When the Clyde Ran Red

by Maggie Craig

  The tribunal said they would give their decision in a fortnight. By that time Maxton had got himself arrested over the deportation of the shop stewards to Edinburgh. At the angry demonstration on Glasgow Green on Sunday, 26 March 1916, he was one of those who addressed the crowd:

  It is now for the workers to take action and that action is to strike and down tools at once. Not a rivet should be struck on the Clyde until the deported engineers are restored to their families. In case there are any plainclothes detectives in the audience I shall repeat that statement for their benefit. The men should strike and down tools.

  Typical James Maxton. Passionate. Defiant. Challenging. Reckless.

  Plain-clothes policemen were indeed present, taking down every word. They waited a few days before they came for him, until midnight on the following Thursday. Maxton had just got home after visiting his friend John Maclean, who himself was out on bail after having been arrested for the speeches he had been making against conscription.

  James Maxton’s dog Karl was ready to go for the policemen but his master restrained him and went quietly. Well, probably not at all quietly, but peacefully at least. After Maxton’s arrest, Karl the dog was stoned to death by thugs claiming to be patriots objecting to his master’s antiwar stance.

  James MacDougall, with whom Maxton had shared a platform at Glasgow Green, was also arrested. Both men spent the next four weeks in Glasgow’s grim Duke Street Prison, charged with ‘attempting to cause mutiny, sedition and disaffection and with impeding, delaying and restricting the war effort’.

  Maxton was desperately worried about his girlfriend Sissie and his mother Melvina, who now had two sons in prison. John Maxton had also claimed exemption from military service as a conscientious objector but was refused. After a court martial, he had been sentenced to imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs.

  Outwardly, James Maxton put on a brave face. Unable after all to attend the ILP conference in Newcastle in April 1916, he sent his apologies. In the letter read out to the delegates he explained he was unable to attend owing to the unfortunate circumstance of currently being confined to his room:

  People in the movement here have done everything they could to make me as comfortable as possible. The prison officials have been very decent and have shown every respect and consideration. It is a valuable and instructive experience and everyone should have at least ten days in prison annually for the good both of their health and their immortal souls.

  While he was confined to his lonely cell, he was thinking deeply about life, his and Sissie McCallum’s in particular. She was allowed to visit him in Duke Street and it was in prison that he proposed to her and was accepted. She must have really loved him, for he certainly wasn’t much of a catch: out of work, in prison, facing a trial for sedition and an even lengthier prison sentence. Understandably, Sissie’s parents were not exactly over the moon about their daughter’s choice.

  She had to buy her own ring, although her new fiancé did arrange to get the money to her for that. He wrote movingly to her on 4 May 1916:

  My own dearest lass,

  We’ve got our marching orders quicker than I expected so yesterday was our goodbye, I fancy for some time now. Whatever the time may be it will soon pass and then see how glad we’ll be when we meet. Always look forward til then and things won’t seem so bad. I’ll make up to you for every sorrow you’ve suffered and every tear you’ve shed in every way I can.

  I’ve only realised in the last four weeks what a woman’s love means, and I’m sure that’s one good thing prison has done. I never believed it possible in any other circumstances that any woman would do what you’ve done for me, or stick so loyally through thick and thin. I shall never forget it, and every power, every ability I have, and I’m afraid they’re not many, will be used henceforward for your sake.

  I haven’t so much time as usual for this note so I’ll cut off here. Keep cheery, enjoy yourself as much as possible, have as many friends as possible, and I’ll be with you again soon.

  Yours ever,

  Jim

  They were both thirty at the time of their engagement and it was another three years before they could be married. A major reason for the delay was that it was only Sissie who now had a regular income. The bar on female teachers being married meant she would be obliged to give up work as soon as they wed.

  Maxton and MacDougall were tried at the High Court in Edinburgh, sitting in Parliament House, off the Royal Mile. Their legal team on Thursday, 11 May 1916 included the indispensable Mr Rosslyn Mitchell and both defendants took the advice to plead guilty. The core of their defence was the strength of their feelings over the deportation of the shop stewards of the CWC. They had felt this was a grave injustice and that was why they had spoken out so passionately against it. They realized now they should not have said what they had done.

  The Lord Advocate, prosecuting, was having none of it. Maxton and MacDougall had incited the workers to strike while ‘the flower of our British manhood’ was fighting a war to save Britain from the Germans. Given the strong anti-German sentiment in Edinburgh after the death and destruction caused by the Zeppelin raid, the sentence imposed was considered lenient: one year’s imprisonment.

  The two men served their time in Calton Jail. Perched on the cliff which rises above the main railway line to London at Waverley Station, this occupied the site of today’s St Andrew’s House. There’s not much left of the prison now apart from one of its fanciful Victorian towers, complete with battlements. Maxton joked about it being his ancestral home.

  Conditions were pretty grim, with a monotonous diet of porridge and buttermilk, little comfort in terms of bedding and nothing to read except the Bible and a hymn book. The prisoners were isolated too, despite now having other friends occupying cells in the same building. Willie Gallacher and Johnny Muir were also in Calton Jail. So, briefly, was John Maclean.

  Maclean too had been tried and found guilty of sedition, sentenced to a harsh three years’ penal servitude. He was soon transferred from Edinburgh to Peterhead, on the windswept Buchan Coast north of Aberdeen. If the authorities hoped thus to put him out of sight and out of mind, they had badly misjudged the esteem in which thousands of people held him.

  The prisoners in Edinburgh had friends outside the jail. Davie Kirkwood and the CWC shop stewards were still in Edinburgh:

  Another of our interests was to go to Calton Hill, overlooking the Jail, and wave to James Maxton, William Gallacher, John W. Muir, Walter Bell, and James McDougall [sic] when they came into the yard for exercise.

  Let it be said in honour of the good-nature of their jailers that, when it was discovered that we were sending greetings, the officers found something to attract their attention elsewhere for that one precious minute a day. It was an open secret that every one in Calton Jail learned to love James Maxton.

  The warders certainly warmed to him. As Gordon Brown put it, he ‘persuaded some of them to form a branch of the Police and Prison Warders’ Trade Union and even inveigled a few into the ILP’.

  Outside the prison walls but their internal exile enforced by having to report to the Edinburgh police three times a day, the CWC deportees spent varying amounts of time in the capital. The ASE, of which they were members, refused to give them any help, although some came from other quarters.

  When rank-and-file members of the union elected a member to attend the Labour Party Conference in Manchester in January 1917, Davie Kirkwood won by a mile. After various shenanigans and the intervention of Colonel Levita, he was allowed to go. He told the Colonel that when he was finished at Manchester he was going home to Glasgow. The Colonel dared him to do it. Kirkwood did.

  The Glasgow police called on him as soon as he got there, asking him to sign a document promising that in future he would interfere in no way with the production of munitions. He indignantly refused, on the grounds that he never had done. On the contrary, he had helped keep production going. Not quite sure what to do with him, the police asked h
im to give his word of honour that he would not leave home for the next 24 hours.

  When they hadn’t returned four days later, a bemused Kirkwood consulted with John Wheatley and Tom Johnston. Seeing that he was under the weather physically, they advised a short rest, and ‘it finished up with me being packed off in my best clothes with bag and umbrella to Crieff Hydropathic’.

  It was a new experience for me. I had never before been in a hydropathic or any similar resort of the well-to-do. I was astonished to find that, as the old woman said, ‘the place was fair polluted wi’ meenisters.’ It was like a ministers’ guest-house. I was still more surprised in the evening to see the ministers and their lady friends dancing or sitting at a dozen tables, playing cards! So innocent was I of the fashionable world that I thought ministers looked upon card-playing as a sin and a folly. I could not play cards. I thought it strange to have dancing and card-playing during the War.

  The police caught up with him the morning after his arrival. He had eaten a hearty breakfast, sung hymns at a morning service and was thinking good thoughts about everyone around him when the Chief Constable of Perthshire turned up and arrested him. The platoon of soldiers the Chief Constable had brought with him to the Hydro were to escort Kirkwood to Edinburgh Castle.

  ‘All right,’ said the dangerous revolutionary, ‘but I’ll need to go upstairs for my bag and my umbrella.’ Although outwardly he remained calm, seeing the soldiers had shaken him badly. ‘They had come for me at last,’ he wrote. Not only was this mere months after the Easter Rising, they were also in the middle of a war where terrified young men suffering from shell shock were shot at dawn. Facing that firing squad must once again have seemed a real possibility.

  His senses clearly heightened, Kirkwood looked out of the window of his fifth-floor room in Crieff Hydro and observed how beautiful the surrounding countryside was:

  The Chief Constable looked, and said he had no idea that Crieff was such a beautiful place and that he had never seen it from such a height.

  Then he turned to me and said:

  ‘Kirkwood, you’re a queer fish. I can’t make you out at all. If I were you, I should have something more on my mind than looking at the ordinary things of Nature.’

  They took me from the Hydro by a back door, lest I should give the place a bad name or disturb the peace of the ministers.

  He had nothing but praise for the ‘utmost kindness and good will’ with which the Perthshire police treated him before he was sent off to Edinburgh: ‘One of Britain’s greatest achievements is the creation of a police force which performs its duty with efficiency and retains an attitude of detachment.’

  When they offered him bread, butter and tea he told them he was a lot hungrier than that. What he wanted was ‘steak, potatoes and a vegetable, and then a pudding’. The police burst out laughing, and obliged:

  These things were sent for, and a fine Scots lassie brought them in. I enjoyed my dinner.

  The train arrived. The Chief Constable shook hands and wished me good luck, and my soldier escort and I boarded the train.

  In little more than an hour I was in a dungeon in Edinburgh Castle, sitting on my bag, with my umbrella propped up in a corner!

  The two weeks he spent there were dark in more ways than one:

  The Castle of Edinburgh is of great age. It was built at a time when oppression drove the people in rebellion and then cruelly crushed the rebellious.

  My new habitation was a vault far below the ground, into which the only light entered from a small grated window high up near the roof. Above my vault were the guards’ quarters, occupied by German and Austrian officer-prisoners. They were a noisy crew, singing, shouting, and scrapping day and night. They seemed to want for nothing.

  I thought it strange that I, who was innocent of any offence, should be in a dungeon while the captured enemy should be so cheerfully housed up above.

  I was a done man. My mind refused to think. My body seemed incapable of exertion. I wondered what was to happen next. Hours passed in utter loneliness.

  On his third day, a soldier flung open the cell door, slapped the revolver at his belt and threatened to dispatch him: ‘. . . I’d raither use it to shoot you nor a German. You’re David Kirkwood o’ the Clyde.’ Kirkwood drew his own weapon in defence: words and reasoned argument. They soon got onto the Bible:

  I was grateful to Joseph – he occupied fully twenty minutes! Then we passed to Pharaoh and Moses, and the very pleasant story of the mother who made Pharaoh’s daughter pay her for being a nursemaid to her own child. After that it was easy to tramp through the desert, though it took the Israelites forty days and forty nights. By the time we had reached the Land of Promise, in which I was more fortunate than Moses, I was becoming exhausted, but I was grateful to the minister whose Bible class I had attended in my youth!

  The soldier had long since stopped menacingly patting his revolver. Davie Kirkwood spent two hours talking to the man about the Bible and made a shrewd observation:

  He was more interested in the Bible than in shooting me, although he had come for that purpose. I have often noticed that people who are attracted by the blood stories of the Old Testament are inclined to look upon weapons of destruction as instruments confided to their care for carrying out what they believe to be the purposes of the Almighty. It is a kind of brain affection that has put a blight on religion through the ages.

  When the guard changed, Kirkwood told the soldier going off duty that maybe one day he would see the light, that ‘this was a capitalist war’ and after it he might very probably find himself out of a job. Years later, Kirkwood met that soldier again. He came up to him at an open-air meeting, shook his hand and told him that he had indeed now seen the light. Kirkwood had converted him that day in Edinburgh Castle.

  Unable to coerce him into signing any undertakings that he would cause no trouble in the future, an exasperated Colonel Levita released the stubborn Mr Kirkwood but reminded him that he was still under sentence of deportation and could not therefore return home to Glasgow. Kirkwood walked out of Edinburgh Castle into the fresh air of the outside world. He remembered to take his umbrella.

  Once again he sought refuge with John S. Clarke. He told Kirkwood he should head south to Moffat Hydro. The CWC had already sent James Maxton, Willie Gallacher and James MacDougall there to get their strength back after their months in prison. The group stayed at Moffat for two weeks, the cost funded by a collection of the faithful taken up by John Wheatley, doing what he so often did and quietly making the necessary arrangements. Kirkwood’s train was met by another chief constable:

  How had he known I was coming? He saluted and said: ‘Good afternoon, Mr Kirkwood.’ It was a most generous greeting. I raised my hat and said: ‘Good afternoon, Chief.’ It was like Stanley’s meeting with Livingstone in Africa. The Chief Constable ought to have said: ‘Mr Kirkwood, I presume?’ He turned away and I went on to the Hydropathic – the second time I had been in such a place.

  Davie Kirkwood once observed that James Maxton always looked so ill nobody noticed when he really was unwell. That Maxton kept body and soul together on a diet which consisted mainly of cigarettes and tea probably didn’t help. At Moffat, worried by his friend’s persistent cough, Kirkwood insisted on taking him to see a local doctor. Dr Park was reassuring about Maxton’s health but damning of the wild men of the Clyde everyone was talking about:

  ‘Traitor of the deepest dye,’ he called Kirkwood, and said Maxton was a vagabond. It was a good thing they were both safe within the walls of Edinburgh Castle. We kept back our laughter with difficulty.

  As we were saying our good-byes, Jimmie said, pointing to me:

  ‘This is the traitor of the deepest dye.’

  ‘And this,’ I said, ‘is the vagabond, though he’s mair like a scarecrow nor a Russian revolutionary.’

  Dr Park’s mouth fell open. Then he began to laugh, the traitor of the deepest dye and the vagabond joined in and they all parted the best of friends. Da
vie Kirkwood made another astute observation: ‘Like so many people who thought they hated us, he did not hate us. What he hated was his own idea of us.’

  Relations with the many wounded officers staying at Moffat Hydro were not so cordial:

  It was tragic to see them, splendid men, hobbling about. Of course they knew who we were, but they paid no attention to us. They gave a good example of self-control, for I am sure that in their distress they must have hated us.

  In all the fortnight only two of them spoke to us.

  One of those who did was a Cameron Highlander who swayed up to their table one night when he was drunk and ‘full of insulting remarks’. When the Red Clydesiders refused to rise to the bait, the soldier tried harder:

  Then he ruffled Maxton’s hair, saying: ‘Look at his hair. He’s more of a Frenchman than a Scot.’ That was too much for me. I rose up and said: ‘Look here, Captain, if you don’t go over to your own table, I’ll smash your jaw for you, and the whole British Army won’t protect ye.’ He gave a silly wave of the hand and went away like a child. The other officers looked, but said nothing.

  Still a deportee, Kirkwood had to go back to Edinburgh when he left Moffat Hydro. Desperately worried about his wife, who was expecting a baby, he had a crisis of conscience as to whether to sign the documents which would allow him to go home. When his son sent a telegram to say his mother had given birth to a baby girl, Kirkwood ‘ran to the Scottish Command’.

  Although Kirkwood continued to refuse to sign the documents, Colonel Guest, the new commander, told him he was a married man himself and would do his best to get him home. Kirkwood went to Waverley, bought a single ticket to Glasgow and packed his bag. Once again, he did not forget his umbrella.