The Battle of George Square: The day that class war ignited in Scotland

The prime policies for peacetime were to demobilise the forces and push industrial production back to peaceful purposes. While welcome, the return of normality caused huge problems of its own, above all the threat of mass unemployment as the UK slashed spending that had carried it over four years of war.

The government felt a need to keep an eye on Glasgow especially. The Scottish Trade Union Congress and, at a local level, the Clyde Workers’ Committee caused a lot of trouble that did not stop when peace came. They called for the number of jobs available to homecoming soldiers to be boosted by trimming the working week from 47 to 40 hours. If not, the defiant men would be called out on strike, and a great industrial powerhouse would grind to a halt.

Action began on January 27 with a meeting of 3000 workers at Charing Cross. Three days later, 40,000 men from the Clyde’s shipbuilding and engineering sectors had joined in. Others came out in sympathy, in local power stations and the west of Scotland’s mines.

To agitate and spread the word was the work of flying pickets, often discharged soldiers who had learned to distrust the political and military officer class on the Western Front.

On January 29, a delegation of strikers went to the City Chambers to see the Lord Provost of Glasgow, Sir Malcolm Stewart. They wanted him to send a telegram to the deputy prime minister Andrew Bonar Law (above), MP for Glasgow Central, and ask the government to step in. They promised to be back at noon in two days’ time to hear what the answer was.

Another man at that meeting was the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, Alastair Mackenzie. He had contacts in London and now he used them. He asked whether military aid would be available to him should he require it during those two days – if the crowds in the streets grew bigger, for instance, or if the police proved unable to control them.

On both sides were men, in these first grim months of peace, with a hunch that revolutionary times had dawned. After the vast slaughter of the war and, at the armistice, the breakdown of old habits and beliefs, many people were deciding a new era had to be better than the old. In Russia the Bolsheviks formed Soviet republics, while a beaten Germany tore itself apart and countries like Hungary and Sweden were already trying Communist governments.

But in one Celtic country there was revolution too, as Ireland embarked on the civil war that led most of it to independence in a few years. In another Celtic country there were at least radical stirrings, though Scotland had no nationalist movement and settled for the prospect of progress in a UK hoping to become a home fit for heroes.

Yet these were the thoughts of Willie Gallacher, Paisley’s most militant Marxist and chairman of the Clyde Workers’ Committee: “Had there been an experienced revolutionary leadership, instead of a march to Glasgow Green, there would have been a march to the city’s Maryhill Barracks.

“There we could easily have persuaded the soldiers to come out, and Glasgow would have been in our hands … we were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution”.

But he found few comrades. He toiled away till he became Communist MP for West Fife in 1935-50 but he never got further in his cause. Perhaps, even in George Square in 1919, that dim future for the Scottish left could have been foretold.

The trade union leaders – Gallacher, David Kirkwood, Emmanuel Shinwell – duly arrived at the City Chambers in the forenoon of January 31 and went in for their meeting. At their backs were perhaps 20,000 striking workers. The police, though some were mounted, barely kept control. There was jostling and scuffling, while traffic round the square ground to a halt.

The police did not like this one bit. Press photos show them triggering the violence that followed. Sheriff Mackenzie tried to read out the Riot Act but a ruffian snatched the paper from his hand. At 12.20pm the police mounted a charge.

Gallacher recalled: “Suddenly, without warning, police made a savage, totally unexpected assault on the rear of the meeting, smashing right and left with their batons.”

Some men fought back – there were 34 workers and 19 policemen injured, figures that surely could have risen higher had the square not been quickly cleared. The men meant to hold a meeting at Glasgow Green anyway, and the police meant to make sure they got there.

Still inside the City Chambers, Kirkwood and Shinwell heard the swelling uproar and rushed out to see if they could calm things down. Four towering Glasgow policemen were on duty by the door, and one brought his truncheon down on the head of Kirkwood, a diminutive figure who slumped into another officer’s arms. Class war came to George Square.

The other exertion of the afternoon took place in London, where a meeting of the War Cabinet was called for 3pm. Scottish Secretary Robert Munro spoke to it and described the situation in Glasgow as “a Bolshevist uprising”.

While it was official policy at the time to avoid getting troops involved in labour disputes, still it was agreed there had to be “sufficient force” round any given trouble spot to maintain public order and see to the operation of municipal services.

That applied to the west of Scotland too, but ministers decided the troops should preferably not be those already stationed at Maryhill, nearest to the scene but perhaps capable of siding with the workers. General Sir Charles Harington, deputy chief of the imperial general staff, informed the Cabinet that six tanks supported by 100 lorries were “going north that evening”.

Nearly 12,000 troops were available. Sheriff Mackenzie called them up and by the late afternoon of February 1 they started to arrive. The six tanks were on their way too, and due to be parked at the Cattle Market. The troops stood on guard at positions where the rioters might make trouble.

They also manned machine-gun nests in George Square. But they stationed themselves after the rioting was over and played no active part in dispersing the protesters. They stayed on duty till February 12.

In fact the vanguard of the proletariat kept their distance from the agents of law and order as well. With hindsight some called the outbreak of violence Bloody Friday, though in fact no blood was shed. Others settled for Black Friday, to signify the defeat for the working class that they reckoned it represented.

In the General Election of 1922, Scotland elected 29 Labour MPs, including Shinwell and Kirkwood. The general election of 1923 ended with the first Labour government in power at Westminster under its Scottish leader, Ramsay MacDonald. Red Clydeside’s socialist sympathies earned that nickname, but Glasgow has never had a revolution yet.