Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [231]
In 1892 the eternal verities found a voice in a Scottish miners’ organizer with the zeal of a prophet. Keir Hardie, then thirty-six, was a short handsome man with smoldering brown eyes and hair brushed back from a domed forehead. Born in a one-room cottage on a Lanarkshire coal field and brought up with two adults and nine children in that room, where somehow his mother taught him to read, he went to work as a baker’s errand boy at the age of seven. On one weekly payday, with his father out of work, his mother in bed with a newborn child and no food in the house, the family’s small and only breadwinner walked the two miles to his place of employment in the rain, to arrive for the second day in a row fifteen minutes late. “You are wanted upstairs by the Master,” said the girl behind the counter. Entering the room where the employer and his family sat around a mahogany breakfast table set with steaming coffee and hot rolls, he was told he was dismissed and, as a reminder against lateness, his week’s wages were forfeit. On his empty way out the maid in silent pity gave him a roll.
Hardie believed in class war to the end. Liberals to him were no different from Tories but just another face of the employing class. When he stood for the first time as an independent labour candidate from mid-Lanark in 1888, the Liberal candidate—Sir George Trevelyan—explained to him how unfortunate it was that they should fight each other to the benefit of the Tories and proposed that if Hardie withdrew, the Liberals would assure him a safe seat and election expenses at the next general election and pay him as M.P. a yearly salary of £300. Hardie, who had never earned anything approaching that sum, refused. Although he lost on this occasion, receiving only 617 votes out of a total of 7,000, four years later he was elected as an independent from South West Ham. When he took his seat in the House wearing tweeds and a cloth cap, unlike others of his class who put on respectable black broadcloth when they mixed in the world, it was as if the red flag had been raised at Westminster. He never succumbed to the capitalist embrace. During a debate on the unemployed he sat listening in growing rage while no word of sympathy for the starving was uttered and finally burst out, “You well-fed beasts!” On another occasion when a member was denouncing the unemployed as lazy vagabonds who did not want to work, Hardie suggested that an equal number of vagabonds could be seen “every day on Rotten Row in top hats and spats.” When he addressed meetings, standing like a statue in hewn granite of the emancipated worker, with head thrown back and body erect, he seemed to express the “equality, freedom and triumphant self-reliance” which he wanted to infuse in the working class. With no salary or political funds to draw on, he supported himself, his wife and three children on what he could earn from journalism, the maximum he ever made being £210 a year.
In 1889 the desperate dockers’ strike for 6d. an hour started the movement to organize the unskilled in industry-wide unions. It continued through the nineties with organizers moved by a sense of “religious necessity” and workers whom it was difficult to persuade that arbitration paid them better than “the fierce strikes in which their repressed emotions sought