Emanuel Shinwell

Emanuel “Manny” Shinwell lived for more than a hundred years and through almost the whole of twentieth-century British politics. The son of Jewish immigrants, a Glasgow tailor and seamen’s union official, in January 1919 he led the strike for a 40-hour week that ended in the Battle of George Square, the arrival of troops in the city and a five-month prison sentence for himself. To the government he was then one of the Clydeside “Reds”, feared as harbingers of revolution. Three years later he entered the House of Commons; in the 1930s he defeated a former prime minister at the polls; and after the Second World War, as Secretary of State for War and Minister of Defence, he was responsible for the British Army in the first years of the Cold War. His life shows how the labour movement that the authorities had so feared after the Russian Revolution took the parliamentary rather than the revolutionary road in Britain.

From the East End to Glasgow

He was born on 18 October 1884 in Spitalfields in London’s East End, the eldest of thirteen children. His father was a Polish Jew who ran a small clothing shop; his mother came from a family of Dutch Jews. When he was a boy the family moved to Glasgow. Emanuel left school at eleven to be apprenticed to a tailor and worked as a machinist in a clothing workshop. He educated himself in the public library and the Kelvingrove art gallery. He loved sport, especially boxing, and coached a local football team.

He entered the labour movement through the tailors’ union. By 1903 he was active in the clothing workers’ union, and in 1906 he became its delegate to the Glasgow Trades Council. In 1911 he was assigned to organise the seamen of the port of Glasgow. He played an important part in the six-week seamen’s strike that summer and then became secretary of the local branch of the seamen’s union. In 1912 he led a revolt against the national union leadership and took the branch over to the rival British Seafarers’ Union, remaining its Glasgow secretary until the unions merged in 1922. He belonged to the Independent Labour Party, a left-wing socialist group that then operated within the Labour Party.

Forty hours

During the Great War Clydeside became the most radical region of Britain, and Shinwell one of its leaders. In December 1918 he stood unsuccessfully for parliament in Linlithgowshire (West Lothian). At the beginning of 1919, as chairman of the Glasgow Trades Council, he headed the joint strike committee formed by the council and William Gallacher’s Clyde Workers’ Committee, which demanded that the working week be cut to 40 hours. The aim was to ensure that after demobilisation there would be work for everyone, including the soldiers returning from the war.

The darkest chapter of his life also belongs to this period. On 23 January 1919 he addressed several hundred seamen outside the shipping recruitment office in the harbour and protested against the employment of Chinese seamen on British ships. A few hours later white seamen attacked Black colonial seamen there. Some historians believe that his speeches, in which he portrayed foreign seamen as unfair competition, contributed to these race riots.

The strike began on 27 January. On 29 January Shinwell met the Lord Provost with a deputation, and outside the City Chambers he announced that if the government did not meet their demands the strikers would stop the trams and paralyse the city. On 31 January, while the leaders were waiting in the City Chambers for a reply, the police charged the crowd in George Square. Shinwell slipped away from the square but was soon arrested. In April 1919, together with eleven other defendants, he stood trial before the High Court in Edinburgh for inciting a riot, and in his case the speech in the harbour was also taken into account. Most of the accused were acquitted, but Shinwell was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment, the heaviest sentence in the trial. He served it in Calton Jail in Edinburgh. After his release he stood for Glasgow Town Council.

A Clydesider at Westminster

At the general election of November 1922 Shinwell won Linlithgowshire. With David Kirkwood, James Maxton and John Wheatley he belonged to the “Clydesiders”, MPs from Glasgow and the surrounding area who brought the temper of the street-corner meeting into the House of Commons. In the first Labour government of 1924 he was Secretary for Mines, a junior post outside the cabinet. He lost his seat in the autumn 1924 election and won it back at a by-election in 1928. In Ramsay MacDonald’s second government he was Financial Secretary to the War Office (1929–1930) and then Secretary for Mines again (1930–1931). He was at that time a supporter of Ramsay MacDonald and tried to dissuade him from forming a coalition National Government with the Conservatives in 1931. When MacDonald did so and Labour expelled him, Shinwell lost his seat in Labour’s electoral rout that same year.

He took his revenge in 1935. In the Seaham constituency in the Durham coalfield he defeated MacDonald himself, then a member of the National Government. So began his 35-year tenure in parliament for a single constituency, later renamed Easington.

Against concessions to the dictators

In the second half of the 1930s Shinwell, like Aneurin Bevan, called for support for the government of the Spanish Republic in the Civil War and sharply criticised the foreign policy of Neville Chamberlain’s government. On 4 April 1938, a few weeks after Germany’s annexation of Austria, during a heated debate in the House of Commons, the Conservative MP Robert Bower shouted at him to “go back to Poland”. Shinwell took this as an antisemitic insult, crossed the floor and struck Bower on the head. Both men later apologised to the House. The incident captures the atmosphere of those years, in which politicians of Jewish origin, even those born in London, were told that they belonged somewhere else.

When Winston Churchill formed his coalition government in May 1940, he offered Shinwell a post at the Ministry of Food. Shinwell considered the offer an insult and refused. Throughout the war he remained on the back benches as one of the sharpest critics of the conduct of the war, although he never questioned the war against Hitler itself. Together with the Conservative Lord Winterton, an equally relentless critic of the government, he formed a double act that wags called “Arsenic and Old Lace”.

Attlee’s minister

After Labour’s victory in July 1945 Clement Attlee made Shinwell Minister of Fuel and Power. Shinwell carried out the nationalisation of the coal industry, which the labour movement had demanded for decades, and negotiated a “miners’ charter” with the miners. Opencast mining in the park of the Wentworth Woodhouse estate, which he pushed through against the owners and some of the local people, was regarded by the former as an act of class warfare. His standing was destroyed, however, by the exceptionally severe winter of 1946–1947. Coal stocks proved too small, the distribution system collapsed, power stations cut output and factories came to a standstill. Shinwell, who had earlier given assurances that there would be no fuel crisis, was blamed for the disaster. In October 1947 Attlee moved him from the post.

Shinwell became Secretary of State for War – the minister responsible for the Army – now without a seat in the cabinet. He held the office until February 1950, a period that saw the end of the British Mandate for Palestine, the beginning of the fight against the communist guerrillas in Malaya and the Berlin Blockade. He worked well with the military, including Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and was regarded as a hawk. The former strike leader against whom troops had been brought into Glasgow now ran that army. In February 1950 he was promoted to Minister of Defence and returned to the cabinet. Soon afterwards the Korean War broke out, and Britain sent troops. Shinwell pressed for a large rearmament programme, and its cost led the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, to introduce charges in the National Health Service. In protest Bevan resigned from the government in April 1951, splitting the Labour Party for years to come. The Attlee government fell at the election of October 1951.

The last decades

The left-wing radical from Glasgow in time became a politician of the party’s right, although he never ceased to be unpredictable. He sat in the shadow cabinet until 1955. When Labour returned to power in 1964, Prime Minister Harold Wilson made him chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Shinwell resigned in 1967, partly because of his opposition to Britain’s bid to join the European Community. In 1965 he was made a Companion of Honour. In 1970, aged 85, he left the House of Commons and, as Baron Shinwell, took his seat in the House of Lords, where he remained active almost until his death. In 1982 he resigned the Labour whip in protest at the influence of the hard left.

He wrote several volumes of memoirs: Conflict Without Malice (1955), I’ve Lived Through It All (1973) and Lead with the Left (1981). The 1973 book was the first to claim that it was Churchill who had persuaded the government to send troops and tanks to Glasgow in 1919. Research by the historian Gordon Barclay has shown that, in the light of the War Cabinet minutes, the claim is untrue, but it has become a permanent part of Scottish legend. Shinwell died in London on 8 May 1986, at the age of 101. A few weeks earlier he had become the longest-lived peer in the history of the House of Lords.

Significance

Shinwell belonged to a generation that began with strikes and rallies under red banners and ended in the cabinet room. The events of 31 January 1919 show how much the British authorities then feared a revolution on the Russian or German model, and his later career how groundless those fears proved with regard to most of the labour movement. The Labour Party to which he belonged chose the road of elections and reform, not of the Comintern. The same party entered Churchill’s government in May 1940, shared in shaping Britain’s war effort against Germany and after the war built the welfare state. Shinwell’s figure also has its dark side: his speeches in the harbour in January 1919 are a reminder that the labour movement of the time could defend white workers’ jobs at the expense of others, and the fuel crisis of 1947 became an example of the hubris of a minister who would not listen to warnings.