[ Three new books tell the tale of Glasgow’s radical Clydeside,
when militant shop stewards and the longshore community during and
post World War 1 rose up against war and attacks by capital, fighting
for labor dignity and a fair society for all.] [[link removed]]


PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE RADICAL ATMOSPHERE OF THE RED CLYDE  
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Jean McNicol
January 2, 2020
London Review of Books
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_ Three new books tell the tale of Glasgow’s radical Clydeside,
when militant shop stewards and the longshore community during and
post World War 1 rose up against war and attacks by capital, fighting
for labor dignity and a fair society for all. _

George Square, Glasgow, January 31, 1919, London Review of Books

 

Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside

by Kenny MacAskill

Biteback Publishing; 310 pages

January 22, 2019

Hardcover:   £20

ISBN-10: 178590454X

ISBN-13: 978-1785904547 

 

When the Clyde Ran Red: A Social History of Red Clydeside 

by Maggie Craig

Birlinn; 313 pages

Hardcover:   £9.99

March 2018

ISBN: 978 1 78027 506 2 

 

John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside 

by Henry Bell

Pluto Press; 256 pages

Paperback:  £14.99

December 15, 2018

ISBN: 978 0 7453 3838 5

(All books, by British publishers, available in the US at Amazon.)

_ _

 

 

 

In​ the general election of 14 December 1918, the Labour Party
disappointingly won only one of the 15 constituencies in Glasgow; in
the next election, on 15 November 1922, it won ten. Nine of these
seats, or their successors, remained Labour for the next ninety years,
until in 2015 it lost every single one of them to the SNP, and not
narrowly: the SNP majorities in all seven Glasgow constituencies
were around ten thousand. Labour’s hegemony in the city, which had
seemed eternal, had suddenly evaporated. It was easy enough to find
reasons for it, but the abruptness and scale of the party’s fall
were still shocking.

In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night
mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group,
assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde
getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his
colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918
you couldn’t join the Labour Party directly, only an affiliated
organisation like the ILP, the Fabian Society or a trade union),
which was by far the most powerful body in the Labour Party in
Scotland. The atmosphere of the Clyde in the early 20th century was
in large part its creation. In _When the Clyde Ran Red_, Maggie Craig
quotes an article published in the _Times_ just after the 1922
election which suspiciously lists some of the things organised by
the ILP: ‘Socialist study circles, socialist economics classes,
socialist music festivals, socialist athletics competitions, socialist
choirs, socialist dramatic societies, socialist plays – these are
only a few of the devious ways in which they attempted to reach the
unconverted.’ There were also socialist Sunday schools, cycling and
hiking clubs, several newspapers and, unsurprisingly, endless
meetings. The city in 1915 was described by the _Daily Herald_ as
‘a place of many meetings; a place rumbling with revolt ... I
seemed to see a meeting at every street corner, and late in the
evening the theatres poured forth huge masses of people who had been,
not at entertainments, but at serious deliberations.’ There was a
belief that the people, once properly informed, would seize the
opportunity to control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all
that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his
trial for sedition in 1918.

 

My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end
of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view
of the party and of that period, helped along by my mother’s stories
of their family friend John S. Clarke, an ILP MP not very happily
in the late 1920s, a pretty terrible political poet, but also a
lion-tamer (he’d joined the circus at 17) who cured Lenin’s dog
when he was in Russia as a delegate at the Second Congress of the
Third International in 1920. My mother remembers his signed photograph
of Lenin, addressed to ‘comrade Clarke’. I was struck, too, by
another photograph, which shows a large crowd gathered in George
Square in January 1919. A huge red flag is being waved above a sea of
men in bunnets, a tramcar stands unmoving in the background, while a
single policeman turns to look at the camera. Soon after it was taken,
there was a pitched battle when the police charged demonstrators,
leading the secretary of state for Scotland to warn of ‘a Bolshevist
rising’, send in tanks and (non-Glaswegian) soldiers, and set up
machine-gun nests in the square.

There hadn’t been much sign at the turn of the century that Glasgow
would become a centre of socialist activism. Keir Hardie founded
the ILP in 1893, five years after the foundation of the Scottish
Labour Party, itself formed after Hardie, a local miners’ leader,
lost badly as an independent labour candidate in the Mid-Lanark
by-election of 1888 (the two organisations soon merged). In the
19th century the Liberals had been totally dominant in Scotland, but
men like Hardie, who had tried to get the Liberal nomination in
Mid-Lanark, had come to doubt the party’s willingness to allow
working men into positions of power. The views of these early
socialists remained close to radical Liberalism: land reform,
evangelical Protestantism and temperance were important to them. They
saw socialism as a moral crusade, not as class war.

The Labour movement grew slowly in Scotland. Union membership was
smaller than it was in England (under 3 per cent of the population as
late as 1910) and the Liberal Party remained powerful. In 1896
the ILP had 17 branches in Glasgow; that number didn’t increase
until 1910. Although the ILP was easily the biggest socialist
organisation in Scotland, two smaller groups which emerged not from
the Liberal tradition but the Marxist one also became important: the
Social Democratic Federation (SDF), set up in 1881, which in 1911
became the British Socialist Party (BSP), and the syndicalist
Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which split from the SDF in 1903.
Before the First World War, however, there was ‘no clear demarcation
between “revolutionary” and “reformist”’, as Joan Smith
points out in _The ILP on Clydeside, 1893-1932_, and, in Glasgow at
least, the ILP and BSP ‘shared similar policies and held joint
demonstrations’ and were involved in both political and industrial
activism (nationally, the SDF/BSP was much less radical, opposed to
industrial unrest and in favour of rearmament, than Maclean’s
Scottish section). The left remained a small minority: George Barnes,
who won Glasgow Blackfriars and Hutchesontown in the 1906 election,
was still the only Labour MP in the city during the First World War.
‘The world is gettin’ socialism now like the measles,’ John
Buchan’s old Borders radical Andrew Amos says in _Mr
Standfast_ (1919), but most people remained unaffected by
the epidemic.

By 1913, according to T.C. Smout in _A Century of the Scottish
People 1830-1950_, Glasgow made ‘one fifth of the steel, one third
of the shipping tonnage, one half of the marine engine horsepower, one
third of the railway locomotives and rolling stock, and most of the
sewing machines in the United Kingdom’. It was the eighth largest
city in Europe and called itself the Second City of the Empire (other
cities called themselves that too). Its workforce was around 70 per
cent skilled, mostly employed in the shipyards on the Clyde and in
engineering workshops. Uneven demand since the turn of the century
meant that many had experienced periods of unemployment, and employers
had exploited their advantage by bringing in new machines and making
productivity demands that antagonised a conservative workforce used to
feeling that it had some special status and some control over its
working conditions.

 

 

The strike that is often seen, as it is by Kenny MacAskill (the
new SNP MP for East Lothian) in _Glasgow 1919_, as marking ‘the
start of “Red Clydeside”’ took place not in the shipyards or
engineering workshops or in the mining towns around Glasgow, but in
the Singer sewing-machine factory in Clydebank and involved many
female workers. The factory employed 11,000 people making a million
machines a year across a huge site that had its own railway station,
also called Singer (it’s still there; the factory shut in 1980). The
strike began after the introduction of working practices influenced by
Taylorism, or scientific management, and intended, as in the
engineering works, to increase productivity and reduce the need for
skilled workers. The Singer factory had 41 departments: employees in
one sharpened the needles; in another, they tapped them to make sure
they hadn’t been bent during the machining process; in a third they
polished the wooden cabinets that housed the machines. The strike
began after three of the 15 young women in this department were moved
elsewhere and the remaining 12 told to do the same amount of work for
a weekly wage of 12 shillings: a pay cut of two shillings. They walked
out, followed by two thousand other women workers, and soon afterwards
by the men. A few days later, led by the strike committee, they
marched back into the factory en masse to collect their pay packets
and then left again. It’s ‘curiously hard’ to work out who the
strike leaders were, Craig writes: their names aren’t mentioned in
the mainstream press or the socialist papers (she thinks it’s
because some of them were women), though it’s known that Arthur
MacManus of the SLP, who worked pointing the needles, was involved.
The strike collapsed after three weeks when Singer wrote to its
employees asking them to sign and return a postcard with a printed
message promising they’d go back to work when ‘you assure me that
at least 6000 persons have signed this agreement’ (Singer claimed to
have got 6015 cards back). Afterwards, around four hundred people –
all the strike leaders and anyone thought to be a political activist
– were sacked.

When war began, opinion on the left was divided. Keir Hardie, Ramsay
MacDonald, who resigned as Labour leader over it, and many of the
prominent members of the ILP and the other socialist organisations
active in Glasgow opposed it, but most workers, trade unions, Labour
MPs and 16 of the 18 ILP councillors in the city backed it (as did
Barnes, Glasgow’s only Labour MP, who left the ILP over its
opposition). More men per capita joined the army in Scotland than in
any other part of Britain; a battalion was formed in less than a day
just from employees on the Glasgow trams. Maxton and Maclean, both of
whom worked as teachers and had met a decade earlier because they got
the same train to Glasgow University (Maclean introduced Maxton to
Marx), made themselves unpopular with the school board by speaking at
anti-war meetings. The Sunday night meetings on Bath Street in the
city centre that Maclean began in late 1914 are Henry Bell’s
nomination, in his biography of Maclean, for ‘the birthplace of
Red Clydeside’.

The city itself became a huge armaments factory: the Clyde Munitions
Area. Most of the industrial unrest during the war took place in the
engineering works: Beardmore’s (ships, steel armour plate, naval
guns; its enormous site at Parkhead Forge is now a shopping centre),
Weir’s (pumps, compressors), Albion Motors, and Barr and Stroud
(rangefinders). There was a steep increase in the cost of living after
war began, and the first trouble came early in 1915 when the engineers
demanded a wage rise of tuppence an hour. A strike was called when it
became known that Weir’s had been recruiting workers in the United
States, and paying their passage to Glasgow, as well as higher wages
and a bonus at the end of their contract. The strike committee was the
first incarnation of what would become the Clyde Workers’ Committee
(CWC), which led most of the industrial action during the war,
sidestepping the national trade union leadership. ‘I’m a shop
steward,’ Andrew Amos says in _Mr Standfast_. ‘We represent the
rank and file against office-bearers that have lost the confidence
o’ the working man. But I’m no socialist.’ Here, Buchan moved
away from reality. The CWC was led by the senior shop stewards at
the major engineering firms: at Weir’s, Arthur MacManus of the SLP,
the needle-pointer from Singer; at the Albion Works, William Gallacher
of the BSP; at Beardmore’s, David Kirkwood, who had recently joined
the ILP and was a reluctant supporter of the war (‘I was too proud
of the battles of the past to stand aside and see Scotland
conquered’); and at Barr and Stroud, John Muir, also of the SLP.

The strike ended after a couple of weeks, with the engineers accepting
a rise of a penny. ‘This is an engineer’s war,’ Lloyd George,
then munitions minister, warned. ‘And it will be won or lost owing
to the efforts or shortcomings of engineers.’ Keen to stop any
further interruptions to production, he made William Weir (an adherent
of Taylorism and the author of a pamphlet called _Responsibility and
Duty_, which stressed that ‘every hour lost by a workman could
have been worked, has been worked by a German workman’) munitions
controller in Scotland, and in July 1915 saw a Munitions Act through
Parliament that severely restricted workers’ rights. Three workers
at Fairfield’s shipyard were sent to prison by the new munitions
tribunal after failing to pay fines for refusing to work (they’d
been striking over the dismissal of two colleagues). With more general
strike action threatening, the fines were mysteriously paid (MacAskill
says Lloyd George told the unions to pay). As well as making strikes
illegal, the Munitions Act forbade workers to leave a job without
permission, forced them to accept any new job offered by an employer,
even if it paid less, and in an attempt to increase production,
allowed for the employment of unskilled workers, many of them women:
this was known as dilution. Maclean and Gallacher saw it as an
opportunity to take on the employers and radicalise the workforce;
Kirkwood, who could see the need for higher production, worried about
the threat to union rights; the engineers worried about loss of
status, pay and, possibly, the protected nature of their work.

Rents were rising steeply, with landlords taking advantage of the
scarcity of housing caused by the influx of at least 20,000 munitions
workers to a city already acutely overcrowded (a council report of
1912 said 65,000 new homes were needed, but only 1400 had been built
when war began). Even before the war, wages on Clydeside had been
lower, living costs higher and overcrowding much worse than in similar
English cities. In 1911 nearly half of the population of Glasgow lived
in two-room tenement flats, known as a room and kitchen; more than an
eighth lived in one room (a single end); toilets were shared between
several flats. This had obvious effects on health: in 1911 234 babies
out of every 1000 born in the Broomielaw died in infancy; tuberculosis
was common. Glaswegians were often suspicious of landlords and of the
factors who acted for them: many of them had come to the city from
Ireland or after being cleared from the Highlands. Maclean’s father,
for example, had been ‘swept out’ from the Isle of Mull, and his
mother from Corpach, near Fort William. As a young child she’d
walked with her own mother all the way to Glasgow, around a hundred
miles of rough mountainous country. Tom Johnston, founder and editor
of _Forward_, which became the mouthpiece of the Glasgow ILP, wrote
a popular series of polemical but impressively researched articles on
the iniquities of Scottish landowning families. When it was published
in book form in 1909 as _Our Scots Noble Families_ it sold more than
100,000 copies. He hoped, he wrote in the introduction, to ‘shatter
the Romance that keeps the nation dumb and spellbound while privilege
picks its pockets’.

In the spring of 1915 a rent strike was organised in Govan by Mary
Barbour of the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association, which had been
formed by female ILP members the year before. In the summer it began
to spread, after the threatened eviction of a Mrs McHugh in
Shettleston, whose husband had been wounded on active service and who
had two sons serving in France (and five other children at home). She
owed the landlord less than a pound. The factor was prevented from
entering her house by a crowd including the local ILP councillor,
John Wheatley (one of the ILP MPs elected in 1922, and responsible
in 1924 for the Housing Act, which enabled central government to
subsidise the building of council housing). An effigy of the factor
was burned in the street, and he was chased all the way back home. The
plight of soldiers’ wives and families was made much of by the
leaders of the rent strike, most of whom were against the war. One
photograph taken during the strike shows children carrying placards
with variations of the lines: ‘My father is fighting in France. We
are fighting the Huns at home.’ They were adept at publicity:
notices appeared in thousands of windows reading ‘rent strikes
against increases.  we are not removing.’ Craig writes that they
cost a penny and had written on them: ‘Please tack this to top of
lower sash of window.’ Soon at least 25,000 households were taking
part. Threatened evictions were thwarted by Mrs Barbour’s Army: a
woman would sit on the stairs outside a flat and ring a bell if an
eviction was attempted. ‘The women came from all parts of the
building,’ according to the suffragette Helen Crawfurd, one of the
strike leaders. ‘Some with flour, if baking, wet clothes, if
washing, and other missiles. Usually the bailiff made off for his
life, chased by a mob of angry women.’

 

London Review of Books
 

The munitions factories began to get involved; the rent rises were
seen, like the Munitions Act, as evidence of the way the war was being
used to break a compact with the working class. Finding evictions too
difficult to carry out, the landlords had started making claims
against tenants in the small debt court instead (this allowed arrears
to be deducted directly from tenants’ pay). When a factor in
Partick, Mr Nicolson, brought actions against 18 households, 15
containing munitions workers, in November 1915, the strikers,
accompanied by men from the shipyards and engineering works, marched
to the Sheriff Court: ‘on we went, leaving the factories empty and
deserted, shouting and singing,’ Gallacher wrote. Mary Barbour and
the marchers from Govan went past Lorne Street School, where Maclean
was working out his notice: he’d been sacked after being found
guilty a week or so earlier under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA)
of making statements likely to prejudice recruiting during his weekly
meetings on Bath Street. Maclean came out of the school and joined the
march. The judge knew that the government was planning, belatedly, to
bring in rent controls and, hearing the crowd outside, must have
worried about the consequences of finding in favour of the landlord.
He managed to persuade the factor to drop the cases (Lloyd George had
already tried to intervene), and a week later the government
introduced a Rent Restrictions Bill, which froze rents at prewar
levels. (Again, as Bell notes, no record of Barbour’s speeches
survives, though she continued to be a significant figure: a
councillor, Glasgow’s first female magistrate and responsible for
opening the city’s first family planning clinic in 1926.)

This was a clear victory, and one that was popular even with those
unsympathetic to the anti-war activism of the now ex-teacher Maclean
or the sectional demands of the engineers, but as Maclean realised,
the government had to ‘do something to balance the victory’ and so
they needed to ‘prepare for the enemy’s counter-stroke’. Lloyd
George set off for Glasgow to make the case for dilution and the
introduction of conscription, though a press release made clear he
wouldn’t meet ‘unofficial’ representatives like the leaders of
the CWC. He did, despite this, ask to meet Kirkwood at Beardmore’s,
presumably because he was thought, not incorrectly, to be the least
radical of the CWC leaders. But Kirkwood told Lloyd George his Act
had ‘a taint of slavery’ and that they would agree to dilution
only if the workers were put in control of the means of production. As
MacAskill says, Lloyd George seems to have felt that he might do
better with a large audience of workers on whom he could work his
charm, and so a rally was planned for Christmas Day (not then a
holiday in Scotland). He wasn’t confident enough to let just anyone
attend, however, and compliant officials from the Amalgamated Society
of Engineers were given tickets to hand out, together with
‘expenses’ of seven shillings and sixpence for each attendee
(remember the weekly wage of the polishers at Singer: 12 shillings).
Gallacher discovered what was going on and made it impossible for the
audience to be vetted. When Lloyd George got up to talk, according
to _Forward_, he ‘was received with loud and continued booing and
hissing ... Two verses of “The Red Flag” were sung before the
minister could utter a word.’ The meeting ‘broke up in disorder’
and reporting of it was restricted, with newspapers told to reproduce
a press release stating that Lloyd George had been given a
sympathetic hearing.

_Forward_ was shut down for six weeks, under DORA, after publishing
its uncensored account of the meeting, though Johnston had been
careful, as he thought, not to print anything that contravened it
(William Beveridge, assistant secretary at the Ministry of Munitions,
found it correspondingly difficult to make a case against him).
Johnston wrote in his memoirs that Lloyd George ordered the police to
remove copies from every newsagent in Scotland, and ‘had the police
search the homes of known purchasers’. Eventually he was summoned to
London to meet Lloyd George. He ‘walked out free to start again, and
“it had all been a mistake, and these happen in the best regulated
families, Ha! Ha! And we must see more of each other and be better
friends in future.”’

In _Forward_’s absence, the CWC began to publish a paper (funded
by the expenses paid to those who attended the Christmas Day meeting),
but the _Worker_ was soon shut down in turn, after carrying an
article called ‘Should the Workers Arm?’ (the piece said they
shouldn’t). Muir, its editor, and Gallacher were arrested on 7
February 1916, the day after Maclean was arrested for breaching DORA.
While they were under arrest, Kirkwood signed an agreement with the
government over the implementation of dilution at Beardmore’s. The
other shop stewards weren’t happy about this unilateral action, and
Kirkwood, it turned out, had unwittingly agreed that shop stewards
should be confined to their own departments. When Beardmore’s
wouldn’t budge on this, he resigned as senior steward and the
workers at the forge came out on strike on 17 March.

A week later, the government, keen to get rid of what a government
paper described as the ‘whole gang’, got Kirkwood out of the way
too: as MacAskill writes, ‘the state chose simply to deport leading
shop stewards from Glasgow under DORA.’ Kirkwood was woken at 3
a.m. and told by armed detectives that he had been court martialled
the day before and sentenced to deportation from the Clyde Munitions
Area. He was asked where he wanted to go. He said Edinburgh and was
taken to the station, where he was given a single ticket and a
ten-shilling note and told to report to the police when he got there.
Kirkwood wrote later that he worried ‘they might shoot me, as they
had shot my friend James Connolly in Dublin a few days previously’
(Connolly was born in Scotland, a founder of the SLP and wrote
for _Forward_).

 

 

That dealt with the CWC, which Lloyd George described in the House of
Commons as ‘purely an organisation for sedition’, and its threat
to munitions production. But the arrests continued, with Maxton, James
MacDougall, a friend of Maclean’s who was also in the BSP, and Jack
Smith, another shop steward, held after speaking at a demonstration in
favour of the deported men. ‘Not a rivet should be struck on the
Clyde until the deported engineers are returned to their families,’
Maxton had said. ‘In case there are any plainclothes detectives in
the audience I shall repeat that statement for their benefit.’ The
deported men didn’t attract much general sympathy, however, and the
strike soon petered out. Maxton’s dog Karl (named after Liebknecht)
was stoned. The first of those arrested to be tried was Maclean, whose
case was heard in Edinburgh a few days after a Zeppelin raid there
killed 11 people and hardened opinion against anti-war activists. He
was sentenced to three years’ hard labour, essentially for speaking
against conscription; Gallacher and Muir received a year; Maxton and
MacDougall were also sentenced to a year, and Smith to 18 months.
Kirkwood and his fellow deportees remained in Edinburgh (where they at
first stayed with my grandparents’ friend John S. Clarke, then of
the SLP, who soon went on the run to escape arrest), though some
eventually moved to England to get work. The decapitated CWC became
moribund, and industrial unrest and anti-war activity were much
reduced for the rest of the war, though the ILP, which was largely
responsible for the success of the rent strike and less dependent on
industrial organisation, continued to grow strongly. Its membership
tripled between 1914 and 1918, by which time it had around 10,000
members in Scotland, and most of its leaders, with the exception of
Maxton, remained out of prison.

Most​ of the convicted men were held in Calton Jail in Edinburgh,
where Maxton is said to have persuaded some of the warders to set up a
union branch, while Maclean was moved to Peterhead, where, according
to Bell, he was ‘kept in a cell four feet wide, eight feet long and
seven feet high and spent his days working in a quarry’. His plight
was arousing interest among the still exiled Bolsheviks, and Lenin
wrote several times of ‘the Scottish schoolteacher and socialist,
Maclean’. After a year in prison, he became ill: he was prone to
respiratory illnesses, and he wasn’t eating properly, believing his
food was poisoned. This, as Bell says, is a contentious subject. After
the war, and especially after Maclean’s death, former friends like
Gallacher would claim he had had a breakdown in prison that had
permanently affected him. It’s clear that later political
disagreements, notably Maclean’s refusal to join the Communist Party
of Great Britain, despite Lenin’s pleas, made it convenient for them
to portray him as a hero during the war and a madman after it, but
it’s clear too that he was suffering from paranoia: he saw spies
everywhere (though he was of course being spied on) and blamed
government agents for his wife Agnes’s decision to leave him after
the war. Then again, as Bell points out, his letters and articles are
unchanged ‘in tone and rationality ... after this episode’.

Apart from Maclean, all those imprisoned were released early in 1917.
When Lenin returned to Petrograd in April he told the waiting crowd,
Bell writes, that ‘the struggle was the same in Glasgow and
Berlin’. As many as 80,000 people took part in that year’s May Day
procession, at which speakers celebrated revolution in Russia and
called for Maclean’s release (the _Daily Record_ said that
speakers included ‘a Jew, a Lett, a Russian and a Lithuanian’).
New rules on conscription led to strikes in some English cities, but
not in Glasgow, to Gallacher’s disgust, partly because the engineers
were still in a protected occupation, but largely because there was
little enthusiasm. In June Lloyd George, by now prime minister,
visited the city again. A few days earlier, the deportees had finally
been allowed to return, and had spoken at a large meeting: ‘The
greatest Huns in Christendom are the capitalist class of Britain,’
Kirkwood said. Protesters were kept well away from Lloyd George, but,
according to Gallacher, Mrs Reid, an ‘old stalwart of the
movement’, lived in the flats beside the hall where Lloyd George was
to speak, and, as he arrived, she ‘was waving a great red flag’,
‘her white hair crowning a face alight with the flame of revolt’.
Lloyd George saw her, raised his hat and gave her a bow. As he was
spirited out of the city, Maclean’s wife received a telegram saying
he was to be released. ‘I think the Russians secured it,’ George
Lansbury, then the editor of the _Daily Herald_, wrote to Agnes.

‘I am quite unrepentant, and more revolutionary than ever,’
Maclean told one reporter, insisting that there was nothing wrong with
him other than ‘a slight nervous strain and a general catarrh’. He
began teaching economics at the new Scottish Labour College, which he
had been instrumental in founding, with the object of training workers
‘for the battle against the masters’, holding eight classes a week
for more than a thousand pupils. After the October Revolution, he was
made Bolshevik consul in Scotland, although the funds to support his
consulate were confiscated and the Post Office wouldn’t deliver to
it (Maxim Litvinoff, the ambassador in London, who’d been irritated
by Maclean’s failure to respond to his messages, received a bundle
of returned letters marked: ‘Consul not recognised
by HM government’). By now the government was beginning to wonder
whether Maclean, who was speaking to large crowds all over Britain,
might not be better back in prison (the Scottish Office checked with
the Foreign Office whether he should be classed as having diplomatic
immunity). He was particularly keen to challenge Kirkwood’s
encouragement of workers to hit record production figures (Beardmore
had eventually agreed to take him back, and Kirkwood, Gallacher and
MacManus were all working in Beardmore’s shell factory). Kirkwood
boasted that ‘records were made only to be broken’ and that
Beardmore had given him the ‘best hat in Glasgow’ (a ‘fine
Austrian velour bonnet’) as a reward; Maclean argued that workers
should ‘ca’ canny’, otherwise they would find they are
‘speeded up again and again’.

In April 1918 Maclean was again charged with sedition, on the basis of
various phrases in his speeches (they included: ‘tools should be
downed,’ ‘the revolution should be created,’ ‘the Clyde
district had helped win the Russian revolution’), and tried the next
month, again in Edinburgh. His address to the jury, which Bell calls
‘one of the most famous’ speeches ever made in Scotland, lasted
more than an hour and was a defence and a restatement of the views
that had led to his arrest, alternately stirring and analytic. ‘I am
not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism
dripping with blood from head to foot.’

I have squared my conduct with my intellect, and if everyone had done
so this war would not have taken place ... I have nothing to be
ashamed of. Your class position is against my class position ... My
appeal is to the working class ... They and they only can bring
about the time when the whole world will be in one brotherhood, on a
sound economic foundation ... That can only be obtained when the
people of the world get the world, and retain the world.

The jury found him guilty without retiring to consider their verdict
and he was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. Lenin was among
those who protested: ‘Maclean is in prison because he acted openly
as the representative of our government; we have never seen this man,
he is the beloved leader of the Scottish workers; he has never
belonged to our party, but we joined with him.’

During his speech Maclean had said that he would ‘take no food
inside your prisons’, and he immediately began a hunger strike. The
prison doctor started force-feeding him. ‘He has aged very much,’
his wife wrote in October, ‘and has the look of a man who is going
through torture.’ Still in prison, Maclean, whose party, the BSP,
was affiliated to the Labour Party, was chosen as candidate for the
Gorbals, despite the opposition of the national leadership; Barnes,
the sitting Labour MP, was standing for Lloyd George’s ruling
coalition. The government again started to wonder whether it was
better to free him, perhaps under the Cat and Mouse Act, than to let
him become a martyr. John S. Clarke wrote one of his bad poems: ‘He
is one against an army, are you going to see him downed?/Are you going
to let him die without a fight/He will pay you back in plenty. It’s
you who stand to gain/His lion heart is yours if he is spared.’ When
the war finally ended, the cabinet decided to release Maclean before,
as Barnes put it to the cabinet, ‘the agitation assumes larger and
more dangerous dimensions.’ When he reached Glasgow on 3 December
around 100,000 people came out to meet him, though anger at his
treatment didn’t necessarily translate into support for
his programme.

He didn’t campaign in the ten days left before the election
(Gallacher had given up his job to run the campaign), speaking only on
the night before the poll; it’s unclear whether his physical or
mental health was the problem, or his belief, as he wrote in
the BSP magazine, the _Call_, that ‘the election in itself counts
for nothing ... The real British crisis is coming and coming
quickly.’ Later accounts, by Gallacher and others, describe him as
rambling, disturbed, in ‘a very sick condition. He was seeing spies
everywhere.’ As Bell points out, it’s strange that the mainstream
press didn’t seem to notice this. The election results were
disappointing – in Glasgow Labour only won Govan; Wheatley lost in
Shettleston by 74 votes; Maxton and Maclean both polled respectably
but lost easily – even if there were obvious reasons: a lack of
organisation and funds; many soldiers hadn’t yet returned home; the
electoral register was out of date; there was some unhappiness with
the ILP’s anti-war stance; a low turnout.

In January 1919 there was a race riot in Glasgow after thirty or so
black, South Asian, Arab and Chinese sailors looking for work at the
Sailors’ Yard were attacked by a mob, a few hours after Manny
Shinwell, the seamen’s leader, had spoken there and warned of mass
unemployment unless foreign labour was restricted. None of the memoirs
written by the Red Clydesiders mentions it, nor is there any record
that Maclean ever spoke of it. The CWC had begun to argue for a
forty-hour week, partly as a way of controlling the anticipated rise
in unemployment. As during the war, events quickly escaped the control
of union leaders. The CWC called a strike, which the ILP backed,
as did Maclean, who was lobbying hard to get the miners, railwaymen
and transport workers involved, hoping for a general strike. Even
without them, around 70,000 men went on strike, and it spread quickly,
with workers in power stations, for example, joining. Most of these
strikers thought they were involved in a straightforward enough labour
dispute, but on 28 January the home secretary’s Report on
Revolutionary Organisations stated that ‘my Glasgow correspondent
reports that the revolutionary movement is gaining ground.’ The next
day, the strikers marched to George Square, where a delegation went
into the City Chambers and asked the lord provost to discuss their
case with the government (not a revolutionary move). They would return
on Friday, en masse, to hear the response.

On​ friday morning a large crowd – somewhere between 20,000 and
100,000; as usual, accounts conflict – gathered to hear the news.
There were rows of police lined up outside the City Chambers. Inside,
a deputation including Kirkwood and Wheatley waited to see the
provost. Then the fighting began. The chief constable claimed that his
officers had been attacked, that the air was black with missiles, and
(separately) that his men were trying to stop the crowd obstructing
the tramcars moving through the square, but it seems that the police
charged without provocation and with what MacAskill calls ‘shocking
brutality’. Gallacher pushed his way through the crowd to
remonstrate with the chief constable, ‘but batons were raised all
around me, so I struck out.’ As usual, he makes his part sound a bit
more heroic than it probably was. He missed the chief constable and
was quickly ‘battered’ to the ground. Those inside, hearing the
commotion, rushed out. Kirkwood saw Gallacher being dragged away by
the police, went to object, and was hit on the head and knocked out. A
lorry delivering (slightly unexpectedly) bottles of fizzy water on one
of the streets that lead steeply uphill from the square was turned on
its side and the bottles lobbed at the police. The Riot Act was read,
at least in part (it was snatched out of the sheriff’s hand). The
authorities, feeling they were being overwhelmed, asked Gallacher and
Kirkwood (who were under arrest) to address the protesters from a
balcony. They told the crowd to move to Glasgow Green, on the edge of
the city centre. Skirmishes continued, but people began to
drift away.

Gallacher says in _Revolt on the Clyde_ that they should have
marched instead to Maryhill Barracks: ‘If we had gone there we could
easily have persuaded the soldiers to come out and Glasgow would have
been in our hands.’ He blames the absence of ‘experienced
revolutionary leadership’ (Maclean, if he fitted the bill, was
speaking in England, trying to spread the strike). Of course, his own
decision to tell the crowd to move out of the square shows that at the
time he had no thought of attempting to exploit the moment in a
revolutionary direction. The authorities, however, as a piece
published in the _Glasgow Herald_ a few days later makes clear,
‘actually believed a Spartacus coup was planned to start in Glasgow,
and they were prepared to suppress it at all costs.’ (The Spartacist
rising in Germany had taken place earlier the same month; Liebknecht
and Rosa Luxemburg were executed on 15 January.) That night troops
began to enter the city (Glaswegian soldiers were confined to
barracks, just in case), machine guns and a Howitzer were soon
positioned on the roofs of the buildings around George Square, and six
tanks were garaged in the cattle market. The strike didn’t last much
longer: many workers went back on 12 February, to a shorter working
day (a reduction from a 54-hour week to a 47-hour week had been agreed
by engineering and shipyard union leaders), and by the 17th the
soldiers had left the city.

Maclean continued to hope and organise for revolution, but he hadn’t
expected it to come then (as his close colleague Harry McShane said,
‘We didn’t regard the Forty Hours Strike as a revolution. We saw
it more as the beginning of things’). But rather than increasing,
militancy faded as economic conditions worsened. The BSP began to
reconstitute itself as the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB),
but Maclean refused to join: he wasn’t keen to submit to Soviet
direction and had begun to favour a more nationalist and
anti-imperialist position. ‘The Social Revolution is possible sooner
in Scotland than in England,’ he wrote. ‘Scottish separation is
part of the process of England’s imperial disintegration and is a
help towards the ultimate triumph of the workers of the world.’
Lenin asked him to visit Russia to discuss uniting the various groups,
but he never did (he had several passport applications turned down).
Towards the end of 1920 he and Gallacher, by now of the CPGB, fell
out publicly during a meeting at which Maclean had hoped to launch a
Scottish Communist Party. ‘We can’t have a man going around
trading on his past, and accusing everyone who disagrees with him of
being a government agent,’ Gallacher said. Maclean’s
‘weakness ... is notorious throughout the whole movement’.
Though still a popular speaker and lecturer, Maclean was now a man
essentially without a party. (Gallacher would become the
Communist MP for West Fife between 1935 and 1950.)

By this point the co-operation that had characterised the left in
Glasgow during the war had broken down. ‘The formation of
the CPGB,’ Alan McKinlay writes in _The ILP on Clydeside_,
‘signalled the total collapse of the interlocking networks of
socialist activists’ that linked ‘the factory, the community and
the state with a combination of direct action and institutional
politics’. Before and during the war Maclean and Gallacher and
others in the BSP and SLP had worked closely with ILP members,
whose views more or less closely approached their own. Now the Labour
Party had turned into an orthodox centralised party and was starting
to recruit members, the revolutionary left was splitting off, with the
foundation of the CPGB (although Lenin had insisted it affiliate to
the Labour Party) and the isolation of Maclean, and the ILP, its
membership dropping as the recession worsened, was focusing on
electoral politics. Wheatley wrote in _Forward_ in 1919 that he was
‘anxious not to minimise the value of industrial action’ but
wanted ‘to impress upon the workers of this country the tremendous
importance of political power’.

The ILP’s success in 1922 came in part from capturing the large
Irish vote, thanks to Wheatley and Patrick Dollan, the first Catholic
lord provost of Glasgow and the ILP’s supreme organiser, and the
party’s decision to back Catholic schools, drop its support for
prohibition (many of the ILPers were teetotal; so were Gallacher and
Maclean) and back Home Rule in Ireland. Its reputation on housing and
its demonstrations of the benefits of municipal socialism also helped.
Johnston, for example, was a councillor in his hometown of
Kirkintilloch, where he opened a municipal bank and cinema, organised
evening classes in maths and English, with the carrot that attendance
brought free entry to dance classes with a ‘first-class band’,
bought baby food and sold it on at cost price (the local infant
mortality rate halved in three years); he also set up a municipal jam
factory and a restaurant, as well as a piggery and a herd of goats.
Now the war was over, and the soldiers had returned, unhappiness with
the way it had been conducted was becoming more obvious. More than
100,000 Scots had been killed (the exact figure is unclear), the vast
majority working class. Meanwhile, the recession was badly affecting
the shipyards and engineering yards, whose workforces had shrunk to a
fraction of what they had been during the war. In the 1920s 60 per
cent of Scottish workers had at least one period of unemployment. My
grandparents wanted to get married, but my grandfather was sacked the
day he finished his engineering apprenticeship because it was cheaper
to take on another apprentice than pay a journeyman’s wage. All
through the 1920s he worked in casual labouring jobs. They didn’t
marry until 1931 – he was laid off days before the wedding, but they
got married anyway.

The ten ILP candidates who won in Glasgow in 1922 included Maxton,
Wheatley and Muir (who’d joined from the SLP); Kirkwood and
Johnston won in nearby constituencies. Maclean, recently released from
another prison sentence for sedition, polled 4000 votes in the
Gorbals, but lost to the ILP’s George Buchanan, who got 16,000.
(‘If you cannot agree with me then vote for George Buchanan,’
Maclean’s election address said. ‘On no account vote for anyone
else. Yours for world revolution.’) But this was the high point: the
atmosphere of the Clyde didn’t get the better of the Commons.
Wheatley had some victories, notably the 1924 Housing Act, which
resulted in the building of half a million council houses, before his
death in 1930; Johnston became a highly efficient secretary of state
for Scotland during the Second World War and afterwards founded the
North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board, which brought electricity to
the Highlands (he also chaired the Forestry Commission, which brought,
less happily, serried ranks of Sitka spruce). In general, however, the
story of the Red Clydesiders in Parliament is not very cheering. In
1932 the ILP disaffiliated from the Labour Party, with Maxton’s
encouragement; only two of the 1922 Glasgow MPs went with him (my
grandparents did too). Maxton argued that they had to disaffiliate to
‘regain their socialist soul’, but the ILP quickly declined into
insignificance, ‘pure, but impotent’, as Bevan had warned. Maxton
was treated indulgently by a House of Commons that no longer feared
the power of the Glasgow socialists. ‘He is their raven-haired
pirate, a Captain Hook who waves his finger but is really the most
loveable of fellows,’ Kingsley Martin, the editor of the _New
Statesman_, wrote. By the time of Maxton’s death in 1946
the ILP had almost disappeared, as had the energetic, didactic,
all-encompassing political culture it helped create.

Maclean, too, ended his life without a real party. In 1923 he tried to
found one, the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party. ‘It had some
queer people that I didn’t like,’ McShane, who’d now joined
the CPGB, wrote. ‘They had never been to John’s economics
classes, they knew nothing about socialism or revolutionary work.’ I
don’t know whether he thought they were (more) spies, hangers-on of
the sort Gallacher blamed for leading the later Maclean astray, or
merely nationalists. A few months later the government split over
Tariff Reform and another election was called for 6 December. Maclean
planned to stand, although his health was worrying his friend Sylvia
Pankhurst, who complained that ‘he spoke outside in all weathers and
survived on pease brose.’ On 17 November his wife, who’d left him
in 1919, returned, despite his continued refusal to ‘take a break
from politics’. Eight days later, he had a coughing fit during a
speech and had to be brought home. He died of pneumonia on 30
November. He was 44; only one of his six siblings survived him.

He’s not been much written about by historians outside Scotland, who
seem to regard him as an insubstantial figure. Presumably, this is in
part a consequence of the posthumous destruction of his reputation by
his former friends, but his marginalisation, and indeed that of the
Glasgow ILP, from accounts of the early history of the left, remains
striking. He continued to be fought over in Scotland: the Communists
(Gallacher and others) gave one account; the Labour Party (Maxton, a
pallbearer at Maclean’s funeral, was going to write his biography)
tried to claim him too. Then the poets took over: Hugh MacDiarmid,
Hamish Henderson and Sorley Maclean saw Maclean as synthesising
nationalism and internationalism (you could go on adding Caledonian
antisyzygies, as Bell does: Highlander and Lowlander, atheist and
Calvinist, hero and fool, teacher and revolutionary), linking Scotland
with the wider world, Glasgow with Petrograd. They were also attracted
by the vivid phrases that occasionally jump out from his speeches. The
1918 Speech from the Dock gives his analysis of the war, predicts the
postwar depression, says that ‘in 15 years’ time we may have the
first great war bursting out in the Pacific – America v. Japan’,
but also gives, almost incidentally, glimpses of what he thought he
was fighting for. ‘Maclean was not naive,’ Edwin Morgan wrote,

                                     But

                                           ‘We
are out

for life and all that life can give us’

was what he said, that’s what he said.

_[Essayist Jean McNichol is deputy editor of the London Review of
Books.]_

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