Men of the

People

Lord Robens tiPhill All The Way Bernard Taylor (Sidgwick and Jackson £3.00) The Road from Wigan Pier Olga Cannon and J. R. L. Anderson (Gollancz £3.90)

Bernard Taylor was born in 1895 and Leslie Cannon in 1920. Today Bernard Taylor is Lord Taylor, sits in the House of Lords and takes an active part in political debates there. Leslie Cannon died in 1970 when he was fifty.

Strange as it may seem, the lives of these two men are very similar, although they lived Miles apart. One a Lancashire man and the Other from Nottinghamshire. Only the Pennines and the years separated them, their environment roughly the same, they were both Children of a large family, they were both from working-class families, both knew and experienced poverty, both moved into the Labour movement, both became active in the Trade Union movement, and both were imbued with the same ideals and determination to change the system of society which had dealt them and their contemporaries such a raw deal.

Bernard Taylor became a Nottinghamshire Miner at the age of thirteen. He knew what it Was to work a nine-hour day for Is 3d and When finally he was allowed the glorious Privilege of working underground, he received 2s a day. The Nonconformist chapel was his training ground in public speaking, and as a lay preacher he travelled far and wide. One of the great dettghts of my life has been to sit in the House of Commons and listen to the very well modulated voice of Bernard Taylor talking of Nottinghamshire and the mines and the mining villages and the men and the Communities amongst which he lived and still does, and loved.

Very little is really understood and known about the mining community by people outside the mining areas. But no one, reading this book by Bernard Taylor, could but fail to be impressed by the graphic description of the kind of life that young men like himself lived in and around the pits and the communal life of the mining villages. One can understand the pressures that caused high-minded first-class people like Bernard Taylor and Leslie Cannon 'to devote themselves to the Labour and Trade Union Movement in an endeavour to improve not Just their own lot, but the lot of the community in which they lived. Where else could theY turn? The alternative to activity in the Trade Union, Labour and Co-operative movements was to do nothing but lie down under an inhuman uncaring capitalist system of society. Bernard Taylor lived in hard and difficult times, and his description of the long drawn out strikes in the Nottinghamshire coal field, of the rise and fall of the Spencer Union has to be read quietly and with understanding to be believed and understood. Today in the mining industry one is still getting the splash-back from those early days. This is not surprising, bearing in mind that the children of miners are the miners of the future. They are at home with the mining language and the mining atmosphere from the moment they can first talk and under

stand. Around the kitchen table it is stories of the pit and the coal that they hear first. It is not to be wondered, therefore, that the hard, difficult and merciless days of the 1920's and the 1930's linger on and show themselves in a militancy which regards management as a natural enemy. In due course this will change, but only when a new generation grows up which has its own experience based on rather better standards of management and humanity than in the early days of Bernard Taylor.

No one today, meeting Bernard Taylor, would ever believe that this was a man who had seen hardship and poverty, victimisation, unemployment and all the things which one might expect would sour a man. Bernard Tay lor today is a man who has not been soured by his experiences. I can remember that remarkable partnership between him and another great mining man — a great humani tarian, Jim Griffiths — when in the immediate post-war years Griffiths was the Minis ter for National Insurance with Taylor as his Parliamentary Private Secretary. These two men operated the post-war social security system with some feeling, based as it was upon personal knowledge of the requirements of those who were grievously under-privileged.

Bernard Taylor's story is a story of a man who rose above hardship and who remains today a great gentleman, enriched by his life's experience, an enrichment that permeates his whole being and is manifest in all his conversations.

Twenty-five years later came Leslie Cannon, a fellow Lancastrian, another man whom I came to know intimately, and whom I greatly admired.

He was born in the 1920s and so lived through two decades of unemployment and a restless young generation. In this he took a different line to Taylor. Not for him the way of the Methodist chapel or the gentle line of the Labour Party, quietly working for change and an amelioration of the capitalist system. Les Cannon turned towards Communism and the Marxist philosophy. He lived in the years of the harshness of the means test and in a world where unemployment was never below two million people, and in 1931 reached a peak of three million. He was the son of a miner in the days when the post-war boom for the mining industry had come to an end. By 1921, when Leslie was just a year old, the first real battle between the miners and the mine owners took place. There was a lock-out for three months and the miners returned to the mines defeated. They were hard days, because there was no alternative work, no income tax to be recovered, and no social services such as we know today. By the time Leslie Cannon was six, came the General Strike in support of the miners.

The General Strike lasted nine days, but the miners went on and stayed out for another six months. They then went back to the pit beaten and broken on much worse terms than before. The hates and the bitterness reached deep down. Revolution seemed to many in the working class the only way out. Leslie's father had by that time been a member of the Communist Party for six years. He was known and noted and blacklisted. He had, as could readily be imagined, taken an active part in the strike; he was a lodge official of his Union and he played a prominent part locally and nationally in the dispute; his activities not passing unnoticed. When the strike was over he was a marked man. Jim Cannon never worked in the coal fields again.

.He was unemployed and as an unemployed worker his unemployment relief came to just over £2 per week for the whole family. Even allowing for the difference in prices, £2 per week to keep nine people was an impossible task. Food was short, the children were ill, Leslie himself suffered from an ear discharge and was ill from time to time, his mother organised a paper round and did the best she could with the relief by selling papers to keep the family together. The boys in the family would go to the Wigan open air market to pick up whatever orange boxes or broken crates they could persuade the stall-holder to let them have. These they would take home for father Cannon to chop into firewood, then tied up in bundles the boys sold them in the streets from a home-made wooden barrow at id or id a bundle. In order further to increase the family income they went coal picking.

Leslie's father was a founder member of the Wigan Branch of the Communist Party in 1920 and he broke with the Communists in 1929. Strangely enough he broke with the Communists not because of anything the Russians had done, as so many have broken with the Communists, in these post-war years, but because the Communists decided to conduct a campaign against A. J. Cook, the miners leader. Leslie Cannon's father sup ported Cook and so he was told that he must either endorse the campaign against Cook or leave the Communist Party. His loyalty to the miners and the miners' leader won. He left the Party and he advised his son not to join the Party.

Nevertheless, when he was nineteen, Leslie Cannon joined the Communist Party. It was the year of the Hitler war, 1939. This, in brief, was the background of a man who when he died had carved for himself a special niche in the councils of the nation. He had won for himself the respect of men of all parties and of none. His views were listened to with respect by Prime Ministers and businessmen. His clear decisive thinking and modern approach to trade unionism marked him out as a man of the future, and the trade union movement is much the poorer for his passing. His early death a tragic loss to the nation.

The story of the way in which he came to be regarded as one of the ablest young men in the Communist Party of Great Britain, his break with the Communist Party, his long battle to prevent the Communist domination of the Electrical Trades Union, of which he was a member, the difficulties which he faced in almost single-handedly searching the country from end to end for the evidence which finally smashed the Communist hold in his union and finishing in a brilliant victory in the High Court in 1961, makes absorbing reading.

Indeed, if it were not that one knew this was true in every sense of the word, one would almost think that one was reading a novel about events in which a good deal of :icence had been used. But it is the true story of a great man who had he lived would undoubtedly have made a great mark on the country and in the international trade union movement.