Just Finished Reading: 1919 – Britain on the Brink of Revolution by Chanie Rosenberg (FP: 1987)

It almost happened here – apparently. With the war over the only thing on the soldier’s minds was going home. Unfortunately the British government had other ideas. As the Russian revolution descended into Civil War the victorious Allies saw the opportunity of ending the Red Menace in its crib. The soldiers, awaiting demobilisation, had other ideas. Not only did they not want to continue fighting, many of them had left-wing sympathies. Being used, after being told that a land ‘fit for heroes’ awaited them, to suppress a workers revolt in a faraway place was for many the final straw. Grumbling grew into restlessness and that grew into actual revolt. First individuals refused to be redeployed, that whole units. Officers were ignored or roughed up. The mood was angry, bitter and getting worse. In one such revolt soldiers from another unit were sent to supress things before they got out of hand – only to join their comrades in arms. Alarm bells began to ring in London. This they knew from information coming out of Russia was how revolutions started. Almost in panic demobilisation was speeded up and speeded up again. Within months tens of thousands of troops had been sent home but that was far from the end of it.

At the end of World War One Britain was bankrupt. The ‘land fit for heroes’ would need to be delayed. Debts needed paying and the economy needed to move away from its long ‘war footing’ conditions. Wages needed holding back, women needed to go home and the workers themselves needed to be put back in their place after 5 years of increased power. None of this went down well with the newly empowered working class. They wanted more – more power, more leisure and more money – and they wanted it now before their numbers had been diluted by returning soldiers and unemployment rose again and diluted their power. It was here that the government discovered that the old remedies of carrot and stick no longer sufficed. The carrot was a shrunken remnant and the stick…..? The stick – in the shape of the police and military forces – was seemingly more inclined to join any rebellion than put it down. Indeed during the Liverpool police strike of 1919 fresh army recruits (returned veterans were considered too volatile) fired on striking policemen while naval warships sat in Liverpool harbour with their guns trained on the city itself. It would only take a single low-level commander to panic and fire into the crowd to ignite at all – at least that’s what the Tory government felt.

Clearly such a revolution never occurred. A mixture of luck, planning and divide and conquer tactics – playing individual unions off against each other and using the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) to take the heat out of any revolutionary talk got them past the point of no return. It was a close run thing it seemed but just how close is anyone’s guess. Could it have happened here? Possibly. The circumstances seemed to be ripe but, according to the author, without one critical component – a revolutionary vanguard to lead the way. Again this may be the case. The fact that the author was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (a hard Left pro-revolutionary party) undoubtedly played into this idea. This doesn’t mean he was wrong – just somewhat suspect. One of the things I am most intrigued by is that so little of this period has made it into the history books. It’s almost as if there’s a conspiracy to deny people knowledge of their (almost) revolutionary past. I find that most interesting. Definitely food for thought and an area that deserves more attention.