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Anarchism in Glasgow Part 2 Charlie Baird Snr, Mollie Baird, John Taylor Caldwell, Babs Raeside, Jimmy Raeside, 14/8/87 In August 1987 the Raesides, who had been living in Australia for many years, returned to Glasgow for a visit. This provided a rare opportunity to bring together some surviving members of anarchist groups in Glasgow during the 1940s for a public discussion on the history of that movement and the lesson which can be learned. JTC: What did you think of Eddie Shaw as a speaker? CB: Well, I didn't agree with his type of propaganda. He could draw a crowd; he could hold a meeting, but you always got the feeling that Eddie was speaking for Eddie and his distinctive propaganda was different from Jimmy's. Jimmy was a very capable speaker The difference was that Shaw's type of propaganda and perspective was that Shaw pandered to an audience, he commiserated to them in their misery and all the rest of it. You could see blokes bring their wives up to hear him. Raeside sent them away thinking - this was the difference. I didn't agree with Shaw - I told him that at the time. MB: The apprentices strike: now, we had about a dozen apprentices at the time... Q: When was this, Mollie, '44? MB: '45 I would say. JR: They started coming in before that - Roy Johnston and that - that was before... MB: That's right. They were holding meetings down at Clydeside, like at... JR: John Browns Yarrows, right along the Clydeside... MB: ...and these young apprentices were getting interested. Then the apprentices strike - and we had about a dozen young apprentices coming in - Bobby Lynn was one of them, and a big fellow - Willie Johnston - not that he was much of an anarchist, he stood for Lord Provost of Clydebank before he finished up. The boys were really keen, Spain had just finished and they were still interested in Spain. Johnston had a conference that Sunday and, just to give you an insight into Shaw: if you could have got Chic Murray, the comedian, he would have been just about as good. Charlie got this boy Johnston to go up on the platform, he was doing quite well, he said: well, I'm not a speaker, but Charlie said: We'll help you if you get into difficulties. The boy had a marvellous meeting and the other apprentices were asking questions, and he even did quite well in answering these questions. The boy was holding their attention, but Eddie said: You know, they're only holding on waiting for me. The man's head was that size! JTC: He was a forerunner of Billy Connolly. MB: Eddie was in America for a few years - he was a fender-bender. He wouldn't work for a boss, he would only do for the different garages which would employ him. His wife used to say, come on in Eddie when he was standing watching the suckers (and he said "suckers" from the platform!) putting in the hours. Now you know you've got to do something to get money but... CB: That was the debit side of Eddie Shaw, but there's another side of him. He was an asset of the movement, I recognised that. I didn't agree completely with the type of propaganda - he was comical, funny, entertaining, a carefree type of person. There was a place in the movement for him, he was an asset. Mollie gave you another side of him, but then we could live with that, it wasn't doing the movement any harm. Except that he was a personality with most of the other members, and this is one of the lessons to learn from anarchist groups who broke up and disappeared. We have to ask ourselves the question: why? what happened? If we don't learn from them, it's worse. I'd suggest to young anarchists today to consider these aspects of the problem. I'd say the responsibility to prevent these splits is to be vigilant about personalities and see that no-one constructs power from the group; once that happens that's the beginning of the end for the group. We may have mentioned certain comrades, but you have to understand I still liked Shaw, in spite of all the thing we've said about him. Leech I couldn't like - some people excused him by saying he was naive - he was naive but he was dangerous. He contributed most to the split within the group by his activities. During the war Q: What may amaze many people sitting here is that this was all happening in the middle of the Second World War, which was meant to be mass united patriotism united everyone against the common foe. Here we're getting a picture that in Glasgow it was a bit different. Maybe we haven't talked about the industrial front, as well, the opposition to the CP collaborating with the bosses. MB: Yes, that certainly did happen. JR: I understand that at that time when the CP in New York were discussing it, one bloke went to the toilet and when he came back the position of the group had changed! JTC: One I can tell you intimately about was that Harry McShane was due to go down to Brunswick St to speak on a Sunday morning. He got his orders to change completely and call the war a people's war, a patriotic war, a war against fascism, and he didn't know where he was - he had to read it. He only spoke about 20 minutes, so that he could report back to the party that he had held the meeting as directed. They did such a somersault. But then he (CB) was going into more theoretical stuff... The difficulty is that in the anarchist movement there's always lack of definition: get 3 anarchists together and they'll give you 30 definitions of what anarchism is, because by its very nature it's indefinable because it's without authority. Therefore you have different kinds of anarchism. Talking of personalities and clashes within the movement: Bakunin and Marx destroyed the 1st International between them and although Proudhon was dead, his influence was so great that Marx moved the centre of the International movement from France to Germany, in which it became connected with Kautsky and took on Social Democratic character, which was later reflected in the ILP and the Labour Party... The movement has been riddled with dissention the whole time, with personalities - we've just got to contend against that, try to clear your way through that and see what you can find solid. Now there's many different schools of anarchism. Guy used to say there were 7, but two which seem to come to the fore now and again were anarchism and egotism, that is Max Stirner's "Ego and His Own" in which an anarchist was an individual and a multiplicity of anarchists were a concourse of individuals, and these individuals had to find some common denominator in running society, but these individuals were all persons in their own right. Now, the Kropotkinite anarchists were anarchist-communists - in simplistic terms, an ego is not a person bounded by his skin from head to toe, an ego is a ramification of all his associations... and his associations go back beyond his present time, beyond your 20 years away back into the past, so that we inherit much of our ego, much of our responsibility. Therefore a centre of our egoism should be a concept of the community. He tried to prove this was a predominating feature in biology from the beginning of time and one of the causes of evolution - not "nature red in tooth and claw" as Darwin had said and the capitalists were now using... That's two different clashes you had. You can, when you join a movement, have at the back of your head "I am but an integral part of a community. What I do has to be related to the advantage of a community. Mixed with other people I can develop what's inside myself, my own personality, that's my anarchy"... You do not accept standardised authority for its own sake... That's two different types of anarchism. Bakunin had a slightly different one... Egoism and Mutual Aid Q: Can we explore the situation in the 1940s with these three different movements: Guy Aldred's USM, the Anarchist Group, Willie MacDougall's group. Did people get on? Was there mutual aid in relation to the anti-war movement, etc? JTC: No, there wasn't mutual aid. JR: There was indeed, there was a great deal of mutual aid. JTC: Well, we both look from different aspects. CB: As a matter of fact, in the Glasgow group, it was split too. This didn't contribute to the ultimate split, but the group was split over the question of mutual aid and the ego. Eddie Shaw was an egoist; he was a Max Stirner man, and it was a bible with him, he carried it in his pocket every day and crusaded with it. On the other hand there was Jimmy Dick who was a Kropotkin man It became so tedious that we had a debate on it. So Shaw and Jimmy Dick put their cases and we were still split. In fact from my own point of view and others too, mutual aid and the ego weren't antagonistic at all, they were complementary. First of all take the ego: a herd of buffalo - why do they herd together? For the maximum of safety - that's mutual aid. It comes from the self, the ego, the individual. So there's no conflict between the ego and mutual aid in that respect, and that was pointed out to Jimmy Dick and Eddie Shaw and we heard no more about it. JTC: George Woodcock in his study of anarchism refers to the Glasgow anarchists as a small group who are still Stirnerites, believing in Egoism. Now, I know that Eddie Shaw believed that, he once had quite a long talk with me, but he was a crude Stirnerite. He said to me "I believe in Number One - Get what you can out of it" And he said of fixing his cars: You see the one that's going to give you the most, and hang on to him. That was his concept. CB: He didn't relate it to the group. Conscious Stirnerites, through self-interest, would identify their safety in numbers and that we can achieve more in numbers than as an individual... JR: One point regarding that, this attitude towards the ego. I believe (with Bertrand Russell) that the most we can hope from the individual in our society is intelligent self-interest, and if he is intelligent he'll see that cooperation is going to be a great deal better than confrontation. JTC: That's asking too much. The intelligent self-interest of most people means getting themselves and their family on... JR: Well, it's hardly very intelligent then, is it? JTC: Mrs Thatcher in one of her last speeches (you must listen to Mrs Thatcher, she's a genius of mediocrity) said that a person should do the best for themselves and get the best they could out of society and pass it on to their son. She said that is the deepest morality. That's not the deepest morality. JR: I believe literally in what you just said she said. Because I don't think she meant it the way you meant it. That you should screw everyone else - that's hardly intelligent self-interest. I think the norm of intelligence doesn't vary very much and we're all products of our environment, which includes even our parentage and our upbringing. JTC: No, I'd say the fact of economism, trade unionism gathers strength in countries before anarchism does proves that people re out for what they can get. That has been the bugbear of socialism. JR: The people who make a living from trade-unionism are very much to the fore in persuading people to accept that outlook. JTC: Very few strikes are entirely idealistic. They're about 3p more because the labourers got a rise: they're differentials. Strikes Q: What about the strikes in 1944: the apprentices, the strikes in Lanarkshire, etc? MB: What was the apprentices strike about in 1944? CB: Wages. JTC: They were still getting 8/- a week and with the war there was inflation of wages, but the boys weren't getting it. Q: And fighting for their rights? MB: Plus the fact that boys who were not fully-fledged journeymen were doing men's work... JTC: That's true. They were making the fourth year apprentices do men's work. MB: And sending an apprentice along with an apprentice. Q: What about the printing press question? You've talked about the problems with Freedom Press in London. Guy Aldred had his own printing press, but it was the one time there was a really strong anarchist group in Glasgow - did you never think of doing your own paper? MB: We did. CB: After the split we did produce a paper, "Direct Action" but it was mostly industrial. JTC: Willie MacDougall did a paper? Who produced "Advance" and "Solidarity"? MB: Willie MacDougall did his own "Solidarity" but "Direct Action" was another wee printer, an alternative to... CB: While that issue was going on about more industrial news in "War Commentary", I suggested to the Glasgow Group, that we had the money and could produce an organ of our own, quite a substantial thing too, but, of course, Shaw and Leech sabotaged that too. But with the benefit of hindsight, as Mollie said earlier on, the majority weren't anarchists, just camp-followers suffering from a leadership complex. MB: We had one good wee Irish guy, wee Reilly, he had a huge meeting one Sunday in Princes St, and was doing quite well and got very excited and said "If you want a leader I'll lead you!" The majority did require a leader. JTC: What was the name of the old fleapit cinema you (JR) used to fill every Sunday in Partick? JR: No, the only one was the Cosmo in Rose St. MB: Oh, the Grove. Q: Did the women play a distinctive role in those days? MB: No, women play a part, they're merely a part. I'm against all this gay movements and black movements and womens movements. If you're an anarchist, you're an anarchist and it doesn't matter what section of them you are. If you start splitting them into groups you're going to have less. JR: Babs was minutes secretary... BR: And also made tea! Social Life Q: What social events were organised besides the business meetings? MB: Well, they had dances, we had groups playing... CB: Drinking sprees... MB: Even in Guy's... JTC: You look at "The Spur" and you'll see adverts for days in the Waverley, the paddle-steamer. It cost about 2/6 for the whole day. We did a lot of these things. Then you had fighting things too... Other socialist groups, the cycling club... MB: The Clarion Club, that did a marvellous job, but the Communists bust that up. The Clarion rooms were up in Wellington St. You didn't have to be in a group at all; they had tea rooms, all these things... JTC: Snooker... MB: That's right and social evenings, which all helped to defray expenses. The Clarion Club covered a long period. And they had camping facilities out in Carbeth. The CP went in and started to run it too. By the time they were done, there was no group. JTC: But also the deterioration in social standards helped. The Clarion had a place in Queens Crescent, that was their club, but in no time the billiard balls were pinched the tablecloths were ripped - all sorts of things which never happened before the war. Things were sabotaged, graffiti on the lavatory walls; that never happened before the war. MB: Even during the war. JTC: A general deterioration of social standards which happened at the end of the war, because the war broke down inhibitions. Young fellows of 18 or 19 were smashing windows in Germany and pinching things, they carried that back with them. They didn't break them down in a revolutionary sense, where you did things because you were an anarchist or because you were showing you were opposed to authority, you did it for sheer irresponsibility. All the framework of society had been shattered and that's how it started and it helped destroy the Clarion. MB: They didn't have a watch committee as such. But it was yours, so everyone looked after it. It was a workers' thing.. Parents could let very young children go cycling with them, because the strongest waited for the weaker... there was none of this out-to-win. In the rooms it was the same, you just saw that the rooms were looked after. JTC: They also had caravans pulled by horses from village to village... Q: Were the socialist sunday schools connected to the Clarion Clubs? MB: No. I was taken very young to the APCF, I knew about the rooms in Clarenden St, and also about Bakunin House. Tom Anderson ran a Socialist Sunday School. They met.. JTC: They met in Methven St in Govan but there may have been other places... MB: Originally in Bakunin House, merely a let. That was my first visit, I was 5 or 6 at the time. They moved away then, and it was too far for us to travel from the north of Glasgow. The College Sunday School was predominantly ILP, not because the ILP ran it. There was a bond between even-pink revolutionaries at that time, that you gathered together. We went to the College Socialist Sunday School. It started down at College St and went from that. Again, it burst up - there's no socialist Sunday School. Q: What do you think caused the lull in anarchism after the Second World War? And what do you think of the upsurge in militant anarchism? CB: There's always been a continuation of splits. Anarchist movements have drifted away and disappeared, but there's always another crops up again. Right from the beginning of the anarchist movement, as Caldy described. There will always be an anarchist movement in Britain now. We've got to try to assess just what happened to those movements which disappeared. They didn't die a natural death. That's what I was trying to get at tonight. As long as we allow people to dominate within groups there will be splits. And if we are anarchists, we shouldn't allow them, because that's one of the principles of anarchism. JTC: I must have been at thousands of group meetings and always a personality appears, and when it comes to voting, they want to see how he's going to vote, and you get the votes swung by a person who has the power of speech rather than by pure logic. CB: I can recognise that Raeside was a great speaker and can hold an audience for hours; I can recognise that Guy was a great speaker, but I never looked up to them, never treated them as personalities, though they had charisma or anything like that. If I did, I'd know I was suffering from an inferiority complex. No anarchist should suffer from something like that. [Tape ends here] Transcribed in November 1993 from a not-always-clear cassette tape. Audio copies can be obtained by contacting Scottish Anarchist Part 1 of this interview is contained in issue 1 of Scottish Anarchist.