by Maggie Craig
Questions were asked in the House of Commons about this suppression of free speech. Tom Johnston was quite sanguine about the whole affair, having just been handed some brilliant free advertising. He played the game all the same, making as much noise as he could and demanding compensation. Eventually, ‘after five or six weeks of this hullabaloo Mr. Lloyd George bowed before the storm of ridicule’.
The young editor was invited to London to meet the Minister for Munitions. He took his solicitor with him. He was Rosslyn Mitchell, a dapper, charming and radical Glasgow lawyer who later became Labour MP for Paisley.
Just as with Willie Gallacher, Lloyd George greeted Tom Johnston effusively, ‘as if I were a long lost brother, and shaking my hand like a pump handle’.
‘My dear Johnston, you mustn’t get me wrong. You really mustn’t. I am the last man on God’s earth to suppress a Socialist newspaper.’
I laughed.
‘My dear young man’ (he was so ostensibly pained and distressed at my unseemly mirth). ‘My dear young man, don’t you believe my word? Why do you laugh?’
‘Well, Mr. Minister, you say you are the last man on God’s earth to suppress a Socialist newspaper. You are. You did it six weeks ago, and no one has done it since!’
They sat down to discuss the situation and at the end of their chat Johnston ‘walked out free to start again, and “it had all been a mistake, and these happen in the best regulated families, Ha! Ha! And we must see more of each other and be better friends in future.”’
This avuncular approach did not extend to the other Clydeside socialists who had declared war on the Munitions Act. Perhaps some class distinction was operating. Or perhaps Lloyd George did not think Tom Johnston and the Forward were nearly so dangerous as the CWC.
Believing Tom Johnston disapproved of the CWC and wasn’t giving them enough support in his newspaper, Willie Gallacher and Johnny Muir had started up their own. The first edition of The Worker appeared in the middle of January 1916, while the Forward was still officially forbidden to publish.
In a story he could only have got from Tom Johnston, Willie Gallacher maintained Lloyd George had shown the former a copy of the new paper during that visit to London. According to Gallacher, Lloyd George told Johnston he had thought Forward was bad until he saw The Worker.
‘Should the Workers Arm?’ That was the article that did it. The piece actually said that the workers shouldn’t but Gallacher and Muir were arrested anyway. John Wheatley and Davie Kirkwood visited them in prison, the latter telling them not to worry. He’d engaged a good lawyer to fight their case. Step forward once again Mr Rosslyn Mitchell. Willie Gallacher gives us one of his word pictures on him:
He was a dapper little gentleman with a beaming, cultivated smile. Someone had told him that he resembled Lord Rosebery, and he tried to live up to the part, with winged collar, spats and all.
Gallacher and Muir appeared in court the following morning to hear the charge against them:
Having on or about January 29th at 50 Renfrew Street or elsewhere in Glasgow attempted to cause mutiny, sedition or disaffection among the civilian population, and to impede, delay and restrict the production of war material by producing, printing, publishing and circulating among workers in and around Glasgow engaged on war materials, a newspaper entitled The Worker.
Rosslyn Mitchell got them released on bail but it was only a temporary reprieve. When their case came to trial, Muir got a year, Gallacher six months and the printer three. According to Davie Kirkwood, at least one innocent man was locked up. He told the story in My Life of Revolt, claiming that Johnny Muir was not the author of ‘Should the Workers Arm?’:
John Muir was charged with having written the article. He did not write it nor did either of the other two arrested men. The man who wrote the article was married and had a family of five children. John Muir was unmarried. He accepted the responsibility. There were only three persons who knew the author – John Wheatley, Rosslyn Mitchell, and myself. It was suggested that Muir should reveal the secret. He refused, saying: ‘Some one [sic] is going to jail for this because the Military has read it the wrong way. If . . . . . goes, there will be seven sufferers. If I go, there is only one so I am going.’
Many years later, John Muir was elected to Parliament and became Under-Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions. To the day of his death he never by word or suggestion went back on his word, nor did the others who knew his secret.
The government’s Dilution Commission had visited Glasgow at the beginning of 1916. They held meetings with employers and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), the engineers’ union, to hammer out the details of how dilution was to work but refused to meet with the CWC or allow shop stewards to approve new dilutees. Workers at Beardmore’s, where Davie Kirkwood was a shop steward, promptly went on strike in protest.
Three other Glasgow munitions factories came out in sympathy, including Weir’s of Cathcart, where Arthur McManus was one of the shop stewards. Presumably Lord Weir was unaware that he was nursing such a socialist viper in his bosom. The government took swift and decisive action. On Friday, 24 March 1916, the shop stewards regarded as the main ringleaders were arrested and deported to Edinburgh.
Despite observing that the ‘Minister for ad-Munitions’ had given them the new motto of ‘gang Forward warily’, there was no sign of caution in the howl of outrage Tom Johnston splashed all over his front page on Saturday, 1 April 1916:
BANISHED!
Kirkwood and other Clyde Shop Stewards
Expelled from West of Scotland
Taken from their Beds
It was a dawn raid. Or, as Davie Kirkwood put it in My Life of Revolt, ‘During the night Lloyd George struck.’
On March 25, 1916, at three o’clock in the morning, I was sleeping the sleep of the just. I was awakened by a violent rat-tat-tat at the door.
My wife said: ‘That’s them for ye noo.’
The same thought flashed through my mind. I went to the door and asked who was there. A voice answered: ‘The police. Open the door.’
‘I will do nothing of the kind,’ I answered.
‘You’d be better to open it. We have a warrant under the Defence of the Realm Act to take you to the Central Police Office. If you do not open the door, we shall batter it in.’
I opened the door. There were four detectives with revolvers at their sides. I gave them the dressing-down of their lives.
None of the policemen involved having written their memoirs, we’ll have to take Davie’s word for it that he told them in no uncertain terms they had no right to arrest a man who had done nothing wrong. He was, he declared, neither a savage nor an anarchist. He’d read about these sort of things happening in Russia (where the Tsar still had a year left to rule) but never in his wildest dreams had he thought they could happen in Scotland. How could Scotsmen stoop so low as to ‘arrest another Scotsman who had done nothing, but simply was standing up for his rights and the rights of his fellows’?
Friendly but firm, the police told him to get dressed and come with them. They reiterated that they were acting under the authority of DORA, the Defence of the Realm Act, and on the instructions of the competent military authorities.
After a cold night sleeping on the floor of a prison cell without even a blanket, Kirkwood discovered he had been court-martialled the day before in Edinburgh and sentenced to be deported. Understandably furious, he demanded to know how he could have been court-martialled without even having been there or knowing anything about it. He had never in his life been in trouble with the police. Where on earth was he supposed to go, anyway?
A Colonel Levita told him he could ‘go to San Francisco or anywhere you like, so long as it is outside of the Clyde Munitions area’. Plucking his destination out of the air, Kirkwood said he would go to Edinburgh. After another night on his own in the cells, he was collected by two detectives who took him home to Parkhead to collect some clothes.
Sparing no expense, they took him b
y tram. By the time they had walked from the stop to his home, a crowd of people were following him and the policemen. Perhaps fearing trouble on the streets, that evening the police used cabs to transfer the court-martialled shop stewards between the Central Police Station and Queen Street Railway Station. Police officers rode shotgun above and below the cabs.
‘In Queen Street Station,’ wrote Kirkwood, ‘I was handed a single ticket for Edinburgh and a ten-shilling note, and put inside the barrier. We were cast adrift.’
Bemused, their only instruction being to report to Edinburgh’s Chief Constable immediately upon arrival in the capital, the six men on the train were stunned by the speed with which they had been wrenched away from their homes and families. One of those men was Arthur McManus.
Worried about how his wife and six children were going to manage without him, Kirkwood was worried for himself too. On the journey through to Edinburgh, he wondered if he might be destined to face a firing squad. Dublin’s Easter Rising had happened only two weeks before, and his friend James Connolly had been shot for his part in it. Meeting the same fate must have seemed a real possibility.
They came up out of Waverley into a blizzard. It had stopped the trams, and the deportees stood for a while in the swirling snow, watching some men trying to reconnect one tramcar to the overhead electric cable. Kirkwood thought they could be in Russia: ‘. . . an antiquated method of engineering and transport, a blinding snowstorm, and my emotions outraged at being lifted in the middle of the night without any charge preferred against me’.
Things began to look up when they reached police headquarters. Captain Ross, the chief constable, was polite and kind, asking them where they were going to stay. They were permitted to live anywhere within a five-mile radius of the city centre.
None of them had much money. They did have friends in Edinburgh though, and eventually they settled on John S. Clarke, later to become a Labour MP and subsequently a Glasgow town councillor. So it was that four of the dangerous revolutionaries of Red Clydeside deported under the draconian terms of the Defence of the Realm Act walked out through the snow to douce Morningside.
Known to his friends as ‘John S.’, Clarke was living in Edinburgh with his wife, son and mother. He came originally from Northumberland and was a member of a circus family. To describe him as a colourful character would be something of an understatement, as the title chosen by his biographer, Raymond Challinor, shows: John S. Clarke: Parliamentarian, Poet, Lion-tamer. Davie Kirkwood thought Clarke’s house was more like a museum than a home, full as it was of stuffed birds and animals.
John S. was not at home but his womenfolk were very hospitable, taking the refugees from Glasgow in until they could find work and seek out alternative lodgings. Finding work proving not so easy, the exiles had lots of time on their hands.
One day they walked out to take a look at Roslin (usually now spelled Rosslyn) Chapel and Castle. Reverend Morrison, the minister there, hated their politics but he and his wife gave afternoon tea to ‘the wild men from the Clyde’. Davie Kirkwood said that as they all sat round the table in the manse they were ‘as meek and gentle as schoolchildren at a Sunday School party’.
Banned from any political activity or attendance at public meetings though he was, one evening he just happened to be passing the Mound while Helen Crawfurd, ‘well known as a militant suffragist, pacifist, and Communist’, was addressing a meeting urging a negotiated peace to end the war. When a couple of Australian soldiers threatened to get violent with the speaker who followed her, Kirkwood intervened, defusing a potential riot.
Barely two weeks after he and his fellow shop stewards arrived in Edinburgh, the horror of war came to the Scottish capital. Once again ignoring the ban on political activity, they were in the ILP hall in Edinburgh ‘when the lights were gradually lowered’. This happened three times, and on the third occasion the lights stayed out. ‘The Edinburgh people knew what it meant,’ wrote Kirkwood. ‘They whispered: “Zeppelins!”’
There had been Zeppelin raids on London which had caused fatalities and injured hundreds and there was a great fear the Germans might attempt a raid on Scotland. The warning drill had been well rehearsed:
Very silently we stole out into the pitch-dark streets. We walked to Morningside, a mile and a half, speaking in whispers, careful not to let our heels click too hard on the pavement. At last we reached the house where we were staying. Six of us entered. The only occupants were Mr Clarke’s mother and her little grandson.
Midnight came and went. Clarke’s mother-in-law took herself and her grandson off to bed. And then it happened: ‘Suddenly a terrifying explosion occurred. Windows rattled, the ground quivered, pictures swung. We all gasped. I ran to the window and saw Vesuvius in eruption.’
Everyone but Kirkwood ran out of the house to see what had happened, not even stopping to put their boots back on. Mrs Clarke reappeared in her dressing gown, concerned the noise of the explosion might waken the wee boy. Kirkwood smiled at her and told her that was probably it, and she went back to bed, but the Zeppelin raid was by no means over:
I opened the window. A great flash greeted me from the Castle and then, above the roaring, I heard the most dreadful screeching and shouting. The inmates in the Morningside Asylum had started pandemonium. Another bomb exploded, but nearer Leith, then another, followed by a fire.
When I was a young man I had read Dante’s Inferno, which came out in parts at 4 ½d. each. Here it was in reality.
And the old lady in bed and the little boy slept peacefully through it all!
The men who had rushed in their stocking soles out into the night gradually came back to the house, the last of them not until three o’clock in the morning. Kirkwood didn’t like this man, describing him as a braggart who was now gabbling away, the shock of the raid making him talk nineteen to the dozen.
He told the other men he had not only seen the Zeppelin, he had heard the gunners being ordered to shoot him. Davie Kirkwood remarked drily that he must have learned German gey quick to be able to understand what was being said. He doesn’t name this man but takes two more sideswipes at him:
That fellow turned up at the forty hours’ strike. While some of us were being batoned, he cleared away, and, like Johnnie Cope, didn’t stop running till he reached England.
A few years later he put all Britain into a panic.
Could Kirkwood be referring here to Arthur McManus and the notorious Zinoviev Letter? Published by the Daily Mail in 1924, this purported to be orders from Soviet Russia to Britain’s communists and socialists, urging them to work towards revolution. It was signed by the Russian Zinoviev and Arthur McManus, by then British representative on the Communist International. The resulting reds-under-the-bed panic helped bring about the defeat of the first Labour government in 1924.
The Zeppelin which bombed Edinburgh on Sunday, 2 April 1916 killed 11 people and injured many more. The bomb dropped at Leith hit a whisky bond, setting fire to the spirit and lighting up the night sky. Bombs were dropped on Marchmont and Causewayside, where a five-storey building was completely destroyed, although with no loss of life. In the Grassmarket a bomb hit the pavement outside the White Hart Inn, killing one person and injuring three more. An engraving on the paving stones now marks the spot.
The raid was a shocking event, both physically and psychologically. It wasn’t only that Scots had thought themselves too far away to be bombed. It was the reality of the Germans bringing death and destruction to Scottish soil. Anti-German sentiment intensified after the Zeppelin raid, feeding the flames of jingoism. This was bound to have an effect on how people regarded those, like Helen Crawfurd, John Maclean and James Maxton, who were speaking out against the war.
The deportation of the shop stewards had provoked an angry demonstration on Glasgow Green on Sunday, 26 March, two days after they had been dispatched to Edinburgh. It was here that James Maxton, who was in enough trouble already, blithely got himself into some more.
It was midni
ght when they arrested him.
16
Prison Cells & Luxury Hotels
This is the vagabond, though he’s mair like a scarecrow nor a Russian revolutionary.
In December 1915 permission was refused for St Andrew’s Halls as a venue for a demonstration ‘in support of free speech and against conscription’. The meeting was switched to George Square. When they were told they couldn’t hold it there, the speakers went up into North Hanover Street and addressed a crowd of around 2,000 people from the traditional platform of the back of a lorry.
Those speakers were Manny Shinwell, John Maclean, Willie Gallacher and James Maxton. They were arrested for causing an obstruction, fined 20 shillings each and released. The incident did not help Maxton’s increasingly strained relationship with the Glasgow School Board, which took a dim view of his antiwar activities and the amount of time he was spending outside the classroom in order to pursue them.
When he wanted even more time off to attend the Labour Party Conference in Newcastle in April 1916, he offered John Maclean as a substitute for himself. Since Maclean had already been dismissed by the Glasgow School Board for his own involvement in antiwar activity, it’s hard not to see Maxton’s suggestion as deliberate provocation. The School Board reacted by transferring him from his school at Dennistoun to one in Finnieston and putting him on a final warning. Any more trouble and he would be sacked.
When conscription came into force at the beginning of March 1916, Maxton was called up. He applied for exemption as a conscientious objector and appeared before a tribunal in Barrhead to state his case, launching into an eloquent argument as to why he should be allowed to claim this status. After he had finished speaking, he was asked why his employers had not put in a good word on his behalf, as they had done for other teachers.
The answer was simple. The Glasgow School Board had made good on their threat. The troublesome Mr Maxton had received his letter of dismissal. The tribunal asked if he would consider joining the army as a medic. His retort was immediate and unequivocal. No, he would not consider that: ‘It’s all part of the game, and you know it.’
