William Gallacher

William Gallacher – “Willie” to everyone – was Scotland’s best-known communist and for ten years the only communist Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons. During the Great War he led the Clyde Workers’ Committee, which challenged the government in the very heart of the armaments industry. In January 1919 he was one of the leaders of the strike for a 40-hour week in Glasgow and one of the central figures of the Battle of George Square, after which he spent three months in prison. To the end of his life he regretted that “we were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution”. Soon afterwards he went to Moscow, met Lenin and became one of the founders of British communism. His life shows both faces of that movement: the genuine anger of the workers of Clydeside and unconditional loyalty to Moscow, even when Stalin made his pact with Hitler in 1939.

Youth in Paisley

He was born on 25 December 1881 in Paisley, an industrial town near Glasgow, the son of an Irish father and a Scottish mother. His father died when William was seven, and his mother supported the family by taking in washing. The boy worked from the age of ten and left school at twelve. He was an errand boy for a grocer, then worked in a plumbing workshop, and for a time was a steward on ships crossing the Atlantic. The heavy drinking of his father and elder brother, which he witnessed at home, led him as a teenager to join the temperance movement. Although he later broke with it, he remained teetotal all his life.

After a brief spell in the Independent Labour Party he moved to the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. There he came into contact with John Maclean, a schoolteacher and the most famous Scottish Marxist of the day, who had an enormous influence on him, although they later fell out bitterly. In 1913 he visited his sisters in Chicago, then worked as a scaffolder in Belfast, and in 1914, just before the outbreak of war, he took a job at the Albion motor works in Glasgow.

The Clyde Workers’ Committee

Gallacher was opposed to Britain’s participation in the war. In 1915 he became chairman of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, which brought together shop stewards from the munitions works and shipyards rather than the official union leadership. The committee fought against the Munitions Act, which forbade workers to leave their workplace without their employer’s consent, and against the introduction of unskilled labour into the factories without safeguards for skilled workers. The Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, and the Labour leader Arthur Henderson came to Glasgow in December 1915 to win the workers over, but reached no agreement with the committee. In the spring of 1916 the government struck at the committee. Its paper, The Worker, was prosecuted under the wartime Defence of the Realm Act for an anti-war article. Gallacher and the editor, John Muir, were convicted – Gallacher was sentenced to six months in prison, Muir to a year. Other leaders, among them David Kirkwood, were deported from Glasgow.

The 1919 strike

After the war Gallacher and his committee feared that demobilisation would bring mass unemployment. They proposed a campaign to cut the working week to 30 hours. When the Glasgow Trades Council, chaired by Emanuel Shinwell, joined in, the demand was moderated to 40 hours. The strike began on 27 January 1919. On 29 January Gallacher and Shinwell announced outside the City Chambers that if the government did not give way they would stop the city’s trams and cut off the electricity.

On 31 January, when the police charged the crowd in George Square, Gallacher ran out of the City Chambers and was beaten by police officers. Under arrest, he was allowed, together with the MP Neil Maclean, to address the crowd, and he called on people to move to Glasgow Green. In the evening troops summoned by the sheriff began to arrive in the city. At his trial in Edinburgh in April 1919 Gallacher, who cross-examined some of the witnesses himself, was found guilty and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.

In his book Revolt on the Clyde, published in 1936, Gallacher wrote that had the strike been directed by experienced revolutionary leadership, the crowd, instead of going to Glasgow Green, would have marched to Maryhill Barracks, persuaded the soldiers to join them, and Glasgow would have been in the hands of the workers. These words became the basis of the legend of Scottish soldiers being locked in their barracks because the authorities feared they would mutiny. Historians have found no evidence for this, and most of them believe that there was no revolutionary situation in Glasgow in January 1919.

With Lenin in Moscow

In 1920 Gallacher opposed communist participation in parliamentary elections and affiliation to the Labour Party. Lenin quoted and criticised his letter on the subject in the pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. That summer Gallacher travelled to Soviet Russia for the Second Congress of the Communist International. His conversations with Lenin won him over. According to his memoirs, Lenin asked him outright whether he admitted that he had been wrong about Parliament and the Labour Party, and Gallacher agreed. On his return he brought his Scottish followers into the Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in the summer of 1920. Final unification came at the congress in Leeds in January 1921. From then on Gallacher was one of the party’s leaders and a member of its executive.

A communist in a parliamentary country

In the 1920s Gallacher stood for Parliament several times without success. In 1922 he was a candidate in Dundee, the constituency in which Winston Churchill was defeated that year; the following year he stood in Dundee again, then in West Fife and in Shipley. In the autumn of 1925, as the conflict in the coal industry was escalating, the Conservative government had twelve leaders of the Communist Party arrested. They were charged under an Act of 1797 with incitement to mutiny in the armed forces. Gallacher, as one of the five with previous convictions, received the heaviest sentence, twelve months in prison. This was a period when the British authorities, alarmed by the letter attributed to Grigory Zinoviev and by the preparations for the General Strike, saw communists as agents of Moscow.

Success came in 1935. In the mining constituency of West Fife, in the county of Fife, Gallacher narrowly defeated William Adamson, a former Labour leader and Secretary of State for Scotland. He was the only communist in the House of Commons. He used his seat to speak about the poverty of mining families and the threat of fascism. He called for military aid to the Spanish Republic in the Civil War and visited the British volunteers fighting in the International Brigades. He fiercely attacked the policy of concessions to Germany, and in the autumn of 1938 he was among the opponents of the Munich Agreement.

The pact, the war and the about-turn

His loyalty to Moscow was severely tested in 1939. When Britain went to war with Germany in September, the party’s general secretary, Harry Pollitt, backed the war as a struggle against fascism. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, however, the Comintern declared it an imperialist war in which workers should support neither side. At a meeting of the Central Committee in early October 1939 Gallacher vehemently opposed the new line, whose spokesman was Rajani Palme Dutt, but unlike Pollitt and the editor of the Daily Worker, J. R. Campbell, who were removed from the party leadership, he submitted to the decision. Until June 1941, as the party’s only MP, he had to defend in the House of Commons the position that the war against Hitler was not the workers’ cause. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the party changed its mind overnight and supported the war – and Gallacher with it.

In the 1945 election he held West Fife, and a second communist, Phil Piratin from London, entered the House of Commons. This was the high point of communist influence in post-war Britain. With the onset of the Cold War their support melted away. In the 1950 election Gallacher came third in his constituency and lost his seat. Both communist MPs left Parliament, and the party never returned to it.

Last years

Gallacher remained loyal to the USSR to the end. After Stalin’s death in March 1953 he wrote a tribute in the party’s monthly in which he asserted that the dictator’s life had ended with the completion of his work, and that the party and the Soviet people would go forward under his wise guidance. In 1956–1963 he was President of the Communist Party of Great Britain. During this time the party supported the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet troops, which cost it thousands of members. He wrote several books, including Revolt on the Clyde (1936), The Chosen Few (1940), The Rolling of the Thunder (1947) and the posthumously published Last Memoirs (1966). He died on 12 August 1965 in his native Paisley, at the age of 83.

Significance

Gallacher was one of the most colourful figures of “Red Clydeside” and one of the few British communists respected even by their opponents. His career, however, illustrates why communism never won mass support in Britain. The Clydeside workers who followed him into George Square in 1919 voted overwhelmingly for Labour, not for the communists, at elections. The party he served, strictly subordinated to the Comintern, changed its views on orders from Moscow – the most glaring example being the period from September 1939 to June 1941. The legend he himself helped to create, of an unrealised revolution in Glasgow and of soldiers locked in Maryhill Barracks, has outlived his party by a long way.