Feeding the Flames
More than simply keeping picket lines going, providing food to workers in dispute is a form of collectivism that has shaped the trade union movement.
Women serve food to strikers during the 1919 Seattle General Strike. Similar models of collective eating have been set up throughout the history of Britain's trade union movement. (Credit: Webster & Stevens via Wikimedia Commons)
It’s far better to show up at a picket line with cake than a newspaper to sell. Donations of food and drink are usually welcome gestures of solidarity during an industrial dispute; in drawn-out struggles, they become essential. Feeding a strike is often unspectacular, hidden work, which deserves greater recognition. It’s not all tales of camaraderie, though. The history of food and strikes also traces the many differences and divisions that have marked the British labour movement.
Joshua Clover, among others, has argued that the strike replaced the bread riot as the predominant form of popular struggle in this country during the nineteenth century. The pre-eminence of strikes is connected to proletarianisation, the process whereby wage labour overtook alternative forms of income and subsistence. Removal from the land, and therefore from immediate access to food, was a crucial aspect of this development. As a result, when workers lost their income during industrial conflict, the question of food became urgent.
Perhaps the most obvious example is the seven-month coal miners’ lockout in 1926. Given its duration, and the fact that mining families then accounted for more than 10 percent of the population, this was arguably the largest industrial dispute in twentieth-century Britain. The communal soup kitchens that were organised in the coalfields became emblematic of the struggle, demonstrating the strength of collectivism in the face of the harshest circumstances.
Both men and women worked in the soup kitchens, blurring the strict gender divisions of labour that usually governed mining areas. However, as Sue Bruley has shown in her study of South Wales, if the work was partially shared, ‘adult communal eating in 1926 was a male experience’. Miners’ wives were largely uncatered for by the soup kitchens because strikers’ dependants were entitled to some state welfare. Many schools provided coalfield children with meals, meanwhile, deducting the costs from poor-relief entitlements. The women who didn’t work in the school or miners’ canteens may therefore have experienced even greater isolation than usual, as their children and husbands were fed outside the home.
Funding for mining communities’ provisions came from their union, the local working population, and, to a lesser extent, from fundraising bodies outside the coalfields. The latter included the Women’s Committee for the Relief of Miners’ Wives and Children, organised by Labour Party activists. The group appealed in humanitarian terms for support that excluded the miners themselves. The historian Grace Millar points out that there was a tendency to view ‘women and children as innocent victims of strikes, who therefore deserved charitable aid’. The question of whether food provision was charity or solidarity has often been contentious, with some striking workers wary of the stigma associated with accepting donations.
Perhaps for this reason, or simply because of the limits of collective provision, there were also less communal means of getting by in 1926. Bruley explains that many in the coalfields turned to their families or neighbours for support. Some had allotments, kept chickens for eggs, rustled sheep, poached rabbits, or fished illegally. Such survival strategies can be obscured by a focus on the soup kitchens. They also suggest that the proletarian separation from the land was not absolute.
In later cases, including strikes which were shorter and engendered less extreme hardship, small acts of generosity demonstrated solidarity while also illuminating the conflicts that can emerge within industrial disputes. In the summer of 1972, Britain’s dockers were fighting for their jobs in the face of the rapid restructuring of the industry. Most of the large and well-established docks were registered under the National Dock Labour Scheme, which provided comparatively good working conditions. But ‘unregistered’ ports, those not covered by the scheme, were attracting an increasing proportion of trade. These became an important target for pickets during the national strike.
The most intense conflict took place at the unregistered Neap House Wharf near Scunthorpe. Across two weeks, hundreds of pickets confronted police from ten different forces. At times, as Hull docker Terry Turner described it, ‘everything was chaotic and violent, as vicious, indiscriminate punches and kicks rained in from both sides’. Sixty dockers were arrested for offences ranging from threatening behaviour to assault.
Nevertheless, there were quieter moments that stuck with Turner. He remembered one searingly hot afternoon:
[An] elderly couple who live on their small-holding opposite the wharf helped us pickets by patiently providing buckets of water. . .. As the pickets queued up to drink the precious liquid the old man had two glasses ready which he gave to us so that we could at least slake our thirst in dignity. Never, never has water been so welcome or tasted so good.
Such kindness didn’t always go unpunished. At Howdendyke, another unregistered wharf a little further north of Neap House, pickets were supplied with tea and sandwiches by a local resident. The woman knew some of the dockers, who came from nearby Goole. Her husband happened to be a lorry driver, and, in response, the wharf workers boycotted him, preventing him from doing any work at Howdendyke. The strike pitted hauliers, dockers, and wharf and container depot workers against each other. At a time of such tension, even minor acts of sympathy for one side could be interpreted as betrayal of the other.
The police were conscious of this vulnerability. A mobile canteen circulated around the unregistered ports in Essex to feed officers on duty at the picket lines, and at one point the media alighted on the fact that more than a dozen dockers had availed themselves of the service. That this unremarkable event was considered newsworthy exemplifies how the police were expected to treat pickets as their antagonists, rather than people engaged in lawful and legitimate trade union activity. The police exonerated the canteen staff, claiming that they had been intimidated by the dockers into serving them. Maybe that was true — or perhaps they just didn’t view pickets as the enemy.
Feeding the Country
The dock strike also had a larger-scale relationship with food. As a result of the stoppage, ten-tonne containers of Danish bacon were stranded at the Hull docks. The Danish Bacon Board made plans to use ‘secret’ ports to circumvent the action. Guernsey’s tomato crop, too, an essential part of the island’s economy, risked being ruined, and authorities had to try transporting it by aircraft instead. Interruptions in the supply of animal feed posed a threat to livestock. The crucial role of the dockers in feeding the country was repeatedly demonstrated.
Still, this clarification — of the essential nature of certain work — doesn’t always produce sympathy. The 1979 strike of road hauliers also appeared to threaten food supplies. Margaret Thatcher, just months before her election as prime minister, used the issue to assail trade union power. In a TV broadcast, she lamented the fate of ‘food rot[ting] at the docks’, insisting that some towns and cities looked ‘as though they were under siege’. The dispute was envisaged much like a military blockade. Admittedly, strikers didn’t always help their public image. Bill Astbury — described by The Guardian as ‘Britain’s most outspoken picket leader’ — was reported to have asked, ‘If I cannot afford to buy food, why should anyone else have it?’
The hauliers weren’t trying to stop everything from moving. They often granted permission for essential goods to pass picket lines. At a national level, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) understood this policy to include all food-related products, but the operation of the strike in practice was often under the control of local reps. Astbury apparently insisted that pickets in his area only allow the movement of food in special cases, such as for hospitals. Some employers had to queue outside union offices, waiting to ask a TGWU shop stewards’ committee for permission to move their goods. This more complex form of control was at least as enraging to the labour movement’s opponents as pure disruption, representing the world turned upside down. Thatcher railed that ‘the place is being practically run by strikers’ committees and . . . they are using such language as “allowing” access to food, “allowing” certain lorries to go through. They have no right to prevent them from going through.’
Thatcher gained her revenge on the unions, most famously during the year-long 1984–5 Miners’ Strike. That year saw many of the practices of 1926 — communal feeding, food parcels, mass fundraising — revived. There were some novel features, however, that reflected the substantial changes in British society in the intervening half-century.
The Black Delegation to Support the Miners organised support for the strike among people of African, Caribbean, and Asian heritage. One of their activists, Pragna Patel, described the group arranging for coachloads of people to travel to the Kent coalfield: ‘That was really interesting, because we took Indian food . . . and often the mining communities had never met or talked to Indian people or Asian people.’ She felt these visits helped build connections that didn’t exist before. Food both sustained relationships and highlighted differences between the coalfields and the diverse support movement for the strike.
Strong links were also made at that time with the international labour movement. One coalfield woman explained: ‘We’ve learned to eat a wide range of food. Especially from the foreign convoys. It’s given us a wider range of menu.’ The idea that the strike helped broaden people’s horizons was a common refrain of that year. In certain forms, it could be a little patronising, as if coalfield communities were insulated from the wider world, waiting for cosmopolitan outsiders to enlighten them. Viewed in terms of a mutual learning process, however, wherein both miners and their supporters were making new connections, we can see these experiences in more egalitarian terms.
Nonetheless, food also marked some of the tensions in these relationships. Mansfield miner Brian Lawton talked to me about fundraising in London during the strike.
[We were asked,] ‘Do you want to come out and have a meal?’ We thought, fuck off, no, I’d rather go and get pissed, to tell the truth. So, you’d have to sit there and have this meal with people and think, we don’t do this.
Lawton wasn’t remembering bitterly; he was thinking through the conflicting cultural norms that he understood at least partly as class differences. We could understand the apparent bafflement with which South Wales mining families viewed the arrival of vegetarian Londoners, dramatised in the film Pride, in similar terms.
Meat-eating was still the norm at the time of the Liverpool dockers’ dispute of 1995–8, a drawn-out struggle that straddled the end of Conservative rule and the arrival of New Labour. Ronnie Forsters, a docker with thirty years’ experience, became the picket line’s head chef. ‘We serve bacon, eggs, sausage, ulster fry, liver sausage, and beans,’ he explained. Forsters would arrive at 4:40 AM to start preparations. ‘The lads get cold down here and you can’t picket for four to six hours with nothing to eat.’ There was also a local pub where ex-seafarers with cooking experience catered for strikers.
Such work was a crucial element in sustaining the dispute and maintaining morale, but it wasn’t always sufficient. As in 1926, many had to seek less communal means to keep going. Maria Langan, a nursery worker in Liverpool married to a docker, explained that while she learned to cook new things — like shank soup — during the strike, in order to stretch resources, she also relied on visits to her family to make her meals. She found this deeply upsetting. The shame associated with accepting support isn’t necessarily excluded when it comes from kin.
Strikes can be extraordinary events that upend the usual routines, forcing new networks of reliance and acts usually conducted in private — like the provision of food — out into the public and collective realm. Such exceptional events are thereby revealing, too, of the relationships that prevail in more mundane times, and of the ways we can start to build closer ties today as food insecurity becomes more prevalent. As Peter Linebaugh writes, the ‘kindness of strangers . . . is how commons are renewed and class solidarity is maintained, starting in the kitchen’. It is incumbent on all of us to put in our shift on the stove.