‘death’s proletariat’ Maclean and the ‘Red Clydeside’ of the 1920s, such conditions produced rising
Scottishsupport for the ILP under James Maxton and Tom Johnston. The Home
Rule question began to stir again, and support for Scottish nationalism actually grew
stronger in the 1930s and the early years of the War. (Under the impetus of Hugh
MacDiarmid, after all, the Scottish literary renaissance had produced its finest work
in the years between 1923 and 1939 in a movement that had always insisted on the
marriage of cultural and political issues.) Now further tensions were generated as
English workers came north to staff Scottish factories (despite still widespread local
unemployment), while the Ministry of Labour caused even more resentment by
conscripting thousands of young Scottish women and sending them south to work
in munitions factories in the Midlands.^51 Tom Johnston, who became Secretary of
State for Scotland in 1941, spoke for Home Rule by citing the shocking disparities
between Scotland and England in matters of industrial investment, slum renewal,
unemployment, and infant mortality.
Such were the considerations that had fuelled the socialism of MacDiarmid,
Henderson, and Sorley MacLean, and which gave a particularly anti-English bias
to the nationalism of young George Campbell Hay, now working as a teacher in
Edinburgh after graduating from Oxford with a degree in classics.^52 Hay’s refusal to
serve was not to be sustained, however, and after his arrest he was inducted into the
Royal Army Ordnance Corps. According to Sorley MacLean, who met him at that
time, Hay had come to recognize that the Nazis were ‘the greatest curse to small
nations’.^53
Hay was the son of John MacDougall Hay, a church minister best remembered
as the author ofGillespie(1914), a grim novel of commercial greed and spiritual
doubt in a small Scottish town. Hay was only 4 when his father died, and he was
brought up in Edinburgh by his mother, spending many summers with his father’s
relatives in Tarbert, Loch Fyne. The boy proved to be a gifted linguist, and soon
learned Gaelic from the old folk and the local fishermen there. He is one of the few
Scottish poets of the time to write in Scots, English, and Gaelic with equal facility,
and indeed he was later to become competent in ten other languages, including
Norwegian, Croatian, Icelandic, French, Italian,Modern Greek, and Arabic. During
(^51) See Tom Devine,The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000(London: Allen Lane, 1999), ch. 23 (‘War and
Peace’), pp. 548–9. Devine notes that Britain was the only country on either side to conscript young
women in this way. The SNP did well in the War, and Robert MacIntyre, the first nationalist MP, was
elected to Westminster in 1945. 52
Hay met Douglas Young in Oxford. Young was a regular correspondent with both Hay and
MacLean. Hay introduced MacLean to MacDiarmid and translated some of theEimhirpoems into
Scots. MacLean shared a small booklet of poems in Gaelic Scots and English with Robert Garioch: 17
Poems for 6d(Edinburgh: Chalmers Press, 1940).
(^53) MacLean, quoted inCollected Poems and Songs of George Campbell Hay,ed.MichaelByrne,2vols.
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), ii. 29. This is the definitive account of Hay’s life and
times. The first volume is a notable scholarly edition of all his poems. The cited English translations
are by the poet himself.