The rise and fall of Lanarkshire’s little Lithuania

Between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, around 650,000 Lithuanians – an astonishing one in four individuals – emigrated from a homeland which, at the time, was part of the Russian Empire. Many set sail for the bright lights of the United States but thousands instead sought new lives in Britain. By 1914, there were approximately 12,000 Lithuanians across Britain, with 7,000 of them in Scotland, heavily concentrated around the industrial central belt.

For these migrants, it was not just the abstract hope of a better life that led so many to leave their farmlands behind. Instead, it was Tsarist oppression that was the driving force behind the mass migration of peasants that occurred over several decades, as Lithuanians sought an escape from the Russification policies that regulated and restricted their lives. These policies, which intensified in response to the Polish-Lithuanian uprising of 1863, included the prohibition of the Lithuanian language, the banning of the Lithuanian press, the closure of Lithuanian schools and monasteries, and the repopulation with ethnic Russians of villages believed to have links to the uprising.

As the Romanovs attempted to eradicate the very existence of Lithuania, it simply fuelled the Lithuanian National Revival, a national movement supporting self-determination as a way to escape the Tsarist regime, producing literature and newspapers often smuggled into Lithuania itself over the border from East Prussia, exploring the development of national ideas, and inciting opposition to the Tsar. But while this was an admirable endeavour in the fight against imperialism for those at home, many others chose to leave the country instead.

Sources suggest that Scottish collieries were quick to take advantage of both the poverty in Eastern Europe and the resulting desire from many peasant families to secure a new life. Colliery agents aboard ships exporting coal to Baltic ports would often prey upon those circumstances, offering Lithuanians cheap passage on their vessels, designed for the transportation of fossil fuels rather than human beings, with the promise, it is widely claimed, of work in the United States of America. They would find themselves usually deposited in Leith instead.

“Lithuanians in Scotland faced vitriol and sectarianism from many quarters, including the Scottish Miners’ Federation, who argued that they undercut wages and diluted the labour market.”

Despite this, of the 7,000 of those who came to be residing in Scotland in 1914, a huge number of the Lithuanians managed to find themselves in Lanarkshire, swapping their farming scythes for mining picks. In fact, some estimates suggest up to 6,000 of the incomers were settled in Lanarkshire, particularly in and around the town of Bellshill.

Unsurprisingly, the early experiences of the migrants in Scotland, and further afield in Britain, were marked by a combination of misunderstandings and ignorance from locals at best, and downright hostility at worst. Labelled officially as “Russian Poles” and, rather unofficially, as “cockroaches” and “beastly, filthy foreigners”, they faced vitriol and sectarianism from many quarters, including the Scottish Miners’ Federation, who argued that they undercut wages and diluted the labour market.

Even Keir Hardie, a founder of the Labour Party and its first parliamentary leader, and often heralded as a champion of the left, led a vicious campaign against the Lithuanian community in his role as leader of the Ayrshire Miners’ Union. He wrote articles criticising collieries and ironworks who employed the foreigners, claiming they lived “on garlic and oil” and would “introduce the Black Death”, described them as having “filthy habits” in speeches, and was quoted as stating:

“Dr Johnson said God made Scotland for Scotchmen and I would keep it so.”

A little Lithuania in Bellshill

In the face of ongoing xenophobia and sectarianism, the Lithuanian community still flourished – at least within the context of the harsh, poverty-stricken conditions of the time. Culture, language, food, and tradition thrived more in Bellshill than perhaps would ever have been permitted back in the old country. And, with the Lithuanians seeming to not only build their own community but simultaneously attempt to integrate with their fellow workers, the perception of many locals soon changed.

Accounts suggest that the perception of the incomers gradually changed from xenophobic stereotypes and suspicious hostility to a view of the Lithuanians as hard workers with great community spirit and a knack for inventiveness. Their vibrant community came to boast its own newspapers, insurance societies, general stores, co-operatives, recreational groups, and shoemakers, and the Lithuanian miners and their families not only showed themselves to be conscientious and spirited neighbours but also keen to stand in solidarity with their fellow workers, despite the miners’ unions brutal reactions to their arrival. Because of this steadfast solidarity, the Lanarkshire Miners’ Union soon changed its rules to allow for Lithuanian members.

By the First World War, it appears as though this huge community of migrant workers in the coal-mining heartlands of the west of Scotland was at its peak – thousands of Lithuanian men, women and children existing on a pittance, but doing so with both a desire to keep their culture alive and to build relationships with the natives. And as the slaughter of the Great War drove more and more people across Europe towards revolutionary ideas, things were presumably no different in the small miners’ cottages of the Lithuanian communities.

Vincas Mickevicius-Kapsukas, the Lithuanian communist, publicist, and revolutionary, had been an active member of the Lithuanian National Revival. A member of the Marxist SDLP (Social Democratic Party of Lithuania), before becoming a founder and leader of the Lithuanian Communist Party, he is known to have met Lenin in Krakow in 1914 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. He subsequently became the short-lived leader of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and Lithuanian-Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1918-19. He would also go on to work for the Comintern.

But his whereabouts during the First World War is of particular interest in the context of Lanarkshire’s Little Lithuania. After being imprisoned and then exiled by Nicholas II in the early 20th century, he had escaped Russia, travelling across Europe, during which his engagement with Lenin had occurred, eventually living in Britain from the onset of war. And it was from 1915 until the following year that he resided in Bellshill, editing the socialist newspapers Socialdemokratas and Rankpelnis, while heading up the SDLP’s Scotland chapter, with its very base in Bellshill’s Little Lithuania.

No escape from war

When the February Revolution occurred in Russia in 1917, it naturally had seismic effects not just across Russia but across Europe. The Lithuanian community in Bellshill was no different. By 1917, Kapsukas was living in the United States but one would assume that large swathes of the Lithuanians still living and working in Bellshill, who once fled from their homes because of Tsarist oppression, would have celebrated the abdication of Nicholas II. The celebrations, however, would be somewhat short-lived.

Seeking more cannon fodder to be fed into the meat grinder on the frontlines, and simultaneously recognising the increasing anxiety around the potential for a domestic revolution, the British government took its opportunity to alleviate both dilemmas somewhat. Having formed diplomatic relations with Russia’s newly installed Provisional Government, on the 17th of July 1917 the Military Service (Conventions with Allied States) Act came into force, ensuring that all men living in Britain who were Russian subjects and aged between 18 and 41 would be required by law to join either the British or Russian forces.

It is widely accepted that while a few hundred men opted to fight for the British, the majority of those to be sent to war chose to fight for the Russian forces. Perhaps some felt that it was akin to fighting for their Lithuanian homeland, even if they still harboured ambitions of self-determination – but it would also be sensible to assume that many others saw the potential in returning to a Russia now no longer under the Tsar’s control.

There was to be another quirk of fate in the story. By the time that the men who opted to fight for Russia arrived back in a homeland they may or may not have viewed as their own, Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks had already led the successful October Revolution.

And so, rather than arriving to fight for the Russian Provisional Government in the Great War, the men instead found themselves faced with yet another choice between two sides – fight for the revolution or for the Tsarist counter-revolutionaries. It would be difficult to imagine that this was a tricky choice for the vast majority, if not all, of those who had chosen to return to post-Tsarist Russia in the first place.

The strategic decimation of a migrant community

And so, in one negotiated, war-mongering swoop, the Lithuanian community in Bellshill, and Lithuanian communities elsewhere in Britain, were dealt a harrowing blow. We know now that many, many fathers, brothers, sons and uncles who chose to travel to Russia were simply never heard of by their families again, while many others, whether opting to fight for the British or Russia, met their deaths like the millions of other working men sent to their graves in the imperial conflict.

There were, of course, those men who were too old to be sent into the horrors of war. Some remained in Scotland for the rest of their lives with their families; others returned to Lithuania by choice in the following years. And there were women, either single or married to local Scots, who may have been largely unaffected by the mass removal of the majority of Lithuanian men. But the fact remains that the Military Service Act of 1917 had a seismic impact on Bellshill’s Little Lithuania, both in terms of sheer numbers and the ability of the community itself to survive.

The aftermath for the Lithuanian families left to fend for themselves in Britain, with most of the working men now no longer around, was horrendous. The women and children still living in Bellshill were permitted to continue residing in the cottages owned by the collieries, as the British government provided them with a lowly maintenance that was unsurprisingly far from enough to survive.

Whereas figures like Hardie had openly disparaged the Lithuanians, others like the great Scottish revolutionary John Maclean stood in solidarity with them, as outlined in his famous Speech from the Dock in 1918, in which he took the opportunity to address their plight directly:

“The children ought not to suffer because their fathers have been taken, but those children have suffered. There is not a Lithuanian family in the West of Scotland but has trouble today as a consequence of the starving of these people. These women and children of the Russian community have died as a consequence of the meagre supplies given to them by the British Government, and I seize this opportunity for the purpose of making my statement public, in connection with these women, in the hope that the public in general will press the government to see that these women and children are attended to at least on the same scale as the wives and dependents of British soldiers.”

Yet even the slow, calculated starvation of the women and children left behind was not to be the end of the suffering. Whereas the Military Service Act had severely wounded the Lithuanian community in Bellshill, and the hunger and disease that had followed had slowly strangled it, it was not quite at its fatal end.

That would come in 1920, when the British government implemented a “voluntary” repatriation scheme at the same time the meagre maintenance that was being supplied to the women and children was halted. And thus, the voluntary aspect of such a scheme became merely a stark choice for those women and children: either take your chances with deportation back to a land you may have left decades before – in the case of most of the children, had never even set eyes on – likely with no knowledge of where your husbands and fathers were, or starve to death, homeless, in Bellshill.

A British imperialist atrocity

For too long, the stories of the Lithuanian mining communities in Lanarkshire and across Britain have gone untold. The history of Lanarkshire’s Little Lithuania is largely forgotten, ignored, and unmarked, apart from a plaque in Carfin and the Scottish Lithuanian Social Club in Mossend.

But these are stories that should be heard, read, understood, and remembered – not just as tales of hardship, oppression, solidarity, and revolution, but also a reminder that capitalists and imperialists will think nothing of decimating entire communities and starving women and children, even here in Britain, to protect or further their own interests.

It is, of course, important not to generalise. We do not know to what degree revolutionary sentiment was permeating throughout the Lithuanian community in Bellshill in the midst of the First World War. The destruction of the community was so swift and so successful that the information left behind can only be largely pieced together from family accounts, a handful of useful articles, and an excellent book by John Millar entitled The Lithuanians in Scotland. But let us consider what we do know about this long-lost community.

This was a community borne out of a need to escape Tsarist oppression and persecution; a community that did not shirk in the face of vicious xenophobia and hostility, instead building relationships with fellow workers and obtaining trade union membership in a display of genuine internationalism and solidarity; a community that was known and respected enough by Marxist revolutionary John Maclean to not only be referenced in his most famous speech but to be referred to within it as Lithuanians rather than Russian Poles, a rarity at the time; a community that was the hub for a branch of the communist SDLP and the printing of revolutionary newspapers; and the home for a couple of years of a Lithuanian revolutionary, acquaintance of Lenin, and future Bolshevik.

With all of this in mind, it seems only logical to assume that the thousands of Lithuanians who built their vibrant community in Bellshill, and changed local perceptions in the process, were heavily connected to the revolutionary fervour sweeping across Europe, conceivably more so than their Scottish counterparts. And it was perhaps because of this very fact that the community paid the ultimate, tragic price at the hands of the British ruling class.

Main photo: Lithuanian miners in Bellshill. © North Lanarkshire Council. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk.