Very British Strike

"At midnight on 3 May 1926, two million workers downed tools and came out on the only General Strike ever staged in Britain. The country braced itself for a Socialist revolution. Yet in the ensuing nine days, far from working for the overthrow of the state, strikers as well as strike-breakers mobilised to save parliamentary democracy." "The General Strike, a doomed attempt to halt pay cuts in Britain's faltering industries, was perhaps the most dramatic peacetime event in twentieth-century Britain. It affected every inhabitant of every town of any size throughout the country. In an imitation of the soviets of early revolutionary Russia, local committees of trade unionists controlled the distribution of food and power. Newspapers were shut down. Only the unfamiliar voice of the BBC broke the silence and heralded a new era of communication." "A Very British Strike draws on previously unpublished sources and contemporary accounts as well as meticulous research, building a picture of exactly how and why the Strike began and how Britain's brief revolutionary spark burned out less than two weeks later."--BOOK JACKET.