A look at how the Unemployed Workers’ Movement helped poor workers stand up for themselves against landlords, bailiffs and police in the 1920s and 1930s.
Reposted from our comrades CPGB-ML
It’s summer 1922 and the postwar recession is biting hard in Sheffield, with 49,000 on unemployment benefit and thousands more having exhausted this and scraping along on poor relief. The working class are under tremendous pressure from all directions.
Harold Cundy was one such man. Laid off in 1921, he lived with his wife and two children at 8 Court, Providence Road, Walkley. In the spring of 1922, their landlady started proceedings to get them evicted claiming rent arrears. Both their children were suffering from measles, so a friendly doctor helped obtain a postponement over the Whitsun holidays, but on the morning of Wednesday 7 June, one PC Tippitt arrived with bailiffs to remove the family’s very few possessions.
In shock at this turn of events, the Cundys took stock of their situation. Harold’s wife Annie took off to find alternative housing while Harold himself went to find Arthur Butcher, an unemployed engineering worker and newly elected Labour councillor. Butcher was also a supporter of the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain – Britain’s original communist organisation) and their unemployed union, the NUWM (National Unemployed Workers Movement).
The established policy of the NUWM in such cases was to oppose evictions by taking control of the street and moving the evicted belongings back into the home from which they had been taken.
Speaking outside Crookesmoor Vestry hall to a growing crowd, Butcher said: “This is dirty work. We have a big unemployed organisation here in Sheffield. We are not going to allow the authorities to turn a man out into the street who is unemployed. We are going to march from here to West Bar. We shall pick up more on the way. We are going to protest to the authorities against turning a man out of his house. If they don’t let this man, his wife, family and goods go back into the house, I for one will put them back in defiance of the authorities.”
Eventually, 300 men set off to West Bar. On the way, several hundred more joined from the Kelvin area. They were joined by laid-off workers and CPGB members including Alfred Haydock and Albert Smith.
On Tay Street, Butcher once more spoke to the crowd, by now nearly a thousand strong: “I have a matter to bring forward to you. It relates to a man named Cundy who has been ejected from a house at Walkley. This could have occurred to any one of us. I feel so strongly on this point. I suggest we march in a body to Walkey and put the furniture back.”
Off they marched, eventually arriving back on South Road. An eyewitness described a human tide of angry men, five or six abreast, surging down Providence Road to 8 Court. Waiting for them was a Superintendent Hebb with an advanced party of police to uphold bourgeois property rights (or should that be exploitation rights?) Sheer weight of numbers, however, made theirs an impossible task, as soon nearly 300 men were in the yard area alone.
Superintendent Hebb reminded the crowd of the “illegality” of their interference. The men took no notice and the police were asked to leave.
Said Butcher: “Now men, you know what you are here for. We are going to put this man back in his house. You have fought and bled in this war. This might happen to all of us. You know what happened. This man, his wife and family have been turned out of their home. They have got to get it back. I asked the superintendent to take his men away and we will see no violence is used. He does not agree. If it means fight, we are going to fight.”
A way was made through the crowd and two NUWM leaders, Frank Horsefield and Charles Baker, started the process of securing the house and moving the furniture back in. Horsefield once again reminded the police they were not wanted in the yard. At around this time the two Cundy children were brought forward on a mattress, and at the same time another 16 police arrived, some on horseback. Tensions were at boiling point.
Initially there may have been a little pushing and shoving, but the police were determined that any working-class resistance had to be dealt with very harshly. They advanced on foot with truncheons flying, followed by those on horseback with their typical ferocity that would still be recognised today. A dozen police were badly hurt in the ensuing melee, as were at least 60 of the assembled unemployed, four of whom were taken to hospital.
By early evening a calm of sorts had descended upon Providence Road. Left upon were street stones, rocks, blood and the Cundys’ smashed furniture. The following day, arrests began to be made. The first man arraigned was George Grantham, an unemployed miner who was charged with riot. He was soon joined by 12 others. There was still anger and tension in the air. At every court sitting the police had to keep large crowds at bay, which on some occasions managed to gain entrance and stop proceedings.
Two days Grantham’s hearing John Williams Baker died from injuries received at Providence Road – almost certainly the result of a heavy beating by truncheon. He quickly became a political symbol and a martyr. It should be noted that throughout all this the official Labour group either appealed for calm or asked for an enquiry (!)
Baker’s funeral was set for 29 June, providing an opportunity for a mass demonstration of local feeling and transforming the event into the largest political funeral seen in Sheffield since Chartist times. It began with a gathering of workers in the vicinity of his house at 183 Penistone Road.
Fred Hollingsworth, a young moulder at Osborn’s foundry, described the scene: “I saw the procession assembling at the bottom of Gilpin Street and saw it move off. It was led by Tom Pickering, the unemployed padre. He was in his vestments … Never has there been in Sheffield a procession of any dignity to compare with what that boy was getting. It was completely in dignity with what it was about, although of course it was used as a means of demonstrating the unemployed’s problems.”
On an overcast summer’s day, two thousand people set off in procession, bound for the cemetery. At the front was a cross bearing the words “In loving memory”, which was carried by members of the Attercliffe Unemployed organisation. Prominent at the front of the entourage were many leading local members of the NUWM and the CPGB. By the time the march reached City Road cemetery, with more and more people joining along the way, it was around two miles long.
After the funeral there was a brief lull in court proceedings. Three men were convicted of riot and sentenced to one or two months each. Ruling class ‘justice’ had prevailed but, in what seems a calculated move to suppress any further unrest, charges against all the others were dropped.
Little is known of what happened to many of the people involved in the rent riot: some of the leaders such as Baker, Horsefield and Butcher stayed in politics, in the trade unions, and in the CPGB; some were later involved in the Labour party. Many years later an interview was made with the Cundy family’s daughter. They later got a house on Douglas Terrace and her father returned to work.
Local labour historian Bill Moore later wrote in a pamphlet for the Holberry Society (from which much of this narrative has come) that in reconstructing the story of Providence Road we have recounted a story of defeat. That is undeniable; inspiring but undeniable.
However, a year later the Communist party newspaper Workers’ Weekly carried a report of an attempt to evict a man with three daughters and a disabled son. The man was on a three-day week and the rent had gone from six shillings and sixpence to eight and six. He lived in one of the ‘huts’ on Tyler Street in Brightside – an area of great hardship where three quarters of the 760 tenants were on benefit or some kind of poor relief.
The Communist party and the Provisional Unemployed Committee once again organised the tenants, who forced the door of the ‘hut’ and replaced all the furniture. An evening rally the same day declared a rent strike, at which point the agents backed off and came to an agreement.
So here is recounted a now virtually unknown glimpse of the brutal times the working people of Britain faced in the 1920s. One point to take from this is the influence and organisation of the CPGB and the NUWM. Despite its later trajectory, the CPGB at this time was a party of and amongst the people.
Fast forward 100 years. Today the welfare state is being dismantled, as is the NHS. Jobs are low-paid and precarious. More people than ever today are at the mercy of private parasitic landlords. Labour party social democracy and the class peace of Keynesianism is a sham (and only introduced post-1945 owing to specific historical conditions); the Labour party is simply an arm of the state (always was) and needs to be destroyed.
In some aspects of social affairs we are closer now to the 1920s than we are to the 1960s. There is growing anger and restlessness amongst the working class which needs to be harnessed and directed against those who truly wield power in Britain today.
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries unite!” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848)
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