Hubert Tunney and Sidney Webb

Beatrice Webb was the wife of Sidney Webb, the Labour Party intellectual who became the MP for the Seaham Division in 1922 through to 1928, when he was followed by Ramsay MacDonald. In her diaries, the very uppercrust Webb frequently attacks the the working class senior union figures within the budding Labour Party for their supposed lack of intelligence, debating and administrative skills. They were generally hopeless as ‘brainworkers’ she maintained. And, in one memorable diary entry she contemptuously wrote off the entire Labour project as ‘the party of checkweighmen.’

Beatrice Webb was privately scathing about the east Durham colliery villagers her husband represented as MP for six years in 1922-28, following his selection as candidate in 1920 In the course of those eight years, he would have had frequent contact with Hubert Tunney, who campaigned on his behalf. In her diaries Beatrice Webb talks about the few ‘bookish’ miners in each colliery village and contrasts them with the majority who were more interested in drink and gambling. In among Hubert Tunney’s surviving library of books is a biography of the philanthropist Robert Owen in which he inscribed that it was given to him by Sidney Webb. That confirms Hubert Tunney as one of Mrs Webb’s bookish miners! The inscription is copied at right and reads:

Presented by Mr Sidney Webb (now Lord Passfield, 1936) when candidate for Seaham Division. Hubert Tunney, Thornley’

The significant terms here is ‘when candidate,’ which indicates that the book was given to Tunney after Webb’s selection as candidate in 1920 but before his election in 1922.

In a Sid Chaplin article in a July 1969 edition of the NCB house newspaper Coal News, there’s this tantalizing memory from my grandmother about Sidney Webb:

‘Hubert Tunney, 79, was elected as Thornley Colliery's Lodge Secretary in 1917. Several times a member of the DMA Executive, he eventually became a deputy labour director in the Coal Board's old Northern Division. His wife, Ellen, is daughter of a Northumbrian miner who signed the bond in his time, and tea-maker extraordinary for a host of miners' leaders and MPs.

She remembers the late Jack Lawson beating his way back to her Thornley home after a tiring day in the election campaign of 1918 and demanding a pot of tea; and a few years later Sidney Webb, also fighting the Easington Division, knocked at the door.

'He was dressed so shabbily that at first we thought he was a tramp, but he was a canny man--and he always had a pocketful of Pontefract cakes for the bairns,'.

It not too much to speculate that something of Sidney’s Webb’s analytical vigour and Beatrice Webb’s arch condescension must have galvanized Tunney further in his attempt to educate himself. In their company he would have felt out of his depth in all kinds of ways. Meeting people of that high intellectual calibre, he would have known he still had a lot to learn--about everything. His underlining in ink of the passage at right middle is graphic proof of his on-going bid to learn more about the ruthless economic forces that had shaped his life and those of his fellow miners since birth. He was actively developing a political consciousness.

The page is from a ten volume encyclopedia published in 1936 called The Modern Home University. It must have cost a lot of money on a miner’s wage. My grandfather gave the books to me one Sunday in 1973 and I still remember a very difficult wobbly walk home with them piled up to my chin. The passage he’s underlined at right is a perfect summary of how the coal industry was organised under private ownership. The economic man is,

‘..a man with a low mind, who buys in the cheapest market and sells in the dearest, whose morals can be expressed as sums of money on a balance sheet, whose intellectual equipment is a card index and who feeds on pound notes...

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