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This is the radical Elders's Oral History Project and today we're talking with William Allen, a labor journalist for more than 30 years and now working for the people's world. Billy Where and when were you born? Uh, Glasgow, Scotland, April 24th, 1907. Could you tell us what

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kind of a community that was? Well, it was in the slum districts of Glasgow working class community. Uh, I was born and raised in a tenement 3 flights up. Cold water flap as he would say here. And with the toilet and the landing in between the.

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Tenement stories and uh. Of course there was no central heating or anything of that nature. All you had was a fireplace which heated the kitchen and you cooked your meals and there was no bathroom of any kind. If you wanted a bath, you had to go

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to the public baths which was about 810 blocks away. What did that mean all this year depressed area, uh, to the health of the people there? Well, uh, there was a very high rate of tuberculosis in Glasgow and, uh, many of the communicable diseases were spread

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uh constantly and rapidly because of the close proximity of the people's lives. And the fact that there was no playgrounds, there was no recreation. And, uh, these buildings, uh, towered over each other and there were always darkness in the, in the houses and, uh, in many

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of the houses, the, uh, gas, the, the, uh, they had no electric lights or anything like that, it was gas light. The gasses we used to say that was on all the time. And uh The climate balance is in Scotland. Is uh One of uh constant

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dampness and lots and lots of rain, very little sunshine, and it makes for many of the uh. Uh, diseases like rheumatism and arthritis and many other illnesses that workers suffer from. Then also in that particular set up, the houses are very crowded in the family when

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I was raised, there was my father, my grandfather, my grandmother, my auntie, and my uncle, and myself. I was the only child. We lived in two small rooms, two small rooms, and I was sort of an average. A number of people who lived in these type

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of places. So as a result, things were very crowded and jammed. And uh it didn't help the health of the people whatsoever. Uh, tell us something about your parents. Well, my father was a house painter. And uh Worked in a number of places, of course, and

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was subject to many layoffs. Uh, particularly because Britain was always in a state of depression, semi depression, or going into depression or trying to emerge from one. Uh, we were a poor family. Tell us something about his politics. Do you remember the Labor Party of Glasgow.

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Uh, the Independent Labour Party was a sort of an advanced thinking group of workers who were close tied in with the Scottish Labour Party. Uh, which is part of course of the general British Labour Party. Uh, it was the IOP in which my father was around

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were more or less, uh, advanced thinking workers. They were not communists or Marxists, but, uh, well, as far as the young Soviet republic was concerned in 1917, they were one of the strongest and most articulate supporters of that, uh, uh, interesting international development. The ILP was

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known as the. The advanced group of the uh people who believed in some form of socialism. I wonder if you could tell us something. I remember you telling me about him working in the shipyard. Could you tell me, uh, something about those conditions and during World

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War 1, there were thousands of Scotch workers who refused to, uh, uh, sign up as they said into the British army and go to war. And of course they passed conscription and were forcing them and many of the workers refused. Uh, thousands of them, by the

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way, went to jail. And became a Inmates of the terrible prisons that Scotland has, has got like Peterhead and Bini and a number of others, uh, and then others were, uh, who had families depending upon them like, uh, in my particular case, and my father was

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given the choice of going to work in the shipyards, uh, painting razzle-dazzle, uh, painting on the freighters that were being built there to transport, uh, goods. Razzle Dazzle was supposed to, uh, And razzle dazzle the the sub boats. Uh, when your father worked in the shipyard,

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can you remember him talking about any particular people that he was, uh, he sort of admired? Well, he was a great admirer of Willie Gallagher. Uh, Willie Gallagher was one of the outstanding, uh, working class leaders of that time. He, uh, helped to put together one

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of the great organizations of the Scottish working class, which was the Clydeside uh Shop Stewart's councils, which was a very powerful movement and was led by men like Gallagher, uh, who later on of course became the first communist member of parliament from Fife. Uh, would you

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say your father had an impact on your thinking insofar as what we say politics and religion? Oh, no question about that. And my father was a very articulate man and when he wanted to be, uh, First of all, he, he, uh, he read a lot of

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material at that time and the shipyards and the workshops in Glasgow in particular, uh, was a beehive of ideological discussions. Glasgow was always known as the left center in Scotland and later on became known as the Red Clyde. The River Clyde flows through the heart of

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the city. They elected many progressive men and women into a public office and He knew Gallagher and then he also knew a man by the name of John McClain. John McClain, by the way, was the first, uh. Uh, Scottish, uh, ambassador, uh, to, uh, the new

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Soviet republic, and John McClain was a well-known communist and was uh A man who my father respected very highly. How long did you attend school, Billy? Well, I went to school from the time I was 5 and I left when I was 1315. I was a

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half a grade advanced and uh. 13.15 was when I quit school, went to work. You had no chance to go further. In order to go to high school over there, you had to pay. And uh The chances were there providing you had the money. And my

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father was never in a position to have that money. And, uh, whatever little wages I could earn, uh, was needed in the house, believe it or not, to keep us, uh, eating. When you finish school, uh, where do you go to work? I went to work

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in a bakery, uh, John Austin's bakery, which was not too far from me. And uh the reason I got in that job was that there was a long take a strike. And my father had, like many other workers, done some solidarity picketing there, and he took

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me there several times to picket. And when I started to look for work, which was very desperate and very little of it. Uh, some of the bakers knew me from picketing and, uh, told me to come and uh there was a job for me there in

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the bake shop. And when you went to work in a bake shop, uh. What was your first impressions? What happened there? Well, I got a very sharp impression right away. Uh, I was supposed to come to work at 4 o'clock in the morning. And I was

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there about 4:45 and I started to put on a little apron that my grandmother had made for me and was walking over to the bench to start. Doing what I was told by the bakers. When a man came up and asked me who I was and

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I told him, and he said to me, do you have a shilling? I said, no. Well, he said, uh, you can't work here without a shilling. He said that's your initiation fee into the union. This is a union shop. And he said, your father should know

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better than to send you here without money to join the union. So go on back home and get a shilling from him. So I went back home and got the old man out of bed and he found a shilling, and I came back and gave it

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to the shop steward whom I didn't know at that time. That was the title. And he accepted it and very solemnly gave me a receipt and I put it in my little pocket, put on my apron, and stepped up to the bench and I was fully

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installed. That was how I learned what unionism was dramatically and immediately. A young man or almost a child going to work at 1315. How big were you at that time? Well, if the bench was too high, I had to have a small box to stand on.

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And uh later on, I, I became a very expert, uh, Worker at the ovens, huge ovens there, and I was very small and. But uh I used to have a box to stand on there, but I, I grew, I grew because in the bake shop, there

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was a lot of food that I didn't mind eating, which, of course, I never saw very much at home. The bake shop always had plenty of eggs. And uh there was lots of bread there and other stuff and for the 1st 6 months, I would say

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that I put on at least about 1015 pounds. What was the politics of the rest of the family who lived in a flat? Well, it was a sort of a very interesting political, uh, smorgasbord is the best way to describe it. My father, as I said,

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was around the IOP, the Independent Labour Party. And my auntie voted uh uh labor. She was in the arrested TB case. And had been a factory worker. Uh, my uncle Alec, who later migrated to Canada, was a sheet metal worker and a very highly skilled worker.

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And my grandmother, of course, he voted Tory. My grandmother was a very devout Scotch Presbyterian woman who came from the highlands. And uh, but yet nevertheless, uh, she voted for a communist candidate, John McClain, when he ran for Detroit City council. She had a great deal

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of respect for him. And uh my grandfather, of course, who had long connections with the British army, uh, he was a Tory. So that was the political, and you can imagine that, uh, many an evening and many a discussion was raging back and forth, uh, particularly,

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uh, during the time of elections. Your grandfather, were you very close to him? No, I was not. He, uh, was a big tall soldierly looking worker who had served many years around the armed forces and British territorials, and he played in the band of the British

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territorials. He was what we call a big drummer. Uh, he carried a huge drum on his chest and, uh, he had a leopard skin in front of him and he was quite a notable figure in the community. It did, uh, but he didn't have much to

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do with you, right? No, he, uh, he was a very silent reserved kind of a man, and even when he was drinking and he was, he loved his, uh, scotch schnapps, he never had too much to say, he was very quiet man. Was, uh, you spoke

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about McClain, who was a communist, I believe. Yeah, John McClain, was he elected? Yeah, John McClain was elected and there's an interesting little anecdote about that. He was elected to the Glasgow City Council. And it, uh, the thing I remember my, my folks who were discussing

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this and I heard it later on and I put it together finally, uh, he was elected and he was a Marxist. And a very, very strong defender of the new young Soviet republic. He was a school teacher and a brilliant speaker. And he ran in the

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town head that was the district that I belonged to. And to the amazement of everybody, he got elected. When he went down to be sworn in with the rest of the city council members, the story goes that he refused to take the oath of loyalty to

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the king or to the queen, whoever happened to be occupying that position at that time, and uh this uh this uh. It was sufficient to allow the ruling class of course to say that well if he wouldn't take the oath then he couldn't be seated. Uh,

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did any of the people you work with as a young man Did they impress you in any way? Oh yes, uh, among the Scotch working class, there was a very strong socialist, uh. Uh, tenancies and uh. They were also very interested and very strong supporters of

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the young Soviet republic, which had just been established in 1917. And they had a very strong hatred of the Tories or the Conservative Party. What kind of recreation do you remember participating in? Oh, street soccer played the. Take a lot of old newspapers and wrap them

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up with string and uh played out in the streets, played soccer. And when we could afford it, we'd buy a ball and play soccer. Uh, that was about the height of our recreation. Did you do anything on weekends with your friends, the guys you work with?

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Oh yes, I caddied on the weekends. I went to the golf courses because there was money to be made at the golf courses, particularly the private ones outside of Glasgow. You didn't drink. Oh no. Uh, did you go to any spectator sport? Yeah, soccer was a

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great game there and uh. Of course, in the soccer field, uh, if you've ever been in England or Scotland or Wales or Ireland, uh, Saturday afternoon is soccer day there and all the working class, great sections of them go there. But the old British ruling class

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never misses chance. And one of the things they do is that they've injected into the great game of soccer, the whole age of, uh, divisions among the people, and they did that by the use of religious. In Glasgow, for example, there was the Glasgow Celtics world-famous

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soccer team, and, uh, that has become identified with Catholics. And then there was another great world-famous team, the Glasgow Rangers, and that has been identified with the Protestants. And, uh, it's unbelievable. uh, on a Saturday afternoon you go to a soccer match between Glasgow Celtic and

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Glasgow Rangers, and they have as high as 80 to 87,000 people. And uh at one end of the park is the, uh, the Celtic supporters in green and at the other end is the Protestant and blue, and they get into violent, deadly struggles, the use of

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razors and clubs and bottles. And as a matter of fact, it's become such a national scandal that, uh, and by the way, the National Front, which is the fascist movement in Britain has utilized this also. How many hours did you uh work a day? Well, when

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I first went to work, we worked, uh, when I was 1315, the first shop John Austin and I worked in, and we worked from 4 to 12, 8 hour day. It was a union shop. What about girls at this time? What about girls at this time?

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Were you? Oh, I didn't have any time for them because Uh, first of all, I was, uh, you had to be dressed to attract the girls and uh. Then on top of that, when you work in a bakery, it's, uh, you know, you get up at

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4 o'clock in the morning, you, you, uh, when you go home in the afternoon, you go to sleep and but uh I suppose I had as much interest as any, but, uh, I don't remember too much about this thing because in my family there were some

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physical problems. My auntie was in the arrested TV case and my grandmother was an old woman by this time. And it descended upon me to take care of most of the housework and as I worked in the bakery and around the cooks and so forth, I

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gradually became the baker and the cook of the family, and it was interesting that in my age 1415, I was becoming the, the chief cook and bottle washer. I, I wanna get to a question that I thought I'd ask you today, and that is. He spoke

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about your grandfather and your father and your grandfather was still the head of the family. Is that uh a sort of a thing of respect in in Scotland? Oh, absolutely. This is uh this is part of the tradition of the Scotch family, uh, that the oldest

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is generally looked upon as the head of the family. When I mean the head of the family. Uh, he runs the house. Whether he's working or not, whether he's working or not. Uh, most of what happened in 1919, you heard from your elders, but you must

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also remember a lot about some things that happened that time. Can you tell us what you remember and what you heard? Well, I remember that there was in 1919 there was big strikes and uh there was a lot of great activities going on in the city

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of Glasgow. As I said before, Glasgow was a very highly class conscious working class city and uh there was lots to demonstrate and battle for and one of the big things that I recall. At that time was the tremendous unemployment, particularly after the end of the

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war, World War I. And the fact that the government had provided no solution to who was going to employ the returning demobilized soldiers and sailors. And it took people like Gallagher and McLean and the Glasgow Stewart's Council and the general IOP left movement to come forward

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with some proposals and tactics. They proposed uh the uh the 40 hour week, uh, to be established in order to provide jobs. Secondly, they also went down to the Glasgow City council. And petitioned them that they would ask the government to provide subsidies and money and

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establish this as a national law in order to guarantee some reemployment for those people. Not only were they demobilized soldiers, unemployed, but there were thousands and hundreds of thousands of workers who had been laid off and had not been recalled back to work. What about the

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more conservative members of your family, of whom there was a couple, would they join in the discussions in the house? It depending on what it was about. If it was on the issue of unemployment and jobs and so forth, there was a general agreement that uh

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that something had to be done, so to speak, that attitude. So there was, there was no disagreement about that. No, because this was the question of bread. What about the 1919 strike and what were you told about that? And what I got. Well, the 1919 strikes,

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uh, generally the discussion at my house, by the way, was a very interesting house. And my father had a number of very good friends of his, uh. People who came around the house workers. And there was a rising in Glasgow, a very militant, articulate and colorful

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group of leaders, uh, Gallagher I mentioned, McLean I mentioned, but then there was David Kirkwood. And there was George Hardy and there was James Maxton. And there was a number of others, and as a result, the Glasgow had a splendid leadership of the left and the

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masses of the workers in Glasgow were on the streets constantly demonstrating and fighting and demanding that the government uh live up to its responsibilities to provide jobs. Uh, what, what, what about the strike? Well, the strike was, uh, the, the little I do remember about it

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was, uh, what you were told about it. Yeah, what I was told about was that uh. It was successful in many ways, of course, it was met by a very violent police attacks and uh. They brought in the, the, uh, the troops and for the first

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time they used tanks, uh, that is to, uh, for example, there was a big demonstration in George Square which is right in front of the city hall. And while the committee was up there, uh, discussing with the Lord Mayor, the question of uh them appealing to

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the government, one of the leaders of the committee, David Kirkwood, on his way out was clubbed from behind by a policeman. And uh And when he got down on the street and reported to the just actually thousands upon thousands of workers in the square. Uh, the

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doors of the city hall opened up and out came the new soldiers, not the, not the old army soldiers. The government had made a big appeal to young unemployed to join the army, and many of them had joined out of sheer desperation and hunger, and these

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were new troops, and they were not unwilling to be told to go out and attack even though they were the elder brothers and sisters and some of them even their own families. And that was a very violent, very violent type of thing, and I dimly recall

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with my father being there and him shoving me to get away from the, uh, the amount of police who were coming charging through the crowds. It was in that kind of a, that kind of an atmosphere. Uh, what was the result of this strike? Well, the,

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the, the result of the strike was that there was a very highly developed political action movement that began to place political candidates in the field to run for public offices, and they were getting elected. They were getting elected, they were getting elected to parliament and they

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were elected to councils, city councils, and many civic bodies. And of course this was something new. See, the British working class had a, had a party, the British Labour Party, and in Scotland you had the Scottish Labour Party. Now this was before the formation of the

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Communist Party. Communist Party was organized in 1920, but this was before that. The Communist Party was organized about the time that the one here in America was in it. Yeah, approximately about the same, and it went through the sort of the same type of formation, many

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little grouplets with different ideologies, but believing in socialism eventually came together into one united organization somewhat similar to the United States. What were some of the, your personal activities around this time? Well, my father was, had a very close friend. His name was Bob Bruff. He

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was a painter. And he had a lot of influence on me. He was a very kind, patient, and tolerant son of a man, which my father was not. And Bob often would talk to me and uh He would try to encourage me to participate in uh

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in marches and demonstrations. He felt that young people had to learn early, whereas my father was sort of an indifferent whether I came or I didn't. Uh, there were several things that Bob Brough helped me to do. Number one, he got me to go to social

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Sunday school, and that was on a Sunday morning and we opened up the Sunday school by the singing of the red flag. And there was no religion in this Sunday school, nothing about God, no, no, no. What you got there was economics and the Scottish history

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and the need for independence in Scotland. There's a great campaign going on these days about Scottish independence and separating from the English and so forth. Well, when I was about 12 years old, I was listening to that in the Socialist Sunday. that was the kind of

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a, uh, Bible that they taught us there. Then, uh. I also got interested in Glasgow, the Salvation Army was very active and in a number of the uh tenement districts as we call them, they had these clubs that were sort of a poor kids clubs and

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they used to have all boxing gloves there and a few, uh, athletic things there. And uh I finally got involved in one of them and was uh. Boxing around as they used to give us big pillows in our hands and knock each other around and I,

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I, I fooled around with that for a while. It was very interesting, but uh after once or twice getting in there with some toughies and coming home with my face looking like hamburger, uh, that was the end of that. I guess you had a lot of

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spectators. Oh yeah, we had a big cheering section as long as they were not in there getting beating, they were ready to cheer you on. Did you attend this uh socialist Sunday school regularly? I don't recall if I went for a very long time. I was

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there and uh I went there because of this friend of my father, and he had a son by the name of Willie Brough who had a rheumatic heart as they call it in these days. And he couldn't do very much and he was my constant companion.

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I went there probably for about a year and a half or so, but then I finally found some other athletic activities that I became interested in. Getting back to the soldiers and sailors who were demobilized after World War One and couldn't get work. Uh, this offers

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uh something in the way of uh of what happened to them insofar as ideology was concerned and uh. Uh, did your education, uh, begin at that time, many of them. Oh yes, I would say that uh. They, they, well, before they were discharged. The many of

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them uh. And it recalls to my mind what happened at the end of World War 2 here, uh, where the soldiers in the South Pacific, uh, where I was, uh, demonstrated to end the war and to, uh, go home. Well, Similarly, there, the, the, the soldiers

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after the end of the war ended on November 11th, 1918, the soldiers demanded to be shipped back home, demobilized and shipped back home, and there was many big rallies, parades and demonstrations of the soldiers, and the British ruling class got got very much afraid of this,

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this tremendous uh politicalization of the, of the armed forces, so they got them out as soon as they could. They figured if they could break up this dissociation of each other that this would uh would dissipate, so to speak, the growing uh solidarity and and militancy.

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They, they definitely, they definitely got some political understanding and then when he came back home to nothing and no jobs, uh, I would say that 9/10 of them were participants in these big demonstrations, hunger marches, uh, job marches, and the fight for the 40 hour week.

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Something I want to get back to here that, you know, the socialist uh revolution had happened around, uh, you know, it was in full bloom and fighting a lot of enemies in 1919. What was going on in Scotland insofar as the Russian revolution was concerned. Uh,

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a very interesting and dramatic thing was going on not only in Scotland but in practically all the seaports in, uh, in Britain. The uh The government of course was allowing industry to Begin to ship armaments and stuff to the interventionist armies in Russia. And as a

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result of this, the left movements began demonstrations to stop it. And the most dramatic was the uh in London. Uh, one of the ships there, uh, the callers refused to call the ship, and, uh, this started at sort of a spark and the flame swept all

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through Great Britain and in Glasgow they refused also like they did many of the other ports to, uh, To, uh, put any, well, the dockers, the Dockers were the most militant, of course, and the Dockers Union refused to load or unload any of these ships. Uh,

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did anyone uh? Any uh officials from Scotland or go to uh Uh, the Soviet Union to find out what was going on. I Willie Gallagher made a long arduous 3 month trip there, uh, by boat and by foot and by rail and by whoever means it

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took him over 3 months to get from Scotland, uh, to Moscow to meet Lennon, and he had a long discussion with Lennon on, uh, the whole matters affecting the British working class and where they should go and how they should go. And much of the advice

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that was gotten there by Gallagher later was a tremendous help to the British working class.