Mike Arnott recounts an episode when the party machine decided to over-ride Labour Party members’ wishes about who should be the city’s parliamentary candidate
The selection of Indian nationalist Krishna Menon as Dundee’s Parliamentary Candidate for the Labour Party in 1939 - and his rapid deselection one year later - is one of those fascinating details from Dundee’s Labour history.
Menon was selected by the Dundee Trades and Labour Council at a meeting in July 1939. At that time, this was one body – it later became two separate entities: the local Dundee Labour Party District Committee and the Dundee Trades Union Council.
On 29th November 1940, the National Executive of the UK Labour Party sent a letter to Krishna Menon confirming the ‘Cancellation of your candidature for one of the Dundee seats … As you know, our Constitution exacts a degree of loyalty and discipline rendered necessary by circumstances. It feels sure that you would not claim that, owing to your natural allegiance to India, you can give full support to Labour Party policy’.
This formal letter confirmed a decision that had been taken seven months before, in April 1940, which was reported at the time in the Dundee Courier.
The first question for us must be: Who was Krishna Menon?
Vengalil Krishnan Kurup Krishna Menon was born into an aristocratic family in Thiruvangad on 3rd May 1896. He was educated at Presidency College, Madras (now Chennai). As a young man he joined the Theosophical Society and became a member of Mrs Annie Besant's inner circle and was a volunteer in her Indian Home Rule campaign.
Besant was a remarkable character. She advocated both Indian and Irish Home Rule, was a member of the Social Democratic Federation and had been involved in Trade Union campaigning, including in the London Matchgirls’ Strike in 1888. She had moved to India in the 1890s and became President of the Indian National Congress in 1917. She helped Menon move to London in 1924 where he graduated from the London School of Economics and University College London. He also studied law and was called to the bar by the Middle Temple.
In 1927 Menon became the general secretary of the India League. He transformed the British-based independence movement, moving the group away from what had been a largely student body and from Annie Besant’s pedestrian and polite movement towards a more radical and effective vehicle for change. Through the League, Menon developed a close relationship with Pandit Jawarahal Nehru which was to last throughout his life. In 1934 he was elected as a Labour councillor to St Pancras Borough Council in London. Three years later, he had been proposed as a Labour Parliamentary Candidate in St Pancras, but was unsuccessful.
So how did he come to be selected by Labour for Dundee? His selection by the Trades and Labour Council arose by him being nominated by the Jute and Flax Workers Union, seconded by the National Union of Railwaymen. What was their motivation?
It was almost certainly related to the links between Dundee, India and the jute industry, which was a major influence in both places. Jute production in Dundee grew out of the linen industry. The mills which had made Dundee the main producer of Sailcloth in Europe, including for Nelson’s HMS Victory, were adapted to produce the coarser but more profitable Jute cloth. The raw Jute was imported from India, mainly from around the area of Calcutta.
Dundee mill owners realised that they could produce the Jute cloth in India at an even greater profit and in 1855 the first Dundee owned Jute mill in India was opened, using machinery and senior staff from Dundee. By 1900, Calcutta had overtaken Dundee as the world’s major Jute exporter. By 1921 Jute represented 27% of India’s exports, which themselves underwrote over 40% of Britain’s balance of trade deficit with Europe and North America.
The Jute and Flax Workers Union had been founded in 1905. It was not the first attempt to organise Jute workers in the city. There had been a number of attempts over the previous 30 years. They included one founded by the Unitarian Minister Henry Williamson, aimed at women jute workers and whose constitution stipulated that he would be its leader and that strike action would not be entertained.
In 1922, K. S. Bhat of the Workers Welfare League of India addressed the Scottish TUC Congress and spoke of the need for a union between Scottish and Indian workers. He specifically mentioned Dundee and jute. Three years later, John Sime of the Jute & Flax Workers Union and Tom Johnston, a Scottish Labour MP, visited the Indian jute mills. The Jute and Flax were increasingly convinced that, to address the issues being faced by their members in Dundee, it was worth investing time and effort in campaigning for better wages and conditions for jute workers in India.
In 1928, the working week for Calcutta’s jute workers was increased from 54 hours to 60 hours with no increase in pay. This had a devastating effect on the workers in India - but also had dire consequences for Jute workers in Dundee.
There were calls for import duties, which the British Government ignored because getting more cotton into India was a much greater political and economic priority than protecting Dundee workers - and because Lancashire cotton had a greater political voice than Dundee’s.
In 1937 half a million Bengal jute workers went on strike but to no effect.
It is clear that the main impetus to have Menon selected in Dundee came from the Jute & Flax Union. They had specifically approached him in 1938 to become a candidate in Dundee, so their analysis must have included a strong indication that he would be beneficial to their interests, either for their members and the industry in Dundee or, plausibly, for the pay and conditions of jute workers in India. Indeed, the India Office of the British Government noted that Menon was accepted in Dundee ‘mainly on the vote of the Jute Trade Union interests’.
Menon did have another potential ally in Dundee - the Indian born Labour Councillor Dr Jainti Das Saggar who had been elected in 1936 and who was himself an Indian nationalist. Saggar, after whom Saggar Street in Dundee is named, was a remarkable character. He was Scotland’s first black councillor and an advocate of forward-thinking and progressive policies on the Council, often focused on health improvements, including school meals and community meal provision for Dundee’s poorer areas.
There is an elephant in the room here, both in Menon’s selection but possibly more significantly in his deselection, and that is the Communist Party of Great Britain.
That Menon had links with the Communist Party is not in doubt. A previous Labour candidate in Dundee, Jean Mann, wrote of Menon; ‘he stalked across the Scottish platforms like a colossus, always urging policies which were espoused by the Communists, in whose company he seemed more at home than even the ILP’.
Attempts to exclude communist influence from trade union organisations, including the Trades Council and the Jute & Flax Union, had clearly failed over the years. In 1928, the Jute & Flax introduced what were known as Bans and Proscriptions. These were common in trade unions and tried to ban Communist Party members from holding elected positions. Dundee City Archives holds a form from the Jute & Flax which carries the name of a member who was excluded from office precisely for refusing to declare if she was a Communist Party member.
I was told by an old timer that, in those days, at the start of Trades Council meetings, delegates would be asked to affirm that there were no communists present. His description of the scene reminded me of John Cleese’s character in the Life of Brian, asking the bearded crowd at a stoning if there were any women present. In both cases, the mode of response should have been enough to raise suspicion.
In 1937, a Jute & Flax delegate on the Trades Council, Willie McGuire, was killed at the Battle of Jarama in the Spanish Civil War. He also happened to be the Secretary of Dundee Young Communist League. The Marx Memorial Library has a photograph of Krishna Menon, in the company of Nehru and leading Scottish Communist Peter Kerrigan, in Spain in 1937 where they were visiting the British Battalion of the International Brigade. Just months after his selection, Menon wrote to the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, sympathising with the recent death of his mother and mentioning that he was going to Dundee.
The Communist Party also had a long-standing interest in fighting for India’s freedom from the Empire as part of its internationalist and anti-imperialist positions. In 1923, we find British Intelligence expressing concern that leading British Communist Bob Stewart was trying to win over Indian students at Dundee University. In the same year, Shapurji Saklatvala MP, an Indian and Britain’s fist Communist to become an MP, spoke in Dundee, berating the jute trade unionists; “During all these years you have called yourselves trade unionists. You are nothing of the sort. You are only Dundonians. In the jute trade, the men who ought to be in your union first and foremost were the Bengal growers of jute”.
In 1924, the Communist International in Moscow gave the British Communist Party responsibility for establishing a Communist Party in India, a task which produced some results, particularly in Bengal, but with which it was still engaged in 1936. Also during the thirties and forties, one of the most influential British Communist leaders was another Indian, Rajani Palme-Dutt, with whom Menon developed a close relationship.
So the Communists in the Jute & Flax Union, and on the Trades Council, quite conceivably saw an ally for their party’s policies in the form of Menon and having him as a Dundee Labour MP would assist their positions, including the goal of Indian independence from the British Empire. The Union leadership’s position in supporting him was based on their conception of him helping defend the interests of their Union’s members through better conditions for India’s workers. Menon offered both groups what they saw as a solution but they both had very different end goals.
Labour’s policy on India is also interesting. It was far less supportive of Indian independence. A resolution at its 1939 Party Conference stated that ‘the right to rule subject peoples must be regarded as a sacred trust’. The Congress Party in India protested angrily when the Viceroy took the colony into WWII in September 1939 without consultation. The 1939 Defence of India order, which permitted imprisonment without trial, was not opposed by the Labour Party. After the outbreak of war, Menon was publicly denouncing the was as imperialist, which, at the time, was the policy of the Communist Party, definitely not Labour’s. He also wrote articles for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker and spoke at a conference ‘Labour and the War’ organised by Labour Monthly, which, despite the name, was a Communist Party publication edited by Palme-Dutt. Menon’s contribution included reference to thousands of war resisters, imprisoned in India, including Nehru, and again categorised the war as an imperialist project.
If we go back to the letter from the Labour Party National Executive, the basis they quoted for his deselection in April 1940 was; ‘you would not claim that, owing to your natural allegiance to India, you can give full support to Labour Party policy’. So it seems that their view is that it was Menon’s attitude to Indian Independence which was the crux of the issue. The Courier press report of the original decision in April mentioned ‘alleged activities with bodies opposed to the official policy of the Labour Party’, which is more ambiguous.
What was the response to this decision?
Under pressure from UK Labour, the Political Executive of Dundee Labour Party and the Trades and Labour Council felt they could do nothing else but withdraw his candidature. The Jute & Flax, his nominating sponsor, was not informed. It protested vehemently to the Trades Council in Menon’s defence and demanded action. After much lobbying by the Union and the NUR at national level, a deputation was sent by Labour’s National Executive to Edinburgh in September to hear representations.
Menon defended himself at the hearing. Remember, he was an experienced lawyer. No charges had ever been laid against him. He had heard about his deselection from the press. He had asked to meet the General Committee of the Party, but no response had been forthcoming.
In his evidence, the Dundee Trades Council Secretary said that his organisation had been struggling to exclude communist influence. Menon had spoken at the Labour Monthly conference, had written for the Daily Worker and was due to share a platform in Glasgow with Willie Gallacher, the Communist MP. Menon responded that other Labour figures had written for both publications and that once he heard that Gallacher was also to speak in Glasgow, he withdrew from the meeting. This line of accusation clearly implies that Menon’s closeness to the Communist Party was the main issue.
G. R. Shepherd, Labour Party National Agent, who presided, reported to the NEC and suggested that Menon’s candidature be withdrawn on the grounds of double loyalty “His first loyalty is to India”. The decision was confirmed, and they wrote to inform Menon in November.
Menon replied on 16 December and maintained that he did enjoy the confidence of the Dundee Labour Movement’. He accused the agent of having ‘instigated and inspired the action’. Menon also wrote to the party’s secretary, enclosing his letter to Shepherd and questioning the incompatibility of his ‘natural allegiance to India’ with ‘Labour Party policy’.
He wrote that the NEC had hitherto ‘refrained from openly committing itself to the position that there is an inherent contradiction between Labour Party policy and an allegiance to socialist principles in their application to India … [T]he record of Labour in government and of Labour in opposition is one of the more unhappy chapters in Indo-British relations … [The Labour Party has not] ‘raise[d] its voice in protest against the savage sentence imposed on the foremost socialist in India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru or against … the imprisonment of nearly four thousand men and women’.
Menon also argued that ‘the “natural allegiances” of peoples do not divide them; on the contrary they are bonds of unity in what is a common struggle … I shall continue to work to bring about the realisation that the struggle of people of all lands is a common one against our common foes … the people of India have no quarrel with the people of this country, their struggle is directed against an exploiting and oppressive system.
Menon pointed out that he had been a Labour Party member for sixteen years, had not changed his political position in regards to India, and that this had not previously been questioned.
But the die was cast. What happened to Menon?
Following Indian Independence in August 1947, Menon was appointed the first High Commissioner to the United Kingdom by Nehru. In 1953 he was elected to the upper house of the Indian parliament and became his country's representative on the General Assembly at the United Nations, a position he held until 1962. In July 1956 when President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, he took a leading part in the international negotiations that followed. In January 1957 he made an eight-hour speech to the UN Security Council, spread over two days, on India's position on Kashmir, the longest recorded speech made to the council.
In 1956 Menon entered Nehru's Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio and in April 1957 he became India’s Defence Minister. He died in Delhi on 6th October 1974.
The vacant Dundee Labour Party Candidacy went to John Strachey in 1943, and he won one of Dundee’s two seats as part of the Labour landslide in 1945. Strachey’s own political trajectory was complex. He had joined the Labour Party in 1923 and in 1924 was the unsuccessful Labour candidate for Birmingham Aston. He became a close ally of Oswald Mosley, then an up-and-coming Labour politician who had contested the neighbouring Birmingham Ladywood constituency. Mosley was the best man at his wedding.
At the 1929 general election Strachey became the MP for Birmingham Aston and Mosley's Parliamentary private secretary. In May 1930 Mosley and Strachey resigned over the government's unemployment policies and formed the New Party but Strachey broke with Mosley when Mosley rejected socialism and turned to fascism.
In the October 1931 election, Strachey defended his seat at Aston as an independent pro-communist workers’ candidate but was defeated. He even applied to join the Communist Party in the summer of 1932 but was rejected as an unreliable intellectual. In 1934, Strachey was founding secretary of the Committee for Coordinating Anti-Fascist Activities, a response to Mosley’s growing British Union of Fascists – the Blackshirt movement.
In 1936, Strachey joined the publisher Victor Gollancz in founding the Left Book Club. This institution which has left its legacy, even today, in second hand bookshops and on lefty bookshelves around the country.
He remained MP, for Dundee West until his death in 1963.
So what do we think? Was it Menon’s allegiance to India or his closeness to the Communist Party which led to him falling foul of the Labour Party? Was racism an issue, as he claimed? It must be said that I have found little to no evidence of him suffering racist attitudes during his time in Dundee, but the sources are far from plentiful. If he hadn’t been deselected, would he have stayed on in Britain as an MP when India became independent?
I’m puzzled by the Labour Party’s apparent decision to attribute his deselection to his links to India. As he stated in his defence, he had long held positions on India during his Labour Party membership and during his many years as a Labour Councillor, but these had never attracted any concerns or censure. Had it been his criticism of the British Government’s clamp-down on anti-war protestors there which had been a final straw? We sometimes fail to appreciate, or wilfully ignore, that fighters against our imperial rule in countries around the Empire didn’t fall into line when Britain was at war. That was certainly true in Ireland during the first world war and was also true in India during WWII. Since independence in 1947, Indian veterans who fought against Britain have received a government pension and received decorations from the Indian Government. This is not the case for those Indians who fought in Britain’s Indian forces.
So much simpler, surely, to come out and blatantly call him out as a communist sympathiser and fellow traveller. At the time of these events, the Communist Party of Great Britain had adopted a policy of opposition to the war, in line with Moscow’s demands. This policy was forcefully implemented by Palme Dutt against the initial opposition of those within the Party like Harry Pollitt, its General Secretary, who couldn’t reconcile the party’s support of the International Brigades, fighting Fascism in Spain, including against Hitler and Mussolini’s troops and which had seen many of the Party’s finest activists killed, with an abandonment of the continuation of that same fight against Fascism in WWII. The British Party’s policy only changed when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Published 30 August 2024. This article draws on a number of sources including Marika Sherwood, Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society. vol.42, 2007 and Dr Tony Cox: Empire, Industry and Class, The Imperial Nexus of Jute 1840-1940. Routledge 2013. In a slightly different form, it has been published on the website of Woven Together: Dundee’s Multicultural History Project.