Industrial Nation: Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800 - present 9781474469906

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INDUSTRIAL NATION

INDUSTRIAL NATION Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800-Present

W. W. Knox

EDINBURGH University Press

For

Patty

© W. W. Knox, 1999 Transferred to Digital Print 2009

Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Sabon by Pioneer Associates, Perthshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenharn and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1084 7 (hardback) ISBN 0 7486 1085 5 (paperback) The right of W. W. Knox to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations List of Tables Abbreviations

Vlll X Xll Xlll

Introduction PART 1:

1

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

29

1. Interpretations

31

2. The Social Consequences of Industrial and Urban Growth, 1800-1850

34

3. 'Rough and Respectable': The Culture of the Scottish Working Classes, 1800-1850

40

4. Technological Change and Workplace Struggles, 1800-1850

47

5. Class Struggle and the Growth of Trade Unions in Scocland, 1800-1850

52

6. Nation v. Class: Radical Struggles in Scocland, 1800-1850

56

PART II:

7.

MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

Interpretations

79 81

v

CONTENTS

8. Heavy Industry and Social Change, 1850-1880 9.

Respectability and the Scottish Working Classes, 1850-1880

85 94

10. Skill and Managerial Authority, 1850-1880

104

11. Trade Unionism in Scotland, 1850-1880: A New Model?

114

12. A Mid-Victorian Political Consensus? Labour Politics in Scotland, 1850-1880

122

1880-1914

127

PART III: THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR,

13. Interpretations

129

14. Relative Economic Decline and the Problem of Poverty, 1880-1914

132

15. Drink, Football and Sectarianism: Working-Class Culture in Scotland, 1880-1914

137

16. Skill under Pressure: Changes in the Workplace, 1880-1914

145

17. Trade Unionism on the March, 1880-1914

156

18. The Challenge of Socialism, 1880-1914

163

PART IV: WAR, DEPRESSION AND THE REMAKING OF

LABOUR IN SCOTLAND,

1914-1945

185

19. Interpretations

187

20. 'Starving in the Midst of Plenty': Economic Depression and the Social Impact of Mass Unemployment, 1914-1945

189

21. Billies and Dans in the Jazz Age: Working-Class Culture and the Labour Movement in Scotland, 1914-1945

196

22. Technological Change and the Skilled Worker, 1914-1945

203

Vl

Contents

23. Trade Unionism in a Cold Climate, 1914-1945

216

24. The Remaking of the Political Culture of the Scottish Working Class, 1914-194 5

232

PART

v: THE COLLAPSE OF THE CRAFT CULTURE AND THE RISE OF NEW LABOUR IN SCOTLAND,

249

1945-1990s

25. Interpretations

251

26. 'From Ships to Chips': Economic and Social Change in Scotland, 1945-1990s

254

27. The Affluent Worker? Working-Class Culture, 1945-1990s

265

28. The End of Skill? Work and Workplace Relations in Scotland, 1945-1990s

272

29. The Demise of Craft Unionism and the Rise of White-Collar Unions in Scotland, 1945-1990s

280

30. Labour and Nationalism: Working-Class Politics in Scotland, 1945-1990s

296

Select Bibliography Notes Index

308 313 356

Vll

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the culmination of much of my academic and intellectual endeavour over the last ten years or so. Because of this I have been able to incorporate a fair amount of previous research into my analysis of Scottish work, society and culture over the last two hundred years. As such, many individuals and institutions have played a large part in facilitating the writing of this volume. Financial support and intellectual assistance has been forthcoming on a generous level. However, since these sources have already been thanked for all they have done for me, I hope I can be forgiven if on this occasion I only thank those individuals who have materially and intellectually supported the writing of the current volume. Of course, any researcher needs the support of efficient and helpful archivists and librarians. Thankfully, in Scotland there are a large number of institutions in which these qualities are to be found in large measure. The staff of the Scottish Record Office, the National Library of Scotland, the Mitchell Library, and, not least, the University of St Andrews' Library have helped me in so many ways that it would be impossible to list them all. All I can say is thank you for making research such an enjoyable and rewarding experience. In this vein I would also like to thank Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre, Scottish Life Archive, University of St Andrews Library, and Ian MacDougall for their kind permission to reproduce photographs from their collections. I have also benefited from discussions with colleagues and students concerning the contentious intellectual issues that the book attempts to grapple with. In particular, Alan McKinlay has acted as a sounding board and, at times, a mentor for my theories and speculations. All I can say is thanks for your patience and advice Alan. I also have to thank him for allowing me access to unpublished work and for providing me with research material. In this connection I would Vlll

Acknowledgements also like to thank Chris Whatley for reading and commenting on the first chapter. His erudition and knowledge of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish history proved invaluable. Chris, of course, bears no responsibility for any mistakes and misunderstandings on my part. The same can be said of Hamish Fraser, who not only refereed the typescript, but also made some very valuable comments on the text and introduced me to sources which have been of great help in the process of redrafting the book. Finally, my thanks go to the commissioning editor of Edinburgh University Press, John Davey, who was a delight to work with and provided all the encouragement and support an author could need. To end on a personal note I want to express my thanks to my wife, Patty, and my children, David, Kim, Liam and Natasha for their unflagging support, their occasional criticisms, and their love. They make the whole endeavour worthwhile.

lX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (between pages 144 and 145)

1. A half-time school in Arbroath, 1887. Note the class size and age range. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

2. Female jute workers in Dundee, c.1900. Note the ages of the workers and the presence of the supervisor in the background. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

3. Paisley mill girl strike, 1907. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

4. The Lady Victoria Pit bottom, Newtongrange, c.1900. A comparatively early example of a Scottish pit using the longwall method and machinery to mine coal. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

5. Steelworkers in Beardmore's Parkhead Forge, Glasgow, 1910. Craft pride on display! (Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre)

6. A cartoon showing the links between the worker in factory and yard and those at the battle front, c.1915. (Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre)

7. Miners' leader, A. J. Cook, addressing a mass meeting in Fife during the General Strike of 1926. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

8. Harp Athletic FC c.1921-2. The name was chosen by the team's trainer, Patrick Drummond, but the sectarian overtones are clear. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

9. Unemployed men, Edinburgh, c.1930. Hanging around the streets was one of the few free leisure pursuits open to the unemployed. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh) X

List of Illustrations 10. An elderly couple living in the Overgate, Dundee, in wretched conditions in the 1920s. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library) 11. A woman gathering sea coal in Fife in the 1930s. One of anumber of casual jobs women did which went unrecorded in the occupational census. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library) 12. Female cop winders in the Dundee jute industry c.1930s. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library) 13. Fife miners using hand-got methods of coalmining, c.1930. Note the very cramped conditions. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library) 14. A Clydeside riveter using a pneumatic rivet machine, c.1930. (Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre) 15. The Youth Guild of the Independent Labour Party, Glasgow, c.1930. Note the presence of James Maxton in the middle of the second row. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh) 16. A programme not only showing the range of Beardmore's business activities, but also containing an interesting address from staff and workers, c.1942. (Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre) 17. Clyde welders at work, c.1942. (Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre) 18. A woman welder on Clydeside at work during the Second World War, c.1942. (Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre) 19. An engineering workshop, c.1942. Note the presence of women in the fitting shop; a sight calculated to reduce a craftsman to tears! (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh) 20. Women assembly workers in a television and radio factory in Crail, Fife, 1952. The growing electric and electronics industries relied heavily on the nimble fingers of increasing numbers of female workers. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library) 21. A sugar beet factory outing in Fife in February 1952. The male Xl

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

smoker not only bonded workers, but also was a means of identifying with the firm. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library)

22. An Orange parade in Glasgow c.1959. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

23. A Right to Work March in Glasgow, c.1971. Note the presence of Tony Benn linking arms with James Airlie and Jimmy Reid, leaders of the UCS Work-In. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

LIST OF TABLES 26.1 Percentage of adults on low wages in Scotland at selected dates

259

29.1 Occupational structure of the General Council of the STUC at selected dates

285

29.2 The number of working days per 1000 employees lost through industrial action in Scotland in the years 1975-78 and 1980-82

288

30.1 Percentage of Conservative support in England and Scotland among manual workers, 1974-1992: random sample

297

Xll

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

smoker not only bonded workers, but also was a means of identifying with the firm. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library)

22. An Orange parade in Glasgow c.1959. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

23. A Right to Work March in Glasgow, c.1971. Note the presence of Tony Benn linking arms with James Airlie and Jimmy Reid, leaders of the UCS Work-In. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

LIST OF TABLES 26.1 Percentage of adults on low wages in Scotland at selected dates

259

29.1 Occupational structure of the General Council of the STUC at selected dates

285

29.2 The number of working days per 1000 employees lost through industrial action in Scotland in the years 1975-78 and 1980-82

288

30.1 Percentage of Conservative support in England and Scotland among manual workers, 1974-1992: random sample

297

Xll

ABBREVIATIONS

ACU ALU AWMA AEU AEEU ASCJ ASE ASRS ASW AHR ACLW ACLL ASTMS

Aberdeen Charter Union Aberdeen Ladies Union Aberdeen Working Men's Association Amalgamated Engineering Union Amalagamated Engineering and Electrical Union Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners Amalgamated Society of Engineers Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers American Historical Review Annual Conference of Labour Women Anti Corn Law League Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staff

BIFU BPU BSP

Banking, Insurance and Finance Union Birmingham Political Union British Socialist Party

CSA

CPGB CLP

Clyde Shipbuilders' Association Clyde Workers' Committee Communist Party of Great Britain Constituency Labour Party

ETC

Edinburgh Trades Council

FCM

Free Collier Movement

GMWU GCLP GTC GTLC

General and Municipal Workers' Union Glasgow City Labour Party Glasgow Trades Council Glasgow Trades and Labour Council

ewe

Xlll

ABBREVIATIONS

GLWEU GNCTU GDP

Glasgow Liberal Working Men's Electoral Union Grand National Consolidated Trade Union Gross Domestic Product

HWJ

History Workshop Journal

ILP IMR IOGT lOR IRSH

Independent Labour Party Infant Mortality Rate Independent Order of Good Templars Independent Order of Rechabites International Review of Social History

JPs JSLHS

Justices of the Peace Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society

LMC LRC LWMA

Labour and Monopoly Capitalism Labour Representation Committee London Working Men's Association

MFGB

Miners' Federation of Great Britain

NALGO NCB NUWM NUDL NUM NUSMW

National National National National National National

PBR PBS PAS

Premium Bonus Rate Premium Bonus System Protestant Action Society

SCLP SEC SESH SGYB SHMA SLP SLLL SLA SPL SRL SNP SSP

Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish Scottish

Association of Local Government Officers Coal Board Unemployed Workers' Movement Union of Dock Labourers Union of Mineworkers Union of Scottish Mine Workers

Council of the Labour Party Economic Committee Economic and Social History Government Year Book Horse and Motorman's Association Labour Party Land and Labour League Liberal Association Protestant League Reform League National Party Socialist Party XlV

Abbreviations STUR STUC SWAC SWPEC SEF SDF SOCLP SL SLC SB

Scottish Trade Union Review Scottish Trades Union Congress Scottish Women's Action Committee Scottish Workers Parliamentary Elections Committee Shipbuilding Employers' Federation Social Democratic Federation Socialist Labour Party Socialist League Socialist League Collection Supplementary Benefit

TAS TUC TGWU

Total Abstinence Societies Trades Union Congress Transport and General Workers' Union

UA

Unemployed Association Upper Clyde Shipbuilders United Free Church United Irish League United Mineworkers of Scotland

ucs

UFC UIL UMS

XV

INTRODUCTION

This book is about Scottish workers: their culture, their working lives, and their politics. Twenty-five years ago such an enterprise, whether viewed from a methodological or ideological standpoint, would have been relatively unproblematical. Marxist categories of analysis dominated theoretical discourses in the arts and social sciences and class was seen by all, with the exception of those on the right of the political spectrum, as the key to unravelling the processes of transformation in society; indeed, class struggle was viewed as the motor of change in history. A quarter of a century later, writing a book about the working class of any country calls for a very different set of academic considerations and as an historical exercise appears to need some form of intellectual justification. New challenges posed by the growth of feminism, nationalism and a resurgent right-wing historiography have forced historians, particularly on the left, to confront the philosophical certainties of the post-war decades. The great isms and truths of philosophical systems, of social analyses, of historical and cultural studies have come under greater critical scrutiny, and in the process have been rejected by newer generations of academics as less than useful in understanding past and present developments in society. We now live, it is argued, in a world of postmodernist rationality, in which everything is relative and identities and values compete with each other in an incoherent and indeterminate hierarchy of significance. Whereas in the past historical and political analysis rested on the rock of class division, of a social landscape divided into owners and non-owners of capital, post-modernist philosophy views human behaviour as deeply complex, diverse and fragmented, and, as a result, impossible to explain by recourse to a reductionist, all-encompassing theory of human affairs based on social class. 1 Human beings, their behaviour and values, are seen by post-modernists as the product of a multiplicity of influences. Thus, we are not simply workers or 1

INTRODUCTION

bosses, but members of churches, of football clubs, of ethnic, national and racial groups. We are men and women, young and old, urban and rural dwellers, Highlanders and Lowlanders, fashionable and unfashionable, carnivores and vegetarians. In essence, there is not one variable that assumes primacy in shaping social and political behaviour but many. Everything is in flux and explanations of actions and events highlight the uniqueness of factors and circumstances. In this mode of analysis, religion or gender might be seen as more important than social class as a nodal point around which solidarities might be grouped. Class, then, has been dethroned as historians look elsewhere for explanatory categories in order to understand the processes of social and political change. Politically, the turn away from class and the modes of analyses connected with it coincided with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet state in the 1980s and the early 1990s; and, in Britain, with the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, and the inability of the Labour Party to break the Conservative stranglehold on political power in the 1980s and for most of the 1990s. The self-confidence of the Labour movement so brilliantly captured in Francis Williams's whiggish interpretation of its history- The Magnificent Journeywas shattered. Eric Hobsbawm, and others on the left, began to write and talk of the 'forward march of Labour halted'. 2 The pessimism was fuelled by the fact that millions of trade unionists had deserted Labour and voted for the Tories in the 1983 general election. The defeat of the miners in the following years only added to the gloom. It was from this political nadir that 'New Labour' emerged, committed to the politics of consumption rather than production. The underlying analysis pointed to changes in the occupational structure of the country. The process of de-industrialisation saw the collapse of working-class communities, of old style collective values, and community institutions such as social clubs and co-operative societies. The 'new' working class was to be found in the service sector. Its values were far more instrumental and materialistic than the old working class. As a result, the 'new' working class was more interested in tax cuts than in a fairer distribution of wealth, or in defending collective provision through the welfare state. The growth of owner occupation, as mortgages became more easily available and tax relief on them more generous, encouraged workers and their families to join the property-owning democracy so beloved of the ex-Tory prime minister, Harold MacMillan. Increasingly the division in society was between those who were part of the private property

2

Introduction system and those who were not, that is, the unemployed, the poor, and other elements of the so-called underclass. 3 In the light of these changes in the social structure of Britain, the taken-for-granted working-class Labour voting bloc simply evaporated. The shift in theory also exploded myths of working-class community and solidarity. Workers were seen as less than the salt-of-the-earth types with socialist leanings portrayed by writers from the inter-war period such as D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell and J. B. Priestley, through to post-1945 commentators and novelists such as Richard Hoggart, Alan Sillitoe, and historians like E. P. Thompson. 4 In contrast to this 'idealised' portrait, workers were shown as nationalistic, patriotic, racist, misogynist, materialistic and privatised. 5 If they were not, then how could a third of the working class traditionally vote Tory, and how could appeals in the 1980s and beyond by the Conservatives to patriotism and self-interest command so much support from workers and their families? It was obvious that a reappraisal of the role of class in shaping identity and political behaviour was necessary if we were to account for the phenomenal success of the Tories and their values in winning over even long-standing trade unionists. Historians have been to the fore in this process of reassessment regarding the impact of social class on human attitudes and behaviour. The various critiques, notably by Craig Calhoun, of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), 6 and Hobsbawm's theory of the labour aristocracy 7 could rightly be viewed as the starting point in the recent process of dethroning class as the foundation of historical analysis. But more recently the debate has focussed on Harry Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital (LMC) (1974), which initiated a whole series of investigations and theoretical speculations regarding the relationship between work and politics. The polemics of that debate brought to the fore revisionist historians such as Patrick Joyce, Charles More, Alastair Reid and Jonathan Zeitlin. Although with no formal or institutional attachment, as a group they mustered a powerful and compelling critique of Braverman's thesis concerning deskilling, and, by direct implication, the whole Marxist idea of class conflict as the motor-force of societal change. 8 In this introduction these intellectual critiques of Marxism and the role of social class as an explanatory concept in history will be critically discussed before examining the extent to which they have influenced historical writing on these issues in Scotland. Additionally, the extent to which the experience of workers in Scotland fits the

3

INTRODUCTION

national scenarios constructed by the revisionists will also be considered. By doing this we will be in a better position to decide how far the revisionist critique is peculiarly anglocentric, and, conversely, how far it provides the basis for a genuinely British history of workers and their families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, before embarking on this task, the theoretical background to these debates has to be filled in. 1. Marxism and the Capitalist Labour Process It was the student and worker unrest in France and Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s which stimulated social scientists to re-investigate the relationship of the workplace to politics. 9 The workplace had been the site of resistance to Gaullism and Christian Social Democracy in these years, and because of this it appeared to offer important clues as to the process of how the more narrowly economistic struggles of the shop floor interacted with the wider world of politics. Furthermore, the student/worker revolts of this period also demonstrated the continuing revolutionary potential of the proletariat, something which contradicted those consensus commentators in the 1960s who had spoken about the end of ideology. 10 Marx, as so often in these decades, provided the starting point for analysis with his pathbreaking study of the capitalist labour process. By the labour process Marx meant the way humans interact with nature to produce things to meet their needs. In a primitive society based on common ownership such endeavour, outside of its organisation, is relatively unproblematic since what is produced is consumed by the producers and their kin and friends. However, in a capitalist society it is not enough that what is produced can be consumed, or is socially useful; the capitalist has to be able to exchange it for a price greater in value than the cost incurred in its production. As labour is seen by Marx as the source of value, the capitalist must ensure that the worker creates a superior value than he or she gets back in the form of wages. Production in a capitalist society is therefore bound up with exploitation, or, as Marx would put it, the creation of surplus value. The process by which surplus value was extracted from the workers was termed by Marx as valorisation. 11 As valorisation becomes the rationale for production then the labour process becomes inextricably linked to the struggle for profitable production. To ensure the continuous flow of profit the capitalist must not only provide the materials for labour to work on; he or she

4

Introduction must also acquire control of the conditions under which the speed, skill and dexterity of the worker operates. Once that is realised the goal of capital becomes the subordination of labour. In the process of subordination science and technology are used to break down complex skills into routine operations performed by unskilled labour. In this way capital and its agents in the system of production gain control of the labour process and effectively destroy any resistance coalesced around skill. Deskilled labour becomes homogenised and easily exploited and manipulated as recalcitrant workers are dismissed and replaced by more passive ones without significantly disrupting production. Braverman adopted Marx's work on the labour process and enriched it by drawing on theories of scientific management, such as those propounded by Frederick W. Taylor in The Principles of Scientific Management (1914). 12 By doing so Braverman was able to take a fresh look at questions surrounding skill, technology and work organisation, particularly in the period of monopoly capitalism. From his research two main conclusions were drawn regarding the labour process: firstly, crucial to understanding its development in a capitalist society is the desire to cheapen the cost of production by substituting unskilled for skilled labour; and secondly, and more important, is the desire to guarantee effective employer control of the labour process by, as Tony Elger puts it, 'dissolving those esoteric skills which underpinned effective craft control and reorganising production in the hands of capital and its agents'. 13 However, the homogenisation of labour which results from deskilling was a doubleedged sword for the capitalist class. It may have cheapened production costs and increased the level of exploitation, but it also created the potential for a unified working-class response to the pressures of capitalist society, since all the divisions resulting from gradations of skill were obliterated. Capitalism in its relentless pursuit of profit by implication was creating its own gravediggers. The relationship of work to political change was made very clear in Braverman's account. However, in spite of its clarity and elegance, his thesis on deskilling was attacked by all sides of the political spectrum. His thesis concerning the development of work in industrial society was seen as simplistic and one-sided, relying too heavily on scientific managerialists, such as Taylor. Left-orientated historians and sociologists criticised Braverman for failing to understand the role of class struggle in resisting changes in the organisation of production.14 Feminist historians also exposed his lack of appreciation of

5

INTRODUCTION

the role gender played in shaping the structure of industrial relations and the occupational hierarchy in the workplace. 15 However, for our purposes, the most damning critique came from the previously mentioned revisionist historians associated with 'New Labour', and those influenced by the neo-liberal economic theories emanating from the right-wing of British politics. 2. The New Revisionism and the Labour Process Drawing on an important article by Raphael Samuel on the uneven development of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, 16 the revisionists argued that there was no linear trend towards deskilling as the nature of work patterns remained disjointed and haphazard. Far from being deskilled many workers were able to retain a large measure of control over the work process. The labour intensive methods favoured by employers, and the highly differentiated product markets they operated within, ensured that skill remained at a premium throughout the nineteenth century. Consequently, the scope employers had to deskill was limited, and because of this, instead of acting to destroy skills, employers actually went out of their way to nurture them. In what could be interpreted as a re-articulation of nineteenth-century views on the mutuality of capital and labour, Patrick Joyce argued that the Victorian workplace was a terrain of compromise rather than conflict with 'capital often ced[ing] to labour the control [over the labour process]' Y This view is underscored by Charles More's work on apprenticeship. He claims that employers and employees co-operated to 'encourage skill' development. Apprenticeship survived and skill was maintained because it was economically rational on both the part of the employer and the apprentice. The former saw that it was in his interest to ensure that the lad was well-taught in order that he could benefit from skilled apprentice labour at low wages; while the latter had a desire to learn a skill which would give him secure earnings and regular employment at the end of his apprenticeship. 18 As part of the emphasis on the skilled nature of work, More rejected the idea of skill as a social construct and the role of trade unions in determining skill. 19 Although the twentieth century has seen major changes in the nature of technology and the organisation of the workplace, revisionists have maintained that the tendency has not been towards the destruction of skill, but towards its recomposition. Some skills have, of course, completely disappeared, increasingly so with the onset of 6

Introduction

computerised techniques in industry. Riveting in the shipbuilding industry gave way to welding; muscle power in clockwork gave way to automatic methods of cargo handling and containerisation; and so on. However, the disappearance of older competencies has made way for the emergence of new skills. In 1963, the Technical and Salaried Staffs Association listed seven categories of technical worker, including draughtsmen, designers, estimators, planning engineers and others. Ten years later the list had grown to 486, of which 400 were of a technical nature and the rest clerical or supervisory. 20 These changes in the division of labour in engineering was further proof against any tendency within capitalism towards the degradation of labour as the numbers of workers with technical expertise in the industry was increasing rather than diminishing. The new technologies also encouraged greater flexibility in the distribution of tasks. This increased the sense of relative autonomy in making decisions, which reduced the level of alienation, and allowed workers increased freedom within a production regime which was more challenging and interesting than routine. 21 Taken as a whole the revisionist critique amounts to a complete rejection of Braverman's theory of deskilling and, as a consequence, a denial of the Marxist concept of class struggle as the determinant of power and authority in the sphere of production. By shifting the focus of the historian's concerns away from the terrain of class conflict to the terrain of compromise industrial relations could be depicted as a search for a mutually reciprocal agreed set of rules and codes of conduct, rather than a struggle over the distribution of the social product. Patrick Joyce's notion of 'reciprocity' became a key term in the new social histories of the workplace. By stressing the mutuality of capital and labour over issues of common concern, revisionist history did not lose sight of the fact that conflict was still embedded in workplace relationships; however, it was seen as less to do with abstract notions of power and authority, and more with instrumental issues of pay and conditions of work. Contrary to Braverman, far from being a radicalising agent the workplace was depicted in these accounts as disabling radical initiatives by continuing to promote material and status divisions among workers. Alastair Reid sums up the views of the revisionists when he writes that in the period 1850-1914: Most working men and women ... retained real skills and real autonomy at work, experienced a rising trend in real incomes,

7

INTRODUCTION

and were increasingly able to sustain their own independent economic, social and political organisations. As a result the inevitability of fierce conflict between capital and labour was considerably reduced and there were many areas where agreement was possible even over the organisation of work itsel£. 22 The links between work and politics seem in this scenario to be tenuous, and, contrary to Braverman, there is no clear and unambiguous trajectory of deskilling in the workplace. 3. Rethinking Des killing and Politics The revisionist view that skill was preserved and nurtured within the changing economic and technological regimes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism can be contested. Although this will be dealt with in greater detail in the succeeding chapters of the book, a few basic points have to be made in order to establish the theoretical currency of class as a basis of analysis in the sphere of production. Firstly, there is the evidence of testimony. All the histories of work in the nineteenth century point to a widespread restructuring of skill and a tightening up of industrial discipline. And while these changes were experienced unevenly, few trades were left untouched. As autobiographies of working men show, the cumulative effect of these changes was to create a sense of bewilderment and loss among skilled workers. 23 Secondly, even if one could argue that some of these changes involved an element of re-skilling, to suddenly find that one's skills, which were developed over a long period of time, were no longer required must have been a profoundly disturbing experience for those affected by technological change. Whether this acted to radicalise workers, or, indeed, provides us with clues in which to theorise the relationship in general terms between work and politics is problematic. While it is empirically impossible to verify the relationship between the two worlds, it might be possible to establish a number indirect and broad connections. In spite of the general reduction in working hours that took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, people still spent a considerable part of their daily lives in the workplace. Average hours of work for a skilled man were about fifty-four a week in 1900, but with overtime it might be much longer. Railway engine drivers and guards spent around seventy hours a week at work. The inner life of the workplace and the relationships built around it deeply embedded

8

Introduction themselves in the consciousness of the worker. Moreover, since it was work and the status it conferred on a worker which provided him or her and family with a place in the wider society of working-class communities the importance was multiplied in complex ways. The removal of the foundation of that status and the income that underpinned it through changes in the work process involved a loss of face for those involved. A recent example of this can be found in the destruction of mining communities in Britain through changing world markets for coal. This has been accompanied by the demise of the miner as the symbolic hero figure of the proletariat. The fear of sinking into poverty was enough to drive displaced workers, and those threatened by displacement, to seek a modicum of protection from the state either in the form of a reduced working week, or a minimum wage. The pursuit of social security inevitably involved them in political struggles. Furthermore, as changing work regimes impact themselves on wages and status, workers are normally moved in the direction of trade unionism. Although greater union densities do not make industrial conflict any more likely, during periods when production systems are changing and profoundly threatening inherited skills the conflicts that erupt are on such a large-scale they assume a highly symbolic nature. This is because they are not confined simply to the specific work group or groups involved in the action, but engulf whole communities. Alan McKinlay's work on inter-war shipyard riveters has shown how important kinship networks are not only in terms of recruitment to the trade, but also in enforcing solidarity during periods of industrial struggle. 24 The 1984/85 miners' strike demonstrated the importance of women's groups in the maintenance of solidarity. Therefore, the tensions induced by the introduction of new technologies and the conflicts they produced tend to draw in whole communities. In major industrial set pieces, this may have also involved the worker community in an encounter with the state in the presence of the police; normally seen by workers as pro-employer. Dealing with the sharp end of the state's coercive arm inevitably produced a politicising impact on the local community. Thus, the workplace cannot be written off as having no relationship with the world of politics. As industrial relations became increasingly politicised by the state from the late nineteenth century onwards workers in struggle were drawn into politics whether they liked it or not. The cultural shift in social and political history with its emphasis on discourse fails to take these factors into account and in

9

INTRODUCTION

doing so separates politics from economics. This leads to a number of intellectual problems which can be best illustrated by examining the social history of class. 4. The Social History of Class The implications of these studies of the labour process for workingclass politics in the nineteenth and twentieth century are highly important. For if the history of workplace relations is the story of the acceptance by the workers of the rights of private property and the unsocial ownership of wealth, then how far did the legitimisation of property also signify acceptance of the major institutions of liberal capitalism? If the answer is one of affirmation, then, the whole Marxist project regarding the historic mission of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish a socialist society is a false and ahistorical one; a product of the philosophical imagination of a German emigre. The political story of the working class can, therefore, be written as voluntary incorporation rather than as class struggle. The Labour Party can be seen in this historical scenario as the institutional expression of incorporationist tendencies with the organised working class, instead of a vehicle for restructuring the economic basis of society in favour of the proletariat. As Ross McKibbin, in his celebrated essay, 'Why there was no Marxism in Britain', put it: Two of the prime assumptions of any Marxist party- a rejection by much of the working class of existing social institutions and a belief in the unity of 'economics' and 'politics'- simply did not hold. The Labour Party was not free to choose between Marxism and reformism but only between varieties of reformism. 25 McKibbin's essay was a riposte to the dominance of Marxist thought in historical studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Accepting the main philosophical tenets of historical materialism, historians saw the history of the working class in relatively unproblematic ways. In these accounts there was a clear and unambiguous relationship between one's economic position and one's political behaviour. The historical project of Marxist historiography was to discover why 'reformism' had dominated the politics of the labour movement, rather than more radical alternatives, then, to shift the workers in the latter direction. 26 As a result, labour history was written as a series of disjunctures in 10

Introduction

which the forces of accommodation and struggle vied with each other as rally points of working-class political allegiance. This way of patterning the past led to the construction of a periodised scenario peopled by the demons and heroes of class struggle. Firstly, there was the period of political radicalism in which the working class accepted middle-class political leadership and political economy in an attempt to democratise the British state. The culmination of this phase of political struggle was the First Reform Act of 1832 in which the urban property owners were enfranchised. The failure to include the working class in the constitution set the stage for the next phase - Chartism. This movement for the political enfranchisement of the working class was a reaction to middle-class betrayal in 1832 and the establishment of the New Poor Law in England in 1834. Chartism was the first independent political expression of the proletariat, and through its political struggles an ideology of class interests was developed and entrenched within the worker's consciousness. Its failure to achieve its goals opened up a period of class collaboration in the third quarter of the nineteenth century in which the leadership of the working class, or labour aristocracy, was bought off by the ruling class with the promise of material and status rewards. The third phase saw the rise of socialism as socialist agitators mobilised the previously unorganised unskilled workers towards a new political alignment with skilled workers, who themselves faced displacement by semi-skilled labour, due to the growth of big business and technological change. The culmination of this phase in the history of the working class was the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. From this point onwards the history of Labour became the struggle between reformism and revolution. On the wider front, British politics had polarised into working-class Labour and middle-class Tory, with the Liberals in the political wilderness. Class, therefore, provided the key to the understanding of the process of political change, which was depicted by labour historians as inevitable and predictable.27 However, the sight of millions of trade unionists turning their backs on Labour and voting for the Tories in 1983, moved historians to question the basic assumptions of class interpretations of political behaviour. The jettisoning of reductionist emphasis on the relationship between economics and politics, saw the whole trajectory of Marxistinspired labour history undergo a profound revision. E. P. Thompson's view that class consciousness emerged within the working class out of the traumatic experience of industrialism, and that by 1832 it was

11

INTRODUCTION

'made', in the sense of having its own institutions and ideology, was heavily attacked. Drawing on developments within post-modernism which stressed the determining importance of language in shaping political actions, Patrick Joyce argued that the language of 'the people' was a far more potent shibboleth than the language of class. 28 Thompson was further criticised for failing to show that his dispossessed and displaced artisan radicals represented the 'working class', rather than a small intellectual elite. Moreover, there was a tendency to concentrate on the pre-industrial losers in the process of modernisation at the expense of the winners. The stress on language was also evident in Gareth Stedman Jones's revisionist essay on Chartism. Discarding social explanations of the rise of Chartism, Stedman Jones saw the movement as part of the tradition of political radicalism dating back to the late eighteenth century. Chartism, he argued, never developed a socialist critique of the capitalist system and neither did it seek to establish a society based on the common ownership of wealth. Chartism saw as its constituency not simply the working class but 'the people', and it employed a language of politics drawn from the radical tradition in keeping with this vision. 29 The enemy still remained 'old corruption' and hereditary power. As the Chartist Circular put it: Hereditary power corrupted the whole government, poisoned the press, demoralised society, prostituted the church, dissipated the resources of the nation, created monopolies, paralysed trade, ruined half the merchants, produced national bankruptcy -it could be overthrown if capitalocracy united with the people. 30 By establishing Chartism as a movement for political reform organised round the main shibboleths of the radical tradition, rather than as a movement based on the political interests of a single class, once the movement had collapsed, it was the core political values of that radical tradition, rather than socialism, that motivated workers in their continuing search for a share of political power. Biagini and Reid, in a recent collection of influential essays on political radicalism, argue that there 'is enough continuity in political radicalism [to] ... demonstrate [that] ... social explanations of major changes [are] unnecessary'. 31 They go on to stress the importance of radical Liberalism in the early formation of the Labour Party, rejecting the views of Marxist historians, such as Thompson and Hobsbawm, that the latter was formed out of socialist activity amongst the unskilled,

12

Introduction or that intensified class conflict brought it about. Thus, working-class history in the nineteenth century can be viewed in terms of continuity rather than in terms of disjuncture. Alastair Reid claims that there was no 'widespread support for state socialism, whether of a revolutionary or reformist type, among the British working people in this period [1850-1914]'. 32 Indeed, the choice was between Liberal or Conservative parties. However, if socialism was not an option for working people in the period 1850-1914, how far did the experience of the First World War and the inter-war depression create the kind of class society, and with it the level of class struggle predicted by Marx and his followers? John Stevenson and Chris Cook in The Slump (1977) show British society divided between a prosperous South and a depressed North, with the rising living standards of the former contrasted with the poverty and unemployment of the latter. They argue that there was little threat to liberal democracy of the dimension faced by Germany in the early 1930s because the main institutions of British society still were accorded legitimacy by subordinate groups. The unemployed were fatalistic rather than radical as extremist left-wing political parties, such as the Communist Party, received only minuscule support from redundant workers. Those in work gave overwhelming support to the National government in the 1931 general election. Political and industrial protest may have occurred in this period, but it rarely amounted to more than a series of economistic demands for work, improved wages and welfare benefits. The Britain of the post-Second World War decades is the story of dimming of class awareness as encapsulated in the work of Goldthorpe.33 Rising living standards saw consumption become the key to understanding political behaviour rather than class. The old communities and heavy industries which sustained notions of class consciousness were swept away by housing redevelopment and the transformation of the labour market due to the growth of the service sector. The class structure which emerged from this profound period of economic and social restructuring became more, rather than less, complex. Braverman's prediction of a homogenised proletariat was contradicted by the persistence of income and status differences, as well as the recomposition of skills demanded by new computerised technology. 34 The Conservative breakthrough in 1979 was the climax of this long transformation in the economic and social fabric of British society. Thatcher's electoral victory and the changes it has wrought in society found even sympathetic voices on the left writing

13

INTRODUCTION

that: 'Socialism is not inherent in the consciousness of the working class, but is one possible development amongst others'. 35 Class in this revisionist scenario is a meaningless concept in British history as its relevance to the experience of working people is, at best, tangential, and, at worst, irrelevant. It remains as only one of a series of relatively minor forms of self-identity. As Patrick Joyce puts it: it is 'seen less as objective reality than as a social construct'. 36 Liberal capitalist, or social democratic regimes, survive not because of coercion, or the 'false consciousness' of subordinate groups, but through the freely given consent of workers and their families to the major institutions of civil societyY 5. Languages of Class The powerful revisionist critique of the role of class in British history would appear to make a book on the Scottish working class a redundant and an otherwise useless project; that is, of course, if we believe that class is as jejune a concept as the revisionists would have us believe. Not all historians and social scientists are prepared to follow the revisionists down the yellow brick road to the classless society. Although one can appreciate that reductionist theories of class linked to teleological models of historical change may obscure more than they shed light on issues concerned with social and political change, does this mean that more refined and subtle usages of the concept need be discarded too? Class interest and communual concerns over religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on, can come into conflict with each other leading to one or more of these factors obscuring the other as focal points of identity and association, but any sophisticated use of the concept of class should be able to accommodate these tensions. As Eley and Nield comment, part of the problem of the post-modernists in their messianic fervour to dethrone Marxism is: The refusal to talk about Marxism as anything other than a single and undifferentiated thing . ... The vanished - or vanquished - utility or plausibility of Marxism is apparently connected in the minds of Joyce and others with the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the irreversible 'failure' of the experiments begun in 1917. 38 Likewise, when it comes to the question of class the tests applied to its currency by revisionists in explaining social and political behaviour 14

Introduction

are so rigorous that the working class continues to fail to achieve a pass mark. Only evidence of revolutionary consciousness is permitted within the parameters of revisionist discourse as Patrick Joyce makes clear. He defines class consciousness as the capacity of a class 'to behave as a class actor' through organisation; 39 in other words the old dichotomy of Marx's 'class in itself' and 'class for itself' rephrased. Texts are scrutinised for any hint of departure from this pedantic reading of class consciousness. But, as Neville Kirk points out, to adopt such a severe test of class consciousness would be to write off almost all of the working-class political activity in Britain from the 1840s to the 1990s.40 This point is underscored by Michael Mann when he says that 'classes have never had a full, pure and independent life'. 41 For a variety of reasons classes fail the tests of Stedman Jones and Joyce, but what is of concern is that failure pushes us even further down the linguistic path of analysis. By rejecting the link between social being and consciousness, postmodernists are heading, as Ralph Miliband argues, in the direction of subjectivism in which 'notions of class, structure and society itself, cease to be regarded as proper tools of analysis'. 42 Indeed, the stress on language, or the 'text', as the only means of analysis leads to a form of linguistic determinism in which human agency and non-linguistic historical phenomena are considered irrelevant or unknowable. Within this new framework of analysis the influence of literary criticism allows historical documents to be stripped of any referential or contextual links, which misses the obvious point that language, and the way it is understood, depends on the context in which it is articulated. If that was not the case then language itself could not be the object of historical analysis since it would be timeless. As Neville Kirk points out: 'if reality does not extend beyond representation in language and discourse how is it possible to investigate the links between "the linguistic", "the social", "the political" and "the economic"'.43 There is, then, obviously a relationship between language and structure; a relationship which can be further explored by examining in some detail Stedman Jones's revisionist critique of traditional interpretations of Chartism. Stedman Jones, as we have seen above, saw Chartism as movement of the 'people' bound together by subscription to a common political language, rather than the first politically organised expression of the industrial proletariat. But as John Foster points out, the language of radicalism is a 'historian's construct'. 44 What Chartists said is perfectly well-known; what they meant, and how that language

15

INTRODUCTION

was interpreted by the 'people' is altogether a different matter. Searching the voluminous writings connected with Chartism can lead the historian in diametrically opposing directions in which the language of the people vies with the language of class. Such linguistic tensions have always existed within Chartist texts. The above quotation from the Chartist Circular can be set aside the following quotation from a leading Chartist:

If they will not reform this, aye uproot it, they shall have the revolution they so much dread. We shall destroy their abodes of guilt .... If they will not ... [provide] that every man shall by his labour find comfortable food and clothing for his wife and babes- then we swear ... that from the East, the West, the North and the South, we shall warp in one sheet of devouring flame ... the manufactories of the cotton tyrants, and the places of those who raised them by rapine and murder, and founded upon them the wretchedness of millions whom God ... created to be happy. 45 Although blood-curdlingly unsophisticated compared to Marxist analysis, the sense of class hatred is clearly and overwhelmingly articulated. It is also clear from a reading of more moderate Chartist texts that incorporation into the constitution was never seen as an end in itself, but as a way of redressing economic and social grievances. Neville Kirk, in his analysis of the writings of leading Lancashire Chartists, also makes this point, showing them to be acutely aware of class and exploitation. 46 Stedman Jones, therefore, in his eagerness to establish the continuity of Chartism with previous forms of political radicalism, seems to be guilty of a selective reading of the movement's texts. In reality, Chartism was a diverse political and social movement which spoke to a great deal of concerns, although primarily to the working class. The diversity of the political constituency, which included at various times pre-industrial workers, such as handloom weavers and colliers, and more modern workers, such as cotton spinners, along with petty bourgeois types, and a complex array of religious and social visionaries, demanded a varied political language that on inspection is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. Justification for one, highly particular, reading of Chartism simply does not hold up. Whether linguistic analysis provides the key to unlocking the mysteries of the past and making more rigorous our approach to its study

16

Introduction is, thus, open to severe doubt. But the debates engendered by the 'linguistic turn' have been fruitless. The stress on language has led to the abandonment of simplistic reductionist notions of the role of class. It has also made us more aware of the differences and complexities within working-class communities, and drawn our attention to the need to adopt a more critical analysis of the documents of workingclass life. But, in spite of these undoubted gains, the influence of postmodernism has had a baneful impact on labour and social history. It has influenced historians to jettison accepted and worthwhile categories of analysis with bewildering speed and with little regard to the intellectual consequences. The extremism of the post-modern revolutions has led even those broadly sympathetic to the linguistic turn to comment that: Although class history is fading, the histories that remain still present a story of power relationships and exploitation ... [and] while a history based on ideal class types may have run into the ground, a history that testifies to the ongoing narratives of subordination and social discipline continues. 47 Even Patrick Joyce has recognised that there existed tendencies in the nineteenth century towards a unity of labour experience and class solidarity and that this could fuse in times of economic and political crisis. He concludes his review of the relationship between social class and political radicalism by saying: 'Simply, class mattered' .48 It would appear that, at least, some revisionist historians do not quite wish to throw the baby out with the bath water. The concept of class remains central to our understanding of historical development, not simply because it is a convenient tool of positional measurement within the social-structure, but also because it allows us to address the larger historical questions linked to the distribution of power and wealth in society. By focusing on the working class as the most disadvantaged and exploited section of society, and its relationship with other more advantaged groups, the nature of power and authority in all their guises is made clearer. The working class, however, is not a static economic category. It is re-made and re-makes itself in a dialectical interplay as changes which occur in the economic and social structure of capitalism elicit political responses. As I was informed as an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh by R. J. Morris, class formation is an historical process; since that time there has been little written to convince me otherwise of the compelling nature of

17

INTRODUCTION

his insight. The working class of today may be quite different to that which emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century - muscle is less of a qualification for membership in an economy dominated by services than it was 150 years ago- however, powerlessness and exploitation remain a fact of working-class life in modern society. Moreover, the traditional working class has not disappeared. Manual workers made up 51.8 per cent of all employees in 1980; a figure higher for men at 55 per cent than women at 35 per cent. As Eley and Nield eloquently put it: We accept that class is being re-composed; it is not available in its previous manifest forms; it is no longer recognizable via former iconographies, typologies and embodiments. But this does not mean that either capitalism or its characteristic forms of exploitation have gone away. Current analyses of race, gender, space, sexuality, ethnicity are important not least for their purchase on changing modes of ensuring an inequitable distribution of the product. They provide access to the late capitalist modalities of exploitation and inequality- of class- in this sense. 49 The recognition of the enduring nature of capitalist social relations ensures that class remains a salient feature of socio-political analyses. As Michael Savage and Andrew Miles conclude: The working class is constantly being made and re-made, and the political implications of class formation are often ambiguous and uncertain ... as long as we live in an unequal society, in which some people exploit others, class divisions are likely to have profound political ramifications. 50 6. Rethinking Class Class, then, still matters, but it is important that it is studied in a dialectical way as a social entity subject, in the case of the working class, to recomposition, constantly negotiating and re-negotiating its relationship to other social classes and interests groups, rather than as a fixed and immutable economic category. There should also be an awareness of the tensions within the working class which result from divisions based on skill, gender, ethnicity, religion and nationalism. The model used in this book is one which tries to encompass the insights derived from post-modernist writings with the more 18

Introduction

traditional concerns of labour and social history. Although on the surface the process of social and political change may appear to be theorised in a relatively unproblematic and somewhat linear manner, the nuances and subtleties of class and inter-class relationships are prominent in the analysis. In dealing with the history of class formation and structure the book takes as its starting point the nature of the economy and the level of technology, since it is the way they interact with each other that determines the structure of the labour market and the mechanisms of income distribution. The inequalities and insecurities which result from a hierarchically structured system of rewards, the trade cycle and an ever-changing technological production regime create common or shared experiences and grievances among wage earners. These give rise to the need to organise to protect oneself, family and community from the vicissitudes of impersonal economic forces. Organisation is at first localised. However, as capital grows and nationalises itself labour follows suit assisted by the spread of communications and transport. The larger the organisations, the greater the potential for conflict and disruption, and the greater the necessity for the state to adopt an interventionist role in industrial relations. The more the state intervenes, the more it acts to politicise industrial relations, and the more it is viewed as pro-employer by workers. Recognition of bias in the state's actions pushes the trade unions in the direction of politics, eventually resulting in the formation of an independent working-class political party, since middle-class parties cannot accommodate in whole the interests of labour. Indeed, all successful labour and socialist parties have evolved out of the trade unions and survive and grow because of this political bond. While this might appear teleological, the question of speed of formation, the nature of the ethos and ideology of the party, become more problematic and draw in factors concerned with ethnicity, gender, religion, regionalism, and nationality. It is these sometimes ambiguous, competing and contradictory factors which act to prevent the emergence of any predestined or given pathway of labour's political development. Their influence also demonstrates the need to view labour's arrival and continued presence on the national stage of politics as a constant process of negotiation and re-negotiation. Theories based on predestination fail to answer obvious, but important, questions of timing, such as why, when the objective economic conditions of insecurity and poverty were conducive to the formation of an independent workingclass party, did it take until1906 in Britain? Relying on sloppy theories 19

INTRODUCTION

of 'false consciousness', or vanguardism, prevents us from engaging with the realities of working-class consciousnesss and creates ultimately unhistorical categories of analysis. Questions concerning the nature and content of political consciousness can only be addressed by developing a dialectical and subtle model of social and political change which allows for the interplay between the economic, the social and the political. This has obvious implications for the way the subject is written about. Adopting a totalising historical approach necessarily involves an abandonment of reductionist views of class, and also of workerist models of social change which abstract the workplace, and the social relations it gives rise to, from the wider community, in favour of a model which establishes linkages between the workplace, the community and the political system, and which takes account of the relationship of material conditions to thought and language. Although the focus of this particular study is the Scottish working class's experience of industrial capitalism and the responses this engendered at a variety of levels, the underlying aim is to realise this conceptual desideratum. 7. Scottish Historians and Class History The study of the Scottish working-class's historical development offers an important and instructive corrective to the almost exclusively anglocentric focus of current debates on the issues of class and class formation. Indeed, the failure to consider the experience of workers in the celtic fringe of Britain is somewhat bewildering given the suitability of these regions for examining the relationship of class to other socio-political factors. Scotland stands out as a paramount ommission in this respect. Economically, it has traditionally experienced higher levels of poverty and lower wages than England and Wales, had a higher proportion of immigrants from Ireland, and, in the west of Scotland, the greatest concentration of skilled workers anywhere in Europe with the possible exception of the Ruhr. Socially, Scotland has suffered extreme inter-class divisions resulting from religious sectarianism and endured higher levels of overcrowding and low amenity housing than the rest of Britain. Politically, it was more entrenched in support in the nineteenth century for the Liberal Party, and more for Labour in the twentieth century, than anywhere else in Britain. Moreover, in recent years the Scottish working class has undergone profound restructuring with the shift from heavy industry to services and light manufacturing which has all but destroyed the 20

Introduction skilled, male, Protestant culture. In spite of this, Scotland has bucked the electoral trends exhibited elsewhere in the UK since 1979 by steadfastly and increasingly voting Labour, while, at the same time, encompassing a growing movement for national independence. These factors alone make Scotland an interesting and almost ideal social laboratory to test recent theses concerning the demise of class. At the very least, it allows for a greater comparative dimension to be added to an agenda dominated by insular and nationalist concerns of English historians and social scientists. Indeed, the political development of the Scottish working class has taken a different trajectory from that of its English counterpart. It has been more influenced by the rational and educational philosophies of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment than has the English. 51 This has resulted in moral suasion and rational argument being a more powerful part of the armoury of political resistance north of the border than south. As a consequence of the stress on literacy and education by a Calvinist-dominated social theology, the tradition of auto-didactism and self-improvement was entrenched in the working class and the labour movement from an early stage. Somewhat contradictorily, given the influence of rational thought, the labour movement in Scotland also adopted the moral concerns of Calvinism, hence the powerful influence of temperance, something which appealed to both moderates and revolutionaries alike. 52 Religion itself has exercised a longer and more powerful grip on the consciousness of workers in Scotland than in England, with higher levels of membership and attendance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 53 The divisions caused by sectarianism's purchase on working-class affections have proved a much more disabling factor in Labour's political progress than in England, with the possible exception of Liverpool, and in spite of the traditional religious enmity between Anglicans and Methodists. 54 The other major difference between Scotland and England has been the potently enduring appeal of national self-government. The enduring tensions over the hugely unpopular settlement of 1707 have seen Home Rule figure as an important and enduring symbol of working-class resistance, particularly to the landed elite. Anti-landlordism has featured more strongly in the political agitation north of the border, not least because of the Highland Clearances, and the large waves of Highland and Irish migration to the urban central belt of Scotland. 55 Unfortunately, there exists no history of the Scottish working class which provides an overarching account of its development since the

21

INTRODUCTION

1800s to the present, or attempts to synthesise the various strands and nationally specific peculiarities of this development within a totalising model of socio-political change. However, a number of studies do exist which address themselves to working-class history. The first of these was Thomas Johnston's whiggish interpretation of the rise of labour in Scotland - A History of the Working Classes in Scotland (1923). Since then only two serious attempts have been made to offer some kind of overview of working-class history in modern Scotland- J.D. Young's The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class (1979) and T. C. Smout's A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950 (1986). However, both studies provide only partial accounts of the historical experience of the Scottish working class and the chapters are written with little attempt to synthesise their conclusions and fit them into the wider perspectives of class history. Also their concerns and ideological positions are very different: Young presents a class in constant struggle for emancipation, while Smout, in a more subtle account, shows how the working class accommodated itself to the main institutions of power and authority in Scottish, and British, society. Both Smout and Young show the influence of E. P. Thompson's 'history from below approach'; an approach which with the publication of The Making of the English Working Class (1963) signalled a move away from institutional labour history to a social history of the working class. With this shift the whole question of class and class consciousness became the focal point of labour history and was treated as problematical rather than being taken for granted. In practice, the new approach meant that labour history was less concerned with union structure and institutional political histories and more with the workplace, the family, the community and popular struggles. Thompson's intervention made people more aware of the differences within the working class and this resonated with the growing disenchantment of those historians operating within the so-called celtic fringe of Britain with English-based history. The disillusionment of historians in Scotland coincided with a resurgence of the national question as the key item on the Scottish political agenda in the 1970s. Both the volume and quality of historical writing were greatly enhanced at this time as the dramatic revival of the Scottish national movement, in part, accompanied and, in part, stimulated a greater interest in Scottish history, society and culture in its own right. Labour historians became concerned to define the distinctive national characteristics of the Scottish labour 22

Introduction

movement, in particular, and the working class, in general. From this came a very distinctive kind of historical project which had as its overriding concern the need to delineate and define the organisations, interests, values and politics of the skilled, male, Protestant worker. However, in spite of its narrow focus, the gains from this approach have not been negligible. An impressive amount of published material in recent years has illuminated the darker areas of the experience of the skilled worker within the context of the workplace and the wider society. The work of Braverman on the capitalist labour process has influenced a great deal of research on the question of deskilling in Scottish industry. Studies of shipbuilding, engineering and coalmining have stressed the means by which skilled workers adapted to the changing imperatives of production and how this allowed them to sustain the craft culture in spite of economic decline. 56 The work of R. Q. Gray on the artisan elite of mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh has highlighted the ways in which skill and status in the workplace resonated with wider societal values to establish a culture of respectabilityY Regrettably, Gray's work has not been satisfactorily extended into the twentieth century, but there are a number of individual studies of aspects of class culture, for example, on temperance and religion, which are of interest in this connection. 58 However, given the overconcentration on skilled workers, it would appear to anyone new to Scottish labour history that certain sections of the working class will have only to be seen to play a minor role in shaping its historical development. These omissions have distorted the historical record. As a result of the process of exclusion, women and the whole issue of gender in the workplace and politics have been severely under-researched. Women's issues and their position in the class structure have been traditionally marginalised in labour historiography north of the border, although to some extent this has been addressed in the last decade or so. However, in spite of worthy attempts by historians to alter the focus of labour history, the volume of published work on working-class women is small and does little to alter the impression of historical marginality. 59 Similarly, material on white-collar workers and their experiences in the workplace, their involvement in trade unionism, and their political behaviour is virtually non-existent. 60 More crucially, outside of a consideration of the labour market, there has been a general lack of interest shown in the position of the unskilled worker. The changing nature of unskilled work, the historical narrowing of wage differentials in industry and the relationships this created between skilled and 23

INTRODUCTION

unskilled, as well as the rise of unskilled unions, have not as yet excited the interest of Scottish historians to any large degree. The only full-scale published study of unskilled workers in Scotland and their unions is Angela Tuckett's institutional history of the Scottish carters and motormen, although recent work by William Kennefick on dockers holds out the promise that this lucana will at some point in the future be addressed. 61 More impressive progress has been made in the areas of ethnicity and popular struggles of the radical era. The role of the Irish Catholic immigrants in shaping the development of the Scottish working class and the labour movement is now more widely appreciated than it was twenty years ago. 62 However, the phenomenon of internal migration from the Scottish Highlands to the Lowland cities is not as yet well understood, 63 although there is little doubt that the presence of two ethnic communities competing in the same labour markets exacerbated sectarian and national tensions. There is also much evidence, as we have said, to support the idea that the existence of large migrant communities pushed the early socialist organisations in the direction of land reform. 64 Anti-landlordism linked with the idea of Home Rule for Ireland and Scotland became an essential and self-evident part of the political culture of the Scottish working class and the Labour Party north of the border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The struggles over land reform were part of a tradition of popular revolt against authority and deprivation dating back to the late eighteenth century. During the first phase of industrialisation the struggle was mainly aimed at democratising Scottish and British politics through reforming the franchise. Although normally peaceable, at times the conflicts assumed greater intensity which pushed the participants in the direction of insurrection and violence. Rioting was a frequent response by working people to unfavourable economic conditions, but as the industrial system became more entrenched the unrest increasingly took a political form, culminating in the Radical War of 1820. Strikes and the use of insurrectionary violence to overthrow (unsuccessfully) the British state emphasised the growing class dimensions of Scottish politics. Such incidents form the backcloth to ongoing debates among Scottish historians regarding the vexed question of class and class consciousness. While few historians in Scotland would accept the completeness of class formation articulated in Thompson's epic work, there has emerged a division among the former over the degree of class consciousness exhibited by Scottish 24

Introduction workers in this period. 65 Although the debates are still in progress, it can be argued that they have been carried out within the parameters set by a historiography that fails to take account of the new work on politics and language. The insights of revisionist historians such as Stedman Jones into the meanings and significance of political discourse and the language of class struggle in this period have not been incorporated in a serious way into the evaluations of class formation and political struggle. The main text on Scottish Chartism - A. Wilson, The Chartist Movement in Scotland (1970)- was written over twenty-five years ago. In spite of these conceptual failings, the more recent studies of political radicalism have the virtue that they are set within a consideration of wider questions of class formation, although significantly little appreciation of the economic basis of exploitation or the labour process exists in them. Other works on popular agitation in nineteenth-century Scotland lack this conceptual dimension; in particular, studies of the political development of the women's movement are almost bereft of any conceptual awareness. 66 This is compensated to some extent by the studies of the struggles on Clydeside during the period 1915-1919. Here we witness evidence of the impact of more recent sophisticated and nuanced approaches to social historyP However, even among the more informed and intellectually rigorous historians of the 'Red Clyde', there remains a tendency to highlight moments of heroic class struggle and disjuncture at the expense of wider, more discreet and continuous narratives of class history. The tendency to focus almost exclusively on the heroic at the expense of the mundane is understandable, but the silences of the past have left the working class in modern Scotland unable to comprehend or make intelligible its own history. There are no overarching histories of the development of the Scottish working class or the Labour Party in Scotland which cover the period 1918 to the present. Thus, the historical memory of popular mobilisation and struggle has, outside of 'Red Clydeside', been virtually erased from the consciousness of even the organised working class. And while other European socialist parties have continued to mobilise historic symbols of popular resistance which speak to contemporary concerns, 68 currently Labour in Scotland has to operate within an iconography - the rose -and language- neo-liberalism- borrowed from other political traditions that address themselves solely to instrumental and functional concerns over consumption. Ambitious it might be in terms of period and scope, this study

25

INTRODUCTION

cannot hope to fill the lacuna or make wholly intelligible the silences of the past. There remains too much work to be done in this direction. What the book does attempt to do is to synthesise the author's own original research with other published monographs and articles. By doing so it is hoped that a more theoretically credible and challenging account of the development of the working class in modern Scotland can be produced. The study is split into five main time periods. The first period deals with the impact of industrialisation and technological change on the growth of working-class organisations in the workplace and in the political realm, culminating in the rise and fall of Chartism. The second period covers the decades of the the third quarter of the nineteenth century and addressess itself to questions regarding the demise of the radical Chartist agenda and the creation of socio-political consensus in Scottish, and British, society. The third period deals with the rise of Labour to 1914 and asks whether this posed a real challenge to the Liberal hegemony north of the border in the light of important changes in the workplace and in trade union organisation. The fourth period addresses the issues connected with the debates on 'Red Clydeside' and extends this into the inter-war period, examining how mass unemployment and widespread social dislocation forced the ethos and politics of the Scottish labour movement to undergo a fundamental revision. The final period of the book analyses the impact of far-reaching economic and technological change on the occupational and social structure of Scottish society, in particular, looking at destruction of the skilled, male Protestant culture; asking why this did not lead to a fundamental re-structuring of the political landscape as happened in England in the late 1970s and 1980s. Dividing the book into these time periods is done for convenience sake; it does not mean that the approach to working-class history taken is insensitive to the importance of the continuity of older forms of social relationships, past political practices, values and attitudes in shaping current configurations of social and political relations. Because of its pioneering nature and large chronological terrain covered, the study will no doubt appear, at times, faltering in its methodology and interpretations. However, perhaps it is more important to initiate the process of dialogue with all the dangers and pitfalls inherent in it, than to maintain a silence on these contentious theoretical and historical issues. After all the history of the Scottish working class and its organisations is rich in content, and rewarding in study, offering those who wish to delve into it valuable comparisons

26

Introduction which are illuminating and instructive in dealing with the nature of class and class formation in Britain and elsewhere. If this book succeeds in winning the recognition of this from anglocentric historians, then perhaps it will mark the end of the peripheralisation of the experience of those workers on the celtic fringe of Britain. From this a truly comprehensive and comparative account of the historical evolution of the 'British', rather than the 'English', working class may emerge in the future. The argument for it could not be more compelling, or the moment more appropriate, given the present debates regarding national identity initiated by Linda Colley's study of the formation of British nationalism in the eighteenth century. 69

27

Chapter 1

INTERPRETATIONS

The Great Reform Act of 1832 marked a turning point in the political history of Scotland and Britain as a whole. The enfranchisement of the non-landowning propertied classes climaxed decades of political agitation dating back to the 1780s, and resolved the main tension between the different strata of property regarding the question of 'no taxation without representation'. Although the main offices of the state remained in the hands of the aristocracy, the political economy of the government, particularly with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, became more attuned to furthering the interests of the industrial arm of capital. These political changes belatedly reflected the shift in wealth-holding and ownership of property in Britain which had taken place since the mid-eighteenth century and had been ushered in by the series of economic and technological changes which we, for convenience sake, call the Industrial Revolution. However, while in Scotland the Edinburgh Whigs and their middle-class supporters congratulated themselves on their constitutional triumph, another section of society had much less reason to be enthusiastic. Working people had campaigned as ardently as the middle classes for the franchise, but had found themselves ignored in the new constitutional arrangements following 1832. This sense of alienation in the sphere of politics was intensified in England by the introduction of the oppressive New Poor Law in 1834 and in Scotland by the failure of its Radical MPs to support reform of the Factory Acts. These political actions only served to underline the growing distance in the workplace between capital and labour. Social and political factors thus conflated after 1832 to create profound feelings of disenchantment with the new British state in working communities and from this emerged the Chartist movement in the late 1830s. Although as a political movement Chartism failed in its mission to win a share of political power for the working classes, and was a spent force by 1850, its activities have generated a great deal of 31

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

debate as to whether it constituted a movement of a single class or a 'people'. The debate has been fuelled by the revisionist writings of Gareth Stedman Jones, who, as we have seen, argued that Chartism cannot be understood as a knee-jerk response to the social distress of industrialisation, nor can it be understood 'in forms of consciousness of a particular social class, since the form pre-existed any independent action by such a class'. 1 This view is underscored by R. Q. Gray who urges us to take 'seriously' Chartism's rhetoric of 'the people' and 'not dissolve that specific identity into class or occupational bases' .2 The ideological rupture prefaced by Stedman Jones's intervention has provided a strong and compelling alternative interpretation to older, more class-based analyses. It is surely correct to stress that Chartism was part of an ongoing political tradition of radicalism which pre-figures the creation of social class. Equally, it seems perfectly acceptable to question the wisdom of analysing Chartism using Marx's concept of class consciousness, or to see it as a defining moment in the history of socialism. However, to suggest, as he does, that the movement can be abstracted from the material conditions in which it took root appears less than helpful. 3 This type of idealistic, non-referential analysis of Chartism can only be sustained by assuming that the language of Chartism was in itself uncontradictory and that it was capable of coalescing disparate groups of the politically powerless within a commonly understood political vocabulary. While to an extent Chartism achieved this latter goal, its success in mobilising 'the people' was only ever realised because its language of political reform was appropriated and 'deconstructed' by each of the social constituencies which made it up in ways which addressed their own particular sets of aspirations and grievances. The social experiences of industrialisation, particularly privation, squalor and unemployment, helped mobilise the powerless in a popular revolt against state power; a revolt which gained increased momentum during downturns in the trade cycle. The language of political reform made sense to many in this context because it appeared to offer relief from harsh social policies and economic hardship. The link with the social was also confirmed by the fact that political reform was never seen by the Chartist constituency as an end in itself; indeed, it was an integral part of a wider programme of social reform which included a more generous poor law, a progressive system of taxation, and so on. Linguistic explanations of the development of political radicalism have, therefore, a useful, but limited, role in explaining Chartism's rise and fall, or its relationship to the development of working-class 32

Interpretations

consciousness. Part of the problem is that Stedman Jones and other historians influenced by post-modernist trends have relied on an ideal type of Chartism with little regard paid to the regional differences which were apparent in its leadership, organisation, rhetoric and value system. Without wishing to pre-empt the foregoing analysis, Scotland had a higher proportion of Chartist Churches than anywhere else in Britain, and temperance also played an important part in shaping the values of Chartists north of the border. It is little wonder that political speeches by Chartist leaders were heavily weighted with religious symbolism and that their choirs sang with gusto verses three to eight of the ninety-fourth Psalm. 4 Moreover, given the strength of anti-landlord feeling in Scotland, attacks on hereditary privilege resonated more powerfully with the consciousness of Scottish workers, many of whom were rural migrants, than in other parts of Britain. Diversity on this scale has to be understood by a referential analysis which links material conditions to the development of political consciousness. Therefore, to understand fully Chartism's origins, appeal and ultimate demise in the case of Scotland, we must: firstly, delineate the shifting character of the country's social and economic bases, with particular reference to the occupational structure, emigration and the growth of urban settlements; secondly, show how technology altered the nature and distribution of skills and how this affected the development of workplace and community solidarities; and, finally, examine whether the Chartist experience altered the political consciousness of the working classes in Scotland in the long term.

33

Chapter 2

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIAL AND URBAN GROWTH, 1800-1850

Under the impact of the new economic history industrialisation has now come to be viewed as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process. 5 A regional perspective, however, offers the possibility of a different interpretation of the British economy's development. 6 Because of the pivotal role played by the cotton industry north of the border in the process of industrialisation, compared to England, Scotland's economy developed in a series of dynamic stages. From an economy based primarily, but not exclusively, on agriculture in the eighteenth century, Scotland developed in a short space of time an overwhelming reliance on textiles, particularly cotton, before undergoing a transformation after 1840 to heavy industry. Although older forms of production co-existed with more modern ones, and Scotland in 1830 could still be described by one historian as a 'rural country' ,7 it was nevertheless true that by 1840 it had become 'irreversibly a different kind of society'. 8 Even landed society had experienced massive changes in its social structure with the peasantry, or sub-tenancy, of Lowland Scotland being swept away between 1780 and 1820. 9 In the period 1780-1840 it was textiles, with its novel methods of organising work, its rapidly changing technologies and its dynamic growth, which was the engine of economic growth. By 1826 nine out of ten manufacturing workers in Scotland were in textiles, with a ratio of six workers in cotton to three in linen, to one in wool. 10 Indeed, everywhere textiles was the dominant manufacturing employer, even in the less industrially developed east of Scotland. By 1843 a quarter of the population of Aberdeen, and a third of that of Edinburgh, were employed in textiles. However, in Glasgow the figure was nearly 37 per cent in 1841, while in smaller towns such as Paisley the numbers

34

Social Consequences of Industrial and Urban Growth

were even larger. 11 The spinning factories tended to be large by contemporary standards with more than 150 workers being the norm by 1840, although in Glasgow the figure was higher at 244. 12 The large outlays of capital involved in constructing and equipping a factory meant that the structure of ownership favoured partnerships over family or sole control. This closed off avenues of mobility for artisans and small farmers as the industry became dominated by capitalists. With large numbers of workers and capitalist ownership and control, textiles, and in particular cotton spinning, gave birth to the modern industrial proletariat in Scotland. And as the 1840s wore on that trend intensified with the mean workforce in textiles put at 662 per firm in 1851; a figure much higher than that in England.U However, although dynamic, the growth of textiles was uneven, with the weaving sector lagging behind spinning. In Paisley and the surrounding area there was only one power-loom factory in 1837, while in Lancashire the weaving process had been almost completely mechanised by this date. 14 The domestic system of production continued to dominate weaving in Scotland with handloom weavers being numbered in tens of thousands: Glasgow alone was estimated to employ 20 000 in 1831, while for the country as a whole the figure was around 84500 in 1840. 15 With average weekly wages for handloom weavers as low as 6s 6d a week in 1831, the abundance of cheap labour retarded the drive towards mechanisation. 16 In spite of the fact that in the east of Scotland all the carpet weaving in Dunfermline was factory-based, and over 1000 of Aberdeen's weavers were employed in factories, as well as a quarter of Arbroath's and five-sixths of Montrose's weaving population, 'factory weavers represented only a small minority of the workforce even in the east of Scotland and the typical webster of the area, even as late as 1840, was still the domestic outworker'. 17 However, in the Border towns woollen weavers, although the handloom still predominated, were being increasingly grouped in loom-shops 'in the interests of managerial efficiency' . 18 Employers persisted with labour intensive methods of production as it avoided them having to shoulder the burden of high overhead costs during economic downturns. The weavers were dismissed or simply denied webs; stocks of cloth built up in good times saw the employers through the bad. The limited manufacturing base combined with the uneven development in the cotton industry had a retarding effect on the wider economy. Transportation was slow to develop with the only railway of note in Scotland in 1832 being the Garnkirk/Glasgow line of 35

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

eight-and-a-quarter miles. It was not until 1842 that Edinburgh was linked by rail to Glasgow, and it took until 1848 for a rail link to be established between the capital city and England. The low level of demand in the economy for capital goods necessarily slowed the progress of the coal and iron industries. Although output increased thirteen-fold in the period 1700-1830, it was still far short of Lancashire, Wales and the South-West of EnglandY Coalmining until after 1832 was basically an industry which supplied local markets. Low levels of demand allowed miners to follow a dual occupation in some parts of the west of Scotland. Until 1840 many colliers were 'tenants or owners of small holdings'; as, indeed, were linen weavers - it was not until 1820 that weaving became a full-time occupation in the east of Scotland and, even as late as 183 8, over a quarter absented themselves during the summer harvest. 20 Shipbuilding was a small affair on Clydeside based mainly on wood and sail; indeed, in 1831 Aberdeen with a workforce of 681 men was arguably the most important centre of this activity in Scotland. 21 To underline the limited development of Scotland's industrial base at this time agriculture and domestic service were still the largest employers of labour in 1851.22 However, in spite of the importance of older forms of employment, the decade after 1830 witnessed a massive leap forward in terms of the modernisation of Scotland's economic base. Following the introduction of Neilson's hot blast furnace in 1828, which dramatically lowered the cost of pig-iron production north of the border, Scotland's share of British output grew from 5 to 25 per cent, or from c.37 500 tons in 1830 to 700 000 in 1849. 23 The railway building mania of the 1840s had much to with the mushroom growth of the Scottish iron industry, and it in turn had multiplier effects on other parts of the economy. Coal production soared from 3m tons in 1830 to around 7.4m in 1851, with 76 per cent of this produced in the west of Scotland. 24 Steamship building also benefited from the surge in cheap iron production, and by 1850 the Clyde was responsible for 66 per cent of the tonnage of iron vessels in Britain. 25 These developments, according to Chris Whatley, meant that in a very short space of time Scotland had become 'more industrialised than the rest of Britain', although even north of the border industrial employment was more concentrated in Strathclyde, Central, Fife and Tayside than elsewhere in the country. 26 The growth of textiles and ancillary trades, such as chemicals, and, later, heavy industry drew in thousands of migrants to the cities and 36

Social Consequences of Industrial and Urban Growth the growing industrial towns of the west of Scotland. Scotland which had been tenth in the world's urban league in 1700 was fourth by 1800, and second only to England and Wales by 1851.27 Under the weight of mass migration places such as Glasgow mushroomed with the population growing from 77 000 in 1801 to 275 000 forty years later. Small industrial towns also grew spectacularly in this period with Paisley's population more than doubling in twenty years. By 1841 70 per cent of the population of the west of Scotland was living in urban settlements. 28 Migration played a major role in the growth of urban settlements with 53 per cent of the inhabitants of the ten largest Scottish towns in 1851 being born elsewhere. 29 Hugh Miller, stonemason, recalled in his autobiography that in Edinburgh in the mid-1820s 'less than one-fourth' of the mechanics he made an acquaintance with were 'natives of the place'. The rest had migrated to the capital from 'country districts and small towns'. 30 As early as 1801, 29 per cent of the population of Greenock was from the Scottish Highlands, and by 1851, 54 000 Highlanders had settled in the west of Scotland. 31 Indeed, Highlanders tended on the whole to migrate to the western Lowlands, with 60 per cent of them living there in 1851. 32 On top of this came Irish immigration. Although constant since the late eighteenth century, emigration from Ireland tended to be temporary. In spite of this 4.8 per cent, or 126 321, of Scotland's population was Irish-born; however, in the west of Scotland the figure was much higher. Forty-four thousand, or 16 per cent, of Glasgow's population in 1841 was Irish-born, but if we include those of Irish extraction the figure might be put at double this. 33 Although most were Catholics, there was a sizeable Irish Protestant community in Glasgow by this time. James Cleland, the early statistician of Glasgow, estimated that of a total Irish population of 35 534, 8569, or just under a quarter, were Protestant in 1831. 34 What turned this steady stream of immigrants into a flood was, of course, the Irish famine of the mid-1840s. By 1848 an average of 1000 Irish migrants were arriving every week in Glasgow, and as a result of this explosive diaspora Scotland's Irishborn population increased by 90 per cent in the decade 1841-51. 35 Compared to only 2.9 per cent for England and Wales, the Irish-born portion of the population of Scotland had reached 7.2 per cent at its peak. 36 The growth of mining, handloom weaving and transport was an attraction to the Irish, and by the late 1830s over 30 per cent of handloom weavers were Irish-hornY Although most of them were of 37

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

Catholic origin, there is evidence that the Protestant Irish had established themselves in the spinning and weaving factories of the Calton-Mile End area of Glasgow and in Blantyre in Lanarkshire. 38 As an employer agriculture was also important to the Irish. A total of 16.5 per cent of the population of rural Wigtownshire in 1841 was Irish-born, and there was a sizeable Irish community established in Dumfrieshire by this date. 39 Thus, settling in an area was related to the occupational structure. Aberdeen had only 1.8 per cent of its population Irish-born in 1851, whereas its near neighbour, Dundee, with its vibrant textile industry, had over 20 per cent. 40 Nearly half the female textile workers in Greenock in 1851 were Irish-born; and half the coal and ironstone miners of Coatbridge were of the same origin. Indeed, by mid-century over a third of the population of Coatbridge was Irish-born. 41 Although most Irish workers were employed in unskilled, low paid occupations, there is evidence to suggest that some were able to penetrate into skilled occupations. A study of the marriage register in St Patrick's RC Church, Anderston, Glasgow, shows that of 146 Catholic males engaged in metals, machines and shipbuilding, excluding labourers, 28.1 per cent were low paid hammermen and 10.4 per cent were riveters; however, 16 per cent of the total described themselves as boilermakers and 9. 7 per cent were moulders. 42 This does not alter the fact that the majority of Catholic Irish workers were in unskilled jobs, but it would appear at this stage that religious persuasion was not the barrier to a trade that it became later in the century. However, the scramble for jobs and living space created tensions both within and without the Irish community. By 1835 there were twelve Orange Lodges in Glasgow and in the following year they provided the platform for the launch of the 'Tory and Presbyterian' Glasgow Operative Conservative Society (1836-42). 43 Priests and ministers reported on the open friction and social distance between the two communities in places such as Glasgow, Greenock, Paisley and Kilmarnock. 44 The overcrowding and squalor which resulted from the mass influx of migrants turned cities like Glasgow into the nearest suburbs to hell. The chief constable of Glasgow, Captain Miller, remarked at a meeting of the British Association in 1840 that in 'the very centre of the city there is an accumulated mass of squalid wretchedness which is probably unequalled in any town of the British dominions'. 45 The death rate in urban areas increased dramatically as disease took its toll on the squalid and impoverished town dwellers. Glasgow's mortality rate was the highest in the country, peaking at 39.9 per 38

Social Consequences of Industrial and Urban Growth 1000 between 1845 and 1849. 46 Even Edinburgh with its small manufacturing and service-based economy saw its death rate increase from 25 per 1000 in 1810-19 to 29 per 1000 in the decade 1831-39. Fever mortality levels were higher in the capital than in the worst English townY Much of the poverty arose from the presence of a large reserve army of labour which led to work being scarce or irregular. However, wages for most workers, even skilled, were lower in Scotland than south of the border; a result of the numbers crowding into trades rather than deskilling. Building workers earned somewhere between 15 and 25 per cent less than their equivalents in England. 48 Ian Levitt and Christopher Smout, in their study of poor law returns in 1843, confirm that, in spite of regional and occupational variations, Scotland was a low wage economy. The average weekly wage for Scottish stonemasons in 1843 was 15.63s, with colliers receiving 15.51s and millwrights 14.0s respectively. Moreover, earnings were also subject to fluctuation as in the economic depression of 1848 colliers' wages fell to a nadir of 1Os per week, and even in better times a shilling deduction was made for tools, lights and powder which brought their wages down; while woollen weavers in the southern counties of Scotland saw their wages fall from 15-18s per week in the early 1830s to only lOs 4d in 1849. 49 Those male workers in the lowest categories of employment were estimated to earn an average of 5. 79s a week, or around a third of the skilled wage. Thus, although it was claimed at the time that 'decent work people ... [in Glasgow] have generally a tolerably furnished house ... a carpet, a mahogany chest of drawers ... good blankets and bedding' ,50 a survey of average real wages in nineteen occupational groups showed that during the first phase of industrialisation many Glasgow workers in employment experienced a decline or stagnation in their standard of living, with the unskilled being worse off in 1830 than they had been in 1790. 51 Even skilled workers experienced a fall in their real wages of over 30 per cent between 1815 and 1840. 52

39

Chapter 3

'ROUGH AND RESPECTABLE': THE CULTURE OF THE SCOTTISH WORKING CLASSES, 1800-1850

The inequalities in the distribution of rewards inevitably impacted themselves on the lifestyles and culture of Scottish workers, but traditional notions of status were also important in this respect. Weavers, in spite of declining wages, saw themselves as superior to spinners, and even as late as the 1890s in Bridgeton in Glasgow there was 'little social intercourse between the two'. 53 However, as James Myles, author of several studies of working-class life in Dundee, observed, there were also gradations of status among domestic and factory weavers, with the former being: Mostly Scotchmen advanced in years, who work in their own homes, and who have a fair share of intelligence and education, and ... maintain a more decent exterior than the latter class. Their wages are not higher than the factory weavers; yet as their families are mainly up, their burdens are not so oppressive. The majority of factory weavers are Irishmen and young Scotchmen, sons of poor house weavers. 54 The social distance between handloom weavers and spinners and factory weavers was a legacy of the golden age of handloom weaving and the ethnic divisions within the industry. The Irish, lacking the skills to do complicated or fancy weaving, tended to crowd into the spinning sector or factory weaving, as occurred in Paisley and Dundee, and divisions based on skill were overlain by cultural and religious divides. 55 The high wages earned by weavers in the early 1800s also allowed them a more than tolerable degree of comfort. It was said that the best paid weavers 'had libraries equal to those of 40

Culture of the Scottish Working Classes ministers or professional men'. 56 Indeed, according to James Orr, himself a weaver, handloom weavers: to a great extent built their own houses, partly by their own savings and partly on borrowed money; they were careful to educate their children and they never contracted a bad marriage until they had saved up the means of beginning to keep house. 5 7 Although poverty and the influx of illiterate Irish peasants drove down the educational standards among the children of handloom weavers, in the east of Scotland weavers retained their book clubs and attended lectures. 58 In contrast, the spinners with their Irish connections were invariably presented in contemporary literature as 'uneducated, violent and drunken'. James Myles summed up Presbyterian Scotland's view of the Irish when he wrote that: It is deeply to be lamented that the vast hordes who have migrated to the Scouring burn [Dundee] are composed of the most debased and ignorant of their countrymen. Their vile slang and immoral habits have seriously injured the general character of the poor population of Dundee, and I believe throughout Scotland. The low Irish are not a very improvable race. They cling to their rags, their faith and their filth with all the besottedness of perfect ignorance and stupidity. The customs now prevalent amongst the poorer classes on Sundays of standing in their every-day clothes in groups in the street - sitting outside stairs, and smoking ... tippling of counters, and swearing ... are all derived from the examples of the vulgar Irish, who within the last fifty years have ... deluged all the manufacturing towns of modern civilization. 59 But ethnic stereotyping of the Irish by the Scots was duplicated in English attitudes to Scottish workers in the coal and iron industries. Rob Duncan's study of the iron and coal industries of Monklands shows that workers from South Wales and Staffordshire saw themselves as superior to the Scots in these industries, and because of this 'generally distanced themselves' from the indigenous population. 60 Differences were also observed in other trades. Hugh Miller regarded tailors in Edinburgh with their fashionable clothes and 'grotesque' manners as the most ridiculous and affected of mechanics; whereas in the complementary trade of shoemaking, the artisans

41

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

were said to be 'intelligent' and 'manly', although over-fond of St Monday. 61 In Glasgow, letterpress printers were reckoned to be 'the most intelligent' of the artisanate 'and ... very well behaved', while outworkers such as tailors and shoemakers were considered 'very irregular in attending to their work and in their habits of living'. 62 Independence was a feature of the character of smiths and stonemasons; the latter were said by Miller to 'rarely touch [their] hat[s] to a gentleman'. 63 Colliers too had an inherent sense of independence, 'which the cringing slaves in other trades envied but could not match'. 64 In 1842 a Lothian coalowner stated before the Children's Employment Commission that: 'I have no control whatever over the colliers in my employment ... [they] go to their work at whatever hour of the night or day they think proper and work just as long as they choose'. 65 The occupational culture of the skilled trades was a hierarchical one that was mirrored in their treatment of those below them. The unskilled and female workers were viewed as socially inferior by artisans and a kind of workplace and social system of apartheid kept these groups apart. Alexander Somerville, general labourer, remarked, in his autobiography, that 'masons were intolerable tyrants to their labourers' and were allowed to beat and intimidate them, and when he complained about this he was informed that 'it was against the laws of their body to hear their privileges discussed by a labourer'. A labourer in a coppersmith's shop in Glasgow underscored Somerville's claim, remarking that 'in all large shops ... the labourer is the servant of every journeyman in the place ... [and] to lord it over the labourers is the rule'. 66 Things were no better for women. As the eighteenth century wore on they found themselves increasingly reduced to the role of performing ancillary or support work to that of men and that reflected in their declining social status and wages. 67 One of the foundation stones of the exclusiveness of artisanal culture vis-a-vis other groups was literacy. Although Scotland had a superior level of literacy to that of England, it was clear that many workers were excluded from the ranks of the skilled trades on the grounds of illiteracy. According to the 1834 Factory Act, 96 per cent of male mill workers could read, but only 58 per cent could write, compared to 86 and 43 per cent respectively in England. A more detailed study of the Grandholm Linen Works, Aberdeen, showed that of 1119 workers employed at the mill, 28 per cent could both read and write, 45 per cent could only read and 27 per cent were illiterate. The Children's Employment Commission of 1842-43 reported that

42

Culture of the Scottish Working Classes

the children of miners left school at the age of nine years, if they went at all. A wider study of 3836 children and young persons found that 'not a couple of dozen could be found to write a dozen consecutive lines on any given subject capable of being read and understood'. 68 In contrast, the necessity to read plans and execute written orders called on a high order of literacy skills, all of which underscored the self-improving aspirations of the artisanal elite. Mechanics Institutes, debating clubs, literary and scientific societies, and other self-help institutions had a substantial artisanal membership. Total Abstinence Societies (TAS) flourished in lowland Scotland in the 1830s and 1840s and most Chartists were members of temperance organisations; indeed, Aberdeen TAS had 3000 members, which was made up 'almost entirely' of Chartists and other radicals, and a favourite song at Chartist gatherings was Neil Gow's 'Farewell to Whisky'. 69 However, parallelling this world of self-improvement was a rougher culture based on drink and linked to other forms of amusement, which in the pre-industrial period focused on blood sports, such as cock fighting which drew large audiences, as did bare-fisted fighting. Traditional football games tended towards violence and riot as sides were seemingly unlimited in terms of the number of players involved and were not subject to time limits, going on until the players were exhausted or bored. But as industrial change brought the need for a more disciplined labour force in the workshops and factories, and the movement of people away from rural areas to the towns and cities deprived them of space, popular community games of the pre-industrial order were increasingly outlawed or subject to greater regulation. As early as 1814, a ranger was appointed in Glasgow to keep ball games off Glasgow Green and to disperse crowds of noisy young people. 70 Public order concerns and restricted space drove the unrespectable indoors. Penny theatres became highly popular with the working classes, in spite of the opprobrium showered on them by the respectable middle classes. In Glasgow, the Saltmarket/jail Square area abounded with these establishments offering cheap entertainment and alcohol. According to one minister, penny theatres were by-words for drunkenness, prostitution and every other vice imaginable. They were also very unsafe and the last major one- Anderson's City Theatre- burned down in 1848. Supplementing the penny theatres was the annual fair, another event subjected to religious condemnation. The Glasgow, or St Mungo's, Fair had been established in the fifteenth century as a religious celebration; however, during the first 43

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1S50

half of the nineteenth century it was 'reduced to a day or two celebrated in blind drunkenness', attracting showmen, circuses, and freak shows from all over Britain. 71 Thus, the disorder and violence of the 'rough culture' continued to persist into the 1830s and 1840s. Part of the problem was the easy access to drink. The replacement of porter and stout by whisky provided a cheap route to oblivion and Scots applied themselves with dedication. Most of the drinking was done in licensed premises and they proliferated with remarkable speed throughout Scotland. Edinburgh in the 1840s, according to Hamish Fraser, had one pub per 30 families; Dundee had one for every 24 families; and Glasgow one for every 150 inhabitants.72 Therefore, the idea of a pub on every street corner was more than just an alcoholic's fantasy. Young and old, men and women, all enjoyed a tipple, sometimes with devastating effects. A journeyman baker, who worked in an alehouse for a short period, spoke of the 'fearful ... scenes [he] witnessed', saying: Many weeping mothers ... came to the house pleading with their darling sons to come home; wives pleading with their husbands not to destroy their whole families by spending their earnings on drink. ... I have seen children leading home their drunken mothers and I have also seen companies of children come to the house and call for drink themselves. 73 Age was no barrier to drink and with drunkeness came wife-beating. Anna Clark's work on domestic violence in Glasgow in the first half of the nineteenth century shows that it was directly linked to alcohol consumption and that it cut across all strata of the working class. Of men convicted of wife-beating in the period 1813-24 over one-third were skilled workers, and that figure was maintained into the 1830s.74 However, in spite of repeated condemnation by the middle classes, little could be done to remedy the situation. Alcohol was woven into the social fabric of the workplace and the wider society. It was crucially important at life cycle events such as births and deaths, but it was used also during a boy's apprenticeship to mark the various stages in his progression to skilled man. John Dunlop, temperance reformer, chronicled the drinking customs and habits among the Scottish workers at this time. Among plumbers, when the apprentice cast his first sheet of lead, he was expected to 'treat' his workmates to a drink; when a block-cutter cut his first printing block he was bound to pay 20s for the purpose of treating his fellow workers with 44

Culture of the Scottish Working Classes drink.7 5 In the shipbuilding yards apprentices had to pay £2 entry money which was stored up until enough was accumulated to pay for a night out. 76 Hugh Miller said of the masons of the Cromarty Firth area that they were treated to a drink when an apprentice joined the squad; treated to a drink when his 'apron was washed'; and treated to a drink when his 'time was out' .77 Even in occupations not normally afforded the accolade of being skilled similar practices could be found. In cotton spinning, new hands coming in, or a spinner getting his wheels, all involved a celebratory drink.7 8 The moralising of Dunlop and Miller concerning drink in the workplace blinded them to the role it played in structuring social relationships. Firstly, few workers could avoid an association with a public house since, as Dunlop himself recognised, 'most work-people are either paid in public houses, or receive pound notes and [are forced] ... to go to the public house for change and division of the money'. 79 Secondly, the charging of entry fees to apprentices was not simply a means of financing debauchery, but also of regulating the supply of labour. The print workers of Scotland charged an entry fee of £7 which even Dunlop in his more lucid moments could see acted as a 'check on the reception of apprentices, and kept up a monopoly of hands'. 80 Alexander Somerville found that sawyers in Edinburgh would not work with him until 'a certain quantity of whisky' was supplied. Only after that was he 'initiate[d] into the mysteries of brotherhood' and was able 'to secure the good will of the whole body'. 81 The rituals associated with the drinking customs thus emphasised the closed nature of the group. Finally, employers plied their workers with drink at strategic times of the year or at the completion of a certain workload. Drinking in this context had the effect of symbolising the hierarchical relations of production, and in a period of political upheaval it could also be used to build understandings between management and workers. During the 'Radical Rising' of 1820, the employees in the Glasgow printfields were thanked by the manager for their lack of involvement who 'afterwards entertained them with a case of Highland whisky'. 82 But the impact was ambiguous as alcohol could at the same time symbolise the independence of labour from capital. Thomas Stewart, the Larkhall collier poet of the 1840s, recalled how, on the slightest pretext, the colliers would decide to retire to the pithead for a 'social glass'; and the practice of St Monday was common among workers in Scotland. James Myles bemoaned the habit of power loom weavers in Dundee spending 'Saturday, Sunday and Monday ... indulging their passion for whisky'. 83

45

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

Another elemental part of the skilled worker's ethos was independence, which, in part derived from the relative autonomy they enjoyed in the workplace, but also found part of its origin in Scottish Presbyterianism. The Protestant notion of everyman his own priest, and the stress placed on literacy by the Church as the means of reaching God, inculcated a sense of self-esteem in Scottish workers captured in Robert Burn's line 'a man's a man for a' that'. Although it was estimated that two-thirds of the slum-dwelling unskilled workers of Glasgow and one-third of the population of Edinburgh rarely attended a recognised place of worship, 84 and contemporaries despaired that 'upwards of a HUNDRED THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS are to be found in Lanarkshire ... unprovided with any accommodation in any place of worship', 85 the work of Callum Brown and Peter Hillis on church attendance and membership shows that skilled workers predominated in the congregations of many Presbyterian churches. 86 Proof of how important religion was to skilled workers can be seen in the way the whole debate over the future of the Church of Scotland in the early 1840s distracted a great many artisans from radical politics. Even among those who were outside the reach of the Church, religion was used as a form of measuring status and policing the boundaries of the labour market. Indigenous Protestant hatred of Catholicism ensured a large measure of hostility to Irish immigrants throughout Scotland, and confined Catholics for generations to come to unskilled, low paid work. Plebeian culture in the first half of the nineteenth century already prefigured the division of the working class into the respectable and unrespectable. However, acquiring the status of respectability was derived not simply from lifestyle, but also from occupation and the degree to which one exercised control over the terms and conditions of one's employment. The long hours, low wages and recurring unemployment precluded the poor from respectable working-class pursuits and pushed them in the direction of the shebeens, brothels and penny theatres. Textile workers in Lanarkshire were condemned by Sheriff Archibald Alison for their immorality as 'cohabitation, private marriages and bigamy were extremely common'. 87 Thus, the workplace is central to understanding working-class culture in this period in as much as it conditioned the form and determined the access.

46

Chapter 4

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND WORKPLACE STRUGGLES,

1800-1850

The lower wages earned by Scottish employees were not compensated by a less authoritarian and harsh working regime. However, the sternness of the regime was tempered by the degree of skill involved in the occupation. Not all trades were to undergo profound transformation in this period, but all were drawn into regional and international markets, and because of this were open to the influences of the trade cycle. Although one might expect that the most far-reaching changes in technology and work organisation were to be found in the those occupations associated with industrialisation, this was not necessarily the case as an examination of certain industrial occupations will show. The major change taking place in the cotton industry in Scotland at this time was the mechanisation of spinning and the growth of factory production. However, the development of the steam-powered mule did not result in the diminution of skill and neither did it increase the employers' control of the labour process, although it did much to marginalise the role of female spinners and downgrade most of them to ancillary or supplementary work, such as piecing. Cotton spinners in Glasgow were able to establish an informal system of apprenticeship by which young boys entering the mill at the age of nine were trained gradually until the age of seventeen when they qualified as spinners. As most of them were the sons or relatives of existing spinners, the adult male workers were able to control and regulate the supply of labour. The physical demands of mule spinning put the occupation beyond female labour. Women, on the whole, were confined to the lighter task of throstle spinning or ancillary tasks in the mill mainly in water-powered mills in the country. 88

47

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

Attempts to alter the balance of power in the factory by the invention of a machine 'which would dispense with the labour of the spinner' by rendering the mule 'self-acting' did not get very far. 89 Although it offered the possibility of automating many of the spinner's tasks, self-acting machines were never adopted on a large scale until the 1850s. Wage cutting by employers retarded 'the introduction of the self-acting mules for some time' ,9° as they began coupling existing mules together and, in the process, doubling the productivity of the spinner. 91 In spite of the fact that the spinners were defeated in the 1837 strike over this issue, their defeat did not encourage employers to employ more female labour on spinning machines as long as the mule was favoured over the self-actor. There were only 70 female mulespinners in Glasgow out of a total of 1000 in that year. 92 Advances in technology, therefore, increased the power of the male cotton spinner, and employers retaliated by tightening up industrial discipline. The motivation for factory production over the domestic system had, as Landes points out, been to increase the control of the employer over the workforce: 'Factory equalled discipline cum supervision' .93 During the 1820s there were numerous strikes in the cotton industry over the question of discipline. A strike at the Broadford Mill in Aberdeen saw David Thompson of the Weavers' Union accuse the managers of becoming 'aristocratical and grasping', of exercising 'their generosity only when they have satisfied their own rapacity'. The West of Scotland Female Power Loom Weavers' Association was set up partly to combat the 'tyranny of the overseers' in the Glasgow cotton industry. 94 Generally, the target of the workers' action was 'too zealous managers' and the protests were aimed at the excessive use of fining workers for breaches of managerial designed codes of working. 95 In Glasgow, the employers formed an association in 1823 to combat striking spinners challenging managerial control of the labour process. 96 Weavers too were subjected to tighter discipline. The issue of embezzlement of webs had demented employers from the late eighteenth century and in the 1820s it was still going on with 52 Glasgow companies and individuals reporting 'very serious losses'. The employers set up a 'Detecting Society', the managers of which 'scoured Glasgow in a search for weavers who took webs but did not work them' . 97 If the tensions in the spinning mills and the weaving sector emerged over the questions of control and discipline, in the skilled trades the issues tended to be connected with specialisation. Shoe-making underwent a complete reorganisation of the division of labour. James

48

Technological Change and Workplace Struggles Myles, in his fictional autobiography, stated that he obtained employment in Dundee in 1835 as a 'woman's man', that is, 'an operative who confines himself to the making of women's shoes'. 98 Further sub-division of tasks by 1850 led to the cutting out of leather and sewing together the uppers ('closing') as separate operations. 99 In the engineering trade a similar and more extensive process occurred. The millwright's craft was broken up into a series of sub-divided tasks each requiring a separate worker to perform them. Planers, fitters, turners, borers, and so on, were employed to carry out a portion of the millwright's craft. 100 In the building industry there was also a drive towards specialisation of labour. The trade of carpenter and joiner, and that of plumber/glazier/painter, was broken down into its constituent parts. 101 Finally, in the coal industry massive expansion took place in the 1830s and 1840s following the boom in iron production. Large integrated coal and iron consortiums such as Bairds in Lanarkshire developed as a result. Many former independent coal workers and newly arrived immigrants from Ireland were forced into waged labour for these giant firms. The independence of the Scots' colliers clashed with the more supine attitude of the Irish and the trade became divided between 'honourable men' and 'degraded slaves' . 102 Although there was little the majority of employers could do to control the labour process underground, the larger coal and iron combines in Lanarkshire were able to introduce an early version of the longwall method of coal-getting which reduced their dependency on skilled colliers, as well as intensifying industrial discipline through a mixture of mechanisms, including fines for absenteeism and closer supervision. 103 Another means of ensuring application from the miners open to the coalowners was altering the sexual division of labour. According to the report of the 1842 Commissioners on the mining industry in the east of Scotland there were 338 women for every 1000 men. These women were mainly employed to transport coal from the pit face to the bottom of the shaft, although some of them worked above ground. Most of the women were directly related to the colliers either as wives or daughters and were employed directly by them. The question of inducing greater responsibility among miners towards their work regime forced employers to the conclusion that by making them responsible for family maintenance, by prohibiting the labour of women and children underground, they could bring about a change in attitude. After prohibition was legalised in 1842, evidence, according to Jane Humphries, from pits where women had been excluded

49

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

suggests that the policy had a 'steadying impact on male labour'. 104 According to the Commissioners, 'in the Duke of Buccleugh's mines [the exclusion of women and children meant that] the colliers are much more regular in the their labour than heretofore'. 105 However, the intensification of the division of labour, or altering its sexual composition as in the case of the coal industry, did not necessarily end on-the-job control and because of this a certain autonomy continued to be enjoyed by many skilled workers. Edinburgh stonemasons, for example, let their hammers fall without striking if time was called as an assertion of their right to control their own pace of work. 106 This applied also in coalmining, in spite of the stricter imposition of industrial discipline noted above. The 'pillar and stoop' method of coal-getting used in most pits made underground supervision almost impossible as colliers were spread out over a large area. This left them with a degree of responsible autonomy unknown to most industrial workers, at least in the smaller pits. 107 However, the changes which had taken place in Scottish industry generally ensured that no one trade was capable of controlling the labour process in the way that, say, the millwright had been able to do in engineering and the shipwright in shipbuilding. Thus employers to a certain extent were able to break down craft privileges which allowed them greater freedom to adjust wages to prevailing market conditions. This placed the skilled workers in a more insecure position than previously and also put them at the mercy of the trade cycle. These uncertainties also struck at artisanal notions of the historic interests of the working community of brothers at the trade. The long period of training of between five to seven years and work experience required in most trades meant that, according to artisanal logic, a form of property had been acquired embedded in their skill, one of whose characteristics was that it was inheritable. As one foreman carpenter put it when asked by a Commons' committee whether limiting apprentices was 'beneficial to the trade': I think it rather beneficial, as the trade is at present quite overstocked and in order to give my brother carpenters an opportunity of rearing up our children, our brothers, or nephews in this trade if we please. We consider that an employer, not a carpenter, has no right to take seven or eight apprentices to learn the trade ... to the exclusion of our children or our brothers. 108 Thus, the practice of sons following fathers into a trade as their 50

Technological Change and Workplace Struggles

'birthright' had a functional dimension to it as well as an ideological one. Patrimony ensured the transmission of certain customary practices concerning such important issues as workloads and wage differentials. But as trades expanded in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century this personal form of socialisation could not be guaranteed, and neither could a trade be restricted exclusively to sons and relatives. As regulation broke down, it was increasingly the ownership of tools which symbolised the collective or social ownership of skill. As Eric Hobsbawm points out this not only advertised the 'relative independence of the artisan from management, but, even more clearly, his monopoly of skilled work'. 109 In the building trade, for example, bricklayers' labourers were not allowed to use the trowel. 110 Changes in the workplace, therefore, had a contradictory effect on skill; however, all craftsmen were subject to greater competition from 'half bred men' and suffered from the vicissitudes of the economic cycle. During the eighteenth century the journeymen could expect some form of relief from the courts in regard to wages and working conditions. However, as Hamish Fraser points out, from certainly 1813 onwards this was no longer assured. Judicial interference in the market for labour was increasingly viewed by a manufacturing class, raised on the laissez-faire doctrines of Adam Smith, and by their sympathisers on the bench as 'impracticable' . 111 Without the protection of the JPs workers had little choice but to come together and unite to form associations for the redress of grievances.

51

Chapter 5

CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE GROWTH OF TRADE UNIONS IN SCOTLAND, 1800-1850

As we have seen, the pressures emanating from the first phase of industrialisation increasingly meant that the agent of socialisation and defence of trade practices lay with the trade unions or unofficial workshop committees. Although associations of workers existed in pre-industrial times and engaged in industrial struggle, they were mainly benefit societies, or 'coffin clubs', rather than trade unions in the modern sense of the word. The early unions, however, were small, local, based mainly on skilled workers, and concerned with limiting the supply of labour and controlling the labour process. They operated around the notion of the trade as a community of interests and defended these interests against strangers, females and 'dishonourable' employers. The rules of the Edinburgh Society of Bookbinders were typical in as much as they allowed that 'all bookbinders, whether masters or journeymen ... may choose to join us' . 112 However, with the expansion of the economy and the changes in the labour process the unions became more class orientated. The Edinburgh journeymen bookbinders by 1822 had a change in the rules which stated that 'when any member commences business, he must immediately leave the society; and if any employer, who has taken leave of the society, shall again become a journeyman, he shall be admitted free of expense ... after he begins to work as a journeyman'.113 In pursuit of their goals the early unions adopted a form of organisation which was dualistic. The modern aspects of trade unionism, that is, visible leaders, conferences, branches and membership cards, competed with the pre-industrial ones, based on secrecy, rituals and signs, and violence. The Associated Colliers of Scotland had an

52

Class Struggle and Growth of Trade Unions

initiating ceremony and an oath which bound them not to reveal the collier's password. The word 'Balaam' was derived from the biblical verse 'and the angel said unto Balaam, Go with the men, but only the word I shall speak unto thee, that thou shall speak' . 114 Among the Scottish blacksmiths there were 'courts of justice' in which 'he who presides wears a quantity of tow ... around his head, in imitation of a wig, and is styled the Lord Justice Clerk. The decisions of these judges are final: and such as do not comply with them, are compelled by persecution to leave the shop'. 115 The United Joiners of Glasgow had to call an emergency committee meeting in January 1837 when it was reported that 'a baker had become acquainted with the Pas sword of the English order' . 116 These passwords, rituals and signs were, therefore, fairly endemic in the trade unions of this time and owe something to the influence of freemasonry. In spite of their antiquated nature, they served an important function in impressing upon new members the seriousness of their undertaking, and were useful in building a collective identity and interests in the trade. Acts of violence also had a part to play in the enforcement of union strategy. Ear cropping was occasionally used in mining areas to deal with blacklegs; arson, intimidation and murder occurred in the cotton industry. In 1819/20 the introduction of female spinners at the Broomward Mill in Glasgow led the men to burn the mill down. One woman was shot amid the mayhem. Similarly in 1832 women spinners were blinded by vitriol, and five years before this a new worker at the Adelphi Mill was shot dead while sleeping. 117 In spite of these pre-industrial forms of protest, a more visibly modern form of organisational structure was beginning to evolve among the unions. The Glasgow cotton spinners' association, which relied on violence to maintain discipline among the membership, had a democratic structure which stretched from the factory floor to the executive committee. Elected delegates determined membership of the governing body of twelve members, collected dues and issued membership cards. A supply committee arranged credit for strikers and organised the distribution of food; a finance committee raised money and distributed strike pay; and a guard committee took charge of picketing. On top of this the union also paid unemployment and funeral benefit. 11 8 In keeping with the spirit of modernisation and in response to the formation of associations of employers, there evolved an appreciation among workers of the need to form national or, at least, larger trade unions, in spite of the fact that few succeeded for any length of time. 53

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

In this the cotton spinners and weavers showed an early awareness. A general weavers' association was formed in 1812 when employers attempted to dismantle piece rate structures; and the strength of the spinners' union was so formidable that the employers formed an association of their own in 1810 to free themselves of the influence of 'Third Parties' combined for 'the sinistrous and illegal purpose of controlling the trade at large' . 119 Other trades experiencing expansion and change adopted the strategy of the cotton workers. In 1817 the Glasgow and Ayr Miners' Associations merged in order to 'regulate the market for coal and labour', although the arrest of its leaders shortly after this led to collapse. 120 Eight years later the Lanarkshire miners formed the Associated Colliers of Scotland, although like its predecessor it was defeated by a counter offensive by the employers shortly after its formation. 121 However, a national union - the General Union of Operative Colliers- resurfaced. Again it was defeated by the ironmasters through the use of blackleg labour and evictions. 122 In the building trade in 1832 a Scottish National Joiners' Association was initiated by the Glasgow and Greenock joiners. 123 More impressive than these attempts to establish occupational trade unions was the formation of the Glasgow United Committee of Trades Delegates formed in early 1830 to push for the Reform Bill. After 1832 it met sporadically; however, interestingly it was revived in 1837 to support the Glasgow cotton spinners in their strike. In Edinburgh, organisation was on a more ad hoc basis but 'trades delegates' organised a protest against the sentences of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, and in 1835 opposed parliamentary grants to the Church of Scotland. 124 However, the most formidable expression of solidarity among the labouring classes was the support given to Robert Owen's Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU). Although its main support was based in London, branches of Owen's organisation were said to have existed all over Scotland; however, the strongest centres were Glasgow and Paisley. The experience of the branch formed in Aberdeen was fairly typical. The branch was set up in the early part of 1834 and drew on the support of a wide range of trades, but with the collapse of the GNTCU in mid-summer of that year, it rapidly went into terminal decline. However, in Glasgow the Consolidated Union maintained a presence, thanks to the efforts of Alexander Campbell, until the end of the 1830s. 125 Trade unionism in general in Scotland received a crushing blow in 1837 with the failure of the Glasgow cotton spinners' strike. The spinners were the best organised workers in the west of Scotland. By 54

Class Struggle and Growth of Trade Unions adopting the primary craft principle of limiting the supply of labour through refusing to teach persons who were not 'sons or brothers of a spinner', the spinners had virtually established a closed shop in the Glasgow mills. It was estimated by one working spinner that out of a total of 1000 spinners in Glasgow in 1837, 850-900 were members of the union. 126 So effective was the union's control of the spinning sector that the first factory inspector for Scotland was moved to remark: 'the operatives have so completely organised their association, as not only to prescribe the wages to be paid to members of the association, but to all other persons, from whatever quarter they come' . 127 In the course of events, however, the employers' association proved stronger. Not only were the spinners defeated, but the identification of the strike with the worst excesses of violence led to the trial and transportation of their leaders. 128 Defeat ensured that the Glasgow Association lost much of its power in the workplace and its ability to control the labour supply, but the capacity for collective organisation remained intact, that is, if measured by its means to wage industrial warfare. Further strikes occurred in 1844. 129 However, the bad publicity the trade union movement received as a result of the violent tactics of the spinners' association, and the failure of the Lanarkshire miners to defend their ability to restrict output in the same year, despite being out on strike for four months, 130 further weakened Scottish trade unionism and it took many decades before it recovered. The economic depressions of 1838-42 delivered the final blow to the remnants of worker organisation north of the border. National unions among spinners and miners broke up and the locality became the dominant locus of organisation. During the 1842 miners' strike, Rob Duncan shows that there was little effort made to link up the struggles of the miners in Monklands with those in Ayrshire, the Lothians, Fife and Stirlingshire and Clackmannanshire. 131 Moreover, the association of industrial conflict with alcoholic excess led Scottish unions to meet in coffee houses as part of a new search for 'respectability' .132 Even the Glasgow cotton spinners' rule book in 1838 stated that its executive committee 'must take a room not connected with a public house' .133 However, in the immediate term, the demise of trade unionism after the spinners' strike of 1837 and the onset of economic depression led workers back in the direction of politics as they had done during the years 1815-20.

55

Chapter 6

NATION v. CLASS: RADICAL STRUGGLES IN SCOTLAND, 1800-1850

The pillars of the political culture of the Scottish workers in the period from the 1790s to the Chartist movement of the late 1830s and early 1840s were democracy and social justice, which, in turn, rested on a value system which derived its strength from independence, temperance and religion. As we have seen, the first was the product of workplace notions regarding skill and status; the other two enhanced this by emphasising the respectability and social worth of the worker. As with trade unionism, worker politics in Scotland were dominated by the concerns and ideology of skilled, predominantly male, Protestant workers. Women, in spite of the fact that they played an active part in political reform movements throughout this period, found themselves increasingly excluded from the public sphere as even Chartists championed the ideal of domesticity for their wives in return for the badge of citizenship. This social ethos combined with the political principles to which skilled workers subscribed in this period were by no means exclusive. They were shared by other groups in Scottish society, particularly the petty bourgeoisie. This shared ethos, which drew its inspiration and strength from the Scottish Enlightenment, made class alliances possible and, indeed, were a noted feature of political development in this period. However, it has to be stressed that the interpretation of these principles was open to negotiation and re-negotiation. Thus, the meanings and understandings attached to them were never static and never universal, and because of this they were capable of being moulded to suit the aspirations and interests of any one social grouping. Moreover, the cross-class ethos was fragile, particularly when threatened by the volatile culture of the unskilled and ethnic communities, as well as

56

Radical Struggles in Scotland

from declining occupations such as handloom weavers. The fragmentation of the working class along ethnic, material, status and sectarian lines also invited a number of contrasting and alternative responses to the pressures thrown up by industrial and urban development in this period. The engagement of the workers with the political system came in the various radical attempts to alter the character of the British state dating from the 1780s. The radical critique of politics based itself on the distinction made between the parasitic landowning class, which ran the state in its own interests through a corrupt and venal electoral system, and the politically powerless, but useful and productive masses. Thus, the workers and middle classes as the 'useful' masses were to be united through radical leadership in an attempt to restructure the basis of the unreformed state by gaining the franchise. The first serious challenge in the 1790s by this alliance of the 'rough and refined' to the state ended in failure. The governing classes were able to paralyse the reformers by labelling them unpatriotic and proFrench. Lord Cockburn brought out the essential weakness of the radicals when he said: The chief object at which our discontented aimed was parliamentary reform. But this and other home-bred ends were hid by a cloud of foreign follies, which the Tories exhibited as demonstrations that the correction of domestic abuses was a pretence, and Jacobinism the truth. On this foundation they represented the whole lower orders as hostile to our institutions; from which the desired and comfortable inference was, that there was no salvation for the country except in the predominance of their own party. 134 The cry of 'King and country' proved more capable of mobilising the masses than the democratic shibboleths of political radicalism in this period. State repression forced the radical movement underground in the early 1800s and it took the economic depression after the defeat of Napoleon to kickstart the reform movement into political life. This new phase of radicalism increased the bitterness and hostility of the workers towards the government, particularly after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. A Radical War ensued in Scotland and culminated in a call in the west of Scotland in 1820 to strike and to bear arms in order to establish a Scottish Republic. Sixty thousand workers, among them handloom weavers and colliers, heeded the call and an

57

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

armed insurrection ensued with a march on the Carron Ironworks. The march was intercepted by soldiers and the revolt put down and this phase of radicalism came to an end, only for the door to be pushed open once more in the early 1830s. Workers united with the middle classes were able to win a major political concession from the ruling classes in parliament in the form of the Reform Act of 1832, although not before mass demonstrations had taken place, and political threats and hints of revolution had been made. However, although the workers had campaigned with as much enthusiasm as the middle classes for the franchise they were disappointed as only the propertied were granted the vote. The narrative of political struggle in these decades of war and peace throws up a number of questions and issues concerning the politics and language of class; the economic and the social; and the national and the transnational. There is little doubt that the radical movement of the years of the French Wars was inspired and led by the middle classes. However, these were the same people who were in the vanguard of the creation of free trade and the destruction of customary practices and other restraints on trade which seemed to attack the moral economy of the labouring classes. Yet there is evidence that groups of workers such as handloom weavers figured very prominently in radical organisations such as the Friends of the People and that many were converted to the ideas of Tom Paine. 135 Indeed, it was groups such as the weavers that during the repression years of the 1800s kept the radical movement alive in their membership of a clandestine and insurrectionary organisation - the United Scotsmen. 136 Why the degree of collaboration between two essentially antagonistic social classes? The alliance was viable because of the possibilities each group saw in reform of the British state. Workers had been used to petitioning the state for redress of economic grievances, and JPs as the embodiment of the local state had been appealed to on a regular basis to fix minimum wages and prices. Until the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century JPs were not unsympathetic to the demands of the workers. In 1799 high food prices saw JPs in Lanarkshire grant wage increases to wrights; in the same year Midlothian JPs granted Leith shipwrights a 4d a day rise in wages; and after much petitioning the Edinburgh printers were granted a table of piece rates by the Court of Session in 1805. 137 However, with the growing popularity of the economic doctrines of Adam Smith and other classical economists among employers and politicians the state was increasingly moving 58

Radical Struggles in Scotland in a less than even-handed way in dealing with disputes between masters and workers. In 1775 and 1799 legislation abolished serfdom in the mining industry, but not as a humanitarian act, more as an attempt to 'free the masters' hands over wages and workrates without the interference of powerful combinations' . 138 In the same year, the first Combination Acts were passed and a year later they were extended to cover every trade in England. Although the aim was to prevent the growth of unions and political organisations, the success of the Acts in this direction was decidedly patchy. 139 Moreover, their legal status in Scotland was open to debate, and their interpretation was more or less left to the discretion of the judiciary, some of whom were sympathetic to legal interference, and some who were decidedly against it. In spite of the ambiguity surrounding their interpretation, the leaders of the Glasgow weavers' strike of 1812 were charged and found guilty of the 'crime of combination' .140 The aim of the strikers had been to establish minimum piece rates through parliamentary legislation, but on being rebuffed twice by the authorities, who had been successfully counter petitioned by the employers, a seven week strike ensued in the west of Scotland; an event which led to the arrest and imprisonment of the leadership for two to eighteen months in February 1813. 141 Four months after the defeat of the weavers, statutes allowing JPs to intervene in industrial disputes were abolished by parliament and the market was given the freedom to set the level of wages. 142 The radical cry against 'class legislation' inspired weavers and other groups of workers to see the possibilities arising out of the reform of the state, and this made possible the construction of political alliances with middle class radicals. As a result petitioning the local JP gave way to the petitioning of the 'nation'. The economic depression and the mass unemployment which followed the end of the French Wars gave the workers little alternative but to turn to radical political practice. The high-handed attitude of the state, the massacre of Peterloo and the repression of political activity only intensified the agitation for franchise reform. A meeting in Paisley in 1819 to condemn the 'butchers' of Peterloo led to five days of conflict between workers and the troops of the 80th Regiment and the 7th and 10th Hussars. 143 The actions of the landowners' government also alienated large numbers of people migrating to urban centres from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland. Their historical experiences of dealing with the landowning classes and the bitterness which that had induced in them were intensified by these displays of 59

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

aristocratic arrogance. Appeals to bridle the power of the aristocracy by radicals, therefore, touched a raw nerve in this section of Scottish society and brought a ready response from them. Although some historians have interpreted these events from a nationalist perspective, 144 nationalism was only one strand which comprised the ideology of political radicalism; the main aim of the reform movement was the democratisation of the British state, rather than establishing a Scottish republic. However, since that state was controlled primarily by the English landowning class, and given the history of active resistance in Scotland to the Union of 1707, opposition to political tyranny was, at times, overlain with assertions of national identity. Fifteen thousand Scots came to Bannockburn in 1814 to commemorate the SOOth anniversary of the defeat of Edward II; and the popular Scottish song 'Scots wa'hae' was used as a rallying call against tyranny by the radicals north of the border in the years 1817-20. 145 The republican aspirations of the abortive uprising of 1820 represented the apotheosis of the weaving of national identity with radical politics. The nationalism of the protestors was, however, half-hearted. At mass anti-government demonstrations in Paisley in 1819 banners referred to 'Bruce' and 'Wallace', but there were others which referred to the 'Magna Carta' and to the rights of 'Britons'. 146 As Christopher Smout points out, the symbolism of resistance to tyrants which was the essence of the lyrics of 'Scots wa'hae' also appealed to cotton spinners in Lancashire. 147 Furthermore, it was clear that in the period 1817-20 Scottish radicals looked to England for leadership. Indeed, the Radical insurrection of 1820 to establish a Scottish republic was timed to coincide with a rising in England; an event which did not happen, although there were uprisings in Lancashire and Yorkshire. 148 There is also the patriotism of Scottish workers to take account of; something which was particularly evident on the monarch's birthday. Twenty thousand people turned out on Glasgow Green in June 1795 to watch a review of the Glasgow Royal Volunteers 149 and four years later it was reported that 20 000 attended a review of the Renfrewshire Volunteer Association on 31 August. 150 In 1820 there were 50 000 'patriotic' spectators at a military display on Glasgow Green. 151 Although the celebration of the monarch's birthday was generally a drunkenly riotous affair, and the 'mob' used it as means of lampooning and jostling their social superiors, there was little attempt to politicise the event in the direction of radicalism; indeed, only in 'Edinburgh in 1792, and perhaps Perth around the same time, is there any connection between the monarch's birthday celebrations and

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Radical Struggles in Scotland Radicalism' . 152 Thus, nationalism in this context was contradictory and dualistic and did not lead in Scotland, as it did in peripheral nations such as Norway and Portugal, to independence from a more powerful neighbour. Scots were able to combine a sense of Scottish identity with an equally powerful and compelling sense of being North Britons. 153 The fact that in the reform agitation of the crisis years 1830-32, and again in the Chartist campaigns of the late 1830s and early 1840s, Scottish republicanism played no part in mobilising workers tends to point to the essentially ephemeral nature of this political phenomenon. The other outstanding feature of working-class radicalism at this time was the rejection of violence as a means of changing the political system. The shadowy United Scotsmen movement, although active in weaving communities in the 1800s, was unable to mobilise mass support for its Jacobin-inspired insurrectionary form of politics.154 The fact that only forty to fifty men could be persuaded to march on the Carron ironworks during the 1820 Radical War 155 also points to the inability of the idea of armed insurrection to capture the imagination and support of the workers in Scotland. Moreover, after 1820 political protest became peaceful and orderly, although riots, particularly those associated with the monarch's birthday, continued to be a part of the rich, but rough and disruptive, culture of urban life with serious outbursts occurring in 1819 and 1820 in Glasgow. The riots, on the whole, tended to be associated with the unskilled and poor than the politically organised skilled workers. Indeed, according to newspaper reports of these carnivals of the oppressed, the crowds were mainly comprised of young adult males and boys: the 'veriest scum of the city'. 156 Although the prospect of violent revolution was remote, there were clear signs of a growing awareness among workers of their common or shared grievances and the need to organise collectively to alter the political status quo. This view is at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy among Scottish historians regarding the seriousness of the threat posed by workers to property and the institutions of civil society during this period. Christopher Smout best sums up this view when he says 'the unenfranchised masses ... were so divided by income, life expectancy, culture and creed as to pose, on the face of it, little threat to property' . 157 Moreover, the organisations of collective self-defence- the trade unions- operated a sectional policy which promoted their interests at the expense of workers in general and were little involved in radical political activity. 158 By viewing the working class as essentially fragmented, orthodox

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historiography seems to disregard the factors pulling against the forces of division. As we have seen, skilled workers were facing similar problems as regards issues of apprentice restriction and the labour supply. Periodic unemployment as a consequence of the operation of the trade cycle also posed a threat to the security of skilled workers and their families. These uncertainties were duplicated across all trades and were articulated in the growing labour press of the period, which brought different groups of workers together. There were also signs of trades supporting each other in struggle. During the weavers' struggles to limit the number of apprentices in 1811, their petition to parliament had the support of 'the whole of the trades of any consequence in the town of [Glasgow]'. 159 Collaboration could take a political turn as in 1820 when 60 000 workers answered the call to strike. The involvement of trade unions in these political struggles was remarked upon by the prosecutor fiscal for Glasgow, when he said to the crown agent that the leaders of the cotton spinners were 'again, at least most of them, in jail as Radicals' . 16° Christopher Whatley's work on working-class communities also shows how ethnic and occupational divisions tended to crumble in moments of crisis. He found that within the Glasgow parish of Barony, where most of the weaving looms were concentrated, and where there was a considerable number of spinning mills, a calico print works, an iron works and a few coal mines, there was a high volume of political activity prior to 1830. Most disturbances either took place here or 'involved' a disproportionate number of people from Barony. This was also an area which had a high concentration of Irish workers, both Catholic and Protestant, and their families; indeed, the most turbulent districts in Barony, that is, Anderston, Calton, St Johns and Shettleston, were those with the highest proportion of Irish-born residents. 161 These finding should make us a little suspicious over accounts of the period which all too readily fall back on fragmentation and collaboration as elemental parts of political analysis. However, more research needs to be done on other parishes in Glasgow and in other large towns on these issues before the solidarities of class and community in Scotland in this period can be delineated. There is also the problem of reconciling the political and the economic. The experiences of change and tension in the social relations of the workplace were leading workers to develop a view of the economy, and their position within in it, which was in opposition to the radical political ideology which they had accepted. In the workplace a political economy based on custom and regulation was articulated 62

Radical Struggles in Scotland which put the trade unions at odds with the free market philosophy of the employing class. The labour theory of value became the bedrock of their economic analysis. As the Radical Reformer's Gazette put it: 'the land derives all its value from the labour and skill applied to it, and that there is no Capital in the Country but has sprung from the same source'. 162 There was also a persistent demand for the economic system to be based on co-operation rather than competition. However, artisanal conceptions of politics, as an organised conspiracy of the landowning class to maintain its privileges and power, led them to adopt anti-landlord policies, which were antagonistic to their growing interest in, and advocacy of, quasi-socialist plans of co-operation. Indeed, as Fiona Montgomery argues, championing free trade over protectionism came close to classical economic doctrine. 163 The labour newspaper The Herald to the Trades Advocate, extravagantly claimed that free trade: gives a stimulus to exertion, encouragement to the noblest energies of scientific genius ... diffuses liberal sentiments, and benevolent feelings ... while monopoly produces sloth, violence and extravagance ... in a few; poverty, wretchedness and servility in the many.l64 Trade unionists continued to believe throughout this period that the Corn Laws and excessive taxation forced 'honourable' employers to press down on wages. Corruption in government was thus still viewed as the main cause of all economic ills, and for this reason workers in Scotland and elsewhere in Britain were still prepared to accept the political leadership of middle-class radicals. Moreover, as the central 'issues' in the workplace remained 'ones of control rather than ownership of the means of production', 165 the tensions referred to above did not obstruct the emergence of joint middle- and workingclass political campaigns for reform. Large crowds throughout Scotland demonstrated in favour of parliamentary reform in the early 1830s. In Glasgow, three distinct organisations emerged: the predominantly middle-class Reform Association; the National Political Union supported by the petty bourgeoisie and artisans; and factory operatives' committees composed of representatives from trade unions and workshops. They were, however, by no means exclusive and membership was fluid; additionally joint campaigns were organised and a common ideology was expressed on classical radical lines. However, working-class 63

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radicals had a different set of priorities to that of middle-class reformers. They stressed universal suffrage, annual parliaments and secret ballots, while manufacturers and merchants in Aberdeen and elsewhere demanded burgh reform and an end to self-elected councils.166 Thus, the question of priority provoked class tensions between those in the radical camp. However, as Fiona Montgomery notes, artisans in Glasgow were prepared to accept this arrangement as they 'felt that more could be gained by co-operation and working through the system, than by outright hostility'. 167 There were no riots in Scotland on the scale of Nottingham, Derby and Bristol during the reform crisis, although contemporary Alexander Somerville reported that, after the second reading of the Reform Bill in the Commons, in Edinburgh there was an orgy of window breaking by the 'ten thousand headed mob'. 168 In Glasgow, however, property was respected and, in spite of talk of revolution, political demonstrations were orderly and peaceful. As The Herald to the Trades Advocate put it: 'they [the authorities] will strain their eye-sight before they see any movement in this quarter' .169 Any talk of 'arming' was interpreted by Glasgow workers as defending the king and his ministers rather than promoting a revolution.'7° With the failure of the Reform Act to enfranchise the workers and the disappointment this created, as well as the failure of the middle classes to support factory reform in the shape of Sadler's Ten Hours Bill (manufacturers in Fife and Glasgow actively opposed it), 171 the emphasis turned to trade unionism and Owenite socialism. Robert Owen offered a complete alternative to the capitalist system and a different analysis of labour's oppression to that put forward by radicals. Owen argued that the root cause of workers' oppression lay in the exploititive social relations of industrial capitalism rather than corruption in government. To Owen and his followers changing the political system was irrelevant; the way forward was in building small communities of producers based on his principles of utopian socialism. Ideas of building a co-operative and harmonious alternative to competitive capitalism struck a chord with those workers who were experiencing displacement due to economic competition and technological change. Thus the Dundee and Lochee Weavers' Union, 1000 strong, resolved in 1834 to 'make an attempt at manufacturing for themselves', and Aberdeen had 900 members established in eight branches of the co-operative movement. 172 To spread the word the Universal Community Society of Rational Religionists was formed in 1835 and by 1839 it had sixty-two branches in Britain, four of which 64

Radical Struggles in Scotland were in Scotland at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Paisley with a membership of around 300. 173 In addition, there were also a number of co-operative stores established in the late 1830s at Hawick and Galashiels. 174 Even during the Chartist period when attention was firmly fixed on political reform, there were several experiments in co-operation. Co-operative stores, inspired by Owenism, were established in places as far apart as Leith, Greenock, Tillicoutry, Dalkeith, Hawick, Forfar and Coupar Angus. By the end of 1840, there were sixteen Chartist co-operative stores, in addition to those which were reputed to exist in 'every village' in Fife, as well as an Aberdeen Association of Producers, which owned a store in the town's Gallowgate and set up a savings bank for members in 1845. 175 However, in spite of these ventures, Owenite socialism failed to make a significant impact on Scottish workers. Owen's GNCTU was an ephemeral success in 1834, but as a trade union, and not as a vehicle for ushering in a new moral world. The main ideological weakness was that Owenism failed to develop a theory of politics in general, and the state in particular. Moral regeneration rather than political change was seen by Owenites as the central goal of labour. Because that moral reforming spirit envisaged a rational society and an equal role for women it came up against the deeply held religious principles of skilled workers. Peter MacKenzie's Scotch Reformers' Gazette condemned Ownenite lectures on rational religion and appealed to the Glasgow authorities to prevent 'the disgraceful proceedings of these infamous Socialists' . 176 A godless society was anathema to workers in Scotland at this time: a point endorsed by an artisan journal when it reported that 'there was strong hostility to Owen's religious views among the Glasgow trades', and to underline this the The Herald to the Trades Advocate dropped the sub-title Co-operative Journal from its masthead. 177 John Hodge, in his contemporary study of Owenism, also pointed to the secularism of the movement in analysing the reasons for its collapse after 1845. 178 But a stronger reason was that the republics of petty producers, envisaged by Owen as the future social organisation of society, were backward looking and irrelevant solutions to the problems faced by trades such as cotton spinning, engineering, iron-making, and so on, which were created by industrialisation. Traditionless, these trades could not look back to a 'golden age' of domestic production as starving handloom weavers could, and, thus, concentrated on making the best bargain they could within the free market. A lacuna developed between the utopian social prescription of Owen and the direct 65

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social experience of the developing proletariat. The co-operative societies continued to grow but, shorn of their millenarian role, they merely modified free market mechanisms rather than superseded them. The peripheralisation of quasi-socialist alternatives such as Owenism meant that the links forged with the middle classes during the suffrage campaigns of the early 1830s were never wholly severed. The split between the anti-working class Whigs and the radicals in the mid-1830s led to a new configuration of Scottish politics which held out hope for the emergence of a new reform movement. John Taylor and the 'advanced' radicals set up the Scottish Radical Association (SRA) in December 1836, which later became the Universal Suffrage Association. The SRA adopted four basic political principles - universal male suffrage, annual parliaments, vote by ballot and a voluntary church system. In Edinburgh, the Radical Association added repeal of the Corn Laws to its basic principles at a meeting in July 1837, as well as amending its demand for universal suffrage to household suffrage, in order to attract wider support from the progressive urban middle classes. 179 There was also a certain amount of co-operation on the industrial front. During the cotton spinners' strike, rioting occurred at the Oakbank Mills in May 1837. An appeal from the Tory Sheriff of Lanarkshire, Archibald Alison, among propertied families for special constables to contain the riot led to only one man answering the call. In Glasgow, Liberal manufacturers obstructed Alison's plan of extending police powers to curb the dispute in outlying areas. 180 In Paisley, manufacturers supported Fielden's Minimum Wage Bill in 1835, and agreed on a voluntary basis to fix prices in order to stabilise weavers' wages; additionally, a more liberal poor law operated with provision made for the able-bodied. 181 These initiatives which maintained the distinction in working-class circles of the 'honourable' and 'dishonourable' employer, as well the attachment of the artisans to the doctrines of free trade, were important during the Chartist agitation of the late 1830s and early 1840s in ensuring a dialogue, and to some extent an alliance, continued between workers and the middle classes. The Chartist movement which emerged in 1838 demanded a wholesale reform of the British state and the incorporation of the working class in the constitution. Chartist demands were inscribed in the Six Points of the People's Charter drawn up by the London Working Men's Association in 1838. Although primarily political demands, once achieved they were to establish a platform for a programme of 66

Radical Struggles in Scotland social and economic reform. A national petition was drawn up in favour of the Six Points by the Birmingham Political Union (BPU) and speakers were sent out to other areas of Britain to stir up support. Indeed, Scotland's political reawakening was largely the responsibility of the BPU and their 'holy and peaceful' campaign north of the border. 182 The response to Chartism in Scotland was greatest, like elsewhere in Britain, during the years 1839-42 when unemployment was high, bread was dear, and trade unions weak. However, support for the Charter cannot be seen simply as an economistic knee-jerk response to worsening economic conditions by poor and unemployed workers. Miners and factory workers were more prominent during times of severe economic distress such as in 1842, and again in the years 1847-48, but the backbone of the Chartist movement was radical artisans and weavers in alliance with disaffected members of the middle classes. Trade sections were established among coopers, masons and shoemakers in Glasgow, and among coachmakers and tailors in Edinburgh. 183 The artisanal and middle-class basis of the movement was, however, even more pronounced in the leadership. The Central Committee in Scotland was made up of a powerloom weaver, Mathew Cullen, an engineering trade unionist, W. C. Pattison, and an Edinburgh scavenger, but middle class members existed too in the shape of James Moir and George Ross, Glasgow shopkeepers, John McCrae, an Ayrshire teacher, and Dr Glover, of Edinburgh. 184 In Aberdeen, there were no factory operatives among the leadership cadre and the principal activists came from the shoemaking and weaving trades; 185 and in Paisley, the Rev. Patrick Brewster was the main advocate of Chartist reform. The social structure of the movement, particularly of the leadership cadre, infused a moral dimension into what was essentially a political movement. Most of the Chartist leaders in Glasgow, including Cranston, Fraser and MacFarlane, were involved with the temperance movement at an officiallevel. 186 Fraser initiated a nationwide campaign in 1838 'in which advocacy of ... total abstinence held almost equal prominence with that of universal suffrage' . 187 The TAS, as we have seen, not only preached temperance, but also supported the Six Points of the Charter. 188 Temperance was not restricted to one class, it cut across all social groups and acted as a means of furthering social contacts between artisans and the middle classes in Scottish society. Religion performed a similar role to that of temperance. Most Chartists were said to be 'devout, God-fearing men, whose scepticism 67

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[about religion] was confined to the behaviour of false pastors'. 189 Chartists were also prominent in the dissenting churches, particularly the United Secessional Church and the Relief Synod. 190 However, the refusal of the radical churches and their ministers to take up explicitly political demands led some Chartists, in order to unite Christianity with the message of social justice and political freedom, to set up their own ministries. The first Chartist Churches were established in May 1839 in Hamilton, Paisley and Bridgeton. Five months later regular services were being held on the Sabbath by the Glasgow, Bridgeton, Gorbals, Paisley and Hamilton Chartist Associations. 191 By 1841 a delegate to a conference of Scottish Chartist Churches could claim that 'a Chartist place of worship is now to be found on the Lord's Day in almost every town of note from Aberdeen to Ayr' . 192 These churches performed baptisms, marriages, funerals and communion, and held their own Easter, Christmas and New Year celebrations with 'tea drinking, concerts ... and dancing' . 193 In keeping with their democratic principles there was no minister but a rotational chairman and vice-chairman who between them conducted services and performed other ceremonies. The Church's social gospel was summed up by Eileen Yeo: 'their Christ was a working man who had been crucified on the social rack like they; their mission [was] to win back the rights God had given, but which the rich and powerful, the priesthood among them, had taken away'. Chartist Churches had their parallels in England, but only in the form of holding Sunday services in the numerous branch premises of the National Charter Association in the early 1840s. Prior to this development the English Chartists were given to holding protest demonstrations at hostile Anglican and dissenting sect churches. 194 The more formal organisation of the Chartist Churches in Scotland, as we will see, demonstrated the manner in which the social basis of Chartism profoundly affected its politics and language. The moralism with which temperance and religion infused Scottish Chartism made the movement amenable to the idea of 'moral force' as against 'physical force' as a way of achieving political reform, and made it less hostile than its English equivalent to alliances with other social classes. However, at the same time, one could argue that there were two Chartist movements in Scotland: there was the moral and peaceful movement of the period 1838-40, and there was the more aggressive and confrontational movement of the years 1841-42 and 1848. This difference was linked to condition of the economy and the social structure of the support for the Charter. lain Hutchinson

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noted that in the agitation of 1848 the social composition of the movement was changing to include the Irish and young unskilled workers: 'two categories which had not been so central to the earlier phase of Chartism' .195 It was these groups which were responsible for the rioting which accompanied the Chartist revival of 1848, although their centrality to the movement is debated below. In the first phase of Chartist agitation the movement had suffered severe splits over the issue of moral versus physical force. The former were moderates and associated with Chartists, such as William Lovett of the LWMA and Thomas Attwood of the BPU; the latter were supporters of Feargus O'Connor and believed in the use of nonconstitutional methods, including armed force and national strikes, to achieve their ends. The Scots supported the moral force delegates at the May 1839 Convention in Birmingham which gave effect to the resolution passed earlier at the meeting on Calton Hill, Edinburgh. The delegates to Edinburgh had resolved that only peaceful means should be employed to obtain the Charter. 196 Although the strategy of using moral force was adopted by most Chartist associations in Scotland, there were pockets of support for O'Connor's position. Research by Tony Clarke has shown that in 1839 associations from parts of the north-east of Scotland, particularly Forfarshire, Clackmananshire, Dunfermline and from Renfrewshire favoured a national strike supported by an armed people to obtain the Charter. However, in Ayrshire, Glasgow and Lanarkshire, Edinburgh and parts of the Lothians support was lukewarm for this kind of direct action, 197 in spite of the fact that there were few Chartists in Scotland who could be found to endorse the Rev. Patrick Brewster's position of obedience to constituted authority. Scottish artisans, with their strongly held belief in their independence, favoured the idea that 'obedience to authority was conditional on the enjoyment of constitutional rights' . 198 The rejection of the Chartist petition by the Commons in 1839 led to a decline in the influence of moderate moral force Chartism. In Aberdeen, the movement split and the Aberdeen Charter Union (ACU) replaced the Aberdeen Working Men's Association as the focal point of Chartist organisation. The ACU had strong links with the trade unions and in 1841 proposals to organise a trades demonstration in support of O'Connor produced general hysteria in the magistracy and town council. Millowners were called upon to prevent their workers attending the demonstration. Five hundred special constables were sworn in and the military were given sixteen rounds

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of ball cartridge. 199 In Glasgow, O'Connor's attack on 'the saints of the Glasgow Chartist synod' moved the Association in favour of the physical force position. The shifting political strategy of the Chartists towards a more confrontational position with the state coincided in 1842 with the onset of severe economic distress. The rejection by parliament of the second Chartist petition initiated the call for the 'Sacred Month', that is, a month-long general strike. This brought a violent response in the north of England in the so-called 'plug riots'. 200 However, in Scotland the response was muted; something which has led historians to suggest that the moral basis of Scottish Chartism and its tenuous links with the trade unions precluded support for industrial action. Hassan argues that during the miners' strike of 1842 there were no attempts by the Midlothian colliers to link their economic grievances with demands for political reform,2° 1 and Rob Duncan points out that the strike itself was conducted as a series of discrete local actions. Moreover, Aberdeen Chartists opposed the 'use of the strike weapon and condemned the violence in 1842'. 202 But the evidence seems somewhat contradictory. Alan Campbell, in his study of the Lanarkshire miners, states that at a 'great meeting' of miners held near Coatbridge a resolution was passed in favour of Ashley's Bill to exclude women from the mines and also in support of the People's Charter. 203 Thus, the evidence here points to a more explicit linking of politics with economic grievances by miners' leaders. This was consistent with the far greater degree of proletarianisation of miners in Lanarkshire, particularly in the mines owned by the great ironmasters such as Bairds of Gartsherrie, compared to the semi-rural, paternalistic coalfields of Midlothian. Likewise in Dundee, in the summer of 1842, jobless workmen allied themselves with millworkers to demand 'The Charter and Nothing Less'. As the crisis deepened in autumn a public meeting attended by 8000 workers supported overwhelmingly a proposal to call a political strike for the implementation of the Charter. Although the strike call was heeded by 4000 workers, a planned march on Forfar with the intention of arousing support in neighbouring towns ended in failure. 2 04 Regardless of the success of these demands, the actions and language of the workers point to the weaknesses in Hassan's and Duncan's analyses. The strikes in the mining industry may have been concerned with economistic issues, such as wages and hours, and control of the labour process, but to confront the employers and the state on these matters involved a perception of the social order which

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Radical Struggles in Scotland alluded to the presence of different and antagonistic sets of interests in society. Moreover, in searching for the, admittedly tenuous, links between trade unions and Chartism there is a tendency in Duncan's and Hassan's work to focus on formal organisations; an approach which obscures the fact that much union activity at this time was informal and based on immediate workgroup solidarities, rather than the trade. As Clive Behagg points out: There is a clear resonance between the workplace as a democratic forum, the 'worst of democracies' as critics would insist, and a political vision with an emphasis on participation and accountability brought about by universal suffrage and annual parliaments. 205 However, the failure of the 'Sacred Month' and the return of better economic conditions in 1843 saw militancy dissipate and moderates resume leadership of the movement. In Glasgow, despite the fact that some 78 000 people had signed the National Petition in 1842, 'within a year [Julian] Harney and others reported that the movement had all but gone except for the Chartist Churches'. 206 The restoration of traditional radicals to prominence coincided with attempts to promote greater understanding with the middle classes, particularly those involved in the struggles against the Corn Laws. In the preceding years tensions had run high between the Chartists and the Anti Corn Law League (ACLL). In 1840 the Glasgow Chartists decided to intervene at all public meetings of the League; indeed, at any meeting which diverted attention from the Charter. 207 Relations were said to have deteriorated so badly that each class was consistently 'abusing and opposing' the other. 208 In other places the situation was no more friendly. In Aberdeen, the ACU adopted a pronounced anti-middle class and ACLL position; 209 and in Scotland as a whole there was the feeling among Chartists that little was to be gained 'by union with doubtful reformers'. 210 However, in spite of these tensions, there never existed the enmity in Scotland between the workers and the middle classes as occurred in England due to the implementation of New Poor Law in 1834. Chartists in Scotland were quite prepared to sign petitions in favour of repeal of the Corn Laws, particularly those working in export industries for whom the 'ideology of economic Liberalism had an apparently irrefutable logic'; 211 and those, such as John Mitchell, leader of the moderate Aberdeen WMA, who saw in the campaign 71

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an opportunity to 'unmask the titled locust band' of landowners. 212 From 1842 onwards there was also manifested a closer collaboration between the League and the Chartists, and between the workers and the middle classes as evidence in the cross-class support for the Complete Suffrage Union established in 1841 by Joseph Sturge. Tensions, however, continued to exist on the question of priorities, with the Chartists arguing that reform should take precedence over repeal, and the ACLL taking the opposite view. When the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846 handloom weavers in Paisley staged a series of celebratory demonstrations. 213 However, the blessings of free trade were little in evidence as the economy plunged once more into crisis in 1847; an event which coincided with the beginning of revolution in Europe. From this favourable platform the third and final phase of Chartism was launched, but, like the others, it ended in failure as the Commons rejected the third petition. However, the finale involved the construction of a new alliance between Irish Catholics and native Scots which prefigured later political developments. Sectarianism and snobbery had driven a wedge between the two communities which had been fatal to the prosecution of the political struggle for the franchise. After 1842 there were a series of social and political initiatives which encouraged the two communities to pull closer together. The assault by the Catholic hierarchy on drunkenness among the Irish did much to improve their image in Scotland. Thirty thousand Irish in Glasgow were led to establish a connection with the temperance movement as a result of a series of campaigns run by Father Theobald Mathew in 1843. 214 The ties were further strengthened in protests against the operation of the Scottish Poor Laws which not only discriminated against the Irish, but also, under the Law of Settlement, against the rural migrants flooding into the cities. In February 1843 joint protests were made by the Chartists and the Irish in Edinburgh over this issue. 215 Politically, the adoption by the Chartists of Irish demands for the repeal of the Union between Britain and Ireland made an alliance irresistible. There was, however, one obstacle to a full blown rapprochement between the Irish and the Chartists: Daniel O'Connell. Since his condemnation of the Glasgow spinners' strike of 1837, O'Connell had become a figure on which a great deal of indigenous radical and trade union hatred had coalesced. His death in 184 7 removed any remaining barriers to closer co-operation between the Irish Democratic Convention (IDC) and the Chartist movement. 216 72

Radical Struggles in Scotland Perhaps the presence of large numbers of Irish workers, with their historic association with violence, made the reaction to the rejection of the third petition all the more aggressive. The year had begun with the moral force leadership in the ascendancy as electoral associations, or 'People's Leagues', were formed having equal membership of Chartists and CSUers. Glasgow City Council passed a resolution supporting Hume's motion in the Commons for an extension of the franchise. 217 However, by March 1848 the political initiative briefly passed to the riotous mobs of impoverished and starving workers. A riot broke out in Glasgow among the 'unemployed operatives' and the people marched through the streets crying 'Bread or Revolution'. A confrontation with the military left five protestors dead. 218 The 'spirit of rebelliousness' also spread among colliers and iron workers to the west of Glasgow and the authorities were said to have been 'seriously alarmed' at 'midnight ... secret meetings held near the pitheads, at which highly spiced, even seditious, speech-making was indulged in'. 219 Following the rejection of the third petition a meeting of Chartists on Edinburgh's Calton Hill passed a resolution calling for the 'necessity of arming themselves and purchasing a musket or a pike', and two weeks later in Adam Square Hall a further resolution advocating the formation of a National Guard 1600 strong was carried by a large majority; while in Aberdeen a 'National Guard of around 1000 men had been formed'. 220 The riotous events surrounding the Chartist revival in 1848 are the subject of some debate regarding the participants. lain Hutchinson, as we have noted, saw the young, unskilled workers and the Irish as central to the movement in this period. Alexander Wilson, on the other hand, argues that while it is true that there was a great deal more involvement of the Irish in Chartist struggles in 1848, it would be incorrect to include the latter group. Also it would be misleading 'to call the disturbances [of March 1848] Chartist riots', as even the Tory Scotsman recognised, this 'was a mistake unjust in itself'. John McCaffrey views the actions of the Glasgow mobs as less disorganised and criminal, and while the links were not formalised with Chartism, it is clear from the evidence that the crowds were inspired by Chartist denunciations of unemployment and social distress. A list of those arrested and tried for riotous behaviour showed that only 26 out of the 64 were unemployed, and their ranks included skilled iron workers, a printer and a coppersmith. As McCaffrey concludes 'this analysis hardly squares with a picture of the riot caused by a combination of the idle, the curious and the criminal'. 221 73

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

The confrontational stance of the Chartists alienated the supporters of franchise extension in the middle classes. 222 Perhaps this is because during 1848 the challenge to property had become more apparent as the numbers of disaffected young, unskilled operatives and Irish overwhelmed the respectable radical artisans. The fears of the middle classes in granting the vote to this section of society were succinctly expressed by the Lord Provost of Edinburgh when he said: Suppose [the working classes] get universal suffrage and suppose ... that five-sixths of the community belonged to the working classes ... it was clear ... they would legislate for their own interest and make wages as high as possible. 223 The challenge to capital was clear and the middle classes closed ranks with the rest of private property, including their traditional enemies in the landowning class. The alliance of property in 1848 reflected the way the divisions among ruling groups in Scottish and British society had been healed. Once the Corn Laws had been repealed there was little space between the two which radicals could exploit to create a crisis within the state. In the face of threats to property the aristocratically-controlled state was resolute, safe in the knowledge that it had the backing of the vast bulk of the middle classes. As one contemporary journalist put it when reflecting on the riots of 1848: 'the prompt suppression of the Glasgow riots ... [showed] the men that the arm of the law was still a power in the land'.224 When examining the reasons why the Chartists failed to achieve their goals the response of the state is of paramount importance. This does not mean that the divisions within the movement over the issues of moral versus physical force, of co-operation or opposition to the ACLL, as well as the personality clashes within the leadership, were not harmful to the effective mobilisation of the workers in pursuit of the Charter, but they were not decisive. Even the most resolute and united leadership cadre would not have been able to defeat a solidaristic state. Moreover, the mobilisation of the Irish at an earlier date might have generated greater unity within the movement, but it would not have removed the issue of the state's willingness to use its monopoly of coercion to frustrate and ultimately destroy the Chartist movement. In these circumstances reciprocal violence was the only possible strategy open to the Chartists. However, this was a route which the skilled workers refused to travel. Scottish workers rejected the use of

74

Radical Struggles in Scotland violence as a vehicle of political change. As the children of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, their's was a political culture in which rational thought and peaceful persuasion were elemental. As Christopher Smout points out, artisans in Scotland held to the strong belief that 'inequality could and would be overthrown by moral pressure and by reason'; a belief reinforced by their religious convictions. 225 The pacifism of the skilled stratum was also a reflection of their material circumstances and position within the working classes. In Aberdeen most of the stalwart members of the Chartist movement were independent craftsmen and small producers and because of this could not reconcile themselves to attacks on property. 226 The leadership had a disproportionate representation from the petty bourgeoisie and many were involved in temperance and other self-improvement organisations. To a certain extent they all had a stake in the private property system, which is perhaps why schemes of 'co-operation were relatively unimportant to the Chartists'. 227 This was all the more apparent post-1848, when even the working-class members of the Central Committee joined the ranks of the Scottish petty bourgeoisie. William C. Pattison, the engineering trade unionist, became owner of a printing business; Matthew Cullen, the powerloom weaver, became a professional reformer and leading light in social reform movement in Glasgow. 228 The self-improving dimension of artisan ideology allowed for understandings with the propertied strata in Scottish society, particularly since they seemed to be operating within a common or shared value system. It was only the dispossessed industrial proletariat who had nothing to lose, but they were far from numerous and their interest in political reform was limited in most cases to periods of economic distress. Moreover, the political economy of radicalism had a fatal flaw for this section of the working class. As Gareth Stedman Jones argues, if the economic and social misery of the working class was due to its disenfranchisement, once the state began addressing these problems, for example, through the Ten Hours Act, and economic conditions improved, it was impossible to convince the burgeoning proletariat that their grievances were linked to an unreformed political system. The critique of class legislation, therefore, did not extend to the class divisions at the point of production; hostility to the bourgeoisie was based simply on the part they played in the political system. As Stedman Jones makes clear: Once, therefore, the conviction of the totally evil character of the political system itself began to fade and distress became less

75

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

pervasive, there was no independent rationale within the radical ideology for antagonism to the middle classes. 229 Owenism with its critique of competitive capitalism might have filled that ideological lacuna, but the movement's atheism, and advanced views on personal relationships, resulted in its alienation from the working people. Moreover, as Hamish Fraser points out, by the 1840s the Owenite movement had become very petty bourgeois in composition, rather than working class. The leadership included men of substantial means: James Nockles, the secretary, was a manufacturer; James Edminston, treasurer, was middle class; and John Cairns and Lloyd Jones were both wholesale tailors and clothiers. The leader of the Paisley branch, James Motherwell, was a successful bookseller, of which there were quite few in the movement. 230 As a result, Owenism developed into a kind of mystical, semi-religious movement divorced from the realities of working-class life. In spite of the failure of Owenism to provide the programmatic basis of worker unity, there is clear evidence of the development of shared grievances and a more thorough understanding of the economic bases of inequality among, at least, the literate, skilled workers. It can be argued that the experiences of the 1830s and 1840s left workers with a greater awareness of themselves as a social class with interests and aspirations which set them apart from and, indeed, at times, in opposition, to other social groups. As Michael Mann points out, in spite of occupational, ethnic and religious differences, because 'the franchise was a class one, they had to organise as a class'. 231 Although that awareness generally excluded workers in positions of dependency on their employers, such as those in agricultural or domestic service, workers at the cutting edge of economic and technological change saw the class basis of institutions more clearly. Chartists demanded a wholesale set of social and economic reforms which were inimical to the interests of the middle classes. As Ernest Jones put it at a meeting in the Waterloo Rooms, Edinburgh, on 19 April 1848: '[The Chartists] were not merely political reformers but social reformers'. 232 In Aberdeen, during the depressions of 1842 and 1848, Chartist leaders demanded full maintenance and the right to work. Ten years earlier the Aberdeen operative masons criticised the 'self-interested combinations of politicians, bankers, merchants, manufacturers, corn dealers ... and the Established clergy', as did Edinburgh Chartists in 1838 when they stated that there were only two parties: 'the rich oppressors and the poor oppressed'. 233

76

Radical Struggles in Scotland However, at this stage, although the social and economic demands made by the Chartists could be considered antagonistic to free market philosophy, they were not opposed to capitalism at a systemic level, and this is the crucial factor in analysing the question of class consciousness in this period. Chartists demanded that the rights of the subordinate classes to some form of social security be recognised by those in power. In that sense, it was not the class consciousness of socialism which was being articulated, rather it was an endorsement of the levelling spirit which had permeated the consciousness of subordinate classes throughout history. This was brilliantly captured in]. R. Stephens' speech to the Glasgow Chartists, when he demanded: 'that every man shall by his labour find comfortable food and clothing - not only for himself, but for his wife and babes' .234 The levelling dimension of Chartist political philosophy was a necessary outcome of the fact that the uneven development of the Scottish economy was productive of a complex social structure. Thus, Chartism had to appeal to a socially diverse constituency of workers and petty bourgeois elements. The result was unity on the Charter, but little else. As John Duncan, the pastor of the Dundee Chartist Church, pointed out, within the Chartist ranks there were: Repealers and anti-repealers, anti-Poor Law men and Malthusians, O'Connorites, O'Brienites, Cobbettites, Churchmen, Dissenters, or no Church-at-all men and others ... differing in their views of political economy, morals and religion, wider as the poles asunder. 235 Thus, the form of working-class political practice which characterised the 1830s and 1840s has to be understood in terms of an interaction between past cultural formations with present sets of structures, actions and attitudes. 236 It is this relationship which provides the basis for opposing and contradictory linguistic interpretations centred around the leitmotif of the people versus class. If on investigation the historian of Chartism finds both tendencies embedded in the language of political activism in these turbulent years, then this was only to be expected given the different constituencies and interests Chartists were attempting to address. The period from the 1790s up to 1850 was a political learning curve for the working people of Scotland and their allies. The outcome of struggle was understanding what was politically and socially possible, and what was not. In terms of future political strategy there 77

SOCIAL CHANGE AND POLITICAL RADICALISM, 1800-1850

was a general acceptance among workers of a framework of society based on liberal capitalism. Thus a political system which appeared for a number of decades as inherently unstable, a consequence of profound socio-economic changes which disrupted the traditional structures of family and working lives, as well as the landscape of settlement, became highly durable. The older traditions of protest by riot, and moral sentiments concerning fixed or fair prices and wages, declined as organisation became more recognisably modern and more attuned to working within the free market system. Trade unions and pressure groups, operating within the mainstream legal and political framework, became the accepted vehicles through which grievances were to be articulated. Labour politics in Scotland in the future would be democratic, evolutionary, independent and morally infused by the interaction of temperance, religion and respectability. But they would be understood within a language and meaning system which recognised the validity of class as both an abstract ideological formulation and a lived experience. This was the political legacy of the Chartist years for the workers in Scotland and the rest of Britain. Therefore, the demise of Chartism did not bring an end to the process of class formation, or the desire of the workers for political equality and social security; it simply entered a new phase.

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Chapter 7

INTERPRETATIONS

Coming as it does between the turbulent years of Chartism and the rise of socialism in Scotland, the period 1850-1880 has been viewed by some historians as a period of class collaboration and political consensus.1 The class antagonisms of the Chartist era, which threatened to undermine the political system, gave way to a more harmonious and stable set of social relationships between capital and labour based on a shared commitment to the values and ethos of liberal capitalism. In this scenario of historical development stabilisation was closely identified with the emergence of an elite upper stratum of 10-15 per cent of the working class - the labour aristocracy - whose earnings, lifestyle, status and values isolated it from the rest of the working class and pushed into the welcoming arms of the middle class. Under bourgeois influence and patronage the labour aristocracy actively sought incorporation into the major institutions of civil society and the state, and accepted a framework of industrial relations founded on conciliation rather than conflict. Accommodation rather than confrontation characterised working-class political behaviour in this period. This reading of mid-Victorian social and political relationships has experienced ferocious attacks from historians in recent years in that it is inadequate and simplistic, and at least one of the original formulators of the labour aristocracy thesis has rejected it. 2 Critics of the thesis propounded by Hobsbawm, Gray and others have drawn attention to both its socio-economic and political weaknesses. Generally, the idea of periodising history in such an artificial manner is attacked since very little change is detected in the language or practice of working-class politics in this period. Periodisation, it is argued, is the outcome of a misreading of Chartism. Only by viewing Chartism as a movement of the class consciousness industrial proletariat could the notion of a mid-Victorian lacuna in the political development of

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MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE l'OLITIC:S OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

the working class be entertained. As Biagini and Reid put it in a classic statement of the new revisionist history: Our rethinking of post-chartist radicalism ... begins from the assumption that popular politicking needs to be assessed in the first instance within its own political context, rather than in terms of what it 'ought' to have been, defined for example in terms of its consistency with external norms of revolutionary rhetoric or with teleogical models of historical development .... Once we place mid- and late-Victorian working-class Liberal and Labour activists back into their own political context in this way, enough continuity in popular radicalism can be demonstrated to make the social explanations of major changes unnecessary. 3 Specific criticisms are also aimed at the fundamental props of the labour aristocracy thesis. The existence of a privileged stratum within the working class is considered to be more the product of the historical imagination than reality. Studies of earnings show that they were never regular as all skilled workmen suffered periodic bouts of unemployment and the only workers who could be guaranteed employment during depressions were foremen and apprentices. 4 Moreover, work on expenditure and savings patterns within the working class emphasises that most workers were able to put something by for life cycle events, such as funerals, after meeting their own personal expenses. 5 As to closer identification with the middle classes research on marriage registers in this period has shown that there was minimal mobility between working and middle class, and that workers viewed raising themselves solely within the context of the class they were a part of. Social aspirations operated round the idea of independence rather than acceptance of middle-class lifestyles. 6 Trade unions may have spoken the language of conciliation, but they never exercised enough control over their members for this to have had any bearing on industrial relations. Contrary to the Webbs' 'new model' unionism, centralised control was a myth and the workshop rather than the union was the focal point of collective bargaining in the mid-Victorian period.? Politically, the working class operated within the inherited framework of radical politics. Continuity rather than change then best sums up this period in the history of the working class. Indeed, as David Nicholls succinctly puts it in a review of the new revisionist history: 'According to the revisionist bible, eighteenth century radicalism begat Chartism, Chartism begat popular liberalism, popular liberalism begat New Liberalism, and

82

Interpretations

New Liberalism begat the Labour Party'. 8 The debate over the labour aristocracy was important as it created new understandings of working-class attitudes and behaviour over a wide range of socio-economic and political subjects, from employment patterns, to leisure pursuits and popular politics. But no matter how telling the criticisms of the thesis were they did not in general provide a satisfactory alternative explanation as to how stabilisation and political consensus were achieved. 9 What we were left with was a picture of a fragmented and sectional working class whose lifestyles and behavioural patterns were so diverse across the country that to talk of class seemed a fruitless exercise. The stress on continuity further confirmed the impression of socio-economic and political stasis. But the historical project to correct the wilder explanatory excesses of the labour aristocracy tended to obscure significant qualitative and quantitative changes taking place both in the composition, and in the workplace and political culture, of the working class. In the middle decades of the century, formerly powerful alternatives to industrial capitalism, such as the co-operative societies of the Owenites, the trade guilds of the builders' union, the Chartist land banks, and so on, lost their appeal to the dispossessed. The legitimacy of private property and the permanency of the industrial system was accepted by Scottish and English workers alike. The precepts of the moral economy of the first half of the nineteenth century which had conditioned the political economy of the labour movement gave way to a recognition of labour as a commodity, whose worth was determined by the market rather than by custom and tradition. There were also changes in the social relations of the workplace and in working-class cultural values. The middle classes mounted an impressive assault on the behaviourial patterns associated with the pre-industrial order, particularly drinking and riotious assembly. Although there had been attempts earlier to remould working-class culture, particularly its rougher aspects, the mid-Victorian period witnessed an intensification of effort on the part of the middle classes. In the workplace, a more paternalist and welfare-orientated regime was introduced by employers to modify the bitter and hostile relations which had developed in the 1830s and 1840s. These shifts in social relations were concomitant with improvements in the standard of living as real wages increased and brought with them a more benign attitude among workers towards free market capitalism. Politically, important changes were discerned in the conduct and language of political struggle within the working class. Although the violence of Chartism is exaggerated in some accounts of the 1840s, 10 there is no 83

MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS Of CONSENSUS,

1850-IS~W

doubt that after 1850 working-class politics were more strongly-based on prevailing ideology and working through mainstream institutional channels as a means of resolving continuing socio-economic grievances. John Hodge's description of the 1866 franchise demonstration in Glasgow brilliantly captures the respectable and sectional face of the newfound political practice of the workers. He recalled that: 'I remember the tailors walking in this procession, all dressed with their white shirts and their evening suits, and the other trades all marching in the procession ... carrying models of their craft, which ... had been made by their own hand' .11 In the segmented political atmosphere of the decades after Chartism, the concern was less with The Rights of Man and more with the right of respectable working-class householders to share political power through the franchise. These factors are of equal relevance to British workers north and south of the border at this time, but there is also the specifically Scottish changes which need to be considered. Economic restructuring which began in the 1840s witnessed in these middle decades the establishment of a mature industrial economy based on the integration of coal, iron and shipbuilding. This transformation led to the demise of more traditional forms of employment, such as handloom weaving, and even newer occupations in textiles, such as cotton spinning, as well as to a continuous haemorrhaging of labour from agriculture. As the newer occupations were labour intensive, skilled, male and Protestant, a masculine culture operating round the concerns and values of the time-served man was emerging as the hegemonic force within the working class, particularly in the west of Scotland. As we shall see this led to the creation of a peculiarly Scottish political culture somewhat at odds and, at times, in opposition with that prevailing among the working class in England. These changes are in need of explanation as they represent altered forms of industrial, social and political consciousness compared with those explicit in the radical and Chartist eras. However, in saying this, it is important to recognise that in the process of re-composition there existed old and new forms of production in industrial Scotland and that led at times to contradictory patterns of political and workplace behaviour. These contradictions allowed for the continuance of a 'radical political tradition' to speak to contemporary concerns regarding the distribution of power and wealth. 12 But, in spite of this duality, the changing nature of the Scottish working class is unmistakable and it is this which provides the key to the process of stabilisation in the mid-Victorian decades. 84

Chapter 8

HEAVY INDUSTRY AND SOCIAL CHANGE, 1850-1880

The obvious starting point for understanding these changes is an examination of the changing nature of the Scottish economy and its impact on the occupational profile of the country. As we have seen prior to 1850 the industrial structure was dependent on a narrow range of textile industries, particularly cotton. This had a retarding effect on the primary and secondary sectors of the economy, as did the frequent economic crises which resulted from overcommitment to a single group of industries. However, with the advent of the railways the heavy industries in the 1840s began to take off; a phenomenon assisted by the inventiveness of the Scots, as well as copious amounts of cheap labour, fuel and energy. Between 1850 and 1880 these foundations were built on to create a broad industrially-based economy. These decades witnessed the mushroom growth of shipbuilding on the Clyde and the equally impressive growth of the coal and iron industries. The coal industry experienced an impressive surge of growth with output doubling from 7.4m tons to 14.9m tons between 1854 and 1870, and employment from 32 969 workers to 46 984 in the same period. Most of the production was at this time located in the west of Scotland and the region employed around 74 per cent of the workforce in 1870. 13 Most of the mined coal was destined for nondomestic consumption with the export market and iron industry consuming between them 40 per cent of output in this period. 14 Capitalising on Neilson's invention of the hot blast furnace, Scottish ironmasters were producing the cheapest pig iron in the world. Output of pig iron increased from 797 000 tons in 1854 to a peak of 1206 000 in 1869-70. 15 These developments were crucial to the growth of the shipbuilding industry which saw the Clyde's share of British shipbuilding employment grow from only 3 per cent in 1831 85

MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

to 21 per cent (and that of Scotland to 26 per cent) by 1871. In that year the Clyde accounted for 48 per cent of the shipping tonnage launched from British yards. 16 The growth of engineering complemented developments in shipbuilding and other transport industries, particularly the railways. The Springburn district of Glasgow became the world's leading manufacturer of locomotives. Textiles were still important as an employer of labour, particularly of women. By the 1850s the spread of power-loom weaving brought about the demise of handlooms in all but the fanciest aspects of the trade. The structural changes taking place in the west of Scotland have tended to dominate accounts of the country's economic history. This has obscured the fact that other parts of Scotland were undergoing a similar period of transition. Aberdeen's transition to industrialisation was propelled like many parts of Scotland by the expansion of textiles; however, by 1850 cotton production had collapsed with 'thousands of hands ... thrown out of employment' resulting in 'an exodus ... which was almost to nullify the natural increase of population for the next ten years' Y Industrial collapse was only reversed by the growth of the herring and white fishing industries and granite production.18 By diversifying into new products the Aberdeen economy enjoyed a resurgence and greater prosperity. Dundee adopted the opposite course and as a result saw its economy develop a remarkably high dependence on coarse textiles, particularly flax and jute. Textile firms employed 41550 workers in 1867, most of them women, which represented more than 25 per cent of the city's total population. 19 The massive surge in economic growth in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was in the main export led. Two million tons of mined coal was exported annually between 1865 and 1869. The development of the iron industry was even more determined by export markets. Between 1830 and 1870 Scotland, although only supplying on average 25 per cent of British output of pig iron, was responsible for between 50 to 90 per cent of British pig iron exports. 20 In the engineering industry recurring economic crisis was overcome by diversification of product line and by selling in overseas markets. 21 Glasgow's economy was more dependent on overseas trade than any other British region. The reliance on export markets had the disadvantage of making Scottish manufacturing industry sensitive to shifts in world demand. Shipbuilding suffered seven major cycles averaging seven to nine years between 1822 and 1879. 22 Given the integrated economic structure that had developed in the west of Scotland cyclical depressions in shipbuilding had serious knock-on effects on related 86

Heavy Industry and Social Change industries. Burghs such as Dundee and Paisley which were reliant on a single industry suffered disproportionately in economic downswings. The collapse of the Paisley shawl trade devastated the town in 1857, as did the repeated cyclical depressions in Dundee. 23 The relative success of Scottish industry at this time has overshadowed the fact that much of the manufacturing base was made up of small units of production. Rodger, in his study of mid-Victorian Scottish industry, shows that half the firms in urban areas in this period employed fewer that five workers and three out of every four firms less than nine. Only 10 per cent of Scottish firms employed more than twenty workers. The largest firms were in textiles with a mean workforce of 662. However, he also notes that 60 per cent of Scotland's industrial workforce was concentrated in plants of a hundred or more workers. 24 The duality of the industrial structure in Scotland in mid-century was, therefore, evident, and this had some bearing on the divisions between workers: a phenomenon we will examine later in the chapter. However, regardless of the size of enterprise, the rapid expansion of the Scottish economy increased the demand for labour, which became insatiable in times of economic boom. The number of metal workers in Scotland increased from 60 800 in 1851 to 210 400 in 1901, an increase of 346 per cent, as did the number in mining from 48 100 to 127 900, an increase of 266 per cent, in the same period. There were similar gains in other branches of industry with the exception of textiles which lost 67 000 jobs over the second half of the nineteenth century. 25 The rise in industrial employment more than compensated for the decline in agriculture, which saw its share of the total workforce fall from around 30 per cent in 1851 to just over 19 per cent in 1881. The Strathclyde region showed the largest fall of those working in agriculture from just over 16 per cent of the total working population in 1851 to 7.4 per cent thirty years later. Agriculture was only significant as an employer of labour in the rural Borders, Grampian and Highland regions. 26 Between the major cities there were contrasting patterns of employment, as there were for men and women. Industrial employment during the period 1851 to 1881 was the main source of income for Glasgow and Dundee workers with three-quarters in the case of Glasgow and astonishingly nearly nine-tenths in the case of Dundee located in these occupations. However, even in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, two cities with large service sectors, two-thirds of male workers were employed in industry, although only around a third of females.27 87

MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

Female workers in Scotland were predominantly found in four occupational groups: agriculture, domestic service, clothing and textiles. 28 Most of them tended to be young and single with few married women in employment. Although this discounts the number of married women employed in casual or home work, official participation rates in Scotland were some 4 per cent below that for England and Wales in 1871.29 The expansion of the economy and the labour market, as well as the changing character of occupations had important political and social implications. Much of the industrial and political protest prior to 1850 had centred on groups of workers deskilled and impoverished by industrial change such as handloom weavers. The widespread use of the power-loom in the 1850s witnessed the destruction of handloom weaving as an occupation and the absorption of weavers in other forms of industrial employment. Male cotton spinners, who had formerly been at the frontier of technological change, found themselves outnumbered by women as employers increasingly met internal and external competition by cheapening labour costs. By the 1880s two-thirds of the workforce was female with the number of male workers having declined by 50 per cent between 1871 and 1881; a development which was replicated in the woollen industry of the Scottish border counties. 30 The former militancy of the cotton spinners was broken in this new sexual division of labour. Of those workers associated with pre-industrial modes of organisation only the colliers remained. As we will see, they continued to prove militant in times of rising prosperity, but the militancy tended to be confined to the large and integrated coal and iron combines such as the Dixon enterprises of Lanarkshire. Most miners worked in small pits with the average figure for west Lanarkshire in 1873 being 136.9 men per pit, although in districts such as Old Monklands in 1864 it was as low as 45.6 men per pit. The paternalism of the coalowners in these small enterprises proved a barrier to effective union mobilisation and it was not until the 1880s that a workforce of around 300 became common for a colliery in the west of Scotland. 31 Therefore, as the labour force changed in composition the threats to the industrial order diminished. It assumed a permanency among the workers as they became attuned to bargaining using economic, rather than moral, criteria, indeed, by 'playing the market'. 32 The expansion of the labour market and the rising prosperity of the Scottish economy in this period provided important clues as to the forces promoting social and political stability. For consensus to develop there needs to be tangible evidence that society has the 88

Heavy Industry and Social Change

sustained ability to deliver an increasing amount of goods and services to a growing population. If the experience of the Soviet Union or Britain in the 1970s is anything to go by it is the provision of larger parcels of consumption, rather than broad and binding policy agreements between corporate powers, which generates the basis of stable social relationships. The first phase of industrialisation saw many workers experience a decline, or at least stagnation, in living standards, a phenomenon which fuelled much of the industrial and political protest of the 1830s and 1840s. The middle decades of the century saw things improve for the broad mass of Scottish workers and their families as 'investment after 1850 was capital saving and labour using, resulting in a steady growth in employment incomes'Jl Although the data are somewhat fragmented and tend only to cover wage rates rather than actual earnings, as well as making no allowance for unemployment or broken time, which was thought to affect the wages of one in four Scottish workers, there seems to have been a substantial improvement across industry in money wages. During the 1848 depression colliers' wages had reached a nadir of lOs weekly, 34 but by 1863 wages averaged 4s to 4s 9d per day in the Glasgow area, and by 1880 hewers were receiving around 25s 3d per week at a time of falling prices. 35 In the more skilled trades wages were much higher than in mining. Keith Burgess notes that building wages in Scotland reached parity with England in the 1850s; a factor which eroded the differential advantage Scottish employers had over English by as much as 15-25 per cent. 36 Indeed, between 1843 and 1880 stonemasons in the Glasgow area saw their money wages increase by around 35s, or 230 per cent, for a reduced working week of 43 hoursY Engineering and shipbuilding workers also experienced rises in wages. According to the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), average minimum wages increased on a much reduced working week from 18-34s in 1851 for 63-57 hours of work, to 22-36s in 1866 for 60-56 hours, and in 1880 to 24-36s for 54 hours. 38 Data for the Glasgow area over the same period tend to confirm these estimates as weekly rates for fitters were said to be 28s 9d in 1866 for 60 hours of work. Fourteen years later the respective figure was 31s 9d for 54 hours, although workers on piece could earn more. Shipyard riveters on the Clyde were earning 25s lOd in 1866 for a 60 hour week, but this rose sharply in 1880 to 40s for those on piece, although the hours of work were unspecified. 39 Even among certain sections of the unskilled money wages were rising. Pan men in the sugar refining industry were earning as much as skilled workers, with wages estimated 89

MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

to be 30-40s per week in 1866; and machine men in paper manufacture in 1863 were getting 19-21s, although in both cases official reports do not indicate the hours worked. 40 Increased income afforded a lifestyle for many workers which allowed for greater variety in the consumption of food, entertainment and travel. A study of the expenditure patterns of a Dundee engineer in 1864-65, shows that his earnings were sufficient to fund a lifestyle which included luxuries such as fruit and sweets, refreshments, shows, newspapers, journals and books, and a fair amount of travel by cab and rail. 41 That prosperity was shared by workers outside of the main cities. A Hawick tweed manufacturer, C. J. Wilson, in evidence to the Royal Commission on Labour in 1891, claimed that local workpeople saved with local building societies, had shares in the co-operative societies of the area, and worked assidiously on their allotments. 42 Perhaps, as a consequence of the rising standard of living and improved economic opportunities at home emigration slowed down in the early 1860s and late 1870s.43 However, although earnings of a broad range of trades were increasing over the third quarter of the nineteenth century, there remained important vertical divisions among wage earners based on the nature of their economic activity, geographical location and gender. According to Dudley Baxter's survey of national income in 1867, 70 per cent of working Scots, predominantly young, female and unskilled, earned less than £30 per annum. 44 Differentials between the unskilled and skilled were higher in Scotland than in England. Labourers in the Glasgow building trades earned 57 per cent of the skilled rate, whereas in London they earned 66 per cent. 45 These differentials were also found to exist between major urban centres. Many of the trades in Aberdeen, such as textiles and fishing, paid low wages in comparison to Clydeside metal trades, but they were substantially above those in Dundee. 46 Aberdeen carpenters and joiners averaged 27s 7d in the early 1890s compared to 36s 1.5d for Glasgow. Inter-city differentials mirrored national ones. Scottish workers were thought to earn 16-19 per cent less than English workers in the 1860sY As a measure of improvement the first wage census of 1886 saw this narrow to 94.8 per cent of the English rate. However, it was still the case that in the cotton, shipbuilding, construction and printing trades Scottish employees earned substantially less than their English equivalents, while in engineering and carpet manufacture there was little difference, but in coalmining and linen manufacture wages were a trifle higher. 48 90

Heavy Industry and Social Change While things were improving, the Scottish economy was still characterised by low wages; a point noted by Edward Young, the US Consul in Edinburgh, who remarked that the world dominance of Clyde shipbuilders was due less to technical superiority and more to 'the low rate of wages'. 49 However, this point was made with even more force when the level of women's pay is compared to men's. As women were seen as dependants rather than breadwinners, which was the case in many households, they were thought to need less to keep them than men. Women's work was, thus, synonymous with low pay. By the end of the nineteenth century the average wage for a woman was still only 42 per cent of the male average. Even in skilled trades women earned less than men for doing the same job. The highest paid skilled women in the Edinburgh printing trades earned 20s a week, whereas the lowest paid unskilled men and warehouse hands earned between 15s and 21s. 50 In spite of these generally low levels of pay there existed an income hierarchy in female occupations. Female cotton spinners earned on average 19s 6d a week in 1861, while female jute spinners a paltry 7s 3d. 5 1 In the Paisley thread trade a copwinder received 14s 8d a week in 1878 compared to 12s 6d for a spooler. 52 These differentials were the source of social and workplace divisions. As a female spinner in the Dundee jute trade put it: 'weavers thought themselves somethin', aye and winders tae ... they never looked at us ... they thought they were somethin' special. ... They used to walk past you as if you were something low and they were "it"'. 53 Therefore, not all Scots shared in the economic boom of the midVictorian decades and the system of hierarchically determined rewards created social divisions within the ranks of workers. Indeed, 2 7 per cent of Glasgwegians in gainful employment earned around a pound a week, and from this meagre sum they were expected to feed, clothe and house their families. This was less than it cost the City Poor House or Prison per week for an equivalent number of inmates in their care. 54 Low wage levels obviously affected the type and condition of housing that was available for renting. The first reliable guide to this question was provided by the 1861 census. The data showed that one-room houses comprised 34 per cent of the housing stock of Scotland, and that a further 3 7 per cent consisted of two rooms. Thus, in 1861, 71 per cent of Scottish housing consisted of not more than two rooms, and housed 64 per cent of the population. 55 The average size of a one-room house in Edinburgh was only 14 by 11.5 feet, but, in spite of this, 226 000 families inhabited single rooms. 5 6 91

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The amenities available to tenants were also poor. In 1861, with 91664 inhabitants, Dundee had only five WCs, and three of them were in hotelsY All water in Dundee was drawn from wells of which the chief, the Lady Well, was heavily polluted by the local slaughterhouse. 58 The situation was not much better in Dundee's more prosperous neighbour. As late as 1865 the city engineer, Robert Anderson, stated that two-thirds of Aberdeen had no sewers, and each water well in the city had to supply 400 families. 59 Conditions in Scotland were summed up by one contemporary essayist, who wrote in 1866 that: Sanitary arrangements [are] of the most defective description .... The absence of conveniences ... is a great preventive of that thorough cleanliness and purity ... as a consequence the atmosphere is foully tainted, and rendered almost unendurable by its loathsomeness at those periods when offal and nuisance require to be deposited on the streets. 60 Not surprisingly, overcrowded and cramped low amenity housing impacted itself on the health of the urban working class. Infant mortality rates were appallingly high in Scotland with 42 per cent of all deaths in Glasgow in the age cohort 0-5 in 1861. 61 Children born in one room houses were the most vulnerable. Of all children in Glasgow who died in 1861 before the age of five, 32 per cent were born or living in 'single ends', while only 2 per cent were in five roomed houses. 62 The most common killer was gastric illnesses, but in truth the majority died because their mothers were too undernourished to feed them properly. This underlines the fact that epidemics and poor health were not simply the result of bad housing and defective drinking supplies. Part of the problem lay with food and drink adulteration, but conditions in the workplace also had a major impact on health. A study of Tranent, near Edinburgh, in the 1840s found that mining, because of the dirt and dust, was an unhealthy trade. Out of 35 colliers' families, the average age of death for the male head of household was 34, while the average age of death for male factory workers was over 50. 63 The poverty was made worse by the continuous flood of people looking for work in the cities and towns. The working or occupied population of Glasgow nearly doubled from 123 052 in 1841 to 233 982 in 1881; while in the same period Dundee grew even more spectacularly from 24 785 to 69 150, and Edinburgh from 57 626 to 104 985. 64 The influx showed a different pattern to that of the first 92

Heavy Industry and Social Change half of the nineteenth century. Nearly half of all migrants to the west of Scotland in the decades 1851 to 1871 were from rural areas in lowland Scotland, but the most homogeneous group came from the Scottish Highlands. From 54 000 in 1851 the number grew to 79 000 twenty years later, of which over 70 per cent were settled in the Glasgow district. 65 The Irish continued to settle in Scotland in large numbers, but the tidal wave of the 1840s had began to slow, and there was a shift in the religious denomination of the incomers. By 1871 the number of Irish-born in Scotland stood at 207 700, of which 76 per cent were located in the west of Scotland. Although this represented only 13 per cent of the total population of Scotland, Anthony Slaven argues that 'Somewhere between a quarter to a third of the inhabitants ... must have been of Irish extraction'. 66 Moreover, half of all Irish immigrants to Scotland in the period 1851 to 1881 were Protestant, 67 although in the quinquenium 1876-81 the figure was much higher at 83.2 per cent. Of these incoming Irish Protestants, 58.7 per cent came from the four most staunch Ulster countiesAntrim, Armagh, Down and Tyrone. 68 Reflecting the new pattern of Irish immigration was the establishment by 1878 of 100 Orange Lodges in Glasgow with a membership of 15 000 out of a total of 90 000 for England and Scotland. 69 Irish Protestants, through patronage and the right of the foreman to hire and fire, found their way into skilled occupations in shipbuilding and engineering; however, the Catholic Irish remained confined to unskilled low paid employment. In 1851, 52 per cent of the unskilled workers in Greenock were Irish-born and this was still the case forty years on; in Coatbridge in 1861 around 60 per cent of unskilled metal workers were lrish.7° Employers generally colluded in this practice or adopted a position of benign neglect. But in some enterprises an openly hostile attitude to Catholic Irish workers was displayed. The iron and coal magnate, William Baird, closed his Gartsherrie works in Lanarkshire on Sundays to allow workers to attend church and encouraged strong Orange sympathies among them. 71 The third quarter of the nineteenth century provided rising living standards for many workers, although as we have seen the young, women and ethnic groups were by-passed in the distribution of rewards. Poverty and poor social conditions remained a way of life for far too many in Scotland, however, the rise in employment incomes put respectability within the grasp of increasing numbers of workers and their families. This was to have an important impact on the cultural ethos of the Scottish working class. 93

Chapter 9

RESPECTABILITY AND THE SCOTTISH WORKING CLASSES,

1850-1880

Respectability was based on a series of social and economic supports including regular earnings and employment, sobriety and thrift. While the fluctuating fortunes of the Scottish economy could not always guarantee the former, there seems clear evidence that many skilled workers and their families subscribed to some negotiated form of the latter. Respectability can be said to have been negotiated because, although nurtured by the middle classes as part of a cultural and religious onslaught on the values of the working class, particularly those associated with the older, rougher culture of pre-industrial society, it was modified in the light of the realities of working-class life. The drive towards respectability arose out of middle-class fears over slum life and the integrity of the working-class family, as well as the desire to promote greater standards of public order, and this led to a barrage of initiatives designed to promote self-help and selfimprovement schemes. However, it also involved concessions 'from the people above', such as the building of libraries and public parks, and, more politically, the passing by the state of legislation designed to improve the economic and political position of the working class. Middle-class concerns were to some extent not surprising as the depravity surrounding the culture of drink reached the point where on New Year's Day in Aberdeen 'old and middle aged men and women and boys and girls [were] falling about in a state of intoxication at two o'clock in the day'.7 2 In Glasgow, a team of investigators working for the North British Mail estimated that in the old city centre there were 200 brothels and 150 shebeens in operation in the early 1870s. These were split into 'respectable' shebeens in which only the licensing laws were violated, the 'disreputable' which were frequented by 94

Respectability and the Scottish Working Classes the criminal fraternity, and the 'wee' shebeens 'on the stair head' .73 Moreover, the riotous behaviour surrounding the monarch's birthday continued after 1850. An example of this was the riot which broke out in Dundee on Queen Victoria's birthday in 1853 which led to the sacking of the town hall and the breaking of every window in the High Street. What, asked an editorial in the Dundee Advertiser, can you expect if 'you coop up hordes of human beings in narrow pestilential closes, hemmed in on all sides by whisky shops, pawn shops' without regard to their 'social condition' .74 The response to this kind of social pandemonium was swift and within twelve years the journeyman engineer, John Sturrock, could enjoy a performance of the Artillery Band in Dundee's Baxter Park on the monarch's birthday without a 'hint of the disorder that coloured earlier celebrations of this event' .75 The eradication of unruly and riotous behaviour involved the middle classes in the promotion of acceptable and respectable behaviour and an obvious starting point in this process of remoulding working class culture was the reform of drinking habits. In this endeavour middle-class philanthropists and the state built on the foundations established in the 1830s and 1840s among skilled workers and Chartists. The labour movement in Scotland, unlike that in England, had introduced the practice of holding meetings in coffee shops rather than public houses at an early date. 76 Coopers used the fines and footings collected from apprentices and strangers, previously for the purpose of financing alcoholic excess, for respectable 'annual soirees, pleasure excursions, vocal and instrumental events' .77 This change also applied to the loosely organised trades councils which emerged in the post-1850 period. The Edinburgh Trades Council (ETC) met in a coffee shop from its inception until 1867 and, then for the next twenty years, in a temperance hotel.7 8 Trade union leaders railed against the demon drink as harmful to the interests of the trade and to the labour movement in general. The Boilermakers' Society complained that 'stopping off drinking is the greatest evil that our trade and society has to contend against'; 79 a view underscored by the Ironfounders' Society which claimed that all non-unionists were by definition, mostly corrupt, tending to be 'drunkards, idlers and very often improvident men'. 80 Employers, anxious to maintain production and reduce absenteeism, and the state, concerned over questions of public order, were also enthusiastic supporters of temperance. By the 1860s, temperance lodges were established at Calder, Gartsherrie and Calderbank ironworks, and legislation in the form 95

M!D-V!C:TOR!AN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, !850-1880

of the Forbes Mackenzie Act of 1853 brought in Sunday closing of pubs, though not of hotels. 81 The rhetoric of union leaders was supplemented by initiatives from temperance societies. The Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT) formed in 1869 and the Independent Order of Rechabites (lOR) were the largest organisations of this kind in Scotland, with the former's Airdrie branch being the largest temperance lodge in the world. 82 However, as Callum Brown notes, by this time the leadership of the temperance movement had been 'appropriated by the middle classes and the churches' 83 and the links it enjoyed with radical politics were severed by the change of leaders. Nevertheless, the impact of the societies could be electric. The arrival in 1870 of the IOGT in Aberdeen brought a membership of 4000 and 23 lodges within a year. 84 Bands of Hope, mixing religion and temperance, were set up in the 1870s to target children and young people. In Glasgow, the Abstainers' Union established the highly popular Saturday night concerts from 1854 to 1914, which attracted the best professional performers from the British music hall and international opera stars, while the smaller societies, such as the Temperance Crusaders, ran their own successful amateur concerts. 85 Outside of temperance reform, voluntary societies addressed themselves to a wide range of social problems, but the integrity of the working-class family and, in particular, the position of women and young females was at the forefront of middle-class concerns. Domestic training for girls was written into the school curriculum after the passing of the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872, not only because of the middle class's need for servants, but also, as Helen Corr points out, because it was 'feared that the working class family in towns and cities was falling into a state of physical deterioration through poor housing, bad health and moral decay'. 86 Outside the classroom organisations like the Aberdeen Ladies Union (ALU), which had as its object 'the bringing together of all workers for the welfare of women and girls in Aberdeen', worked among the half-timers in the textile mills. The ALU attempted to extend a form of social control over the behaviour of the mill girls by raising 'the moral standard in all ways possible'. This was to be done through the establishment of 'lily bands', whose main social activities included reading circles, needlework and family worship. Within two years of its foundation in 1883 the ALU had 300 mill girls enrolled in 'lily bands'. For older females 'lily band' evening classes were established along the same lines and they had around 250 members in the late 1880s.87 Eleanor 96

Respectability and the Scottish Working Classes Gordon, in her study of the Dundee jute industry, noted that several middle-class voluntary associations developed in the city to instruct mill girls in 'dressmaking, millinery, cooking, laundry', and so on. 88 It would appear that as far as the middle class was concerned the crisis of the working-class family was to be resolved by strengthening the Victorian association of women with the domestic sphere and men with the world of work, even in places such as Dundee where a high percentage of households were dependent on the earnings of women. 89 Upon these social constructs a system of patriarchy emerged in both the workplace and the wider society. Although the role of patriarchy has not been fully explored in the context of Scottish workplace relations, its existence points to another source of cultural fragmentation within the working class, and, as Patrick Joyce suggests, to the creation of 'all sorts of understandings with employers (a "boss" in his sphere as was the worker in his home and work functions)' .90 Women's work, therefore, where it was not considered irrelevant, was unrespectable. The mixing of the sexes was considered undesirable even by pro-labour publications. The Chartist Circular claimed that factory work 'degraded and contaminated' female workers; the Glasgow Sentinel declared in 1860 that: 'The employment of women at occupations where it is necessary they should be mixed up with men is not desirable'. 91 Attempts to restructure the working-class family and to maintain the subordination of women in and out of the workplace were linked to the need to provide healthy and 'rational' recreation, particularly as a counterweight to the public house. By refocusing working-class leisure pursuits round the family a more respectable and less rough culture might emerge. The public parks movement was one element in this strategy. Dundee's Baxter Park, named after one of the city's leading jute manufacturers, was constructed with the surface objective of providing 'the working population [of Dundee] with a means of recreation and enjoyment after their hard labour and honest industry'; but also with the more discrete objective of dissolving class tensions by providing a 'common ground, where all the inhabitants of that large and busy town may meet in mutual acknowledgement of their dependence of the one upon the other'. 92 Cricket and rowing were also promoted with similar social objectives as alternatives to the rough culture and enjoyed some popularity among workers. Neal Tranter's research on the social origins of organised sport in and around Stirlingshire and Clackmannanshire shows that in the years

97

MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

1880-83 skilled workers and the middle classes made up just over 80 per cent of cricketers, whereas football, athletics and quoiting drew players from almost an exclusively skilled backgrounds. 93 Interestingly, the research shows that down to the 1880s active participants in organised sport were rarely drawn from the ranks of the unskilled or semi-skilled. Even among football players only one in ten was an agricultural or semi-skilled worker, while at the level of club officebearer public service and professional occupations dominated. 94 The social purpose of these sporting ventures was fairly explicit. Wishaw Cricket Club was formed in 1856 with the express desire to 'draw the young men away from the public houses and other evil devices' and to promote more social harmony. 95 Their organisational structure also reflected the class basis of society and reinforced the superior status of the middle classes in their capacity as office-bearers. Sharing this objective, Volunteer Companies, established during the French invasion threat of 1859, survived to bring different social classes together. 96 Far from blind to the opportunities the Volunteers provided for reinforcing employer authority, firms set up their own branches. In the integrated coal and iron firms of Lanarkshire, Volunteer Companies were set up in which the managers were the officers, the foremen the NCOs, and the colliers the privates; a hierarchical structure which reproduced the authority relations of the workplace. 97 Regardless of origin, leisure pursuits had to be afforded and this necessitated a commitment to the virtues of thrift. The mid-Victorian decades witnessed the growth of savings banks and functional cooperative societies, divorced from the socially transforming role assigned to them by Owen, as institutions of working-class self-help. Savings banks had a preponderance of stonemasons, joiners and engineers among their depositors, although very few, according to Levitt and Smout, were 'unskilled urban labourers either in Scotland or England' .98 However, female factory workers in Paisley were the main contributors to the assets of the Paisley Savings Bank, which saw its deposits grow from £60 000 in 1854 to upwards of £90 000 in 1871. 99 Similarly, those workers involved in the co-operative movement came from a wide-range of trades, although the artisan or 'skilled class' predominated. 100 The Bannockburn society was composed mainly of 'carpet weavers and pitmen'; the Kilmarnock society set up in 1860 was the work of 'handloom carpet weavers'- a 'class of men esteemed for their intelligence and thrift' - and engineers; and the Paisley society was found on the initiative of groups of weavers. 101 98

Respectability and the Scottish Working Classes

Religion was another arm in the weaponry of the culture of order; a process which had begun with Thomas Chalmers' social work in Glasgow in the 1820s. The skilled worker had always figured prominently in the congregations of the established church, but the Disruption of 1843 in the Church of Scotland over the question of patronage had led many to leave the fold. However, this did not lead to a diminution in church attendance as the rivalry with the Free Church led to a furious church building programme. A study of eight Glasgow churches in the period 1845-65 showed that three-quarters of 1330 members of the Church of Scotland and over half the 2663 members of the dissenting churches were mainly skilled working class. 102 The United Presbyterians and the Free Church increasingly drew their ministers from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie and skilled workers. 103 For those outside the ranks of the skilled stratum - the 'godless poor' - a whole series, of admittedly partially successful, initiatives were promoted by the churches. The range of this cultural assault can be guaged from the activities of St Mary's Free Church in the working-class district of Govan, Glasgow. By the end of the 1880s St Mary's had 1137 children enrolled in its Sunday School, 493 in Bible class, 155 Sunday School teachers, a company of the Boys Brigade numbering 58, Gospel Temperance meetings with 420 members, a Penny Savings Bank, several branches of the YMCA, and 292 Home Mission workers. 104 If that was not enough there were congregational district visitors, 'Bible Women', the Salvation Army from the late 1870s, Mothers' Kitchen Prayer Meetings, and Medical Missions. There were also missions to seamen, railwaymen, and shipyard workers, as well as evangelical 'tents' for the poor in major urban centres. 105 Peter Taylor, an engineer, recalled in his autobiography, that the local minister, Dr Andrew Bonar, frequently addressed the workers of Barclay and Curle, Whiteinch, Glasgow, during their dinner hour. 106 Callum Brown has also pointed to the 'controlled' religious revivals of the third quarter of the nineteenth century led by the Free and United Presbyterian Churches, 107 which contrasted with the millenia! rivalism occurring in Lanarkshire colliery villages, Perth factories and Shotts ironworks of the 1830s and 1840s. One at Kilsyth in 1839 paralysed a whole community as 'the web became nothing to a weaver, nor the forge to the blacksmith, nor his bench to the carpenter, nor the furrow to the ploughman. They forsook all to crowd the churches and prayer meetings'. 108 Revivalism was, therefore, stripped of its class identity and spread under its more respectable cloak to 99

MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

the middle- and working-class families of Edinburgh and Glasgow by the 1870s; a high point of which was the Moody and Sankey revival of 1874. Quasi-religious organisations further enhanced contacts between the skilled workers and other social groupings. By 1879 the Masonic Order in Scotland was estimated to have just over 69 000 members in lodges affiliated to the Grand Order and over a thousand dormant lodges. With its distinguished patrons, including members of the royal family, and high entry fees and annual subscriptions, the Order had strong artisan and middle class membership. 109 However, perhaps, the main tool of middle-class social engineering was education. As we have seen industrialisation, with its demand for child labour, had a baneful effect on education. Attendance was intermittent and the peak years for boys seemed to have been between the ages of seven and ten. The 1872 Education Act was passed to address this problem by introducing compulsory schooling for working-class children between the ages of five and thirteen, although those reaching the fifth grade before thirteen could gain exemption after the age of ten. The impact of the legislation was profound. While in 1857 only around half of Glasgow's children attended school, and only a third of Catholics of school age, by the end of the century attendance was fairly universal and illiteracy had been virtually wiped out for both sexes. 110 However, the schools were not only transmitters of literacy and numeracy skills, but also agents of discipline and order. School rules included the injunction that: 'there should be sustained quietness and instantaneous obedience' . 111 Should the injunction fail, the tawse was always on hand to enforce silence. The habits instilled in the children in the classroom were designed to make them amenable to the disciplines of the work rhythm of the factory and workshops, as well as to the authority of those above them. Increasingly imperial and military considerations came to dominate the political agenda in schools. Military drill was taught by ex-soldiers, who were often employed as janitors, and it was added to in time by emphasis on musical drill and gymnastics, all thought by the Educational News to encourage in pupils: The habit of acting in concert, of strict obedience to the word of command, of deference to authority, of military precision, all contribute to the formation of a character, in which sense of duty, esprit de corps, respect for authority, and affection for, and loyalty to, school, are conspicuous .... pupils imbued with such a spirit will go out into the world well prepared to play their part as good citizens. 112 100

Respectability and the Scottish Working Classes Education also reinforced, as we have noted above, the gender divisions of the wider society with girls being educated in domestic skills, while the boys were fitted to take part in the world of work. The cultural attack by the middle class on the disorderly habits of working-class life was complemented by the growing moderation and restraint shown by workers and their families. If the response by the latter had not been positive, the overtures from 'the people above' would have come to nothing. By responding in such a sure manner to values such as sobriety and thrift, the working class could have been said to have been embourgeoised. However, the values were sufficiently ambiguous to be open to a variety of interpretations. As R. Q. Gray points out, 'these values and norms were reinterpreted within the upper working class's social world: their meaning might change as they became embroidered in distinctive manual working class institutions'. 113 The meaning skilled workers attached to these 'values and norms' derived from their social and economic concerns and fears; in that sense they could be described as functional. Temperance made sense in as much as marginal income and working time lost in drinking endangered the family as a viable social unit and one's life chances. Indeed, the success of the temperance societies lay less in their promotion by employers, and more because they not only offered spiritual and moral guidance, but also a range of welfare benefits and a form of recreation which was more family orientated than that provided by the public house. Under the impact of shorter hours, particularly from the 1870s, and rising incomes there was a cultural shift towards the family and home life; a development encouraged by bargaining round the concept of the 'family wage'. A thrifty worker made it possible for his wife to remain at home and to open avenues for improved education for his children. Savings also ensured survival during periods of distress and illness in a pre-welfare society, as well as allowing the worker to set aside some money for the buying and replacement of lost or worn out tools, and to pay the rent, which in Scotland was collected on a yearly or half-yearly basis. Finally, thrift provided a measure of independence, which David Kirkwood, of 'Red Clydeside' fame, defined in the words of father, a skilled worker, as: Not being starved, not being homeless, not being in debt. It meant, above all, not being thrown on the parish [which] ... was to be cast into the bottomless pit.... The glorious privilege of being independent was no mere poet's fancy. It was the very marrow of life. 114 101

MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

Following what Kirkwood has to say on the matter, the material basis of respectability should not be lost sight of. As Hamish Fraser points out, a 'respectable' man in an economy based on reputation and trust had a much better chance of finding employment, obtaining credit, receiving a character reference, finding an apprenticeship for his son, and getting a decent house. 115 Although modified by the realities of working-class life and open to diverse and ambiguous meanings, there is little doubt that the promotion of respectability by the middle classes and the subscription to its underlying values by workers went some way to encourage greater understanding between the various social strata in Scottish society. As we have seen, temperance was from the outset an alliance between the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. Its basic premise was that working-class poverty was the result of drink, rather than the inadequacies of the free market economy, and these assumptions were shared by the politically conscious members of the working class, and, at a later date, by socialists such as Keir Hardie. Intellectualising poverty in this way individualised the problem and encouraged ideas of self-help or self-improvement. Although primarily associated with the voluntary institutions, such as Mechanics Institutes, mutual self-improvement initiatives also took place at the segmented workplace level. Peter Taylor recalled, while working at Blackwood and Gordon, shipbuilders and engineers, Paisley, settingup a Mutual Improvement Association among the apprentices. The Association's twenty members met in Taylor's mother's kitchen, where they discussed all sorts of issues and subjects, ranging from geology to trade unionism, before 'closing with a prayer' . 116 Other voluntary societies also helped to promote a shared consensus on social and political issues, particularly the debating and literary societies which young artisans clustered around. James Leatham, a printer and, later, socialist agitator and writer, recalled that in his youth the Aberdeen Commercial Literary Society of which he was a member consisted of a 'crowd of young lawyers, solicitors, medical students and skilled workers' . 117 Affording the membership fees of clubs and societies was a hallmark of respectability, as was membership of a church. Indeed, religion acted as a social cement bringing together and furthering understandings between the different social classes in Scotland. Scottish Presbyterianism's virulent brand of anti-Catholicism was used to define a sense of Scottish identity which excluded large sections of society, particularly the Catholic Irish. In much the same way as race 102

Respectability and the Scottish Working Classes in the Southern states of America in the post-Reconstruction era created alliances between poor whites and their social superiors, sectarianism in Victorian Scotland performed a similar function, as hostility to Irish Catholics cut across all social groups. Helen Crawfurd, daughter of a small bakery owner in Glasgow, and, later, a leading suffragette and member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), recalled in her autobiography that she looked 'upon the Fenian and Catholic Irish as sub-human' . 118 David Kirkwood, speaking of his childhood in Glasgow, referred to the social distance between Catholic and Protestant, saying 'it would be untrue to say we were one people. Religion and race ... kept us apart' . 119 The response of the Irish was to withdraw into their own community which centred on the Church and a reactionary priesthood. As William Walker points out: 'the Catholic Church created an entire way of life based upon the parish church, school and church hall' . 120 Respectability was, thus, a culture of exclusion. It sought to reproduce the status hierarchies of the workplace in the wider society and shore up gender divisions by increasing the dependency of women on men. John Holley, in his study of working family economies in Victorian Scotland, showed that the level of female dependency on men increased in proportion to the skill of the worker. In the Borders tweed mill of Ballantynes, Walkerburn, in 1881, 57 per cent of skilled workers' families were dependent on the man's wage, compared to only 31 per cent of unskilled workers' families. 121 Respectability from whatever point of examination was, thus, ultimately divisive. However, these relationships and hierarchies were influenced to a large degree by the speed and scope of technological and organisational change taking place in the economy.

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Chapter 10

SKILL AND MANAGERIAL AUTHORITY, 1850-1880

In periods of intense change, such as that associated with the first half of the nineteenth century, the status of formerly respected occupations, such as handloom weaving, and the literate culture and way of life associated with them could be undermined and ultimately destroyed. William Thorn, the poet weaver, was so impoverished that he could not purchase a copy of the Aberdeen Journal in which his first poem was published. 122 These insecurities did not disappear after 1850, but in the third quarter of the nineteenth century technological changes did not appear as threatening. The expansion of the economy brought with it not only more jobs and higher wages, but also new products, which called on an even greater demand for a variety of skills. Cotton was perhaps the most affected by technological innovation with the introduction of the self-acting spinning mule, which was gradually appropriated by female spinners, and the universalisation of power-loom weaving. Similarly, shipbuilding experienced profound redistribution of skill and a heightened division of labour with the change from wood to iron and, later, steel construction. As a result the shipwright was marginalised, but the change in material created a highly skilled class of metal workers, whose job it was to shape, bend and join hot iron plates. However, the new subdivision of labour mean that no trade was capable of controlling the work process. As W. C. Steadman put it: In the building of the hull of an iron ship, the work which in earlier times, and in wooden ships, would have been done by one man ... is now divided up amongst men in several branches, such as platers, riveters, holders-up, putters-in, drillers. What 104

Skill and Managerial Authority have originally been branches of one trade, have now become distinct trades in themselves. 123 The construction industry was also affected by significant changes in the distribution of skills, with some trades being subject to deskilling. According to Raymond Postgate, painting was by the 1860s open to unskilled labour and master painters 'could and did put totally unskilled labour, after perhaps a half-a-day's instruction, onto slopping paint on their jobs' . 124 In plumbing a ruraVurban divide emerged with the town plumber concerning himself with the erection and repair of WCs, while in the country he specialised in installation and maintenance of pipes. 125 Supplementing the specialisation of labour was the shift to a rudimentary system of standardised parts. Much of the preparatory work in the construction industry was being reduced through prefabrication. Saw mills took over from the carpenter the business of making doors, staircases, windows, and so on; 126 prefabrication did away with the need for plumbers to make their own pipes.I27 In other trades changes were confined to the reorganisation of production, which increased firm and product specialisation and intensified the division of labour. In engineering local specialisms began to emerge in the 1850s and 1860s. Bertrams in Edinburgh was already a noted manufacturer of paper-making machinery by the early 1850s, and engineering firms in Leith specialised in marine engineering.128 In the Glasgow area locomotives, textile machines and marine engineering were specialised product lines. As the president of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers put it in 1874, 'within the last few years ... the business of mechanical engineering has divided itself into distinct branches so that the locomotive builder is little more than locomotive builder' . 129 The decline of the multi-product engineering workshop reduced the need for all round skills; indeed, it was rare after 1850 for apprentices in large works to be trained in all aspects of the engineer's craft and they became specialised as either fitters or turners. 130 In the coal industry the extensive use of blasting powder in the 1850s increased output and that in itself necessitated the introduction of labour saving haulage devices to speed up the transfer of coal from the bottom of the pit to the top. Winding machines and endless chains and ropes were introduced in addition to steam-powered underground haulage engines which replaced the muscle power of men and horses. As more coal could be transported to the surface the 105

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traditional output restrictions of the collier, that is, the darg, were interfered with. 131 Although they did much to improve productivity, these innovations did not make any serious inroads into the skill of the collier; indeed, the most important change in the position of the coal-getter was the tightening of industrial discipline and the introduction of a new contract system in the 1850s which made all agreements terminable on a day's notice. In 1866 no notice at all was needed, which had a two-sided effect on relations between owners and colliers. The owners were empowered to regulate output more closely with demand, but, at the same time, allowed the colliers to leave a badly paid contract for a more lucrative one. 132 Complementing contract changes was the increase in supervisory workers. By 1868 one in fifteen persons employed in the pits of Scotland was either a manager, deputy manager, or overlooker. 133 Colliers were also forced to instruct labour chosen by management, which effectively challenged entry rules and the system of patrimony it was based on, and they were in the 1850s forbidden to form trade unions or hold meetings underground. 134 The technical improvements, however, were not in the main labour displacing. The element of 'craft mystery' was still in many trades a tangible factor giving the worker a measure of control over the planning and execution of his work, something which was enhanced by the marked unwillingness of Scottish employers to alter the capitaV labour ratio due to recurring problems in world markets. In these circumstances deskilling was hardly a viable strategy in the pursuit of increased productivity and lower costs, and realisation of this led employers to experiment with a series of industrial strategies to address the question of the wage/effort bargain and to enhance their control over their workforce. This was achieved through direct (enhanced control and supervision) and indirect (internal subcontracting and incentive payments schemes) means. Paternalism was, perhaps, the most sophisticated method of establishing direct social control over the workforce. It had a long historical pedigree as a means of social control within the relatively closed parameters of landed society, and was traditionally used as a way of managing the tensions which arose from the existence of huge inequalities in the distribution of power and wealth within this mode of production. The operation of the system was based on both parties in landed society recognising the reciprocal rights and duties involved in the paternal relationship. In return for the acceptance of the unquestioned right of the landowner to exercise authority and power 106

Skill and Managerial Authority in his sphere of ownership, the subordinate members of landed society expected to have work for life and to be protected against exigent problems, such as famine, and other pressures resulting from the growing commercialisation of agriculture in the eighteenth century. Recent historical research has applied this concept to the wider arena of class relations in capitalist society, as well as industrial enterprises, most notably Patrick Joyce's study of the Lancashire cotton towns. 135 Joyce argues that the implementation of paternalism by employers was fundamental to understanding the stabilisation of class relations in the mid-Victorian period. As employers moved away from a policy of confrontation and the intensive quest for accumulation, a civic ethos emerged which stressed the virtues of philanthropy and of awarding recognition to labour. Although this did not abolish conflict between capital and labour, it modified it and made it more manageable. At the micro level of individual enterprises, detailed studies by historians have shown how paternalism encouraged worker identification with the goals of management and assisted in the recruitment and retention of labour through establishing strong links with worker families and firms. 136 Powerful and informative as these studies might be, one can argue that Joyce, in particular, has placed too much weight on the concept as a means of understanding the stabilisation mid-Victorian liberal capitalism. Paternalism has several limitations and weaknesses as a strategy for manufacturing consent in the workplace and the wider industrial/urban culture and an awareness of these will help in applying the concept in a more meaningful and insightful manner. Firstly, as Newby eta/. have observed, paternalism in landed society was based on tradition, which legitimised the right of the person embodying it to control subordinate forms of labour. This enabled power relations to become moral ones as the subordinate classes accepted the dominant class's definition of their social situation. 137 However, the moral authority of the landowner was not easily transferable to a capitalist society, where social relationships were governed less by intimate personal bonds, and more by what Thomas Carlyle called the 'cash nexus'. The authority of the capitalist was established through the wages system and worker dependence, rather than by custom and tradition. Job security and protection from exigencies were seen as barriers to the free movement of capital and labour, and in a price conscious society the antithesis of the laws of supply and demand. Security of employment was, moreover, problematic in a society in which wealth was as much destroyed as it was created through the continuous cycle of boom and bust.

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Secondly, the intimate nature of the class structure of landed society was missing in industrial capitalism after its pioneering phase. Social distance increased between the worker and the employer both in the workplace and the community. The defection of the middle class from the disease-ridden and overcrowded inner-city areas to the cleaner and healthier suburbs reconstructed residential patterns on explicitly class lines. 138 The workers became alienated from other social classes and only came into contact with their superiors in the course of their work; but even here this was becoming rarer as industry grew in size and employers withdrew from the sphere of production, devoting their energies towards the sphere of distribution. As plant size increased the construction of a bureaucracy was unavoidable, and this development, as we will see, placed several tiers of authority between the owner and the worker. Thirdly, the impersonal nature of production in capitalist society made expectations of deferential behaviour unrealistic among urban proletarians, particularly skilled workers, of which independence was one of the chief characteristics of their culture. As Joyce notes, the desire for self-respect among workers meant that the deferential aspect of the paternalistic relationship was missing in an industrial environment. He also noted that the desire for self-respect was also reciprocated by the employers, many of whom had risen from humble backgrounds. They disliked being called 'Sir', and were acutely aware of the need to combine the aloof with the familiar. 139 Such factors as these restricted the operation of paternalism to specific locations and production sites. Glasgow, for instance, with its massive and continually shifting population, and its varied occupational structure, lacked the community stability needed to cement paternalistic relations. Although some of the larger textile firms in the city adopted a policy of company welfare, as did the Caledonian Railway Company through its company sponsored Friendly Society, the scope was limited and the rewards negligible. 140 Shipbuilding firms owned considerable amounts of housing, but this was used either to overcome problems associated with fluctuating labour supplies, or to prevent supervisors from occupying the same tenements as journeymen. 141 As Joe Melling argues, the provision of welfare in these cases was based on a rational cost/benefit basis or with an avertly strategic purpose behind it. 142 It was, therefore, in the small towns and isolated industrial villages, where the employer(s) had a near monopoly in the labour market, controlled housing, and through acts of public benevolence was able to extend the workplace

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Skill and Managerial Authority authority beyond the walls of the factory, that paternalism was a realistic and highly beneficial employer strategy. Paternalism was used extensively in the thread mills of Paisley and the coalfields of Midlothian where the working community was more cohesive and stable and dependency on a specific employer was evident. Hassan's study shows that in 1861, 94.9 per cent of all Newtongrange miners had been born in the coalfield, with the Irish only accounting for 1.3 per cent of the total population of the area. Participation rates in the mining industry among the males in the five villages studied varied from 70 to 100 per cent. 143 In Paisley a similar pattern emerged. A study of heads of households having connection with the textile industry showed that in 1851, 77 per cent were natives of the burgh; while in Bridgeton, Glasgow, the figure was only 36 per cent. 144 The stable communities were treated to a range of welfare provision designed to increase worker dependency on the employer, all of which, as we will see, helped stabilise industrial relations. The thread barons of Paisley not only provided a comprehensive system of welfare for their own employees, which included pensions, schooling and housing, they also donated hospitals, churches, schools and other civic amenities to the town. 145 Their antennae reached beyond the factory gates to enmesh a whole community of workers in a social matrix welded together by a mixture of material and ideological supports which were both obvious and, at the same time, discrete and subtle. Even those workers in Paisley not directly dependent on the thread firms for employment and wages felt able to identify with their commercial success and civic benevolence, as did the town's smaller enterprises. The procession to mark the inauguration of the George A. Clark Town Hall in 1882 symbolised the economic and social power of the threadocracy. Every trade in Paisley was represented, from blacksmiths to joiners, from bricklayers to engineers, as well as friendly societies, public authorities and officials. The banners of the various trades included inscriptions such as 'Wher'er the Town Hall chimes do ring, the Donors to our minds they bring' (threadworkers); 'Long live the Brothers [Clark] one and all, the Donors of the new town hall' (joiners); and 'Combine to support, but not to injure' (bakers).146 The celebrations surrounding the inauguration of the Town Hall were interpreted by the working class in terms of mutual dependency. This was also true of other industries and small towns. In the Midlothian coalfields, the owners donated libraries, schools, bowling

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greens and parks to the mining communities, and also provided assistance for widows of colliers killed in mining accidents and benefits for those men incapacitated through industrial injury. 147 Housing was also provided at Dalkeith rent free and was found to be superior to that generally prevailing in Scottish mining districts. Moreover, housing was never seen as a weapon against militancy as it was in Coatbridge for instance. Evictions were not unknown, but they were said to have been 'rare'. 148 These acts of benevolence had the effect of not only increasing worker identification with the firm, but also, depending on the scale of the civic philanthropy, of representing the industrial community in the persona of the employer. An example of this was the monument of the shipyard workers of Dumbarton to the memory of their employer, William Denny, shipbuilder. Another might be found in the workers of Coats, cotton thread manufacturers of Paisley, parading the streets of Edinburgh on an away day excursion with their company banners, or turning up in their 'hundreds ... late at night' in 1857 to welcome James Coats and his American bride back from their honeymoon. The Paisley Herald described the scenes: The deafening shout of the multitude when the first carriage came in sight, the music of the instrumental bands ... there was also artillery to fire midnight salvoes, after which the carriage horses were unyoked, [and] a great army of Ferguslie workers pulled the first carriage up to Woodside House where his father lived. 149 Where paternalism was not an option other forms of direct control were adopted. In industries where work was confined under one roof as in factories and workshops, close supervision by foremen was favoured as a way of imposing more discipline and pushing the workforce to more effort. The foreman performed most of the tasks of management; he was an organiser, responsible for hiring and firing, distributing overtime, training, and ensuring the smooth running of the production process; and he was also a quality controller in the absence of such a workplace specialist. Enjoying relative economic security in times of depression, the foreman had a lifestyle which marked him out in the working community. As an authority figure, embodying the economic and social power of capital, his was the subject of deference from other workers. His power is well-illustrated in a letter to a building trade journal, which claimed that:

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Skill and Managerial Authority In nine out of ten establishments, one man - the foreman - has supreme control, and can employ or discharge whomsoever he thinks fit .... By the present working system, a foreman who has supreme control over 50 or 60 men can add to his salary by receiving weekly pay from inferior hands, who are always ready to tender the bribe in return for being kept in constant work. 15 o Peter Taylor recalled that in finding work in Glasgow he had to wait on the foreman of the works, who could 'only be seen at meal-hours, or at six in the evening'. The fact that there were normally 'a dozen [men] waiting on the same errand as yourself' 151 further demonstrated the power the foreman had over the journeymen. The system of foremanship was also used to enhance the subordination of women to men in the textile trades. In weaving, although male tenters performed similar functions to those of foremen in other trades, they were in charge of a mainly female workforce. As their wages were dependent on the output of those under their direct control it was in their interest to drive the females to meet production targets. By only allowing women and young girls to work the looms, thus restricting the supply of labour and keeping out males, they enforced a strict sexual division of labour. This only reinforced stereotype images of women as dependants and incapable of exercising authority in the workplace. 152 Internal subcontracting was the major means of imposing indirect control over workers, particularly in those occupations, such as coalmining or shipbuilding, where close supervision was practically impossible given the dispersed nature of production. Under this system of labour organisation a leading craftsman or group of workers was offered a price for a job and if acceptable he or the 'gang', or 'company', would recruit labourers, discipline and pay them. The system had advantages for both employers and men: it offered the employers a ready-made substitute for inadequate managerial and cost accounting resources; for the men it provided avenues of mobility for key workers and through piece work, ensured individual and group self-discipline. Among Monklands, ironstone miners subcontractors were chosen by the employers on the basis of 'loyalty and experience' and were left to recruit and organise team workers. 153 In the ironworks themselves, puddlers paid their underhands, as did the shinglers their assistants. 154 In coalmining and shipbuilding similar arrangements existed between skilled workers and their assistants or labourers. This created divisions between these different gradations of skill and

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authority. Platers in shipbuilding were paid by the piece while their assistants were paid time rates and this led to the former being paid 'at least three times as much as the helper' .155 The relationship was essentially exploitative as platers were in the habit of taking days off and making up their losses by driving themselves and their helpers. This worked to the advantage of the plater who was working by the piece, but the helper on time rates could not make up for lost days. The arrangement meant that the helper had to work harder for less. Robert Smillie, the miners' leader, recalled in his autobiography, that when working as a young man in the 'plating squad as a labourer, helpers had to turn up every day, but returned home if the platers were not there' . 156 Complaints to management by helpers over loss of earnings or short payment fell on deaf ears. As one commentator put it: 'the shipbuilders will not move in favour of the helpers, and the platers will not voluntarily relinquish their unjust privileges' .157 While divisive, the system of internal subcontracting had one major drawback for employers: its operation meant that key workers were effectively setting the intensity of the work rhythm, delimiting the areas of skill and, hence, reward. In some areas it was used in a democratic manner as in the case of the Burntisland Co-operative Coal Trimmers' Association. The Association elected its own foreman and one man as leading hand in each of the five squads of twelve, who in turn formed an executive committee to run its affairs. The employers 'do not attempt to exercise any sort of control over the association ... nor are any labour superintendents employed by the company' .158 To offset the worker power inherent in internal subcontracting, employers experimented with piece rate payments. This had the advantage of encouraging self-discipline among workers, as the harder they worked the more they earned, and also promoting ideas of individuality as workers were all on different earnings. Moreover, as a worker under the piece rate system was responsible for his/her own earnings there was little need for third party intervention. The effort/wage bargain was, thus, determined by an individual's industry and skill, rather than the organised collective power of the workers. Piece rate systems, therefore, had an ideological, as well as an economic, dimension to them, but in spite of this they had two fatal weaknesses: they encouraged constant conflict over their interpretation and they involved complicated calculations. As an old woollen weaver put it, piece rate meant that: 'The question of pay was a

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Skill and Managerial Authority constant source of wrangling and annoyance .... Few weeks wages were paid without some degree of feeling being shown' .159 The outcome of these different methods of controlling labour was that the locus of authority in a number of occupations was not homogeneous. Authority was dispersed within the complexity of occupational structures and this, as Joyce points out, created within the worker 'an indistinct notion of the capitalist employer ... as a class, let alone the major class enemy'. 160 The social and economic antagonisms of the workplace could be spread over a range of authority figures including the employer, foreman, piece master, subcontractor and ganger, rather than focussed on an individual. The house on the hill was still there, but in the large urban workshops and factories the boss had removed himself from the sphere of production to concentrate on the problems associated with the marketing of the product. By doing so he made himself an increasingly anonymous figure. Therefore, not only were workplace relations enmeshed in a complex web of group and personal loyalties and antagonisms, the easing of the rate of technological advance, combined with changes in work organisation and the division of labour, meant that employers did not exercise total autonomy in the workplace. These factors, and the values and attitudes they engendered in workers, had an important impact on the development of trade unionism in Scotland in this period.

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Chapter 11

TRADE UNIONISM IN SCOTLAND, 1850-1880: A NEW MODEL?

As we have seen the defeat of the Glasgow cotton spinners in 1837 encouraged workers to seek a more acceptable and respectable form of conduct and organisation. This was reflected to some extent in the decline of the practice of holding union meetings in public houses. These apparent shifts in attitude and behaviour on labour's part has allowed the third quarter of the nineteenth century to be seen by virtue of Sydney and Beatrice Webb's monumental history of trade unionism as the period of 'new model' unionism. 161 The archetypal examples of this form of trade unionism were the ASE and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (ASCJ). In contrast to the aggressive trade unionism of the 1830s and 1840s, the new unions were seen by the Webbs as models of passive, bourgeois-minded behaviour, eschewing the strike weapon and seeking to conciliate rather than confront employers. The change of outlook was accompanied by the centralisation of organisation, the creation of sound financial structures and the payment of friendly society benefits rather than strike pay. The Webbs' construct of new model unionism has been effectively rejected by leading English labour historians, who have demonstrated that the mode of organisation and concentration on day-to-day issues at the expense of wider socio-political concerns existed among craft workers even during the Chartist era. 162 The Scottish experience would also tend to contradict the views of the Webbs. Far from being models of centralisation, Scottish unions were highly localised and fiercely independent institutions. Although we have no reliable figures for union membership in the mid-Victorian period, R. H. Campbell, drawing on the work of the Webbs, estimates that of the 14 7 000 trade unionists in Scotland in 1892 two-thirds were organised in exclusively Scottish unions. 163 Even the archetypal 'model' unions

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Trade Unionism in Scotland such as the ASE exercised little control over the activities of their branches. In the case of the engineers' society it is hardly surprising as it was not until 1892 that the executive was elected on a district basis. Previous to this it was composed of representatives of the Society's London members. Branches openly contradicted executive rulings. Glasgow members enrolled piecemasters in the ASE, although this was against union policy and thus deemed 'illegal' . 164 Scottish trade unionism in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was thus based on local associations exercising wide powers of autonomy on questions of pay and conditions in sharp contrast to the bureaucratic centralised model of organisation articulated by the Webbs. The bureaucratic approach of the Webbs to the question of labour organisation also fails to recognise that it was the immediate work group rather than the union branch which was the primary unit of working-class self-defence in industry in this period. Richard Price has calculated that around 50 per cent of restrictions imposed at the workplace in the engineering industry emerged out of 'informal workgroup decisions rather than from shop steward or union policies'. In the building industry when employers spoke of 'conspiracies' they were more often than not, claims Price, referring to workgroup action rather than trade unionism. 165 Joe Melling notes that even in the late nineteenth century full-time union officials were 'still trying to impose a coherent hierarchy of responsibility on their motley organisations' . 166 Indeed, in a Scottish context, informal trade unionism with its flexibility was perhaps a more appropriate model of organisation than the highly bureaucratic and expensive official version given the volatility of the economy and the ineffectiveness of official unionism. Hamish Fraser claims that, of the 46 organisations listed in the first national Trade Union Directory of 1860, 'most were poor and ineffectual and frequently undermined by dishonest officials'.167 Of course, for low paid women workplace organisation was perhaps the only viable model of trade unionism. 168 However, it was a mode of organisation that was associated more with weakness than with strength. As the unions were largely unrepresentative of Scottish workers at this time, individual bargaining was also a feature of the relationship between capital and labour. With skill at a premium and piece rate payment growing in popularity workers could bargain on the basis of individual worth rather than by collective strength. Working men's autobiographies point to the widespread nature of the system

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of individual bargaining. Peter Taylor described the mechanics of the process: After being ten months in the place, I thought I was worthy of more wages, but knew it was no use asking, for the manager, and he alone, had the power to grant a rise [and he did not like me]. I resolved to leave and told some of the men so. 169 Taylor's bargaining strategy was in some ways forced on him as trade unionism in Scotland fluctuated in terms of influence and at times of economic depression underwent periods of severe retreat. Indeed, unionisation was so completely smashed in the Scottish coalfields in the 1860s that the miners formed the quasi-mystical Free Collier Movement [FCM]; and no person was admitted who did not 'believe in a supreme being'Y0 Until its decline in 1866, the FCM was firmly established in Lanarkshire, but also in the more passive coalfields of Midlothian, where it was said to have 1200 members in December 1864. 171 Basing itself on the rituals and ceremonials, as well as the lodge organisation, of Freemasonry, the FCM alienated many Irish Catholic workers. The practice of naming FCM lodges after Scottish patriots, such as Bruce and Wallace, and singing 'Scots wha hae' at gatherings and meetings furthered the distance between the Scots and Irish miners. 172 It is little surprising that sectarian tensions were heightened and that this constituted a barrier to effective unionisation in the coalfields. Alan Campbell notes that sectarian incidents were most frequent in the period 1850-75; a phenomenon which coincided with the heaviest penetration of Irish immigrants into the Lanarkshire coalfields. 173 In Airdrie Scots colliers went on strike 'until all the Roman Catholics should be expelled'; an incident which was fairly typical of the antagonisms between the two ethnic communities. 174 However, it was mainly community-inspired violence and acts of hooliganism which constituted the mean side of Scottish/Irish relations in the coalfields. 175 Another problematic factor in maintaining stable trade unions in Scottish coalmining was the prevalence of temporary overseas emigration. As the steamship had cut journey times to around sixteen days and reduced the cost of travel across the Atlantic to £6, younger miners took advantage of the higher wages to be had in America. Youngson Brown noted that between 1863 and 1872 some 59 000 miners and quarrymen left Scotland, mainly for the USA, returning in times of prosperity or during the winter months. 176 The key to 116

Trade Unionism in Scotland mobility was wage levels, as miners' leader, Alexander MacDonald, said: 'whenever the wages come to 4s or 5s or 6s a day they will not be found here but will be off' . 177 The correlation between union membership and wage levels in this period was strongly marked, as mining unions almost completely collapsed in the economic downswings of 1848, 1863 and 1879. 178 Trade union organisation also proved fragile in other trades in the 1860s. After the failure of the nine hour strike on the Clyde in 1866 union membership collapsed and two years later the Boilermakers' Society was reduced to 156 members in Scotland, concentrated in nine branches, the largest being Glasgow No. 2 with 41 members, and the smallest Paisley with only two members. The weakness of the Boilermakers' Society meant that 90 per cent of shipyard workers on the Clyde in the late 1860s were unorganised. 179 On the railways fewer than one in twenty workers held a union card, and the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) set up in 1871-72 by a paternalistic shareholder was said to have had a 'precarious' existence. 180 Even the so-called new model ASE could only claim 500 members in three branches in Glasgow in 1860. 181 Unskilled workers understandably found the establishment of viable institutions more difficult to sustain. Labourers' unions were established among railway carters and dockers in Glasgow in the 1850s and affiliated to the Glasgow Trades Council (GTC) when it was formed in 1858, but they were short-lived affairs. 182 In the 1860s and 1870s attempts were made by the trades councils to assist unskilled workers to form organisations and some temporary success was achieved in Edinburgh in 1868 with the establishment of a Labourers' Association. In Glasgow, in 1874, the Glasgow Causewaylayers' Association affiliated to the GTC, and a year later the Marine Stokers' Association joined. However, as Hamish Fraser points out, few 'survived the [onset] of depression' in the late 1870s. 183 The fragility of organisation, at times, saw workers experiment with alternatives to permanent association. A study of the Scottish woollen industry shows workers employing an ad hoc strategy of organisation. Hawick dyers in 1889 formed a union to achieve a pay rise and once achieved, dissolved it, as did the town's 'fast' loom female weavers in a struggle over pay differentials two years earlier. 184 Continuity of organisation, therefore, proved difficult for workers, even those who were skilled, and this enhanced informal workgroup organisation. The question which emerges from the dominance of this mode of association is: did union weakness encourage a more

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MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

conciliationist approach to industrial relations by workers and their organisations in mid-Victorian Scotland? On the face of it there does seem to be strong evidence to suggest that craft and mining unions were actively conciliationist. Presidents of the branches of the Boilermakers' Society informed new recruits that: 'We are not united to set class against class but to teach one another that men are all brothers. Our greatest desire being to cultivate a close and lasting relationship between those with whom we have to do with in undertaking our daily work' .185 The collaborationist nature of the statement was further underlined in a society song which included the following lines: Now 'tis true that Capital All the risk must run Like a ship exposed to all Winds beneath the sun; Feel's the first trade's ebb and flow, Must keen competition know. So 'tis just and meet Labour must co-operate, And help with all their might Master to compete. 18 6

If further emphasis was needed the rule book of the Boilermakers' Society allowed members who became small employers, publicans, or members of the managerial staff to remain in the union as honorary members. 187 This society's attitude to capital was shared by other trades. Miners in the west of Scotland regarded strikes as a last resort and the union rule book 'emphasised that strikes tended to fail and that collaboration was to be preferred' .188 Midlothian miners echoed this view and urged miners to adopted the 'rules and regulations enforced by the Duke of Buccleugh at Dalkeith Colliery'. The union rule book of the United Association of Colliers included the astonishing statement that: 'In former times it was usual to impute all our evils to our employers but whatever truth ... in this, in most instances we are fully persuaded that they are attributable to ourselves' . 189 As a reflection of the conciliationist mood miners and other trades consistently demanded a compulsory system of arbitration, which also contained an unstated demand for recognition. However, the degree of pacifism among union members at this time was somewhat exaggerated by the leadership. The rule book 118

Trade Unionism in Scotland was more a chimera than reality. Strikes took place in most trades, although more frequently in mining than in any other. Drawing on the work of Gordon Wilson on the west of Scotland coalfields, it would appear that major conflicts erupted on average every four or five years between 1850 and 1874. The longest strike took place in 1856 and involved twelve districts and 15 000 workers for fourteen weeks. There were 24 small-scale disputes in the period 1855-74. The cause of these strikes was almost always reductions in pay, although a few concerned the weighing of output. 190 Similarly, in shipbuilding prolonged strikes, outside of the 1866 nine hours' dispute, occurred in the depression years of 1874, 1876, 1877 and 1878. In the construction industry, wage demands were the source of major conflicts between 1850 and 1880, although the issue of the labour supply also assumed an importance. 191 Thus conflict was still written into the relationship between capital and labour, but the relationship itself had undergone a transformation. From issues connected with the control of the labour process, unions increasingly concerned themselves with the price of labour and, in the main, abandoned attempts to exercise regulation of the supply of it. The United Joiners of Glasgow argued in 1860 that 'no restriction be imposed, rather than deprive our proportion of the rising generation of some handicraft' . 192 The ETC found that of those trades represented in June 1873 only two of the twelve had any policy of restriction. 193 Market principles were recognised as determining the level of wages rather than custom or morality. The sliding scale in the mining industry was a good example of these changing attitudes. Making the best of the effort/wage bargain also signalled labour's recognition of the permanency of the industrial order. Moreover, since much of the industrial conflict, whether conducted by the organised or unorganised, was sectional or, at the very best, occupationally-based, and involved only a minority of workers, class interests were subordinated to the concerns of the locality and the immediate workgroup. Indeed, the weakness of the unions during much of this period drove some workers to seek individual solutions to their economic problems. John Wilson, cotton spinner, was so disillusioned with the struggle, which had cost the operatives 'hundreds of thousands of pounds', to maintain list prices for spinning, that he resigned himself to a privatised solution. As he put it: 'the question now is, what amount of wages can I make to take home to my family'. 194 Faced with sectional and sectarian divisions within the working class, and confronted by a self-confident and

119

MID-VICTORIAN SCOTLAND AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS, 1850-1880

well-organised industrial bourgeoisie, the unions of this period were, not surprisingly, weak and fragmented. Indeed, it is clear that many workers, particularly women, saw them as irrelevant to their social situation. The high subscriptions in a low waged economy also made them seem exclusive even to the best paid workers, with those in the skilled trades not always able to afford union dues. Membership of the Boilermakers' Society was held back in this period by the fact that shipyard workers earning 17-24s per week in the late 1860s found it difficult to pay 4s a month in subscriptions, and this led to mass disaffection. 195 Similarly, gains made in one period could be swept away by the onset of depression or by an employer backlash. During the boom of the early 1860s bakers in Glasgow and Greenock achieved a twelve hour day heralding an end to 'the days of slavery'; however, in 1884 they were striking against an 80 hour week. 196 Engineers in the recession of 1878 not only experienced wage reductions, but also lost the 51 hour week. Joiners also experienced a similar pattern of success followed by retreat. A strike in 1870 for a nine hour day was successful after fourteen weeks of struggle, but a downturn in the fortunes of the building trade just six years later saw these advances cancelled out and wages substantially reduced. 197 Other trades experienced the ebb and flow of fortune and with each setback membership declined proportionately. Only well-organised and cash-rich unions such as the Operative Masons could hope to maintain solidarity in times of distress. By 1870 the masons had established a nine hour day in forty towns in Scotland and there is little evidence to suggest that this gain was eroded in the depression of the late 18 70s. 198 It must also be remembered that gains were sometimes made at the expense of other, less well-organised workers. This was true of the construction industry, and applied with equal force in the case of the iron industry. Here the highly skilled moulders won a 51 hour week in 1872, 'the only craft', according to Tom Johnston, 'in the industry to secure the concession'. 199 However, these sectional advances were only reflective of the general weakness of trade unionism in Scotland during this period. But weakness was also a motivation for greater solidarity. The growth of trades councils in the 1850s and 1860s drew workers from different trades together to discuss matters of common interest, including those of a political nature. Their activities in this respect cast doubt on the claim by Alaister Reid that workers accepted 'the separation of their economic concerns and their political representations'.200 The councils were at the forefront of agitation for the 120

Trade Unionism in Scotland franchise and for the amendment of anti-trade union legislation. The ETC was a branch of the Scottish Reform League (SRL) and was active in the municipal politics of Edinburgh. To this end it established the Municipal Election Committee, which later became a permanent body - the Scottish Reform Union. With the granting of the franchise to urban householders in 1867, the ETC supported nationalisation of the railways and a non-sectarian system of education, among the more usual trade union demands. 201 Indeed, most trades councils at this time in Scotland recognised that a political solution was necessary to remove the legal impediments barring the effective waging of the economic struggle. However, the political role of the trades councils did not please some unions in the labour movement, such as the cotton spinners, who severed ties with the GTC for being 'too political'. 202 In spite of opposition of this kind, the councils continued in their efforts to raise the political consciousness of workers, alerting them to the need to combine in greater numbers to combat organised capital. The Address of the GTC in April1873 'To the Trade Unionists of Scotland' called on the organised workers to combat 'the arrogance of capital' by organising on a much broader national front. As the Address put it: The trade societies that simply protected local interests will be found to be inadequate to meet the demands of the future. The disposition of the employers to unite for the purpose of frustrating the just demands of labour, the concentration of capital, coupled with the application of machinery ... a general organisation of skilled labour becomes absolutely requisite. The primary object of this institution is to levy a small sum on each trade, according to its numerical strength, for the purpose of supplementing ... those who have already a protective fund, and generally assisting trades in the throes of a lock-out, or a strike that could not be averted without loss or degradation, instead of at present depending partly on if not wholly on eleemosynary aid. Although this attempt to build a confederation of unions in Scotland failed with the onset of depression the following year, the Address presaged future developments, and, at the same time, explicitly recognised the opposing and antagonistic interests of labour and capital. However, this realisation failed in these decades to translate itself into self-determined political action on the part of the workers.

121

Chapter 7

INTERPRETATIONS

Interpretations

New Liberalism begat the Labour Party'. 8 The debate over the labour aristocracy was important as it created new understandings of working-class attitudes and behaviour over a wide range of socio-economic and political subjects, from employment patterns, to leisure pursuits and popular politics. But no matter how telling the criticisms of the thesis were they did not in general provide a satisfactory alternative explanation as to how stabilisation and political consensus were achieved. 9 What we were left with was a picture of a fragmented and sectional working class whose lifestyles and behavioural patterns were so diverse across the country that to talk of class seemed a fruitless exercise. The stress on continuity further confirmed the impression of socio-economic and political stasis. But the historical project to correct the wilder explanatory excesses of the labour aristocracy tended to obscure significant qualitative and quantitative changes taking place both in the composition, and in the workplace and political culture, of the working class. In the middle decades of the century, formerly powerful alternatives to industrial capitalism, such as the co-operative societies of the Owenites, the trade guilds of the builders' union, the Chartist land banks, and so on, lost their appeal to the dispossessed. The legitimacy of private property and the permanency of the industrial system was accepted by Scottish and English workers alike. The precepts of the moral economy of the first half of the nineteenth century which had conditioned the political economy of the labour movement gave way to a recognition of labour as a commodity, whose worth was determined by the market rather than by custom and tradition. There were also changes in the social relations of the workplace and in working-class cultural values. The middle classes mounted an impressive assault on the behaviourial patterns associated with the pre-industrial order, particularly drinking and riotious assembly. Although there had been attempts earlier to remould working-class culture, particularly its rougher aspects, the mid-Victorian period witnessed an intensification of effort on the part of the middle classes. In the workplace, a more paternalist and welfare-orientated regime was introduced by employers to modify the bitter and hostile relations which had developed in the 1830s and 1840s. These shifts in social relations were concomitant with improvements in the standard of living as real wages increased and brought with them a more benign attitude among workers towards free market capitalism. Politically, important changes were discerned in the conduct and language of political struggle within the working class. Although the violence of Chartism is exaggerated in some accounts of the 1840s, 10 there is no 83

䵉䐭噉䍔佒䥁丠

千佔䱁乄

䅎䐠 呈䔠 偏䱉呉䍓

佦 䍏乓䕎单匬

摯畢琠瑨慴慦瑥爠 ㄸ㔰 睯牫楮札捬慳猠 灯汩瑩捳 睥牥 浯牥 獴牯湧汹ⵢ慳敤 潮 灲敶慩汩湧 楤敯汯杹慮搠睯牫楮朠瑨牯畧栠浡楮獴牥慭 楮獴楴畴楯湡氠 捯湴楮畩湧獯捩漭散潮潭楣杲楥皭 捨慮湥汳 慳 愠浥慮猠 潦 牥獯汶楮朠 潦 瑨攠ㄸ㘶 晲慮捨楳攠 摥 浯湳瑲慴楯渠 慮捥献䩯桮 䡯摧攧猠摥獣物灴楯渠 楮 䝬慳杯眠 扲楬汩慮瑬礠 捡灴畲敳瑨攠牥獰散瑡扬攠 慮 搠獥捴楯湡氠 晡捥潦 瑨攠湥睦潵湤 灯汩瑩捡氠 灲慣瑩捥潦 瑨攠睯牫敲献 䡥 牥捡汬敤瑨慴㨠 ❉ 牥浥浢敲 瑨攠瑡楬潲猠 睡汫楮朠楮 瑨楳灲潣敳獩潮Ⱐ 慬氠 摲敳獥搠 睩瑨 瑨敩爠 敶敮楮朠獵楴猬 慮搠瑨攠潴桥爠 瑲慤敳慬氠 浡牣桩湧 睨楴攠獨楲瑳慮搠瑨敩爠 捡 牲祩湧浯摥汳 潦 瑨敩爠 捲慦琬睨楣栠⸮⸠ 桡搠 楮 瑨攠灲潣敳獩潮⸮⸠ ㄱ 䥮 瑨攠 扥敮 浡摥 批 瑨敩爠 潷渠 桡湤✠ . 獥杭敮瑥搠灯汩瑩捡氠 慴浯玭 䍨慲瑩獭Ⱐ 瑨攠捯湣敲渠睡猠汥獳睩瑨 灨敲攠潦 瑨攠摥捡摥猠慦瑥爠 慮搠浯牥 睩瑨 瑨攠物杨琠 潦 牥獰散瑡扬攠 睯 牫楮札捬慳猠 灯睥爠瑨牯畧栠瑨攠晲慮捨楳攮 桯畳敨潬摥牳瑯 獨慲攠灯汩瑩捡氠 瑯 䉲楴楳栠 睯牫敲猠湯牴栠慮搠 周敳攠晡捴潲猠 慲攠潦 敱畡氠牥汥癡湣攠 獯畴栠潦 瑨攠扯牤敲 慴 瑨楳瑩浥Ⱐ扵琠瑨敲攠楳 慬獯 瑨攠獰散楦楣慬汹 䕣潮潭楣 牥獴牵捴畲楮朠 卣潴瑩獨 捨慮来猠 睨楣栠湥敤 瑯 扥 捯湳楤敲敤⸠ 睨楣栠 扥条渠楮 瑨攠ㄸ㐰猠睩瑮敳獥搠楮 瑨敳攠浩摤汥 摥捡摥猠瑨攠 敳瑡扬楳桭敮琠 潦 愠浡瑵牥 楮摵獴物慬 散潮潭礠扡獥搠潮 瑨攠楮瑥杲慴楯渠 潦 捯慬Ⱐ 楲潮慮搠獨楰扵楬摩湧⸠ 周楳 瑲慮獦潲浡瑩潮汥搠瑯 瑨攠摥浩獥 潦 浯牥 瑲慤楴楯湡氠 景牭猠潦 敭灬潹浥湴Ⱐ獵捨 慳 桡湤汯潭 睥慶楮本 慮搠敶敮 湥睥爠潣捵灡瑩潮猠 楮 瑥硴楬敳Ⱐ 獵捨 慳 捯瑴潮 獰楮湩湧Ⱐ 慳 睥汬 慳 瑯 愠捯湴楮畯畳桡敭潲牨慧楮朠潦 污扯畲晲潭 慧物捵汴畲攮 䅳 獫楬汥搬 浡汥 慮搠偲潴断 瑨攠湥睥爠潣捵灡瑩潮猠 睥牥 污扯畲楮瑥湳楶攬 獴慮琬愠浡獣畬楮攠捵汴畲攠 潰敲慴楮朠 牯畮搠瑨攠捯湣敲湳 慮搠癡汵敳 潦 瑨攠瑩浥⵳敲癥搠 浡渠 睡猠敭敲杩湧 慳 瑨攠桥来浯湩挠景牣攠 睩瑨楮 瑨攠睯牫楮朠捬慳猬灡牴楣畬慲汹 楮 瑨攠睥獴 潦 卣潴污湤⸠ 䅳 睥 獨慬氠 捵汴畲攠 獥攠瑨楳汥搠瑯 瑨攠捲敡瑩潮潦 愠灥捵汩慲汹卣潴瑩獨灯汩瑩捡氠 獯浥睨慴 慴 潤摳 慮搬 慴 瑩浥猬楮 潰灯獩瑩潮睩瑨 瑨慴灲敶慩汩湧 慭潮朠 瑨攠睯牫楮朠捬慳猠 楮 䕮杬慮搮 慳 瑨敹 牥灲敳敮琠 慬瑥牥搠 周敳攠捨慮来猠慲攠楮 湥敤 潦 數灬慮慴楯渠 慮搠灯汩瑩捡氠 捯湳捩潵獮敳猠 捯浰慲敤 睩瑨 景牭猠潦 楮摵獴物慬Ⱐ獯捩慬 瑨潳攠數灬楣楴楮 瑨攠牡摩捡氠 慮搠䍨慲瑩獴敲慳⸠ 䡯睥癥爬 楮 獡祩湧 瑯 牥捯杮楳攠 瑨慴楮 瑨攠灲潣敳猠 潦 牥ⵣ潭灯獩瑩潮 瑨楳Ⱐ 楴楳業灯牴慮琠 卣潴污湤 瑨敲攠 數楳瑥搠 潬搠慮搠湥眠景牭猠潦 灲潤畣瑩潮楮 楮摵獴物慬 慮搠 瑨慴 汥搠慴 瑩浥猠瑯 捯湴牡摩捴潲礠 灡瑴敲湳潦 灯汩瑩捡氠 慮搠 睯牫灬慣攠扥桡癩潵爮周敳攠捯湴牡摩捴楯湳 慬汯睥搠 景爠 瑨攠捯湴楮畡湣攠 潦 愠❲慤楣慬 灯汩瑩捡氠 瑲慤楴楯渧 瑯 獰敡欠瑯 捯湴敭灯牡特 捯湣敲湳 ㄲ 䉵琬 楮 獰楴攠 瑨攠摩獴物扵瑩潮 潦 灯睥爠慮搠睥慬瑨. 潦 瑨楳 牥条牤楮朠 楳 畮浩玭 摵慬楴礬瑨攠捨慮杩湧 湡瑵牥 潦 瑨攠卣潴瑩獨睯牫楮朠捬慳猠 慮搠楴楳瑨楳睨楣栠灲潶楤敳瑨攠步礠瑯 瑨攠灲潣敳猠 潦 獴慢楬­ 瑡歡扬攠 楳慴楯渠 楮 瑨攠浩搭噩捴潲楡渠 摥捡摥献 㠴

Chapter 13

INTERPRETATIONS

The last few decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth have been seen as marking the inevitable and predictable rise of the Labour Party, and concomitantly the decline of the Liberal Party. The key factors in this process were the growth of class consciousness, particularly among the unskilled, due to mass strikes in the last decades of the nineteenth century; adverse legal decisions which drove the unions into politics; changes in the franchise which brought more workers into the electoral system; and, finally, the activities of socialists and the ideology of Marxism. The way we thought about the origin and rise of the Labour Party was dominated by the writings of Eric Hobsbawm and Henry Pelling, and their influence was evident even in the works of Tory historians such as Robert Rhodes James. 1 Since then labour and social historians under the influence of Harry Braverman's seminal work - Labour and Monopoly Capitalism (1976)- have sought also to include changes in the labour process that blurred the distinctive characteristics between skilled and unskilled workers by narrowing wage differentials and opening up skilled work to greater encroachment from the latter. The threat of technological displacement acted to radicalise the skilled workers in the direction of independent labour representation and the politics of class struggle, thus breaking their allegiance to the liberal/capitalist framework of British society. As one of the foremost labour process historians, Richard Price, put it recently: In general terms socialism emerged as a response to the restructuring of the labour process. For both the skilled and semiskilled, socialism provided a vocabulary which enabled the tensions, conflicts and promise of restructing to be understood and interpreted .... Socialism attained a new-found significance in the 1890s as restructuring began to impact on the skilled and 129

THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR, 1880-1914

semi-skilled; equally, by 1900, as the evidence mounted of a growing complexity of the problems of industrial and political power, the syndicalist spirit made its appearance. 2 Price's views marked a shift in the explanatory balance concerning the rise of Labour away from the sphere of politics to the sphere of production. Thus, the exploitation of the working class at the point of production becomes the fundamental basis of Price's understanding of political change and the growth of class consciousness in this period. Workerist views such as these have not gone unchallenged. Historians from both the left and right of the political spectrum have argued that, in these accounts of political development, the weakness of the Liberals in the face of the growing level of class consciousness has been seriously overstated, and that the level of deskilling has been much exaggerated. Building on P. F. Clarke's important study of New Liberalism in Lancashire in the late nineteenth century, 3 newer political histories have highlighted the continuing appeal of Liberalism to the working class. Alistair Reid summed up the new revisionism when he claimed that: Right up to the outbreak of the First World War there were few signs of any widespread popularity of socialist ideas, and recent attempts to relate the emergence of an embryonic Labour Party from the 1880s to a major change in political consciousness, as a result either of the erosion of the position of the 'labour aristocracy', or of an escalation in industrial conflict are seriously misguided .... The organised and enfranchised working class ... continued to vote Liberal even when on strike, and there is no reason to assume that a mere increase in strike activity would ... result in a change in political consciousness. 4 In this revisionist scenario, instead of being asked to 'Account for the rise of the Labour Party before 1914', historians ought to be asked 'Why popular Liberalism continued to exercise such a hold on the political allegiance of workers both north and south of the border'. When examining the political situation in the north the question is of particular significance as Scotland had been solidly Liberal throughout the nineteenth century. A report of the Labour Party in Scotland to its conference in 1914 glumly stated that: 'Unfortunately Scotland was so imbued with Liberal principles that it was a harder fight there than in any other part of the country'. 5 130

Interpretations

The diametrically opposed views cited above lead once more into the question of continuity and change, and whether, as Reid contends, it is correct to periodise the mid-Victorian and Edwardian years into decades of quiescence and radicalism. While the evidence for Scotland tends to suggest that Liberalism was still the major beneficiary of working-class political loyalty until the outbreak of war in August 1914, it would be a distortion of the period to suggest that there existed some sort of political paralysis, and that the increasing tempo of industrial conflict and changes in the labour process did not affect the consciousness of the working class in Scotland and elsewhere. However, why this did not translate itself into mass support for the emerging Labour Party involves an analysis not simply of the language of politics, but also of the economic and workplace restructuring which occurred during the period, the impact that this had on industrial relations and trade unionism, as well as the major changes which were taking place in the social world outside the workplace and at the level of the state. As Michael Savage's study of Preston shows, one-dimensional accounts of political change based almost entirely, as Price does, on workplace developments, or language pace Reid, fail to understand the dynamics of political transformation, which are as much rooted in community concerns as those emanating from the site of production, or national political systems. 6 Thus, the partial accounts of political change offered by both schools of history are in need of revision in order that a more rounded analysis of the dynamics of politics in the period 1880-1914 may emerge.

131

Chapter 14

RELATIVE ECONOMIC DECLINE AND THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY, 1880-1914

The structure of the modern Scottish economy had been predetermined in the mid-Victorian decades. The period up to the First World War simply entrenched and expanded that structure. The numbers employed in coalmining increased from 46 900 in 1870 to 147 500 in 1913, with just over half the workforce concentrated in the coalmines of the west of Scotland. Output grew almost threefold in these decades from 14 900 000 tons to 42 400 000 tons.7 Shipbuilding, however, was the jewel in the Scottish economy's crown, as from the 1870s to 1914 it constituted the 'chief growth point', accounting for 756 976 launched tonnage in Britain in 1913; more than the combined total output of the German and American shipbuilding industries. 8 As Scotland's premier industry shipbuilding's growth initiated similar expansion in related industries. The steel industry in Scotland in 1873 was only capable of producing 1119 tons of steel, but due to the increasing preference for steel over iron by Scottish shipbuilders, output reached 485 000 tons by 1890. 9 Complementing the impressive growth of industry were the equally important new developments in the service sector, particularly transport. By 1901 it was estimated that one in seven adult males were employed in transport activities on Clydeside. 10 Economic growth was encouraged by the expansion of the export market. This was, perhaps, inevitable since the Scottish population was becoming increasingly static, with a loss of 41 per cent of natural increase, or 218 274 persons, in the 1880s alone. Census returns show that between 1861 and 1901 around half-a-million Scots emigrated to other countries, including England, and this trend continued into the twentieth century. 11 Thus, low levels of domestic demand and the 132

Economic Decline and the Problem of Poverty product mix of Scottish industry combined to focus production on overseas, particularly imperial, markets. Some 38 per cent of the total output of the Scottish coalfields in 1913 went abroad. 12 Export dependency was also true of Scottish shipbuilding and certain branches of engineering, particularly locomotive production. Overall, between 1870 and 1900, Scottish capital exports amounted to approximately 10 per cent of the net national product; a figure much higher than that for England over this period. 13 In spite of these impressive economic achievements weaknesses had began to surface in the late nineteenth century which heralded future disaster. The industrial economy's buoyancy was ever more dependent on the condition of world trade, which made it increasingly subject to cyclical fluctuations. Scottish industry stuttered in the period of the 'Great Depression' and suffered serious depressions in 1904-05 and 1908-09. Industrial performance was also beginning to falter, in spite of appearances to the contrary. Most of the steel producers were former malleable iron manufacturers, for as steel grew iron production declined. Consequently, the iron industry never again reached its peak of 1870 as falling supplies of indigenous iron ore forced ironmasters to rely on imported ores which increased costs and lowered competitiveness in a market increasingly dominated by Wales and Cleveland. 14 Even the steel industry began to run into difficulties. The smallness of steel mills north of the border, the additional transport costs, and the relatively high price of coal, saw Scottish producers compared to their English rivals disadvantaged by 5-7 per cent in costs in the 1880s. After 1900 'the position deteriorated' further and the Scottish share of British steel output fell from 20 per cent in 1900 to 18 per cent in 1913. 15 Textiles too were declining rapidly in terms of output and employment, particularly in Glasgow where the cotton spinning and weaving sectors collapsed in the 1890s. It was only the jute industry of Dundee, the manufacture of thread at Paisley and wool in the Borders which held out any promise of sustained growth. 16 Shipbuilding experienced falling profit margins and Denny's shipyard on the Clyde between 1909 and 1913 made a loss of 28 per cent on its contractsY Failing competitiveness in the commercial sector saw Clyde shipyards turn more frequently to the state to provide warship orders to maintain the buoyancy of the industry; a trend which grew after 1918. Early responses to these economic trends from Scottish employers saw a greater move towards amalgamation. As a result, industry began to be concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, thus reaping 133

THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR, 1880-1914

the benefits of economies of scale. Arthur Mcivor's study of west of Scotland employers shows the degree to which heavy industry had become the subject of high levels of interlocking directorships. In textile printing and dyeing a monopoly had been established with the formation of the United Turkey Red Dye Company and the Calico Printers Association; and in thread manufacture the amalgamation of the firms of Coats and Clarks of Paisley in 1896 created the fifth largest company in the world. Similarly, Tennants of Glasgow was the largest chemical works in Europe and the North British Locomotive Company in Springburn, Glasgow, was the largest locomotive producer in the world. Other major companies on Clydeside included the multi-national Singer corporation, Weirs in Cathcart, and the big shipyards of the Upper Clyde such as Browns, Fairfields and Yarrows. 18 Increasingly capital was nationalising itself, although most of the firms remained family-owned and there remained a multitude of small businesses. However, generally speaking, economic domination was becoming the preserve of a charmed circle of large companies. Although the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth brought mixed fortunes for the industrial economy, it would appear that on the whole real wages were improving and the differentials between Scottish and English workers were narrowing. The first UK wages census in 1886 provides the most reliable guide to comparison between English and Scottish wages. The data generated by the census has led, however, to conflicting interpretations. For R. H. Campbell it proved without a shadow of doubt that Scotland was a low wage economy, 19 although E. H. Hunt was more optimistic, viewing wages in the central belt as near the UK average. 20 In reality, both were right. In certain occupations, such as cotton, shipbuilding, construction and printing, Scots' earnings, as Christopher Smout has shown, were significantly below the national average; however, in engineering, carpet manufacture and distilling there was little difference, while in coalmining and linen there was a slight advantage over England. 21 The next wage census was in 1906 and there was, with the exception of the cotton industry, little or no difference between English and Scottish wages. Scotland had gone from being a low wage region to a high wage one in twenty years. This implied a remarkable increase in real wages way above the 80 per cent figure for the UK as a whole in the second half of the nineteenth century. The magnitude of the increase, however, has been treated with some sceptism by 134

Economic Decline and the Problem of Poverty certain historians. Christopher Smout suggests that other factors have to be taken into account before drawing optimistic conclusions that Scottish workers before the outbreak of war in 1914 were enjoying hitherto unknown prosperity. These include the fact that there were substantial numbers of unskilled workers, such as shipbuilding labourers and girls in textiles, who were badly paid by any standard. Moreover, employers in the supposedly high-waged shipbuilding industry also deliberately inflated average earnings of riveters by 25 per cent in their evidence to the wage census. 22 Research into engineering workers' pay on Clydeside bears this out with 75 per cent of fitters only averaging 30s a week, or about the same as the middle grades of semi-skilled machine men. 23 It should also be borne in mind that the cost of living and rents were higher in Scotland than in England. Richard Rodger points out that for an identical basket of food in 1912 Dundonians paid 10.2 per cent and Glaswegians 5.7 per cent more than Mancunians. 24 Again there is the question of regional and gender differences to take into account. Wages tended to be higher in the industrial counties of Scotland than in rural or semi-rural areas. Glasgow carpenters and joiners averaged 36s 1.5d a week in the early 1890s compared to only 27s 7.5d in Aberdeen for a 51 hour week. This also applied to unskilled earnings, with building labourers in Aberdeen earning only 21s 3d a week compared to 25s 6d in Paisley. 25 Homeworkers, mainly women, endured the worst conditions and pay. In Edinburgh, needlewomen were thought to earn 4-5s a week in the early 1840s. By 1906 little had changed with shirtmakers in Glasgow enduring a gross income of 8s a week in exceptional cases, but more normally 4-Ss; it was not said for nothing that homeworkers 'slaved in the summer and starved in the winter'. 26 Poverty was endemic throughout Scotland and large numbers of workers and their children were caught in its web. John Paton recalled in his autobiography, that at the turn of the century in the poorer areas of Aberdeen the people lived largely on 'tick', that is, credit. 27 In these areas new or even second hand clothes were a luxury. Older women remembered that 'lots of clothes were made out of flour bags', and one even remembered 'sewing flour bags together to make bed sheets'. 28 ·women and children suffered most from poverty. A study undertaken in 1906 by the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws found that in Scotland 83 per cent of paupers claiming relief were women and children. 29 Large and enduring pockets of poverty in Scotland had as one 135

THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR, 1880-1914

might expect a determining influence on the type and level of housing for renting. In spite of improving wages in some trades, renting was the preferred option even for skilled workers. The boom and bust cycle of much industrial employment in Scotland meant that the regular payments which house purchase involved were beyond the reach of the best paid workers. On the eve of the First World War, half of Scotland's population still lived in one or two rooms. 30 In Glasgow, the situation was even worse with 62 per cent of the population crammed into this type of accommodation. 31 As a result the infant mortality rate (IMR) was exceptionally high in Glasgow, particularly in the poorest areas. In 1898, the IMR in Glasgow Gorbals was 200 per 1000 live births. 32 The high concentrations of population in urban areas contributed to this situation. Sydney Checkland estimated that by 1914 no fewer than 700 000 Glaswegians were living in three square miles, 'thus creating the most heavily populated central area of Europe'. 33 Thus, the problem of 'starving in the midst of plenty' was still a prominent feature of working-class life in Scotland and one which not only conditioned the cultural experience of many workers, but also had important impact on political developments in this period.

136

Chapter 15

DRINK, FOOTBALL AND SECTARIANISM: WORKING-CLASS CULTURE IN SCOTLAND, 1880-1914

Tenement living created solidarities among workers, regardless of ethnic origin, religious persuasion or position in the occupational hierarchy, which contributed to those formed in the workplace. There were few areas of residence in urban Scotland which were ethnically pure, although certain districts might be more associated with one ethnic group than another. Daily contact with neighbours, petitions and complaints to factors, evasion of ticketing enforcement, and other contested areas of the housing market, all brought workers together. Employers, as we have seen, recognised the potential solidarities of tenement living at an early stage and built housing to separate foremen from ordinary workers. Indeed, they went as far as to reproduce the status hierarchies of the workplace in the wider society. Railway workers in Springburn, Glasgow, were housed by their employer- the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway Companyon Springburn Hill. The houses at the top of the hill were 'of a better standard and were for the top drivers, engineers and supervisors, while the lower blocks were for other drivers and lower grades'. 34 The solidarities of tenement living were also cemented by changing marriage patterns. R. Q. Gray noted that in Edinburgh, in the period 1880-1900, unskilled males were marrying females from higher social strata, promoting a trend towards greater social homogeneity. 35 Ewan Knox's work on the marriage patterns of the petite bourgeoisie of Victorian Edinburgh showed that 'contact with the established middle class in 1890 was negligible'. 36 However, in contrast, 'close contact with the petite bourgeoisie and the skilled working class' was growing as 'significant numbers of grooms who were small masters found their brides from families in the labour aristocracy' Y The

137

THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR, 1880-1914

experience of unemployment also brought skilled and unskilled together, particularly in the depressions of 1904-05 and 1908-09. Bob Stewart, joiner, recalled that during recessions in his trade, he took up various dead-end jobs, such as labouring in a bridge building works, selling lottery tickets, and so on. 38 His experience could probably be duplicated many thousands of times over. This suggests that contact between the skilled and the unskilled was greater than might be expected, and that social exclusiveness was fragmenting in the late nineteenth century; something which may have been assisted by changing patterns of consumption, in particular the growth of the Co-operative movement after 1880. Membership for the whole of Scotland nearly doubled between 1895 and 1914, increasing from 238 248 to 467 270. 39 However, in some regions the Co-operative movement grew even more spectacularly. In Lanarkshire, for example, membership grew more than five-fold from 8525 in 1886 to 43 270 in 1913. 40 Developments in the provision of leisure services was another, albeit less conscious, force making for greater social solidarity. The rise of mass sporting pursuits, particularly football, made leisure 'less closely linked to a pattern of stratification within the working class'. 41 By the 1880s football had a massive following in the west of Scotland. One in four of all Scottish males aged between 14 and 29 were members of a football club, prompting a contemporary writer on the game to remark that 'the enthusiasm of the Scot for the Association game is without parallel in any race for any particular sport or pastime'. 42 The first Hampden Park international between Scotland and England in 1878 was watched by 20 000 spectators; in 1902, 102 000 attended. 43 Very few analyses exist of the social composition of the football crowd, but the death toll in the Ibrox Park disaster of 1902 provides some clues. Two-thirds of the dead came from the ranks of skilled workers. 44 Horse racing was also highly popular and off course betting was, as Paton notes, 'an obsession of nearly everyone'; a view confirmed by the Lord Provost of Glasgow, Samuel Chisholm, and the Chief Constable of Glasgow, John Orr, in their evidence to the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Betting in 1902. According to them, the 'locus' of betting 'is the streets and the classes are the industrial classes'; the 'riveters and smiths' and the 'labourers and dockers'. 45 Counteracting the unrespectable nature of these pursuits was education. As we have noted, the Education Act of 1872 provided a universal educational experience for working-class children in Scotland. 138

Working-Class Culture in Scotland Gradually escapist clauses in the legislation permitting children to work half-time in industry, or gain exemption form schooling at an earlier age than thirteen, were eradicated. By 1901 the school leaving age had been raised to fourteen and the system of exemptions except in necessitous cases was abolished. The stress on Empire and the Union became even more intense in this period as the new school boards elected to run the system were dominated by church and business. In spite of the fact that working-class candidates were successful later in the century, Labour, as late as 1918, still had only 120 school board members in Scotland. The first chairman of the Glasgow School Board was Alexander Whitelaw, leading partner in Bairds of Gartsherrie, and the iron company also dominated the Coatbridge Board. 46 Reflecting these interests the Education Code in 1895 made drill compulsory and after the outbreak of the Boer War the Scottish Education Department (SED) issued a circular on the importance of physical exercise in schools, saying that exercises: Indirectly, bring the individual into contact with the principles which lie at the foundation of national defence, and they bring home to him his duties and responsibilities as a citizen of the Empire. 47 As part of the stress on Empire Scottish children were denied a past. As Robert Anderson remarks, Scottish history was generally depicted in schools as a squalid and wretched tale with little evidence of progress or development, or as the businessman chairman of the Govan School Board put it: Scottish history and geography begat 'provincialism'. 48 As part of this process of imperial reeducation Empire days and flagwaving became part of the socialising experience of the working-class child. In Edinburgh in 1908 a gathering of 1500 schoolchildren witnessed each school being presented with a flag by the Victoria League, and harangued by Lord Rosebery on imperial unity and citizenship.49 However, while it was evident that these educational and leisure developments generated a greater sense of homogeneity among the working class, particularly the skilled stratum, and drew them, if marriage patterns are to be used, closer to the petite bourgeoisie, the possibilities for division were as great. A contemporary study of the Glasgow skilled working class at the turn of the century pointed to the continued existence of two competing cultures; one, respectable, the other, turbulent and rough. The respectable worker, it was 139

THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR, 1880-1914

claimed, cared not for 'football or whisky', but for discussions of a 'political or theological' nature, and hobbies, such as model shipmaking. He was, indeed, 'the backbone of the working classes' .50 However, parallelling this world was the rougher masculine culture based on drink and football, which 'works, together with overcrowded tenement houses, to make family life rather an impossible thing' .51 The sexism of this culture was brought out by John Paton when he says of Aberdeen bakers that when 'the gossip of the bakehouse was exhausted', there was one topic which 'seemed inexhaustible- women and sex'. 52 Among the respectable Protestant skilled working class religion was still an essential part of their consciousness. Some 65 per cent of Glasgow children between 5 and 15 were said to attend Protestant Sunday Schools in 1890. Among adults oral-history testimony from all over Britain shows that church attendance in Scotland at over 50 per cent between 1872 and 1906 was, with the exception of Wales, the highest in the UK. 53 The high attendance rates were partly due to the increasing stress placed by the Protestant churches in reaching the working class, which was mentioned in the previous chapter. However, the later nineteenth century also witnessed a new sensitivity by the Church towards the social problems of the working class. The mid-Victorian church had been fiercely anti-trade union and had adopted whole-heartedly the doctrine of laissez-faire, which saw poverty as the consequence of moral failure. In nine out of ten cases, remarked the Church of Scotland's Commission on Intemperance (1867), poverty was the result of the 'sins' of the poor. The reactionary views of the Scottish churches alienated large sections of the working class and such sentiments forty years later led to the foundation of the Labour Church movement, with branches throughout Scotland. The movement was set up 'in protest against the social failure and middle class bias and assumptions of the regular churches'. 54 These protests also resonated in the formation of the Socialist Sunday Schools in Glasgow in the 1890s, which later spread to other parts of Scotland. 55 However, as middle-class assumptions regarding state intervention, poverty and political democracy came under increasing attack in the later nineteenth century a greater willingness to accommodate working-class social grievances became evident. A sign of this was the increasing influence among churchmen of social witness and building the kingdom of God on earth. Practically, this led to social inquiries into living conditions, such as the Glasgow Presbytery's 140

Working-Class Culture in Scotland investigation of housing conditions in the 1890s, the setting up of the Christian Social Union in the early 1900s, and recommendations for material improvement. This shift in the theology of the church did much to attract workers to it, but as we will see later, it also did much to affect the ethos of the burgeoning labour movement in this period. Linked to religion were the numerous temperance organisations. As we have observed, temperance was an essential element in the culture of respectability and its various organisations had a large subscribing working-class element. But it was also important in the late nineteenth century in shaping the ethos and in providing social analysis for the emerging movement for independent labour representation. This was recognised by the president of the Scottish Trades Union Congress in 1897 when he claimed that in building a reformed society the 'Trade Unions have no better confederate than that of temperance'. 56 The division between the two strands of working-class culture was less impressionistically seen in the housing market, where from the 1880s its distribution among workers was more visibly stratified. According to the Royal Commission on Housing (1884-85), families in Edinburgh occupying one room only were 'labourers and people of the poorest class', while at the upper end of the artisanal stratum there was reported a 'growing demand' for self-contained flats, built on two storeys with outside stairs and separate street doors. 57 Consumption of leisure also produced ethnic and local rivalries, which were highly evident in football, and often led to clashes between rival supporters. The Hampden Riot of 1909 was, according to Bert Moorhouse, 'one of the most spectacular instances of violence around a British football match - with arson, baton charges ... fourteen hospitalised policemen, slashed fire hoses, stonings, fights, knives, [and] damage of £15 12s 6d to street lamps'. 58 Although this was more the case in Glasgow, where the sectarian rivalries between Celtic and Rangers continue to exist, other cities had their own scaleddown version of this religious melodrama. In Edinburgh, the rivalry between Catholic Hibernian and Protestant Heart of Midlothian is well documented. Lesser known is that in Dundee between Catholic Dundee United and Protestant Dundee FC. Aberdeen escaped the worst excesses of sectarian rivalry as the Irish population there was minuscule and there was only one football club - Aberdeen FC. As is apparent divisions within the working class based on consumption were compounded by ethnicity and religion, and also less visibly by gender; a situation reinforced by employment practices. 141

THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR, 1880-1914

The right of the foremen to hire and fire allowed religious affiliation to be used to police the boundaries of skill. Among ironworkers in Lanarkshire, the Protestants tended to dominate the skilled positions, while the Catholics were more often than not employed as unskilled labourers. 59 In the higher skilled trades the situation was little different. In the engineering trades of Coatbridge the skilled occupations were the preserve of the Scots and Irish Protestants. The local branch of the ASE met in the Orange Hall and there was not one Catholic member of the Society until 19 31. 60 This situation was replicated throughout the west of Scotland. Harry McShane recalled, in his autobiography, that it was rare for a Catholic to become apprenticed to the engineering trade in Glasgow. 61 Similarly, John Foster and Charles Woolfson have shown that some shipyards on the Clyde operated a policy of ethnic discrimination and that core yard workers tended to be Freemasons or members of the Orange Order. 62 In the Springburn and Partick districts of Glasgow there existed the 'most intensely Orange section' of the city's proletariat. 63 Indeed, religion determined one's life chances to such an extent that there was little mobility experienced by Irish Catholics in the nineteenth century labour market in the west of Scotland. The pattern of employment of the Glasgow Catholic Irish which marked the post-famine years was maintained until before the First World War - that is, clockwork, labouring, lower grades of tailoring, and casual work in the boot and shoe trade. 64 The only exception to this form of discrimination in the labour market was Dundee, where, in spite of high concentrations of Irish Catholics, sectarian tensions were, on the whole, quite muted. This was put down by W. A. Walker to three factors; firstly, the absence of a dominant culture; secondly, the absence of an effective Orange opposition; and, thirdly, the fact that the Irish Catholics in Dundee tended to be mainly women. 65 Thus, it would appear that sectarianism was at its most divisive in places with a high degree of association with the Orange Order. The Order had been growing since the emigration of Ulster Protestants in the 1870s and its membership stood at 25 000 in Scotland in 1900, of which 8000 were in Glasgow alone. 66 By 1913-14, over a quarter of the Order's 400 branches in Britain were located in Glasgow. 67 The high and continuing levels of discrimination and prejudice against Irish Catholics saw them retreat into their own communities, which were naturally centred on the Catholic Church. Indeed, the social value of the Church to ordinary Catholics cannot be underestimated. Walker has itemised the range of social services provided by 142

Working-Class Culture in Scotland the Catholic Church in Dundee in 1915, although as Bernard Aspinwall's research shows they were also duplicated in the west of Scotland. 68 The services included churches and schools, voluntary societies, such as the Catholic Young Men's Society, a St Vincent's Hostel for respectable working girls, a Catholic day nursery, a working mothers' restaurant, a school club for girls, a home for Catholic Working Boys, and through the St Vincent de Paul society a scheme for administering rent books, an insurance and probation service. As Walker concluded, 'Irish Catholic parochial life became a way of life in which religious, political, economic, educational and recreational elements were so fused as to form a culture from which total withdrawal was unlikely'. 69 These links were strengthened by the emergence of professional football. The original Celtic supporters' clubs, the Celtic brake clubs, required that members were also 'fully fledged members of the League of the Cross' .7° Even the overtly political aspects of Catholic culture were bound up with the social. The United Irish League (UIL) was concerned not simply with Home Rule, but also with the relief of hardship among Scottish Catholics and, as a result, membership often overlapped with that of Catholic friendly societies.7 1 The political implications of creating an enclosed culture will be considered later. Like the Irish, women were also treated as second-class citizens. Their work was by definition low paid and unskilled and this reinforced wider societal notions concerning the inferiority of women. In Victorian and Edwardian society the pervasiveness of the ideology of 'separate spheres' meant that 'work was defined as something which men did, and, indeed, the working class was generally defined as working men' .72 Margaret Irwin, trade unionist and women's campaigner, beautifully summed up the these masculine attitudes when she recalled that the manager of a powerloom factory in Glasgow told her that he had once introduced male labour into his weaving department; however, the experiment was short-lived as the 'men gave it up, being unable to stand the ridicule to which they were daily exposed to for taking up "women's work'".7 3 The object of society was to keep women out of the workplace and in the home and, indeed, a measure of masculinity, as well as respectability, in this period was a non-working wife.7 4 Female inactivity in the labour market after marriage served to justify capital in its failings to equip women with skills. Work was seen as an interlude between school and marriage. It also, as we will see, justified trade unions in ignoring women workers' concerns, or in actively discriminating against 143

THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR, 1880-1914

them. As one trade unionist in Dunfermline put it in the early 1890s: 'the women are ... quite content with their conditions of work, which the bulk of them consider as terminable probation between them and marriage'.75 Unfortunately many women and, as James Treble points out, almost all working men, acquiesced in these assumptions regarding the economic and social role of women. 76 However, the economic and social realities of working-class life in Scotland in this period conflicted with the domestic ideal of a patriarchal society. Women did much paid work which went unrecorded in the occupational census, particularly washing, child-minding, homework in sweated trades, and so on. 77 Moreover, given the number of spinsters and single parents, many women had to work out of necessity. Treble's figures for Glasgow in the period 1891-1911 show that around one-third of the female population of Glasgow above the age of ten years were recorded as active in the labour market. 78 Furthermore, in places such as Dundee women were the dominant wage-earning section of the working class and their social behaviour had all the hallmarks of a rougher masculine culture; a matter, as one might guess, of grave concern to the Dundee middle classes. 79 Thus working-class culture reflected the dualism between the respectable and unrespectable which had run through it from 1850 onwards. However, the move towards a greater cohesion of social experience was also evident and that was partly the outcome of important changes which were occurring in the late nineteenthcentury labour process.

144

1. A half-time school in Arbroath, 1887. Note the class size, and age range. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

2. Female jute workers in Dundee, c.l900. Note the ages of the workers and the presence of the supervisor in the background. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

3. Paisley mill girl strike, 1907. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

4. The Lady Victoria Pit bottom, Newtongrange, c. 1900. A comparatively early example of a Scottish pit using the longwall method and machinery to mine coal. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

5. Steelworkers in Beardmore's Parkhead Forge, Glasgow, 191 0. Craft pride on display! (Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre)

6. A cartoon showing the links between the worker in factory and yard and those at the battle front, c.1915. (Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre)

7. Miners' leader, A. ]. Cook, addressing a mass meeting in Fife during the General Strike of 1926. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

8. Harp Athletic FC c.1921-2. The name was chosen by the team's trainer, Patrick Drummond, but the sectarian overtones are clear. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

9. Unemployed men, Edinburgh, c.1930. Hanging around the streets was one of the few free leisure pursuits open to the unemployed. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

10. An elderly couple living in the Overgate, Dundee, in wretched conditions in the 1920s. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library)

11. A woman gathering sea coal in Fife in the 1930s. One of a number of casual jobs women did which went unrecorded in the occupational census. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library)

12. Female cop winders in the Dundee jute industry c.l930s. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library)

13. Fife miners using hand-got methods of coalmining c.1930. Note the very cramped conditions. (Cowie Collection, University of St Andrews Library)

14. A Clydeside riveter using a pneumatic rivet machine, c.1930. (Glasgow University Archive and Business Records Centre)

15. The Youth Guild of the Independent Labour Party, Glasgow, c.1930. Note the presence of James Maxton in the middle of the second row. (Scottish Life Archive, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

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