When the Clyde Ran Red

by Maggie Craig

  Taylor’s solution was not to pay people by the day but by how much they produced each day: piecework. Ironically – or perhaps not, given that Taylorism did tend to view workers as no more than cogs in the machine – after the Russian Revolution of 1917 both Lenin and Stalin tried to introduce the ideas of Scientific Management into Soviet industry.

  Taylor did suggest one concession to human biology. At a time when factory and office workers finished at noon on Saturday and thus had weekends which lasted only a day and half, he advised, ‘All young women should be given two consecutive days of rest (with pay) each month, to be taken whenever they may choose.’

  Taylor argued that Scientific Management would benefit both bosses and workers, allowing the latter to earn higher wages without even having to think for themselves how to do the job. Their manager or supervisor would spell that out to them, each task being broken down into the science of it. He was convinced only managers or supervisors would be capable of making such an analysis.

  Knowledge is power. That was a clear undercurrent of Scientific Management. It’s also clear that Taylor was reflecting bosses’ fears of the intelligent and experienced worker. Knowing their jobs and trades inside out, they had bargaining power that mere cogs in the machine could never have. A telling example of this provides an unintentionally comical vignette in The Principles of Scientific Management:

  We have all been used to seeing bricklayers tap each brick after it is placed on its bed of mortar several times with the end of the handle of the trowel so as to secure the right thickness for the joint. Mr Gilbreth found that by tempering the mortar just right, the bricks could be readily bedded to the proper depth by a downward pressure of the hand with which they are laid. He insisted that his mortar mixers should give special attention to tempering the mortar, and so save the time consumed in tapping the brick.

  Whether any of us would have trusted Mr Gilbreth – ‘who had himself studied bricklaying in his youth’ – to build a wall which wouldn’t have come down in the next high wind is another matter entirely.

  Scientific Management resulted in work which could be both back-breakingly tiring and mind-numbingly boring. Singer’s at Clydebank was producing one million sewing machines every year. Each of these went out with one needle fitted, plus a neat little packet of three spares. Spare needles were also needed for the Singer shops found in high streets all over Britain. So more than four million new needles were required each year.

  There were girls at Singer’s who spent hours each and every day tapping newly made needles with a light hammer to correct any faults, straightening bends the machining process could put into them. It was quite an art to know where to hit and how strongly: a little harder than you might think so the needle would bend briefly in the opposite direction before coming back to rest perfectly straight. As soon as one batch was finished another box of needles would be delivered to your workbench by a young message boy or girl – a job which gave many people their start at Singer’s – so you didn’t waste any time by going to fetch it. Nor, of course, did you get the chance to stretch your legs or refocus your eyes.

  Arthur McManus, who was to become a significant figure in the story of Red Clydeside, was just 21 years old in 1911 and working at Singer’s. His job was to point the needles. Passionate, intelligent and well-read, one day he simply cracked. His friend and workmate Tom Bell told the story in his autobiography, Pioneering Days:

  I remember Arthur McManus describing a job he was on, pointing needles. Every morning there were millions of these needles on the table. As fast as he reduced the mountain of needles a fresh load was dumped. Day in, day out, it never grew less. One morning he came in, and found the table empty. He couldn’t understand it. He began telling everyone excitedly that there were no needles on the table. It suddenly flashed on him how absurdly stupid it was to be spending his life like this. Without taking his jacket off he turned on his heel and went out, to go for a ramble over the hills to Balloch.

  McManus had to come back, of course. Like everyone else, he needed the job and he needed the money.

  Later generations of Singer’s workers were to have fond memories of their time there, when management encouraged and supported all manner of clubs, social activities and events. There was a Singer’s theatre and an annual Singer’s sports gala. One girl chosen from the factory would be crowned gala queen, and celebrities were invited to officially launch the fun and games. In 1950 it was Hollywood star Dorothy Lamour who did the honours.

  With the company filling all their working time and so much of their leisure time, employees used to joke that they had become ‘Singerized’. It may be that the impetus to create this all-encompassing Singer’s culture had its origins in the troubles of 1911. Perhaps management realized it would be to their advantage to evoke loyalty rather than hostility from their employees.

  In 1911 that radical thought hadn’t yet struck. One man who worked there at that time described how the morning lasted from seven o’clock till noon and you weren’t even allowed to break off for a cup of tea or a piece to keep you going. One foreman was notorious for checking on who was in the toilets. Anyone caught in there smoking and taking an unofficial break was sacked on the spot.

  There was resentment too that, although British industry was beginning to emerge from the depression which had paralyzed the economy between 1907 and 1910, pay had not risen with renewed profits. Wages were still being cut on the basis of timing and testing carried out by cordially detested ‘efficiency engineers’ imported from America. Tom Johnston described the process in the Forward. A few months before, in October 1910, the sensational trial in London of the infamous Dr Crippen for the murder and dismemberment of his wife had been all over the newspapers, hence the reference here:

  In many of these departments foremen stand with watches in their hands timing the men and girls so that the maximum amount of labour can be exacted from the operatives in return for the minimum wage. In one department especially, a foreman has been nicknamed ‘Crippen’ because of his timing propensities. The watch is seldom out of this individual’s hand. Wages are not reduced collectively. In Singer’s the wages of two or three are broken today; a few others tomorrow and so on until all the workers have been reduced, and the game of SCIENTIFIC REDUCTION begins once more.

  Singer’s in 1911 was a powder keg waiting to explode – and explode it did.

  5

  An Injury to One is an Injury to All: The Singer Strike of 1911

  We’ve struck work, son. The whole factory’s coming out.

  One chilly March afternoon in 1911 ten-year-old James Wotherspoon was walking home from school in Clydebank. His route took him past Singer’s, where his father worked. As he made his way up Kilbowie Road the vast complex lay to the boy’s left. To his right, where the Clydebank Shopping Centre now is, coiled the railway lines and sidings of the Singer Lie. During the working day the trains lay here which transported those 4,000 or so Singer employees who didn’t live in the town to and from the factory.

  As James continued his journey home, he saw a sight he was never to forget. Hours before the end of the working day, people began to stream out of the factory. This was unheard of. In the midst of the crowd he spotted his father, who hurried across to where his young son stood staring in amazement through the railings which surrounded the plant. Till the end of his long life, James Wotherspoon was to remember the exact words his father used that day: ‘We’ve struck work, son. The whole factory’s coming out.’ What the schoolboy was witnessing was the start of a bitter industrial dispute which began with that mass walkout and carried on with public meetings, rallies and much heady talk only to collapse in acrimony three weeks later.

  The spark which ignited the strike was a dispute involving 12 young women who worked as polishers. Their task was to bring the cabinets which housed the sewing machines to a high sheen. When management transferred three polishers out of the department the twelve remaining girls were asked to do thei
r work as well as their own. A change in the way they were paid meant they would also have to accept a reduction of two shillings in their pay packet, a substantial loss when their total weekly wage amounted to around fourteen shillings. Angry at being asked to do more work for less pay, the polishers downed tools and withdrew their labour.

  Two thousand other girls immediately came out in sympathy. The men soon followed. By the middle of the following day, Tuesday, 21 March 1911, almost all of the more than 10,000 employees were on strike. Those who remained at their workbenches and desks were largely foremen, managers and skilled men. Pickets at the factory’s gates on Second Avenue, Kilbowie Road and Dalmuir did their best to persuade them to come out too.

  James Wotherspoon, the schoolboy who witnessed the start of the strike, died in 2005, a few months after his 105th birthday. He spent his own working life at Singer. Almost a century after the events of 1911, he retained a photographic memory of them. He vividly recalled seeing a group of ‘girl strikers’, as the Glasgow Herald quickly dubbed them, trying to get a foreman to join the stoppage. While one contemporary newspaper photograph shows female strikers in elegant large-brimmed hats, James Wotherspoon remembered that many of the younger girls wore brightly coloured berets – red, yellow, blue and green – pulled down over their hair and secured by a hatpin. He described the result as ‘not very flattering’.

  The attempt to persuade the foreman to join the strike was good-natured but noisy. The girls blew toy paper trumpets, linked hands and danced around the man. Keeping his cool, he repeatedly and politely tipped his bowler hat to them and walked on into the factory.

  The initial dispute among the polishers set light to the bonfire of grievances which had been smouldering inside the factory: the imposition of Scientific Management, the continual timing, testing and wage cuts. Union membership was another bone of contention. Singer’s management was forced to tolerate those unions to which the relatively small number of time-served men, mainly engineers and printers, belonged. It refused to sanction any union activity in respect of the unskilled workers who made up most of the workforce.

  Union activists had, however, been quietly recruiting inside Singer’s for about a year before the 1911 strike. Tom Bell, author of Pioneering Days, was one of them: ‘Factory gate meetings were held, literature was sold, and study classes begun. Soon contacts were extended inside and it was not long before every department had a small group.’

  A group to which Bell already belonged changed its name to the Industrial Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), becoming part of the British branch of the US-based Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The members of this magnificently named organization, which still exists today, were more familiarly known as ‘the Wobblies’.

  One of the IWW’s brightest lights was Joe Hill, the Swedish–American labour activist. Four years after the Singer’s strike, he was executed by firing squad in Utah for a murder that people then and since don’t think he committed, believing he was framed to get rid of a troublemaker. His life and story inspired the ballad ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’. Most famously sung by Paul Robeson and Joan Baez at Woodstock, it’s a song which continues to inspire rebels around the world. Novelist Stephen King and his wife Tabitha named one of their sons Joseph Hillstrom King in honour of Joe Hill.

  The Wobblies gave the workers at Singer’s a stirring slogan: ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’. Tom Bell reported in Pioneering Days that it quickly caught on, helping to stiffen the resolve of the new union members.

  The organization of the Singer’s strike was tight and highly effective. It was masterminded not only by the IWGB but also by the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). Small in membership, the SLP made up for that in dedication to their cause of socialist revolution and the creation of a workers’ republic. They would have no truck with those who advocated reform instead. They come across as rather a dour bunch but they seized the opportunity the Singer’s dispute presented to them with both hands. Strike headquarters were established at their committee rooms on Second Avenue, part of the Holy City. The flat-roofed houses where many Singer’s workers lived now belonged officially to the district of Clydebank known as Radnor Park. This geographically commanding location also had psychological significance, providing a lofty vantage point over Singer’s. The Second Avenue gate, one of the factory’s main entrances, was nearby. Once through it, a dizzyingly steep flight of stone stairs – they’re still there – plunged into the factory grounds.

  A strike committee was quickly formed and strike districts established in Bridgeton, Govan, Dumbarton, the Vale of Leven and elsewhere to ensure that the 4,000 workers who did not live in Clydebank were kept in the loop. Accurate information being deemed crucial to morale and the potential success of the strike, each district had a meeting place where the same trusted messenger gave them an update at half past six every evening.

  Much stress was laid on good behaviour. Workers at Singer’s normally collected their pay packets or had them delivered to their workbenches when they finished work at midday on Saturday. On the first week of the strike, money still being owed to them, they marched en masse into the factory, lifted their pay packets and marched out again. Even the Glasgow Herald was impressed by how they did that. No friend to the strikers, the newspaper of Glasgow’s Establishment estimated that 10,000 people, not much short of the whole workforce, had taken part in the collection of the pay: ‘Although extremely quiet and orderly there was something intensely dramatic about the whole scene.’

  Mass meetings, parades and processions were held throughout the strike, in Clydebank and beyond, to gain publicity and support for the strikers’ cause. On Thursday, 23 March, four days in, a demonstration estimated to include eight thousand people marched through Clydebank to John Brown’s. A meeting was held with the shipyard’s workers, requesting their solidarity and support. Headed by Duntocher Brass Band, those marchers must have been a sight to see.

  Despite the biting March winds, commented on in contemporary newspaper reports, there’s a sense of a carnival atmosphere at the beginning of it all. It must have been quite a novelty to be out and about in normally quiet but now bustling streets during working hours, away from the constant supervision and measuring and testing of the factory.

  On Sunday, 26 March, another demonstration was organized on Glasgow Green, time-honoured place of protest. Again, strike leaders emphasized the good behaviour of the strikers. Who those strike leaders were is curiously hard to establish. The records aren’t there, either for the strike committee or for Singer’s management. Other than the Singer managers, newspapers named no names either. This applies both for the socialist Forward and for what its readers called ‘the capitalist press’. That the Forward was protecting those who might later be blacklisted by Singer’s and other employers seems likely, that the capitalist press was doing the same, less so.

  Perhaps some newspapers were choosing to diminish the leaders of the dispute by not naming them. After all, many of them were mere ‘girl strikers’. Clearly these were females who did not know their place, neither the one allotted to them by class nor by gender. Or perhaps the newspapers were choosing not to give any of the strikers the oxygen of publicity.

  The Singer Strike: Clydebank, 1911 is an authoritative account of the strike, published in 1989 by Clydebank District Library and compiled by members of Glasgow Labour History Workshop. It names several names, making educated guesses as to these individuals’ involvement. It seems highly likely that Arthur McManus, the 21 year old who decided there had to be more to life than the processing of millions of sewing machine needles, was involved in the strike along with his friend Tom Bell. Bell was not only one of the prime movers behind the establishment of the IWGB union in Singer’s; he was also for a time a member of the SLP. Both he and Arthur McManus later became yet more Scottish founder members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, McManus becoming its first chairman.

  Neil MacLean, later to become long-standing
Labour MP for Govan, may also have been involved, although there is no documentary evidence of this. However, he was doing his apprenticeship as an engineer at Singer’s around the time of the strike.

  Eighteen-year-old Frances Abbot, later Mrs McBeth, worked as a polisher in the department where the dispute began. Again, there is no documentary evidence of her involvement, but her daughter described her as ‘a fighter all her days . . . right into “Red Clydeside”’. Fanny McBeth later came to know James Maxton and Davie Kirkwood, who became MP for the town, and remained throughout her life a dedicated member of the Labour Party.

  Jane Rae was in her late 30s at the time of the strike. She worked in the needle flat and was sacked afterwards because of her involvement. She subsequently became a member of the ILP, a suffragette, local councillor, supporter of the temperance movement and Justice of the Peace. In this role she earned a reputation for handing down the toughest penalties she could legally impose on men found guilty of domestic abuse.

  It’s curious that few references are made to the Singer Strike in the memoirs of the major figures of Red Clydeside. John Maclean certainly wrote at the time about what he called ‘this rather romantic effort’, but he was not a member of the SLP and there seem to be no accounts of him or his friend and fellow orator James Maxton addressing the strikers at their numerous meetings on Glasgow Green and elsewhere. Admittedly, Maxton was only 26 at the time and still serving his political apprenticeship.

  Singer’s management met the strike committee on several occasions but insisted there could be no discussion on any grievances until everyone went back to work. Management also emphatically refused to agree to factory-wide union recognition or the principle of collective bargaining, on which the strike had begun to focus.

  One of the arguments advanced by strike leaders here was that any individual girl who took a complaint to management was likely to have it ignored. Outspoken and spirited the lassies at Singer’s may have been, but nobody paid much attention to what girls had to say.