Anarchism in Glasgow

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.
 
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 1st 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 Party
was 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 2nd
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 | 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 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 
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 to
thefore 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]

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.
Audio copies can be obtained by contacting Here & Now magazine.


Title: Anarchism In Glasgow

Author: Charlie Baird Snr, Mollie Baird, John Taylor Caldwell, Babs
Raeside, Jimmy Raeside, etc.

Date: August 1987

Description: 
When the Raesides returned to Glasgow for a visit, it provided a rare
opportunity to bring together some surviving members of anarchist
groups in Glasgow during the 1940s to discuss the history of that
movement and the lesson which can be learned.  

Keywords:
Anarchism, Glasgow, Aldred, Stirner, Class 

Related Material:
1. John Taylor Caldwell's "Come Dungeons Dark"
2. The photographs and brief discussion in Albert Meltzer's "The
Anarchists in London".
3. Also one sentence in Peter Marshall's "Demanding the Impossible".

