Ewan MacColl: The early years
Ewan MacColl was born in Salford and named James by his parents, Betsy and William Miller. William was an iron-moulder, militant trade-unionist and a communist from Stirlingshire. Betsy Hendry was from Auchterarder, in Perthshire. When William was unemployed she supported the family, cleaning houses and offices, and taking in washing.
" They were married in 1908. My father was twenty-four and my mother twenty-two years of age. In the two years that followed their marriage, my father was sacked from three or four different foundries because of his union activities, and it became fairly obvious that there was no future for him in Scotland. Burnley, in northeast Lancashire, was his next base, working in the foundry of a firm specialising in textile machinery."
After a further move, to Warrington, they finally settled in Salford, but Betsy's health was suffering and the Millers planned to emigrate to a drier climate.
"My father would go to Australia, where there was plenty of work for skilled moulders, and there he would earn enough to pay for my mother's passage over and for somewhere to live. And so, in the summer of 1912 he began the six-week voyage to Australia. He found work right away...and, at the same time, found himself up to the neck in a union battle ... Then, eight months from the day he left, my mother received a telegram saying that he was on his way home. It would seem that the u
nrest in the foundry had finally erupted in a strike and the emigration officials suddenly decided that my father's entry permit had been due to a mistake. He was deported ... It must have been fairly soon after his return that I was conceived. A few months later, the First World War started. I was born on 25 January 1915."
William and Betsy, as well as being active socialists, were accomplished singers and storytellers, and these aspects of their lives were to become deeply ingrained in their son's development.
"During my childhood my parents spoke often of Scotland and their life there. They were exiles and still regarded themselves as visitors rather than settlers in this new land. I loved their stories - they were jewels embellishing my childhood with visions of a magical landscape in which my father and mother walked in a cloud of music ... For a child who had never been out of Salford it was an evocation of paradise".(EM:J)
"...this marvellous voice that he had, and how he would stand up and sing this song with such great feeling. Jimmy's father singing MacGregor's Gathering was really something I'll never forget as long as I live. It must have had a tremendous impact." (EF)
Occasionally, when my father was unemployed for long periods, he'd spend time in the Workers' Arts Club. The Workers' Arts Club was in Hyndman Hall, Liverpool Street, Salford. Next to it was a cinder croft, and behind that the main gasworks for Salford. I wrote a song inspired by that scene when I worked in Theatre Workshop. It was called 'Dirty Old Town'.
The Workers' Arts Club was an extraordinary institution. I don't know how it got the name 'Arts Club', because there was very little in the way of arts; it was a three-storey building, with rat- infested cellars. The top floor was a boxing gym - where later a number of boxers were to be recruited into the Communist Party and the YCL. Some of them later went to fight in Spain, people like Joe and George Norman for example - the Norman brothers, they went from there; they were two welter-weights who had been in the navy.
On the floor underneath the gym there was a room that was kept for meetings, and on Saturday political groups would organize dances or socials there. The floor wasn't really fit for dancing - it was absolutely torn to ribbons by people's boots! It wasn't a very big room anyway. But there would be a little band - three or four instruments and people would dance. Downstairs, on the ground floor, there was a bar and a snooker table. There'd always be people playing snooker, and that's where the debates were held, in that room, to the click of snooker balls.
The old-timers would sit there on a Sunday evening. There was a fellow called Jimmy Tilbrook, a great mountain of a man. When I first heard about Dr Johnson I imagined he looked like Jimmy Tilbrook, and for God's sake, when I actually saw a picture of him, he did! A cross between G. K. Chesterton and Dr Johnson. He used to sit there in a special chair that had been made for him, one of those Windsor-type chairs, but about twice the normal size. And he'd sit there and pontificate, and the rest of the old fellows would sit round in a semi-circle and discuss and debate this or that topic.
I can remember occasionally sitting on the edge of it and listening, when I was about fourteen, and thinking, 'What a lot of bloody nonsense'. They would discuss Edward Clodd's History of Creation, Volney's Ruins of Empires, Haeckel's Riddle of the Uníverse. And they'd have passionate debates on Dietzgen. Science and religion occupied a very important part of the talk. But also the mid-nineteenth- and late-nineteenth-century German philosophers would be discussed. The younger elements there, like George Poole for example, who was the son of a docker, would dismiss them as Utopians and not part of the century. And in a way he was right. They were the end of an epoch. Nevertheless it was a valuable atmosphere to grow up in.
George Poole was organizing discussions among his contemporaries, that is, kids from fourteen to eighteen. Among other things he ran a class on the history of philosophy and another on dialectical materialism... I was taking part...from about the time I was thirteen.
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