The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain's First Labour Government

NB: This was reviewed alongside The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government by Peter Clark and A Century of Labour by John Cruddas.

Ahead of a possible Labour victory in Britain’s next general election, three new histories published on the centenary of the party’s first government provide a useful opportunity for reflection and perspective. Peter Clark’s brisk and personable The Men of 1924 devotes roughly half its length to Labour’s early years, as the party transformed itself ‘from pressure group to government in waiting’. Formed in 1900 from the trade union movement and a patchwork of small and frequently fractious socialist parties, societies and groups with origins in the late 19th century, the party’s initial show more electoral successes were limited to the local level but had wide-ranging reach. In its early strongholds in the Welsh valleys and poorer London boroughs such as Poplar, Labour councillors focused on improving working conditions and on health, housing and education, often building in microcosm the mechanisms of welfare that would be introduced nationally under Labour governments of greater success and stability than that of 1924.

The election of December 1923, in which a shock electoral advance by Labour led to an unprecedented three-way split in the Commons, saw the party enter government a month later for the first time. At a century’s distance, this nine-month-long minority administration – a venture cautioned against at the time by some of its own members – tends to be treated as an embarrassing failure or false start at best. Both Clark and David Torrance, in his more tightly focused The Wild Men, offer more even-handed assessments of the 1924 government. Both authors also paint largely forgiving portraits of its leader Ramsay MacDonald – although his political achievements and his personal snobbery, prickliness and social climbing have been judged so harshly by the majority of Labour’s historians that the bar for sympathy is somewhat low. Clark’s series of biographical sketches, and Torrance’s more smoothly integrated study, bring in the personalities beyond MacDonald that shaped Labour’s brief time in power: Lancashire autodidacts Thomas Shaw and J.R. Clynes; Fabian intellectuals such as Sidney Webb; the avuncular Arthur Henderson and the brash and bibulous Jimmy Thomas.

Other than Margaret Bondfield, the former shop assistant and trade union activist who would later became Britain’s first female cabinet minister in the second Labour government of 1929-31, this story reflects the domination of 1920s British politics by what Clark, pre-empting the obvious observation, acknowledges as ‘white men in dark suits’. Both books do, however, draw on some of the many female voices behind the scenes, including Beatrice Webb, Dolly Ponsonby and journalist Mary Agnes Hamilton. The 1924 Housing Act, enabling the subsidised building of public housing, was driven by health secretary John Wheatley’s experience of rent strikes in Glasgow – collective actions which were largely led by women. Labour’s electoral success reflected the rising influence of newly enfranchised demographics – both women and working-class men – and, in terms of class, was unarguably groundbreaking. MacDonald himself was the illegitimate son of a housemaid and a farmhand, and his cabinet replaced Old Etonians with former miners, railwaymen and millworkers.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Rhian E. Jones writes on history and politics. Her latest book, with Matthew Brown, is Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too (Repeater, 2021). show less