A People's History of Scotland (19 page)

Meanwhile, the government toughened up the Munitions Act and Dilution of Labour Act, making it nigh impossible for a worker to leave one job for another – any who did were subject to military law
— and enforcing the replacement of skilled labour by unskilled. In the interim, the government had also noted the existence of the CWC, and a paper dated 24 November 1915 states: ‘To obtain a reasonably smooth working of the Munition Act, this committee should be smashed.'
³¹
That month, the government tightened wartime laws against strikers and decided to send Lloyd George to address Clydeside munitions workers, hoping to trade on his pre-war reputation as a radical for his opposition to the earlier Boer War in South Africa and his attacks on Tory aristocrats.

However, when Lloyd George visited Weir's and Albion Motors, shop stewards refused to meet him, as agreed with the CWC. At Parkhead Forge the union convenor David Kirkwood broke ranks and did receive him, causing splits in the committee that were papered over for a time. On Christmas Day (not a holiday in Calvinist Scotland), Lloyd George was to address a mass meeting of munitions workers in an attempt to directly appeal to them to rally behind the war effort. The meeting was packed. David Kirkwood took the chair, and introduced the future prime minister: ‘This, fellow workers, is Mr Lloyd George. He has come specially to speak to you and I have no doubt that you will give him a patient hearing. I can assure him that every word he says will be carefully weighed. We regard him with suspicion because every act associated with his name has the taint of slavery about it.'
³²

Defying government orders that there should be no publicity,
Forward
published a comprehensive report of the meeting, with Kirkwood demanding to know whether Lloyd George was prepared to give the workers responsibility for managing the plants, but the minister replied that the workers were not capable of managing factories. Kirkwood responded that the shop stewards had the confidence of the workers, ‘Who runs the workshops now?' Lloyd George replied that giving workers any say in management was a revolutionary proposal and pointed out that Labour leaders now in government, such as Arthur Henderson, who was present, shared responsibility for the Munitions Act. Kirkwood responded, ‘We repudiate that man, he is no leader of ours. If you, Mister Lloyd George, wish to know the mind of the workers, don't go to such
men. If you wish to do away with the discontent in the workshops, then do away with the cause.' At this point, Lloyd George left the meeting, to the accompaniment of ‘The Red Flag' sung by a chorus of shop stewards.
³³

After the debacle of the Christmas Day meeting, the government determined to get revenge. After
Forward
published its account, the paper's offices were raided and new issues were prevented from appearing for a month. As the demand for munitions rose and rose, the government announced in January 1916 that it would enforce ‘dilution'; the engineering shop stewards of the Clyde Workers' Committee pledged to resist this. Nonetheless, within three days, ‘three Dilution Commissioners arrived on the Clyde'.
³⁴

The Munitions Ministry official in charge of labour wanted the CWC leaders and John Maclean deported from the city, but planned to do so if and when a strike against the dilution of labour broke out.
³⁵
The Scottish Director of Munitions was the Glasgow industrialist William Weir, who determined to ram through the scheme in a select number of Clydeside workplaces in a matter of days in order to break the unity of the CWC. The police and army were on hand to deal with trouble, and Weir could call on the powers of the draconian Defence of the Realm Act. But none of this was needed, because David Kirkwood agreed to accept the scheme in return for assurances he would have a say in the running of Parkhead Forge.
³⁶
A member of the ILP, Kirkwood took the view that the interests of the workers he represented were paramount over those of the working class as a whole.

Meanwhile, an article in the CWC paper,
The Worker
, headlined ‘Should the Workers Arm?' provided the authorities with an opportunity to act – even though the author answered his own question ‘No'. Willie Gallacher, John Muir and the paper's publisher, Walter Bell, were arrested and charged with sedition. In response, workers at Weir's, Coventry Ordnance Works, Beardmore's in Dalmuir, John Brown Engineering, Albion Motors, and Barr and Stroud walked out on strike. But Parkhead Forge, where Kirkwood was corresponding with Lloyd George about his ideas for running production, did not. The strike ended when the three men arrested were released on bail.

News that Kirkwood had broken ranks once more in negotiating a dilution scheme at Parkhead Forge led to bitter recriminations among members of the CWC, whose goal had been a Clydeside-wide strike against dilution. Despite Kirkwood's initial actions, the next flashpoint would be at Parkhead Forge when the first women workers arrived on 29 February. Kirkwood wanted them to join the National Federation of Women Workers and he addressed them soon after they started. The next day, management banned him from the women's section, and he later was again banned from entering another department where a dispute had arisen. When the owner, Beardmore, would not back down, the shop stewards voted to strike on 17 March.

The Parkhead strike was joined by strikes at the North British Diesel Engine Works, at Weirs, and another by the gunmakers at Beardmore's in Dalmuir. But resentment at Kirkwood's previous behaviour meant stewards elsewhere did not argue to join the strike. Sensing a victory, the government deported Kirkwood and eight other shop stewards from the striking plants under wartime emergency laws.

On 29 March, at a special tribunal, thirty strikers were fined £5 each, and two days later a big rally was organised on Glasgow Green against the deportations, but the strike had lost momentum and workers were beginning to drift back to work. The CWC had failed to respond to this attack, with leading figures like Gallacher allowing their anger at Kirkwood to get in the way of providing solidarity.

For a year the Clyde was quiet. The biggest strike of the war, which began in Sheffield in May 1917, after the protection against conscription previously provided to skilled workers was lifted, did not cross the border.
³⁷
Scottish historian Christopher Harvie has noted that ‘the government was fortunate' to have broken the CWC before ‘really huge casualty lists came in from the Somme.'
³⁸
But during the demonstrations that took place in 1916, protesters took up the ditty ‘Henry Dubb' penned by James Maxton, who was in jail for refusing to serve:

The movement was not fully broken. In the autumn of 1916, John Maclean's economics classes drew 200 shop stewards each week. They increased over that winter: his Central Halls class had ‘recruited 500 members by November 1917; while the Govan class had 100 members. MacLean conducted three Marxist classes in Fife, and three in the West; while James MacDougall also taught eight classes in Paisley and in Lanarkshire, mainly in the mining communities where he and rank-and-file miners were leading the reform movement within the union, demanding workers control in a socialized industry.'
³⁹
Some 2,000 students attended such classes across Scotland, with 854 signing up in Glasgow.

But opposition to the slaughter in the trenches was growing, and
the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917 found ready support. For the May Day march that year in Glasgow, the
Glasgow Herald
gave a figure of 70,000 participants. A year later it quoted the same number, despite the march taking place on a weekday during work hours. On his release from jail for sedition, Gallacher re-formed the CWC in September 1917, and it made its presence felt in disrupting the government minister Sir Auckland Geddes when he addressed munitions workers, demanding greater output.
⁴⁰

That September, the CWC was also able to call a strike over wages, and while it had to be called off after a few days, they retreated in good order. Subsequently, the government awarded a 12.5 percent pay increase. In November, four women workers at Beardmore's East Hope Street shell factory were victimised for taking part in a go-slow, and the factory stopped, demanding their reinstatement. Their union disowned the strike but the CWC called a solidarity rally on Glasgow Green. The women won reinstatement.

In January 1918, 10,000 shipyard workers struck over pay, and the action spread to engineering plants. James Hinton, a historian of the shop stewards' movement, argues: ‘By January 1918 the Clyde was back in the vanguard of the national movement.'
⁴¹

That same month the Lloyd George government passed the Manpower Bill to increase conscription both into the armed forces and the war industries. A government minister was sent to Glasgow to sell it to workers. He was first shouted down then allowed to speak before a resolution was passed, saying Glasgow and Clydeside would ‘do nothing at all in support of carrying on the war but … everything we can to bring the war to a conclusion'.
⁴²
The resolution was seconded by Jimmy Maxton, and after it was passed, the crowd marched to George Square.

The May Day demonstration of 1918 saw up to 110,000 on the streets, and the rally passed motions in solidarity with revolutionary Russia and the working class of Germany, with whom Britain was still at war.
⁴³

The Red Flag in George Square

As the war came to a close, demobilisation meant that unemployment now rose to 11 percent by February 1919. The Scottish Trades Union Congress had already backed a motion for a thirty-hour week in April 1918. That August, its Parliamentary Committee joined Glasgow Trades Council and the Scottish Advisory Committee of the Labour Party to lobby the Westminster government for a forty-hour week.

The engineering union, the ASE, agreed to a forty-seven-hour week with the engineering employers in January 1919, and this was narrowly approved in a ballot by 36,000 votes to 28,000. But now breakfast had to be eaten before work started because there was no longer a break at 9 a.m. as before, so workers had to get up early to go to work and did not get back any sooner.
⁴⁴

Clydeside shop stewards met and rejected the forty-seven-hour week, electing an eight-man committee to fight for a forty-hour week and to call for industrial action if necessary. Factory gate meetings were held prior to votes being taken at shop-floor meetings in support of a strike call. A further shop stewards' conference took place in Glasgow on 16 January with delegates from all over Scotland. It was reported that well over half the workshops where a vote had been taken were in favour of thirty hours a week, less for a forty-hour week and few for forty-seven hours.
⁴⁵

The ASE responded by attacking the shop stewards for defying a ballot decision, but a strike date was set nonetheless for 27 January. That morning some 40,000 workers responded to the strike call and by the close of the week there were 1,000,000 on strike in Clydeside, where engineering plants and shipyards in Glasgow, Paisley and Dumbarton were solid; and 14,000 on the Firth of Forth, with 8,000 shipyard workers in Leith on strike alongside engineering and printing workers in Edinburgh, Rosyth naval dockyard workers; and another 1,000 in Grangemouth.
⁴⁶

In west Fife a strike that began in Cowdenbeath on 23 January, to demand that demobilised tradesmen be taken back on, quickly spread to Bowhill, Lochgelly and Glencraig pits, with the Fife Miners
Reform Committee co-coordinating the action and raising the demand for a six-hour day and a five-day week. On 30 January, 10,000 miners marched on the official union HQ in Dunfermline, demanding the stoppage be made official, something the union leaders opposed. They called a ballot across the Fife coalfield and secured a narrow majority against the strike.
⁴⁷

In Lanarkshire it was a similar story. On 27 January many miners stopped work despite an appeal from the Scottish Executive of the miners' union not to do so. Pickets spread the strike to Hamilton and Holytown. On the Wednesday afternoon, 1,500 strikers met in Hamilton's public park and rejected appeals from their officials to return to work. Instead, they agreed to stay out and to send a delegation to the union's Lanarkshire executive committee. That evening they rallied outside its offices in Hamilton, occupying them as the crowd sang ‘The Red Flag'. The union was forced to call a strike across the coalfield, and the next day 15,000 miners and supporters marched through Hamilton. On the Saturday, however, the executive took off to Edinburgh, where it met to vote for an end to the action. By the following Tuesday the strike was over. The local Hamilton paper condemned the mass picketing that had been central to the action.
⁴⁸

Mass picketing was a key feature of the Forty-Hour Strike. On the first day of the stoppage, 2,000 workers from the Albion car plant in west Glasgow marched on Barr and Stroud and brought it out. In Dalmuir, Beardmore's was similarly brought out, and the next day John Brown's. On the Tuesday, 5,000 strikers marched through Dumbarton and formed mass pickets at Dennystoun Forge and Babcock and Wilcox, stopping work there. On the Thursday, strikers marched up through the Vale of Leven to bring out the munitions plant in Alexandria.