A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  When the reforms were passed and finally received royal assent from a reluctant William IV, it was discovered that property qualifications effectively barred the working class from having the vote. This reality led to further radicalisation and Chartism. Neither did the passing of the Reform Act change the daily reality of the relationship between employers and workers, even though many of the employers had supported the bill, and had even joined demonstrations in its support. When it came to dealing with their own workers, they remained ruthless. Consequently, by 1833 the West of Scotland Female Powerloom Weavers Association could boast 6,000 members.51

  The confidence of the women and the solidarity between the male mechanics (tenters) and the power-loom weavers is illustrated by the following incident in Glasgow. A male handloom weaver, James Hewit, took a job at Mr Broughton’s factory. The majority of the power-loom weavers were women and they were angered that Hewit had accepted wages two shillings less than the union rate. On a late, dark December afternoon the gas lights suddenly went out on the factory floor. A crowd of women weavers emerged from the dark to jeer at Hewit and by force of numbers ushered him into a dark corridor where the waiting Mary Morrie struck him with her ‘loom semple’. A manager rushed in and immediately sacked two women he regarded as ringleaders, Janet Cain and Sarah Quin, but Cain just ‘shook her fist in [Hewit’s] face and called him all the old buggers she could think of – said it was he who was the cause of this and if God spared her she would be revenged on him’.52

  Cain was as good as her word. When Hewit left work that night he was surrounded by a crowd of women, and Cain and Quin set about him, with the former stabbing him in the eye with her powerloom hook.

  In 1833, employers launched a full-scale assault on the unions. The masters of calico printing introduced women and children together with impoverished hand-loom weavers to replace higher-paid male workers. They underestimated the solidarity of the local communities and the determination of the existing workforce, which went on strike. When scabs tried to start work at Kelvindock (in Maryhill, Glasgow), women power-loom weavers from a neighbouring factory joined the strikers, all of whom lived in nearby Botany Row (also known as Reform Row), and stoned them. Eventually the dispute was resolved and the male workers accepted their female counterparts.53

  The cotton spinners were also well organised in the city, but by 1837 demand was falling and employers cut wages. The Glasgow Cotton Spinners Union called a strike and the employers began a lockout. The dispute was a violent one, and the spinners’ leaders were arrested and stood trial for murder and conspiracy. Five of them were sentenced to transportation after being found guilty of lesser charges. After three weeks, funds were exhausted and the union said they would accept the wage cuts and return to work. But the employers said wages would now be cut by 40 percent. The strike continued, sustained by regular collections and donations from Manchester and the Lancashire cotton industry.54

  The employers then recruited large numbers of scabs, or ‘nobs’, housed inside the factories to avoid pickets. One did leave to go shopping with his wife in the city centre in July 1837, and was waylaid by strike supporters and shot from behind, dying shortly afterwards from his wounds. A reward of £600 was offered for the arrest of the guilty men, and consequently two former spinners went to the notoriously anti-strike Sheriff of Lanarkshire, who, acting on their claims, issued arrest warrants for the entire strike committee. A few days later the man reputed to be the killer was arrested. He and four members of the union executive were brought to trial in Edinburgh in January 1838. The prosecution was carried out by Sheriff Archibald Alison, a Tory who regarded unions as a ‘moral pestilence’ and believed Glasgow was in the grip of ‘insurrectionary fever.’ He could provide no evidence associating the men with the killing, but that did not stop the Whig judge, Lord Cockburn, from sentencing them to seven years’ transportation.55

  Their trial and the campaign to secure their return to Scotland coincided with the launch in London and Birmingham that year of the People’s Charter and its six demands – universal suffrage, and end to property qualifications, a secret ballot, equal electoral constituencies, payment of MPs and annual parliaments. The case of the Glasgow cotton spinners became a major factor in the Chartists developing a national profile across Britain. The defeat of the strike encouraged Scottish workers to look to political change, through Chartism. The effect of its defeat, rising unemployment, attacks on the unions and the abundance of cheap labour, as a consequence of the Highland Clearances and Irish Famine, not only undercut industrial militancy, but also helped ensure the timidity of Scottish Chartism.

  Chartism in Scotland

  As the cotton spinners were being deported to Australia, the first of the more famous Tolpuddle Martyrs were returning from their sojourn abroad. They addressed meetings in support of the Glasgow spinners along with the Chartist leaders Feargus O’Connor, Augustus Beaumont and Bronterre O’Brien. The Irish champion of Catholic emancipation, Daniel O’Connell, formerly regarded with favour by British radicals, chose the Glasgow case as a way of attacking trade unions, causing great bitterness.56 In Glasgow itself, it was claimed that 200,000 people attended a Chartist rally in support of the strikers in May 1838, which helped the Chartists establish themselves in Scotland.

  A Newcastle Chartist broadsheet published the following:

  Ye working men of Britain come listen awhile,

  Concerning the cotton spinners who lately stood their trial,

  Transported for seven years far, far awa’

  Because they were united men in Caledonia.

  Success to our friends in Ireland, who boldly stood our cause,

  In spite of O’Connell and his support of whiggish laws,

  Away with his politics, they are not worth a straw,

  He’s no friend of the poor in Ireland or Caledonia.

  Success to O’Connor who did nobly plead our cause,

  Likewise to Mr Beaumont, who abhors oppressive laws,

  But all their efforts, justice and law,

  We are banished from our country, sweet Caledonia.

  Whigs and Tories are united, we see it very plain,

  To crush the poor labourer, it is their daily aim,

  The proverb now is verified, and that you can all knaw,

  In the case of those poor cotton spinners in Caledonia.57

  The historian W. Hamish Fraser stresses the significance of the cotton spinners’ strike in 1837:

  … the full weight of the united capitalism, plus the state, was brought to bear to smash the hand mulespinners’ union. It was the end of an era … Like the miners’ strike of 1984–85, the implications of the defeat of the spinners went far beyond their own union. It had great symbolic importance, marking the defeat and break up of an organisation that, for two decades, had been the most tightly knit and dynamic in Scottish society. It was a deterrent to vigorous action.58

  In his history of Chartism in Britain, John Charlton contrasts Chartism in Scotland, ‘marked, largely, by its moderation’ and Chartism in Wales, which had an insurrectionary character.59 This was by no means because of lack of support. The cotton weavers of Glasgow, the shawl weavers of Paisley and the linen and jute weavers of Dundee gave great support to Chartism. One report from Dunfermline said: ‘Among the weavers there are 1800 who pay for newspapers – those go into the workshops and are read by all the men and boys in them so that a man who does not read newspapers is rarely met with …’60 In Aberdeen, 10,000 people attended a Chartist rally in August 1838 and the city provided more than 8,500 signatures for the first national petition, which was presented to Parliament, and rejected, that year.61

  Summer 1842 saw the first general strike in world history. Its storm centre was north-west England but it spread to Scotland, and Dundee in particular, where local Chartists provided leadership. In August, a public meeting demanded that wages, which had been cut due to an economic downturn, be returned to their 1839 level. Shortly afterwards a hundred de
legates from forty-six of the town’s fifty-one textile mills agreed to strike for the People’s Charter. The vote was put to a mass meeting of up to 14,000 on Magdalene Green the next day, and agreed.

  In response, at Baxter’s in Maxwelltown, twenty-four weavers were told by the owner he would give them a rise when the other owners did, and that they should leave their looms under his lock and key. They struck immediately. At Ferguson’s, the owner expressed sympathy but refused any rise. The sixty-one weavers there declared they were ‘ready to strike for the Charter, but not for wages’. At Blaikie’s, the seventy-five men similarly said they would ‘not identify themselves with the movement for wages but turn out for political privileges’. At Walker’s Mill the twenty-nine workers were striking for the Charter, the same at Johnson’s Lower Factory, while the seventy workers at Steel and Hutton wanted ‘to go full hog, but not for wages’.62

  The strike began on 22 August but many of the city’s mills and factories kept running, so the next day, a procession of strikers tried to march on the mills on Perth Road. A local magistrate and mill owner read the Riot Act and police dispersed the demonstrators. Nevertheless, 400 marched to Forfar to join their brothers and sisters there. After a march through the town they returned to Dundee. That town’s magistrates then enrolled special constables to bolster the police and banned all assemblies, effectively breaking the strike. Several Chartist leaders were tried and jailed for their role in the affair.63

  In the coalfields that August, 12,000 miners in the Monklands and Glasgow districts were out on strike, with a network of strike committees. The strike spread into Ayrshire, Midlothian and East Lothian. The issue was wages and conditions, but there was considerable support for the Charter. In Monklands, Chartist branches were active in Coatbridge, Airdrie and Holytown, leading the sheriff there to believe he was facing a Chartist-led uprising.

  For the first three days of the strike, across North Lanarkshire, miners patrolled the roads, picketing and holding marches and rallies. There was no strike fund, and with some 70,000 mouths to feed the miners took food from farms and gardens, seized it from carts and looted company stores. Large groups of women from Dundyvan attacked strikebreakers. Police and troops were drafted in from Glasgow and Edinburgh to face the unrest, and the local sheriff-led cavalry went on night-time patrols. Anyone caught taking food faced sixty days in jail.

  In short order, a number of companies conceded and as the number of strikers fell the authorities cracked down hard on the remainder, with three Ayrshire miners sentenced to be transported for ten years, as were six Airdrie miners who had besieged the local prison, freeing miners held there. By October, the miners had returned to work, the majority having lost the fight.64

  Nevertheless, the ‘moral force’ of Chartism remains true. Scotland led the way in establishing formal Chartist churches – the first being set up in May 1839 in Hamilton, Paisley and Bridgeton. Two years later, a convention of Chartist churches boasted they existed from Ayr to Aberdeen.65 Temperance also marked Scottish Chartism, and this created a tradition where working-class meetings did not take place in pubs.

  The authorities in London, fearing revolution, faced down Chartist attempts to force acceptance of their demands between 1839 and 1842. They were not hampered by any debate about whether to use moral or physical force, and were quick to unleash repression.

  Hunger, not the Charter, was the root cause of rioting in 1846, as the potato crop failed across Scotland and Ireland, threatening starvation in the Highlands and causing deadly famine in Ireland. In Macduff, crowds barricaded the quay to stop food exports and looted shops. In Aberdeen, flour mills and carts were seized. The sheriff was forced to release rioters when the crowd intervened, and in Avoch, when the sheriff read the Riot Act, the people replied that they might as well be shot as starved. Warships were moved into the Moray Firth and soldiers sent to Caithness before the government initiated a relief fund that ensured people were fed.66

  Scotland marked 1848, a year of revolution across Europe, by economic downturn and unemployment. On 6 March a crowd of several hundred unemployed rallied on Glasgow Green to protest the City Council’s failure to deliver on the promise of soup kitchens. All seemed to have passed peacefully, and police had returned to the Central Police Station when crowds began attacking food shops and a gun shop in the Trongate and London Road. During the Glasgow riots, Chartist slogans were shouted along with cries of ‘Vive la Republique’, stoking fears among the upper classes.66 For two hours the crowd controlled the city centre until troops were brought in. The next day, rioting broke out in Bridgeton, where special constables opened fire, shooting six people.67 The Sunday Post complained that the police had left the city in the hands of rioters for two hours.

  The wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 encouraged a revival of the Chartists and a new sense of militancy. The economy was in recession with between 30,000 and 40,000 receiving relief (food handouts) in Paisley alone. The lack of genuine relief and the excitement caused by news of revolution in France, which had overthrown the monarchy, encouraged unrest.67 In both Paisley and Airdrie railway lines were torn up.

  April saw major demonstrations, with Ernest Jones, an English friend of Karl Marx, addressing a rally of 25,000–30,000 in Edinburgh and 30,000 in Paisley. In Glasgow the organisers claimed 100,000 were present, the Scotsman reported 25,000 and the Glasgow Herald 40,000.68 In Aberdeen, 5,000 Chartists defied the police, and in Holytown in Lanarkshire the yeomanry reported a ‘slight brush’ with miners. There were meetings in Dundee, Dunfermline and other towns across Scotland.69

  There was further unrest in Edinburgh in July when a rally on Calton Hill was followed by a crowd demonstrating outside Calton Jail, which was prevented from proceeding to County Hall only by a specially mobilised police force.

  The question of using physical force came to the fore once more. Could the workers succeed without their own force? From France came the example of the National Guard, based on the popular militia that emerged in revolutionary Paris. An Edinburgh Chartist told an audience in Dundee that it was absolutely necessary to overthrow the government, or in a short time they would all be starved. He asked the hall: ‘Was William Wallace a moral force man?’70

  One Irish nationalist, John Daly, told a Glasgow Chartist rally: ‘Prayers and petitions are the weapons of cowards, arms are the weapons used by the free and the brave.’ They could best help Ireland by keeping the army in Scotland.71

  Just the discussion of physical force was enough to get the authorities nervous, leading to a number of prosecutions. Among those put on trial was an elderly shoemaker, James Cumming, charged, on the basis of an intercepted letter, with forming a National Guard. At his trial details of this National Guard and the clubs affiliated to it were made known:

  [Thomas] ‘Muir Club,’ 200 [members]; [John] ‘Mitchell [Irish nationalist leader] Club,’ 56; [John and Andrew] ‘Baird and Hardie [executed in Stirling in 1820] Club,’ 20; [Joseph] ‘Gerald [the London Corresponding Delegate to the 1793 People’s Convention in Edinburgh, who was deported with Hardie] Club,’ 26; [Robert] ‘Burns Club,’ 25; [George] ‘Washington Club,’ 25; [Feargus] ‘O’Connor [Irish Chartist leader] Club,’ 12; Besides these there were 500 enrolled in the National Guard and an unascertained number in the [Robert] ‘Emmet [Irish nationalist executed after the 1803 rising] Club.’ The National Guard had given an order for 40 muskets with bayonets, ‘but a great many have provided themselves with arms.72

  Things came to a head later that year when, in the wake of the Chartists’ disastrous attempt to deliver the last monster petition to Parliament, which was called off by the leaders, faced with the might of the state forces guarding London’s Whitehall. After this failure the movement declined in Scotland, as elsewhere.

  One legacy of Chartism was that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto first appeared in English in the radical Chartist paper the Red Republican, translated by a Scotswoman, Helen McFarlane. Louise Yeoman
of BBC Scotland took up McFarlane’s story in November 2012. She was born in Crosshill near Barrhead in 1818 to a wealthy family prepared to bring in troops to break strikes. But her father went bankrupt and she had to become a governess. Finding work in Vienna, she experienced the tumults there in 1848 and was, in turn, won to revolution. Back in London, she threw herself into the left wing of the Chartist movement.

  McFarlane was the first translator of the Communist Manifesto, using the male pen name Howard Morton. She was a feminist, fighting for a world without slaves. ‘A republic without poor; without classes … a society, such indeed as the world has never yet seen, not only of free men, but of free women’, she wrote. No wonder Karl Marx called her a ‘rara avis’, a rare bird, and praised her original ideas.73

  McFarlane fell out with the editor of the Red Republican and married a French revolutionary exile, Francis Proust, but when the family attempted to emigrate to South Africa her husband became ill and had to be taken off the ship before it sailed. Subsequently her baby daughter died in South Africa. She returned to find her husband was dead. She then re-married a Church of England minister but died at the age of forty-one in 1860.

  Chartism failed in its immediate goal of securing the demands of the People’s Charter, but in Scotland and elsewhere it laid the groundwork for the emergence of a strong trades union organisation and for the political representation of the labour movement in the British Parliament.

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