EDWIN SCRYMGEOUR (1866-1947)

Prohibitionist and Politician

by DONALD SOUTHGATE

On 16th November 1922 the many enemies of Winston Churchill chuckled and others not lacking in good will towards him (though these were temporarily in short supply) smiled at the news that he had been defeated at Dundee in the general election by the founder of the Prohibition Party of Great Britain. Five months later Edwin Scrymgeour, M.P., as a peroration to his speech moving the second reading of his Liquor Traffic Bill (to impose penalties of up to five years' imprisonment for the sale of alcohol other than for medical, scientific or industrial purposes), avowed: "He who said 'I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee' has brought me here to this House of Commons in the most marvellous fashion that anyone could have contemplated, notwithstanding all the forces arrayed against me. including all the official forces of party organisation. I am here at the clear, expressed call of Him who has called me and Who calls you today to serve the masses . . . and to help in sustaining not merely the prestige of the country and to advance its interests but, better still, to advance the Kingdom of Christ. . . ."

Here are summarised the abiding features of "Neddy" Scrymgeour's public life—an undeviating conviction that it was possible to convert Britain to Prohibition; a strong sense that he was doing, and was called to do, God's work; a loving care for and championship of the welfare of the "masses". Nothing could be truer than the assertion of Mr. Leif Jones, a leading, critic of the Liquor Traffic Prohibition Bill introduced by Scrymgeour on 13th February 1931, that it was something other than "actual sympathy by his constituents with the views which he put forward this morning" which had made him member for Dundee, which had never exercised its statutory right to "go dry". Scrymgeour's assertions that this was because the people disapproved of the local option system (to him a fiendish trick to check the course of Prohibition) were hardly convincing The Commons, in rejecting his bills by 236 : 14 in 1923 and 137 : 18 in 1931 probably represented opinion in Dundee as well as in Britain as a whole. It is said that "The Trade" welcomed Scrymgeour's fundamentalist crusade for Total Abstinence (as contrasted with temperance, restriction of licences and local option) and that many publicans voted for him. His supporters included steady drinkers, and unsteady ones could be found at election times in his campaign rooms at Lochee.¹ To Scrymgeour this was all part of "God working in a mysterious way". Better a vote for God's servant than for a Unionist wedded to 'The Trade', a Liberal whose licensing legislation would be part of a 'deal' between 'The Trade' and the temperance forces, or the Labour Party whose shelving device of a Royal Commission in 1929 showed, he said, that "the Labour movement is still loyal to a glass of beer . . . (and) a dram of whisky". Of his personal sincerity there was never doubt; he had given up his beloved pipe in a bargain with some men to give up drink.

"Votes! What matter votes? .Seats! What matter seats?", cried Scrymgeour in the Commons as a reproach to Labour. "Character, courage, devotion to principles. These are the things that our great Leader . . . Christ Himself asks us to observe when we pray that God's will may be done upon earth as it is done in Heaven". The language of Evangelical Christianity came naturally to his lips, for his father James (1821-87) and his mother had been stalwarts of the Wesleyan chapel in Tally Street. Theirs was not a religion of mere piety or bible-punching, but one of good works, and from them Edwin inherited both his zeal for total abstinence and a loving care for the unfortunate, whether or not the misfortune was caused 01 aggravated by drink. His father was the local pillar of the Prisoners' Aid Society. It was perhaps while serving out supplies to shivering queues of destitute people that the son concluded that it was not enough to relieve individual hardships. He must campaign for the transformation of the social order, to obtain for all as a right of citizenship what voluntary aid could provide for only some of the victims of Capitalism. Parents, he said, in his first parliamentary election campaign in 1908, should not demand school meals foi their children; they should demand the means of feeding them themselves. Society must minister to the individual's self-respect. Of those who spoke grudgingly of 'the dole' as a financial burden to the nation and a symptom of fecklessness in the recipients, he said, movingly: "It is so petty, and so hard a thing to say of bodies of people, while the great body of men and women who are receiving that allowance at the Employment Exchange are feeling saddened beyond measure that they have to go and accept such a provision".

While Leif Jones had ground for saying that Scrymgeour had 'been elected . . . for his own personal independent qualifications, and he has fully earned in this House the reputation which his constituents gave him of being an independent man of strong individual views, who does not shrink from putting them forward in their strongest form", no independent can get into Parliament for a populous constituency without organisation. Within a month of his election in 1922 a committee of church people asked him to put his 'splendid organisation' at the disposal of the local anti-licence movement (and received in reply a characteristically stinging rebuke for neglecting the poor and street-corner preaching). But this organisation had no backing from vested interests, capitalist or labour, and was enlisted in aid of a man who was never well-off and not, one suspects, very good at managing his own private affairs. He had been a clerk in a manufacturer's office at fifteen, then briefly in London, then in the offices of the Caledonian Railway at the West Station and then with an iron merchant. He gave up regular employment after election to the parish council in 1898 and from 1904 was organising secretary of the new National Prohibition Party and editor of The Prohibitionist. He could not have afforded to be an M.P. but for the payment of members, for which he campaigned as the key to a Socialist break-through, and was much relieved that by the time that the candidates were freed from the obligation to pay the returning officer's expenses in 1918 (subject to forfeiting £150 if polling less than one-eighth of the voters) he had cleared the one-eighths hurdle. In this he was helped by the fact that he had been the only candidate to oppose Churchill when, after a period out of office after the Dardanelles Affair, he became Minister of Munitions in 1917 and, according to law as it then stood, had to submit himself for re-election. Though Scrymgeour was anti-war, he got 21.8% of the votes. In 1918, opposing the two sitting members who supported the Lloyd George coalition and had the 'coupon', Scrymgeour, with 26.71% of the voters supporting him, did markedly better than the I.L.P. candidate, though he, too, was local. He was thus well poised to come up from behind and head the poll in 1922, in a very bitter campaign in which Churchill and another National Liberal were opposed by a Labour, a Communist and an Independent Liberal candidate as well as Scrymgeour, and Churchill was smeared by the Tory Courier and damned with faint praise by the Liberal Advertiser.

In 1922 Scrymgeour escaped the big guns but had many a passage at arms with Willie Gallacher. For, as a Christian Socialist born out of Methodism Scrymgeour abominated Marxism, and the Communists regarded him as a muddle-headed bourgeois sentimentalist. -He rose to make his maiden speech on the Address in 1922 just after Newbold, the member for Motherwell, boasted that he was the first representative of the International elected to Westminster. Scrymgeour agreed with him that "that tomfool show of theirs" (the State Opening of Parliament) was like the challenge presented to the French people by Marie Antoinette, and that Downing Street was subservient to Wall Street, and on his first visit back to Dundee complained that the speeches lacked sincerity because of the convention and the courtesy. But he denounced both atheism and talk of unconstitutional action, while annually warning the parties that it was their fault if, because of their shadow-boxing, the conviction spread among the poor and the unemployed that the House of Commons was a futile institution. He spoke for "The Old Book' against both Das Kapital and the "gamesters . . . playing ducks and drakes with the interests of millions of our people".

In 1923 Gallacher condemned Scrymgeour as neither ornamental nor useful and said that if people voted for him, God knew what they were voting for, though, according to Scrymgeour, God really did know. The Courier and the Advertiser, however, weightily instructed the electors to reject him because he favoured a Labour government and a capital levy and all the other wild devices of Socialism, admitted that as a member he was earnest, diligent and a useful advocate of local interests. The electors gave him his reward. Again he headed the poll. He had 40% of his votes in common with the Labour member, K. D. Morel, and hardly any with Gallacher (634 to Morel's 9,239). He had 5,130 plumpers (to Morel's 1,762) and no less than 9,509 (compared with Morel's 1,864) in common with a candidate of the Right.

But the 1923 election was the only one in which Scrymgeour received really dramatic support right across the political spectrum. He never joined the Parliamentary Labour Party, though invited to do so after his election in 1922, and none of the Labour candidates elected with him ever stood in alliance with him. But Scrymgeour was elected, and thrice re-elected, largely because lie belonged to the Labour movement, if not the Labour Party. He was an independent, but he was very much aligned. He unfurled his banner in 1922 as 'a pledged opponent and deliberate challenger of all the forces adverse to the interests of the working class'. In 1929 he called himself 'Prohibition and Labour' and crossed the floor of the House when the Labour government took office. In 1922 two-thirds of his votes, and in 1924 nearly two-thirds, were obtained in common with Morel, in 1929 and 1931 85% and 80% respectively with Marcus, Scrymgeour was an unofficial Labour candidate who had pre-empted one of the Dundee seats and against whom, with the Communist polling quite strongly, Labour dare not put up two candidates lest they won neither seat. But in 1923 Scrymgeour would have been defeated by a Liberal if 5,935 people had not voted Liberal-and-Scrymgeour (and 3,574 Unionist-and-Scrymgeour), many of them, no doubt, people who did not understand that for a Liberal to give a vote to Scrymgeour as well as the Liberal was equivalent to not voting at all. Evidently the Liberal organisers grasped the point, for in 1924 the Liberal-and-Scrymgeour voting fell to hardly more than a thousand. Scrymgeour, losing his place at the head of the poll, scraped in by 1,075 against a Unionist, perhaps saved by the fact that there were still 3,243 Unionist-and-Scrymgeour voters, by holding whom Scrymgeour was again in 1929 at the head of the poll.

But there was a gradual waning of Scrymgeour's distinctive hold on the electors, as his share of the plumpers reveals—1918, 3,884 of 9,248; 1922, 5,015 of 7,381; 1923, 5,130 of 11,512; 1924, 3,431 of 7,123; 1929, 1,588 of 8,431; 1931, 1,722 of 9,598. In 1929 both the Unionist and the Communist obtained more plumpers than he, a sign of political stratification which more and more reduced him to the ranks of a Labour candidate with, however, enough votes from people who also voted Unionist or Liberal to give him an edge over a Unionist or Liberal challenger in a marginal contest. But in 1929 his victory by more than 16,000 was not marginal and in 1931 his defeat by more than 16,000 was not marginal. In the former year he still obtained 5,000 votes in common with the Unionist or the Liberal (semi-allied as anti-Socialists) and in 1931, when Dundee was won by Dingle Foot (L) and Florence Horsbrugh (U), allied as candidates supporting Ramsay MacDonald's National Government. Scrymgeour was still the beneficiary of 3,593 of the 4,850 votes 'mixed' between Right and Left, although no more violent critic of the National Government existed and he had lately been co-operating closely with Maxton's I.L.P.

Scrymgeour's relationship to the Labour Party was that of 'candid friend'. He could, he said, best help the Labour movement by telling the Labour Party when it was wrong. "As an independent representative of the Labour movement", he said in the House in October 1930, "I can see what I prophesied years ago would happen, that is, the Labour Party developing into a Liberal and radicalized party". To stay in office it was playing the shameful, irrelevant game of party politics, courting the Liberals, telling Parliament through the King's Speech that its business would be 'unreal business', unrelated to the cure of poverty and unemployment, instead of presenting a Socialist programme and falling on it. To him MacDonald's treachery in allying with Tories and Liberals in the 'national' government was only an accentuation of his refusal to take any radical measures to deal with the economic depression. To Scrymgeour it was all so simple—"Men and women are unable to find an honest means of earning a living, and what is this wealthy country going to do for them? . . . We are sent here to defend those who are defenceless, and to let this Government (the Labour government) or any other government know that, by whatever means they have to find the money, the business of defending these people must be done". He did not shrink from advocating the entire abolition of the army and air force, both to get the money and to give a lead in world disarmament. MacDonald agreed—Scrymgeour was always quoting him—that it was "a question of masses of toiling people being played with as mere pawns in a game, a question of powerful financial forces manipulating the interests of the nations of the world for their own particular gratification and satisfaction". But, not seeing how to beat them, he joined them. To Scrymgeour the 'national government' was "a national disgrace", and when extra police were drafted to deal with unemployment riots in Dundee, and the House was discussing how to prevent dishonest receipt of the dole, Scrymgeour burst out in the House (28th September 1931)— "You dare to say that about men . . . You stand at that Box and insult them! ... It is downright blackguardism". There were the inevitable cries of 'Name'.

Two days later Scrymgeour made what he did not suspect was his last speech in the House of Commons. It was against an increase in the duty on beer unaccompanied by one on the drink of the rich. "If", he said, "beer is a legitimate commodity it ought to be relieved of all taxation . . . But why pursue this wretched plan of taking revenue out of what is perfectly well known to be a prolific source of infamy and a business into which no man with self-respect and with the highest ideals of Empire and people would enter?"

For the last time in October 1931 the strains of Farewell my Bluebell echoed from election halls in Dundee. To it had been set in 1908 the words:

To it in 1922 a crowd of 30,000 with a pipe band had seen him off to Parliament. His vote now was almost identical with that of the year of his first triumph, but it was not enough, for the electorate had been swelled by the women of 21-30 and older unmarried women (as from 1929). Dundee elected its first (and so far its only) Unionist M.P. and, in the person of a 26-year-old English barrister (more than thirty years' hence a Labour minister), its last Liberal member. Scrymgeour's defeat in 1931 was part of that remarkable swing, against Labour the dimensions of which no one had foreseen. But it was peculiarly poignant, and when, after the declaration of the poll, the good and faithful servant, bewildered by the result, said "My heart is with the people. I have never deserted them, although they have deserted me", he made for himself a fitting epitaph.

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