PREMIER’S BAD DAYS

Stratford Evening Post, Volume I, Issue 173, 2 July 1931, Page 5

PREMIER’S BAD DAYS

WALKING LONDON STREETS MR. MacDONALD’S MEMORIES Visions of himself as a friendless Scottish boy of 18, without a job, tramping the streets of London and not knowing where his next meal was coming from, must have been in Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s mind when he recently told a West Bromwich audience; “I know what unemployment is. I have trodden the streets of London, envying the very newspaper boys, knowing that, however little they might be making, I, at least, was making less.” Tempted by the offer of some sort of job in London, says the Sunday Dispatch, the future Prime Minister turned his back, as he believed, on the extreme poverty which had been his lot as boy and pupil teacher in Lossiemouth, his birthplace in Scotland. But there was no work for him when he reached the capital. With only a few shillings in his pocket the young man was stranded; but lie refused to accept failure and return to Lossiemouth, or even to let his friends there know of his plight. He wanted to study and obtain a science scholarship. Instead he read and answered advertisements and walked miles daily on the chance of finding work. Day after day went by, and young MacDonald was penniless when, on the verge of desperation, he obtained work addressing envelopes at the offices of the newly-formed Cyclists’ Touring Club. The task was poorly paid, and, having never ridden a bicycle, he was not interested in the objects of the club.

He addressed interminable envelopes, and more than 40 years later he was the guest of honour at the club’s jubilee dinner. Mr. MacDonald’s next job was as invoice clerk in a city warehouse, at a wage of 12s (id a week. That left no money for mid-day meals, and he spent the luncheon hours reading in the Guildhall Library. In the evenings he studied at Birkdeck College, and the interest of an analytical chemist led to his exchanging the warehouse for more congenial work in a laboratory.

A dream of a scholarship at South Kensington, with a scientific career to follow, were shattered, however, by a severe breakdown in health. Insufficient sleep and scanty meals had undermined a constitution never over strong. Mr. MacDonald could not take the examination.

At this time the coming statesman had his political baptism of fire in London, risking arrest in order to hold with other Socialist sympathisers a meeting in Trafalgar Square. Soon afterwards he became private secretary, at a salary of £75 a year, rising to £IOO, to Mr. Thomas Lough, then Liberal candidate for West Islington. “Now 1 have attained fortune,’ lie wrote. His career was beginning to shape itself.