Red Clydeside

The 1915 rent strikes and their legislative outcome are well documented in Parliamentary records and contemporary press, as is the basic chronology of 31 January 1919. Where this topic becomes genuinely contested is in interpretation: how revolutionary the movement's leadership actually was, how close the British state believed itself to be to insurrection, and how much of the dramatic "tanks in George Square" imagery reflects what happened versus what was believed, feared, or later exaggerated by sympathetic and hostile accounts alike. Historians including those associated with the Open University's research on the period have specifically revisited and corrected several popular claims (the timing and purpose of troop deployment; whether Scottish troops were deliberately confined to barracks) using primary military and government records. This article follows that corrective, better-evidenced account over the more dramatic popular version.

Origins: wartime pressure on a working-class city

Red Clydeside did not emerge from nowhere. Glasgow and its satellite industrial towns were already a dense concentration of heavy engineering, shipbuilding, and munitions production before the First World War, with a correspondingly large and organised industrial workforce. The war intensified existing pressures rather than creating entirely new ones: rents rose sharply as factors (landlords' agents) exploited acute wartime housing shortages caused by workers flooding into the city for munitions jobs, while the "dilution" of skilled labour — the introduction of less-skilled, often female, workers into previously skilled trades to meet wartime production demands — created sustained friction over pay, status, and conditions in the engineering and shipbuilding workforce. These were, overwhelmingly, disputes about housing and labour conditions, not disputes about the legitimacy of the British state or the war effort as such, even though a vocal minority of activists increasingly framed them in more radical terms as the war dragged on.

The 1915 rent strikes

The rent strikes began in Govan in May 1915 and spread rapidly through working-class Glasgow districts including Partick and Parkhead over the following months, driven substantially by women, since many male tenants were away at the front or working long factory shifts. Mary Barbour's leadership of the Glasgow Women's Housing Association became emblematic of the movement, organising mass resistance to evictions through direct confrontation with sheriffs' officers attempting to enforce rent arrears. By October 1915 around 15,000 tenants were refusing to pay increased rents, rising to around 20,000 by November, with coordinated demonstrations including a mass rally at St Enoch Square. The campaign achieved a genuine and rapid legislative victory: in December 1915, within months of the strikes' peak, Parliament passed the Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act, freezing rents at their pre-war level for the duration of the war. This is among the clearest, most concretely documented successes of the entire Red Clydeside period, and it is notable that it was won primarily by women organisers rather than by the trade union and parliamentary left that later came to dominate popular memory of the movement.

The January 1919 crisis and "Bloody Friday"

The most famous single episode is the Battle of George Square, 31 January 1919, remembered locally as "Bloody Friday." By January 1919, with the war ended and demobilisation creating fears of mass unemployment, the Clyde Workers' Committee had organised a campaign for a reduction in the standard working week from 54 to 40 hours, partly as a direct strategy to spread available work across more workers. On 29 January, committee representatives presented their case to Glasgow's Lord Provost; two days later, a mass rally of tens of thousands gathered in George Square to hear his response. What began as a demonstration became a riot when strikers blocked tram traffic and police responded with baton charges; the Riot Act was read, and around 53 people were recorded injured in the resulting disorder.

The popular memory of this episode has often been considerably more dramatic than the documented record supports. Claims that the government deliberately confined Scottish troops to their barracks for fear they would side with the strikers, and that tanks were sent into an active, ongoing confrontation, do not hold up against the primary record: the troops that arrived in Glasgow that evening did so after the main violence had already subsided, and the tanks associated with the episode arrived six days later, on 6 February, reported as English units moved partly from Dorset — a significant, deliberately visible show of state force, but one directed at deterring further unrest rather than suppressing live fighting in the square. Within about a week of the riot, a compromise reduced the working week to 47 hours, well short of the 40-hour demand but a real concession extracted under sustained pressure. Strike leaders Manny Shinwell and Willie Gallacher were subsequently arrested and jailed, Shinwell on a charge of incitement through inflammatory speech.

Impact and scale: how revolutionary was it, really?

The scholarly consensus, reflected in historical reassessments including those produced by the Open University on this specific period, is that Red Clydeside's revolutionary character has been substantially overstated both by contemporaries who feared a "Bolshevist uprising" and by later popular and some left-wing accounts eager to claim a genuinely insurrectionary tradition. Most of the movement's leadership and rank and file were focused on concrete, bread-and-butter issues — rent levels, working hours, post-war unemployment, dilution of skilled trades — rather than the overthrow of the British state. Willie Gallacher himself, looking back, suggested the movement's leaders "should have" pursued a more genuinely revolutionary course, an admission that, read carefully, undercuts rather than supports the claim that they actually did so at the time. Only a small number of figures, most notably the Marxist John Maclean — who organised tenant associations and was repeatedly imprisoned for anti-war agitation — consistently and explicitly pursued revolutionary politics rather than industrial or municipal reform.

Legacy and ongoing debate

Red Clydeside's longer political legacy is widely asserted — a seedbed for the later electoral strength of the Labour Party on Clydeside, and sometimes linked, more loosely and more contestably, to the subsequent rise of left-leaning Scottish political identity more broadly — but this is a matter of historical interpretation about causation across intervening decades rather than a directly documented, traceable chain. Several figures associated with the movement, including James Maxton and Willie Gallacher, went on to long parliamentary careers (Maxton as an Independent Labour Party MP, Gallacher as Britain's second Communist MP), which does support a continuity-of-personnel argument even where a continuity-of-ideology argument is harder to establish cleanly. The 1919 centenary in particular prompted renewed public and academic attention to separating documented fact — the rent strikes' legislative success, the basic chronology and casualty record of George Square — from the more dramatic mythology that has attached itself to the episode in the century since.

A dissenting view: the Russian Revolution on the Clyde

shared Not all historians accept the sceptical consensus. The Marxist historian John Foster, writing in 1988 explicitly against Iain McLean's The Legend of Red Clydeside, argued that the October Revolution had a real effect on Clydeside even though there was never a revolutionary situation. He points to several pieces of evidence. In January 1918 some 3,000 West of Scotland shop stewards refused to let pro-war officials chair a meeting with Sir Auckland Geddes, the minister responsible for conscription, insisted that Willie Gallacher take the chair, rejected the new conscription bill and voted unanimously for an immediate armistice. On May Day 1918 the hostile Glasgow Herald estimated 100,000 people on Glasgow Green, where the resolutions from twenty platforms called for immediate peace and solidarity with the Russian Revolution. In January 1920 the Scottish ILP conference voted by 156 to 28 for affiliation to the Third International, against its own leadership. In the 1918 election the anti-war, pro-Soviet Neil Maclean won Govan, while the reformist John Wheatley lost Shettleston.

shared Foster also stresses how little Scots knew at first. The Glasgow Herald reported Kerensky back in control for days after the Bolsheviks took power, and conceded otherwise only on 22 November 1917; on 1 December the ILP paper Forward said "we do not know enough about what is going on in Russia to comment on it". He argues that the movement's later weakness owed much to retribution: in 1921 the Clyde shipbuilding workforce was cut from 50,000 to 18,000 and almost all activists were removed. Foster's account is openly committed and partisan, as McLean's critics say his is the other way; the scale of support for revolutionary politics on the Clyde remains genuinely disputed.

shared The historian Eleanor Gordon adds a point both sides long neglected. The wartime struggles over "dilution" were aimed largely at keeping women out of skilled work, and the craft unions' resistance drew on a firm belief that a woman's proper place was in the home, not only on fears of cheaper labour.

What the Clydeside left read

A reading culture. established The historian Jonathan Rose, in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), uses the memoirs of Clydeside activists to show how much of their politics came from books. David Kirkwood, the Parkhead shop steward deported from Glasgow in 1916, saw "a subtle association between weaving and Radicalism in Scotland", citing his own great-grandfather, a weaver (as quoted by Rose). Helen Crawfurd, a baker's daughter from the Glasgow slums and a leader of the 1915 rent strikes, traced her political awakening to Thomas Carlyle and said she found in him what she later read in Marx. The Glasgow woodcarver James Murray noticed that the workmates with the keenest minds in his shop were socialists. Manny Shinwell, who left school before twelve after spells in London, South Shields and Glasgow, taught himself from difficult books in the public library and all his life used a dictionary to check his pronunciation.

Marxism and its limits. shared Rose argues that Marxist study often failed to win ordinary workers because of its jargon and sectarianism, and several of his witnesses are Glaswegian. The foundryman Thomas Bell admitted that the Socialist Labour Party could silence opponents with quotations from Marx "but we never made members". The Communist J. R. Campbell ran Marxist study circles for Glasgow slum-dwellers who, his stepson recalled, could not follow him. The Glasgow MP George Barnes gave up on the Social Democratic Federation after being "belaboured with words" at a meeting. The engineer Harry McShane, an early Communist, came to reject the Party's view that "history makes men" (all as quoted by Rose). Willie Gallacher opened his first memoir (1936) by refusing to discuss anything not bearing on his becoming an agitator, but in later volumes admitted a liking for Burns, Scott and Dickens. Rose's argument is an interpretation, and the large audiences drawn by John Maclean's economics classes cut against it.

• On May Day 1918 the Glasgow Herald, no friend of the left, estimated 100,000 people on Glasgow Green calling for peace and solidarity with Soviet Russia.
• The 1915 rent strikes' legislative victory — the Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act — came within months of the strikes' peak, an unusually fast Parliamentary response for the period.
• Mary Barbour, the rent strikes' most prominent organiser, was honoured with a bronze statue in Govan unveiled in 2018, nearly a century after the events it commemorates.
• The tanks popularly associated with the Battle of George Square did not arrive in Glasgow until 6 February 1919, six days after the riot itself.
• Willie Gallacher later became one of only two Communist Party MPs ever elected to the British Parliament.
• The 40-hour week demanded in January 1919 was not achieved at the time; workers won a reduction to 47 hours instead.
• John Maclean, the movement's most consistently revolutionary figure, was repeatedly imprisoned for anti-war activity rather than for the George Square riot itself.
• Manny Shinwell, jailed after Bloody Friday, went on to a long Labour political career, eventually serving as a government minister.
• The rent-strike leader Helen Crawfurd said she found in Thomas Carlyle what she later read in Marx.
• Modern historical reassessment of Red Clydeside has specifically used Open University research to correct the popular "troops locked in barracks" claim using primary military records.

• Myth: tanks were sent to crush an active Bolshevik uprising in George Square. Tanks arrived six days after the riot, as a deterrent show of force, not to suppress live fighting.
• Myth: Scottish troops were locked in their barracks for fear of disloyalty. Not supported by primary military records; troops arrived after violence had subsided.
• Myth: Red Clydeside was a genuinely revolutionary threat to the British state. Most participants and leaders pursued concrete reforms (rent, hours, conditions); only a minority, notably John Maclean, held consistently revolutionary politics.
• Myth: the movement's rank and file were steeped in Marxist theory. Glasgow Marxists such as Thomas Bell admitted their jargon won few members, and many activists drew their politics as much from Carlyle, Burns and wider reading.
• Disputed: the direct causal link between Red Clydeside and later Scottish Labour, and even later left-nationalist, political strength. Asserted widely, but resting on interpretation of causation across decades rather than a documented chain of cause and effect.