This article is based on such material and shows how the predominant subject matter for ladies’ letters during the war years was that of voluntary fundraising for the many charities and associations connected with the war. Such charities were often suggested to the women through personal or local ties - family members at the front; local regiments or Scottish connections. As we shall see, these women perceived their war work in localised or provincialised terms, and were led by the local elite, in both the city and the surrounding countryside. Whilst this approach did eventually lead to inequalities in provision for the men at the front, the hospitals and the prisoners of war, this voluntary approach was at first the only one which existed - and such an approach was part of the government’s own approach to the war until late 1915. After this time, and with the growing power of Lloyd George, the government and local authorities began to impose a more centralised and less personalised approach to the voluntary organisations. While this approach was at first resented by many of the charitable ladies affected, as can be seen in their letters to the newspapers, it was necessary in order to provide a more uniform approach to the provision of comforts and necessary medical items to the ever-increasing number of men and women in need.
One of the most extraordinary omissions from Scottish historiography is a comprehensive and rigorous study of the impact of English-born migrants in Scotland. Paradoxically, the relationship between England and Scotland is a theme that constantly attracts the interest of historians. Yet, apart from isolated citations, English-born migrants, who form one of the largest migrant communities in Scottish history, have remained invisible from serious historical study. It is not as though the subject of migration has failed to attract the attention of historians. In his influential work The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 Professor Tom Devine devoted his longest chapter to what he calls ‘The New Scots’. There were sections on the Catholic Irish, the Protestant Irish, Lithuanians, Italians, and the Jews in Glasgow. However, the English only got a passing mention. Devine is by no means the only historian to have ignored or underestimated the significance and scale of English migration. The same accusation can be laid at the door of nearly everyone who has contributed to the Scottish historiography. An intriguing irony is that many Scottish historians are English-born. One of the leading Englishborn Scottish historians, Professor T. C. Smout, only made occasional references to English migrants. For instance, he cited that the introduction of the 1853 Gaming Act caused English Bookmakers ‘to migrate to Scotland like lovers to Gretna Green’. In the same work he reported that growing wealth in Glasgow attracted criminals from south of the Border. This hardly amounts to a serious study or commentary on the English in Scotland. Moreover, in a recent oral history interview Professor Smout was asked why historians had ignored the English in Scotland? He answered: ‘I really don’t know. You have a very good question. I don’t know what the answer is.’ 5
One of the authors of this paper was recently discussing the historical literature on inter-war unemployment in Britain with a class of honours students, who were amused by the assertion of the scholar who characterised this as a regional phenomenon, concentrated in ‘Scotland, northern Britain, south Wales and northern Ireland’. Where, wondered the students, was this region called ‘northern Britain’, and what kind of ‘region’ was Scotland? Such eccentric and Anglo-centric conceptualisations of the United Kingdom have perhaps become less pervasive since 1991, when this example was published. The most significant general corrective here has probably been the devolution to Scotland of aspects of political power, but of great importance – when reconfiguring ideas of Britain – in academic and particularly historical circles has been the steady expansion of published research on Scotland’s varied economic, social and political development since the Industrial Revolution. Much of this research has, to an extent, revolved around the question of Scottish particularity – or exceptionalism – within the United Kingdom, and also developed understanding of the huge variety of economic and social conditions in industrial Scotland. These have encompassed differentiated experiences of class, gender and religion, and the contrasting degrees of development between rural and urban society and according to geographical location. In both cases – whether examining Scotland’s position in the Union or different experiences in Scotland – the historical literature has engaged with and, to some extent, under-mined the notion that Scotland can be viewed as a homogeneous economic, social and political ‘region’. Examples of three different kinds of historical writing commonly illustrate this trend: Clive Lee’s 1995 study of the twentieth-century Scottish economy, which places substantial emphasis on the regional as well as sectoral pattern of difference and development; Tom Devine and Richard Finlay’s edited collection of 1996 on the twentieth century, the diversely themed chapters of which bring out the huge variety of life in modern Scotland; and Ian MacDougall’s Voices from Home and Work, published in 2000. Gathering evidence from, inter alia, coal miners, laundresses,
These are the words of a retired Ayrshire miner looking back over forty years of working in the Fife and Ayrshire coalfields of Scotland. Although now disabled, stricken with an occupation-related lung condition which prevents him from enjoying an active retirement, he still holds no grudges against the industry which brought about his ill health. Some other personal testimonies were less sanguine. This participant evidence drawn from one of the UK’s most life-threatening industries, is, we feel, crucially important in broadening our understanding of what is was like to work in mining and the effects such toil had upon workers’ bodies. For the most part, the history of this industry has been reconstructed from written evidence alone. Moreover, despite the harshness of the working conditions underground, surprisingly little attention has been paid by historians to health and safety in this industry. In this article, then, we explore a neglected aspect of the history of Scottish coal mining, utilising oral testimony and focusing on the body – what one American scholar, Arthur McEvoy has aptly termed the ‘ecological core’ of the workplace.
The problem of ‘sweated labour’ in nineteenth-century Britain, which many commentators defined as the exploitative use of female and juvenile operatives for low-paid outwork, generated fierce contemporary debate and an extensive subsequent historiography. Modern perspectives on low-paid outwork see sweating as an outgrowth of industrialisation. Outworkers were integrated within complex systems of production, especially in the garment trade, where lowwaged domestic work by women engaged in hand production was allied with factory-based, mechanised processes. Contemporaries offered additional interpretations of the problems of sweating, often comingling critiques of labour-force exploitation with radicalised discourses about the agents of that exploitation; in Glasgow and other British urban centres these concerns mixed with nativism and especially fears that Jewish involvement in the workforce, both as workers and as organisers of garment production, diluted wages and worsened conditions for British-born workers. Indeed, urban sweating was often cast as a specifically ‘ethnic problem’ associated with Jewish communities in Glasgow, Leeds, London and other centres of the trade, although this view was challenged by the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Sweating in 1890. Poor working conditions were also attributed by anti-sweating campaigners to the unscrupulous practices of employers generally, the deleterious impact of new technology (especially the sewing machine) on skilled work, and to systems of production which atomised the workforce, militating against effective labour organisation and in favour of internicene competition, with disastrous consequences for wages. Recent scholarship has emphasised this latter factor, and its interaction with the high supply of female casual labour in structuring the poor conditions of ‘sweating’. But there is considerable evidence that an ‘Irish problem’ was also articulated by some commentators on British sweating – one that related not to the influx of immigrant Irish
Introduction At the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the west of Scotland was the industrial heartland of the nation, with Glasgow a key focus for the wartime industries, notably engineering, munitions production and ship building and thousands of women were drafted into the industrial labour force, in order to meet the production targets of wartime. However, despite the desperate need for female labour, women were not welcomed into heavy industry by male workers, or their trade unions, and the story of women’s wartime employment in this sector of pro duction is characterised by gender struggles over the issues of dilution, job security and wage levels. Indeed, such was the perceived threat of women’s employment in traditionally male trades that the west of Scotland, instead of being remembered as a key centre of munitions production, became infamous as a key centre of industrial unrest, out of which was born the notion of ‘Red Clydeside’.
The eighteenth century was a formative period in many sectors of Scottish life. As well as the working out of the consequences of the Union with England, with its various political and social effects, there was also an acceleration in economic development. There is a con siderable literature on the developments in major economic sectors like agriculture and industry, although some lesser sectors have understandably had less attention. Fishing has to be listed in these lesser sectors; yet for centuries the development of fishing was seen by many in Scotland as a potential field for the increase of national wealth. In the changed circumstances after the Restoration of 1660 (and more particularly after the Union of 1707), there was a lobby of opinion that saw the fisheries as the main Scottish hope for economic growth. And in the prospects for fishery development in Scotland there was one species that always dominated the scene: the herring. Despite the official interest avowed in the industry, the eighteenth century was not, until its end, one of real progress in the herring fishery, and indeed for most of the time it saw no real advance over the pre vious century. In effect, it was a period of debate, experimentation and trial to find a way forward, and what did emerge in the end was the forward momentum which was to lead in the nineteenth century to Scottish fishing increasing to the status of a world leader. Although the records of nineteenth century fishing for Scotland are among the world’s best for the period, the analysis of the eighteenth century changes has to be done from a much more restricted information base. Increased official attention was afforded to fishing during the century, culminating in several government reports of unprecedented detail at the end of the period. However, the official attention was selective and partial: it concentrated on that sector of the herring fishery which was aided by
