Ewan MacColl: 1915 - 1989
A Political Journey

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 in a foundry on Cockatoo Island and, at the same time, found himself up to the neck in a union battle which had been on the boil there for some time. He wrote enthusiastic letters to my mother and managed to supplement his wages by busking at the Sydney races. 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 unrest 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. Later he would joke about it, but he always regretted losing the chance to settle there. 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." (Eddie Frow) 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'.

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.

"In the spring of 1928, Charlie Harrison became our lodger. Charlie was a waterproof-worker by trade and a member of the Communist Party. Indeed, he had recently been appointed the branch organiser. The fact that the entire membership of the branch didn't exceed a dozen people didn't prevent him from regarding his new role as an important one and one to be worn with dignity. It was, of course, unpaid. His regimen was strict, based (I suspect) on the one adopted by Lenin during his period of Siberian exile.
Every morning come rain, hail or shine, he was up by 7.30 a. m. Standing naked in the back yard he would hose himself down with cold water. This would be followed by a session of Swedish drill and deep-breathing exercises after which he would sit down to his breakfast of brown bread and marmalade. Most mornings he would read for half an hour or so, alternating Lenin's State and Revolution and Marx's Paris Commune. I was greatly impressed with this systematic approach to reading and for a time I considered adopting it.

On Sunday mornings, he broke with routine and spent the morning playing gramophone records on his portable machine. The discs were 78s and overplaying had thinned the walls of the grooves. Some of them were so worn that their shiny black surface had acquired the greyness of unkempt old age. Die Walküre, in particular, was in an advanced state of decrepitude and both Sieglinde and Siegmund sounded as if they were suffering from violent hiccups.
I imitated them for my cousin John and was overheard by Charlie. A few days later he suggested that I make use of my talents by joining a theatre group which some of his friends had organised for the purpose of staging working-class plays and sketches. The group was the Clarion Players and joining it was my first individual political act. "

A week after his fourteenth birthday, Jimmy Miller left school. After two months introduction to the frustration and tedium of unemployment he found a job at a wire works. 11 months later, March 1930, he was made redundant.

"Back at the Albion Street Labour Exchange, I found that the dole queues had grown much longer during the eleven months that I had been employed. In the first five or six weeks of my enforced freedom, I wrote dozens of applications for jobs in response to adverts in the situations-vacant columns of the daily newspapers.

On two occasions I was sent after jobs by the clerk at the labour exchange. One of them was to a coal merchant who needed a shovel-slinger to ful coal bags. The job had already been filled by the time I arrived. The other was to a large asbestos firm in Rochdale where an office boy was needed. The queue of applicants for this job must have numbered close on a hundred. In the short time that I stood there, another thirty or forty lined up behind me. We stood there and shuffled slowly up the steps and through the entrance to the offices where two young men wielding rubber-stamps put the firm's mark on our chits, proof that we'd actually followed the labour exchange's instructions in applying for the job.

As the weeks passed, I began to understand the desperation of men like my father, skilled men whose skills were no longer needed. More and more often, I met old neighbourhood friends and schoolmates in the lengthening dole queues, and though we tried to re-establish the old camaraderie, we felt awkward in each other's company and soon made a point of avoiding each other".

Eventually a job came up as editor's assistant at the Textile Trader. This turned out to be a journal on its last legs. Three months later Jimmy was back on the dole.

"Every Thursday evening I dutifully went along to The Clarion Players meetings and took part in rehearsals of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and The Singing Jailbirds. At first I had been overawed by the other members of the group; they seemed to be so knowledgeable about things and about writers of whom I hadn't heard. Now I wasn't so sure. I was impatient. The rehearsals didn't seem to be leading anywhere. There was too much talk, too many cups of coffee, too many jokes, too many references to people I didn't know. I mentioned my feelings about the group to Charlie Harrison who suggested that I might be interested in attending a meeting of the Young Communist League. A few days later he introduced me to the members of the Manchester branch of the YCL."

"(The) first meeting left me feeling confused and a little alienated and it wasn't only because of the unfamiliar words. I had expected something a good deal more exciting, conspiratorial perhaps. What I actually saw was a group of perfectly ordinary young people who, when they weren't using the codified language of left-wing politics, talked about how to sell pamphlets and where to distribute leaflets and how to make meetings more interesting and who would make the tea and prepare the sandwiches for next week's social. "

There was a big dance-hall near by called 'The Jig', but the fights there were incredible. If you went there you took your partner with you. If you walked across the floor to ask a girl to dance and she was, say, a member of the Percy Street mob, a dozen blokes would converge on you. And you were lucky if you got out without being beaten up. The YCL dances, and the socials run by the Workers' Arts Club, were cheap and not very glamorous, but there were no fights.

Jimmy's life of jobseeking, rehearsals, and self education was now enhanced by attendance at YCL meetings.

In the course of the next three or four weeks I attended further meetings of the YCL and then I formally enrolled as a member. I say formally but actually it was anything but formal. All that happened was that at the end of a meeting a young woman asked me for my name and address and then handed me a membership card and, voila! I had become a cell in the body of the spectre that was haunting Europe. It was a step which was to influence my whole life...

I was still spending a lot of time in the Peel Park reading room and sometimes, for a change, in the temporary quarters of the Manchester Reference Library in Piccadilly. My ten-new-words-a-day programme had now become a habit and I was reading everything I could lay my hands on, including political works like The Communist Manifesto, Engels' Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Bukharin's Historical Materialism and Lenin's State and Revolution. I had also discovered Balzac and was beginning to work my way through The Human Comedy."

Cinema was another love, and he joined the Manchester and Salford Workers' Film Society as soon as it formed.
In 1930 Clarion Players affiliated to Workers' Theatre Movement , taking the name in the process.
He was active in the youth council of the National Unemployed Workers Movement.

Our most sympathetic audiences were those drawn from the ranks of the unemployed, particularly those organised in the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (N.U.W.M.). From being a small and weak offshoot of the Communist Party, the N.U.W.M. had grown in the space of a few months into an enormous movement numbering tens of thousands. At their meetings, demonstrations and hunger-marches we could always rely on a sympathetic hearing and had it not been for them I doubt whether the Red Megaphones would have survived.

There were regional hunger marches from Manchester to Lancaster: and of course national hunger marches; Lancashire to London; Glasgow to London; Tyneside to London . . . so we were performing for hunger marchers too. I wrote a fair number of songs for hunger marchers. They were all parodies of popular songs like:
Forward unemployed, forward unemployed,
Led by the NUWM,
We fight against the cuts again.
From fighting Birkenhead, we've learnt our lesson well.
We'1I send the National Government
And the means test all to Hell.

Sunday, January 21, 2001 From Lancashire and down the Clyde,
From Birmingham, Yorkshire and Wales we stride,
We're marching south to London to open Parliament.

He contributed to several of the factory papers that Communist Party members were producing:

"There was a factory in Salford in Salford called Ward & Goldstone. This was a factory where there were a lot of youngsters employed. A girl called Nellie Edgar was working there in the office and she was in the YCL and one way and another ... there was information provided about the conditions of work, which were very very bad, in the factory. A factory paper was produced called the Ward & Goldstone SPARK - Jim and Nellie Edgar and Larry Finlay and Sid Jenkins... they got this paper, it was duplicated, ... we used to duplicate these papers, we used to write them and duplicate them ourselves... and they issued this paper. Jim was very much involved in that. Was able to write the sort of bits of jingles and short, catchy things helped to make it so that it caught on and sold very well in the factory." (Eddie Frow)

Like many young city people living near the Pennines in the twenties and thirties, Jimmy was a rambler.

"...we had camps, we had The British Workers Sports Federation, we had camps and rambles...
...there was a tremendous number of youngsters that on Sundays would go to what they called London Road Station in those days, it's now called Piccadilly and they'd get a ticket out to Glossop or Hayfield and they'd go of either on their own or frequently in groups and they would walk up Kinder and over the mountains and all that sort of thing." (E. F.)

Jimmy helped organise actions in the mass trespass campaigns. [See Benny Rothman archives ]
He wrote 'Manchester Rambler' after the 1932 mass trespass that was the watershed of the movement.

"...he had a talent for improvisation. He certainly had a tremendous talent as a youngster for picking out a tune and putting words to it that he could almost compose as he went along. You think of that 'Dirty Old Town' and 'The Manchester Rambler' song ...These are the sort of things that he's almost do in 5 minutes. You know, he wouldn't sit down with his head in his hands and labouriously compose sornething....it would just come to him spontaneously while he was walking..."I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler, from Manchester Way, I get all my pleasures the hard... ", and he'd be off, you know, and we'd be picking it up.
Hello! Jim's off again, what is it? We'd be picking up the words from him, this was the sort of lad he was. Everybody'd be joining in, laughing and joking and off we'd go!
...to the best of my knowledge Jim's words and phrases came out pat from the start. They almost came out in the final form from the first time he enunciated it......He could ....I don't know whether he had to think about it for a quarter of an hour before it came out but he could do it almost spontaneously, he could come out with a song, or verses of a song, quite spontaneously." (E.F.)

I was also busy helping to organize the Ramblers' Rights movement and the mass trespass campaigns. I wrote songs about this too. There was one to the tune of 'The Road to the Isles'. An old friend reminded me of it recently when I was up in Manchester at an Anti-Nazi rally:

We are young hikers who in search of healthy sport,
Leave Manchester each weekend for a hike,
Though the best moorlands and hills are closed to us,
We'll ramble anywhere we like.

For, by Kinder, and by Bleaklow and through the Goyt we'll go.
We'll ramble over mountain, moor and fen,
And we'll fight against the trespass laws
For every ramblers rights,
And trespass over Kinder Scout again.
For the mass trespass is the only way there is,
To gain access to mountains once again.

A very awkward piece of writing, just doggerel.

Another song I wrote at that time, 'The Manchester Rambler' , is still fairly widely sung

But his main occupation was theatre:

"...the Red Megaphones was really an agit-prop, it was really a method of putting over a message to a crowd of people outside that was different than just one person speaking. Four would get up on the platform and the first one would shout out a slogan, the second one would pick it up, the third one would carry it on then they would all do it in unison. Something that was like a drill, it had a tremendous dramatic effect because you must remember that there was a tremendous tradition in vogue of open-air meetings. There were many, many places like Stephenson Square and innumerable places in Salford. There were traditional meeting places from the time of the Socialist Movement and earlier than that..Another big meeting place was outside Labour Exchanges where you had to go and sign on twice a week, you'd nothing to do with your time. You signed on for unemployment benefit - what was called the dole. So the Red Megaphones had a tremendous impact when they were able to get up and project a message ...young people coming over with vigour and clarity related to things that they were concerned about - what the policy of the government was in regard to unemployment, how it could be altered...a real purposeful and meaningful message.
And it wasn't the whole part of the meeting - that frequently helped to attract the crowd and then the other two would get up and expound the whole thing! It was very very successful. In many Lancashire towns for instance in Rochdale, ... the town hall square was a huge area fon a meeting place, the appearance of these youngsters, in this sort of way which had never been seen before, really did create a tremendous impression. But they did have a little group in Rochdale at one time, of their own, so there was more than one group, it wasn't only the Manchester Red Megaphones, there were one or two others in areas near by." (E.F.)