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The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government
An in-depth look at the diverse group of men who comprised Britain’s first Labour Party in 1924.
In January of 1924, the cabinet of the first Labour government consisted of twenty white, middle-aged men, as it had for generations. But the election also represented a radical departure from government by the ruling class. Most members of the administration had left school by the age of fifteen. Five of them had started work by the time they were twelve years old. Three were working down the mines before they entered their teens. Two were illegitimate, one was abandoned at birth, and three were of Irish immigrant descent. For the first time in Britain’s history, the cabinet could truly be said to represent all of Britain’s social classes. This unheralded revolution in representation is the subject of Peter Clark’s fascinating new book, The Men of 1924 . Who were these men? Clark’s vivid portrayal is full of evocative portraits of a new breed of politician, the forerunners of all those who, later in the last century and this one, overcame a system from which they had been excluded for too long.
In January of 1924, the cabinet of the first Labour government consisted of twenty white, middle-aged men, as it had for generations. But the election also represented a radical departure from government by the ruling class. Most members of the administration had left school by the age of fifteen. Five of them had started work by the time they were twelve years old. Three were working down the mines before they entered their teens. Two were illegitimate, one was abandoned at birth, and three were of Irish immigrant descent. For the first time in Britain’s history, the cabinet could truly be said to represent all of Britain’s social classes. This unheralded revolution in representation is the subject of Peter Clark’s fascinating new book, The Men of 1924 . Who were these men? Clark’s vivid portrayal is full of evocative portraits of a new breed of politician, the forerunners of all those who, later in the last century and this one, overcame a system from which they had been excluded for too long.
- GenresHistory
304 pages, Hardcover
Published January 17, 2024
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About the author
Peter Clark
207 books8 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 26, 2023
This is very much about the men who formed the first Labour government in 1924, rather than an analysis of that government itself (for which readers might have to await David Torrance’s forthcoming tome). That said, there is a short passage about Margaret Bondfiekd. Most of the narrative is taken up by potted lives of the leading figures in that government up to 1924. There’s lots of entertaining and curious detail. I hadn’t previously realised that Lawrence Olivier was a nephew of a member of Ramsay MacDonald’s first cabinet. Yet there’s also significant gaps. There’s no real discussion of how Philip Snowden reconciled his budgetary policies with his socialist aspirations. More light might also have been cast on the personality clashes of this government. Furthermore, the generally sympathetic presentation of MacDonald doesn’t sit well with some of his failures of judgment and leadership. This doesn’t stop this being an entertaining book, but it’s not the most analytical.
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January 30, 2024NB: This was reviewed alongside The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government by David Torrance and A Century of Labour by John Cruddas.
Ahead of a possible Labour victory in Britain’s next general election, three new histories published on the centenary of the party’s first government provide a useful opportunity for reflection and perspective. Peter Clark’s brisk and personable The Men of 1924 devotes roughly half its length to Labour’s early years, as the party transformed itself ‘from pressure group to government in waiting’. Formed in 1900 from the trade union movement and a patchwork of small and frequently fractious socialist parties, societies and groups with origins in the late 19th century, the party’s initial electoral successes were limited to the local level but had wide-ranging reach. In its early strongholds in the Welsh valleys and poorer London boroughs such as Poplar, Labour councillors focused on improving working conditions and on health, housing and education, often building in microcosm the mechanisms of welfare that would be introduced nationally under Labour governments of greater success and stability than that of 1924.
The election of December 1923, in which a shock electoral advance by Labour led to an unprecedented three-way split in the Commons, saw the party enter government a month later for the first time. At a century’s distance, this nine-month-long minority administration – a venture cautioned against at the time by some of its own members – tends to be treated as an embarrassing failure or false start at best. Both Clark and David Torrance, in his more tightly focused The Wild Men, offer more even-handed assessments of the 1924 government. Both authors also paint largely forgiving portraits of its leader Ramsay MacDonald – although his political achievements and his personal snobbery, prickliness and social climbing have been judged so harshly by the majority of Labour’s historians that the bar for sympathy is somewhat low. Clark’s series of biographical sketches, and Torrance’s more smoothly integrated study, bring in the personalities beyond MacDonald that shaped Labour’s brief time in power: Lancashire autodidacts Thomas Shaw and J.R. Clynes; Fabian intellectuals such as Sidney Webb; the avuncular Arthur Henderson and the brash and bibulous Jimmy Thomas.
Other than Margaret Bondfield, the former shop assistant and trade union activist who would later became Britain’s first female cabinet minister in the second Labour government of 1929-31, this story reflects the domination of 1920s British politics by what Clark, pre-empting the obvious observation, acknowledges as ‘white men in dark suits’. Both books do, however, draw on some of the many female voices behind the scenes, including Beatrice Webb, Dolly Ponsonby and journalist Mary Agnes Hamilton. The 1924 Housing Act, enabling the subsidised building of public housing, was driven by health secretary John Wheatley’s experience of rent strikes in Glasgow – collective actions which were largely led by women. Labour’s electoral success reflected the rising influence of newly enfranchised demographics – both women and working-class men – and, in terms of class, was unarguably groundbreaking. MacDonald himself was the illegitimate son of a housemaid and a farmhand, and his cabinet replaced Old Etonians with former miners, railwaymen and millworkers.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Rhian E. Jones writes on history and politics. Her latest book, with Matthew Brown, is Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too (Repeater, 2021).
Ahead of a possible Labour victory in Britain’s next general election, three new histories published on the centenary of the party’s first government provide a useful opportunity for reflection and perspective. Peter Clark’s brisk and personable The Men of 1924 devotes roughly half its length to Labour’s early years, as the party transformed itself ‘from pressure group to government in waiting’. Formed in 1900 from the trade union movement and a patchwork of small and frequently fractious socialist parties, societies and groups with origins in the late 19th century, the party’s initial electoral successes were limited to the local level but had wide-ranging reach. In its early strongholds in the Welsh valleys and poorer London boroughs such as Poplar, Labour councillors focused on improving working conditions and on health, housing and education, often building in microcosm the mechanisms of welfare that would be introduced nationally under Labour governments of greater success and stability than that of 1924.
The election of December 1923, in which a shock electoral advance by Labour led to an unprecedented three-way split in the Commons, saw the party enter government a month later for the first time. At a century’s distance, this nine-month-long minority administration – a venture cautioned against at the time by some of its own members – tends to be treated as an embarrassing failure or false start at best. Both Clark and David Torrance, in his more tightly focused The Wild Men, offer more even-handed assessments of the 1924 government. Both authors also paint largely forgiving portraits of its leader Ramsay MacDonald – although his political achievements and his personal snobbery, prickliness and social climbing have been judged so harshly by the majority of Labour’s historians that the bar for sympathy is somewhat low. Clark’s series of biographical sketches, and Torrance’s more smoothly integrated study, bring in the personalities beyond MacDonald that shaped Labour’s brief time in power: Lancashire autodidacts Thomas Shaw and J.R. Clynes; Fabian intellectuals such as Sidney Webb; the avuncular Arthur Henderson and the brash and bibulous Jimmy Thomas.
Other than Margaret Bondfield, the former shop assistant and trade union activist who would later became Britain’s first female cabinet minister in the second Labour government of 1929-31, this story reflects the domination of 1920s British politics by what Clark, pre-empting the obvious observation, acknowledges as ‘white men in dark suits’. Both books do, however, draw on some of the many female voices behind the scenes, including Beatrice Webb, Dolly Ponsonby and journalist Mary Agnes Hamilton. The 1924 Housing Act, enabling the subsidised building of public housing, was driven by health secretary John Wheatley’s experience of rent strikes in Glasgow – collective actions which were largely led by women. Labour’s electoral success reflected the rising influence of newly enfranchised demographics – both women and working-class men – and, in terms of class, was unarguably groundbreaking. MacDonald himself was the illegitimate son of a housemaid and a farmhand, and his cabinet replaced Old Etonians with former miners, railwaymen and millworkers.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Rhian E. Jones writes on history and politics. Her latest book, with Matthew Brown, is Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too (Repeater, 2021).
January 6, 2026
Fascinating characters to learn about. Men who left school in their early teens to work in mines, mills and docks going on to become the government of the largest empire the world has ever known!
That kind of cohort will never be seen again. Even a modern equivalent is unlikely as prospective Labour parliamentary candidates emerge from local government and Westminster think tanks rather than via trade unions and socialist societies.
But saying that - this book demonstrated how the government had individuals from the elite too - Liberal aristocrats, Christian landed gentry, well to do Lawyers, and even, perhaps, a sympathetic King.
The book focuses on the men’s lives leading up to taking office in 1924 and a brief overview of their work in their positions rather than doing a post mortem into the collapse of the government 9 months in.
Read this book if you want to know more about the socialists who for the first time in British history stood up and said “we’ll take it from here”.
That kind of cohort will never be seen again. Even a modern equivalent is unlikely as prospective Labour parliamentary candidates emerge from local government and Westminster think tanks rather than via trade unions and socialist societies.
But saying that - this book demonstrated how the government had individuals from the elite too - Liberal aristocrats, Christian landed gentry, well to do Lawyers, and even, perhaps, a sympathetic King.
The book focuses on the men’s lives leading up to taking office in 1924 and a brief overview of their work in their positions rather than doing a post mortem into the collapse of the government 9 months in.
Read this book if you want to know more about the socialists who for the first time in British history stood up and said “we’ll take it from here”.
December 20, 2023
As we enter 2024 there will be, we can assume, a recognition of the fact that it is 100 years on from the first Labour government. On that basis this book is timely and it starts well pointing out how the Cabinet differed in terms of education and class from any that had gone before. In the following pen pictures of its members, Peter Clark fails to bring this alive despite having researched widely.
I have a particular interest in the Red Clydesiders from this period and therefore know, perhaps better than the author, more of the details of the life of their representative in the government, John Wheatley. My judgement here is that, because Clarke has relied on 'official sources' and biographies the result is superficial. Wheatley's socialism and his relationship with his constituents were more complex than the author described.
There's no doubt that space and time were a factor in deciding how deeply he would delve into each life but the end result, although informative and interesting, is dry and missed the opportunity to catch the spirit and ambition of the individuals and the collective.
I have a particular interest in the Red Clydesiders from this period and therefore know, perhaps better than the author, more of the details of the life of their representative in the government, John Wheatley. My judgement here is that, because Clarke has relied on 'official sources' and biographies the result is superficial. Wheatley's socialism and his relationship with his constituents were more complex than the author described.
There's no doubt that space and time were a factor in deciding how deeply he would delve into each life but the end result, although informative and interesting, is dry and missed the opportunity to catch the spirit and ambition of the individuals and the collective.
October 21, 2023
Far too short a book for the scope it tries to cover; to get a good sense of the early history of the Labour Party you’d have to Robert Caro it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews