Those who stayed behind soon realised that their value to the country had increased, and they not unnaturally felt that their working conditions should reflect this. Rumours and even evidence that some manufacturers were making huge profits from war production and not passing anything on to their employees fuelled anger and led to a series of strikes. The first serious one occurred in Glasgow in February 1915 when 5,000 engineers, whose union had been asking for a rise of twopence an hour since the previous June, laid down their tools. The dispute spread until some 10,000 members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers at eight engineering plants were on strike, but it lasted only a little under three weeks. Dissatisfaction with the settlement of the strike led to the forming of the Clyde Workers’ Committee. In particular, the CWC challenged the 1915 Munitions of War Act, which had been passed in order to ensure the uninterrupted production of weapons and ammunition. Although agreed by trade union leaders, the Act was seen by many as an opportunistic erosion of workers’ rights, including the right to strike.
Meanwhile a rent strike had also broken out in Glasgow, where landlords had attempted to raise rents and evict tenants who could not or would not pay. Many of the tenants were women whose husbands were at the front and who had entered the workforce, finding employment in munitions factories. The refusal of some 20,000 of them to pay rent gained support among other industrial workers, who threatened to come out on strike in sympathy. In order to prevent the disruption of war production, the government was obliged to introduce new legislation protecting tenants’ rights. The government also had to accede to the demands of miners in South Wales who came out on strike in July 1915 in a dispute with mine-owners. There was little else it could do since a prolonged stoppage of coal production would have been disastrous.
Back on Clydeside the ‘dilution’ of the munitions industry by allowing unskilled men and women to fill the large gaps left by those who had enlisted – by this time about a quarter of the workforce – was causing further unrest. A refusal in March 1916 to allow one of the leaders of the CWC to investigate the conditions under which such people were employed in one factory was seen as an affront to the rights of shop stewards and led to more strikes in 1916. Opposition to the Military Services Act, which introduced conscription at the beginning of March, fuelled additional protests in Glasgow and led to the arrest and imprisonment of several activists under the deeply unpopular and draconian Defence of the Realm Act, which had been passed without debate four days after war was declared in August 1914. The Act restricted trade union activity (strikes and lockouts had been outlawed in the munitions factories), regulated – which is to say decreased – pub opening hours, and generally cracked down on dissent and any other behaviour thought to be unpatriotic or unhelpful to the conduct of the war.
In 1918 even the police went on strike. Prevented by the Crime Act of 1885 from belonging to any sort of union, many police had nevertheless responded to an anonymous letter published in the September 1913 issue of the Police Review announcing that just such an organisation was being formed. Throughout the war many policemen secretly became members of the unrecognised and technically illegal National Union of Police and Prison Officers, which was established to address their grievances over pay and conditions. The 1918 strike was triggered by the sacking of a police captain who had been active in this union, which by then claimed to have 10,000 members and was demanding proper recognition. The entire Metropolitan Police Force of London, numbering 12,000 members, went on strike on 30 August, and the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, while refusing to recognise the NUPPO on the grounds that such an organisation could not be contemplated while the country was at war, nevertheless met with its representatives and agreed to many of their other demands. The union’s membership subsequently saw a rapid growth, reaching some 50,000 by the time of the Armistice.
The British people were suffering in their homes as well as in the workplace. German submarine raids caused massive losses among the merchant marine, which meant that there was a lack of imported goods, so food prices soared. Coal rationing was introduced in October 1916, and in December of that year a Food Controller was appointed as part of the newly formed Ministry of Food. People were encouraged to monitor their own consumption, but rumours in 1917 that Britain’s food supply was all but exhausted led to panic buying, after which rationing was introduced: sugar in December, followed by butter, meat, jam and tea.
It was one thing to eat less for your country in times of war, but rationing was no more over by Christmas 1918 than the war had been in 1914, and its continuation long after the Armistice caused considerable resentment. Victory may have been greeted with jubilation, but it did little to calm the industrial and social unrest that pervaded the country. A more general imbalance between supply and demand in goods was not much helped by the fact that there was no immediate return to peacetime conditions in factories either. The Munitions of War Act had obliged many manufacturers to adapt their factories for the production of vital armaments, and it would take time to reconvert production lines so that they could return to making the goods they produced before the war. The Defence of the Realm Act remained in place, and the gulf that had opened up during the war between the Western and Home Fronts, fuelled by mutual incomprehension and, on the part of the serving men, a degree of hostility towards those who for whatever reason had not joined up, was not healed by peace. Soldiers at the front had resented the fact that the jobs from which they were absent had been taken over by those who had stayed at home rather than join them on the battlefields. It was not only ‘shirkers’ who had usurped them in the workplace: women had been absorbed into the overall workforce in huge numbers and, newly emancipated, could hardly be expected to return to hearth and home the minute the war was over – although many of them did.
‘The unity of the nation which has been the great secret of our strength in war must not be relaxed if the many anxious problems which the war has bequeathed to us are to be handled with the insight, courage, and promptitude which the times demand,’ Lloyd George declared, and he decided to call a general election for 14 December. He felt that a new parliament ‘possessed of the authority which a General Election alone can give it’ would be needed ‘to make the peace of Europe and to deal with the difficult transitional period which will follow the cessation of hostilities’. Just how difficult that transitional period would be soon became apparent.
Often referred to as a ‘khaki election’ because it took place immediately after a war, the 1918 general election might equally have been dubbed a ‘petticoat’ one, since it was the first in which women – at any rate, women property-owners over thirty – had the vote. With the massive losses suffered in the war, the women’s vote was more significant than its legislators might have envisaged. Given that many of those in khaki were still on active service abroad and that many women were in mourning for a husband, son, father, brother or fiancé, it must have looked like a ‘black’ election as much as a khaki one at the polling booths. The shadow of the war certainly loomed over the election in Nottingham, where now redundant shell cases were used to make up the shortfall in ballot boxes. It was also the first election in which men who were not property-owners were allowed to vote, but they had to be twenty-one. Many former servicemen like Harry Patch, who was twenty when the election took place, discovered that while they were deemed old enough to be sent off to fight for their country, they were still considered too young to vote. The result of the election was an overwhelming victory for a coalition chiefly composed of Liberal and Conservative members under the renewed premiership of Lloyd George.
It was all very well to win a general election, but Lloyd George now needed to lead the country into a post-war future with all its attendant problems. Making the peace in Europe would prove to be a great deal easier than