A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  That September, the CWC was also able to call a strike over wages, and while it had to be called off after a few days, they retreated in good order. Subsequently, the government awarded a 12.5 percent pay increase. In November, four women workers at Beardmore’s East Hope Street shell factory were victimised for taking part in a go-slow, and the factory stopped, demanding their reinstatement. Their union disowned the strike but the CWC called a solidarity rally on Glasgow Green. The women won reinstatement.

  In January 1918, 10,000 shipyard workers struck over pay, and the action spread to engineering plants. James Hinton, a historian of the shop stewards’ movement, argues: ‘By January 1918 the Clyde was back in the vanguard of the national movement.’41

  That same month the Lloyd George government passed the Manpower Bill to increase conscription both into the armed forces and the war industries. A government minister was sent to Glasgow to sell it to workers. He was first shouted down then allowed to speak before a resolution was passed, saying Glasgow and Clydeside would ‘do nothing at all in support of carrying on the war but … everything we can to bring the war to a conclusion’.42 The resolution was seconded by Jimmy Maxton, and after it was passed, the crowd marched to George Square.

  The May Day demonstration of 1918 saw up to 110,000 on the streets, and the rally passed motions in solidarity with revolutionary Russia and the working class of Germany, with whom Britain was still at war.43

  The Red Flag in George Square

  As the war came to a close, demobilisation meant that unemployment now rose to 11 percent by February 1919. The Scottish Trades Union Congress had already backed a motion for a thirty-hour week in April 1918. That August, its Parliamentary Committee joined Glasgow Trades Council and the Scottish Advisory Committee of the Labour Party to lobby the Westminster government for a forty-hour week.

  The engineering union, the ASE, agreed to a forty-seven-hour week with the engineering employers in January 1919, and this was narrowly approved in a ballot by 36,000 votes to 28,000. But now breakfast had to be eaten before work started because there was no longer a break at 9 a.m. as before, so workers had to get up early to go to work and did not get back any sooner.44

  Clydeside shop stewards met and rejected the forty-seven-hour week, electing an eight-man committee to fight for a forty-hour week and to call for industrial action if necessary. Factory gate meetings were held prior to votes being taken at shop-floor meetings in support of a strike call. A further shop stewards’ conference took place in Glasgow on 16 January with delegates from all over Scotland. It was reported that well over half the workshops where a vote had been taken were in favour of thirty hours a week, less for a forty-hour week and few for forty-seven hours.45

  The ASE responded by attacking the shop stewards for defying a ballot decision, but a strike date was set nonetheless for 27 January. That morning some 40,000 workers responded to the strike call and by the close of the week there were 1,000,000 on strike in Clydeside, where engineering plants and shipyards in Glasgow, Paisley and Dumbarton were solid; and 14,000 on the Firth of Forth, with 8,000 shipyard workers in Leith on strike alongside engineering and printing workers in Edinburgh, Rosyth naval dockyard workers; and another 1,000 in Grangemouth.46

  In west Fife a strike that began in Cowdenbeath on 23 January, to demand that demobilised tradesmen be taken back on, quickly spread to Bowhill, Lochgelly and Glencraig pits, with the Fife Miners Reform Committee co-coordinating the action and raising the demand for a six-hour day and a five-day week. On 30 January, 10,000 miners marched on the official union HQ in Dunfermline, demanding the stoppage be made official, something the union leaders opposed. They called a ballot across the Fife coalfield and secured a narrow majority against the strike.47

  In Lanarkshire it was a similar story. On 27 January many miners stopped work despite an appeal from the Scottish Executive of the miners’ union not to do so. Pickets spread the strike to Hamilton and Holytown. On the Wednesday afternoon, 1,500 strikers met in Hamilton’s public park and rejected appeals from their officials to return to work. Instead, they agreed to stay out and to send a delegation to the union’s Lanarkshire executive committee. That evening they rallied outside its offices in Hamilton, occupying them as the crowd sang ‘The Red Flag’. The union was forced to call a strike across the coalfield, and the next day 15,000 miners and supporters marched through Hamilton. On the Saturday, however, the executive took off to Edinburgh, where it met to vote for an end to the action. By the following Tuesday the strike was over. The local Hamilton paper condemned the mass picketing that had been central to the action.48

  Mass picketing was a key feature of the Forty-Hour Strike. On the first day of the stoppage, 2,000 workers from the Albion car plant in west Glasgow marched on Barr and Stroud and brought it out. In Dalmuir, Beardmore’s was similarly brought out, and the next day John Brown’s. On the Tuesday, 5,000 strikers marched through Dumbarton and formed mass pickets at Dennystoun Forge and Babcock and Wilcox, stopping work there. On the Thursday, strikers marched up through the Vale of Leven to bring out the munitions plant in Alexandria.

  In Dumbarton, mass meetings were held each morning to decide where to picket, and unemployed workers helped in spreading the strike. Both there and in Paisley were elected strike committees that sent a delegate each to the strike centre in Glasgow mid-morning to report in, to return to the strike committee in the early afternoon and then back to Glasgow by 4 p.m. In this way secure lines of communication were kept open.49 The trams ran in Dumbarton only if they carried the strikers’ new bulletin in their windows. The daily strike bulletins, sold for a penny, had a readership of 20,000.

  The Scottish section of the Federation of Women Workers backed the strike, and in Clydebank a special mass meeting of women from across the town voted in support. Afterwards some successfully picketed and stopped apprentices attending an official trade union meeting called in opposition to the strike.50 The Paisley Express reported from the picket lines: ‘It was noted that the women were not silent onlookers but in some cases showed more zeal and demonstrated more in speech than the men.’51 The central strike committee reported, ‘we have had as many as five thousand females forming one of our massed pickets.’52

  On Wednesday 29 January, there was a demonstration at Glasgow City Chambers to demand the Lord Provost request that the government intervene and to back the strike’s demands. He told them to come back on Friday at 2.30 p.m. to get the government’s reply.

  Thus, 30,000 strikers gathered in George Square on the Friday. The most famous image of the demonstration shows the Red Flag raised from the middle of the crowd outside the City Chambers. The police were there in large numbers and used the pretext that the trams had to run through the square to begin baton charges. A young seventeen-year-old apprentice in the shipyards, Finlay Hart, was there:

  I marched with the Clydebank contingent eight miles to George Square on ‘Bloody Friday’. We walked on the tram lines and never let a tram-car pass us. When we reached George Square, the baton charge had taken place, and we marched through the Square on to Glasgow Green. The tram-cars were halted in the centre of the city, because the marchers pulled down the electric cable and bent them. The police would charge, the crowd would scatter, then reform and the police would charge again.54

  The Daily News reporter on the scene wrote on 3 February: ‘I have no hesitation in saying that the baton charge made with the object of clearing a way for a tram car was the beginning of the trouble.’ And political historian Iain McLean points out: ‘But no tramlines ran along the east side of the square, in front of the City Chambers, in 1919. Nor where there any in North Frederick Street …’54 Under attack the crowd fought back. The strikers commandeered a lemonade lorry and used its bottles to pelt police lines. Willie Gallacher ran to remonstrate with the chief constable and was knocked to the ground by a police baton. Eventually, the crowd left the square when their leaders asked them to march to Glasgow Green for a rally. Three of those leaders
, Gallacher, Davie Kirkwood and Emmanuel Shinwell, were arrested.

  The Secretary of State for Scotland told the War Cabinet, which met on the afternoon of ‘Bloody Friday’, that this was not a strike but ‘a Bolshevist rising’.55

  The next day, the city awoke to find itself under military occupation. Troops from English and Highland regiments had been ordered in because Whitehall was worried the local garrison might be unreliable. The strike continued into its second week but there was no more mass picketing. The press then went on the attack. At the same time, lack of money began to bite (there was no strike pay because the stoppage was unofficial) and to cap it all the union officials grew louder in attacking their members’ action in stopping work.

  The Clyde shop stewards had hoped that the strike would spread, and Belfast engineering and shipyard workers had been out since 25 January for a forty-four-hour week. In England there were stoppages on Tyneside, Merseyside and on the Humber, but union officials held the line in preventing an all-out strike. On 6 February, the engineering union suspended its Glasgow, Belfast and London district committees. The following Wednesday, the joint strike committee in Glasgow ordered a return to work.

  In the meantime, the Glasgow District Committee of the engineering union had shifted towards a more militant stance, advocating, alongside the CWC, a five-day, thirty-hour week. Nationally, the engineering and shipbuilding workers had voted to accept a forty-seven-hour week, as agreed with management.

  The strike was defeated. One cause was the failure of the Glasgow strikers to try to co-ordinate with other centres south of the border. Shop stewards’ organisations existed in Sheffield, Coventry and elsewhere but there was no national co-ordination. Delegations went south after Bloody Friday but that was too late. The Sheffield shop stewards’ leader J. T. Murphy argued that the Clyde Workers’ Committee’s ‘greatest mistake’ was that ‘… it had done nothing to prepare the movement beyond the Clyde. Although it was represented on the National Council of the Shop Stewards, it had not even acquainted the committee of its plans.’56

  Later, in his book Revolt on the Clyde, William Gallacher claimed, ‘We were leading a strike when we should have been leading a revolution. A rising was expected – a rising should have taken place.’57 Gallagher was wrong. Glasgow was not Petrograd in October 1917. A rising was not on the agenda. But a victory for the strike could have opened up a revolutionary crisis. Britain was facing a strike wave and the British state was faced with a developing liberation struggle in Ireland. Its troops were spread over the globe – occupying Germany, Istanbul, Iraq, Palestine and in Revolutionary Russia fighting the ‘Reds’.

  The strike leaders called off mass pickets and made no plans to try to win over the troops sent into the city. Only John Maclean made attempts to link up with unrest in the coalfields. Above all, the CWC did not link, as we’ve argued, with shop stewards who were similarly organised in Sheffield, Manchester, Coventry, London and Belfast.

  Everything had been possible in January 1919. The Lloyd George government understood that, and it played to win. Nevertheless, despite the failure of the Forty-Hour Strike, something fundamental had shifted in Scotland. Prior to Red Clydeside, Scottish workers were not renowned for their militancy. Now they had gained a reputation as determined fighters, and had produced a generation of leaders who gained international repute. Glasgow and the west of Scotland were seen as a bastion of the left.

  There are those who want to undermine that legacy or even suggest that Red Clydeside was simply a legend. The ruling class had suffered a great fright and wanted to eradicate any collective memory of such working-class insurgency. If it became a legend, it was because it was the stuff of legends.

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  REBEL LIVES: JOHN MACLEAN

  Of the Clydeside socialist John Maclean, in ‘Krassivy, Krassivy’ the great poet Hugh MacDiarmid said this:

  Scotland has had few men whose names

  Matter – or should matter – to intelligent people.

  But of these Maclean, next to Burns, was the greatest.

  Maclean’s parents were Highlanders, his father from the Isle of Mull and his mother from Corpach, beneath Ben Nevis. In 1903, in his early twenties, Maclean joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). This was Britain’s main Marxist organisation but it was a dogmatic one that saw its role as the teacher of the working class, saw socialism as inevitable and denounced strikes for dealing with the effects of exploitation, not its causes. Its stress was on propaganda, outdoor meetings in summer and indoor in winter, and elections. Its leader, H. M. Hyndman, was a wealthy businessman, an autocrat and inclined to nationalism.

  A year before Maclean joined, the SDF had disaffiliated from the Labour Representation Committee (the precursor of the Labour Party) because of its refusal to openly proclaim socialism. The Scot believed this was a mistake because the SDF could have helped shape the new party and because it would have widened its audience. He believed revolutionaries should not be a sect apart from the working class. Later, a majority of its Scottish branches broke away because they believed in a general strike as the means to achieve socialism, and wanted to create ‘one big union’.

  It was his experience of the 1907 Belfast dockers and carters strike, which had united Catholic and Protestant in that divided city, that convinced Maclean of the importance of strike action, and the potential for it to politicise workers. He was active around the strike wave of 1910–11, the Great Unrest, which made him a popular figure among the Clydeside working class. He was also to the fore in opposing, from 1910 on as the war danger grew, the patriotic stand of the leadership of the British Socialist Party (as the SDF had come to be known).

  Opposition to war and militarism became a central theme for Maclean in the years and months before the outbreak of war in August 1914, and may help explain why he could maintain his open-air meetings, which elsewhere were broken up by pro-war crowds.

  ‘Jingoism’, argued Maclean’s comrade James D. MacDougall, ‘was at a discount in Glasgow from the very beginning of the war; it was the sole place in the British empire where there was perfect freedom of speech for international socialists and opponents of the war.’58

  Less than a month into the war, Maclean stated:

  It is our business as socialists to develop ‘class patriotism’, refusing to murder one another for a sordid world capitalism. The absurdity of the present situation is surely apparent when we see British socialists going out to murder German socialists with the object of crushing Kaiserism and Prussian militarism. The only real enemy to Kaiserism and Prussian militarism … was, and is German social democracy. Let the propertied class, old and new, go out and defend their blessed property.59

  By the autumn of 1915, Maclean’s Bath Street meetings were drawing large crowds and his Marxist economic classes were attended by 400 workers. But that October he was charged after saying in Bath Street, ‘I have been enlisted in the Socialist army for fifteen years. God damn all other armies!’60 When he was fined £5 he refused to pay and was jailed for five days. Meanwhile, Govan School Board dismissed him from his teaching post.

  The following year, Maclean was unequivocal in his defence of the Easter Rising in Ireland and of James Connolly’s leading role in the rebellion, on the basis that it was a major blow against British imperialism. The war continued to radicalise him, and after 1917 he was appointed as the consul for the Soviet Union in Scotland. This last straw seemed to spur the authorities to action. The General Officer commanding the army in Scotland was, in February 1918, fearful of the mood on Clydeside, warning that ‘indications of unrest continually prevail’. He wanted further legal action taken against Maclean.61

  In April 1918, Maclean was arrested once more on the grounds of sedition. When he set off to face trial in Edinburgh, some 100,000 workers took time off work to march behind him through Glasgow. He famously told the court: ‘I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripp
ing with blood from head to foot.’62 He was jailed for a second time, sentenced to three years’ hard labour for his anti-war activities.

  Prisoners in Scotland then were denied books, writing materials and much else. The regime in Peterhead Prison, where Maclean was sent, was particularly harsh. The campaign for his release extended across Britain, with 10,000 gathering in North London’s Finsbury Park and the Labour Party national conference voting in support of his release, which came in December 1918 – a month after the war ended.63

  On his release he was thrown into a general election campaign in which he stood in the Gorbals against George Barnes, who had been elected on the Labour ticket but had refused to follow the party when it quit the coalition government led by Lloyd George at the war’s end. Maclean polled 7,436 votes against Barnes’s 14,247.

  His immediate hope at the end of the war was that a general strike could be achieved, and even the defeat of the Forty Hours strike on Clydeside did not dim his hopes; in particular he looked to the miners carrying out propaganda work in the coalfields.

  The years 1919 and 1920 saw unprecedented class struggle across Europe, with Britain experiencing a strike wave. On May Day in 1919, 150,000 marched in Glasgow, with the Irish anthem ‘The Soldier’s Song’ being sung along with ‘The Red Flag’, and that evening Maclean shared a platform with John Wheatley and the Irish republican, and comrade of James Connolly, Constance Markievicz.64 But the revolutions in Germany, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere were defeated and the economy went into recession, undermining working-class insurgency. Maclean had to adapt his strategic vision.