In 1926, MacDiarmid, then living in Montrose, threw himself into the General Strike, and it showed in his poetry. In 1928, he was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland but was expelled four years later when it merged with the Scottish Party (disaffected Tories in the main) because his left-wing views were an obstacle to the unity that created today’s SNP. The new party set its aim as securing a Scottish parliament, not independence, but for MacDiarmid there was no point in gaining Home Rule; he wanted a complete break with the United Kingdom.
He wrote after his forced exit:
The Scottish Party headed by the Duke of Montrose and Sir Alexander MacEwan entirely consists of that sort of right wing moderate, and has as its sole object the confining of the Scottish Movement within the narrowest possible limits and with the least possible discomfort to the existing order. The National Party of Scotland had attempted, on the other hand, to stand pat on the few basic facts to a whole range of other considerations; but it has now abandoned even that effort and is fused with the Scottish Party.85
In 1934 MacDiarmid joined the Communist Party, but he could hardly hide his disdain of its central leadership in Scotland. A year after joining, he quoted Lenin: ‘It would be a very serious mistake to suppose that one can become a Communist without making one’s own the treasures of human knowledge.’ He then added: ‘My Scottish Communist comrades must forgive me if I am quite unable to recognise any of them in this description of what really constitutes a Communist.’
Later that year, in his journal, New Scotland, he raised the prospect of a new world war, arguing that Scotland should follow the lead of Ireland during the last conflict, and called for a ‘proletarian and Republican’ secession from the Empire.86 This drew the ire of the Scottish Party leadership.
An exchange of letters followed, and by the beginning of the next year the Scottish leadership expelled him, but on appeal the leadership in London reinstated his membership. MacDiarmid’s final expulsion, for ‘nationalism’, came in 1939 after he claimed that Scottish and Irish members of the International Brigades in Spain had refused to fight in the British Battalion because they could not fight alongside English volunteers. Despite his expulsion he continued to identify with communism and the Soviet Union, yet his full-blooded identification with Stalinism and the USSR luckily did not contaminate his poetry.
One huge service he did perform was keeping alive the memory and beliefs of John Maclean. In 1948, MacDiarmid and his fellow poet Sidney Goodsir Smith addressed a rally in Glasgow’s St Andrew’s Hall to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Maclean’s death. Hamish Henderson wrote his famous song ‘John Maclean March’ for this meeting. MacDiarmid helped found the John Maclean Society in 1968 with Morris Blythman (Thurso Berwick).
In 1957 he re-joined the Communist Party in solidarity with the Soviet Union, which a year before had sent in tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution, and at a time when it was losing members in protest. By the end of the decade, the poet was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and also joined the more radical, direct action Committee of 100. In 1964, he spoke along with Malcolm X at the Oxford Student Union.87 He remained active on the Scottish left and in nationalist politics until his death.
MacDiarmid initially wrote poetry in English, but in the course of the 1920s began to use his own version of Lallans (or Doric, as he called it), using his own version for the simple fact that there are so many variations across Scotland. MacDiarmid set himself the task of carrying through the Scottish Renaissance, a rebirth of the culture that he believed had been destroyed by Anglicisation, Walter Scott and the subsequent kailyard movement. His task also involved rescuing Burns from tartanry and a sentimental portrayal of Scottish life. MacDiarmid also drew on Modernist influences, James Joyce being one of his heroes. All of this comes together in ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’, surely his finest poem.
‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ also reflects his own passionate involvement in the 1926 General Strike and a section of the long poem is entitled ‘The Ballad of the General Strike’. He had joined the strike movement in Montrose, where he lived in the 1920s, and recalled:
we had the whole area of Angus, Forfarshire; we had it sewn up. I was speaking when news came through of J.H. Thomas’s [general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen] betrayal of the strike. I was speaking to an audience of mainly railwaymen and they all broke down weeping. It was one of the most moving experiences I have ever had – middle aged men most of them, weeping like children, you know. It was such a disappointment, because we knew, we knew we had it.88
Although typically in the poem the thistle has been considered the symbol of Scotland, writer John Baglow points out: ‘… the promise of the thistle eventually being transformed into a lovely flower represents on one level the aspirations and struggle of the working class to realise their potential.’89
The rose now bursts forth from the thistle:
A rose loupt oot and grew, until
It was ten times the size
O’ ony rose the thistle afore
Had heistit to the skies.
And still it grew until it seemed
The hail! braid earth had turned
A reid reid rose that in the lift
Like a ball o’ fire burned.
But the rose shrivels as hope gives way to bitter defeat:
Syne the rose shrivelled suddenly
As a balloon is burst;
The thistle was a ghaistly slick,
As gin it had been curst.
Was it the ancient vicious sway
Imposed itsel’ again,
Or nerve owre weak for new emprise
That made the effort vain.
In the inter-war years the hopes of a Scottish Renaissance seemed to have been dashed. MacDiarmid was ekeing out a precarious existence and had fallen out badly with his friend Edwin Muir. In the post-war years his stock rose and a new generation of writers and artists celebrated his influence, which casts a long shadow over Scotland’s cultural life.
Central to MacDiarmid’s poetry is the very identity of Scotland, and that is what ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ returns to again and again. As his biographer Alan Bold points out: ‘Much of his poetry is a dialogue between Chris Grieve, the postman’s son, and Hugh MacDiarmid, the self-appointed saviour of Scotland.’90
There can be no denying his nationalism or that his view of the class struggle tended to identify the bourgeoisie as the English upper class, ignoring their Scottish allies. But for MacDiarmid freedom involves more than national independence. It is about human liberation, as he wrote in ‘To Circumjack Cencrastus’:
For freedom means that a lad or lass
In Cupar or elsewhaur yet
May alter the haill o’ human thocht
Mair than Christ’s altered it.
I never set een on a lad or lass
But I wonder gin he or she
Wi’ a word or deed’ll suddenly dae
An impossibility.
MacDiarmid’s tombstone, in his hometown of Langholm, carries this extract from ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’:
I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet – it’s the only way I ken
To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt
That damns the vast majority o’ men.
There could be no finer epitaph.
TWELVE
World War II and After
Scotland’s War
Thousands of Scots were on the front line during World War II, but Scotland itself was not. Even after Hitler overran Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940, and then the Low Countries and France in May and June, Scotland was too far removed to be the object of sustained attack. Britain faced the threat of invasion that summer, with the crucial fight being over who controlled the skies above London and south-east England, the Battle of Britain. When the Luftwaffe failed to establish dominance they switched to the night
bombing attacks of the Blitz, in a failed bid to demoralise the civilian population of the imperial capital.
But Scotland did not escape the bombing, nor horrific civilian deaths, though not on the scale of what London suffered. This does not mean that Scotland was not central to Britain’s war effort. The Clyde was where the cross-Atlantic convoys that brought badly needed men, armaments, raw materials and food from North America were marshalled. The Orkneys was home to the Home Fleet, and Invergordon and Rosyth were important naval bases. Much of the exiled Polish army was based here before going to Italy and France, while the Highlands was used as a training ground for special forces and the Commandos. Scottish shipyards, factories, mines and farms worked at full stretch, and industry was working overtime to produce armaments. Above all, Scots served in every theatre of war.
For Scots, as for so many others in Britain and across the globe, Hitler had to be stopped. That made this war different from its predecessor. Some were aware that Churchill was fighting to preserve the British Empire, but they were, nevertheless, prepared to serve. Fifty thousand Scots were killed or wounded during World War II, whereas the casualty figure for the 1914–18 war totalled nearly 150,000. That is in part a reflection of the fact that the wartime government of Winston Churchill was aware that there could be no repeat of the horrendous casualty figures of twenty years before and did its utmost to avoid such high rates.
On 1 September 1939, children and their mothers were evacuated from Glasgow and Clydebank, Edinburgh, Rosyth and Dundee, fearful that the declaration of war would be followed by the carpet-bombing of strategic towns and cities. They were sent to rural areas and towns believed to be safe from bombing. The arrival of these children brought some of the realities of working-class life to the middle-class inhabitants of the communities that received them. In his history of Britain at war, Angus Calder recounts the story of one Glasgow mum who admonished her six-year-old for urinating, saying, ‘You dirty thing, messing up the lady’s carpet. Go and do it in the corner.’ Calder points out: ‘It throws light on the Glasgow tenements, where one broken-down lavatory might be shared (or ignored) by thirty people, and it was the cleanest families who refused to use the communal closets.’1 He points out, too, that half the people of Glasgow did not have a bath.
Wartime food rationing, however, benefitted the poor. Access to a better diet meant the number of children dying in their first year fell by 27 percent during the war years and the average height of Glaswegian thirteen-year-olds increased by two inches. People were eating better because there were jobs and because incomes per head in Scotland doubled from £86 in 1938 to £170 in 1944.2 Nevertheless, the reality of those conditions, which helped ensure class warfare on the home front, was never far away.
The fear of a repeat of the labour and rent strikes of the first war weighed heavily on the minds of the Churchill administration, and Clydeside was an area of key concern. Accordingly, despite being a High Tory, Churchill was prepared to effectively cede control of the home front to his coalition partner, Labour, as well as once more relying on the trade union leaders to hold the cap on strikers. He appointed the former editor of Forward, Tom Johnston, as Secretary of State for Scotland. Johnston asked for and got approval to form a Council of State, and in 1942 he set up a broad-based Scottish Council of Industry, which helped boost the number of government contracts for Scotland.
When Johnston discovered that special hospitals in the Clyde Basin, built to treat casualties of aerial bombing, were lying unused, he ordered them to treat everyone for free; it was a nascent NHS. Later in the war he created the Hydro-Electricity Board, which used the waterpower of the Highlands to generate electricity.3 Even before the landslide election victory that would return Labour to office in 1945, ushering in the welfare state, Johnston was putting many such measures in place.
Though Scotland was spared the worst of Hitler’s air assault, there were still attacks on towns key to the British war effort. On the nights of 13 and 14 March 1941, German bombers attacked Clydebank, a major centre for shipbuilding and armaments. The first attack was made up of 260 bombers, dropping high-explosive bombs, incendiary bombs and landmines over a nine-hour assault. Much of the town was set alight and people were trapped in collapsed buildings. The following night, 200 bombers returned in a seven-and-a-half-hour attack. Over the two days, 528 civilians were killed, and more than 617 people were seriously injured. Out of Clydebank’s 47,000 inhabitants, 35,000 were left homeless. One survivor recalled:
What I’ll never forget as long as I live was the noise and the screams and cries when I was taken to the First-Aid post … This was something you couldn’t believe … the screams were terrible … people had lost arms and legs … some people were doing what they could to help but it was just too much for them. Oh … what a catalogue of injuries … people broken, smashed and burned … and others dead without so much as a scratch on their bodies … killed by blast.
Another survivor was in an air-raid shelter, playing cards with two pals, his brother, mother and father also there. He never heard the bomb that hit them: ‘I felt the wall on my back … saw my brother being blasted through the door … my pals … blasted to bits … the concrete roof caved in smashing into my mothers chest … crushing my father.’ He was buried in the rubble with the fire blazing and his dead friends on top of him for eight and a half hours before being dug out: ‘I was paralysed from the waist down … my mother was killed … my friends were killed … my father and brother survived … all the other people in the adjoining shelters were killed’.4
On 7 May, the Luftwaffe hit Greenock, a key port for the wartime convoys. After a bomb hit a distillery, setting it ablaze, the flames acted as a beacon for the other bombers. An air-raid warden recalled that the whole town was ablaze. Bombs were still dropping in the early hours. That night, the civil authorities had to deal with more than 200 corpses as the warden recalled: ‘At the mortuary at Princes Pier we had the unclaimed bodies of eight infants not any of them older than a year or eighteen months. We photographed them all. They were never claimed and we buried them privately in the Greenock Cemetery.’5
Wartime Strikes
In the summer of 1940, Parliament passed Order 1305 outlawing strikes and setting up a National Arbitration Tribunal to resolve any industrial dispute. Although strikes were unlawful, the government took a much more softly, softly approach than in 1914–18. There were just thirty-eight wartime prosecutions under Order 1305 in England and Wales, but seventy-one in Scotland, mainly concerned with labour unrest on the Clyde.6
The temper there was evident in March 1940 when Beardmore workers walked out over the sacking of two men, and Albion Motors struck over the employment of a non-union worker.7 Even as the Battle of Britain was reaching its climax that September, a major strike erupted over the sacking of the union convenor at British Auxiliaries, lasting most of the month before the workers started drifting back.8
These strikes were both illegal under wartime legislation and unofficial because the trade union leaders had agreed to police those laws. The Labour Party in government from May 1940 onwards was utterly opposed to such actions. However, strikes were supported by the Communist Party until June 1941, when, following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, they switched to opposing them, in line with Moscow’s wishes that they help the war effort. The ILP and more radical groups continued to support workers taking action.
In 1942, a number of strikes in Glasgow occurred when boilermakers at the Queens Park works of North British Locomotives walked out and stayed out despite the best efforts of the Glasgow District Committee of the engineering union. Women workers at Rolls-Royce Hillington struck for union recognition. Two years later, workers at Albion Motors were out for six weeks.9 Agnes MacLean, born in Scotland Street in Kinning Park, started at Rolls-Royce Hillington at the outset of war. Women were doing skilled work using sophisticated equipment but were denied equal pay with men doing the same or even less skilled work:
… something had to be done about it, I mean we were really very angry about it, and in 1941 we did this big fight about it, the women’s rate, and we were wanting at least the same grade as the unskilled, the labourer … so we fought for the male labourers rate, and and we didn’t get it, of course, and we went on strike, and at that time there was law which stated that you can’t go on strike because everybody was helping the war effort … it was really spontaneous and we just one day got on our coats and walked out and each department as it walked out was walking through each section, the girls just put on their coats and joined … we did put up a bit of a fight and eventually they had to look at it and they had to get some recognition for the male labourers’ rate.10
In 1943, however, the women discovered that the company was not honouring the agreement. And so in July they threatened a strike. The engineering union intervened (they had started to admit women into membership) and a Court of Inquiry was set up. In October, angry at the slow pace of negotiation, the women walked out, ‘taking with them most of the men in the plant’, as Agnes recalled, adding that ‘the men were absolutely fantastic’.11
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