When the Clyde Ran Red

by Maggie Craig

  Indeed the order maintained was draconian, any exuberant being promptly and roughly conducted by a frog’s march to the open air; the students’ Committee took its duties very seriously. The experiment was a great success, and we had to limit the first dancing class to one hundred dancers.

  Attendance at classes in the other subjects shot up:

  Mothers sent letters of thanks in that they no longer feared for their daughters dancing at disreputable howffs; the ratepayers were saving money; further education was being promoted; we felt as if we were on top of the world.

  Growing ever more ambitious, Johnston put on a boxing class. He and his friends did some discreet social work there: ‘Contestants on the first evening who disclosed holes in their socks or ragged undergarments only came so circumstanced once.’

  It was the boxing rather than the dancing which roused the ire of the local kirks:

  Elders held meetings and we were denounced from pulpits with bell, book and candle; foremen in public works interviewed young apprentices and strongly ‘advised’ against attendance; letters showered upon the local press condemning our wickedness in teaching violence and bloodshed, and asking sarcastically when we were going to start breeding whippets, and teaching faro and roulette; clerical deputations waited upon members of the School Board, some of whom got windy, and the poor boxing (or physical culture) instructor, unable to stick it out, packed up and went off in disgust.

  The most popular dance of the 1920s was, of course, the Charleston. Those who thought the young and the light-hearted were having far too much fun warned them no good would come of this shocking and vulgar dance. They would damage their ankles. The jerky movements might even lead to permanent paralysis. The Black Bottom left the killjoys speechless.

  People continued to dance the tango, loving the smouldering passion of it, especially when you were in the close embrace of a handsome young man paid not to complain even if you did tread on his feet. Enter the gigolo, the archetypal lounge lizard. Most paid dancing partners were perfectly respectable professionals. It was a sought-after job in the 1920s and ’30s, one way in which young working-class men and women with talent could dance their way out of poverty, although it was a hard slog. In Scotland it wasn’t ten cents a dance but sixpence, of which the management of the dance hall or club kept fourpence.

  In February 1927 Glasgow’s Evening News reported on the boom in the dance trade, doubting it was going to be as short-lived as the enthusiasm for roller skating, as some people had thought. Some people had also thought the cinema was destined to be nothing more than a passing fad, and look how wrong they had been:

  The teaching of dancing, and the provision of facilities for dancing have become a lively and profitable industry, giving occupation to far more men and women than are employed in all the theatres, music-halls, and picture-houses put together. It may be that the craze for dancing (and the term is not extravagant) may sooner or later fade away as quickly as it began, and that the case of the roller-skating rink was a true analogy, but as yet there is not the slightest sign of it in Glasgow.

  There’s not much evidence from Scotland of the humiliating dance marathons depicted in the film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? However, there was a dark side to the happy feet, elegant evening suits, glittering gold and silver shoes and fringed dresses. In a well-choreographed sequence of events reminiscent of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, dancing partners could find themselves coerced into prostitution.

  Take an attractive young woman or man with dancing talent, give them a job doing something they love and a place to stay, buy them some nice clothes. A month or so down the line, demand to know how they’re going to pay you back for all these pretty things. You could go to the police and press charges against them, your word against theirs, or they could agree to be booked out for private dancing lessons. That was the euphemism. The manager of the dance hall took one pound, the dancing partner ten shillings. It would take you an awfully long time to earn that the respectable way.

  The biggest dancing-partner scandal of the 1930s in Scotland happened at Edinburgh’s Kosmo Club, on Lothian Road, and those were the sums involved there. At the trial in December 1933, one witness was asked, ‘As a man of the world, what did you think that this fee was paid for?’ He offered the following reply:

  If young ladies stay in lodgings, and gentlemen take them home, there is the probability that they would say good-night at the door, but if they were in flats the gentlemen might be invited in for coffee, and there is no knowing what might happen.

  Glasgow had acted to try to stop this covert prostitution in 1927, imposing a series of strict rules on the hiring of dancing partners which included their having to give details of what they were doing on their day off and not being allowed to sit a dance out with a paying customer. The city fathers were mocked for this as ‘grandmotherly Glasgow’. The entertainments-licensing court at this time also banned smoking on stage at theatres and music halls unless it was necessary for the play. This seems less likely to have been a health measure than a precaution against a potential fire hazard. Cigarettes were still being advertised as good for your throat and your health, particularly recommended to people suffering from TB.

  The Glasgow Herald defended the new rules for the hiring of dancing partners, albeit only very discreetly alluding to prostitution, not wanting to ‘paint a lurid picture of the possibilities that are being guarded against’. The important thing was to make the dancing craze ‘as happy, healthy, and enjoyably wholesome as may be’.

  Using the pseudonym of ‘Open Turn’, one dancing partner wrote an indignant letter to the newspaper, defending the professionalism and respectability of her profession. It was good that booking-out had been done away with, but what on earth was wrong with sitting-out?:

  The average gentleman who may visit a dance hall without a partner cannot, and does not want to, dance every dance, and he appreciates the fact that he can have company between dances. To a stranger in the city the system is a perfect godsend. I talk from experience on this point, and there must be thousands of gentlemen who agree with me.

  And, with or without dancing partners, under the glitter balls of the fashionable palais de danse, the bright lights of public halls, the gloom of disreputable howffs or at home in the kitchen to the strains of a dance band on the wireless, Glasgow kept right on dancing.

  23

  Sex, Socialism & Glasgow’s First Birth Control Clinic

  I never saw so many wives of comrades before.

  One of the allegations used to discredit socialists was that they all believed in free love. If the revolution they were doing their best to bring about ever happened, everything would be nationalized, including women. Take a look at the lives of the Red Clydesiders and this claim quickly becomes risible.

  Willie Gallacher described himself and the rest of them as ‘tee-totallers and puritans’. Davie Kirkwood agreed: ‘We were all Puritans. We were all abstainers. Most of us did not smoke.’ James Maxton made up for them there. There was always a cigarette between his fingertips.

  When it came to love and family, almost all the key male figures of Red Clydeside were devoted husbands and fathers who paid handsome tributes to their wives as friends and political comrades. Maxton remained a widower for 13 years after the death of his beloved Sissie. He was 50 when he married for the second time. Madeleine Glasier was a member of the ILP and worked with Maxton as a researcher. They had over ten happy years together until his death in 1946.

  Helen Crawfurd agreed with free love in its literal sense, asking what other kind there could be. She believed it was wrong to associate sex with sin, describing making love with someone you loved and creating a child out of that love as something beautiful, clean and holy. She responded to those who accused socialists of believing in free love in the sense of promiscuous sexual intercourse by quoting Lenin. Klara Zetkin, one of the surviving leaders of Germany’s Spartacist Revolution of 1918, had told the Soviet leader many rev
olutionary socialists in Germany believed sex was nothing more than an appetite to be satisfied. When you were thirsty, you drank a glass of water. When you were sexually attracted to someone, you had sex with them. No shame, no blame, no guilt.

  Helen Crawfurd disagreed, believing there was an issue of gender equality here. Up until the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, a woman could lose that most valuable of attributes, her reputation, for what nowadays no longer even raises an eyebrow. Living with a man to whom you weren’t married was shocking. Having a baby out of wedlock was a disaster.

  For men and women who had multiple sexual partners, there was also the threat of sexually transmitted diseases. Lenin too spelled this out, making it clear to Klara Zetkin that he disapproved of the German revolutionary socialists’ attitude towards sex:

  I think this glass of water theory has made our young people mad, quite mad . . . I think this glass of water theory is completely un-Marxist, and moreover, anti-social . . . Of course, thirst must be satisfied. But will the normal man in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips? . . . Drinking water is of course an individual affair. But in love two lives are concerned, and a third, a new life, arises. It is that which gives it its social interest, which gives rise to a duty towards the community.

  Birth control was a highly contentious issue. In July 1920 American Margaret Sanger visited Glasgow to speak on the subject. Scotland enchanted her: the countryside, the people and the Glasgow sense of humour:

  Guy Aldred, who was in Scotland, had planned my schedule there, and I had three weeks of a Scottish summer – bluebells so thick in spots that the ground was azure, long twilights when the lavender heather faded the hills into purple.

  When I had been in Glasgow before, I had encountered only officials, but on this occasion I met the people in their homes and found them quite opposite to the stingy, tight-fisted, middle-class stereotype. They were hospitable, generous, mentally alert, just as witty as the Irish and in much the same way, which rather surprised me.

  She was struck by how interested Scots of both genders were in hearing what she had to say:

  Fourth of July, Sunday, we had a noon meeting on the Glasgow Green. Nearly two thousand shipyard workers in caps and baggy corduroys stood close together listening in utter, dead stillness without cough or whisper. That evening I spoke in a hall under Socialist auspices, Guy Aldred acting as chairman. One old-timer said he had been a party member for eleven years, attending Sunday night lectures regularly, but never before had he been able to induce his wife to come: tonight he could not keep her at home. ‘Look!’ he cried in amazement. ‘The women have crowded the men out of this hall. I never saw so many wives of comrades before.’

  Margaret Sanger is a controversial figure, accused by her critics of advocating some of the worst excesses of eugenics, fiercely defended against those charges by her supporters. That her interest in birth control had a deeply personal and visceral basis cannot be doubted. She was the sixth of eleven children. Her mother gave birth to eighteen babies, seven of whom did not survive childhood.

  Sanger is credited with having come up with the term ‘birth control’, although initially she advanced her ideas under the name of ‘family limitation’. While she was touring Europe in 1920, her book of the same title was circulated by a fellow socialist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, our old friends the Wobblies. That got her into trouble on her return to the States. It was illegal in both America and Britain to distribute literature promoting birth control.

  Along with his partner, Rose Witcop, Guy Aldred, who organized Margaret Sanger’s speaking engagements in Glasgow, was prosecuted in 1922 for publishing Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation, allegedly an obscene pamphlet. Aldred and Witcop are among the few characters in the story of Red Clydeside who advocated free love.

  Originally from London, Aldred was an anarchist who lived for many years in Glasgow. As an angry young man, he thought romantic love between men and women was incompatible with his political views and any hope for equality between the sexes. In 1907 he published a pamphlet on The Religion & Economics of Sex Oppression. Although at this point he thought celibacy might be the only answer, he subsequently changed his mind.

  Guy Aldred and Rose Witcop were married in front of a Glasgow sheriff in 1936 only to save her from being deported to her native Russia. By that time their relationship was over: ‘We parted at the sheriff’s chambers and each took a different way.’

  There were some socialists who used free love to try to discredit birth control. Hiding behind a pseudonym, ‘Nestorius’ launched his attack – and he does sound like a man – in an article in Forward on 1 May 1926, just before the General Strike. He was responding to a letter to the editor from Dora Russell, wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell and one of Britain’s most prominent campaigners for birth control.

  Nestorius attacked Dora Russell for what she had written about free love. She was, of course, entitled to her views, but he thought that if the Labour Party ever adopted these as party policy the movement would be ‘smashed to smithereens’. He was shocked by what she had written, that, for younger women, the war had made sexual relations more free and easy: ‘Sex, even without children and without marriage, is to them a thing of dignity, beauty, and delight.’

  For her part, Dora Russell was furious with Clydeside’s Labour MPs for not having supported moves to allow municipal child welfare clinics to give advice on birth control. Labour MP Ernest Thurtle had brought a bill before Parliament in 1924 hoping to achieve this. First Labour minister of health in that first Labour government, John Wheatley told Thurtle in a debate in the House of Commons that he did not think public funds should be used to support such measures ‘which are the subject of controversy’.

  Dorothy Jewson, feminist and Labour MP, who later married Red Clydesider Campbell Stephen, MP for Camlachie, did not mince her words when she responded to John Wheatley:

  Is the Minister aware that many working-class women attending these welfare centres are unfit to bear children and to bring up healthy children, and the doctors know they are unfit, and yet they are unable to give this information, which any upper or middle-class woman can obtain from a private doctor; and will he consider the bearing of this on the question of abortion, which is so terribly on the increase in this country?

  John Wheatley gave her a non-committal answer.

  When Ernest Thurtle’s bill was voted on, only one of the Clydeside Labour MPs went through the lobbies. Rosslyn Mitchell, now MP for Paisley, voted against allowing child welfare clinics to give out birth control equipment and advice. The others abstained: James Maxton, Tom Johnston and all. Forward did carry regular adverts for birth control advice and supplies, to be bought by post from London.

  The son-in-law of 1930s Labour leader George Lansbury, Ernest Thurtle also fought to abolish the death penalty in the British Army for soldiers found guilty of cowardice or desertion. Supporters of this measure included T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Thurtle’s proposals, which stopped any more men from being shot at dawn, became law under a Labour government in 1930.

  The continuing failure of Red Clydeside’s Labour MPs to support birth control provoked Dora Russell’s letter to the Forward in 1926. Describing birth control as ‘the most burning women’s question of the day’, she berated them for what she called their stupidity:

  Not one of them voted for Mr. Thurtle’s Bill, or seems to realise that one subject with which it dealt is more serious and urgent to the average mother than even the housing on which so much good Scottish eloquence is expended. Countless downtrodden women of Clydeside who seem indifferent to politics can be stirred to active responsibility by an intelligent propaganda on Birth Control and creative motherhood. The shadow of threatened religious opposition blinds many Scottish members and organisers to the reality of possible support – great in numbers and passionate in belief – from these
awakening women.

  It was the highly respectable Govan housewife Mary Barbour of the 1915 rent strike who helped set up the first birth control clinic in Glasgow. She was its chairman. As ‘patronesses’, she had aristocratic support: the Countess of Strathmore, Lady Geddes and Lady Colquhoun of Luss.

  Both men and women served on the committee of the Glasgow Women’s Welfare and Advisory Clinic. It had its offices at 123 Montrose Street in Glasgow, tucked in behind the City Chambers, and its clinic south of the Clyde, at 51 Old Govan Road. A questionnaire filled out by attending physician Dr Isobel Sloan in November 1927 offers some fascinating details, not least of the industries which surrounded the clinic in 1920s Govan. They included shipbuilding and engineering works, docks, ropeworks, the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, factories making jam, biscuits and pickles.

  Another question asked who had started up the clinic and who was now organizing it. As with support for the suffragettes, once again the mining communities of Lanarkshire show themselves to have been ready to embrace change:

  Interest was aroused by a birth control campaign carried out mainly among the miners and workers in Lanarkshire in the Spring of 1926 followed by the initiation of the Birth Control Clinic, by an enthusiastic group of women. These agreed to follow the lines of the Walworth Clinic, London under the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics.

  The Govan clinic opened in August 1927 in what had previously been a shop. It was well kitted out, with three rooms and three cubicles, two gas fires and one radiator, various bits of medical paraphernalia ‘and what Doctor requires’. Financial support came from a few trade unions, the Labour Party, the ILP and women’s guilds attached to the Co-operative, including Dumbarton, Clydebank and St Rollox.