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Joseph Robert Clynes, the son of the labourer, Patrick Clynes, was born in Oldham on 27th March 1869. He began work as a piecer at the local cotton mill when he was ten years old. A self-educated man, at the age of sixteen, Clynes wrote a series of anonymous articles about life in a cotton mill. The articles illustrated the harsh way children were still being treated in textile factories. Clynes argued that the Spinners Union was not doing enough to protect child workers and in 1886 he helped form the Piercers' Union.

In 1892 Will Thorne recruited Clynes as organiser of the Lancashire Gasworkers' Union. Clynes joined the Fabian Society where he met George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter and Sidney Webb. He also joined the Independent Labour Party and was one of the delegates at the conference in February, 1900 that established the Labour Representation Committee. A few months later Clynes was elected as one of the Trade Union representatives on the LRC executive.

Clynes was a talented writer and in the early 1900s became a regular contributor to socialist newspapers such as The Clarion. Clynes, the Secretary of Oldham's Trade Council, was asked to be the Labour Party candidate for North East Manchester in the 1906 General Election. Clynes won the seat soon established himself as one of the leaders of the party in Parliament. Like George Lansbury and Philip Snowden, Clynes was a strong supporter of votes for women.

A popular and well-respected member of the House of Commons, Clynes was elected as vice-chairman of the Labour Party in 1910. Unlike most of the leaders of the party, Clynes supported Britain's involvement in the First World War. In July 1917 the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, rewarded Clynes by appointing him as Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Food in his coalition government.

After the defeat of Arthur Henderson in the 1918 General Election, Clynes became the new leader of the Labour Party in the House of Commons. The pre-war leader of the party, Ramsay MacDonald, had been forgiven for his pacifism by the time of the 1922 General Election and was elected to represent Aberavon. MacDonald now replaced Clynes as the leader of the party.

When Ramsay MacDonald formed the first ever Labour government in 1924, Clynes was given the post as leader of the House of Commons. A post he held until the fall of MacDonald's administration in October, 1924.

When MacDonald became Prime Minister again after the 1929 General Election, he appointed Joseph Clynes as his Home Secretary. The election of the Labour Government coincided with an economic depression and MacDonald was faced with the problem of growing unemployment. MacDonald asked Sir George May, to form a committee to look into Britain's economic problem. When the May Committee produced its report in July, 1931, it suggested that the government should reduce its expenditure by £97,000,000, including a £67,000,000 cut in unemployment benefits. MacDonald, and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, accepted the report but when the matter was discussed by the Cabinet, the majority, including Clynes, George Lansbury and Arthur Henderson voted against the measures suggested by the May Committee.

Ramsay MacDonald was angry that his Cabinet had voted against him and decided to resign. When he saw George V that night, he was persuaded to head a new coalition government that would include Conservative and Liberal leaders as well as Labour ministers. Most of the Labour Cabinet totally rejected the idea and only three, Philip Snowden, Jimmy Thomas and John Sankey agreed to join the new government.

In October, MacDonald called an election. The 1931 General Election was a disaster for the Labour Party with only 46 members winning their seats. Clynes lost his seat at Manchester but returned to the House of Commons at the 1935 General Election. Joseph retired from Parliament at the 1945 General Election. Joseph Robert Clynes died on 23rd October, 1949.

 

Joseph Clynes: Spartacus

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Military Commanders and the First World War

Battle of the Somme

Joseph Clynes

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(1) J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)

In 1851, when he was a quiet farm worker in Ireland, a Parliamentary Act which he did not understand was passed, like a divine decree, and Patrick Clynes, with hundreds of others, suffered the cruelties of eviction, and was left to find a new way of living. He could not find it in Ireland; but the cotton boom in Lancashire was attracting thousands of machine-minders, and he went to Oldham, where he worked in a mill.

My father, from his twenty-four shillings, paid a penny or two a week each for myself and my brother and five sisters, so that we should receive the education he had missed. My school master taught me nothing except a fear of birching and a hatred of formal education. My school days have no pleasant memories.

When I achieved the manly age of ten I obtained half-time employment at Dowry Mill as a "little piecer." My hours were from six in the morning each day to noon; then a brief time off for dinner; then on to school for the afternoons; and I was to receive half a crown a week in return.

The noise was what impressed me most. Clatter, rattle, bang, the swish of thrusting levers and the crowding of hundreds of men, women and children at their work. Long rows of huge spinning-frames, with thousands of whirling spindles, slid forward several feet, paused and then slid smoothly back again, continuing the process unceasingly hour after hour while cotton became yarn and yarn changed to weaving material.

Often the threads on the spindles broke as they were stretched and twisted and spun. These broken ends had to be instantly repaired; the piecer ran forward and joined them swiftly, with a deft touch that is an art of its own.

I remember no golden summers, no triumphs at games and sports, no tramps through dark woods or over shadow-racing hills. Only meals at which there never seemed to be enough food, dreary journeys through smoke-fouled streets, in mornings when I nodded with tiredness and in evenings when my legs trembled under me from exhaustion.

 

(2) J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)

In advocating wider universal education I received much bitter opposition. Elderly spinners claimed bitterly that "learning" only made the youngsters discontented, and taught them to cry for the moon. "What was good enough for me ought to be good enough for my children" was the basis of their belief. The mill owners, too, threw their weight solidly against the unsettling influence of education. They wanted steady workers; it did not suit their ends that the workers should know too much.

 

(3) J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)

I bought a copy of John Mitchell's Jail Journal in an Oldham junk-shop in 1888, and the author's patriotism, courage and loyalty to his country affected my feelings in a way I have not yet forgotten. But books of my own were rare luxuries. Most of my reading was done in the Oldham Equitable Co-operative Society's library. I sat at the table reading Shakespeare, Ruskin and Dickens, or whatever else I could get hold of. I remember my discovery of Julius Caesar, and how the realization came suddenly to me that it was a mighty political drama, not just an entertainment.

 

(4) James Haslam, the Secretary of the Piercers Union in Oldham described a meeting that too place in 1888.

The turn of Clynes came about nine o'clock. He was nothing to look at - a frail lad, pale and serious in ungainly clothes. For three-quarters of an hour the piecer-orator spoke with well-measured sentences of sincerity and grammatical precision. The audience, which had not been easy to control, laughed with him, and were sad with him.

Afterwards the chairman of the committee said to me: "Where did you get that lad from? This country will know summat about him - if he lives!"

 

(7) J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)

Looking back I am awed at the task we undertook. That Labour should have progressed so much in less than a hundred years is very short of a miracle. It has been said that faith can make mountains move from their appointed places. Faith was the only thing that upheld us in the early days. Collarless, moneyless, almost wordless, we earnestly believed that it was wrong for the ill-educated to be exploited for the benefit of the aristocrats. We were prepared to die for our faith, knowing that others would come after us to whom our failing hands could throw the torch.

 

(8) In 1892 Clynes was employed by the Gasworkers Union. This resulted in him taking his first journey away from Oldham.

Millions of men and women died in their own towns and villages without ever having travelled five miles from the spot where they were born. How vividly I remember my first long journey away from Oldham. I had to attend a conference of the Gasworkers Union at Plymouth. To get there entailed a railway journey down the length of England.

Men of my own class were driving the engine and acting as porters. I remember a sensation of power as I glimpsed a future in which all these men would be teamed up together with mill-hands, seamen, gas-workers - in fact, Labour everywhere - for the benefit of our own people.

The least change of accent in speech, as we stopped at various towns, fascinated me, and I noted varieties of face, dress and manner. That was a wonderful journey for me, who had never before been out of the Lancashire murk. To look through the carriage windows and see grass and bushes that were really green instead of olive, trees that reached confidently up to the sun instead of our stunted things, houses that were mellow red and white and yellow, with warm red roofs, instead of the Lancashire soot and slates, and stretches of landscape in which the eye could not find a single factory chimney belching - this was sheer magic!

I began to experience an inexhaustible wonder at the gracious beauties of the world outside factory-land, and this sensation has never wholly left me. That first long railway journey was as wonderful to me as if I had been riding upon the magic carpet in the Arabian Nights.

And more and more strongly as I gazed, I felt a sense of indignation that the world should be so generous and so lovely, and yet that men, women and children should be cooped up in a black and exhausted industrial areas like Oldham, merely so that richer men could own thousands of acres of sunlit countryside of whose experience many of the mill-workers hardly ever dreamed.

 

(9) J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)

George Bernard Shaw agreed to take the chair for me at a Fabian Society meeting. The meeting was a great success. Shaw has always been a brilliant speaker as well as a provocative writer. During the early years of the Fabian Society he spoke constantly at public meetings, drawing crowded audiences. He always gave of his best, whether there were two thousand listeners or only twenty. That is the hallmark of the true artist.

 

(10) J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)

In the 1906 General Election Labour victories were recorded from towns as far apart as Bolton, Newcastle, Bradford, Leicester, Leeds, Halifax, Norwich and Dundee. When the last results were published we found that we had won a stupendous victory. In the previous Parliament the Labour Party had been represented by 4 members; now, out of 50 candidates, we has 29 successful returns.

 

(11) J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)

The Old Age Pensions Act was brought in by Mr. Lloyd George, and provided pensions for some half a million men and women over seventy years of age. But it was a well-recognised fact that the Liberals would never have supported these Bills in their final form, save for the pressure of Labour behind them, which made them fearful of losing their position as the professedly reformist Party in Parliament.

 

(12) J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)

Hardie died of a broken heart. He had always been a pacifist, and had fiercely opposed the South African War, being nearly killed in Glasgow during a riot caused by one of his speeches there against it. Between the end of the South African War and 1914 he burned himself out working to try and prepare a tremendous international general strike, to be declared when the European War, which he could see was coming, broke out. This strike he hoped would paralyze hostilities and bring immediate peace.

When August, 1914, showed him that his hopes were vain, that the workers' leaders he had painfully taught were marching to war and singing their respective patriotic songs, and when British Labour refused to inaugurate a great strike on behalf of peace, Hardie became a broken man. For the next twelve months the old dominant figure we had known was seen no more in the corridors of the House of Commons; he shrank into a travesty of his former self, never spoke in debates and said little to anyone. The great leader of Labour was dying on his feet. We all loved and respected him; it was a great grief to us that our attitude to war was driving the sword into his heart; but between our conscience and our friend there was only one choice.

 

(13) J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)

Much of the delay in our production of war supplies was due to sheer incompetence, but more of it was attributable to the will of the profiteers, who constantly deliberately kept the Government short in order that famine prices should be offered to stimulate their output. Thousands of the shells supplied in 1914 and 1915 were more dangerous to their users than to the Germans, and hundreds of our own artillerymen and many guns were blown up in trying to fire them. Meanwhile, men at the heads of great British armament firms were speedily becoming millionaires by betraying the common soldiers who were dying for them at the front.

 

(14) David Kirkwood wrote about the election for the leadership of the Labour Party in 1922 in his autobiography My Life of Revolt (1935)

Ramsay MacDonald was the son of a Lossiemouth farm-servant. He started as a pupil teacher, had come to London and earned a scanty living with the Cyclists' Touring Club, later as Secretary of the Scottish Home Rule Association,
and thereafter as a journalist. He had been Secretary of the Labour Party from 1900 to 1912, and Chairman from 1912 to 1914.

John Clynes was a poor boy in Oldham who started work in a cotton factory and entered Parliament in 1906. For his services during the War he had been made a Privy Councillor and had been honoured by the Universities of Durham
and Oxford, both of which conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L.

Nature had dealt unevenly with them. She had endowed MacDonald with a magnificent presence, a full resonant voice, and a splendid dignity. Clynes was small, unassuming, of uneven features, and voice without colour.

 

(15) Philip Snowden, An Autobiography (1934)

Joseph Clynes had considerable qualifications for Parliamentary leadership. He was an exceptionally able speaker, a keen and incisive debater, had wide experience of industrial questions, and a good knowledge of general political issues. In the Labour Party Conferences when "the platform" got into difficulties with the delegates, Mr. Clynes was usually put up to calm the storm.