Story of the explosive rent strikes staged by the Clydebank community

The measures will bring some respite for those facing surging rents and the icy threat of winter eviction, but its significance pales in comparison with the successes achieved by Clydebank tenants a century ago.

If you had climbed the Kilpatrick Hills in 1922 and looked across Clydebank, you would have seen the homes of hundreds of people involved in a co-ordinated refusal to pay their rent.

A 1984 pamphlet by Sean Damer documents how action was strongest in regions where folk lived alongside co-workers in plants, factories and yards. Much of the organising was done by veterans of major industrial strikes, including the women who led the 1911 all-out strike at the huge Singer sewing machine factory.

My cousin Kevin Gallagher, a historian, explained that in 1808, the cotton manufacturer William Dunn acquired the mill at Duntocher and in 1821 work had begun on his Milton cotton mill, built on top of the old Dalnottar ironworks, near where the Erskine Bridge crosses the Clyde today. A huge industrial tide was about to burst along the riverbank.

Over the first half of the 19th century, Dunn purchased the patchwork of estates that make up modern-day Clydebank – Dalmuir, Kilbowies, Balquhanram, Auchentoshan and others. By his death in 1849, most of the local population still lived in Duntocher, which had developed from a settlement of 150 into a thriving village with a population of over 2000.

According to various biographers, this cotton baron from Campsie was esteemed by his workers and tenants.

He opposed the entailment laws which allowed land to remain concentrated in a few hands and wanted more people to have land of their own.

Dunn depended for his riches on Scotland’s colonial connections and cotton trading routes, and he profited from the exploitation of enslaved cotton pickers. But when it came to people in his own country, he aspired that those living on his land and working in his mills might live in some degree of comfort and security.

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His principles influenced the housing policies of the local authority and after Clydebank obtained burgh status in 1886, the quality of housing within the burgh boundaries tended to be relatively good for its day. By the mid-1880s, thousands worked in the shipyards, producing a significant share of the world’s shipping, while Clydebank’s mighty Singer factory was the largest sewing machine factory in the world when production started in 1885.

Alas, Dunn’s principles and the policies of the new burgh council were not shared by company bosses, who threw up additional housing outside the burgh’s bound to meet growing demand. New company tenement blocks became known as the Holy City, because their flat roofs were reminiscent of the houses of the Holy Land. However, in reality the quality of these low-roofed, damp and expensive houses was diabolical.

During the First World War, landlords in Glasgow demanded higher rents, resulting in a city-wide rent strike, and the fuse was lit for the explosive Clydebank rent strikes of 1922.

At first, much of the dispute centred on a legal technicality. According to Scottish law, in order to raise rents, a landlord had first to issue an eviction notice before issuing a new contract of tenancy. For years, landlords had failed to do this, so tenants not only had grounds to resist increased rents, but were also sometimes entitled to a significant rebate for the rent they had paid previously.

However, legal manoeuvres only helped some of those affected. Many other families did get evicted, spending winters in tents in the park. They depended on more direct action.

The Clydebank rent strikes were not won in courts or in Parliament but by the result of canny collective agitation, organising and creative tactics employed to prevent evictions.

Some folk took a violent approach. A group of Bankies planned to blow up the home of a local joiner who was helping bailiffs enter houses by removing windows. Many more joined peaceful actions such as mass pickets, barricades, and bellringing when bailiffs came. Sometimes they removed furniture to stop it being confiscated.

One resident recalled a particularly imaginative tactic. Eviction decrees named the tenants that were to be evicted from their own homes, so before the bailiffs came to the door to evict them, folk swapped houses with their neighbours, so that the names on the eviction decrees didn’t match the occupants. “So they’d go back to the court and get it changed,” one tenant recalled, “and of course the people just changed back again and when he came back it was no bloody good again.”

The successful action was a great embarrassment to the Labour government, whose own MPs were encouraging tenants to break the law. David Kirkwood, the socialist Labour MP elected in 1922 for the Dumbarton Burghs which included the burgh of Clydebank, stood on a soapbox and told tenants to “pay no rent”. As yet, no politicians have called directly for tenants to refuse increased payments. If tenants in Clydebank or any other town began to strike for decent rents, who would stand with them?

lMost of the account of the rent strike is from Sean Damer’s Rent Strike! The Clydebank Rent Struggles of the 1920s lDr Kevin Gallagher is co-editor of 1820 Scottish Rebellion: Essays on a Nineteenth-Century Insurrection, which is released this week by Birlinn