Sectarianism
The 1930s is the decade most associated with sectarianism in Scotland. By 1931 the Catholic population of Scotland had reached 662,000, up from half a million in 1911. Discrimination was already rife, but in the 1930s the Catholic population was the target for worse.20
Anti-Catholic bigotry is usually associated with the west of Scotland, but in this decade its worst expression occurred in genteel Edinburgh. A former serviceman, John Cormack, formed Protestant Action, and was elected to the city council for South Leith in 1934. At the peak, in 1937, it had nearly 8,000 members in the city.21 That might have been its high point in terms of membership but in terms of the street that was undoubtedly in the summer of 1935.
In April that year, the city council hosted a civic reception for the Catholic Young Men’s Society. Prior to it, Cormack told a 3,000-strong protest rally in the Usher Hall: ‘On the 27th day of April, this peaceful, cultured, enlightened city of Edinburgh, that has never known in my lifetime what a real smash-up means, is going to know it that day if this civic reception comes off.’22 On the night of the reception, some 10,000 people joined the protest in the High Street. One man jumped on the Catholic archbishop’s car and councillors were heckled. The Lord Provost refused to address the reception and shook hands with Cormack, who hailed the raucous rally as a victory and was carried through the crowd. Later they tried to march on the Cowgate, where young Catholic men were ready to defend St Patrick’s Church, but police barred their way.
The next morning, a Sunday, some thousand people gathered outside the city’s Catholic cathedral to abuse those attending mass. They shouted ‘No Popery’ and sang ‘God Save the King’, and a favourite chant was ‘One, two, three a-leerie, / Kick the Pope and De Valeerie’, the last being in reference to the Irish prime minister, Eamon de Valera.
Worse was to follow that June. Edinburgh was the venue for a Roman Catholic Eucharistic Congress. Cormack promised a demonstration outside, and on the evening before the Congress he drew 3,500 to a protest rally in the Usher Hall. The next day, the Congress centred on a meeting for Catholic women in Waverley Market in the city centre. Cormack led a protest that the Scottish Daily Express numbered at 7,000. When the Cardinal’s car arrived they rushed to attack it but were driven back by police batons. Four priests were beaten up.
That night, the crowd marched on St Patrick’s in the Cowgate. The church bell was rung to rally defenders, and missiles and buckets of water were thrown at the mob from tenement windows before police ended the fighting.
The next day, Sunday, was the culmination of the Congress, a religious service in a priory in sedate Morningside. Once again Cormack’s supporters heckled those attending and at its close tried to bar the exit, being thwarted when police took worshippers out of the rear entrance to waiting coaches.23
Throughout that summer, Cormack kept up nightly anti-Catholic street meetings across the city. It also saw the launch of Kormack’s Kaledonian Klan, modelled on the Ku Klux Klan, a group supposedly formed to defend his meetings from attack. That autumn in the city’s council elections Protestant Action (PA) took 23.37 percent of the vote (the Moderates polled 41.99 percent and Labour 34.86 percent). In the working-class port of Leith, PA beat Labour into third place.24
But Cormack’s victory was short-lived: two years later, fresh elections saw Labour come top, taking 36.93 percent over the Moderates’ 36.66 percent, with PA taking 25.28 percent. Cormack stood in both North Leith and Gorgie, but failed to win either.25 He would soldier on nevertheless as a councillor in South Leith until his retirement in 1962, having been elected a bailie by Progressive (Tory) councillors in 1952.
Sectarianism was on display in Glasgow, too, in the 1930s, but took an electoral form under the leadership of a preacher, Alexander Ratcliffe, who formed the Scottish Protestant League, winning two council seats in 1931: Dennistoun, where Ratcliffe was elected, and Dalmarnock. When challenged by an ILP councillor that the SPL’s programme was simply ‘Kick the pope’, Ratcliffe responded: ‘Yes, we do kick the Pope! That is our job! It is our programme!’26
In 1932, the SPL took another council seat and won nearly 12 percent of the total vote across Glasgow. A year later it stood in twenty-three wards, won four seats and polled 71,000 votes, 23 percent. All four seats were taken from the Moderates (the Tory-Liberal alliance).27
The SPL vote that year had lasting significance; by cutting the Moderate vote it allowed Labour to take control of the city council for the first time. Nevertheless, the organisation fell apart as Ratcliffe’s dictatorial style alienated his supporters and a dispute over funds ended up in court. The other SPL councillors defected to the Moderates, and when Ratcliffe had to defend his Dennistoun seat he lost, despite the Moderates standing down to give him a clear run. After a visit to Germany in April 1939 he became pro-Nazi and switched his attacks to the Jews, but he was a peripheral figure and died in relative obscurity in 1947.
Fighting Fascism
Other social divisions were making themselves apparent during the 1930s. In 1934, The Blackshirt described the British Union of Fascists branch in Dalbeattie as being ‘several hundred strong’ and ‘the largest and most active branch in Scotland’. Its leader was James Little, who combined the post of town clerk with being a local bank manager.28 Special Branch described its membership as ‘business men, mostly in a small way’.29
Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) attempted repeatedly to build in Scotland, but with limited success. There was, however, support for fascism within Scotland’s upper class. The Lord High Constable, Lord Erroll, joined the BUF in 1934. The Earl of Mar was a Mosleyite and the Duke of Buccleuch was pro-Hitler.30 The Tory MP for Peebles and South Midlothian, Captain Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay, was a member of the anti-Semitic Nordic League and would be detained in 1940 for his pro-Nazi stance.31
The BUF’s Scottish membership, which probably totalled around 1,000, had ‘a clear professional, military and middle class bias’.32 This composition was confirmed by other accounts. In Motherwell the BUF had an active branch, holding open-air and indoor meetings, and for a time had their own hall in the town centre. In May 1934, they were given the lease of the tennis courts in Calder Park. After Lady Mosley, the mother of the party’s leader, spoke there in June 1934, she reported that she ‘didn’t know of any branch of the movement that had started on such strong lines as the one at Motherwell’.33
The BUF had its Scottish headquarters in Glasgow, and in June 1934 the Glasgow Herald reported that several thousand anti-fascists had ‘trapped’ the fascists in their headquarters and that only police intervention got them out.34 One Glaswegian anti-fascist recalled protesting a gathering in which William Joyce, a BUF leader better known during the war as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, attempted to speak: ‘Joyce came to speak at Queen’s Park recreation ground and we organised a counter demonstration. We organised, a number of us from the working class, the Labour League of Youth, Young Communist League and other youth organisations, who all agreed to disrupt this meeting. I had the privilege of taking one of the platform legs and throwing the platform up in the air.’35
Another Communist, and later an International Brigader, Garry McCartney, stated that anti-fascism became integral to left-wing activity and identity in the city: ‘The working class movement was very much informed and very much involved in the anti-fascist struggle. Glasgow at the weekend was a forum of meetings, all over the city, at street corners, and in the centre of the city. We had tramp preachers, we had the YCL [Young Communist League], ILP … it was a whole seabed of discussions.’36
Despite the opposition, Mosley organised two rallies in Edinburgh. On the first occasion, in 1934, hundreds of uniformed Blackshirts – many of them bussed in from the north of England – clashed with anti-fascist opponents after the close of the meeting. As the Blackshirts’ busses drove away, ‘stones and bricks were thrown’, smashing many of the bus windows and causing several of their passengers to require hospital treatme
nt. One Blackshirt was partially blinded. The meeting itself, attended by 2,500 people, was less eventful, with just a few minor interruptions, giving Mosley the opportunity to outline his party’s policy in relation to Scotland to an audience of ‘ministers of religion, prominent lawyers, city councillors, farmers, clerks, shop assistants and artisans’ – at least according to the BUF’s own propaganda.37
In 1936, Mosley organised a second rally, of which one Communist Party member who would later serve in the International Brigades, George Watters, recalled: ‘I remember gaun to a meeting in the Usher Hall, having been supplied wi’ a ticket by some of the students at Edinburgh University. I landed right down in the second front seat in the Usher Hall … My job was to get up and create a disturbance right away by challenging Sir Oswald Mosley, which I did. At that time I had a pretty loud voice. And Sir Oswald Mosley wasn’t being heard … There was a rush and in the rush I got a bit of a knocking about, and taken up to High Street [police station].’38 Later he was fined £5 for breaching the Public Meetings Act.39
October 1936 also saw anti-fascists protest outside and inside Ibrox Park, home of Rangers FC, when Scotland played Germany at football. They were further angered when the swastika flag was flown above the grandstand.40
In his book The Fascists in Britain, Colin Cross argued that for the BUF, ‘the most difficult area was Scotland where throughout its existence the BUF found it impossible to make headway’. He does point to one exception, stating Aberdeen was ‘the real centre of Scottish Fascism where W.K.A.J. Chambers-Hunter, a former planter from Ceylon, who had lost an arm in the war, ran a keen, lively group’.41
John Londragan was a railworker who went from fighting fascists in Aberdeen to fighting fascism in Spain with the International Brigades, because for him ‘… the fight, whether it be here in Aberdeen against the British Union of Fascists or against Hitler and Mussolini in Spain, was exactly the same fight to me, no difference at all’.42 Things came to a head on Sunday, 16 July 1937. The BUF was determined to hold a rally at the prime spot in the city, the Market Stance, a traditional meeting spot for the left.
The BUF leader Chambers-Hunter hoped that a Sunday evening during the city’s summer holidays would catch the anti-fascists wrong-footed; he was proved wrong. That morning, Bob Cooney, a local Communist, addressed a crowd of 2,000 anti-fascists at the Links. They promised to return that evening to prevent the Fascist rally. The Fascists arrived with an armour-plated van, a public-address system, and their own stewards together with a police escort. But when Chambers-Hunter clambered onto the roof of the van to start the meeting, the crowd surged forward, cut the electricity cables and drove the Mosleyites away so that by 8 p.m. there were none left. Bob Cooney was one of many arrested, serving four days in jail.43
On occasion, the Communists received word of BUF gatherings in advance, including in September 1938 when ‘a hostile mob of over 6000 people’ attacked Chambers-Hunter as his van rolled into Torry, greeting him with ‘a shower of burning fireworks, sticks, stones and pieces of coal’.44 In a new turn of events, the police on this occasion stood by, more concerned with directing traffic than throwing themselves in the way of the anti-fascist onslaught. The three fascists – including Botha and Chambers-Hunter – eventually managed to flee, later requiring hospital treatment.
Anti-semitism was key to Mosley’s propaganda but it does not seem to have attracted much support in Scotland. Not that it was absent. In Glasgow, there was a strong Jewish community in the Gorbals estimated by 1939 to be approximately 10,000. The neighbourhood was attractive because of its cheap accommodation, but once roots had been established and individuals began to prosper there was a movement towards Pollokshields and later farther south. The community was relatively well integrated into Gorbals life and young Jews in the 1930s often gravitated leftwards into the unions and associations.
In Glasgow, the Workers’ Circle, composed of left-wing Jews, took part in directly opposing the BUF, organising demonstrations and actions when the Fascists tried to hold an event. Jewish anti-fascists were particularly active in opposing the BUF’s attempts to gain a foothold in Govanhill, just south of the Gorbals, where the mass of Glasgow’s Jews lived. Morris Smith, its secretary, has said that the BUF were ‘howled down. They never got a turnout. That was the line then, we had to stop them appearing on the streets.’45
The determination of anti-fascists to prevent the Mosleyites organising in Scotland was, in large part, central to ensuring that the BUF did not gain significant support. Many of those who had fought the Fascists on the streets of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh would carry that fight farther afield.
Aid for Spain
In the summer of 1936, the call came out for volunteers from across the world to rally to the side of the Spanish Republic. The Spanish military, under General Francisco Franco, had risen up to overthrow an elected left-wing government and was receiving help from Hitler and Mussolini. Democratic governments like those of Britain and France did not aid the threatened government in Madrid, but nonetheless thousands made their way to Spain to help stop fascism. Among them were many Scots. The numbers of those from Britain who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain is estimated at 2,400; 23 percent came from Scotland. Of the 540 British volunteers who died in Spain, 134 were Scots.46
They were predominantly working class – miners, railworkers, engineers, printers and other skilled workers, as well as labourers. Some were unemployed and a few were students or white-collar workers.47 The vast majority of those who fought in Spain did so with the International Brigades, organised by the Communists, and the majority of them were Communist Party members and supporters. Others were members of the Independent Labour Party or anarchists. The ILP contingent fought with the militias of the Spanish Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), labelled Trotskyists by the Communists. In May 1937, the POUM was suppressed by the Republican government, its leader Andreu Nin arrested and killed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.
Those who volunteered to fight were driven by a hatred of fascism and the stark reality of inter-war Scotland. They made their way to London and then moved on to Paris, travelling on a weekend ticket that did not require a passport. From the French capital they went south by train and then crossed the Pyrenees into Spain on foot.
Tommy Bloomfield from Fife had been navvying before getting a job with a contractor in Kirkcaldy prior to going to Spain: ‘The gaffer was a pig. He shouted from one end of King Street in Kirkcaldy to another. “Hurry up, come up here.” When I got up there I said, “Here you don’t want me to run?” He says, “Hurry up, hurry up!” I says, “Look, gie’s the books. I’d rather go to Spain to shoot bastards like you.”’48
Annie Murray served as a nurse for most of the Spanish war. Born in Aberdeenshire to a political family, she had led protests over working conditions while at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and joined two of her brothers who volunteered for the International Brigades. She would recall: ‘It was the most important thing of my life. It was a terrific experience I would have never liked to have missed. I have certainly no regrets at having gone there at all.’49
From the first battles at Brunete and Jarama in 1937 to the final Republican offensive, the Battle of the Ebro in 1938, they were fighting against the odds, against a professional army backed up by the air power, tanks, munitions and men of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. At Jarama the International Brigades blunted Franco’s advance to the east of Madrid. Forty-five Scots died there, one of whom was Bob Mason of Edinburgh. His family wrote this tribute to him, which was published in the Daily Worker in March 1937: ‘When Bob volunteered to go to Spain, it was not with the object of personal gain or with the spirit of adventure. He had every reason to hate fascism by his knowledge of the brutal and murderous suppression of the working class movement under Hitler and Mussolini.’50
A volunteer from Glasgow’s Possilpark, Alex McDade, wrote ‘There’s a Valley in Spain Called Jarama’, which became the anthem of the B
ritish Brigade and continues to be sung today. Its first verse goes:
There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama,
That’s a place that we all know so well,
for ’tis there that we wasted our manhood,
And most of our old age as well.51
Eventually, the International Brigades were withdrawn from the fight, after the Republic agreed that all foreign fighters would leave the country. The defeat of the Republic in March 1939 left a bitter taste but did not dampen the determination of the volunteers to continue to fight fascism when Britain went to war with Germany six months later.
But the fight for Spain was also fought at home in Scotland. In August 1936, news that a businessman in Ayr was re-fitting aeroplanes to sell to Franco led 400 townspeople to demand the delivery be stopped. In Kirkcaldy, anti-fascist pilots dropped leaflets defending the Spanish Republic over the crowd attending a British Empire air display. In Glasgow’s Argyll Street on a Saturday evening, Communists could sell 2,000 copies of a Daily Worker special edition on Spain.52
This took place against the background of 30,000 marching against the means test in Lanarkshire, and in September, a stay-down strike by miners over pay and conditions at the Dickson pit in Blantyre. When management refused to allow them food and water, thousands of Lanarkshire miners walked out in solidarity.53
Committees to raise aid for Spain spread across towns and villages in late 1936. There were fifteen in Glasgow alone. The city’s 1937 May Day march was the biggest since the General Strike, with 15,000 demonstrating under the slogan ‘Solidarity with Spain’.54
A People's History of Scotland Page 23