12 – Churchill was happy to attack his own people
“Make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you let loose upon us again a general strike, we will loose upon you”
As we have heard, Churchill was the product of an upbringing that instilled beliefs in the power of Empire, the supremacy of white British people and the need for a strong, patronly leadership to keep order. We have also seen how ready he was to strike back against anyone who defied him and his class’ god given right to rule over the whole world without any dissent. While this was usually expressed far away from home, whether starving Indians, beating up Irish people, herding Kenyans into concentration camps or massacring Africans, there is ample evidence that Churchill did not think much of those with whom he shared his own island.
The young Winston was the child of an aristocratic family and lived his life as an aristocrat, but the time in which he lived was the absolute height of British industry and the British working class movement. Trade Unionism was as strong as it would ever be and the newly-founded Labour Party was representing the interests of the organised working class in Parliament and beyond. Winston had very little time for the working man, especially when that working man exercised his right to strike or to demonstrate against those in power.
The most notable incident was the Tonypandy Riots, which took place in 1910 and 1911 in Wales, when Churchill was Home Secretary. Miners had been in a dispute with mine bosses for several months and, when the bosses locked workers out of their workplaces, the miners went on strike. They managed to get 12,000 workers all over South Wales to come out with them and, fearing the potential for destruction that such a force possessed, the bosses called in the police. All pits were closed in the Tonypandy region of South Wales by picketing miners and they clashed with police sent in to keep the mines open.
When the police were unable to quell the miners, they appealed to the Home Secretary for help. Churchill sent in the Army and they clashed with the strikers, with an estimated 500 injured and at least one killed. Rumours spread all over Wales that the Army had fired on unarmed demonstrators. Churchill was widely blamed for the incident, as he had ordered that the troops in. Furthermore, by sending in the soldiers to a civil dispute, he had made it impossible for the miners to win their strike, essentially intervening directly on the side of bosses in an industrial dispute.
In the eyes of many working-class Britons, Churchill’s reputation as a posh bully boy was never erased. When giving a speech in the Welsh capital of Cardiff in 1950, he was forced to acknowledge his huge local unpopularity and even in the late 1970s, his grandson was told by then Prime Minister James Callaghan not to speak on a House of Commons debate regarding the pay of coal miners for fear that people associate it with “the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy”. He would later utilise the Army against striking workers in Liverpool in 1911 and then, after the First World War and while serving as Secretary of State for War, set the troops on protestors in Glasgow during the so-called Red Clydeside period.