A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  The Daily Worker reported from Edinburgh on 7 December 1938 that ‘Over £20 and two wedding rings were collected at a meeting in the Oddfellows Hall.’ Four days later it further added, ‘Eight members of Granton Young Communist League borrowed a barrow from the manager of the local Co-operative and collected 1 cwt. of food.’ 55

  In Lochgelly in the Fife coalfield, local pipe bands were used to help with street collections of money and tinned food. Despite poverty and unemployment, the response was generous. Mary Docherty writes of the response in Fife to the Aid for Spain campaign: ‘Teams were formed for the different areas of Cowdenbeath. Bob Selkirk [a Communist councillor] and my father and members of the NUWM went round every Friday in the fourth ward with a two wheeled barrow, even though there was mass unemployment in Cowdenbeath at that time, there was a great response to our appeal.’56

  NUWM activists in Hawick took over a disused woollen mill, running it as a co-op, producing clothing for Spanish Republican troops. The town council had earlier voted down support for such a scheme when it was proposed by the town’s only Communist councillor.57

  Naomi Mitchison, Catherine Carswell, Edwin Muir, Hugh MacDiarmid and William Soutar were among the literary figures who signed an appeal for the ‘ancient peoples of Catalonia and the Basque Country’ following Franco’s final victory in the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Britain’s appeasement of Hitler in September 1938, Edwin and Wilda Muir together with Eric Linklater issued an open letter expressing their sense of shame.58

  Nevertheless, among the upper echelons of Scottish society there was support for Franco. After visiting rebel territory, Major General Sir Walter Maxwell-Scott (a great-great-grandson of Sir Walter Scott) launched the Scottish Friends of Nationalist Spain (FNS), with Cameron of Lochiel among the vice-presidents. In March 1938, it attempted to hold a rally in Glasgow’s St Andrew’s Hall. Some five hundred anti-fascists tried to storm the hall, being met with police batons. More were inside, heckling Maxwell-Scott and other speakers and hanging the Red Flag from the balcony.

  June saw 500 people attend a FNS public meeting in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, fewer than the 800 who’d protested against it on the previous evening at the Mound. The meeting seemed to have passed off peacefully, but as the audience filed out to their waiting buses, 800 anti-fascists ambushed them, blocking their departure.59

  In the end fascism was victorious in Spain, with the Spanish Republic deserted by those who claimed to uphold democracy. Its defeat ensured that Hitler felt confident to go to war in the summer of 1939.

  The sacrifice of these volunteers was appreciated at the time and ever since. When in December 1938 eight volunteers arrived back at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station, the Scotsman reported on their reception: ‘When the train arrived there were scenes touched with great emotion on the platform when the men were welcomed by their relatives. The welcome they were given on the station roadways was loud and prolonged, the station rang with the cheers of the crowd. “The Internationale” and “The Red Flag” were sung and accompanied by a band.’60

  Looking back, Tommy Bloomfield from Kirkcaldy wrote this: ‘Today as a pensioner, I live on social security but I’m the richest man in this world having known my comrades of the International Brigades and the leaders of the National Unemployed Workers Movement along with the outstanding men and women of my era. If I had to live over again I would do the same as there is no other way.’

  Striking Once More

  The defeat of the General Strike had sapped the morale of workers to strike and win. The unemployment of the early 1930s was another blow. But in the mid-1930s there was a brief upturn in the economy, which meant a revival of confidence on the shop floor. The experience of fighting unemployment and fascism fed into that newfound mood of resistance. One of the first major strikes occurred in March 1935 at the Richmond Park Laundry Company in Cambuslang, the largest single laundry in Britain at this time, employing 1,000 workers.

  The action began when the laundry management refused to recognise the trade union National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers (NUDAW). As the NUDAW journal New Dawn reported following the strike, ‘The intimation of non-recognition coupled with one or two other irritating incidents roused our members to the pitch which demanded immediate action.’61 The workforce had also recommended a general increase in wages and two weeks holiday with pay. When the management refused these demands the workers went on strike. At least 500 workers were involved in this one-week strike, the vast majority young women. In the course of this strike the women attended outdoor and indoor meetings, picketed the laundry with large numbers of their supporters and marched through Rutherglen and Cambuslang.

  In order to prevent other laundries carrying out the work of Richmond Park Laundry, deputations of girl pickets were dispatched to laundries across the west of Scotland with national organisers from NUDAW to distribute leaflets to fellow laundry workers. According to New Dawn, they won the support of these workers, who, ‘although unorganised, they immediately responded and … let their respective employers know that any attempt to get this work done would lead to trouble and consequently working class solidarity triumphed.’62

  It seems that the laundry management made a number of attempts to intimidate the young women into returning to work, going as far as to write to their parents, presumably to urge them to exert pressure on their daughters to return to work, as the management also threatened to dismiss all of the strikers. Despite management intimidation the strike continued and, as New Dawn reported, the threats of dismissal only resulted in greater support from the local community for the strikers.

  The strike then became tumultuous and the police intervened as strikers and their supporters gathered on the second day and a tramcar was smashed by the crowd. On the following night the crowd stopped trams and buses, attacked the police, threw stones and ‘howled’ at blacklegs, which resulted in the police charging the crowd. Later, 600 strikers and supporters gathered at Cambuslang where house windows were smashed.63

  A number of altercations took place between the management, the strikers and their supporters and the police. As New Dawn reported: ‘In addition to fighting the employers our members also had to fight the police who showed in no unmistakable fashion “upon which side their bread is buttered”, our pickets were batoned by the police on two successive days and for cowardly brutality we haven’t seen the like of it. Heads were smashed by the “keepers of the law and order” and of course it goes without saying that the casualties were not all on one side.’64

  An important feature of this strike was the support the strikers received from large sections of the local community and the unemployed who joined with the strikers in their demonstrations. As a result, the strike ended with the company ceding union recognition and some improvements in wages and conditions.

  Elsewhere, troubles continued. Conditions on the Clyde shipyards can be summed up in the story told by a retired worker to the historian Richard Croucher about a riveter who had fallen to his death in the shipyard. The foreman simply ordered that his body be put in a cart, covered, and taken home to his wife.65

  Beardmore’s at Parkhead Forge had, exceptionally, retained strong shop steward organisation from the early 1920s, and in March 1937 the members brought 1,300 members of the engineering union out on strike over pay, demanding a penny an hour more. The national union refused to recognise the strike but it quickly won solidarity across Glasgow. The strike went on until May, holding up vital parts for the luxury liner Queen Mary being built on the Clyde. The workers returned when management agreed to sit down to negotiations.

  In 1937, as the economy went through a brief recovery and rearmament meant orders, apprentices across Scotland began to organise, sharing grievances with those in Aberdeen by issuing a leaflet headed ‘We Are Nobody’s Baby’ in complaint at the way they were treated by management.66 Engineering and shipyard apprentices had not been paid two wage increases given to older workers. The demand
for an ‘evening up’ of their wages now caught an echo. A committee elected from across Clydeside was sent to meet the employers, who refused to see them.

  The Beardmore’s strike now acted as an example, and three days after it began 500 apprentices stopped work at Fairfield’s shipyard and used mass pickets to bring out their fellows across the Upper Clyde shipyards. On 5 April, the Daily Worker reported that 3,700 apprentices were out and the strike was spreading across the engineering industry to 130 factories. The spread of the strike to John Brown’s shipyard, where the Queen Mary was being built, added pressure on the employers.67

  The Govan apprentices took over a disused shop as their headquarters and organised an ‘apprentices’ Olympics’ and a football competition involving forty-eight teams.68 The central strike committee elected by 160 shop stewards and yard delegates and chaired by Stuart Watson of the Young Communists, met daily and from it circulated a strike bulletin distributed by 150 cyclists.

  By the second week of April, more than 11,000 apprentices were out and the strike spread to Edinburgh, Teesside and Belfast. Five hundred women ‘trainers’ had come out at Barr and Stroud in Glasgow for an extra penny an hour and asked to join the strike but were told they were not apprentices and could not. Feeling ‘rather hurt’, they would have to wait until November, when a women’s strike got under way.69

  The engineering union recognised the strike two weeks later, and on 16 April adult workers stopped work for the day in solidarity. That morning, chalked up on the walls outside workplaces across Clydeside were messages such as ‘Don’t Let Us Down’, ‘Don’t Scab Today’ and ‘Don’t Work Today Daddy!’. Some 150,000 workers answered the call and downed tools.70

  The union leaders and the Conciliation Officer of the Ministry of Labour secured talks with the employers, and on 5 May the apprentices agreed to return to work, having won substantial pay increases but not recognition for the union to represent them. Nevertheless, they retained their strong rank-and-file organisation.71

  The Clydeside apprentices launched their own paper and had a green, red and blue badge, green for one side of the religious divide, blue for the other and red for socialism.72 The Clyde set an example that was quickly followed by apprentices in Manchester, Lancashire and Coventry.73

  The Birth of the SNP

  Today’s Scottish National Party was formed in the 1930s – a decade of misery for working-class Scots but also one of deep uncertainty bordering on fear for the middle and upper classes. Economic power had shifted southwards, with the takeover of so many Scottish concerns by London-based corporations.

  As the Great Depression began in 1929, the industrial giant Beard-more’s was brought near to bankruptcy. Its shipyard on the Clyde was closed the following year and its engineering company sold off.

  In 1932, the president of Edinburgh’s Chamber of Commerce warned that the blood was being drained out of Scotland’s economy: ‘Business after business was being bought up by English money and factories, one after another, closed down … if the process of English absorption is not stopped, Scotland will drop to a position of industrial insignificance.’74

  There was a move away, too, from a political commitment to Home Rule. The once-powerful Liberal Party had fractured and was marginalised. The Labour Party shifted from its intent to create a Scottish parliament. In 1922, on the departure of the ‘Red Clydesider’ MPs for London, John Wheatley had championed Home Rule but changed his mind after the defeat of the 1926 General Strike, arguing that only the power of the whole British state could protect the working classes from the predatory nature of international capitalism. Another MP, Tom Johnston, agreed: ‘What purpose would there be in our getting a Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh if it has to administer an emigration system, a glorified poor law and a desert?’75

  That chimed with the direction of the Labour Party, its identification with the British state, and within the ruling class the acceptance of the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, which proposed that an element of state direction was needed to revive the economy. Supporters of Home Rule saw Labour’s support for it ebbing away.

  The National Party was launched in June 1928 by intellectuals, most notably the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, nationalists, students and former ILP members, such as its dynamic organiser John MacCormick. A year earlier, a Home Rule bill had been defeated at Westminster and the new party took up the demand for a Scottish parliament.

  In the 1931 Westminster general election, the National Party stood five candidates, winning 21,000 votes – gaining 9.4 percent in Edinburgh East, 14.9 percent in Inverness, 10.9 percent in Renfrew West and 13.3 percent in St Rollox in Glasgow. The Communists stood eight candidates, winning 35,000 votes.76

  In 1931, the Unionist constituency party in Glasgow Cathcart broke away in support of Scottish Home Rule within a wider federation of British dominions, forming the Scottish Party. The disgruntled Tories, led by a Glasgow solicitor, Kevin MacDowell, were joined by the Duke of Montrose and Alexander Dewar Gibb, Professor of Scots Law at Glasgow University. He warned that ‘inferior’ people of Irish stock were ‘usurpin’’ the land of a ‘dwindling, though virile and intelligent, race’.77 MacDowell was an enthusiast for the British Empire and wanted to modernise it.

  John MacCormick quickly opened discussions with the new grouping, arguing that the National Party of Scotland ‘could not allow the Scottish Party to continue in its separate existence. It was led by men whose names were far better known to the public than were many of ours and who command the respect which is always given, whether due or not, to rank and position.’ The pursuit of such men involved MacCormick engineering the expulsion of Hugh MacDiarmid, regarded as too radical for such men.78

  The emphasis of both organisations became one of addressing middle-class concerns about the loss of Scottish identity, with its leaders supporting either devolution or independence within the Empire. At a House of Commons special debate in November 1932, George Buchanan, MP for the Gorbals, reported that the surge of nationalist sentiment was now coming from the professional and middle classes: ‘I meet lawyers and sheriffs, and nearly every one of them is in sympathy with the movement … same with the doctors and the higher-paid civil servants.’79

  The nationalists polled well enough in the 1933 UK general election, garnering 16 percent of the vote across the eight seats they contested, but rather than that being a bridgehead for advance, it was its pre-war high mark. In 1934, the two groups finally joined together in the Scottish National Party, which claimed 10,000 members but by 1939 was down to 2,000.

  The party began to polarise between those who saw the creation of a Scottish parliament as the immediate goal and those who advocated nothing less than independence. By the close of the decade it seemed to be a waning and fractious force. Time was to prove that impression wrong.

  What was true was that the 1930s had left a deep imprint on Scotland. The working class was determined that it would never have to repeat what it had suffered in those years. The confidence of the upper classes had been badly knocked. As war approached, re-armament would bring orders to the shipyards and engineering plants, but that alone could not shake off an awareness of decline.

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  REBEL LIVES: HUGH MACDIARMID

  Scotland has produced two of the world’s finest poets. The first, and most obvious, is Robert Burns. The second is Hugh MacDiarmid, the pen name adopted by Christopher Murray Grieve. MacDiarmid’s reputation is greater after his death than in his lifetime, in large part because his poetry has become more widely available than it was when he died of cancer in 1978. But interest in him has also grown as interest in Scotland’s culture and the debate on her place in the world have grown.

  MacDiarmid was a difficult man, who loved an argument and never suffered fools gladly. For most of his adult life he had two passions – Scottish nationalism and communism. In Who’s Who he listed Anglophobia as one of his hobbies.80 MacDiarmid was not just cantankerous
; he verged on misogyny, as is evident from this quote: ‘Scottish women of any historical interest are curiously rare … our leading Scotswomen have been … almost entirely destitute of exceptional endowments of any sort.’ Despite such statements, his two wives, Margaret ‘Peggy’ Skinner and Valda Trevlyn, were fiercely independent women.81

  Born in Langholm in the Borders in 1892 to a father who was a postal worker and a mother who was the caretaker of the town’s library, he was proud of his solidly working-class roots. He wrote in his autobiography: ‘My development owed a very great deal to my growing up in a working class family and being fed on out-and-out Radicalism and Republicanism when still a child.’82

  During World War I he served in the Royal Medical Corps. He recalled his reaction to news of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin: ‘I was in Barracks, in Sheffield of all places … If it had been possible at all I would have deserted at that time from the British army and joined the Irish.’83 After the war, he hoped to eke out a living through writing, and became involved in the Independent Labour Party, the Scottish Home Rule Association, the No More War campaign and the unemployed movement.

  Despite that, after Mussolini and the Fascists took power in Italy in 1922, he wrote admiringly of them. He was looking at Italy through Scots eyes and believed the slogan ‘Italy First’ could be taken up at home as ‘Scotland First’. Mistakenly, he believed Mussolini would move leftwards and champion the peasantry. The poet, literary critic and Communist John Manson points out: ‘MacDiarmid was never a Fascist in the sense of a supporter of a right-wing dictatorship; he didn’t belong to a Fascist group … he saw “a Scottish Fascism” as nationalist.’84

  But his fascination with Mussolini does illustrate one weakness in MacDiarmid’s politics: he saw the liberation of working people as being achieved through the actions of a ‘great man’. Later, that would be Stalin.