Strikes and Solidarity: Coalfield Conflict in Britain 1889-1966 by Roy Church; QuentinOutramReview by: Peter WeilerThe American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 5 (Dec., 1999), pp. 1757-1758Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2649498 .

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Europe: Early Modem and Modern 1757

Short discusses will be of great interest and use to historians, be they antiquarians or professionals.

The book is in two parts. The first part is about Lloyd George's budget and the scale, structure, and findings of the survey. Part two, entitled "Themes and Locality Studies," offers readers some of the applica- tions of the survey materials. Short carefully relates the sources to some key historical themes, such as the problems of the Edwardian rural economy and the ever-growing demands and pressures of an increasingly urbanizing and suburbanizing nation. He is sensitive to the nuances of different local contexts. He analyzes the usefulness of the survey materials for urban social area analysis and for studies of the rural society and economy of Edwardian Britain and of rural industrial communities. He discusses the potential for detailed micro studies as well as for contrasts and comparisons across regions and nations. Separate surveys were undertaken for Ireland and Scotland, and they are discussed here, too.

The dustjacket says the book "will be of particular use not only to historical geographers, economists and anthropologists, but also to local historians and gene- alogists." That is true, but it is also rewarding for social historians and for both rural and urban historians of early twentieth-century Britain. This potential range of usage of the book is a testament to Short's skills of synthesis. Unfortunately, rather like aspects of the archive itself, some of the text in the book is difficult to access. It is densely written in parts and broken up by many illustrations, including street plans, maps, dia- grams, tables, and photographs. These are certainly very interesting, and they do provide a strong visual complement to Short's analysis. But they also interrupt the narrative flow and make the book a hard but rewarding read. For these reasons, it is perhaps less likely to become an undergraduate text and more an essential reference book, and source guide, for a wide variety of researchers of the era.

MARK CLAPSON University of Luton

Roy CHURCH and QUENTIN OUTRAM. Strikes and Soli- darity: Coalfield Conflict in Britain 1889-1966. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xx, 314. $69.95.

Revisionist history is always bracing to read, and in this book, Roy Church and Quentin Outram have taken on a number of well-established views about the history of the British coalmining industry and of British coalmin- ers. Perhaps the most famous of these is that the industry was particularly strike prone: in part, it has been held, because the very nature of the industry elicited workplace conflict, in part because miners, often living in isolated, rural communities, had devel- oped a strong class consciousness and close class ties. Certainly, the image of the militant miner, willing to stay on strike to the point of starvation in support of his comrades, has been a staple of the heroic version of

British labor history in the twentieth century, from the first national miners' strike in 1912 to the last in 1984.

Church and Outram call all these views into ques- tion. Using an extensive statistical analysis of govern- ment data on coalmining strikes, they show that the famous large national strikes, which have so captured historians' attentions, were anomalous. In fact, they write, "the typical British coalmining strike [was] ... localized and short-lived, confined to a single colliery, and involving a few hundred workers for a little over a week before the First World War, or no more than a day thirty years later" (p. 91). True, strikes were more likely to occur in particular strike-prone collieries, but most of these remained strike prone only for a short period of time.

Not only were strikes usually confined to a single place or a single colliery-sympathetic strikes were rare-but also within particular communities uniform action tended to be exceptional, as internal rifts proved difficult to overcome. Although some places, particularly in Scotland and South Wales, adhered more closely to the historical stereotype of workplace militancy, "the prevailing picture in many districts before and after the Second World War was one of secionalism rather than solidarity" (p. 128). Church and Outram see the famous national strikes, such as those in 1912 or 1926, less as the automatic response of a community with shared experience and shared values than as the "achievement of purposive social action" (p. 129), the successful mobilization of support by union leaders. Hence, for Church and Outram, "the notion that British miners' strike behaviour has always been solidaristic is a myth" (p. 95), as was the famous cry of "one out, all out" (p. 131).

If coalminers were less united than has usually been thought, it remains true that trade union density was particularly high in the mining industry and that strikes occurred more frequently in coalmining than in most other industries and far more frequently than in the mining industries of France and Germany, if not the United States. Church and Outram have a harder time explaining these phenomena. A considerable portion of their book is devoted to an examination, and rejection, of theories that have been held to explain miners' strike behavior. They find Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel's notion of the "isolated mass" want- ing, as well as theories that point to technological change or radical leadership. Although agreeing with some analysts that the size of the pit played at least a part in many strikes, they mainly stress the contribu- tory role that management had in causing conflict. "Indifference to labour management at boardroom level, a lack of managerial control over the conduct of supervisory officials underground or ineptness on their part ... [were] potentially strike-precipitating factors down the pit" (p. 265). But it remains unclear how this explains miners' strike behavior as opposed to that of workers in other industries.

This book is highly useful as revisionist history, but it has limitations. Given the subject matter, it is

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1999

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1758 Reviews of Books

remarkably bloodless; for this reader at least, the sociological theory and jargon proved heavy going at times. Church and Outram convincingly point to the ways in which the mining industry was more like other industries than has been realized, but in the end they are unable to explain satisfactorily the presence or absence of miners' solidarity. For that, more detailed, qualitative studies, particularly of peaceful communi- ties, are still needed. In the preface, Church and Outram write that they aim "to revitalize the historical analysis of the practice and theory of industrial rela- tions" (p. xvii). Whether they have done that remains an open question, but they have shaken up the histo- riography of the field and will doubtless compel histo- rians to reexamine questions that had seemed to be settled. That is a considerable accomplishment.

PETER WEILER

Boston College

N. J. CROWSON. Facing Fascism: The Conservative Party and the European Dictators, 1935-1940. (Routledge Studies in Modern European History.) New York: Routledge. 1997. Pp. xii, 270. $75.00.

Although the foreign and defense policies of Britain in the 1930s have been exhaustively researched, the role of the Conservative Party in the policy-making process is a neglected topic. N. J. Crowson's book is designed to remedy the deficiency by exploring the connections between the internal workings of the party and the response of the Baldwin and Chamberlain govern- ments to the fascist dictators. In practice, Crowson has little to say about Benito Mussolini, and the Italian dimension fades rapidly into the background. The Spanish Civil War, in which both dictators were deeply implicated, merits only four pages. This book is pri- marily a study of Conservative reactions to Nazi Germany.

Historians of the political elite (so Crowson argues) have tended to assume that the Conservative Party in general played a passive and deferential role in the history of appeasement, an assumption reinforced by the fame of the dissident minority of "anti-appeasers" who came out in support of Winston Churchill or Anthony Eden. Crowson, by contrast, turns the spot- light on the activists in the constituency associations, and the "silent majority" of backbench MPs. In com- mon with other revisionists, Crowson maintains that the Conservative Party was internally far more demo- cratic than it appeared to be. An outward show of deference and loyalty to the leader concealed vigorous private politicking and great sensitivity to pressures from the rank and file. His main finding is that dissent from Neville Chamberlain's policies began earlier and was more widespread than previous accounts have recognized. The fall of Chamberlain in May 1940 was therefore the outcome of a gradual erosion of confi- dence over the whole period since the Anschluss.

As Crowson admits, this "bottom-up" version of Tory history is of limited application to sudden crises

like the Hoare-Laval affair, the Munich agreement, or the occupation of Prague in March 1939. At such times, events moved too fast for the constituency associations to formulate a view, and it was backbench MPs, acting apparently on the basis of personal con- victions, whose judgments proved decisive. Yet as Crowson argues, the constituencies had some impact on the shaping of policy over the longer run. Heavily populated by retired imperial types, they were strongly opposed to the restitution of the former German colonies. The presence of large numbers of ex-officers with experience of World War I may also help to explain the enthusiasm with which activists champi- oned the introduction of compulsory national service after Munich. Conservatives, however, were seldom of one mind. As Crowson demonstrates, there were sev- eral groups or tendencies within the party. Under Stanley Baldwin, the "left" and the "right" of the party tended to cancel one another out; under Chamberlain, Crowson maintains, elements of the "right" began to coalesce with elements of the "left" in a revolt against appeasement that compelled Chamberlain to change course in the spring of 1939.

The author's decision to begin the story in 1935 rather than 1933 leaves a rather puzzling gap where we might have expected some discussion of Tory reactions to the rise of Adolf Hitler and an assessment of the impact on the party of Churchill's campaign for the expansion of the Royal Air Force. Crowson is right, however, to separate out questions of defense from questions of foreign policy. His very thorough research into constituency and other archives has yielded com- pelling evidence of persistent disquiet over the state of Britain's defenses. But, as he himself points out, demands for rearmament were perfectly compatible with continuing support for appeasement.

The evidence that dissent over foreign policy ever spread much beyond the ranks of the "anti-appeasers" (or "foreign policy sceptics," as Crowson prefers to call them) is sketchy. The occupation of Prague caused a wave of anger in the Conservative Party, to which Chamberlain responded by issuing the Polish Guaran- tee, but this was a deliberately ambiguous pledge that left the door open for another Munich. Since Hitler denied Chamberlain the opportunity, we shall never know how many Conservatives would have supported such a deal. The Crowson thesis, with Chamberlain under pressure from a revival of Tory patriotism, is intriguing and plausible, but speculative: like the scores of backbench MPs who never spoke on foreign affairs, the broad mass of the party was simply inartic- ulate.

Crowson's book reads more like a dissertation than a book for a wider public. Although generally clear and forceful, the author pays little attention to style and seems quite happy on occasion to score seven out of ten for syntax or vocabulary. That said, it would be wrong to dwell on the minor flaws in an absorbing and

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1999

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