Keith Laybourn

Over the Threshold

‘The Labour Party, after more than twenty years strenuous work, (is) now the Official Opposition, holding itself out to the electors as the Alternative Government,’ Sidney Webb proclaimed proudly at the annual party conference in June 1923.1 His Presidential Address painted a compelling picture of Labour’s advance during the previous decade and beyond that was to take the party ‘over the threshold’ of power and into office.2 Inexorably, it seemed, the Labour Party had gathered strength on all fronts. Growth in parliamentary and municipal representation was testament to the party’s steady increase in membership to around four million affiliated members, sound organisation with local parties established in nearly 600 constituencies, and comprehensive political programmes in domestic and foreign policy. As seen earlier, Webb forecast precisely the future arrival of the first Labour government. He announced that ‘a continuation of the rising curve of Labour votes from the 62,698 of 1900…(to) the 4.5 millions of 1922, would produce a clear majority of the total votes cast in Great Britain somewhere about 1926.’3

A Comment on the Historiography of Communism in Britain

‘‘A Peripheral Vision’’ is a timely and much needed critical review of the recent debate that has occupied historians of British Communist history, most bitterly in the pages of Labour History Review (LHR). It presents powerful arguments for reuniting the role of Stalinism with work on the British Party leadership and the rank-and-file activists in future histories. The vital point is that the revisionist history which has emerged since the 1980s has sought to remove, or at least greatly downplay, the importance of the Russian leadership as one of the factors, undoubtedly, in the view of this writer, the primary one, in the evolution of the CPGB. Revisionists have rejected the work of Pelling, Kendall and Macfarlane, who are criticized for believing that the CPGB was robotic in its acceptance of Moscow direction.1 In contrast McIlroy and Campbell are adamant that only reinstatement of the centrality of Bolshevism and Stalinism will permit an accurate picture of the Party.

‘King Solomon's mines cannot compare with the money that has been raked in by greyhound racing’: greyhound racing, its critics and the working class, c. 1926–1951

Greyhound racing emerged in Britain in 1926 and, during its first quarter of a century, was subject to institutional middle-class opposition because of the legal gambling opportunities it offered to the working class. Much maligned as a dissipate and impoverishing activity, it was, in fact, a significant leisure opportunity for the working class, which cost little for the minority of bettors involved in what was clearly no more than a ‘bit of a flutter’.

'A Divine Discontent with Wrong': The People's Martyrology

This introduction excavates the meaning and use of ‘martyr’ in the thinking of British and Irish oppositionists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the theological roots of the term, the practices of the Church and the impact of the Reformation on later understandings of who and what a martyr was. Furthermore, it pursues a philological investigation into the use of the word ‘martyr’ and its related terms—‘saint’, ‘hero’, ‘Judas’ and ‘innocent’—in conventional, radical and oppositionist writings. The final section turns to the concept of a ‘civil religion’ before considering how a simple ‘death’ is transformed into a ‘martyrdom’. This, and the following contributions, make it clear that ‘the people’s martyrology’ is more than just a particularly apt phrase.

‘The People’s Flag Is Deepest Red, It Shrouded Oft Our Martyred Dead’: Martyrdom and the People’s History

This concluding chapter reviews the histories presented in the book and seeks out the commonalities and the contrasts between them. All share features with the sacred martyrdoms of earlier centuries. In each case the state’s response has also demonstrated common features: primarily, each martyrdom represents a failure of the state, either tactically or strategically. In England and Wales the role of a community in creating and sustaining a secular martyrdom has been primary, while in Ireland martyrdoms demonstrate the power of institutions such as the nascent Irish state. Each martyrdom has been not merely a drama but also an historically significant ‘event’, happening at a moment marked by new times and the emergence of new forces. As a result, a general history of secular martyrdom can be written.

Historiography and Argument

The emergence of the motorised vehicle has led to a rapidly expanding academic literature which has focused upon both the conflict between the motorists and the pedestrians, and the role of the police. This literature has been dominated two major questions. Firstly, why did the motor car become dominant on British roads? Secondly, what part did the police play in this process? The second question, in particular, raises a number of subsidiary questions. Were the police complicit in the success of the motorist? Were the chief constables and ordinary policemen subservient to the motorist? Why did the police commit themselves to a policy of segregating the motorist and the pedestrian? Why did the police assume the responsibility of traffic control and the challenge of dealing with congestion? Why did they accept the three Es of Enforcement, Engineering and Education, which formed the holistic approach to traffic policing they adopted? How did the police structure change to meet the demands of traffic control and traffic crime? Relevant, but only peripheral to this book, is the question: How effectively did the police work with the courts in dealing with the enforcement of traffic offences?

The Challenge of Automobility and the Response of Policing in Britain: An Overview of a New Vista

The automobile brought about seismic changes in every developed country in the world by rapidly replacing horsedrawn vehicles as the predominant form of transport in the early decades of the twentieth century. The exponential growth of motorised vehicles across the world, from a few thousand in the late 1890s to one million in 1910, 50 million in 1930s, 100 million in 1955, 500 million in 1985 and to more than 1 billion by 2010, has exerted profound social, economic, political and environmental impact upon societies and fundamentally changed the way in which many of them have operated.1 The private ownership of cars, in particular, has been central to the personal autonomy of the majority of people. It has become the basis of transport, overtaking the train and other forms of transport, and a desired possession that provides status. Yet almost immediately they appeared, motor vehicles posed major problems for society and have done so ever since, whether as a cause of social discrimination, death, injury, congestion, gridlock and environmental pollution in what has become a battle for the roads between motorists and pedestrians in which the emergence of trunk roads and motorway can be seen as the triumph of the motorists. Ever-increasing numbers of motor vehicles were forced to jostle alongside horsedrawn traffic, trams, hand-pulled barrows and carts, with dramatic social consequences.

‘An Unwanted but Necessary Task’: Traffic Policing and the Enforcement of the Law, c.1900–1939

Sir Philip Game, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner of the mid- and late 1930s, reflected that: Since the time of Sir Robert Peel’s reforms, no single change has had more effect on the work of the police and their relations with the public than the introduction of the motor car and the consequent revolution in the method of transport.16 To Game, the arrival of the motorised vehicle challenged the, apparently, improving relations between the police and the public, and had inaugurated an age of conflict between the police, motorists, cyclists and pedestrians. H. Alker Tripp, his assistant commissioner B for Transport, went further. He suggested that the growth of the ‘mechanically propelled traffic’ had ‘outstripped the normal means of dealing with it’ [the problem of safety on the road] and that the ‘only organisation in the country which possess [sic] the necessary machinery for the proper and effective control of the roads’, is the police.17 The statements of Game, Tripp, and indeed other chief constables, raised issues about the relationship between the police and road users — most obviously the motorist — as well as the role of the police in the new age of the car.

Engineering the Environment c.1900–1970: Congestion, Meters and Redefining the Urban Landscape

It is axiomatic to suggest that the motorised vehicle transformed the urban landscape of Britain between 1900 and 1970. Motor cars were not designed for the British roads of the early twentieth century, which were often rutted, narrow and winding, lacking clearly designated pavements, and open to many forms of competing road users. The obvious incongruity of cars on roads suitable only for nineteenth-century traffic, combined with the rapid increase in automobile numbers, and resultant road congestion and noise pollution, dramatically increased the existing traffic problems of many towns and added significantly to road deaths and injuries. Photographs of town centres in the 1920s and 1930s testify to the confusion of traffic flow on the roads that forced the second Labour government (1929–1931) to introduce The Highway Code in 1931. The fact is that there were different speed limits operating for cars, for buses, trams and other road users, which were in conflict with each other and the slow pace of the pedestrian, the cyclist and the horse. Irate car owners honked their horns to add to an incredible cacophony of sound in Britain’s urban centres. Indeed, the Daily Mail mounted a campaign in the late 1920s to reduce noise pollution in London, in conjunction with the Columbia Gramophone Company, which made two records of London Street Noises — Leicester Square and London Street Noises — Beauchamp Place, Brompton Road on 11 and 20 September 1928.4

Traffic Accidents and Road Safety: The Education of the Pedestrian and the Child, 1900–1970

Herbert Morrison, Minister of Transport in the Labour government of 1929–1931, wrote to the Home Secretary in early 1931, boasting that he had driven about 500,000 miles without an accident.1 Such preening pride would not have been uncommon from some car drivers, but the Minister of Transport was a prominent political figure and his driving record was both exceptional and exemplary in an age of road carnage. Indeed, the confidence he exuded is perhaps a reflection of the faith he, and the second Labour government (1929–1931), held in removing the speed limits for cars under the Road Traffic Act of 1930.2 Indeed, both Morrison and the second Labour government seemed to have acted as conduits for the temporary convergence of opinions of both motoring organisations and chief constables; the former wanting to simply remove speed limits per se, whilst the latter wished to remove some of the contentious speed limits for motorised vehicles, albeit convinced by the evidence, emerging in their annual reports, that it was the pedestrians, not the motorists, who were primarily responsible for road accidents. Yet even if pedestrians contributed significantly to their own deaths and injuries, the decision to remove the speed limit seems remarkably thoughtless, and belied the obvious dangers that the car, and other motorised vehicles, presented on the roads of Britain, regardless of who was at fault.3