In The Women and Men of 1926 Sue Bruley recounts the social history of the mining communities in south Wales during the 1926 lockout. Relying on hitherto unpublished oral testimony as well as other archival material, Bruley investigates how households coped with the lockout and assesses the impact that it had on gender relations. Individual chapters consider topics such as school canteens, miners' lodges, recreational activities, picketing, and politics.
A lark for the sake of their country tells the tale of the upper and middle-class ‘volunteers’ in the 1926 General Strike in Great Britain. With behaviour derived from their play traditions - the larks, rags, fancy dress parties, and treasure hunts that prevailed at universities and country houses - the volunteers transformed a potential workers’ revolution into festive public display of Englishness. Decades later, collective folk memories about this event continue to define national identity. Based on correspondence and interviews with volunteers and strikers, as well as contemporary newspapers and magazines, novels, diaries, plays, and memoirs, this book recreates the context for the volunteers’ actions. It explores how the upper classes used the strike to assert their ideological right to define Britishness as well as how scholars, novelists, playwrights, diarists, museum curators, local historians, and even a theme restaurant, have continued to recycle the strike to define British identity.
This comprehensive survey of English history during the first half of the twentieth century has three main themes: the political and social consequences of the replacement of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party; the continuous development of the welfare state; and the changes in England’s imperial and international position caused by the ambitions of Germany and Japan and by the emergence of the U.S.A and the U.S.S.R as world powers. The leading personalities of the period are brilliantly portrayed and the issues challengingly presently.
The miners' lockout of 1926 was a pivotal moment in British twentieth-century history. Investigating issues of collective identity and action, Hester Barron explores the way that the lockout was experienced by Durham's miners and their families, illuminating wider debates about solidarity and fragmentation within working-class communities.
This book tells the story of 15,000 wool workers who went on strike for more than a year, defying police violence and hunger. The strikers were mainly immigrants and half were women. The Passaic textile strike, the first time that the Communist Party led a mass workers’ struggle in the United States, captured the nation’s imagination and came to symbolize the struggle of workers throughout the country when the labor movement as a whole was in decline during the conservative, pro-business 1920s. Although the strike was defeated, many of the methods and tactics of the Passaic strike presaged the struggles for industrial unions a decade later in the Great Depression.
The third and final volume of Kevin Morgan's widely acclaimed series Bolshevism and the British Left centres around the figure of Alf Purcell (1872-1935), who between the wars was one of the leading personalities in the British and international labour movement. A long-term member of the TUC General Council, Purcell became chairman of the general strike committee in 1926 - and this could have been his hour of glory. But when it was called off ignominiously he experienced the obloquy of defeat. Purcell was most famous as one of TUC 'lefts' of the 1920s. But he was also Labour MP for both the Forest of Dean and Coventry, as well as being the founder of a working guild in the spirit of guild socialism, the controversial president of the International Federation of Trade Unions and the man who moved the formation of the British communist party. A sometime syndicalist and associate of Tom Mann, his experiences in the militant Furnishing Trades gave rise to the uncompromising trade-union internationalism which features so centrally in these chapters. But with the squeezing of his syndicalist approach, as the labour movement polarised into Labour and communist currents, Purcell died a politically broken figure. Morgan also deploys the life of Purcell as a biographical lens, a way of exploring wider controversies - among them the rival modernities of Bolshevism and Americanism; the reactions to Bolshevism of anarchists like Emma Goldman (who called Purcell 'that damn fake'); and the roots of political tourism to the USSR in the British labour delegations in which Purcell featured so prominently. The volume also includes a major challenge to existing interpretations of the general strike, which it compellingly presents, not as the last fling of the syndicalists, but as a first and disastrously ill-conceived imposition of social-democratic centralism by Ernest Bevin.
