One of the 95 men sentenced at the end of the great Chicago IWW trial in August 1918 was the British socialist and syndicalist George Hardy. Much to his surprise he only received a one-year term of imprisonment, something he put down to the prosecution not realising how long he had been active in the organisation. He was certainly not the only British socialist active in the IWW at this time. And interestingly, while there was not a single protest at the sentences handed down from any AFL affiliate, there were protests from dozens of British labour organisations. Hardy’s memoir, Those Stormy Years, published in 1956 is an invaluable account of the experiences of a British Wobbly.
George Hardy was born in 1884, the son of a farm labourer near Beverley, East Yorkshire. One of his earliest memories was of seeing the cavalry riding through his village on their way back from breaking a dockers’ strike in Hull. He started work full-time aged 13. Work was casual, poorly paid and unorganised and he had regular periods of unemployment. In 1906, he became an “assisted” immigrant, shipping out to Canada in the hope of a better life.
In Canada, Hardy found the job situation much as it had been in Britain. He moved from one casual low paid job to another, often sacked for complaining about pay and conditions. And then in British Columbia he met a Swedish lumberjack, “the first Socialist I ever met to my knowledge”. Together they travelled to Vancouver Island looking for work and his new companion, a Wobbly, introduced him to “the principles of industrial unionism and socialism” and gave him “an elementary education in Marxism”. Hardy never forgot one crucial phrase that his friend repeated over and over: “We are robbed at the point of production”.
In Victoria, he became active in the Teamsters’ union, playing a leading role in a number of strikes and in the end helping to lead his union local out of the Teamsters and into the IWW. He was enthusiastically involved in spreading the gospel of militancy and industrial unionism. The IWW was actively involved in supporting the great Vancouver Island miners’ strike of 1912-1914 when troops “fully equipped with machine guns and artillery” occupied the minefield and thousands of scabs were brought in, many from abroad. One of Hardy’s proudest moments was when British miners from Durham who had emigrated to Canada to work in the mines arrived, promptly refused to scab and joined the strike. The miners were defeated, with thousands blacklisted, and the union was not to be recognised in the coalfield until 1938.
The outbreak of war in 1914 led to widespread unemployment and in 1915 Hardy returned home to Beverley, working on the docks in Hull as a casual labourer and campaigning against the war. Eventually, he signed up as a merchant seaman. By the summer of 1916, he decided to ship out to the United States and once again became active in the IWW. Early in 1917, he was elected general secretary of the IWW’s Marine Workers’ Industrial Union.
One of the problems the US labour movement faced was that posed by industrial spies. Hardy became suspicious of the chairman of the Marine Workers and arranged to have him followed. He led them to the offices of the Thiel Detective Agency. At the next meeting of the union executive, the man was exposed as a spy and thrown down four flights of stairs and out the door.
Hardy was heavily involved in the lumber workers’ strikes of 1917, helping Tom Whitehead, the British secretary of the Seattle IWW. And then, on 5 September 1917, all across the country IWW offices were raided, documents seized and members arrested. In Seattle, the police even confiscated Joe Hill’s death mask. Among those arrested was George Hardy, shipped off to Chicago to stand trial, a 3,000 mile train journey, in chains all the way.
The prisoners refused to be broken. One way they kept their morale up and brought down that of their jailors was by singing revolutionary songs. Hardy remembered the song that was written in jail to celebrate the October Revolution in Russia:
One day as I sat pining
A message of cheer came to me,
A light of revolt was shining,
in a country far over the sea….
All hail to the Bolsheviki!
We will fight for our class and be free…
An echo from Russia is sounding
The chime of true liberty,
It’s a message of millions resounding
To throw off your chains and be free.
After a trial lasting four months, the Wobblies were found guilty, sentenced, and transferred to Leavenworth Penitentiary, Kansas, to serve their time. When they arrived, the governor warned them not to cause any trouble. In response, they marched into the prison singing the “Internationale”. They were almost immediately in conflict with the prison authorities.
Wobbly prisoners refused to do prison work on Saturdays. They were put in isolation cells where they slept on the concrete floor with one blanket and were put on a diet of bread and water. The hours they were supposed to be working, “they were chained up, with their hands over their heads to the top bars of the cell gates”. After a fortnight the governor gave in and Saturday working was ended.
After a protest against prison food, a number of Wobbly prisoners were severely beaten and sentenced to be held in the isolation cells. One of them, Bert Lorton, another British Wobbly from Birmingham, remained in isolation for over a year. As Hardy observed: “He was forever unrepentant”.
Revolutionary literature was smuggled into Leavenworth. It was here that Hardy read Lenin’s pamphlet Soviets at Work and began to turn to Bolshevism as the way forward.
He served his year inside and went on to become one of those urging the IWW to move in a Bolshevik direction. The attempt failed and Hardy eventually returned to Britain and joined the Communist Party. He was actively involved in the 1926 General Strike, “the highest point of struggle ever reached by the British working class”. When the police raided the National Minority Movement headquarters, Hardy, who was in the building, escaped by sliding down a slate roof and then crawling over a plank onto the wall of the timber yard next door. He jumped down inside and found himself locked in because they were all on strike. He had to climb over the wall out of sight of the police.
Looking back, he admitted that they were ready for the TUC right to sell the strike out, but were taken by surprise by the capitulation of the left wing union leaders. Afterwards, he worked in the Red International of Labour Unions in China before returning home in 1929 and going to work for the Communist International. His son, George, was killed fighting the fascists in Spain.