Homage to Caledonia

by Gray, Daniel.

  Anti-republican editorial content appeared in the pages of the Glasgow Evening Times and the Glasgow Evening Citizen. Not as rabidly pro-nationalist as the Express and the Mail, they appeared lukewarm to the idea of a Franco victory but were definitely hostile towards the republican side. In its editorials, the Evening Times portrayed the elected Spanish government as a puppet of the Soviet Union, averring on 15 July 1937 that Madrid and the republican government were under the control of the SIM, scathingly concluding:

  Evidently the so-called Spanish government, which our Socialist friends constantly support, is quite unable even to control the police in Spain! Apparently its authority is not sufficient to save either its own partisans or foreign volunteers who went to its assistance, from being dropped into prison and shot! What sort of a government is that? It certainly cannot reasonably claim to be the Government of Spain.

  ILP activist David Murray responded by slating the Evening Times as ‘actually a fascist paper or near a fascist paper, one of the most reactionary in the district’. Meanwhile, despite protestations that ‘Our readers know that we are not partisans of either Fascism or Communism’, the Evening Citizen was even more transparently pro-Franco. In an editorial published on 21 September 1937, it labelled the republican government a ‘junta’ and expressed incredulity at the way in which General Franco had generally been described as a ‘rebel’, arguing that the nationalist government had attained legitimacy as ‘General Franco governs more than half of Spain and the rest of that country is disunited and practically without a supreme government.’ The inference was that nationalist rule had become the most viable option for Spain:

  The continued pretence that the Junta in Valencia is the legitimate Spanish government, and that General Franco, who exercises all the functions of government over a vastly greater number of Spaniards, is little better than a bandit, is farcical… General Franco has obtained the support of a very large number of the Spanish people, and has given them orderly government and security.

  The Citizen’s anti-republican position found favour among some of its readers. ‘After reading the anti-Franco balderdash purveyed by some newspapers and MPs’, wrote a correspondent identified only as ‘Saltire’, ‘it is a relief to turn to the sensible leading articles in the Citizen’. The pithily-nicknamed ‘Gib’ assented with the view that ‘If Franco wins, peace will be established’ and advocated the inauguration of a dictatorship. In a warning to pro-republicans, ‘Gib’ concluded, ‘We will certainly make a mistake if we lead the Francoists to think we are against them and favouring their opponents.’ In April 1938, a correspondent went even further, asserting that ‘Franco and the Christians came to the rescue of Spain and civilisation.’

  Such sentiments often came from Scottish Catholics. Their anti-republicanism had the side-effect of causing difficulties for a Labour Party that, particularly in Glasgow, relied heavily on their votes. While instinctively opposed to Franco’s nationalists, Party officials realised that by outwardly backing the republic they ran the risk of alienating some Catholic voters, which contributed to Labour’s slow, often cool support for the republican aid movement in Scotland.

  David Murray’s comments on the effects of this policy in the Motherwell district were applicable to all of Scotland. He wrote in an ILP bulletin that ‘the local Labour Party has been very loath to disturb its possession of what is called the Roman Catholic vote’, a theme he continued in a letter to Josiah Wedgwood MP:

  The Labour Party is afraid to tackle the question of Roman Catholic Church influence and is piling up a store of trouble for itself. In my own district, the obvious angling for the Catholic vote has distinctly alienated the people who owe no allegiance to that church, and who are not only more dependable but are also in the majority.

  Another ILP man, John McGovern, MP for the heavily-Catholic area of Shettleston, bore the brunt of Glaswegian Roman Catholic hostility. McGovern, a Catholic himself, travelled to Spain early on in the war for an insight into the level of persecution suffered by the church at the hands of republicans. He returned convinced that the government had halted attacks on Catholic figures and property and released a pamphlet entitled Why the Bishops Back Franco, lambasting the church for its suppression of the Spanish poor and its collaboration with Franco. For his troubles, he received torrents of abuse during the mass meetings at which he spoke following the Spanish trip and there were heated debates between pro-republicans (often Catholic themselves) and those who took umbrage at his portrayal of their church.

  Addressing a crowd of 2,500 at a Parkhead gathering in late 1936, McGovern opened with a defence of the right of Spaniards to take strike action over their disgust at the wealth of the Catholic Church:

  If you were tramway-men working for two pesetas or four pence per day, and came on strike to better your conditions and found that the buses and trams were owned by the Catholic Church, and the clergy in the pulpits were denouncing you as ‘dupes of Moscow’ for going on strike, what would you British working men do? You would denounce the clergy as the enemy of the people. That’s what the workers in Spain did, and I for one don’t blame them.

  To cries of ‘liar!’ from some sections of the audience, McGovern spoke of a 16-year-old boy he had met in Spain who had been ‘instructed’ by a priest to join the nationalist uprising in return for work upon Franco’s victory. Attracting further derision, he stated that ‘the lumber industry, the iron industry, even dog-racing and bull-fighting’ were owned by the Catholic church. Aware of the upset his words were causing his devotedly Catholic constituents, McGovern defiantly remarked: ‘If I had a thousand seats, I would lose them on this issue; my self-respect is more important to me than any seat in the country.’ He further incensed many of those present by informing them that the Catholic church in Scotland was collecting money to fund Franco’s bombing of innocent women and children and described the local priest, Father Daniels, as ‘an apostle of Christian terrorism’. A furious constituent barked at McGovern, ‘Why do you go to Spain and come back and denounce the Church? Are you a Catholic? You are a turn-coat.’ More tersely, another audience member apparently replied ‘Sit on your arse, for God’s sake.’

  McGovern’s Catholic opponents were no doubt influenced by the anti-republican warnings emanating from church leaders. In August 1936, the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Glasgow began a campaign condemning the Spanish government for allegedly organising state terror against priests and nuns, and the ransacking of religious buildings. Individual clergymen also railed against the republican regime. Archbishop MacDonald of St Andrews and Edinburgh lamented that persecuting the church in Spain meant persecuting Jesus Christ. In a pastoral letter, he described events in melodramatic language:

  The appalling outbreak of Communism in Spain has shocked the whole civilised world. The unspeakable atrocities perpetrated against priests and nuns, the horrible outrages on sacred images, on churches, on the Eucharist itself, the insensate revolt against all law and order – these prove beyond doubt that Christianity is the enemy aimed at. God himself is the foe.

  By implication, volunteering to serve in Spain or even contributing to aid appeals would not be an act in defence of democracy or war-afflicted civilians, but an attack on God. Such teachings did impact upon the views of some working class Catholics. John McNair, an influential ILP figure, wrote to David Murray in November 1936 informing him of some of the difficulties he had encountered whilst speaking on Spain:

  I had three meetings in Fife which, the local comrades were good enough to tell me, were successful, but there was a strong Catholic opposition. I understand that [Willie] Gallacher’s meetings in this constituency were broken up by the Catholics. While I was speaking I realised the force of the opposition and its effectiveness as it was led by a local priest, who was no fool, and the secretary of the Young Catholics’ League.

  Reporting support for Franco in working class areas in more acerbic tones, the February 1938 edition of Motherwell ILP’s news bulletin vi
tuperated:

  De-classed degenerates in Craigneuk are stupid enough to chalk ‘Up Franco’ on the streets; lumps who never had a square meal in their lives. They are crazy but fascism draws its cannon fodder from such degenerates.

  After complaints from readers about these remarks, the next issue contained a retraction, of sorts:

  We do not for a moment infer that all the folks up in Craigneuk are of this type, nor do we allege that this district has any monopoly of what is termed the ‘lumpen proletariat’. None the less, the debatable land between Motherwell and Wishaw is the only area where Franco slogans have been chalked above street announcements.

  This political friction was a clear symptom of unrest among working class Catholics. Nevertheless, the influence of Catholicism in determining which side Scots took in the Spanish Civil War was relatively insignificant. This is borne out by the fact that so many Scottish volunteers to the International Brigade came from Catholic backgrounds. The position of Scottish Catholic Brigaders was encapsulated in words written by a friend about James Cassidy, a Maryhill man killed at Jarama, published in the Daily Worker on 25 March 1937:

  Newspaper headlines from the 1930s highlighting the surge of fascist activity in Aberdeen, and anti-fascist reaction.

  While Cassidy was a Catholic, he did not believe the lies that the fight of the Government in Spain was against the church and religion. He recognised that the fight in Spain was an issue that concerned all lovers of democracy, and he had no hesitation in volunteering to fight.

  Noteworthy political support for Franco in Scotland was similarly negligible. What backing there was came from the aristocracy and small BUF branches, most markedly in Cathcart. So infinitesimal were Scottish BUF numbers, though, the sending of a battalion to fight for Franco, as happened with Ireland’s Blue Shirts, was unthinkable. As the experiences of Aberdeen and elsewhere showed, wherever the BUF materialised in Scotland, they were crushed by a far weightier anti-fascist movement.

  Among the most solidly pro-Francoist group in Scotland were the aristocracy, in particular those with strong links to the armed forces. Prominent here was the 8th Earl of Glasgow, formerly an influential member of the British Navy and by the 1930s a devotee of Oswald Mosley. In common with other pro-nationalists, he consistently demanded belligerent rights for Franco, confessing in the House of Lords that he could not see ‘why this country should insist on the withdrawal of Italian troops from Spain before they have finished the work they were sent for.’ Colonel RG Dawson, of Orenill, Braco, berated the Duchess of Atholl, his local MP, for her pro-republican stance, circulating a pamphlet entitled My Reply that questioned the validity of Atholl’s antipathy towards Franco.

  Sympathy for this view came from Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, the Conservative MP for Peebles. A rabid anti-semite, Ramsay viewed the Spanish Popular Front government as the centre of an international Jewish–Marxist conspiracy. He formed the United Christian Front, to fight ‘to prove the real fact, that General Franco is fighting the cause of Christianity against the anti-Christ.’ He received support from the Earl of Home, father of Lord Dunglass MP, acting parliamentary private secretary to Neville Chamberlain during the Munich peace agreement. From 1940, Ramsay, a member of the Council of the Nordic League, an ‘association of race-conscious Britons’, was interned for four years by the British government as a consequence of his political activities and beliefs. In parliament, Lord Marley alleged that Ramsay was Hitler’s chosen Gauleiter for Scotland should Germany emerge victorious from World War Two. The Peebles MP’s right-wing extremism was exceedingly rare in Scotland.

  While Ramsay was arguably the most unequivocal individual advocate of Franco in Scotland, collective aristocratic support came from a group whose figurehead was directly descended from a Scottish literary behemoth.

  Major-General Sir Walter Maxwell-Scott was the great-great-grandson of Sir Walter Scott. In March 1937, he travelled to Franco-held territory in Spain on a fact-finding mission. Maxwell-Scott issued a statement upon his arrival home as he considered it ‘only just to General Franco and to all Spaniards fighting with him to let the press and public know the following facts.’ Those ‘facts’ amounted to a clear endorsement of Franco, and a denunciation of the republican government and its forces. Social policy had remained intact, according to Maxwell-Scott, as had the basic rate of wages. Food was plentiful, and republican prisoners relieved to have been captured and liberated. ‘In other words’, he wrote, ‘General Franco is bound to win.’ He continued:

  The infiltration… of many thousands of volunteers has only helped to prolong the agony in Spain. A terrible responsibility lies on the shoulders of all those direct or indirect agents and sympathisers who, themselves safe at home, have sent over 50,000 ‘workers of the world’ (not soldiers) to unite in death.

  One year on, in March 1938, Maxwell-Scott called a meeting of establishment friends sympathetic to the Spanish nationalist cause. The result was the formation of a Scottish Friends of National Spain (FNS) branch under the tutelage of four vice-presidents, Maxwell-Scott himself, his wife Marie, Donald Cameron of Lochiel and Captain Luttman Johnson. The pro-Franco FNS, which had previously been restricted to activity in England only, set about making a mark in Scotland, successfully applying to Glasgow Corporation for permission to stage a meeting at St Andrew’s Hall on 27 March.

  On the 22nd, the Burgh Labour Party wrote a letter to the city’s magistrates imploring them to reverse their decision to allow the FNS use of St Andrew’s Hall. Protestations were also received from the Communist Party, local Co-operative societies and the Left Book Club. Citing fears over public order in the event of the meeting being staged, the magistrates acceded to their request. The FNS, however, vowed to hold the meeting regardless and expressed their incredulity at the magistrates’ volte-face:

  The sudden change of front has amazed the society, as no new circumstances have arisen. Some letters have been received by the magistrates apparently threatening violence. It seems that the magistrates’ decision has proceeded from a fear of mob law and [an] inability to maintain order in their city.

  A pamphlet outlining the BUF’s vision of a corporate state modelled on the Italy of Benito Mussolini. Outside of Cathcart, the vision failed to gain significant support in Scotland.

  Noting that magistrates’ permission was not required for week night hire of the Hall, the FNS responded by craftily moving the date of their meeting to the following Thursday, 31 March. They had not reckoned upon the input of another council organ, the Halls Committee of the Corporation. The Halls Committee became the second body within two days to cancel the FNS meeting, reasoning that staging it would cause danger to St Andrew’s Hall by provoking disorder and damage at the hands of rival groups. The General Finance Committee, however, overturned that decision by a single-vote majority, meaning the meeting could, in theory at least, now take place. The final decision rested with the councillors of the Glasgow Corporation.

  Amidst this bureaucratic to-ing and fro-ing, political schisms had erupted within two of the three parties that made up Glasgow Corporation, as councillors advocating unbridled free speech clashed with those who wished to see pro-Franco groups subdued at any cost. The official position of the Socialist (an affiliated offshoot of the Labour Party) and Independent Labour parties was to deny the FNS any council premises for meetings. Yet within both parties’ ranks sat a handful of avid proponents of free speech prepared to vigorously defend their position. The third component of the Corporation was made up by the Progressive Party, and their strict free speech ethos meant that dissenting ILP and Socialist voters could well determine votes on the matter.

  On 31 March councillors met to decisively determine whether or not to approve Maxwell-Scott’s request for meeting space. Their poll took place after a fierce debate in the City Chambers in which both sets of arguments were articulated. The motion to ban the FNS from using St Andrew’s Hall was moved by Bailie Kerr, a Labour councillor representing Govan. He sta
ted that even the ‘shibboleth’ of free speech should be bypassed on this occasion, and in blunt terms set out his argument to those present:

  The point you are considering is whether or not you are going to give any opportunity to an association who are avowedly out to justify the brutalities of Franco in Spain, his butchering of the non-combatant population; a man whose hands are reeking with the blood of innocent women and children. Are we going to open our doors to any of them to allow them to justify the conditions that exist in Spain at the moment?

  Indicating a split within the ranks, the main opponent of this statement was a fellow Labour councillor, Bailie Rosslyn-Mitchell, who highlighted the centrality of free speech in the history of British democracy:

  It [free speech] is a spiritual essence. It is right down to the very blood and marrow of this nation that men who have thoughts should be free to express those thoughts; that whatever may be the opinion of those in authority, they shall not use their authority to prevent those who differ from them expressing that view.

  It was to be Rosslyn-Mitchell’s view that prevailed, with 51 councillors voting in favour of allowing the meeting, 38 against and 13 abstaining. The meeting had been given the green light on the very day it was to take place.

  By that evening, anti-fascist protestors had gathered outside St Andrew’s Hall creating a volatile atmosphere. Over 500 of the protesters ran through surrounding streets chanting ‘down with Franco and the Labour traitors’ until police employed force to disperse them. Many anti-fascists had obtained entrance tickets for the meeting and scuffles between them and the 150 FNS-employed stewards erupted at the start and continued throughout. About 1,500 people were in attendance to hear Maxwell-Scott and skier Arnold Lunn speak from the platform, though both were often drowned out by the din of protesters, some of whom unfurled a large red flag over the balcony. Lunn used his speech to deplore supporters of the Spanish republic, and refuted claims that civilians had been intentionally targeted in nationalist air raids: