BOOK REVIEWS

Published date01 March 1965
Date01 March 1965
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1965.tb00891.x
BOOK
REVIEWS
CITRINE
ON
THE
GENERAL
STRIKE
AND TRADE
UNIONSTRUCTURE
As a body of literature, and as a contribution to labour history, the auto-
biographies of trade union leaders make poor reading. Full of stale anec-
dotes, often inaccurate, they do little to illuminate the character of their
authors or the nature of the organizations which they led. Lord Citrine has
now given
us
something very different. The first volume of his autobio-
graphyl is well-written and well-constructed; it tells
us
much about the
trade union movement and its problems in the period it covers; and it has
the ring ofhonesty. We can take it that it was Citrine’s intention to be frank.
But his competence as a shorthand writer must take its share of the credit.
It is, for example, difficult to believe that, without their words and his own
comments freshly recorded at the time, his memory of the parts played by
Bevin and Thomas in the General Strike would not have been affected by
their subsequent reputations. As it
is
the pictureof Bevin, thestageNapoleon,
and Thomas, the man who grasped the needs of the hour, comes across
almost with the impact of a snapshot.
Above all, however, Citrine does not hesitate to turn the camera on
himself
-
‘warts and all’. He makes it clear how far his rise in the trade
union world was due to the efficiency of his office methods. He records with
pride the remark of an official of the Electrical Trades Union ‘that “the
system
of
centralized finance which Citrine introduced saved the union”
’.
And when he was appointed assistant secretary to Fred Bramley at the
Trades Union Congress ‘it wasn’t long before
I
acquired a knowledge of
the work of the departments and started to effect improvements with his
fuil support’. But his interest in fortune-telling is also recorded; he is willing
to see some of the main events of his career as the fulfilment of the forecast
of a Liverpool phrenologist’s widow. In his youth he tried to conquer ner-
vousness by setting himself such tests as ‘walking at night through the
darkest and most forbidding places’, and climbing New Brighton Tower.
The same Citrine cut his future wife’s and his own ‘full names’ on a sand-
stone obelisk in West Kirby in
1912,
but chose ‘an unobtrusive spot’. Here
is a man who shows himself as he is.
He leaves little doubt that he
is
a prig. Having undertaken not to smoke
until the age of twenty-one the habit became ‘so firmly rooted that
I
never
at any time afterwards have had the desire to smoke’. He broke the pledge
at the age of thirty-eight, but only by one glass of sherry at a time, and
SO
1
Men and
Work,
An Autobiography,
by
Lord Citrine. Hutchinson, London,
1964,
384
pp.,
40s.
I10
BOOK
REVIEWS
I11
as not ‘to appear unsociable’. This, he tells us, is not to be construed as
‘a
tirade against those who do drink, most of whom (in my experience) are
temperate, good-natured fellows’. As for gossip, ‘fortunately
I
had one
of
those memories which could not carry tittle-tattle’.
It has been remarked
(I
think by
V.
L. Allen) that to judge from those
who have written autobiographies, trade union leaders are not interested
in trade unionism. Political successes, trips abroad, contacts with those
born to fame, especially members of the royal family, all appear to loom
larger for them than the trade union problems of their day. In this respect
Citrine is not wholly untypical. There could be a fascinating story in
the rebuilding of British trade unionism during the nineteen-thirties, with
revised policies and altered methods which have dominated the movement
to this day. Citrine, however, having given good measure on trade unionism
in the twenties, then seems to have lost interest in its domestic problems.
He has much to say on the development of the labour movement’s attitude
to fascism (and is for once unfair in attributing all the blame for non-inter-
vention in Spain to Blum, leaving none to British Labour) but for the rest
we have trips to Russia, America and the West Indies, a long defence of the
acceptance
of
honours by trade union leaders, and the Abdication.
There
is
perhaps another respect in which Citrine is typical of many
trade union leaders of
his
day
-
the development of his social and political
philosophy. When he became a socialist he joined the Independent Labour
Party, to the chagrin of his Marxist mentor. He ‘never weakened in [his]
Socialist faith’, but of his experience as a young trade union officer he
writes: ‘The longer
I
served as a district official the stronger grew the mutual
confidence between the employers’ officials and myself.
.
.
and
I
look back
on a happy association with men of sterling character both on the side
of
the unions and of the employers’. Nevertheless after 1917 he ‘accepted
almost at its face value, without critical reservations, practically everything
which emanated from Russian official sources’. Even in 1925 he retained
enough of Marxist dogma to believe that ‘some time or other a collision
would take place between the unions and the employers as a whole’, but
two years later he was, he claims, the real originator of the Mond-Turner
discussions.
This mixture of theoretical class-war and practical class-collaboration,
of right-wing attitudes and left-wing theories, with a strong dash of romantic
enthusiasm for the Russian revolution developing into anti-Communism,
must be appreciated by anyone who would understand Citrine’s generation
of trade union leaders. One comic illustration occurs in Citrine’s interview
with Baldwin at the time of the Abdication. ‘We were republican at
heart
. .
.’,
said Citrine; but it ‘was impossible to contemplate, without a
feeling of humiliation, the fact that newspapers in other countries were
carrying discreditable stories about the King’.
Besides its picture of the man and his opinions, this volume will probably
be valued by students of British industrial relations mainly for two things
:
H
I
I2
BRITISH JOURNAL
OF
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
its contributions to the history of the General Strike, and to the debate on
the reorganization of the British trade union movement.
The General Strike
Several recent books, notably Bullock‘s life of Bevin, have added con-
siderably to the diplomatic history of the General Strike
-
the story of the
negotiations between the General Council and the Cabinet before the strike
began, and the talks with Samuel during the strike. Necessarily almost all
of them contribute only to our knowledge of the trade union side of the
exchange, and Citrine is equally unable to add much about the divisions
and decisions in the Cabinet. But what he has to offer on the General
Council and its committees is well worth having.
One of the crucial questions about the meetings between the Cabinet
and the General Council
is:
how near were they to an agreement in the
early hours of Monday,
I
3
May, when the talks were broken off by Baldwin
on the pretext of the
Daily Mail
incident? Citrine himself quotes Bevin
(reported in the
Munchester Guardian)
as saying ‘within ten minutes of that
ultimatum to us the peace terms would have been in the hands of the Prime
Minister, and there would never have beena General Strike’. Thenegotiators
who saw Baldwin and hiscolleagues that night were Pugh, Swales,Thomas
and Citrine. Pugh and Swales did not give the world their versions. In
My
Story,
Thomas’s account is vague, neither confirming nor denying that
agreement was close; but his biographer Blaxland
(A
L$e
for
Unity)
is
unambiguous. Following Symons
(
‘The General Strike)
,
he asserts that when
Birkenhead devised the famous formula (‘We the TUC would urge the
miners to authorize us to enter upon discussions with the understanding
that they and we accept the Report as a basis ofsettlement and we approach
it with the knowledge that it may involve some reduction in wages.’),
Thomas said ‘We accept it, never mind what the miners or anyone else say’.
Blaxland goes on: ‘Thomas felt convinced that he was near the point of
persuasion’. Bullock does not say whether the General Council represen-
tatives accepted Birkenhead’s formula or not, but states that, when they
reported back to the General Council, ‘Pugh and Thomas said nothing’
about this formula. Instead discussion turned on an earlier version with no
explicit reference to a wage reduction, and then proceeded to proposals
drafted by Bevin until the negotiators were summoned back to Baldwin
to hear the Cabinet’s ultimatum.
Citrine’s account differs from all of these. The negotiators, he says,
rejected the Birkenhead formula, and refused even to put it to the General
Council. ‘We said we could not possibly put this formula to our people, as
they would be certain to reject it, and if we did
so
it might look as though we
had some sympathy with it.’ Nevertheless in reporting back to the General
Council
a
‘formula’ was mentioned
-
apparently the earlier version
-
and caused some disquiet. The negotiators on both sides had undertaken
not to keep any records or notes of their meetings and this led to the

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