1926 United Kingdom General Strike - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• The poet Hugh MacDiarmid composed an ultimately pessimistic lyrical response to the general strike, which he incorporated into his long modernist poem of the same year, "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle". His imagistic depiction of how events unfolded occurs in the extended passage beginning "I saw a rose come loupin oot..." (line 1119).
• The strike functions as the "endpiece" of the satirical novel, The Apes of God, by Wyndham Lewis. In that novel, the half-hearted nature of the strike, and its eventual collapse, represents the political and moral stagnation of 1920s Britain.
• The failure of the strike inspired Idris Davies to write "Bells of Rhymney" (published 1938), which Pete Seeger made into the song "The Bells of Rhymney" (recorded 1958).
• In the 1945 novel, Brideshead Revisited, the main character, Charles Ryder, returns from France to London to fight against the workers on strike.
• The LWT series, Upstairs, Downstairs, devoted an episode entitled "The Nine Days Wonder" (Series Five, episode 9; original airing date, 2 November 1975) to the general strike.
• Touchstone, a 2007 novel by Laurie R. King, is set in the final weeks before the strike. The issues and factions involved, and an attempt to forestall the strike are key plot points.
• A BBC series entitled The House of Eliott included an episode depicting the general strike.
• In the novel Any Human Heart by William Boyd the protagonist Logan Mountstuart volunteers himself as a special constable in the 1926 general strike.