Narrative

IAs early as I can remember, my mother and father were involved in politics. Specifically they were involved in the politics of the Communist Party, and for my father the politics of trade union struggle. He was a member of the Iron Founders Union which at that time was a craft union; the metal trades were divided into hundreds of different crafts. My father was stomping the country with John Maclean when he was eighteen. He believed in the concept of one big union, not in the idea of the craft union at all. And so he spent pretty well all his working life agitating for the Moulders to become part of a bigger union, which was later to be the Iron Founders Union. And, consequently, he found himself involved in strikes pretty much all the time. At one period he was blacklisted throughout the whole of Great Britain, couldn’t get a job in any foundry. They just told him, quite categorically, ‘You’re on the blacklist!’ So he went to Australia to find work there. He worked on a government installation on Cockatoo Island, and organized a strike there during the First World War. He was deported from Australia, and came back to Scotland.My father was one of that great army of iron-founders who came out of Smith and Wellstood’s at the Carrón Ironworks in Falkirk. They looked upon themselves as the cream of the world’s moulders. And perhaps they were. And although he believed passionately in the idea of one union for all people connected with iron-working, he still had all the kind of hang-ups that you got from somebody who was a craftsman. For example, my mother’s sister married a moulder too, but he was a pipe-moulder, and pipe­moulding, according to my old man, was the simplest form of moulding, ‘a job for idiots’. And for the whole of my childhood, he never showed any real feelings of friendship for my uncle because he was of a lower status in the craft business. There were all those kinds of contradictions.