A People's History of Scotland (16 page)

The Tyneside plant paid higher wages, John Tennant claimed this was because coal was cheaper there, but the real reason was that in Glasgow there was an abundant supply of cheap labour, with migrants from Ireland and rural areas crowding into slums in Garngad, beside the St Rollox works.

John's son, Charles Tennant II, took the business to new, giddy heights. His policy was to keep wages at rock bottom, and in Garngad there was a stready supply of cheap unskilled labour to be found. But his Tyneside works were unionised, and so too was Hallside Steel Works in Lanarkshire, and at both he was not always able to pay wages as low as he would have liked. A visitor to the Tennant household in 1897 noted, ‘my host is possessed by an almost maniacal hatred of trades unions and all their works.'
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Despite this, Tennant continued the family's commitment to the Liberal Party, serving as a Glasgow MP from 1877 to 1880 and then representing Peebles and Selkirk. By the start of the twentieth century, however, he was a Tory in all but name, supporting Joseph Chamberlain's unsuccessful campaign to end free trade and to impose import controls. This was despite one of his daughters marrying Herbert Asquith, a future Liberal prime minister. His biography mirrored those of much of the British bourgeoisie, worried by the fact Britain had been overtaken industrially by the USA and Germany, and fearful of working-class discontent. He died in 1906 with a fortune of more than £3 million, a half-billionaire in today's terms.
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Scottish cities were small enough to ensure constant tension. The upper classes, with their servants, inhabited a world of country estates for the very wealthy and seaside homes for the middle classes, a million miles away from the world of the workers, despite living together cheek by jowl in town. Hyndland in the west of Glasgow peered down on Partick and across the river on Govan. In Edinburgh it was a short walk from Morningside or Newington across the Meadows to slum housing, the worst of which was in the Cowgate.

Just how different their lives were was spelled out by a Royal Commission in 1840 that investigated the appalling conditions in Scotland's pits. Among the places its members visited was Liberton, then a mining village south of Edinburgh, where the commission reported children were working down the mine: Janet Cumming, aged eleven, told how she works ‘with father, have done for two years. Father gangs at two in the morning. I gang with the women at five and come up at five at night, work all night Friday and come away at five in the day.'

For Agnes Reid, aged fourteen, things were still worse: ‘I bear coal
on my back. I do not know the exact weight, but it is something more than a hundredweight. It is very sore work and makes me cry and few lassies like it … but I suppose father needs me …'

William Woods at fourteen was probably already falling victim to silicosis: ‘I have been three years below. I gang at three in the morning and return at about six. It is no very good work, and the sore labour makes me feel very ill and fatigued. It injures my breath.'
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Two years later the Children's Employment Commission produced a report with interviews it had carried out. At a pit outside Edinburgh a twelve-year-old boy told them:

I have worked two years at Sheriffhall, and go below at two or three in the morning, and hew til six at night; after that I fill and put the carts on the rails to the pit bottom … The pit I work in is very wet; we used to fall asleep; am kept awake now. It is most terrible work; and I am wrought in a thirty inch seam, and am obliged to twist myself up to work on my side; this is every day work except Friday, when I go down at twelve at night, and come up at twelve to noon.
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The Mines Act of 1845, which followed the commission's work, banned women and girls from underground labour and set an age limit of ten years for boys.

From the 1830s on, Coatbridge in the Monklands was at the centre of the new, hot-blast iron industry, with six ironworks and fifty blast furnaces, reliant on mining coal and ironstone. This ‘black country' was seen as Scotland's Wild West. Between 1831 and 1841 the working class in the area doubled to 40,000. The next year, when Lanarkshire coal and ironstone owners tried to impose wage cuts, there were strikes at 140 pits in the Airdrie and Coatbridge area alone, with 8,000 out of 10,000 miners taking part across the county.

The self-taught poet Janet Hamilton wrote this verse, ‘Oor Location', describing her home town, Coatbridge, in the 1850s:

In 1858, the newly formed Glasgow Trades Council was addressed by Alexander McDonald, who six years before had founded the Scottish Miners' Association: ‘He said that 1600 miners were killed every year, leaving 700 widows. He added that 10,000 men were unfit for employment because of accidents in the mines. Mr McDonald mentioned cases of boys working in the mines from two am to seven pm.'
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The worst mining accident in Scotland was on 22 October 1877, when an explosion rocked the Blantyre mine in Lanarkshire, killing 209 men. Ninety-two families, with a total of 250 children, were left without a father.
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Showing no pity the pit owners, Dixon's, took out eviction notices on thirty-four widows still living in company-owned cottages six months after the disaster. Two weeks later, on 28 May 1878, they were evicted.
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This traditional song, ‘Blantyre Explosion', gained international fame in 1985 when the Irish singer and writer Christy Moore recorded it (although earlier still, Ewan MacColl had done the same):

Sobbing and sighing, at last she did answer,

‘Johnny Murphy, kind sir, was my true lover's name.

Twenty-one years of age, full of youth and good-looking,

to work down the mine of High Blantyre he came.

The wedding was fixed, all the guests were invited

that calm summer's evening my Johnny was slain.

The explosion was heard, all the women and children,

with pale anxious faces made haste to the mine.

When the truth was made known the hills rang with their mourning.

Two hundred and ten young miners were slain.

Now children and wives and sweethearts and brothers,

that Blantyre explosion they'll never forget.

And all you young miners who hear my sad story,

shed a tear for the victims who were laid to their rest.'

Housing was awful for the majority of the people of Glasgow. The first real census to record details, in 1861, found 34 percent of the population lived in a single room, 37 percent in just two rooms. Two-thirds of the population lived in a single end or a ‘but-and-ben', a two-room cottage.
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Twenty years later, a quarter of Glasgow's citizens still lived in such cramped conditions, and 50 percent in a room and kitchen.
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In 1892, the Royal Commission on Labour was told of the houses provided by William Dixon's mining company at Auchenraith. Forty-two single-room and forty-one twin-room houses provided accommodation for 492 people: ‘There were no wash houses or coal cellars (coals were kept under the bed): there was an open sewer behind, with twelve doorless “hen roost privies” (so called because you could not sit down): there were two drinking fountains.'
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By 1911, half of all Scots still lived in one- or two-bedroom homes. In England and Wales the figure was 7 percent.
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Among those who paid the price were the newborn. Scottish infant mortality was 118 per 1,000 births in 1855–59, rose to 130 in 1895–99 and still stood at 122 in 1900–04. In 1908, the Glasgow socialist John Wheatley published an index of infant mortality across the city and argued: ‘You may see at a glance that the infant death-rate in working-class wards is three, four and almost five times higher than in Kelvinside [in the affluent West End].'
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All of this explains why at the height of Scottish capitalism the country was haemorrhaging people. Between 1830 and 1914 nearly two million emigrated overseas, with another 600,000 moving south of the border.
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A Bastion of Liberalism

The 1832 Reform Bill increased the Scots electorate from around 4,500 to 65,000. Landlords were able to exploit loopholes and to use
their control to sway the vote. Reform led to the dominance of the Liberals (as the Whigs were now known). Between 1831 and 1919, Edinburgh was a Liberal stronghold, not returning a single Tory MP in all that time. It remained so during the crisis over Irish Home Rule in 1886, which led to a party split in Glasgow, and it even bestowed the freedom of the city on the Irish nationalist Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell.
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Between 1832 and 1886 the voters of Glasgow only once returned a Tory MP.
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By 1843, the Church of Scotland had gone through a ten-year conflict that led to a third of its ministers marching out of the General Assembly to form the Free Church of Scotland. At issue was the right of patrons, landowners or, as in 30 percent of parishes, the government, to select the parish minister. The leader of the breakaway sect, Thomas Chambers, was politically conservative but objected to such interference, championing the right of presbyteries to elect their own ministers, and kirk control of education and poor relief.

In rural areas, especially the Highlands, the aristocracy blocked the new church from building places of worship, and the Liberal press made hay of this. In the burghs, middle-class Free Church members rallied to the Liberal Party, strengthening its hold there. In reality, however, the split weakened the hold of the churches, and allowed the state to take control of schools.

Trade unions were weak, largely confined to male skilled workers, and clung to the Liberal Party. So, for example, the miners' unions always urged its members to vote Liberal. In Edinburgh, from 1870 until they lost the fight in 1885, the Trades Council allied with sections of the city's lower middle class to oppose attempts by the rich and powerful to convert George Heriot's Hospital, which had been endowed by James VI's watchmaker in order to educate the poor, into the select, fee-paying school it remains to this day.
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The crisis over Gladstone's Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886, however, saw the Liberals shed the support of those who wanted no concessions to Irish nationalism and allowed the breakaway Liberal Unionists to win a majority of Scottish parliamentary seats, including every seat in Glasgow.
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After a further Home Rule crisis in the
1890s, the Liberal Unionists and the Tories would eventually unite, with the Conservatives using the name Unionist on the ballot and election material until long after World War II.

Sectarianism: A Blight on Scottish Society

Religious sectarianism has blighted Scottish society for more than two centuries. Today its main expression is in the rivalry between the two main Glasgow football teams, Celtic, identified with the Catholic population, and Rangers, seen as the Protestant team. In the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century sectarianism was expressed in violence on the streets and in the close links developed between the Protestant Orange Order and the Tories in the west of Scotland.

Sectarianism was rooted in the arrival of Irish Catholic immigrants in the nineteenth century; before that the two countries had had a rich history of exchange, with Scotland benefitting most. However, the Great Famine of the 1840s increased immigration into the west of Scotland, West Lothian, Fife and Dundee, where industrialisation was already under way. By 1852, the Irish in Edinburgh reached a peak, numbering 12,514 in 1851, 4.5 percent of the city's population. They were concentrated in the Grassmarket, the Cowgate, St Mary's Wynd and Leith Wynd in the Old Town, and their main jobs were labouring, dealing in old clothes, scavenging and street lighting.
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By 1851, 7.2 percent of Scotland's population was Irish, compared with 2.9 percent in England and Wales.
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The main Irish concentration was in the west and Dundee. There was antagonism towards the immigrants, particularly in the Lanarkshire coalfields, where they were believed to drive down wages by working for less pay. Yet even before the Famine, sectarian violence was in evidence. The organisation that personified anti-Catholic bigotry was the Orange Order. Its first Orange Lodge in Scotland seems to have been formed in Maybole in 1799 by returning members of the Ayrshire and Wigtownshire Militia, who had served in Ireland suppressing the United Irishmen's rebellion of the previous year.

Serious rioting broke out in 1831 in Girvan when armed Orangemen broke up a reform march in the town. The
Glasgow Herald
reported an anti-Catholic riot in Airdrie in July 1835 and pointed out the sympathetic attitude of the police: ‘The crowd seemed to have the tacit support of the local authorities. When the crowd attacked the home of a Protestant by mistake, the head of the Airdrie police merely pointed out the error to them, but made no effort to dissuade them. One of the burgh magistrates was also reported to be in the midst of the mob.'
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Immigration preceded the 1846–51 Irish famine as a result of the collapse of native industry. However, the arrival of a significant Irish immigrant population was the driving force behind Orangeism. Since the Reformation, this had been a Protestant and indeed Calvinist state, with pockets of Catholicism only in the Highlands and Islands. The 1841 census showed 126,321 people of Irish birth in Scotland, some 5 percent of the population (16 percent in Glasgow). Ten years later the number of children born in Scotland to Irish immigrants totalled 207,367, including 18 percent of Glasgow's population.
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