The life of Bob Cooney

This tribute by nephew Neil Cooney was given on 15 August 2024 at a celebration held in Aberdeen on the 40th anniversary of Bob Cooney’s death.

Bob Cooney was born in Sunderland on 12 November 1907, the seventh and last child of an ambitious Aberdeen family. His father, Sandy, a cooper, moved around the country chasing better wages to feed his growing brood. Less than two years previously, the sixth child, Dod, my father, had been born in Edinburgh. Sandy was a fit man, an athlete, a champion swimmer, winner of the exhausting Dee to Don swim, a water-polo player of some note, and good enough on the bowling green to win the Ushers Vaux trophy in 1903. 

He also played football for Orion, a team that won the Aberdeenshire Cup five times before it amalgamated into Aberdeen FC in 1903, but by then Sandy and his family were off on their travels. 

It certainly came as a total shock when he died suddenly in June 1909. He had just returned from a funeral in Aberdeen, where he was soaked, and travelled home in his wet clothes. He died of pneumonia. He was 41 and had been married for 16 years. Bob was still a babe in arms at 18 months. 

Sandy’s widow Jean had just turned 37 and she was left with seven children, none of whom was of an age to earn. She had been a cotton spinner in Aberdeen before she married, but that trade was no longer open to her – spinners had to be spinsters. It was a time when there was no welfare, though the subject was now, at last, being debated. But the prevailing opinion on the right of the ruling Liberals and in the Tory-dominated House of Lords was that welfare would sap the moral fibre. 

Jean had little hope but to take her children back to Aberdeen, where at least the support of relatives could tide her over the next few difficult months. They came by boat from Newcastle. Rooms had been found for them in Links Place, and there they were soon to be burgled out of what little they possessed. 

The children were enrolled in St Andrew’s Episcopal School in King Street, in the church where Jean and Sandy had got married. Jean got a cleaning job at HM Theatre, with extra evening work as a dresser for the big shows. She was fiercely independent and ruled her children with a rod of iron. Times were tough and she had to be extra tough to survive. Bob and Dod, in particular, often tasted the back end of a hairbrush. 

In time, the family moved first to Northfield Place, then to Rosemount Viaduct where Jean was employed as caretaker of the five tall blocks of flats. This entailed a lot of scrubbing and polishing, helped by the children as they grew up. The family remained in Rosemount Viaduct until the 1950s when medical needs necessitated a move to Manor Drive. By then, Minnie, the younger daughter was virtually immobile with multiple sclerosis, and Jean herself was frail, although she would never admit it. 

Schooling at St Andrew's Episcopal was fairly basic, but the children learned the necessary skills of literacy and numeracy to fit them for future life. Both Bob and Dod were clever enough to reach the top class at 11. There they remained until they could leave school at 14. The boys cleaned the school before and after classes. They also had to sing in the choir. 

They were not alone in their poverty. One fellow pupil was tempted to steal a sausage from a Justice Street butcher’s display. Unfortunately for him, it was the end of a huge link of sausages and he was quickly caught and brought to justice – some six lusty strokes of the birch: he bore the scars for the rest of his life. Schooling was never boring. Bob, being younger, was let out of school before Dod, but had to wait for him to be escorted home. Bob, even in his younger days, was adventurous enough to prove his capacity to see himself home. His early homecoming was enough to get them both a hiding. 

Bob Cooney's Spanish Civil War memoir was published by Manifesto Press in 2015.

The children were all given a trade, a significant financial sacrifice because apprentice wages were pitifully low. Matthew never qualified. He died in his teens. Young Jean went into service before training as a nurse. She provided the younger children with the tender loving care that her mother was unable to provide. Daughter Jean never married, nor did her sister Minnie, who trained as a seamstress but spent much of her life cruelly crippled. Tom was a carpenter and died young, leaving a very young family. Young Sandy became a French polisher in the shipyards. He remained a bachelor, spending his weekends cycling and hostelling. He loved books and music and was an expert in Esperanto. Dod became a watchmaker with Gills of Bridge Street before moving on to the Northern Coop where he worked until he retired. Bob became a pawnbroker. 

The pawnshop was an alternative to debt. It provided the pennies to see you through the week. Men’s suits would go in on a Monday morning and be redeemed on a Saturday morning, still in the neat brown paper parcel. If the suit was needed for a funeral, then the neat parcel was filled with old newspapers. Bob allowed himself to be deceived, but he hated the pawnshop system and poverty was beginning to really anger him. He was listening to the debates at the Wallace Statue and in the Castlegate, his finishing school, and he became a socialist. 

He became a speaker out of necessity – there was no one else around to do the job and he was making speeches in his teens. He honed his technique over the years. His mother did not like his political involvement and firmly drew the line at his ambitions as a public speaker. He had to stop or get out of her house, and he got out for a while to escape the unbearable tension. As she saw it, his antics were taking away from her the respectability that she had earned the hard way. She had already followed his route through the streets, scrubbing the slogans he had chalked on the pavements. How could he let her down like this?

In many ways, Bob took after his mother. Both could be stubborn, strong and single-minded, and both set themselves very high standards. Jean was perplexed that Bob had gone down the same route as Sandy and Dod. She was worried that, if her employers found out, she could lose her job and became homeless. Why were her sons disgracing her in this way? Her two daughters were good church-going Christians, but the boys were meddling with left-wing politics. She was black affronted, and she was also quietly scared. 

Political tempers were running high in 1926, the year of the General Strike. Churchill’s British Gazette was deliberately playing the Red Menace card, ‘Reds under the Beds’, and she seemed to have a house full of them. 

The collapse of the General Strike was a let-down to the left and a huge disappointment to the Aberdeen socialists who had completely controlled the city. Nothing moved without a permit and the strike-breaking students were stopped in their tracks. The Aberdeen strikers even produced their own news sheet. 

Bob Cooney (foreground) in Spain during the Battle of the Ebro in 1938. Photo: Marx Memorial Library.

After the strike collapsed, the jubilant Tories exacted every ounce of revenge. New anti-trade union legislation was rushed through. The unions were further weakened by the Depression. Churchill’s 1925 decision to go back to the Gold Standard was a mistake of the highest order, making our exports far too expensive. The killer blow came with the shock waves of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Unemployment soared and the Insurance Scheme could no longer self-finance. The Treasury’s answer was to save our way out of the crisis. 

This meant cuts in spending, cuts in benefits and cuts in public sector salaries. The National Government produced a vicious cuts package that provoked a wave of anger and triggered a rather polite naval mutiny at Invergordon. The Navy budget was cut by 10 per cent and, by the time the Admiralty tightened its belt, the lowest ratings had wage cuts of 25 per cent. After the mutiny, the wage cut was reduced to 10 per cent. Sam Wild and Bill Johnstone participated in the naval mutiny, along with 12,000 others. Both men later served in Spain, where Sam became a very courageous commander, was wounded some five times and kept coming back for more. 

The mutiny led to a run on the banks and forced the government, in panic, to come off the Gold Standard. It was one of the best pieces of economic management that they ever produced. 

Bob missed most of the 1931 crisis because his life had entered a new phase. In 1930 he packed up his job as a pawnbroker’s clerk in order to devote himself full time to politics. It was a brave decision. His new job carried no wages, but it did give him the opportunity of further education. He spent 13 months between 1931-32 in Russia, studying by day in the Lenin Institute in Moscow and working by night in a rubber factory. There he picked up an industrial throat infection and spent some time in a sanatorium. It left him with a huskiness in his voice that became part of his oratory. There was also time for a glorious holiday on the Volga that charged up his batteries for the tasks ahead. He was not short of work when he returned in 1932. 

There was a lot of heavy campaigning to do, to mobilise the unemployed, to help organise the hunger marches. He travelled from Aberdeen to Glasgow and Edinburgh speaking at open-air meetings to campaign against unemployment, to rally public opinion against the iniquitous Means Test that robbed the poorest of both their Dole and their dignity. 

Out of the turmoil of the Depression came the strange phenomenon of the British Union of Fascists. Oswald Mosley, its creator, had served in both the Tory and Labour camps before forming his Blackshirts. He copied the style of Mussolini and was both influenced and financed by Hitler. 

His gauleiter for the north east of Scotland was William Chambers Hunter, a minor laird by inheritance. He had started off life as plain Willie Jopp, but now had pretensions of power. Aberdeen was targeted as his power base, and he recruited and hired thugs from as far afield as London to help him take over the city. 

Bob led the movement to stop him. There were pitched battles, arrests, fines and imprisonment, but the locals succeeded. Fascism was not allowed to take root in Aberdeen. Those who deny free speech to others, don’t deserve free speech themselves. Aberdeen has a tradition of fairness and tolerance, and no trumped-up laird was going to destroy it. Bob emerged out of these battles as a working-class hero, displaying his undoubted courage and organisational skills. It wasn’t enough to stand up to the fascists, you had to outthink them, outnumber them, outfight them and run them out of town. 

The first fascist rally set for the Music Hall, to be addressed by Raven Thomson, Mosley’s deputy, had to be cancelled half an hour before it was due to start. Then they tried hit and run tactics at unadvertised venues, but were rapidly chased off as their arrival was spotted by an army of runners who rounded up the locals to drive them out. The fascists eyed the Market Stance in the Castlegate as a key target. It had become a working-class stronghold and it became the site of the key battle for Aberdeen. 

Chambers Hunter pencilled in the evening of Sunday 16 July 1937 for his big rally. The workers would be caught out on a Sunday in the height of the trades holiday. He miscalculated. The grapevine was finely tuned. Bob addressed a crowd of 2,000 on the Links at 11am and they vowed to gather in the Castlegate in the evening. The fascists duly arrived with their armour-plated van, their police escort, their amplifiers and their heavies. 

As Chambers Hunter clambered on to the roof of the van, the locals surged forward, cut the cables and chased the fascists for their lives. Some ended up in the harbour. The Castlegate was cleared by 8pm. Bob was one of many arrested. He served his four days before his trial. He was duly fined and the fine was paid for by his comrades. A young Ian Campbell, later of folk music fame, remembers sitting on his father’s shoulders watching Bob being carried shoulder high on his release from the court. He also recalls how the crowd fell silent as Bob addressed them. It was Bob’s last speech in Aberdeen for a long time, because within hours he was on his way to Spain. 

Bob had pleaded for many months to get to Spain, but the Communist Party kept stalling him, claiming he was too valuable at home in the struggle against the Blackshirts. It wasn’t until the Castlegate victory that he eventually got the go-ahead. He had argued that he felt hypocritical rallying support for the Spanish people and urging young men and women to go off to Spain to aid their cause, and yet doing nothing himself. Thoughts of Spain filled every moment of every day: the desire to fight in Spain burned within him. He later said that participation in Spain justified his existence on this earth. Spain was the front line against fascism. It was his duty as a fighter to be there. 

Bob was 28 when he left for Spain. He eventually became battalion commissar. The role of commissar was similar to that of an adjutant, an administrative assistant. The commissar post originated in the French Revolution, when the officer class, all from the nobility, fled the people's army. The ordinary soldiers elected leaders from their own comrades, men they could trust, men who would look after them. 

Each battalion within the International Brigades had its own commissar. They led by example. They physically led their men into battle. They kept up morale, even at base camp. They kept busy writing their own newspaper, running a school for the illiterate peasants, holding sports events and concert parties and organising choirs – and an orchestra of mouth organs. 

Bob Cooney in later life.

Bob was a born organiser. He had time for everyone and had to keep them motivated and wedded to the cause. There were other less pleasant duties. Commissars had to bury their dead and send home personal effects to their loved ones. 

Bob always claimed that he worked with the very best of human resources, men of conviction who voluntarily put their lives on the line, true comrades willing to dance with death in defence of democracy. The Brigaders represented the most courageous of their generation. The Brigades were an expression of solidarity. To them, this was not a civil war, but a war of liberation from the scourge of fascism. 

He always said that he was afraid to be afraid. He told his men never to show fear. They were not conscripts, they were comrades, and they would look after each other. He had to prevent their bravery descending into bravado. Some had vowed never to hide from the fascists, never to run from them, and to fight them in open country. That would have been futile and suicidal and such romantic notions had to be curbed. 

Just over 2,400 joined the Brigades from Britain, 526 were killed and almost 1,000 others were wounded. Some 476 Scots took part, of whom 19 came directly from Aberdeen. Other Aberdonians came indirectly from their new homes in England and Canada. Five of the Aberdeen contingent were killed in combat in Spain. Tom Davidson died at Gandesa in April 1937. The other four died at the Ebro: Archie Dewar, Bob’s best pal, in March 1938, Ken Morrice in July 1938, Charlie MacLeod in August 1938, and finally Ernie Sim in September 1938 in the very last battle fought by the battalion. Some 60 left Dundee for Spain and 16 never returned. Glasgow lost 65 of their volunteers in Spain. Scotland had 10 per cent of the UK population but sent 20 per cent of the volunteers. 

On Bob’s return from Spain, his mother wept at the sight of him. He was so thin and emaciated. For more that a year after his return, he still bore open sores on his arms and legs. He had served a stern apprenticeship as an amateur soldier and now the professionals conscripted him in the fight against Hitler. 

In September 1939 the Second World War began. Bob was there as a gunner from the beginning to the end. He was sickened by the poverty he encountered in reconquered Europe. His eyes filled as he told of young German mothers giving their bodies for an egg to feed their bairns. We are all losers in war. Bob was to campaign vigorously in the peace movement, but he was never a pacifist. There are times when you have to stand up and fight for a just cause. 

After the war, Bob championed a new group of friends, the homeless. Housing was a key issue in the post-war era. There had already been an acute housing shortage in 1939 and wartime bombing added to the problem. Shortages of men, materials and money made post-war housebuilding very difficult and ever increasing waiting lists rendered the future bleak for thousands of Aberdeen families. A short-term practical answer lay in organising squats in empty properties, such as the old camps at Torry Battery and Hayton. Bob was once again organising. 

He was by now a family man with a wife, Nan, and twin daughters Pat and Pam, a third daughter, Eileen, would come later. He had to be earning. He joined the building trade and was soon involved in unionising the men. These activities soon got him blacklisted in his beloved Aberdeen. There were no vacancies when Bob came to call. He was elbowed out of the dignity of work. 

He spent 20 years in exile in Birmingham, where he found work as an industrial crane operator. He lodged with Dave and Betty Campbell and their close family. The Campbells were old comrades from the pre-war Aberdeen days. He was adopted into the family and shared their love of folk music. The second generation, Ian and Lorna Campbell, became leading lights in the 1960s folk revival. Ian’s sons founded the reggae and pop group UB40 in 1978. Ian died of cancer in 2012, aged 79. 

Music had been a popular socialist activity in the hungry thirties. Many fine shows ere produced in Aberdeen. The rehearsals kept the young unemployed busy. My mother’s brother, little Alfie Howie, an unemployed comb-maker, recalled dozens of rehearsals for a star turn choral enactment of the Volga Boatmen, ‘Yo Ho Heave Ho’. On the big night of the show, the rope was long, the line went in descending order of size, so Aflie was last, and the song was over and the curtains were closed before Alfie reached the narrow stage. Bob even wrote a complete musical for Unity Theatre, but it was never performed: fascists and Spain got in the way. 

Bob himself became a minor folk celebrity, performing traditional north-east songs such as the ‘Wee Toon Clerk’ and bothy ballads, or his own compositions such as ‘Fool Friday’ and ‘Torry Belle’, or Chartist songs or Wobbly songs of American labour such as ‘Pie in the Sky', or Spanish anthems such as Alex McDade’s ‘Song of Jarama’. Alex died for the cause at Brunete in July 1936. Bob wrote his own anthem to Spain for the 27th Reunion of the International Brigade, at a time when Franco was still in power. He called it ‘Hasta La Vista, Madrid’. It is a prose poem that he would deliver with gusto. 

Our century had to be cleansed
So we went to Spain
Where the defeat of Hitler started. 

No freedom fight is ever lost
While folk can learn.
Each human mind’s an outpost
And the frontiers of freedom expand
Conquering minds and hearts
Prelude to the conquest of cities and states
Till the world will be wholly free
Then?
Folk will strive for higher freedoms still. 

Bob even appeared on vinyl records with the ‘Singing Campbells’. He also worked with Hamish Henderson in the epic folk song collection. When he retired back home to Aberdeen in 1973 at the age of 65, he was adopted by the Aberdeen Folk Club and they honoured him by publishing in 1983 a selection of his poems and songs, entitled ‘When of Heroes We Sing’. That little booklet sums up his philosophy of life and the cause he so fervently supported. 

His active mind kept him awake. Insomnia wore him down, and he spent his last months in Kingseat Hospital still humming his tunes and composing poems in his head. He died in August 1984: he was 78. 

Bob gave so much and asked nothing in return except comradeship. He lived a full life. Bob could be very shy in company until you knew him. Then he could be quite gregarious. He could tell you a joke you had heard many times before, but he added his own little bits to milk the story for a few more hilarious moments. 

He wanted a world full of laughter. He challenged a word full of injustice. He won his fair share of battles. The cause was always more important than personal comfort. He sacrificed himself in a huge effort to improve conditions for his fellow human beings. He kept the flame of freedom burning.
He lived a rich life and it is worth celebrating. He was a man and a half. 

I will leave the last words to Bob:
For freedom is a hardy plant
The more you tramp it down
The sweeter it will flower again In countryside and town.
Its seeds are scattered on the wind
And multiply their kind.
That's why no matter where you go,
Bold rebels there you’ll find.