A People's History of Scotland (23 page)

In 1924, Jock joined the Communist Party; his brothers had already joined on its formation in 1920. ‘At that time there was a Communist Party branch in the village. They called them “locals” in those days. We called ours “the local” – and it absolutely ran the village.'
⁵³
The miners were thus thrust into the front line of the class struggle in Britain in the 1920s when wartime state subsidies for miners' wages came to an end, and with the price of coal dropping as a result of the economic downturn, coal owners and the government were determined to cut their pay in order to boost profits and reduce the price of coal for industry.

The Miners Federation of Great Britain refused to accept this, and on 1 April owners locked mineworkers out of the pits. Immediately on the heels of this provocation, the government put into force its Emergency Powers Act, drafting soldiers into the coalfield.

In the face of such aggression, the union formed a Triple Alliance with the rail and transport workers, who had pledged to strike with them. But on what became known as ‘Black Friday', 15 April 1921, the other two unions issued no such strike call. The miners were forced to fight alone.

The Scottish and South Wales coalfields saw the greatest number of mineworker strikes in the inter-war years, with the Welsh taking part in the most strikes in the 1920s, and the Scots in the 1930s. In both coalfields the fight for union recognition had been a long and bitter one, and in both there was a strong tradition of rank-and-file organisation. The Lanarkshire Miners' Reform Committee began in the summer of 1917 (inspired by John Maclean and his comrade James MacDougall, who was working in the Blantyre pit), and the Fife Reform Union was set up in 1923 to combat the right-wing local leadership of the union.
⁵⁴

The 1921 coal strike saw bitter clashes between strikers and police across Britain. A miner's daughter, Mary Docherty, writes about Cowdenbeath in Fife:

there were lots of riots between the miners' pickets and the police. The army was brought in and some were billetted at the Church Hall in Church Street. The soldiers were also guarding the Gordon and Dora pits. They had to pass our house to go to the pit, so my father got talking to them. They said they would not use their arms against miners as many of them were themselves from mining families.
⁵⁵

She went on to describe events after pickets tried to stop managers pumping water out of the Dalbeath pit: ‘The police assembled in the middle of the High Street and nobody was allowed to go past them. Shop windows were broken with police batoning the men and pushing them against the windows. In all three baton charges that took place miners and police were badly hurt.'
⁵⁶
Docherty's obituary in the
Independent
included this recollection of the strike:

The 1921 miners' strike, which led to a state of emergency being declared, is stamped on Miss Docherty's memory. She was 13 when the Army was drafted into Cowdenbeath to back police against pickets. The situation grew ugly after her father and other pickets and their families tried to throw a pit manager in a pond. Later there were pitched battles between police and pickets. Some miners spent more than a year in prison. The charges only stopped when all the streetlights went out and the place was in darkness. ‘I had seen my father earlier that morning make a baton with a part of the shaft of a pickaxe.'
⁵⁷

After three months the miners were forced back to work, resulting in a dramatic fall in union membership. In the two-year period following the strike, membership of the Federation dropped by more than 200,000. But from March 1923, a groundswell of energy and purpose began building again in the coalfields, a groundswell that within another three years would lead to a conflict that would dwarf the great lockout of 1921.

In December 1923, the miners voted to fight again – to get rid of the terrible agreement that had been forced on them in 1921. In the spring of 1924, following the report of a government Committee of Inquiry, the coal owners and the MFGB executives agreed a deal that removed the worst of the pay cuts imposed three years earlier.

In March 1926, the Samuel Commission published its report recommending a reduction by 13.5 percent of miners' wages along with the withdrawal of government subsidy to the industry. Two weeks later, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, announced that the government would accept the report. Mine owners declared that from 1 May, miners would have to accept new terms of employment that included a longer working day and pay cuts of between 10 and 25 percent, or else be locked out. The Miners' Federation refused to accept this blackmail and appealed to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which promised to call a general strike in support of the miners if the coal owners did not back off. The coal owners did not.

The 1926 General Strike, which began on 3 May and lasted ten days before the TUC called it off with nothing gained, is often portrayed as a very ‘British' affair – workers playing football with police or parading to church services, all so very different from their hot-headed counterparts across the English Channel. The reality was very different. In Scotland there were bitter clashes with police and scabs. In the coalfield of west Fife, workers began to take control of their communities, forming Councils of Action to co-ordinate picketing and solidarity.

The striker John Wheatley summed up what was at stake: ‘The miners occupy the front trenches of the position singled out for attack and if their wages are reduced it will be the beginning of a general wage reduction.'
⁵⁸
Winston Churchill understood too, writing: ‘It is a conflict which, if it is fought out to a conclusion can only end in the overthrow of parliamentary government or its decisive victory.'
⁵⁹

The ruling class understood this was a critical clash and was prepared. Neither the TUC nor the Miners' Federation had been so prescient. Only in Fife had the miners and other workers prepared for battle. At the beginning of April, Lochgelly Trades Council convened a conference that set up a Central Committee of Action for Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan, and on 22 April, Methil Trades and Labour Council met to discuss initiating a workers' defence corps.
⁶⁰

Such organisation was necessary because they were up against not just the employers and the state but the local right-wing leadership of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, led by the local Labour MP, Willie Adamson. The Methil Council of Action was the most militant in the country. Formed by the town's trades council, it issued a daily bulletin from its headquarters in the Co-operative Hall. A leading Communist miner, David Proudfoot, reported after the strike:

The organisation worked like clockwork. Everything was stopped – even the railway lines were picketed. The Council had a courier service second to none in Britain with three motor cars (and a maximum of six available), 100 motor cycles and as many push bikes as were necessary. They covered the whole of Fife taking out information and bringing in reports, sending out speakers everywhere, as far north as Perth.'
⁶¹

Its chair, John MacArthur, recalled: ‘Our slogans locally were: “All power to the councils of action.” We said each organisation had to give up power to the Council of Action. There was no disagreement.'
⁶²

A notable feature of the Methil Council was its formation of a Workers Defence Corps, which was formed following police attacks on pickets. At the start, 150 joined, and that number soon rose to 700. Marching in military formation through the town, the Corps joined the picket line. David Proudfoot recalled, ‘The police did not interfere again.'
⁶³

Elsewhere in Scotland, similar Workers Defence Corps were formed in Denny and Dunipace in Stirlingshire.
⁶⁴
Abe Moffat, later leader of the Scottish miners, described the situation in Cowden-beath in Fife:

All motor vehicles had to get permission from the trades council before travelling up the Great North Road. We had pickets in various parts of the road to ensure than no one passed without the permission of the trades council. To ensure than no one would pass, miners had a rope across the road. If a motor vehicle had a pass it got through, if it had no pass it had to turn back.
⁶⁵

‘All solid' is how the historian of the National Union of Railwaymen described the response of its members in Aberdeen.
⁶⁶
From Dundee it was reported: ‘Here as elsewhere our greatest difficulty in the first week was in preventing men ceasing work before being called on to do so.'
⁶⁷
It was a similar story in North Lanarkshire: ‘by the end of the first week even second-line men came out on strike before they were officially called out.'
⁶⁸

The level of organisation in Methil contrasts with Glasgow, where the strike committee was chaired by a Communist, Peter Kerrigan, but was dominated by trade union officials who toed the TUC line. When Kerrigan proposed mass picketing, this was rejected and he went along with the decision. Later he admitted that at no time was the authority of the TUC questioned by the strike committee. Kerrigan admitted he was taken completely by surprise by the decision of the same General Council to call off the strike.
⁶⁹

Outside of Glasgow, the main industrial centre at the time was North Lanarkshire, a centre for coal mining, steel, engineering and rail. Twenty-three Councils of Action were set up across the county with a Joint Committee that brought them together, meeting in the Lanarkshire Mineworkers' Union head office in Hamilton. Mass pickets up to 4,000 strong brought everything to a halt by the third day of the stoppage. The local Motherwell paper reported after the strike: ‘Motherwell, red and revolutionary Motherwell has been a perfect model of peace and quietness … it was also one of the towns where solidarity was the keynote all during the conflict.'
⁷⁰

In Cambuslang, Lanarkshire, the strike was so solid that pickets were sent into Glasgow at the request of the city's tram car workers, who asked them to target the Ruby Street depot where students and other scabs were being billeted before taking the cars out in the morning. Five hundred Cambuslang pickets marched on the depot, and violent clashes followed as police used baton charges. Twelve pickets were arrested, and later were sentenced to three months' hard labour.
⁷¹

Some 7,000 ‘volunteers', including 300 university students, had been recruited to break the strike, and there were soon clashes between them and the strikers.
⁷²
The fighting at Ruby Street was the first major clash in Glasgow but others quickly followed, as even the next day police baton-charged strikers in Bridgeton who were attempting to persuade two students operating a tram car to stop scabbing. Later that day, a mass picket at the Dennistoun depot was also attacked by baton-wielding police.

As pickets of the tram depots continued, there were more arrests in Bridgeton later that week. At a tram depot near the university, police dispersed strikers protesting the use of student volunteers. On 8 May, the Saturday following the initiation of the strike, women organised pickets at tram stops in Govan to stop people using them, and police baton charges of protesters were followed by rioting and looting in Dennistoun, Bridgeton and Anderston.
⁷³

Rioting continued for four nights. The
Evening Times
reported: ‘The struggle was of the wildest description; pots and pans, iron bars, pickheads and hammers were used as missiles, but fortunately
no police were injured. Over sixty arrests were made.'
⁷⁴
The government stationed warships on the Clyde and naval ratings joined the scabs in shifting strike-bound goods.

In Condorrat, East Dunbartonshire, on the main Glasgow–Edinburgh road, several hundred miners armed with long poles and stones blocked traffic despite police baton charges and arrests.
⁷⁵
Farther west in Renfrewshire, the Johnstone and District strike committee reported: ‘Never before has such solidarity been shown in an industrial dispute, Orangemen being active pickets and taking part generally in the struggle.'
⁷⁶

On the east coast, the high number of student, public schoolboy and middle-class ‘volunteers' in Edinburgh added to the tension. On Thursday evening, 6 May, a serious riot broke out in the High Street and Canongate. The local newspaper reported that thousands of women and children had joined a huge crowd around the Tron Church, which refused to disperse despite police charges. At 9.15 p.m. police retreated to the central police station in the High Street. For half an hour the crowd waited in silence, and then down the High Street came mounted police followed by hundreds of police wielding batons.
⁷⁷

In the East Lothian pit town of Tranent that same night, strikers blocked roads and a crowd of 1,000 laid siege to the police station, smashing all its windows. Police reinforcements had to be brought in to break the deadlock. Attacks on trains running on the main East Coast Line to London were so numerous that police were stationed on it.
⁷⁸
Farther north there were baton charges in Aberdeen after a crowd of 6,000 attacked scab buses and trams, smashing windows.
⁷⁹

In Govan, the ‘Emergency Press Special Edition' reported on 12 May that women wearing red rosettes were ‘standing at the stopping places on the [tram] car routes endeavouring to persuade members of the public not to use the cars'. In Dundee a spinner, Jessie Latto, was arrested and fined £3 for throwing a missile at the driver of a scab lorry. The number of women in the dock was, the
Scotsman
reported, ‘a remarkable feature of the cases arising out of the strike disturbances heard at Glasgow Sheriff Court.' Among them were twenty-six women prosecuted for attacking a blackleg bus driver in Govan, and a group of women charged with throwing bags of flour
in the faces of scab transport workers, and then resisting police when they tried to intervene.
⁸⁰