The Battle of George Square

On Friday 31 January 1919 some 20,000–25,000 striking workers gathered in George Square, the main square of Glasgow, in front of the City Chambers. They were waiting for the government’s answer to their demand that the working week be cut to 40 hours. At around midday the police charged with batons into the crowd, which was trying to stop the trams crossing the square. A brawl followed that spread from the square into the neighbouring streets and went on until late evening. The Sheriff of Lanarkshire read the Riot Act and then called on the army for help. The strike leaders, among them Emanuel Shinwell, William Gallacher and David Kirkwood, were arrested. During the night soldiers began arriving in the city, and three days later six tanks. The events of that day, called “Bloody Friday” by the left, went down in history as the Battle of George Square. Over time they acquired so luxuriant a legend that it still has to be separated from what actually happened.

Red Clydeside

In 1919 Glasgow was the second city of the British Empire and one of the greatest industrial centres in the world. The shipyards and engineering works on the Clyde built warships, cast guns and turned shells. During the war they worked flat out, but the workers paid a high price for it: overcrowded and dilapidated tenements, rising rents, a Munitions Act that forbade skilled workers to change employers, and the introduction into the works of unskilled labour, including women – what the unions called the “dilution” of the trade.

Out of these disputes grew a movement that the press began to call – at first disapprovingly – “Red Clydeside”. In 1915 thousands of tenants, led mainly by women, refused to pay rent increases and forced the government to freeze rents. That same year the Clyde Workers’ Committee was formed, bringing together shop stewards from the works rather than the official union leaderships. Gallacher was its chairman, and one of its leading figures was Kirkwood, chief shop steward at Beardmore’s Parkhead Forge. In 1916 the authorities dealt with the committee under the wartime Defence of the Realm Act: Gallacher was jailed for an anti-war article, and Kirkwood and several other leaders were deported from Glasgow.

The end of the war brought new fears. Military orders were drying up, and hundreds of thousands of demobilised men were returning from the army and navy. Clydeside, which lived off the armaments industry, faced mass unemployment. At the turn of 1918 and 1919 the engineering and shipbuilding unions negotiated nationally a reduction of the working week from 54 to 47 hours. The Glasgow radicals thought this too little. If everyone worked shorter hours, there would be work for all, including the returning soldiers. The Clyde Workers’ Committee at first wanted to demand 30 hours, but after reaching agreement with the Scottish Trades Union Congress and the Glasgow Trades Council it settled on 40. At the head of the joint strike committee stood Shinwell, chairman of the city’s Trades Council and an organiser of the seamen’s union.

The forty-hours strike

The strike was called without the approval of the unions’ national leaderships, so it was unofficial. It began on Monday 27 January 1919. The shipyards and engineering works of Glasgow and the surrounding area came to a halt, the organisers also threatened to shut down the city’s power stations, and over the following days the strike spread, by various estimates, to several tens of thousands of people. The organisers used mass picketing: crowds several thousand strong would stand before the gates of works still operating and persuade – and sometimes force – the workers to down tools. The strike’s real weakness was the city’s tramwaymen, most of whom did not join the protest. The trams kept running, and the strikers saw them as a symbol of strike-breaking.

Tension in Glasgow was enormous at the time for other reasons too. On 23 January, in the harbour, in the yard of the seamen’s recruiting office on James Watt Street, white sailors attacked Black sailors from the colonies, whom they saw as cheap competition. A few hours earlier Shinwell had addressed the sailors gathered there, protesting against the employment of Chinese seamen on British ships. Some historians, among them Jacqueline Jenkinson, believe that his rhetoric contributed to the riot, in which the victims were Black sailors – and it was they, not their attackers, whom the police arrested. This speech was later added to the charges brought against him after 31 January.

On 29 January a delegation of strikers went to the City Chambers and presented its demands to the Lord Provost – the Mayor of Glasgow – James Watson Stewart. The Provost agreed to forward to London a request that the government compel the employers to grant a 40-hour week. In a telegram to Lloyd George’s deputy, Andrew Bonar Law, he noted that if the government did not act, the strikers would resort to “other methods”, but that they had agreed to wait until Friday. Outside the City Chambers Shinwell and Gallacher told the crowd that if the answer was unsatisfactory they would stop all the trams, cut off the lights and bring the city to a standstill. After this meeting the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, Alastair Oswald Morison Mackenzie, made sure that he could count on military assistance if needed.

On 30 January the War Cabinet in London, chaired by Bonar Law, took up the question of Glasgow. The prime minister, David Lloyd George, was in Paris, where the peace conference had been in session for nearly two weeks. The government decided that it would not intervene in a dispute between workers and employers over the heads of the official unions. Bonar Law warned, however, that if the movement in Glasgow grew it would engulf the whole country, and that there must be enough forces in the city to keep order and protect the power stations. Ministers had before their eyes a Europe in ferment from Berlin to Budapest: only a few weeks earlier the Spartacist uprising had broken out in Berlin and been bloodily crushed, and in Russia the Bolsheviks were fighting for control of the whole former empire. Scottish Command was ordered to keep troops ready in case the civil authorities asked for them. A refusal was sent to the Provost that evening. On the morning of 31 January everyone, the strikers included, could read it in the newspapers.

Bloody Friday

On Friday morning processions from the working-class districts and the surrounding towns began streaming into George Square. According to the newspapers of the day and to Gallacher himself, who used the figure at his trial, 20,000–25,000 people gathered. In later accounts and memoirs the number swelled to 60,000, 90,000 and even more than 100,000, but there is no evidence for this. In the square stood some 140 police officers, a few of them mounted, with a reserve hidden in the inner courtyard of the City Chambers. At around midday a delegation of strike leaders entered the City Chambers and waited in the library for the Provost, who was in conference with the councillors.

At about 12.20 p.m. the police made a baton charge into the crowd on the south side of the square. The immediate cause was the strikers’ attempt to block the trams, but who was to blame is still disputed. The strikers maintained that the attack was planned; the police that they had to clear a path for the trams. The historian Gordon Barclay, who has studied the trial records and government papers, considers the most likely explanation to be an over-reaction by police forces too weak to face so huge a crowd. Hearing the sounds of fighting, the leaders rushed out of the City Chambers. As he came out, Kirkwood was struck from behind with a baton and fell unconscious to the ground. He was detained together with the beaten Gallacher. A photograph of Kirkwood lying on the ground became one of the best-known pictures of the day.

A second charge followed in front of the City Chambers. Part of the crowd armed itself with bottles from an abandoned lorry and pelted the police and the city authorities with them. Sheriff Mackenzie judged that a “riot and tumult” was in progress and went out in front of the building to read the proclamation under the Riot Act of 1714. Under the law, anyone who had not dispersed within an hour of its reading committed an offence carrying a severe penalty. A bottle struck the Sheriff and the text was torn from his hands. The Chief Constable, his deputy and the Town Clerk were also hit. Gallacher and the Labour MP Neil Maclean, though already under arrest, were allowed to address the crowd and urged it to move to Glasgow Green, the great park by the Clyde where workers’ rallies had been held for generations. Things calmed down briefly, but scuffles with the police, mounted officers among them, spread to the streets of the city centre and went on until late evening. The crowd wrecked trams, smashed shop windows and looted shops. According to contemporary reports several dozen people, civilians and police officers, were injured. In the Saltmarket district a bottle struck Constable William McGregor on the head. He died of his injuries on 1 June 1919. Shinwell slipped away from the square in the confusion but was soon arrested as well.

Troops in the city

After the Riot Act had been read, the Sheriff, the Provost and the Chief Constable concluded that the city’s forces were not enough to keep order, and Mackenzie asked for military assistance. Only he could do so: in Scotland the right to call on the army to aid the civil power lay with the sheriff of the county, and the government could not send soldiers against citizens without declaring martial law, which was not done. At 3 p.m. the War Cabinet met in London. The Secretary for Scotland, Robert Munro, declared that it was a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike, for it was “a Bolshevist rising”. The military reported that orders had already been sent to Scotland and that some 12,000 troops could be sent to Glasgow quickly. The Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff announced that six tanks and a hundred lorries would leave for the north by rail that very night.

The first troops arrived at Queen Street station at around 10 p.m., by which time the rioting had died down. More trains came in throughout the night and over the following days. According to the press, nearly 10,000 soldiers were in the city. Most were Scots from the reserve battalions of the Royal Scots, the Seaforth Highlanders, the Gordon Highlanders and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, along with men of the only English battalion stationed in Scotland, the East Surreys, and of the Durham Light Infantry, the only troops sent from England. The soldiers occupied the City Chambers, the post office, the railway stations, the bridges and the power stations. Machine guns were set up in the courtyard of the City Chambers. The six tanks arrived from their base at Bovington in Dorset on Monday 3 February and halted at the cattle market in the Gallowgate district. There is nothing to suggest that they ever left it. The army did not clash with the strikers, fired not a single shot and injured no one. Its task was to guard important sites and relieve the police.

The end of the strike and the trial

The strike did not survive this test. The leaders were in custody, the mass pickets stopped, and the workers gradually drifted back to work. On 10 February the strike committee called off the strike, and on 12 February the last strikers returned to work. The demand for a 40-hour week was not met, and industry kept the 47-hour week won before the strike. The last soldiers left Glasgow on 17 February.

On 7 April 1919 twelve defendants, among them Shinwell, Gallacher and Kirkwood, stood trial before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. They were charged with inciting the crowd to riot and with taking part in the disturbances. The trial lasted eleven days. Most of the defendants, Kirkwood among them, were acquitted. Decisive in his case was the photograph showing that a policeman had struck him from behind without any provocation. Shinwell was sentenced to five months in prison and Gallacher to three. According to some accounts, two other defendants also received short prison sentences.

Legend and reality

The Battle of George Square became one of the founding myths of the Scottish left, and later of the Scottish independence movement too. In the most popular version, Winston Churchill sent English soldiers and tanks into the square against Scottish workers, while the Scottish soldiers were locked in Maryhill Barracks for fear that they would go over to the strikers. Barclay, comparing this story with the War Cabinet minutes, the trial records, army returns of troop strength and the press of the day, has shown that almost every element of it is false. Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, was not a member of the War Cabinet, and at the meeting of 30 January he warned against exaggerating the threat, although he also spoke of arresting the leaders. The army was called in by the Sheriff, not by the government. Most of the soldiers were Scots. The tanks did not enter the square. The version casting Churchill as the culprit first appeared only in 1973, in Shinwell’s memoirs. The story of the “locked-in” soldiers at Maryhill comes from Gallacher, who claimed in 1936 that instead of going to Glasgow Green the crowd should have marched to the barracks and won over the soldiers, and Glasgow would have been in the workers’ hands. Barclay found no evidence that the Maryhill battalion was confined to barracks or that anyone feared it would mutiny. All that is known is that at least one battalion left behind its Glasgow men before setting off, so that they would not have to face relatives and friends.

Most historians also doubt that Glasgow was close to revolution in January 1919. The strike had a political aim, since it sought to compel the government to regulate working hours, but its leaders were thinking of a union struggle rather than a seizure of power. Gallacher himself later admitted bitterly that “we were carrying on a strike when we ought to have been making a revolution”. The government saw things quite differently. London feared that after Petrograd, Berlin and Munich it would be Glasgow’s turn, and police reports on “revolutionary organisations” fed those fears. Hence the size of the forces sent, out of all proportion to the real threat.

Significance

The strike’s defeat did not mean the end of Red Clydeside. The Glasgow labour movement moved from strikes to parliamentary politics. In the 1922 general election Labour won 29 seats in Scotland, and a group of “Clydesiders” from the Independent Labour Party entered the House of Commons, among them Shinwell and Kirkwood. Their departure from Glasgow for London, seen off by cheering crowds, became the symbol of a new era. In January 1924 the first Labour government was formed. Gallacher chose a different path: in 1920 he went to Moscow for the Comintern congress, met Lenin and became one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The fear of Bolshevism so clearly visible in the minutes of late January 1919 left a lasting mark on British politics. The government drew up contingency plans for general strikes and expanded its surveillance of the left. The labour movement, for its part, itself influenced foreign policy in 1920. In May London dockers refused to load arms for Poland onto the SS Jolly George, and in August, with the Red Army outside Warsaw, the Labour Party and the trade unions threatened a general strike if Britain went to war with Soviet Russia. Fear of the Reds played its part in the 1924 election campaign, when the press published a letter attributed to Grigory Zinoviev, and in the government’s tough response to the General Strike of 1926. In the 1930s many Conservatives’ hostility to the Soviet Union was one of the factors that hampered an understanding with Moscow against Hitler and favoured the policy of concessions.

The men of George Square travelled a long road. In 1935 Gallacher became the only Communist MP in the House of Commons and spoke against the policy of appeasement. Shinwell, who served his sentence in Calton Jail in Edinburgh, was during the Second World War one of the fiercest critics of Churchill’s government from the Labour benches, and after the war he sat in Clement Attlee’s government: in 1947 he became Secretary of State for War and in 1950 Minister of Defence. The man whose strike had brought troops to Glasgow in 1919 was, thirty years later, responsible for the British Army in the early years of the Cold War and during the Korean War.