When the Clyde Ran Red

by Maggie Craig

  By half-past seven all the marchers had departed with the exception of one man from Glasgow, who for some reason or other refused to leave.

  As the buses passed through the town and along Princes Street, with red banners sticking out from the windows, the departing demonstrators cheered, shouted, and sang songs lustily, their exodus attracting as much attention as their stay in the city had done.

  MP and marchers’ leader John McGovern ‘warmly congratulated the Edinburgh police on the way they had behaved in a difficult situation’.

  The marchers’ demands might not have been met but they had made their point and gathered lots of publicity and sympathy for their plight, although not from all quarters. Kicking men while they were down, Greenock Corporation decided hunger marchers from their town would have three days’ dole money deducted for the time they had been away. Motherwell showed more compassion, leaving the benefit payments as they were.

  Lord Provost Swan of Glasgow heard representations from Harry McShane and John McGovern on hardship experienced by the Glasgow hunger marchers. People had lost between six and sixteen shillings each when their unemployment benefit was docked. Significant sums of money for anyone in the 1930s, this was obviously a terrible financial blow for families surviving only on the dole.

  The Lord Provost made up the full losses for the married men and asked McShane and McGovern to distribute money left over from this to the ‘most deserving cases of single men. Mr McGovern thanked the Lord Provost for the interest he had taken in the matter, and for his generosity in meeting the situation so handsomely.’

  Others among the unemployed tried different ways of improving their own situations. Smallholdings which came with a cottage and an acre of land where a man could grow vegetables to feed his family were built around the country. There are surviving groups of them near Kirkintilloch and on the hill above Inverkeithing in Fife.

  The Scottish Allotments Scheme for the Unemployed, operating a joint committee with the Quakers, the Society of Friends, was willing to help people who wanted to grow their own produce or keep chickens. One young man who found his way to their Glasgow office in the summer of 1935 was 23-year-old Alex Craig of Old Monkland, whose first name was always pronounced Alick.

  He had initially written to the enquiry bureau of a magazine called The Smallholder, Poultry-Keeper and Gardener. They sent him back a sympathetic and helpful typed reply:

  We are afraid, however, that there is no society which would help you financially to start a poultry farm, but we think that were you to get into touch with Sir A. Rose, Commissioner of Distressed Areas, he might possibly be able to help you. We understand that funds are to be available for cases such as yours, and we think that an application from you would be very favourably considered.

  When he followed this up, he was contacted by the Scottish Allotments Scheme for the Unemployed and the West of Scotland Agricultural College, in Blythswood Square in Glasgow. Robert Hislop of the college sent a postcard saying he would ‘be very pleased to see you at Coatbridge on Monday 2nd Sept. I shall be at the Cuparhead Plots in the forenoon and at Whifflets Plots in the afternoon.’

  Practical advice and small loans were on offer. You had to show willing by already having a plot no smaller than a quarter of an acre and be at least in your second year of working it. Loans were interest free, with no repayment in the first year, half in the second and the remaining half in the third:

  The maximum amount of loan to each Plotholder will be £10. No cash advances will be made. Advances from the loan will be made by the Committee by way of the purchase of goods, stock, plants, &c., as explained herein.

  The Committee will be prepared to make advances to any approved Plotholder-borrower for the purchase of:

  Tools, Manures, Plants, Fruit Trees, Bushes, Poultry, Pigs, Bees, Goats, &c., and for the necessary equipment in connection with the management of these items.

  Already keeping chickens and working a piece of ground near his home to help feed his widowed mother and brothers and sisters – he was one of eight surviving children – Alex Craig received a two-page letter from the Scottish Allotments Scheme giving him detailed advice on how he should look after the hens. They could offer him financial help to buy henhouses or more birds:

  If you will first write out this in your own way mentioning any doubts or difficulties, it will assist me to do the best I can for you, as it is most pleasing to see a young man trying to do something for himself.

  Years later, in the 1960s, Alex Craig met John L. Kinloch and came to share his passion for the dream of a new city and deep-water port at Loch Eriboll. Both men worked tirelessly on promoting ‘Kinloch-Eriboll, a Pioneer City of the Scientific Age’.

  Like the hunger marchers who wanted the government to start building a new road bridge over the Forth, Davie Kirkwood also believed the government ought to spend its way out of recession. As MP for Clydebank, he was doing his utmost to get work on the Cunarder restarted:

  For more than two years, 534 had been engraved on my heart. In the morning I woke wondering if something could be done that day to bring the skeleton to life again. During the day I made myself a nuisance to all and sundry. They said I had a bee in ma bonnet. In the evening I would try to plan something new for the morrow.

  Kirkwood’s efforts did not go unnoticed. One evening in the lobby of the House of Commons, Conservative MP and society hostess Lady Astor came up to him and said the Prince of Wales was planning a visit to Scotland and wanted to speak to him about conditions on the Clyde. Kirkwood at first refused, reluctant to have anything to do with the Playboy Prince.

  Lady Astor persisted. When she sent him a formal invitation, he told her he had no evening clothes. She returned with the response that it was him the Prince wanted to talk to, not his clothes. He could wear a serge suit if he liked:

  There was a Robert Burns ring about that, man to man, Prince of the Realm and Engineer of the Forge – and behind it the thought of the great silent Cunarder. So I said: ‘Then I’ll go.’

  Remembering the painting which shows the ploughman poet being lionized by Edinburgh society, Kirkwood thought of Burns again when he walked into an elegant first-floor dining room. He heard himself being announced and found Lady Astor and the Prince of Wales standing up and coming round the table to greet him. The Prince of Wales took him into the library of this grand house and asked him to give him the truth: What did the workers on the Clyde think about the current situation?

  Kirkwood was an engineer to his fingertips and he had the soul of an engineer. He had been brought to meet the future Edward VIII in what he described as ‘a beautiful motor-car, a masterpiece of the engineer’s craft’. Now he told the Prince they were all living in momentous times when ‘Man’s ingenuity applied to nature has brought the age of plenty. But instead of plenty, we have reduction.’

  There was, Kirkwood told the attentive Prince, an atmosphere of fear, and it was running right through society, ‘so that those who are rich are curtailing expenditure’. There’s a resonance with our own times in what he said next:

  It has become fashionable to be economical. It used to be fashionable to be lavish. Every one is afraid to spend, rich and poor. Those who have wages are afraid to spend them. They are banking their money instead of spending it.

  And, Kirkwood went on, it wasn’t only manual workers who were suffering. There were 2,000 qualified school teachers in Scotland who couldn’t find work and the situation was similar in other professions. The Prince of Wales asked what was to be done. Kirkwood made his suggestion that the country should spend its way out of recession. Send the unemployed back to work and they would soon be able to start spending again, thus reviving the economy:

  Twenty minutes more passed in a friendly discussion. We were two British citizens talking about our land and our people. A man’s a man for a’ that. It was as if we were on a ship in a storm, when class and creed and caste are forgotten.

  Whether the Prince of Wales exerte
d any influence or not, the government did decide to bale Cunard out. Work on the 534 started up again on the Tuesday after Easter Monday in April 1934, with a projected launch date for the new Cunarder of that September. On the first day back, the workforce was led through the gates of John Brown’s by two kilted pipers and the streets of Clydebank were decorated with bunting.

  A foreman rebuked a returning worker because his tools were rusty. The quick-fire repartee came right back at him: ‘You should see my frying-pan.’

  27

  Pride of the Clyde: The Launch of the Queen Mary

  Ten million rivets, sixty million hammer blows.

  The Queen Mary was launched from Clydebank on Wednesday, 24 September 1934. All Glasgow’s newspapers produced special souvenir supplements for the occasion. The Daily Record’s entire front cover was given over to the now iconic photograph of the bow of the ship, still known as the 534, stretching up towards the sky. By tradition, the name she would bear would be revealed only when it was pronounced by the Queen at the launch.

  Queen Mary and King George V were joined there by their son Bertie. He had flown home from Paris for the occasion, staying the night at his home at Fort Belvedere ‘before entraining for Glasgow’.

  Selected guests were presented to Their Majesties and the Prince of Wales at the launch: the directors of John Brown’s and Cunard’s White Star Line; local dignitaries; six shipyard workers with fifty years’ service apiece at John Brown’s; and Clydebank’s MP and tireless campaigner to get work started again on the 534, Davie Kirkwood.

  He contributed an article to the Daily Record’s souvenir supplement entitled ‘WHAT TO-DAY MEANS TO ME’. His words were wrapped around a poem specially written for the occasion by Poet Laureate John Masefield:

  For ages you were rock, far below light,

  Crushed, without shape, earth’s unregarded bone.

  Then Man in all the marvel of his might

  Quarried you out and burned you from the stone.

  Then, being pured to essence, you were nought

  But weight and hardness, body without nerve;

  Then Man, in all the marvel of his thought

  Smithied you into form of leap and curve;

  And took you, so, and bent you to his vast,

  Intense great world of passionate design,

  Curve after changing curving, braced and masst [sic]

  To stand all tumult that can tumble brine.

  Kirkwood’s words were poetic too, and very personal. He recalled for the readers how he had cause to be grateful to John Brown’s. In his youth, seeking work, he had tramped the 12 long miles from his home at Parkhead in the east of Glasgow and Brown’s had taken him on. He was fiercely proud of the new liner, the largest ship that had ever been built, and of all the hard work put in by the men who had built the Cunarder:

  As an engineer, I salute the architects and designers, builders and platers, riveters, caulkers, blacksmiths, joiners, carpenters, coppersmiths and plumbers. And with them the labourers. ‘Unskilled,’ they call them. None in a shipyard is unskilled and some of these labourers are as highly skilled as the craftsmen.

  This is their Day, managers, draughtsmen, foremen, journeymen, apprentices and labourers, boilermakers, marine engineers, electricians and the rest.

  It is everybody’s Day. And how singularly British it all is. The Day, not of War, but of Peace. The Day of the Mercantile Marine.

  The whole nation is built into this ship. Throne and Parliament, Commerce and Industry, Arts and Crafts, all feeling that they are moving onward as the 534 gangs doon the slip.

  As the local MP, Kirkwood had a VIP ticket for the launch. Thousands heading for the Clyde from all over Britain had no ticket, and the touts were active. Anyone wanting to sell one could get £25 for it, a substantial sum back in 1934.

  Writing about that in the Daily Record, Sir John Foster Fraser, ‘the world-wide traveller – a journalist of unrivalled experience and great descriptive ability’, also reported that the Queen was going to use a bottle of ‘Empire wine’ to launch the 534, which ‘suggests Australian or South African burgundy’. Some locals thought a good Scottish bottle of whisky would be more appropriate. One ‘stiff-jawed engineer’ told the worldwide traveller he thought the ship ought to be named David Kirkwood, although Britannia was the odds-on favourite.

  Foster Fraser was indeed an excellent journalist, describing a conversation he’d had with ‘a genial fellow primed with contrasts and bubbling with statistics’. He poked a little gentle fun at this avalanche of facts and figures but allowed his informant his pride in the Cunarder:

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that if all the steel plates were laid end to end they would provide a path from London to Leicester?’ No, I didn’t know that.

  ‘Or that there are ten million rivets, which means that hammers have delivered sixty million blows to drive them in?’ I took his word for it.

  ‘Has anybody told you that on one of the decks you could have three football pitches and that in the large lounge you could stack ten double-decked omnibuses?’ I confessed nobody had imparted the information.

  The local man told the celebrity journalist he should tell his English readers the Cunarder was taller than Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, with a promenade deck twice as long as the front of Buckingham Palace. That would ‘make the Cockneys have respect for what we do on the Clyde’:

  ‘Man, 94 years ago the Cunard people built their first ship here; the “Britannia” it was called, and it could be stuck end-on in one of the funnels of 534 and be lost. Why, when she slips into the water tomorrow, there will be 26 drag chains weighing over 2350 tons, so she won’t bump on the other side of the Clyde and knock Renfrew out of shape.

  ‘There are steel cables as thick as your wrist and four anchors each weighing sixteen tons. Four thousand miles of electric cables, think of that.’

  I gasped that it was all very wonderful.

  ‘Aye,’ said he, ‘nothing has been forgotten. You know, if anybody falls overboard the man on the bridge will just press a wee button and a whole bunch of life-belts will be catapulted at him. But come over here and I’ll tell you some more. It’s thirsty work talking.’

  It took almost two years to fit the Queen Mary out with her beautiful art deco interiors and her luxurious cabins, saloons and restaurants. She also had her own chapel, cinema, theatre, libraries and tennis courts. Huge amounts of Clydeside craftsmanship and huge amounts of Clydeside pride went into all of that.

  Artists and craftworkers from all over Britain made their contributions, from the specially designed crockery and silverware to the large-scale original paintings commissioned for the public spaces of this great ocean liner. One of the most famous pictures was Kenneth Shoesmith’s Madonna of the Atlantic.

  The Queen Mary left the Clyde in March 1936. It’s estimated that as many as a million people lined the banks of the river to watch her go. One of the best views to be had was from Erskine, on the southern shore. Amateur film-maker James Blair stationed himself there and shot some unique colour footage of the ship as she steamed past. This can be viewed online today at the Scottish Screen Archive.

  The emotions of those who had come out to bid the Queen Mary farewell from the river of her birth ran high and deep. Another contemporary observer summed up the overwhelming mixture of enormous pride and real sadness: ‘She leaves a big gap in the landscape, and a hole in the hearts of thousands of Clydesiders.’

  28

  The Spanish Civil War

  To fight by the side of the people of Spain.

  The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 and ended, finally, on 1 April 1939. It started with a rebellion launched from Spanish Morocco by General Francisco Franco against the democratically elected Republican government of Spain. While Britain, France and the US adopted a policy of non-intervention, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy weighed in on the side of the Fascists.

  The Spanish Fascist forces styled themselves
Nationalists, describing their rebellion as a crusade to save Spain from the socialist republic. Socialists, communists, anarchists and idealists in Europe, the United States and throughout the world found in this most vicious of civil wars a cause which set them alight. Thirty-five thousand people volunteered to defend Spain’s democracy and the legitimate Republican government.

  Those volunteers joined the Brigadas Internacionales, the International Brigades. Many were impelled to do so by the horror of the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica in the spring of 1937. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were using Spain as a terrible training ground and dress rehearsal for the European war everyone feared was coming.

  It was 26 April 1937 when the German Condor Legion bombed the market place in Guernica, raining death out of the sky. Commissioned by the Republican government, Pablo Picasso painted the masterpiece which forever remembers this event which so stunned the world. Wars were meant to be fought by soldiers on battlefields. In Guernica innocent civilians – men, women and children – had been slaughtered while peacefully going about their daily business.

  What made Guernica even more shocking was that death had been delivered by aircraft. The Zeppelins of the First World War notwithstanding, up until Guernica planes had been seen as a shining symbol of the modern age, a magnificent example of the progress of the human race. After Guernica, it became chillingly clear that mankind could harness technological marvels to unspeakable evil, killing more people more effectively and with greater devastation than ever before.

  Three thousand volunteers went from Britain to Spain to fight for the Republic, over five hundred of them from Scotland. Most of the Scottish volunteers were socialists and communists who’d seen plenty of action on the battlefield of politics. They went from Aberdeen, the coalfields of Fife, the shipyards of Glasgow, Dundee, Edinburgh and Inverness.