18 January 1934: the general strike and the night in Marinha Grande

Late on the night of Wednesday 17 January 1934, men gathered in a shed at Casal Galego, a hamlet on the edge of Marinha Grande. The historian Maria de Fátima Patriarca counts at least 59 of them. Weapons were handed out, along with axes and saws for felling pine trees across the roads. The men were split into groups, each with a target, and each group's leader wore a red armband.2 sources2 sources

Three groups went out to block the roads to Leiria and Vieira de Leiria and the railway, and telephone and telegraph poles came down. Three more went into the town. At about three o'clock a pistol shot gave the signal. A tailor known as Amarante, the local communist organiser, later said he fired it.2 sources2 sources

The post office was taken quickly. The post of the Republican National Guard (GNR), the country's rural gendarmerie, was harder: the attackers threw bombs, there was shooting, and then António Guerra, a shop clerk, talked to the sergeant by telephone. At about five the post's 12 guards gave up their weapons. They were walked to the national glass factory and locked in, unharmed.2 sources2 sources

For an hour or so the town belonged to the insurgents. They opened up the glassworkers' union building and threw a bomb at the house of the industrialist Emílio Galo. Most of them simply went home to eat. At six the first shots came from police who had come out from Leiria, and by nine the rebels were scattering into the pine forest in groups of four or five.2 sources2 sources

That night in Marinha Grande became the best-known episode of the 18 January general strike. Of the three places where the movement had real support, it involved the fewest workers and was the quickest to be broken.1 source1 source

Portugal had been a dictatorship since a military coup in 1926. In 1933 a constitution drafted by António de Oliveira Salazar, the head of government, founded the Estado Novo, or New State. It was approved by a plebiscite in which abstentions counted as votes in favour, and it left freedom of expression, assembly and association to be regulated by special laws.2 sources2 sources

The special laws for workers came on 23 September 1933. A single issue of the official gazette carried six decree-laws, led by the National Labour Statute (Decree-Law 23:048). Its article 9 made it a punishable act for workers to stop or disrupt economic activity to win better conditions, and for employers to do so without good reason. Decree-Law 23:050 created state-approved “national unions”. The old workers' associations had until 31 December 1933 to adopt approved statutes; those that did not would lose recognition and be dissolved.1 source1 source

The regime also built the tools to enforce the new order. A political police, the PVDE (State Surveillance and Defence Police), was created on 29 August 1933. A decree of 6 November 1933 treated strikes as rebellion and sent them to special military tribunals. In late November it arrested republican officers suspected of plotting a military rising and deported about 150 of its most dangerous opponents to Angra do Heroísmo, in the Azores.3 sources3 sources

Rather than accept the new system, the four labour currents of the day agreed, for once, on joint action. Their plan combined a general strike with sabotage of railways and telephone lines, bombs and armed attacks, and counted on a republican military rising that would strike at the centres of power at the same time.3 sources3 sources

The police were waiting. Mário Castelhano, the railway clerk who led the CGT, was arrested on 14 January and held in the military prison at Trafaria, accused of preparing the strike in Sines and making weapons for Marinha Grande. On 7 January police had already seized bombs and arrested militants at São Bartolomeu de Messines, near Silves, and on the night of 17 January the government took precautions across the country.2 sources2 sources

The strike failed first in Lisbon, where most workers ignored the call. The capital saw scattered violence instead: a bomb at Poço do Bispo, the railway cut at Xabregas and a passenger train derailed near Póvoa de Santa Iria. In Coimbra a bomb at the power station put out the lights. Telephone lines were cut around Leiria, there were explosions on the line at Martingança, sabotage near Tunes in the Algarve and the road between Vila Boim and Terrugem, near Elvas, blocked.3 sources3 sources

Almada, across the Tagus from Lisbon, was the opposite of Marinha Grande. The only violence was a cut telephone line and a sabotaged submarine cable between Trafaria and Porto Brandão. But the whole industrial workforce of the municipality stopped: cork workers, millers, dockers and 500 men building the Alfeite naval arsenal. Thirty GNR troopers and 40 sailors patrolled the streets. When the cork workers and millers stayed out on the 19th, 24 of the municipality's union leaders were arrested; the strikers went back only on the 20th.1 source1 source

In Silves, an Algarve town with a thousand or so cork workers, the 7 a.m. train was the signal. When it failed to arrive, the leaders took it to mean that the railwaymen had struck and Lisbon had risen, and the cork factories stopped to a man. Strikers occupied their dissolved association's hall and raised a red flag. The train pulled in hours late, and the plan to attack the GNR post was dropped. The strike held all day and partly on the 19th and 20th.1 source1 source

Marinha Grande had about 9,000 inhabitants and 2,000 glassworkers. Its glass industry had been hit hard by the depression of the early 1930s, and the town had a long record of strikes. Communist cells had spread through the factories only in the months before the revolt; a prison record shows there was still no cell in the glassworkers' union at the end of September 1933.3 sources3 sources

How long the town was held depends on who tells it. Patriarca, working from official telegrams and the press, gives about an hour of calm control, from the GNR surrender at five to the first police shots at six. A regime-friendly Leiria weekly, O Mensageiro, wrote that the town had been “at the mercy of the rebels” for two hours. The communist leader interviewed in O Proletário that spring said the town was theirs from five and that troops entered only at about eleven.3 sources3 sources

The numbers were modest. Newspapers of the time put the insurgents at 150 to 200, and estimates in government papers ranged from 150 to 300. Only four people were wounded, two on each side, and nobody was killed. When the military reopened the factories the next morning and asked employers for lists of absentees, nine firms reported 67 missing workers, some of them already in jail or in hiding. As Patriarca puts it, there was no strike in Marinha Grande, on the 18th or the 19th.2 sources2 sources

Within hours the government decided what 18 January had been. The press, censored but allowed to cover the story at length, ran it on the front page for four days. The correspondent in Marinha Grande called the rebels communists almost line by line, while reports from Coimbra, Barreiro, Almada and Silves never gave the strikers a political label. A photograph of the prisoners now in the national archives is captioned as showing men who had taken part in the “communist uprising of Marinha Grande”.2 sources2 sources

The Communist Party, then a small group, accepted the label gladly. Its secretariat called Marinha Grande “a completely positive case of proletarian action” and blamed the CGT, the socialists and the autonomous unions for the bombings and for the strike's failure to spread. The CGT, which had staked its whole organisation on the strike, answered defensively and never told its own story of Almada and Silves.2 sources2 sources

Late on 18 January the Interior Minister read out a note from Salazar: “Now, naturally, the sanctions follow.” The next evening the Council of Ministers spelled them out. Employers in Marinha Grande, Almada and Silves were told not to take back anyone who had stayed away during the strike. Strikers as well as leaders would face the special military tribunals, and the main organisers would be shipped within days to a “concentration camp” to be set up at the mouth of the Cunene, in southern Angola.1 source1 source

Some of this proved impossible. The Silves cork firms, unable or unwilling to replace a thousand strikers, closed their factories on 22 January; three days later 23 industrialists employing 878 people petitioned the minister, and the government gave way in early March. In Almada, close to the capital, the order to sack strikers was never enforced. The tribunals in the end tried only leaders, militants and activists.1 source1 source

PVDE agents questioned the Marinha Grande prisoners in Leiria and sent them on to Lisbon by lorry. Joaquim Gomes, a teenage glassworkers' activist already in jail at the time, recalled seventy years later that men came back from interrogation recognisable only by their clothes. The PVDE then sent its case files to the Special Military Tribunal, which tried the Marinha Grande men in February and March.3 sources3 sources

Some of the convicted men were sent to Angra do Heroísmo, on Terceira island. A survey by URAP, an association of anti-fascist veterans, counts about 500 political prisoners held there during the dictatorship, in the Fortress of São João Baptista and a smaller fort, and says Marinha Grande glassworkers were probably among the first. Castelhano reached the fortress on 8 September 1934. In October 1936 he and others were moved to the new camp at Tarrafal, in Cape Verde: an overseas camp of the kind the government had promised in January 1934, though not in Angola.4 sources4 sources

Lisboeta's article on Tarrafal follows them there. The Museu do Aljube names ten participants in 18 January who died in that camp, among them Castelhano in 1940 and the communist leader Bento Gonçalves in 1942. Two were from Marinha Grande: the glassworker Augusto Costa, who died in September 1937, and António Guerra, who died in December 1948.4 sources4 sources

The strike ended half a century of free trade unionism in Portugal. The CGT lost almost all its leaders and the anarcho-syndicalists lost their hold on the labour movement, while the Communist Party, rebuilt within months in the Marinha Grande factories, became the one permanent organisation of the opposition. Ten days after the strike, on 28 January, Salazar told a rally in Lisbon that communism was “the great heresy of our age”.3 sources3 sources

Marinha Grande itself did not forget. While prisoners' families went without wages, young people collected money at factory gates for them. After 25 April 1974 the Communist Party made the town the centre of public commemorations. Patriarca wrote that these rested on the canonical version, the one the main evening news repeated on the anniversary in 1993: a communist revolt that failed everywhere except Marinha Grande.2 sources2 sources

In 1984, fifty years on, the town unveiled a monument to the revolt by the local sculptor Joaquim Correia, placed in the middle of the Rotunda do Vidreiro. In 2021 the council planned to restore it and move it a short distance, to the site the mayor said the sculptor had intended. Councillors of the communist-led CDU coalition and the glassworkers' union opposed the move. On the anniversary the union, the STIV, lays flowers on the graves of the 1934 prisoners in the cemeteries of Casal Galego and Marinha Grande and holds a rally by the monument.3 sources3 sources