Battle of George Square centenary: modern echoes from the rise of Red Clydeside

It was less than three months after the end of the Great War and thousands of former soldiers had flooded back to Glasgow from the trenches to the slums, vainly looking for work, with thousands more still to be demobbed. As a country Scotland had provided more men as a proportion of its population than anywhere else in Britain. The city had also been the industrial powerhouse in the war, building ships, submarines for the Royal Navy and fulfilling the ceaseless demands for armaments and war munitions.

The city was also in mourning for the generation of lost sons, brother, husbands and fathers. However, the survivors had learned about solidarity and direct action, but they returned to a flooded job market where the pre-war industrial status quo, with 54-hour weeks starting at 6am still the norm, where minimal, if any, workplace rights still prevailed. The war had radicalised people, not just men, but particularly women who had taken up the jobs left by the men going to the front and had fought for better conditions at home.

In 1914, when hostilities began, the Liberal Party was Scotland's main political party, but by the end it was divided, unrepresentative of the large working-class community, unprepared to put forward ordinary people as candidates. The Labour Party supported the war and even joined the coalition government of 1916, but, crucially, the Independent Labour Party, formed by miner Keir Hardie, bitterly opposed it. Its influence mushroomed.

Britain may have won the war, dressed up as the Armistice, but there was no peace plan, nothing in place to help those who had won it back into employment and decent housing. The recently-formed Clyde Workers' Committee and the Scottish TUC, demanded a 40-hour week. The coalition government offered 47 hours. But that didn't satisfy, and so the strikes began, aided by flying pickets, most of them recently-discharged servicemen, going from factory to shipyard calling on workers to down tools.

It was less than two years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, just over two weeks since the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin had sought to overthrow the Weimar Republic and establish a communist state in Germany.

Britain's war cabinet met on Thursday, January 30, to discuss "the strike situation in Glasgow". It was chaired by Bonar Law in the absence of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and in attendance was Robert Munro, the Scottish Secretary who was not a member of the cabinet. The fear of a general strike and a communist uprising inflamed the meeting. The most vociferous voice calling for strong action was Winston Churchill.

Government policy at the time was not to become involved in labour disputes, but this was ignored. It was agreed that there had to be "sufficient force" to maintain public order and that armed forces would provide that force. Orders were sent out to the military to be ready.

One of the Clyde Workers' Committee (CWC) leaders, Willie Gallacher, summed it up later, admitting that he believed they had lost a historic opportunity. "We had forgotten we were revolutionary leaders of the working class. Revolt was seething everywhere, especially in the army.

"We had within our hands the possibility of giving actual expression and leadership to it, but it never entered our heads to do so. We were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution."

On Friday workers began to gather in George Square, the numbers swelling throughout the morning to an estimated 60,000. They were there to hear the response to the petition the CWC had delivered to the Lord Provost, calling for support for their demands.

The large crowd was boisterous but good-natured, but at 12.20 the police charged the striking workers, hitting out with their batons as they went. As fighting broke out the CWC deputation was still inside but when they rushed out one of the leaders, David Kirkwood, was felled by a police baton.

“Suddenly, without warning, police made a savage, totally unexpected assault on the rear of the meeting, smashing right and left with their batons,” Gallacher later described. He punched the Lord Provost before being felled with a baton.

The Riot Act was read and he, together with Kirkwood and Manny Shinwell, were arrested and charged with inciting a "large crowd to form part of a riotous mob". Kirkwood was later to get off, as photographs showed him unconscious and incapable on the ground at the time, but Gallacher was sentenced to three years and Shinwell three months.

In the square, after the baton charge, outnumbered police retreated and fighting between workers and police, some on horseback, spread to surrounding streets and continued into the night.

In Westminster, the war cabinet met at 3pm but by then troop deployment had already begun. Scottish Secretary Munro described the ongoing battle as a "Bolshevist uprising".

It had already been decided to send in troops from the north of England and from bases outside Glasgow in case the local detachments, now confined to Maryhill Barracks, might join in on the side of the strikers. Six tanks and 100 lorries were now making their way north, with 12,000 troops ready to be deployed.

Red Clydeside: The background

Radicalism and resistance had been growing since 1910. In 1911, 11,000 workers at the Singer factory in Clydebank went on strike in solidarity with 12 female colleagues protesting against reorganisation, which included an increase in workload and reduction in wages.

At the end of the strike Singer sacked 400 workers.

In May 1915, a rent strike, organised by Mary Barbour and started by a women's committee, involved more than 20,000 tenants protesting about rent increases. In three years Glasgow's population had swollen by 65,000 as Irish and Highland migrants came to the city, with just 1500 housing units built.

There were mass demonstrations against evictions, with fighting breaking out, often involving the police who were backing the bailiffs. Strikers responded by attacking factors and sheriffs' men. In November, faced with the threat of war-time factory strikes, the government caved in and rents were frozen at pre-war levels.

The radicalism of the women inspired men and in January 1916 strikes broke out over plans to allow semi- and unskilled workers to carry out skilled work in engineering factories. The government ordered the arrest of CWC leaders and they were "deported" ... to Edinburgh!

The committee journal, The Worker, was prosecuted under the Defence of the Realm act for an article criticising the war. Gallacher and editor John Muir were jailed for sedition, Gallacher for six months, Muir for a year.

The immediate aftermath

The first troops arrived on the Friday evening, with the numbers increasing over the following days. Machine gun nests were set up in George Square and on its buildings. The Royal Tank Regiment's six Medium Mark C tanks arrived on Monday, February 3.

The troops had set up base in the City Chambers, which was like an armed camp, and the square was filled with soldiers and their military accoutrements. The armed pacification of Glasgow and surrounding areas was to remain in place until February 18. There had been no fatalities.

In his memoir Gallacher said the leaders could have persuaded the soldiers in Maryhill Barracks to come out an join them "and Glasgow would have been in our hands" rather than the army's. Other accounts, and later historians, counter that this was a reformist movement rather than revolutionary one.

The strike ended with the workers giving up the 40-hour claim and tacitly accepting the previously agreed 47 hours. But in a historical context this was not defeat.

In the 1922 general election, Scotland elected 29 Labour MPs, including Manny Shinwell and Davie Kirkwood, and a year later the first Labour government came to power.