|
 I
first got to know the late John Murphy over a quarter of a century ago
in the mid-1970s when I began attending the 1820 commemorations at
Sighthill and Strathaven which he had been organising since the late
1960s in his capacity as Secretary of the 1820 Commemoration Committee,
formed in the aftermath of the 1968 publication of the late Frank
Sherry’s seminal pamphlet, "The Rising of
1820"!
As a young history
teacher I was fascinated to learn of the exploits of the working-class
Scots Radicals of 1820 especially as they had not been mentioned in any
history course I had ever taken either at school or university. I was
also immensely impressed by the quiet dedication which John brought to
the task of keeping their memory alive in sometimes daunting
circumstances —the 1970s, after all, was a
decade of intense political development in Scotland
in which the energies of most young Radical Scots, whether inside or
outside the SNP, were focussed on the struggle for some kind of
self-government.
It was therefore difficult to
embark on a campaign aimed —
at least on the surface — at merely raising historical awareness as this
was (wrongly) seen by many activists to be irrelevant. If you want to
change the present you have to understand the past in all its
complexities. Though not himself an academic historian but an engineer
to trade, this was a history lesson John nevertheless instinctively
understood, and for a decade and a half until the mid-1980s he kept his
1820 show on the road, often dipping into his own meagre resources to
keep the now re-christened 1820 Society afloat.
It pleases me to recall
that my own election in 1984 as
Secretary of the newly reconstituted 1820 Society was likewise a source
of considerable satisfaction for John. Not only did he buy me a post AGM
pint at a local (Paisley) hostelry but he also presented me with his
battered old orange briefcase containing his 1820 papers as a kind of
badge of office and, I suppose, a guarantor that I would persevere in
the often onerous task I then inherited from him! John was of course a
lifelong Nationalist who had been a teenage recruit to the infant SNP
back in the 1940s. A political protégé of R E Muirhead, the Renfrewshire
industrialist, ex-ILP pacifist and SNP founding father (& SI financial
backer), John followed the latter in the 1950s into his fringe group
Scottish National Congress with its programme of passive resistance
— or "nonviolent non-co-operation
with English
domination".
On Muirhead’s death he served on a committee
formed to perpetuate his memory — alongside other Nationalist stalwarts
like Oliver Brown, the Rev Alexander Borrowman and Robert Blair Wilkie.
His interest in history
extended beyond the 1820 episode to embrace in particular the history of
his native Paisley of which he was inordinately proud. A member of the
Old Paisley Society he in 1984 produced a small booklet on Paisley’s two
Covenanting martyrs, James Algie and John Park — who are both also
commemorated in Woodside Cemetery where they are indeed buried. In 1997
he published (with Robbie Moffat) a more substantial booklet on Patrick
Brewster, the Radical mid-19th century Minister at Paisley Abbey who
championed the causes of Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emancipation,
and in whose honour the people of Paisley erected a statue in Woodside
Cemetery in 1863.
Previously
— in the early 1980s—he had inaugurated the
1820 Society’s annual commemoration at the Baird & Hardie Memorial in
the same Woodside Cemetery, an event which has since become an
established feature of the local Paisley scene, regularly attracting the
attendance of the Renfrewshire Provost or some other local dignitary.
A man of many parts—
trade unionist, community councillor, CND activist —John Murphy was also
a talented photographer and a Past President of the Paisley Photographic
Society. For the past decade he was an Honorary Vice President of the
1820 Society which he had effectively founded. At his funeral,
appropriately in Woodside Crematorium, his coffin was draped in the
Society’s banner with its slogan "Scotland Free — Or A Desert"
and the names of the martyrs, "BAIRD, HARDIE & WILSON" inscribed on
it, as a mark of our enormous respect for him.
In 1993 former Party
leader veteran SI columnist and academic historian James Halliday had
dedicated his booklet, "THE
1820 RISING — The Radical War" to "JOHN MURPHY—A
MODERN PAISLEY RADICAL". It is impossible to think of a more fitting
epitaph. John, who was unmarried, passed away at the age of 75 on
14th February in Paisley’s Royal Alexandra Hospital after a lengthy
illness.
Ian Bayne |
