McHugh, Edward

by Patrick Maume

McHugh, Edward (1853–1915), political activist and trade unionist, was born on 21 August 1853 in Co. Tyrone (probably in the parish of Termonamongan in the far west of the county), the son of Matthew McHugh, smallholder and labourer, and his wife Margaret (née McCrory); he had one surviving younger brother. His family emigrated to Scotland in 1861, possibly as the result of eviction. McHugh grew up in Greenock, where he undertook casual dock labour to help fund his self-education and became an apprentice compositor. He told a New Zealand interviewer in 1912 that these experiences 'made him a student of economic questions' (Newby, Ireland, 11).

In 1869 he moved to Glasgow, where he worked as a compositor at various firms, acquired his first trade-union experience through the Scottish Typographical Association, and was active in the local branch of the Irish Home Government Association. He became a member of the circle of Irish radicals that included John Ferguson (qv) and Richard McGhee (qv) and that had close contacts with Scottish radical reformers. Like these associates, he became a friend and strong admirer of Michael Davitt (qv). A founder member of the Irish National Land League in Scotland, McHugh became its first secretary and was appointed as its first paid national organiser. He orchestrated a series of 'monster meetings' across Scotland in 1881 addressed by prominent Irish nationalists, and gained a reputation as a forceful speaker and an intensely hard-working organiser. With Ferguson, he opposed endorsement of the 'no rent manifesto' issued after the imprisonment of Charles Stewart Parnell (qv), but was overruled; this would not be the last time that his tactical sense was overborne by rank-and-file enthusiasm. He also opposed proposals to extend boycotting to Scotland.

Accompanied by the highland radical John Murdoch (1818–1903), McHugh engaged in agitation on the island of Skye on behalf of the National Land League of Great Britain (April–June 1882); his efforts were assisted – according to Davitt, who thereafter nicknamed him 'McSkye' – by his ability to speak Gaelic. His activities aroused considerable comment among conservative and pro-landlord commentators, who accused him of spreading revolutionary 'Fenianism' and even of engaging in catholic proselytism. One official lamented that McHugh's insistence that his hearers should keep within the law, coupled with his teetotalism (he was also a vegetarian), made it difficult to find a pretext for arresting him. McHugh's Skye mission is traditionally seen as one of the starting points of the 'crofters' war', the highland land agitation of the mid 1880s which led to the return of several independent tenant-right MPs and the passage of legislation restricting landlords' property rights and conceding a form of dual ownership. McHugh's biographer Andrew Newby argues that his activities should not be seen as purely agrarian: like his Glasgow associates, he subscribed to the land-taxation theories of the American reformer Henry George (1839–97) and hoped that the crofters might provide the base for a wider agitation extending to urban Scotland. McHugh, Ferguson and other activists regularly sent reports on Scottish developments to the New York Irish World, edited by the Irish-American nationalist Patrick Ford (qv).

In 1884 McHugh organised George's tour of Scotland and became a founder member of the Scottish Land Restoration League. Like Davitt, McHugh and his Glasgow allies were increasingly dissatisfied with Parnell's conservatism. (In 1912, McHugh lamented that through the adoption of loan-funded tenant purchase 'the land question in Ireland had been side-tracked. The Irish tenants had a millstone around their necks they were never likely to get rid of' (Newby, McHugh, 197)). He openly opposed Parnell's support for Conservative party candidates in 1885, particularly in the Partick constituency in Glasgow, where this involved opposing Murdoch (a longstanding associate and supporter of Irish nationalism). McHugh subsequently campaigned for Gladstonian home rule and against Irish coercion measures undertaken by the Conservative–Unionist government of 1886–92, but in 1888 supported the independent labour candidacy of James Keir Hardie at the Mid Lanark by-election, despite Irish nationalist support for the official Liberal. (For much of McHugh's career, socialists and Georgists cooperated, though their relationship grew increasingly tense because of George's general Cobdenite belief in free trade and free enterprise, except in relation to landownership.)

McHugh was an unsuccessful 'workingmen's candidate' for Glasgow Town Council in the thirteenth ward, centring his campaign on trade unionism and Georgist land taxation (October–November 1889). When offered a parliamentary candidacy for the Kirkdale division of Liverpool in 1892, he refused, saying he was an agitator rather than a politician. (McHugh never sat in parliament, but is sometimes confused with the Edward McHugh (1846–1900) who was anti-Parnellite MP for Armagh South (1892–1900)). In 1889 he became paid general secretary of the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL), created as a result of a dockers' strike in Glasgow under the auspices of Joseph Havelock Wilson's National Sailors' and Firemen's Union. As the NUDL developed, McHugh moved to Merseyside, settling in Birkenhead. The union was initially dominated by the 'three Macs' (McHugh, McGhee and the Armagh-born vice-president, Michael McKeown), and was popularly known as 'the Irish union'. McHugh brought some Land League tactics to the task of organising unskilled workers on the docks of Irish and northern British ports. He was particularly associated with the tactic known as 'ca'canny' or 'go slow', which had some success in securing increased wages. However, increased militancy among NUDL members on Merseyside brought on a strike in 1890 that McHugh led, despite doubting privately if it could succeed. His efforts to play rival shipowners off against each other were frustrated by the refusal of militants to distinguish between employers, and the union was obliged to admit defeat. Nonetheless, the NUDL survived, with McHugh seeking to make up lost ground by renewed 'ca'canny' tactics. He also sought to spread the union to Dublin, and during an 1891 organising visit worked with Adolphus Shields. In 1893 McHugh stood down from his NUDL office, partly because of his inability to cope with the complex and fragmented work culture of the dockers, and partly because of a feeling among members that a docker should be president. This led to a challenge to his eligibility to represent the NUDL at the TUC. James Sexton, who retained strong contacts with McHugh throughout his own leadership of the NUDL, believed McHugh had been treated with 'nauseating' ingratitude despite his 'wonderful services' (Taplin, 48).

In 1896 McHugh went to the USA on behalf of the London dockworkers' leader, Tom Mann (1856–1941), and organised the American Longshoremen's Union (ALU), which aimed to spread the tactics of 'new unionism' to North America and lay the foundations for an international dockworkers' organisation. He was strongly opposed to racism, and insisted on incorporating longshoremen of all races in a single union. (On a subsequent tour of Australia, McHugh was criticised for his opposition to the 'white Australia policy'.) He also appears to have been a supporter of women's equality.

As with the NUDL, McHugh incorporated advocacy of the Georgist programme of land-value taxation into his American trade-union activities, and supported Henry George's candidacy for mayor of New York (1897). George died suddenly shortly before the poll, and McHugh took an important role in regrouping the movement in subsequent months, which may have led him to neglect the ALU, which disintegrated in 1898–9 owing to internal divisions and embezzlement by the union secretary. Although not implicated in the theft, McHugh was held to have been negligent in supervising his officials.

Returning to Birkenhead in 1899, he spent the rest of his life as a travelling campaigner for and executive member of the English League for the Taxation of Land Values, and its post–1907 successor body, the United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values. In the Edwardian era, land taxation became a popular cause among sections of the radical wing of the Liberal party. McHugh made a speaking tour in the Hebrides in 1909 in support of David Lloyd George's 'people's budget' (which incorporated experimental provisions for land taxation), and undertook a lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand (1911–12). Until his death, he ran a Georgist study circle in Birkenhead. Despite the fact that his primary political focus after 1889 was Georgist rather than Irish nationalist, and suffering failing health towards the end of his life, McHugh remained a regular attendee at national conventions of the United Irish League.

McHugh married (5 February 1885) Ellen Quigley, a seamstress and former Glasgow president of the Ladies' Land League; they had a son (whom they named after Henry George) and a daughter. He died of cardiac failure caused by arteriosclerosis on 13 April 1915 at his home in Birkenhead. In The fall of feudalism, Davitt memorialised him as 'a man of remarkable ability and an ideal propagandist to any just cause that captures his adhesion' (quoted in Newby, McHugh, 37).