Tag: Prison

It’s Not My War.

Bob Stewart: Conscientious Objector.

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.

Alan Stewart.

Comrades: Annie ‘Nan’ Stewart.

L-R Bob, Annie and Margaret Stewart. Photograph probably taken in Moscow around 1924.

Today’s post is about Bob Stewart’s youngest child, his daughter Annie who was my dad’s aunt.

Annie, otherwise known Little Nannie or Nan was born in Dundee on 30th November 1913. Her earliest memories would have been those of her father imprisoned for refusing to fight; her mother bringing up the family with the assistance of a legion of aunts and the contempt in which the general public held conscientious objectors such as Bob. Whether there was sympathy for the family among her neighbours I do not know but the common opinion that ‘conchies’ were cowards and traitors would have been part of the atmosphere that she grew up in. There was talk in the press of banning COs from positions such as teaching lest they contaminate the young and many, many similar stories. A law was even  passed in which they could be disenfranchised. Bob actually lost his vote in 1921, shortly after the Caerphilly by-election, when a jute merchant, John Willison, petitioned for him to be removed from the electoral register on the grounds that he had refused military service. Willison, a prominent Dundee Unionist, stressed that there was no political party behind his application and that he bore no ill will against Mr Stewart, it was simply that men of his ilk were “embittering people against doing their duty” and should face, “the full measure of the law.” So, from the time she was learning to walk to her first years at school Annie would have understood that her family stood for something and that the attacks these principles drew had to be stood up to.

L-R Harry Pollitt, Annie Stewart and Bob Stewart.
L-R Harry Pollitt, Margaret Stewart, Bob Stewart, Annie Stewart and Rose Cohen.

It was an unusual childhood. The Bolshevik revolution took place when she was four and it shaped the rest of her life. How could it not? In his study of CPGB members, Communism in Britain, 1920 – 39: From the Cradle to the Grave, Thomas Linehan points to the idea that the communist upbringing of ‘red diaper’ babies would help them withstand the future demands of capitalism but would also help prepare them physically and mentally to play a future role in the party organisation. It’s difficult not to view Annie as an example of this tendency. Bob went to work for the Comintern in 1923 and took Nan with him. At that time, travelling to the Soviet Union was not an easy task and not entirely legal. Whatever route Bob, Margaret and Annie took to get to their destination they would have risked arrest at certain stages and the journey would have been arduous and uncomfortable. The strangeness of leaving Dundee behind and settling in Moscow at the age of ten must have been overwhelming. In a Henry Sara slide taken at the Pushkin School she looks a little ill at ease and awkward amongst her classmates. However, the experience left her able to speak Russian – a language her parents never managed to learn.

Pushkin School: Nannie Stewart fifth from the right in the front row. Bob and Margaret just about visible in the back row. (Henry Sara Archive, Warwick Modern Records Centre)

The young Annie’s fluency with Russian is the focus of this remarkable news report in the Aberdeen Press and Journal dated 3rd June 1925:

WOMEN COMMUNISTS

Police Raid Glasgow Meeting.

GREETINGS IN SCOTS AND RUSSIAN.

Glasgow police raided yesterday the conference there of women Communists.

A demand for the names of the delegates failed to produce the desired results, and a request that each representative should speak produced remarks in braid Scots, Esperanto and Russian.

GLASGOW, Tuesday. Glasgow police raided the congress of women Communists in St Mungo Hall, Glasgow, to-day, five minutes before the dispersal of the meeting. Forty uniformed and plain-clothes men surrounded the hall, the plain clothes men entering the congress room. The visit of the police was regarded by the women as a comedy.

The plain-clothes men entered by the South York Street door. They swept aside the inner guard, and were confronted by Mr William Gallacher, who objected to the intrusion, and only four detectives and the aliens’ officer entered the congress room.

A Bit of Scots.

Immediately the presence of the police was known the women rose and greeted them by singing the “Internationale.” When quiet was restored, the police demanded the names of all the delegates present. This was refused, and the officers then asked that all the women present speak in turn, the request being made apparently for the purpose of detecting any foreign accent. This caused some hilarity, and Mrs Helen Crawfurd who presided shouted in braid Scots, “It’s a braw, bricht, meen-licht nicht the nicht, pipe clay, up the lum. Camarachanchoo.” Greetings in Esperanto were given by a delegate of Irish birth from Alexandria and an 11 year old girl, Nannie Stewart, daughter of the Communist candidate for Dundee at the last general election addressed the detectives in Russian. With her parents, she lived for some time in Russia and had been a pupil in a Russian school for about a year.

The officers then withdrew. Their search was obviously for the purpose of discovering if any foreign delegates, whose presence had been banned by the Home Office, were in the meeting.

The Girl’s Greeting.

Little Nannie Stewart told the Press that what she had said to the police was, “I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t care.” Asked what the police replied, she said, “I don’t think they understood me, because they never answered.” A remarkable sidelight on the intensity of the Communist instruction of the young was revealed in her remark, “They are a lot of moral cowards, any way.” The statements in Esperanto were interpreted simply as, “I thank you for your visit.”

Some of the women Communists were in terror, and Mrs. Crawfurd remarked, facetiously, that she thought it was a great compliment to the women’s section of the Communist Party that, while four detectives were considered sufficient for the main congress the previous day, over 30 officers were sent to the women’s conference. Others laughingly described the raid as “A rare sporting finish.”

The police refused to make any official statements.

I adore this article. As much as her youthful commitment to Marxist-Leninist revolution is apparent in this encounter, many decades later she became a resolute anti-communist – even going so far as to join the Conservative Party. And, after what she experienced – her husband murdered in Stalin’s purges with her and their baby son escaping by the skin of their teeth – who could blame her?

After Bob, Annie is the most important character in the book I’m writing. It wasn’t until recently that I realised I have never seen a photograph of her as an adult. I will have to do some more digging.

Alan Stewart.

PS – Many thanks, once again, to Maurice J Casey. This time for turning up the photographs of the Stewart family and their friends in Moscow in a newly discovered cache of letters belonging to Rose Cohen. For the upteenth time buy his book Hotel Lux!

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 25: The Right Wing Labour Leaders Sell Out.

Ramsay Macdonald.

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!

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 17: Red Agent in Glasgow.

Mikhail Borodin

As the membership of the Communist Party grew and our organisation developed, better relations with the Labour Party were established in many districts. At the 1922 Labour Party Conference held in Edinburgh in June, the right wing on the National Executive Committee placed a change of rule on the agenda that would prevent such unity and indeed would go a long way towards isolating the Communists from the labour movement. The rule in question concerned the eligibility of delegates to local and national Labour Party conferences and the selection of candidates, and the changes read:

a) Every person nominated to serve as a delegate shall individually accept the constitution and principles of the Labour Party.

b) No person shall be eligible as a delegate who is a member of any organisation having for one of its objects the return to Parliament or any Local Governing Authority of a candidate or candidates other than such as have been endorsed by the Labour Party or have been approved as running in association with the Labour Party.

This change of rule, carried by a two-to-one majority at the conference, was directly aimed at the Communist Party and created a new position in the British labour movement. It was discussed by the Communist Party National Executive, who decided to recommend to their members that where it was necessary, such as in Trades and Labour Councils, Communists should accept the constitution of the Labour Party, and that where Communists were standing for parliamentary or local council elections they should be withdrawn unless there was agreement with the local Labour Party, thus fulfilling the conditions required by the change of rule.

To discuss the executive’s recommendations, I called a special extended meeting of the Scottish District Executive, but fate decreed that we were to have something more on our plate in this discussion. At this time Borodin, a member of the Communist International, was in Britain, and had previously visited a number of districts in England and Wales. He was a lawyer by profession, an erudite and well-informed man. He came to Britain to get an on-the-spot understanding and appreciation of British politics and the way in which the British Communist Party was working.

When I met him in Scotland he told me he wanted to meet people in the labour movement, to get to know them, their background and their attitude to politics. He said I was the only party organiser who had really been able to do this for him. I think that was flattery. He knew all the fine arts of winning people. I had a number of discussions with him and, while I was undoubtedly able to help him in assessing the Scottish political scene, he also greatly assisted me in reaching a deeper appreciation of the way a serious politician must work to win mass support. He patiently explained the value of international work, international trade union contact, international exchange of information in the cultural and educational fields, all of which was very new to me.

At the extended Scottish Executive meeting, Willie Gallacher spoke for the National Executive, emphasising the tactics of the right wing of the Labour Party to drive the Communist members out of the working-class movement, out of the Trades and Labour Councils and finally out of the trade unions. Naturally Mr. Brown, for that was the name Borodin used, asked to speak. He was quite critical of the way a number of Communist members were working. “When I saw the Communist delegates at the Labour Party Conference,” he said, “I thought- if this is how the party is handling the situation then it is manœuvring very poorly.” Borodin was a great story-teller, and went on to say: “It is easy not to get drunk when you pass every saloon bar, but to be good politicians our members must learn to enter these places and not get drunk. To be able to seek affiliation to the Labour Party, the greatest saloon bar I have ever seen, to drink in the bar without getting drunk, that is what is needed. No party can avoid these places.” He talked about the Glasgow Trades and Labour Council. “Here is a basic working-class organisation with 362 affiliations representing 126,116 members. We have fifteen Communists representing their organisations. What do they do? Are we to allow them to be thrown out or do they stay inside and conduct work for the unity of the working class and for working-class policy? Do we fight on ground favourable to the right wing Labour people or on ground favourable to the left wing? Revolutionary tactics demand they stay inside.”

Despite the support of Willie Gallacher, Johnnie Campbell and Mr. Brown for these proposals, there was much criticism in the ensuing discussion of the National Executive’s recommendations, particularly the one seeking to withdraw our candidates where we got no agreement with the Labour Parties. We had already selected candidates for the next general election. J. V. Leckie, Tommy Clark and Ned Douglas, all members of the Scottish Executive, and various other comrades, had a real go. Frankly I could see their point of view and said so in the discussion. At one o’clock in the morning it was voted that we adjourn the meeting on the understanding that we would re-assemble the following week and try and finalise the position.

But the next meeting did not last long. We had just started when the Glasgow Criminal Investigation Department intervened in force. There were dozens of policemen and plainclothes men-they must have been concealed on all the stairs round about. They burst into the meeting and commenced to take all our names and addresses until they came to Brown. “Who is he?” they asked me.”A Yugoslav journalist visiting Scotland, interested in the Scottish Labour Movement,” I answered truthfully. “He’s the man we want,” and they left, taking Borodin with them. This was not an entirely new experience for me, but I admit to being worried during the questioning because I was standing beside a little sideboard we had in the office, hoping they would just leave me there. Fortunately they did. In the sideboard lay Borodin’s briefcase and his private papers. He also left a beautiful big panama hat which would have been a major sensation in Sauchiehall Street any day. I can’t remember who fell heir to that. Once the police had left, we set to work. Goods, chattels and papers were taken away to safe custody.

We arranged for food to be taken to Duke Street Gaol where Borodin lay on remand awaiting trial. This the law allowed. We had a relay of comrades who carried out this duty very willingly and well. The privilege stopped and then he had to exist on the normal prison diet which, in those days, to Borodin, must have been really nauseous, a real punishment indeed only kail and porridge daily.

Our most important task was to find a lawyer to take charge of his defence. Our choice was an ex-bricklayer who had won his way into the legal profession; his name was Alex McGillivray. He worked night and day. In the course of the case Borodin and McGillivray developed a great admiration and a real affection for each other. I never heard a lawyer speak of a client with such profound comradely feeling. Even so, the defence was not a smooth run. Borodin was trained in American law and practice and Alex had great difficulty in persuading him that this would not take a trick in the much more subtle practices of the Scottish Court.

The newspapers made a meal of the incident. “Underground Agent of Communism Caught”; “Red Agent in Glasgow” were two of the headlines. On Wednesday, 3oth August 1922, Borodin appeared in the Glasgow Court. The Procurator Fiscal was J. D. Strathearn and Borodin was charged that, at 156 Vincent Street, Glasgow, he (a) failed to produce a passport to the Registration Officer; (b) failed to produce a registration certificate; (c) refused to answer questions.

The Procurator Fiscal said Mr. Brown, alias Borodin, was a Yugoslav journalist, in Britain without the knowledge or authority of his country. How he came to Britain was not known. The British Intelligence considered him a dangerous person because he was sent to this country to foster revolution and had been found in Glasgow about to deliver an address. The C.I.D. considered his arrest very important. He had previously been in Britain, but on this occasion had only been in Glasgow one day (a big build-up for the efficiency of the Glasgow C.I.D., but a lie). The Procurator Fiscal asked for a prison sentence and deportation. The sentence was six months’ imprisonment with deportation immediately on release.

Note from Special Branch about Borodin’s imprisonment.


Borodin served his time in Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow. He did not like jail, a sentiment I strongly shared with him. He said Barlinnie was colder than Siberia and having sampled both he would be a good judge of that. We did our best to cheer him up while he was on remand, taking in food and news of the outside world. I remember buying one of those iron plates that hold hot water and keep the food warm, to take into prison. Probably because of the coldness of the prison, he always asked for hot food.

Borodin was unfortunate in prison. He worked in the laundry and was badly scalded on the feet and legs with boiling water. Six months pass slowly in prison but fast enough outside. I got special visits to see him and much of our discussion dealt with his deportation. He was like a bird in a cage and his release and deportation must have been a welcome relief to him.

I had to consult with the Russian Trade Delegation about Borodin’s deportation. They were stubborn and, in my opinion, unreasonable people and I became a real angry man. However, I finally persuaded them I was right and on his release off Borodin sailed.

I met Borodin again on my first visit to Moscow when I went there to work on a British Commission. Borodin was very helpful to me during this long survey. After this I was asked to return to Moscow to work at the Comintern headquarters. I was very reluctant and doubtful about my competence to do this work but Borodin pleaded with me to accept. “Bob,” he said, “you come. I will give you all the help you need.” When I arrived in Moscow some time later, with my wife and daughter, as a delegate from the British Communist Party to the Comintern, Borodin had gone, I think to China. Anyway, he was not there to give the “every help” he had promised.

Naturally the Borodin arrest had a profound effect on the Scottish Party. There was an inquisition amongst ourselves as to how the leak had taken place. I began to treat the work with greater carefulness. Afterwards, when the full story was known, we discovered that the leakage did not come from Scotland but from further South.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 16: The Caerphilly By-election.

Election Poster 1921.

This was the first parliamentary election ever to be contested by the British Communist Party. The decision to contest was taken by the Party Executive on July 16th 1921. The main reasons were, firstly, the severe attack on the party at the time sixty-eight leading Communists had been arrested and many of them, like myself, were doing hard labour. Secondly, the economic position was becoming desperate. In July, the unemployment figures, according to the Labour Gazette, were 2,178,000. Thirdly, it was a mining constituency and the betrayal of the miners by the right-wing Labour leaders had just taken place. Black Friday was only a few months before the by-election. During the miners’ struggle the party had supported them wholeheartedly throughout and in fact was the only political party to give full support, and we were therefore entitled to stand in a mining constituency. No doubt the reason that I was selected as the candidate was because I had been arrested for delivering speeches in favour of the miners’ wage demands and, when the election date was announced, was actually in jail only a few miles from the constituency. For these reasons the party decided that a contest was necessary and completely justified.

The selection of a Labour candidate created some trouble. A whole number of right-wing labourites, including Ramsay McDonald, were angling for what was considered a safe seat. However, the miners were so disgusted with the action of the right-wingers during the struggle of the Triple Alliance (miners, transport workers and railwaymen) and the final sell-out of Black Friday, that they had no hope of support from the miners’ lodges. The eventual choice of candidate for Labour was Morgan Jones. Like myself, he had been a conscientious objector during the war, but only on religious grounds. He was one of the big guns of the Independent Labour Party, a Baptist lay preacher and at the time of the election, Chairman of the Bible Classes in the valley and, as Tommy Jackson said, “this endeared him to the old women of both sexes”. He was a nice chap but not a virile working-class politician. The Coalition (Tory- Liberal) candidate was Ross Edmunds.

Morgan Jones had the full Labour election machine behind him- the Labour Party, the Miners Federation and the Daily Herald. Even the Free Church Council campaigned vigorously on his behalf. The Daily Herald laid it on thick. “A brilliant young man with a promising career before him–a man who was born among you a fine Baptist who can speak Welsh.”

The government candidate, Edmunds, had the traditional Tory and Liberal Party machines and all the capitalist newspapers on his side. To match this, we were a handful of rebels, maybe sixty in all mostly strangers to the district–with no election machinery, no tradition, no money, nothing to give except the “message” of working-class struggle to gain political power. Our main slogan during the election was ” All Power To The Workers”. Yet we conducted such a powerful political campaign that three days before the poll the Labour Party got the wind up, and in the Labour camp, with its big battalions, the word went out to smash the Communists. The Labour Party bullied, cajoled and wheedled and finished with an SOS- “Don’t split the vote and let the Coalition candidate in”, while the chapels worked overtime calling for the protection of Morgan Jones from the ungodly Reds.

We had a wonderful team of speakers- -Bill Gallacher, Helen Crawfurd and John McLean from Scotland, Walton Newbold, Arthur McManus, Bert Joy, Harry Webb, Joe Vaughan, who came within a hair’s breadth of winning Bethnal Green for the Communist Party in the 1924 parliamentary election, Tommy Jackson and myself. Open-air speaking was our strength. We opened our meetings in the Square in Caerphilly at ten o’clock in the morning and closed them at eleven o’clock at night. We swept the Coalition candidate supporters from the streets altogether, they retired from this arena defeated. Early on in the campaign, a Coalition speaker challenged Harry Webb during one of his speeches to a debate, and this was arranged to take place at Abertridwr. The hour arrived for the debate but not the Coalition speaker; he did not turn up. Bill Gallacher had a debate in public with a group headed by Captain Gee, VC. It was a political massacre of Coalition policies. One of my happiest recollections of the election was of a meeting when Edmunds asked me to state where I stood in relation to the industrial strife in British industry, and then I watched his face as I replied. His fixed conception of the inevitability of the master-worker permanent industrial relationship took a very hard knock.

I remember one night Gallacher and I were speaking at a place called Sengenet. The local synod had been having a meeting and when they finished a number of ministers came around the meeting to have some fun. “Ah! The Bolsheviks! Why don’t you read the Bible?” shouted one of them. Now that was a real question! Challenging Bill Gallacher and me to read the Bible! We gave them Bible lessons they had never dreamed of. Then, when they were quietened, and the audience were laughing their heads off, I told them quietly, “That’s what you get for putting people like Gallacher and me in gaol and making the Bible compulsory reading.”

Another time Tommy Jackson was holding forth to an audience in Caerphilly, when on looking up he noticed that the tower of the castle was leaning to one side. “There you are,” he said, “even the castle tower is leaning to the left.” It was just as well he was holding the meeting at that stance because if he had gone to the other side he would have seen it leaning to the right. Still, Tommy was always one to make the best of any situation.

Apart from our splendid team of propagandists we had dozens of hard workers on the knocker, selling our pamphlets, chalking, arguing in the streets and in the pubs. Everywhere there were people, our fellows were there. Many of them were unemployed and had come from all over Scotland, London, the Midlands and from every part of Wales- to help the party. To go into the committee rooms late in the evening and watch this bunch getting their shake-downs ready for the night was like walking into a picture from John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World. But they were a real bunch of first-class fighters. Dai Davies had charge of the Election Address and the job was done competently and on time.

In our campaign it was the transport that took the eye. One national newspaper talked of “Bolshevik emissaries rushing through the Caerphilly Division in expensive cars.” Actually, what happened was that Jimmy Shand came down with his big car from Liverpool and it did valuable service. It was certainly a big flash car; it seemed to hold dozens at a time and with great speed transported speakers and workers to the assigned places. Jimmy was possibly one of the best car drivers I ever knew, certainly one of the few I would sit back and trust on a pitch-black night, driving on a Welsh mountain-side.

The night before the poll I was talking to some journalists who were covering the election. They said, “Your speakers are first class, they have made a great impact. They have destroyed any chance the Coalition candidate had of pulling a patriotic vote-catching stunt, but in attacking and exposing the weakness of his policy you have created a real fear that a split vote will let the Coalition candidate in. You have frightened the Labour crowd and made them work as they have never done before. Your campaign has made the voters class-conscious enough to make them vote Labour but not enough to make them whole-hog Communists.” One should never under-estimate the wisdom of press reporters when speaking off the record and not for their papers, because the final result on polling day bore out their estimation:

Morgan Jones (Lab.) – 13, 699

Ross Edmunds (C. & L.)- 8, 957

Bob Stewart (Comm.) – 2, 592

We lost our deposit. We had spent all our money. In a constituency twenty miles broad, to cross which meant climbing three mountains real ones, not home-made mountains, as Ernie Brown called the slag heaps at the pits. We had given all the energy we had in a tremendously exhausting campaign. What did we get in return? In South Wales mining districts in 1921 there was mass unemployment, a psychology of gloom and despair. Labour was chanting “Leave it all to Parliament- direct action is dead”. We roused enthusiasm in many who had lost hope; we won an understanding that action by the rank and file was essential. We put light back in eyes grown leaden with despair, the spring back in the step of many a young miner, we painted a picture of a future of opportunity and prosperity.

For the first-ever Communist parliamentary election contest this was a real achievement. As the crowds waited for the result of the election, Gallacher, in his inimitable way, started a sing-song and soon everyone had joined in. When the result was announced, you would have thought by the shout that greeted the Communist vote that we had won the seat. We did not win the seat but we won many other things including, most of all, the appreciation that the British Communist Party had a right to take its place in parliamentary elections, against the alleged statesmen whose policies spelt ruin to Britain.

Comrades: Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky (Part One).

Anatomy Naumovich Kaminsky (1907-1941)

Where to begin? It’s a troubling, ultimately tragic part of the story and some of it is truly inexplicable. Perhaps the best way to deal with it is to set out the information as simply as I can.

What we knew was this. At some point in the early 1930s Bob Stewart’s daughter, Annie (my dad’s Aunt Nan) married a ‘Russian’ and they went to live in Moscow. We didn’t know his name nor had we ever seen a photograph of him. At some point Nan gave birth to a baby boy – my dad’s cousin Greg. Soon after this Nan’s husband was killed in Stalin’s purges. Nan fled with their infant child back to London. Information about her husband was almost impossible to come by. I have no idea how they managed to escape. In the years that followed, Nan remarried, had two more children and remained a member of the Communist Party until 1956.

For me, all of this was rather abstract. Dad had a lot of family somewhere out there but was rarely in contact with them. Until recently, apart from visits to my grandfather when I was a toddler, the only other person I’d ever met from my father’s side was Greg. That was at my brother’s wedding just over a decade ago. I only spoke to him briefly as I was on best man duties. All I can really remember is how strange it was to be speaking to somebody who bore such a strong resemblance to my dad and yet was someone who was to all intents and purposes a complete stranger. I never made the effort to remain in touch. I wish I had.

After my father died, I started reading through the security files on Bob Stewart that the National Archives had digitised and put online. Trying to find glimpses of who he was before he was our dad. To begin with, I knew very little about the Communist Party or our family. I tended to focus on the later files as during that period MI5 weren’t simply intercepting Bob’s post and tailing his movements but bugging his offices and tapping his phone. Rather than squinting at spidery 1920s handwriting and trying to work out what it all meant I could easily read the transcripts of conversations and, through their voices, almost begin to get to know these people who were long gone.

I started looking at the files collected during 1956. The year that Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech condemning the crimes of Stalin and the first official recognition about what had gone on in the decades before. At this time Nan was living in a large house in North London with her family and also her father who was nearing eighty but still involved in the secret side of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Most of the documents in that file focus on the general disquiet about the revelation in ‘secret speech’ felt by those at the CPGB’s HQ at Covent Garden. However, a more personal impact is outlined in the transcript of a phone call Nan made to her sister in law Margaret on 10th August 1956.

O/G call from NAN CAPLAN to MARGARET STEWART, BOB’S daughter in law. HARRY is back, and DRONA, (the father of NAN’s son GREGORY CAPLAN) was definitely shot in 1941. They are both shattered by it. HARRY came to see BOB and NAN insisted on seeing him. She says there is not one of the five brothers in KRONA’s (sic) family left. She threatened that if HARRY does not give her justice she’ll follow him to every meeting at which he speaks. BOB’s threatening to leave (The house? The party?) She would like her brother RAB STEWART to come and see her. BOB is going away next week so they will arrange it.
(KV2/2790 – Security File on Robert Stewart held at the National Archives.)

‘HARRY’ was Harry Pollitt, the leader of the CPGB, who had gone to Russia in part to find out what had happened to the family members of several of his own colleagues and friends. Of course, this transcript raises so many questions. How had they lived with this trauma for so long? How had they maintained their commitment to the CPGB in all that time in the face of it? What had they already known?

At this stage I still did not know the identity of Nan’s husband. From the battered suitcase that had been up in the loft, every old photograph or letter in Russian that I sifted through proved a dead end. So too did the references to KRONA or DRONA in the transcript- a nickname that didn’t seem to crop up elsewhere. However, later on in the files I did find a reference that linked Greg’s father to Grigory Kaminsky and this was the first real breakthrough in my search.

Grigory Kaminsky

Grigory Kaminsky was the People’s Commissar for Health of the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1937. He set up the Soviet health system, improved the production of medicine and medical training and battled malaria in the USSR. Evidently, he was also Nan’s brother-in-law. However, in 1937 he made speech in which he condemned the wrongful arrests of people and accused Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, of counter revolutionary activities. As a result, he was arrested and then executed by firing squad in February 1938. Then, it seems, the NKVD went for the rest of his family.

Now I had a surname I went back to the earlier files from the 1920s and 1930s and managed to find documents that linked Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky and Annie Stewart together which speculated about whether they were married. So, now I knew who he was but still no idea of what he looked like or any real details of what had happened to him. My first port of call would have been to search for him through the Memorial website. Memorial is the Russian human rights organisation set up to investigate the crimes of the Stalin era and beyond. They’d amassed records of all known victims in a ceaseless effort to record every human rights violation. However, last year it was closed down after years of intimidation by the Putin regime. During one court hearing the state prosecutor announced that Memorial was “creating a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state.”

Screenshot of the information I found on Anatole Kaminsky. Apparently the information is from a database of “Victims of political terror in the USSR”; Moscow, execution lists -Kommunarka.

Despite Memorial being closed down I think I’ve still managed to find a record of what exactly had happened to Anatole. It appears that there are several websites that have ‘backed up’ the information held by Memorial and similar agencies and these have not all been shut down yet. Not being a Russian speaker, I can’t fully judge the reliabilty of the website I found but, as key parts of the information held on Anatole Kaminsky match what’s held in the MI5 files, I am reasonably sure that this is what happened.

On June 20th 1938 NKVD officers arrived at Anatole Kaminsky’s Moscow flat on the St. Malaya Dmitrovka. They arrested him on charges of espionage and participation in counter revolutionary organisations. He remained in custody for the next three years and was eventually convicted on 8th July 1941 shortly after the Nazis invaded the USSR. His sentence was noted down as ‘VMN’. This stood for ‘Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya’ which translates as ‘the supreme measure of punishment’. In other words, the death penalty. On July 28th the sentence was carried out. They took him to the Kommunarka shooting ground on the outskirsts of Moscow where his body lies alongside thousands of other victims to this day. He was 34 years old.

Anatole was rehabilitated by the Khrushchev regime in 1956. Rehabilitation would have had to have been requested and I assume it was Harry Pollitt who put that in motion or it might have been Bob on his visit to Moscow in August that year. That’s as far as justice stretched.

In November this year I finally saw some photographs of Anatole, one of which is reproduced at the top of this article. They were attached to his MI5 security file held at the National Archives. I spent the morning reading all about the six years he spent in Britain before he returned to the Soviet Union and the dreadful fate that awaited him. That afternoon I met, for the very first time, another of my dad’s cousins. It was Rab and Margaret’s daughter Linda. It had been Margaret who Nan had rang up after discovering what had happened to her husband in that summer in 1956. It was an emotional meeting and we covered a lot of ground in the few hours we were together. She could not believe I had found photographs of ‘Natte’ as he’d been known. He’d died long before she was born and she’d never seen a picture of him either. Of course she was familiar the story and knew that her aunt and cousin had got away by “the skin of their teeth.” When I showed her the photographs on my phone she was instantly struck by the resemblance to Greg who she’d known well and who died in 2019. I was glad I was able to show her these images. I wish that I could have shown them to my father. Above all, I wish I could have shown them to Greg.

Alan Stewart.

Thanks to Linda Stewart, Ian Stewart, Ruth Holliday and Maurice Casey for all their help.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 15: In Gaol Again.

HMP Cardiff.

In 1921 I was attending the Party’s National Executive in London. It was close to May Day and McManus, who was booked to speak at a May Day meeting in South Wales, said he could not go and asked me if I would like to take his place. “Sure,” I said, “I have never been to South Wales and it will be a new experience.” As it turned out it was.

I went down by train to Aberdare but before reaching there the train stopped at a small station and along the platform came a group of fellows shouting, “Bob Stewart, Bob Stewart!” I stuck my head out of the window and said, “That’s me.” “Can you do a meeting for the Party in Mountain Ash tomorrow night?” they asked. “Yes, I’ll be there.” So, after the meeting in Aberdare I travelled to Mountain Ash. The meeting was in a cinema and was crowded out. As usual at the time, the “splits” were in the boxes taking notes of my speech, but this happened at all meetings so I ignored them. The meeting finished and the local fellows said they were very pleased with the attendance and the effect. The repercussions were then still unknown.

I returned to London, and on the following Saturday, 7th May 1921, came the police raid on the party offices at King Street, Covent Garden, when Inkpin the general secretary was arrested. The raid was made without a warrant, under the Emergency Regulations Act. It was carried out by Detective-Inspector Parker, acting under the instructions, so he said, of the Director for Public Prosecutions.

During the raid all personnel in the office were rounded up from their individual rooms and brought to the general office on the ground floor of the building. The rooms were ransacked and, while this was going on, the homes of the office workers, even those of the girl clerks, were being searched. The police authorities certainly put on all the trimmings to build the raid up into a first-class political scare.

When Inkpin came into the general office and he exploded at Parker for the unwarranted intrusion into private property. “I demand to see your warrant to search these premises,” he said. “I don’t need a warrant,” replied Parker. “I am acting under the Emergency Regulations.” Parker then started to question Inkpin about the publication and sale of the Communist Party pamphlet called The Statutes of the Communist International. “Who wrote the book?” asked Parker. “What do you mean who wrote it?” said Inkpin. “These are the Statutes adopted by the 2nd Congress of the Communist International.” “Where did the books come from?” persisted Parker. “They came from Moscow, from the Communist International,” replied Inkpin. During the interrogation Inkpin again protested to Parker about the manner in which the police were acting, forcing their way into all the rooms in the building, sorting out files of correspondence obviously with the intention of taking them away. But Parker brushed this aside and kept on asking questions about the pamphlet The Statutes of the Communist International. Inkpin continued to answer truthfully this was a record of the decisions of the Communist International which was sent by the International not only to Britain but to most countries throughout the world.

Now Detective Inspector Parker might have been a good man at detecting crime, but he did not seem to have the elementary knowledge required to comprehend the simple working of an international body. Maybe, of course, he had had his instructions not to try to understand. Anyway, after fifteen minutes of this sham he stopped asking questions and started giving instructions. To Inkpin he said, “I am going to arrest you under the Emergency Regulations Act No. 19. I am further going to search the premises and take possession of anything I think fit under an order signed by the Chief of Police.” He then turned to another detective and said, “Mr Hole, here is the order,” and to “Inkpin, “Come with me.” “What, without a warrant?” said Inkpin. “None necessary,” was the reply and he turned to leave. It was then he spotted me standing in a corner trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, but obviously not succeeding. “Who is that man?” he barked. “That’s Mr Stewart,” said Inkpin. “Get his name and address, and the name and addresses of all the others.” And with that little lesson of how democracy works in this land of the free he turned, taking Inkpin with him, and disappeared out of the door.

The place was alive with police and plain-clothes men. I ran from room to room trying to salvage what I could, but the police ransacked the place, almost everything went, even to the paper and the stencils. There were a number of spare files of our paper Communist and I knew that McManus had some papers ‘filed’ away for safety. I said to the policemen who were carting all the material away for examination., “Here, take these away; they are only in the damned way here. You’ll be doing something useful then.” “We don’t need these,” was the reply, “we have files of them ourselves.” So that saved something. After the raid, in the evening, I went out to try and contact some of the Executive members.  I went to the Corner House in the Strand and luckily, I bumped into a few of them and learned that there was to be a meeting at Bill Mellor’s house later to discuss what we could do under the circumstances. After the discussion, I had an argument with McManus because I said I thought that Mellor was deciding to leave us-to get out. McManus said I was a fool, but I was eventually proved right; William Mellor, despite all his thunder and aggressive revolutionary phrases, was afraid of being on the wrong side of the police authorities, and a short time after left the party.

After the meeting, I was sent to get a lawyer for Inkpin, to Torrington square, to see WH Thompson, a lawyer who was on the left. I found him in a strange way. I was ascending the stairs to his place when a young fellow came running past me. Suddenly, he stopped and said, “Jesus Christ! Bob Stewart!” “The latter’s right,” I replied. “What brings you here?” This fellow had been a conscientious objector in Wormwood Scrubs when I was there, so we wore the same old school tie. I explained the position. He worked for WH Thompson. He said, “He’s not here but I’ll tell you where to find him.  He has gone to see his girl friend,” and he gave me the address. I found WH, explained the position, where Inkpin was- Snowhill Prison- and he assured me that I could leave everything to him. I returned to my hotel in Villiers Street, near the Strand, a good evening’s work done. As I entered two big fellows ‘took’ me, one on each side. “Your name Stewart, Robert Stewart?” one of them said. “Yes, a good Scottish name.” “Well, we want you, we have a warrant out for your arrest.” Naturally, I thought it was in connection with the raid on the party office, but as soon as I got to Cannon Row Police Station I discovered I was booked at the request of the Welsh police for speeches made in Aberdare and Mountain Ash. So, I was stuck in a cell, arrested for sedition. I was interrogated by an inspector, a very clever fellow, to his own way of thinking. “Ah! I know you,” he said. “I have heard you speaking in Dumbarton.” “Up on the rock?” I asked. “Sure, there was always a big crowd there.” There was never a meeting on Dumbarton Rock in all history, so I continued to kid him but he twigged it and finally closed up.

Next day I was taken to Wales, to the Abercynon Gaol where I rested the night, and the day after I went before the magistrate. He was an old fellow, sitting at his desk. “Your name Robert Stewart?” he asked. “Yes, but what’s going on?” I replied. “You’re in Court.” “What Court? Only you, me and a policeman?” “Yes, and you are remanded to the Assizes.” And that was the strangest court I was ever in, but then the Welsh do many things in strange ways. Back I went to the cell and the policeman said, “I want to take your fingerprints.” “Not mine, I am no criminal, I draw the line at that.” “We’ll see about that,” he said and went off but he did not return for the fingerprints.

In due course I was taken to the Assizes at Pontypridd. A bunch of snuffy magistrates, local publicans and others of that ilk. The prosecutor was a little fellow called Lloyd. The charges were seditious speeches. Little Lloyd had a real go. He built up a terrible case against me, and said I should be ashamed to call myself a British subject, I was an agitator coming into the district in troublesome times stirring up strife and hatred, saying the miners were being treated worse than German prisoners and that Jimmy Thomas was a traitor to the working class- which appeared to be sedition, I don’t know why. In passing I may add that the selfsame Mr Lloyd was some time later pinched for embezzlement , but I suppose that that would not trouble his loyalty to Britain. The witnesses said their piece. The local secretary, who was a canny lad named Foot, was very good. But the other party witness, Billy Picton, undid the good work. Billy was one of the aggressive type; good in an industrial struggle, but not much use in a court of law. Asked about my reference to miners being treated worse than German prisoners, he replied, “Well, it’s bloody true, isn’t it?” – not very helpful in a court in which the scales have already been loaded against you. In the long run the trial came to an end. The magistrate said a lot of wise words, then asked if there was anything known about a past record. Innocent like, of course. Then out came the dossier. Tried, court-martialled; tried, court-martialled, on and on. When he finished reading out the record, I looked at him and said quietly, “A good record.” The magistrate said that this sort of thing must not be allowed to continue, it would not continue, and so on. The sentence would have to be appropriate to the offence. I would be made an example. The sentence was three months’ hard labour. Three months’ hard. You can do that, as the old lags say, on the door knob.

Well, there I was inside again. In Cardiff Gaol. Interesting, because Cardiff being a big seaport the gaol is very cosmopolitan- men from all nationalities are inside and going around the ring at exercise you saw all colours and all kinds of men. For the first three days I sat sewing a pillow case. That was my hard labour, putting in stitches and pulling them out again. Of course, reading the Bible in between. This was the compulsory reading, but a very valuable book for left wing propagandists. One day the artisan warder came to see me. “What the hell are you sewing pillowcases for?” he demanded. “You’re a carpenter, aren’t you?” I told him what I thought about his pillowcases, his prison and his magistrates, but he only laughed. He turned out to be a good sort. He didn’t like clergymen and that was an instant bond between us. The prison chaplain at Cardiff and I could not get on. Charlie Chaplin we called him. This was because of the way he walked, not because of his humour. One day in my cell he said to me, “Mr Stewart, in cases of your kind, it is the wives and children I am sorry for.” I said, “Don’t you try telling my wife you are sorry for her, because if you do you will end up being sorry for yourself.”

The artisan warder stopped the pillowcases lark and took me down to the workshop. There was method in this because part of the prison was being demolished and an old oak floor was being scrapped. “Can you do anything with this, Jock?” he asked me, showing me a bit of the wood. It was a good bit of oak. “You could make some nice things with that,” I said. And I did- bookcases, hallstands, cupboards, small stools and many other pieces of oak furniture found their way into the warder’s home from the floor of the Old Cardiff Gaol. I am quite sure the government got none of it.

One day the warder gave me a shout when I was working. “Come here, Jock, I have a job for you.” So, I picked up my tools. “No, no,” he said, “all you need is an oil can. We’re going round to the execution chamber to oil the joints of the hanging apparatus.” Two men, sentenced to death for murder, were to be hanged the next day. “I’ll not oil your bloody hanging apparatus.” “What! You not in favour of hanging?” “Oh yes I would hand prison warders at a bob a time,” I said; “the trouble is they usually hang the wrong people.” “Well come and see how it works,” he said. So off we went to the execution chamber. He oiled the necessary places then gave me a demonstration of the proper way to operate it by pulling the lever and pointing to the drop. He seemed to take delight in it.

One day towards the end of my term, in came Jock Wilson, the Welsh Party Organiser, to see me; well, really to tell me something- that I had become a parliamentary candidate because Alfred Irons, the MP, had died. A by-election was pending at Caerphilly and the party had decided to contest their first ever parliamentary election as a party and I had been chosen as the candidate. Well, anyway, being in gaol, I couldn’t speak back. There had been quite a barney with the prison authorities. A report in The Communist appeared as follows:

We had expected difficulties to be put in the way of Robert Stewart’s Candidature in the Caerphilly mining constituency. They have already begun, and the Prison Governor has taken a hand. We wished to know when Stewart would be released for the purpose of the election campaign.

The party had sent a letter to the Governor of Cardiff Gaol in the following terms:

Dear Sir,

I should be very much obliged if you would kindly let me know on what date Robert Stewart, the National Organiser of the Communist Party, whom we understand to be present in Cardiff Gaol, will be released.

Yours faithfully

(signed) Fred H. Peat, acting secretary

Back came the reply:

HM Prison,

Cardiff

23rd July, 1921

In reply to your letter of inquiry it is regretted that the information asked for cannot be given.

I am your obedient servant

(signed) HJ Perwin

One night before the end of my time I was pleasantly surprised when the head warder came and asked if I would like to be released a day early. “Fine,” I said. But really the authorities were afraid of a demonstration, because when I had been taken from Pontypridd to Cardiff Gaol to start my sentence there was a bus load of policemen in the front and a bus load of policemen behind all the way. Certainly a good few tons of policemen to hold mine nine stones of communism. No doubt they were also taking no chances when I was leaving.

Out of the gaol, I went to Alf Cook’s house to discuss the political situation, and I had just arrived when a telegram was delivered from Moscow informing us of the death of Bill Hewlett in a monorail accident in Russia. It had been a bad accident and Jim Stewart of Lochgelly was also injured. So, I had the sad task of making arrangements for someone to break the news to Mrs Hewlett.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 12: Fourth Court Martial.

Dundee Jail. Bob Stewart wrote most of the poems in Prison Rhymes here.
In the "Clink"-Edinburgh Castle

On jam and bread and bully beef,
They feed us in the clink,
There's a guard that's got the wind up,
And not a drop to drink.
We are short of fags and matches
And squeezed in very tight,
But we don't go short of scratches
When the flea-bags' come at night.

We are exercised each morning,
Deep down in Castle moat,
We play football and pitch and toss
And get the sergeant's goat.
We throw kisses to the ladies
And curses at the Yanks,
And when they pitch us cigarettes
There's mutiny in the ranks.

When the lovely war is over
And we're back at 'joyful' work,
When we've hypnotised old "Jerry"
And camouflaged the Turk,
When we meet again in "civvies"
What a tale we'll have to tell,
Of the clink up in the Castle,
Good old forty-second Hell.

Bob Stewart's Prison Rhymes

So I did my time in Dundee and with my remission I came up for my fourth court martial. Back to Edinburgh and this time to the Castle, with “Bobby” Moncrieff in charge. “Ha-ha,” they all warned with glee, “wait till Bobby Moncrieff gets hold of you.” But I knew Bobby, he was one of the family from Perth who made their fortune in ink. He was in command of the Dundee-Perth regiment of the Black Watch. I used to watch him march the jute workers through Dundee, men with the lowest wages in the country, hardly a bite in their belly, and Bobby howling at them “Bout turn!” “Forward march!” trying to make them into big brawny soldiers fit to be killed. Oh, I knew him all right, and I had known many of his kind in my time. But he didn’t put the fear of death into me.

However, I arrived at the Castle and got shoved into the guard-room. The sergeant said to the corporal, “Search that man.” “Not necessary,” I replied, “I’ll turn out my pockets.” So I counted my money, took out a box of matches and counted them. “What are you doing?” the sergeant hollered. “The Black Watch has a reputation! “I know,” I answered, “that’s why I’m counting my matches.” Soon I am shoved into another room with all the other delinquents. Like every other place, you soon make friends. First the meal. Beef and
potatoes are served. But no fork and knife. “Where’s the tools?” I asked. No answer. So I sit, and the other lads, possibly hungrier than myself, ask, “Aren’t you going to eat it?” “Not without tools.” “Can we eat it?” “Better leave it till we sort this out.”

Back comes the sergeant. “Not eating the food, Stewart?” he says. “No, and I won’t until I get a fork and knife.” “Well, we will get you some sandwiches.” When the sandwiches came there was a rush for the plate of beef and potatoes that certainly did not say much for the culture practised in the British Army.

Into the guard-room came a wee drummer boy. I remember him well because he was so tiny. A jockey of jockeys, you might say. A bit nosey, he starts his own investigations. “What are you in for?” he asked me. “Because I won’t fight.” “Why won’t you go and fight?” “Because it’s not my quarrel.” “Christ, it’s no’ mine either:” Round and round he goes, asking his questions and getting his answers, until he comes to a fellow sitting very despondent and taking no heed of the proceedings. “How long have you been absent?” asks the nipper. No reply. Then he looks into the fellow’s face. “You’re no’ absent, he said, “you’re lost!” The lighter moments come and very often can linger much longer in memory than the tribulations. I did see Bobby Moncrieff but he must have been in a subdued mood. The war weariness was weighing heavily on everyone, even the Top Brass were feeling the weight of the loss of millions of good lives.

So I am again sentenced and returned to Dundee Gaol.

It was in Dundee Gaol I had a real barney with one of the religious mentors. The normal chaplain had gone to the front to administer religion to the soldiers, because you can’t very well preach the old adage “Fix your bayonet and say Be Holy or I’ll make you holy” if you don’t sometimes obey it yourself. Anyway, that honest little chaplain was succeeded by a little guy called McDonald. A little weasel. He and I never got on. Coming through the prison one day while I was whitewashing the walls, he said, “That’s a nice clean job you’re making of the walls, Stewart.” “I’m not cleaning the walls,” I replied, “I’m covering up the dirt.”

But I really detested him because he took advantage of his pulpit every Sunday to have a go at the Bolsheviks. Telling how Lenin ate children, Trotsky shot all the workers, and so on. The microbes eating each other up. I was sorely tempted to have a go at him, but Dave Donaldson was waiting to go out for another court martial, which is always a break, you understand, so I had to bide my time. When Dave went the storm broke.

The Weasel commenced his usual sermon with the evil doings of the Bolsheviks, then got on to his main theme, “They must be crushed like rats, etc., etc.” I could stand it no longer, so I jumped up. “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 in British prisons.

We were all marched out. One of the warders who knew me said, “You must write to the Prison Commissioners, Bob, complaining of the chaplain using his pulpit for political purposes.” “No,” I replied, “I have done what I wanted to do. Let it rest meantime.” Next came the Head Warder. “You’ll have to apologise to the chaplain,” he said. “That’s what I’m waiting for,” I replied. “Send him up here.” But he never came and the matter ended there.

During my stay in Dundee Jail I fancied myself as a poet and wrote a number of prison rhymes. I can make an apology for these because prison is not the best place to practise literary ambitions. However, when I came out of jail, the Prohibition and Reform Party published them in pamphlet form and they were a best-seller. Many thousands of copies were sold, giving a much-needed boost to the party funds.

The library in Dundee Gaol was composed of a few old copies of monthly and quarterly magazines. When I first asked for a book the warder said, “Christ, nobody reads here.” It was at this time that, through questions in Parliament and outside pressure, certain concessions were granted, so that newspapers and books could be sent to friends in prisons. An exception was The Tribune, published with great difficulty by the No-conscription Fellowship, which was the most hounded and persecuted little paper at that time. It was then edited by a group of women, amongst whom was Joan Beauchamp, who became the wife of W. H. Thompson, a famous expert on Compensation Law and Labour Law questions. The Socialist Monthly was also banned. Despite this banning, we still got these papers. I took up the question of supplies of newspapers with the Prison Commissioners, and finally we got a number of daily and weekly newspapers and a number of books as well. In fact, one of the new governors, on occasions, borrowed my books from me.

We got one or two of the warders, particularly the female warders, interested, and were able to circulate rationalist, progressive and socialist literature quietly in prison. Now and again our privileges were threatened when the newspapers turned up where they ought not to be, but we weathered the storms.

News from the outside only adds to the impatience and yearning for release-it was always galling to be divorced from activity as well as from home and friends.

It was while I was doing my term for the fourth court martial that the war finished, but still I was confined to gaol. Month after month was passing and not a word said about my release. 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.

My first reception was from my little daughter, who on seeing us ran to her mother saying there were two dirty- looking soldiers coming into the house. But we had a real party to celebrate the occasion. So many people came that we had to borrow trestle-tables from the co-operative shop next door to accommodate all the guests.

So that was the end of the court martials. More prison sentences were to come, but I didn’t know that then. Left-wing politics in the twenties were not be to a bed of roses after all.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 11: Third Court Martial.

Edinburgh Castle.
Duffy, he got huffy,
And says he to little John,
“You've got no business talkin'
When you're out at exercise,
I've tould you that, I'm sure, until I'm sick."
“Ach, Duffy dear, recall the days,When you were human too,
Before you took a screw’s job in the nick.”
"There's got to be no more of it
Or else I'll lock you up;
Will yez promise that ye won't talk any more?"
“Ach bless yer heart, I couldn't promise,such a stupid thing,
I'd be speakin' to mesilf behind the door."

Bob Stewart’s Prison Rhymes

I was taken from Calton Gaol to East Linton to await my third court martial. The officer in charge there was a Broughty Ferry man (Broughty Ferry is a suburb of my home town, Dundee) and he asked me, “Is it true, Stewart, that while you were in Calton you got home at weekends?”‘ “If it is,” I answered, “I never noticed it.” “Well, that’s what they said in the Ferry.” “It isn’t the only lie they told about me in the Ferry.” As the Ferry was, and still is, the stronghold of Toryism since it became the home and playground of jute millionaires, I was certain I was right, but if anyone believed that conscientious objectors got weekends out from Calton Gaol they would believe anything.

Keeping me company in the line of court martials was a very fine man called Alex McCrae. A little chap who had been in Smyrna when the war broke out. When he came home to Britain he had declared his conscientious objection. His wife, a very pretty lass who was active in the No-conscription Fellowship, came to East Linton the day I arrived, to see her husband. Knowing this, McCrae asked the Broughty Officer in Charge if he could have a night out with his wife, which was granted. So when I arrived at East Linton I got a seat at a table set for four, McCrae, two of God’s own, Christadelphians I think, and myself. Knowing McCrae would be absent, these two others shared the third meal between them and never said “Would you like an extra bite?” I was so enraged that I rounded on them. “I don’t know which Bible class you were brought up in but there’s not a prostitute in the whole of Glasgow as mean as you two.’

Then off I went to Leith Street School for the court martial. The two men in charge were rankers, had risen from the ranks to this exalted position, and didn’t they let everyone know it. My wife arrived and they refused to let her see me. I got to know and demanded to see the orderly sergeant. “This is a
bloody lousy trick,” I said, “keeping my wife and kid from seeing me.” “I know,” he replied, “but it’s that fellow Cross (the ranker), he refused permission. But hang around and I think it will be all right when he goes.” And it was.

But at the court martial I got my own back good and proper. It was a real field day. Edinburgh Castle was the headquarters of Scottish Command and most defaulters passed that way. So there we were, a huge crowd in Leith Street, sergeants, corporals, privates, all in the queue; and there in the court- the Colonel and his henchmen.

Command: “Prisoners and escorts in!” So in we march, and are ranged in front of the Court. The Chairman said, “I am Colonel so-and-so, this is Captain —-and this is Lieutenant —-. By regulation I have to ask you, each one separately, if you are satisfied with the composition of the Court.” He didn’t say what would happen if anyone objected. Then he went on. “Sergeant —-, are you satisfied?” “Yes, sor.” Then it came to Private Stewart. No answer. A repeat, a bit louder, and still no answer. So he passes on until the queue is finished then bawls out, “All except Stewart.” At least there is no “Private” this time. He
then turned direct to me and shouted, “Are you satisfied?” “Before we come to that I would like to ask you a question,” I said. “What is it?” “How much notice should an accused get before he is court martialled?” “Well, that depends on the conditions.” “In the present conditions?” I asked. “Twenty-four or forty eight hours.” “What happens if you don’t get any notice?” I asked. Suddenly he whipped round on them lieutenant. “Did this man get notice? “Didn’t think it was necessary,” replied the lieutenant. “Case adjourned–prisoner and escort out!” shouted the colonel. “Wait here, Lieutenant.” My escort was standing, his eyes like glass, and the order had to be repeated. When we reached the corridor he was besieged by his mates. “What happened? What did he get?” “Made a bloody mess o’ them, case adjourned.” “Holy jees!” So the story buzzed around the escorts and accused, and all seemed highly pleased. Then the door opened and out came the lieutenant in a furious rage. “Take him back to barracks,” he shouted; then howled, “And see he gets no privileges.”

So we reach the street and then I find the escort is blazing mad. He had schemed that he could leave me after sentence and visit his wife who lived in Leith, only a mile away. “Well,” I said, “that’s tough on you, you haven’t done anything wrong. Why should you be deprived of a night with the wife? Why not buzz off and I will meet you in the morning?” “Can I trust you?” “Sure, I’ll be at the station in the morning.” So off he went to see his wife and I to see an old pal, Jimmie Leven, who lived out in Gorgie. There I had a great welcome, a bath and a good feed. In the evening Jim and I went to a Peace Committee meeting and I made such an impassioned speech that the secretary thought the war had come to his meeting.

I was soon back again and this time no mistake. All regulations duly observed – ‘Refused to Parade’ was the charge. So I was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour (later remitted to one year). I was sent to the state prison in Edinburgh Castle. But I was not long there. My mother was much too old to make the journey to Edinburgh but naturally she wanted to see her youngest son as many times as she could. So she came a few times, and in the process discovered that the Governor came from the same part of the country as she did. When she had said good-bye to me, the Governor invited her into his office to chat–as we Scots say, “Hame crack ower farms and farmers, cattle and crops, lairds and tenants and the hamely fare o’ the countryside.” I remember my mother telling me about him saying to her, “What I canna understand, wumman, hoo wi’ a maither like you Robert’s an atheist.” “Aye;” she replied, “he was aye a great Bible student.”

My mother died while I was in the state prison, but military regulations would not allow me permission to attend the funeral. There was much local feeling about this because my mother was greatly respected by all her neighbours, and protests were made to the Lord Provost of Dundee. He did intervene and said he would vouch for my return. I was then transferred to civil imprisonment again in Calton Gaol for a few hours, and taken under a most inhuman warder to Dundee, where I arrived too late to see my mother buried; but I met the family, among them my two soldiering brothers who had managed to get leave. The warder was in a hurry to get back to Edinburgh and so he dumped me in Dundee Gaol. More deputations to the Lord Provost and the upshot was that it was decided I would do the rest of my time in Dundee. Dundee was a smaller prison than Calton, and at that time, much to the chagrin of the warders, not fully occupied. How well I remember their glee at reception of new prisoners. Not that they were more devoted to duty or softer-hearted than the turnkeys at Calton, but the massacres in Europe were eating up hosts of men, and patriotic as the warders naturally were, they were not at all anxious to be called up to the front for service.

As a matter of record, I helped some of them make out their claims for exemption on compassionate, domestic or other grounds. So 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!

Jute being the staple industry of Dundee, the situation in its prison was more or less the same. Teasing jute ropes, making and sewing sacks for coal, copper, meat-packing, etc. The working day was ten hours, sixty sacks, sides and bottoms, being the daily norm: a smaller number of coal sacks, which were heavy and hard to bore with the needle. Of course, all material was hand sewn, there were no machines, and the work was primitive and not very economic. At times my work was in association with a fellow called Tammy Sword, a local worthy doing his fifty-second sentence for being drunk and disorderly. When he got really drunk he boasted that it took half a dozen policemen to carry him to gaol, where he was more at home than in his own home.

The warders appreciated Tammy’s capacity as a sewer. He set a hard pace for his fellow prisoners, but he had a soft spot for me. “Dinna sew any, Bob,” he would say,”tak’ some o’ mine to mak’ up your lot.” Dave Donaldson and I were
couriers in a romance with his sweetheart, who was doing time in the female part of the gaol. Dave was working with the artisan warder who did the maintenance work, and so was able to move around. In this way amorous notes were exchanged between Tammy and his lass with great regularity. Dave Donaldson was a beam and scale maker, and was handy at pipe fitting and whatever small smithy work had to be done. When necessary I was his labourer. We changed over when there was a carpenter’s job to be done, I then becoming
the skilled man. We painted and whitewashed too, and were getting quite proud of our skill until Willie Findlay, another “conchie” and a painter by trade, came to do his hard labour. Then we sadly gave in and admitted that painting was a trade.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 10: Second Court Martial.

Calton Jail.


Oh, Calton Gaol! Oh, Calton Gaol!
Sae sombre, grim and grey,
Within thy wa’s were gallant hearts,
Held captive many a day,
For they refused to bend the knee,
To tyrant’s cruel sway,
Their stand remembered aye shall be,
They stood for liberty.

Bob Stewart’s Prison Rhymes


The days wore on to my second court martial. Now I was really beginning to know the ropes. Culprits for the court were lined up outside the court-room in good time, in charge of a sergeant. There was the usual to-ing and fro-ing, standing to attention, saluting and so on. Yours truly, of course, was taking no part in the proceedings and a young soldier standing near me said, “Some funny things come up in times of war.” “No, no,” I replied. “No different from time of peace. Only different uniforms.” “You should be shot,” he came back. “Well, if I wait till you save up to buy a gun I don’t doubt I’ll have my old age pension before that.” After a turn down the line, he came back and said, “Christ! that was a good one!”

The sentence of the court conformed to regulations. “For failing to obey military order, etc., etc. . . One year’s imprisonment with hard labour ” (subsequently reduced to six months). In due course I was escorted Calton Gaol, Edinburgh , and handed over to the authorities. The authorities, by trial and error, had discovered by this time that even their notorious “glass-houses”, the military detention barracks with their “at the double” man breaking exercises, only stiffened the resistance of the objectors to military service. The refusal to obey the “lion-tamers” was having a bad effect on the other prisoners who became inclined to emulate them, and so the government made a virtue out of necessity, and a show of their “humanity”, by transferring the objectors to civil jails.

Calton Gaol was grim and grey, old and forbidding both inside and out. Reception was not quite so noisy as the Scrubs. I remember the warder fussing around, listing the King’s property in my possession, which tended to get less and less as I passed through the guard-rooms where other soldiers were
always short of kit.

“Whit’s your size in buits?” Try them on. “Have you had a bath?” Oh, aye, you look clean. “Where’s your moleskins?” In Scottish prisons the dress includes moleskin breeches tied at the knees with tape, long stockings which never matched, rough cotton shirt (Kirkcaldy strip to the trade), moleskin jacket, glengarry cap, and of course a badge with hall and cell number. “Oh, Stewart, whit’s your religion? “I haven’t any.” “Ye maun hae a religion, a’body has in here.” “Well, here’s one that doesn’t.” “Well I’ll just mak’ ye a Quaker, there’s a lot o’ your kind Quakers.’ So down on my cell card alongside age, height, etc., goes Quaker. Now comes the chaplain. What are you in for?” “Me? Twelve months.” “That’s not what I mean. What have you done?” “Oh, I refused to do anything.” I think he then began to tumble to the position so he went outside and looked at the card. “I see you are a Quaker.” “Not me, I neither quake nor shake.” “It says so on your card.” “Ah yes, I had a soldier’s suit on yesterday but
that did not make me a soldier.” So ended the spiritual ministrations and Quaker was crossed out and atheist inserted in a bold hand.

A favourite prison tale is told of this chaplain, who was alleged to be fond of a
“wee drap”. One of his congregation became suddenly religious and requested the chaplain to read a bit chapter to him as he had no glasses. This the chaplain
did with great pleasure but he was not so happy when he heard the convert’s explanation–that next to the taste of rum the smell can be comforting.

To supplement the swashbuckling sermons of the professional chaplain who wielded the Sword of Gideon over us on Sunday mornings, we had a diversion to amateurism on Sunday afternoons with an Evangelist; accompanied by a lady
organist.

Here is the routine. When the fleshpots were removed after dinner came the order: “Stools down to the Hall for Bible Class!” Down we clattered to the Hall, and set our stools, spaced well apart to avoid conversation between prisoners (it
did not!).

Mr. Bannerman the preacher opened the service with prayer (that was a signal for whispers). Then came a hymn accompanied by a wheezy harmonium. A bit doleful, but it revealed to me where the griddlers, back court and street singers had received their training. Then the prisoners recited texts from the Bible, still more doleful, but it gave the prisoners a feeling of participation which they enjoyed. Then a short sermon, a bit weepy. Another hymn or two, then an announcement that anyone who recited the 15th Chapter of St. Luke without a mistake would receive a Bible on release. On my second Sunday I gave St. Luke full voice! I got that Bible when released.

There were always “Conchies” passing in and out of Calton Gaol, many of them religious, who enjoyed reciting texts. I thought I might diversify the service a bit, so started to quote the poets: Tennyson, Burns, Shelley. Other “Conchies” soon followed suit with their favourites, from Omar Khayyam to Walt Whitman. It got too much for Mr. Bannerman, who said we must take only texts from the Bible. I think he had been taken to task by his superior. After that we had a bit of difficulty in persuading some of the lads not to utter some of the rather bawdy texts from the Good Book which might offend the lass at the music box.

One Sunday we had visitors from outside to see what we looked like. As usual the texts were invited. After a few regulars had said their piece I took a turn with: “Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees–Hypocrites” etc., etc! That tore it! I think the visitors were taking it to heart. The outcome came the next Sunday when Mr. Bannerman told us we were getting into a rut with our texts, so we must take them in future from the 19th Psalm, which had plenty of verses, but it was deadly dull. So I tried my hand at making my own texts. They sounded much the same, and there were no complaints.

One day I was sitting in my cell at Calton when the door opened and in comes the warder. “I wonder at you, Stewart,” he says, “all these nice people who come to see you, your wife, your wee lassie and the others, all such nice people.” “Well, what of it?” I asked, puzzled. “On your card it says you are
an atheist and I thought all atheists were thieves, robbers, devils or whoremongers.” “How many atheists have you in this jail?” I asked. “Only you,” he answered. “Well, if all the others are Christians it doesn’t say very much for Christianity, does it? So the poor old joker went out, locked the door and made off quite confused.

It was in Calton Gaol I first heard of the March Revolution in Russia. One day I was going round the exercise ring when in beside me came my old pal Dave Donaldson who had just been convicted again and given another dose. “There’s been a revolution in Russia. They’ve set up Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils,” he whispered. “There will be a revolution here in six months.” “Hae ma doots,” I said, but the warder put an end to our observations on this epoch-making event.

Time marches on. Sometimes much better than the army. My time came to an end, and I was sent for by the chief warder, the Governor being away. “Well, Stewart,” he says, “you are to get another chance to shoot the Germans.” “Look, brother,” I replied, addressing him in good trade union language, “if
ever I take it into my head to go shooting it won’t be Germans I’ll be looking for.” “And who will you be looking for?” “Warders.” And with that I moved to my third court martial.