• 842/43
  • [c1973]
  • Item
  • Subjects include (transcript page numbers given in brackets): attendance at St Margaret’s Roman Catholic school (1); hearing debates on religious issues and evolution on Glasgow Green around 1903, and his extensive reading about these subjects at this period (2-3); starting work as a sailmaker at the age of fourteen and becoming an engineering apprentice at Houghtons aged sixteen (3); long working hours at the time (3); controversy arising from support of Labour candidates in 1906 general election by United Irish League in Dundee and Gorbals, in defiance of League policy of support for Liberals (4); attacks on John Wheatley for arguing that Catholics could also be socialists, 1908-1909 (4-5); joining the Kingston branch of the Independent Labour Party in 1909 (5); reading ‘A summary of Marx’s ‘Capital’’ by A P Hazel, Robert Blatchford’s ‘The Clarion’ and other socialist literature (6); notable members of the ILP Kingston branch (6-7); issues on which ILP Glasgow branches campaigned (7); breaking completely with religion on reading Blatchford’s ‘Not guilty – in defence of the bottom dog’ (7); popularity of Victor Grayson’s campaign in 1910 for the formation of a militant British socialist party (7-8); drunken speech by Grayson at Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow (8); speech by John Maclean rejecting ILP’s claim that Lloyd George’s 1909 budget was a socialist one (9-10); disagreement with Maclean on voting tactics when a member of the joint committee of the provisional British Socialist Party and the Social Democratic Party (10); wide range of socialist speakers at meetings in Glasgow (10-11); influence of German social democrats (11-12), of Gustave Herve’s anti-militarist ‘My country, right or wrong’ and of syndicalists like Tom Mann (12); sacking from Houghtons for refusing to do apprentices’ work during their strike, and subsequent frequent changes of job (13); danger of being sacked for being a socialist (13); selling of ILP and other socialist literature, including the ‘Daily Herald’ in factories (14-15); distribution of the ‘Daily Worker (14-15); large number of socialist meetings in Glasgow at which literature was sold (15-16).
  • 16 pages
  • Open
  • English