A People's History of Scotland (29 page)

In the inter-war years the hopes of a Scottish Renaissance seemed to have been dashed. MacDiarmid was ekeing out a precarious existence and had fallen out badly with his friend Edwin Muir. In the
post-war years his stock rose and a new generation of writers and artists celebrated his influence, which casts a long shadow over Scotland's cultural life.

Central to MacDiarmid's poetry is the very identity of Scotland, and that is what ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' returns to again and again. As his biographer Alan Bold points out: ‘Much of his poetry is a dialogue between Chris Grieve, the postman's son, and Hugh MacDiarmid, the self-appointed saviour of Scotland.'
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There can be no denying his nationalism or that his view of the class struggle tended to identify the bourgeoisie as the
English
upper class, ignoring their Scottish allies. But for MacDiarmid freedom involves more than national independence. It is about human liberation, as he wrote in ‘To Circumjack Cencrastus':

MacDiarmid's tombstone, in his hometown of Langholm, carries this extract from ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle':

There could be no finer epitaph.

Scotland's War

T
housands of Scots were on the front line during World War II, but Scotland itself was not. Even after Hitler overran Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940, and then the Low Countries and France in May and June, Scotland was too far removed to be the object of sustained attack. Britain faced the threat of invasion that summer, with the crucial fight being over who controlled the skies above London and south-east England, the Battle of Britain. When the Luftwaffe failed to establish dominance they switched to the night bombing attacks of the Blitz, in a failed bid to demoralise the civilian population of the imperial capital.

But Scotland did not escape the bombing, nor horrific civilian deaths, though not on the scale of what London suffered. This does not mean that Scotland was not central to Britain's war effort. The Clyde was where the cross-Atlantic convoys that brought badly needed men, armaments, raw materials and food from North America were marshalled. The Orkneys was home to the Home Fleet, and Invergordon and Rosyth were important naval bases. Much of the exiled Polish army was based here before going to Italy and France, while the Highlands was used as a training ground for special forces
and the Commandos. Scottish shipyards, factories, mines and farms worked at full stretch, and industry was working overtime to produce armaments. Above all, Scots served in every theatre of war.

For Scots, as for so many others in Britain and across the globe, Hitler had to be stopped. That made this war different from its predecessor. Some were aware that Churchill was fighting to preserve the British Empire, but they were, nevertheless, prepared to serve. Fifty thousand Scots were killed or wounded during World War II, whereas the casualty figure for the 1914–18 war totalled nearly 150,000. That is in part a reflection of the fact that the wartime government of Winston Churchill was aware that there could be no repeat of the horrendous casualty figures of twenty years before and did its utmost to avoid such high rates.

On 1 September 1939, children and their mothers were evacuated from Glasgow and Clydebank, Edinburgh, Rosyth and Dundee, fearful that the declaration of war would be followed by the carpet-bombing of strategic towns and cities. They were sent to rural areas and towns believed to be safe from bombing. The arrival of these children brought some of the realities of working-class life to the middle-class inhabitants of the communities that received them. In his history of Britain at war, Angus Calder recounts the story of one Glasgow mum who admonished her six-year-old for urinating, saying, ‘You dirty thing, messing up the lady's carpet. Go and do it in the corner.' Calder points out: ‘It throws light on the Glasgow tenements, where one broken-down lavatory might be shared (or ignored) by thirty people, and it was the cleanest families who refused to use the communal closets.'
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He points out, too, that half the people of Glasgow did not have a bath.

Wartime food rationing, however, benefitted the poor. Access to a better diet meant the number of children dying in their first year fell by 27 percent during the war years and the average height of Glaswegian thirteen-year-olds increased by two inches. People were eating better because there were jobs and because incomes per head in Scotland doubled from £86 in 1938 to £170 in 1944.
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Nevertheless, the reality of those conditions, which helped ensure class warfare on the home front, was never far away.

The fear of a repeat of the labour and rent strikes of the first war weighed heavily on the minds of the Churchill administration, and
Clydeside was an area of key concern. Accordingly, despite being a High Tory, Churchill was prepared to effectively cede control of the home front to his coalition partner, Labour, as well as once more relying on the trade union leaders to hold the cap on strikers. He appointed the former editor of
Forward
, Tom Johnston, as Secretary of State for Scotland. Johnston asked for and got approval to form a Council of State, and in 1942 he set up a broad-based Scottish Council of Industry, which helped boost the number of government contracts for Scotland.

When Johnston discovered that special hospitals in the Clyde Basin, built to treat casualties of aerial bombing, were lying unused, he ordered them to treat everyone for free; it was a nascent NHS. Later in the war he created the Hydro-Electricity Board, which used the waterpower of the Highlands to generate electricity.
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Even before the landslide election victory that would return Labour to office in 1945, ushering in the welfare state, Johnston was putting many such measures in place.

Though Scotland was spared the worst of Hitler's air assault, there were still attacks on towns key to the British war effort. On the nights of 13 and 14 March 1941, German bombers attacked Clydebank, a major centre for shipbuilding and armaments. The first attack was made up of 260 bombers, dropping high-explosive bombs, incendiary bombs and landmines over a nine-hour assault. Much of the town was set alight and people were trapped in collapsed buildings. The following night, 200 bombers returned in a seven-and-a-half-hour attack. Over the two days, 528 civilians were killed, and more than 617 people were seriously injured. Out of Clydebank's 47,000 inhabitants, 35,000 were left homeless. One survivor recalled:

What I'll never forget as long as I live was the noise and the screams and cries when I was taken to the First-Aid post … This was something you couldn't believe … the screams were terrible … people had lost arms and legs … some people were doing what they could to help but it was just too much for them. Oh … what a catalogue of injuries … people broken, smashed and burned … and others dead without so much as a scratch on their bodies … killed by blast.

Another survivor was in an air-raid shelter, playing cards with two pals, his brother, mother and father also there. He never heard the bomb that hit them: ‘I felt the wall on my back … saw my brother being blasted through the door … my pals … blasted to bits … the concrete roof caved in smashing into my mothers chest … crushing my father.' He was buried in the rubble with the fire blazing and his dead friends on top of him for eight and a half hours before being dug out: ‘I was paralysed from the waist down … my mother was killed … my friends were killed … my father and brother survived … all the other people in the adjoining shelters were killed'.
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On 7 May, the Luftwaffe hit Greenock, a key port for the wartime convoys. After a bomb hit a distillery, setting it ablaze, the flames acted as a beacon for the other bombers. An air-raid warden recalled that the whole town was ablaze. Bombs were still dropping in the early hours. That night, the civil authorities had to deal with more than 200 corpses as the warden recalled: ‘At the mortuary at Princes Pier we had the unclaimed bodies of eight infants not any of them older than a year or eighteen months. We photographed them all. They were never claimed and we buried them privately in the Greenock Cemetery.'
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Wartime Strikes

In the summer of 1940, Parliament passed Order 1305 outlawing strikes and setting up a National Arbitration Tribunal to resolve any industrial dispute. Although strikes were unlawful, the government took a much more
softly, softly
approach than in 1914–18. There were just thirty-eight wartime prosecutions under Order 1305 in England and Wales, but seventy-one in Scotland, mainly concerned with labour unrest on the Clyde.
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The temper there was evident in March 1940 when Beardmore workers walked out over the sacking of two men, and Albion Motors struck over the employment of a non-union worker.
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Even as the Battle of Britain was reaching its climax that September, a major strike erupted over the sacking of the union convenor at British
Auxiliaries, lasting most of the month before the workers started drifting back.
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These strikes were both illegal under wartime legislation and unofficial because the trade union leaders had agreed to police those laws. The Labour Party in government from May 1940 onwards was utterly opposed to such actions. However, strikes were supported by the Communist Party until June 1941, when, following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, they switched to opposing them, in line with Moscow's wishes that they help the war effort. The ILP and more radical groups continued to support workers taking action.

In 1942, a number of strikes in Glasgow occurred when boilermakers at the Queens Park works of North British Locomotives walked out and stayed out despite the best efforts of the Glasgow District Committee of the engineering union. Women workers at Rolls-Royce Hillington struck for union recognition. Two years later, workers at Albion Motors were out for six weeks.
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Agnes MacLean, born in Scotland Street in Kinning Park, started at Rolls-Royce Hillington at the outset of war. Women were doing skilled work using sophisticated equipment but were denied equal pay with men doing the same or even less skilled work:

… something had to be done about it, I mean we were really very angry about it, and in 1941 we did this big fight about it, the women's rate, and we were wanting at least the same grade as the unskilled, the labourer … so we fought for the male labourers rate, and and we didn't get it, of course, and we went on strike, and at that time there was law which stated that you can't go on strike because everybody was helping the war effort … it was really spontaneous and we just one day got on our coats and walked out and each department as it walked out was walking through each section, the girls just put on their coats and joined … we did put up a bit of a fight and eventually they had to look at it and they had to get some recognition for the male labourers' rate.
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In 1943, however, the women discovered that the company was not honouring the agreement. And so in July they threatened a strike.
The engineering union intervened (they had started to admit women into membership) and a Court of Inquiry was set up. In October, angry at the slow pace of negotiation, the women walked out, ‘taking with them most of the men in the plant', as Agnes recalled, adding that ‘the men were absolutely fantastic'.
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The strike involved some 16,000 workers, making it the biggest in wartime Britain, and lasted nearly a month, threatening to spread across Clydeside. Agnes MacLean was again involved, despite joining the Communist Party two years earlier. The strikers won though the settlement fell short of full equal pay.
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Agnes MacLean succeeded in finally negotiating full equal pay in 1952, long before other plants in Scotland.
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In 1943, a strike at the Cardowan pit spread across Lanarkshire. The president of the Scottish miners' union, Abe Moffat, recalled that the colliers struck unofficially over the unfair transfer of a miner to another job. In response, the authorities took thirty-four miners to court, where some were fined but nine refused to pay and were jailed. The strike spread across the Lanarkshire coalfield.
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Moffat arranged a meeting with the nine men in Barlinnie Jail, urging them to pay their fines in the interest of the war effort. Eventually they voted eight to one to do so. As Moffat said, ‘I had to admire the lad who put his hand up against.'
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Under Tom Johnston's administration Labour must have felt any prospects of a nationalist revival had been dashed. Full employment was back, Johnston was putting welfare reforms in place and could reassure doubters that if this was not Home Rule, Scotland was governed from his office, the impressive new St Andrew's House on the side of Edinburgh's Calton Hill.

To add to this, the SNP suffered a split in 1942 when John MacCormick quit after he was outvoted over his proposal to launch a cross-party national convention to secure Home Rule. This had brought to a head the division between those who set the creation of a Scottish parliament as key, and those who wanted nothing but independence. That party conference voted in the pro-independence Douglas Young as chair. He was on bail after being sentenced to twelve months in jail for resisting conscription on the grounds that it
was against the terms of the 1707 Treaty of Union. The party had already taken an anti-war stance prior to the outbreak of World War II hostilities. The dominant mood was one of pacifism, but there was also fringe nationalism that hoped a Nazi victory would bring Scottish independence.

Yet this anti-war stance did the SNP no harm. When Young contested the Kirkcaldy Burghs by-election in February 1944, he captured 42 percent of the vote. In another by-election the following year, the SNP gained its first MP in Motherwell – the Tories and Liberals did not stand, under a wartime agreement to give the sitting party a free run. The well-known scientist John Boyd Orr also took the Scottish Universities seat on a nationalist platform. It was a shortlived triumph because Labour re-took Motherwell that summer in their landslide Westminster general election win.
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The nationalist revival had set down a marker for the future.

Post-War Reconstruction

The 1945 Westminster general election saw Labour returned with a landslide; however, the swing to Labour in Scotland was the lowest in the UK – 9.8 percent compared to 17.5 percent in London, 11.4 percent in Wales and a UK average of 12 percent.
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That October, at the Scottish Labour conference in Musselburgh, Clement Attlee scolded the delegates for the party's poor performance in the general election.
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There was a long-term reason for this poor showing. Labour membership in Scotland was lower proportionally than in England, with party constituencies there averaging 754 members while Scottish ones averaged 410. In its Glasgow stronghold Labour was almost moribund at a grass-roots level. Its strength lay in the party machine, not in a mass membership – the party apparatus distrusted what members might vote for – with the result that the city had few leftwing MPs and none of any flair. That was less the case elsewhere in the country.
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