David
Kirkwood, the son of a labourer was
born in Glasgow, Scotland,
in 1872. He left Parkhead Public School at the age of 12 and found
work as a message-boy at a local print works. Later he became an apprentice
engineer.
In 1891 Kirkwood was converted
to socialism by reading Looking
Backward by Edward
Bellamy.
The following year he joined the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers
(AEU).
Kirkwood joined the Independent
Labour Party and
served on the Glasgow Trade Council. He remained active in the AEU
and was chief shop steward at the Beardmore Works (1914-15). Kirkwood
began working closely with other socialists in Glasgow
including John
Wheatley, Emanuel
Shinwell, James
Maxton, William
Gallacher,
John Muir, Tom
Johnston, Jimmie
Stewart, Neil Maclean, George
Hardie, George Buchanan and James
Welsh.
Kirkwood was opposed to
Britain becoming involved in the First World War
and was an active member of the Union
of Democratic Control. He
was also treasurer of the Clyde Workers' Committee and organisation
that had been formed to campaign against the Munitions Act, which
forbade engineers from leaving the works where they were employed.
David
Lloyd George and
Arthur
Henderson met
Kirkwood and the Clyde Workers' Committee in Glasgow on 25th December
1915 but they were unwilling to back down on the issue.
On 25th March 1916, Kirkwood
and other members of the Clyde Workers' Committee were arrested by
the authorities under the Defence
of the Realm Act.
Then men were court-martialled and sentenced to be deported
from Glasgow. Kirkwood went to Edinburgh
but in January 1917 he travelled to Manchester
to speak at the national conference of the Labour
Party. On his
return to Glasgow he was re-arrested and deported once more to Edinburgh.
He remained there until being freed on 30th May 1917.
After
the war Kirkwood was involved in the struggle for a 40 hour week.
The police broke up an open air trade union meeting at George Square
on 31st January, 1919. The leaders of the union were then arrested
and charged with "instigating and inciting large crowds of persons
to form part of a riotous mob". Emanuel
Shinwell was
sentenced to five months and William
Gallacher
got three months. The other
ten were found not guilty.
In the 1922
General Election Kirkwood was elected to the House
of Commons for Dumbarton Burghs. Also successful were several
other militant socialists based in Glasgow
including John
Wheatley, Emanuel
Shinwell, James
Maxton, John
Muir, Tom
Johnston, Jimmie
Stewart, Neil Maclean, George
Hardie, George Buchanan and James
Welsh.
Kirkwood was one of the
leaders of the Independent
Labour Party in
Parliament until joining the Labour Party
in August 1933. Kirkwood published his autobiography, My
Life of Revolt in 1935.
Kirkwood head his seat
in Parliament until 1951 when he was created Baron Kirkwood. David
Kirkwood died
on 16th April 1955.
(1)
David Kirkwood wrote about his experiences of school in his autobiography,
My Life of Revolt (1935)
At five years of age I was sent to school and was put into what was
known as the ' penny class,' so called because the reading-book cost
one penny. The classes went up to the ' four-penny.' I liked school.
I was slow at lessons which involved spelling or writing. To this
day I write very slowly, forming each letter as I did on my slate
in school. But at memory work I was excellent. I enjoyed history.
Moreover, I could recite all the major bones in the human body, and
I knew the Bible stories.
(2)
David Kirkwood became an apprentice engineer with J. & T. Boyd
in Glasgow.
I worked from 6 o'clock in the morning till 5.30 at night, and my
wage was five shillings weekly. At 8.30 we stopped for three-quarters
of an hour for breakfast, and every morning I ran full pelt from the
works to my home for my breakfast, a distance of about one mile and
a half. Then I ran back, taking my dinner in my pocket. My dinner
consisted of bread and jam.
At 5.30 I came home for
my supper - porridge and buttermilk, and sometimes bread and butter
and a cup of tea. Our principal food was porridge and buttermilk.
Only on Saturdays and Sundays did we have a hot meal, which usually
consisted of broth, made with half a pound of boiling beef and a marrow-bone,
and potatoes.
(3)
David
Kirkwood, My Life of Revolt
(1935)
I had been bred in the
idea that Scotland was the greatest country in the world. I had seldom
been out of Scotland, and had been to very few places in Scotland
apart from Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde. The history of Scotland
I knew.
The geography of Scotland was a closed book to me. But Scotland was
the very breath of my nostrils. Scotsmen were to me the finest race
of men. The engineers of Scotland were the finest engineers. The songs
of Scotland were the sweetest of all songs. The religion of Scotland
was the only true religion. I could roll off stanzas of the order
of: Oh, Scotia, my dear, my native soil!
I revelled in the story
of Scotland's struggle for liberty. I saw her battered but never beaten,
rising from the crushed ashes of her blasted hopes to higher resolve
and fuller power. I felt my body tingle as I sang The Battle o'
Stirling Brig or The March of the Carrier on Men.
(4)
David
Kirkwood,
joined the Union
of Democratic Control in 1914.
He wrote about his decision in his autobiography My Life of Revolt
(1935)
I hated war. I believed
that the peoples of the world hated war, and had no hate for each
other. A terrific struggle tore my breast. I could not hate the Germans.
They loved their land as I loved mine. To them, their traditions and
their history, their religion and their songs were what mine were
to me. Yet I was working in an arsenal, making guns and shells for
one purpose - to kill men in order to keep them from killing men.
What a confusion ! What was I to do ? I was not a conscientious objector.
I was a political objector. I believed that finance and commercial
rivalry had led to war.
(5)
David
Kirkwood,
speech at Glasgow City Hall against the Munitions Act in 1916.
Fellow-engineers, the country
is at war. The country must win. In order to win, we must throw our
whole soul into the production of munitions. Now we come to the point
of difference. The Government and its supporters think that to get
the best out of us, they must take away our liberty. So we are deprived
of the chief thing that distinguishes free men from slaves, the right
to leave a master when we wish to. If I work in Beardmore's I am as
much his property as if he had branded a ' B ' on my brow.
They have us and they
know it. Mr. Lloyd George claims that all this is necessary in order
to win the War. It is a strange doctrine. It amounts to this, that
slaves are better than free men. I deny it. I maintain that for peace
or war free men are
better than slaves. We are willing, as we have always been, to do
our bit, but we object to slavery.
(6)
David
Kirkwood,
speech at the Labour Party conference in
Manchester (January 1917)
No charge has been made
against us; no trial has been offered us. On my return I shall have
no means of life but labour. I am no criminal. If I break the law
in future, I must be dealt with as other men. Today for the first
time I have the opportunity to place my case before the representatives
of British Labour.
Having done so, I place
it on your shoulders with all its responsibilities. Great principles
of constitutional liberty are challenged. You must defend
them. When I leave this Conference I will not go back to deportation.
I go home to
Glasgow or I go to prison.
(7)
Ramsay
MacDonald,
Forward (January 1917)
If nothing else happened,
this incident (David Kirkwood's speech) would have redeemed the Conference.
During it, the Conference went back to its fundamental emotions of
freedom, independence, and hostility to the present governing classes.
The delegates, after one of those silent pauses when the mind is grasping
what has happened, burst out into a tornado of cheers. Thank you very
much, Clyde engineers, for helping some of us to retain our faith
in the Labour
Movement by giving us a chance to see what the heart of that Movement
is.
(8)
David
Kirkwood described
the meeting that took place at George Square on 31st January 1919
in his autobiography My Life of Revolt (1935)
Emerging from the entrance
door of the City Chambers, I saw William Gallacher coming in, his
face streaming with blood. I saw the police using their batons mercilessly.
I did not know that the Sheriff had read the Riot Act. Stones and
bottles were flying through the air; the crowds were surging this
way and that, driven by policemen.
I ran out, with arms widespread,
to appeal for restraint and order. Then I knew - no more. I had been
struck with a baton from behind.
When I came to, I was
lying in the quadrangle surrounded by police, one of whom was bandaging
my wounds. News flies quickly.
My first thought was to
ask John Muir to go to my wife to tell her I was all right. He went
at once, but before he arrived my wife had already been told that
I had been killed.
(9)
Emanuel
Shinwell
described
the meeting that took place at George Square on 31st January 1919
in his autobiography Conflict
Without Malice (1955)
At the Central Police Station some of my friends were
also being charged. Willie Gallagher was there, despite the fact that
he had actually been given police protection so that he could bawl
out to the crowd: "March off, for God's sake." David Kirkwood
had also been arrested. He was excitable but was really a peaceable
soul and had, as a matter of fact, been hit on the head by a policeman
almost as soon as he ran down the steps of the City Chambers, being
attacked from the back as he raised his hand to quieten the crowd.
That might not have meant his discharge at the subsequent trial except
for the lucky fact that a press photographer took a picture of the
policeman's baton raised and Kirkwood collapsing - evidence which,
of course, meant his dismissal from the case when the picture was
exhibited.
(10)
David
Kirkwood described
his election to the House of Commons in
his autobiography My Life of Revolt (1935)
From the outside circumference
of the city to its very heart, Glasgow was ringing with the message
of Socialism. Within a week of the election day, it seemed likely
that the whole team of eleven would win, that Bonar Law would be defeated,
and that Socialism would be triumphant. Such energy, enthusiasm, and
earnestness had not been known in Glasgow for generations. There we
were, men who a few years before had been scorned, some of us in jail
and many more of us
very near it, now being the men to whom the people pinned their faith.
When, at last, the results
were announced, every member of the team was elected - except our
champion of the Central Division. What a troop we were! John Wheatley,
cool and calculating and fearless ; James Maxton, whose wooing speaking
and utter selflessness made people regard him as a saint and martyr
; wee Jimmie Stewart, so small, so sober, and yet so determined ;
Neil MacLean, full of fire without fury; Thomas Johnston, with a head
as full of facts as an egg's full o' meat ; George Hardie, engineer
and chemist and brother of Keir Hardie; George Buchanan, patternmaker,
who knew the human side of poverty better than any of us; James Welsh,
miner and poet from Coatbridge, John W. Muir, an heroic and gallant
gentleman; and old Bob Smillie, returned for an English constituency
though he was born in Ireland and reared in Scotland.
We believed that this people,
this British folk, could and were willing to make friends with all
other peoples. We were ready to abandon all indemnities and all reparations,
to remove all harassing restrictions imposed by the Peace Treaties.
We were all Puritans. We were all abstainers. Most of us did not smoke.
We were the stuff of which reform is made.
(11)
David
Kirkwood,
My Life of Revolt (1935)
A Socialist Government
cannot carry on a capitalist system better than the capitalists. The
men bred by a capitalist system are men of affairs who understand
their business. They are not apprentices.
It was the practice, and
still is, for Socialist propagandists to refer to the great industrial
magnates and their friends in the House as nonentities - stupid, cruel,
selfish people who had fallen heir to positions of power which they
have not the capacity to uphold. I have found that it is not so. The
men in charge, whether in the world of industry or in the world of
politics, are very able men. To change the system is a sound proposition.
If those of us who wish to change the system can persuade a sufficient
number of our fellow-citizens that a change is desirable, then a change
will come. But merely to change masters is not worth striving for.
If the system is to remain, I prefer that the men in control should
be men who can do the job.
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