Peterhead by Robert Jeffrey Read Free Book Online

conscienceless criminals on the hunt for cash or bent on settling old gangland or personal scores. But, as always, there was an exception or two. Some of the Red Clydesiders served time in Barlinnie and Peterhead. These pioneer socialists had an altogether different set of concerns from the majority of the prisoners: they wanted to improve the lives of their fellow men.
    Workers’ leaders in the early part of the last century faced the constant threat of arrest and trial. It might not have been Russia or Germany, but the knock on the door by a uniformed policeman was a daily fear for such as Tom Bell, John Wheatley, John Muir, John Maxton, Willie Gallacher and John Maclean. John Maclean in particular was dealt with extremely harshly by the authorities, who were angered by his passionate and constant campaigning against the slaughter of the First World War. In Glasgow he held hugely well-attended rallies in Bath Street and on his Southside patch in Shawlands. A true legend in his lifetime he had a large army of followers, pacifists and anti-war protesters. At one time they held regular meetings in the old Metropole Theatre (later the home of the Logans, the legendary show business dynasty) in Stockwell Street in the city centre on Sunday nights. In the early days of the First World War with young patriots dying in their thousands in the fight against Germany, it took courage to speak out publicly against the war. But Maclean did not lack guts. He proclaimed: “I have been enlisted in the socialist army for fifteen years. God damn all other armies. Any soldier who shoots another soldier in the war is a murderer.” This powerful and controversial public speaking on the morality of war was deemed by the authorities as likely to harm the war effort and prejudice recruiting.
    It was not a problem exclusive to Scotland or the Scots. An anarchist and revolutionary called Guy Aldred, who despite being a Londoner had settled in Glasgow, was, like Maclean, arrested for his views and jailed, though he did not end up in Peterhead. In August 1916 he was ordered to be detained after an appearance at Winchester and sent to a work camp in Dyce near Aberdeen, just thirty odd miles south of Peterhead. This was almost a worse fate than spending time in one of Scotland’s regular prisons. The prisoners were held in a tented village in primitive conditions, barely surviving in a sea of mud. They were put to work on hard labour in a local quarry just like the Peterhead cons. But unlike a real prison, escape from such tented prisons was relatively easy and Aldred was among those who did a “runner,” though he was recaptured in a relatively short time and this time sent to a conventional jail in the south. There his agitation – he was ringleader in a prisoners’ strike – got him what was called “number one punishment,” a bland way of describing forty-two days in solitary with three days on bread and water and three without food, locked in a bare and unheated cell.
    There were several other such work camps in Britain, their existence obscured by government secrecy that constrained the newspaper coverage of the war. Astonishingly, sixty-nine conscientious objectors died in these places that were little more than the British equivalent of the work camps of the enemy. It is interesting that writers looking at the history of the Dyce camp record that the inmates were given respect and, on some occasions, help by the locals. Perhaps the prisoners’ rebellious attitudes struck a chord with the infamously “thrawn” North-Easterners who rarely like to swim with the tide. Maybe, too, it says something about the relationship between the local folk and Peterhead jail itself, which was highlighted by the support that escapers like Gentle Johnny Ramensky generated. The story of such camps as the one at Dyce is a largely forgotten but important part of the penal history of these isles.
    Early arrests of Maclean had been made under the catch-all