many Jews preferred the three- to five-day journey to Britain, which was cheaper than the direct route to the ‘New World.’ The journey may have been cheaper, but it came with a different price. Once through Russian customs (still a feat in itself) immigrants faced a sojourn riddled with sickness, overcrowding, and filthy, cattle-like conditions. On a voyage lasting from forty to sixty hours depending on the weather, passengers were herded together and made to sleep on fouled rags, dirty blankets, or in the small spaces between decks. As Rose Robins, a member of the London anarchist group Arbeter Fraynd (Workers’ Friend), later recalled:
all of us slept overcrowded in bunks, stretched side by side over the whole length of the ship. We lived in hot, stuffy, filthy conditions. We ate salt herring out of barrels distributed by ordinary seamen. My young brother, one year old, was sea sick, in agony all the time. We scratched while we slept. For the nights were a nightmare.22
Despite the ordeal, the desire to escape Russia and the possibilities of a new life free of discrimination meant aliens arriving in Britain from Liepaja rose from 429 in 1893 to 5,805 in 1897.23 And Philip Josephs was one of them. Around 1897, Glasgow, the centre of Scottish radicalism, became his new home.
Chapter 2: glasgow and the anarchists
Although the most favoured route across Britain for those America-bound was from Hull to Liverpool, a significant number of migrants travelled across Scotland after arriving at the ports of Leith or Dundee.1 Glasgow—the “industrial powerhouse of the Scottish economy”—became an important staging post for these travellers, and many stayed, drawn to the opportunities of a developing city and a thriving Jewish community with its own shops, synagogues, and culture.2 Indeed, Glasgow had the third largest Jewish population in the United Kingdom, rising from 2,000 in 1891 to 6,000 a decade later.3
It is uncertain whether Glasgow was Josephs’ intended destination, if he travelled alone, and when he arrived. The only clue to his permanency in Glasgow is permanency of another kind—on 27 November 1897, he married Sophia Hillman at the Haskalah-influenced Clyde Terrace Synagogue, in the neighbourhood of Gorbals. Sophia had also come from Latvia, born in 1876 in the south-eastern city of Daugavpils (Dzvinsk), and despite the distance between cities, it is possible she had known Josephs outside of Scotland. A rare photograph of a youthful Sophia gives the studio address as Kornstrasse, a main street in Liepaja. According to living relatives, Sophia and Philip may have arrived in Glasgow together via Germany.
One thing is certain: a mere paragraph does not do justice to Sophia’s own story of struggle. Twenty-five years and a life of migration later, another photograph of Sophia with her youngest child, Edie, shows a “beautiful, elegant (did Philip make her clothing?), strong, intelligent woman, with a touch of ironic humour in her face. But an exhausted look too.”4 Two major migrations (with a third to come), a life of raising eight children, and her support of Philip and his endeavours—as well as his tribulations—are marked on Sophia’s brow.
Whether Sophia and Philip romanced on a busy Latvian street or on their oceanic escape, Glasgow became their new home—Philip as a tailor and Sophia, like a number of other Jewish women, as a maker of ‘top quality’ cigarettes.5 Alongside their waged work, these two new arrivals to Gorbals could soon add another task to their daily lives: parenthood. Sophia was pregnant when the couple married, and in 1898, the birth of Jeannie Josephs signalled the first of four daughters born in Glasgow before 1903.6
If Josephs was not already a convinced Bundist or anarchist and had left Latvia agnostic to radical politics, there were plenty of factors in Glasgow ready to convert him to the revolutionary faith of anarchism. Gorbals, south of the River Clyde and in walking distance of the city centre, was at that time, a slum. The rapid expansion of industry, coupled with its overcrowded workers’ dwellings, made it one of Glasgow’s grittiest neighbourhoods, littered with four-storey brick tenements shaped by the needs of the Industrial Revolution (rather than its workers). Tenants, who were unable to afford rent elsewhere, crowded into dark, unsanitary homes at a rate of more than three people to a room, resulting in regular outbreaks of smallpox and other diseases (including the bubonic plague in 1899).7 “The common accompaniments of Gorbals life were poverty, poor housing, and ill health,” confirms Collins, and although some Gorbals streets were relatively wide and prosperous, most were “repositories of filth and the breeding ground of despair and disease.”8
Working conditions were no better. “In seeking a job,” explains Fishman, “the immigrant found himself faced with a number of harsh realities. Opportunities were strictly limited. The system was periodically choked with high static and frictional unemployment. Language and cultural differences bred suspicion and hostility.”9 This, and the difficulty of adjusting to their new environment, led immigrants into a life of labour that involved unskilled and semi-skilled trades such as tailoring, “a new industry of cheap ready-made clothing to meet the demands of a ‘huge and constantly increasing class who have… wide wants and narrow means.’”10 Together with thousands of other Jewish immigrants with limited capital but plenty of labour power, Philip could soon list tailor as his occupation.
In the hope of becoming a semi-skilled machinist or even a master tailor, new immigrants in the tailoring trade (or ‘greeners’ as they were called) entered into a life of speedy production and tedious toil:
They started as under-pressers or plain-machinists, working for about six months for a skilled presser or machinist, doing the first preparatory work for him, till they learned the work them-selves. This lower grade of worker was employed and paid not by the master-tailor, but by the presser or machinist. Sometimes a presser or machinist employed three or four under-pressers or plain-machinists. It suited the master-tailor, because it placed the responsibility for driving the workers of the upper grade on the workers themselves… contrived [so] that each drove everybody else… it was a vicious circle, each trying to squeeze as much as possible out of those under them.11
Like his fellow Jewish workers in London’s East End, Josephs’ occupation of tailoring (by far the biggest occupation of that Jewish community) in which sweating—home workshops that exploited cheap and migrant labour—was endemic. Sweated workshops ranged from large manufacturing plants to small family businesses “working from their own usually inadequate apartments.”12 Groups of workers were huddled into often unsanitary, unventilated, and unlit rooms, and forced to perform a certain section of the production process repeatedly—effectively cutting labour costs and the need for skilled workers. Many women, desperate for work, accepted the lowest and most menial tailoring tasks without pay, hoping that at the end of their ‘trial period’ they would be given paid employment. But when “the so-called training time was nearly complete and perhaps work was slacker these girls would be dismissed and a new set of novices employed.”13 Likewise, the myth that by turning one’s living room into a workshop and with the help of family, the Jewish tailor could ‘become master’ was mostly that: a myth. “Only a ruthless minority made it… the majority who tried, suffered their dubious hour of glory as master, then sank back into poverty and debt.”14
Organizations were created to fight such conditions. In the aftermath of an explosive wildcat strike against sweating by 10,000 tailors in the East End, a Jewish Tailors Union was formed in Glasgow, which soon joined the Trades Council in 1890 as the Amalgamated Jewish Tailors, Machinists and Pressers Union.15 Friendly societies that catered to workers were also active in the Jewish community, such as the Poalei Tsedek (Workingmen’s Synagogue), the Jewish Working Men’s Club, and the Jewish Workers’ Co-operative Society—made possible due to a weakening of religious traditionalism.16 Many Eastern European Jews brought the influence of the Bund with them, while evening English classes, a Literary Society, and public lectures all contributed to an embracing of “mainstream Scottish working-class values and culture” open to addressing the questions of the day.17
Those
