John Clynes was leader of the Labour Party from February 1921 to November 1922. He was, therefore, at the helm when the party made a great breakthrough at the 1922 general election, increasing parliamentary representation from fifty-two to 142 seats. Clynes went on to serve as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Leader of the House in the first Labour government, and then as Home Secretary in the second. He remained in Parliament for a total of thirty-five years. In spite of this, Phil Woolas notes that Clynes is one of the lesser-known figures within the Labour Party’s history, but argues that he deserves much credit. Clynes led the Labour Party to become the main party of opposition, deposing the Liberals and laying the pathway for the first Labour government. He also contributed to the growth of unionism, to the socialist movement in Britain (intellectually, by rejecting Bolshevism) and to party unity, by not challenging his successor Ramsay MacDonald.
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If this book were a quest to establish not just who the most successful leader of the Labour Party has been, but who was its bravest, John Robert Clynes would win without contest. His life was remarkable. His childhood, upbringing and experiences shaped not just his life and career, but the political philosophy of the British Labour Party, and, in turn, laid the foundations of modern Britain.
Astonishingly, given his profound influence on the Labour Party’s birth and political and ideological development, he remains the least known of the party’s leaders. Indeed, the PLP chair in 2006, Tony Lloyd MP, had to argue for Clynes’s inclusion in the pamphlet celebrating Labour’s centenary.154 As a successor in the same north Manchester constituency, Lloyd was aware of his predecessor’s incredible career, but depressed by the ignorance among his contemporaries of John Robert’s existence, let alone monumental service.155
Perhaps this is because Clynes is the only leader in Labour’s history to have been involuntarily deposed.156 Cruelly, he had the opportunity of being Prime Minister snatched away from him by a handful of impatient new-intake MPs – ironically elected on the wave of Clynes’s successful electoral strategy – and the ambition of Ramsay MacDonald. It is breathtaking but futile to speculate on how Britain’s history would have been different but for the five votes by which he lost on that day in November 1922.
A more likely explanation, however, than that of the victor writing history, is Clynes’s simple lack of ego and profound commitment to solidarity, both as a philosophical axiom and as an electoral necessity. The selfless political ego is rare in our times, yet for Clynes it was an obvious prerequisite to leadership. If millions of impoverished Britons were to be liberated from their servitude, they needed power, and power to Clynes required sacrifice by leadership. The self-educated mill-boy had rationalism at his very core; it was the central tenet of his political consciousness. To him, socialism was not just the morally right course of action to adopt, but the only coherently intellectual one. Not without a sense of humour – sometimes dry, sometimes cutting – he genuinely believed that political power for the working class required its leaders to be selfless rationalists. Respect from colleagues, opponents, the King and the people were reward enough, if unsought-for by him and his wife Mary. Starting work as an eight-year-old on the 5 a.m. shift was, if nothing else, character-forming. Such was his self-control, born of this background, that he seems almost to have chosen his own personality.
Yet this wonderful and optimistic aspect of his demeanour explains both why he was a hugely successful leader and why he allowed power to be snatched from him. The story is humbling. Comparisons to modern, TV-age, ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politicians are depressing, as those politicians, when aware, are the first to confess.
Notwithstanding his incredible life story, his role in the founding of general trade unionism and the Labour Party, his fifty-year political career, and his contribution to the intellectual creation of the architecture of British socialism (even if just for his brief sojourn as chairman of the party – as the position was called then), his place on the podium of successful leaders would be secure. Of all Labour’s leaders, only Clement Attlee achieved greater electoral success, and Clynes beats Blair when you look at the raw electoral arithmetic.157
The case for Clynes, however, is not just that he was the second most successful leader in terms of his electoral legacy. However influential a leader is in taking his or her party from A to B, it surely must be recognised that this influence must take into account the slings and arrows of political fortune. Clynes was able to lead Labour to electoral success in 1922 because of his lifelong strategic approach to politics, the electorate’s respect that reaped, and the shaping of events to his will, rather than the will of his formidable opponents. On this measure alone, as we will see, he is on the winners’ podium. Labour’s fortunes before the First World War were really that of a fringe pressure group. After it, under Clynes’s leadership – itself based, in the public mind, on his service, policies and dignity throughout the war, and especially on his attitude and reaction at the October 1918 Special Conference – Labour replaced the Liberal Party as the main opposition, and subsequently as the party of government.
To this historic and epoch-changing success must be added his long-term influence in shaping British politics to the advantage of his party and to the lives of those it represented. My contention is that he, more than anyone else in the twentieth century, was responsible for ensuring the improved social mobility and well-being of more of our citizens than any other person. A bold claim – especially of a man who history has ignored. So, who was he?
John Robert Clynes was born in Oldham, in what is now Greater Manchester, on 27 March 1869. He died on 23 October 1949 in Putney, south London. Within a few weeks, his wife of fifty-six years, a former card-room girl in the cotton mills and his lifelong companion, also passed away.
Born to an Irish immigrant father who worked for the parks department in Oldham, variously digging graves and labouring on the creation of the famously beautiful Alexandra Park, John Robert, or Jack as he was known by the family,158 was the eldest of seven (surviving) children. He was born in a cramped terraced house on the site of what is now Tommyfield Market in central Oldham. He shared a bed with his brother, attended elementary school for a mere five years and started work in the Dowry cotton mill in Lees, walking the 3 miles there to start his shift at 5 a.m., aged ten. From the age of twelve he worked full time as a ‘little piecer’, picking cotton threads from underneath the life-threatening machinery.
Imagine a ten-year-old child with bare feet in a smoke-stacked mill – a human anthill of 2,000 souls – working in the dark from before dawn. Death by accident was common, as the children slipped on the oily shop floor. Personal accounts159 tell us it was the noise that dominated the working environment. The little piecers were essential to the production process, as they were the only ones small enough to dip under the machinery to keep the line going. The little girls, aged ten, were urged, but not compelled, to wear hairnets. The awful reality was not just that they were frequently scalped by getting their hair caught in the machines, but that the noise of the mill was so great that their fellow workers could not hear their screams. This was the childhood of the future occupant of No. 11 Downing Street.
Clynes’s journey out of his situation was through a self-taught education. Earning pennies by reading the newspapers to the blind in the cooperative reading rooms in Oldham, he bought second-hand books to teach himself Shakespeare, Carlyle and Mill, among others, while his siblings slept. According to his only biographer, the young Clynes learned the Oxford English Dictionary by rote.160
By the age of eighteen, Clynes was an accomplished public speaker and debater and ready to take on the world. Perhaps inevitably, he became a trade union organiser, recruited to the General and Municipal Workers Union (GMWU) by Will Thorne, on the strength of Thorne hearing him address a workers’ rally. Clynes always thought that trade unionism without political representation was not the answer to the working class’s problems. He helped found the ILP and the LRC, and threw himself into building the labour movement. After three unsuccessful attempts to be elected as a councillor in Oldham, he became one of the first Labour Members of Parliament, elected in the 1906 general election for the constituency of Manchester North East. He served as an MP thereafter, until 1945, with just a four-year break. In the First World War, he joined the coalition government as one of the first Labour Party members to hold ministerial office. He was deputy to the Minister for Food Control, Lord Rhondda, and, on Rhondda’s early death, Clynes took over the office.
In the post-war election of 1918, Labour returned fifty-seven MPs and was clearly on an upward trajectory. By then, Clynes was already held in high regard. The Observer, in an editorial at the end of the First World War in June 1918, predicted: ‘Within ten years, the Labour Party will form the government and John Robert Clynes will be the Prime Minister.’161
He was seen by many as the natural choice for deputy leader in 1918,162 his skills as an orator complemented his ministerial and trade union experience. Never a flamboyant speaker, he relied on cold facts and rational argument to wrong-foot his opponents. He inspired support through his grasp of the real-world hardships of voters and through his unbreakable logic, politely delivered. Never a tub-thumper, he was nonetheless called for when the chips were down.
He became the leader of the Labour Party in 1921 and served for a brief twenty-one months. On losing the post, he immediately took the office of deputy leader, and served loyally for ten years – one of only two people to serve as deputy after being leader. He went on to hold high office as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Leader of the House in the first Labour government, then Home Secretary in the second. In the first, he was effectively the Deputy Prime Minister, and in the second, with Ramsay MacDonald holding the posts of both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Clynes was effectively in charge of domestic policy.
Clynes’s remarkable achievement in rising up the social ladder is therefore unsurpassed. Even Keir Hardie and MacDonald cannot compete, although admittedly Henderson would have a claim. No leader since comes close.
In February 1921, Clynes replaced William Adamson as party leader. Adamson, while respected, had been largely absent due to illness, and was seen by many as not up to the job. Manny Shinwell, for one, described him as ‘a dour and phlegmatic Scottish miners’ leader, very much out of his depth in the Commons’.163 The former food controller, and, by now, trade union president, was the obvious choice as successor. According to Philip Snowden:
Clynes had considerable qualifications for parliamentary leadership. He was an exceptionally able speaker, a keen and incisive debater, had wide experience of industrial questions, and a good knowledge of general political issues. In the Labour Party conferences, when the platform got into difficulties with the delegates, Mr Clynes was usually put up to calm the storm.164
It is worth noting that John Robert Clynes was the first English person to lead Labour, and it is not fanciful to suggest that this was an electoral asset to the party. While politics in those times was conducted without electronic media, and the public was largely ignorant of its leaders’ accents, Clynes’s affinity with the working class reached at least as far as the conurbations by reputation, if not through the many thousands of public meetings he attended.
As a measure of his modesty and subjugation to political rather than personal advantage, it is also worth quoting his reaction on being elected leader. In his memoirs, written fifteen years after, he recalled: ‘Now I, as an ex-mill-hand, was within measurable distance, so people said, of becoming the first Labour Prime Minister, not so much through efforts of my own to seek distinction, as because of the unflinching loyalty and courage of the Labour rank and file.’165
This modesty, which appears throughout his life, was undoubtedly a vote-winner – if only indirectly – not least through the loyalty and confidence it instilled in his shadow Cabinet and among the wider PLP.
So, by the time of the 1922 election, Clynes as leader was unchallenged within the Labour Party, and bestrode a united party organisation. The goal was to replace the Liberals (both parties) as the agent for social reform and as the opposition to the Tory Party. By now, the Irish question, in what would become the Irish Free State, was being resolved, at least in terms of parliamentary arithmetic. The tide was with him. The extension of suffrage to all men over twenty-one and to property-owning women had to be exploited to the benefit of Labour rather than the Liberals. This was achieved through a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to policy.
The electoral threat to Labour came from abroad. The Russian revolution had support within the trade unions and from some in the nascent Labour Party. From 1918 onwards, the right in British politics were always able to play the ‘reds under the beds’ tactic. While adopting a conciliatory foreign policy within the framework of unflinching support for the British monarchy, Clynes’s patriotism was unquestionable. Central to this was his abhorrence of revolution. His experience of harsh working conditions and the slaughter of the First World War, his internationalism and his self-taught study of history all informed his view that revolutions did not liberate the working class, but rather led to their butchering and starvation. He was not a timid socialist, far from it – and indeed nobody ever accused him of being one – but he did think that a Bolshevik revolution would harm not the rich, but the poor. In any event, despite the horrors of deprivation, Britain could at least claim a democratic system, subject to the rule of law. As leader, he made these views clear, and reassured the populace that he and Labour had the people’s interests at heart.
A further obstacle to electoral success was psychological. This is a British phenomenon that beleaguers the party to this day. Above all else, Clynes and the other members of the ‘Big Five’166 knew that they had to prove to a class-ridden British society, creeping its way towards democracy, that ordinary working people were competent to govern. This had been Clynes’s guiding strategy throughout the war. While his primary goal had been to do what was best from the point of view of the alleviation of poverty and the advancement of social justice, he matched this concern with his firmly held view from childhood that the pre-requisite for the election of organised Labour into Parliament – and socialists into democratic government, having rejected the revolutionary road – was the demonstration of competence. It is hard, perhaps, for the post-Second World War generation, who accept meritocracy as the conventional wisdom, to grasp the height of the political mountain that Clynes and his team had to climb. Having successfully served as War Minister, however, Clynes’s credentials for competence were strengthened.
Armed with this political advantage, a solid practical programme of social advancement and the opportunity to build on the sacrifice and slaughter in northern France, Clynes led the party to huge progression in 1922. In the general election of that year, under Clynes’s stewardship, Labour’s representation increased in Parliament from fifty-seven MPs, elected in 1918, to 142. The vote saw a swing to Labour of 9 per cent. This meant, in brutal terms of power, that Labour were the second party. The forward march of socialism had started. Clynes had succeeded in supplanting the Liberal Party as the opposition – a position from which they have never recovered. He paved the way for the first Labour government, which occurred barely a year after his triumph. Above all, he broke the class-ridden, centuries-old yoke that dictated in the minds of the British working class that ordinary people were incapable of governing. While his true triumph would not be seen until 1945, when the party he had midwifed to power took a majority in Parliament, his contribution as leader to the 1922 result and his influence in building the Labour Party throughout his career are unsurmounted.
So, electorally, his case is strong. Apart from the arithmetic quirk of 1906 – when, by definition, the LRC’s numbers increased infinitely from zero to twenty-nine, among whom, of course, was Clynes – and the aberration of 1935 – following the National Government and the betrayal by Clynes’s vanquisher, MacDonald, when he was re-elected into the House – no other leader has increased the Labour share of the vote by more. Tony Blair did increase the proportion of Labour MPs by a slightly greater margin, but, measured by increase in the share of the vote, Clynes is the winner. In these terms, even Attlee did not match his success.
The question mark over Clynes’s success as a leader is, of course, the fact that he was deposed. The challenge by MacDonald was not out of the blue. MacDonald’s absence from the political firmament, based on his undoubtedly principled opposition to Britain’s participation in the First World War, led, in the eyes of his supporters, to a hero’s return. So, how did Clynes let this happen? Did he take his eye off the ball and become complacent, simply failing to see the plot unfolding? Or did his selfless commitment to the party he had done so much to build outweigh his personal ambition? His memoirs give us a clue to his state of mind:
I hope that nothing I may say further on the subject will cause anyone to conclude that I harbour the slightest personal feeling against MacDonald because he eventually replaced me. Indeed, when I was beaten by a few votes, I felt that he had rid me of a burden rather than robbed me of any ambition to become the first Labour Prime Minister.167
The simple fact is that Clynes did not see the challenge coming. Perhaps he was incapable of reading the motives of those less honourable than himself. Perhaps he was over-confident and simply got his numbers wrong. More likely, Clynes had a statesman’s view. He had spent his life building the party and devoting himself to it. His lack of ego simply prevented him from grubbing around the corridors for votes. Either they wanted him, or they didn’t. Whatever they chose, he was happy to serve, and his loyalty to MacDonald as his deputy was remarkable. Yet this loyalty did not diminish him in the eyes of his contemporaries. Rather, it enhanced his reputation as the father figure of the British labour movement. To someone who had started work in the mills at ten years old, what was important was not who held high office, but whether Labour won. He knew also from decades of struggle that disunity was Labour’s enemy. Maybe he should have done more to project himself, but it is difficult to conceive that those discontented with his gradualism would have remained as loyal to him as he did to them.
A further claim for Clynes’s greatness is that he shaped democratic socialism and ensured that revolutionary socialism (and indeed its counterpart, fascism) took no hold in Britain, as it was doing elsewhere. As he told George V when receiving his seals of office in the first Labour government: ‘Constitutional monarchy has nothing to fear from organised Labour as long as constitutional monarchy recognises the will of the people.’ He was, indeed, the critical political figure in convincing King George that Labour could form a government without threat from those who had murdered his cousin, Tsar Nicholas.
Perhaps his best claim to the mantle of greatest leader of the Labour Party is this: having lost the power he had done so much to gain, Clynes ensured that Labour survived and prospered. His architecture of an alliance between the trade unions, the Labour Party and the intellectual middle classes has stood the test of time. The victories of 1945, 1964 and 1997 were built upon it. He showed that a mill-boy could govern, which was a necessary pre-requisite for the introduction of democracy, and the basis of post-war prosperity. His politics is best expressed by a quote from his speech to the victorious Labour activists in 1924, repeated by David Miliband in his valedictory speech to the Labour conference in Manchester in 2010: ‘Labour enters Parliament not to win the class war, but to end it.’
As well as laying out the party’s organisational and political ideology for 100 years to come, Clynes led by the example of unity. At five critical junctures in the party and country’s history, Clynes, by his actions, held the movement together, and thereby, some claimed, parliamentary democracy itself:
These acts, and others, provided the practical implementation of the sloganeering of the left. They showed that the idealism of socialists was indeed relevant to the daily hardship of working-class people; that it was not hot air, nor was it dangerous. Indeed, Clynes’s leadership while in office – as formal leader of the party and in other roles where he was a leading embodiment of its values – demonstrated the necessity of changing the world order. It had taken just eighteen years from birth to government, and, within thirty-nine years, his more electorally successful heir, Clement Attlee, would reap the harvest.
It is often claimed that the first two Labour governments achieved little in the way of social progress and economic egalitarianism. And, to be fair, neither of those two governments had anything close to a majority in the House. But this misses the point. The great advancements of the period – universal suffrage, the introduction of pensions, public education, the working week, industrial conditions and wage increases – have all been credited, by the Liberal interpreters of our history, to the Liberal Party. But the Liberals were swept out of office and replaced by Labour as the radical party, due to the millions of working-class voters who were inspired by the policies advocated by Labour. And those policies and that advocacy, through writings, pamphlets, speeches and mostly political organisation, were crafted and implemented at that crucial juncture, not by MacDonald, but by Clynes. Time after time – at conferences, in the PLP, as president of the GMWU, as minister in the First World War, as president of the TUC, as leader and deputy leader and as elder statesman – it was Clynes who was called upon when difficult decisions arose. And he never shirked them – often to his own loss.
On the night MacDonald beat Clynes to become the new leader, only a few days after the general election that saw Labour’s greatest success to date (at that point), MacDonald failed to turn up to the victory rally at the Kingsway Hall in Holborn. It was Clynes, installed as the deputy leader only hours before and stripped of leadership by the narrowest of margins (sixty-one votes to fifty-six), who turned up to give the speech. It was, of course, already prepared, and outlined the forthcoming successful path to power. Only just more than a year later, the Labour Party, which Clynes had helped to form only eighteen years previously, would form the government.
It is often said that victory has a thousand fathers, and it is certainly the case that the MacDonald version of history took hold rapidly. With no rebuttal from the Clynes side of the story, the truth has been lost. It is worth looking at the conventional wisdom at the time, though, perhaps best expounded by H. Hessell Tiltman. Published in 1929, Tiltman’s sycophantic and premature biography of MacDonald168 gives an insight into the writing-out of history of Clynes. In 350 pages of text, covering MacDonald’s life through to the advent of his second premiership in 1929, and despite his having worked and fought alongside Clynes for thirty-five years in building the labour movement, including seven hard years with Clynes as his loyal and effective deputy, John Robert warrants but three mentions in the book. Remember, also, that Clynes was more than just the deputy leader of the party. In MacDonald’s first term, he held the office of Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister – the empire being the focus of major governmental decisions. Domestic policy was, by and large, left to Clynes. He lived at No. 11 and held office as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Leader of the House (the PM being nominal Leader of the House). Yet, despite these formidable powers and positions, Clynes features as a minor figure in this and other accounts of MacDonald’s time. Of course, by the time of the great betrayal in 1931, it was, with awful irony, Clynes who lost his constituency seat as a result.
The reason for this great act of redaction was Clynes’s own personality. He simply saw the political cause as being greater than his status within it. It is this unshakeable adhesion to the greater good, the power of reason and the overwhelming necessity to hold together – the lifelong proof of the GMWU’s ‘unity is strength’ call to arms – that caused this wonderful leader to be airbrushed out of political history. To this day, we read a Liberal version of our history. For example, in Andrew Marr’s brilliant account of the rise of democracy in his bestselling book The Making of Modern Britain169 (and in the vast majority of accounts of the period), no mention is made of the role of Clynes’s statecraft in engineering the replacement of Liberalism with Labour socialism as the opposition to the Conservatives.
Yet, Tiltman does give service in his account of MacDonald’s victory over Clynes. His side of the story is wholly through the prism of his returning hero and helps explain how it was that Clynes came to lose:
When once the pendulum begins to move, it does not pause midway in its swing. The man who was ready to serve in the rank and file was, within a week of his re-election to Parliament, and to the surprise of even some members of his own party, elected leader of the PLP in place of J. R. Clynes.170
The usurping of Clynes, when mentioned in our history books at all, follows this narrative. Seen as a stepping stone in the career of MacDonald, the true significance has been lost. Tiltman inadvertently gives the game away: ‘It is worthy of note that MacDonald owed his election to the votes of the more advanced block in the party, who expected from him a “fighting lead”, which they felt was lacking under Mr Clynes.’171
The so-called ‘advanced block’ – that is, the newly elected and impatient – would swallow its naivety in bucketloads just nine years later, in 1931. Yet Clynes’s very loyalty was his downfall. The PLP, following the election in 1922, numbered 142. His defeat to MacDonald, by a mere five votes, was a surprise to all. Yet the numbers show that twenty-five Labour MPs simply failed to turn up to vote. Most of these were trade union officials and representatives still engaged in their industrial work, surprised by their election success. There’s little doubt that these men were Clynes’s supporters. The usurpers, including the ‘Red Clydesiders’, paid no heed to Clynes’s success in leading them to that point, but instead, in their ambition, plumped for the man they saw as the more flamboyant, exciting and closer to their hearts than their heads.
Perhaps, though, Clynes’s lasting achievement was that of forging, explaining and leading the ideological creation of the party. By melding the ‘Labourism’ of the trade unions and the intellectualism of the Fabian wing, he, along with Henderson, shaped Labour’s brand of democratic socialism. It is a balance that is dangerously out of kilter today, but so far it has served well. The rise in the fortunes of the mill-boy John Robert Clynes to the chambers of power in Whitehall was shadowed by the emergence of the people from Victorian squalor to prosperous democratic society – a rise made possible by Clynes himself.
154 Alan Haworth and Dianne Hayter, Men Who Made Labour: The Parliamentary Labour Party of 1906 – The Personalities and the Politics, London, Routledge, 2006.
155 Private correspondence, Tony Lloyd MP to author.
156 The position at the time was known as chairman of the parliamentary party. The name change took place on MacDonald’s succession to Clynes.
157 See Chapter 3.
158 Interestingly, he was known by his colleagues as ‘Jimmy’ but by his family as ‘Jack’. Mary, his wife, was called ‘Polly’ by her family and friends in Oldham, but remained Mary when in London.
159 See, for example, Brian R. Law, Oldham Brave Oldham: An Illustrated History of Oldham, 1849–1999, Oldham, Oldham Council, 1999.
160 Edward George, From Mill-boy to Minister: The Life of John Robert Clynes, London, T. F. Unwin, 1918.
161 The Observer, 30 June 1918.
162 Vice-chairman of the PLP.
163 Emanuel Shinwell, The Labour Story, London, McDonald, 1963.
164 Philip Snowden, An Autobiography, Vol. 2, London, I. Nicholson & Watson Ltd, 1934, p. 531.
165 John Robert Clynes, Memoirs Vol. 1, London, Hutchinson, 1937.
166 The ‘Big Five’, as they became known, were: John Clynes, Philip Snowden, Arthur Henderson, Ramsay MacDonald and J. H. Thomas. Although at this stage MacDonald was outside Parliament, the wider strategy was discussed among this core group throughout the 1920s.
167 Clynes, op. cit. (1).
168 H. Hessell Tiltman, Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s Man of Destiny, London, Jarrolds, 1929.
169 Andrew Marr, The Making of Modern Britain, London, Pan, 2010.
170 Tiltman, op. cit.
171 Ibid.