by Maggie Craig
Force-feeding of suffragettes had garnered much public sympathy. The assault on Burns’ Cottage threatened to swing the pendulum as far back in the other direction as it could possibly go. The Glasgow Herald described the attack as a ‘dastardly outrage’:
Alloway Outrage
Attempt to Blow up Burns’s Cottage
Suffragist in Custody
A dastardly attempt was made in the early hours of yesterday morning by suffragists to fire and blow up Burns’s Cottage, Alloway, the birthplace of the national poet, which is annually visited by thousands of pilgrims from all parts of the world. The attempted outrage was fortunately frustrated by the timely appearance on the scene of the night watchman, but the fact that an attempt was made to destroy a shrine that Scotsmen in all parts of the world regard as sacred has roused in the locality the most intense indignation.
There was further outrage when one of the two suffragists responsible – ‘suffragette’ had still not entirely caught on – was found to be Frances Parker, niece of Lord Kitchener, the man whose eyes were to follow people from the First World War recruiting poster telling them that their country needed them. Fanny Parker’s accomplice at Alloway escaped by bike, leaving behind two canisters containing 4 lb of gunpowder apiece.
Engaged to address the crowd at Perth that evening after the news had broken, fearing there might be people within the throng feeling hostile towards all suffragettes as a result, Helen Crawfurd summoned up her courage and the ghost of Robert Burns. She started by telling her listeners it was his words which had inspired her to be able to speak to them after the shock of the attempted destruction of his childhood home. In illustration, she quoted from ‘Scots Wha Hae’:
Wha wad be a traitor knave,
Wha wad fill a coward’s grave
Wha sae base as be a slave
Let him turn and flee
She explained that the two suffragettes who had tried to destroy Burns Cottage were not Scottish and simply could not understand the high esteem in which all Scots, men and women, held him. She finished by quoting Burns on the subject of the emancipation of women:
While Europe’s eye is fix’d on mighty things,
The fate of Empires and the fall of Kings;
While quacks of State must each produce his plan,
And even children lisp the Rights of Man;
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,
The Rights of Woman merit some attention.
Giving Scotland’s suffragettes the stalwart support he always did, Tom Johnston quoted Helen Crawfurd’s speech to the crowd at Perth in full in the Forward of 18 July 1914.
Tried at Ayr Sheriff Court, Fanny Parker also quoted Burns, as the Glasgow Herald wearily put it, ‘at some length’. She also declared, ‘You Scotsmen used to be proud of Burns; now you have taken to torturing women.’
On 29 July 1914 Glasgow’s Daily Record announced that the Austrians had declared war on Serbia. This dramatic news shared the front page with news much closer to home. The previous evening, Mrs Pankhurst had visited Glasgow, where she spoke to a large audience in St Andrew’s Halls. The Daily Record’s headlines were dramatic:
WILD RIOT IN GLASGOW
MRS PANKHURST ARRESTED
REVOLVER SHOTS IN ST ANDREW’S HALLS
Amid a scene of wild riot in St Andrew’s Halls, Glasgow, last night, Mrs. Pankhurst, the suffragette leader, was arrested. The meeting, which was held under the auspices of the W.S.P.U., had an audience of about 5,000, the vast majority of whom were ladies.
Mrs. Pankhurst, despite the vigilance of the police, entered the hall by one of the main entrances wearing a large picture hat with a yellow feather and trimmings, and a thick black veil.
You wonder how they could have missed her. Janie Allan was convinced the revolver shots were an indicator that a government conspiracy was afoot to assassinate Mrs Pankhurst. In the event, the war between the government and the suffragettes was resolved by the conflict which was about to engulf Europe.
On 4 August 1914 Britain declared war on Germany. The suffragettes immediately called a truce with the British government.
Red Clydeside, however, was just about to initiate hostilities.
10
Not in My Name
This murder business.
As Red Clydesider Willie Gallacher wrote in his vivid autobiography, Revolt on the Clyde:
What terrible attraction a war can have! The wild excitement, the illusion of wonderful adventure and the actual break in the deadly monotony of working-class life! Thousands went flocking to the colours in the first days, not because of any ‘love of country,’ not because of any high feeling of ‘patriotism,’ but because of the new, strange and thrilling life that lay before them. Later the reality of the fearsome slaughterhouse, with all its long agony of filth and horror, turned them from buoyant youth to despair or madness.
Yet there were thousands who were passionately opposed to the war from the outset, many of them on Red Clydeside. On 15 August 1914, above another cartoon by Robins Millar depicting a ferocious and wild-eyed female warrior headed ‘Europe Goes Stark Mad’, Forward published a report on a peace demonstration held on Glasgow Green, estimating that 5,000 people were there. There’s no way of corroborating those numbers, as only the socialist newspaper covered the story, subtitling their piece ‘Boycotted by Press’.
The peace demonstration was organized by the ILP and the Glasgow branch of the Peace Society. Forward was at pains to assure its readers that the demonstrators had come from a broad social spectrum:
The gathering was Cosmopolitan in character and included doctors and dock labourers and rebels of every possible brand from mild peace advocates to the wildest of revolutionaries.
One thing was made obvious by the meeting: that the war is unpopular with people who think, while the rise in food prices is tempering the bellies of those who don’t think.
One of the speakers was John Wheatley of the ILP, who had now been elected Councillor Wheatley. Another was his fellow ILP member Patrick Dollan. All the speakers condemned the war, telling the crowd that ‘the working people [of Britain and Germany] had no quarrel with each other’. This was reiterated by the chairman of the Peace Society, a Miss Adams. After she and her fellow members of the society had spoken, resolutions were read out which had been agreed upon:
. . . by huge gatherings of workers in Austria, Germany and France against war. These workers did not want war, and yet, in spite of their friendship for each other, the shadow of Death overcast Europe. Few homes in Europe would escape scathless from the passage of that shadow.
As we all now know, Miss Adams was proved horribly right in her prediction. At the time, many other people really did believe it would all be over by Christmas. Harry McShane was one of them. In his autobiography, No Mean Fighter, he wrote that, when the First World War broke out in 1914, ‘everyone, including the socialists, thought it would be fought by professional armies and volunteers’.
Those volunteers continued to flock to the colours. Conscription had not yet been introduced, nor did there yet seem any need for it. McShane too described the overheated atmosphere at the start of the war:
A terrible war fever developed. Men rushed to join the army hoping that the war wouldn’t be all over by the time they got to the front; they had to march in civilian clothes because there weren’t enough uniforms to go round. Many young people, particularly those who were unemployed, were caught up in the adventure of the thing. On every hoarding there was a picture of Kitchener, the Secretary for War, pointing his finger, and saying ‘Your Country Needs You’. There he was, and then along came daft middle-class women with white feathers trying to drive young men into the army.
As the cenotaph in Glasgow’s George Square tells us, 200,000 went from Glasgow alone. Standing guard over the names of thousands more are Clydebank’s beautiful art deco war memorial and, around the country, all the other impassive stone angels and sad soldiers, heads bowed over their
rifles. Those who refused to be caught up in the war fever were swimming against a rushing tide. As many of them were to find out, on a personal level they were also treading a dangerous path.
The ILP was split over the war, although Keir Hardie knew exactly where he stood: he had always been against it. By 1915 he was failing fast, his ill health exacerbated by his efforts to prevent the slaughter having been in vain. In his biography of James Maxton, Gordon Brown offers a poignant vignette of Keir Hardie: ‘It is said that latterly, because of his staunch opposition to the war, many of his old friends would ignore him or refuse to shake his hand.’
Willie Gallacher was another of those who spoke out against the war from the start. So was John Maclean, who called the fighting ‘this murder business’. In her biography of him, his daughter Nan Milton describes how he and other socialists and Marxists helped gather together those who were against the war.
From as early as the end of 1914, Maclean organized open-air Sunday-evening meetings on the corner of Renfield Street and Bath Street. His friend and fellow socialist John MacDougall left a description of these, referring to himself at the end of this quote in the third person:
From the very first the meeting attracted large numbers of Socialists. Sunday by Sunday it grew, as the seriousness of the War situation became plain to even the meanest intelligence, and after a number of weeks it had grown so large that the casual passers-by in Renfield Street were attracted. It is a broad street. It was packed from side to side so that a child could have walked on the heads of the people, and that condition extended a long distance down the street. Week after week there was to be seen a vast body of men and women, standing in tense silence, their attention riveted on the speakers for two or three hours on end, while a succession of speakers kept the meeting going. Maclean’s principal assistants were MacDougall, George Pettigrew, Mrs Helen Crawfurd of the ILP and a famous suffragette, and William Gallacher.
The suffragettes might have declared a truce with Lloyd George and the government over votes for women, but during the First World War Helen Crawfurd was one of many women who turned their energies to campaigning for peace. In June 1916 she, her friend Agnes Dollan and others established the Women’s Peace Crusade, hanselling the new organization with another mass meeting on Glasgow Green.
James Maxton was another Red Clydesider who was always bitterly opposed to the war. In August 1914 he wrote to his girlfriend Sissie McCallum, saying, ‘There’s no chance of me volunteering. I’m working for peace for all I’m worth.’ Sissie was also a teacher, she and Maxton having met while working as colleagues at a school in Glasgow.
Like Maxton, John Maclean brought all his skills as a speaker to the fight against the war. At the Bath Street meetings, standing on a table in the middle of the crowd, he repeated what he and many socialists believed. War was ‘the continuation of the peace competition for trade and for markets already carried on between the powers before hostilities broke out’. He told his audiences that capitalists and employers were the real enemy and that they should not join up to fight in a capitalist war:
The men they were asked to shoot were their brothers, with the same difficulty on Saturdays to find a rent for their miserable dwellings, who had to suffer the same insults and impertinence from their gaffers and foremen. What did it matter if they looked a little different? And spoke a different language? The Scottish miners when on strike had often received financial help from the German miners. The international solidarity of the working-class was not only the highest moral sentiment that existed in the world, it had already found expression in many ways.
None of them was ever going to get away with any of this. As John MacDougall put it when writing about John Maclean:
His hearers knew that for these precious words of exhortation and of hope the man would have to pay, and pay dearly. Would he be shot? Would the traditions of British Liberalism stand the strain of this unprecedented test when the British Empire was standing with its back to the wall? Nobody knew. Would he be drafted into the army like Karl Liebknecht?
Liebknecht was a German Socialist, much admired by his British counterparts. James Maxton had a dog called Karl, named not after Marx but Liebknecht.
The Bath Street protests continued. Pushing it even further, John Maclean raged against the ‘British Junkers’ who had introduced DORA, the Defence of the Realm Act. This imposed all kinds of wartime restrictions on freedom of speech and action. A new Munitions Act also enforced draconian rules and regulations.
For the duration of the hostilities, strikes were made illegal. Ships and armaments manufactured on the Clyde being crucial to the war effort, nobody in what was now designated the Clyde Munitions Area was allowed to change their job without permission. This was enforced by having to secure a leaving certificate to show to a new employer. The Clyde’s workers referred to this as a slave clause, depriving workers of their few hard-won liberties.
At the beginning of 1915 Willie Gallacher and fellow shop stewards, including Davie Kirkwood and Arthur McManus, formed themselves into the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC). The CWC was soon to clash head-on with the minister for munitions, Mr David Lloyd George. For them, Maxton, Maclean and MacDougall, the fight against the war and for workers’ rights was soon to become very personal indeed.
11
A Woman’s Place
My good lady, go home and sit still.
Traditional ideas of what constituted women’s work and acceptable female activities and behaviour took a hammering during the First World War. The men who marched off to war left huge gaps behind them. These were felt right across the social spectrum, the lack, of course, emotional as well as practical.
During the Glasgow Fair holidays of the summer of 1915, a poignant cartoon appeared in The Bailie, Glasgow’s normally humorous weekly newspaper. Against the backdrop of a pier on the Firth of Clyde, a young woman sits on a bench under a tree, alone and thoughtful. The caption reads: ‘THE “FAIR” WITHOUT THE BRAVE.’ The Bailie also informed its readers that moonlit cruises doon the watter had been suspended for the duration.
The absence of men threw up some unexpected benefits. The Bulletin was a sister paper to the Glasgow Herald which specialized in bright and breezy articles accompanied by lots of photographs. Showing lots of smiling young Glasgow gels driving, cranking their open-topped cars into action and inflating their tyres, in August 1915 it reported on this new phenomenon:
Since the chauffeur went away to the war the motoring girl has come by her own.
Many ladies could drive cars in the old days, but the motoring girl may be truly said to be a product of the war. These types seem to enjoy all the little troubles that afflict the chauffeur, and only refrain from burrowing beneath the car because nowadays that is unnecessary.
This new ease of movement allowed middle-class women and girls a much greater social and personal freedom. Writing in the woman’s page of The Bailie in July of that same year, the unnamed reviewer of a book called The Street of the Seven Stars recognized this new development. Undoubtedly a lady reporter, she was still rather uncomfortable that a couple in the book were depicted as spending lots of time together ‘sans chaperone’, which meant it ‘wasn’t quite the thing for a Sunday School prize book’. In the same column she made the interesting observation that the current shortage of men meant women were having more opportunity to socialize together and were finding that they enjoyed one another’s company.
Language and the codes by which it indicated class was another preoccupation:
Some years ago a London barrister referred for the first time to his charlady, and now the word he introduced in jest is allowed to describe a very useful section of the community. Within recent weeks we have seen ‘lady’ car-conductors, ‘lady’ lamplighters, and later, I suppose, ‘lady’ scavengers. Even the dignified newspaper just round the corner in Buchanan Street speaks of the ‘ladies’ appointed to such branches of public work. And why not?
Meantime we have �
�female’ teachers and ‘women’ doctors and, instead of clerks ‘clerkesses,’ a word that offends me only a little less than ‘chairman,’ when it would not be in the least awkward to say ‘chairwoman,’ and would convey a sensible meaning without disturbing anybody’s prejudices.
Some of us might agree with her on that last point, finding it risible that the political correctness of our own days reinforces gender inequality by choosing the masculine form of a noun as the superior version. When it isn’t turning human beings into pieces of furniture.
The Bailie’s writer didn’t believe the use of the word ‘lady’ could ‘make two classes into one’. It wasn’t that she was a snob. She believed completely that ‘one woman is as good as another but that doesn’t alter the fact that there are differences’.
As to the ‘lady’ conductors, I like them; and they haven’t yet begun to bully women as some of the gentlemen conductors certainly did when the women were elderly and of good social position. The car ladies are exceedingly pleasant, and now that they have left off wearing earrings and lace neckties they are good to look at too.
A week later The Bailie reported again on the lady tram conductors, who don’t yet seem to have become ‘conductresses’, the name by which future generations knew this fearsome form of Glasgow womanhood. The First World War variety were to be dressed in long skirts of Black Watch tartan, allowing The Bailie to go off on a flight of fancy that maybe they should also wear sporrans and carry skean dhus. A month later The Bulletin took a more serious look at the women working on the trams.
