A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  Women such as Julia Foy, who ran a second-hand clothes shop in Glasgow, acted as couriers and provided safe houses. Ex-servicemen helped train volunteers for service in Ireland, and on two occasions high-ranking IRA officers travelled from Ireland to review the volunteers on remote moorland.34

  Frank Carty, an IRA commander from Sligo, had escaped to Glasgow after breaking out of Derry Jail, but was arrested by police in the city. On 4 May 1921, he was being ferried in a police wagon from the Central Police Court in St Andrews Square to Duke Street Prison. Three armed police were in the front of the van. As the police van turned off the High Street into Duke Street, bullets started to fly as IRA volunteers stormed the van from three directions. One police escort fell from the van wounded and lay in the street, while his two colleagues returned fire. The IRA rescue party surrounded the van and tried to force the doors, one shooting at the lock twice, but it would not open. The volunteers then dispersed. A police inspector lay dead and a detective sergeant was seriously wounded.

  That night the police carried out a wave of arrests in the Calton area. One of those taken away was a young priest from St Mary’s Church in Abercromby Street, Fr Patrick McRory. The arrests provoked riots in the Calton. On 22 July the charges against him, ten other men and seven women were dropped and they were welcomed back to the Calton by large crowds waving the Irish tricolour. Subsequently, the case against twelve IRA members of conspiracy and murder was found ‘not proven’ at Edinburgh High Court.35

  In July 1921, the Lloyd George government agreed a truce with the leadership of the IRA and Sinn Fein, and in December a treaty was agreed between the two sides in London. The exclusion of six Ulster counties from the new Irish Free State (three Ulster counties that had a nationalist majority were ceded to the new state) provoked a split in the republican movement, which led to civil war from June 1922 to May 1923. A majority of republicans in Scotland opposed the treaty and Glasgow became the centre for arms supplies to the anti-treaty IRA and was their propaganda centre for a period after they were driven from Dublin.

  On 11 March 1923, detectives carried out a series of raids across central Scotland, arresting twenty-eight republicans in Glasgow, five in Lanarkshire, two in West Lothian and one each in Dundee and Dumbarton. The information about these men and women came from the government in Dublin, keen to stop arms supplies to their opponents, and all were shipped to Ireland to be interned by the Free State authorities. The eventual defeat of the anti-treaty forces led to an end of IRA activity in Scotland.36 Eamon de Valera, the president of the Irish Republic from 1919 to 1922, said of Scotland’s assistance: ‘The financial contribution to the Irish struggle from among the Scottish communities was in excess of funds from any other country, including Ireland.’37

  In the aftermath, the Scottish-Irish vote largely transferred to Labour. But in difficult times sectarianism towards Scotland’s Catholic minority was never far away. It was not just confined to the terraces of Rangers’ Ibrox Stadium or to working-class areas. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment was evident at the highest levels of Scottish society throughout the 1920s and ’30s.

  The Orange Order was represented on the Western Divisional Council of the Conservative Party from 1893 onwards.38 Sir John Gilmour, Conservative MP for East Renfrewshire, 1910–18, and for Glasgow Pollok, 1918–40, and the first Secretary of State for Scotland in 1924, was a Deputy Grand Master of the Orange Lodge.39 Within the Church of Scotland there was an elite campaign to outlaw Irish immigration. In 1922, the Rev. Duncan Cameron of Kilsyth, a member of the Church of Scotland’s subcommittee on Irish immigration, stated that Scots could not be expected to live alongside ‘weeds’. He blamed Irish immigrants for the upsurge on the Clyde two years earlier: ‘Nearly all the leaders were Irish. In the course of time instead of a Scottish proletariat there would be a body of people who had no regard for the United Kingdom and who were prone to revolutionary ideas.’40

  This reflected a strong anti-Irish sentiment within the Kirk during the inter-war years, with constant warnings at General Assemblies about the danger of Irish immigration. Four years later, a former Moderator of the General Assembly and co-convenor of the Kirk’s Church and Nation, the Rev. John White, argued that the Scottish ‘race’ had to be protected from being ‘corrupted by the introduction of a horde of Irish immigrants’.41

  A Presbyterian Joint Committee visited London in 1928 to meet the Home Secretary and Scottish Secretary to demand Irish immigration be halted and anyone of Irish birth on benefits should be deported.42 In response, government officials were able to produce figures refuting their claim that there was a flood of Irish immigrants to Scotland.

  Despite this, in 1930 the Rev. White, now first Moderator of the now re-united Church of Scotland, stated that the Kirk’s priority would be combatting Catholicism and the ‘menace’ of Irish immigration.43 In 1933, the newly formed Church Interests Committee urged the Church of Scotland to join the International League for the Defence and Furtherance of Protestantism (ILDFP). Based in Berlin, this organisation was Nazi-dominated, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic.

  This flirtation with Nazism was soon considered a step too far, and the Church swiftly rowed back on its anti-Catholic, anti-Irish crusade.

  Rent Strikes – Second Round

  The condition of Scotland’s housing remained a national scandal. The Lloyd George government had promised returning servicemen ‘homes fit for heroes’, but in reality they returned to the same housing they had left, and discovered no repairs had been carried out during the war.

  As a consequence of the 1915 Glasgow rent strike, rents had been frozen at their 1914 level. In 1920, the government produced a Rents Bill, which proposed increases of 10 percent, and 25 percent if significant repairs were carried out. Clydebank Town Council immediately passed a resolution expressing ‘grave concerns [at] the indignation and discontent of the tenants in this vicinity caused by the Government’s proposed Increase of Rent Bill.’44

  In August 1920, the Scottish Labour Housing Association, connected to the ILP, organised a conference in Glasgow, chaired by John Wheatley. They called for a rent strike and a twenty-four-hour general strike, which went ahead later that month in Glasgow and Clydebank, with demonstrations against the rent rises in which notice of the increases were burned.

  But by the end of the month, the Glasgow Herald reported that in the city the new rents were being collected with little sign of opposition. In Clydebank it was a different story. There, tenants refused to pay en masse. Among the organisers of the rent strike was Jane Rae, who had been one of the workers sacked by Singer in 1911 for striking; she had chaired a suffragette rally with Emily Pankhurst in Clydebank’s town hall, had opposed the war and was a councillor from 1922 until 1928.45 Another organiser, Janet Kerr Reid was active in physically resisting evictions and would go on to sit as a Communist councillor for the town’s 5th Ward.46

  By April 1924, £1 million was owed in rent arrears as a result of the strike which involved 12,000 tenants. The Clydebank Housing Association, which organised the strike, was described by the Times as ‘a kind of local Jacobin Club’.47 The battle reached its peak later that year when landlords evicted tenants in arrears with the help of police. Cyclists toured the town ringing hand bells to alert supporters of the rent strike, who gathered to resist the evictions, clashing with police. When the police departed, however, the crowd simply picked up the belongings and furniture of the tenants from where it had been dumped in the street outside, and moved it back into the house.

  As the strike continued, mass meetings and protests were regular occurrences in Clydebank. The Times, searching to explain the longevity of the strike, put it down to ‘Communist influence working on a population which is largely of Irish origin’.48 In July, the Glasgow Herald reported that landlords had decided on a ‘systematic campaign of ejectment’, noting that the rent strike was supported by 75 percent of Clydebank’s population, 700 families, and that £10,000 of rent was being withheld each m
onth.49

  By the close of 1924 evictions began with new fervour. From faraway Australia, the Barrier Miner, published in the trade union stronghold Broken Hill, reported from Clydebank on 31 December: ‘Four evictions were carried out at Clydebank this morning … The eviction officers were compelled to shatter the barricaded doors amidst the screams of the occupants. Scouts warned the neighborhood. Hundreds of women and children were crying piteously. The crowds jeered and hooted the officers, especially at the fourth house, whence agonising screams proceeded while the door was pounded in. The eviction officers found the kitchen barricaded with a sewing-machine, tables, and beds. The inmates rushed an officer when he penetrated into the interior. Police came to the rescue and restored order.’50 The decision to carry out the evictions on Hogmanay was seen as deliberately vindictive.

  The landlords used new tactics to defeat the strike, with the same paper reporting two months later: ‘A firm of Clydebank agents to-day carried out a surprise move against two of four tenants. Joiners and plumbers cut off the gas and water supplies and removed windows and doors, whereupon the tenants departed and new tenants occupied the houses.’51 The town council, the local MP, the Scottish Labour MPs and others attempted to broker a settlement but the residents held out for a ‘fair rent’ – frozen at 1914 levels.

  The decision of a Tory government in 1925 to initiate an official report into private rentals meant some of the momentum behind the rent strike was lost. The issue was finally resolved in individual court actions that generally ruled tenants should pay only 50 percent of the arrears; while it was no victory, the rent strike saved them money.

  Miners, Resistance and ‘Little Moscows’

  Crawlin’ aboot like a snail in the mud,

  Covered wi’ clammie blae,

  Me, made up after the image of God —

  Jings! But it’s laughable tae.

  Howkin’ awa’ ’neath a mountain o’ stane,

  Gaspin’ for want o’ air.

  The sweat makin’ streams upon my bare back-bone,

  And my knees a’ hauckit and sair.

  Strainin’ and cursin’ the hale shift through.

  Half-starved, half-blin’, half-mad,

  And the gaffer he says, ‘Less dirt in that coal

  Or you up the pit, my lad!’

  So I gi’e my life to the Nimmo squad,

  For eicht and fower a day,

  Me! Made up in the image o’ God –

  Jings! But it’s laughable tae.

  ‘The Image o’ God’, written in the 1920s by Joe Corrie, a miner from Bowhill, Fife, who was a socialist, a poet and playwright, offers a glimpse into the miners’ working conditions.

  Mary Docherty, the daughter of a miner, described conditions in the 1920s in west Fife. ‘They always talk about how red Clydeside was, but Fife was just as radical,’ she said. ‘It seemed revolution here was just round the corner. Middle-class people were terrified. You had to lie to your employer about attending marches and hope they did not see you. The London headquarters of the Communist Party even got in touch with Fife to say slow down. We were so far ahead.’52

  Jock Kane was brought up in the mining village of Stoneyburn in West Lothian. The youngest of six, he was the only one born in Scotland after the family emigrated from Connemara: ‘At the full, there would be 500 or 600 men working at the pit, all from the village. It was small by present-day standards, 300 or 400 houses maybe. There were plenty of Irish – God, aye – one thing we were never short of in the pits was Irishmen. Anywhere there’s bloody hard work and slavish labour you’ll find Irishmen, won’t you? They used to crack on about my father, Mick, that the boys from back home, when they came across and got off at Glasgow, they’d ask “Where’s Mick Kane’s pit?” and find their way to us.’

  In 1924, Jock joined the Communist Party; his brothers had already joined on its formation in 1920. ‘At that time there was a Communist Party branch in the village. They called them “locals” in those days. We called ours “the local” – and it absolutely ran the village.’53 The miners were thus thrust into the front line of the class struggle in Britain in the 1920s when wartime state subsidies for miners’ wages came to an end, and with the price of coal dropping as a result of the economic downturn, coal owners and the government were determined to cut their pay in order to boost profits and reduce the price of coal for industry.

  The Miners Federation of Great Britain refused to accept this, and on 1 April owners locked mineworkers out of the pits. Immediately on the heels of this provocation, the government put into force its Emergency Powers Act, drafting soldiers into the coalfield.

  In the face of such aggression, the union formed a Triple Alliance with the rail and transport workers, who had pledged to strike with them. But on what became known as ‘Black Friday’, 15 April 1921, the other two unions issued no such strike call. The miners were forced to fight alone.

  The Scottish and South Wales coalfields saw the greatest number of mineworker strikes in the inter-war years, with the Welsh taking part in the most strikes in the 1920s, and the Scots in the 1930s. In both coalfields the fight for union recognition had been a long and bitter one, and in both there was a strong tradition of rank-and-file organisation. The Lanarkshire Miners’ Reform Committee began in the summer of 1917 (inspired by John Maclean and his comrade James MacDougall, who was working in the Blantyre pit), and the Fife Reform Union was set up in 1923 to combat the right-wing local leadership of the union.54

  The 1921 coal strike saw bitter clashes between strikers and police across Britain. A miner’s daughter, Mary Docherty, writes about Cowdenbeath in Fife:

  there were lots of riots between the miners’ pickets and the police. The army was brought in and some were billetted at the Church Hall in Church Street. The soldiers were also guarding the Gordon and Dora pits. They had to pass our house to go to the pit, so my father got talking to them. They said they would not use their arms against miners as many of them were themselves from mining families.55

  She went on to describe events after pickets tried to stop managers pumping water out of the Dalbeath pit: ‘The police assembled in the middle of the High Street and nobody was allowed to go past them. Shop windows were broken with police batoning the men and pushing them against the windows. In all three baton charges that took place miners and police were badly hurt.’56 Docherty’s obituary in the Independent included this recollection of the strike:

  The 1921 miners’ strike, which led to a state of emergency being declared, is stamped on Miss Docherty’s memory. She was 13 when the Army was drafted into Cowdenbeath to back police against pickets. The situation grew ugly after her father and other pickets and their families tried to throw a pit manager in a pond. Later there were pitched battles between police and pickets. Some miners spent more than a year in prison. The charges only stopped when all the streetlights went out and the place was in darkness. ‘I had seen my father earlier that morning make a baton with a part of the shaft of a pickaxe.’57

  After three months the miners were forced back to work, resulting in a dramatic fall in union membership. In the two-year period following the strike, membership of the Federation dropped by more than 200,000. But from March 1923, a groundswell of energy and purpose began building again in the coalfields, a groundswell that within another three years would lead to a conflict that would dwarf the great lockout of 1921.

  In December 1923, the miners voted to fight again – to get rid of the terrible agreement that had been forced on them in 1921. In the spring of 1924, following the report of a government Committee of Inquiry, the coal owners and the MFGB executives agreed a deal that removed the worst of the pay cuts imposed three years earlier.

  In March 1926, the Samuel Commission published its report recommending a reduction by 13.5 percent of miners’ wages along with the withdrawal of government subsidy to the industry. Two weeks later, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, announced that the government would accept the report. Mine owners
declared that from 1 May, miners would have to accept new terms of employment that included a longer working day and pay cuts of between 10 and 25 percent, or else be locked out. The Miners’ Federation refused to accept this blackmail and appealed to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which promised to call a general strike in support of the miners if the coal owners did not back off. The coal owners did not.

  The 1926 General Strike, which began on 3 May and lasted ten days before the TUC called it off with nothing gained, is often portrayed as a very ‘British’ affair – workers playing football with police or parading to church services, all so very different from their hot-headed counterparts across the English Channel. The reality was very different. In Scotland there were bitter clashes with police and scabs. In the coalfield of west Fife, workers began to take control of their communities, forming Councils of Action to co-ordinate picketing and solidarity.