90 YEARS SINCE EPIC WORKERS’ STRUGGLE

BRITAIN BROUGHT TO A STANDSTILL AS MORE THAN TWO MILLION WORKERS DOWNED TOOLS FOR GENERAL STRIKE ON MAY 3, 1926

NINETY years ago today, Glasgow was about to come to a standstill. The General Strike – called by the TUC in support of the miners – was on its way.

The miners had been in dispute with the colliery owners, who wanted to reduce wages. The miners fought the move under the slogan, ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day’. But they had been locked out of their mines.

After peace talks broke down, trade union executives approved plans for a ‘national’ strike in defence of the miners. And at midnight on May 3, 1926, more than two million workers nationwide downed their tools.

The industries that were called out included public transport, the printing trades, iron and steel, building trades, and electricity and gas. Trams and trains were badly affected. Newspapers failed to appear. Special arrangements were put into place to guarantee supplies of milk and food.

Ordinary Britons put up with the inconvenience as best they could.

But for a number of ministers in the government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the strike held out the prospect of revolt. The Russian Revolution had taken place just nine years earlier.

In the words of Andrew Marr (in his book on the Queen, who was born just days before the strike), “many thought it would be the start of a socialist or communist revolution of the kind that had swept away some of the royal baby’s relatives in Europe nine years before.”

So the strike got under way – the initial response of workers delighted the TUC. But across the country volunteers flocked in their thousands to join organisations to help provide essential services. The officially recognised body in Glasgow, the Roll of Voluntary Workers, opened a recruiting office in Granville Street at the St Andrew’s Halls.

Faced with not being able to publish because their printers were now on strike, The Evening Times, the Glasgow Herald and four other newspapers came together to establish a news-sheet, the Emer gency Press, which was generally anti-strike.

One woman, Elizabeth Cassells,of Pollokshaws, interviewed by The Herald in 1976, recalled being in Buchanan Street in 1926, watching a group of strikers trying to prevent the distribution of the Emergency Press. “When the first worker

Men put their shoulders to the wheel to right an overturned Glasgow bus which had become a casualty of the General Strike in 1926. The strike sparked many angry scenes

Emergency editions of the Evening Times and our sister paper The Herald were produced during the Great Strike in 1926 to keep readers informed of the latest developments