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The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies was a British
right-wing movement, established in 1925 to provide volunteers in the event of a
general strike. During the
General Strike of 1926, it was taken over by the government to provide vital services, such as transport and communications.
Prelude
On "
Red Friday", 31 July 1925, the government avoided a confrontation with the
Miners Federation of Great Britain
The Miners' Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) was established after a meeting of local mining trade unions in Newport, Wales in 1888. The federation was formed to represent and co-ordinate the affairs of local and regional miners' unions in Engla ...
, which was expected to be followed by secondary
industrial action by the railwaymen of the
National Union of Railwaymen
The National Union of Railwaymen was a trade union of railway workers in the United Kingdom. The largest railway workers' union in the country, it was influential in the national trade union movement.
History
The NUR was an industrial union ...
, and wider confrontation. However, as
Stanley Baldwin said later, "we were not ready". The government had an emergency plan but inadequate means of implementing it. It thus established a
Royal Commission and provided a subsidy to enable the mineowners to maintain the miners' existing wages and hours of work.
In early August,
Home Secretary
The secretary of state for the Home Department, otherwise known as the home secretary, is a senior minister of the Crown in the Government of the United Kingdom. The home secretary leads the Home Office, and is responsible for all national s ...
William Joynson-Hicks
William is a male given name of Germanic languages, Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norm ...
reported to the cabinet on the state of preparations, and his recommendations were approved, but the establishment of a volunteer service was deferred.
Formation
The OMS had its public origins in the letters page of ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' (f ...
'', where many were calling for the formation of a volunteer organisation to take over the jobs of striking workers, in the event of a
general strike, which was widely feared by the
conservative
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in ...
establishment at the time, as part of a
communist plot. The same page was used on 25 September 1925 by the Home Secretary to announce the formation of just such a group, the new OMS.
Nevertheless, he admitted, on 1 October, that he had known of its inauguration for many weeks and that its promoters had consulted him. The government had no objection to it.
The organisation, to be run by a committee chaired by
Lord Hardinge, was to have branches in every city and to recruit volunteers in five classes, four of which were based on the men's fitness and age. The fifth was for women, who were to be set to work only where they could avoid any "rough handling".
and other top military men sat on the committee, to give the OMS a military discipline and to instil public confidence in the group that such important figures were involved.
The organisation was, however, explicitly non-political.
British Fascists
The British Fascists was the first political organisation in the United Kingdom to claim the label of fascist, although the group had little ideological unity apart from anti-socialism for much of its existence, and was strongly associated with c ...
were barred from joining unless they changed their name, abandoned their military structure and changed their manifesto. That led to a split in the British Fascists, with several leaders leaving to become the ''loyalists'', an organisation that would be absorbed into OMS. Still, it showed apparent independence by employing nobody in government service.
Reaction
Whilst the scheme was enthusiastically supported by the right-wing ''
Daily Mail'' it was denounced as a form of
fascism
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy an ...
not only by the
Communist Party of Great Britain but also by the
anti-communist ''
Daily Express'', which compared the OMS to the
Ku Klux Klan and the
Blackshirts
The Voluntary Militia for National Security ( it, Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, MVSN), commonly called the Blackshirts ( it, Camicie Nere, CCNN, singular: ) or (singular: ), was originally the paramilitary wing of the Nation ...
. An early speech by one of the group's leaders was deemed unfit for broadcast by the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
, which feared that it would compromise their impartiality.
Brigadier-General
William Horwood, the
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police
The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis is the head of London's Metropolitan Police Service. Sir Mark Rowley was appointed to the post on 8 July 2022 after Dame Cressida Dick announced her resignation in February.
The rank of Commissioner ...
also refused to work with what he believed to be a fascist organisation, and by the end of 1925 the government had informed General Sir Robert McCalmont that in the event of any general strike, the OMS would be disbanded and its membership taken over entirely by the government.
Still, the OMS had the confidence of some provincial police forces and branches of the
Conservative Party despite its inauspicious start.
Development
The development of OMS was not regarded as wholly favourable by some government officials, who were concerned at rumours that OMS agents were expecting to supplant official organisations in the event of an emergency. The junior ministers
William Mitchell-Thomson and
J.C.C. Davidson met the leaders of OMS, who agreed not to establish branches where there were local objections, but to encourage unofficial contacts between the local officials. OMS would concentrate on recruiting lorry drivers rather than those more likely to be employed by local authorities.
OMS was short of funds by March 1926, having failed to gain the commercial backing that it hoped. It also lacked the means to train volunteers.
General Strike
Following the outbreak of the strike and the introduction by the government of emergency powers, it turned over its membership lists to the new government civil commissioners and so became a state organisation. Although the OMS name continued to be used, any notion of independence was abandoned, and it became an arm of government. The group had some 100,000 members registered at the commencement of the strike, but the middle-class background of many of its volunteers meant that they often proved wholly unsuited to the manual work, such as the running railways and ports.
It produced slightly over 5,000 volunteers. Car drivers, lorry drivers and power station workers were the largest groups.
It managed to produce the ''
British Gazette'', a pro-government newspaper, during the strike.
Fascism
The
British Fascisti (BF), which maintained transport and communications units to be used in the event of a strike, provided an organisational structure for the OMS, but there was uncertainty at government level about allowing BF members to join the OMS given fears about their potentially revolutionary nature. Members of the BF were allowed to join only if it agreed to renounce fascism and the BF name, which was rejected by the majority of the group's controlling committee, under
Rotha Lintorn-Orman. The minority faction, led by Brigadier-General
R.B.D. Blakeney and Rear-Admiral A.E. Armstrong, split to form a new group known as the Loyalists (as well as the Scottish Loyalists under the
Earl of Glasgow), which was subsumed into the OMS as soon as the strike began.
Still, individual fascists obtained high rank within the OMS. BF member and later co-founder of the
National Fascisti
The National Fascisti (NF), renamed British National Fascists (BNF) in July 1926, were a splinter group from the British Fascisti formed in 1924. In the early days of the British Fascisti the movement lacked any real policy or direction and so th ...
Colonel Ralph Bingham worked along with
Peter Howard, who had published a magazine for fascists in
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
and would later be a member of the
New Party. They ran an OMS depot during the strike. The BF's
Neil Francis Hawkins, later a leading figure within both the
British Union of Fascists and the
Union Movement
The Union Movement (UM) was a far-right political party founded in the United Kingdom by Oswald Mosley. Before the Second World War, Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) had wanted to concentrate trade within the British Empire, but the Uni ...
, was also important in the OMS during the strike.
[Dorril, p. 200]
Later organisations
The OMS can in some ways be compared to 1970s movements such as
Civil Assistance
Civil Assistance was a British far-right movement in the 1970s, purporting to be a non-governmental civil defence group. It was a voluntary group that aimed to break any planned general strike. It was founded in 1974 by retired General Sir Walte ...
, which played on widespread public fear of trade union militancy.
Sources
* R. Page Arnet, ''The General Strike, May 1926: its origins and history'', Labour Research Department, 1926; reprint 1967
* Robert Benewick, ''A study of British fascism: Political Violence and Public Order'', Allan Lane, 1969
* Stephen Dorril, ''Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley & British Fascism'', Penguin Books, 2007
* A. Mason, 'The Government and the General Strike, 1926', ''International Review of Social History 14 (1969), pp. 1-22
* Anne Perkins, ''A Very British Strike: 3–12 May 1926'', Macmillan, 2006
* G.A. Phillips, ''The General Strike: the politics of industrial conflict'', Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976
* Patrick Renshaw, ''The General Strike'', Taylor & Francis, 1975
References
{{Authority control
1925 establishments in the United Kingdom
Anti-communist organizations
Far-right politics in the United Kingdom
Labour disputes in the United Kingdom
Organizations established in 1925