A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  Her husband died in 1943, by which time Mary Brooksbank had returned to the jute mills. A musician who could play the violin, in 1966 she had a book of her songs published. It included ‘Oh Dear Me (The Jute Mill Song)’.

  Oh dear me, the mill’s gannin’ fast

  The puir wee shifters canna get a rest

  Shiftin’ bobbins coorse and fine

  They fairly mak’ ye work for your ten and nine

  Oh dear me, I wish the day was done

  Rinnin’ up and doon the Pass it is nae fun

  Shiftin’, piecin’, spinnin’ warp weft and twine

  Tae feed and clad my bairnie affen ten and nine

  Oh dear me, the warld is ill divided

  Them that works the hardest are the least provided

  I maun bide contented, dark days or fine

  For there’s nae much pleasure livin’ affen ten and nine73

  In the 1960s, when Ewan MacColl played a concert in Dundee, he complained of the lack of songs about the city. Brooksbank contacted him, and he included a number of her songs in his repertory. In the 1960s and ’70s, she performed frequently in television and radio broadcasts in Scotland.

  She wrote in the late 1960s regarding slum clerarance and re-housing:

  The end of the Second World War saw an all out spurt, after a great deal of agitation … Big strides have been made in housing – agreed. Much has been done. Bit much more remains to be done. Higher standards will have to be achieved. Some of the houses in Fintry, Kirkton, Mid Craigie, Menzieshill and Charleston leave much to be desired. Many of the estates were built too hurriedly and with inferior materials. I myself have but recently been removed from a damp infested prefab which should have been demolished fifteen years ago.74

  In 1970, at the age of seventy-three, Brooksbank went to Hanoi in Vietnam to tend to casualties of American bombing. She died in 1978. A library is named after her in Dundee, but she is best known for her songs. While active to her last – in the pensioners’ campaign, for instance – the fact that Brooksbank had broken with Stalinism meant she was unfairly shunned by many who have recorded the history of the left in Scotland.

  THIRTEEN

  The 1970s: When Workers Won

  By the close of the 1960s, action was being demanded by employers, international financial institutions and the financial press for government action to reduce labour costs and to roll back the trade unions. Despite the two-decades-long post-war boom, the UK lagged behind its competitors in terms of rates of growth, productivity and investment and suffered from a gap between imports and exports that would lead to periodic short economic crises.

  In 1969, the Labour government of Harold Wilson introduced wage controls to limit rises and published a White Paper, ‘In Place of Strife’, that would seek to punish shop stewards for taking strike action. In a time when strikes for extra pay were growing, the government attack on shop stewards and limits on pay increases gave the actions a political edge.

  For the first time since the defeat of the General Strike back in 1926, there occured a political strike against government policy when, on 1 May 1969, the unofficial Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions called for a stoppage against the government’s initiative. Printers, engineers and dockers on Clydeside took part, with some 250,000 workers answering the call across Britain.1

  The election of a Tory government led by Edward Heath in 1970 led to a further rise in working-class insurgency. At first the Heath government seemed to be doing well against the unions, but it came unstuck on the Clyde.

  During the general election, the Tory government had said it would not use state funds to bail out ‘lame ducks’: companies that were in financial trouble. In February 1971, it responded to a request for a £6 million loan from Upper Clyde Shipbuilders by saying no and announcing that it would sell off the military shipbuilder Yarrow’s. On 29 July, the government announced the closure of two out of four yards, with the loss of 6,000 jobs out of a total of 8,000. The shop stewards’ committee announced a ‘work-in’ at the threatened yards in defence of ‘the right to work’. The stewards’ leader, Jimmy Reid, told a mass meeting: ‘We are taking over these yards because we refuse to accept that faceless men can make these decisions … we want to work … there will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying because the world is watching us.’2

  John Taylor was a twenty-year-old apprentice electrician at the time, and looking back recalled: ‘We were all shocked when Jimmy said to us in front of a TV camera that there would be no hooliganism or bevvying because the world was watching us, which seemed to imply that we were hooligans and alcoholics to the very same world he spoke about … The work-in idea caught everyone’s imagination. When vast amounts of money at that time arrived for the fighting fund from all over the world to support the work-in, hope of the survival of the yards was given a serious boost, as was the morale of the workers.’3

  The musician Jack Bruce, who had just left the group Cream, played two fund-raising gigs for UCS and John Lennon donated £5,000. When Jimmy Reid announced this at a mass meeting someone shouted back, ‘I thought Lenin was deid!’4

  On 10 August, more than 12,000 shop stewards from across Scotland and the north of England gathered in Glasgow and voted for a one-day solidarity strike and a national demonstration. The STUC held its first ever special one-day congress in support of the work-in, and on 18 August some 200,000 workers struck across Scotland, with 80,000 marching through Glasgow. Marchers chanted, ‘Launch UCS, Sink Heath.’5

  Strathclyde’s chief constable, David McNee, warned London that he feared serious disturbances on the Clyde. A Tory cabinet minister, Peter Walker, later stated: ‘There was a genuine feeling that unless some action was taken social disorder of a type not seen in this country could have taken place in the city.’6 In February 1972, the government found £25 million to save three of the yards.

  Looking back forty years later, the former shipyard engineer Jimmy Cloughley, one of the sit-in’s coordinators, said: ‘I think it’s fitting that the [Scottish] parliament and the nation recall the achievements of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. We were fighting a right-wing government who decided the shipyards were going to be closed. The most important aspect was that we fought for the right to work and our success can be measured in the 4,000 shipbuilding jobs still on the Clyde.’7

  The success at UCS inspired occupations elsewhere. In 1970, the engineering firm Plessey bought the Royal Naval Torpedo works in Alexandria in the Vale of Leven, paying just £64,000, and promising to expand the workforce and develop production. Neither promise was kept. In May 1971, it made the first redundancies, and that summer announced it was closing the plant. The company had bought the plant not to make torpedoes but to strip it of its valuable machinery. Unemployment in the area was over 10 percent (a high figure in 1971) and there were no jobs on offer locally. On 6 September, the plant was due to close. Instead the workers held a mass meeting, marched through the works, locked the main gates and the Plessey flag was taken down and deposited on the manager’s desk, with him being told, ‘We have taken over’. Managers were admitted to the occupied factory only after agreeing to have their cars searched and having given certain satisfactory assurances to the workers. Any boss refusing this was locked out. The plant was barricaded and local families and some businesses supplied food and blankets.8 The occupation lasted into 1972, when the plant was converted into a small industrial estate that provided some jobs.9

  On 9 January 1972, miners began their first nationwide strike since 1926. The decisive battle would be at Saltley Gates in Birmingham, where engineering and car workers from across the city struck and marched on a key coal depot to join miner pickets in shutting it. The ‘Battle of Saltley Gates’ and the leader of the South Yorkshire miners, Arthur Scargill, that day became a legend in working-class history, but another key battle was also fought 300 miles north on the banks of the Forth. On Monday, 14 February, miners began arriving to form a
mass picket outside Longannet Power Station on the upper Firth of Forth. The first to arrive at 4.30 a.m. were five coachloads from Ayrshire. They were met with a heavy police presence. Eventually 2,000 pickets faced 400 police.

  Thirteen pickets were arrested and charged with ‘mobbing and rioting’. The Scottish miners’ president, Michael McGahey, who sustained a chipped leg bone from an ‘accidental’ – his word – kick from a policeman, told the Glasgow Herald that the mobbing and rioting charges were ‘scurrilous’ but unsurprising: ‘there is no such thing as neutrality in society and the law is not neutral’, he said, highlighting what he saw as the fundamental anti-working-class bias in the laws used to control pickets.10

  The next day, the thirteen arrested appeared at Dunfermline Sheriff Court, were refused bail and taken in handcuffs to Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison. After high-level talks involving senior government officials, the miners were brought back to the Dunfermline court and released on bail to be greeted by a thousand miners chanting, ‘Easy, Easy’. On 16 June, amid further celebratory scenes, they were all acquitted.11

  In the meantime, the fight at Longannet went on, with 1,500 pickets present on the Tuesday and 700 the next day, facing 600 police. On the Thursday, 1,500 pickets tried unsuccessfully to close Longannet and another six were arrested.12 The collapse of the Tory government’s resistance ensured a stunning victory for the miners. However, the behaviour of the police, using riot-control techniques, was not quickly forgotten.13

  In the summer of the same year, a nationwide building strike erupted over pay and casual employment, in which Scotland was once again a centre of militancy. On 5 June, before nationwide selective strike action was called, every building site stopped work for half a day and 2,000 workers marched through the city.

  By August selective strike action was replaced by all-out national action. In Scotland, union officials attempted to find a solution and agreed a deal with employers that fell far short of the workers’ demands. A mass meeting of 4,000 Edinburgh building workers, on top of Calton Hill overlooking the city centre, voted it down.14 In the end, the union leaders pushed through acceptance of local deals and the strike broke up as different companies settled.

  At the same time, new groups of workers who had no tradition of taking industrial action had begun to strike and were winning: civil servants, teachers, council workers and lecturers. At the end of 1973, Glasgow firefighters took unofficial action. They had asked for £5 extra a week but Glasgow Corporation offered just £2.48, making an average weekly wage of £28. Over the previous decade, 27 firefighters had died on duty. On Friday, 26 October, only four of the city’s 600 firefighters reported for duty. Across Britain, other firefighters worked to rule or responded only to emergency calls in solidarity. Two days after the strike began, the Fire Brigades Union’s national conference made the strike official. By 5 November they’d won.15

  Other groups beyond the traditional working class were also taking action for themselves. In 1926, Scottish students had scabbed on the General Strike. The vast majority still came from middle-class backgrounds in the 1970s but they were able to build links with the working-class movement. During the UCS sit-in, students had elected Jimmy Reid as Rector of Glasgow University in a show of solidarity. His speech on taking office was printed in full by the New York Times, which described it as the greatest speech since Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In it, Reid talked about alienation famously saying, ‘A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings.’16 In October 1973, when students marched through Glasgow for higher grants, Glasgow Trades Council and a number of other trade union bodies gave support.17

  There had been growing discontent at the new Stirling University over the lack of facilities, and when the Queen came to open a new building there in October 1972 she was met by a protest over the amount lavished on her four-hour visit. The Scotsman reported, ‘student mobs, drinking beer and cheap wine, shouted obscenities and threatened to engulf the Queen.’18 One student offered the Queen a swig from his wine bottle. The writer seemed shocked that they were not drinking wine of the quality the Queen was used to. The chair of the Scottish Conservative Party, Sir William McEwan Younger, bemoaned that ‘the damage done to Scotland’s image is incalculable’.19

  On the opening day of the disciplinary hearings that followed, The National Union of Students in Scotland called a rally that drew 4,000 people. Student union president Linda Quinn was suspended because she attended a planning meeting for the protest, failed to keep order at it and then drank from a bottle in the Queen’s presence.20 Students across Scotland began to make common cause with striking workers. Despite initially meeting with suspicion, the two groups gradually overcame reservations.

  In another area of crisis, housing, the Heath government also implemented the Housing Financial Provisions Act, which demanded that local councils balance their books and end reduced rents for the poorest council tenants. Labour in Scotland pledged opposition but opposed extra-parliamentary action. Clydebank, Cumbernauld, Denny, Saltcoats, Whitburn, Alloa, Barrhead, Midlothian and Cowdenbeath councils refused to implement the act, holding out for a year.21 But by the end of 1972 just five remained defiant, and by early January 1974 just Clydebank was left to stand alone.

  Clydebank Council was made up of fifteen Labour, three Communist, two SNP and one independent. Threatened with legal action, the Labour group spokeswoman, Betty Brown, responded by saying, ‘We aren’t answerable to the Court of Session but to the people’. Several demonstrations were organised in conjunction with trades councils, individual unions and tenants’ associations, but the issue was resolved at the Court of Session, which ordered the council to implement the Act in January 1973 and subsequently fined it £5,000 when it failed to do so. The council had a choice – defy the law and look to extra-parliamentary means, or accept the court’s verdict and pay up. They chose the latter course. As soon as the fine had been paid, Gordon Campbell, the Tory Secretary of State for Scotland, asked the Court of Session for a final decree against the council. Anticipating an even larger fine, on 6 March, Clydebank Council voted unanimously to implement the provisions of the Act.22

  In the end, the council was forced to implement rent increases greater than those first proposed. Many tenants took part in rent strikes organised at grass-roots level – in Edinburgh’s Pilton and Muirhouse estates, for instance – but without official support from Labour and the trade unions they were left to fight alone and faced eventual defeat.23

  In 1974, a year after the military coup in Chile that brutally toppled the left-wing popular Unity government, killing President Salvador Allende and thousands of others, the Chilean submarine O’Brien docked in Greenock in order that its tailshafts could be repaired, protected and then sent back to South America as spares. When the tailshafts arrived at the Royal Navy Dockyard at Rosyth, the TGWU shop stewards in the stores organisation refused to release them and wrote to the Ministry of Defence, informing it that ‘no future Chilean Navy work will be done in Rosyth dockyard until the fascist junta is removed and a freely, democratically elected government put in power and human rights restored in Chile’.

  The blacking of work for the Chilean navy went on for four years until the MOD eventually agreed that no work would be carried out or supplies provided to the junta by the Rosyth dockyard.24 Rolls-Royce workers at East Kilbride also refused to provide engines for the regime’s airforce, including the British-built planes that had bombed Allende’s presidential palace.

  The election of a Labour government in 1974 did not end the strikes. Wage restraint under the new administration led to a spate of strikes over pay that autumn and winter, with some 40,000 out in October and November – bus workers, lorry drivers, Distillers’ Company workers, refuse workers and engineering workers – but they were opposed by union leaders who wanted to maintain the ‘Social Contract’ with the prime minister, Harold Wilson, whereby they held down wages and were in return given some say over economic policy. Much
of the left, including the Communist Party, followed suit, not wanting to break with the consensus.

  SMT bus workers occupied the Transport Union HQ in Glasgow and sent a delegation to the London head office, but to no avail. On one occasion, five strike committees were meeting at the same time over the same issue in the Glasgow Trades Council offices but there was no co-ordination. This mini strike wave ebbed away.25

  In 1976, cuts in education spending led to an occupation at Jordanhill College of Education in Glasgow, then at Moray House in Edinburgh and then at all Scottish teacher training colleges. The occupations spread south of the border and only the summer holidays brought them to an end.

  In 1978–79 there was an explosion of strikes over low pay and the Labour government’s wage controls, the ‘Winter of Discontent’, but there was not the same political edge of five years earlier. The stage was set for Labour’s electoral defeat and the advent of Margaret Thatcher.

  Oil and Devolution

  Gas was first discovered in the North Sea in 1959, and it was hoped oil might be there too. Ten years later, a BP drilling rig struck pay dirt 150 miles east of Aberdeen. Oil was first brought ashore in November 1975. After the Queen pressed the button to start it flowing through a pipeline to the shore, Harold Wilson proclaimed it a ‘turning point’. North Sea oil brought real changes, with the giant oil-rig yards like those at Nigg, Sullom Voe and Aberdeen becoming staging posts for workers going on and off the rigs.