It was commonly said that the First World War came like a bolt from the blue. That was true for the mass of the population, but it was not true for the government of the day or for the socialists.
In 1912, as I remember, a tremendous campaign was waged by the government for what was then called National Service. The chief propagandist for this was Lord Roberts, “Bobs”. who of course was reputed to have won the South African war. It is never the common soldiers who win wars. Lord Roberts did a tour of the whole country with all the biggest halls in the big towns put at his disposal. When he came to Scotland I followed him around, holding meetings immediately after him. My meetings were naturally in the open air, but nevertheless we got big audiences. We were quite clear in our minds what the intention of the government was and impressed upon the people that the demand for national service was only the introduction to military conscription, no matter how they dressed it up. The workers would be conscripted for war when war came.
On the 4th of August 1914, war against Germany was declared. I spent the following two years, up until the time of my arrest, speaking on anti-war platforms against the prosecution of the war. In this period it was very difficult, but our little organisation in Dundee, and in a number of places throughout Scotland, kept going from the first day war was declared.
Our job was made more difficult by the division in the labour movement. The members of the Labour Party were at sixes and sevens in their attitude to the war. The Labour Party then was described as a federation, consisting of trade unions, trades councils, socialist societies and local parties. The co-operatives were not, at that time, a political party, nor was there individual membership of the Labour Party. That came in 1918. In the Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party claimed 60,000 members, the British Socialist Party 10,000 members and the Fabians 2,000 members. A variety of socialist societies like the Clarion Fellowship, the Church Socialist League, the Herald League, etc., were with the Second International, but with the outbreak of the war, and despite excellent decisions on international solidarity passed before war was declared, the Second International was torn to tatters.
Of the press, the Daily Citizen and the Daily Herald cracked up either before the war or in 1914, and then the Herald became a weekly. Other weeklies were the Labour Leader, Justice, the Clarion, New Age, New Statesman, the Railway Review and a number of small local weeklies run mostly by the I.L.P. There was the Irish Worker run by Connolly and Larkin in Dublin. There were fifty monthlies and a number of trade union journals. But the vast mass of the material published was reformist. Little of it was written from the Marxist standpoint of scientific socialism, although many anti-war articles continued to find a space.
Roughly speaking, on the first real test for socialist internationalism, the red flags turned to tartan with the complete collapse of the Second International and the triumph of the right-wing pro-war people in the British Labor Movement. In Scotland, the I.L.P. called a truce, although a number of their members continued to conduct anti-war propaganda. Forward, the I.L.P. paper Tom Johnstone’s rag-bag I used to call it–had a peculiar line. One writer, who wrote under the pseudonym of “Rob Roy’ was for the war lock, stock and barrel, yet Tom Johnstone and others confined themselves to exposures of the kind of thing that comes up in any war-paying too much for guns, not getting good guns for the money paid, and so on.
On the 4th August, the day on which war was declared. I was at a meeting in Peterhead speaking for the Prohibition and Reform Party. The meeting was on the links facing the prison and anyone who couldn’t make a good socialist speech looking at that view didn’t know anything about socialism. I was quite a popular speaker in Peterhead because I had made it my job to become acquainted with the fishermen’s problems. The Peterhead fishermen had what they called a Parliament, which they held on the dockside. A good democratic practice that could well be emulated in many places at the present time. This Peterhead Parliament had endured for over 100 years. I used to go down to the dockside and listen to the parliamentary discussion, and many things I learned,
both in policy and procedure. Because of my interest in their affairs I was always a welcome visitor.
We had a very big meeting on the links that day and I was just getting into my stride when I was drowned out by the music of a passing band.
“What on earth’s that?” I said.
“It’s the Naval Reserve going to the station,” came the reply from the audience.
Of course in most fishing centres there were a good number of men of the Naval Reserve. They got a retainer, which added to their income and acted as a sweet little pill to recruiting. I stopped the meeting and we all followed the band and the reserves to the station. Wives and mothers were weeping, but most people didn’t know what it was all about. Wars are always sprung on the people. They don’t know their enemies until they are told. They certainly are not allowed to pick their enemies, otherwise a lot of people would disappear. The band was from the Salvation Army and I always remember the tune, “Lead Kindly Light”. Where they were being led I tried to tell them when we resumed the meeting on the links.
In the evening we held another meeting in the Fish Market, which was crowded despite the rain. My chairman was a fisherman called Mitchell, the first fisherman socialist and rationalist I ever met. A very clever man, who according to Dr. Williamson, superintendent of the fish hatchery Aberdeen, was one of the best scholars in marine zoology he had ever had. Mitchell worked on the trawlers, was torpedoed during the war and lost. I remember the introduction to my speech that night. I said: “Whatever else may transpire in the coming war, you will all learn in the course of it or in its aftermath that it is a capitalist war. It is not worth sacrificing the bones of your domestic cat, or your pet canary, even less those of your husbands, brothers and sons.”
When war was declared, many of the lower-paid workers volunteered, which was natural enough because a soldier’s pay was better than a labourer’s. It also had an appeal to the wives because their army separation allowance came regularly, whereas sometimes the wages didn’t. But in the main the artisans and better-paid workers stayed at the work bench, and it was here in the factories and in the industrial field that the government’s problems began to show.
There were several threats of strikes in 1914, but the call came for industrial truce. The right-wing leaders of the unions tried hard to hold the workers in check, the slogan being “The country is in danger’, but they never tried to explain what part of the country the workers actually owned. I don’t know of any honest working man who got anything out of the war.
The industrial truce meant handcuffing the workers. In July 1915 came the Munitions of War Act which meant that it was a penal offence to leave your work without the consent of your employer, and, worse, also a penal offence to refuse to take a new job, whatever the rate of pay. Offenders against the Act could appeal to the Munitions Tribunals where the chairman had the final say. No appeal against his decision could be accepted. There was the dilution of labour and imported labor imposed by the government with the assistance of the trade union leaders. Then came the rent increases and the steep rise in the cost of living. The militants had certainly plenty to battle against.
As the war proceeded, the lefts in the labour movement began to fight back, particularly in the workshop. Industrial unionism, a principle which had been gaining ground in industry for some years, began to find a real practical expression. Best known were the Workers’ Committees on the Clyde, the formation and activity of which are graphically described in Willie Gallacher’s book Revolt on the Clyde and in his Last Memoirs. These grew out of the shop stewards movement, which early in the war was operating as a parallel force with the district committees and local branches.
As the months passed, the war became less and less popular, and the anti-war meetings better appreciated and better attended. Naturally the position of a speaker was very difficult because we often had in the audience people stricken with anguish through the loss of husbands or sons. One also had to fight against the clever official attitude to the war. “We are against war in general but not this particular one. We are not to blame for this war, it was forced on us by the Germans in their lust for expansion” and so on. This was the main stock-in-trade of the Labour people.
The capitalist need for labour meant that the doors of national and regional committees were opened to Labour men and women. They were used in recruiting campaigns and helped to get conscription accepted. They helped to organise the demonstrations with brass bands, pipe bands, flute bands, popular singers, variety artists and top spellbinders like Ben Tillet and Bottomley. The latter was all for a business man’s government and himself made good business out of it. He was not only one of the top speakers at the recruiting meetings, but one of the best paid.
In politics there was the usual intrigue. The position at the front was not too good. We, of course, had the world’s best generals and the best armies; we always have; but for some unknown reason we were retreating. So Lloyd George
squeezed out Asquith because he was too tame, which was no doubt true because he was a man somewhat above the battle. He was a lawyer with a fine gift of words, who in the constituency of East Fife could hold his constituents enthralled with the necessity of changing the kitchen arrangements in the House of Commons. All very well in its way, but not good enough for a main post in a capitalist war cabinet.
On 7th December 1916, Lloyd George became prime minister and secured the support of Conservative, Labour and about half of the Liberal M.P.s in the House. Bonar Law and Balfour, much to everyone’s surprise, agreed to serve under Lloyd George. The prosecution of the war was taken out of the hands of the cabinet and entrusted to a war council of five, headed by Lloyd George himself. Henderson, the Labour leader, was a member of the war council, being a Minister without Portfolio. Another Labour leader, Barnes, was Pensions Minister, a post held by Henderson in the preceding Asquith coalition.
Unfortunately they did not go in on their own but took the Labour Party with them. “Prosecute the war to end war!””Fight for a land fit for heroes to live in!’ are samples of the slogans that began to be propagated in the labour movement. There were oceans of condemnation for German imperialists and none for their British counterparts: but that came as the casualty lists grew bigger and bigger.
The volunteers began to dry up, so the Derby Scheme was introduced. This was named after Lord Derby, its initiator. Fighting for his country meant a lot to Lord Derby, who owned a very large slice of it. In this scheme men who had not already volunteered could attest themselves as ready to enlist and were given a khaki armlet to put on their sleeve so that people would know they were patriots although not yet in the firing line. None of them had any desire to be there because it was being forced home to them every day that war in the trenches was no picnic but a deadly business in the slaughter of human beings who did not know what the war was about. As the volunteers dried up there came the recruitment of special battalions. There were sportsmen’s battalions and, for the smaller men, bantam battalions. I said at the time that if the war lasted long enough they would be recruiting canary battalions.
The capitalist capacity to divide and conquer operated in every field to try and win the acceptance of the Military Service Acts. Single men versus married men; big business men against small business men; the indispensable workers against the dispensable. The times I have sat at the tribunals and watched managers of jute works come in with about a dozen workers to state their case. Dispensable or indispensable? The workers were never asked their opinions. They had no right to an opinion. The manager had a right to an opinion, the tribunal had a right to an opinion, in fact they said they had the most right and used it too; and if they were a Court of Appeal they knew their job was to turn down the appeal, which they invariably did. Men must be found for the front, and no trick to achieve that end was left out.
The Military Service Acts brought the big fight against conscription. In the true British tradition, unity was scorned-not one organisation but a whole number were in the struggle. There was the Anti-Conscription League, mainly fathered by the trade unions; the No-Conscription Fellowship; the Fellowship of Reconciliation; the Society of Friends. There were Socialist objectors, Christian
objectors, Quaker objectors. Objection was the word that counted and the government had a great objection to any kind of objector. The conscientious objectors were quite voluble in their objection to the war and the Christian objectors did valuable work in their objection to conscription. Naturally the official leaders of the church did not take that line. They are part of the establishment of capitalist governments, and as a consequence have the job of bringing in God on the side of the establishment they are working for. This is covered up with beautiful language, texts from both the Old and New Testaments, and for them it is quite easy to justify service for war, just as it is easy to warrant resistance to war. You pay your money and take your choice. Well, you get your Bible and take your choice anyway.
In the case of the conscientious objector it was the refusal to serve that was the important thing, not the opinions held against war. Refusal to serve was penal and you were entitled to be treated as an enemy.
In 1915 the local organiser of the Scottish Horse and Motormen’s Union was called up and the job fell vacant. I applied for it and got it, the pay being 30s a week. This gave me the opportunity to do my work during the day and attend anti-war meetings in the evening. It also meant I got back into the Trades Council as a delegate and was able to play a part there against conscription. We had quite big meetings in Dundee at the time, in the Albert Square, and sometimes, in bad weather, indoors. At the Square a number of forces men
would drift into the audience, men from the Black Watch, the Camerons or Argylls and often a sailor or two, so one had to be careful in speech; but in dealing with human beings, and usually seeing the human side of problems, I became quite skilful in speaking. After all, soldiers and sailors are human
beings and certainly they were getting tired of the war. They came and went. Many only travelled one way. Naturally they were being led by the very best generals but that did not prevent the human sacrifices of Passchendale and the Somme. After the wars, when the memoirs are written, we hear, of
course, of the idiots who were leading the armies, but during the wars this is kept a close secret. The hospitals became filled to capacity with the wounded but the war went on.
Of course war is a profitable business for some, and while they babbled about the war to end war and so on, some of the business people were in no hurry to end it. Many people like this I knew in Dundee–I could give names but I won’t because of libel actions people for whom the war was an extremely profitable business. Fortunately I am long-living and have an extremely good memory for such things.
Breaking the Fetters 