Welsh Journals

their way, none of these matches Llanelli for drama, for the scale of the casualties or, indeed, for destruction. Historians have often identified the years from 1910 to 1914 as a period of great social and political unrest, characterised not only by strikes and public disturbances associated with them, but also by the activities of suffragettes and of Nationalists and Unionists in Ireland. Contemporaries were only too aware of the dimensions of violence in their own society; the epithets 'great unrest', 'social unrest' and 'labour unrest' have their origins in the period itself.7 From mid-1910 onwards, political commentators and politicians were acutely conscious of a change in the climate of industrial relations. There was a sharp increase in the number of disputes, the number of participants and their obduracy. What troubled contemporaries most, however, was the widespread social disturbance and the danger of political ferment which seemed to arise from industrial confrontation. In particular, there was growing concern at the advent of new forms of political ideology which sought to channel and direct the forces of unrest. It took The Times until 1912 to mention the word 'syndicalism', but the concept itself was already widely understood and used.8 In its most explicit form, syndicalism postulated the emergence, after a period of increasing industrial confrontation, of a new State system based on economically- determined forms of organisation. In a more generalised form, however, syndicalism appeared to consist of a new mood of rebelliousness, or 'revolt', as some contemporaries were disposed to describe it, accompanied by the deterioration in the influence of the H. Pelling, 'The Labour Unrest, 1911-14' in Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (2nd ed., 1979), pp. 147-64; R. V. Sires, 'Labour Unrest in England, 1910- 14', Journal of Economic History, xi (1955), 246-66; Stajidish Meacham, 'The Sense of an Impending Clash. English Working Class Unrest before the First World War', American Historical Review, lxxvii, 2 (1972), 1343-64. The period is described as 'unorganized revolt' in Eric Wigham, Strikes and the Government, 1898-1974 (1976), pp. 47-64, and as 'the lesser struggle' in T. A. Critchley, The Conquest of Violence, Order and Liberty in Britain (1970), pp. 141-76. Still the most graphic account, summarized as 'the workers rebellion', is George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (1970 ed.), pp. 195-291. For a discussion of strikes in general from 1911 onwards, see K. G. J. C. Knowles, Strikes-A Study in Industrial Conflict (1954). See, for example, J. E. Barker, 'The Labour Revolt and its Meaning', Nineteenth Century, September 1911; Association of British Chambers of Commerce, Industrial Unrest (1911); Fred Henderson, The Labour Unrest, What it is and what it Portends (1912); W. Cunningham, The Causes of Labour Unrest (1912). See also the continuous discussion of Labour unrest in the Industrial Syndicalist (London, July 1910-May 1911). By 1912-13, a considerable body of books and articles had appeared on the subject by commentators as varied as Charles Booth, J. A. Hobson, H. G. Wells, Ramsay MacDonald and Harold Cox. The Times, 16 April 1912. For specific treatment of syndicalism, see Holton, op. cit.; J. R. MacDonald, Syndicalism (1912); A. Clay, Syndicalism and Labour (1912); G. D. H. Cole, The World of Labour (1913), esp. ch. XI; Philip Snowden, Syndicalism and Socialism (1913). Among the chief syndicalist publications were The Industrial Syndicalist, later renamed The Syndicalist (1910-14), the Industrial Worker (1913-17) and Solidarity (1913-21). For a brief evaluation of the place of syndicalism in British industrial relations, see E. H. Hunt, British Labour History, 1815-1914 (1981), pp. 327-30.