by Maggie Craig
Allegations had been made that the new lady conductors were being overworked. The Bulletin’s lady reporter, again, of course, unnamed, was following up on a story which had appeared in a London newspaper. According to this interloper from south of the border, women working on Glasgow’s trams were being asked to put in the same number of hours as the men they had replaced.
‘The natural result’ of this on one lady conductor was that ‘after a few weeks she had to rest, because the strain was too great’. Even worse than that, when she took the time off to have that rest, she’d been sacked. With the distinct feeling that national pride was at stake here, The Bulletin’s intrepid lady reporter picked up her sword of truth:
Manifestly it was a matter to be investigated, and Mr James Dalrymple, manager of the Corporation Tramways, was the man to see. So I went up to the flag-bedecked building in Bath Street, and the recruiting sergeants standing at the door grinned as I passed in. I suppose they imagined I was one more applicant for the green and tartan uniform!
Mr Dalrymple laughed off the story. So did the lady conductors to whom he gave the lady reporter full access:
‘Of course we are treated as men in the matter of working hours,’ said one woman whose husband is in the trenches, ‘but we took up the work on that understanding, and – what is more important – we are treated as men in the matter of wages, too.’
The lady conductors worked six days a week, eight hours a day. At a total of 48 hours, this was a lot less than the 74 hours and more which waitresses in Glasgow’s tea rooms were putting in. After interviewing a few more lady conductors, the lady reporter declared herself satisfied they did not feel they were being exploited and seemed to enjoy their work. One woman who had been in domestic service said working on the trams was infinitely preferable to doing housework all day long.
More traditional skills were still being valued. On the same page on which they carried the story about the new lady conductors on the trams, The Bulletin reported on the knitting achievements of an Ayrshire woman. Anticipating the arrival of winter and the consequent need for comforts for the troops, a smiling older lady is offered as a shining example for other women to follow:
Mrs Ross, who resides at Darvel, is one of those whose industrious fingers have gone constantly since the first demand went forth. To date she has knitted 60 pairs of heavy sox [sic] for the boys at the front, and declares her willingness to knit more if need be.
The Bulletin returned to the ‘sox’ and comforts issue three weeks later, making an appeal to patriotism with just a touch of advertorial in it and another poignant observation: that there were more soldiers on the front line now, so more women needed to start knitting for them. With winter again approaching, the women’s page tells its readers:
. . . we women must set to work again, and knit and sew as hard as we did last winter – and even harder still, because we have more men to knit and sew for than we had last year. It is obvious that a Tommy warmly clad and comfortable must be a more efficient fighting man than a Tommy who is cold and shivering and miserable. And that is just where we women come in. Nowadays, we never hear of the girl who used to announce boastfully that she ‘couldn’t knit a pair of socks to save her life.’ The war has changed all that, and the girl who has reason to boast in these days of war is the one who can knit a ‘record’ number of socks or mittens or scarves for Tommy within a given time.
The Scotch Wool and Hosiery Stores were happy to give ‘special discounts to work-parties buying large quantities of wool’, and a free hundred-page booklet of knitting patterns could be had from any of their branches. They had 260 of those all over Scotland, 14 in Glasgow alone. Or you could get the booklet by writing to their head office at the simple address of The Worsted Mills, Greenock.
The First World War freed many working-class women and girls from the drudgery of domestic service. Faced with the unthinkable prospect of having to make their own tea and put a few lumps of coal on their own fires, the middle classes whinged about that for the next 20 years, firing off irate letters to newspapers about the ‘servant problem’.
Without an army of housekeepers, cooks and maids, a side effect of just not being able to get the staff these days was the encouragement it gave the inventors and manufacturers of labour-saving devices. These did not come cheap. Adverts which appeared in Glasgow newspapers during the First World War offered electric vacuum cleaners for five guineas. One of those tea room waitresses working for Mr Kerr, the military caterer, would have had to hand over her entire pay for three months to be able to buy one.
Old attitudes continued to die hard, especially when women started working alongside men in industries which had previously been exclusively male preserves. Probably this is why Beardmore’s provided a separate canteen for their ‘girl munition workers’. They and their canteen gave The Bulletin’s lady reporter another subject to write up.
Beardmore’s had converted a ‘light, bright room’ into a canteen for their 300 female workers. Since they worked in shifts around the clock, meals were served throughout the day and night. The food was substantial. On the day the lady reporter went, dinner at one o’clock consisted of lentil soup, meat and potatoes, with rice pudding for dessert.
Wearing ‘neat holland overalls and frilled caps’, the cooks and canteen staff were unpaid, doing their bit for the war effort. Glasgow College of Domestic Science, ‘the Do School’ for short, was one of the organizations which recruited and supplied the volunteers.
Given a glamorous makeover, the female munitions worker in her brown overall and unflattering matching hat became one of the war’s poster girls throughout Britain, encouraging other women to do their bit. This archetypal figure is remembered in a beautiful stained-glass window at what was the headquarters of the North British Locomotive Company and then Springburn College. As Flemington House, it is now the Abbey Mill Business Centre.
Other women from Glasgow, Clydebank and elsewhere in Scotland went off to war themselves, working as nurses, nursing auxiliaries and orderlies. Some joined the Red Cross, whose ambulance train toured Scotland before leaving for France. People queued for hours at Glasgow Central, Paisley Gilmour Street, Greenock, Stirling and elsewhere to view it and make a donation.
Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses served in both world wars. The VADs themselves liked to say that the letters stood for ‘Virgins Almost Desperate’.
The Scottish Women’s Hospitals grew out of the Scottish Federation of the NUWSS, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Their moving spirit was Elsie Inglis. She was an Edinburgh doctor and suffragette, one of those vehemently opposed to the use of violence to get the vote. When the war broke out she immediately offered her services to the War Office.
The reply she got is almost magnificent in its breathtakingly dismissive sexism: ‘My good lady, go home and sit still.’ Elsie Inglis did the exact opposite. The Scottish Women’s Hospitals were soon well established at Royaumont, in France – treating casualties from the Western Front – in Serbia and in Russia. They appealed regularly for donations via adverts in the Scottish newspapers.
The Bulletin carried these frequently, as well as stories and pictures of the Scottish nurses and doctors, all women, in their field hospitals on the front line. They were looking for £100,000 to help them care for the wounded. By September 1915, one year into the war, they were able to tell the folks back home they had already cared for more than 1,250 injured soldiers, and they detailed what they needed so they could tend to more:
To MAINTAIN the HOSPITAL at ABBAYE DE ROYAUMONT, near Creil (200 beds), under the FRENCH RED CROSS SOCIETY.
To establish the new hospital at Troyes (200 beds) under the FRENCH MILITARY AUTHORITIES.
To SUPPORT TWO UNITS now at work in SERBIA under the SERBIAN RED CROSS AND MILITARY AUTHORITIES (600 beds).
To MAINTAIN an AMBULANCE FLOTTANTE AT WORK between the Firing Line and the Two Hospitals in France.
To PROVIDE MOTOR AMBULANCES for these ho
spitals. It is hoped that the motorists of Scotland will assist in this appeal.
To SUPPLY COMFORTS, MEDICAL NECESSARIES, Etc., to the TROOPS in FRANCE AND SERBIA.
£50 WILL NAME A BED FOR A YEAR.
£350 WILL PROVIDE AND EQUIP A MOTOR AMBULANCE.
Donations could be sent to Mrs Laurie of Greenock or to Dr Elsie Inglis in Edinburgh. The Bulletin backed up the advert with photographs of a Dr Butler and her husband, ‘two Glasgow lady doctors’, a group of Scottish nurses attached to Royaumont, and an approving editorial from its ‘Paris correspondent’:
The Scottish Branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the non-militant section of the movement, has done splendid work in various directions since the war began, but in none more than in the equipping and staffing of military hospitals in France.
Dr Butler had graduated with flying colours from Glasgow University in 1890 and had been working on a cancer research project in Austria when war broke out. Her husband worked as a chauffeur at Royaumont.
While the suffragettes were doing their bit for the war effort, the storm of war continued to rage and conflict began to brew on the Clyde. For a brief moment in 1915, however, the clocks stopped.
12
Death of a Hero: The Funeral of Keir Hardie
He got more Socialism from Burns than from Marx.
On 26 September 1915 the ailing Keir Hardie died. Many believed the outbreak of the European war he had worked so hard to prevent was what really killed him. Tom Johnston was sure of it. His tribute on the front page of the Forward on 2 October 1915 spelled it out. Headlined ‘The Passing of Keir Hardie’, the article’s subheading was unequivocal:
He Died of a Broken Heart
By THE EDITOR
A Stroke. A Seizure. Pneumonia! Call it what you will, James Keir Hardie died of a broken heart. I know.
He died of a heartbreak at seeing his cherished dreams, his fondest hopes, his firmest faith shattered in an hour. He had given his all to the building of a Labour Party and to the making of that Labour Party a national wing in the International Army of Labour: he spent his energies and his health rushing feverishly on trains to forge the worker’s weapon that would cease, for evermore, international murder: he organised, instigated, encouraged, and toiled for ‘the Day’ – ‘the Day’ when the masses of Europe would no longer be pawns in the great crime of war.
It was a heartbreaking end to the life of a man who had known much sorrow but had risen above it to devote his life to the fight against poverty and the achievement of a lasting peace among the nations of the world.
James Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party, was born into poverty at Legbrannock near Motherwell in Lanarkshire in 1856, the illegitimate son of a farm servant called Mary Keir. Before he was three, his mother married David Hardie and the family moved up to Glasgow. David Hardie, a ship’s carpenter to trade, found work in the Govan shipyards but was laid off five years later during a prolonged strike.
Young Keir, who had little formal schooling, had already started work. An accident in the shipyard had previously put his adoptive father out of commission. With no money coming in, his parents had no choice but to send their eldest child out to earn what little a boy could. He was only eight years old when he took on his first job as a message boy with the Anchor Line Shipping Company in central Glasgow. He moved on to heating rivets in the shipyard and there were hopes of his becoming an apprentice. However, his mother took fright when two other boys died in an accident in the yard and pulled him out of this workplace. His next job was less dangerous but no less arduous, working full-time as a delivery boy for a local baker, starting at seven o’clock in the morning and finishing when the shop closed in the late afternoon or early evening. He earned four shillings and sixpence per week, his family’s only income while his stepfather was still out of work.
In later life Keir Hardie was to recall what happened when he was late for work one morning. He had the saddest of excuses. Another of the Hardie children, nearest in age to him, was dying of what is described only as a fever. An exhausted Mary Hardie was pregnant with another child. Keir sat up during the night with his dying brother, allowing his mother to get some rest. Hardie’s friend and first biographer, William Stewart, allowed his subject to tell the story of what happened next:
One winter morning I turned up late at the baker’s shop where I was employed and was told I had to go upstairs to see the master. I was kept waiting outside the door of the dining-room while he said grace – he was noted for religious zeal – and, on being admitted, found the master and his family seated round a large table. He was serving out bacon and eggs while his wife was pouring coffee from a glass infuser which at once – shamefaced and terrified as I was – attracted my attention. I had never before seen such a beautiful room, nor such a table, loaded as it was with food and beautiful things. The master read me a lecture before the assembled family on the sin of slothfulness, and added that though he would forgive me for that once, if I sinned again by being late I should be instantly dismissed, and so sent me to begin work.
How awful it must have been for a ten-year-old boy who’d left the house with no breakfast that morning to be in the midst of all this plenty. He was filled with a burning sense of injustice at the baker’s heartless treatment of him, made all the worse because there was no way he could express it. If you wanted to keep your job you didn’t talk back to the master, especially not if you were a child.
Two days after this incident, young Keir was once more late for his work. Once again he’d been doing his best to help his mother and comfort his dying brother. Whether the baker had any knowledge of the tragedy which was being played out in the Hardie home is not clear but he had issued a threat and he carried it out. The boy was dismissed on the spot. Not only that, the baker told him he was fining him his last fortnight’s wages as a punishment. This was a disaster for the whole Hardie family, whose ability to buy food and fuel and pay the rent rested solely on the small shoulders of one young boy.
Immediately aware of the crisis now facing his family, Keir Hardie began to cry, pleading with the woman who served in the shop to help change the baker’s mind. Sympathetic to the child’s plight, she spoke to the man from a speaking tube which linked the shop and the house:
. . . presumably to the breakfast room I remembered so well, but he was obdurate, and finally she, out of the goodness of her heart, gave me a piece of bread and advised me to look for another place. For a time I wandered about the streets in the rain, ashamed to go home where there was neither food nor fire, and actually discussing whether the best thing was not to go and throw myself in the Clyde and be done with a life that had so little attractions.
In the end I went to the shop and saw the master and explained why I had been late. But it was all in vain. The wages were never paid. But the master continued to be a pillar of the Church and a leading light in the religious life of the city!
How Mary Hardie reacted when Keir eventually went home is not recorded. Did she hug her tearful boy, tell him it wasn’t his fault, that they would manage somehow, throw herself on the mercy of a kind neighbour?
The disaster of losing their sole source of income forced a prolonged separation on the family. Whether he had fully recovered from his accident or not, David Hardie went back to sea and Mary Hardie returned to stay near her mother in Lanarkshire. Keir, still only a boy of ten, went down the pit.
He did a boy’s job below the ground, working as a trapper. They made sure the mine was well ventilated by opening and closing a trapdoor, sending air flowing along the passages where men were hewing and digging out the coal. The job was both lonely and cold, although on his first day a ‘kindly old miner . . . wrapped his jacket round him to keep him warm’.
It was an eerie job, all alone for ten long hours, with the underground silence only disturbed by the sighing and whistling of the air as it sought to escape through the joints of the door. A child’s mind is full of vision unde
r ordinary surroundings, but with the dancing flame of the lamps giving life to the shadows, only a vivid imagination can conceive what the vision must have been to this lad.
Thousands of working-class children in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Scotland had such heart-rending tales to tell. Thousands of us whose families lived through such hard times will have heard their stories and shed a tear for the sorrows and struggles of our forebears, been angry on their behalf over the injustices they endured. When Keir Hardie as a grown man spoke to and for those living lives blighted and narrowed by poverty, shared experience forged a powerful link. Education was the key. The belief that learning and self-improvement would open the door to a better life was an article of faith among working-class Scots, who stretched themselves to the limit to get the education poverty had denied them, for themselves and for their children.
Keir Hardie worked down the pit for ten hours a day but still managed to attend night school at Holytown near Motherwell, where the pupils had to bring their own candles so as to be able to see during winter evenings. Even while he was in the pit, he taught himself Pitman’s Shorthand. Down in that Stygian gloom, he used the wick from a miner’s lamp to see by.
At home his mother sang him the old Scottish ballads, told him traditional stories of days gone by and encouraged him to read widely. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan was a great favourite in the Hardie household, as were Tom Paine’s Age of Reason and, of course, the poems of Robert Burns. As his biographer, William Stewart, put it, ‘He got more Socialism from Burns than from Marx: “The Twa Dugs,” and “A Man’s Man for a’ that,” were more prolific text books for his politics than “Das Kapital.”’
Although she retained the strong religious faith of her childhood, the experience with the baker changed Mary Hardie’s outlook on organized religion forever. From then on she would tolerate no religious hypocrisy, priding herself and her family on being freethinkers. As William Stewart put it, ‘All the members of the family grew up with the healthy habit of thinking for themselves and not along lines prescribed by custom.’
