LITTLE WORKERS KNOW YOUR HISTORY - SCHOOL STRIKE 1911.

    A little known strike that lasted no more than three days is worth remembering. It was the school pupils strike of 1911 and started in Llanelli in Wales on the 5th September 1911, when 30 pupils protested against the caning of a pupil by walking out of Bigyn School. It very rapidly spread to 60 towns across the country. According to the Daily Mirror of the day, one boy stated that “our fathers strike – why shouldn't we?”

     Another report from The Times stated; that at one school in Deptford, pupils “organised a demonstration outside the school, and amused the neighbourhood by shouting ‘We are on strike’.” The students chalked demands on the pavement: the abolition of home lessons and the cane, and an extra half-holiday in the week. Many carried “ammunition”: stones and other missiles.

This from The Socialist Review: 

CHILDREN'S STRIKE

Larry Goldstone recounting a revolt of Manchester schoolchildren, September 1911, in a letter to Stephen Humphries

     When I was a lad of ten I used to work after school hours as a lather boy in my elder brother's barber's shop. Now, the barber's shop was a real meeting place for men and sometimes they'd have a big laugh talking about the school strike that they had in their school days.

    My elder brother was a very popular young man, real extrovert, and it was him who was the ringleader of the strike at Southall Street school.

    You see, the teachers at that time, without any doubt, were sadists. They ruled with fear. They firmly believed in the adage that kids were to be seen and not heard. All they needed was the least excuse and they'd cane you without mercy.

    Now when the boys went on strike, they demanded the abolition of the cane, and they also wanted a shilling a week to be paid to the monitors, because they were just used as lackeys. On the big day they met outside the school, over three hundred of them, and they marched to a field opposite the gaol walls of Strangeways. Then they marched along the main road, and threw some stones at the school windows. The strike lasted for three days, but eventually they gave up and returned to school, and all the classes were lined up to witness the punishment of the ringleaders.

    My brother said they were held over a desk by their outstretched hands and caned on their bottoms. Now, one of the brothers put a plate inside his trousers, and the blow of the cane broke the plate into pieces, badly cutting the lad's bottom. But they come unstuck with my brother. When it came to his turn, he took the teacher by surprise, wrenched the cane from his grasp and started hitting him with it, then he ran out of the school and home.

    In the evening, when father came home from work, my brother told him about the canings, and the next morning he went up the school with him. He told the headmaster he didn't approve of the beatings that were carried out at the school, because a lot of the parents were angry when their children told them about the punishments. And he gave the headmaster a strict warning that if anyone dared apply any punishment to his son Jack, then he would go up and mete out far worse to the one responsible. If his lad did anything that required punishment, they were to send a note and he would deal with his son by his own disciplinary methods.

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