A People's History of Scotland (31 page)

One of the speakers at the march was the Rev. George Macleod, leader of the Iona Community, who warned his audience, ‘You cannot spend a dollar when you are dead.' Folksong writer Morris Blythman (pen-name, Thurso Berwick) and John Mack Smith took up Rev. Macleod's words and adapted them in a song that would be sung at anti-Polaris protests and actions, ‘Ding Dong Dollar':

After these initial protests, the Direct Action Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (DAC) organised a campaign, warning President Kennedy by telegram that they intended to: ‘… occupy non-violently the submarines, the
Proteus
depot ship, and land installations. Our aim is to immobilize the base'.

The US proposed that the submarine tender, the
Proteus
, carrying the first missiles, should arrive on Saturday, 4 March, but the British authorities insisted they bring it forward to Friday the 3rd, in order to reduce the number of demonstrators. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) organised the protest on land while a group called the Glasgow Eskimos attempted to gather enough kayaks and rowboats to block the
Proteus
's arrival.

On Friday, 3 March, the
Proteus
sailed up the Clyde and into the Holy Loch with her Polaris missiles. The peace campaigner Marion Blythman recalls that protesters came from all walks of life and from across Scotland by public transport, boat, car or by hitching a lift. At Ardnadam Pier they encountered American sailors waiting to be ferried out to naval vessels, and the protesters ‘sang songs which aimed to get over the idea that Scotland was being pushed around and then, hammer it in. The words were balled into slogans like Ban Polaris – Hallelujah and Send the Yankees Hame …'
⁴⁵

The Glasgow Eskimos did not have enough boats to form a barrier across the loch as planned, having only three canoes and one dinghy. When
Proteus
anchored in Holy Loch, several members of the CND attempted to board it by climbing onto the anchor chains until they were forced off by US sailors. The
Proteus
's Commander Lanin tried to write off the protesters as nothing but ‘a bunch of Goddamn eskimos'.

Morris Blythman and co. set to work again, penning a new ditty to an Orange tune:

Blythman was not finished and produced one of his best songs in response to the attacks on the Glasgow Eskimos, ‘The Eskimo Republic':

The protests continued through that spring around Holy Loch. On 21 May, a day of direct action was organised, with plans for a water blockade of the
Proteus
and also on land at the pier where personnel crossed to the base. Sixteen canoes, a launch and a houseboat serving as a floating hospital, with some 70 people, were there to greet
Proteus
. Some protesters managed to get on board the vessel, but were washed off with high-pressure hoses and then picked up by police boats. Nine canoeists were arrested and eight canoes impounded. Meanwhile, 200 people blocked Ardnadam Pier, and when police cleared a path for the American sailors thirty-two people were arrested.
⁴⁷

A few days later, the
Glasgow Herald
reported:

Three anti-Polaris demonstrators yesterday boarded the U.S. submarine Patrick Henry at the Holy Loch. Michael Nolan (26) made the most strategic approach by climbing up on top of the vessel's after-fin, jutting seven feet up into the air. US naval ratings offered him a cup of coffee if he would join them, but he politely refused and for three quarters of an hour remained cold and damp on his perch. A US naval launch with civil police on board then drew alongside and brought his escapade to an abrupt halt.
⁴⁸

That autumn, another attempt was made at blockading the base but the weather was so bad that 400 protesters were stranded aboard a ferry unable to dock at Dunoon. Those who could not get on a boat staged a march on the naval building in Greenock, but were blocked by police. At Ardnadam Pier there was a sit-down blockade: when American personnel appeared at the pier gate, protesters jeered at them, yelling ‘Ban the bomb', ‘Yankee filth' and ‘Who dropped the first bomb?' Police cleared demonstrators by Saturday evening.
⁴⁹
There were 351 protesters arrested.

In May 1962, the key speaker at Glasgow's May Day march and rally was the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, who was loudly booed. The previous autumn, he had succeeded in getting the party conference to reverse its vote of the year before to back nuclear disarmament, angering CND supporters. Gaitskell had to be escorted away by police, saying the hecklers were ‘peanuts'. Morris Blythman was quick to respond:

The
Glasgow Herald
reported on 11 May 1962 that the executive committee of the Glasgow City Labour Party deplored the action of many Young Socialists on the May Day rally. The committee then ordered the Woodside constituency party to be investigated. The article mentioned that Communist Party members were being blamed for
the heckling but quoted the CP's Glasgow District Committee's denial of responsibility for the protest. The paper then stated that the Federation of Young Socialists had discussed walking out of the rally and ‘some branches' had agreed to this. Subsequently, the Labour Party disbanded the Glasgow Federation of Young Socialists.

Not only did the US base at Holy Loch stay until its eventual closure with the end of the Cold War, but the British nuclear base was built nearby at Faslane. Their presence meant the anti-nuclear protests would continue, and will continue until these weapons of mass destruction are removed.

The Folk Song Revival and the Edinburgh People's Festival

Song and music were a living part of social protest in Scotland in the 1950s, in a way that was not true south of the border. Some of the names already mentioned as penning protest songs were members of the folk song revival of that decade, and a larger attempt to create a Scottish popular culture.

Hamish Henderson not only collected songs but helped singers such as Jeannie Robertson, Jessie Murray and Jimmy MacBeath reach a wider audience. Norman Buchan, a future Labour MP, was a collector of folk songs, and he recalled his excitement at hearing them in concert, as well as his first meeting with Archie Fisher and Bobby Campbell, who wanted to know more about the songs he was making available.
⁵¹

Central to the folk revival of the 1950s was Ewan MacColl. Though born in Salford, both his parents were part of a close Scottish exile community there, with MacColl recollecting that they ‘spoke often of Scotland and their life there. They were exiles and still regarded themselves as visitors [to England] rather than settlers.'
⁵²

MacColl was involved after the war in the radical Theatre Workshop, headed by the playwright and actor Joan Littlewood, and he said of its reception in Scotland: ‘Scotland was in the throes of a cultural renaissance; it was an exciting place to be and the poets, novelists, painters, composers and dramatists that we met greeted us with open arms.'
⁵³

Much later, in the 1970s, John McGrath of the radical 7:84 theatre group remembered: ‘In Scotland people still come up to me after 7:84 Scotland shows and talk with clear and fond memories of “the Ewan MacColl” shows during the late forties. I am told they were
very
well attended, and I imagine there were very few Rolls-Royces outside the door.'
⁵⁴

A participant in the post-war folk revival, Corey Gibson, recalled:

Besides the politics of its form, the Folk-song Revival developed connections with the contemporary political climate. A defining event in the formation of the Revival was the first Edinburgh People's Festival of 1951 which was funded and organised in collaboration with the Labour Movement and trade unions. It was to offer a showcase of national art and folk-song, neglected by the Edinburgh International Festival since its inception in 1947 … the Edinburgh People's Festival during the three years of its existence had elements both literary and folk-based. It presented lectures and poetry recitations by MacDiarmid alongside the singing of ballads and broadsides by ‘source-singers'.
⁵⁵

The festival was initiated by Hamish Henderson, Edinburgh Trades Union Council, the Miners' Union, the Labour and Communist parties, with the stated aim being: ‘To initiate action designed to bring the Edinburgh Festival closer to the people, to serve the cause of international understanding and goodwill.'
⁵⁶

It succeeded in doing that: ‘Highlights were Scots playwright Joe Corrie's “In Place of Strife” and Ewan MacColl's anti-nuclear play “Uranium 235”. The climax to the week's celebration was a “People's Ceilidh”. Singers, poets, performers and musicians from across the burgeoning Highlands and Islands folk scene were introduced by impresario Hamish Henderson himself.'
⁵⁷

The 1952 People's Festival was bigger, running for three weeks. It celebrated Hugh MacDiarmid's sixtieth birthday with poetry readings in English, Lallans and Gaelic by Sydney Goodsir Smith, Alexander Trocchi, Norman McCaig and Sorley McLean. A series of four Beethoven recitals, with explanations of the composer's life and
work, was delivered in the unusual surroundings of George Heriot's School. The comments of miners, their wives and children in the newspapers reflect their glee at gaining access to the august corridors of Edinburgh's most prestigious fee-paying schools as much as their enjoyment of Beethoven. The grand finale was once again the Ceilidh, with performers from the Western Isles plus special guests from the West Indies, and a re-enactment of the trial speech of Thomas Muir, leader of the Scots radicals in the 1790s.
⁵⁸

Tragically, the then right-wing leadership of the STUC condemned the People's Festival as a ‘Communist Front'. The Labour Party followed its lead. There was one more festival in 1953 but the steam had gone out of it. Its bastard offspring is today's Fringe, though its prices are beyond many of Edinburgh's citizens.

The post-war folk revival would see many of the major participants fall out, sometimes spectacularly. Hugh MacDiarmid fell out with both Hamish Henderson and Ewan MacColl over his refusal to accept that folk songs might be great poetry.
⁵⁹
MacDiarmid attacked MacColl, saying he and his friends were ‘left-wing advocates of regression to the simple outpourings of illiterates'.
⁶⁰
MacDiarmid exempted Norman Buchan and Thurso Berwick from this category.

One of those influenced by the likes of Ewan MacColl was Bob Dylan. The two famously fell out when Dylan took up electrified instruments, but other key members of the folk revival were more open. Norman Buchan praised the skiffle movement of the late 1950s, made famous by the Glaswegian Lonnie Donegan. Ray and Archie Fisher and Bobby Campbell were influenced by blues and jazz, believing they were more relevant to city folk than some of the rural folk songs Hamish Henderson and Buchan were promoting.
⁶¹

It was this post-war folk revival that laid the basis for a flowering of wider popular music in the 1960s and 1970s. By then a Scotland was emerging that would be different from the one dominated by Calvinism and the kailyard, albeit one that was nonetheless male-dominated.

_______________________________________

REBEL LIVES: MARY BROOKSBANK

Mary Brooksbank was born in Shiprow, Aberdeen in 1897, in what she described as ‘one of the worst slums in the city'. Her father, Alexander Soutar, was a dock labourer and union activist, and had a reputation of fighting for the union with his fists when necessary. Her mother, Roseann Gillan, worked as a domestic servant and fish gutter.
⁶²
Later, Mary said that she hadn't a stitch when she was born: ‘My mither had nothing for me – nothing. But all the neighbours rallied roon and gave her this and that. They rigged me oot.'
⁶³

Around 1907 the family moved to Dundee, where they lived at the foot of the Overgate and then in Blackness Road. Brooksbank recalled: ‘… we lost a beautiful baby brother, aged two and a half, a victim of diphtheria. No winder! The overcrowding was atrocious, as were the toilet facilities, or rather lack of them, for we had one WC between four tenants.'
⁶⁴
At the age of eleven she left school to work in the Baltic jute mill. She would work in a series of mills, and in Craigie Mill from 1914 until 1920.

While carrying hot tea to her father at work in 1911 she witnessed the beginning of a carters' strike in the city: ‘… I saw a large crowd of carters, some of whom unyoked their horses and heaved their carts into the docks. I remember how the men faced the police who stood at attention with drawn batons.' It was the first time she heard ‘The Red Flag', and when her mother heard her sing it a few days later she turned to her father and said, ‘Dae ye hear that ane singin' a Protestant hymn.'
⁶⁵