When the Clyde Ran Red

by Maggie Craig

  Realizing that this is the greatest crisis in our lives I cannot find

  words to say more. If you come I’d prefer you to come at once and walk right in. Whatever course we follow, remember that you are the only woman

  I love and can now love.

  In June 1922 Maclean won a seat in the local elections for Glasgow’s Kingston Ward. His printed election address warns of the rise of the ‘Fascisti’ in Germany and Britain. He also warned voters off reforms which might seem to be to their benefit but in reality were only applying those patches to capitalism. Once again it all comes down to economics: ‘The worker who votes for the upholders of the system of society that allows him to be robbed of the larger part of the wealth produced by him and his fellows, is clearly a simpleton.’

  Right to the end, he kept faith with Marxism, as his final election address shows:

  For the wage-earning class there is but one alternative to a capitalist war for markets. The root of all the trouble in society at present is the inevitable robbery of the workers by the propertied class, simply because it is the propertied class. To end that robbery would be to end the social troubles of modern society.

  Elated by his success in the municipal election, he decided to contest the Gorbals as a Labour candidate at the upcoming general election. His decision plunged Agnes Maclean into despair: ‘It is just throwing yourself away, and money that is needed to keep your family.’

  Her own health was not too good at the time but she had decided she would ‘go in for nursing or something that will give me some independence and that will be a bit cheerier. We will need to arrange about the children in some way.’ Angry and upset, she told him it was his duty to stand by her and leave politics alone for the moment. Perhaps hoping to persuade him, she agreed to go back to him.

  She found him at a low ebb physically. It was November, month of freezing fogs, but he was still addressing meetings, many out of doors. He had loaned his only coat to a black friend from Barbados who was shivering in the cold of a Scottish winter.

  Determined to work until his last breath to get his message across, John Maclean was on a platform at an open-air meeting when he collapsed and had to be carried home. He was found to be suffering from double pneumonia. He died on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1923, at the age of 44.

  Tens of thousands of people turned out to see him make his final journey, his friend James Maxton one of the pallbearers who carried the coffin out of the house to the horse-drawn hearse. Afterwards money was collected which gave Agnes Maclean and her daughters a reasonable weekly income for quite a number of years. She died in 1953, 30 years after her husband.

  The Soviet Union remembered John Maclean on the centenary of his birth. In 1979 they produced a postage stamp in his honour. In 1973 a cairn in Pollokshaws was erected to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death. The inscription reads, ‘Famous pioneer of working-class education, he forged the Scottish link in the golden chain of world socialism.’

  The revolution he called for never came. Yet there are still those today who continue to make the pilgrimage to that cairn and to his grave in Eastwood Cemetery, paying their respects and taking inspiration from John Maclean, the man whose dedication to his cause was absolute.

  18

  Bloody Friday 1919: The Battle of George Square

  Military Ready to Deal with Clyde Rioters. We didn’t regard the Forty Hours Strike as a revolution.

  The year started with a tragedy. On Hogmanay 1918, HMS Iolaire put out from Kyle of Lochalsh, heading for Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. On board were almost 300 soldiers coming home from the war. In the early hours of New Year’s Day 1919 the Iolaire struck notorious rocks a mile outside Stornoway Harbour. Valiant efforts saved many of the men on board but more than 200 drowned as the ship went down. It was a heartbreaking blow after four long years of war.

  People were exhausted in 1919. The war was over but the peace had yet to be won. Promises had been made of a land fit for heroes but there were few signs this was about to arrive any time soon. After the strain and losses of the war, another blow was dealt when the influenza pandemic swept round the world.

  Between May 1918 and the spring of 1919, Glasgow experienced three outbreaks which caused four thousand deaths. Many of those were of children under five, who were particularly susceptible. Around the world, millions died of the Spanish Flu. Yet it is almost a forgotten tragedy. After so many deaths during the previous four years, perhaps people simply could not absorb any more grief.

  In politics, the Representation of the People Act of 1918 had given the vote to men over 21 and women over 30. Despite this hard-won and so long awaited extension to the franchise, the post-war election disappointed many. There was a widespread view that the poll had been rushed and nothing much had changed.

  As Davie Kirkwood put it, ‘In that election the Socialists went down like ninepins. The country had only one hero, Lloyd George, and only one object: “Make the Germans pay.”’ The Welsh Wizard had now become the Man Who Won the War.

  A new coalition government was formed. Although the Conservatives under Andrew Bonar Law had more seats, Lloyd George’s popularity with so many voters meant that he remained prime minister. The Labour Party had returned 57 MPs to Westminster, the greatest number yet, but they had little power in this new Parliament.

  Frustration mounted as the wartime economy slammed on the brakes. There was no longer the need to go hell for leather on munitions and the Clyde’s order books were beginning to look sparse. Thousands of demobbed servicemen were flooding into a labour market where there soon wasn’t enough work to go round.

  The STUC, Glasgow Trades and Labour Council and other trade unionists came up with an idea. Reducing industry’s working week from 54 to 40 hours would allow what work there was to be shared out more fairly. Resistance to this idea from employers, the government and some unions led to calls for industrial action. The dispute became known as the 40 Hours Strike.

  On Sunday, 26 January 1919, 10,000 people, some waving red flags, marched from St Andrew’s Halls to the City Chambers. In their report the next day in which they gave their readers that information, the Evening Times quoted one of the speakers who addressed the marchers in George Square. Mr Cameron of the Discharged Soldiers’ Federation said his organization was ‘backing the workers this time and looked for the workers to back them. They had fought for their country and they now wanted to own it.’ The next day St Andrew’s Halls was again the focus. Three thousand people attended the meeting where the strike was officially called. Over the next few days the protest gathered momentum.

  Workers at the Port Dundas and Pinkston power stations were among those who came out, cutting electricity supplies throughout Glasgow. They agreed to keep the lights on in the city’s hospitals and streets and to keep Glasgow and their fellow strikers moving by keeping the trams running. By Friday, 31 January, 60,000 people had downed tools.

  Putting the numbers of strikers at 40,000, the Glasgow Herald referred to them and their techniques as ‘the methods of terrorism’. The Scotsman too referred to ‘Terrorism on the Clyde’. The Times had sympathy for the exhaustion of working people after the strain of the war but no sympathy with the ‘gangs of revolutionaries’ it believed were exploiting them: ‘The three firebrands named by the Lord Provost are notorious rebels against all social order.’

  The three firebrands in question were Manny Shinwell, Davie Kirkwood and Neil MacLean. The Times noted that Manny Shinwell ‘is described as a Polish Jew’. In fact, he was born to Jewish parents in the East End of London, moved to Glasgow with them and became an adopted Glaswegian. Formerly of Singer’s, Neil MacLean was one of the 26 Scottish Labour MPs elected to Parliament in the previous month’s poll. ‘These are the men who have challenged the Government,’ wrote The Times disapprovingly.

  On Wednesday, 29 January a committee of strikers asked Glasgow’s Lord Provost to intervene on their behalf with the government. James Stewart said he wou
ld do what he could and asked the committee to come back to see him on the Friday. They brought a few friends with them. Davie Kirkwood described George Square as ‘black with men’.

  Notices requesting their presence had been placed in The Strike Bulletin, Organ of the 40 Hours Movement. The news-sheet was published daily over the course of the dispute and cost one penny, ‘although admirers say it is worth Threepence’. On Thursday, 30 January, their notice ‘TO ALL STRIKERS’ told everyone to come to George Square the following day at half past twelve: ‘BE IN TIME AND BE THERE.’

  Some say 60,000 people gathered in the centre of Glasgow that Friday. Other estimates put the number as high as 100,000. The famous photograph of the event which gives this book its cover is the classic image of Red Clydeside. The unknown press photographer who shot it certainly framed a surging mass of humanity, all crammed in together, all eyes on the City Chambers. If Scotland ever really did come close to revolution, this is the favoured moment.

  Some men have shinned up the ornate lamp posts outside the City Chambers, Glasgow’s seat of municipal power. Red flags have been unfurled. Manny Shinwell, Willie Gallacher and Davie Kirkwood were to the fore. John Maclean was not in Glasgow, fulfilling speaking engagements and attending political meetings in Cumberland, Manchester and London. James Maxton was in Glasgow but did not come to the square. For once in his life he chose to avoid trouble.

  Winston Churchill was now secretary of state for war. The day before Bloody Friday, the Evening Times reported what he had to say about the 40 Hours Strike:

  The present situation in Glasgow had been brewing for a long time. The disaffected were in a minority, and, in his opinion, there would have to be a conflict to clear the air. We should be careful to have plenty of provocation before taking strong measures. By going gently at first we should get the support we wanted from the nation, and then troops could be used more effectively. The moment for their use had not yet arrived. In the meantime the Defence of the Realm Act was still in force, and some of the leaders of the revolt should be seized.

  At the same meeting of what was still called the War Cabinet, the Secretary of State for Scotland said it was clearer than ever that it was a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike. This was a Bolshevist rising. Raising the hare and the panic, perhaps seeking to justify those strong measures, he stated there were no more than 10,000 malcontents and he knew public opinion would ‘support the Government in quelling any disorder’.

  The Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff advised that six tanks and a hundred motor lorries with drivers were going north by rail that night. The War Cabinet discussed prosecuting the strike leaders under DORA but decided that ‘for the moment no further action was necessary by the Government’.

  It’s no wonder the government was nervous of Glasgow’s strikers. Not only had Red Clydeside earned a powerful reputation for its readiness to confront authority, what was going on in Europe must have sent a shiver down the spine. The shock waves pulsing out from Russia’s October Revolution of not much more than a year before were still being felt. Even socialists and communists who had welcomed that with such jubilation had been astonished by how quickly and completely the Tsar and the apparatus and institutions of Imperial Russia had been swept away.

  The German Kaiser had abdicated at the end of the war and Germany had just experienced its short-lived revolution. That ended in spectacular failure and death for its leaders, who included Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. On 15 January 1919, two weeks before the Battle of George Square, they were taken from the Adlon Hotel in Berlin and executed without trial. That the next European revolution might erupt on Red Clydeside could not be ruled out.

  Yet few of the strikers seemed to have thought that. Harry McShane said, ‘We didn’t regard the Forty Hours Strike as a revolution. We saw it more as the beginning of things.’

  Neil MacLean, Shinwell, Kirkwood and Harry Hopkins of the ASE went into the City Chambers to meet the Lord Provost and hear from him what the government had said. While they were in there, around noon, the men and women who’d made sure they arrived early in George Square began to get restive.

  Nobody can quite agree on what happened next. What is undisputed is that, as Glasgow’s Evening News put it, ‘The police found it necessary to make a baton charge, and strikers and civilians – men, women and children – were felled in the melée that followed.’

  The demonstrators responded with stones and bottles, taking those from a lorry which had got stuck in North Frederick Street. Sheriff Mackenzie came out of the City Chambers, saw what was going on and decided to read the Riot Act, a copy of which he had conveniently brought with him, ordering the crowd to disperse. It was the first time in 50 years it had been read and the last time it ever was read:

  Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the Act made in the first year of King George the First, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.

  Sheriff Mackenzie wasn’t very far into it before his copy of the act was plucked from his hand by one of the strikers but he managed to complete the words from memory.

  Tramcars had become marooned in the ocean of people. One female driver was stopped by men jumping up onto her platform and making off with the reversing handle. Afraid because of all the bottles that were flying about and because the windows of her car had been smashed, Mary Beattie left the tram.

  She told her story at the trial of the strike leaders which took place at the High Court in Edinburgh in April 1919. One policeman giving evidence told the court, ‘There was a dense crowd, and young men mounted the cars and were hanging on all over them like a Christmas tree.’ This same policeman claimed to have heard Davie Kirkwood shout from a window in the City Chambers overlooking Cochrane Street, urging the crowd to rush the police: ‘Never mind their batons. Get into them.’ Glasgow’s Town Clerk told a different story, saying Kirkwood was doing his best to calm the crowd and had actually said, ‘This is not the opportune time for us; our time will come.’

  There’s plenty of eyewitness evidence that Davie Kirkwood rushed out of the City Chambers and into George Square when he heard the noise of the disturbance and was almost immediately knocked unconscious by a police baton. Willie Gallacher was also injured and he, Kirkwood and Shinwell were arrested.

  The fighting continued, spreading up into North Frederick Street and Cathedral Street and later developing into running battles down to the river at Clyde Street and along as far as Glasgow Green. Nobody died but both demonstrators and policemen were injured. Official figures put the wounded at 34 strikers and 19 policemen. Given the numbers in the square, this would seem to indicate most people in the huge crowd were not involved in the fighting. The Scotsman reported on some police officers who were:

  WORSE THAN FRANCE

  Sergeant John Caskie described how an inspector and himself were pinned up against the wall while the crowd threw missiles at them. Witness had his helmet bashed and received a severe blow with half a brick on the shoulder. The inspector was hit by a number of stones. They dodged the heavy ones and submitted to the lighter ones. (Laughter.) The attack on the inspector and himself would last about five or ten minutes.

  Constable Campbell Smart, who stated that he was hit on the head, hands, and feet, declared that while he had had some unpleasant experiences in France, where he had served in the Army up to the point of the Armistice, there was nothing worse than they had had in Cathedral Street.

  Harry McShane agreed with that judgement of the situation up in Cathedral Street:

  Finally the police ran for it and the strikers went after them. There were a lot of closes in Cathedral Street and they rushed up these closes to try and get over the back wall. But there were men catching them by the legs and pulling them down. Some of them got a terrible hiding. I think the best fight
was up in Cathedral Street.

  Glasgow’s Evening News was first with the report on the day, carrying it that night:

  STRIKE BATTLE

  RIOT ACT READ

  Police Charge the Mob

  WILD GLASGOW SCENES

  About 30 Persons Injured

  LEADERS ARRESTED

  In the tense hours and days which followed, those army tanks which had been dispatched north rolled through the streets of Glasgow in a show of strength designed to impress and subdue the troublesome natives. It’s part of the romance of the story that the troops who marched in with them were young English conscripts, it being thought too risky to deploy the Scottish troops in Maryhill Barracks. The chance of their changing sides was too high.

  This may well be true, although Harry McShane recalled going ‘to explain things’ to some soldiers arriving at Buchanan Street, ‘the main station for trains from the north’. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were Scottish, of course, and McShane doesn’t specify, more interested in them not knowing very much about the labour movement:

  They were quite prepared to use their weapons, about that there is no doubt. I’ll always remember one of them pointing at his rifle and saying, ‘This is better than bottles.’ I tried to talk to them on the road down to George Square, but the officers were getting between us and the men. But those young soldiers were aggressive too.

  The Daily Record did its best to diminish the demonstrators, presenting them as rowdy youths, mindless neds and thugs. Its report of the events of Bloody Friday refers to ‘disgraceful scenes’ and ‘little groups of malcontents’ who started assembling in George Square from early morning onwards:

  Singing snatches of their favourite ‘Red Flag’ as they swung along, the demonstration presented a menacing and truculent appearance. For the most part the ranks were composed of the prentice class, hefty young fellows upon whom a sense of civic responsibility has not yet dawned.