Imperial internationalism?

Hull labour’s support for South African trade-unionism on

the eve of the Great War

Yann Béliard

University of Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the public support brought by Hull’s labour activists between

January and April 1914 to nine trade-unionists who had been deported from South Africa

because of their leading role in a general strike. The speeches made at the protest meeting

on 29 March 1914 as well as the articles which were published in the local labour press

before and after that day are indeed most revealing as to the nature of working-class

internationalism in the United Kingdom on the eve of the Great War. The study shows how

intricately feelings of class solidarity were mingled with feelings of national and even

racial solidarity. In spite of Hull’s maritime character, in spite of their numerous

transnational contacts and of their radical claims, the way the local trade-union and

socialist leaders apprehended the South African events was almost unanimously shaped

by an imperialistic vision excluding both Boer and African workers.

A ‘Great Labour Unrest’ with Transnational Ties

How transnational was the ‘Great Labour Unrest’ of 1911-1914?

Historians are almost unanimous in acknowledging French and

American influences over the ‘direct actionism’ put into practice

by British workers during those stormy years. But the

international dimension of the strike wave has always appeared in

the footnotes rather than in the body of their analyses, as most

studies so far have tended to approach it either from a national

or from a local angle.1 Just because the cross-national perspective

is currently shedding new light on social history does not mean,

however, that decades of historical research should be swept

aside. Far from building upon a tabula rasa, this article hopes to

show that taking into account the local dimension is, paradoxical

as it may seem, an invaluable way of addressing the issue of

cross-border networking, especially when the ground chosen to lead

the enquiry is a port. For ports are places where ideas as well as

goods and people circulate with particular intensity and where the

feeling of connection to foreign nations can be as strong as the

more obvious link to the hinterland. Does that mean that ports are

necessarily hotbeds of proletarian internationalism? It is often

said that “a seaman’s country is the world”, a statement more or

less implying that maritime workers should be more immune than

others to jingoism. But like any cliché, it cannot be taken for

granted. Whether port workers, in the years leading to World

War I, really formed a milieu preserved from the ideology of

imperialism is open to debate, especially as the opposite

hypothesis also makes sense. Belonging to the biggest merchant1REFERENCES

? The canonical national accounts of the Great Labour Unrest were

published in the thirties: Elie Halevy, Histoire du peuple anglais au dix-

neuvième siècle: Epilogue (1895-1914). 2. Vers la démocratie sociale et vers la guerre

(1905-1914) (Paris: Hachette, 1932); George Dangerfield, The Strange

Death of Liberal England (1935; Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997

edn). Both insisted on the potentially revolutionary situation

created by the coincidence between the workers’ revolt and two

other phenomena: the suffragette movement and the rebellion in

Ireland. Local studies of the Great Labour Unrest did not develop

until the sixties and seventies but since then, they have

flourished. See for example Keith Brooker, The Hull Strikes of 1911

(Beverley: East Yorkshire Local History Society, 1979); Edmund and

Edith Frow, The General Strike in Salford (Salford: The Working Class

Movement Library, 1990); Eric Taplin, Near to Revolution: The Liverpool

General Transport Strike of 1911 (Liverpool: Bluecoat Press, 1994).

fleet in the world, there is reason to believe that many a British

seafarer felt proud to participate in the empire’s prosperity,

even if he sensed that he was not getting his fair share. The

identification of shipwrights with Britannia ruling the waves, a

favourite figure on their union banners, leaves no doubt as to the

possibility of class pride going hand in hand with national

sentiment.

To deconstruct stereotypes, a variety of cases need to be

studied and Hull, because it has been rather neglected by labour

historians, seems a stimulating point from which to venture.

Though it is perceived nowadays as being somewhat ‘off the

tracks’, the city of Kingston-upon-Hull was in no way marginal

under Edward VII and George V: it was actually the third port in

the United Kingdom in terms of the amount of cargo handled, just

behind London and Liverpool, and played a key role in the

country’s exchanges with the rest of the world.2 As far as labour

agitation is concerned, Hull came under the limelight in June

1911, with its waterfront workers’ spectacular participation in

the international seamen’s strike called by the International2 Edward Gillett and Kenneth MacMahon, A History of Hull (Hull: Hull

University Press, 1989). See also Joyce M. Bellamy, ‘Some Aspects

of the Economy of Hull in the Nineteenth Century’, PhD, University

of Hull, 1965.

Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF). That unprecedented event,

involving Hull as well as London, Liverpool, Antwerp and

Rotterdam, has since become the iconic example of class solidarity

in action.3 There would be little point, though, in treading along

such a well-known path. Instead, this article aims to analyse an

episode that has almost fallen into oblivion: the public support

brought by Hull’s labour activists between January and April 1914

to nine trade-unionists who had been deported from South Africa

because of their leading role in a general strike. Hull was not

the only place where such support was expressed, as the Trades

Union Congress (TUC) and the Labour Party orchestrated a campaign

that was truly national in its scope. But the meeting held in Hull

on Sunday 29 March 1914 was presented by the local labour press as

‘the greatest rally of trade unionists Hull has ever known’, as if

the event had taken on an emotional dimension not observed in

other locations.4 Admittedly, none of the local activists mentioned

in the following paragraphs ever achieved any national, let alone

international significance, and the focus of this study may seem

parochial or anecdotal. But its purpose is a general one: by

scrutinising the speeches made at the meeting and the discourse

that preceded and followed that extraordinary evening, it seeks to

explore the very nature of working-class internationalism in the

United Kingdom on the eve of the Great War.

The British campaign to help the South African deportees was

studied for the first time twenty years ago by Logie Barrow in an

article entitled ‘White solidarity [with South African strikers]

in 1914’.5 Since then, only one article, by South African historian

Jonathan Hyslop has been published in relation to that campaign.6

As both titles underline, the kind of internationalism advocated

by the British labour movement in 1914 overlapped with feeling of

national and even racial solidarity. Was the same blend of

3 Ken Coates and Tony Topham, The Making of the Transport and General Workers’

Union: The Emergence of the Labour Movement 1870-1922, vol. 1, part 1, From

Forerunners to Federation (1870-1911) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991),

pp. 335-398.

4 The Dawn, March 1914, no. 12, p. 3. That newspaper is part of a

unique collection that cannot be found at the British Newspapers

Library in Colindale, but only in Hull, at the Local Studies

section of the Hull City Library. There are only nine copies left

of The Dawn, beginning with no. 1 (April 1913) and ending with

no. 34 (January 1916).

imperialism and internationalism present in Hull, or was there

some sort of exceptionalism linked to the maritime character of

the city? From the 1880s to 1913, one of the most prominent

speakers for the Hull Trades and Labour Council was a militant of

German origin, a certain Gustav Schmidt, known as Gus Smith.7 In

May 1911, the seamen of Hull offered a hearty welcome to French

agitator Madame Sorgue and soon adopted the ‘international direct

action’ which she heralded.8 Did such fruitful contacts with

foreigners shape the way the social situation in South Africa was

interpreted locally, making it less chauvinistic than elsewhere?

The internationalist creed was maybe more vocal than in other

cities, but the expressions of international class solidarity on

the part of Hull’s labour leaders were entangled with references

to nation and race that made their stand highly equivocal.

Background: The South African Strikes of 1913-14

Before dealing with the Hull meeting itself, a brief summary of

the events leading to the deportation is needed. On 30 January

1914, nine South African labour leaders were rushed to Durban,

‘pitched’ on a tramp steamer and ‘packed off’ to London.9 That

forced exile was the ultimate episode in a fortnight of violent

anti-union repression. It had begun with a strike in the province

of Natal, a response to the announcement of 2,000 dismissals in

the state-owned railway companies. The decision had been all the

more shocking as traffic was on the rise, which meant that those

not dismissed would soon be slaves to ‘over-work’, ‘speeding-up’

and ‘sweating’.10 The railwaymen’s union, followed by the coal

miners of Natal, had therefore been cornered into planning a

strike for 13 January 1914, which the government saw as an

opportunity to smash the unions. The government declared martial

law on 14 January 1914 and the repression was pitiless. The

leaders surrendered on January 15 and were immediately jailed. Two

weeks later, they were deported.

The brutal measures taken by the government were in fact a

revenge on a general strike that had shaken another province the

year before and had ended in partial victory for the workers but

plain humiliation for the authorities.11 In July 1913, the heart of

labour unrest had been the north-east of South Africa, the mining

areas that the British had conquered through the Boer War, i.e.

Orange and above all Transvaal, more precisely the area west of

Johannesburg known as the Witwatersrand, or simply ‘the Rand’. The

revolt had been directed at the terrible working conditions. It

had lead to the killing of 21 strikers by the imperial troops and

to the severe wounding of 200 others. But the miners, through

their determination, had won the right not to work on Saturday

afternoons. The deportation of the labour leaders, no one doubted

it, was but a belated counter-attack.12

5 Logie Barrow, ‘White solidarity in 1914’, pp. 275-287 in Raphael

Samuel (ed.), Patriotisms: The Making and Unmaking of National Identities, 3

vols (London: Routledge, 1989), I.

6 Jonathan Hyslop, ‘The Imperial working class makes itself

“white”: White Labourism in Britain, Australia and South Africa

before the First World War’, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 12, 4

(1999), pp. 398-421.

7 Gustav Schmidt is mentioned in passing by Raymond Brown in

Waterfront Organisation in Hull 1870-1900 (Hull: University of Hull

Publications, 1972), p. 50. For a sketch of the man’s life and of

his political ideas, see also Yann Béliard, ‘”Le pôle Smit” in Aux

origines de la “Grande Fièvre Ouvrière”: les rapports sociaux à

Hull (1894-1910)’ [The origins of the “Great Labour Unrest”. Class

Relations in Hull (1894-1910)], PhD, Paris 13 University, 2007,

pp. 470-474.

8 George Subervie, ‘Une figure oubliée: la Citoyenne Sorgue’, Revue

du Rouergue, January-March 1949, pp. 5-22. For a tale of her week in

Hull, see also Yann Béliard, ‘“Outlandish ‘-isms’ in the city”: How Madame

The Rhetoric of Philanthropy and Internationalism

A quotation from The Dawn, the monthly paper published by the Hull

branch of the Labour Party, gives some idea of the enthusiasm

aroused by the rally: ‘Turn up in your thousands, workers of Hull,

that our city, which prides itself upon its love of liberty, and

still glories in the name of Wilberforce, may fittingly welcome

our brothers who are the victims of this oppression, and

demonstrate our willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder to

defend the liberty of labour the world over’.13 Many signs show how

intent the local Labour Party branch and the local Trades and

Labour Council were to put Hull ‘to the front in the general

welcome’.14 Whereas the smaller labour gatherings often took place

at St George’s Hall, the venue chosen this time was the City Hall,

which the Lord Mayor had agreed to lend them. Besides, the whole

local labour movement was behind the do, as tickets could be

purchased from its political branch (at the Independent Labour

Party Institute or at the Socialist Club), its trade-union branch

(at the National Union of Railwaymen, Amalgamated Society of

Sorgue contaminated Hull with the virus of direct action’, RANAM (recherches anglaises

et nord-américaines), 36, 3 (2003), pp. 114-125.

9 Hull Trades and Labour Council, Monthly Labour Journal, April

1914, 244, p. 3.

10 The Dawn, March 1914, 12, p. 2.

Engineers and Shop Assistants’ Institutes) and its cooperative

branch (at the Co-operative Institute or at the Hull Printers’

headquarters).15

Despite of the rather pompous tone used for the invitation,

the message was straightforward: it was a necessity for workers to

organise across borders. On 29 March 1914, the same theme was

hammered by all the orators present at the City Hall. The first to

speak were of course the two South African trade-unionists who had11 H.J. and R.E. Simons, Chapter 8 in Class and Colour 1850-1950

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).

12 A coincidence worth noting: on the week that followed our

conference in Coleraine, another international conference took

place at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South

Africa (organised by the History Workshop and the Centre for

Sociological Research, in association with the International

Association of Labour History Institutions and the International

Conference of Labour and Social History) on a topic very similar

to ours: ‘Labour crossings – world, work and history’. Its

coordinator, Lucien Van Der Walt, is the author of an award-

winning thesis which offers an in-depth analysis of many issues

which are merely touched on in this article: Anarchism and Syndicalism

in South Africa, 1904-1921: rethinking the history of labour and the left, University

of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2007.

made the trip from London (where the nine deportees were housed)

to Hull: young Andrew Watson, the president of the Transvaal

Federation of Trades, and ‘old timer’ James Thompson Bain, the

secretary of that same organisation. Bain explained: ‘We have done

nothing worse in South Africa than what the trade unionists of

this country are doing every day’.16 ‘I have never found much

difference in the governments of any country,’ he added. ‘You can

expect scant justice from any class government’.17 The local

speakers followed the same line of thought. Printer Frederick

W. Booth, for the Hull Trades and Labour Council, carpenter Alfred

Gould, for the Hull Labour Party and doctor Joseph Nelson, for the

Hull branch of the British Socialist Party (BSP), had but one

motto: ‘What has happened in South Africa may happen in this

country’.18 Of course, there was some exaggeration in comparing the

lot of South African workers with that of British workers. But

there were a number of reasons to fear a repetition of the South

African scenario in the United Kingdom and on Humberside.

Ever since the end of the dockers’ strikes in the early 1890s,

British employers had engaged in a counter-offensive. For the

British labour movement, the backlash had threatened to destroy13 The Dawn, March 1914, 12, p. 2.

14 Hull Times, 7 February 1914.

15 The Dawn, March 1914, 12, p. 3.

everything they had always fought for. In 1906, the tide had

started to turn, with the emergence of a Labour Party in the House

of Commons. In 1911, a new wave of strikes had forced capitalists

and government to recognise the unions and start negotiating over

wages, hours and conditions. But there was no guarantee as to what

the outcome of the British ‘Great Labour Unrest’ would be.

According to the local labour leaders, the events in South Africa

provided British workers with a vision of how the British

government might react to the strike wave, should it culminate in

joint action by the railwaymen, the miners and the transport

workers. And the rank and file’s impatient calls for the building

of a ‘Triple Alliance’ in the early months of 1914 were proof

enough that such a convergence was not to be excluded. Besides,

the South African story echoed what the BSP orator called ‘the

hottest and most significant struggle of our times’, i.e. the

Dublin strike of 1913, which according to Joseph Nelson had only

been defeated due to lack of support from English labour.19 The

South African affair was therefore an opportunity to show the

world what British labour was really worth, to prove that

international solidarity was not an empty word. ‘Capitalism is

cosmopolitan, and its little schemes for crushing the workers know

no geographical boundaries. Watch out, Mr Working-man!’, another

BSP activist urged.20

Such extracts create the impression that the labour movement

in Hull was made of out-and-out internationalists, ready not only

to put pressure on the British government to help their South

African fellows return home but also to oppose any attempt made by

that same government to send British workers fighting against

foreign peoples. But when war was declared, only five months after

the meeting, not a single demonstration was organised in Hull. The16 ‘Among the Workers’, Hull Times, 4 April 1914. ‘Among the Workers’

was a chronicle written by Frederick W. Booth under the pseudonym

‘Peter Progress’ for a local weekly that happened to be rather

conservative but was willing to attract working-class readers with

news about trade-unions and friendly societies. Because it was

published week after week over a period of more than fifteen

years, it is an invaluable source for the study of the labour

movement in Hull in the Edwardian era.

17 Hull Trades and Labour Council, Monthly Labour Journal, April 1914,

n° 244, p. 3. The Monthly Labour Journal was created by Fred Booth in

1893 and directed by him until 1918, when its publication ceased.

A collection that is almost complete can be consulted at

Colindale.

18 Ibid.

local labour leaders followed the TUC and the Labour Party’s

policy of accommodation. Should one feel surprised by that

attitude? A close look at the rhetoric used to support the

deportees shows that it contained, mingled with the

internationalist theme, a number of nationalist, imperialist and

even racist elements.

Blaming the Boer, Exalting the British

One striking aspect of the discourse generated by the deportation

is that it was blamed not on the London-appointed governor-general

of the Union of South Africa (Viscount Herbert John Gladstone, ex-

Home Secretary in the liberal governments of 1906-1910), but on

the Boer element inside the South African government. Indeed, the

generals directly responsible for the anti-union repression were

two generals that had lead the Boer armies during the Boer War:

General Smuts and General Botha. In January 1914, they had armed

Boer peasants and invited them to raid trade-union headquarters

throughout Transvaal and Natal. Even Cornelius Shearsmith, a

prominent BSP member known for his vigorous antiracist positions,

called Smuts and Botha ‘these stupid Afrikanders’.21 Besides, local

labour monthly The Dawn quoted a letter from a Johannesburg

carpenter that read as follows: ‘These Dutch burgesses submitted

all Britishers they met with great indignities. A more dirty and

disreputable lot I had never met. Many were without boots, the

only clean thing about them being their rifles. They were getting

a bit of their own back for the late war’.22 Although martial law

in South Africa had been declared ‘in the name of God and of the

King’, George V, the imperial authorities and the ‘Tommies’ were

not blamed for the repression.23

In fact, allegiance to the crown and to the British Empire was

strongly vindicated. The text chosen for the poster announcing the

meeting perfectly illustrates the ambiguity of Hull labour men’s

internationalism. Of course they were rallying ‘for the Rights of

Trade Unionists’ but also, and inseparably, for the rights ‘of

British Subjects’.24 It reflected a deeply engraved vision of the

world and of themselves, in which proletarian pride and loyalty to

national institutions were not perceived as being contradictory.

Class and nation were set on exactly on the same level. The South

African events were at times evoked as a foreign story with

lessons for the British worker. But they were more often described

as a domestic affair, insofar as it was set inside the British19 Hull Trades and Labour Council, Monthly Labour Journal, January 1914,

241, p. 1.

20 Hull Trades and Labour Council, Monthly Labour Journal, April

1914, 244, p. 1.

Empire. The recurring comparisons with what was happening in

Ulster at the same time – unionist officers refusing to obey

orders from London, without Home Secretary Winston Churchill

retaliating – reflected not so much an interest in what was

happening abroad, to other peoples and other nations, as an

interest in all matters British. Interestingly, the local

politicians, whether conservative or liberal, refused that

assimilation, considering the South-African deportees as utterly

un-British and far too radical for reasonable trade-unionists,

born and bred in mellow Britain, to have anything to do with them.

Attachment to Britishness may explain why Bain was awarded a

warmer welcome by the Hull audience than Watson. ‘Their sympathies

went out more to Mr Bain, who belongs to the South African Society

of Engineers. White-haired, with iron-grey moustache, he gave the

impression of one prematurely aged and in him the audience could

picture the exile of popular fancy’.25 Indeed there was much, in

Bain’s biography, that a British working-class audience of the age

of empire could relate to. His life was, in itself, representative

of the population flows of the time, between metropolis and21 Ibid., p. 3.

22 The Dawn, March 1914, 12, p. 2.

23 ‘What Martial Law means. The famous proclamation’, The Dawn,

March 1914, 12, p. 3.

colonies, or between colony and colony. Born in Dundee on 6 March

1860, Bain had enlisted in the British army at the age of sixteen

and had been sent two years later to Natal to fight the Zulus.

From 1880 to 1882, he had been stationed in India, before

returning to Scotland, where he trained to become a fitter and was

converted to socialism. In 1890, he was back in South Africa, this

time as a civilian. Working as a miner, he soon became prominent

in the Transvaal Federation of Trades. Inside the Johannesburg

Trades Council, he worked in close contact with Robert Noonan

(better known as Robert Tressell, the author of classic socialist

novel The Raggered-trousered Philanthropists). In the great strike of 1913,

he acted as the secretary of the strike committee and became

immensely popular for holding his revolver to General Smuts’ and

General Botha’s faces during the final negotiation.26

Bain’s appeal was to English patriotism: ‘We are going back to

South Africa; we are going back, but not on Jan Smuts’ conditions;

Jan Smuts has got to hear his master’s voice, and his master’s

voice must be the voice of the citizens of England’.27 That sense

of British pride was widely shared by Hull’s labour orators and

writers. On the day that followed the deportation, Fred Booth

wrote: ‘Such Russian methods will not do in British possessions.

The British flag is supposed to stand for freedom. What has24 The Dawn, March 1914, 12, p. 3.

happened in South Africa smirches our best traditions’.28 Alf’

Gould, the founder of the Labour group on the City Council and of

the local Labour Party, was indignant too, speaking of ‘an act of

tyranny as had never been before committed in the history of the

British Empire’.29 Both he and Booth contested the liberal and

conservative monopoly over British political life. But their

questioning of the social order did not extend to the world order.

To use an expression coined by Bernard Porter, they were, like

many of their contemporaries, ‘absent-minded imperialists’.30 Even

the local socialists’ frame of mind was not so different. BSP

militant William Grainger himself, who represented the far left of

the labour movement in Hull, saw ‘Dublin, Leith and Johannesburg’

as belonging to what he called ‘our country’.31

The Natives’ Plight Obliterated25 Hull Daily Mail, 30 March 1914. The Hull Times alluded to above was the

week-end edition of the Hull Daily Mail. Only the Hull Daily Mail has

survived until today.

26 The story of his life has been told in Jonathan Hyslop. The

Notorious Syndicalism: J.T. Bain –A Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa

(Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2004).

What about the racial question? In a meeting about South African

issues, there was surprisingly little talk about black workers. No

explicit criticism was made of the white supremacist regime that

was already being established. Yet the 1910 Act of Union had

allowed Transvaal and Orange to deprive blacks from the right to

vote that many of them still benefited from in the Cape colony;

and the Native Land Act adopted in its aftermath had forbidden

black farmers to buy or rent land from white owners (an Orange

legislation soon extended to the whole union, pushing the blacks

into the cities and making them the white workers’ direct

competitors). On top of all that, black workers suffered from

severe constraints in their right to move around and did not have

the right to strike, though they took it by force more often than

was known in Britain. Could it be that Hull trade-unionists were

not aware of the existence of a native population in South Africa

and of its sufferings at work? Had it been the case, surely Bain27 Hull Daily Mail, 30 March 1914.

28 ‘Among the Workers’, Hull Times, 31 January 1914.

29 Hull Daily Mail, 30 March 1914.

30 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in

Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, 497 p.

31 Hull Trades and Labour Council, Monthly Labour Journal, June 1914,

246, p. 5.

or Watson would have informed them that out of five million

inhabitants in the Union of South Africa, over three and a half

million were black people. The fact is that the heralds of labour

in Hull knew perfectly well about the inferior status of black

workers in South Africa. But they were not keen on placing that

issue to the fore.

A scrutiny of the local labour press for years 1913 and 1914

reveals no more than three allusions to the situation of the

blacks. One was made by Alf’ Gould in March 1914, in an article

stating that South African miners and railwaymen ‘could not accept

the reducing of the conditions of the white man nearer to the

level of that of coloured or Chinese labour’.32 Another allusion

was made that same month in The Dawn, a vivid report observing that

South African trade-unionists were seeing ‘the mineowners finding

more and more work for native labour, less and less for the white

man every week’. This quotation is taken from a text by Marion

Phillips, the general secretary of the Women’s Labour League,

which was reproduced in the March 1914 edition of The Dawn under the

title ‘The working woman in politics. The wives of the exiles’.33

Very emotional about the fate of the deportees’ wives (‘these

sisters of ours’) and their qualities of ‘love and justice, pluck

and determination, which are supposed to be a British birthright’,

she expressed no fraternal feelings for black workers and did not

write a word about their families.

The possibility of collaboration between black and white

workers was not even raised, the inability of black workers to

organise being simply taken for granted. The fear of degradation

was so strong that the position of black workers at the bottom of

South African society was neither questioned nor denounced – a

point of view that could be described as ‘absent-minded racism’,

to recycle Porter’s formula. That kind of racism was not expressed

aggressively at the meeting, nor was it openly professed as an

ideology worth fighting for. It was adopted for pragmatic reasons

as internationalism sometimes was, under different circumstances.

It was a practical choice based on the assumption that

collaboration with the employers on the basis of colour would be

easier to reach than the organisation of millions of unorganised

workers speaking a different language. As Jonathan Hyslop has

observed, ‘the element of the critique of exploitation and the

element of racism were inextricably mingled’, forming what Logie

Barrow has called a complex ‘imperial consciousness’.34 The term

‘racism’ is of course to be used with precaution, as the British

activists’ solidarity did not extend to the Boers, whose skin was

also white. All in all, their sense of collective identity seems

to have embraced anybody of British origin, whatever part of the

Empire one came from, as though race mattered less than language

or culture.

The one and only sympathetic mention of black workers in

Hull’s labour press is a quotation by Andrew Watson, which local

socialist Cornelius Shearsmith selected for the front page of the

Trades Council’s Monthly Labour Journal: ‘There were no statistics32 The Dawn, March 1914, 12, p. 2. A remark must be made here about

the word ‘coloured’, which Alf’ Gould uses here as a synonym for

‘black’. In fact, the ‘coloured workers’ included only a small

portion of black workers, those descending of the African slaves

that the British had long exploited in their Cape colony and which

were often half-castes. The other black workers, those coming from

territories that the British had since conquered, were in general

known as ‘Africans’ and their condition was even worse than that

of the ‘coloureds’. On 14 January 1914, Africans were used to

break a strike of coloured dockers in Cape Town, an example of how

the bosses managed to exploit not only the racial difference

between white and black, not only the national difference between

Boer and British, but also differences between black people

themselves.

33 Marion Phillips, ‘The working woman in politics. The wives of

the exiles’ in The Dawn, March 1914, 12, p. 3.

regarding the black worker and miners’ phthisis. When they fall

ill they are wheeled back to their kraals and there they die off

like flies. It is worse than the red rubber atrocities you have

made such a scream about’.35 Comparing the methods used in South

Africa by the British mine owners with those implemented in Congo

by King Leopold of Belgium, which Edmund Dean Morel and Sir Roger

Casement had recently exposed, was a daring comment indeed.

Strictly speaking, the working conditions in South African mines

could not be said to be quite as horrific as in the Congolese

plantations, where hundreds of thousands of Africans slaved and

died. But what mattered to Watson – and to Shearsmith – was to

open the public’s eyes to the crimes perpetrated on British

territory, to disturb the widespread conviction that the British

Empire was more civilised than its rivals. It is therefore hardly

surprising that the two major dailies published in Hull

deliberately silenced the young deportee’s revelations. His

compassionate statement tends to confirm Neville Kirk’s thesis

that socialists, across the British Empire, spoke out more often

against racism than in favour of it.36 But socialists, in Hull like

elsewhere in the Empire, represented only a minority inside the

labour movement as a whole – which necessarily limited the impact34 Hyslop, ‘Imperial working class makes itself “white”; Barrow,

‘White solidarity in 1914’.

of their antiracist propaganda.37 The most prominent leaders of the

local labour movement had other fish to fry and chose to turn a

blind eye on the black workers’ fate.

On Hull, Maritime Cities and Globe-Trotting Activists

From the observations made above, three sets of remarks may be

inferred: firstly about the political culture of Hull; secondly

about the supposed internationalist leanings of maritime workers

and their organisations; thirdly about the ideological

implications of cross-national networking. Concerning the first

point, it has to be admitted that the opinion expressed in Hull on

the South African affair belonged to the mainstream, insofar as it

blended social considerations with national, imperial and even

racial ones. In 1914, the fight for internationalism was just as

inconsistent in Hull as in the rest of the British Isles, in spite

of strong local internationalist credentials. At the end of the

day, the key role played by Gustav Schmidt in building the local

trade-union movement was not enough to make the Hull Trades and

Labour Council oppose war against Germany in August 1914. It was

not sufficient either to make it publicly denounce the anti-German

riots that shook the city in 1916. United action with German,

Dutch and German colleagues in June 1911 did not even prevent

local seamen from joining the jingoistic and xenophobic campaign

against the Yellow Peril which Havelock Wilson launched in Hull,

in April 1914, only two weeks after the South Africa meeting, in

the same City Hall.38 There was no ‘Hull exception’. The 1914

experience only confirms the impression that emerged from the

thesis I presented in 2007: in spite of the fresh air brought to

the city by its multifarious exchanges across the North Sea, the

labour movement in Hull did not develop a political culture of a

particularly radical kind during the Belle Epoque, nor did it

break with the TUC’s traditional insularity39 A key factor was of

course the fact that it was in the hands of labour aristocrats,

impregnated with ‘Lib-Labism’ and deeply suspicious of

revolutionary socialism. From 1911 onwards, the number of dockers

and seamen elected to the Trades Council’s executive committee did

increase slightly, but what they brought with them was a certain35 Hull Trades and Labour Council, Monthly Labour Journal, April 1914,

244, p. 1.

36 Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins. Globalization, Workers and Labour

Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London: Merlin

Press, 2003), pp. 219-222.

37 See also Peter Alexander and Rick Halpern (eds.), Racializing Class,

Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (New York:

St Martin’s Press, 2000).

taste for more radical means of action, not an internationalist

weltanschauung. During the same period, the number of socialists

present on the committee also increased, in such a significant way

that they were often in charge of writing the Monthly Labour Journal’s

editorial. But their apparent takeover occurred at a moment when

the local branch of the Labour Party was beginning to supplant the

Trades Council as the commanding body of Hull labour.

Without extrapolating, it is tempting to suggest that labour

activists in maritime cities did not embrace the cause of

internationalism with any more passion than others. Of course,

they had more occasions than workers in secluded provincial towns

to team up with foreigners. But they also had more occasions of

clashing with them, if only because they could be direct

competitors on the labour market. The maritime setting meant that

partnership and brotherhood were an option, but that conflict and

strife were another, which employers encouraged every time they

imported foreign blacklegs to break a strike. Those remarks could

probably apply to wage-earners working in any multicultural

environment, for instance those living in capitals or in border-

towns. In such a potentially explosive landscape, workers can turn

one way or the other depending on the circumstances and the weight

of the national context cannot be underestimated here. Some might

argue that the fundamentally imperialist and racist approach to

the South African troubles that prevailed among Hull activists in

particular and among British militants in general was of little

practical importance, as Transvaal was a long way away and black

workers were rarely seen, at the time, on Humberside or anywhere

else in the country. But it undeniably reinforced feelings of

loyalty towards the British Empire, feelings on which both the

state and the employers were able to lean when, only a few months

later, they asked British workers and their representatives for a

social truce. If the Hull experience has anything to teach us, it

is therefore how risky it would be to consider port workers as

being, per se, more inclined than others to embrace proletarian

internationalism in the socialist sense.

What also stands out when one examines the case of Hull is how

easy it was for moderate labour leaders to use international

affairs to give themselves a more radical face. Expressing

audacious views about overseas topics was all the more convenient

as it did not entail any concrete gestures at home, which leads me

to one final remark about space and politics. Globe-trotting on38 Coates and Topham, Transport and General Workers’ Union, I, part I, 

541-546.

39 Béliard, ‘“Le pôle Smit” in Aux origines de la “Grande Fièvre

Ouvrière”.

behalf of the labour movement has always had a left wing

connotation, possibly because of the example of Tom Mann, who left

Britain a reformist and returned to his homeland a staunch

syndicalist. His odyssey is famous, but too commonly mistaken for

the norm. For cross-national networking has never offered a

vaccine against rightward drifts. In August 1914, the Madame

Sorgue mentioned in the introduction did not call for an

international workers’ strike. Instead, the French government used

her linguistic capacities and her recent experience to strengthen

the bonds between French and British socialists and convince those

circles to stand united against German aggression. Archie

Crawford, one of the nine deportees, left South Africa a

revolutionary socialist, only to come back, ten months later, an

apostle of class collaboration and of racial segregation. When the

war was declared, he actually replaced Andrew Watson as the

president of the Transvaal Federation of Trades and agreed to sign

a no strike pledge, on condition that the bosses would employ no

black workers to do skilled jobs in the mines.40 Such individual

stories are there remind the historian that cross-national

networking is not a prerogative of revolutionary socialists, but

that it is above a tool which any political current can

appropriate, including fascism or religious fundamentalism. The

rediscovery of labour history from a transnational perspective may

be producing renewed interest in labour internationalism, but it

clearly should not lead to any romantic overestimation of its

impact on British workers before World War I.41

40 That ‘colour bar agreement’ was broken by the mine owners once

the war was over, leading to the violent 1922 strike during which

even the Communist Party of South Africa rallied behind the

slogan: ‘Workers of the world, unite for a white South Africa’.

Crawford died two years later, in 1924.

41 To help our collective questioning move forward, the CRIDAF

(Centre de Recherche sur les Domaines Anglophones et

Francophones), a research team based in Paris 13 University,

intends to organise a colloquium in 2011, which could be a useful

sequel to our 2008 gathering in Coleraine, especially if the

Society for the Study of Labour History agrees to co-sponsor it.