Politics

This Lecture was Given at Glasgow Caledonian University

21 November 2008 · Krjimmy Reidp

The last hurrah
Kenneth Roy on Jimmy Reid

This lecture was given at Glasgow Caledonian University

The year after Jimmy Reid was born, a Scottish poet conceived the idea of writing a book about his native country. The idea came to him one evening after he had driven through the mining district of Lanarkshire. The scene evoked in his mind a sense of peace: ‘the groups quietly talking at the street corners or walking among the pit-dumps, the shafts rising smokeless, the neglected roads’.
     When Edwin Muir came to write his ‘Scottish Journey’, it was not so much a travel book – though that was its conventional form – as a meditation on a country stricken by depression and the failure of capitalism. He devoted his longest chapter to the city of Glasgow, where his strongest impression was one of silence. He had once worked in a shipbuilding office. During his time there, 12 clerks had been employed in the office; now there were six – on half-time and half-pay.
     It was a hot day when Edwin Muir went to see the shipyards that he had once passed every morning. It had been hot for several weeks. He noted how all the men he saw were tanned, as if they had just come back from their summer holidays. They were standing in the usual groups, or walking in twos and threes, very slowly, and as he looked at them it seemed to Edwin Muir that the world had not a single message to send to them. He walked on to his old office and spoke to his friends. He found them, not embittered by the state of shipbuilding, but philosophical and resigned to their fate. It was sad to remember the time when this same office had been filled with hope and ambition and to reflect that, for most of the young men he had known, that hope had vanished forever.
     This was the society, this was the Scotland, in which Jimmy Reid was born and brought up. Yet, if Edwin Muir had burrowed a little deeper in the shipbuilding quarter of Glasgow, he might have seen a glimmer of hope. He might have encountered in the streets of Govan an improbable figure – an aristocrat, war hero, and Presbyterian clergyman who announced himself as George MacLeod.
     Why, at the age of 35, did this son of a baronet, educated at Winchester and Oxford, then the minister of St Cuthbert’s in Edinburgh, exchange the bourgeoisie for the No-Man’s-Land of Govan? It is not enough to say that George MacLeod followed that honourable calling to minister in difficult places; nor that he was a maverick, an adventurer, a prophet and a seer; nor that he was an artist and an intellectual – though he was all of these. To understand fully this rocker and upturner of boats, you need to imagine what he must have been like where he belonged – in a pulpit.
     Ian Mackenzie, a friend of MacLeod’s and of mine, recollected his first exposure to MacLeod in these words:
      ‘This is not a sermon. And this is not religion. And this is not about God. It is not a sermon, it is a speech. It is not religion, it is politics. And it is not about God, it is about man. And it is not comforting, it is frightening. Apart from anything else this guy has no idea how to behave. Like a demented baby he is throwing everything out of the pram. He bites great theological chunks out of the pulpit and spits them at us. He throws statistics about poverty and hunger through a stained glass window. He hurls scriptural bombs at the gallery. He flings socialist thunderbolts at the ceiling, sets hellfire to the chancel, and reduces the church soporific to rubble.’

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