When the Clyde Ran Red

by Maggie Craig

  Interestingly, Tom Johnston chose not to mention the National Insurance Act in his overview of 1911. Regarded now as the foundation stone of Britain’s Welfare State, this initiative of the Liberal administration in which Asquith was prime minister and David Lloyd George the minister for pensions provided for the first time for health and unemployment insurance for workers. Those who earned less than £160 per annum were to contribute fourpence a week, their employers threepence and the government twopence. Health insurance and the right to consult what became known as the ‘panel doctor’ did not yet cover workers’ families.

  Germany had introduced compulsory national insurance as far back as 1884. Lloyd George used this in support of Britain’s proposed scheme, arguing that we should be ‘putting ourselves in this field on a level with Germany. We should not emulate them only in armaments.’ Unfortunately, that race was already being hard run and no one seemed able to stop it, although some people did try.

  On the same day as they previewed the Scottish Exhibition, the Glasgow Herald published an account of the inaugural meeting at the Mansion House in London of the Anglo–German Friendship Society. This appointed the Duke of Argyll honorary secretary. Lord Aberdeen was also in attendance. The aim of the new society was ‘to encourage cordiality and friendly feelings between the British and German peoples’.

  Lord Avebury asked, ‘What in the world were we to go to war about with Germany or Germany with us?’ War, he said, would be disastrous to both countries:

  If European monarchs were to retain their thrones, if peace was to be maintained, statesmen must devise some means of stopping this reckless and ruinous expenditure on armaments, which pressed so heavily on the springs of industry and aggravated so terribly and so unnecessarily the unavoidable anxieties and troubles of life. We were one race, we had a common religion and common interests, we were bound by ties of blood, by centuries of peace, and a thousand years of immemorial friendship.

  Keir Hardie agreed with Lord Avebury on this one. In the same edition in which he had written about the struggle to make a living wage, Tom Johnston reported what Hardie had written in Vorwärts, the German socialists’ counterpart of the Forward. Invited by the editor of the German newspaper to contribute, Hardie sent fraternal New Year’s greetings in advance of the forthcoming elections to the Reichstag on 12 January 1912:

  It so happens that the Social Democratic Party of Germany is universally admitted in this country to be wholehearted on the side of peace. If therefore the Social Democrats make substantial gains at the polls, every one here – anti-German and pro-German alike – will accept that as indisputable proof that the German people desire peace.

  It is for this reason that the result of the elections is being awaited with so much interest and why thousands of people who are not themselves Socialists are praying for the success of the German Social Democratic Party on 12th January.

  A great Socialist triumph on that day would not only sweep the clouds of war from off the political horizon but would also make it easy for an understanding to be reached between Germany and Great Britain concerning future naval policy and thus the taxpayers of both countries would be relieved of the crushing burden which the present rivalry in Dreadnought building imposes.

  Meanwhile, back at Kelvingrove, the fine summer of 1911 and the colourful exhibits, pageants and concerts of the Scottish Exhibition were fast becoming a fond memory. The event lives on in a few photographs, postcards and souvenirs. It had been hugely successful, surpassing all expectations.

  It’s only a pity that the corner of the park in which we’re standing allows us to see the Angel of Death, lurking in the shadows under the rustling leaves of the autumn trees as the lights of Kelvingrove’s last great exhibition dimmed for the final time.

  8

  Radicals, Reformers & Martyrs: The Roots of Red Clydeside

  George the Third and last, and damnation to all crowned heads.

  The Red Clydesiders had impressive forebears from whom they drew strength and inspiration. Many were driven by their Christian faith. They read their Bible, took its teachings to heart and saw Christ as the first socialist. Protestants looked back to the Covenanters of the seventeenth century and their fight to worship God in the way they thought He wanted them to. Devout Catholics like John Wheatley found their politics and their faith completely compatible. As an advert in the Forward in December 1911 had it:

  Are you a Socialist and a Christian?

  Then for any Sake DO SOMETHING . . .

  Get a copy of Brewster’s Sermons (cost 6d., or 7d., per post), from the Reformers’ Bookstall. Read it and LEND it!

  Brewster was the great Chartist minister of Paisley Abbey, and his

  Sermons are the most eloquent Labour Appeals in the English

  Language.

  MAKE MORE SOCIALISTS:

  If you send 7d., we will post you a copy.

  BUT DO SOMETHING!

  In January 1926 the socialist newspaper carried an extract from a sermon preached by the Reverend John Munro, who was also Labour parliamentary candidate for East Renfrew. He was in absolutely no doubt that ‘the ideals of the Labour Party are the ideals of the Old Testament prophets, thousands of years ago’. The italics which follow are his:

  We come to the founder of our Christian faith, the head of our Church, Jesus, the Carpenter of Nazareth. He fulfilled the sayings of these Old Testament prophets. He went further than any of them. ‘Never man spake like this man,’ the Bible says.

  He was a carpenter to trade, worked in the little Highland village of Nazareth, reading a great deal, and thinking a great deal.

  He set out to preach what we now call his gospel. He took with him as comrades a few labouring men, three or four fishermen, a farm labourer, and one at least (Simon Zelotes) who had lost his job because of his violent political opinions.

  Scotland’s history also inspired the Red Clydesiders, although many of them, like communist Harry McShane, would have no truck with a romanticized view of it, especially when it came to kings and queens. In The History of the Working Classes in Scotland Tom Johnston took a similar and characteristically robust view. He was particularly scathing about the hero of Bannockburn. Since most ordinary Scots in the Middle Ages lived as vassals to an overlord, for Johnston the battles fought by Robert the Bruce were ‘facetiously termed “The War of Independence”’. He quoted Thomas Carlyle’s comments on Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather:

  It is noteworthy that the nobles of the country (Scotland) have maintained a quite despicable behaviour since the days of Wallace downwards – a selfish, ferocious, famishing, unprincipled set of hyenas, from whom at no time, and in no way, has the country derived any benefit whatsoever.

  Yet Johnston quotes Wallace too, using words attributed to him when talking of the influence his uncle the Priest of Dunipace had on him. By tradition, this was the man who told his nephew, ‘I have brought you to the ring – dance according to your skill.’

  Dico tibi verum; Libertas optima rerum,

  Nunquam servili sub nexu, vivito fili!

  My son, I tell thee soothfastlie

  No gift is like to liberty.

  Then never live in slaverie!

  All these words and more can be read on the dramatic, larger-than-life statue of William Wallace which towers over Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen.

  Red Clydeside can be viewed as a class and economic struggle, bosses and workers pitted against each other in a never-ending battle. One of the slogans of the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, neatly sums this up: ‘The interests of capital and labour can never be the same.’ It may then be somewhat ironic that Clydeside’s innate radical bent has roots in Glasgow’s long history as a city of merchants and traders. Such entrepreneurs had to be forward-looking, always seeking opportunities, always willing to embrace change. In the eighteenth century Glasgow and the Clyde grew prosperous on the back of such business zeal, most especially through the tobacco trade with A
merica.

  By the middle of the 1700s the city was importing half of all the tobacco produced in Virginia and North Carolina. Although some of this was processed in Glasgow, much was sold on, carried across the narrow waist of Scotland, from where it was re-exported to Holland and Belgium. It wasn’t only the tobacco lords who profited from this. Glasgow’s factories and mills geared up to send the tobacco ships back across the Atlantic with the many different goods the American colonists needed. The Workshop of the World was in business.

  There was a trade in ideas too. Scots of the Age of Enlightenment watched with intense interest as Americans sought to free themselves from the British Crown and establish a new kind of government, one in which the people had a say. That the people should even be thought of as being entitled to have their say was a profoundly radical idea. As far as most of Scotland’s gentry and aristocracy were concerned, democracy was not something to be aspired to but something to be resisted at all costs. In the same way, reform was also a dirty word.

  Decades before the American Revolution, in the Glasgow of the 1740s, merchants and traders were beginning to find the deference demanded by the gentry irksome. It got in the way of business, slowed everything down, put unnecessary checks on commercial and industrial progress. At Glasgow University at the same time, Francis Hutcheson was lecturing during Sunday-evening extramural classes open to townsfolk as well as students, on the need for religious tolerance and political liberty. The Ulster-born son of a Scottish father, he had been preaching this gospel for years before the Jacobite army, led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, occupied Glasgow over Christmas and New Year 1745–6.

  Charles Edward Stuart was never a noted fan of democracy. Many of those who rallied to his standard were, seeing in him and the ’45 the only focus for their discontent over Scotland’s loss of independence a generation before and their desire for change and reform. Indeed, it can be argued that the Jacobites of 1745 forged a political movement ahead of its time. In the days before democracy, how else was change to be brought about other than by fighting for it?

  One crucial principle Francis Hutcheson advocated was that people should see themselves as citizens and not subjects of the state. If you lived under a repressive government, it was not only to be expected that you would rebel, it was your duty to rebel. His ideas may well have influenced some of the Jacobites of 1745. Later in the century they certainly had an impact on the Americans who fought for and won the United States’ independence from Britain.

  Thomas Muir of Huntershill, whose home in Bishopbriggs still stands, was another man who believed tyranny should be challenged wherever it was encountered, a view which got him into trouble when he was a student at Glasgow University in the late eighteenth century. Originally destined for the ministry, he transferred to Edinburgh and studied law instead.

  When he graduated and began to practise his trade, ‘his rooms were the reform centre in Edinburgh’. Tom Johnston wrote of him, ‘Muir was a born rebel, and gathered about him everyone who had sympathies with the French Revolution, as a magnet attracts iron filings.’ Muir became a leading light of the Friends of the People, helping found branches throughout central Scotland:

  It was he who organised a meeting of the middle classes in the Star Hotel, Glasgow, on the 30th day of October, 1792, for the purpose of forming a Friends of the People Society in the city which should cooperate with the London Society in demanding ‘equal political representation and shorter parliaments’; it was he who conceived and organised the Convention of the Reform Societies for the December following in Edinburgh; it was he who framed the Convention’s standing orders; it was he who denounced leaders, and congratulated the Convention upon paying little attention to leaders; it was he who insisted, despite the frantic pleadings of the milder conventionists, upon reading the treasonable address from the revolutionary society of United Irishmen . . .

  Nor did he confine himself to the middle classes. Thomas Muir of Huntershill believed democracy was for everyone:

  It was he who toured the weaving districts and addressed the mobs at Kirkintilloch, Kilmarnock, Paisley, Lennoxtown, and innumerable other places; it was he who, though, declaring himself meantime no Republican and setting his face steadily against riot and insurrection as being ‘more likely than not to harm the people’s cause,’ inspired the three hundred delegates of the Edinburgh Convention to conclude the proceedings by standing, and holding up each his right hand, take a solemn oath to live free or die. Suddenly the Government swooped down upon the agitators.

  In all this revolutionary fervour three Edinburgh printers drank a toast to ‘George the Third and last, and damnation to all crowned heads’. They were sentenced to nine months’ hard labour. An excuse to arrest Thomas Muir came when letters intended for him went instead to a different Mr Muir, who handed them over to the authorities.

  These letters which so unluckily went astray contained information on the distribution of pamphlets written by Muir of Huntershill. One of the seditious statements he had made in these political tracts was to describe the House of Commons as ‘a vile junta of aristocrats’. Those words alone were enough to get him arrested. It was 1793, and he was 28 years old. Released on bail, he travelled to France, where he tried in vain to persuade the revolutionary government not to guillotine Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette because this would damn the cause of reform in other countries. On his return to Scotland, he was arrested when he stepped ashore at Stranraer and taken to Edinburgh for trial. He had the misfortune to come up before the deeply unpleasant Lord Braxfield, notorious as a hanging judge, but remained defiant when he spoke in his own defence:

  As for me, I am careless and indifferent to my fate. I can look danger and I can look death in the face, for I am shielded by the consciousness of my own rectitude. I may be condemned to languish in the recesses of a dungeon, I may be doomed to ascend the scaffold; nothing can deprive me of the recollection of the past – nothing can destroy my inward peace of mind arising from the remembrance of having discharged my duty.

  Lord Braxfield responded with spluttering distaste for the French and disbelief at the gall of those who dared to demand democracy and universal suffrage. Braxfield spoke the broadest of Scots, reportedly encouraging one of the jury members to ‘Come awa’, Maister Horner, come awa’, and help us to hang ane o’ thae damned scoundrels!’ His response to Thomas Muir has come down to us translated into Standard English:

  And what kind of folks were they? I never liked the French all the days of my life, and now I hate them . . . Multitudes of ignorant weavers . . . Mr Muir might have known that no attention could be paid to such a rabble. What right had they to representation? I could have told them that Parliament would never listen to their petition. How could they think of it? A Government in every country should be just like a corporation, and in this country it is made up of the landed interest which alone has a right to be represented.

  Muir and his fellow defendants were found guilty and sentenced to 14 years of penal servitude in Australia. The French tried unsuccessfully to rescue him on his way there.

  Once he was in Botany Bay, Thomas Muir’s social status allowed him more freedom than other convicts. Three years into his sentence, he took advantage of this to make good his escape. After an extraordinary series of adventures, which included George Washington sending a ship to rescue him, a shipwreck and a violent clash at sea with a British frigate, he eventually made it back to Europe, where he found refuge in France.

  Fighting in the naval skirmish had cost him an eye and left him with a shattered cheekbone. His health never recovered from his injuries or the exertions of his journey halfway across the world. The Radical from Bishopbriggs died at Chantilly in France in 1799, at the age of 34. One hundred years later, Tom Johnston pronounced an angry epitaph:

  He had given his life for political democracy in the land of his birth; perhaps had he known that the Scots people would value their franchises so lightly that they would hand them over regularly at e
lection times to Braxfield’s class – had he foreseen that, perhaps he had spared himself the sacrifice!

  Muir was an inspiration to people in his own time, including Robert Burns. The poet might have had to keep his head down for the sake of his job as an exciseman and, more importantly, as he himself wrote, for the sake of ‘having a wife and little ones’, but his Radicalism was never very far below the surface. It’s believed Burns started writing ‘Scots Wha Hae’ on the first day of Thomas Muir’s trial and that the stirring words refer not only to Bruce and Wallace but also to Muir.

  The harsh treatment meted out to the Radicals of the 1790s did not stop continuing political protest and agitation for reform. Twenty-one years after Muir of Huntershill died in France came the Radical Rising of 1820. The economic depression which followed the Napoleonic Wars and the increasing pace of the Industrial Revolution helped fuel demands for reform throughout Britain. More and more people had been attracted to Britain’s cities with the promise of work in mills and factories. The economic slump which follows all wars led to many of them losing their jobs. An infamous clash came at St Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819, when a meeting calling for parliamentary reform and an extension of the right to vote was attacked by cavalry armed with swords. Eighteen people died in the Peterloo Massacre and five hundred were wounded, including one hundred women.

  In the west of Scotland the same discontent came to a head in the spring of 1820. The government played the dirtiest of tricks, employing agents provocateurs to stir genuine Radicals and reformers into actions which would lead to disaster. Spreading rumours that a revolution was planned throughout the British Isles, they chose a sadly appropriate date to post placards all over Glasgow and towns and villages in a wide area around it.