Eleven Minutes Late by Matthew Engel

Author:Matthew Engel [Matthew Engel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230740419
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Fur Coat, No Knickers

The soldiers who did make it back from the trenches, leaving so many fallen comrades, left behind any enthusiasm they might have had for fighting. They also left behind much of their traditional working-class deference. In September 1919, less than a year after the armistice, there was another full-scale and highly effective national railway strike.

In the immediate aftermath of war, the government was still effectively the employer while ministers worked out what to do with the railways. They had quickly conceded the principle of the eight-hour day. And the footplatemen, now organized into the Amalgamated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF, initials that would henceforth strike intermittent terror into the hearts of commuters), got a deal protecting their wages and conditions. But with the economy under severe deflationary pressure, the other grades (seemingly less well-organized in the sprawling National Union of Railwaymen) were selected for pay cuts.

Morally and intellectually, the government’s position was pretty weak: Lloyd George, the prime minister, can hardly have believed his own ears when he called the strike ‘an anarchist conspiracy’ and sent the railwaymen’s old military comrades to patrol the stations. With ASLEF supporting its colleagues (which did not set a precedent), the NUR secured what appeared to be victory after a single week of national panic. ‘The strike came because the Government were living in the atmosphere of the old industrial system,’ the socialist J. L. Hammond proclaimed triumphantly, ‘under which the employer gives orders and the worker takes them.’ The only question, it seemed, was exactly how and when this new Eden would come into being.

There was a more mundane reality for the railway industry. With the help of management, blacklegs and volunteers, some kind of train service had been maintained during the strike. And the railways’ customers found their own way round the situation. One party of holidaymakers stranded in Blackpool had walked home to Tipton near Wolverhampton: 113 miles in three days. But Victorian endurance was out of fashion; new technology and ingenuity were in. The new-fangled motor omnibuses kept running. For the wealthy, Daimler Hire Services started running daily private car services out of London. And in Paris, just ten years after Louis Blériot, crowds besieged the parcels office to have their goods air-freighted to London. The real victor of the strike was accurately proclaimed in a Times headline on 1 October, with the strike in full cry: THE TRIUMPH OF THE MOTOR LORRY.

Of all the ill-timed decisions to have bedevilled Britain’s railways over the years, this strike was the killer. The workers, who played lickspittle for decades while their owners grew richer, had chosen the worst possible moment to get off their knees. It is hard to imagine events unfolding in any other way, given the greater historic context. But the new militancy was just one of the problems now besetting the industry.

Tens of thousands of railwaymen came back from the forces to their old jobs determined not to spend the rest of their lives offering unquestioning obedience to absurd instructions, as they had done during the war.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.