Keir Hardie

Bob Holman

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780745953540
• eBook ISBN: 9780745957302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Keir Hardie was a founder and the first parliamentary leader of the Labour Party. At the turn of the 19th century he was Labour's most famous face. But despite being voted Labour's 'Greatest Hero' at the 2008 Party Conference, in recent years his extraordinary story seems all but forgotten.

Born illegitimate just outside Glasgow in 1856, his life didn't start gently. Before the age of 10, he was the sole wage earner in his working class, atheist family. He never went to school but was self-taught, avidly reading books lent him by a kind young clergyman. This led to two major conversions in his life: first to Christianity, and then to socialism.

While earlier biographies have neglected the former, pointing out his experience of hardship as the source of his passion for social justice, the role of Christianity in Hardie's life was profound. It shaped his involvement in many of the greatest social changes of the time.

CHAPTER 1

NEVER A CHILD, 1856–78

Hardie’s Scotland, the Scotland of the nineteenth century, experienced a huge growth in industry, commerce, trade, and financial institutions, with resultant large incomes for many citizens. Yet, as Professor T. C. Smout states in his seminal study, there were losers as well as winners. He wrote, “The age of great industrial triumphs was an age of appalling social deprivation. I am astounded by the tolerance… of unspeakable urban squalor, compounded by drink abuse, bad housing, low wages, long hours and sham education.”¹ This too was Hardie’s Scotland.

Over the century, partly as a result of improvements in machinery, the numbers of jobs in farming and textiles declined by half. Some would have obtained employment in the growing coal-mining industry but found themselves subject to fluctuating demand and no job security. Smout continues that miners, in particular, “generally had no option but to live in company houses which were among the most inadequate and disgusting of all Scotland’s miserable housing stock”.²

For instance in 1892 in Auchenraith there were 492 people who lived in 42 single-room and 41 two-room houses, who had no wash houses and shared twelve doorless privies, an open sewer, and two drinking fountains. It was no wonder that miners and their families were exposed to dreadful diseases above the ground while the men suffered coal-related illnesses and severe accidents below. Hardie was a miner.

The hard labour and long hours were not compensated by adequate incomes. In 1867, unskilled workers (30 per cent of the total) received on average £20 10s. a year while one earner in three hundred (and not always earners but those whom Hardie called the “idle rich” whose money was derived from rents, shares, and dividends) received an average of £3,952 a year. Nor was there any state unemployment pay or pension. Those who suffered unemployment, sickness, or old age had no recourse but grudging charity or the workhouse.

At least Hardie was born in a Britain which had passed the Reform Acts of 1832. In fact, for all their fame, their outcomes in terms of extending the vote were small. In Scotland, the number of men with votes rose to a mere 65,000. The Scottish Reform Act of 1868 made a larger impact, with the vote granted to ratepaying male householders and £10-a-year lodgers in towns and to small owners and tenants paying a middling rent in the countryside. The larger electorate also led to greater local party activity in selecting candidates, winning support, and getting voters to polling stations. The victory of the Tories in the general election of 1874 was partly attributed to their improved local organization.

Welcome as it was, the extended franchise made little difference to the kinds of people who became MPs or the nature of political parties. MPs – who were unpaid and required money for electoral expenses – continued to be drawn from the aristocracy, very wealthy businessmen, and members of the professions, particularly lawyers. The number of working-class MPs was minimal and the few who were elected were paid by and so were dependent upon a political party. The two main parties (apart from Irish MPs), the Liberals and the Tories, continued to dominate politics and to rule in their own interests. Scotland had long been in the hands of the Liberals, who were seen as more sympathetic toward working people. In his early life, Hardie favoured them.

A HARD CHILDHOOD

Hardie was born on 15 August 1856, in a one-room house in Legbrannock, near Holytown in Lanarkshire, some ten miles from Glasgow. His mother, Mary Paterson, was a farm servant who lived with her mother Agnes. At the age of twenty-six, she had become pregnant by a miner, William Aitken, against whom she successfully pursued a paternity suit. She called the baby James Keir.

Aitken took no interest and probably did not, as the sheriff court had ordered, pay Mary £1 10s. for lying-in expenses and £6 a year. Mary continued to work in the fields. Grandmother Agnes looked after the child. She was a story teller and singer and Keir Hardie (as he became known) later spoke fondly of her. He could play in the fields and he always had a streak which looked back upon rural Britain with affection.

In 1859 Mary married a ship’s carpenter from Falkirk, David Hardie, in the Church of Scotland in Holytown on 21 August 1859. In time she was to have a further six sons and two daughters by him. David was a resolute and sensible man who always sought work and accepted Keir as his own son – except when he got drunk and called him “bastard”. They moved to Glasgow to seek work found in a Govan shipyard. Nonetheless, the growing family made life a financial struggle.

Mary was always keen that Keir should be educated. She probably taught him the basics, for she could certainly read. It may be that he attended a school for a very short period. There are references to a clergyman who gave him lessons. The boy responded with enthusiasm and would pick up discarded newspapers as his lesson books.

The Education Act (1872) which established compulsory education for five- to thirteen-year-olds came just too late for Keir Hardie. He started work aged eight, which is probably what he meant when he later said, “I am of the unfortunate class who never knew what it was to be a child.” Hamilton Fyfe cites Hardie as saying: “Under no circumstances, given freedom of choice, would I live that part of my life over again.”³ He was referring to his working childhood. From being a message boy in Glasgow he moved on to a printer’s and then a brass-fitting shop. The latter did not last, as his parents discovered that he would go unpaid for a year as part of his apprenticeship. Next he was in Thompsons Shipyards, heating up rivets for men to hammer in. The work was carried out at a height and, when the boy next to him fell to his death, Mary immediately withdrew Keir from the place.

Matters got worse. David Hardie suffered an accident which meant he could not work. By the time he recovered, a recession and shipyard strike had started in 1866. The family were forced to sell their meagre possessions and moved to one room in Partick. Keir was the breadwinner, with 3s. 6d. a week from a high-class baker’s with his job delivering bread and rolls. There followed an incident which engraved itself into Hardie’s being. It is best to use his words written many years later.

My hours were from 7am to 7.30pm. I was the eldest of a family of three and the brother next to me was down with fever, from which he never recovered, though his life dragged on for two years thereafter. As most of the neighbourhood had children, they feared coming into the house because of the danger of contagion, and my mother, who was very near her confinement, was in delicate health.

It was the last week of the year. Father had been away for two or three days in search of work. Towards the end of the week, having been up most of the night, I got to the shop fifteen minutes’ late and was told by the young lady in charge that if it occurred again I would be punished. I made no reply. I couldn’t. I felt like crying. Next morning the same thing happened – I could tell why, but that is neither here nor there. It was a very wet morning, and I reached the shop drenched to the skin, barefooted and hungry. There had not been a crust of bread in the house that morning.

But this was payday, and I was filled with hope. “You are wanted upstairs by the master,” said the girl behind the counter, and my heart almost stopped beating. Outside the dining room a servant bade me wait till “master had finished prayers” (he was much noted for his piety). At length the girl opened the door, and the sight of that room is fresh in my memory even as I write, nearly fifty years after. Round a great mahogany table sat the members of the family, with the father at the top. In front of him was a very wonderful looking coffee boiler, in the great glass bowl of which the coffee was bubbling. The table was loaded with dainties. 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 the future, I have decided to fine you a week’s wages. And now you may go!”

I wanted to speak and explain about my home, and I muttered out something to explain why I was late but the servant took me by the arm and led me downstairs. As I passed through the shop the girl in charge gave me a roll and said a kind word. I knew my mother was waiting for my wages. As the afternoon was drawing to a close I ventured home, and told her what had happened. It seemed to be the last blow. The roll was still under my vest but soaked with rain. That night the baby was born, and the sun rose on the 1st January, 1867, over a home in which there was neither fire nor food, though, fortunately, relief came before the day had reached its noon. But the memory of these early days abides with me, and makes me doubt the sincerity of those who make pretence in their prayers. For such things still abound in our midst.

The incident planted in Hardie a venomous scorn of hypocritical wealthy Christians. As an adult he became a Christian and his life was characterized by his love for Christianity and his dislike of many so-called Christians.

THE MINER

Later that year, David Hardie went back to sea, which was the only place he could obtain work, as a ship’s carpenter. The family moved to the small mining village of Newarthill. On the very day his father left, ten-year-old Keir started work in the pits owned by the Monkland Iron Company for a shilling a day. He worked from 6 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. six days a week plus four hours on Sunday. This did not count his three-mile walk to and from the pit. In winter, he hardly ever saw the sun. William Stewart, in a biography written for the Independent Labour Party six years after Hardie’s death, adds that at this time, although it may well have been later, “he began to attend Fraser’s night school at Holytown… There was no light provided in the school and pupils had to bring their own candles.”⁴ Here he learned the rudiments of grammar and syntax.

His job was that of “a trapper”, that is he operated the trap door that let air into the mine-shaft. Aged twelve, he was promoted to draw the pit ponies underground. Mining was dangerous enough. As many pit-owners cut costs by ignoring legal safety standards, which were rarely applied, it became increasingly threatening. Before long, Keir Hardie was involved in a pit accident. Again, it is best to write what he recorded after the event.

My pony was a little shaggy Highlander, appropriately named Donald – strong and obstinate, like the race among whom he had been reared. We were great friends and drank tea from the same tin flask, sip about… Donald and I were jogging along, when the voice of Rab Mair, the big, genial fireman, came reverberating out of the gloom, his little lamp shining like a star in the blackness: “Run into the dook and warn the men to come at once; the shank’s closin.” I did not stay on the order of my going. The shank closing! The shank is the shaft by which entrance and egress to the pit is obtained. It was the only outlet. Should it close in we were entombed, and what that might mean I did not care to think. In a very short time all the men were at the pit bottom, only to find that already they were too late. We were seventy fathoms from the daisies, and the weary rocks tired of hanging in mid-air seemed bent on settling down into some semblance of solidarity. For once in a way the drip of water could not be heard. The timber props were creaking and bursting all around us; while strong rocks were groaning and cracking and roaring as they were settling down. As man after man rushed to the bottom breathless and alarmed, they were met with the news that already the cage, by which men and material are taken to the surface, was “stuck in the shank”. The sides of the shaft had so far come together that the cage had no longer a free passage and was held fast some fathoms above us. We were prisoners.

I can recall every detail of the scene. The men gathered in groups, each with his little lamp on his bonnet, their blackened, serious faces discussing what should be done. The roaring and crackling, as if of artillery, went on overhead and gloom began to settle on every countenance. Some of the more susceptible were crying, and I remember two by themselves who were praying and crossing themselves. Rab Mair remained cool and strong, and did his best to keep up the spirits of his fellow-prisoners. By and by I began to feel sleepy, and made my way to the stables whither Donald had already gone. By this time it was evident the worst of the crisis was over; the noise overhead was subsiding and the drip of the water was again to be heard. But the shaft was closed. We were prisoners indeed. After cleaning Donald down, I gave him a feed of corn, put some hay in his manger, and rolling myself in this, kissed him, as was our wont, and then went to sleep. A boy of twelve will sleep when there is nothing to do, even if he is cooped in a trap. How long I slept I have no means of knowing. It was Rab Mair’s voice – swearing if the truth must be told – and some vigorous punches from his fist which brought me back to consciousness.

The engineman, on finding the cages stuck fast in the shaft, and hearing the signals from below, knew there was something wrong and raised the alarm. In a short time the news spread and soon the bulk of the people were at the pit, my mother among the rest. Volunteers were plentiful, and soon some brave fellows had been lowered by an improvised kettle into the shaft, where they soon discovered what was amiss. Cold chisels, picks and saws were requisitioned, and the imprisoned cages cut free and allowed to drop in pieces to the bottom after which the kettle – a bucket used by pit sinkers, and narrower than the cage – was used to bring the imprisoned men to the surface. But where was the trapper? Everyone had seen him in the bottom, and perhaps in the excitement of the moment no one would have missed him had there not been a mother there waiting for him. And so Rab Mair and two companions had to descend into the depths again and search. For a time their searching was in vain until Rab bethought him of Donald’s crib and there sure enough I was, sound asleep. Rab pretended to be angry – but he wasn’t. I think the reception on the top was the most trying part of the affair. At least, it was the only part where I cried.

The twelve-year-old had heard about pit accidents and now he had experienced one. Later he was to campaign strongly for effective legislation to be implemented to reduce their numbers. Trade unionism was not strong in this mine but he had witnessed the readiness of other miners to endanger themselves for the sake of colleagues. Not least, Keir Hardie never failed to identify people such as Rab Mair whose character and ability stood out.

The census of 1871 reveals that the family lived at 88 Durngaber Rows, Quarter Iron Works. It consisted of David Hardie (46), his wife Mary (38), James, that is Keir (14), Agnes (9), Alex (7), William (4) and David (2 months). Mary could not have envisaged in her wildest dreams that two of these boys (plus George, yet to be born) would become MPs.

When Keir was about seventeen, David Hardie, having returned home, found a job as a carpenter at the Quarter Iron Works. The family moved again and were housed in a colliers’ row with no sanitation and no running water. The Franco-Prussian War lessened competition from coalfields abroad and wages rose. The Hardie youngsters had boots and a second set of clothes. Then the enterprising Mary opened a shop in her house which undercut prices in the Ironmaster’s own store. David Hardie was ordered to shut it. Writers have sometimes overlooked that he too was a resolute and principled man: he refused and was sacked.

David and Mary had abandoned religion under the influence of the freethinker Charles Bradlaugh, whose writings they seemed to know, at least by report. But they had no objections to lessons being given to Keir by an evangelical clergyman, Dan Craig from Hamilton. Moreover, Mary encouraged him to attend an evening class at which he mastered shorthand. Keir’s daughter, Nan, later recorded that “he learnt to write shorthand, scratching the characters with the aid of his pit lamp on a slate blacked with smoke”.⁵

CHRISTIAN AND TRADE UNIONIST

David Hardie could be a hard drinker and Mary was determined that her children would not adopt the same vice. Much of Glasgow and beyond was gripped by a culture of heavy drinking. In response, the temperance movement came to the fore. Mary rejoiced when her eldest son joined the local branch, the Good Templars, and when he took the pledge at the age of seventeen. It was dominated by evangelical Christians...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Never a Child, 1856–78
• 2 Journalist and Trade Unionist, 1879–86
• 3 From Scottish Liberals to Scottish Labour, 1887–88
• 4 Keir Hardie MP, 1889–95
• 5 Fight with Lord Overtoun; Friendship with the TUC, 1895–1900
• 6 South Africa and South Wales; an MP again, 1900–1905
• 7 Socialist, Party Leader, Traveller, 1906–1909
• 8 Class War and World War, 1910–1915
• 9 The Man and His Legacy
• 10 Epilogue
• Sources and Bibliography
• References
• Index