David Kirkwood

David Kirkwood was an engineer from the East End of Glasgow who during the Great War became one of the most famous labour leaders in Britain. As chief shop steward at the Parkhead Forge, one of the largest armaments works in the Empire, he clashed with the Minister of Munitions, Lloyd George, and in 1916 the authorities deported him from his home city. In January 1919 he was among the leaders of the strike for a 40-hour week. During the Battle of George Square a policeman felled him with a blow from his baton, and the photograph of Kirkwood lying on the cobbles became one of the symbols of that day. Acquitted at the trial of the strike leaders, he sat in the House of Commons for almost thirty years. His path – from a radical suspected of revolutionary intent, to a parliamentarian fighting for jobs in the Clyde shipyards, and finally to a member of the House of Lords – shows well what “Red Clydeside” really was.

The engineer from Parkhead

He was born on 8 July 1872 in Parkhead, a working-class district at the eastern edge of Glasgow, the son of John Kirkwood, a labourer, and his wife Jean. He attended the local public school but left at the age of twelve. He worked as a message boy in a printing works and then served an apprenticeship as an engineer. By his own account he became a socialist in the early 1890s under the influence of Looking Backward, the utopian novel by Edward Bellamy describing a just society of the future. At twenty he joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, one of the strongest trade unions of skilled workers. He belonged to the Marxist Socialist Labour Party, which he left in 1914 for the Independent Labour Party. He sat on the Glasgow Trades Council.

The Parkhead Forge and Lloyd George

The Parkhead Forge belonged to William Beardmore and Company, which made armour plate, guns and warships. During the war Kirkwood was its chief shop steward and at the same time one of the leading activists of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, led by William Gallacher. The committee opposed the Munitions Act of 1915, which forbade workers to change jobs without their employer’s consent, and the introduction of unskilled workers into the factories in place of tradesmen, known as the “dilution” of the trade.

On Christmas Day 1915 the Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, came to Glasgow to win the workers over to his policy. He also visited the Parkhead Forge, where Kirkwood, as he himself recalled, received him coolly and told him that the workers regarded him with suspicion. The talks brought no agreement with the committee, but in January 1916 Kirkwood helped to negotiate an agreement at Parkhead on the introduction of new workers, which gave the shop stewards some influence over the process. When in March the management restricted his freedom to move about the works, a strike broke out. On 25 March 1916 the military authorities, using the wartime Defence of the Realm Act, arrested him and several other leaders and then deported them from Glasgow to Edinburgh. For many months Kirkwood refused to sign the undertaking of “good behaviour” on which his return depended. He came back to Glasgow in 1917. He took a job as a foreman at the Mile End shell factory, where, according to his memoirs, his team achieved record output. In this way he wanted to show that his opposition had been about workers’ rights, not about munitions production as such.

George Square

When the war ended, fear of unemployment gripped Clydeside. Kirkwood was one of the leaders of the movement for a 40-hour week, which was meant to create jobs for the soldiers returning from the forces. The strike began on 27 January 1919. On 31 January Kirkwood, with Emanuel Shinwell and other members of a deputation, was waiting in the City Chambers to see the Lord Provost when the police charged the crowd in the square outside. The leaders ran out. Kirkwood was struck with a baton from behind, fell unconscious and was then arrested. The same day the sheriff read the Riot Act and called in the army, which began arriving in the city that evening.

In April 1919 Kirkwood and eleven other defendants stood trial before the High Court in Edinburgh. He was charged with inciting a riot. The defence produced a photograph showing a policeman striking him from behind without any provocation. The jury acquitted him, whereas Shinwell and Gallacher were sentenced to several months’ imprisonment. Kirkwood emerged from the affair as a victim of police violence, which only strengthened his popularity. Before entering parliament he sat on Glasgow Town Council for four years.

A Clydesider in the House of Commons

At the general election of November 1922 he won the seat of Dumbarton Burghs, which included among other places the shipbuilding town of Clydebank. He belonged to the group of Independent Labour Party “Clydesiders” that included, besides Shinwell, James Maxton and John Wheatley. They brought an entirely new style to Westminster: fiery speeches, open contempt for parliamentary custom and scenes in the chamber. In May 1924, when opponents blocked a Scottish home rule bill, Kirkwood and Maxton caused such an uproar that the Speaker had to suspend the sitting. Kirkwood was an ardent supporter of Scottish home rule within the United Kingdom.

Over time the Independent Labour Party quarrelled ever more sharply with the Labour Party, whose governments under Ramsay MacDonald it considered too moderate. At the 1931 election Kirkwood was one of five members of the party elected without Labour’s endorsement. But when in 1932 the Independent Labour Party under Maxton broke with Labour, that was a step too far for Kirkwood. He left it and returned to the Labour benches.

The Queen Mary

Kirkwood’s best-known achievement in the years of the Depression was his fight for a ship. At the turn of 1930–1931 the keel of a great transatlantic liner for the Cunard line, known by its yard number 534, was laid at John Brown’s shipyard in Clydebank. In December 1931, during the Great Depression, work was halted for lack of money, and thousands of workers lost their jobs. For more than two years the unfinished hull stood on the slipway as a symbol of Clydeside’s decline. Throughout 1932 Kirkwood campaigned for the resumption of work, lobbied the government and won the support of the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII. In 1934 parliament passed an act giving Cunard a government loan on condition that it merged with the White Star Line. Work resumed, and in September 1934 the ship was launched as the RMS Queen Mary. Part of the loan went to a second ship, the RMS Queen Elizabeth. Cunard’s chairman, Percy Bates, wrote to Kirkwood that the government might not have dared to grant the loan but for his faith in the men of the Clyde. During the Second World War both ships served as troopships and carried hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

In 1935 Kirkwood published his autobiography, My Life of Revolt. Its forewords were written by the Labour leader George Lansbury and by Winston Churchill, then a politician on the fringes of the Conservative Party. Churchill called him and men like him “natural enemies of tyranny”. Ironically, it is Churchill whom Scottish legend would later credit with sending troops and tanks to Glasgow in 1919, although the documents do not show that the decision was his.

War and last years

During the Second World War Kirkwood continued to represent Dumbarton Burghs. In March 1941 the Luftwaffe made two night raids on Clydebank, a centre of the shipbuilding and armaments industries. Several hundred people were killed, and most of the houses in the town were destroyed or damaged. It was one of the heaviest bombings Scotland suffered in the war.

In 1948 Kirkwood was made a member of the Privy Council. When his constituency was abolished in a boundary revision, he won the new seat of East Dunbartonshire in 1950. He left the House of Commons in 1951, and in December of that year was created Baron Kirkwood, of Bearsden, taking his seat in the House of Lords. He died on 16 April 1955 at the age of 82.

Significance

To the British authorities in 1916 and 1919 Kirkwood embodied the menacing radicalism of the Clyde. In January 1919, when the Spartacist uprising was being suppressed in Berlin and civil war raged in Russia, ministers in London saw the Glasgow strike as a “Bolshevist rising”. Kirkwood’s life shows how far from the truth that judgement was. He was never a communist, and his radicalism grew out of the defence of skilled workers’ rights and attachment to Scotland, not out of revolutionary doctrine. Most of his energy as an MP went into the fight for jobs in the Clyde shipyards. The respect in which even Churchill held him shows that the British political system was able to absorb the Clydeside radicals rather than drive them onto the path of revolution, as happened in many European countries after the First World War.