Robert Smillie was born in Belfast on
17th March, 1857. Both parents died when Robert was very young and
he was brought up by his grandmother. He received little schooling
before at the age of nine, starting work as an errand boy. Two years
later he found employment in a local spinning mill.
At fifteen Robert and his brother James, moved to Glasgow
and worked in a brass foundry. However, before he had reached the
age of seventeen he had become a miner at Larkhall. He progressed
from being a pump man to a drawer of coal tubs. Finally, he became
a hewer at the coal face.
Robert was keen to educate himself and for several years attended
evening classes. He developed a love of reading, and especially liked
the work of Robert Burns, John
Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle.
Attempts were being made in Scotland to revive the miners union and
1885 Larkhall Colliery was visited by workers from Motherwell. Smillie
agreed to chair a meeting of local miners and as a result a branch
of the Lanarkshire Miners' Association was formed in Larkhall. Smillie
was elected secretary of the branch and this involved him attending
national union meetings. This brought him into contact with other
union leaders including James Keir Hardie,
secretary of the Ayrshire Miners' Union.
Most miners at that time were supporters of the Liberal
Party. Hardie came to the conclusion that the working-class needed
its own political party. Smillie shared these views and in 1888 helped
James Keir Hardie when he stood as the
Independent Labour candidate for the constituency of Mid-Lanark. During
the election campaign Hardie and Smillie advocated Socialism.
These views were too advanced for the electors and Hardie finished
at the bottom of the poll. However, in 1888 Smillie was elected as
a member of the Larkhall School Board.
In the 1892 General Election Hardie stood
as the Independent Labour candidate for the West Ham South constituency
in London's industrial East End. Hardie won the election and became
the country's first socialist M.P. The following year Hardie and Smillie
joined together with other socialists such as Tom
Mann, John Glasier, H.
H. Champion, Ben Tillett, Philip
Snowden, and Edward Carpenter to
form the Independent Labour Party.
Smillie continued as a union leader and in 1894 he was elected president
of the Scottish Miners' Federation. Two
years later Smillie played an important role in the formation of the
Scottish Trade Union Congress. His role was
recognised when he was elected chairman at its first conference, a
post he was to hold until 1899. The Scottish TUC was more radical
than the English TUC with many of its leaders being members of the
Independent Labour Party.
Smillie also played an active role in the Miners'
Federation of Great Britain (MFGB). As a member of this organisation
Smillie gathered information for the Royal Commission of Mines (1906-1911).
The leadership of the MFGB supported the Liberal
Party and it was mainly due to the efforts of Smillie that the
union affiliated to the Labour Party in
1909. Three years later Smillie became president of the MFGB.
As president of the MFGB Smillie and before the war helped establish
the Triple Industrial Alliance. This was
an agreement for mutual support between the three most powerful trade
unions in Britain, the miners, dockers and railwaymen.
Smillie was opposed to Britain's involvement in the First
World War. He called for a negotiated peace and warned against
the idea of forcing men to join the British armed forces. In 1915
Robert Smillie became president of the National Council Against Conscription
(after 1917 the National Council for Civil Liberties). In June 1917
Smillie was the leading speaker at the Convention in Leeds
that welcomed the Russian Revolution.
David Lloyd George saw Smillie as a dangerous
man and in an attempt to control him, offered him a post in his government.
He refused and when the war finished in 1918, Smillie was one of the
first to call for the Labour Party to withdraw
from Lloyd George's coalition government.
Although exempted from conscription during the war, 40% of miners
of military age had joined the armed forces. Those miners who stayed
in Britain during the First World War
enjoyed improved wages and conditions. The main reason for this was
that during the war the running of the mines was taken over by the
government.
In 1919 Smillie called for the nationalization and workers' control
of Britain mines. David Lloyd George responded
by setting up a Royal Commission under the chairmanship of Lord Sankey.
The Sankey Royal Commission failed to agree
about the solutions to these problems, but the majority of the members
did support the idea of the mines being nationalized. Smillie was
furious when Lloyd George refused to nationalize the mines and allowed
them to go back into private ownership.
In 1920 the mine-owners notified their workers that miners' wages
were to be reduced. The miners decided to go on strike in an effort
to persuade the owners to change their minds. Under the terms of the
Triple Industrial Alliance, the National
Union of Railwaymen (NUR) and the Transport
and General Workers Union (TGWU) declared they would come out
on strike in support of the miners. However, at the last moment, the
leaders of the NUR and TGWU changed their minds, and although the
miners went ahead with their strike they eventually had to give in
and accept lower wages. Smillie was devastated by these events and
in March 1921 resigned as president of the Miners'
Federation of Great Britain.
Smillie had tried several times to enter the House
of Commons. He was defeated at by-elections in 1895 (Glasgow)
and 1901 (N.E. Lanarkshire) and at General Elections held in 1906
(Paisley) and 1910 (Glasgow). Smillie was
finally elected MP for Morpeth in the 1923 General
Election. Smillie declined a post in the 1924 Labour Government
headed by Ramsay MacDonald.
As a result of poor health, Smillie was forced to resign his Morpeth
seat in 1929. Robert Smillie retired to Dumfries where he died on
16th February, 1940.
(1)
Fenner Brockway, Towards Tomorrow
(1977)
Travelling about the country I was
able to meet Socialist personalities beyond the inner circle of the
ILP leadership. I loved Robert Smillie, the Scottish miners' leader,
a friend in personal approach to everyone who belonged to the working
class, contemptuous of privilege and unearned wealth which he regarded
as robbery, convincing in his simple statement of Socialism - "the
best of life to those who give to life".
(2) Crystal
Eastman, Time
and Tide
(6th July, 1923)
It
is very unlikely that all the delegates to the recent British Labour
Party Conference agreed with Mr. Sidney Webb when he declared in his
presidential address that "Robert Owen and not Karl Marx was
the founder of British Socialism." The true believers might well
have replied, "There is no British Socialism. There is only Socialism
and it is international." But there was no spoken protest and
Mr. Webb's able address, with its insistence on political democracy
and a gradual
progress, with its emphasis on "brotherhood" and consequent
disavowal of the class war, was allowed to stand as the keynote utterance
of the conference. Sudden increase in power and responsibility have
had their usual effect; these Labour Party leaders seem to walk a
bit soberly today, as though they feared they might wake up some morning
and find the destinies of the Empire actually in their hands.
The
conference was considerably enlivened by the expulsion of four Scottish
members from Parliament, and it was enormously cheered and heartened
by the opportunity to welcome Robert Smillie as a Labour M.P. It is
the general opinion that Mr. Smillie will help to give unity and coherence
to His Majesty's Opposition. There is such confidence in his honesty
and intelligence on all sides, that he may even be able to reconcile
the emotional Scotch extremists and the
parliamentarians. It is felt that if Mr. Smillie believed certain
"economies" meant the death of little children he would
be quite capable of calling a man who urged them a murderer bur that
he would know how to do it in parliamentary language.
(3)
In
1920 the American poet, Claude McKay visited
England. He wrote about his experiences in A Long Way From Home
(1937)
The official who carried me away with
him was Robert Smillie, the president of the Miners' Federation. Crystal
Eastman had given me a note to him and he said a few wise words to
me about the necessity of coloured labour being organised, especially
in the vast European colonies, for the betterment of its own living
standard and to protect that of white organised labour.
Smillie was like a powerful ash which had forced itself up, coaxing
nourishment out of infertile soil, and towering over saplings and
shrubs. His face and voice were so terribly full of conviction that
in comparison the colleagues around him appeared theatrical. When
he stood forth to speak the audience was shot through with excitement,
and subdued. He compelled you to think along his line whether or not
you agreed with him. I remember his passionate speech for real democracy
in the Congress, advocating proportional representation.
(4)
Jennie Lee, My Life With Nye (1980)
I was Michael Lee's grandfather. As a schoolgirl I had often listened
enthralled to stories of the fearful odds pitted against Bob Smillie,
Keir Hardie, my grandfather and others like them when they were struggling
to build a Labour trade union and co-operative movement.
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