Nevertheless, women mill workers went on strike in Dundee in 1871, with one newspaper reporting: ‘Those on strike today paraded the streets in grotesque processions, bearing emblems of their trade suspended from poles, such as mats, jugs etc… . They also indulged in shouting and singing … Besides this they held threatening demonstrations in front of the works where nobody had turned out.’56
In 1893 a general strike occurred across Dundee against a 5 percent reduction in wages. The strike had originated at the city’s Tay Works, and according to the Dundee Advertiser, ‘it was here that the most violent scenes were witnessed’:
On Monday at 6 o’clock … the employees who had agreed to stand by the resolution assembled outside the gates, and amused themselves by hooting at their fellow workers who felt it their duty to continue at their work. Before breakfast the strikers numbered 500, after breakfast 2,000 … It was observed that many of the younger workers, both male and female, had come provided with wooden laths. The 10 o’clock whistle began to sound and as the shrill notes were heard a few antistrikers made their way towards the entrance. They were immediately set upon by those armed with sticks, and ran the gauntlet under a shower of hearty blows. At the same time they were loudly hooted and subjected to remarks of a far from complimentary kind. In this way, about 100 workers, chiefly men found their way in.57
Elsewhere, Scottish coal was still hacked out of the ground by hand, and pit owners wanted to squeeze everything they could from their workforce. In 1870, the Fife miners won an eight-hour day after a stay-down strike (an occupation) at a time when demand for coal was high. But four years later the price of coal fell and with it came the usual wage cuts. The Scottish miners’ union, led by Alexander McDonald, decided to target the pits of one company, Merry and Cunningham, having sufficient funds for strike pay to the men there and in the hope that a victorious strike would force other employers to reverse the cuts. But in response the employers enforced a lockout across the Motherwell and Wishaw district and began evictions in Logan Rows in Motherwell and Merry Square in Craigneuk. Miners at the Braidhurst pit near Logan Rows were warned by the owners not to take the evicted families in. For several weeks, a hundred families had to camp in Craigneuk. Hunger and cold beat them back to work.58
In 1879 and 1880 the miners fought back against wage cuts and for a reduction in working hours, and the strike lasted sixteen weeks. Once again the company used evictions and the law to impress its power on the workers. Two miners were sentenced to fourteen days’ hard labour for intimidation, and three wives from Berryhill Rows, Wishaw, were jailed for two days for throwing stones and coal slag at scabs. A group of women from Camp Rows, Motherwell, were tried for harassment, but got off with fines and a warning. Eventually the union exhausted its funds and the strike folded.59
In Lanarkshire during the Caledonian Company rail strike of 1891, miners came to the aid of railworkers facing eviction from company houses. Fifty hussars were sent from Glasgow’s Maryhill Barracks to maintain order, but failed to stop a crowd of 20,000 smashing a signal box and the glass roof of Motherwell Station.60 Scottish workers could fight hard, but politically they were undeveloped. Already, however, there were those determined to change that.
The Liberal Party dominated Scottish parliamentary politics in the second half of the nineteenth century, and unlike its counterpart south of the border, was not under any great pressure from the trade unions and working-class supporters that it had to select ‘Lib-Lab’ candidates. In England and Wales the Liberals were prepared to select working-class candidates, usually trade union officials, often from mining areas where they could appeal to working-class voters concentrated in tight communities. But in Scotland, such was their dominance, the Liberals did not feel this to be necessary, which fed demands for independent working-class representation.
Instead, a radical wing developed inside the Scottish Liberal Party, represented by John Ferguson, a Glasgow-based Irish Home Rule activist; the traveller and adventurer Cunninghame Graham, who was won over to socialism in the 1880s and helped form the Scottish Home Rule Association in 1886 when he was a Lancashire MP; and the socialist novelist ‘John Law’ (Margaret Harkness), as well as Christian socialists.61
One of this group was Kier Hardie, who had been involved in two failed strikes, in 1880 and 1881. In the second he had turned his home into a soup kitchen for strikers, but to no avail. In April 1888, Hardie contested the Mid-Lanark Westminster by-election. His vote was not impressive, polling 617 against his Liberal opponent, a Welsh barrister, who took 3,847. The intransigence of the mine owners, the anti-working-class views of the Scottish Liberal leadership and the failure of Gladstone’s governments to bring any significant reform led Hardie and Graham to form the Scottish Labour Party four months later, following the government’s use of troops to break a miners’ strike in the previous year despite 20,000 people marching through Glasgow in its support.62 As the labour historian James J. Smyth argues, this move flowed from the weakness of the trade unions in Scotland: ‘It was the inability of Scottish trade unionists to make local Liberal Associations accept trade union or working class candidates that forced miners’ leaders such as Keir Hardie into a reappraisal of the organisational link with Liberalism.’63
Five years later, the Scottish Labour Party had 150 delegates from twenty-four branches at its conference. Nonetheless, a year earlier it had played a central part in the formation in Bradford of the Independent Labour Party into which it would fold and from which today’s Labour Party would emerge.64
Marxist ideas grew small roots too, with the likes of William Morris touring the country. Aberdeen developed a strong radical tradition, initially tied to the Liberals but moving left as that party was seen to ignore working-class issues. James Leatham, a compositor, helped set up a branch of the Scottish Land and Labour League in 1886, holding open-air meetings on a Sunday in Castlegate. At the first he told his audience: ‘Ye sing of your bonnie Scotland and your heather hills. It’s not your bonnie Scotland. It’s not your heather hills. It’s the landlord’s heather hills. And if you want enough earth to set a geranium in you’ve got to pinch it.’65
On his second outing Leatham was arrested, charged with preaching socialism on the Sabbath. A lively free-speech campaign helped ensure his acquittal.
In 1896 the national chair of the ILP, Tom Mann, stood in the parliamentary seat of Aberdeen North, securing 2,476 votes against his Liberal opponent’s 2,909.66 David Howell observes: ‘Aberdeen had been … a stronghold of New Unionism [the upsurge in the early 1890s among unskilled, formerly non-unionised workers] and much of Mann’s keenest support seems to have come from the dock areas.’67
These albeit small political advances were all signs that something profound was about to change in the Scottish working class.
_______________________________________
REBEL LIVES: JAMES CONNOLLY
On 12 May 1916, James Connolly was driven into the prison yard of Dublin’s Kilmainham Prison strapped to a chair; set down, he was shot dead by a British firing squad, despite the fact that he was already dying from his infected wounds. Beforehand he had smuggled out a statement through his daughter Nora, which said, ‘We went out to break the connection between this country and the British Empire, and to establish an Irish Republic.’68
Connolly was a socialist who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin at the head of the Irish Citizens Army because he wanted to strike a blow against World War I and imperialism. He regarded himself, rightly, as being Irish, but he was born in Edinburgh on 5 June 1868, at 107 Cowgate, in the heart of the capital’s Irish ghetto. Both his father and mother were immigrants. He worked as a manure carter for Edinburgh Corporation; his mother had been a domestic servant. Leaving school, he could not find regular work and enlisted in the British Army, from which he probably deserted.
The politics of the Cowgate were those of the Irish National League, connected to the Home Rule Party in Ireland, and run by the local clergy.
But James’s elder brother, John, had joined the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF). It seems that James joined too, after visiting his brother in Dundee, where he was living, in 1889.
The city magistrates had attempted to ban the SDF from holding outdoor meetings in the city, but 20,000 people came to a rally in Albert Square from where they marched to High Street, into the area covered by the ban. Two leading SDFers were arrested. Undeterred, the left in the city refused to back down and instead the magistrates had to make a U-turn.69
The Edinburgh SDF contained some talented people: Andreas Scheu was an Austrian journalist, Leo Meillet had been mayor of a Paris commune, Rev. W. Glasse would translate the ‘Internationale’. The Irish-born John Lincoln MacMahon joined after forming a Republican Club in the city, and John Leslie, another Irish-Scot from the Cowgate, would help shape Connolly’s view of the Irish situation.
The SDF’s leadership in London was very dogmatic and sectarian, arguing that strikes were futile and that workers had to overthrow capitalism. The development of the New Unionism of the 1890s, the strikes that organised unskilled workers for the first time on any scale, met with their scorn, but in Edinburgh the SDF branch supported a strike by printers, backed the call for an eight-hour day and helped organise the 1890 May Day march.70
Three years later, Connolly had become the party secretary in the city. In a report to the SDF national paper, Justice, in August 1893, he described the population of Edinburgh as being ‘snobs, flunkeys, mashers, lawyers, students, middle class pensioners and dividend-hunters, even the working class portion of the population seemed to have imbibed the snobbish would-be-respectable spirit of their “betters” …’ He reported that the SDF wanted to build membership in Leith because it was ‘pre-eminently an industrial centre’.71
The eventual defeat of the New Unionism led many socialists to look to standing working-class candidates for Parliament as a means to advance. Connolly attempted, unsuccessfully, to get the Irish National League to switch from backing the Liberals to supporting Labour candidates, but he disliked the ILP leadership’s attempts to seek alliances with the Liberals and to court the Irish Home Rule Party, and in 1894 resigned all his positions in the party to devote himself to the SDF.
In this he was influenced by the publication in 1894 of John Leslie’s pamphlet ‘The Irish Question’, in which he argued that the creation of an Irish parliament would not solve the country’s ills. Even though he backed independence he argued that the economic grip of the landlords had to be broken, quoting the radical nationalist Fintan Lalor to good effect. Leslie was attacking the politics of the Irish National League, which held that the workers of the Cowgate should unite with the publicans, priests and slum landlords who made up their own, small middle class. He argued that ‘despite their patriotism [they] were from a working class point of view, not much better, if any, than those they rebelled against …’ Irish workers, he continued, had to understand that ‘The emancipation of their class from economic bondage means emancipation from all bondage; that the interests of the working class are paramount …’72 Leslie was joined by Connolly in attacking any attempts by the left to curry the favour of the Home Rule Party.
Connolly would stand as a socialist candidate in St Giles Ward at the centre of ‘Little Ireland’ in 1894. His election manifesto expressed his hopes for his brothers and sisters: ‘Perhaps they will realise that the Irish worker who starves in an Irish cabin and the Scottish worker who is prisoned in an Edinburgh garret are brothers with one hope and destiny. The landlord who grinds Irish peasants on a Connemara estate and the landlord who rack-rents them in a Cowgate slum are brethren in fact and deed.’73
Five hundred attended his first election rally, and he also held an open-air meeting for carters in Kingstables Road. But many of those listening were denied a vote (nearly half the male working class had no vote, and no women, of course).
The Irish National League attacked Connolly as an ‘atheist’ and said he was betraying his faith and country. In the end he came third – the Liberal won with 1,056 votes, the Tory took 467 and Connolly 263. Connolly understood the limitations of electoral politics, writing: ‘The election of a Socialist to any public body is only valuable in so far as it is the return of a disturber of the political peace.’74 He became a national figure on the Scottish and British left but could not obtain full-time employment as a political organiser. In 1896, he answered an advert for the post of organiser for the Irish Socialist Republican Party in Dublin and emigrated, leaving Edinburgh behind.
Connolly remained a regular visitor to Scotland, however, and an opponent of a growing reformism in the SDF. In the end his supporters walked out to form the Socialist Labour Party. The new party was hard on the ‘Labour Fakers’ but was too doctrinaire. In the build-up to 1916 it printed Connolly’s newspaper and smuggled it into Ireland after the British authorities suppressed it.
In the wake of his execution, few on the Scottish left defended him. Tom Johnston responded to Connolly’s involvement in the Easter Rising by saying, ‘the psychology of it is a mystery to me.’ Forward stated that ‘in no way do we approve of armed rebellion.’75
There was one exception. John Maclean knew Connolly well and defended the Easter Rising and Connolly’s role in it from the outset, just as he would side with the subsequent Republican struggle for independence.
NINE
The Clyde Runs Red
Scotland at War
In August 1914, Scotland went to war. Official propaganda told the people that war was necessary to save ‘poor little Belgium’, which had been occupied by crazed Huns, the racist term used for Germans who were busy raping nuns and butchering civilians. In reality, Britain was fighting to ensure Germany did not dominate Europe and to protect its position as the world superpower.
Scotland paid a high price for this imperial conflict. Of 557,000 Scots who enlisted, 26.4 percent were killed, compared to the UK average of 11.8 percent. Only Serbia and Turkey had a higher mortality rate.1 T. C. Smout says of the war dead, ‘One well-argued estimate put the figure at 110,000, equivalent to about 10 percent of the Scottish male population, and probably about 15 percent of British war dead … Thirteen out of fourteen were privates and non-commissioned officers from the working classes.’2
The outbreak of the Great War divided Labour, a majority of whose MPs were pro-war. Keir Hardie, ill and about to die, was openly anti-war. The Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was a pacifist and privately against the war, but he kept quiet in case the party might split over the issue. Nevertheless, by December 1914, 25 percent of Scotland’s male workforce had volunteered. In the Lothian coalfield 36 percent of the miners enlisted after its Eastern European export market collapsed. In the Lanarkshire coalfield the figure was just 20 percent. Christopher Harvie explains this high rate of enlistment as being down to the ‘herd instinct – “following one’s pals” – and the expectation of a short war’.3
A pamphlet produced by the National Service League entitled ‘The Briton’s First Duty’ admitted, ‘Want and hunger are, unfortunately for us, the invisible recruiting sergeants of a great portion of our army.’4 Economic hardship had a pronounced effect on enlistment rates.5
My paternal grandfather volunteered in 1915, lying about his age, alongside his two brothers; one lies still outside Ypres. As shale miners anything might have seemed better than what they were doing, and anyone who’s been to Tarbrax in Midlothian, where they lived, would understand the wish to escape. He would regret his youthful enthusiasm and was bitter about what he experienced. (My other grandfather objected to the war on religious grounds but when conscripted agreed to be a stretcher-bearer – he never talked about what he saw.) In the main, the workers’ organisation in Glasgow was anti-war but many felt the pressure of the jingoist agitation. Forward, despite its anti-war stance, was compelled to print a prowar column.6 Yet it would not take long for social and economic issues to resurface.
Glasgow was notorious for its ho
using conditions, but a fresh influx of workers to fuel its armament factories added to the pressure. Rents were higher than elsewhere in the UK and, with accommodation in demand, landlords raised rents. Existing tenants, who could not afford the increase, faced eviction – even the families of those away fighting in the trenches.
The government found in October 1915 that a third of rents had increased by 5 percent, while in ‘Govan and Fairfield, the centre of the storm, all the houses … suffered rent increases ranging from 11.67% to 23.08%’.7 Across Glasgow and the west of Scotland a network of Independent Labour Party branches, tenants groups, Co-operative Society branches, the Govan and Glasgow Trades Councils, trade union activists and socialists were able to organise a rising groundswell of discontent.8 The Partick and Maryhill Press reported the 1915 May Day rally in Glasgow thus: ‘Over 165 labour and socialist organisations took part … and Glasgow Green was crowded with thousands of spectators. There were twelve platforms. Among those represented were those of the Socialist and Labour Party, Internationalism, Glasgow Housing Committee, the Anarchist Group, Socialist Children’s School and Women Trade Unionists.’9
Women took the lead in winning the single greatest victory notched up on Red Clydeside. One of the organisers of the rent strike, Helen Crawfurd, had been a radical suffragette jailed three times before the war for actions that included smashing the windows of the Ministry of Education in London and an army recruitment office in Glasgow. Seán Damer notes: ‘The Glasgow suffragettes had a tradition of militancy which included blowing up all the telegraph and telephone cables, cutting the wires around the city.’10
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