by Maggie Craig
At the Metropole Theatre meeting the auditorium was packed in all parts. As the names of the victors were mentioned as speakers by the chairman, Bailie Dollan, there were outbursts of tremendous cheering, though, one of the most cordial receptions was given to Mr. E. Rosslyn Mitchell and others of the unsuccessful candidates.
The Bulletin reported Tom Johnston’s mischievous observation which ‘raised a howl of laughter’ that he was now the Duke of Montrose’s representative in Parliament. He’d given the gentleman a fairly comprehensive doing in Our Noble Families. There were more speeches and more laughter at St Enoch Square, where James Maxton, Patrick Dollan and Neil MacLean, re-elected as Labour MP for Govan, addressed the crowd.
They did so from the parapet of St Enoch’s sweeping carriageway, up above the metal advert which for years extolled to travelling Glaswegians the benefits of the pens produced by an Edinburgh firm: ‘They came as a boon and a blessing to men, the Pickwick, the Owl and the Waverley Pen.’
For James Maxton, the euphoria of that send-off must have been bittersweet indeed. He and Sissie McCallum had married in the summer of 1919 and had a son two years later. Seriously ill through the first year of his life, the baby was nursed devotedly by his mother. The strain did not help her own health, which had never been robust. As young Jim returned to full health and strength, his mother weakened. Sinking fast, she died at the end of August 1922, leaving a distraught husband behind her.
Maxton’s mother stepped into the breach, taking over the care of her baby grandson. His brothers, sisters and friends rallied round, whisking Jimmy off to the continent on a journey which was half a holiday and half a research trip into how conditions for working people were in France, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Ramsay MacDonald, who had also been widowed young and left with a young family, advised Maxton that the only way to cope with his grief was to throw himself into his work.
Doing just that, he made the crowd in St Enoch Square laugh by poking fun at Bonar Law, promising the Prime Minister wasn’t going to know what hit him when the Scottish MPs arrived at Westminster:
Bonar, seek not yet repose
Cast that dream of ease away,
Thou art in the midst of foes,
Watch and pray.
After the parody of the hymn came the warning – and the battle cry:
When they went to the House of Commons, he said, they would make some of the genial old Tories from the backwoods earn their £400 by the sweat of their brows. They could not work miracles, but they promised courage, hard work, genuine and strenuous service. They wanted to pass from the era of government by delusion to government by understanding.
Davie Kirkwood remembered that when he and John Wheatley reached Westminster and walked together from the House of Commons to the House of Lords, he saw the physical manifestation of the world of privilege they all so hated: ‘Turning to John Wheatley, I said aloud: “John, we’ll soon change all this.”’ Looking back on it all, Kirkwood summed up the enthusiasm and the optimism:
We were going to do big things. The people believed that. We believed that. At our onslaught, the grinding poverty which existed in the midst of plenty was to be wiped out. We were going to scare away the grim spectre of unemployment which stands grinning behind the chair of every artisan. We believed it could be done. We believed that this people, this British folk, could and were willing to make friends with all other peoples . . . We were the stuff of which reform is made.
20
The Zinoviev Letter
Another Guy Fawkes – a new gunpowder plot.
The new Scottish Labour MPs were sometimes lonely in London at the weekends. It was too far to go home, and too expensive. In those days MPs had to pay their own expenses, including railway fares between their constituencies and the House of Commons, out of their annual salary of £400.
They kept one another company, sometimes having a wander through the street market at Petticoat Lane. Speaking broad Scots, Davie Kirkwood was not always understood by the Londoners. He kept a guid Scots tongue in his heid in the House of Commons. Famously, in a debate on poverty in Clydebank, he was reprimanded by the Speaker for mentioning the King, reminded that the monarch must not be referred to by name in the House. Kirkwood thought for a moment and substituted ‘the Prince o’ Wales’s faither’. The chamber erupted into laughter.
Sometimes on a Sunday a group of them went together to St Columba’s, the Scots Kirk, and sometimes to an Anglican church in the East End where the parson ‘always put up a fervent word for strength and courage to the men from Scotland who had come down to Westminster to fight against needless poverty’. The opportunity to do so came sooner than they had expected.
Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law resigned due to ill health only a year after that triumphant send-off in St Enoch Square. Stanley Baldwin called another election, hoping to cement his new leadership of the Tory Party, but his confidence was misplaced. His party lost almost 90 seats, while Labour’s share of the vote shot up to almost 200. Not considering his majority strong enough, Baldwin declined to become prime minister. King George V therefore asked Ramsay MacDonald to form a government.
Britain’s first Labour government took office in early 1924. Its supporters had high hopes but these were swiftly to be dashed. MacDonald and other moderates within the Labour Party were anxious not to alarm middle-class voters by pursuing policies they might view as too radical. ‘Alas,’ Davie Kirkwood later wrote, ‘that we were able to do so little!’ One significant piece of legislation did come out of the first Labour government. John Wheatley’s Housing Act started the building throughout the United Kingdom of half a million local-authority houses to be rented out to poorer families.
Manny Shinwell said hindsight showed that the Labour Party in 1924 was not ready to govern. Being in a position to change things had been a dream for so long but the reality brought with it some unpleasant truths. He thought one of those was that the Conservatives had lost public confidence rather than the Labour Party winning it. Their coats were on a shoogly peg.
Ramsay MacDonald gave Shinwell responsibility for mines, which were administered by the Board of Trade. It was a poisoned chalice. Miners and coal owners loathed each other so much they could hardly bear to be in the same room with each other, let alone sit down around a table and hold rational talks about wages and hours. In his memoirs, Manny Shinwell described how fierce the mutual hostility was:
The miners were spoiling for a showdown with the owners. Both sides were frankly stubborn and suspicious, each regarding the other as enemies. For more than two years, the miners had worked under a sense of grievance since being forced to take a wage cut after the cessation of work, as much a lockout as a strike, in March 1921.
The miners were now threatening to strike. Shinwell coerced the mine owners into agreeing a wage increase of 13 per cent and the strike was averted. For now.
Despite his desire to avoid controversy and be seen as a safe pair of hands, Ramsay MacDonald was convinced Britain needed to officially recognize Soviet Russia. This was simply facing up to reality. Unhappy that he might have to receive people who had shot and killed his cousin the Tsar and his family and thrown them down that mineshaft in Ekaterinburg, King George V was reassured by Ramsay MacDonald this would never happen.
There was an economic argument for recognizing the Soviet Union. If diplomatic relations between the two countries were resumed, Britain might be able to collect on the debts Russia had owed Britain since before the Revolution. The Russians said yes, fine, but we’d like a new loan to help get our industry and our agriculture moving. Britain’s bankers and financiers were not the only people in whom this provoked a very sharp intake of breath. Although the King had been brought round to recognizing the Russians, many in Britain were outraged by the very idea of it. The Soviet Union remained a bandit state, a lawless country brimming with brigands and Bolsheviks.
Led by press baron Lord Rothermere, a campaign was mounted against Ramsay Ma
cDonald and the Labour government. In other words, the Daily Mail struck again. They soon found two great big sticks with which to beat Ramsay MacDonald.
John Ross Campbell was a socialist from Paisley, a member of the CWC during the First World War and in 1920 yet another Scottish founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. By 1924 Campbell was in London, editing the party’s Workers’ Weekly. In July of that year he published an open letter to British servicemen, urging them to ‘let it be known that, neither in the class war nor in a military war, will you turn your guns on your fellow workers’.
The Attorney General advised Ramsay MacDonald to prosecute Campbell under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797. The senior law officer changed his advice when it emerged that John Ross Campbell had served with distinction during the First World War and been awarded the Military Medal. It wouldn’t look good to prosecute a war hero. That argument didn’t wash with Lord Rothermere and those so fundamentally and viscerally opposed to the Labour government.
In September of 1924 MI5 intercepted the infamous Zinoviev Letter. This was apparently signed by both Grigory Zinoviev, chairman of Russia’s Comintern, and Arthur McManus, formerly of Singer’s and now the first chairman of the British Communist Party. The letter urged British communists and socialists to work towards revolution in Britain. At the same time, Ramsay MacDonald was dealing with a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons because he had declined to bring a prosecution against John Ross Campbell.
The Conservatives and the Liberals alleged he was under the influence of the Communist Party of Great Britain, even that of Soviet Russia. MacDonald lost the motion of no confidence and resigned, precipitating yet another general election.
Someone then leaked the Zinoviev Letter to The Times and the Daily Mail. Both newspapers published it four days before the election. The somewhat lengthy epistle was nicely summed up in the accompanying written protest from the British Foreign Office to the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in London:
The letter contains instructions to British subjects to work for the violent overthrow of existing institutions in this country, and for the subversion of His Majesty’s armed forces as a means to an end.
It is my duty to inform you that His Majesty’s Government cannot allow this propaganda, and must regard it as a direct interference from outside in British domestic affairs.
It was incendiary stuff. Ramsay MacDonald described it as ‘Another Guy Fawkes – a new gunpowder plot.’ The resulting panic among voters sealed the downfall of the first Labour government. After the election, MacDonald returned to Parliament with 50 fewer seats, only 151 MPs as compared with the 412 now sitting on the Conservative benches.
Although Grigory Zinoviev always denied he had ever seen the letter which bears his name and claimed he had nothing whatsoever to do with it, the document remained controversial. When the late Robin Cook was foreign secretary in 1998, he ordered an investigation into it. While this stated it definitely was a forgery, the Zinoviev Letter continues to exert a fascination over conspiracy theorists.
In August 1925, 12 members of the Communist Party of Great Britain were arrested under the Incitement to Mutiny Act on the basis of the allegedly seditious articles they had written and the communist literature they had circulated. Willie Gallacher and Arthur McManus were among the defendants, sentenced to one year’s and six months’ imprisonment respectively. Arthur McManus died of a heart attack a year after he was released from prison. He was 38.
There’s a conspiracy theory about these arrests too. Some believed they were a pre-emptive strike, an attempt to weaken the warriors of the Left. Another battle was brewing.
21
Nine Days’ Wonder: The General Strike of 1926
Law abiding citizens should refrain from congregating in the streets.
Everything stopped at midnight. Even the cross-border trains between Scotland and London ground to a halt, stranding their passengers wherever that happened to be. Maybe those passengers should have had a little more foresight. The General Strike of May 1926 had been well advertised.
It was called by the TUC, asking workers throughout Britain to support Britain’s miners. Mine owners wanted them to take a cut in their wages and an increase in their hours. The miners refused, going on strike on 30 April. Next day, at the annual May Day celebrations, thousands marched through Glasgow and on to Glasgow Green, where a rally was held in support of the miners. Their leader, Arthur Cook, had come up with a catchy slogan: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.’
Workers in other industries – railwaymen, printers, engineers – saw the miners’ struggle as their struggle too. If the miners’ pay was cut today, their pay would be cut tomorrow. Britain’s economy was in trouble, and this was one solution to fixing it. It was not the strategy favoured by the Left. John Wheatley summed up what was wrong with it:
In 1920, the millions of ex-Service men who had returned to industry gave us, with the aid of the improved methods of production introduced during the war, an enormous output. The standard of wages did not enable the workers to buy up the goods as rapidly as they were produced. The inevitable consequence was a glatted [sic] market, a collapse in selling prices, industrial stagnation and growing unemployment. Competitive Capitalism’s only remedy for this was the paradoxical one of a reduction in wages when the obvious need was more purchasing power.
The coal owners were, however, adamant. The miners of the north of England, Wales and Scotland had to increase their working hours and take a cut in pay. There was a feeling that the men who worked below the ground had been singled out to take the punishment first. Many working-class people throughout Britain were already struggling to survive.
By the early 1920s, 5,000 people in Clydebank were unemployed. Others were on short time. When McAlpine’s, the factors of the Holy City tenements, decided to raise the rents, a prolonged rent strike ensued. It was fought on the tenants’ side by the Clydebank Housing Association. Among others, they were led by Andrew Leiper and David Cormack. Support came also from the ILP, the Communist Party and the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement.
Women were once again to the fore, including Mrs Hyslop and Mrs Pickles, other female members of the ILP and the Co-operative Women’s Guild. Manny Shinwell and Patrick Dollan were also involved, as was Davie Kirkwood, now Labour MP for Clydebank. Telling the tenants to put the rent money aside each week so that they could pay when the dispute was settled was not one of his smarter moves. None of them could afford to put any money aside.
Quoted in Seán Damer’s Rent Strike! The Clydebank Rent Struggles of the 1920s, Mr Lambie of the Clydebank Housing Association, whose first name is not given, recalled that there were people on the verge of suicide because they’d lost their jobs at Singer’s. Those still employed in the sewing machine factory were having their wages arrested by the company to pay the arrears of rent to McAlpine’s, the factors.
The Clydebank Rent Strike did not win the victory Mrs Barbour’s army had. The dispute dragged on and ended in defeat for the tenants. Many were evicted, six of them on Hogmanay 1925, the timing seen as deliberately vindictive. This renewed sense of class conflict was the atmosphere in which the General Strike took place.
The TUC first asked specific groups of workers to come out: transport workers and printers. On Clydeside as elsewhere the disruption to transport led to violent clashes on the roads and tramways and angry confrontations between strikers, non-strikers and the volunteers manning the trams and driving lorries and buses.
Those volunteers are often remembered as well-heeled university students having a bit of a lark. Glasgow Caledonian University’s Red Clydeside website points out that the Students’ Representative Council of Glasgow University declared itself neutral during the strike and that fewer students were involved in strike-breaking in Glasgow than at Edinburgh or St Andrew’s.
That some Glasgow students were involved is recalled on the same website by an oral testimony given in 197
0 by Bill Cowe of Rutherglen. A member of the National Union of Railwaymen, Cowe was one of those who went on strike in 1926:
In Glasgow the Glasgow University students were arraigned by the working class as being the defenders of property and Toryism because the Glasgow students tried to break the General Strike.
The young students, they drove tramcars in Glasgow that led to battles in the Glasgow streets where these trams were wrecked and students were manhandled because every action was a mass action and immediately a tramcar was surrounded by a mass of strikers the police could do nothing. The students foolish enough to do this job really let themselves in for a lot of trouble.
To this day you’ll get among good trade unionists an aversion to university students. Women in the street were encouraging their menfolk to really injure the students.
Class warfare was being waged here, and from both sides. Newspaper reports after the strike ended in failure exhibit an unmistakeable sense of crowing that the middle classes had turned out and managed to do jobs the workers normally did, as a report in The Scotsman of 1926 illustrates:
So far as the Clyde Trust was concerned, they got on with their work at Princes Dock, which they had selected as it was easily protected, central, and with many advantages. Their operations went on extremely well, and he asked the Trustees to concur with him in expressing their gratitude to Col. Wingate and the men of his organisation who came and did that work for them. (Applause.)
It demonstrated that men who had never been accustomed to manual labour, but had their hearts in their work, and wanted to get it through, in the course of a very short apprenticeship, did about just as good work as the men who were employed from day to day. If that was not an object lesson in Trade Unionism he did not know what would be.