Memory and Community in 1926

‘We shall remember 1926 until our blood is dry.’ In thus evoking the 1926 General Strike and miners’ lockout, the South Walian poet Idris Davies was more prophetic than he intended. For as long as organized labour retained the capacity for a similar demonstration of militancy, the memory of Britain’s first and only General Strike remained a potent point of reference. For as long as the coalfields themselves remained a union stronghold, the seven-month miners’ lockout remained the keystone to a ‘militant, heroic, and tragic past’.¹ Since the resurgence of the militant miner in the 1970s, few episodes of peacetime history can have been so frequently revisited as this. Rachelle Hope Saltzman notes that the lockout cropped up on a Kinks album, and that in 1973 the strike play What A Way to Run a Revolution was performed at both the Labour and Conservative party conferences. Two years later, Ken Loach’s BBC docudrama Days of Hope culminated in what writer Jim Allen saw as the strike’s betrayal by its leaders, while on the other side, both literally and figuratively, the world of the strikebreaking volunteer was evoked in ITV’s Upstairs Downstairs.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict fell in 1976, the flow of local histories and academic studies reached its peak. But if these even now provide the basis of any respectable reading list, it is because so little has been written since. Union leaders might threaten a new 1926 against the present coalition, but the immediacy of the image has gone. It is not just the passing of those veterans of 1926 whose blood was literally running dry. It is also the passing of the collectivity, whose collective memory this was. In the last great miners’ strike of 1984–5 the miners’ sense of grievance and solidarity over time was once more abundantly attested. Defeat this time, however, had the sense of finality. Benignly, historian Kenneth Morgan urged the miners to forget their history. Less benignly, Thatcher got rid of the miners who could remember it.

Already in the strike’s aftermath, Saltzman records, commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of 1926 was sparser than before (p. 189); and if anything happened on the seventieth Saltzman does not mention it. Industrial museums spring up where pits used to be; in South Wales, according to Sue Bruley, they steer away from the negative images of conflict as if these might ruin an afternoon out. The only recent history that might be found there offers reassurance, like an avuncular costumed guide, that this was a ‘very British strike’.² In Durham there at least remains the miners’ gala, which the Durham Miners’ secretary describes as the ‘only mass working-class demonstration left in the country’.³ The union itself, which at one time spurned outside assistance, has latterly had to set up a friends’ organization. In doing so, it nevertheless helps to generalize the themes of social justice and intergenerational solidarity which the gala so vividly embodies.

In 2012 even Ed Miliband turned up at the Durham miners’ gala, the first Labour leader to do so since the 1980s, and delivered a Blue Labourish discourse on the theme of community.⁴ That these three books on 1926 appear in such quick succession, after decades of relative dearth, is no more a sign of a historiographical ‘back to the 1970s’ than Miliband’s appearance signals a desire to conjure up the spirit of mass strikes. All three accounts, in their different ways, distance themselves from the uncomplicated celebration...