This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
In Downton Abbey, King George V asks the Dowager Countess of Grantham, a role immortalised by Maggie Smith, whether the family had been affected by the 1926 general strike. “Well, my maid was rather curt with me,” came the sharp reply, “but she is a Communist at heart, so I suppose it was to be expected.”
If the events of May 1926 trigger any memories at all today, the temptation is, like Lady Grantham, to dismiss them as little more than a storm in a teacup. But as two new books — by Jonathan Schneer and David Torrance — demonstrate, the general strike was, in fact, a totemic struggle between Britain’s labour movement and Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government that threatened to bring the world’s most powerful country to the brink of disaster. Although it only lasted nine days, the strike divided society largely along class lines and cost the country a staggering 162 million working days. To the Washington Post, it was nothing less than “a battle for civilization”.
At the heart of the strike was the country’s coal industry. During World War I, government control was strict and even unprofitable mines were subsidised. Broadly, miners wanted the government to continue protecting their wages after the war, whereas owners wanted less state intervention. To further complicate matters, falling demand, rising costs, outdated practices and growing international competition created a perfect storm that made a conflict between miners and owners all but inevitable.
The 1921 Miners’ Strike was an ominous sign of things to come, and, although a general strike was averted, it was becoming increasingly clear that the parties involved were running out of road. Both the Sankey and Samuel Commissions — convened by politicians anxious to buy time — failed to establish common ground between the two sides.
The fatal blow came when Winston Churchill, as Baldwin’s Chancellor, restored Britain to the Gold Standard. This decision proved catastrophic, as the overvalued pound caused coal exports to become so expensive that profits fell by a third. Without government subsidies, Baldwin admitted that “practically 100 per cent” of the Northumberland pits would collapse, and the picture was scarcely less gloomy elsewhere. When owners tried to enforce longer hours and lower wages, the unions responded with the battle cry of “not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day”.
As the bitter negotiations stalled and a general strike was announced, it was said that Baldwin “broke down and wept”. Out in the streets, thousands jostled to hear the news, and the police struggled to maintain order.
A rousing rendition of “The Red Flag” from one section of the crowd prompted a retaliatory version of “God Save the King”.
But both authors dispel the notion that the strike was a Communist plot that aimed at revolution. In fact, Schneer argues that it was more reminiscent of WWI and references the Manchester Guardian, which noted that “the call for volunteers, the appeals for unquestioning loyalty, the absolute conviction of the irrational but nevertheless culpable wickedness of the other side … [all] suggested 1914”. Torrance agrees, quoting A.J.P. Taylor, an undergraduate during the strike, who recalled that “it was August 1914 all over again”.
However, the strike failed because Baldwin was willing to use every weapon in his armoury. His government had seen mass industrial unrest coming, viewed it as an existential menace and cleverly portrayed it as a threat to the constitution. Thanks to the organisational prowess of Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, measures were put in place to organise volunteers — one of Baldwin’s daughters volunteered in a canteen — deploy the army to move supplies, stockpile key provisions and even hire professional spies.
Coupled with Churchill’s flair for communication, as editor of the government’s propaganda sheet The British Gazette, not to mention the BBC’s broadly pro-government stance, Baldwin was ideally placed to fight a battle he could not afford to lose.
By contrast, the unions, in Churchill’s words, sat in their headquarters “organising scarcity, manufacturing misery”, but, in truth, they were not especially well organised. Divided over their ultimate aims, they also underestimated Baldwin’s steadfastness, wrongly assuming that a show of strength would force the government to capitulate. According to A.J. Cook, the general secretary of the Miners’ Federation, “the whole trade-union movement would prove to the Government the solidarity of Labour”.
Worse, they lacked the killer instinct, and, despite what some have argued, there was no real appetite for revolution. When the delegation called at Downing Street to end the strike, Lord Birkenhead was moved to pity: “It was so humiliating that some instinctive breeding made one unwilling even to look at them.”
Ultimately, both books are evocative, scholarly and stylishly written, and, whilst they cover similar terrain, they will appeal to slightly different readers. Those after a comprehensive overview will prefer Schneer. He is especially good when describing the plight of the miners. The walk to work was often several miles; once there, miners were lowered underground in a steel cage, after which there could be another mile-long journey to the coalface.
Although no two mines were identical, conditions were almost universally awful. “There are pits round here so hot you could nearly toast bread,” said a Pendleton miner. If a tin box to protect lunch from the rats was unaffordable, the food was pocketed, with the result that “reaching for it, he would find a rat still there … and the food gone.”
As the miners trudged home after work, drained and starving, the streets rang “with the tread of their boots”. Having prepared a bath for her husband, the wife would “watch the water turn black as her husband soaked and scrubbed”. It is all very well to argue that wage cuts and longer hours were necessary, but even the flintiest of free marketeers would surely have at least some sympathy for the miners after reading Schneer’s eye-opening account.
Torrance really excels at vivid pen portraits that bring to life the central characters. Baldwin’s face alone, according to Lord Vansittart, “dispelled impropriety”, whilst John Reith’s “craggy face and huge frame served to emphasise his intellectual confidence”, leading Churchill to call him “that Wuthering Height”. In keeping with his constitutional expertise, Torrance offers fascinating insights into some of the political controversies surrounding the strike.
For instance, Conservatives who described the strike as “unconstitutional” because it was illegal, were accused of rank hypocrisy, as comparisons were drawn between the strike and the 1912-14 Home Rule Crisis, which had prompted many hardline Tories to support Bonar Law’s argument that there were “things stronger than parliamentary majorities”.
As Torrance asserts, many of these Conservatives “appeared rather more comfortable with the creation of a paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force and provisional government (both of which were illegal), than the passage of a Home Rule Bill backed by a large Commons majority”.
If there is a lesson to be learnt, it must be to see our later troubles in perspective. Although the 1984-5 miners’ strike might have escalated into a general strike, it never actually materialised. Today, the occasional Tube or doctors’ strike may lead us to believe that we live in deeply fractured times but, as these books show, the 1926 general strike effectively killed off militant trade unionism.
After the famous 10 May football match at Plymouth between strikers and the police, which saw the former welcomed by a brass band and ended with an amicable team photograph, a Frenchman remarked that Britain was “not a nation, but a circus”. Perhaps, but most sensible people prefer circuses to revolutions.
