by Maggie Craig
Despite all sorts of complications, Colonel Guest was as good as his word, accompanying his prisoner through to Glasgow on a special late-night train. Kirkwood was horribly afraid the Colonel’s kindness meant his wife had died and that the military man was only waiting for the opportunity to break it to him gently:
At Queen Street, Glasgow, the station seemed to be full of soldiers, all drawn up in parade order. It was now one o’clock in the morning. Glasgow was silent and dark.
I was led to a motor-car in front of which were two soldiers. Colonel Guest sat beside me. We drove to my home. At the close-mouth he stopped and, in the gentlest way, said:
‘I think you had better go upstairs by yourself. If I appear in these regimentals, it might give Mrs Kirkwood a shock. Go up and see how things are, and then come down and let me know.’
I ran up three steps at a time and chapped on the door in the way we both knew so well. Then I pushed open the letter-box and heard my wife say:
‘There’s Davie at the door.’
I think in all my life I have never heard anything so wonderful as that phrase.
When Kirkwood returned to the close-mouth where Colonel Guest was standing in the gloom of the night and told him mother and baby were both doing well, the soldier threw his arms about his prisoner and hugged him: ‘I was speechless. We looked at each other. We clasped hands. He saluted, and moved away to his car in the darkness. I waved to him as he went.’
Impressed that Kirkwood had not exaggerated how ill his wife was in the hope of gaining his own freedom, Guest gave it to him anyway, confirming that by letter at the end of May 1917.
All but one of the Red Clydesiders who had challenged the government were now free. A welcome-home social was held for them at St Mungo’s Hall in June 1917. Everyone was still tremendously excited by the news of Russia’s February Revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar.
Everyone also agreed that the priority now was to get John Maclean out of prison.
17
John Maclean
I am not here, then, as the accused: I am here as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.
John Maclean dedicated his life to teaching people about Marxist economics, the history of the working classes and the class struggle. For him, revolution was the only way to end poverty and injustice. The working classes must rise up and seize the power which, as the producers of society’s wealth, was rightfully theirs.
Passionately opposed to the First World War, he spoke out against it at meeting after meeting and was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act. His first prison sentence lasted less than a week but resulted in instant dismissal from his teaching post. This happened at the end of 1915. Mrs Barbour and her army collected him from the last school he taught in on their way to the Sheriff Court to protest during the rent strike.
Losing his job was a financial disaster for him and his family but freed him to carry on urging revolution, teaching outside the formal school system and protesting against the war and conscription. This got him arrested again in February 1916 under DORA, when he was imprisoned briefly in Calton Jail with James Maxton, James MacDougall, Johnny Muir and Willie Gallacher, and then by himself in Peterhead.
When his wife was allowed to visit him there in the summer of 1916, they discussed the petition which was being mooted to try to secure his release. Maclean was adamant that he would not beg for leniency. Any petition should focus on securing rights for him as a political prisoner. If countries like Germany, Russia and England recognized this category, why was Scotland insisting on treating him like a common criminal?
It wasn’t much of a visit. Husband and wife were permitted to spend only twenty minutes together, had to talk under the supervision of two guards and were not even allowed to clasp each other’s hands through the bars which separated them. Another visit would not be permitted until Maclean had served a year of his sentence.
Letters were also strictly limited. Agnes Maclean visited in July. She and her husband were not allowed to write to one another until the following November. He was allowed one book a week but no newspapers. Sentenced as he was to three years’ penal servitude, he had to work out of doors in all weathers. The often harsh climate of the Buchan Coast was to take its toll on his health.
A campaign was mounted on his behalf: a demonstration on Glasgow Green, questions asked in Parliament, letters to the Home Secretary. Socialists in other countries asked their ambassadors in Britain to enquire into the case of John Maclean. Why had this man been dealt with more severely than others?
Sales of work were held and donations made to a fund to give financial support to Mrs Maclean and the couple’s two daughters. Agnes Maclean wrote to her husband in November 1916: ‘It would take pages to tell you of the people who are always asking about you and thinking of you.’
His continuing imprisonment had become a cause, one which fired up thousands. The burning sense of injustice found a focus at the end of June 1917, when Lloyd George, now prime minister, returned to Glasgow to be given the freedom of the city. That such an honour should be conferred on him was not a universally popular move on Red Clydeside.
Willie Gallacher remembered how Lloyd George was driven through Glasgow in an open carriage, surrounded by soldiers and policemen on foot and horseback, to St Andrew’s Halls where the ceremony was to take place. Was the venue coincidental or was the Prime Minister hoping to lay the embarrassing ghost of the Christmas Day Munitions Conference? The Welsh Wizard was on top form, at his charming best:
At the top window of a block of flats overlooking the west entrance to the hall used on this occasion, an old stalwart of the movement, Mrs. Reid, her white hair crowning a face alight with the flame of revolt against the mad slaughter of the war, was waving a great red flag.
From the distant place to which we had been forced back Kirkwood was shouting encouragement to her at the top of his stentorian voice, while the crowd gave her cheer after cheer. Before entering the hall, Mr. Lloyd George, always acutely conscious of the mood of the crowd, stood up in the carriage which had drawn to a stop, looked up at our comrade bravely waving the scarlet banner, raised his hat and gave her one of his most gracious bows. Then he looked over the heads of the military and police, towards the mass of workers, nodding his head as though to say, ‘You see, I’m a bit of a Red Flagger myself.’
Whether by chance or design, John Maclean was released from custody the morning after Lloyd George was given the freedom of Glasgow. Returned to the city the day before, he was freed from Duke Street Prison. He got his own welcome-home reception, chaired by Tom Johnston. When a telegram of congratulations was read out from the Petrograd Soviet, the cheering raised the roof.
It wasn’t long before Maclean was back at the barricades. In October 1917, like so many on Red Clydeside, he drew strength and inspiration from the second Russian Revolution. This saw the triumph of the Bolsheviks under Lenin and the establishment of a Communist state. Men like Maclean and Willie Gallacher and Arthur McManus longed to achieve the same in Scotland, with society run by workers’ and soldiers’ committees.
At the beginning of 1918 Lenin appointed John Maclean soviet consul for Scotland. It was a dubious honour. No country was as yet prepared to give official diplomatic recognition to the new Soviet workers’ republic. Nothing daunted, Maclean opened a Russian consulate at Portland Street in Glasgow.
In April 1918 the police raided the premises and once again arrested him under DORA, charging him with sedition and attempting to spread disaffection among the civilian population. He was tried in Edinburgh on 9 May 1918 and the speech he gave from the dock that day has acquired legendary status. This ringing denunciation of capitalism took him more than an hour to deliver:
It has been said that they cannot fathom my motive. For the full period of my active life I have been a teacher of economics to the working classes, and my contention has always been that capitalism is rotten to its foundation, and must give place
to a new society. I had a lecture, the principal heading of which was ‘Thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not kill’, and I pointed out that as a consequence of the robbery that goes on in all civilised countries today, our respective countries have had to keep armies, and that inevitably our armies must clash together. I consider capitalism the most infamous, bloody and evil system that mankind has ever witnessed. My language is regarded as extravagant language, but the events of the past four years have proved my contention.
Looking at the carnage which had engulfed Europe in those past four years, you didn’t necessarily have to be a revolutionary socialist to agree with him:
I wish no harm to any human being, but I, as one man, am going to exercise my freedom of speech. No human being on the face of the earth, no government is going to take from me my right to speak, my right to protest against wrong, my right to do everything that is for the benefit of mankind. I am not here, then, as the accused: I am here as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.
The jury did not retire but gave their verdict through their foreman: guilty on all charges. The Lord Justice General turned to Maclean and asked him if he had anything to say. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think I have said enough for one day.’
The judge told him he was not going to dwell on the gravity of his having been found guilty again of an offence under the Defence of the Realm Act, ‘. . . because you are obviously a highly educated and intelligent man, and realise the thorough seriousness of the offence you have committed’.
The Lord Justice General sentenced Maclean to five years’ penal servitude, an even tougher sentence than the last time. In her biography of him, his daughter Nan Milton described what happened next. Maclean turned to friends in the court and told them to ‘Keep it going, boys, keep it going’. As he was being led out of the court, he turned and waved his hat to his wife and friends, who shouted back to him, ‘Ta, ta, Johnnie! Good old Johnnie!’ before standing up and belting out ‘The Red Flag’.
Once again a campaign swung into action to demand his release. It gathered huge momentum, especially after the armistice which ended the First World War was signed on 11 November 1918. Lloyd George called an immediate election. The release of John Maclean was on the agenda at every political meeting in Glasgow and beyond.
Freed on 3 December, he had served only seven months of his five-year sentence but was not a well man, weakened by going on hunger strike while in Peterhead and being force-fed. Bruised and exhausted, he wrote to Agnes Maclean saying she was the only person he wanted to meet him at Buchanan Street Railway Station, but word got out. Thousands were there to greet him when his train pulled in.
The welcoming party had hired a horse-drawn carriage so as many people as possible could see him. Someone handed him a red flag. The horse and the carriage driver picked a careful path through the sea of supporters thronging the city streets. Worn out though he was, a defiant Maclean stood up and waved the red flag above his head. Now, there was a moment. ‘Never in the history of Glasgow,’ wrote Willie Gallacher, ‘was there such a reception as John Maclean got that night.’
The joy so many people felt at John Maclean’s triumphant return to the Clyde and the legendary position he continues to occupy in the history of Red Clydeside are reflected in two exuberant anthems written long after that December night in 1918, Hamish Henderson’s ‘John Maclean March’ and Matt McGinn’s ‘The Ballad of John Maclean (The Fighting Dominie)’.
When the Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in April 1920, Scotland’s most famous Marxist did not join it. He wanted a Scottish communist party, not a British one, so he founded the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party. One newspaper advert for it was cheerfully combative: ‘Roll-up, Glasgow Reds, and join the new Revolutionary Party for a Scottish Workers’ Parliament, allied to Russia, one big industrial union, Marxian education under the Scottish Labour College.’
Maclean served two more prison sentences, in 1921 and 1922. In both cases he was again charged with sedition, firstly for advocating that the miners of Airdrie should lead a workers’ revolution and secondly for saying the post-war unemployed should steal food rather than starve. The first sentence lasted three months, the second a year.
When he was released from prison in 1922 he had little more than a year to live. Once a robust and healthy man, his prison terms, endless teaching and public speaking had seriously damaged his health. He spent the last months of his life working to build up his Scottish Workers’ Republican Party.
He fought every local by-election he could, convinced as always that patching up capitalism was never going to be the answer. Only revolutionary socialism could sweep away poverty, injustice and war:
I come before you at this election at the request of many members of your ward as a COMMUNIST or RED LABOUR candidate. Pink Labourism is of no use to the workers, never will be. Your poverty and misery are more intense today than ever before. Thirteen out of every hundred in Glasgow are getting Parish Council Relief, and the number is growing. World developments are bound to make things still worse, even if Britain is lucky enough to avoid another world war.
Maclean’s manifesto goes on to damn unemployment as ‘a weapon to cow the workers into accepting lower wages and a longer week’. His solution to the lack of jobs was a scheme to ‘reclaim all the moorland lying round Glasgow, and establish a system of co-operative or collective farming on scientific lines’.
He called for a Scottish Parliament, one completely divorced from Westminster. Only a Scotland independent from England had any hope of becoming a country where the workers were in charge. England, he feared, would not be ready for communism before the war Maclean believed was coming:
I therefore consider that Scotland’s wisest policy is to declare for a republic in Scotland, so that the youth of Scotland will not be forced out to die for England’s markets.
The Social Revolution is possible sooner in Scotland than in England . . . Scottish separation is part of the process of England’s imperial disintegration and is a help towards the ultimate triumph of the workers of the world.
The young members of the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party loved John Maclean. In an age much more formal than our own, he insisted they call him by his first name. He encouraged them at every turn, building up their confidence so they could stand up and address a public meeting. ‘In the winter all felt it their cardinal duty to attend the economics and industrial history classes,’ wrote Nan Milton, adding that his students acquired the nickname of ‘John Maclean’s bright young things’.
Maclean remained a teacher to the end, giving his classes on economics and taking a close interest in the education of his elder daughter Jean. At the beginning of 1922 she was coming up to her 12th birthday. Her father’s advice was that she should start reading the papers and finding out what was going on in the world:
A good geography book and an atlas should always be at your side to enable you to know as much about the earth as possible. A general history of the world in all times should prove useful. Perhaps your aunt may be able to tell you about the great civilization of ancient Egypt, the mummies, and the tombs of the Pharoahs [sic] or emperors, and of the recent discoveries at Luxor on the Nile where the tomb of King Tutankhamen has just been found and is causing excitement all over the world.
He did not scruple to tell young Jean that people were already saying there could be another European war but he told her there was a way to stop war:
The only way to end war and prevent all wars is for the wage workers of the whole world to unite and tell the wealthy that the workers themselves will rule the world. For advocating that, your father was sent to gaol and may be sent again. But sooner or later the workers will do as your father wishes them to do.
Sylvia Pankhurst was a friend and supporter of Maclean. On a visit to Glasgow she went to his home in Pollokshaws, where he was living by himself and eating little more than porridge and dates. He had given what money he had to pay
for food and a doctor for a sick child.
Some regard John Maclean as a secular saint, the tragic martyr of Scottish socialism. Heart, head and soul, he was devoted to his cause. He viewed those troubled years immediately following the national trauma of the First World War as opening a door to the revolution he so believed in. Convinced that door would not stay open for long, he could not allow himself to rest until he had done everything in his power to make the revolution happen.
For that goal he sacrificed everything, including his own health and family life. Seeing how he was driving himself into the ground, Agnes Maclean had taken their two daughters and left him, telling him she would come back only if he stopped his political activities.
Maclean wrote to tell her that although he was on a shortlist for the paid post of tutor at the Scottish Labour College, he couldn’t pursue it, as the college was insisting the tutor should not be actively involved in politics. That restriction was something he simply could not contemplate. Agnes should also know his enemies were using her living apart from him as a stick to beat him with. She had to come home and be seen out and about with him:
If you cannot come I’ll be blackened worse than ever, and will be economically damned. If that is so, I have made up my mind for the worst – that we’ll never come together again.
If I go down, I must go down with my flag at the mast-top. Nothing on earth will shift me from that. Now, there’s the tragedy for you, as clearly and bluntly as I can put it.
If it’s your duty to be here, as I maintain it now is, I contend it is your duty to stand shoulder to shoulder with me in the hardest and dirtiest battle of my life. If we have to go under we had better go under fighting together than fighting one another.
