Clydeside's very own Red Rose

and atypical of Jewish immigrants who became a part of Glasgow life in

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Rose Klasko was born in Dublin, where her parents had settled as

refugees from Vilnius in Lithuania before their subsequent move to

Glasgow. She came from a family of five children, itself part of a large

extended family which has now become a mini-Diaspora, both by emigration

and by ''marrying out'', though she maintained contact with her cousins

and second cousins, in Glasgow and abroad, long after she moved to

London.

As with many immigrant Jews, both then and in the later exodus from

Nazi Germany, religious and social persecution was a formative influence

that pushed her into radical politics whose unifying thread was a fierce

opposition to prejudice, unfairness, and exploitation.

The timing of her arrival in Glasgow was perfect, for it allowed her,

in her formative years, to hear the great figures of Red Clydeside, both

on the soapbox at Glasgow Green, and at meetings of the Socialist Sunday

School. James Maxton, John MacLean, Ramsay MacDonald, Manny Shinwell,

and many others provided intellectual support for a radicalism that

began at home.

She was typical in her involvement in the socialist and trade union

movements, to which she was introduced through the influence of her

father, an active member of the Glasgow Jewish Workers' Circle. She

stood out in that she was a woman in what was predominantly a man's

world.

Her radicalism never waned. She joined the Communist Party of Great

Britain at its formation in 1921 and remained a member until it

collapsed with the Berlin Wall. Her radicalism extended to issues that

were not exclusively left wing, although she saw left-wing politics and

trade unionism as a powerful vehicle for their advancement.

In particular, she fought continuously for women's rights long before

they became a mainstream political issue and with little concern for the

institutional male chauvinism that for so long dominated the industrial

wing of the British Labour movement. She loved to describe how, in the

1920s, she scandalised Glasgow's only birth-control clinic by seeking

contraceptive advice before she had any children.

Characteristically, her explanation was economic: she and her husband

would be unable to manage financially if they had children too soon. But

there was politics in it too, for she was an early proponent of the link

between women's rights, and their ability to regulate the reproductive

process.

In 1926 she married Peter Kerrigan, a Communist and an engineering

worker who was one of the Glasgow leaders of that year's General Strike.

Peter went on to become industrial organiser for the Communist Party and

it is a measure of Rose's personality and strength of character that

no-one ever regarded her as anything other than an independent political

force, pursuing her own causes with a vitality and determination that

scarcely needed the organisational base of a political party.

From the Communist Party she became active in the earliest days of the

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and in her retirement she was an active

campaigner for the rights of old-age pensioners, attending meetings in

London until shortly before her death.

Rose Kerrigan was one of the last links to a powerful Jewish immigrant

influence on radical politics on Clydeside. As with many immigrant

communities, the radicalism of Glasgow's Jews has weakened as each

succeeding generation has achieved greater material prosperity and

social acceptance. She would have found that a fair explanation, but a

poor reason for the change.

* Professor Alan Alexander is Professor in the Department of Local and

Public Management at Strathclyde Business School.