A People's History of Scotland (27 page)

Annie Murray served as a nurse for most of the Spanish war. Born in Aberdeenshire to a political family, she had led protests over working conditions while at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and joined two of her brothers who volunteered for the International Brigades. She would recall: ‘It was the most important thing of my life. It was a terrific experience I would have never liked to have missed. I have certainly no regrets at having gone there at all.'
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From the first battles at Brunete and Jarama in 1937 to the final Republican offensive, the Battle of the Ebro in 1938, they were fighting against the odds, against a professional army backed up by the air power, tanks, munitions and men of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. At Jarama the International Brigades blunted Franco's advance to the east of Madrid. Forty-five Scots died there, one of whom was Bob Mason of Edinburgh. His family wrote this tribute to him, which was published in the
Daily Worker
in March 1937: ‘When Bob volunteered to go to Spain, it was not with the object of personal gain or with the spirit of adventure. He had every reason to hate
fascism by his knowledge of the brutal and murderous suppression of the working class movement under Hitler and Mussolini.'
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A volunteer from Glasgow's Possilpark, Alex McDade, wrote ‘There's a Valley in Spain Called Jarama', which became the anthem of the British Brigade and continues to be sung today. Its first verse goes:

Eventually, the International Brigades were withdrawn from the fight, after the Republic agreed that all foreign fighters would leave the country. The defeat of the Republic in March 1939 left a bitter taste but did not dampen the determination of the volunteers to continue to fight fascism when Britain went to war with Germany six months later.

But the fight for Spain was also fought at home in Scotland. In August 1936, news that a businessman in Ayr was re-fitting aeroplanes to sell to Franco led 400 townspeople to demand the delivery be stopped. In Kirkcaldy, anti-fascist pilots dropped leaflets defending the Spanish Republic over the crowd attending a British Empire air display. In Glasgow's Argyll Street on a Saturday evening, Communists could sell 2,000 copies of a
Daily Worker
special edition on Spain.
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This took place against the background of 30,000 marching against the means test in Lanarkshire, and in September, a stay-down strike by miners over pay and conditions at the Dickson pit in Blantyre. When management refused to allow them food and water, thousands of Lanarkshire miners walked out in solidarity.
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Committees to raise aid for Spain spread across towns and villages in late 1936. There were fifteen in Glasgow alone. The city's 1937 May Day march was the biggest since the General Strike, with 15,000 demonstrating under the slogan ‘Solidarity with Spain'.
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The
Daily Worker
reported from Edinburgh on 7 December 1938 that ‘Over £20 and two wedding rings were collected at a
meeting in the Oddfellows Hall.' Four days later it further added, ‘Eight members of Granton Young Communist League borrowed a barrow from the manager of the local Co-operative and collected 1 cwt. of food.'
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In Lochgelly in the Fife coalfield, local pipe bands were used to help with street collections of money and tinned food. Despite poverty and unemployment, the response was generous. Mary Docherty writes of the response in Fife to the Aid for Spain campaign: ‘Teams were formed for the different areas of Cowdenbeath. Bob Selkirk [a Communist councillor] and my father and members of the NUWM went round every Friday in the fourth ward with a two wheeled barrow, even though there was mass unemployment in Cowdenbeath at that time, there was a great response to our appeal.'
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NUWM activists in Hawick took over a disused woollen mill, running it as a co-op, producing clothing for Spanish Republican troops. The town council had earlier voted down support for such a scheme when it was proposed by the town's only Communist councillor.
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Naomi Mitchison, Catherine Carswell, Edwin Muir, Hugh MacDiarmid and William Soutar were among the literary figures who signed an appeal for the ‘ancient peoples of Catalonia and the Basque Country' following Franco's final victory in the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Britain's appeasement of Hitler in September 1938, Edwin and Wilda Muir together with Eric Linklater issued an open letter expressing their sense of shame.
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Nevertheless, among the upper echelons of Scottish society there was support for Franco. After visiting rebel territory, Major General Sir Walter Maxwell-Scott (a great-great-grandson of Sir Walter Scott) launched the Scottish Friends of Nationalist Spain (FNS), with Cameron of Lochiel among the vice-presidents. In March 1938, it attempted to hold a rally in Glasgow's St Andrew's Hall. Some five hundred anti-fascists tried to storm the hall, being met with police batons. More were inside, heckling Maxwell-Scott and other speakers and hanging the Red Flag from the balcony.

June saw 500 people attend a FNS public meeting in Edinburgh's Usher Hall, fewer than the 800 who'd protested against it on the
previous evening at the Mound. The meeting seemed to have passed off peacefully, but as the audience filed out to their waiting buses, 800 anti-fascists ambushed them, blocking their departure.
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In the end fascism was victorious in Spain, with the Spanish Republic deserted by those who claimed to uphold democracy. Its defeat ensured that Hitler felt confident to go to war in the summer of 1939.

The sacrifice of these volunteers was appreciated at the time and ever since. When in December 1938 eight volunteers arrived back at Edinburgh's Waverley Station, the
Scotsman
reported on their reception: ‘When the train arrived there were scenes touched with great emotion on the platform when the men were welcomed by their relatives. The welcome they were given on the station roadways was loud and prolonged, the station rang with the cheers of the crowd. “The Internationale” and “The Red Flag” were sung and accompanied by a band.'
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Looking back, Tommy Bloomfield from Kirkcaldy wrote this: ‘Today as a pensioner, I live on social security but I'm the richest man in this world having known my comrades of the International Brigades and the leaders of the National Unemployed Workers Movement along with the outstanding men and women of my era. If I had to live over again I would do the same as there is no other way.'

Striking Once More

The defeat of the General Strike had sapped the morale of workers to strike and win. The unemployment of the early 1930s was another blow. But in the mid-1930s there was a brief upturn in the economy, which meant a revival of confidence on the shop floor. The experience of fighting unemployment and fascism fed into that newfound mood of resistance. One of the first major strikes occurred in March 1935 at the Richmond Park Laundry Company in Cambuslang, the largest single laundry in Britain at this time, employing 1,000 workers.

The action began when the laundry management refused to recognise the trade union National Union of Distributive and Allied
Workers (NUDAW). As the NUDAW journal
New Dawn
reported following the strike, ‘The intimation of non-recognition coupled with one or two other irritating incidents roused our members to the pitch which demanded immediate action.'
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The workforce had also recommended a general increase in wages and two weeks holiday with pay. When the management refused these demands the workers went on strike. At least 500 workers were involved in this one-week strike, the vast majority young women. In the course of this strike the women attended outdoor and indoor meetings, picketed the laundry with large numbers of their supporters and marched through Rutherglen and Cambuslang.

In order to prevent other laundries carrying out the work of Richmond Park Laundry, deputations of girl pickets were dispatched to laundries across the west of Scotland with national organisers from NUDAW to distribute leaflets to fellow laundry workers. According to
New Dawn
, they won the support of these workers, who, ‘although unorganised, they immediately responded and … let their respective employers know that any attempt to get this work done would lead to trouble and consequently working class solidarity triumphed.'
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It seems that the laundry management made a number of attempts to intimidate the young women into returning to work, going as far as to write to their parents, presumably to urge them to exert pressure on their daughters to return to work, as the management also threatened to dismiss all of the strikers. Despite management intimidation the strike continued and, as
New Dawn
reported, the threats of dismissal only resulted in greater support from the local community for the strikers.

The strike then became tumultuous and the police intervened as strikers and their supporters gathered on the second day and a tramcar was smashed by the crowd. On the following night the crowd stopped trams and buses, attacked the police, threw stones and ‘howled' at blacklegs, which resulted in the police charging the crowd. Later, 600 strikers and supporters gathered at Cambuslang where house windows were smashed.
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A number of altercations took place between the management, the
strikers and their supporters and the police. As
New Dawn
reported: ‘In addition to fighting the employers our members also had to fight the police who showed in no unmistakable fashion “upon which side their bread is buttered”, our pickets were batoned by the police on two successive days and for cowardly brutality we haven't seen the like of it. Heads were smashed by the “keepers of the law and order” and of course it goes without saying that the casualties were not all on one side.'
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An important feature of this strike was the support the strikers received from large sections of the local community and the unemployed who joined with the strikers in their demonstrations. As a result, the strike ended with the company ceding union recognition and some improvements in wages and conditions.

Elsewhere, troubles continued. Conditions on the Clyde shipyards can be summed up in the story told by a retired worker to the historian Richard Croucher about a riveter who had fallen to his death in the shipyard. The foreman simply ordered that his body be put in a cart, covered, and taken home to his wife.
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Beardmore's at Parkhead Forge had, exceptionally, retained strong shop steward organisation from the early 1920s, and in March 1937 the members brought 1,300 members of the engineering union out on strike over pay, demanding a penny an hour more. The national union refused to recognise the strike but it quickly won solidarity across Glasgow. The strike went on until May, holding up vital parts for the luxury liner
Queen Mary
being built on the Clyde. The workers returned when management agreed to sit down to negotiations.

In 1937, as the economy went through a brief recovery and rearmament meant orders, apprentices across Scotland began to organise, sharing grievances with those in Aberdeen by issuing a leaflet headed ‘We Are Nobody's Baby' in complaint at the way they were treated by management.
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Engineering and shipyard apprentices had not been paid two wage increases given to older workers. The demand for an ‘evening up' of their wages now caught an echo. A committee elected from across Clydeside was sent to meet the employers, who refused to see them.

The Beardmore's strike now acted as an example, and three days after it began 500 apprentices stopped work at Fairfield's shipyard and used mass pickets to bring out their fellows across the Upper Clyde shipyards. On 5 April, the
Daily Worker
reported that 3,700 apprentices were out and the strike was spreading across the engineering industry to 130 factories. The spread of the strike to John Brown's shipyard, where the
Queen Mary
was being built, added pressure on the employers.
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The Govan apprentices took over a disused shop as their headquarters and organised an ‘apprentices' Olympics' and a football competition involving forty-eight teams.
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The central strike committee elected by 160 shop stewards and yard delegates and chaired by Stuart Watson of the Young Communists, met daily and from it circulated a strike bulletin distributed by 150 cyclists.

By the second week of April, more than 11,000 apprentices were out and the strike spread to Edinburgh, Teesside and Belfast. Five hundred women ‘trainers' had come out at Barr and Stroud in Glasgow for an extra penny an hour and asked to join the strike but were told they were not apprentices and could not. Feeling ‘rather hurt', they would have to wait until November, when a women's strike got under way.
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The engineering union recognised the strike two weeks later, and on 16 April adult workers stopped work for the day in solidarity. That morning, chalked up on the walls outside workplaces across Clydeside were messages such as ‘Don't Let Us Down', ‘Don't Scab Today' and ‘Don't Work Today Daddy!'. Some 150,000 workers answered the call and downed tools.
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The union leaders and the Conciliation Officer of the Ministry of Labour secured talks with the employers, and on 5 May the apprentices agreed to return to work, having won substantial pay increases but not recognition for the union to represent them. Nevertheless, they retained their strong rank-and-file organisation.
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The Clydeside apprentices launched their own paper and had a green, red and blue badge, green for one side of the religious divide, blue for the other and red for socialism.
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The Clyde set an example that was quickly followed by apprentices in Manchester, Lancashire and Coventry.
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