Apart from the ballot, strikes are the commonest means of attempted social change in Britain. There have been some 100,000 strikes in this country in eighty years, and 1971 saw more stoppages than any other year. Yet the standard twentieth-century social history text acknowledges only one strike, the General Strike of 1926. Such accounts of strikes as do exist are written by academics, by social scientists and historians, by outside observers.
First published in 1973, Strike covers nearly 150 strikes in twenty major industries from the time of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee to the first year of Heath’s government. It does so by going to the source—the strikers themselves, a section of the public much written about but whose views are rarely published in detail. Apart from the introduction and some brief linking material, the story is told by eighty-five strikers. The people the author has spoken to range from a veteran unionist who can recall the Great Dock Strike of 1889 to rank and file leaders of the dock strikes that followed the Second World War and the episodes they recall range from a stoppage by child apprentices in 1887 in a Dundee jute mill to the Postal Workers’ strike of 1971. They include people of the Left, and of the Right, and of no political allegiance: some are familiar names who have entered Parliament and become members of the Cabinet, while others are unknown except to those with whom they work. What emerges from their recollections here is a rich and vivid chronicle of industrial disputes over the past century as these appeared to the strikers themselves.