A People's History of Scotland (17 page)

Sectarianism did not take root everywhere. By 1851 Dundee had a higher proportion of Irish-born residents, 18.9 percent, than Glasgow. The bulk of these were women, attracted to work in the jute mills, and few were from Ulster. The Irish population there was quicker to join the labour movement, helping elect two Labour MPs in 1906, and in unionising the jute mills prior to World War I.
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Reinforced by Protestant immigrants from the north of Ireland, more Orange Lodges were set up in Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Inverclyde, and were involved in brawls and riots with immigrant Catholic Irish, but were seen as ‘a “party” or fighting society and certainly not as a credible organisational mechanism for propagating militant Protestantism'.
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In 1852, when anti-Irish mobs took over the streets of Greenock, attacking Irish homes, a man charged with trying to kill a Catholic policeman with a knife and pistol received a sixty-day sentence, but the central government intervened to suspend the local magistrates and town clerk.
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In 1854, miners in Airdrie struck, demanding the removal of the Irish.
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A quarter of the Irish in Glasgow by the 1860s were Protestants from Ulster. Until 1860, Glasgow had no Orange Lodge, but by 1878 there were more than a hundred in the city.
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The Ulster-born Robert Gault, superintendent of the Free Church Anti-Popish Mission, was the first clergymen to promote the Orange Order, being a regular speaker at its events.

What transformed the fortunes of the Orange Lodge were the Home Rule crises of 1886 and 1893, when the Liberal government was defeated in introducing devolution for Ireland, in the first case losing a vote in the House of Commons, in the second having it blocked by the House of Lords. The Liberal Party split, and as a result, in Scotland the Tories moved into an alliance with the Orange Lodge. This alliance worked well in opposing Gladstone and less well when the Tories gained office after his defeats.
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The President of the Glasgow Conservative Association, Colonel Archibald Campbell, later Lord Blythswood, hosted Orange social evenings as early as the 1870s, and likely joined the order, though he did not stoop to join processions.
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In 1875, there was rioting in Partick when an Irish nationalist procession was attacked. The Orange Lodge attempted to disassociate itself, claiming its members maintained discipline and had been asked by the police to assist them.
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Across Britain from the 1870s on, power was shifting with capitalists moving from the Liberal to the Tory Party. It was not simply because of Irish Home Rule, but because the Tories were recasting themselves as being aggressively pro-business. The reality of having been overtaken industrially by the USA, and with Germany coming up fast behind, sharpened the need to cut labour costs and to boost productivity. On Clydeside, the shipyard owner William Pearce and the ironmaster Sir James Bain stood for Parliament in 1880 as Tories, and enlisted the Orange Lodge in their support. By the 1892 Westminster general election, the Tory candidate in Bridgeton was an Orangeman, the candidate in the College constituency addressed a meeting of the Cowcaddens lodge and, in the election's aftermath, the West Renfrewshire candidate sent his sincere apologies that he could not attend the 12th of July celebrations. Sectarianism remained never far beneath the surface.

Scotland also offered a home to migrants fleeing the repression, anti-Semitism and poverty of the Tsar's Russian Empire. By 1901, Jews made up 24.7 percent of Scotland's foreign-born population. The main centre of the Jewish population was the Gorbals in Glasgow, with an estimated 6,500 living there in 1901, rising to 9,000 within eighteen years. As families began to prosper they started to leave the slums of the Gorbals behind, moving south towards Pollokshields.
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Dundee had a small Jewish community, beginning with German textile merchants who settled there in the 1840s. Four decades later it saw the arrival of Yiddish-speaking East European Jews, who were much poorer than the earlier arrivals. Most lived in the Hilltown area and made a living selling goods in the Green Market or the city arcade, running tearooms, lodgings, pawnbrokers and small shops selling groceries or clothes.
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Scotland was not free of anti-Semitism but it never took the organised form that it did in early twentieth-century Germany, nor did it experience anything like the Dreyfus Affair, which split France at that time. There is little or no record of specifically anti-Semitic organisations operating in Scotland in the nineteenth century.

From the 1880s, coal mine and iron work owners in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire began recruiting Lithuanian workers, promising them work and homes. Some 8,000 came, with 2,600 working in the mines by 1911. At first the ‘Poles', as they were known, were treated with hostility by their fellow workers, who feared, sometimes rightly, that they were being hired to cut wages. This happened in 1902–1903 at Thankerton, Tannochside and Neilsland in Lanarkshire. But many of the newcomers had fled political persecution, and the Lithuanians established their credentials as union members, playing a central role as as pickets in Lanarkshire and West Lothian during the 1912 national strike.

The Kailyard and the Reaction

The late nineteenth century was dominated by the rise of the ‘kailyard' – sugary, sentimental tales of rural Scotland – which appeared in journals such as
British Weekly
(subtitled ‘A Journal of Social and
Christian Progress') and the
Christian Leader
. J. M. Barrie, today best remembered as the author of
Peter Pan
, had success with three novels,
Auld Licht Idylls
(1888),
A Window in Thrums
(1890) and
The Little Minister
(1891), set in his mother's hometown, Kirriemuir (renamed Thrums in the books) and centring on the lives of family members belonging to the ‘Auld Lichts', a strict Calvinist sect to which Barrie's own grandfather had belonged.

Ian MacLaren's
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush
was published in 1894, and Queen Victoria and William Gladstone were among its readers. A year after publication it was the best-selling novel in the USA.
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Its opening line, ‘There grows a bonnie brier bush in our kail-yard', gave the name to this school of literature with its idealised view of Scottish rural life, so far from the reality of the slums of Clydeside or the miners' rows of the coalfields. By 1908 it had sold 256,000 copies and 485,000 in the USA. Maclaren was the pen name of the Rev. John Watson, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, and his stress on family values won praise from Christian evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic.

Others were keen to emulate such success, and a flood of kailyard novels and short stories followed, often written with the North American emigrant market in mind. For six years between 1891 and 1897, kailyard authors appeared in the American top-ten best-seller lists. S. R. Crockett's
The Lilac Sunbonnet
sold 10,000 copies on its first day of publication in 1894. Like Watson, Crockett was a Free Kirk minister.
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While Scotland was a success story, the working class was still not a force in Scottish society, and there was little need for the middle class to dwell on its social problems. It could instead comfort itself in this idyllic view of Scotland. This was also the image developed by the music hall artist Harry Lauder, who always appeared on stage in his kilt with a crooked walking stick, and who gained huge success in Britain and America, becoming the first artist to sell a million records. It would live on with sanitised versions of Burns poetry and songs in the
Sunday Post
and on the
White Heather Club
, a variety show which appeared on BBC TV between 1958 and 1968.

But this image was challenged at the time of its high point in popularity. In 1901, George Douglas Brown published
The House
with the Green Shutters
, focusing on the dark side of Calvinist Scotland, drink and all. Its representation of rural life is a million miles from that of Maclaren, Barrie and Crockett – ‘a brutal and bloody work' was its author's description. He added: ‘Every clachan in Scotland is a hot-bed of scandal and malevolence.'
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His Barbie has, on the surface, similarities to Drumtochty, where Maclaren set his stories, and indeed Brown starts by portraying Barbie in a kailyard way, but spiteful gossip and petty hatreds are never far from view. Barbie's population are the ‘Bodies', a group of malicious gossips who rub their hands in glee when things go wrong for their neighbours. The novel stands the test of time.

Class Warfare in Victorian Scotland

In the 1880s, wages in Scotland were lower than in England, with those in shipbuilding, iron and steel, cotton and brewing averaging £70 per annum compared with a UK average of £76. A report to the US Congress in 1872 described wages in Scotland as a ‘mere pittance'. Trade union membership was lower than south of the border. These were all factors in encouraging the American Singer Sewing Machine Company to build a plant in Clydebank in 1900.
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Employers were determined to try to keep trade unions cowed. One way of doing this was by employing women in the belief that they were immune to unionisation. Between 1871 and 1911, Dundee's jute works employed between two-thirds and three-quarters of Dundee's working women.
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The 1901 census showed that 31 percent of the female population of Dundee was employed in the city's mills and factories and, in the same year, ‘the proportion of married women who had remunerative occupations was exceptionally high' – at least 24.1 percent compared with 6.1 percent in Glasgow and 5.6 percent in Edinburgh.
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Nevertheless, women mill workers went on strike in Dundee in 1871, with one newspaper reporting: ‘Those on strike today paraded the streets in grotesque processions, bearing emblems of their trade suspended from poles, such as mats, jugs etc… . They also indulged
in shouting and singing … Besides this they held threatening demonstrations in front of the works where nobody had turned out.'
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In 1893 a general strike occurred across Dundee against a 5 percent reduction in wages. The strike had originated at the city's Tay Works, and according to the
Dundee Advertiser
, ‘it was here that the most violent scenes were witnessed':

On Monday at 6 o'clock … the employees who had agreed to stand by the resolution assembled outside the gates, and amused themselves by hooting at their fellow workers who felt it their duty to continue at their work. Before breakfast the strikers numbered 500, after breakfast 2,000 … It was observed that many of the younger workers, both male and female, had come provided with wooden laths. The 10 o'clock whistle began to sound and as the shrill notes were heard a few antistrikers made their way towards the entrance. They were immediately set upon by those armed with sticks, and ran the gauntlet under a shower of hearty blows. At the same time they were loudly hooted and subjected to remarks of a far from complimentary kind. In this way, about 100 workers, chiefly men found their way in.
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Elsewhere, Scottish coal was still hacked out of the ground by hand, and pit owners wanted to squeeze everything they could from their workforce. In 1870, the Fife miners won an eight-hour day after a stay-down strike (an occupation) at a time when demand for coal was high. But four years later the price of coal fell and with it came the usual wage cuts. The Scottish miners' union, led by Alexander McDonald, decided to target the pits of one company, Merry and Cunningham, having sufficient funds for strike pay to the men there and in the hope that a victorious strike would force other employers to reverse the cuts. But in response the employers enforced a lockout across the Motherwell and Wishaw district and began evictions in Logan Rows in Motherwell and Merry Square in Craigneuk. Miners at the Braidhurst pit near Logan Rows were warned by the owners not to take the evicted families in. For several weeks, a hundred families had to camp in Craigneuk. Hunger and cold beat them back to work.
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In 1879 and 1880 the miners fought back against wage cuts and for a reduction in working hours, and the strike lasted sixteen weeks. Once again the company used evictions and the law to impress its power on the workers. Two miners were sentenced to fourteen days' hard labour for intimidation, and three wives from Berryhill Rows, Wishaw, were jailed for two days for throwing stones and coal slag at scabs. A group of women from Camp Rows, Motherwell, were tried for harassment, but got off with fines and a warning. Eventually the union exhausted its funds and the strike folded.
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In Lanarkshire during the Caledonian Company rail strike of 1891, miners came to the aid of railworkers facing eviction from company houses. Fifty hussars were sent from Glasgow's Maryhill Barracks to maintain order, but failed to stop a crowd of 20,000 smashing a signal box and the glass roof of Motherwell Station.
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Scottish workers could fight hard, but politically they were undeveloped. Already, however, there were those determined to change that.

The Liberal Party dominated Scottish parliamentary politics in the second half of the nineteenth century, and unlike its counterpart south of the border, was not under any great pressure from the trade unions and working-class supporters that it had to select ‘Lib-Lab' candidates. In England and Wales the Liberals were prepared to select working-class candidates, usually trade union officials, often from mining areas where they could appeal to working-class voters concentrated in tight communities. But in Scotland, such was their dominance, the Liberals did not feel this to be necessary, which fed demands for independent working-class representation.