THE DAY THE TANKS ROLLED INTO GLASGOW
It was perhaps the closest the UK came to revolution, but what was the truth about...
IT happened 100 years ago this week – when demonstrators were read the Riot Act in one of the most bitter stand-offs in modern Scottish history. On January 31, 1919, they gathered in their thousands before the imposing facade of Glasgow’s City Chambers, united in their demands for better conditions in the steelworks and shipyards.
With Bolshevik uprisings across Europe, the British Government feared trouble on the streets of Scotland’s biggest city might spread to other parts of the UK.
Tanks and troops were sent in and, without warning, police were ordered to charge the crowd.
Despite the fears of the authorities, the Battle of George Square, as it came to be known, did not end in revolution. For the men in the crowd, supported by their wives and children, it had been meant as a demonstration of solidarity and hope.
Yet newly unearthed documents reveal a young Winston Churchill actually welcomed confrontation.
Cabinet papers show the future Prime Minister, who at the time was Secretary of State for War, maintained ‘conflict is needed to clear the air’.
The Battle of George Square began when men from the Clyde Workers Committee (CWC) and the radical Clydeside Independent Labour Party met the Lord Provost at the City Chambers to hear if demands for a 40-hour week would be met.
Workers leader Willie Gallacher and future Labour MP Manny Shinwell were perched on a statue to give speeches when police, some on horseback, charged without warning into the crowd, striking indiscriminately with their long batons.
The Sheriff of Lanarkshire read the Riot Act – which had been law since 1715 although barely used in the UK – only for it to be torn from his hands before he could finish.
Six tanks arrived from Dorsetm along with 10,000 troops – and the second city of the British Empire, famed for its people being loyal to king and country, found itself under martial law.
Archives detail minutes of a war cabinet meeting that took place the day before the riots. The documents show how worried the Government was about the threat of a Bolshevik uprising or the ‘Strike Situation in Glasgow’, as the first item on the agenda appeared when War Cabinet meeting No 522 convened at 3pm on January 30, 1919.
With the spectre of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Spartacist revolt in Germany only weeks before, the war cabinet was understandably on edge.
The possibility of sending in the army to keep order had been top on the agenda when Churchill told those gathered – including deputy Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law – that ‘a conflict is needed to clear the air’.
Scottish Secretary Robert Munro believed a revolution was afoot and was backed by Bonar Law, who was anxious there should be ‘some responsible person in Glasgow ready to call in the military when necessary, and that this person should be told that the military had received orders to hold themselves in readiness’.
But army representatives reminded the Government that it had no power to send troops into a British city unless it declared martial law.
‘That explains the heavy-handed response,’ said Dr James Smyth, senior lecturer in history at Stirling University. ‘You had the Russian revolution and various unsuccessful revolutions throughout Europe.
‘Some historians believe the government panicked and exaggerated the threat. Others say it was a reasonable response.’
The tanks and soldiers arrived from where they were billeted in the Cattle Market district.
MILITARY historian Dr Gordon Barclay said: ‘Things had got out of hand in the square and troops started coming and there are newspaper reports them arriving – but there is this myth that it was Churchill who called for the army.’ In fact, documents reveal the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, Alastair Oswald Morison Mackenzie, requested military back-up.
‘Mackenzie was so worried about what he felt might happen that he had contacted the Government to ask if troops would be available,’ Dr Barclay explained. ‘This is the reason why the Government were discussing troops at a meeting on the Thursday.’
By today’s standards, the workers’ demands seem perfectly reasonable.
At the end of the Great War, shipyard workers on the Clyde worked a gruelling 54-hour week, starting at 6am and finishing at 5.30pm, or noon on Saturdays.
Between 1914 and 1918, the Clydeside shipyards was the largest provider of vessels to the Royal Navy, in addition to providing 90 per cent of the armour plating for army tanks and vehicles.
Now, with the war over, shop stewards argued that reduced hours would
ensure employment for ex-servicemen returning from the Great War and prevent mass unemployment.
Dr Smyth said: ‘With a 40-hour working week, the work could be easier shared and limit the mass unemployment which they feared, quite rightly as it turned out, was going to emerge in the years that followed.’
The police response the following day fulfilled Churchill’s prediction of a violent clearing of the air. The union leader Gallacher reacted by diving at the chief constable – and was battered to the ground.
Another CWC leader, David Kirkwood, ran out of the City Chambers to plead for a stop to the violence – and was promptly bludgeoned unconscious from behind. Driven back towards the west side of the square, the strikers rallied and counter-attacked.
Gallacher and Kirkwood, who had regained consciousness, were asked to intervene. Though wounded and under arrest, they persuaded the crowd to march to Glasgow Green.
There they were again attacked by the police, but fought back and routed them. Despite the huge military presence in the city that followed, local troops from the Maryhill district were not deployed for fear they might be faced with relatives in the crowd or, worse still, might join the ranks of the strikers and become revolutionaries.
Yet photographic evidence reveals battalions from other parts of Scotland were drafted in.
Scots historian Professor Sir Tom Devine said: ‘Churchill did mention the possibility of “conflict” at the war cabinet meeting, but stated it was not yet time to bring in the army as the forces of law and order would have to be provoked first.
‘Instead, he argued that some of the ringleaders should be arrested under the powers of Defence of the Realm legislation. He clearly wanted the intervention of the army to be held in reserve, but was not pushing for it at this stage. As part of his thinking, he agreed troops should be mobilised and made ready to maintain order if the civil authorities requested their presence.
‘The most conclusive evidence that government were seriously worried was the fact that, when troops were called out and the tanks were sent up from the Royal Tank Corps centre at Bovington in the South of England, they made a conscious decision not to employ any troops from the nearest Maryhill barracks.
‘There was concern that a unity might be possible, a fusion between workers unrest and discontented soldiery that would be accustomed to the brutality of the trenches of the First World War and who were trained men of violence.’
In the city’s North Frederick Street, strikers seized a lorry full of empty bottles and used them as missiles against the police. Sporadic fighting continued late into the night in some neighbourhoods, particularly Garngad and Govan.
In the morning, Glasgow woke up to find armed and helmeted troops patrolling George Square with Lewis machine guns on the roof of the main Post Office and North British Hotel, and the six tanks standing ominously in the Cattle Market, their guns facing west. Glasgow was now under military control.
BUT the battle, also known as ‘Bloody Friday’, was in fact not all that bloody compared with contemporary Germany or Russia. The official casualty list was 19 policemen and 34 strikers injured. Professor Devine said: ‘It is still notorious but nobody was killed.
‘Notably it is called the Battle of George Square, not the Massacre of George Square – bashed heads, bruises and bloodshed on both sides. You could argue it was a typical Glasgow Saturday night of that period. It helped to cement the myth of Red Clydeside, of a hard socialist city.’
The following week, six CWC leaders and six others were put on trial. Shinwell and Gallacher were convicted. The former received five months, the latter three.
The unofficial ‘40-hour strike’ fizzled out and, after a couple of weeks, the English troops departed.
Shinwell and Kirkwood later became Labour MPs, and all was not lost for those who sought a better deal for the workers.
The national leadership of the engineering unions concluded an agreement for a 47-hour week, which meant workers started at 8am instead of 6am.
Professor Devine said: ‘Is it a footnote in Scottish history? I think it is more than that. The George Square riot is not irrelevant. It did help to further politicise people in the period, and that helps to explain why, in the general election that followed, Glasgow voted for 21 Labour MPs including Manny Shinwell, David Kirkwood and Willie Gallacher.
‘It did have political significance.’
‘Still notorious but nobody was killed’