Pamphlets on art and peace
Cicely Farrer shares three pamphlets associated with art and peace
Cicely Farrer is a curator, writer and current PhD Researcher in Art History at University of St Andrews, where she is researching the activism of women artists connected to the Glasgow School of Art, with the support of SGSAH-AHRC.
Pamphlets act as the printed form of an announcement, to communicate an agenda, a message, distributing educational information, as adverts, propaganda or the line up of an event. They are associated with the materiality of protest, capturing ‘moments of protest’, and arguably have the capacity to activate or re-activate memories of activism.1 Mostly found in the ephemera files of public archives, I seek them out to identify the political activity and affiliation of artists in the early to mid 20th century in Glasgow. Pamphlets have a long political history, but these pamphlets combine politics with art, design and film–they are agitprop. I’ve chosen three historic examples, each relating to peace and anti-war campaigning amongst leftist artists and film-makers of the 1930s, 40s & 50s in Glasgow.
By sharing the pamphlets, I hope to test out how the hidden legacies of political activism sit in relation to actions that many artists are involved with today. All three connect to the public declarations of activism (its protests, marches, sit-ins and rallies) but also the less visible—perhaps sometimes more gendered—aspects (the organisation, administration, education, strategy, collaboration and communications involved).
The pamphlets all connect with Bet Low and Helen Biggar—both graduates of the Glasgow School of Art, members of left-aligned political parties, and affiliates of the socialist arts organisation Glasgow Unity Theatre. Each artist was actively involved in organising groups that promoted principles of community, their actions reflecting a ‘we’ rather than ‘I.’ They often made their art in the context of their political values.
The Young Socialist, June 1953
“A magazine for the young in years and the young at heart.”Catalogue: GB 247 MS Gen 1764/A/3/7
Source: Glasgow University Special Collections Scottish Theatre Archive
Bet Low is not an artist widely known for her activism, yet here is a pamphlet that firmly places her work in a political organising context.2 In the early 1950s, Low and her husband Tom MacDonald were asked to produce twenty-four lino cuts to illustrate the covers of the monthly pamphlet—The Young Socialist. Published in Glasgow, the pamphlet was cheaply printed in a single colour accompanied by black, and distributed amongst the young members of the Socialist Sunday Schools alternative education programmes in Britain. Each issue featured news, alongside poems, letters, lino-prints and photos, connecting members and affiliates, with their potential friends and comrades. Much of the messaging is anti-war, community oriented and hopeful for the furthering of women’s rights.
‘Our little magazine, coloured cover bright,
A pride and joy we see it, Our shining light.
We write our stories, send in our reports,
All to fight for what we think is Justice for the Cause!’
—Pauline S Marshall (aged 15 in 1953)
I love Bet Low’s summer edition print of June 1953 because it depicts a scene of joy, community, nurturing and care—children playing amongst one another, accompanied by mothers, parents, grandparents, or guardians—the gendered reproduction of daily life in 1950s Glasgow. Low’s illustrative style shows the expressions of each protagonist in her setting. She created many ink drawings and prints like these, documenting scenes of the city in the 1940s and 50s. Low and MacDonald’s invitation to contribute to The Young Socialist demonstrates their integration in activist communities, and the causes they believed in at the time.
Art & Peace Festival, presented by The Clyde Group, September 1948
Catalogue: acc 121.77.10 Source: National Library of Scotland
Low, as a member of The Clyde Group, was an organiser of the Art & Peace Festival that happened at the McLellan Galleries in 1948.3 A five-day exhibition and events programme, it brought together artist organisers with left-wing political parties. These included the Scottish Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain, feminist peace campaigners like Helen Crawfurd, as well as nationalist campaigners like poet Hugh McDiarmid, who was working as a labourer in Clydeside at the time. It shows how the artists, many of whom were working-class, were integrated with the allegiances of the left in Glasgow. The prestigious municipal space of the McLellan Galleries was transformed into a site of political speech and action.
The pamphlet is simply designed and text-led. It includes a manifesto of aims for the event, a list of the art works exhibited and a programme of evening events. I’ve not been able to find any photos or memories of this event (yet4) so I’ve had to imagine what happened and how it looked. The pamphlet was the programme for the day, the score for what was to happen. But it is also the record of what may have happened during the occasion, what it set out to do, rather than what unfolded from those planned beginnings. Seeing it as a score, for me it hints at how the politics of the day were performed.
Banners reading ‘Women Unite for Peace Everywhere’ and ‘Wester Auchengeich Branch National Union of Mine-workers’ were hung alongside paintings. Low exhibited her Glasgow Scenes—many of which feature on the covers of The Young Socialist.
‘Please help us by handing this on to a friend to read’
Part of the reason I am drawn to this pamphlet is the radical hopefulness, the confidence in the informal networks of people that will pass on this pamphlet, and their fantastical belief in art, politics and collaboration.
Films for Peace, produced by Kino Films Ltd, 1936
Catalogue: GAA31/C/3Source: University of Stirling Special Collections
Helen Biggar’s collaboratively made film Hell Unltd, 1936, is advertised in this pamphlet alongside two other anti-war, anti-weapons industry and anti-capitalist films, distributed by the production company Kino Films Ltd. The film was shot in a lecturer's studio at the GSA and at sites in the city, including a peace rally. This was the only film that Norman McLaren and Biggar realised under collaborative authorship although they had many more political projects planned. Kino Films had an independent Scottish branch, which McLaren and Biggar were both committee members of— they distributed political, experimental, documentary films across Scotland to great demand and actively organised screenings and events to fundraise for the Spanish Republic, partially detailed in a Kino Film Group minute book.5
The pamphlet is simple in blue and white. It is a how-to-guide, giving prices and equipment information, to organise screenings of the films in ‘your hall’ or ‘school room’. You could also book out a projector and a projectionist/operator to manage your event.
In a description of Hell Unltd, its sentiment of the satirical film is described: ‘The phrases ‘war to end war’ - ‘for democracy’ and ‘for peace’ - are revealed as empty catchwords designed to hide the machinations of the ever-active armaments manufacturer.’ Likely written by Biggar, her harsh critique points to the empty words of the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his Westminster colleagues, who were busy making concessions to fascism in the 1930s despite the conspicuous humanitarian crimes happening across Europe.
In 2026, like in 1936, 1948 and 1953, words like ‘peace’ are slippery: the meaning reliant on the context from which the orator(s) speaks, and the subject they speak to. To campaign for peace in the early 1950s was so culturally unacceptable that it might have resulted in your name being on an Mi5 watchlist, as well as suspicion of being a spy for the Soviet Union.6 ‘Peace’ was the propaganda message of the U.S.S.R. in the 1950s, so for many in Britain, it was associated with Stalin’s authoritarianism and, slowly being discovered, massive humanitarian crimes. What I am finding however is that the anti-war and ‘peace’ messaging in these pamphlets, was in support of social justice locally (for working conditions, for housing, for gender equality, for bodily autonomy and for Scotland’s independence) and in international solidarity (with those seeking freedom from the oppression of Imperial forces, fascism and colonisation). They further show some of the legacies of artists acting politically in Scotland, in their art, and through their direct, and indirect, activism. Each pamphlet was found in an artist's collection of papers, deposited in an institutional archive, perhaps from a drawer or a box under a bed, in anticipation of its future re-awakening.
1. Gilliant Whitely, Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer, Bloomsbury, 2020 p9
2. This pamphlet is a really exciting ‘discovery’ from my PhD research. I found these in Low’s archives which she had so carefully compiled, before depositing them at Glasgow University. For more info on Bet Low you can read: Jenny Brownrigg, “Bet Low. An Active Career,” Visual Culture in Britain, 21, 1, 2020, pp. 57-72. (doi:10.1080/14714787.2020.1721313); https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/9882/1/46066_GSA_Bet%20Low_Exhibition%20A5_24pp_v4RADAR.pdf
3. The Clyde Group formed in the mid-1940s around the principle of bringing art to ‘the people’. They believed in the political potential of art and literature amidst the campaigns for workers’ rights and peace in Glasgow and Scotland. Members included: artist Tom MacDonald; director Eddie Boyd; painter Nancy Irvine and poet John Kincaid, amongst others.
4. Please let us know if you have any leads for photos of the festival. Get in touch at contact.againandagain@gmail.com
5. Located in the GSA Archives & Collections. Catalogue number: DC 097/4/2.
6. Records held at the National Archives at Kew have been released over the last 15 years revealing which left-wing, socialist, nationalist and communist activists, artists, and academics were being monitored by the Government. For example, this story from the Guardian discusses Doris Lessing’s example. It was also revealed five years after Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison’s death, that she too had been investigated by Scotland Yard / Mi5 for her anti-fascist, feminist, social realist book We Have Been Warned (1935).