The Preconditions of Labour Solidarity: Red Clydeside Before 1914

In an important essay on machine-breaking in nineteenth century Britain, Eric Hobsbawm has argued that Luddism was appropriate to an early era in the history of the working-class. Collective activity could not expected at a time of industrialisation. The labourers involved were poorly-paid and lacked strike funds, they were immature and vulnerable, and consequently the strategy of machine-wrecking arose as one appropriate means of counteracting these weaknesses. Collective sabotage could be used as a means to guarantee that the plant would not be operated. In Hobsbawm's words, 'The habit of solidarity, which is the foundation of effective trade unionism, takes time to learn – even where, as in coal-mines, it suggests itself naturally. It takes even longer to become part of the unquestioned ethical code of the working-class.' The implied model of solidarity is one in which solidarity is learned through the formation of an industrial working-class. This implies that certain struggles are more mature than others. Elsewhere, writing about the mid-twentieth century Spanish working-class movement, Hobsbawm has made the case that there was in fact a hierarchy of protest. He suggested that anarchism should be seen as a form of 'primitive rebellion', a pre-industrial revolt that was fated to collapse under the guiding influence of economic development. In its place would emerge a more modern, urban-based, Marxist-led labour movement. The 'archaic' protests of Spanish anarchists would be replaced by a new tradition, more similar no doubt to British trade unionism, in which the dominant expression of working-class action would be the collective withdrawal of labour. Insurrectionary and individualistic forms of protest would necessarily be superseded by more modern forms, characterised by a much higher level of working-class solidarity.

Several writers have criticised Eric Hobsbawm's monocausal history of class development. Jon Amdem rejects it as a 'stages' theory of history which assumes what it should explain, while Chris Ealham has looked more sympathetically at the politics of Spanish anarchism. Yet the interest of this paper is not in Hobsbawm's account of the making of working-class politics, but rather in his linked history of solidarity. If solidarity is defined as the taking of collective action in defence of another group of people, then what conditions are necessary for it to become a viable strategy? In Hobsbawm's work the key factor is class formation, only once a certain level of industrial development is achieved can labour solidarity succeed. Unlike charity which can be universal, solidarity is an act of oppressed groups. Yet it is also a collective action, and (as Marx observed) one of the positive consequences of industrialisation is that it makes collective production possible. This is the insight behind Hobsbawm's argument, those who work together are more likely to protest together. Yet although industrialisation is undoubtedly one factor in the creation of solidarity, it cannot be the only factor - otherwise increasing industrialisation would imply continuously more protest. Solidarity as a habit can be forgotten as well as learned. Indeed, Hobsbawm's accounts of recent British history would suggest that such a process of unlearning had taken place.

So what other preconditions are required for labour solidarity to happen? A second condition for solidarity must be a consciousness of shared experience. To paraphrase E. P. Thompson, solidarity happens when some people 'as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared) feel and articulate the identity of their interests'. Without a common account of shared experiences, it is difficult to call people to take action, and impossible for them to defend their action in the face of hostile authority. Yet a common language of solidarity need not constitute in Marxist terms a full class consciousness. People can struggle without regarding themselves as workers, yet they must feel that they have some common experiences, in order for solidarity to take place. Otherwise this is sympathy or charity, but not solidarity.

A third condition would be the presence of activists. Saying this is not to glorify the role of such 'leaders', nor is it to endorse the division within the trade union and other movements between grass-roots members and paid officials. The argument here is more modest, without individuals who take an initiative in calling or indeed organising acts of solidarity, acts of solidarity simply will not take place. Even the most spontaneous act of solidarity still requires that someone must be identified as the first person to act. The fourth and last factor must be the issue which sparks the action of solidarity, whether this is the only issue or merely the final cause of protest. The history of solidarity gives examples of both cases, from pay strikes which were really disputes about management style, through campaigns against victimisation or over other issues, which were precisely what they said they were and nothing more. In general terms, it should never be assumed that within a collective group taking action, all participants agree with the stated reasons for action, or indeed agree as to what the stated reasons actually were. At all accounts, an immediate context of wrong is needed for solidarity to occur.

One way to conceive of these four preconditions would be to use the well-known social science metaphor of a cat trapped in a box. Each of these four preconditions operates as an extra grille which needs to be removed, if the cat is to be liberated. Although the order of their removal is not significant, it is only once each of the four preconditions has been enacted that solidarity can take place.

The purpose of this metaphor is to map out the pre-conditions of solidarity. As such it remains necessarily general. In order to show way how solidarity has arisen in a specific historical case, this paper will take one celebrated example of solidarity, the industrial agitation which shook Glasgow during the first world war. This agitation reached its in 1915, when shipyard workers and engineers struck in support of a city-wide rent strike. This action was ultimately successful - the government agreed to restrict rents across Britain for the duration of the war. One further part of the campaign saw the formation of the Clyde Workers' Committee (CWC), a city-wide shop stewards' organisation which famously declared 'We will support the officials just so long as they represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.' Glasgow was therefore at the forefront of two linked movements, first, the struggle for trade unionism among workers, second the militant campaign against the war itself. So the purpose of the paper is to explore the pre-history of Red Clydeside (especially the years 1908-1914) and to compare the narrative accounts we have to the model of solidarity given above.

To illustrate the nature of developments of Glasgow in this time, two key sources will be compared, Harry McShane and Joan Smith's No Mean Fighter, and the interview with Annie Davison, in Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham's collection, Dutiful Daughters. These two figures were almost contemporaries. Although McShane was 17 years older than his compatriot, Annie Davison had members of her family in the socialist movement, and attended socialist Sunday-school from an early age. These sources are also similar in structure, each of them originated as oral history, and both sets of interviews were undertaken at the same historical moment, by writers from a similar political background - socialist feminism - in the mid-1970s. Neither Jean McCrindle nor Joan Smith explained why they chose to look at this period, so any explanation of why both chose to study pre-war Glasgow must rely on some degree of speculation. Yet it is surely significant that the Glasgow rent strikes were begun outside the workplace and by women. Whether or the presence of women activists in rent strikes explains the later research, the two accounts we have are both unusual for the extent to which they emphasise personal or domestic factors alongside the high politics of resistance. According to Joan Smith, who taped Harry McShane over a five-year period, 'another interviewer would have produced a different book'. The last section of No Mean Fighter is Joan Smith's account of the interview process, indeed the very last paragraph of the book is a statement mourning the absence of a women's movement in Glasgow. So the shared political background of the two interviewers who produced these sources gives them an added consistency – both Davison and McShane were asked similar questions about the past and their answers can be compared.

Glasgow 1914 to 1918

At the end of the first world war, Glasgow was widely considered to be one of the most radical cities in Europe. When the Bolsheviks decided to name a Soviet consul to Britain, their first choice was John Maclean, teacher, anti-war socialist, and leader of the movement on Clydeside. Equally, in his history of the war-time workers' council movement, Donny Gluckstein named the city as one of three key centres in western Europe, alongside Berlin and Turin. More recently, Chris Bambery has described Red Clydeside as 'the crucial moment in the history of Scottish working class, one of the high points in British, and indeed European, class struggle'. What earned Glasgow this reputation was four years of agitation, in some cases economic struggle against wartime austerity, at other times overt protest against the war. However, the point of this paper is not to describe the outcome of the struggle, but rather to examine the conditions for solidarity, by looking more closely at the condition of Clydeside in the period before 1914-18.

The first source here is Harry McShane's autobiography, No Mean Fighter. This was compiled with the help of Joan Smith of the socialist-feminist organisation, Women's Voice. Born in 1891, Maclean was a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and then the British Socialist Party (BSP) before the first world war. He was later a close friend of John Maclean, from 1922 a leading Scottish member of the British Communist Party (CP) and also a prominent campaigner for the unemployed. McShane left the CP at the age of sixty, and then worked with a variety of Trotskyist and independent left groups. This book was a summary of his life, a balance sheet written to encourage other working-class people to join the struggle. As these were the first years of Harry McShane's activity in the movement, so its author was especially alive to the changes that were then taking place. For this reason, Harry McShane's book is a remarkably vivid memoir of the socialist movement in Glasgow.

No Mean Fighter begins in 1891. Glasgow was then a poor city, as its author records, many workers were unemployed, old people lacked pensions, and there was widespread illiteracy. As an example of poverty, Harry McShane describes the conflicts between working women who had to share one washhouse between an entire tenement block, 'There were lots of fights about whose turn it was for the washhouse key, and it was a common topic of jokes at the music hall.' At this time, according to McShane, a working class existed in Glasgow, but the socialist movement only represented a small minority within the city. Instead of socialism, the dominant ideas in the city was sectarianism, 'In Glasgow the catholic was looked upon with only a degree less hatred than in Belfast at the present'. Coming from a Roman Catholic background, for McShane and his friends, 'Politics, of course, meant Home Rule for Ireland.'

The presence of many Irish in Glasgow meant that the politics of the city were divided along religious lines, with the main parties each claiming the allegiance of religious loyalties. Until 1906, the dominant Catholic organisation, the United Irish League (UIL) recommended a vote for the Liberal Party. It was it only in 1906 that the Catholic vote went over to Labour, and even that change 'was because the official recommendation of the UIL itself changed.' The absence of non-sectarian or class politics did not only weaken the socialist parties, but also the trade unions, especially the unions of the unskilled, 'There were very few unions for labourers. The Workers' Union tried to recruit the unskilled men in engineering and in the building trades. It was mainly the building workers that George Kerr was trying to get, but it was very difficult and I don't think they were ever fully organised in Glasgow.'

The impression given so far would not yet suggest a city capable of the solidarity witnessed in 1914-18. So what enabled Glasgow to change? In McShane's account, the first role was played by the debates every Sunday at Glasgow Green. These encouraged a spirit of critical thinking and rational enquiry which ultimately enabled many workers to reject sectarianism. Yet as late as 1905, 'There were Tory and Liberal lectures [at Glasgow Green], but few who supported Labour.' Before the socialists, the first speakers to reject the religious battle-lines were the secularists, and Harry McShane remembered several of them fondly, G. W. Foote, an Edinburgh anarchist called McAra, Willie Booth, and John Wheatley, an Irish nationalist who came over to socialism. Indeed many of the prominent socialists and anti-war activists from the war started in the free-thought movement, including Willie Gallacher, Emmanuel Shinwell and the key figure of John Maclean.

The second factor which Harry McShane indicates as being important in transforming Glasgow's politics is the campaign against unemployment which began in 1908. Yet the account in No Mean Fighter makes it clear that this campaign was still dominated by individuals and personalities, 'Tom Kerr of the ILP, a future Lord Provost of Glasgow, was very prominent. He was a very unusual fellow, a piano tuner who had been sacked, and he was one of the outstanding agitators of 1908. He threatened to reveal freemason secret rites if nothing was done for the unemployed, which created a big sensation in the press.' By comparison, McShane's later descriptions of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement concentrate less on individual gestures to gain publicity and more on the detail of mass turnouts involving thousands. In 1908, the fight against unemployment was not yet a collective agitation, and nor can this campaign be seen as an example of mass solidarity.

To this point in the narrative, Harry McShane's account concentrates on the birth of socialism in Glasgow. Yet as he indicates, this may not have been the typical experience of the future activists of 1914-18. Later in the book, Harry McShane confronts his own relative disinterest in trade affairs. Although he was a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) and took part in an apprentices' strike, McShane did not attend union meetings very regularly, 'I was always more interested in the socialist side of the movement, a political weakness I kept throughout my life.' Although he jokes about this weakness, in 1914-18 McShane's over-concentration on political matters would prove a great strength. While other activists confined themselves to trade union affairs, and were consequently more moderate in their opposition to the war, McShane's deep-rooted socialist politics ensured that he would follow John Maclean into an all-out opposition to war.

The third process which McShane describes as 'transforming' the socialist movement was the strike wave which began in 1910. As workers came into conflict with their employers, so they were increasingly compelled to take on the British state. Troops were sent into Liverpool and South Wales, when activists in Liverpool wrote an 'Open Letter to Soldiers', this was then publicised by the prominent trade unionists Jim Larkin and Tom Mann. When Mann was jailed, Victor Grayson the socialist MP toured the country repeating the slogans which had landed Mann in jail. On Clydeside, 'We were still waiting for the full formation of the BSP, but our provisional committee organised a meeting for Grayson in Glasgow; we planned to smuggle him from Clydebank in case a warrant should be issued for his arrest.' The semi-legal industrial campaigns must have been an important preparation for the anti-war agitation which followed.

It was around this time that Harry McShane met John Maclean. Before the war an orthodox social democrat, Maclean stood out by his emphasis on working-class self-education, 'It was always very important to John that the entire working-class movement had a grasp of Marxist economics and he put a large part of his energies into teaching them.' John Maclean taught every Sunday afternoon at the Central Halls, with first dozens and soon hundreds attending. According to No Mean Fighter, John Maclean held the anti-war movement together:

John Maclean held Sunday afternoon meetings at Nelson's monument throughout the war. He also started them on Sunday evenings at Bath Street, where the transport offices had been turned into a army recruiting centre. These were supposed to be general socialist propaganda meetings, but John always brought them round to discussing the war and they became very bug and stormy. At the beginning a couple of hundred attended every Sunday; then supporters of the war began disrupting them, and the entire socialist movement rallied to defend the Bath Street meetings.

These meetings represented the beginning of the movement against the war. It was at this point that the capacity was there for the later movement of solidarity to be born.

Although there could be a gap between the long-term propaganda and the more immediate agitation of the BSP, which he was a member of, John Maclean seems to have grasped the activist side of Marxism far better than any of his contemporaries in the Glasgow movement. John Maclean came out clearly against the war, and began to organise anti-war agitation, as other wavered or even supported the carnage. Although the pre-war socialist agitation in Glasgow was a vital pre-condition to the later anti-war campaign, it is remarkable that many of the pre-war socialists travelled in the opposite direction. Among the list of renegades, No Mean Fighter records such fine pre-war socialist agitators as Henry Hyndman of the British Socialist Party, the dockers' leader and militant trade unionist Ben Tillett, the socialist publicist Robert Blatchford and even Victor Grayson. Meanwhile anti-war speakers were threatened, even in Glasgow the opponents of the war found their meetings broken up by local chauvinists.

Having described the history outlined in the first key source, this paper will now describe the second, Annie Davison's memoir, as recorded in Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham's Dutiful Daughters. Davison was born in 1908, and only moved to Glasgow in 1912, yet even then her memories of her family and her own early years still adds to the story given in Harry McShane's book. Almost every member of her family took part in the nascent socialist movement, in one way or another. Therefore her interview can be used to convey the feel of socialism as it shaped one family in Scotland. Davison's father had lived in Glasgow, but moved to Belfast for work and lived there for seventeen years. There he met Tom Henderson, another expatriate Glaswegian and a co-operator, who converted him to socialism. Shortly afterwards Davison senior decided that they had lived long enough in Belfast, 'it was so full of bigotry and hatred', and took the family back to his home city, Glasgow.

On their arrival in Scotland, the Davisons soon acquired a reputation as 'bolshies', something which Annie believed marked her out 'from the average child round about me'. Annie Davison's father had already turned his back on religious hatred. In Glasgow, he became an atheist and joined the ILP. He never become a speaker but attended socialist meetings regularly all the same, 'My father, as I say, was musical in every way; he joined the Socialist Choristers' Choir, he was in the Independent Labour Party – he played the flute, the ocarina and the concertina, he'd take a shot at anything, at any musical instrument, and he was keen.' Certainly before 1914, his politics remained determinedly left-wing. Davison's mother didn't receive enough support from the family to play an active part in the socialist movement, 'The only thing she ever joined, became a member of actually and did any little thing she could, was the Women's International League. But she didn't take an active part in it, because she just hadn't the time.' As for Annie's brother Robert, he was a member of Daniel De Leon's faction, the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). Nearing the end of his apprenticeship in 1917, Robert was asked by the foreman whether he planned to fight. 'I am not joining the army', he replied, 'when they call me up, I am going to prison'. There can be no doubt that the family's conversion to radical politics shaped his refusal to volunteer.

Annie Davison saw the wartime growth of socialism through a child's eyes. For her it meant attending socialist Sunday-school in Partick, reciting socialist poems in one of several dozen left-wing children's groups across Glasgow, reading William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Eugene Sue's twenty-one volume history of the working class in France. John Maclean's street meetings on Brunswick Street were an opportunity to make friends with her fellow children from school. At least some of the education stuck. In Dutiful Daughters Annie Davison was asked by her interviewers what she hoped for the future. Her reply stressed the need for profound change, 'I feel that a long-term result must be the real goal of socialism, and in the end the best rather than trying to do something as a short-term measure. If the short-term measure becomes permanent then it's no use, because the short-term measure is the wrong measure to me.' Davison also suggested that fifty years later, the majority of her generation felt the same.

From these two summaries, it will be clear that Harry McShane as an adult participant in the movement had a better sense of the dynamics within the Glasgow left. Consequently his account reveals more about the pre-conditions which made possible the solidarity of the war years. Yet Annie Davison's history adds to McShane's, in that it conveys something of the variety of the movement. As well as over thirty socialist and anarchist Sunday-schools in Glasgow alone, there were also socialist choirs and orchestras, music festivals and socialist theatre companies. As this paper has argued, one of the preconditions of solidarity is a feeling of common experience. One of the differences between charity and solidarity is that the givers of solidarity should feel that they are somehow of the same class as the recipient. This was the purpose of the Sunday-schools, to teach a gut instinct of solidarity. In Davison's words, 'They wanted their children to learn that socialism was a good way of life and what was good for one was good for all, and so this was a moral attitude they had.'

Solidarity Revisited

Having described the context of pre-war Glasgow, with its growing number of trade union meetings and its socialist choirs, it is appropriate to return to the themes with which this paper opened. What do the memories of Harry McShane and Annie Davison reveal about the conditions for solidarity to occur? One negative argument should be clear, Eric Hobsbawm's description of solidarity as a learned taught by the nature of capitalist industrialisation represents at best a half-truth. The solidarity of 1914-18 was indeed a conscious action which had to be learned. Yet having been learned, it could also be unlearned. McShane describes Ben Tillett, one of the leaders of the great dock strike of 1889, touring Britain, 'telling how he had seen a greasy spot on a wall where a German had bashed a baby's brains out. He poured out atrocity stories against the Germans and he became hateful, really damn well hateful.' There were many Glasgow workers who were caught up in the patriotic atmosphere of 1914 and chose to place the national demand for patriotic loyalty above the class demand for solidarity.

Instead of Hobsbawm's monocausal model, the positive argument here is that each of the four pre-conditions identified earlier can be observed in their accounts of pre-war Glasgow. The first such point is class. In the years immediately prior to the first world war, industry in Glasgow expanded rapidly to cope with the need of empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Clyde valley was a centre for coal mining, shipbuilding, steel production and engineering. Measured by tonnage, Clydeside account for 50 percent of the globe's ship production. It was one of the greatest centres of capital accumulation in the world. For a young apprentice like Harry McShane, 'work' meant metal-working, carried out in huge factories like Howden's, Weir's or Fairfield's. McShane himself seems to have been employed in up to a dozen factories by the age of twenty-five. Some were better organised, others less so, but in every plant the workers were recognisably members of the same class.

The second condition identified earlier was a consciousness of common experience. The problem in 1914-18 was that there was more than one such language. According to the employing classes and the state, the war was a period of common sacrifice. Soldiers at the front, managers and workers in the factories, all were united together in the struggle against the Germans. In Glasgow this language of national unity had at least as much resonance as it did elsewhere. For example, in February 1915, according to McShane, the papers were full of articles 'about the Clyde shirkers, the Clyde slackers, the Clyde traitors'. Lloyd George made a statement blaming strong drink for British set-backs. The Daily Record then took up this theme, carrying a photograph of one pub near Fairfield Shipyards, with a line of whiskies waiting for the yard gates to open at the end of the shift. 'Some papers even suggested that the strikers were in the pay of the Germans!' It was in this context of patriotic opposition to class demands that the anti-war agitation became important. The anti-war activists on Glasgow were overwhelmingly socialists. Without their opposition to the war, workers would have been unable to defend themselves ideologically against the charge that they were betraying 'their' nation.

The third precondition for solidarity was the presence of activists at the head of the movement. Both Davison and McShane describe the crucial role played at times by very small numbers of activists. In Annie Davison's family the most important figure was her father, who argued with each of them to embrace socialism. Even his wife had to be persuaded, 'My mother, who had been bought up even more tightly to the church, found it difficult, but as a very intelligent women – in fact I think she had a better brain than my father – she read a lot and took a long time to consider changing.' For Harry McShane, the decisive figure was John Maclean, the man whose anti-war agitation began in the dark winter of 1914 when so many others dodged the question or turned jingo. Without his lead, the socialist movement would have lacked direction, and would not have been able to deliver the solidarity that was so important after 1914. Indeed in the factories which lacked such anti-war activists, including notably Parkhead Forge, the trade union movement was weaker and solidarity impossible to achieve.

The fourth factor which has been mentioned as a prerequisite for solidarity was an issue to respond to. In the case of Glasgow's wartime protests, there was both one central issue and several smaller ones. The most important overriding question was the war. Its conduct and management shaped the emergence of all the other issues, rent rises, conscription, 'dilution', the practice of employing unskilled workers on skilled workers' tasks, shop steward autonomy, and so on. Of the secondary issues, the most important would be rent. Although neither Davison nor McShane mention this, the campaign against rent rises began as early as 1911, before reaching its first peak in 1915 and continuing to 1920. The 1915 rent strikes began in Govan shortly after May Day. They were widely reported in the socialist press, but ignored in the local papers. Demonstrations raised the profile of the campaign. Soon workers in tied houses were taking industrial action in solidarity with the rent strikers. Coal miners from West Calder were followed by 10,000 Glasgow shipyard workers and engineers who struck in November in support of eighteen rent strikers due in court. Their solidarity had a resonance across Britain, and on 23 December 1914, rents were frozen at their level in August 1914.

Yet despite its strengths, the wartime movement was only a partial carrier of solidarity. Rather than campaigning full-out against the war, most of Glasgow's socialists limited themselves to the task of agitating against the consequences of war. This distinction may appear slight, but in the context of the war it was crucial. Here again, McShane's account captures the contradictions which existed even with the same activists' heads:

Although the leadership of the CWC were supposed to be revolutionary socialists, they actually came under the influence of other ideas … Johnny Muir was the 'intellectual' of the CWC … He argued that the CWC should accept the war as a fact and work for what they could get in the circumstances. Davie Kirkwood was a member of the SLP when the war broke out and because of Muir's attitude he left and joined the ILP. Most other SLP members were anti-war like Arthur McManus, but didn't oppose Muir in the CWC; neither did the BSP members. This meant that no anti-war fight developed inside the factories; the men were making guns, shells and all kinds of munitions, but the all-important question was never raised.

Davie Kirkwood was convenor of the shop stewards at Parkhead Forge, a factory which had witnessed little clear anti-war agitation, and it was there that the power of the Clyde Workers' Committee was broken, when management took away Kirkwood's right to move from shop to shop. First a strike call failed, next Kirkwood was deported, and then another nine stewards were arrested and detained. Maclean was jailed, and the CWC was smashed.

It would be wrong, however, to end on this note of defeat. The Clyde Workers' Committee stood out against the destruction of working-class living standards that was justified in the name of wining the war. Although the movement went into decline in 1915, it was reborn towards the end of the war, reaching a new peak with the near-insurrection of 1919. In his book, McShane stressed the importance of the war-time experiences in shaping a new generation of militants who led the campaign for the unemployed in the 1930s. According to Annie Davison the children from the socialist Sunday-schools also continued to play their part, still organising Glasgow's trade unions, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Women's Liberation when she was interviewed, five decades on.