Tillett set up a camp at Tower Hill with Harry Gosling andWill Godfrey from which to direct the next moves of the now ten million men of the Thames Valley who were caught up in the strike. He attended nightly meetings at Tower Hill, and travelled up and down the country to speak at the volatile, potentially violent meetings resulting from the threatened intervention of troops, riding the crisis. The Times saw the gravity of the situation and was both angry and unsympathetic. ‘There is an imminent danger of famine,’ it warned. In its view, ‘the whole thing is as insanely foolish as it is wicked. The trade union leaders talk of putting an end to poverty. Are they really so hopelessly ignorant as to imagine that destroying property, stopping trade and dislocating the whole machinery of civilisation is theway to benefit the poor?’

  By an unpredictable and almost unbelievable clash of events, the Lords’ vote on the Parliament Bill was scheduled for 10 August, a day that found the entire structure of the country teetering towards breakdown. If that were not enough, on this most politically critical day of the summer the temperature, reflecting cruelly the drama of events, broke all known records. An announcement from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich claimed ‘the doubtful honour of reporting for the first time in its history, a shade temperature officially returned as 100 degrees Fahrenheit’. Farmers in Cheshire reported that their cattle were now being fed on expensive corn, as there were no pastures fit for grazing, and the milk yield was 25 per cent below average for the time of year. Men repairing the roof of Lincoln Minster had to drop their tools and return to the ground when the lead started melting at 130°F and became impossible to handle. That same day Stepney Crown Court dealt with seven inquests on children, all found to have died from violent diarrhoea attacks caused by rotting food and bad milk. There were 548 reported deaths from childhood diarrhoea that month, nearly three times the usual annual average. The Times reported the case of six-year-old Charles Maslan, sent to the Western Fever Hospital at Fulham in London, near the Brompton Cemetery, where he died of ‘spotted fever’, due to ‘congestion of the brain’ brought on by the high temperatures.

  On 10 August Queen Mary recorded in her diary the outcome of the preceding day’s vote: ‘At 11 a.m. we heard that the Parliament Bill had passed, thus avoiding the creation of peers, a great relief to our minds.’ The tension in the House of Lords before the vote had been extreme. Peers who rarely left their country seats came to town to take part in this historic occasion; some even had to ask for directions to the Houses of Parliament. Sir Thomas Eamonde, MP, startled his sober-suited fellows by appearing for a day of exceptional parliamentary business dressed in a suit of ‘snow white drill’: the Daily Mail noted approvingly that such ‘holiday-wear’was at least ‘impeccably cut’.

  The vote was taken and the result was announced: 131 peers had voted in favour of the Bill, 114 against. From now on the House of Lords would be unable in law to block for more than two years any bill that had already passed through the Commons. Some Lords dared not think where this erosion of their powers might eventually lead.

  Queen Mary was relieved that her husband had not been compelled to exercise the Royal Prerogative to force the Bill through the second chamber, and now felt free to make her own plans, to leave a stifling London and spend a few days at Windsor sitting in the garden, picking roses, rowing on the lake, and arranging her photograph albums. Feeling he had been ‘spared a humiliation which I should never have survived’, the King embraced the chance to celebrate the first day of grouse-shooting, the Glorious Twelfth, and left for the open moors of Studley Royal in Yorkshire to enjoy himself on the estate of his friend Lord Ripon. There, according to the Prince of Wales, he was ‘stimulated by the bracing air and hard exercise and on the alert for a flushed bird, and he would put aside the cares of State.’ His host’s wife Gladys tolerated the visit though it kept her on the hated moors. Nothing about shooting endeared itself to her, even when it involved the honour of a visit from the Sovereign.

  Lloyd George was relieved by the result of the Lords’ vote and the resulting restrictions on the power of the second chamber. The aristocracy, he felt, bore a strong resemblance to cheese in as much as ‘the older it was the higher it smelt.’ In the same Parliamentary sitting MPs were for the first time awarded a salary, making it feasible for men from less wealthy families to stand for election. The apparent ease with which this financial award was authorised, and the fact that it was paid regardless of an MP’s other income, did not go unnoticed by the men and women of Bermondsey in East London, nor by those in Liverpool, Hull, Bristol and Southampton who were unable to pay their rent or call a doctor to their sick children. Pawnbrokers in the vicinity of the Victoria and Albert docks announced that they would enter into no more transactions: they had simply run out of room to store the possessions of thousands of desperate people. The Dean of a local church spoke about the daily effect of the strike on the most vulnerable, the strikers’ families: ‘It is impossible for the outside world to realise all the ghastly horror of this strike. The people are literally starving to death by thousands . . . they have nothing left to buy food with, no clothes to go out in, and no furniture and no fuel. They just sit on the floor in speechless despair, day and night, waiting for something to come and end it all.’

  By 11 August George Askwith had unravelled the skein of claims put forward by the various workers and had come up with offers that seemed to be acceptable to most. Wages were raised and cautious guarantees of employment were given by the dock owners, and this was enough, in conjunction with the benefits to be incorporated in Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act, to ensure that much of the machinery at the docks began to move once again. But the mood of distrust prevailed, and disruption continued. A crowd of roughs in London’s Gray’s Inn Road, still fired up and aggressive, attacked a heavy closed wagon – but when they found it to contain a cage occupied by a full-grown lion they willingly allowed it to proceed, unmolested.

  Detachments of troops had been mobilised for strike duty in case the tension should develop into violence. In Hyde Park, soldiers were camping once again on the same grass where only a couple of months earlier they had gathered for their ceremonial role in the Coronation. Battersea Park, Hackney Marshes and Regent’s Park were all filled with men sweltering in helmets and bearskins. To the amusement of railway passengers, an unprecedented ‘Changing of the Guard’ ceremony took place on the platform at Clapham Junction. A chain of Army signallers on tall buildings communicated by flag-waving during the day and torch-light at night. A look-out had been established on the golden gallery of St Paul’s, the highest point in the City.

  On 11 August the House was told that the Prime Minister was suffering from laryngitis brought on by strain and had been advised by his doctor to rest his voice. But the events that had caused this strain continued to develop. The passionate intention of the Liverpool railway workers to demonstrate their unhappiness found expression at Central Station, where a cart containing herrings was attacked and hundreds of fish were sent skimming through the air to land in shimmering slithery, silvery piles all over the street. There was a sense of barely contained violence in the city, and on the11th, a Sunday, Churchill decided that military intervention was the only possible way to relieve the situation. At a request for help from the Lord Mayors of Liverpool and Birkenhead who were thought by some MPs to be ‘hysterical’– the warship HMS Antrim sailed up the coast to anchor off Birkenhead: 2,300 troops and cavalry officers, representing the entire Aldershot garrison, had arrived on the Mersey. The streets were teeming with angry men. The 1715 Riot Act was read aloud, that famous injunction to a rioting crowd to disperse or risk not less than three years in prison. But that day the ominous words carried no deterrent. One hundred thousand workers assembled in the heart of the city outside the magnificent pillared Victorian St George’s Hall, on St George’s Plateau. Forty speakers, including Jimmy Thomas, the MP for Derby, took their turn on four special platforms, and at first the meeting was peaceful, until a soldier spotted a man leaning from a window in a threatening manner. The man refused to come down when ordered to do so, and this challenge sparked a sudden sense of panic in the crowd. The police were ordered to charge the crowd, and to move them from the Plateau. The Riot Act was read twice more, and hundreds were injured as glass and stones and logs were hurled at the police.

  By 15 August the determination of the Liverpool workers had become still more entrenched. A prison van containing several demonstrators under arrest was attacked, and in the mayhem two men were killed. Churchill was told that there was ‘a revolution in progress’, and during the week that followed, workers in every part of the city stopped work in sympathetic protest. On the same day notice was given by union leaders that the first-ever national rail strike would begin the following evening. The gunmakers of St James’s Street and Pall Mall sold out of their stock of revolvers within 48 hours as nervousness spread to the residents of central London. The King, who had moved his shooting party across the moors to the Duke of Devonshire’s estate at Bolton Abbey, sent Churchill an anxious telegram: ‘Accounts from Liverpool show that the situation there is more like revolution than a strike.’ Churchill telegraphed back: ‘The difficulty is not to maintain order but to maintain order without loss of life.’

  At Bolton, despite temperatures reminiscent of the tropics, the Royal party dressed in their thick tweed knickerbockers and tightly fitting shooting-jackets, and went out onto the Yorkshire moors. That evening a satisfying bag of 390 brace of grouse was recorded by the head gamekeeper. The General Steam Navigation Company announced that their serviceswere operating as normal, and holidaymakers continued to make journeys to resorts up and down the British coast, apparently oblivious of the prospect that with a stoppage of all transport by train, they ran the risk of being stranded far from home once the strike began. By Thursday 17 August the railway network had ceased to operate. Tom Mann was Ben Tillett’s counterpart, representing the railwaymen. Meetings were held in Hull, Cardiff, Salford, Bristol, Glasgow, Cardiff and Swansea. George Askwith was alarmed by reports that in Hull women ‘with their hair streaming and half nude’ were reeling through the streets, smashing and destroying shop windows.

  The Prime Minister, still suffering from a sore throat and exhausted by the events of the past few months, not least the strain of the days leading to the passing of the Parliament Bill, was mishandling the Union leaders. He promised to hold an investigation into the railwaymen’s grievances, but undermined their trust by his evident determination to keep the railways running at all costs; he did not seem prepared to give the Union time to agree to back down, and to wait for the results of the investigation. The military presence remained, serving only to inflame the heady atmosphere. The Home Secretary, already considered by many to be a loose cannon, merely compounded Asquith’s high-handed behaviour. Lucy Masterman, industrious and observant recorder of her MP husband’s colleagues, noted with some alarm that Churchill was evidently ‘enjoying mapping the country and directing the movement of troops.’

  To the relief of many, the Chancellor Lloyd George now intervened for the second time that summer.Having spoken out in July about the German threats to Agadir, emphasising Britain’s position of solidarity with France, he now threw his weight into the domestic crisis. At his instigation Asquith called a Cabinet meeting, at which the Chancellor explained that he did not think the strike could possibly be settled by force; he advised a return to mediation. He also believed it possible that an appeal to patriotism and a reminder of the danger posed to every Englishman’s liberty by the German activity in Morocco might prove persuasive. Patriotism was, he believed, the key to unification.

  On Friday 8 August the War Minister, Lord Haldane, described to Lucy Masterman the level of anxiety that was building at desks throughout the War Office, with ‘a General in each room with his ear glued to the telephone receiving reports as to military arrangements.’ Suddenly Lloyd George burst excitedly into the room: ‘A glass of champagne! I’ve done it. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve done it. The strike is settled.’ The patriotic card had been well played, and it had worked.

  A message had already reached Churchill, who was packing to leave London for the weekend. He telephoned almost at once, asking to speak to the triumphant mediator. ‘I’m very sorry to hear it,’ Churchill spluttered. ‘It would have been better to have gone on and given these men a good thrashing.’And having made his own feelings clear, he left to play golf.

  The King was deeply grateful, and telegraphed at some length from Bolton to acknowledge his Chancellor’s invaluable interven-tion: ‘Very glad to hear that it was largely due to your energy and skill that a settlement with regard to this very serious strike has been brought about,’ he said. ‘I heartily congratulate you and feel that the whole country will be most grateful to you for averting a most disastrous calamity. It has caused me the greatest possible anxiety.’

  The 1911 strikes had a markedly beneficial effect on union power. Many of the transport unions doubled in size, and the overall number of people in trade unions increased from 2,565,000 in 1910 to 3,139,000 in 1911. More than a million trade union memberswere involved in the 1911 strikes. There had never before been solidarity between workers on such a scale, and several union leaders were committed to continue working together. But the settlement came too late to prevent a dreadful event that took place the very same afternoon in Lloyd George’s own part of the United Kingdom. In the small town of Llanelli a mild confrontation between the armed forces and the pickets that had brought a train to a standstill ended with two innocent bystanders being shot and killed by soldiers fromtheWorcestershire Regiment. Looting then broke out, a cargo of combustible carbide packed on one of the trucks exploded. Four more people including a woman bystander were killed, and another man was burned beyond recognition.

  And the repercussions were not at an end. Thousands who had considered themselves lucky to be able to afford a short holiday now found themselves stranded in waiting rooms and on railway platforms across the land. In Lancashire some people walked for over twenty miles to the nearest town of Preston looking for some form of transport. The elderly found it impossible to continue in the heat, limping with raw blisters from their heavy shoes. One woman carried her five-year-old, who had a broken leg, ten miles across the Yorkshire moors. Farmers were powerless to object as hundreds of holiday makers cut suddenly adrift lay down in the dry fields, too exhausted to continue the long journey home.

  By the middle of August the militant atmosphere of that perfect summer of 1911 had seeped into the confectionery factories of East London. The women workers of Bermondsey, ‘the black patch of London’ according to the pre-eminent surveyor of the poor and their life in the City, Charles Booth, were about to join their husbands on strike. For those women the holiday month of August presented no prospect of fruit-filled silver dishes on the white linen cloths laid for luncheon aboard a yacht or sunny afternoons in rose gardens, or even of days out to the music halls of the coastal resorts of Brighton and Blackpool. The working life of the very poor was monotonous, and did not allow for days off. Some men looked for escape in the Army, recently flooded with enquiries, many from unsuitable, unhealthy and elderly applicants, all of whom sought steady employment. The comradeship of the new Boy Scout movement had also encouraged younger men to consider an eventual military career. Women had almost no such opportunity, with the Girl Guide movement merely a fledgling year old in 1911.

  With so many men in uncertain employment, it was often the women who took control of the weekly household budget. Rent and burial insurance, the cost of living and dying, took priority, while the sum spent on food varied depending on what was left after such other expenses as wood, gas, coal and cleaning materials had been taken care of. Clothes were never allocated a fixed sum. A canny mother had been known to tape a penny to her baby’s small body, concealed beneath the nappy and retrieved only in desperate need. Maud Pember Reeves, a sympathetic Fabian compiling a report on the poor of Lambeth, would on occasion unstitch the lining of her coat and hand over the coin she had placed there to weight the hem, leaving the house with her coat-tails flapping.

  Insurance for funerals and burial, the second largest fixed household cost after rent, was considered essential. The death of a child, especially during hot summer days when disease spread so rapidly, was an agonising if familiar part of daily life. The cost of a decent funeral for a little girl dead of cholera that August was at least five times the weekly wage of a woman factory worker, but a pauper’s funeral was an indignity few would tolerate. A bereaved mother would rather borrow, then starve for the months it took her to repay the loan. Kindly neighbours would often show their respect by contributing to the cost of a wreath and the men, black diamonds of cloth sewn to their sleeves, would line the street, their hats tucked under their arms, as the hearse passed by.

  A funeral sometimes served as an emotional unifier. Across the Bridges, Alexander Paterson’s study of life in Kennington, was published that year. In it he wrote that ‘The cord is tightened and ideals are found to be true in these dark days which in brighter ones are almost lost to sight.’ The costs of death were broken down as follows:

  The funeral service £1 12s.

  Death Certificate 1s. 3d.

  Gravediggers 2s.

  Hearse attendants 2s.

  Woman to lay the body out 2s.

  Insurance agent 1s.

  Flowers 6d.

  Black tie for father 1s.

  Total £2 1s. 9d.

  There was rarely any money left over for a private grave, and the child would be buried in a common plot with two others. If a child had died very young, the undertaker might take pity on a poor family and save them the cost of a hearse by driving the coffin to the church wedged beneath the seat of his van.