A People's History of Scotland (32 page)

The dockers were out too, and police reinforcements were rushed into Dundee. On 19 December, 300 men of the Black Watch arrived at the request of the Lord Provost. The strike ended on 24 December after the employers agreed to go to arbitration.

A year later, Mary Brooksbank was herself out on strike, demanding a pay rise. A young woman, dubbed ‘The Lassie wi' the Green Felt Hat', was reported to be going around the mills with a half loaf tied around her neck, and blowing a whistle to pull women out on strike. The strikers then marched to other mills, pulling those out.

Brooksbank was appalled by the loss of friends during World War I and was drawn to those opposing the slaughter, and in 1917 was
inspired by the Russian Revolution. In 1920, as wartime demand for jute dried up, she was made unemployed after standing up to an overseer. At the age of twenty-one, she joined the Communist Party, becoming active in the unemployed movement and helping spread the party's message in the city.
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By 1921 the soup kitchen at Constable Street baths was feeding 1,000 people a day. The unemployed movement organised a protest demanding ‘work or full maintenance'; after it was attacked by police, three days of rioting followed. Brooksbank was charged with using ‘seditious language' after telling a crowd, ‘why die in the midst of plenty', when all that lay between them and food for their families was ‘plate glass'. According to the press, she was repeating a remark of John Maclean, knowing full well he had been sent to jail for saying it.
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She would serve the first of her three jail sentences.

In 1922, Mary received three months' training as a domestic servant on a government scheme. She was subsequently sent to Coldstream, in Berwickshire, as a maid in a hotel, and then moved to work as a domestic servant in Glasgow, where she attended one of the last meetings held by John Maclean, who left a deep impression on her. By 1924 she had returned to Dundee, where on 3 October that year she married Ernest Brooksbank, a widower, a journeyman tailor by trade.

In 1927, Mary Brooksbank attended a mass rally against Bolshevism in the city's Caird Hall. During a lull she demanded to know why the organisers had not protested the mass slaughter of 1914–1918. She was immediately grabbed by police and taken out to a police van. The next day, she was fined three guineas.
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Mary escaped prison when she and three male members of what was now the National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM) went as a delegation to the council but, after being told they'd be heard, were refused admittance. Angry, they burst into the council meeting only to be arrested by police. The men were fined and Mary was ordered to be kept under police observation for two weeks.

In September 1931, some 15,000 people joined a NUWM march to Albert Square over government benefit cuts. As it dispersed it was attacked by mounted police. Looking back, Brooksbank said, ‘I still recall a woman cowering into the Exchange doorway, an old man lying with
blood streaming from his head … I can still see the young mother cowering with her baby beneath the arches of the Albert Institute.'
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She was one of six organisers arrested and kept in custody for three weeks. They were brought to trial only after the matter was raised in Parliament.

In court she was asked by Sheriff Malcolm to sit alongside him because he had heard she suffered from deafness. Typically, she is alleged to have replied: ‘That'll be the last thing on earth I would do, sit wi' you.'
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She was jailed in Perth Prison.

In October 1934, Brooksbank was one of the organisers of a NUWM march to Forfar to lobby the county council, with the Dundee marchers being joined by contingents from Blairgowrie, Montrose, Ferryden and Arbroath. A 25,000-strong rally in March 1935 waved off a Hunger March that had marched from Aberdeen, Fraserburgh and Peterhead on route to Glasgow under the slogan ‘Down with the Slave Act'.

On her release she formed a branch of the Working Women's Guild, and her other activities included selling the
Daily Worker
and other party literature, picketing the parish council's poorhouse for better conditions and organizing street demonstrations against the Means Test investigators. In 1932, she was instrumental in launching the guild's ‘charter', which included a demand for a reduction in rents. She twice stood in Dundee town council elections as a candidate for the Communist Party, but was not elected.
⁷¹

Her disillusionment with the Communist Party came after listening to women party members who'd visited Russia. As a result she was labelled a ‘Trotskyist' and expelled. Its doubtful she'd ever met a Trotskyist, but one of her former comrades who argued for her expulsion was later to claim in an interview, ‘She was no Trotskyist, but she might as well have been one for all the trouble she caused.'
⁷²

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)'.

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.
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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.

B
y 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.'
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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.'
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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!'
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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.'
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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The occupation lasted into 1972, when the plant was converted into a small industrial estate that provided some jobs.
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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.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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'.