A People's History of Scotland (25 page)

By 1918, Crawfurd had become Vice-President of the ILP, and travelled across Scotland and Britain addressing meetings. Nonetheless, she was moving towards revolutionary ideas, forming in 1920 an unofficial grouping within the ILP known as the Left Wing Committee, with a journal, the
International
. This group would join the Communist Party on its formation in 1920, with Crawford put in charge of the new organisation's work among women. That year she also travelled to Moscow to attend the Second Congress of the Communist International, arriving after proceedings had ended.
¹⁰⁰
However, Crawfurd did find the opportunity to meet Lenin, already seriously ill, and other revolutionary leaders.
¹⁰¹

Looking back shortly before her death, Crawfurd wrote: ‘What a job the Bolshevik leaders undertook. What a magnificent job they have done. Anyone who refuses to see the significance of what the Russians have done can only be either dishonest or dead mentally!'
¹⁰²

Back in Britain, Crawfurd was involved in organising a Communist Women's Day with Sylvia Pankhurst.
¹⁰³
A year after her visit to Moscow, Crawfurd became Secretary (in 1921) of the Workers' International Relief Organisation (WIR), which raised money for the famine-stricken people of the Volga region. In 1926, she organised food and money collections for the miners left to fight alone after the TUC called off the General Strike. She also organised support for those facing hunger in the west of Scotland and in the Highlands. She recalled: ‘Jim Larkin lent us a car to visit far parts of Ireland and carry food to the hunger stricken people of Donegal.' The relief in Donegal was particularly acute because of extensive flooding. Helen worked with Constance Markievicz, Charlotte Despard, Peadar O'Donnell, Father Flanagan and the Dundee Communist Bob Stewart, who stated, ‘These three women (Crawfurd, Markievicz and Despard) formed a wonderful trio. With entirely different backgrounds they had worked miracles in the struggle for women's rights, yet it took the flood relief in Ireland to bring them together'.
¹⁰⁴

Helen Crawfurd stood as the Communist candidate for Govan Ward in the 1921 Glasgow council elections, her manifesto stressing the fight for women's equality. She remained a party member to the end, loyal to Stalin's Russia. After ‘retiring' to Dunoon at the end of World War II she was elected the town's first woman councillor at the age of 68 and served for two years.

On her death in 1954, one woman member of the Glasgow Communist Party, Margaret Hunter of Polmadie, wrote this:

Her distinguished appearance, her warm personal charm, her lively wit, her single-minded devotion to the cause of the workers, and clarity of purpose, her fearlessness and courage, her nobility of mind and sterling character, made her loved, admired and respected by all the friends who knew her, and from her foes, who may not have loved her, she compelled admiration and respect.
¹⁰⁵

T
he 1930s were a decade of unemployment, sub-standard housing and poor levels of health in Scotland. Glasgow acquired many of the negative stereotypes still attached to it: a centre for drink, razor gangs and religious sectarianism, as portrayed in Alexander MacArthur and Herbert Kingsley Long's 1935 novel
No Mean City
. One contemporary report described the unemployed in these words: ‘With drooping shoulders and slouching feet they moved as a defeated and dispirited army. They gave their names, signed the necessary forms and shuffled out of the Exchange. This, twice a week, was the only disciplined routine with which they had to comply.'
¹

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, unemployment in Scotland reached a quarter of the workforce in 1931–33. The UK average was a fifth, although until 1933 unemployment levels in north-east England were worse than in Scotland. Despite rearmament bringing jobs in the late 1930s, Scotland's jobless total was a third higher than the UK average.
²

Throughout the 1920s, unemployment never dropped below 10 percent of Scotland's workforce, but in the '30s it averaged over 20 percent. Motherwell and Wishaw had unemployment rates of 49 percent and 53 percent respectively during late 1932 and early 1933.
³
The demoralisation caused by long-term unemployment left deep scars, and came as a shock to skilled workers who had never been out of work for any length of time before.
⁴

The Orcadian poet and socialist Edwin Muir toured Scotland in 1933 and wrote of the idle shipyards:

The weather had been good for several weeks, and all the men I saw were tanned and brown as if they had just come back from their summer holidays. They were standing in their usual groups, or walking by twos and threes, slowly, for one felt as one looked at them that the world had not a single message to send them on, and that for them to hasten their steps would have meant a sort of madness. Perhaps at some time the mirage of work glimmered at the extreme horizon of their minds but one could see by looking at them that they were no longer deceived by such false pictures.
⁵

The dole was means tested so that the unemployed were forced to sell possessions before they could qualify. An Inspector of Poor in Airdrie in the '30s recalled: ‘The means test was iniquitous and a shatterer of homes. It broke up families, it penalised the tryers, it starved children, it drove people to suicide and insanity.'

For the children of unemployed parents in the 1930s, there would be long memories of food scarcity, homes with little or no heating, overcrowding and parents struggling to provide life's treasures. A 1935 report by the biologist and doctor John Boyd Orr ‘showed that the diet of the Scottish poor was insufficient to maintain health.'
⁶
Diphtheria
was rife among children, and as late as 1940, 15,069 cases were reported. Of Glasgow children evacuated during the war, 31 percent were found to be infested with fleas and lice, and scabies was common.
⁷

The suffering of the 1930s was real but working people, in and out of work, also fought back and Scotland was to the fore in joining the great issue of that decade, resisting fascism both at home and abroad. Any hope in the Labour government elected in 1929 was dashed by its insistence that it had to balance the books. In 1931, the Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, quit his party to form a coalition with the Tories and Liberals. He did so because he accepted the economic orthodoxy that held austerity as the answer to the economic crisis, and because of opposition to his proposed cuts in the dole.

In the aftermath of his departure, the Labour Party seemed to suffer a reverse in its forward march. From 1932 until the formation, in 1940, of a new wartime coalition including Labour, Britain was effectively ruled by a Tory government. In the 1931 Westminster general election, coalition candidates won sixty-four Scottish seats to Labour's seven. In 1935, there were forty-three Unionist MPs returned, just three Liberals, twenty Labour and five Independent Labour Party.

The ILP had broken with Labour in 1931 because of its refusal to adopt a clear socialist programme. But while the ILP's leader, Jimmy Maxton, was joined by four other Glasgow MPs, they did not win over the party in the city itself. Rather, that was dominated by the machine led by Patrick Dollan. In 1933, Labour took control of Glasgow City Council, the Scottish Protestant League taking votes and seats off the moderates. Working-class politics was being shaped in a way that would hold true until the end of the millennium.

The Hunger Marches

The situation facing those out of work north of the border was grimmer even than that facing the unemployed in England and Wales. Under the Poor Act of 1845, parish councils in Scotland were responsible for the destitute, but they were not required to build workhouses or to levy a poor rate. Consequently, they could provide little for the
unemployed, who were left to appeal to the parish guardians or to rely on family or charity.

After World War I, Westminster did expand the National Insurance scheme but this was only to supplement parish relief and was always under pressure from governments keen to cut public spending. To claim the dole you had to sign on at least twice a week, but the labour exchange brought together the unemployed and became places where they could organise.
⁸

Scotland had a strong history of organisation among the unemployed. In the early 1920s that work was led by John Maclean and his comrades in the Tramps Trust Unlimited, who dominated the Glasgow Unemployed Committee, resisting efforts to incorporate it into the Communist Party. This initiated the National Unemployed Workers Movement, which organised on an all-British basis, because Maclean claimed the Party was too concerned with committees rather than agitation. But in July 1922, Maclean's key ally in the work, Harry McShane, decided to join the Communist Party, and became the right-hand man of the NUWM's leader, Wal Hannington.
⁹

The NUWM had already organised hunger marches in the 1920s, but with the onset of mass unemployment it organised such protests on an even greater scale. In 1930 there was a Scotland-to-London hunger march and in November of that year, the NUWM in the Vale of Leven organised a march on the labour exchange, 2,000 women and men in protest at a change of day for signing on. They won a day's money that they had lost because of the change, ‘a small but significant victory'.
¹⁰

On 24 September 1931, the NUWM in Glasgow called what the
Daily Record
described as the biggest unemployed demonstration seen in Britain since the war, in protest at the National Government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, and its 10 percent cut in unemployment benefit. Contingents from across the city converged on Jail Street and together the crowd of 30,000 made their way to St Enoch Square, where an effigy of Baillie Fletcher was burned. Fletcher had angered the crowd by saying the unemployed were not ‘citizens they could be proud of'.
¹¹

The next day, Harry McShane led a delegation of some 30,000 to Glasgow City Corporation, demanding they petition Parliament in London against the cuts. The council refused to do anything. That evening, the protesters gathered to hear a report from McShane. The
Daily Record
described events outside Glasgow Green:

Before the crowd realized what was happening, fifteen mounted [police] men, who had come down Saltmarket in sections of four, spread across the wide thoroughfare in one rank and headed for the mass of humanity jammed in the semi-circular space around the gates of the green. Behind the mounted men came the foot police who tackled what the mounted police had left. The crowd scattered in every direction and as they scattered the crash of shattered windows could be heard along Saltmarket.
¹²

The 1932 Hunger March from Glasgow to Westminster began with the departure of the Scottish contingent, led by McShane. One woman explained why she was there:

The reason why I am marching is because of the Means Test. For instance, a friend of mine in Glasgow is working in a steel works and earns 10s a week, and because of this his son, who has the misfortune to be idle, gets nothing from the labour exchange. In addition the housing conditions in Glasgow are so bad they are difficult to describe. Four-storey tenement buildings, with seven or eight single apartments on each floor, which are bug infested and not fit for human beings to live in. I am the mother of two girls, and, although not as hard hit as many of my class, I felt it my duty to come on this hunger march in order to help those less fortunate than myself.
¹³

On arrival, having joined with other marchers from all across the UK, they would have to physically fight the police in order to access Hyde Park for a rally and, three days later, to battle past the Met's finest in order to present a petition to Parliament.

In 1933, the NUWM organised a hunger march from Glasgow to Edinburgh. When it arrived, it occupied the centre of the capital for
three days and nights. They paraded through the royal palace of Holyrood with their band playing ‘The Internationale' and other socialist tunes, and when the city council refused to provide accommodation, their leader, Harry McShane, said they'd sleep on the pavement of Princes Street, the city's most prestigious thoroughfare.

On the first morning, women marchers blocked the tramway while men shaved using the windows of the big department stores to see their reflections. Tom Ferns remembers: ‘And they couldnae ha' picked a better spot than Princes Street. Under the Conservative Party headquarters, the Liberal Party headquarters and the big luxury hotels, here was hundreds and hundreds o' angry unemployed. Obviously a sight like that is not seen every day, particularly in the capital city of Edinburgh.'
¹⁴
Another marcher, James Allison, said, ‘the police were going mad'.
¹⁵
Yet the Edinburgh police were not keen on inciting a pitched battle, as Hugh Sloan recalled: ‘At dinner time our field-kitchen came along and the police chief told Harry McShane, “This is Princes Street, you can't feed here.” Harry told them, “It was good enough for us to sleep here, it's good enough for us to feed here.”'
¹⁶

The marchers then demanded free transport home. Eventually, the city's chief constable and deputy town clerk told them they would provide transport if McShane guaranteed there would be no more marches to Edinburgh. He refused, and the chief constable, worried about disturbances on the capital's streets, backed down.
¹⁷

The NUWM provided other forms of support. In 1934, it raised over £100 for a children's outing to Battery Park in Greenock that 4,700 children attended, each getting half a pint of milk and a bag of buns on arrival, and an orange and a bag of toffee on departure.
¹⁸
Nor was its work confined to the west of Scotland. In 1935, 3,500 unemployed from Aberdeen travelled to Glasgow for a Scottish hunger march. In 1938, an NUWM branch was set up in Inverness and grew to fifty paying members, who organised a children's Christmas party and representation for those appearing before the Public Assistance Committee. That winter, it organised a hunger march from Inverness to Edinburgh. Tom McKay, then a clerk on the railways, recalled that about a dozen people marched the whole way with others joining for shorter distances or as it passed through a town.
¹⁹

The autumn of 1936 saw a hunger march to London, with the first contingent setting off from Aberdeen. That leg continued south through Dundee and Edinburgh before crossing the border. The second group started from Glasgow. Eventually 700 unemployed marchers reached London, with 100,000 people joining them to demonstrate in the city. A number of the marchers would fight in Spain, including the leader of the Aberdeen contingent, Bob Cooney.

Sectarianism

The 1930s is the decade most associated with sectarianism in Scotland. By 1931 the Catholic population of Scotland had reached 662,000, up from half a million in 1911. Discrimination was already rife, but in the 1930s the Catholic population was the target for worse.
²⁰

Anti-Catholic bigotry is usually associated with the west of Scotland, but in this decade its worst expression occurred in genteel Edinburgh. A former serviceman, John Cormack, formed Protestant Action, and was elected to the city council for South Leith in 1934. At the peak, in 1937, it had nearly 8,000 members in the city.
²¹
That might have been its high point in terms of membership but in terms of the street that was undoubtedly in the summer of 1935.

In April that year, the city council hosted a civic reception for the Catholic Young Men's Society. Prior to it, Cormack told a 3,000-strong protest rally in the Usher Hall: ‘On the 27th day of April, this peaceful, cultured, enlightened city of Edinburgh, that has never known in my lifetime what a real smash-up means, is going to know it that day if this civic reception comes off.'
²²
On the night of the reception, some 10,000 people joined the protest in the High Street. One man jumped on the Catholic archbishop's car and councillors were heckled. The Lord Provost refused to address the reception and shook hands with Cormack, who hailed the raucous rally as a victory and was carried through the crowd. Later they tried to march on the Cowgate, where young Catholic men were ready to defend St Patrick's Church, but police barred their way.