Labour, British Radicalism, and the First World War ed. by Lucy Bland and Richard Carr (review)

This is an idiosyncratic collection of thirteen essays loosely linked by the First World War and covering attitudes toward war, local working-class organization, trade unions, and the role of women. Unfortunately, there is no overarching argument binding the essays.

Marcus Morris offers a cogent explanation of the pre-1914 views of H. M. Hyndman, Robert Blatchford, and Harry Quelch, who regarded Germany as the greatest threat to peace and advocated an expanded navy as a deterrent to military aggression. They propagated their ideas by writing for the Daily Mail, whose offers of payment they apparently refused. Writing for the Daily Mail would have been useful for Hyndman, Blatchford, and Quelch to develop their thinking during the war period as supporters of the socialist case in favor of military conscription.

Jonathan Davis discusses the reactions arising from two visits to Russia during wartime by the liberal journalist Morgan Philips Price and Labour Party minister Arthur Henderson. Under the influence of revolutionary Russia, Price moved leftward, eventually sympathizing with the Bolsheviks, while Henderson became alarmed by the "undisciplined" behavior of both Russian and British workers. It would be worth extending the evolution of Henderson's thinking into the immediate postwar years, when he was a strident critic of direct action in the labor movement as a result of his Russian experience.

In a chapter on war aims and the Treaty of Versailles, John Callaghan gives an account of Labour's response to the outbreak of war and the attitudes of the critics of war. A definition of British war aims proves to be elusive in the chapter. This is presumably because H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George were reluctant to lay out war aims beyond simply winning. Over time the British simply developed local and regional aims, including the partition of Ottoman territory and the acquisition of German Africa. Although the British leaders were coy about it, Britain's real war aim was to maintain France as a great power, as her defeat by Germany would have posed a major strategic threat to the British Isles and the empire; Belgium was of marginal importance, though useful as propaganda.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the collection comprises four chapters dealing with aspects of women's wartime roles. Tackling a rather neglected topic, Mari Takayanagi considers the parliamentary decision to grant women the right to stand in parliamentary elections in 1918, just before the new franchise came into force. The explanation requires more context, however. Traditionally it had been assumed that the right to vote implied the right to stand, but this had been overthrown in the courts following the election of two female county councillors in 1885 and was not resolved until the Liberal government legislated in 1907. This is a useful contribution, though it is a pity it was not extended slightly to explain why certain women decided to contest the 1918 election and how they fared in the event. Mary Macarthur, a woman who did stand but who narrowly lost at Stourbridge, is the subject of a chapter by Deborah Thom. Thom compares her with Sylvia Pankhurst, who, though invited by the Labour Party to stand at Sheffield Hallam, refused because she had concluded by 1918 that parliamentary democracy was simply a fraud by the establishment to con the workers into accepting capitalism. Had she lived, Macarthur would surely have emerged as the leading woman in the Labour movement. She believed that state intervention would benefit women, and though she supported votes for women, she saw working through the trade unions as the more effective way forward for women. Matt Perry contributes a valuable discussion of Ellen Wilkinson's wartime role. Wilkinson was an industrial unionist who successfully combined her feminism (she promoted equal pay in advance of most trade unions) with the effective organization of young unskilled women workers who were neglected by craft unions. Despite the absence of a...