by Maggie Craig
Working conditions in the many commercial laundries of the period were particularly brutal, employees having to work through the night in stifling temperatures. Margaret Irwin visited one girl of eighteen whose health had broken down under the strain. She earned only six shillings for a working week of ninety hours. Small wonder that her mother described laundry work as ‘murderous’.
It might seem ironic to us now that His Grace the Duke of Westminster spoke up for the shop assistants, describing their having to stand all day as ‘long hours of enforced sentry duty which would provoke a mutiny if imposed upon soldiers of the Line’. However, there was disquiet at the time that what was also described as the torture of young girls was causing them, when they became mothers, to produce weak and sickly children. There was philanthropy and real concern here, even, across the yawning class divide, an element of chivalry. Essentially though, this was about the future of the race, an obsession of the time.
This brings us uncomfortably close to eugenics, which sought to direct evolution towards a supposed improvement in the human stock. Very much in vogue in the early twentieth century, enthusiasts for eugenics included Marie Stopes, pioneer of birth control, economist John Maynard Keynes, US president Theodore Roosevelt, and Mr Kellogg of cornflakes fame. Eugenics was to be completely discredited after the Nazis took the removal from the human gene pool of what they deemed the degenerate, unfit and racially inferior to the nightmare extreme of the gas chambers. Before that Rubicon was reached, the idea of some intervention to improve humanity was supported by many socialists. The birth control movement was closely bound up with it.
Despite the lack of toilets for shop assistants, an associated preoccupation of the age was hygiene, both moral and physical. In July 1904 Glasgow’s Chief Sanitary Inspector, Peter Fyfe, delivered a paper at the Congress of the Sanitary Institute at Glasgow University entitled What the People Sleep Upon. His speech was also published by Glasgow Corporation’s Committee on Health:
It has been said that ‘there are combinations of evil, against which no human energies can make a stand.’ Combinations of evil, at all events in a sanitary sense, seem peculiarly attachable to a certain class of the people. It is this class I had in my mind when I put down the word ‘people’ in the title of the present paper. The major part of the people in this city are composed of those who nightly sleep in houses of one or two apartments. The most of them dwell in this limited space because they cannot afford to pay for more. Poverty compels them.
Peter Fyfe went on to list some of the medical complaints which dogged the people who lived in these cramped houses: enteric, dysentery, diarrhoea and other ‘diseases the origin of which we cannot trace’. Despite giving the city ‘an irreproachable water supply’, the Victorian engineering marvel of running clean water from Loch Katrine to Glasgow did not seem to have helped. He believed that Glasgow had ‘a reasonably perfect sewage system’. Maybe not quite so perfect if people suffering from diarrhoea and dysentery were sharing an outside toilet with every other family who lived up their close, and one tap and one sink with at least three other families on their landing.
Peter Fyfe’s diagnosis of what was wrong was that 78 per cent of what he called the lower classes of Glasgow were sleeping on mattresses made out of old rags, ‘the offcast of every class of the population, from the wealthy of the West-end to the tramp and vagrant of the East’. Some of these rags were filthy. None was cleaned or disinfected before being processed into the flock with which mattresses were stuffed. Fyfe got the Corporation chemist to carry out experiments on that, comparing it with samples taken from Glasgow’s crude sewage. Full of dangerous bacteria, the mattresses were dirtier than the effluent, leading Fyfe to conclude, ‘It would be manifestly safer to sleep on a bed filled with sewage than on this material.’
Observing all this, those who wanted to change the lives of the poor for the better took two different approaches. They might meet one another in the middle, working together on specific issues, but there was a profound difference between their respective philosophies. There was philanthropy, and there was politics.
Margaret Irwin spent her life working tirelessly to improve the lot of women workers. Some see her as being very much in the tradition of the middle-class philanthropist, helping the poor from the outside. In contrast, Helen Crawfurd believed in empowering the poor so that they could improve their lot for themselves. Shocked though she was by Glasgow’s slum housing and poor health, it took Helen Crawfurd a long time to see socialism as the answer to these ills. Socialism was a radical and a dangerous doctrine. She described her attitude to it when she was younger as being something she would run away from in the street.
Her politics gradually grew more radical, and it was becoming a suffragette which started her on that journey. Clear in her own mind that it was women who held the home and the family together, she came to the unshakeable belief that if only women had the vote and could get themselves organized, they would do their utmost to improve these terrible living conditions.
As a young woman, Helen Crawfurd’s religious faith was so strong it persuaded her to marry a man years older than herself because she thought this might be God’s plan for her. Alexander Montgomerie Crawfurd was an evangelical minister in the Gorbals, a widower with a daughter and granddaughters. He was 58 when they married in 1898, shortly before Helen’s 21st birthday. The marriage lasted 16 years, until Alexander’s death in 1914. There were no children.
Although there was affection between Helen and her husband, friction between them grew as she began to challenge what she read in the Bible, especially about the supposedly inferior position of women. The command that women should keep silent in churches infuriated her. When she expressed her criticism of what she saw as the misogyny of the Bible aloud to Alexander Crawfurd, he would thunder his disapproval at his young and passionate wife: ‘Woman, that is blasphemy.’
It was the hypocrisy of so many churchgoers which really got to her. As she saw it, religious people were too concerned with the life hereafter and not enough with life on Earth in the present, ‘where God’s creatures were living in slums, many of them owned by churches, amidst poverty and disease’.
Helen Crawfurd’s views crystallized when controversy erupted over the proposed Sunday opening of the People’s Palace. Established on Glasgow Green in 1898, this museum with its beautiful winter gardens had been designed as somewhere the working classes could go to enjoy their leisure time in pleasant and uplifting surroundings. A pity then that it didn’t open on Sundays, the only full day in the week the working classes could count on having off.
A prominent figure in evangelical Christianity in Glasgow, Lord Overtoun was a vociferous defender of the sanctity of the Sabbath – but Lord Overtoun was a hypocrite. He was exposed by a pamphlet which supporters of the growing Labour movement began to sell on the streets of the city. This pointed out that the chemical works in Rutherglen, which Lord Overtoun owned, just across the Clyde from Glasgow Green and the People’s Palace, were open around the clock, seven days a week, including Sundays.
Helen Crawfurd described the pamphlet as showing pictures contrasting the slums in which his workers lived with the well-appointed stables where Lord Overtoun kept the horses which pulled his carriage. There were pictures too of the scabs and sores on the faces and arms of the people who toiled in his chemical works, as well as details of how badly they were paid. She found the pamphlet a powerful response to what she called the hypocrisy and cant of Glasgow’s leading evangelists. The opponents of Sunday opening fell silent and the working people for whom the People’s Palace had been built were free to visit it on their day off.
The influence of the pamphlet was greater than that. Helen Crawfurd believed the campaign for ‘saner Sundays’ and the exposure of Lord Overtoun’s hypocrisy opened many people’s eyes, including her own, to the idea that socialism might have more answers to what was wrong with the world. She herself was to travel even further to the left. In 1920, m
ore than 20 years after the argument over the Sunday opening of the People’s Palace, Helen Crawfurd became a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The author of the pamphlet which so influenced her was Keir Hardie, self-educated Lanarkshire miner, father of the Labour Party and an inspiration to generations of socialists. In the early 1900s he was joined by a new band of fighters for fairness and justice.
One of the most bitter battles of Red Clydeside was to be fought in Clydebank in 1911.
4
Sewing Machines & Scientific Management
It suddenly flashed on him how absurdly stupid it was to be spending his life like this.
The Clyde made Clydebank too, arguably even more than it did Glasgow. Surrounded though it is by ancient settlements such as Old Kilpatrick, Dalmuir, Duntocher and Yoker, the town itself is a mere stripling, no more than 150 years old. It was the building of J. & G. Thomson’s shipyard in 1871 which called it into being.
In the most literal sense of the term, the forerunners of John Brown’s chose a greenfield site. The area between the Forth and Clyde Canal and the river was known as the Barns o’ Clyde and it was farmland, dotted here and there with a few cottages. This made it an attractive proposition too for the American Singer Manufacturing Company. Some ten years after Thomson’s established their shipyard on the banks of the Clyde, Singer’s found the ideal spot on which to build the biggest sewing machine factory in Europe.
Set back a little from the river, Singer’s 41 different departments soon spread themselves over a large expanse of ground bounded by the canal and Kilbowie Hill to the north and east and Dalmuir to the south and west. The site is now occupied by Clydebank Business Park. Four strategically placed gates allowed workers to enter and leave the complex at the point closest to where they lived or at the point closest to the railway station. Although the factory has long since disappeared, the station is still called Singer.
Clydebank grew rapidly during the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. In 1881 the population was around 3,000. By 1913 it stood at over 43,000. John Brown’s, Singer’s and Beardmore’s, whose yard lay downriver at Dalmuir, were big employers of labour. In the early 1900s their workforces numbered 5,000, 9,000 and 6,000 respectively.
There was a frenzy of house building to accommodate these economic migrants moving down from Glasgow and over the river to what had so recently been the wide open spaces of the Barns o’ Clyde. While many handsome tenements from this era still stand, some were flung up rather too hastily. These included the flat-roofed rows of the ‘Holy City’, which stood on the edge of Kilbowie Hill overlooking the sewing machine factory and the river and with fine views across the Clyde Valley and to the hills of Renfrewshire. You could almost have waved to James Maxton, over there on the hill above Barrhead.
Local tradition has it that the Holy City acquired its nickname when a sailor on a boat on the river remarked that the flat roofs reminded him of houses he had seen in Jerusalem. The story’s a picturesque one, the reality of living in the Holy City less so. Within a year of the houses being built in 1904 tenants were refusing to pay their rent until the landlords carried out repairs needed because corners had been cut during construction.
Despite all the house building, there still weren’t enough people in Clydebank to staff the sewing machine factory. Thousands of workers had to be brought in every day by train from Bridgeton and other parts of Glasgow and from the Vale of Leven down at Dumbarton. This continued right up until the factory closed in the 1960s, ‘Singer Specials’ thundering through intervening stations to get the workers to and from Kilbowie.
At its peak, Singer employed around 14,000 people. In 1911 the workforce numbered well over 10,000, with 4,000 coming in each day on the special trains. A railway clerkess who worked at Singer Station during the Second World War used to reminisce about the difficulties that could pose. Not being an octopus, it was well-nigh impossible for her to collect or check tickets when hundreds of people were piling out of each train and thrusting them towards her.
Singer’s 41 different departments, known as ‘flats’, produced everything required to send a finished sewing machine out of the factory gates. The wood for the cabinets came into the company’s own timber yard on the canal, transported there by Clyde puffers, the sturdy little seagoing workhorses of Scotland’s west coast. The wrought iron for the beautifully curlicued legs which supported the sewing machines was forged in Singer’s onsite foundry. The Kilbowie plant even had its own power station and railway line to move heavy materials about the complex.
After the opening by Howard Carter of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the 1920s the beautiful gold patterns on the shining black enamel of the sewing machines were often motifs inspired by Ancient Egypt. Those were applied in Singer’s paintshop. The company’s stationery was produced in the printshop, as was the famous ‘Wee Green Book’. This neat little instruction manual was sized to fit comfortably into one of the long, narrow drawers of the cabinets which housed the sewing machines. The Wee Green Book was translated into several languages. Singer’s exported from Clydebank to the world, one of Kilbowie’s biggest markets being pre-revolutionary Russia.
Sadly, the style of Singer’s management in 1911 was not to harness the pride all this engendered in those who worked in the town within a town. Like too many employers on Clydeside and elsewhere, they treated their workforce as a potentially volatile assembly of people who had to be kept rigorously under control.
If you were five minutes late for your work you would find the gates shut against you, the gatekeeper under strict instructions not to allow you in until the midday break: half a day’s pay lost. If you made it in before the gates closed but arrived late at the flat where you worked – after handing in your brass token or check at the nearest time office – you might be quartered: lose quarter of an hour’s pay. You couldn’t argue that you hadn’t realized what time it was. High up on the tower which rose above the plant, the Singer’s clock was a landmark for miles around. This fondly remembered timepiece survived the devastating Clydebank Blitz of the Second World War only to be demolished with the factory in the 1960s.
A large proportion of the workforce at Singer’s was female, employed for the sake of their superior manual dexterity when carrying out fine work. In 1911 around 3,000 women and girls worked there. The standard working-class practice was for husbands, sons and daughters to hand over their pay packets to the mother of the family at the end of the week. In return she would give you back some pocket money. However, working outside the home brought more than financial benefits, especially for girls.
You got out into the world, achieved the status of a wage earner and had company of your own age during the day. Although you might have to put up with a strict foreman or supervisor, factories like Singer’s bred young women who tended to be more self-confident than their sisters in domestic service. These girls, and most of them were only in their late teens or early 20s, were more likely to speak out if they perceived an injustice being done to them or their workmates. This was to be a significant driver in the trouble brewing at Singer’s through 1910 and 1911.
Much of the tension arose out of the practice of Scientific Management, for which the company’s American bosses and senior managers were great enthusiasts. This broke work down into small steps, the assembly line concept. The principle could be more crudely expressed – and was. When the inventor of Scientific Management backed up his theories with the example of how to handle pig iron, he wrote:
This work is so crude and elementary in its nature that the writer firmly believes that it would be possible to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any man can be.
So trained gorillas were preferable to men, less likely to ask for a pay rise, shorter hours or better working conditions either. In this modern machine age of the shiny new twentieth century, human intelligence, skill, initiative and experience were
not to be valued. Nor did the enthusiasts for Scientific Management take into account the unquantifiable benefits of allowing employees to carry out work in which they could take a pride. In the drive to maximize profits by getting as much work as possible out of people for as little pay as possible, few allowances were made either for the fact that human beings are not machines.
Scientific Management was popular with many companies on Clydeside at the time. Lord Weir of Weir Pumps in Cathcart was another enthusiast. He and the Red Clydesiders were to cross swords on many issues. The bible of the theory was The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American whose book was based on a paper he had delivered some years previously to ASME, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Perhaps the first-ever management consultant, the man and the theory became so mutually identified that Scientific Management was often referred to as ‘Taylorism’.
Taylor was scornful of the claims of ‘labor agitators (many of whom are misinformed and misguided)’ about ‘“sweat-shop” work and conditions’. In his view the real problem was that people were intrinsically lazy, most workers naturally inclined, as he put it, to loaf or soldier or ‘“ca’ cannie,” as it is called in Scotland’. Although he cites no examples from Scotland in his paper, it’s intriguing to speculate how he became familiar with that expression.
Taylor believed that bringing together workers doing similar work and paying them the same standard daily rate of pay only made this problem worse:
Under this plan the better men gradually but surely slow down their gait to that of the poorest and least efficient. When a naturally energetic man works for a few days beside a lazy one, the logic of the situation is unanswerable. ‘Why should I work hard when that lazy fellow gets the same pay that I do and does only half as much work?’
