When the Clyde Ran Red

by Maggie Craig

  The Glasgow Herald was at least more honest about the fear the Battle of George Square struck into the hearts of the city’s Establishment. John Wheatley might have stated quite clearly in 1918 that the ILP rejected revolution: ‘The people of this country may have socialism when they consider it worth their vote.’ Not convinced, the Glasgow Herald declared that the people who had caused the trouble in the square were Bolsheviks.

  Bolsheviks, sometimes Bolshevists, were entering popular culture as the villains of the piece. Glasgow 1919: The Story of the 40 Hours Strike includes among its press cuttings and Harry McShane’s account of Bloody Friday and what led up to it an episode of a serial which appeared in the Glasgow Herald on 8 February 1919, one week later.

  ‘Banished from the World’ features ‘Derek Clyde, the famous detective’, a man who ‘sauntered into the room in the cool, listless way that was habitual to him’. Naturally, the languid air is all a front. Our hero has already dealt with one of those cunning Russian revolutionaries:

  . . . when Vladimir Tolstoi, one of the six Russian Bolshevists who had been sent to England and Scotland to spread their pernicious doctrine, had met with a tragic death. He had been blown to fragments at his lodgings in the Gorbals by the explosion of an infernal machine with which he had meant to destroy a vessel that was lying off the Broomielaw.

  The dramatic drawing which accompanies the serial shows an ‘infuriated Bolshevist’ pointing a gun at Derek Clyde, the famous detective: ‘I mean to kill you! I shrink from nothing that is my duty. It will be no crime to destroy one who is the tool of tyrants and oppressors.’ Adding to the mix that dash of casual anti-Semitism so common at the time, the story also includes ‘a Jew named Finkelstein’.

  By Sunday, 2 February The Times’s special correspondent was reporting that the troops on guard in Glasgow seemed to be teaching the strikers a lesson, as there were ‘signs of returning reason. The futility of violence in the face of machine guns and rifles has been realized.’ Those machine guns were mounted on top of the buildings around George Square, with a howitzer in the City Chambers. Would Lord Provost James Stewart really have been prepared to sanction the mowing-down of thousands of Glaswegians, his fellow citizens?

  The Bulletin showed two soldiers in tin helmets and with fixed bayonets at the power stations, describing them as ‘this formidable guard – equal in strength to the guard at a bridge-end on the Rhine’, although it has to be said that they and many of the soldiers in the photographs of the aftermath of Bloody Friday do look very young.

  Despite the soldiers, the tanks in the Trongate, the machine guns in George Square and the Daily Record’s headline of ‘Military Ready to Deal with Clyde Rioters’, Harry McShane said, ‘There was no open threat and we learned to live with them.’

  On Monday, 10 February the 40 Hours Strike was called off, with a recommendation that everyone should go back to work on Wednesday, 12 February. The Glasgow Herald was unable to resist a de haut en bas wagging finger, printing a ‘WARNING TO REVOLUTIONARIES’:

  The strike can hardly be said to have reached an official termination; it died a natural death because it had no moral or financial support, because so very few people wished it to live any longer, and because its continued existence was an obvious anachronism in a community which never took it seriously as a Labour movement, but which objected to it emphatically as a symptom of incipient revolutionary tendencies wholly foreign to the good sense and the political and social beliefs of the people.

  Although James Maxton had not been in George Square on Bloody Friday, he rallied to the support of those who had. A touching little vignette from Davie Kirkwood illustrates the characters of both men:

  When I was arrested after the Riot of the Forty Hours’ Strike, I was taken from the Central Police Station to Duke Street Jail in a Black Maria. Maxton was waiting outside the Central. As I passed he put something in my hand. It was a clean white handkerchief.

  He had remembered my great weakness for a clean hankey.

  The 12 men tried in Edinburgh in April 1919 were charged with ‘forming part of a riotous mob to hold up the traffic in the Square and adjoining streets, to overawe and intimidate the police force on duty there, to forcibly take possession of the Municipal Buildings and the North British Station Hotel’. Five of the defendants, including Kirkwood, Gallacher, Shinwell and Harry Hopkins of the ASE, faced additional charges of inciting a mob ‘of 20,000 or thereby riotous and evilly disposed persons’.

  One of the witnesses for the defence was Rosslyn Mitchell. As a town councillor, he had been on a balcony in the City Chambers watching the crowd, giving him an excellent view of what was going on. He thought the police had initially drawn their batons to push the crowd back to clear the way for a tramcar to pass and it had escalated from there. According to Mitchell’s testimony as reported in The Scotsman:

  . . . some of the police poked the crowd. If the crowd had been determined to move forward with a vicious intent, the cars would have toppled over, and there would have been massacre. To his astonishment, the police charged the crowd at the double. In his view, there was no reason for that charge. After the charge the crowd took turf and daffodil bulbs from the plots in the square, and stones, and threw them. There was another baton charge, in which men were struck down indiscriminately, and a great many people were injured. It was some time after the second baton charge that the bottle-throwing began. After the first baton charge the attitude of the crowd was pretty ugly. There was no evidence of the crowd to do mischief that day.

  King’s Counsel Mr Constable also argued there had been no ‘preconcerted design to do mischief on the part of the mob assembled in George Square’ and that the trouble had largely been concentrated around the trams in one corner of it. Every time the police advanced, ‘the people ran before them like sheep. The conclusion was irresistible, that some at any rate of the baton charges were made without any excuse or provocation’. Another of the advocates concurred: ‘The real cause of the trouble on 31st January was the hasty action of the police.’

  Conducting his own defence, Willie Gallacher was dismissive of the idea that what is now the Millennium Hotel, on the north side of George Square, was ever in any danger of being stormed by the crowd:

  . . . for good or ill he had referred to the North British Station Hotel, but no one paid any attention to it, and the authorities never thought there was going to be any interference with that hotel. There had never been such a ridiculous case put up against a body of men, and whichever way the jury decided his conscience was easy, and he would sleep as well in a prison cell as at home.

  In his final summing-up, the Lord Justice Clerk told the jury he was ‘sure they were tired of the case, but he thought it right to say that in his judgment the case had not occupied any more time than it ought to have occupied’. Nor did His Lordship see much significance in the red flag having been carried by the strikers on the Monday before Bloody Friday:

  . . . he was not sure he knew what the red flag meant. But whatever it meant, it had the capacity, apparently, of exciting paroxysms of indignation and derision in some quarters, and exciting enthusiasm beyond bounds in others.

  The crowd which had gathered in George Square had done so perfectly legitimately in order to hear from the Lord Provost what the Prime Minister had said. Be that as it may, rioting or inciting other people to riot was against the law.

  Eight of the defendants were acquitted, including Davie Kirkwood. That he had been struck by a police baton and there was a photograph of him lying concussed on the pavement had earned him a lot of sympathy. James Murray and William McCartney were sentenced to three months in prison, as was Willie Gallacher. This was despite the jury recommending leniency in his case, as he had tried to get people to disperse peacefully. Manny Shinwell was given a sentence of five months.

  The 40-hour week didn’t come until the Second World War, although after the strike hours were reduced from 54 to 47. The biggest difference that made was to start t
imes, meaning men and women no longer had to be at the yard or factory gates for six o’clock. That had always been a killer.

  On 1 February, The Strike Bulletin gave what happened in George Square the name it’s been known by ever since:

  Henceforth January 31, 1919, will be known to Glasgow as Bloody Friday, and, for the crime of attacking defenceless workers, the citizens will hold the authorities responsible. The police have once more been used as hirelings to bludgeon the workers.

  The workers will not forget.

  The news-sheet also urged strikers to ‘keep cheery’. It was a very Scottish affair, this revolution that never was.

  19

  The Red Clydesiders Sweep into Westminster

  We were the stuff of which reform is made.

  Another square in the centre of Glasgow, another massive crowd. As at George Square on Bloody Friday, estimates vary. Some say well over 100,000 men and women filled St Enoch Square and spilled over into Argyle Street and the other streets around it.

  Those who’d got there first stood in front of the two sweeping carriageways which curved up into the grand Victorian railway station. Extra lamps had been brought to light up the gloom of the November night and two large red flags fluttered over the entranceway.

  There was music, of course, as there always was. The William Morris Choir led the singing: ‘The Red Flag’, ‘The Internationale’, ‘Jerusalem’, Psalm 124. The Covenanters knew this as ‘Scotland’s Hymn of Deliverance’:

  If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, now may Israel say;

  If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when men rose up against us:

  Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us:

  Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul:

  Then the proud waters had gone over our soul.

  Blessed be the LORD, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth.

  Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.

  Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.

  The men going off to London had been given a sacred trust, one they acknowledged in a printed declaration distributed to their supporters at services of dedication held earlier in the day:

  The Labour Members of Parliament for the City of Glasgow and the West of Scotland, inspired by zeal for the welfare of humanity and the prosperity of all peoples and strengthened by the trust reposed in them by their fellow-citizens, have resolved to dedicate themselves to the reconciliation and unity of the nations of the world and the development and happiness of the people of these islands.

  The election of 1922 might have returned a Conservative government to power but it also produced an earthquake which rocked the political landscape of Britain. For the first time ever, the Liberal Party was no longer the opposition: the Labour Party was. Its candidates and supporters had strained every sinew to win electoral success. This was an election fought with real passion. Tom Johnston wrote in the Forward of the many female volunteers who helped him win his seat in West Stirlingshire:

  They hustled the indifferent to the booths; they lent shawls and held babies: they carried the sick and dying to the polls on mattresses – and they won. May black shame fall upon the individual or the party, who, having the trust of these women, ever betrays it.

  There were no Red revolutionaries or dangerous Bolsheviks here. This was all about using democracy and the parliamentary process to get into Westminster and start reforming the system from within.

  James Maxton stood for Bridgeton in 1922, the constituency he was to represent at Westminster until his death in 1946. His election manifesto gives full details of where to vote and how to establish which ward you’re in, providing the names of the relevant streets so you can work this out. Like other candidates, he spoke at numerous public meetings before the election to put his case. That was how elections were fought in those days.

  Since he held two public meetings a night at different schools in the neighbourhood, all at eight o’clock in the evening, presumably he had a warm-up man or two, or quite possibly a warm-up woman. Under the details of the meetings is a polite encouragement to come along: ‘All Electors cordially invited to attend. Ladies specially invited.’

  Unemployment, housing and education were at the top of Maxton’s list of issues. His experience as a teacher allowed him to strengthen the message:

  The welfare of children is of first importance to me. I have had experience of the children of Bridgeton, both as a teacher in the district and as a member of the Education Authority. I know that every year many clever and capable boys and girls lose the opportunity of developing their talents to the fullest through the poverty of their parents. It is the duty of the nation to see that opportunities of education are open to the children of the worker as to the children of the rich.

  This was the first election to the Westminster government after the establishment of what was then known as the Irish Free State. Maxton’s position on the Irish Question, of profound interest to all those Glaswegians of Irish extraction, was typically idealistic. He believed Britain should continue to give support to ‘the Irish nation, both North and South. I look to the developing Irish Labour Party to put an end to the feuds that have rent Ireland asunder.’ His manifesto finishes with his stance on Scotland: ‘Scotland’s commercial and social progress would be considerably quickened by the establishment of a Scottish Parliament.’ Crystal clear there too.

  His deep appreciation of the women of West Stirlingshire notwithstanding, Tom Johnston later claimed he never actually wanted to be an MP, offering a tongue-in-cheek defence for having done so which basically amounted to ‘Jimmy Maxton made me do it’:

  . . . it was not until James Maxton sent me a rather indignant letter saying he thought it most unfair that he should be landed for a contest in Bridgeton, while I should sit high and dry; in fact if fellows like myself were going to escape, he would jolly well get out too – not until then did I fall for the apparently ‘hopeless’ seat of West Stirlingshire. But I lived on the borders of the constituency: a hired car could bring me home every night: the constituency covered the field of Bannockburn, the Wallace Monument on the Abbey Craig, and parts of the bonny banks of Loch Lomond, and touched Loch Katrine; and above all there was not the remotest chance of winning.

  They were in buoyant mood as they set off. One story attributed to Manny Shinwell has him telling the crowd the first thing they were going to do when they got to London was ‘find the Prince of Wales and hang the bugger from the nearest lamp-post’. The Playboy Prince, briefly to become Edward VIII, did not lead the sort of life calculated to endear him to the working people of Red Clydeside.

  The 1922 election returned 142 Labour MPs from constituencies throughout the United Kingdom, the highest number yet to sit in the Westminster parliament. The change in the political landscape of Glasgow and the west of Scotland, where ILP candidates had won 18 seats, was especially dramatic. In Glasgow alone, ten out of the city’s fifteen constituencies returned ILP candidates.

  Above a cartoon of a bemused St Mungo wondering why a respectable person like himself was now casting a queer kind of a shadow, that of the sinister Russian Bolshevik who had so seized the popular imagination, The Bailie informed its readers that ‘Glasgow is now two-thirds red. Politically and geologically Glasgow stands on shaky ground. It is said that there is a serious “fault” under our feet. Earthquakes are predicted.’

  Like a victorious rebel army, blue bonnets crossing the border, ten of the new MPs were to travel down to London together on the night mail from St Enoch. In My Life of Revolt Davie Kirkwood offered a summing-up of his comrades of 1922:

  What a troop we were! John Wheatley, cool and calculating and fearless; James Maxton, whose wooing speaking and utter selflessness made people regard him as a saint and martyr; wee Jimmie Stewart, so small, so sober, and yet so determined;
Neil MacLean, full of fire without fury; Thomas Johnston, with a head as full of facts as an egg’s full o’ meat; George Hardie, engineer and chemist and brother of Keir Hardie; James Welsh, miner and poet from Coatbridge; John W. Muir, an heroic and gallant gentleman; and old Bob Smillie, returned for an English constituency though he was born in Ireland and reared in Scotland.

  The Conservative prime minister, Sir Andrew Bonar Law, sat for a Glasgow constituency. It’s probably a fair bet that the Right Honourable member for Glasgow Central chose to return to Westminster and Downing Street by a different train.

  The Bailie was generous enough to observe that the ‘ten wise men’ deserved their electoral success:

  A new spirit is abroad in politics. In one respect we give credit to the Labour Party. They take their politics seriously. Look at the send-off those Labour M.P.’s received on Sunday. Had the old parties shown the same enthusiasm the political complexion of Glasgow would have been very different to-day.

  Putting the number of people in St Enoch Square at 50,000, The Bulletin too gave remarkably generous coverage to the send-off of the ‘elated labourists’. Perhaps the newspaper realized many of its readers had to be among the vast crowd:

  SEND-OFF SCENES

  Enthusiastic Crowds at the Station

  At both the Metropole Theatre, where an I.L.P. rally was held to celebrate the Labour victory, and at St Enoch Station later in the evening when the new M.P.’s were leaving the city for the opening of parliament today there were scenes of remarkable enthusiasm, the crowds of well-wishers attending the departure being of such dimensions that they choked up all approaches to the railway station.