Ramsay Macdonald: The Portrait of a Man

I

J. RAMSAY MACDONALD is a figure of romance as well as of political significance. He was born in what was then a primitive village named Lossiemouth, in Morayshire, to the far north of Scotland, from parents of peasant stock. His mother was a woman of profound piety and of sterling character, and during the years that the little Ramsay grew and eagerly assimilated the learning available in the village school she became known as the saint of the village; in every house where there was trouble, there Jeanette Ramsay was called on as friend and helper.

Ramsay’s abilities were recognized by the village dominie, who carried him along as far as he was able and who encouraged him as he grew toward manhood to strike out for London. There he starved in a garret, doing any work he could pick up. Presently we find him writing for a newspaper and acting as secretary for a Liberal M.P. Already a stir was in the air which was soon to brew a big storm. He was beginning to speak on many street corners and in monster meetings at Trafalgar Square, and John Burns and Keir Hardie were elected to Parliament, the latter wearing his miner’s cap when he joined that aristocratic assembly. Ramsay MacDonald threw in his lot with these insurgent forces

and accepted a nomination as candidate for Parliament.

A first fruit of MacDonald’s sparse living and of his ardent agitations came in the form of an illness which laid him low in St. Thomas’s Hospital, across the Thames and facing the Houses of Parliament and Westminster. There was brought to him a check for his campaign under the signature of M. E. Gladstone. This was but a name to him, whether male or female he knew not. His formal acknowledgment followed. And in a small diary of Margaret Ethel Gladstone’s under date of May 29, 1895, one reads: ‘First letter from J. R. MacDonald’; while a little later came a second note: ‘First saw him Pioneer Club, June 13, 1895,’ on which date he took part in a debate on Socialism, with Margaret Gladstone, unknown to him, in the audience. It was not until the following summer that MacDonald saw her. A year later they became engaged, and in November 1896 they were married.

Ramsay MacDonald’s wife has been so potent a part of her husband’s life that although she died years ago I can never think of him and her as apart. She was the youngest daughter of Dr. John Hall Gladstone, a distinguished chemist and the successor of Faraday at the Royal Institute. Margaret’s mother was a niece of the Thomson brothers, famous physicists, one of whom became Lord Kelvin. Her parents had ample private means. For many years Margaret’s father devoted himself to school-board work at a time when this was a truly liberal undertaking. He was gentle and wise in character; ‘a quiet and reverent man,’ is Ramsay MacDonald’s tender description, ‘whose wealth, intellectual distinction, and liberality of thought reigned over all.’ Religion and charity were the dominating atmosphere of the household; and as Margaret grew and her experiences ripened, religion and charity claimed her more and more. But gradually the forms of expression changed. In her Sunday School class and in her Charity Organization Society visiting, she faced the wrongs of the downtrodden. The ferment of social duty was stirring the depths of her being. Charity was not enough. Her own life was running over with blessings. How could she share them? Thus by 1895 she had groped her way, as her husband described it, from ‘the human pity, which was her inheritance, to the reforming faith, which was her conquest.’

For fifteen years Ramsay MacDonald and his wife lived and worked together, and in the first weeks after her death he wrote, as she had bidden him, a little Memoir of her. It is surely one of the most poignant books ever written. In it he reveals her heart, as well as his own. Very different is it from the larger biography which he wrote later for the public. In the small privately circulated volume he tells of his first visit to her in her home in Pembridge Square. The house stands with broad steps and massive front doors and separated by a yard from neighboring houses, ‘frugally narrow, but enough to give the detached air of independence,’ and shut off by a little distance from ‘the bustle which fills the neighboring Bayswater Road.’ When MacDonald told Margaret Gladstone of his love, he spoke of his mother, of her poverty in this world’s goods, of her remarkable character, and of her brave struggle for her son. He would wish that the woman who was to share his life should share his love and his reverence for her. The bond which came to bind the two women together was a very rare one. ‘I always hoped that, if I ever married, my husband’s mother would be living and would like me,’ she had written, in her first letter. And in a later letter she wrote: ‘“My dear Mother!” I am so glad to be able to write those three words together.’ Her own mother had died when she was born, and the love of older sisters and devoted aunts and a doting grandmother seems to have left a place vacant in her heart.

MacDonald took his wife up to Lossiemouth to see his mother and his childhood’s home almost as soon as they were made man and wife. There they took their children for their vacations. And there they used to leave them when they went on their many journeyings — for Mr. MacDonald is an inveterate traveler, and wherever he went his wife went too. This was not merely the Englishwoman’s habit of cleaving unto her mate. It was the passionate desire for another and yet another honeymoon. ‘We are going away once more into liberty to be together,’ MacDonald described their starting upon one of these journeys. The children they were sure would be well and more than happy with his mother. Thus they visited Canada and the United States, Australia, South Africa, and lastly India, besides making many journeys to near-by places; and each time they returned to welcoming friends and duties and found their immediate family circle unbroken.

II

MacDonald records that his wife was an inveterate worker for the downtrodden and the unenfranchised classes. The endless committees on which she served as the chairman or the secretary were ‘but the means through which her untiring and aspiring spirit sought to bring justice and beauty into the lives of working women’ — such are the words with which he sums up her activities. And always she wanted the facts; these she gathered for herself from bluebooks or from her own investigations. Even at the dead of night she was often out and abroad, as when she investigated the night employment of women. Her findings were recorded carefully in endless notebooks and memoranda. ‘She was the daughter of science as well as of religion, the descendant of a long line of D.D.’s and of LL.D.’s, and F.R.S.’s.’

MacDonald tells of one incident (of which I also heard from friends) which is full of character and likewise of humor. It appears that on one occasion when his wife was to head a delegation her clothes were playfully derided by her comrades. ‘You will disgrace us all,’ they said. So, for the sake of the Cause, she bought a fine new blouse in which the next day she arrayed herself, and, neglecting to look in the glass, she fastened it back part before! Judge the dismay of the group when she presented herself—the strangest figure, they declared, that had ever met human eyes. It was what her husband called her ‘ blind eye’ toward externals of all kinds. Never did mediæval saint pay less attention to the ‘flesh and its decorations.’

Their most precious hours, he says, were in the evenings when he was at home and they sat together, she sewing and darning in the narrow circumference of lamplight, and he reading aloud.

‘As I write this, there lie by me Francke’s Social Forces in German Literature, a bookmark halfway through it showing at the edges, and Browning’s Ring and the Book, also marked about three parts through. They will never be finished now. With them it is as with other things; the plough has been left in the middle of the furrow.’

There were times, however, when his wife withdrew from companionship even with him whom she loved best. She ‘had within her being,’ MacDonald writes, ‘a Holy of Holies where she sat alone and where the presence of her dearest was forbidden. In the long, dark nights at Lossiemouth in late autumn and winter, with the moan of the sea passing over the land like the cry of toiling creation, the call of the night bird overhead and the mass of stars shining above her, she would retire within herself and go out silently to the shore or the moors in quest of something which haunts life like a dim vision of a strange beauty, or a confused echo of a far-away melody.’

The MacDonalds made their home in an ample apartment at 3 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which provided the social centre hitherto lacking in the Labor Movement. Here comrades came from near and far. It was often said that they established a ‘political salon.’ But the fact was far different. They opened their home to their friends, and all comrades were friends, representatives of every race and every clime, who were welcomed in a spirit of amplest hospitality. To the two of them Socialism was a religion, binding its converts together, as in a church. Amid their guests they moved, their quick sympathy and unerring memory of names and faces making them an ideal host and hostess. ‘I was lonely until that night, but five minutes in her home were enough to banish my bad mood’ — so wrote one who in the early years had come to London a stranger from Canada.

A picturesque incident is told of another visitor, an obscure member of a colonial parliament. ‘ You must come to us of an evening, and we will introduce you to our friends,’ Mrs. MacDonald had said. ‘Oh, no!’ he exclaimed, abashed. ’I am the merest nobody.’ ‘But my husband and I are worse than nobodies in most people’s eyes,’ she answered. Some ten years later, when this former ‘nobody’ had become Labor Premier in his own land, MacDonald and his wife went thither. They were met by the government launch; every high honor was lavished upon them; and they were laughingly told how the Premier had often related in cabinet meetings what they had done for him when he had gone, a ‘nobody,’ to London.

Thus they became the centre of a great companionship of men and women doing work in every corner of the earth. The little group of fellow workers widened until at last it stretched around the world. So Mr. MacDonald described the ‘political salon’ and its ramifications which grew up at 3 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

III

I first met the MacDonalds in 1909. ‘If you are lonely in England,’ a young friend had said to me, when I was about to set sail, ’find out Mrs. Ramsay MacDonald and hold on to her hand. She has the biggest heart in the whole world. And she has the most adorable children.’ Thus it was that when H. G. Wells asked me whom I wanted to meet I answered, ‘Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald.’

I sent my introductory note, and it brought an invitation to luncheon. Lincoln’s Inn Fields is a big square lying to the north of the Strand, and not far from the Law Courts. Whatever it may have been when the MacDonalds first made their home there, I found it a business section, and the brass plate bearing MacDonald’s name among those of lawyers and other such would have suggested his office had I not held in my hand the assurance that it was his home.

Two long flights of stairs and a long dark entry ushered me into a very large room lighted by four windows, reaching from ceiling to floor, which looked out on to the tops of the trees, and into which filtered pale rays of the winter sun — the first sunshine I had seen since arriving in London. The room, to judge from the toys, mixed with books and pamphlets and papers, piled on tables and overflowing on to chairs, served as study, living room, and nursery combined. And on the sofa sat Mrs. MacDonald with the kindest look I have ever seen in human eyes, and with her fifth child, little Joan, then perhaps a year old, upon her knee. Ishbel and David, then perhaps six and four, were playing in the room. And later, the elder children, Alister and Malcolm, came in from school. Sheila was born a year later. And some months before her birth little David — ‘our boy,’ they called him — died; the one sorrow that clouded their married life.

Mrs. MacDonald made me feel at home at once. Presently Mr. MacDonald came in, wearing the red tie of the Socialists habitual with him in those days, when he was called the handsomest man in the House of Commons; and still more is this true to-day, although his hair and moustache have changed from dark to silver gray. His talk was as direct and as informal as his wife’s. And he seemed as detached as did his wife from the somewhat bare lunch that was served at a table toward the end of the living room.

They arranged that I should go with them in the special car for the delegates to attend the Labor Conference which was about to be held at Portsmouth. ’I shall be much engaged there,’ said Mr. MacDonald (which indeed proved to be the case, he being the storm centre of every contest), ‘but my wife will keep with you.’ She it was who introduced me to all the comrades, and they gave me the passwords which let me into the world within the world, the Labor Movement of Great Britain. Thereafter, wherever I went, I was sent with an introduction to comrades, who met me at the trains and took me in charge, and usually kissed me at meeting and at parting, and gave me an introduction to the next town.

Thus it was that I got behind ‘the stately façade, which is all that most people see of England,’ and I saw what a very wise friend in the United States to whom I later told my experiences called ‘the saddest sight in all Europe — the English people.’ At the factory gates of provincial towns I saw the workers, narrow-chested, bent of shoulders, knock-kneed, and dwarfed in stature — the sorriest specimens of humankind I had ever looked upon. But likewise I saw the seeds of the new world which is in the making— the little bands of men and women all over the land who meet together week by week all through the year, as Christians used to meet together in a far-off time, declaring that the capitalist order is in process of dissolution and that it is for the workers to reorganize the Commonwealth so as to afford a chance for a good life to all.

When the MacDonalds took me over to the House of Commons there was an incident which typifies the material to which the Independent Labor Party has to look for recruits. Mrs. MacDonald and I were awaiting the coming of her husband in the lobby outside of the House called St. Stephen’s Hall, and from among the several groups likewise waiting there came one to claim Mrs. MacDonald’s acquaintance and to introduce her to the delegation of the unemployed who had come there to tell their representatives that they were starving. I followed across the hall and was introduced to a woman who in answer to my questions told me her miserable story. And then, her face brightening, she had said, ‘But God has been wonderfully good to me.’ I asked, ‘Will you tell me how He has showed His goodness?’ ‘He has given me wonderful courage,’ was her simple answer. It is this courage which burns in the hearts both of the Independent Labor Party leaders and of the rank and file.

IV

Soon after this visit to the House of Commons I went to live at a settlement in Bermondsey, and there I got an impression of a very different element to which Labor must look for its recruits, and likewise I got MacDonald’s explanation. Being in England for the specific purpose of seeing the Socialism of which we in the United States were just beginning to hear, I naturally attended all the Socialist meetings that I knew about. Philip Snowden was booked to speak at the Bermondsey Town Hall, and I volunteered to canvass with the fliers. I would ring the bell of the mean little houses and the door would be opened a few inches, allowing me a view of a slatternly woman whose hair was always done up in crimping pins. I would start to explain about the meeting, but the door would be slammed in my face. I spoke to Mr. MacDonald about these degradedlooking women, and he answered: ‘Yes, what you see is the third generation of industrialism. The working women of Great Britain have lost the home-making arts.’

He made the same comment on the dwarflike men and women whom we saw in the cotton-mill district in Lancashire where I went to trail him for a series of meetings for which he was advertised; but there was this difference in the Lancashire folk — that though their bodies were stunted, and no doubt likewise their minds, they had been trained in trade-unionism for several generations, and they have thus retained standards of living and habits of self-help. Thus Lancashire has been the backbone of the Labor Movement.

I got a real feeling of intimacy with Mr. MacDonald during this Lancashire trip, as we stayed in the same hotel at Rochdale, from which he went by train or by trolley to the nearby towns; and one afternoon he asked me to walk with him about the historic town.

MacDonald is a great speaker; he has a rich voice, and his strong Scotch accent gives a new beauty to the English tongue. I have heard numberless speeches from him, first and last, and I never heard the same speech twice. He is likewise a prolific writer, both of bound books and of contributions to a Socialist weekly and monthly. Thus it is easy to see how vast has been his part in shaping the Socialist mind of Great Britain.

MacDonald was first elected to the House of Commons in 1906, when the Taff Vale decision roused the workers to defend what they conceived to be their rights. That election brought the nation to recognize them as a power to be reckoned with. Mrs. MacDonald was often in the House gallery, and, whether or no, she was up when her husband got home, to give him his supper; and they counseled together over every move that was made.

The last time I saw MacDonald’s wife was at a by-election at Croydon, where she appeared one morning and sat among the other helpers as if she were completely one of themselves. My last word was a little message on a post card carrying her picture with little Joan in her arms, as she and her husband were starting for India. They were summoned back by an unexpected general election, to be met by the news that a leading Socialist and most dear friend named Mary Middleton was dying. Almost immediately after the election little David, the most beautiful and gifted of their children, sickened and died, followed eight days later by MacDonald’s mother, always a mother to his wife and children. Mr. MacDonald sent me the little pamphlet giving the funeral service held for David. In a few months came Sheila’s birth. Meanwhile, Mary Middleton’s life was drawing to a close: and when the end came ‘the will to live,’ said MacDonald, ‘seemed to go out of my wife.’ She died on September 8, 1911, holding her husband’s hand until her hand should be clasped by those who had gone before her. Her husband sent me the pamphlet giving the funeral services at which friends and intimates said their farewell to a dearly beloved comrade.

MacDonald did not dare to speak, so he said, of his wife’s tenderness for their children. But he did tell of her realization that they were personalities, due to play their part in the world, and that it was her duty to leave them free and even to drive them back upon themselves, lest she do violence to the life that was their hidden spring. Her work for them was spiritual. ‘It would be so easy to spoil them!’ she said. And on the last sad day when she had been told that her own hours were numbered she said to her husband, ‘Oh, put romance into the lives of the children! Teach them to know the things of the spirit.’

As one sees MacDonald to-day with his children, now grown men and women, about him, one feels sure that he has carried out his wife’s behest. Their baby Sheila, always appealing to me because of her romantic name and the tragedy that overshadowed her birth, is a bonny girl, studying at the University of London. Joan is studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Ishbel, the oldest of the daughters, left the University of London when her father was first made Prime Minister to do the social functions of Downing Street. She seems to take life very seriously. In 1926, when I was in London, her father was planning a flying trip to the United States, and I asked Ishbel if she would accompany him. She said in an almost frightened tone, ‘Oh, no; I could not leave the Committee’; to which her father responded playfully, ‘She is the honorary secretary of the School Committee, and she thinks it is her part to do all the work.’ She campaigned for her brother Malcolm in 1923, when a general election came on unexpectedly while he was on a debating tour in the United States, and she campaigned for him again in the last election, in which he was victorious. She is now a member of the London County Council.

Ishbel and her father are obviously great friends. She seems untouched by the prominence of her position. A friend wrote me recently from London; ‘I saw Ishbel in the Tube lift a day or two ago; she is a nice-looking child and absolutely unspoiled.’ She is alleged to have remarked when she and her father first returned from Buckingham Palace: ‘The Queen and I were the only women there whom I consider were properly dressed.’

Of the boys, the younger, Malcolm, won a seat in Parliament in the last election. How MacDonald will enjoy his comradeship! The older son, Alister, is an architect. I got a glimpse of his public mind when I read his protest, several years ago, against the destruction of the Wren bridge across the Thames. He is married and has two children. And their grandfather has little attention for anyone else when they are present!

And little David? I noticed a bust of the child when I was at the MacDonalds’ house a couple of years ago. That made me inadvertently use his name, when I meant to ask for Malcolm. ‘Where is David!’ exclaimed MacDonald with blanched face and in a tone that seemed fit to raise the dead. David evidently lives for his father among his other children.

V

During the war, MacDonald underwent what seemed to be a total eclipse, for he stood for a negotiated peace when all Great Britain would hear no word except more war. In the general election of 1919 he was flung out of Parliament, and he was defeated repeatedly as he stood for one and another constituency. How did he bear his life during those years? Had his wife been with him, one could have understood. But to have closed the doors in his own face when he would have been welcomed into the Liberal Cabinet and later into the Coalition Cabinet, and to find himself hooted when he took the platform, and then to go to his desolate home — oh, those must have been bitter years! I wonder, was it the Scotch in him that pulled him through?

Finally, however, the tide turned. In 1923, the Tories made a bid for a new lease of power on the basis of what they call tariff reform and we in this country call protection, and MacDonald spoke to crowds at last eager to hear him, all across the country. He was returned to Parliament from Aberavon in South Wales. While falling short of an absolute majority, Labor had the largest block of votes in Parliament, and the King sent for MacDonald to form the first Labor Government in Great Britain.

Labor held office then, as it does to-day, by grace of support from Liberal votes. In 1924, after only nine months in office, it was thrown out of power. Whether the Liberals played fair or played foul may be a matter of dispute. But two big things were accomplished by MacDonald’s brief term of office.

First, he demonstrated that Labor is fit to rule, with its own welltrained trade-union leaders and an adequate support from the best of the former Liberal Party; and second, his outspoken stand for peace at the Geneva Conference when he was in office made a profound impression on the temper of Europe. These facts sank into the public mind during the years that he led the Opposition, and in the general election last May his party rose from 162 seats to 288, while the Tories fell from 400 seats to 255, and the Liberals, despite their great campaign fund, increased their seats only from 46 to 57. The Communists lost their solitary seat.

The continued dependence of Labor upon the Liberal votes is a vast disappointment to ardent spirits. But it seems to me, an outsider, it may become an asset. If Labor were supreme, how could it not attempt to take radical steps to right the wrongs which afflict society? And how could it be hoped that the country would stand behind attempts at rapid transformation?

Ramsay MacDonald is a Socialist in his thought through and through. But he is likewise an evolutionist; he understands that social customs must grow. The goal is always in his mind; hut a slow accomplishment is equally present with him. Thus the necessity, which even the most impatient must understand, of attracting and holding Liberal votes may prove a condition which will give to Labor a long lease of power.

Beneath the windows of the apartment in Lincoln’s Inn Fields where MacDonald made his home for so many years is a long semicircular bench, and above it a statue of his wife with her arms stretched wide over groups of children — a beautiful and fitting memorial. But Lincoln’s Inn Fields is obviously an unsuitable location in which to bring up children, and not long after his wife’s death Mr. MacDonald moved up to 9 Howitt Road, in the neighborhood of Hampstead. He has recently bought a stately house in Hampstead called Upper Frognal Lodge, which has a big garden and from which he can look across London. The Queen asked him, — and this is authentic, — ‘Mr. MacDonald, may I ask you why you bought your home?’ To which he made answer: ‘Madam, I bought it because I fell in love with it!’ I confess I felt like asking him the Queen’s question. But not so the Labor Party of Great Britain. Without a doubt, they love the stately old English ways. They call him Ramsay or Mac or J. R. as in the old days. He is the man who stood with them when they were but a mere handful, who was humbly born and hardly reared, and who understands them and their ways. But all the same he is the Prime Minister, and they like to see him housed as befits the first man in the nation.

Ramsay MacDonald stands to-day with no rift in the ranks behind him. Even the Tories agree that his cabinet is an exceptionally strong one. And they, and all the world, are awaiting expectantly what his government will bring forth, to repair and to revise the shattered fortunes of Great Britain.