Glasgow (18 page)

There was an inbuilt coal bunker and a wooden dresser alongside. Just imagine coal being tipped into a bunker in the middle of the living room! There was a black iron sink with a single brass swan-neck cold water tap. Cupboards for pots were underneath the sink, and the cupboard for food was alongside at right angles. This was always referred to as the ‘press'. There was a set-in bed at right angles to the fireplace.

Above the wooden dresser, opposite to the fireplace was a set of electroplated dish covers, which hung on hooks in a row. These ranged from a huge one, suitable for a baronial feast in some place like Balmoral Castle, all the way down in size to a small one. There were four of them, never, ever used. But they were a wedding present. The shelves above, two shelves, held a blue and white dinner service, a wedding present from the firm my mum worked for, hardly ever used, and a tea set, which my mother was proud of; it had pansies on it, hand painted, my mother told us. This was only ever washed then put back on the shelf. Also there, in the centre, a brass jelly pan, and an ornamental brass kettle. On the wall in the room there were two great big photos, oh about eighteen inches by two feet. Lovely portraits, one of my mother, one of my father, taken after their wedding day.

We had gas lighting, quite new then. Inverted gas mantles, ‘Veritas' make, and a glass shade. We also had a paraffin lamp. My dad was the only one allowed to touch it, trim the wick, and fill it. It was on a stand and quite elegant, another wedding present.

SUFFRAGETTES AT WAR, 1914
Helen Crawfurd

Originally from the Gorbals, Helen Crawfurd (1877–1954) grew up in East Anglia. However, as a teenager she moved back to Glasgow, where in due course she married a Church of Scotland minister. She became active in the women's suffrage movement at the turn of the century but a decade or so later she switched support to the more radical Woman's Social and Political Union (WSPU). In 1912, she broke the windows of the Ministry for Education, for which she spent a month behind bars. A year later she was twice arrested in Glasgow when Emmeline Pankhurst was speaking. She was again jailed for a month and went on a five-day hunger strike. She left the WSPU in 1914 over its support for the war and joined the Independent Labour Party
.

The body of the Hall had a large part of it filled with Socialists and anti-war adherents. The organ was pealing out patriotic songs which were countered by revolutionary songs from the body of the Hall. Many shop stewards, who were fighting in the workshops against the dilution of Labour by women at undercut wages, were also there to hear what the speakers had to say. The question of equal pay for equal work was not discussed but merely propaganda on the patriotic duty of women to go into the factories and produce munitions. Soon the audience became restive, and the singing and shouting rose to a deafening height. The Lord Provost Dunlop said if the uproar didn't stop he would let the munition workers loose on them. The women's patriotic fervour had been lashed to fever heat and they came down into the body of the Hall and up into the gallery and began an attack upon the men, some only with their hands, others with sticks. It was a most disgraceful scene. The fight was an unequal one. The finest men refused to return the blows rained on them, while others gave as good as they got. I was disgusted at Christabel Pankhurst and Mrs Drummond for being a party to such work. To me it was lowering to the dignity of women. I had not taken part in it but sat quietly watching till I could endure it no longer. I got up and walked down the centre passage of the hall, mounted the Reporter's table and protested, saying: ‘Shame on you Christabel Pankhurst to get these women to do your dirty work. It is an insult to womanhood.' One of the platform party lifted a carafe of water to throw over me, but Flora Drummond prevented them, saying: ‘She is not responsible!!'

BEARDED LIKE A MAN, 1914
Patrick MacGill

It has been estimated that around 300,000 refugees migrated to Britain during the Great Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Of those around a third arrived in Scotland. The influx of Irish continued well into the twentieth century, with the majority settling in the west central belt, Glasgow and Lanarkshire especially. Patrick MacGill came from dirt-poor Donegal, where he left school at the age of eleven, working for hiring fairs and farms before getting a job on the Glasgow–Greenock railway line. He made his name with a slim volume of verse and for a spell was a journalist. Known as the ‘Navvy Poet', he is best known for his book
, Children of the Dead End
(1914). In its foreword he wrote: ‘When asking
a little allowance for the pen of the novelist it must be said that nearly all of the incidents of the book have come under the observation of the writer.'

I got a job on the railway and obtained lodgings in a dismal and crooked street, which was a den of disfigured children and a hothouse of precocious passion, in the south side of Glasgow. The landlady was an Irishwoman, bearded like a man, and the mother of several children. When indoors, she spent most of her time feeding one child, while swearing like a carter at all the others. We slept in one room, mother, children and myself, and all through the night the children yelled like cats in the moonshine. The house was alive with vermin. The landlady's husband was a sailor who went out on ships to foreign parts and always returned drunk from his voyages. When at home he remained drunk all the time, and when he left again he was as drunk as he could hold. I had no easy job to put up with him at first, and in the end we quarrelled and fought. He accused me of being too intimate with his wife when he was away from home. I told him that my taste was not utterly so bad, for indeed I had no inclination towards any woman, let alone the hairy and unkempt person who was my landlady. I struck out at him on the stair head. Three flights of stair led from the house down to the ground floor. I threw the sailor down the last flight bodily and head-long; he threw me down the middle flight. Following the last throw he would not face up again, and I had won the fight. Afterwards the woman came to her husband's aid. She scratched my face with her fingers and tore at my hair, clawing like an angry cat. I did not like to strike her back so I left her there with her drunken sailor and went out to the streets. Having no money I slept until morning beside a capstan on Glasgow quay.

RENT STRIKE, 1915
John Maclean

In 1915, in the middle of the First World War, many wives in Glasgow whose husbands were serving as soldiers found their rents were escalating. In the words of Helen Crawfurd, who had been raised by middle-class parents in the Gorbals, the ‘fight was essentially a women's fight'. Through careful organisation and swift action, a campaign was mounted, supported by the shop stewards' movement and including the likes of John Maclean (1879–1923), who opposed the war on the grounds that it fuelled capitalism. After six months, the government capitulated and passed the Rent Restriction Act
.

Through the tireless energy of Mr [Andrew] McBride, Secretary of the Labour Party's Housing Committee, and ardent supporter of the Women's Housing Committee, an agitation was started in the early summer against rent increases in the munition areas of Glasgow and district. Evening and mid-day work-gate meetings soon stimulated the active workers in all the large shipyards and engineering shops.

Emboldened, the organisers by demonstration and deputation tried to commit the Town Council to action against the increases. As it acts as the Executive Committee of the propertied class the Council shirked the responsibility of curbing the greed and rapacity of the factors and house-owners.

Enraged, the workers agitated more and more until the Government intervened by the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry. This was the signal for all the factors in the city to give notices of increase of rent. They anticipated that this united front would influence the Commissioner (as it did), and that the Government wold compromise the situation by allowing half the demands to be made legal . . .

Encouraged by the universal working-class support, and irritated by the operation of the infamous Munitions Act, the Clyde workers were ready to strike. This several yards did when 18 of their comrades appeared before Sheriff Lee. Beardmore's workers at Dalmuir sent a big deputation to tell the Sheriff that if he gave an adverse decision they would at once down tools. We have been favoured with a report of the proceedings in the Sheriff's room from the principal spokesman. It is intensely interesting as described by one of the spokesmen. In the circumstances the Sheriff wisely decided against the factor's demand for an increase. This was the first victory for working-class solidarity. We state the cause of triumph in these terms advisedly, for it really was due to joint action and not to the justice of the case (and there could be no juster) that success came to our side.

The strike having taken place, the workers were bent on letting the Government know that they would come again unless it restored rents to their pre-war level. It now transpires that a Rent Bill will be passed, forcing all factors of houses rented at £21 and under (£30 in London), to reduce the rents to the level prevailing immediately prior to the outbreak of the Great Slaughter Competition.

It should be noted that the rent strike on the Clyde is the first step towards the Political Strike, so frequently resorted to on the Continent in times past. We rest assured that our comrades in the various works will incessantly urge this aspect on their shopmates, and so prepare the ground for the next great countermove of our class in the raging class warfare.

Readers ought to know that three years ago a report was issued of an investigation into the living conditions of about a hundred families
in working-class wards in Glasgow. The investigators found that one out of every three families had to live under starvation conditions, on the assumption that every penny was put to the utmost use. The same conditions prevail to-day, with the infant mortality now deplored by wealthy ladies who themselves refuse to bear youngsters enough to fill up the gaps of war, and who consequently are anxious to keep up the balance of population by amateurish attempts to save the kiddies who, by misfortune or mistake, happen to enter this devilish world. In the circumstances it would be preposterous, as well as impolitic from a capitalist standpoint, to hold back anything from wages. We well know that an attempt will at first be made to limit deductions to those earning £2 and more per week. When once the ‘principle' has been established, the process will be gradually applied to all workers by the same piece-meal method as Lord Derby intends to use to force conscription.

It is up to the workers to be ready, and resist with a might never exerted before . . . Every determined fight binds the workers together more and more and so prepares for the final conflict. Every battle lifts the curtain more and more, clears the heads of our class to their robbed and enslaved conditions, and so prepares them for the full development of the class war to the end of establishing Socialism.