Worker-intellectual who fell prey to the right
David Douglass looks back at the life of Lawrence Daly: October 20 1924-May 23 2009
By the late 1960s, the left was on the ascendancy within the National Union Of Mineworkers. This was illustrated in 1968 by the election of my mate, the left-Labour Lawrence Daly, for NUM general secretary, beating Joe Gormley, the arch-moderate. But we were not having it all our own way. In 1971 Gormley defeats Mick McGahey for NUM president. The pitmen think red Mick - the communist and leader of the Scottish miners - is a step too far; perhaps they think Joe will strike a balance with our Lawrence.
But his election was the start of a wind of change that would blow away the cobwebs from the union and in the process bring down a government. As it turns out, though, Lawrence is more Labour than left, but we were not to know that just then.
He was a man of the old tradition of Marxist worker-intellectuals and thoroughly well read. He knew his literature, he knew his political theory, he was a lover of art and poetry. On the TV Book club intellectual discussion programme, given over to a panel of writers and critics, Lawrence was a regular member of the team. Analysing books, plays, poems. That he was a coal miner and leader of our union was a great source of pride for me.
One of the authors of a new, comprehensive, though flawed, book on the 1984-85 strike recalls how he “treasures the memory of standing with Daly on Euston station at midnight, some time in the early 70s, after long sessions in the pub, and reciting the whole of act 1, scene 2 of Julius Caesar. First Daly played Brutus, then they changed parts and he played Cassius” (F Beckett, D Hencke Marching to the fault line: 1984 miners’ strike and the death of industrial Britain London 2009, pp20-21).
Lawrence was a member of the prestigious International War Crimes Tribunal investigating America’s war on Vietnam. It had been established by the great veteran peace campaigner, Bertrand Russell, and included internationally famous philosophers, lawyers, parliamentarians, historians, writers and scientists. Lawrence’s voice was there, not only as representative of the British working class, but also in an equal intellectual capacity as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Deutscher and the others. He visited Vietnam as the bombs fell - defying all caution, he went to see for himself whether or not the USA was devastating civilian towns.
Lawrence was born of Irish roots, and mixed religion, in the West Fife coalfield. His dad, Jimmy, had been a founder member of the Communist Party, and a militant in the Miners’ Federation. The family felt the whip of the blacklist and eviction time after time, as the coal-owners crowed on top of their dung heaps following the massive defeat of the 1926 strike and lockout. Lawrence went down the pit at 14 and joined the Young Communist League that same year.
His early years were deeply immersed in the culture of Scotland, the politics of class struggle and Marxist theory. In 1972, I invited Lawrence back to Ruskin College, Oxford to a boozy, noisy sing-song, discussion and poetry reading of the kind which dominated the left workers’ movement at that time. Memorable, of course, was his fine rendition of Scottish workers’ songs and his faultless presentation of Burns. One of the comrades - Big Chris Green, a cockney locomotive fireman - suggests to Lawrence: “I think you will be the last general secretary of the NUM” and Lawrence, with a twinkle in his eye, replies: “No, he will be”, pointing at me. It was quite an honour and a noble prediction - but, no, it never came to fruition: the forces of political opposition always had more organisation than I did.
Lawrence was to the left of the Communist Party, having publicly torn up his membership card (although no-one seems quite certain if this was in protest at Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinisation in 1956 and what they considered a right turn or the crushing of the Hungarian rebellion that same year).
The NUM HQ in London stood at the end of Euston Road, round the corner from North Gower Street - which, as it happened, was the home of the Agitprop bookshop. I encountered the two buildings at the same time. What I think none of us realised was that the NUM offices were opposite those of the state’s secret political service, MI6 - that was discovered decades of surveillance later. They probably had extensions attached to our phones - in fact they needed only to open their windows to earwig on the NUM and urban guerrillas.
But Lawrence was a fish out of water down there. At the end of his shift in the office, he would stroll round to the pub on North Gower Street and after a few jars regale the scattered commuters with fine renditions of pit songs and rebel verses.‘The foggy dew’ was one of his best performances - head back, arms outstretched: “While Britannia’s sons with their long-range guns sailed into the foggy dew …”
An unlikely team we made. There were the comrades from Agitprop - militant, anarchist, some to be the bedrock of 1970s armed struggle - Lawrence and me. By god, we solved some problems around that pub table. Lawrence was a most undogmatic and open-minded man. But lonely for Scotland and the company of miners.
London kills union officials, we always said, and it was eating Lawrence alive. On one occasion, he dragged me back to his house - rather our house, since it belonged to the NUM. He had called it Glencraig after the pit where he had worked. As we staggered through the leafy suburb singing ‘Red fly the banners-oh!’, the curtains twitched and one got the impression that Lawrence was not the kind of resident who had usually abided there.
I was one of a number of mining waifs and strays he brought back from time to time. While Lawrence was having his ear thumped upstairs, I sat looking at the lush, wood-tiled floor of the sumptuous living room, full of ticking clocks, books and souvenirs of delegations and trips. An old raggedy dog stood at the entrance to the room, wagging its bum in joy. “Come on, then,” I called, and it skidded in its excitement, trying to gain traction on the polished floor as it slid across to me, and nuzzled into my hands for a big pat, just as Mrs Daly arrived downstairs. “You devil!” she cried. “You know you’re not allowed in there” - both me and the dog stood up at once, though it was the poor old dog who got bollocked. “Ee,” says I, “he just come in” ( ‘Traitor,’ telepathed the dog).
Actually I found, breakfasting with the family the next morning, they were all fish out of water. They all missed Scotland and all missed the company of pit folk and being where real life was. One of the lads was a left Scot Nat at that time, and I couldn’t blame him for that; his politics were not exactly going down a treat at the comfortable southern school he was at. I must have stayed for the weekend, because I recall our loud conversations in the country pub, about strikes and rebellions and history, drawing disdaining remarks about “full-time, well paid trouble-makers”. “That’s us,” said Lawrence, “Na, that’s you,” said I.
The wage or the house we paid Lawrence wasn’t a matter of contention. He was a Scottish communist collier through and through, and a sudden change in income and venue wasn’t going to make him cross the class line (but his isolation and class loneliness probably cost his health).
Lawrence did in the end move to the right, though. On the crucial issue of the ‘social contract’ he and Gormley switched from the union’s stated opposition to this Labour government project to one of support and threw the union’s votes behind the collaborationist scheme. That was to draw a withering criticism from me in the pages of The Miner. Lawrence responded in person in the next edition with a double-page defence of his actions.
That the national secretary had deemed to publicly cross swords with me, a person of no particular position, demonstrated just how deeply he felt the criticism. He was more than aware that it was the rank and file that had put him there, through a combine of unofficial agencies represented by people just like me, and it might be said in opposition to Gormley. That movement had not yet finished its work.
Lawrence chose in the end the wrong side, and was as far as his health was concerned in the wrong place. He became caught in that pincer, but I actually didn’t discover to what extent he was a casualty of it until nearly the end of my tale.
In 2002 at the NUM Yorkshire area council meeting, I notice in the report of the finance and general purposes committee, that Glencraig, Lawrence Daly’s house provided by the union, has been sold. Few people apart from myself knew whose house this had been. I enquire why it is being sold and I am told that Mrs Daly is moving back to Scotland. I assume Lawrence, my old comrade and later sparring partner, has died. Nobody contradicts me.
Then in June 2005 Ian Lavery, the national chairman of the NUM, with whom I had been to see Billy Elliott, the musical, and with whom I had argued, debated and disagreed over policy, principle and history, phoned to tell me that he could now confirm my old mate was in fact still alive. He was living alone in a bedsit in London, apparently a victim of some mental-health problem. I am “astonished”, to use one of Arthur Scargill’s pet words. In fact, I now discover he had spent the last 10 years of his life, since 1989, in a nursing home in Luton, but I had told everyone, including Ian, that Lawrence had died around 1986. How could such a man, a giant of humanity, wit, poetry and wisdom, be discarded like a rusting hulk on some abandoned and unknown shoreline?
I made it my intention to see if we could at least check on his welfare and if we could draw him back into our solidarity. I never succeed and on May 23 2009 he died - I had never got to see him again. His family resolved that his funeral service was to be a private affair, so we did not get the chance to celebrate Lawrence’s great humanity and intellectual capacity, and the love many of us in the miners’ movement felt for him regardless of political differences over the passage of time. However, the Scotland area, along with Northumberland and Durham, are talking about having a memorial rally for him. When they do the left and union movement should attend it on mass.
What can we say of Lawrence in conclusion? A pitman of the old school, a Marxist and communist steeped in the old-time religion of communist organisation and history. A brilliant union orator and negotiator. An intellectual, font of music, song and poetry. A comic and storyteller.
He fell victim to isolation from the rank and file and prey to rightwing, social democratic influences. But his life and contribution should not be judged solely on that. Farewell, comrade.
Our sympathies go to his family, close friends and comrades.
