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This isn’t to say that there were no attacks on property in Scotland. Indeed, in 1912 and 1913, there was what the
Glasgow Herald
described as the ‘outrages’. The WSPU in Scotland had members as militant as any in England. Ethel Moorhead symbolically smashed a glass case at the Wallace monument near Stirling, threw an egg at Winston Churchill and was later imprisoned for attempted arson; Arabella Scott tried to set fire to Kelso racecourse before enduring five weeks of enforced feeding at Perth Prison; Catherine Taylor set fire to the stand at Ayr Racecourse; and, on a lighter note, Lilias Mitchell replaced the marker flags at Balmoral Golf Course with new flags painted in the colours of the WSPU.
Action in Scotland was varied and widespread, including
Cutting telegraph and telephone wires
Firebombing the railway station at Leuchars, near Dundee
Setting fire to the Gatty Building at St Andrews University
Burning Lanarkshire mansions to the ground
Pouring corrosive acid through letter boxes across the country
Throwing caye
Smashing shop windows
Some were arrested for their actions and when imprisoned immediately embarked on a hunger strike. This led to force feeding, with some predictably horrendous results, such as the early death of Frances Balfour’s sister-in-law, Constance Lytton, largely attributed to her experiences in prison.
In 1913, the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge of Ill Health (‘Cat and Mouse Act’) changed government policy toward hunger strikes. Prisoners were released when they became ill. When they had recovered, they were re-arrested and taken back to prison to finish their sentences.
Things came to a head with the suicide of Emily Davison, who threw herself in front of the king’s horse in the Epsom Derby in 1913. The sacrifice won the WSPU a great deal of publicity, but it had the effect of putting people off. Things had got out of hand. In any case, war was approaching and patriotism became a more important pull on women’s loyalties than the vote. The main suffrage organisations suspended action during the war and, partly as a result of their contribution to the war effort, in 1918 the vote was granted to women over the age of 30.
Liberal Scotland
The franchise reforms in 1832, 1867–8 and 1884 turned Scotland into virtually a one-party state – a Liberal fiefdom. While England was largely Tory in the 19th century, Tories were conspicuous by their absence north of the border. So confident were the Liberals of their hold on the Scottish vote that they could afford to conduct intra-party squabbles in public with tremendous ferocity.
In the 1885 general election, there were rival Liberal candidates in 27 of Scotland’s 72 constituencies. What exactly was the appeal of Liberalism to the Scots? Liberalism appealed to all sections of Scottish society because of
Franchise reform
Temperance
Anti-landlordism
Social justice
Free trade
Home rule
There was enough in the basic principles for everyone to get their teeth into – from wealthy landowners, such as the duke of Argyll (known as Whigs); to intellectuals, such as T.B. Macaulay (known as radicals); to workers (known as Lib/Labs). The great strength of Liberalism was that it was flexible – everyone had his or her own version. It was the Heinz 57 of political philosophies.
But at the end of the day, it was a coalition of different interest groups and, like all coalitions, there was an inbuilt tendency to fall apart when what divided becomes more important than what united. This happened to the Liberal Party in Scotland over the question of Irish home rule.
The attack from the right
The Tories were politically irrelevant in Scotland for most of the 19th century. The party’s philosophy was seen as a ‘creed for lairds and law agents’ and, therefore, anathema to Scottish voters. Fortunes changed, however, with the a
The Liberal Unionists, led by Joseph Chamberlain, were implacably opposed to home rule for Ireland because they felt that it would lead to the collapse of the British Empire. Other Nationalist movements might demand the same – a sort of domino effect.
In Scotland, the Unionists had the support of the main newspapers –
The Scotsman
and the
Glasgow Herald
– as well as businessmen, lawyers and the Church of Scotland. But they could also draw on the support of some sections of the working class, particularly the Protestant Irish.
Religion and politics
Between 1841 and 1851, the Irish population of Scotland nearly doubled, which Presbyterian Scotland found very alarming. It was the industrial areas of the west of Scotland that saw the largest concentrations of Irish immigrants, with almost 29 per cent of all Irish migrants settled in Glasgow. But the smaller industrial towns of the west also had a substantial Irish presence. The population of Coatbridge in 1851 was 35.8 per cent Catholic Irish.
The Catholic Irish were discriminated against at all levels of Scottish society, from the labour market to the poor law. They were also caricatured and stereotyped as drunken and disease-ridden – typhus was known as ‘Irish fever’.
Excluded from the mainstream of Scottish society, the Irish Catholics became a community within a community. This community was strengthened by the degree of intermarriage. In Greenock in 1851, 80.6 per cent of Irish men and women had married other Irish Catholics. Forty years later, the numbers were still high at 72.4 per cent.
As Catholic Irish immigrants declined in number in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Protestant Irish took up the slack. Most of these new immigrants came from the most Orange counties of the north, such as Armagh. The arrival of Ulster Protestants, with their Orange traditions, increased the tempo of sectarian rivalries. Orange lodges (local branches of the Orange Order) multiplied, with more than a quarter of them in Glasgow and Scottish membership at 25,000 in 1900.
Sectarian riots associated with the ‘Glorious Twelfth parades’, which commemorated the Protestant ‘victory’ at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, often ended in local civil wars. For example, a violent clash between Catholics and Protestants took place in Blantyre in February 1887 and resulted in military intervention and the arrest of 51 people, including several women.
The rioting spread to Coatbridge and, after much stone throwing and window breaking, the 4th Hussars were sent in to restore order. It appeared that the whole district was under military siege, as armed soldiers and mounted constabulary were sent to Hamilton and De
The sectarian divisions in Scottish society also had political repercussions. The Catholic Irish were encouraged by the Catholic Church to cha
In 1912, the Liberal Unionists joined with the Tories to form the Conservative and Unionist Party. From that time onward, the party in Scotland was known as the Unionists.
The attack from the left
The Liberals in Scotland were under pressure not only from a resurgent right, but also from the left. The entry of the ‘great unwashed’ (the working class) into politics was a long-delayed phenomenon. It was only in the last few decades of the 19th century that the idea of an independent working-class party gained some credibility. Up until then, working-class men had been willing to give their support either to the Liberals or to the Tories.
But things were begi
Unskilled workers, like dockers, were becoming unionised in trade unions led by Marxists.
Skilled workers were under pressure from technological change.
Government intervention in industrial disputes politicised them.
Strangely enough, the politicisation of the urban working class began with concerns regarding the land. The support for the crofters in urban Scotland galvanised the left. In 1888, at a by-election in Mid-Lanark, former miner Keir Hardie stood as an independent Labour candidate. Although he was well beaten in the election, failing to win much support from the miners, the begi
Hardie realised that if the party was to succeed, the support of the trade unions was critical. As it stood, in 1889, Socialist societies had a combined membership of only around 2,000 in Scotland. In contrast, membership of the trade union movement was 750,000. A purely Scottish party was unlikely to succeed, so with the support of some trade unionists and numerous small Socialist societies, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) was formed in Bradford in January 1893. It became the foreru
The new party was able to tap into the disappointment skilled workers had with the Liberals for failing to select working men to stand for Parliament and to protect trade unions from hostile employers and judges. The biggest ever industrial dispute in the 19th century, the engineering lockout of 1897, which was in opposition to the introduction of new technology, ended in defeat of the workers. ‘Get political’ – that was the message, and the trade unions did just that. Gradually, support grew and the modern Labour Party was launched in 1906.
But it should be noted that Labour made greater strides in England than it did in Scotland. The Scottish ILP had only 5,000 members in 1910. Labour organisation was said to be a shambles. The party had only three MPs and 200 councillors of all kinds – parish, town and country – and school boards by the outbreak of war in 1914.
There were two nuts Labour had to crack before they could become a major player in Scottish politics:
Wi
Destroying the Liberals
They proved unable to do this. Every time they put up Irish Catholic candidates at elections, they suffered a Protestant backlash. Moreover, the political expression of the Irish – the United Irish League – was viewed by contempt by Labour leaders. Patrick Dollan of the ILP claimed he would rather see Labour’s prospects put back 30 years than form an alliance with a bunch of publicans.