Chapter 2 From learning the language to founding local clubs: the making of an Esperanto speaker

The first meeting in Dundee: setting the scene for the ‘nova lingvo’

In 1905–6, Esperanto was under the spotlight and in the news. Hundreds of newspapers across Europe covered the story of Esperanto speakers gathering at the first international congress in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1905. Thousands of articles from tsarist Russia to Austria–Hungary, France and Spain created a buzz around this new language.⁶ A sense of excitement was in the air and, as in many other places, the local press in Dundee picked up on it. This happened in the wake of the second international congress in Geneva, where 900 Esperanto speakers and ‘representatives of 18 different languages’ gathered in August 1906.⁷ In October 1906, the Dundee Advertiser and other local papers reported about the ‘nova lingvo’ (new language) and the formation of an Esperanto club in the city.

It was Janette King (1862–1947) who presided over the inaugural meeting of the Dundee Esperanto Club at the Lamb’s Hotel in October 1906. According to the local press, the meeting was ‘largely attended’, with King giving a lecture on the history of ‘universal languages’, Esperanto and the recently held congress in Geneva. ‘Emboldened by the attendance before her’ as well as the interest in the language, King ‘formally moved the founding of an Esperanto club’. A committee, with Janette King as its first president, was voted in on the same evening. Others in the audience, including John Beveridge, expressed an interest in joining the newly formed club:

Rev. John Beveridge […] expressed his belief in the usefulness of Esperanto, remarking how awkward it was at international congresses to have the proceedings interpreted to the delegates. He also expressed his interest in the Club, and mentioned that, though he would not himself be able to be present on Wednesday evenings, he would be represented by members of the family.⁸

These family members were his daughters Lois and Heather Beveridge. In 1902, there had been an attempt to form an Esperanto club in the city, but it did not get off the ground. In 1906, by contrast, the initiative was a success. This time, members of the newly formed club did not waste any time and started meeting the following Wednesday at the Cercle Français, in Dundee City Centre. The local Dundee Courier regularly reported on the club’s social events and gatherings, which drew between twenty and fifty participants.⁹ With the Dundee club established and running, Scotland had three Esperanto clubs: both Glasgow’s and Edinburgh’s were founded in 1903, and others would follow in the coming years.

In 1905 and 1906, new Esperanto clubs were formed across Britain, including Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Chester, Deal, Goole, Kingston upon Thames, Manchester, Norwich and Sheffield – to name just a few. Dundee was a typical club in that it followed the wave of Esperanto enthusiasm in the aftermath of the first two congresses, along with the prospect of the third international congress to be held in Cambridge in 1907. A myriad of new clubs were founded in France, Germany, Austria–Hungary and beyond Europe.¹⁰ Esperanto took root in a wide variety of places. Some were capital cities, others were bustling trade hubs, others were intellectual centres, home to universities.

Dundee was one of the fastest growing cities in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1851 and 1901, its population tripled from around 61,000 to over 182,000 inhabitants. By 1900, it had overtaken Aberdeen and was the third largest city in Scotland.¹¹ The rapid urbanisation and economic boom largely rested on Dundee’s jute industry, which linked the port city to Bengal, where the raw jute fibres were harvested. Dundee textiles were shipped across the globe, to places in the British Empire, the European continent and the US. Other key industrial sectors in Dundee were shipbuilding and the whaling industry, but it was mainly the jute industry that carried with it the prolonged boom and rapid growth.¹²

There was a constant influx of workers to Dundee’s industries, the majority of whom were women. Dundee was known as the ‘women’s town’ as it pulled in a large female workforce from across Britain.¹³ Given the significant surplus of women in Dundee, many of these – often young – were unmarried and lived together in shared accommodation. Dundee expanded rapidly through the immigration of workers, but housing was hard to come by and living conditions for workers were often poor. The lives of these women did not quite conform to what was frequently conveyed about young women during Victorian times: they were hard-working manual labourers, many were politically minded and went on strikes fighting for better wages and working conditions, and some were activists in the then growing women’s rights movements.¹⁴

It was in this urban setting that the foundational meeting of the Dundee Esperanto Club took place. As with many other Esperanto clubs, its meetings and evening courses were held in spaces such as community halls, cafés and hotels. In Dundee, the first meeting took place in the Lamb’s Hotel, part of a hotel business across Scotland run by Alexander Crawford Lamb (1843–97), as well as part of the wider temperance movement of the nineteenth century.¹⁵

It may not have been by sheer coincidence that the would-be Esperanto learners met at a temperance hotel. With its hard-working jute spinners, weavers, whalers and ship crews, Dundee most certainly had an alcohol problem.¹⁶ The temperance movement was present locally – John Beveridge, for instance, was ‘an ardent advocate of total abstinence’¹⁷ – but it was also a widespread transnational political group. The early Esperanto-speaking community partly overlapped with the temperance movement as Esperanto offered – at least potentially – a language solution to such a cross-border organisation.¹⁸ More generally, the language appealed to reform movements, philanthropic organisations and international Christian organisations, ranging from the Rotary Club to the YMCA.¹⁹

In this urban setting marked by local iterations of broader international issues ranging from women’s rights and workers’ rights to temperance, Janette King gave her pitch for Esperanto. King was one of the first women journalists in Scotland around 1900, having worked since 1881 for the Dundee Advertiser and, later, for the Evening Telegraph. In her journalistic work, she covered workers’ rights and mill strikes in Dundee, while also advocating for women’s rights and universal suffrage. She was engaged in the local temperance movement and was a co-founder of the Dundee branch of the Women’s Liberal Federation. In her line of work, the news and buzz around Esperanto certainly did not escape her. Even though she does not seem to have attended the earliest Universal Congresses of Esperanto,²⁰ her contacts with fellow journalists abroad and her local activism for transnational causes such as women’s rights and temperance turned Esperanto into a logical and consequential interest to her.

As only one of countless women that took on leading activist roles and helped launch clubs, Janette King acted as the first president of the Dundee Esperanto Club before she and her husband moved to Newcastle the following year, with John Beveridge taking over as president in 1908. As with any other organisation or society, one needs Kings and Beveridges, the rank-and-file members who do more than just pay an annual membership fee and turn up every now and then. In Esperantujo, this is no different: as the next section will show, becoming an active Esperanto speaker also involved creating the occasions and the institutional frameworks that would host the learning and regular use of the language.

Becoming an Esperanto speaker: learning, writing, congregating

Once someone decides to learn Esperanto – motivated by various reasons – the first step in the making of an Esperanto speaker is studying the language. In John Beveridge’s case this involved working through a number of self-study learning materials and manuals. These included books he owned, such as Esperanto for Beginners – a low-cost publication by the British Esperanto Association – The Esperanto Home-Student, Esperanto for All: How to Read, Write and Speak It and A Grammar and Commentary on the International Language Esperanto,²¹ as well as other works on grammar and syntax.²²

These learning materials sought to present Esperanto as a language appealing to broad and diverse publics. Their underlying message was unequivocal: becoming an Esperanto speaker was for anyone. The preface to An Esperanto Grammar and Commentary, for instance, praised the language for enabling ‘anyone to correspond on any topic, social, commercial, or scientific, with persons of all nationalities’. The author, George Cox, highlighted the growing body of translations covering various topics and disciplines, in particular the sciences and medicine.²³ Like many other self-learning books, Cox’s volume runs learners through the alphabet and its pronunciation before delving into grammar followed by exercises, specimen texts and basic vocabulary. While all the materials emphasised the ease of learning Esperanto, Cox aimed to equip beginners to ‘write and speak it in good style’, noting that, like ‘every national language, [Esperanto possessed] a certain style and elegance of expression of its own’.²⁴

The appeal for anyone to become an Esperanto speaker was indeed broad and socially inclusive. Print runs were high – for instance, James Robbie’s Esperanto Home-Student, originally published in 1909, was in its sixth edition with a total of 25,000 copies by 1913. The low price of just one or two pennies per copy further reflected its accessibility. Robbie’s slim volume of around fifty pages was aimed at self-learners and evening school students, and it targeted learners from a wide spectrum of professional backgrounds – from pharmacists, lawyers and teachers to bankers, sailors and manual labourers. Some professions – such as railwaymen, postal employees and policemen – were singled out as having their own Esperanto magazines. Robbie concluded his book’s opening remarks with an explicit invitation, particularly aimed at manual labourers interested in the language: ‘Are YOU interested in the objects which any of the above Societies have at heart? Then, Become an ESPERANTIST, and enter into communion with kindred fellow labourers all over the world.’²⁵

Part of the language-learning process, as well as of the consolidation of Esperanto beyond its grammar and syntax, drew on a rapid increase in both translated literature and works originally written in Esperanto. Beveridge himself owned works including Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland translated as La aventuroj de Alico en Mirlando and Esperanto translations of Charles Dickens and August Strindberg.²⁶ In addition, Beveridge had numerous issues of Esperanto magazines including Germana Esperanto-Gazeto, Amerika Esperantisto and Brazila Revuo Esperantista, as well as magazines from Austria–Hungary, Finland and France – several of which he received in exchange for posting British Esperanto magazines abroad to his pen pals.

The vast majority of Esperanto literature, language learning and propaganda materials found in the Beveridge household date from the period between 1906 and 1913, when the family lived in Dundee. However, even when the family relocated to a small parish in Fossoway – a village located between Perth and Edinburgh – John Beveridge continued collecting Esperanto magazines and literature. Later, after moving further inland to lead a parish in Gartmore – and, therefore, being seemingly more geographically isolated from the Esperanto scene – he nevertheless continued to be a regular presence at Esperanto gatherings.²⁷ Having these reading materials at hand and on his desk, John Beveridge also kept an exercise book in which he drafted some of his congress talks and magazine publication drafts.²⁸

In a language that was more regularly written than spoken, reading magazines was a key way of widening one’s vocabulary. As part of a language community largely based on sharing printed materials, copies of periodicals were sent abroad or exchanged with pen pals, as John Beveridge did when he received magazines from Brazil or Finland in exchange for a copy of The British Esperantist.²⁹

Early Esperanto periodicals served to showcase the language in use and the consolidation of this community. Many of these publications, from The British Esperantist to the Germana Esperanto-Gazeto, were bilingual in the early decades of Esperanto, to attract newcomers and support those still learning the language. While some articles appeared only in Esperanto or English (or German), most of the content was available in bilingual format, often in dual-language columns. Having the two languages side by side allowed for accessible reading practice.

With news about newly found clubs, forthcoming congresses, the latest Esperanto publications and adverts for shops where one could find Esperanto books and learning materials, as well as sections with lists of addresses of pen pals, these print media were among the spaces through which the first generation of Esperanto learners joined the language community. Over the years, John Beveridge became a regular contributor to The British Esperantist and La Revuo. Like her father, Lois Beveridge also contributed to Esperanto magazines. She was eighteen years old when one of her poems was published in The British Esperantist – in 1908, the same year she travelled to Dresden to attend that year’s Universal Congress of Esperanto.³⁰

Esperanto speakers became familiar with one another by reading each other’s names on the pages of magazines and by meeting in person at both local and international gatherings. When Lois Beveridge travelled to Dresden, she likely had the opportunity to put faces to names she had previously encountered through her readings – figures such as Ludwik Zamenhof and Marie Hankel.

Marie Hankel (1844–1929) – to whom we will return in Chapter 3 – was a prolific early writer of Esperanto literary prose and poetry. She was highly active in the local Esperanto scene in Dresden, where she lived. Having come to Esperanto in the same period as the Beveridges, Hankel became the first president of the Esperantista Literatura Asocio (Esperanto Literature Association) in 1911. At the time John Beveridge served as president of the Scottish Esperanto Federation.

Marie Hankel and Lois Beveridge may or may not have met in Dresden, yet the lives of Marie Hankel and the Beveridges significantly overlapped. In addition to their leadership roles in Esperantujo, both Marie Hankel and John Beveridge had articles published in the same issue of La Revuo. Among Marie Hankel’s short stories and poems was a piece she published in commemoration of the German humorist and writer Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908).³¹ On the same page of the literary magazine was an obituary written by John Beveridge in honour of the mathematician Lord William Kelvin (1824–1907).³²

Just as with many other Esperanto speakers at the time, Lois Beveridge, Marie Hankel and John Beveridge had mastered the language to a level of proficiency well beyond passive reading or the odd icebreaker in classroom conversations. They translated and published literary prose and poetry, as well as content of general interest to a wider readership – and they did so as volunteers, with no direct payback or monetary incentive. Regardless of having ever met in person, Hankel and the Beveridges certainly met one another on paper.

None of these activities and encounters would have been possible without the underbelly of hundreds of local clubs like the ones in Dundee and Dresden. These often-unacknowledged local clubs were responsible for the heavy work of promoting the language, arranging the teaching and sales of learning materials, and congregating at the local level. Most importantly, local clubs also tailored Esperanto to the demands and interests of people whose lives had little in common with Zamenhof’s in 1887 Warsaw. Relatedly, the Universal Congresses of Esperanto – short-lived events for a few summer days every year – would perhaps not have existed without the support of local clubs who, ultimately, were the ones responsible for inviting and hosting these large-scale materialisations of Esperantujo.

After Janette King moved to Newcastle, a certain Alexander Pride took over as president of the Dundee Esperanto Club, preceding John Beveridge’s presidency in 1908. That year, The British Esperantist reported that the club was ‘still small in point of numbers, but the members are enthusiasts and are hopeful of gaining new converts’.³³ On other occasions, the Dundee press praised the ‘local Esperanto success’ when both Alexander Pride and Lois Beveridge gained, through examination, the British Esperanto Association’s advanced diploma in language proficiency. Holders of this diploma, the article explained, were recognised teachers able to organise language exams in the district. ‘With Esperantists in Dundee qualified to act as examiners, it is probable that the number of candidates for the diploma will be much larger in the future.’³⁴

In the years that followed, the Dundee club indeed flourished, with numerous regular events. One of these was held on 9 April 1912 at the Lamb’s Hotel, where everything had started a few years earlier. That evening, the club’s president invited members for tetrinkado, kantoj, deklamoj and babilado. Coming together for tea, singing, literary recitations, an evening lecture or simply an informal chat constituted a typical evening in any Esperanto club. From social gatherings to outings – involving picnics, excursions and visits to Esperanto clubs in places nearby – Esperanto clubs brought together men and women, younger people like the Beveridge daughters and older demographics, as well as people from a variety of professional backgrounds, including clergymen, solicitors, journalists and librarians.

The Beveridge family was actively involved in these early club activities, turning the practices of getting together and congregating into part and parcel of their local experience of Esperantujo. A social gathering in 1908 included the songs La Espero – the anthem of Esperanto – and Serenade sung by Heather Beveridge, and the song Mia Esperantistino performed by John Beveridge. Along with Heather Beveridge, three other either young or unmarried women – indicated as ‘F-ino’ and, thus, as Miss in the programme – also performed that evening.³⁵

Such evenings were first and foremost social. They certainly served the purpose of language practice, but they were also about building relationships, being together and having fun. Amidst conversations that constantly switched between Esperanto, English and, occasionally, Scots, there must have been laughter over debates about how to say such and such words in Esperanto, which suffix to use and why the Esperanto word for ‘shelf’ was breto, rather than the more English-friendly ŝelfo*.

Like in chess clubs or book clubs, conversations and events in the Esperanto club did not necessarily revolve around Esperanto. Rather, chess, books and Esperanto were primarily the means and motivators for people to join a local club, come together on a regular basis and do things with people with whom they might become friends. Coming home from such events, some may have felt inspired to do more with the language, such as writing poetry, exchanging correspondence with Esperanto speakers abroad or even travel to a congress – or, in some cases, simply go along to the next social gathering of the club.

Why only spread the word when we could also travel and have fun?

The Dundee club was by no means exceptional in shaping the local materialisations of Esperantujo. However, it was a particularly successful one, with constant activities and a steady membership rising to around one hundred members by around 1910.³⁶ While Esperanto speakers expected the language to connect people from distant places and across borders, Esperanto connected people at the local level in the first place.

In 1908, a group of people from Perth – some thirty kilometres further inland from Dundee, along the River Tay – reached out for support to create a local Esperanto club, seeking advice on how to reproduce Dundee’s success. The person chosen to be the link between the two places was Lois Beveridge – after all, she was one of the few certified Esperanto teachers at the time. Young and active, Lois Beveridge soon found herself commuting between Dundee and Perth to run weekly evening classes and help organise social events.³⁷

A photograph taken in 1908 captures the Perth Esperanto Club at the time – a group of twenty-eight adults and one child gathered in a park (Figure 2.1). Precisely half of the group is made up of women, which was not unusual for Esperanto clubs at the time. The people in the photograph appear dressed for the occasion: men wearing suits and hats, women wearing long dresses, most of them with white blouses and hats – some of which were elaborate and unlike people’s everyday attire. Despite being staged, this photograph shows an air of spontaneous joy: people are smiling, with some sheepish grins and open laughter. While Esperanto was conceived as a serious response to ethnolinguistic tensions, aimed at fostering cross-border understanding, this image from Perth reflects the more personal, communal pleasures of Esperanto life. Photographs from other locations during this period capture a comparable atmosphere of warmth, conviviality and shared enthusiasm around the language.³⁸

In addition to language classes, the Perth Esperanto Club organised social evenings similar to those in Dundee. On Christmas Eve in 1908, the club celebrated the end of the year with a Festkunveno (Festive Gathering). The somewhat makeshift, handwritten programme consisted of talks, committee reports, a violinist and a juggler for entertainment. Lois Beveridge gave a talk on her experiences at the Universal Congress in Dresden earlier that year. The leaflet with the programme also contained the lyrics of La Espero, the Esperanto anthem that became a fixture of such festive events.³⁹

Likewise, a Sociala Kunveno (Social Gathering) held at Perth’s Royal George Hotel on the evening of 15 February 1912, in tribute to Zamenhof’s birthday, included musical performances, dances – from waltz to a sword dance and quadrilles – a violin performance, magical entertainment, cards and table games, as well as a running buffet. Beyond simply learning the language and occasionally exchanging correspondence, many Esperanto speakers saw these social activities as alluring motives driving them to regularly use the language. Along these lines, the longer-term success of such clubs relied on the constant remaking of such activities and gatherings. From the programmes of social evenings that survived time, Esperanto speakers certainly knew how to have fun and organise enjoyable evenings.

By the time the Perth Esperanto Club was formed, The British Esperantist reported on activities of clubs in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Leith, which had also been founded in the first decade of 1900. Edinburgh’s club boasted a membership of 320 and was growing steadily. The Glasgow club was ‘actively engaged in propaganda and study. The president’s class is progressing well, and the weekly club meetings are a great success. A special feature of these meetings is the reading in Esperanto of papers on various literary subjects.’⁴⁰ The latter included, for instance, lectures in Esperanto on Charles Dickens and Scottish poetry, which attracted up to 200 attendees.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Glasgow had a population of over 775,000 inhabitants, and Edinburgh’s population was close to 400,000. Esperanto clubs flourished in both cities, with membership figures comparable to those in continental European cities. Dresden – which hosted the 1908 Universal Congress of Esperanto – boasted a thriving Esperanto scene, while Prague, with a population of around 200,000, was home to around ten Esperanto clubs at the time.

Similar patterns of producing and reproducing the Esperanto community at the local level can be traced in many places across Europe. For instance, similar to what the Beveridge family did in Dundee, Julie Šupichová (1884–1970) – a young teacher, from the same generation as the Beveridge daughters – launched an Esperanto circle in her hometown, Červený Kostelec, a town in Bohemia of around 8,000 inhabitants. A few years later, in 1910, upon moving to Prague, she founded another Esperanto Circle, which she led for several years. In addition to founding clubs and producing Esperanto learning materials for Czech speakers, Julie Šupichová served as the secretary of the 1921 Universal Congress of Esperanto, held in Prague – the congress that marked the resurgence of annual international congresses following the interruption caused by the First World War.⁴¹

The dissemination of this international auxiliary language in big cities with international trade, as well as in cultural and intellectual hubs like Edinburgh, Dresden and Prague, was perhaps not a surprise. After all, these were places where the appeal of a language aimed at international communication felt especially immediate and relevant. Yet the reach of Esperanto and the (re)production of Esperantujo extended well beyond these urban centres into smaller towns and their hinterlands. In this regard, Scotland serves here as a case in point to spotlight a broader phenomenon also happening in places such as southern Finland, Bulgaria and eastern Bohemia, as Chapter 1 hinted at.

By 1910, several new clubs had mushroomed across Scotland. What started in Dundee and spread to Perth was repeated in coastal places like Arbroath, Montrose, St Andrews and, further north, in Aberdeen. Montrose at the time had a population of around 12,000, and Arbroath, just over 22,000.⁴² These towns – as well as smaller villages such as Cowdenbeath and Burntisland, north of Edinburgh – were not key cultural hubs, did not host major trade activities and had no key industries. Yet, Esperanto drew the attention and spoke to the interests of people in these places.

The consolidation of local Esperanto clubs was not always easy. In some places, like Aberdeen (150,000 inhabitants), it took several attempts to form a functioning club. Similar to Dundee, an early attempt at it around 1904 failed. It was a later visit by London-based, experienced Esperanto speaker John Bredall – who gave a ‘very convincing presentation of his case, which aroused great enthusiasm’ – that eventually boosted the formation of a club, with evening classes promptly attracting fifty learners.⁴³

How much the success – or sheer survival – of such a club rested on the efforts of one or two very engaged individuals was stressed by David S. Rattray, a local Esperanto speaker who penned, in English, a brief account of the Aberdeen club:

A special tribute must be paid to the good work done by Miss Constance Ogston [who taught the language and organised most outings] who has kept the flag flying through circumstances of great discouragement and difficulty which might well have been fatal to the Esperanto career of one less enthusiastic, courageous, and persevering. Valuable help has also been given by Miss Annie L. Burgess, our esteemed secretary & treasurer, who is the first student of our group to gain the Diploma of the British Esperanto Association, and who in all her work for Esperanto has displayed the qualities of the true pioneer.⁴⁴

If it was not for efforts such as those of Constance Ogston to gain a teaching qualification and pass the language on to newcomers, or Lois Beveridge to teach in Perth, or Annie Burgess to keep the books and minutes of her local club, or Julie Šupichová to found a new group wherever she lived, Esperantujo would perhaps never have been institutionalised.

In his brief account of the development of Esperanto in Scotland, John Beveridge analysed some of the obstacles in the process of building the Esperanto community. First, ‘Scotland has not had so much diversity of language to contend with as many other lands.’⁴⁵ In other words, language diversity at the local and regional levels did not constitute a challenge as it did elsewhere, as Scotland did not offer a contentious scenario where people from different linguistic backgrounds struggled to communicate or clashed with each other. John Beveridge also contended that Scottish people had followed the rise as much as the collapse of Volapük as an earlier international auxiliary language project in the 1880s, which made some of them rather reticent about the prospects of Esperanto. Yet, according to him, the Scots were eager to travel abroad. The potential of going beyond their localities – be it via correspondence exchange or congress attendance – were among the key reasons driving people from these small towns and villages to organise and participate in events that would turn them into fully fledged Esperanto speakers.

Dundee’s 1911 Scottish Congress and Kraków’s 1912 Universal Congress: being at home abroad

In 1912, it was finally John Beveridge’s turn to travel. Four years after his daughter Lois attended the 1908 Universal Congress in Dresden, he set off for the Universal Congress of Esperanto in Kraków. Formerly the capital of Poland and, at the time, part of Austria–Hungary, Kraków had been chosen to host the congress in celebration of Esperanto’s Polish origins twenty-five years after Ludwik Zamenhof’s first publication. As for many others who had the opportunity to attend such large gatherings, visiting a Universal Congress of Esperanto surely was the highlight of John Beveridge’s long-standing engagement with the language (Figure 2.2).

In previous years, John Beveridge had helped found and then presided over the local club in Dundee. He also established a wide network of pen pals, sent back and forth Esperanto materials, exchanged friendly postcards and postal stamps, published in Esperanto periodicals and participated in translating the New Testament. In the latter process, he also exchanged postcards with Ludwik Zamenhof, and the congress in Kraków would constitute the only opportunity for the two to ever meet in person.⁴⁶ However, meeting Zamenhof was not the reason for his trip. John Beveridge’s main purpose was to experience a Universal Congress in action, be part of it and, ultimately, propose, on behalf of the Scottish Esperanto Federation, to host a Universal Congress in Edinburgh in the near future.

The Scottish Esperanto Federation was one of the key spaces in which John Beveridge played a leading role. Two years before the Kraków congress, in 1910, John Beveridge became the founding president of the Federation. In 1911, he took on the role of vice-president, with J. D. Simpson – a founding member of the Montrose club – becoming president. The Federation was organised in four districts – Norda (north), Centra (central), Okcidenta (west) and Orienta (east) – each with its own secretary. Overall, fifteen clubs were affiliated with the newly founded Federation, which featured a total of 531 Esperanto-speaking members. Whereas the Esperanto clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow boasted the largest membership figures, it was John Beveridge’s home district in east Scotland that was singled out as the most active and vibrant region.⁴⁷

The main purpose of the Scottish Esperanto Federation was to further promote the language and institutionalise the language community by replicating at the national level the model of founding new clubs, gaining members and garnering new learners. The first annual report listed among the Federation’s goals to foster the foundation of new clubs in Aberdeen, Inverness, Crieff, Cupar, Angus, Forfar, Arbroath and Oban. While new clubs in Aberdeen and Arbroath did come into being, this is less certain in other locations. As part of this strategy of founding clubs, the meetings of the Federation’s steering committee were tactically held in small Scottish villages where there were no Esperanto clubs yet.⁴⁸

The foundation of the Scottish Esperanto Federation mimicked at the national level what had been achieved in 1908 – two years earlier – at the transnational level, with the establishment of the World Esperanto Association, then headquartered in Geneva. Between the local and the transnational level, many other national associations were founded during this period to coordinate activities and institutionalise the growing Esperanto community.

Even preceding the formal establishment of the Scottish Esperanto Federation, the most active members of several local clubs regularly gathered to organise the Scottish Congresses of Esperanto held in Stirling (1906), Linlithgow (1907), Edinburgh (1908) and Perth (1909). It was during the 1910 Scottish Congress in Glasgow that the Scottish Federation came into being. With John Beveridge as its first president, the following Scottish congress would be held in Dundee.

Leading up to the June 1911 congress in Dundee, the secretary of the Scottish Federation announced that the coming congress would ‘be the most interesting and important Scottish Congress yet held’.⁴⁹ The congress’s honorary presidents were John Pollen – then President of the British Esperanto Association – and, more prominently, Winston Churchill (1874–1965) as Home Secretary and Alexander Wilkie (1850–1929) as Member of Parliament for Dundee. In addition to attracting people – both Esperanto speakers and non-speakers curious about the potential of the language – such congresses also attracted the attention of the press, as well as constituting opportunities for Esperanto to gain the favour of political authorities.

The 1911 congress in Dundee included talks and debates on topics ranging from Esperanto in medicine and the commercial world to the potential of Esperanto in the Red Cross, in peace movements, in missionary work and among the blind. Close to John Beveridge’s heart and practical commitments, there was also a session to report on the translation of the Bible into Esperanto.⁵⁰ Aside from one of the opening speeches as president of the Federation, John Beveridge led the church service on the Sunday of the congress.

In addition to these more formal activities, the congress programme also featured teatime gatherings, dinners, songs, dances, a theatrical performance and visits to the city’s Victoria Art Galleries. These activities were conducted entirely in Esperanto, which was the key feature that made national and international congresses the highlight of many people’s experience with the language. For a period of four days in Dundee (16–19 June 1911) or eight days in Kraków (11–18 August 1912), Esperanto speakers could almost completely step out of their linguistic comfort zones and daily routines – carried out in regional or national languages – to join a language community whose membership constituted an entirely separate facet of their life experiences.

During Esperanto congresses, the everyday work commitments of a clergyman or journalist lost their centrality as they engaged in voluntary, collective efforts to perform a theatre play, just as solicitors set aside their office work to act as tour guides showing Esperanto speakers around a local art gallery. Speaking Esperanto constituted the cue to temporarily leave behind one’s everyday concerns in order to participate in a microcosm founded on egalitarianism, voluntary work, creativity and a heightened sense of community.

One of the main outcomes of the Dundee congress was to lay the foundation for the Federation to propose Edinburgh as the host city for the 1915 Universal Congress of Esperanto.⁵¹ It was agreed that this proposal would be formally made at the following year’s Universal Congress in Kraków. The honour to do so fell on John Beveridge. The 1913 annual report of the Scottish Esperanto Federation proudly announced that Edinburgh’s invitation to host the 1915 congress had indeed been accepted at the 1913 Universal Congress of Esperanto held in Bern. The prospect of creating the highlight of the Esperanto experience in Scotland motivated local speakers to further teach the language, organise local activities and form clubs in preparation for this major event.

Concluding remarks

Not all members of the Dundee Esperanto Club and the Scottish Esperanto Federation were Beveridges, Hankels, Simpsons and Šupichovás. As with any club – be it a tennis or a book club – many members simply pay their membership fees and enjoy attending gatherings, without taking on additional responsibilities. Yet, such clubs exist because there are people who put time and energy into setting them up and running them. It was these volunteer presidents, treasurers and secretaries of local Esperanto clubs in the early twentieth century who ensured the spread of Esperanto and played a role in shaping this language community, providing speakers not only with reasons to learn the language but, most importantly, with opportunities to regularly use it.

Just as ordinary individuals – arguably more so than key figures like Ludwik Zamenhof – came to constitute the backbone of Esperantujo, it was at the local level that the foundations of Esperantujo were laid. Congresses alone, held only once a year, were not enough to ensure the long-term stability of a geographically dispersed Esperantujo. As John Beveridge’s accounts illustrate, while crossing borders may be the ultimate goal for many people learning Esperanto, one does not normally live in a constant state of border-crossing. In this scenario, local Esperanto clubs provided opportunities to breathe life again and again into the language community throughout the year, between congresses.

In August 1914, as the First World War broke out, most cross-border Esperanto activities were interrupted, just as much international communication was disrupted in one way or another. As a consequence, the Universal Congress of Esperanto planned for Paris in 1914 was cancelled at the last minute and the one scheduled for Edinburgh did not take place in 1915.

What next? Reaching back to the question that opened this chapter, becoming an Esperanto speaker involves being committed to regularly create and join occasions on which to speak the language – and, in this manner, to constantly create and recreate the Esperanto-speaking community, particularly at the local level. By founding clubs, leading organisations, writing, publishing, exchanging correspondence and attending congresses, John Beveridge played his part in this community-building practice and made the most of what Esperanto had to offer.

Meanwhile, what comes next in the face of the First World War? The Universal Congress scheduled for Edinburgh did not take place in 1915, but the city did host a Universal Congress in 1926, after cross-border travelling had been fully resumed following the war. However, at a period in which international communication was heavily disrupted, it was the social gatherings at the local level – as well as personal correspondence and magazines – that kept the language alive and increasingly emphasised the potential of Esperanto in helping reunite, through an international auxiliary language, a divided world, at a time when nationalisms seemed to have triumphed over internationalism.

Notes

1. 1  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/4.

2. 2  Guilherme Fians, ‘Mind the Age Gap: Communication Technologies and Intergenerational Language Transmission among Esperanto Speakers in France’, Language Problems and Language Planning 44, no. 1 (2020): 87–108; Sabine Fiedler, ‘Standardization and Self-Regulation in an International Speech Community: The Case of Esperanto’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 177 (2006): 67–90.

3. 3  See Humphrey Tonkin, Lingvo kaj popolo: Aktualaj problemoj de la Esperanto-movado (Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 2006).

4. 4  Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals.

5. 5  See K. G. Beauchamp, Exhibiting Electricity (London: The Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1997).

6. 6  On newspaper coverage of Esperanto at the time, see the newspaper collection Zeitungsausschnitte 1898–1915, available at the Austrian National Library.

7. 7  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/17.

8. 8  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/17.

9. 9  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/17.

10. 10  Félicien de Ménil, ed. Tutmonda Jarlibro Esperantista Enhavanta La Adresaron de Dro Zamenhof por 1907 (Paris: Hachette, 1907), 254–71.

11. 11  Patricia Dennison, The Evolution of Scotland’s Towns: Creation, Growth and Fragmentation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 300; Michael Anderson, Scotland’s Populations from the 1850s to Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 99.

12. 12  Jim Tomlinson, Dundee and the Empire: ‘Juteopolis’ 1850–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Tara Sethia, ‘The Rise of the Jute Manufacturing Industry in Colonial India: A Global Perspective’, Journal of World History 7, no. 1 (1996): 71–99.

13. 13  Emma M. Wainwright, ‘Constructing Gendered Workplace “Types”: The Weaver-Millworker Distinction in Dundee’s Jute Industry, c. 1880–1910’, Gender, Place & Culture 14, no. 4 (2007): 467–9.

14. 14  Eleanor Gordon, Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland 1850–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 142; Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins, eds., The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (London: University of London Press, 2021).

15. 15  John Kemp, ‘Red Tayside? Political Change in Early Twentieth-Century Dundee’, in Christopher Whatley and Bob Harris, eds., Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), 217–39.

16. 16  George B. Wilson, ‘A Statistical Review of the Variations during the Last Twenty Years in the Consumption of Intoxicating Drinks in the United Kingdom, and in Convictions for Offences Connected with Intoxication, with Discussion of the Causes to Which These Variations May Be Ascribed’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 75, no. 2 (1912): 183–247, here 231–2. George Bailey Wilson, Alcohol and the Nation: A Contribution to the Study of the Liquor Problem in the United Kingdom from 1800 to 1935 (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1940), 293–5.

17. 17  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/15, 2.

18. 18  See, for instance, The British Esperantist, 3 March 1905, 41, on the formation of an Esperanto League by the Swedish Temperance Association to foster international cooperation. On the global temperance movement, see Nikolay Kamenov, Global Temperance and the Balkans: American Missionaries, Swiss Scientists and Bulgarian Socialists, 1870–1940 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991).

19. 19  See, for instance, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Stefan Huebner and Ian Tyrrell, eds., Spreading Protestant Modernity: Global Perspectives on the Social Work of the YMCA and YWCA, 1889–1970 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021).

20. 20  Universala Kongreso de Esperanto, 2a Universala Kongreso de Esperanto: Nomaro de la Kongresanoj (Geneva: Universala Kongreso de Esperanto, 1907).

21. 21  British Esperanto Association, Esperanto for Beginners (London: British Esperanto Association, n.d.); James Robbie, The Esperanto Home-Student (Edinburgh: Leith Burghs Pilot, 1913); British Esperanto Association, Esperanto for All: How to Read, Write and Speak It (London: British Esperanto Association, 1913); George Cox, A Grammar and Commentary on the International Language Esperanto (London: British Esperanto Association, 1914).

22. 22  John Beveridge Collection, Bev PM8202.E8; 4; Bev PM8213.E8R7; Bev PM8213.C7. See, for instance, Paul Fruictier, Esperanta sintakso laŭ verkoj de S-ro D-ro Zamenhof kaj aliaj aŭtoroj (Paris: Hachette, 1907).

23. 23  Cox, Grammar and Commentary, v.

24. 24  Cox, Grammar and Commentary, vii–ix.

25. 25  Robbie, Esperanto Home-Student, non-paginated.

26. 26  See John Beveridge Collection, Bev PM8285.D6A5; Lewis Carroll, La aventuroj de Alico en Mirlando, trans. E. L. Kearney (London: British Esperanto Association, 1910).

27. 27  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/15.

28. 28  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/2b.

29. 29  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 37–46; David Barton and Mary Hamilton, Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community (London: Routledge, 2012).

30. 30  Lois Beveridge, ‘Eĉ pereos tio ĉi’, The British Esperantist, March 1908, 43.

31. 31  Marie Hankel, ‘Wilhelm Busch’, La Revuo, III, March 1908, 348–9.

32. 32  John Beveridge, ‘Barono Kelvin’, La Revuo, III, March 1908, 347–8.

33. 33  The British Esperantist, January 1908, 15. See also Oficiala Gazeto Esperantista, November 1908, 147.

34. 34  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/17.

35. 35  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/17.

36. 36  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/15.

37. 37  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/15.

38. 38  See, for instance, photographs taken in 1908 of the Konversacia Esperantista Klubo in Copenhagen, available at the Austrian National Library, 1092 B, 24.3 C.

39. 39  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/17.

40. 40  The British Esperantist, January 1908, 15.

41. 41  Stanislav Kamarýt, Historio de la Esperanto-Movado en Čehoslovakio: Iom da historio kaj iom da rememoroj (Prague: Čeha Esperanto-Asocio, 1983), 53–4.

42. 42  Dennisson, The Evolution of Scotland’s Towns, 300.

43. 43  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/3.

44. 44  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/5.

45. 45  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36244/1.

46. 46  John Beveridge Collection, Ms36242/169; Ms36242/223.

47. 47  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/16.

48. 48  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/16.

49. 49  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/15.

50. 50  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/15.

51. 51  John Beveridge Collection, Ms38908/16.