A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  Mary Barbour arrived in Govan in 1896, a newly married engineer’s wife, and became active in the Independent Labour Party. She began organising over rents by holding meetings, large and small, in kitchens, in closes and in backcourts, attracting her audience with a football rattle.11

  In April 1915 the eviction in Govan of the family of a soldier serving in France was met with angry protests, as Willie Gallacher, a leader of the shops stewards’ movement on the Clyde, describes:

  In Govan, Mrs. Barbour, a typical working class housewife, became the leader of a movement such has never been seen before, or since for that matter, street meetings, back-court meetings, drums, bells, trumpets – every method was used to bring the women out and organise them for struggle. Notices were printed by the thousand and put up in the windows: wherever you went you could see them. In street after street, scarcely a window without one: WE ARE NOT PAYING INCREASED RENT.12

  One landlord had applied for an eviction order against a mother and family for non-payment of rent at a time when the man of the house was fighting in France and a son was recovering from war wounds. The court supplied the necessary authorisation despite an offer from the local miners’ union to pay the rent debt within a week. However, the attempt at eviction was successfully resisted by a large crowd that had to be restrained from physically attacking the landlord.13 Similar scenes were repeated across the city, for instance in Partick: ‘… a seventy year-old-pensioner living alone was due to be evicted on a warrant issued by Sheriff Thomson for refusing to pay a rent increase. The old man barricaded himself in his tiny tenement flat and a large crowd gathered outside in his support, making his “castle” impregnable. Again no official showed face.’14

  Gallacher records that ‘the factors [agents for the property owners] could not collect the rents’.15 When a factor turned up in Partick in late October, the Glasgow Herald reported, ‘he was pelted with bags of peasemeal and chased from one of the streets by a number of women, who upbraided him vociferously’.16 The landlords then applied to a judge for an eviction warrant, and executing it fell to the city’s sheriff, who asked the police to carry out the task:

  But Mrs. Barbour had a team of women who were wonderful. They could smell a sheriff’s officer a mile away. At their summons women left their cooking, washing or whatever they were doing. Before they were anywhere near their destination, the officer and his men would be met by an army of furious women who drove them back in a hurried scramble for safety.17

  In every window of every house there were notices that read, ‘We are not removing’. Within weeks, thousands of notices were displayed in street after street. Soon all of Glasgow was involved: from Park-head to Govan, Pollokshaws to Calton.18

  Throughout 1915, John Maclean, the leading revolutionary on Clydeside, spoke at meeting after meeting outside the shipyards and other workplaces, demanding action on rents. On Sunday nights he addressed huge open-air meetings in Bath Street while his Marxist night class had an average attendance of 493, mainly shop stewards. In October he was brought to court under the Defence of the Realm Act for opposing the war and was bound over on agreement that he would not speak publicly on the war, though he made it clear he would still speak out over rents.19 Because of this conviction, Maclean faced the sack from his teaching position.

  By October 1915, 15,000 refused to pay rent increases, and a month later it was 20,000. That month a factor took eighteen tenants to court, providing a focus for the movement, as Mrs Barbour’s women marched on the City Chambers. Tom Bell would write that en route: ‘The women marched in a body to the shipyard and got the men to leave work and join them in a demonstration to the Court.’20 Forward estimated the crowd outside the City Chambers as being 4,000 strong.21 John Maclean was among those who spoke, denouncing the evils of capitalism.22 His arrival was unusual: ‘On their way from Govan one contingent marched to the school where John Maclean, already under notice of dismissal from Govan School Board, was teaching. He was taken out and carried shoulder high through the streets to the court.’23

  Helen Crawfurd would remember: ‘I will never forget the sight and sound of those marching men [from the shipyards]. Thousands of them marched through the principal streets to the Sheriff Court and the surrounding streets were packed. John Maclean … was one of the speakers, who from barrels and up-turned boxes, addressed the crowds.’24

  The government in London was worried by the scale of the protests and that the eviction of rent strikers might be the spark for a walkout in the Clyde yards.25 It responded quickly, hurrying through the Rent Restriction Act of 1915, which returned rents to pre-war levels. This was a major victory for working-class people of Britain, won by the working women and men of Glasgow.

  A Revolutionary Storm-Centre Second to None

  The rent strike coincided with the beginning of grass-roots trade union organisation, which would challenge the employers, the government and the union leaders who were determined to police their promises that there would be no strikes during wartime.

  The factory owners took the initiative when the hawkish, antiunion William Weir brought American engineers to his Cathcart plant, paying them a bonus of six shillings a week, in order to bring in US working practices and to undermine the union. In response, the engineering workers walked out on an unofficial strike in defiance of their union leaders. The strike at Weir’s quickly spread to twenty other factories, with an official ballot of engineering union members overwhelmingly rejecting the employers’ offer. Shop stewards from all the striking plants met to co-ordinate the action, forming what was to be the Clyde Workers’ Committee, made up of 200–300 shop stewards who met each Sunday. Its attitude was summed up thus:

  We will support the officials just as long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them. Being composed of Delegates from every shop and untrammeled by obsolete rule or law, we claim to represent the true feeling of the workers. We can act immediately according to the merits of the case and the desire of the rank and file.26

  Without strike pay and under a media attack orchestrated by the munitions minister, Lloyd George, the strike began to crumble. A ballot agreed to a deal hammered out by government arbitration, which gave a penny-an-hour raise and 10 percent on piece rates.

  In February 1915, the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC) led a campaign demanding a twopenny pay increase, promised before the war, but denied by a wartime pay freeze, despite rocketing prices. Ten thousand workers responded, two-thirds of Clyde’s engineering workforce. They faced not just the government but the hostility of their own engineering union, which called on them to return to work.27 The employers were forced to concede, but they negotiated a raise of one penny, not with the CWC but with the engineering union. The engineering unions had agreed a no-strike deal with the government in March 1915, ‘with a view to accelerating the output of war munitions or equipments’.28

  The next industrial flashpoint was at Fairfield’s shipyard in July 1915, with a call for two strikes to protest the necessity for anyone switching jobs to be given a leaving certificate by management to indicate good time-keeping and service. This was seen as a means of discriminating against ‘troublemakers’. The two walkouts that summer led to seventeen strikers being convicted, with three refusing to pay their fines. The issue was resolved only when the national union paid their fines after talks with the government.

  The Clyde Workers’ Committee restricted itself to shop-floor issues – pay, conditions and protecting job status – and refused to address wider issues like the war, the one issue that defined everything else. Their attitude was summed up in that of Gallacher, who was a member of the British Socialist Party and spoke against the war at weekends, but kept this separate from his trade union work.29

  The CWC has often been dismissed as an association of skilled workers, labour aristocrats, concerned with protecting their status as unskilled men and women were introduced into engineering. However, the radicalis
ation of skilled engineers and metalworkers was a feature of the period across Europe. Traditionally, the response of these skilled workers was to try to maintain their standing above their unskilled fellows. But now they saw the attacks on them as part of a more general war on all trade unionists.

  The CWC’s concentration on dilution, the replacement of skilled workers by semi- or non-skilled workers, meant it did not take up the issue of conscription, which would be introduced by the government in January 1916, but had been much debated beforehand. Opposing conscription would have allowed the CWC to broaden out to other sections of the working class on the Clyde.30 While it did become involved in solidarity with the rent strike, no attempt was made to bring that together with the growing industrial unrest. If the housing agitation, labour unrest and opposition to war came together on Clydeside, Maclean argued, that could create a revolutionary situation.

  Meanwhile, the government toughened up the Munitions Act and Dilution of Labour Act, making it nigh impossible for a worker to leave one job for another – any who did were subject to military law — and enforcing the replacement of skilled labour by unskilled. In the interim, the government had also noted the existence of the CWC, and a paper dated 24 November 1915 states: ‘To obtain a reasonably smooth working of the Munition Act, this committee should be smashed.’31 That month, the government tightened wartime laws against strikers and decided to send Lloyd George to address Clydeside munitions workers, hoping to trade on his pre-war reputation as a radical for his opposition to the earlier Boer War in South Africa and his attacks on Tory aristocrats.

  However, when Lloyd George visited Weir’s and Albion Motors, shop stewards refused to meet him, as agreed with the CWC. At Parkhead Forge the union convenor David Kirkwood broke ranks and did receive him, causing splits in the committee that were papered over for a time. On Christmas Day (not a holiday in Calvinist Scotland), Lloyd George was to address a mass meeting of munitions workers in an attempt to directly appeal to them to rally behind the war effort. The meeting was packed. David Kirkwood took the chair, and introduced the future prime minister: ‘This, fellow workers, is Mr Lloyd George. He has come specially to speak to you and I have no doubt that you will give him a patient hearing. I can assure him that every word he says will be carefully weighed. We regard him with suspicion because every act associated with his name has the taint of slavery about it.’32

  Defying government orders that there should be no publicity, Forward published a comprehensive report of the meeting, with Kirkwood demanding to know whether Lloyd George was prepared to give the workers responsibility for managing the plants, but the minister replied that the workers were not capable of managing factories. Kirkwood responded that the shop stewards had the confidence of the workers, ‘Who runs the workshops now?’ Lloyd George replied that giving workers any say in management was a revolutionary proposal and pointed out that Labour leaders now in government, such as Arthur Henderson, who was present, shared responsibility for the Munitions Act. Kirkwood responded, ‘We repudiate that man, he is no leader of ours. If you, Mister Lloyd George, wish to know the mind of the workers, don’t go to such men. If you wish to do away with the discontent in the workshops, then do away with the cause.’ At this point, Lloyd George left the meeting, to the accompaniment of ‘The Red Flag’ sung by a chorus of shop stewards.33

  After the debacle of the Christmas Day meeting, the government determined to get revenge. After Forward published its account, the paper’s offices were raided and new issues were prevented from appearing for a month. As the demand for munitions rose and rose, the government announced in January 1916 that it would enforce ‘dilution’; the engineering shop stewards of the Clyde Workers’ Committee pledged to resist this. Nonetheless, within three days, ‘three Dilution Commissioners arrived on the Clyde’.34

  The Munitions Ministry official in charge of labour wanted the CWC leaders and John Maclean deported from the city, but planned to do so if and when a strike against the dilution of labour broke out.35 The Scottish Director of Munitions was the Glasgow industrialist William Weir, who determined to ram through the scheme in a select number of Clydeside workplaces in a matter of days in order to break the unity of the CWC. The police and army were on hand to deal with trouble, and Weir could call on the powers of the draconian Defence of the Realm Act. But none of this was needed, because David Kirkwood agreed to accept the scheme in return for assurances he would have a say in the running of Parkhead Forge.36 A member of the ILP, Kirkwood took the view that the interests of the workers he represented were paramount over those of the working class as a whole.

  Meanwhile, an article in the CWC paper, The Worker, headlined ‘Should the Workers Arm?’ provided the authorities with an opportunity to act – even though the author answered his own question ‘No’. Willie Gallacher, John Muir and the paper’s publisher, Walter Bell, were arrested and charged with sedition. In response, workers at Weir’s, Coventry Ordnance Works, Beardmore’s in Dalmuir, John Brown Engineering, Albion Motors, and Barr and Stroud walked out on strike. But Parkhead Forge, where Kirkwood was corresponding with Lloyd George about his ideas for running production, did not. The strike ended when the three men arrested were released on bail.

  News that Kirkwood had broken ranks once more in negotiating a dilution scheme at Parkhead Forge led to bitter recriminations among members of the CWC, whose goal had been a Clydeside-wide strike against dilution. Despite Kirkwood’s initial actions, the next flashpoint would be at Parkhead Forge when the first women workers arrived on 29 February. Kirkwood wanted them to join the National Federation of Women Workers and he addressed them soon after they started. The next day, management banned him from the women’s section, and he later was again banned from entering another department where a dispute had arisen. When the owner, Beardmore, would not back down, the shop stewards voted to strike on 17 March.

  The Parkhead strike was joined by strikes at the North British Diesel Engine Works, at Weirs, and another by the gunmakers at Beardmore’s in Dalmuir. But resentment at Kirkwood’s previous behaviour meant stewards elsewhere did not argue to join the strike. Sensing a victory, the government deported Kirkwood and eight other shop stewards from the striking plants under wartime emergency laws.

  On 29 March, at a special tribunal, thirty strikers were fined £5 each, and two days later a big rally was organised on Glasgow Green against the deportations, but the strike had lost momentum and workers were beginning to drift back to work. The CWC had failed to respond to this attack, with leading figures like Gallacher allowing their anger at Kirkwood to get in the way of providing solidarity.

  For a year the Clyde was quiet. The biggest strike of the war, which began in Sheffield in May 1917, after the protection against conscription previously provided to skilled workers was lifted, did not cross the border.37 Scottish historian Christopher Harvie has noted that ‘the government was fortunate’ to have broken the CWC before ‘really huge casualty lists came in from the Somme.’38 But during the demonstrations that took place in 1916, protesters took up the ditty ‘Henry Dubb’ penned by James Maxton, who was in jail for refusing to serve:

  Oh, I’m Henry Dubb

  And I won’t go to war

  Because I don’t know

  What they’re all fighting for.

  To Hell with the Kaiser

  To Hell with the Tsar

  To Hell with Lord Derby

  To Hell with GR.

  I work at munitions

  I’m a slave down at Weir’s

  If I leave my job

  They’ll give me two years.

  To Hell with the sheriff

  To Hell with his crew

  To Hell with Lloyd George

  And Henderson too.

  I don’t like the factor

  His rent I won’t pay

  Three cheers for John Wheatley

  I’m striking today.

  To Hell with the landlord

  I’m not one to grouse

&n
bsp; But to Hell both with him

  And his bloody old house.

  The movement was not fully broken. In the autumn of 1916, John Maclean’s economics classes drew 200 shop stewards each week. They increased over that winter: his Central Halls class had ‘recruited 500 members by November 1917; while the Govan class had 100 members. MacLean conducted three Marxist classes in Fife, and three in the West; while James MacDougall also taught eight classes in Paisley and in Lanarkshire, mainly in the mining communities where he and rank-and-file miners were leading the reform movement within the union, demanding workers control in a socialized industry.’39 Some 2,000 students attended such classes across Scotland, with 854 signing up in Glasgow.

  But opposition to the slaughter in the trenches was growing, and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917 found ready support. For the May Day march that year in Glasgow, the Glasgow Herald gave a figure of 70,000 participants. A year later it quoted the same number, despite the march taking place on a weekday during work hours. On his release from jail for sedition, Gallacher re-formed the CWC in September 1917, and it made its presence felt in disrupting the government minister Sir Auckland Geddes when he addressed munitions workers, demanding greater output.40