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I have no idea who any of these people are, but the poem's great. What had
Churchill got to say about Kirkwood?
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Thanks, Dominic.
This may be a case where annotation is useful, as the background may be just
a little parochial.
Goes back to Glasgow a little before WWI, when there were two Labour
Parties. There was Official Labour, and there was the Independent Labour
Party. Mostly the ILP focused around Glasgow. It was non-Communist but
hard Marxist left. There were five -- the four in the poem, and Manny
(Emmanuel) Shinwell -- may pariah dogs piss on his grave.
They created a bit of a stir in the Mother of All Parliaments, despite their
small numbers.
But ... about 1920, in the wake of WWI, the ILP went belly-up and fissured.
McLean ("The English Poisoned John McLean", every Glasgwegian's Ultimate
Hero) had been imprisoned as a conchie, and came out of prison schitz, thus
the badge. Maxton faded back into the shadows from whence he'd come.
Gallagher (re)stood as CP, for Govan, and carried the seat, and held it into
the fifties, till he retired, still undefeated. David Kirkwood switched to
Official Labour. (As did Manny Shinwell. But while I'd happily piss on
MS's grave if there wasn't a pi dog handy, I adored David Kirkwood.)
So it goes ...
Kirkwood was pretty-much non-ideological, Clyde shipyards union organiser,
and I suspect he didn't even notice when he crossed from the ILP to Official
Labour.
Anyway, by the time he published his autobiography -- what the hell was it
called? -- he was Respectable, and Winnie wrote the introduction. "David
Kirkwood is a safe pair of hands (despite being a Socialist)". But what
struck me as hysterically funny was the photo of David K. having his heid
cracked open in an anti-WWI demonstration in George Square. And a lot of
Kirkwood's autobiography details the origins and collapse of the ILP. Dunno
whether Churchill had read what Kirkwood wrote before he wrote the
preface -- I seriously doubt it.
There was just this lunatic split between Churchill's intro and what
Kirkwood said in the book, and That Photograph ... Well, yeah, what
Churchill +said+ about Kirkwood was Standard Political Blah.
There is (naturally enough, difficult to be brung-up in Glasgow and not) a
personal spin on this. My great-grand-uncle, before this happened, stood
against Maxton as a Liberal Councillor. And lost. Thank god.
And in Glasgow in the sixties, I could look out a window and see Willie
Gallagher, by then retired, hobbling down the street. Christ knows why I
didn't rush out the house and kiss the hem of his garment. Well, I was
about fifteen years old then, and fifteen year olds don't do things like
that.
And then there were The Last Vestigial Remnants of the ILP in Glasgow
University in the sixties ...
Dunno if this illuminates, or simply adds more smoke ...
Robin
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