Essays in Labour History. In Memory of G.D.H. Cole, by Briggs and Saville

[p025] Essays in Labour History, in Memory of G. D. H. Cole. Edited by Asa Briggs and John Saville. Macmillan. 42s. Students of the history of the British working-class movement are already in debt to John Saville as 59 editor for his Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Hon- our of Dona Torr (1954). which con- tained such valuable contributions as Eric Hobsbawm’s study of ‘The Labour Aristocracy in 19th-Century Britain’ and Daphne Simon’s of the fight against the Master and Servant Acts. Now, in association with Pro- fessor Asa _ Briggs, Saville has brought together another collection of specialized studies to enrich our knowledge and understanding of the struggles which have shaped the pre- sent. Of particular interest are Royden Harrison’s essay on Professor Beesly, whose name is known to all students of Marxism for his association with Karl Marx in the First International —‘a very capable and courageous man’, as Marx called him, whose life has fully repaid the research that Harrison has devoted to it. The need for a detailed biography of a very different associate of Marx’s, the Tory agent Maltman Barry, is re- emphasized by the brief mention of his activities in ‘The _ English Branches of the First International’, by Henry Collins. Edward Thomp- son, in ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’. examines the circumstances in which an independent Labour Party was born in England—its connection with ‘partial failure’ in the trade-union field, why Bradford rather than Leeds was the scene of the actual birth, and the truth about the rule of Methodism of which so much has been said. William Collison, large- scale organizer of strikebreakers (‘Free Labour’), bulks big in Joha Saville’s own study of the back- ground to the Taff Vale decision, which throws new light on the em- ployers’ counter-offensive in the 1890s against the New Unionism. (Why no acknowledgment, though, to the pioneer examination of this phase by Allen Hutt—‘A Forgotten Campaign by “The Times” Against Trade Unionism’ in the Modem Quarterly for January, 19397) In the other contributions, Asa Briggs traces the emergence of the concept of ‘class’ in the early 19th century; Sidney Pollard follows the change in the character of the co- operative movement (‘from commun- ity-building to shop-keeping’); Eric Hobsbawn shows how traditional wage-levels and wage differentials were

[p026] 60 broken down with the development of so-called ‘scientific management’; Peter Brock rescues from obscurity the socialists among the Polish émigrés of 1831 and after, and ex- plains the prominence of Poles among Marx’s co-workers and in the Paris Commune; and Stephen Colt- ham tells of the origin and early struggles of the ‘Bee-Hive’, the ’ workers’ .newspaper founded oy George Potter as a result of the nine hours’ movement in the London building trades, which became im- mensely influential and was adopted as its organ in England by the First International. The research studies in this book are preceded by a series of memoirs of Cole written by persons who knew him at different stages of his career. Hugh Gaitskell brings out Cole’s nostalgia for pre-industrial Britain and his prejudice against political institutions and methods. (Gaitskell himself, a product in part of Cole’s teaching, exemplifies plainly enough some of the weaknesses in the great scholar’s appreciation of the realities of the 20th-century class struggle in England!) G. D. N. Worswick describes revealingly how Cole was encouraged to organize his project of a post-war reconstruction survey between 1940 and 1943, only to see the project then strangled by withdrawal of Treasury support. Once the crisis of confidence in the tuling class caused by the 1940 débacle had been lived down (not without aid from the Coles of the labour movement), and once it was plain that the Red Army had put an end to Germany’s military aspira- tions, the powers that were in Eng- land began showing their true face again in such cynical gestures as this. Conspicuous by its absence is any study of Cole’s life and work in what some regard as the most im- portant phase of his life—the years just before, during and immediately after the First: World War. Cole was then most intimately involved in the trade union movement and played a leading part in the propa- ganda for Guild Socialism, that strange offspring of a marriage of Fabian and Syndicalist ideas which helped to queer the pitch for revolu- tionary Marxism here at a decisive moment in our history. B. P. LABOUR REVIEW — June-July, 1960 Ironmoulders’ Record