Fire and Steam (33 page)

As the Scottish strike showed, the underlying issues were really the profitability and modernization of the railways. The railway companies did not want to take on more staff, which they would have to do if the men's hours were limited. Most railways had a policy of one crew per locomotive and therefore any delays simply resulted in unpaid overtime for the driver and fireman. If hours were limited, the railway companies would have to carry out costly improvements, such as adding passing loops or doubling sections of track in order to improve punctuality.

But it was a losing battle. The unions were strengthened as a result of the Scottish workers' action and membership of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), which had been just a few thousand in the 1880s, leapt to 86,000 in 1897, when the long-standing General Secretary, Edward Harford, was pensioned off. Indeed, not only that, but the railway – or rather its unions – can lay claim to the birth of the Labour Party. The ASRS had long realized the importance of political, rather than industrial, action and had sponsored the resolution at the Trades Union Congress conference in 1899 that was to lead to the creation of the Labour Representation Committee, the precursor of the Labour Party.

The railway workers' union, too, was involved in a landmark strike on the Taff Vale railway that would help establish the legal footing of the trades unions, even though initially it was a terrible defeat for the workers. The Taff Vale railway was one of several based in the Welsh coalfields that became highly successful and profitable by transporting coal from the valleys to the docks. The intensity of traffic on these railways is shown by the neat statistic that the Taff Vale carried nearly as much coal on its 124 miles of track as the Great Western did on its 3,000 miles. The union had negotiated a sixty-hour week following a brief strike in 1890 but then the company employed a general manager,
Ammon Beasley, who would have no truck with organized labour. It was a highly prosperous railway, paying double-figure dividends every year, partly thanks to sweating the labour of men who were overworked and underpaid. After years of bullying by Beasley, the workers finally went on strike for ten days in August 1900, demanding union recognition. They quickly found themselves in the courts and the strike was called off, resulting in a kind of score-draw, with the company agreeing not to victimize the strikers and accepting the establishment of an independent conciliation board. However, the legal issues rumbled on and in a devastating decision that ensured Taff Vale's prominent place in the annals of union history, a High Court judge ruled that the union was liable for any losses by the company resulting from the strike. The decision was eventually upheld by the House of Lords and the ASRS had to pay the company £42,000 in damages and costs. More importantly, the judgment made any industrial action all but impossible.

Beasley was rewarded with £2,000, a pair of candelabra and a brooch for his wife, but while the battle was won, the war was soon lost. The injustice of the case stimulated not only a rapid increase in trade union membership but contributed to the massive defeat of the Conservatives in the 1906 General Election. For the first time, Labour established a strong presence with twenty-nine MPs, confirming the party as a new political force. Parliament that year passed the Trade Disputes Act, which gave British trade unions immunity from legal proceedings in respect of damages committed in pursuance of legal action – effectively the right to withdraw labour.

It was not long before the unions sought to use their new industrial muscle. The ASRS immediately demanded an eight-hour day for drivers and a ten-hour day for the rest and a wage increase. The Railway Companies Association – as mentioned previously, they, of course, had been allowed to form a ‘combine' long before the trade unions – refused even to discuss the claim. In consequence, the ASRS, along with the General Railway Workers Union which represented unskilled grades, balloted its members and called what could be seen as the first general rail strike for November 1907.

The companies' obduracy in the face of this increased militancy was partly traditional: they had always resisted dealing with organizations
purporting to represent their workforce on the basis that trade unionism was not compatible with the military-style discipline required to run a railway and was therefore akin to mutiny. But, their resistance was also born of necessity. The companies, while still the largest businesses in the land, with more capital employed than any other industry,
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were being squeezed by having to pay for better services as well as by the intense competition between one another. The railways were also paying the price for being the first in the world, mostly having been built at least fifty years previously. Equipment desperately needed renewing and this investment had to be paid for out of current profits.

On the workers' side, their wages were being squeezed by the grim economic situation. Almost for the first time since the creation of the railways, the economy was barely growing, while prices were rising. The railway workers were one of the groups most affected by this phenomenon – now known as ‘stagflation' – because the companies were not at liberty to increase fares in response to rising costs. Following pressure from traders and merchants, a series of Acts had been passed in the 1880s and 1890s to control the charges for carrying freight because the railways were essentially monopoly providers. Many fares, too, remained controlled and therefore the railway companies were unable to respond to their workers' demands by increasing wages paid for out of selling their product at a higher price. Conflict in this situation, given that the unions now had legal protection, was inevitable.

The 1907 strike was warded off by David Lloyd George, then the President of the Board of Trade in the Liberal government, who managed to bang heads together, forcing the employers to agree to the formation of a conciliation scheme, even though, stuck in their nineteenth-century time-warp, they still refused to recognize the unions. The unprecedented intervention of the government into this industrial dispute highlighted the vital role of the railways in the economy. It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the economy was dependent on the continued running of the railways, given its dominance as the main mode of transport but also as one of the country's half dozen biggest industries, employing 643,000 by the outbreak of the war.
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In 1911, however, the government was unable to stop the railway workers from downing tools. The conciliation boards had seemed to
work against the interests of the unions and their members, who called them ‘confiscation boards'. Thanks to the machinations of the board, the average weekly wage had stagnated at around 25s 9d between 1906 and 1910. Walk-outs in other industries were becoming commonplace and the railwaymen were becoming increasingly frustrated as their fellow workers in jobs outside the rail industry seemed to manage to increase their wages while they could not. In 1910 the economic situation had improved, with rail company dividends increasing, and yet still the railway workers did not get any extra money. It set the scene for a classic battle of capital v. labour. Matters came to a head the following summer when there was a walk-out of men on the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, the worst paid in the area, and unofficial action quickly spread with 50,000 railway workers going on strike. The executives of the four rail unions
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met on 15 August and sent an ultimatum to the railway companies, demanding recognition or talks, with the threat that their members would go on strike within twenty-four hours.

An immediate reaction came not from the railway companies but the government, terrified of the economic consequences of a national rail strike. The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, tried to see off the men, meeting them personally the following day and offering a Royal Commission – but the prospect of another ‘talking shop' after the failure of the conciliation boards was never going to satisfy the unions in their militant mood. Telegrams were sent out calling for a national strike and on 18 August the railways ground to a halt.

The railway companies had also met the government, declaring that they would rather face a strike than negotiate with the unions, the only major group of employers to remain so obdurate in the face of changing times. Winston Churchill, at the time temporarily ensconced with the Liberals as Home Secretary, was convinced that the strike was part of a revolutionary plot by syndicalists, who believed social change could be brought about by united industrial action, and he instantly mobilized 58,0 troops to provide support for the rail companies. In Llanelli, there was a riot after strikers stopped a train and two innocent bystanders were shot dead after the order was given to fire. This tragic event, which only reinforced the solidarity of the strikers, ensured the action came to a swift end.

That very day, the unions and the companies were brought together in the same room – a historic first – by the new President of the Board of Trade, Sidney Buxton. He cajoled the companies into conceding a small pay rise in return for relaxing the price controls on the industry contained in the 1894 Railway and Canal Traffic Act, and a Royal Commission was established to examine the failings of the conciliation boards. The companies had also promised that there would be no victimization, but several broke that commitment, notably the Great Western which marked the service records of prominent strikers with a ‘D' for disloyal and kept records showing who had made speeches during the action. The railways, and the country, returned to normal after just five days, but the railway companies seemed not to have learnt that their disdain for their workforce could not survive in the modern world. When the Royal Commission report appeared in October, parts of it were unacceptable to the unions and it took a further threat of strike and an unprecedented resolution in the House of Commons calling for a meeting of employers and unions to persuade the companies to come back to the negotiating table. A deal was eventually thrashed out with modest wage increases and reduced hours, and the creation of a Byzantine structure of grades which would ultimately be to the disadvantage of many workers as it would entrench the system of playing off one grade against the other.

Three of the unions – the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, the General Railway Workers' Union and the United Pointsmen and Signalmen – realizing there was strength in unity, merged after lengthy negotiations in 1913, creating the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR). However, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), the locomotive drivers, remained aloof.

The old industrial order had been upset by these events and the change was to prove irreversible. The railways, too, were talking of amalgamation and consolidation rather than competition, which had for the most part dried up: one company emerged as dominant on nearly every route, with revenues being pooled through the Railway Clearing House. The London & South Western, for example, gave up competing on the Plymouth route in 1910 and revenues were pooled with its former rival, the Great Western.

The Railways Act of 1912 allowed the companies to offset higher wages through increased charges, but they were hard pressed to pay decent dividends. The railway in the Edwardian years had been at its most dominant, its apogee at the heart of the nation's transport system, and yet the companies still struggled to make sufficient profits in the face of an increasingly demanding public, competition from one another and the demands for better conditions from their workforces. The war, when the railway companies would reach the peak of their usefulness in meeting the nation's transport needs, would also be their undoing, unfairly treated by government and, despite their brilliant performance, still not sufficiently recognized by the public.

ELEVEN

FIGHTING TOGETHER – RELUCTANTLY

The strategic importance of the railways in wartime had been realized as early as 1855 in the Crimean War when the army shipped out 900 navvies to build the Balaklava Railway, which ultimately played a key role in the fall of Sebastopol by providing a supply line that was far more efficient than the roads. Plans to create a circular railway around London to enable armoured trains with artillery to protect the capital were even mooted in response to invasion fears CJ) and later the railways also played a significant part during the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the century. It was inevitable, therefore, that in the event of a major war the government would want to control the railways. Provision for such a takeover had been made as early as 1871 through the Regulation of the Forces Act and, as the situation in Europe deteriorated, in 1912 the government formed the Railway Executive Committee, consisting of nine (later eleven) managers of the biggest railway companies, to run the railways in the event of war.

As soon as war against Germany was declared on 4 August 1914, the government exercised this power and the Railway Executive Committee took immediate charge of the railways.
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The committee was immediately confronted with a huge military task: the despatch through Southampton Docks to the European mainland of the thousands of troops making up the British Expeditionary Force. The difficulties of this massive undertaking – which was supposed to be kept secret from the public – were exacerbated because the war had rather inconveniently
been declared on the Tuesday of a Bank Holiday week when Territorial Army reservists were being sent to train at their annual camps and enormous numbers of holidaymakers were also cluttering up the railway system. Eight trainloads of reservists had already arrived that weekend at Wareham in Dorset and a further ten were about to be sent there when the order came for the operation to be reversed so that troops could be sent to France.

Fortunately, as part of the government's preparations for the long-anticipated war, emergency timetables for major troop movements had already been drawn up and the operation passed off remarkably smoothly. The British Expeditionary Force timetable was an amazingly detailed document, envisaging that special trains would arrive at Southampton every twelve minutes, for sixteen hours per day. Any train not keeping to its allotted arrival time would lose its place, but in the event all were on schedule. Remarkably, by the end of August, 670 trains had carried 118,000 men, along with 37,650 horses, 314 large guns, 1,800 bicycles, as well as thousands of tons of baggage
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to Southampton for boarding ships to the Continent, and all these trains had arrived on time or early.
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Apart from the cancellation of a few special holiday trains, this huge movement of men and matériel was undertaken without disruption to the normal traffic.