Tyneside’s forgotten uprising: how workers took on the state in 1926

Nine days that shook the establishment. That’s how leading north east playwright Ed Waugh describes the 1926 General Strike – and on Saturday 12 September, he’s bringing that story home to Newcastle City Library.

Waugh is best known for The Cramlington Train Wreckers, his hit play about the strike’s most notorious episode – the accidental derailment of the Flying Scotsman by striking miners at Cramlington, Northumberland. His new talk will touch on that incident, but its real focus is Tyneside itself – and the ordinary people who built something extraordinary in nine days.

“The General Strike of 1926 was the biggest rupture in society since the civil wars of the 1640s,” Waugh says. “It posed the question of state power – it was the working class against the capitalist system.”

It’s a story, Waugh argues, of betrayal at the top and organisation from below. While the TUC leadership dithered – “not preparing for the event and being ready to sell out the strike from day one” – rank-and-file trade unionists, Labour members and Communist Party activists didn’t wait to be told what to do. They built councils of action up and down the country – the nascent shape of an alternative government, economy and society.

Waugh calls the full nine days “a fascinating time in British history” – workers organising on instinct, pursued by the Tory government, the police and the army. “This happened nationwide, but the talk is primarily about the organisation and activities on Tyneside,” he says. “Working-class history is not something we are taught in the school curriculum, where kings and queens are primarily the subject matter,” said Waugh.

Tyneside and the General Strike takes place at Newcastle City Library on Saturday 12 September at 11.30am. Tickets are free but must be pre-booked, via Eventbrite.

Click here to order free tickets for Tyneside and the General Strike.