Britain's Revolutionary Summer: The General Strike of 1926

by Edd Mustill

Midnight, 30 April 1926. Coalowners lock out a million miners. In response, British workers across the country down their tools. Britain’s first General Strike has begun.

The government feared that the country teetered on the brink of revolution. Trade union leaders thought they’d be shot by the end of the week. For nine days, trains, buses and trams stopped running. Lorries could only leave the docks protected by military convoy. In Birmingham, the police hunted down city councillors, and in London they raided trade union headquarters. And for those in the coalfields, from South Wales to Scotland, the strike would not last nine days, but nine months.

On the strike’s centenary, Edd Mustill tells the story of why millions of workers came out on strike, and why the government did anything it could to quash them.

Genres: Nonfiction, British Literature

337 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 9, 2026

Reviews

[Steven R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid introduction to the General Strike. Lots of good anecdotes and stories from the rank-and-file.

[Sylvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book by a local author at a local independent bookshop, which is very nice.

Aside from that, I think this is an authoritative account of the General Strike. Mustill's trade union background is evident, utilising a range of sources from various trade unions. There is also a good build up to the strike, the strike itself and then the defeat and legacy of the strike.

At times, some of the passages on trade union meetings/leaders can slow down the pace a bit for me. I think my favourite passages were the accounts of people during the strike, both those on strike and the volunteers effectively getting an opportunity to cosplay working class life for a bit.

It's great to have so many books come out for the centenary of the General Strike and I think this one is certainly worth a read, especially if you are more interested in the trade union perspectives.

[History Today]

For those other perspectives we must turn to Edd Mustill, a trade unionist and labour historian, who has no trouble finding sources for how the strike played out around the country – everywhere except Northern Ireland – and how trade unionists at local as well as national level managed the tricky business of pressuring the government without harming the people, trying to ensure the flow of essential goods (especially foodstuffs) while shutting down businesses, transport, and trade. Mustill makes particularly good use of the local press, regional histories of the strike, and trade union records at the Modern Records Centre in Warwick, with which, to judge from his footnotes, Torrance has only the most glancing familiarity.

At certain junctures Mustill’s partisanship gets in the way of the story. In the span of a few pages he describes the cuts to wages proposed by the mine owners that triggered the strike as ‘savage’, ‘brutal’, harsh’, and ‘draconian’ without spelling out what they meant either in terms of absolute living standards or wages relative to miners’ previous rates or other workers’ rates. Similarly he is too ready to equate unionised workers with ‘the whole working class’ at a time when millions of workers were unionised but millions were not, and a working-class identity was, while still in formation, a fragile thing. But overall his treatment is more balanced than Torrance’s, with his careful attention to local trades councils and ‘Councils of Action’ which bore the burden of organising the strike and mitigating its ill effects, vividly documented in some local strike bulletins preserved at Warwick, without neglecting the role of strikebreakers, special constables, and other volunteers. He does so without losing sight of the main outlines of the ‘chess games’ being played in Downing Street and Eccleston Square.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Peter Mandler is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.