Our Noble Johnston

Tom Johnstone Credit National Galleries Scotland

by David McVey

IN WITHOUT QUARTER, his 1995 biography of the man, Russell Fairgrieve wrote, ‘No one else this century has dominated Scottish politics quite like Tom Johnston.’ This will surprise those, including some within politics, some in the Scottish Labour Party, who have never heard of Johnston.

Johnston is perhaps largely forgotten because his achievements - which were considerable - seem to belong to a bygone era, rather than just the last century. Even the idea of a Labour Government seems to have a period charm, these days, though Johnston was prominent in the wartime National Government. Johnston, though no left-winger, was a class-based socialist who penned a pungent diatribe against Scotland’s aristocracy, and a scholarly History of the Working Classes in Scotland. I expect Jeremy Corbyn has heard of him and regards him with respect, but his nu-Blairite rivals would find little common cause with the feisty and determined Johnston.

Johnston was born in 1881 into a comfortable middle-class home. His home town was Kirkintilloch (I like that in a person). He enrolled as a mature student at the University of Glasgow in 1907 by which time he was already working as a journalist. He edited a left-wing newspaper, Forward, for many years after helping to found it in 1906. A strong advocate of teetotalism, he would have held modern Guardian-reading champagne socialists in contempt. In 1909 was published Johnston’s Our Scots Noble Families, a Hollywood Babylon of its time, exposing the past crimes against the people, of Scottish aristocrats and questioning their right to hold what they had won by dubious means. Later he was apologetic about it, perhaps because in government he was mixing with so many noble Scots (and English), but he oughtn’t to have done. It’s still an entertaining and passionately-written piece of polemic.