Common Cause

By Kate Hunter

It's 1915 and Britain is at war as Kate Hunter's sequel to The Caseroom - shortlisted for The Saltire First Book Award 2017 - opens on the next stage in the lives of Iza Orr, skilled compositor, and the workers in Edinburgh's print industry.
At a time of momentous events, we step alongside Iza as she copes with unexpected complexities of patriotism, women's suffrage, worker victimisation and a historic wartime lockout.
It seems the country needs starched cloth-lappers and lunatic asylum attendants, but it does not need books, does not need learning and intellectual stimulation. Printers are denied reserved occupation status but, with bankruptcies looming, the jobs of Edinburgh's dwindling number of female hand typesetters are on the line.
Driven by challenges both political and personal, Iza must weather conflicting calls for loyalty to nation, to class, to gender, to family - her marriage to troubled John, her children, her estranged daughter Mary, now a grown woman - to discover her true common cause.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fledgling Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912280209

Kate Hunter

Kate Hunter's father's family earned a living in the Edinburgh print trade. They made books and newspapers; they read them, but they never got the chance to write them. Kate has read thousands of books and helped to make a fair few. Now she's written one. She grew up in Edinburgh, worked in a printers there when she was fifteen and, later, was a Mother of the Chapel in Milton Keynes where she now lives.

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Common Cause

Kate Hunter

In memory of Millie Hunter and to the future of Dexter and Sorrel Morley Medd

On a mild summer’s day you watch a piping of dark smoke from a fat chimney take all day to reach a pale blue sky. From the top of Arthur’s Seat, that big humpy lion of a mound that crouches above the city, you fancy you could reach out to wipe away the smudge. Not a chance. It’s a good half mile to your north. Anyhow, you’ve no wish to be spending your holiday mopping and scrubbing.

It’s Edinburgh’s trades fair, the workers’ holiday, and while other factory chimneys sleep in this morning – and will snooze the afternoon away – Leith’s metalworks belch. No need to pity its sweating workers though. They’ll be glad of the pay packet. Peer through the smoke and you might make out a few masts and a paddle steamer chugging out into the Firth of Forth. Want a look at the ships of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet? Too late. They sailed out into the North Sea, headed for Jutland, a few weeks back. Nothing left of the rousing tune that played them off, deflated bagpipes are packed away, but stretch your ears and from Portobello beach further along the shore you might catch squeals as folk dip bare toes into cold grey waters.

Now stretch your eyes and look down. In St Leonards’ streets, brewers and coopers, masons and printers take their loose-limbed ease. Since you can’t see through close-packed tenements, you’ll have to make do with picturing how they lounge, sleeves rolled not for toil but to feel sunbeams stroke white arms. That spare man at his stair door pulling back hinged elbows to stretch his chest? See him cough and gob dark phlegm? A machineman at Nelsons Parkside, that sprawling factory at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. As a lover of good books you’ll have read some of the cheap editions he helps to pump out. Ah, he’s off, like as not to join those bent figures dotting a patch of allotments at the rear of Parkside. The neighbour he stops for a blether with, hands his tobacco pouch to? A compositor at Ballantynes, another of Edinburgh’s fifty-odd printing and publishing houses. See those furrows on his brow? He’s a worried man. Next week, back to his ten-minute tramp south to Ballantynes’ Pauls works in Causewayside, he’ll be fretting over short-time work and light pay packets. Not much call for fine books when the country’s at war. All the city’s printing firms have been hard hit, but he, and his father and grandfather before him, have seen the spectre of financial ruin stalk Pauls works.

Leave him and the machineman to their smoking and gobbing. They need their rest, as do those bindery girls and envelope folders sitting on the pavement, skirts hitched and chins lifted to catch the sun. Even the wifie watching goings-on from an open window, folded arms and bosom lodged on the sill, is taking it easy, though there’s mopping and darning and cooking to see to and no daughters to help seeing as they’re seamstresses and domestics in big houses and when did seamstresses and domestics get the holiday, you tell me that.

Before you turn back to the north, take a quick look further south. No. Not as far as the Pentland Hills that fringe the horizon. Closer to the city’s beating heart. See that big building? Though in our enlightened times we’d never call it such, that’s the Morningside loony bin. Closer still, a long stone’s throw from the machineman and compositor having a smoke in a St Leonards’ tenement street, you’ll see Newington’s big houses. They’ve got garages for motor cars at the end of their back gardens. Fancy that, eh?

Swing back to the north and west of Leith’s metalworks you’ll see another cloud of factory smoke daubing the sky above Broughton. That’s the North British Rubber Works pumping out trench boots. Now wipe your eyes to skim over the stately Georgian streets and crescents, the wrought-iron fenced gardens of the city’s New Town, on, on down to where the Water of Leith flows. We’ve had a dry spell and the river runs low, thrashing brown froth and foam spewed from Canonmills factories swilled away by clearer waters trickled down from the hills. Near to the river sit two printing houses, Neill & Co. and Morrison & Gibbs. Their Bellevue and Tanfield works stand within sniffing distance of the gasworks, a good stone’s throw from the glass palm house of the Botanic Gardens and, with the presses stilled for the holiday, within earshot of a few remaining snorting pigs, squawking chickens and the odd lowing cow.

Take a closer look. That woman at a tenement window? Though she’s heaved it full open, the house is still stuffy and it’s a quick tidy of her hair and she’s off down the stair for a dander along Logie Green Road. As always in the holidays, bairns charge by, whooping and whacking, skipping and kicking, but soon enough she’s thinking that bairns’ games are not what they were. Where a couple of years ago you’d have seen the odd lad with a stick lodged under his arm, heard him call bahm, bahm as he raised and aimed, today a fair few are at it, sharp wee faces keeking out of stair doors to fire at enemies across the street, slinking close to tenement walls to escape. Go round to the back green to hang out washing and you’re liable to come across a gang of them lined up for a drill, a podgy, red-faced lad out in front barking orders.

Back in the street, you’ll notice how the holiday’s ease is soiled by nervy glances that put you in mind of a cuddy left unharnessed of a morning, nostrils sniffing for signs of where it’s headed, out to grass or for the knacker’s yard. Now take a good look. Not many young men about, are there? Though here’s one coming along, a freckled lad of, say, eighteen. Kitbag slung over his shoulder, he stops to look up at the sky as though he might find his future written there, before loping off with his gaze set straight ahead. Passing Bellevue print works, where he’s done three years of his machineman apprenticeship, he wonders for a moment if he’s done right to swop overalls for uniform. His step falters, but the works being dead to the world for the holiday helps to quell doubt and he’s off, the shadow of a martial march entering his loping gait.

Had the young serviceman tarried to nip round to the yard, he’d have seen a lone figure, the watchman, pick up an empty crate, carry it a few feet and swing it onto a stack by the wall. Now, lifting his bunnet to wipe his brow with a forearm, the watchman walks slowly to the gates and steps out into an empty alleyway. He takes a tobacco pouch from his pocket, scrapes it for scraps, rolls and goes to light his smoke. A breeze has got up and he has to cup his match. It’s blown out. He curses, takes out another and goes to strike, but before he does a white feather blown along catches on his boot lace. He picks it up and, glowering, crushes it between thumb and forefinger, then he strikes his match and, sheltering the flame, holds it to the feather. It singes but doesn’t burn. He drops it and, sucking a finger, grinds it with a boot heel.

‘M ind out.’

Too late. If the labourer’s words didn’t halt Iza Orr’s march, the blow to her hip did. Eyes fixed on big double doors on the far side of the yard, teeth gritted, she’d ploughed straight into a loaded sack-barrow.

Mouthing an apology that had the hiss of a curse, she left the man to shake his head at the sorry state of manners these days as he righted his packages of paper. Now, had you seen the way that warehouse door burst open when she barged it with a shoulder, you’d have taken it for a flimsy affair and Iza Orr for a woman with the strength of a horse if not an ox. But these doors were not flimsy, and though nobody who’d heaved heavy cases of metal type for nigh-on twenty years could be without a bit of muscle, Iza was not a hefty woman. She’d grown from a slip of a girl into a slight woman; one, moreover, whose last confinement, the birth of her daughter two years past, took a good deal of stuffing out of her.

Out in the yard, mid-summer’s silver-blue light came seeping through the city’s grime and above the roofs of Neill & Co’s Bellevue print works a blurred disc of sun peeked through smoke from factory chimneys and trains pulling in and out of a nearby goods yard. Had winter fires been alight in the surrounding tenement grates, you’d have caught no sight of sun or sky. Inside the warehouse, what little light made it through filthy windows was soon soaked up. Without pausing to let her eyes adjust to dimness, Iza wove her determined way through a warren of stacked crates and boxes, past ranks of ceiling-high shelves and long tables piled with bound books, before she halted by the figure of a man bending to lift a crate.

‘Is Drew Rennie about?’ she demanded.

The warehouseman took his time to straighten to a good two heads above her, dust off his hands, run fingers through sparse hair and turn.

‘Mornin hen.’ A measure of reprimand in his warm tone and a prick of his strikingly big lugs invited a response.

Though Iza’s clipped ‘Mornin’ hardly served, the warehouseman accepted it.

‘Drew’s gone, hen. Signed up. Marched off down south.’

At this, the mixture of rage and fear that had fuelled Iza’s march away from her frame in Bellevue’s caseroom, across the yard and into the warehouse went off the boil. Just last week when, near enough on this very spot, she’d handed her twopence to Drew Rennie, Warehousemen and Cutters Union representative, and watched him date and initial her subscription card, he’d said nothing of signing up. Or, wait a minute, had he? She raised her eyes to the rafters as though up there she’d find an answer not just to Drew Rennie’s doings but to the whole bloody mess she was in. Every Friday payday she came here to hand over her twopence and her scuffed buff card. Every payday Drew took it and made his mark. And now she was in desperate need of him he’d taken himself off to the war?

Batting aside the sickening thought that her plight was nothing when laid alongside bodies blown to smithereens, she gulped in a lungful of dusty air.

‘Who’s the union representative then?’

‘Yours truly.’

Iza lowered her eyes from the ceiling to the warehouseman. His striking height for folk around these parts meant she was still looking up. A softness to his droopy eyes, a look that went with the mild Highland lilt of his voice, had her lower her eyes to the chest of his clarty navy overalls.

‘They’re letting me go,’ she blurted out. The sound of it shocked her.

‘Woah there.’ The warehouseman held up a hand so large it had her flinch. ‘Duncan Grant,’ he said, patting his chest and cocking a big lug.

‘A comp. In the caseroom. They’ve just come and told me ah’m finished.’ Iza was close to shouting.

‘And you are?’ Ear still cocked, the warehouseman smiled like they’d all day for chummy introductions.

‘Ah need you to come and speak to them. Now.’ Iza was shouting.

‘Calm yourself, hen. Hang on a minute. Let’s find you a perch.’ The union representative turned and beckoned her to follow.

Iza didn’t take a perch. She didn’t calm down. Not five minutes later she was out of there.

On the way out, the warehouse door did not burst open to her touch. It felt like a ton weight. Turned out it wasn’t the same door. Having stormed through the warren of shelving, Iza emerged not to blink in the light of the yard but in a dingy, low-ceilinged corridor that smelled of rot.

She’d never come across this part of the works before. She didn’t have a clue where she was, though a familiar thump-woosh-thud of presses in the machineroom was close enough to shake the damp brick walls of the corridor, or at least give her the feeling they were shaking like to cave in. That there wasn’t a soul about suited her. She needed to think. That this corridor might be leading her away from the stairs up to the caseroom, away from the frame she’d just been ejected from, the frame where she’d stood for years past setting type, that suited her very well indeed. She’d no wish to see the overseer’s jutting chin and slicked whiskers, or to see Charlie Dewar, Bellevue caseroom’s Father of the Chapel, turn sheepish eyes on her; couldn’t face sidelong glances, a smirk on a male comp’s face, or, worse, pitying looks from her work chums, not until she’d swallowed what had happened and thought what she might do about it. Trouble was, a frantic mind is useless for stringing together beads of thought, especially beads repeatedly scattered by the image of an overseer approaching you, stopping, clearing his throat.

Walking at a snail’s pace, stopping for minutes on end without noticing she’d stopped, Iza had managed to stretch out a short corridor into a good ten minutes, but now she found herself in a room that opened out from the corridor like a cavern in a cave. A single electric bulb dangling from a long flex lit one of four shallow sinks along a wall. Beneath the light, a lone man bent to his work and, above a rasping noise from the sink and the background thuds of the presses, his fine singing voice echoed round the walls. ‘And when I told them, how beautiful you are, they didn’t believe me.’ This, she knew without knowing how she knew, was the stone polishers’ room and its hollowness filled with song had her feel she’d stumbled on a sanctuary.

No wonder stone polishers complained of poor lighting. The caseroom could be bad enough when its pitched glass roof was caked in soot and if, come winter, they skimped on the electric, but this dank tank of a room put her in mind of talk of the bowels of liners that took folk off to Australia and Canada. Nostrils smarting at a reek of gum and Vim laced with acid, she stopped still as the polisher paused to wipe his brow. Sensing her presence, he straightened up. When he glanced over his shoulder, the bulb’s beam lit a ragged purple scar that ran from the corner of an eye over his cheek and chin to snake down his neck. A bit of flap and lobe were missing from his ear.

‘Just passing through,’ Iza assured him. Her voice echoed.

‘Aye,’ he said.

Because he gave her a quizzical smile before turning back to his work, and because his ‘Aye’ had an inviting sound to it, she found herself going to his side to take a look. His red-raw hand gripped what looked like a brick that he swept with strong, smooth sweeps over a slab of flat stone.

‘You work on your own?’ Iza said, thinking him lucky to have this cavern to himself.

‘Aye. Peace and quiet suits me fine.’

‘Och, sorry. Ah’ll leave you in peace,’ she muttered.

The stone polisher shook his head. ‘No, you’ll not bother me, hinnie.’ He paused to turn on a tap and swill purple ink and scummy froth and gritty grease from the stone with sweeps of a palm.

‘Where’s all the others?’ Iza nodded towards vacant sinks.

‘Not needed. Not much call for illustrated books these days, eh? Even at the best of times, like on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, there was only call for two polishers.’

‘Ah worked on the Ency Brit,’ Iza said. ‘In the caseroom.’

Catching her wistful smile, the stone polisher turned to his work in a way that shut the door on the days of the Ency Brit, though not on her.

‘Is that a brick you use?’ Iza had a yen to linger here, and she did want to know, to lose herself in practices strange to her.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘A brick.’

‘Why? What for?’

Glazed eyes raised to the low ceiling while his hand went on scouring in a swirling figure-of-eight, the polisher pondered a question he’d never before been asked about his work, one a wee bairn might have asked. His scar wriggled when he turned to grin at her.

‘Re-graining for re-use. First get rid of the ink and gum and acid, all the muck, then rub it down smooth as...’ He paused.

‘A baby’s beam-end.’

‘Aye, that’ll do, though flesh is a sorry substance when it comes up against stone.’ He tapped his scar, eyeing her.

‘What happened?’ Iza kept her eyes on the stone.

‘Got too close to stone is what happened. Doon the pit.’

‘What, you worked down the pits?’

He wasn’t an old man, more ages with herself and her husband John, early thirties. There was an old miner in her street worked as watchmen at the gasworks. He’d got blacklung. But you wouldn’t expect to find a younger miner working at a job like this in the town.

‘Aye. Glenesk colliery. Not far from here. Near Dalkeith.’ Mouth smiling, eyes veiled, he went on with his scouring. ‘Same idea as sandpaper, ’cept stone’s a mite harder than wood, eh?’

Iza bent to take a closer look at a fading image of a warship on the slab of pale greenish stone.

‘How does it work? The illustrations?’

‘It works because oil and water don’t mix. The image gets drawn on the stone with gum and a bit of acid so it’ll take the ink. Acid decomposes the lime.’

‘Mmm. Complicated.’ Iza felt light-headed, though, oddly, firmly planted on this wet tiled floor. Somewhere up above her work chums’ fingers were plucking and setting type. She pictured Charlie Dewar pulling on his lip as he eyed her empty frame, pausing outside the overseer’s office before going in. All this and all the world and its worries faded as she watched the ship fade and muck and grit wash down the plughole.

‘It’s nice, eh? The stone,’ she said. ‘Can ah?’ She stretched a hand to it.

The stone polisher nodded. ‘Lithographic limestone. A sedimentary rock rich in calcite and aragonite.’ He gave a shy smile. As he shifted aside, his right leg dragged.

She ran her palm over a cold, wet, grainy surface.

‘Feels gritty.’

‘Aye. It’s needing a good go with fine carborundum grit now.’

Iza’s curiosity faltered, but when he went on talking, as much to himself as to her, her agitation drained away and she found herself loathe to leave. To go where? Back to her frame? A sickening prospect. Besides, nothing in his bearing said he was wanting shot of her.

‘Marvellous stuff, stone. Down the pit you saw it all. Layers and layers of coal and limestone and grey whinstone. Planet Earth in the making.’ His face shone. ‘Glistening quartz. Debris from glaciers. And fossils. Used to come up with pockets stuffed. Got stopped one time by the polis when there was trouble at the pit. They spotted the bulges and had me down as a hooligan. Mind you, ah was a bit of a tearaway.’

He grinned as he swilled and wiped.

‘You must miss it then, the pit?’

He pondered this before shaking his head. ‘There’s interesting rock and stone everywhere once you get the eyes to see and know what you’re looking at. Plenty of treasures with all those volcanoes right here in the Edinburgh.’

‘Volcanoes?’

‘Aye. Extinct volcanoes. Arthur’s Seat for instance. And amazing discoveries made at Salisbury Crags. Intrusion of basalt into sandstone.’

‘You’ve lost me there,’ Iza said.

‘That’s lesson two,’ he said. ‘Next time you drop by.’

Was that a wink? Hard to tell with that scar puckering his lower lid. Shame.

He was thinking for a moment. ‘Ah do miss the company,’ he said.

‘Thought you liked working on your own.’

‘Aye, in here, but you wouldn’t want to be alone down a pit, not with the roof liable to cave in on you.’

‘Is that what happened?’

A wee nod and he dodged the matter. ‘And lodgings. Colliers’ houses are crammed to bursting but you’re crammed with your own folks. Ah’ve never found good lodgings in the town and right now ah’m in the worst yet. The man of the house and his missis always cursing and brawling. Heavy drinkers.’

‘D’you not go to the pub of an evening?’

‘Aye, ah do that, when it gets bad. But that pair have put me off the drink for life.’

Something heavy dropped on the floor above thudded and sent the electric bulb jiggling on its flex. Iza jolted. She’d nigh-on forgotten that up there the world was going about its business.

‘Are you all right hinnie?’

She knew he’d already noticed her agitated state. She’d seen and ignored a questioning look in his eyes.

‘You’ll have to mark me absent for lesson two. They’re letting me go,’ she blurted.

‘Go?’

‘Showing me the door.’

‘Aye, pet, ah well know what it means.’

‘Ah’ve just been to see the union rep in the warehouse.’ She’d kept her eyes on the stone as she spoke. When she looked up, something warm in the polisher’s eyes had words pouring out of her.

‘He won’t help. Says he can’t. Told me ah need to speak to the Typographical, but ah never switched to them when they started letting women in. All mah chums did, the other women comps.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

While Iza chewed on this the stone polisher held up a hand, hang on, looked about him and, spotting a stool, fetched it.

‘Sit yourself down a minute.’

Iza shook her head. ‘Ah better let you get on.’

‘No rush. Make yourself useful and hand me that tin will you?’ He nodded towards a shelf above the sink.

Iza passed him the tin and perched on the stool. ‘Ah met this lad at the works gates and he introduced me to someone who told me about the new unions, ones for men and women, skilled and unskilled. When he said, this man ah met...’ She caught the stone polisher’s eye. ‘You might have heard of him. James Connolly?’

The stone polisher’s face spoke of surprise and admiration.

‘He said working folk must all stand together. The Typographical’s just for skilled. Ah’ve been in the Warehousemen and Cutters nigh on twenty year, since ah was time-served. Ah don’t know why ah stuck with them. Loyalty ah suppose you’d call it. Now it seems ah was cutting mah nose off to spite mah face.’

‘So what’s their beef?’ He flicked a glance up through the ceiling, up at the ones with the beef. ‘You’ve not gone and given the overseer a kicking have you?’ His wry smile said he knew it was no laughing matter.

‘Wish ah had. Maybe ah’ll go and do that right now.’

Easing the lid off the tin and scattering dark grey powder onto the stone, the polisher cocked an ear for more. And, recognising his consideration in busying himself while he listened, Iza obliged.

‘Too much time off. Ah’ve struggled this past year or so. Two bairns and ah struggle to cope when there’s women with houses full of bairns working all the hours God sends.’

Iza watched the stone polisher choose his words. She waited.

‘What about your man?’ he said by way of asking what her husband thought to her working in the caseroom and what it meant for domestic relations.

She answered in like vein, her ‘He’s never objected’ pointing to deeper layers. ‘None of the other women comps are wed, mind. But the work’s no harder than plenty of mothers manage.’

‘So you’ve had a lot of time off?’

‘Not that much. The odd day here and there. A couple of days this week when the minder had a diphtheria scare and ah gave up trying to find somebody else to see to the bairns. And we had words.’ Thought of her share in these ‘words’, shouted in the stair for all to hear, had Iza snigger like a bairn up to mischief. ‘Anyhow, it wound up with her telling me ah could mind mah own bloody bairns.’

The polisher glanced up. ‘The odd day off shouldn’t be a crime, but they make no allowances, not for man, woman or beast.’

‘Truth of it is,’ Iza said, ‘they’re looking for any excuse to get rid of us and ah’ve been daft enough to