The socialist persisted.
Mr Maxton: Is the ordinary civilian governor in control of the whole prison and both civilian and military prisoners?
Mr Colville: No, sir, a part of the prison has been handed over to the military authorities.
The debate continued with Davie Kirkwood, a former ILP colleague of Maxton and with a similar firebrand CV as a left-winger and political stirrer, chipping in with a question delivered with, one would surmise, his tongue firmly in his cheek:
Mr Kirkwood: Do I understand that there is plenty of room in Barlinnie for other individuals? I was informed that the Duke Street prison in Glasgow could not be demolished as there was no other place available in which to put prisoners, and now it seems that there is plenty of room in Barlinnie Prison, which was said to be overcrowded, to accommodate soldier prisoners.
Mr Colville: That is another matter.
This vignette shows prisons as a political football, even in the midst of war, and Barlinnie overcrowding which would still be causing anger nearly 70 years later. You wonder what humanitarians like Maxton and Kirkwood would have made of the large numbers languishing two to a tiny cell in the twenty-first century.
Barlinnie in the First World War, too, played a significant role in the story of Scotland. Respected historian, author and Sunday Herald columnist Trevor Royle published a remarkable book in 2006 – Flowers of the Forest: Scotland And The First World War – which chronicled the militant activism around at the time of the conflict and how many objectors to the war ended up in the Bar-L. These were intellectual prisoners and protestors of a very different stripe from the violent men plucked from the city streets and sentenced to do time. In it he details the many street demonstrations and the strong feelings of the men who went to prison rather than fight in the armed forces. Glasgow women – always a strong-minded lot – also organized rent strikes. According to Royle, out of all this, including the activities of men like Tom Bell, John Wheatley and John Maclean, the legend of the Red Clydeside was burnished.
Workers’ leaders in these turbulent times faced the constant threat of arrest and trial, among them Maxton, John Muir, and Willie Gallacher. Others were banished in internal exile to Edinburgh. Maclean was dealt with most harshly. Several jail terms were handed down to him, the last in Barlinnie. Maclean was a convinced and consistent campaigner against the slaughter of the First World War. He held hugely well-attended rallies in Bath Street and at the fountain at Shawlands Cross. Maclean had a large army of followers, pacifists and anti-war protestors. At one time they held regular meetings in the old Metropole theatre in Stockwell Street on Sunday nights. But as the war progressed and the newspapers filled with reports of British deaths, a backswell of patriotism grew to oppose them and the rallies tended to move away from the spotlight of the city centre to local halls.
It was brave in these times to speak out in public as Maclean did: ‘I have been enlisted in the socialist army for 15 years. God damn all other armies. Any soldier who shoots another soldier in the war is a murderer.’ His early arrests came under that handy catch-all for the police, breach of the peace. But Maclean’s stance against the war was much more serious than that. And in the end it was the Defence of the Realm Act that sent him on his way to jail. The case against him was that his outspoken public speaking on the morality of war was likely to harm the war effort and prejudice recruiting. The legal moves against him began with a few fines and escalated. He also was fired as a teacher by Govan School Board. The balloon finally burst in 1916 when he was arrested on his way to his home in Pollokshaws after a rally in Bath Street. He was taken to the Central police station en route to Edinburgh Castle where he was held as a prisoner of war and given a choice of a court martial or appearing before the high court. He went for a day in court and was convicted of four of six charges laid against him.
This was no surprise to the firebrand, but the sentence was: three years. He was treated harshly. The first month was spent in the capital’s old Calton Jail, where the food was vile and the staff, some recruited from the army and mental institutions, were cruel. The regime was similar to that in some other Scottish prisons at the time: solitary confinement in a cell with no mattress for the first 60 days, no reading matter, no talking to inmates or wardens, one letter, one visit every three months. Convict 2652 was silenced, out of the loop in the anti-war campaigning. But he was far from forgotten. One rally in Glasgow Green, attended by around 100,000, demanded his release. The Glaswegians once again showed their characteristic independence and that, no matter their own patriotic feelings, they also respected John Maclean and his sincerity.
After a time he was sent to Peterhead where he damaged his health with a hunger strike after a request to be moved to Barlinnie was turned down. He was force-fed in a degrading manner. He was also making accusations that his food had been drugged. He was still a celebrated figure in British politics and there was even a protest meeting in London’s Albert Hall calling for him to be released. The end of the war on 11 November 1918 was the catalyst for his release. He stood as a Republican candidate for the Gorbals seat aged barely 40, but by now his travails had made him look twice that age. The public was still not ready for his brand of revolution and he got only a few thousand votes.
The authorities were still suspicious of the firebrand and his street corner meetings were spied on. After one such event in Airdrie he was back in custody for using language ‘calculated and likely to cause sedition and disaffection among His Majesty’s Forces and among the civil population’. This time his destination was Barlinnie and the authorities were wise enough not to court unrest by force-feeding such a political celebrity, even if he was a long-time thorn in their flesh. Instead, he was granted the unique status of a political prisoner, allowed to wear his own clothes, eat his own food and have his own books – and there were no hunger strikes. He was soon released but then rearrested shortly after for egging on the starving unemployed in the Gorbals to direct action. This time it was for a year and he left Barlinnie for the last time in October 1922.
He died the next year and thousands lined the streets for the funeral procession. His legacy has spawned many books, poems and songs. In one poem Hugh MacDiarmid wrote that ‘of all Maclean’s foes not one was his peer’ and described him in another as ‘both beautiful and red’. No argument he was one of the most intellectual of men to do time in the Bar-L. I wonder how many of the current inmates are aware of him and his connection with their current place of incarceration. Perhaps more than you might expect.
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All this activity by Maclean and others had a lasting effect in the political life of Scotland, sometimes sowing the seed of the demand for independence. But it does seem remarkable that the prison experiences of such intellectuals did not result in long-term changes in the most inhumane parts of penal policy like shared cells and slopping out. Especially if you consider that at one time, much later than the Red Clydeside era, it has to be said, there were so many Labour politicians doing time that it was half joked the prison name should be changed from Barlinnie to ‘Baillies’ton in deference to the political nature of some of the inmates. Joking aside you would have thought that the jailing of many politicians, conscientious objectors and others, would have led to more of a public clamour to ameliorate the conditions in which prisoners were held. But it did not seem to happen. Noise there may have been but little action in the jails.
Apart from the Red Clydesiders, another political activist to taste porridge in Barlinnie was a Londoner called Guy Aldred – for a lifelong revolutionary the name Guy was apt, though it had come about by the mundane fact that he was born on Guy Fawkes Day 1886. Aldred, an anarchist and pioneer communist, got into all sorts of scrapes with the law in London before coming north, attracted some say by the citizens’ infamously truculent attitude, rebellious spirit and disrespect for leaders. Just the place for an anarchist to set up camp. He was to end up doing jail time in his adopted city, but he first tasted imp
risonment in the south when he waged a constant battle to resist joining the armed forces during the First World War. He was jailed in Winchester, but in August 1916 he was sent to Aberdeenshire to Dyce work camp. This is a long forgotten horror. Prisoners were held in rudimentary conditions in tents in a granite quarry where the ground was a sea of mud. There were other similar places around Britain and the remarkable figure of 69 conscientious objectors died in them.
Guy Aldred, as you would expect of a man with his political views, simply walked out of Dyce, but was soon rearrested in England. It is illustrative of penal conditions at the time to read of his treatment. His constant protesting to the authorities when imprisoned at a Military Camp led to a court martial, his third and not his last, and he was sent to Wandsworth Prison where he was judged to be a ringleader in a planned ‘work and discipline strike’ by the prisoners. He along with some of his co-conspirators was sentenced to ‘No.1 Punishment’. This consisted of 42 days solitary confinement with three days on bread and water and then three days off, locked in a bare unheated basement cell. When this was over, Aldred and his friends were sent to Brixton. Throughout his various confinements Aldred somehow managed to smuggle out articles to be printed in the anarchist press. So it seems that even in such tough days in tough prisons security was not all that effective! Though now the smuggling is mostly in the other direction and the contraband is drugs. At the end of the war Aldred’s new life in Glasgow began. He got a huge welcome and spoke at a meeting organized by the Glasgow Anarchists, but on a trip back south he was rearrested and again sent to Wandsworth.
Back in Glasgow in 1921, the constant agitation continued and an article by Guy Aldred appeared in a paper called The Red Commune advocating the Sinn Fein tactic of standing for election, but not taking the oath or your seat. This landed him back in the dock. Along with anarchist/communist colleagues he was charged with ‘exciting popular disaffection, commotion, and violence to popular authority’. It must have been one of the rarest of charges to get someone a ticket to the Bar-L. Guy Aldred was sentenced at a trial in the Glasgow High Court to a year in Barlinnie and served the full time plus four months on remand. This harsh sentence made some prison history – it was the first time the authorities had said that the months on remand did not count as part of his year’s sentence. A female colleague, Jane Patrick, was sent to Duke Street Prison. Guy Aldred lived until 1963 and became a well-kent figure, propagandising until his death. Some credit him as a one-man fore-runner of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. He dispensed free advice to all and sundry who came to him for help. For 60 years – except for his time in prisons – he spoke every May Day at a rally. His politics verged on the extreme, but his life of struggle and his consistency earned the affection, if sometimes a tad begrudging, of his fellow Glaswegians.
In Barlinnie in the Second World War for his ‘idealism’, Aldred shared his time with men with no social conscience, men with no conscience at all, violent men with no instinctive bond with their fellows. A little anecdote told in the wartime diary of a Gordon Highlander shows how tough these guys were. There was a mini riot in the military wing with prisoners smashing up the dining hall and the army decided that the best place for 25 of these troublemakers was not the Bar-L but Taunton military prison, which, although set in beautiful countryside, was reputed to be the toughest establishment in the military.
A handful of Gordon Highlanders was dispatched to the Scottish prison and issued with the handles of spades normally used to dig trenches. These pickaxe-style weapons were to provide protection against the hard men who were to be escorted south. They came in handy. The 20 or so prison troublemakers selected were pushed on to a bus and driven to Central Station where a special carriage, attached to the London train, awaited them. Prisoners and soldiers were met by a mob in the station, but with police help the soldiers managed to get the prisoners through to the carriage. In the general melee one prisoner managed to leg it through the mob of passengers, police and soldiers to nearby Gordon Street, but was swiftly caught. When he arrived back at the train he was said by the army men to ‘look a bit roughed up’. Probably something of an understatement.
The journey was barely an hour old when carriage windows were broken and shards of broken glass used to threaten the escorts. The spade handles soon proved their worth and this little mutiny was subdued. Next came a stop in a tunnel near Birmingham and this time a handful of prisoners took off into the darkness and escaped. The journey to Taunton took ten hours and the special carriage with the Barlinnie contingent was shunted from train to train. On arrival at the military prison the reluctant passengers were now much quieter, tired by the long journey and fearful of what would become of them in this tough jail. They were apparently helped on the way into their new home by the boots of the large number of Red Caps who had assembled to welcome them.
The Second World War also saw political prisoners cool their heels in Barlinnie, wrapped in the beliefs that prevented them joining the fighting forces. These idealists didn’t just fight against conscription; they were also against such routine matters as air raid precautions and compulsory fire watching schemes. One of the most prominent dissidents was Frank Leech, an anarchist who, before the war, had given shelter to a number of fellow anarchists belonging to a German group who advocated the assassination of Hitler. He also ran a radical bookshop in Buchanan Street in Glasgow which was associated with the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation.
At a time when the ordinary citizen was dining on bread and marge and maybe an egg or so a week and carefully going around the house switching off lights and covering windows with blackout paper to make life difficult for the German bomber pilots, anarchists like Leech and Eddie Fenwick were ferociously fighting against such mundane day-to-day parts of the war effort. Fenwick justified refusing to fire watch by saying since ‘owners of private property had denied him the elementary rights of man, he was entitled to refuse to protect private property’. Leech was of similar opinion and was fined for refusing to comply with the fire watching regulations. He refused to pay and was sent to Barlinnie where, in the tradition of political prisoners, he promptly went on hunger strike. He went without food for 17 days and was eventually released when friends paid his fine.
The strength of anti-war feeling was extremely strong in conscientious objectors and sometimes it started young. One young Queen’s Park secondary school boy was, for example, sent home for refusing to carry a gas mask. He went on to be a well-known conscientious objector.
Leech’s threat not to submit to the authorities as long as he had a breath left in him was not empty posturing. He could well have starved himself to death. Hunger strikes, of course, are common in prisons and such as TC Campbell, wrongly imprisoned for the Doyle murders in the Ice Cream wars, often resorted to them. But only occasionally do they result in death.
Barlinnie in the Hitler war was often busy with conscientious objectors. Another notable anti-war protestor was Philip Boyle, a young civil service student who was a most reluctant private in the Highland Light Infantry. He was court-martialled in May 1940 for disobeying a lawful command while on active service. He had refused to wear his military uniform. ‘No one is going to make me a soldier’ was the stance of the young man from Todd Street, Dennistoun, who was the first Catholic conscientious objector to face court martial in Britain.
The Catholic hierarchy of the time and the Catholic press argued that a Catholic could not be an objector but Boyle was sent to Barlinnie military prison by way of Maryhill Barracks. He seems to have suffered some rough handling by the military. When his father visited him in prison he found him clad only in an old mackintosh and the army uniform which had been forced on him lay on the floor. On his release from this sentence he was again court-martialled for a not wearing a uniform. This time he was sent down to Barlinnie civil prison for 98 days.
The Scottish Daily Express reported his case in an interesting fashion. Boyle appeared in court in his own brown suit and Gordon Sto
tt, Advocate, said: ‘It shows that in the eyes of the military authorities he had proved his case.’ Boyle was asked if, as a non-combatant, he would do farm work and he answered, ‘Nothing I am compelled to do.’ This prompted Mr Stott to make a remarkable comment on life in the civilian section of wartime Barlinnie. He said: ‘Boyle seems to be going to the limit. I have seen his cell and I think that anyone who is prepared to put up with such conditions is a very strong objector.’ Eventually this determined young man was granted conditional exemption from army service and directed to work on land drainage, forestry or agriculture. He had endured a lot to make his point.
Stott’s comment on conditions in the prison were echoed the following year, in 1941, in the Commons when Willie Gallacher asked the Secretary of State for War ‘whether he is aware that visitors to Barlinnie detention camp have to speak to the detained soldiers through iron bars; that the soldiers are in small cubicles three feet away; that as many as four visits may take place at a time with visitors and soldiers trying to make themselves understood above each others’ voices; and can modern methods be introduced instead of this method of dealing with visitors?’
Viscount Margesson replied, ‘I am aware that the facilities for interview at the military prison and detention barracks to which my Honorable friend refers have been unsatisfactory and the construction of alternative accommodation has been put in hand some time ago. I am glad to say the new premises have now been completed and are already in use.’ Willie Gallacher was a wee bit dubious about this answer and continued: ‘Are we to understand that this method of receiving visitors will be stopped? It is only two weeks since I was there visiting and I had this experience.’ The Secretary of State for War told him he hoped the new arrangements would be satisfactory. It is curiously reassuring that in the darkest days of war, with cities under attack from the Nazi bombers and soldiers fighting desperate battles on the front line, that Red Clydesiders and Viscounts alike were still able to keep a civilised eye on what was going on in the Bar-L.
The Barlinnie Story Page 20