A People's History of Scotland

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A People's History of Scotland Page 22

by Chris Bambery

Crawfurd continued to take part in the fight for women’s votes. The royal family was due to visit Perth in 1914, and as they paraded through the streets Crawfurd was arrested when she tried to approach their carriages. After five days on hunger strike she was again released, but she returned to Perth that summer to address a rally protesting the incarceration of two fellow suffragettes. She was arrested again for making ‘inflammatory remarks’, and returned to the prison for three days, during which she refused food.

  She was sent to prison for a fourth time following a bomb attack in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, and went on hunger strike once more, securing her release after just three days.

  Crawfurd joined the Independent Labour Party after hearing George Lansbury speak at a public meeting: ‘Though never formally associated with the WSF [Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers Socialist Federation], Crawfurd seemed to revive its language of “social soviets” and housewives’ as well as workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Claiming that “a housewife” had not the fear of getting the sack, as the men did’, and that ‘far better rebels would be made out of the women than out of some of the men.’94 On her decision to join the ILP, Crawfurd explained, ‘Skilled creators of the city’s wealth were living in squalor, in hovels unfit for human beings. I began to think that there must be something wrong with a system that could allow this.’95 The fact that her husband’s parish covered the docks clearly influenced her: ‘coming into contact with Dockland life, and human misery indescribable … the living conditions appalled me, a lover of beauty. It struck me as ugly, inhuman and cruel.’96

  Alongside Mary Barbour, Agnes Dollan, Jessie Stephens and other women, Helen Crawfurd was key in organising the 1915 Glasgow rent strike against profiteering landlords. She wrote later: ‘The housing conditions in Glasgow in 1914 were appalling, the Labour Party before the war initiated a Glasgow Women’s Housing Association … [it] took up this issue [rent increases] and in the working class districts, committees were formed to resist these increases in rent. Cards, oblong in shape, were printed with the words: RENT STRIKE. WE ARE NOT REMOVING, and placed in the windows of the houses where rent increases were demanded.’97

  When World War I broke out in August 1914, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, Helen Crawfurd’s former comrades in the struggle for women’s suffrage, suspended the fight for the vote and became vehemently pro-war. However, Crawfurd would have no part of that. The ILP was active against the war, holding a ‘No Conscription’ demonstration in Glasgow in December 1915, drawing 7,000 people. Crawfurd spoke alongside Emmanuel Shinwell, Willie Gallacher and John Maclean.98 Earlier in 1915, alongside another leading ILP member, Agnes Dollan, Helen helped form a branch of the Women’s International League in Glasgow, and the following year helped to organise a Women’s Peace Conference in the city. The conference took the decision to launch the Women’s Peace Crusade (WPC), which began its activity in 1917 with Helen Crawfurd as its Honorary Secretary. The WPC held pickets, protests and meetings across Scotland against war and conscription. Crawfurd was twice arrested for her anti-war work.99 That year she also rallied in support of the October Revolution in Russia.

  Two years later, she was part of the British delegation to the Conference of the Women’s International League for Peace at Zurich in 1919, which included Ethel Snowden (a prominent Labour Party member), Charlotte Despard (suffragette and Irish republican), Ellen Wilkinson (a future left-wing Labour MP), Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (a central WPSU leader before her expulsion by Christabel Pankhurst in 1912) and others. The delegation chose Helen to deliver the report from Britain to the conference.

  By 1918, Crawfurd had become Vice-President of the ILP, and travelled across Scotland and Britain addressing meetings. Nonetheless, she was moving towards revolutionary ideas, forming in 1920 an unofficial grouping within the ILP known as the Left Wing Committee, with a journal, the International. This group would join the Communist Party on its formation in 1920, with Crawford put in charge of the new organisation’s work among women. That year she also travelled to Moscow to attend the Second Congress of the Communist International, arriving after proceedings had ended.100 However, Crawfurd did find the opportunity to meet Lenin, already seriously ill, and other revolutionary leaders.101

  Looking back shortly before her death, Crawfurd wrote: ‘What a job the Bolshevik leaders undertook. What a magnificent job they have done. Anyone who refuses to see the significance of what the Russians have done can only be either dishonest or dead mentally!’102

  Back in Britain, Crawfurd was involved in organising a Communist Women’s Day with Sylvia Pankhurst.103 A year after her visit to Moscow, Crawfurd became Secretary (in 1921) of the Workers’ International Relief Organisation (WIR), which raised money for the famine-stricken people of the Volga region. In 1926, she organised food and money collections for the miners left to fight alone after the TUC called off the General Strike. She also organised support for those facing hunger in the west of Scotland and in the Highlands. She recalled: ‘Jim Larkin lent us a car to visit far parts of Ireland and carry food to the hunger stricken people of Donegal.’ The relief in Donegal was particularly acute because of extensive flooding. Helen worked with Constance Markievicz, Charlotte Despard, Peadar O’Donnell, Father Flanagan and the Dundee Communist Bob Stewart, who stated, ‘These three women (Crawfurd, Markievicz and Despard) formed a wonderful trio. With entirely different backgrounds they had worked miracles in the struggle for women’s rights, yet it took the flood relief in Ireland to bring them together’.104

  Helen Crawfurd stood as the Communist candidate for Govan Ward in the 1921 Glasgow council elections, her manifesto stressing the fight for women’s equality. She remained a party member to the end, loyal to Stalin’s Russia. After ‘retiring’ to Dunoon at the end of World War II she was elected the town’s first woman councillor at the age of 68 and served for two years.

  On her death in 1954, one woman member of the Glasgow Communist Party, Margaret Hunter of Polmadie, wrote this:

  Her distinguished appearance, her warm personal charm, her lively wit, her single-minded devotion to the cause of the workers, and clarity of purpose, her fearlessness and courage, her nobility of mind and sterling character, made her loved, admired and respected by all the friends who knew her, and from her foes, who may not have loved her, she compelled admiration and respect.105

  ELEVEN

  The Great Depression:

  Suffering and Resistance

  Another day thus upon the mountain

  And great Scotland under the doom of beasts

  Her thousands of poor exploited

  Beguiled to a laughing stock,

  Flattered, deceived and anointed

  By the nobles and the godly bourgeois

  Who make a bourgeois of Christ

  – Sorley MacLean

  ‘The Cuillin’

  The 1930s were a decade of unemployment, sub-standard housing and poor levels of health in Scotland. Glasgow acquired many of the negative stereotypes still attached to it: a centre for drink, razor gangs and religious sectarianism, as portrayed in Alexander MacArthur and Herbert Kingsley Long’s 1935 novel No Mean City. One contemporary report described the unemployed in these words: ‘With drooping shoulders and slouching feet they moved as a defeated and dispirited army. They gave their names, signed the necessary forms and shuffled out of the Exchange. This, twice a week, was the only disciplined routine with which they had to comply.’1

  After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, unemployment in Scotland reached a quarter of the workforce in 1931–33. The UK average was a fifth, although until 1933 unemployment levels in north-east England were worse than in Scotland. Despite rearmament bringing jobs in the late 1930s, Scotland’s jobless total was a third higher than the UK average.2

  Throughout the 1920s, unemployment never dropped below 10 percent of Scotland’s workforce, but in the ’30s it averaged over 20 percent. Motherwell and Wishaw had unemployment rates of 49 percent and 53 percent respectively during late
1932 and early 1933.3 The demoralisation caused by long-term unemployment left deep scars, and came as a shock to skilled workers who had never been out of work for any length of time before.4

  The Orcadian poet and socialist Edwin Muir toured Scotland in 1933 and wrote of the idle shipyards:

  The weather had been good for several weeks, and all the men I saw were tanned and brown as if they had just come back from their summer holidays. They were standing in their usual groups, or walking by twos and threes, slowly, for one felt as one looked at them that the world had not a single message to send them on, and that for them to hasten their steps would have meant a sort of madness. Perhaps at some time the mirage of work glimmered at the extreme horizon of their minds but one could see by looking at them that they were no longer deceived by such false pictures.5

  The dole was means tested so that the unemployed were forced to sell possessions before they could qualify. An Inspector of Poor in Airdrie in the ’30s recalled: ‘The means test was iniquitous and a shatterer of homes. It broke up families, it penalised the tryers, it starved children, it drove people to suicide and insanity.’

  For the children of unemployed parents in the 1930s, there would be long memories of food scarcity, homes with little or no heating, overcrowding and parents struggling to provide life’s treasures. A 1935 report by the biologist and doctor John Boyd Orr ‘showed that the diet of the Scottish poor was insufficient to maintain health.’6 Diphtheria was rife among children, and as late as 1940, 15,069 cases were reported. Of Glasgow children evacuated during the war, 31 percent were found to be infested with fleas and lice, and scabies was common.7

  The suffering of the 1930s was real but working people, in and out of work, also fought back and Scotland was to the fore in joining the great issue of that decade, resisting fascism both at home and abroad. Any hope in the Labour government elected in 1929 was dashed by its insistence that it had to balance the books. In 1931, the Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, quit his party to form a coalition with the Tories and Liberals. He did so because he accepted the economic orthodoxy that held austerity as the answer to the economic crisis, and because of opposition to his proposed cuts in the dole.

  In the aftermath of his departure, the Labour Party seemed to suffer a reverse in its forward march. From 1932 until the formation, in 1940, of a new wartime coalition including Labour, Britain was effectively ruled by a Tory government. In the 1931 Westminster general election, coalition candidates won sixty-four Scottish seats to Labour’s seven. In 1935, there were forty-three Unionist MPs returned, just three Liberals, twenty Labour and five Independent Labour Party.

  The ILP had broken with Labour in 1931 because of its refusal to adopt a clear socialist programme. But while the ILP’s leader, Jimmy Maxton, was joined by four other Glasgow MPs, they did not win over the party in the city itself. Rather, that was dominated by the machine led by Patrick Dollan. In 1933, Labour took control of Glasgow City Council, the Scottish Protestant League taking votes and seats off the moderates. Working-class politics was being shaped in a way that would hold true until the end of the millennium.

  The Hunger Marches

  The situation facing those out of work north of the border was grimmer even than that facing the unemployed in England and Wales. Under the Poor Act of 1845, parish councils in Scotland were responsible for the destitute, but they were not required to build workhouses or to levy a poor rate. Consequently, they could provide little for the unemployed, who were left to appeal to the parish guardians or to rely on family or charity.

  After World War I, Westminster did expand the National Insurance scheme but this was only to supplement parish relief and was always under pressure from governments keen to cut public spending. To claim the dole you had to sign on at least twice a week, but the labour exchange brought together the unemployed and became places where they could organise.8

  Scotland had a strong history of organisation among the unemployed. In the early 1920s that work was led by John Maclean and his comrades in the Tramps Trust Unlimited, who dominated the Glasgow Unemployed Committee, resisting efforts to incorporate it into the Communist Party. This initiated the National Unemployed Workers Movement, which organised on an all-British basis, because Maclean claimed the Party was too concerned with committees rather than agitation. But in July 1922, Maclean’s key ally in the work, Harry McShane, decided to join the Communist Party, and became the right-hand man of the NUWM’s leader, Wal Hannington.9

  The NUWM had already organised hunger marches in the 1920s, but with the onset of mass unemployment it organised such protests on an even greater scale. In 1930 there was a Scotland-to-London hunger march and in November of that year, the NUWM in the Vale of Leven organised a march on the labour exchange, 2,000 women and men in protest at a change of day for signing on. They won a day’s money that they had lost because of the change, ‘a small but significant victory’.10

  On 24 September 1931, the NUWM in Glasgow called what the Daily Record described as the biggest unemployed demonstration seen in Britain since the war, in protest at the National Government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, and its 10 percent cut in unemployment benefit. Contingents from across the city converged on Jail Street and together the crowd of 30,000 made their way to St Enoch Square, where an effigy of Baillie Fletcher was burned. Fletcher had angered the crowd by saying the unemployed were not ‘citizens they could be proud of’.11

  The next day, Harry McShane led a delegation of some 30,000 to Glasgow City Corporation, demanding they petition Parliament in London against the cuts. The council refused to do anything. That evening, the protesters gathered to hear a report from McShane. The Daily Record described events outside Glasgow Green:

  Before the crowd realized what was happening, fifteen mounted [police] men, who had come down Saltmarket in sections of four, spread across the wide thoroughfare in one rank and headed for the mass of humanity jammed in the semi-circular space around the gates of the green. Behind the mounted men came the foot police who tackled what the mounted police had left. The crowd scattered in every direction and as they scattered the crash of shattered windows could be heard along Saltmarket.12

  The 1932 Hunger March from Glasgow to Westminster began with the departure of the Scottish contingent, led by McShane. One woman explained why she was there:

  The reason why I am marching is because of the Means Test. For instance, a friend of mine in Glasgow is working in a steel works and earns 10s a week, and because of this his son, who has the misfortune to be idle, gets nothing from the labour exchange. In addition the housing conditions in Glasgow are so bad they are difficult to describe. Four-storey tenement buildings, with seven or eight single apartments on each floor, which are bug infested and not fit for human beings to live in. I am the mother of two girls, and, although not as hard hit as many of my class, I felt it my duty to come on this hunger march in order to help those less fortunate than myself.13

  On arrival, having joined with other marchers from all across the UK, they would have to physically fight the police in order to access Hyde Park for a rally and, three days later, to battle past the Met’s finest in order to present a petition to Parliament.

  In 1933, the NUWM organised a hunger march from Glasgow to Edinburgh. When it arrived, it occupied the centre of the capital for three days and nights. They paraded through the royal palace of Holyrood with their band playing ‘The Internationale’ and other socialist tunes, and when the city council refused to provide accommodation, their leader, Harry McShane, said they’d sleep on the pavement of Princes Street, the city’s most prestigious thoroughfare.

  On the first morning, women marchers blocked the tramway while men shaved using the windows of the big department stores to see their reflections. Tom Ferns remembers: ‘And they couldnae ha’ picked a better spot than Princes Street. Under the Conservative Party headquarters, the Liberal Party headquarters and the big luxury hotels, here was hundreds and hundreds o’ angry unemployed. Obvio
usly a sight like that is not seen every day, particularly in the capital city of Edinburgh.’14 Another marcher, James Allison, said, ‘the police were going mad’.15 Yet the Edinburgh police were not keen on inciting a pitched battle, as Hugh Sloan recalled: ‘At dinner time our field-kitchen came along and the police chief told Harry McShane, “This is Princes Street, you can’t feed here.” Harry told them, “It was good enough for us to sleep here, it’s good enough for us to feed here.”’16

  The marchers then demanded free transport home. Eventually, the city’s chief constable and deputy town clerk told them they would provide transport if McShane guaranteed there would be no more marches to Edinburgh. He refused, and the chief constable, worried about disturbances on the capital’s streets, backed down.17

  The NUWM provided other forms of support. In 1934, it raised over £100 for a children’s outing to Battery Park in Greenock that 4,700 children attended, each getting half a pint of milk and a bag of buns on arrival, and an orange and a bag of toffee on departure.18 Nor was its work confined to the west of Scotland. In 1935, 3,500 unemployed from Aberdeen travelled to Glasgow for a Scottish hunger march. In 1938, an NUWM branch was set up in Inverness and grew to fifty paying members, who organised a children’s Christmas party and representation for those appearing before the Public Assistance Committee. That winter, it organised a hunger march from Inverness to Edinburgh. Tom McKay, then a clerk on the railways, recalled that about a dozen people marched the whole way with others joining for shorter distances or as it passed through a town.19

  The autumn of 1936 saw a hunger march to London, with the first contingent setting off from Aberdeen. That leg continued south through Dundee and Edinburgh before crossing the border. The second group started from Glasgow. Eventually 700 unemployed marchers reached London, with 100,000 people joining them to demonstrate in the city. A number of the marchers would fight in Spain, including the leader of the Aberdeen contingent, Bob Cooney.

 

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