3 Trade Union Freedom and the Labour Movement: Arthur Deakin, Frank Cousins and the Transport and General Workers Union 1945-1964 No union has contributed more in organised strengtti, in practical wisdom and in imaginative vision to tiie success of the Labour partv than the Transport and General Woricers union. Clement Attlee' Brothers, we have got to recognise the difficulties that confront us aiio act with a sense of responsibility, while expressing our determination to secure those conditions that will make for a reduction in the price^ level and increase the level of the wages that we get. Arthur Deakin^ The general executive council of my union firmly believe that its job is to improve the standard of living of our people. We are not satisfied even to maintain it. We know the economic struggle that the country is facing but we also know that we are governed by a body which advised us that we were coming into an era of prosperity in an atmosphere of free for all. We have said and we mean it that if it is a free for all, we are part of the all. Frank CousmS'^ 102 Deakin, Cousins and the TGWU 103 The Transport and General Workers Union was always the colossus of the Labour Movement from the moment of its formation through mergers in 1922 under the visionary leadership of Ernest Bevin.'* During the period immediately after the Second World War, it became the largest trade union in the western industrialised world, claiming over 1.3 million members by the middle of the 1950s. The TGWU's massive block vote of 1 million in the 1950s out of a total conference vote of just over 6 million was used ruthlessly to dominate policy-making at party conference as well as to decide who sat on most of the National Executive Committee and the all-important Conference Arrangements (Committee. Labour leaders always tried to make sure the TGWU was on their side in their inner-party battles. In power and influence, it towered over the other trade unions affiliated to the party. Only the National Union of Mineworkers enjoyed comparable strength and that union’s importance went into serious decline during the 1950s in line with the loss of jobs in the contracting coal industry. The pivotal role played by the TGWU in TUC and Labour Party politics, however, was not simply due to the sheer size of its mass membership translated into a huge block vote. Its strategic position also owed a great deal to the strong character and robust opinions of the union’s successive general secretaries. Ik>vin deliberately created a highly centralised trade union, designed to unify the often conflicting sectional interests that existed between its disparate members. Its sense of purpose and direction therefore came primarily from the personal abilities of the man who reigned at the top of the union. The authority he wielded was strengthened enormously by the fact that the post of general secretary was the only one in the TGWU elected through a branch ballot vote of the entire membership. 'The general secretary represented the unity of the union', explained Alan Bullock in his biography of Bevin. 'He was the man who held it together and resisted the particularist tendencies of the trade groups. It was to the general secretary that the executive looked for guidance in formulating policy and under his supervision that the officers carried out the executive’s decisions.'^ The union's unique structure reflected Bevin's personal domination. He used it to turn himself into the indispensable figure both in the mod­ ernisation of the TUC with its general secretary Walter Citrine after the 1926 General Strike as well as in the return of the Labour Party to the mainstream of national politics in the aftermath of the 1931 election disaster. Without the TGWU's moderating influence, it is doubtful whether Labour would have accomplished even a limited electoral recovery during the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second 104 The тис World War. However, the TGWU often looked to the outside world as little more than Bevin's creature. He seemed to control or at least dominate its internal proceedings through both the union's general executive council and the biennial delegate conference by the sheer force of his dynamic but overbearing personality. But in May 1940 Bevin was seconded from the TGWU by Winston Churchill to join his coalition government as Minister of Labour with the task of mobilising Britain's workers for total war against Nazism. He turned out to be one of the great successes of that administration in the eventual achievement of victory. After 1945 Bevin, as Foreign Secretary, was an impressive guarantor of Labour's peacetime social revolution with its commitment to full employment, the creation of a national health service and the nation­ alisation of key industries like coal, the railways and iron and steel. Deakin and the social settlement The history of the TGWU between 1945 and 1964, however, suggests that the union did not require a larger than life figure like Bevin in order to exercise effective power and influence over the rest of the Labour Movement. Both Arthur Deakin, general secretary from February 1946 until his death on May day 1955, and Frank Cousins, who held the post from March 1956 until June 1969, were to demonstrate in their contrasting ways just how important the TGWU continued to be after Bevin's departure in ensuring the party's political success as well as its internal cohesion. Deakin's posthumous reputation has suffered badly, especially from the hands of his own union. He is invariably portrayed by the TGWU as a tyrannical figure of 'darkness', an anti-Communist autocrat who tried to dominate the union with a rod of iron against an increasingly restive rank and file hostile to wage restraint. 'In running the union Deakin resembled a small businessman in outlook, rather than the leader oi hundreds of thousands of industrial workers', wrote future TGWU general secretary Jack Jones, who disliked Deakin's right-wing anti Communist Labour politics, perhaps more than his autocratic style ot running the union.^ But Geoffrey Goodman - no enthusiast - wrote in his biography of Frank Cousins that Deakin was 'a strange mixture . Outwardly he was a 'hard, ruthless, blustering, bully-like man', but behind the 'iron mask was an unexpectedly sensitive and generous human being'.^ Michael Foot - from a hostile Bevanite perspective - described Deakin as 'a fierce, breezy, irascible, stout-hearted bison of a man who genuinely believed that any proposition he could force Deakin, Cousitis and the TGWU 105 through his union executive must be the will of the people and more especially the will of Ernest Bevin whose requirements he had normally taken the precaution of finding out in advance'. Foot also believed he 'lacked Bevin's redeeming powers of imaginative rumination'.*^ It is true Deakin was no Bevin but then there has never been anybody else like Bevin in the trade union movement. However, when judged by any other standard, Deakin turned out to be an impressive and effective general secretary who maintained the TGWU as a powerful and responsible force in a period that turned out to be, but perhaps did not seem so at the time, Labour's golden age. It is no exaggeration to assert that it was the TGWU and the TUC under Deakin's leadership that helped to save the Attlee government from economic disaster. Between February 1948 and the summer of 1950 Deakin - at first with under­ standable reluctance and then with characteristic enthusiasm - took the lead inside the TUC in trying to restrain pay demands among the rank and file at a time of full employment. Deakin was one of the most belligerent champions of Labour's post­ war social settlement. Professor Hugh Clegg believed Deakin equalled Bevin in his courage and 'came near to him in force of character', while sharing most of the same values, although he lacked Bevin's genius for 'an intuitive grasp of situations and problems and how they could be handled'.^ Philip Williams described Deakin in his biography of Hugh Gaitskell as: 'one of those vigorous, boisterous, extroverted and intolerant working-class characters whose bullying and crudity are readily excused by intellectuals who like their politics but never forgiven by those who do not'. But Deakin belonged to that small group of post­ war national trade union leaders who 'in the precarious economic situation after the war used their great bargaining power with restraint'. Despite persistent left-wing criticism, Deakin and others like him, wrote Williams, 'improved their members' real standard of living substantially without imposing the arbitrary injustice of inflation on the poor and weak and they made It possible under the Attlee Cabinet to reconstruct the economy and lay the foundations for lasting prosperity on which future governments failed to build'.*® Deakin was acting TGWU general secretary during Bevin's absence at the Ministry of Labour between May 1940 and July 1945. It was under his leadership that the TGWU grew in membership during the Second World War. There is no reason to believe he was anything less than competent and diligent both in managing the union and acting on its behalf in the mobilisation of the organised working class under crisis conditions. The shopfloor war effort owed much to the work of the trade 106 The тис unions, and not least to the TGWU. Deakin played a key role among that remarkable generation of Labour Movement leaders who helped to defeat Nazism and prepare for post-war reconstruction.