James Barke (1905-58) was a precocious young man. ‘At 17 he chaired his first Labour Party meeting ...’ his friend, James A Russell wrote in the Scottish Co-operator. Barke was living in Partick at the time and he was Chair of the Partick ILP. In 1946 one of his comrades in that branch wrote: ‘For more than twenty years I have considered myself an “old comrade” of yours, though we were never more closely associated than appearing on the platform of the Star Palace in Partick at an unemployed meeting. Your chairmanship had perhaps room for improvement, but I thought you very intellectual.’[ 1 ] In the General Election of 1922 ten Labour MPs were elected in Glasgow and the first Scottish Communist MP, in Motherwell, J T Walton Newbold.
In notes for a talk Barke wrote: ‘by the age of 18 [I] had written my first play which I was soon to see produced by the Scottish National Players. By then it was 1923. But the biggest influence in my life had already taken place - the impact of the ‘14-‘18 War and the Russian Revolution...’[ 2 ] In 1923 John MacLean died. In his article ‘Living in Scotland’ for the Scottish Field in January 1956 Barke wrote (of Glasgow): ‘Here I became acquainted with the now almost mythical John MacLean.’ Perhaps ‘legendary’ would have been a better word. Did he know MacLean personally or did he attend his meetings? He describes MacLean’s outdoor meetings in The World His Pillow (1933) and The Land of the Leal (1939). A copy of MacLean’s printed ‘Notes of lectures given at the British Socialist Party (Glasgow) Economic and Industrial History Class’ remains in Barke’s Papers.
Barke also re-created scenes from different aspects of the General Strike in the novels mentioned above. But he worked in management himself for Barclay, Curle & Co Ltd, Clydeholm Shipyard, Whiteinch from 1922 to 1946 (following three years as office-boy for the same firm).
By 1930 Barke was writing to Theodore Dreiser: ‘I notice you are a signatory to the Amsterdam Anti-war Congress. My concluding word is that you may become as great a power in that direction (the overthrow of World Capitalism and the establishment of the workers’ dictatorship) as you have so magnificently been in the world of letters.’[ 3 ]
In his ‘Living in Scotland’ article Barke referred to: ‘the bright (if brief) promise of the ILP...’ He appears to have supported the ILP until 1932 but in his diary for 5 and 6 August that year he makes notes of a meeting with James Maxton, then Chair of the ILP. ‘All in all I left Comrade Maxton depressed and disillusioned. Maxton is such a wonderful personality, is such a sincere fighter that it seems a great pity that he hasn’t the intellectual honesty to see the CPGB position much more clearly. It is very sad to see an ILP leader of the international standing of Maxton believing such a lot of tosh about the Communists.’[ 4 ]
Clearly Barke supported the CP at this time without praising the party in public as he had praised the ILP. In a letter to Grassic Gibbon, 5 September 1933, he wrote: ‘either you stand by the working class and its heroic vanguard the Communist Party or you take your stand... with Fascism...’[ 5 ] This sharp confrontation reflected the policy of the Third Period of the Communist International.
But did James Barke join the CP? In his essay in A Weapon in the Struggle, ‘James Barke: A Great-Hearted Writer, a Hater of Oppression, a True Scot’, H Gustav Klaus assumes that he did. ‘He crossed the Rubicon some time in late 1932 or 1933 by joining the CP in whose ranks he remained until his death in 1958.’[ 6 ] In Red Letter Days, too, Andy Croft refers to Barke as ‘...James Joyce writing about Glasgow with a Communist Party card in his pocket.’[ 7 ] These statements are not supported by evidence.
The question had already been asked by a contemporary Scottish socialist author, J Lennox Kerr (1899-1963). On 3 March 1936, Barke replied, ‘I understand that you are anxious to know if I am a member of the Communist Party. The first time we met you asked me this question and I replied in the negative which was true and remains so. Now you have Max Goldberg’s reassurance. I am merely a Left writer - whatever that may be.’[ 8 ] Max Goldberg (1899-1973) is shown in a CP photo of the 1930s reproduced on the cover of Scottish Labour History Society Journal 31, 1996. In a letter to Hugh MacDiarmid, 9 February 1939, Peter Kerrigan writes: ‘There is one thing in your letter [of 6 February] to which it is necessary to draw your attention. James Barke is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party.’[ 9 ] At that time Peter Kerrigan was Secretary to the Scottish District Committee of the CP.
Why was Barke ‘merely a Left Writer’? The most specific clues as to Barke’s and Kerr’s reasons for not joining the CP are contained in letters from Kerr to Barke in which Barke’s views are reported as well as his own. One is dated ‘3rd Oct.’ from Kerr’s address in Sussex. He had been living in Paisley in 1936 and had moved to Sussex by 1937.
Don’t go fashing yourself about tackling the Party until you are sure you are well. It’s a poor policy to die for a cause you would be more useful to alive. Later on, we’ll get together to talk about what’s in our minds and we’ll evolve some method of retaliation. I have an idea I’ll never be much welcomed by the Party as it is constituted in its higher places today and I’m not greatly troubled.
Just now my usefulness is curtailed by being away from the folks I know and would work with but that’s just temporary and I’m more concerned with getting ready for them than I am with biting the heels of the young gentlemen of the Party now.
But I do think it would be a good idea if we could collect the best of the working-class writers now and see how they feel about this attitude of the Party. A dozen of us could exert so much more pressure than two of us. So, if you have any names in mind, we might make a start by writing to them, laying out our views. We could keep the Party informed of what we are doing, so we could not be given the label of sabotagers. Send them a copy of all our letters.[ 10 ]
It seems clear that Barke and Kerr were in communication with the party or some of its officers at this stage, but the point at issue, ‘this attitude of the Party’, is unclear here. Another letter from the same address but only dated ‘Wednesday’ is more specific.
In the isolation of my own room, I can at least be away from these young men in flannel bags and Marxist handbooks.
It is a bitter pill, Jamie, that the likes of us... who if we are not conversant with the latest Strachey interpretations... do know our own folks are rendered so useless. We could, I know, go into the struggle from the Party membership as wall chalkers, and by our intense devotion to one of the Leaders, be appointed sharpeners of the chalks, but I still, as I always have done, consider that a waste of material and refuse to lay aside my real usefulness. You in your Major Operation and I in Woman of Glenshiels earned our standing and are entitled to exercise our best qualities in the struggle, as writers. I am not going to take any other job. If they won’t recognise us as authors and give us work to do in that field, then I, for one, will dig my own furrow and to hell with ‘Party loyalty’... if what they do is Party loyalty. I am more concerned with the fight to shape some sort of proletarian literature out of myself....
…But, as you propose, if we could gather a band of working-class authors together, we could assert ourselves. And we ought to do it.[ 11 ]
Kerr continued his sarcasm in ‘yours... fraternally’. Major Operation (1936) was built around the international communist metaphor for revolution in the thirties and Peter Kerrigan was thought to be the model for the character of Jock MacKelvie, a red leader who becomes a Red Leader. Woman of Glenshiels (1935) was set mainly in an earlier period and contained a particularly sensitive re-creation of a conscientious objector in the First World War who is is driven by pressure to enlist and is killed in France. It appears that Barke and Kerr looked for some special position in the party as writers and were unwilling to undertake the ordinary duties of members. Kerr later joined, and left, the Labour Party.
Barke remained in Scotland and was known to leading communists there. He was photographed with William Gallacher, Communist MP, for West Fife from 1935 to 1950, and wrote on the back, ‘J.B. with Willie Gallacher M.P. - after the culmination of the greatest 1930s Hunger March.’ The photograph was probably taken in Queen’s Park, Glasgow in 1936; and James A Russell has recorded that: ‘as long as (Barke) was fit he marched in the May Day procession to Queen’s Park.’
In November 1936 Barke contributed the anti-Nationalist article, ‘The Scottish National Question’, to the Scottish issue of Left Review which earned him the description of ‘the official mouthpiece’ of the ‘Scottish “Communist” clique’ by Hugh MacDiarmid[ 12 ] and of ‘the British CP’s ideological policeman’ by James D. Young.[ 13 ]
Barke’s position can be seen as ambiguous. Harry McShane, for example, records that he was a member of an ‘extended’ Scottish Committee of the party of ‘forty or fifty people instead of the normal fourteen to twenty’ which was called to vote on Aitken Ferguson’s draft statement on Scottish devolution in 1938. McShane continued: ‘A lot of the people invited to the extended committee were the literary elements of the Party, and when the vote was taken on the statement there were only two against: myself and Jimmy Barke, the novelist and playwright.’[ 14 ] However, it seems highly likely that this committee included non-party sympathisers on a particular question.
In his TS memoirs in the Gallacher Memorial Library in Glasgow Caledonian University Bill Cowe, the Party’s Glasgow organiser in 1938, referred to Ferguson’s pamphlet Scotland, now published, and stated that Ferguson, George Middleton, who became General Secretary of the STUC in 1948, and Barke organised the ‘Pageant of Scottish History’ which was ‘initiated by the Communist Party’. MacDiarmid was omitted from the printed ‘Cultural’ section.
An unusual incident took place in the Glasgow Press Club on the evening of 3 December 1938. Writers, including Barke and MacDiarmid, had assembled for the PEN dinner in honour of William Power, author and journalist. While in Glasgow MacDiarmid was due to attend a meeting with the Scottish Secretariat of the party on either 6 or 7 December to discuss his differences with the Secretariat. In a letter to his friend, Barbara Niven, MacDiarmid related why he did not attend.
I intended to do so, but as the result of an assault upon me in the Glasgow Press Club by James Barke, the novelist, whom I understood to be a member of the CP and a personal friend of some of the District Committee and of my particular enemies in or near the Party, I finally decided not to do so, and didn’t. The District Committee now tell me that Barke is not a member of the Party.[ 15 ]
Another piece of evidence shows that Barke was on familiar terms with individual CP members at this time. Tom Murray recalled to Ian MacDougall that he had approached a prominent activist in the west of Scotland (in 1939) to ask him if he would form part of a skeleton party organisation if the party were made illegal on the outbreak of war. Murray went on:
This individual, who had given us his word of honour that he wouldn’t discuss the matter with anybody, nevertheless immediately proceeded in confidence to a friend of his, James Barke, the author, to find out if Barke knew what this was all about because we, of course, hadn’t shown our hands. James Barke, knowing nothing, proceeded to the Party district office, who of course said they knew nothing about it, which was the correct line to take.[ 16 ]
In January 1941 Barke became the first Chair of Glasgow Unity which had been formed by five companies which had been brought together by the necessities of war - Glasgow Workers’ Theatre Group, Clarion Players, Glasgow Players, Transport Players and the Jewish Institute Players. The company performed four of Barke’s plays: Major Operation, based on the novel, in 1941; The Night of the Blitz in 1944; When the Boys Come Home in 1945; and Her Name Was Barbara Allan in 1946. Among the dedicatees of the published script of Major Operation in 1942 were William and Jean Gallacher and J R Campbell.
‘The night of the blitz’ was 14-15 March 1941. In the play Barke shows the reconciliation of a working-class and a middle-class family, both of whom had lost daughters in the blitz. William, son of working-class parents, marries Concordia, daughter of middle-class parents, and makes a powerful communist declamation at the end:
We are the workers, strong. We are the masses moving, in a vast triumphant throng: moving towards the daylight, moving towards the sun, out of the night and terror of bomb, and plane, and gun. Gathering purpose, slowly; but working out a plan, to end the exploitation of man by man. We know how our Russian comrades won out for a sixth of the earth and, in spite of the blood and terror, brought Socialism to birth. Now we in our terror and torment must reach for the Soviet Star and hold it aloft as a banner to rally from near and from far.[ 17 ]
The theme was in direct opposition to the theme of Major Operation which appeared to show at the end that the only role for a middle-class man lay in aiding a working-class man and going to his death in the process.
The title When the Boys Come Home refers to the expectation that the returning soldiers would not tolerate pre-war conditions. The main characters are skilled workers and the scenes are set in the Foreman Steel Checker’s office. The characters represent different points of view, for example, Donald and Peter are platers but Donald is a communist and shop steward and Peter is a nationalist. In a long letter to Gallacher, 6 June 1945, Barke revealed that he has had a ‘very painful relationship with the small anti-Barke CP group in Unity Theatre...’ This group had raised serious objection to his new play and Sam Aaronovitch had ‘vetoed the play’ in the name of the CP. Barke also recalled that Aaronovitch had criticised The Night of the Blitz and he (Barke) had been banned from attending rehearsals. He explained the basis of the group’s objection to When the Boys Come Home and added his reply:
... the play was ‘anti-working class; too Scottish Nationalist; too much bloody Burns; attacks on industrial canteens, which we support; all wrong about hydro-electric development ...’ - in fact not a play at all but a hotchpotch of anti-Party, anti-working class confusion.
I answered briefly [to Robert Mitchell, the producer]. I categorically denied every charge, repudiated them with scorn and said I had never (despite many attractive temptations) become a political or artistic prostitute; and that, though all art was political, politics were not art - that I had written a play and not a pamphlet.
Barke also quoted the opinion of ‘a leading comrade, on leave from the Navy’ that ‘we don’t want any Mayakoffskys driven to suicide by a bunch of half-witted RAPPists.’[ 18 ] The reference was to the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers which Mayakovsky had joined two months before his suicide. The letter showed that Barke was able to make personal contact with leading Party members in Glasgow, including Kerrigan, Johnny Gollan and Bob McIlhone.
However, the production of When the Boys Come Home went ahead unaltered on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 21 June to 14 July 1945.
On 27 June Gallacher wrote a fine, undogmatic letter to Barke from his constituency without indicating receipt of Barke’s letter:
Geo. Middleton spoke to me about your new play the other night. He told me it was very good but offered a bit of light criticism about certain features of it.
He then said you were having some trouble. I told him to tell you when he got back to Glasgow that I am on your side, whatever the trouble is.
Of course there may be something in the play that I don’t like. That I cannot say, but you & the lads are doing a great job & you deserve all the help & encouragement we can give you.[ 19 ]
On 12 October 1945 Barke gave his clearest hint as to why he wasn’t a party member in the ink draft of a letter in reply to a letter from Albert Mackie, poet and journalist, on 3 October. ‘To you my non-conformism is communism. Well, why boggle at a name - except that the Communist Party would not acknowledge me. That is the extent of my non-conformism…But The Day’s coming yet for a’ that. ...’[ 20 ]
In a letter prior to 1 August 1946 Kerr wrote: ‘Rumour has it that you are proceeding to America. Let me in mischief recall... The Manifesto declaration - “The Communists disdain to conceal their aims”... Earl Browderism is dead. Have a good time - with your conscience.’[ 21 ] Here Kerr appears to regard Barke as a communist. Earl Browder had dissolved the CPUSA after the dissolution of the Third International in 1943 and formed a looser Communist Political Association in its place; however, the CPUSA was re-established in 1945. Perhaps Kerr implies here that Barke would have preferred a looser communist political association.
Barke replied on 1 August: ‘Rumour is not always a lying jade. I am also going to the USSR; but either there or in America my conscience will be what it has always been: I can therefore be depended upon to enjoy myself accordingly. Not having any political affiliation will not affect this in any way.’[ 22 ] There is no evidence that Barke visited either the USA or the USSR.
When Geoffrey Wagner, an American scholar, wrote to Barke, 12 June 1950, to ask him if he had written about Grassic Gibbon in the Daily Worker, Barke noted in the margin of the letter: ‘I most definitely did not write here’.[ 23 ] In an undated draft reply to Wagner, he wrote, ‘In so far as the Daily Worker and Our Time are concerned, I wouldn’t touch Our Time with a barge pole!’[ 24 ] Our Time, a monthly cultural review, had ceased publication in October 1949. Perhaps Barke knew that it was under the control of the CP’s National Cultural Committee (Chair, Emile Burns, and Secretary, Sam Aaronovitch).
Barke and Gallacher remained in friendly correspondence until Barke’s death. Gallacher thanks Barke for his ‘kind thoughts’ when he is hospital in 1950, and plans to visit him after he has heard that he is unwell in 1957. Out of eight letters Gallacher only once addresses Barke as ‘Comrade’ (in 1942).
Gallacher and MacDiarmid both spoke at Barke’s funeral. In his essay, ‘James Barke - A True Son of the Soil’, Robert Bonnar recorded that Gallacher had said that: ‘it was in Glasgow… that Jimmy Barke’s mind was formed and his inmost thoughts fashioned. It was there on Clydeside in the hungry Thirties that Jimmy Barke became the Marxist, the communist, the crusader. He remained a crusader to the end.’[ 25 ]
MSS are quoted by permission of the National Library of Scotland, the Mitchell Library and Alasdair Barke.
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Communist History Network Newsletter, Issue 19, Spring 2006 |
