The historian A J P Taylor was at Oxford during the general strike of 1926. After it, he later recalled, relations between the minority of undergraduates, such as himself, who had gone to help the strikers and those who had signed on as special constables or volunteer strike-breakers were cordial. Only those sensible men who had stuck to their books and essays were disdained. The whole episode seemed funny in a stereotypically English way – like a Punch cartoon brought to life. Far from being the desperate revolutionaries that their enemies sometimes portrayed, the strikers were disciplined and well organised – although not, as it turned out, as well organised as their opponents. A good deal of enmity caused by the strike was quickly forgotten. Winston Churchill, one of the most ferocious of its opponents in 1926, was to be a figure of national unity twenty years later. Ernest Bevin, a strike leader in 1926, became a fiercely anti-­communist foreign secretary whom Churchill admired. One is tempted to sum up the whole thing with an adaptation of one of Taylor’s aphorisms: the general strike was ‘a turning point when history failed to turn’.

Jonathan Schneer and David Torrance have written books about the strike to mark its centenary. Both are vivid and readable works with a special emphasis on the biographies and personalities of leading participants. They capture its absurdities. Torrance describes a volunteer strike-breaker who acted as a bus conductor and ordered his female passengers to open their umbrellas to protect themselves from broken glass if pickets broke the windows. Both books, however, go beyond the picturesque elements of the strike to examine its wider significance and the forces at play. Schneer’s angle of vision is wider and he covers all aspects of the strike. Torrance has a sharper focus on the debates inside the governing classes and he is particularly good on debates about the constitutional implications – although, as befits a historian of Scotland, he is also good on the way in which the strike played out far from London.

For one group, the strike was not funny and not quickly forgotten. It began and ended with the miners. They led hard lives. About a thousand a year died in accidents. Of the three most important leaders of the miners in 1926, two had lost their fathers in accidents underground. There were many injuries. Schneer cites the case of Thomas Baker of Sheffield, who received ten shillings a week as compensation for having lost a leg at the age of seventeen. Not surprisingly, Baker said of the general strike: ‘I was HOT in my reasons for it.’ A revealing bourgeois fantasy (incarnated in Ian Hay’s novel A Safety Match, 1911) revolved around the mine owner who risks his life to save his workers after an accident, but the truth is that it was almost always miners themselves who dragged their injured comrades out of mines. The life of a miner was unimaginable to most people. Driving trains or buses might, for a time, seem amusing – which is why so many young men volunteered to do it in 1926. No one would have volunteered to be a miner, which is why men had to be conscripted to dig coal during the Second World War. 

Class divisions in the mining industry were particularly sharp. The employees of, say, the motor manufacturer Herbert Austin knew their boss to be a hard man, but they also understood that he had built his business from almost nothing by hard work and enterprise. Mine owners, by contrast, had almost invariably inherited their companies; aristocrats, such as the Duke of Northumberland, derived income from the royalties that they were paid simply because mines existed under the land they owned.

The mines had been taken over by the state in the First World War. After it, they were returned to private ownership, which meant a drop in wages. Official inquiries into how the mines might be reorganised produced no result that miners and mine owners would accept. In May 1926, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) called a strike in sympathy with the miners. General strike was a misleading term. Specific industries were called out – at first this meant transport, steel and printing (the last of these had a symbolic importance because preventing the publication of newspapers prompted such outrage from Conservatives). The strike did not shut down the whole economy in the way that the French general strikes of 1936 and 1968 were to do and, importantly, the British strike of 1926, unlike the French ones, remained under the control of trade union leaders, who were wary of embarking on all-out war with the government. In the febrile industrial climate of the late 1970s, radical young historians sometimes rebuked union leaders who had ‘betrayed’ their militant members in the general strike. The radical historians were quieter in the next decade after Arthur Scargill had shown what happens in an all-out conflict between strikers and a determined Conservative government.

Although the general strike is normally described as having lasted just nine days, it had a ragged end. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, called for no reprisals against strikers and refrained from the most savage legislative attacks on trade union powers that some of his fellow Conservatives wanted. All the same, not everyone returned to work straight away and not all employers were gracious in victory. For a time, the future Labour leader Clement Attlee faced the prospect of bankruptcy because a firm sued him on the grounds that, as an alderman in Stepney, he had failed to maintain their electricity supply. The coal owners locked the miners out at the end of the general strike; they only finally returned to work, months later, after having accepted reduced wages. For them it was a crushing defeat. 

The strike marked an end rather than a beginning. Before the First World War, British politics was mainly the province of men and largely conducted out of doors. It was rumbustious and sometimes violent. Popular politics during the war was also often rough – mobs attacked anti-war campaigners – and there were hints of serious disorder in the strikes and mutinies that came at the end of the war (the latter were particularly worrying for those in authority). After this, however, public disorder diminished – perhaps because a large proportion of women had the vote; perhaps because returning servicemen had learned to submit to discipline or to dislike the sight of blood; perhaps because British people came to define themselves against the style of politics that they saw on the Continent. The general strike fitted into this new pattern and was remarkable, on the whole, for its absence of violence.

In party terms, the postwar period was one of flux. The Liberals were divided between supporters of Asquith and those of Lloyd George (who had evicted Asquith as prime minster in 1916 and led a coalition government that lasted until 1922), but it was not, at first, apparent that Labour would replace the Liberals as the main force on the Left. 

The arrival of Stanley Baldwin as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister in 1924 marked the beginning of the end of this political flux and the general strike marked the end of its end. It sealed the fate of the Liberals because the supporters of Asquith were so obviously rooted in a pre-1914 politics that revolved around individuals bound by contract and legal obligations rather than social classes. Sir John Simon, the most literal-minded exponent of Liberal principles, recalled in his memoirs that the strike was ‘in essence a revolutionary proceeding which … struck at the root of parliamentary government in this country’. Lloyd George did understand class politics but could not rally enough support. John Maynard Keynes, the Liberal Party’s most important thinker, could only say that his heart was with the miners and his head against them. The politics of Baldwin, by contrast, revolved around class differences, though not necessarily class antagonism. He appreciated that he would need interlocutors who could represent the working class – which is why he wanted to beat the general strike but not destroy its leaders. Roy Jenkins is remembered as an apparently patrician Labour minister and founder of the Social Democratic Party, but he was the son of a miner and trade unionist who had been imprisoned during the general strike. Jenkins wrote of Baldwin, with a grudging admiration, that he wanted ‘to emasculate his opponents and then to pretend they were coming together as equals’. Baldwin’s room for manoeuvre was increased by the fact that, beneath the rhetoric, he had little time for abstract discussions of the non-existent British constitution which so exercised his more intellectual colleagues.

The Conservative Leo Amery later wrote that the strike was defeated by private motorcars and radios. Curiously, it was the fact that cars and radios were still comparatively scarce that made them important. Movement and communication were easier for the middle classes than their enemies. The archbishop of Canterbury and the archbishop of Westminster both pontificated during the strike (the former urged compromise and the latter, revealing the rightward turn in Catholic social teaching, said the strike was a sin). But Torrance and Schneer suggest the real arbiter of official morality in Britain by now was John Reith – the general manager of the BBC – who made sure that nothing inconvenient to the government was broadcast. 

Most workers, even unionised ones, did not strike in 1926. Factories remained open and the interruption of transport, which had such an impact on office workers in London, mattered little to those in provincial towns who often still lived within walking or cycling distance of their workplace. The greatest excitement was felt among the young men (they almost all were men) who helped break the strike. This was more than a mobilisation of the Drones Club: hundreds of thousands of strike-breakers, often from relatively modest provincial backgrounds, joined in. Men too young to have fought in the Great War and stuck in comparatively junior office jobs seem to have welcomed a break in routine.

The general strike was an oddly bureaucratic affair. The government sometimes intercepted Soviet funds that were sent to support the strike, but, on the whole, it was reluctant to interfere with the right of trade unions to draw money from banks. As Torrance shows, the Governor of the Bank of England and the King were both worried by anything that might seem like confiscation of private property – even the private property of organisations that were alleged to be hostile to private property. Most of the strike-breakers never got the fight of which some of them dreamed. All the strikers went back to work a little poorer (in the case of the miners, a lot poorer) and, perhaps, a little less likely to trust their own leaders. But Eric Hobsbawm, writing in the early years of the Thatcher Government, managed to dig a kind of heroism out of the career of the miners’ leader Herbert Smith: ‘I defy anyone to withhold all admiration from the man who in 1926 sat at the negotiating table in his cap, minus his false teeth which he had put on the table for comfort, and said “no” on behalf of the miners to the coal-owners, the government and the world.’