It’s a week since the founding conference of Your Party and the less said about the mess of factionalism and wasted opportunity the better. However, it did put me in mind of another gathering that attempted to harness the potential of Britain’s left- the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. Here’s an extract of my account of it from the book I’m writing about Bob Stewart.
There’s a photograph in the CPGB archive at the People’s History Museum in Manchester depicting a large gathering outside London’s Cannon Street Hotel in 1920. It resembles the kind of yearly school photo they used to take at the better type of educational establishment during the early part of last century. The passing of a hundred years or so has lent these figures some semblance of respectability – if you didn’t know who they were then it would be hard to identify them as revolutionaries and a threat to the British state. Red flags and ushankas are conspicuous by their absence. The men are all in sober suits and ties and, for the most part, adhere to the code of the time that a gentleman is not fully dressed without a hat. The headgear on display ranges from formal looking homburgs, some egalitarian flat caps and even a couple of jaunty straw boaters. Possibly interlopers from the Fabians. The comparatively few women present look out from under wide brims and give the impression that they do not, under any circumstances, suffer fools gladly. Everyone looks as if they have something extremely important on their mind. Bob is there, instantly recognisable with his broken face, sitting on the cobbles front row, seventh from the left. As ever, he looks more serious and full of intent than anyone else. Everyone looks as if they have something extremely important on their mind. This was the Communist Unity Convention. Over a hundred and fifty delegates from all across the country drawn from over twenty different left wing groups. Although it was formalised the following year in Leeds, this last day of July was essentially the beginning of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The following day, as the conference continued at a second venue, the International Socialist Club on East Road, Bob was voted onto the Executive Committee and became its Scottish organiser.
It had been two and a half years since the October Revolution. The Red Army was engaged in a brutal civil war repelling counter revolutionary forces aided by Western European allies. This support stemmed from the worry that the worker’s state would default on loans made to Imperial Russia and that insurrection would spread across continents like a disease. Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, voiced his antipathy in visceral terms. In conversation with the Prime Minister David Lloyd George, he was purported to have said, “One might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks.” Publicly, he announced that the ideology should be “strangled in its cradle.” Right wing groups such as the British Empire Uniontoured the country to “campaign against Bolshevist propaganda.” A photograph in The Daily Mirror shows that this amounted to a small group of portly, middle aged men each resembling the cartoonish stereotype of a bowler hatted capitalist standing dourly in front of a carriage daubed with the slogan, ‘Britain for the British.’ The union flag was unfurled and one of their number meekly held a placard decrying the red menace. The ‘B’ word became the pejorative of the day. More often than not its application was ridiculous. Even Austen Chamberlain, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer of the coalition government had his 1920 budget described as containing “the seeds of Bolshevism.” Any prospect of the mildest wealth redistribution would draw similar accusations. Appealing for greater harmony between Liberal and Conservative MPs, Lloyd George called for a united front against socialism. He emphasised his commitment to restoring the country through a “fair reward for individual effort” and damned the Labour Party’s commitment to “the doctrine of common ownership” as essentially the same as Lenin’s hated vanguard party. An absurd comparison but thanks to the extension of the franchise, Labour had emerged as the official opposition and so would inevitably be subject to incessant outlandish claims such as this.
If it attracted so much invective, what was it that drew some people towards communism in the 1920s? The answer is simple. For many, the shattering experience of The Great War was capitalism’s greatest crisis. As the population attempted to forge some kind of normal life in the years that followed they were assailed by a raft of social problems. What people got in actuality was far from what they thought they had been promised. At the beginning of the 1918 General Election Campaign, the Prime Minister had acknowledged the dire situation for many in the country. The war had been like a “gigantic star shell” illuminating the land. It had lit up “all the dark places […..] that we have never seen before.” The past four years of conflict had shown the “appalling waste of human material” in the nation. If people had been fed and housed properly and had lived in healthy conditions a million more men would have been fit for the services whereas there were millions “below par.” This was to be put right. Children could not be brought up in these conditions. After a death toll of millions in the battlefields of Europe he warned that there were, “more lives being lost and maimed through the atrocious social conditions that prevail, than through the terrors of this war.” The work of the nation was summed up in the memorable line, “What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.” Slums would be cleared, houses built and industry and agriculture revived. Stirred by this rhetoric, the electorate rewarded Lloyd George’s coalition with a landslide victory. The type of victory that, once the fuss has died down, can only ever disappoint and disillusion. Bob’s view was this:
“I came out of gaol in April 1919 and entered an entirely changed world from the one I had left. The heroes had returned from the war to find the golden promises of a land fit for heroes to live in had not materialised. Many were unable to find work. Many, when they found it, got low wages on which they could not adequately provide for their wives and children. The housing shortage became a serious social problem as the soldiers, married during the war, tried to set up house with their war-wives and young children. The landlords, taking advantage of the shortage, found ways and means to raise rents.
The Dundee I came back to had all these problems and more. Lack of work, low wages, unemployment, bad housing and a housing shortage, and to add to the confusion, thousands of war disabled demanding work and maintenance.”
The economy was nosediving and social reforms put in place as an insurance policy against another Petrograd were failing to lift people out of misery. In the light of this, communism offered a compelling vision of the world.
The birth of the CPGB was made possible by the creation of the Communist International. Also known as the Comintern or the Third International it was formed in Moscow in 1919 and it’s raison d’etre was to advocate for a world revolution. Lenin believed that, unless there was a successful socialist uprising in Europe, all that the Bolsheviks had achieved would be crushed by the military might of its capitalist neighbours. To protect itself it would establish communist parties across the world and provide funding, instruction and training. The parlous economic state of much of the continent and the memories of the war still fresh in people’s minds meant that there was fertile ground for radical militancy. There were many eager to learn from the one band of Marxist revolutionaries who had actually achieved what others spent so much time discussing in smoke filled rooms or shouting about in front of factory gates.
In Britain, those others were the myriad of leftist groups that weren’t the Labour Party or the ILP. Veterans of the trenches and veterans of the anti-war movement. Trade unionists and suffragettes. All haunted by the horrors of recent years and united, in the grand tradition of British radicalism, by an intense distrust of each other. That aside, there was a feeling, which Bob shared that, with things the way they were, there should be more progress politically towards socialism. All had been galvanised by the events of October 1917 and began to hold talks to foster greater cooperation. The Comintern began to court several of these parties and Lenin secretly donated £500, 000 towards setting up the CPGB. A phenomenal sum worth well over £10 million today. As Francis Beckett noted in his history of the CPGB, Enemy Within, “Without Lenin’s continual encouragement, and the careful distribution of Soviet money among groups which had always been starved of funds, the Communist Party would not have existed.” The Unity Convention, in the Italianate surroundings of a railway hotel, was the first fruition of that investment comprising of representatives from the British Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party, Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation and also from tiny organisations such as the Doncaster Worker’s Committee, Ferndale Socialist Society and Bob’s own band of socialist temperance campaigners. The sun had decided to shine after several days of rain. Things were looking up. The collapse of capitalism was surely imminent.
Amid a fug of pipe smoke, it was clear, when the first resolution was debated, that this new party would be closely modelled on the Russian one. The conference declared for a Soviet system as a means for the working class to achieve power. Lenin’s slogan, “All power to the Soviets!” from the October Revolution still had the capability to thrill or terrify. The term referred to the worker’s councils that had begun in 1905 and proliferated in 1917. Emerging from the factory floor, they were created to fight against the Imperial regime’s control of the workforce through strikes, direct action and also military force. After the Tsar’s abdication, the Petrograd Soviet played a key role in toppling the provisional government during the Bolshevik coup. Those gathered in the room were convinced something similar could be achieved in Britain and that this would lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat. This concept was also much discussed and Bob admitted to the delegates that he did not know much about it and doubted whether anyone else gathered there did either, an early indication of how impenetrable the language of the CPGB could alienate even the most sympathetic listener. Still, it was deemed a necessary step in order to achieve the party’s main aims – a society where the means of production would be communally owned and controlled. The conference also declared that they would ally themselves with the Communist International. Bob could not know at this point how this organisation would come to dominate his life.
There was a debate as to whether the Party should follow a Parliamentary route or whether it should be an armed revolutionary movement – the disenchantment many felt regarding the Labour Party’s reformist path was tangible. Not that it would prevent several futile attempts by the CPGB to affiliate with them in the immediate future. A social revolution could not be delivered through the ballot box alone. And yet, “electoral action [would provide a] valuable means of propaganda and agitation.” Any elected representatives from the CPGB would be considered as having a mandate from the Party rather than the constituency in which they happened to sit. The majority of attendees wanted to get councillors and MPs elected but there were a few who enthusiastically advocated “the use of the gun” to achieve their aims. Given his experiences of the past three years, Bob was not among them. He said he often found the people who wanted to “shoot it out” to be the “worst stayers in the movement” and felt that such people seemed “unable to cope with the hard day to day grind of politics.” Bob rebuked one such comrade with the memorable line, “A great many people talk about guns who would run away when they saw one. I am more interested in folks having brains in their heads.” Bob went on to outline his argument further.
“Whether guns come soon, late or not at all, there will be times when it is far more revolutionary to refuse to have anything to do with guns. I think the provisional executive which is to be set up by the conference will be far wiser to devote themselves to building up such organisation as will make it possible to win the maximum of our party policy with the minimum of violence.”
In his account of the conference, Francis Beckett relates a story about how Bob attempted to get the Communist party to go down the prohibitionist path. The temperance movement had struck a chord with many of the comrades – alcoholism being one consequence of the hardship suffered by the poverty stricken and several saw abstinence as an essential part of their socialism. To Bob, prohibition was a revolutionary tactic.
“After the main resolution was carried, the stout sincere man with a sober moustache walked solemnly to the platform to ask the new Party to come out in favour of suppressing the manufacture of alcoholic drinks. Few thought much of the idea, but they liked Bob Stewart, so they referred it to the executive for action. In seventy-one years no action was ever taken.”
Sadly, this moment was left unrecorded in his memoir, Breaking the Fetters.
For Remembrance Sunday here’s something I wrote about Bob Stewart’s experiences as a conscientious objector during the First World War.
On the day war was declared, Bob was campaigning on behalf of the Prohibition and Reform Party a hundred miles up the coast in the fishing port of Peterhead. The last days of peace had been dreich. Endless rain lending a sullen mood to the maritime manoeuvres taking place a little way out of port. The clock ticking as the country waited for Britain’s ultimatum to Germany to expire. That morning the weather had improved enough to hold an outdoor meeting at which there was quite a crowd. He’d visited the town many times before and had always taken an interest in its affairs; some weeks previously he’d been presented with a pipe and a purse of sovereigns as a thank you for his part in organising a successful strike at the wood yard there. It had always been a good place to campaign.
The rally took place up on the links looking out onto the treacherous North Sea. Choppy, battleship grey whitecaps stretched out to the horizon. Also visible was the prison next to the Admiralty Yard. One of the toughest in the country, it housed long term convicts sentenced to breaking rocks in the granite quarry. These were used to construct the Harbour of Refuge breakwater to reduce the number of ships lost to storms. In Bob’s opinion anyone who couldn’t make a good socialist speech looking at that view didn’t know anything about socialism. Just as he was getting into his stride, the breeze carried a crescendo of tenor and contralto voices and the sound of euphoniums and trumpets began to drown him out. It was the Salvation Army band playing Lead Kindly Light as they accompanied the Naval Reserve to the station. This was how he learned of the outbreak of hostilities. The reservists were mainly trawlermen – the retainer both supplementing their income and acting as a “sweet little pill to recruiting.” He resumed his speech and tried in vain to tell them where exactly they were being led but the mood of those marching into town was buoyant and hymns gave way to songs of king and country. The meeting broke up and everyone followed them to the recruiting office where wives and mothers, who regarded the situation very differently, began to weep and howl. “Many affecting scenes were witnessed,” as the local paper put it.
That evening, there was another assembly, this time held at the fish market. Despite the rain it was full. These were uncertain times. Bob thought that wars were “always sprung on the people. They don’t know their enemies until they are told.” He was under no illusion who the real adversary was. During his speech he declared:
“[This] is a capitalist war. It is not worth sacrificing the bones of your domestic cat, or your pet canary, even less those of your husbands, brothers and sons.”
Conflict meant insecurity. Already the fishing trade in Peterhead was paralysed. The whole of the east coast was at a standstill. Fearing attacks on shipping, insurers had “intimated to trawler owners that vessels […..] must not leave port.” Any boats attempting to reach the fishing grounds would be uninsured and would sail entirely at their own risk. Five hundred fishermen in nearby Aberdeen had been laid off days before but worse was to come. On average, each trawler had nine crew members which meant that eventually four thousand sea going men would be thrown into idleness in the Granite City alone. This had ramifications for the rest of the industry. Thousands of men and women employed in gutting and packing would soon be out of work as would the hundreds of coopers who made the fish barrels. The daily losses would run in to thousands. Meanwhile, the first trawlers were being stripped of their fishing gear and were being made ready for mine sweeping duty.
Advertisements urging young men between the ages of 18 and 30 to heed their country’s call and “rally round the flag and enlist in the ranks of her army” were already appearing in the press the day after the declaration of war. The choice between no job or a soldier’s wage was no choice at all to many. Aside from the prospect of unemployment, Bob recognised that countless ordinary people joined up for the slaughter not due to nationalistic fervour but simply because a soldier’s wage together with the separation allowance for wives was better than a labourer’s earnings. At the beginning of the war a private at the front got 6s 8d a week. The separation allowance was 7s 7d with 1s 2d added per child. Although this benefit rose significantly – 12s 6d from March 1915- it does not say much for labourer’s wages.
Attitudes to the war divided the left and, as far as Bob was concerned, this was the first real test for socialist internationalism. A test he considered the Labour movement to have largely failed. His belief that a British worker had more in common with a German worker rather than a British capitalist was a minority view. As he put it, in no time at all, “the red flags turned to tartan.”
When Bob returned home he found his city gearing up for the battles ahead. An article in the Courier prosaically titled. ‘The Recruiting Sergeant is Busy’ gives some indication of what the first week was like. Lord Kitchener’s appeal for recruits was “stirring the hearts of young Dundee.” The thousands of millworkers and those in clerical professions proved “up to the hilt that the young fellows of the city [were] patriotic to the core.” They constituted a “fruitful source” to the Nethergate recruiting office which was now thronged by a persistent gathering of young and old outside. Periodically the door was unlocked and another batch of men passed through for processing. The flow of aspirants for the army was almost constant. This zeal carried on in the town’s social life. A programme of Strauss and Lizst at the King’s Theatre was preceded by “scenes of great enthusiasm” as the orchestra played Rule Brittania, The Marseillaise and God Save the King. The audience rose to the national anthem a second time when a company of soldiers marched into the auditorium greeted by cheers. Dundonians could also try and spot their loved ones on the big screen as the Scala Picture Theatre showed footage of the Tayside Naval Reserve and the Territorials carrying out their mobilisation orders before the main feature, Beneath the Czar. The movie topping the bill concerned a woman forced to enter the Russian Secret Service to save her father, an active Nihilist, from being put to death. If my great grandfather went to the pictures that week I do wonder what he made of that film.
The readership of The Courier was hungry for every scrap of detail about the war and the paper eagerly obliged. The coverage in one issue in the first week ranged from German submarines in the North Sea to a call for the women of Angus to knit two thousand pairs of socks for the forces while also taking in a French victory in the Alsatian town of Colmer and restrictions on aliens in the UK. A German spy was shot in Paris; there were skirmishes on the Russian frontier and English cricket was to continue. Articles about the phenomenal number of men joining up dominated. Some stories such as the West Fife licensees ordered to exercise more care in the supply of drink might have consoled Bob but not for long. Look closely and amid all the breathless excitement of world events and everyone pulling together for the good of the nation there’s hints of the crisis to come. The 26 year old infantryman fatally shot after coming off duty in Romford. A forgotten cartridge in the breech of his rifle had accidentally discharged. The British Red Cross appealing to the public for supplies. They needed mattresses and sheets, bandages and basins. The one naval and three military deserters committed to the respective authorities at Dundee Police Court. Presumably they were reluctant to find themselves confined to one of the beds the Red Cross had salvaged. Or they feared worse.
Looking back on 1914, Bob remarked, “ I don’t know of any honest working man who got anything out of the war.” He was also aware that, for some, it was very profitable. While the business sector “babbled about the war to end war” they were “in no hurry to end it.” He bemoaned the industrial truce that came into play with moderate trade union leaders resisting strikes and keeping their membership in check while the nation was in peril. What part of the country the ordinary people actually owned was a question he never heard answered. Dundee historian William Kenefick described the age as a time when, “citizens’ rights and civil liberties became secondary to those of the British state.” A condition that was “never fully removed.” The workers were handcuffed when the Munitions of War Act was passed in 1915 – eroding what little employment rights trade unions had fought for. It was an offence to leave your work without the consent of your employer or to refuse to take a new job whatever the rates of pay. With rent increases and a steep rise in the cost of living there was plenty for Bob to battle against.
As the war progressed, the supply of young factory and agricultural workers used as cannon fodder began to dry up. In March 1916 the Military Services Act came into effect and all single men aged 18 to 41 in Great Britain were to be called up to fight. Married men became eligible for conscription two months later and the age limit was extended to 51 in 1918. Widowers with children, clergymen and those in reserved occupations such as coal miners, train drivers and steel workers were exempt. Conscientious objectors had to appear before a tribunal to argue their case for refusing to enlist. These arguments did not get a sympathetic hearing.
The largest socialist organisation opposed to the war was the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and, in December 1914, they played a large part in establishing the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF). Formed in anticipation of the 1916 Act, the NCF would campaign against it and offer support and guidance to those refusing to join the armed forces. After a large ILP meeting in Dundee in November 1915 the city’s branch of the NCF was set up with the support of Bob’s party as well as that of his old rival Scrymgeour. In January the following year both organisations banded together with members of the Trades Council, the Labour Representation Committee, the ILP, the British Socialist Party and the Free Religious Movement to found the Dundee Joint Committee Against Conscription. Disparaged in the press as being “Pro-German” the group ensured that Dundee became one of the strongholds of the anti-war movement. They drew crowds of more than 1, 500 at their weekly Sunday meetings and Ramsay Macdonald, in an article in Forward in 1917, acknowledged that Dundee was “said to be ‘fair hotchin’ with conscientious objectors” as it fought for “liberty and Socialism.” By then the army had caught up with Bob. Pushing forty, he was conscripted in 1916. In July, he featured in a report on the COs appealing at the local tribunal. He appeared alongside several trade unionists and ILP officials, a couple of Socialist Sunday School teachers, another prohibitionist and an ex policeman turned left bookseller who declared he worked eighty four hours a week, “62 for wages and the remainder for downtrodden humanity.” Bob was described as:
“Ex-Town Councillor, Prohibitionist, Socialist and International Protagonist; a clever writer and convincing speaker; refuses non-combatant service on the grounds that it simply means holding the jackets for others to fight.”
He was an absolutist. Some of his fellow conscientious objectors managed to escape imprisonment after being offered alternative Home Office schemes which involved voluntary service for the war effort. This might include labouring on a farm or in a factory for a Work Of National Importance (WNI) initiative; or they might be drafted into the Non-Combatants Corps to fix infrastructure after battle or work as medics. But there was no way Bob would abandon his principles for an easier life. The war was wrong and he was not going to assist in its prosecution in any way. “Quakers, Christadelphians and priests in holy orders and their like” were, it was assumed, the only people who “could aspire to a conscientious objection to killing their fellow men.” He was not a member of any religious body. Even worse, he was a well-known socialist and anti-militarist. His appeal at tribunal was turned down as a matter of course and he was ordered to present himself for military service. He refused. Whatever hulking Victorian gaol was waiting to confine him, he was resolute.
Arrested and taken to the police court, he was charged with being AWOL. The Chief Constable. acting as prosecutor, asked for a pause of a week which allowed Bob more time to make preparations for the inevitable prison sentence. He spent this time assisting others with their cases and speaking at some anti-war meetings. This was “much to the annoyance of the local respectables, who if they couldn’t get me shot at least expected me to be put out of sight for a long time.” Also, Margaret would have to take over some of his work. He’d recently become the local organiser of the Scottish Horse and Motormen’s Union, applying for the job after the previous post holder had been called up. Margaret would have to carry on with this as well as bringing up the family. A legion of aunts would be on hand to help but it would be tough. Bill and Rab were thirteen and ten, old enough to understand what was going on. Annie or Nan as she was known was only three years old. Her earliest memories would be those of her father in jail and the general contempt in which the general public held people like him. Whether there was sympathy for the Stewarts among her neighbours I do not know but the common opinion that ‘conchies’ were cowards and traitors would have been part of the atmosphere in which she grew up. There was talk in the press of banning COs from positions such as teaching lest they contaminate the young and many, many similar stories. Annie would have to understand that her family stood for something and that the attacks these principles drew had to be stood up to.
Once Bob was back in court, a recruiting officer took to the witness stand to prove that on a given day Robert Stewart was ordered to appear and did not do so. The officer looked rather pleased with himself after giving his evidence, as did the magistrate. An example was about to be set. Not the example they expected though.
“…their expressions changed when I asked, “Under what regulations do you mark a man absent?” “Under the King’s Regulations,” was the reply. “Under which one?” I persisted. The beak looked blank. The assessor said, “Can you help us, Mr. Stewart?” a rather unusual form of address to a prisoner at the bar. So I helped them by quoting the […..] King’s Regulations, in which it was clearly stated that a man could not be posted absent until twenty-one days had expired from the date of his call-up.”
Unwilling to take the word of a prisoner as final, a messenger hurried to find a copy of the manual which bore out Bob’s contention. There was some frantic consultation before the magistrate announced, “I am afraid we can’t convict.” Bob walked free to the “great glee of a small crowd […..] and the extreme chagrin of the military escort.” Immaculate in his polished uniform, this officer brandished a pair of handcuffs. “Ay laddie […..] You’re too early,” was Bob’s greeting. Eventually, they got the paperwork right and he was court martialled for the first time. So began the seemingly endless spells at His Majesty’s Pleasure simply because, when asked why he wouldn’t fight, he answered, “It’s not my war.”
He was sentenced to one hundred and twelve days of hard labour in Wormwood Scrubs- almost five hundred miles away. He had no visitors and his mail was withheld from him, thus no contact with his wife and children or news from his friends during his incarceration. As he was handed over from the military to the civil authority in London Bob noted that, in actuality, it was “far less civil” than the army.
“The Scrubs was one of the largest and in consequence most regimental of what were known in official jargon as ‘His Majesty’s Prisons’, which of course he never used as a personal residence. I was turfed into a reception cell to await disposal. It was a dirty, begrimed hole, some thirteen feet long and six and a half broad, its dingy walls covered by names of former occupants and an occasional word of advice, like “Sleep on it, chum”, and some uncomplimentary remarks about officers and prison food.”
Late in the afternoon he was officially received. The voice of the head warder echoed around the reception room as he barked out every single one of Bob’s personal possessions while they were collected in and did the same for each article of kit that was handed out. They took down his height and weight and then he had to have a tepid bath in three inches of water. The suit of prison clothes he was given were, “not ready to wear but already well worn.” A medical followed. The prisoners were ordered to line up, face the wall, to stand apart and stop talking. Then, one at a time, they passed by the doctor as the guard yelled, “Shirt up and trousers down!” Bob found it strangely amusing that, “members of this humane profession should lend themselves to this farcical medical examination and humiliation of their fellows.”
After this, bibles and prayer books were doled out, the “compulsory library of each prisoner” and they were ordered to, “Get up them stairs!” He was housed on the third corridor of the D hall with the other conscientious objectors. In 1889, fifteen years after ‘the Scrubs’ had opened, the journalist FW Robinson had praised the “brightness and lightness” of the cells. Such an atmosphere was, “not frequently met with in a convict prison at all.” At that time it was considered a fine example of penal architecture. Bob’s appraisal of his new accommodation reflected the prison’s notorious reputation it had garnered in the three decades that had since passed.
“My new abode was the usual brick-walled domicile, thirteen feet by about seven feet. Its furnishing, a six feet by thirty-inch board bed. Top and bottom sheets of canvas, one or two blankets according to season, a bedcover, a small table under a pane of obscure glass through which a flicker of gaslight shone, sufficient to strain your eyes when reading. A small shelf for books, and a pint pot, a tin basin and a jug for water, a minute portion of soap, a very small weekly supply of toilet paper and a slop pot for natural necessities. A window in the outer wall with twenty-one very small panes of obscure glass. Woe betide any prisoner who was caught (as many were) trying to get a cock-eyed view of the outside world by standing on the stool provided to be sat on and not stood on. A copy of the prison regulations and diet sheet was hung on the wall.”
The warders he regarded curiously, contemptuous of their pretensions to be called officers. A “screw by any other name” was “still only a turnkey […..] under just as close a surveillance as the prisoners.” He observed that some were “sadistic and cruel [and] extra officious” with promotion being their main object rather than the care of their charges. Some could be “reasonably human” but all were “fearful of the economic consequences of losing their steady and comparatively lazy occupation which carries a pension with it.” As the following encounter demonstrates, prison magnified the intransigent aspect of Bob’s character.
“I soon ran into my first bit of trouble. […..] the screws regard themselves as officers and like to be called Sir. I have never said Sir to anyone in my life […..] One of them said to me, “Call me Sir.” “Why?” I asked. Well, there is no direct answer to that but it meant I did two weeks in very, very solitary confinement. After that I went to sewing mail bags for an hour or two a day.”
Besides the mail bags the hard labour he was engaged in was mostly joinery. A fortnight after his arrival he was marched before the inspector who demanded to know what his occupation in civil life was. He gave his profession as “Agitator.” Further questioning saw him passed to the carpenter’s shop to make furniture and fitments for the HM Office of Works. The prisoners laboured under the gaze of a pacing disciplinary officer whose snarling and growling annoyed even the artisan warder who was responsible for seeing that the men got the job done. All the tools had to be checked and locked up in a cupboard with drawings of each tool to show where it went “like a kindergarten” and pencils had to be sharpened by the guard who “painted one end and notched the other lest the lead be pinched for writing purposes.” Other than work the prisoners had exercise once a day – “the large contingent walked from nowhere to nowhere and back again. What a silly exhibition.”
The prison day seemed much longer than the normal twenty-four hours. Once his hundred and twelve days were done he was taken to the Governor and then to reception to be returned to Scotland for his next court martial. His army chaperon didn’t arrive and so he was shut up in his cell for one more night. “Overtime without pay” as he put it.
After refusing once more he was handed a sentence of one year, later commuted to sixth months. This time he did his stretch in Calton Gaol, Edinburgh. A remnant of this penitentiary is still visible today in the castellated form of Governor’s House looking down on the city from Calton Hill. Bob’s future comrade Willie Gallacher also endured a spell in there during the war for sedition. He described it as, “by far the worst prison in Scotland; cold, silent and repellent. Its discipline was extremely harsh, and the diet atrocious.” Bob viewed it as “grim and grey, old and forbidding” He found the initial reception “not quite so noisy as the Scrubs” as the warder fussed around listing the King’s property in Bob’s possession. To his relief, his family were allowed to visit. His reminiscences of the months spent there largely focus on the mischief he and other inmates got up to during Bible classes and Sunday services. Prisoners had to recite Bible passages and anyone who could perform Luke 15: 1-10 without error would receive their own copy of the good book when their term ended. On Bob’s second Sunday he gave full voice to the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son and won that prize on release. He also tried to diversify with a selection of Tennyson, Burns and Shelley. It got too much for the preacher who ruled that only extracts from scripture were allowed. Bob was then one of the older inmates who had to persuade some of the lads not to “utter some of the rather bawdy texts […..] which might offend the lass at the music box.”
One day a warder stopped by his cell and wondered aloud that such nice people as his wife and daughter could come to visit when he was an atheist. In the warder’s mind unbelievers were all “thieves, robbers, devils or whoremongers.” Bob asked him how many atheists were in the jail. The warder replied that Bob was in fact the only one. “Well, if all the others are Christians it doesn’t say very much for Christianity, does it?” replied Bob. The warder slunk off in confusion.
Perhaps the most significant event during his second term came in March 1917. He was trudging round the exercise yard when a fellow internee came up to him and whispered, “There’s been a revolution in Russia. They’ve set up Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils!” Bob recognised that this was an epoch making event but was, at this stage, sceptical at its impact. Just before the warder put an end to their conversation Bob’s friend declared excitedly that there would be a revolution in Britain within six months. Bob’s verdict? “Hae ma doots.” Still, it sparked something in him. When his time at Calton came to an end the Chief Warder told him that he was going to get another chance to shoot the Hun. Bob replied, that if he ever got it into his head to go shooting he wouldn’t be looking for Germans. “And who will you be looking for?” was the next question. Bob looked him straight in the eye and said, “Warders.”
Found guilty of the charge ‘Refused to Parade’ in his third court martial and receiving two years hard labour in the process, Bob was interned at Edinburgh Castle for a short while. The sentence was later remitted to one year. His elderly mother was growing increasingly frail and found it hard to make the return journey to Edinburgh sixty miles away. She’d been a widow for several years, Bob’s father passing away in 1915, something he doesn’t touch upon in his book. Two of her sons, Jock and James were away fighting while Bob, her youngest was jailed. Naturally she wanted to see him as often as she could in the time she had left. There’s very little in Bob’s writing about her but he does mention that in the course of her visits she struck up a rapport with the prison Governor after he found out they both came from the same part of Scotland. After spending time with Bob she would be ushered into the Governor’s office to gossip about “lairds and tenants and the hamely fare o’ the countryside.” The issue of Bob’s godlessness came up once more. The Governor said to her, “What I canna understand, wumman, hoo wi’ a maither like you Robert’s an atheist.” She lamented that, “he was aye a great Bible student.”
Bob’s mother died at the age of seventy eight on the 10th September 1918. She passed away at home and a short notice in the Dundee People’s Journal announced these simple details along with her status as William’s widow and her maiden name, Georgina Ferrier Fraser. I cannot imagine what it was like to receive such news in prison, separated from loved ones. Worse was to come. Although he was held in a state prison, he was serving a military sentence. Regulations meant that he was refused permission to attend the funeral. With some understatement, he observed, “there was much local feeling about this.” Georgina had been “greatly respected by all her neighbours” and Bob had many friends on the outside. All were extremely angry at the situation and complaints were made to the Lord Provost of Dundee. He intervened and said he would vouch for Bob’s return. Wheels were grudgingly set in motion. Bob omitted any detailed description of how he felt about the whole experience but the contempt is still there. A “most inhuman warder” took him to Dundee but he was too late to see his mother buried. There was some consolation that he was at least allowed to meet his family. His two soldiering brothers had managed to get leave to join them. An all too brief hour or so with his wife and children and his siblings all united in grief. Impossible to find the words that needed to be said with the warder ever present and repeatedly checking his watch. His guard was impatient to get back to Edinburgh and so “dumped” him at Dundee Gaol. An awful end to an awful day. At least he was nearer home. After more deputations from colleagues and neighbours to the Lord Provost it was decided that he would do the rest of his time there.
At this late stage of the war, the jingoistic optimism exemplified by Jessie Pope, the favourite poet of The Daily Express, who urged the nation’s youth not to “lie low” but be “part of the fun” had given way to an acknowledgement of the realities of mechanised slaughter. In the newspaper carrying the details of Bob’s mother’s death, her name is among twenty six others who died either at home or in hospital of natural causes after living full lives. That list takes up about a third of a column. A further three and a half columns concern the Dundee war dead. Under the banner ‘For Their Country’ there’s a catalogue of the recently slain. Private Andrew McCabe aged 19 and the beloved son of Mrs McCabe, 40 Hunter Street- “died of wounds” on 25th August. Private Peter McIntyre, reported missing on October 4th 1917, now reported killed on that date – “Not dead to us who loved him dear.” Private Scott who died from gas poisoning on the 21st August – “We mourn for you dear son.” It goes on and on. Name after name in tiny print. Then there’s the ‘In Memoriam’ section marking the anniversaries of so many families’ bereavements. Private Donald Dewar of the Cameron Highlanders was killed in action on 14th September 1914 – “Not forgotten.” Did his family remember him this way every year? How long did they continued to do so?
The way the war was playing out was beginning to affect Bob’s jailers. Dundee was a much smaller prison and wasn’t fully occupied. This was a source of dismay to the warders. Bob recalls the glee at which they greeted new prisoners. Not because their hearts were softer or they were more devoted to their role than other officers but because, while they were avowedly patriotic, they were not overly keen on being called up to fight at the front while thousands of men were being killed each day in Europe. Bob even helped some of them complete their claim forms for exemption on compassionate and domestic grounds. It was an absurd position – “the warder who locked me up for resisting military service then asked my assistance to fill up his application form for exemption so that he could continue to lock me up!”
It was while he was captive in Dundee that Bob began to write the poems which he later gathered together in the pamphlet Prison Rhymes. Published in 1919 as a fundraiser for the Prohibition and Reform Party, Bob claimed it sold thousands and helped keep the organisation in funds. Copies are rare -there are a few in archives up and down the land but until recently the cheapest copy I’d come across was priced at £650. At the time of writing, Blackwell’s Rare Books advertise one at just under £5000. It comes an inscription to the Miners’ Leader, trade unionist and Labour politician Robert Smillie. Bob had served time in Worwood Scrubs with Smillie’s son Alex, a fellow conscientious objector. Collecting labour history is a habit I cannot afford but fortunately our family does have its own copy. It was acquired by my brother in the late 1980s around the time he had a wall length poster of Lenin in his bedroom and wore a Che Guevara t-shirt like an East Anglian Wolfie Smith. He rang up the Communist Party explaining the family connection and asked if they had a spare. The elderly lady on the other end of the line cooed about Bob being the one who shifted the Moscow gold around back in the day. A photocopy of the pamphlet landed on our doormat a few weeks later.
Bob was modest about his poetic achievements. “Prison”, he remarked “is not the best place to practice literary ambitions.” However his diffidence is more than made up in the preface to the work in which a Mr G Anderson of Coatbridge is effusive. The author of the verses is described in grandiloquent terms as formerly a “man of lucid and terse prose” whose forced confinement has made him turn to rhyme with “happy effect.” While the body is held captive by “stone walls and iron bars” the “spirit of the man never flinched” and the lines inspire a “veneration of love for humanity.”
The poems are mostly written in Scots dialect and are largely concerned with protest, socialist agitation and reflections on the isolation of prison life. They are written to be sung to the tune of popular hymns and folk songs. Common harvests, scarlet banners and rallying comrades feature heavily. Robert Burns is an influence. One poem, ‘A Man’s a Man For A’ That’ takes the Scottish national poet’s celebration of egalitarianism and tailors it to the anti-war movement. This also featured on a postcard sold by the Prohibition and Reform Party featuring a portrait of the author on the other side. He looks very smart and serious with his moustache seemingly waxed at the tips in one concession to vanity. It’s the earliest photograph we have of him. The most affecting poems are those that deal with the sadness of separation. Little Nan is about Bob’s youngest child Annie. She would have been six at the time of publication and the poem reflects Bob’s sadness of being separated from her for most of the preceding three years.
“O bonnie lass o’ mine
Wih eyes that brightly shine,
With your winsome ways and tender loving smile
O how pleasant it would be
Could I come away with thee
And leave this dismal solitude awhile
O to listen to your voice
How ‘twould make my heart rejoice,
And to see the lovelight glancing in your eyes,
What recompense ‘twould be
For the days spent wearily
So far away from those I love and prize.”
While at Dundee he was court martialled for a fourth time but with little change in his situation. Prison life was dull. A pint of skillyfor breakfast; slopping out; work detail; exercise; an inedible dinner and as little association time as the authorities could manage before lock up. The only variation being chapel on Sunday or punishment in solitary. There was the occasional cause to fight for such as access to newspapers and books but then only the smallest subterfuge to be indulged in when passing round banned copies of Tribune and Socialist Monthly smuggled in by one or two sympathetic warders. As the months passed, it was “galling to be divorced from activity” and news from outside only added to “the impatience and yearning of release.”
Unlike the other prisons where Bob had viewed the religious mentors sympathetically or at least with an amused detachment there was one chaplain at Dundee named MacDonald who succeeded in antagonising him more than any other figure. Every Sunday in the pulpit he’d veer off the topic to “have a go at the Bolsheviks” The Russian Revolution had caught Bob’s imagination and the scraps of news he could gather were what inspired him while confined to a cell. It might seem unusual – a man imprisoned for refusing to fight and kill his fellow man clinging on to news of a violent revolution for hope but he knew his enemy. For Bob, being forced to listen to a man he held in contempt preach about how “Lenin ate children” and “Trotsky shot all the workers” was insufferable. He said nothing for a while as his friend, a fellow conchie called Dave Donaldson, was approaching his next court martial – to all intents and purposes a day out – and he didn’t want to get him into trouble. Still, during one sermon MacDonald moved on to how the Bolsheviks “must be crushed like rats” and Bob exploded.
“”You dirty miserable little coward,” I said, “standing up there in your coward’s castle maligning men who can’t speak back. Well, here’s one that speaks back, you dirty contemptible little rascal! They should put you in a prison cell not a prison pulpit.” During this outburst he sat down too surprised to say a word and he never rose again. It must be the shortest prison service on record.”
Amazingly there were few repercussions. No solitary. No withdrawal of privileges. Once the men were marched out of the chapel one of the warders suggested to Bob that he write to the Prison Commissioners to complain that the chaplain was using the pulpit for political purposes. Bob preferred to let the matter rest. He’d done what he’d wanted. The Head Warder told him that he’d have to apologise to the Rev. MacDonald. Bob expected this and was fully prepared to do so, even though he’d taken to referring to the clergyman as “The Weasel.” The minister never came. Too afraid. Here endeth the lesson.
Around this time Bob began to sense the war weariness “weighing heavily on everyone.” The “loss of millions of good lives” even affecting the top brass. The conflict was drawing to a close, victory was near but the atmosphere of the guard rooms where the conchies were shoved before facing military trial was subdued. Bob recalled one fellow silent and unable to answer the sergeant demanding, “How long have you been absent?” The man seemed to be wholly unaware of what was happening but just sat and stared despondently ahead. The sergeant took one look at his face and declared, “You’re no’ absent – you’re lost!” He wasn’t alone. Four long years and there were few families who hadn’t feared the knock at the door and the dreaded telegram. The sight of the wounded, the disfigured and the amputated was disturbingly common. Many wore their scars on the inside trying to suppress the trauma of what they’d experienced. All this damage wrought on people who mostly couldn’t even vote until the Representation of the People Act in 1918.
Bob was serving his fourth term when The Great War finally came to an end. The fighting carried right up until the last minute and then it simply finished. The combatants slowly limping home. A damaged generation. Once they’d returned, many hoped that things would be back to how they were before, or that things would be a little better. That world had gone. Who knew what kind of world would replace it? Bob, however, was still confined to gaol. Month after month passed and there was no word said about his release. Bob felt it as purgatory.
“One day I was communing with myself. “What am I doing in here? It was in April 1919. I was going with a bucket of water and a brush to clean some windows. “Ach,” I said, “I’m finished.’ So I went back to my cell and the warder hurried after me. “What’s up?” “I’m finished.” “What do you mean, you’re finished? “I’m through. I’m not going to do another damned thing. I’m not going to work, eat or drink in this prison.” Up came the Governor, but I held my ground. “I’m finished,” I said. “There’s neither sense nor reason for my being here. The war ended months ago and to keep me here is sheer malice. I am not going to continue.” That started the ball rolling and in a few days Dave Donaldson and I were out. They called a cab to take us home.”
As the pair stepped out of the cab it was Annie who first spied her father and went running to Margaret and told her that there were “two dirty looking soldiers coming into the house.” An impromptu party followed with neighbours and well wishers stopping by to celebrate the occasion. An honest man all his life, it might have occurred to Bob that he’d never see the inside of a jail again. There would be more prison sentences to come though and the decade that was about to begin would change his life forever.
When we started this project on our great grandfather Bob Stewart, my brother and I both agreed that we thought there was much to admire about the man but also much to criticize. Although I’ve tried to steer clear of hagiography in my writing I probably haven’t been as critical on this blog as the subject deserves. Lately I’ve been working on Bob’s life during the Second World War. In my misremembered reading of Francis Beckett’s Enemy Within I had been under the impression that Bob had objected to the CPGB’s acceptance of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact – Stalin’s squalid arrangement with Hitler. Turns out I was wrong. He followed the Stalinist line. So disappointing. Below is part of the first draft of my chapter on this period. Thanks to Katherine Mackinnon from Glasgow, who sent me the material on Bob from About Turn – the transcript of the CPGB’s meeting about the non-aggression pact. I wouldn’t have been able to write about this without her help and you can find out about her work at kmackinnon.org.
Bob Stewart and Harry Pollitt in 1947. Photograph taken by Edith Tudor Hart.
A spectre had been haunting Europe. The spectre of fascism. During the 1930s this new doctrine, fusing myths of noble past eras with a disturbing sense of victimhood, tantalised nations still shattered by The Great War. Many looked to Mussolini’s rise the decade before and sought to emulate his example. It was time for an iron hand. A need for discipline and national pride. Paramilitary uniforms accompanied political violence. Parties with an authoritarian distaste of the masses and enthralled with notions of racial purity flourished across the continent from Portugal to Romania. For a time it seemed unstoppable. Hitler had come to power in 1933, Franco took Spain few years later. In Britain, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists were given a sympathetic hearing in the press for several years and attracted a membership of around 50,000. Reactionaries aghast at liberal advances in society found themselves a natural home.
Anti-fascism was the impulse that caused a new generation to gravitate towards communism. Whereas Bob’s politics had progressed to Marx and Engels via temperance, trade unionism and the anti-war movement, younger comrades viewed the world in which they found themselves with horror. A rising tide of cry bully dictators and the terror they’d bring. Communists were added to the long list of scapegoats that fascists believed were polluting society. Inspired by the Nazis, Mosely often denounced Marx to his followers, in part because of the philosopher’s Jewish heritage. Communists were often at the forefront of disrupting the British Union’s rallies and stopping them marching through Jewish areas to intimidate the populace. By the middle of the decade the Comintern encouraged communists across Europe to form popular fronts with other anti-fascist parties with the aim of halting the spread of the far right. The CPGB, having exhausted its approach of decrying everyone else on the left as ‘social fascists’ threw itself into this new line. Campaigns to aid republican Spain or to challenge Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Adolf Hitler benefitted from drawing in a wider range of people. The party considered itself the bulwark against fascism. It had to be fought at every opportunity. Socialism or barbarism. It was a rare edition of The Daily Worker that didn’t highlight the fact that Hitler was the greatest threat to the world. Right up until the moment that he wasn’t. And everything turned upside down.
The volte -face was the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed on the 23rd August 1939. A treaty of non-aggression, it committed the USSR and Germany to ensure neither country made alliances with an enemy of the other. Russia had been an implacable foe of Nazism; it now supplied the Wehrmacht with fuel and grain. Many made justifications that Stalin was buying time in order to build up his armed forces in order to more readily combat the threat from Hitler but the grubby deal included not so secret plans to carve up parts of Europe between them. Germany invaded Poland from the West on the 1st of September causing Britain to declare war. Sixteen days later the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East. The British communists were caught in an unresolvable conundrum. Their opposition to fascism was genuine and strident but the leader they had held up as a paragon of all that was good and true, Joseph Stalin, was now arm in arm with Adolf Hitler.
In the second week of hostilities, the CPGB’s leader, Harry Pollitt, published a pamphlet that laid out his party’s position explicitly:
“The Communist Party supports the war, believing it to be a just war. To stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases while the fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe, would be a betrayal of everything our forebears have fought to achieve in the course of long years of struggle against capitalism…. The prosecution of this war necessitates a struggle on two fronts. First to secure the military victory over fascism, and second, to achieve this, the political victory over the enemies of democracy in Britain.“
On the day these words appeared Pollitt received a telegram from Moscow giving him instructions that the war was to be opposed. Stalin had instructed Georgi Dimitrov, the current head of the Comintern and one of Bob’s travelling companions on his first visit to Russia, that communist parties abroad should condemn their governments’ involvement in the conflict as imperialistic and, to keep Hitler on side, he wanted anti-fascist rhetoric to be minimal. Foreign communist parties were expected to correct their line immediately. Douglas Springhall, the CI’s British representative was on his way back from Moscow to clarify matters. On his return there followed a series of bad tempered meetings of the CPGB’s Central Committee to thrash out what they should do about the change of circumstances. Although Bob was not a member of the committee at this time he was seen as a senior voice in the party and attended the final two sessions.
Against the new line were Pollitt, J.R. Campbell and the party’s only MP, Willie Gallacher, figures who Bob was closely aligned with. Everyone else on the committee favoured following Moscow’s instructions which, as a travel weary Springhall admitted in the first meeting, amounted to the CPGB to not only highlight the imperialist nature of the conflict but to actively work for Britain’s military downfall. Revolutionary defeatism. When pressed on the possibility of fascism being imposed from within or without as a consequence of this Springhall confessed he had raised this question at the Comintern but had received only non-committal answers. A state of affairs which should have made the majority pause but, instead, the lemming like desire to adhere to Stalin’s directive was too strong to resist.
The hardline theoretician Rajani Palme Dutt opened the next meeting on the 2nd of October. He was the main proponent of the Stalinist line and began by fashionably traducing an old comrade – Harry Pollitt. The new policy needed to be accepted by every party member with absolute conviction and those that had misgivings should be mercilessly cleared out. It was “foul slander” that the CPGB was changing because of the Soviet Union. The reversal was necessary because, “our line was the wrong line.” He implied that Pollitt was a half-hearted vacillator and that the crisis had unveiled “dangerous tendencies in our Party.” The duty of a communist was not to disagree but to accept. Reading the transcript of Dutt’s speech what springs to mind is not a key moment in the liberation of the international working class but, instead, a badly acted one man fringe theatre production of Animal Farm performed to a minuscule audience in a tatty room in Covent Garden. Which is what it was. Gallacher was outraged. Never before had he listened to a “more unscrupulous and opportunist speech.” Pollitt assured his opponent that he would not be intimidated, “I was in the movement practically before you were born, and will be in the revolutionary movement a long time after some of you are forgotten.”
When Bob spoke up it was to deplore the manner in which the topic was being discussed. He was glad not to have been present at the previous session and, in defence of Pollitt, he was wary of “sledge-hammer demands for whole-hearted convictions and solid and hardened Bolshevism and all this bloody kind of stuff.” Aiming a barb at Dutt, he emphasised that the tone he had struck at the beginning of the meeting was “not a good way to start.” It was a very difficult situation that they were facing and they had to find a way through. Clarity was essential. And he was unequivocal, “I am for the line.” Over eighty years later, I wish his words had been different. He qualified his support – the thesis the CPGB had received from the Comintern had been very short and he anticipated a longer explanation of why this policy was necessary and correct but he was willing to accept it in the meantime. Part of his reasoning stemmed from his background as a conscientious objector. If they could stop the war the communists would, “be doing a service to the people of Europe and the world in general.” He also reflected on Winston Churchill’s address as First Lord of the Admiralty which had been broadcast the previous night. It was a month into the war and the statesman had described Russia as, “a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma.” It only acted in its own self-interest. In Churchill’s analysis, this might not be a wholly undesirable trait. He might have wished that the Russian Army had acted as friends and allies of Poland rather than its invader, but the Soviets were standing where they were because it was, “necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.” The invasion from the East had halted Germany’s designs on the Baltic states and Ukraine. A small silver lining. Bob imagined that the situation would bring about a “very definite searching of hearts even amongst the bourgeoisie.” His own contemplation had led him to an overly charitable reading of the situation.
“Is it not the case that in the workshops there is no serious antagonism at all to the Soviet Union having walked into Poland? In the first few hours there was, but after a little bit of thinking and after they saw the newspapers, with the peasants getting their landlords’ land, etc, then a different kind of attitude began to occur in the minds of the workers.”
Tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war were murdered by Stalin’s secret police, 22, 000 in the Katyn massacre alone. The Soviet occupation was marked by mass deportations to Russian Gulags and brutal repression. Bob’s comments, even in these early weeks, were as shameful as they were misguided.
The meeting dragged on until the next day in a belligerent atmosphere but it was clear the majority were prepared to support the Comintern directive whatever misgivings they may have had. The Second World War was a conflict between old Imperial powers and should be denounced and opposed by communists everywhere. I am thankful that my great grandfather was not a member of the committee and could not participate in the final vote on the resolution the next day. His friends Pollitt, Gallacher and Campbell remained consistent in their anti-fascism and voted against. Bob would have joined sixteen of his comrades in adopting a position endorsing Stalin and Hitler’s marriage of convenience which spat in the face of all they had campaigned for over the last decade. Once the meeting was over, Pollitt was no longer the leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain though his last act was to ask that the record show that Gallacher had voted with the majority. As the party’s only presence in Parliament he had to be seen to be following the line. Dutt took over as General Secretary in all but name.
Walking out of King Street that evening, mithering over what had just occurred, Bob would have been greeted by the sight of London’s preparations for war. Barrage balloons beginning to dot the skyline like eerie sentinels. Railway stations crammed with duffle coated school children weighed down with kitbags and boxed gas masks being shepherded onto hissing steam locomotives hauling them away to safety and homesickness. Late afternoon in autumn took on a gloomier aspect with the street lights and neon advertising extinguished in the blackout. A depressing and maddening day. It would be the last time he’d visit CPGB HQ for months. He’d not been coming in very often for a while. Through the tapped telephones MI5 kept track of people trying to reach him. They were often told that it was no good enquiring for him, that the only way to get hold of him was to visit him at home. He did not come in these days. Was he ill? No. As time went on there seemed to be some confusion over his whereabouts. In November one caller asked whether Bob was in London and received the reply, “I think he is.” Time and time again people were informed he wasn’t in and nor was he likely to be. He was no longer at King Street. Had he washed his hands of the whole lot of them after the rift? Or had he gone to ground?
Harry Pollitt used the free time he had unexpectedly acquired to write his memoirs, Serving My Time. In its pages he described the moments he shared with my great grandfather in 1924 when, surrounded by snow and ice, they attended Lenin’s funeral in Moscow. The event was of paramount importance to them both.
As Bob Stewart and I stood there, we pledged ourselves and the Communist Party to which we belong to prove worthy of our trust , and to build up in Britain a revolutionary party of which we could be proud. And Comrade Lenin would desire no greater tribute, no greater memorial , than the building up of a Communist Party in Great Britain that will lead the working class in the age-long fight to smash capitalism and achieve the emancipation of the workers.
I can’t let the year end without posting something about my favourite book published this year – Maurice Casey’s ‘Hotel Lux’. I’ve no time to write a proper review so these hastily written words will have to do…
One of the least edifying aspects of being a socialist is the tendency of some comrades always having to prove to those present that they are the most left wing person in the room. Last week I achieved this enviable position with practically no effort on my part at all. And me being only slightly to the left of Ed Miliband. The occasion was the presentation of the Biographer’s Club Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize for best proposal for a first time biographer for which I was nominated for my Bob Stewart book. I didn’t win but it was fantastic to be in the running. The event was held at Albany, a large Georgian apartment block in the heart of London’s Piccadilly, the previous residents of which include Wordsworth, Byron and Gladstone.
It’s an exclusive address. Apartments or ‘sets’ rarely become available for sale and, when the occasion arises, you would need to have several million and be able to convince the residents’ association that you were just the right kind of person to have as a neighbour. Families tend to put their names down for a place a few generations before they secure one. As a child of the lower middle classes I was somewhat out of my depth in these surroundings. My hosts could not be faulted, however. My partner and I were made very welcome, wine flowed and I spent the evening chatting to other guests about our biographical obsessions.
The subject of my own work did occasion several wary enquiries as to whether I was a communist myself. It was if they were worried that I was about to requisition the property on behalf of the proletariat or collectivise their Hampshire estates. I reassured anyone who asked that there hadn’t been a Marxist-Leninist in the family since my grandfather died in 1978. Most of the guests were placated but one elderly gentleman in and immaculate Prince of Wales check jacket and a rather fetching bow tie muttered to me, “Communism is a virus!”
I bridled a little at first, taking it personally, a potential family insult, before we both steered the conversation away from the controversial. Encounters such as this do reflect one of the dilemmas of this project. Getting to know my ancestors has been a privilege, I find so much to admire and to celebrate. However, though their beliefs were shaken in 1956, they were staunch defenders of Stalin. This is a hard pill to swallow. I can understand, even when I don’t share it, this gentleman’s reaction. When I began my research this inheritance seemed far too huge for me to do it any justice. The best commentary I’ve read on it has been in ‘Hotel Lux.’
The book’s main focus is the relationship between three revolutionary women who came to Moscow and stayed at the Comintern’s preferred lodgings in the early twentieth century. It’s an immersive read full of fascinating detail. Woven through the narrative are the author’s reflections on being part of the radical left tradition and how one should deal with the ramifications of Stalinism. Early on in his research in Moscow, Casey is asked by a University professor, “So, are you for the Romanovs or the Bolsheviks?” The author fumbles his answer and wishes he could have given the more considered response he came up with after the event.
“The Soviet experiment inaugurated by the Bolsheviks was the culmination of many projects for revolutionary emancipation that arose in 19th century Europe. For better or worse, I consider all those emancipatory projects a part of my political ancestry. This is a messy inheritance, one that includes revolutionaries embracing one another in enthusiasm for a shared dream and former comrades sentencing one another to death in service to their cause. At the most basic level, the Romanovs did not want the world that I and others like myself desire. The Bolsheviks sought what I seek: equality. Therefore, when presented with this choice and within this context, I am for the Bolsheviks.“
This theme is developed during his research when he comes across that rare but not rare enough figure, a modern day admirer of Stalin.
“For two weeks, I made my way through the Comintern’s personnel files, folders where personal material relating to comrades and enemies of international communism was collated. I struck up an acquaintance with another English speaking researcher who regularly visited Moscow to work with Stalin-era materials. This researcher, I learned over coffee breaks, supported a resolutely hard-line form of communism. This gradually became clear over coffee- break discussions of our research topics. ‘Stalin was a man of great depth,’ he told me as I sat, disconcerted, before a disappointing cappuccino.
With one part of my mind thinking over the steel Memorial plaques I constantly saw on the walls of Moscow residential block, our conversation turned to 1937 and the Great Terror. For those who saw communism as a dead idea, it was not merely the Great Terror but one of the many inevitable red terrors. Violent oppression was, according to this theory, the unavoidable outgrowth of left wing ideas. They could not be fulfilled without it: radical levelling required violent purging. Such determinist readings, including those made by proponents of a teleological Marxism, always seemed unconvincing to me through their wilful blindness to the extraordinary range of possibilities that exist in the past. In our conversation, my coffee break companion appeared to share with the anti-communists a belief in the inevitability of terror. He differed only in his approach to its desirability. He upheld the orthodox communist line: yes, mistakes were made, but the terror was ultimately necessary to defend socialism: counter-revolution needed to be met with all-encompassing violence
This interpretation of the terror, one I’ve encountered occasionally in left wing circles seemed to render socialism a cruel idea. Yet I needed to confront how many of those I wrote about and researched people whose lives seemed to me so full of sympathetic moments accepted similarly cold logic. Before coming to Moscow I found it easier to see my people as those who courageously faced the firing squads without renouncing their ideals but now I could see more clearly that our political ancestry is never so neat. This was an admission that I tried to keep central in my mind once I returned to my work. I continued passing through fragments from a time when other paths seemed open, when dreams were not yet vanquished. I was learning to become more comfortable with murky moral complexity of revolutionary lives.“
Similar reflections are woven into the narrative as the book progresses and the protagonists and their families are affected in different ways by Stalinism. It’s an incredible piece of work and I’d encourage anyone to grab themselves a copy as soon as possible. If you’ve already read it buy it for friends and family for Christmas. It’s been invaluable to me as I contemplate the “murky moral complexity of revolutionary lives” of my own family.
Extract from Bob Stewart’s memoirs Breaking the Fetters from which the title of my biography is taken.
I’ve not posted much on here lately and so before 2024 draws to a close I’d like to update you on what’s happening with the project. The reason for the lack of new articles is that I’ve been concentrating on finishing the biography I’m writing of Bob Stewart. It is tentatively titled Everything You Get Must Be Fought For and it’s about three quarters finished. Frustratingly, it has sometimes seemed that this is the book’s permanent state as work commitments get in the way but it will be finished. I’ m just wise enough now not to confidently say when that will be.
Back in January I handed my work in progress to Stu Hennigan, the author of Ghost Signs: Poverty and the Pandemic and his editing and advice was invaluable. Following his suggestions during redrafting has improved the book beyond measure and I’m very excited by the results. It might turn out that Everything You Get… will be something people will actually want to hold in their hands. If you haven’t read Stu’s book yet I urge you to do so as soon as possible – its an essential exploration of our recent history. I also can’t recommend his editing enough – sympathetically forthright is possibly the best description I can offer. I think he’s currently swamped with work and deadlines for his own writing at the moment but if, in the future, he announces he’s ready to take on more editing assignments I’d encourage any author to seize the opportunity of working with him. You can find him easily on Bluesky now that Twitter/X becomes a less attractive option with every passing day.
Early this autumn I entered the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize. This is run by the Biographer’s Club and awards £2,000 to the best proposal for an uncommissioned first biography. Since then I’ve had little time to write and I’ve hit a patch where I’m stuck. I’m finding the 1940s very difficult to navigate and I’ve been pretty fed up with the whole thing. I had assumed that my proposal had got nowhere but yesterday, to my amazement, I received an email telling me that I had been shortlisted and the prize will be announced on the 11th December. I am overjoyed at this unexpected development – it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. It’s all very exciting and I’m looking forward to the announcement. I am in some very good company. The details of the prize and the other shortlisted titles can be found here: https://thebiographersclub.com/elizabeth-buccleuch-prize-2024-shortlist-announced/
Before Christmas I hope to post a couple of new articles. First of all a few words on Hotel Lux by Maurice J Casey which is my favourite book released this year. I would be very pleased if mine were half as good when it’s finished. Also, I hope to do a Comrades post on Bob’s daughter Annie Walker Stewart or Nan as she was better known. There’s a magnificent newspaper story from the 1920s which features her as precocious young revolutionary which I’ve shared before on Twitter but which needs to be on the site.
Anyway, that’s it for now except to say thank you to everyone who has been so generous in helping me either in person or online. Keep your fingers crossed for me at the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize announcement on the 11th of December!
Portrait of Bob Stewart taken by Edith Tudor-Hart.
Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber's chain has bound us,
Fond memories bring the light,
Of other days around us.
Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
At the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in Moscow in 1961, I met among others an old man whom I discovered was one of Lenin’s oldest companions, even in the days before the Russian Communist Party was formed. We had a long discussion about politics past and present, and the Communist Parties past and present, with particular emphasis on the difficulties of the days long since gone; and naturally, as old people do, we discussed ages. Petrov, the man with whom I was having the discussion, was then eighty-seven years, and I eighty-four years. In all this welter of reminiscence I said to Petrov, “We must meet at the dawn of Communism.” “All right,” he replied. “We shall meet in Moscow in 1980.” So that’s a date, though I have had doubts of whether Petrov and I will be able to keep it. However, I heard Petrov speak on a radio programme from Moscow in April 1966 and my spirits revived. I certainly have no intention of throwing in life’s sponge at this interesting stage in world politics and so the meeting may yet take place.
Much more certain than the meeting between Petrov and myself is the dawn of communism. In all my political life, since the early days of work in the Dundee jute mills, through all the vicissitudes of political, trade union and social work, I have never lost my faith in the people to change the economic and political system which holds back progress to a full and happy life. Of course there have been the ups and downs. That is life, and it is part of political life as well. But as I look back with a mature eye to the days of the early struggles of the Communist Party, I can see the giant strides that have been taken in Britain.
One of our first tasks on the formation of the party was to get clear what revolution meant. Our political enemies naturally pictured the revolution as a bloody civil war, as a destructive act, neglecting entirely the aim of the revolution, which is to transfer political power from the capitalist class to the working class. It is that transfer of power which constitutes revolution, whether it is accompanied by civil war as it was in Russia and China, or in a different set of circumstances, as it happened in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. In Britain and the countries of Western Europe it seems reasonably certain it will be a peaceful revolution achieved within the present parliamentary system, but changing Parliament from a showpiece into a workshop, legislating in the interests of the people.
We explained our main aim, the transfer of political power, patiently in speech and print; and gradually it became understood if not always accepted. Our second trouble in the early days was to get our own people to accept the idea that revolution in one country cannot be just a carbon copy of revolution in another country. In the early days it was common to find at our meetings five Russian posters to each British poster. Exaggerations took place and in some districts the party looked more Russian than British. There was a Smolny Institute in Sheffield. All this was very well intentioned but certainly wrong in the field of British political work. We soon learned that the major part of our policy and work must be for our own country-which does not exclude, nor can it, the greatest possible interest in the countries outside Britain, and in particular the greatest interest in what was then the only socialist country in the world, Russia. Even to this day there are people who talk of the Communist Party as a foreign or Russian party. Well, this was also said of the early socialist movement. It was falsely accused of being a German importation.
In its forty-six years of existence the Communist Party in Britain, in addition to being effective, active and militant in the workshops, has secured a large following of workers who respect it even if many of them, as yet, have not joined. The party has had great success in education for scientific socialism, in all aspects of Marxist philosophy. In its daily news-paper, the Morning Star (for many years the Daily Worker), in its weekly and monthly publications, in many thousands of pamphlets and books, there has been the necessary explanation of the political events which has been read, appreciated and discussed by millions of people. In the times when the labour movement was in retreat, the political discussion and action arising from these political explanations held the movement together and laid the basis for future advance. It may be idle to speculate where the British socialist movement would have finally landed if it had not been for the work of the Communist Party, but it is a fact of life that many times in the last forty-six years, in government and out of it, the Labour Party has moved far away, very far away, from socialist principle and practice. The criticism of the work of the labour movement by the Communists has many times assisted in bringing the movement back to policy and practice that represented the interests of the working class and condemned capitalism.
This condemnation of the capitalist system is at the centre of working-class politics. Condemnation is needed, not because the individual boss is bad, or a group of bosses treat their workers badly, although this frequently happens. We don’t object to capitalists as good husbands to their wives and good fathers to their children. What we object to is the miserable way they make their living, by exploiting the workers, by making profit out of the labour of the workers. The capitalists are parasitical, yet they get a much better living than the workers. The aim of the Communists in politics is to end capitalism and the capitalists’ parasitical existence. The Communists take a Marxist scientific view of events. We don’t live in the clouds, although it was a member of the Communist Party who first soared into space and it is the Soviet Union which leads the world in space exploration.
We know how and why capitalism came into existence. It was not born overnight. It had to destroy the handicaps and barriers to its progress from the reactionary feudal system which it superseded, and with quite a bloody red hand. There was no nicety about the emergence of capitalism. In many countries kings literally lost their heads. The British capitalists conveniently forgot about King Charles being beheaded when Russian capitalism was overthrown, and they condemned the killing of the Tsar. They forgot they themselves had set an example.
The Communists know that capitalism is not an everlasting system, and that just as it displaced feudalism and mercantilism in order to develop the production processes and meet the needs of the people, so now is socialism necessary to break the capitalist stranglehold on production to meet the needs of the present day. Feudalism became a fetter on production and the capitalist system took the fetter off. Now the people will end the capitalist system which has become a barrier to developing production. Socialism must come to provide a better and more scientific system in which the means of production will be owned by the community and work will become a virtue and not a drudge.
In the early days of the party we had to argue from theory alone. We have now in the course of history reached a stage when theory has become practice. As Lenin said, “Theory is grey but the tree of life is green.” So the green tree is growing, and now in the Soviet Union and China and in the other socialist countries there is the evolution of new industrial techniques to meet the requirements of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first which is not so far away. It was easy in the early days for the capitalists and the Labour leaders to sneer at the size of the Communist Party, to jeer at our utopianism, but great developments have taken place and are continuing to take place in the socialist countries. The opponents of socialism can’t jeer away a new town, vast new industrial automated plants, great new industrial regions, some of which produce more than the entire production of some of the advanced capitalist countries.
For example, the British or United States railwaymen can’t say to the Russian railwaymen “Wait till you catch up with us”, because the Russian railways are now far in advance in all modern railway techniques. This is not because the Russian railwaymen are born better, but because their industry is more modern and because socialist practice in the Soviet Union has electrified more railways than has all the capitalist world put together.
People all over the world can see, if they want to see, the fundamental difference between socialist industry and capitalist industry. In the socialist states the trade union office is in its rightful place, inside the factory, not pleading for a bigger share of the cake, but as an essential part of the running of the factory and taking part in every discussion and decision on production and labour conditions. There are no brass hats in the factory who have the last word on what is to happen to wage increases and hours of labour. In the socialist states the day of the brass hats is over and their obstructing power flung into the dustbin of history.
In 1917 there were 300,000 Communists in Russia. Today there are 12,000,000. Twelve million devoted scientific workers can make a tremendous productive difference in an old economy. As they lead the Russian workers in operating the new modern industrial techniques in the vast new industrial plants, great new production targets are set and broken, set and broken again and again. Production is rising to vast new heights.
I remember vividly my first journey to Russia in 1923, the tremendous thrill I experienced when I crossed the frontier. “Ours!” I said, “a country which the workers own and control.” On that first trip from Riga to Moscow I shared a compartment with Vassili Kolarov, his wife and two young sons. Kolarov, who became head of the People’s Republic in Bulgaria, was the bosom companion of Georgi Dimitrov with whom he worked for many years, sharing the disappointments of the stagnant periods and the joys of the revolutionary periods. Georgi Dimitrov of course became famous after the Reichstag fire trial in Hitler Germany, but at that time, in 1923, he was just “one of the boys” with whom I later had the pleasure of working.
Looking back on the Russia of my first visit, how right I was to be immensely proud of entering a country which was owned and controlled by the workers, in which capitalism had been overthrown! How right I was in my judgment that this land of socialism would transform the lives of the people and in doing so set an example to the workers all over the world!
It is not a question of rivalry between country and country. Progress does not rest on the character of persons or nations. It is a question of science being applied to the most important thing that human beings engage in, that is making a living, and in our day making a living means giant production for giant populations, the elimination of hard labour, using the machine to release the workers from hard toil and to reduce the hours of labour and give the workers more and more leisure time. There are so many things to do, so many things to learn, that no person lives long enough to do and learn even a fraction of them, even the cleverest of us, and most of us are not too clever. At the age of ninety years there are many things I still want to do, still want to learn to do.
On looking back over the many years of work of the British Communist Party we should remember the positive as well as the negative features. Never at any time did we admit the hill was too steep or the mountain too high to climb. Our attitude has always been “How can we overcome?” and by our work we have overcome the one-time hostility of many millions of people who, while in open discussion they will not say too much, nevertheless in private conversation will admit how impressed they are with the work of the Communists and the Communist Party. Millions of people now understand perfectly well that the Communists are not the “troublemakers” the capitalist press, the T.V. and the radio would like to brand them, but honest, sincere people who work for a fundamental political change. This has been a long process.
In the early twenties the Communist Party fought with the miners, tried to mobilise the entire labour movement to the side of the miners. The Communists gave everything they had in support of A. J. Cook in his fight for “Not a minute on the day–Not a penny off the pay’. It was the Communist Party who expelled Bob Williams from their ranks because of the part he played in destroying the triple alliance of miners, railway and transport workers.
In the General Strike we knew more of what was happening than the General Council of the T.U.C. We did not spend our valuable time playing football matches with the police. We gave the striking workers leadership as their militancy developed. This contrasted with the T.U.C. leaders who got diarrhea and went chasing round corners following Lord Samuel and looking for a way to sell out.
After the strike it was the Communist Party who organised to reform the ranks of the working class and the unions for the political and industrial struggles of the 1930s. In the fight against the sell-out of the Labour Government by Ramsay McDonald and his associates, and against the anti-working-class legislation of the National Government that followed, the Communists were always part of the vanguard.
Then came the fight against fascism. I remember well the formation of the British battalion of the International Brigade which went to fight fascism in Spain. At first many ordinary Labour people were hostile to the idea, but as the struggle against fascism deepened and the fight for Spanish democracy against Franco developed, so did the understanding of the necessity of the fight against fascism grow. The International Brigade grew in popularity, and when they were repatriated from Spain under a decision of the United Nations I remember the amazing scenes at Victoria Station in London. Tens of thousands of people filled the station and crowded the surrounding streets to welcome the British soldiers home. Everyone felt that the Brigade had honoured Britain by their fight against fascism and had upheld the good name of the British labour movement.
In the struggle decisive changes take place in people’s thinking, and this leads to further action. The Communists said the war that ravaged Spain would come to Britain if rapacious fascism were allowed to proceed unchecked. We were right, not because we were good astrologers or prophets, but because we were Marxists and could read events better than other political parties.
In my many decades of work I have met, discussed with, worked with, and become friends with some of the finest people who ever breathed. Men and women whose main aim in life was to serve mankind. Men and women who came from many nations and whose skins were of different colours but whose aim in life was the highest of all: to serve. Many of these people are found in the pages of this book. Many younger than myself have died, leaving their mark on politics and political parties. Some of them greatly influenced my thinking and I want to write of a few of them who made a decisive impact on British political life. Not in order of merit: that would be quite impossible because they all had merits of different degrees, and in any case my prejudice, if I have one, favours the men and women who come from the workshops, a bias not entirely separated from my experience of life.
A man who influenced masses of people in Britain was Harry Pollitt, for many years the General Secretary of the Communist Party. An outstanding politician, Harry was virtually born in the working-class movement. His home was a socialist organising agency. His mother was a clear-thinking and capable socialist, and from boyhood Harry was forever on the stump. No doubt this early training was invaluable, because he developed into one of the finest orators in the British political movement. This fact was widely acknowledged by his bitterest political enemies, and remember he spoke from platforms in the days of great orators in other parties, Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan to mention only two.
But Pollitt was not only a very fine speaker. He had organising qualities few possessed. Always for Harry the question was “What is to be done?” Not only did he pose the question but he worked on it and tried to answer it. He applied himself diligently to everything he did and was extremely careful in the preparation of his speeches. This stood Harry in good stead when the shorthand notes of the reporting policeman would be put against his own notes in the Court cases in which he became involved. One thing Harry Pollitt proved beyond all doubt. The speaker who likes to speak has every chance to become a good speaker. Many times I have tired listening to speakers telling me how difficult it was for them to speak. Well, if they found it difficult to speak no doubt their listeners would find it more difficult to listen. The good speaker is one who feels he has something to say, a message to give. Anyone who heard Harry Pollitt in any meeting, big or small, found his speech lucid, powerful and sincere. While speaking of the needs of the present Harry could always paint a picture of how socialism could be won and the joy it would be for the working class. That was his great achievement. In both speech and organisation he brought many thousands into the struggle for socialism in Britain and many into the membership of the Communist Party.
Another man who loved to speak, and who was sometimes impatient of others speaking, was Willie Gallacher. He was an experienced workshop man who, in the period of the First World War, by his forthright stand against sectarianism, did much to weld together the famous shop stewards’ industrial movement which played such an effective role in Glasgow and many of the great industrial centres such as London, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham and other cities. Every. where the name of Gallacher was known as a working-class leader in the industrial and political movement. He was a man without self-interest whose life was devoted to the working-class movement and who made an unrivalled contribution to the work of the British Communist Party.
Internationally Gallacher became a well-known figure. When he met Lenin, he complained because Lenin, while praising his courage, attacked his political ideas. Gallacher told Lenin that he (Gallacher) was an old hand at the game of politics. Lenin’s justified criticism of Gallacher was published in that internationally famous book Left-Wing Communism–an Infantile Disorder. This book was sorely needed in the early 1920s when the young Communist Parties were making so many fundamental political errors. Because of Lenin’s advice, Gallacher discarded his anti-parliamentism and helped many others to do so. The negative attitude that a good socialist could not remain good if he went into parliament was strongly held in the twenties.
One very good characteristic of Gallacher’s was his ability to admit to being wrong on occasions, a characteristic not readily shared by a few of the leading Communists. Gallacher’s parliamentary career stands out as an example to those who believe that Members of Parliament can remain true to socialist principles and fight for them in Parliament. When he first entered Westminster he was portrayed as a revolutionary who wanted the streets to flow with blood. But he proved in his fifteen years in the House of Commons that he was a first-class parliamentarian. In fact he was one of the few who knew the rules of the House sufficiently well to break them and get away with it. His first thought in Parliament during any business before the House was: Will the working class gain? On that he took his stand, and his hundreds of speeches recorded in Hansard from 1935 till 1950 are essential reading for any serious student of British political history.
Harry Pollitt and Willie Gallacher are dead. Many others who gave all their life for the advancement of the working class are also dead. Albert Inkpin, Arthur McManus, Tom Bell, Tommy Jackson, big Jock McBain, the names are countless. All of them great working-class politicians and great companions in the day-to-day struggle.
There are a number like myself who are blessed with long life and are still working hard. R. Palme Dutt was one of my early mentors and mentor to many leading Communists. He comes from a remarkable family of highly educated people and I doubt if anywhere in the world, certainly not in Britain, one could find a political journalist who has made such a regular, consistent contribution to the elucidation of British political problems, particularly in relation to the colonial and ex-colonial countries. There is also that wee pawky Scotsman John Ross Campbell, familiarly known as J.R.C., who was in the early days editor of the Glasgow Worker and became, many years later, editor of the Daily Worker. He is one of the best working-class politicians and economists Scotland has ever produced. His speech is remarkably clear, witty and always down to earth. In those early days his workshop notes in the Glasgow Worker had a very wide readership.
And so I could go on, lists and lists of names, industrial and professional, all of whom made big political contributions to the struggle for socialism. One thing above all these older leading Communists understood was the fundamental Marxist principle: “That which is coming into being and growing is more powerful than that which is ascendant but is already dying away.”
The leading Communists of the past educated, trained and prepared the many thousands of Communists of the present who by their diligent and successful work have been elected to leading positions in the labour movement. This re-creation on an ever increasing scale is the guarantee that the British people will take the road to socialism.
The great world political argument rages. For Socialism. For Capitalism. The Communists understand that the aim of a modern political party must be to end capitalism. Not to keep it on its feet to totter around preventing the introduction of dynamic socialism. Not to agree to sacrifice by the workers in the interests of the bosses, but to end capitalism for all time. The Communists by their scientific analysis know that socialism will finally be victorious, and while in the Western capitalist countries the capitalist fetters may bind the hands of the workers for a few years yet, without doubt the tools are ready, well and truly sharpened to break the bonds.
In little more than a decade the call will change. Then it will be “For Communism!” I am certain, positively certain, that the world will see the dawn of communism, and I will frankly admit, despite having had more than my three-score years and ten, and a full and exciting life, that I hope, fervently hope, I shall be able to accept the invitation of my good comrade Petrov and be there in Moscow to see the Dawn. In any case, whether or not I live till 1980 or sign off sooner, as William Morris wrote:
On my return from Moscow I was sent to Ireland to work. At that time, in 1924, there was no Communist Party in Ireland, although since its inception the British Communist Party had given direct assistance to the Irish revolutionaries. After the Easter Rising of April 1916, there had followed turbulent years of working-class struggle. The Government of Ireland Bill was piloted through Parliament in the autumn of 1920. It provided for the partition of Ireland, with both North and South having a Parliament with restricted powers, subordinate to Westminster. There was a state of war until the summer of 1921, followed by six months of bargaining and intrigue, which ended in the offer of fiscal independence for the twenty-six counties of the South. The handing over of power to the provisional government was accompanied by brutal economic oppression and wage reductions, often amounting to one-third. There was a deep economic crisis and strikes were widespread.
It was clear that the political and economic conditions in Ireland necessitated a Marxist party with a solid basis in the Irish trade union movement. My work was to see how this necessity could be achieved. I was glad of this opportunity because I had met Jim Connolly in 1913 and I was also well known among the Irish for my work in Dundee.
Big Jim Larkin was then the best known trade union leader in Ireland and headed the biggest and most militant trade union, the Transport and General Workers Union; and naturally any hope of success in my task rested on my ability to interest Larkin in the formation of a Marxist party.
Jim Larkin
Jim Larkin will always be revered as one of the great line of Irish rebels whose names will never be forgotten in the history of the Irish working class. As a very young man he was already in the leadership of many industrial struggles in both Northern and Southern Ireland and in 1909 at the age of thirty-two he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. He said at the time that the total assets were two chairs, a table, a candle and an empty bottle to hold the candle, and a potential membership drawn from the Dublin carters who had just concluded a strike. By hard, patient and militant work he built the union into a real fighting organisation. In 1911 he launched a newspaper called the Irish Worker which sold 95,000 copies weekly and which was in itself a great trade union organiser and a splendid forum for left political opinion.
In 1914 Larkin went to the United States, as he said to interest the American Irish in the Irish at home, but he was soon at work in the United States trade union movement. His militant trade union principles and his left political opinions got him into trouble with the authorities. He was arrested and charged with “criminal anarchy” under a law which proscribed “the advocacy of force and violence”. He was tried in New York and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He did four years in the prisons of the United States and in 1923 he was released from Sing Sing by governor Al Smith, who at the time said: “Larkin has suffered enough for his beliefs.”
On his release he came back to Britain, where he had a great welcome when he arrived at Southampton. Many people, including Bill Gallacher, were at the docks to welcome him back home.
I spent months working with Larkin in the attempt to found a Marxist party in Ireland. He was, like myself, a total abstainer and one of his hates he had many-was strong drink. One of his first acts when he became a trade union official was to stop the then prevalent practice of paying the dockers their wages in public houses. He was a professed Marxist and fully supported the Soviet Union.
Working with Larkin and the other Marxists, both in Dublin and in the country districts, I soon found that one of my greatest difficulties was to keep the peace among our own people. Larkin was the biggest problem because he always personalised his politics. He would denounce this scoundrel, that scoundrel, in fact almost everyone in Ireland was a scoundrel. I think his experiences in the gaols in the United States may have had something to do with this attitude, but it certainly was anything but helpful in the political position we were in at that time in Ireland.
All the time I was in Dublin I lived with Larkin and his sister Delia and his brother Peter, who were political personalities in their own right. Peter had been a leader in the trade union movement in Australia and had done time in the Australian jails for fighting for the workers’ right to organise. But despite their similarity of political beliefs there were family squabbles. Jim did not speak to Delia and Delia did not speak to Jim, so they had to talk to each other through Peter. When Peter was missing I was used as the go-between. It was a dreadful position for grown-up people to create, particularly when to make any political headway friendship and comradely tolerance were an absolute necessity.
The house we lived in at Gardiner Street had a very large living-room. During the day and in the evening all kinds of people kept coming and going. It was a clearing house for all problems political and economic or even purely domestic. As people came and went there were no introductions so that you had not the faintest idea whom you were speaking to, or anything about them, and yet you were expected to engage in serious discussion and to give your opinion on the subject.
At that time in Ireland I knew it was much safer to keep certain discussions and opinions to the circle of people whom you knew and understood. In all this welter of coming and going, discussion and argument, Big Jim would sit in his easy chair talking to everyone, butting in the conversation and lighting match after match trying to get his pipe going, so that after a while he was entirely surrounded by burnt matches. It certainly was an odd scene looking round the circle. It was in this room that I had my first discussion with Sean O’Casey, the Irish poet and playwright, but I did not know who he was then. O’Casey used to say of Jim that it was his ideal to see workers with a loaf of bread under their arms and a bunch of flowers in their hands.
Sean O’ Casey
However, these were but small difficulties, easily got over in a day’s work.
I got on well with Larkin and I was one of the few men he really trusted politically. Lenin said of Larkin, “His remarkable oratorical gifts and seething Irish energy performed miracles among the Irish workers.” That was justified. He was a powerful and popular speaker, and every weekend we were out in the country or in a Dublin hall speaking at meetings and selling the Irish Worker. The paper had a big sale because there was usually something sensational in its pages. Larkin was continually in trouble defending himself against libel actions in the Courts. The Court verdicts were always against him and his debts piled up. But, of course, it brought huge crowds to the meetings and sold the paper.
The aim of the group I was working with was to plan a political campaign leading to and culminating in the formation of an Irish Marxist party. In Ireland at that time politics took a wide sweep. Poverty in some places was desperate, and it was necessary not only to recognise this politically but to do something about it. So we were constantly engaged in relief work. But a special more urgent relief became necessary. Flooding took place in Donegal and we placed part of our organisation on this relief work. I got together a three-woman team to take charge of the work: Mother Despard, Countess Markievicz and Helen Crawfurd from Scotland.
Countess Markievicz, Mother Despard and Helen Crawfurd
These were three remarkable women. Countess Markievicz was one of the famous Booth sisters, daughter of Sir Henry William Gore-Booth, a family of the Sligo aristocracy. In 1900 she married a Polish count, Casimir de Markievicz, but despite her background and marriage she was a revolutionary in politics. She took part in the Dublin rebellion in 1916, and was sentenced to death, which was subsequently commuted to penal servitude for life. She was released from prison in 1917. She was M.P. for St. Patrick’s, Dublin, 1918-21; M.P. for Dublin City, 1921-22; and re-elected for the Irish Free State in 1923, being the first woman elected to the Dail. Mother (Charlotte) Despard was one of the leaders of the British suffragette movement and without doubt one of the ablest women politicians of this century. Her work in the Women’s Labour League, the suffragette movement in defence of women’s rights, and her work in the care and needs of children, was outstanding by any standard. She was highly intelligent and an able organiser. Helen Crawfurd was a foundation member of the British Communist Party, a Scotswoman who was always in the thick of political struggle and one of the finest women politicians I ever worked with.
These three women formed a wonderful trio. With entirely different backgrounds they had worked miracles in the struggles for women’s rights, yet it took the flood relief in Ireland to bring them together. They organised relief in the form of food, clothes and household goods from Britain and the continent, and even made trips to America to get relief from there. I remember making a trip to Donegal myself during this period, and in doing so I learned a valuable political lesson about working in the Irish countryside. In Ireland at that period you couldn’t give anything away without a priest. In these small towns, even though the people were in really desperate straits, you needed a priest with you before they would accept relief goods. The people, of course, showed their gratitude and goodwill to all who did the relief work, but if the priest was not there it was very difficult indeed.
Very likely because of such lessons I have a healthy regard for priests.
During this relief campaign I met Father Flannigan. He was a hard worker and spoke at many meetings with Larkin and myself. He used to say to me, “Bob, your Lenin was a great Christian and should have spent his life preaching the Christian doctrine.” Naturally I tried to refute this and convince Father Flannigan that he was a Marxist and should join the Communist Party. He never did, but he worked miracles on the relief work and gave great assistance in building relief and welfare organisation.
Peadar O’ Donnell
I well remember another Irish Catholic priest in the same mould. In the late nineteen-twenties I was again in Ireland trying to organise a peasant delegation to visit a Congress in Berlin. To do this I sought the assistance of Peador O’Donnell. I knew Peador O’Donnell well: he was a member of the IRA and a staunch republican. He was also a famous author and wrote many novels, including The Gates Flew Open, being his experiences in the Irish prisons. I managed to interest Peador O’Donnell in the sending of the peasant delegation and we went to Galway to see what could be done. He was well known to the local councillors and prominent citizens, so we organised a meeting on a Saturday evening, which was very successful, in fact too successful, the drinking and discussion going on well into the Sunday morning. I remember the hotel keeper coming into the meeting with an emphatic protest that we must finish, because he said: “Never in my hotel have people been awake at two o’clock on a Sunday morning.” Before we retired Peador O’Donnell said to me, “Bob, I am going to Mass in the morning and if you come along I will introduce you to a rebellious priest if ever there was one.” Well, that coming from what I considered was a real rebel was something that intrigued me, so I inquired: “Who is this fellow?” “His name is Father Fahy and he has been expelled to the country for battering a bailiff who took an old woman’s cow to pay for her debts.” “I think I will come to the Mass,” I replied. Next morning we drove in a jaunting car to a very small village where we met Father Fahy. As we entered the room he was putting on his robes and his back was to us. “Father Fahy,” said Peador O’Donnell, “I have brought a man who has no soul to save.” “Ah well,” was the reply, “it will save him a great deal of trouble.” Then turning round he said, “But I know this man. I saw him often in Dundee when I was there. He is a great speaker.” “Ah,” I said, “you are Father Fahy of St. Andrew’s Cathedral.”
There was a famous Dundee story of Father Fahy. During the 1914-18 war (I was in jail at the time, but the story was well known) a number of soldiers from the Black Watch, Irishmen by birth, came to St. Andrew’s Cathedral for Mass from Father Fahy. However, along with the Mass he gave them a severe lecture, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves serving in the British imperial army, adding they should be patriotic Irishmen and go home to fight for Ireland. One of the soldiers reported the incident and Father Fahy was carpeted.
Not having a soul to save we did not waste time on Mass, but we got to talking over old times in Dundee. Politics and elections were discussed. “Well,” said Father Fahy, “Scrymgeour can thank the Catholic Church for his becoming an M.P.” Then he went on to tell me that in the 1922 election the organised Catholics came to the conclusion that Churchill did not stand a chance of retaining the Dundee seat. With two votes to be cast the three most likely to get them were Scrymgeour, prohibitionist, Morel, Labour, and Gallacher, Communist. “Morel as the official Labour candidate was certain to win,” said Father Fahy, “so we Catholics decided to give our second vote to Scrymgeour instead of Gallacher.” The Catholic voters then in Dundee were nearly 50 per cent of the total electorate. A glance at the election result of 1920 will show Father Fahy was right. Prohibitionism and Catholicism have little in common, if anything. But the Catholic vote, although be it said some Catholics did vote for Gallacher, certainly made Scrymgeour the Member of Parliament.
But to return to the position in Ireland in 1924. With the tremendous political campaigning and the prodigious relief and welfare work we got a good political footing in many Irish counties, but most important and best of all in Dublin. We decided the time was opportune to launch the call for the formation of a mass Irish Marxist party.
After much deliberation and argument we drew up a manifesto and organised a mass demonstration in the Mansion House. It was essential to get Larkin to sign the manifesto and I discussed this with him many times, always with the same result. “All right, Bob,” he would say, “I am thinking about it. What are you worrying about? I will likely sign it.” And he went about with the manifesto in his pocket for days but it was never signed.
The demonstration in the Mansion House was one of the best ever held in Dublin. The hall was packed to capacity, with hundreds standing in the aisles and the corners. Over two hundred people applied to join the new party. All we needed for a successful launching of the party was Larkin’s acceptance of the manifesto. But this he refused. My own opinion is that Big Jim would never accept the democracy of a disciplined Marxist party. He always had to be in the centre of the stage all the time, and so to join a party where the emphasis is put on collective work was not for him. Shortly after this I left Ireland with the feeling that a great political opportunity had been lost. In 1924 the political situation in Ireland was ripe for the formation of a Marxist party based on the Irish workers’ organisations, principally the trade unions. Larkin’s refusal to play his part in the creation of such a party greatly weakened the fight. The result was that much of the good work done over the years preceding 1924 ran into sand and failed to bear fruit.
Early in the summer of 1931 I went to Northern Ireland, to Belfast, along with Bill Joss of Glasgow, a man who knew the “Irish question” from A to Z and from Z back to A again. I remember him giving the Irish some lectures on Ireland and Irish history, both political and economic, that left them speechless and if you can do that to an Irish audience you are a master of your subject. Although their mouths were shut, many eyes were opened.
The Irish Workers’ League (the Marxist party) had its main basis in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Waterford, but was finding it difficult to get a trade union basis in Belfast. Bill Joss and I were there to try and help with this problem. We were no longer working with Larkin but with Sean Nolan and a number of the local members.
The republican movement was quite strong in Belfast and Dublin, and I thought it right and necessary to try and work closely with them. Their politics were quite progressive and most of them detested the booze, so for me at least there was this added bond of unity.
We held our meetings on the Customs House steps and they were very rowdy; many a donnybrook took place. During our meetings the place was alive with police trying to keep order and, I must admit, on occasions trying to keep the crowd from “getting at” the speaker usually me. Our opponents had another way of stopping us speaking. They would bring out the band with the big drum and stop in front of the meeting place, playing at top pitch. In this field of competition I could never compete and I never found a public speaker who could. On such occasions we packed up and then came back later when the band had blown themselves out or had gone for a drink.
Some time after I had left Ireland, Harry Pollitt told me of a chat he had had with the Chief Constable of Belfast. The Chief asked him, “Where is that flat-nosed bugger Stewart? The trouble I had with that man! He spoke for hours and hours at the Customs House steps and my young policemen got fed up waiting for his meetings to finish. He insulted the police. He insulted the Irish authorities. He insulted everybody in Ireland.”
The last rebuke was wrong, the rest correct. I have done a bit of insulting in my time, but that’s permissible when dealing with political enemies who insult the working class every day of their lives. I remember one meeting at the Customs House steps. The news broke that there were to be cuts in wages and unemployment benefits. This meant a big cut in policemen’s wages as well. I couldn’t resist a dig at that. With dozens of police around, I said, “Here they are, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, big, strong, intelligent, known throughout the world as the wildest and bravest men in any fighting force the Government says their wages are to be reduced by 10 per cent and not one of them gives a whistle.” I thought that would have caused a riot, but no, the audience burst into laughter and a few of the policemen even joined in. That’s what makes Ireland such a bloody nice place to work in. You never know what’s around the corner.
In the late summer of 1931 the Labour government was running into trouble and it looked certain that a general election was not far off. I was still parliamentary candidate for Dundee and the party there asked me to come over from Belfast to do a few meetings. The Belfast lads did not want to let me go, but I promised I would only be away for a week or so, and on that understanding I left. I walked out of the frying pan into the fire.
When I arrived in Dundee there was the usual welcoming party, several hundreds strong, and as always it was decided to have a demonstration, a march through the town to the Albert Square. It was not a big demonstration, but the Dundee police didn’t like it, giving a bit of provocation to the marchers en route. However, we got through the town and were entering the Square without trouble when I heard a commotion behind me and, looking back, I saw a young fellow being manhandled by the police. I went back to see what was wrong and try to smooth things over, but before I could say anything a couple of hulking policemen grabbed me and I was frog-marched all the way to the Bell Streel Gaol. Naturally there was a near riot as our supporters let go at the police for this unwarranted provocation. If they had let us alone for another ten minutes it would have been all over in peace, but maybe it was not meant to be peaceful as far as the police were concerned.
My wife ran about getting the bail money and I and five others got out. The papers were full of the incident and the word got around: “The police have got Bob Stewart and are kicking his arse off.” An exaggeration, but that’s what happens in such cases. I was speaking at an open-air evening meeting in Lochee, a Dundee suburb. Thousands assembled to hear the workers’ side of the story. The people were really incensed, and demonstrations went on for over a week. Mounted police were drafted into the city and further arrests were made daily. Another bad slip by the authorities, because this only further incensed the workers.
The Court case was a Fred Karno farce. At one point I laughed outright at the absurdity of it all. Two of the policemen who had picked me up and this was done literally-were big Geordie Clark, and big Ed Anderson. Both world champion athletes. They tossed the caber at the Highland Games like someone using a match to light a pipe. They were built like Aberdeen Angus prize bulls and both looked like one. Real Scottish policemen of the period. Mountains of oatmeal, and little in the top piece.
It was a snotty-nosed little magistrate called Paterson who heard the case. The charges were:
a) In Meadowside he (that’s me) assaulted George Clark, constable, and struck him with his fist.
b) Committed a breach of the peace.
c) Molested constables Clark and MacFarlane in the execution of their duty while arresting Grant.
d) Assaulted William Gorrie, constable, and kicked him and after arrest struggled with the constables and refused to walk.
In cross-examination, big Geordie Clark was forced to admit that I had been frog-marched to the police station. The magistrate asked me to plead and I said I would not; it was a lot of nonsense and absolutely irrational. “Do you think,” I asked, “if I wanted to assault policemen I would choose the world heavy-weight champions? Please grant me a little intelligence.” But Baillie Paterson, like most magistrates, was only a figure-head. The real strings were pulled from behind. He found me guilty. What a laugh; me, guilty of assaulting the world heavyweight champion and punching him in the face! Me, a wee fellow not half Geordie Clark’s weight! He could have thrown me as far as the caber with one hand. There never was justice in the courts and certainly this case was the proof.
So I went up the river to Perth Gaol for thirty days and, to add insult to injury, the magistrate in his best pompous style advised me “That in future, Stewart, you should keep away from crowds.”
While I was away from the crowds and in Perth penitentiary, the great Labour split came and with it the fall of the Labour government. In late August Ramsay McDonald had made his now infamous sell-out radio speech. A National Government, with the Tories well entrenched in the new cabinet, was formed all to defend the pound sterling on which, claimed Ramsay Mac, “the well-being not only of the British nation but a large part of the world has been built”. Cuts in unemployment benefits to the extent of £70,000,000 per annum, and cuts in wages. Means tests for the unemployed. But this only for the working class. No cuts in profits and dividends. No means tests for the rich.
On October 22, a few weeks after MacDonald’s “save the pound” appeal, the Daily Express published: “Baldwin’s ordinary shares have advanced this year by €650,000 in value”. Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Tory Party, and brought into the National Government cabinet by MacDonald, held huge blocks of shares in Baldwin Limited, a great steel combine. On the day the Daily Express published this news, Baldwin was stumping the country telling the unemployed they must accept a dole cut of 10 per cent to save the pound and save the nation. Equality of sacrifice was the slogan of the National Government.
In his sell-out of the working-class movement, MacDonald pretended to give it a decent burial. In his broadcast, with an affected broken voice and, presumably, tears in his eyes, he said: “I have given my life to the building of a political party. I was present at its birth. I was a nurse when it emerged from infancy. At the moment I have not changed my ideals.” But he had sold out to the capitalist class just the same.
I profoundly believe McDonald actually thought he was presiding over the death of the Labour Party and the British working-class movement. His ego was that big. But historically the working-class movement has an indestructible habit of moving on, despite all the predictions of its destruction, and MacDonald lived to see that.
With the Labour Party demoralised by the split, the National Government called a general election for Tuesday, October 27. I had come out of Cardiff Gaol to fight my first parliamentary contest at Caerphilly in 1921. Now I came out of Perth Gaol to fight my last parliamentary contest at Dundee in 1931. This time the prison authorities were not so lenient; they let me out of gaol on the Saturday before polling day, giving me two full campaigning days -if you include Sunday.
The candidates for Dundee were Marcus for Labour and Scrymgeour for Prohibition, the sitting members who had been returned in 1929. In the election they teamed up together, with Scrymgeour still seeking the Labour and Catholic vote. The anti-Labour forces put up two new candidates, Florence Horsbrugh (now Baroness Horsbrugh) for the Tories, and Dingle Foot for the Liberals, both, of course, standing on the Nationalist ticket. I was the outsider as the Communist candidate at least that was how it was meant to be, but this time we did shake some of the political pundits.
The main brunt of the Nationalist campaigning fell on Dingle Foot who was then a young man of twenty-six years of age. This is the same Dingle Foot who is now a Labour Member of Parliament, having successfully changed his coat and maintained his membership of the House of Commons. He is one of the Foot family of professional politicians which includes Lord Caradon, formerly Hugh Foot, and Michael Foot, the left wing Labour MP. The ‘old man’ Isaac was no fool at professional politics.
At this time Dingle was bitterly anti-Labour, anti-working class. In one of his speeches he said, “The National Government stands for sense and solvency, Labour for sob stuff and starvation.”
My election agent was a little fellow called Sweeney. He called at the Perth Gaol and we went over the election address which was despatched in the usual efficient manner. The people knew we were campaigning all right. Apart from holding our own meetings, our fellows went to the other candidates meetings and question-time became a furious battle. Most of the Foot and Horsbrugh meetings ended with three cheers for Bob Stewart and the singing of “The Red Flag”. When I came out of prison on the Saturday, my first job was to lead a delegation to the Public Assistance for a number of hardship cases. There were some families then in real poverty. On the Sunday night we held a huge meeting at the Albert Square with an audience of 5,000 and great enthusiasm. Some of our lads began to talk of victory and I had to caution them, although the support we were receiving was our best ever in any election campaign.
But I was long enough in the political tooth to understand what was going on. The election campaign was one of the dirtiest in history. Every stick was used to beat the candidates standing against the National candidates. We were called traitors, saboteurs, wreckers no word, no turn of phrase, was bad enough to stampede the people and gain National votes.
In Dundee unemployment was high and to find work was an impossible task for the unemployed. In the final days of the election, the local newspaper, the Courier and Advertiser, published an interview with a Mr. Charlie Finch, who was reported to be about to open a bottle and glass factory in Dundee, employing 950 workers. But, emphasised Mr. Finch, he would only open the factory if the National Government were returned. Well, they were, but I never heard of the opening of Mr. Finch’s glass factory. This was the sort of thing that went on. Nothing was base enough to blacken the opponents of the National Government, nothing too low to win “National” votes.
Nine days before the poll the Courier and Advertiser published a prominent article praising another “National” leader who was then making his way in the world. His name was Adolf Hitler and according to the Courier he was the man who was to save the German nation.
On the final rally night-Monday-Dingle Foot invited all the candidates to speak from a platform in the Albert Square. He was providing loud-speaking equipment and a microphone. This was the first time this had ever been used in a Dundee parliamentary election. All the candidates refused, except me, so Foot and I had the meeting to ourselves. I asked for the other candidates’ time but Dingle would not agree. The local newspapers estimated that there was an audience of 20,000 but my reckoning was nearer 30,000.
At first Foot tried to play it funny. He was no doubt put out at being the only candidate to appear with the Communist candidate, but he would know later that this did him a power of good.
He started by saying, “I hope that when Bob Stewart and his pals come to power and I am hanged they will let me choose my own lamp-post.”
I intervened to say, “Dingle is growing up a bit too fast, we will reserve the lamp-posts for the important people,” and that cut him down to size. I remember his concluding remarks that night.
He said, “Do you want a member of the Trades Union Congress or a Member of Parliament for Dundee? I want you to send me to Westminster not as a bondsman of the Trades Union Congress, or as a catspaw of Moscow, but as a member of the National Government.”
I wonder who he thinks serves the nation now?
The split in the labour movement and the slanderous campaign of the National candidates, in which the former right-wing Labour leaders, MacDonald, Snowden, Thomas and others, were the most vehement of all, was too much for the working-class forces to surmount.
If anyone still thinks that the labour movement is strengthened when the right-wing leaders abandon and rupture the movement in this way, they ought to read the history of the 1929-31 Labour government. Working-class political success rests on the ability of the labour movement to purge itself of the right-wing leaders by political exposure, before they can sell out and not after.
In the 1929 general election, the Labour Party had won 288 seats. In 1931 Labour won only 51 seats and had a net loss of 228.
The Dundee result showed Florence Horsbrugh to be the first Tory candidate to be returned for Dundee this century (she remained M.P. for Dundee until 1945). Dingle Foot was top of the poll, the result being:
D. Foot 52, 048
F. Horsbrugh 48, 556
M. Marcus 32, 573
E. Scrymgeour 32, 229
R. Stewart 10, 262
Dingle Foot was so delighted when Sheriff Morton declared the result that he called for three cheers for Stewart, Marcus and Scrymgeour. Smart fellow!
The Tory government elected in 1924, largely because of the Zinoviev forgery, ran almost its full term of five years; 1929 had to be election year, and the election came in the spring. Parliament was dissolved and the date of the election set for May.
The 1929 parliamentary election will be remembered for two things: the return of the second Labour Government and the flapper vote. This was the first election in which women of twenty-one years of age voted. Before then the minimum age for votes for females was thirty years. Some people at the time said it was the flapper vote that made the return of a Labour government possible. This was definitely not true. The flapper vote did not assist the Labour or Communist candidates in 1929. While I have always wholeheartedly supported the elementary right of every adult to have a vote (except in extreme cases, such as insanity, etc.) I am not starry-eyed about the result and do not believe that new voters, the vast majority of whom have not been engaged in political action or discussion, will go to the polls and vote left with their first vote. I would say the same for votes at eighteen years of age. Very right and proper, but for those who think this will mean a mass increase in the left vote I fear there is a disappointment in store.
I was again the Communist candidate at Dundee in 1929, along with four others contesting for the two seats. No doubt because of the flapper vote, the Tories retained Frederick Wallace, a handsome military Tory gentleman who claimed to have fought the Russian Reds in 1919 after he had defeated the Germans. This sort of talk got him into serious trouble all through his campaign. The Liberals put up Henderson Stewart, a good looker and an able debater. Later he contested East Fife and was M.P. for that constituency for many years, pairing for a time with Bill Gallacher, who was M.P. for West Fife. Neddy Scrymgeour was the sitting member and was forward again in the interests of prohibition–although, be it noted, Neddy had been seven years M.P. for Dundee and all the time the public houses in the city had increased in number and the amount of whisky and beer consumed had likewise increased. In fact, during the years of Scrymgeour’s tenancy of the Dundee parliamentary seat the only trade in the city that had flourished was the liquor trade. Jute, ship-building, jam had their ups and downs but the liquor trade did well. In the 1924 general election Edmund Morel had been returned for Labour but died only months after taking his seat. In the resulting by-election Tom Johnstone, one of the early pioneers of the socialist movement, had stood for Labour and won. The Communists had not contested, giving Johnstone a clear run. By 1929 Johnstone had fallen out with some of the local right wingers and told them “where to put” their parliamentary seat, so a little lawyer fellow called Marcus stood for Labour in 1929. He was of Russian descent and was born in Grodno. His father, Nathan Marcus Tashen-ovsky, emigrated in 1911 and later Marcus became naturalised and took the family second name. At the start of the campaign the Scottish Nationalists declared they were to put up C. M. Greive, who was a rising young man in Scottish literature under the name of Hugh McDiarmid. I can’t remember why Hugh did not stand, but many years later he had a parliamentary contest in the 1964 general election as a Communist against the reigning prime minister, Sir Alex Douglas-Home.
The issues in the election for us were clear. Since the General Strike wages were at poverty level and unemployment was over two million. In Dundee in particular wages were below the national average in jute, and unemployment in all industries was rampant. The flapper vote was also important. In Dundee the 1924 electoral register showed 42,804 men and 35,493 women. The 1929 register showed 46,246 men and 62,880 women. It was estimated that in Dundee in 1929, 36,000 women voted for the first time in their lives. A number of candidates “cast their fly” for the flappers, and Harry Hope, a candidate in the neighbouring North Angus constituency, had the following advertisement in the newspaper on polling day:
TO THE WOMANHOOD OF ANGUS
VOTE HOPE
As can be readily guessed this left itself open to some bawdy jokes. The Dundee Tory candidate Fred Wallace added a bit of Christmas spice to his advertisement which read:
TO ALL WOMEN AND MEN OF GOODWILL
VOTE WALLACE
This showed the new importance of women. Up till then no one gave a damn for the women’s vote, accepting that most women did what some man told them to do.
I never had any claims to be beautiful, and as I was no chicken I treated the flappers as I did all others, with the greatest of respect, and sought to win their vote by reasonable political argument.
The campaign was a lively one, marred by a dirty attack by the Tories and the local press on Michael Marcus. Antisemitism was vigorously peddled by Tory canvassers who openly said a vote for Marcus was not a British vote but a vote for a Russian Jew. Unfortunately Marcus was neither a forceful personality nor an astute politician; he may have been a good lawyer, but he never really hit back in the right way at this sewer-type politics.
The Tory meetings were usually “snorters”, with many of our lads roasting the candidate at question time. Wallace had the real boss’s attitude, always wanting to dish out orders and tell everyone what they should do. But he wasn’t telling our fellows what to do at election meetings, they had been around too long for that. So Wallace complained to the press that at his meetings he was faced with dan audience of lions with Communist teeth”.
Of course he asked for much of what he got and maybe he baited the lads a bit. He was very fond of boasting how good a soldier he was and how he had fought and won in Northern Russia. I think he spoke so much about his military prowess that he began to believe it himself. Any-way, at his final rally he really let his verbosity get the better of him and shouted: “Men of Dundee, men of the fighting Black Watch with whom I had the great honour to fight shoulder to shoulder, we want our native land to flourish!” The truth was he was never in the Black Watch and according to the Dundee Courier, which took pleasure in giving him a full biography, he was with the Royal Artillery well behind the Black Watch in the fighting line. Strange how all the Tories contesting Dundee always wanted to appeal to the Black Watch for support. The funny thing was that if it had been left to the ex-Black Watch men to elect an M.P. the Communist candidate would have been a cert. Many of our supporters were men who had served in the Black Watch during the war, and had had enough and didn’t want any more wars. That’s why they campaigned for the Communist candidate.
But Wallace detested the Communists and Russia. One night our lads must have really got under his skin. The Courier reported he had had a rowdy meeting and had “thrown back” at his “tormentors” in the audience: “The practice of socialism has been operated in Russia since 1917 and has been a ghastly failure.” And for good measure, and to see that the voting public really got the message, in the same edition the Courier published a letter which said: “Bob Stewart and Marcus have not told the Dundee electors that under the Soviet government there are five million unemployed in Russia, that Moscow is swarming with beggars, that common people are huddled together worse than pigs, and that al homes in Moscow are under control of the government.” That last phrase could give a clue to the origin of the writer. My guess was he was a Tory landlord. Of course I tried to answer back, but in good British democratic parliamentary style the non-union D. C. Thomson press published neither my letters nor my speeches.
In the campaign we hammered home the lessons of the General Strike and the need for working-class unity. All the other candidates dodged the issue with general platitudes, except Wallace who said, “The General Strike marked an epoch in British industrial history, because for the first time for nearly a century since trade unions were formed, there has developed in the minds of trade union leaders the realisation that the strike weapon has outlived its usefulness.”
Our campaign, while not at the same high level as those of previous elections, was quite good. I remember a meeting in the Kinnaird Hall with over a thousand present, at which Tom Mann spoke for two hours, taking off his jacket midway through his speech because he said he was becoming a little heated. So was the candidate, waiting for his turn to speak. There was not much time left for me after Tom, but he did a valuable job in the election. He was a well built, handsome man and very, very popular with the women jute workers. He certainly could, with success, have made a play for the flapper vote on looks and physique. He was a powerful working-class orator, with a great gift of making friends readily.
At our final rally I had a speaker from Germany, comrade Gaspar, a member of the executive of the German Communist Party. He spoke that night of the emergence of the German fascist party and the utter refusal of the German social-democrats to unite with the German communists in face of the fascist menace. I wonder how many Dundonians in 1939, when Hitler declared war, thought of the speech made by Gaspar on working-class unity in the Caird Hall ten years earlier.
The main thing I remember about the 1929 parliamentary election campaign was the inability of the party to win votes from numbers of men and women who openly admitted that the policy of the Communists was correct. There was a profound fear that after five years of reactionary Tory government, the Tories might again be returned to power. There was an intense desire to get the Tories out, and to do this many voters who would otherwise have voted for the Communist candidates, voted Labour to get, as they said, a Labour government. Many thousands of men and women recognised the weakness of Labour with the right wing in control of the Labour Party, but they saw a Labour vote as the only alternative to Baldwin and the Tories. While in Dundee this feeling did not have the same effect as in the other constituencies where the Communists were contesting, near the end of the campaign in Dundee, Marcus, the Labour candidate, said publicly, “Give the second vote to Scrymgeour,” hoping Scymgeour would reciprocate, which he did. The Dundee result was:
Scrymgeour (Prob.) 50, 073
Marcus (Lab.) 47, 602
Henderson Stewart (Lib.) 33, 890
Wallace (Con.) 33, 868
Stewart (Comm.) 6, 163
The election resulted in a decided swing to Labour, which won 288 seats. The Tories won 250 seats and the Liberals 53.
Ramsay McDonald again visited Buckingham Palace and became prime minister. But in less than two years from McDonald’s taking office the truth of all the Communist Party had been saying in the 1929 parliamentary general election campaign was to become a living reality for the British working class.
On my return from Ireland I found the country in a political ferment. A Labour government, with Liberal support, had been formed arising from the general election of November 1923. This government, headed by Ramsay McDonald as prime minister, had run into trouble and was in no way solving the deep economic crisis. The cost of living was high, wages were low and unemployment still at a very high level. Despite this the big political discussion was taking place on foreign policy. The de jure recognition of the Soviet Union had been effected in the early days of the Labour government, and demands were being made by Labour M.P.s for this to be followed up by normal trading and diplomatic relationships.
This demand soon ran into difficulties. The Tories were vehemently against. They demanded compensation for British property in the Soviet Union which had been nationalised by the Soviet government, and also trading rights for British firms on Soviet territory. The first was realisable, but naturally the Soviet government would not entertain the latter. In Parliament Lloyd George supported the Tories, so with a Tory-Liberal coalition the minority Labour government was in difficulty. Pressure by Labour M.P.s, however, forced the government to open discussions with the Soviet government on compensation for confiscated British property, trading relations and a British loan to the Soviet Union.
The Soviet delegation arrived in Britain in April 1924, and negotiations under Arthur Ponsonby from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began immediately. By August all the problems had been settled except one: the compensation for British property. Then news came that negotiations had broken down. The Tories were jubilant, saying this showed that it was impossible to negotiate with these Bolsheviks. In this critical situation, when it was obvious that the future of the Labour government was in jeopardy, a number of Labour M.P.s went into action. One of them who played a leading part, and who later told the full story, was Edmund Morel, M.P. for Dundee, a man I knew well. Morel was secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, a champion of the colonial peoples and founder of the Congo Reform Association in 1904. Among his many books and pamphlets outstanding was Red Rubber, an exposure of the rubber slave trade in the Congo. Morel and the others had discussions with the Soviet delegation and then went to Ponsonby with a suggested formula. At first this was accepted, but later rejected by Ponsonby, and it was deadlock again. On the critical day when Parliament was to re-assemble and a parliamentary statement of the negotiations was to be made in the House of Commons, Labour M.P.s again saw the Soviet delegation and only four hours before the parliamentary statement was due agreement was reached by all parties in what were really last-minute negotiations. Edmund Morel later told the story of what the argument was about. The British government wanted the words “valid claims” inserted in the compensation agreement. The Soviet delegation suggested “valid and approved by both governments”. The Soviet government demanded they should have a say in what was “valid”. The eventual compromise which was finally accepted used the words “agreed claims”.
This draft treaty on trade was, however, never put into effect. It was clear that the Tories violently opposed any trade with the Soviet Union and, with the Liberals supporting them, the defeat of the Labour government was only a matter of time. The Communist Party estimated that the general election was at most only a few months away.
The party called for a closing of the working-class ranks and for an end to the divisions in the labour movement and a fight for the return of a majority Labour government based on the unity of the working class, with Communists being accepted with full rights in the Labour Party. We decided that no Communist candidates would run against Labour candidates when the election took place and instructed our branches to submit the names of Communists to the Labour selection conferences to go forward for selection with the Labour nominees. In some constituencies the nominations of Communists were ruled out by right-wing Labour, but in others Communists were nominated and eventually selected to stand as joint Communist-Labour candidates. In this way Saklatvala contested Battersea and won the seat. In all, seven Communists stood as Labour-Communist candidates and in Leeds Tom Mann lost a selection conference by two votes. Gallacher was only narrowly defeated in the Motherwell selection.
In Dundee, however, the position was different. It was a double-barrelled constituency, two seats for the city. There was only one Labour candidate, Edmund Morel. The other M.P. was Edwin Scrymgeour, the prohibitionist, who, while occasionally supporting Labour, was not officially connected with the Labour Party. We took a decision to contest Dundee and I was chosen as the candidate, thus becoming the only “clear” Communist candidate in the election. However, it was not the British-Soviet draft treaty that defeated the Labour government. The defeat came on a much smaller issue. Johnnie Campbell, who was then the editor of the Workers Weekly, the paper of the Communist Party, had written an article which the Crown held to be seditious. This contention was one which might have been difficult to sustain in Court and, on second thoughts, the Attorney General withdrew the charge. The Tories, hell bent for an election at any cost, raised an outraged cry. The Tory press claimed intimidation of the Labour government by the Communists and in parliament the Tories tabled a vote of censure on the government. This vote of censure was defeated, but a Liberal amendment to it seeking an “appointment or a select Committee to investigate ” the withdrawal of the charge against J. R. Campbell was carried against the government by 364 votes to 198. Next day, October 10, Ramsay McDonald announced the dissolution of Parliament.
Our party was first in the field in the Dundee hustings. I commenced my campaign with meetings on the 14th October. With me I had Harry Pollitt who, because he had been in Dundee with Gallacher in the previous elections, knew Dundee as well as his home town of Gorton. He was also a great favourite with the local shipyard workers, many of whom were to him “fellow boilermakers”. Also with me was Helen Crawfurd, a wonderful woman speaker invaluable in an election in a women’s town. And also Johnnie Campbell. Poor Johnnie, he always had to open his meetings with an apology: “I would much rather have discussed the election without dragging in personalities, but I will have to because if I don’t, you will.” After all, he was supposed to be the cause of the election, although he soon disposed of that in his speeches. Still, it was all grist to the mill and filled the meetings to capacity, with Johnnie always in top form.
The Dundee Tories and Liberals had made a pact for the election, running one candidate each, two votes -one Tory, one Liberal. The Liberal was Sir Andrew Duncan, a barrister from Kent, who boasted of Scots ancestry. This brought him his first mistake in the election. At his first meeting he was laying on the charm and said, “I come as a Scotsman among Scotsmen.” Then a voice from the audience put him right: “Hauf o’ wiz are Irish.” This was indeed true. At any Dundee meeting 50 per cent or more of the audience were Irish. Scrymgeour, who had lived all his life in Dundee, knew this and always deliberately campaigned for the Irish Catholic vote.
Early on in the campaign Harry Pollitt also gave Duncan a knock. Sir Andrew let it be known in the press that he wanted a debate with a trade unionist, preferably a shipyard worker, no doubt to show he knew the trade union position very well. The boilermakers got together and accepted the challenge and put forward as their speaker Harry Pollitt. The brave Sir Andrew then changed his pipe music. He would not debate with a Communist, he said, much to the glee of the local shipyard workers who put his gas at a peep for the rest of the campaign.
Sir Andrew Duncan’s running mate was a Tory called Frederick Wallace who had already contested Dundee in the 1923 General Election.
The Labour candidate was Edmund Morel, who as I have said had taken an important part in the British-Soviet negotiations on the trade treaty. When the Labour government was first formed he was tipped to be the first Foreign Minister, but he was much too left for Ramsay McDonald, who took the Foreign Ministry himself as well as being the Prime Minister. Morel was a strong candidate, a good speaker and always on the left, but he always hedged at being officially associated with the Communists. Privately he would say he hoped the Communists would win the second seat, but he would never say it publicly.
Edwin Scrymgeour was the sitting member and, while he stood as a prohibitionist, he campaigned for the second Labour vote. I said at the time he was the candidate from heaven who would steal a vote from all parties, Tory, Liberal, Labour and Communist, and then say he had a mandate for the abolition of the liquor trade. This in fact was a great joke at the time, because Dundee was one of the most “drunken” cities in Britain and many of those who voted for Scrymgeour could be seen every Saturday in life fou’ with the beer and whisky.
This election was one of the most rousing in Dundee’s long history of tousy election campaigns. From the day I opened my campaign on October 14th to my final meeting on the 28th I spoke to full houses only. On many occasions there were overflows. This went for every candidate. From the City Hall holding three thousand to the smaller halls holding a few hundreds, all were packed out. The main issues in the election, in fact almost the only two issues, were British-Soviet relations and employment with good wages. In Dundee these fused together because Dundee is a big textile town and before the war of 1914-18 a large flax manufacture was based on the export of flax from Russia. This had dried up and many flax workers were unemployed, so the question of British-Soviet trade was not an academic one in Dundee. It was on diplomatic relations between Britain and the Soviet Union that the big election fight took place.
I had just returned from my spell on the Communist International and my knowledge of the Soviet Union was standing me in good stead. I knew what I was talking about and could discuss developments in the Soviet Union at first hand. Morel, with his knowledge of British-Soviet trade discussions, was also campaigning well on this issue. This rattled Sir Andrew Duncan and his Tory running mate, and as they tried to answer the questions their meetings became rowdier and rowdier. They were under a constant barrage of interruptions, which was not unnatural because they began to insult people at the meetings. Many of the audience had been in dire straits and unemployed for months, and they retaliated by showing their disgust in good election fashion. The singing of “The Red Flag” at the end of the Tory and Liberal meetings became a commonplace event. The local newspapers, seeking to find a reason for this, accused the Communists of trying to break up the Tory-Liberal meetings. I was mad about this and wrote to the papers pointing out the Communists had a campaign in operation and this was stretching our resources to the limit and occupying 100 per cent of our time. We had no time to think about other candidates’ meetings.
So it was Morel and I for recognition and trade with the Soviet Union, Duncan and Wallace with their “down with the Bolsheviks and trust the boss” attitude, and in between came Scrymgeour talking of God and Heaven, the iniquity of the drink trade, appealing to the reason of the Labour voters, and in particular to the Irish Catholic voters. As the campaign went on he became more and more anti-Soviet, no doubt through pressure of the Catholics and in order to win Catholic support.
Of course the election hustings were full of good give and take questions and answers, with the Tory and Liberal mostly on the receiving end. The following question, noted by the press of the period and kept for posterity, is a good example. At Sir Andrew Duncan’s final rally, after he had concluded his final speech and was no doubt saying to himself, as all candidates do, “Well that’s finished,” the chairman asked for questions. Up jumped one bright fellow to ask: “As the only difference between Churchill and you is that Winnie sent us to war to slash the Germans whilst you stayed at home to slash wages, is there any reason why we should not give you the same dose as the Kiel Canal rat catcher?” Amid a storm of cheers Sir Andrew was heard to whimper, “I stand on my record.”
As the election campaign neared its end it became increasingly clear that Labour was gaining ground. It was at this point that the Zinoviev letter incident broke (1). This was one of the crudest political frauds ever inflicted on the British voter. It was a forged letter purporting to have been sent by the Communist International to the British Communist Party. On the Saturday before the election all the press in Britain had banner headlines: “Soviets Intervene in British Elections,” “Red Hands on Britain’s Throat”, and so on. Immediately Rakovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Britain, indignantly and emphatically denied the authenticity of the letter and categorically stated it a forgery. All Sunday the country waited for an explanation from Ramsay MacDonald, who was Foreign Minister, but nothing came. On Monday the local paper in Dundee, The Courier, carried a huge banner headline:
COMMUNIST PLOT-RAMSAY MACDONALD SILENT
While such a denial from the Soviet Ambassador was to be expected the fact remains that the socialist government, the foreign office, and Mr. McDonald personally were satisfied it was a genuine document and not a forgery.
Arthur McManus, who had taken my place on the Communist International and who was an alleged signatory to the letter from Zinoviev, was speaking at Manchester two days before the poll. In the audience were police and C.I.D. men. McManus denounced the document as a forgery and challenged the police to arrest him, but no one moved. The last thing the Foreign Office ever wanted was an investigation into the origins of the document.
On Tuesday, MacDonald made a statement casting doubt on the genuineness of the document, but the damage was done. The British electorate went to the polls without a clear statement from MacDonald, and the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in British political history had paid off. The result of the poll was a resounding Tory victory. On dissolution of Parliament the state of the parties was:
Tories 258
Labour 193
Liberal 158
After the election it was:
Tories 403
Labour 157
Liberal 38
The Liberals who had precipitated the election were smashed and never again returned as a main British parliamentary party. That was the outcome of their anti-Soviet policy and their demand for an investigation in the Johnnie Campbell case.
Edmund Morel held Dundee, with Scrymgeour second. The result was:
Morel (Lab.) 32, 864
Scrymgeour (Prob.) 29, 193
Wallace (Con.) 28, 118
Duncan (Lib.) 25, 566
Stewart (Comm.) 8, 340
After the count we mounted the platform to say our piece, but the Tory and the Liberal would not speak. They were sorely disappointed because they had really believed that the Zinoviev scare had won them the seats. Morel, knowing this, went for them, saying he would demand an immediate investigation from Parliament, which I think he did. Scrymgeour, safe in the second seat, found time to thank God for being good to him and thus saving the second seat from the Communist menace. He did not add but must have thought, “Yes, and with the aid of the Irish Catholic vote.”
With such a resounding victory at the polls the road was now open for a direct attack on the British working class. It certainly came.
Footnote (1): Some facts regarding the notorious letter came to light years after-wards. The letter was dated Moscow, September 15th 1924. It purported to be signed by three people: Zinoviev, President of the Presidium of the I.K.K.I., McManus, Member of the Presidium, Kuusinen, Secretary.
Zinoviev was not president of the presidium of the I.K.K.I. (Communist International) although he was president of the I.K.K.I. itself, and therefore would not sign himself as president of the presidium. Also, he always signed as G. Zinoviev. Secondly, McManus always signed as A. McManus. or Arthur McManus. Thirdly, Kuusinen was not the secretary of I.K.K.I The secretary was a man named Kolarov. To add to this mountain of obvious forgery the letter was headed from “the Third Communist International”. There was no Third Communist International. It was always referred to as “the Third International’ because it followed the First and Second Internationals, which were not Communist. These were such infantile mistakes that even a cursory examination would have shown the document to be a blatant forgery.
In later years it came to light that a Foreign Office official, Mr. J. D. Gregory, who was dismissed from the Foreign Office after an inquiry into some illegal currency deals, was stated to have been involved with some Russian emigrés in the forgery of the letter. This was never ultimately proved, but the whole story of the Zinoviev letter, dealt with in W. P. and Zelda K. Coates’ book A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations, is fascinating reading for all students of political history.
Breaking the Fetters 