A Time of Tyrants

by Trevor Royle

  In the aftermath of the walkout passions continued to run high at Hillington, and the AEU took the unusual step of accusing the strike committee (Clyde Workers’ Committee) of being anti-war and Trotskyite in its approach by misrepresenting the deal on offer. In so doing, claimed the anonymous author of an article in the AEU magazine New Propeller (later called The Metal Worker), they simply played into the hands of the ‘capitalist Press’ which had accused workers of entertaining pacifist tendencies: ‘Unfortunately, wild rumours were deliberately fostered by anti-war elements in the works, whose declared policy is to hold up vital war production, the effect of which is to help Hitler . . . In order to hide their Fifth Column disruptive role they attempted to cover up this disruption by dragging in the Communist Party so that workers would be diverted by the “Red Bogey” so beloved by Goebbels.’41

  This was strong language, but it reflects the unions’ need to protect their members’ rights at a time when strikes were illegal and any manifestation of stoppages or walkouts were thought to be unpatriotic. In this instance, too, AEU negotiators believed that the management of Rolls-Royce had not fully explained the outcome of the Court of Inquiry and had been economical with the facts by producing grading cards which gave the impression that women would remain on the lowest grade of pay. By then, too, women had become an integral part of the workforce. In 1942 women had been admitted to membership of the AEU and dilution had become an accepted part of the war effort. Indeed the Rolls-Royce plant at Hillington could not have operated without the huge input made by female workers who had demonstrated that they were the equal of the mainly male workforce.

  It was a delicate balance: on the whole unions had signed up to the no-strike legislation and were supportive of the war effort, not least because the Soviet Union was an ally. At the same time, though, industrial relations were not always easy, strike action continued throughout the war and workers, such as the Hillington women, were not always inclined to accept second best if they felt that their rights were being infringed or they were being worsted over rates of pay. Memories were still alive of the problems caused during the inter-war years when trade unionism was in decline and management was in the ascendancy. This was especially true in the coalmining industry, but it was also rife in all sectors of manufacturing where shop stewards had been victimised and there had been a noticeable decline in working conditions. It took some time for employment levels to rise as government policies began to take effect across the industries involved in the war effort. As a result, membership of the trades unions increased from 4.5 million to 7.5 million over the course of the war, and this was accompanied by the spread of recognition agreements to industries which had previously been neglectful of any involvement with the TUC.42

  There was a price to be paid for Scotland’s failure to benefit fully from the huge increases in wartime production. By the end of 1946 unemployment in Scotland had crept up to 5 per cent, and although this was to fall as world markets rallied to meet the need for replacement equipment, especially in shipbuilding, Scotland’s heavy industries were still rooted in the Clyde valley just as they had been earlier in the century. Worryingly, there had been little diversification during the war when only thirty-two government factories had been built in Scotland, and this was clearly regarded as a lost opportunity.43 As a result, there had been little improvement in Scotland’s infrastructure. A list of engineering projects on the railways shows that only one line in Scotland had been improved – between July 1942 and March 1943 £95,000 was spent on four passing loops on the Ayr–Stranraer line, built as a result of the construction of the modern deepwater port at Cairnryan. In the munitions sector, a key employer in Scotland during the previous conflict, the three existing Royal Ordnance Factories at Bishopton and one at Irvine were refurbished as part of a national programme undertaken by the Ministry of Supply. Elsewhere, a new nitro-glycerine works was built in 1940 at Dalbeattie by Sir Robert McAlpine for the Royal Naval Armaments Depot, and was in constant use throughout the war. As for other wartime emergency factories, most closed after 1945, the notable exception remaining open for business being the Rolls-Royce engine factory at Hillington which survived until 2005, before moving to nearby Inchinnan.44

  8 Home Front

  For the first time in the history of modern warfare, civilians across the UK discovered that they too might find themselves on the front line or that they were required to make substantial and valuable contributions to the nation’s war effort, not just in the armed forces but also in the civilian support services. That had been true to a lesser extent during the previous conflict, but in most respects the Second World War proved to be all-embracing as far as the population was concerned. Very few British people, even children, escaped being caught up in what was taking place, and while that inclusiveness helped to democratise the war, it also meant that civilians had to share many of the dangers and privations that had previously been the lot of service personnel. Certainly, no one in Scotland, even in the most remote or under-populated rural areas, escaped the reality of modern total war. By the same token, just about every family contributed members (male and female) to undertake some form of service under the various National Service Acts which harnessed the energies of the bulk of the population.

  The idea of universal effort and combined hardship was so rooted within the national consciousness that when the BBC broadcast loyal messages to the king during the celebrations for the end of the war in Europe, the words of the civil defence services took pride of place immediately after the tributes offered by the armed forces: ‘We are ordinary citizens, men and women, old and young, weak and strong; and most of us are part-timers. Our battle was fought around our homes, in the villages, the towns and the cities of our country, among our people and our own kin. For us, the sounding of the Alert was a summons to face the danger, and to face it without the satisfaction of being able to hit back.’1

  Those sentiments were given voice in May 1945 at a time when the war had been won and there was some reason to express satisfaction, but they give a good indication of the sense of common cause which had guided Britain’s war effort throughout the conflict. By then, too, the hardships facing the civilian population had been revealed and people wanted their suffering to be recognised as part of the communal war effort. Enemy bombing had destroyed buildings and made people homeless, and the death toll in the main cities had been considerable, but this was balanced by an understanding that it was part of the price that had to be paid. In fact, even before hostilities had broken out, preparations had been put in place for children and vulnerable adults to be evacuated in advance of the anticipated bombing campaign against major cities. On 24 May 1938, the Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare had set up a commission under the chairmanship of Sir John Anderson, MP for the Scottish Universities, which outlined the need for evacuating children from potential target areas and to provide billeting for them with families in parts of the country considered to be safe. In Scotland detailed planning began as early as the first half of 1939 to take children from the main centres of population in the central belt and to move them to safer areas in the countryside.

  Within the Scottish Office, responsibility for organising the evacuation was put in the hands of the Department of Health which identified the following areas for immediate evacuation: Edinburgh, Rosyth, Glasgow, Clydebank, Greenock, Port Glasgow, Dumbarton and Dundee. Following German bombing raids against targets in the Firth of Forth area in October, North and South Queensferry and Inverkeithing were added to the places requiring evacuation. The reception areas were to be towns and villages in the Borders, the North-East and the Western Highlands, and the relevant powers were vested in Regulation 22(1) of the Defence Regulations 1939.2

  From the evidence of the planning papers produced by the Scottish Office a great deal of effort was put into the exercise to ensure its smooth operation once hostilities had broken out, although it has also to be said that the public response was muted. As early as March 1939
Glasgow Corporation’s Evacuation Officer had circulated a letter to parents and guardians advising them of plans to evacuate children. In Edinburgh a similar survey of 33,150 households was held but it attracted little interest, with only 12,462 families registering, only 30 per cent of the total. Unlike similar schemes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland where school classes were the focus for children being moved, Scottish evacuees would be kept together in family groups. The first trial involving 200 children was held in Cupar, Fife in June but overall the national registrations proved to be disappointing. Glasgow followed Edinburgh’s example with only 106,000 children being signed up for the scheme, less than 50 per cent of those expected.

  However, the arrival of war seemed to concentrate minds. When the order arrived ‘implement forthwith’ on 3 September, 118,833 children in Glasgow arrived at the city’s main railway stations where 388 special trains had been organised to remove them to designated safe areas.3 Clyde steamers were also pressed into service, and the Royal Scottish Automobile Club organised private cars for transport. The Scottish Special Housing Association also made available a number of camps at Broomlee (West Linton), Middleton (Gorebridge), Glengonnar (Abington), Aberfoyle and Belmont (Meigle). Responsibility for billeting arrangements was left in the hands of the local councils, and by the end of September the total figures for evacuees in Scotland were:

  Unaccompanied schoolchildren:

  62,059

  Mothers and accompanied children:

  91,170

  Expectant mothers:

  405

  Blind persons, cripples and other special cases:

  1,787

  Teachers and helpers:

  13,4654

  For everyone it was a traumatic experience. Many of the children had never left their homes or neighbourhoods before, and on arrival there was frequently confusion in getting mothers and children to their final destination. This caused added difficulties for the billeting officers, especially in areas where housing was sub-standard – the Anderson report had indicated that children over the age of fourteen should be given single rooms and those under the age of fourteen would have to share. All evacuations had to be completed before nightfall, and in Scotland there were problems with late-arriving trains and transfers from the stations to the billets, especially in rural areas. Religion also intruded, with reports of Catholics from Glasgow being made unhappy because they had been billeted in ‘strong Presbyterian homes in the south-west’.5 Problems of perception also abounded. Two Glasgow children billeted in Dumfries-shire were sent to a comfortable middle-class home and given a bed with clean white sheets. When the householder went to bid them good night she found them cowering in a corner. ‘We’re no’ goin’ there,’ they said, ‘that’s the bed for the deid folk.’6

  Almost immediately there were other tensions between the evacuees and those providing the billets. Middle-class hosts were confronted with families who had been brought up in overcrowded tenement flats with basic toilet facilities and a rudimentary grasp of personal hygiene. A story told by Tom Johnston summed up the problem. A party of ‘ragged and smelly’ evacuee children was billeted on the Countess of Elgin who asked her housekeeper to fill a bath with hot water so that they could be washed, but one little boy screamed at the sight and refused to be immersed, shouting all the while in an unintelligible accent. Eventually Lady Elgin asked her housekeeper to tell her what the boy was saying, only to receive the reply: ‘He’s saying, madam, that it’s ower fuckin’ deep and ower fuckin’ hot.’7

  Enuresis, or uncontrolled urination, proved to be a particular problem, with a leading medical journal reporting that ‘every morning every window is filled with bedding hung out to air in the sunshine. The scene is cheerful but the householders are depressed.’8 A report showed that one-third of the children were verminous – impetigo was also a recurring problem – and although local education authorities had statutory powers to provide clothing and boots through Section 6 of the Education (Scotland) Act of 1908, a large proportion of the children arrived ill-shod and badly clothed. In Auchterarder in Perthshire the Kennaways were one of many local families who provided billets for children from Dundee, and as the future novelist James Kennaway remembered, it was a bewildering time for everyone (his father was a wealthy lawyer and factor and they lived in a large and comfortable house). On getting back from church the Kennaways found waiting at the front door ‘some extraordinary people . . . dirty, dark and real . . . half a dozen keelies with their mother . . . the woman is awful, highly painted yet dirty, small with too much hair, tired and oddly silent’. No sooner were they admitted to the Kennaway’s house than two of the boys urinated on the front doorstep and one of them merely remarked, ‘it trickles a’ the way doon’.9

  Another novelist, Robin Jenkins, was also involved in the process as a boy, in his case as a participant, and later wrote about it in Guests of War (1956) which was based on his own experience. In the novel he traces the fortunes of a group of evacuees from Gowburgh (Glasgow) after they arrive in the douce Borders town of Lanrigg (Moffat). Almost immediately, one of the mothers, Bell McShelvie, questions her motives for escaping with her son while leaving the rest of the family in danger back at home. In the novel’s opening pages she accepts a neighbour’s reproach that she is being selfish. ‘Here indeed was her battlefield: the enemy she had to fight was despair at the ugliness shutting her in, at the inevitable coarseness and pitiable savagery of many of the people shut in with her, and above all at her inability to keep her own family healthy, sweet, and intact. She was weary of fighting. Even soldiers in war were given relief . . . The battle was at its height, therefore, and she had made up her mind to desert.’10

  There is a sub-text: Bell has spent most of her life in a rundown tenement and yearns to return to the countryside which she remembers leaving as a six-year-old girl. As she and many others discovered, it was a fraught time, and although for some it turned out happily enough, in general, evacuation was a dislocating experience which led to a great deal of unhappiness and loneliness. By January 1940 at least two-thirds of those evacuated had started returning to their homes, and the count showed that the exodus had been uniform across the country. Amongst them is the fictional Bell McShelvie, who fails to overcome her feelings of guilt and decides to return to Gowburgh with its ‘age and grime’ and its many faults.11 The figures for those who decided to remain were:

  Unaccompanied schoolchildren:

  37,600 (61 per cent)

  Mothers and accompanied children:

  8,900 (9 per cent)

  Expectant mothers:

  40 (10 per cent)

  Blind persons, cripples and other special cases:

  160 (9 per cent)

  Teachers and helpers:

  3,100 (23 per cent)12

  It was not always the evacuees who failed to adapt. There is also evidence that host families and local organisations were often unwilling to make an additional effort to ensure that the evacuees were given sufficient help and facilities, far less a warm welcome. When 150 mothers and children arrived in Inverary from Glasgow they found that they were to be billeted in a local hall with only two lavatories, and equipped with bedding that consisted of dirty straw sacks and ancient mattresses with broad arrows painted on them, indicating that they had been used in the local gaol. When the matter was raised in the House of Commons by Campbell Stephen, Labour MP for Glasgow Camlachie, it was also pointed out that the nearby castle owned by the Duke of Argyll was largely empty and had sufficient bedrooms which could have been used, but no steps were taken to requisition the accommodation. Later, things did get better, if only modestly.

  Ultimately the Duke did take a few children and made provision for them in the basement of the castle. That is very discreditable in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. On the other hand, many of the local people were worried and anxious about what had occurred and were ready to help. There were some condemned houses that had been shut up for possibly a
year. They got the keys of those houses and opened them, and many of the mothers who had been sent to this place with their children set about washing the dirty floors and cleaning up the condemned houses which had been uninhabited so long.13

  When Stephen complained that the billets ought to have been inspected prior to the arrival of the evacuees Sir James Henderson Stewart, Conservative MP for Fife Eastern unhelpfully but pertinently interjected, ‘and the children’. It was also reported that in other parts of Scotland there was equal outrage when the evacuees arrived and were lined up to allow locals to have their pick of them, one observer describing it as being like ‘a slave market in the old days’.14

  The debate echoed subsequent findings about the evacuation of women and children in the early months of the war. In his analysis of the plans and their subsequent execution the official war historian was clear that they had not worked as smoothly as had been anticipated, and that the scheme had quickly encountered problems simply because evacuation on that scale had never been attempted in the past: ‘as an integral part of the plans for the protection of the civilian population, [evacuation] had largely failed to achieve its object of removing for the duration of the war most of the mothers and children in the target areas.’15 There were many reasons for the failure. Although Anderson’s commission had laid down strict guidelines for the smooth running of the evacuation scheme, it could not factor in all the human aspects. For most of those involved, like the Kennaway family and their unwilling ‘guests’ from Dundee it had been a case of social collision: as far as previous contact would have been concerned, the evacuees and their hosts could have been living on different planets. But for every incident of bed-wetting there were also stories of increased criminality involving evacuees – in Glasgow, for example, the number of children under the age of fourteen convicted or found guilty of theft or housebreaking was more than twice as high in 1940 as it had been before the war, and this resulted in increased delinquency in many of the reception areas. (Smashing light bulbs to hear them ‘pop’ was a particular problem.)16