A People's History of Scotland (18 page)

Instead, a radical wing developed inside the Scottish Liberal Party, represented by John Ferguson, a Glasgow-based Irish Home Rule activist; the traveller and adventurer Cunninghame Graham, who was won over to socialism in the 1880s and helped form the Scottish Home Rule Association in 1886 when he was a Lancashire MP; and the socialist novelist ‘John Law' (Margaret Harkness), as well as Christian socialists.
⁶¹

One of this group was Kier Hardie, who had been involved in two failed strikes, in 1880 and 1881. In the second he had turned his home into a soup kitchen for strikers, but to no avail. In April
1888, Hardie contested the Mid-Lanark Westminster by-election. His vote was not impressive, polling 617 against his Liberal opponent, a Welsh barrister, who took 3,847. The intransigence of the mine owners, the anti-working-class views of the Scottish Liberal leadership and the failure of Gladstone's governments to bring any significant reform led Hardie and Graham to form the Scottish Labour Party four months later, following the government's use of troops to break a miners' strike in the previous year despite 20,000 people marching through Glasgow in its support.
⁶²
As the labour historian James J. Smyth argues, this move flowed from the weakness of the trade unions in Scotland: ‘It was the inability of Scottish trade unionists to make local Liberal Associations accept trade union or working class candidates that forced miners' leaders such as Keir Hardie into a reappraisal of the organisational link with Liberalism.'
⁶³

Five years later, the Scottish Labour Party had 150 delegates from twenty-four branches at its conference. Nonetheless, a year earlier it had played a central part in the formation in Bradford of the Independent Labour Party into which it would fold and from which today's Labour Party would emerge.
⁶⁴

Marxist ideas grew small roots too, with the likes of William Morris touring the country. Aberdeen developed a strong radical tradition, initially tied to the Liberals but moving left as that party was seen to ignore working-class issues. James Leatham, a compositor, helped set up a branch of the Scottish Land and Labour League in 1886, holding open-air meetings on a Sunday in Castlegate. At the first he told his audience: ‘Ye sing of your bonnie Scotland and your heather hills. It's not your bonnie Scotland. It's not your heather hills. It's the landlord's heather hills. And if you want enough earth to set a geranium in you've got to pinch it.'
⁶⁵

On his second outing Leatham was arrested, charged with preaching socialism on the Sabbath. A lively free-speech campaign helped ensure his acquittal.

In 1896 the national chair of the ILP, Tom Mann, stood in the parliamentary seat of Aberdeen North, securing 2,476 votes against his Liberal opponent's 2,909.
⁶⁶
David Howell observes: ‘Aberdeen had
been … a stronghold of New Unionism [the upsurge in the early 1890s among unskilled, formerly non-unionised workers] and much of Mann's keenest support seems to have come from the dock areas.'
⁶⁷

These albeit small political advances were all signs that something profound was about to change in the Scottish working class.

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REBEL LIVES: JAMES CONNOLLY

On 12 May 1916, James Connolly was driven into the prison yard of Dublin's Kilmainham Prison strapped to a chair; set down, he was shot dead by a British firing squad, despite the fact that he was already dying from his infected wounds. Beforehand he had smuggled out a statement through his daughter Nora, which said, ‘We went out to break the connection between this country and the British Empire, and to establish an Irish Republic.'
⁶⁸

Connolly was a socialist who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin at the head of the Irish Citizens Army because he wanted to strike a blow against World War I and imperialism. He regarded himself, rightly, as being Irish, but he was born in Edinburgh on 5 June 1868, at 107 Cowgate, in the heart of the capital's Irish ghetto. Both his father and mother were immigrants. He worked as a manure carter for Edinburgh Corporation; his mother had been a domestic servant. Leaving school, he could not find regular work and enlisted in the British Army, from which he probably deserted.

The politics of the Cowgate were those of the Irish National League, connected to the Home Rule Party in Ireland, and run by the local clergy. But James's elder brother, John, had joined the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF). It seems that James joined too, after visiting his brother in Dundee, where he was living, in 1889.

The city magistrates had attempted to ban the SDF from holding outdoor meetings in the city, but 20,000 people came to a rally in Albert Square from where they marched to High Street, into the area covered by the ban. Two leading SDFers were arrested. Undeterred, the left in the city refused to back down and instead the magistrates had to make a U-turn.
⁶⁹

The Edinburgh SDF contained some talented people: Andreas Scheu was an Austrian journalist, Leo Meillet had been mayor of a Paris commune, Rev. W. Glasse would translate the ‘Internationale'. The Irish-born John Lincoln MacMahon joined after forming a Republican Club in the city, and John Leslie, another Irish-Scot from the Cowgate, would help shape Connolly's view of the Irish situation.

The SDF's leadership in London was very dogmatic and sectarian, arguing that strikes were futile and that workers had to overthrow capitalism. The development of the New Unionism of the 1890s, the strikes that organised unskilled workers for the first time on any scale, met with their scorn, but in Edinburgh the SDF branch supported a strike by printers, backed the call for an eight-hour day and helped organise the 1890 May Day march.
⁷⁰

Three years later, Connolly had become the party secretary in the city. In a report to the SDF national paper,
Justice
, in August 1893, he described the population of Edinburgh as being ‘snobs, flunkeys, mashers, lawyers, students, middle class pensioners and dividend-hunters, even the working class portion of the population seemed to have imbibed the snobbish would-be-respectable spirit of their “betters” …' He reported that the SDF wanted to build membership in Leith because it was ‘pre-eminently an industrial centre'.
⁷¹

The eventual defeat of the New Unionism led many socialists to look to standing working-class candidates for Parliament as a means to advance. Connolly attempted, unsuccessfully, to get the Irish National League to switch from backing the Liberals to supporting Labour candidates, but he disliked the ILP leadership's attempts to seek alliances with the Liberals and to court the Irish Home Rule Party, and in 1894 resigned all his positions in the party to devote himself to the SDF.

In this he was influenced by the publication in 1894 of John Leslie's pamphlet ‘The Irish Question', in which he argued that the creation of an Irish parliament would not solve the country's ills. Even though he backed independence he argued that the economic grip of the landlords had to be broken, quoting the radical nationalist Fintan Lalor to good effect. Leslie was attacking the politics of the
Irish National League, which held that the workers of the Cowgate should unite with the publicans, priests and slum landlords who made up their own, small middle class. He argued that ‘despite their patriotism [they] were from a working class point of view, not much better, if any, than those they rebelled against …' Irish workers, he continued, had to understand that ‘The emancipation of their class from economic bondage means emancipation from all bondage; that the interests of the working class are paramount …'
⁷²
Leslie was joined by Connolly in attacking any attempts by the left to curry the favour of the Home Rule Party.

Connolly would stand as a socialist candidate in St Giles Ward at the centre of ‘Little Ireland' in 1894. His election manifesto expressed his hopes for his brothers and sisters: ‘Perhaps they will realise that the Irish worker who starves in an Irish cabin and the Scottish worker who is prisoned in an Edinburgh garret are brothers with one hope and destiny. The landlord who grinds Irish peasants on a Connemara estate and the landlord who rack-rents them in a Cowgate slum are brethren in fact and deed.'
⁷³

Five hundred attended his first election rally, and he also held an open-air meeting for carters in Kingstables Road. But many of those listening were denied a vote (nearly half the male working class had no vote, and no women, of course).

The Irish National League attacked Connolly as an ‘atheist' and said he was betraying his faith and country. In the end he came third – the Liberal won with 1,056 votes, the Tory took 467 and Connolly 263. Connolly understood the limitations of electoral politics, writing: ‘The election of a Socialist to any public body is only valuable in so far as it is the return of a disturber of the political peace.'
⁷⁴
He became a national figure on the Scottish and British left but could not obtain full-time employment as a political organiser. In 1896, he answered an advert for the post of organiser for the Irish Socialist Republican Party in Dublin and emigrated, leaving Edinburgh behind.

Connolly remained a regular visitor to Scotland, however, and an opponent of a growing reformism in the SDF. In the end his supporters walked out to form the Socialist Labour Party. The new party was
hard on the ‘Labour Fakers' but was too doctrinaire. In the build-up to 1916 it printed Connolly's newspaper and smuggled it into Ireland after the British authorities suppressed it.

In the wake of his execution, few on the Scottish left defended him. Tom Johnston responded to Connolly's involvement in the Easter Rising by saying, ‘the psychology of it is a mystery to me.'
Forward
stated that ‘in no way do we approve of armed rebellion.'
⁷⁵

There was one exception. John Maclean knew Connolly well and defended the Easter Rising and Connolly's role in it from the outset, just as he would side with the subsequent Republican struggle for independence.

Scotland at War

I
n August 1914, Scotland went to war. Official propaganda told the people that war was necessary to save ‘poor little Belgium', which had been occupied by crazed Huns, the racist term used for Germans who were busy raping nuns and butchering civilians. In reality, Britain was fighting to ensure Germany did not dominate Europe and to protect its position as the world superpower.

Scotland paid a high price for this imperial conflict. Of 557,000 Scots who enlisted, 26.4 percent were killed, compared to the UK average of 11.8 percent. Only Serbia and Turkey had a higher mortality rate.
¹
T. C. Smout says of the war dead, ‘One well-argued estimate put the figure at 110,000, equivalent to about 10 percent of the Scottish male population, and probably about 15 percent of British war dead … Thirteen out of fourteen were privates and non-commissioned officers from the working classes.'
²

The outbreak of the Great War divided Labour, a majority of whose MPs were pro-war. Keir Hardie, ill and about to die, was openly anti-war. The Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was a pacifist and privately against the war, but he kept quiet in case the party
might split over the issue. Nevertheless, by December 1914, 25 percent of Scotland's male workforce had volunteered. In the Lothian coalfield 36 percent of the miners enlisted after its Eastern European export market collapsed. In the Lanarkshire coalfield the figure was just 20 percent. Christopher Harvie explains this high rate of enlistment as being down to the ‘herd instinct – “following one's pals” – and the expectation of a short war'.
³

A pamphlet produced by the National Service League entitled ‘The Briton's First Duty' admitted, ‘Want and hunger are, unfortunately for us, the invisible recruiting sergeants of a great portion of our army.'
⁴
Economic hardship had a pronounced effect on enlistment rates.
⁵

My paternal grandfather volunteered in 1915, lying about his age, alongside his two brothers; one lies still outside Ypres. As shale miners anything might have seemed better than what they were doing, and anyone who's been to Tarbrax in Midlothian, where they lived, would understand the wish to escape. He would regret his youthful enthusiasm and was bitter about what he experienced. (My other grandfather objected to the war on religious grounds but when conscripted agreed to be a stretcher-bearer – he never talked about what he saw.) In the main, the workers' organisation in Glasgow was anti-war but many felt the pressure of the jingoist agitation.
Forward
, despite its anti-war stance, was compelled to print a prowar column.
⁶
Yet it would not take long for social and economic issues to resurface.

Glasgow was notorious for its housing conditions, but a fresh influx of workers to fuel its armament factories added to the pressure. Rents were higher than elsewhere in the UK and, with accommodation in demand, landlords raised rents. Existing tenants, who could not afford the increase, faced eviction – even the families of those away fighting in the trenches.

The government found in October 1915 that a third of rents had increased by 5 percent, while in ‘Govan and Fairfield, the centre of the storm, all the houses … suffered rent increases ranging from 11.67% to 23.08%'.
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Across Glasgow and the west of Scotland a network of Independent Labour Party branches, tenants groups,
Co-operative Society branches, the Govan and Glasgow Trades Councils, trade union activists and socialists were able to organise a rising groundswell of discontent.
⁸
The
Partick and Maryhill Press
reported the 1915 May Day rally in Glasgow thus: ‘Over 165 labour and socialist organisations took part … and Glasgow Green was crowded with thousands of spectators. There were twelve platforms. Among those represented were those of the Socialist and Labour Party, Internationalism, Glasgow Housing Committee, the Anarchist Group, Socialist Children's School and Women Trade Unionists.'
⁹

Women took the lead in winning the single greatest victory notched up on Red Clydeside. One of the organisers of the rent strike, Helen Crawfurd, had been a radical suffragette jailed three times before the war for actions that included smashing the windows of the Ministry of Education in London and an army recruitment office in Glasgow. Seán Damer notes: ‘The Glasgow suffragettes had a tradition of militancy which included blowing up all the telegraph and telephone cables, cutting the wires around the city.'
¹⁰

Mary Barbour arrived in Govan in 1896, a newly married engineer's wife, and became active in the Independent Labour Party. She began organising over rents by holding meetings, large and small, in kitchens, in closes and in backcourts, attracting her audience with a football rattle.
¹¹

In April 1915 the eviction in Govan of the family of a soldier serving in France was met with angry protests, as Willie Gallacher, a leader of the shops stewards' movement on the Clyde, describes:

In Govan, Mrs. Barbour, a typical working class housewife, became the leader of a movement such has never been seen before, or since for that matter, street meetings, back-court meetings, drums, bells, trumpets – every method was used to bring the women out and organise them for struggle. Notices were printed by the thousand and put up in the windows: wherever you went you could see them. In street after street, scarcely a window without one: WE ARE NOT PAYING INCREASED RENT.
¹²

One landlord had applied for an eviction order against a mother and family for non-payment of rent at a time when the man of the house was fighting in France and a son was recovering from war wounds. The court supplied the necessary authorisation despite an offer from the local miners' union to pay the rent debt within a week. However, the attempt at eviction was successfully resisted by a large crowd that had to be restrained from physically attacking the landlord.
¹³
Similar scenes were repeated across the city, for instance in Partick: ‘… a seventy year-old-pensioner living alone was due to be evicted on a warrant issued by Sheriff Thomson for refusing to pay a rent increase. The old man barricaded himself in his tiny tenement flat and a large crowd gathered outside in his support, making his “castle” impregnable. Again no official showed face.'
¹⁴

Gallacher records that ‘the factors [agents for the property owners] could not collect the rents'.
¹⁵
When a factor turned up in Partick in late October, the
Glasgow Herald
reported, ‘he was pelted with bags of peasemeal and chased from one of the streets by a number of women, who upbraided him vociferously'.
¹⁶
The landlords then applied to a judge for an eviction warrant, and executing it fell to the city's sheriff, who asked the police to carry out the task:

But Mrs. Barbour had a team of women who were wonderful. They could smell a sheriff's officer a mile away. At their summons women left their cooking, washing or whatever they were doing. Before they were anywhere near their destination, the officer and his men would be met by an army of furious women who drove them back in a hurried scramble for safety.
¹⁷

In every window of every house there were notices that read, ‘We are not removing'. Within weeks, thousands of notices were displayed in street after street. Soon all of Glasgow was involved: from Park-head to Govan, Pollokshaws to Calton.
¹⁸

Throughout 1915, John Maclean, the leading revolutionary on Clydeside, spoke at meeting after meeting outside the shipyards and other workplaces, demanding action on rents. On Sunday nights he addressed huge open-air meetings in Bath Street while his Marxist
night class had an average attendance of 493, mainly shop stewards. In October he was brought to court under the Defence of the Realm Act for opposing the war and was bound over on agreement that he would not speak publicly on the war, though he made it clear he would still speak out over rents.
¹⁹
Because of this conviction, Maclean faced the sack from his teaching position.

By October 1915, 15,000 refused to pay rent increases, and a month later it was 20,000. That month a factor took eighteen tenants to court, providing a focus for the movement, as Mrs Barbour's women marched on the City Chambers. Tom Bell would write that en route: ‘The women marched in a body to the shipyard and got the men to leave work and join them in a demonstration to the Court.'
²⁰
Forward
estimated the crowd outside the City Chambers as being 4,000 strong.
²¹
John Maclean was among those who spoke, denouncing the evils of capitalism.
²²
His arrival was unusual: ‘On their way from Govan one contingent marched to the school where John Maclean, already under notice of dismissal from Govan School Board, was teaching. He was taken out and carried shoulder high through the streets to the court.'
²³

Helen Crawfurd would remember: ‘I will never forget the sight and sound of those marching men [from the shipyards]. Thousands of them marched through the principal streets to the Sheriff Court and the surrounding streets were packed. John Maclean … was one of the speakers, who from barrels and up-turned boxes, addressed the crowds.'
²⁴

The government in London was worried by the scale of the protests and that the eviction of rent strikers might be the spark for a walkout in the Clyde yards.
²⁵
It responded quickly, hurrying through the Rent Restriction Act of 1915, which returned rents to pre-war levels. This was a major victory for working-class people of Britain, won by the working women and men of Glasgow.

A Revolutionary Storm-Centre Second to None

The rent strike coincided with the beginning of grass-roots trade union organisation, which would challenge the employers, the
government and the union leaders who were determined to police their promises that there would be no strikes during wartime.

The factory owners took the initiative when the hawkish, antiunion William Weir brought American engineers to his Cathcart plant, paying them a bonus of six shillings a week, in order to bring in US working practices and to undermine the union. In response, the engineering workers walked out on an unofficial strike in defiance of their union leaders. The strike at Weir's quickly spread to twenty other factories, with an official ballot of engineering union members overwhelmingly rejecting the employers' offer. Shop stewards from all the striking plants met to co-ordinate the action, forming what was to be the Clyde Workers' Committee, made up of 200–300 shop stewards who met each Sunday. Its attitude was summed up thus:

We will support the officials just as long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them. Being composed of Delegates from every shop and untrammeled by obsolete rule or law, we claim to represent the true feeling of the workers. We can act immediately according to the merits of the case and the desire of the rank and file.
²⁶

Without strike pay and under a media attack orchestrated by the munitions minister, Lloyd George, the strike began to crumble. A ballot agreed to a deal hammered out by government arbitration, which gave a penny-an-hour raise and 10 percent on piece rates.

In February 1915, the Clyde Workers' Committee (CWC) led a campaign demanding a twopenny pay increase, promised before the war, but denied by a wartime pay freeze, despite rocketing prices. Ten thousand workers responded, two-thirds of Clyde's engineering workforce. They faced not just the government but the hostility of their own engineering union, which called on them to return to work.
²⁷
The employers were forced to concede, but they negotiated a raise of one penny, not with the CWC but with the engineering union. The engineering unions had agreed a no-strike deal with the government in March 1915, ‘with a view to accelerating the output of war munitions or equipments'.
²⁸

The next industrial flashpoint was at Fairfield's shipyard in July 1915, with a call for two strikes to protest the necessity for anyone switching jobs to be given a leaving certificate by management to indicate good time-keeping and service. This was seen as a means of discriminating against ‘troublemakers'. The two walkouts that summer led to seventeen strikers being convicted, with three refusing to pay their fines. The issue was resolved only when the national union paid their fines after talks with the government.

The Clyde Workers' Committee restricted itself to shop-floor issues – pay, conditions and protecting job status – and refused to address wider issues like the war, the one issue that defined everything else. Their attitude was summed up in that of Gallacher, who was a member of the British Socialist Party and spoke against the war at weekends, but kept this separate from his trade union work.
²⁹

The CWC has often been dismissed as an association of skilled workers, labour aristocrats, concerned with protecting their status as unskilled men and women were introduced into engineering. However, the radicalisation of skilled engineers and metalworkers was a feature of the period across Europe. Traditionally, the response of these skilled workers was to try to maintain their standing above their unskilled fellows. But now they saw the attacks on them as part of a more general war on all trade unionists.

The CWC's concentration on dilution, the replacement of skilled workers by semi- or non-skilled workers, meant it did not take up the issue of conscription, which would be introduced by the government in January 1916, but had been much debated beforehand. Opposing conscription would have allowed the CWC to broaden out to other sections of the working class on the Clyde.
³⁰
While it did become involved in solidarity with the rent strike, no attempt was made to bring that together with the growing industrial unrest. If the housing agitation, labour unrest and opposition to war came together on Clydeside, Maclean argued, that could create a revolutionary situation.