Beatrice Green – a socialist, feminist and
prominent activist in the 1926 General Strike Lock out
Taken from a
book by Sue Bruley and written by Keith Jones, son of Tom Jones (1)
The General Strike of 1926 and the six month-long Miners’
Lockout which followed was a hugely important event in Welsh history and was
arguably the most significant labour dispute of 20th-century Britain.
The only comparable event was the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85.
After a nine-day “General Strike” in which engineers and transport workers came
out in support of the miners, the Trades Union Congress caved in and the strike
collapsed.
In this 1920s version of “austerity”, it was only the miners
who stood out bravely in opposition to the Conservative Government led by
Stanley Baldwin.
In the South Wales coalfield, communities rallied together
in an attempt to stave off harsh cuts to wages, increased working hours, and
falling living standards for the miners and their families. Behind the militant
miners were their equally militant wives, mothers and girlfriends. The unsung
heroines of 1926 were these women who rallied their families, their
neighbourhoods and their communities together, and kept everyone going some of
the older women were experienced suffrage campaigners and were still active in
the struggle to achieve absolute parity with men. Women had to reach the age of
30 to vote, at least before 1928.Others joined the Women’s Co-operative Guild
or the Women’s Labour League and joined in campaigns for maternity benefits,
infant welfare clinics, family planning, nursery schools, and even changing the
voting system to proportional representation.
Among those who became activists in the heady days of 1926
was Beatrice Green (née Dykes) of Abertillery.
She emerged as an outstanding leader of women because of the
lockout. Born into a mining family in 1895, she was very active in the local
Ebenezer Baptist church, did well at school and went on to become a teacher She
married Ron Green, a miner, in 1916, and had her first child the following
year. A second child was born eight years later.
Being a miners’ wife was very much a full-time job in those
days, but Beatrice was politically inclined. With amenable in-laws, who were
prepared to keep house in her absence, she was able to throw herself into
Labour Party activism.
She also supported the hospital Linen League, which raised
funds to buy and launder linen for the hospital in Abertillery. And she took an
active interest in Marie Stopes’ campaign for birth control, not then a popular
movement in Wales.
Beatrice soon began to be noticed in Labour Party women’s
circles in Abertillery and in Monmouthshire more generally. Her address “Women
in the State” – delivered to the Abertillery Labour Women’s Section early in
1921 – was published in the local newspaper adding to her growing popularity.
Following that experience, she developed her writing and
speaking skills and, being both internationalist in outlook and proficient in
French, she contributed regular pieces on women’s issues to a French socialist
magazine.
She subsequently wrote for the Labour Woman in Britain.
When the strike broke out in May 1926, Beatrice was
determined that miners and their families would not be starved into submission.
She began an exhausting round of fundraising activities on
behalf of the Women’s Committee for the Relief of Miners’ Wives and Children,
an organisation later described as an “industrial Red Cross”.
She was active on the Abertillery Maternity Relief Committee
which sought to provide food, clothing and blankets for pregnant women in need.
And she was regularly in London speaking at meetings to raise for all of these
committees, becoming very much in demand as a public speaker.
At one open-air meeting in the city, her emotional and
affective plea for aid caused a young boy to tug at her dress and say: “I ain’t got a penny Miss, but I will
sing for you.”
Raising the
plight of Abertillery’s needy
In her articles, she wrote of the distress caused in Abertillery
– declaring in one of her interviews that the whole community had fallen on the
Poor Law.
Like many towns in South Wales, Abertillery had very little
work except for mining so the entire town was plunged into economic misery as a
result of the strike and lockout.
Beatrice helped to organise the temporary fostering of
vulnerable children, removing them from the coalfield for the duration of the
dispute and easing the financial burden on their parents.
For those who remained behind, there were soup kitchens and
school dinners. 1,600 people were fed this way every day in Abertillery.
To keep the miners out and to maintain the relief efforts
needed a considerable sum of money.
Much of this was raised through campaigning but some came
from international assistance, from the miners of Canada fresh from their own
strikes the year before and from the Soviet Union where miners voted a small
levy from their wages towards the relief fund.
June 1917: A political protest in Petrograd, one of many
demonstrations that led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and so to the
October revolution
June 1917: A political protest in Petrograd, one of many
demonstrations that led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and so to the
October revolution
As a thank-you and to cement relations between British and
Russian trade unions, a 19-strong delegation was sent to the Soviet Union at
the end of August 1926.
Beatrice Green was one of six miners’ wives who made the
two-month trip, each representing a different coalfield.
The women travelled thousands of miles across the vast
territory of the Soviet Union by rail, using a sleeping carriage for most of
the trip. Part of the train was formed from the former Czarina’s private
carriage.
The British group attracted much interest from Russian
workers in cities as diverse as St Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) and
Tbilisi.
Stopping at stations, the women were greeted with much pomp
and ceremony. Brass bands and banners, many of them offering words of welcome
in English, accompanied the crowds that gathered.
The women held meetings at every place they came to with Beatrice
speaking to large crowds about the situation in Britain. The Russian workers
offered their continued support for the miners in south Wales and the other
coalfields of Britain.
We are fortunate to have two lengthy reports which she sent
back during her trip and which were published in the Labour Woman. She wrote
particularly about women in the Soviet Union and was eager to draw favourable
contrasts between Czarist Russia and what was happening in the workers’ state.
A victim of propaganda?
“One of the greatest marvels accomplished by the Russian
revolution,” she wrote, “Is the complete emancipation of women... Today in
Russia, woman possesses an absolute equality of rights with man. She has
economic independence and equal political, moral and social rights.”
With hindsight these observations appear somewhat naïve.
We should be mindful of the fact that this trip was
carefully stage-managed to show off the best of the newly-formed USSR. At this
time there was much suspicion and hostility in the West towards the Soviet
Union, but for many British socialists, particularly in south Wales, it was a
beacon of hope and optimism.
St Petersburg and Moscow undoubtedly presented the best of
the Soviet Union, but Beatrice did nevertheless concede that there were real
problems in the eastern republics such as Azerbaijan.
There male opposition to the new equality laws created
serious tension and violence, including deaths.
The trip was a remarkable one for all of the women who went.
Miners’ wives in the 1920s rarely travelled beyond their own
district, or at the most to London on special occasions, and so to undertake
such an extensive trip was an incredible experience.
For Beatrice, in particular, it was transformative. Marion
Phillips, the Labour Party’s chief women’s officer and later MP for Sunderland,
https://markwrite.co.uk/dr-marion-phillips-sunderlands-first-female-mp/
wrote that Beatrice blossomed as a great speaker, writer and organiser,
describing her work in the Soviet Union as a “crowning happiness in her life”.
Back home, the lockout was slowly disintegrating, although
the miners of south Wales remained solid giving in only when it was clear that
the cause was lost nationally and they could not hold out on their own.
Determination rises out of defeat
The dispute finally came to an end at the end of November,
little more than a month after Beatrice returned from her trip abroad. The
miners had to accept defeat.
The Women’s Committee the Relief of Miners’ Wives and
Children raised £313,874 over the course of the lockout, a huge sum for the
time and the equivalent of more than £17m today. It did much to alleviate
distress in the coalfields and to sustain the miners in their struggle.
Despite the bitter blow of defeat Beatrice was determined to
maintain her activism.
She wrote regularly for the Labour Woman, offering
sensible and compassionate advice on child care and in September 1927 presided
over a conference of Monmouthshire Labour women which attracted over 800
delegates.
Described by contemporaries as being “in perpetual motion”,
she seemed destined for a political career. But sadly it was not to be.
Beatrice Green was tragically struck down with ulcerative
colitis and died on October 19, 1927.
She was just 32 years old. She left behind a grieving
husband and two young sons.
The people of Artillery named an ambulance after her, a
fitting tribute who gave so much to her community and who believed passionately
in a health service open to all.
We should remember Beatrice Green today as a socialist, a
feminist, and an outstanding activist.
Above all, we should remember her for the way she attempted
to speak to the world about the dire plight of her community in the momentous
Miners’ Lockout of 1926.
Sue Bruley is a reader in Modern History at the University
of Portsmouth.
She is also author of The Women and Men of 1926, The General
Strike and Miners Lockout in South Wales (University of Wales Press,
1.
TOM JONES – a fighter for freedom and working people;
a booklet written for Unite the union by Mark Metcalf https://markwritecouk.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/tom-jones-booklet11-19899.pdf
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