Leaders: Willie Adamson 1917-21

Willie Adamson (1863-1936)

Heavily built and retaining a bristling chestnut moustache until his later years, the circumstances of the time meant that Willie Adamson was, despite not being a particularly heavy hitter, Scottish Secretary in both MacDonald's governments and, briefly, Labour's leader.

Following the resignation of Arthur Henderson from the Lloyd-George Coalition Cabinet and the Chairmanship of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), William Adamson was in October 1917 elected unopposed as PLP Chairman and Commons Labour leader in his stead, joining the Privy Council in 1918. He was not, however, a success and his absence from Parliament through illness for much of 1919 and 1920 contributed to his being replaced as PLP Chair by J R Clynes. Solid, industrious and widely trusted, he was nonetheless a poor debater, Manny Shinwell depicted him in The Labour Story as, 'a dour and phlegmatic Scottish miners leader very much out of his depth in the Commons.'

He was not, however, entirely inactive as a minister. He was a supporter of the Scottish Home Rule Association and as Scottish Secretary he came out strongly for devolution. In May 1924 he backed the Private Member's Bill by Clydeside Labour MP George Buchanan, subsequently talked out by the Conservatives at second reading, for a single-chamber Scottish Assembly for dealing with Scottish legislation within the UK framework.

He was also a staunch free-trader and on 24 April 1930 wrote to MacDonald attacking the proposal to compel millers to purchase a certain quota of their wheat from English farmers as forcing Scottish consumers to pay higher prices 'solely to ensure an increased return to English farmers.' By 1929, according to Tom Johnston's Memoirs, Macdonald was amongst those who regarded Adamson's time as a player as over. Despite Adamson having been consistently re-elected to the shadow cabinet every year since 1923, MacDonald initially suggested to Adamson that he go to the Lords as titular Scottish Secretary, 'and do the ceremonial stuff,' whilst Johnston himself take charge in the Commons as Under-Secretary of State. Both were happy to agree to this and duly sworn to secrecy whereupon Adamson asked, 'Can I no' tell my wife about the Lords?' To this MacDonald assented, whereupon Adamson asked, 'And my son?' 'You what!' shouted the PM. 'I didn't know you had a son. That arrangement is off. I am against appointing peers who have heirs to inherit their titles.!' He therefore became Scottish Secretary with Johnston and later Joe Westwood as his deputy. In 1931, Adamson was amongst the nine of MacDonald's Cabinet who rebelled against the proposal to cut the dole.

Born in Halbeath, near Dunfermline, on 2 April 1863, he attended a school run by the local mining engineer's wife. Family poverty led him down the mines as an eleven-year-old pit-boy, where he remained until the age of thirty-eight. His mother Flora had worked in the pits until the Act of 1842 and his father, James Adamson, a coalminer, died before the young William left school. He had four children by his wife, Christine Marshall, whom he married in 1887.

Attempts by mine-owners to drive down wages and maintain long-hours and appalling conditions produced a climate of industrial militancy in the Scottish mines. Adamson's activism in his local miners association during the 1890s was sufficient to propel him by 1902 to the assistant secretary-ship and in 1908 to the general-secretary-ship of the Fife and Kinross Miners Association. A devout Baptist, he also co-founded the Dunfermline Temperance Council and a local mutual society. Politically, his early allegiance to the Liberal Party shifted to support for Labour in advance of the Lib-Lab Miners Federation of Great Britain. In 1905 he was elected a Labour Councillor in Dunfermline and in 1910 he fought West Fife for Labour at both General Elections. Defeated by a Liberal in January 1910, in December he became the first Scottish miner to become an MP.

As an MP he urged the nationalisation of the mines and, despite the death in action of his eldest son, the vigorous opposition of the enemy, Prussian militarism, during the Great War. He continued his trade-union involvement through the 1920s, preoccupied increasingly with the growing communist-inspired militancy in the Scottish mining associations, in particular in Fife and Lanarkshire. A staunch democrat, he favoured conciliation and arbitration as the means by which the trade-unions could secure better conditions for working people. As Tom Johnston recollected in his Memoirs, 'With caution personified with a capital P; he carried on for years a relentless warfare with the communists in his county, and his motto in that warfare as I once told him was the motto on the Covenanters banner at Tippermuir, "Jesus and No Quarter."' In the summer of 1928 the battle came to a head, following his suspension from local union office by the communists who had by now gained control of the Fife union, Adamson, backed by the National Union of Scottish Mineworkers' executive, founded a rival Fife, Clackmannanshire and Kinross Miners Association.

Losing his seat in the 1931 General Election disaster, he failed narrowly to regain it in 1935, beaten by the Communist Willie Gallagher. His wife died that year and on 23 February 1936 he died of pneumonia in a Dunfermline nursing home.