Tag: Temperance

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 22: The First Labour Government and the Zinoviev Letter.

The First Labour Government.

On my return from Ireland I found the country in a political ferment. A Labour government, with Liberal support, had been formed arising from the general election of November 1923. This government, headed by Ramsay McDonald as prime minister, had run into trouble and was in no way solving the deep economic crisis. The cost of living was high, wages were low and unemployment still at a very high level. Despite this the big political discussion was taking place on foreign policy. The de jure recognition of the Soviet Union had been effected in the early days of the Labour government, and demands were being made by Labour M.P.s for this to be followed up by normal trading and diplomatic relationships.

This demand soon ran into difficulties. The Tories were vehemently against. They demanded compensation for British property in the Soviet Union which had been nationalised by the Soviet government, and also trading rights for British firms on Soviet territory. The first was realisable, but naturally the Soviet government would not entertain the latter. In Parliament Lloyd George supported the Tories, so with a Tory-Liberal coalition the minority Labour government was in difficulty. Pressure by Labour M.P.s, however, forced the government to open discussions with the Soviet government on compensation for confiscated British property, trading relations and a British loan to the Soviet Union.

The Soviet delegation arrived in Britain in April 1924, and negotiations under Arthur Ponsonby from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began immediately. By August all the problems had been settled except one: the compensation for British property. Then news came that negotiations had broken down. The Tories were jubilant, saying this showed that it was impossible to negotiate with these Bolsheviks. In this critical situation, when it was obvious that the future of the Labour government was in jeopardy, a number of Labour M.P.s went into action. One of them who played a leading part, and who later told the full story, was Edmund Morel, M.P. for Dundee, a man I knew well. Morel was secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, a champion of the colonial peoples and founder of the Congo Reform Association in 1904. Among his many books and pamphlets outstanding was Red Rubber, an exposure of the rubber slave trade in the Congo. Morel and the others had discussions with the Soviet delegation and then went to Ponsonby with a suggested formula. At first this was accepted, but later rejected by Ponsonby, and it was deadlock again. On the critical day when Parliament was to re-assemble and a parliamentary statement of the negotiations was to be made in the House of Commons, Labour M.P.s again saw the Soviet delegation and only four hours before the parliamentary statement was due agreement was reached by all parties in what were really last-minute negotiations. Edmund Morel later told the story of what the argument was about. The British government wanted the words “valid claims” inserted in the compensation agreement. The Soviet delegation suggested “valid and approved by both governments”. The Soviet government demanded they should have a say in what was “valid”. The eventual compromise which was finally accepted used the words “agreed claims”.

This draft treaty on trade was, however, never put into effect. It was clear that the Tories violently opposed any trade with the Soviet Union and, with the Liberals supporting them, the defeat of the Labour government was only a matter of time. The Communist Party estimated that the general election was at most only a few months away.

The party called for a closing of the working-class ranks and for an end to the divisions in the labour movement and a fight for the return of a majority Labour government based on the unity of the working class, with Communists being accepted with full rights in the Labour Party. We decided that no Communist candidates would run against Labour candidates when the election took place and instructed our branches to submit the names of Communists to the Labour selection conferences to go forward for selection with the Labour nominees. In some constituencies the nominations of Communists were ruled out by right-wing Labour, but in others Communists were nominated and eventually selected to stand as joint Communist-Labour candidates. In this way Saklatvala contested Battersea and won the seat. In all, seven Communists stood as Labour-Communist candidates and in Leeds Tom Mann lost a selection conference by two votes. Gallacher was only narrowly defeated in the Motherwell selection.

In Dundee, however, the position was different. It was a double-barrelled constituency, two seats for the city. There was only one Labour candidate, Edmund Morel. The other M.P. was Edwin Scrymgeour, the prohibitionist, who, while occasionally supporting Labour, was not officially connected with the Labour Party. We took a decision to contest Dundee and I was chosen as the candidate, thus becoming the only “clear” Communist candidate in the election. However, it was not the British-Soviet draft treaty that defeated the Labour government. The defeat came on a much smaller issue. Johnnie Campbell, who was then the editor of the Workers Weekly, the paper of the Communist Party, had written an article which the Crown held to be seditious. This contention was one which might have been difficult to sustain in Court and, on second thoughts, the Attorney General withdrew the charge. The Tories, hell bent for an election at any cost, raised an outraged cry. The Tory press claimed intimidation of the Labour government by the Communists and in parliament the Tories tabled a vote of censure on the government. This vote of censure was defeated, but a Liberal amendment to it seeking an “appointment or a select Committee to investigate ” the withdrawal of the charge against J. R. Campbell was carried against the government by 364 votes to 198. Next day, October 10, Ramsay McDonald announced the dissolution of Parliament.

Our party was first in the field in the Dundee hustings. I commenced my campaign with meetings on the 14th October. With me I had Harry Pollitt who, because he had been in Dundee with Gallacher in the previous elections, knew Dundee as well as his home town of Gorton. He was also a great favourite with the local shipyard workers, many of whom were to him “fellow boilermakers”. Also with me was Helen Crawfurd, a wonderful woman speaker invaluable in an election in a women’s town. And also Johnnie Campbell. Poor Johnnie, he always had to open his meetings with an apology: “I would much rather have discussed the election without dragging in personalities, but I will have to because if I don’t, you will.” After all, he was supposed to be the cause of the election, although he soon disposed of that in his speeches. Still, it was all grist to the mill and filled the meetings to capacity, with Johnnie always in top form.

The Dundee Tories and Liberals had made a pact for the election, running one candidate each, two votes -one Tory, one Liberal. The Liberal was Sir Andrew Duncan, a barrister from Kent, who boasted of Scots ancestry. This brought him his first mistake in the election. At his first meeting he was laying on the charm and said, “I come as a Scotsman among Scotsmen.” Then a voice from the audience put him right: “Hauf o’ wiz are Irish.” This was indeed true. At any Dundee meeting 50 per cent or more of the audience were Irish. Scrymgeour, who had lived all his life in Dundee, knew this and always deliberately campaigned for the Irish Catholic vote.

Early on in the campaign Harry Pollitt also gave Duncan a knock. Sir Andrew let it be known in the press that he wanted a debate with a trade unionist, preferably a shipyard worker, no doubt to show he knew the trade union position very well. The boilermakers got together and accepted the challenge and put forward as their speaker Harry Pollitt. The brave Sir Andrew then changed his pipe music. He would not debate with a Communist, he said, much to the glee of the local shipyard workers who put his gas at a peep for the rest of the campaign.

Sir Andrew Duncan’s running mate was a Tory called Frederick Wallace who had already contested Dundee in the 1923 General Election.

The Labour candidate was Edmund Morel, who as I have said had taken an important part in the British-Soviet negotiations on the trade treaty. When the Labour government was first formed he was tipped to be the first Foreign Minister, but he was much too left for Ramsay McDonald, who took the Foreign Ministry himself as well as being the Prime Minister. Morel was a strong candidate, a good speaker and always on the left, but he always hedged at being officially associated with the Communists. Privately he would say he hoped the Communists would win the second seat, but he would never say it publicly.

Edwin Scrymgeour was the sitting member and, while he stood as a prohibitionist, he campaigned for the second Labour vote. I said at the time he was the candidate from heaven who would steal a vote from all parties, Tory, Liberal, Labour and Communist, and then say he had a mandate for the abolition of the liquor trade. This in fact was a great joke at the time, because Dundee was one of the most “drunken” cities in Britain and many of those who voted for Scrymgeour could be seen every Saturday in life fou’ with the beer and whisky.

This election was one of the most rousing in Dundee’s long history of tousy election campaigns. From the day I opened my campaign on October 14th to my final meeting on the 28th I spoke to full houses only. On many occasions there were overflows. This went for every candidate. From the City Hall holding three thousand to the smaller halls holding a few hundreds, all were packed out. The main issues in the election, in fact almost the only two issues, were British-Soviet relations and employment with good wages. In Dundee these fused together because Dundee is a big textile town and before the war of 1914-18 a large flax manufacture was based on the export of flax from Russia. This had dried up and many flax workers were unemployed, so the question of British-Soviet trade was not an academic one in Dundee. It was on diplomatic relations between Britain and the Soviet Union that the big election fight took place.

I had just returned from my spell on the Communist International and my knowledge of the Soviet Union was standing me in good stead. I knew what I was talking about and could discuss developments in the Soviet Union at first hand. Morel, with his knowledge of British-Soviet trade discussions, was also campaigning well on this issue. This rattled Sir Andrew Duncan and his Tory running mate, and as they tried to answer the questions their meetings became rowdier and rowdier. They were under a constant barrage of interruptions, which was not unnatural because they began to insult people at the meetings. Many of the audience had been in dire straits and unemployed for months, and they retaliated by showing their disgust in good election fashion. The singing of “The Red Flag” at the end of the Tory and Liberal meetings became a commonplace event. The local newspapers, seeking to find a reason for this, accused the Communists of trying to break up the Tory-Liberal meetings. I was mad about this and wrote to the papers pointing out the Communists had a campaign in operation and this was stretching our resources to the limit and occupying 100 per cent of our time. We had no time to think about other candidates’ meetings.

So it was Morel and I for recognition and trade with the Soviet Union, Duncan and Wallace with their “down with the Bolsheviks and trust the boss” attitude, and in between came Scrymgeour talking of God and Heaven, the iniquity of the drink trade, appealing to the reason of the Labour voters, and in particular to the Irish Catholic voters. As the campaign went on he became more and more anti-Soviet, no doubt through pressure of the Catholics and in order to win Catholic support.

Of course the election hustings were full of good give and take questions and answers, with the Tory and Liberal mostly on the receiving end. The following question, noted by the press of the period and kept for posterity, is a good example. At Sir Andrew Duncan’s final rally, after he had concluded his final speech and was no doubt saying to himself, as all candidates do, “Well that’s finished,” the chairman asked for questions. Up jumped one bright fellow to ask: “As the only difference between Churchill and you is that Winnie sent us to war to slash the Germans whilst you stayed at home to slash wages, is there any reason why we should not give you the same dose as the Kiel Canal rat catcher?” Amid a storm of cheers Sir Andrew was heard to whimper, “I stand on my record.”

As the election campaign neared its end it became increasingly clear that Labour was gaining ground. It was at this point that the Zinoviev letter incident broke (1). This was one of the crudest political frauds ever inflicted on the British voter. It was a forged letter purporting to have been sent by the Communist International to the British Communist Party. On the Saturday before the election all the press in Britain had banner headlines: “Soviets Intervene in British Elections,” “Red Hands on Britain’s Throat”, and so on. Immediately Rakovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Britain, indignantly and emphatically denied the authenticity of the letter and categorically stated it a forgery. All Sunday the country waited for an explanation from Ramsay MacDonald, who was Foreign Minister, but nothing came. On Monday the local paper in Dundee, The Courier, carried a huge banner headline:

COMMUNIST PLOT-RAMSAY MACDONALD SILENT

While such a denial from the Soviet Ambassador was to be expected the fact remains that the socialist government, the foreign office, and Mr. McDonald personally were satisfied it was a genuine document and not a forgery.

Arthur McManus, who had taken my place on the Communist International and who was an alleged signatory to the letter from Zinoviev, was speaking at Manchester two days before the poll. In the audience were police and C.I.D. men. McManus denounced the document as a forgery and challenged the police to arrest him, but no one moved. The last thing the Foreign Office ever wanted was an investigation into the origins of the document.

On Tuesday, MacDonald made a statement casting doubt on the genuineness of the document, but the damage was done. The British electorate went to the polls without a clear statement from MacDonald, and the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in British political history had paid off. The result of the poll was a resounding Tory victory. On dissolution of Parliament the state of the parties was:

Tories 258

Labour 193

Liberal 158

After the election it was:

Tories 403

Labour 157

Liberal 38

The Liberals who had precipitated the election were smashed and never again returned as a main British parliamentary party. That was the outcome of their anti-Soviet policy and their demand for an investigation in the Johnnie Campbell case.

Edmund Morel held Dundee, with Scrymgeour second. The result was:

Morel (Lab.) 32, 864

Scrymgeour (Prob.) 29, 193

Wallace (Con.) 28, 118

Duncan (Lib.) 25, 566

Stewart (Comm.) 8, 340

After the count we mounted the platform to say our piece, but the Tory and the Liberal would not speak. They were sorely disappointed because they had really believed that the Zinoviev scare had won them the seats. Morel, knowing this, went for them, saying he would demand an immediate investigation from Parliament, which I think he did. Scrymgeour, safe in the second seat, found time to thank God for being good to him and thus saving the second seat from the Communist menace. He did not add but must have thought, “Yes, and with the aid of the Irish Catholic vote.”

With such a resounding victory at the polls the road was now open for a direct attack on the British working class. It certainly came.

Footnote (1): Some facts regarding the notorious letter came to light years after-wards. The letter was dated Moscow, September 15th 1924. It purported to be signed by three people: Zinoviev, President of the Presidium of the I.K.K.I., McManus, Member of the Presidium, Kuusinen, Secretary.

Zinoviev was not president of the presidium of the I.K.K.I. (Communist International) although he was president of the I.K.K.I. itself, and therefore would not sign himself as president of the presidium. Also, he always signed as G. Zinoviev. Secondly, McManus always signed as A. McManus. or Arthur McManus. Thirdly, Kuusinen was not the secretary of I.K.K.I The secretary was a man named Kolarov. To add to this mountain of obvious forgery the letter was headed from “the Third Communist International”. There was no Third Communist International. It was always referred to as “the Third International’ because it followed the First and Second Internationals, which were not Communist. These were such infantile mistakes that even a cursory examination would have shown the document to be a blatant forgery.

In later years it came to light that a Foreign Office official, Mr. J. D. Gregory, who was dismissed from the Foreign Office after an inquiry into some illegal currency deals, was stated to have been involved with some Russian emigrés in the forgery of the letter. This was never ultimately proved, but the whole story of the Zinoviev letter, dealt with in W. P. and Zelda K. Coates’ book A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations, is fascinating reading for all students of political history.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 6: Into Politics Full Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

Blackness Road, Dundee. Early 20th century.

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


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


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

Winston Churchill campaigning in Dundee, 1908.


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


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

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

Edwin Scrymgeour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 5: South Africa.

South Africa 1903.

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 4: A Man Grown.

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


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

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

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

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

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


Annan today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RRS Discovery in the Antarctic, 1923

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

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

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

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


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

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

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 3: Learning a Trade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prison Rhymes 2

There is a wonderful scene in the 1981 film ‘Reds’, the unlikely Hollywood epic about the American left and the impact of the Russian Revolution. Warren Beatty plays John Reed, the author of the definitive eyewitness account of the events in Petrograd ‘Ten Days That Shook the World’. Early on the film, Reed has been invited to speak at a Democrat fundraising dinner about the conflict that has recently engulfed Europe and the question as to whether America should get involved. In their evening dress the attendees drip wealth, although it’s concerned, liberal wealth. Reed is asked, “What is the war for?” The audience are quietly expectant awaiting an impassioned speech about fighting for freedom. They are disappointed. There is silence. Reed, shuffles awkwardly to his feet, looks around the room and replies, “Profits,” before sitting down. It was just such a position that Bob took when addressing a large crowd in Dundee on the day the First World War broke out – though he put it less succinctly but perhaps more forcefully:

“Whatever else may transpire in the coming war, you will all learn in the course of it or in its aftermath that it 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.”

Bob recognised that many ordinary people joined up for the slaughter not due to patriotic fervour but simply because a soldier’s wage together with the separation allowance for wives was better than a labourer’s earnings. He also saw that the 1915 Munitions of War Act had the effect of ‘handcuffing the workers’ eroding what little employment rights trade unions had fought for. As the war progressed and the supply of young factory and agricultural workers used as cannon fodder began to dry up the government began conscription. Inevitably Bob involved himself with a myriad of organisations in the movement against this and also inevitably, though pushing forty, he was himself eventually conscripted in 1916. Those who refused to fight were tried in civil courts and handed over to the military authorities and if they still refused they were court martialled and sent to prison. He didn’t get out until 1919 months after the war ended. In that time there were three further court martials and he got to know Wormwood Scrubs, Calton and Dundee Gaols and the cells at Edinburgh Castle very well. As I’ve said elsewhere on this site these articles aren’t about hero worship but Bob’s stand does make me proud.

During this time Bob wrote the poems which would be collected in ‘Prison Rhymes’  which were sold to raise funds for his socialist National Prohibition and Reform Party. The photographs that accompany this piece are of a postcard featuring one of the verses included in that pamphlet, an anti-war version of Robert Burns’ ‘A Man’s A Man For A’ That’. Many thanks to Graham Ogilvy who brought them to our attention on Twitter.

Alan Stewart.

Prison Rhymes


“…the author of these verses -Mr Robert Stewart- the man of lucid and terse prose, the very matter of fact economist, having the leisure of the prison cell thrust upon him, turns to Rhyme, and with apt and happy effect expresses not merely his hatred of War, but his whole-souled antagonism to the basic cause of War. Because of his trenchant condemnation of the Capitalistic system and of the Capitalistic Governments whose machinations had inevitably produced the terrible holocaust of death, Mr Stewart was arrested in December 1916, and remained imprisoned in guard-room or gaol until April 1919. But stone walls and iron bars can only hold the body captive, and the spirit of the man never flinched and never faltered-a fact that may be gathered from a perusal of his verses. two passions seem to me to inspire them all-a passion of veneration of love for humanity and a passion of hatred towards every circumstance, convention and condition which operates to the detriment of the human race.”

G. Anderson from the Foreword to Robert Stewart’s Prison Rhymes (1919).

When the First World War began Bob Stewart spent most of his energies agitating against it. By 1916 the government had passed the Military Service Acts which imposed conscription on all males of military age with few exceptions. Eventually, Bob was called up to fight. He refused and so this led to a series of court martials and a large amount of time spent at his majesty’s pleasure in Wormwood Scrubs, Calton Gaol, Edinburgh Castle and Dundee Gaol. He was eventually released in 1919 several months after the end of hostilities.

Surviving copies are rare and few come up for sale. I saw one advertised at the end of last year but £650 seemed a bit steep and I didn’t have it spare. In the late eighties my brother rang up the Communist Party of Great Britain to ask if they had one and they kindly sent a photocopy which is the only version we’ve ever seen. I imagine the original is now in the People’s History Museum in Manchester with the rest of the CPGB archive.

For the most part the poems are written in Scots dialect and are largely concerned with protest, socialist agitation and reflections on the isolation of prison life. I’m not making any great claims for the collection as poetry but it is a good example of popular socialist pamphleteering . It was published in 1919 in order to raise funds for Bob’s party – the Socialist Prohibition Fellowship (formerly the Prohibition and Reform Party). As Bob explains in his memoirs:

“…meetings packed out Sunday nights in the Foresters Hall. They were always packed out, with hundreds left outside. Invariably there was a queue to get in an hour before starting time to make sure of a seat. my Prison Rhymes now became a best seller. So with the money from the collections and the booklet we were doing very well financially.”

Bob Stewart, Breaking the Fetters, Lawrence & Wishart 1967

I’ll be posting some of the poems on here over the next few months. The first one, ‘Little Nan’ is about Bob’s daughter Annie Walker Stewart or Aunt Nan as my father knew her. 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. Like all of Bob’s children she would eventually become a committed member of the CPGB though Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 together with matters closer to home brought all that crashing down.

‘Little Nan’ by Robert Stewart

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.

Alan Stewart.

Winston Churchill and the Evils of Drink

Despite Bob Stewart – the communist spy being a background presence throughout my life I never once took my copy of his autobiography ‘Breaking the Fetters’ off the shelf and read it until my mid forties during the first COVID-19 lockdown. To be honest I’d been reluctant to tackle it for a long time fearing an unreadable droning of a stern and unrepentant Marxist-Leninist full of words and phrases that I still don’t fully understand like ‘surplus value’ and ‘commodity fetishism’. I’d imagined the kind of person who, just at the point when everyone wants to leave a three hour meeting, starts bringing up endless points of order while everyone else coughs and sighs while dying inside. It was a surprise and a relief to find that spending a few hours with him, through the years, through his printed words was, by and large, a joy. I found someone with a deep sense of justice, of compassion and who possessed a sense of humour as dry as the bar at the temperance movement’s Victory Lodge. 

A highlight was Bob’s encounter with Winston Churchill early on in the future Prime Minister’s career. Surreally, so many years after his death, Churchill looms larger in our national consciousness now than at any other point in my lifetime. Towering historical figure he may be but he’s now revered in a way he simply wasn’t in his own time. The heavy jowelled, bulldog appearance synonymous with British grit and determination in the face of the enemy to those convinced they fought them on the beaches even though they were born in 1963 and the closest they’ve got to combat was watching ‘The Dambusters’ endlessly just because you can’t say the dog’s name these days. Voice any slight criticism of the Harrow and Sandhurst alumni and his conduct regarding Gallipoli, or striking miners in Tonypandy or famine in Bengal is tantamount to treason. There’s a whole generation of people out there who believe that the scene in ‘Darkest Hour’ where Gary Oldman in bald cap and fat suit is riding on the London Underground and a representative cross section of the population travelling with him offer him their unanimous wholehearted emotional support is literally true. But it wasn’t like that. It never is. Whole nations rarely take serving politicians to their hearts- they cause too much damage on the way. Watch the footage of crowds at Walthamstow Stadium booing the great man while canvassing for votes in the general election that followed our victory in the Second World War. Look at how decisively the electorate booted him out that year. Churchill on the 5th of July 1945 represented a return to the old way of life and he was comprehensively rejected.

Whatever your views on him however, there is one pillar of Winston’s appeal that is ingrained into the British psyche– his herculean capacity and tolerance for the grape and the grain. He was, by all accounts, a sot. One of the greatest drinkers of the twentieth century. If you locked Oliver Reed, Peter O’Toole, Richards Burton and Harris and, oh, let’s say Dylan ‘Drink Canada Dry’ Thomas together with the nation’s favourite Prime Minister in the Coach and Horses overnight I know which one would I would bet on being the last one standing when the owner came to open up in the morning. It wouldn’t be the actors and it wouldn’t be the poet. Churchill would still be there pouring himself a whiskey mouthwash and ignoring the smoking ban. So, when my great grandfather met Churchill for the first time in 1908 they were not only political opposites– the one being an advocate for the cause of the working class, the other a patrician born into the highest levels of the aristocracy- they were divided on what Bob considered the most moral question of the time – the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. The temperance movement had got Bob early and it was the damage that drink caused in working class communities that most concerned him.

Bob had recently returned from South Africa and his miserable experiences in Pretoria and Cape Town cemented his wish to fight the exploitation of ordinary working people and so he decided to go into politics full time. Up to this point he writes that his life had, “consisted of finding a job, trying to keep it, trade union work, organising in the temperance movement, speaking and debating on radical platforms and reading and trying to assimilate the new revolutionary socialist ideas.” The polar opposite of the life of an aristocratic, high Tory grandee such as Churchill. Bob became a full-time organiser for the Scottish Prohibition Party and in 1908 he was elected to Dundee Town Council where he worked to alleviate the effects of endemic unemployment and hunger through organising soup kitchens, food donations and tree planting schemes to provide much needed work. Around this time Winston Churchill, eight years into his Parliamentary career and enjoying an opportunistic dalliance with Asquith’s Liberal Party found himself having to contest a by-election in Dundee. This was occasioned by him having been promoted to the cabinet by being appointed President of the Board of Trade and this required him, due to the regulations of the period, to face the electorate again in his constituency of North West Manchester. Embarrassingly, he lost to the Tory candidate. At this point, he was parachuted in to contest a seat in Dundee. For Churchill the stakes were high – if he didn’t win then his future in politics was in doubt. Young Winston threw himself into his campaigning with his customary energy but Bob, working as election agent for the Prohibition Party candidate couldn’t help but notice “the gulf between Churchill’s oratory and the living reality” on the streets where meetings were held. While in a packed Drill Hall Churchill declared, “Britain has great imperial strength. We have belted the world with free institutions!” my great grandfather pointed to the Sherriff Court next door, the salvation Army Home for fallen women across the street, the Parish Council Lunatic Department next to that and the nearby Curr Night Refuge for homeless people. Tick off any of Beveridge’s five great evils – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – it was as unlikely then as now that any tory in a liberal disguise would throw a life belt or offer so much as a sticking plaster to those in suffering. Let alone the institutions of empire. That said, and true to the eternal frustration of the left whereby the proletariat inevitably vote against their own bloody interests, Churchill romped home with a comfortable majority. “How do you think it’s going?” he asked Bob at the count. “You’re in by a mile, worse luck,” was my ancestor’s reply.

Nevertheless, earlier on that evening – with his future in the balance – Churchill was agitated. Bob noticed him alone twisting little rubber bands around his fingers until they snapped and pacing the floor. Seizing the opportunity of the seasoned temperance campaigner he struck up a conversation with him while the Liberal votes started to pile up and the aristocrat’s cabinet position was increasingly secured. What concerned Bob most would be what his opponent would do in Parliament to bring the banning of the sale of strong drink into law. Eventually the Lord Provost sidled up to the veteran temperance campaigner and remarked, “I understand you’ve been trying to convert Winnie to prohibition. By Christ! Bob, you never give up!” In his memoir Bob, laconically observes:

“He said it in a voice of admiration for my courage and with the certainty that I was on a forlorn quest. As later years proved, Churchill and the prohibition of strong drink were poles apart.”

The understatement in that last sentence serves as an elegant example of his humour. Bob looked on as the electorate hoisted Churchill onto their shoulders at the moment of victory and then deposited him in is automobile outside and then proceeded to carry him- in his car – down the street. No doubt much strong drink was taken that night. However, this anecdote also highlights one of the problems of those in the temperance movement. That of separateness, of being apart. Your concern for the less fortunate making you holier than thou. Bob found it hard to understand the pleasures drink can bring – the release, the freedom, the escape.  At one level it shows an inability to understand the people you’re supposed to be representing – clearly the path the Communist Party of Great Britain was on when Bob was writing his memoirs in the mid-sixties. However, by the time Bob was heading into his forties he wasn’t yet a communist, nor did the organization that he would dedicate the rest of his life to exist. It would take the First World War to bring that about.

Alan Stewart.