17. COPYRIGHT N
Tom Johnston, journalist, socialist and statesman, was the man who
without question did more for Scotland than any other politician this
century. He was described by Churchill as the 'King of Scotland'.
The apogee of his remarkable career came during the Second World War,
when he was a visionary and highly effective Secretary of State for
Scotland. In this, the first of our exclusive prepublication extracts
from Russell Galbraith's important new biography of Johnston, we look at
Johnston's outstanding achievements during these dark years.
CHURCHILL wanted Johnston in the Government -- and he wasn't prepared
to take no for an answer. His first offer was the Ministry of Health.
Johnston baulked at the idea of a London job. Nor, according to his
version of events, was he keen to accept the Scottish Office.
Summoned to London to face the Prime Minister, he was asked finally to
state his reasons for refusing to join the National Government. Johnston
explained he wanted to stay in Scotland, abandon politics, and write
books. History books.
Churchill could hardly believe his ears. ''Good heavens, man,'' he
growled. ''Join me and you can help make history!''
Johnston, who was rarely complimentary, never mind kind, to Churchill
in print over many years, likened the experience to a rabbit cornered by
a boa constrictor.
Before he agreed to join the Government as Secretary of State for
Scotland, he obtained the Prime Minister's support for a cherished idea
-- a Council of State composed of everyone who had been Secretary of
State for Scotland, regardless of party, to advise him. If the Council
was unanimous on a Scottish issue, he expected Churchill to add his
considerable support to whatever action they proposed.
To the Prime Minister, it seemed he was simply suggesting ''a sort of
National Government of all parties idea, just like our Government
here''.
Whatever he told the Prime Minister, and continued to claim long
afterwards, Johnston was clearly delighted with his appointment.
''Coming down to Whitehall I ticked off in my mind several of the
things I was certain I could do, even during a war,'' he recalled. His
priorities included ''an industrial parliament to begin attracting
industries north, face up to the Whitehall departments and stem the
drift south of our Scots population. And I could have a jolly good try
at a public corporation on a non-profit basis to harness Highland water
power for electricity.''
But there was also a frivolous side to his appointment from the Prime
Minister's point of view. According to his private secretary, John
Colville, it amused Churchill to know that Johnston and the premier duke
of England were both serving in his administration: the Duke of Norfolk,
Earl Marshall of England, had been appointed Under-Secretary of State
for Agriculture.
Colville, in his book The Fringes of Power, judged Johnston both
dynamic and excellent.
Johnston's friend Emrys Hughes took a jaundiced view of his departure
to join the wartime Coalition. ''Who would have dreamt that Tom Johnston
of Forward, who had so scornfully derided the Lloyd George coalition in
the First World War, would become Secretary of State for Scotland in a
coalition Government headed by Winston Churchill?''
On 8 February 1941 Tom Johnston arrived in the First Division
Courtroom of the Court of Session in Edinburgh and handed his letter of
appointment, as Secretary of State for Scotland, to the country's most
senior judge, the Lord President, Lord Normand.
Having satisfied himself that the paperwork was in order, the Lord
President administered the oath of office. A bench of Scottish judges
was in attendance to witness the proceedings as Johnston solemnly swore
that he would ''well and truly serve His Majesty in the office of the
Lord Keeper of the Great Seal''. He then signed the parchments of
office, bowed to the watching judges, and left the Court of Session to
begin the most important job of his life.
Hitler and his murderous crew probably hadn't heard of Tom Johnston.
But they would have been right to assume that anyone chosen by Churchill
to take charge of Scotland during the war would be an implacable foe.
Johnston, who took no salary for his work as Secretary of State, moved
speedily, and with considerable determination, to recruit his surviving
predecessors to the high-sounding Council of State. His old boss,
William Adamson, the only previous Labour politician appointed Secretary
of State for Scotland, had been dead since 1936: for as long as it
lasted Johnston would be presiding over a Tory-dominated committee.
The guidelines he provided for the six-man Council were simple and to
the point. ''Individuals among us were free to take their own line upon
disputed issues,'' Johnston explained. ''As a Council we would
concentrate on securing results upon issues where we were agreed about
Scotland's interests.'' The final result was ''a surprisingly large
field of agreement. And none can say but we acted promptly,'' Johnston
added.
The five who served on the Council of State for the duration of the
war, in addition to Johnston himself, were Lord Alness (formerly Robert
Munro), Archibald Sinclair, Walter Elliot, John Colville and Ernest
Brown who was unable to attend the first meeting of the new Council,
held at Fielden House, 10 Great College Street, London, on 29 September
1941. With four civil servants, Sir A P Hamilton, P J Rose, David Milne
and A J Aglen also present, Johnston opened the meeting by outlining his
plans for the group.
It would be their job, he explained, to consider Scotland's post-war
problems, set up inquiries, decide on their priority and survey the
results. The responsibility for any action which might be taken as a
result of their recommendations would remain with the appropriate
Ministers, Johnston added; meaning himself, mostly, for as long as he
remained at the Scottish Office.
A preliminary list of subjects for consideration by the new Council
included hydro-electric development, the hard-pressed herring industry
and the unification of hospital services; all proposed by Johnston. Sir
Archibald Sinclair considered dairy farming worth the Council's
attention. John Colville was concerned about industrial development. The
business of housing and food production was raised by Walter Elliot.
Johnston used the authority of the Council of State to resist key
building workers from Scotland being conscripted to the armed forces.
Their influence, Johnston claimed, helped local authorities, the Special
Housing Association and private builders to complete 36,200 houses, in
addition to carrying out repairs on 75,000 houses damaged by bombing.
''It enabled us also,'' Johnston went on, ''to secure the erection of
Civil Defence hostels in such a manner as would enable their rapid
conversion after the war to separate dwelling houses: it gave us labour
too for the restoration and rehabilitation in suitable cases of
dwellings previously condemned, and for the conversion of empty shops
and offices into dwelling houses.''
It was estimated, at the height of the conflict, that more than
400,000 houses in Scotland were without sanitation of any kind. Miles of
traditional tenement buildings in Glasgow, in particular, provided an
obvious target for improvement. Many were beyond saving. Others were in
a state of terminal decline. But there was a community spirit in many of
the affected areas which was worth preserving.
A sub-committee of the Scottish Housing Advisory Council, established
by Johnston, recommended full modernisation of all properties with a
life expectancy of at least 20 years and improvement grants for
properties which offered decent accommodation for at least five years.
But this committee didn't report until 1947. By then Tom Johnston was
no longer in charge at the Scottish Office. And his successors, well
meaning but grievously shortsighted, were committed to a policy which
failed to discourage the wholesale destruction of Glasgow's tenement
townships; and the creation of vast, bleak housing schemes on its
periphery.
Scotland hadn't recovered from the depression of the inter-war years
when the Second World War started, Johnston argued, in a paper prepared
during his years as Secretary of State. For reasons arising out of
social and economic trends in the past few decades, the country's
contribution to war industry was not quite fully commensurate with her
natural resources and human capacity.
''But it is of a vitally essential kind, Johnston insisted, ''and it
is astonishingly large, for a country that by the time of James Watt has
barely recovered from the devastation of prolonged civil war, and whose
subsequent prodigious advance was largely frustrated by calamitous
all-round depression in the period between the great wars of our day.''
Many industries were bound to benefit from the war. Unfortunately for
people living in Britain's northern territory the main beneficiaries
were in England; as Tom Johnston soon discovered when, on 8 February
1941, he arrived at the Scottish Office as Secretary of State. There was
no Board of Trade in St Andrew's House and no machinery of any kind for
industrial contacts. Most war-related work had been located in England.
Scotland was used to provide storage space and as a source of labour for
factories in the south.
According to Johnston's own records, in the course of the war, some
13,000 women were transferred to England because of the shortage of
factories in Scotland. This figure included 500 women directed south in
a single week in 1942, a year after Johnston was appointed Secretary of
State.
''Unless drastic and immediate steps had been taken to correct these
drifts to the land beyond the Cheviots, the outlook for Scottish
industry and the Scottish nation post-war had been bleak indeed,''
Johnston noted later.
Johnston ackowledged the need for planning. But he was suspicious of
planners who operated from a distance. During his time at the Scottish
Office he insisted on drawing an imaginary line in chalk at the
Cheviots, to separate Whitehall planners from the people he believed
should decide Scotland's future: Scots living in Scotland! ''Every now
and again some ingenious gentleman in London would exude a plan for a
centralised planning of our industries, our housing, our roads, rails,
canals, airports, our shops, our churches -- yes, the location of our
churches! -- and our beer shops,'' Johnston recalled. ''And you never
knew in what rapturous moment some persuasive hierarchy at a Ministry
might have been authorised to so plan and blueprint for us.''
His answer was to establish, at Government expense, two regional
planning authorities for Scotland, covering east and west of the
country. ''Thereafter, when central planning boiled up in London, I
would always point to the prior existence of my regional associations
and say that centralisation must stop south of the Cheviots,'' Johnston
claimed.
One senior colleague, Herbert Morrison, revealed that whenever
Johnston looked in danger of losing an argument in Cabinet he didn't
hesitate to remind those present that ''there was a strong nationalist
movement in Scotland and that it could be a potential danger if it grew
through lack of attention to Scottish interests.''
It was a useful tactic, as Johnston proved frequently, during his
occupancy of St Andrew's House.
His long-cherished idea for an industrial parliament in Scotland was
persued, but never properly achieved, by merging two existing bodies,
the Scottish Development Council and the Scottish Economic Committee,
into a new, and powerful, pressure group with a cumbersome title, the
Scottish Council (Development and Industry).
Its membership and funds were drawn from local authorities, the
Chambers of Commerce, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, the
Development Council and the Scottish banks. ''Its functions,'' Johnston
explained, ''were the safeguarding, the stimulation, and the
encouragement of Scottish industrial development, both during and after
the war.''
In three months Government production space in Scottish factories and
workshops doubled to 1,000,000 square feet. A month later another
500,000 square feet was added; with another 350,000 square feet
confirmed a few weeks later. During the next three years the Council
managed to persuade three Government supply departments to spend #12m on
factories and plant in Scotland. In total, between 1942 and the General
Election of 1945, they were able to secure over 700 new enterprises, or
substantial extensions to existing companies, involving 90,000 jobs.
But there was no sign, as the war neared its end, of the Scottish
Council (Development and Industry) resting on its record. In its view
the wartime central Government didn't direct enough high-priority
production work to Scotland. It even proposed sending home mobile
workers from England and replacing them with unemployed Scots.
One former senior civil servant, George Pottinger, thought Tom
Johnston was probably overstating its importance when he likened the
Scottish Council (Development and Industry) to an industrial Cabinet.
Pottinger also noted that the Council ''rapidly became the most
effective pressure group in Great Britain and its success is still
envied by English regions''.
Whitehall departments often complained that in one respect the
Scottish industrialist had a positive advantage compared with his
competitors in the south, Pottinger added. ''The English firm could
approach the appropriate Ministry through the local MP. The Scottish
industrialist could also enlist the aid of the Secretary of State, if
necessary in Cabinet, and he in turn could cite an impressive consensus
of support from the Scottish Council.''
Due to major expansion in a number of key industries unemployment in
Scotland totalled about 20,000 during the war. This figure probably
represented an irreducible minimum, Johnston sensed.
In the national interest, as it affected ordinary people especially,
Johnston usually demonstrated uncommon good sense. When he was Secretary
of State for Scotland, he anticipated the National Health Service by
using hospital beds earmarked for Civil Defence casualties to
accommodate ordinary patients who could not afford specialist services.
Everyone knew voluntary hospitals couldn't cope with the demands on
their time and facilities at the start of the war. It could take a year
for a troublesome appendix to be removed. People with minor complaints,
including ear, nose and throat ailments, usually waited months before
being treated. Johnston learned of one elderly man who had been waiting
seven years for a hernia operation. When he discovered there were fewer
Civil Defence casualties than expected Johnston decided, as an
experiment, to make the hospitals, which had been equipped to cope with
a rush of casualties, available for free specialist examination and
treatment of civilian war workers.
''It was obviously foolish to have well-equipped hospitals often
standing empty and their staffs awaiting Civil Defence casualties --
which, thank God, never came -- while war workers could not afford
specialist diagnosis and treatment,'' Johnston explained.
The experiment started on Clydeside and was a huge success.
Eventually, on Johnston's authority, it covered the whole of Scotland.
Waiting lists for treatment at the voluntary hospitals, totalling 34,000
patients, simply disappeared. And, as Johnston testified after the war,
there was no friction or antagonism from the voluntary hospitals over
any of the lost patients. ''Indeed,'' wrote Johnston, ''they made a
small monetary payment for every patient taken off their hands, and a
vast amount of preventable suffering and pain was simply obliterated.''
Family doctors also contributed to this minor revolution in patient
care. They were encouraged, with difficult cases of diagnosis, to seek
assistance from specialists paid by the Scottish Office, or refer
patients to the Civil Defence hospitals for treatment.
Together with Ernest Brown, Minister of Health in the wartime
Government, Johnston was largely responsible for the original White
Paper outlining a National Health Service, which was approved by the War
Cabinet on 9 February 1944.
The original blueprint document had been submitted to the
Reconstruction Priorities Committee the previous month. By February
1944, when the White Paper outlining the coalition Government's plans
for a National Health Service available to all reached the House of
Commons, Ernest Brown had been replaced as Minister of Health by Henry
Willink.
In an introduction to the most far-reaching leglislation ever
attempted in Britain, Willink and Johnston explained that it was the
Government's intention that ''in future every man and woman and child
can rely on getting all the advice and treatment and care which they may
need in matters of personal health; that what they get shall be the best
medical and other facilities available; that their getting these shall
not depend on whether they can pay for them, or on any other factor
irrelevant to the real need -- the real need being to bring the
country's full resources to bear upon reducing ill-health and promoting
good health in all its citizens''.
It was an inspiring endeavour and one Tom Johnston was pleased to
promote.
The Council of State met for the last time at St Andrew's House on 16
February 1945, four years, a week and a day after Johnston became
Secretary of State.
It was the 16th occasion on which the Council of State had been
convened and the depleted group settled down to consider the usual mixed
agenda. Before them were many of the chairman's pet projects, developed
over his years in power.
These included the future role of Prestwick Airport as an
international airport, complete with feeder services to the rest of the
United Kingdom, the need for an aircraft industry in Scotland -- a dream
notion which hadn't been discounted totally by Sir Stafford Cripps, the
Minister for Aircraft Production, in a speech delivered in Edinburgh the
previous week -- local rating, the requirements of a Bill covering hill
sheep farming and a review of the latest National Health Service
proposals.
The minutes show that, on the controversial subject of the NHS, ''Lord
Alness and Mr Ernest Brown congratulated the chairman on the measure of
agreement resulting from discussions in Scotland. They felt, however,
that progress in England, where the fears of the voluntary hospitals had
not been allayed, and where medical politics would play a considerable
part, would be more difficult, and that it would be doubtful whether
legislation could be introduced in the present session.''
Johnston credited the Council of State with encouraging a new spirit
of independence and hope in our national life.
''You could sense it everywhere, and not least in the civil service.
We met England now without any inferiority complex. We were a nation
once again.'' (Herald italics).
Unfinished business included the 1945 Education (Scotland) Bill. Tom
Johnston maintained a declared interest in education throughout the
whole of his political career. ''If a secondary schooling is good for
the children of the middle class and the children of the rich,'' he once
told the House of Commons, ''it ought to be good enough for the children
of the working class.''
Similarly, when he received the freedom of Kirkintilloch, his
acceptance speech included a heartfelt reminder: ''The justification of
all educational expenditure is the interests and well-being of our
children -- the sound mind in the sound body.''
He was vehement in his criticism of a curriculum which sustained
historical falsehoods and relied heavily on subjects which were of
little practical value except for examination purposes.
Some of his views would find little support among feminists. By his
own admission Johnston was ''indifferent if the girl students knew
nothing about the height of Mount Popocatepetl, provided they could cook
a vegetable stew, and could beautify a home, and had been taught the
rudiments of health and first-aid and citizenship, and some of the arts
and handicrafts.''
His attempts to introduce what he considered the first necessity of
all education, a culture of good citizenship, into schools, failed. At a
Convention on Juvenile Delinquency which he arranged as Secretary of
State, Johnston suggested that any headmaster who succeeded in keeping
his school clear of delinquency convictions should be invited to appear
before the local authority and publicly thanked by the provost.
''We thank and reward a man who jumps off a bridge to save a child
from drowning,'' Johnston argued. ''How much more should we congratulate
and reward a schoolmaster who, by forethought, exhortation, and
organisation of a public school spirit, succeeds in saving perhaps
hundreds of pupils from acquiring criminal records and habits and our
whole social organism from grave perils.''
Johnston enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the mandarins of the
Scottish Education Department. He considered them over-cautious and set
in their ways: they disliked his impetuous approach and his affection
for ad hoc committees outside the established order.
He was actually out of office, and about to retire from the House of
Commons, when Winston Churchill agreed to help him obtain a third
reading for the 1945 Education (Scotland) Bill which many people
believed should carry his name.
Churchill, who was now Prime Minister in the Conservative caretaker
Government which followed the end of the war in Europe, offered to
support Johnston's Bill on one condition: it must first obtain general
agreement in the Scottish Grand Committee.
Johnston worked hard to achieve the necessary accord. At its third
reading on 3 June 1945 the Education (Scotland) Bill, complete with 92
clauses and six schedules, required only two hours in the House of
Commons before it was sent to receive the Royal Assent.
A week later, just days before the 1945 Education (Scotland) Act
arrived on the King's desk for signature, the country's teachers showed
their appreciation by making Johnston an Honorary Fellow of the
Educational Institute of Scotland. His political career was ending where
it began.
The first political speech he ever made was about education when he
was a member of the local School Board in Kirkintilloch. And the last
time he addressed the House of Commons the subject was education. It was
a kind of symmetry that was bound to please him.
* Extracted from Without Quarter -- A biography of Tom Johnston by
Russell Galbraith, to be published by Mainstream on Thursday 26 October
at #20.
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