SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

J. W. M. THOMPSON

Historians rummaging among the minutiae of our period may wonder how Mrs Castle's White Paper on trade union law came to b%given

the theatrical title In Place of Strife instead of being named in the sober and factual style

customary with official publications. It has puzzled me, too. The obvious explanation is that here is yet another incursion of the ad-man into fields he would be better kept out of, following the pattern which led the Tories to

call their last policy statement Make Life Wetter (or something of the sort) and which may well cause Mr Crossman to entitle his pensions plan Old Age Can Be Fun and a grave work like the Annual Abstract of Statistics to be re- named Figures for Everyone. However, this is a cynical view. I prefer to look deeper.

Mrs Castle gave a clue when, rejecting false modesty, she described her little scheme as `the most important charter of trade union advance for sixty years.' Unimaginative people merely supposed she was referring loosely to the Trade Disputes Act of 1906; they neglected the perfectly obvious fact that it is sixty years, almost to the day, since John Gals- worthy's harrowing drama Strife was first per- formed at the Duke of York's theatre. What more likely than that this play, epitomising as it does the bitterness and class hatred of indus- trial disputes in Edwardian England, should have entered the First Secretary's mind as the perfect symbol of that dark night out of which she proposed to lead us?

And that is not all. Strife was the progenitor of that vast sequence of dramas and novels which- all reach their climax when someone utters the ominous words, 'There's trouble at t' mill.' These are deep waters, Watson. For this is a form of literature to which the Prime Minister himself, many years ago, became in- curably addicted. I think the White Paper's title ought really to read, In Place of 'Strife.' One day a PhD student, digesting the archives of Mrs Castle's department, will give a glad cry as he finds the minute to prove me right.

A public service

For my part, the dreadful Forsyte family has all but extinguished any liking I may once have had for Galsworthy's works. Nevertheless, in picking up the text of Strife for the first time since I made my way through it as a set- book at school, I have found more to interest me than I expected. It presented, I recall, a distinctly off-putting picture of the world of industry to schoolboy readers (who are hazy about separating such works of fairly recent vintage from present-day realities) and today the savagery of the conflict between master and men in the Trenartha Tin Plate Works still emerges with shocking effect. On the one hand is the boss, implacably determined to starve his striking workers and their families into sub- mission; on the other is the workers' leader, prepared to drive his forces through any hard- ship to damage 'the white-faced, stony-hearted monster' of Capital. It is all very fraught and raw; the wife of the workers' leader dies terribly; the hatred, poverty and suffering are unsparingly depicted. Indeed,• the nature of the conflict might belong to an era centuries away rather than to a period less than a man's lifetime ago—so far and so fast has society

moved. Are we really to wonder if ageing politicians and trade union leaders still glance back over their shoulders at those days?

Out of idle curiosity I looked up the 1909 Times to see how Strife had been received.

Galsworthy, wrote the critic in a review of prodigious length, 'has done much more than write a play; he has rendered a public service.' It was a rave notice. The critic, presumably, was the great A. B. Walkley. He was much im- pressed by the irony of the ending, which sees the dispute (an unofficial strike, by the way) settled after great distress upon the terms which had been proposed at the very beginning. So not everything has changed. After that little ex- cursion into the past, almost the first words read were these in Monday's Guardian: 'What is futile about many British strikes is that the strikers could probably have achieved their aim without striking. .

A touch of the Enochs ?

As an old by-election fancier, I see some promising fixtures in the offing. Before long we shall have the titanic duel at Brighton be- tween Mr Skeffington-Lodge, the Prime Minister's most dazzled and awed admirer, and Mr Julian Amery, who is thought to see things rather differently. There is also a contest pend- ing in a Unionist seat in Ulster: Heaven knows what will happen there. But the by-election likeliest to set the politicians by the ears is that visited upon the Ladywood division of Birmingham by the death this week of Mr Victor Yates. On the face of it, Ladywood has all the characteristics of a pocket borough, with an electorate barely exceeding 20,000 and a Labour majority in 1966 of 5,315. But no: the Liberals came second last time, have been making steady advances in local government, and are quietly agog with excitement at the prospect. Well, they deserve a break, and the best of luck to them, etc etc. The sting is that the Liberal candidate, Wallace Lawler, holds views on immigration which some of his colleagues find acutely embarrassing because of their supposed resemblance to those of Mr Enoch Powell. Mr Lawler, it may be re- membered, shattered the tranquillity of a Liberal party political programme on Tv last year by abruptly speaking his mind on immi- gration, overcrowding, venereal disease and related topics. Consternation followed. Mr Lawler .s tough line may well prove highly popular with the Ladywood voters. It's hard to believe, though, that if he ever gets to West- minster it will go down half as well with all his fellow-Liberals there.

Trunk call

From a letter this week from a county educa- tion officer: 'I enjoyed your likening business mergers to a frenzy of mating elephants last week. It reminded me of a comment made to me by a former chief inspector in the Ministry of Education who shared my dislike of gargantuan local government areas. He said that doing business with the then London County Council was like attempting intercourse with an elephant, for access was difficult and one was liable to be overlain.'