Red Clydeside & Interwar Scotland

The core events of this article are Established: the rent strikes and the 1915 Act, the dilution disputes and the 1916 deportations, Maclean's imprisonments and consulship, the George Square riot, the 1922 electoral breakthrough, the interwar depression, and the SNP's 1934 founding are all documented in primary records and peer-reviewed scholarship. What is Disputed or Mythologised is the interpretation — specifically how close Glasgow came to revolution, and several widely-repeated "facts" about George Square (that Churchill sent the troops, that they were all English, that tanks confronted the crowd, that Scottish troops were locked in Maryhill). Following McLean (1983) and Barclay (2018–19), this article treats the "near-revolution" reading as a legend and the myth-details as demonstrably false. John Maclean's actual contemporary influence versus his later legendary standing is treated as an Established distinction widely accepted across the historiography.

The rent strikes were the first great episode of Red Clydeside and, in retrospect, its most unambiguous victory. War transformed an already acute housing problem into a crisis: Glasgow's population swelled by tens of thousands as workers flooded into the shipyards and munitions works, while house-building stalled for want of labour and materials. With men away at the front and demand far outstripping supply, private landlords — who then held a near-monopoly on rented housing, before council housing existed — raised rents, confident the law was on their side.

They reckoned without the organised women of Govan. Under Mary Barbour, the South Govan Women's Housing Association and the wider Glasgow Women's Housing Association organised tenants' committees, resisted evictions, picketed sheriff-officers, and coordinated a mass withholding of rent increases (tenants continued to pay the old rent). Willie Gallacher famously dubbed the movement "Mrs Barbour's Army." Fellow organisers included Agnes Dollan, Helen Crawfurd and Mary Laird. The strike began in the spring and spread through the summer and autumn of 1915; at its November peak, around 20,000 tenants were involved. When a group of tenants was summoned to the Sheriff Court on 17 November 1915, thousands besieged the building, and the case collapsed.

The government, fearing disruption to war production, moved with remarkable speed: the Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act became law in late November–December 1915, pegging rents at pre-war levels. This was the first rent control legislation of its kind in Britain, and it opened the road to state intervention in housing that would culminate in council housing. Notably, even Iain McLean's revisionist account concedes that the rent strikes' influence on housing policy is "with us to this day" — the one strand of Red Clydeside whose radical, lasting impact is beyond dispute.

Mary Barbour's own career embodied the transition from street agitation to municipal power. In 1920 she was elected to Glasgow Town Council for the Fairfield ward in Govan, one of the city's first women councillors; from 1924 she served as one of Glasgow Corporation's first women bailies and magistrates, and she went on to found Glasgow's first family-planning clinic for married women in 1926. She died in 1958. On 8 March 2018 (International Women's Day), a statue by Andrew Brown — depicting her leading the rent strikers — was unveiled at Govan Cross after a long citizen-led campaign by the Remember Mary Barbour Association.

The second front of wartime militancy was in the engineering shops, and it was fundamentally about the "dilution of labour": the wartime introduction of unskilled and semi-skilled workers (including women) into jobs previously reserved for skilled, time-served engineers, together with the restrictions on workers' mobility and the right to strike imposed by the Munitions of War Act 1915. Skilled engineers feared dilution would permanently erode their status and wages.

The Clyde Workers' Committee (CWC), formed in October 1915 out of the earlier Labour Withholding Committee, became the organising body for this resistance. It was a shop-stewards' movement — a network of workplace delegates — rather than a conventional union, and it distrusted the official union leadership as much as the employers. Willie Gallacher chaired it and David Kirkwood, a shop steward at William Beardmore's Parkhead Forge, was treasurer; other figures who passed through its orbit included John Maclean, Arthur MacManus, Tom Bell, Harry McShane and James Maxton. At its height the CWC claimed to represent workers across some 29 Clydeside engineering works.

The government moved decisively to break it. After the suppression of the CWC paper The Worker in early 1916 and a strike at Beardmore's, the military authorities in March 1916 arrested and "deported" leading shop stewards from Glasgow — Kirkwood, MacManus, Messer and others — banishing them to Edinburgh under the powers available through the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) and the munitions regime, where they had to report to police daily. With its leaders scattered or imprisoned, the CWC collapsed as an effective force by the end of 1916. It was a comprehensive defeat for the skilled engineers' resistance, though it seeded a shop-stewards' tradition that outlived the war.

No figure of Red Clydeside has been more mythologised than John Maclean (1879–1923), the Pollokshaws-born schoolteacher who became Scotland's most famous revolutionary Marxist. A tireless popular educator, Maclean drew large audiences to his Marxist economics classes and campaigned relentlessly against the war as a capitalist–imperialist bloodbath. He was imprisoned in 1916 for breaching DORA (released 1917 after a public campaign), and again in 1918 for sedition, when his 75-minute "speech from the dock" — "I am not here as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot" — became a celebrated text of the Scottish left. In January 1918 he was elected honorary president of the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and the following month Lenin's Bolshevik government appointed him its consul in Scotland; he opened a consulate at 12 South Portland Street, Glasgow, which the British government refused to recognise.

Maclean's personal courage and suffering are not in doubt. His health was broken by repeated imprisonment, hunger strikes and force-feeding — he became convinced his prison food was being drugged (Iain McLean and others read this as a persecution complex developed under extreme duress, a matter that should be treated with sensitivity rather than sensationalism). Released after the Armistice in December 1918, he founded the Tramp Trust Unlimited and later the Scottish Workers Republican Party, fusing Marxism with Scottish independence ("a Communist Republic of Scotland"). He died on 30 November 1923, aged just 44; his funeral was one of the largest Glasgow had seen.

Yet the crucial historiographical point — central to this historical assessment — is the gap between Maclean's symbolic stature and his practical influence, especially in his final years. McLean's Legend of Red Clydeside argues that the revolutionary wing around Maclean and Gallacher was a minority even within Clydeside socialism, and that Maclean in particular became increasingly isolated. He refused to join the Communist Party of Great Britain at its 1920–21 formation, was outmanoeuvred by the CPGB's organisers, and his own splinter parties gained little traction: in the November 1923 municipal elections, none of the Scottish Workers Republican Party's twelve candidates came close to winning — Maclean himself polled only 623 votes out of 8,190 cast in Kinning Park, where the Labour candidate took 3,440. In the 1922 general election he took around 4,000 votes in Gorbals, losing decisively to the ILP's George Buchanan (roughly 16,000). His enormous posthumous fame — the songs, the Leningrad street once named for him, the 1979 Soviet stamp, the competing claims of Scottish socialists and nationalists to his legacy — is precisely that: posthumous. In his lifetime, the reformist, gradualist ILP, not Maclean's revolutionary Marxism, was capturing Clydeside's working-class vote.

By January 1919 the war was over but the peace felt precarious. Demobilised soldiers were returning to uncertain jobs; revolutions were convulsing Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia; and Clydeside's labour movement launched a strike for a 40-hour week (down from the 47 hours just negotiated nationally), intended to spread available work and forestall mass unemployment. On Friday 31 January 1919 a large crowd — best estimated at 20,000–25,000 — gathered in George Square outside the City Chambers to hear the Lord Provost's response, while a CWC deputation met officials inside.

What happened next is not seriously disputed in outline: as police tried to clear a path for tram traffic, clashes broke out; the police baton-charged; the crowd fought back with fists, bottles and improvised missiles; the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, Alastair Mackenzie, attempted to read the Riot Act and had the paper torn from his hands; and fighting spread from the Square to the surrounding streets and Glasgow Green through the day and into the night. Hundreds were injured on both sides. David Kirkwood was felled by a police baton — a moment captured in a press photograph that later helped clear him at trial — and he, Gallacher and Shinwell were arrested. One police constable, William McGregor, struck by a thrown bottle, died of his injuries some months later, on 1 June 1919; no one was killed on the day itself.

It is the interpretation and aftermath that have generated an enormous and enduring mythology, now comprehensively corrected by the peer-reviewed archival work of Gordon J. Barclay (2018, 2019), building on McLean. The key myths and the reality:

• "Churchill sent the troops." The government had no legal power to deploy troops against civilians without declaring martial law (which was never even discussed). Under King's Regulations, military aid in Scotland had to be requested by the Sheriff — and Sheriff Mackenzie had pre-arranged availability from 29 January and made the formal request on the 31st. Troops were already moving before the War Cabinet met at 3pm that day. Churchill (Secretary of State for War) was not a voting member of the five-man War Cabinet; the recorded decisions rested chiefly with the Secretary for Scotland, Robert Munro. Bonar Law — himself a Glasgow MP — insisted that "the first responsibility in the whole matter must be by the Secretary [for] Scotland." Barclay's reading of the Cabinet minutes (TNA CAB 23/9) found that at the meeting of 30 January twelve of those present were Scots, and on 31 January both War Cabinet members present and seven of the eleven civilians present were Scots — so it was emphatically not an "English government" that made the troops available. The "Churchill sent the tanks" claim traces to Emanuel Shinwell's 1973 autobiography and is absent from his own earlier accounts.

• "English troops and tanks attacked the crowd." The roughly 10,000 troops were drawn overwhelmingly from Scottish Command's reserve battalions (Royal Scots, Seaforth, Gordon and Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, and others), with only the East Surreys and later the Durham Light Infantry being English. Contemporary photographs and press reports show mature, medalled veterans — not "raw recruits." Crucially, the troops arrived after the day's violence had ended (the first detachments reaching Glasgow late that evening), and the six Medium C tanks did not arrive until Monday 3 February — three days later — and were stationed at the Cattle Market in the Gallowgate. Barclay found no evidence the tanks were ever deployed on the streets or that troops clashed with, or injured, any demonstrator. The famous "tank in a crowd" photograph shows the tank "Julian" in a 1918 war-bond parade, not George Square 1919.

• "Scottish troops were locked in Maryhill Barracks lest they join the strikers." Barclay found the unit at Maryhill was the 4th (Reserve) Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers — not, as usually claimed, the Highland Light Infantry (of whom only a couple of dozen men were then in Glasgow, in a garrison battalion being disbanded). There is no contemporary evidence any troops were "locked in" for fear of mutiny; the claim derives from Gallacher's 1936 memoir. One Seaforth battalion was paraded to remove Glasgow-born men before deployment — a humane precaution against relatives facing each other, not evidence of disloyalty.

The deeper question — how close this came to revolution — is where McLean's reassessment is decisive. Gallacher himself later wrote (in Revolt on the Clyde, 1936) that "we were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution," claiming that had the strikers marched on Maryhill Barracks the soldiers would have joined them and "Glasgow would have been in our hands." Most historians now regard this as retrospective romanticism. The 40-hours strike was a militant industrial dispute with a reformist leadership and reformist aims; there was no organised plan for insurrection, no seizure of key points, and no evidence of disloyalty in the garrison. The government's alarm — Munro's telegram describing a "Bolshevist rising" — reflected genuine but exaggerated fear in a jittery post-war, post-Petrograd climate, not an actual revolutionary threat. (It is worth recording that the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, writing on 17 January 1919 about the wider wave of industrial unrest, thought Churchill "the only one who is sane on this subject" — a telling counter to the image of a war-mongering Churchill.) As McLean tartly observed, the tanks' main effect was to give the strike "a romantic history which successfully concealed an otherwise ignominious failure."

The 40-hours strike collapsed on 12 February 1919; the workers returned with a 47-hour week — a modest improvement, but far short of the demand. The Edinburgh trial of the strike leaders in April 1919 ended with only two convictions: Gallacher received five months and Shinwell three; the rest, including Kirkwood, were acquitted.

If George Square was, industrially, a defeat, the longer-term political current ran the other way — but decisively toward parliamentary socialism, not revolution. In the general election of 15 November 1922, Labour and the Independent Labour Party won ten of Glasgow's fifteen seats (with more gains in surrounding Clydeside constituencies), a sensational breakthrough. The victors — the "Clydesiders" — included James Maxton (Bridgeton), John Wheatley (Shettleston), and, in neighbouring seats, David Kirkwood and Tom Johnston. Their send-off from St Enoch Station, as they left for Westminster, became legendary: a huge crowd sang "The Red Flag" and the Covenanters' Old Hundred and Twenty-Fourth Psalm ("Scotland's psalm of deliverance"), and Maxton promised that "the atmosphere of the Clyde" would transform the Commons.

It did not, quite. The Clydesiders became famous for parliamentary theatre — Maxton was suspended for calling opponents "murderers" over cuts to school milk — but their most substantial legacy was legislative and reformist: John Wheatley, as Minister of Health in the first (1924) Labour government, produced the Housing (Financial Provisions) Act 1924, which subsidised the construction of over half a million council homes across Britain by the time the subsidy was withdrawn in 1933 — around half of all the council housing completed between the wars — and set the template for social housing for decades. Tom Johnston went on to become an outstanding wartime Secretary of State for Scotland. In 1932, under Maxton, the ILP disaffiliated from the Labour Party and rapidly declined into insignificance. The trajectory of Red Clydeside, in other words, ran not toward the barricades but into the council chamber and the House of Commons — the very outcome the revolutionaries around Maclean had disdained.

Labour's rise in Scotland was sudden: from a minority party to almost a majority within four years. In 1922 it became the largest party in Scotland and won ten of Glasgow's fifteen seats. The prospective Conservative prime minister Andrew Bonar Law, a Glasgow MP, feared for his own seat. Finlay argues that Scotland's political geography made the clash sharper than in England: with most Scots packed into the Central Belt, socialist heartlands were never far from middle-class suburbs. Tories and Liberals cooperated informally to keep Labour out until 1924, and by then the Liberals had been squeezed to the margins.

Scottish business was notably confrontational. The Economic League, funded by industrialists, compiled blacklists of socialist activists. Police and arrest powers were used more widely in Scotland than elsewhere during the General Strike of 1926, and middle-class volunteers were, Finlay says, "every bit as militant as strikers". Rhetoric ran hot on both sides, from James Maxton calling Liberals and Tories "murderers of children" to the industrialist Sir James Lithgow's hostility to state welfare. The defeat of the 1926 strike calmed middle-class fears of revolution and dampened working-class faith in direct action.

The Depression split the left. In 1931 Labour MPs who refused to back Ramsay MacDonald's spending cuts were swept away by the National Government landslide, and in 1932 Maxton's Independent Labour Party, strong in Scotland, broke away from Labour. John Wheatley, whom Finlay calls Scottish Labour's one original thinker, had died in 1930.

For the wider Scottish economy, the interwar decades were largely a story of structural decline. Scotland's prosperity had rested on a narrow base of heavy industry — coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding and heavy engineering — heavily geared to export and to each other. The brief post-war boom collapsed in 1920–21, and the "staple" industries never fully recovered. By July 1921 a quarter of a million Scottish workers were unemployed. Employment in Scottish shipbuilding fell from around 100,000 in 1920 to a fraction of that by the late 1920s; over half of Scotland's iron furnaces were dismantled in 1927; the coal industry contracted sharply.

The Great Depression after 1929 turned decline into catastrophe. UK unemployment peaked at more than 3,000,000 in 1933 — over 20% of the working population — but Scotland, with its concentration of hard-hit heavy industry, ran markedly worse: some 407,000 were out of work at the start of 1933, about 30% of the Scottish workforce, with far higher rates in the industrial heartlands. Shipbuilding unemployment hit around 45% by the end of 1930, and some shipbuilding-dependent districts (such as Dunbartonshire) saw close to a third of the entire workforce idle. The abandoned, rusting hull of Cunard's "Hull 534" — the future Queen Mary — looming over John Brown's yard at Clydebank after work stopped in December 1931 became the international symbol of the Clyde's despair. Poverty, poor nutrition and ill-health scarred the industrial towns.

Richard Finlay, in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), traces the slump to the war itself. The Clyde was Britain's most important centre of armaments production, and its capacity grew by a fifth during the war. Easy war profits halted the move into consumer and electrical goods, pre-war textile and jute markets were lost to overseas rivals, and the Russian Revolution and Versailles closed Eastern European markets for Scottish fish and coal. By the early 1920s some 100,000 Scottish men were, in Finlay's phrase, permanently "superfluous" to the economy.

Policy made things worse. The return to the Gold Standard in 1925 overvalued sterling, making exports expensive and pushing employers to cut wages. Business adopted a "wait-and-see" attitude and merged firms defensively, often keeping old plant running at the expense of newer works. In the Depression after 1929 Scotland was among the worst-hit parts of Britain, with more factory closures, higher unemployment and a slower recovery. Lanarkshire still had 27 per cent unemployment in the late 1930s.

Housing and poor relief sharpened class conflict. At the end of the war a quarter of a million people needed rehousing from overcrowded slums, but "homes for heroes" was an early casualty of post-war spending cuts. Ratepayers went to court in the early 1920s to restrain generous poor relief. Rent controls hit middle-class landlords, many of whom relied on rents for income, and about 12 per cent of Scotland's housing stock was simply abandoned as uneconomic to maintain.

One consequence was renewed mass emigration. Where emigration from England tailed off after 1918, it continued at extraordinary levels from Scotland: an estimated 400,000 Scots — around 10% of the population, and often among the more skilled and educated — left the country between 1921 and 1931, so that for the first time since records began Scotland's population actually fell between censuses (1921–1931), despite a healthy birth rate. Emigrants left from the Clyde for Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; increasingly, as the Depression closed off overseas opportunities, Scots migrated instead to the more prosperous English Midlands and south-east.

Against this bleak backdrop, housing was the great constructive achievement. The 1915 rent controls had exposed the failure of the private rented sector; the answer, pioneered by Clydeside socialists, was subsidised municipal housing. The Housing (Additional Powers) Act 1919 (the "Addison Act") began the process; Wheatley's 1924 Act put council housing on a firm, long-term financial footing, funding over half a million homes across Britain by 1933; and the Housing Act 1930 (with its Scottish counterpart) drove slum clearance. Across the interwar period, local councils in Britain built well over a million homes, transforming working-class housing conditions and physically reshaping Scottish cities with new council estates — Wheatley's "homes not hutches." This, more than any strike or riot, was Red Clydeside's most tangible bequest.

Interwar disillusion with Scotland's economic plight, and frustration at Westminster's perceived indifference, also fed a nascent political nationalism. The National Party of Scotland (founded 1928, centre-left, associated with John MacCormick) and the smaller, more conservative Scottish Party (founded 1932) merged on 7 April 1934 to form the Scottish National Party, with Sir Alexander MacEwen as its first leader. The new party was electorally marginal for a generation — it won no Westminster seat until the 1945 Motherwell by-election — but its 1934 founding is the institutional origin of a force that would reshape Scottish politics later in the century. It is worth noting the cross-currents of the period: several Red Clydesiders, Maclean and Maxton among them, mingled socialism with a belief in Scottish self-government, and some later nationalists claim Maclean as a forebear.

Finlay sets interwar Scotland against Europe. On paper it had many of the ingredients that drove other small nations towards the extreme right: prolonged depression, mass unemployment, a frightened middle class, a new nationalist party and rising racism, especially against Irish Catholics. Church of Scotland reports blamed "the great racial problem" on Scottish emigration and Irish immigration, and some anti-Catholic writing, Finlay notes, would not have been out of place in Nazi propaganda. Yet Scotland stayed politically stable.

He gives several reasons. Because the economy had never boomed in the 1920s, the Crash was "more like a bump, albeit a heavy and painful one". Being part of the UK meant money could be moved to the depressed regions, and British unemployment benefit was comparatively generous despite the means test. Scotland had relatively few small shopkeepers and self-employed, the groups that formed the core of far-right support in Europe, and its farms were fewer, larger and more efficient than on the Continent. Heavy emigration in the 1920s removed many potential radicals. Above all, Scottish politics was largely British politics in Scotland: first-past-the-post voting protected the big parties, Labour and Tory leaders in Scotland were moderates, and holding Scottish and British identities together caused little strain. Scottish fascists, Finlay notes, could not even decide which nationalism to support.

The Scottish Renaissance writers shared the European "politics of cultural despair". Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir and Lewis Grassic Gibbon all blamed industrialism for blighting the nation; Gibbon and Muir turned left, while MacDiarmid swung between left and right. Government answered the growing sense of national grievance in the mid-1930s with administrative devolution and more recognition of Scottish nationhood within the Union, which helped keep the new SNP on the fringes.

Clydeside's revival came not from domestic recovery alone but from the gathering storm in Europe. From the mid-1930s, British rearmament in the face of Nazi Germany stimulated the heavy industries that had languished for a decade. Government intervention helped restart the Queen Mary (work resumed in 1934, and she was launched that September and entered service in 1936), and, more importantly, a flood of Admiralty warship orders returned to the Clyde: all the "mixed" Clydeside builders were back in profit by 1939. Clydebank's John Brown yard, which would build the battleship Duke of York and much else, was once again at full stretch. The heavy industries that had defined — and then devastated — interwar Scotland were, on the eve of war, being called back into national service, setting the stage for the Clyde's crucial role in the Second World War (Card #23).