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| ISBN-13: | 9781927145166 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Canterbury University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 318 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Revolution
The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand
By Melanie Nolan
Canterbury University Press
Copyright © 2005 The ContributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-927145-16-6
CHAPTER 1
Erik Olssen
The lessons of 1913
There were unprecedented scenes of violence and civil disorder in New Zealand during the 1913 strike, the most significant strike in the country's history. If I can summarise my overall argument, right at the beginning, 1913 was the final, decisive stage in a long and complicated process that had began in the 1880s that I think can be summed up in a phrase from another national historiography: the making of the working class, in this case New Zealand's. The working class that was 'made' in these tumultuous events of 1913 was, of course, going to have an extraordinarily large impact upon the history of twentieth-century New Zealand, although the nature of that impact outside the political arena, like the history of unionism in this country, is not as well known as it should be.
Barker's tale
I will begin with a brief story that focuses upon two men. One of them later became the first Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand, Michael Joseph Savage. He was president of the Auckland branch of the Socialist Party, probably the most powerful branch in the country. It was famous (or infamous) within its own city; indeed, throughout the country. The other person I will focus on is not so well known. Tom Barker was a migrant from Britain (Savage had come from Australia). Barker had received his 'deconversion' from the ranks of evangelical Protestantism and his conversion into the ranks of revolutionary socialism at the skilful hands of the Auckland Socialist Party's silver-tongued orator and spellbinding educator, another Australian, Harry Scott Bennett.
In the summer of 1911–12 Barker, like many of Auckland's socialists, became increasingly disillusioned with both the Socialist Party and, more particularly, with the 'Red' Federation of Labor (NZFL). The latter's failure to assist the Auckland General Labourers' Union in its struggle for a new collective agreement, and then its weak-kneed refusal to extend the Waihi Strike by calling for a general strike, profoundly disillusioned the militant cadres within the revolutionary army. Barker was one of those. As a result, he moved his support to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – he became, in short, a 'Wobbly'. In the years 1911–13 the Wobblies became a powerful presence in New Zealand, particularly in the North Island mining towns of Waihi and Huntly, and in Auckland city, where the depth of disaffection with the NZFL and its executive (known as 'Red Feds') was greatest. The plight of the Auckland general labourers and then the Waihi strikers profoundly affected the mood of Auckland's unionised workers.
When the dispute between shipwrights and the Union Steam Ship Company (USS Co.) brought Wellington's wharves to a standstill in 1913, Barker was in Wellington. Although this conflict is usually considered the start of the 1913 strike, it was only one of two flashpoints. The Huntly mine was the other. There, prominent supporters of the Waihi strikers were locked out after a one-day sympathy strike. Barker was down in Wellington trying to breathe a bit of revolutionary fire into the Wellington movement: he was an energetic evangelist and revolutionist. However, when the Huntly coalminers again walked out, and support erupted in Auckland, he went back to Auckland. As a general strike spread across that city, the newspapers became hysterically hostile. Barker and the Wobblies launched their own paper, the Industrial Unionist. The Red Feds adopted this weekly paper as the newspaper of the strike. The Wobblies kept control, and produced the paper three times a week. They sold it on the streets, and some sympathetic shopkeepers also stocked it.
The police arrested Barker for sedition and he came up before the Magistrate's Court in Auckland. I pick up the story at this point, as reported in his memoir. It was produced from a series of interviews with Barker in his old age in London, undertaken by the prominent Australian labour historian Eric Fry. Barker had gone on to become influential in the Australian revolutionary movement during the First World War.
I was just completing the sale of my last paper when along came a policeman who asked me, quite courteously to go to the Police Station with him. He didn't know why I was wanted. At the Police Court the Magistrate was sitting and he told me I was charged with sedition in Wellington during the time of the meetings in Post Office Square ... The Magistrate said I would have to appear ... in Wellington. He told the police to put me in the cells then escort me to Wellington in time for the hearing. But the police objected that being shorthanded ... they couldn't possibly spare anyone. So the Magistrate turned to me and said, 'Look Mr. Barker, if we let you go, on your word of honour, will you take yourself to Wellington?'
Barker did go to Wellington, but not immediately. 'I went on this trip to Wellington with Joe Savage. He was going down to participate in the strike and so the two of us set out by train.' Their train was one that a handful of saboteurs tried to blow up – the only attempted sabotage of commercial transport during the 1913 strike.
The two young firebrands got to Wellington and were hauled off triumphantly by enthusiastic strikers to Post Office Square. There they tried to inject still more revolutionary fire into the by now fairly outraged strikers, who were in almost continuous session. Every time I walk through that place – Wellington's Post Office Square, marked by no plaque to remind us of those extraordinary events – I think of Barker and Savage, and imagine that I can almost hear the crowds of wharfies and their supporters cheering them. They had a good time and enjoyed themselves. I think that is one of the things that needs to be understood. These were young men in their prime and they had a vision of a new world. This was the battle. For some of them it was not the battle they would have chosen – some of them thought they were probably (if not inevitably) going to down to defeat. The executive of the United Federation of Labour (UFL), formed in 1913, certainly knew from day one that the general strike would lead to defeat. But once battle was joined, all agreed that they would give it their all. Barker's memoir leaves you with a sense of a lot of young men having the time of their lives, although they were aware that there were momentous consequences attached to the outcome of their struggle.
But I digress. At Barker's court appearance he was ordered to report the next day to the Supreme Court to be sentenced. It was surrounded by uniformed police and 'Massey's Cossacks' (volunteers). Barker noted: 'I had a devil of a job to satisfy them ... that I was wanted in the court.' (They probably thought he was some sort of a terrorist or anarchist. Terrorism was widespread in Europe and the United States at that time, although we now think it peculiar to other civilisations.) Barker finally persuaded the police of his purpose and was 'committed to The Terrace gaol ... to be tried later'. Here he joined Harry Holland, Bob Semple and Peter Fraser, to name the best known, an adult education group of no mean ability. Barker recalled: 'We were treated as honoured guests.' It was not just the prison guards who were sympathetic; so were many police. In fact this was one of Prime Minister W. F. Massey's biggest headaches. The police's own attempts to unionise themselves had created profound tensions both within the police force and between Massey's government and the police.
Revolutionary lessons
What can we take from this story? The first lesson is that, although there were many revolutionaries around, with quite a few of them carrying revolvers, no one in New Zealand really knew what a revolution looked like. The last successful one had been in France in 1789 (if we ignore the Mexican revolution of 1910, which most New Zealanders did). What did you storm? What did you do once you had stormed it? From the Prime Minister's perspective, armed 'mobs' rampant in the streets and an unreliable police force made the prospect of revolution imminent. After all, revolutionary crowds in France had tried to seize the legislature and the capital. As Bob Hogg, editor of the radical weekly the New Zealand Truth, pointed out, it was but a short walk from Post Office Square to Parliament, and the building could easily be invaded and Cabinet seized, or worse. Massey had no trouble persuading the Governor, Lord Liverpool, of the danger, and together they convinced the local commander of the Royal Navy to help. Warships trained their guns on Wellington and Auckland. Marines paraded with naked bayonets. Meanwhile the government called for volunteers, promptly christened Massey's Cossacks. We should note in passing that the local naval commander was eventually reprimanded by the Admiralty, which held the view that unless you could see the Prime Minister's blood oozing down the stairs, as it were, the military was not to intervene in a civil conflict.
Second, it was quickly clear to the strikers, and especially to their leaders, that not all working people supported them. In fact one of the profound lessons that would be drawn from the strike was spelt out by that great English and New Zealand revolutionary, E. J. B. (James) Allen. It was that the conditions for a successful general strike were the conditions for a successful revolution. Success required virtually the complete unity of the revolutionary class – the working class in this case, and the neutrality or indifference of other major classes within society. And that, of course, was not the case in 1913. As soon as Massey called for volunteers, thousands of farmers and a sizeable proportion of the urban business classes were keen to teach the would-be revolutionaries a lesson that would not need to be repeated. In the main towns clerks, teachers, businessmen and professionals rushed to take part. In Wellington province's small towns and rural districts the Territorials, a voluntary military force, mobilised, and in Auckland province the Farmers' Union organised opposition to the strikers. Thousands of these men came into town on their horses, picked up a baton, and enjoyed a veritable social whirl punctuated by occasional forays and skirmishes. It was like a regular army with foot soldiers and mounted soldiers: infantry and cavalry. Not surprisingly, the mounted variety posed the biggest threat to the strikers, who did not have horses. Many probably could not even ride a horse. Thus they re-learned, in many cases painfully, one of the oldest lessons of Eurasian warfare.
There is another point relevant here. The farmers came to town to get the goods moving. They were not going to tolerate having their butter sitting around going bad. But they also had become deeply offended by the revolutionary claims, and the disrespect for monarch and empire, not to mention church and clergy, that the Red Feds both represented and symbolised. They eagerly looked forward to the encounter. Of course there was no love lost between urban – especially unionising urban – New Zealand and rural, small-farm New Zealand. This had become one of the great tensions within New Zealand society, and the events of 1913 profoundly intensified that estrangement. As the Sydney Morning Herald said, the strike represented a sort of modified civil war between town and country. (We should note in passing that the use of Massey's Cossacks did more than anything else to unify the urban working class.)
The third thing a modern reader learns from Barker's story was the innate respect for law and order that characterised even the most ideologically informed revolutionaries. What veterans of American-style class conflict would have thought we can readily imagine! There seems to have been no thought in Barker's mind that he might break his word of honour to the magistrate to report to the Supreme Court. Nor, one presumes, did the little group of strike leaders sitting in the local jail contemplate either resisting arrest or organising their own release. They left the conflict confident that others would take their place. They and their followers believed in the rule of law, the notion of a citizen's rights and duties, and the principles of justice and fairness. Only one or two Wobblies, men such as J. B. King, actually acted as if such ideas were bourgeois subterfuges – King fled the country when questions were asked in Parliament. Savage, of course, ended up as New Zealand's first Labour Prime Minister, and Peter Fraser was the second Labour Prime Minister. Barker, after a long, colourful, extraordinary career, ended up as the Labour Party mayor of St Pancras in London. Those Wobblies who sneered at morality and law as the weapons of the boss class had left by 1913, repudiated by all.
I will leave you to ponder how close the country came to a revolutionary moment, but the size and extent of the strike is indisputable. According to the Labour Department, about 14,000 actually went out on strike. But in Auckland the entire city came to a standstill. Bakers went out, carpenters went out, tramwaymen went out, labourers went out. It was not just the battalions of the Red Feds; it was not even just the organised. When newspaper boys declared that they would not sell the Herald any more, or even turn up to work, there was enormous jubilation among the ranks of the strikers. Indeed, you find in the ferment that even groups such as the disabled began to be more conscious of their rights and entitlements and to effectively start to use the tactics that the Red Feds were popularising in pursuit of their particular goals. All this was by no means confined to unionists. The attack on the injustices of capitalism, and the tactics of direct action, diffused into all sorts of groups that saw themselves as marginalised or oppressed. Even the farmers themselves were to learn some lessons about direct action from the Red Feds. After the first flush of enthusiasm for the hard yakka of a wharfie's life, some of the strike-breakers began to copy their enemies' tricks and ploys.
Some 14,000 workers were on strike and a large number of others were offering money and support as they could. In terms of the numbers involved (on both sides), the days of work lost, and the economic cost to the country, it was by far the biggest strike that had ever occurred in New Zealand. Taking into account the difference in population size, I think it exceeded 1951, if you use this sort of traditional measure to determine a strike's impact. And besides, as I said earlier (and this was the main theme of my book, The Red Feds), 1913 forged a national working class based in the towns, the mines and the ships; 1951 was a major event in 'unmaking' that working class, and in my view hastened that process.
There are a number of points worth making about the significance of the 1913 strike that have largely been forgotten. The strike brought the New Zealand economy to a standstill. The Red Feds occupied what James Belich has called the strategic centres of the recolonising economy, the export industries. They shut down the freezing works, the coal and gold mines, the wharves, and the colonial merchant marine. They did not quite shut down the railways. The Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (which included the men of the country's numerous workshops) did not come out on strike. Of course the New Zealand railways system was state-owned and the men risked forfeiting conditions, such as superannuation, if they struck. In certain parts of the system, however, wildcat actions occurred despite the union. It was a close-run thing, however, and the government, like the nation's employers, knew that whereas farmers and bank clerks might tackle the work of wharfies, they could not operate the dominion's railways. From that point on a spectre haunted the colonial bourgeoisie.
The size and success of the strike in disabling the economy should not obscure that fact that this strike was the direct result of rank-and-file action. The Wobblies and the revolutionary socialists believed in the importance of the rank and file. They considered state socialism simply a variant of capitalism and wage slavery. More to the point, they regarded union officials – especially the paid officials of arbitrationist unions – as a sort of hybrid species of gutless parasite. The only people you could really trust were those working at the point of production. This was the Wobbly ideology. On Wellington's wharves, and in the mines at Huntly and Waihi, the Wobblies and revolutionary socialists became dominant in 1912–13.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Revolution by Melanie Nolan. Copyright © 2005 The Contributors. Excerpted by permission of Canterbury University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Acknowledgements,
Chronology of events Peter Franks,
Introduction: 1913 in retrospect: a laboratory or a battleground of democracy? Melanie Nolan,
1. The lessons of 1913 Erik Olssen,
2. Interpreting 1913: what are the important questions? Miles Fairburn,
3. The police, the state and lawless law Richard S. Hill,
4. Crime as Protest in the Great Strike in Wellington Donald Anderson,
5. A tale of two cities: military involvement in the 1913 strike John Crawford,
6. Contemporary media portrayals of the 1913 dispute James Taylor,
7. 'Arbitrationists out and out': the involvement of the craft unions Peter Franks,
8. Missing in action: the role of the Seamen's Union David Grant,
9. Cases of the Revolutionary Left and the Waterside Workers' Union Kerry Taylor,
10. The making of the New Zealand ruling class Jim McAloon,
11. 'Do your share, like a man!': the issue of gender in the strike Melanie Nolan,
12. The origins of traditions of industrial militancy in the UK Donald M. MacRaild,
13. The case of William E. Trautmann and the role of the 'Wobblies' Mark Derby,
Notes on contributors,
Select bibliography,
Index,
Copyright,