The Red Flag

It is a truism that the Irish are always revolting! Indeed the contribution of the Irish to World Revolution is often overlooked. Take the French Revolution for instance. People are often unaware of the unique Irish contribution to both sides of the events. The charge of the mob on the Bastille Prison was led by Robespierre’s Irish assistant and of the only seven prisoners they found inside one was an Irish lunatic who thought he was Julius Caesar!


Charlie and Fred

Then in South America we did our bit from Bernardo O’Higgins the liberator of Chile to more recently Ernesto Guevara Lynch, more commonly known as Che, his nom de guerre. Less known is our contribution to Charlie and Fred who produced the Communist Manifesto, itself launched in 1848 to a largely Irish audience at a Workingman’s club at the corner of Endell Street and Long Acre in Covent Garden, London. The analysis of social conditions and the effects of Capitalism on which the Manifesto is based was “The Condition of the Working Class in England”. This was the study over two years of social conditions in working class Manchester which Frederick Engels compiled with the help of Mary Burns, an Irish factory worker, who was his lover and collaborator and lived with him until her death in 1863. Engels then lived with Mary’s sister Lydia! Mary Burns was the key who unlocked access for Frederick Engels to the working class poor of Manchester. They also travelled to Ireland together on a number of occasions and Engels also wrote on the conditions in Ireland under English rule. When Frederick moved from Manchester to London they lived in Primrose Hill not far from Karl Marx in Belsize Park.


Jenny and Charlie


The house in Primrose Hill where Frederick Engels and Mary Burns lived "in sin" much to the disgust of Jenny Marx



Indeed one of the delicious footnotes to the foundation of Communism is a letter from Marx’s wife Jenny von Westphalen (the Von lets you know her family were aristocratic) to a friend that she found Engels living with an Irish factory girl somewhat common! Marx married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843 and she accompanied him into exile. The family lived in Dean Street, Soho.


Karl Marx lived at 28 Dean Street between 1851 and 1856. It was a time of great sadness, hardship and poverty. Marx and his family survived only on an allowance paid by Engels. Three of his six children died during their stay in this house.

Then in 1855 when Jenny inherited some money enabling the family to move to a small house in No.1 Maitland Park Road, Belsize Park. Both Marx and Engels lived in London until the end of their days Marx in 1875 and Engels in 1895. The only “successful” revolution in their lifetime was the Paris Commune


Plaque at 41 Maitland Park, Belsize Park where Marx died. The house was demolished in 1900 and is now occupied by a block of flats called “The Grange.”

in 1871, which with hindsight was not a great success for the Communards who were massacred if they didn’t escape.


Communards after the Commune: Better luck next time Comrades

Still in Labour Movements and political parties in the countries where the Irish Diaspora settled they formed the backbone in agitation for labour and political rights. There were two reasons for this; they had been schooled in Ireland through anti-landlord / British organisations such as the Land League and the Fenian Brotherhood and wherever they settled they found themselves at the bottom of the pile and excluded.

One such export to England was the remarkable, Jim Connell, best known as the author of the Socialist anthem, “The Red Flag.” Connell was born in Kilskyre, near Kells, County Meath and as a teenager became involved in land agitation and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Aged 18 and a signatory to the Fenian Oath, he moved to Dublin where he worked as a docker until he became blacklisted for attempting to unionise the workers. The story combines two of my interests, Irish History and Railways for it was a railwayman’s red signal flag which provided the inspiration for the song’s title.


Red and Green railway signal flags

In 1875, in the footsteps of millions of Irish men and women, Connell then made his way to England and London in search of reliable work. Here he developed his knowledge of politics, economics and science, particularly Darwin's theories.

In a pamphlet entitled Socialism and the Survival of the Fittest, Connell challenged the idea of capitalism being a "natural" system. He contrasted many species in nature, such as bees, who were "natural communists", with capitalism, which protects the unfit and parasitical in the shape of those non-producers, the capitalists themselves.

He held a variety of jobs, including time as a staff journalist on Keir Hardie's newspaper The Labour Leader, and was secretary of the Workingmen's Legal Aid Society during the last 20 years of his life. For 10 years he was a member of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) led by Henry Hyndman, which supported the cause of Irish land reform and self-determination; both Connell and Hyndman were on the executive of the National Land League of Great Britain, which aimed to promote the need for land reform in Ireland amongst the workers in England. In the late 1890s, however, Connell left the SDF and joined the Independent Labour Party.


Moscow, Victory Day Parade

Connell was inspired to write a socialist anthem after attending a lecture at a meeting of the SDF during the London Dock Strike of 1889. He set down the words while on a train journey from Charing Cross railway station to New Cross on his way to his home in Honor Oak, south London. It is generally accepted that he gained inspiration as he watched the train guard raise and lower the red signal flag on the platform. It is normally sung to the tune of the German-language carol O Tannenbaum (also used for the state song of Maryland) though Connell had wanted it sung to a tune he called The White Cockade. Indeed, Tannenbaum was not a felicitous choice being once described by my townsman, George Bernard Shaw as “the funeral dirge of a dead snail!”

Many years later, Connell wrote that the song was inspired by the upsurge in trade unionism at the end of the 1880s, the Land League in Ireland, the struggle against tsarism in Russia, and the hanging of the Chicago anarchists in 1887 – the struggles of the international proletariat of his time. It reflected a time of great strides in working class political life, after a quarter century of economic depression when reaction had reigned supreme on the international scene.


Chicago Anarchists

In 1920 in How I Wrote "The Red Flag" he commented: "Did I think that the song would live? Yes, the last line shows I did: "This song shall be our parting hymn". I hesitated a considerable time over this last line.

I asked myself whether I was not assuming too much. I reflected, however, that in writing the song I gave expression to not only my own best thoughts and feelings, but the best thoughts and feelings of every genuine socialist I knew... I decided that the last line should stand."

Jim Connell was by all accounts something of a maverick. According to the communist author Wal Hannington, a close friend in Connell's later life, he was "very much an individualist who would have found it difficult to accept any sort of party discipline," while his daughter Norah Walshe said that at times he could be "wild, uncontrollable and impulsive".



Notwithstanding, he was a man who remained true throughout his life to the ideals of socialism, using his many skills to further the cause, and in the process giving us The Red Flag. He died in February 1929 in Lewisham, south London. His memory is preserved by a plaque at 22a Stondon Park, Lewisham, South London, and a bronze bust in Crosskiel, County Meath, Ireland.

So there you have it, a potted history of the revolting Irish from the French Revolution to modern times and two unsung Irish heroes, Mary Burns and Jim Connell. One final footnote. When Jim Connell wrote “The Red Flag” on a steam train from Charing Cross to New Cross in 1889 he had only 17 minutes to write it. If he did it today due to the great advantages of Rail Privitisation he would have 21 minutes. So it is likely a modern version of the Red Flag would have an extra verse, probably on the evils of Privatised Railways!




THE RED FLAG

(sung to theme of the German Christmas carol, O Tannenbaum)

The people's flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts blood dyed its every fold.
Then raise the scarlet standard high. (chorus)
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

Look round, the Frenchman loves its blaze,
The sturdy German chants its praise,
In Moscow's vaults its hymns are sung
Chicago swells the surging throng.





It waved above our infant might,
When all ahead seemed dark as night;
It witnessed many a deed and vow,
We must not change its colour now.

It well recalls the triumphs past,
It gives the hope of peace at last;
The banner bright, the symbol plain,
Of human right and human gain.

It suits today the weak and base,
Whose minds are fixed on pelf and place
To cringe before the rich man's frown,
And haul the sacred emblem down.

With heads uncovered swear we all
To bear it onward till we fall;
Come dungeons dark or gallows grim,
This song shall be our parting hymn.

See also for the French Revolution and Ireland.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/03/years-of-french.html

Jimmy Reid – Working Class Hero

Jimmy Reid

I always remember as a young 11 year old scout seeing the River Clyde for the first time as we neared the end of the slow and dreary overnight 14 hour voyage from Dublin to Glasgow. Dreary was the voyage trying to catch some fitful sleep in the basic “steerage” class in the bowels of the antiquated Burns and Laird boat “Irish Coast” which carried a mixture of cattle and people. I looked at the cattle with envy as they disembarked three hours before us at Port Glasgow; to this day I’m convinced they had the better deal. Dreary was the voyage and dreary was the wet drizzly morning as we edged up the river to the centre of Glasgow. But as we went up the Clyde I looked open mouthed at the miles and miles of shipyards with their slipways to the river, enormous sheds and cranes and behind rows of grim tenement buildings in the black limestone calp which added to the gloom of the perspective. Then standing out from all others was the sight of the magnificent 66,000 tons of the QE2 on its berth at John Brown’s yard virtually complete just 2 months before its launch. For a young Irish kid this was not just a different landscape, in its primeval strangeness it could have been a different planet.


Irish Sea routes in the 1960's


The Burns & Laird boat "Irish Coast" which I travelled on

That was then the still impressive Clyde which at one stage had 257 shipyards and built a quarter of the world’s ships which were proudly referred to as “Clyde Built”, the ultimate badge of quality in maritime circles. That was then but now is different, there are only two yards remaining at Govan and the rest of the Clyde I saw is a post-industrial wasteland. Where our boat docked that morning in the centre of Glasgow is no longer navigable, silt has reclaimed the channel and a pedestrian bridge blocks it off providing access to a Clyde Heritage themed area and the “Armadillo” concert hall and conference centre which is meant to bring visitors to the “New Glasgow.” In truth it is only a shadow of its former self for not just the Shipbuilding is gone but also all the associated trades and crafts backed up by the famous Glasgow Art School and the impressive Engineering Faculty at the still prestigious university. Today Glasgow is a city which has lost its heart and its meaning where the biggest employers are the call centres which employ 150,000 people. It could have been so different if people had listened to a person who was a true Working Class Hero, Jimmy Reid.




SECC Glasgow - Arena; The Glasgow "Armadillo" and the once bustling quayside where passenger ships docked

The death of veteran trade unionist and socialist Jimmy Reid, just short of the 40th anniversary of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilder’s work-in which he led, robs the radical left of a once-towering figure. Reid has been labelled "the best MP Scotland never had". Reid secured his place in the pantheon of popular revolts because, along with fellow Communist party members and fellow travellers such as Jimmy Airlie and Sammy Barr, he led not only one of the most important post-war struggles but one which did not end in glorious defeat. Instead, the revolt ended after 18 months of hard struggle in a stunning victory with the nationalisation of the yards. This was one of the first nails in Edward Heath's political coffin, as he became a lame duck prime minister who was forced to make umpteen U-turns.


Old cine film of a boat trip up and down the River Clyde, Scotland. From Greenock to Glasgow & back in the 1960's. Featuring footage of the many shipyards that used to sit beside the river.

What Reid had done was to initiate a form of constructive protest which was far more difficult for governments to deal with than simply walking out away from the job. The hallmark of what Reid said in his moving speeches was that the dignity of workers demanded discipline and that it was their duty to continue production as far as they were able to do so. This attitude at the time was novel, and made a tremendous impression among those who would normally have been quick to condemn strike action.


Jimmy Reid as Rector of the University of Glasgow

Reid remained a cult figure and was elected by the students as rector of Glasgow University. His rectorial address was hailed by the New York Times, who printed it in full, as "the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address" Re-reading it today it still resonates with our society and has lost little of its relevance and I reprint it in full;

“Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has, however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It's the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision-making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies.



Many may not have rationalised it. May not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it. It therefore conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation expresses itself in different ways in different people. It is to be found in what our courts often describe as the criminal antisocial behaviour of a section of the community. It is expressed by those young people who want to opt out of society, by drop-outs, the so-called maladjusted, those who seek to escape permanently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of course, it would be wrong to say it was the sole reason for these things. But it is a much greater factor in all of them than is generally recognised.

Society and its prevailing sense of values leads to another form of alienation. It alienates some from humanity. It partially de-humanises some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony is, they are often considered normal and well-adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than anyone else. They remind me of the character in the novel, Catch 22, the father of Major Major. He was a farmer in the American Mid-West. He hated suggestions for things like medi-care, social services, unemployment benefits or civil rights. He was, however, an enthusiast for the agricultural policies that paid farmers for not bringing their fields under cultivation. From the money he got for not growing alfalfa he bought more land in order not to grow alfalfa. He became rich. Pilgrims came from all over the state to sit at his feet and learn how to be a successful non-grower of alfalfa. His philosophy was simple. The poor didn't work hard enough and so they were poor. He believed that the good Lord gave him two strong hands to grab as much as he could for himself. He is a comic figure. But think – have you not met his like here in Britain? Here in Scotland? I have.


Glasgow Tenements in 1957

It is easy and tempting to hate such people. However, it is wrong. They are as much products of society, and of a consequence of that society, human alienation, as the poor drop-out. They are losers. They have lost the essential elements of our common humanity. Man is a social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women. The big challenge to our civilisation is not Oz, a magazine I haven't seen, let alone read. Nor is it permissiveness, although I agree our society is too permissive. Any society which, for example, permits over one million people to be unemployed is far too permissive for my liking. Nor is it moral laxity in the narrow sense that this word is generally employed – although in a sense here we come nearer to the problem. It does involve morality, ethics, and our concept of human values. The challenge we face is that of rooting out anything and everything that distorts and devalues human relations.



Let me give two examples from contemporary experience to illustrate the point.

Recently on television I saw an advert. The scene is a banquet. A gentleman is on his feet proposing a toast. His speech is full of phrases like "this full-bodied specimen". Sitting beside him is a young, buxom woman. The image she projects is not pompous but foolish. She is visibly preening herself, believing that she is the object of the bloke's eulogy. Then he concludes – "and now I give...", then a brand name of what used to be described as Empire sherry. Then the laughter. Derisive and cruel laughter. The real point, of course, is this. In this charade, the viewers were obviously expected to identify not with the victim but with her tormentors.
The other illustration is the widespread, implicit acceptance of the concept and term "the rat race". The picture it conjures up is one where we are scurrying around scrambling for position, trampling on others, back-stabbing, all in pursuit of personal success. Even genuinely intended, friendly advice can sometimes take the form of someone saying to you, "Listen, you look after number one." Or as they say in London, "Bang the bell, Jack, I'm on the bus."



To the students [of Glasgow University] I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?"

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society. The power structures that have inevitably emerged from this approach threaten and undermine our hard-won democratic rights. The whole process is towards the centralisation and concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. The facts are there for all who want to see. Giant monopoly companies and consortia dominate almost every branch of our economy. The men who wield effective control within these giants exercise a power over their fellow men which is frightening and is a negation of democracy.


The liner QE2 being launched from John Brown's yard on the Clyde, September 1967

Government by the people for the people becomes meaningless unless it includes major economic decision-making by the people for the people. This is not simply an economic matter. In essence it is an ethical and moral question, for whoever takes the important economic decisions in society ipso facto determines the social priorities of that society.

From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books. To appreciate fully the inhumanity of this situation, you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man suddenly told he is redundant, without provision made for suitable alternative employment, with the prospect in the West of Scotland, if he is in his late forties or fifties, of spending the rest of his life in the Labour Exchange. Someone, somewhere has decided he is unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.



The concentration of power in the economic field is matched by the centralisation of decision-making in the political institutions of society. The power of Parliament has undoubtedly been eroded over past decades, with more and more authority being invested in the Executive. The power of local authorities has been and is being systematically undermined. The only justification I can see for local government is as a counter- balance to the centralised character of national government.

Local government is to be restructured. What an opportunity, one would think, for de-centralising as much power as possible back to the local communities. Instead, the proposals are for centralising local government. It's once again a blue-print for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented, in a few years when asked "Where do you come from?" I can reply: "The Western Region." It even sounds like a hospital board.

It stretches from Oban to Girvan and eastwards to include most of the Glasgow conurbation. As in other matters, I must ask the politicians who favour these proposals – where and how in your calculations did you quantify the value of a community? Of community life? Of a sense of belonging? Of the feeling of identification? These are rhetorical questions. I know the answer. Such human considerations do not feature in their thought processes.

Everything that is proposed from the establishment seems almost calculated to minimise the role of the people, to miniaturise man. I can understand how attractive this prospect must be to those at the top. Those of us who refuse to be pawns in their power game can be picked up by their bureaucratic tweezers and dropped in a filing cabinet under "M" for malcontent or maladjusted. When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet.


Govan shipyard, one of only two left on the River Clyde, saved from closure by Jimmy Reid and his colleagues in 1971

If modern technology requires greater and larger productive units, let's make our wealth-producing resources and potential subject to public control and to social accountability. Let's gear our society to social need, not personal greed. Given such creative re-orientation of society, there is no doubt in my mind that in a few years we could eradicate in our country the scourge of poverty, the underprivileged, slums, and insecurity.

Even this is not enough. To measure social progress purely by material advance is not enough. Our aim must be the enrichment of the whole quality of life. It requires a social and cultural, or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country. A necessary part of this must be the restructuring of the institutions of government and, where necessary, the evolution of additional structures so as to involve the people in the decision-making processes of our society. The so-called experts will tell you that this would be cumbersome or marginally inefficient. I am prepared to sacrifice a margin of efficiency for the value of the people's participation. Anyway, in the longer term, I reject this argument.


George Square & Town Hall, Glasgow

To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people. I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It's a social crime. The flowering of each individual's personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone's development.

In this context education has a vital role to play. If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with a full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change. The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with and in service to our fellow human beings, can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.

Universities must be in the forefront of development, must meet social needs and not lag behind them. It is my earnest desire that this great University of Glasgow should be in the vanguard, initiating changes and setting the example for others to follow. Part of our educational process must be the involvement of all sections of the university on the governing bodies. The case for student representation is unanswerable. It is inevitable.


Orange Parade, Glasgow, 2008

My conclusion is to re-affirm what I hope and certainly intend to be the spirit permeating this address. It's an affirmation of faith in humanity. All that is good in man's heritage involves recognition of our common humanity, an unashamed acknowledgement that man is good by nature. Burns expressed it in a poem that technically was not his best, yet captured the spirit. In "Why should we idly waste our prime...":

"The golden age, we'll then revive, each man shall be a brother,
In harmony we all shall live and till the earth together,
In virtue trained, enlightened youth shall move each fellow creature,
And time shall surely prove the truth that man is good by nature."

It's my belief that all the factors to make a practical reality of such a world are maturing now. I would like to think that our generation took mankind some way along the road towards this goal. It's a goal worth fighting for."

James Reid, trade union activist, politician, journalist and broadcaster: born Govan 9 July 1932; married Joan Swankie (three daughters); died Greenock 10 August 2010.



Jimmy Reid being interviewed on the Upper Clyde Shipbuilder’s work-in