Coal an’ ironstone, charrin’, smeekin’,
Navvies, miners, keepers, fillers,
Puddlers, rollers, iron millers,
Reestit, reekit, raggit ladies,
Firemen, enginemen, an’ Paddies;
Boatmen, banksmen, righ and rattlin’,
’Bout the wescht wi’ colliers battlin’,
Sweatin’, swearin’, fectin,’ drinkin,’
Change-house, bells an’ gill stoups clinkin’
In 1858, the newly formed Glasgow Trades Council was addressed by Alexander McDonald, who six years before had founded the Scottish Miners’ Association: ‘He said that 1600 miners were killed every year, leaving 700 widows. He added that 10,000 men were unfit for employment because of accidents in the mines. Mr McDonald mentioned cases of boys working in the mines from two am to seven pm.’23
The worst mining accident in Scotland was on 22 October 1877, when an explosion rocked the Blantyre mine in Lanarkshire, killing 209 men. Ninety-two families, with a total of 250 children, were left without a father.24 Showing no pity the pit owners, Dixon’s, took out eviction notices on thirty-four widows still living in company-owned cottages six months after the disaster. Two weeks later, on 28 May 1878, they were evicted.25
This traditional song, ‘Blantyre Explosion’, gained international fame in 1985 when the Irish singer and writer Christy Moore recorded it (although earlier still, Ewan MacColl had done the same):
Sobbing and sighing, at last she did answer,
‘Johnny Murphy, kind sir, was my true lover’s name.
Twenty-one years of age, full of youth and good-looking,
to work down the mine of High Blantyre he came.
The wedding was fixed, all the guests were invited
that calm summer’s evening my Johnny was slain.
The explosion was heard, all the women and children,
with pale anxious faces made haste to the mine.
When the truth was made known the hills rang with their mourning.
Two hundred and ten young miners were slain.
Now children and wives and sweethearts and brothers,
that Blantyre explosion they’ll never forget.
And all you young miners who hear my sad story,
shed a tear for the victims who were laid to their rest.’
Housing was awful for the majority of the people of Glasgow. The first real census to record details, in 1861, found 34 percent of the population lived in a single room, 37 percent in just two rooms. Two-thirds of the population lived in a single end or a ‘but-and-ben’, a two-room cottage.26 Twenty years later, a quarter of Glasgow’s citizens still lived in such cramped conditions, and 50 percent in a room and kitchen.27
In 1892, the Royal Commission on Labour was told of the houses provided by William Dixon’s mining company at Auchenraith. Forty-two single-room and forty-one twin-room houses provided accommodation for 492 people: ‘There were no wash houses or coal cellars (coals were kept under the bed): there was an open sewer behind, with twelve doorless “hen roost privies” (so called because you could not sit down): there were two drinking fountains.’28
By 1911, half of all Scots still lived in one- or two-bedroom homes. In England and Wales the figure was 7 percent.29 Among those who paid the price were the newborn. Scottish infant mortality was 118 per 1,000 births in 1855–59, rose to 130 in 1895–99 and still stood at 122 in 1900–04. In 1908, the Glasgow socialist John Wheatley published an index of infant mortality across the city and argued: ‘You may see at a glance that the infant death-rate in working-class wards is three, four and almost five times higher than in Kelvinside [in the affluent West End].’30
All of this explains why at the height of Scottish capitalism the country was haemorrhaging people. Between 1830 and 1914 nearly two million emigrated overseas, with another 600,000 moving south of the border.31
A Bastion of Liberalism
The 1832 Reform Bill increased the Scots electorate from around 4,500 to 65,000. Landlords were able to exploit loopholes and to use their control to sway the vote. Reform led to the dominance of the Liberals (as the Whigs were now known). Between 1831 and 1919, Edinburgh was a Liberal stronghold, not returning a single Tory MP in all that time. It remained so during the crisis over Irish Home Rule in 1886, which led to a party split in Glasgow, and it even bestowed the freedom of the city on the Irish nationalist Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell.32 Between 1832 and 1886 the voters of Glasgow only once returned a Tory MP.33
By 1843, the Church of Scotland had gone through a ten-year conflict that led to a third of its ministers marching out of the General Assembly to form the Free Church of Scotland. At issue was the right of patrons, landowners or, as in 30 percent of parishes, the government, to select the parish minister. The leader of the breakaway sect, Thomas Chambers, was politically conservative but objected to such interference, championing the right of presbyteries to elect their own ministers, and kirk control of education and poor relief.
In rural areas, especially the Highlands, the aristocracy blocked the new church from building places of worship, and the Liberal press made hay of this. In the burghs, middle-class Free Church members rallied to the Liberal Party, strengthening its hold there. In reality, however, the split weakened the hold of the churches, and allowed the state to take control of schools.
Trade unions were weak, largely confined to male skilled workers, and clung to the Liberal Party. So, for example, the miners’ unions always urged its members to vote Liberal. In Edinburgh, from 1870 until they lost the fight in 1885, the Trades Council allied with sections of the city’s lower middle class to oppose attempts by the rich and powerful to convert George Heriot’s Hospital, which had been endowed by James VI’s watchmaker in order to educate the poor, into the select, fee-paying school it remains to this day.34
The crisis over Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886, however, saw the Liberals shed the support of those who wanted no concessions to Irish nationalism and allowed the breakaway Liberal Unionists to win a majority of Scottish parliamentary seats, including every seat in Glasgow.35 After a further Home Rule crisis in the 1890s, the Liberal Unionists and the Tories would eventually unite, with the Conservatives using the name Unionist on the ballot and election material until long after World War II.
Sectarianism: A Blight on Scottish Society
Religious sectarianism has blighted Scottish society for more than two centuries. Today its main expression is in the rivalry between the two main Glasgow football teams, Celtic, identified with the Catholic population, and Rangers, seen as the Protestant team. In the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century sectarianism was expressed in violence on the streets and in the close links developed between the Protestant Orange Order and the Tories in the west of Scotland.
Sectarianism was rooted in the arrival of Irish Catholic immigrants in the nineteenth century; before that the two countries had had a rich history of exchange, with Scotland benefitting most. However, the Great Famine of the 1840s increased immigration into the west of Scotland, West Lothian, Fife and Dundee, where industrialisation was already under way. By 1852, the Irish in Edinburgh reached a peak, numbering 12,514 in 1851, 4.5 percent of the city’s population. They were concentrated in the Grassmarket, the Cowgate, St Mary’s Wynd and Leith Wynd in the Old Town, and their main jobs were labouring, dealing in old clothes, scavenging and street lighting.36 By 1851, 7.2 percent of Scotland’s population was Irish, compared with 2.9 percent in England and Wales.37
The main Irish concentration was in the west and Dundee. There was antagonism towards the immigrants, particularly in the Lanarkshire coalfields, where they were believed to drive down wages by working for less pay. Yet even before the Famine, sectarian violence was in evidence. The organisation that personified anti-Catholic bigotry was the Orange Order. Its first Orange Lodge in Scotland seems to have been formed in Maybole in 1799 by returning members of the Ayrshire and Wigtownshi
re Militia, who had served in Ireland suppressing the United Irishmen’s rebellion of the previous year.
Serious rioting broke out in 1831 in Girvan when armed Orangemen broke up a reform march in the town. The Glasgow Herald reported an anti-Catholic riot in Airdrie in July 1835 and pointed out the sympathetic attitude of the police: ‘The crowd seemed to have the tacit support of the local authorities. When the crowd attacked the home of a Protestant by mistake, the head of the Airdrie police merely pointed out the error to them, but made no effort to dissuade them. One of the burgh magistrates was also reported to be in the midst of the mob.’38
Immigration preceded the 1846–51 Irish famine as a result of the collapse of native industry. However, the arrival of a significant Irish immigrant population was the driving force behind Orangeism. Since the Reformation, this had been a Protestant and indeed Calvinist state, with pockets of Catholicism only in the Highlands and Islands. The 1841 census showed 126,321 people of Irish birth in Scotland, some 5 percent of the population (16 percent in Glasgow). Ten years later the number of children born in Scotland to Irish immigrants totalled 207,367, including 18 percent of Glasgow’s population.39
Sectarianism did not take root everywhere. By 1851 Dundee had a higher proportion of Irish-born residents, 18.9 percent, than Glasgow. The bulk of these were women, attracted to work in the jute mills, and few were from Ulster. The Irish population there was quicker to join the labour movement, helping elect two Labour MPs in 1906, and in unionising the jute mills prior to World War I.40
Reinforced by Protestant immigrants from the north of Ireland, more Orange Lodges were set up in Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Inverclyde, and were involved in brawls and riots with immigrant Catholic Irish, but were seen as ‘a “party” or fighting society and certainly not as a credible organisational mechanism for propagating militant Protestantism’.41 In 1852, when anti-Irish mobs took over the streets of Greenock, attacking Irish homes, a man charged with trying to kill a Catholic policeman with a knife and pistol received a sixty-day sentence, but the central government intervened to suspend the local magistrates and town clerk.42 In 1854, miners in Airdrie struck, demanding the removal of the Irish.43
A quarter of the Irish in Glasgow by the 1860s were Protestants from Ulster. Until 1860, Glasgow had no Orange Lodge, but by 1878 there were more than a hundred in the city.44 The Ulster-born Robert Gault, superintendent of the Free Church Anti-Popish Mission, was the first clergymen to promote the Orange Order, being a regular speaker at its events.
What transformed the fortunes of the Orange Lodge were the Home Rule crises of 1886 and 1893, when the Liberal government was defeated in introducing devolution for Ireland, in the first case losing a vote in the House of Commons, in the second having it blocked by the House of Lords. The Liberal Party split, and as a result, in Scotland the Tories moved into an alliance with the Orange Lodge. This alliance worked well in opposing Gladstone and less well when the Tories gained office after his defeats.45
The President of the Glasgow Conservative Association, Colonel Archibald Campbell, later Lord Blythswood, hosted Orange social evenings as early as the 1870s, and likely joined the order, though he did not stoop to join processions.46 In 1875, there was rioting in Partick when an Irish nationalist procession was attacked. The Orange Lodge attempted to disassociate itself, claiming its members maintained discipline and had been asked by the police to assist them.47
Across Britain from the 1870s on, power was shifting with capitalists moving from the Liberal to the Tory Party. It was not simply because of Irish Home Rule, but because the Tories were recasting themselves as being aggressively pro-business. The reality of having been overtaken industrially by the USA, and with Germany coming up fast behind, sharpened the need to cut labour costs and to boost productivity. On Clydeside, the shipyard owner William Pearce and the ironmaster Sir James Bain stood for Parliament in 1880 as Tories, and enlisted the Orange Lodge in their support. By the 1892 Westminster general election, the Tory candidate in Bridgeton was an Orangeman, the candidate in the College constituency addressed a meeting of the Cowcaddens lodge and, in the election’s aftermath, the West Renfrewshire candidate sent his sincere apologies that he could not attend the 12th of July celebrations. Sectarianism remained never far beneath the surface.
Scotland also offered a home to migrants fleeing the repression, anti-Semitism and poverty of the Tsar’s Russian Empire. By 1901, Jews made up 24.7 percent of Scotland’s foreign-born population. The main centre of the Jewish population was the Gorbals in Glasgow, with an estimated 6,500 living there in 1901, rising to 9,000 within eighteen years. As families began to prosper they started to leave the slums of the Gorbals behind, moving south towards Pollokshields.48 Dundee had a small Jewish community, beginning with German textile merchants who settled there in the 1840s. Four decades later it saw the arrival of Yiddish-speaking East European Jews, who were much poorer than the earlier arrivals. Most lived in the Hilltown area and made a living selling goods in the Green Market or the city arcade, running tearooms, lodgings, pawnbrokers and small shops selling groceries or clothes.49
Scotland was not free of anti-Semitism but it never took the organised form that it did in early twentieth-century Germany, nor did it experience anything like the Dreyfus Affair, which split France at that time. There is little or no record of specifically anti-Semitic organisations operating in Scotland in the nineteenth century.
From the 1880s, coal mine and iron work owners in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire began recruiting Lithuanian workers, promising them work and homes. Some 8,000 came, with 2,600 working in the mines by 1911. At first the ‘Poles’, as they were known, were treated with hostility by their fellow workers, who feared, sometimes rightly, that they were being hired to cut wages. This happened in 1902–1903 at Thankerton, Tannochside and Neilsland in Lanarkshire. But many of the newcomers had fled political persecution, and the Lithuanians established their credentials as union members, playing a central role as as pickets in Lanarkshire and West Lothian during the 1912 national strike.
The Kailyard and the Reaction
The late nineteenth century was dominated by the rise of the ‘kailyard’ – sugary, sentimental tales of rural Scotland – which appeared in journals such as British Weekly (subtitled ‘A Journal of Social and Christian Progress’) and the Christian Leader. J. M. Barrie, today best remembered as the author of Peter Pan, had success with three novels, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1890) and The Little Minister (1891), set in his mother’s hometown, Kirriemuir (renamed Thrums in the books) and centring on the lives of family members belonging to the ‘Auld Lichts’, a strict Calvinist sect to which Barrie’s own grandfather had belonged.
Ian MacLaren’s Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush was published in 1894, and Queen Victoria and William Gladstone were among its readers. A year after publication it was the best-selling novel in the USA.50 Its opening line, ‘There grows a bonnie brier bush in our kail-yard’, gave the name to this school of literature with its idealised view of Scottish rural life, so far from the reality of the slums of Clydeside or the miners’ rows of the coalfields. By 1908 it had sold 256,000 copies and 485,000 in the USA. Maclaren was the pen name of the Rev. John Watson, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, and his stress on family values won praise from Christian evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Others were keen to emulate such success, and a flood of kailyard novels and short stories followed, often written with the North American emigrant market in mind. For six years between 1891 and 1897, kailyard authors appeared in the American top-ten best-seller lists. S. R. Crockett’s The Lilac Sunbonnet sold 10,000 copies on its first day of publication in 1894. Like Watson, Crockett was a Free Kirk minister.51
While Scotland was a success story, the working class was still not a force in Scottish society, and there was little need for the middle class to dwell on its social problems. It could instead comfort itself in this idyllic view of Scotland. This was also the im
age developed by the music hall artist Harry Lauder, who always appeared on stage in his kilt with a crooked walking stick, and who gained huge success in Britain and America, becoming the first artist to sell a million records. It would live on with sanitised versions of Burns poetry and songs in the Sunday Post and on the White Heather Club, a variety show which appeared on BBC TV between 1958 and 1968.
But this image was challenged at the time of its high point in popularity. In 1901, George Douglas Brown published The House with the Green Shutters, focusing on the dark side of Calvinist Scotland, drink and all. Its representation of rural life is a million miles from that of Maclaren, Barrie and Crockett – ‘a brutal and bloody work’ was its author’s description. He added: ‘Every clachan in Scotland is a hot-bed of scandal and malevolence.’52 His Barbie has, on the surface, similarities to Drumtochty, where Maclaren set his stories, and indeed Brown starts by portraying Barbie in a kailyard way, but spiteful gossip and petty hatreds are never far from view. Barbie’s population are the ‘Bodies’, a group of malicious gossips who rub their hands in glee when things go wrong for their neighbours. The novel stands the test of time.
Class Warfare in Victorian Scotland
In the 1880s, wages in Scotland were lower than in England, with those in shipbuilding, iron and steel, cotton and brewing averaging £70 per annum compared with a UK average of £76. A report to the US Congress in 1872 described wages in Scotland as a ‘mere pittance’. Trade union membership was lower than south of the border. These were all factors in encouraging the American Singer Sewing Machine Company to build a plant in Clydebank in 1900.53
Employers were determined to try to keep trade unions cowed. One way of doing this was by employing women in the belief that they were immune to unionisation. Between 1871 and 1911, Dundee’s jute works employed between two-thirds and three-quarters of Dundee’s working women.54 The 1901 census showed that 31 percent of the female population of Dundee was employed in the city’s mills and factories and, in the same year, ‘the proportion of married women who had remunerative occupations was exceptionally high’ – at least 24.1 percent compared with 6.1 percent in Glasgow and 5.6 percent in Edinburgh.55
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