The striker John Wheatley summed up what was at stake: ‘The miners occupy the front trenches of the position singled out for attack and if their wages are reduced it will be the beginning of a general wage reduction.’58 Winston Churchill understood too, writing: ‘It is a conflict which, if it is fought out to a conclusion can only end in the overthrow of parliamentary government or its decisive victory.’59
The ruling class understood this was a critical clash and was prepared. Neither the TUC nor the Miners’ Federation had been so prescient. Only in Fife had the miners and other workers prepared for battle. At the beginning of April, Lochgelly Trades Council convened a conference that set up a Central Committee of Action for Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan, and on 22 April, Methil Trades and Labour Council met to discuss initiating a workers’ defence corps.60
Such organisation was necessary because they were up against not just the employers and the state but the local right-wing leadership of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, led by the local Labour MP, Willie Adamson. The Methil Council of Action was the most militant in the country. Formed by the town’s trades council, it issued a daily bulletin from its headquarters in the Co-operative Hall. A leading Communist miner, David Proudfoot, reported after the strike:
The organisation worked like clockwork. Everything was stopped – even the railway lines were picketed. The Council had a courier service second to none in Britain with three motor cars (and a maximum of six available), 100 motor cycles and as many push bikes as were necessary. They covered the whole of Fife taking out information and bringing in reports, sending out speakers everywhere, as far north as Perth.’61
Its chair, John MacArthur, recalled: ‘Our slogans locally were: “All power to the councils of action.” We said each organisation had to give up power to the Council of Action. There was no disagreement.’62
A notable feature of the Methil Council was its formation of a Workers Defence Corps, which was formed following police attacks on pickets. At the start, 150 joined, and that number soon rose to 700. Marching in military formation through the town, the Corps joined the picket line. David Proudfoot recalled, ‘The police did not interfere again.’63
Elsewhere in Scotland, similar Workers Defence Corps were formed in Denny and Dunipace in Stirlingshire.64 Abe Moffat, later leader of the Scottish miners, described the situation in Cowden-beath in Fife:
All motor vehicles had to get permission from the trades council before travelling up the Great North Road. We had pickets in various parts of the road to ensure than no one passed without the permission of the trades council. To ensure than no one would pass, miners had a rope across the road. If a motor vehicle had a pass it got through, if it had no pass it had to turn back.65
‘All solid’ is how the historian of the National Union of Railwaymen described the response of its members in Aberdeen.66 From Dundee it was reported: ‘Here as elsewhere our greatest difficulty in the first week was in preventing men ceasing work before being called on to do so.’67 It was a similar story in North Lanarkshire: ‘by the end of the first week even second-line men came out on strike before they were officially called out.’68
The level of organisation in Methil contrasts with Glasgow, where the strike committee was chaired by a Communist, Peter Kerrigan, but was dominated by trade union officials who toed the TUC line. When Kerrigan proposed mass picketing, this was rejected and he went along with the decision. Later he admitted that at no time was the authority of the TUC questioned by the strike committee. Kerrigan admitted he was taken completely by surprise by the decision of the same General Council to call off the strike.69
Outside of Glasgow, the main industrial centre at the time was North Lanarkshire, a centre for coal mining, steel, engineering and rail. Twenty-three Councils of Action were set up across the county with a Joint Committee that brought them together, meeting in the Lanarkshire Mineworkers’ Union head office in Hamilton. Mass pickets up to 4,000 strong brought everything to a halt by the third day of the stoppage. The local Motherwell paper reported after the strike: ‘Motherwell, red and revolutionary Motherwell has been a perfect model of peace and quietness … it was also one of the towns where solidarity was the keynote all during the conflict.’70
In Cambuslang, Lanarkshire, the strike was so solid that pickets were sent into Glasgow at the request of the city’s tram car workers, who asked them to target the Ruby Street depot where students and other scabs were being billeted before taking the cars out in the morning. Five hundred Cambuslang pickets marched on the depot, and violent clashes followed as police used baton charges. Twelve pickets were arrested, and later were sentenced to three months’ hard labour.71
Some 7,000 ‘volunteers’, including 300 university students, had been recruited to break the strike, and there were soon clashes between them and the strikers.72 The fighting at Ruby Street was the first major clash in Glasgow but others quickly followed, as even the next day police baton-charged strikers in Bridgeton who were attempting to persuade two students operating a tram car to stop scabbing. Later that day, a mass picket at the Dennistoun depot was also attacked by baton-wielding police.
As pickets of the tram depots continued, there were more arrests in Bridgeton later that week. At a tram depot near the university, police dispersed strikers protesting the use of student volunteers. On 8 May, the Saturday following the initiation of the strike, women organised pickets at tram stops in Govan to stop people using them, and police baton charges of protesters were followed by rioting and looting in Dennistoun, Bridgeton and Anderston.73
Rioting continued for four nights. The Evening Times reported: ‘The struggle was of the wildest description; pots and pans, iron bars, pickheads and hammers were used as missiles, but fortunately no police were injured. Over sixty arrests were made.’74 The government stationed warships on the Clyde and naval ratings joined the scabs in shifting strike-bound goods.
In Condorrat, East Dunbartonshire, on the main Glasgow–Edinburgh road, several hundred miners armed with long poles and stones blocked traffic despite police baton charges and arrests.75 Farther west in Renfrewshire, the Johnstone and District strike committee reported: ‘Never before has such solidarity been shown in an industrial dispute, Orangemen being active pickets and taking part generally in the struggle.’76
On the east coast, the high number of student, public schoolboy and middle-class ‘volunteers’ in Edinburgh added to the tension. On Thursday evening, 6 May, a serious riot broke out in the High Street and Canongate. The local newspaper reported that thousands of women and children had joined a huge crowd around the Tron Church, which refused to disperse despite police charges. At 9.15 p.m. police retreated to the central police station in the High Street. For half an hour the crowd waited in silence, and then down the High Street came mounted police followed by hundreds of police wielding batons.77
In the East Lothian pit town of Tranent that same night, strikers blocked roads and a crowd of 1,000 laid siege to the police station, smashing all its windows. Police reinforcements had to be brought in to break the deadlock. Attacks on trains running on the main East Coast Line to London were so numerous that police were stationed on it.78 Farther north there were baton charges in Aberdeen after a crowd of 6,000 attacked scab buses and trams, smashing windows.79
In Govan, the ‘Emergency Press Special Edition’ reported on 12 May that women wearing red rosettes were ‘standing at the stopping places on the [tram] car routes endeavouring to persuade members of the public not to use the cars’. In Dundee a spinner, Jessie Latto, was arrested and fined £3 for throwing a missile at the driver of a scab lorry. The number of women in the dock was, the Scotsman reported, ‘a remarkable feature of the cases arising out of the strike disturbances heard at Glasgow Sheriff Court.’ Among them were twenty-six women prosecuted for attacking a blackleg bus driver in Govan, and a group of women charged with throwing bags of flour in the faces of scab transport workers, and then resisting police when they tried to i
ntervene.80
Far from the strike weakening prior to the TUC decision to abandon it on 12 May, a Ministry of Labour report on Glasgow that was written just before the strike was called off, noted: ‘There is not the slightest sign of any break whatever in the strike. In fact many of those now working wish to join in.’81 One Scottish ILP activist in Perth expressed the hopes of those taking part: ‘There’s never been anything like it. If the blighters o’ leaders here … dinna let us down we’ll hae the capitalists crawlin’ on their bellies in a week. Oh boy, it’s the revolution at last.’82 In contrast, J. R. Clynes, head of the General and Municipal Workers, said: ‘I am not in fear of the capitalist class. The only class I fear is my own.’83
On 12 May 1926, the TUC General Council visited Downing Street to announce its decision to call off the strike, provided that the government offered a guarantee that there would be no victimisations. The government responded that it had ‘no power to compel employers to take back every man who had been on strike’. The TUC agreed to end the dispute without such an agreement.
When news came through that the TUC General Council in London had called off the strike there was shock. John McArthur in Methil recalls:
When the strike was called off after nine days of growing power and organisation, we couldn’t believe it. We were stunned. Each day it went on we had gained in confidence. We had new and marvellous experiences in struggle. We had mass meetings every night, wonderful meetings, five and six thousand strong. We were full of vim and go. We were spreading out, too, sending speakers to Perth and other places.84
The capitulation would cost workers dear. In Glasgow, Outram Press, which published the Glasgow Herald and Evening Times, went non-union, even banning its journalists from having dinner with union members. From Edinburgh an engineering union official bewailed that ‘immediately after the very precipitate and badly arranged calling off of the strike, we are in a sea of trouble in connection with the complaints of members who had failed to secure reinstatement’.85 Across the UK, some 3,000 strikers were brought to court for actions undertaken during the General Strike; about half for incitement. Victimisation of union activists was common and many never worked in their industry again.
The capitulation by the TUC was the green light for employers to go on the offensive for the next decade and more. Meanwhile, the miners were left to fight on alone throughout that summer.
In west Fife, the Council of Action set up soup kitchens. John McArthur recalled:
In each area we would organise a kitchen committee elected by popular vote. Each committee had to have a kitchen convenor and assistant convenor … We had an organisation to go round the gardens getting whatever produce there was there. We had people out round the farmers begging, borrowing or stealing tatties and the rest. Some responded very well. Fish merchants gave us box after box of kippers. From bakers we had rolls for the morning. We were able to provide three meals daily, more than people got in ‘normal times’.86
It was a good summer, but as the lockout went on the strikers faced further problems. The shoes of strikers and their families were falling apart. The Council of Action organised shoe repairs and haircuts, and distributed the penny coins needed to feed gas meters.
The poem ‘The General Strike’, probably written by Bob Young of Bothwellhaugh, catches the spirit of that summer:
As lads we ran aboot the braes
In wee bare feet an’ ragged claes;
Nae such thing as ‘Dinna Like’,
For then oor faithers were on strike.
Yet in these times they still could sing
While haulin’ hoose coal frae the bing;
Nothing then tae waste or spare,
Still everyone would get their share.
They’d share their last with those in need,
There wisnae such a thing as greed,
A piece on jam was something rare,
An’ no so much o’ that to spare.
To maintain morale, miners’ gala days were held and bands played at concert parties. As a participant, one young melodeon player and striking miner laid the basis for a long career as a musician and band leader, Jimmy Shand from East Wemyss.
John McArthur, a Communist from Buckhaven, was elected to the parish council. Single men and the women who worked at the pit head were refused any assistance, so it was decided to protest to the council at Thornton. Three thousand women and men demanded access to the poorhouse, but there being no room, assistance was paid.87 Hugh Reynolds, from Plean in Stirlingshire, recalled: ‘Thursdays were special days. We had mince and tatties on Thursdays. All the other days, it was bone soup. The church in Plean gave us the use of the mission hall, and we used the boiler at the back to make soup. You would go up with a can and, according to the numbers of your children, you would have a plateful; it was fair to everybody. Some of the farmers were very good and gave us tatties. But others weren’t so good and wouldn’t give us any.’88
Jock Kane recounted the solidarity shown for the striking miners:
We used to get all sorts of prizes from chocolate firms, and McVities would send us a box of biscuits here and there. We’d groups which went out to Edinburgh and surrounding towns selling raffle tickets.
I spent six weeks in Dundee and I went to Edinburgh. When you knocked on the door regular on Friday night or Monday or Tuesday morning, eventually they’d come to accept you just like the insurance man or debt collector. They’d have their tuppence there, or their four pence if they were taking two tickets, and you’d sell them a raffle ticket and they were there, they were waiting on you coming, very poor people.
I’ll never forget it. I went one Saturday night to deliver a prize – a box of McVities biscuits – at one of these tenements in Edinburgh. We always had to fetch the tin back because that was one of the conditions – McVities gave us a tin and took away an empty tin, so we always had to fetch the tin back. I went to this house to tell the woman: ‘You have won this prize.’ I went in and there were rags in the corner and another woman stretched out and two or three kids running about, just little ragged vests on them, and there was a table and a chair and nothing else in that bloody room, you know. But they would still find that tuppence.89
The Glasgow ILP ran ten of its own communal kitchens and assisted another two, and raised in total almost £3,500 for the miners.90 In West Calder at the end of August, a Labour councillor, Sarah Moore, known as ‘Ma Moore’, led a sit-down protest lasting several days over the council stopping relief payments to locked-out miners and their families. One evening police intervened, insisting that the good-natured crowd clear the road. When one man was pushed to the pavement and suffered a bleeding head wound, anger at police heavy-handedness boiled over. Police drew batons and in response the protesters overturned two vehicles. Frightened by such scenes, the council immediately met with Moore and promised to restore relief payments the next day.91
Special constables were recruited and by September parts of Lanarkshire and Fife were under virtual martial law. One night in Glencraig in Fife, police ran amok, batonning anyone they caught, including women and children. The mining companies evicted strikers from company-owned homes and brought in blacklegs instead.92
In the end hunger won, and in November the mining union ordered a return to work on company terms.
Towards the Abyss
As the decade drew to a close, Scotland was in a weak position economically even before the onset of the global recession that resulted from the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The 1926 defeat brought with it the Tory government of Stanley Baldwin, which was thoroughly anti-working-class. The trade unions were on the back foot and retreated from confrontation in the wake of the General Strike. The Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald was elected to office in 1929, desperate to stress its moderation and its commitment to standard, free-market economics. In 1929, MacDonald would make it into 10 Downing Street just as the country and the world toppled into an abyss.
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REBEL LIVES: HELEN CRAWFURD
Helen Crawfurd (1877–1954) was born Helen Jack on 9 September 1877 in the Gorbals. Her family moved to Ipswich when she was quite young and she was educated in England before the family returned to Glasgow when she was seventeen.
Her family was intensely religious and at home she took part in discussions about justice and equality. In her early twenties she married a Church of Scotland minister, the Rev. Alexander Montgomerie Crawfurd of the Brownfield Church in Anderston. The marriage was a happy one, despite a significant age difference between them, with the Rev. Crawfurd holding strong temperance and anti-militarist views. He died in 1914, leaving Helen to concentrate on her political work.
In 1910, Helen Crawfurd had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and two years later she travelled to London for a mass window-smashing operation, in which she targeted the Ministry of Education, receiving a one-month prison sentence. Of this she said: ‘Participation in the raid was right. If Christ could be a Militant so could I.’93
Under the terms of what was called the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, Crawfurd was barred from further suffragette activity but, undeterred, she was one of the stewards trying to stop Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested when she spoke in Glasgow in March 1914. The next day, she took part in a protest outside the army recruiting office, smashing two windows and being arrested and sent to Duke Street Prison for a month. Crawfurd along with other suffragettes went on hunger strike and the WPSU organised protests outside the jail. After just eight days, she was released.
A People's History of Scotland Page 21