OPERATION EXODUS
NARRATED BY
VANESSA REDGRAVE
1979
EXT. LONDON – DAY, 1928
Montage of clips of police officers battling with striking workers. Shots of men and women constructing barricades. Shots of police officers on horseback. Shots of police officers with rifles positioned in streets in West London.
Redgrave: While politicians in Westminster oversaw the downfall of the United Kingdom amidst a chorus of argument and parliamentary intrigue, for men and women on the ground the end of 1928 marked the beginning of the end of a more substantive battle: the battle for the survival of the workers’ movement.
A baker hands out bread to women and children. Workers play football in the street. A woman addresses a small crowd on a street corner.
Children playing football on a street in the East End, c. 1928.
Redgrave: Since the outbreak of hostilities between bosses and workers in the coal industry at the end of May 1927, the united efforts of the trade unions had been working towards the formation of a British state more sympathetic to the livelihood of its working classes. By the time of the Labour budget over a year later in late October 1928, this great effort had resulted in large areas of the country falling under de facto worker control. Across the valleys of South Wales, the industrial towns of the North, and the coal-mining communities of County Durham, traditional structures of power had fallen away in the face of sustained working-class organisation. All over Britain, everything from food distribution to the management of local transport networks was being handled by committees formed from the ground up by working men and women.
Volunteer special constables police dockers on a picket. Bourgeois students drive a bus. Stock footage of fascisti paramilitaries outside a village hall. Anti-fascist guerrilla groups are shown drilling in a field in Essex.
Redgrave: As existing power structures failed and were replaced, numerous counter-revolutionary groups materialised in a bid to prevent the working class from taken full control. In the early days of the strike, this effort against the workers was led by the government-backed Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, a paramilitary force of bourgeois strikebreakers formed under the guidance of Winston Churchill, called upon by Stanley Baldwin to maintain order. But the OMS lasted only a few months, before succumbing to widespread antipathy from the bourgeoisie brought about after a series of violent scandals. The Organisation was an easy target for infiltration by more violent counter-revolutionary groups, including splinter groups from the British Fascisti. A lack of governmental oversight combined with sheer desperation on the part of the strikebreaking effort ensured that by the end of its life the OMS was a hotbed of far-right activity. Tasked with supporting the existing policing networks through the deployment of volunteer special constables, this led to a sharp rise in the number of violent clashes between police and the workers’ movement.
A group of workers on a street corner tend to an injured man, his face bruised and bloodied. This is presumably the aftermath of an altercation between strikers and Fascisti thugs, though could just as easily be a consequence of a police raid.
Redgrave: With the election of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government in late February 1928, it was widely hoped that there would be a subsequent drop in the level of violence used against the workers’ movement by the state’s forces of order.
Cut to stock footage of Ramsay MacDonald entering Downing Street, the doorstep flanked by officers of the Metropolitan Police.
Redgrave: MacDonald had spoken out against the heavy-handed policing tactics of Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government, winning a victory for the Opposition when he forced the government to admit to the presence of Fascisti columns within the OMS in late 1927. Early into his term in office, MacDonald worked to redress some of the worst injustices suffered by the workers at the hands of the police. He released hundreds of men imprisoned after the Battle of Riverside, and promised the formation of a royal commission into policing abuses.
Workers occupying Parliament Square. A young Wal Hannington giving a speech to a vast crowd. Fascisti thugs stood around by a car parked in central London.
Redgrave: Yet by the summer, the government’s good favour amongst the workers’ movement was fast running out. Millions of the men and women out on strike were unprepared to wait for the conclusion of MacDonald’s patient policy, and in a show of union strength over one-hundred thousand workers took to the streets in Westminster once the Houses of Parliament had broken for summer in July. The Metropolitan Police were unable to deal with the numbers of demonstrators, and workers occupied Parliament Square in a symbolic act of trade union power. At the start of August, 350 thousand members of the National Unemployed Workers’ Committee took control of Hyde Park in a bid to force government action on the question of unemployment.
Roadblocks in the East End. Footage of men and women smiling while building a barricade across one end of Cable Street. Footage of fighting between Q Division thugs and anti-fascists.
An overturned van is used by antifascists as the basis of a barricade at one end of Cable Street, 1928.
Redgrave: At the same time, communists in the East End began to organise themselves into paramilitary groups in response to mounting displays of anti-left violence by the British Fascisti Q Divisions. The largest of these groups was the so-called “Stepney Column”, led by 21-year-old tradesman Phil Piratin. Piratin came to the attention of the national organisation of the CPGB as a leader in the guerrilla campaign against the Fascisti. In the aftermath of the worker occupations, Fascisti leader Rotha Lintorn-Orman declared the Metropolitan Police “unfit for purpose”, and called for an escalation in the campaign against the unionist movement. Clashes erupted across the capital, though were most concentrated in the Jewish regions of the East End where Q Divisions launched attacks on both anti-communist and anti-Semitic grounds.
Lintorn-Orman’s campaign achieved little. Violence was widespread, but the Q Divisions were neither as disciplined nor as numerous as the anti-fascist forces. In some instances, the Met turned a blind eye to Fascisti attacks. Privately, many special constables were glad of the assistance in their own battle against the workers. Ramsay MacDonald took to the BBC on August 12th to make a special broadcast condemning the violence, but it fell on deaf ears. Each for their own reasons, neither the Fascisti nor the trade unions were willing to hear out the Labour government’s calls for peace.
Workers are seen running through training exercises and drills. Footage of men and women being instructed in the use of rifles. Younger partisans are shown hurling bricks at houses and slashing tyres.
Redgrave: By the middle of August, governmental London was at a standstill. Whitehall and Westminster were both under solid worker control, forcing the civil service to evacuate a skeleton staff to the safe haven of Oxford. Ramsay MacDonald accepted an offer from heiress and Conservative MP Nancy Astor – whose anti-communism was matched only by her anti-Semitism – to reconvene Parliament at her home at Cliveden after the summer recess. In the wake of the departure of the British state, the workers’ movement established its own informal economy in London, as it had done across the country throughout the strike. In response to the dual threat of the Q Divisions and the Metropolitan Police, CPGB military spokesman Tom Wintringham was secretly tasked with overseeing the formation of an organised paramilitary force capable of defending worker control of London. By the end of summer, the first of the Workers’ Brigades had been deployed in the fight against the Fascisti. Phil Piratin became one of the Brigades most prominent commanders: at its peak, his Stepney Column numbered six thousand volunteers.
Stock footage of the Cliveden Parliament. Army guards stand around on the driveway, lifting up a roadblock to allow an MP’s car to enter the estate. MacDonald is shown speaking from the dispatch box.
View of the southern facade of Cliveden House, c. 1926.
Redgrave: After the heated summer of 1928, a period of relative normality followed in the autumn. With Parliament back in session, albeit removed to Buckinghamshire, the crisis left the streets and returned to the political stage. While Labour experienced a crisis of its own with the delivery of Snowden’s budget in late October, an uneasy ceasefire had materialised on the streets of London as the city’s inhabitants accommodated themselves to worker occupation. The Met had given up their attempts to remove the workers, and instead contented themselves with minor campaigns of harassment as levels of antipathy amongst constables rose. Much of the Fascisti core retreated to its base in the Home Counties, licking their wounds. As in Parliament, the crisis devolved into a stalemate.
Mosley gives an impassioned address from the backbenches. Annie Kenney speaks to a crowd in London. Police arrest a group of young men and women. Crowds of workers and clash with Fascisti squads.
Redgrave: The arrival of Oswald Mosley’s Provisional Labour–Unionist Alliance at the start of November shattered this impasse, both in Parliament and on the streets. MacDonald’s majority was cut down to only fifteen, and Churchill too had seen some of his most energetic young backbenchers quit the Conservative Party. The government, which had been in power for only eight months, looked closer than ever to collapse; it was unclear who would be the prime beneficiary when the time finally came.
Outside of Parliament, Mosley’s break with the Labour Party inspired fierce emotional response from the Fascisti, who branded the PLUA leader an “enemy of the people”. Lintorn-Orman saw herself in grand terms as the only figure capable of preventing the descent of the United Kingdom into untrammelled Bolshevism; in early November she declared the start of a renewed campaign against worker-occupied London. The most controversial episode in this campaign occurred on November 9th in Canning Town, when Q Division street-fighters attacked a crowd who had gathered to hear old suffragettes Annie Kenney and Adelaide Knight speak. Kenney and Knight themselves were arrested by police on charges of incitement and sedition, while many Fascisti fighters escaped arrest or else found themselves charged with only minor offences. MacDonald made noises of protest, but did not act. By this point, he could not afford to alienate the Met.
Stock footage of Tom Wintringham in a pub in Haggerston with men and women from one of the Workers’ Brigades. Two women are shown operating a checkpoint on a road in Hackney. Phil Piratin leads a patrol along Cable Street.
Still image from footage taken of anti-fascist fighters in the East End, 1928.
Redgrave: While Parliament demurred, the workers’ movement was quick to respond. At the start of December, unemployment hit 2 million and membership of the NUWC hit 1.2 million. The occupation at Hyde Park remained quarter of a million strong, and after the arrests of Comrades Kenney and Knight hostile feeling towards the Met was at a peak. At the start of December, Phil Piratin issued a declaration on behalf of the tenants of Stepney withdrawing consent for the Metropolitan Police to operate within the boundaries of the ward. Similar statements followed in the days after, and by the start of winter much of the East End had turned into a Met no-go zone. The situation only worsened when reports emerged that Kenney and Knight were being force-fed in prison, causing a scandal for the beleaguered Labour government. MacDonald, startled into action, quietly worked to secure the women’s release, but it was too little too late. At a ceremony to welcome the women home at St George in the East, Adelaide Knight collapsed and became unconscious. She had contracted pneumonia in prison, and died only three days after her release. Her widower Donald Brown Knight, a decorated foreman at Woolwich Arsenal, gave an emotional address to the Hyde Park occupation on Christmas Eve in which he denounced both the government and the Metropolitan Police as Adelaide’s killers. The next day, on Christmas morning, the CPGB declared the start of Operation Exodus.
Firefights between workers and police constables. An injured Workers’ Brigade volunteer is shown being lifted into an improvised ambulance car. Workers with rifles survey an empty street behind a barricade.
Redgrave: Operation Exodus was the CPGB-backed campaign by the workers against the Metropolitan Police, led by Tom Wintringham. Wintringham was a former mechanic in the Royal Flying Corps who had established himself after its founding as the Communist Party’s expert on military affairs. He had an interest in street fighting and guerrilla warfare, and later in the Spanish War would prove a formidable commander. But it was in the campaign against the Metropolitan Police, and by extension the Q Divisions, that he cut his teeth. So long as MacDonald refused to call in the troops, the Met remained both outnumbered and outwitted by the tactics of Wintringham’s Workers’ Brigades. Given material backing by the TUC and its allies abroad, the Brigades were able to prosecute a fast and highly effective campaign. Spreading out from existing unionist strongholds in Westminster, Hackney and modern Tower Hamlets, by the New Year worker control had extended and secured throughout Islington and on its eastern perimeter hit the Northern Circular. A number of factors influencing both sides meant that fatality rates were low: the population of London displayed little to no resistance to the expansion of worker control, the combined unions having already taken over the de facto running of city life months before, while the Met offered only a muted response in most areas, perhaps in anticipation of the imminent deployment of the armed forces.
In Cliveden, the question of deployment had vexed Parliament. MacDonald, who had come to power in part on the back of his impassioned opposition to Stanley Baldwin’s deployment of troops at Wapping and Riverside, had little appetite for directing fire on the workers movement. Yet Churchill was unrelenting in his own opposition to Labour’s timidity, and after weeks without a resolution on deployment put forward a vote of no confidence in the ministry on January 9th. MacDonald lost, and Prince Edward dissolved Parliament the following day.
Stock footage of MacDonald leaving Downing Street. Various clips of parliamentary candidates campaigning across the country. Some events are policed by Fascisti; others are accompanied by a Workers’ Brigade presence. Life in London goes on as per usual under the occupation.
Oswald Mosley campaigning in Stoke-on-Trent, February 1929.
Redgrave: Having delayed in office for as long as he could, MacDonald was thus finally ejected over the issue of the troops. By New Year 1929, Parliament had switched roles from primary mover to secondary follower: no longer was British politics dictated by matters of policy, but by the events being played out on the streets of London and elsewhere. By the end of January, as the United Kingdom went through the motions of acting out one of the most unorthodox elections in its history, Tom Wintringham and his Workers’ Brigades had all but pacified the Metropolitan Police and secured London for the workers’ movement. For perhaps the first time in British history, it felt as if the outcome of the election wouldn’t matter – not because of a lack of diversity in opinion, but because Westminster’s power was now all but ceremonial. Now more than ever before during the long arc of the strike, the conclusion seemed imminent. The success of Operation Exodus put the workers of Britain within touching distance of final victory over the forces of capital. The United Kingdom had only weeks to live.