Ray Physick mentions the use of the army during the 1911 transport strike

Resource Type: Audio | Posted on 22nd July 2011 by Liam Physick

Ray Physick mentions how the army was used to try and put down the 1911 transport strike, including what he estimates to be the first armoured vehicle ever to be used on a British street, and how Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, used the strike to experiment with the use of military force

Interviewee: Ray Physick

Interviewee Gender: Male

Interview Transcript

Nothing was moving in Liverpool without the permission of the trade unions, very . . . and they were new trade unions as well, they, they weren’t hide-bound by the bureaucracy of the, of the, sort of, TUC leaders, so they were very, very vibrant and very, very moving very, very, very quickly, so, so what happened in Liverpool was the state machine, the state, if you like, through Winston Churchill, had a few experiments, and this is the . . . as far as I’m aware, the first armoured vehicle to be used on British streets where they, they would tour round the city, and there’d be troops and police with guns and police, sort of (indecipherable) here, so it was quite a serious dispute, and they got the state machine doing that. Next slide please? And there you see here that Liverpool was a city under siege, men with bayonets, police in the front, horses, there was thousands of troops and hundreds of police drafted in from Bradford, Birmingham, places like that, from all over the country to try and defeat the Liverpool working class, which they didn’t do, thankfully.

Tagged under: army, 1911 strike, police, trade unions, winston churchill

Categorised under: Work & Industry