A People's History of Scotland (13 page)

Meanwhile, in Glasgow a band led by Andrew Harvie assembled in Anderston, aiming at seizing the Carron Iron Works, with its stock of cannon and ammunition. They marched along the Forth and Clyde Canal and at Condorrat were joined by another group, led by John Baird. Passing through Castlecary, the band was spotted by a soldier who warned the garrison at Kilsyth, which moved to intercept the radicals, catching them at Bonnymuir outside Bonnybridge. In the ensuing engagement, four of the radicals were wounded before all forty-seven were captured. They were armed with just five muskets, two pistols and pikes.

The government in London demanded a special commission be set up to try the rebels under English law, so they could face the charge of high treason. Eighty-eight people were found guilty, most being sentenced to transportation and three, Hardie, Baird and James Wilson, to execution. There was little or no evidence against the latter, but he was a thorn in the side of the authorities, who were glad to see him removed. When the public executioner who cut off the dead man's head held it up, shouting ‘the head of a traitor', from the crowd came cries of murder. The body was then deposited in a common grave, but his family rescued it and returned it to Strathaven. Elsewhere, the call for a strike and national uprising found strong support that April. On 2 April a general strike took place in Paisley and a mass meeting was held at Maxwelltown to decide how to respond to any attempt by the authorities to intervene. Groups were sent to acquire arms from the homes of landowners, and in the process one striker was shot dead. The next day, Paisley was placed under military occupation, and troops went from house to house searching for arms and to arrest whichever strike leaders they could find.
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The defeat that followed was due to ‘poor planning, the failure of English radicals to respond and the loyalty of the Scottish propertied classes and the military'.
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For a long time it was believed the authors of the posters proclaiming the uprising were agents provocateurs, but in 1999 T. M. Devine argued that the evidence indicated that they were written by three weavers from Parkhead in Glasgow, rather than spies.
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The impact of such unrest was felt even in rural Scotland. In 1820, Alexander Somerville, a schoolboy in Berwickshire, and his schoolmates played a game of militia versus radicals, with the better-off being the militia. Somerville, a radical, was sentenced to be hanged. Perhaps because of that he wrote sympathetically about the radicals: ‘They were people who complained that the country was not governed as it should be, that the laws were not made by those that should have made the laws. They were grieved to be excluded from voting for members of parliament, and they felt at the same time that food was dear, wages low and taxation very high … the great body of the radicals was composed of honest working men.'
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The Radical War of 1820, as it became known, and the preceding social unrest marked the emergence of the working class as an organised social force in Scotland, and one that, in however a rudimentary form, had already employed the highest forms of class struggle: a general strike and an attempt at armed insurrection. Yet this was also the last gasp of the insurrectionary tradition, which had existed from 1789 onward. In the immediate aftermath, attention switched to securing parliamentary reform and the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, which was blocked by the Tories with their majority in the House of Lords – despite it being a very modest step extending the vote to £10 tenants in the burghs, and £10 owners (only males, of course) in the counties.

The debate that preceded the first Reform Bill brought rioting to Edinburgh's New Town. Fearing that the legislation might be blocked, a crowd of 10,000 gathered in the High Street. Supporters of reform had ‘illuminated' their windows by lighting candles. Noting the lack of light in the windows of the New Town, the crowd moved down there, smashing the windows of the Lord Provost and touring the streets, breaking unlit windows and chanting, ‘Up with the Reform light, down with Tory darkness'.
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In Glasgow, 100,000 people marched in support of this Whig measure.

When the House of Lords kicked out the bill in 1831, things took a more serious turn. In Lanark, the Tories were attacked at the hustings and, after the Riot Act was read, soldiers charged the crowd. In Hawick, a hundred weavers gave Walter Scott a rough welcome;
and in Rothesay, Lady Bute was stoned as she drove in her carriage. (Thomas Johnston points out the instigator as a Whig mill owner who was happy to employ children under five.) In May 1832, workers across Glasgow struck and 120,000 marched with banners saying ‘Liberty or Death' and ‘Better to die in a good cause than live in slavery'.
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In Perth, 7,000 people, described in contemporary accounts as being overwhelmingly working class, marched through the town. There was no violence but it was also a show of strength that frightened the local aristocracy and bourgeoisie.
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When the reforms were passed and finally received royal assent from a reluctant William IV, it was discovered that property qualifications effectively barred the working class from having the vote. This reality led to further radicalisation and Chartism. Neither did the passing of the Reform Act change the daily reality of the relationship between employers and workers, even though many of the employers had supported the bill, and had even joined demonstrations in its support. When it came to dealing with their own workers, they remained ruthless. Consequently, by 1833 the West of Scotland Female Powerloom Weavers Association could boast 6,000 members.
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The confidence of the women and the solidarity between the male mechanics (tenters) and the power-loom weavers is illustrated by the following incident in Glasgow. A male handloom weaver, James Hewit, took a job at Mr Broughton's factory. The majority of the power-loom weavers were women and they were angered that Hewit had accepted wages two shillings less than the union rate. On a late, dark December afternoon the gas lights suddenly went out on the factory floor. A crowd of women weavers emerged from the dark to jeer at Hewit and by force of numbers ushered him into a dark corridor where the waiting Mary Morrie struck him with her ‘loom semple'. A manager rushed in and immediately sacked two women he regarded as ringleaders, Janet Cain and Sarah Quin, but Cain just ‘shook her fist in [Hewit's] face and called him all the old buggers she could think of – said it was he who was the cause of this and if God spared her she would be revenged on him'.
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Cain was as good as her word. When Hewit left work that night he was surrounded by a crowd of women, and Cain and Quin set about him, with the former stabbing him in the eye with her powerloom hook.

In 1833, employers launched a full-scale assault on the unions. The masters of calico printing introduced women and children together with impoverished hand-loom weavers to replace higher-paid male workers. They underestimated the solidarity of the local communities and the determination of the existing workforce, which went on strike. When scabs tried to start work at Kelvindock (in Maryhill, Glasgow), women power-loom weavers from a neighbouring factory joined the strikers, all of whom lived in nearby Botany Row (also known as Reform Row), and stoned them. Eventually the dispute was resolved and the male workers accepted their female counterparts.
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The cotton spinners were also well organised in the city, but by 1837 demand was falling and employers cut wages. The Glasgow Cotton Spinners Union called a strike and the employers began a lockout. The dispute was a violent one, and the spinners' leaders were arrested and stood trial for murder and conspiracy. Five of them were sentenced to transportation after being found guilty of lesser charges. After three weeks, funds were exhausted and the union said they would accept the wage cuts and return to work. But the employers said wages would now be cut by 40 percent. The strike continued, sustained by regular collections and donations from Manchester and the Lancashire cotton industry.
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The employers then recruited large numbers of scabs, or ‘nobs', housed inside the factories to avoid pickets. One did leave to go shopping with his wife in the city centre in July 1837, and was waylaid by strike supporters and shot from behind, dying shortly afterwards from his wounds. A reward of £600 was offered for the arrest of the guilty men, and consequently two former spinners went to the notoriously anti-strike Sheriff of Lanarkshire, who, acting on their claims, issued arrest warrants for the entire strike committee. A few days later the man reputed to be the killer was arrested. He and four members of the union executive were brought to trial in
Edinburgh in January 1838. The prosecution was carried out by Sheriff Archibald Alison, a Tory who regarded unions as a ‘moral pestilence' and believed Glasgow was in the grip of ‘insurrectionary fever.' He could provide no evidence associating the men with the killing, but that did not stop the Whig judge, Lord Cockburn, from sentencing them to seven years' transportation.
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Their trial and the campaign to secure their return to Scotland coincided with the launch in London and Birmingham that year of the People's Charter and its six demands – universal suffrage, and end to property qualifications, a secret ballot, equal electoral constituencies, payment of MPs and annual parliaments. The case of the Glasgow cotton spinners became a major factor in the Chartists developing a national profile across Britain. The defeat of the strike encouraged Scottish workers to look to political change, through Chartism. The effect of its defeat, rising unemployment, attacks on the unions and the abundance of cheap labour, as a consequence of the Highland Clearances and Irish Famine, not only undercut industrial militancy, but also helped ensure the timidity of Scottish Chartism.

Chartism in Scotland

As the cotton spinners were being deported to Australia, the first of the more famous Tolpuddle Martyrs were returning from their sojourn abroad. They addressed meetings in support of the Glasgow spinners along with the Chartist leaders Feargus O'Connor, Augustus Beaumont and Bronterre O'Brien. The Irish champion of Catholic emancipation, Daniel O'Connell, formerly regarded with favour by British radicals, chose the Glasgow case as a way of attacking trade unions, causing great bitterness.
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In Glasgow itself, it was claimed that 200,000 people attended a Chartist rally in support of the strikers in May 1838, which helped the Chartists establish themselves in Scotland.

A Newcastle Chartist broadsheet published the following:

The historian W. Hamish Fraser stresses the significance of the cotton spinners' strike in 1837:

… the full weight of the united capitalism, plus the state, was brought to bear to smash the hand mulespinners' union. It was the end of an era … Like the miners' strike of 1984–85, the implications of the defeat of the spinners went far beyond their own union. It had great symbolic importance, marking the defeat and break up of an organisation that, for two decades, had been the most tightly knit and dynamic in Scottish society. It was a deterrent to vigorous action.
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In his history of Chartism in Britain, John Charlton contrasts Chartism in Scotland, ‘marked, largely, by its moderation' and Chartism in Wales, which had an insurrectionary character.
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This was by no means because of lack of support. The cotton weavers of Glasgow, the shawl weavers of Paisley and the linen and jute weavers of Dundee gave great support to Chartism. One report from Dunfermline said: ‘Among the weavers there are 1800 who pay for newspapers – those
go into the workshops and are read by all the men and boys in them so that a man who does not read newspapers is rarely met with …'
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In Aberdeen, 10,000 people attended a Chartist rally in August 1838 and the city provided more than 8,500 signatures for the first national petition, which was presented to Parliament, and rejected, that year.
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Summer 1842 saw the first general strike in world history. Its storm centre was north-west England but it spread to Scotland, and Dundee in particular, where local Chartists provided leadership. In August, a public meeting demanded that wages, which had been cut due to an economic downturn, be returned to their 1839 level. Shortly afterwards a hundred delegates from forty-six of the town's fifty-one textile mills agreed to strike for the People's Charter. The vote was put to a mass meeting of up to 14,000 on Magdalene Green the next day, and agreed.

In response, at Baxter's in Maxwelltown, twenty-four weavers were told by the owner he would give them a rise when the other owners did, and that they should leave their looms under his lock and key. They struck immediately. At Ferguson's, the owner expressed sympathy but refused any rise. The sixty-one weavers there declared they were ‘ready to strike for the Charter, but not for wages'. At Blaikie's, the seventy-five men similarly said they would ‘not identify themselves with the movement for wages but turn out for political privileges'. At Walker's Mill the twenty-nine workers were striking for the Charter, the same at Johnson's Lower Factory, while the seventy workers at Steel and Hutton wanted ‘to go full hog, but not for wages'.
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