What did 1.7 million Britons stop doing 100 years ago?

The General Strike was the greatest display of worker solidarity in British history, but also its greatest defeat. A century after 1.7 million people downed tools and brought Britain to a standstill, Jonathan Schneer reveals why their efforts were doomed to failure

A group of miners pose outside a brick building, many in work clothes and holding lamps, standing beneath posters reading “Distress Fund – Help the Miners,” suggesting a historical appeal for support during industrial hardship.

Published: May 20, 2026 at 5:00 PM

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As May 1926 dawned, Britain spiralled into industrial chaos. On the first day of that momentous month, notices posted at pitheads by coal-mine owners barred perhaps three-quarters of a million miners from their places of work. Thirty-six hours later, following an emergency ballot, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) instructed its members to down tools – and some 1.7 million took action in support of their locked-out comrades.

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The effects were swift and dramatic. Unions immediately set about shutting down heavy industry. Within hours, building work and production of iron, steel, chemicals, electricity and gas had ground to a halt. The strikers also brought to a stop virtually all trains, buses, trams, tubes, taxis and commercial vehicles. They even deserted the docks. A general strike was under way – and Britain had never experienced anything like it.

Over the course of nine days, 4–12 May, the General Strike delivered an enormous jolt to everyday life across Britain. Yet, to anyone with a passing acquaintance with the state of industrial relations in the spring of 1926, it can hardly have come as a great surprise. This showdown between business owners and workers had been months, even years, in the making.

At the heart of the dispute was a commodity that had helped fuel Britain’s rise to global superpower status: coal. For decades, Britain had been a world leader in coal production but, in recent years, foreign competitors had modernised while for the most part their British rivals had not. This enabled them to sell their product more cheaply. Worse still, and regardless of improvements made by foreign competitors, an overvalued pound made exporting coal from Britain uneconomic.

A busy industrial coal yard with rows of open railway wagons filled with coal, marked with company names, set beside a docked steamship and large cranes used for loading cargo.

Coal-filled wagons amass at Birkenhead Docks in the mid-1920s. By this time, Britain’s coal industry was struggling to compete with foreign producers (Image by Getty Images)

By the mid-1920s, British coal mines were in deep trouble. In the summer of 1925, the Mining Association of Great Britain (MAGB) – the body representing British mining industry employers – attempted to do something about it. On 30 June, the association announced a new contract that would not only drastically cut miners’ wages but also add an extra hour to their working day.

This provoked a predictably frosty reaction from the men at the receiving end. When the mine owners unveiled the new contract, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) – the union representing mine workers – announced that it would fight, and appealed for support to the TUC. After some dithering, the TUC promised to back the miners. A general strike loomed.

Spooked by the prospect of a mass walkout, Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government intervened. It promised to make up the difference between the new, tougher contract proposed by the MAGB and the existing, less-demanding one, and to honour that promise for nine months. During that period, a commission led by Herbert Samuel, a former Liberal cabinet minister and high commissioner for Palestine, would study the industry and then recommend improvements.

Red and black

The MFGB called off its threatened strike, and celebrated what it hailed as ‘Red Friday’. But Red Friday had one consequence that the MFGB never foresaw. “We were not ready” for a general strike in 1925, said Baldwin. In the wake of Red Friday, his government began to prepare for one.

Samuel released his report on 10 March 1926. Generally speaking, it favoured the miners – but it did concede that wage cuts were inevitable. For six weeks, representatives of the mine workers and owners haggled over this report in increasingly acrimonious and ultimately fruitless meetings, some of which were chaired by Baldwin himself. The mine owners hated the government subsidy – they wanted government out of their business altogether, and insisted that the MFGB accept either pay cuts or a longer working day. “Nowt doing,” answered the miners’ leader, Herbert Smith. Baldwin, whose family owned coal mines, thought the miners pigheaded. So did members of his cabinet, some of whom were, or had been, employers. What’s more, nine months had passed since Red Friday – and the government was now ready for a general strike.

An older man in a light-coloured fedora, bow tie, and suit stands at the centre of a group of formally dressed men, all wearing hats, in a black‑and‑white early‑20th‑century scene.

Herbert Smith, president of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, which successfully fought pay cuts in 1925 (Image by Getty Images)

The TUC believed that threatening such large-scale industrial action could be useful, as it had been before Red Friday. But it did not want a general strike, and had not prepared for one. Aside from understanding that it would be big, the union body had not thought through what a general strike really meant.

The MAGB was far more bullish. It genuinely believed that it could triumph in any confrontation with the TUC. That confidence was clear in the owners’ decision to lock out miners on 1 May 1926. When those notices were posted declaring that workers would be turned away, a general strike became all but inevitable.

Within hours of industrial action being called two days later, much of Britain had ground to a standstill. Strikers were giddy. A few romantics thought that the General Strike would lead to revolution. Eventually, TUC leaders realised that might be a possibility – and it scared them. They never ceased insisting that all they wanted was for the government to reconvene discussions between the MAGB and MFGB, and that their aim merely was to ensure “bread and cheese” for miners who faced starvation wages. “There is no constitutional crisis,” they swore. But Baldwin knew that a national General Strike threatened everything a government was supposed to ensure – above all, its citizens’ health and safety. If it ceased to safeguard those, it lost its raison d’être.

Strikers were giddy. A few romantics thought the General Strike would lead to revolution

In calling merely for a resumption of talks, the TUC was playing for something like a tie. Baldwin, however, was playing to win. The government mobilised the army and navy, even the air force. Cabinet ministers, civil servants and newly appointed ‘civil commissioners’ all swung into carefully considered action to maintain essential services and supplies across the country. They recruited, trained, sent to work and paid half a million strike-breakers.

Soldiers in First World War–era uniforms march in formation along a street, each carrying a rifle, with a supply truck loaded with sacks visible behind them.

Soldiers deployed during the General Strike. The army, navy and air force were all mobilised (Image by Getty Images)

In 1926, there was no better-organised working class than Britain’s. However, it could not beat the British government. Once the leaders of the TUC figured that out, and realised they did not want to beat it, they called an end to the fight. Of course they wanted to replace the Conservative government – but only as the result of Labour winning a general election. If they won the General Strike, then they would have defeated a democratically elected government. Who, then, would govern the country? That would fall to them, which was unthinkable. None of the TUC leaders was a revolutionary.

In addition to the army and navy, the government reinforced the police with 240,000 ‘specials’ sporting armbands, tin hats and truncheons. They were not much loved. “We viewed them as strike-breakers plain and simple,” said a picket. In Ipswich, for example, gentleman ‘specials’ belonging to the Ranelagh Polo Club rode great, galloping steeds at picketers. Their humbler brothers patrolled in mere automobiles. On one occasion, a car screeched to a halt before a line of pickets. “In a few moments,” recorded a Metropolitan Police news sheet, “the strikers… were in full retreat, pursued by a number of hefty young specials who gave them something to go on with and a bit more.”

These kinds of brawls occurred everywhere. “What grieves the men most,” recorded a TUC Intelligence Committee report, “is the sudden arrival of irresponsible youths called ‘specials’ in motor cars, who jump out and commence slashing about with their batons without using any discretion whatever.”

A damaged early‑20th‑century double‑decker bus sits on a city street, its front end broken, with pedestrians and nearby vehicles around it and route advertisements visible along the upper deck.

A charred London bus in the aftermath of an attack by striking workers in 1926. Pickets often targeted vehicles driven by volunteers (Image by Getty Images)

Volunteers as villains

To undertake the jobs that strikers would not, the government also employed ‘volunteers’ – many of whom, according to Cambridge alumna JL Dawson, who knew some, thought they were engaged in “a lark, for the sake of their country”. ‘Volunteers’ staffed every sort of enterprise. Usually, the learning curve was not steep – unless volunteers were driving a train, in which case it was so steep they might fall off. Possibly the worst example came in Edinburgh on 10 May, when a passenger train and a goods train manned by volunteer crews collided. Three people died and 13 were hospitalised.

Strikers hated the ‘volunteers’ almost as much as they hated the ‘specials’. They thought that the ‘volunteers’ stood between themselves and a decent standard of life, and acted accordingly. To cite just one example, on the morning of 6 May, 500 miners “armed with stones and other missiles” (according to the Daily Mirror) descended upon the Glasgow tramway depot in Ruby Street “to prevent student volunteers who were sleeping [there] from coming out with the Corporation cars”. A melee ensued, and windows were smashed. When police arrived, one Sergeant McLintock suffered “head injuries and concussion through having been struck by a brick.” Later, according to the Manchester Guardian, the undaunted miners “marched to the Students’ Union and challenged the students to a fight… Another conflict occurred in the evening, lasting fully three hours”.

And yet, when the strike finished, some ill-informed, boastful Britons congratulated themselves for living in a country where so peaceful a stoppage had taken place. True, there had been no armed rebellion, but violence bubbled beneath the surface almost everywhere. Whenever it broke through, however, it was disorganised, conducted by men armed with sticks and stones, never firearms, and with no greater purpose than to defend an aspect of the strike. Almost always police contained it – and anyway, everyone knew that the army and navy stood behind the police.

Scratch a socialist

In 1926, a spectre haunted British Conservatives: communism. According to Major GM Kindersley, MP for Hitchin, communists were undermining his country “not merely by destroying the patriotic and religious instincts, but also by deliberate sex corruption” (presumably because Kindersley believed communists practised ‘free love’). According to Viscount Bledisoe, parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, “The tyranny of Bolshevism [was] becoming intolerable, and [was] ruining many poor & ignorant people” – by which he meant workers in his own coal mines. According to Conservative home secretary William Joynson-Hicks (‘Jix’), “Scratch a socialist and you will find a communist.” In effect, he was suggesting that members of the Labour Party and the TUC were communists.

A group of early‑20th‑century women stand outdoors beneath a banner reading “Women’s Guild of,” dressed in patterned dresses, shawls, and hats, some holding blankets, suggesting a gathering or march by a women’s organisation

These fishermen’s wives from Cullercoats, Northumberland, were among those who protested against the strike (Image by Getty Images)

Jix did not understand what British communists were up to in 1926, nor even what Josef Stalin thought they should be up to. The Soviet leader had concluded that there would be no revolution in Britain for the foreseeable future. The government was too strong, the leaders – and members – of the working class too tame and short-sighted. Stalin laid down the law: British communists should “bore from within”, slowly but surely gaining the trust and respect of workmates on the shop floor and in the unions, in order to teach them to be far-sighted and less tame.

Most British communists understood that the General Strike did not presage revolution. “This is not the revolutionary crisis which is haunting the minds of the ruling class,” wrote JT Murphy, a member of the party’s executive committee, in the Workers’ Weekly of 30 April. “[Rather, it is] one of a long series of crises attending the decline of British capitalism.”

Still, the General Strike provided British communists with a teachable moment: they thought it revealed the true nature of British conservatism and capitalism, tame trade unionism and the tamer Labour Party. However, pointing that out got British communists into trouble – not least because they also often declared that they themselves were not tame, and dared the authorities to do something about it. Which the authorities did during the strike, arresting 1,200 out of approximately 6,000 members of the British Communist Party.

Not only did Jix and other prominent Conservatives misunderstand the temper of the communists, the Labour Party and the TUC, they misunderstood the temper of the country. In 1926, few Britons were worrying about the Russian Revolution of October 1917, but many were recalling August 1914. Some remembered their older brothers volunteering to defend the country from Germany; now they volunteered to defend it from strikers. “With nearly all of us,” a St John’s College, Cambridge undergraduate explained to his mother, “it is the desire of the unattached young male to be ‘in it’.” He became a ‘volunteer’.

An equal number who remembered 1914 jumped to help the miners. “During the Great War we were told to look for our enemy abroad,” remembered a miners’ leader, “but [today] the… miner is in the front trench [in Britain] and he must be backed up by every calling and trade.”

Two million workers did just that. Some had more in mind than backing up their comrades. According to the Newcastle Workers’ Chronicle, many of the strikers wanted “a higher, nobler and better standard of life” for everyone. Striking in sympathy with the miners, they meant to make all workers’ lives “honourable, magnificent and noble”. “They were laying the foundations of a new society in which men, women and children would enjoy life in accordance with civilised conceptions.”

Many were more interested in the Bible than in Bolshevism. One aspiring Labour candidate said she stood for the “practical operation of Christ’s teaching, and the same spirit that animated His disciples. Jesus said: ‘Feed my lambs.’ He did not say: ‘Give thousands of pounds to the Duke of Northumberland.’” This kind of language only worried the leaders of the TUC. The General Strike had opened Pandora’s Box. They wanted to slam it shut.

Humiliating end

On the evening of 6 May, Herbert Samuel returned from holiday in Switzerland. The main author of the report that had been intended to avert the strike had come home because now he thought he was the man to end it. He interviewed the principals again, and followed up his earlier report with the Samuel Recommendations. Most importantly, these advised the miners to agree to discuss wage cuts; the government to reconvene negotiations between the two parties; and the employers not to victimise striking employees when they returned to work.

A person in early‑20th‑century formal clothing stands outdoors wearing a dark overcoat, tie, and bowler hat, with part of a building and door behind them.

Liberal politician Herbert Samuel, whose proposals for British coal-mining failed to avert the strike (Image by Getty Images)

Although Samuel scrupulously told the TUC men that he had no remit from the government at this point, he unscrupulously let them believe that the government would accept his proposals. So the TUC men accepted them – without consulting the miners who, when they finally learned what Samuel proposed, answered once again: “Nowt doing.”

By now, TUC negotiators had had enough of the miners’ intransigence. Two million workers had risked all on their behalf, and faced what could be devastating defeat as a result. A TUC delegation appeared at 10 Downing Street at noon on 12 May to call off the strike unconditionally. These men assumed that Baldwin had accepted all of Samuel’s recommendations. In fact, he accepted none. Lord Birkenhead, secretary of state for India, was moved to pity: “It was so humiliating that some instinctive breeding made one unwilling even to look at them.”

Two million workers risked all on the miners’ behalf, and faced devastating defeat as a result

Finer feelings were absent where it counted. Employers had no pity for local strike leaders who wanted their jobs back; instead, they blacklisted them. Similarly, mine owners had no sympathy for their workers who’d been driven (after six months’ more futile resistance, leaving their cupboards completely bare) to accept, as one MAGB leader himself termed it, “a miserable wage”.

The General Strike was at once the greatest demonstration of worker solidarity in British history – and the greatest defeat for British labour. This action takes its place as a monumental event in the country’s history for these reasons alone.

But the story doesn’t end there. British workers and their leaders also learned several vital lessons from the strike. The first was that unions had enormous power. The second was that they should use this power for specific industrial purposes only – taking similar mass actions off the table in future, because inevitably an effective national General Strike must threaten the government. The third was to follow the parliamentary road always. These lessons are as relevant today as they were 100 years ago.

Jonathan Schneer is a historian of modern Britain. His latest book, Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926, was published by OUP in March

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This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

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