A People's History of Scotland (22 page)

A high point for Scottish republicans was the visit in 1920 of the Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix. An outspoken critic of British policy in Ireland, Mannix had attempted to travel to Ireland but his ship had been intercepted by the Royal Navy and he was brought to Penzance in Cornwall, where he was informed that he could not visit Ireland or any British city with a substantial Irish population. Despite this he was allowed to come to Scotland, addressing enthusiastic crowds in Edinburgh, Greenock, Dalmuir, Kilmarnock, Dumbarton, Cowdenbeath and Dundee. A planned meeting in Glasgow was banned; however, in defiance the archbishop addressed a rally of more than 50,000 people in Whifflet, outside Coatbridge.

The organisation was of real significance by 1921, when the guerrilla war in Ireland was at its height; so much so that Tom Gallagher has claimed that almost every town in Scotland ‘with a sizeable Irish presence' was home to an IRA company. Each had to forward revolvers, ammunition and rifles to headquarters in Glasgow from where they were smuggled to Ireland. Gelignite and gunpowder was stolen from quarries, coal pits and shale mines, and eight raids were successfully carried out on Glasgow munitions works. On one occasion a Royal Navy gunboat undergoing a refit at the Finnieston dockyard was raided and arms taken with the crew held at gunpoint. As one IRA volunteer would later describe their role, ‘Our job was to raise money and obtain guns which were then smuggled to Ireland.'
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The commander of the Scottish IRA, Seamus Reader, gained access to the Chemistry Department at Glasgow University to produce explosive devices which were sent to Dublin.
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Women such as Julia Foy, who ran a second-hand clothes shop in Glasgow, acted as couriers and provided safe houses. Ex-servicemen helped train volunteers for service in Ireland, and on two occasions high-ranking IRA officers travelled from Ireland to review the volunteers on remote moorland.
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Frank Carty, an IRA commander from Sligo, had escaped to Glasgow after breaking out of Derry Jail, but was arrested by police
in the city. On 4 May 1921, he was being ferried in a police wagon from the Central Police Court in St Andrews Square to Duke Street Prison. Three armed police were in the front of the van. As the police van turned off the High Street into Duke Street, bullets started to fly as IRA volunteers stormed the van from three directions. One police escort fell from the van wounded and lay in the street, while his two colleagues returned fire. The IRA rescue party surrounded the van and tried to force the doors, one shooting at the lock twice, but it would not open. The volunteers then dispersed. A police inspector lay dead and a detective sergeant was seriously wounded.

That night the police carried out a wave of arrests in the Calton area. One of those taken away was a young priest from St Mary's Church in Abercromby Street, Fr Patrick McRory. The arrests provoked riots in the Calton. On 22 July the charges against him, ten other men and seven women were dropped and they were welcomed back to the Calton by large crowds waving the Irish tricolour. Subsequently, the case against twelve IRA members of conspiracy and murder was found ‘not proven' at Edinburgh High Court.
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In July 1921, the Lloyd George government agreed a truce with the leadership of the IRA and Sinn Fein, and in December a treaty was agreed between the two sides in London. The exclusion of six Ulster counties from the new Irish Free State (three Ulster counties that had a nationalist majority were ceded to the new state) provoked a split in the republican movement, which led to civil war from June 1922 to May 1923. A majority of republicans in Scotland opposed the treaty and Glasgow became the centre for arms supplies to the anti-treaty IRA and was their propaganda centre for a period after they were driven from Dublin.

On 11 March 1923, detectives carried out a series of raids across central Scotland, arresting twenty-eight republicans in Glasgow, five in Lanarkshire, two in West Lothian and one each in Dundee and Dumbarton. The information about these men and women came from the government in Dublin, keen to stop arms supplies to their opponents, and all were shipped to Ireland to be interned by the Free State authorities. The eventual defeat of the anti-treaty forces led to an end of IRA activity in Scotland.
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Eamon de Valera, the president
of the Irish Republic from 1919 to 1922, said of Scotland's assistance: ‘The financial contribution to the Irish struggle from among the Scottish communities was in excess of funds from any other country, including Ireland.'
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In the aftermath, the Scottish-Irish vote largely transferred to Labour. But in difficult times sectarianism towards Scotland's Catholic minority was never far away. It was not just confined to the terraces of Rangers' Ibrox Stadium or to working-class areas. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment was evident at the highest levels of Scottish society throughout the 1920s and '30s.

The Orange Order was represented on the Western Divisional Council of the Conservative Party from 1893 onwards.
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Sir John Gilmour, Conservative MP for East Renfrewshire, 1910–18, and for Glasgow Pollok, 1918–40, and the first Secretary of State for Scotland in 1924, was a Deputy Grand Master of the Orange Lodge.
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Within the Church of Scotland there was an elite campaign to outlaw Irish immigration. In 1922, the Rev. Duncan Cameron of Kilsyth, a member of the Church of Scotland's subcommittee on Irish immigration, stated that Scots could not be expected to live alongside ‘weeds'. He blamed Irish immigrants for the upsurge on the Clyde two years earlier: ‘Nearly all the leaders were Irish. In the course of time instead of a Scottish proletariat there would be a body of people who had no regard for the United Kingdom and who were prone to revolutionary ideas.'
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This reflected a strong anti-Irish sentiment within the Kirk during the inter-war years, with constant warnings at General Assemblies about the danger of Irish immigration. Four years later, a former Moderator of the General Assembly and co-convenor of the Kirk's Church and Nation, the Rev. John White, argued that the Scottish ‘race' had to be protected from being ‘corrupted by the introduction of a horde of Irish immigrants'.
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A Presbyterian Joint Committee visited London in 1928 to meet the Home Secretary and Scottish Secretary to demand Irish immigration be halted and anyone of Irish birth on benefits should be deported.
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In response, government officials were able to produce
figures refuting their claim that there was a flood of Irish immigrants to Scotland.

Despite this, in 1930 the Rev. White, now first Moderator of the now re-united Church of Scotland, stated that the Kirk's priority would be combatting Catholicism and the ‘menace' of Irish immigration.
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In 1933, the newly formed Church Interests Committee urged the Church of Scotland to join the International League for the Defence and Furtherance of Protestantism (ILDFP). Based in Berlin, this organisation was Nazi-dominated, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic.

This flirtation with Nazism was soon considered a step too far, and the Church swiftly rowed back on its anti-Catholic, anti-Irish crusade.

Rent Strikes – Second Round

The condition of Scotland's housing remained a national scandal. The Lloyd George government had promised returning servicemen ‘homes fit for heroes', but in reality they returned to the same housing they had left, and discovered no repairs had been carried out during the war.

As a consequence of the 1915 Glasgow rent strike, rents had been frozen at their 1914 level. In 1920, the government produced a Rents Bill, which proposed increases of 10 percent, and 25 percent if significant repairs were carried out. Clydebank Town Council immediately passed a resolution expressing ‘grave concerns [at] the indignation and discontent of the tenants in this vicinity caused by the Government's proposed Increase of Rent Bill.'
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In August 1920, the Scottish Labour Housing Association, connected to the ILP, organised a conference in Glasgow, chaired by John Wheatley. They called for a rent strike and a twenty-four-hour general strike, which went ahead later that month in Glasgow and Clydebank, with demonstrations against the rent rises in which notice of the increases were burned.

But by the end of the month, the
Glasgow Herald
reported that in the city the new rents were being collected with little sign of
opposition. In Clydebank it was a different story. There, tenants refused to pay en masse. Among the organisers of the rent strike was Jane Rae, who had been one of the workers sacked by Singer in 1911 for striking; she had chaired a suffragette rally with Emily Pankhurst in Clydebank's town hall, had opposed the war and was a councillor from 1922 until 1928.
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Another organiser, Janet Kerr Reid was active in physically resisting evictions and would go on to sit as a Communist councillor for the town's 5th Ward.
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By April 1924, £1 million was owed in rent arrears as a result of the strike which involved 12,000 tenants. The Clydebank Housing Association, which organised the strike, was described by the
Times
as ‘a kind of local Jacobin Club'.
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The battle reached its peak later that year when landlords evicted tenants in arrears with the help of police. Cyclists toured the town ringing hand bells to alert supporters of the rent strike, who gathered to resist the evictions, clashing with police. When the police departed, however, the crowd simply picked up the belongings and furniture of the tenants from where it had been dumped in the street outside, and moved it back into the house.

As the strike continued, mass meetings and protests were regular occurrences in Clydebank. The
Times
, searching to explain the longevity of the strike, put it down to ‘Communist influence working on a population which is largely of Irish origin'.
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In July, the
Glasgow Herald
reported that landlords had decided on a ‘systematic campaign of ejectment', noting that the rent strike was supported by 75 percent of Clydebank's population, 700 families, and that £10,000 of rent was being withheld each month.
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By the close of 1924 evictions began with new fervour. From faraway Australia, the
Barrier Miner
, published in the trade union stronghold Broken Hill, reported from Clydebank on 31 December: ‘Four evictions were carried out at Clydebank this morning … The eviction officers were compelled to shatter the barricaded doors amidst the screams of the occupants. Scouts warned the neighborhood. Hundreds of women and children were crying piteously. The crowds jeered and hooted the officers, especially at the fourth house, whence agonising screams proceeded while the door was pounded in. The eviction officers found the kitchen barricaded with a
sewing-machine, tables, and beds. The inmates rushed an officer when he penetrated into the interior. Police came to the rescue and restored order.'
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The decision to carry out the evictions on Hogmanay was seen as deliberately vindictive.

The landlords used new tactics to defeat the strike, with the same paper reporting two months later: ‘A firm of Clydebank agents to-day carried out a surprise move against two of four tenants. Joiners and plumbers cut off the gas and water supplies and removed windows and doors, whereupon the tenants departed and new tenants occupied the houses.'
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The town council, the local MP, the Scottish Labour MPs and others attempted to broker a settlement but the residents held out for a ‘fair rent' – frozen at 1914 levels.

The decision of a Tory government in 1925 to initiate an official report into private rentals meant some of the momentum behind the rent strike was lost. The issue was finally resolved in individual court actions that generally ruled tenants should pay only 50 percent of the arrears; while it was no victory, the rent strike saved them money.

Miners, Resistance and ‘Little Moscows'

‘The Image o' God', written in the 1920s by Joe Corrie, a miner from Bowhill, Fife, who was a socialist, a poet and playwright, offers a glimpse into the miners' working conditions.

Mary Docherty, the daughter of a miner, described conditions in the 1920s in west Fife. ‘They always talk about how red Clydeside was, but Fife was just as radical,' she said. ‘It seemed revolution here was just round the corner. Middle-class people were terrified. You had to lie to your employer about attending marches and hope they did not see you. The London headquarters of the Communist Party even got in touch with Fife to say slow down. We were so far ahead.'
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Jock Kane was brought up in the mining village of Stoneyburn in West Lothian. The youngest of six, he was the only one born in Scotland after the family emigrated from Connemara: ‘At the full, there would be 500 or 600 men working at the pit, all from the village. It was small by present-day standards, 300 or 400 houses maybe. There were plenty of Irish – God, aye – one thing we were never short of in the pits was Irishmen. Anywhere there's bloody hard work and slavish labour you'll find Irishmen, won't you? They used to crack on about my father, Mick, that the boys from back home, when they came across and got off at Glasgow, they'd ask “Where's Mick Kane's pit?” and find their way to us.'