A right proper Charlie, he was

A  diamond brooch once owned by Bonnie Prince Charlie is to be auctioned off.  The brooch is expected to fetch up to £300,000 in a sale in Geneva. The brooch features a 7.33-carat yellow diamond within a border of near-colourless “cushion-shaped” diamonds. Following the Battle of Culloden  he is thought to have offered the gem to the Corsini family in gratitude for their support.

The 1745 Rebellion has become part of the romantic heritage in Scottish history. But at the time there was little romance to it and the reality is far from the idealistic view portrayed through the mists of time and Hollywood films. It has been described as Highland versus Lowland, feudal Scotland against bourgeois Scotland, catholic against protestant, autocrats against democrats, as well as Scotland versus England. The reality was that it was a civil war, with many families divided. In the Stuart's Jacobite army, fro example, was Roderick Og Chisholm, youngest son of the chief of Clan Chisholm. On the opposing side were two of his brothers, James and John, who wore the uniform of St Clair's Regiment. It was Scot fighting Scot, Highlander against Highlander. In reality, Camerons, MacDonalds and Chattans fought Campbells, Munros and the many other clansmen that joined the ranks of the Argyll Militia. Some clan chiefs hedged their bets and sent sons off to fight on opposing sides. Nor was the '45 rising merely just a parochial civil war, it was also a part of the greater international politics of the period. War between Britain and France had been simmering below the surface since 1740. In order to divide the British further, the French encouraged the Jacobite plotting. The French defeat of the British at Fontenoy in May 1745 offered the perfect opportunity for a rising. 

Prince Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, The Young Pretender, C was born in Rome to a Polish mother where his father had been given a residence by Pope Clement XI. He spent almost all his childhood in Rome and Bologna. He spoke and behaved Italian. Charles was an instigator of the unsuccessful Jacobite uprising of 1745, which ended in defeat at the Battle of Culloden. In a battle that lasted less than an hour, thousands were slaughtered (Cumberland suffered only 300 dead or wounded). The Battle of Culloden went down as one of the bloodiest in Scottish history. It was not, as often portrayed, a battle between the Scots and the English: in reality the Scots on the Government side outnumbered those fighting for the Jacobites. There was no Geneva Convention in those days to protect the vanquished and the result was a ruthless victors' justice. Charles fled to the Isle of Benbecula where, it is reported, he met Flora Macdonald who helped him escape to the Isle of Skye, disguised as a maid. He escaped to France and never returned to Scotland. The Skye Boat Song was written almost a century later by an Englishman, and was for a Scot who spent just a year of his life in Scotland.

The Jacobite cause was supported by some Highland clans, both Catholic and Protestant. However, the majority of the Highland clans were Presbyterian, not Catholic like the Prince, and did not support his cause. 43-6% of the Jacobite Army came from the Highlands, 17-24% from Moray, Aberdeen and Banff, 17-20% from Perthshire, 7% from Dundee and Angus and 2.5% from Edinburgh and Hanoverian deserters with the balance being made up by the Irish Piquets, south and west Lowland recruits, the Manchester Regiment and the French Royal Scots. In the North, Mackays and Sutherlands supported the Government as some clans were openly Hanoverian, for example the Campbells of the Argyll Militia stood with the Regular Army against the Jacobites. Other clans were neutral. Had he gained the support of all the Highlanders, it is widely recognised that he would have access to nearly 50,000 fighting men, not 5000. These men who did fight for him were indeed brave and loyal highlanders, sadly being used by the prince for his own ends.

 Bonnie Prince Charlie was no hero. For most Highlanders he was the harbinger of doom. Charles' thanks for their unwavering loyalty and sacrifice was to blame his treacherous "mountaineers" for the failure of the rebellion until his dying day. He was a spoilt aristocrat who had no trouble with leading trusting men to their graves for his own personal ambitions. Nor did Jacobitism really stand for a noble cause for it sought to put the Stuarts back on the throne and they stood for the "divine right of kings" meaning that the king was chosen by god and should have absolute authority above all.

The pretender, in more ways than one, died in Rome in 1788, an obese, bloated and bitter alcoholic

The Crofters' Wars

“The land under sheep and deer is my property and I can do with it what I like.” -  Lady Matheson

"Treasa tuath na tighearna." (The people are mightier than a lord) - Highland Land League slogan

The common people of the Highlands and Islands had been cleared from large areas of their ancestral lands. The Highland Clearances had crammed the surviving remnants  into crammed crofting townships on very small areas of land where they were very vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by their landlords. Many lacked even crofts of their own and became cottars and squatters on the crofts of other people. Landlords turned most of the land over to use as sheep farms and deer forests. The creation of sheep farms, often comprising large tracts of empty, uncultivated and often fertile land, which hemmed in the congested townships on their boundaries, created social tensions, which unavoidably led to revolt among the disadvantaged. The farms established on Tiree in the 1840s and 1850s, having been forcibly cleared of their original occupants were but a few of the farms designated by crofters as suitable for resettlement by themselves.  In addition, in the 1880s, the Highlands and Islands were ravaged by a decade of severe, occasionally chronic, agricultural depression. As wool prices collapsed, sheep farmers‘ profits and landlords‘ rentals fell back sharply from the heights they had reached in the balmy years of the 1860s and early 1870s. The poor harvests of 1881-1882 plunged the crofting population to a level reminiscent of the potato famine. Then on 1st October 1882 after prolonged rain in August and September came a severe southerly gale that destroyed the unharvested grain. In addition, the storm damaged or destroyed some 1,200 fishing boats, their nets and fishing gear

A mass movement for the reform of land laws erupted in the 1880s. Links formed by radical crofters in the Highlands and industrial workers in the Lowlands worried the authorities: and the crofters leaders who attended conferences organised by the Labour movement in Edinburgh were followed and hounded by police officers. It has been argued that the the Crofters movement of the 19th century was a catalyst for the formation of various working-class organisations in Scotland and it has also been suggested that the influences were the other way, both describe the organic links between the struggles for land and workers rights.

The association between land reform and those movements claiming to be socialist  had always been more marked in Scotland. Before the emergence of Keir Hardie the principal workers organisation in Scotland, which was for a time affiliated with William Morris’s Socialist League, called itself the ‘Land and Labour League’. Far from wishing to be a carbon copy of the Social Democratic Federation, the Scots were keen to establish their own separate national identity. This was why they named  their organisation the Scottish Land and Labour League. In Scotland the Scottish Land and Labour League severed its connection with the SDF to join the break-away Socialist League.

 "I was then a member of the Scottish Land and Labour League, in Edinburgh, Scotland. It must have been in the very early Eighties I guess in 1883. The Scottish Land and Labour League was the first body in Scotland to take up the "New" Socialism, that is to say, it was the first to study Marx. Das Kapital had not yet been translated into English; we studied it from the French translation. We had affiliated ourselves with the Socialist League in London." describes Thomas H Bell (the anarchist, not the later Communist Party Tom Bell)

John Mahon was a former engineer from Edinburgh and member of the Scottish Land and Labour League, who joined the SDF, served on its executive, and was to go on to be the first secretary of the Socialist League. Nevertheless the alliance between the "socialists" and the group interested primarily in the land question did not endure. They became involved in the same sort of conflict  the Socialist League as with the SDF.

In the early 20th century the land agitation had become a vital force uniting farmer and crofter, miner and smallholder, and Highlander and Lowlander. To understand why the land question was of even greater importance in Scotland than in England, we must direct attention to the strength of feudal legislation in Scotland. An old Act of 1621 was still in force, for instance, which penalised farmers, miners, crofters since no-one could kill game unless he owned a ploughgate of land (about 100 acres). Moreover, even a farmer could be convicted of being “unlawfully on his own farm at night for the purpose of killing game.” The 19th century Trespass Act and the various Game Laws that legitimised the rights of landowners to restrict the movement of citizens wishing to gain access to uncultivated moorland and mountain in Scotland created a powerful sense of public grievance. In addition to restricting many traditional rights that the rural population had enjoyed they created a great deal of resentment amongst the growing urban membership of amenity groups and recreational clubs. Climbing and hill walking clubs were particularly active in campaigning to have the concept of freedom to roam enshrined in law. In the 1880s and 90s members of these clubs in conjunction with key figures from the Land League spearheaded a public and parliamentary campaign to have the Trespass and Game Laws altered. The campaign for freedom to roam was unsuccessful but during the following decades the number of people going to the hills increased as did the membership of walking and mountaineering clubs. The tension between hill goers and sporting estates during the grouse and deer stalking seasons was a constant reminder of unfinished business.

At the 1885 and 1886 General Elections a group of candidates, The Crofters Party, who described themselves as representatives of the crofters contested some of the Highland constituencies of north-west Scotland with almost complete success. The group had varying degrees of links to the Highland Land League which had been established to independently promote the interests of crofters and their specific land rights. The League never seems to have made a clear statement of its ultimate objectives. Although, as will be seen, it made use of Henry George for propagandist purposes, it was not a ‘Single Tax’ organisation. While some of its leaders spoke at times of "the necessity of abolishing landlordism" and "the restoration of the land to the people" – stock phrases of Henry George advocates – they appear to have had peasant proprietorship more in mind.

The discontent of the crofters had mounted to the point of revolt in the early 1880s. Although the days of the notorious Clearances were over, they had no security of tenure, the rents of many of them had been raised several times during the preceding decade, not a few were living in extreme poverty, and evictions seem to have been frequent. Many had recently been moved to less fertile holdings to make way for sheep-grazings or sporting preserves; some were still in the process of losing common grazings to their landlords. While a large proportion did not hold written leases, but were entirely dependent upon the goodwill of their landlords, without even the protection of recognised custom,  many of the written leases that did exist appear to have been merely annual. One of their main grievances was their inability to increase the size of their holdings, most of the plots being quite insufficient for the support of a family. Bitterly resenting being dealt with according to commercial, profit-making considerations – with the growth of luxury in England due to the increase in industrial productivity, the shooting rights of Highland estates rose in value much higher than crofters’ rents – they accused the lairds of abusing a sacred trust in their management of the soil, which they claimed was really the traditional property of the clans. Predictably the problem of landlessness was most acute in areas where the crofting population was at its most dense. In Tiree and the Outer Isles, it was not uncommon, as the Napier Commission noted, to find "crowds of squatters who construct hovels, appropriate land, and possess and pasture stock, but pay no rent, obey no control, and scarcely recognise any allegiance or authority".

An important source of disaffection, the first notable demonstration – the so-called ‘Battle of the Braes’ – took place in April 1882. It occurred at the foot of Ben Lee, in Skye. In protest, perhaps in part inspired by events in Ireland, the Crofters War began against an attempt by Lord Macdonald, their landlord, to deprive them of some pasturage to which they claimed a right, some of the crofters were refusing to pay their rents – a measure that was becoming widespread at this period. When an attempt had been made on 7th April to serve summons of ejection upon them, they had responded by burning the summonds and mildly assaulting the sheriff-officer’s assistant. Then, on 17th April, a force of fifty Glasgow police, sent to the area to effect the arrests of six ring-leaders, was set upon, when making the arrest,by some hundreds of crofters with sticks and stones. It succeeded in withdrawing the prisoners, no major injuries being suffered by either side. In February, two months previously, a gunboat had been sent to Skye to facilitate the arrest of three crofters in another district, Glendale, for their part in a similar instance of deforcing a sheriff-officer. One of these men, John Macpherson, known thereafter as the ‘Glendale Martyr’, became a leading figure in the movement, an impassioned speaker at Land League meetings throughout the Highlands.

Over the next few years there were numerous such incidents in various parts of the crofting counties. Invariably sympathisers in the towns and cities – Portree being particularly notable in this respect – found bail for imprisoned crofters or otherwise saw to their interests and comfort.  In November 1884 a number of gunboats were sent to Skye and a force of marines made several marches over the island; this action, however, had been taken as the result of some fabricated reports of disturbances sent to the press by a landlord’s official, and no disorder either preceded or followed this action.

The Napier Commission published recommendations in 1884 but  fell a long way short of addressing crofters' demands, and it stimulated a new wave of protests. The ensuing Act of 1886 applied to croft tenure in an area which is now recognisable as a definition of the Highlands and Islands established the Crofters Commission which had rent-fixing powers. Rents were generally reduced and 50% or more of outstanding arrears were cancelled. The Act failed however to address the issue of severely limited access to land,

In October 1886 a further force of marines and police went to Skye to enforce the collection of rates: both landlords and crofters had been refusing to make payment, with the result that the schools were on the point of closing, and the banks were declining to meet cheques for the Poor Law Officers. On the landlords’ part this action was, of course, a demonstration in protest against the refusal of the crofters to pay their rents – and it was their default which had precipitated the crises, since their share of the arrears of rates formed by far the largest proportion of the total amount. As soon as the expedition reached the island the landlords gave way; but there were a number of ugly scenes when the authorities distrained the personal effects of crofters who professed themselves unable to pay. At about the same period two hundred and fifty marines and fifty police were sent to Tiree (Argyllshire) when the Duke of Argyll Greenhill farm was occupied by over 300 men who at once proceeded to divide the farm among crofters and cottars from nearby townships. Confronted at Greenhill by a force of men and youths armed with sticks and clubs, the police – outnumbered by about six to one – were obliged to withdraw to the relative security of the inn at Scarinish, their mission unaccomplished. On the morning of 22nd July, Scarinish Inn was surrounded by the men responsible for the seizure of Greenhill. The police contingent, it was demanded, should immediately withdraw from Tiree. They left that afternoon. With the police in full retreat and the Duke of Argyll complaining that Tiree was "under the rule of savagery", military involvement became inevitable. On 31st July 1886, a detachment of fifty police escorted by five times that number of marines was landed on the island from the naval ships HMS Ajax and HMS Assistance. Eight crofters were promptly arrested and conveyed to the mainland where they were subsequently found guilty of mobbing and rioting as well as of deforcement – five being sentenced to six month‘s imprisonment, the others to four months.

In later years, there were still isolated cases of deforcements. Plus there were still demonstrations – at the ‘Pairc Deer Raid of Lewis’,  in November 1887 the crofters organised a deer-hunt (the venison distributed to the needy.) in protest at their treatment by The Matheson’s, landlords of the Lewis Estate. The authorities panicked and sent a contingent of police and marines to quell what they thought was a full-scale rebellion. Six were arrested and sent to trial in Edinburgh but all were acquitted. Today, most of Pairc is still a sporting estate in private ownership.

 And then there was the ‘Aignish Riot’, also in the Lewis, in January 1888, crofters, despite the presence of a force of marines, drove stock from a large farm. It took the bayonets of the marines and the arrival of company of the Royal Scots, however, made them realise there was little more they could do and to keep them at bay. Eleven prisoners, were escorted aboard HMS Jackal, and taken to Edinburgh where they were  found guilty of the crime of mobbing and rioting and sent them to prison for periods ranging from twelve to fifteen months.”

In Glasgow, in 1909, a second Highland Land League was formed as a political party. This organisation was a broadly left-wing group that sought the restoration of deer forests to public ownership, abolition of plural farms and the nationalisation of the land. Also they resolved to defend crofters facing eviction by their landlords and they supported home rule for Scotland. During the First World War politicians made lavish promises about reform which would follow the war, and of course many croftsmen lost their lives in the war itself. After the war the words of politicians did not translate into action, but croftmen returning from the war were in no mood to accept government inaction. Land occupations began again. In January 1918 in Tiree a number of cottars from Cornaigbeg took possession of a 13-acre field on Balephetrish farm and at once proceeded to prepare it for a spring planting of potatoes. The Balephetrish raiders were all old men – two at least being in their seventies – and all had sons on active service. But none of that prevented them from being sentenced to ten days‘ imprisonment as a result of legal proceedings initiated by the Duke of Argyll.

When faced with new land seizures the government responded by giving the Board of Agriculture the money and powers to do something like what had been promised. The Board's work was assisted by a downturn in the profitability of sheep farming and, by the late 1920s, perhaps 50,000 acres of arable land and 750,000 acres of hill pasture had been given over to establishing new crofts.

 In August 1918 the new Land League  affiliated with the Labour Party, with four candidates for the 1918 general election being joint League-Labour. By the 1920s they had fully merged with Labour, under the unfulfilled promise of autonomy for Scotland were Labour to gain power in the forthcoming years. Land League members were then key to the formation of the Scottish National Party in 1934.

The Crofters Act of 1886 was not the remedy. It gave the remaining Highlanders security of tenure but froze the crofters on the marginal land to which they had been driven. In the forty years between 1891 and 1931, on the other hand, in a period in which it was virtually impossible under Scottish law to evict a Highland crofter from his holding but singularly easy to evict a Lowland farm labourer from his cottage, the population of the Highlands & Islands counties fell by 26%, that of the Lowland group by only 16%. The law seems to have done nothing to slow down the drain of men from the Highlands. Some twenty-three Not-for-private-profit organisations own, lease or manage by agreement around 5 percent of the Highlands and Islands’ land area – some 506,725 acres. The state sector (Forestry Commission , Scottish Natural Heritage, Dept. of Agriculture, etc) whose land holdings comprise just over 14 percent (1.4 million acres) while the private estate sector owns some 80 percent (8.1 million acres).

Campaigners, radicals and social reformers of the 19th century attempted to implement a number of practical schemes based upon self-reliance and mutual assistance. Community ownership in the region in the 20th century commenced in 1923 with the Stornoway Trust. A resurgence of interest in the concept of community land ownership in the early 1990s has enabled new groups to form and re-discover older initiatives. This recent upsurge has resulted in a variety of different types of community landowners emerging in the region. Bill Aitken, the Conservatives' chief whip in the Scottish Parliament, along with Mohamed al-Fayed, Harrods owner, describes the 2003 Scottish Land Reform Act granting crofters the right to buy estates as a "Mugabe- style land grab" and the Conservatives' rural affairs spokesman, Alex Ferguson declares that it undermines "the principles of private property and freedom of contract which underpin a free society". Peter de Savary, who is chairman of Skibo Castle, where Madonna and Guy Ritchie were married and the destination of choice for the world's rich and famous said the Bill could have been drawn up "in Cuba or North Korea" !!

Scotland as a whole has one of the most concentrated patterns of land ownership in Western Europe. Some 50 percent of the country’s land area is controlled by just 600 (or even 343, depending on source) owners. In the Highlands, this pattern of ownership is even more extreme with some 85 privately owned estates accounting for about a third of the total land area. This results in various barriers and obstacles being placed in the way of development. Examples of these include difficulties in obtaining land for housing, industrial use, community facilities and recreational access to river, woodland, moor and hill. Only when land is commonly owned by the people who inhabit and work it, as opposed to private ownership, leasing or renting, can a community master its own destiny.

Under the clan system of land tenure, the land within the area occupied by a clan, belonged to the clan as a whole collectively, romantically described by some such as John McLean as "celtic communism". The clan chief had no exclusive rights in the clan lands. He was given nominal control of the land for administration purposes, on behalf of the clan. The clan chief’s position was not hereditary but by the consent of the clan, and there was nothing to stop the clan from replacing their chief at any time, if necessary. The clan system was  a communal social system albeit organised on military lines. The old social order in the Highlands disintegrated and the clan chieftains were encouraged to assume control of the clan lands as private landowners. Then they proceeded to oppress their own clansmen. The real philosophy behind these events was the unrestricted accumulation of wealth in the hands of the privileged few, by exploiting the land as well as any other basic resource available. These changes in Highland society introduced a new class division of privileged and servile. Gone forever was the sense of kinship and loyalty to a patriarchal leader. But an emotional attachment to territory – an attachment stemming ultimately back to the clan land of the ancient kin-based society of the Highlands – continues to be prevalent among crofters.

The social ownership sector can trace its history back to the first organised efforts of crofters and land re-settlement schemes just over a 150 years ago. Only with the creation a people’s organisation representing the aspirations of community organisations across the country can there be the necessary counter-power to that of the existing landed establishment and which can challenge the dominant position in Scottish society of the Scottish Landowners Federation, that has for almost 90 years exercised power on behalf of the landed elite and other powerful rural interests.

Clearing away the Scots

 "Should the Czar of Russia take possession of these lands next term that we couldn't expect worse treatment at his hands than we have experienced in the hands of your family for the last fifty years." (In 1854 Highland landowners were asked to recruit troops from their tenants to fight in the Crimean War. One retort was the above)

 Fuadaich nan Gàidheal, the expulsion of the Gael, is a name given to the forced displacement of the population of the Scottish Highlands from their ancient ways of warrior clan subsistence farming, leading to mass emigration from the Highlands to the coast, the Scottish Lowlands, and abroad. This was part of a process of agricultural change throughout the United Kingdom, but the late timing, the lack of legal protection for year-by-year tenants under Scottish law, the abruptness of the change from the clan system and the brutality of many of the evictions gave the Highland Clearances particular notoriety.The Highland Clearances are a notorious part of Scottish history. The Clearances' was not just a hundred or so victims who suffered eviction, but tens of thousands of men, women and children alike, often violently, from their homes to make way for large scale sheep farming. The stories of the Clearances are endless, whether they are individual cases or something that effected whole communities. Although the clearances are associated with the Highlands there were other parts of Scotland which suffered as well, like Argyll and Perthshire, not to the same extent as the likes of Sutherland, but they were cleared never the less. Rural England had already experienced areas of depopulation in the agricultural revolution and the Enclosure Acts, but not to the extent of what the Highlands would experience. Similar developments also began in Scotland in the Lowlands and this Scottish agricultural revolution was changing the face of the Lowlands and transformed the traditional system of subsistence farming into a more productive agricultural system. This also had effects on population and precipitated a migration of Lowlanders. Towards the end of the 18th century ships were leaving from all parts of Scotland with those who were being forced to leave in one way or another.

From the late 16th century the clan-leaders increasingly took up droving, taking cattle to sell in the Lowlands. Increasing demand in Britain for cattle and sheep and the creation of new breeds of sheep, such as the black-faced which could be reared in the mountainous country gave the landowners and Chieftains the opportunity of higher rents to meet the costs of their increasingly aristocratic lifestyle. As a result, many families living on a subsistence level were displaced. Yet despite the emigration, the population of every highland county increased between 1755 and 1821. Population was not the only thing on the way up. Rent was increasing and ordinary people found it more and more difficult to pay. Crofters had become a source of virtually free labour to their landlords, forced to work long hours, for example, in the harvesting and processing of kelp. Burning seaweed produced kelp ash, an alkali source, an important constituent in glassmaking at the end of the 18th century. It was also crucial in the textile industry: mixed with quicklime it was used as a bleach; in soap form it washed wool and, for dying, it was an ingredient in potash. The requirements of shipbuilding led to legislation which prevented wood being burned to produce this so the seaware of the Western Isles became extremely attractive as an economic resource. The kelp, though, did not come from just any seaweed washed ashore, the best sources lay underneath rocks some distance offshore which had to be cut by workers wading out and cutting it with scythes. It was then dragged ashore and dried, before burning, all in all a most labour-intensive activity and a most unpleasant one.To landlords, 'improvement' and 'clearance' did not necessarily mean depopulation. Hard and unpleasant though the work was it was very lucrative for the landlord that is. The wages of the kelp harvester was between £1 and £3 per ton for the entire period from 1790 until the collapse of the industry. It was during this period that fortunes were made by the landlords who “owned” the kelp. During the Napoleonic Wars kelp prices reached £20 per ton. As the entire manufacturing process was carried out by cheap island labour, this constituted pure profit for the landowners. Even the small cost of labour did not really need to be met: the labourers were crofters and either had a requirement to work so many days each year for their landlord or, alternatively, the kelping was deducted from their rent payments. At least until the 1820s, when there were steep falls in the price of kelp, landlords wanted to create pools of cheap or virtually free labour, supplied by families subsisting in new crofting townships. Kelp collection and processing was a very profitable way of using this labour, and landlords petitioned successfully for legislation designed to stop emigration. This took the form of the Passenger Vessels Act passed in 1803. Its net effect was to raise the minimum cost of a passage (Many of the requirements of the 1803 Act were lost in new legislation in 1817 and emigration, which now suited the landlords, was made easier). It was little wonder, then, that landlord after landlord was prepared to subordinate all other land management considerations to the almost unbelievably lucrative business of making and marketing kelp.The landlord to benefit most from this industry was Lord Macdonald of Sleat.

Attitudes changed during the 1820s and for many landlords, the potato famine which began in 1846 became another reason for encouraging or forcing emigration and depopulation. As in Ireland, the potato crop failed in the mid 19th century, and a widespread outbreak of cholera further weakened the Highland population. The ongoing clearance policy resulted in starvation, deaths, and a secondary clearance, when families either migrated voluntarily or were forcibly evicted. There were many deaths of children and old people. As there were few alternatives, many emigrated, joined the British army, or moved to the growing urban cities, like Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee in Scotland and Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Liverpool in England. In many areas people were given economic incentives to move.

 Landlords of the clan estates removed the local people to make way for sheep. Sheep were given priority over people, but not just any people, for the folk burned out of their homes were the descendants of the clansmen, the native people of the land - the Highlanders,  those who had fought or fell in previous campaigns to preserve their clan identity. Many chiefs engaged Lowland, or sometimes English, factors with expertise in more profitable sheep farming, and they "encouraged", sometimes forcibly, the population to move off the land. 1792, infamously known as the Year of the Sheep, signalled another wave of mass emigration of Scottish Highlanders. The people were accommodated in poor crofts or small farms in coastal areas where farming could not sustain the communities and they were expected to take up fishing. Population fell significantly in some areas, where large numbers of Highlanders relocated to the lowland cities, becoming the labour force for the emerging industrial revolution, many emigrated to other parts of the British Empire, particularly Nova Scotia, Quebec and Upper Canada and later Cape Breton and the Carolinas of the American colonies. 

Karl Marx could accurately write that "The history of the wealth of the Sutherland family is the history of the ruin and of the expropriation of the Scotch-Gaelic population from its native soil." (The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery )

Time-line

1724 --25 Anticipating the clearances of the Highland lairds, the gentry of Galloway and Dumfriesshire evict farmers and the tenants who rose and destroyed the stane-dykes and slaughtered cattle. They had already been passive resisters of rent; the military were called in; women were in the forefront of the resistance

1729 -- That good Jacobite, Mackintosh of Borlum, who in 1715 led the Highlanders to Preston, wrote a book recommending enclosures and plantations so a defeat of the Hanovarians would have meant little what took place.

1747 -- The Act of Proscription was introduced which was to ban the wearing of tartan, the teaching of Gaelic, the right of Highlanders to "gather," and the playing of bagpipes in Scotland. The Heritable Jurisdictions Act forced Highland landowners to either accept all English rule or else forfeit their lands. Many Highland landowners and Clan chiefs moved to London. The Act of Proscription is repealedin 1782 , but many Highland landowners, who have been born and raised in London or other metropolitan areas, remain in their urban homes, distancing themselves from the tenant clan members on their lands.

1762 -- Sir John Lockhart-Ross brings sheep to his Balnagowan estate, raises tenant rents, installs fences and Lowlander shepherds.

1782 -- Thomas Gillespie and Henry Gibson lease a sheep-walk at Loch Quoich, removing more than 500 tenants, most of who emigrate to Canada.

1780s  -- Donald Cameron of Lochiel begins clearing his family lands, which span from Loch Leven to Loch Arkaig.

1791 --The Society of the Propagation of Christian Knowledge reports that over the previous 19 years more than 6,400 people emigrated from the Inverness and Ross areas.

1791 -- "The dis-peopling in great measure of large tracts of country in order to make room for sheep is taking place," observes the Reverend Kemp after visiting the Highlands.

1792 -- Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster brings the first Cheviot Sheep to his Caithness estates. These sheep would later be referred to as four-footed Clansmen, indicating the tenants' rage at being removed in favour of animals.

1792  -- Angry tenant farmers drive all the Cheviots in Ross-shire to Boath. The 42nd (Royal Highlanders) Regiment intervenes, and the sheep are returned to Ross-shire.

1800-1813 -- Extensive clearances in Strathglass, Farr, Lairg, Dornoch, Rogart, Loth, Clyne, Gospie, Assynt, and lower Kildonan.

1801 -- The first clearances of the Strathglass area by William, the 24th Chisholm. Nearly 50% of the Clan living there are evicted.

1807  -- Evictions at Farr & Lairg -- the first major Sutherlandshire clearances.

1807  --  The Northern Association of Gentlemen Farmers and Breeders of Sheep agree to move their activities into Ross-shire, Sutherlandshire, and Caithness. This decision would lead to massive clearances in those areas.

1809 -- The Chisholm enacts another large clearance of his lands in Strathglass, advertising to interested sheep-farmers lots holding between 1,000 and 6,000 sheep.

1811 -- More than 50 shepherds are brought into Sutherlandshire and made Justices of the Peace -- thereby giving them legal control over the native tenants.

1813 -- Lord and Lady Stafford, the landowners of Sutherlandshire, hire James Loch to oversee the clearing of their lands.  Lady Stafford writes that she would like to visit her Sutherlandshire estate but: "at present I am uneasy about a sort of mutiny that has broken out in one part of Sutherland, in consequences of our new plans having made it necessary to transplant some of the inhabitants to the sea-coast from other parts of the estate"

1813 -- Nearly 100 tenants of Strath Kildonan emigrate to Canada aboard the Prince of Wales and settle near Lake Winnipeg.

1813 -- Sir George  MacKenzie of Coul writes a book justifying the clearances, citing: "The necessity for reducing the population in order to introduce valuable improvements, and the advantages of committing the cultivation of the soil to the hands of a few...."

1813  -- a group of Strath Kildonan residents march towards Golspie in order to have their grievances against the clearances heard. They are met by soldiers and the Sheriff, who, aided by local church ministers, intimidate the tenants into returning to their homes to await their eviction notices.

1813 (December 15) -- Tenants of the Strathnaver area of Sutherlandshire go to Golspie at the direction of William Young, Chief Factor for Lord and Lady Stafford. The tenants are told they have until the following Whitsunday to leave their homes and relocate to the wretched coastlands of Strathy Point.

1814  -- Under the direction of Patrick Sellar, a Factor for Lord and Lady Stafford, heath and pastures surrounding Strathnaver are burned in preparation for planting grass for the incoming sheep. The native tenants of Strathnaver make no motion of moving to Strathy Point, or anywhere else.

1814 (June 13) -- Patrick Sellar begins burning Strathnaver. Residents are not given time to remove their belongings or invalid relatives, and two people reputedly die from their houses burning.

1815 -- The Sheriff-Substitute for Sutherlandshire arrests Patrick Sellar for:willfull fire-raising. Not surprisingly, a jury of affluent landowners and merchants acquit Sellar in 1816. Soon after, Sellar continues clearing vast areas of Sutherlandshire.

1818 -- Patrick Sellar retires to his Sutherlandshire estate, given to him by Lord and Lady Stafford in acknowledgment of his work.

1819  -- Another violent clearing of Strathnaver residents. Donald Macleod, a young apprentice stonemason witnesses: "250 blazing houses. Many of the owners were my relatives and all of whom I personally knew; but whose present condition, whether in or out of the flames, I could not tell. The fire lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins."

1819  -- The Kildonan area is cleared. Donald MacDonald later writes: "...the whole inhabitants of the Kildonan parish, with the exception of three families--nearly 2,000 souls--were utterly rooted and burned out."

1820 -- James Loch publishes his account of enacting the clearances, or, as he calls them, the improvements. He declares that Gaelic will become a rarity in Sutherlandshire. Journalist Thomas Bakewell severely criticizes both Loch's book and his actions during the clearances.

1820  -- Hugh Munro, the laird of Novar, clears his estates at Culrain along the Kyle of Sutherland. A riot ensues when the Sheriff and military arrive to evict the tenants. Remonstrated by the minister Donald Matheson, the tenants eventually cease fighting and move away.

1821  -- Officials bearing Writs of Removal for the tenants of Gruids, near the River Shin, are stripped, whipped, and their documents are burned. Fearing another riot like Culrain, military and police accompany the Sheriff back to Gruids where, faced with such strong opposition, the tenants gathered their few belongings and moved to Brora.

1821 -- showed an increase over the census of 1811 of more than two hundred. The county has not been depopulated, its population has been merely been re-arranged in a new fashion. "The Duchess of Sutherland found it spread equally over the interior and the sea-coast, and in very comfortable circumstances--but she left it compressed into a wretched fabric of poverty and suffering that fringes the county on its eastern and western shores".

1826 -- The Island of Rum is cleared except for one family. MacLean of Coll pays for the other natives to emigrate to Canada.

1832 -- Despite the fact that he forcibly evicted them, exiled members of Clan Chisholm swear allegiance to their chief back in Scotland!

1847  --  "The Scotsman," reports that the Highlanders' problems are due to their own laziness and suggests the best solution is for the native tenants: as soon as they are able to labour for themselves, be removed from the vicious influence of the idleness in which their fathers have been brought up and have lived and starved.

1849 -- Despite some rioting by the native tenants, Lord Macdonald clears more than 600 people from Sollas on North Uist.

1850s  -- Clearances of thousands of tenants in the Strathaird district, Suishnish, and Boreraig on Skye; and Coigach at Loch Broom.

1851 -- Sir John MacNeill, under the direction of the Home Secretary, tours the Highlands and reports back that the Highland poor are "parading and exaggerating" their poverty and are basically lazy. The only solution MacNeill sees is emigration.

1851 -- The clearance of Barra by Colonel Gordon of Cluny. The Colonel called all of his tenant farmers to a meeting to "discuss rents", and threatened them with a fine if they did not attend. In the meeting hall, over 1,500 tenants were overpowered, bound, and immediately loaded onto ships for America.

1853 -- Knoydart is cleared under the direction of the widow of the 16th Chief of Glengarry. More than 400 people are suddenly and forcibly evicted from their homes, including women in labor and the elderly. After the houses were torched, some tenants returned to the ruins and tried to re-build their villages. These ramshackle structures were then also destroyed.

1854 -- The clearing of Strathcarron in Ross-shire. Some Clan Ross women tried to prevent the landlord's police force by blocking the road to the village. The constables charged the unarmed women, and, in the words of journalist Donald Ross: "...struck with all their force. ...Not only when knocking down, but after the females were on the ground. They beat and kicked them while lying weltering in their blood....and more than twenty females were carried off the field in blankets and litters, and the appearance they presented, with their heads cut and bruised, their limbs mangled and their clothes clotted with blood, was such as would horrify any savage."

1856 --  Harriet Beecher Stowe author of the anti-slavery Uncle Tom's Cabin visits Sutherlandshire. Her tour is carefully orchestrated by the current Duchess of Sutherland to avoid sites of eviction, and so Stowe proclaims the tales of the clearances to be mostly fictional.

1872 -- A Parliamentary Select Committee is established to investigate claims that tenant farmers are being evicted in the Highlands to make room for deer. As the people had been cleared for sheep and not deer, the Committee finds no evidence.

1874 -- Starving tenants of Black Isle, Caithness and Ross areas attempt to commandeer grain shipments going from Lairds' estate farms to export ships. Military forces are called in to guarantee safe shipment of the grain

20th Century

1976 -- A study concluded that some thirty‑five families or companies possess one third of the Highland's 7.39 million acres of privately owned land.

1977 --  Earl of Airlie’s trustees sold two parcels of this common land, and admitted in the deed of sale they had never claimed the disputed area they were selling on the Hill of Alyth was part of their property. They simply claimed it could be “construed” to be. They also conceded in the deed “we or our predecessors in title have at various times disponed [made over or conveyed legally] parts of the subjects known as The Hill of Alyth to which we or they may have had a right but granted no warrandice [legal guarantees, including that the seller can validly transfer ownership]. So, despite not being able to prove they owned it, they sold it to another landowner who then sold it to the Scottish Government, whose lawyers approved the purchase.

1993 -- One of the world's richest absentee landlords, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoumm of Dubai, bulldozes houses in his Wester Ross "glen of sorrow" to prevent human habitation,  because of "the night-time poaching activities of the local population." Twelve family homes have been reduced to rubble in a district which has 800 applicants on the local authority housing waiting list.

1997  --  The Scotsman reports: "The tenth Earl of Airlie, a former Lord Chamberlain to the Queen and brother of Sir Angus Ogilvy, has started an action to evict Norman Ogg, 58, a farmer, from his 125 acre farm on the 40,000 acre Airlie estate. "Nearby, in a separate action, Captain Alwyne Farquharson, chief of the Clan Farquharson and 16th baron of Invercauld, is trying to evict Jean Lindsay and her son, Sandy, from the 2,500 acre hill farm she has farmed for 26 years in Glenshee. "Capt Farquharson wants to extend the area available for grouse habitat -- and at Kinwhirrie farm, near Cortachy, Lord Airlie wants to improve the pheasant shooting."

1997 -- The Scotsman reported that the owners of the Highland Spring mineral water bottling company are allowing the houses on their 3,000-acre Blackford estate in Perthshire "to crumble as they fall vacant." Scottish National Party MP Roseanna Cunningham said "...the owners appear to be pursuing a policy of deliberately allowing perfectly serviceable properties to fall into disrepair rather than providing much needed rural housing."

1998  -- From The Scotsman: The 6th Earl of Granville, the Queen's godson and a man whose favourite pastimes include scuba diving for scallops, is invoking an archaic law, "foreshore entitlement", which allows him to levy royalties on kelp harvested from his 60,000-acre estate in the Outer Hebrides. While he sits in his elegant seven-bedroom mansion in Callernish accumulating royalty cheques, around 40 crofters on North Uist eke out a meagre living using sickles to hack tonnes of the crop from rocks jutting out of freezing Atlantic waters. After labouring in the bitter cold for as long as eight hours a day, the cutters are likely to earn just £15.20 per tonne. On a good day they may receive £45 for the seaweed harvest, which is shipped to the mainland and turned into a thickening agent for toothpaste, ketchup and jam. The 38-year-old Earl, Fergus Leveson Gower, is entitled to a percentage of the value of the seaweed crop simply because it is washed up on his piece of shore. Earl Granville has done his best to defend the seaweed royalties, amounting to around £800 a year, saying the money was paid by the alginate company Kelco-NutraSweet and did not affect the price paid to cutters. However, the crofters say the Earl's argument is disingenuous. They argue the tax is passed on to them in the form of reduced rates for their crop.

1998 -- leading estate agents Savills market a part of the common land on the Hill of Alyth as part of a farm for sale and were completely frank that the sellers could not prove they owned it. According to the particulars, they had acquired title “from previous heritable proprietors to the Hill of Alyth without warrandice. The purchaser will be given title to the hill on the same terms.”

2000 -- John MacLeod, the 29th MacLeod clan chief, puts the Black Cuillin mountains on Skye up for sale for £10 million. Local residents protest, sparking a debate about who actually owns the land and their rights to sell it.

Some writers see the Clearances as an early version of "ethnic cleansing". Although, landowners and employers were generally callous about the "lower orders", these modern terms such as  "ethnic cleansing"  do not apply, as most of the landlords were fellow Scots. Highlanders were also required to provide factory fodder in the rapidly expanding Scottish cities. Marx noted, "In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns." As early as 1790, 30 percent of the population of Greenock was from the Highlands, while in Glasgow in 1851 there were 16,500 workers who had been born in the Highlands.

SOURCE
http://www.cranntara.org.uk/clear.htm

Marx and the Clearances

It should not be overlooked that Karl Marx was spurred to his communist conclusions when Rhineland landowners sought to introduce a bill to outlaw as theft the customary right of peasants to collect fallen timber for firewood. This was a time-honored tradition that--for the impoverished peasantry--often meant the difference between life and death during the harsh German winters.

The tenure of land in the Highlands was essentially a tribe or family right.  All the members of the clan had an equal right to their proportionate share of the land occupied by the whole. The equality of title and blood thus enjoyed created a sense of individual self-respect and mutual dependence. The tenures of a clan was of course frequently disturbed by war; and whenever a tribe was driven or emigrated into a district where it had no hereditary claim, if it obtained land it was on the payment of a tribute to the king. Marx commented on the similar legal robbery of clan land in Scotland:

"...the Scotch lairds-chiefs of clans profited, since the insurrection of 1745, of this juridical confusion, of the tribute paid to them by the clansmen, with a “rent” for the lands held by them, in order to transform the whole of the clan-land, the common property of the clan, into their, the lairds, private property; for — said the lawyers, if they were not the landlords, how could they receive rent for that land? And thus this confusion of tribute and rent was the basis of the confiscation of all the lands of the Scottish Highlands for the benefit of a few chiefs of clan who very soon after drove out the old clansmen and replaced them by sheep"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_06_10.htm

He also writes that "the systemic robbery of the Communal lands helped...to swell those large farms, that were called in the 18th Century  capital farms or merchant farms, and 'set free' the agricultural populations as proletarians for manufacturing industry"

Blast from the Past

Bill Knox, a one time member of Edinburgh branch of the SPGB,  produces some interesting facts from the 19th and early 20thcentury

The Inequality

In Scotland in 1867 by 10% of the population received over 50% of national income. Those in the top 1% of income earners annually received 200 times more than the bottom 30%. Some of these men were fabulously rich, with industrialists such as ironmaster James Baird leaving an estate worth £1,190,868 on his death in 1876. The uneven distribution of wealth is also shown in the fact that only 12% of Scots had estates worth making a will for in 1881, and that the yearly wage for a well-paid skilled worker, such as a compositor, only amounted to £78 in 1880. The skilled worker would have had to have worked for over 15,000 years before he could have earned what Baird left on his death.
The super-rich were followed by the substantial middle classes whose average annual income was around £145 in 1867. They enjoyed a lifestyle which revolved around work, family and the kirk. Although they did not enjoy the social trappings of the super-rich, which included lavish houses and country estates, they experienced all this on reduced scale. What marked them out from the rest of Scottish society was servant-keeping. Over 55% of female workers in Edinburgh in 1871, although somewhat less in Dundee and Glasgow, were employed as domestic servants.

By the 1890s the picture might have seemed rosy: economic growth was inducing complementary improvements in the standard of living which, in turn, was actively transforming the social experiences of the Scottish people. However, much of this was a delusion.

Between 1901 to 1910 net emigration was running at the equivalent of 52% of the natural increase in the population, or some 282,000 people. Although many of the emigrants  were from the Lowland towns, the numbers leaving the Highlands were still significant. The collapse of the fishing industry in the 1880s had impoverished many crofters and they were unable to afford the rents on their crofts. This led to rent strikes and land grabbing and provoked retaliatory measures in the form of evictions by the landlords. The result was the Crofters' Wars of the mid-1880s. The Highlands and Islands remained poor, with agricultural wages in 1907 13% below the British average. As much as 34% of the total land area of the crofting counties of the Scottish Highlands was given over to deer stalking in 1914. Hunting lodges proliferated costing anything between £10,000-£70,000 for the more palatial to £3,000-£6,000 for the more modest. Although activity in this respect created employment for builders and gamekeepers, the gains were more than offset by the decline in the number of shepherds. Spending was of little benefit to local suppliers as the rich brought their supplies of food and wine from Glasgow or London. As one contemporary put it, the popularity of deer stalking turned the Highlands into the happy hunting grounds of the rich.

In spite of reform in 1845, the Poor Law still discriminated against the able-bodied poor. Under the 'Law of Settlement' the Irish were singled out for particularly harsh treatment, with regular deportations. Spending on the poor was also parsimonious. Expenditure increased from £740,000 in 1864 to £1,600,000 in 1914, but this was still grossly deficient in relation to need. It was also less than expenditure in England. Indeed, the latter on average spent a third more on its poor than Scotland did. For those in work outside the skilled trades the picture was not much better. Women earned much less than men and there was a large gulf between the skilled and unskilled worker.

The Slums

An indicator of poverty - the infant mortality rate - increased as the 19th century wore on. The rate increased from 118 per 1,000 live births in the period 1854-1859 to 122 in 1904- 1905; a figure much higher than that for England and Wales. This was primarily the result of poverty but it also had an obvious connection with housing conditions. In Glasgow 32% of all children who died before the age of five in the late 1890s lived in one apartment houses. The 1861 census had showed that 34% of all Scottish housing consisted of only one room - the 'single end' - and a further 37% consisted of two rooms. Fifty years later the census showed that while the number of people living in one-roomed houses declined to 13% of the total, the number of those living in two-roomed houses remained high at 41% of the total. Of course, in the large cities the situation was much worse. Glasgow still had two-thirds of its population in this type of cramped accommodation, as did Dundee. A survey of Edinburgh in 1913 revealed that there were over 7,000 one-roomed houses, of which 94% shared a common water closet and 43% a common sink. In Glasgow there were 44,345 such houses and of these 93% shared a toilet, but most had their own sink. The position was not much better in Glasgow's 111,451 two-roomed houses as 62% of them shared a toilet. There was a need for good quality public sector housing let at rents people could afford, but the dominance of property owners and their interests on town councils blocked such a move. The public health measures introduced in the  large urban centres in the 1850s and 60s were ignored by smaller towns and villages. Lochgelly in Fife in 1867 had two toilets for a population of 2,000. Sewage was thrown on the streets where it seeped through the ground surface into a mine well from which the public water supply was drawn.

Lloyd George's election slogan 'Homes fit for Heroes' led to the passing of the Addison Act of 1919. This began a programme of house building in the public sector. Local authority building in Scotland was responsible for over 50% of new housing in 1934, while in England it was only around 20% which was to intensify after the 2nd World War and leave Scotland in the 60s with a higher state ownership of housing than most Eastern Bloc countries. However, in spite of the general expansion of the public sector, it was still a fact that most of the population of the leading cities were living in one or two roomed houses, with Dundee and Glasgow by far the worse. Those in most need of re-housing were put off applying for a new council house because of the high cost. In Dundee the yearly cost in 1926 of a four apartment house on the Craigiebank estate was estimated to be 52% of the average textile wage, and a three apartment at the Logie estate was 46%. As a result most of the new tenants tended to be from the white collar or the skilled working class.

The 'Godless Poor'

A survey carried out in 1900 showed that the unskilled did not attend church in large numbers. In mining areas evangelists found it difficult to win converts; in industrial Hamilton the presbytery found that from one-fifth to a half of Protestant families did not attend church in the 1890s. Ten years earlier in one area of Glasgow noted for its unskilled working population only two out of every seven men surveyed had any connection with the church. In spite of the abolition of pew rents, the working class was still alienated from the church and its ministry. The exception was the Catholic Church.

Religion divided Scotland on sectarian lines. Catholic Irish families suffered from the prejudices of presbyterian Scotland. They were depicted by the media and the pulpit as uncivilised and drunken, idle and lazy. The same did not apply to Irish Protestants who migrated in large numbers in the 1870s and 1880s to Clydeside. The growing large Irish Protestant population increased religious tensions as they brought their Orange Lodges with them. By 1913-1914 Glasgow had 107 Orange Lodges out of a total of 400 for the whole of the United Kingdom, and certain occupations, such as boilermaking, were recruited for on a religious basis. Prejudice and discrimination combined to keep the Catholic Irish at the bottom of the heap. Insecurity fuelled sectarianism rivalries. Reacting to the decision in 1918 to provide for Catholic schooling out of local taxation, the Protestant churches led a racist anti-Irish Catholic crusade. In 1923 the Church of Scotland issued a pamphlet condemning the Irish as a 'menace' to the Scottish race and kept up a stream of anti-Irish propaganda throughout the 1920s. This set the tone for more extremist Protestant organisations to make headway as the economic depression grew worse after 1929. At a time when the main churches were losing members in droves, the Scottish Protestant League in Glasgow and the Protestant Action Society in Edinburgh made spectacular gains in local elections, with the latter also carrying out a policy of attacking and harassing Catholic gatherings. Glasgow also faced the problem of sectarian gang warfare which emanated from football. The Billy Boys supported Rangers, while their rivals the Norman Conks identified with Celtic.

 

The Free Colliers - the original Bravehearts

Continuing our little bit of Scots history

Until the end of the 18th century the Scottish collier was a serf, bound in servitude to his master, the coal owner, almost as tightly as any slave on the cotton plantations of the Americas. Although he could not actually be sold as an individual, he and his family were ranked with any other article attached to the colliery to be bought and sold along with lengths of rail or stacks of timber. Once bound to a pit they had no right to move to another place of work and could be brought back to face severe punishment if they tried. Many did just that and were returned in manacles to face the wrath of the owners. Convicted criminals, beggars and other homeless people were gifted as 'perpetual servants' to the masters and, children born to collier families were, on payment by the owner of a small sum of money, bound like their fathers to the owner and his pit for life. No surprise then that few outsiders would volunteer to join the ranks to labour in Scotland's dangerous pits even when the industrial revolution increased demand for coal and pushed up wages. It was with a good deal of reluctance that the colliers were granted their freedom in grudging stages, first the new recruits in 1775 and twenty four years later the whole workforce.

But their new found freedom did not bring justice.

 In the early decades of the 19th century conditions in Scotland's mines were deplorable with women and small children working long hours alongside the men in dark, cramped and dangerous conditions. Attempts by the colliers across the country to organise into trade unions were strenuously opposed by the authorities and the owners and even the repeal of the laws forbidding union activity did not protect workers and their families from the threat of dismissal for taking action or encouraging others to do the same. In 1856 the coal owners combined to reduce the colliers' wages from five to four shillings per day and a widespread strike followed. In the Falkirk area the Redding (In 1923 40 miners lost their lives in a pit disaster) colliers took the lead and on more than one occasion troops and special constables were sent to the area to disperse marches and demonstrations. Amid great hardship the strike dragged on for twelve weeks before the defeated colliers returned to work for the lower rate. Similarly, in the early 1860s, the establishment of a General Association of the Operative Coal and Ironstone Miners, Reddsmen  and Drawers* in Lanarkshire was crushed by an employers' lockout which lasted for six weeks and ended in a humiliating return to work and reduced wages. * reddsmen clear the way for the colliers, drawers transported the coal.

Soon after the anniversary of the Battle of Falkirk which had been fought near their homes in 1298 colliers they began an annual march from pit  to pit under the banner of their hero, William Wallace,  to the spot near their village, the Wallace Stone, where he is said to have viewed the battle. Such associations or brotherhoods among the miners were not unusual at the time but the annual demonstration and the association with Wallace marked out the Redding colliers from the rest.

It was obvious that a new defence was needed to mobilise the colliers and reassert their rights and this came about the following year. In 1863, at Redding, James Simpson who had been a trade union activist in the area before and during the 1856 strike, realised that he had in the annual William Wallace marchers a ready made army of volunteers, and on February 3rd he and his colleagues constituted themselves as the first Lodge of Free Colliers pledged to take up the struggle. Within nine months there were lodges in Slamannan and Bo'ness and the movement spread to the Lanarkshire and Ayrshire coalfields. By the end of the following year there were sixty-five lodges in a network covering the whole Scottish coalfield and uniting miners by the thousand. Some areas like Stirlingshire and Lanarkshire were more enthusiastic than Fife and Midlothian but no area was without its lodge. The lodges usually bore the name of a Scottish noble from  the romantically remembered  past  - John de Graeme and Robert Bruce, the Lord Andrew Moray and the Young Boswell, the Duke of Gordon  and the Sir William Baillie

One of the weaknesses of previous union activity had been its openness, which the masters had exploited. Many miners claimed they were frightened to speak out at open meetings for fear of their employers. To ensure that the actions of the Free Colliers remained secret and the new lodges adopted many of the trappings of freemasonry, binding each to the other by oaths of loyalty and using coded signs and language to preserve their unity and secrecy. Simpson himself became Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Scotland. 

The actions of some of the Free Collier lodges especially in the west of Scotland led to considerable internal argument and many union members outside the movement felt that the secrecy associated with the lodges could be counter productive. Their very Scottishness was seen by many as potentially devisive in an industry where a growing number of the colliers were immigrant Irishmen and where solidarity of all workers was essential. The Free Colliers insisted that their ranks were open to all miners but hostility and suspicion remained. Just four years after their birth Free Collier membership began to decline and many of the lodges which had bloomed so quickly began to wither away. In east Stirlingshire, in the last of the lodges,  the role of representation passed and eventually to the National Union of Mineworkers.

http://www.falkirklocalhistorysociety.co.uk/home/index.php?id=98

Scottish common ownership

Scotland has a tradition of common property rights. They include rights arising from commonties, grazing rights, peat-cutting rights, salmon rights, rights to use harbours and foreshore, mineral rights, sporting use rights, ownership rights, rights to usufruct, rights of access to resources and rights of passage over land and inland water. Commonty in Scots Law means; a piece of land in which two or more persons have a common right. A widespread example of such common property is living in a  tenement. Those who own or rent a flat also hold other parts of the property,  e.g. the stairs or close (and have its common responsibility - your turn to clean the stairs!) and access to the communal back-garden  It does not mean state-owned or public-land but could be parish/burgh land.

It is estimated that half the land area of Scotland was still common land in 1500. They provided areas of free access. It was not a "free for all" but their use was covered by sets of rules that were well established and understood locally. No-one could make financial profit. The resources of the commonty were solely for personal uses, and individuals could not, for instance, cut timber for sale or rent grazing to someone else. By the mid 19th century, virtually all this common land had been divided into the private property of neighbouring land owners. Subsistence farming could not survive without access to the resources that the commons traditionally supplied and their loss was a major factor in forcing local people to abandon the way of life that had sustained generations before them and join the mass of people leaving the Scottish countryside. "Ferm touns" or collective farm settlements, of Scotland’s subsistence agriculture, which survived in northern areas into the 19th century, were a traditional arrangement that typically could not have survived without the resources provided by a commonty which provided many of the resources needed by a community at no cost apart from the inhabitants’ own labour. The commonty also offered a degree of flexibility to meet fluctuations in population or food supply, that was not possible within the formal restrictions of privately held land. The image of commonties as barren wastes was the perspective of the land-owning class, who were seeking to do away with commonties and the "ferm touns" they served.

A green is a small area of common land usually closely associated with a settlement, whether a town or village or single clachan. These greens provided an area where cows could be milked, markets and other events held, garments bleached and a host of other common and communal activities carried out. The greens associated with many fishing communities were used for the drying and repairing of nets, the salting and drying of fish and other related activities. One specific type of green were the overnight and river crossing stances associated with traditional routes and drove roads.

A loan was a common route through private property to and from an area of common land or some other ‘public’ place. The distinction between this and a right of way was that the loan was itself common land and not just a right of use. Their former existence of others is indicated by street and  place names, like Loanhead.

A moss is a wet area where peats can be dug and historically many were used in common by local inhabitants. Common mosses were the same form of shared property. The common status of surviving common mosses has often gone unnoticed because they have been of relatively little use since the decline of peat cutting in the eastern and central Highlands.

Rigs were narrow strips of cultivated land, sometimes up to around 15 metres wide. Traditionally, adjacent rigs were used by different cultivators and the rigs periodically re-allocated between them. This system was known as runrig. Lands lying runrig were invariably associated with an area of rough ground or hill land that was also shared in common. These two types of land were the longstanding basis of farming in Scotland before the Improvements of the 18th  and 19th centuries. Originally, many areas of runrig, together with their shared hill ground, were held by two or more proprietors. Each owned a number of rigs, which were interspersed with the rigs of the other owners and each owner had an undivided share of the ownership of the common hill. The common hill was thus a commonty and the runrig lands equivalent to a commonty on arable land.(Bishopbriggs was originally Bishoprigs)

Burghs were established in Scotland from the 12th century. The creation of Royal Burghs was to provide the Crown with a convenient counter-balance to a feudal aristocracy which threatened to assume supreme power in the State. It was necessary that the King’s burgesses should have absolute freedom from the jurisdiction of the neighbouring baron and should have an adequate patrimony. The Kings, therefore, granted wide privileges and vast territorial estates for the common good use of their chartered burghs. In 1617 the jurisdiction of the Magistrates of Rutherglen extended from Polmadie on the south side of the river Clyde to Carron; the entire parish of Ayr at one time belonged to the Burgh of Ayr; Aberdeen once possessed lands which extended many miles in circuit round Aberdeen, granted by the Kings of Scotland, for the use of the town. Edinburgh’s common land, the Burgh Muir had a total area of approximately 5 square miles. The last open area of common land remaining of the Burgh Muir is now Bruntsfield Links. The Border towns still retain the tradition of the annual Common Ridings, reasserting the boundaries of it.

 Even the towns which did not hold their charters from the Crown, but from the neighbouring baron, possessed wide territories of commonity. The lands over, which property rights and privileges of use were held by the burgh were the burgh commons. The loss of the burgh commons stemmed in large part from an Act of the Scots Parliament in 1469. This Act had suppressed the popular election of Councils and led to the dominance of burghs by local land owners and wealthy merchants. The evidence in the reports shows how these land owners and merchants, with their relations and allies, had appropriated the burgh commons to themselves through generous land grants and cheap feus.  Labour politician Thomas Johnson wrote extensively about Burgh commons and its loss, being a sympathiser of "municipal socialism" and nationalisation

Crown Commons were land held directly by the Crown and are thought to have originated out of the once extensive Royal Hunting Forests. The lands that became Crown Commons were areas within those forests where traditional communal use, which had predated the establishment of the forests, continued after the system of forests broke down in the medieval period. While these Commons were most heavily used by people living nearby, anyone unconnected with the area could also use them. Crown Commons had certainly largely disappeared by the early 19th century. An Act in 1828 allowed for their division and the land was then shared out between the adjoining land owners.

Crofters’ Common Grazings are an example of a common property resource where legislation has been used to safeguard equitable access to the resource by those entitled to a share in it. Many, but not all crofts have two parts: the in-bye land - arable ground on which the crofter’s house is usually built; and rough grazing held in common with neighbouring crofts, usually a much larger area of rough hill pasture – the common grazings. While the land involved is mostly owned by private land owners, the local crofting communities have secure legal rights of occupation and use. This is as a result of the Crofting legislation of 1886 and 1891 that followed a period of riots, rent strikes, political agitation, land raids and government commissions of inquiry in the aftermath of the Highland Clearances. crofting common grazings still cover a substantial part of the Highlands and Islands - 541,750 hectares or around 7% of Scotland’s total land area. The management of common grazings is governed by regulations which are administered by local committees appointed by the grazings shareholders. There are some 853 registered grazing committees and a further 200 unregulated grazings. The main functions of these committees has until recently been to administer, manage and improve the grazings primarily for livestock production

During recent decades, an increasing number of rural communities mostly in the Highlands and Islands have become directly involved in the ownership and management of land within their locality through purchasing, leasing or some form of management arrangement. It is estimated that over 94 community land trusts control around 130,242 hectares which amounts to some 1.98 percent of rural land. Many of the early instances of this were remote rural communities whose members were largely the tenants of a single large private estate and who set up a collective body which bought the property on the open market, preferring to be their own landlord than have another new private landlord. In a number of celebrated cases (Assynt, Eigg and Knoydart), community purchases took place when the private land owner had gone bankrupt or run into financial difficulties and the community was able to negotiate with the main creditors or the financial receivers. To purchase properties, local communities form a democratic body with an appropriate legal structure to represent the whole community or make use of an existing one.

SOURCES
http://www.scottishcommons.org/docs/commonweal_1.pdf
http://www.scottishcommons.org/docs/commonweal_2.pdf
http://www.scottishcommons.org/docs/commonweal_3.pdf

Re-writing the past

Salmond will launch the SNP's campaign for  independence later this month claiming he is on track to win secession following last week’s local government elections. The Alpha and Omega for the SNP is the Scottish Saltire fluttering over a fully independent parliament. Lets not make any mistake, the cause of Scottish suffering is not the Union with England but the fact that the means by which Scots must live are in possession of a class which will not allow the people to use these means unless they accrue profit to that minority parasite class. Socialist Courier has shown that the Scottish capitalist class obtained their possessions by theft, that in the process of the thievery thousands of workers’ lives have been sacrificed.

Our allegation that capitalism was built upon the robbery and murder of the workers is fully justified yet the nationalists receives them with welcoming open arms, ignoring the fact that the patriotism of the master class, like their pretences of kindness, generosity, and magnanimity, is sheer hypocrisy and cant. The capitalist’s love of his country withers before a fraction percent on the yield of his capital. He has no scruples in displacing the Scot's worker with machinery, directly he can save wages by so doing or by exporting jobs and investment abroad if the returns prove greater.

Scots sing of Bonnie Scotland and its purple heather covered hills. Its not their Bonnie Scotland, nor their heather hills. A typical Scot could scarcely fill a flower-pot with the land he owns in Scotland. Its the bosses' Scotland. It is their hills. The government acts as their factor, serving their interests.

All nationalism is based on mythical history and have to create their ideologies from whatever scraps come to hand, and the Scots version is no exception.  But perhaps luckier than most with its many tales of romance.  But we should not  ahistorically give to a medieval mind the sensibilities of a later, modern age. Such as the idea of Wallace was an early exponent of “democratic patriotism”. Wallace never fought for an abstract “people” or even “nation”, but always in the name of a legitimate power of which he was but the temporary protector or “Guardian”  -  the disposed king, John Balliol. It was William Wallace's sole aim to restore Balliol to the throne of Scotland. And those medieval signatories to the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath were no more than feudal  barons asserting their claim to rule and lord it over their own tenants and serfs, not leading any  "liberation struggle". In fact, John de Menteith, who turned Wallace over to Edward of England put his seal to the Declaration of Arbroath.

Little known fact!
Edinburgh branch of the Socialist League was launched with a meeting of 500 in 1885. In 1887 William Morris writes in the Socialist League's Commonweal "In Edinburgh which is the most bourgeois town in Britain, we are able to get our halls filled Sunday after Sunday with the very best of workmen.They mean business..." Between May 1887 and May 1888 40 open air meetings and 29 indoor meetinhgs were held.

Neither Orange or Green but Red

Even up to the present time, demonstrated by new laws to curtail bigotry and letter bombs mailed to the Celtic manager Neil Lennon and other Catholics, Scotland has been plagued by religious sectarianism. For many Scots "1690" and "1916" have had more resonance than "1314" or "1707". Many blame it on segregated denominational schools, some blame football supporters, the football clubs blame extremists and the extremists blame the Catholic schools, a vicious circle. Catholics make up only 16% of the Scottish population, largely descended from poor Irish immigrants, and still largely working-class. Though overwhelmingly of Irish extraction, even by 1900 most Catholics were Scottish-born. Yet they were still known as "Irish" up until around the Second World War. Despite this Scottish Catholics do not any longer largely define themselves as Irish anymore, but Irish symbolism and allegiances can still be witnessed amongst Celtic or Hibs supporters which can be seen more now about working-class alienation in modern Scotland, an alienation perhaps equally shared with their "loyalist" counterparts on Ibrox or Tynecastle terraces. Communal strive between the Orange and the Green was just as prevalent in other regions of mainland Britain eg Liverpool, however, that feeling of religious differences has faded and has effectively disappeared yet remains strong in Scotland. What often still matters in a lot of places in parts of Lanarkshire and West Lothian is whether you are a "Billy" or a "Tim", "Hun" or "Fenian" .

The Scottish Reformation did not launch a major religious civil war in Scotland. The biggest religious disputes here were actually been between Protestants: the Episcopalians and Presbyterians (the Covenanters). The war fought between James and William had little to do with Irish independence or religion.These two foreigners were fighting over the throne of England and influence in Europe. Catholics and Protestants fought for both sides. It was only after the abortive United Irishmen revolution over 100 years after the Williamite wars, the British founded the Orange Order pretending that the Williamite war was fought exclusively by Protestants on one side, and Catholics on the other. British government used religious differences as a political tool over and over again. It nurtured the Orange Order and related organisations that led to Protestant hatred of Catholics. In Glasgow in the 1790s, there lived no more than 39 Catholics in the town, but there existed 43 anti-Catholic societies. And paradoxically, on the other side, the Catholic Church was always the enemy of popular freedom movements throughout the world. In point of fact, most revolutionaries in Ireland were excommunicated by the church for their activities. It was only after Irish independence that the church authorities found a sense of nationalism in the scramble for political power and influence. Thus both sides played into the British governments hands. It is easy to divide and conquer when there is already religious tension. The religious card was played over and over again by successive British governments. It led to an institutionalised religious intolerance. The breeding and recruiting ground for religious and political extremism may have been the over-crowded and poverty-stricken streets of the Scottish slums AND there is a tendency to associate the  sectarianism in Glasgow as a working-class phenomenon, sustained by the rivalry between Rangers and Celtic, but in the inter-war period anti-Irish prejudice became much more pronounced and cannot be identified solely with working-class Orangemen. Prominent politicians, churchmen, intellectuals, and even the aristocracy all contributed to the growing perception of the Catholic-Irish as a threat, not just to the established Protestant religion, but to the "Scottish race".

Thomas Johnston, a leading labour personality of the times, was particularly dismayed by the religious sectarianism that existed. No sympathiser with Orangemen, he nevertheless tried to convince them without too much success that their Protestant heritage could find expression through the Left. In 1919 the Orange Order attempted to establish the strikebreaking "Patriotic Workers League" In 1923 the '"Orange and Protestant Political Party" defeated the sitting Communist MP in Motherwell and Wishaw to win its one and only seat. In 1923, the Church of Scotland published its report "The Menace of the Irish Race to Our Scottish Nationality". This document advocated deporting Irish natives receiving poor relief and job discrimination in public works in favour of native Scots because Scotland was "over-gorged with Irishmen". The Church of Scotland and United Free Church attacked the General strike with stories about "Catholic manipulation".  In the Depression years specifically anti-Catholic parties - the Scottish Protestant League (SPL) in Glasgow and Protestant Action (PA) in Edinburgh - took up to a third of the votes in local council elections. Ratcliffe of the SPL had previously been a member of the "British Fascists", along with Billy Fullerton of the Bridgeton Billy Boys. Fullerton was also a thug who was awarded a medal for strike-breaking in the 1926 General Strike. Ratcliffe became an anti-Semite and follower of Hitler in 1939, but by then his support was waning. Edinburgh's John Cormack of Protestant Action lacked such fascist connections, and even led physical opposition to Oswald Mosley on his visit to Edinburgh in 1934. The Blackshirts sympathy for a united Ireland and Mussolini's associations with the Vatican were too much for them to take. But Cormack's own violent incursions into Catholic neighbourhoods and combination of electoral intervention with control of the streets suggest at least an outline of a Protestant variety of fascism. Cormack remained a councilor in Leith for twenty years. Orangeism had long been a crucial element to working-class Toryism.The Orange Order leadership's Conservative politics can be stressed but it can also be contended that the Order's appeal to the working class was to a large extent based on issues such as education and jobs  and  the perceived Irish Catholic immigration, issues which did not break down neatly into party political terms.

The Masons were perhaps just as influential than the Orangemen in Scotland. Freemasonry still has a disproportionately large Scottish membership, and is strongly identified with protestantism. Though they did not go in for public displays of racism (or anything else) their rituals, loyalty to the Sovereign and networking amongst groups with marked establishment associations all reinforced a socialisation process. It kept the Catholic Irish as outsiders, excluded from influence and mainstream public life. Skilled positions in industry were also difficult to obtain. Bairds in Coatbridge, a town with a large Catholic population, did not have a Catholic member of the skilled engineers' union until 1931.

Religious divisions in European politics are not unusual, but the Catholic church's support in Scotland for the traditional Left is. The Catholic church hierarchy had previously always reserved strong opposition for its socialist opponents, and raised money for Franco in Glasgow Churches in the 1930s. They remained arch-enemies of those on the Left, organising against them both at elections and within the unions. But they could not prevent their followers from recognising a basic class interest and voting Labour, once the Irish question was effectively removed from Scottish politics in the early part of the 20th century.

John Wheatley formed the Catholic Socialist Society in 1906 and suffered the hostility of local priests who on one occasion incited a mob of several hundred to burn an effigy of him in front of his house while singing the hymn "Faith of our Fathers". Glasgow of that era was solidly Liberal due to the Liberal Party's support for Home Rule and it was the shift of activists towards the labour movement that led to a re-positioning of politics and religion. Until 1914 the main outlet for political activists within the Catholic community had been the United Irish League. The UIL expertly marshalled the Catholic vote to the ends of Irish nationalism. Ex-SPGB member Bill Knox comments in his Industrial Nation that "Irish Catholics might disobey their priests and the UIL and vote labour; however, it was a rare occasion, and was never repeated in local elections." Many Irish Catholics in Scotland were afraid that labour politics, dominated as they were by men of Protestant backgrounds might lead to secular education." The STUC in 1913 had voted for such secularism in all state-aided schools. Knox refers to the anti-Irishness of the likes of ILP hero Keir Hardie who described the typical Irish immigrant coal-miner as having "a big shovel, a strong back and a weak brain" and to Bruce Glasier who declared upon the death of Protestant Truth Society's, John Kensit, "I esteem him as martyr... I feel a honest sympathy with his anti-Romanist crusade"

Yet history changes. The 1918 Education Act, which brought Catholic schools within the state system in Scotland and guaranteeing their religious character, although provoking opposition, expressed in the cry of "No Rome on the Rates" was a transformative moment for the Catholic Church and Labour Party relationship. Although the Labour party had no responsibility for the Act, its general willingness to support denominational schooling encouraged an identification of Labour and Catholic.

There is "a strong socialist republican tradition running through the Celtic support" professor and play-write Willy Maley argues. In 1992, double the proportion of Scottish Catholics to Protestants voted Labour. Catholic support for Labour has always antagonised establishment Scotland, who have exploited the links whenever it suited them. The "Monklandsgate" scandal of 1994 falls partly within this tradition, though it was also aided by new critiques of Old Labour. Complaints by four Labour councillors in Airdrie (all Catholics) became sensationalised as allegations of Protestant discrimination. This rested entirely on apparent bias against "Protestant" Airdrie in favour of "Catholic" Coatbridge, both towns had "minority" populations of over 40 per cent.

One of the 16%% Catholics living in Scotland in the 21st century is more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than if you are a member of any other ethnic or religious minority. Catholics were victims in 58 percent of the 693 criminal offences aggravated by religious prejudice in 2010/11, the highest recorded number in four years. Protestants were victims in 37 percent of cases, while crimes related to Judaism comprised 2.3 percent and Islam 2.1 percent. 51 percent of hate crimes in Scotland occurred within the Glasgow area, a third of the charges were directly related to football. 

Of course, there are other forces at play here other than due to the tactic of divide and rule ,such as  the fact that Glasgow Celtic Plc and Glasgow Rangers Plc and the media corporations knew that there is a lucrative market for sectarianism. Also Professor Tom Devine of Edinburgh suggests that Scotland, so long a stateless nation, sought to over-invest in religion as a form of identity. In this regard the Socialist Party desires that the Scottish Protestant and the Scottish Catholic cast aside their religious and nationalist affiliations and identify and bound with one another on an economic basis, as part of the World's working class. In 1932 the workers of the Falls Road and the Shankill united upon class lines to fight for their own interests and made common cause against the ruling class, the one thing the capitalist class most fear - working class unity.

Red or Pale Pink Clydeside?

In the eyes of many, Glasgow during the First World War and its aftermath gained the reputation of being a centre of socialist ideas, a hotbed of revolution. The city acquired the nickname "Red Clydeside". There remains a debate on the Left, over whether the Red Clydeside movement constituted a genuine revolutionary opportunity for the working class, or that the revolutionary potential of the Clydeside working class has been exaggerated. Prior to the Red Clydeside, Glasgow was quite solidly Liberal at elections and did not have a significant history of workers’ militancy. The city shared the jingoistic wave which swept Britain at the outbreak of the First World War. Thousands of Glaswegians signed up for the armed forces of their own volition. The trade unions, supported by the overwhelming support of their members, agreed not to call any strikes and didn’t bat an eyelid at repressive pieces of legislation such as the Defence of the Realm Act. To undermine the war effort was to risk alienating the working class, which many labour leaders were unwilling to do.

Although, at Clydebank, there was a fore-taste of the militancy in 1911 when 1,000 workers at the largest factory of Singer sewing machines factory went on strike in March–April, ceasing to work in solidarity of 12 female colleagues protesting against work process reorganisation. Following the end of the strike, Singer fired 400 workers, including all strike leaders and purported members of the Industrial Workers of Great Britain , the Socialist Labour Party affilated offsping from the Industrial Workers of the World, among them Arthur McManus. Labour unrest, in particular by women and unskilled labour, greatly increased between 1910-1914 in Clydeside, with four times more days on strike than between 1900 and 1910. During these four years preceding World War I, membership of those affiliated to the Scottish Trades Union Congress rose from 129,000 in 1909 to 230,000 in 1914.

When war broke out excepting John Maclean, none of the labour leaders on the Clyde developed a class analysis of the war, nor did they seriously consider threatening the power and authority of the state. Some of the labour leaders, including Maclean opposed the war; others, including David Kirkwood, who later became manager of an ammunitions factory, did not. It was the behaviour of those conducting the war, not the war itself that really provoked opposition within the labour movement. As the war dragged on, a disenchantment with politicians, who had claimed the war would be over by Christmas, grew as those in power were exposed as liars.

The Clyde Workers' Committee (CWC) was formed, with Willie Gallacher as its head and David Kirkwood its treasurer. The CWC led the campaign against the Liberal government of David Lloyd George and their Munitions Act, which forbade engineers from leaving the company they were employed in. While another core issue was the skilled workers' protest against "dilution", which meant bringing in unskilled men and women to do parts of skilled trade jobs. Dilution was a calculated move by the state and employers to free up engineers, to fight and die in the fields of France and Belgium. This movement has received a great impetus from the introduction by the Government of a measure for extending the power of Conscription by the military authorities, usually referred to under the misleading but catchy title of the “Man Power Bill.”   It was seen that trusted and prominent men, both parliamentarians and trade union officials, were associated with every piece of legislation that fettered the workers more. The growth of the “Shop Stewards” movement up and down the country helped to undermine the influence of the “official” cliques in the trade unions, as shown by the numerous “unauthorised” strikes. It would be a big mistake to suppose that these strikes and threats to strike indicate an acceptance of the principles of socialism, or even a general awakening to the fact that they are slaves to the master class, on the part of those engaged in this movement, nevertheless,  the oppression became so unbearable, the injustice so apparent, that little scrappy revolts and outbreaks ensued.

The Socialist Standard wrote at the time:
"The Clyde trouble of Christmas 1915 is perhaps the best specimen of these sectional and local revolts. The principle of the men was strong, but they were driven down by lies, hunger, victimisation, deportation of their leaders, and, what is more important still, because the strike was local. Instead of abandoning the political machine to ambitious wiseacres and unscrupulous plotters, and letting them, in the secrecy of Cabinet conclaves, everlastingly scheme to set the social changes on you, see to it that those who are now proven the enemies of your class are no longer sent to represent you. Fill their places with class-conscious men of your own ranks, controlled and guaranteed by the political organisation of your own class.Engineers! At an early date you will be confronted with other trouble. We want your demands to be more exacting, and more deep the principles you struggle for. Fight with your brothers of other industries for these bigger and nobler things as earnestly and solidly as you recently fought. Fight politically as well as industrially, then, with the principle of the class struggle to guide your fighting."

In Germany and Austria strikes began on the dire problem of securing of food, but nearly always accompanying this demand, and in some cases forming the sole object, was the call upon the governments to declare an armistice and enter into negotiations for peace. In this country a similar movement spread. A resolution moved at Glasgow at a meeting resolved: “That having heard the case of the Government, as stated by Sir Auckland Geddes [the manpower Director of Recruiting], this meeting pledges itself to oppose to the very uttermost the Government in its call for more men. We insist and pledge ourselves to take action to enforce the declaration of an immediate armistice on all fronts; and that the expressed opinion of the workers of Glasgow is that from now on, and so far as this business is concerned our attitude all the time and every time is to do nothing in support of carrying on the war, but to bring the war to a conclusion.” Better late than never the Clyde workers realised that they have nothing to gain but a good deal to lose by the continuance of the war.

As these outbreaks were only spasmodic they were easily over-ridden by the ruling class. Of course, the Government soon arranged for a counterblast. Government propaganda denounced the strikers for their self-interest. "Even now your protest is not on behalf of the working class, but a claim that a small section – the members of the ASE. – should not be placed in the Army until the ‘dilutees’ have been taken. Surely if you did not complain when we smashed agreements and pledges given to the whole working class it is illogical to complain now when a section of that class is being similarly treated.” This latter fact is the fatally weak point in the ASE. case, and was being used effectively by the capitalist press and spokesmen against them, keeping alive the jealousies and divisions that are so useful to them in their fights with the workers.  A. G. Gardiner, of the Daily News was easily the cleverest of their agents at the game of misleading the workers by using a style of seeming honesty and openness to cover up a substance of slimy deceit. A good example of this was his ‘Open Letter to the Clyde Workers’. His articles, while appearing to condemn the government, were strenuous attempts to defend the existence and maintenance of capitalism. Their purpose was to persuade the workers to still leave in the hands of the bosses  the manipulation and direction of affairs. And there was a great danger that the workers, so long used to following this course, so long in the habit of following “leaders”, would succumb to this influence. Some of them not daring to trust themselves to manage their own affairs, believe it better to leave the management to their "betters" ” If only half of the blunders and appalling crimes of this war had been brought into the light of day, these timid workers would  have had a rude shock concerning the ability of those “experts.” The biggest danger that confronts them – the biggest mistake they can make – is to place power in the hands of “leaders” under any pretext whatever. It is at once putting those “leaders” in a position to bargain with the master class for the purpose of selling out the workers. It allows the master class to retain control of the political machinery which is the essential instrument for governing society. All the other blunders and mistakes the workers may make will be as dust in the balance compared with this one, and not until they realise this fact will they be on the road to socialism.

The Rent Strikes

Class struggle activity also took place outside the workplace and on the streets in general. Many working class women were outraged that while their husbands were off fighting and dying for King and country they and their children lived in worse conditions and with less money. Was the war really worth it? Was it really being fought in the interests of all sections of British society? The drastic rent increases of 1915 proved massively unpopular. With their men fighting at the front, the women left behind were seen as vulnerable by landlords, and massive rent increases became the norm. With the city becoming a major centre of arms manuafacture during the war, it was necessary to bring in workers from outside the city, which only added to the overcrowding problem and pushed up rent. Existing tenants who could no longer afford the rent were evicted, causing widespread alarm among the now mainly female populace. By October of that year, some 30,000 tenants were withholding rent and huge demonstrations were called whenever bailiffs dared to attempt an eviction. When three engineers were arrested for non-payment of rent, some 10,000 workers in Govan downed tools and marched to the court to demonstrate. The initial failure of the government to restrict the raising of rents revealed that the interests of working people in Glasgow were not the real priority of the government. In Govan, an area of Glasgow where shipbuilding was the main occupation, the women organised an effective opposition to the rent increases. The main figure in the movement was Mary Barbour, later to be elected a Labour Party city councillor, and the protesters soon became known as "Mrs. Barbour's Army".The usual method of preventing eviction was to block the entrance to the tenement. Photographs of the time show hundreds of people participating. If the sheriff officers managed to get as far as the entrance, another tactic was to humiliate them - pulling down their trousers was a commonly used method. The mood of the placards carried by the protesters was that the landlords were unpatriotic. A common message was that while the men were fighting on the front line the landlords were in league with the enemy e.g. "While my father is a prisoner in Germany the landlord is attacking us at home".

Bloody Friday - The Battle of George Square

After the war a campaign for a 40-hour week and improved conditions for the workers took hold of organised labour. 40,000 Glasgow workers came out on strike on Monday 27 January and 70,000 on the following day. On January 31, 1919, a massive rally organised by the trade unions took place on George Square in the centre of Glasgow. It has been estimated that as many as 90,000 were present, and the red flag was raised in the centre of the crowd. The riot which ensued on between the police and protesters is widely believed to have been started by a police baton charge against what was, up until that point, a peaceful demonstration. Some sources indicate that trams running through the strike may have started the riot. City magistrates had been forewarned of the dangers of keeping trams on the streets at a time when thousands of strikers were marching to occupy George Square. But the warning was ignored, and the riot started after a tram tried to make its way through the square. The peaceful protest having been provoked changed the scene and the mood almost immediately and the rally transformed  into what is generally considered to now have been a police riot, with the Riot Act being read.  The police were now confronted by an angry crowd of workers who met baton charges with fists and bottles. As they exited the City Chambers, Davie Kirkwood and Emmanuel Shinwell to try and quell the riot and before they could reach the crowds outside Kirkwood was beaten to the ground by police and both himself and Shinwell arrested.

 The police had anticipated that their baton charge would drive the crowd out of the square - not so. Not only did the strikers and their supporters stand their ground but drove the police back. Eventually there was a re-grouping and the workers began to move off from George Square to march towards Glasgow Green. When they reached the Green the police were waiting, ready to charge again. Undaunted the strikers, including many ex-servicemen, pulled up the park railings and chased off their attackers. For the rest of the day and into the night, further fighting took place throughout the city.

Troops based in the city's Maryhill barracks were locked inside their post, with troops and tanks from elsewhere in the country sent into the city to control unrest and extinguish any revolution that should break out. No Glaswegian troops were deployed, and few veterans, with the government fearing that fellow Glaswegians might sympathise with the strikers if a revolutionary situation developed in Glasgow. Young, mostly untried, troops were transported from camps and barracks around the country and stationed on the streets of Glasgow specifically to combat this possible scenario. Howitzers were positioned in the City Chambers, the cattle market was transformed into a tank depot, machine guns were posted on the top of hotels and, remembering Easter 1916, the main post office, and armed troops stood sentry outside power stations and patrolled the streets. New regulations were also introduced by the government to legalise whatever violence the troops might need to use to break the strike. If the troops were used to suppress any fighting involving the strikers the Riot Act must first be read - but only "if circumstances permit". Similarly, the commanding officer had to consult with the magistrates before opening fire - but again only "if time permits". Most revealing of all was regulation 965: "It is undesirable that firing should take place over the heads of rioters or that blank cartridges should be used."

Willie Gallacher, as well as Harry Hopkins, secretary of the ASE and George Edbury, national organiser of the BSP were also arrested. Shinwell and Gallacher were found guilty and sentenced to 5 months imprisonment.

"It is a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike - this is a Bolshevist uprising."  were the words of hysteria from the Secretary of State for Scotland to describe what was happening in Glasgow at the beginning of 1919

William Gallacher, who would later become a Communist MP claimed that whilst the leaders of the rally were not seeking revolution, in hindsight they should have been. He claimed that they should have marched to the Maryhill barracks and tried to persuade the troops stationed there to come out on the protesters' side. "We had forgotten we were revolutionary leaders of the working class. Revolt was seething everywhere, especially in the army. We had within our hands the possibility of giving actual expression and leadership to it, but it never entered our heads to do so. We were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution."
Plainly, that would have been a recipe for a disaster and a massacre, in light of the government's determination tosuppress sedition through use its military might.

At the 1922 General Election,  10  Red Clydesiders were elected to serve in the House of Commons. They included Maxton, Wheatley, Shinwell, Kirkwood, Neil Maclean and George Buchanan. Before leaving together from St Enoch Station to take their seats at Westminster, they had a send-off where the audience sang "The Red Flag" and Psalm 124, the Covenanters' "Old 124th", described as "Scotland's psalm of deliverance". Red Clydeside nurtured some people who later became prominent in the Labour Party or the Independent Labour Party or went on to be founders of the Communist Party.

The story of Red Clydeside is one of disappointment in that the "revolutionary" movement was not truly revoltuonay and was ultimately unsuccessful. Red Clydeside was far more pragmatic, from a trade union perspective, and not to mention more patriotic, than the Left's rhetoric asserts. But it does offer us a message of hope and a glimpse of what we can achieve. In 1919, Lloyd George in a memorandum remarked “there is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt amongst the workmen… existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned… by the population from one end of Europe to another”. That statement is as relevant today as ever when we witness the protests of the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring.