At the age of twenty-two, as an unemployed shipyard worker, Duncan Corcoran encountered a revolutionary movement that was to transform his life. Born in Greenock, Scotland, on January 3, 1913, he grew up in poverty that was the norm for working class families. As the major port serving the great city of Glasgow, twenty-two miles upstream, Greenock prospered in the 18th and 19th centuries with the growth of trade with the New World and West Indies. Most of Duncan’s family worked in sugar refineries or shipbuilding.
At fourteen, young Duncan left school and went to work as a message boy at McGregor’s Emporium. This first work experience convinced him to join a union as soon as he got the chance. At sixteen he started an apprenticeship in the pattern making shop at John J. Kincaid & Co. Ltd. which made the engines and boilers for the shipyard across the street. Shipbuilding was a cyclical industry and during the worst three years of the Great Depression, apprentices only worked one week in a month. Later, as business picked up, Duncan moved to the machine shop.
It was during periods of unemployment in October 1935 that Duncan was introduced to the Oxford Group (the precursor of Moral Re-Armament and Initiatives of Change) by Thompson Revel, a teammate in the local youth club badminton team. Duncan was the team captain, and his friend surprised him by apologizing for jealously, admitting that he had hoped to be captain himself. Revel was a student at Glasgow University. He explained to Duncan and his friend, Blyth Ramsay, a shipyard laborer, that he and other students had decided to try to make a positive difference in the world, starting with a change in their own lives. They described a social revolution based on change in the lives of people. Duncan was immediately intrigued by the possibility that change in the attitudes and behavior of individuals could provide a basis for change in society.
The Greenock workers responded to an invitation to speak to students at Glasgow University. The president of the Students Union, Stuart Smith, was to become Duncan’s lifelong friend. Another new friend was with Archie Mackenzie, who went on to a distinguished diplomatic career. While the students opened the door to a new world of ideas to the Greenock men, their encounter with Duncan and his friends was an education in real life.
Over the next two years a remarkable alliance of workers, students, educators and businessmen emerged. The team approached the editor of the Greenock Telegraph and the local member of parliament, both of whom became allies in the cause. They visited members of the city council to help sort out differences between political enemies, and they held public meetings to “give a new vision for industry.” Trade union officials and management of the shipyards became interested and, according to Mackenzie, “a culture of teamwork began to challenge the inherited doctrine of class war.”
In April 1939, the young Scots suddenly found themselves on the global stage. A surprising invitation came from a group of provincial and city leaders in Canada to help launch a program of moral rearmament. They were joined by students from Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was to be seven years before Duncan returned to Greenock. He plunged into the tempestuous industrial relations of the ‘thirties, and his outgoing personality and passionate conviction quickly opened doors. In the coalmines of Nova Scotia, the steelworks of Pennsylvania and the aircraft industry of California, he became the trusted friend of many of America’s labor leaders, often staying in their homes. Some of these men were to experience changes in their personal lives that made them powerful forces for better working relationships in their industries.
It was in America that Duncan linked up with Bill Jaeger, who had grown up in a working-class district in Stockport, England and had studied at a Baptist college in London. He had been organizing activities in London’s East End with city councilors and labor leaders. The Scot and the Englishman instantly bonded: the collaboration was to last sixty years. Arriving in San Francisco, Duncan called on Philip Murray, head of the Steelworkers of America: “I heard he was from Hamilton, Scotland.” Murray recommended a meeting with John Riffe, the West Coast organizer of the Steelworkers’ Organizing Committee. Riffe was a powerful man who had entered the mines at fourteen and who carried a deep bitterness towards employers. His family life was also in deep trouble. Encounters with Corcoran, Jaeger and their colleagues resulted in a dramatic turnaround in his domestic life and a new perspective on class warfare. He later became the executive vice-president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and played a significant role in the settlement of the national steel strike of 1952.
The Boeing and Lockheed aircraft plants in Washington state and California were often wracked with strife. The communists were attacking any support for Britain’s “imperialist war” against Germany. In Seattle, Blyth Ramsay and fellow Scot Adam McLean stayed in the home of the head of the machinists union – another Scot. They provided crucial support in efforts to build up a positive, alternative labor leadership at Boeing. Similar action went on at Lockheed.* After Pearl Harbor, Duncan joined the US armed forces, serving at Air Force bases in Florida, Washington and Greenland.
Returning to Europe after the war, Duncan linked up with Bill Jaeger and Gordon Wise, an Australian, and headed for Germany in support of Frank Buchman’s sustained effort to provide a moral and spiritual foundation for a reconciled Europe. At the time communism was reckoned to have an 80% hold on the key mining and steel area of the Ruhr.
He visited Hans Bockler, the president of the new unified German Trade Union Federation. Bockler had been deeply impressed by a forum attended by 190 leading industrialists, hosted by Dr. Heinrich Kost, head of the German Coal Board. Kost opened the meeting by saying, “Gentleman, it is not a question of whether we change, but how we change. It is not for us to wait for Labour to change. Change is demanded of us.” A few months later, Duncan chaired an international meeting at which Bochler delivered his carefully worded conclusion: “When man changes, the structure of society changes. When the structure of society changes, men change. Both go together and both are necessary.”
While in the U.S. during the war years, Duncan got to know Lucy Davis, the daughter of a London businessman, who was also working with Moral Re-Armament. They were married in Los Angels in 1948. This union across traditional class lines produced three children: Robert, Ann, and Ian. Lucy wholeheartedly embraced Duncan’s vision for world labor.
Duncan and Lucy spent nearly three years in Japan where they became close friends of leading trade unionists. In the following decades, Duncan found himself working with people of all classes and cultures to offer a new philosophy to the world labor movement. He was equally at home in textile factories in India, tea gardens in Sri Lanka, rubber plantations in Malaysia, and shipyards in Japan. For decades he attended the annual meetings of the Imitational Labor Organization in Geneva. There he would meet with such friends as P.P. Narayanan from Malaysia, the first non-Western general secretary of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, and Gopeshwar, the vice president of the Indian Trade Union Congress.
In the sixties and seventies, communists and Trotskyites made a determined bid for control of key British industries. The battle was fought out in car factories, steelworks, coal mines and shipyards. Duncan and his colleagues played a not insignificant role in encouraging the development of responsible union leadership. Into his nineties, his mind was constantly active, He was a friend of many leading British labour leaders, including Bill Morris, the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union. His files contain correspondence with several members of parliament. He knew Lord George Robertson when he was a young member of parliament in Scotland and kept in touch as he served as Defense Secretary and then Secretary General of NATO. At his death Robertson wrote, “Duncan was quite a guy. He was a strong believer in what was right and a great correspondent. I always valued his opinion and advice. He leaves a formidable legacy.”
* After America joined the war, Dale Reed, leader of 70,000 machinists reported, “There are planes on the fighting front that would not be there” but for such efforts. Senator Harry Truman, in his report on industrial relations said, “They have achieved remarkable results in bringing teamwork into industry in the spirit of not who is right but what is right”
Rob Corcoran © 2024
English
