Chapters 9 to 12, can be read here, covering the period from the First World War to the General Strike (Chapter 9), the Depression years (Chapter 11 1927-39), the Second World War (Chapter 12)
CHAPTER NINE
REFORM OR REVOLUTION? CLASS POLITICS 1918-25
1 The 1918 general election
2 The revolutionary period 1919-21
3 Battles on the economic front - from the war to the early twenties
i) The engineering industry
ii) General and Municipal Workers
iii) Printing and paper workers
iv) The mining industry
v) The railway industry
vi) Teachers
vii) Police unionism
viii) Co-operative and other distributive workers
ix) The builders labourers union
x) The textile industry
xi) The Workers Union
xii) Agricultural workers
xiii) Boot and shoe operatives
xiv) Painters
xv) Public services and professional workers
4 Battles on the political front
i) political radicalism in the early Twenties
ii) the Co-operative movement and Labour politics
5 Unemployment and the depression 1921-25
i) the textile industry
ii) the Workers Union
iii) the mining industry
iv) the building trade
v) the NUVB
vi) the engineering industry
vii) the Transport and General Workers Union
viii) the railway industry
6 Unemployed Struggles 1920-25
7 Electoral battles 1921-2S
8 Chapter 9 References
1 The 1918 general election
As the war drifted to its close, the Labour Party in particular, faced an important crossroads in its future. The party leader, Arthur Henderson, joined with others in arguing for a new party constitution in 1918. There was an underlying motive to the apparent quest for efficiency of organisation. The bulk of the parliamentary party, along with the key trade union leaders, wanted to curtail the growing power and influence of the socialist tendencies within the movement. Individuals who did not work in typical paid employment in a factory, mine, mill, shop or office were not usually able to join a union and thus become involved in the Labour Party. Whilst those who were unwilling to join the mostly Marxist, or certainly left-leaning, socialist societies, were similarly discomforted. For the very first time, the concept of individual membership was brought into the party, thus dramatically altering - but by no means ending - its essentially federal character. Especially since the domination of the party conference by the affiliated union block vote was confirmed. But from herein, Labour activists were no longer firstly members of an affiliated union or socialist society.
Naturally, none of this was designed to appease the left within the overall movement, but the more radical element was gratified with a morally important, but practically irrelevant, concession. The general character of the constitutional aims of the party was to be clearly socialistic for the first time. The effect was to deliver power into the hands of the right wing of the movement and the soul of the party into me sight of the left. In particular, Clause Four of the constitution pleased the militants by defining the socialism sought in theory by the party. “To secure for the workers by hand and by brain the full fruits of the industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.” [1]
The result of all this was to give Labour a clear mid-way appeal between out-and-out socialism and social-reform Liberalism, a formula which was to provide a mass electoral base to the party. Nonetheless, interest in the theoretical basis of socialism grew phenomenally, even in some unexpected areas. For example, David Amyas Ross, a sixth former at the Derbyshire public school of Repton appeared one day in the summer of 1918 in the London office of the Labour Research Department (LRD). This body was actually independent of the Labour Party as such and engaged in research work for trade unions. Ross went to the LRD to ask on behalf of the entire sixth form at Repton what assistance they could give to helping to spread the Russian Revolution!! In later years, Ross would go on to become a Workers Education Association tutor. [2]
Support for the Russian Revolution and the adoption of Clause Four boosted support for the idea of socialised or nationalised production in quarters of the workers’ movement which had hitherto been reluctant to jettison Liberal ideals. There were good, practical reasons for this. In November 1918, the Workers Union Derby District Committee adequately expressed the general mood. A resolution called upon the government to “utilise all national factories for essential after-the-war industries as a means of providing against unnecessary unemployment and further that the same be owned by the state for the benefit of the community”. [3] ‘National factories’ were privately owned companies which had their product and output taken under the control of the state for the duration of the war.
Furthermore, as the 1918 general election neared, the unions were at pains to make clear their partisanship. The WU proclaimed to the press in Derby, at a special meeting called to discuss the election, that the District Committee (DC) “representing 6,000 male and female members urge its members in the constituencies of Derby and South Derbyshire to use all the means in their power to secure the return to parliament of Mr J H Thomas and Councillor Trueman, both of whom are the official Labour candidates”. [4] Despite the sense of confidence evident here, the newly revamped Labour Party did not win the election. Quite naturally, the government had timed the date of the election to suit itself. Few of the men in the armed forces, who might have held quite strong views about the way the future should develop, actually managed to vote. Despite this, the 1918 electoral roll in Derby was three times as large as it had been in 1914. Some 11,000 of the 61,000 potential voters were engaged in military service, but whether many of these were able to cast their vote is doubtful, as the bulk of the forces were still tied up in foreign parts. Moreover, 24,000 of these voters were casting their votes for the very first time and were no doubt rather cautious about it. [5]
Labour’s electoral machine was poorly developed. In some areas, the influence of Lib-Labism had retarded the political strength of Labour, so much so that no formal organisation existed in some places. The WU may well have wanted to urge support for Councillor Samuel Trueman of Long Eaton, who stood for South Derbyshire. But in reality there was very little practical organisational back up for the candidate. South Derbyshire Divisional Labour Party was established in 1918 at a conference composed of delegates from three co-op societies, three ILP branches and 27 trade union branches, including no less than twelve branches of the South Derbyshire Miners Association. Amongst other unions were the Potters, the Bakers, the WU, the ASE, the Colliery Engineers, the Carpenters and the Agricultural Workers. Trueman was proposed by the NUR and the Long Eaton Co-operative Society - of which he himself was a prominent member. While many of the old LECS stalwarts were Liberals, the society had voted 114 to 6 to affiliate to the South Derbyshire Labour Party only that year. A proposition to disaffiliate which came in 1919 was easily defeated. Political involvement was actually quite a new development for the co-operative movement. The Swansea Congress of the Co-operative Union in 1917 had set up the Co-operative Party, with the aim of representation in local and national democratic assemblies.
Trueman won the selection vote in the local party committee by 34 votes to 21 against Bill Smith of Church Gresley, who had been proposed by the South Derbyshire miners. [6] In common with many socialists, Trueman had adopted a pacifist stance in the war and this fact was crudely exploited with great effect by his Liberal opponent during the campaign. The Government faced the December 14th election quite confidently. A sitting government having led the nation through stormy times, it rightly believed it could rely upon patriotic calls. The preferred slogan of winning Government candidates was “Hang the Kaiser”. Such an approach rather excluded Labour’s serious and rather sober programme for social betterment from considered attention. Despite this, Labour considerably increased its representation and became the official Opposition.
The still largely federal character of the Labour Party showed itself in the results. The British Socialist Party was still affiliated and fielded candidates in sixteen seats. Twelve secured official endorsement from the Labour Party and one from the Co-operative Party, whilst the others ran as independents. The BSP did rather well, especially when compared to the ILP, which engaged in the election in a similar way. The ILP polled an overall average of 21.4% to the BSP’s 21.1% The latter doubled its 1910 average of 11.1 %, quite an achievement considering that it was a relatively new entrant into the electoral sphere. Derby’s Willie Paul stood for the other avowedly Marxist organisation, the Socialist Labour Party, in Ince, Lancashire, where he took 13% of the vote in a straight fight with an official Labour candidate.
In Derbyshire, Labour officially won only one seat. Two miners’ candidates, Hancock and Kenyon, took their seats unopposed respectively in Belper and Chesterfield. Supposedly Labour men, they were in reality Liberals, but the Labour Party deliberately left the field clear for them. The miners’ nominees in Clay Cross, Frank Hall, and in North East Derbyshire, Frank Lee, only narrowly managed to beat a Liberal, as did George H Oliver, the former Derby Rolls Royce convenor, in Ilkeston. Only J H Thomas victoriously led the field in the two-member constituency in Derby. He polled two-thirds as much again as his nearest rival, the successful Independent Unionist. There was much local speculation as to the reasons for the failure of Labour to field a second candidate and many ascribed to Thomas a fancy for a continuation of the Lib-Lab alliance of previous years. Whatever the truth, his Liberal ‘partner’ came far behind, only a little ahead of the fourth candidate, Captain H M Smith, the grandly styled “National Democratic and Labour Party” candidate. This was a group tied to the British Workers League, a pro-capitalist body which sought to win the working class. The NDLP saw itself as a patriotic working class propaganda group, opposing class struggle and acting upon a policy of support for the Government coalition and the prosecution of the war. This party did remarkably well in Derby, winning a good share of the poll, which split fairly evenly between the three candidates other than Thomas.
Percentage of the Poll
Labour 37.8
Ind Unionist 22.4
Liberal 20.2
NDLP 19.6
It was a result which intrigued the local press, the Mercury commented that the “Lib-Lab compact has existed for many years, but on this occasion Labour, who were exhorted to split their “Progressive” vote did not carry the Liberal with them. If there was any surprise it was the splendid poll which Capt. H M Smith ... obtained.” [7]
Labour had not yet eclipsed the Liberals, but signs of this future development were clearly there. Labour had won 57 seats, only a small improvement on the 1914 position. But what was of considerable significance was the fact that Labour was generally the second candidate to the winner in many former Liberal strongholds. The 1918 constitutional compromise in the Labour Party aided unity in the movement and this, with the improved electoral performance, rather perturbed many sections of the establishment. For the workers, it was a time to redress old wrongs, above all to win the peace after the war. In the preceding four years, wholesale prices had increased by 13S% and the cost of living index by 120%. Wages had stayed well behind prices, being somewhat less than double the 1914 level. Trades unionists determined to put this right. In 1919 wages rose by about 20%, while prices were relatively stable, the standard of living of 1914 was thus all but restored. Apparently contradicting the results of the 1918 election, the popular mood turned strongly militant. The contradiction was easily explained by the fact of the enormous numbers of returning soldiers, determined that some sense come out of the horror of 1914-18, for themselves and their families.
2 The Revolutionary Period of 1919-21
The need to re-assimilate millions of men returning from the battlefields caused considerable problems to the economies of Europe. The immediate concern of many was to locate the demobilised into peacetime jobs. In the engineering industry, the skilled unions had won the introduction of the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act, eventually enforced by 1919, to ease the return to ‘normality’. The ASE had extracted this concession as a price for its co-operation in the practice of dilution, but the Workers Union, speaking for the many unskilled workers who had benefited by the disturbance of normal industrial life, opposed the Act. Moreover, if the skilled unions had extracted some concessions, they could not cushion their members from every hazard. Britain was a victorious nation, but it was still prone to the vagaries of the capitalist economy.
Recognising the dangers of large scale unemployment among returning soldiers, the Government introduced a weekly allowance and raised unemployment benefit by 4/, to a total of 11/- a week for those demobilised, but still out of work. Moreover, employers were prevented from effecting wages cuts by the Wages (Temporary Regulation) Act until May 1919 and this was subsequently extended to November and again to September 1920. Despite these measures, there were serious concerns about the plight of the former serviceman. In Derby, the Mayor received a letter from the Demobilisation Council, which worried over the “serious state of unemployment in Derby” and recommended public works as the solution. [8] Some looked for deeper solutions, while others thought no further than how to get back to the pre-war state of affairs. The Derby WU DC agreed to support a resolution referred to it by its No.1 branch, which asked the Labour Party to “endeavour to promote a bill forbidding married women to enter employment where the husbands are able, through their income to keep them at home, whilst there are single women out of work”. [9] No doubt many on the almost exclusively male committee had unemployed married and single men in mind as well, although the resolution diplomatically
avoided that argument.
Support for more radical, even revolutionary solutions reached a high spot in the 1919-21 period, when industrial militancy was generally accepted as a legitimate tool of working class struggle. Massive and frequent wage rises and even some progress in the reductions of the working week were sustained in and around Derby, as recorded in the Derby WU DC Minutes:
Some Wage Rises (1918-20) in Derbyshire
Feb 1918
Offiler’s Brewery 8/- weekly increase
Derby Engineering Industry 3/- war bonus
Graham & Bennett 3/4d hour increase
Aug 1918
Offiler’s 10/- increase
Jones & Co. 12% plus 7.5% increase
November 1918
Lolson’s (Pentrich) 2/- weekly increase
Graham and Bennett 1d an hour increase
January 1919
Rolls Royce 3/- a week increase oilers and store keepers 1/- a week increase for machine moulders
February 1919
Rickard’s 5/- a week increase and a 47-hour week
March 1919
Green’s 4d an hour increase
Shardlow boatmen 10/- a week increase
Tarmac 41/2d an hour increase
September 1919
Derby Ice 5/- a week increase
Lolson’s (Pentrich) 6/- a week increase
Offilers 2/6d a week increase
November 1919
Lolson’s 2/- a week increase
Long’s 5/- a week increase
Engineering 5/- a week increase
Chemicals 5/- a week increase
Rail Workshops 5/- a week increase
Concordia Electric Cables 48-hour week
Dec 1919
Belper Urban District Council 2/- a week increase
DP Battery 2/6d to 5/- a week increase
Barnes & Fryer Packing Cases 2/6d to 5/- a week increase
Jan 1920
Mackintosh’s 4/- to 8/- a week increase
Hampshire and Co 48-hour week
Fletcher’s Lace, Nottingham Rd 5/- to 13/- a week increase
Leather Industry 5/- a week increase
Derby Silica Firebrick (DSF) 1d an hour increase
Feb 1920
Derbyshire Royal Infirmary 5/- a week increase
Graham and Bennett 1d an hour increase
Mar 1920
Long’s 2/- a week increase
Engineering Industry 6/- a week increase
April 1920
Belper UDC 5/- a week increase
Long’s 5/- a week increase
Lolson’s (Ripley) 5/- a week increase
Brick making 8/- a week increase
Leather 7/6d a week increase
June 1920
Kegworth Brewery 8/- a week increase
Dickinson and Housall 5/- a week increase
Derby Lead Works 6/- a week increase
J Fowler (Borrowash) 12/6d a week increase
Sandiacre Sewage 48-hour week
September 1920
Graham and Bennett 11/2d an hour
Bakewell UDC 5/- a week increase
Barnes and Fryer 1 1/2d an hour
October 1920
T Long and Co 5/- to 10/- a week increase
Peters Ltd (labourers) 10/- a week increase
Peters Ltd (metal spinners) 10/- a week increase
Clay Industry 6/- a week increase
December 1920
DSF 3d an hour increase
Offiler’s’ clerks 12/6d a week increase
A series of major disputes, locally and nationally, became the centre ground of a testing battle between capital and labour. More dramatically, these took place amid serious controversy about British interference in the revolutionary developments in Russia that had shaken the world. The continuation of conscription, the sharp rise in the cost of living, the low rate of exemption from income tax, which began for the first time to take revenue for the state from ordinary workers in this way, and the use of troops in industrial disputes, all combined together in creating a seething discontent amongst the working class.
The “Triple Alliance” of miners, railway workers and dockers proposed a strike ballot specifically on three of these issues - Russia, conscription and troops in strikes. Some in Derbyshire were violently against the notion. Frank Lee of the Derbyshire miners told the Staveley Trades Council that “he was the last man in the world to favour the (proposed) strike which would upset the commerce of the country”. [10] Not everyone agreed with him. The impact of the Russian Revolution amongst all activists of the labour movement was overwhelming; right from the first moment the workers’ movement in Derbyshire followed events as far as was possible, given the circumstances. The Trades Council convened a meeting on the Menshevik supported revolution of February 1917, very soon after the event and over the next two years there was much interest in the dramatic events in the east. In spite of the grip of right wing ideas on the labour movement in the country and county, little but praise for the revolutionary developments in Russia could be found.
In 1919, Derby NUR asked the Trades Council (DTC) to convene a “town’s meeting to be addressed by a Russian on Russia”. However, no progress seems to have been made on this idea, perhaps largely because no official Soviet representative existed in Britain, the government having refused credentials to the first to be appointed. Soviet Russia had asked the Clydeside working class leader, John MacLean, to be their consul and the gesture was not meaningless. In Scotland, large sections of the working class were little removed from potential revolution and the Government knew it. There was no hesitation in bringing out armed forces to quell the growing sense of revolution, an act that in itself only served to highlight the increasing unease. Even though there was no formal plan for an insurrection, troops were used in a ruthless manner. Workers protested against the use of troops in strike action and had troops used against them in turn. The labour movement in and around Derby was as one in roundly condemning the Government’s approach.
The DTC was of the opinion that “military troops, when used in strikes, are always used in the interests of Capital against Labour and demanded the immediate release of Davie Kirkwood and Willie Gallagher, the imprisoned leaders of the Red Clyde.”[11] Such widespread support for radicalism naturally seriously worried the Government and the employers in all industries and localities. A familiar tactic of appealing to national pride and a joint employer-employee approach to industrial relations began to be exploited on a grand scale. The DTC however showed positive hostility to the forming of a Derby branch of the “National Alliance of Employers and Employed”, despite persistent approaches over the next few years from certain key local trade union officials who were supporters. [12]
British capitalism had important financial interests in Russia and men of power and wealth were sorely annoyed at the revolution, which pulled her out of the war. As soon as Germany was dealt with, Britain and twenty other nations invaded the young Soviet republic by force of arms, intending to crush the revolution almost at birth. Britain’s press was hysterical about the new experiment and violently condemned any signs of sympathy for Russia. To the consternation of many civic dignitaries, Derby’s most respected and respectable Labour leader, W R Raynes, announced at the local May Day rally in 1919 that he supported the demands for a withdrawal of British troops in Russia. His view was that “Russia had to fight to work out its own emancipation without Czars and capitalism”. [13]
Even more clearly, on another occasion, Raynes gave his support to the educational policy of the new workers’ republic, concluding that “if that is Bolshevism then I am a Bolshevik”. Naturally, the local press went to town! “I am a Bolshevik - W R Raynes” ran the placards. Horatio Bottomley’s weekly, “John Bull”, called him a “dangerous fool and an unholy liar”, regretting that he was not in the range of an active gun. “Derby should spew such a man ... out from its midst.” [14] Bill Raynes, misquoted though he was, found he was by no means alone. Workers’ organisations of all kinds adopted favourable policy decisions regarding Russia. In June of 1919, the Belper branch of the WU forwarded a resolution to the Derby DC that was accepted without dissent. As a result, the WU was locally committed to acting against “any further money or munitions being used in Russia” and to demanding the “immediate withdrawal of all British troops there”. [15]
The local branch of the BSP, one of the main constituent parts of the yet to be formed Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), submitted a resolution to the DTC in September 1919, “asking for support for the Soviet Government” and had no difficulty in getting this carried. [16] As an aside here, it is instructive to note that no constitutional queries were raised about the validity of such a motion coming from a non-trade union body. The BSP was still affiliated to the Labour Party and trades councils were still seen as central co-ordinating bodies of all working class organisations and the notion of banning or proscribing controversial tendencies had not yet been invented. A vigorous “Hands off Russia” campaign developed throughout the country, including Derby, whose committee wrote to the DTC in 1919 calling for support. Without any hesitation, the council demanded the “withdrawal of troops from Russia, and the removal of the Blockade and the refusal of supplies to Kolchak and Deniken”. [17] These were two generals who each waged civil war against the revolution. Subsequent meetings were to decide to send a donation of £1 to the Derby Hands Off Russia campaign, to send a delegate to a solidarity conference held on November 29th 1919 and finally to demand “immediate trade relations with Soviet Russia”. [18]
The strong sense of internationalism evident from these developments coincided with industrial militancy in an open way. However, the response was sometimes mixed. Staveley ASLEF branch voted on their EC’s request to consider the Triple Alliance threefold question in January 1920. Perhaps concern about the implications for railway jobs of coal nationalisation motivated the spilt vote on that issue, but there can be no doubt about the radicalism provoked by the events in Russia, shown by the vote:
“1 nationalisation of mines For 14 against 13
2 to abolish Conscription For 36 against 0
3 to withdraw British troops from Russia For 25 against 2”
Support for the EC’s motion was however massive. Even so, Derby ASLEF, in considering the circular from their general secretary, Bromley, uncharacteristically voted decisively against all three propositions. [19] Perhaps there were tactical, internal or constitutional reasons for this. The branch was certainly politically far more radical than other Derbyshire ASLEF branches.
Trades councils, shop stewards committees, trade unions, socialist societies, Hands Off Russia committees all formed “Councils of Action”, to unite all the forces opposed to intervention in Russia. The Parliamentary Committee of the TUC, the fore-runner to the General Council, the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party and the Parliamentary Labour Party all joined together to declare that the industrial power of the workers would be used to stop the war with Russia. The unprovoked invasion of Russia by the right-wing reactionary government of the newly created country of Poland stirred much sympathy for the Soviet republic. Derby branch of ASLEF had changed their tune by June, when they declared that no member of their society would “handle any goods consigned to the Government of Poland for the purpose of prosecuting the war with Russia”. [20] For the threat of another war was now clear. The DTC meanwhile demanded the withdrawal of British troops amidst a great surge of solidarity which swept the working class. Dockers refused to load munitions ships bound for Poland. The TUC called a Special Congress on the issue.
In August, the DTC passed an almost revolutionary resolution, when it decided to “support steps taken by Councils of Action to prevent the government entering into war with Russia, and warns the British government if it attempts to send either men, money, munitions or stores directly or indirectly to the aid of Poland, organised Labour of Derby ... will resort to direct action to prevent it”. [21] 200 delegates met in Derby to set up the local Council of Action, on the initiative of the Derby Labour Party (DLP) and the DTC. Specialist committees on transport, information, organisation, supply were set up to deal with particular problems should the “direct action” be called for. Circulars were sent out by all unions demanding absolute loyalty to any instructions issued by the National Council of Action. Derby ASLEF adopted a position typical of most unions, after receiving the instructions. The branch agreed to support the Council of Action “in whatever step they think necessary to prevent war with Russia or any other country”. [22]
Many viewed the all-embracing character of the Councils of Action and drew the obvious parallels with the Russian ‘soviet’, or council of workers, soldiers and peasants. In the face of these developments, the Government trod warily and avoided confrontation, shelving the intervention in Russia. But it was clear as to where its main threat lay. Albert Inkpin, national Secretary of the Communist Party was arrested in 1921 on trumped up charges, as an authoritarian mood now grew amongst politicians. His imprisonment was raised in 1922 at the DTC, which passed a resolution asking the Home Secretary to consider his immediate release. But the warning signs were not clear enough for some. Having done their immediate job, the Councils of Action were wound up by the leadership of the labour and trade union movement, perhaps with indecent haste. But the experience of the councils was to surface and to be used once again in the General Strike of 1926 and this would be particularly evident in Derby and Chesterfield.
3 Battles on the Economic Front - from the War to The Beginning of the Twenties.
i) The Engineering Industry
In September 1919, the moulders and the ironfounders found themselves engaged in a strike for what the DTC called a ‘living wage’, when it discussed the issue at its meeting the next month. [23] As part of the national movement for an advance in wages, a Derby strike committee was set up. This began to receive donations from the movement towards the strike fund, such as the £2 which the Derby Builders’ Labourers gave in November to the Friendly Society of Ironfounders [24], while the Rowsley NUR donated £1 in December. [25] The FSI had held a mass meeting at the Derby Market Place in late October, as the strike set in and attitudes hardened. The men decided to continue with their stance by an overwhelming vote. The strike committee was established at this meeting, when seven men were elected to lead the struggle locally. [26]
Much hardship was experienced by the iron workers and their families. The Derby Board of Guardians granted relief in one week in December alone to 177 men, 143 women and 260 children. Similar grants were made every week at a cost of between £150 and £200, actually taking the Board’s funds into deficit. [27] Faced with an unrelenting force of employers and acute starvation as winter progressed, the ironfounders had to return to work in January 1920, unfortunately with nothing gained, but importantly with nothing lost.
A major factor in the impotence of the dispute must have been the sharp disunity between the two key unions involved, the FSI and the Workers Union. There was “much reluctance to bring the WU men out’, according to the Derby WU DC and there were arguments about who was to run the dispute, which drove the unions concerned apart. The WU complained bitterly that the FSI was “anti-WU”, and while there was much truth in this statement, the dislike was entirely mutual. [28] The FSI sent a circular to all craft unions “charging WU members who are moulders with working under price”. The WU protested that this was untrue and asked for full details from the FSI of their allegations. [29] Meanwhile the FSI took in some other small unions to become the National Union of Foundryworkers, which many years later joined the AEU one of the key components ultimately of amicus.
In the engineering industry generally the newly powerful shop stewards were determined to prevent the loss of their prestige and one reflection of this was a desire for unity amongst craftsmen, which took the form of a widespread demand for organisational solidarity. Eight skilled engineering unions joined together, the principal society being the ASE, to form the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) in 1920. In Derby, there were at least two societies along with the ASE which were brought into the new union. The Steam Engine Makers were well established at Haslam’s, along with the ASE. The Number One shop was organised by the former, the latter taking the membership in Number Two and Number Three shops. The Steam Engine Makers were present in most of the organised factories, as was the ASE. Similarly, the United Machine Workers Association, which was particularly strong at Rolls Royce, brought many members in Derby to the merged AEU. Councillor Arthur Sturgess, the convenor of shop stewards at Haslam’s and the part-time District Secretary of the ASE in Derby for some eight years, became the first full time organiser for the AEU, being based at the Labour Party offices in Green Lane.
A massive rally of members of all the unions forming the AEU was held at the Central Hall in Derby, presided over by H Grey. Councillors Ansell and Sturgess proposed and seconded a resolution welcoming the amalgamation. But without doubt the highlight was the speech by the new general secretary of the AEU. This was Tom Mann, veteran socialist, one of the leaders of the 1889 Dock Strike, founder of the Workers Union and originator of the pre-war syndicalist movement. Mann made an uncompromising speech, which was warmly welcomed by the mass audience. He declared himself a “Socialist, Bolshevist, Spartist or any other ‘ist’ and lay great stress on the fact that he was out for the complete control of industry by the workers”. [30] (‘Spartist’ was presumably the local newspaper’s mishearing of ‘Spartacist’, the name recalling Spartacus the famous leader of the slave rebellion against the Roman Empire, which had been adopted by one of the left wing tendencies which would form the Communist Party in Germany.) Mann proudly approved the Soviet system, making special play of the role of shop stewards’ committees as a kind of British soviet.
In a test of strength between this new, strong union and Rolls Royce, the biggest engineering employer in Derby, 6,000 workers from all departments, including office workers, struck at the company in May 1920, ostensibly over the dismissal of a shop steward. The firm at first accused Bolton, the dismissed man, of bad workmanship, but later said it was because of insufficient production. Bolton conceded a minor error, but pointed out that it had been rectified within two hours, whilst the lack of production was entirely due to his trade union duties. Three days into the strike, Rolls Royce claimed to have no knowledge of Bolton’s position as a shop steward, a claim which had little impression on the daily mass meetings which consistently backed the stance of the strike committee. To counter many public and media distortions about the dispute, the shop stewards produced a leaflet over the names of J Clarke and William Wilkinson, Chairman and Secretary of the joint committee. One rumour about the strike was that it was over the right to smoke at will, still a disciplinary offence, or only during meal breaks. The workers’ committee was quite clear what was at stake. “The Strike was caused in the first instance because we believe our brother and workmate, Bolton, was unjustly dismissed, and in the second place because the Management of Rolls Royce refused to remove the cause of friction pending negotiations.” [31] That is to say, to re-instate Bolton while the matter was discussed around the table.
Moreover, the whole attitude of the company annoyed the men and women on strike and the strike committee summed up their feelings. “We are not going to remain slaves and chattels, but are free thinking individuals, and in our Trades Unions and Shop Committees we are banded together for mutual help and protection. We stand by our brother as we would stand by any worker worthy and in need of protection.” Beyond arguing that the strike was held outside of the agreed procedure for the resolution of disputes, the company and the Engineering Employers Federation kept remarkably quiet. Within only a few more days, a compromise solution was found which avoided embarrassment, but left the company in no doubt as to the collective strength of their employees.
It was an important lesson for Rolls Royce, which embarked upon a more benevolent course of employee relations, which recognised the especially skilled nature of its employees’ work. Increasingly, a job at Rolls Royce was seen as a particularly worthy one and the quality of employment became ever better. Even so, such disputes had been common throughout the engineering industry, but it only took a national lock out in 1921 to tilt the balance of power back towards the employers. Meanwhile, the national shop stewards movement which had emerged in 1917 was formally wound up in 1922, as the official trade union movement took up the challenge of shop floor organisation more seriously.
The railway workshops in Derby faced an even more daunting task than the Rolls Royce workers in changing their work environment. A visit to the Litchurch works in Derby in the early Twenties, more than any other experience, converted to socialism the noted Methodist, Donald (or Lord, as he was later to become) Soper. The noise, dirt, lack of safety and the rigid discipline created a lasting impression upon the young man. The manager’s office was called the “Baron’s Fortress”, a term which reflected the warlike behaviour of the management. The foremen wore bowler hats, as if to place them above the workers who had to stand to attention when talking to them. The foremen’s blue suits were almost a uniform, designed to intimidate and the practice of distinguishing supervisors by dress only died out after 194S. Men were hired and fired at will.
One former worker in the railway workshops, Les Clay, was taken on when hundreds of men waited every day outside the gates for a company official to appear. “Any joiners?” the foreman would say. “Any blacksmiths? Any turners?” Clay was in the front row on one occasion when the last to be taken on was called. When he thrust himself forward, he was rewarded with a job. Casual work even for skilled men was the norm and security of employment was equally risky once in the works. Clay had an average of one in four weeks unemployed and was always in the first batch to be laid off on account of his trade union commitment. The employer tended to hire labour when needed that day and to fire it as soon as work dried up. Forward planning was not a concept then familiar to the railway workshops.
Shop stewards, or to be precise ‘shop committeemen’, were provided for in a new agreement concluded for the railway workshops in 1923. In the Derby loco works, these committeemen were subjected to terrific harassment. Les Clay’s foreman, Healey, was a “bastard”. When Healey stood as a Liberal candidate in the local elections, Clay responded to a comment by the chairman of one of Healey’s public meetings, even though Sir Henry Fowler, the head of the Midland Railway, was also on the platform. The chair remarked that the men who worked under Healey would testify to his qualities. To the surprise of all, Clay announced to the meeting that the only thing Healey lacked in qualities was a whip! A member of the press fell off his seat on a window ledge in amused amazement at Clay’s audacity. [32]
Amongst other skilled engineering trades there was also sign of the desire for organisational unity of the kind displayed by the AEU. In 1919, the National Union of Vehicle Builders (NUVB) came into existence by the merger of the old established UKSC and three London based coach making societies. In Derby, the new union was particularly well based in the rail workshops having 313 members in the local branch compared to only 80 in 1915. The branch secretary was one T Osman and he steered the NUVB locally through its amalgamation and beyond. The effect of the new union was very positive in this highly specialised section of the engineering industry, for within two years membership had risen substantially.
ii) General and Municipal Workers
The Gas and General Labourers Union (G&GLU) was still strongly based among quarry workers in the north of the county, which was largely rural and remote from the major towns. Not that they were at all docile. One thousand quarrymen and lime workers in the Buxton area came out on strike for a week in May 1920, to satisfactorily resolve their grievances. But it was only with expansion into other fields, which was assisted by mergers, could the union emerge as the massive body that is today’s GMB. The G&GLU had been taking members in a variety of industries for some time. To underline this fact, the union changed its name in 1922 to the Amalgamated Society of Gas, Municipal and General Workers. However, the merger of three big general workers unions in 1924, which brought about the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (NUGMWU) really laid the basis for growth, particularly in the municipal sphere. In the lead up to the merger, the veteran leader of the gas workers, Will Thorne, visited Derby to address a mass meeting in the Temperance Hall in June 1923. Members of his own union joined in to listen to the merger proposal with those of the Municipal Employees Association, which had members employed by the Borough Council in Derby, and the National Amalgamated Union of Labour, which had members in the coalfields and elsewhere in Derbyshire. [33]
iii) Printing and Paper Workers
The female printing and paper workers of Derby were able to win an agreement in early 1919 to provide for wages of between 12/- at 14 years of age and 30/- at 20 years, which significantly was inclusive of war bonuses, thus protecting the increments. Skilled printers also received increases, taking them to 69/- a week in May 1919. The Operative Printers (NATSOPA) and the Paper Workers Union, representing male warehousemen, cutters and packers extracted rises taking the most experienced workers to within 3/- a week of the most highly skilled men. Their union, the Typographical Association, responded by asking for a 10% increase, but by the beginning of December the semi-skilled unions had obtained an immediate 6/-increase and a 1/6d increase to apply from January 1920. [34] The general thrust of all this is to only underline the fact that the general experience of the printing unions during the war continued immediately afterwards. Organisation of the workers was high, control of the trade was firm and demand for the products of the labour of print workers was still rising rapidly.
iv) The Mining Industry
The mining industry had been relatively quiet during the war, as demand for energy was at a premium. The Derbyshire Miners Association (DMA) was even able to expand itself in other, unusual areas. The price of lead rocketed during the war years and in consequence the mineral was once more actively mined in the county. But as the price of lead was left to rise or fall in an open market, the onset of peace presented serious problems for DMA members in the Mill Close mines in Darley Dale. This was Derbyshire’s largest ever lead mine, producing half a million tons of lead concentrates over three centuries of exploitation. Mill Close experienced no less than four defensive strikes over 1918-9, the last being in August 1919, when union members were made redundant at the same time that non-unionists with lesser service were given their jobs, after being transferred from other areas of the mines. 86 DMA members came out and the strike dragged on for months - until early 1921 in fact!
Under Derbyshire’s ancient lead mining regulations, a claim could be made for possession of disused mines, so the DMA decided to do just that in order that the men could be provided with work. A claim for three disused mines near to the Mill Close operations was made, the idea being to run the workings as a worker co-operative. But the capital required to fund such a project was too much for the union. Meanwhile, the owner of Mill Close, H Denman, sold out his interests in the mine, but the new owner still refused to take the DMA strikers back. In 1922, New Consolidated Goldfield Ltd, which now controlled Mill Close, injected much needed capital in the mines. [35]
The experience of the DMA’s coal mining membership over the next few years was to prove to be every bit as exhilarating as the struggle of the lead miners and sometimes as bitterly disappointing. As the demobilisation of the troops took place, some coal owners dismissed men to make way for returning servicemen, a course of action that led to disputes at Tibshelf and Normanton. The employers argued that they could not keep ‘uneconomic’ levels of labour on their books unless they had some help from the Government. This line of approach led in turn to definite calls for nationalisation of coal mines, as pit after pit faced the same problem. Another repeated demand during this period was for the abolition of the butty system. This operated throughout Derbyshire and the mass of the men were thoroughly opposed to it. They did most of the work whilst the butty took the lion’s share of the wages. Even so, there were some workers who believed that piece work maximised earnings. After decades of controversy, the unfair aspect of butty was finally ended in 1919, when a ballot of the DMA showed a three to one majority for a new system whereby every man would share equally in the results of a butty contract.
The ease with which such a long-standing grievance was resolved must have given great confidence to the DMA. A national claim for a 30% increase, a six hour day, full wages for the unemployed displaced by returning servicemen and nationalisation of the mines was made against the background of bold confidence in every coalfield. Of Derbyshire’s men, 93% balloted in favour of strike action. Wages had not kept up with the price of coal. Since the establishment of the datum line of 1888, wages had risen threefold, but prices had risen fourfold, so the demand for a 30% rise was not seen as unreasonable. Only the involvement of Lloyd George, as Prime Minister, averted the strike. A proposal to set up a Royal Commission was accepted by the Miners Federation, so long as they could have a say in the appointment of the members of the Commission.
Its Chairman was Mr Justice Sankey, hence the Royal Commission began to be called the ‘Sankey Commission’. It eventually reported that the high prices and low wages of recent years had allowed the owners to make extremely large profits, despite their inefficiency in managing their own businesses. But differences in the Commission resulted in three separate reports being presented to Parliament. Six on the Commission voted for the majority report, which provided for the MFGB’s demands for a 30% increase, a six hour day and a guarantee for those laid off due to demobilisation. A minority report, put by three of the Commission’s members and supported by the coal owners, argued for a 1/6d a day increase, a seven hour day for underground workers and an eight hour day for surface workers. A third proposal, which the government accepted, dubbed the ‘Sankey Report’, envisaged a 2/- a day increase, a seven hour day in 1919 and a conditional six hour day in 1921. The coalfields were in ferment at this manoeuvring and the MFGB balloted the men. Railway workers were in a similar struggle and were also on the verge of a national strike. It seemed impossible to hold the miners back to await the result of the ballot. In Derbyshire, sporadic strikes of pit deputies took place and, on 27th March 1919, 8,000 men in twelve of the coalfield’s pits walked out on unofficial strike. But the DMA advised acceptance of the Government’s terms and eventually the men came around to this.
The question of nationalisation had yet to be settled and the Sankey Commission began another inquiry. This time four reports emerged, but all of them favoured some form of state involvement. This apparent sense of unanimity to some extent lulled the miners into a false sense of security, rudely shattered when the Government rejected nationalisation. There were also difficulties in implementing the shorter working week, as the Government hedged on whether the reduction in hours would mean a reduction in wages. Unrest in the coalfields reached a new high, especially when it became clear that fewer hours would also mean fewer wage. 20,000 Derbyshire miners came out from 21st July in 30 pits. The DMA leadership laboured in vain to head off the strike wave, which was paralleled in the rest of the country. On 2Sth July, Lloyd George agreed a formula ending the strike, but nationalisation was still an unresolved issue. Mass meetings were held in the coalfields to win the miners for action on the issue over August and September. But the failure to generate support in other industries for sympathetic action ensured the failure of this struggle. In early 1920, Derbyshire miners voted nine to one for action. The MFGB as a whole was more evenly split, but nonetheless still voted in favour of a strike. However, the TUC took the initiative and decided by an overwhelming vote not to call a general strike on the affair. Nationalisation became a dead issue for a generation.
Not that this experience dented the resolve of the miners to tackle their immediate problems. The introduction of iron and steel props in underground workings at the Butterley mines in May 1920 led to a threatened strike and the idea was hurriedly withdrawn. The notion had proved controversial because the cheaper props would not give out a cracking sound when excessive pressure might lead to a roof collapse, as did wooden props. More emphatic than this was the major wages confrontation of 1920. The Derbyshire miners voted in a national MFGB ballot by well over two to one to strike for a claim to reduce the price of employees’ coal and increase wages. The owners made the fixing of a datum line to calculate production bonuses the main issue, but this was clearly rejected by the miners. The extent of feeling amongst the men can be gauged by the stormy reaction of the historically less militant South Derbyshire miners. There was a special reason for their outrage; the wages of miners in the Swadlincote area were about 3/- a day less than their fellows in the north of the county around Chesterfield. South Derbyshire joined with most other miners in the national strike, which started on Saturday 16th October. The DMA immediately made the decision to conserve its funds by paying a reduced strike pay of £1 a week to full members.
The miners naturally looked to the Triple Alliance, formed in 191S, for support from the transport unions. Rowsley NUR, like other railway union branches, formed a strike committee. But the domination of the solidarity action with the miners by the NUR was not well received by Staveley ASLEF, which voted 12 to 54 against supporting the NUR action. Instead, a proposal to stand by a decision of their own EC, once it had consulted ASLEF branches, went through with 40 for and only 22 against. Despite such bickering, at a national level the rail unions warned on October 21st that unless the miners’ demands were met, they would strike within days. The Government rushed through an emergency powers bill to give it authority to stand up to this challenge, but in also began negotiations with the MFGB. After four days, a proposal was made sufficient to avert the solidarity railway strike. Amidst much confusion and a split in the DMA’s leadership, there was a small majority in a ballot for acceptance in the county. Nationally, there was a wafer thin majority for rejection of the Government’s offer. Despite the ballot result, a special MFGB conference abandoned the strike.
Subsequent increases gave the Derbyshire men 3s 6d a day more than they had been previously earning. But, essential, very little in terms of lasting gains had been extracted from the strike. Essential strike funds had been drained away, weakening the miners’ bargaining position if a sudden fight came. The valuable offer of solidarity action by the Triple Alliance had frightened the Government, but the firmness of such offers had not been put to the test. Within a single year, the employers would be back to reassure themselves of their dominance over the miners.
(v) The Railway Industry
The eight hour day was introduced on the railways as part of the process of establishing a peace-time national agreement for the industry but not until after a fight. Discussions with the Government took place, amidst an atmosphere of intense militancy amongst the workforce. By the end of November 1918, the rail unions were deciding upon industrial action unless the Government definitely indicated that the eight hour day would be introduced. In December, Derby ASLEF considered that the “time has arrived when the question shall be settled once and for all”. A strike committee was elected, in a determined mood, while the branch pledged to “abide by whatever decision the EC considers the best”. Faced with the certainty of a major national railway dispute, the Government determined that discretion was the better part of valour and calmly retreated. The eight hour day was introduced from February 1st 1919, a momentous occasion. As Derby ASLEF called it, a “red letter day”.
As soon as rail workers realised their full strength, other issues came to the fore. In particular, after the tensions generated by the preparations for a national strike had revealed the potential extent for strike breaking, the question of working with non-trades unionists emerged as an issue. The future ability of railway unionism to face up to the employers was seriously affected by this. The isolated Rowsley branch of the NUR in North Derbyshire was, in those days, the centre of a major marshalling yard. Yet this rural NUR branch was just as affected by the prevailing mood of determination to seize material improvements as any big city branch. Rowsley NUR carried a resolution that a strike committee be formed and pickets “appointed to carry out the EC decisions of January 7th re their call on the non-union question”. In anticipation of future conflict, the branch set up a 15 man strike committee and another 15 members constituted a special picket group. [36]
These developments had been a reflection of the improved bargaining position that had been brought to railway unions by the war and its aftermath. National conformity of wages and a big improvement of the lot of the rail worker went hand in hand with the massive increase in union membership which had taken place over the war years. The Railway Clerks Association (RCA) won the right to represent station masters and other supervisory workers in national negotiations in early 1919, a fact which no doubt had a direct bearing on the sudden jump in RCA membership. The Derby branch reached the heady heights of some 1,500 members by the end of 1920. [37]
Throughout 1919, the Government and the rail unions negotiated over the question of a national wage agreement based on the standardisation of the hundreds of grades which the various companies used. Both sides naturally adopted postures designed to maximise their bargaining strength. The NUR especially sought to revamp the Triple Alliance, a fact underlined by a special discussion at the Rowsley branch in June at which “absolute support for the Triple Alliance” was declared. [38] A major crisis was reached in September 1919, when the Government proposed a wages settlement which would supposedly end wartime controls and lay the basis for the future rail negotiations with the independent companies at a national level. The proposal gave special concessions to drivers and firemen who were organised by ASLEF. The entire 33/- war bonus, which had been arrived at in seven stages was to be added to the highest pre-war company footplate rate. However, for the other grades, reductions of between one and sixteen shillings a week would apply from the beginning of January 1920.
A national strike was the only thing to be expected in the circumstances and this began on midnight Friday 26th September 1919. The obvious attempt to split the unions by treating loco drivers and firemen and the bulk of NUR members differently failed miserably, for the 57,000 members of ASLEF stopped work in solidarity. Derby ASLEF took a hard line over any of its members who might be tempted to waver. The branch resolved that “all members that remain at work during the strike shall be expelled from the society and forfeit all benefits”. The motion was carried unanimously. Moreover, to ensure complete solidarity, the branch decided not to resume work until “every man has been reinstated” and that “we unanimously agree that we will not resume work till the whole of the men that remained at work during the strike have been dismissed”. Seven men were given four hours notice of expulsion unless they ceased work, but in contrast seven non-unionists joined up from September 14th onwards. [39]
The wider labour movement geared itself to mobilising support for the rail workers. The United Machineworkers No 69 Derby branch simply reflected the overwhelming mood of solidarity with the rail workers, when it declared full support for them. The public at large were decisively in sympathy with the rail workers’ struggle. Meanwhile, the rail unions began to make arrangements for a long dispute. The joint strike committee In Derby approached the board of Derby Co-operative Society (DCS), after the Government ensured the withholding of wages duly earned. The Co-op was asked to supply food to strikers by voucher on their honour to redeem the full costs later. A similar request came from the iron founders who were themselves also engaged in a dispute at the same time. The DCS Board unanimously agreed to assist both groups of workers. [40]
This central strike committee of the railway unions met constantly during the dispute. In particular, NUR and ASLEF held their own and joint branch meetings practically every day. 11,000 railway workers were out on strike in and around Derby, so naturally the effect on industry was both immediate and dramatic. Thousands were laid off in the Derbyshire coalfields and many pits, such as Barlborough, Whitwell and Southgate were completely closed. 150 trains normally came out from Derby each day, but only three appeared on the first day of the strike. [41] After that there were no trains for five days out of Derby and the Trades Council later summed up the general view of the movement, when it “congratulated the railwaymen on the splendid stand made by them during their recent strike”. [42]
The Government waged a fierce propaganda battle against the rail workers, with newsreel films in the cinema and full page advertisements in the newspapers. It was the first, systematic use of such sophisticated techniques of mass persuasion during an industrial dispute. The Government’s campaign so infuriated members of Derby ASLEF that they decided to ask assistance of the Vehicle Workers Union, a recent merger of the London based bus and tram union and the Manchester based Amalgamated Association of Tramway Workers, which had a branch in Derby. The union was asked to “refuse to handle any transport (of) any capitalist papers seeing they are trying to influence public opinion by making false statements about the railway dispute”. The NUR countered the propaganda by commissioning the Labour Research Department to present its case to the public. Well argued advertisements appeared in the newspapers, asking workers whether they wanted to see their own wages cut in a similar way, for their turn would come next. The tremendous public support was maintained partly due to this professional aid from the LRD, which was an independent body much influenced by Marxist elements. The use of the LRD was an important first step for unions in utilising intellectual skills in a coherent and modern way.
Another major aid was the threat by print workers to strike if their own newspaper put the strikers’ case unfairly. It was very quickly apparent that the rail workers were due for a stunning victory and they were magnanimous in their strength. A party of soldiers returning home on leave were stranded in Derby by the strike, but were sent to Birmingham in taxis paid for by the local branches of the NUR. [43] The strike did not spread to other industries, simply because the rail unions did not call for such solidarity action. Nonetheless, the Derby builders’ labourers working on railway contracts came out in support, although they need not have done so, such was their sympathy for the dispute. The ABL subsequently sought official dispute benefit from the union’s head office for their members “who left work with the railwaymen in the recent strike”. [44]
After nine days of struggle, the strike ended on October 5th 1919, when the Government met with the railway union leaders to settle the dispute in No 10 Downing Street. The terms of the settlement allowed for no victimisation and the guarantee of existing earnings until September 30th 1920, when new negotiations on standardisation of wages would begin on the basis of a SI- a week minimum wage. Following this success, it proved no difficulty to negotiate a series of agreements which were signed during 1920. The extremely complex wages scales were simplified. Enhanced payments for overtime and shift work and a guaranteed week were all introduced, as the NUR maximised its advantages by adopting a strongly militant posture within the Triple Alliance.
The rail unions tried to achieve 100% membership within the industry. Derby ASLEF considered in December 1919 that “the time has arrived when all men joining the footplate fraternity shall be compelled to join a trades union”. The victory ensured that it began to be much easier to pick up membership. One Derby member of ASLEF, T Wasley, received a medal from the EC for proposing 60 new members in eight months during 1920. [45] Bargaining opportunities also arose that year, when the unions put a proposal to the Minister of Transport to establish national conciliation machinery. Derby No.1 ASLEF voiced a common concern, when it decided to keep its rank and file Vigilance Committee, “while the new machinery is set up and then we shall see what is required to work it”, thus hedging their bets. [46]
Railway workers were still subject to the rigidity of stern disciplinary rules. For example, instant dismissal for smoking on duty was not at all rare. Despite these restraints, perhaps because of them, the unions were able to prosper in the aftermath of 1919 strike. This was so even in what might be considered the more remote areas. Rowsley NUR, for example, went from strength to strength. The branch affiliated to the Matlock Trades and Labour Council in 1919, with as many as four delegates attending the council. Links were forged with the Matlock, Cromford and Ambergate NUR branches and the NUR in North Derbyshire even supported Hibbs of ASLEF as a Labour candidate in the Darley Dale Urban District Council elections of 1920 with some vigour. Rowsley NUR set up a branch library and with great pride recorded their intent to buy a volume of a Keir Hardie biography for this. The branch became an intrinsic part of the daily life of the locality, engaging in house to house charity collections - especially for the local hospital - amongst other community activities in the Darley Dale area. This work was so advanced that a formal “collection committee” was set up.
In a similar way, Derby ASLEF branch tried to view its activities with a broader perspective. A “workers education class for the younger members” was set up in 1921. However, a different mood was to be detected already, as recession began to set in. The ASLEF branch thought that their initiative ought to be followed by other branches “with a view to lifting the workers out of the apathy that they are in at the present time”. [47] We shall see in due course how this came about.
(vi) Teachers
In sharp contrast to manual workers, the lot of the teacher was infinitely less disagreeable, in terms of the standard of working conditions. Yet it is a measure of the seriousness of unrest amongst all employees in Britain at this time that the profession was beset with ‘industrial’ relations problems. The failure of Derbyshire County Council (DCC) to more effectively deal with the still inadequate salary of its teachers caused a strike in the county in early 1919, quite an unheard of development. The Derbyshire area of the NUT had by now achieved the not inconsiderable membership of 1,459. In the course of its dispute over county rates of pay, it became clear that only a nationally set level of payments would resolve the teachers’ problems. Indeed, the Derbyshire area demanded such.
A similar process of unrest was evident throughout the country and resulted in the convening in 1919 of the Burnham Committee of enquiry into teachers’ pay. This accepted the NUT’s demands for a national salary scale, although much pressure had to be exerted upon DCC to implement the terms of this decision. Two years later, area scales were still in existence in Derbyshire. [48]
More controversial still, was the pressure from women teachers for equal pay. A separate organisation, the Union of Women Teachers had been formed in 1909. But little progress on fairer treatment for women had been achieved and the war years had exacerbated the discrepancies which existed. The perfectly sound, egalitarian principle of equal pay caused much dissatisfaction amongst male teachers. Despite the fact that the NUT’s membership was 70% female and that equal pay became union policy in 1919, the NUT maintained an ambivalent attitude, causing support for the continuation of separate women’s and men’s only teachers’ unions, as hostility towards each others’ positions developed. [49]
(vii) Police Unionism
Even more astonishing to modern experience is the unionisation of police and - perhaps less surprising - prison officers, which came about in this turbulent period. A process which began in 1914 culminated five years later in the terminal defeat of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO), a bona fide trade union in the contemporary sense of the word. NUPPO was defeated in the course of a major dispute, which seriously worried the Government and establishment. For the very survival of British capitalism rested upon notions of neutrality of the state and its instruments. To have the police engaged in conflict with the state raised very profound questions.
At first NUPPO grew very slowly, its members having to meet in secret. A branch began organising in Derby in 1917. [50] As the war came to an end, discontent about pay and conditions spilled out into the open, as it was to with so many other diverse industries and occupations. Some local authorities, the technical employers of the police, were prepared to concede advances in pay. The Derbyshire County Council Standing Joint Committee asked the Home Secretary for sanction to improve reserve police pay. It submitted an entire new scale of payments for approval in 1918. [51] Demands for the reinstatement of a dismissed leading member of NUPPO in 1918 were initially refused and led to a strike in some parts of the country on 29th August.
Within days a settlement had been reached and membership of NUPPO rose to five sixths of the entire force. Like any other trade union, NUPPO had learned the value of solidarity, both for its own members’ problems and for other workers. In the summer of 1919, the Derby branch of NUPPO decided to affiliate to the Labour Party. Nationally, the union had already affiliated to the TUC. Locally, NUPPO benefited from the organisational and financial assistance of the Derby Trades Council. The DTC gave Derby NUPPO a donation of £1 4s 0d to help it on its feet. Generally, there was widespread sympathy in the labour movement for the policemen’s’ case. Charles Duncan, the WU leader, was an honorary official of NUPPO and was himself involved in a libel action on the latter’s behalf in 1919. [S2]
But the Home Office had moved very little on police pay and by the summer of 1919 had rejected NUPPO’s demands outright. A strike broke out principally in London and Liverpool, as the wider trade union movement declared itself decidedly in favour of the union. The Derby Trades Council did so on July 9th 1919. Despite the earlier signs of militancy, in common with most other police areas, Derby’s NUPPO branch did not come out on strike. The branch would only comment that they were “not on strike for the present”, implying that their hesitancy arose out of misconceived tactical considerations on the part of the union.
Whilst Derbyshire police did not actively join the dispute, there is an interesting sidelight which provides a link with the county. One of the key leaders of the strike was Leonard Petchey, who had served with the Derbyshire Constabulary in 1903 and 1904. His experience as a 19 year old in a North East Derbyshire mining village was decisive in preparing him for the leading role he played in the police strike of 1919. When in the county, he had to work a 63 hour week for £1 4s 6d, with no holidays, no bicycle and with primitive lodgings. Petchey resigned out of disgust at the high handedness of the police authorities. Yet, for him, the local people were “real decent and warm-hearted, they took a bit of knowing, but once you knew them, they presented no problem at all”.
Because of the spilt amongst the men themselves in 1919, well exemplified by the hesitancy of NUPPO activists in places like Derby, the Home Office was able to ride out the dispute. After a humiliating return to work, mass dismissals of militant policemen began and an emergency Police Bill was introduced in Parliament. This had the objective of stifling police trades unionism, once and for all. Strike action by the police would be illegal from the passing of the Bill into legislation. The wider trade union movement registered its opposition, for example the DTC in August and Rowsley NUR in November but it was to little effect, for the Government had got its way and independent trades unionism amongst the police was at an end. Whatever professional bodies which were subsequently established to represent the police would say about their own representativeness, these would remain quite divorced from the wider workers’ movement and would operate in a manner quite alien to trade union traditions.
(viii) Co-operative and Other Distributive Workers
In the period which followed the war, not even the Co-operatives - which were supposed to be on the side of organised labour - avoided industrial disputes. In 1919, the South Yorkshire Amalgamated Union of Co-operative and Commercial Employees (AUCCE) fought a battle for the merging of war bonuses into a complete wages scale. The Co-ops realised that the dispute could escalate into a fight for a national arrangement along these lines. Consequently, the employers decided to pre-empt this by threatening a lock out of North Midland and Lancashire employees. Co-ops in Derbyshire would have certainly been affected by this. But a negotiated settlement resolved the immediate conflict, although the argument about wages scales rumbled on for eighteen months.
This experience encouraged the mood for greater trade union unity in the sector and the three societies which mainly organised in the Co-ops decided to opt for amalgamation. AUCCE had over a thousand members in Derby, when the union joined with the Shop Assistants Union and the Warehouse Workers Union. A mass meeting to promote the fusion of the three was held in Derby in November 1919. Held at the Temperance Hall, this was chaired by Councillor W R Raynes, who put the rather suspect view that Derby was “at one time a black spot in the trade union world”. This was presumably by contrast with the rapid growth of unionism in his time. [53]
But, as it happened, only the Warehouse Workers joined up with AUCCE. However, a merger with the Journeyman Butchers’ Federation (JBF) enabled the union to change identity to the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers (NUDAW). The Shop Assistants remained aloof from all this until as late as 1947. To complicate matters further, the Shop Assistants suffered a breakaway in the form of the National Chemists Assistants, which became the National Union of Drug and Chemical Workers by a merger. In 1936 shortening its name to the Chemical Workers Union (CWU), this earned a long-standing reputation for being a maverick union. It was to leave the TUC in 1923, rather than conform to a Disputes Committee ruling on membership recruitment from another union altogether. There were very strong objections from the TGWU and NUGMW, which both suffered from the casual approaches of the CWU to snatching the members of other unions. Oddly, the union subsequently merged with the TGWU in 1971. Apart from sporadic attempts to organise in British Celanese, the union never really featured locally.
As for NUDAW, the new union broke into its chosen sphere of activity with enthusiasm. Its paper, New Dawn, was not only a slight pun on the name of the union, but was really symptomatic of a sense of a new beginning that the establishment of the union gave co-op workers. Some evidence of an initially militant industrial policy exists. For example, after permission had been given to NUDAW members at Ripley Co-op to engage in official strike, the Society agreed to pay the “Boot Repairers’ Log”, a disputed payment claimed by shoe workers. [54] While a total strike of all the employees of the Derby Co-op was called by the local representative and later approved by NUDAW’s executive. This was actually averted in the end, but a strike of butchery department members did occur when some employees changed membership to the craft butchery union, the JBF, before the merger which created NUDAW. The craft union advocated a higher rate of pay, as generally observed by Derby’s specialist retail butchers. Arbitration was proposed, but there was still a strike, which eventually was ended by agreement to refer the affair to a joint committee of the TUC and the Co-operative Union, the latter being essentially a trade society of the co-op organisations. Another instance of local militancy was in the early 1920s, when Derby Co-op Society workers came out in sympathy with craft bakers in their national dispute, whilst bakers at Long Eaton Co-op unsuccessfully campaigned for night work to be abolished in 1921. [55]
A more serious and lengthy affair was the insurance workers’ dispute. The Cooperative Insurance Society (CIS) dismissed W Stokes, District Manager in Derby, “due to his actions as a trade union secretary” for sending out in his own time a circular to his members telling them not to accept new conditions of employment until they had been considered by the union’s executive committee. [56] This event took place against the background of another dispute on a new scale of wages, which had been raging for eighteen months that had been set off in South Yorkshire. These insurance workers were just unable to resolve their problem and the dispute bubbled on, with morale beginning to flag.
In September 1922, the CIS rejected arbitration and nine months later the issue was discussed at the Derby Trades Council. There, one delegate argued that “it is ridiculous (since the CIS) were preaching the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth”. [S7] But if dissatisfaction with the co-operative movement was evident, then this was equally the case with NUDAW. Insurance workers set up a rival union, seceding from their own union. The new formation, established in 1923, was called the National Union of Co-operative Insurance Society Employees (NUCISE). Due to technicalities of a constitutional nature, NUCISE was not considered eligible for affiliation to the TUC and therefore, in 1934, it affiliated (not merged or amalgamated) to the TGWU. Affiliation ensured continued autonomy, while access to all TGWU services and facilities was possible by the payment of an annual affiliation fee. In 1982, NUCISE formally merged with the TGWU, after a ballot of its members, to become part of that union’s clerical and supervisory trade group, ACTS.
Apart from the initial hostilities with NUCISE, NUDAW had problems with the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks (NAUSA) all during the Twenties. The tensions were so strong as to receive a report on the problem at the DTC in 1923. [58] The antagonism continued for some time, but the two unions were destined to unite in 1947 in the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW), which today is the main union in the Co-ops. In the meantime, the forcefulness of the two unions mellowed, as the Co-ops themselves now began to cope with the notion of effective trade unionism amongst their employees, A special relationship with the Co-op unions was nurtured. This was exemplified by the introduction of worker directors, as in the Long Eaton Co-operative Society in 1922, when NUDAW member Arthur Church took his seat. [59]
However, there was little trades unionism in the distributive trade outside of the Coops. Major stores like Woolworth’s were then noted for their anti-trade union outlook. The DTC launched a boycott in 1924 of Woolworth’s store - the first in the area - for its open refusal to employ union labour, [60]
(ix)The Builders Labourers Union
Charles Brown, the former branch secretary of the Derby ABL, only came back from the army to take up his union activities in October 1919. It was an opportune moment to return, for the membership of ABL was about to phenomenally explode. An enormous amount of building work began to be undertaken for British Celanese (or British Cellulose, as it was called at first) at Spondon. This enabled the ABL, and also the craft unions, to make major recruitment gains during 1919. A shop steward was elected for the ABL on site by October of that year and the union decided to extend the election of shop stewards to all yards organised by itself in the Derby area and on all jobs where there was in excess of twenty men.
Throughout this period, the minutes of the ABL show an almost obsessive concern for the “non-union question”. While the organisation of the shop stewards’ system grew apace and in October 1919 the ABL voted to meet monthly instead of quarterly. Apart from the expansion of the Spondon site, there was generally a building boom and this reflected itself in some startling recruitment levels. National membership of ABL in 1918 was 9,969, so the local branch was not an insignificant part of the whole union.
Derby ABL membership [61]
1917 65
1918 281
1919 248
1920 835
A number of locally and nationally well-known firms were organised by the ABL. McAlpine’s had employees in the union in Derby in 1918. [62] W Ford’s, which had been organised as early as 1913, were still organised in 1920, when the company was warned about paying under the union rate. Gee’s, which later became Gee Walker, were organised. In 1920, they too received a union warning; this time about allowing bricklayers to unload brick lorries, obviously the work of labourers. [63] Ford and Weston had a number of labourers organised by Brown, when he visited a Melbourne job to check on membership. Astral Company in Kedleston Road were organised in September 1920. [64]
Faced with this growth, the Derby branch of ABL began to feel the need for some more permanent arrangement of an officer. This would be a departure from the past practice of periodically appointed district delegates, when a working member of the branch would be paid loss of earnings to attend to problems on the job of branch members. A new rule book adopted in 1916 at a national level - and supported by the Derby branch - for the first time made provision for the existence of full time officers. [65] The branch discussed the idea of a local full timer, as a general principle, in the spring of 1920. [66] A working group reported to the branch committee that it was a feasible proposition and on July 1st the branch voted to make Brown the full-timer at the remuneration of £5 a week, paying for this by means of a levy of 2d per week per member. Such decisions were being made in a number of towns where the ABL organised. The head office determined a standard rate for the job later that month of £6 a week, so Brown got an increase earlier than he might have expected! [67]
The work of an organiser was fairly strictly controlled by the membership. It was agreed by the local ABL committee in 1921 that to check “the organising work done by the secretary ... a report in writing be made weekly (and) to each quarterly meeting”. [68] £6 was a good wage for the building industry, even though rates had risen quite dramatically, compared to the pre-war position. Building labourers got 16s 8d for an eight hour shift in 1920, compared to 6s 0d for nine hours in 1914. Labourers managed to maintain a rate moderately close to that of the skilled men. Plasterers, plumbers, bricklayers and carpenters could expect around 19/-, or just under, for a ten hour day in 1920. [69] This was very much due to the pressure on the wages front that the entire industry felt from 1918 onward. During the course of 1918, the ABL lodge in Derby decided to press their head office to “apply to the Government for the payment of the 121/2% for all members working in controlled establishments and on work of public utility”. [70] Great changes began to be made in the industry. In October, a new local federation of building unions was established under the rules of the newly set up National Federation of Building Trade Operatives.
The significance of both the local branch resolution and the new structures was that, effectively, local bargaining in the building industry had come to an end. In 1920, this became formally confirmed after the ABL head office circulated branches indicating that all future claims for pay and conditions improvements would be handled nationally. [71] A major demand for the building unions in this period was for a reduction in basic hours of work. Derby ABL balloted 194 for and 3 against the claim for a 44 hour week in May of 1919. Only one year later, after all building unions had agreed to press for this without reduction in pay, the reduced working week came in.
(x) The Textile Industry
At the end of 1918, the Ilkeston Hosiery Union (IHU) voted to press for the 44 hours, at a time when average hours in the textile industry were in the region of 54 a week. The hosiery unions throughout the East Midlands were generally a little more cautious than the IHU and asked for a 47 hour week in negotiations with the employers. After five hours argument, an agreement was reached for a 48 hour week and increases in overtime premia and piecework rate.
Despite this advance, some textile workers were not happy with the deal. In parts of Derbyshire, the S4 hours were accepted as quite normal and the full amount of earnings lost by the six hour reduction in standard hours were not totally compensated for by the increase in piecework agreed to by the employers. Union members demanded that in future no agreement should be made at the negotiating table without reference back to the membership at large. More positively received were the series of cost of living rises agreed on at the joint forum. [72]
Even largely unorganised firms were affected by the general agreement in the textile industry to improve pay and conditions. The English Sewing Cotton Company issued the following circular early in 1919, concerning working arrangements at its Derwent Valley mill in Derbyshire. [73]
“ENGLISH SEWING COTTON CO LTD NOTICE
Changes in Working Hours
It has been decided to make an experiment for three months commencing from February 17th 1919 of a Forty-nine-and-a-half working week at this mill and during the period the daily hours of work will be as follows:
MONDAYS TO FRIDAYS (inclusive):
8.00 am to 12.30 pm
1.30 pm to 6.00 pm
SATURDAYS: 8.00 am to 12.30 pm
Piece rates will be unaltered and the weekly wages of Time Workers will remain as at present.
The directors look with confidence to the workers to use their utmost endeavours to see that, as far as practicable, production is unaffected as little as possible as a result of the reduced working hours.
Breakfast will have to be taken before starting work, but in the case of those workers who come a long distance, the gate will be open at 7.30 am, and Breakfast can be taken in the Dining Room between 7.30 am and 8 am, when Tea will be provided if sufficient names are handed in.”
While responding to the advances won elsewhere, the company maintained a studied attitude of, on the one hand, benevolent working conditions and, on the other, firm resistance to trade unionism. A move on hours was made, but there was no question of paying for it out of anything other than reduced earnings.
But the textile industry was about to experience major technological change, albeit over a long period, The British Cellulose Chemical Manufacturing Company Ltd was first established in the Derby area in 1916 and the company thoroughly developed the cellulose acetate process during the war, By 1921 this had been applied to yarn production, as modern techniques were explored. Knitting, dying and finishing units were soon installed in the Spondon fibre plant. This new artificial fibre industry would give rise to massive factories, more like chemical plants than clothing establishments. A union like the Workers Union was well placed to take advantage of this development. As early as 1919, when the giant Spondon plant was only in the first stage of expansion, the WU was fighting the company over the issue of shop stewards’ representation. Although the WU executive sanctioned an official dispute over the sacking of a shop steward in 1919, the company was unmoved and maintained a vigorous resistance to the influence of shop stewards for decades after. [74]
More traditional industries like the lace making trade viewed the immediate future somewhat differently. The three lace making unions had established some degree of unity in 1919 and engaged in a long running dispute aimed at raising the level of wages outside of Nottingham, in the Eastern Derbyshire area, In November 1919, the delegates of the various unions in Long Eaton, Ilkeston and Derby met to decide what to do to break the deadlock. A joint leadership, consisting of Wood of the Long Eaton Operative Laceworkers and Warburton of the Derby WU unsuccessfully pressed the employer for an increase in the bonus of 30%. The Nottingham bonus was 50% on basic rates - the lower rate prevailing outside the city. Despite much strengthening of the trade union movement in the trade, this differential proved very difficult to break down. [75]
(xi) The Workers Union
There was still much speculation in the local labour movement as to the way in which the WU had negotiated a conclusion to the Darley Abbey affair. This was characterised by a rift between Derby Trades Council (DTC) and the union itself. The conflict was fuelled by events elsewhere in the textile industry. Workers at Doulds engaged in a dispute in the summer of 1919, when the DTC Executive Committee initially condemned “the action of the Workers Union official”. This approach was backed at the July meeting of the full council, when the DTC strongly protested against the conduct of Stokes. The WU DC protested equally robustly at the DTC’s intervention. [76] Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the case, there was resentment at outside intervention. In the end, the DTC at its August meeting simply withdrew the letter of complaint.
At Darley Abbey, the local branch began pressing for an improvement on the length of the working week in 1919 and a resolution on this was forwarded on through the DC to the WU executive. [77] A fact which re-enforces the probability that the settlement of the recognition dispute had envisaged only national bargainers dealing with local matters affecting the mill. Such a set of circumstances rather implied a hollow victory in the 1917-8 strike. The WU branch had found itself without rights to raise grievances directly with their employer. The shorter hours hoped for did not occur, for early in 1919 short time working hit the company as recession followed the former boom in the textile industry. The short time working was applied within the mill so unfairly that the WU had to intervene to unsuccessfully negotiate on the matter. Despite this, the Darley Abbey WU members still pressed for a reduction in hours and the claim was put in the hands of the Divisional Organiser, J Clarke of Burton-on-Trent and Julia Varley, the National Women’s’ Officer, based in Birmingham, towards the end of 1919. [78]
In January of the following year, the Darley Abbey branch made an application for an increase in wages, but this appears to have been referred to national level. [79] The branch protested to the DC about the long delay in handling their problems in April and this was again referred to the executive. [80] Despite the inevitable disillusionment which surfaced at the mills, trades unionism did hold firm in the company at least until some time after 1920. No doubt the decline in organisation evident in the town generally, following the end of the militant years, had an effect on confidence of workers at the company as well. Nonetheless, it was a far cry from the brave words of support which had been spoken for the ‘Darley Abbey girls’ to the dismal end which unionism at the company faced. During the course of 1921 trade union organisation at the firm came to end altogether and the company ceased trading some two decades later, without a union ever again breaking ground.
Another cause of friction between the DTC and the WU was the dispute at Alderman Green’s Agard Street tape mills late in 1919. A dispute had broken out in the summer, but due to dissatisfaction with the progress the union had made, the employees dropped out of the WU. The DC noted in August that their “EC had decided to pay strike pay to our members employed at Aid. Green’s Ltd, but it had come to the knowledge of the organiser that the girls did not intend to pay any more money into the union”, Stokes was given a free hand in dealing with the situation by the DC, [81] Yet, somewhat contrary to the impression created by this, the workers went to the DTC for assistance. The DTC executive organised a deputation to Green, much to the displeasure of the WU, which protested at what it saw as inaccurate press reports. But the correction subsequently made by the local paper was considered by the WU as worse than the initial statement, so the union sent a sarcastic letter to the DTC “thanking them for disorganising our women members at Greens’s”. Relations, following these controversies, between the WU (and even the TGWU, its subsequent ‘heir’, locally at least) remained distinctly cool for more than a decade afterwards. Defending the fact that not one single WU branch was at this stage affiliated to the DTC, Hind retorted that “none of the women (at Green’s) had been taken back”. The affair would not die down, for in 1924 it once more surfaced. [82]
Disappointing experiences like this apart, the WU began to expand throughout the county. While it had established a branch in Ashbourne at least as early as 1914, it was not until 1920 when membership exploded in that area. Declared branch income, a rough and ready indication of membership, in Ashbourne in 1914 was £44s 0d; six years later this figure had reached £842 3s 21/2d. A District Committee was set up with C Holmes of Green Lane, Clifton, Ashbourne as secretary. Elsewhere in the county, branches were begun in Borrowash, Youlgreave, Belper, Spondon and Langley Mill. [83] The union spread into new sectors, notably public services. A strike of WU members employed by Heanor’s Urban District Council (UDC) ended quite successfully in October 1919, giving the green light to other municipal employees in manual grades to try out the WU, even as far north as Bakewell’s UDC. There, on Christmas Eve 1920, Stokes withdrew the threat of a strike by WU members at the gasworks, after a 1/- increase was conceded. It was claimed that these were the worst paid group of its kind in the entire country prior to the increase. [84] Clearly, the threat of action at Christmas had some publicity pressure value. These furthest reaches of Derbyshire were gradually organised by the WU, operating from Derby. The union found a friendly response when the Bakewell branch approached the Rowsley NUR for the first ever dispute at OP Battery. [85]
In another trade, the WU made inroads, to the displeasure of the small specialist unions, in the furnishing industry. As in textiles and engineering, the WU showed itself capable of an almost priggish independence when it came to joint industrial action. The furniture unions for their part thought that the union should follow their lead. The industry faced a lock out in 1919, which was discussed at the WUDC held at the Mikado Cafe in Ilkeston on August 9th. An official of the National Furniture Trades Union had called out the WU members in the trade in that locality. But Stokes “ordered the girls back to work pending a decision of the Executive Committee”. [86]
(vii) Agricultural workers
The mood of buoyant confidence rubbed off onto this very difficult to organise group. Derbyshire rural workers were largely non-unionised until this period. The main body was the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union (NALU), later to become the National Union of Agricultural Workers and, from the 1980s the T&G’s Rural, Agricultural and Allied Workers trade group. NALU began to find a basis in the villages around Derby. A Findern branch of NALU was founded in early 1920; the secretary, C JeIf, initially arranging a social evening to which he invited local farm labourers. The event was entirely successful, with enough recruits made to enable the branch to be declared well and truly established. The trend to greater organisation on farms and in the countryside aided the difficult set of negotiations which decided farm labourers’ wages. A county wages board set the standards, often to the dissatisfaction of the labourers.
In 1920, the board decided on a minimum scale, affecting 2,000 workers, of £2 2s 0d, a considerable rise from the previous figure of £1 17s 6d. But NALU had wanted a minimum of £2 105 0d and many members were reported by their area organiser, Charles Wozencroft, as being upset. The rise of 11.5% was obviously extracted by virtue of the prevailing state of unionisation in this and other industries, Pressure on central government to introduce an Agricultural Wages Act bore fruit eventually in 1924. Predictably, the farmers in Derbyshire opposed this. Alderman Peat, Chairman of the Derbyshire Farmers’ Union, said that they were “prepared to pay their labourers adequate wages”, but their objection was to the insult of the “penalties of imprisonment and fines” which the legislation imposed. The effects of the overall militancy of the working class were very quickly lost in agriculture, even more so than elsewhere. Wages had dropped to as little as £1 11s 6d in 1924, as effective unionism became more difficult; but the new Act did bring in a minimum of £1 16s 0d. [87]
(viii) Boot and shoe operatives
Boot and shoe workers in the village of Eyam in North Derbyshire stood their ground for some three years in an extraordinary dispute. The trade had first established itself in the village in around 1906. Ankle and bar shoe work was carried out at Eyam, while pit boots were made at the village of Stoney Middleton. J Buckle of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives began organising these workers in 1918. (NUBSO, after a name change and a merger, became part of KFAT, which in turn merged with the ISTC into `Community'.) But the employers, determined to maintain the very low rates of pay, sacked the Eyam NUBSO branch secretary, as well as the president and his son and daughter. In fact, the entire branch committee was dismissed - and all because they had dared to join a union. There was no pretence on the part of the employer that the action was anything other than a calculated attempt to smash the union. An immediate strike would have taken place, but NUBSO officials advised the workers to stay at work, whilst attempts were made to arrive at a negotiated settlement. But, in the event, the employers stubbornly refused to even meet with the union.
So, the strike began, with the workers immediately maximising demands by asking for a reduction in hours from 59 to 52 hours 30 minutes, a war bonus payment and of course the re-instatement of the dismissed trades unionists. However, the employer adopted an entrenched position and the battle was to be a long one. The strikers organised marches, headed by a band, and paraded between the two villages at which open air meetings were held. Over £9,000 - then a small fortune - was paid out in dispute benefit by the union, which decided to adopt an old stratagem as the months slipped by, by placing shoe-making machines in the homes of strikers, to provide some form of work. Then a bold suggestion was made - that of starting a rival factory - some two years after the dispute had begun. Many of the men had been supplementing their strike pay by home-working, quarrying or farm work during all that time.
Clearly, some more stable solution had to be found. Buckle purchased an 80 foot by 15 foot hut on the outskirts of the village for £250. A roadway and a small stone building were built and the whole of this was paid for by voluntary subscriptions, collected within the space of two months. The total cost of this venture was £2,000. The new ‘strike’ factory was capable of producing much better work than the employers were and also had a greater capacity. The old employer paid 13/- a week maximum with some of the women getting less than 10/-. The new factory paid the union rate of £2 a week minimum and piecework earnings of up to an extra 10/-, all in a 43 to 48 hour week. It was a bold solution to a bold-natured dispute. But it eventually “petered out without any definite settlement being reached”. The perennial problem that has arisen over all history, for all worker co-operatives or employee-owned businesses, of a shortage of capital bedevilling the project. The strikers’ factory closed down and strikers who had not obtained employment elsewhere returned to their former occupations. [88]
(xiv) Painters
The painters’ (NASOHSPD) New Mills branch had established a closed shop at Howard’s in 1915. [89] Within four years the branch was organising painters at Whaley Bridge and Chapel-en-le-Frith, all within the boundaries of Derbyshire, but close to the influence of Manchester, [90] A total of four shops were now ‘closed’ to all but union members: Alsop and Clayton’s, J Barbers, G & J Howard’s and Jackson & Potts. [91] From time to time, problems surfaced over the employment of non-unionists, but these were usually solved as when, in 1920, Howard’s were given an ultimatum that unless a non-society man became a member before May 1st an indefinite strike would begin, Needless to say, the union got its way! [92]
The New Mills NASOHSPD branch under its secretary, Potts, and its president, Stewart, operated very tight rules and regulations. This was exemplified when nine society members from outside their area were taken on by the Derbyshire County Council Education Committee, without reference first to the branch. The men were fined 10/- for operating contrary to society rules, [93] Even though the NASOHSPD executive seemed not to be in sympathy with the action of the New Mills branch, it decided to summon the men to the branch to explain their actions in taking the local men’s jobs without their endorsement first, [94] Conflict with their executive was not necessarily a strange feature of the life of the New MiIIs branch. When the EC had granted permission in 1920 to members in Matlock to work 44 hours in 5 days, the branch sought to challenge the ruling via their delegate at the Building Trades Federation meeting.
(xv) Public Services and Professional Workers
Public service workers of all kinds began to organise. Post office workers were ruthlessly preventing from organising easily, especially in rural areas, In March 1924 and again on August Bank Holiday 1925, the Union of Post Office Workers had a demonstrative event to put their case for recognition, which was held at the Whitworth Institute in North Derbyshire. Other trades unionists, including Rowsley NUR, turned out to assist them. Between 1906 and 1920 firemen were sporadically organised by the Municipal Employees Association (which later helped to create the NUGMW) and the National Union of Corporation Workers (which later became NUPE, today part of Unison). Most of this work was concentrated in and around London, but some slight signs of interest existed locally. More concretely, the Poor Law Officers Union (a section of the Asylum Workers Union, later to become the Confederation of Health Service Employees - COHSE, now part of Unison) was set up in 1919. Both the section and the main body had members in Derby at the local asylum employed by the Board of Guardians. Even white collar public service workers were beginning to combine, The Civil Service Clerical Association (later the Civil and Public Services Association, or CPSA, now part of PCS - the Public and Commercial Services Union.) was founded through the amalgamation of a number of unions in 1922. A product of the contemporary vogue for organisational unity, the new union had some membership in the locality, but its activities were very limited.
White collar workers in the private sector saw unionism as an extension of their professionalism, Draughtsmen at Rolls Royce and the railway workshops began to join the Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen during the war. The first formal step towards recognition of the AESD locally was in 1918, when the engineering employers were one of two of the first district associations to agree to negotiate with the union over draughtsmen’ salaries. [95] The Derby AESD specialised in organising monthly trips to engineering firms in the North and Midlands, to examine new techniques in design and engineering. Over a hundred members went on a visit to Hadfield’s steel works in Sheffield in December 1923, for example. [96] Interestingly, in recognition of new developments in the trade, in 1922, a special section for tracers, a job that would become dominated mainly by women, was created.
There were other private sector white collar workers who organised locally. The National Amalgamated Union of Life Assurance workers emerged in 1918, a branch being created in Derby in 1922, with the help of R E Stokes of the Workers Union. [97] Whilst the National Union of Clerks had some significant membership at Stanton Ironworks in 1918. The NUC would later become the Clerical and Administrative Workers - CAWU - later the Association of Professional, Executive and Clerical workers - APEX - which subsequently became the white collar section of the GMB. [98] A Derby branch of the NUC had catered for local government clerks for some time, when a second branch was set up in 1920. The absorption of some smaller unions saw a name change to the National Union of Clerks and Administrative Workers (NUCAW). This then organised a wide range of membership in areas not today the province of its heir, APEX, the white collar section of the GMB. Municipal clerks, education departments, income tax offices, labour exchanges and pensions offices were all organised to some extent by the NUCAW. [99] A NUCAW office was set up in Ilkeston in 1920, but the finance committee of the borough refused a written request from the union’s local secretary for sole negotiating rights. [100] It is clear that concern for the position of the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO) existed here. NALGO had yet to establish its dominance of Britain’s town halls, which is today inherited by Unison.
Finally, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which had been founded in Birmingham in 1907, set up a chapel, or branch, in Derby in this period. Thomas Jay, the president of the union, visited the town in May 1921 to speak to the local NUJ, which was well based in the local press, The president of the branch was Walter Piper. [101]
Some Strikes in Derby 1917-24
September 1917 Darley Mills v Workers Union
September 1917 Midland Railway Loco Works v Boilermakers
April 1918 Ambergate Timber v Woodcutting Machinists Society
June 1918 Rubber Cable v Asbestos Workers Union
April 1919 Scarle & Co. v Upholsterers Union (a)
July 1919 Building Trades Employers v Building Trades Federation
July 1919 Doulds v Workers Union
August 1919 Derby Master Bakers v Bakers Union
October 1919 Foundry Employers v Moulders and Iron founders
May 1920 unknown v Piano Workers
June 1920 Woolworth’s v NAUSA
October 1920 Lysol v Chemical Workers Union
1921 British Celanese v Workers Union
March 1922 Maypole Dairy v NAUSA (b)
1922 Rolls Royce v engineering unions (c)
February 1923 Building Employers v Building Trades Federation
March 1923 Smith’s of Drury Lane v Garment Workers
March 1923 Stokes and Hudson v Elastic Web Weavers
June 1923 Borough Asylum v Asylum Workers (d)
July 1924 A Green Ltd v Workers Union
Most of these disputes, reported in the local press or in Trades Council minutes were over wages. Some interesting exceptions are:
(a) over trade union recognition
(b) to resist an increase in contractual hours worked
(c) a nine day strike over a dismissed shop steward
(d) to resist an increase in contractual hours worked
4 (i) Political Radicalism in the Early Twenties
It was but a small step from opposing imperialistic venture in Soviet Russia to support for the right to self-determination in Ireland, Especially as the national struggle of armed rebellion and civil war in Ireland reached crisis proportions. The Sinn Fein nationalists had won an absolute majority in Ireland itself in the general election of 1918, but refused to take their seats in the British parliament. The mass of the Irish people no longer recognised (if they had ever!) the authority of Britain in Ireland and were determined to achieve self-determination for their country. The British Government sent vast numbers of troops to Ireland to prevent this.
Derby trades unionists and socialists were mainly solidly in support of Irish independence, The Trades Council viewed with concern “the state of affairs in Ireland, where men are arrested, imprisoned and deported without charge or trial and expresses its sympathy with the men suffering in Mountjoy Prison in the cause of Political and Social Freedom”. Significantly, the resolution was passed unanimously. [102] Partition of Ireland had yet to come, so there was little sense of the need to defend ‘loyalists’, while distaste for repression was strong. In September 1920, the DTC attacked the Government’s treatment of the Mayor of Cork, who was on hunger strike. [103]
Derby’s Labour Party (DLP) came down in favour of Irish independence in an unambiguous decision. The quarterly DLP meeting supported the immediate liberation of all Irish political prisoners and the offering of a truce. The party looked forward to the time when all armed forces would be withdrawn and the time when the “keeping of order has been placed in the hands of the Irish local elected bodies, thus creating conditions under which the Irish people may determine their own form of government’. The DTC was as equally clear in its policy for complete withdrawal of troops from Ireland and for complete self-government, as expressed in its resolution adopted in March 1921. [104]
Many were alienated by the viciousness of the so-called ‘Black-and-Tans’, the troops sent to Ireland. The nick-name arose from the half police, half army uniform this ragtag and bob-tail outfit were clothed in. Derby No.1 ASLEF voted 32 to 3 for a motion in February 1921, condemning with horror the “atrocities committed upon innocent railwaymen” in Ireland. A strike over the situation, particularly over the shooting of ASLEF members in Mallow, near Cork, was proposed by the EC of the union. The move was supported by the local activists, until a joint Derby branches meeting revealed that the decision would not obtain ‘a great deal of response from the membership. Nonetheless, the threat of a strike brought pressure to bear on the Government, which agreed to an inquiry into the Mallow atrocities. [105]
Faced with widespread criticism of its policy in Ireland, the British Government opted for a political, rather than a military settlement. In negotiations with Sinn Fein, an offer was put of an Irish Free State of 26 counties, still owing allegiance to the British Crown, but effectively independent in political terms. In due course, this institution would become the Republic of Ireland. However, six counties were to remain within the British Union. This compromise attracted the support of a small majority of the nationalist camp and laid the basis for a temporary solution to the Irish problem, albeit in an atmosphere of extreme controversy amongst the Sinn Feiners, leading to a civil war and the long-running hostility to Northern Ireland of the remnants of the IRA. This minority within the nationalist camp, which refused to accept the settlement and attempted to maintain the armed struggle, were subject to fierce repression. The labour movement in Britain did not immediately loose interest in the affairs of Ireland with the settlement. The Trades Council voiced the concern of the movement at the imprisonment of James Larkin, the outstanding Irish trade union leader, in the USA in 1922 and sent a message to that effect to the American Ambassador in London. [106]
Interest in political matters at home was largely based on the seriousness of the economic situation. Prices of wholesale goods in the spring of 1920 were 225% above the 1913 level and the cost of living, or retail prices, in November of that year reached a peak of 176% above August 1914. [107] Workers could only maintain their position by the exertions of industrial militancy and this in turn fuelled political passion. In this situation, it is hardly surprising that Labour’s electoral fortunes took a favourable turn. The first signs of this in Derbyshire were in the Derby School Board elections in April 1919, when Labour gained an extra five seats to add to its existing two, out of a total of fifteen available places. In Belper, Labour gained five seats at the UDC elections the same month. Jabez Walker unseated the ‘independent’, a sitting councillor since 1904. Gains were made throughout the county in Ockbrook, Codnor, Blackwell, Clay Cross, Ilkeston, Duffield and at Derby - all in County Council elections. [108]
In November 1919, the small Labour group on the Derby Borough Council of four was joined by an extra ten councillors. In the following year, another five joined the group, bringing the total to 19 out of 64. Labour had arrived as a major force in municipal politics. [109] In these circumstance, the Tories made a special appeal to the working class voter, going beyond their traditional stance of patriotism and blind faith in the economic system. A Derby section of the ‘Labour Committee’ of the National Unionist Association was set up in 1920. The function of the committee was to foster anti-socialism and support for the Tories in the unions. The committee had members in the NUR, the WU, the ASE, the Tailors, the Moulders, the Motor Drivers and the Burton Coopers. [110]
But such devices had little real effect in denting the surge of interest in working class politics, which reached a new height. There was even a locally printed, leftist rank and file newspaper aimed at trades unionists, the Derbyshire Worker. This would play an important role in the north of the county in the General Strike of 1926. The Worker circulated in the mining districts of the county, in particular, throughout the period and the DMA officially gave a subsidy for 1,500 regular copies of the paper. The Worker proved to be a sufficient thorn in the side of the establishment to justify special attention. A novel way of trying to close down the paper was found. John Reynolds, the printer of the Derbyshire Worker was prosecuted for “employing” workers on overtime, contrary to the Factories Acts. It appears that Reynolds’ hours of work were supposed to be 8am to 8pm, but the Factory Inspector caught Reynolds, his wife and their three children all at work at 805pm. Despite his defence to the court that the children were only “amusing themselves”, Reynolds was found guilty and fined £5. The Worker was of course merely a self-help initiative by political activists, but the authorities treated it as a business. [111]
The spread of popular socialist ideas really ensured the development of a modern look to British politics, with the Labour victory at the Spen Valley by-election in January 1920. Over the next four years, the challenge of Labour as a major electoral force became more than evident. As this came about, the Tory leadership destroyed the Coalition, the Liberal Party and Lloyd George. As the Liberal Party disintegrated, middle-strata opinion clustered for comfort around the Tories as the guardians of law and order, the Empire and the “British Way of Life”. Under Baldwin’s leadership, the Tories won the 1924 general election and were to dominate Britain for the next two decades without serious challenge, apart from short intermittent periods.
The arrival of Labour as a significant electoral force revealed the degree to which the establishment feared a repeat of the traumatic events of the 1917 Russian Revolution in Britain itself, even if that were moulded by British experiences and traditions, The newly arrived electoral power of Labour was treated in the Tory press to almost the same sense of horror as the Bolshevik revolution had been. The Derby Mercury featured a weekly column throughout 1920 by ‘Ruskinian’, entitled “Labour’s Forum”. This was in fact one continuous, lengthy theoretical diatribe against the generality of socialist ideas.
Inspired by the events in Russia and the call by Lenin, with all the prestige he commanded as leader of the first socialist revolution, to found revolutionary parties on the model of the Bolsheviks, many socialists joined together with militant trades unionists from the shop stewards’ movement to form the Communist Party in August 1920. A variety of socialist groups amalgamated into the Party, including the BSP, the SLP and the South Wales Socialist Society. The biggest group, the BSP, had re-affiliated to the Labour Party in 1916 and so it seemed natural that the new organisation should apply for affiliation. Although a significant minority from the SLP were opposed to this, But the leadership of the Labour Party departed from the established federal basis of the party and aimed to exclude the Communist Party from its ranks right from its very foundation. Persistent attempts to reverse this at the Labour Party annual conference were always defeated, albeit sometimes relatively narrowly. For most of the 1920s, however, individual members of the Communist Party were able to attend Labour conferences as delegates from trade unions and even be nominated for public office as official Labour candidates by local constituencies. Gradually, each inroad the Communists had into the wider federation of working class politics was closed off.
At its foundation, and for much of its history, the Communist Party had strong roots in Scotland, Wales and London. In towns like Derby and Chesterfield, the party was able to establish a significant presence in the local labour movement, basing itself on pre-existing socialist groups. The Derby SLP branch and its key figure Willie Paul enjoyed some prominence, but there was also a BSP branch in the area. At the time of the foundation of the Communist Party, Willie Paul lived at ‘Pen Bryn’ in Littleover, Derby. He became a member of the Provisional Executive Committee of the Party and was particularly involved in the debates inside the SLP over the unity process and the nature of the new formation. Paul was in fact a major influence in coalescing those in the SLP who favoured joining the Communist Party. [112] At the founding conference however, Paul displayed much of the revolutionary zeal which the SLP had made its hallmark, by speaking against affiliation to the Labour Party in a most scathing and cynical way. This was of course entirely consistent with the SLP’s view of the matter. Nevertheless, the anti-affiliationists were beaten in the debate and the Communist Party’s policy was to be for affiliation. The Derby Communist Unity Group was one of many smaller, local societies represented at the founding Unity Convention. The Communist Unity Group was the faction inside the SLP which had convened a special national conference at Nottingham to win the SLP to the notion of unity of all communist organisations. The SLP official leadership expelled the CUG for this action but was left only with a rump and quietly faded away over the years.
Paul stood unsuccessfully in 1923 as official Labour candidate in Manchester, bravely following Communist Party policy, even though he disagreed with it. Publicly well known to be an individual member of the party, he had strong connections with Manchester. Paul had often “rendered songs of the Irish potato famine” at the Openshaw BSP meetings for Harry PoIlitt, later to become the long-standing leader of British Communism. Paul has been described by PoIIitt’s ‘official’ biographer as a “powerful and expressive baritone”. He polled a respectable 21% of the vote against strongly fielded Tory and Liberal opponents in the 1923 election. The following year, he stood again with much the same result, but increased the share of the vote, this time as an official Communist with Labour backing. Paul later edited the Sunday Worker newspaper in the late 1920s but left the national stage during the period of the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the CPGB, even if he remained on the fringes of Communist politics all his days. In the 1930s and l940s he was closely identified with Soviet friendship activities in Derby and was a prominent supporter of the Derby Peace Council in the 1950s, until his death in the latter part of that decade. He was to leave his considerable personal library to the Party in his will. [113]
Derby’s Labour Party was not really affected by significant Communist involvement. Perhaps the DLP’s decidedly right-wing leanings encouraged residual anti-Labour attitudes amongst local Communists, which were inherited from the SLP. As with all working class political organisations in the immediate post-war period, the DLP experienced a period of growth. Branches were being established everywhere, even in rural areas of Derbyshire, as with the founding in March 1920 of the Mickleover branch, then a small village on the outskirts of the town. The DLP’s membership and income rose phenomenally and the healthy financial situation meant that by the end of the year new premises were to be acquired at 63 London Road in Derby.
DLP annual income DLP affiliated membership
1910 £92 -
1918-9 £398 7,634
1919-20 £1,100 14,244
Little wonder then that the working class movement viewed the future optimistically. The success of the pro-Soviet councils of action, the rising industrial militancy and the increasing electoral support for Labour all seemed to bode well, There was also an enormous growth of interest in socialist ideas and a general belief that world peace had at last been achieved and this made for a sense of security. The joint DTC-DLP May Day celebration in 1920 was a big event. W R Raynes declared that “May 1st should be reckoned as a general holiday” and trades unionists and their families crowded the streets of Derby in a carnival atmosphere to watch a parade of decorated carts and drays. One represented “S.S. Co-operation”, another portrayed a garden allotment. Every union had its banner out in what was probably one of the largest May Day processions ever held in Derby. [114]
ii) The Co-operative Movement and Labour Politics.
For the first time, the 1917 Congress of the Co-operative movement recognised that it needed a political voice and founded the Co-operative Party. From herein the Co-ops around the country, in varying degrees, began to exert political authority. The first act of Derby Co-operative Society (DCS), along these lines, was to set up a Political Committee, the first meeting of which was held on February 20th 1918. A list of possible parliamentary and municipal candidates who would be approved by the DCS was composed. Additionally, a political structure was established in Normanton ward and Jessie Unsworth stood in Pear Tree ward in the Board of Guardians elections. It was thought that a good campaign was waged, even though the seat was not won. Formal co-operation was established with the Labour Party, which had agreed to leave a gap in its list of candidates to enable Co-operative candidates to stand unimpeded. Utilising this agreement, A J Tapping was elected in Dale Ward in 1919 as the first Co-op councillor.
Affiliation or alliance to the Labour Party became a controversial question in the Cooperative movement and in 1920 the DCS, for the first time, accepted the need to affiliate to the Derby Labour Party. The radicalism of this period affected almost every section of the working class movement. The almost exclusively retailing role of the Co-op movement had not entirely been defined and there was a potential for political conflict with other sections of the movement arising from this. For example, the DCS by 1918 had lent no less than £400,000 to its members for housing purposes. Was this a role for the Co-ops, or for direct works departments of local authorities? More profoundly, the conjunction of political and economic values represented by the Coops lent itself to an abiding interest in and fascination for all things Russian. J J Wooley, secretary to the Cooperative Producers Federation, was invited to lecture DCS members at the Co-op Hall in 1923 on his visit to Moscow.
Others were not so certain about the propriety of the co-ops being linked up with politics. In the mid-1920s, the Long Eaton Co-operative Society (LECS) did eventually disaffiliate from the Labour Party after a series of arguments. In doing this, the LECS was showing how influenced it was by its president, Wilkins, who made the objective of disaffiliation a personal crusade. The decision was taken by a referendum of the membership of LECS and the question posed not only the disaffiliation from the Labour Party, but also from the Co-operative Party. 1,859 voted for ending affiliation, with 846 voting for continuing the relationship. It had been the decision of the Co-operative Party to work with the Labour Party, on fixing the number of Co-op candidates overall and to label such candidates in future as ‘Labour and Co-operative’, that had finally pushed people like Wilkins of the LECS to move in this direction. The long term future of LECS was to remain with the Co-operative Party, but it was not for very many years that the Society would eventually drop its determined resistance to links with the Labour Party.
In Derby, “very cordial relations” existed between the DLP and the Political Committee of the DCS, resulting in the implementation of the Co-operative Party’s agreement with the Labour Party and the appearance of joint candidates in local elections. An organised disaffiliation campaign was waged in Derby, but it was not one which had highly placed support. An attempt was made in June 1923 at a quarterly meeting to get the DCS disaffiliated but was lost on a vote of 359 to 214. In an attempt to meet the criticism that not all DCS members voted Labour, the Society affiliated on a figure of only 5,000. It being claimed that this was a “fair estimate of those who held sympathy towards the Labour Party”. [115]
5. Unemployment and Depression 1921-5
The immediate future for working people was bleaker than could have been imagined. Unemployment and short-time working became a common feature of industrial life durin