Workers' man
Lord Robens My Generation Will Paynter (Allen and Unwin, £5) The aftermath of the first world war, with its terrible poverty and massive unemployment swung a great many people into the Labour party and the trade union movement. They came from various walks of life and with very different backgrounds. Intellectuals like Stafford Cripps .and Hugh Dalton, social workers like Clem Attlee, youthful young enthusiasts with a deep and abiding interest in people and a burning desire to improve the lot of the mass of suffering humanity like Hugh Gaitskell, and from, the ranks of the workers themselves — Will Paynter. Although their backgrounds were so widely different and their political philosophies shaded4 from being social democrats to communists, they had two things in common. They were all socialists and they were all determined to bring about fundamental changes in society so as to remedy the gross poverty and the social evils that sprang from the worst features of the industrial revolution and Victorian capitalism. There are not many years between Will Paynter and myself, so we both lived the formative years of our lives in the 1920s and the 1930s, when unemployment was never less than two million and early in the 1930s peaked at three million. They were the days when it was unthinkable that after marriage a girl should continue to work. Some employers, even co operatives, refused to employ married women, so great was the pressure for jobs for men. So the proportion of the working population out of employment was extremely high and nowhere greater than in South Wales I was one of the lucky ones because my mother and father had four sons, of whom I was the youngest, and none of us was ever unemployed. My politics were those of a social democrat, and the trade union movement and the co-operative movement were the instruments of change. I did not accept the need for the destruction of capitalist society although I wanted substantial changes. The experience of the communist countries then and now never appeared to me as great a prize as the changes in society that could be brought about by political democracy and industrial organisation through the trade unions.
But Will Paynter had a different environment and this to my mind made all the difference. He became involved in revolutionary politics and communism. To understand this My Generation must be read by all those under thirty or thirtyfive, who in their wildest imagination can never conceive of the hardships, poverty, misery and despair that cradled him in the Welsh valleys. Having read his book I understand why he became a communist, but I understand even more why in the ten years in which we were associated, he as the General Secretary of the Mineworkers' Union and I as Chairman of the National Coal Board, my personal admiration for him grew from day to day, so that today I regard it as one of the privileges of my life that for ten years we worked together, albeit on either side of the table.
To me Will Paynter has always been a man of great integrity whose word can be relied upon implicitly. A bargain to him was a bargain and an agreement something that had to be honoured. He was a leader who knew how to lead, and unlike some trade union leaders today, he could deliver the goods. Good-humoured courageous, completely devoted to the cause in which he fervently believed (sometimes there was a tug of loyalties, which the union and the welfare of his members always won), he has all the qualities of a good man. And if I've used this review to describe the man that I came to know and respect rather than describe the book, it is because I want you to read the book and see for yourself the ingredients from which such a man is made.
He left school at thirteen, so he educated himself at the workmen's library attached to the colliery. At fourteen he was working at the pit face (illegal today). Twelve hours a day from home to home, out of bed at four o'clock in the morning so as to be down the pit at 6 o'clock. Hard physical and laborious work was no stranger to Will Paynter. The strikes of 1921 and 1926 in his youth obviously began to mould his mind.
His mother was deeply religious, but whilst he himself never claimed to be religious his respect and deference to his mother meant that he was at Chapel three times on Sunday and at the Band of Hope prayer meetings and Young People's Guild three nights a week. He says that he considered Darwin offered a better explanation for man's existence on earth than the Bible, so it was respect for his mother that took him there and the General Strike and miners' lock-out in 1926 that made him leave.
He joined the Communist party in 1929; by this time he was 26, and became increasingly involved in strikes, lock-outs and the continual battle against the coal owners. Even imprisonment and unemployment, mainly as a result of his activities, failed to turn him from his course of action. He led the Hunger Marches on three occasions in the 'thirties, fought tenaciously whenever and wherever he could against unemployment, mass poverty and privation. His fight against fascism took him to Spain and the International Brigade, and to Berlin on missions which make fascinating reading. Written in frank but modest style, this book shows very clearly how his environment together with his good family background made him the man that he became.
There is a slight tinge of bitterness towards the end, or is it rather sadness? Having given his whole life to the working class and their welfare, upon his retirement at sixty-five he accepted a seat on the Commission on Industrial Relations, whereupon some of those with whom he had worked through the years suggested that he had taken the job for the money, and in effect suggested he had joined the other side. One letter which must have struck him deeply began—
Just for a handful of silver he left us; Just for a ribbon to pin on his breast.
How low can a person get? What a rewaru after the personal sacrifices of a life-time. Enough for most people to wonder whether it was all worth while. But not Will Paynter; the last lines of his book read—.
" Yet would I tread again, all the road over, Face the old joy and pain, hemlock and clover."
If you want to know what makes a man, My Generation by Will Paynter makes everything clear in a graphic manner.
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