A Lark for the Sake of Their Country: The 1926 General Strike Volunteers in Folklore and Memory

A lark for the sake of their country tells the tale of the upper and middle-class ‘volunteers’ in Great Britain’s 1926 General Strike. With behaviour derived from their play traditions - the larks, rags, fancy dress parties, and treasure hunts that prevailed at universities and country houses - the volunteers transformed a potential workers’ revolution into a festive public display of Englishness. This book recreates the cultural context for the volunteers’ actions to explore how volunteers, strikers, and the Government used the strike to define national identity; it also considers how and why scholars, novelists, playwrights, diarists, museum curators, local examine historians, and even a theme restaurant have continued to recycle the event. While there are scores of books about the strike, there is no other full-length study of the volunteers. Using the methodology and theory of folklore, social anthropology, literary criticism, and social history, this study presents a cultural ethnography of one of modern British history’s most significant events. From 1985-87, the author conducted correspondence and interviews with nearly 300 volunteers, strikers, and contemporary observers, research that is now impossible to replicate. Those materials, combined with archival documents and a survey of contemporary media along with novels, diaries, plays, memoirs, histories, and exhibitions, provided the basis for exploring the traditional expressive culture of the British upper classes. The General Strike was not merely evidence of class divisions and a post-war society in transition. Decades later, collective memories about the event continue to shape the discourse about British identity.