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.
It thus established a Royal Commission and provided a subsidy to enable the mineowners to maintain the miners' existing wages and hours of work.
[1][2] 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.
[5] 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.
[8] 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.
[9] 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.
[15] The group had some 100,000 members registered at the commencement of the strike, but the middle-class background of many of its volunteers meant that they often proved wholly unsuited to the manual work, such as the running railways and ports.
[18] The British Fascisti (BF), which maintained transport and communications units to be used in the event of a strike, provided an organisational structure for the OMS, but there was uncertainty at government level about allowing BF members to join the OMS given fears about their potentially revolutionary nature.
[22] The OMS can in some ways be compared to 1970s movements such as Civil Assistance, which played on widespread public fear of trade union militancy.