Keir Hardie

The Making of a Socialist

Fred Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429826184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia judía

First published in 1978. This book is an essay in labour biography. Labour leaders of the nineteenth century are often enigmatic personalities, and James Keir Hardie is no exception. The main purpose of this study is to penetrate the heart of the enigma that is Kier Hardie. Why does he remain so puzzling? The author explores Hardie's childhood and his interest and involvement within the Labour Party. This title will be of interest to students of politics and history.

1 INFANT SENSIBILITIES

I

James Keir Hardie was born in the tiny hamlet of Legbrannock, in Lanarkshire, Scotland, on 15 August 1856. He was the illegitimate son of a Scottish farm servant, Mary Keir, and a miner, William Aitken. Thus were united, in the circumstances of his birth, the two spheres of mining and agriculture which were to influence so much of his political outlook in later life. He continued to live at Legbrannock until his mother married David Hardie, in 1859. His grandmother looked after him while his mother earned their livelihood by working long hours on the local farms.

Legbrannock lay, in 1856 and for some years to come, on the margin of heavy industry. It was situated at one corner of a triangle formed by the towns of Coatbridge, Airdrie and Holytown. Although the sides of this triangle were only three miles long, it contained within its area no fewer than sixty-six coal-mines, many of them owned by iron-smelting companies, of which the largest was that of the Bairds, whose Gartsherrie works at Coatbridge were the second largest iron works in the world. Within this triangle, known as ‘The Monklands’, lay the heartland of Scottish heavy industry, whose growth, since 1830, had been relentless. Within a generation, its rural character had been obliterated. Coatbridge had mushroomed from a tiny village into a great company town. Immigrants, many of them from Ireland, had poured in to work in the new coal-mines and smelting furnaces. Black smoke by day and the lurid glow of the furnaces by night hung over the whole district, giving it a hellish appearance which visitors often commented on.¹

To the east of Holytown and Legbrannock, however, the scene gradually changed. Coal-mines became smaller and more scattered, standing isolated among the fields and farmhouses of the rich, mixed farming countryside of the upper Clyde. Across the river stood the fashionable burgh of Hamilton, seat of an ancient line of dukes. In the 1850s and 1860s, it had not yet acquired the ring of large collieries that were to destroy its character as a ducal seat. Further up river stood New Lanark, where Robert Owen had dreamed of reuniting agricultural and industrial life in his famous model village.

It is important to bear constantly in mind that Keir Hardie’s childhood was thus spent in intimate contact with Scottish rural life as well as with heavy industry. The land question was to come to have a powerful fascination for him and he would dream, like Owen, of a socialist Utopia in which the hell of modern industry would have given way to pastoral peace and innocence. Too often, biographers have dwelt only on his later memories of urban life, which were usually unpleasant, and have failed to pay sufficient attention to his recollections of Arcadia. Yet his village experiences may have played an important part in shaping his character and outlook by providing a nostalgic escape world to set against his urban and industrial memories in later life.

On 22 April 1859, Mary Keir married David Hardie, a thirty-four-year-old ship’s carpenter from Carron in Stirlingshire. They left Legbrannock and settled first in the nearby village of Eastfield, where Mary Hardie bore him a son in 1860.² At some time between 1860 and 1862, David Hardie decided to seek employment in the shipbuilding yards of Govan, in Renfrewshire, where Mary Hardie’s third child, a daughter, was born in the latter year. Time-served craftsmen like David Hardie often formed an aristocracy of labour in Victorian Britain. They could hope to earn higher wages than unskilled labourers and had the chance of achieving some respectability. Such good fortune, however, eluded the Hardies. Three more pregnancies followed in quick succession by 1866 and, at the very time when David Hardie’s services as breadwinner were most needed, he struck a period of very bad luck. A serious accident kept him off work for months. Mary Hardie was forced to sell the furniture to make ends meet and eventually they had to move across the river to the poorer district of Partick, where they lodged in a back room in a mean street. Then, shortly after David Hardie had recovered his health and returned to work, the shipyards were stopped by a prolonged strike in 1866. During these long periods of enforced idleness, David Hardie became moody and frustrated. He took to drink, and there were frequently violent quarrels between him and Mary, in which he reproached her with ‘the bastard’.³

Mary Hardie, who was a hard-working, striving countrywoman,⁴ had hoped for better things than this for her son James from the marriage. She had sent him to school, but that had lasted only a few months, as there was soon no money to pay the fees. She continued to encourage him to develop the skill he acquired in reading. His natural intelligence enabled him to do so by studying the captions of eye-catching advertisements in the window of Thomas Lipton’s grocery shops. Later, he was able to study sheets of newsprint picked up in the streets. His mother had also tried to get him apprenticed to a trade, by means of which he could have some hope of a decent start in life. He began work in a brass finishing shop, but had to leave almost immediately when it was discovered that he would have to serve the first year of his apprenticeship without wages. By this time, the family’s deepening poverty required him, at the age of eight, to contribute to its breadwinning. He drifted through a series of casual jobs. The first was in the shipyards, working as a rivet-heater for the skilled platers, high up on the hulls of the iron ships. The boy next to him fell to his death and Mary Hardie took James away.

During the shipyard strike of 1866, he worked as delivery boy for a baker. His mother was then in an advanced stage of pregnancy and a younger brother was down with fever. David Hardie rose very early each day to wander the city in search of work and young James had to help his mother nurse the sick child and prepare breakfast before setting out for his work at the shop, where his attendance was required by six a.m. Not surprisingly, he was often late and his irritated employer finally warned him that another offence would mean dismissal. Next morning he arrived fifteen minutes late, breakfastless and drenched with rain. The shop assistant told him the master wanted to see him. Upstairs, he was kept waiting outside the master’s dining-room until prayers were finished, then ushered into a room in which the breakfast table was laden with dainties. Hardie often recalled the scene in later life with bitter reproaches on those who professed Christianity while intensifying the sufferings of the poor:

My master looked at me over his glasses and said in quite a pleasant tone of voice: ‘Boy, this is the second morning you have been late, and my customers leave me if they are kept waiting for their hot breakfast rolls. I therefore dismiss you, and, to make you more careful in future, I have decided to fine you a week’s wages’.⁵

Biographers have retailed faithfully these bitter memories of Hardie’s city childhood. There can be no doubt about the scars they left on his later life, yet they have perhaps been given an undue prominence. Hardie also set down pleasant recollections of his childhood. Significantly, such early memories are always connected with rural life, the escape from city and mine. The earliest of these is, perhaps, a children’s story which Hardie wrote for publication in his paper, the Miner, in 1887. The story is a conventional melodrama, such as might be found in many popular papers of a Christian moral tone at that time, but there can be no doubt of the autobiographical character of some of its contents. The hero is abducted and then abandoned by a wicked uncle in order to prevent him inheriting his father’s estate. This infant has the name James. He is found and fostered by a country couple. The foster-mother is loving and loyal, but the foster-father, a miner, is given to drink and comes to a horrible end in a pit accident. Misfortune is heaped upon misfortune. The child suffers a second abduction, this time to California. At last, after discovering his true identity, he returns to claim his fortune and just in time to comfort his loyal foster-mother on her death-bed. The most lively part of the tale is Hardie’s description of the childhood of the hero in the village of his foster parents, where he becomes known by the nickname, ‘Wee Jamie Keekie’. The origins of this alliteration on his own childhood name, Jamie Keir, are explained in the following nostalgic manner:

Wee Jamie Keekie was everybody’s wean [child]. There were few houses Righa’ that Jamie had not made his way into, and not into the houses only, but somehow he managed to get into the hearts of the people as well. Whenever a ‘tap, tapping’ was heard at the door of a house, the following colloloquy was always sure to follow:—

‘Wha’s that?’

‘Wee Jamie Keekie wantin’ in, for his feet’s caul’ an’ his shin’s din’ [feet are cold and his shoes are worn out].

And then the door would be opened and the little fellow admitted. Though the door stood wide open, and the day was the hottest in summer, the formula had to be gone through. Little wonder he was a favourite. When he turned up his round laughing face, and looked with his clear blue eyes that seemed, young as he was, to be wells of liquid light, and said in his own simple, childish way — ‘Wee Jamie Keekie, let me in, my feet’s caul’ an’ my shin’s din’.⁶

It is impossible to doubt the autobiographical quality of this recollection of an idyllic childhood and it may refer to the short period which the Hardies spent at Eastfield after their marriage and before moving to Govan. We shall have to note presently the bearing of the tale on the question of Hardie’s view of his own illegitimacy, but for the moment what needs to be stressed is that Hardie could recall village life as a kind of innocence of early childhood, before the fall into the Glasgow years of the drinking step-father and the master who treated him with cold indifference. Hardie did not experience village life as, say, Joseph Arch knew it, an exploited child-worker, drudging to augment the family income. For Hardie, the countryside was always to be an escape from the city of dreadful night. The contrast in his own childhood helps to explain his penchant in adult life for rural Utopias such as farm colonies for the unemployed and for the strong ‘Back to the Land’ strain in his socialism. It was with a veiled autobiographical reference that he could write in 1893:

The divorce of the worker from the forces of Nature is to me a most lamentable thing. Imagine the hapless lot of the poor child, born and reared in the working-class quarters of a city, surrounded by hard, cold and unsympathetic stone walls, no green fields, no summer birds or music of brooks, no communication with the silent, yet all powerful force of Nature. How can healthy life, physical or moral, be expected under such conditions?⁷

II

The contrast between the life of heavy industry and that of agriculture continued to run, like dark and bright threads, through the texture of Hardie’s experience in his teens. In 1867, his parents left Glasgow and returned to the district of James’s birth on the edge of the Monklands. David Hardie had decided to resume his old occupation at sea, no doubt for him the quickest way of restoring the family’s fortunes. Mary Hardie was perhaps reassured to be back beside her mother ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Infant Sensibilities
• 2 The Independent Collier
• 3 ‘Black Diamonds’
• 4 Crisis and Conversion
• 5 The Scottish Labour Party
• 6 From West Ham to Bradford: The Foundation of the ILP
• 7 Member for the Unemployed
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Hardie’s Illegitimacy
• Appendix 2: The Sons of Labour
• Bibliography
• Index