by Trevor Royle
Politics too had changed the complexion of the country. The old Liberal hegemony which had held the country together for so many years had disappeared during the war. The main beneficiaries had been the Conservatives and Labour; the latter party won 34 seats and 35.9 per cent of the total votes cast in the 1924 general election. This allowed the first Labour administration to come into power under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald, albeit with the support of the Liberals. A second election later that year returned the Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin with a total of 415 seats, 38 of them in Scotland. Labour dropped to 152, with 26 in Scotland, but the biggest losers were the Liberals who ended up with only 42 seats, 9 of which were in Scotland. When Labour won the next election with another minority government in 1929 it was the largest party in the House of Commons. However MacDonald’s promising career ended sadly and messily in the summer of 1931 when he was forced into forming an unpopular National Government during a financial crisis which almost brought about the collapse of the pound. Viewed as a traitor by the left – most unfairly – MacDonald stood down four years later, a broken man.
It was against that background that Muir set out on his perambulation around Scotland, and the result is one of the sharpest pieces of analysis ever to have been written about the country and its people. He began his journey in Edinburgh where, like many others before him, he was made uncomfortably aware of the contiguity of the wealthy and the poor, as evidenced by the closeness, yet apartness, of the neighbouring New and Old Towns, the former the home of the wealthy professional classes, the latter a sordid slum. He also became conscious of the all-pervasive ‘floating sexual desire’ which he encountered in the city’s streets and ‘adjacent pockets and backwaters: the tea-rooms, restaurants and cinema lounges’. Conviviality and restraint seemed to march hand-in-hand in the capital, and the memory of Scottish history overlaid everything encountered in a city that Muir did not find to be particularly Scottish.3 From Edinburgh he headed south to the Borders where he discovered, to his delight, that the small towns still had active lives of their own and retained a sturdy independence. This stage also allowed him to visit Abbotsford near Selkirk, the home of Sir Walter Scott, but Muir was unimpressed, likening the building to a ‘a railway hotel designed in the baronial style’ and its collection of relics to an arsenal reflecting ‘violent and dramatic masculine action’.4
Another Scottish literary icon, Robert Burns, also received critical treatment when Muir moved on to Ayrshire by way of the south-west. Unlike Abbotsford, he found that the poet’s cottage in Alloway was less a museum and more a place where ‘a human being could live with decency and dignity’, but he was contemptuous of the cult surrounding Burns, describing it as ‘a vested interest, jealously preserved like all vested interests’.5 From there Glasgow beckoned, and as he made his way towards the city he became aware that he was leaving the Scotland of myth and history and entering contemporary Scotland with its ‘spectre of Industrialism’. This is the beating heart of Scottish Journey, and Muir’s narrative produced the best set-piece descriptions of what most of the central belt of Scotland was like during the 1930s. Much of what he experienced was coloured by his sojourn in the city a dozen years earlier, but what struck him were the changes that had been brought about by unemployment at a time when 69 per cent of Glasgow’s registered shipbuilding workers were out of a job:
Thousands of young men started out a little over twenty years ago with the ambition of making a modest position in the world, of marrying a wife and founding a family. And thousands of them have seen that hope vanish, probably never to return for the rest of their lives. This is surely one of the most astonishing signs of our time: the disappearance in whole areas of society of a hope so general at one time that not to have it would have seemed unnatural. As for the generation of unemployed who have risen since the war, many of them are not even acquainted with this hope.6
In fact, by the time the book was published in 1935, the Muirs had decided to settle in St Andrews – the decision to return to Scotland having been cemented by Scottish Journey – and there were signs of a gradual recovery across the country. Government subsidies allowed work to begin again on the ship that would become the Cunard liner Queen Mary, and against the background of the worsening international situation a policy of re-armament benefited the shipbuilding, steel and heavy engineering industries. As had happened in the First World War, the need for sandbags came as a lifeline to the jute industry in Dundee, and under the terms of the Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act of 1934, government funds were made available to areas where unemployment was 40 per cent of the insured workforce. This brought much-needed public sector projects and employment to Scotland’s ‘special area’ which was identified as Clydebank and North Lanarkshire. Another interventionist measure was the creation of the Scottish Economic Committee which was formally recognised in 1936 as the main instrument for finding solutions to the country’s economic problems. In a time of despair it provided a degree of hope, but many of its initiatives such as the creation of the Hillington Industrial Estate in Renfrewshire were largely palliative rather than remedial. As was noted at the time, Hillington only created 15,000 mainly menial jobs while the government’s naval rearmament programme rejuvenated the Clyde by ploughing £80 million into orders for new warships.7
Muir ended his odyssey in Orkney after making his way north through the Highlands which predictably he found to be beautiful but empty and made a wasteland by the clearances of the previous century. It also allowed him the opportunity try to make sense of his experiences and to put them into a social, economic and political perspective. Generally speaking, his findings were gloomy both about the country and its people whom he found to be lacking a cause which they could support in order to get Scotland out of its slough of despond. He had little enthusiasm for the nationalist movement in general or for the National Party in particular which he reckoned was ‘numerically so weak as to be negligible’.8 It had come into being in 1928, becoming the Scottish National Party (SNP) six years later following amalgamation with the moderate Scottish Party, but, as Muir pointed out, its impact on Scottish politics was insignificant. Sporadic attempts had been made in 1924 and 1927 to revive the home rule legislation which had been scuppered by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, but the SNP was usually viewed as a minority party dominated by extremists or eccentrics. There might have been a good deal of nationalist sentiment within the country as a result of the dire economic conditions and a perception that not enough was being done for Scotland but this did not translate into votes, and at the 1935 election the SNP only contested eight seats, winning 16 per cent of the poll.
Outside the political spectrum, though, nationalism did have a number of powerful adherents amongst the intelligentsia, and none was more influential than the poet who wrote under the name of Hugh MacDiarmid. During the First World War Christopher Murray Grieve had served on the Salonika front with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and on demobilisation he had gone on, almost single-handedly, to lead a cultural revolution aimed at transforming Scottish literature. As his biographer put it, he had lost faith with the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and Fabian socialism which dominated the left in Scotland and ‘he now held firmly nationalistic opinions about the economic state and inferior political status of Scotland.’9 MacDiarmid began writing poetry in Scots, and from those early efforts he evolved the idea of a Scottish renaissance movement whose aim was to dissociate Scottish writing from the vernacular-based poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and to bring it into line with contemporary political thinking. Like W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound he was aware of the post-war exhaustion of English culture and of the need to explore a new means of self-expression. As a result he put his faith in the idea of a ‘synthetic Scots’, an etymologically based language which would ‘adapt an essentially rural tongue to the very much more complex requirements of our urban civilisation’.10
Ironically,
MacDiarmid was expelled from the National Party when its left wing was purged in preparation for the creation of the SNP. He then joined the Communist Party only to be expelled in 1938 for ‘nationalist deviation’. Other literary figures who flirted with nationalist politics included a trio of novelists – Eric Linklater, who stood unsuccessfully for the National Party in the East Fife by-election in 1933, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the author of the Scots Quair trilogy which lamented the break-up of the farming community, and Compton Mackenzie, a bestselling author and dramatist who had served in the intelligence services during the First World War. Of the three, Mackenzie was the most eccentric in his approach to nationalism but his literary prestige ensured that his ideas were given publicity. At heart he was a romantic and a sentimental Jacobite whose ideas were best expressed in the Pictish Review, one of the many publications edited by MacDiarmid: ‘All the dreams that haunt us – the salvation of Gaelic, the revival of Braid Scots, a Gaelic University in Inverness, the repopulation of the glens, a Celtic federation, and a hundred other things, will only embody themselves when we have a Scottish Free State under the Crown.’11
It was an extreme view which managed to be parochial, even Brigadoonish, in its approach, but despite the fractures within the movement and the occasional dottiness which frightened off potential supporters the Westminster government took Scottish nationalism seriously. In 1926 the post of Secretary of State for Scotland came into being, thereby providing Scotland’s senior politician with a permanent place in the Cabinet, and ten years later work began on the construction of St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh which was built on the site of the old Calton Jail to enable the Scottish Office to have a centralised presence in Edinburgh. Until then its main departments – Health, Education, Agriculture and Fishery – sprawled over eighteen different locations, and the new building brought a sense of unity and centralisation when it opened in 1939 to a design by Thomas Tait, the leading architect of the earlier Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. True to form the plans for the new building had caused considerable controversy in Edinburgh – the resulting building has been likened to a Soviet-era railway station – and its function has also been queried. Although some historians such as James Kellas hailed its opening as a moment which ‘accelerated the movement towards political separatism’, Christopher Harvie noted that it only gave Scotland what Dublin had received at the time of the Act of Union of 1801, while Richard Finlay has claimed that ‘administrative devolution provided the appearance of greater autonomy without compromising the existing political structure’s ability to set the agenda and dictate policy.’12
While these events were unfolding it is easy to understand Muir’s exasperation but his alternative solution was hardly more practical. He favoured a hundred years of socialism and the imposition of ‘social credit’, a fashionable economic system evolved by Major C. H. Douglas, a wartime aviation engineer of Scottish descent who based his theory on the observation ‘that we are living under a system of accountancy which renders the delivery of the nation’s goods and services to itself a technical impossibility’.13 Douglas’s thinking gathered considerable support but the concept was difficult to grasp, a fact ridiculed by Linklater in his novel Magnus Merriman (1934) in which the character Hugh Skene, a thinly fictionalised MacDiarmid, ‘refused to explain the system because, as he logically declared, an explanation would be wasted on people still ignorant of its fundamental hypotheses.’14 None the less, Muir was adamant that ‘Scotland needs a hundred years of Douglasism to sweat out of it the individualism which destroyed it as a nation and has brought it to where it is.’15
There were a number of reasons for the prevailing political confusion which enveloped Scotland in the 1930s. First and foremost was the sense of defeatism caused by the depressed economy and its side effects – the high unemployment (at one stage never less than 23 per cent of the available workforce), the lack of investment, low wages and an alarming rise in emigration between the censuses of 1921 and 1931 which saw an annual loss of an average of 80 per thousand people (compared to 5 per thousand in England). Towards the end of the 1930s the deteriorating international situation was also a factor and encouraged the popularity of ‘popular front’ politics to oppose the policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany. As we have seen, throughout that period Hitler had made a succession of increasingly outrageous territorial demands, and the arrival of 1939 brought no cessation of his bellicose rhetoric. On 15 March German forces occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and Hitler was driven in triumph through Prague as Czechoslovakia fell into Nazi hands. At the same time he made threatening noises about Poland, a move which was countered on 1 April by Britain and France which jointly guaranteed Polish territorial integrity as a tripwire to deter further German threats.
War was now more or less inevitable and the mood of the country began to change. The euphoria of Munich became a memory, opposition to re-armament evaporated, appeasement became an unmentionable word and opposition to fascism hardened. The Committee of Imperial Defence began to plan for war: the first steps were taken to create an expeditionary force to serve in France, the Royal Navy moved onto a war footing and plans were laid to bomb German industrial targets. On 27 April there was a further escalation when conscription was introduced in peacetime for the first time in Britain with the passing of the Military Training Act which obliged men aged twenty and twenty-one to undertake six months’ military training.
Attempts were also made to woo the Soviet Union into a pact which would be similar to the triple entente of the First World War. However these ended on 23 August when Josef Stalin entered into a non-aggression pact with Hitler who had already decided that Poland should be his next target and did not want to trigger Soviet animosity. Also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, it was a cynical piece of diplomacy which divided Eastern Europe, including Poland, into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. As the month neared its end there was a sense that war was not only imminent but necessary, both to save the country and to check Hitler’s growing domination of Europe. On the day before the pact was signed the German leader had convened his senior generals and told them that he wanted them ‘to unpityingly and mercilessly send men, women and children of Polish descent and language to death. This is the only way to gain the Lebensraum [living space] we need.’16 A week later, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) General Sir Henry Pownall noted in his diary: ‘We must finish the Nazi regime this time, to compromise and discuss is useless, it will all happen again . . . we must have a war. We can’t lose it.’17
In addition to the military and naval preparations the first civil defence measures began to appear across the UK, and the newspapers were full of advice about what should be done in the event of the expected air raids. On 24 August parliament passed the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act which gave it wide-ranging authority to do whatever was required to maintain the defence of the realm. The following day vulnerable points were taken over by soldiers of the Territorial Army. (The War Diary of 5th Highland Light Infantry recorded the fact: ‘Cowlairs [railway] Tunnel occupied by 2/Lt G. R. Dunn, 8 NCOs [non-commissioned officers] and 24 Ptes [privates].’18) This, and subsequent legislation, effectively suspended all civil liberties for the war, and while the moves were broadly welcomed they did cause concern. When some criminal cases were held in camera in Greenock Sheriff Court, Arthur Woodburn, Labour MP for Clackmannanshire and East Stirlingshire made a complaint in parliament but was assured by the Solicitor-General that as these cases involved the movement of warships the powers conferred by section 6 of the Act had been invoked.
The whole question of curtailing liberties was discussed throughout the first parliamentary session of the war and the general feeling, as expressed by Sir Dingle Foot, Liberal MP for Dundee, was that the safety of the state had to come first. After apologising for using the word ‘English’ to describe the country’s victory in the War of the Spanish Succession he said that the theory had been tested in Marlborough’s time and it still held good in 1939
: ‘We think that once again, by the same methods and along the same lines, we can contradict the expectations of many people on the Continent of Europe, but it seems to many of us – and certainly to Hon. Members who sit in this part of the House – that this can be achieved only if, at a time of emergency and war, instead of trying to suspend our free institutions, we jealously preserve them.’19
In addition to the legislation other practical measures were announced. Reservists were called up to rejoin the armed forces, and Air Raid Precaution (ARP) wardens were put on standby to make sure that the rigorous blackout regulations would be enforced after nightfall. Calls were also made for volunteers to increase the size of Scotland’s fire brigades from 21,000 to 300,000, and for the creation of 200,000 auxiliary policemen to augment the 70,000 officers already serving in Scotland. Gas masks had also been issued and tested, and newspapers carried poignant photographs of children standing in serried ranks with the cumbersome rubber masks hiding their faces. In the event of a gas attack they would have been useless, but that summer they were an important part of people’s lives at a time when it was feared that the Germans would use gas or chemical bombs against the civilian population.20
