Pen Portraits from the Port
Posted by The Leither in June's Magazine
Rabble rousing John Cormack once wrote a Daily Record article entitled ‘If I Were Dictator of Edinburgh’. This being 70 years ago, his piece was free of modern day concerns such as the proliferation of tartan tat shops or the curtailment of the number 12 bus route, and instead concentrated on far more light-hearted topics. Chief among them was a healthy dose of Catholic-bashing.
At 15 years of age, Edinburgh-born Cormack volunteered as a boy soldier with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. This also happened to be the regiment of his father, a Baptist preacher. With such an upbringing, a career in light entertainment never seemed likely for young John, unless you consider a lifetime campaigning against the ‘papist beast’ to have been a prolonged piece of performance satire.
Cormack saw World War One service in France and the Rhineland, and was then sent to Ireland at the time of the Easter Rising. It was there in the face of local hostility that his anti-Catholicism grew. That or he was like most modern British visitors to Eire, returning home muttering “£5 for a pint of Guinness? I’m bloody well never going there again.”
£5 pint of Guiness
Back in Edinburgh, Cormack worked at the Post Office for a decade from 1922, developing a side line in vitriolic street preaching at the Mound. His extra-curricular activities caused controversy at work, and he was dismissed for the unproven theft of postal orders. If only the makers of Postman Pat had introduced storylines of sectarian tension to the show, with Mrs Goggins as Greendale’s very own Gerry Adams.
Cormack was an expert orator, inspiring and enraging those who gathered to hear him speak. He raged against perceived historical crimes within the Catholic Church, and demanded Scotland be rid of its influence. Having been expelled from the Edinburgh Protestant Society on account of his ‘having uttered certain threats of physical violence to Roman Catholics’; Cormack joined the Scottish Protestant League.
In 1933, he co-founded his own anti-Catholic organ, the Protestant Action Society and began to drive up and down Leith Walk in a car covered with the slogan ‘No Popery’. The vehicle was purchased in the 1980s by a group of Goths who scored out the ‘ery’ and used it to run a similarly miserablist campaign against Wham and Culture Club. Probably.
Protestant Action garnered immediate and surprising success, gaining 4,000 members. In the 1934 municipal elections, Cormack was returned as Councillor for North Leith. He was ridiculed within the Council as lacking any local policies. To clear things up, Cormack asserted, “We have only one ‘plank’. It is a comprehensive one. Wherever in the political life of our country the papist beast shows its head we must crush it.” As well as fighting to tame the papist beast Cormack campaigned against Leith’s slums, for an increase in nurses’ pay and the building of a civic airport, presumably so the Pope could fly direct from Rome.
Morningside riots
In 1935 Cormack warned the Council it would learn “what a real ‘smash-up’ was” if it granted the Catholic Young Men’s Society a reception in the lead up to Edinburgh’s Eucharistic Congress. The Council ignored him, and 10,000 protestors gathered at both the reception and the Congress, held in Morningside. Riots ensued, with missiles hurled and buses overturned. Archbishop Joseph McDonald wrote to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to protest that: “Priests were savagely assailed, elderly women attacked and kicked, bus-loads of children mercilessly stoned and inoffensive citizens abused and assailed in a manner that is most unbelievable in any civilised country today.” Morningside had not experienced such rioting since the Great Blue Rinse Shortage of 1869.
Protestant Action made a breakthrough in 1936, taking 31% of votes in Council elections, and winning six more seats. 1937 saw a dip in support, but a year later Cormack was elected to represent South Leith. His repeated success in an area without a past of ‘No Popery’ can be explained by economic, historical and political factors; depression-hit Leithers felt isolated from an Edinburgh that had largely escaped economic downturn, ignored by a Council that had forced amalgamation upon them in 1920 and unrepresented by a Labour Party blind to their plight. Theirs were not anti-Catholic votes, but protest ones. At least New Labour learned from this during the rise of the BNP…no hang on.
Protestant Action’s popularity, though, had reached its apex; in wartime, anti-Catholicism melted. Cormack was accused of inciting attacks on Italian businesses and in 1945 lost his bid to become MP for Leith. Remaining a Councillor for the next 17 years, the old firebrand mellowed somewhat, and became a fierce advocate of Leith causes, one historian describing his evolution as “ogre to institution.” Time had tamed the Cormack beast (insert crude erectile dysfunction remark here).