The labour movement in Clydeside politics, 1914-1922

The history of the Labour movement in the Clyde valley between the outbreak of the First World War and the General Election of 1922 has always attracted great interest. On at least three occasions - the "dilution crisis" of 1915-16, the Forty Hours' Strike of 1919, and the 1922 election itself - the Clyde appeared to be distinguished by the militancy of its socialism, and the tradition of "Red Clydeside" was born, to be maintained after the election by the "Clyde group" of I.L.P. left-wingers in Parliament. These events attracted a good deal of attention at the time, and have continued to do so ever since. There has, however, been surprisingly little academic writing on the subject. The work of contemporary economists or social scientists, such as Professors W.R. Scott and A.W. Kirkaldy, or G.D.H. Cole, has provided us with valuable eye-witness accounts which are somewhat more detached than those given by the main participants in events; but between their generation and the present there is an unexpected lack of serious work on "Red Clydeside". The first modern study to look at it as a whole makes an interesting attempt to view the parliamentary careers of the "Clydesiders" after 1922 in the light of their earlier careers, but it is marred by a distressingly large number of factual inaccuracies. Other recent research of a more rigorous kind has opened up small areas of the subject, but no comprehensive treatment has yet been attempted. It is the purpose of this thesis to examine the years 1914 to 1922 in depth, from a standpoint independent of that of any of the participants.
The thesis is divided into two parts, the first dealing with wartime unrest, and the second with the fortunes of the local Labour movement between the 1918 and 1922 general elections. The first unofficial wartime strike among Clydeside engineers was in February 1915; the background to this is analysed in terms of the paradoxical combination of socialist militancy and craft conservatism in the engineers' union. Conditions peculiar to engineering produced this combination, and wartime munitions production concentrated its effects most notably in a small number of engineering plants.
The February 1915 strike was followed by the protests against rent increases which occupied the latter half of 1915. The influence of labour bodies, official and unofficial, in bringing about a governmental expedient (the 1915 Rent Act) which became, by default, the basis of later policy, is assessed. The end of the rent strike coincided with the first peak of agitation against the Ministry of Munitions and wartime munitions legislation. The origins of this Ministry, and the conflicts it set up in Whitehall, are examined, as are the amendment of "leaving certificates" legislation after shipyard strikes between July and November 1915, and the beginnings of the struggle over "dilution" - the efforts by the Ministry to introduce unskilled men and women into parts of munitions production which were traditionally the preserve of craftsmen. One highlight in the process was the visit of Lloyd George to Glasgow at Christmas and the suppression of the socialist Forward for the damage it was doing to dilution - including a full report of Lloyd George's hostile reception. Another was the appointment, in January 1916, of Commissioners to effect dilution. Their efforts, which were successful, were directed primarily against craft conservatism and only secondarily against the militant socialists of the Clyde Workers' Committee, although the latter have always attracted much more attention. After March 1916 there was no more unofficial unrest on the Clyde for the rest of the war, in spite of an increase in both industrial militancy elsewhere and political radicalism locally. This accords with the contention that revolutionary socialism was inseparable from craft conservatism. Clydeside in wartime was not ripe for revolution, because the issues which drove the craftsmen to unofficial militancy actually increased the historic divisions and hostility between then and the unskilled.
The last upsurge of unrest occurred immediately after the end of the war; fear of loss of jobs united official and unofficial labour organisations in demanding a shorter working week to spread the available work. But the lack of national support severely weakened the Forty Hours' Strike, whose entire failure was only masked by the over-reaction against it of the G-overnment and by the misconduct of the police in handling the "Bloody Friday" demonstration. This strike marked the end of the industrial influence of the revolutionary socialists; their political influence vanished into sectarianism, or into unsuccessful organisational efforts on behalf of the new Communist Party The influence of John Llaclean over the working class also vanished, partly because of the growth of his paranoia. Some explanation other than the postulate of a continuous revolutionary tradition has therefore to be sought for the deviance to Labour of Glasgow and the West of Scotland in the 1922 General Election, when Labour won ten out of the fifteen seats in Glasgow. Two basic explanations may be suggested - housing and the Irish. When the local Labour movement arose from the depression of 1919, it was in the form of a crusading opposition to rent increases, which culminated in a striking House of Lords judgment in favour of a tenant on the very eve of the 1922 election. And the years 1918-1922 covered a realignment in local affairs, when those in charge of Irish ward politics transferred their allegiance to Labour in national and local politics. Statistical analysis of local election results can be used to buttress literary sources in trying to demonstrate this point.
A conclusion to the thesis tries, inter alia, to assess the legacy, industrial, political, and social, of "Red Clydeside" between 1934 and 1922. It finds that the principal points are the polarisation on class lines of local politics and the influence of "Red Clydeside", through the rent agitations of these years, on the structure of the Scottish housing market in both public and private sectors.
Efforts to use the widest possible variety of sources are nowhere more important than in labour history, where one-sidedness is a perennial danger. In a complicated conflict such as that over dilution, which involved the Ministry of Munitions, other ministries, the officials of the engineers' union, and their rebellious Clydeside members, only the last (and to a certain extent the first) published accounts of their actions and intentions. It is therefore essential to have recourse to unpublished sources in order to redress the balance. Minutes of labour organisations are of importance here, and cover the whole period from 1914 to 1922. But bodies like the Clyde Workers' Committee, which were unofficial and anti-bureaucratic, have of their very nature left few records of this kind. What has survived is of great interest, but is inevitably somewhat haphazard. Many gaps must be filled from close study of contemporary newspapers. Forward, the principal socialist journal of the West of Scotland, is of the first importance, and every weekly issue from August 1914- to December 1922 has been consulted. Other socialist journals, several of them the products of small left-wing groups, provide insights into conflicts within the labour movement. As a journal of record, the Glasgow Herald (which is indexed) has been used. I am confident that its political views do not diminish the accuracy of its news reporting, a comment which cannot be made of other contemporaries, such as the Daily Record and the Evening Times, whose evidence must be treated with more care.
At various times between February 1915 and January 1919 labour unrest on the Clyde was a cause of great concern to authority, and public archives are rich in relevant material. Cabinet minutes and supporting papers are the most important of the documents to have been released under the "30 years rule" at the Public Record Office. Both are scanty for the period up to December 1916, but very full thereafter; and by January 1919 the practice of giving very full reports of Cabinet discussions, with attribution of points of view, had still not been abandoned in favour of a mere list of Cabinet conclusions. With regard to departmental records, those of the Scottish Office provide some new material; but they are rather thin, partly because of defective filing practices and partly because the Scottish authorities appear to take a nore comprehensive view than those in London of what ought to be kept from researchers for a period longer than thirty years. The records of the Ministry of Munitions are a goldmine. They include the enormous unpublished History of the Ministry of Munitions and the surviving departmental archives which were collected in preparation for it. These are supplemented by the unique collection of policy documents which were assembled and kept by Sir William Beveridge during his time at the Ministry, and by the political correspondence of Lloyd George, the Minister. None of the other surviving ministerial archives, unfortunately, has yielded anything of importance, and the papers of Christopher Addison, the Parliamentary Undersecretary at the Ministry,are not available to researchers.
The records of other departments have been consulted on more technical matters such as rent control and educational legislation.
The nature of the sources used changes, perforce, after January 1919- Clyde labour was no longer a matter of concern to the Government, and "the supply of information from public archives dries up. A very great proportion of the material for the last three chapters of the thesis is therefore drawn from the contemporary press - the newspapers and socialist periodicals being supplemented by reference to the Catholic press, which was generous in political advice to the Glasgow Irish. The only Clydeside labour leader to have left substantial archive material was John Maclean, and this has been drawn upon in assessing his career.
Most writing about "Red Clydeside" has come from writers overtly sympathetic to revolutionary ideals - whether the Clydesiders themselves or later academic admirers. It is hoped that a wider use of outside sources will help to provide a more detached view.