Julian Symons’s The General Strike: A Historical Portrait is a narrative history of the British General Strike of May 1926. Its subject is the nine-day stoppage itself and the industrial and political crisis surrounding it, rather than the later career of any participant. Symons treats the strike as a national emergency and as a social portrait: a moment when transport, printing, power, and heavy industry were drawn into a confrontation between the Trades Union Congress, the miners’ unions, the mine owners, and Stanley Baldwin’s government.
The book sets out the background in the coal industry and in post-First World War industrial relations. It explains the miners’ grievances over wages, hours, and the owners’ demand for cuts and longer working time, together with the failure of negotiations and the government’s decision to support the owners while preparing for a general stoppage. Symons gives attention to the Samuel Commission and to the attempts at compromise that failed before the TUC called the general strike in support of the miners. The account also describes the government’s emergency preparations: the use of the Emergency Powers Act, the organisation of volunteers, special constables, and emergency transport, and the determination to keep essential services running.
During the strike, the book follows the spread of the stoppage from the printing and transport trades into other industries, and the efforts of the TUC General Council to coordinate it. It describes the government’s counter-measures and propaganda, the role of the BBC and the press, and the practical work of volunteers who drove buses and trains, worked in the docks, and filled other essential jobs. Symons is concerned with the texture of the nine days: the local incidents, the orderly and sometimes tense encounters between strikers and volunteers, the fears of revolution on one side and of union defeat on the other, and the ordinary public life of a country whose normal services had been abruptly interrupted. He keeps the miners’ dispute at the centre of the story, showing how the General Strike was called in support of the miners rather than as a revolutionary seizure of power.
The final part of the book deals with the collapse of the General Strike. It describes the negotiations and pressures that led the TUC to call off the strike on 12 May, the miners’ sense of betrayal when the support was withdrawn, and the continuation of the miners’ own lockout after the general stoppage ended. Symons assesses the outcome as a defeat for the miners and for the TUC, a strengthening of the government’s authority, and a damaging blow to trade union unity and prestige. The book closes with the immediate industrial and political aftermath of the dispute, including the bitterness left among miners and the wider consequences for the labour movement.
Throughout, The General Strike is a work of narrative history rather than memoir or theoretical argument. Its “portrait” is of a society under severe strain, with the strike presented as a defensive industrial conflict that briefly threatened to become something larger, and whose ending exposed the limits of trade union solidarity and the government’s capacity to organise against a general stoppage.
A further theme in the book is legitimacy: the strike is presented as a contest over who could claim to speak for the country and for organised labour, and over whether a sympathetic stoppage could be contained within industrial bargaining rather than becoming a constitutional confrontation. The narrative is attentive to the constraints on each side—the TUC’s need to sustain solidarity without appearing to challenge parliamentary government, the miners’ need to turn wider support into practical leverage, and the government’s need to keep essential services running while avoiding disorder that would undermine its authority.
The book’s significance lies in its treatment of the General Strike as a test of logistics, publicity, public order, and institutional discipline as much as of union militancy. It shows how the meaning of the strike was contested in the press, on the radio, in local encounters, and in the routines of daily life, and how the gap between revolutionary fears and the strike’s actual conduct shaped both public response and the eventual settlement.
