A history of Irish working-class struggle and organisation in Dundee provides a valuable picture that should inspire similar studies for other cities in Britain, finds Chris Bambery

The city of Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland, has two very contrasting legacies. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Dundee was the centre of the world’s jute industry, Juteopolis, its mills turning raw jute from Bengal into sacking, baling cloth for cotton and carpet-backing cloth.

The first bales of jute fibre arrived by ship from Bengal in 1820, and by the 1890s, more than 120 jute mills were in operation in the city, employing around 50,000 people. The majority of jute workers were women and children because they cost less, and serious accidents were common. Additionally, the ‘Jute Wallahs’ of Dundee effectively ran the growing number of jute mills in Bengal itself until independence, with upper-class Dundonians going out to manage them and to enjoy a life of wealth and privilege based on vicious exploitation and racism. The other legacy is that Dundee was home to a restless and combative working class, in which women, who made up the majority of those working in the jute mills, were to the fore.

From early on in Dundee’s industrialisation, Irish weavers migrated to the city, mainly from southern Ulster, Leitrim and Sligo, bringing with them their tradition of rural rebellion. By 1841, 5000 of Dundee’s population of 55,000 were Irish. That would increase further as the Great Famine hit. By 1851, the number of Irish inhabitants was 15,000, 20% of the population; the highest percentage of any town in Britain.

Rút Nic Foirbeis charts the politics of Dundee’s Irish population, its involvement in Irish politics from Catholic emancipation to the War of Independence, and its involvement also in class struggle in the city, to which they gave a notable lead. ‘Moral force and temperance’ were the leading themes of working-class struggle in Scotland, and Chartism there was generally moderate. However, Rút Nic Foirbeis shows that, in Dundee, the struggle was much more militant, particularly during the Chartist-inspired nationwide strike in 1842, sometimes called a general strike, in which female workers and Irish migrants played a key part.

Unlike in Glasgow and Edinburgh (as recounted in my A People’s History of Scotland), anti-Irish racism or sectarianism was not a particular feature of Dundee. In large part that was because many of the new arrivals were young, single women concentrated in the jute mills, and class solidarity overcame prejudice. Nonetheless, because of the high numbers of women employed, wages were kept lower amidst appalling working and housing conditions.

The city’s upper classes supported the Liberal Party, the main British ruling-class party in the mid-nineteenth century, and, unlike in Glasgow, they did not defect when that party, under William Ewart Gladstone, championed Irish Home Rule from 1886 onwards. As more working men got the vote, they were keen to retain Irish support in the city.

Irish nationalist politics

Rút Nic Foirbeis brings out the tensions between the more militant strands of Irish nationalism in the city, most importantly the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood (the Fenians) and more mainstream supporters of the Irish Parliamentary Party who looked to the Liberals to deliver Home Rule and did not want to rock the boat. That calculation would last until the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent rise of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army.

The other tension was between the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland and the newly arrived Irish. For most of the nineteenth century, the former were drawn from Scotland’s small, indigenous Catholic community centred in the Western Isles and the northeast, who were hostile to the new arrivals. Some Irish priests espoused Irish nationalism, and Rút Nic Foirbeis highlights several such in Dundee, but many followed the line of the Irish hierarchy who, for instance, denounced the IRB.

Dundee’s Irish community was different from that in, say Glasgow or Liverpool, where sectarianism was rife, in the greater number of women, but in terms of class composition it was not so different. There was a small middle class, often centred on the spirits trade, but including lawyers and journalists as well as clerics, most of whom remained in or close to the areas where the Irish were concentrated. These were In Dundee, Scouringburn in the city centre, and the weaving village of Lochee, which would become incorporated into the city.

By 1865, the IRB in Dundee had some 3000 members, more than Glasgow and Edinburgh. At the end of that year, 370 of them travelled via Belfast and Derry to Sligo to take part in a planned uprising. It was aborted and 21 Dundonians were arrested.

One of the IRB members arrested and jailed was Michael Davitt who on his release founded the Irish Land League to prevent evictions and rent hikes physically. He would become an important visitor to Dundee where the League took root (many of the Irish there had been victims of eviction).

What’s interesting in this book is the roll call of speakers who came to Dundee: Davitt, William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, Constance Markievicz, Éamon De Valera and more. Dundee was far from Ireland or the main concentration of population in Scotland’s central belt, but it was a centre of radical politics including Irish nationalism and later republicanism.

Ireland’s greatest socialist, James Connolly, may have hailed from Edinburgh, but it was to Dundee he came in 1889 when he deserted the British army from nearby Perth, to join his brother John, and the Socialist League, to which his brother belonged. James was involved in a free-speech campaign joining Irish nationalists and the socialists against police attempts to ban their street meetings. Connolly also earned experience of female trade unionists in Dundee which would stand him in good stead in his later life in Ireland and the USA.

Dundee’s political web

For me, the two high points of the book are the account of both the 1910-1914 Great Unrest, a militant UK-wide strike wave, and the Home Rule crisis of those same years. During the latter crisis, Ulster Unionists and the Tories created a mass, armed militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force, and threatened civil war to stop a Liberal government dependent on Irish votes passing an Irish Home Rule Bill.

The jute-working women of Dundee hit the streets using mass pickets to secure higher wages. Among the Irish organisations, there was a radicalisation as the Irish Volunteers were formed to fight for Home Rule. Also thrown into this mix was the fight of the suffragettes, which was particularly militant in Scotland, and Rút Nic Foirbeis highlights the contribution of two Dundonians, Florence McFarlane and Ethel Moorhead.

The second highlight is the role played by Dundee in the fight for Irish independence following the Easter Rising. Scotland had a strong IRA which concentrated on supplying arms and explosives to Ireland. Elsewhere, women were separated off into Cumann na mBan (Connolly’s Irish Citizen’s Army recruited women). But in Dundee, women joined the IRA.

Two, Lena and Cathy McDonald, ran a really important gun-running operation from Dundee via Glasgow to Ireland. They acquired guns from British soldiers in the garrison in the city and at the Barry Budden camp nearby, and explosives from miners in Fife. Both were arrested but acquitted through lack of evidence. Both would be awarded medals by the Irish government.

Once again, there were strong links between the left in the city and the republicans. One leading socialist, Edwin (Neddy) Scrymgeour, would achieve fame at the 1922 Westminster general election when he stood against the sitting MP, a certain Winston Churchill, as the candidate of the Scottish Prohibition Party (temperance was big in the Scottish labour movement) backed by Labour and the republicans, beating Churchill. The 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and the subsequent Irish civil war brought an end to this chapter and a downturn in Irish nationalism in Dundee.

What the book does not tell us is how prominent those from an Irish background were in the Communist Party in the city, which won significant support, though she does point to volunteers from that community fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the International Brigades.

Problems of solidarity work

The book ends with an account of Irish solidarity work in the city in the late 1970s and 1980s. It draws on one person’s account. I knew the comrade involved, now dead, and don’t want to get involved in challenging it, but it is a dispiriting read, going through in gory detail debates between increasingly smaller far-left groups.

It also misses out how the revolutionary left in the city, the International Socialists (later Socialist Workers Party) did respond to the civil-rights movement, internment in August 1971 and Bloody Sunday in January 1972. There is one further detail I want to mention which is missed out. The IMG established a branch in Dundee in 1977-1978 when two members of Peoples Democracy in Belfast (the IMG’s fraternal organisation), Sue Pentel, a Jewish woman from London still active in Palestine solidarity campaigning, and her partner, John McGeown, moved there for studies. Sue was a member of Women Against Imperialism which was centred on supporting the fight for political status of the Republican prisoners in Armagh jail. I came up from Glasgow a lot to help them. It was they who established the importance of the fight in the H Blocks and Armagh for political status.

I have written elsewhere of the difficulties of building an Irish solidarity movement in Britain and in Scotland post-1972.ⁱ As a consequence, frustration with that could boil over into moralism; blaming those you were working alongside for your isolation. It was also the fact that the Republican movement in Ireland was not asking for the creation of an IRA support group in Britain, which is what this one comrade, noted above, desired. Rather, it supported focusing on the removal of British troops. It also looked to create an alliance with Labour left figures such as Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and, later, Clare Short. They would, eventually, succeed in that. In contrast, creating an IRA support group cut yourself off from such people, and the pool of support was reduced still further to those small numbers who supported the IRA’s armed struggle.

What is also missing is that, in the 1970s and 1980s, Dundee had a vibrant working-class movement with a record of militancy; I recall an unofficial city-wide one-day strike against cuts being imposed by the Labour government of James Callaghan. This drew on the earlier tradition outlined here.

But leaving this final section aside, which might be best, this is a book which brings alive the story of the Dundee Irish. It is a story worth telling, is well told and Rút Nic Foirbeis is to be congratulated. I hope it will encourage others in Scottish, Welsh and English cities to follow her example and undercover the history and politics of the Irish communities there in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

i Chris Bambery, ‘Irish Solidarity in Scotland: How we failed and what we won’, Scottish Labour Society 58, 2023.