Labour
Keeping up
Michael Hatfield
Joyce Bellamy and John Saville, in their Dictionary of Labour Biography, have set themselves more than a lifetime's work. AS they acknowledged in the first volume, the project will have to be completed by others. With enthusiasm and not despair they wrote that they see no end to the Dictionary. Sufficient, therefore, that they devote their energies to laying a substantial foundation to a many-volumed work. Styled to an extent on the DNB, the work will be a compilation of biographies of those who have contributed in 'large or small degree to the evolution of the Labour movement. The lieutenants of Labourism will stand alongside the more instantly recognisable generals. The period covered is from the near-revolutionary 1890s to the present day. Those who beat back and overcame the "swinish multitude" resistance of Burke and his kind will be linked to their heirs who will have to deny those prophets of doom who forsee Orwellian totalitarian courts run from a pigsty.
It is not the function of Bellamy and Saville to speculate. In their lifetime they hope to produce the first eight or ten volumes of this mammoth and invaluable undertaking which first seized the imagination of the late G.D.H. Cole. Twenty-five years ago his wife, Dame Margaret, wrote a book on the makers of the Labour movement in which the hope was expressed: "One day our movement will itself produce a biographical encyclopaedia, a worthy collection of the names and lives of those who served it. May that day be soon, for records are not immortal." The Dictionary fulfils that wish and is rightly dedicated to the pioneering spirit of the Coles. On the basis of the first two volumes, the second of which is now published (Macmillan 00), the achievement of the editors (and their contributors) is remarkable both in scholarship and scope. Many of those who figure were active in the years when, to use the memorable phrase of Professor Briggs, "the scaffolding of the modern Labour movement" was erected. For the majority, dogma had to ride tandem with the constraints of a developing democracy. Here is the lost Labour leader David Shackleton (Churchill took him as a labour adviser) addressing the 1910 annual party conference before he left politics: "We have had the usual attempts to alter the constitution in the direction of including the word 'socialist' in the title of our candidates, but I am pleased to say this has been overwhelmingly defeated, and the candidates will still be known under the simple title of Labour candidates." Some departed, drained or disillusioned; others, like Victor Grayson, to whom Shackleton, in part, was referring, retired, hurt.
The Dictionary is more than a compilation of biographies. A list of sources is given under each name as well as lists of written work. And a further dimension is added with the innovation in this type of publication of a general index ranging over the subject matter which will be of enormous value to students of working-class history. The area covered is vast. While in the first volume there was a concentration on the cooperators' and miners' leaders, the net has been cast wider in the latest. Chartists stand column by column with Owenites; radical trade unionists mingle with revolutionaries. The editors make no pretence that the areas under study have been exhausted. By volume three they hope to have completed all the Lib-Lab and Labour Members of Parliament elected before 1914 as well as extending further into the area of cooperators and miners. It is an on-going process and the editors make a point of saying they welcome contributions and suggestions.
Some of the names in the first two volumes will be familiar, others outside the knowledge of most but the specialist. Lansbury appears in the second volume and so does Deakin. There is also Sir James O'Grady (the name was selected at random) and one may be forgiven for saying — who? His contribution has now been virtually forgotten. It is one of the glories of the Dictionary that such men, and women, should be resurrected and preserved. O'Grady started his working life at fourteen in a mineral water factory; by the age of thirty-two he was President of the Trades Union Congress and closed his heavily politicised presidential address with the closing lines of Morris's 'The Day is Corning': ". . . Come cast off all the fooling, for this at least we know, That the Dawn and the Day is coming, and forth the Banners Go." The speech was seen as the first to be made by a TUC president advocating socialism as an objective of the trade union movement. One year later, in 1899, the TUC was to establish the Labour Representation Committee. The banners were to be carried by a potent political force.
Those who erected the scaffolding also unknowingly acted like woodworm on the fabric of the Liberal Party. This is not what C. F. G. Masterman — the subject of a revealing study in Essays in Anti-Labour History — had in mind when he referred to the "dead and disastrous attempts to construct an insect state." In criticising and warning against the advances of socialism he was attempting to influence his fellow Liberals to absorb some of the aspirations of the working classes or be cold-shouldered out of the main political ring. In this he failed and the Liberals were squeezed out with the advent of class politics. Bevan's
dictum that those who walk in the middle or the road are bound to get knocked down sooner or later is heretical in these days of consensus centre politics, but who is to deny that there is something to be learned from yesterday's lessons?
The authors of the Essays (edited by Kenneth D. Brown: Macmillan £10) trace some of the movements and men wno either attempted to siphon off the growing discontent or erect bulwarks against the banner carriers. The recent attempt of Conservative Mr John Gorst to form a middle-class organisation is not the first. A Middle Class Defence Association was active in the early part of the century, as was the Anti-Socialist Union and the Liberty and Property Defence League. Sixty years or so on and the middle classes, as some would have it, still see themselves encircled by a renaissance of trade union militancy. There was also at the beginning of the century prophets of doom like Mr J. St Loe Strachey who thought socialism meant "the overthrow of the Christian moral code to marriage and the relation of the sexes, and must end in free love and promiscuity." Has there been an advance, and if so, who are carrying the banners?
Not all were quite as extreme as Strachey, as some of the essays demonstrate. But as Brown in his instructive introduction points out almost the only positive policy which anti-socialists did develop was that of co-partnership and profit-sharing, which forms the subject of Edward Bristow's study. The prime motivation of those who attempted to channel the rising tide of Labourism into the contemporary conduits of politics was the fear of the threat to the individual. It is indeed significant, as Brown tells us, that according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the words 'individualism and 'collectivism' were first used in the context of government growth in the 1880s. Nearly a century on and there is a sense of viewing part of the political landscape through a reflex lens: the inherent collectivist Labour Party is now backpedalling away from the essentially bureaucratic control over wages white the managerial men in the Conservative Party see • the salvation of neo-capitalism and an accepted mixed. economy in the rigidities of a planned prices and incomes policy.
Michael Hatfield is On the political staff of the Times
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