Censors, spies and The Worker
Sheltered within a tolerant environment, the anti-war movement in Huddersfield was relatively unmoved by the growth of the wartime security and intelligence agencies. The activities of the censors seem to have affected it only slightly, and the occasional appearances of police spies and agents provocateurs were reported with the amused condescension of a movement confident in its own strength, rather than with the paranoia of the genuinely oppressed.
The censors' work raised occasional complaints but the references in the local press were understandably oblique and often runic. For example, in January 1917, The Worker reported the arrest of Slaithwaite socialist CO Harry Meal, and added:
"A correspondent sends in an appreciation of the work and attitude of Meal. While one can appreciate the indignation of our correspondent and members of the Slaithwaite (Socialist) Club, the existence of DoRA has to be remembered."
How much The Worker censored its own copy in fear of DoRA and the censor is not known. Unlike other similar socialist newspapers in Glasgow and Bradford it was never prosecuted nor its offices raided. It must be assumed, therefore, either that it stayed within the law or that it was thought too unimportant. Another possibility is that the local security services had a much more relaxed attitude to The Worker and to the Huddersfield anti-war movement as a whole. Corroboration for this view can be found in the Northern Command's intelligence summary for the week ending the 25 February 1918 in which, 'The Superintendent of the Huddersfield Detective Department (who had been in the police service in the town for 27 years) said that there was no evidence of pacifist troubles in Huddersfield.' The intelligence services were far more concerned about the subversive potential of 1,000 Irishmen, allegedly mostly Sinn Feiners, employed as construction workers at British Dyes in close proximity with a plant producing over a third of Britain's high explosives.
George Thomas' vigorous and potentially inflammatory campaigning style was, therefore, rarely inhibited. It was not censorship which was The Worker's major problem but the inroads made by conscription into its full-time professional staff. George Durrans, a former Worker compositor, was conscripted in 1916 and killed in action in the autumn of that year; W. L. Dixon, chief reporter and CO, was arrested in July 1916 imprisoned and then handed over to the army. In July 1917, George Thomas himself had to go. From then until the end of the war, reduced by newsprint shortages to four pages, it was edited by its directors and by volunteers.
John Schofield, BSc. of Netherton, was its first replacement editor. He survived for only four issues. An arrogant individualist and technocrat and surviving HWORC supporter, he took the opportunity offered by access to the leader column to attack all those in the local movement with whom he disagreed. The range was sufficiently broad - from Alderman Wheatley on the right to Fred Shaw on the left - to raise a howl of protest from the whole movement. He was removed. From October 1917 the responsibility was shared between Ben Riley and the local socialist schoolteacher and NUT branch President, Oliver Smith. The partnership worked well until, in June 1918, Riley was adopted as prospective parliamentary candidate for Dewsbury and Smith was called up. For the last six months of the war it carried on publishing weekly, compiled by various directors and relying increasingly on nationally syndicated labour and socialist material.
In spite of these uncertainties The Worker, although less of a source of new ideas and campaigning vigour than in Thomas' time, continued to serve its purpose as mouthpiece for the local movement and forum for the exchange of ideas. It remained both the recorder and promoter of its remarkable resilience.
The evidence of police or secret service surveillance and interference within Huddersfield's anti-war community is insubstantial. No doubt the reporting restrictions the DoRA imposed on the press had a bearing here. In 1916, however, there was a press report of a police raid on H. B. Flanders' house in Marsh. How much of a threat Flanders, a revolutionary socialist and later a member of the Communist Party, was thought to be, is not known. The police went away without taking anything. Later that year, in September, there was another raid on the home of an unnamed former NCF official with a warrant issued by 'a competent military authority'. It is not certain whether these apparently isolated events amounted to anything nor whether the anti-war movement was seriously disturbed by them. During and shortly after the events of the Alice Wheeldon affair in the spring of 1917, there were reports of government spies who were known to have been active in the area. Another report of an agent provocateur at work in the area appeared in June 1917, but it appears that he was soon spotted and did not stay long. Rather than fragmenting and reducing the power of the anti-war presence in Huddersfield, events after January 1916 helped to reinforce its own coherence and strengthen its sub-cultural identify. The part played by the CO process was important here but so was the continuing critical and multi-faceted campaigning against the war and wartime condition which, immeasurably aided by the burst of radical optimism which greeted the Russian revolution, continued unabated.
'The struggle continues ...'
After January 1916 the COs resistance to conscription gave the anti-war movement in Huddersfield a focus for its activities, but the weight of its continuing struggle was augmented, as before 1916, by related campaigns on a broader front. Workplace questions continued to irritate class relations, unsettling the propaganda certainties of a nation united and in arms. Further government regulation of trade and manufacturing provoked strong and well-founded suspicion of impending industrial conscription. Record company profits smacked of profiteering and drew calls for the conscription of wealth. The housing problem festered untended, although occasionally made bearable by promises of post-war building. Proposals for the militarisation of schooling confirmed the anti-militarists' worst suspicions; and the food crisis brought all sections of the radical community together in protest. Meanwhile, between January 1916 and the end of the war, events outside the town, especially those associated with the Russian revolutions and the 1917 Leeds Convention sharpened and reinforced aspects of the left's commitment.
Workplace disputes disturbed the wished-for social and industrial harmony of wartime Huddersfield. Most disputes ended peacefully after negotiations, but strikes were not uncommon. Some employers, arguing special cases, refused to accept nationally negotiated wage rates and provoked strikes. In September 1916 the Huddersfield firm of Westfield Cotton refused to be bound by a national settlement and drove its dyers into a nine week strike which was only settled by arbitration. In other cases, short and usually unofficial strikes became the standard response to particular grievances. This was especially true at British Dyes and among some skilled male textile workers.
All of Huddersfield's major industries were, from time to time, affected by disputes. The textile and clothing industries and the explosives-related chemical industries were regularly disturbed and not even the otherwise patriotic members of the local Carters' union were immune from workplace militancy. This inevitably renewed questions of class and class conflict but the disputes also reflected growing tensions between trade union leaders and their rank and file. While there is evidence of this in the local engineering unions, it was particularly marked in the GUTW. Its executive committee was regularly taken to task by mass meetings and branch committees for accepting arbitration too soon, for accepting too readily offers which fell far short of members' demands and for negotiating secretly and without reference to the rank and file. For example, in September 1916, the Colne Valley branch of the GUTW entered 'its emphatic protest against the action of the General Executive in accepting arbitration on the application for an additional war bonus without consulting the members.'
The bureaucracy of negotiating machinery and Munitions Tribunals, which was clamped down onto British industry in the years after 1915, made its own contributions to the erosion of trust which was at the root of the sharpened social and political attitudes of 1917 and 1918. The details of the regulations were irritants enough, restricting as they did many of the employees' basic rights and freedoms with no commensurate restriction in the power of the employers. The leaving certificate was a particular irritant because it prevented workers changing jobs without first securing the approval of either their employers or the Munitions Tribunal. It gave rise to a resentment which was fuelled by cases such as that in April 1916 of an engineering labourer earning 22s per week who had been offered 26s per week in textile dyeing but was refused a leaving certificate by the Munitions Tribunal.
The occasional heavy-handed use of the Munitions Tribunal's police powers to reinforce the employers' workplace discipline was equally unwelcome. In June 1916, for example, in response to a government request, delivered by Arthur Henderson at a public meeting in Leeds, to cancel all holidays until after July, the Engineering Employers' Federation and the Huddersfield and District Engineering and Allied Trades Federation had agreed to suspend the Whitsuntide holiday. Local engineering workers refused to work on their holidays unless they were paid time and a half. Two hundred and eighty of them from five Huddersfield factories failed to turn up to work on one or all of the usual three days of the Whitsuntide holiday. Consequently they were all summoned to appear before a special Munitions Tribunal hearing on the 5 July, and fined.
Levels of industrial unrest in Huddersfield were not sufficiently acute to attract the attention given to Glasgow, or to Sheffield or South Wales, nevertheless they were sufficient, when taken with similar conditions in other Yorkshire towns, to prompt a special enquiry in the summer of 1917. In its published report, the government commission identified, at the root of the problem, the suspicion of government intentions, the unpopularity of the Munitions Tribunals, fatigue from working systematic overtime with infrequent breaks and anger at constantly rising prices and profiteering.
Whether they were profiteering or not, there was ample evidence that many local companies were doing very well out of the war. In January 1916, for example, Learoyd Bros., a major local wool textile firm, announced profits almost double those for 1913/14 and a dividend of 15%, as opposed to 7.5%. Such figures were not unusual. Dividends in excess of 10% were the norm rather than the exception.
These wartime industrial experiences gave George Thomas and The Worker some of their most persistent propaganda themes. No sooner was compulsory military service in place than they began to sound the warnings of industrial conscription. Substitution, the practice of replacing able-bodied young men, badged because of their essential work skills, with older or less skilled workers to release them for military service, was condemned as creeping industrial conscription. In 1917, the volunteer system of National Service in industry confirmed the trend, as did 1918's desperate 'weeding' or 'combing out' of essential workers to make up short-falls in army numbers.
By the spring of 1917 concern about the impending imposition of industrial conscription was such as to persuade the Huddersfield Trades Council, local socialist groups and the local No-Conscription Council (now the Council for Civil Liberties) to convene a special conference at which the delegates unanimously expressed their opposition 'to any form of Industrial Compulsion for Military purposes ... as a menace to the civil and industrial liberties of the British people'.
For the anti-war movement and the left, Lloyd George's accession to power in December 1916 had confirmed their worst suspicions of the potential for an even more ruthless wartime capitalism. There were fears that the new ministry was bound to introduce industrial conscription because everything that the 'infamous swashbuckler' Lloyd George 'touched was tainted with slavery'. There could also be little hope from a ministry supported by 'profiteers and exploiters'. The Trades Council demanded not only that the Parliamentary Labour Party 'pursue an individual line in Parliament in the interests of the working class' but that it 'insist upon the exploiters being compelled to cease their robbery of the workers'.
The real and theoretical workplace issues were combined with more domestic concerns. The housing problem, increasingly complicated by the influx of labour to work at British Dyes, persisted unresolved. Pleas to the Local Government Board for a special subsidy to allow council house building came to nothing. Alderman Wheatley and the Trades Council continued to conjure up new ideas for financing and building new houses such as using direct labour and the product of a special one-off rate levy, but the Corporation and central government both resisted.
The housing crisis created real problems for individuals and families but the growth of wartime militarism worried both liberal radicals and the anti-war labour and socialist movement far more. It seemed to threaten not only to oppose Prussian militarism with a home-grown British version, but by its proposals for schoolchildren, to seek to re-order the social and political attitudes of the rising generation.
The radical anti-conscription alliance in pre-war Huddersfield had decisively swept the local militarists to the political sidelines. By 1916, however, they were trying to get back into the game. Wartime conditions gave credibility to their arguments for the need for a stricter social discipline and some measure of military training for boys. This time they had a new leader, Alderman Ernest Beaumont. As President of the Huddersfield Scouts and Wolf Cubs he was enthusiastic to bring their particular benefits to Huddersfield's schoolboys. His actual proposal, put to the Education Committee in April 1916, was 'that facilities be given to the Scout Rangers Association for the promotion of its work for the children attending public schools from nine to twelve years of age'.
The intention was to 'drill the boys and train them in athletics and to encourage them to become cadets'. The Education Committee was being asked to allow the Association use of school playgrounds and classrooms in each ward of the Borough. The proposal had a hostile reception. Julia Glaisyer expressed her unease at the influence of the 'militaristic element' but Liberal councillor Woffenden claimed, more force-fully, that 'they were out in the Continent to kill the very thing that this movement represented'. The Trades Council unanimously condemned it 'believing that the fostering of the military spirit among schoolchildren will be a certain cause of further wars'. The anti-militarist alliance within the Town Council put paid to Beaumont's proposals. However, anxieties about the intentions of the military and the Boy Scout lobby persisted. It came to light again during the discussions which preceded Fisher's 1918 Education Act. Anti-militarist groups worried about what they saw as 'loopholes left in the Education Bill for the introduction of military teaching by the War Office'.
Huddersfield's branch of the Council for Civil Liberties held a special meeting in June 1918 under the title 'Militarism in Education'. The conference was attended by 170 delegates representing 33 trade unions, fourteen Co-operative Societies, Adult Schools, the Free Church Council, Spiritualist Societies, six Labour parties and Trades Councils covering Huddersfield, Colne Valley and Elland. In all, the delegates representing 74,000 members, declared their unanimous:
"opposition to the military training of children under the age of 13, to the introduction into schools of special lessons on the authoritative view of patriotism and other political matters and to the application of any political or religious test whatsoever for teachers."
Later that month, Yorkshire's Women Liberals, meeting in Huddersfield, unanimously approved the same resolution.
If resurgent militarism was one issue which could call up the combined forces of Huddersfield's broad radical community, the growing crisis in the supply of food, fuel and other basic commodities was another - especially when linked to the drink question.
Shortages and high prices of essential goods had been issues on the home front since the first months of the war. After the initial panic the crisis had subsided. For a time 'business as usual' seemed to be able to provide the goods and feed the people. The government was reluctant to intervene further. By the spring of 1917, however, the crisis was beginning to reappear. In April London's coal supplies ran short and local rationing was introduced. Newsprint and other sorts of paper were in short supply, but the real problem was food.
Food prices had moved up rapidly since the early days of the war and supply had become more difficult. During the first half of 1917 there was a potato shortage and rumours of hoarding were widespread. Twice in May The Worker reported popular action by crowds to seize loads of potatoes and sell them at a price they thought reasonable. In other parts of the country there was violent rioting. Shop windows were smashed and goods commandeered for sale or simply stolen.
Protest meetings throughout the country urged the government to take some sort of action. In The Worker Harry Snell attacked the government for 'gambling with famine' and drew attention to grain wasted, in his view, in feeding racehorses and in making drink. It was this drink connection which roused Huddersfield's temperance lobby and brought it onto the same platform as the ILP. At a 'large gathering' at Huddersfield Town Hall on Friday the 27 April 1917, the Liberal Party's Alderman Woodhead and the ILP's Ben Riley united to support a resolution urging the government 'entirely and immediately to prohibit the drink trade during the war and demobilisation.' Riley justified his solidarity with the temperance lobby 'on the grounds that (1) it was necessary to conserve the food of the people, and (2) the problems of demobilisation would require to be faced by a sober clear-minded people'. The anti-war left's links with one of the traditional issues of the Liberal Nonconformist constituency were further strengthened three weeks later by a meeting at which a broad alliance of elements within the labour and socialist movement found common ground in the food and supplies crisis with radical Liberals and local Co-operative Societies.
As winter approached queuing for often inadequate supplies created its own sort of tensions. By December 1917, reports of food shortages and queuing were appearing regularly in the Huddersfield newspapers. The Trades Council called for the immediate introduction of ration cards and a politically mixed public meeting in St George's Square threatened a local general strike if the Food Committee did not immediately take power to distribute food more equitably.
The effect was dramatic. The following week the Food Committee began to take limited action. It commandeered supplies of margarine and distributed them to small shops. Shortly afterwards it began to talk of a 'sugar card' system, and to investigate ways of pooling supplies and organising a fairer system of distribution to all shops. Initially, however, the Committee's concerns were to counteract hoarding and to aid distribution. It was the local Co-operative movement which showed the way in rationing individual consumers. By January 1918, Huddersfield Industrial Society had introduced 20,000 of its own ration cards for tea, lard, butter, margarine, ham, bacon, cheese and matches.
In the meantime, the crisis continued. Queues became one of the major issues of the winter of 1917-18. For the officers of Northern Command concerned with internal order, they posed a problem. On the other hand, Huddersfield's Chief Constable thought little of them because 'it was common talk ... that 50% of the women who stood in the queues did so from choice ... they regarded the queue as a social occasion'. Serious or not, the Huddersfield Food Committee announced its own ration card scheme on 23 February. In April a national system of rationing was introduced.
The immediate problems of work, food, housing and survival were at the centre of public concern in Huddersfield during 1916 to 1918. However, for the labour and socialist movement these personal and parochial issues had to be seen in a wider context. There were national and international events and questions which had to be addressed. Most important of these was 1917's Russian revolution.
The impact of the first Russian revolution in the spring of 1917 on the British labour and socialist movement has been recognised, if occasionally exaggerated. There was much enthusiasm and optimism that similar events might spread through the rest of Europe. Huddersfield's labour and socialist movement shared that enthusiasm. At its May Day meeting it sent 'joyful congratulations to the Social Democrats of Russia'.
Of greater significance than this, however, was the summer's Leeds Labour and Socialist Convention.
The Convention was the first major venture of the United Socialist Council (USC), a small joint ILP/BSP group, formed in August 1916 to co-ordinate propaganda work at a national level in the way that the local branches were doing already. The details of the reasons for calling the Convention in Leeds and for the 3 June have become clouded by subsequent disagreements and by the divergent views of those who took part. To some, both enthusiasts for and opponents of the Convention, it was a proto-Soviet organisation committed to the overthrow of the British state and a significant moment in the history of the revolutionary left. To others, it was much less than this and had thoroughly democratic, although extra-parliamentary, intentions. In both cases the rhetoric of the time gave false impressions. In 1917 both Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald used language which could be understood as revolutionary and such was the paranoia in some parts of local and national government that they were frequently seen as such.
Broadly speaking, however, most would agree that the Convention was motivated by two basic concerns. Firstly, to welcome and celebrate the Russian revolution as a long-postponed blow for freedom and democracy in Europe. Secondly, because of the irrevocably compromised pro-war positions of both the TUC and the Labour Party, to create new agencies through which the working class and other radical groups could articulate their wartime grievances and plan for peace.
Huddersfield's BSP, ILP, Trades Council and Labour and Socialist Election Committee were all represented at the Convention and the enthusiasm of their delegates, whatever their understanding of what was going on, carried them forward to the next stage. This called for the establishment of thirteen regional Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, agreement on new resolution for the regional meetings and the election of delegates to both the regional and national councils. The Trades Council discussed the best way to handle this and the majority of delegates agreed with Alderman Wheatley who argued that 'It was time to abandon the BSP, the ILP and all the other outstanding associations and get onto one common basis'. In keeping with that spirit the Trades Council agreed to meet the LSEC and the local Council for Civil Liberties (HCCL) to decide on a common policy and to agree on someone who could be Yorkshire's delegate to the National Council. The HCCL responded, as did the LSEC. The enthusiasm soon spread beyond the town to join with similar feelings in the immediate area. On the 5 July a Huddersfield and District Workers' Committee was formed. It comprised representatives from socialist groups, trade union and Co-operative Societies in Huddersfield, Colne Valley, Brighouse, Elland and the Holme Valley. Its first purpose was to organise mass meetings throughout the area on the 29 July. Resolutions were to be put welcoming the Russian revolution, calling for a negotiated peace and urging 'upon the toilers of this country the vital necessity of securing immediately the complete control of industry'.
Despite wet weather, the key afternoon meeting in the open air in St George's Square, Huddersfield, was attended by 'several thousand Socialists' who approved the resolutions. In better weather, the evening meetings in Brighouse, New Mill, Elland, Slaithwaite and Huddersfield again, attracted average attendances of about 1,000.
Elsewhere, there was neither the enthusiasm nor the organisation to match that of the Huddersfield District. The Convention's timetable allowed for regional meetings in July and a national conference in London on the 28 July. This was far too optimistic. It was only in mid-July that Leeds Trades Council agreed to take the initiative in calling the Yorkshire regional meeting for 11 August. No one was quite sure what to do next. Huddersfield's already well-organised and collaborating groups met to take their next steps. They agreed on Wilfrid Whiteley as their nominee to be the Yorkshire region's delegate to the National Council. They also agreed on radical amendments to the Provisional Council's resolution which called upon the National Council to:
"prepare and submit to the local councils for approval: (a) proposals for the control of industry by workers; (b) proposals for replacing the present political control of the country by the administration of the National Committee and local Councils of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates."
The opportunity to test out the extent of support in this region never happened. The government banned the August meeting of the Yorkshire regional Workers' and Soldiers' Council, but the enthusiasm generated spluttered on. At its September meeting the Huddersfield LSEC was told that the Leeds conference had been abandoned. In January 1918, when invited to nominate a delegate to a revived Workers' and Soldiers' Council, it declined. The HCCL, in contrast, appointed Grace Tavener, but to no effect; the movement was dead.
The anti-war hegemony complete, 1916-1918
The failure of the Workers' Own Recruiting Committee had left Huddersfield labour and socialist movement's commitment to oppose the war unshaken. Indeed, by the end of 1917, there were complaints that that commitment was 'too unanimous to be really satisfactory'. Satisfactory or not, it was true. In fact, it went further. Anti-war sentiment not only dominated the labour and socialist movement, that movement, in turn, dominated all the other local agencies of opposition to the war. As the war continued that hegemony become more complete.
In spite of this, however, the long-standing pressure for socialist unity, between the ILP and the BSP, remained frustrated. In 1917 there was a further fusion for propaganda purposes with the Trades Council, the NCF and the HCCL, but the hoped-for ILP/BSP fusion remained elusive. The fault was not entirely with the Huddersfield members. Jess Townend as Huddersfield's delegate to the BSP's national conference in April 1917, was mandated to vote for amalgamation with the ILP. Unfortunately the majority had other plans and sidestepped the issue. This, in turn, strengthened the hand of those within the branch who had always been suspicious of diluting the BSP's ideological purity with the ILP's milk and water socialism, and prevented the branch taking unilateral action.
The more significant, and ultimately more successful, moves towards unity came from the Trades Council and the Labour and Socialist Election Committee. The need to co-ordinate wartime work may have been important here but the major reason was the need to eliminate unnecessary duplication. Since the admission of the ILP and the Labour and Socialist Clubs, the membership of the Trades and Labour Council had become an almost exact replica of that of the LSEC. As early as February 1916, Fred Wood, a former assistant secretary to the Trade Council was speaking publicly of the need for reform. He argued that the LSEC was superfluous and that the Trades Council should assume all its functions. Eighteen months later, a special meeting of the executive committees of both organisations recommended just that. In April 1918, under the new constitution of the Labour Party, the merger was agreed when the LSEC decided 'that it is desirable ... that the Trades Council form the Labour Party Branch'.
The Socialist Sunday Schools at Lockwood and in Huddersfield were integral parts of the anti-war consensus. They not only helped reinforce and extend the commitment locally, they carried opposition to the war to other parts of Yorkshire. More particularly, in May 1916 they were instrumental in resisting the influence of the 'patriotic socialists' of Bradford and Armley SSSs and in re-asserting the Yorkshire Union of Socialist Sunday Schools' commitment to 'the international solidarity of Socialism'.
In August 1917, the hegemony of the anti-war view was extended further. At the half-yearly meeting of The Worker's shareholders two of the retiring pro-war directors were soundly beaten by two anti-war candidates:
Joe Pickles 62
Jess Townend 61
J. I. Swallow 28
F. C. Green 26
The consequence was that, for the first time, The Worker had a committed anti-war majority on its board of directors. A month later that was further enhanced by the resignation of France Littlewood, the last of the 'patriotic socialist' directors who, like Green and Swallow, had been a member of the Workers' Own Recruiting Committee.
The increasingly seamless garment of the anti-war cause within Huddersfield's labour and socialist movement after 1916 was not without its flaws. Bickering between individuals did continue. This was usually conducted publicly in letters to The Worker, but there was no organised and sustained challenge. The movement, therefore, approached the end of the war more united than it had ever been.
