Ireland and Scotland in the First World War: from the Dublin Rising to Red Clydeside

Dave Sherry

The history of the British labour what was then called ‘the colonial world’. movement between 1910 and the This revolt had started in the previous early 1920’s has a special claim decade but ruling class propaganda and a to our attention. These years wave of enthusiasm for a war that was sup- mark a climax of class-conscious posed to be ‘over by Christmas’ suddenly self-activity among the workers, broke its momentum. In August 1914 the which in Britain, has not yet European workers’ movement was seemingly been surpassed...there is good derailed, by the sudden capitulation of its reason to re-examine the last leaders. great revolutionary period in Writing in the August 15 issue of For- British history. ward, the Glasgow socialist weekly that he The First World War precip- had contributed to regularly since 1910, itated an international revolu- James Connolly directed his anger and tionary crisis. That the cli- sarcasm at those ‘internationalists’ who max had already occurred in claimed to have done all they could to stop the Bolshevik revolution of Oc- the war but who - now it was underway - tober 1917 was far from appar- were for defending their own countries; ent during the immediate post- war years. October was widely What then becomes of all our seen, both on the right and the resolutions, all our protests of left, as a beginning, not an end. fraternisation, all our threats of Reasonable men could anticipate general strikes. . . all our hopes the Hungarian, Austrian, Ger- for the future? Were they all man, Italian, French and even as sound and fury, signifying British revolutions. It is an ex- nothing? Even an unsuccess- perience that deserves to be res- ful attempt at social revolution cued from oblivion.1 - James by force of arms would be less Hinton, 1973. disastrous to the socialist cause than the act of socialists allow- James Hinton is the acknowledged his- ing themselves to be used in the torian of the first shop stewards movement. slaughter of their brothers in the His statement about the significance of the cause. A great continental up- period between 1910 and the early 1920’s ap- rising of the working class would plies to Ireland as much as mainland Britain stop the war: a universal protest and he could well have added Ireland to his at public meetings will not save list of anticipated revolutions. a single life from being wantonly 2 In 1910 Ireland was still part of Britain. slaughtered. By the early 1920’s that and many other in- iquities had been overturned. The Dublin Connolly’s frustration and pessimism Lockout, the Red Clyde, the Easter Ris- were understandable. 1914 had been an ap- ing and Ireland’s War of Independence were palling year. The outbreak of war had come all part of a great tidal wave of revolt that on the back of two other great setbacks; engulfed the whole of Europe and much of the betrayal of the Dublin Lockout by the 1James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards Movement, (George Allen & Unwin Ltd. London, 1973), pages 13 and 17. 2Forward, 15 August 1914, quoted in Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, (Weiden- feld & Nicolson, London 1969), p88.

43 British TUC; and the sudden threat of par- argued Ulster was a Scottish colony during tition in the wake of the Home Rule crisis. the seventeenth century. In 1603 James 1 Yet within a year, resistance to the war recruited Scots Presbyterian settlers to es- was spreading. The shock and horror of tablish loyal ‘plantations’ in Ulster. His aim trench warfare combined with the terrible was to crush its catholic population and use privations imposed on home fronts every- it as a protestant bridgehead for the subju- where, meant class -consciousness and strug- gation of the whole island. gle from below came back with a vengeance. At the start of the nineteenth century Although the Dublin rising of 1916 was Ireland’s population was eight million. Dur- crushed, it was a portent. By 1917 mass ing the 1840’s it fell by three million -two strikes, food riots, desertions and mutinies million dying of starvation and one million were driving a Europe wide revolt and emigrating. Not only did Scottish troops pulling in wider layers behind working class help police this genocide but Scottish cap- resistance. So powerful was this move- ital played a big role in developing Ire- ment that it dissolved armies, pulled em- land’s one area of industrial development pires apart, toppled monarchies and ended around Belfast. When Glasgow’s Victorian four years of imperialist slaughter. entrepreneurs were building tenements to October 1917 saw the working class take house and exploit shipyard workers and their power in a major country for the first time. families in the Govan and Kinning Park dis- The German revolution brought the slaugh- tricts of the city, they chose to re-name part ter to an end and the world working class of this new community ‘Plantation’ in com- moved closer to its own emancipation than memoration of Scotland’s role in colonising at any time before or since. Colonial rebel- Ulster. lion that had begun in Ireland inspired oth- Throughout the nineteenth century, ers and spread across the globe. For a brief thousands of Irish men, women and children few years the prospect of world socialism was were driven into the industrial revolution real. that was gathering pace in lowland Scot- The outcome of these momentous events land. Along with the victims of the High- shaped our present, whether you live in land clearances, much of the unskilled labour Dublin or Damascus. With the forthcom- that transformed Glasgow from a small trad- ing centenary of the Easter Rising, the rela- ing port into the ‘Second City of Empire’ tionship between Red Clydeside and Ireland came from this source. It built the roads, during this period merits attention. But first canals and railways and laboured in the we need to look back at the differences be- mines, mills and factories that made Clyde- tween the position of Scotland in the United side such a powerhouse of capital accumula- Kingdom and that of Ireland. tion. With Manchester in mind, Engels England, Ireland and Scotland claimed the industrial revolution would have been a more gradual affair but for the hu- For centuries Scotland and Ireland were sub- man raw material provided by Irish immi- ject to England’s imperatives. Both were gration. This was even more valid for Scot- treated as strategic bulwarks against foreign land; by 1851, 7.2 percent of its population invasion and as captive markets whose com- was Irish compared to 2.9 percent in Eng- merce and industry were bound by restric- land and Wales. In Glasgow the Irish immi- tions protecting English exports from com- grant population had grown to 19 percent petition. and would increase as the city tripled in size But Scotland was never an imperial de- between 1851 and 1911. pendency like Ireland. While the Scottish In the 1840’s average life expectancy in ruling class benefited from union with Eng- Glasgow was 30 and the Irish had the worst land in 1707, Ireland was driven backwards. of it; ‘The Irish constituted the most abject Scots were at the forefront of British im- part of the population, prepared to tolerate perialism, not least in Ireland. It could be a lower standard of life than all but the very

44 poorest of the workforce.’3 stronghold. Between 1832 and 1886, its vot- Marx had already drawn attention to the ers only once returned a Tory MP. Liberal division between British workers and Irish support for Irish Home Rule led Glasgow immigrants in the great industrial cities. shipyard tycoon William Pearce and iron- He was struck by the extent to which the master Sir James Bain to stand for Parlia- ‘native’ workers were encouraged by their ment in 1880 as Tory unionists, enlisting the bosses to see their fellow Irish workers not support of the Orange Lodge. In the 1892 just as an economic threat liable to under- election the Tory candidate for Bridgeton cut wages and conditions, but also as racially was an Orangeman. ‘inferior’. Marx argued this was ‘the secret of Many big employers set out to use im- the impotence of the English working class’ migration and the threat of Irish home rule and the only remedy was to win the British to weaken and divide the working class. ‘No labour movement to supporting the struggle Irish need apply’ was a common phrase in for Irish self-determination. the employment columns of the newspapers and in the windows of businesses looking Sectarianism: divide and rule or to hire workers. But the Lanarkshire mine owners and ironmasters attempted to cut unite and fight wages and break strikes by hiring Irish immi- Because of the fear of Jacobitism in lowland grants. Often the bosses sponsored sectarian Scotland during the eighteenth century, anti infighting by recruiting an Irish workforce -Catholicism was prevalent long before the comprised of rival Protestant and Catholic arrival of the Irish and despite the fact that sections. the Catholic population was then tiny. This terrible division was eventually Ever since the reformation Scotland had overcome. According to the historian of been a Calvinist country with pockets of the Lanarkshire miners; ‘The Irish actually Catholicism in the Highlands and Islands. took a prominent part in the labour distur- 5 One historian with a grim sense of humour bances’. Scottish and immigrant Irish work- claimed that in the 1790’s, when Glasgow ers shared a common experience of exploita- had no more than thirty-nine Catholics, tion and as the Irish came more into the there were forty-three anti-Catholic soci- workforce they helped to build the union - eties.4 providing some of its best fighters, its most The arrival of a significant Irish popula- able organisers and- as far as the bosses were tion after 1840 was the driving force behind concerned-the biggest troublemakers. the growth of the Orange Order. By the In the 1880’s the coal and iron masters latter half of the nineteenth century more began recruiting Lithuanian workers with than a quarter of Glasgow’s population was the promise of work and homes. About catholic and a quarter of the Irish in Glas- 8,000 came with some 3,000 working in the gow were Protestants from Ulster. mines by 1911. At first the ‘Poles’ as they Until then Glasgow had no Orange were called, were treated with hostility by Lodge but, by 1880, there were more than workmates, who suspected, sometimes accu- a hundred. Lodges were established in the rately, that they were being hired to reduce mining communities of the Lanarkshire coal- wages. field on the southeast of the city and in the Most had fled political persecution from shipbuilding towns of Greenock and Clyde- the Czar’s Empire. They established their bank located further down the Clyde. credibility as good trade unionists by play- The Liberal Party dominated Scottish ing a central role in the picketing during politics in the second half of the nine- the 1912 miners’ strike. Out of this strike, teenth century and Glasgow was a Liberal John Maclean built solid links with both the 3Tom Gallagher, Glasgow The Uneasy Peace; religious tension in modern Scotland, (Manchester Univer- sity Press, 1987), p12. 4Colm Brogan, The Glasgow Story, (Muller, London, 1954), p183. 5Tom Gallagher, p15.

45 Lithuanian and Irish mining communities. industrial centre. The occupa- MacLean was a primary school teacher. tional structure of the city in- When he was dismissed from his post at the cluded a far higher percentage of end of I915 because of his anti-war activities unskilled manual and part-time and his prominent role in the Glasgow rent jobs for which the Irish were in strike, Lithuanian and Irish miners were in- a position to compete. So to a strumental in organising protest strikes for greater degree than in Glasgow, his re-instatement in some Lanarkshire pits. sectarian friction stemmed from Historian Tom Gallagher, in his book, economic competition and was of Glasgow, The Uneasy Peace, explains why a more intense and unpleasant the rivalry and sectarianism that disfigured kind.7 the mining areas surrounding Glasgow did not exist in the city to anything like the same As Joan Smith shows in her study of the extent; labour movements in Liverpool and Glasgow before the First World War, there were also In Glasgow with its exception- political forces at play that shaped these im- ally high ratio of skilled jobs, portant differences: there was considerably less fric- Glasgow was a town with strong, tion since the unskilled Irish im- radical, Liberal politics. The migrants could not compete for radical liberalism of many of the them. Instead they dominated Glasgow workers was not just an the city’s unskilled labour mar- ideology that had to be defeated ket, finding work as casual con- if socialism was to lead the Glas- struction or dock labourers, coal gow working class movement - heavers, and as sweated labour it was also a rock like founda- in textiles and in the chemical tion for the development of that and dyeing works. Here men, socialism. Many attitudes were and especially women, toiled in shared with Liberalism, which appalling conditions. Where the made it possible, in a town of Irish left behind casual, open-air high Irish immigration, for the labour and became part of the Protestant-Catholic divide to be factory workforce, they were af- contained. fected by the class consciousness, which developed in the enclosed The Labour movement in Glas- world of the factory.6 gow became the strongest in Britain. By 1909 30,000 To a much greater extent than in Belfast marched together on the May and much earlier than in Liverpool, the Irish Day parade. The enormous Catholic population was able to integrate it- strength and potential of the self into the working class movement: Glasgow labour movement was partly based on the depth of feel- Nineteenth century Glasgow was ing for a previous Liberal under- second only to Liverpool as a standing of the world- an under- reception centre for Irish immi- standing that could also evolve grants and, to this day, the com- into labourism and then revo- munal tensions which unite the lutionary socialism, as well as two in many minds, are seen being opposed to those beliefs. as taking identical forms. But In Liverpool Liberal beliefs had Liverpool was a mercantile and no purchase. Any emergent commercial port rather than an labour and socialist movement 6Tom Gallagher, p15 & p16. 7Tom Gallagher, p14 & p15.

46 had to battle against national- gle and revolutionary upheaval that brought ism and sectarianism. The rul- hope and confidence. ing Orange-Tory bloc dominated In 1905 the Russian empire was rocked Liverpool politics. by mass strikes, the first emergence of work- The first issue of Forward took ers’ councils and the first workers’ revolu- up the slogan ‘Home Rule for tion. Although defeated, it inspired work- Scotland’ and turned it into the ers across the continent and prompted new slogan ‘Home Rule All Round’. developments in Marxist theory - not least It was through this slogan that Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet, The Mass the Glasgow ILP also defended Strike, which analysed how mass workers’ the demand for Irish Home movements could fuse economics and poli- Rule. The strong Liberal tra- tics into revolutionary struggle. dition in Glasgow kept in check In 1907 there was revolutionary up- the rise of sectarianism, con- heaval in Turkey and in the same year the tributing greatly to the process mass strike resurfaced on the Belfast wa- through which a Liberal work- terfront. Unskilled and previously unorgan- ing class became a Labour work- ised protestant and catholic dock labourers ing class. . . With no socialist cur- fought side by side against their unionist rent established in the ‘common- bosses and the state. Thousands flocked sense’ thought of Liverpool, it to Jim Larkin’s new dockworkers’ union. was possible for Tory Democracy Battleships were sent to Belfast Lough and and Irish Nationalism to assert troops attacked the picket lines, killing three their leadership of the Liverpool strikers. The strain of protecting the com- working class.8 pany scabs provoked a police strike and the city was in chaos. The consequences were shown during the Clydeside socialist, John Maclean was a Irish Home Rule crisis. In October 1912 friend of Larkin. In keeping with ortho- Sir Edward Carson came to Liverpool to dox social democracy and his membership raise support for the Ulster Covenant and of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the promise of volunteers, should the Liberal Maclean had been, until then, pessimistic government attempt to impose Home Rule. about the role of trade unions and the value 150,000 attended the demonstration, organ- of strikes. His view had been jaundiced by ised by the Liverpool Conservative Working his experiences on Clydeside, where unions Men’s’ Association and pledged support for had made little impact on the unskilled. Protestant Ulster. 20,000 went on a torch- This led Maclean to stress the limita- light demonstration afterwards. tion of strikes and trade unionism, which he A few days later only 8,000 turned out saw as necessary but essentially defensive in for Carson when he came to Glasgow. There character. His involvement in the Belfast were as many Orangemen in the West of dock strike led to a dramatic change in his Scotland as in Liverpool but in Glasgow politics. it was possible to contain extreme anti- Maclean was fine orator and Larkin Catholic Protestantism until the end of the asked him to address the mass strike meet- 1920’s. ings. He was transformed by the dramatic events and left Belfast exhilarated, having The wave of revolt before the witnessed for the first time the politicis- First World War ing effect of a major industrial struggle on masses of workers. His diary of the speak- The years leading up to the First World War ing tour was printed in the SDF newspaper saw a rise in nationalist feeling in many ar- Justice and it recorded how much the strike eas across the globe but also a wave of strug- had changed his outlook; ‘Strikes reveal the 8Joan Smith, Labour Tradition in Glasgow and Liverpool, (History Workshop Journal 1983, Number 17), pages 33, 34, 41 & 42.

47 underlying reality of capitalism and the class troops to suppress the resistance and isolate war in ways that are more effective than all the Turin general strike. For this reason the the theory we might fire at our benighted Italian ruling class were unable to join in the class from now till doomsday. Fighting leads First World War until 1915. to new facts, to new theory thence to revo- By 1912 the Russian workers’ movement lution’. 9 had recovered from its defeat in 1905 and the class struggle continued to escalate until the summer of 1914.

Britain and the Great Unrest The years before the First World War are usually depicted as Britain’s golden age. Her empire spanned the globe, her economy seemed strong and with Asquith’s Liberal Party winning re-election in 1910, political stability seemed assured. But something dramatic was about to happen; ‘Between 1910 and 1914 and against the wishes of their own leaders, British work- ers plunged into a series of furious strikes John Maclean which, but for the declaration of war, would have culminated in September 1914, in a general strike of extraordinary violence’10. From here on Maclean was always alive The causes of the Great Unrest are easy to the revolutionary potential of trade union to identify. Trade union membership had struggle whenever it raised its head. Hence trebled since 1889 but wages had fallen by his involvement in what would become The ten per cent. Over the next four years a Great Unrest, his prominence in the subse- tidal wave of strikes engulfed the whole of quent wartime struggles on the Clyde and mainland Britain and colonial Ireland. It co- his support for Bolshevism. incided with the resurgence of the suffrage Bitter battles like the Belfast dock movement and the Irish Home Rule crisis, strike swept North America. In 1909 saw which threatened civil war. mass strikes by women sweatshop work- The Great Unrest centred on huge ers throughout Manhattan’s Lower East strikes- first in the ports, then the railways Side for union rights and the right to and the mines. It involved unskilled and of- vote. These events inspired German socialist ten non-unionised workers. And it directly Clara Zetkin to found International Working involved large numbers of women workers. Women’s Day. Singers, an American company, opened In 1911 there was the Mexican Revolu- the biggest sewing machine factory in the tion and mass strikes throughout Spain. Be- world at Clydebank. It employed over tween 1910 and 1912 strikes swept Germany 12,000 workers in assembly line mass pro- and 1912 saw the ‘Bread and Roses’ tex- duction. Most were unskilled and a third tile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts where were women. In 1911 a strike began when 20,000 immigrant women workers took on the women downed tools against speed-up. their bosses and won. Within days the whole factory was out. The years between 1911 and 1914 saw big Elsewhere the movement was on the up. struggles in Italy. In June 1914 agitation Old sectarian differences between workers, against Italy’s participation in the coming soured by centuries of prejudice, were swept war led to a massive revolt. It took 100,000 aside. In Liverpool and Dublin orange and 9BJ Ripley & J McHugh, John Maclean, (Manchester University Press, 1989), p51. 10George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, (Serif, London, 1977), p213.

48 green banners joined the demonstrations. Some on the left think that Scotland was Trade union membership in that single year and is naturally more radical and more left grew by over 600,000 and the unions them- than England and that the Red Clyde is ex- selves were transformed. Helping to organise plained by the fact that Glasgow was always strikes among young women millworkers on a hotbed of socialism and trade union mili- Clydeside, Glasgow socialist John Maclean tancy. This is a myth. wrote at the end of 1911; ‘The times we are At the start of the 20th century Scot- living in are so stirring and full of change land was one of the most advanced capi- that it is not impossible to believe that we talist economies in the world yet indepen- are living in the rapids of revolution’11. dent working class trade union and politi- In 1912 over 40 million working days cal organisation lagged behind other parts were ‘lost’ due to strikes and Maclean of Britain. wrote; ‘Never were the masses so pug- When the great wave of New Unionism nacious. . . never were they so class con- exploded in the 1880’s, Clydeside largely scious.’12. Unlike Maclean, most commen- missed out. The growth of union member- tators assumed the storm would pass but it ship among the unskilled had less impact on raged on through 1913. The biggest, longest Glasgow than on other centres in Britain. As and most bitter battle was In Dublin - the a result trade union membership was largely five-month lockout in 1913. confined to its large number of skilled work- In 1910 Larkin had formed the Irish ers. Transport & General Workers Union and In 1902 when John Maclean joined the from then until the outbreak of war in 1914 Glasgow branch of the Social Democratic a succession of strikes swept the country. Federation (SDF), the first British Marxist The bitter Dublin Lockout won massive sol- organisation, its Scottish membership num- idarity and sympathy action from British bered less than 200. The Marxist movement workers. There were street collections in in Scotland was smaller and weaker than its towns and cities throughout the UK but the counterpart in England and this was no acci- British TUC sold out the struggle. Their re- dent; it reflected the relative backwardness fusal to call solidarity strike action came at of the Scottish working class movement at a time when ordinary British workers had the time. never been so militant. As a consequence In the 1910 general election Labour’s the strikers were starved back to work. percentage share of the vote in Scotland was The Great Unrest rolled on into 1914. half its overall percentage share through- Between 1911 and 1914 trade union mem- out Britain. Labour returned three Labour bership had doubled. But the declaration of MP’s compared to 42 MP’s for Britain as a war in August brought it to a juddering halt. whole. Between January and July 1914, nine million Average wages in Scotland were much days had been lost to strikes but from Au- lower than England and trade union mem- gust to December 1914 only a million days bership was lower too- a big factor in con- were lost. vincing the American Singer Sewing Ma- chine Company to build a major new fac- Red Clydeside tory employing 12,000 men and women at Clydebank in 1900. In recent years there’s been a major assault All of this gave Scottish industrialists an on Red Clydeside from those who either advantage and they planned to keep it by want to belittle its existence or incorporate holding the unions in check. But things were into the tradition of Labour reformism. Red about to change on Clydeside as the growth Clydeside was a crucial moment in Scottish of US and German competition led to ratio- history and one of the high points of Euro- nalization and the mechanization of produc- pean class struggle. tion. 11Nan Milton editor, John Maclean: In the Rapids of Revolution, (Alison & Busby, London, 1978) p62. 12 John Maclean, Justice, 24 February, 1912.

49 The changing mood in the Clydeside Dublin, Sheffield & Belfast but it was not working class had already been shown by unique. Across Europe all the big munitions the 30,000 who turned out on the 1909 Glas- centres- Petrograd, Turin, Berlin, and Bu- gow May Day demonstration and by the big dapest, - saw revolutionary upheaval on a strikes in 1911 involving women workers at bigger scale. the textile dye plants in the Vale of Leven If the war transformed Clydeside it also and 12,000 workers at the nearby Singers transformed Maclean. Here in Britain and Sewing Machine factory in Clydebank. across Europe most Labour, Socialist and In 1913 Glasgow led the way in support- trade union leaders backed their own govern- ing the Dublin Lockout; ments. Maclean took the same position as Lenin and James Connolly; for revolutionary From September 1913 to Jan- defeatism and workers’ power. uary 1914 the Glasgow Labour Maclean was a key figure on Clydeside, movement devoted its energy to involved with the Clyde Workers’ Commit- organising the largest collection tee, the rank and file revolt against the for the Dublin Lockout outside dismantling of trade union defences during of Dublin. Forward, the ILP pa- wartime. Yet he refused to subordinate his per was the centre for collection, socialist politics to trade unionism. That’s raising £3,000 when unskilled why he consistently argued for strike action men earned 21 shillings a week. to stop the war; why he was a key figure in Collections were taken at so- the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915; and why cialist branches, workshop meet- he was one of the few on the British left to ings, cinemas, football matches support the Easter Rising in 1916. and in the streets, quite apart His significance was acknowledged by from trade union branches. The both the British and Russian governments ILP organised demonstrations and for quite different reasons. The war on behalf of the Dublin strik- cabinet saw him as a dangerous revolu- ers, putting up speakers from tionary and jailed him 3 times during the the trades council and had Jim war. In Russia the workers’ government Larkin speak at their large Sun- elected him their honorary president along- day night meetings. The Go- side Lenin and Trotsky and appointed him van Trades Council efforts in- Soviet Consul in Glasgow. cluded collections inside every Glasgow was a key munitions centre and local shipyard and factory and its engineering workers were in a powerful in the area’s tenements and at position. The attempt to destroy their con- Ibrox, the ground of the Protes- ditions, hold down wages and ban strikes 13 tant football club. for the duration of the war drove them into The turning point came when engineer- struggle. ing and shipbuilding expanded as the British Glasgow also had a small, active group- ruling class prepared for war. It was the ing of young anti-war socialists. They were changes wrought by the war economy in the rooted in the key munitions plants and were workplace and on the overcrowded tenement influenced by the new syndicalism and by housing that made Clydeside fertile soil for Maclean’s Marxist economic classes. Willy militant trade unionism and socialist agita- Gallagher, shop stewards convenor at the tion. Albion Works and chair of the Clyde Work- In these conditions politics and eco- ers’ Committee recalled the importance of nomics fused together, creating opportuni- Maclean’s factory gate meetings and his eco- ties for anti- war socialists like Maclean. nomics classes; The Clyde became the vanguard of what Maclean applied his knowledge was a British-wide movement that included to the events around him. He 13J Smith, ‘Taking the Leadership of the Movement’, in A McKinlay and RJ Morris , The ILP on Clydeside 1893-1932 (Manchester, 1991), p 78.

50 demonstrated in the clearest forced to impose a rents freeze for the dura- manner that the war was a tion of the war. war for trade and brought out In the spring of 1916 splits in the Clyde into full relief the sinister rob- Workers’ Committee (CWC) and its failure ber forces behind it. He gave to link up with other munitions centres al- example after example of the lowed the British state to launch an offen- financiers and big employers sive over the question of dilution and arms pointing a gun at the head of the production. The socialist press was seized Government and demanding in- and McLean & the leaders of the CWC were creased profits. These examples rounded up and jailed or deported for sedi- were carried day after day into tion. Maclean, who’d fought against the the munitions factories.14 syndicalism of the leading shop stewards, got the heaviest sentence - 3 years penal The first big strike of the war came servitude. in February 1915 at Weirs - a key muni- A few weeks after Maclean was impris- tions plant where shop stewards organisa- oned by the British state, it crushed the tion already existed. Despite being branded Easter Rising in Dublin. On 12 May, the as traitors in the press and denounced badly wounded James Connolly was taken by their union leaders, the illegal strike to the prison yard of Kilmainham Jail, spread rapidly to other munitions factories. strapped to a chair and executed by a British On the back of further local battles, the firing squad, despite the fact he was already Clyde Workers’ Committee was launched dying from his wounds. in November 1915. Based on independent Before leaving Edinburgh for Dublin in rank and file organisation within the existing 1896, Connolly had been a prominent figure unions, it was the first ever shop steward’s on the Scottish and British left and had been movement. a founder member of the Socialist Labour At its height 300 delegates from the ma- Party (SLP). In the build up to 1916 the jor munitions plants met every week. It was SLP printed Connolly’s newspaper in Glas- an embryonic workers’ council or soviet and gow. One of its members, Arthur McManus, it provided the model, which militant work- was a leading member of the CWC who ers across Britain would follow in their op- would later become a founder member and position to the war economy and eventually first Chair of the British Communist Party. to the war itself. He smuggled copies of Connolly’s paper into Throughout 1915, the unrest in the fac- Ireland on a number of occasions, after the tories was accompanied by mass commu- British had suppressed it. nity campaigns led by working class women After Connolly’s execution, few on the against rent increases and evictions. Pre war Scottish left defended him. Forward, the Glasgow was already short of housing. The ILP paper that often published Connolly’s influx of munitions workers exacerbated the articles stated clearly that it didn’t. Arthur shortage and drove up rents. McManus defended Connolly and so too did By November 1915 over 20,000 Glasgow John Maclean. Like Lenin, Maclean saw the tenants were on rent strike. Wednesday 17 Easter Rising as the first blow against the November is one the highpoints in British war and British imperialism. working class history. Agitation by the lo- After his release from prison McLean cal housewives, local ILP activists , Maclean went on to endorse the Irish struggle against & other socialists culminated in walkouts British rule at street meetings and public at 5 shipyards and a mass protest at Glas- meetings, which he dared to hold in strong gow Sheriff court to halt fines, evictions and Orange areas like Port Glasgow and Moth- wage arrestments. Threatened with a wild- erwell. cat strike in munitions the Sherriff dismissed The assault on the CWC in the spring of the cases before him and the government was 1916 meant the momentum on the Clyde was 14Willie Gallagher, Revolt on the Clyde, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1936), p37

51 temporarily halted but mass resistance to Yet their attempts to prevent it failed and conscription saw the struggle spread to other they had to go along with it in order to munitions centres across the UK - most no- regain control. Within days mass pickets tably Sheffield. Soon the Clyde was moving brought the whole Clyde Valley to a stand- again too. still. In May 1917, 90,000 workers marched Local strike committees met daily and it to Glasgow Green in support of the Febru- soon spread to the coalfields, the North of ary Revolution in Russia. McLean was re- England, London and Belfast. The strike leased from jail by mass protest and soon in Belfast was even more solid than Glas- his weekly Marxist economics classes were gow. The flashpoint came on Friday 31 attracting over 1,000 workers across Clyde- January when 40,000 workers and unem- side. ployed marched on Glasgow’s George Sq. McLean toured Britain speaking to mass Bloody Friday, as it became known, was the rallies, arguing the best defence of workers’ key moment for the developing revolution- Russia was revolution in Britain. He spoke ary movement in Britain. Under Winston at a monster rally in the Albert Hall but in Churchill’s pre- arranged orders the police April 1918 the government had him arrested baton charged the demonstration but the again for sedition. strikers fought back and routed their attack- Prior to his arrest McLean had been ar- ers. guing that since May Day, was being held That night the key leaders were ar- on a working day, workers in Glasgow should rested. Trainloads of troops & tanks held on strike against the war. His call was answered standby, flooded into Glasgow from England when 100,000 stopped work and marched to because the government could not depend on Duke St jail, where he was being held pend- the local troops. The strike committees in ing trial. At the Edinburgh High court he Glasgow, London & Belfast were suspended was sentenced to five years penal servitude by the union leaders, who then announced after his famous speech from the dock. He the end of the strike via the press. Strike pay went on hunger strike & was adopted by was withheld & the mass picketing called off. the Gorbals Constituency Labour Party as The strike petered out with Glasgow like an their candidate in the 1918 election, defy- armed camp. MacLean pointed out; ‘The ing the Labour Party executive. Mass pres- strike was defeated more by lack of working sure forced his release just before Christmas class preparation than by tanks & machine 1918. guns’. The German revolution ended the war In his book, Revolt on the Clyde, strike at and Britain saw an explosion of strikes leader Willie Gallagher claimed; ‘We were and mass mutinies in the army, navy and leading a strike when we should have been police. The ruling class was terrified and in leading a revolution. A rising was expected- 1919, Britain, like most of Europe was on a rising should have taken place’15. the brink of revolution. The two key battles Gallagher was wrong; it was not a rev- were the forty hours strike in engineering for olution. But had the local leaders led the a shorter working week to absorb the unem- strike as revolutionaries and not simply as ployed and a threatened all out strike by one trade union militants they could have won a million miners for a wage rise, a reduction in decisive battle and raised the stakes against hours and workers’ control of the industry. a worried ruling class. McLean argued to link these battles into If the strike committees had maintained an all-out attack on the ruling class but the the mass pickets when the army appeared; if impatient local leadership in Glasgow de- they had marched to the barracks to frater- cided to go ahead on their own. The 40 nise with the local troops; if they had sent hours strike was a strike from below. The delegations out into the coalfields, to Belfast leaders of the Engineering union, the Scot- and into England to link up with the other tish TUC and the TUC, opposed it at first. engineering centres- then they could have 15Willie Gallagher, p234.

52 turned over a frightened ruling class. spite his political differences, he made it Three months later on May Day, 150,000 clear that he supported the Irish Republi- marched through Glasgow with the Irish cans in their fight against the British; ‘The anthem, ‘The Soldier’s Song’, being sung Irish Sinn Feiners, who make no profession along with ‘The Red Flag’ and that evening of socialism or communism and who are at McLean shared a platform with John best non-socialists, are doing more to help Wheatley and the Irish Republican, Con- Russia and the revolution than all we pro- stance Markievicz. fessed Marxian Bolsheviks in Britain’.17 In 1919 most of Europe, Ireland and Later in 1920, after a visit to Dublin large parts of the British Empire were in re- where he spoke at a big public meeting, he volt. Victory in the 40 hours strike would launched a ‘Hands Off Ireland’ Campaign have opened up a political crisis. Britain and wrote the pamphlet, Ireland’s Tragedy, was facing a strike wave, there were mutinies Scotland’s Disgrace. It sold over 20,000 in the army and the British state faced a copies in a few months. liberation struggle in Ireland. The troops The failure of the revolutionary move- it could still rely on were spread out across ment in 1919, the successful ruling class the globe - occupying Germany, Turkey, Iraq counter - offensive and his own isolation led and Palestine. him to call for a Scottish workers Republic. At the time the Italian revolutionary He saw how the fight for independence in Ire- Gramsci, put it like this; land had spread to the British Empire and believed a similar fight in Glasgow would We say that the present period tear it apart. is revolutionary because we can Maclean’s position was light years away see that the working class in from Nationalism. He was for a Glasgow So- all countries is tending to gen- viet - a workers council, not a bourgeois par- erate from within its own ranks liament in Edinburgh. He knew the work- and with the utmost energy, pro- ing class would have to smash the British letarian institutions of a new state and by 1917 saw himself as a Bolshe- type -representative in basis and vik. Lenin had wanted him to lead the newly industrial in arena. We say formed Communist Party but in the negoti- the present period is revolution- ations Maclean was sidelined then refused to ary because the working class join because of his political differences with tends with all its energy and all those who came to lead it. its willpower to found its own state.16 Maclean died of pneumonia in 1923 when he was only 44. His death was the result of There is no doubt the Clyde was part poverty, physical exhaustion and the hunger of what Gramsci described. But the miss- strikes he’d endured in prison. He remained ing link was independent, revolutionary or- a revolutionary until the end but sadly for ganisation. When the CPGB was belatedly the last 2 years of his life he was operating launched in late 1920, the tide had turned. more and more as an individual. Like his 1919 was a missed opportunity. The Trade great contemporary, James Connolly, he left Union leaders got the British ruling class nothing behind in the way of solid political off the hook and by 1920 the boot was on organisation. His Scottish Workers’ Repub- the other foot. The post war boom col- lican Party, founded in the last year of his lapsed, unemployment rocketed and the rul- life, numbered its membership in dozens and ing class launched a vicious counter offensive its electoral support in mere hundreds. that broke the back of what had been a pow- None of this diminishes his great signif- erful movement. icance for us today. At the same time as McLean became increasingly pre- Lenin, he broke with the rotten politics of occupied with the struggle in Ireland. De- the Second International and did so with- 16James Hinton, p17. 17John Maclean

53 out ever falling into the trap of syndicalism. prevent Glasgow coming to me’18 The IRA A consistent anti imperialist, he argued the was of real significance, with almost every war was an imperialist war. town in Scotland home to an IRA battalion The beneficiaries of the defeat of Red when the guerilla war was at its height. Clyde were the Labour Party. By the time In July 1921 the Lloyd George govern- the war ended in November 1918 the ILP, ment agreed a truce with the leadership of which was the Labour Party in Scotland, Sinn Fein and the IRA. In December a treaty had seen its membership triple compared was agreed between the two sides in London. with 1914. It had grown to 9,000 mem- The exclusion of six Ulster counties from the bers, a third of the total British member- new Irish Free State provoked a split in the ship. Elsewhere in Britain Labour Party Republican movement, which led to civil war membership had fallen. In 1920 Labour took that lasted for a year. A majority of the a third of the seats in Glasgow’s municipal Republicans in Scotland opposed the treaty election. At the Scottish conference of the and Glasgow became the centre for arms ILP in 1920, the ‘illegal’ Irish Republic was supply to the anti -treaty IRA and their pro- recognised. paganda centre after they were forced out of The real breakthrough came in the 1922 Dublin. Westminster election when Labour increased At the time there were a number of its vote to 32 percent and twenty -nine seats young Irish revolutionary socialists, follow- on Clydeside - half in Glasgow, half in the ers of James Connolly, who came on speak- surrounding area. The Irish vote had swung ing tours to Glasgow. behind Labour as Lloyd George’s policy of repression in Ireland had broken the back of The eventual defeat of the anti-treaty its traditional support for the Liberals. The forces in 1923 led to the virtual end of IRA breakthrough was made in nearly all the in- activity in Scotland. In the aftermath the dustrial areas, which had working class com- Irish vote transferred to Labour. munities of Irish descent. Eamonn De Valera later revealed; ‘The Events in Ireland were having a big im- financial contribution to the Irish struggle pact on Clydeside. By September 1920 the from the Scottish communities was in excess Procurator Fiscal reported that the IRA had of funds from any other country, including 19 3,000 volunteers in the City and by 1922 the Ireland’ . number of Sinn Fein clubs had risen to 88. This great period of working class strug- A high point for Scottish Republicans was gle produced in James Connolly and John the visit in 1920 of the Archbishop of Mel- McLean, arguably the two finest revolution- bourne, Daniel Mannix, an outspoken critic aries of the British and Irish labour move- of British policy in Ireland. ments. The fact that both of them had to His planned meeting in Glasgow was act and survive without a revolutionary or- banned but in defiance of the state authori- ganisation and were sent to an early grave, ties the Archbishop addressed a rally of over meant they were unable to leave much be- 50,000 in Coatbridge, just a few miles out- hind in the way of solid political organisa- side the city. Mannix told the crowd; ‘the tion. What they did leave us is a great British government prevented me from go- legacy of anti-imperialism that is as relevant ing to Glasgow; obviously it was unable to today as it was then.

18Niall Brennan, Dr. Mannix, (Angus & Robertson, London, 1965), p 200. 19Quoted by Stephen McGinty, ‘Scottish Support for Irish Independence in the 1920s’ The Scotsman, 29th June 2014.

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