THIS week will see the centenary of a pivotal moment in Scottish political history. On Thursday, January 31, it will be 100 years to the day since the Battle of George Square, otherwise known as Bloody Friday.

On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, The National will publish excerpts from a new book called Glasgow 1919: The Rise Of Red Clydeside, by former Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill. It contains the best accounts of Bloody Friday and its aftermath that I have ever read.

As a “trailer” to the excerpts, today’s Back in the Day looks at the events that led up to Friday, January 31, and the battle which, as MacAskill shows, was the nearest thing to civil war and a socialist revolution that the UK ever experienced – no wonder the government of the day sent troops and tanks to the city, as those Clydeside strikers really were a threat to their cosy capitalist authority.

In order to understand why Glasgow was a powder keg waiting to explode on that fateful day, you have to look back at the First World War and the brutal suppression by the British Government of protests in the shipyards and factories of Clydeside.

The historian Christopher Smout has shown that by that war, Glasgow and its immediate suburbs on the Clyde were producing “one-fifth of the steel, one-third of the shipping tonnage, one-half of the marine-engine horsepower, one-third of the railway locomotives and rolling stock and most of the sewing machines in the United Kingdom”.

Glasgow also had the worst levels of poverty before the war, with some areas seeing child mortality rates of 20%. Little wonder then that from before 1900 up to 1914, militancy among the Clydeside industrial workforce grew exponentially and strikes were commonplace and observed well by workers, even after shop stewards and strikers were sacked and blackballed.

The strikes continued until the war broke out. Though most union leaders in England were pro-war, a significant number of trade unionists in Scotland were against the war and were certainly anti-conscription. Militancy did not expire on Clydeside during the war, the Rent Strike organised by local women being one large and successful sign of working-class organisation.

The British State acted, however, against such anti-war organisations as the Clyde Workers’ Committee, and used the brutal Defence of the Realm Act 1914 to do so. Leaders of anti-war protests were tried and imprisoned, including John Maclean, Willie Gallacher, the editor of The Worker newspaper John Muir, and even its printer Tom Bell.

They were followed into jail by James Maxton of the Independent Labour Party, the socialist activist James MacDougall and a self-avowed anarchist called Jack Smith – all of them put behind bars for a year.

Future Labour MP and Privy Counsellor David Kirkwood actually supported the war, but for his agitation for workers’ rights he was deported to Edinburgh and banned from returning to Glasgow until late 1917, along with five other shop stewards.

The government in Westminster wanted no threat to the production of ships and munitions, but in jailing and deporting all these workers’ leaders they made martyrs and heroes of them. Many would end up becoming Red Clydeside MPs.

The Russian Revolution in October, 1917, proved inspirational to trade unionists, socialists and radicals everywhere, not least in and around Glasgow. On his return to Glasgow that year, Kirkwood had developed a more radical edge, saying in one speech: “Some workers you can find who are afraid of the Germans, but they forget one thing, they forget that the greatest Huns in Christendom are the capitalist class of Britain.”

The road to January 1919 developed during 1918. Maclean had been released from prison and, though ill, he thundered against the impositions on workers and their families. His oratory at the time of the Russian Revolution and afterwards inspired many who heard him to think of revolution themselves. The press openly discussed the possibility of a Glasgow Soviet –which horrified them, of course.

Then the State made a huge mistake, charging Maclean with sedition and jailing him for five years’ penal servitude in June, 1918. His speech from the dock is one of the greatest ever made in Scotland. A mass protest against the conviction on Glasgow Green was met with a police baton charge, which was a sign of things to come. He was indeed released early at the end of 1918, his health broken.

The key point in the run up to Bloody Friday was a strike. The resurgent Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC) had already begun to agitate for a 40-hour week, in defiance of the national 47-hour week – down from 54 hours – negotiated nationally by trade unions and managements. The CWC called a strike on Monday, January 27, and somewhat to their surprise the industrial action was well supported, albeit only on Clydeside.

The strike was well organised, and by Wednesday, January 29, had attracted up to 70,000 workers on to the streets with Red Flags flying – the press were aghast. On that Wednesday, a large crowd of strikers went to George Square in Glasgow for a rally, while a deputation of strike leaders went into the City Chambers to press their case with Lord Provost Sir James Stewart. He asked them to return two days later and promised to contact the government down south and ask them to intervene on the strikers’ behalf.

The scene was set for Bloody Friday.