Arthur Henderson, who began his political career as an agent to a Liberal MP, came to play an important role in the development of the Labour Party. He is given credit by historians for building the party’s organisation by linking the industrial and political factions. Henderson was also, in effect, leader no fewer than three times. He was chairman of the party twice (1908–10 and 1914–17) and then leader for thirteen months, from September 1931. Henderson, therefore, took Labour into the general election of that year, which was to become one of the greatest defeats in the party’s history, with Henderson losing his own seat. Chris Wrigley argues, however, that Henderson could not be blamed for that result, coming, as it did, after MacDonald and Snowden had split with the Labour Party and formed the National Government with the parliamentary opposition. In fact, it could have been a worse defeat, were it not for Henderson’s appointment as leader. Henderson was a good but not outstanding speaker, nor was he notably innovative in developing policy, but he provided moderate and experienced, if not charismatic, leadership during a time of great turmoil for the party.
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Arthur Henderson (1863–1935) was leader of the Labour Party in 1931–32, fighting the disastrous 1931 general election. He was also chairman of the PLP twice, in the period before the formal post of leader existed. He became the second chairman of the PLP in 1908 and was in that position at the time of the January 1910 general election. He was again chairman of the PLP in 1914–17, taking over after James Ramsay MacDonald resigned following the outbreak of the Great War. In 1917–18, Henderson played a major role in revitalising the Labour Party through a new and socialist constitution, reorganising it as an electoral machine and, building on wartime social changes, assisting it in formulating a full range of policies to offer the post-war electorate. He saw himself, rightly, as the Labour Party’s great organiser. In 1931, he told the Webbs that he had hoped to continue as Foreign Secretary in the Lords and ‘devote himself to the party machine’, adding that he ‘had never wished to be leader, but only the manager of the party’.189
Henderson was unique among Labour Party leaders in having been a professional political organiser before being elected to Parliament. Henderson had been the agent of the Liberal MP, Sir Joseph Pease, for the Barnard Castle constituency in County Durham from December 1895 until early 1903. At the third LRC conference, held in Newcastle upon Tyne in February 1903, Henderson moved a successful amendment to increase the trade union levy from 1d to 4d per member. In so doing, he drew on his expertise as an agent, observing: ‘If they were going to do something more than simply play a game, they must not be satisfied to go on, for instance, depending upon a register that was made up by the other parties.’ He had been engaged for the past seven years in connection with registration work, and happened to know what expense was associated with that work: ‘If they were going to build up a perfect machinery of organisation and registration they could not do it on a 1d contribution.’190
Although still a paid Liberal agent, Henderson’s union, the Friendly Society of Iron Founders, sent him to assist Will Crooks in the Woolwich by-election of March 1903, which Crooks won easily for the LRC.191 Arthur Henderson was elected in a by-election for Barnard Castle in July 1903. Henderson went on to be the Labour Party’s major organiser. When he was the party’s treasurer (1903–12), he and Ramsay MacDonald, the Secretary 1900-12, dominated the organisation of the party on behalf of its NEC. Henderson took over as party secretary in 1912 – his ‘succession gave organisation much more energetic direction’, in Ross McKibbin’s view – and he held on to the post (with breaks in 1924 and 1929) until 1934. He had been acting secretary from August 1906 until January 1907, and then from September to December 1909. He enjoyed having his hands on the levers of the party machine. As McKibbin has commented, ‘Henderson had a tendency to accumulate responsibilities, but a disinclination to shed them.’192 He saw himself more as an organisation person than as being at the front of the political stage as leader, and he played key organisational roles in the 1918–24 general elections. He also liked the power behind the scenes of the parliamentary party that came with being Chief Whip – a post he held from 1906 to 1908, from January to August 1914, from 1920 to 1924, and from 1925 to 1927.
In the early years, Henderson’s position owed a lot to his experience as a political organiser. He gave the party much of its electoral advice. At the 1907 Labour Party conference, he spoke up for the appointment of an election agent.193 This matter was referred back to the NEC and, in the following year, a sub-committee reported on the matter. At the 1908 conference, Henderson again supported this appointment, saying: ‘The head office was constantly receiving communications asking for explanations and definitions of difficult points of election law and of registration law.’ Most of those communications were handed over to him to explain, and he thought it was too much to expect that a man like himself, engaged in so many other things, should be called upon to give all these explanations.194 The burden of giving detailed electoral advice was lifted from Henderson with the appointment of Arthur Peters as national agent (1908–18).
Henderson’s status in the early Labour Party also owed a great deal to his position as a representative of a major trade union – the fourth largest to affiliate with the LRC in its first year.195 The trade unions provided funds and organisation, and were vigilant as to expenditure on political administration. Henderson had been apprenticed at twelve as an iron-moulder in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1892, he had become the union’s district delegate for the Newcastle area. The following year, he left his trade and instead worked for the Newcastle Evening News, while still working for the union. He made a national reputation for himself when acting for his union during the great iron-founders’ dispute of 1894. When, in 1902, Henderson’s union balloted for someone to be parliamentary candidate and general organiser until elected, Henderson topped the poll of six nominees.196
His union’s support for the independent labour politics of the LRC was decisive in moving Henderson from Lib–Lab to Labour politics. His change of allegiance had nothing to do with him having any form of socialist beliefs. The trade union–socialist alliance of the LRC was sensitive to ‘the various attempts that have been made to initiate a Labour representation movement as an adjunct to trade unionism’, as the first annual report put it when giving a brief history.197 Henderson had been an offshoot of such moves. When he stood in a Newcastle council by-election in November 1892, he was backed by the Tyneside National Labour Association and secured the seamen’s leader – Middlesbrough MP, Joseph Havelock Wilson – to speak for him. Later, Havelock Wilson recalled that Henderson had ‘made a brilliant speech’ in support of the distinguished Gladstonian Liberal MP, John Morley, ‘with the result that he was immediately regarded as the coming man of politics’.198 Henderson advocated a mix of trade unionist and radical policies; in this, he was somewhat similar to John Burns and the London Progressives. But he was also very much a product of north-east England politics – as McKibbin put it: there, ‘advanced radicalism, temperance, class harmony and Methodism were characteristic’.199
Henderson was a committed Methodist, having been converted by Gypsy Smith at a Salvation Army street meeting in 1879 or 1880,200 and, in the 1890s, he spoke widely at North of England Temperance League meetings. Apart from the centrality of trade unionism to his politics, his Nonconformist background and the venues for the development of his speaking skills were similar to the background of many radical Liberals, including his contemporary David Lloyd George. Like Lloyd George, he had grown up as an admirer of Gladstone, and Henderson’s politics certainly owed more to him than to Marx or Robert Owen.
He came to be chairman of the PLP in 1908 because he was the most able of the early trade unionist MPs – or at least the most able available after David Shackleton declined to be chairman, even though Shackleton had acted in that capacity when Keir Hardie was ill and abroad for much of 1907. Henderson remained on his union’s executive committee after becoming an MP, and he became its president in 1910. Like J.R. Clynes, he remained very much in touch with his trade union roots. Henderson, in early 1908, was forty-four, full of confidence – stemming from his major role in a skilled union and his nonconformity – and an able speaker. His abilities in this respect have been undervalued by several historians. Henderson did not match up to the rhetoric – sometimes flowery and not filled with meaning, but often outstanding – of an orator such as MacDonald. He had no wish to emulate the socialist equivalents of the ‘Come to Jesus’ rhetoric of several of the early ILP ‘prophets’. Clynes wrote of him that he had ‘qualities of exposition’, useful on the shop floor.201 Alan Taylor, who heard him speak in Preston in the 1920s, recalled that he was ‘a good speaker – very effectively making his points’ and, while he was something of the stolid trade unionist, the fact ‘that he had been a Methodist preacher came through very clearly’.202
He was not the only able trade unionist of the first three decades of the Labour Party – others such as Jimmy Clynes, Willie Adamson and George Barnes also took on leading roles – but he was probably the weightiest politically, before Ernest Bevin in the 1940s. Like Bevin, he became a domineering figure in the party, but not as brutal as Bevin could be in his treatment of others. He gained the nickname ‘Uncle Arthur’ from Peter Curran MP when shepherding to a train a Labour delegation in Germany, 1912.203 ‘Uncle Arthur’ did not have the sinister connotations that became attached to ‘Uncle Joe’ for Stalin, but it did involve bossiness. One person who worked with Henderson when he was Foreign Secretary (1929–31) recalled: ‘He was genial by nature but was apt to get irritable and shout at people.’204 One former Labour MP, Lord Snell, recalled:
Robust in expression, a little prone to carry any disputed point by verbal assault, he was quickly roused to wrath, but was even more quickly composed. He was always approachable, always reliable, and considerate in his judgements, sometimes a little more ‘Uncle Mussolini’ than the ‘Uncle Arthur’, who was a revered friend of us all.205
Henderson felt deeply the many slights that MacDonald inflicted on him. Although their Labour politics were very similar, and Henderson went out of his way to support MacDonald, Kenneth O. Morgan was perceptive in observing: ‘In many ways they were two prima donnas locked in combat.’206 The relationship lasted so long because Henderson’s priority was party organisation, not being leader.
Before the First World War, Labour’s electoral strategy was the responsibility of the NEC. Henderson, along with MacDonald, was a key figure as party treasurer. Being chairman of the parliamentary party at the time of the January 1910 election added to this.207 As Neal Blewett has argued, in 1910 much depended on constituency-level organisation – sometimes controlled by dominant unions such as the miners, sometimes by trades councils, and occasionally by working men’s clubs. In other places, the Labour candidates benefited from the Liberal organisations.208
The Labour Party owed much of its 1906 parliamentary success to the secret 1903 Gladstone–MacDonald electoral pact, which gave the party a run against Conservative candidates, without Liberal intervention, in many seats. More than this, the pre-First World War Labour Party was the beneficiary of electoral swings against the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists in 1902–7, but did poorly when there were electoral swings against the Liberals, as in 1911–14. In the run-up to the January 1910 general election, the electoral strategy was to focus Labour’s attack on the House of Lords and on Labour’s social proposals, with Henderson also speaking out against tariffs.209
The PLP did try to differentiate its approach to the House of Lords from that of the Liberals, though. Some wished to move an amendment to Asquith’s resolution – which declared the House of Lords’s rejection of a financial measure to be a breach of the constitution – that would demand the abolition of the House of Lords. Instead, they agreed that Henderson should not move an amendment but instead should reiterate Labour’s policy of the abolition of the Lords, as expressed in a motion he had moved in June 1907.210
The party’s election address began with, and devoted nearly half the space to, the issue of the House of Lords. After denouncing it for having ‘mutilated or destroyed’ many important bills passed by the House of Commons, it observed: ‘Not content with this, they now claim the right to decide what taxes shall be paid, upon whom they will be levied, and for what purpose they will be spent.’ It concluded: ‘The Lords must go.’ The other half of the manifesto listed some of the party’s 1906 pledges that had been fulfilled. It also promised to achieve: the Right to Work; the break-up of the Poor Law; the abolition of poverty; the extension of non-contributory old-age pensions; and the full extension of the franchise to men and women. It used the slogan: ‘The land for the people. The wealth for the wealth producers.’ Roy Douglas may well have been right when he argued: ‘Most of the pre-1914 Labour MPs, like a very large section of contemporary Liberals, were probably stirred more by the land question than by any other.’211
Henderson was a leading figure in the general election campaign of December 1909 and the first half of January 1910 – at least, the press saw him as such. Henderson’s speeches were reported by The Times as being by the chairman of the Labour Party, with only Keir Hardie getting anywhere near as much coverage. Yet Henderson’s role in the January 1910 election was much less high-profile than that of Labour leaders after the Second World War.
Labour’s election strategy was hobbled both by the central issues of the House of Lords and the Budget, and by widespread suspicions that, in practice, the Labour Party was not as independent as its constitution proclaimed. Not only was Labour committed to the abolition of the House of Lords, but it also fully supported the ‘People’s Budget’, believing many aspects of it to have been taken from Labour policies. Hence, it was difficult not to appear to be in the Liberal slipstream. The sudden calling of the election caught Labour out, in that many potential candidates had not been endorsed, and many constituencies’ electoral organisations were not ready. With potential Labour candidates withdrawing, the Tory press and Labour left, as well as other socialist groups, were both quick to accuse the Labour leadership of dirty deals with the Liberals. Yet, as Neal Blewett has observed, for Labour’s right wing, especially some miners, there were not enough deals with the Liberals.212 Henderson, a devout Methodist, cannot have been comfortable making denials of a Liberal–Labour deal – even if there was no fresh, detailed pact (like that of 1903), there was probably at least a general understanding and some local arrangements. At Canning Town, on 10 December, he said: ‘There had been no alliance. It would be against the constitution of the Labour Party. It was quite true that candidates had been withdrawn, and others might be withdrawn … They had withdrawn candidates to oblige nobody, but only to suit themselves.’213 Henderson himself may have been a beneficiary, as it was believed he would lose in 1910 in a three-way contest, and there was serious talk of an independent Liberal standing in January.214
Henderson was most probably intending to stand down from the chair of the parliamentary party in 1910 anyway. But it seems very likely that he was confirmed in doing so by a major crisis in trade union relations with the Labour Party – one that would affect him even after the public payment of MPs. This was the Osborne Judgment, delivered on 21 December 1909, which undercut the rights trade unions believed they had to fund political parties. Henderson withdrew from being the main speaker at an election meeting in Stockport on 30 December in order to attend a meeting of Labour representatives in London that day and the next, trying to find ways around the judgment.215 Henderson and his colleagues devoted much time in 1910 to adjusting Labour’s policies to achieve a partial reversal of the Osborne Judgment with the Trade Union Act, 1913.216
Henderson’s second period as chairman of the PLP came in early August 1914, when MacDonald resigned after the outbreak of war. Henderson supported the war effort, condemning Prussian militarism and believing that Germany had ‘prepared for and fought a war of aggression, not of defence’.217 Henderson’s three sons fought, and David Henderson was killed on the Somme on 15 September 1916. In the preface to his small book, The Aims of Labour, Henderson wrote that he intended any profits from the sale of the book to go to:
The fund the Labour Party is promoting with a view to erecting a suitable and lasting memorial to the honour of those who have fallen on the field of battle in furtherance of the ideals and aims that inspire British democracy and on behalf of which British Labour has sacrificed so much and so freely.218
He was the Labour Party’s first Cabinet minister, serving under H. H. Asquith – as president of the board of education from May 1915 until August 1916, when he became Paymaster General – and under David Lloyd George – as a member of the small War Cabinet and as Minister without Portfolio from December 1916, until he resigned on 11 August 1917 over his desire for the Labour Party to be represented at an international socialist conference in Stockholm. He had hoped that attendance at this conference would strengthen the Kerensky government in Russia and keep that ally in the war. Throughout his time in these posts, his main government task was being the major industrial relations advisor, and he formally became Labour advisor to the Ministry of Munitions, with George Roberts, Labour MP for Norwich, as his deputy, in August 1916, before having a more prestigious overview as a member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet.219 In the sphere of industrial relations, he exhibited competence, even if many trade unionists pressing for better pay and conditions in wartime Britain were highly critical of him for taking on the role. For Henderson, however, it was a natural concomitant to supporting the drive for victory, just as, in 1940–45, Bevin took on manpower issues.
On 24 October 1917, Henderson stood down as chairman after three years. In large part, his motivation again was to do work that he believed was more valuable for the party. Henderson’s biggest electoral contribution to the Labour Party came after his second period as chairman of the parliamentary party, and before the 1918 general election. With Sidney Webb and Ramsay MacDonald, Henderson was responsible for producing revised internal and external policies for Labour in the post-war world, and a new, socialist constitution. Henderson was the main force behind the reorganisation of the Labour Party, making it more effective as a national electoral organisation, and this included creating a press and publicity department.220 He was blunt as to the crucial importance of party reorganisation in January 1918 at the annual conference:
It was no use the executive issuing anything in the nature of the programme; it was no use talking about building a new social order or reconstructing society, until they had taken into very careful consideration their present position as an organised political force. They had done so, and come to the unanimous conclusion that Labour, as politically organised in the existing circumstances, was altogether inadequate to the great task that lay immediately before it. They had never, in the proper sense, claimed to be a national political party.221
When Henderson became leader in 1931 his role was very much that of damage limitation. The 1931 general election was Labour’s worst electoral disaster, but it would be very wrong to blame Henderson’s leadership for this dismal result. Indeed, it might be better to ask whether it could have been even worse had not a respected Labour figure of great experience been willing to take over after the departure of Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, J. H. Thomas and others. Henderson’s contribution in 1931 was to provide experienced and moderate leadership, but it was not dynamic or very effective during the 1931 general election. However, that was an election that could not be salvaged by a party that had just divided. Although politics was very different in 1846, the Conservative Party had a bad experience in shedding its leaders then – although not too bad when emerging from an unpopular coalition government in 1922. In 1931, it was a far more damaging split than in 1922, and was in the midst of an international economic crisis.
Henderson had a wealth of experience in both the labour movement and in Whitehall. As well as his earlier roles, he had been a lacklustre Home Secretary in the first MacDonald Labour government of 1924. He had a more distinguished record as Foreign Secretary in MacDonald’s second Labour government of 1929–31, where he did impress with his initiatives. Unlike MacDonald as Foreign Secretary in 1924 and as Prime Minister in 1929–35, Henderson did not give the impression of being embarrassed by Labour Party policies. Indeed, when resisting a unilateral disarmament motion, he told the 1930 Labour Party conference that he ‘was trying religiously to stick by Labour and the Nation’.222 Foreign policy was the area of government activity where most election promises (other than disarmament) were fulfilled. In spite of friction between Henderson and MacDonald over foreign policy, the Prime Minister used the loyal and hard-working Henderson as, in effect, deputy Prime Minister when he was away in March 1931.
Henderson declined to be involved in plans to replace MacDonald, either in 1924 or twice during the second Labour government. Indeed, he kept the door open for MacDonald’s return during the First World War and tried to do so even after the 1931 split, being the sole voter against MacDonald’s expulsion at the Labour Party’s NEC on 28 September. In the situation after MacDonald’s defection in 1931, Henderson had major assets: he had immense experience in the party organisation and in Parliament; he was usually in tune with the Labour Party’s membership; and, especially important, he represented the solid trade union base of the party. Within the parliamentary party and among most trade union leaders on Labour–trade union joint bodies and meetings, Henderson was able to carry support for policies in a way that MacDonald and Snowden could not. In the Cabinet crisis over cuts, he predictably went with the view of the trade union movement, finding additional cuts unacceptable beyond the initial package of £56 million. With MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas gone, Henderson was the near inevitable replacement.223 Near – as Clynes, who was deputy leader, and who, like Henderson, had kept close to the trade unions, might have taken on the leadership, although he declined and later observed that ‘others deserved the position’.224
Henderson sensibly had doubts that he should take on the leadership, not least because he had been a member of the Cabinet economy committee and had supported the first tranche of £56 million in cuts. He also would have been sensible to give up either his Labour Party posts or his League of Nations work; instead, as was his weakness, he added another huge task to his already big workload. He did, however, have two deputy leaders, in Clynes and Willie Graham, not just one.
Henderson had to promote Labour in spite of the glaring contradictions in its policies. A TUC-dominated trade union and Labour Party committee produced a policy document approved on 27 August that rejected all the cuts, especially in unemployment benefits, and proposed various taxes on wealth. In September, Henderson and other prominent Labour figures moved away from denouncing all the cuts. However, he was embarrassed by having accepted £56 million of cuts (subject to cooperation by the Conservatives and the Liberals) under MacDonald, which he acknowledged in the Commons on 7 September, and by being in a Cabinet that had accepted a revenue tariff, thereby proving willing to break with free trade.225 Yet these were concessions intended to avoid or lessen cuts to unemployment benefit.
Later in September, Henderson greatly disappointed his parliamentary colleagues by not vigorously condemning the government when it abandoned the gold standard – its defence being the ostensible reason for forming the National Government. As Andrew Thorpe has argued, this may have been due to Henderson’s desire to try to avoid an early general election and to appear patriotic over the retreat from gold.226 However, his troops greatly needed lifting and encouraging in their struggle with MacDonald and the National Government. Henderson, faced with the disdain of many, offered to resign. He was successfully urged to continue. Henderson, as usual, would have preferred an organisational role. As Dalton said: ‘He must look after the organisation in view of an early election.’227
Henderson had no new ideas on economic policy. He had relied on Snowden and, with Snowden gone, he relied much on Willie Graham, who had been president of the board of trade. Graham had been an admirer, even an acolyte, of Snowden, following in his free-trade and balanced-budget footsteps.228 Ernest Bevin had an alternative economic policy but, when electors still in employment feared for their jobs and savings, Henderson would have been ill advised to have gone for a mix of deficit finance and tariffs alongside the agreed abandonment of the gold standard.229 In his Burnley constituency on 25 September, Henderson outlined what were to be Labour’s main election policies: the public control of the banks; the reconstruction of industry; support for agriculture; and the scrapping of the Economy Bill. In the 1931 general election, Henderson presided over Labour’s worst defeat, losing his own seat again (as in the 1918, 1922 and 1923 elections).
Henderson was one of the many links between the working-class Liberal politics of late-Victorian Britain and the socialist politics of the Labour Party from 1918. In many respects, he was at the radical end of the Nonconformist and Temperance supporters of Gladstone. This is so with regard to the Ottoman Empire and Ireland. In 1917, Henderson commented to an American newspaper reporter: ‘Though Armenian atrocities are not much talked about here, they have undoubtedly made a deep impression on the minds of the working population who, I think, are determined that never again shall a Christian nation be under the yoke of the Turk.’230 As for Ireland, Henderson was long a supporter of the Irish Nationalist Party. By early 1920, he recognised the widespread desire in Ireland, outside of Ulster, for Britain to ‘clear out’, but, until autumn 1920, he wanted Ireland to remain within the British Commonwealth. However, as he put it in a motion of censure on Lloyd George’s coalition government, 25 October 1920, he was appalled by ‘reprisals on the part of those whose duty is the maintenance of law and order’. When Labour’s call for an independent investigation was defeated in the House of Commons, Henderson headed Labour’s own investigation, which visited southern Ireland for just over two weeks in November to December 1920. He followed his Irish trip with a series of public meetings in 1921, at which, he believed, the ‘moral fervour and the deep indignation’ of earlier times was displayed. Labour’s Irish investigation marked the end of Lib–Lab Irish policy as much as the new Labour Party constitution and organisation of January 1918 marked the end of the pre-1914 style of Labour Party politics.231
Henderson’s first period as chairman of the PLP was in a different phase of Labour Party politics to his period as leader (1931–32). Henderson’s leadership in 1908–10 was criticised by the ILP wing of the party. This was partly due to his failure to insist sufficiently on the Labour Party’s independence. Keir Hardie complained that his successor as chairman of the parliamentary party was ‘reactionary and timid’.232 However, Henderson’s was a different style of politics to that of the self-proclaimed prophets or apostles of socialism, such as Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden or Glasier. Henderson, as a former Lib–Lab local politician, simply did not deem the Liberals to be as bad as the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists. Glasier complained of Henderson’s ‘eternal appearances on Temperance and Methodist platforms’, his deeply held religious views (‘a canting humbug on religion’) and his ‘seeming camaraderie with the Liberals’. Henderson’s sober worthiness connected well with many hitherto Liberal-supporting working people. Yet Glasier held kindred views to Henderson’s when it came to gambling – joining with Henderson in June 1913 in opposition to removing an embargo on betting on a Daily Citizen sports page – and he echoed Henderson when he said that he ‘regarded betting as a more degrading slavery than landlordism and capitalism’.233 Even on independence, there is a case for seeing Henderson as a realist, given his immense desirability for Labour to avoid as many three-way contests as possible. Even Keir Hardie went in for secret talks with south Wales Liberals; as Kenneth Morgan has commented: ‘It was far from being crystal-clear what distinguished his approach from the Lib–Labism of Shackleton or Henderson, which he so often criticised.’234 As for MacDonald, it is probable that Henderson threw cold water on his aspirations to take office in a Liberal Cabinet in 1910–14, being mindful of his own public denials of deals being done and of the iron-founders’ views.235
As for his alleged timidity, it was the case that he did not give charismatic leadership, either in the Commons or in the country. This was partly due to how he interpreted the role of chairman of the parliamentary party. He saw it as being the spokesperson for the Labour group. It was also partly due to Henderson not seeing the need on the current big issues to be abrasive. He was impressed by Lloyd George’s radicalism and, in 1909–10, was pleased with the ‘People’s Budget’ and the confrontation with the House of Lords, even if he was committed to ending not mending it. His record as chairman of the PLP was not strong, but it was arguably no worse, and probably better, than Keir Hardie’s before and Barnes’s after him – Keir Hardie being a non-team player, even when team leader, and Barnes being impetuous and deemed by many as not adequately representing Labour’s views.
By 1931, the post of leader was very significantly different from that of the earlier chairman of the PLP. It involved being the face of the Labour Party in an era of radio and newsreels, as well as popular newspapers.236 Henderson, as he well knew, lacked the charisma and oratory skills of MacDonald. He also lacked the inclination for virulent attacks on colleagues of three decades – in this, he was markedly unlike Philip Snowden. Henderson’s successes in Whitehall had been in industrial relations and in foreign policy. In the 1931 general election, the Conservatives and Liberal Nationals nearly ignored foreign policy and barely mentioned Henderson’s big issue: the forthcoming world disarmament conference.237 Probably no Labour leader, even with greater time before a general election, could have moved the national political debate away from the economic crisis to more favourable areas, especially not when nearly all the media poured vitriol on to the Labour Party. Part of his timidity in autumn 1931 came from his electoral organisational experience, with him tactically, desperately desiring to defer a general election.
Henderson was a mediocre leader in 1931–32, but in taking on the leadership at that time, he did the Labour Party, and the labour movement as a whole, a major service. The trade union movement would have been highly reluctant to have a non-trade unionist as leader after the defection of MacDonald and Snowden (both of whom had so often in the past voiced their distaste for the trade unions). Henderson had wide appeal to the ‘respectable working class’, which, other than in the conditions of 1931, would have been a notable asset. One working-class woman later recalled: ‘He was a man of integrity who showed how an ordinary working man could achieve a lot in public. People liked to look up to such figures. They showed what working people could aspire to.’238
Being leader in the 1931 general election was his last major service to the party. He had long been in touch with the mood of the mass of the party. Now he was fast losing touch. During and after the general election, Henderson tried to return Labour to being the party of the 1920s, while the bulk of the labour movement was moving on after the defections and the bitter general election to policies of greater state intervention, as acted on by Attlee’s 1945–51 majority Labour governments.239 It was very much time for him to give up being leader when he stood down in 1932.
189 Cole, op. cit., p. 287, entry for 20 September 1931.
190 Labour Representation Committee, ‘Report of the Third Annual Conference of the Labour Representation Committee’, 21 February 1903, p. 34.
191 Wrigley, op. cit., 1990, p. 26; Paul Tyler, Labour’s Lost Leader: The Life and Politics of Will Crooks, London, I. B. Tauris, 2007, p. 114.
192 McKibbin, op. cit., 1983, pp. 72 and 125. He even became secretary and treasurer from 1930.
193 The Labour Party, ‘Report of the Seventh Annual Conference of the Labour Party’, 24 January 1907, pp. 47–8.
194 The Labour Party, ‘Report of the Eighth Annual Conference of the Labour Party’, 20 January 1908, p. 55.
195 It affiliated with 18,357 members (5.2 per cent of the trade union total in 1900–01).
196 Friendly Society of Iron Founders, ‘Monthly Report’, January 1903.
197 Labour Representation Committee, ‘Report of the First Annual Conference of the Labour Representation Committee’, 1 February 1901, pp. 7–8.
198 J. Havelock Wilson, My Stormy Voyage Through Life, London, Cooperative Printing Society, 1929, p. 266.
199 McKibbin, op. cit., 1978, pp. 79–101.
200 There is no consensus on the exact date, nor does the biography of Gypsy Smith help on this.
201 On class unity and brotherhood, including in skilled unions, see, for instance: Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 256–9. John Robert Clynes, Memoirs, Vol. 2, London, Hutchinson, 1937, p. 210.
202 Talking with the author, 30 July 1984; Chris Wrigley, A. J. P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe, London and New York, I. B. Tauris, 2006, p. 29.
203 Edwin A. Jenkins, From Foundry to Foreign Office: The Romantic Life-Story of the Rt Hon. Arthur Henderson, MP, London, Grayson & Grayson, 1933, p. 36.
204 Major A. C. Temperley, The Whispering Gallery of Europe, London, Collins, 1938, p. 163.
205 Lord Snell, Men, Movements and Myself, London, Dent, 1936, p. 233.
206 Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants: Hardie to Kinnock, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 78.
207 He stood down on 15 February 1910.
208 Neal Blewett, The Peers, The Parties And The People: The General Elections of 1910, London, Macmillan, 1972, pp. 283–6; McKibbin, op. cit., 1983, pp. 16–19.
209 The Times, 4 January 1910.
210 ‘Political Notes’, The Times, 2 December 1909; Jenkins, op. cit., pp. 28–30.
211 Roy Douglas, ‘Labour and the Constitutional Crisis’ in Brown, op. cit., p. 221; Roy Douglas, Land, People and Politics: A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878–1952, London, Alison & Busby, 1976.
212 Blewett, op. cit., p. 237.
213 The Times, 11 December 1909.
214 The Times, 10 January and 12 January 1910.
215 Barnes, the deputy chairman, spoke in his place. The Times, 31 December 1909.
216 Henry Pelling, ‘The Politics of the Osborne Judgment’, Historical Journal, Vol. 25, 1982, pp. 889–909; Chris Wrigley, ‘Labour and the Trade Unions’ in K. D. Brown, op. cit., pp. 129–57.
217 Arthur Henderson, ‘Prussian Militarism’ (an interview with Arthur Draper of the New York Tribune) in British Finance and Prussian Militarism, London and New York, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917, p. 17.
218 Arthur Henderson, The Aims of Labour, New York, Headley Bros, 1918, p. 5. The preface is dated 22 December 1917.
219 On Henderson’s substantial role as an industrial trouble-shooter for Asquith and Lloyd George, see ‘Oiling the War Machine’ in Wrigley, op. cit., 1990, Chapter 5.
220 J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War: Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912–1918, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, pp. 259–63; Laura Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party, Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 34, 38–9.
221 Speaking on the New Constitution, 23 January 1918; The Labour Party, ‘Report of the Annual Conference of the Labour Party’, 1918, p. 19.
222 The Labour Party, ‘Report of the Thirtieth Annual Conference’, 8 October 1930, p. 240.
223 As Dalton observed in his diary, 24 August 1931. Quoted in Leventhal, op. cit., p. 193.
224 Clynes, op. cit., (2), p. 198.
225 Andrew Thorpe, The British General Election of 1931, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 133, 136–7 (see also the same author’s ‘Arthur Henderson and the British Political Crisis of 1931’, Historical Journal, 31(1), 1988, pp. 117–39).
226 Thorpe, ibid., pp. 146–8. For a harsher view, see Williamson, op. cit., pp. 429–31.
227 Dalton’s diary, 24 August 1931.
228 Thomas N. Graham, Willie Graham, London and New York, Hutchinson, 1948, pp. 184–7.
229 For a recent reappraisal of Bevin’s economic arguments, see Chris Wrigley, ‘Labour dealing with Labour: aspects of economic policy’ in John Shepherd, Jonathan Davis and Chris Wrigley ed., Britain’s Second Labour Government, 1929–31: A Reappraisal, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011, pp. 37–54. For an excellent broader discussion of economic policy, see Peter Clarke, The Keynesian Revolution in the Making 1924–1936, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988.
230 Henderson, op. cit., 1917, p. 21.
231 The Labour Party, ‘Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland’, December 1920; Wrigley, op. cit., 1990, pp. 135–7.
232 Lawrence Thompson, The Enthusiasts, London, Victor Gollancz, 1971, p.156.
233 Morgan, op. cit., 1975, p. 220; Thompson, ibid., p. 186.
234 Morgan, ibid., p. 229.
235 Marquand, op. cit., pp. 142–3, 150–51, 159–63; Leventhal, op. cit., p. 40; Wrigley, op. cit., 1990, pp. 66–7.
236 On this see Beers, op. cit., pp. 129, 141–2.
237 Thorpe, op. cit., p. 249.
238 Monica Walsh recalling Henderson in Burnley (in conversation with the author, 5 July 1987).
239 See, for example, Daniel Ritschel, The Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in the 1930s, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977.