Revolution: The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand

By Canterbury University Press

Leading New Zealand historians re-explore the 1913 Great Strike through the eyes of the state, the police, the strikers, the militants, the moderates, and the ruling and working classes. The 1913 strike remains the most violent strike in New Zealand's history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury University Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781927145166

Book preview

REVOLUTION

The 1913 Great Strike

in New Zealand

Edited by

MELANIE NOLAN

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Chronology of events

Peter Franks

Introduction: 1913 in retrospect: a laboratory or a battleground of democracy?

Melanie Nolan

1. The lessons of 1913

Erik Olssen

2. Interpreting 1913: what are the important questions?

Miles Fairburn

3. The police, the state and lawless law

Richard S. Hill

4. Crime as Protest in the Great Strike in Wellington

Donald Anderson

5. A tale of two cities: military involvement in the 1913 strike

John Crawford

6. Contemporary media portrayals of the 1913 dispute

James Taylor

7. ‘Arbitrationists out and out’: the involvement of the craft unions

Peter Franks

8. Missing in action: the role of the Seamen’s Union

David Grant

9. Cases of the Revolutionary Left and the Waterside Workers’ Union

Kerry Taylor

10. The making of the New Zealand ruling class

Jim McAloon

11. ‘Do your share, like a man!’: the issue of gender in the strike

Melanie Nolan

12. The origins of traditions of industrial militancy in the UK

Donald M. MacRaild

13. The case of William E. Trautmann and the role of the ‘Wobblies’

Mark Derby

Notes on contributors

Select bibliography

Index

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection of papers arose out of a highly successful seminar, ‘A Laboratory or a Battleground of Democracy?: The 1913 General Strike’, held by the Trade Union History Project (TUHP) on 22 November 2003 at PSA House in Wellington. The TUHP videoed the seminar and the masters are held at the New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington.

I was on the seminar’s organising committee, along with Dave Grant (chair), Richard Hill, James Taylor and Peter Franks. The Public Service Association (PSA) provided the venue, as it has for many of our seminars. Professor Pat Walsh, then director of the Industrial Relations Centre (IRC) at Victoria University of Wellington, granted us funds to employ an assistant, Hilary McGeachy. The Public Service Investment Society (PSIS) and the New Zealand Seafarers’ Union provided us with subsidies for seminar presenters’ travel. Indirectly, then, this book owes a debt of gratitude to the PSA, Victoria University’s IRC, the Seafarers’ Union and the PSIS.

The TUHP is central to this book’s production. It was established in 1987 by trade unionists and working people interested in history, together with several academics. Its activities have included the awarding of research and publication grants in labour history and sponsoring conferences and seminars. Many of the contributors to the 1913 seminar and to this collection are TUHP committee members. There is no New Zealand labour history journal and the TUHP plays a vital role in the broader New Zealand labour history community. We are particularly pleased that the work of younger, emerging labour history scholars is being supported by the publication of this collection.

I have incurred some personal debts as I edited these papers. I am grateful to the Victoria University’s Leave Committee and a period of research and study leave that enabled me to work on this collection. A number of colleagues helped me in its preparation: Richard Hill, Peter Franks, Jim McAloon and Don MacRaild commented on drafts and discussed the issues; James Taylor did general cartoon research and wrote a first draft of the bibliography; and Peter Franks prepared the timeline.

That these papers are being published at this time, however, is largely due to Professor George Lafferty, the current director of the IRC, who provided a publication subsidy. I gratefully acknowledge his and the IRC’s continuing support for the TUHP.

Finally, I thank Richard King, Rachel Scott and Kaye Godfrey at Canterbury University Press, who now, having supported so many TUHP ventures, have virtually created a labour history series!

Melanie Nolan

December 2005

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

Peter Franks

Wellington Harbour, full of ships, at the height of the 1913 Great Strike.

111771-1/2, ATL

Drays lined up, waiting to unload, outside the Queen’s Wharf gates, Jervois Quay, Wellington.

ATL 1/2-004031

After the strike, arbitrationists were awarded medals, and federationists took to pilfering them. Here the Maoriland Worker lampoons the brave deeds rewarded. The Evening Post returned the compliment, suggesting badges commemorating the Waterside Workers’ Waterloo.

Maoriland Worker, 28 April 1914; Evening Post, 16 December 1913, ATL

This timeline is based on a wide range of sources. Contemporary sources include the diary of the strike recorded by the Wellington Evening Post, union and employer records held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, and the analysis of the strike by G. G. Hancox and J. Hight, ‘The Labour Movement and the Strike of 1913 in New Zealand’, Economic Journal, No. 94, Vol. XXIV, June 1914, pp. 177–204. Secondary sources include: H. O. Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand, Wellington, 1974; Pat Lawlor, Pat Lawlor’s Wellington, Wellington, 1976; Erik Olssen, The Red Feds: Revolutionary industrial unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour 1908–1914, Auckland, 1988; Richard S. Hill, The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove: The modernisation of policing in NZ 1886–1917, Palmerston North, 1995; and Len Richardson, Coal, Class & Community: The United Mineworkers of New Zealand, 1880–1960, Auckland, 1995.

INTRODUCTION

Melanie Nolan

1913 in retrospect: a laboratory or a battleground of democracy?

¹

It is conventional to observe that the principle at stake in 1913 was part of a global change in both the ideological beliefs and strategic methods of trade unionists. The term used to describe the new modus operandi was syndicalism, a concept derived from French socialist thought. With its belief that workers should use their industrial might to bring about revolutionary political change, syndicalism caused greater consternation among ruling elites than it won true adherents among workers.² In 1913, as with any potential strike situation, the key questions for unionists remained the same: would they strike to achieve their goals and would they succeed?

The New Zealand condition was not expected to breed such ideas as syndicalism, still less to see the practical results of general or wave-like strike action. Indeed, the state had previously made provision to create a corporatist rather than confrontational condition in which New Zealand industrial relations would operate. The 1905 amendment to the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration (I C & A) Act had made strikes and lockouts illegal where there was an award in place covering both employers and workers. An amendment in 1907 extended the penalties for striking illegally. Only unions registered under the 1908 Trade Union Act, which permitted the use of the strike weapon, could legally strike.³ A union had to choose, then, between arbitration and direct action. The act was tested by the Auckland tram workers’ strike in 1906 and the slaughtermen’s and Wellington bakers’ strikes in 1907.⁴

Passing Another Milestone: 1913 as the grim reaper.

New Zealand Truth, 21 December 1913, ATL

But it was the 1908 Blackball Strike, or the famous ‘Tucker-time’ Strike, that is regarded as the real turning point (a tribute to the miners’ propaganda skills).⁵ Miners wanted a longer mealtime or ‘crib’. A group of workers decided to take half an hour rather than 15 minutes. The mine manager went down the shaft, clocked a group including Pat Hickey, Bob Semple and Paddy Webb, and sacked them when they would not go back to work. The union went on strike until the men were reinstated. The union was charged for striking in defiance of the act. Wearing red ribbons, up to 600 men walked the 25 kilometres to Greymouth, accompanied by their band, for the case to be heard. It was not lost on the miners that the court adjourned for an hour and a half for lunch. Of course they lost their case, but the Arbitration Court lost face when bailiffs managed to raise only a small sum of money from a sale of goods confiscated from the miners’ homes. The employers eventually conceded the half-hour, and the militants were much encouraged by the effect of their strike.

The ‘strikers’ formed the Federation of Miners in 1908,⁶ which became the New Zealand Federation of Labor (NZFL) in 1909, its members known as the ‘Red Feds’.⁷ The rhetoric of this organisation was syndicalist socialism. Hickey, Semple and Webb had ties with the International Workers of the World (IWW) or ‘Wobblies’. Their goal is usually held to have been to unite workers into one big union and destroy capitalism by means of industrial action.⁸ Certainly, industrial unrest and militancy increased after the formation of the NZFL, with 35 unions withdrawing from the arbitration system in 1911.⁹ By February 1912 the NZFL had 43 affiliates and almost 15,000 members (although there were still 322 unions and 60,622 members registered under the I C & A Act at the end of the year).¹⁰ In 1912 William Massey and the Reform Party took office and faced the challenge of the Waihi Strike.

In 1910 the Waihi miners had asked the NZFL executive to take their case for better conditions of employment.¹¹ Semple handled the case and won the abandonment of the contract and piece-rate systems that the workers argued employers used to ‘speed up’ work. In August 1911 the union deregistered from the I C & A Act and registered under the Trade Union Act. This opened the way for a group of engine drivers to secede from the union in 1912 to register a new union under the I C & A Act. Despite protests by workers, management recognised the new union. As tensions rose, the NZFL executive was reluctant to fully commit itself to industrial action at Waihi when it met in conference with the Goldminers’ Employers’ Association. Nevertheless, a strike was called, which traumatised the town between May and September 1912.¹² Prime Minister Massey sent the police in, 60 miners were arrested, and four leaders were sentenced to imprisonment. Unionists stormed the union hall and Fred Evans was fatally bludgeoned. The leading Red Feds were given 48 hours to leave by the strike-breaking leaders, and many were assaulted. As a result of the violent breaking of the 1912 Waihi Strike, some trade unions left the NZFL and returned to the arbitration system. For its part, the federation made a sustained effort at unifying the labour movement after Waihi, eagerly supported by the urban radicals. The result was the Unity Conference in July 1913, and the formation of the United Federation of Labour (UFL).¹³

By that stage, industrial tensions were mounting more generally, to judge from the Labour Department’s crude measure of industrial actions:

Table 1: Labour Department’s record of industrial disputes¹⁴

In September 1913 the management at the Huntly mine suddenly dismissed 16 workers, including three union officials, without warning, resulting in a strike that had reverberations on the West Coast. A seemingly more minor dispute developed in Wellington when employers revoked a travelling allowance for a group of about 40 shipwrights, which led to a strike.¹⁵ In May 1913 the shipwrights cancelled their registration under the I C & A Act and affiliated with the Wellington Waterside Workers’ Union. Management refused to recognise the watersiders as a party to the dispute and on 18 October 1913 the shipwrights struck. The dispute soon escalated when a stopwork meeting was held on 20 October for the 1,500 members of the Wellington Watersiders’ Union. The employers took the stopwork meeting to be a breach of the industrial agreement signed the year before, locked the workers out and recruited alternative labour. This closed the Wellington wharves.¹⁶ The dispute was referred to the UFL on 29 October without settlement. Other watersiders, as well as seamen, miners, drivers, building labourers and other unionists affiliated to the UFL became involved, eventually closing down all the ports in New Zealand.

The ‘demeanour of the strike’ had already ‘changed completely’ from 24 October.¹⁷ There were riotous scenes in Wellington when employers used ‘free’ (non-union) labour to unload ships. The strikers broke down barricades to ‘get at’ strike-breakers. They also answered the mayor’s refusal to allow about a thousand watersiders to use the Basin Reserve for a protest meeting on 26 October by tearing down the gates and having the meeting anyway, watched by the small number of police on hand. In response, the government decided to enrol ‘special’ constables to assist the regular police and army and naval forces. Indeed, with 850 police in New Zealand for a population of a million, they were always going to be outnumbered by the strikers in the main centres. While there were volunteers from urban areas, the mounted ‘specials’ from rural areas particularly attracted opprobrium. The first contingent rode into Wellington on 30 October. From the end of October to early November there were almost daily encounters between strikers and those opposed to them. The mounted specials became known as ‘Massey’s Cossacks’. The most serious encounter was in Wellington, where the Royal New Zealand Artilleymen fired rifles and machine guns from barricades constructed on Buckle Street.¹⁸ Bert Roth, in discussing the extent of the violence in 1913, used Joseph Ward’s description that ‘a system of Mexican revolt and civil war’ developed on normally quiet Wellington streets.¹⁹

The unionists were eventually, almost certainly inevitably, defeated. The government began arresting the leaders as soon as it felt the moment was propitious to do so. On 11 November UFL leaders Holland, Semple, Peter Fraser and George Bailey were arrested for their inflammatory speeches, and the next day W. T. Young and IWW activist Tom Barker were arrested. This was the beginning of the harsh state clampdown that eventually crushed the strike. Trams and hotels were operating again in inner-city Auckland by 27 November. In early December the seamen’s conference voted to go back to work. Most of the ports opened again on 18 December, and the UFL conceded defeat the next day.

It is important to recognise that 1913 was not a single or unified action: it was a group of strikes.²⁰ It began as a strike of shipwrights and became a series of port strikes. On 10 November 1913, in an attempt to sustain pressure, the ULF called a one-day nationwide general strike, which some unions answered. The action spiralled and they stayed out. On 23 November ‘Auckland’s general strike was declared over’.²¹ Indeed, 1913 is usually described as a ‘great strike’ in Wellington and a ‘general strike’ in Auckland.²² The miners and the seamen ended their strikes at different times. As elsewhere, the miners stayed out longest: some did not go back to work until January 1914. On 6 January 1914 farmers began working the Huntly mines, and the strike had ended by the close of the week. While it has been decided to describe 1913 as a Great Strike for this collection, clearly these events were the closest New Zealand has ever come to a general strike.

Where the Strike Struck New Zealand First: But the severance lasted only a week. New Zealand wharves were working again (with ‘free labour’) little over a week later.

Free Lance, 6 December 1913, ATL

It was a key moment in history for some of the most violent industrial disputes in New Zealand history occurred at this time. Keith Sinclair captures the level of animosity when he argues that ‘the years 1912 and 1913 witnessed the most violent scenes since the Anglo–Maori wars as the Government, the employers, and the cowcockies smashed the Red Feds’.²³ How close did New Zealand come to revolution? Both Miles Fairburn and James Belich argue that ‘in 1912 and 1913 New Zealand came closer to class war than at any other time in its history’.²⁴ The struggle in 1913 was not a fight over wages and conditions: it was a power struggle. This is why contemporaries, journalists and historians were fascinated by it. No sooner had the strike collapsed than the analysis began.²⁵

Visitors to the social laboratory

In order to analyse the interpretations of 1913, two important prefatory issues must be dealt with: first, we must provide a narrative of 1913; second, we need to canvass what we might usefully term the pre-history of the historiography of the activities of this important year. In many accounts, the industrial disorder of 1913 seems to develop suddenly. In 1898 British Fabians Sydney and Beatrice Webb visited New Zealand, together with the British Liberal Charles Trevelyan. The I C & A Act of 1894, ‘in effective operation barely three years’, had settled only a few cases and was still seen, even by its architect, as a ‘venturesome and hazardous experiment’.²⁶ The visitors ‘interviewed the leading trade unionists and employers’, court members, public servants and politicians. At the time, Trevelyan wrote to their friend, William Pember Reeves, the architect of the industrial legislation passed between 1891 and 1896 but now living in London, that the ‘working classes are thoroughly contented with the vigorous land policy of McKenzie and the labour laws which Seddon keeps bringing in, in a clumsy imitative way of yourself’.²⁷ Beatrice Webb concluded that, even though the court covered only a small proportion of workers, and despite the ‘terribly slow and irritating court procedure’, the net result of the act was good from the reformist workers’ point of view: ‘New Zealand workmen are very confident of the advantages of the Act, and they are using it deliberately to obtain common rules for each trade.’ She also noted that the employers’ representative on the Arbitration Court reckoned that ‘Many employers are beginning to say that they prefer the old-fashioned strike to this constant hauling up of themselves and their books before a long-winded court of arbitration.’²⁸

She characterised working men as having no ideas beyond Liberalism and said the employers offered little resistance to the Liberals, however much they might grumble to visiting observers. The Webbs described New Zealand as a working democracy, albeit one held in an ‘unstable equilibrium’. Indeed, they would have preferred something more radical; they were sympathetic to municipal socialism and democratic centralism and would later admire the Soviet