A Time of Tyrants

by Trevor Royle

  There was another fallout. For the Poles who came from eastern Poland, many of whom had been released in 1941 and joined the western allies in the Middle East, the prospect of returning was not appealing as their homeland was now in Soviet territory. Others, too, decided that there was little future in going home, and of the 240,000 Poles under British command only 105,000 were repatriated.12 With the help of the Polish Resettlement Corps, which offered help in finding work, the rest stayed on, many of them because they had married local women and were already raising families. Large numbers remained and settled in Scotland, especially in the Border counties and in the counties of Angus, Fife and Perthshire where they had done their training. In the early days some suffered hostility from a small section of Scots on the left who supported the Soviet Union or were anti-Catholic, but by and large the assimilation of former Polish soldiers into Scottish life was one of the success stories of the post-war world.

  Although the government-in-exile suffered many vicissitudes and much internal squabbling, it remained in being in London until it was dissolved following the collapse of the Communist government in Warsaw in 1989. And by one of history’s quirks there was a second friendly Polish ‘invasion’ in the first decade of the twenty-first century when some 50,000 young Poles took advantage of their country’s entry into the European Union to come to work in Scotland. They too were greeted as welcome visitors.13

  Scotland, too, had been affected by political decisions made during the course of the Second World War. Even before the fighting stopped, and peace of a kind returned to a shattered globe, the first steps had been taken to try to ensure that it would be a world fit for heroes. In fact the theme was much more intense than a simple appeal to the optimism that had accompanied the end of the previous conflict. For the beleaguered British people who had withstood almost six years of continuous warfare when for much of the time they themselves had been on the front line, the predominant emotion was ‘never again’. They had seen what could be achieved when people combined in common cause, and the experience of coalition government with united war aims had provided them with the foundations for a new beginning. Now it was their time and they were determined to make the most of it.

  Many of their hopes were based on the principles embodied in William Beveridge’s Social Insurance and Allied Services report which had provided the blueprint for a comprehensive post-war ‘cradle to the grave’ welfare state. Published in December 1942, its timing was doubly fortuitous. Not only did it bring the promise of change but it provided hope at the very moment when it seemed that the war could be won following the victories at El Alamein and Stalingrad. Not surprisingly, perhaps, because it caught the mood of the moment it became an instant bestseller, with a print run of over 600,000 copies plus many thousands more in a truncated version which was distributed to members of the armed forces. Within a few weeks of publication it was estimated that nineteen out of twenty people had heard of the report and mainly understood the gist of its findings.14 From that point onwards support for the Labour Party began to grow, and although the wartime electoral truce held firm and support for Churchill never wavered, there was a distinct shift leftwards in the second half of the war as people dared to dream of a New Jerusalem.

  Such attitudes were not altogether surprising. During the war people had become used to a collectivist approach to government. They could see what might be achieved by state interventionism on a grand scale, and did not want to return to the laissez-faire attitudes of the 1930s which had failed to deliver economic recovery. The coalition government had demonstrated what could be done when the will of the country was bent towards defeating the enemy, and with over five million men and women conscripted into national service they wanted that mood to continue into the peacetime years. Nothing else would do. If the evil of fascism could be extirpated by united national resolve then surely a similar effort could be made to defeat poverty, unemployment and social exclusion.

  There was, too, the added incentive that thousands of men and women had fought and risked their lives on the front line and were not prepared to see their sacrifices dissipated by political inaction. As a returning Black Watch soldier put it when he went back to the Braes of Angus and an uncertain future in hill farming: ‘These were men who had been fighting in North Africa and Europe and they weren’t prepared to go back to damp, tied farm cottages and the minimum agricultural wage.’15

  The real problem, though, had little to do with implementing those hopes; it was finding the money in a world in which Britain was economically exhausted and saddled with a debt of over £3 billion. Hopes were all very well, but the stark reality was that money was in desperately short supply. The situation in Scotland was both similar and dissimilar to what was happening elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and there was a tentative reaction from the Scottish Office when Churchill requested initial ideas for reconstruction during what was described as ‘the period of Transition which would lie between the two stages of War and settled Peace’. When asked to respond on 3 November 1943 the specifically Scottish subjects identified by Scottish Home Department were solidly utilitarian: demobilisation as it related to the fire and police service and ARP; release of buildings and land used for war purposes; the creation of a revised electoral register; the repair and re-conversion of requisitioned fishing boats; clearance of mines; recruitment of police; and liquidation of the evacuation scheme.16

  At that early stage very little was said about deeper issues such as poverty, low pay, poor health and, above all, inadequate housing which had always offered challenges for social reform and which was still a desperate problem, especially in the western end of the central belt. Bomb damage had been severe in Glasgow and the Clyde estuary following the blitz of 1941, but the sorry truth was that the existing housing stock could not cope with the massive overcrowding that afflicted the area. In 1943 Glasgow’s Town Clerk revealed that 700,000 people were crammed into an area of barely 1,800 acres, with the bulk of them living in the three square miles of the city centre.17 Other large conurbations in the west of Scotland were just as badly affected with high population densities. Even before the war had broken out the Scottish Office had estimated that 250,000 new houses were required in Scotland, and following the 1941 blitz officials recognised that bomb damage would have increased that number.

  Clearly this problem had to be solved before other associated health care and economic issues could be successfully addressed, and after the initial summarising of the main issues, re-housing quickly became one of the major planks in Scotland’s post-war recovery programme. On 13 March 1941, at a time when Clydebank was being bombed in the first of the heavy raids on Scotland, a Joint Memorandum on Reconstruction was produced by Mr J. Westwood and Mr J. S. Wedderburn and presented to the Secretary of State.

  If we are to tackle these problems [town and country planning] effectively there must be planning before the end of the war so that on the cessation of hostilities we can start on this work at once. Scotland ought to be Town and Country planned as speedily as possible and legislation ought to be fully examined with a view to removing all delaying obstacles . . .

  This raises the question of whether or not the provision of these services should be left in the hands of existing Local Authorities. Whilst Local Authorities have done much to help in this problem, the problem is so big and calls for such speedy action that it would seem that the best way to deal with the building programme is by means of a National organisation and National direction and aim at the building of 30,000 houses per annum.18

  In fact their estimates were not misplaced, and they were astute enough to point out that it was not just housing but the business of construction itself that would be beneficial to society, as house building would absorb the maximum labour and provide outlets for a wide variety of jobs. At its simplest, civil servants in the Scottish Home Department quickly realised that the nation’s housing stock would be inadequate for post-war needs, and that the deficit would have to b
e made good by a massive rebuilding programme. With the problem being most acute in Glasgow and the Clyde valley, the efforts for the post-war period centred on a phased development plan which would ease higher densities of occupancy while attempting to keep people within existing residential areas. By the end of June 1945 sites had been approved across the area for the construction of 128,000 houses, and the Scottish Special Housing Association in association with local authorities had invited tenders for the immediate construction of 5,000 new homes.19 However, from the outset it was conceded that in Glasgow at least it would be impossible to resettle everyone within the city boundaries, and that there would be overspill owing to an acute shortage of available buildings and existing space on which to construct low- and high-density housing.

  It would take time and effort to redress the country’s long-standing ills and to make a reality of the hopes expressed in the Beveridge report, but in other respects Scotland emerged in reasonably good shape to meet the expectations of the brave new world. That this was the case was due in no small measure to the system of good governance which had been instituted by Tom Johnston. Throughout his reign as Scottish Secretary he had been given a free hand and had used it mainly to good effect. While his Council of State had not emerged as a realistic working model for devolution, it had overseen a number of worthwhile innovations, and under Johnston’s direction positive steps had been taken to plan for the kind of country which he hoped would emerge from the mayhem of war. In 1945, as the war drew to a close, Johnston was entitled to claim that ‘we were no longer representatives of an old nation in decay, but of a young virile people lit up with the assurance that whatever men dare in unison they can do.’20

  It was a bold claim, and typical of the optimism that Johnston brought to everything that he had done during the war, but what did it mean in practice? For a start, the Council of State had authorised the establishment of thirty-two sub-committees which looked at various aspects of post-war planning, the first of which had met as early as 1941, and which produced voluminous files dealing with subjects as various as juvenile delinquency and sheep farming. Even today it is impossible not to be moved by the sense of hope that permeated the first tentative steps taken by politicians and civil servants as they met in wartime Edinburgh to discuss a far-from-certain future.21

  As we have seen, the pioneering work of the Emergency Hospitals Scheme and the Clyde Basin Scheme had already shown what could be done by producing the groundwork for a prototype National Health Service in Scotland, and Johnston himself had used his position in the Cabinet to work closely with like-minded English colleagues such as the Minister of Health Henry Willink. There was also a blueprint already in place in the Cathcart Report of 1936 which recommended, amongst other proposals, the establishment of health centres run by general practitioners and the need to institute a sound system of health education as a preventative measure – no bad thing, considering the low state of personal health in the country as a whole. Together with the need to reform education and to provide financial benefits for sickness, unemployment and old age, the idea of state intervention had gathered pace during the war, and as the end of the fighting loomed a growing majority of the population was desperate to embrace the social reforms promised by Beveridge.

  However, it was never going to be easy for the political establishment to understand that a sea change was taking place in people’s thinking. By 1944 the wartime electoral truce was already under pressure as the need for reform became ever more pressing. That same year Churchill acknowledged that a general election would be fought after Germany had been defeated, and it was agreed that arrangements would be made to allow members of the armed forces to participate in the poll. By the beginning of the following year the gloves had been removed, albeit carefully, as the main political parties began to plan for the forthcoming contest. In January 1945 Attlee told Labour supporters that he sensed a swing to the left, with people telling him that they had seen the country come first in war and now they wanted to see it come first in peace. This was answered by Churchill at the Conservative Party’s conference on 15 March when he accused Labour of pandering to Communism by seeking to introduce ‘sweeping proposals which imply not only the destruction of the life of our whole existing system of society and life and labour, but the creation and enforcement of another system, a system borrowed from foreign lands and alien minds’. Although the parties maintained the solidarity of the wartime coalition to the end of its life, the first cracks had appeared by the spring of 1945, and it took three by-election defeats in April to show which way the wind was blowing. Two of them were in Scotland, and while they did not break the mould of British politics, they were indicative of a dissatisfaction with the kind of Conservative politics which had prevailed before the war.

  The first of the by-elections took place in the Motherwell and Wishaw constituency on 12 April, following the death in a motoring accident of the sitting incumbent James Walker, Labour MP since 1935. There were only two candidates: Alexander Anderson, representing Labour, and Dr Robert McIntyre, the secretary of the SNP who fought his campaign on the grounds of ‘national freedom based on self-government for Scotland and the restoration of national sovereignty by the establishment of a democratic Scottish government, whose authority will be limited only by such agreements as will be freely entered into with other nations, in order to further international co-operation and world peace’. Acting on the principle agreed in 1942, that the SNP should contest elections in its own right and not just as a means of promoting home rule, McIntyre fought a good campaign in which he called on the people of Scotland to take responsibility for their own future. Backed by strong local support, McIntyre won the by-election, beating Anderson by 617 votes and thereby becoming the SNP’s first member of parliament. While the turnout was low, at 58 per cent, it vindicated the SNP’s wartime decision that the party could contest elections with hope of success. McIntyre then caused minor controversy when he failed to follow parliamentary procedure by refusing to accept the traditional sponsorship of a fellow MP before taking his seat at Westminster.

  As it turned out, it was something of a flash in the pan as McIntyre failed to hold the seat at the general election three months later, and hopes of an SNP breakthrough were stillborn. However, it did serve notice that in a post-war election nothing could be taken for granted – tellingly, for what happened next, during McIntyre’s campaign the local press published messages of support from Scottish soldiers serving overseas.

  The second Scottish by-election held in the same month was equally momentous: standing as an Independent, the distinguished biologist and Rector of Glasgow University Sir John Boyd Orr won the Combined Scottish Universities seat by 20,197 votes to 8,177, beating his Liberal rival R. M. Munro with a 70 per cent swing. Once again there was a negative outcome for the Coalition government, as Munro’s candidacy had been endorsed by Churchill. A week later there was a further shock when the safe Conservative seat of Chelmsford in Essex was lost to Wing Commander Ernest Millington, a wartime bomber pilot representing the short-lived Common Wealth Party which backed a co-operative socialist policy. After winning the seat Millington claimed that ‘the people are tired of the old order and want a new plan’; once again, as happened in Scotland, he was supported by service personnel with homes in the constituency.

  If the April 1945 by-elections could be taken as portents, they demonstrated that Common Wealth’s leader Sir Richard Acland was probably correct when he insisted that ‘Socialists had nothing to fear from the myth of the Churchill prestige’. On the face of it, it must have seemed inconceivable that Britain’s wartime leader would have difficulty winning votes in the forthcoming general election which had been fixed to take place on 5 July, and which would take up to three weeks to conclude. He was the architect of victory and his standing in the country was immense, so much so that when Churchill made a triumphal trip around Britain in the last week of June he was given an ecstatic reception. In no other place was th
e enthusiasm greater than in Scotland. In Glasgow the Daily Express reported ‘a tempest of cheering and shouting compared with which even some of the exciting scenes which the Prime Minister had seen this week were a mild vapour’.22 Thousands leaned from tenement windows to cheer him as his cavalcade made its way along Paisley Road, and a tickertape welcome awaited him in Sauchiehall Street, while 50,000 gathered to listen to him speak in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh.

  Churchill was both surprised and delighted by the response, and he would not have been human had he not believed that he was heading for a substantial victory. But behind the personal enthusiasm for the wartime prime minister lay a huge groundswell of antipathy towards the Conservative Party, which was generally held to be responsible for all the ills of the previous decade – the Depression and its accompanying high levels of unemployment, the scandal of poverty and lack of investment, and the policy of appeasement which had failed to prevent war with Nazi Germany. People might have admired Churchill as a war leader, but they did not like the Conservatives who seemed to lack the necessary policies to address post-war problems and had been lukewarm about the idea of social change. Because this would be a ‘khaki election’, with all servicemen and servicewomen being included in the vote – either by proxy or by post – their presence was another imponderable.