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By the end of 1915, the British total of volunteers was 2,466,719. Out of this, 13 per cent, or 320,589, were Scots.
By the end of the war, the number of Scots in the armed forces had risen to 688,416.
The enthusiasm for war stalled when the horrors showed themselves in the rising numbers of dead and wounded. The government introduced conscription in 1916, which meant that all men of a certain age could be made to join up unless they were physically unable, were in restricted occupations (such as coalmining) or were conscientious objectors.
The war lasted 1,564 days. Scotland’s losses during that time amounted officially to 74,000, but this was based on the arithmetic of dividing the British total by 10, because Scotland made up about 10 per cent of the British and Irish population. The losses were later revised to 100,000, or 13 per cent of the total. Even later they were upgraded to 142,218. The Scottish death rate was exceeded only by that of Serbia and Turkey.
The Black Watch regiment lost 10,000 men, as did the Highland Light Infantry. In Glasgow, 18,000, or 1 in 57, did not return from war. Of the 13,568 men who volunteered from the Scottish universities, 2,026 were killed. The majority of casualties were in the 16 to 34 age group, with 45,000 dead. There were also 150,000 men seriously wounded. Added together, it meant that 20 per cent of the active male population of Scotland was dead or injured.
Indeed, there was hardly a home in Scotland untouched by war. Husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins perished. Of those who survived, some lost limbs and others lost their minds.
The economy of war
It’s often said that war is good for business, and the First World War proved to be no exception. Businesses concerned with the arming and supplying the troops made huge profits, while workers were subjected to long hours, oppressive levels of supervision and rising costs. It was said of the jute industry in Dundee that ‘Jute fibres had been turned into strands of gold’ –such was the huge demand for sacking and uniforms of all kinds. Workers trying to get a share of this ‘gold’ went on an unsuccessful 11-week strike in 1916.
The war was an economically divisive experience. Workers protested that it should not be an occasion for profiteering. In 1918, Tom Johnson, editor of the ILP weekly paper
Forward,
published a pamphlet, ‘The Huns at Home’, in which war profiteers were the ‘Huns’. Protest slogans included ‘the Prussians in Partick’ and ‘Fighting the Huns at Home’.
But the war brought opportunities, even if only temporary, for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, particularly women, in the munitions industry to earn higher wages. Labour shortages arose due to the numbers of men in the armed forces. Nearly half the men between the ages of 15 and 49 in Scotland were in uniform. They had to be replaced, so women were brought into the labour force in large numbers:
In 1911, 185,442 men were employed in heavy industry on Clydeside compared to 3,758 women.
By the end of the war, 31,500 women were employed in the munitions industry in Scotland.
The presence of untrained workers in previously skilled occupations meant that the job had to be simplified. These workers had to hit the ground ru
Daily Mail
called it, showed that the boys at the front were not adequately armed as stocks of shells ran out. Production of armaments had to be ratcheted up. This led to the introduction of ‘dilution’ (reducing the skill content of work so that women could do work previously considered the preserve of skilled men) – the most contentious development of the war.
The industrial discontent cause by the scheme was compounded by the introduction of industrial conscription. A system of ‘leaving certificates’ was included in the measures, which shop steward David Kirkwood branded a ‘slave’s clause’, because workers could leave their employment only with their employer’s consent. Definitely not fair.
Red Clyde
In response to these measures, the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC) was formed. This was a body composed mainly of shop stewards who had been well schooled in Marxist economics. They could represent the workers’ complaints, because the official trade unions had signed an agreement with the government at the start of the war not to do anything to impede production. With unions’ hands tied behind their backs, step forward the revolutionaries. Illegal strikes were called against the provisions of the Munitions Act of 1915.
Lloyd George, then minister of munitions, met the workers in December 1915, and they gave him a hostile reception, introducing him as ‘the best paid munitions worker in Britain’. Failure to pacify the workers led to a series of measures intended to destroy the CWC. Its leading members were arrested and tried for sedition. Found guilty, some were imprisoned and others deported, normally to Edinburgh.
By these means industrial discontent was silenced. But did the shop stewards really pose that much of a threat? Were the actions of the state over the top? A couple of things to bear in mind:
Skilled workers were more interested in defending their own interests than those of the working class as a whole.
There was a failure by the shop stewards to link the industrial discontent with the political struggle against the war.
When tried before the court, the revolutionary chairman of the CWC, William Gallacher of the British Socialist Party, made a cringing apology, saying that he ‘had no desire to impede production’ and a fellow worker was called to give evidence that he had opposed strikes. Interestingly, John Maclean, a school teacher revolutionary, in his famous ‘speech from the dock’, condemned the leaders of the CWC for their lack of revolutionary purpose.
But there was a real dilemma even for the revolutionary elements in the CWC: to actively oppose the war ran the risk that one’s own country might be defeated. Because the CWC was never prepared to take that risk, the industrial power at its disposal was never used politically to bring the war to an end.
Rent strikes
Most of the housing in Scotland was in the privately rented sector. So, even before war broke out, rents were a sensitive issue. During the war, Glasgow was flooded with munitions workers earning fairly high wages, and the housing factors decided that they could afford to pay a little more in rent. The problem with this decision was that, because it was an across-the-board increase, it penalised those families whose main breadwi
Attempts to evict tenants were met with mass resistance and a rent strike. These strikes were organised by the women of Clydeside. The strongholds of resistance were in the shipbuilding constituencies of Govan and Pollock. Twenty-five thousand households refused to pay rent. The pressure by the tenants forced the government to intervene. In 1915, it introduced the Rent and Mortgages Restrictions Act, which pegged rents at pre-war levels. It was the first time the state had intervened in the housing market. This brought home to the strikers and the labour movement that there untapped possibilities for social reform that a government of the people could unleash.
The politics of war
The First World War set in motion a series of political changes that would bear fruit in the peace that followed (see Chapter 15). Under the impact of war, the political landscape of Scotland began to profoundly alter. The Liberal one-party state that had been re-established in the early 1900s was seriously undermined, and a new configuration was begi
Liberals
What undermined the Liberal Party in Scotland? First, there was the war itself. Many Liberals were pacifists, and just as they had opposed the Boer War (1899–1902), they opposed the First World War when it broke out in 1914. Second, there was the introduction of conscription in 1916, which a large number of Liberals felt was a breach of civil liberties.
However, these factors faded into in significance when Herbert Asquith was replaced as prime minister by Lloyd George in 1916, an act which split the Liberal Party in two. The followers of Asquith and Lloyd George hated each other with a vengeance, feelings that carried on into the immediate post-war years (see Chapter 15).
Another factor that weakened the Liberals in Scotland was the disaffection of the Irish Nationalist community. Initially, the Catholic Irish were as enthusiastic about defending king and country; in fact, six people from Glasgow were awarded Britain’s highest military honour, the Victoria Cross. But the violent Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 to establish a Socialist republic in an independent Ireland changed attitudes. The rising was put down ferociously by the British army; its leaders, among them the Scot James Co
Labour
Just before war broke out in August 1914, Keir Hardie, leader of the Labour Party, called for ‘No alliances, no increased armaments, no intervention in the Balkans, [and] fraternity with the workers of the world’.
The workers put country before class, and that broke Hardie’s heart. He died soon after, on 26 September 1915. So at the outset, the anti-war position was an unpopular one. Of Labour’s 17 town councillors in Glasgow, only two spoke out against the war, and both in Edinburgh and Glasgow the trades councils were pro-war.
What made people oppose the war? Anti-war Labour leaders saw wars as the product of the greed of arms manufacturers and financiers. They also opposed conscription because they felt the selection process was biased against the working class. So, it was the inequality of sacrifice demanded of the workers that provided the focus for opposition rather than the war itself. If we were going to have conscription, then it was for everything, including wealth. It was war Socialism!
Like the shop stewards, many of the opponents of war paid a high price for their opposition. James Maxton, a school teacher, was arrested for sedition and incarcerated in Calton Jail in Edinburgh. Conditions were brutal, with a daily diet of bread, water and porridge, combined with long hours of solitary confinement. John Maclean, the Marxist school teacher, suffered a mental breakdown, as did others.
However, the anti-war movement, due to rising casualties and disillusionment with how the war was being conducted both on the home front and the battlefield, grew in strength. The Scottish Trades Union Congress claimed that by 1917, the ‘War Party is a discredited minority in nearly all the Trades and Labour Councils north of the Tweed’. On May Day 1918, 100,000 Glaswegians defied the law and stopped work to demonstrate for a negotiated peace.