The People's Flag: A History of the Union of Britain, 1925-2010

The following counterfactual history book takes place in a universe much like our own. The point of divergence came in 1917, when Woodrow Wilson was unable to convince the US congress to back war with Germany. With America absent from the war, the German had more time to defeat Russia and build up their forces in the west, beginning their final offensive in 1919 (rather than the rushed ‘Operation Michael’ of our universe’s 1918).

The French war effort collapsed and German troops marched into Paris. Just as it began, the Third Republic ended under German fire and facing revolution from within. Shortly after capitulating, France descended into Syndicalist revolution, creating the Commune of France. Similar events occurred in the defeated Italy, with the south of the country proclaiming the Anarcho-Syndicalist Republic of the Sicilies, and the victorious Austrians proclaiming a loose federation of Italian duchies in the north, under the nominal authority of the Pope.

Ironically, as Western Europe collapsed into leftist revolution, the Whites won the Russian Civil War. Kerensky managed to secure the support of the German Armed forces in exchange for acceptance of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’s concessions, and the White Generals, together with the German army, defeated the Reds. Lenin died at Petrograd, Trotsky at Tsaritsyn, while Bucharin went into hiding. The revolutionary calling himself ‘the Man of Steel’ was believed to have fled the country for the US.

But Britain did not capitulate as quickly as France and Italy did. Ludendorff and Hindenburg saw the folly of invading the British Isles and instead waged an inconclusive war on the seas and in their colonies. After two years without a decisive outcome being reached, Ludendorff proposed a ‘Peace with Honour’ to Lloyd George. Neither country would cede any colonial holdings to the other, but Britain would recognise German hegemony over Mitteleuropa and pay ‘reasonable’ reparations.

It was this that began the final months of the United Kingdom. Months after the signing of the Peace with Honour in November 1921, the bloody Irish War of Independence was concluded with the cessation of most of Ireland to Michael Collins’ ‘Republic of Ireland’. In exchange for recognition of the Republic, Britain kept hold of six of the nine counties of Ulster, establishing ‘Northern Ireland’. On the mainland, however, things were going from bad to worse. The economy was exhausted from years of war, and Britons felt humiliated and that they had wasted hundreds of thousands of lives for nothing. All it would take for Britain too to fall to leftist revolution was the right sequence of events. It just so happens that what we in our universe call ‘the General Strike of 1926’ happened a year earlier in this timeline, and became known as ‘the British Revolution’.

This timeline is not my own work – the credit for that must go to the team behind the Kaiserreich Project. More details can be found online if one Googles ‘Kaiserreich mod HoI2’. The contents of this book, however, are my own. Some events and descriptions between the years of 1925 and 1943 will also be from the Kaiserreich official timeline, but otherwise all details and machinations have been devised by myself. And, as if it needed to be said, any resemblance of any persons mentioned to real individuals, living or dead, is entirely intentional.​

Introduction

It is perhaps an example of our nation’s exceptionalism that until now, no complete history of our Union has ever been attempted. Historians like Taylor and Kershaw found their efforts frustrated and instead focused on different parts of its history, most prominently the Second Great War, while the closest anyone has come to producing a complete history is the former Commissary for Education Eric Hobsbawm, whose death prevented his work ever being completed. Some of his completed essays and notes are present in this collection.

For that is what this is – a collection. Perhaps where Comrades Taylor and Kershaw went wrong was attempting to write an entire history of such a remarkable nation on their own. Here, I serve as both contributor and humble editor, accompanied by many of the finest minds of our scholarly generation. Even so, the task of chronicling such a long period is not without difficulty – the structure of this publication is that of a series of essays, some narrative and some analytical. The hope is that together, my colleagues and I can create an accurate picture of the Union, from the trials and tribulations of the 20s through to the 50s, through the prosperous yet tumultuous 60s and 70s, and into the reformist 80s, 90s and modern age. Here, we hope you will agree, can be found an uncensored and scholarly picture of the entirety of our Union’s history, ‘warts and all’.Contents

Volume One: The Road to 1936

• The Violent Death of Illiberal England by John Durham
• The Inaugural Congress by John Durham
• The Royalist Exodus by Eric Hobsbawm
• Carving Out a Place in the World by Terry Pollitt
• The Congress Concludes by John Durham
• The End of Empire by Eric Hobsbawm
• Staying On Track by Jeremy Clarkson
• John Maclean (1879-1931) by Shirley McKitterick
• The Congress of 1931 by John Durham

The Road to 1936

The Violent Death of Illiberal England
John Durham

It is hardly necessary to describe the circumstances which led to the proclamation of our Union, for it is the first thing taught to us in school and the subject of a great many works of literature, from the classic novelisation The men that shook the world published in 1930 to the 2006 film Deepest Red. It is impossible to remain on this island for more than a month and not learn in detail of the brave struggle of the Welsh miners in 1925, the escalation into a General Strike and the failed government’s catastrophic miscalculations of how to deal with it.

What is perhaps less well-known, and is only coming to light after the archives of that tumultuous period are being opened to us now, is the political intrigue among the revolutionaries. Far from the united front that school text books espouse at length over, different factions, led by men and women who would (in most cases) eventually form a government of compromise, vied for control. The Autonomists of Niclas y Glais started as Welsh nationalists seeking a Commune of Wales. Horner and Snowden’s Federationists came from far less Trade Union-friendly roots than their later actions would have you believe. Annie Kenney’s Congregationalists began as little more than an even more militant form of the Suffragettes, believed by some historians to sprung from the ‘Women’s Shelters’ that were quickly established in abandoned churches as the chaos of revolution and the collapse of the rule of law led to fears of mass rape. And the Maximists, so notoriously personified by Oswald Mosley’s iron-fisted rule ten years after the Revolution, were by far the most violent of the revolutionaries. Many of the bloodier acts that school textbooks choose to avoid – the Burning of the Ritz, the Covent Garden Massacre[1] – were perpetrated by hard-line Maximists whose experiences in the Russian Bolshevik Rebellion had closed their eyes to such concepts as cruelty.

In addition to the problems among the revolutionaries, there are a number of myths about the Revolution itself that persist to this day. The ‘Glorious Six’ as the weeks between the proclamation of the General Strike and the storming of Parliament have been known have entered our Union’s mythos and have, as such, gathered a fair few urban legends behind them. One regards the infamous deployment of a platoon of Territorials against a pamphleteers’ march on 14 September. The story goes that the pamphleteers, a massed group of about 500 men and women (their political affiliation within the Revolution is never stated in the popular version of the story) were peacefully marching through the streets of Brixton carrying placards and distributing Revolutionary pamphlets. The story goes on to say that the Territorials’ commander, the unfortunately named Lieutenant Scruton, was so enraged by the sight that he ordered his men to open fire. When the smoke had cleared, forty-one lay dead in the street, and many of the Territorial soldiers would desert later that day.

The truth is not so picturesque. Like the Boston Massacre before it, the politics of the occasion eclipsed the facts of it. It is never said, for instance, that those marching were English Autonomists, calling for the proclamation of an English Republic. Nor is it pointed out that the marchers, far from marching peacefully, were armed with clubs and the occasional firearm and were chanting threats to those citizens who did not agree with their position. Finally, the greatest injustice is always done to the Territorials themselves, who, far from obeying unquestioningly the orders of the admittedly ruthless (and jumpy) Scruton, refused to fire until it became clear that, due to a miscommunication (believed to be Scruton firing his revolver at a nearby marcher) the marchers intended to charge them. To say that some of the Territorials deserted later that day is also an understatement – almost all of them defected to the Revolution and Scruton himself was found hanged on a lamppost, a .303 round in his heart. The ‘Marching Martyrs’ as the rhyme goes, were not quite the victims of reactionary zeal and bloodlust, more the catastrophic consequence of one man’s possession of absolute power in a high-pressure situation.

But this article’s aim is not to give the reader an impression of revisionism and deliberately controversial history. These are just some facts to bear in mind when studying those that all the Union knows; that in 1925, the Stand of the Miners became the General Strike, and that after six weeks of attempted reaction, including the lamentable (and ultimately self-defeating) decision to deploy troops against pamphleteers, the establishment had no choice but to give in as Parliament itself was stormed by the massed workers of London[2]. With London and all centres of communication in Revolutionary hands, it was only a matter of time before popular proclamation led to the inaugural Congress of the Trade Unions in February of 1926.

[1] Still relatively unknown because of the alleged involvement of Mosley himself, the massacre involved a group of Maximist agitators opening fire on a crowd leaving the Covent Garden Opera House, killing 17 and wounding dozens more. Among the dead was the then-recently elected MP for Warwick and Leamington, Anthony Eden.

[2] One verifiable example of the United Front is found here – it is not merely an urban legend that Maximist Eric Blair gave his later sworn enemy, Niclas y Glais, a ‘leg-up’ over the fences surrounding Parliament Square. Blair documented it in his diaries, but it was removed when they were published, and the unedited versions only came into public hands in 2001.​

The Inaugural Congress
John Durham


The first Congress of the Trade Unions, as it soon became known, was a turning point in British history. It was here that all thoughts of Royalist reconciliation were thrown away and that the last vestiges of so-called ‘democratic liberalism’ were cast aside. Beginning on 1 February 1926, a date much publicised on pamphlets, posters and by word-of-mouth across the country since the fall of the government on 24 October 1925, the delegates from Trade Unions across the country filed into Congress House on Eccleston Square with optimism in the air. The agenda for the day was as follows:

1. Apologies for absence
2. Acclamation of the Union of Britain
3. Election of Officers
4. Any other business

While point one resulted in the most wads of paper being passed to the front of any CTU in history (the process delayed proceedings by a full two hours) point three is of most interest to the historian. As no elections among the CTU had been held until this meeting, the question of who should chair the first meeting itself had led to a bitter struggle among the organisers of the event. The chairman of the TUC (Trade Union Congress, the spiritual predecessor of the CTU), Alonzo Swales, had been elected by that body the previous year and fully expected to take up the leadership of what he considered to be an ‘extraordinary general meeting’ of the TUC. Very much representing the most reactionary segment of the Trade Union movement, he found his plan deeply unpopular and, as such, his candidacy untenable. Among the contenders for the chair were lifelong socialist and ‘candidate of conciliation’ Tom Mann and John Maclean, at this time a famously powerful speaker who had invigorated the dockers of Clydeside into some of the most explosive actions of the General Strike and Revolution. Eventually, it would be Tom Mann who was ‘elected’ as interim chair, though no election took place. Mann was simply proposed as a candidate to the assembled TUC and Revolutionary heads, and no-one raised an objection. The Congress was to be chaired by Tom Mann, and this would not be the last the Union heard of him.

When the Congress eventually came underway, the factions of the Revolution that had hardly been friends during it now turned upon one another savagely, though admittedly only verbally. There is no question that all of them wanted Socialism for Britain and had their people’s interests at heart, but there is equally no question as to how vehemently some of them disagreed over the best way to achieve this. To quote a contemporary edition of The Chartist – then a recently established radical pamphlet rather than the state newspaper it would become:

Of the multitude of factions present on the first day of the Congress, the four largest have been established to be the following:

The Federationists believe in giving local Syndicates and Trade Unions a great deal of power over local policy, similar to the local councils of the recently failed state. However, the key difference is the popular support and membership of the worker in each of these Syndicates. National policy would largely be with reference to overseas matters if these men have their way. They believe industry and all practically all domestic matters (barring the ‘Key Aims’ of each year of the Union’s life) should be decided by these local Syndicates rather than the central government. The key figures within this movement include John Maclean, GDH Cole and Philip Snowden.

The Congregationalists are a feminist oriented group, headed by Annie Kenney. Economically they are similar to the Federationists, but believe the path to Socialism must be quickened through greater involvement of women in the Revolution. Isolationism is the core of their philosophy, believing Britain suffered enough trying to maintain an Empire and presence overseas. ‘Socialism in one country’ is their motto.

The Autonomists believe in further decentralising the Union, arguing for the home nations to have greater autonomy, possibly even total independence for England, Scotland and Wales. Instead of the more widely-accepted ‘Union of Britain’, they believe in establishing a Federation of the British Isles with its capital in Birmingham, while each nation would be a full and independent member of this federation. They are led by the Welsh Poet Niclas y Glais, who has described his plans as ‘the independence of the States in the United States of America combined with true Socialist freedom’.

The Maximists favour an approach similar to the Commune of France's system - a strong central government and full state control of the economy. Controversially, they are also heavily nationalist, and support an immediate expansion of the military so that Britain may not only defend herself but also project and expand the Revolution. They are led by Revolutionary hero Arthur James Cook.

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As the experienced student of history will notice, the factions thus remained very similar to the state they would be in by 1936. But the factions would need to form powerful voting blocs if they wanted to achieve anything at the Congress, something they immediately set about doing.

The second point on the agenda, planned by Tom Mann himself, was a very careful piece of wording. The Union of Britain itself had already been ‘proclaimed’ per se by the red-banner waving revolutionaries on top of the Houses of Parliament. The new constitution, drawn up by, among others, GDH Cole, Victor Gollancz and John Maclean, had been widely circulated as a pamphlet for the last two months. To proclaim the Union again, therefore, would be irrelevant and potentially dangerous. What Mann proposed instead was that the assembled members would, on behalf of those local people they represented, show their support for the Union of Britain through acclamation and thereby cement its status as the accepted way forward for Britain. Unsurprisingly, the motion was met with great enthusiasm. Margaret Cole wrote in her diary: ‘There were whoops and cheers and goodness knows what else. All around me were men and women stamping their feet and throwing their hands into the air. Gradually, a chant began to emerge, and as soon as I heard what it was I too felt compelled to join in. “Onwards Britain!” we cried, “Onwards Britain!”’[1].

This successfully set the mood for the Congress to be highly jubilant and assuaged any fears of a bitter or violent contest. Point three of the agenda could now be advanced to. The election of officers had been accepted as the turning point of the Congress already. Whichever faction got its people elected would be in de facto control of the Union already, given the Chairman and General Secretary’s power to decide the agenda of the Congress, and the simple fact that whoever won a majority in this election was likely to do the same on the matters of policy that the constitution required voting on over the coming days.

The four candidates who gained the sufficient nominations for Chairman were, unsurprisingly, all representatives of a major faction. Representing the Maximists was coal miner and union leader Arthur James Cook. The Congregationalists put forward Victor Gollancz as their candidate, apparently believing (with perhaps some accuracy) that at this stage in the Revolution a woman stood no chance of being elected. Niclas y Glais, a poet and natural orator, stood for the Autonomists. The Federationists nominated John Maclean, seen by many as the natural leader.

The candidates were each permitted to give a six-minute speech on why they sought this office. Many memoirs of those present have thought it important to note that Victor Gollancz spoke somewhat quietly and in a far more subdued manner than his opponents, with one delegate noting that ‘he could have been proposing the finest implementation of Marxist theory ever put forward by man or beast, I just couldn’t bloody well hear him’. Cook chose to give a fiery speech (he is said to have been trained in oratory by his close ally, Oswald Mosley) about the need for ‘Permanent Revolution’ and used examples from his time leading miners against the army in the Revolution. It was a strong speech, but contained few sustainable ideas, according to those present. Niclas y Glais, arguing for by far the most complex of the four factional proposals, found his audience uninterested and even appeared to detect that his views were not widely shared, declaring at the end of his speech ‘and if my message is not heeded here in the towns and cities, I shall take it to the hills and valleys, where it might be better understood!’[2].

The final speech came from John Maclean of the Federationists. Cutting a massive figure as he strode towards the podium, he spoke without notes for the full six minutes, promising a small central government that acted in the interets of local Syndicates and Trade Unions, the right to local autonomy for workers’ groups, and socialist reform of the armed forces. His conclusion was greeted with thunderous applause from all sides of the chamber, notably a great number of women and Congregationalist supporters. When the voting took place, there was already a clear idea of who would be the first elected Chairman.

As expected, Maclean won the Chair by ‘a clear majority’, believed to have been achieved through the support of Congregationalists who supported many of his views while sensing Gollanz’s inability to win. In his acceptance speech, he urged his assembled comrades to elect his choice of General Secretary, Philip Snowden, something they promptly did (the closest competitor was Arthur Cook, who stood again in an attempt to create a ‘balanced government’).

With the two major offices elected, the first day of the inaugural Congress drew to a close. The ‘any other business’ almost turned into a lengthy debate on the exact role of the CTU and its officers in running the country, until Tom Mann, in his final act as interim Chairman, banged his gavel and declared such discussions were for the following days of the Congress, not now. As the delegates parted ways for the first time, there was still a feeling of optimism in the air. The Federationists were arguably the least controversial choice, and Maclean was personally popular with almost all the delegates. It would remain to be seen how effective this unofficial ‘Federationist majority’ would be in deciding the major questions of the coming days – the role of the constitution, the army and the other officers (now named ‘Commissaries’) that would serve as the equivalent of ‘ministers in cabinet’ under the old regime. The only tension detectable in the atmosphere of the departing delegates was how much of a split would occur if some choices proved unpopular, or there were serious disagreements over how important the ‘federal authority’ should be. As they left, Oswald Mosley is said to have remarked to a young Eric Blair who was by his side, ‘Today we have seen the end of the beginning. Let us hope tomorrow is not the beginning of the end.’

[1] Margaret Cole, Living for Britain: My Diaries (London: Penguin Publishing Cpv., 1945) p.73

[2] Though a poetic phrase and one he is much-remembered for, y Glais' hopes never came true. His politics were not much more popular in the valleys of Wales than they were in the town halls of England. That he and the Autonomists survived as a political entity for so long is an historical oddity that is examined later in this book in an article by Terry Pollitt.​

The Royalist Exodus
Eric Hobsbawm

It is a favourite pastime of Royalist intellectuals to wistfully speculate on the futures of those men and women who, either through untimely death or flight from the British Isles, left the British public sphere forever after 1925. A recent bestseller is 'Mr Windsor and Mrs Simpson' by Australasian-born Philippa Gregory. The novel is a racy counterfactual loosely based on the brief courtship between Edward VIII and an American divorcée. Where the courtship broke up in the face of the exiled King’s national duty in ‘OTL’ (‘Our TimeLine’ as I believe the ‘counterfactual community’ refer to it), the novel pictures a world where a cockier Edward finds himself on the British throne, the Revolution having been averted, but out of mad love for Mrs Simpson, abdicates. It was remarked by critic and Chartist culture editor Polly Toynbee that ‘only the poor prose and paper-thin characters can make the absurdity of the plot seem true-to-life.’

But such speculation is not limited to ‘aerodrome fiction’. A more dated example, published in the German Empire in the 1930s, is 'Fuhrerreich'. Banned by Von Papen in 1938 for its ‘exceedingly dark moral tone’,[1] the work portrayed a world created by Entente victory in the First Great War. Casting Imperialist martyr of the Russian Civil War Adolf Hitler instead as a disgruntled dictator, what is more interesting to note is its treatment of Britain. Its author, Otto Strasser, predicted Britain led by the relatively obscure (and disgraced by Gallipoli) former First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, with the equally obscure deceased MP Anthony Eden somehow finding his way into the cabinet. More mainstream Royalist thought has speculated on who among the ‘lost political generation’ of 1925 would have done great things for reactionary Britain. Stanley Baldwin, Harold Macmillan, Austen Chamberlain and many others are often mourned as having been forced to waste their talents in political isolation during Exile. There is also something of a habit among Royalists to figuratively beat their breasts like mourning Persians over those rising stars killed during their attempts to leave Britain.

It is with this background in mind that we come to the first of a number of articles in this book by the late Eric Hobsbawm. It was first printed in 1981 in 'History Today', and follows in its unedited entirety.


The Exodus, as it became known, saw the flight from Britain of thousands of men, women and children. This article shall examine the facts of the matter. Who ‘escaped’ from Britain, and why? What were the conditions on the way to Canada? And, perhaps most crucially, what became of those members of the ‘ancien regime’, particularly the large number of aristocrats, who could not get away?

The Exodus began on 26 October 1925. Two days after the collapse of the government and the proclamation of the Union of Britain, Margaret Cole wrote in her diaries that ‘a procession of motorcars, some battered and scratched, some even with bulletholes in them, was speeding down the road towards the docks. Their horns were a cacophony of panic. As we lined the streets to watch them go by, a man next to me cried "and good riddance, too!" I later heard that in one of the cars had been our MP. He was a Conservative, and an agreeable MP as Conservatives went. I do not know if he made it to Canada - one heard such terrible things about the overcrowded ships.'[2]

Cole's experience was far from unique. All across the country, local aristocrats, reactionary MPs and members of the wealthy middle classes were racing towards the coast. Some even tried to buy their way onto aircraft at Croydon Airport, without success. The 'terrible things' Cole referred to is something of a euphemism. Those that survived 'the exodus ships' have, in their own memoirs, detailed the level of squalor they experienced. Former Sea Lord Winston Churchill, who travelled to Canada on board RMS Antonia wrote that 'military-issue sleeping mats were spread across the ballroom, its chandelier and wall furnishings now the only thing that distinguished it from an inner city church hall. Upon entering the room it was impossible not to recoil at the stench. The indignity that some of the society women who were now huddled with their children next to a few tins of corned beef was too much to bear. I found myself standing on the freezing and sea-blasted deck whenever possible.'[3]

Churchill's entry, although published in Royalist Canada, was seized upon by the British press when it was made known to them as a gleefully-upheld example of how the Reactionaries had suffered when they tried to begin their fight against the people's Revolution. It just one of many such examples, so it is quite reasonable to conclude that the conditions aboard the ships were truly awful. Churchill was lucky enough to get onto an ocean liner - many of the Royalists had to buy their way onto cramped destroyers, and be content with sharing a tiny billet with a dozen others for the entire journey.

But let us not make too much of the conditions of the 'escape' itself. The real question is 'who escaped, and why?'. The most famous and most obvious group to escape was the Royal Family. The King, for reasons obvious to the reactionary authorities, was given absolute priority to escape the country. He, his wife, along with the Prince of Wales who had joined them on the way, boarded the humble minesweeper HMS Bagshot[4] and set sail for Montreal on the morning of the 26th. The rest of the immediate Royal Family - the 'Princess Royal', Prince Albert, Prince Henry and Prince George, were to board a similar craft the following day. While Princess Mary, Prince George and Prince Albert made it to Plymouth in time for their evacuation, Henry elected, for reasons that died with him, to lead a battalion of die-hard Army troops (aptly from the King's Rifles), who had volunteered to defend the outskirts of Plymouth's harbour district from the approaching 'mob' of Revolutionary forces. Armed only with his Sandringham training and a Webley revolver, he announced to his tearful brother and sister that he would 'rather die in merry old England than live to see it turn rotten'. His body was recovered a few days after the fighting ended, a Webley round in his skull (it is believed he committed suicide to avoid capture). It was buried, like all the bodies of soldiers who chose to side with the Royalists during the revolution, in a simple grave with his name, rank and unit. There was no publicised funeral.

The more minor members of the Royal Family found themselves in the same boat (the pun is, I must confess, intended) as the aristocracy. The Dukes and Earls of Reactionary Britain, some of whom with ancestors that could be traced back to the Battle of Hastings, suddenly found themselves in a world where your birth meant nothing. Many of them tried to 'escape', too, most famously George Bingham, 6th Earl of Lucan, who was rescued from drowning by local 'Cheapside Militia' in the early hours of the 8th of November, having become extremely drunk and tried to get to the Thames Estuary in 'what looked like a child's rowing boat - the type you see at the fair'[5]. Bingham was far from alone as a member of the aristocracy that failed to escape. There were dozens more like him across the country who, once the window of opportunity to escape had passed (all docks came under the control of the CTU and Britain was declared a 'closed port' on an interim basis), found themselves increasingly worried as to what would happen to them. It is, and remains to this day, a credit to the spirit of our Revolution that not one aristocrat was hanged, or even tried, on grounds of his or her title alone. Of course, those who had served in treacherous Tory, Liberal or 'Labour' governments were tried, and some sentenced to hard labour. The only aristocrats who were executed were members of the armed forces who had been found guilty of 'crimes against the people' for their part in various massacres. Of the four death sentences handed out by People's Courts in late 1926, two were commuted to life imprisonment on appeal.


But what for those men like Bingham who had lived a fairly harmless life but had hardly sought to change the country for the benefit of their 'social inferiors' either? The answer to that came in the opening days of the Inaugural Congress. Setting a precedent that would remain for decades, the CTU unanimously voted to 'extend a hand of comradeship' to the former aristocracy, and welcome them into the working community. Bingham himself was welcomed into a farming collective in Gloucestershire after he had been declared 'de-Bourgeoised' by the CTU's re-education centres in early 1928. Others, including Charles Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax, travelled with his son to Newcastle, where they took jobs in the accounting office of the local Mining Syndicate[6].

The 'hand of comradeship' movement was by and large a resounding success, allowing for the peaceful and (generally) unresented incorporation of the former aristocracy - and numerous members of the upper middle class whose workers had brought them to trial for Reaction, as well as numerous remaining MPs - into Britain's new society. Some were easier than others - the more radical of Labour's MPs were far more willing to take jobs in their local Syndicates than some of the more 'refined' Ladies and Duchesses of Kent. But it managed to deal with an exceptionally difficult situation in a largely satisfactory manner - for the popular majority at least. The problems that it untangled, however, were a mere triviality compared to the issue that was most pressing for the new state: how to defend our Island while ensuring the removal of any malignant or reactionary elements within our own Armed Forces.

The Armed Forces were, thanks to the decadence of the past few centuries, plagued with reactionary elements and dyed-in-the-wool aristocrats. The response of 'the mob', therefore, was swift and just. Earl Haig, so inconceivably granted a peerage after slaughtering Britain's best against the German guns, was arrested and put before a 'people's court martial', presided over by none other than Tom Wintringham. After being sentenced to death by firing squad, the ageing Field Marshall spluttered in protest, declaring 'I fought for Britain's honour like a lion fights for its pride!'. Wintringham's famous reply 'Nay, sir! Your men fought like lions. You led them like a donkey!' has entered the common lexicon. Haig was executed at the Tower of London after his death sentence was carried by a narrow vote at the Inaugural Congress[7].

But, in a statement commonly said at the time, 'the lieutenants of the last war will be the generals in the next'. Men like Bernard Montgomery and John Gort, who had fought and bled alongside their men in the trenches, were treated with far less distaste. In a lengthy process beginning in July 1926 (ironically the 10th anniversary of the bloody Battle of the Somme), the Army, Navy and fledgling Air Force had their officer corps entirely examined, one by one, in the dock before people's courts. Though few would swear under oath that they were radical socialists, there were many who sympathised with the common man and, perhaps still angry from the loss of the Great War, agreed that the previous regime had let the people of Britain down. The overwhelming consensus from those who stood before the people and testified their support was that they had sworn to serve and defend Britain - to them, defending their 'king' meant nothing compared to that. This was given additional credence by their very presence on the mainland - particularly the naval officers, who would have been free to leave for Canada if they had a ship under their command. Bernard Montgomery, later hero of the Second Great War, captured the mood of the times when he declared 'A socialist I am not. But a Reactionary am I neither. I entered the Army with no interest in politics, but with an interest in the continued wellbeing of the people of this nation. The Union can provide that wellbeing, and I shall strive to defend it!'.

Of course, this was not universally popular. Wintringham in particular wanted to purge the officer corps of all members who were not 100% committed to leftist revolution. But John Maclean himself stepped in and prevented this, arguing (quite correctly) that Britain needed soldiers as its defenders more than it needed ideologues - the Armed Forces would, of course, over time be gradually brought into line with the politics of the Union, but with a large section of the Fleet now rumoured to be rearming in Canada, and the Kaiser's armies allegedly sharpening their bayonets in Kiel, the decision was made to keep on all who would swear simply to uphold the Union and defend its people. The period of an 'Apolitical Army', as Kershaw calls it, had begun.

In conclusion, then, what defined the Exodus? It is perhaps best considered to be the flight of the 'old regime' and its replacement by the new. As Margaret Cole's fellow bystander remarked, there was an element of 'good riddance' to many who fled the Union during those tumultuous days. The reorganisation of the Armed Forces would probably not have been possible had its truly reactionary and rabidly rightist elements remained within. All in all, then, the Exodus was highly beneficial to the Union - many who escaped spared the Union the trouble of a messy trial and potential execution - the fate of Field Marshall Haig was, if one believes contemporary sources, desired for many other members of the 'old regime' by the more bloodthirsty members of the new.

[1] It became available in all four German states after the Second Great War, and has since been translated into English, French, Italian and Spanish.

[2] Margaret Cole, Living for Britain: My Diaries (London: Penguin Publishing Cpv., 1945) p.60

[3] Winston Churchill, The Empire in Crisis (Ottawa: Britannia Books, 1931) p.42

[4] Cpt. Eric Edwards, The King had my Cabin (Ottawa: Britannia Books, 1949) p.12

[5] Derek Hobbs, Onwards, Cheapside: My time in the militia (London: Macmillan, 1955) p.56

[6] Their story was not entirely a happy one - Charles' son, Edward Wood, found himself unable to cope with what he called his 'fall from gwace' and committed suicide in 1930.

[7] He would not be the last to die there.

​

Carving out a place in the world: Public decisions and diplomatic undertones in the foreign policy of the Congress of 1926
Terry Pollitt


It is apparently too great a task for the common historian to worry his or her self with the complexities of political theory. It is therefore the duty of myself, your humble political analyst, to recount the hum-drums of the processes that have shaped our Union throughout the last nine decades. The first of my articles in this book will focus on the real meaning behind the opening plays of Union foreign policy, particularly the decisions made at the Inaugural Congress.

The second week of the congress had been set aside for foreign affairs. Faith in Britain's military strength was still faltering at this point, so the first item on the agenda was the importance of securing the Union's independent status. There was fear on all sides – some panicking elements of the congress feared that the Royalist ‘Exodus fleet’ was simply going to refuel and rearm then turn right back round again to reconquer the British Isles[1]. Others expected Germany to take military action against yet another emerging Socialist state. The priority was therefore to establish diplomatic relations with all necessary parties, while maintaining an element of isolationism. Germany was deemed the biggest and most immediate threat, and Ernest Bevin was dispatched to the coast with a delegation of negotiators and a CTU-granted overseas travel permit. So what did the dispatch of this physically huge former Baptist minister mean politically? The message that Britain was sending to Germany was ‘we’re here and we’re not going anywhere, but we don’t mean any trouble’. Bevin captured the essence of this mentality perfectly in his stoic attitude and presence, grand speaking style (he sounded like a statesman even in casual conversation) and peaceful demeanour. Arriving at Kiel on board a Republican Navy frigate on 9 February 1926, it took the German coast guard four hours to permit him to land. Once there, he was met not by diplomats or ministers, but by the Kaiser’s police, who threatened to lock him up if he did not state exactly what his purpose was. Never a man to mince his words, the West Country docker stated that ‘my purpose is something far greater than anything you will achieve in your officious, bourgeois little lives – to secure peace and freedom for my people. Now, take me to your Kaiser!’. Within minutes he was on a train to Hamburg, where he was met by an undersecretary to ‘Chancellor’ Tirpitz. The diplomatic wranglings and niceties that ensued are not, to be blunt, particularly interesting – unlike some modern writers I take no interest in what vintage of wine was offered by either party or whether any symbolism of intent can be drawn from the colour of Bevin’s handkerchief that day[2]. The outcome is what interests us.

And what an outcome it was! Both countries stopped short of mutual diplomatic recognition[3], but Tirpitz (who personally arrived at the meeting as it came to a close) gave Bevin an assurance that Germany ‘held no interests regarding the British Isles provided those ruling it acted within the boundaries of the Peace with Honour’. Bevin, in return, assured Tirpitz that the Union was content to build socialism for its people, and had no interest in any overseas affairs. Bevin returned to the Congress on 11 February to a hero’s welcome, but the celebrations were cut short by troubling news from the West – at midnight, Irish troops under military dictator ‘President’ Michael Collins had flooded over the border into the ‘six counties of Ulster’ that had made up Northern Ireland after the Irish War of Independence. As the Union had claimed sovereignty over all areas in ‘northwest Europe’ controlled by previously by the United Kingdom, this was technically the first incursion by foreign military forces into Union territory. So how should Britain respond?

The answers came from all sides. Arthur James Cook and his Maximists called for immediate war with Ireland, in the name of ‘preserving territorial unity’. This claim was ridiculed by Niclas y Glais’ Autonomists, who argued that the Irish were doing just that by subsuming a missing part of their nation into the whole. More to the point, said Victor Gollancz on behalf of the Congregationalists, the Union was in no way ready for war, not even against a ‘priest-infested backwater like Ireland’. But the calm-seeking John Maclean who appealed for pragmatic realism to be brought to the forefront of the discussion. Pointing out the total lack of representatives from Ulster at the CTU itself, and indeed the extremely lukewarm reception that socialism had always received there (even in the previous few explosive months), Maclean asked the assembled delegates whether letting the Ulstermen go would be such a bad thing. The ‘Irish question’ had plagued imperialists for generations, and to hold on to a people who simply did not wish to be one with the Socialist British – many of the rabidly pro-British leaders in Northern Ireland found their extreme Protestantism incompatible with Socialist support, and instead, in one documentable case even at this early stage, had turned to Canada’s exiles for support – would surely be reactionary and counter-revolutionary. Nevertheless, Maclean was quick to assure the delegates that he was not taking the matter of an unauthorised military incursion lightly. To demonstrate his seriousness, he turned to Bevin – whose place at the lectern he had taken just minutes before – and asked him on behalf of the Congress to travel immediately to Dublin to meet with ‘President’ Collins and make clear where the Union stood.

The above is one of the finest political performances John Maclean ever gave. While privately a fiery ideologue, he had always been respected for being able to put pragmatism first in his leadership of the Union. In this case he did just that. His diaries indicate that every fibre of his being wanted to hang on to Ulster so that socialism could be properly spread there, but it was really the vast military superiority of Collins’ forces over those in the area, and the disarray the Republican Navy, that made him think twice. One thing that he truly meant when he said it, though, was the belief that the Ulstermen did not really wish to be one with a Socialist Britain. That much was clear. The final act of his performance came when he asked Bevin – minutes ago proclaimed a hero of the Revolution for seeing off the German threat with such dignity – to deal with the situation personally. There was no way that any hard-line proponent of maintaining a grip on Ulster could have questioned this, and when Maclean so ‘humbly’ offered to sit on a Extraordinary Steering Committee that Bevin himself would chair about the matter that evening, no-one suspected that it was his intention to ‘steer’ the committee towards his exact way of thinking. Therefore it is no surprise that Bevin’s meeting with Collins at the Four Courts (after first visiting the Dublin Post Office to pay his respects to James Connolly[4]) culminated in exactly what Maclean proposed – Collins agreed to an apology for not informing the Union of his intentions, and issued a full and frank assurance that no further territorial incursions onto Union soil would take place. This point was somewhat moot, as what else were the Irish going to want? Cornwall? In exchange, Bevin, on behalf of the workers of the Congress of the Trade Unions of the Union of Britain, formally recognised the Irish Republic’s sovereignty over the entirety of Ulster. Collins also requested the right to an Irish representative in London, putting forward Jim Larkin as his candidate for this ‘sub-ambassadorship’[5]. Diplomatic recognition was still a long way off, but both Collins and Bevin recognised the value of such representatives. From this, the idea of a ‘Special Representative’ was born, and Larkin was granted permission to travel back to London with the Bevin delegation (the eccentric William Joyce remained in Ireland to take up the equivalent post in Dublin[6]).

Maclean had played a masterstroke. Domestically, his reputation was secure and a war had been averted. Internationally, the Union had come across as reasonable and true to its principles of self-determination by abandoning imperialist holdings. While relations with Ireland were destined to always be somewhat frosty on ideological grounds, there was genuine respect for the integrity of Maclean and Bevin in the eyes of Collins and the Irish people. Popular at home and tolerated abroad, it was on this high that Maclean began the most controversial stage of the Week For Discussion And Votes Regarding International Policy – whether Britain should seek friends as well as assurances of neutrality.


The most obvious candidates for friendship were the Commune of France and Republic of the Sicilies. Already maintaining close relations with each other, the two countries were in dire need of friends. Maclean, wary of getting entangled in some sort of alliance, proposed to invite representatives from both republics to speak on the final day of the ‘International Week’. The motion was cautiously carried, and telegrams were sent to both Naples and Paris. Pietro Nenni and Pierre Brossolette (of the Sicilies and France respectively) were apparently only too happy to attend and welcome another socialist state to Europe, for they both arrived with speeches already written. Nenni spoke in passable English but with a fiery Italian passion behind his words. Comparing ‘the righteous anger of the British people against their reactionary masters’ with the struggles his own people had undergone against the ‘Papists and Germans’ in the North, he extended a hearty offer of friendship from the central government in Naples, with full diplomatic recognition very much on the table. Brossolette offered much the same thing, while praising the speed with which the British had achieved socialism (in perfect English, he joked that ‘my people went through three republics before they saw the light – you managed it with one’). Both men were given a standing ovation as they left the chamber.

As soon as they had left the building, however, the debate began in earnest. Annie Kenney, speaking for the first time at length before her comrades, argued fiercely against any kind of formal link with either state, saying they were both likely to drag Britain into a war, as France had done in 1914. Oswald Mosley, speaking on behalf of Cook’s Maximists, argued instead that the links should be nurtured and improved, and that all three nations should work together to improve their military strength. GDH Cole put forward the idea that Britain needed friends, but not allies, so perhaps a compromise could be reached. Maclean seized upon this idea and argued that their offers of diplomatic recognition should be accepted, not least for the trading relationships they would bring. Cleverly turning the extreme isolationists’ arguments against them, he ‘agreed’ that war and alliance was not what the Union needed, but pointed out that Britain lacked many resources of its own, particularly foodstuffs that did not grow naturally upon our island. ‘Is a mineworker not entitled to a glass of Sicilian orange juice upon his return home?’ he asked, ‘May our Syndicates not toast their success with a fine Bordeaux? Are we, as a people, not entitled to the money, grain and vital oil that such a trading system would allow?’ Thanks to Maclean’s public speaking skills, the day had been won. The motion to open up full diplomatic relations with Sicily and France was passed.

And so ended the so-called ‘International Week’. Its public statements had been of co-operation, joy and fierce defense of Britain and her socialist principles. Its undertones had been those of continuity in British politics – the stoical, ‘love me or hate me, I’m here to stay’ attitude of Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and Queen Victoria lived on in the practices of John Maclean and Ernest Bevin. I am pleased to note that their reactionary beliefs did not.

[1] A ludicrous idea, for the ‘Exodus fleet’ was little more than a fleet of under-fuelled and armed warships and a string of dilapidated ocean liners. See Comrade Hobsbawm’s article earlier in this book for more details.

[2] It was white. Unlike a certain AJP Taylor, I don’t consider that a sign that he sought to ‘surrender Britain’s integrity’.

[3] Germany continued to recognise the exiled King as rightful ruler of Britain until the fall of the Second Reich.

[4] According to an Irish observer, Bevin directly addressed the name engraved into the stone when he said ‘Had you lived, Comrade, my mission would be a far happier one.’

[5] The decision to send Larkin was largely a selfish one. Collins hated the man for his radical socialist beliefs and had wanted to put him somewhere where he could not influence Irish politics anymore, but could not afford to arrest or execute him because of his populist support.

[6] Joyce, despite his appearances and ‘posh voice’, had been a die-hard leftist ever since his attempt to address a group of Labour Party members in 1924 had ended with him being mobbed by a gang of ‘Honourists’ (reactionary ex-Tommies who took it upon themselves to break up what they saw as ‘revolutionary’ meetings), who slashed his face with a razor. Calling those responsible ‘reactionary heathen’, he became involved with leftist militia groups and played an active role in overcoming the Royalist barricades in West London during the Revolution. Nevertheless, his somewhat wild temperament made him unsuitable for serious public service in Britain, so Bevin recommended him as their Special Representative for many of the same reasons that Collins recommended Larkin.​

The Congress Concludes
John Durham


The foreign policy of the Inaugural Congress having been discussed in the previous chapter of this volume, it now falls to me to conclude this book’s analysis of the Congress as a whole. What did it conclude in those crucial final days? Who were the winners and losers, both individually and factionally? And, perhaps most crucially, how well-received were the reforms that the Congress voted on, and did they get put into practice properly?

The final two weeks of the Congress had been designated as ‘Matters regarding infrastructure and domestic matters’ – a term so broad it might as well have been ‘any other business’. The first item on the agenda (drawn up by General Secretary Philip Snowden) was the determination of the exact role that individual workers, Syndicates and Unions, and the ‘central government’ would take in shaping Union policy and practice. The Federationists having a clear majority as a voting bloc by this stage, it was expected that their way of thinking was going to triumph. It was therefore of no surprise to anybody when a nine thousand word document titled ‘The Motion for Limited Federal Control and Authority Combined with Regional Autonomy’[1] was presented by a steering committee chaired by administrative genius and former miner Arthur Horner. Representatives involved in its authorship included Tom Mann, James Maxton (former radical Labour MP[2]) and Jimmy Thomas, the Railway Union leader. The document was both radical and uncontroversial – a theme that runs throughout the years that gave birth to our Union. It was radical in the level of power it gave to local Syndicates and Unions (several Unions made up a local Syndicate, each with their own Congress House), yet uncontroversial in how much power it presented to the Federal Council – effectively the new ‘cabinet’. The Council would act only in cross-Syndicate matters as a mediator, and would determine national ‘goals’ each year that were to be voted on at each national Congress (held every September). The only other matters that the Federal Council would involve itself it were international affairs and matters of infrastructure – railways, electricity and so on – that crossed the boundaries of each Syndicated region. All other matters – the organisation of trades and prices between unions, law enforcement (the police unions were re-educated along the same lines as the army, and elected Commissioners introduced), local transport, utilities and more – fell to the authority of local Syndicates. It was this that was most offensive to the Maximists. Eric Blair called it ‘a blueprint for underachievement’ while Mosley and Cook both made speeches railing against the lack of a centralised industrial body. There were also those who considered the whole Motion ‘utterly unconstitutional’, but it was pointed out that the Constitution, proclaimed a few months ago, had always left provision for a proper administrative structure ‘to be determined during a Congress of the Trade Unions’[3].

The Motion was put to the vote in an atmosphere of extreme tension. Oswald Mosley nonchalantly remarked to anyone who would listen that ‘if we splinter here, the whole bloody structure could come crashing down’. It took over four hours of debate and numerous amendments to the Motion (which had already spend ten days in the hands of the steering committee), but eventually it passed by a majority of 355 to 280 – enough, under the Constitution, to make it lawful. There was a great collective sigh of relief as now, finally, it was clear how the country would actually be run. Britain’s future, at least for the short term, was secure.

The other major area of policy that had to be defined (and voted on for the first time) was the Armed Forces. As Comrade Hobsbawm’s article earlier in this volume pointed out, the ‘apolitical army’ was the consensus of the day. Maclean, as usual, gave a passionate speech explaining the need for this move. Using a typically Macleanian technique, he gave just enough ground to appear impeccably socialist while at the same time making sure the only conclusion that could be reached was his own. In this instance, he declared that it was indeed a sad state of affairs if Britain had to rely on the remaining members of a ‘once royalist army’, but it would be sadder state if she had no military minds at all defending her from German bayonets or Royalist shells. Seizing on the spirit of compromise, he proposed that Tom Wintringham, the fiercest proponent of hanging or imprisoning all former army officers and rebuilding the whole service from scratch, be placed in overall command of the operation to ensure socialist values became entrenched in the existing armed forces. Wintringham appears to have accepted this compromise – other than those army, navy or RAF officers who would not swear to protect the people of the Union rather than ‘that decadent crown’, no officers came to any harm (either prison or the noose) under his command. All this was the result of the general vote on the matter, the motion being ‘To preserve the officer corps of Britain’s armed services, with provisos for their political re-education, for reasons in the National Interest’. It passed by a reasonable majority, with Cook’s Maximists being the only faction encouraging its members to vote ‘Nay’[4].


With these and other administrative questions answered (some of which will be expanded upon in later chapters covering the development of the Union in the 1920s), the Congress now turned to the matter of electing those of its members who would oversee their putting into practice. While the election of Syndicate chairmen was a matter to be decided locally, the ‘Federal Council’ that would meet each week in Congress house was to fill the role of the cabinet under the failed state. The people who sat on this council would have briefs and, in some cases, Commissions (based largely on the old system of ‘ministries’). The Commissary for the Exchequer, for instance, would be based out of the old treasury building for the time being, keeping control of inflation through careful mediation of price control among the regional Syndicates. The old ‘Foreign and Colonial Office’ was stripped of its paintings of foreign dignitaries and Emperors (notably a disgustingly large picture of Napoeleon III that Queen Victoria had allegedly refused to keep in any of her homes, and so given to the Foreign Office) and re-opened as the ‘People’s Commission for Foreign Affairs’. The election of the men to fill these posts, then, was to be the final stage of cementing the government of the Union of Britain.

Philip Snowden had already been elected as General Secretary of the Congress of the Trade Unions (CTU)[5], so the major roles that remained to be filled were the Exchequer, Foreign Affairs, Home Infrastructure and Industrial Relations. Several candidates had each put together a manifesto for why they should be considered for these posts, but there were clear frontrunners in each category. Arthur Horner was a close ally of John Maclean and well-known as a superb mathematician, so easily took the job in the Exchequer, despite strong opposition from Oswald Mosley, beginning their decade-long feud. Ernest Bevin, given his recent escapades abroad, was the obvious choice for Foreign Affairs. Jimmy Thomas, head of the National Union of Railwaymen who had successfully crippled the Reactionary efforts to keep the country moving during the Revolution[6] made his case for being the Commissary for Home Infrastructure by arguing for a strong system of railways, bolstered by popular support and Union involvement, carrying more freight and passengers around the country to help underdeveloped sections grow. He was elected to little opposition. Finally, the eccentric James Maxton was elected as Commissary for Industrial Relations after much recommendation by his old friend John Maclean. Maxton was, in many ways, the ideal candidate as a mediator between Syndicates and Unions (this being what the job entailed). His experience in parliament made him one of few Revolutionaries who had spoken with real power behind his words before now, and his fiery manner was well-respected by tough-talking Union leaders. The first ever Federal Council, therefore, was thus:
And so the Congress entered its closing stages. John Maclean praised the work that had been done thus far, and talked positively of the change that lay ahead. However apprehensive people like Mosley had been about the Congress, the outcome was clear – the people of Britain, through their representatives, were genuinely prepared to ‘give it a go’, as Comrade Hobsbawm once said. On the other hand, there were certainly 'winners and losers' in the debate - the Maximists had had their centralised views rejected (for now) and had been opposed to a number of Federationist measures that were passed successfully. But the implementation of the policies would be undertaken in a local, regional and fundamentally decentralised manner, and this is what made the process so popular and easy for local administrators. So what conclusions can be drawn from the end of the Congress? A sense of optimism, no doubt inspired by the Revolution itself and the decadence of the previous regime, played a large part in the congeniality of this first Congress. A degree of British openness and fairness resulted in the free debate that carried on almost without interruption over every issue. The most important conclusion, then, in the mind of this author, is that the Inaugural Congress symbolises the very essence of where our Union came from. A Revolution with very little bloodshed, compromise abound and a hand of brotherhood being extended to those who, under the Bolshevik Rebellion, for instance, would have been executed. The Congress was, therefore, the perfect microcosm of what Tony Benn would later call ‘our unique brand of a very British Socialism’.

[1] Hardly a catchy title, it quickly became known as the ‘Limited Federation’ motion.

[2] Maxton had foregone the post-Revolution ‘examination process’ his parliamentary colleagues underwent by personally joining a Popular Militia during the early days of the Revolution, and helping plan the attack on the Houses of Parliament using his own knowledge of the building. A close friend and ally of both John Maclean and Arthur James Cook, he had served as a principled socialist politician for his entire career, and as such was under little scrutiny anyway.

[3] Article iia, line 23, The Constitution of the Union of Britain, original pamphlet from November 1925

[4] The Congregationalists were also initially uneasy about the militaristic tone of the motion, but gave it their support after Annie Kenney negotiated an amendment to the Motion which placed the emphasis on Britain’s defence rather than any overseas operations.

[5] The role of General Secretary was a powerful administrative one that involved the planning of all Union Congresses and the maintenance of the very structure of the state itself. Snowden would have found it easy to set a precedent for the General Secretary outshining the Chairman and eventually overtaking him as the de facto head of state and take his crucial ‘casting vote’, but this never took place, to our Union’s benefit. The General Secretary remained the role it was supposed to be.

[6] One amusing incident saw students at Oxford University offer to fire and run steam locomotives from their local depot in an attempt to undermine the strike. When desperate bosses put the manicured scabs to work, they found that all the students were capable of doing was ruining fireboxes and, in one case, permanently warping a boiler. So laughable was the attempt that after the Revolution, the students responsible’s punishment was simply to be named and shamed on pamphlets around the city.​

The End of Empire
Eric Hobsbawm



The following article was written as part of Comrade Hobsbawm’s planned book on the transition of the United Kingdom into the Union of Britain. It was never completed, and we are indebted to his wife Marlene for presenting the manuscript to us.

It is perhaps unsurprising that in Royalist literature regarding the collapse of the British Empire, parallels are freely and viciously drawn between it and the end of the Western Roman Empire. Most popular among these flawed ideas is that one that, like the barbarians who brought down Rome, the Revolutionaries who marched on London were to blame for the ‘catastrophic loss’ of the Empire’s overseas holdings. This is something I am only too happy to discuss, for just as scholarship on the fall of Rome has recently shifted the blame away from the generally harmonic barbarian peoples (themselves fleeing oppression under the Huns, just as we Britons fought our oppression under the Bourgeoisie) and onto the corrupt ‘magister militum’ – the cabal of military leaders who were essentially running the Roman Empire for their own personal gain – real scholarship regarding the end of the British Empire has also shifted the blame onto a far more culpable set of individuals – the exiled colonialists themselves.

The reasoning for this is clear. If, as all now accept, an Empire was a morally bankrupt drain on Britain’s manpower in exchange for resources that were being denied to those proletarians who harvested them in their homelands, what interest was the ‘new government’ of the Congress of the Trade Unions meant to have in preserving the Empire of the failed state? The loudest argument for keeping hold of as much of the Empire as possible came from the young Eric Blair, who at just 23 had made a name for himself as a pamphleteer, militiaman and ally of Oswald Mosley. ‘Letting the Empire collapse is not an option,’ Blair argued in his pamphlet ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’[1] (although he conceded that a more socialist name than ‘Empire’ needed to be found[2]) ‘the alternative is to throw our holdings overboard and reduce the Union to a cold and unimportant little island where we shall all live on herrings and potatoes!’. While Blair stressed that it was also the duty of the Revolutionaries to ensure quality of life and peaceful Socialism for the workers of the Empire rather than just ‘cutting and running’, some naturally decried this as reactionary snobbery. The economic thrust of his points, however, was accepted by John Maclean, and matters regarding how to deal with the Empire in a manner least economically damaging to the Union were sent to the top of the agenda in the first meetings of the Federal Council.

Matters had been taken out of the Council’s hands in some parts of the Empire, notably India. The already fragile Raj had splintered into three factions in a short but catastrophic war that broke out almost immediately after the Royal Family fled mainland Britain. An uneasy stalemate had set in across the borders of the subcontinent’s three new states – the Raj (though it had little claim to this title, and was more popularly called ‘Delhi’ after its capital), the Princely Federation (made up of the ‘gun-salute’ Princes who had so loyally served the British and now found themselves having to oppress their people themselves) and the People’s Republic of Bengal. Both the exiles, desperately trying to create some level of bureaucracy in Ottawa by which to rule the Empire, and the Federal Council in London were at a loss as to how to make any reclamation of what was once the jewel in Britain’s crown. The exiles had some luck on their side – the ‘Raj’, or Delhi, pledged support to the Royal Family but made it clear that Governor-General Lithgow was the man in charge of all matters Indian, not the King. The British troops (essentially what was left of ‘The British Army In India’) running the country had pledged allegiance to the Governor-General rather than the King ‘until a more stable circumstance should arise’. The Canadian and exile response was to refuse military support for a 'reclaiming of lost territory', allowing the country to descend into further chaos. The Princely Federation naturally wanted nothing to do with either the exiles or the Revolutionaries, being more interested in preserving their wealth on their own terms. Britain’s eyes, then, fell on Bengal. Bengal had become a Socialist Republic, much like Britain had, and many of its leading lights had learned their Marx and Engels at British Universities – James Maxton claimed to remember a young Mohandas Gandhi during the former’s visit to Oxford (now Ruskin) University.

Ernest Bevin, therefore, in his first act as Commissary for Foreign Affairs, dispatched a delegation led by R.H. Tawney to Calcutta to broker friendship with the Bengali state, as well as give assurances that the new Britain had no interest in recolonisation. Tawney was by all accounts the ideal man to send, having been born in Calcutta and, during his time in the Fabians, a strong advocate of Indian independence. The results of the delegation were good, and it bore fruit within months – a telegram from Tawney himself arrived back in London in October 1926.




Whether the request was motivated by the demands of the Bengali government or by Tawney's own experience of the dilapidated Indian rail network, it was granted and a team of railway engineers was sent out to reorganise and build up the collapsing Bengali infrastructure. It was headed by none other than Clement Attlee, who had only a month before satisfied the 'Commission for Determination of Socialist Belief in Former Members of Parliament' of his intentions and, in particular, his extraordinary planning ability.


For the Union and its interests in India, the best had been made out of a decidedly bad lot. In exchange for the railway engineers (who themselves were instructed to take notes on how to restructure such a system to they could oversee the same thing in Britain on their return) Bengal offered a series of trade agreements brokered by Tawney. Britain's supply of Indian tea, certain rare materials and rubber (through the deals the Bengalis themselves had reached with the emerging Burmese state to their East) appeared safe.

Other parts of the former Empire were more definitely lost to Britain's inhabitants. In the Caribbean, local governors banded together to form the Caribbean Federation with its capital on Jamaica. Though little more than an economic union that heavily depended on Canada for its protection, its unsurprising refusal to trade with Britain hurt sugar supplies greatly. Even until the 1930s and the Maximisation programmes, it was said that 'nobody ever asks "how many sugars" anymore, for they are afraid that the answer will be more than one'[3]. Similar failure was found in the South Pacific, where Britain's Pacific holdings were quietly annexed by the Japanese and, to some consternation in London and Ottawa, the Germans. Australia and New Zealand, evidently becoming highly aware of their position many thousands of miles away from both London and Ottawa, rejected the Revolutionary government and formed the Australasian Confederation, immediately swearing loyalty to the King and exiled government of the Empire in Ottawa while, like Delhi, elevating their Governor-General to the post of Governor and transferring some powers reserved for royalty to him. There was nothing the Union could do to stop them, and the exiles were too paranoid about further mutiny in the navy to deploy it in the South Pacific.

The final nail in the wretched, rotten and long-awaited coffin of the British Empire came from, ironically enough, the rising star of its usurper - the German Empire. Chancellor Tirpitz, having apparently spent every waking moment since Ernest Bevin's initial visit scrutinising the agreements they had signed, had satisfied himself that when the Union said it had no interests outside the British Isles (with special dispensation added for the Channel Islands, which were occupied by Revolutionary forces in the Navy and turned into Communes), it meant just that. With this in mind, on the morning of 13 April, 1926, ships, submersibles and zeppelins began docking in major ports and aerodromes around what was left of the British Empire's African and Mediterranean holdings. They flew the flag of truce alongside the war ensign of Germany, but aircraft dropped leaflets announcing these territories' incorporation into the German Empire. The British garrisons, torn between a useless Ottawa and a polluted London and certain of annihilation if they opposed, handed over the territories.


The Congress had been over a month when the news broke, so there would be no frantic speechmaking or votes en masse to decide this particular piece of foreign response. The news officially came through when the Governor of Malta requested assistance from London, as per protocol (ignoring the obvious change of government given the desperation of the situation, as his and others' pleas for help had already been rejected by Ottawa) on the morning of the fourteenth of April. Ernest Bevin, being informed of the call by his assistant, famously remarked 'where the hell is Valletta?'. The seriousness of the situation quickly became clear. Unlike far-off parts of the Empire like Guadalcanal or Kingston, the key ports of Malta, Cyprus[5], Gibraltar (which had been marched upon from Spanish territory on the understanding it would be returned to Spain by Germany after a five year lease) and Suez were a very important part of Britain's naval supremacy and, arguably, continued existence. The unenviable task of deciding what, if anything, to do now fell to the emergency meeting of the Federal Council, chaired as always by John Maclean.

In his capacity as Commissary for Foreign Affairs, Ernest Bevin admitted that the agreement signed with Germany in February made these actions entirely legal. Arthur Horner, speaking on behalf of the Exchequer, nonchalantly remarked that he had been leaving overseas ports out of his calculations on how to plan the economy anyway. Tom Wintringham, acting head of the armed forces at this point, was adamant that aggressive war with Germany was completely out of the question, and a defensive one would be of dubious outcome. It quickly became clear that the Union could do nothing. The Germans offered no payment for the islands, nor indeed did they contact London directly it what was clearly a calculated insult. Maclean proposed that the assembled council vote on a motion to protest the Germans' decision not to ask London's permission but accept their sovereignty over the islands and African territories[4] they had now acquired. Arguing, as ever, for pragmatism, he pointed out that the Union's navy would be stretched out beyond its capabilities if it had to constantly defend these valuable ports that, to an isolationist power like the Union, were ultimately useless. The vote passed unanimously, with only Philip Snowden abstaining on the grounds that he could not 'in good conscience hand over the residents of these lands to German Imperialism, but equally cannot turn the wrath of the Hun towards Britain herself'[6].

In summary, then, the Empire collapsed around the Revolution not because of the villainous intent of the revolutionaries, but the incompetence and corruption of the self-serving exiles. Their narrow mindedness was what led to their own failure to properly mend the disintegrating Raj, or keep Australasian nationalism at bay. The Union can only be blamed for, if anything, not having the resources to properly foster and export revolution in these collapsing states. The loss of naval ports overseas was ultimately of no import to the isolationist early governments of the Union, and the Second Great War and Congress of Trier vindicated early British inaction when the German Empire occupied and oppressed the peoples of Malta, Suez and Cyprus. Trier would see these lands and peoples finally granted true independence and the right to pursue their own socialist destiny - for better or worse.

[1] In a somewhat flimsy analogy, the Lion represented British will, and the Unicorn the colonies of the failed state that were now, like the elusive mythical creature itself, were seeking independence.

[2] Blair himself proposed ‘Commonwealth of Nations’.

[3] Shirley McKitterick, The Revolutionary Housewife: Liberation and stagnation in British feminism, 1925-1941, (London: Macmillan, 1989) p.146.

[4] All of pre-Revolutionary 'British Africa' fell into German hands, though they would lose control of Egypt by 1931 due to nationalist rebellion. A deal struck with the new government ensured Suez and Port Said remained German.

[5] Germany held Cyprus for two years before selling it to the Ottoman Empire as an 'act of friendship'. The real reason was they had only really needed it as a stop-off point for their fleets on their way to Suez, and once the canal had been refitted to German standards they had no use for Cyprus.

[6] Philip Snowden et al, Selected Extracts from the Minutes of the Federal Council, 1926-1931, (London: Red State Publishing, 1993)

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Staying On Track
Jeremy Clarkson


In an attempt to make this book more ‘accessible’ to those less scholarly members of society, this and a number of other chapters in this book are kindly provided by members of the broadcast and journalistic media. We thank Mr Clarkson for his frank and amusing writing style.

I’ll make no bones about it – I’m no historian. You won’t find any pieces of chalk in the pockets of my jacket, or my neck to be crooked from years of staring down into dusty volumes about the Roman Empire. The contents of my pockets are more likely to be my car keys, a notebook containing the latest numbers I’ve jotted down from the side of trains, and a plane ticket to Iberia. On a good day, that is. As you can probably tell, my interests lie more in British engineering than in British exceptionalism (when Richard Hammond first told me that phrase in the studio I asked if it was some sort of real ale). So naturally, when Professor Durham wrote to me to ask if I would contribute to this book of his, I was more than a little sceptical. So sceptical, in fact, that you could probably have cut glass on the stiffness of my raised right eyebrow. But when he told me what he wanted me to write about – ‘something about engineering. The railways, design industry, that sort of thing’ – I was sold. As a railway enthusiast (cars have always been a secondary passion for me) since my dad first took me on the Brighton Belle when I was 4, I consider it a great honour to be able to put down in writing an account of the great railways of this great country.

So, despite me not being much of a historian in general, I’m not ashamed to say that like any self-respecting gricer I know the history of the railways of this fair isle of ours pretty much off by heart. The bit I’ve been asked to recount first is the first stage of the plans that the Union put in place when it took over from the UK in the 1920s. Basically, the ‘grouping’ plan that had been instituted in 1922 after the Great War ended the chaos (or so it seemed) of all the different railway companies in the country by combining them all into four part-state owned but operationally independent companies: the Southern Railway, the London and North Eastern Railway, the London, Midland and Scotland Railway and the Great Western Railway. These groupings, while a marked improvement on the cripplingly inefficient (and horribly exploitative of their workers) companies that were running things all over the country before the Great War, were themselves severely lacking in the efficiency and workers’ rights department. It’s not surprising that Jimmy Thomas and his railway union were leading lights in the General Strike that led to the Revolution, given how unpopular the bosses of the railway companies were. Working conditions were appalling, and there was widespread concern among the railwaymen that the railway network itself was not helping the most needy sections of the country that it needed to. In short – it wasn’t that great, it was too expensive for the poor, and poorer areas were woefully under-serviced.

So that was the lie of the land on the eve of the Revolution. Flash forward a couple of years and Jimmy Thomas (the same bloke) has been put in charge of reorganising the railway network along socialist lines. Complete nationalisation was talked about, but rejected as too expensive and potentially taking too much control away from local Syndicates. Thomas’ commission decided instead on two key plans. First it would work closely with the railwaymen of the Union to improve working conditions and hours, while increasing services in under-represented and poorer areas. Second it was to work with both the Federal Committee and the local Syndicates (regional groupings of local Unions, each with their own Chairpersons) to establish a new, freight-focused (there was little call for moving around the country at time) rail network. The track would be the responsibility of both the regional rail operator (there were four, like under Grouping, but they had been given a thoroughly socialist structure now) and the Federal Committee. Timetables, rolling stock and so on would be the sole responsibility of the individual railway operators. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Well, I don’t blame you if it doesn’t sound that simple, because it wasn’t.

Thomas and his committee had their work cut out for them. The UK’s system of grouping had begun the job of restructuring the network, but focused it more on passenger work. Local Syndicates really had no interest in their own workers deserting them for a more industrially rich area, and the focus that the Union required was very much freight-based. New parts, building materials and so on needed to be able to get across the country with high priority to allow the plans made by the country’s Syndicates to take shape – for instance, the lads in Sheffield wanted to triple the city’s steel output by 1930. That meant coal from Newcastle, blast furnace materials from Kent and increased supplies of iron from Cornwall. The Sheffield Syndicate (affectionately nicknamed ‘the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’ thanks to the ballsiness of the men in charge) had successfully struck deals with all the other appropriate Syndicates and were on track (pun intended) to make this happen. The trouble was, the railways weren’t up to it. The Sheffield Syndicate was demanding at least five full trainloads every hour until noon, and the network wasn’t kitted out for that sort of load. Junctions got clogged up, passing loops had queues stretching back miles and large sections of the line in rural areas were still in single track thanks to the bonkers era of ‘railway mania’ in the 19th century.

This wasn’t the only problem they faced, but it represents all the chaotic redevelopment that the railways had to supply throughout the 1920s. Couple with this (another pun, sorry) the problem of passenger traffic having to exist on the same lines – unemployment might not have existed anymore [Debatable – J. Durham] but some people still had a gran in Scotland they had to visit, and football fans still had away games to go to – and Thomas and his committee had an absolute nightmare on their hands. By 1929, industry had started improving but not at the rate people wanted, and John Maclean himself was breathing down Thomas’ neck like a lorry driver in a queue behind a 19 year old blonde.

Luckily for poor Jimmy, his saviour was about to arrive. Balding but tanned, healthy yet pipe-smoking (take that, anti-smoking culture) and arguably the greatest administrator this country has ever produced, Clement Attlee arrived home from Bengal on 11 June 1929. He’d been exceptionally highly praised by the locals in Bengal for the work he’d done for their railways, and learned a fair few tricks of the trade while he was at it. His plan for the Union’s railways was simple but ambitious, and combined with Thomas’ command of the Unions it had a chance of working. Clem is said to have entered Thomas’ office without any sense of grandeur, sat down opposite him when invited to do so, and looked him dead in the eyes. ‘So, what’s your big idea, Comrade?’ Thomas asked. Attlee’s reply was characteristically subdued and simple, while making a massive statement at the same time.

‘Four tracks good. Two tracks bad.’[1]

This simple formula would be applied and extended to every trunk line (and some branches) in the country. The problem had always been the railways choking on the amount of freight they now had to take on. Clem had proposed to, wherever possible, double the amount of track currently in use. It was an incredibly ambitious idea, not least because of the amount of land the railway syndicates were going to have to buy up to accomplish it. Thankfully, regionalisation[2] meant that instead of convincing local landowners acre by acre, once the local Syndicates were convinced (and when their committees had taken one look at the number of jobs that would be created for local men, they were convinced pretty quickly, I tell you) there were no more administrative hurdles. As a result, the glorious stretches of eight-track line that run on the major northern industrial routes that survive to this day (there is a bridge a short walk from Wakefield Westgate that provides, in my humble opinion, the best spot to photograph large numbers of trains from on the whole network) were underway by 1930 and completed by 1934. The load on all lines was lightened and jobs were created in areas particularly hard hit by the departure of capitalist bosses who left with their workers’ rightful wages stuffed in a grandfather clock and set off for Canada. The restructuring, after looking in its early stages like it would fail, had achieved great success. In helping him, Clement Attlee had saved Jimmy Thomas’ skin – but not for long. Thomas knew his star was falling as Attlee’s was rising, and Attlee found himself elected Commissary for Home Infrastructure after Thomas’ resignation at the Congress of 1932.


There was one other piece of business that Thomas’ committee had to attend to, although it was usually handed off to the more idealistic and less administratively talented members. A number of locomotives on the rails and about to be completed were of classes and names most unsuitable for a republican railway network. Thomas’ committee’s most lasting legacy aside from the increasing of the numbers of tracks is the set of guidelines they published for all future namings of locomotives, as well as the names they gave the particularly reactionary locos running at the time. Here are a few of my favourites:


So there we have it. I hope this summary hasn’t been too jarring, stuffed in here between pages and pages of waffle from some men who are no doubt a billion times cleverer than me. What I wanted to convey to you is the beauty of the British camaraderie and ingenuity that was displayed in the restructuring of our railways in the 1920s and 1930s. Organisers like Attlee and Thomas, engineers like Bulleid, Stanier and Gresley (all of whom had turned down places on the Exile ships – they loved their people more than any king, those fine men) and union men and leaders across the country pulled together to produce the right lines, the right freight plans and the right locomotives for the situation. And in true British style, they did a fantastic job, for our railway system was up to scratch and handled everything we threw at it.

Until the war.

[1] Eric Blair, Clem: The Man Who Rebuilt Britain (London: The Book Club, 1955) p.42.

[2] A shorthand term used to describe the regional Syndicates’ ownership of all formerly private land – as opposed to nationalisation.

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Red Clyde Rising: John Maclean (1879-1931)
Shirley McKitterick


Any student embarking on a degree in Political Biography will tell you that the first essay they will ever be told to write is about John Maclean. The man known as ‘The Great Compromiser’, ‘The Father of the Republic’, ‘The Red Giant’, and, according to Hugh McDiarmid, ‘Beautiful’ has, perhaps more than any other leader of our Union, been immune from real criticism or serious evaluation. Perhaps it is his status as the first Chair of the Congress of the Trade Unions, or his death at the relatively young age of 51, that have created this air of an invulnerable historical opinion around him. But one thing should be made clear about this article – I neither come to bury Maclean nor to praise him. There is no agenda here, no attempt to undermine the years of veneration that Maclean has been subject to. What there will be, however, is some investigation into what failings he may have had – notably the ‘collapse of compromise’ that took place at the end of the 1920s and nearly sent the Union into a spiraling nosedive to anarchy. So here, in the spirit of this volume, is a picture of John Maclean – warts and all.

John Maclean was born in 1879 to Calvinist parents in Pollokshaws on the outskirts of Glasgow. A bright boy, he trained as a teacher under the Free Church and gained a Master of Arts degree in 1904 from the University of Glasgow. It was here that he met James Maxton, forging a friendship and partnership that would last until Maclean’s death. Both were fiery orators who engaged heavily with University politics, but Maclean’s background in politics had come about through his involvement in the Pollokshaws Progressive Union and the local co-operative movement. His experiences there led him to conclusion that the conditions of the working classes would only be improved by social revolution, and this in turn led him to Marxism. He joined the Social Democratic Federation, which then became part of the British Socialist Party.

As the First Great War broke out across Europe, Maclean found himself utterly at odds with the imperialist conflict that was separating workers from one another because of ‘dented reactionary pride’. Fuelled by a revolutionary spirit, he worked with his comrade Maxton to agitate against the war. His fiery speeches attracted great attention among the dockers of Clydeside, and he along with Maxton is credited with radicalising that generation of workers who became known as the ‘Red Clydeside’ movement. In 1915, however, he was arrested under the hated Defence of the Realm Act and sacked from his teaching post. Though not imprisoned, he was stripped of official standing within ‘society’ and consequently turned to Marxist lectures and organization, continuing his hard work as an educator of the workers in Glasgow, eventually founding the Scottish Labour College, which survives to this day as the Maclean Institute. In 1916 he was arrested once again and imprisoned – but released in 1917 following agitation by loyal socialists inspired by the ultimately doomed rebellion underway in Russia. This freedom was shortlived, however, for upon continuing his anti-war organising and speeches he found himself arrested for ‘sedition’. On 9 May, he conducted his own defence when his trial began. He refused to plead and, in a confrontational style typical of his early career, replied ‘I object to the whole lot of them’ when asked if he objected to any members of the jury. The trial was a sham, with sections of speeches and notes being quoted completely out of context to make it seem like Maclean wanted to bring some bloody harm upon the British people, when his quarrel had always been with ‘the trickery of the British government’.

As the trial drew to a close, Maclean addressed the jury in an impassioned speech lasting 75 minutes, which he used to attack the capitalist system:


He was sentenced to five years penal servitude, and imprisoned in Peterhead prison near Aberdeen. However, a militant campaign was launched for his release:The call, surprisingly, was heeded. After being told that continued force-feeding would result in ‘irreparable damage to the prisoner’s health’ the authorities presented Maclean with a bargain that he initially refused: leave prison without charge but on the understanding that no further agitation will be made against the war. This changed, however, when news of the French capitulation reached Britain. The authorities, terrified that the mobs gathering around the prison would resort to violence to free their hero, freed Maclean that same day.

Maclean immediately rejoined the anti-war movement and wreaked havoc for the government. In the final months of the war before the ‘Peace with honour’ he was pushing for a General Strike to cripple the economy – only loyalty to British workers who would face violence kept the TUC from complying. Maclean had established himself, through links with the leaders of dockworking Unions in Glasgow, as a respected figure among Trade Unions, while his friend James Maxton had begun a campaign to enter Parliament as a radical Labour MP. By 1923, Maclean was seen as the spiritual leader of workers across the country, offering lukewarm support for the Labour Party (except when introducing Maxton as a speaker) and appearing at rallies to encourage actual revolution. The security services, knowing that arrest would simply result in all-out rioting, plotted to kill him and on the 11 January 1924 an ‘unknown assailant’ fired a pistol at him from the window of a moving car as he left a working men’s club in Leeds. The bullet completely missed him, but struck a companion in the shoulder. Maclean, in a rage, wrote an open letter to The Times (a daily newspaper of the day) and challenged those who wanted him dead to explain why ‘in broad daylight, before their peers – the workers and poorest of this country – to see how their argument for my demise is received’. The Times published it, remonstrating quite how seriously the establishment was taking Maclean by this time. There were no more attempts on his life, but his wife Agnes wrote in her diary that since that day he had seemed ‘a little more worried, and, oddly enough, a little more interested in what other people had to say’[3]. It is likely that this assassination attempt is what made Maclean so suitable as the ‘champion of compromise’ that the Union needed in those early years.

My colleague John Durham has already enlightened readers of this book on the events of the Revolution and Maclean’s role in the Inaugural Congress, so I shall add no more on that subject. However, the real business of evaluation requires a careful inspection of Maclean’s actions as Chair at the end, not the beginning, of his tenure. It was in 1928 that the first cracks in the Union’s ‘utopian’ structure began to emerge. It started a minor disagreement between two Syndicates – those of Devon and Cornwall, to be precise. Devon was home to the thriving port of Plymouth, upon which Cornwall relied for much of its overseas tin sales – its main product. The Republic of the Sicilies and the Commune of France both had great need for cheap tin, but Cornish ports lacked the capacity to take the strain of large freighters moving freely day-by-day. The dispute emerged when Devon wanted to limit Cornish Mining Unions’ access to the port, saying that Devon, too, had goods to export. Cornwall, led by the charismatic John Spargo, respectfully stated that Devon was not a different country to Cornwall, and under the Constitution of the Union of Britain all resources were to be shared and provided where needed. Devon’s reply to Spargo was that a port was not a resource. Spargo’s reply was that actually, it was.

This argument over semantics was in danger of boiling over into something far more dangerous, thanks to Sunderland-based Unions in the Tyne and Wear Syndicate deciding to take umbrage with Newcastle’s dockers restricting their own access for similar reasons. The Federal Council watched with alarm, and John Maclean decided to exercise his impeccable compromising ability by calling a meeting between all the affected parties. The meeting was a disaster. Spargo accused Maclean of being ‘an irrelevant Scotsman’ who had no moral authority to ‘dictate on Cornish matters’[4]. The Sunderland Unions believed they were being underrepresented and patronised, comparing Maclean to ‘a nice man from the government’ that the old regime would have sent up to assuage their fears. To compound this, their leader Joseph Havelock Wilson threatened to strike indefinitely until access to Newcastle’s ports was completely open to them as well as any other Union in the country. Maclean was rapidly losing control, and by the time the Congress of 1929 came around, he was faced with the first seriously contested Chairman’s election of his political life[5].


The candidate who challenged him, with real regional support, was none other than John Spargo. Highly popular in Cornwall and, ironically, Devon after his stance against the meddling of ‘an irrelevant Scotsman’ in local matters, he appealed to a great many Autonomists at the Congress and was privately endorsed by Arthur James Cook and Oswald Mosley as ‘the perfect ferret to get rid of that soft rabbit Maclean’, with the intention that Cook would easily take the Chair from Spargo at the 1930 Congress. Spargo gave a powerful speech before the election, promising to reform the ‘utterly non-regionally sensitive’ Federal Council and ‘never again permit spurious meddling’ into the affairs of local Syndicates and Unions. He was met with rapturous applause, with some Congress delegates rising to their feet. Maclean sat in his Chair, the blood draining from his face and looking like a broken man. Where was the fire of his youth now? Had he tried to compromise too much? James Maxton, sitting nearby, leant over to him and looked him straight in the face. Allegedly pausing to flick a strand of his unruly fringe out of his right eye, Maxton spoke a simple sentence to Maclean.

‘Are you going to let that Sassenach[6] do this to you?’

Maclean’s response is famous. Saying nothing to Maxton, he rose to his feet and clapped Spargo himself, before striding to the podium to make his own speech. Clearing his throat with a characteristic return to form, he raised his hands to the Congress. ‘Comrades,’ he began, ‘my Comrade here makes a number of very good points.’ The rest of the speech was not quite so pleasant to Spargo. Maclean highlighted the problems with what Spargo proposed, and viciously attacked what he perceived as the man’s hypocrisy – he had wanted to force a deal through with Devon yet objected to the elected mediators on the Federal Council helping him do so. Maclean pointed out Spargo’s other faults – his lack of real Union credentials, and how he had allegedly been elected as Chair of the Cornwall Syndicate because each Union leader voted for themselves with Spargo as a second choice. True or not, the comment led to a ripple of laughter around the room, which was said to create a glint in Maclean’s eye as he continued to lambast the man while playing up his own successes and plans for the future. ‘As we approach a new decade, Comrades, now is not the time for a novice!’ he cried, banging his fist into the lectern. ‘I may have faltered, but I put to you that I have not failed – if re-elected, my first action will be to meet with Comrade Wilson and thrash out an agreement that is suitable for all – and I promise you now that I will not sleep until it is written in the law of this Union that ports are open to all, and no longer under the direct jurisdiction of whichever Syndicate they happen to be in!’[7]. The Congress Hall erupted – for the most part. The election was still closer than it could have been, with Maclean winning by just 13% of the votes cast,[8] a far cry from his 97% of the previous year.

Nevertheless, evaluating Maclean requires not only a report of his actions, but an analysis of them. His true motivation for that powerful speech is called into question by Maxton’s words just before it – was it heartfelt, or brought on by a genuine Scottish dislike for this arrogant Cornish man who threatened Maclean’s personal popularity? We cannot know for sure, but it does not bode well for the picture of Maclean as a constant unwavering and committed socialist who always put the Union before his own ambitions. Similarly, the whole affair damages Maclean’s credibility as a great compromiser, for it was here that compromise failed. The Sunderland strikes were averted, yes, but through luck rather than Maclean’s work – Joseph Havelock Wilson died in April 1929, and the movement for striking fell apart without his leadership. Maclean also did not put in as much work as he said he would on introducing greater legislation to free ports from local authority, instead passing this duty to Jimmy Thomas and Arthur Horner, the latter of which added ‘Commissary for the Independent Port Authority’ to his ever-expanding list of titles when the work was completed. Maclean was, above all, a tired man. He was elected unopposed one final time in 1930, and appeared ‘visibly older’ to all present. The strain of the Ports Crisis has taken its toll on him, and he fell sick with influenza at the end of 1930, with most work now being done behind the scenes by the triumvirate of Maxton, Snowden and Horner. On 15 January 1931, aged 51 years, John Maclean took to his bed somehow knowing it would be for the last time. It is said that he turned to Agnes before he closed his eyes and muttered ‘Don’t you dare let them put me in Westminster Abbey.’


True to her word, Agnes ensured that his instructions were followed to the letter. Tom Mann (taking over as interim Chair until the Congress the following month) and Maxton agreed to have a State Memorial Service rather than a State Funeral, and the casket itself traveled by train overnight to Scotland, where it was eventually carried through Pollokshaw to the graveyard Maclean’s home had overlooked as a child. He is buried there to this day, although a plaque commemorating him also sits in Chairs’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

In conclusion, then, John Maclean is in many ways an enigma to evaluate. A decisive, defiant agitator in his youth, and apparently morally upright for his entire life. But a closer look at his actions in his final years tells a different story – a story of a man potentially more motivated by personal ambition and pride, a man whose complacency with his abilities as a compromiser nearly wrecked the fabric of the Union during the Ports Crisis of 1928-29. However, it would be all too easy to reach the incorrect conclusion that his zeal for socialism disappeared during this time – it did not. Even when suffering in his final months, he would answer letters and attend factory openings as much as he could, always seeming genuine and full of pride with what the workers of this country had and would continue to accomplish. Flawed? Yes. Disingenuous? Perhaps. A failure? Never.

[1] Max Hastings, The Long Walk to Revolution: John Maclean’s Story (London: Penguin Publishing Cpv., 1994) p.89.

[2] James G. Brown, Maxton: A Biography(Edinburgh: October Books, 2002) p.153.

[3] Agnes Maclean, John (Glasgow: Red Flag Publishing, 1945) p.231.

[4] This quotation made it into The Chartist, further embarrassing Maclean and calling into question his very authority outside of Scotland to some more prejudiced Autonomists.

[5] The Maximists, Autonomists and Congregationists had all declined to back candidates against Maclean in the previous two years, in light of his enduring popularity and success.

[6] Pejorative term for Englishman in Scottish slang.

[7] Margaret Cole, Living for Britain: My Diaries (London: Penguin Publishing Cpv., 1945) p.73.

[8] Eric Hobsbawm, The Ports Crisis (London: Forward Books, 1967) p.432.

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