Keir Hardie , livre ebook

Lion Hudson - Bob Holman

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121 pages

English

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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.

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Lettres et linguistique

Reino Unido

Central government

United Kingdom

Great Britain

Royaume-Uni

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Publié par	Lion Hudson
Date de parution	08 octobre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780745957302
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Copyright 2010 Bob Holman This edition copyright 2010 Lion Hudson
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Published by Lion an imprint of Lion Hudson plc Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England www.lionhudson.com
ISBN 978 0 7459 5354 0 e-ISBN 978 0 7459 5730 2
First edition 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
All rights reserved
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset in 11.5/14 Minion Pro
Cover image: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy
BOB HOLMAN
KEIR HARDIE
LABOUR S GREATEST HERO?
To our family
C ONTENTS

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
P REFACE

I had wanted to write about Keir Hardie ever since I first came to live in his part of Scotland - Lanarkshire, Ayrshire and Glasgow - in the 1970s. But in the business of retirement, including looking after our two grandsons, I was reluctant to leave too much on my wife s shoulders. Her response was short and sharp, as becomes a Scot, You must do Hardie. So thanks, Annette. Our son, David, and daughter, Ruth, along with our son-in-law, Bruce, and our beloved grandsons, Lucas and Nathan, have all groaned when I announced my latest bit of Hardie trivia such as, Did you know that Hardie was a keen cricket player? But it was a supportive groan.
From 2008 I was making the seventy-mile drive to Cumnock in Ayrshire where Hardie lived for much of his life. Here the Baird Institute possesses a number of documents relating to him, along with certain items which had once been in his office, lodged in what was known as the Hardie Room. I wish to thank staff members of the East Ayrshire Council, Linda Fairlie and Gibson Kyte, for their cheerful helpfulness.
My publishing contacts with Lion Publishing go back thirty years. Now as Lion Hudson plc, I received immediate encouragement from Kate Kirkpatrick. Editors tend to dislike too many references but I have listed a considerable number. To shorten them, I have not given specific references for every quotation from Hardie (and from his daughter Nan) for speeches and articles. At the end of the book, I do list the relevant journals in which his talks and writings appeared.
I NTRODUCTION

L ord Overtoun was a wealthy Victorian factory-owner in Glasgow and a prominent supporter of the Liberal Party. He was also a well-known Christian noted for his gifts to charities, his financial support to foreign missions, his provision of a 1,000 salary to a local evangelist, and his backing for campaigns to keep the Sabbath holy.
In 1899 Keir Hardie, also a Christian but one of very limited financial means, launched a fierce attack on Overtoun. In a widely read pamphlet, he revealed how Overtoun treated his workers in his chemical works at Rutherglen in Glasgow. They were made to toil for twelve hours a day with no food breaks, seven days a week. Deadly fumes were likely to poison their lungs. He accused Overtoun of being a hypocrite who even docked the wages of men who did not work on Sundays. The Glasgow clergy, almost to a man, rose to defend Overtoun and condemned Hardie as an atheist. Hardie soon responded.
More will be written of the Overtoun affair in a later chapter. Here it is sufficient to say that, throughout his life, Hardie both proclaimed Christianity and attacked those Christians and churches who tolerated huge poverty, sufferings, and inequalities.
Who was this Keir Hardie? In Glasgow, I asked some school children if they knew about Robert Burns. All did, always attended a Burns Night at school, and had been to visit his birthplace and homes in Ayrshire. None had heard of Keir Hardie, let alone visited the place where he lived for over thirty years, also in Ayrshire. In 2009 Scotland was agog with celebrations to mark 250 years since the birth of Burns. Three years previously, in 2006, the 150th birthday of Keir Hardie was hardly noticed.
Yet Hardie was one of the founders of the Labour Party and its first leader in the House of Commons. He was immensely popular among many working-class supporters yet hounded by the press. Initially as an MP he stood completely alone. Many MPs in other parties - and not a few in his own - disliked him.
In some ways, he is still an enigma. He wrote no autobiography, penned just a handful of pages in a diary, kept hardly any of the thousands of letters he must have received. On the other hand, he wrote numerous articles in papers and magazines.
Hardie had several early biographers. More recent academic writers tend to dismiss them as hagiographers who failed to see his limitations. Certainly, for instance, William Stewart, in J. Keir Hardie , a book published six years after Hardie s death, makes no mention of his illegitimacy. David Lowe in his From Pit to Parliament in 1923 avoids the question of Hardie s close relationship with Sylvia Pankhurst, as does Emrys Hughes, Hardie s son-in-law, in Keir Hardie , published in 1956. Yet two points must be made. First, they were not silent on some of his limitations, particularly his growling temper and his failures, as a leader in the Commons. Second, they all knew Hardie and his family. Thus David Lowe wrote, I knew Keir Hardie well - perhaps no-one knew him better. I knew his father and his mother, his sisters and his brothers; worked, travelled, slept, discussed, smoked and laughed with him, and yet I always retained an intact liberty to differ with him. 1 William Stewart knew Hardie and, after his death, interviewed his wife Lillie Hardie, his brothers, several miners who knew him in his early years, and supporters who campaigned with him in West Ham and Merthyr. These are the writers who felt the real Hardie.
The academic Hardie specialists include Iain McLean in Keir Hardie (1975), Kenneth Morgan in his widely read Keir Hardie . Radical and Socialist (1975), and Fred Reid in Keir Hardie. The Making of a Socialist (1978). They differ between themselves on the factors which shaped Hardie s behaviour, the extent to which Hardie was a socialist, when he became a socialist, and what his achievements were. But all agree he was a major political figure.
Particular mention must be made of Caroline Benn s exhaustive - and sometimes exhausting - Keir Hardie (1997). She brilliantly draws together the historical material relevant to Hardie and produces a sympathetic but not uncritical biography. I have drawn upon her considerably. She observes that many biographers have felt ill at ease with his religion. 2 Although not a Christian herself, she does give serious attention to his religion and sees it as one of his phases which developed from temperance campaigning to evangelical Christianity to new union militancy; from free speech campaigns to women s suffrage and finally to war resistance . 3 A major theme of my book will be to place more importance on his religious faith than most previous biographers. I will develop it not as a passing enthusiasm when he was a church leader in his twenties but as one of the main factors in his personal and political life until the end.
Christian writers of late have published lives of several political Christians, including John Milton, William Wilberforce, Lord Shaftesbury, Jonathan Aitken, and Tony Blair. None has written about Keir Hardie. Fred Reid explains that apart from historians practically nobody remembers him . 4 Perhaps this is partly because of the fact that the Labour Party is now so different from the one he helped to form. Kenneth Morgan, a historian with several distinguished studies of the Hardie period, concludes that he is now an almost forgotten figure . 5
On entering the town of Cumnock, where Hardie spent the major part of his life, there is no sign to indicate that this great man had lived there. In a small way I hope to bring the forgotten leader back to the attention of today s readership.
CHAPTER 1
N EVER A C HILD , 1856-78

H ardie 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 10 s. a year while one earner in three hundred (and n