Authors: Mary Gibson
Now, sitting on the beach, enjoying the unaccustomed freedom of doing nothing at all, she leaned her head back and glanced up at the couples and families strolling along the promenade above where she sat. Her attention was caught by a laughing group of three young women, in summer hats and flowing dresses, who sat on the promenade railing swinging their legs. Suddenly she was transported back to another lifetime. She saw her little sister Elsie gazing up at a poster of three young women.
Wouldn’t it be lovely to go to the seaside instead of down hopping
, Elsie had said, and Milly, so angry because she couldn’t go, had dragged her off, dismissing her sister’s longing as selfishness. Now she understood what Elsie had longed for and wished she could spirit her here. She closed her eyes, tears pooling beneath the lids – tears of regret and tears of guilt, for she’d visited Elsie only once since her marriage last February. Her sister hadn’t even commented when Milly showed her the wedding photo. After that, the truth was, Milly had simply found it too painful to visit again.
Suddenly she felt her face being sprinkled with cold water and opened her eyes with a start.
‘Wake up, sleepyhead, come and see the castle!’ Bertie stood over her with Jimmy’s bucket, ready to douse her again. She made a dive for him, knocking him off his feet, while Jimmy, his city child’s pale body browned with sun and crusted sand, stood stock-still, a worried look on his face.
‘Mummy’s cryin’!’ he accused, until Milly pulled him down too, wrestling them both into submission.
‘Who’s the king of the castle?’ she demanded, sitting on Bertie’s chest and tickling Jimmy until they both laughingly capitulated. ‘Mummy is!’
Their first seaside holiday had been every bit the success that Bertie had hoped. Milly had the spring in her long stride again and even the children seemed less fractious. But as soon as they returned from their week at Ramsgate there came news that worried Bertie and frightened Milly. While they’d been away, there had been talk in the newspapers of a miners’ strike in response to the colliery owners demanding more work for less pay. Bertie said the word at the Labour Institute was that if the miners went out, there would be a national uprising in support of them, for if it could happen to the miners, then everyone would be under threat.
One Thursday evening, not long after their return, Bertie came home from a lecture given by Dr Salter at the Fort Road Labour Institute with the news that a general strike of all workers had been called.
‘The doctor’s right when he says we should stick together like glue, Milly, or else it’ll be every wage that’s cut next. We’ve got to stand with the miners if the working man in this country is going to have any chance of a decent life. Look at us last week. Just a few days away at the seaside, and see what a difference it’s made to you – you’ve got back the roses in your cheeks!’
She smiled as he reached out to stroke her face. ‘It certainly made me feel alive! I suppose it’s right what you said. It shouldn’t be all work and bed, should it? But what would it mean, if we did “stick together like glue”?’
Bertie threw up the back kitchen window as he lit his pipe. The spring night air was mild, and the sweetness of bluebells planted beneath the window came wafting through to her.
‘Come into the garden with me.’
They walked outside and she waited while he drew on the glowing bowl of tobacco and puffed. He could never seem to gather his thoughts quickly, or perhaps, unlike her, he preferred not to put both feet into his mouth as soon as he opened it.
‘What he means by “sticking together like glue” is that all working men, wherever they are in the country, should come out on strike... in sympathy.’
She certainly had sympathy for the miners and their families. She’d read enough in the newspapers about their lives lately – worse off than before the war, many faced seeing their children starve, and they had little to lose by going out on strike. But what good would a sympathy strike do, she asked him. Wouldn’t it just mean their own families and children starving?
‘Not if we organize it properly, with a strike fund, so no striker’s family needs to go hungry. And imagine, Milly, what would happen if the railways came out and the docks and the print, all the heavy industries?’
‘The country’d come to a standstill,’ she answered.
‘Exactly!’ He poked the air with his pipe stem. ‘And then the government’d be forced to give the miners a living wage.’
She put her hand through his arm and asked softly, ‘Would you go on strike, Bertie?’
‘I would!’ he said. ‘I’d be ashamed to do anything else, Milly.’
She could feel him tense a little and knew he was waiting for her to dissuade him. Though some of his decisions might seem to others fanciful and impractical, they had always turned out for the good. She only had to look at her own life. Good sense would have told Bertie to run like the wind from common Milly Colman, teetering on the edge of the Thames with a bastard on her hip, but instead he had run in the opposite direction, straight into her arms.
‘Bertie, whatever you do, I know it’ll be the right thing,’ she said, and she meant it, for if joining a general strike was his latest foolish quest, then it was hers too, whatever the consequences might be for all of them.
And it appeared most trade union members agreed with Dr Salter and Bertie, for on the third of May, the General Strike was called. That evening, when the first workers downed tools, there was a meeting at the Bermondsey Town Hall, which Bertie attended. He came home almost glowing, as he described how the whole borough council had voluntarily disbanded itself and set up a Council of Action for the duration of the strike. Bertie, along with most of the other drivers at Jacob’s, refused to cross the picket lines at the docks, and as most of the raw materials for the biscuits came from the river warehouses, work at the factory virtually ceased. The same was true of all Bermondsey food factories, including Southwell’s, which although it had its own wharf, couldn’t land fruit or sugar without the stevedores’ cooperation. It wouldn’t be long before there was an impact on the food cupboards of the capital – Bermondsey wasn’t called London’s Larder for nothing.
Bertie immediately volunteered for the Council of Action and was given the job of helping distribute the daily bulletin, produced by the Bermondsey Labour Party. In the absence of any newspapers it was essential that all the strikers knew exactly what was going on, so the daily mimeographed paper was snapped up within minutes of it being distributed. Every evening, Bertie collected stacks of the newly printed sheets from the Labour Institute and drove a commandeered council van around Bermondsey, delivering the bulletin to official distribution points along Tooley Street, Tower Bridge Road and the Old Kent Road. When he told Milly the job he’d been given, her heart sank. Police were said to be arresting anyone producing or even reading a strike bulletin. But when she asked him if he couldn’t do another job, he’d shrugged it off, saying they’d have to get through the barricades to catch him and that wouldn’t be easy as all the roads into Bermondsey were manned by strikers.
The Town Hall in Spa Road became the centre of operations, and on the second afternoon of the strike Milly joined other women there for a packed meeting. They crammed into the hall. Many, like Milly, had husbands who were strikers; some were striking themselves, or, like Florence Green, were willing volunteers. She’d been surprised to meet Florence on the way to the meeting. Somehow she’d expected her to be one of the middle-class volunteers on the opposite side of the barricades, but as they walked together along Southwark Park Road Florence had explained.
‘Bermondsey’s my home now, Milly. I could no more cross the barricades than I could return to my father’s parsonage, not after all the hardship I’ve seen. Besides, the doctor would have my guts for garters if I did!’
Milly laughed. Dr Salter might be a saint, but when it came to commitment to Bermondsey, he was a hard taskmaster.
‘Everything’s so quiet, isn’t it?’ Florence said.
Milly had to agree. The familiar Bermondsey streets had an eerie, abandoned feel, with the normal rumble of carts and crush of traffic silenced. It felt to Milly as though they were under siege. Main roads in and out of the borough were barricaded by the Council of Action, with only authorized vehicles allowed through. Pickets were being posted at the docks, railway and bus stations. It felt as though the natural boundaries of the borough had been sealed: the river to the north; London Bridge to the west; Rotherhithe Tunnel to the east; and the Old Kent Road to the south. They were turning the tiny borough into an impregnable fortress within the very heart of London.
The town hall was abuzz with the ear-splitting, high-pitched chatter of women. Milly had left Jimmy and Marie with her mother, but many of the women had brought their children and the hall rang with shouts from toddlers and cries from babies. As they squeezed past the crush into the hall, Milly heard her name being called. It was Kitty, beckoning them over. Although there was not a seat to be had, Kitty elbowed out a space near her in the aisle. There was an almighty banging from the stage as a woman with a gavel tried to establish order.
‘It’s worse than club night at the Settlement!’ Kitty said.
Florence pulled a face. ‘Oh no, club night is much worse, especially when Milly Colman and Kitty Bunclerk turn up drunk!’
The three of them giggled as the exasperated chairwoman bellowed, ‘Order, ladies, please, it’s not Saturday night at the Dockhead Tavern!’
In spite of the apparent chaos, by the end of the meeting rotas had been organized for soup kitchens, and volunteers signed up for supplying tea and sandwiches to men on the picket lines. Women who were on strike, like Kitty, would join the picket lines themselves.
‘I wish you were still at Southwell’s,’ Kitty said. ‘We might need someone who can land a wallop on that picket line!’
‘If I didn’t have the kids, I’d be there!’
As it was, she signed up for a daily stint at the Labour Institute, preparing food parcels for strikers’ families. She was surprised at how quickly she’d been caught up in the excitement of all the preparations. There were plenty of wives who complained and made their husbands’ lives a misery, failing to see any benefit to themselves in an enterprise that might leave them for weeks without a wage coming in. But she found it easy to believe in the rightness of the cause, and talking to Bertie just confirmed that this was the only decent, unselfish course of action, for both of them.
But Milly had her first glimpse of the earnestness of the government’s resistance to their cause when she went to Arnold’s Place, a few days after the strike began. Her mother was against the strike – the Archbishop had after all pronounced it a sin against God – but nevertheless, she juggled her conscience as she always did, and agreed to look after Jimmy and Marie while Milly went with Florence Green to deliver sandwiches to the pickets at Butler’s Wharf. Florence hadn’t been the only middle-class volunteer at the Settlement to surprise her with their support. Many of them, like Francis Beaumont, were Oxbridge graduates, who’d come to Bermondsey on short-term missions. Having lived among the poor streets of the riverside, they now found it impossible to cross the line and join the students volunteering at Hay’s Wharf to unload vessels in an attempt to break the strike. When Milly had expressed her surprise, Florence told her that ‘her Francis’ had been helping Bertie deliver the strike bulletins.
‘We both agreed which side we’d be on, when we heard about Blaina.’
Milly hadn’t heard of the place, but Florence told her it was a small village in Wales, where children were near to starving. ‘If we call this a Christian country, then I don’t see how our government can countenance cutting those men’s wages even further. Francis and I believe it’s our Christian duty to stand with them, Milly!’
So there it was, Milly thought, God, as usual, was on both sides, and in the end, the only thing to do was to make up your own mind.
Her mother’s front door was wide open when they arrived. Florence waited patiently, while Milly persuaded Jimmy it would be more fun to stay with his grandmother than to come with her. With the front door still open, it wasn’t hard to hear the familiar bellowing of Barrel as he came hallooing along the street.
‘That boy’s got a gate on him like the Blackwall Tunnel!’ her mother said as he, Amy and all the usual crew of urchins clustered breathless round the front door.
‘They’ve sent in the big guns, the navy’s arrived!’ Barrel leaned on the doorpost, chest heaving.
As no newspapers were being printed, it was useful to have a little band of spies roaming the docks, and the children had proved very effective at slipping through the lines of policemen and soldiers and ferreting out information. People started to come out of their houses, curious to hear the latest development. Many were strikers, home for dinner or a break from the picket lines, and Milly could see looks of alarm passing from one to the other. Fear seemed to ripple along the street as women ran to gather up children and men headed off towards the river.
Milly handed Jimmy to her mother and then broke into a trot, with Florence at her side, the two of them following the crowd down to the riverside. They arrived at Horsleydown Stairs just in time to see two huge ships steaming into the pool of London. They dwarfed the tiny tugs and lighters ranged along the dockside, and as the arms of Tower Bridge rose to greet them, their combined grey bulk blotted out the Tower of London on the far shore. Lines of sailors, in smart whites, lined the decks, and just as Barrel had said, the big guns seemed to be aimed directly at the riverside streets and docks of Bermondsey. It felt like wartime all over again.
‘Destroyers!’ one man explained to her. ‘I was in the navy during the war. They could blow us all to smithereens if they wanted to.’
It made Milly wonder how many of the strikers who surrounded her were ex-servicemen, how many had risked their lives in the trenches, fighting for the very country which was now turning its navy upon them. If anything could make you bitter, it must be that. Yet there was no eruption of violence; there was no call to arms. Instead the men seemed to accept the navy’s presence, as though it were simply the opposing side in a football match turning up on to the playing field.