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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

The Burston Strike School

by Robin McGregor

Sunday sees the sleepy commuter village of Burston in Norfolk come to life for the annual celebrations of the Burston Strike School, which ran between 1914-1939.

In 1914 two popular school-teachers, the husband and-wife team of Tom and Kitty Higdon, both members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), were dismissed from their posts at Burston. They had arrived at the parish school three years earlier, having previously had trouble with Norfolk County Council for the same offence of supporting the farm labourers’ unions in a different school.

They continued with this work at Burston, which resulted in false allegations of assault against pupils being made against them. This time the gentry and clergy who controlled the county ensured there would be no second chance.

On the day of their departure, 1st April, the vast majority of their pupils (66 out of 72) refused to attend school in protest and held a lively procession around the village lanes. What the local Rector airily dismissed as an “April Fool’s day joke” was no flash in the pan.

Instead, it led to most of the pupils leaving the County Council-run school permanently and the establishment of the Burston Strike School that was to endure for the next quarter of a century. At first the two teachers taught their pupils on the village green, moving to a disused carpenter’s shop as winter approached. Repeated fines for non-attendance were levied on the parents, who were mostly farm workers. Attempts by farmers to sack and evict their rebellious workers were halted by war-time labour shortages.

Press publicity brought nation-wide support from trade unionists, first to pay the fines for non-attendance and later to build a new school on the village green opened in May 1917 by Violet Potter, the leader of the children three years earlier. George Lansbury, chairman of the national appeal for the school and future Labour Party lead er, unveiled the foundation stone. Contributions came from many branches of the ILP, the National Union of Railwaymen and in particular the coal miners’ unions who contributed a quarter of the cost.

The school continued throughout the twenties and thirties. In 1920 the Rector who had been one of the main opponents of the Higdons left and was replaced by a more agreeable clergyman, and relations between the Strike School and the county school improved to the extent that both schools had equal numbers and had friendly contests on sports days. In addition to local pupils, members of the Soviet Trade Delegation in London sent their children to Burston. During the 1926 General Strike children of Nottinghamshire miners were educated and boarded free of charge. The school finally closed in 1939, when it had only 11 pupils, after the death of Tom Higdon. His widow, then aged 75, was unable to continue.

The Background

This episode remains one of the highlights of the gener ally sad story of rural trade unionism in Britain. When the Higdons arrived at Burston, Norfolk had long been an almost exclusively agricultural county. The medieval woollen industry did not survive the industrial revolution.

The lack of alternative employment meant that agricultural wages in Norfolk were the lowest in England and Wales. In 1902 the average wage in the county was only 15 shillings and three pence (76 pence or less than £77 to day). The “Great Depression” of 1873–96 hit agriculture particularly hard, grain imports from across the Atlantic were especially damaging to an arable area such as Norfolk.

Norfolk however, was a comparative stronghold of agricultural trade unionism. Joseph Arch founded the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers Union in March 1872; in May of that year a conference of this and other county unions formed the National Agricultural Labourers Union (NALU), with other local unions joining in the coming months. London trade unionists formed a committee to assist them. The next two years saw a great deal of conflict between farmers and their workers who were eventually defeated, setting back trade unionism in the fields for decades. At first the mere existence of unions persuaded some farmers to increase wages. Highly localised strikes, particularly at harvest time, brought wage increases while older forms of protest such as rick burning and letting sheep into the cornfields of stubborn farmers continued.

Farmers fought back. In addition to reducing ‘slack period’ wages after the har vest, “trouble-makers” were sacked. Given that farm labourers lived in tied cottages, dismissal equalled home lessness and being forced to leave their village. The Master & Servant Act, which made breaches of contract by employees a criminal offence while breaches by the employ er were merely a civil matter, was much employed. Repeal of this Act was a major goal of NALU. In one well publicised case an old woman had her p arish relief withdrawn for the crime of having a son in the union.

Meanwhile, farmers formed Farmers Defence As sociations binding members not to employ trade unionists or concede wage rises. By a combination of lock-outs, mechanisation and selective pay-rises for non-unionists the farmers were able to claim victory in 1874. Like many unions, the NALU supported emigration schemes assuming this would raise wages for the remaining workers. This benefitted workers who went to Canada or New Zealand, but removing trade unionists did not help to build class solidarity. Internal squabbles did not enhance the appeal of the union to the demoralised labourers. Although NALU did not finally give up the ghost until 1896, membership fell from 86,000 members in 1874 to 20,000 in 1880.

One remaining stronghold was Norfolk. In 1885 Joseph Arch was elected as MP for the county’s North-West seat, the first agricultural worker to do so. Elected on the “Liberal and labouring class interest” he was defeated the next year by only 20 votes by the Tory son of a local landlord. He was returned at the 1892 election, retiring in 1900. In the 1900 ‘Khaki election’, which was won by the Tories, the six rural Norfolk seats returned five Radical MPs and only one Tory.

Arch was not particularly radical. He opposed land nationalisation and was proud of being the MP of the Prince of Wales whose Sandringham estates were in his constituency. After the defeats of 1874 farm workers’ hopes focused on extending the franchise. Once the vote was won the rural working-class vote had to be wooed. The Liberals had to come up with policies that appealed to both farmers and their employees. They found one in Joseph Chamberlain’s ‘Three Acres and a Cow” policy, which would allow local authorities to purchase land to provide cheap allotments for farm labourers. This helped gain the 1885 Liberal victory at little cost: any allotments would be purchased from landowners. Keeping both employers and employed happy was a difficult balancing act for the Liberals.

Shortly after the 1906 Liberal landslide, the Eastern Counties Agricultural Labourers’ & Small Holders Union was formed. While the founding meeting was attended by working men, a Liberal MP was elected Treasurer. It might seem odd for a bourgeois political party to actually support the formation of a union, but they were anxious to avoid losing support to Labour which had gained 29 MPs. A long, unsuccessful strike in volving about 80 farm labourers ended when the Liberals wound-up the strike on the grounds that strike funds were running low rather than broaden it as the Norwich branch of the ILP had demanded. Such a move would have alienated other Liberal voting and funding farmers. At the AGM after the strike the Liberal leadership was replaced by ILP supporters. This comparatively small dispute was one of many where workers became disillusioned by the Liberal Party.

Afterwards

Labour and agricultural trade unionism did not have an easy ride in the countryside after the First World War. Of the 203 rural Parliamentary Constituencies only 45 had a District Labour party in 1921. At a by-election in Shropshire local activists, against the wishes of Party HQ, contested the election. In addition to losing their deposit, canvassers were pelted with dung by farm workers who either had never heard of Labour or thought they would nationalise women.

In Norfolk a NALU stalwart, George Edwards, was twice elected for Norfolk South (which included Burston) in 1920 and 1923, but his tenuous hold on the seat demonstrates how weak rural Labour was. In Norfolk North, Noel Buxton who was the Liberal MP from 1910–1918 regained it in 1922 in the Labour interest. “Remember the Ballot is Secret” was a necessary warning on Labour Party cards until the 1930s. Hiring halls that were owned by farmers was out of the question. On election day polling stations were often decorated with the Union Jack, the same symbol used by the Tories. Eventually Labour made a breakthrough in the countryside. The 1945 landslide was the start. But it cannot be said that agricultural trade unionism is in a good shape these days. The mechanisation of agriculture in the post war era has greatly reduced the numbers working on the land and their independent unions are now merely sections of the giants that dominate the TUC today.