The Scottish Farm Servant is not a well-known journal. Established in 1913, amongst the wider maelstrom of the ‘Labour Unrest’, the journal served as the official organ of the Scottish Farm Servants Union (SFSU) and was explicitly aimed towards Scotland’s agricultural labour force.  While it never achieved a broad readership, perhaps only a few thousand at its peak, the Scottish Farm Servant was one of the most interesting publications of the inter-war Scottish labour movement. Comparable to its more famous Glaswegian left-wing counterpart, Forward, the journal was varied in its coverage. Broad in scope and lively in style, the Scottish Farm Servant far exceeded coverage on purely the ‘bread-and-butter’ organisational issues, and delved into matters such as fiction, socialist theory and agricultural science. In many respects, there were holistic intentions behind the journal’s style. It both combatted the geographical isolation of the rural working class and aimed to supplement the limited education accessible to rural workers and their families during the period. From its ardent feminism to its advocacy for land nationalisation, there is a lot which could be written about the journal but perhaps the most interesting content can be found in its international coverage.

From the journal’s inception, there was always an eye turned to matters beyond rural Scotland. As the revolutionary wave swept over Europe, beginning with the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916, the journal engaged keenly with world events. This was bolstered by the SFSU’s General Secretary, Joe Duncan, taking a prominent role in the International Landworkers’ Federation, which brought together the trade unions of Europe’s agricultural workers. The period between 1916 and 1923 in the Scottish Farm Servant provides an incredibly valuable view of the experiences of some of Europe’s most vulnerable unionist workers during a period of both revolutionary optimism and reactionary despair. Frequently, letters were published from the authoritarian democracies of Poland and Hungary or Fascist Italy detailing the oppression, imprisonment and victimisation faced by their international comrades. Amongst the most interesting of these correspondences comes from Weimar Germany, shortly following the Kapp Putsch.

While overshadowed by Hitler’s abortive Beerhall Putsch in 1923 and frequently skipped over in high school curricula, the Kapp Putsch was a major event of the early period of the Weimar Republic. Launched in 1920 the Putsch was a coup that presented a grave existential threat to the fledgling German republic. Proto-fascist Wolfgang Kapp and General Walther von Lüttwitz harnessed the counterrevolutionary forces of the Freikorps in an attempt to undo the gains of the German Revolution. The coup was ultimately defeated through a nationwide general strike with an approximate 12 million workers participating. Most narratives of the Putsch stress the importance of civil servants or striking miners in the Ruhr, who were to launch the ill-fated Ruhr uprising in the coup’s aftermath; however, the Scottish Farm Servant brings attention the important role played by Germany’s agricultural workers.

In June 1920 the Scottish Farm Servant reported on a ‘famous victory’ won by their German counterparts. It notes the anger felt by agriculture workers towards the coup which provoked a widespread mobilisation in favour of the general strike. However, the SFSU noted the precariousness of those who participated in the strike, writing, ’We must remember that, to the German country folk, the success of this “crazy Junker revolt” would have been an unspeakable calamity.’ Such a statement is well evidenced in the article. Firstly, they alleged the close alignment of landowners with the coup, with estate houses across Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia being used as weapons caches for the counterrevolutionaries. This effectively placed agricultural workers on the frontlines of the conflict from the very offset and brought members of the Deutscher Landarbeiter Verband (DLV) into direct conflict with the coup.  Furthermore, it was stressed how vulnerable the recent victories of agricultural workers were. It was only with the revolution in 1918 that the complete legal domination of land owners over their workers, once enshrined by the Prussian Land and Domestic Regulations, was abolished.

A closer reading of the events of the Kapp Putsch reflects the impression of the coup imparted by the Scottish Farm Servant. Dr. Bernd Kasten’s study of Mecklenburg during the coup is particularly illustrative. The predominately agricultural region of Mecklenburg saw an extensive participation of agricultural workers in the general strike. This was in spite of their wide geographical distribution and relatively limited involvement in the trade union movement – with union membership growing rapidly following the war from 2000 in 1911 to 30,000 in 1919. DLV organiser, Heinrich Schmidt, would comment on how aggressive reprisals against agricultural workers were during the putsch.  As Kasten would conclude this was most likely an act motivated by the close, and often familiar, relationship between the putschists and the estate owners. Reprisals against striking members of the DVL were brutal. In the village of Niendorf, for example, the Roßbach Freikorp summarily executed two of the local leaders of the agricultural strike. This was, however, one of many such occurrences. In total 91 workers were murdered during the Kapp Putsch in Mecklenburg.  

The Scottish Farm Servant’s coverage of the Kapp Putsch was truly significant. During a period when anti-German sentiments and a jingoistic desire to punish Germany could be commonly detected in the press and political meetings, the SFSU’s expression of solidarity with their compatriots was exceptionally powerful. Additionally, it provides a completely different perspective on counter-revolution from a constituent element of the working class that is so often overlooked. Despite the peripheral nature of both agricultural workers and the wider rural working class, it is incredibly important that their struggle is brought into focus. We must acknowledge the precariousness of their position and the sheer courage that it takes to organise in such conditions. It is therefore apt to end with the words of Bernd Kasten, who in his reflections of the Kapp Putsch wrote the following:

There was a lot of stupidity, a lot of cowardice and a lot of murderous arrogance during the Kapp Putsch in Mecklenburg, but there was also a lot of courage. Thousands of workers went on strike, took to the streets and took up arms to defend their freedom and democracy. – We should remember that.

Suggested Reading:

Richard Anthony, Herds and Hinds: Farm Labour in Lowland Scotland

Simon Constantine, Social Relations in Estate Villages of Mecklenburg c.1880–1924

Bernd Kastern, Der Kapp-Putsch in Mecklenburg: Lokale Ereignisse und regionale Folgen eines Angriffs auf die Demokratie

Lewis Willcox is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews. His work concerns the development of the labour movement in rural Scotland during the war period.

If you’re a postgraduate student or ECR researching any aspect of post-1914 European history (including the UK and Europe’s overseas empires), we’d love to hear from you. To submit a blog idea, or for more information about New Voices, please email cehnewvoices@gmail.com