You can say that Chen Muwu was lucky, he caught up with a general strike.
If you want to say that Chen Muwu was unlucky, he became a witness to the largest strike in British history.
The root cause of the strike was, of course, the class conflict between the mine owners and the workers.
But the direct cause is the convergence of various factors.
Britain is the birthplace of the first industrial revolution, and more than 150 years have passed since then.
In the steam age, people burned coal to drive steam engines.
In the electrical age, people used coal to generate electricity.
Even though God is kind and has given Britain, a small island country, ample coal resources.
However, after more than 150 years of mining, the easier-to-obtain coal in the shallow layers of the coal mine has been basically mined.
Although there are still a large amount of coal resources under the shallow layers, it is much more difficult to mine, and the UK's coal production has also been declining year by year.
When World War I began, the British war machine was running at full speed, factories across the country were operating at full capacity, and British coal was mainly supplied domestically.
Coupled with the fact that sea routes were blocked due to the war, coal exports dropped significantly, further stimulating the development of the coal industry in other countries.
Although the UK's coal production is decreasing year by year, overall supply still exceeds demand.
After the war, domestic demand for coal dropped. Britain wanted to continue exporting its remaining coal in exchange for money, but found that the United States, Germany and even Poland had become major coal countries, and no one bought its own coal.
"It rains all night when the house leaks." In order to save Germany's economy, the United States created a Dawes plan that allowed Germany to export free coal to repay the war reparations of France and Italy, which further lowered the price of the war. European coal prices.
Churchill, the finance minister who said "it is our duty to recast the glory of the British Empire" insisted on restoring the pound's gold standard status. This made the pound with an artificially high exchange rate too strong, which was not conducive to British commodity exports.
Putting all kinds of factors together, British coal mine owners found that their profits suddenly became lower?
If profits become lower, coal miners will be squeezed.
Not only must their wages be lowered, but their working hours must also be lengthened.
The matter got bigger and bigger, and finally it went directly to the British government.
There were see-saw negotiations between the TUC and the British government until May 1, 1926, International Labor Day, when the negotiations broke down and the strike finally began.
Among the main strikers, in addition to the coal miners who had been unfairly treated, there were also workers from other industries who expressed solidarity and sympathy with the coal miners.
It stands to reason that the impact of this strike on Cambridgeshire, an academic city that is neither a mining city nor an industrial city, should be quite small.
The only inconvenience may be that transportation will be affected by the strike.
But just at this point, the unlucky guy Chen Muwu caught up with him.
Without getting the customized accelerator parts, Chen Muwu, Cockcroft, and the truck Chadwick found all came in good spirits and returned disappointed.
After returning to Cambridge University, Chen Muwu could only finish the paper on path integrals while listening to various people around him talk about the news of the general strike.
Smooth traffic and interrupted postal routes also affected the transportation of newspapers.
Now Cambridge University can no longer even receive the Times and the Daily Mail.
Of course, because printing workers were also part of the strike in support of the coal miners, even the two newspapers with the largest circulation in the UK were unable to escape the fate of sharp declines in page space and print runs during the strike.
But there are always well-informed people. Cambridge is not far from London, only fifty miles.
If you take a car, it only takes two or three hours.
Fifty miles was nothing even to the great cyclist Eddington.
The modified bicycle given to him by Chen Muwu made Eddington even more powerful.
Let him ride a bicycle from Cambridge to London and back in one day.
From the most primitive method of information dissemination - word of mouth, Chen Muwu roughly understood the specific attitudes of various parties in the UK during this strike.
King George V of the United Kingdom stood up and called on the workers to end the strike as soon as possible and return to work.
Prime Minister Baldwin is also thinking about how to resolve the strike peacefully and quickly.
Wherever there is a crowd, there is a left, center and right.
Within the Conservative Party, there are naturally moderates and hard-liners.
The representative figure of the hard-liners was Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who did not yet know that he was also involved in the strike.
He felt that Prime Minister Baldwin was a little too rational, so he might as well send soldiers directly.
As the largest opposition party, the Labor Party is also not monolithic.
Naturally, some people within the Labor Party, which has the word "work" in its name, support workers in safeguarding their own interests.
But there is another, larger group of people who are afraid that this strike may bring them together with those Soviet Communists who support the strike, thus damaging the reputation of the party.
After all, a large part of the reason for the collapse of the Macdonald cabinet was the Zinoviev letter, which made the British think that the Labor Party was the British agent of the Communist International.
They are going too far now and do not want to have any contact with the Soviets. They are even more afraid that a few real revolutionaries will appear among the workers on strike this time, causing Britain to follow the old path of Tsarist Russia.
By then the red flag was flying at Buckingham Palace, George V and his family were executed, and the Houses of Lords and Commons were dissolved.
Without parliament, where would the ruling and opposition parties be? Doesn’t the Labor Party then have no future?
Therefore, most people in the Labor Party still have deep resistance to this strike.
Cambridgeshire, the academic city, is once again involved in this matter.
As the top university in the UK, the University of Cambridge not only produces countless world-renowned scientists, but also cultivates generations of politicians in the UK.
Those conservative students who agreed with the British government and hoped that the strike would end as soon as possible could not help much and could only wait and see what happened.
Those students who were influenced and inspired by the Red Soviet Union and stood on the side of the workers supported the workers in various ways.
Rutherford, who was very indifferent to political topics, issued a death order in the Cavendish Laboratory. Everyone should concentrate on the experiment. No one could talk about this matter in the laboratory, let alone comment on it. Comment on things.
Although he did not name names, everyone knew that the director was targeting several people who often talked about communism in the laboratory, including his beloved disciple Kapitsa.
In Rutherford's eyes, Chen Muwu, another disciple who devoted himself to the particle accelerator, was much more lovable than those students who did not let him worry about it.
But he didn't know that Chen Muwu was also a member of the Cambridge Apostolic Society, the most radical secret organization in Cambridge University.
At the weekly gathering of the Apostolic Society, the strike was discussed lively.
Most of the news Chen Muwu learned about the strike came from gatherings.
These apostles not only discussed donating money to the union to support the coal miners in continuing their struggle against the capitalists, but also planned to publish articles in newspapers using their real names or pseudonyms to express support for the strike.
Regarding donating money, no one asked Chen Muwu whether he would donate or not.
Although in Rutherford's eyes, Chen Muwu, a student, was the richest in the Cavendish Laboratory, so he lobbied him to give up the Maxwell Scholarship.
But in the eyes of these young men from the Cambridge Apostolic Society, the various bonuses Chen Muwu received, plus the royalties he received from the George Chen series, and the shareholder dividends he received from Penguin Publishing, were nothing at all. money.
However, they still sought Chen Muwu's opinion when publishing an article in support of the strike.
To everyone's disappointment, their brother Chen's behavior on this matter was as negative as when he participated in previous discussions on related topics.
Some people even began to think about whether it was a wrong decision for them to recruit Chen Muwu into the Apostolic Society just because of his wisdom without considering his position.
…
Some people support the strike, while others oppose it.
In London, some people use their private cars as shared cars to facilitate people's travel.
Some people also saw business opportunities in this strike and organized privately operated buses in an attempt to make a lot of money in this basically paralyzed London city.
The trains connecting London, England and Edinburgh, Scotland, the two most important cities in the UK, have also restarted with the help of volunteer drivers.
As a result, the fastest steam locomotive in Britain, the "Flying Scotsman" running on the railway artery, derailed near Newcastle due to sabotage by striking workers.
In this case, Chen Muwu finished writing his path integral paper.
Rutherford did not understand and did not want to understand the content of the paper.
He believed that this was just because the strike prevented the previously ordered generator parts from being transported to Cambridge by rail, resulting in the inability to carry out follow-up work, so Chen Muwu was bored and wrote a theoretical paper to pass the time.
Rutherford had always believed that this sympathy strike should not last long, and that except for the coal miners whose lives were at stake, it would not take long for all walks of life to return to the status quo.
His suggestion to Chen Muwu was to wait until transportation resumed before sending someone to deliver the paper to the Royal Society in London.
However, this good student disagreed with Rutherford's idea and showed an attitude of being very eager to publish the paper.
So Chen Muwu found Kapitsa and asked him to drive him from Cambridge to London.
Kapitsa, who likes liveliness, has long been tired of being trapped in Cambridge University and isolated from the outside world, so he is willing to go with his good friends.
In this regard, Rutherford did not raise any objections, but only told the two disciples to go back quickly and pay attention to safety on the road.
In one day, Kapitsa drove Chen Muwu a hundred miles round trip.
After returning, everyone felt that Kapitsa, who had taken a trip to London, seemed to be more excited than before. He talked to everyone about the scene in London during the general strike.
After being yelled at by Rutherford's loud voice, he restrained himself.
In London, the editors of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed little enthusiasm for Chen Muwu's long-lost paper on theoretical physics.
This is not because they cannot understand the content of the paper. The editors just feel that even if they type and issue a supplement as soon as they get the paper, the supplement will be stuck in the printing factory that is also on strike.
The Times and the Daily Mail remain in a state of de facto hiatus despite significantly reducing their pages.
During the strike, in order to deliver news, two new newspapers appeared on the London market, the "British Gazette" and the "British Worker".
The British Gazette is a temporary newspaper created by the British government to promote the government's views. Churchill, the chancellor of the exchequer, who had been a journalist, was appointed as the newspaper's editor-in-chief.
The "British Worker" was a counterattack launched by the trade union federation in response to the "British Gazette" and to boost the morale of the working brothers.
But after all, his arms could not twist his thighs. In order to prevent the spread of "The Worker", Churchill used a trick to remove the firepower. In the name of the British government, he requisitioned most of the newsprint of "The Worker".
The Workers' Daily had no choice but to reduce its page from the previous eight to four pages, but still persisted in the struggle.
Also on the same day after the reduction, an article in support of British coal miners appeared in The Worker.
The author of the article did not use a pseudonym. He was the model student who was never harsh in Rutherford's eyes, Chen Muwu.
In the article, Chen Muwu expressed solidarity with these striking workers, and at the same time introduced to them that on the other side of the Eurasian continent, in China, their brother workers have been fighting against the capitalists who enslaved them.
In May last year, a large number of workers went on strike in Zihai and Qingdao yarn mills.
The behavior of Japanese capitalists was much worse than that of current British mine owners. They shot striking workers, arousing public outrage in China.
On May 30, workers in Wuhai went on strike in the public concession and were arrested by the concession authorities.
However, the Chinese people have not bowed to the capitalists, and until now, they still tenaciously persist in the struggle.
Chen Muwu appealed in the newspaper, hoping that British workers would persevere like their Chinese brothers and never give in in the face of the coercion and inducement of the capitalists.
He had previously asked Kapitsa to drive him to London, and it was just a pretense to submit a paper to the Royal Society.
Sending this article is Chen Muwu’s real purpose.
He already had this idea at the beginning of the strike.
At the gathering of the Apostolic Society, Chen Muwu's thoughts became more mature, but he just didn't reveal them to his buddies.
The article he wrote not only supported the strike movement, but also used the British people's sympathy for the workers to promote the "May 30th Movement" a year ago to them.
Previously regarded as a model of British education and frequently appearing in British newspapers, Chen Muwu can be regarded as a public figure with certain influence even if he is not a household name.
The newspaper that published the article caused a great stir in London.
Although the newsprint was requisitioned, the Workers' Daily was unable to print more copies.
However, people could not stop circulating it among themselves. More and more readers knew that Dr. Chen from Cambridge University supported the strike, and also knew how disgraceful the role played by their motherland leader in the May 30th Massacre.
Churchill, who monitored the strike through the Workers' Daily, also read Chen Muwu's article.
He didn't care about the dirty things the British government did in China that were promoted in the article. The report in the Daily Mail about an old man named Gandhi in India had been reported for so many years. Didn't it make any waves?
Churchill's top priority remained dealing with the strike.
He was just angry. Chen Muwu's article might boost the morale of the striking workers and cause him trouble.
In his heart, Churchill already hated this Chinese who cheated and cheated, and he would definitely teach him a lesson if he had an opportunity in the future.
Chen Weicheng, the charge d'affaires of the Republic of China in the UK who just took office, is very "grateful" for the "appointment gift" sent by Chen Muwu. He will probably be very busy with this article soon.
But he can't complain yet, because his predecessor Zhu Zhaoxin specifically told him before he went to Italy that as long as he served the most famous Chinese in the world, getting promoted and making a fortune would not be a problem in the future. He is the best example.
The Japanese Embassy in the UK held an emergency meeting overnight to discuss countermeasures against the article published by Chen Muwu that "smeared" the Japanese Empire.
The Soviet Embassy in the UK sent a secret report to the country.
At the Royal College of Surgeons in London, Henry Norman Bethune, a Scotsman from Canada, also read Chen Muwu's article in the Workers' Daily.
(End of chapter)
