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Written by Dr Anthony Carew
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The Stoker, the Gunnery Lieutenant and Issues of Naval Discipline around the 1906 Portsmouth Barracks Mutiny
On a summer’s day in 1933, a man in his fifties - down on his luck and ‘on the tramp’ in search of work - knocked on the door of an upmarket Regency terraced dwelling in West London barely a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace. He was a former naval rating. Whether or not he’d been tipped off locally that this was the home of a naval officer and so a possible ‘soft touch’, his pitch on the doorstep was the ...
Sustaining the Lower Deck
Tobacco (and Jam)
Tobacco had a long identification with the Royal Navy’s lower deck in public perception. Indeed the Nottingham tobacco firm John Player built its substantial business on the image of the rating as a smoker of ‘Navy Cut’....
Lionel Yexley (1862-1933)
The naval reformer and journalist, Lionel Yexley, was born James Woods in Stratford Essex, one of two children of James Woods a journeyman bootmaker and his wife, Mary, nee Yexley. He was educated at the Boys British School, Stratford. Against his parents’ wishes, aged sixteen he joined the navy as a boy seaman. Over the next twelve years he served in the Persian Gulf, East Indies and Mediterranean, rising in 1890 to petty officer second-class ...
The Invergordon Mutiny – thoughts on its past treatment
I would like to offer some observations on the treatment (or lack of it) of the naval mutiny at Invergordon in Chapter 5, Comintern Work in the Western Armed Forces in the 1930s (Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no. 2). This chapter uses Invergordon as a peg on which to introduce the Comintern programme, but its two short paragraphs that deal with the mutiny contain two important errors that are likely to mislead the unsuspecting ...
Collective Organisation in the Armed Forces: the Case of the Lower Deck of the Royal Navy, 1900-1925
Labour and military historians have left unexplored the occasional attempts by other ranks in the armed services to establish the right to collective representation. Yet in the Royal Navy at least collective organisation of ratings in a primitive form of trade unionism and efforts to win recognition from the authorities were significant factors in lower-deck life in the first quarter of the last century. (1) The organisational base for this reform movement was a collection of lower-deck death benefit societies which first emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth ...
Tribute to John Saville (1916-2009)
When I graduated, Saville encouraged me to take a research position with the Canadian labour movement. Years later, when I moved back to Britain, he gave further encouragement to my work in the academic field, first at the University of Sussex and then at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. It was a proud moment for me when I appeared on the same panel at the North American Labour History Conference in 1995. So I owe a great deal to him and to ...
Tribute to Walter Kendall (1926–2003)
I first became aware of Walter Kendall, the editor of Voice of the Unions and member of the executive committee of the Institute for Workers’ Control, when I was living in Ottawa and working for the Canadian labour movement. He was then a Research Fellow in the Centre for Contemporary European Studies at Sussex University. When I registered for post-graduate work at Sussex, he took an interest in my research for an M Phil on rank and file movements and workers’ control in the British engineering industry ...
Deeper Dives
These are longer articles I wrote for various magazines/journals that you can view now and/or download for later perusal.
British Trade Unions in International Affairs
As the second largest national trade union centre in the non-Communist world, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was a major force in international labour circles in the years after the War. More than any other central organization, the TUC played a leading role in the evolution of the international labour movement. It was pivotal in the short-lived attempt in these years to unify the world movement within the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) formed in Paris in October 1945.
Origins of CIA Financing of AFL-CIO Operations Abroad
Was the American labor movement used by the CIA in the early years of the Cold War, and if so to what extent? Did CIA money finance some ostensibly independent Labor projects? Until recently there was little to add to Tom Braden’s 1967 revelations about his work as Director of the Agency’s International Organizations Division.
The Schism Within the World Federation of Trade Unions: Government and Trade Union Diplomacy
The creation of the World Federation of Trade Unions in October 1945 was intended as a major step towards international trade-union unity. Less than four years later, in January 1949, the secession of its British, American and Dutch affiliates, soon to be followed by the bulk of Western trade union centres, left the international labour movement more divided than ever. Narrative accounts of the WFTU's brief life as a united body and of the developments leading to the schism have long been available and are not matters of contention.¹ As to the cause of the split, however, there is less agreement.
Conflict Within the ICFTU: Anti-Communism and Anti-Colonialism in the 1950s
Formed as an anti-communist labour international, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) nevertheless experienced internal conflict over the appropriate approach to communism. The different perspectives of the two largest affiliates, the British TUC and the American AFL- CIO, caused disharmony and ultimately near organizational paralysis until it forced a change of leadership. Caught between these rival positions, the ICFTU secretariat's relations with the AFL-CIO were initially the most strained, but as the International extended its activity in Africa, in a bid to outflank communist organization among labour, relations with the TUC also deteriorated over the correct stance on nationalism and colonialism.
ICFTU Failed Experiment with an Organising Supremo, 1955-61
The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), the global union organization formed in 1945 in an ambitious attempt to continue in peacetime the alliance that had developed in World War II between the labour movements of Britain, the USA, and the Soviet Union, split apart in 1949 under the pressure of big power politics.
The Marshall Plan and Productivity: The AACP's Role
In the context of Britain's early post-war economic crisis, with food and commodity shortages and a persistent foreign exchange problem, national attention focused on the question of increasing industrial production. By 1948, with the introduction of Marshall Aid from the United States, that general quest for greater physical output had been overtaken by a more specific focus on increasing productivity, with low labour productivity coming to be identified as Britain's essential problem.
The Politics of Productivity and the Politics of Anti-Communism: American and European Labour and the Cold War
Endless efforts have been made to increase productivity without coming to grips with this problem [i.e. the role of organized labour]. Foremen have watched workers. Engineers have measured workers. Personnel technicians have cajoled workers. Industrial psychologists have tested workers. And the latest group, the psychiatric sociologists have brought psychoanalytic techniques to the workbench and, where others have failed, they now offer to mesmerize workers.
Free Trade Unionism in the International Context
"Free trade unionism" is one of the great rhetorical expressions of the labour movement. The rights of "free" trade unions are what are denied today in countless national situations in an international trading context that contrives to pit workers against one another in the proverbial race to the bottom. In these situations, free trade unionism is a hurrah term: we in the labour movement are all free trade unionists now.
The Invergordon Mutiny, 1931: Long Term Causes, Organisation and Leadership
On Tuesday September 15th, 1931, at 8.00 a.m. most of the stokers of the forenoon watch in the battleship HMS Valiant, under orders to sail from Invergordon for exercises in the North Sea, refused duty and prevented the ship from sailing. In the battleships Rodney and Nelson and the battlecruiser Hood, all due to follow Valiant out to sea, the crews also refused to turn to. By 9.31 a.m. the admiral commanding the Atlantic Fleet had cancelled the exercises and recalled to Cromarty Firth those ships already at sea. What was to become known as the Invergordon Mutiny had begun.