From Lossiemouth to London

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 998, 14 June 1930, Page 6

From Lossiemouth to London

Life Story of Britain’s Prime Minister

A Scots Lad’s Rise to Fame

= (By

Mary Agnes Hamilton.)

THE SEN has secured, the rights of this interesting biography of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald , Prime Minister of England. The second instalment appears belov.d. The biography xciil be continued each Saturday.

|_TE had to fight from the beginning: to stand alone, as few have to. This isolation shaped without thwarting a natural geniality. He had learned to be silent as well as to speak, to rule himself as well as to rule others, st an age when the well-to-do child is still in the nursery. This went on unconsciously. The conscious part of him was absorbed in the adventure of learning. His Dominie helped him, but he did most of it himself. Of details about these years oi dawning manhood there is little to be gleaned. He gained in power in his studies, reached the point where his master had no more to teach him, and he had exhausted the resources Lossiemouth possessed in the way of books. He had begun to practise both in speaking and in writing; passed examinations with distinction; won a prize for a sfory in a newspaper competition, and began to strain toward a wider world. London, and all that London meant in his imagination, called him. His teacher dreamed of a university career, but the road seemed barred by poverty. But in London, who knows? 1-Ie might find a way both to learn and to earn. XJndiscouraged by the failure of what looked like the first chance, he took his courage in his hands and set forth into the unknown.

His way to London, as it proved, led through Bristol, where he obtained a temporary post as a private secretary, his idea being to keep himself going in that way, while preparing for one of the science scholarships at any of the schools at which they were offered, like the Royal College of Mines. “The Bristol experiment did not turn out a success, and I therefore came to London. I did not know a soul in London at that time.’* Nor had he even the traditional half-crown in his pocket. One would give a good deal for a picture of MacDonald when, like Dick Whittington, and with hardly more luggage, and no cat he came up to London with only that bright talisman of native genius to promise something bigger than a Lord Mayorship. There was a remarkable brain behind the dark curls, a remarkable tenacity of will in the firm jaw, a spark of something rarer than either in the flashing eyes; but beyond these, what had he to show? He had passed examinations, written stories; he knew a good deal of science, and more of politics and the life behind than many men of twice his age, but he was not 20, had neither friends nor connections. Lonely, desperately poor, without a friend to whom to turn for advice or assistance, he walked the cruel streets, knew, and has surely not forgotten, what they felt like to the Ishmael whom no man helps. But he was not going back. A solicitor’s clerk, whom he had kno i in connection with writing he had done for a boy’s paper, and who was one of the very few people whom he even knew by name, put him up, and to pay for his lodgings he was glad to take on work with the Cyclists’ Touring Club, ad dressing envelopes at 10s”a week. Even this, however, was only temporary work—and there was a grim interval before, after considering employment as a bus conductor, he got taken on at 15s as an invoice clerk in a city warehouse. Fifteen shillings then, seemed wealth to the lad. “I lived like a fighting cock, saved money, had a holiday in Scotland, and helped to keep my mother, and, in addition I paid the fees at the Birkbeck, the City of London College, and the Highbury Institute, out of my salary.” It. looks impossible, but he has told us how it was done.

“How did I manage to do it? In the first place, I used to buy myself whatever food I wanted around the slums Kins s Cross, but I used to receive my staple food, oatmeal, sent to me from home, and I always paid for it “Of course I could not afford tea or coffee, but I found water quite as good as tea from the point of view of food, and that it tastes quite as well when you have grown used to it.

-‘Til j:lie middle of the day I had a meai at Pearce and Plenty’s in Aidersgate Street. I don’t think I ever spent more than twopence or threepence on it, although it was the meal of the day. “It generally consisted of beefsteak pudding. I don't know that there was very much beefsteak in it, \r t it filled up a corner and certainly did me no harm. My food bill* worked out at about 7d or 8d a day for everything, so that saving was easy. “After a time I received a rise, and v. as put into the counting-house at a pound a week. Soon after this a friend who had given me a free run of his laboratory gave me some chemical work to do. This enabled me to leave this counting-house.” He passed South Kensington examinations in science, and was within a few weeks of sitting for a scholarship that would have cleared the immediate future when his health broke down. The strain had been too great, even for the iron constitution of youth.

At the time, this collapse, breaking across the scientific course he had

gapped out for himself and defeating him when success seemed in sight) appeared a malign stroke of fate. Now it looks almost providential. Not so to the young man on whom it fell. His scientific passion persisted, but he had to make a living somewhere else. His gifts had already struck those with whom he. came into any sort of contact, and Mr. Thomas Lough, then a Oladstonian candidate and later Gladstonian M»P. for West Islington (“He got in when I left him,” is MacDonald’s own reported account), offered him in 1888 the post of private secretary and a salary that, though small enough (£75 a year, rising to £100), was sufficient for his Spartan needs. “Now i have attained to fortune,” he wrote at the time. The work taught him much of the practical side of politics. By the time he left Mr. Lough he had a working "knowledge of the machine. Though practical politics in the ’eighties still spelt Liberalism, other currents were stirring, which corres-

ponded more nearly -witli the ardent aspiration of the lad who asked, "Cannot these humane feelings be the foundations of ideas?” Reading on one side, contacts with men on the other, were beginning to show him how that could be done. Very soon after his arrival in London he joined all the Socialist or semi-Socialist societies there were to join—the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, and the New Fellowship (associated with the name of the Rev. Thomas Davidson); and also—more significant perhaps of his outlook than any—the London Trades Council, of which the. secretary was James MacDonald, ’ much better known at this stage than himself. He saw John Burns first in the dock at Bow Street, where he, Hyndman, and others were on trial for

“revolutionary disturbances”; a day or two after that he addressed an open-air meeting in Regent’s Park on the Sunday. “That meeting was the first one at which I ever spoke, and I suppose it was a success, as I was asked to speak again on the following Sunday. That began my work for the Socialist movement in London. It was a queer, insignificant movement, then, doing most of its work in the open-air, or in poky little halls.” His face struck an artist who heard him in one of the “poky little halls" so much that he made a drawing of it as an illustration for the hero of

“Prince Charming,” a novel by William Black, then a highly popular author. Through the TradeS Council, he got to know the men who were working in the Trades Union movement; in Fabian circles he met Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas, Bernard Shaw, and others. Of Bernard Shaw, he says, “I remember him as a red-headed person whom nobody knew, who was writing for Mrs. Besant’s ‘Monthly Corner,’ and whose jokes I generally thought bad. His early work was Issued by the Modern Press, and I have a copy of ’Cashel Byron’s Profession’ in its original paper covers.” (The remarkable library he now possesses was already beginning to be assembled.) With the Fabians, he was associated a large part of the time as an executive member, until he left the society because it did not seem to him that a sufficiently strong or clear line about the South African War was being taken.

While he learned much from these associations, and established many fruitful personal contacts, it was still from incessant reading that his thought was mainly fed and directed. Reading led on to writing. He began to find his feet as a journalist. When, after four years’ association, lie finally left Mr. Thomas Lough, he was able to rely on his pen for a living. He was for a time attached to the staff of the “Weekly Despatch," when Fox Bourne was its editor, and wrote regularly for the “Echo,” under Passmore Edwards, and the “Daily Chronicle," under A. E. Fletcher, besides doing free-lance work of all sorts. There was a brief period when he took charge of the “Labour Leader,” the organ of the Iridependent Labour Party. It was for the “Echo” that he wrote later that courageous and outspoken series of articles on South Africa, as he saw it, after the Boer War (published in 1002 under the title “What I Saw in South Africa"), which sreated a profound impressitm, and did much to change opinion. Meanwhile he was growing less and less satisfied with Liberalism politically. In 1888, when Keir Hardie stood as an Independent Labour candidate for Mid-Lanark against a Liberal candidate, MacDonald sent to Hardie not only the official good wishes of the Scottish Plome Rule Association (of which he was London secretary), but his own. But four more years were required completely to convince him not only that Hardie’s objects were the same as his, but that his methods also were right. It was in 1594 that he wrote again to Hardie, this time to make personal application for membership of the Independent Labour Party, which had been founded at Bradford in the previous year. This step, forced on him by realism and conviction, brought him into close association with Hardie, with Philip Snowden and the other founders of the new Independent Labour Party, with whom he was to work side by side for the next 20 years, and marks a turning point in his career. The new recruit, whom Hardie was soon to describe as the party’s “greatest intellectual asset,” proved a most powerful agent. Although, of course, not present at the original Bradford Conference, which drew up the constitution of the new party and gave it its name, his agreement, as he subsequently stated, was complete on both. “The object of Socialists, who are active in politics,” he wrote later (1909) “ought not to be to form a Socialist party, but a party that will journey toward Socialism. . . .

Socialism is a view of what society is to be when it has completed a further stage in its existence; a political party embodies working ideas for immediate activities.” From this view and from the distinction it expresses, he has never wavered.

When he •said to Hardie that he would “do what work seems good to you,” he meant what he said. From 1894 he was active, up and down the country, speaking and organising for the I.L.P. When the 1895 election came he was their candidate at Southampton. At this first essay he polled SC7 votes; the Liberals ran a LiberalLabour workman against him, who smashed his trade union support. The lesson of this was not lost upon him; it was a vivid demonstration of the vital significance of the fight Hardie and others had been waging inside the Trade Union Congress to induce the trade unions to shake off their Liberal allegiance.

(To be continued next Saturday.)