A Time of Tyrants

by Trevor Royle

  Another manifestation of the collision between war and culture occurred at Port Glasgow where the Lithgow shipyards were home to the artist Stanley Spencer, who had been selected by the War Artists Advisory Committee to record the work of the Clyde shipbuilders. A product of the Slade School of Fine Art, Spencer had served on the Salonika front during the First World War and had used the experience as inspiration for much of his output in the 1920s, notably the cycle of nineteen paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire. However by the end of the 1930s his life was in chaos, dogged by an unhappy love life, financial problems and humiliating rejections. In that respect the commission from the War Artists Advisory Committee came as a lifeline, and Spencer threw himself into the work at Port Glasgow, becoming a familiar figure to the Lithgow workforce, with whom he quickly built up an easy rapport.

  The results were impressive. Between May 1940 and March 1946 he spent a number of extended periods in the yards where merchant ships were built; in that period he produced Shipbuilding on the Clyde, a sequence of eight massive paintings, each almost six metres wide and half a metre high. Massive in scale and lofty in ambition, they resemble Renaissance frescoes, but instead of narrating religious stories they commemorate the gangs of Clydebank workers as they work in harmony to create a ship. As one reviewer described the enterprise when the frescoes were put on display at Chatham dockyard in 2010, Spencer’s effort had created a thing of beauty and a celebration of an essential contribution to the nation’s war effort. ‘The overall effect is of the drama, busyness, grandeur and importance of the enterprise. We witness numerous welders, plumbers, riveters, riggers, burners, labourers, furnace men, rope makers, machinists and apprentices earnestly contributing their skills to a single overall purpose.’40 So large is the work that it is held by the Imperial War Museum and is only rarely put on public display. After the war Spencer returned to his native Cookham in Berkshire where he died in 1959.

  One of the problems facing those who wanted to provide entertainment during the war was the government ban on the assembly of crowds which came into force at the outbreak of hostilities. As the conflict progressed the conditions were eased, but the regulations effectively put paid to the playing of organised sport in wartime Scotland. Following the declaration of war the Scottish Rugby Union cancelled all trial and international matches, and the stadium at Murrayfield in Edinburgh was turned over to the army and used as a supply depot by the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. Clubs continued to play friendly fixtures wherever possible, and there were several matches with sides representing the armed forces, but to all intents and purposes the game went into hibernation for the duration of hostilities. The main exception was the staging of two Services’ international matches against England, played each year on a home-and-away basis, with the Scottish home matches staged at Inverleith in Edinburgh. Just as had happened in the previous conflict, Scottish international rugby players joined up or were conscripted into the armed forces and fifteen of their number were killed or died on active service. Amongst them was Eric Liddell (seven caps), an Olympic gold-medal-winning sprinter who died in China on 21 February 1945 while working as a missionary.

  Football was in a similar position. The season was only four games old when war was declared, with Rangers leading the First Division while Dundee were at the top of the Second Division. All player contracts were rescinded and the leagues were abandoned for the duration of the hostilities, although the Scottish Football Association initiated moves to find an alternative structure which would suit the new wartime conditions. The result was the creation of two regional (western and eastern) divisions of sixteen clubs each, but this was immediately unpopular in the east of Scotland because it cut off larger teams such as Hibernian and Heart of Midlothian from fixtures with the wealthier Glasgow sides. Other regional leagues were formed and there were also Southern League Cup and North-East League Cup competitions as well as a Summer Cup which was first won by Hibernian in the 1940–41 season. However the dearth of football spelled doom for some of the smaller clubs. Two clubs failed to survive the war – King’s Park which was reborn as Stirling Albion and St Bernard’s which disappeared altogether after its ground in Edinburgh was taken over for military purposes. As happened with the game of rugby, professional footballers were also called up, and this often led to many of them making guest appearances with other clubs in other parts of the country. For example, Bobby Flavell, a promising young player with Airdrieonians played for both Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur while he was stationed near London during the war.

  Football retained its ability to attract large crowds, and on a casual basis it remained very much part of the social scene in Scotland throughout the war. Cinemas were also deservedly popular as in a world before the advent of television they provided not just entertainment but also glamour and escapism. In Dundee the Caird Hall started showing films – Gone with the Wind played to full houses for four weeks in 1941 – and Glasgow could boast 104 screens, one of which was the iconic Cosmo in Rose Street (later the Glasgow Film Theatre) which showed movies from all over the world.

  Along with the cinema, going to ‘the dancing’ is one of the abiding memories of Scots who lived through that period. It also managed to survive the government’s temporary measure to close down dancehalls immediately after war was declared, and it continued to thrive. Glasgow alone had 159 registered dancehalls, from small local affairs to the huge and massively popular venue at the Barrowlands where the resident band of Billy McGregor and the Gaybirds played to enthusiastic crowds of dancers throughout the war. The only change was that the landmark neon sign of a man pushing a barrow was removed as part of the air-raid precautions. In Dundee Andy Lothian’s band kept the music going at the Empress Ballroom, and there were other similar facilities at the Locarno on Lochee Road and the Palais in Tay Street. The only discordant note was struck at the Progress Hall in Dundee’s Hilltown which quickly gained a seedy reputation for alcohol-fuelled fights involving service personnel.41 Apart from incidents of that kind, which seemed to occur when drink and men in uniform mixed, dancing was not only popular but it also offered temporary escape from the drudgery and tensions of wartime, and scarcely a town or village did not have some kind of hall which could be used at the weekend. As Land Girl Ina Seaton found when she served with the SWLA near Gifford in East Lothian, the countryside offered all sorts of entertainments, with the possibility of the cinema twice a week and dances on a Friday night. ‘You were never short of partners, you know,’ she remembered. ‘They were away with a Land Girl – oh, they’re coming from the toon, they’re toonies. Seems daft now. It was good fun, it really was.’42

  9 Sikorski’s (and other) Tourists

  In the spring of 1944 the poet Hugh MacDiarmid finally managed to escape from the increasingly difficult and enervating war work to which he had been conscripted in Mechan’s Engineering Company in Scotstoun in Glasgow. In circumstances which are still unclear, the poet was able to transfer to a job as Postal Officer to the Allied fleets in Greenock which entailed working in the small boat pool servicing the huge numbers of Allied vessels in the Clyde estuary. At the Tail of the Bank – the stretch of water between Greenock and Gourock – were found the assembly points for incoming and outgoing Atlantic convoys as well as safe anchorages for Allied warships. From 1940 onwards it was an exceptionally busy stretch of water, with swarms of small boats sailing to and fro between the ranks of Allied warships and merchantmen.

  In his autobiography Lucky Poet MacDiarmid states that after making application for a transfer he was simply employed on board a Norwegian vessel, the MFV Gurli, which was under charter to the Admiralty. Later, in the 1980s, when MacDiarmid’s biography was being written his close friend and colleague Robert Blair Wilkie claimed that political influence was brought to bear on the appointment through the intervention of Dr Robert McIntyre, general secretary of the SNP. Wilkie, a leading member of the party’s General Council, had already railed against the ‘insanity’ of
employing a middle-aged man in such unsuitable manual work and it is entirely probable that he attempted to intervene on the poet’s behalf.1 Throughout this period Wilkie and his wife Helen provided a home-from-home for MacDiarmid, and their relationship continued to be strong after the war – in 1949 both were expelled from the SNP for ‘extremist behaviour’.2

  Whatever the cause of the transfer it came as a lifeline to MacDiarmid by removing him from the daily grind of hard physical work and introducing him to more suitable employment, first as a deckhand and then as an engineering officer. It also gave him first-hand experience of the way in which Scotland had been exposed to the global influences of the conflict. Not only was the Tail of the Bank home to some of the warships of the Free French Navy, together with 1,500 of their sailors at Fort Matilda, but as the assembly point for Atlantic convoys it meant that the waters ‘held the biggest small boat pool in Great Britain with French, Belgian, Dutch, Scandinavian and other vessels. Greenock was as a consequence highly internationalised then and each of its public houses a veritable Babel.’3

  The port was also home of the North Command of the Free Polish Navy which had begun arriving in Scottish waters before the outbreak of hostilities and whose ships came under the control of the Admiralty while remaining sovereign Polish territory. Of all the babel of foreign voices heard by MacDiarmid and others in the Clyde estuary, the Poles were the most insistent because as it turned out they were to leave the longest-lasting and deepest impression on the country by becoming the largest and most influential immigrant group in Scotland both during the war and in the years that followed.

  With the entry of the United States into the war in late 1941 the whole complexion of the conflict began to change. Between the summer of 1940 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor eighteen months later, Britain and her Commonwealth allies had been fighting alone against Nazi Germany, and the strains on their military and industrial capacities were beginning to tell. Britain was virtually under siege from constant aerial bombardment, and unrestricted German submarine warfare threatened essential supplies and the seaborne lines of communication across the world. There were huge demands on the national exchequer, and the military setbacks in North Africa and the Mediterranean had inevitably sapped morale. By then, too, the original reasons for the outbreak of the war had blurred with the passing of time and Nazi Germany’s relentless subjugation of Europe.

  When Poland had been invaded there were high hopes that its armed forces would be able to resist for anything up to six months – British military planners believed that the Nazi army would use the tactics of the First World War by bombarding Polish positions for several weeks before launching its attack – but the speed and aggression of the invasion had produced a relatively easy German victory. As it turned out, it was not the end of the war for the Poles but this first battleground of the conflict gave the Germans much-needed confidence about their own military abilities and seemed to prove that their tactics were unbeatable. This was confirmed eight months later when France and the Low Countries were subjected to blitzkrieg, leaving Hitler master of Europe from the Atlantic to the Carpathian mountains.

  For the Poles it had been a shocking and bewildering experience which justifies one writer’s later comment about the country’s history in the twentieth century that ‘Poland today is not cursed by destiny but by a brutal share of bad luck.’4 However, it was not as if Poland was an undeveloped country or that its forces were unsuited to modern combat. In an important historical sense Poles had always known that any assault on Poland would threaten its very existence. The country’s history stretched back over ten centuries but in more recent times it had been subjected to cynical carve-ups by Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia, and the modern state had only come into being at the end of the First World War. Even so, the Polish government was well aware of the threat posed by its acquisitive neighbours, Germany and the Soviet Union, and had taken steps to defend its territorial integrity. In the summer of 1939 the Polish Army numbered one million soldiers, and even though only half of them had been mobilised by the time of the German invasion, there were solid measures in place to fight a defensive war. In 1936 a National Defence Fund had also been instituted to raise money for modern weapons and equipment so that the people themselves felt that they had a share in their country’s security.

  That being said, the modernisation programme had not been completed and there were shortages of armour and modern aircraft. The tank force consisted of two armoured brigades equipped with the 7TP light tank and four independent armoured battalions, and the bulk of the cavalry was still mounted and used in the reconnaissance or mounted infantry role. (This did not make them less efficient – the Germans also relied on horses – but it gave rise to the later myth that Polish cavalry regiments attacked German armour armed only with lances and sabres.) The Polish air force was also at a disadvantage, being equipped with aircraft such as the lumbering PZL P11 fighter which was no match for its speedier German counterparts. On the other hand it possessed reliable light and medium bombers, but these failed to make much impact largely due to the dispersal of Polish aircraft in advance of the German assault. As for the navy, it escaped relatively unscathed: following a secret pre-war agreement, Operation Peking, most of the fleet of destroyers and support vessels escaped to British ports on 20 August while Polish submarines mounted a short campaign in the Baltic before making good their escape to the west.

  The German plan to deal with Poland called for an attack on four fronts, the main one led by General Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South which would attack from the borders of Silesia, Moravia and Slovakia towards Lodz, Krakow and Warsaw. In the north there would be an attack from East Prussia, while Germany’s Slovakian allies would join the attack in the south. The fourth front would be provided by uprisings of specially prepared Selbstschutz guerrillas of the country’s German minority. Poland’s terrain suited the mobile high-speed tactics used by the Germans but it did little favours to the Poles who were quickly over-stretched and their lines of communication were over-exposed and frequently under-defended. The Germans also quickly gained air superiority at an early stage in the invasion, and the terrifying bombing campaign encouraged civilians to flee from their homes, blocking roads and demoralising the Polish forces. Within three days von Rundstedt’s forces had reached the River Vistula, and by 8 September they were within striking distance of Warsaw having advanced 140 miles in little over a week. As the German forces advanced they managed to split up the Polish defenders, and although the Poles inflicted heavy losses on the Germans during the fighting on the Bzura River, they were unable to counterattack in any meaningful way. By 13 September the bulk of the Polish forces were in full retreat towards the border with Romania. With them they took President Ignacy Moscicki’s government which had abandoned Warsaw soon after the invasion began.

  From this point onwards Poland’s fate was sealed. There were plans to defend the so-called Romanian Bridgehead behind the Vistula and San rivers but the Red Army’s invasion changed the strategic balance and made further resistance impossible. The Soviets had around 800,000 soldiers under their command while the whole Polish defensive plan was geared towards halting the German onslaught from the west by rolling with the punch and then falling back. For young Polish soldiers like Władysław Fila, at the time an officer cadet, this bewildering turn of events changed everything and made further resistance impossible, not least because, as he noted later in life, ‘we never expected Poland being attacked by our [eastern] neighbours.’5

  With grim inevitability key points began falling: the city of Lwow on 22 September, symbolic Warsaw on 28 September and the huge Modlin Fortress north of the capital a day later. The Soviet intervention also changed the nature of the fighting, with large numbers of Polish officers being executed after being taken prisoners, one of the worst incidents being a mass execution at the conclusion of the Battle of Szack. On 6 October the last engagement was fought at Kock near Lublin where force
s led by General Franciszek Kleeburg surrendered to the Germans. Not that the Poles gave up easily: during the fighting the Germans lost 16,343 soldiers killed in action and 30,300 wounded, a higher rate of attrition than they were to suffer in the following year’s invasion of France.6

  Despite the heaviness of the defeat and the reality that their country had been over-run by enemy armies, the Poles did not surrender, and thus began one of the most extraordinary retreats of the Second World War. As the Polish government and high command crossed over the border into Romania they did so in the certain knowledge that while the first battle had been lost the war would continue from the territory of their oldest ally, France. It was a bold declaration. Huge numbers of Poles had to get from neutral Romania and Hungary and make their way westwards across Europe, using whatever means they could. Others passed through Yugoslavia, travelling long hours by train, usually on false passports provided by the Romanians and Hungarians. Some units even managed to stay together during the long exodus, with the result that when they arrived in France a new government and Free Polish Army quickly came into being under the command of General Władysław Sikorski, an experienced soldier who combined his post with that of prime minister. By the early summer of 1940 it consisted of four infantry divisions and an armoured brigade which was earmarked to serve under the French chain of command in the south of the country. (Also formed at this time was an independent infantry brigade which served in Syria and the Podhalanska (Highland) Brigade which formed in Brittany and which took part in the ill-fated operations in Norway later in the year.)

  The rapid fall of French resistance in May and June 1940 was a disaster for the Poles. Not only were they badly mauled in the fighting as the Germans swung south, but the dismaying collapse of French resistance meant that the recently arrived Polish forces had to retreat once more, this time into neutral Switzerland. From there they moved to Britain where they pledged to continue the struggle with the one ally which was still capable of resisting the Germans. They arrived in a motley collection of hastily requisitioned liners and ferries, landing mainly at Southampton and Liverpool. By the middle of July there were 17,000 Polish troops on British soil – eventually the numbers would swell to 120,000 as the stragglers came in. On the whole the Poles received warm welcomes by organisations such as the Women’s Voluntary Services, but the arrival of this substantial force, most of whom did not speak English, was a drain on national resources at a time when a German invasion seemed to be imminent and there was considerable perplexity within the War Office about what should be done with them.