History – Page 5 – Breaking the Fetters

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 6: Into Politics Full Time

Although committed to temperance, Bob Stewart couldn’t abide the ‘religious prattling’ within the Scottish Prohibition Party.

During all the comings and goings, organising for the trade union and for the Templars, I was always drawn to political affairs. In a way this was natural, because Dundee was a politically radical city and had been so ever since the days of the Jacobins when Palmer, an associate of Thomas Muir, had been banished to the hulks in Botany Bay for his political activities. Dundee was also one of the main centres of Chartist agitation. In the 1880s and 1890s, Dundee was a real stronghold of radical liberalism and the local weekly newspaper, The People’s Journal, published strong radical views. I sold this newspaper on the streets and got fourpence a dozen; even when a boy I was doing a useful job in spreading the message.

In 1892, a political leftward move took place in Dundee when Jimmy McDonald, then secretary of the London Trades Council, stood as a Labour parliamentary candidate and polled 345 votes. In 1895 he again contested, this time as an Independent Labour Party candidate, and polled 1,313 votes. I did some campaigning for McDonald in this election and remember that the elder men thought this was an excellent vote because his candidature did not have the support of the Dundee Trades Council. A resolution which sought to support him in the Council had been defeated and an amendment to support the Liberal candidate had been carried by 19 votes to 16. It was shortly after this that I became a delegate to the Trades Council and very soon began to take part in the debates.

The Scottish Labour Party had been formed on July 23rd 1892. Many of the temperance men left the Liberal Party and joined the new party, taking their temperance views with them. But at this time I was still singularly obsessed with the struggle to stop the sale of strong drink and remained uncommitted to any political party. However, I read avidly-topical pamphlets, books theoretical and otherwise- I particularly remember several by Karl Kautsky. American temperance books and socialist pamphlets held a particular appeal, and I was always drawn to the Chartist books because they had a positive political programme.

Up to just after the turn of the century, therefore, my life consisted of finding a job, trying to keep it, trade union work, organising in the temperance movement, speaking and debating on radical platforms and reading and trying to assimilate the new revolutionary socialist ideas.

On my return from South Africa I was soon back again in the organising and political groove. I became full-time organiser for the Scottish Prohibition Party with a wage of 27s. a week; this was much less than I could have earned in the yards, but political idealism was taking a hold of me and political principle was more important than money. The Prohibition Party was committed to a reformist labour programme but was semi-religious. I travelled up and down Scotland in all the big cities and in many of the villages doing propaganda meetings. We had a small newspaper called The Prohibitionist, and I helped to edit this as well.

This was the period of great political struggle to break Liberal-Labour coalition politics and for independent working-class action. In the General Election of January 1906 fifty-one Labour candidates were returned as Members of Parliament, including some fine leaders for independent working-class action such as Keir Hardie. One month later, on February 15th at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, London, the Labour Representation Committee transformed itself into the Labour Party and thus started the final break with Liberal-Labour unity and the birth of organised independent working-class political action. One of the first demands of the independent Labour M.Ps was the passing of the Trades Disputes Act, a very progressive piece of legislation that stood the test of time for over half a century.

In the 1906 Parliamentary General Election, Alex Wilkie, general secretary of the shipwrights’ union and one of the original Labor Representation Committee of 1900-6, stood on the Labour ticket in Dundee and won. He was, however, very much a Lib-Lab politician, and, while campaigning for him, I and a number of others tried to change his ideas. Dundee was then a double-barrelled constituency, that is, there were two votes for two parliamentary seats. Wilkie was returned to Parliament together with a Liberal named Robertson.

The year 1908 was one of heavy trade depression and high unemployment, but politically it was a vintage year for me. I stood for the Dundee Town Council and won. The full-time secretary of the Prohibition Party, Scrymgeour, was also on the Council so this made a mover and seconder for any motion we desired to put. We certainly enlivened the Council meetings. The first night I took my seat we were both suspended for being “‘offenders against decorum”. I had called another councillor a liar and the Lord Provost interrupted me to warn against the use of such language. The Provost was Jimmy Urquhart and I knew he had a university education, so I asked him to tell me how I could call a man a liar without actually saying so. “See me after the meeting,” he replied, “but don’t use that word here.”

There was a Baillie on the Council called Robertson who was, among other things, a director of the Dundee Football Club. Some material had disappeared from the Council Stores and found its way to the Dundee Football Club. I called Robertson a thief. This was a bit too much for a mere reprimand. I was taken to Court and fined £5 and £8 costs, but it put a stop to a number of things that were going on. A friend of mine, Adam Piggot, a butcher, paid the fine or I would have been “inside” again, because £13 was a small fortune to me in those days.

All this was good political campaigning, because it was all official Town Council business, and the local press gave it great publicity. Dundee in 1908 was in a desperate position. Unemployment was rampant, so bad that relief work had to be arranged. Soup kitchens were erected in the wards. Farmers from the surrounding area brought in vegetables free, and local butchers donated beef and bones. Door-to- door collections for money were organised and food was
distributed to the needy- over half of the town were needy. I did an immense amount of work on relief both for the Prohibition Party and as a councillor. One helper I remember, who worked like a Trojan, was a Roman Catholic priest called Turner. He was out day and night working; and never a needy case was turned away. He was a kindly, hard-working man, which was more than could be said for many of those who did nothing but were always on hand to give advice on how the relief should be distributed.

The employment position was so bad that I moved in the Council that we provide some work for the unemployed. I suggested that to provide work trees be planted in the Blackness Road to beautify the street. Many were against it because it was spending the town’s money needlessly. However, I won; the trees were planted and are still there today. Blackness Road, lined with trees, is one of the prettiest in the city.

Blackness Road, Dundee. Early 20th century.

During the Council term I was elected as a representative to the Blind Institution Committee. Usually the meetings of the Committee lasted fifteen minutes. Minutes would be read and approved, a lot of nice things said and then everyone would go home. The Committee consisted of one or two mill owners, a few business men and representatives of the Town and Parish Councils. At my first meeting the minutes were read and approved and then I started to ask questions. There was consternation, but I knew many of the blind people living in their own homes were weaving baskets, making mattresses and the like, and were being very poorly paid. So I continued to press my questions and to get answers, which when followed up made it clear that the manager was making absurdly high profits out of the blind people’s work. On leaving the meeting, one of the mill masters, a great county cricketer, Sharp by name, said to me,
” Stewart I did not know anything like that was going on. I think it’s a scandal.” “So do I,” I replied, “but the living standard of the working class is a scandal.” He nodded his head and went away. No doubt next morning he would be demanding more effort from his jute workers to provide more profit for himself.

After a year in the Council I had to stand for re-election. A campaign was waged, in which the local press took a hand, to get Councillor Stewart, that spendthrift agitator, out of the Council. Naturally, with the expenses for relief work the rates had gone up -32d. in fact- -and I got the full blame for this. Of course I defended the relief work, but the forces against me were too strong, and I was defeated at the poll.

The year 1908 saw another famous election in Dundee. It was a Parliamentary by-election in which Winston Churchill stood as a Liberal candidate.

Winston Churchill campaigning in Dundee, 1908.

Churchill had started his parliamentary career as a Tory and won the seat at Oldham in October, 1900. In the fight for tariff reform at the beginning of the century he changed his coat and became a Liberal, contesting the North-West Manchester constituency. In the general election of 1906 he defeated Joynson Hicks in what was accepted as a safe Tory seat. In 1908 he succeeded Lloyd George as President of the Board of Trade and this necessitated a by-election. (This was the parliamentary procedure of the period: when an M.P. became a cabinet minister he had to face the electorate again.) On the 24th of April, 1908, in the by-election at North-West Manchester Jonson Hicks got his revenge and defeated Churchill, largely because of the intervention of Dan Irving, a Socialist candidate. The date is important because, while, Churchill was contesting this by-election, the Dundee Liberal Party were meeting to choose their candidate for the Dundee by-election. After a few stormy meetings the decision was postponed. There was a terrible row at the time, with the local press giving pages of publicity to the rumours that some Liberal leaders in Dundee were keeping the candidature warm for Churchill should he be defeated at Manchester. So it came about that Churchill, who was defeated as a sitting M.P. on April 24, packed his bags and was campaigning in Dundee three days later. On May 10, sixteen days after his defeat, the Dundee result was announced and Churchill was returned to Parliament and became President of the Board of Trade, but as M.P. for Dundee and not for Manchester. In this by-election I was election agent for Scrymgeour. The Prohibition Party had decided not to support the candidature of Stuart, the Labour candidate, but to put up our own candidate. It was a short but lively campaign. With four candidates in the field, the meetings were all packed out. I remember one meeting in the Drill Hall at which Churchill spoke. He shouted to the crowd: “Britain has great imperial strength. We have belted the world with free institutions.” He was speaking in Bell Street, next door to the Sheriff Court, across the road from the Salvation Home for fallen women; next door to that was the Parish Council Lunatic Department, nearby the Curr Night Refuge for homeless people to get a cup of tea and a bed, before they started their wanderings the next day. The gulf between Churchill’s oratory and the living reality was there in the street where the meeting was held. This was a good propaganda point I certainly did not miss.

During the counting of the votes I noticed Churchill standing alone in a corner twisting little rubber bands around his fingers, and as each one broke he threw it away. He was obviously in a very agitated condition.

I went over and started a conversation with him about stopping the sale of strong drink, asking what he would do in Parliament to bring this into law. It was obvious he was only interested in one thing-the result. In retrospect he was right; another defeat in Dundee after Manchester would have ruined his political career. “How do you think it’s going?” he asked me. “You’re in by a mile, worse luck,” I said. You didn’t have to look at the vote-counting very long to see that. However, our little discussion on prohibition had not gone entirely unnoticed. Later, the Provost, Jimmy Urquhart, came over to me and said: “I understand you’ve been trying to convert Winnie to prohibition. By Christ! Bob, you never give up!” He said it in a voice of admiration for my courage and with the certainty that I was on a forlorn quest. As later years proved, Churchill and the prohibition of strong drink were poles apart.

Scrymgeour and I had many differences in the election campaign. He dwelt too much on religion. He had a great advantage over all the other candidates because he had a mandate from God. His speech to the crowd after the announcement of the result was really heavenly: “I feel deeply grateful to the Almighty God that has enabled the Prohibition Party to put me forward as the first British Prohibition candidate and look forward to another day when success will attend our efforts.” That speech was the beginning of the break in the Prohibition Party.

Winston Churchill was Member of Parliament for Dundee until the general election of 1922, when Willie Gallacher stood for Dundee as a Communist candidate. But in 1908 he was the hero. When the result was declared that May night, the Dundee workers not only lifted Churchill shoulder high, they lifted his motor car with him inside it and carried him down Bell Street.

A year or so after the election the inevitable split came in the Prohibition Party. I could no longer stomach the religious prattlings of Scrymgeour and some of his adherents. A number of us broke away and formed the Prohibition and Reform Party. It was at this period that I wrote the pamphlets, En Route To The Sober Commonwealth and Socialism, which were laced with good socialist principles. Apart from the aim of achieving complete National Prohibition its aims were:

SOCIALISM
The abolition of private ownership of the land and the means of manufacture, production and exchange, and the substitution of public or social ownership without compensation.

COMPLETE DEMOCRATIC RULE
Abolition of the hereditary principle in government, adult suffrage, initiative and referendum, devolution on separate Parliaments of domestic legislation.

INTERNATIONALISM
Recognition of the common interests of mankind. The establishment of international arbitration courts for the settlement of all disputes between nations, leading up to world-wide government elected by the citizens of all nations.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 5: South Africa.

When I sailed for South Africa I got a present of a pocket book and a little money from the Templars, a Gladstone bag and a set of razors from the joiners in the Yard. At Cape Town, where I landed, my first visit was to my sister who was housekeeper to A. B. Reid, one of the protégés of Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes was the big imperialist and had a vast amount of satellite firms under his control- building works, contracting firms of all descriptions, transport firms and so on. A. B. Reid was one of the biggest building contracting men in South Africa. I met him during the visit to my sister’s and he advised me to stay in Cape Town and said he would give me work. However, I had promised my friend in Pretoria to go there and to me a promise is something you keep.

Bob’s pocket book. A gift from the Dundee branch of the IOGT.

My first night in Pretoria I ran into the race question. I was out with my two pals, Henderson, the fellow who had sent me my fare, and another called Scott, who also came from Dundee. We were walking along the street when we came to a junction and met some Africans coming up the other street. They were big fellows and going along quietly, minding their own business. Suddenly Henderson, who was quite a small fellow, about five feet three inches tall, lashed out with his boot at these Africans and kicked one to the ground. I reacted by taking a swing at him and clouting him on the jaw, then demanded to know why he wanted to kick a man like that. He gazed at me in amazement. “Do you not know that Kaffirs must stand back and let us pass?” and I got a lecture on how the black man must be kept in his place and all the blah blah that we are so familiar with at the present time. But the lecture had no effect on me. I could not understand the line of reasoning that because the colour of a man’s skin was black he could not pass in front of you. I had never had a spare pair of boots until my apprenticeship was finished and therefore such “superior” thinking was foreign to my nature, and no doubt the reading of socialist and temperance books, which always had an international content, would wipe out any thought of a colour bar.

But I very soon discovered that the colour bar in South Africa was not only an idea in some people’s minds. It was a way of life. On public transport, in places of entertainment, even in churches, there was segregation, special places for whites and others for the blacks, and to my horror even the Templars had white and black lodges.

My first job was in the railway workshops but after a few weeks hundreds of men were stood off because for some reason supplies of material and money from Britain were stopped. So back I was, unemployed again. I worked on odd jobs for the farmers on the veldt, building stables and doing all sorts of joinery work. I also worked for a few weeks finishing bungalows and villas for British officers. The war had finished long ago, but it looked as if they were anchored. Another place to find work was in the rising shanty towns. Here ordinary British soldiers took over an African woman each, set up in a shack and sent her to work washing and cleaning for the whites, while they frequented the white clubs and pubs buying and selling land script. If one tenth of the tales I had to listen to at boarding house tables and in the “scoff”‘ houses were true, then many of the whites by their own boasting were a far from reputable lot.

But as the weeks passed it became brutally apparent to me that Pretoria was a place men were not coming to, but rather getting out of very fast. The cost of living was high and unemployment was rising rapidly. So I followed the exodus and made for the Cape, where living was cheaper although wages were lower. By this time I had had to flog nearly half my toolkit to keep going and the sun-tan of the promised land had begun to wear off- if it had ever taken on.

Back in Cape Town I attended the joiner’s trade union branch and the Templars lodge and got up-to-date with the local position- state of work, employers and so on. I was elected as a delegate to the Cape Town Trades Council and on occasions was on deputations to the ministries during industrial disputes, of which there were many, but the trade unions were still weak and ineffective. This weakness was aggravated by the attitude of the whites to the organisation of the coloured and black workers. My experience was that generally speaking the whites were not only against the blacks coming into the white trade unions but in many cases against the blacks and coloured being organised at all. There was a commonly held idea that they were too stupid to organise effective trade unions.

One morning, to the horror of all “decent” people, the blacks who loaded and unloaded the ships at Cape Town did not turn up for work. They also bunkered the ships running with their heavy loads of coal on their backs up the gangways. It made me sweat to look at them. They had a grievance, a very old one. They said, maninga sabenzi i kouna mali, too much work too little money. So they stayed on their location. The bosses tried to persuade them to go back to work, but always got the same answer, we want more money. The police, both black and white, surrounded the location. The parsons of all the churches prayed and entreated. The authorities offered the time-honoured dodge of setting up a
committee of inquiry. It was all of no avail. The blacks stayed quietly on their location and waited. Finally the bosses gave way and granted extra wages. This burst the bubble that the blacks were unable to organise.

I landed a job in a wood yard at Mowbray. A shipload of timber had come in and I had to supervise a gang of Africans who piled the wood, classified as firsts, seconds and thirds, in the sheds. I was constantly in trouble because I was told I did not drive the blacks hard enough. I saw they did their work; there was certainly no slacking; they worked hard and I rather liked them. They were a happy crowd and I noticed that they ate together and that many of them shared their meal pack with their less fortunate mates, something that seldom happened with the white tradesmen.

In the Cape wages were lower than up country. At this time Kruger, the Boer leader, had decreed that no white man should work for less than £1 a day, a very good wage then. But British contractors got over this by contracting men in Britain, Sweden and elsewhere for much lower rates, paying their fares to South Africa and then holding the men to their contracts while they were there. Because of this wages were lower in the Cape, approximately 14s. a day for tradesmen. Certainly the Kruger decree was never applied, but 14s. a day
was a good wage if you could get steady work.

Unemployment got so bad that demands were made for relief work for the unemployed. The Cape Town Trades Council waged a campaign on this and eventually succeeded. The unions paid unemployment pay, which was only IOS. a week and lasted for only thirteen weeks. Even the cheapest board for a single man was (2 a weck. It was because of this impossible position and the campaign waged by the Trades Council that relief work was started by the authorities.

Usually the relief work was strenuous manual labour, making new roads, excavation for new buildings, and such like. This is where many of the Africans got their own back. Firstly, because they had the same relief rates as the whites and, secondly, they were much better used to the handling of a pick and a shovel and the whites could not keep pace; no doubt this made a dent in some of the superior attitudes.

I was never reduced to relief work though many times I was next door to it. I passed through several jobs that lasted only a few weeks , keeping body and soul together. then came the news that there was to be an industrial exhibition in Cape town. All joiners heard this news with glee. We went down to the site and saw the foreman. Yes! He required plenty of joiners, but he said “What rate were you expecting?” “The standard rate,” I replied. There was a heated argument with the foreman who offered 10s. a day, a figure well under the standard. We could not shift the foreman. In face of this I suggested we hold a meeting and after some discussion it was agreed that a deputation go to see the management and make it clear that if the standard rate was not paid there would be no joiners to build the exhibition. The deputation soon returned with the answer. No more than 10s. a day. So I said, “Let’s all walk off the job,” and to give a lead my pal, a fellow joiner named Forest, and myself walked off. But we were the only ones who did. The rest stayed put. The men who stayed were good trade unionists but the employment situation was so bad they weren’t prepared to fight.

One night, feeling very low, I went to the Templars and found a cricket match on. I was asked to play and at the finish got talking to another player from the opposing side, Australian, “How’s business?”‘ he asked. No one asked “How’s
work? “I haven’t got any,” I replied. “I got sacked and I have no job at the moment.” He then told me a friend of his was fitting out a restaurant for his fancy woman and could do with a man to do various joinery jobs. Naturally I gobbled at this and was introduced to the friend, a shipping agent, who
was satisfied I could make the necessary alterations to the restaurant.

I measured up the job, started with the wood available, and sent an order to the saw mills at Salt River for more. Things were looking up. Then, out for a walk at lunch time, I ran into another joiner, a member of the union, who was really miserable. “Christ! If I could only get another job I would tell the swine of a foreman where to get off,” he said. “Well,” I replied, it was. “I have a bit of a job myself,” and I explained what “You can have half of it if you want.” “Good, wait there a minute and I’ll be back.” He went off like a shot and when he returned a few minutes later he was a different man. I don’t know what he said or did to the foreman but he certainly relieved himself of a burden.

The shipping agent and I got along very well. A lot of furniture and prefabricated counters, etc., came out from London. These had to be put together. There were ovens to be put in the kitchen, sinks and other plumbing work to do. In fact all the building tradesmen in my digs got into the scheme. Masons worked on the walls and cut out fireplaces, plumbers worked at the water fittings, joiners fixed the floors, counters, fretwork arches and so on. This kept us going for a few weeks. I had the right to purchase most of the material and came to an agreement with the suppliers from which I got a 5 per cent commission which supplemented my wages.

I never met the shipping agent’s fancy woman and I do not know how she fared as a restaurateur, but she got a first-class place, and several building trades workers gave her thanks for supplying them with work during very hard times.

I made up my mind while doing this job that I had had enough of South Africa. During my stay I had tried to send some money home to my wife in Dundee, but although I didn’t smoke and was strictly teetotal it was hard going. My wife, working in Dundee, was finding it difficult to make ends meet, so I decided to return home. With the money from the restaurant job I had enough for the steerage fare home.

On the boat home I found many like myself, some had been even worse off. The promised land had not fulfilled its promise. Many had done a spell of relief work and were bitter about their experiences. One interesting fellow I met was a Cornishman. Cornishmen are very common in South Africa, particularly in the gold mining areas. No doubt their tin mining experience had some value. When a Cornishman got a job he wasn’t long in asking the gaffer if he could find a job for his cousin Jack. So Cornishmen in South Africa are all called Cousin Jacks. This Cornishman on the boat had been the first to take a group of Chinese down the mines. There was a tremendous political row in Britain at the time about imported Chinese labour in South Africa: This was not only a reactionary racialist matter continuing the dirty ‘Yellow Peril’ scare launched by the German Käiser in 1900, but also a strong protest expressed in the resolutions of British trade unions and socialist organisations against indentured Chinese labour kept in compounds which they regarded as a form of slavery. But the Chinese never had intentions of working in the mines for low wages. At this time the African natives were prohibited from drinking intoxicating liquor so the Chinese got into a racket of making the liquor and selling it very profitably to the Africans.

The Cornishman gave me some very graphic details of life in the gold mines. The duration of life was not long even for the white artisans. For the natives it was only a matter of months or at best a few years. The dust, lack of sanitation, intolerable labour conditions and disease were dreadful reapers of human life, white or black.

I returned home more convinced than ever that a change in economic and social conditions was necessary. South Africa was certainly a land of promise for men of capital and money, but for ordinary workers like me it was hell. The great weakness of the workers’ organisations, trade unions and co-operatives, meant that in any labour dispute the boss invariably won. I had left Dundee well equipped with tools and clothes, a book of Burns’ poems and the Bible, transport paid for and all looking rosy. I squared my debt for my outward passage, left South Africa minus half my tools and arrived home a wiser and much more experienced man.

William Stewart and the National Unemployed March to London, 1929.

The 1929 National Unemployed March from Glasgow to London arriving at Hyde Park.

Frankly, the 1920s do not seem very different to our own times. Huge inequality, increasing poverty and a government wholly indifferent to the situation, more concerned with preserving their interests and dismantling the rights of ordinary people. Liberal voices and the fourth estate hostile to any ideas that may remedy the situation. Perhaps the main difference between then and now is that, in the twenties, unemployment was the source of hardship whereas these days most people tipping into poverty are in work.

During the 1920s and 1930s there were numerous marches and protests to combat unemployment and hunger and my grandfather Bill Stewart was on one of the first. I recently discovered two documents that shed a little light on these times. One of them was my grandad’s own handwritten account of his experiences, written sometime in the 1970s for The Morning Star. The other was a letter to Bill from trade union legend Tom Mann- a colleague and friend of his father Bob Stewart.

Letter from Tom Mann to William Stewart.

The envelope is addressed to ‘Comrade William Stewart – WITH THE MARCHING UNEMPLOYED’ to be picked up at the Aylesbury post office on or after the 20th February. The marchers had made it on foot from Glasgow to Buckinghamshire in a little less than a month. The letter is on the headed notepaper of the National Unemployed Workers Committees Movement – an organisation set up by the CPGB to highlight the conditions of the unemployed after the First World War and on the back Tom Mann has scrawled something along the lines of ‘Good luck Will- you’ve stuck it grand.’ There’s even a signed photograph. The letter reads:

To Comrade Will Stewart and the Boys on the March.

Dear Comrades,
I send you a word of hearty good luck and sincere congratulations on your splendid march.

In London we are eager for all details as to how you fare on the road. We
are doing our best to prepare nicely for you on your arrival.

You have done splendidly and are now within a few days of your destination. In spite of all obstacles you have achieved your purpose so far and we believe will carry it out to the letter.

I am hoping to meet you at Watford on Friday, continue in the
same spirit of Comradely devotion to our great cause and you will do much to bring about betterment now and the great Industrial and Social change for the future.

Hail to the Marchers;
Fraternally Yours,

Tom Mann

Part of William Stewart’s handwritten account of the 1929 Unemployment March from Glasgow to London.

William Stewart’s own handwritten account seems to have been written sometime in the 1970s almost fifty years after the event. It sheds more light on what it was like to be on the march and the issues they faced on the way. Wal Hannington was a founding member of the CPGB and the head of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. If any one could identify the Geo Middleton mentioned I’d be extremely grateful.

I have just been reading your article in this morning’s Morning Star on the Hunger Marchers, and I think that apart from the actual primary importance of the political side of the campaign, please let us tell the up and coming militants what made an ‘Unemployable Person’ (as the title often was quoted) a Hunger Marcher.

I took part in the first Scottish Hunger March from Glasgow to London, we gathered in the centre of Glasgow made up of Clydeside engineers, jute workers from Dundee, fish and dock workers from Aberdeen Scottish miners from Fife and elsewhere in fact a representative section of the working class of Scotland. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor altogether some 300 marched off with Wal Hannington, Geo Middleton and a braw lad from the Isle of Arran. I must not omit the mobile soup kitchen of this ‘great little army’. It was an old tin Lizzie which had been an ornate ice cream cart common in Scotland. For our purpose it was fitted with an old wash house boiler (as used these days for cooking pigs swill) a few sacks of boiler coke and firewood and of course a ‘cook’ of whom more later.

The month of January was not best weatherwise in Scotland and as we progressed on our way snow was falling as we marched through Thornhill singing the old marching songs of the Movement in which we were soon to become as efficient as any body of marching troups and when London’s Trafalgar Square was reached our rendition of Macgregor’s Gathering and the Hunger Marchers song was worthy of a Red Army Choir.

I am transgressing, to get back to purport of these notes I must go back to our march across the border into Carlisle, here along a country road came the power of the law in the shape of a PC Sergeant and Chief Constable resplendent in blue and yards of black braid and a flashing silver nobbed cane. Wall gave the command to stand to attention coming abreast of the Chief Constable – he stepped forward saluted Wal and said ‘Mr Hannington you have a fine body of well disciplined men. I had visions of a rabble.’ Our well organised army of determined men had evoked a Chief Constable’s admiration. Sad to say this was not the case as we progressed.

What comradeship and warmth we received – the big splendid meals of hot vegetable soups and through Lancashire the tons of hotpot consumed as we lay down on school floors or club floors tired but proud with the great justification of the duty we were performing for our class. Proud of the bands of working class women who cooked and fed us at each halt on the way – of butchers who handed us joints of meat – bakers who gave us bread and buns – of the Co-op Womans Guild who organised their local Co-op resources on our behalf – of women, whose homes were full of their own unemployed fathers and sons, took and did washing for us.

Each marcher had an Army blanket which on the march was rolled and worn bandolier wise over our overcoats and with each man wearing an Army haversack we did look as if we meant business – marching in battalion formation of companies and sections, (we had no lack of military advisers- many of the lads were ex-servicemen).

Our commander and his deputy Wal Hannington and Geo Middleton respectively were tremendous, not forgetting the role they played – for want of a better name – political commissars.

To get back to my story and to emphasise the main purpose of writing is to show that it was in the organisation and the day to day problems and details dealt with by “Our Command’ without this the impact on the community would have been lost. All working class organisations rallied to us as the march continued south.

We had a cyclist courier on an old boneshaker who would ride ahead to alert local comrades of our impending arrival and make arrangements for our rest at night – all important when we had forced our march to some 30miles in one day on some occasions.

Wal Hannington- head of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement.

We were approaching Warwick – our scout or courier said we would have to go to the ‘Spike’ that night and he was not too sure of the ‘Workhouse Master’. As we marched in that evening there stood the Master well dressed in tweeds and stout brown brogues – the envy of the Army booted marchers. His eyes showed his amazement at our discipline quietly he said ‘this is not what I expected’ and he re-arranged all the quarters and implemented the meals after which he asked Wal and I to share his supper in his own quarters and as the meal of lamb and pickles progressed and Wal explained the reason and the purpose of what the march involved he grew in admiration and from a hostile attitude almost came to flattering of our efforts. He voluntarily waved the 3hour work rule then in force – (any person using the workhouse overnight was compelled to do such things as cleaning, wood chopping and coal carrying. This was not always the case as in later cases when a downright refusal had to be made at other workhouses). As Wal and I said good night to him and walked across to the main building and our floor space Wal said to me “Billy another couple of hours with that bloke I would have had him packing up and joining us.

On down through Lancashire among the lassies in their clogs and shawls ladling out mountains of hotpot full of meat scrounged off local butchers and cigarettes from their own meagre supplies – though on occasions a Tobacconist gave a supply of Woodbines, Shag and papers

What an army from Glasgow to London without a courtmartial! At no time was anyone reported for drinking such was the effect of good leadership and voluntary discipline in our day to day organisation of ordinary working blokes with intellect enough to understand how worthwhile this great effort was. Many had little knowledge of The Working Class Movement when the march started other than they were against the system that had unjustly degraded them but the hell of it had not broken the spirit that took them on the march.

One wee chap whose feet were a bit sore as we marched along half whispered to me ‘Hey Bill I’ve been thinking we missed a wee thing at the start of this — job – we should have sent a telegram to Budyonny to hae sent us some o his Red Cavalry horses – ma feet always walked better in stirrups? Later I learnt he had been in the Scots Greys.

The bedding down at night were like any barrack room except the arguments were on a higher plain and as the march progressed the full sense of class and political involvement came to the top and the knowledge of fully participating in the struggle of the masses and the need to implement their knowledge grew in their eagerness and enlightenment so that when London came everyman Jack was fully conscious of every facet of the political causes that prompted our actions as working class militants.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 4: A Man Grown.

RRS Discovery under construction in Dundee in 1900. (www.rrsdiscovery.co.uk)

Now I was a fully fledged journeyman, Gourlay’s offered me an extra year at an improver’s rate, which was 10s. under the basic journeyman’s rate. This was usual at the time but did not appeal to me. I felt I had done my apprenticeship and was entitled to the full journeyman’s rate. So I left Dundee and went to the Clydeside where I got a job in a yard in Renfrew called The Ring. This yard did specialised work on dredgers. I worked 53 hours a week for a basic 38s. 3d., 9 hours week-days and 6 hours Saturday.

I held this job for a few months. Then, after the ship was launched, there was a big pay off. It was just before the Glasgow Fair holidays and was a blow to the Glasgow men. No work meant no trip “down the water” for the wife and kids and no whisky and chasers in the pubs with their pals on Saturday nights,

For me it meant looking for another job immediately. I tramped the whole of the reaches of the Clyde, Greenock, Yoker, Partick and Govan, but at every yard the position was the same, no work. Trying to find a job was humiliating. At the yard gates hundreds of men would wait each morning and dinner-time for the foreman to come out. In most cases he did not appear, but if he did he would walk down the line of waiting men and then turn on his heel and go back inside the gates with a grunt of ‘Nothing today”, or sometimes even not a word. There were no employment exchanges then and no dole. The unemployed got 10s. a week from the union for thirteen weeks and then it was reduced. My position became desperate and, unable to find work in the yards, I was forced to find other employment. I got a job with what was called the National Benefit Trust. It had a system in which a draw was held periodically and the winner got his advance of money free of interest to buy a house. My job was to hawk around the doors trying to interest people in the lottery. The whole thing was run by a family who held all the top positions in the firm. Sellers like myself were paid on a commission-only basis. I stuck this for a month. The whole thing revolted me and I had the feeling of being degraded.

Then, by a stroke of luck, I picked up a job in the Arrol Bridge Building Works. A mate of mine, Jimmy Walsh, had an uncle who was foreman in the template shops and he told Jimmy to come and get a start. But Jimmy had also been offered another job at the Linthouse Yard which he preferred, so I went to see the uncle. He was a good sort and when I explained that his nephew had taken a job at Linthouse and hoped I would be suitable, he asked me “Can you draw?” “A barrow,” I replied . “All right,” he said, “start tomorrow and we’ll see how good your barrow is.”

I stayed there until the New Year but it was not my cup of tea. I wanted back to my trade and when I saw an advertisement for joiners for a small shipyard at Annan, I applied and got the job.

Annan is a small market town on the River Annan near the border and naturally, being so far inland, the ships built there were small-stern wheel ships. They were built in sections and exported, mostly to the American lakes. When I arrived, the joiner’s shop was just being erected and I went in with the
pattern makers. In fact, I was the only ship joiner in the yard. The manager, a little fellow who wore a bow tie and was always very smartly dressed, but a decent fellow to work for, asked me if I could get more joiners, so I wrote to the Glasgow union committee and asked for another five to be sent. I went
up to the station to meet them when they arrived and asked to see their union cards. One of them said, “Christ! I’ve left mine at home.” “Well, you had better go home and get it because you can’t start here without one,” I said. Fortunately, the other four had their union cards up-to-date and I said they were all right. I can imagine their astonishment next morning when they found out I was the only other ship joiner in the yard. Now that I had some mates I did a lot of union canvassing on the building sites in the area and we soon formed an Annan union branch of the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners.

Annan was a nice place to work in. The countryside was beautiful in summer. It was a great temptation to throw up a brick and if it came down you didn’t go to work that day. The laws of gravity being what they are, one day we did throw up a brick on the job and down it came, so we had the day off. We went to the hostelry and hired a two-horse brake. No motors then, and no traffic jams. We had a run round the countryside and a real good picnic. Next morning, when we turned up at the yard, the manager asked: Where were you all yesterday?” “It was too good weather to work,” I replied. “Where did you go?” “To the Loch Mabon.” “Why the hell didn’t you tell me and I would have been with you.”

In Annan there was a branch of the Good Templars Lodge. A real live lodge it was. We had dancing every week, and fishing competitions, as the River Annan was famed for its salmon and trout. We even ran a regatta, which in those days was considered a real feat of organisation. I don’t know if we took many people out of the public houses, but we certainly did give them a chance to employ their time fully in the Templars Lodge.

I lived with an old lady and her daughter who looked as old as her mother. She kept an excellent house. I had a room of my own for a time but one day Mrs. Patterson came in to apologise, saying she would have to put another lodger in with me. In this way I met Harry Watson, an iron planer from Manchester.

Harry was a good singer, he had done a bit of amateur stage work at the “free and easies” in Manchester and I persuaded him to join the Templars, stop drinking and use his talents. Soon he had more money than he had ever had in his life. He bought himself new shoes, suits, shirts and began to feel and be a man about town, So I said one day, “Harry, now I have introduced you to the finer things in life, I must now introduce you to Scottish culture. Let’s have a walk to Ecclefechan and I will show you where Thomas Carlyle was born.” “Who’s Thomas Carlyle?” asked Harry. So I explained to him as best I could that he was a Scottish writer, explained briefly what he had written, then went off to Ecclefechan which was six miles by road. But Harry remained unimpressed by his introduction to Scottish culture, his final comment being: “Thomas Carlyle must have been a bloody fool to have been born in a place like that!’

One time Harry had a flaming row with his sweetheart. Flora Whimpenny was her name. I remember it well, because many a letter I wrote to her signed “Harry”. I was engaged for a long time trying to effect a reconciliation, which I eventually did. But I never knew how Harry explained these letters to Flora because he could not write a sentence, never mind a letter, and the only papers he ever read were children’s comics. He was not alone in this. The best sellers in the shipyards in those days were Comic Cuts, Chips and other comics specially written for children. I was astounded to find that grown men read such bairn’s weeklies.

One day I was working on a little wooden boat, the type used by the missionaries in Africa. It was being built for some religious society and had only a dozen rivets in its whole construction, but unfortunately a fragment of a red-hot rivet finished up in my eye. I was on the stair panelling, and the riveter knocking off the rivet failed to stop the blaze coming off it. Off it came, and struck me right in the eye. There was no first aid. One man wanted to put carbolic in my eye. That was enough for me. I immediately took the next train home to Dundee where the eye specialist said I was just in time to save the eye. That ended my idyllic situation in Annan.

When the eye healed and I was ready to resume work, the shipyards were still slack but the Boer War had made necessary the building of many more barracks. So I went down to Salisbury Plain and got a job on the building of Bulford Camp. We were a motley lot, drawn from all over the British Isles with the Irish in the majority. At that time there was a strike in Belfast and to save strike pay joiners were sent in mass to Bulford and other camps. You could work as many hours as God sent at 9d. an hour. We slept in the huts as we built them. A hardboard bed with one blanket, which I rolled into and made the best of it. Trade unionism in this setting took a back seat although we had forms of organisation on the job.

In 1900 the shipyards got busy again and I went back to Gourlay’s at Dundee where I became a shop steward and also a member of the yard management committee. The job of the shop steward was to see that members were fully paid up and being paid in accordance with the existing agreements, and so I religiously examined all cards and wage packets from time to time in case anyone was being paid under the rate for the job. Some union organisers today pride themselves on the excellent state of their organisation but in those days in shipbuilding, particularly in places such as Dundee and on the Clyde, there was already well organised labour in the trades.

Naturally, of course, a lot depended on the activity of the delegate and his standing in the trade union branch. The rule was that men more than eight weeks in arrears would not be started, so if a man came on the job the first thing was to see his union card and get it in order. I tried to make it the generally accepted thing that when a man started he would clear his card if in arrears, and sometimes this was done by borrowing the money from me, the money being paid back from his first pay.

It was about this time that I got a job on the building of the Discovery, the ship which took Captain Scott on the National Antarctic expedition. It was most interesting work. The ship was built at the Dundee Shipbuilder’s Company yard and was constructed almost entirely of Scottish oak, with a little greenheart and elm. There were no rivets, no steel plates, no iron nails. With the exception of the funnel the ship was entirely constructed of wood. It was said at the time that they had to dig men out of the Howff (the local graveyard) to get the right labour for the construction. The wood was steamed to get it bent into its proper position and wooden nails called trunnels were used and battered in to hold the beams in position.

When construction commenced, the joiner gaffer on the job was Joe Wyllie, a man with a great respect for the trade unions and respected by the workers, so in the early days the construction went smoothly and well. The job, however, was not being completed fast enough. Joe got the sack and another gaffer was brought from Grangemouth. We called him the Rat, and he was just that. The first thing he did was to have a little glass-fronted bucky built so that he could survey the whole of the shop, and from this perch he would periodically dart down to snarl at some workmen. This was to frighten them and consequently to get more work out of them. I was never able to fathom this type of thinking. I had one brush with the Rat. The joiners had a dispute and I was deputed to by-pass the Rat and go and see the yard manager, Davie Low, who was a very decent fellow. When the Rat saw me standing at the door of the manager’s office, he rushed down, threatening me and demanding to know what I was doing. His attitude sickened me. I said “Get back to your glass bucky, I’m waiting to see the manager and don’t want to be molested by an insignificant pup like you.” “You won’t be paid for this time,” he shouted, but at this point Davie Low came out and I cut it short by informing him that I was on union business, so not to worry about “his” money. Strange how such people as the Rat always scem to think it’s their money that pays the wages. So I saw the manager, told him of the dispute and in the course of it made a few uncomplimentary remarks about the Rat. “Well, Bob,” he said, “I’m only the manager, not the whole company.” Then he explained to me that the Rat had been specially employed to horse on the men and get the ship finished. Like us, the manager didn’t like it but also had to put up with it. In March, 1901, the Discovery was launched. At a reception at the Queen’s Hotel after the launching Captain Scott said “that for some months the preparing of the ship had been handed over to him. It was work that involved great detail, some harassing detail. In fact it got on your nerves occasionally.” I do not know if the new gaffer had rubbed Scott the wrong way but he certainly caused many a disturbance amongst the workers who built the good ship Discovery. But I suppose Lady Markham, who bashed a bottle of champagne against the bows at the launching, would be blissfully ignorant of such mundane shipbuilding affairs.

At this time I had a good run of work and accepted that my employment was steady. So while at Gourlay’s I got married, in 1902, on the 13th of June.

I met my wife Margaret in the Templars Lodge and with the occasional breaks I saw her regularly for some months. In fact we courted for years, then we decided to get married- a decision which I never once regretted in all my forty-eight years of married life. Margaret’s father was a master painter and had a shop of his own. Quite posh in those days. He later emigrated to New Zealand and died there.

With a master painter for a father-in-law we had a beautifully decorated home to start our married life, although it was only one room, kitchen and lavatory. One year after we were married, shipyard order books began to wear very thin. When the pay offs came, I was one of the first to go, as was usual for shop delegates.

I really did not mind this at first because I had a friend in South Africa who had been writing to me extolling the vast opportunity working men had in that great new developing country. I had done him some service previously and he said he would send me my fare to take me out to South Africa. so when the pay off came at Gourlay’s I had made up my mind to accept the offer and try my luck in the promised land. It was summer when I set sail on a ship of the Union Castle Line, the Guelph, from Southampton.

The Case of the SS Stalingrad, the Polar Bear and the Barrels of Siberian Honey.

God, how my father loved to tell stories. At his funeral I spoke about the times in my twenties when I used to ring home and he would talk and talk to the point where I would put the receiver down and walk off for five minutes to make a cup of tea. When I picked up again, dad would still be going strong, never knowing he’d been speaking to empty space. In the week following his death I searched everywhere for any recording I had of him and his voice. I imagine a lot of people who don’t stop talking only ever think of themselves but I don’t think this was true of dad. He was interested in everything and everyone. Our friends became his friends and he was always happiest surrounded by people. In short – he was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, in his last years vascular dementia dulled a lot of this. Buttonholing strangers for random conversations and endlessly repeated reminiscences of his wartime childhood were the norm for a while. Whereas in the past his stories entertained us, now they just made us apprehensive. They were to be policed and quietly managed. He had no filter. There would be myself, my partner and our small child together with my parents on a day out and when we sat down for lunch in a cafe dad would often turn his chair around and begin regaling the family behind us with his criticisms of ‘the colour bar’ in the 1960s, or the Napoleonic wars, whatever came to mind at that moment. These strangers would look bemused and often a little alarmed wondering why this person had attached themselves to their party before we got his attention to turn back to us. However, the illness didn’t dull his sense of the absurd. A few years before he died, during one of the rare times our small family was all together, he told a bizarre anecdote about his father trapped on a cargo ship with a polar bear drunk on Siberian honey. I had originally remembered the bear as being loose on a Russian submarine but my brother put me right – his memory of the story makes much more sense.

Although I can’t recall the exact words, dad’s tale left indelible images in my mind. Here’s my attempt at a retelling:

An icy breeze buffets the gulls gliding in the stone grey Leningrad skies. The docks seem busier than usual – all the activity focussed on a cargo ship berthed on the western side already sitting heavy in the water ready for its voyage. On the quayside, amongst the bedraggled dockworkers, stands a group of soldiers with rifles on their shoulders smoking and chatting nervously amongst themselves. Sailors weave past them, hats pulled down and jackets fastened tight against the Baltic air as they make the final preparations for their journey. Just one more item of cargo to load.

A crane rattles and wheezes into life. The crowds of dockers, soldiers and sailors all stop for a moment to gaze up at the large cage now being loaded on to the deck. Inside lies a huge mass of white fur which undulates slowly. Wheezing and snuffling sounds can be heard – the beast is heavily sedated. However, it is the large, black claws, each one the size of a hunting knife, that seizes the bystanders’ attention. This very large, very dangerous polar bear is on its way to London. It is a gift from Stalin himself.

With some difficulty sailors and dockworkers push and heave the massive drugged carnivore into a small compartment down in the hold where it settles down to snore away the effects of the anaesthetic. There is relief when the bar is shut down against the door and the key is turned – every man fully aware of the damage their cargo could do if it woke up and decided to clamp its jaws around their head. The final preparations are made for the journey and before long the steamship is manoeuvring its way out of the harbour towards the Gulf of Finland and out to the Baltic Sea on its way to England.

Unfortunately, the comrades haven’t read their AA Milne. In a oversight that they would soon regret, the sailors have stored a consignment of Siberian honey next to the sleeping bear. It may as well have been a powder keg. There are barrels and barrels of the stuff and, while a small group of off duty sailors sit around and pass the time playing cards, a pungent, earthy smell diffuses throughout the hold.

One of the sailors there is called Bill- a communist from Scotland. He’s there to make sure everything runs smoothly. That Stalin’s magnanimous gift is delivered without a hitch. As the cards are dealt once again, Bill becomes aware of a low growl and a scratching noise coming from the bear’s compartment. He ignores it as do the rest of the company and the game goes on. They imagine the bear is simply dreaming in the way they’ve seen their pet dogs chase rabbits in their sleep. But the bear is not dreaming. Instead the bear is emerging slowly from its slumber and has caught the scent of the wild honey.

Before long, the smell begins to intoxicate and torment the beast. It begins to get more and more agitated. To begin with the card players merely shout at it to keep the noise down before returning to their game. The growls get louder and then suddenly there is a thudding noise as the bear slams itself against the door in an effort to get to the barrels. It’s at this point the men stop playing and look nervously at each other. There is another thud. The sailors get up. While the others step warily back, Bill takes a few steps towards the bear’s compartment but instinctively stops. It is a very bad idea. Another thud accompanied by an almighty roar and the sailors scatter in panic. They shout to their comrades on deck that the bear is escaping. They shout to their comrades to bring rifles. Another thud and the sound of wood splintering. The sight of a claw, an eye, bared teeth. It’s only going to take a few more goes at battering the door before the bear escapes.

Bill shouts at the others to get out immediately and they scramble for to the steps that will take them up to the deck. Bill is the last to leave and, as he does so, the bear finally smashes through the door sending splintering wood everywhere. The sound it’s making is terrifying. It heads straight for the steps just as Bill gets onto the deck, the swipe of a paw missing his leg by inches. The ashen faced sailors are joined by their comrades as they look down the hatch, the bear snarling up at them. Someone brings along a rifle and attempts to push it into another’s hands. The man refuses. As does another. And another. Soon the whole crowd around the hatch are ignoring the chaos down below, shaking their heads and remonstrating with the man with the rifle. Not one of them is prepared to shoot the animal no matter how much danger they could be in or the damage that could be done. Shoot a gift from Stalin? How would you explain that? Staring at the floor they’d all rather take their chances with the bear.

Looking at the nervous crew Bill decides there is only one solution. He slams the hatch down and locks it, trapping the bear in the hold. The reaction down below is instantaneous- those on the deck can hear the animal going beserk. This seems to last an age- the sound of a bear wrecking every single barrel in the hold. Each smashed casing and the devouring of its contents propelling it into a further frenzy. What is to be done? Nothing it seems and most of the crowd drifts away from the hatch to worry and fret while leaving Bill and a comrade to stand guard. Eventually the bawling and growling gives way to huffing, slurping and chomping. Gradually these are replaced by a whimpering, the sound of a bear dropping to the floor and a heavy wheezing. Its a while before Bill opens the hatch. When he does, he is awed by the scenes of destruction that meet his eye. Every part of the bear’s fur seems matted and drenched with honey, its eyes rolled narcotically to the back of its head and its tongue lolling out of its slavering mouth. It is lying awkwardly on its back atop the wreckage of the entire consignment. Honey oozes out across the floor and splashes the walls. Bill will always remember this sight. A miracle no one was injured. With luck, they can now keep the bear sedated, clean up the mess and fix the worst of the damage. They can deliver their gift. Stalin need never know.

I can still remember the looks my brother gave me as we sat in a Chinese restaurant listening to Dad recount this tale. We hadn’t heard him in full flow for quite some time. It was more lucid than we were used to at that point but also more bizarre. And funny too. Much funnier than my attempt. He was more like his old self. Dad, for his part, maintained it was all true and that his father, Bill, had been one the sailors. It’s since become one of the main things we remember Dad by. Somehow typical of him but also, as it was one of the last of his tales he managed relay to us, more unique than ever. In the intervening years, the only other time I heard him talk at that length and detail was when we spoke on the phone a week before he died. For years all he’d managed was, “I’m being well looked after!” before passing the receiver back to Mum. In that last conversation he spoke for half an hour about how much he loved his parents, our Mum, my brother and me and our partners before speaking beautifully about his grandson. I knew then that it wouldn’t be long and it wasn’t a surprise when my mother rang distraught later that week. That last conversation will stay with me forever. However, the memory of it doesn’t make me laugh which is what Dad was so good at and which is why I have always wanted the polar bear story to be true.

I knew that grandad did work on Soviet steamships so there was a chance it could have happened. I had his discharge book which gave me the details of the ships he sailed on and their destinations but this stopped in 1927. Anyway, the Stalin element suggests that the incident took place in the 1930s but by that time my dad had been born and Bill had a chequered career ranging from working for the Soviet Embassy to being the catering manager at Tottenham Lido. When would he have had the time to go to Leningrad to load a polar bear onto a steamship in the first place?

I knew that if I started to pull at the threads of this tale it might not hold up. In fact it might unravel completely. All the same, I thought it was worth looking into. So, last year I sent an email to the Zoological Society of London. I began by explaining the story and apologising for it being so preposterous. The email continued:

I recently uncovered lot of documents detailing my grandfathers time on the SS Koursk- a steamship transporting goods from USSR to Britain which was operated by ARCOS during the 1920s. So, I have the Russian sailor part of the story but I don’t have the polar bear part. So, my question is. How would I find out whether the USSR gave London Zoo (or similar) a polar bear during the 1920s or 1930s? Is there any further information you could give me?

There might be no proof any of this happened. My dad told a lot of stories and this was one of the best. Wish I’d asked him more about it when he was alive.

The reply I received was remarkably unfazed as though they received requests like mine all the time. On reflection, I’m sure they do. They told me it would take a few days to research as the animal records weren’t kept in the Library and they needed to check with another department. A couple of weeks later I received the following:

Dear Alan,

I have searched our animal record cards to locate the polar bear that was shipped from the Soviet Union. There was only one polar bear which seemed a possibility, but I cannot be sure that it is the polar bear that you were told about. I have attached a photograph of the record card to this email.

So, on 30th September 1935 Captain Melenkhov and the crew of the SS Stalingrad presented London Zoo with a male polar bear called Mischa. In all probability this was the bear I was looking for. I managed to find an image of Mischa fairly easily. Standing upright in the Mappin Terrace enclosure. A huge beast. One you definitely wouldn’t want to get too close to. He looks fairly benign but then look at the size of those paws and imagine the strength behind them. You know how bears are. They can turn on you just like that. Much later Mischa became a father to the much more famous Brumas -the first baby polar bear to be successfully reared in Britain and a huge hit with the public. His image adorning a seemingly endless range of memorabilia. So, this was the polar bear part of the tale- whether I’d be able to find the truth regarding its journey to England though was another matter entirely.

The SS Stalingrad, was a cargo-passenger ship built for ice navigation making regular trips across the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic transporting goods back and forth between Russia and the United Kingdom. That means it was more likely to sail out from Vladivostok, Murmansk and Archangel rather than the Baltic port of Leningrad. During the Second World War, while it was part of a convoy carrying munitions from the UK to Russia via Reykjavik, it was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat. 21 lives were lost.

However, though our grandad had served on similar vessels in the past, by 1935, having recently become a father, he was rarely at sea. Did he make it onto the SS Stalingrad at all? My brother thinks that if he made this trip it was a one off. Possibly because he could be trusted & spoke English. After all, his sister was working in Moscow, and his father was a Comintern Agent. However, I think now it’s just as likely that Bill Stewart wasn’t on the crew. That maybe he just had friends on board and that he met up with them when they docked at Surrey. That he had nothing to do with trying to calm down a raging, Stalinist bear, blitzed on honey in the middle of the Baltic but that he heard all about it later. Or, of course, he may have made the whole thing up.

That first photograph I found of Mischa had lent a little bit of credence to the story and, as I put the whole thing aside for a few months wondering how to write about it, I just accepted that Russian sailors had stored an adult polar bear in the hold. There was something I’d missed on the card from London Zoo though. Next to the category ‘Habitat’ it said ‘Born in the Artic Circle in 1935’. I only noticed that, however, once I’d found another photograph of Mischa. This time on board the SS Stalingrad on its arrival in Britain that same year.

Mischa being fed on board the SS Stalingrad shortly before he as presented as a gift to the London Zoological Society. September 1935

Of course, Mischa hadn’t been a raging beast crammed into the hold ready to burst out and attack the crew until it was overcome by a stupor brought on by its gargantuan consumption of nectar. In reality one of the crew had picked up an infant bear of considerably less terrifying stature somewhere around the Arctic Circle during the ship’s voyage. Whether it was an orphan or not I do not know but Mischa clearly became a kind of ship’s mascot and the cute little thing might have been able to give you a nasty nip but would have found smashing through a compartment door next to impossible. Evidently Captain Melenkhov wasn’t sure what should be done with it on arrival in England and so presenting it to London Zoo seemed as good an idea as any. The story wasn’t true. It was wholly exaggerated. It was nonsense.

And then I realised what the story was. And I realised why my dad came to be telling it to us just as dementia started taking hold. When Mischa arrived in London, dad was a little over two years old. The tale of the polar bear drunk on Siberian honey was simply a story told by our grandfather Bill to his son Robin. Bill hadn’t been there. He may have had only the slightest connection to the whole incident but he made it his own. It was told to enchant, to amuse and to delight. To bring the teller and the listener closer together. I remember recounting a similar story to my toddler at a visit to the Natural History Museum once as we filed past a row of stuffed bears. “Look- that’s the bear that stole Daddy’s hair,” I said, going on to invent a suitably outlandish tale which my child, now a teenager, still remembers. My dad’s story was better though and the care he took to tell it showed the care our grandad took in embellishing it in the first place and none of it is surprising as clearly we are all a ludicrously sentimental lot in our family.

When I realised the whole saga was just a story told by Bill to Robin I cried for a bit. And then I was ok.

Our grandfather, Bill Stewart, our dad in his arms, sometime in 1935 or thereabouts.

Alan Stewart.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 3: Learning a Trade.

The Dundee Jute Industry circa 1900. (www.verdantworks.co.uk)

At school I passed the fifth standard when I was thirteen and so entered the labour market looking for a full-time job. Following my half time work I first tried the jute mills, and was offered a start on the breaker -can. But when I saw the nature of the work my first thought was to get out, which I did. I picked up my jacket and ran as fast as I could- certainly out of sight and sound of the gaffer, who thought the new start was well on the way to being shown how to tramp the cans.

So I tried another mill and got a job in the spinning flat. Some months later, however, I did do a turn on the breaker-can. in fact, as I passed from mill to mill, I had a turn at most of the jobs.

The process of jute manufacture was then as follows. First the jute was broken from the 2 cwt. bales in which it was shipped from India. Then it was impregnated with oil. This was to add resilience to the fibre. (In the old days whale oil was used. Dundee was a main whaling seaport.) After the jute was batched , it was passed through a feeder which had rows of sharp needles called hackles. These ripped the jute fibre into strands before it fell into a breaker-can. Into these cans the boys and girls packed the jute hard with their hands. This was called tramping the cans. The fibre then went through the carding machine, the drawing machine, then to the roving, each process making the jute sliver finer. At the roving, the shifter laddies took the roves off the machine and threw them into barrows, then the roves were barrowed to the spinners where the jute was spun on to bobbins. The bobbins went to winders where the jute yarn was wound on to cops. The cops then went to the factory where the weavers at their looms wove the yarn into the finished cloth.

In many cases the factories were not adjacent to the mills and the cops had to be transported by lorries. To have a job in the factory was considered posh, much better than having a job at the mill as a spinner or a shifter, and the low mill- that is the preparing flats- was considered the lower depths.

Many a song was sung about the work in the mills and factories. There was the Dundee Weaver’s song, the Dundee Spinner’s song, and the Wee Shifter’s song, all of which have made their way one time or another to the top of the folksong charts. There were songs about the batchers and the breaker-cans, but as these came from the low mill I am afraid the language was a little on the strong side for the publishers and their printing machines, and so they remain to this day in the heads of the old mill worlkers, reserved as a special party piece when occasion permits.

It was during this time that I became involved in my first strike. As a matter of fact I was the leader. The object of the strike was none other than William Gladstone, then prime minister in Her Majesty’s government. Gladstone was a great Liberal and frequently visited a small town near Dundee called Blairgowrie which had a large area of wooded countryside around it . When in Blairgowrie, the prime minister took a hand at tree felling, and this gave rise to the cartoon of Gladstone, axe in both hands, and the slogan “Woodman, spare that tree”. Speaking of Blairgowrie, I should not forget to mention that it is also the parental home of the Grimond family who had made their fortune in Dundee jute. From the Grimond family tree came the present leader of the Liberal Party, Jo Grimond. The Grimonds were Liberal in politics but never liberal in paying wages to the Dundee jute workers who were, and still are, among the lowest paid workers in Britain.

However, that day Dundee was en fête for the prime minister, who was to receive the freedom of the city. Now it seemed to me an insult to that worthy person and a slur on the city’s reputation that while the freedom ceremony was being performed we mill workers should be slaving away in the mills. At least that was how I put it to the fellows when I suggested we knock off and go to the freedom ceremony. The proposal was carried unanimously. I can’t remember anything Gladstone said that day so it could not have been important. The important event came m next morning when the gaffer demanded an explanation: and on being told I had suggested stopping work to hear the prime minister I was given the sack on the spot.

I crossed the road to another mill and got a job there. In all, I stayed in the mills until I was sixteen. These three years of mill work and my half-time mill experience had an important effect on shaping my character and my attitude to life. Working long hours for small wages, living daily with injustice and intolerance, sowed the seeds of the desire to see a system which gave justice to the workers. Allied to this was the poverty to be seen everywhere in this jute city. Dundee was considered a town of drunkards, but when I look back with the wisdom of age, I can see that this really arose from the impoverished life of the people. They were so poorly fed that a couple of nips of whisky and a pint of beer was enough to send them into a drunken stupor. The Scottish drink was a nip of whisky, price twopence, and a penny pint of beer. That is still the Scottish drink today, but the prices are somewhat higher. When Scotsmen talk of the Good Old Days they usually refer to drink prices.

The public houses were evil, smelly places. I had first-hand experience because I used to go in them to sell news-papers, another sideline of mine to make an extra penny or two. There was the stench of beer, the sawdust on the floor, the spittoons and the salt fish the publican kept on the counter because it gave the customers a thirst when they chewed it. Most of them would not need the salt fish because those from the mills had enough jute “stoor” (flakes of jute) in their lungs and bellies to give them a thirst that a barrel of beer would not quench.

Dundee on a Saturday night (Saturday was pay day) was bedlam let loose. It used to be said that the workers did more fighting in the Overgate (a street in the city centre) on a Saturday night than the Black Watch did during all of the war. Certainly there were many pitched battles, often family against family. The Molonys against the Mulligans, O’Fees versus the McFarlanes and so on. It is laughable but true that the police used wheelbarrows to cart away the drunks and the casualties after the battles had subsided. The police wisely kept well clear until they could move in for the kill. On Monday morning, as kids, we used to go down to the prison and see dozens at a time being thrown into the Black Maria and taken to the courts. Each successive court appearance meant a higher fine but this did not lessen the number of offenders, nor make the Overgate a more peaceful place on a Saturday night. It brought tragedy to many homes, however. Fortunately my parents did not drink. My father could take an occasional bottle of ale and my mother was a strict teetotaller, a complete abstainer.

All this squalor and degradation, seeing and experiencing the misery of some of my pals who went back on a Saturday night to a home with parents brawling and fighting in a drunken stupor, had a very profound effect on my thinking. Many of my political acquaintances throughout my life have asked me why I spent so many of my early years in the Temperance and Prohibition movement. This was the reason. In fact for many years I had only one way of separating right from wrong. Those who drank were wrong- those who did not drink were right. True, my temperance was always colored with socialist principles and working-class justice, but the real reason why my early political work was done in the I.O.G.T. (Independent Order of Good Templars) was because of my experience in early life in Dundee.

When I was sixteen my life took another turn. My mother, knowing the lot of the labouring classes and not wishing her son to be one of them determined to make me an artisan, But it was by sheer accident that I became a joiner. The tailor who made my father’s clothes came on a periodic visit to get his order for trousers and jacket. When the measurements were done and a chat was taking place over a glass of ale, the subject to a trade for wee Bob came up. It transpired that the tailor had a son who was gaffer to a builder. He “spoke” for me and so I started my time as a joiner apprentice with the firm of Sandy Stewart at 4s. for a 54-hour week. This part of my apprenticeship lasted for over two years. I learned to plane and saw, making doors and windows for whatever jobs we were working on, jobbing or building. But a vast amount of my time was spent on labouring work, Sandy Stewart had a strange idea of how an apprentice should
acquire the skill of his trade. I was worked like a wee Scots donkey. I had to push a barrow from the yard to the docks nearly a mile away, stack the timber on the barrow and push it back, all uphill, a very strenuous job. Worse still, I had to combine brute force with diplomacy. Sandy Stewart was always in debt to the timber merchants, Bell and Sime, and so I had to promise faithfully that the firm would give prompt attention to future payments before I could load the timber on the barrow.

The crunch came in the winter of my second year. The snow was very deep, and thick ice covered everything. The boss sent me up to his house to clear the roof and clean out the gutters. At the end of the week I received my apprentice’s wages, 6s., the second-year rate. I said, “If I do labourer’s work I want labourer’s wages.” “You’ll have to see the boss then.” So in to Sandy Stewart I went. “I did labourer’s work last week and I want labourer’s wages,” I said. “Ye’ll get no labourer’s wages here,” shouted Sandy Stewart, then he went into a rage shouting that I was a lazy good for nothing and so on. “Get out or I’ll put you out that window,” he roared. “You’ll need a new pane of glass then,” I said, “because it’s you who’s going to make that journey. Give me my apprenticeship lines.” I moved towards him, but like most men who shout and bluster their way through life he didn’t need much pressure to cave in. I got my apprenticeship lines with a note saying I had left of my own accord and so my work in Sandy Stewart’s yard came to an abrupt end.

Unemployment in the city was high. The hard winter had closed the building sites and all outside work was at a stand-still. Labour was plentiful, jobs were scarce. After much searching and standing at work gates, I started on the railway, shunting with the hydraulic capstan at the Tay Bridge goods shed. But that did not last long. One day the capstan went faulty and did not stop, the shunting rope and the hook flew off the wagon and twisted around my legs, giving me a bad though not serious injury.

I was off work for many weeks, but the railway was a new experience and there I learned a few more tricks of the workers’ trade. Railwaymen were among the lowest paid workers and always on the look out for ways to supplement their wages. Maybe it was an extra bag of flour on the lorry; there was always a market for that. Or it might be fruit. Apples or pears, particularly in the Christmas season, were always a winner. But the best bet of all was the whisky trade. Broaching the barrel was a railway skill, in fact it was more,
it was an accomplished art, and many a “dab hand’ there was at the game. It was done with a very fine brace and drill. When the tiny hole was made in the barrel and the fine thread of whisky spurted out, every vessel capable of holding liquid was pressed into service- bottles, pails, flasks, the lot. After they had been filled, a very fine sliver of wood was knocked into the hole, a concoction of oil and dirt rubbed over the surface and the barrel proceeded on its way.

Broaching the barrel was so prevalent at the New Year period that special corps of police were drafted in for protection. But these guards were lured away to the bothy on the loading bank for a wee dram, just to keep them warm, and of course while they were having their wee dram another barrel was being relieved of its liquid gold. As one old loader used to say when he had got the special cop out of the way, “Whisky has a greater drawing power than the world’s best
poultice.” In the bothy on the loading bank there was a barrel sunk into the ground. All the time I was there it was never empty. Anyone could drink as much as they wanted. Some did, and were carried home on occasions, but I was never once tempted, which proved conclusively that the temperance movement had one adherent whose lips were sealed to strong liquor.

I was again idle after my accident, but through people in the temperance movement I got a job in Gourlay’s shipyard. Gourlay’s was quite a famous yard; many world-renowned ships left its slipway.

While in Gourlay’s yard, I threw myself heart and soul into building the temperance movement. We had a strong group of Templars in the yard, but most of our work was done in the evenings and on Sundays. Some of the “big” fellows, the Fathers of the Lodges, wanted young people to be, as they said, “good law abiding Christians” to just come to the meetings, listen to speeches about the evils of strong drink and then meekly return home. I fought against this attitude. I thought the lodges were places where young people should
have debates, sport and entertainment. Finally a few of the more progressive fellows and myself started a new lodge, the Victory Lodge. We broke the rule, we organised dances and concerts and from the money made we bought billiard tables, dart boards, draught and domino sets, and made the lodge into a real young people’s club. We held open-air meetings at which I often spoke and asked people to sign the Pledge. Naturally, because of our activity, we attracted many young people and our new lodge soon became the largest in the city. In fact, at one time it had more members than any other lodge in Scotland, and I became the Chief Templar in Dundee.

There was a lot of competition for the allegiance of the young people in the city. Churches with their auxiliaries, Young Men’s and Young Women’s Groups, were always active. There was a very good and active Secular Society. They too held meetings in the Albert Square. Their main theme was “religion is the opium of the people” and all their work was aimed at destroying the various images of God. I spent many evenings and Sunday afternoons listening to the secularists, all of them excellent speakers. Wull Bowman (grandfather of Dave Bowman, who has now for many years been Communist candidate for Dundee), and Jimmy Croll, a local shopkeeper, were two of their best who could hold a big crowd, often in face of much heckling. Their paper The Freethinker had a good sale. I was attracted to much of the logic in the secularist argument and began to have my doubts about God. Interesting therefore to record that, in later years, it was mainly on religious grounds that I finally broke with the prohibition and temperance movement.

Entrance card for the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. (TUC History Online)

In the last year of my apprenticeship I joined the union. It was forbidden to do so before then. I immediately took part in active work. There were two unions, the Scottish Association of Carpenters and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. I joined the latter. I was elected to the management committee for the yard and did a valuable job. I was the only one who thoroughly read the National Committee minutes and consequently was always up-to-date on demarcation problems, and extra payment agreements for varying types of work. While I was there we had a very militant management committee and a closed shop was enforced, with a trade union card examination every month.

In doing this work I became a well known and popular figure, so when my apprenticeship finished my mates were determined to give me a good show. The practice then was for the new journeyman to give the fellows a big booze-up in one of the public houses in the Vault (an old alleyway in the city centre nearly three hundred years old). A journeyman was often remembered in later years for the number of drunks he had at his pay off. But I put an end to that idea for me. I said no pub. But I took a restaurant instead, and there we gave the fellows a slap up feed. Aberdeen-Angus steaks were in my opinion a better pay off than Whitbread’s beer or Morton’s whisky, all of them, by the way, products of Dundee. Naturally, when the steaks had been consumed, many of the fellows gravitated across the road to the pub, and a few got so tight that they had a swing on the glass chandelier and were “Bounced” into the street for their daring.

Now I was a fully fledged joiner. Mrs. Stewart’s work had borne fruit. I was an artisan with papers to prove it, but I was soon to discover that the lot of the artisan and that of the common labourer were very much the same.

Comrades: William ‘Bill’ Stewart

William, the eldest son of Bob and Margaret Stewart, was born in 1903. He was our grandad. He died in 1978 when I was four and so I have few memories of him but those that I do are incredibly vivid. He was a warm, kind and gentle man. This impression has only been strengthened by the many letters and photographs he left behind. Every new detail I come across makes me wish I’d known him longer and I don’t know whether it’s his or Bob’s story I’d rather tell.

Like his father, he joined the Dundee Branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain on its inception in 1920. He was 17 and remained a card carrying member for the next 58 years until his death. It would have been his commitment to these ideals and presumably family connections that led to him working for ARCOS during the earliest years of the Soviet Union’s existence. Bill worked on merchant steamships sailing from British ports to Odessa and Leningrad progressing from cabin boy to chief steward on the way. ARCOS – the All Russian Co-Operative Society was the body responsible for facilitating Anglo- Soviet trade in the wake of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. MI5, quite understandably, regarded it as a front organisation for espionage and other subversive activities and it was raided and shut down in May 1927. Britain then broke off all diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

However, it is not the idea of espionage that interests me particularly. Still less the movement of textiles, timber and coal across the Baltic to the benefit of British commerce. It is this photograph that I found amongst hundreds of others in an old suitcase in my mother’s loft. A lively group of young people assembled in a shabby room adorned with agitprop posters and photos of Lenin. Their style of dress ranges from the bohemian to the Bolshevik. The majority of the group are looking towards their left- it appears that someone else is taking a group portrait while a second photographer caught this image from another angle. A couple of the figures stare out in other directions in slight confusion. Despite this there is a distinct sense of that much maligned word ‘comradeship’. One of the young men carries an accordion and I suspect that there has been quite a bit of drinking going on. A much younger boy looks on grinning in the doorway. I love this photograph.

Bill Stewart and the Russian Communists.

At the centre, in the back row is my grandfather. He’s the one wearing the budenovka- the distinctive early headgear usually worn by the troops of the Red Army in the 1920s. He looks like he’s having a good time. There is some writing on the back which explains that the picture features Russian and English communists with the affectionate declaration, “Don’t forget the Russian young communists! [Komsomoltsiev]” This is accompanied by signatures from several of those gathered there. It must have been a gift to Bill and it appears to have pinned up as a memento to serve as a reminder of his younger days.

“Don’t forget the Russian young communists! [Komsomoltsiev]” Thanks to Maurice Casey for the translation.

It’s hard enough to imagine your parents in their youth let alone your grandparents and my hearts bursts for grandad when I look at this image. It marks him out as someone who, in contrast to my own mundane life, had adventures. Striking out to places far away from home carried away in a moment in history. I’m quite jealous of him to be honest. How on earth did he end up there? When you think of the USSR youthful optimism and idealism is far from what first comes to mind but it’s certainly present in this image captured almost one hundred years ago. But, as with any photograph of the young when the subjects are long dead, there is melancholy too. Whatever happened to Bill’s companions, particularly the young Russians, in the years that followed? I fear for them.

When I first came across the photograph I had the no idea of the circumstances surrounding it or when and where it was taken. The first clue was finding Bill’s ‘Continuous Cerificate of Discharge’- the log book that records the various voyages and their destinations. It would definitely have to have been taken between 1925 and 1927. However, it was finding a small battered autograph book that belonged to Bill that narrowed it down further. The pages are dotted with various signatures and messages in Cyrillic script from friends and comrades my grandfather met on his journeys. Yelena McCafferty of http://www.talkrussian.com provided the translations and the picture became clearer. The photograph was likely to have been taken around October or November 1925 while the SS Koursk, where Bill was working as an assistant steward, was docked at Leningrad. The messages reproduced below describe how Bill and his colleagues met a group of Russian members of the Kosomol during celebrations of the 8th anniversary of the October revolution and struck up a friendship. There is a sense of the Russians eager to know how the proletarian struggle is faring overseas and much talk of Britain working towards its own revolution which, of course, is inevitable and imminent. In the light of what happened in the years that followed I find it all incredibly moving.

Alan Stewart.

Wishing dear comrade William Stewart to be always in the leading line of the English proletariat fighting for the proletarian revolution. It’s not long until England is united with our union and until the creation of one powerful Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

[Signed]

Flat 6, 11 Voskresensky Pr., Leningrad

Dearest comrade,

It was so joyous for us, Komsomol members from Leningrad to see you, messengers of England’s youth, that England we so often see glimpses of in the news in our newspapers but which in essence we know so little about.

Somehow it was particularly joyous to see in you the signs of being relentless fighters, healthy in both spirit and body. You are not yet the powerful Lenin-like party, but you are a wonderful material, fire bricks which will be used to make it. When in the place of a group of young, stubborn Komsomol members, in the place of a small working league comes a broad, mass, proletarian Bolshevik party – then your cause will win. Until then we will bring this day closer together. We will be proud to see that you have found something to learn from our way of life and work. May your visit be an initial point in our closely-knit connection, friendship, correspondence. Please write to us about the way you live, work, what’s happening in Komsomol, about the progress of your work in the unions, work cells, printed press, among farming community. We will write to you everything you are interested in.

Hello! “Stay alive”!

On behalf of the youth section of the Central Club of the Professional Union of Soviet and Clerical Employees.

Leningrad. Bureau Organiser.

09.11.25 K. Vasilevsky

I am walking on Prospekt 25 Oktyabrya on the 8th anniversary of the October revolution, from the commemoration evening in honour of the October revolution and suddenly I hear energetic sounds of our Internationale in English. I was very happy to find out that you are English Komsomol members and did my best to show you our way of living. I think you will remember the days spent with Russian Komsomol members, and when you have Soviets in power I hope to shake handswith you once again in England in a workers’ club. So far you have a lot of fight on your hands to reach power, but you will be able to build socialism quicker and easier compared to our backward country (in the economic sense). We, Russian Komsomol members, will come to help you when needed and will help you to carry out a social revolution.

It’s not long until the slogan of the Communist manifesto becomes reality and the proletarians of all countries join in one World Republic of Soviets.

Written by one of the army of a million and a half Russian Lenin Komsomol members, a member of the Leningrad Organisation, Central City District, Membership card №92039.

Leo Aksberg

Flat 5, 82 Prospekt 25 Oktyabrya, Leningrad

Postscript

Here’s a few items I wanted to get into the main article but they wouldn’t quite fit:

Bill obviously made firm friends on these trips. Here’s a translation from a book on the SS Koursk published in Odessa in 1972 in a series about ‘heroical ships of the Merchant Marine Fleet’. I found it amongst all the jumble of letters and documents I’ve been sifting through. I think the translation is, as the writer admits, only rough as I don’t think Comrade William Stewart ever reached the rank of captain.

“In April 1923, a British Court decided to return several ships to the young Soviet Republic. But before this decision, the British Government had already returned nine former Russian ships among which was the Steamship “Koursk’. The Koursk was included in the ARCOS Fleet and commenced voyages between the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.

The crew of the SS Koursk mainly consisted of Russian seafarers but the Captain of the ship was a young Englishman – Communist William Stewart. William Stewart has kept good memories of the Koursk and her crew, about the excellent work and the consistently good human relations between seafarers and the communal help existing between them. Several Russian seafarers still remember William Stewart with a great sense of pleasure, for example, a former second engineer of the SS Koursk, P. Sirenko, recently remembered the following about William Stewart:

“In 1929, the SS Transbalt, on which I was working as a fireman, was lying in the London Docks. Whilst repairing the boilers, I fell and broke my arm. Our Captain approached the Port Authorities and requested that I be admitted to hospital. However, a large sum of money was involved in order to find me a place in a hospital and even so there was no free place. Suddenly, a young Englishman came aboard our ship. He spoke to the Captain and the ship’s doctor and then came to see me. “May I introduce you, Pavel, to Comrade William Stewart. He was once the Captain of the SS Koursk and has promised to help you”. A kind Englishman shook my hand, smiled and invited me to his car. He drove me to a hospital in Greenwich which was a naval hospital named after Queen Victoria. He spoke to an administrator of the hospital and I was given a bed in a very nice ward. During my stay in hospital, William Stewart visited me several times and we had many discussions when he warmly remembered his days as Captain of the SS Koursk when the ship was part of the
ARCOS fleet.

When I recovered, Captain Stewart came to collect me and drove me to my ship. On saying goodbye, he asked me to send his best and warmest regards to his friends on the SS Koursk'”

Photographs of the hospital anecdote above. It has just occurred to me that every single Russian he met seemed to be incapable of making the distinction between Scottish and English. He was a very patient man.

Colourised version of the British and Russian young communists.

Another entry in the autograph book- ‘To the Youth, the future- Sam Brasonovitch, Odessa.’ I love this.

William Stewart’s record book detailing his many journeys to and from the Soviet Union aboard the SS ARCOS and then the SS Koursk.

This is a tiny photograph that I’ve magnified here. I presume it was taken either on the SS Arcos or the SS Koursk. I had thought that the figure at the front was Bill Stewart but now I’m not so sure.

“Comrade Stewart, from VLKSM (All-Union Leninist Young Communist League), 3rd Division of GPU (State Political Directorate). Medvedev” – Thanks again to Yelena McCafferty for the translation.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 2: School and Half Time.

Mitchell Street School. The mill is next door on the right.

I went to school when I was seven years old. It was in the period that free education became law. Just before then, the fee was 1s. 1d a quarter. I was there until I was ten years old.

I can vividly recollect my first two teachers. They were sisters named Shaw. The elder was in charge and we nicknamed her “Tattie Shaw”. She had a thick black strap which she wielded with great power. I knew because I sold newspapers after school hours and to get quickly on my paper round, a necessity both to get the work done and to get the maximumm time for play, I climbed the school railings for a short cut. When caught I felt the full weight of the black strap brought down sharply on my bare hand. Still, I knew the newspapers must be speedily dispatched, so I continued in the fear of the black strap for many a day.

I remember another time when the strap tingled my fingers. A boy in my class named Tammy Soutar was my back neighbour one day. All pupils stood back to back when doing sums. Tammy was a very stupid fellow and as I finished my sums he asked me what to do. I said “swap slates” but, when caught, I was the one judged unable to do the sums and so I was punished for copying from Tammy Soutar. I was sure then there was no justice in this world.

Many years later, when my wife was canvassing for me at a municipal election, she knocked at “Tattie Shaw’s” door. She was invited inside, given a cup of tea and a donation with the request to keep it secret as the opposing candidate was also an old pupil of hers and a lawyer to boot.

When I reached ten years, in the natural course of events I became a half-timer. Monday, Wednesday and Friday at work, Tuesday and Thursday at school. The next week vice versa, but Saturday work till 2pm. This was law. When you reached thirteen you could leave school, if you had passed fifth standard. If not you had to remain until you were fourteen. At fourteen you left, no matter how uneducated or daft you were.

This meant working three days one week and two and a half the next. A short week’s pay was 2s 9d and a long week’s pay 3s 4d. In the spinning flat where I worked we sang:

“Oh dear me, the mull’s gaein’ fest,
Pour wee shifters canna get a rest,
Shifting bobbins coarse and fine, 
Who wad work for twa and nine”

And work we certainly did. From six in the morning till six at night with two breaks for breakfast and dinner. Breakfast at 9am to 10am. Dinner at 2pm to 3pm.

I was a shifter in Mitchell’s mill. My work was to shift the full bobbins off the spinning frames and put the empty ones on. I remember my first day very well. I was so busy cleaning out the waste from under the machines I did not notice that the other lads had gone, so I got locked in. Many times in my life I have been involved in “lock-outs” and to be locked in on my first day at work was not a very significant start. I banged and banged again on the door, shouted at the top of my juvenile voice, but with no result. Fortunately for me it was Friday and the lads came back to clean the machines, so I was released.

At the mill I had an interesting “gaffer” (foreman), Jock Carey. He was a striking man, powerfully built with a big red beard. A typical Hielandman, I always thought.

The cleaning out of the jute waste under the spinning frames was done when the power was off. That meant we were expected to do it during our break. We devised a few tricks to get this done at times other than the break , keeping the break for our leisure time. One of the tricks was to set the waste on fire and put the power off. I became adept at these tricks, and after getting the cleaning done would dash off in the break on my own ploys.

But big Jock Carey rumbled me and soon found me another job. Every morning he bought the liberal newspaper, The Advertiser, published by the Leng Publishing House, and this he made me read to him every day. So started the daily reading sessions. Big Jock could read very well , but like many other Scotsmen he preferred other people to do his ‘work’ and so ‘Wee Bob’ became an official reader to ‘Big Jock’ . When the newspaper was not so interesting Jock brought in books and I had a go at these . These sessions gave me an appetite for reading and an appreciation of the written word that has never left me. It gave me a profound grounding in the art of expression which has stood me in good stead countless times in later life.

Apart from my half time job, I had another job ‘on the side’. I went out early in the morning wakening people for their work. This was done by knocking on their doors and I was called a ‘chapper’. There were no alarm clocks in those days, and many workers were glad of such a service because to be late for work meant loss of wages. I knocked on the doors with a mallet, or ‘mellie’ as we called it. A number of boys did chapping and woe betide any stranger who trespassed on our terrotory. If someone did we would hide in a dark alley with a well laden treacle-scone and push it in the trespasser’s face.

We charged twopence a week for chapping. anyone who missed paying it would not be chapped. Nor could they expect to cash in by hearing the chapper knock the next door neighbour. We covered our mellies with our bonnets so that the only people who could hear were in the house being chapped. I remained a chapper until I finished my apprenticeship.

Chapping money was very welcome and when saved up gave the possibility of a trip out of town. I never had any holidays but my pals and I had a few day trips. I remember one very well. A crowd of us had saved up our chapping money and we went to Edinburgh. I can recall the events of the day. First being thrown out of the Art Gallery for laughing at the nude statues and secondly, a rare event, having tea at a restaurant called the ‘Heave Awa”.

Most of my ’treats’ were connected with the Sunday School picnics and in the winter the ‘soirees’. I soon realised that to get the full number of picnics and soirées I had to join all the churches. So I went to the Free Kirk- this was the one to which I was supposed to belong. But I also went to the Episcopal Church and soon realised the only difference was that the English did their mumbling kneeling on hassocks. I also attended the Salvation Army, so that going to these in rotation I ensured myself of at least three summer and three winter treats a year.

The half-time school we attended was in the mill. There were two classrooms, forty pupils in each class and two teachers. One of them was adept at clouting you on the ear and as soon as your head came round she would wallop you on the other for good measure. I can’t remember if she was as adept at getting knowledge into the heads of the pupils, but like most schools we had our periodic examinations. I remember I had a ‘first’ in an examination on general knowledge. No doubt the reading sessions with Jock Carey had something to do with this achievement.

At the prizegiving day the bosses and their ladies came along to make the presentations. I was barefoot, as were all the other boys, and no doubt my clothes would be a little threadbare. I will always remember the look of disgust on My Lady’s face as she presented me with my ‘first’, a book 0f holy stories given, no doubt, to cleanse my soul.

We worked barefoot in the mill becasuse it was so hot. Some of the colder footed made and wore jute shoes which we called rovies. Because of the toughness of the jute fibre they were excellently hard-wearing footwear, and could be sold outside for a small sum. Another way of making an extra copper if you were not caught.

In the summer the school closed for five weeks. The dodge then was to present yourself for work, say you were fourteen years of age, and if you were taken on you were now working full time. When the five weeks ended you picked a fight with the ‘gaffer’, got the sack and returned to your half-time existence.

Trying to look back over the years, I must confess that half-time schooling did not result in half-time education. I can remember very little being taught in a manner which would be of lasting benefit to the pupils. I fully believe that the reading sessions with Jock Carey were of more benefit to me, and The Advertiser, being a progressive paper, may have sown good seeds. Still, to have had at that time compulsory education for worker’s children must have been progressive, and such legislation must have been near-revolutionary and a fine tribiute to the many working-class organisations in Scotland who struggled many years to enable such a breakthrough in the Scottish education system to take place.

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 16^th 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.