Strife and strikes in post-war Britain

摘要

The final shots of the First World War rang out on the battlefields of Meuse in the north east of France on November 11 1918 - commemorated ever since by Armistice Day. But when railway workers downed tools almost a year later, on September 26 1919, Britain was in many ways still a country at war. Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George was still holding meetings of the War Cabinet, a committee he had established on entering Downing Street three years earlier to put key decisions in the hands of a group of select ministers. And the conflict with Germany had given way to an unprecedented wave of civil unrest in Britain and throughout its empire. In January 1919, the military had been deployed to Glasgow's George Square, to crush what Scottish Secretary Robert Munro described as a "Bolshevist uprising". The Glaswegians fared better than the people of Amritsar in the Punjab, where anywhere between 379 and 1,000 were killed in April when the British Indian Army opened fire on a curfew-defying gathering.