by Maggie Craig
A separate list of those who had made donations includes Janie Allan, suffragette and socialist. Other contributors preferred to remain anonymous, perhaps because birth control remained such a contentious issue.
Although there were no official links, moral support and encouragement came from the child welfare clinics which had been set up in Glasgow. One of the doctors helping to run those was Dorothea Chalmers Smith, the suffragette who had been imprisoned in 1913 after the ‘Halloween at the High Court’ trial.
Dr Sloan noted that some probation officers were supporting the new birth control clinic ‘and one of those a Roman Catholic’. She and the nurse who worked with her offered two sessions a week, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. They dispensed advice and supplies of the birth control methods available at the time, essentially Dutch caps, spermicides and condoms.
Some of the women being advised, all of whom had to be married, were suffering from the great scourge of TB. Their health would not allow them to bear another child. Others needed birth control for economic reasons, so they could have fewer children but look after them better.
Unemployment, wages not equal to the maintenance of the family already there, also lack of housing accommodation and generally the depression in industry specially felt in Glasgow and the Clyde area. With Birth Control Education, patients and mothers specially would be enabled to keep and raise the social condition of the family.
The researchers who asked Dr Sloan to fill out the questionnaire were keen to know if the clinic was ‘getting information to the lower and less intelligent members of the working class as well as those of more foresight, initiative and intelligence’, which would seem to bring us back to eugenics. One of the devices given out by the Govan birth control clinic was called the ‘Prorace’ cap, a rather uncomfortable name when we now know where eugenics went next.
In a telling reply to another question, Dr Sloan wrote that she had never been taught anything about contraceptive methods during her medical training or while she was doing her hospital residency. By 1934, the Govan clinic was advising that they could offer training to ‘lady doctors’.
In 1927 Glasgow’s libraries were offered a free set of a journal called Birth Control News. This was published by Marie Stopes’s Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, another uncomfortable name. John S. Clarke, socialist and lion-tamer, the man who’d taken in the banished Clyde shop stewards in 1916, was now a Glasgow councillor. Serving on the libraries’ acquisitions committee, he and fellow councillor Kate Beaton, member with Helen Crawfurd and Agnes Dollan of the Women’s Peace Crusade of the First World War, voted that the gift should be accepted. Two others voted against. One of them was Councillor Izett, who’d been on the side of the angels during the rent strike of 1915.
The argument blew up into a controversy, the issue debated by a meeting of the entire Corporation. Twenty-three councillors voted in favour of Glasgow’s libraries stocking Birth Control News, sixty-two against, and Marie Stopes’s gift was rejected. While all those 23 councillors who voted in favour were Labour, other Labour members voted against. Others again, like the Clydeside MPs in Parliament, tried not to come down on one side or the other. One of these was Patrick Dollan. He and his fellow socialist and suffragette wife, Agnes, were both born into large families. That they themselves had only one child may indicate where they actually stood on the issue of birth control.
Attitudes were changing, even if too many men in the Labour Party did not have the courage of their convictions. As J.J. Smyth wrote in Labour in Glasgow, 1896–1936, by 1930 the second Labour government ‘quietly allowed clinics to provide information on contraception on health grounds but, as these could be interpreted quite widely, this was close to the demand for free advice for married women’.
That year also saw the establishment of the National Birth Control Association, which a few years later became the Family Planning Association. When the Glasgow Women’s Welfare and Advisory Clinic published its annual report for 1934–35, nine years after it had been established, it felt there was still a long way to go before birth control would be accepted simply as a branch of public health provision.
This report listed three women they had helped at the Govan clinic. As it says itself, the facts require no further comment:
Mrs. X. Aged 34. Husband (unemployed), carter. 11 pregnancies. 5 children alive now. 4 born dead. Mother anaemic.
Mrs Y. Aged 33. Husband (unemployed), miner. 10 pregnancies. 7 children alive. Mother anaemic.
Mrs Z. Aged 39. Husband five years younger. 17 pregnancies. 16 children alive now.
These examples speak for themselves.
24
The Flag in the Wind
No man was more generously international in his outlook and spirit, and yet to the very core of his being he was a Scotsman of Scotsmen.
Home Rule for Scotland was on the political agenda before the ink had dried on the Treaty of Union. Universally unpopular, the Union of the Parliaments of 1707 which followed the Union of the Crowns of 1603 was contemplated only because Scotland was bankrupt. This financial disaster was caused by the catastrophic Darien Adventure, a failed attempt to establish a Scottish colony in Panama.
Scotland’s precarious economic situation gave England the opportunity to finally neutralize the threat its troublesome northern neighbour had always posed. Bribes paid by the English commissioners whose job it was to push the Union through persuaded the Scottish nobility to vote their own country out of existence. These were the people Robert Burns branded ‘a parcel of rogues’.
Ordinary Scots were devastated by this betrayal, dismayed beyond measure that their country was now to be swallowed up by England. When the Treaty of Union was ratified on 1 May 1707, the bells of St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh played an old Scottish air which caught the despairing spirit of the moment: ‘Why Am I So Sad on My Wedding Day?’
There were some honourable exceptions within the parcel of rogues, most notably Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. Other members of Scotland’s gentry and aristocracy who spoke out against the Union were Lockhart of Carnwath and Alexander Forbes, 4th Lord Pitsligo. Carnwath and Lord Pitsligo were also Jacobites, supporters of the exiled House of Stuart.
The longing to reclaim Scotland’s lost nationhood was a powerful driver of the Jacobite risings of the first half of the eighteenth century. Most support for the Stuarts had little to do with religion or some mythic belief in their divine right to rule. What they offered was a focus for discontent and the possibility of change in a country a century and a half away from anything faintly resembling parliamentary democracy.
When Radical leaders James Baird, Andrew Hardie and James Wilson died for this ideal, one of the rallying cries was ‘Scotland free or a desert!’ When the long march towards democracy and universal suffrage really got under way after the Great Reform Act of 1832, it always went hand in hand with the cry of Home Rule for Scotland.
During the nineteenth century the burning question of Home Rule for Ireland made many ask why this was desirable for one of the Celtic nations of the British Isles and not the others. One of those who advocated ‘Home Rule all round’ was Liberal prime minister William Gladstone, the man who famously declared that his mission was to pacify Ireland.
The Gladstones were originally a Scottish family. The Prime Minister sat at times for a Scottish seat. This may have had some impact on his position, although the pamphlet he published in 1886 put the case of Home Rule for Ireland, Scotland and Wales on the basis of logic. He argued that the Union should be replaced by a federal Britain.
The idea was clearly in the air. It was also in 1886 that the Scottish Home Rule Association was formed. Keir Hardie was a supporter from the start, one of the SHRA’s early vice presidents. As Ramsay MacDonald wrote in his foreword to William Stewart’s biography of Hardie:
No man was more generously international in his outlook and spirit, and yet to the very core of his being he was a Scotsman
of Scotsmen, and it is not at all inappropriate that I came across him first of all at a meeting to demand Home Rule for Scotland.
MacDonald himself was for some years secretary of the London branch of the SHRA. Scottish miners’ leader Robert Smillie also served as vice president, as did Cunninghame Graham. Don Roberto was a founding father of both the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party.
Founded some years after the SHRA, the ILP and the STUC shared its commitment to Home Rule for Scotland. Not all Scottish nationalists were political radicals but all political radicals were Scottish nationalists. Momentum built up, culminating in a Home Rule Bill being brought before the Westminster parliament in 1913. It might well have gone through if the First World War had not intervened.
The war itself gave a boost to Scottish nationalism. As H.J. Hanham puts it in his Scottish Nationalism, ‘complaints about the dead hand of the Whitehall bureaucracy were an important element in Clydeside discontent’. In 1917 the STUC passed a resolution in support of a Scottish parliament:
This Congress reaffirms its demand that the control of Scottish affairs should be placed in the hands of the Scottish people by the reinstitution of a Scots’ Parliament, and regrets at this juncture the Scottish people should not be represented directly on the Imperial War Council.
In the aftermath of the First World War the Labour Party, of which the ILP was a more radical component, was also enthusiastic about Home Rule for Scotland:
Now that the War is ended and an era of reconstruction begun, Scottish problems require the concentration of Scottish brains and machinery upon their solution.
Your Committee is of the opinion that a determined effort should be made to secure Home Rule for Scotland in the first Session of Parliament, and that the question should be taken out of the hands of place-hunting lawyers and vote-catching politicians by the political and industrial efforts of the Labour Party in Scotland which should co-ordinate all its forces to this end, using any legitimate means, political and industrial, to secure the establishment of a Scottish Parliament upon a completely democratic basis.
On the Left, it was only communists like Willie Gallacher who rejected Home Rule for Scotland, calling instead for an international union of the working classes. John Maclean believed in a Scottish workers’ republic, independent of England. Gallacher’s and Maclean’s profound disagreement on this point meant Maclean never joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.
ILP members continued to advocate Home Rule, often through the pages of the Forward. One of the paper’s most loyal backers was Roland Muirhead, long-standing chairman of the SHRA. Tom Johnston described him as the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Scottish nationalism. On several occasions, Muirhead rode to the rescue of the socialist newspaper:
Time and again it looked as if our ship was heading for the bankruptcy rocks, but somehow we always escaped . . . A witty but rather cynical friend used to say he always knew when the Forward was in exceptionally deep water: it would then come out with a specially strong Home Rule issue: that would be preparatory to ‘touching’ Mr. Muirhead for a loan!
The victorious Labour MPs who got such a resounding send-off from St Enoch Station in 1922 were all committed to Home Rule. Speaking at the service of dedication held in St Andrew’s Halls on the Sunday before they left on the night mail for London, Govan MP Neil MacLean at first addressed the still burning issue of rent. The Bulletin reported what he said next:
When they went to London Home Rule for Scotland would not be confined to the drawing-rooms of Brodick Castle. They would talk Home Rule in a way that several of these people did not realise. It did not mean a palace at one end of the glen and a ruined crofter’s cottage at the other. It meant civilisation in Scotland, plenty and security for the Scottish people in the land of their birth.
Neil MacLean’s ‘drawing-rooms of Brodick Castle’ is a reference to the 3rd Marquess of Bute, one of the aristocratic supporters of Home Rule. There were several of those. In Scottish Nationalism, Hanham described Bute as ‘a Roman Catholic Tory philanthropist and antiquarian . . . outside the realm of ordinary party politics. He was one of the first to evolve something like a distinctive Catholic nationalist point of view.’
Yet the Marquess of Bute put Home Rule above his own traditionalist and Conservative views, expressing his point of view in a letter to Lord Rosebery way back in 1881:
Allow me to say that I think there are many Tories like myself who would hail a more autonomous arrangement with deep pleasure. We would prefer the rule of our own countrymen, even if it were rather Radical, to the existing state of things.
Another aristocratic Home Ruler was the Honourable Ruaraidh Stuart Erskine of Marr. His nationalism was rooted in the mysticism and mystery of Celtic Scotland and the Gaelic language. Despite having been born in Brighton and living for long periods of time in England and France as well as Scotland, he spoke Gaelic quite fluently.
As a Highlander, a Catholic, a royalist and a socialist stirred and excited by the Russian Revolution, Erskine of Marr’s politics were something of a patchwork quilt. Communist Harry McShane described him as an old-fashioned Radical.
The focus always came back to Scotland. At the time of John Maclean’s 1918 sedition trial, Erskine of Marr was critical of Maclean for not having fought the charges brought against him under the Defence of the Realm Act as not being valid in a Scottish court. The Clydeside Labour MPs of the 1920s took the argument to Westminster. Speaking in a debate on Home Rule in 1924, Tom Johnston delivered a typically passionate and romantic speech:
Our historical and cultural traditions are different; our racial characteristics are different. The Celt has long memories, the Englishman forgets quickly. There are members on these Benches and on those Benches too who fight their electoral battles upon, say, the Battle of the Boyne. We have members on these Benches who fight them on the battle of Bannockburn. But the Englishman forgets quickly. We can never obliterate these national characteristics . . .
Johnston went on to cite Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns and William Wallace, allowing Englishman Rudyard Kipling (slightly misquoting the poet) to sum up why you have to be a nationalist before you can be an internationalist:
God gave all earth to men to love;
But, because our hearts are small,
Ordained for each, one spot should prove
Beloved over all.
Despite having been known to say that the workers had no country, Davie Kirkwood said something very similar in the wake of the drama of the Zinoviev Letter:
I take no orders from Rome or Moscow.
To the world I give my hand, but my heart
I give to my native land.
On one occasion Kirkwood objected to an English MP being in the chair of the Scottish Grand Committee. Sir Richard Barnet told him with some indignation that he was a direct descendant of King Robert the Bruce. Kirkwood bowed and apologized, saying, ‘it would be a sin and a crime to torment a descendant of the victor at Bannockburn’.
In July 1924 Kirkwood brought forward a bill to return the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey to Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. The proposal went to a second reading, was co-sponsored by the Clydeside Labour MPs and garnered considerable support.
Kirkwood gave a typically eloquent speech arguing the moral case for the repatriation of the Stone of Scone, calling it a symbol of Scottish nationhood. He quoted the Bible and eminent historians. He spoke of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. Telling the House that he stood before his fellow Members of Parliament ‘representing an unconquered race’, he also talked of the ‘great spiritual, historical and sentimental bonds that bind together a race. When we seek bread and shelter for our people, we also demand roses.’
John MacCormick, one of the founders of what was to become the Scottish National Party, first joined the ILP when he became a student at Glasgow University in 1923. In his memoirs, The Flag in the Wind, from which this chapter has borrowed its title, he summed up the attitude
of mind and spirit which inspired so many people at the time:
Socialism in those days was not the doctrine of the State-planned economy which it has since become. The I.L.P. had inherited much of the old Radical tradition of Scotland and for the most part as a street-corner missionary I was expected not to expound the theories of Karl Marx but merely to give expression to the general sense of injustice and aspirations for a better way of life which were very natural feelings among the workers of Clydeside in the years between the wars.
‘The general sense of injustice and aspirations for a better way of life’: beautifully summed up. MacCormick wrote of how much, as a young speaker for the ILP, he enjoyed ‘the almost religious atmosphere of enthusiasm in which we all worked’.
Enthusiasm for Home Rule within the Labour Party began to lessen. There was a strong feeling that if Labour was to continue to make headway at Westminster it needed to do so as a British party, uniting Labour supporters from England, Wales and Scotland. The argument was again advanced that the workers have no country, as the STUC did when it officially withdrew its support for Home Rule in 1931: ‘Workers should look upon themselves as workers, and not as Scotsmen or Englishmen. Let them be honest and get back to the ideals of international Socialism.’
Some kept the flame of self-determination burning. Two separate nationalist parties came together in 1934 to form the Scottish National Party. In 1948 John MacCormick and the Scottish Convention launched the Scottish Covenant at a ceremony at the Church of Scotland Assembly Hall on the Mound in Edinburgh. Two million people signed this pledge ‘within the framework of the United Kingdom, to do everything in our power to secure for Scotland a Parliament with adequate legislative authority in Scottish affairs’.