George Nicoll Barnes and William Adamson were just two of several chairmen of the PLP prior to 1922, but are significant as they both fought general elections. Barnes took up the position in 1910. He stayed in office for only a year, though long enough to fight two general elections, before resigning due to ill health in the context of party indiscipline. Adamson’s tenure, meanwhile, lasted from 1917 to 1921 following the chairmanships of MacDonald and Henderson (which will be considered in subsequent chapters), and fought the 1918 general election. William W. J. Knox argues that Barnes and Adamson became leaders due to fortunate circumstances rather than their own leadership abilities, and produced relatively unremarkable legacies for the party. Although they made modest parliamentary gains at their respective elections, more was expected of them given the size of the party’s base.
• • •
In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Malvolio, in a moment of self-delusion, remarks: ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.’96 In the case of George Barnes and William Adamson, it is tempting to amend the quotation to read: ‘Some are born mediocre, some achieve mediocrity, and some have mediocrity thrust upon them.’ Both men became chairmen of the PLP by default rather than for any obvious, particular talent for party politics or any ability to inspire those around them. Their rise to prominence could only have occurred in a political party in which the concept of leadership was barely developed. Yet this verdict may be a little hasty and unfair. Barnes served with distinction in the coalition government of Lloyd George, was a signatory to the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty, and used his influence to get an agreement among all parties at the talks to set up a commission for world labour – this evolved into the International Labour Office (ILO). Adamson served as leader for nearly four years – longer than any other trade unionist – and was the first Labour Leader of the Opposition in Parliament. As leader of the Fife miners, he held out against the challenge of the Communist Party throughout the 1920s, and was Secretary of State for Scotland on two occasions. Thus, while distinctly uncharismatic politicians, their durability suggests that they were perhaps more politically astute than they have been given credit for. Moreover, their lack of education and the tough circumstances in which they grew up, only serve to remind us how remarkable their achievements were.
Barnes was the older of the two men by four years. He was born in Lochee, near Dundee, in 1859 – the son of a skilled engineer and mill manager from England, who had strong religious convictions and was a Tory. When Barnes was eight, the family moved to England, finally settling down in Middlesex, where George attended Enfield Highway Church School for four years, walking 2 miles to get there. In spite of his petit bourgeois background, George was sent out to labour at the age of eleven in a factory. From there, he found work as a clerk for 7s. a week, but, as the job had no promise of anything better, Barnes was apprenticed, like his father, to the engineering trade. His father was a seminal influence and Barnes’s religious convictions, although, ultimately, not his politics, were shaped by him. As he recalled in his autobiography, his father would be ‘arguing theology one night and hammering Gladstone the next’.97
There was very little in his early life to suggest he would reach Cabinet rank in the wartime coalition government. He said that during his apprenticeship he did not do ‘study[ing] of any kind’, however, he did read ‘a lot’ (‘without method or guidance’) and showed an interest in ‘public affairs’.98 It seems as if his interest in politics was sparked by attending hustings during the 1874 general election, as he listened to one of the Liberal candidates make a speech in Dundee that left him ‘in open-eyed wonder’.99 Having moved from firm to firm, district to district, during his apprenticeship years, Barnes found work in Barrow-in-Furness for two years, before moving to London – a move that was to leave an indelible mark on his political outlook.
Barnes found himself without a job during the slump in 1879, ‘facing the winter as one of London’s unemployed’.100 After ten weeks out of work in a pre-welfare society, he found poorly paid employment in an engineering shop in Shoreditch before moving to the Isle of Dogs and, then, finally settling in Fulham, where he got married and began to take an active interest in trade unionism. The question of unemployment was something he continued to take an interest in, arguing that it was essentially the consequence of under-consumption and could only be remedied when the ‘great mass of the people … had longer wages, shorter hours of work, and were in a position to buy back some of those goods they were constantly producing in ever-increasing quantities’.101
Adamson, on the other hand, was from a decidedly working-class background. His father was a miner and he was brought up in a little mining village, Halbeath, near Dunfermline, Fife. Like Barnes, he received an elementary education in a Dame school run by a mining engineer’s wife. At the age of eleven, Adamson’s father died, and, due to family poverty, he was forced to enter the mines as a pit-boy. At school, he had only picked up the ‘rudiments’ of literacy; however, he extended this by reading in his spare time, sometimes well into the early hours of the morning. His desire for self-improvement was mirrored in the homes of hundreds of young artisans in Scotland in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a young miner, Adamson was a member of the village Mutual Improvement Society, where he came under the influence of religion, temperance and the poetry of Robert Burns. These early formative religious, moral and literary influences remained with him all his life: he was deeply proud of his Baptist Church connection; a total abstainer, who in later years founded the Dunfermline Temperance Council; and, as an ardent student and admirer of Scotland’s national bard, he was much sought-after for Burns festival orations.102
Barnes’s formative steps into public life were through the trade union movement. Barnes had become an active member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), as well as the cooperative movement, and was a founder member of the ILP in 1893. He was associated with figures on the left in London and had a reputation as a ‘militant and energetic “new” unionist’.103 Although in later life he played down his early left-wing activism, claiming himself at the time to have been a moderate, he was involved in the unsuccessful campaign to elect Tom Mann of the Marxist SDF in 1891 as general secretary of the ASE. Furthermore, in 1910, Barnes wrote a pamphlet for the ILP on Marxism, stating that much of the progress of the labour movement in Britain towards unity was ‘due largely to Karl Marx’.104 However, as far as he was concerned, New Unionism was not intended to foment revolution, but rather for ‘gingering up the old unionism’ for ‘parliamentary purposes’.105
His moderateness reflected the craft mentality of the engineers who elected him, at the age of thirty-seven, general secretary of the ASE in 1896, after four years as assistant secretary. The society was the most powerful and wealthy trade union in Britain at the time, but barely was the appointment of Barnes ratified when it was plunged into turmoil by the great lockout of 1897 – an event that threatened the union’s very survival. On the surface, the dispute with the employers was over demands for an eight-hour day, but, as Barnes himself recognised, it was ‘really the question of machines and workshop management’.106 The key factor in the dispute was the rights and prerogatives of management to manage.
The experience of the lockout was a particularly bruising one for Barnes, and it was to have a lasting influence on his views on industrial relations. He became convinced of the Liberal concept of essential harmony between capital and labour and, as such, advocated closer ties between bosses and workers through shop-floor representation on boards of directors. At the same time, he condemned sectional ‘internecine strikes’, the ability of a minority of ‘woolly headed and truculent’ workers ‘to foment trouble’, and the greed of some employers.107 He saw greater scope for the state to intervene in industrial disputes and to introduce legislation that would eliminate strikes altogether, saying: ‘We need not strike at all, except through the ballot box.’108
This shift to the centre ground was perhaps a reflection of the difficulties Barnes faced in running the ASE during a period in which employers had the upper hand. The defeat in 1897 had allowed capital to impose a humiliating and highly restrictive set of terms on the ASE. In honouring them, the NEC came into conflict with the rank and file over such issues as the premium bonus system. Matters came to a head in the north-east of England in 1908 over the refusal of the local branches to accept the executive’s policies and call off their strike. Failing to convince or bully the district officials into compliance saw Barnes resign as general secretary. In his resignation statement, he said that ‘there had been the development of an undemocratic feeling in the trade unions which worked out in the direction of mistrust of officials’.
Adamson’s introduction to trade unionism was equally traumatic. In the early 1870s, there was an upsurge in mining trade unionism in Scotland after many years of inactivity. In June 1870, the eight-hour day was won by Fife miners and, nearly a year later, in February 1871, the Fife, Clackmannan and Kinross Miners’ Association (FCKMA) was formed. The employers hit back after a fourteen-week lockout in 1877 ended in victory for the miners. By 1880, nearly all the county and local mining unions had collapsed or been driven underground. Adamson went through these stirring and difficult times as a young man in his twenties and, as with Barnes, they had a lasting impact on his attitudes towards employer–employee relations.
He rose through the mining ranks, from Halbeath delegate to vice-president in 1894, then, in 1908, to general secretary of the FCKMA. Adamson was the epitome of the Labourist miner: a firm, unyielding trade unionist, favouring conciliation and arbitration, and seeing strikes as a last resort, ‘only after contracts had been duly fulfilled’. As with Barnes, he was also a strong advocate of using parliamentary democracy to improve the living standards of mining communities, as well as conditions of work.
Although both had their political baptism as Liberals, their stories provide for the construction of a political narrative of disillusionment, which was articulated in the journey of the organised working class from the party of Gladstone to independent Labour representation. It was felt that the Liberals, when in office, had turned against their core Lib–Lab support. The engineering lockout of 1897, the failure to introduce an eight-hour day for miners, the unwillingness to put up working men as parliamentary candidates through social snobbery, and the legal assaults on the new unions during the 1890s all alienated the organised working class. But this did not denote an ideological break with Gladstonian Liberalism. When Barnes was invited to stand for Labour in Dundee in 1902, he declared that ‘he was prepared to accept only on the condition that he was adopted by the Liberals. If there was a Liberal in the field he would not stand.’109 One central tenet of Gladstonian Liberalism – anti-landlordism – was deeply embedded in Barnes’s political philosophy, with him describing the hereditary House of Lords as ‘an absolutely ridiculous thing, an insult to the intelligence of the people of this country’.110
The continuing influence of Liberal radicalism was reflected in the general election campaigns of the 1900s. During the 1906 general election, the pact agreed between Labour secretary, Ramsay MacDonald, and the Liberal Chief Whip, Herbert Gladstone, did not operate in Scotland, owing to the political hegemony of the Liberals north of the border. The LRC put up four candidates, of whom two were successful: Barnes in Glasgow Blackfriars (Gorbals from 1918) and Alex Wilkie, of the Shipwrights Association, in Dundee. The Scottish Workers’ Parliamentary Election Committee put up a further five candidates, but they were all defeated. Throughout his campaign, Wilkie emphasised his Liberal sympathies and, in his election manifesto, also managed to avoid using the word ‘Labour’.111 When Adamson stood as Labour candidate for West Fife in 1910, the local Liberal newspaper praised him as a ‘fine upholder of Liberal principles’.112
It was clear that the Labour Party was, prior to 1918, little more than a trade union pressure group in parliament.113 It was also manifestly far from being a socialist party. As the party’s historian G. D. H. Cole stated: ‘Right up to 1914, the Labour Party neither stood, nor professed to stand, for socialism. There were … socialists in its ranks … But [also] in its ranks were quite a number who neither were, nor called themselves, socialists; and behind these men were the trade unions.’114
Indeed, the vast majority of the Labour MPs elected in 1906 were trade union leaders, who combined their union work with their parliamentary duties – some had to, since MPs did not receive a salary until 1911. Adamson carried on into the 1930s, while Barnes was convinced that if ‘Labour representation is to be effective, Labour representatives should give up trade union work and devote themselves to Parliament entirely’.115
The fact that most of the Labour MPs were not wholly dependent on politics for their livelihoods or careers allowed a great deal of scope for independent thought and action. Indeed, local constituency parties had little control over the views of candidates, and they could select whomever they chose, as long as he had the financial backing of an affiliated organisation.116 Barnes recognised this problem, saying that we ‘were loose in our discipline … and pretty difficult to manage and pretty evenly divided … this weakened us as a team’.117 When he became chairman of the PLP in February 1910, through the rotational system then in place and MacDonald’s unavailability for personal reasons, the issue of party discipline came to the fore.
MacDonald, who had cultivated the Liberal Party and had engineered the pact that brought a measure of electoral success in 1906, was keen that nothing should be done to endanger that relationship. The evidence that cooperation with the Liberal Party was crucial to success was overwhelming. Where there was a straight fight between a Labour and Liberal candidate, the former was normally defeated. In 1906, in twenty-four constituencies in which there was a straight contest, Labour lost – and, in four of them, Labour came bottom of the poll. It was clear that if any headway were to be made, the Liberals had to be kept onside.
However, shortly after the first general election of January 1910, a by-election was called at Swansea, which, under the terms of the electoral pact, should have meant that Labour step aside and give the Liberals a free run at the Tories. However, Ben Tillett, leader of the dockers’ union and author of a pamphlet highly critical of Labour in Parliament,118 threw his hat into the ring as an independent socialist candidate with the support of local ILP branches. Although Tillett had little chance of winning the seat, the fear was that he would split the vote and allow the Tories in. As it turned out, he came third, while the Labour leadership urged the Swansea voters to elect the Liberal candidate.
It was this kind of ill discipline that had caused Barnes to resign as general secretary of the ASE in 1908, but he continued as chairman of the PLP through the general elections of 1910. The performance of the party was hardly inspiring. It put up seventy-eight candidates in the January election and won forty seats. In December, spreading resources in a more concentrated manner, it fielded fifty-six candidates, but only increased the number of MPs to forty-two; indeed, the party’s share of the vote had decreased by 0.2 per cent. This was highly disappointing, particularly as trade union membership stood at 2,565,000 in 1910.119
As reflected in Tillett’s intervention at Swansea in 1910, there was a growing unease among some of the more left-wing members of the party over the party’s direction. Criticism had come from within the ASE over the performance of the Labour MPs elected in 1906. One member wrote that ‘the list of what George Barnes and Charles Duncan had done in the House since 1906 could be inscribed on the side of a threepenny piece’.120 That criticism became louder when one of the party heavyweights, David Shackleton MP, at the invitation of Winston Churchill, left in 1910 to join the civil service as a special advisor to the Liberal government on labour issues. Many members were asking the question: what did the party stand for and whom did it represent?
By February 1911, Barnes had had enough and, on the grounds of ill health, resigned as chairman to be replaced by Ramsay MacDonald. However, the split within the party intensified during the First World War.
In the 1890s, Barnes had been a member of the International Crusade of Peace and had said at one of its meetings that ‘most wars … could have been avoided if there had been … enlightened public opinion and a smaller number of men trained in the art of war’.121 However, when Britain and her Allies declared war on Germany in August 1914, Barnes, as well as Adamson, was as jingoistic as Ben Tillett or H. M. Hyndman in their opposition to what they saw as Prussian militarism. Such was Barnes’s enthusiasm for war that, before the introduction of conscription, he took part in recruiting drives. In his autobiography, he recalled speaking from a cart with the Marquis of Bath in the west of England and on large platforms in Scotland with Lord Curzon.122
With the fall of Asquith in 1916, Barnes was invited, along with other Labour leaders including Arthur Henderson, to join Lloyd George’s coalition as Minister of Pensions. Barnes had a distinguished record in fighting for the introduction of old-age pensions in 1908; indeed, his crusade led to the saying that Barnes and pensions were inseparable.123 While in wartime government, he improved ‘both the level and system of administration of service pensions’.124 His big moment came in 1917, when Arthur Henderson resigned and Barnes replaced him in the War Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio.
In accepting the ministerial role and becoming embedded in the coalition government, Barnes was increasingly the subject of criticism from inside a party that was beginning to move away from uncritical support for the war effort. By 1917, it was claimed in Scotland that: ‘The strength of hostility to militarism … may be gathered from the fact that the war party is a discredited minority in nearly all the trades and labour councils north of the Tweed.’125 The change in mood was also reflected in the party’s dissatisfaction with the speed and direction of the government in reaching a peace settlement with Germany.126 In 1917, the Labour Party held a conference to discuss whether it should participate with other socialists of various national and political backgrounds, including the German Social Democrats, in a peace conference to be held in Stockholm to bring an end to hostilities and show the way to permanent world peace. Barnes opposed the idea of a negotiated peace, saying: ‘I believe that the only way of ending this war is the way in which our brave boys at the front are trying to end it.’127 Government hostility to the proposed conference ensured that it came to nothing, but the Labour delegates endorsed it in spite of Barnes’s opposition. However, his opposition to the peace conference may also have been influenced by personal factors. Barnes’s son, a second lieutentant in the Seaforth Highlanders, was killed in action in October 1915, aged twenty-five.128
It was increasingly obvious that Barnes was completely at odds with the mood of the Labour Party, but he repeatedly rejected calls to resign from the coalition, dismissing his critics as ‘simple and excitable adherents and camp followers’.129 As far as he was concerned, he had been mandated to serve as Labour’s representative in the Cabinet until a peace treaty was signed. He was determined to see it through, even resigning from the party and fighting the 1918 general election as one of four coalition Labour candidates, comfortably defeating the official Labour candidate for Glasgow Gorbals – the Marxist school teacher and anti-war protestor John McLean, who Barnes described as an ‘agent for Russian Soviet power’ and someone who ‘shared the … Soviet hatred of our parliamentary institutions’.130 His patriotism was rewarded, and in 1920 he was made a member of the Order of Companions of Honour.131 The order was founded in 1917 by George V and consists of the monarch plus sixty-five ordinary members.
Recognition by the establishment pushed Barnes further to the right of the Labour Party and his views on the class struggle were clearly unwelcome on Red Clydeside, the centre of the more radical ILP. According to Barnes, ‘class war, direct action, revolutionary propaganda’ were clearly unnecessary in a country ‘in which the humble and haughty have equal right of speech and vote’.132 In spite of returning to the party fold after Versailles, the local Gorbals Labour Party refused to endorse his candidacy for the 1922 general election. Indeed, such was the opposition to Barnes in Glasgow that, when he was about to receive the freedom of the city, cries of ‘traitor’ rang out from some of the audience.133
After this rejection, he retired from public life in Britain, devoting himself to the ILO134 – which he, as British Labour’s only representative, had fought for at the 1919 Paris peace talks – and the League of Nations – whose first assembly, in 1920, he had attended as one of three British delegates. His one major regret, he claimed, was that he ‘wish[ed] we had done more to have brought the Kaiser and other chief warmongers to trial, and if found guilty to have hanged them out of hand’.135
Adamson had a much lower profile during the war years. He was as implacably opposed to Prussianism as Barnes and was ‘heart and soul for a vigorous prosecution of the war, less an inconclusive peace occur and leave the power and menace of the Prussian military caste intact’.136 However, he did not succumb to the win-at-all-costs mentality of Barnes, voting against the second reading of the Military Service Bill in January 1916,137 which sought to introduce conscription. Like Barnes, he too had lost a son in the conflict.
In spite of his pro-war stance, Adamson did not share in the general opprobrium of those Labour politicians who had supported Lloyd George’s coalition government. After the 1918 general election, Labour became the official opposition in Parliament, and Adamson was unanimously elected as party leader – a move that had the support of the press. The Times said of him: ‘In training and outlook he is the antithesis of his predecessor, Mr Asquith. Mr Adamson has little scholarship, and no dialectic, but he is as shrewd as he is sincere.’138 The party itself was less enthusiastic. As Beatrice Webb said of him: ‘He is most decidedly not a leader, not even like [Arthur] Henderson, a manager of men.’139 Later, Labour MP for Jarrow, Ellen Wilkinson, criticised him as being ‘unfit’ for the post of Scottish Secretary, and ‘useless’ in the House of Commons.140 Although his obvious working-class origins, his awkwardness in manners, and his slowness and deliberateness in speech were calculated to arouse, in intellectuals like the Webbs, a sense of derision, Adamson’s term of leadership was far from disastrous for the future of the party: his leadership was competent if rather uninspiring and undynamic. He was a safe pair of hands – a man unlikely to upset his colleagues or country. Emanuel Shinwell said of his selection as leader that it ‘was motivated by a desire to have a chairman who would create the minimum of trouble, so the movement got the results it deserved’.141
The 1918 general election saw Labour put up 361 candidates, but the outcome was below expectation, as only sixty-one (including four Labour MPs who stood as coalition candidates) were returned to Westminster. The main reason for Labour’s lack of success was that the election was fought on the old restricted franchise; it would take until 1922 for the electoral reforms of 1918 to massively impact upon the size of the electorate, doubling the number of voters from 10,434,000 to 20,874,000. It also faced the daunting task of challenging the charismatic wartime premier Lloyd George, whose slogans of ‘hang the Kaiser’ and ‘a land fit for heroes’ powerfully resonated with the public imagination. In spite of these political difficulties, Labour increased its share of the total vote from 7.1 per cent in 1910 to 21.5 per cent in 1918 – an increase of 14.4 per cent. The party now had the support of nearly 2,250,000 voters – an outcome that made Adamson, if measured by election results, the most successful leader in the history of the Labour Party.142 However, as it stood, Labour remained a mainly northern trade union pressure group in Parliament. Twenty-five of the newly elected MPs were from the Miners’ Federation alone, and ‘all but eight of the remainder were union nominees’.143 Added to this, most of Labour’s political heavyweights had lost their seats in the election, including Henderson, Frederick Jowett and MacDonald.
The expansion of the electorate was in proportion to Labour’s ambition for a share of real power. But to achieve this, it was obvious that a more dynamic and charismatic leader in the age of communication was needed. Thus, a short illness in 1921 was the pretext for Adamson to step down from leadership to be replaced in the immediate term by another trade unionist, J. R. Clynes, who led the party into the 1922 election. The outcome saw Labour win 142 seats to the Liberal Party’s sixty-two, and a whole raft of new of faces sat on the cross benches, many of them non-trade unionists. Ramsay MacDonald’s election as leader reflected the new social composition of the PLP and, under his leadership, Labour began to prepare for government.
In some ways, his loss of leadership of the party was fortuitous for Adamson as it allowed him space to concentrate on trade union affairs. The FCKMA in the early 1920s was in a state of disarray, and conflict and tension continued throughout the decade and for most of the 1930s. The main reason why the tense situation developed was the fact that the old conservative mining leaders, like Adamson, had become increasingly detached from a rank-and-file that had been radicalised during the war years and was moving in a left-wing direction. The lengthy struggle between the radical and communist left and the old guard for control was a tortuous one and is told in all its byzantine detail elsewhere,144 however, his involvement did major damage to his reputation both at the time and since. He was shown to be high-handed, duplicitous and undemocratic.
While Adamson had been involved throughout the ’20s in the power struggles within the FCKMA, two minority Labour governments had taken office, and in both he served as Secretary of State for Scotland. His time at the Scottish Office was undistinguished, Adamson preferring to concentrate on the civic side of the post (attending freedom ceremonies and social occasions) rather than engaging with the business of policy formation, which he left to his under-secretary, the very able Tom Johnston.145 However, he came out in favour of Scottish devolution. In 1924, when Labour MP George Buchanan introduced a private members’ bill to establish a single-chamber assembly for dealing exclusively with Scottish issues, Adamson expressed his approval of the idea of Scottish self-government within a federal UK.146 Although Buchanan’s bill was talked out by the Tories at its second reading, Adamson’s intervention showed that he was clearly proud of his Scottish ancestry. On behalf of the Scottish Home Rule Association, he had delivered an oration on the anniversary of the birth of the medieval Scottish patriot William Wallace at Elderslie, Renfrewshire, in 1924, in which he said that he looked ‘forward with confidence to the time when Scottish legislation [will] be enacted by Scotsmen in a Scottish Assembly’.147
His second stint as Secretary of State for Scotland was a more traumatic experience. In December 1929, Adamson was knocked down by a bus crossing Southampton Row but, in spite of the fact that he suffered cuts and bruises and his clothes were torn to shreds, he was still able to take his place in the Commons that afternoon.148 The experience proved minor compared to the economic storm that was brewing in the western world.
Mass unemployment and economic depression following the Wall Street Crash in 1929 blew the minority Labour government off course and created a fiscal crisis. MacDonald’s reaction was to form the National Government with the Liberals and the Tories, committed to swingeing cuts in public expenditure. The decision split the Labour Party. Adamson, along with the majority of Labour MPs, opposed the cuts, saying: ‘I’ve never voted against the poor yet and I can’t now.’149 The fall of the Labour government in 1931 was followed by a general election in which Adamson lost his West Fife seat to the Unionist candidate, but only through the intervention of the communist candidate Willie Gallacher, who polled 7,000 votes. He was defeated again four years later by the ‘Rids’ (Reds), when Gallacher narrowly triumphed by 593 votes after a bitterly fought election. The defeat was evidence of the strong feelings against him in the mining communities of Fife. Adamson died shortly after this, followed four years later by Barnes.
Adamson and Barnes were primarily in the mould of late nineteenth-century conservative trade union leaders; indeed, as one political commentator said of the former, ‘He has little of the revolutionary in his nature’150 – a judgement endorsed by his Tory Lord Advocate, who said he ‘found him far from revolutionary. He was a real canny Scot.’151 Their political and industrial attitudes were formed during the high-water mark of Gladstonian Liberalism and this exercised a lasting impact on them, although they ultimately rejected the Liberal Party.
However, their rejection was organisationally motivated rather than ideologically. They remained committed to an older set of values, based on notions of respectability, which included self-help, sobriety and thrift. They were the living embodiment of the iconic figure of nineteenth-century Scottish literature: the ‘lad o’ pairts’. Barnes said that his purpose in writing his autobiography was ‘to give encouragement to some who, born like men in humble circumstances, aspire to step a little aside from the beaten track’.152 These values were quickly seen as outdated in the socially polarised decades of the ’20s and ’30s, and served to alienate them from their union members and constituents. Unfortunately for these former frock-coated Labour aristocrats, the masses had become classes.
However, to men like Adamson and Barnes, progress was not measured by the level of class consciousness achieved by the working class – indeed, they tended to speak out against class-based politics – rather it was to be found in the improving material conditions of life and thus the creation of the basis for the possibility of triumphing over adversity. As Barnes put it:
I have seen freedom broadening down to the class in which I was born … and which I have tried to serve. When I was young, working people were uneducated and unenfranchised. They were poor and dependent and their working days were banded by age and want without concern by the state, which their labour had enriched. Now they have at least a modicum of education, they are politically, as well as industrially, organised and, although there is still unemployment and … fear of want, these grim problems are being tackled with greater knowledge and more humane feeling than ever before.153
As political leaders, they were unsuccessful in the tests of leadership: their performances at general elections were not particularly impressive; they were uninspiring; they failed to manage their party; and they were leaders purely by default.
96 For a similar adaption of Shakespeare, see Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
97 George Nicoll Barnes, From Workshop to War Cabinet, London, Herbert Jenkins, 1923, p. 10.
98 Barnes, op. cit., p.16.
99 Ibid., p.18
100 Ibid., p.24
101 The Scotsman, 2 May 1910.
102 William W. J. Knox, Scottish Labour Leaders 1918–1939: A Biographical Dictionary, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 1984, p. 58.
103 James B. Jeffreys, The Story of the Engineers, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1945, p. 41.
104 George Nicoll Barnes, Karl Marx, London, The Labour Party, 1910, p. 21.
105 Barnes, op. cit., pp. 38–9.
106 Ibid., p.48.
107 Ibid., pp. 50–51.
108 Engineering, 5 November 1897.
109 I. G. C. Hutchinson, A Political History of Scotland 1832–1924:Parties, Elections and Issues, Edinburgh, John Donald Short Run Press, 1986, p. 261.
110 The Scotsman, 22 January 1907.
111 W. H. Fraser, ‘The Labour Party in Scotland’, in K. D. Brown ed., The First Labour Party, London, Croom Helm, 1985, p.46.
112 West Fife Echo, 2 February 1910, quoted in Hutchinson, op. cit., p.261.
113 Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 1.
114 G. D. H. Cole, A History of the Labour Party from 1914, London, Routledge & K. Pau, 1948, p. 3.
115 Barnes, op cit., pp. 59–60.
116 Duncan. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–1918, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 89.
117 Barnes, op. cit., p. 83.
118 Ben Tillett, Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a Failure?, London, Twentieth-Century Press, 1908.
119 McKibbin, op. cit., 1983, p. 86.
120 Jeffreys, op. cit., pp. 161–2.
121 The Times, 16 February 1899.
122 Barnes, op. cit., p. 112.
123 Jeffreys, op. cit., p. 133.
124 Alastair Reid, ‘Barnes, George Nicoll (1859–1940)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2004.
125 Scottish Review, spring 1917.
126 Reid, op. cit.
127 Mary Agnes Hamilton, Arthur Henderson: A Biography, London, W. Heinemann, 1938, p. 153.
128 The Scotsman, 4 October 1915.
129 Barnes, op. cit., p. 196.
130 Ibid., p. 203.
131 The Scotsman, 3 January 1939.
132 Barnes, op. cit., p. 290.
133 The Times, 29 November 1922.
134 George Nicoll Barnes, History of the International Labour Office, London, William & Norgate Ltd, 1926.
135 Barnes, op. cit., p. 264.
136 Glasgow Herald, 24 February 1936.
137 David Howell, ‘Adamson, William (1863–1936)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2004.
138 The Times, 8 January 1919.
139 Beatrice Webb, Diaries 1912–1924, London and New York, Longman, 1952, p. 142.
140 David Torrance, The Scottish Secretaries, Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2006, p. 106.
141 Emanuel Shinwell, The Labour Story, London, McDonald, 1963, pp. 111–12
142 See Charles Clarke’s analysis in Chapter 3. The second most successful was Clement Attlee, who increased the party’s share by 10 per cent in 1945.
143 McKibbin, op. cit., 1983, p.111
144 Robert Page Arnot, A History of the Scottish Miners, London, Allen & Unwin, 1955; Alan Campbell, The Scottish Miners, 1874–1939: Trade Unions and Politics, Vol. 2, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000; Abe Moffat, My Life with the Miners, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1965; Roderick Martin, Communism and the British Trade Unions, 1924–1933, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969.
145 Torrance, op. cit., p. 106.
146 Hansard, 9 May 1924.
147 The Scotsman, 25 August 1924.
148 Torrance, op. cit., p. 107.
149 Quoted in Torrance, op. cit., p. 108.
150 Anon, The Scottish Socialists, 1931, p. 119.
151 Lord Macmillan, A Man of Law’s Tale, 1953, p. 90, quoted in Torrance, op. cit., p. 103.
152 Barnes, op. cit., p. xi.
153 Barnes, op. cit., p. 295.