When the Clyde Ran Red

by Maggie Craig

  In Glasgow at least it feels like revenge was being taken for how scared the middle classes had been back on Bloody Friday in 1919. Forward apart, the city’s newspapers were either part of that middle-class Establishment or highly deferential towards it. Three months after the end of the General Strike, in August 1926, the Institute of Journalists met in Glasgow. Its chairman was Sir Robert Bruce, editor of the Glasgow Herald.

  He won applause from the floor when he stated that his institute did not want to ‘be dominated at a moment of crisis by a cabal of militant Trade Union leaders’. The Institute of Journalists also sent a loyal message to the King, by telegram to Balmoral Castle.

  The printers who produced the newspapers were a horse of an entirely different colour, a group of men with a long tradition of political Radicalism. One of the incidents which precipitated the General Strike was the refusal of those working on the Daily Mail to print an article calling the miners, and those who proposed to strike in sympathy with them, subversive revolutionaries.

  With printers solid for the strike, Sir Robert Bruce and other newspaper owners and editors in Glasgow took a leaf out of Red Clydeside’s book and got organized, producing the Emergency Press, which came out every day over the nine days of the strike. The papers which cooperated to get their side of the story out were the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Record, The Bulletin, Glasgow Evening News, the Evening Times and The Citizen.

  On Wednesday, 5 May, the second day of the strike, the Emergency Press told its readers the country was quite calm, there were no scenes of disorder, government plans were working well and that in London thousands had walked to work. On Saturday, 8 May 1926, the fifth day of the stoppage, they reported there had been more rioting in Glasgow’s East End, which they described as the city’s ‘Storm Centre’. They also got right up onto their high horses about a news-sheet the TUC was producing for the run of the strike called The British Worker:

  This paper announces that it is entirely worked by union men. It is thus clear that the strike in the printing trade is not a general strike, but only a strike against those newspapers of whose political opinion the T.U.C. do not approve.

  The Emergency Press claimed that many in the printing trade had come out on strike ‘with the deepest grief and reluctance’. They also carried a ‘Notice to Citizens’ from the Lord Provost of Glasgow and the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, issued on 7 May 1926:

  In the present emergency we earnestly recommend that law abiding citizens should refrain from congregating in the streets, and should avoid the main thoroughfares as much as possible. This would not only conduce to their own safety, but materially assist the police in the exercise of their duty.

  There was a great sense of shared purpose among the strikers. Bill Cowe of Rutherglen found it inspiring:

  The strike was tremendously successful, the solidarity, the united determination of the working class. I’ve never seen it before or since, and as a young man it’s always recorded in my memory as being the most outstanding example of how unity in action can bring a government to its knees.

  John Wheatley agreed, describing the response to the strike call as ‘magnificent and electrical’:

  Highly respectable, middle-class railway clerks who had never struck on their own behalf had stood shoulder to shoulder with the grimy miner. Railwaymen and dockers brought their wages agreements and placed them on the altar of sacrifice. General transport workers stood still. Compositors, printers, and builders, with two or three times the income of a miner, rallied to the call. Millionaire newspaper magnates discovered that a ‘fifth estate’ had appeared in the realm.

  Everywhere among the strikers there was order, determination and confidence. It was a wonderful, unforgettable spectacle which put fresh hope and courage into the hearts of men whose lives had been devoted to the cause of working-class unity and intelligence.

  And then came the betrayal. That’s how thousands on the Left saw the actions of the TUC, which capitulated on Wednesday, 12 May. The miners stayed out until November, when they had to go back to work and agree to longer hours and less pay. The General Strike had totally failed to achieve its aims.

  Strikers and their supporters were stunned and confused, unable to understand why the TUC had conceded defeat while the strike was still rock solid. John Wheatley called them cowards:

  Some days must elapse before we learn accurately all the cause of the dreadful debacle. But I have no doubt that when everything is straightened out cowardice will occupy a prominent place. The qualities which distinguish men in a drawing-room, a palace, or a debating society are of little use in a vital struggle. Smart quips and polished manners play little part amidst grim realities. From the first moment of the struggle, and indeed before it, prominent Labour leaders were whining and grovelling. The day before the general strike was declared we were told by one of the men who were going out to lead us, that defeat was certain.

  Tom Johnston said he’d had his doubts about the strike but that once it had started, and with so many answering the call, the TUC should have had the courage to carry on ‘until the Government had been compelled to throw the coalowners and their slave terms overboard’.

  John S. Clarke dismissed the idea that what he called ‘The Nine Days’ Wonder’ had been a revolution in the making, a sinister plot to bring down capitalism:

  Because Mrs. McNab, good soul, lost her rag at Brigton and fired a bag of pease meal at a car conductor in spats, it hardly follows that attacks upon Woolwich Arsenal were contemplated in East Ham with a view to procuring howitzers and machine guns.

  Baton charges by police are, in nine cases out of ten, the result of panic in the police. Many police, in Glasgow at any rate, were highly sympathetic to the strikers.

  Clarke quoted some lines from Karl Marx all the same:

  EFFORT

  Let us do and dare our utmost,

  Never from the strife recede,

  Never live in dull inertia,

  So devoid of will and deed.

  Anything but calm submission

  To the yoke of toil and pain!

  Come what may then, hope and longing,

  Deed and daring still remain.

  Forward had, of course, not broken the strike. In its first edition after it, on Saturday, 22 May 1926, it launched a ferocious attack on ‘the blackleg press’, listing those newspapers by name and ownership. Those included all those Outram- and Hedderwick-owned papers in Glasgow which had joined together with others to publish the Emergency Press.

  In Dundee, Tom Johnston’s accusing finger was pointed at the Thomson Press, owners of the Dundee Advertiser, the Dundee Courier, the Weekly News and the Sunday Post. He lashed out at the Sunday Post, condemning its ‘sheer fatuity’ in its story of a religious revival in Kilmarnock – those were still happening – when young children had solemnly told their parents they did not want to go to the sinful cinema any more: ‘No, papa: I will not look at Charles Chaplin. I sin no more! Slow music!’

  His solution for how to deal with the blackleg press was not only to boycott the papers themselves but to write to the companies which advertised in them to say you would not buy their products if they continued to do so. The bitterness was intense. One letter to the editor suggested that, while throughout history unsuccessful generals had been court-martialled, he did not want the TUC General Council to be treated in the same way: ‘I think if they have any self-respect left they will fold up their cloaks and disappear silently into the night.’

  Ramsay MacDonald tried to take some consolation from the solidarity of the working classes:

  But we must not be blind to the wonderful demonstration of working-class solidarity which we have seen. It has been a moving and heartening manifestation. It shows a single minded goodness and willingness to bear sacrifices which should put pride and thankfulness into our hearts. If the nation could only understand it, it would be proud that it possessed the spirit which made the demonstration possible, whatever it may think of the ac
tion itself.

  The general strike of 1926 will be a glowing point in the history of British Labour.

  John Wheatley saw the solidarity but was bitter about the TUC:

  The workers have sustained a smashing reverse. It was not inflicted by their bosses due to their own weakness. It is a most astonishing result to a most magnificent effort. The struggle will surely rank as the greatest and most bungled strike in history.

  The strike was followed by prosecutions for assault, breach of the peace and words and actions ‘calculated to cause disaffection among the populace, contrary to the Emergency Regulations’. Fines and prison sentences were imposed, the latter with hard labour.

  Many strikers had to apply to get their jobs back and give an undertaking they were not in any trade union and would not engage in any trade-union activity. This happened at Singer’s in Clydebank and in many newspaper offices, including those papers owned by Outram’s and Hedderwick’s. In its first edition after the strike, on Saturday, 15 May 1926, the Glasgow Herald spelled it out, listing rates of pay and conditions, which included two weeks’ paid holiday each year, ‘funeral and sickness allowances’:

  Owing to the action of certain Trade Unions in breaking agreements with us, to which they were parties, we can have no confidence that any contracts which might be entered into in future would be observed. As continuity of publication is essential in the interests of newspaper readers and advertisers, we are compelled to protect them and ourselves against any repetition of what has taken place on this occasion.

  We quite recognise the difficult position in which so many of our former employees found themselves, and desire to say that we have no unfriendly feelings towards them individually.

  Applications from former employees would be considered as long as they had been received by nine o’clock that Saturday morning. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

  Defiant as ever, Tom Johnston took some advertising space immediately after the end of the General Strike to promote his own newspaper and the cause of socialism:

  SOCIALISM IS THE ONLY HOPE!

  SOCIALISM—

  WILL END POVERTY!

  WILL ESTABLISH JUSTICE!

  WILL ABOLISH WRONG!

  WILL EXALT FREEDOM!

  The way to get Socialism is to make Socialists.

  The way to make Socialists is to push the sale of ‘FORWARD’

  Let your slogan be FORWARD!

  22

  Ten Cents a Dance

  A low-class exotic from fourth-rate saloons in the Argentine.

  It was years before people came to terms in any way with the shock, grief and sadness of the First World War. A generation of young women had lost their lovers. A generation of men who survived the nightmare had gazed into the abyss, seen how hideously far man’s inhumanity to man could go. Perhaps the burden was too heavy to keep on carrying it.

  The shift in mood came around 1925. Women cut their hair and their skirts short, dropped their waists and flattened their chests. Fashionable young men took to wearing soft, unstructured clothes, affecting a languid air to go with their floppy shirts and flannel trousers. In some circles there was a blurring of gender boundaries, as evidenced by the title of one of the hit songs of the time: ‘Masculine Women, Feminine Men’.

  It’s not hard to see why some young men rejected the traditional role. That kind of masculinity was lying dead and broken in the green fields of France or, wounded in body and soul, shuffling like a sad ghost around the edges of other people’s lives. Slamming the door on the nightmare, the generation which followed declared that life was all about having fun.

  This was the Jazz Age, and the more its frantic gaiety horrified the older generation, the more the younger kicked up its heels and enjoyed it. ‘Jazz’ was used as an adjective. Put it in front of any noun and it meant modern, fashionable, just the ticket, right up to the minute. Deploying a creative crescendo of exclamation marks, an exasperated Helen Crawfurd had a go at it in 1921:

  Today, we are living in the jazz period. We have jazz music, jazz dancing, jazz frocks, jazz furniture, jazz art, jazz politics, and Lloyd George the grand jazz master of Britain, like the trickster on the fairground . . .

  If it is something capable of fulfilment – then for God’s sake stop jazzing and get to work. Up Labour! Organise! organise!! organise!!!

  She was on a hiding to nothing there, especially when it came to the dancing. Glasgow was famously dancing daft, as the Evening News told its readers in 1927, informing them that nowadays it had to be bright lights, swinging floors, palms and buffets and that ‘thé dansant is French for dancing interspersed with pastry’:

  Now Sauchiehall Street blossoms with dancing-palaces that vie in size with the greatest cinema-houses; incorporate features – garages, tearooms, lounges and club-rooms – out of the question for the theatres; and it looks as if more and more young people (and not so very young, either, some of them) are taking up evening dancing as their life’s career.

  Serious-minded socialists were not the only people who disapproved of this shocking frivolity. Free Kirk ministers and other puritans who had always nursed the suspicion that dancing was the vertical expression of a horizontal desire were absolutely appalled.

  Fighting their corner, dancing teachers and owners of ballrooms went to great efforts to present dancing as respectable. They’d had their work cut out when the tango arrived in Glasgow in 1913. Fortunately, Mr James D. Macnaughton, president of the British Association of Teachers of Dancing, had a cunning plan. He staged a demonstration of tango dancing in the eminently respectable surroundings of the McLellan Galleries, in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street. As the Glasgow Herald reported, during the evening he delivered a short talk which posed the provocative question ‘Is the Tango suitable for the ballroom?’

  . . . the public, having formed their opinions of the Tango from exaggerated performances at variety entertainments, Tango teas, and through press pictures, had only become acquainted with the objectionable side of the dance, and therefore there was little wonder that the Tango as thus shown to them had been objected to, and he heartily agreed with those who thus objected. He believed that the Tango as commonly presented to the public was a low-class exotic from fourth-rate saloons in the Argentine. As such, it should be banned from the ballrooms.

  Clever chap, Mr James D. Macnaughton. ‘Fourth-rate saloons in the Argentine’ was code for the brothels of Buenos Aires, where the tango began. Having met the major criticism head on – the tango was just too damn sexy – he reassured his audience that he and his fellow members of the British Association of Teachers of Dancing were working tirelessly to ensure good deportment and impeccable decorum in ballroom dancing.

  Performed in the way these good people thought suitable, ‘the tango rhythm was not only pleasing and fascinating but could be made as decorous and dignified as might be required’. After watching an exhibition of the dance, the Glasgow Herald’s reporter gave it cautious approval:

  It was certainly very different from some displays that have been witnessed in Glasgow and elsewhere. The dance gained much in gracefulness by the fact that the movements of all who took part in it were executed with uniformity to music of a strongly marked rhythm. And it did not appear to be difficult; quite suitable indeed for the ballroom provided it were danced correctly.

  A second Herald reporter, dispatched to the new Alhambra Tango Teas, was distinctly unimpressed, finding it all rather dull, even if there had been ‘an exciting scramble for admission’:

  As to the dance itself, it would be futile to attempt a description. So far as one could gather from a first impression a great deal of the Art of the Tango – if there is any art in it – consists in the endeavour of the lady and the gentleman to come as near as possible to treading on each other’s toes without actually doing so. Stepping alternatively ‘fore and aft,’ posturing and swaying, and ‘ducking’ the right knee until it touches the floor, varied by cross-limbed movements and some of the co
nvolutions of ragtime, seem to be the principal movements of the dance.

  So there, with a great big disapproving Presbyterian sniff. Dancing Glasgow couldn’t have cared less, embracing the new dances and the music which went with them. Ragtime was wildly popular, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ the big hit of 1912. The foxtrot reached Scotland in 1914. In her definitive Oh, How We Danced! Liz Casciani describes how well that went down:

  Of all the dances in the ballrooms, the Fox Trot seemed best suited to the times. The trotting movements and ragtime rhythm were new and different. Young men on leave from the War wanted to dance but had no time for formal instructions. Parents and girlfriends wanted to spend free time with them without the discipline of dancing lessons. The Fox Trot with its lack of formal steps was easy for everyone to pick up and they came along in droves to the ballrooms.

  They danced on the ocean-going liners too. Glasgow’s Louis Freeman ran an agency to supply the orchestra and the singers and became musical director for both the Anchor Line and the Donaldson Line. The musicians who worked on the ships were known as Louis Freeman’s Navy.

  Tom Johnston did his bit for the formal teaching of dance in 1911. Starting his political career by getting himself voted onto Kirkintilloch School Board, he was put in charge of the evening-class committee. Many of Kirky’s young adults were not exactly bursting with enthusiasm to attend.

  Hoping higher attendance would attract higher government grants which would allow a more attractive syllabus to be created, young Mr Johnston came up with the idea of starting dancing classes. There would be free entry to these for any students who regularly attended evening classes in the less enticing subjects: maths, sewing, English, mining and building construction. His idea proved hugely popular. They hired a band and a dancing instructor and the students formed a committee to make sure everything was conducted with that oh-so-important decorum: