A People's History of Scotland (30 page)

There was little evidence of any significant improvement in the relationship between employers and their workers on Clydeside. A
fresh wave of apprentices' strikes swept the Clyde in 1952 after a half-day stoppage on 7 February was followed by the suspension of some of the strikers. In response, apprentices in shipyards and engineering plants walked out. By March there was a full-scale strike. The
Glasgow Herald
reported on 21 March that ‘Mr J. Reid' – Jimmy Reid – had successfully moved a resolution supporting the action at the engineering union's national youth conference. On 1 April, an employers' spokesman tried to blame the strike for holding up pay talks. Ten days later, apprentice delegates accepted a pay offer that fell short of their original claim. Once more they had gained a partial success.
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The last great apprentices' action was the biggest strike in 1960, with 60,000 out all over Britain. The Clyde Apprentices Committee organised what became a UK-wide strike, which began on 21 April. The strike committees organised collections and strike pay. ‘Flying Squads' were sent to spread the strike to England. National delegate conferences were held. Employers, union officials and the press blamed the Communists and claimed intimidation was involved. The strike organisation continued until a national conference on 14 May called it off. The pay settlement that followed gave the workers less than they had aimed for, but was a still substantial step forward.
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The issue of equal pay for women had not been resolved during the war and remained a festering sore, particularly as greater numbers of women entered the workforce. Eventually, 1969 saw a fourteen-week strike by 1,000 women engineering workers at BSR (British Sound Recorders) in East Kilbride over the bonus system. Two of the strikers, the convenor, Annette Brownlie, and Margaret Milligan, a shop steward, decided after some weeks that things had gone ‘flat' and something needed to be done to lift it and to stop strike-breakers. The next morning they led a sit-down in front of the buses bringing in the scabs: ‘They brought in the riot police to drag us out of the way, but the thing snowballed and more people sat down. Then stones started to fly … Some of us wouldn't have said boo to a goose before the strike, but the things were done – fighting the police, painting the strikebreakers' houses “Scabs live here” …'

They returned to work having won equal pay, but management insisted on breaking up the women workers by forcing them to take on new and often menial tasks: ‘One foreman said, “If I tell you to clean the toilets, that's what you'll do.” So out we came again for another week, until we got our old jobs back. We got 100 percent trade unionism in our factory and union recognition.'
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By the end of the 1960s, Scottish workers were striking and demonstrating against the Labour government's attempts to introduce anti-union laws. The stage was set for further, bigger confrontations.

The post-war British governments, both Labour and Tory, actively intervened to provide badly needed jobs. They helped create the pulp and paper mill at Corpach, near Fort William, the car plants at Linwood outside Paisley and Bathgate, West Lothian. Government grants and cheap greenfield sites helped attract US multinationals, such as National Cash Register and Timex in Dundee, so that by 1973, 148 plants employing 14.9 percent of the total workforce were US-owned. Research and development remained, however, in the United States, and these plants proved very vulnerable when recession returned to stalk the global economy in 1973.
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Between 1954 and 1960 the UK economy grew by 23 percent as world capitalism went through its great post-war boom, but Scotland's managed just 9 percent.
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Unemployment topped 100,000 in 1959; between 1950 and 1970 more than half a million Scots voted with their feet and quit the country, and between 1951 and 1966, 476,000 emigrated, 89 percent of the population increase.
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In the 1950s, 282,000 left, 142,000 of them for overseas.
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Between 1961 and 1971, 215,000 left Scotland (55 percent for overseas), and of these 190,000 were from Clydeside. In those same years Glasgow's population fell by 165,000, 6.5 percent a year, twice that of Liverpool, in second place for population fall.
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The population shift continued too. By 1951, 73.5 percent of Scotland's population lived in the central belt compared to 56.1 percent a century earlier.

During this period Scotland became renowned for having the worst housing conditions in Europe. The post-war housing crisis was particularly acute. Of 300,000 homes identified as slums in 1956, only 92,000 had been removed by 1963.
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At the end of World War II the housing shortage in Aberdeen led to a successful squatting movement led by left-wingers like Bob Cooney who took over the disused military camps at Torry Battery and Tillydrome. Blacklisted in Aberdeen, Cooney would go to work in Birmingham for twenty years, lodging with the Aberdonians David and Betty Campbell, all part of a thriving left-wing folk scene in the city. The Campbells' son and daughter, Ian and Isobel, were well-known artists, and their grandsons Ali and Robin helped form the band UB40 in the early 1980s. Bob Cooney was proud of these connections.
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In 1947, Harry McShane wrote a pamphlet pointing out that 98,000 Glasgow families were waiting for a council home, stating that they were trapped in ‘insanitary accommodation suffering chronic overcrowding and infestation by vermin'. These conditions he blamed for the high rates of maternal and infant mortality in the Gorbals, which ‘of thirty eight wards in the city … is either at the top, or second from the top, when each year, the figures relating to infant mortality are made known'.
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The Housing (Repairs and Rents) (Scotland) Act of 1954, passed by a Tory government, forced local authorities to draw up plans for slum clearance. In the ten years following the passing of the Act, 32,000 homes in Glasgow were demolished. Many were moved to schemes on the city's edge, such as Easterhouse, Pollok, Castlemilk and Drumchapel, which had few amenities and required a costly trip into the city. The housing office in Easterhouse soon had a daily queue of tenants requesting a transfer. Others were rehoused in new towns such as East Kilbride and Cumbernauld, which had similar problems with lack of amenities and were far from old haunts in the city. Glenrothes in Fife was planned around the development of a new ‘supper' pit at Rothes but it was forced to close almost immediately after opening because of flooding.

Within a decade and a half, 63 percent of housing in Glasgow, 57 percent in Dundee and 48 percent in Aberdeen was public, much of it high-rise building and new council estates, many on the periphery of the city. Similarly, Edinburgh saw much of its working class shunted off to schemes such as Wester Hailes, Niddrie and
Muirhouse. In his novel
Swing Hammer Swing
, Jeff Torrington writes of the new Gorbals emerging at the start of the 1960s: ‘Whole tribes of Tenementers had gone off to the Reservations of Castlemilk and Toryglen or like, the bulk of those who remained had ascended into Basil Spence's “Big Stone Wigwam in the Sky”.'
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The last is a reference to the seventeen-storey high-rises built in the new Gorbals.

Successive local authorities in Glasgow developed an addiction for driving motorways through the city, something that has continued into the twenty-first century, despite the European Environment Agency's finding in 2012 that Glasgow was the most polluted city in the UK.
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There was hardship outside the cities as well. In the early 1930s, the Knoydart Estate was bought by the former Conservative MP and ex-Etonian Arthur Ronald Nall-Cain, Lord Brocket. Brocket was one of the most prominent supporters of Hitler and the Nazis, being personally invited to attend the Führer's fiftieth birthday celebrations in 1939. He fired most of the estate workers and evicted them from their homes to create a sporting estate for the enjoyment of himself and his upper-class pals. Gamekeepers were hired whose job it was to keep locals off the land.

As crofters returned from the war in 1945, hundreds across the Highlands applied for crofting land only to be told by the Department of Agriculture that no land was available. So on 9 November 1948, a group of seven young men, the Men of Knoydart, who had previously unsuccessfully applied for crofting land, decided to take matters into their own hands. Led by the local parish priest, Father Colin Macpherson, they occupied a small corner of Brocket's estate and began turning it into crofts.

Brocket took legal action and won. The land raiders had been told by their lawyers that they could expect to win the case and, accordingly, should end the occupation, which they mistakenly did.

The Labour Secretary of State for Scotland, Arthur Woodburn, who publicly boasted that he had never even set foot in Knoydart, refused to help the crofters and rejected the appeal lodged by them under the Land Settlement Act. Hugh MacDiarmid would turn his venom on Brocket and his like: ‘There are far too many of these “business peers”
swanking about, who are not worthy of a lance-corporal's stripe let alone a peerage – and far too many of them seem to have acquired vast Scottish estates in recent years. They ought to be expropriated.'
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Hamish Henderson's song ‘The Men of Knoydart' ends thus:

Labour, Tories and Nationalists

In the aftermath of the war Labour dropped its historic support for Home Rule on ‘compelling economic grounds'.
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The experience of wartime coalition meant the Labour Party and trade union leaders looked to Westminster for direct investment and economic stimulus, as well as the new welfare state.

In October 1949, the veteran nationalist John MacCormick launched a covenant in support of Home Rule that attracted 1,250,000 signatures, a third of Scotland's adult population. It reached 2 million signatures in 1950, and 1,000 delegates came to a National Assembly in its support, but Labour was bitterly opposed and the SNP, from which MacCormick had resigned, stood aside. Instead, he negotiated an electoral agreement with the Tories and Liberals that alienated much of the support, and he failed to develop the momentum.
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MacCormick would later become involved in more adventurous affairs like the removal of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey and its temporary return to Scotland.

In the 1951 general election, Labour polled 47.9 percent of the Scottish vote, although the Tories were returned at Westminster.
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Little did they know that this would be followed by a gentle but relentless decline in their support. Between 1945 and 1997 Labour's share of the vote north of the border was greater than in England in nine out of fourteen UK general elections, in 1950 the share was equal, and in 1955 Labour polled better in England.
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It seems incredible today, but in the 1955 Westminster general election the Tories took slightly more than half the votes in Scotland. For a further decade the Tories were called the Conservative and Unionist Party on the ballot paper. In Glasgow, the Tories retained control of council seats such as Kinning Park, Whiteinch, Partick and Govanhill.
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Despite their high water mark in 1955, the Conservative and Unionist Party was in decline thereafter. In 1951, the Tories held eleven of Glasgow's Westminster constituencies, including Govan and Glasgow Central, to Labour's eight, and polled more than 270,000 votes. By 1964 they had just two Glasgow MPs and polled just over 180,000 votes in the general election of that year.
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The Tories were not the only ones seeing a decline in their fortunes. In 1950, membership of the Church of Scotland was 60 percent of the adult population, almost three times more than in England. By 1960 membership was in decline, the number falling by 1 percent each year during the subsequent decade, and by 2 percent between 1970 and 1974.
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The Kirk could not stop cinemas from opening on a Sunday in the 1960s, nor pubs from opening on the Sabbath in 1976. In the Western Isles and Highlands, the ‘Wee Frees', strict Calvinists who had refused to join the re-united Church of Scotland, continued to block such moves.

After the rapid rise and fall of the Scottish Covenant movement, nationalism seemed sidelined but the SNP was able to win support from a younger layer of middle-class people concerned about the country's continuing decline. The SNP was able to make some impact, taking 18 percent of the poll in the November 1961 Bridgeton by-election, and in West Lothian a year later they came second to Labour.

There were warnings that the SNP could tap into discontent with Labour. The Nationalists saw further advances in 1967, coming
second in the Glasgow Pollok by-election, taking 28 percent of the vote, and, in local elections, 18.4 percent nationally, returning sixty-nine councillors.

By May the Labour government of Harold Wilson was facing a run on the pound and to placate the markets was implementing austerity measures, creating bitterness among Labour voters. In the coalfields, more pits closed under Wilson than any other prime minister. In that month's Hamilton by-election, a Glasgow lawyer from an ILP background, Winnie Ewing, overturned a 16,000 Labour majority to win. In the following year's local election the SNP took 30 percent of the vote across the country.
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Ban the Bomb!

In 1961, the Tory government of Harold Macmillan agreed that the US Navy could base its nuclear submarine fleet, together with its Polaris missiles locked onto targets in the Soviet Union, at Holy Loch on the Clyde. Up to 10,000 people marched through Glasgow demanding that the government repudiate the agreement with the United States.
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