McGhee, Richard

by Patrick Maume

McGhee, Richard (1851–1930), trade unionist and politician, was baptised on 12 February 1851 in Lurgan, Co. Armagh, the eldest of three sons of Richard McGhee, a tenant farmer and later a shopkeeper, and his wife Alice. He claimed that at age 14, in protest against 'the bigotry and cowardice' of some leading protestants in Lurgan, he left the local Church of Ireland school to complete his education at a catholic school, and that when living in Glasgow and again when resident in Lurgan from c.1888 he sent his own children to catholic schools by preference (Drogheda Independent, 14 March 1896). This may have been partly dictated by his strongly nationalist views; he possibly joined the IRB in his youth. Despite his public advocacy of state-supported catholic schools and a catholic university, McGhee in 1906 encouraged the abortive plan of Michael Davitt (qv) to campaign in support of interdenominational state education. His own religious beliefs were nebulous: though brought up in the Church of Ireland, he described his religion as 'none' in the 1901 census, while refusing religious information on the rest of his family; in the 1911 census, all the family were described as 'Christian unattached'.

In 1871 McGhee moved to Glasgow, serving a seven-year apprenticeship as an engineer. He started a short-lived engineering business before making a financially successful career as a commercial traveller in stationery and cutlery. This enabled him to subsidise his nationalist and trade-union activities, refuse payment for them, and even make occasional disastrous investments in such patriotic ventures as Davitt's Labour World newspaper (1890–91) and an 1888 attempt to establish a shipping company to export Irish cattle from Derry to Glasgow.

A supporter of the Home Rule League of Isaac Butt (qv) from its inception in 1873, McGhee worked with a group of Glasgow radicals centred around John Ferguson (qv). He joined the Irish National Land League at its foundation in 1879, and claimed to have organised four league branches in Lurgan, with considerable protestant membership, and to have directed land agitation on the estate of Lord Lurgan (qv). The Land League brought him into contact with Davitt; their friendship was based on their shared interest in labour politics and in Henry George's theories of 'land nationalisation'. McGhee took a prominent role in organising George's visit to Scotland and Ireland in 1884 under the auspices of the Scottish Land Restoration League and its Belfast-based offshoot, the Irish Land Restoration Society; he also worked with Ulster-based Georgists, such as Rev. Harold Rylett (qv). Until Davitt's death in 1906, McGhee was one of his closest political confidants; their correspondence is preserved in the Davitt papers in TCD.

In 1882 McGhee became a member of the executive of the Irish National League (INL), making a point of attending meetings at his own expense. At the behest of Charles Stewart Parnell (qv), he undertook a survey (1882–4) of Irish voters in ninety British constituencies, which formed the basis of making tactical use of the Irish vote in Britain at the 1885 general election. At the same time, in association with Davitt and the Ferguson circle of Glasgow radicals around the home government branch of the INL (including Edward McHugh (qv) and native-born Scots such as J. Bruce Glasier), McGhee worked to encourage the developing land agitation among 'crofters' (tenant farmers) in the Scottish highlands, in the hope of yoking it to the wider radical agenda. Several crofter MPs were elected for highland constituencies in 1885, but the agitation was defused by the irruption of the Irish home rule issue and crofters' willingness to accept a solution based on dual ownership.

From 1887 McGhee was an active organiser for the American-based Knights of Labor, a pioneering attempt to organise unskilled as well as skilled workers. Initially he organised metalworkers in the English midlands before being sent to recruit in Glasgow. In February 1889, as a wave of strikes connected to the 'new unionism' (which endeavoured to organise unskilled labourers) spread across Britain, McGhee, McHugh and Michael McKeown organised the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL), with McGhee as first general president. Although McHugh as general secretary was the most active leader, McGhee played a significant role in spreading the union to Irish ports and to Liverpool and other ports in north-west England. He devised the 'union button' (membership badge) and helped to develop the 'ca'canny' (go-slow) technique, which facilitated some of the union's successes. Though it suffered setbacks in early disputes in Glasgow (1889) and Liverpool (1890), was criticised in Britain as an 'Irish union', and after 1907 was challenged in Irish ports by the ITGWU (founded by former NUDL organiser James Larkin (qv)), the NUDL remained one of Britain's major waterfront unions until merging into the Transport and General Workers' Union in 1922.

McGhee and McHugh resigned their NUDL positions in 1893, partly because of factional disputes, but they continued to assist the union. In 1896 McGhee joined the executive council of the International Federation of Ship, Dock and River Workers, founded by Tom Mann (1856–1941), but his principal affiliation in later life was with the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union, led by Joseph Havelock Wilson (1859–1929). McGhee served on the NSFU executive for some years and remained a trustee until his death; in this capacity, he helped to secure coverage of seamen by the Workmen's Compensation Act, 1906, and became involved in disputes with the breakaway British Seafarers' Union (1911–12). Like Havelock Wilson, McGhee was a 'Lib-Lab', favouring trade-union affiliation to the Liberal party and opposing James Keir Hardie's advocacy of an independent labour party.

In 1887 McGhee was privately more hostile to Parnell's continued leadership of Irish nationalism than was Davitt, and he took the anti-Parnellite side in the split of December 1890. He campaigned for Davitt in Meath North in the 1892 general election (before which Davitt unsuccessfully sought a candidacy for McGhee in Louth South, the NUDL having a strong presence in Drogheda). McGhee took a leading role in organising the Ulster Labourers' Union in the Lurgan area (1892–3). In a by-election on 19 March 1896, he was elected anti-Parnellite MP for Louth South (1896–1900). His parliamentary contributions – almost all questions, though he was a forceful public speaker – covered a wide range of subjects, including the living conditions of sailors and local matters in areas of Ulster with no nationalist MPs (notably the dredging of Donaghadee harbour, Co. Down, and the construction of a new post office in Lurgan), as well as Louth constituency concerns. A strong supporter of the cross-party campaign against the over-taxation of Ireland, and an outspoken opponent of the Boer War (1899–1902), he continued to campaign extensively for pro-home rule Liberal candidates in Britain.

He was unexpectedly defeated at the 1900 general election by the former Louth North MP Joseph Nolan (1846–1928), who was supported by the licensed trade, which was strong in Co. Louth (McGhee was a temperance campaigner). Remaining active in the nationalist movement, McGhee was a long-term member of the United Irish League executive and accompanied John Redmond (qv) on a fund-raising visit to the USA in 1908.

At the December 1910 general election McGhee became MP for Mid Tyrone (1910–18). The constituency had a nationalist majority, but was taken by the Unionists in January 1910 because of a nationalist split. The factions agreed to support a candidate nominated by John Redmond, who chose McGhee, highlighting his protestantism as proof of catholic-nationalist tolerance. McGhee was also supported by Joseph Devlin (qv), who presented him as 'a typical nationalist democrat' embodying the IPP's alliance with 'the forces of progress and of freedom in Great Britain' (Derry Journal, 17 December 1910). McGhee's parliamentary interventions were particularly concerned with seamen's affairs, notably the new national insurance system, the extension of which to seamen was partly due to his influence. His principal contribution to the home rule cause was as an organiser and public speaker on Liberal platforms, especially in Scotland, to counter Irish Unionist campaigners, whom he dismissed as reactionaries and ragamuffins; he claimed that the Orange order was visibly declining and would soon disappear, and denounced the 'conciliationist' policy of William O'Brien (qv) (1852–1928) as factionist and ineffective.

During the Dublin lockout (1913–14), he helped organise British trade-union support for Larkinism, suggested privately that strikers should arm themselves in self-defence against the police, and wrote repeatedly to John Dillon (qv) criticising IPP passivity and failure to condemn police violence. He strongly supported the British effort in the first world war, paying two visits to the USA to try to arouse American sympathy for the allied cause. He publicly condemned the 1916 rising, and in 1917 addressed several meetings in Tyrone to rally Redmondite support, claiming the IPP had kept conscription from Ireland and accusing Sinn Féin leaders (including Dr Patrick McCartan (qv)) of being double agents paid by Orangemen to wreck home rule. This campaign relied heavily on support from the exclusively catholic AOH. A meeting addressed by McGhee in Omagh broke up in rioting between Redmondites and republicans (25 September 1917). He participated in the 1918 anti-conscription campaign, addressing meetings in Lurgan and Omagh, but did not contest the 1918 general election (his seat was abolished in boundary changes). Instead he toured Scotland campaigning for Liberal and Labour candidates endorsed by the UIL. Around this time, if not earlier, McGhee moved from Lurgan to Glasgow.

McGhee married (20 July 1880) Mary Campbell (d. 1948); they had five sons and one daughter. He died on 7 April 1930 from pneumonia at his residence in Partickhill, Glasgow; his health had been in long-term decline. His remains were cremated without a religious service. His youngest son, Henry George McGhee (1899–1959), born in Lurgan, was Labour MP for Penistone (Yorkshire) (1935–59) and after 1945 was a leading member of the anti-partitionist Friends of Ireland parliamentary group.

Richard McGhee is chiefly remembered by British labour historians. Considering his longevity and prominence as an Ulster protestant nationalist, he has received relatively little attention from Irish historians, possibly because of his home rule commitment and non-Marxist form of radicalism. His career serves as a reminder that the IPP was an ideological conglomerate, containing radicals as well as petit-bourgeois conservatives, and was active in British as well as Irish political contexts.