A People's History of Scotland (24 page)

Far from the strike weakening prior to the TUC decision to abandon it on 12 May, a Ministry of Labour report on Glasgow that was written just before the strike was called off, noted: ‘There is not the slightest sign of any break whatever in the strike. In fact many of those now working wish to join in.'
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One Scottish ILP activist in Perth expressed the hopes of those taking part: ‘There's never been anything like it. If the blighters o' leaders here … dinna let us down we'll hae the capitalists crawlin' on their bellies in a week. Oh boy, it's the revolution at last.'
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In contrast, J. R. Clynes, head of the General and Municipal Workers, said: ‘I am not in fear of the capitalist class. The only class I fear is my own.'
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On 12 May 1926, the TUC General Council visited Downing Street to announce its decision to call off the strike, provided that the government offered a guarantee that there would be no victimisations. The government responded that it had ‘no power to compel employers to take back every man who had been on strike'. The TUC agreed to end the dispute without such an agreement.

When news came through that the TUC General Council in London had called off the strike there was shock. John McArthur in Methil recalls:

When the strike was called off after nine days of growing power and organisation, we couldn't believe it. We were stunned. Each day it went on we had gained in confidence. We had new and marvellous experiences in struggle. We had mass meetings every night, wonderful meetings, five and six thousand strong. We were full of vim and go. We were spreading out, too, sending speakers to Perth and other places.
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The capitulation would cost workers dear. In Glasgow, Outram Press, which published the
Glasgow Herald
and
Evening Times
, went non-union, even banning its journalists from having dinner with union members. From Edinburgh an engineering union official bewailed that ‘immediately after the very precipitate and badly arranged calling off of the strike, we are in a sea of trouble in
connection with the complaints of members who had failed to secure reinstatement'.
⁸⁵
Across the UK, some 3,000 strikers were brought to court for actions undertaken during the General Strike; about half for incitement. Victimisation of union activists was common and many never worked in their industry again.

The capitulation by the TUC was the green light for employers to go on the offensive for the next decade and more. Meanwhile, the miners were left to fight on alone throughout that summer.

In west Fife, the Council of Action set up soup kitchens. John McArthur recalled:

In each area we would organise a kitchen committee elected by popular vote. Each committee had to have a kitchen convenor and assistant convenor … We had an organisation to go round the gardens getting whatever produce there was there. We had people out round the farmers begging, borrowing or stealing tatties and the rest. Some responded very well. Fish merchants gave us box after box of kippers. From bakers we had rolls for the morning. We were able to provide three meals daily, more than people got in ‘normal times'.
⁸⁶

It was a good summer, but as the lockout went on the strikers faced further problems. The shoes of strikers and their families were falling apart. The Council of Action organised shoe repairs and haircuts, and distributed the penny coins needed to feed gas meters.

The poem ‘The General Strike', probably written by Bob Young of Bothwellhaugh, catches the spirit of that summer:

To maintain morale, miners' gala days were held and bands played at concert parties. As a participant, one young melodeon player and striking miner laid the basis for a long career as a musician and band leader, Jimmy Shand from East Wemyss.

John McArthur, a Communist from Buckhaven, was elected to the parish council. Single men and the women who worked at the pit head were refused any assistance, so it was decided to protest to the council at Thornton. Three thousand women and men demanded access to the poorhouse, but there being no room, assistance was paid.
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Hugh Reynolds, from Plean in Stirlingshire, recalled: ‘Thursdays were special days. We had mince and tatties on Thursdays. All the other days, it was bone soup. The church in Plean gave us the use of the mission hall, and we used the boiler at the back to make soup. You would go up with a can and, according to the numbers of your children, you would have a plateful; it was fair to everybody. Some of the farmers were very good and gave us tatties. But others weren't so good and wouldn't give us any.'
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Jock Kane recounted the solidarity shown for the striking miners:

We used to get all sorts of prizes from chocolate firms, and McVities would send us a box of biscuits here and there. We'd groups which went out to Edinburgh and surrounding towns selling raffle tickets.

I spent six weeks in Dundee and I went to Edinburgh. When you knocked on the door regular on Friday night or Monday or Tuesday morning, eventually they'd come to accept you just like the insurance man or debt collector. They'd have their tuppence there, or their four pence if they were taking two tickets, and you'd sell them a raffle ticket and they were there, they were waiting on you coming, very poor people.

I'll never forget it. I went one Saturday night to deliver a prize – a box of McVities biscuits – at one of these tenements in Edinburgh. We always had to fetch the tin back because that was one of the conditions – McVities gave us a tin and took away an empty tin, so we always had to fetch the tin back. I went to this house to tell the woman: ‘You have won this prize.' I went in and there were rags in the corner and another woman stretched out and two or three kids running about, just little ragged vests on them, and there was a table and a chair and nothing else in that bloody room, you know. But they would still find that tuppence.
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The Glasgow ILP ran ten of its own communal kitchens and assisted another two, and raised in total almost £3,500 for the miners.
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In West Calder at the end of August, a Labour councillor, Sarah Moore, known as ‘Ma Moore', led a sit-down protest lasting several days over the council stopping relief payments to locked-out miners and their families. One evening police intervened, insisting that the good-natured crowd clear the road. When one man was pushed to the pavement and suffered a bleeding head wound, anger at police heavy-handedness boiled over. Police drew batons and in response the protesters overturned two vehicles. Frightened by such scenes, the council immediately met with Moore and promised to restore relief payments the next day.
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Special constables were recruited and by September parts of Lanarkshire and Fife were under virtual martial law. One night in Glencraig in Fife, police ran amok, batonning anyone they caught, including women and children. The mining companies evicted strikers from company-owned homes and brought in blacklegs instead.
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In the end hunger won, and in November the mining union ordered a return to work on company terms.

Towards the Abyss

As the decade drew to a close, Scotland was in a weak position economically even before the onset of the global recession that resulted from the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The 1926 defeat brought with it the Tory
government of Stanley Baldwin, which was thoroughly anti-working-class. The trade unions were on the back foot and retreated from confrontation in the wake of the General Strike. The Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald was elected to office in 1929, desperate to stress its moderation and its commitment to standard, free-market economics. In 1929, MacDonald would make it into 10 Downing Street just as the country and the world toppled into an abyss.

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REBEL LIVES: HELEN CRAWFURD

Helen Crawfurd (1877–1954) was born Helen Jack on 9 September 1877 in the Gorbals. Her family moved to Ipswich when she was quite young and she was educated in England before the family returned to Glasgow when she was seventeen.

Her family was intensely religious and at home she took part in discussions about justice and equality. In her early twenties she married a Church of Scotland minister, the Rev. Alexander Montgomerie Crawfurd of the Brownfield Church in Anderston. The marriage was a happy one, despite a significant age difference between them, with the Rev. Crawfurd holding strong temperance and anti-militarist views. He died in 1914, leaving Helen to concentrate on her political work.

In 1910, Helen Crawfurd had joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and two years later she travelled to London for a mass window-smashing operation, in which she targeted the Ministry of Education, receiving a one-month prison sentence. Of this she said: ‘Participation in the raid was right. If Christ could be a Militant so could I.'
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Under the terms of what was called the ‘Cat and Mouse Act', Crawfurd was barred from further suffragette activity but, undeterred, she was one of the stewards trying to stop Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested when she spoke in Glasgow in March 1914. The next day, she took part in a protest outside the army recruiting office, smashing two windows and being arrested and sent to Duke Street Prison for a month. Crawfurd along with other suffragettes went on hunger strike and the WPSU organised protests outside the jail. After just eight days, she was released.

Crawfurd continued to take part in the fight for women's votes. The royal family was due to visit Perth in 1914, and as they paraded through the streets Crawfurd was arrested when she tried to approach their carriages. After five days on hunger strike she was again released, but she returned to Perth that summer to address a rally protesting the incarceration of two fellow suffragettes. She was arrested again for making ‘inflammatory remarks', and returned to the prison for three days, during which she refused food.

She was sent to prison for a fourth time following a bomb attack in Glasgow's Botanic Gardens, and went on hunger strike once more, securing her release after just three days.

Crawfurd joined the Independent Labour Party after hearing George Lansbury speak at a public meeting: ‘Though never formally associated with the WSF [Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers Socialist Federation], Crawfurd seemed to revive its language of “social soviets” and housewives' as well as workers' and soldiers' councils. Claiming that “a housewife” had not the fear of getting the sack, as the men did', and that ‘far better rebels would be made out of the women than out of some of the men.'
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On her decision to join the ILP, Crawfurd explained, ‘Skilled creators of the city's wealth were living in squalor, in hovels unfit for human beings. I began to think that there must be something wrong with a system that could allow this.'
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The fact that her husband's parish covered the docks clearly influenced her: ‘coming into contact with Dockland life, and human misery indescribable … the living conditions appalled me, a lover of beauty. It struck me as ugly, inhuman and cruel.'
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Alongside Mary Barbour, Agnes Dollan, Jessie Stephens and other women, Helen Crawfurd was key in organising the 1915 Glasgow rent strike against profiteering landlords. She wrote later: ‘The housing conditions in Glasgow in 1914 were appalling, the Labour Party before the war initiated a Glasgow Women's Housing Association … [it] took up this issue [rent increases] and in the working class districts, committees were formed to resist these increases in rent. Cards, oblong in shape, were printed with the words: RENT STRIKE. WE ARE NOT REMOVING, and placed in the windows of the houses where rent increases were demanded.'
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When World War I broke out in August 1914, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, Helen Crawfurd's former comrades in the struggle for women's suffrage, suspended the fight for the vote and became vehemently pro-war. However, Crawfurd would have no part of that. The ILP was active against the war, holding a ‘No Conscription' demonstration in Glasgow in December 1915, drawing 7,000 people. Crawfurd spoke alongside Emmanuel Shinwell, Willie Gallacher and John Maclean.
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Earlier in 1915, alongside another leading ILP member, Agnes Dollan, Helen helped form a branch of the Women's International League in Glasgow, and the following year helped to organise a Women's Peace Conference in the city. The conference took the decision to launch the Women's Peace Crusade (WPC), which began its activity in 1917 with Helen Crawfurd as its Honorary Secretary. The WPC held pickets, protests and meetings across Scotland against war and conscription. Crawfurd was twice arrested for her anti-war work.
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That year she also rallied in support of the October Revolution in Russia.

Two years later, she was part of the British delegation to the Conference of the Women's International League for Peace at Zurich in 1919, which included Ethel Snowden (a prominent Labour Party member), Charlotte Despard (suffragette and Irish republican), Ellen Wilkinson (a future left-wing Labour MP), Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (a central WPSU leader before her expulsion by Christabel Pankhurst in 1912) and others. The delegation chose Helen to deliver the report from Britain to the conference.