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Keir Hardie: Radical, Socialist, Feminist

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Keir Hardie: Radical, Socialist, Feminist Études écossaises 10 | 2005 La Réputation Keir Hardie: Radical, Socialist, Feminist W. Hamish Fraser Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/153 DOI: 10.4000/etudesecossaises.153 ISSN: 1969-6337 Publisher UGA Éditions/Université Grenoble Alpes Printed version Date of publication: 31 March 2005 Number of pages: 103-115 ISBN: 2-84310-061-5 ISSN: 1240-1439 Electronic reference W. Hamish Fraser, « Keir Hardie: Radical, Socialist, Feminist », Études écossaises [Online], 10 | 2005, Online since 31 March 2005, connection on 10 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ etudesecossaises/153 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesecossaises.153 © Études écossaises W. Hamish Fraser Keir Hardie: Radical, Socialist, Feminist When Keir Hardie died in September 1915 one of the strongest tributes came from James Connolly in the Workers’Republic: By the death of Comrade James Keir Hardie labour has lost one of its most fearless and incorruptible champions, and the world one of its highest minded and purest souls.... James Keir Hardie was to the labour movement a prophetic anticipation of its own possibi- lities. He was a worker, with all the limitations from which no worker ever completely escapes, and with potentialities and achievements such as few workers aspire after, but of which each worker may be the embodiment... he was a living proof of the truth of the idea that labour could furnish in its own ranks all that was needed to achieve its own emancipation, the proof that labour needed no heaven-sent saviour from the ranks of other classes. He had been denied the ordinary chances of education, he was sent to earn his living at the age of seven, he had to educate himself in the few hours he could snatch from work and sleep, he was blacklisted by the employers as soon as he gave vent to the voice of labour in his district, he had to face unemployment and starvation in his early manhood and when he began to champion politically the rights of his class he found every prostitute journalist in these islands throwing mud at his character, and defaming his associates. Yet he rose through it all, and above it all, never faltered in the fight, never failed to stand up for truth and justice as he saw it, and as the world will yet see it. Adjectives like «fearless», «incorruptible», «prophetic», and «high-minded» are the ones which have generally stuck to his reputation. Although, one could argue, that he was conspicu- ously unsuccessful during his lifetime in persuading Scots – and particularly Scottish miners – to abandon their attach- ment to Liberalism and to support independent Labour – after all, it was in London and Wales that he had to find a parlia- mentary seat – nonetheless, he seems to embody much that the Scots include in their historical self-image: self-educated, true to his working-class origins, radical in politics and reli- gion, single-minded, unbending and with a deep attachment to his native heath. In folk memory and in the populist discourse W. H AMISH FRASER University of Strathclyde. of Labour Party rallies he remains the embodiment of the | 103 ÉTUDES ÉCOSSAISES 10 ideal leader who, unlike his successors, rejected the political path of compromise and concession. There is little evidence that academic modifications to the myth have done anything to alter that popular reputation. The biographical outlines are well-enough known. Born in Lanarkshire in 1856, the illegitimate son of Mary Keir, a domestic servant, who married David Hardie, a ship’s carpenter. He called himself James Hardie until the 1880s when he adop- ted Keir. He started work at the age of 8, with various jobs and when his father went back to sea in the mid 1860s, he went to work as a trapper in the coal pits. Both mother and step-father were free-thinkers, rejecting Christian belief, and were readers of Charles Bradlaugh’s secularist National Reformer. Hardie, however, at the age of twenty-one was converted and became a member of the Evangelical Union, a group of churches which challenged the Calvinist notion of election, which still held sway in most Presbyterian churches, with the belief in universal atonement. He joined the growing temperance movement, the Good Templars, which had spread from the United States in the early 1870s, and which Brian Harrison describes as « a pseudo-masonic organization of the most extreme temperance zealots» (Harrison, 1971, p. 241). Throughout the 1870s he was involved in the process of self-education, going to night school, teaching himself shorthand and submitting short pieces for publication to the Glasgow press. In 1879 he played a major part in organising the Lanarkshire Miners’Union and became miners’agent. When the Lanarkshire Union began to crumble he was invited to help form an Ayrshire one, and in 1880 he moved, with his recent wife, to Cumnock, which was to be his family home for the rest of his life. As well as his union activities he began writing a column in the local weekly paper, and became active in the Liberal Association. He remained a prominent Good Templar and an occasional lay preacher. He helped establish a Scottish Miners’ Federation in 1886 and became its secretary, at the same time launching, his own monthly paper, The Miner. He was clearly developing political ambitions and in 1888 put himself forward as a candidate at the by-election in Mid Lanark. When the Liberal Association failed to select him he stood as an independent labour candidate, on what could be seen as a radical, but still Liberal, programme: home rule, nationa- lisation of land, abolition of the House of Lords, direct local 104 | KEIR HARDIE : RADICAL, SOCIALIST, FEMINIST veto on public houses. He got a mere 667 votes. He was immediately accused of being in receipt of «Tory gold» to split the Liberal vote. It was an accusation which was to follow him throughout his life, and it was not without justification in these early days, with funding via H.H. Champion from the Tory Democrat, Maltman Barry. Immediately afterwards Hardie, with a group of disenchanted Liberal radicals, formed the Scottish Labour Party – the first party committed to indepen- dent labour representation and to socialism. He was quite specific: «Liberalism is one thing, Socialism is quite another, and the new Labour Party is Socialistic » (Hardie, 1927, p. 32). In the next few years he began to become known nationally with speeches at the Trades Union Congress and visits to Lon- don, where he came into contact with other socialists. He attended the Marxist International Congress in Paris in 1889 and developed lasting international contacts, while rejecting the possibility of a revolutionary Marxist road to socialism in Britain. Eventually, in 1892, he was elected as Member of Parlia- ment for South West Ham in London. This is when the first mythical image of Hardie emerges. He was carried to West- minster by a waggonette full of supporters, including one with a trumpet playing the Marseillaise (Davies, 1992, p.16) and with Hardie reputedly wearing a cloth cap – as opposed to the nor- mal parliamentary uniform of the frock coat and top hat. The Liberal Daily News claimed that he arrived «with a blare of trumpets» wearing «a tweed cap, which, taken in conjunction with a short jacket, trousers frayed at the heel, a flannel shirt, and no necktie» appalled it (Lowe, 1923, p. 64). To later gene- rations it indicated that he was «impervious to the blandish- ments of Parliament with its sense of ease and self impor- tance» (Davies, 1992, p. 28). In Parliament he took up the issue of unemployment and miners’causes and generated the occasional Parliamentary scene. Outside, he played a major part in the formation in 1893 of the Independent Labour Party and was its chairman for the next eight years. Despite this, he and all ILP candidates went down to disastrous defeat in 1895 and it looked as if his political career was at an end. He did, however, continue to have a voice in that The Miner had been turned into the weekly Labour Leader large parts of which were written by Hardie himself, under various pen-names. | 105 ÉTUDES ÉCOSSAISES 10 Between 1895 and 1900 he worked with great energy and endless travel to persuade the trade unions to back inde- pendent labour and he played down the socialism. He wrote, The unity of the working class is the one thing that matters. That can never be a thing of rapid growth. Abstract theories with them count for very little.... Socialism supplies the vision and a united working class satisfies the senses as a practical method of attaining its realisation. To attain that unity is, and must be, the first object of all who desire Socialism. (Johnson, 1922, p. 4) Elsewhere he wrote that «a mere abstraction, be it ever so demonstrable scientifically, will never move masses of people» (Hardie, 1927, p. 93). To win over Nonconformist trade unio- nists socialism had to be presented as an ethical gospel. The result was the formation in 1900 of the Labour Repre- sentation Committee, uniting socialists and trade unionists in a Party committed to evolutionary change. It was under the aus- pices of the LRC that Hardie was again returned to Parliament in 1900, this time for Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, which he continued to represent until his death in 1915. In this election in the midst of the South African War, he was elected on a pro-Boer stance. According to Michael Holroyd, Hardie «pictured the Boers as pure-living, God-fearing farmers grazing peacefully under the Christ-like guardianship of President Kruger» (Holroyd, 1989, p.
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