The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies was a British right-wing movement, established in 1925 to provide volunteers in the event of a general strike. During the General Strike of 1926, it was taken over by the government to provide vital services, such as transport and communications.
Prelude
On "Red Friday", 31 July 1925, the government avoided a confrontation with the Miners Federation of Great Britain, which was expected to be followed by secondary industrial action by the railwaymen of the National Union of Railwaymen, and wider confrontation. However, as Stanley Baldwin said later, "we were not ready". The government had an emergency plan but inadequate means of implementing it. It thus established a Royal Commission and provided a subsidy to enable the mineowners to maintain the miners' existing wages and hours of work.
In early August, Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks reported to the cabinet on the state of preparations, and his recommendations were approved, but the establishment of a volunteer service was deferred.
Formation
The OMS had its public origins in the letters page of The Times, where many were calling for the formation of a volunteer organisation to take over the jobs of striking workers, in the event of a general strike, which was widely feared by the conservative establishment at the time, as part of a communist plot. The same page was used on 25 September 1925 by the Home Secretary to announce the formation of just such a group, the new OMS. Nevertheless, he admitted, on 1 October, that he had known of its inauguration for many weeks and that its promoters had consulted him. The government had no objection to it.
The organisation, to be run by a committee chaired by Lord Hardinge, was to have branches in every city and to recruit volunteers in five classes, four of which were based on the men's fitness and age. The fifth was for women, who were to be set to work only where they could avoid any "rough handling". Lord Jellicoe and other top military men sat on the committee, to give the OMS a military discipline and to instil public confidence in the group that such important figures were involved.
The organisation was, however, explicitly non-political. British Fascists were barred from joining unless they changed their name, abandoned their military structure and changed their manifesto. That led to a split in the British Fascists, with several leaders leaving to become the loyalists, an organisation that would be absorbed into OMS. Still, it showed apparent independence by employing nobody in government service.
Reaction
Whilst the scheme was enthusiastically supported by the right-wing Daily Mail it was denounced as a form of fascism not only by the Communist Party of Great Britain but also by the anti-communist Daily Express, which compared the OMS to the Ku Klux Klan and the Blackshirts. An early speech by one of the group's leaders was deemed unfit for broadcast by the BBC, which feared that it would compromise their impartiality.
Brigadier-General William Horwood, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police also refused to work with what he believed to be a fascist organisation, and by the end of 1925 the government had informed General Sir Robert McCalmont that in the event of any general strike, the OMS would be disbanded and its membership taken over entirely by the government.
Still, the OMS had the confidence of some provincial police forces and branches of the Conservative Party despite its inauspicious start.
Development
The development of OMS was not regarded as wholly favourable by some government officials, who were concerned at rumours that OMS agents were expecting to supplant official organisations in the event of an emergency. The junior ministers William Mitchell-Thomson and J.C.C. Davidson met the leaders of OMS, who agreed not to establish branches where there were local objections, but to encourage unofficial contacts between the local officials. OMS would concentrate on recruiting lorry drivers rather than those more likely to be employed by local authorities.
OMS was short of funds by March 1926, having failed to gain the commercial backing that it hoped. It also lacked the means to train volunteers.