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The 1911 childrens' strike In the summer of 1911, unrest broke out in every industrial town in Britain. The superisis.:..- Edwardian Britain had already broken the year before, and by the next year the first ever a ***= had been waged - in transport and the mines. These were the really bitter, formative bears ciie.i?: = movement as we know it today. The working class was. feeling its potential strength. Shop::: += grew enormously and national trade un ions were forged from the proliferation of local and ofter ect me The National Union of Railwaymen was created in 1912 and sprung in months from ::: i These were years of bitter struggle. A movement of millions established the basis for those trade - - ..: political rights which today are under fire from the Tory government. Today's seizure of the Politica: F.-=: of the Engineers was echoed sixty and more years ago by court judgements which tampered witn unior. ?..:: and limited drastically the rights of unions to use them for political purposes. The whole decade before the First World War was torn with social strife. Proud "Britannia", the uncerase:able, suffered dissent at home and across the Irish sea. The "Irish Question" was a permanent irritant ic: i= ruling class; middle class women were taking a militant stand on the question of the vote which was denied them; for the first time for decades, inflation was eating at workers' wages as the former position of total economic dominance in the world was challenged, in particular by Germany.
Starting with seamen and firemen in Southampton, the strike movement of the summer of 1911 swept the ports It was in the waterfront jungles and dense slums of Hull, Dundee, Glasgow, Liverpool and Lorde= that the struggle raged most fiercely. In the aftermath of this, and learning directly from it, the school childrer. in these areas came out on strike. The first action was probably in Llannelli, where two striking railwaymen had been shot dead, and within days the elementary schools in every industrial town were affected. In a new pamphlet by Dave Marson in the Ruskin History Workshop series, he lists 62 towns which had school strikes in the September of that year, and he estimates that to be an incomplete list. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. Crowds of boys paraded outside schools, calling out the others. akin to flying pickets, were organised by strike committees. In Hull and Dundee, where the strikes had most support, thousands of children marched through the streets carrying placards to advertise their demands. Particularly disliked teachers were stoned in some cases, and in Liverpool a teacher was killed! On the other hand, in many areas the threat of head-teachers, police and magistrates were sufficient to break up the Who were they and what did they want? The pamphlet is based on an exhaustive study of local newspapers of the time, and makes it very clear that the mass of those involved were from what was called the "Truant class" - the poorest and most downtrodden slum children. The photographs show them with shaved heads to had begun that summer to raise their heads; the dock labourers and warehouse workers who had begun to The direct relationship between this upsurge of working class children and their parents' fight, was not lost "First the sailors and dockers; then the millers, cement workers, timber workers, railway men, news boys, "Their conduct of the strike reveals a close intimacy with the methods employed in the railway and dockers' But neither was it lost on the boys: "Our fathers starved to get what they want; what our fathers have done, we can do," one boy is reported to have told a reporter. At Ashton-under-Lyne, pickets pinned cards to their By interviews with retired workers and the use of other material, the author paints a brief but vivid picture of the conditions which existed in docklands in 1911. For example, where there were never less than 7,000 men looking for work on the docks, even at the height of a boom there was only work for 4,000 in Hull. Such conditions were responsible for the ruthless role of the employers, poverty, disease and starvation. against this that the most ferocious battle had to he waged for even the right to regular work. Small wonder that Ben Ellet led the London docker: on Tower Hill in 1912, in a prayer "God strike Lord Devonport dead" The children carried all the scars of these conditions; they bore the brunt. From the earliest age, hunger, disease, filthy dwellings, drunkenness, prustitution, were well known to them. At the same time, forcibly dragged into the state elementarv schools. often up since dawn as butchers' boys and the like. they were treated 300,000 members.
like wild fire.
courage and solidarity of the children.
keep down the lice, organise against the most horrific conditions imaginable.
on the ruling class :
factory girls and now the school boys" (Hull Daily News) strikes" (Birmingham Daily Mail).
coats with the word 'pickets' written on them.
(The chairman of the Port of London Authority).
"Rolling columns"
31
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in the most humiliating fashion. Dave Marson brings to life the sort of daily miseries heaped onto the heads of At the benevolent discretion of the head, poor children could get hand-outs. Arriving bare-food. they were sent with a ticket to a clog maker who provided clogs marked with a circle on the toccap so they couldn't be Similar humiliations are heaped today on the heads of the children who have to queue publicly for free dinner These youthful members of the working class saw their fathers stand up for themselves and fight and someeven then no employer was able to systematically beat his workers if they struck. They were also young, 14year olds at the most. A pair of strikers aged six and eight were hauled up in front of Tower Bridge Magistrates for "wandering abroad without proper guardianship" as if the authorities cared too much in "normal" circumstances about the tens of thousands of vagrant and half-starved children in the East End and docklands of Their demands varied from area to area. but always the demand for the end of the cane. Very common were the calls for payment and for free meals. In Leicester. they carried banners saying "He want 30s a week and But just as with the less widespread but important movement in London schools in the spring of 1973, the particular demands were often confused and unclear. It was a general revolt against their conditions and a striving for fundamental change, in the wake of tremendous and exemplary struggles of the organised working class. It was particularly the miners in carly 1972 who had impressed on all layers of the working class, the possibilities of dealing the Tories a blow through action. Working class school students in London were champing at the bit and took inspiration from the miners; only a small spark set thousands to demonstrations It is not accidental that the capitalist press reached new depths of low abuse and lies against these children as it had done in 1911. The London evening papers excelled themselves in filth against their 13 and 14 year old adversaries with no voice to answer them. The ruling class was scared stiff of these movements. In both cases, notice was served that the rising generation of young workers was already learning to fight. And were they so far wrong in 1911? I don't think so. A bit of arithmetic puts it in perspective. The leaders were around 13 vears of age in 1911. All old enough to have been hurled into the carnage of the First Those who came back would have been around 21 years old in the year or so following, when revolutionary events took place in Britain in the wake of the Russian Revolution. the very same school strikers of 1911 were in the vanguard in the post-war industrial battles. many being seasoned fighters by the 1926 General Strike. It is just such a repetition over the next few years which explains the present ruling class's fears about schools today. It is the reason for the increasing campaigns But history is never repeated in the same way. Education in modern capitalism has a much bigger role than in 1911 - all working class pupils now stay until they are 16 and vastly increased numbers stay beyond that. A situation of near breakdown and crisis is already developing, and general social changes have determined that working class children start at a far higher level of confidence and preparedness to struggle. Similarly, the 1911 movement was in part "broken" by the working class mothers who, afraid of the consequences rather than because they had no sympathy. hauled their children back to school. Girls played very little role except in Scotland. It is difficult to imagine either being the case in modern conditions. This pamphlet is limited to a vivid and lively account of the events. There is little or no context or perspective developed. Vesertheless, a 'must' for socialists, particularly Young Socialists. One thing is certain and that is that in the nest few years, explosive movements of the working class will be echoed in the comprehensive and secondary schools such as to eclipse even this first, long forgotten but magnificent fight of over 60 years ago. A study of this pamphlet will help in understanding and future intervention in these children by their stick-wielding teachers!
pawned.
tickets!
how gathered the courage to do the same.
London!
less hours per day."
in the centre of London.
about "indiscipline" in schools.
these struggles.
32 daily 'inspection' and public humiliation for the unwashed.
That was the message which struck terror in the bosses' hearts.
how they were singled out as "dunces": how school began with This was in some ways even more difficult for school-children- Il is a fair bet that many of BY BOB REEVES
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