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Title: Anarchism in Glasgow (Interview)
Author: Various Authors
Date: 14/8/87
Language: en
Topics: class, Glasgow
Source: Anarchy is Order CD
Notes: Transcribed in November 1993 from a not-always-clear cassette tape. A formerly inaudible section has now been transcribed with help from Charlie Baird Jnr.

Various Authors

Anarchism in Glasgow (Interview)

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.

Q: How did people come in contact with the movement and how did the

movement strike them at the time?

JR: Well, the clothes have changed a bit! And the venue — the anarchist

movement would have had to grow quite a bit to get a room like this.

MB: Yes... The “Hangman’s Rest”: when there was a lull in the questions

the rats used to come out!!

JR: Or street corners...

JTC: The movement started in Glasgow in a way that’s buried in a certain

amount of mystery because they haven’t been able to research it

properly, but after the Paris Commune a number of Frenchmen came to

Britain and one of these settled in Glasgow and became the companion of

a woman called MacDonald who lived in Crown St. She had anarchist views

and they organised the first anarchism movement in Glasgow working from

Crown St. and meeting in the space outside Glasgow Green which is called

Jostling Sq or Jail Sq. People gathered there every Sunday. Afterwards

there was a lull until we have the Social Democratic Federation

(Hyndman’s crowd) building up a group in Glasgow; the next stage on the

road to anarchism was when the disaffected formed the Socialist League

under William Morris. They wanted to be anti-parliamentary but not

anarchist. There was such an influx of anarchists in Glasgow and

eventually in 1895 it broke up and the anarchist movement of Glasgow was

formed. It had 50 members and met in a place in Holland St. It had a

number of speakers: Willie MacDougal was one — and the movement

developed from that. From 1900 it was able to invite Kropotkin and

Voltairine deClerke to speak in Glasgow and was quite a force up to the

start of the 1^(st) World War when it broke up because of the

persecutions it had to endure because of its anti-war position. MB: I

knew that Guy (Aldred) had a group in little rooms in Clarenden St...

JTC: Guy Aldred came to Glasgow in 1912... The anarchist movement in

London had three elements: one was Stepniak, one was Kropotkin, the

other was Bakunin. Stepniak had shot a policeman in St.Petersburg and

fled to London — he belonged to the old Russian Narodniks, who believed

in propaganda by deed, in shooting officials and they believed that the

State has a social contract with the people and when it fails to fulfil

that contract, the common people are in a state of nature and can

declare war. That was the beginning of the theory of propaganda by deed

in Russia. The other stream was Kropotkin who believed that we are

dominated by the State and he gave a historical analysis of the State

and that we should get back to a pre-state condition of a society run by

communes. But the third person was Bakunin who from a philosophical

point of view came through Hegel and he believed that we had to destroy

authority. Guy developed that point of view in the Freedom Press, but

then felt that they were too theoretical, Sunday afternoon anarchists,

so he and another founded a paper called the “Voice of Labour”, to carry

the fight into the factories. After 3 or 4 months Guy realised that it

you do that it runs along trade-union and amelioration lines; what we

need is education — so he formed the Communist Propaganda Groups — these

were to educate, the other to agitate. Now the CPGs were

anti-parliamentary. You have to remember the context: the Labour

Partywas something new, it had been formed to represent trade unions and

wasn’t sure whether it was going to be a left or liberal party or be an

industrial syndicalist organisation as identified with Tom Mann or

Daniel deLeon in America. There was a careerist element and Guy fought

against payment of members, and this took on the form of an

anti-parliamentary faction. Guy was invited to speak in Glasgow in 1912

by a splendid organisation called the Clarion Scouts. It had all kinds

of things to interest young people — camera clubs, bicycle clubs, etc.

Youngsters used to get on their bikes and cycle through the villages and

they had a secret sign when they passed each other (one said “hoops”,

the other said “spurs”). They formed their first organisation in Glasgow

in 1898, I think, and would help any left-wing organisation — they

helped the ILP, they helped the anarchists — they were not sectarian.

They invited Guy Aldred to speak in the Pavilion Theatre in 1912. There

were no microphones in those days and the theatre was filled, but he was

such a success that he came back again and again, and in the end made

Glasgow his native city and formed his own Communist Propaganda Group.

He was running “The Spur” which had a good circulation and was well

known in the movement. When the war came Guy went off to jail but his

paper was carried on by Rose Witcop, his free-love companion. When he

came back after the war, his CPG had folded, because he was really the

centrepiece of it. The Glasgow Anarchists (those who’d formed a group at

the time of William Morris) were carrying on: Willie MacDougall was one

of them — he’d been jailed too, taken down to Dartmoor. He simply

escaped from Dartmoor — he jumped on a bike and cycled home and nobody

stopped him. (Only a few years ago, at 86, he was still carrying on his

propaganda) Then came the Russian revolution, which split the group in a

dozen ways introduced a new concept — vanguard communism. There came a

conflict between the anti- and pro- parliamentarian communists.

Guy was quite in favour of the Russian revolution when it took place and

spoke favourably of Lenin, even although he knew him to be a statist. He

thought that, under the conditions in Russia, Lenin was doing all he

could do, until he discovered that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were

persecuting the anarchists in Russia and when the 2^(nd) Congress of the

Communist International took place and Lenin declared distinctly that

anti-parliamentarians were not to be allowed in the Communist

International. He denounced left-wingism in Britain; he said it was

infantile, you must capture that organisation which has the attention of

the working class, the Labour Party, so the Communist Party was founded

in 1921 with a programe of capturing the Labour Party and trying to

capture parliament. Opposing that, Guy reconstituted his Propaganda

Groups but in time called it the ANTI-PARLIAMENTARIAN Propaganda Groups;

he had a paper called The Spur. The new group wanted its own paper, and

called it the Red Commune, which had a program of anti-parliamentism.

Guy said , Let’s take a leaf out of the book of the Sinn Feiners, who

made use of the ballot box in 1918 by standing for every seat they could

capture. Guy said “There’s what to do, let the workers say, ‘We are the

disinherited’; let us use their ballot boxes and let us pledge ourselves

not to go into parliament but stay in Scotland until there’s enough of

us to form a quorum. This was his anti-parliamentism. Some of the

anarchists in his group and some belonging to the remnants of the

William Morris groups opposed this, so the Anti-Parliamentary Communist

Federation was formed with some antagonism. It existed until 1932 when

it was taken over by a different faction and faded. Then came the

Spanish Civil War in 1936. Then from nowhere erupted the anarchists who

had deserted anti-parliamentism as too dogmatic and too theoretical.

They came to the fore again and, under Frank Leech and one or two

others, formed the new Anarchist Federation. Guy at this time had

changed his group to the United Socialist Movement, because when the

Labour Party fell apart in 1931 and formed the National Government, Guy

said “We don’t have to be anti-parliamentary; history has proven it” and

said to his anti-parliamentary comrades, who had their headquarters in

Great Western Rd.in Bakunin House: “You’re crushing socialism to reach

anti-parliamentarism — let’s try to get united and assume parliament is

dead”. The ILP and the left had left the Labour Party because of the

National Government and (this is coming into my own area) Fenner

Brockway said “Let us form a united movement and use parliament only as

a sounding-board for the workers’ demands”. Guy said: “Let’s forget past

antagonisms and join with the ILP, the Trotskyists” (the American Left

Opposition groups). So at this point, the Spanish Civil War, Guy had the

USM; there was still a APCF under Willie MacDougall; but when the

anarchists came on the scene again the anti-pantys (as they called them)

and the anarchists joined to fight the Spanish Revolution. They adopted

Emma Goldmann as a hero, and Guy was opposed to that, because Emma

Goldmann was at that time promoting culture and literature in America

and was doing this with various literati and had forgotten about her

anarchism and was now coming back. He opposed that and this caused a

great deal of antagonism in the streets of Glasgow — they were tearing

each other’s hair out, metaphorically. Frank Leech continued his group

until he died and then on the scene came Eddie Shaw, Jimmy Raeside, I

think a man called McGatvey was there too...

JR: Johnny Garvey?

MB: Aye, but he was much later though

JTC: Was he later? I met him some time ago and was speaking about the

past.

JR: Charlie (Baird) was in the movement before I was...

JTC: Well, I’ve brought the movement up from the beginning of the

century until the time when Charlie and Jimmy were in it. Now they can

tell you about it then. I remained in the United Socialist Movement,

agitating for some form of unity. Before Guy died we’d long realised we

weren’t getting it, that we in the movement were only being Guy’s

supporters, because he was an enormous platform figure and well-known

orator, and we in the USM were finally simply his stewards and

supporters. (I may say that Guy did a lot of work helping conscientious

objectors during the war; he helped Eddie Shaw, the two Dicks.)

CB: That was an excellent history of the origins of the anarchist

movement. To go on from then: Anarchism continued in the form of the old

Glasgow Anarchist Group, which was actually from a split in a group

called the Marxist Study Group. Two men broke away from that group:

Eddie Shaw and Frank Leech. A little fellow, an ex-miner called Jimmy

Kennedy, a man steeped in Marxism used to give excellent lectures on

anarchism. Now that may be misleading — Jimmy Kennedy was an anarchist

out-and-out although he approached anarchism from a marxist point of

view. It was deceptive but they still called themselves the Marxist

Study Group. Shaw and Leech had broke away from them (a clash of

personalities or something). Another group was started up calling itself

the Glasgow Anarchist Group. I was in prison at the time (so was Jimmy)

and don’t know exactly what happened but...

MB: Jimmy Dick was also in prison at the time. He had been a member of

the Marxist group but Charlie and Jimmy only came into it when the came

out of prison. Roger Carr was in prison at the same time, and Eddie

Veigh. Fenwick and Carr and Jimmy Dick had been members of the Marxist

Group and that was when the split took place and they formed the

Anarchist Federation.

JTC: The Marxist Study Group had a place in George St. on the corner on

Albion St. where they held mock tribunals, that is at the beginning of

the war young chaps went before this mock tribunal — 3 or 4 would

pretend to be the sheriff principal, etc. and the youngster would have

to put forward his case and what happened then was they were prosecuted

There was a 2 day trial and they were found not guilty. And outside

George St they had the anarchist red and black flag and the police

pulled it down...

MB: The shop was painted red and black...

JTC: And on the other side of the road was the Strickland Press.

MB: ..Round the corner.

Q: So was it really your experiences in prison which made you want

to move into the anarchist group?

CB: Since I was 16 I’d been a rebel. I’d a short period in the Communist

Party, a short period in the ILP and came out of both disillusioned. I

was an anarchist and didn’t realise it — politically immature, of

course, at that age. I registered as a conscienscious objector, went to

prison where I met Jimmy, Jimmy Dick, and Denis Glyn, who all became

members of the Glasgow Anarchist Group. I knew Eddie Shaw, who was a

founder member of the GAG. When we came out of jail, Roger Carr, myself

and Denis McGlynn and Jimmy came out and joined the GAG. Do you want to

take it from there, Jimmy?

JR: No, I think you’re a repository of knowledge of the entire GAG. I

keep learning things from Charlie.

CB: The Glasgow Anarchist Group in the 1940s became a very large group,

very active. We had meetings at the weekend in Burnbank, Hamilton,

Paisley, Glasgow, Edinburgh. It was the Glasgow group who supplied

speakers...

MB: It had a big following among the miners in Hamilton and Burnbank...

JTC: The anti-parliamentary movement had laid the foundations...

MB: That’s right.

CB: The Glasgow group supplied all these towns with speakers and sold a

tremendous amount of anarchist literature and had tremendous meetings in

Brunswick St and had a hall too in Wilson St. We had meetings there too;

when the weather was inclement we took them into the hall. That must

have been one of themost prosperous, lively periods for Freedom Press,

on account of the amount of literature we took from them. Later on we

might have something more to say about the estrangement between the

Glasgow Anarchist Group and Freedom Press, which finally led to the

split and final demise of the Glasgow Anarchist Group.

JR: I wasn’t too aware of the machinations prior to the split and the

fact that, although Charlie was the elected secretary of the group,

there were individuals in the Freedom Group who bypassed Charlie and had

a sort of liaison with Frank Leech. When this became common knowledge it

led to clashes of all kinds...

MB: They talked about “Frank Leech’s group”, “Eddie Shaw’s group”. How

do you have an anarchist “Charlie Baird” group? — You become an

anarchist to do away with that! They allowed these personalities to take

over. I mean, even Guy — the very last time I talked to Guy, he talked

about Frank Leech’s group.

JTC: I know, he identified a group by its outstanding person,

Kropotkin’s group, Bakunin’s group, but when it comes down to

definition, as you say, it’s wrong. They called USM Guy’s group,with

this justification, that Guy was an outstanding person...

MB: Guy was the group...

JTC: ...But Frank Leech couldn’t speak for toffee apples! It was called

his group because he ran three newsagents...

JR: He was the biggest newsagent in Scotland, metaphorically and

physically!

JTC: Physically he had been heavyweight champion of his regiment.

Another reminiscence which won’t add to your theoretical knowledge but

will give more biographical colour: Frank Leech joined the APCF when he

left the Navy. He had been the heavyweight champion. Bakunin Press had a

little gym down in the basement, although they were all pacifists! Benny

Lynch used to go down there. Jenny Patrick (Guy Aldred’s companion) says

Frank was so indestructible, you couldn’t knock him down, but you could

knock him out on his feet and he’d still be fighting! When we had the

Free Speech Fight on Glasgow Green. The Communist Party tried to take it

over and we had a meeting in the City Hall and a fight developed between

the anti-parliamentarians and the Communist Party over the domination of

the meeting. It came to fisticuffs and the CP were very surprised when

they discovered we’d so many pugilists!

MB: I remember that! There weren’t membership fees for the APCF. I can

tell you a bit about Bakunin Press... They had these wee dances to help

to pay the rates, because the rooms were their own and the Communists

used to burrow from within (same as now) came to Bakunin House, and it

was Willie MacDougall, my father, Jimmy Murray and Frank Leech who had

to put them out of Bakunin House.

CB: It’s important for young anarchists to understand why splits took

place. Caldy’s mentioned a few. Why did the Glasgow anarchists split up?

You’d think that anarchists didn’t look up to leadership and shouldn’t

regard any other member of the group as a personality ot as a

charismatic person. Anarchists should be free of all those things:

over-estimating people, getting impressed by their personality. If you

look up to a person with charisma, it’s a leadership complex. This is

what happened in the Glasgow Anarchist Group. Eddie Shaw was regarded as

a great personality and very few could see beyond him. He was a good

speaker, a good orator, and he worked hard enough at the group, but

Eddie was pro-Freedom Press along with Frank Leech. The group was mainly

based on the activities of industrial workers in the factories and

shipyards. A tremendous amount of literature was taken into these

factories by these comrades.

There came a time when we asked Freedom Press to give us more industrial

news in War Commentary. Immediately, Eddie Shaw and Frank Leech ganged

up against the idea, so we had a conference — several conferences — with

Freedom Press, but no way would Freedom Press give way. As a compromise

they allowed us one article in War Commentary and by the time it got

into print it had been condensed out of all recognition of the original

copy. So this was the beginning of the dry rot in the movement. It was

obvious then that a split had taken place.

I knew too that there was a bit of subterfuge on the art of Eddie Shaw,

Frank Leech and Freedom Press. (Incidentally, the anarchist movement was

known by this time as the Anarchist Federation of Britain. Glasgow was

the centre; the secretary of the Glasgow group, who was myself, was the

secretary of the AFB.) For example, I had correspondence with Freedom

Press regarding the request for more industrial news in the paper, which

we thought was the organ of the anarchist movement as a whole, and I

found that Frank Leech was corresponding with Freedom Press regarding

Glasgow’s business with Freedom — over my head. I said nothing at the

time, but I knew that a split would inevitably happen, but in the

interests of the continuation of the movement I didn’t tell anybody.

Eventually it came out anyway and what forced me to bring it out was

another incident. We had another comrade in prison at the time — Johnny

... from Burnbank?

MB: Johnny Carracher

CB: He was a married man with about ten of a family. I went through to

see him before he went in, and as a consolation I was able to tell him

that the Group would help his family.

MB: Of course we were doing that with other guys, with Glasgow lads...

CB: So I brought it up at the next meeting — Johnny was in prison by

this time — How much will we give Johnny’s family? Frank Leech got up

and whispered: I want the members of the group to stay behind tonight,

I’ve something confidential to tell them. We’d a few strangers about —

we didn’t stop anyone coming in. So at the end of the meeting the

strangers left and Frank finally told us: “You know, Johnny Carracher’s

not married!”(laughter)

JTC: Earth-shattering news!

CB: That was it. I had to come clean and told them that Leech (and Shaw

too — he was definitely pro-Freedom Press and against the members who

were for the class struggle, the industrial struggle...

MB: Of course, you should set this up right for the people who’re here

In the group in London we had Vero Richards, Marie-Louise, Sampson and

all that. But they were theoretical...

CB: They were philosophicals...

MB: And intellectuals, But up in Glasgow, and this is why we wanted the

page of industrial news, all the members we had up here were

industrials. They were working all over the Clyde and that was why we

wanted the news — we felt they were entitled to that because they were

putting in the funds — we were sending at least 100 pounds a week to the

running of Freedom Press and getting nothing out of it.

CB: I talked about the pro-Freedom Press members of the group. Well, the

rest of them weren’t anti Freedom Press. We agreed that Freedom Press

were doing a good job as far as publications were concerned — anarchist

books, pamphlets, leaflets — we realised that the intellectual has a

place in the movement, but so too do the workers. Freedom Press didn’t

accept that, so the breakaway eventually took place. The strange thing

was — there was no intimation of it: Shaw and Leech didn’t come and say:

Well, we’re finished. Everything was going all right and I still had

hopes of salvaging the group by speaking to Leech and Shaw. There was no

way they were going to compromise. One week they didn’t appear at the

business meeting and the following Sunday they had a meeting in Maxwell

St. They had deserted Brunswick St where they usually had their meetings

and — that was the split.

Q: When was that?

JR: It was before the end of the war, because when I came back I wasn’t

even aware the split had taken place when I was speaking in Maxwell St!

I was approached by both Eddie Shaw and Frank Leech who said We hold

great meetings in Maxwell St, you’ll need to come up. And I did.

MB: What you must realise about the split, is you must come back again

to Marie-Louise and Vero Richards getting the jail, because it was all

part of the split... We had a very big group, but it’s no good kidding

ourselves — they weren’t all anarchists. They were deserters from the

army, the navy, the airforce, but there were different lads home on

leave getting literature and taking it back and spreading it around. The

boys were getting the idea — this was the idea, but they wanted to know

more about it... If you were above a sergeant, Frank Leech took you in,

but privates he didn’t want to know them. Frank had this big newsagent

at Knightswood — Temple — and he had a loft; the only private he ever

took, he put up in the loft; the rest got decent digs. They (Freedom

Press) put out a leaflet from Connolly’s speech — you know, keep your

arms — but prior to this the Trots in London had got the jail also for

suggesting it. The first edition of War Commentary afterwards came out

with London Anarchists slamming the Trots for getting bourgeois lawyers

to defend them. Then Freedom Press put out this leaflet and got the jail

for sedition. Charlie’s the bloody secretary of the AFB and doesn’t know

the leaflet’s out — he’s up speaking at a meeting and liable to get the

jail and he doesn’t know the thing’s printed!

CB: To put that in perspective: it was a leaflet carrying a quote from

Jim Connolly. He suggested to the British soldiers during the First

World War — “When the war’s finished, hang on to your arms, come back

and assert yourselves, demand your rights”. Well, I agreed with that;

I’d never seen it, I didn’t know what they were arrested for, I knew it

was sedition but apart from that didn’t know anything about it So they

were setting up a defence committee and the group wanted to know

something about why they were arrested. A week after that, Albert

Meltzer, who was doing correspondence for the Freedom Press group, who I

was corresponding with, suddenly appeared in the Glasgow group in their

rooms. He went over to Eddie Shaw and pulled a leaflet and showed it to

Eddie Shaw. Eddie read it and handed it to another comrade who read it —

Frank Leech read it — and it went back into his pocket. I mean, what the

hell’s going on here? I asked Shaw about it on the way home — we both

stayed in the east end — I asked him what was in the leaflet. He said

“It’s just a list”. “Christ”, I said, “Come off it, let us know what’s

in it.”

That was the situation in the group. On to the defense committee. As

Mollie pointed out, when the Trotskyists were arrested, War Commentary

came out with a front page article lambasting them for employing

bourgeois lawyers, but when they were arrested it was the first thing

they done — employ bourgeois lawyers. However, we’ll let that one go.

All these things were mentioned; the cumulative effect was the split.

What shocked me was that the majority of the Glasgow group disappeared

at that period too; whenever Shaw and all went away they disappeared.

JTC: The group practically ended when Jimmy Raeside and Shaw left it.

CB: Mollie and I, Phil Gordon and Jim Dennis — we carried on. We had big

meetings at Wellington St., good meetings. My voice wouldny stand

outdoor speaking — I didn’t regard myself as a speaker anyway. Bill

Borland went into hospital — he died in Knightswood Hospital — and John

Dennis went down to London and he drifted out. And that was the end of

it. We were still anarchists.

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 Clyde side...

MB: ...and these young apprentices were getting interested. Then the

apprentices strike — and we had about 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, the’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.

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 mins, 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 1^(st) 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

egotism 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...

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

tothefore 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.

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!

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]