by Maggie Craig
Also by Maggie Craig
NON-FICTION:
Damn’ Rebel Bitches: The Women of the ’45
Bare-Arsed Banditti: The Men of the ’45
Footsteps on the Stairs: Tales from Duff House
FICTION:
The River Flows on
When the Lights Come on Again
The Stationmaster’s Daughter
The Bird Flies High
A Star to Steer By
The Dancing Days
One Sweet Moment
WHEN THE CLYDE RAN RED
Maggie Craig
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Epub ISBN: 9781780571645
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Copyright © Maggie Craig, 2011
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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY
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ISBN 9781845967352
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For my father,
Alexander Dewar Craig,
who first sang me the songs,
and first told me the tales of Red Clydeside;
and for the other exceptional human being who is his beautiful granddaughter & our brilliant daughter.
Acknowledgements
Ishould like to express my sincere thanks to the following people and institutions for the help they gave me with my research and in supplying illustrations for this book: Audrey Canning, librarian, Gallacher Memorial Library, Glasgow Caledonian University, with special thanks for pointing me in the direction of Helen Crawfurd and Margaret Irwin; Carole McCallum, archivist, Glasgow Caledonian University; all those who contributed to Glasgow Caledonian University’s Red Clydeside website; the late Mr James Wotherspoon of Clydebank, still sharp as a tack at the age of 105; Pat Malcolm and her colleagues at Local Studies, Clydebank Library; the librarians and all other staff at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, with particular thanks to Nerys Tunnicliffe, Patricia Grant, and Martin O’Neill; Claire McKendrick, Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library; the Willow Tea Rooms, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow; James Higgins and Christine Miller of Bishopbriggs Library; Marie Henderson of Glasgow Digital Library at the University of Strathclyde; Shona Gonnella and Anne Wade at the Scottish Screen Archive, National Library of Scotland; Kevin Turner of the Herald and Evening Times Photo Library; the Marx Memorial Library for permission to quote from Helen Crawfurd’s unpublished memoirs; and, for permission to quote from his poem on the launch of the Queen Mary, The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield.
I should also like to express my appreciation to all the Bankies, some of whom have now passed on, who have shared with me over the years their memories of the Clydebank Blitz. They have included my parents, Margaret Hamilton, Grace Peace, Grace Howie, Joen McFarlane, Jean Morrison, Andrew Hamilton and Maisie Nicoll née Swan, with special thanks to Maisie for the pianos. Thanks are due also to Kate McLelland for another great cover, and to everyone at Mainstream, most particularly Ailsa Bathgate, and Eliza Wright.
I’d also like to thank the wonderful Will, Tamise, Alexander and Ria for all their love and support, with special thanks to Ria for coming up with le mot juste in the nick of time.
Contents
Preface
1 Rebels, Reformers & Revolutionaries
2 The Tokio of Tea Rooms
3 Earth’s Nearest Suburb to Hell
4 Sewing Machines & Scientific Management
5 An Injury to One is an Injury to All: The Singer Strike of 1911
6 No Vote, No Census
7 The Picturesque & Historic Past: The Scottish National Exhibition of 1911
8 Radicals, Reformers & Martyrs: The Roots of Red Clydeside
9 Halloween at the High Court
10 Not in My Name
11 A Woman’s Place
12 Death of a Hero: The Funeral of Keir Hardie
13 Mrs Barbour’s Army: The Rent Strike of 1915
14 Christmas Day Uproar: Red Clydeside Takes on the Government
15 Dawn Raids, Midnight Arrests & a Zeppelin over Edinburgh: The Deportation of the Clyde Shop Stewards
16 Prison Cells & Luxury Hotels
17 John Maclean
18 Bloody Friday 1919: The Battle of George Square
19 The Red Clydesiders Sweep into Westminster
20 The Zinoviev Letter
21 Nine Days’ Wonder: The General Strike of 1926
22 Ten Cents a Dance
23 Sex, Socialism & Glasgow’s First Birth Control Clinic
24 The Flag in the Wind
25 Socialism, Self-improvement & Fun
26 The Hungry ’30s
27 Pride of the Clyde: The Launch of the Queen Mary
28 The Spanish Civil War
29 On the Eve of War: The Empire Exhibition of 1938
30 The Clydebank Blitz
Legacy
Select Bibliography
Preface
This book is about Red Clydeside, those heady decades at the beginning of the twentieth century when passionate people and passionate politics swept like a whirlwind through Glasgow, Clydebank and the west of Scotland. It’s also about the world in which those people lived. My aim has been to paint a vivid picture, telling the story by setting them and their politics within the wider context of the place and the times.
These were years of great wealth and appalling poverty, when Glasgow was home to some of Europe’s most magnificent public buildings and some of its worst slums. This Glasgow welcomed the world to spectacular open-air exhibitions, chatted with its friends in elegant art nouveau tea rooms, fell in love with the movies in glittering art deco picture palaces and tangoed and foxtrotted the night away in the palais de danse which dotted the city.
This Glasgow also lost a thousand young adults each year to tuberculosis. Overcrowded and insanitary tenements where a bed to yourself was an unheard-of luxury provided the perfect breeding ground for the Captain of all the Men of Death. Other spectres stalked the poor. Thousands of Glasgow’s children were born to die. Thousands of women had a child each year until it killed them, dying worn out before they were even 40 years old.
Outside the home, men and women worked exhaustingly long hours for low pay in filthy conditions where health and safety had never even been thought of. Horrific workplace accidents were commonplace. Find yourself incapacitated by such an injury and the most you could hope for to help pay the rent and feed your family was a whip-round organized by your workmates. There was no National Insurance, Social Security or National Health Service. Other than the absolute last resort and shame of going on the parish, only the kindness of others caught you when you fell. Small wonder that one Red Clydesider described this Glasgow as ‘Earth’s neare
st suburb to hell’.
Yet poverty, an unequal struggle and lack of opportunity do not always breed despair. Sometimes they breed a special kind of man or woman, one who uses his or her anger and apparent powerlessness to fuel a fight for justice and fair treatment for everyone. The Red Clydesiders belonged to this special breed. So did my father.
Growing up in Old Monkland at Coatbridge during the Depression of the 1930s, he and his family knew real hardship. Yet they knew how to laugh too, as they knew how to tell stories. A railwayman who worked his way up from shunter to stationmaster, my father travelled all over Scotland in his work, and he knew the story behind every stone. A Buchan quine who loved both her native Aberdeenshire and her adopted Glasgow, my mother too had her stories to tell, as did our battalion of aunts and uncles.
Growing up where I did, my earliest memories are of Clydebank and the Clyde and all the stories that went with them. My father, active in Labour politics and a lifelong member of the National Union of Railwaymen, had many tales to tell about the Red Clydesiders. Rebels, reformers and revolutionaries, these radicals, socialists and communists were larger-than-life characters, yet approachable to all. Far beyond their own family and social circles, they were known by the affectionate diminutives of their first names. It was always Jimmy Maxton, Davie Kirkwood, Wee Willie Gallacher, Tom Johnston, Manny Shinwell.
It was during the turbulent years before, during and immediately after the First World War that the sobriquet of Red Clydeside was earned. That history extended to include the General Strike of 1926, the Hungry ’30s, the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s and the Clydebank Blitz of 1941. The great Clydebuilt ships belonged in there too.
Meeting a debt of honour to my family and forebears, I wrote six novels set in Glasgow and Clydebank during the years when the Clyde ran red. This is the history that goes with them.
Enter, stage left, the Red Clydesiders.
1
Rebels, Reformers & Revolutionaries
Distorted and destroyed by poverty.
James Maxton was one of the great personalities of Red Clydeside. Jimmy or Jim to his friends and family, he was a man of enormous warmth, compassion and charisma. An inspiring public speaker, he could hold huge audiences in the palm of his hand, moving them to tears one moment and making them laugh out loud the next. His sense of humour was legendary, sometimes sardonic and cynical but never cruel. Born in 1885, Maxton served for more than 20 years as a Labour MP at Westminster, where he also shone as an orator. Loved by his friends and respected by his political foes, he was described by Sir Winston Churchill as the greatest gentleman in the House of Commons. Former prime minister Gordon Brown wrote an engaging biography of him, entitled simply Maxton.
Maxton was born into a family which, while not wealthy, was quite comfortably off. Both his parents were teachers. His mother had to give up her career when she married, as female teachers of that time were obliged to do. Young Jimmy grew up as one of five children in a pleasant villa on a sunny ridge overlooking Barrhead near Paisley, at the back of the Gleniffer Braes. He is remembered there today in the names of surrounding streets and the Maxton Memorial Garden.
Tragedy struck the Maxtons when Jimmy was 17 years old. After a swim during a family holiday at Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde his father had a heart attack and died. Left in straitened circumstances though she was, Melvina Maxton was determined her two sons and three daughters were going to be educated as far as their brains would take them. Her determination paid off: all five became teachers.
His tongue firmly in his cheek, James Maxton was later to observe that his mother should really have sent him and his older siblings out to work. With typically cheerful sarcasm, he recalled that the family lived during those years after his father’s death in ‘the poverty that is sometimes called genteel’. It was a real struggle, although it helped that Maxton had at the age of 12 won a scholarship to the highly regarded Hutchesons’ Grammar School, known more informally as ‘Hutchie’. He did well, though he wore his learning and intelligence lightly, awarding himself some ironic distinctions: honours in tomfoolery, first-class honours for cheek, failure in intellectuality and honours advanced in winching. Unlike ‘wench’, this word could be applied to both sexes, allowing grinning west of Scotland uncles to thoroughly embarrass both teenage nieces and nephews by asking, ‘Are ye winchin’ yet?’
Although nobody would have called James Maxton handsome, his dark and saturnine looks were undeniably striking. He was a tall man, and his long, lantern-jawed face was framed by straight black hair which he wore much longer than was then fashionable or even acceptable. Curling onto his collar, it gave him a rather theatrical air. You could easily have taken him for an actor.
When Maxton first went to Glasgow University his long hair was as far as any youthful rebellion went. He met Tom Johnston there. Later a highly respected secretary of state for Scotland and prime mover behind the creation of the hydroelectric dams and power stations of the Highlands, Johnston was a young political firebrand from Kirkintilloch who took great delight in scaring the lieges through the pages of the Forward, the weekly socialist newspaper he founded in 1906. When he first got to know James Maxton, Tom Johnston described him as a ‘harum scarum’ who just wanted to get his MA so he could make his living as a teacher. Maxton himself said the only activities in which he excelled at university were swimming, fencing and PE. He was a good runner too.
As his contemporary at Glasgow University, Johnston’s first memory of Maxton was indeed a theatrical one. Johnston had fun telling the story in his Memories. A group of students had gone together to the Pavilion Theatre, where the evening grew lively with ‘the throwing of light missiles to and fro among the unruly audience’ – young gentlemen and scholars indulging in some youthful high jinks. Ejecting the well-educated hooligans failed to dampen their enthusiasm. Maxton and his co-conspirators managed to get back in through the stage door and find their way onto the stage, where they ‘appeared from one of the wings, dancing with arms akimbo to the footlights’.
It wasn’t long before the light-hearted young Mr Maxton began to think seriously about politics. Tom Johnston was an influence. So was John Maclean, the tragic icon of Scottish socialism. When Maxton was at Glasgow University in the early 1900s Maclean was four years older than him and had already got his MA degree. They often met by chance on the train travelling into Glasgow from Pollokshaws, where they both then lived. A teacher by vocation as well as training, Maclean used these railway journeys to tell Maxton about Karl Marx.
Glasgow taught Maxton about life, especially when he began working as a teacher and saw the effects of poverty on his young pupils and their families. Years later, he spoke about how his experiences had influenced his thinking. The title of his 1935 BBC Radio broadcast was Our Children’s Scotland:
As a very young teacher, I discovered how individualism and their individualities were cramped, distorted and destroyed by poverty conditions before the child was able to react to its environment. That was the deciding factor in bringing me into the socialist and Labour movement.
Maxton was 19 when, in 1904, he made the decision to join the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Founded by Keir Hardie and others who saw that the Liberal Party was not going to solve the problems of the poor, the ILP was particularly strong in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, one of the engines which powered Red Clydeside. Although later a component part of what is now the modern Labour Party, it was always a more radical group. As one of the ILP’s most influential members, James Maxton devoted the rest of his life to politics, becoming part of the band of Labour MPs who swept to power in the pivotal general election of 1922. Tom Johnston was also in that group.
Only once did a heckler get the better of James Maxton, as Tom Johnston recalled. Not long after he graduated from Glasgow University, Maxton returned to address a meeting at the Students’ Union:
That meeting remains in my memory for an interruption which, for once,
left Maxton speechless and retortless. Maxton by that time had grown his long tradition-like actors’ hair, and during his speeches he would continually and with dramatic effect weave a lock away from his brow. At this Students’ Union gathering he was set agoing at his most impressive oratory . . . ‘Three millions unemployed (pause). Three millions unemployed (pause). Three millions unemployed (pause).’ Amid the tense silence came a voice from the back: ‘Aye, Jimmy, and every second yin a barber!’
James Maxton’s friend John Maclean comes across as a more sombre character. He was only eight when his father died, the catastrophe plunging his widow and their four surviving children into a poverty which was not at all genteel. Like Melvina Maxton, however, Anne Maclean was a woman determined that her children should be educated.
Both John Maclean and James Maxton lost their jobs as schoolteachers because of their political activities. Controversially, they spoke out against the First World War and conscription. This led to even more serious consequences: trial, conviction and imprisonment on charges of sedition and spreading disaffection. Maclean remained a teacher but outside the system, devoting himself to public speaking, writing articles, running the Scottish Labour College, which he founded, and imparting the theory of Marxist economics in night and weekend classes. He advocated revolution rather than reform, his self-appointed mission to convince the working classes the only solution to their ills was socialism, the only way to get that by seizing power. The ruling classes were never going to give it away.
Tom Johnston was a rebel rather than a revolutionary. Passionate, romantic and idealistic, he too could be cheerfully sarcastic, as when he described the decisions taken at the start-up of the Forward: ‘We would have no alcoholic advertisements: no gambling news, and my own stipulation after a month’s experience, no amateur poetry; every second reader at that time appearing to be bursting into vers libre.’