Glasgow's Red Clydeside and the politics of poetry

Through extensive archival research and close-reading, this thesis recovers and explores poetry from Glasgow’s Red Clydeside period (c. 1910 to 1932). Though the Red Clydeside period occupies an important place in Scottish labour history, and remains powerfully relevant for left-wing political activists in the present, the poetry of the period has yet to be considered critically by researchers in either the fields of history or literary studies. This thesis collects and examines poetry from a range of sources, including newspapers, pamphlets, song books, and collections of verse, in order to explore the important role poetry played in the political struggle of the period. I begin by exploring poetry published in the radical newspaper the Worker, considering the ways in which poems were used to support the paper’s broader political agenda. I then go on to consider the impressive literary output of John S. Clarke, editor of the Worker and the Red Clydeside period’s most prolific writer. Next, I explore poems related to the rent strike of 1915, considering how poets both in the past and in the present day represent the strike and its major figures, before moving on to focus on the political poetry of the striker and suffragette, Helen Crawfurd. Following this, I investigate the poetry of Glasgow’s radical Proletarian Schools and their schoolmaster Tom Anderson, arguing that poetry provided an important educational tool. Finally, the thesis ends with an exploration of shifting poetic representations of the prominent Clydesider John Maclean, both in his own lifetime and later in the twentieth century. In its recovery of Clydeside-period poetry, and in its assessment of more contemporary responses to Red Clydeside, this project aims to correct critical neglect of its associated literary output, and to bring these texts into critical discussions of working-class literature more broadly. I conclude that Clydesiders’ repeated return to poetry demonstrates their core belief in its importance within political struggle.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Burns, Megan Holly

Contributors dc:contributor

• Kövesi, Simon
• Lea, Daniel

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/42zj-hc86

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:6f6ff525-89f1-4ed9-8ae2-d139805cfa71:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1