It’s a week since the founding conference of Your Party and the less said about the mess of factionalism and wasted opportunity the better. However, it did put me in mind of another gathering that attempted to harness the potential of Britain’s left- the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. Here’s an extract of my account of it from the book I’m writing about Bob Stewart.
There’s a photograph in the CPGB archive at the People’s History Museum in Manchester depicting a large gathering outside London’s Cannon Street Hotel in 1920. It resembles the kind of yearly school photo they used to take at the better type of educational establishment during the early part of last century. The passing of a hundred years or so has lent these figures some semblance of respectability – if you didn’t know who they were then it would be hard to identify them as revolutionaries and a threat to the British state. Red flags and ushankas are conspicuous by their absence. The men are all in sober suits and ties and, for the most part, adhere to the code of the time that a gentleman is not fully dressed without a hat. The headgear on display ranges from formal looking homburgs, some egalitarian flat caps and even a couple of jaunty straw boaters. Possibly interlopers from the Fabians. The comparatively few women present look out from under wide brims and give the impression that they do not, under any circumstances, suffer fools gladly. Everyone looks as if they have something extremely important on their mind. Bob is there, instantly recognisable with his broken face, sitting on the cobbles front row, seventh from the left. As ever, he looks more serious and full of intent than anyone else. Everyone looks as if they have something extremely important on their mind. This was the Communist Unity Convention. Over a hundred and fifty delegates from all across the country drawn from over twenty different left wing groups. Although it was formalised the following year in Leeds, this last day of July was essentially the beginning of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The following day, as the conference continued at a second venue, the International Socialist Club on East Road, Bob was voted onto the Executive Committee and became its Scottish organiser.
It had been two and a half years since the October Revolution. The Red Army was engaged in a brutal civil war repelling counter revolutionary forces aided by Western European allies. This support stemmed from the worry that the worker’s state would default on loans made to Imperial Russia and that insurrection would spread across continents like a disease. Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, voiced his antipathy in visceral terms. In conversation with the Prime Minister David Lloyd George, he was purported to have said, “One might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks.” Publicly, he announced that the ideology should be “strangled in its cradle.” Right wing groups such as the British Empire Uniontoured the country to “campaign against Bolshevist propaganda.” A photograph in The Daily Mirror shows that this amounted to a small group of portly, middle aged men each resembling the cartoonish stereotype of a bowler hatted capitalist standing dourly in front of a carriage daubed with the slogan, ‘Britain for the British.’ The union flag was unfurled and one of their number meekly held a placard decrying the red menace. The ‘B’ word became the pejorative of the day. More often than not its application was ridiculous. Even Austen Chamberlain, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer of the coalition government had his 1920 budget described as containing “the seeds of Bolshevism.” Any prospect of the mildest wealth redistribution would draw similar accusations. Appealing for greater harmony between Liberal and Conservative MPs, Lloyd George called for a united front against socialism. He emphasised his commitment to restoring the country through a “fair reward for individual effort” and damned the Labour Party’s commitment to “the doctrine of common ownership” as essentially the same as Lenin’s hated vanguard party. An absurd comparison but thanks to the extension of the franchise, Labour had emerged as the official opposition and so would inevitably be subject to incessant outlandish claims such as this.
If it attracted so much invective, what was it that drew some people towards communism in the 1920s? The answer is simple. For many, the shattering experience of The Great War was capitalism’s greatest crisis. As the population attempted to forge some kind of normal life in the years that followed they were assailed by a raft of social problems. What people got in actuality was far from what they thought they had been promised. At the beginning of the 1918 General Election Campaign, the Prime Minister had acknowledged the dire situation for many in the country. The war had been like a “gigantic star shell” illuminating the land. It had lit up “all the dark places […..] that we have never seen before.” The past four years of conflict had shown the “appalling waste of human material” in the nation. If people had been fed and housed properly and had lived in healthy conditions a million more men would have been fit for the services whereas there were millions “below par.” This was to be put right. Children could not be brought up in these conditions. After a death toll of millions in the battlefields of Europe he warned that there were, “more lives being lost and maimed through the atrocious social conditions that prevail, than through the terrors of this war.” The work of the nation was summed up in the memorable line, “What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.” Slums would be cleared, houses built and industry and agriculture revived. Stirred by this rhetoric, the electorate rewarded Lloyd George’s coalition with a landslide victory. The type of victory that, once the fuss has died down, can only ever disappoint and disillusion. Bob’s view was this:
“I came out of gaol in April 1919 and entered an entirely changed world from the one I had left. The heroes had returned from the war to find the golden promises of a land fit for heroes to live in had not materialised. Many were unable to find work. Many, when they found it, got low wages on which they could not adequately provide for their wives and children. The housing shortage became a serious social problem as the soldiers, married during the war, tried to set up house with their war-wives and young children. The landlords, taking advantage of the shortage, found ways and means to raise rents.
The Dundee I came back to had all these problems and more. Lack of work, low wages, unemployment, bad housing and a housing shortage, and to add to the confusion, thousands of war disabled demanding work and maintenance.”
The economy was nosediving and social reforms put in place as an insurance policy against another Petrograd were failing to lift people out of misery. In the light of this, communism offered a compelling vision of the world.
The birth of the CPGB was made possible by the creation of the Communist International. Also known as the Comintern or the Third International it was formed in Moscow in 1919 and it’s raison d’etre was to advocate for a world revolution. Lenin believed that, unless there was a successful socialist uprising in Europe, all that the Bolsheviks had achieved would be crushed by the military might of its capitalist neighbours. To protect itself it would establish communist parties across the world and provide funding, instruction and training. The parlous economic state of much of the continent and the memories of the war still fresh in people’s minds meant that there was fertile ground for radical militancy. There were many eager to learn from the one band of Marxist revolutionaries who had actually achieved what others spent so much time discussing in smoke filled rooms or shouting about in front of factory gates.
In Britain, those others were the myriad of leftist groups that weren’t the Labour Party or the ILP. Veterans of the trenches and veterans of the anti-war movement. Trade unionists and suffragettes. All haunted by the horrors of recent years and united, in the grand tradition of British radicalism, by an intense distrust of each other. That aside, there was a feeling, which Bob shared that, with things the way they were, there should be more progress politically towards socialism. All had been galvanised by the events of October 1917 and began to hold talks to foster greater cooperation. The Comintern began to court several of these parties and Lenin secretly donated £500, 000 towards setting up the CPGB. A phenomenal sum worth well over £10 million today. As Francis Beckett noted in his history of the CPGB, Enemy Within, “Without Lenin’s continual encouragement, and the careful distribution of Soviet money among groups which had always been starved of funds, the Communist Party would not have existed.” The Unity Convention, in the Italianate surroundings of a railway hotel, was the first fruition of that investment comprising of representatives from the British Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party, Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation and also from tiny organisations such as the Doncaster Worker’s Committee, Ferndale Socialist Society and Bob’s own band of socialist temperance campaigners. The sun had decided to shine after several days of rain. Things were looking up. The collapse of capitalism was surely imminent.
Amid a fug of pipe smoke, it was clear, when the first resolution was debated, that this new party would be closely modelled on the Russian one. The conference declared for a Soviet system as a means for the working class to achieve power. Lenin’s slogan, “All power to the Soviets!” from the October Revolution still had the capability to thrill or terrify. The term referred to the worker’s councils that had begun in 1905 and proliferated in 1917. Emerging from the factory floor, they were created to fight against the Imperial regime’s control of the workforce through strikes, direct action and also military force. After the Tsar’s abdication, the Petrograd Soviet played a key role in toppling the provisional government during the Bolshevik coup. Those gathered in the room were convinced something similar could be achieved in Britain and that this would lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat. This concept was also much discussed and Bob admitted to the delegates that he did not know much about it and doubted whether anyone else gathered there did either, an early indication of how impenetrable the language of the CPGB could alienate even the most sympathetic listener. Still, it was deemed a necessary step in order to achieve the party’s main aims – a society where the means of production would be communally owned and controlled. The conference also declared that they would ally themselves with the Communist International. Bob could not know at this point how this organisation would come to dominate his life.
There was a debate as to whether the Party should follow a Parliamentary route or whether it should be an armed revolutionary movement – the disenchantment many felt regarding the Labour Party’s reformist path was tangible. Not that it would prevent several futile attempts by the CPGB to affiliate with them in the immediate future. A social revolution could not be delivered through the ballot box alone. And yet, “electoral action [would provide a] valuable means of propaganda and agitation.” Any elected representatives from the CPGB would be considered as having a mandate from the Party rather than the constituency in which they happened to sit. The majority of attendees wanted to get councillors and MPs elected but there were a few who enthusiastically advocated “the use of the gun” to achieve their aims. Given his experiences of the past three years, Bob was not among them. He said he often found the people who wanted to “shoot it out” to be the “worst stayers in the movement” and felt that such people seemed “unable to cope with the hard day to day grind of politics.” Bob rebuked one such comrade with the memorable line, “A great many people talk about guns who would run away when they saw one. I am more interested in folks having brains in their heads.” Bob went on to outline his argument further.
“Whether guns come soon, late or not at all, there will be times when it is far more revolutionary to refuse to have anything to do with guns. I think the provisional executive which is to be set up by the conference will be far wiser to devote themselves to building up such organisation as will make it possible to win the maximum of our party policy with the minimum of violence.”
In his account of the conference, Francis Beckett relates a story about how Bob attempted to get the Communist party to go down the prohibitionist path. The temperance movement had struck a chord with many of the comrades – alcoholism being one consequence of the hardship suffered by the poverty stricken and several saw abstinence as an essential part of their socialism. To Bob, prohibition was a revolutionary tactic.
“After the main resolution was carried, the stout sincere man with a sober moustache walked solemnly to the platform to ask the new Party to come out in favour of suppressing the manufacture of alcoholic drinks. Few thought much of the idea, but they liked Bob Stewart, so they referred it to the executive for action. In seventy-one years no action was ever taken.”
Sadly, this moment was left unrecorded in his memoir, Breaking the Fetters.
For Remembrance Sunday here’s something I wrote about Bob Stewart’s experiences as a conscientious objector during the First World War.
On the day war was declared, Bob was campaigning on behalf of the Prohibition and Reform Party a hundred miles up the coast in the fishing port of Peterhead. The last days of peace had been dreich. Endless rain lending a sullen mood to the maritime manoeuvres taking place a little way out of port. The clock ticking as the country waited for Britain’s ultimatum to Germany to expire. That morning the weather had improved enough to hold an outdoor meeting at which there was quite a crowd. He’d visited the town many times before and had always taken an interest in its affairs; some weeks previously he’d been presented with a pipe and a purse of sovereigns as a thank you for his part in organising a successful strike at the wood yard there. It had always been a good place to campaign.
The rally took place up on the links looking out onto the treacherous North Sea. Choppy, battleship grey whitecaps stretched out to the horizon. Also visible was the prison next to the Admiralty Yard. One of the toughest in the country, it housed long term convicts sentenced to breaking rocks in the granite quarry. These were used to construct the Harbour of Refuge breakwater to reduce the number of ships lost to storms. In Bob’s opinion anyone who couldn’t make a good socialist speech looking at that view didn’t know anything about socialism. Just as he was getting into his stride, the breeze carried a crescendo of tenor and contralto voices and the sound of euphoniums and trumpets began to drown him out. It was the Salvation Army band playing Lead Kindly Light as they accompanied the Naval Reserve to the station. This was how he learned of the outbreak of hostilities. The reservists were mainly trawlermen – the retainer both supplementing their income and acting as a “sweet little pill to recruiting.” He resumed his speech and tried in vain to tell them where exactly they were being led but the mood of those marching into town was buoyant and hymns gave way to songs of king and country. The meeting broke up and everyone followed them to the recruiting office where wives and mothers, who regarded the situation very differently, began to weep and howl. “Many affecting scenes were witnessed,” as the local paper put it.
That evening, there was another assembly, this time held at the fish market. Despite the rain it was full. These were uncertain times. Bob thought that wars were “always sprung on the people. They don’t know their enemies until they are told.” He was under no illusion who the real adversary was. During his speech he declared:
“[This] 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.”
Conflict meant insecurity. Already the fishing trade in Peterhead was paralysed. The whole of the east coast was at a standstill. Fearing attacks on shipping, insurers had “intimated to trawler owners that vessels […..] must not leave port.” Any boats attempting to reach the fishing grounds would be uninsured and would sail entirely at their own risk. Five hundred fishermen in nearby Aberdeen had been laid off days before but worse was to come. On average, each trawler had nine crew members which meant that eventually four thousand sea going men would be thrown into idleness in the Granite City alone. This had ramifications for the rest of the industry. Thousands of men and women employed in gutting and packing would soon be out of work as would the hundreds of coopers who made the fish barrels. The daily losses would run in to thousands. Meanwhile, the first trawlers were being stripped of their fishing gear and were being made ready for mine sweeping duty.
Advertisements urging young men between the ages of 18 and 30 to heed their country’s call and “rally round the flag and enlist in the ranks of her army” were already appearing in the press the day after the declaration of war. The choice between no job or a soldier’s wage was no choice at all to many. Aside from the prospect of unemployment, Bob recognised that countless ordinary people joined up for the slaughter not due to nationalistic fervour but simply because a soldier’s wage together with the separation allowance for wives was better than a labourer’s earnings. At the beginning of the war a private at the front got 6s 8d a week. The separation allowance was 7s 7d with 1s 2d added per child. Although this benefit rose significantly – 12s 6d from March 1915- it does not say much for labourer’s wages.
Attitudes to the war divided the left and, as far as Bob was concerned, this was the first real test for socialist internationalism. A test he considered the Labour movement to have largely failed. His belief that a British worker had more in common with a German worker rather than a British capitalist was a minority view. As he put it, in no time at all, “the red flags turned to tartan.”
When Bob returned home he found his city gearing up for the battles ahead. An article in the Courier prosaically titled. ‘The Recruiting Sergeant is Busy’ gives some indication of what the first week was like. Lord Kitchener’s appeal for recruits was “stirring the hearts of young Dundee.” The thousands of millworkers and those in clerical professions proved “up to the hilt that the young fellows of the city [were] patriotic to the core.” They constituted a “fruitful source” to the Nethergate recruiting office which was now thronged by a persistent gathering of young and old outside. Periodically the door was unlocked and another batch of men passed through for processing. The flow of aspirants for the army was almost constant. This zeal carried on in the town’s social life. A programme of Strauss and Lizst at the King’s Theatre was preceded by “scenes of great enthusiasm” as the orchestra played Rule Brittania, The Marseillaise and God Save the King. The audience rose to the national anthem a second time when a company of soldiers marched into the auditorium greeted by cheers. Dundonians could also try and spot their loved ones on the big screen as the Scala Picture Theatre showed footage of the Tayside Naval Reserve and the Territorials carrying out their mobilisation orders before the main feature, Beneath the Czar. The movie topping the bill concerned a woman forced to enter the Russian Secret Service to save her father, an active Nihilist, from being put to death. If my great grandfather went to the pictures that week I do wonder what he made of that film.
The readership of The Courier was hungry for every scrap of detail about the war and the paper eagerly obliged. The coverage in one issue in the first week ranged from German submarines in the North Sea to a call for the women of Angus to knit two thousand pairs of socks for the forces while also taking in a French victory in the Alsatian town of Colmer and restrictions on aliens in the UK. A German spy was shot in Paris; there were skirmishes on the Russian frontier and English cricket was to continue. Articles about the phenomenal number of men joining up dominated. Some stories such as the West Fife licensees ordered to exercise more care in the supply of drink might have consoled Bob but not for long. Look closely and amid all the breathless excitement of world events and everyone pulling together for the good of the nation there’s hints of the crisis to come. The 26 year old infantryman fatally shot after coming off duty in Romford. A forgotten cartridge in the breech of his rifle had accidentally discharged. The British Red Cross appealing to the public for supplies. They needed mattresses and sheets, bandages and basins. The one naval and three military deserters committed to the respective authorities at Dundee Police Court. Presumably they were reluctant to find themselves confined to one of the beds the Red Cross had salvaged. Or they feared worse.
Looking back on 1914, Bob remarked, “ I don’t know of any honest working man who got anything out of the war.” He was also aware that, for some, it was very profitable. While the business sector “babbled about the war to end war” they were “in no hurry to end it.” He bemoaned the industrial truce that came into play with moderate trade union leaders resisting strikes and keeping their membership in check while the nation was in peril. What part of the country the ordinary people actually owned was a question he never heard answered. Dundee historian William Kenefick described the age as a time when, “citizens’ rights and civil liberties became secondary to those of the British state.” A condition that was “never fully removed.” The workers were handcuffed when the Munitions of War Act was passed in 1915 – eroding what little employment rights trade unions had fought for. It was an offence to leave your work without the consent of your employer or to refuse to take a new job whatever the rates of pay. With rent increases and a steep rise in the cost of living there was plenty for Bob to battle against.
As the war progressed, the supply of young factory and agricultural workers used as cannon fodder began to dry up. In March 1916 the Military Services Act came into effect and all single men aged 18 to 41 in Great Britain were to be called up to fight. Married men became eligible for conscription two months later and the age limit was extended to 51 in 1918. Widowers with children, clergymen and those in reserved occupations such as coal miners, train drivers and steel workers were exempt. Conscientious objectors had to appear before a tribunal to argue their case for refusing to enlist. These arguments did not get a sympathetic hearing.
The largest socialist organisation opposed to the war was the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and, in December 1914, they played a large part in establishing the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF). Formed in anticipation of the 1916 Act, the NCF would campaign against it and offer support and guidance to those refusing to join the armed forces. After a large ILP meeting in Dundee in November 1915 the city’s branch of the NCF was set up with the support of Bob’s party as well as that of his old rival Scrymgeour. In January the following year both organisations banded together with members of the Trades Council, the Labour Representation Committee, the ILP, the British Socialist Party and the Free Religious Movement to found the Dundee Joint Committee Against Conscription. Disparaged in the press as being “Pro-German” the group ensured that Dundee became one of the strongholds of the anti-war movement. They drew crowds of more than 1, 500 at their weekly Sunday meetings and Ramsay Macdonald, in an article in Forward in 1917, acknowledged that Dundee was “said to be ‘fair hotchin’ with conscientious objectors” as it fought for “liberty and Socialism.” By then the army had caught up with Bob. Pushing forty, he was conscripted in 1916. In July, he featured in a report on the COs appealing at the local tribunal. He appeared alongside several trade unionists and ILP officials, a couple of Socialist Sunday School teachers, another prohibitionist and an ex policeman turned left bookseller who declared he worked eighty four hours a week, “62 for wages and the remainder for downtrodden humanity.” Bob was described as:
“Ex-Town Councillor, Prohibitionist, Socialist and International Protagonist; a clever writer and convincing speaker; refuses non-combatant service on the grounds that it simply means holding the jackets for others to fight.”
He was an absolutist. Some of his fellow conscientious objectors managed to escape imprisonment after being offered alternative Home Office schemes which involved voluntary service for the war effort. This might include labouring on a farm or in a factory for a Work Of National Importance (WNI) initiative; or they might be drafted into the Non-Combatants Corps to fix infrastructure after battle or work as medics. But there was no way Bob would abandon his principles for an easier life. The war was wrong and he was not going to assist in its prosecution in any way. “Quakers, Christadelphians and priests in holy orders and their like” were, it was assumed, the only people who “could aspire to a conscientious objection to killing their fellow men.” He was not a member of any religious body. Even worse, he was a well-known socialist and anti-militarist. His appeal at tribunal was turned down as a matter of course and he was ordered to present himself for military service. He refused. Whatever hulking Victorian gaol was waiting to confine him, he was resolute.
Arrested and taken to the police court, he was charged with being AWOL. The Chief Constable. acting as prosecutor, asked for a pause of a week which allowed Bob more time to make preparations for the inevitable prison sentence. He spent this time assisting others with their cases and speaking at some anti-war meetings. This was “much to the annoyance of the local respectables, who if they couldn’t get me shot at least expected me to be put out of sight for a long time.” Also, Margaret would have to take over some of his work. He’d recently become the local organiser of the Scottish Horse and Motormen’s Union, applying for the job after the previous post holder had been called up. Margaret would have to carry on with this as well as bringing up the family. A legion of aunts would be on hand to help but it would be tough. Bill and Rab were thirteen and ten, old enough to understand what was going on. Annie or Nan as she was known was only three years old. Her earliest memories would be those of her father in jail and the general contempt in which the general public held people like him. Whether there was sympathy for the Stewarts among her neighbours I do not know but the common opinion that ‘conchies’ were cowards and traitors would have been part of the atmosphere in which she grew up. There was talk in the press of banning COs from positions such as teaching lest they contaminate the young and many, many similar stories. Annie would have to understand that her family stood for something and that the attacks these principles drew had to be stood up to.
Once Bob was back in court, a recruiting officer took to the witness stand to prove that on a given day Robert Stewart was ordered to appear and did not do so. The officer looked rather pleased with himself after giving his evidence, as did the magistrate. An example was about to be set. Not the example they expected though.
“…their expressions changed when I asked, “Under what regulations do you mark a man absent?” “Under the King’s Regulations,” was the reply. “Under which one?” I persisted. The beak looked blank. The assessor said, “Can you help us, Mr. Stewart?” a rather unusual form of address to a prisoner at the bar. So I helped them by quoting the […..] King’s Regulations, in which it was clearly stated that a man could not be posted absent until twenty-one days had expired from the date of his call-up.”
Unwilling to take the word of a prisoner as final, a messenger hurried to find a copy of the manual which bore out Bob’s contention. There was some frantic consultation before the magistrate announced, “I am afraid we can’t convict.” Bob walked free to the “great glee of a small crowd […..] and the extreme chagrin of the military escort.” Immaculate in his polished uniform, this officer brandished a pair of handcuffs. “Ay laddie […..] You’re too early,” was Bob’s greeting. Eventually, they got the paperwork right and he was court martialled for the first time. So began the seemingly endless spells at His Majesty’s Pleasure simply because, when asked why he wouldn’t fight, he answered, “It’s not my war.”
He was sentenced to one hundred and twelve days of hard labour in Wormwood Scrubs- almost five hundred miles away. He had no visitors and his mail was withheld from him, thus no contact with his wife and children or news from his friends during his incarceration. As he was handed over from the military to the civil authority in London Bob noted that, in actuality, it was “far less civil” than the army.
“The Scrubs was one of the largest and in consequence most regimental of what were known in official jargon as ‘His Majesty’s Prisons’, which of course he never used as a personal residence. I was turfed into a reception cell to await disposal. It was a dirty, begrimed hole, some thirteen feet long and six and a half broad, its dingy walls covered by names of former occupants and an occasional word of advice, like “Sleep on it, chum”, and some uncomplimentary remarks about officers and prison food.”
Late in the afternoon he was officially received. The voice of the head warder echoed around the reception room as he barked out every single one of Bob’s personal possessions while they were collected in and did the same for each article of kit that was handed out. They took down his height and weight and then he had to have a tepid bath in three inches of water. The suit of prison clothes he was given were, “not ready to wear but already well worn.” A medical followed. The prisoners were ordered to line up, face the wall, to stand apart and stop talking. Then, one at a time, they passed by the doctor as the guard yelled, “Shirt up and trousers down!” Bob found it strangely amusing that, “members of this humane profession should lend themselves to this farcical medical examination and humiliation of their fellows.”
After this, bibles and prayer books were doled out, the “compulsory library of each prisoner” and they were ordered to, “Get up them stairs!” He was housed on the third corridor of the D hall with the other conscientious objectors. In 1889, fifteen years after ‘the Scrubs’ had opened, the journalist FW Robinson had praised the “brightness and lightness” of the cells. Such an atmosphere was, “not frequently met with in a convict prison at all.” At that time it was considered a fine example of penal architecture. Bob’s appraisal of his new accommodation reflected the prison’s notorious reputation it had garnered in the three decades that had since passed.
“My new abode was the usual brick-walled domicile, thirteen feet by about seven feet. Its furnishing, a six feet by thirty-inch board bed. Top and bottom sheets of canvas, one or two blankets according to season, a bedcover, a small table under a pane of obscure glass through which a flicker of gaslight shone, sufficient to strain your eyes when reading. A small shelf for books, and a pint pot, a tin basin and a jug for water, a minute portion of soap, a very small weekly supply of toilet paper and a slop pot for natural necessities. A window in the outer wall with twenty-one very small panes of obscure glass. Woe betide any prisoner who was caught (as many were) trying to get a cock-eyed view of the outside world by standing on the stool provided to be sat on and not stood on. A copy of the prison regulations and diet sheet was hung on the wall.”
The warders he regarded curiously, contemptuous of their pretensions to be called officers. A “screw by any other name” was “still only a turnkey […..] under just as close a surveillance as the prisoners.” He observed that some were “sadistic and cruel [and] extra officious” with promotion being their main object rather than the care of their charges. Some could be “reasonably human” but all were “fearful of the economic consequences of losing their steady and comparatively lazy occupation which carries a pension with it.” As the following encounter demonstrates, prison magnified the intransigent aspect of Bob’s character.
“I soon ran into my first bit of trouble. […..] the screws regard themselves as officers and like to be called Sir. I have never said Sir to anyone in my life […..] One of them said to me, “Call me Sir.” “Why?” I asked. Well, there is no direct answer to that but it meant I did two weeks in very, very solitary confinement. After that I went to sewing mail bags for an hour or two a day.”
Besides the mail bags the hard labour he was engaged in was mostly joinery. A fortnight after his arrival he was marched before the inspector who demanded to know what his occupation in civil life was. He gave his profession as “Agitator.” Further questioning saw him passed to the carpenter’s shop to make furniture and fitments for the HM Office of Works. The prisoners laboured under the gaze of a pacing disciplinary officer whose snarling and growling annoyed even the artisan warder who was responsible for seeing that the men got the job done. All the tools had to be checked and locked up in a cupboard with drawings of each tool to show where it went “like a kindergarten” and pencils had to be sharpened by the guard who “painted one end and notched the other lest the lead be pinched for writing purposes.” Other than work the prisoners had exercise once a day – “the large contingent walked from nowhere to nowhere and back again. What a silly exhibition.”
The prison day seemed much longer than the normal twenty-four hours. Once his hundred and twelve days were done he was taken to the Governor and then to reception to be returned to Scotland for his next court martial. His army chaperon didn’t arrive and so he was shut up in his cell for one more night. “Overtime without pay” as he put it.
After refusing once more he was handed a sentence of one year, later commuted to sixth months. This time he did his stretch in Calton Gaol, Edinburgh. A remnant of this penitentiary is still visible today in the castellated form of Governor’s House looking down on the city from Calton Hill. Bob’s future comrade Willie Gallacher also endured a spell in there during the war for sedition. He described it as, “by far the worst prison in Scotland; cold, silent and repellent. Its discipline was extremely harsh, and the diet atrocious.” Bob viewed it as “grim and grey, old and forbidding” He found the initial reception “not quite so noisy as the Scrubs” as the warder fussed around listing the King’s property in Bob’s possession. To his relief, his family were allowed to visit. His reminiscences of the months spent there largely focus on the mischief he and other inmates got up to during Bible classes and Sunday services. Prisoners had to recite Bible passages and anyone who could perform Luke 15: 1-10 without error would receive their own copy of the good book when their term ended. On Bob’s second Sunday he gave full voice to the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son and won that prize on release. He also tried to diversify with a selection of Tennyson, Burns and Shelley. It got too much for the preacher who ruled that only extracts from scripture were allowed. Bob was then one of the older inmates who had to persuade some of the lads not to “utter some of the rather bawdy texts […..] which might offend the lass at the music box.”
One day a warder stopped by his cell and wondered aloud that such nice people as his wife and daughter could come to visit when he was an atheist. In the warder’s mind unbelievers were all “thieves, robbers, devils or whoremongers.” Bob asked him how many atheists were in the jail. The warder replied that Bob was in fact the only one. “Well, if all the others are Christians it doesn’t say very much for Christianity, does it?” replied Bob. The warder slunk off in confusion.
Perhaps the most significant event during his second term came in March 1917. He was trudging round the exercise yard when a fellow internee came up to him and whispered, “There’s been a revolution in Russia. They’ve set up Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils!” Bob recognised that this was an epoch making event but was, at this stage, sceptical at its impact. Just before the warder put an end to their conversation Bob’s friend declared excitedly that there would be a revolution in Britain within six months. Bob’s verdict? “Hae ma doots.” Still, it sparked something in him. When his time at Calton came to an end the Chief Warder told him that he was going to get another chance to shoot the Hun. Bob replied, that if he ever got it into his head to go shooting he wouldn’t be looking for Germans. “And who will you be looking for?” was the next question. Bob looked him straight in the eye and said, “Warders.”
Found guilty of the charge ‘Refused to Parade’ in his third court martial and receiving two years hard labour in the process, Bob was interned at Edinburgh Castle for a short while. The sentence was later remitted to one year. His elderly mother was growing increasingly frail and found it hard to make the return journey to Edinburgh sixty miles away. She’d been a widow for several years, Bob’s father passing away in 1915, something he doesn’t touch upon in his book. Two of her sons, Jock and James were away fighting while Bob, her youngest was jailed. Naturally she wanted to see him as often as she could in the time she had left. There’s very little in Bob’s writing about her but he does mention that in the course of her visits she struck up a rapport with the prison Governor after he found out they both came from the same part of Scotland. After spending time with Bob she would be ushered into the Governor’s office to gossip about “lairds and tenants and the hamely fare o’ the countryside.” The issue of Bob’s godlessness came up once more. The Governor said to her, “What I canna understand, wumman, hoo wi’ a maither like you Robert’s an atheist.” She lamented that, “he was aye a great Bible student.”
Bob’s mother died at the age of seventy eight on the 10th September 1918. She passed away at home and a short notice in the Dundee People’s Journal announced these simple details along with her status as William’s widow and her maiden name, Georgina Ferrier Fraser. I cannot imagine what it was like to receive such news in prison, separated from loved ones. Worse was to come. Although he was held in a state prison, he was serving a military sentence. Regulations meant that he was refused permission to attend the funeral. With some understatement, he observed, “there was much local feeling about this.” Georgina had been “greatly respected by all her neighbours” and Bob had many friends on the outside. All were extremely angry at the situation and complaints were made to the Lord Provost of Dundee. He intervened and said he would vouch for Bob’s return. Wheels were grudgingly set in motion. Bob omitted any detailed description of how he felt about the whole experience but the contempt is still there. A “most inhuman warder” took him to Dundee but he was too late to see his mother buried. There was some consolation that he was at least allowed to meet his family. His two soldiering brothers had managed to get leave to join them. An all too brief hour or so with his wife and children and his siblings all united in grief. Impossible to find the words that needed to be said with the warder ever present and repeatedly checking his watch. His guard was impatient to get back to Edinburgh and so “dumped” him at Dundee Gaol. An awful end to an awful day. At least he was nearer home. After more deputations from colleagues and neighbours to the Lord Provost it was decided that he would do the rest of his time there.
At this late stage of the war, the jingoistic optimism exemplified by Jessie Pope, the favourite poet of The Daily Express, who urged the nation’s youth not to “lie low” but be “part of the fun” had given way to an acknowledgement of the realities of mechanised slaughter. In the newspaper carrying the details of Bob’s mother’s death, her name is among twenty six others who died either at home or in hospital of natural causes after living full lives. That list takes up about a third of a column. A further three and a half columns concern the Dundee war dead. Under the banner ‘For Their Country’ there’s a catalogue of the recently slain. Private Andrew McCabe aged 19 and the beloved son of Mrs McCabe, 40 Hunter Street- “died of wounds” on 25th August. Private Peter McIntyre, reported missing on October 4th 1917, now reported killed on that date – “Not dead to us who loved him dear.” Private Scott who died from gas poisoning on the 21st August – “We mourn for you dear son.” It goes on and on. Name after name in tiny print. Then there’s the ‘In Memoriam’ section marking the anniversaries of so many families’ bereavements. Private Donald Dewar of the Cameron Highlanders was killed in action on 14th September 1914 – “Not forgotten.” Did his family remember him this way every year? How long did they continued to do so?
The way the war was playing out was beginning to affect Bob’s jailers. Dundee was a much smaller prison and wasn’t fully occupied. This was a source of dismay to the warders. Bob recalls the glee at which they greeted new prisoners. Not because their hearts were softer or they were more devoted to their role than other officers but because, while they were avowedly patriotic, they were not overly keen on being called up to fight at the front while thousands of men were being killed each day in Europe. Bob even helped some of them complete their claim forms for exemption on compassionate and domestic grounds. It was an absurd position – “the warder who locked me up for resisting military service then asked my assistance to fill up his application form for exemption so that he could continue to lock me up!”
It was while he was captive in Dundee that Bob began to write the poems which he later gathered together in the pamphlet Prison Rhymes. Published in 1919 as a fundraiser for the Prohibition and Reform Party, Bob claimed it sold thousands and helped keep the organisation in funds. Copies are rare -there are a few in archives up and down the land but until recently the cheapest copy I’d come across was priced at £650. At the time of writing, Blackwell’s Rare Books advertise one at just under £5000. It comes an inscription to the Miners’ Leader, trade unionist and Labour politician Robert Smillie. Bob had served time in Worwood Scrubs with Smillie’s son Alex, a fellow conscientious objector. Collecting labour history is a habit I cannot afford but fortunately our family does have its own copy. It was acquired by my brother in the late 1980s around the time he had a wall length poster of Lenin in his bedroom and wore a Che Guevara t-shirt like an East Anglian Wolfie Smith. He rang up the Communist Party explaining the family connection and asked if they had a spare. The elderly lady on the other end of the line cooed about Bob being the one who shifted the Moscow gold around back in the day. A photocopy of the pamphlet landed on our doormat a few weeks later.
Bob was modest about his poetic achievements. “Prison”, he remarked “is not the best place to practice literary ambitions.” However his diffidence is more than made up in the preface to the work in which a Mr G Anderson of Coatbridge is effusive. The author of the verses is described in grandiloquent terms as formerly a “man of lucid and terse prose” whose forced confinement has made him turn to rhyme with “happy effect.” While the body is held captive by “stone walls and iron bars” the “spirit of the man never flinched” and the lines inspire a “veneration of love for humanity.”
The poems are mostly written in Scots dialect and are largely concerned with protest, socialist agitation and reflections on the isolation of prison life. They are written to be sung to the tune of popular hymns and folk songs. Common harvests, scarlet banners and rallying comrades feature heavily. Robert Burns is an influence. One poem, ‘A Man’s a Man For A’ That’ takes the Scottish national poet’s celebration of egalitarianism and tailors it to the anti-war movement. This also featured on a postcard sold by the Prohibition and Reform Party featuring a portrait of the author on the other side. He looks very smart and serious with his moustache seemingly waxed at the tips in one concession to vanity. It’s the earliest photograph we have of him. The most affecting poems are those that deal with the sadness of separation. Little Nan is about Bob’s youngest child Annie. She would have been six at the time of publication and the poem reflects Bob’s sadness of being separated from her for most of the preceding three years.
“O bonnie lass o’ mine
Wih eyes that brightly shine,
With your winsome ways and tender loving smile
O how pleasant it would be
Could I come away with thee
And leave this dismal solitude awhile
O to listen to your voice
How ‘twould make my heart rejoice,
And to see the lovelight glancing in your eyes,
What recompense ‘twould be
For the days spent wearily
So far away from those I love and prize.”
While at Dundee he was court martialled for a fourth time but with little change in his situation. Prison life was dull. A pint of skillyfor breakfast; slopping out; work detail; exercise; an inedible dinner and as little association time as the authorities could manage before lock up. The only variation being chapel on Sunday or punishment in solitary. There was the occasional cause to fight for such as access to newspapers and books but then only the smallest subterfuge to be indulged in when passing round banned copies of Tribune and Socialist Monthly smuggled in by one or two sympathetic warders. As the months passed, it was “galling to be divorced from activity” and news from outside only added to “the impatience and yearning of release.”
Unlike the other prisons where Bob had viewed the religious mentors sympathetically or at least with an amused detachment there was one chaplain at Dundee named MacDonald who succeeded in antagonising him more than any other figure. Every Sunday in the pulpit he’d veer off the topic to “have a go at the Bolsheviks” The Russian Revolution had caught Bob’s imagination and the scraps of news he could gather were what inspired him while confined to a cell. It might seem unusual – a man imprisoned for refusing to fight and kill his fellow man clinging on to news of a violent revolution for hope but he knew his enemy. For Bob, being forced to listen to a man he held in contempt preach about how “Lenin ate children” and “Trotsky shot all the workers” was insufferable. He said nothing for a while as his friend, a fellow conchie called Dave Donaldson, was approaching his next court martial – to all intents and purposes a day out – and he didn’t want to get him into trouble. Still, during one sermon MacDonald moved on to how the Bolsheviks “must be crushed like rats” and Bob exploded.
“”You dirty miserable little coward,” I said, “standing up there in your coward’s castle maligning men who can’t speak back. Well, here’s one that speaks back, you dirty contemptible little rascal! They should put you in a prison cell not a prison pulpit.” During this outburst he sat down too surprised to say a word and he never rose again. It must be the shortest prison service on record.”
Amazingly there were few repercussions. No solitary. No withdrawal of privileges. Once the men were marched out of the chapel one of the warders suggested to Bob that he write to the Prison Commissioners to complain that the chaplain was using the pulpit for political purposes. Bob preferred to let the matter rest. He’d done what he’d wanted. The Head Warder told him that he’d have to apologise to the Rev. MacDonald. Bob expected this and was fully prepared to do so, even though he’d taken to referring to the clergyman as “The Weasel.” The minister never came. Too afraid. Here endeth the lesson.
Around this time Bob began to sense the war weariness “weighing heavily on everyone.” The “loss of millions of good lives” even affecting the top brass. The conflict was drawing to a close, victory was near but the atmosphere of the guard rooms where the conchies were shoved before facing military trial was subdued. Bob recalled one fellow silent and unable to answer the sergeant demanding, “How long have you been absent?” The man seemed to be wholly unaware of what was happening but just sat and stared despondently ahead. The sergeant took one look at his face and declared, “You’re no’ absent – you’re lost!” He wasn’t alone. Four long years and there were few families who hadn’t feared the knock at the door and the dreaded telegram. The sight of the wounded, the disfigured and the amputated was disturbingly common. Many wore their scars on the inside trying to suppress the trauma of what they’d experienced. All this damage wrought on people who mostly couldn’t even vote until the Representation of the People Act in 1918.
Bob was serving his fourth term when The Great War finally came to an end. The fighting carried right up until the last minute and then it simply finished. The combatants slowly limping home. A damaged generation. Once they’d returned, many hoped that things would be back to how they were before, or that things would be a little better. That world had gone. Who knew what kind of world would replace it? Bob, however, was still confined to gaol. Month after month passed and there was no word said about his release. Bob felt it as purgatory.
“One day I was communing with myself. “What am I doing in here? It was in April 1919. I was going with a bucket of water and a brush to clean some windows. “Ach,” I said, “I’m finished.’ So I went back to my cell and the warder hurried after me. “What’s up?” “I’m finished.” “What do you mean, you’re finished? “I’m through. I’m not going to do another damned thing. I’m not going to work, eat or drink in this prison.” Up came the Governor, but I held my ground. “I’m finished,” I said. “There’s neither sense nor reason for my being here. The war ended months ago and to keep me here is sheer malice. I am not going to continue.” That started the ball rolling and in a few days Dave Donaldson and I were out. They called a cab to take us home.”
As the pair stepped out of the cab it was Annie who first spied her father and went running to Margaret and told her that there were “two dirty looking soldiers coming into the house.” An impromptu party followed with neighbours and well wishers stopping by to celebrate the occasion. An honest man all his life, it might have occurred to Bob that he’d never see the inside of a jail again. There would be more prison sentences to come though and the decade that was about to begin would change his life forever.
L-R Bob, Annie and Margaret Stewart. Photograph probably taken in Moscow around 1924.
Today’s post is about Bob Stewart’s youngest child, his daughter Annie who was my dad’s aunt.
Annie, otherwise known Little Nannie or Nan was born in Dundee on 30th November 1913. Her earliest memories would have been those of her father imprisoned for refusing to fight; her mother bringing up the family with the assistance of a legion of aunts and the contempt in which the general public held conscientious objectors such as Bob. Whether there was sympathy for the family among her neighbours I do not know but the common opinion that ‘conchies’ were cowards and traitors would have been part of the atmosphere that she grew up in. There was talk in the press of banning COs from positions such as teaching lest they contaminate the young and many, many similar stories. A law was even passed in which they could be disenfranchised. Bob actually lost his vote in 1921, shortly after the Caerphilly by-election, when a jute merchant, John Willison, petitioned for him to be removed from the electoral register on the grounds that he had refused military service. Willison, a prominent Dundee Unionist, stressed that there was no political party behind his application and that he bore no ill will against Mr Stewart, it was simply that men of his ilk were “embittering people against doing their duty” and should face, “the full measure of the law.” So, from the time she was learning to walk to her first years at school Annie would have understood that her family stood for something and that the attacks these principles drew had to be stood up to.
L-R Harry Pollitt, Annie Stewart and Bob Stewart.L-R Harry Pollitt, Margaret Stewart, Bob Stewart, Annie Stewart and Rose Cohen.
It was an unusual childhood. The Bolshevik revolution took place when she was four and it shaped the rest of her life. How could it not? In his study of CPGB members, Communism in Britain, 1920 – 39: From the Cradle to the Grave, Thomas Linehan points to the idea that the communist upbringing of ‘red diaper’ babies would help them withstand the future demands of capitalism but would also help prepare them physically and mentally to play a future role in the party organisation. It’s difficult not to view Annie as an example of this tendency. Bob went to work for the Comintern in 1923 and took Nan with him. At that time, travelling to the Soviet Union was not an easy task and not entirely legal. Whatever route Bob, Margaret and Annie took to get to their destination they would have risked arrest at certain stages and the journey would have been arduous and uncomfortable. The strangeness of leaving Dundee behind and settling in Moscow at the age of ten must have been overwhelming. In a Henry Sara slide taken at the Pushkin School she looks a little ill at ease and awkward amongst her classmates. However, the experience left her able to speak Russian – a language her parents never managed to learn.
Pushkin School: Nannie Stewart fifth from the right in the front row. Bob and Margaret just about visible in the back row. (Henry Sara Archive, Warwick Modern Records Centre)
The young Annie’s fluency with Russian is the focus of this remarkable news report in the Aberdeen Press and Journal dated 3rd June 1925:
WOMEN COMMUNISTS
Police Raid Glasgow Meeting.
GREETINGS IN SCOTS AND RUSSIAN.
Glasgow police raided yesterday the conference there of women Communists.
A demand for the names of the delegates failed to produce the desired results, and a request that each representative should speak produced remarks in braid Scots, Esperanto and Russian.
GLASGOW, Tuesday. Glasgow police raided the congress of women Communists in St Mungo Hall, Glasgow, to-day, five minutes before the dispersal of the meeting. Forty uniformed and plain-clothes men surrounded the hall, the plain clothes men entering the congress room. The visit of the police was regarded by the women as a comedy.
The plain-clothes men entered by the South York Street door. They swept aside the inner guard, and were confronted by Mr William Gallacher, who objected to the intrusion, and only four detectives and the aliens’ officer entered the congress room.
A Bit of Scots.
Immediately the presence of the police was known the women rose and greeted them by singing the “Internationale.” When quiet was restored, the police demanded the names of all the delegates present. This was refused, and the officers then asked that all the women present speak in turn, the request being made apparently for the purpose of detecting any foreign accent. This caused some hilarity, and Mrs Helen Crawfurd who presided shouted in braid Scots, “It’s a braw, bricht, meen-licht nicht the nicht, pipe clay, up the lum. Camarachanchoo.” Greetings in Esperanto were given by a delegate of Irish birth from Alexandria and an 11 year old girl, Nannie Stewart, daughter of the Communist candidate for Dundee at the last general election addressed the detectives in Russian. With her parents, she lived for some time in Russia and had been a pupil in a Russian school for about a year.
The officers then withdrew. Their search was obviously for the purpose of discovering if any foreign delegates, whose presence had been banned by the Home Office, were in the meeting.
The Girl’s Greeting.
Little Nannie Stewart told the Press that what she had said to the police was, “I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t care.” Asked what the police replied, she said, “I don’t think they understood me, because they never answered.” A remarkable sidelight on the intensity of the Communist instruction of the young was revealed in her remark, “They are a lot of moral cowards, any way.” The statements in Esperanto were interpreted simply as, “I thank you for your visit.”
Some of the women Communists were in terror, and Mrs. Crawfurd remarked, facetiously, that she thought it was a great compliment to the women’s section of the Communist Party that, while four detectives were considered sufficient for the main congress the previous day, over 30 officers were sent to the women’s conference. Others laughingly described the raid as “A rare sporting finish.”
The police refused to make any official statements.
I adore this article. As much as her youthful commitment to Marxist-Leninist revolution is apparent in this encounter, many decades later she became a resolute anti-communist – even going so far as to join the Conservative Party. And, after what she experienced – her husband murdered in Stalin’s purges with her and their baby son escaping by the skin of their teeth – who could blame her?
After Bob, Annie is the most important character in the book I’m writing. It wasn’t until recently that I realised I have never seen a photograph of her as an adult. I will have to do some more digging.
Alan Stewart.
PS – Many thanks, once again, to Maurice J Casey. This time for turning up the photographs of the Stewart family and their friends in Moscow in a newly discovered cache of letters belonging to Rose Cohen. For the upteenth time buy his book Hotel Lux!
Extract from Bob Stewart’s memoirs Breaking the Fetters from which the title of my biography is taken.
I’ve not posted much on here lately and so before 2024 draws to a close I’d like to update you on what’s happening with the project. The reason for the lack of new articles is that I’ve been concentrating on finishing the biography I’m writing of Bob Stewart. It is tentatively titled Everything You Get Must Be Fought For and it’s about three quarters finished. Frustratingly, it has sometimes seemed that this is the book’s permanent state as work commitments get in the way but it will be finished. I’ m just wise enough now not to confidently say when that will be.
Back in January I handed my work in progress to Stu Hennigan, the author of Ghost Signs: Poverty and the Pandemic and his editing and advice was invaluable. Following his suggestions during redrafting has improved the book beyond measure and I’m very excited by the results. It might turn out that Everything You Get… will be something people will actually want to hold in their hands. If you haven’t read Stu’s book yet I urge you to do so as soon as possible – its an essential exploration of our recent history. I also can’t recommend his editing enough – sympathetically forthright is possibly the best description I can offer. I think he’s currently swamped with work and deadlines for his own writing at the moment but if, in the future, he announces he’s ready to take on more editing assignments I’d encourage any author to seize the opportunity of working with him. You can find him easily on Bluesky now that Twitter/X becomes a less attractive option with every passing day.
Early this autumn I entered the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize. This is run by the Biographer’s Club and awards £2,000 to the best proposal for an uncommissioned first biography. Since then I’ve had little time to write and I’ve hit a patch where I’m stuck. I’m finding the 1940s very difficult to navigate and I’ve been pretty fed up with the whole thing. I had assumed that my proposal had got nowhere but yesterday, to my amazement, I received an email telling me that I had been shortlisted and the prize will be announced on the 11th December. I am overjoyed at this unexpected development – it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. It’s all very exciting and I’m looking forward to the announcement. I am in some very good company. The details of the prize and the other shortlisted titles can be found here: https://thebiographersclub.com/elizabeth-buccleuch-prize-2024-shortlist-announced/
Before Christmas I hope to post a couple of new articles. First of all a few words on Hotel Lux by Maurice J Casey which is my favourite book released this year. I would be very pleased if mine were half as good when it’s finished. Also, I hope to do a Comrades post on Bob’s daughter Annie Walker Stewart or Nan as she was better known. There’s a magnificent newspaper story from the 1920s which features her as precocious young revolutionary which I’ve shared before on Twitter but which needs to be on the site.
Anyway, that’s it for now except to say thank you to everyone who has been so generous in helping me either in person or online. Keep your fingers crossed for me at the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize announcement on the 11th of December!
I found the following document – a celebration of Scottish history through a communist lens, in Bob Stewart’s files at the National Archives. Been waiting for an occasion to share it and today seems as good a day as any.
The ScotsmanJim LarkinShapurji Saklatvala Bob Stewart
At the moment I’m working on a biography of Bob Stewart. Hopefully this will build on what he revealed in his memoirs and will offer a fuller picture of his political and clandestine life and how this affected his family. I’ve just finished writing a chapter on his activities in Ireland in the 1920s when he was tasked with trying to set up an ‘Irish Marxist Party’. As part of the research, I came across this news article from The Scotsman that hopefully gives a little more of an idea of how Bob’s activities were viewed at the time.
Alan Stewart.
COMMUNISTS IN IRELAND.
ACTIVE CAMPAIGN OPENED.
TO PROMOTE A ” WORKERS ‘ REPUBLIC . “
(FROM A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.)
Fishing in troubled waters is, and has always been, a favourite pastime of Communist agitators , and in the Irish Free State they have had opportunities for its prosecution, of which they have promptly availed themselves from time to time. During recent years they have made repeated attempts to take advantage of the unsettled conditions in order to spread discontent and carry on their propaganda . It will be remembered that when a considerable part of the South was held by the armed supporters of Mr De Valera they seized the opportunity afforded by the disorders to raise the Red Flag and to establish Soviets in Tipperary and Clonmel . The only consequences of their activities then, however, was the destruction of creameries and other works and the ruin of the workers.
Subsequently there was a lull in the Communist propaganda, although now and again Mr Jim Larkin and a few others made efforts to instil life into the movement. Larkin has been twice at least in Russia during the past eighteen months, and the fact that he is a welcome visitor there is in itself significant . He claims to be a recognised link between Moscow and Ireland, and to have been appointed to some sort of official position as a delegate or deputy from the Bolshevists to the Free State.
A DANGEROUS DOCTRINE.
Lately there has been a revival of Communist agitation, and an active campaign has now been inaugurated in Dublin, where a public “demonstration” has been held beneath the folds of a Red banner said to have been sent by “the Russian proletariat” to their “Irish comrades.” The chief speakers at this “demonstration” came from Great Britain. They were Mr Saklatvala , the Communist MP for North Battersea and Mr Robert Stewart , of Dundee. Mr Saklatvala (who spoke for nearly two hours) declared that the revolutionary method was the only one that would befriend the working classes and Mr Stewart pledged himself that before the end of next month an organisation will be established in the Free State for the promotion of a Workers’ Republic. Mr Stewart, who recognises, as Irish agitators have done before, the value of land hunger as a , political weapon, appealed to workers if they wanted land to take it, and legalise their action afterwards. A dangerous doctrine and all the more dangerous that it has always been a popular one among a large class in Ireland. One of the troubles which the Free State government is experiencing arises from the illegal seizure of land in some of the Western counties at this moment.
While the Government do not, it is understood, take the Communist irruption into the Free State very seriously at present, they are watching developments with great care. They recognise that the real danger of the campaign which has been inaugurated lies not in its political propaganda, however pernicious, but in the possibility of resort being made to the weapons of terrorism and violence. Any association with Moscow cannot fail to be disquieting , especially at the present juncture.
The Scotsman Friday 24 April 1925
POSTSCRIPT
A shorter version of the story appeared in the Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner on Saturday 25 April 1925.
A Workers’ Republic
Addressing a meeting in the Mansion House on Sunday Mr. Saklatvala said the revolutionary method was the only method that could befriend the labouring classes. They seeded a great revolutionary measure by which boards of directors could be set aside and representatives of the working class take their places. British Labour betrayed the Irish workers when they were fighting for their freedom.
Mr. Bob Stewart, Dundee, said if the workers wanted the land of Ireland for the people they must take it and legalise it afterwards. Before the end of May he would have established in Ireland an organisation whose object would be a Worker’s Republic.
Early in the summer of 1931 I went to Northern Ireland, to Belfast, along with Bill Joss of Glasgow, a man who knew the “Irish question” from A to Z and from Z back to A again. I remember him giving the Irish some lectures on Ireland and Irish history, both political and economic, that left them speechless and if you can do that to an Irish audience you are a master of your subject. Although their mouths were shut, many eyes were opened.
The Irish Workers’ League (the Marxist party) had its main basis in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Waterford, but was finding it difficult to get a trade union basis in Belfast. Bill Joss and I were there to try and help with this problem. We were no longer working with Larkin but with Sean Nolan and a number of the local members.
The republican movement was quite strong in Belfast and Dublin, and I thought it right and necessary to try and work closely with them. Their politics were quite progressive and most of them detested the booze, so for me at least there was this added bond of unity.
We held our meetings on the Customs House steps and they were very rowdy; many a donnybrook took place. During our meetings the place was alive with police trying to keep order and, I must admit, on occasions trying to keep the crowd from “getting at” the speaker usually me. Our opponents had another way of stopping us speaking. They would bring out the band with the big drum and stop in front of the meeting place, playing at top pitch. In this field of competition I could never compete and I never found a public speaker who could. On such occasions we packed up and then came back later when the band had blown themselves out or had gone for a drink.
Some time after I had left Ireland, Harry Pollitt told me of a chat he had had with the Chief Constable of Belfast. The Chief asked him, “Where is that flat-nosed bugger Stewart? The trouble I had with that man! He spoke for hours and hours at the Customs House steps and my young policemen got fed up waiting for his meetings to finish. He insulted the police. He insulted the Irish authorities. He insulted everybody in Ireland.”
The last rebuke was wrong, the rest correct. I have done a bit of insulting in my time, but that’s permissible when dealing with political enemies who insult the working class every day of their lives. I remember one meeting at the Customs House steps. The news broke that there were to be cuts in wages and unemployment benefits. This meant a big cut in policemen’s wages as well. I couldn’t resist a dig at that. With dozens of police around, I said, “Here they are, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, big, strong, intelligent, known throughout the world as the wildest and bravest men in any fighting force the Government says their wages are to be reduced by 10 per cent and not one of them gives a whistle.” I thought that would have caused a riot, but no, the audience burst into laughter and a few of the policemen even joined in. That’s what makes Ireland such a bloody nice place to work in. You never know what’s around the corner.
In the late summer of 1931 the Labour government was running into trouble and it looked certain that a general election was not far off. I was still parliamentary candidate for Dundee and the party there asked me to come over from Belfast to do a few meetings. The Belfast lads did not want to let me go, but I promised I would only be away for a week or so, and on that understanding I left. I walked out of the frying pan into the fire.
When I arrived in Dundee there was the usual welcoming party, several hundreds strong, and as always it was decided to have a demonstration, a march through the town to the Albert Square. It was not a big demonstration, but the Dundee police didn’t like it, giving a bit of provocation to the marchers en route. However, we got through the town and were entering the Square without trouble when I heard a commotion behind me and, looking back, I saw a young fellow being manhandled by the police. I went back to see what was wrong and try to smooth things over, but before I could say anything a couple of hulking policemen grabbed me and I was frog-marched all the way to the Bell Streel Gaol. Naturally there was a near riot as our supporters let go at the police for this unwarranted provocation. If they had let us alone for another ten minutes it would have been all over in peace, but maybe it was not meant to be peaceful as far as the police were concerned.
My wife ran about getting the bail money and I and five others got out. The papers were full of the incident and the word got around: “The police have got Bob Stewart and are kicking his arse off.” An exaggeration, but that’s what happens in such cases. I was speaking at an open-air evening meeting in Lochee, a Dundee suburb. Thousands assembled to hear the workers’ side of the story. The people were really incensed, and demonstrations went on for over a week. Mounted police were drafted into the city and further arrests were made daily. Another bad slip by the authorities, because this only further incensed the workers.
The Court case was a Fred Karno farce. At one point I laughed outright at the absurdity of it all. Two of the policemen who had picked me up and this was done literally-were big Geordie Clark, and big Ed Anderson. Both world champion athletes. They tossed the caber at the Highland Games like someone using a match to light a pipe. They were built like Aberdeen Angus prize bulls and both looked like one. Real Scottish policemen of the period. Mountains of oatmeal, and little in the top piece.
It was a snotty-nosed little magistrate called Paterson who heard the case. The charges were:
a) In Meadowside he (that’s me) assaulted George Clark, constable, and struck him with his fist.
b) Committed a breach of the peace.
c) Molested constables Clark and MacFarlane in the execution of their duty while arresting Grant.
d) Assaulted William Gorrie, constable, and kicked him and after arrest struggled with the constables and refused to walk.
In cross-examination, big Geordie Clark was forced to admit that I had been frog-marched to the police station. The magistrate asked me to plead and I said I would not; it was a lot of nonsense and absolutely irrational. “Do you think,” I asked, “if I wanted to assault policemen I would choose the world heavy-weight champions? Please grant me a little intelligence.” But Baillie Paterson, like most magistrates, was only a figure-head. The real strings were pulled from behind. He found me guilty. What a laugh; me, guilty of assaulting the world heavyweight champion and punching him in the face! Me, a wee fellow not half Geordie Clark’s weight! He could have thrown me as far as the caber with one hand. There never was justice in the courts and certainly this case was the proof.
So I went up the river to Perth Gaol for thirty days and, to add insult to injury, the magistrate in his best pompous style advised me “That in future, Stewart, you should keep away from crowds.”
While I was away from the crowds and in Perth penitentiary, the great Labour split came and with it the fall of the Labour government. In late August Ramsay McDonald had made his now infamous sell-out radio speech. A National Government, with the Tories well entrenched in the new cabinet, was formed all to defend the pound sterling on which, claimed Ramsay Mac, “the well-being not only of the British nation but a large part of the world has been built”. Cuts in unemployment benefits to the extent of £70,000,000 per annum, and cuts in wages. Means tests for the unemployed. But this only for the working class. No cuts in profits and dividends. No means tests for the rich.
On October 22, a few weeks after MacDonald’s “save the pound” appeal, the Daily Express published: “Baldwin’s ordinary shares have advanced this year by €650,000 in value”. Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Tory Party, and brought into the National Government cabinet by MacDonald, held huge blocks of shares in Baldwin Limited, a great steel combine. On the day the Daily Express published this news, Baldwin was stumping the country telling the unemployed they must accept a dole cut of 10 per cent to save the pound and save the nation. Equality of sacrifice was the slogan of the National Government.
In his sell-out of the working-class movement, MacDonald pretended to give it a decent burial. In his broadcast, with an affected broken voice and, presumably, tears in his eyes, he said: “I have given my life to the building of a political party. I was present at its birth. I was a nurse when it emerged from infancy. At the moment I have not changed my ideals.” But he had sold out to the capitalist class just the same.
I profoundly believe McDonald actually thought he was presiding over the death of the Labour Party and the British working-class movement. His ego was that big. But historically the working-class movement has an indestructible habit of moving on, despite all the predictions of its destruction, and MacDonald lived to see that.
With the Labour Party demoralised by the split, the National Government called a general election for Tuesday, October 27. I had come out of Cardiff Gaol to fight my first parliamentary contest at Caerphilly in 1921. Now I came out of Perth Gaol to fight my last parliamentary contest at Dundee in 1931. This time the prison authorities were not so lenient; they let me out of gaol on the Saturday before polling day, giving me two full campaigning days -if you include Sunday.
The candidates for Dundee were Marcus for Labour and Scrymgeour for Prohibition, the sitting members who had been returned in 1929. In the election they teamed up together, with Scrymgeour still seeking the Labour and Catholic vote. The anti-Labour forces put up two new candidates, Florence Horsbrugh (now Baroness Horsbrugh) for the Tories, and Dingle Foot for the Liberals, both, of course, standing on the Nationalist ticket. I was the outsider as the Communist candidate at least that was how it was meant to be, but this time we did shake some of the political pundits.
The main brunt of the Nationalist campaigning fell on Dingle Foot who was then a young man of twenty-six years of age. This is the same Dingle Foot who is now a Labour Member of Parliament, having successfully changed his coat and maintained his membership of the House of Commons. He is one of the Foot family of professional politicians which includes Lord Caradon, formerly Hugh Foot, and Michael Foot, the left wing Labour MP. The ‘old man’ Isaac was no fool at professional politics.
At this time Dingle was bitterly anti-Labour, anti-working class. In one of his speeches he said, “The National Government stands for sense and solvency, Labour for sob stuff and starvation.”
My election agent was a little fellow called Sweeney. He called at the Perth Gaol and we went over the election address which was despatched in the usual efficient manner. The people knew we were campaigning all right. Apart from holding our own meetings, our fellows went to the other candidates meetings and question-time became a furious battle. Most of the Foot and Horsbrugh meetings ended with three cheers for Bob Stewart and the singing of “The Red Flag”. When I came out of prison on the Saturday, my first job was to lead a delegation to the Public Assistance for a number of hardship cases. There were some families then in real poverty. On the Sunday night we held a huge meeting at the Albert Square with an audience of 5,000 and great enthusiasm. Some of our lads began to talk of victory and I had to caution them, although the support we were receiving was our best ever in any election campaign.
But I was long enough in the political tooth to understand what was going on. The election campaign was one of the dirtiest in history. Every stick was used to beat the candidates standing against the National candidates. We were called traitors, saboteurs, wreckers no word, no turn of phrase, was bad enough to stampede the people and gain National votes.
In Dundee unemployment was high and to find work was an impossible task for the unemployed. In the final days of the election, the local newspaper, the Courier and Advertiser, published an interview with a Mr. Charlie Finch, who was reported to be about to open a bottle and glass factory in Dundee, employing 950 workers. But, emphasised Mr. Finch, he would only open the factory if the National Government were returned. Well, they were, but I never heard of the opening of Mr. Finch’s glass factory. This was the sort of thing that went on. Nothing was base enough to blacken the opponents of the National Government, nothing too low to win “National” votes.
Nine days before the poll the Courier and Advertiser published a prominent article praising another “National” leader who was then making his way in the world. His name was Adolf Hitler and according to the Courier he was the man who was to save the German nation.
On the final rally night-Monday-Dingle Foot invited all the candidates to speak from a platform in the Albert Square. He was providing loud-speaking equipment and a microphone. This was the first time this had ever been used in a Dundee parliamentary election. All the candidates refused, except me, so Foot and I had the meeting to ourselves. I asked for the other candidates’ time but Dingle would not agree. The local newspapers estimated that there was an audience of 20,000 but my reckoning was nearer 30,000.
At first Foot tried to play it funny. He was no doubt put out at being the only candidate to appear with the Communist candidate, but he would know later that this did him a power of good.
He started by saying, “I hope that when Bob Stewart and his pals come to power and I am hanged they will let me choose my own lamp-post.”
I intervened to say, “Dingle is growing up a bit too fast, we will reserve the lamp-posts for the important people,” and that cut him down to size. I remember his concluding remarks that night.
He said, “Do you want a member of the Trades Union Congress or a Member of Parliament for Dundee? I want you to send me to Westminster not as a bondsman of the Trades Union Congress, or as a catspaw of Moscow, but as a member of the National Government.”
I wonder who he thinks serves the nation now?
The split in the labour movement and the slanderous campaign of the National candidates, in which the former right-wing Labour leaders, MacDonald, Snowden, Thomas and others, were the most vehement of all, was too much for the working-class forces to surmount.
If anyone still thinks that the labour movement is strengthened when the right-wing leaders abandon and rupture the movement in this way, they ought to read the history of the 1929-31 Labour government. Working-class political success rests on the ability of the labour movement to purge itself of the right-wing leaders by political exposure, before they can sell out and not after.
In the 1929 general election, the Labour Party had won 288 seats. In 1931 Labour won only 51 seats and had a net loss of 228.
The Dundee result showed Florence Horsbrugh to be the first Tory candidate to be returned for Dundee this century (she remained M.P. for Dundee until 1945). Dingle Foot was top of the poll, the result being:
D. Foot 52, 048
F. Horsbrugh 48, 556
M. Marcus 32, 573
E. Scrymgeour 32, 229
R. Stewart 10, 262
Dingle Foot was so delighted when Sheriff Morton declared the result that he called for three cheers for Stewart, Marcus and Scrymgeour. Smart fellow!
The Tory government elected in 1924, largely because of the Zinoviev forgery, ran almost its full term of five years; 1929 had to be election year, and the election came in the spring. Parliament was dissolved and the date of the election set for May.
The 1929 parliamentary election will be remembered for two things: the return of the second Labour Government and the flapper vote. This was the first election in which women of twenty-one years of age voted. Before then the minimum age for votes for females was thirty years. Some people at the time said it was the flapper vote that made the return of a Labour government possible. This was definitely not true. The flapper vote did not assist the Labour or Communist candidates in 1929. While I have always wholeheartedly supported the elementary right of every adult to have a vote (except in extreme cases, such as insanity, etc.) I am not starry-eyed about the result and do not believe that new voters, the vast majority of whom have not been engaged in political action or discussion, will go to the polls and vote left with their first vote. I would say the same for votes at eighteen years of age. Very right and proper, but for those who think this will mean a mass increase in the left vote I fear there is a disappointment in store.
I was again the Communist candidate at Dundee in 1929, along with four others contesting for the two seats. No doubt because of the flapper vote, the Tories retained Frederick Wallace, a handsome military Tory gentleman who claimed to have fought the Russian Reds in 1919 after he had defeated the Germans. This sort of talk got him into serious trouble all through his campaign. The Liberals put up Henderson Stewart, a good looker and an able debater. Later he contested East Fife and was M.P. for that constituency for many years, pairing for a time with Bill Gallacher, who was M.P. for West Fife. Neddy Scrymgeour was the sitting member and was forward again in the interests of prohibition–although, be it noted, Neddy had been seven years M.P. for Dundee and all the time the public houses in the city had increased in number and the amount of whisky and beer consumed had likewise increased. In fact, during the years of Scrymgeour’s tenancy of the Dundee parliamentary seat the only trade in the city that had flourished was the liquor trade. Jute, ship-building, jam had their ups and downs but the liquor trade did well. In the 1924 general election Edmund Morel had been returned for Labour but died only months after taking his seat. In the resulting by-election Tom Johnstone, one of the early pioneers of the socialist movement, had stood for Labour and won. The Communists had not contested, giving Johnstone a clear run. By 1929 Johnstone had fallen out with some of the local right wingers and told them “where to put” their parliamentary seat, so a little lawyer fellow called Marcus stood for Labour in 1929. He was of Russian descent and was born in Grodno. His father, Nathan Marcus Tashen-ovsky, emigrated in 1911 and later Marcus became naturalised and took the family second name. At the start of the campaign the Scottish Nationalists declared they were to put up C. M. Greive, who was a rising young man in Scottish literature under the name of Hugh McDiarmid. I can’t remember why Hugh did not stand, but many years later he had a parliamentary contest in the 1964 general election as a Communist against the reigning prime minister, Sir Alex Douglas-Home.
The issues in the election for us were clear. Since the General Strike wages were at poverty level and unemployment was over two million. In Dundee in particular wages were below the national average in jute, and unemployment in all industries was rampant. The flapper vote was also important. In Dundee the 1924 electoral register showed 42,804 men and 35,493 women. The 1929 register showed 46,246 men and 62,880 women. It was estimated that in Dundee in 1929, 36,000 women voted for the first time in their lives. A number of candidates “cast their fly” for the flappers, and Harry Hope, a candidate in the neighbouring North Angus constituency, had the following advertisement in the newspaper on polling day:
TO THE WOMANHOOD OF ANGUS
VOTE HOPE
As can be readily guessed this left itself open to some bawdy jokes. The Dundee Tory candidate Fred Wallace added a bit of Christmas spice to his advertisement which read:
TO ALL WOMEN AND MEN OF GOODWILL
VOTE WALLACE
This showed the new importance of women. Up till then no one gave a damn for the women’s vote, accepting that most women did what some man told them to do.
I never had any claims to be beautiful, and as I was no chicken I treated the flappers as I did all others, with the greatest of respect, and sought to win their vote by reasonable political argument.
The campaign was a lively one, marred by a dirty attack by the Tories and the local press on Michael Marcus. Antisemitism was vigorously peddled by Tory canvassers who openly said a vote for Marcus was not a British vote but a vote for a Russian Jew. Unfortunately Marcus was neither a forceful personality nor an astute politician; he may have been a good lawyer, but he never really hit back in the right way at this sewer-type politics.
The Tory meetings were usually “snorters”, with many of our lads roasting the candidate at question time. Wallace had the real boss’s attitude, always wanting to dish out orders and tell everyone what they should do. But he wasn’t telling our fellows what to do at election meetings, they had been around too long for that. So Wallace complained to the press that at his meetings he was faced with dan audience of lions with Communist teeth”.
Of course he asked for much of what he got and maybe he baited the lads a bit. He was very fond of boasting how good a soldier he was and how he had fought and won in Northern Russia. I think he spoke so much about his military prowess that he began to believe it himself. Any-way, at his final rally he really let his verbosity get the better of him and shouted: “Men of Dundee, men of the fighting Black Watch with whom I had the great honour to fight shoulder to shoulder, we want our native land to flourish!” The truth was he was never in the Black Watch and according to the Dundee Courier, which took pleasure in giving him a full biography, he was with the Royal Artillery well behind the Black Watch in the fighting line. Strange how all the Tories contesting Dundee always wanted to appeal to the Black Watch for support. The funny thing was that if it had been left to the ex-Black Watch men to elect an M.P. the Communist candidate would have been a cert. Many of our supporters were men who had served in the Black Watch during the war, and had had enough and didn’t want any more wars. That’s why they campaigned for the Communist candidate.
But Wallace detested the Communists and Russia. One night our lads must have really got under his skin. The Courier reported he had had a rowdy meeting and had “thrown back” at his “tormentors” in the audience: “The practice of socialism has been operated in Russia since 1917 and has been a ghastly failure.” And for good measure, and to see that the voting public really got the message, in the same edition the Courier published a letter which said: “Bob Stewart and Marcus have not told the Dundee electors that under the Soviet government there are five million unemployed in Russia, that Moscow is swarming with beggars, that common people are huddled together worse than pigs, and that al homes in Moscow are under control of the government.” That last phrase could give a clue to the origin of the writer. My guess was he was a Tory landlord. Of course I tried to answer back, but in good British democratic parliamentary style the non-union D. C. Thomson press published neither my letters nor my speeches.
In the campaign we hammered home the lessons of the General Strike and the need for working-class unity. All the other candidates dodged the issue with general platitudes, except Wallace who said, “The General Strike marked an epoch in British industrial history, because for the first time for nearly a century since trade unions were formed, there has developed in the minds of trade union leaders the realisation that the strike weapon has outlived its usefulness.”
Our campaign, while not at the same high level as those of previous elections, was quite good. I remember a meeting in the Kinnaird Hall with over a thousand present, at which Tom Mann spoke for two hours, taking off his jacket midway through his speech because he said he was becoming a little heated. So was the candidate, waiting for his turn to speak. There was not much time left for me after Tom, but he did a valuable job in the election. He was a well built, handsome man and very, very popular with the women jute workers. He certainly could, with success, have made a play for the flapper vote on looks and physique. He was a powerful working-class orator, with a great gift of making friends readily.
At our final rally I had a speaker from Germany, comrade Gaspar, a member of the executive of the German Communist Party. He spoke that night of the emergence of the German fascist party and the utter refusal of the German social-democrats to unite with the German communists in face of the fascist menace. I wonder how many Dundonians in 1939, when Hitler declared war, thought of the speech made by Gaspar on working-class unity in the Caird Hall ten years earlier.
The main thing I remember about the 1929 parliamentary election campaign was the inability of the party to win votes from numbers of men and women who openly admitted that the policy of the Communists was correct. There was a profound fear that after five years of reactionary Tory government, the Tories might again be returned to power. There was an intense desire to get the Tories out, and to do this many voters who would otherwise have voted for the Communist candidates, voted Labour to get, as they said, a Labour government. Many thousands of men and women recognised the weakness of Labour with the right wing in control of the Labour Party, but they saw a Labour vote as the only alternative to Baldwin and the Tories. While in Dundee this feeling did not have the same effect as in the other constituencies where the Communists were contesting, near the end of the campaign in Dundee, Marcus, the Labour candidate, said publicly, “Give the second vote to Scrymgeour,” hoping Scymgeour would reciprocate, which he did. The Dundee result was:
Scrymgeour (Prob.) 50, 073
Marcus (Lab.) 47, 602
Henderson Stewart (Lib.) 33, 890
Wallace (Con.) 33, 868
Stewart (Comm.) 6, 163
The election resulted in a decided swing to Labour, which won 288 seats. The Tories won 250 seats and the Liberals 53.
Ramsay McDonald again visited Buckingham Palace and became prime minister. But in less than two years from McDonald’s taking office the truth of all the Communist Party had been saying in the 1929 parliamentary general election campaign was to become a living reality for the British working class.
On my return from Ireland I found the country in a political ferment. A Labour government, with Liberal support, had been formed arising from the general election of November 1923. This government, headed by Ramsay McDonald as prime minister, had run into trouble and was in no way solving the deep economic crisis. The cost of living was high, wages were low and unemployment still at a very high level. Despite this the big political discussion was taking place on foreign policy. The de jure recognition of the Soviet Union had been effected in the early days of the Labour government, and demands were being made by Labour M.P.s for this to be followed up by normal trading and diplomatic relationships.
This demand soon ran into difficulties. The Tories were vehemently against. They demanded compensation for British property in the Soviet Union which had been nationalised by the Soviet government, and also trading rights for British firms on Soviet territory. The first was realisable, but naturally the Soviet government would not entertain the latter. In Parliament Lloyd George supported the Tories, so with a Tory-Liberal coalition the minority Labour government was in difficulty. Pressure by Labour M.P.s, however, forced the government to open discussions with the Soviet government on compensation for confiscated British property, trading relations and a British loan to the Soviet Union.
The Soviet delegation arrived in Britain in April 1924, and negotiations under Arthur Ponsonby from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began immediately. By August all the problems had been settled except one: the compensation for British property. Then news came that negotiations had broken down. The Tories were jubilant, saying this showed that it was impossible to negotiate with these Bolsheviks. In this critical situation, when it was obvious that the future of the Labour government was in jeopardy, a number of Labour M.P.s went into action. One of them who played a leading part, and who later told the full story, was Edmund Morel, M.P. for Dundee, a man I knew well. Morel was secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, a champion of the colonial peoples and founder of the Congo Reform Association in 1904. Among his many books and pamphlets outstanding was Red Rubber, an exposure of the rubber slave trade in the Congo. Morel and the others had discussions with the Soviet delegation and then went to Ponsonby with a suggested formula. At first this was accepted, but later rejected by Ponsonby, and it was deadlock again. On the critical day when Parliament was to re-assemble and a parliamentary statement of the negotiations was to be made in the House of Commons, Labour M.P.s again saw the Soviet delegation and only four hours before the parliamentary statement was due agreement was reached by all parties in what were really last-minute negotiations. Edmund Morel later told the story of what the argument was about. The British government wanted the words “valid claims” inserted in the compensation agreement. The Soviet delegation suggested “valid and approved by both governments”. The Soviet government demanded they should have a say in what was “valid”. The eventual compromise which was finally accepted used the words “agreed claims”.
This draft treaty on trade was, however, never put into effect. It was clear that the Tories violently opposed any trade with the Soviet Union and, with the Liberals supporting them, the defeat of the Labour government was only a matter of time. The Communist Party estimated that the general election was at most only a few months away.
The party called for a closing of the working-class ranks and for an end to the divisions in the labour movement and a fight for the return of a majority Labour government based on the unity of the working class, with Communists being accepted with full rights in the Labour Party. We decided that no Communist candidates would run against Labour candidates when the election took place and instructed our branches to submit the names of Communists to the Labour selection conferences to go forward for selection with the Labour nominees. In some constituencies the nominations of Communists were ruled out by right-wing Labour, but in others Communists were nominated and eventually selected to stand as joint Communist-Labour candidates. In this way Saklatvala contested Battersea and won the seat. In all, seven Communists stood as Labour-Communist candidates and in Leeds Tom Mann lost a selection conference by two votes. Gallacher was only narrowly defeated in the Motherwell selection.
In Dundee, however, the position was different. It was a double-barrelled constituency, two seats for the city. There was only one Labour candidate, Edmund Morel. The other M.P. was Edwin Scrymgeour, the prohibitionist, who, while occasionally supporting Labour, was not officially connected with the Labour Party. We took a decision to contest Dundee and I was chosen as the candidate, thus becoming the only “clear” Communist candidate in the election. However, it was not the British-Soviet draft treaty that defeated the Labour government. The defeat came on a much smaller issue. Johnnie Campbell, who was then the editor of the Workers Weekly, the paper of the Communist Party, had written an article which the Crown held to be seditious. This contention was one which might have been difficult to sustain in Court and, on second thoughts, the Attorney General withdrew the charge. The Tories, hell bent for an election at any cost, raised an outraged cry. The Tory press claimed intimidation of the Labour government by the Communists and in parliament the Tories tabled a vote of censure on the government. This vote of censure was defeated, but a Liberal amendment to it seeking an “appointment or a select Committee to investigate ” the withdrawal of the charge against J. R. Campbell was carried against the government by 364 votes to 198. Next day, October 10, Ramsay McDonald announced the dissolution of Parliament.
Our party was first in the field in the Dundee hustings. I commenced my campaign with meetings on the 14th October. With me I had Harry Pollitt who, because he had been in Dundee with Gallacher in the previous elections, knew Dundee as well as his home town of Gorton. He was also a great favourite with the local shipyard workers, many of whom were to him “fellow boilermakers”. Also with me was Helen Crawfurd, a wonderful woman speaker invaluable in an election in a women’s town. And also Johnnie Campbell. Poor Johnnie, he always had to open his meetings with an apology: “I would much rather have discussed the election without dragging in personalities, but I will have to because if I don’t, you will.” After all, he was supposed to be the cause of the election, although he soon disposed of that in his speeches. Still, it was all grist to the mill and filled the meetings to capacity, with Johnnie always in top form.
The Dundee Tories and Liberals had made a pact for the election, running one candidate each, two votes -one Tory, one Liberal. The Liberal was Sir Andrew Duncan, a barrister from Kent, who boasted of Scots ancestry. This brought him his first mistake in the election. At his first meeting he was laying on the charm and said, “I come as a Scotsman among Scotsmen.” Then a voice from the audience put him right: “Hauf o’ wiz are Irish.” This was indeed true. At any Dundee meeting 50 per cent or more of the audience were Irish. Scrymgeour, who had lived all his life in Dundee, knew this and always deliberately campaigned for the Irish Catholic vote.
Early on in the campaign Harry Pollitt also gave Duncan a knock. Sir Andrew let it be known in the press that he wanted a debate with a trade unionist, preferably a shipyard worker, no doubt to show he knew the trade union position very well. The boilermakers got together and accepted the challenge and put forward as their speaker Harry Pollitt. The brave Sir Andrew then changed his pipe music. He would not debate with a Communist, he said, much to the glee of the local shipyard workers who put his gas at a peep for the rest of the campaign.
Sir Andrew Duncan’s running mate was a Tory called Frederick Wallace who had already contested Dundee in the 1923 General Election.
The Labour candidate was Edmund Morel, who as I have said had taken an important part in the British-Soviet negotiations on the trade treaty. When the Labour government was first formed he was tipped to be the first Foreign Minister, but he was much too left for Ramsay McDonald, who took the Foreign Ministry himself as well as being the Prime Minister. Morel was a strong candidate, a good speaker and always on the left, but he always hedged at being officially associated with the Communists. Privately he would say he hoped the Communists would win the second seat, but he would never say it publicly.
Edwin Scrymgeour was the sitting member and, while he stood as a prohibitionist, he campaigned for the second Labour vote. I said at the time he was the candidate from heaven who would steal a vote from all parties, Tory, Liberal, Labour and Communist, and then say he had a mandate for the abolition of the liquor trade. This in fact was a great joke at the time, because Dundee was one of the most “drunken” cities in Britain and many of those who voted for Scrymgeour could be seen every Saturday in life fou’ with the beer and whisky.
This election was one of the most rousing in Dundee’s long history of tousy election campaigns. From the day I opened my campaign on October 14th to my final meeting on the 28th I spoke to full houses only. On many occasions there were overflows. This went for every candidate. From the City Hall holding three thousand to the smaller halls holding a few hundreds, all were packed out. The main issues in the election, in fact almost the only two issues, were British-Soviet relations and employment with good wages. In Dundee these fused together because Dundee is a big textile town and before the war of 1914-18 a large flax manufacture was based on the export of flax from Russia. This had dried up and many flax workers were unemployed, so the question of British-Soviet trade was not an academic one in Dundee. It was on diplomatic relations between Britain and the Soviet Union that the big election fight took place.
I had just returned from my spell on the Communist International and my knowledge of the Soviet Union was standing me in good stead. I knew what I was talking about and could discuss developments in the Soviet Union at first hand. Morel, with his knowledge of British-Soviet trade discussions, was also campaigning well on this issue. This rattled Sir Andrew Duncan and his Tory running mate, and as they tried to answer the questions their meetings became rowdier and rowdier. They were under a constant barrage of interruptions, which was not unnatural because they began to insult people at the meetings. Many of the audience had been in dire straits and unemployed for months, and they retaliated by showing their disgust in good election fashion. The singing of “The Red Flag” at the end of the Tory and Liberal meetings became a commonplace event. The local newspapers, seeking to find a reason for this, accused the Communists of trying to break up the Tory-Liberal meetings. I was mad about this and wrote to the papers pointing out the Communists had a campaign in operation and this was stretching our resources to the limit and occupying 100 per cent of our time. We had no time to think about other candidates’ meetings.
So it was Morel and I for recognition and trade with the Soviet Union, Duncan and Wallace with their “down with the Bolsheviks and trust the boss” attitude, and in between came Scrymgeour talking of God and Heaven, the iniquity of the drink trade, appealing to the reason of the Labour voters, and in particular to the Irish Catholic voters. As the campaign went on he became more and more anti-Soviet, no doubt through pressure of the Catholics and in order to win Catholic support.
Of course the election hustings were full of good give and take questions and answers, with the Tory and Liberal mostly on the receiving end. The following question, noted by the press of the period and kept for posterity, is a good example. At Sir Andrew Duncan’s final rally, after he had concluded his final speech and was no doubt saying to himself, as all candidates do, “Well that’s finished,” the chairman asked for questions. Up jumped one bright fellow to ask: “As the only difference between Churchill and you is that Winnie sent us to war to slash the Germans whilst you stayed at home to slash wages, is there any reason why we should not give you the same dose as the Kiel Canal rat catcher?” Amid a storm of cheers Sir Andrew was heard to whimper, “I stand on my record.”
As the election campaign neared its end it became increasingly clear that Labour was gaining ground. It was at this point that the Zinoviev letter incident broke (1). This was one of the crudest political frauds ever inflicted on the British voter. It was a forged letter purporting to have been sent by the Communist International to the British Communist Party. On the Saturday before the election all the press in Britain had banner headlines: “Soviets Intervene in British Elections,” “Red Hands on Britain’s Throat”, and so on. Immediately Rakovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Britain, indignantly and emphatically denied the authenticity of the letter and categorically stated it a forgery. All Sunday the country waited for an explanation from Ramsay MacDonald, who was Foreign Minister, but nothing came. On Monday the local paper in Dundee, The Courier, carried a huge banner headline:
COMMUNIST PLOT-RAMSAY MACDONALD SILENT
While such a denial from the Soviet Ambassador was to be expected the fact remains that the socialist government, the foreign office, and Mr. McDonald personally were satisfied it was a genuine document and not a forgery.
Arthur McManus, who had taken my place on the Communist International and who was an alleged signatory to the letter from Zinoviev, was speaking at Manchester two days before the poll. In the audience were police and C.I.D. men. McManus denounced the document as a forgery and challenged the police to arrest him, but no one moved. The last thing the Foreign Office ever wanted was an investigation into the origins of the document.
On Tuesday, MacDonald made a statement casting doubt on the genuineness of the document, but the damage was done. The British electorate went to the polls without a clear statement from MacDonald, and the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in British political history had paid off. The result of the poll was a resounding Tory victory. On dissolution of Parliament the state of the parties was:
Tories 258
Labour 193
Liberal 158
After the election it was:
Tories 403
Labour 157
Liberal 38
The Liberals who had precipitated the election were smashed and never again returned as a main British parliamentary party. That was the outcome of their anti-Soviet policy and their demand for an investigation in the Johnnie Campbell case.
Edmund Morel held Dundee, with Scrymgeour second. The result was:
Morel (Lab.) 32, 864
Scrymgeour (Prob.) 29, 193
Wallace (Con.) 28, 118
Duncan (Lib.) 25, 566
Stewart (Comm.) 8, 340
After the count we mounted the platform to say our piece, but the Tory and the Liberal would not speak. They were sorely disappointed because they had really believed that the Zinoviev scare had won them the seats. Morel, knowing this, went for them, saying he would demand an immediate investigation from Parliament, which I think he did. Scrymgeour, safe in the second seat, found time to thank God for being good to him and thus saving the second seat from the Communist menace. He did not add but must have thought, “Yes, and with the aid of the Irish Catholic vote.”
With such a resounding victory at the polls the road was now open for a direct attack on the British working class. It certainly came.
Footnote (1): Some facts regarding the notorious letter came to light years after-wards. The letter was dated Moscow, September 15th 1924. It purported to be signed by three people: Zinoviev, President of the Presidium of the I.K.K.I., McManus, Member of the Presidium, Kuusinen, Secretary.
Zinoviev was not president of the presidium of the I.K.K.I. (Communist International) although he was president of the I.K.K.I. itself, and therefore would not sign himself as president of the presidium. Also, he always signed as G. Zinoviev. Secondly, McManus always signed as A. McManus. or Arthur McManus. Thirdly, Kuusinen was not the secretary of I.K.K.I The secretary was a man named Kolarov. To add to this mountain of obvious forgery the letter was headed from “the Third Communist International”. There was no Third Communist International. It was always referred to as “the Third International’ because it followed the First and Second Internationals, which were not Communist. These were such infantile mistakes that even a cursory examination would have shown the document to be a blatant forgery.
In later years it came to light that a Foreign Office official, Mr. J. D. Gregory, who was dismissed from the Foreign Office after an inquiry into some illegal currency deals, was stated to have been involved with some Russian emigrés in the forgery of the letter. This was never ultimately proved, but the whole story of the Zinoviev letter, dealt with in W. P. and Zelda K. Coates’ book A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations, is fascinating reading for all students of political history.
During one of my periodic visits to Dundee in early 1923 I ran into a serious confrontation between the jute employers and the jute workers. To make things more serious this took place while nearly 25 per cent of the workers in the city were unemployed. A running battle was taking place over unemployment pay and parish council assistance to those who had exhausted their unemployment benefit.
In February 1923 there were 10,500 workers claiming benefit on the Dundee unemployment register. This was by no means the total unemployment figure; many women workers were not entitled to benefit when they were unemployed. Under the unemployment acts then in force, by April 4th 7,000 would be completely cut off from unemployment benefit and would then have to apply for parish relief. This bleak prospect was causing a serious crisis in every home in the city. The scales for weekly parish relief were 7s. 6d. for a husband, 7s. 6d. for a wife and 1s. for every child under fourteen years of age. This meant a family consisting of man, wife and four children under fourteen years of age (by no means an uncommon family then) had to live on 19s. a week.
Into this already seething cauldron of discontent another problem boiled up. In Cox’s jute mill, one of the largest in the city, employing thousands of workers, the management introduced new spinning frames and demanded a reduction of women spinners. Where formerly three worked, two now would be employed, thus saving the wage of every third spinner. No offer of extra payment to the spinners left was even contemplated. The impudence of such a demand was highlighted by the fact that only the week before, the Associated Companies of Jute Industries, whose chairman was Mr. J. Ernest Cox, had published their profits for the year showing a record £606,224 and declaring a dividend of 9 per cent, all of which Mr. Cox said was very satisfactory. No wonder Cox’s workers were hopping mad. The spinners refused to work the machines and held up the work for the rest of the mill, so the management then locked out all the workers. The mills in the Federation followed suit and in a few days 30,000 jute workers were on the streets swelling the number of unemployed to more than half the population of the city. The locked-out workers got no unemployment pay and were being denied relief from the parish council. There was no doubt in my mind that behind-the-scenes attempts were being made to smash the jute trade union and to try and bring the workers to heel.
The party had discussions with the workers involved and decided to approach the trades council. At first there was a joint effort to organise collections and pay out a few bob to the unemployed, but it soon became clear that this was not even scratching the surface of the problem. Arrangements were then made for a joint demonstration to demand that the parish council raise the relief rates and pay relief to all unemployed.
The demonstration was the largest, noisiest and possibly the most successful in Dundee’s history. The crowd assembled in the Albert Square. The newspapers at the time estimated that 50,000 filled the Square and the adjoining streets. The chairman, one of the locked-out workers, called on me to put the proposals on what should be done. I suggested that the demonstration should elect a delegation to go to the parish council, which was holding a meeting that evening, to table our demands. Secondly, that the crowd should form fours and march to the parish council offices at West Bell Street, making themselves and their demands heard on the way, and continue back to the Square where the delegation would return to give their report. A deputation of ten was selected including Billie Tom Stewart, Councillor John Ogilvie, the A.E. U. organiser Alf Maloney, myself and others. The ten heading the procession, we set off. When we reached West Bell Street there were hundreds of sweating policemen struggling with thousands of people, trying to keep them on the sidewalks so that the demonstration could pass on the road. All traffic was completely halted. In Dundee most of the jute employees were women and many of the husbands stayed at home to keep house and make the meals, so there was the contradictory spectacle of the majority of the marchers being women and those on the sidewalks men. The call went up from the women marchers: “Get the kettle-boilers in the march!” so there was a rush from the sidewalks into the road. The demonstration then became a seething mass of slow-moving humanity.
As the head of the march came to the parish council offices, the deputation dropped off and were admitted to the parish council meeting. At least we got there. A number of the parish councillors were unable to get in the front door and had to be hoisted in by the rear windows. The chairman, Davie Duncan, a pal of mine from the old Temperance movement days, opened the meeting, but no one heard a word he said; you could see his lips move but there was no sound. His voice was entirely drowned by the deafening noise from the thousands passing outside shouting slogans for unemployment benefit, increased relief rates, snatches of “The Red Flag”; the sound bounced off the walls of the building and filled every room. At last Bobby Allan, the clerk of the council, made signs that the delegation should be heard. Now Bobby Allan was a terror in Dundee. In the old days when the mothers wanted to frighten their children and get them to go to sleep they recited the old ditty:
“Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret ye,
The Black Douglas’ll ne’er get ye.”
In many homes Bobby Allan had replaced the Black Douglas. He was a real swine who saw working-class people as beasts of burden and treated them as such.
Allan began by objecting to one of the delegation called McGuire and demanded that he be asked to leave. I promptly told him and the council that McGuire was an elected member of the delegation and if he left, all left. That finished that lot! So we had our say. I let Baillie Stewart and Councillor John Ogilvie, “Mr. Facing-both-ways” as we called him, have the first go. They started with tear-jerking humanitarianism, poor people without a crust of bread, children who were the future citizens starving, and so on. With the flint-hearted parish councillors that didn’t get us very far. When it came to my turn to speak, Davie Duncan said, “Please be brief, Bob.” “Why me?” I asked. I told them the workers were entitled to a good life and it was no fault of theirs that they were unemployed. I accused the jute bosses of locking out the workers and said they were deliberately trying to bust the trade union. “The workers won’t have it,” I said, “and what’s more if you don’t give them money to buy food and clothes, they will likely take them without asking your permission.” I cautioned them and said if there was any trouble then it was the fault of the parish council and not the starving workers.
Bobby Allan said there was the question of legality involved. Discussion would have to be held with government authorities on raising the scales of payment and certainly discussions with the unemployment exchange before any payments to the locked-out workers could be made. When Bobby cracked the whip the councillors usually obeyed, but on this occasion a few demurred. However, he had the majority with him. So we went back to the Albert Square to report. What a thunderous howl of rage greeted my simple announcement that the parish council were not prepared to move meantime! An unbiased outsider would have thought the day of revolution had arrived. From all sides came the demand to smash the council offices, to smash into the shops and take the goods “that belonged to the workers”. For a time it looked as if control of the meeting had been lost. The chairman then called on me to make any proposals of what could be done. I suggested that the demonstration refuse to accept the parish council decision as final, that the deputation should return to the council meeting, and that the demonstration form a procession again and march as before, only this time making their demands a bit louder. I knew that the “spies would be out” and that before we reached the council offices they would know what had transpired on the Square.
This time there was no one on the sidewalks; there was just a huge surging mass of humanity. On the way the window of G. L. Wilson the clothier went in, and this was followed by a few more, including the Buttercup Dairy, and a few goods were extracted; but the wonderful thing was that with the police impotent because of the vast surging mass, thousands of these people desperately in need of food and clothes remained disciplined and orderly.
When the deputation was received the second time I charged Bobby Allan with provoking the workers and creating a situation in which thousands of people could be seriously injured. I said if I went back and told these people nothing was to be done to relieve their distress, then it was the parish council who would be responsible for what would happen. Some of the councillors, no doubt already well briefed on what was happening, supported me, and Bobby Allan knew he would have to make concessions, so we started to talk. First it was conceded that the scales of payment should be raised, and then that the locked-out workers would be given relief while discussions proceeded with the unemployment exchange authorities. So it was back to the Square with a success report and victory for working-class solidarity and united action. This decision to a certain extent ended the starvation tactics of the jute employers and gave the workers confidence to fight on. Dundee people say Bobby Allan never forgot that evening and for years after he continued to extract revenge from the individual cases he dealt with in the parish council.
The case of the locked-out jute workers dragged on. The jute employers were hard men and did not give up easily. I am sure one of their aims was to smash the jute union, at least to cripple it. The case was discussed in parliament where Edmund Morel, M.P. for Dundee, demanded that something be done to end the lock-out. The Lord Provost tried to mediate but without success. Finally the Minister of Labour, Sir Montagu Barlow, intervened and set up a court of inquiry under the chairmanship of Sir David Shackleton. Naturally the report of the inquiry came down on the employers’ side but, if I remember correctly, it also said that increased rates should be given to the spinners, thus sweetening the blow. The lock-out lasted eight weeks, two months in which Dundee was a storm centre in every sense of the word. It was a remarkable coincidence, but true, that as the lock-out was ending the British Trades Union Congress was opening its first session in Dundee.
Breaking the Fetters 