Tag: Family

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 1: The Stewart Family.

Brief overview of Bob Stewart’s life taken from the MI5 files held at the National Archives.

I’m going to start serialising Bob’s memoirs ‘Breaking the Fetters’ on this blog as it has long been out of print. It was first published on the author’s ninetieth birthday by Lawrence & Wishart in 1967. As he was beginning to go blind during this time, the memoirs were dictated onto tape and then edited and prepared for the press by Dave and Elizabeth Bowman. The dedication runs as follows:

To the parents who begot me, William Stewart and Georgina Fraser Stewart. To my eight sisters and three brothers, a hard-working, kindly clan.

To all those who struggle to break the fetters that capitalist society has rivetted on public enterprise and social advance.

To my dear comrades the world over who form the vanguard of liberators of human kind from age-old bondage.

Finally, to my beloved wife, Margaret Lang, who in storm and stress was my loyal and loving comrade.

Chapter 1: The Stewart Family.

Recent photos of Balgownie Steading, Angus. In all probability this is the farm where Bob Stewart was born.

I was born on 16th February 1877 in the Parish of Eassie, at the farm of Balgownie in Glen Ogilvie, which is part of the beautiful How O’ Strathmore in County Angus, Scotland.

My father was a grieve (foreman) on the farm and my mother naturally worked in the fields, but to augment the small income she was also a handloom weaver, doing two jobs and rearing a family at the same time. Handlooms were in all the homes and apart from weaving for the families’ own needs, the women also worked for the textile merchants in Glamis and Forfar which are only a few miles from Eassie.

It was the small income and the Stewart family, growing both in number and appetite, that forced us to leave Eassie and seek a better means of livelihood in the town of Dundee, which was known at the time as a woman’s town, because its main industry was jute manufacture and the work of spinning and weaving was done by women.

I was two years old when the move to Dundee took place, so I was of little consequence, but my older brothers and sisters were reaching working age. The flitting to the town was made to secure employment and a bigger income for the family.

In town my father got a job as a carter with one of the delivery firms, driving a horse and lorry. There were no motors at the time. His main work was carrying raw jute, which was shipped from India in 2 cwt. bales, from the harbour to the mills. A hard, arduous job for which he was paid a mere 18s per week.

When we were children, we did not see much of my father, as he left home at five o’ clock in the morning and did not return until seven or eight o’ clock in the evening. He took with him bread, sandwiches and a flask of tea. If funds were good and he had twopence to share he would treat himself to a large bottle of ale, called twopenny, the common beer drink of the period.

My father was not a church goer, Sunday “claes” were expensive, but he religiously adhered to the Scottish sabbath as a day of rest. After six days of back-breaking toil his Sunday consisted of lying abe all day reading the newspapers.

My mother had a hard struggle to make ends meet. To feed a big family like ours, to provide the clothes, was no mean task. Our fare consisted mainly of porridge for breakfast, broth for dinner with an occasional treat of rice pudding, an evening tea of bread, butter and home-made jam. Clothes were handed down from the older to the younger children. Boots were worn only in the winter; in summer we ran barefoot.

Through all her troubles and worries my mother kept a cheery disposition. A lovely singer, she could be heard all day singing to herself as she went about her work.

I am the tenth child of twelve. I had three brothers and eight sisters. My youngest brother Willie was a carter. A hard-working, hard-drinking man. When he got drunk, generally on Saturdays, he wanted to fight policemen, an urge which on many occasions landed him in serious trouble. They say in Dundee that a drunk man is an honest man, so deep down Willie must have had a dislike of the police force- a dislike I have shared on many occasions.

Later in life I persuaded Willie to change his ways. He became a total abstainer and an excellent trade unionist. He was one of the founders of the Dundee Branch of the Scottish Carters’ association, which is now the Scottish Horse and Motormen’s Trade Union. I was quite a youth when the Dundee branch opened but gave what help I could. This was my introduction to the trade union movement.

My eldest brother Jock was a regular soldier. He served for thirty years in the army and fought in the Boer War and in the First World war. He said he was fighting for his country. My sisters used to kid him about this when he was home on leave, asking if he had got his farm yet. They said if he had been fighting for his country all these years, he was surely entitled to a wee farm out of it. No doubt he was, but like millions of other British soldiers who defended the rights of the British imperialists to exploit the world, all the land Jock ever got was the eight feet by three in which he found his last resting place. He could well have agreed with Cynicus’s famous carton of a graveyard: “Your portion: make the best of it. The Landlord’s got the rest of it.”

Brother Jim did a short spell in the Cameron Highlanders and trained in the Militia. The militias were county organisations and were used as army reserves. In times of industrial unrest, a common enough feature of these times, they were handy for the Establishment. Each county had its militia, from Aberdeenshire to the South. The training period for a militia man was usually one month, but when a man was finished in one county, he could move onto another.

Jim went one morning after breakfast and came home a year later at dinner time. In between meals he had sampled training in quite a few militias. Jim also liked his dram but differed from Jock in his drinking habits. Jock said he took his medicine regularly while Jim took his in bouts, one time drinking very heavily and then with periods of total abstinence. My horror of the booze was intensified when I spent anxious nights looking after him when he had the DTs.

My sisters, all eight of them, were hard-working lasses, weavers and spinners in jute manufacture doing a ten -hour working day and six hours on Saturday.

Betsy wed a mill ‘gaffer’ whom I taught to read and write so he that he could qualify for the gaffer’s job. She died when she was ninety-two years of age, a fully paid up member of the Communist Party. Georgina for many years peddled household goods in the country, married and had a family of twelve. One of her daughters Madge Hodgson, is a foundation member of the Communist Party and still does her share of party work. Georgina died when she was ninety years of age.

Mary had a tragic life with her husband, a roving ferocious Scotsman who was often “fou’ wi’” the booze. He was a ship’s stoker, and sailed with the Dundee whaling fleet for many years. Mary died at the age of fifty-three, the first break in the twelve.

Elizabeth was a barmaid, and finally emigrated to South Africa where I met her many years later. A handsome, capable lass who served the South African bourgeoisie well as cook or housekeeper and, I fear, imbibed much of its racial prejudice.

Maggie married a railway engine driver and a number of their family became members of the Communist Party. Jean married a carter, a grand player of the melodeon, who was much in demand for weddings. Many a merry evening was spent at her hospitable fireside.

Agnes, next in age to myself, was a mill weaver. A foundation member of the Communist Party well known in Dundee and a devoted sister and comrade, she was also for many years an active Co-op Guildswoman.

My youngest sister Annie is the only one still alive and has been in the USA for thirty years, married, with one daughter. I refrain from giving their names as it is a crime to be related to such as me in that much-advertised land of the free.

Lawrence Street, Dundee, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. (Dundee City Archives).

Our first house in Dundee was at 21 Lawrence Street, in a block of tenements, built like all the others, in close proximity to the jute factories. These tenements were built in flats or platforms very similar to the construction of most prisons. There were four ‘houses’, usually a kitchen with one or two rooms, on each ‘plat’. There were no lavatories, no baths or other essential amenities, but there was running water, naturally only cold.

We entered by a covered entry called a close, which led to a stair winding up to the ‘plats’, again in the best prison design. There was a ground floor and three stories which meant sixteen families to a block, many of them large families such as the Stewarts. In the courtyard stood an open midden for rubbish which was used by the males as a dry closet. The women used a pail indoors and later emptied the contents into the midden. The scavengers emptied the midden weekly, wheeled out the muck and emptied it on the street to wait for a cart to take it and its perfume for disposal.

The tenements from the other side of the street from ours were a bit more classy. They did not have the middens and had a WC on the stair landing. This we called the syrup side and our side the treacle side. Many years after we first moved to Dundee, the Stewart family managed to move to the syrup side.

I went back to the old tenement in 1962, when I was on a visit to Dundee. Eighty-three years had passed but the original tenements complete with ‘plats’ were still standing. The only change was that the midden had gone and one lavatory had been installed for each ‘plat’. That is one lavatory for four families.

Poor as our family was, we kept our heads high. In our kitchen and two rooms the males slept in one room and the females in the other and my parents in the kitchen. As both rooms led off the kitchen, however, the privacy was somewhat restricted. As some of the family married and set up on their own they left more breathing space for the rest.

Such was the Stewart family and its abode. A royal name without a royal income. A royal name without a royal residence. A hard-working family of men and women fighting for a livelihood in a Scottish textile, engineering and ship building town.

In Calton Gaol, may years later, in 1917, I wrote the following:

“In olden days, ‘tis written,
Their sires o’er Scotland ran,
Wi’ shield and spear and sharp claymore,
Made war on many a clan.

Wi’ rieving, robbing, ravaging,
They hewed their bloody way,
Until upon a throne they sat,
To wield their tyrant sway.

But pride o’ place and courtier’s grace
Are little to be trusted,
To brave the force of truth and right,
So the Stuart line was worsted.

And down the centuries grey and old,
New kings, new wars, arrangeth,
But now the Stewarts have wiser grown,
And bestial methods changeth.

Brave and free and fit to dee,
For justice truth and right,
They cannot see that these can be
Maintained by warrior’s might.

A cleaner road, though hard to tread,
They chose to travel through,
To free the earth from lust of war,
And shape the world anew.”

Bob Stewart’s Prison Rhymes.

Books: ‘Common People’ by Alison Light

When I started looking into my family’s past I quickly realised I knew rather less than I thought I did. Consequently, I’ve read nothing but communist history for the past eighteenth months – each successive book (most of them red and with the obligatory hammer and sickle on the cover)- pushing me forward into new directions and new avenues to explore. A lot of the reading has been deathly but some of it has been a joy. Finding out that The Daily Worker used to carry a cartoon strip for children featuring the character of ‘Micky Mongrel the Class Conscious Dog’ for example, was a particular highlight.

“Child communist readers were treated to seeing ‘Micky’ in a variety of activist roles, whether ‘whitewashing’ communist political slogans, leafleting, picketing outside the dog biscuit factory, or fighting a range of class enemies that included the boss ‘Bertram the bulldog’, the reformist Labour leader ‘Lionel lapdog’, or the headmaster ‘Mr Mastiff’, who just happened to be very fond of wielding the cane.”

(Thomas Linehan, Communism in Britain 1920-39: From the Cradle to the Grave, MUP 2007- page 36)

I’ve found that you need to come across gems like this to keep you going when you’ve come across the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’ for the umpteenth time. However, although an understanding and knowledge of communism is vital to this project, it is first and foremost, a work of family history. In this respect, Alison Light’s Common People has proved to be an important and inspirational text. Light’s name cropped up a few times in the research I was doing. She’d edited Raphael Samuel’s posthumous ‘The Lost World of British Communism’ and provided a foreword for Yvonne Kapp’s autobiography and so that’s how I first came to this book which focuses on her own family story and reflects on the process of immersing yourself in the past. Prompted by the death of her father, it is her investigation into her ancestors starting with her grandparents. Beautifully written throughout it becomes a memorable evocation of the lives of working people over the last two centuries.

There are two moments I’d like to draw attention to and quote at length. Here’s the first:

“Secrets and lies are a staple ingredient of family history. Every family has its skeletons in the closet, its black sheep, the children born the wrong side of the blanket, the fortune swindled, the prison sentence hidden. The stories of poorer people and migrants are especially likely to unravel or be full of loose ends: disappearing husbands and wives, children left behind or brought up by relatives, relationships that were never officially registered, trails that go cold. As a ‘family detective’ the family historian expects to track down the facts about a person, follow the plot of a life and unveil the truth behind familial myths. In the record offices in Britain I got used to hearing other researchers relaying their family legends. In the cloakrooms or lobbies, over paper cups of vile instant coffee from the machines, another fevered searcher, high on an archive hit, would buttonhole me like the Ancient Mariner, and I would listen, slightly glazed to yet another astonishing revelation that meant so much to the teller and next to nothing to me.”

(Alison Light, Common People, Penguin 2015- page 128)

I recognise myself as the buttonholing researcher here- far too many times I’ve done the same thing over the last year and so I’d like to get my apologies in early. On this blog I hope the material we uncover will be of interest to as many people as possible but both my brother and I are aware that it could just be us two that find all this endlessly fascinating. However, if that is the case it’s still enough. The way each new discovery resonates and shifts our perspective is reward enough. As Light observes:

“Family historians are always stumbling over uncanny coincidences. Magical thinking is part of our stock in trade. The place once unbeknownst to us, or which we passed heedlessly every day, suddenly becomes luminous with significance, uniting disparate people and random moments, making them radiate and rhyme. Since family history moves in a psychological dimension, it is always plangent, resonating with loss, and coincidences are like ley lines mysteriously transforming the map of time. Such discoveries find pattern and meaning in what otherwise threatens to be mere accident, but they also seem to offer evidence of commonality. Family history knows that everyone- and everything- is ultimately, and intimately, connected. And there is truth in this.”

(Page 249)

My hope is that the articles we post here will ‘offer evidence of commonality’. That what is particular to our family history will resonate with others. After all, everyone and everything is connected.

Alan Stewart.

What Is to Be Done?

I came to this story through grief. In 2018 my father, Michael, suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of 84. His passing brought to an end years of decline through vascular dementia. I had loved him very much and the idea that now there was only myself, my elder brother Ian and our mother was impossible to process. We did what most families do in that first year – come together for solace, then fracture painfully, then slowly heal. We did most of our grieving separately but I imagine it looked pretty similar. Sleep never seemed to arrive and I spent many nights in the spare room as my partner slept on searching through photographs, old letters and hunting down any recording or videos just so I could hear his voice again. He left very little trace on the internet – I picked up a few extra photographs from his days as a parish councillor, the odd story archived from the local paper from his days as the landlord of the village pub but very little else. Although it was in no way a reality, I felt I was losing him just as surely as the dementia had whittled down his ability to tell the stories he loved. God knows why I was looking for proof that he existed but, as is the way with these things, the death of a parent leads you to wanting to know more about where you come from and who your family are. And inevitably, you always leave it too late to ask the questions you need to ask. The gathering at my father’s funeral had been small. That’s not surprising for someone of my father’s age. He’d not been wealthy, he’d been an only child, both his parents had been dead for decades and illness had reduced his world. I’d always been aware that my family was perhaps more compact than my friends’ with all their cousins and uncles and aunts but, on my dad’s side, despite there being family out there somewhere, I can’t remember very much contact while I was growing up. Other than the affection he held for Bill and Jessica, his mother and father, and a few stories about his grandfather Bob I knew very little about his life before he was our Dad.

One insomniac night I was looking for more traces of him, and I finally found something more. I’d searched the National Archives collection and discovered the security service files relating to ‘Robert Stewart: A founder member of the British Communist Party…British representative on the Comintern and a member of its Executive. For many years he oversaw the British Communist Party’s secret apparatus including, it was thought, those of its members who passed military information to the Soviet Union’.  Of course I’d grown up with the knowledge of who Bob Stewart was but here was acres of material – all scanned and, from what was once top secret, easily accessible. Skimming through one file I found this dated August 1933:

“I saw Bob Stewart yesterday. Bill’s wife is in hospital. She had a baby a couple of days ago. Bob didn’t know a thing until it arrived. Both are doing well.”

The extract was from a letter intercepted by MI5 and written by the union agitator and one of the few communist politicians to be elected to Parliament, Willie Gallacher. The baby was my father who was born a few weeks before. The letter is mentioned during some notes about Bob’s arrival from Holland. Not only is his correspondence and that of his friends being intercepted, his movement around the country and abroad are being closely monitored. I continued to search the files for any mention of my father, occasionally rewarded with a tantalising glimpse. By the time the surveillance crept into the 1950s they were bugging telephones and offices. Through the transcripts I had the intimate conversations of the side of the family I had vaguely heard about but never really knew.

So, what is to be done with all of this? And all the letters, photographs and souvenirs left behind that we inherited from Granddad after his death in 1978. The case full of stuff that convinced me that all my family were all Soviet agents when I was five. The answer is to read and remember and to try to understand. There’s a lot in Bob’s life that I admire but, as with any lifelong communist from the 1920s, sooner or later you have to confront the obscenity of Stalinism. At the moment, as I’m researching the ramifications of Khrushchev’s secret speech and the Hungarian uprising in 1956 its clear these events had huge repercussions for my great grandfather, his children and his grandchildren. I’m not sure Bob comes out of it well but that’s for later. For now, all that remains is to say – Dad, all this is for you. I wish you were here to show you what we’ve found out. I wish you were here to talk about it all. We miss you.

Alan Stewart.