And the lesson for today is Unity

``That's the lesson,'' says Edinburgh historian David Fisher. ``If you are an individual on your own they can smash you, but if you are united you can't be broken. And that obviously stuck in a lot of children's minds.''

The Socialist Sunday School movement, born out of the original Glasgow branch founded 100 years ago this month, delivered a curriculum that was a pattern for life.

To read the literature; the hymn book, the notes for teachers, the guiding ``precepts''; the ``declaration of first principles''; and to listen to the last generation of pupils and teachers, who saw the few remaining Socialist Sunday Schools wither away in the early 1970s, is to enter a lost world of infinite hope, where paradise was just around the corner - so long as the young were taught how to work for it.

``We taught them to work at their lessons at school, and when they came to take on their job, to be good at their job,'' says Duncan Ireland, 75, former pupil, organiser and choirmaster at several Glasgow branches, and the national movement's last treasurer. ``If you're an apprentice in the shipyard, you be the best apprentice, not because there's a prize, but because you, as a young Socialist, are required to be the best apprentice, because one day you will be required to build Socialism, and you will need to be a good worker.''

Dr Fred Reid, senior lecturer in history at Warwick University and himself a product of the Pollok Socialist Sunday School, argues in an article on Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain, 1892-1939, that the movement was created in the same spirit of revolt which gave rise to the Independent Labour Party in 1893; a realisation that poverty, hunger, and bad housing came about not because the working class were feckless backsliders, as Church and Government might hold, but because society was organised that way.

Duncan Ireland remembers one teacher, Rab Chambers, who visited Glasgow schools before the war: ``In one example, he's giving us kids money for doing jobs of work and then he changes his coat and says, `Give me your money if you want to buy in my shop!' and of course the kids are saying, `We gave you all that money, and we produced all these goods in the first place!' ''

In the early 1890s a group of Glasgow social reformers, among them J Bruce Glasier, later ILP president, his lecturer wife Katherine Conway, his sister Lizzie Glasier, and child welfare activist Margaret MacMillan were considering how to teach Socialism to the young, following the lead of Keir Hardie, by then MP for South West Ham and founder of the Crusaders club for young people.

He was also owner/editor of the Labour Leader, which is the organ Lizzie Glasier chose for her appeal to form Socialist classes for children nationwide: ``Effort ought to be made to get at the little ones when their minds and susceptibilities are plastic and impressionable.''

David Fisher, whose book on the Edinburgh schools, A Band of Little Comrades, is shortly to be published by the People's Story museum, says: ``The Socialist Movement didn't see it as a given fact, that when you come to the age of reason you would subscribe to the cause. It was a way of life, therefore it had to involve the whole of life; it had to involve children, and they had to be brought up in it, or otherwise how would there be a next generation of socialists?''

On February 2, 1896, ILP Socialist lecturer Caroline Martyn formed the Glasgow Socialist Sunday School, laying the pattern for a movement which grew rapidly.

Under the direction of former Christian Socialist Archie McArthur, who founded the movement's magazine, the Young Socialist, in 1901, at least 108 schools were opened before the First World War (nearly a quarter of them in the Scottish heartland, the rest centred in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Tyneside and London) teaching some 4540 children, 1788 ``adolescents'' (17 to 21-year-olds) and 6328 adults. By 1921 there were 153 schools across Britain.

The influence of ``theology-soaked Scotland'', says Reid, pervaded the movement, and the early proceedings were a mixture of church services and committee meetings. Lessons started, and were interspersed, with hymns (the schools were secular, and had their own hymn book, containing stirring songs exhorting children to arise and work for the good. The schools adopted many of the forms of orthodox churches, including baptism, or ``naming'' ceremonies).

The minutes of the previous week's meeting, always taken by a child, were read, and moved and seconded by the children themselves. In this way, they learned how to organise and run meetings for the future; many would go on to become trade union leaders, like former TUC general-secretary Vic Feather, and politicians, like Maryhill MP William Hannan.

The Minute Book for the Central Edinburgh school recounts the meeting of September 28, 1913: ``Comrade Beattie told the story of Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the tar baby. Hymn 9 was sung. Comrade Hardy gave us a lesson on the origin of names. Comrade Hardy named the baby son of Mr and Mrs Beattie, Lawrence, and he hoped that some day Lawrence would take part in the great movement of socialism. Hymn 7 was sung.''

PARENTS or visiting specialists - the Burns historian, the naturalist, and so on were the teachers. The schools pioneered visual aids in teaching, with models of tenement blocks to illustrate a lesson on housing, or a dumpling cut up to symbolise the distribution of wealth, or the provenance of a cake's ingredients giving an understanding of world trade. Children prepared ``items'' - singing, playing violins, reciting poetry. Seen politically, of course, this was another way of training the working class in confidence and public speaking.

After the turn of the century, says Reid, critical members demanded more than the ethical approach offered by the founders, who conceived of Socialism as a religion, without God but with a strict moral law. (``We had the ethics, we just dispensed with the supernatural,'' says one former pupil). The new demand for a clearer statement for the aims of Socialism was met in 1908 with the Declarations of First Principles, a form of political catechism. (Question 3: Why is Socialism necessary? Answer: Socialism is necessary because the present system enables a few to enrich themselves out of the labour of the People.) By the 1920s, lessons evoked a ``semi-revolutionary Socialism'', according to Reid, with one Glasgow School teaching the lives of Lenin, Spartacus and Karl Marx.

But former pupils insist that to concentrate exclusively on its political aspect is to deny the ethical bedrock on which the movement was founded.

``I never did feel that the main function of the Sunday School was the socialist message,'' says May Hutcheson, who attended Pollokshaws school before the war and Nitshill afterwards. ``I felt it was the comradeship that we all got from it, plus the interests in lots of wider things in life.''

The Sunday Schools opened up to working-class children a world of culture, always in the spirit of contributing to the community.

``My wife is typical,'' says Bill Aitken, 78, former chairman of the Glasgow union of Socialist Sunday Schools. ``Someone taught her country dancing, so she felt it behoved her to teach the children.'' Music played an enormous part, with Glasgow alone boasting dozens of choirs within the Socialist Movement. Children also wrote and performed in plays and shows, and learned unheard-of skills; Ella Hillhouse, 73, who went to Maryhill school in Glasgow, learned Esperanto, for example.

And then there was the rambling; the schools recognised the importance of taking the children outside the tenements where they grew up.

``We were hiking before the word existed,'' says Duncan Ireland. ``We called it tramping.'' From May onwards, many Sunday Schools met outside in parks or hopped straight on the trams that took them out to the country. There were youth hostel weekends and the lessons of nature to learn. ``I always remember,'' says Bill Aitken, savouring the memory, pinching together delicately the fingers and thumb of his right hand and holding them up before his face, ``the teacher saying `And this is a Coltsfoot. It is the first flower of spring.' '' Duncan Ireland remembers a nature teacher coming through Kelvinside on his way to the class and picking up a huge handful of leaves, grasses and berries. ``And that was his lesson!''

The schools also gave like-minded families a refuge from an often hostile world.

May Hutcheson, whose three children attended Nitshill school, recalls: ``My family did not feel that they were entirely at odds with the rest of the community in our atheism and pacifism. With their Socialist Sunday School comrades they could be quite unashamed of the fact that their father had been imprisoned as a `conchie' during the war.''

The 10 ``precepts'' or commandments of the movement, which every child learned by heart, united members in their beliefs. Like Lizzie Glasier's statement above, the precepts have attracted the wrath of opponents accusing the movement of brainwashing children (the extreme right-wing British Empire Union steered an eventually unsuccessful bill through the House of Lords in 1924, seeking prosecution for those who taught ``seditious and blasphemous doctrines'' to children).

Number 9, for example, read: ``Do not think that those who love their own country must hate and despise other nations, or wish for war, which is a remnant of barbarism,'' and number 7 is: ``Remember that all the good things of the earth are produced by labour. Whoever enjoys them without working for them is stealing the bread of the workers.''

But greatest of these was number 8, says Bill Aitken. ``Observe and think in order to discover the Truth.'' This harks back to the foundation of the movement, a challenge to the existing social order. ``The Precepts were rooted in the ethics of love, justice and truth. The economics is superimposed on that.''

After the interruption of the Second World War, schools in England and Edinburgh died out, although the Glasgow Union flourished until the late sixties. Duncan Ireland and Bill Aitken founded new Glasgow branches and attempted to update the traditional forms, such as the Precepts - but the schools found themselves promoting Socialism with an approach that suddenly looked old-fashioned.

The creation of the welfare state, the break-up of traditional communities as families were moved on to housing schemes, the rise of youth culture, the flourishing local authority education programmes; members of the Sunday School movement found their voluntary community work usurped by the state; ironically this was, after all, what they had been working for.

Fisher says: ``The irony of Socialism is that you had this wonderful, vibrant Socialist movement before the war, involved in all sorts of areas, with a very clear function. After the war they said, we've got what we want, so they stopped fighting, so they lost everything that was making them distinctive and worthwhile.''

Gone, but not forgotten, says May Hutcheson. The Sunday Schools were merely part of the culturally rich Socialist movement, which flourished in a period when people knew that if they wanted things to change they had to work for it. ``Our lives were enriched, if you were part of the Socialist Movement.

``We really believed that there was a better world possible and that it was up to people to unite to achieve it, that it would be for the good of all. I think we were very idealistic. I wouldn't say it was mistaken, it was good. But the world has changed so much. It couldn't last.''