mines and their wealth, they shunned – or were shunned by – ‘society’; as Outram discovered, they stood apart from the political social elite. Few had been to the ‘right’ schools – Eton, Marlborough or Harrow; their families had chosen to send them to grammar schools or to minor public schools like Fettes and Clifton instead. A university education was the exception and only a handful had a record of military service. Their births, deaths and marriages were not reported in
The Times
; most had married the daughters of men from similarly provincial backgrounds to themselves. Only four maintained a London residence. In the terminology of the day, the coal owners were ‘players’ rather than ‘gentlemen’ – men of practical skills gained through experience or technical training, with few outside interests and whose chief concern was business. Deeply conservative in their outlook and in their politics, they regarded the strike as a challenge to their very existence. As the months wore on, they became determined to destroy the miners’ union, the MFGB.

Crucially, the MFGB wanted the Government to guarantee the miners a minimum wage. In the mid-1920s, wages were still determined at a district level. The rates at every colliery – and for the different jobs underground – varied across the country. The drastic halving of the miners’ average earnings between 1920 and 1926 had resulted not so much from cuts in wages as from the reduction in the length of their working week. If the coal owners could not sell their coal, they simply switched the pits to ‘short-time’. It was a felicitous equation; at a moment’s notice, they could cut their overheads by cutting the number of shifts. The consequences for the miner were brutal: if the coal owner stopped the pit, he did not get paid.

An agreed national minimum was the surest way of conferring ‘a living wage’, a cushion against the iniquities of ‘short-time’. But during the months of bitter negotiations to resolve the strike, the coal owners would not concede it.
Evan Williams
, the President of the MAGB, refusing to give credence to the miners’ distress, accused the MFGB of demanding a national minimum wage for the sole purpose of achieving its political objectives, ‘the nationalization or socialization [of the mines] by means of the power which national agreements give them to threaten to hold up the whole country and make an industrial question a political issue’.

The coal owners’ use of the rhetoric of class war obscured the real issue: the poverty and hardship the miners were being forced to endure. Their success is evident in the letter Miss Brodigan wrote to the Prime Minister following her visit to Blaina and Nantyglo in South Wales. There, as she reported to Baldwin, the County Medical Officer had described the miners’ living conditions as ‘worse than the black hole of Calcutta’. Yet in the covering letter attached to her report she felt compelled to stress that her findings had not been coloured by the politics of the Left – quite the reverse. ‘
I spent
last Monday and Tuesday at the Rectory there, where the rector is a strong unionist and his wife an ardent member of the British Fascisti,’ she wrote. ‘I think therefore that had there been anything serious to say against the local labour councillors I should have heard of it. As a matter of fact the rector and his wife described the miners as honest, decent men.’ Miss Brodigan also felt bound to declare her own Tory colours and to emphasize that she had found no evidence of class hatred among the miners themselves. ‘They struck me as a particularly moderate body of men, without any bitterness against anyone,’ she assured the Prime Minister, ‘just thoroughly depressed and worried about their future and fatalistically certain that however the coal dispute ends it will leave them with even more unemployment than before.’

In the autumn of 1926, with the coal owners and the miners’ leaders proving equally stubborn, Winston Churchill, the one man in Baldwin’s Cabinet who had the vision to see beyond the rhetoric of class war, took charge of the Government’s efforts to resolve the dispute.

Churchill’s reply to Lord Londonderry had been stern. ‘You say that the Owners are fighting Socialism,’ he wrote. ‘It is not the business of Coal Owners as Coal Owners to fight Socialism. If they declare it their duty, how can they blame the Miners’ Federation for pursuing political ends? The business of the Coal Owners is to manage their industry successfully, to insist upon sound economic conditions as regards hours and wages, and to fight Socialism as citizens and not as owners of a particular class of property.’

Throughout the autumn, Churchill fought to convince Baldwin that the Government should force a compromise on the coal owners. Appalled by their intransigence and shocked by the poverty in the mining districts, he argued that they should be pushed into meeting the miners half-way. Adamant that the Conservative Party should not be seen to align itself with the interests of one class, he vented his frustration in a letter to the Prime Minister. ‘
It would seem
quite impossible for us to avow impotency when confronted with recalcitrant owners,’ he wrote. ‘We have legislated against the miners, broken the General Strike, imported foreign coal, and kept the ring these long five months. We can hardly take the purely class view that owners, however unreasonable, are sacrosanct and inviolable.’ The solution Churchill proposed was to keep the mechanism of district wage settlements in place but to set – through legislation – a national minimum for the districts below which no coal owner could go.

Churchill’s was a lone voice in the Cabinet. Even Lord Birkenhead, who had been so withering in his condemnation of the coal owners, rallied to their defence. In a telegram to Churchill, sent in mid-September, he said, ‘I am not happy with your attitude. Why should we impose upon owners national settlement if they are strong enough to obtain district settlements? Why should we enable men’s leaders who have done their best to ruin England to escape without the brand of failure?’

‘Moscow Gold’, perhaps the most inflammatory issue of the coal strike, had played into the coal owners’ hands. In the course of the dispute Russian trades unions contributed £1,200,000
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to the miners’ welfare funds – almost three times as much as the amount contributed by British trades unions. ‘The Moscow influence and the Moscow money have been powerful enough to drown the voice of reason and good feeling,’ Churchill later wrote to his political ally, Sir James Hawkey. The Bolshevik donations revived the fear of revolution that the General Strike should have quashed. The coal owners remained ‘sacrosanct and inviolable’; after seven months the Coal Committee concluded that it would be better to leave the miners and the owners to fight it out between themselves: the majority view was that to legislate against the coal owners would be to yield to force majeure.

In November 1926, the miners, driven by poverty and hunger, returned to work. The coal owners won their victory: they returned to less pay and longer hours. The strike had cost the Treasury £30 million; Britain’s coal exports for the year 1926 were a paltry 26 million tons.

It could have been so different. When the Prime Minister opened the Emergency Debate at the start of the General Strike, he had begun his speech with a reprimand to the managers of the coal industry: ‘
The whole machinery
requires in my view a radical overhauling. I think that when we are in a position to deal with these matters in a calmer atmosphere, that must be one of the first subjects to which we devote ourselves.’ His criticism was echoed by the Leaders of the Opposition. ‘If wages are depressed, it is not the fault of those who are working in the mines,’ said Lloyd George, ‘it is something which is inherently wrong in the whole of the industry. That is accepted by the Government today. It was accepted by the previous Government, and it has been accepted by three inquiries.’

The industry had not, as Churchill had urged the coal owners, been ‘successfully managed’. It was inefficient and antiquated; the lack of investment, the taking of quick profits, the labyrinthine wage and price structures, the appalling labour relations and the poor safety conditions at many pits had all contributed to its decline.

The coal owners’ persistent summoning of the demons of revolution in the years after the First World War masked their refusal to put their own house in order, just as it masked the acute distress in the mining districts during the months of the coal strike.

As Lloyd George pointed out in the Emergency Debate, three Government inquiries had been commissioned into the state of the coal industry: the Sankey Inquiry, by his Government in 1919, and the Macmillan and Samuel inquiries commissioned under Labour and Conservative Governments in 1924 and 1925. Each had concluded that the restructuring and reorganization of the coal industry was a national imperative. Each had called on the Government of the day to direct the brains of the nation to draft legislation to place the coal industry on a secure footing. Each had pointed a finger at the coal owners, judging that they were largely to blame. And all had failed to deliver. Extraordinarily, given that coal was Britain’s biggest industry on which her balance of payments depended, successive Governments – Liberal, Labour and Tory – had balked at forcing the coal owners to reform. The misguided and obsessive preoccupation with the war between the classes meant that, for all political parties during the 1920s and early 1930s, the defence of the coal owners’ interests became synonymous with the defence of the realm.