Articles and items of interest
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Below is a reprint of an article which may be of interest to Society members on the Singer Strike of 1911.
from: THE PEOPLE, FEBRUARY 2001, VOL. 110 NO. 11
A PAGE FROM WORKING-CLASS HISTORY
British slp led famous clydebank singer strike
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Visit the Web site of the Singer Manufacturing Corp. http://www.singerco.com and you will find that 2001 is the 150th anniversary of the worlds largest and best known manufacturer of sewing machines and sewing products. You will find a historical sketch of the company that will tell you that I.M. Singer, in regulation Horatio Alger fashion, started his company at Troy, N. Y., "with borrowed capital of $40 ...." You will also find that, "In 1867, Singer became the first multinational industrial company [by] manufacturing sewing machines in Glasgow, Scotland".
What you will not find, however, is one word about the working men and women whose labor built Singer into what it is today, about the conditions under which they labored, or about why 12,000 workers at Singer's mammoth Kilbowie factory at Clydebank near Glasgow finally went on strike nearly 90 years ago, in March 1911. The Kilbowie Singer strike of 1911 ranks as one of the most important episodes in the history of the labor or socialist movement. It was one of the first to take on a major international corporation. It was conducted along industrial union lines, as distinct from the craft union lines typified in this country by the AFL-CIO and its affiliates.
Indeed, it was conducted by the Industrial Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) and the De Leonist Socialist Labor Party of Great Britain. As the Glasgow Labour History Workshop summed it up in its 1987 booklet, The Singer Strike: Clydebank, 1911: "The confrontation itself, we believe, was characterized by remarkable solidarity between the workforce -- divisions based on occupation, skill, gender, religion and locality being submerged during the strike. The philosophy of the industrial unionists played a part here.
Along with the Socialist Labour Party, they helped to raise levels of class consciousness and were instrumental in organising and directing the escalating struggle. Their call for working class solidarity was encapsulated in their slogan, "An injury to one is an injury to all".
As noted in the first selection reprinted in this issue, "Industrial Union Activity at Kilbowie", the SLP of Great Britain was instrumental in establishing the British Advocates of Industrial Unionism, the group that ultimately became the IWGB. It should also be noted that the IWGB was patterned after the original Industrial Workers of the World founded at Chicago in 1905 and that the IWGB, unlike the anarchist element widely associated with the IWW name since 1908, accepted the need for political organization and activity. Similarly, it should be mentioned that the SLPGB established along Marxist-De Leonist lines in 1903 has no historical or other connection to the so-called Socialist Labour Party in Britain today.
The De Leonist SLPGB went out of existence in the 1960s. Over the next few months, the U.S SLP periodical The People will commemorate the anniversary of the Kilbowie strike with a series of reprints from The Socialist, which was the official journal of the SLPGB. We begin with two articles from the April 1911 issue that give some background on the IWGB and on conditions at theSinger plant before the historic strike began on March 21, 1911.
Robert Bills, acting Editor
Access The People on-line by visiting its web page at
Send e-mail to: thepeople@igc.org
Men
of industry
John Foster reviews SHALE VOICES by Alistair Findlay
Luath Press, £10.99
(Extract from the Morning Star 28/02/00
Traveling
toward Edinburgh from the west you will see what appear to be a series of low,
conical hills, 200-300 feet high. Surrounded by lush green vegetation, their
tops are bare, sterile and pinkish red.
These
hills are the last physical remnants of Scotland's shale-oil industry, giant pit
bings composed of crushed rock.
Established
in the 1860s, the industry employed over 10,000 workers in the early 2Oth
century. By then it was producing 70 million gallons of oil a year and provided
much of the fuel for the British Navy during World War I. The last mine closed
in 1962.
Alistair Findlay's Shale Voices seeks to ensure that the industry's people, as well as its waste tips, survive. Findlay records their voices, as sharp and red as the rock they worked.
In
his introduction Findlay quotes
the Scottish socialist poet Tom Leonard. "Any society is a society in
conflict and any anthology of a society's poetry which does not reflect this is
a lie"
The
book's achievement is to reveal the milling villages of West Lothian as
communities that are alive in Leonard's sense.
It
is no mere archive of recordings. Findlay reconstructs the big families of the
miners' rows, their often distant origins in the Highlands and Ireland, their
work histories and struggles.
Their voices are also, in a strange way, freed. Findlay, himself a poet, lays them out on the page as poetry to capture the "dynamics of conversation." The result recreates the directness, simplicity and power of everyday speech.
The
shale mining communities of West Lothian will continue to he heard through Shale
Voices. As Tam Dalyell says in his introduction, "Scotland owes him a debt
of gratitude."
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The article below is Taken from
the Sunday Herald
30/01/00
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We must free ourselves from the rosy myth of Red Clydeside
The socialism of Glasgow did real harm to the West of Scotland, argues lain McLean
The legend of Red Clydeside is hanging on grimly in modern Scottish life, even or perhaps especially - in our brave new moment of Scottish democracy.
Take Tommy Sheridan, MSP and Scottish Socialist party leader, who often hails John MacLean, the most colourful figure in Red Clydeside during the first world war, as his predecessor.
In the Glasgow Evening Times,, on the 75th anniversary of MacLean's death, Sheridan painted a vivid picture of the city in the autumn of 1915: "working class women organise their communities to defy private landlords and confront sheriff officers. Thousands down tools and march with the women… A general strike is threatened unless the government changes the law. A schoolteacher [MacLean] is whisked from his classroom and carried shoulder-high by protesters in order to make demands directly to the prime minister on their behalf. The law is changed. In Edinburgh High Court, [MacLean] charged with treason and incitement to revolution, is sentenced to five years hard labour."
It is all true, with a little dramatic licence. The Glasgow strikes of 1915-16 challenged the state. The rent strike of 1915 interfered with wartime arms production so Lloyd George introduced rent control to keep the factories at work. The strikes of 1915-16 directly threatened production. But when Lloyd George came to Glasgow on Christmas Day of 1915, he failed to charm the Clyde shop stewards and suppressed Tom Johnston's socialist magazine Forward for reporting what really happened.
In March 1916, shop stewards were exiled to Edinburgh to stop them causing trouble. In 1919 there was a massive strike in and around GIasgow to try to enforce a 40-hour week. MacLean thought revolution was just round the comer. So did the acting prime minister, Bonar Law. The government sent six tanks to Glasgow to prevent a Bolshevik rising. The strike failed, but the Red Flag was raised in George Square on January 31, 1919 -Bloody Friday - before police broke up the demonstration.
In the 1922 election, Labour won 10 of the 15 seats in Glasgow The Red Clydesiders departed by night train n St Enoch, the singing of Psalm 124 in their ears, to continue the revolution in parliament They caused Labour as much grief as Sheridan and Dennis Canavan do now.
But hang on a minute. Psalm 124? "Scotland's psalm of deliverance", as Red Clydesider David Kirkwood called it? Deliverance from what? The Old 124th was the battle hymn of the Covenanters in the 1670s. They wanted deliverance from the English, from a broad church, and from Roman Catholicism. The leading Clydesiders were true heirs of the Covenanters: teetotal, nationalist and presbyterian. They could not unite the Glasgow working class; neither could the struggle against wartime "dilution". This meant dividing up work in munitions factories so skilled tradesmen were restricted to doing what only they could do and unskilled men and women came in to do the rest. The toolmakers of Lang's in Johnstone struck in 1915, resolving that "no woman shall be put to work a lathe, and if this was done the men would know how to protect their rights". This had a Covenanting tone all right.
MacLean and the other socialists who cheered on the anti-dilution campaign headed a truly motley army Johnston, owner of Forward, scourge of Highland lairds and secretary of state during the second world war, analysed his readership: "Neither the bartender's pest nor the Sauchiehall Street dude ever spend a penny on the Forward ... In the slum areas few socialist periodicals are purchased but many copies of Red Welcome, the Daily Record and John Bull. And the reason is obvious. A man requires toreach a certain level of culture before he can understand socialism."
In my book The Legend Of Red Clydeside, I argue that the stories Sheridan recalls are seriously misleading. MacLean was a tragic
hero, but had no serious political influence. In reality there were two Red Clydesides - a sectional and divisive one during the first world war, and a more open, inclusive one after 1919. The failure of the first was a precondition for the limited success of the second, which rebuilt bridges with the Glasgow Irish. It reached out from the teetotal Johnston, who ensured there were no pubs in Kirkintilloch, to the Sauchiehall Street bartender; from the tradesman to the unskllled worker; from men to women.The only achievements of Red Clydeside were in housing. The Rent Act 1915, rushed through by Lloyd George, was unrepealable. No government of any party found it politically possible to remove rent control until the Housing Acts of 1980 and 1988. And Clydesider John Wheatley legislated for the best and most spacious council houses as minister of health in the first Labour government in 1924.
But these well-intentioned policies had evil outcomes in Glasgow an west of Scotland. Rent control caused housing stock to deteriorate because nobody was paying for its upkeep. The Wheatley Act's inter-war estates used up all the building land in the suburbs of Glasgow until the 1950s when, with central areas becoming dreadful slums, the only places to put the people were Easterhouse and Drumchapel. I doubt whether Sheridan agrees with me. He inherits a colourful tradition, but it is not quite as colourful as he paints it.
My book has been highly controversial since it first came out and I have been called all sorts of names-including English. But now Scotland runs her own affairs again, she must confront the real legacy of Red Clydeside. Myth is romantic, but a clear head is even better for policy-making.
lain Mclean is professor of politics at Nuffield College, Oxford University. He was born and brought up in Edinburgh. The second, revised edition of The legend of Red Clydeside is published by John Donald, price £16.99