The Battle for George Square 1919 E-Book

Gordon Barclay

• Herausgeber: John Donald
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 578

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The Battle of George Square, a riot during the Forty Hours Strike in Glasgow, on 31 January 1919, is routinely claimed to be one of the most iconic events in Scottish working-class history. It is also the most mythologised. For a century, the narrative created for the defence of the strike leaders charged with incitement to riot – an 'unprovoked attack on a peaceful crowd' as an act of oppression – has been repeated uncritically by academic and popular writers. Mythology has almost completely replaced reality, most notably in the Scottish education system, where educational materials have been described by two prominent historians as, 'arrant propaganda' and a 'perversion of history'. Now, Gordon Barclay and Louise Heren have undertaken a meticulous examination of the contemporary evidence to tell a more complex story. In doing so they examine the ways writers have failed to subject the celebratory mythology of this iconic event to adequate scrutiny. They document the creation of the mythology, from the writings of the strike leaders to those who use the mythology of the Battle to promote their own politics. They also examine the legal basis and reality of the military deployment to Glasgow in the aftermath of the riot.

Leseprobe

THE BATTLE FOR GEORGE SQUARE

Dr Gordon Barclay FSA, FSA Scot, FRHistS worked as Principal Inspector and Head of Policy at government heritage agency Historic Scotland. He has published extensively on the history and surviving remains of the defence of Scotland, including ‘If Hitler comes’: Preparing for Invasion: Scotland 1940 and (with Ron Morris) The Fortification of the Firth of Forth, 1880–1977. His main research interests lie in the misuse of the past for political ends by British, English and Scottish nationalism.

Dr Louise Heren FSA Scot, FRHistS has a doctorate in Scottish male violence from the University of St Andrews and is published in Scottish violent crime history. Her most recent work Sex and Violence in 1920s Scotland examines masculinities, gender, judicial attitudes and juridical responses to violence in the aftermath of the First World War War; all topics that help explore what really happened in Glasgow in 1919.

Dedicated with thanks toBailie Malcom Cunning1957-2022

First published in 2025 by

John Donald, an imprint of

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

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www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Gordon J. Barclay and Louise Heren, 2025

The moral right of Gordon J. Barclay and Louise Heren to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher

ISBN: 978-0-85976-741-5

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Set in Sabon by Tom Johnstone Editorial Services

Printed and bound at TJ Books Cornwall

Contents

List of Illustrations

Maps

Foreword: The Historians

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1 A Warning to the Curious

2 To Begin

3 Memory and Sources

PART II: GLASGOW JANUARY 1919

4 The Simmering Pot: Glasgow, 1914 to 1919

5 Monday 27 January 1919

6 Tuesday and Wednesday Morning, 28 and 29 January 1919

7 Afternoon, Wednesday 29 January 1919: the Meeting with the Provost

8 Wednesday 29 January: after the Meeting, in the Square

9 Thursday 30 January 1919

PART III: ‘BLACK FRIDAY’/‘BLOODY FRIDAY’

10 Before the Violence: Mid-Morning in George Square, Friday 31 January 1919

11 The Riot, 31 January 1919: the Prosecution Evidence

12 The Riot, 31 January 1919: the Defence Evidence and the Press

13 31 January 1919: Trouble Spreads across the Square

14 ‘The horrors that attend on conflict with the executive power’: the Violence Spreads North

15 A ‘scene of great disorder’: the Violence Spreads South

16 The Sheriff Calls the Troops: Friday Afternoon

PART IV: INTERLUDE

17 ‘A subject not unattended with obscurity’: Military Aid to the Civil Power

18 Aspects of the Mythology

19 Historiography

PART V: AFTERMATH

20 Evening of 31 January to Sunday 6 April 1919

21 The Trial, 7 to 18 April 1919

22 The Charge to the Jury and the Verdicts

23 Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

Index

Illustrations

1.1. Postcard showing George Square looking from the south-east

1.2. Postcard showing George Square looking from the west side

2.1. Glasgow women tram driver and conductress around the end of the First World War

3.1. ‘Julian’s Baby’ in a fund-raising parade in January 1919

5.1. The procession from St Andrew’s Halls to George Square 27 January

5.2. Crowds in George Square, Monday 27 January

5.3. Shinwell and Hopkins speaking to the crowd from the plinth of the City Chambers

5.4. The red flag flying from the corporation flag pole, George Square on Monday 27 January

5.5. The red flag in George Square on Monday 27 January

6.1. A strike picket at Weir’s of Cathcart’s works, Thursday 30 January

6.2. A strikers’ procession, Tuesday 28 January

6.3. A placard in a procession on Tuesday 28 January

7.1. Lord Provost James Stewart denies knowledge of Friday’s deputation

7.2. Town Clerk Sir John Lindsay’s precognition

11.1. Town Clerk Sir John Lindsay’s precognition

11.2. Town Clerk Sir John Lindsay’s precognition

13.1. Kirkwood being batoned by Sergeant Steele

14.1. The police withdraw after a baton charge in North Frederick Street

14.2. Sheriff MacKenzie before reading the proclamation of the Riot Act

14.3. Kirkwood being brought round in the City Chambers quadrangle

14.4. Gallacher, bandaged, in the City Chambers quadrangle

14.5. A police casualty being put in an ambulance

14.6. George Square in the immediate aftermath of the riot

14.7. The immediate aftermath of the Battle

16.1. Troops marching in George Square 1 or 2 February 1919

16.2. A soldier sleeping in the City Chambers, 3 February

16.3. Soldiers of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders guard Coplaw [Tram]Car Works

16.4. Mortars set up for the cameras in the quadrangle of the City Chambers

16.5. Soldiers in Scottish military headgear, resting at the City Chambers

16.6. Soldiers with fixed bayonets escort a supplies cart, 1 or 2 February

16.7. Soldiers pose on one of the Mark V* tanks stationed in the Cattle Market

16.8. Tanks in the Cattle Market, 3 February

16.9. Soldiers guarding a railway bridge over the Clyde, 1 or 2 February

18.1. Tank ‘Julian’ parading along Trongate on 18 January 1918

18.2. A still from Pathé film of tanks in Liverpool in August 1919

20.1. A soldier inspects a damaged tram

20.2. One of the smashed and looted windows of the Cable Shoe Shop

20.3. Biographical details on William Gallacher from police perspective

21.1. Some of the accused in court, April 1919

23.1. Soldiers and police on guard at the docks

Maps

Map 1.

Map 2.

Map 3.

Map 4.

Map 5.Recruiting areas for the ten Scottish regiments in 1919.

Foreword

The Historians

Lawrence Stone paraphrased E. H. Carr: ‘before we read the history, examine the background of the historian’.1 Published accounts of the Battle of George Square, which took place on 31 January 1919, demonstrate how difficult it has been for single authors to approach the events completely dispassionately. The Battle is an iconic but surprisingly little-studied event in twentieth-century Scottish history, and perhaps the most mythologised.

As collaborators, we come from different backgrounds and inevitably bring different perspectives, but we believe our combined approach enables either of us to examine critically the other’s preconceptions and prejudices. Gordon is a lowland Scot from Aberdeen and had never heard of the Battle until 2017. He came to it through a research interest in the use of mythologised history in contemporary politics. He has applied methods from earlier projects in the marshalling of large amounts of evidence to create a soundly-based, coherent narrative. Unlike many writers about these events, he has no particular research interest in, or commitment to, labour history. The son of a policeman, he was himself a public servant and union member for over 30 years, and finds distasteful the glorification of the extreme violence, especially against the police, so common in accounts of the Battle. He is a member of the successor party (Liberal/Liberal Democrat) to which many of the ‘establishment’ protagonists belonged.

Louise is a social historian whose work is always grounded in primary research and dataset analysis. She analyses first, exploring trends in the data before attempting to explain their meaning. Her approach is not: What do I think, now where do I find archive sources to support my ideas? She is the daughter of a marine fitter and grand-daughter of a ship’s boilermaker, both of whom worked in the Port of London and who experienced long periods of unemployment at the hands of the shipyard management. Louise has never carried a political party’s card, but she considers herself to be a small ‘s’ socialist.

We literally bumped into each other on 16 November 2018 in the National Records of Scotland locker room. Initial apologies led to enquiries about what each was working on; he was copying parts of the transcript of the trial of the leaders of the Forty Hours Strike, for allegedly fomenting the riot, the ‘Battle of George Square’, on 31 January 1919. She remarked that she had for some years been trying to promote the idea of a television documentary on the events of that day. Within five minutes we had agreed in principle to write this book. By Christmas, we had made an informal approach to a publisher. Our first book has since been published – Tanks on the Streets? The Battle of George Square, Glasgow 1919 – an avowedly popular rather than scholarly work, aimed at informing a general audience, providing a wider background to events but consistently grounded in the archival evidence to prove our points.2 This volume complements it, as a definitive presentation of our evidence and of our discussion of the problematic historiography of the Battle.

Our shared approach explicitly tries to avoid the problems caused by framing the story of the Battle of George Square solely as an iconic symbol of working-class struggle, centring on the strike leaders and the idea of ‘Red Clydeside’ as established in those leaders’ unreliable memoirs. Instead, we analyse events in Glasgow in 1919 as they unfolded, as a particular event growing out of local circumstances, although viewed through a prism of wider domestic and international events. We have avoided allowing later events and people’s later careers to cast a retrospective shadow. For example, one anonymous referee chided us for not introducing Emanuel Shinwell earlier since he was ‘perhaps the most important figure in the narrative’. Shinwell’s importance in the context of the Battle is perhaps as the least reliable of narrators. An approach so centred upon the point of view of the strike leadership and their followers has shown itself to be unproductive of good history, so far as the Battle is concerned.

__________

  1. L. Stone, ‘History and Post-Modernism’, Past and Present, no.135 (1992), p.189.

  2. L. Heren and G. J. Barclay, Tanks on the Streets? The Battle of George Square, Glasgow 1919 (Pen and Sword, 2023).

Part IINTRODUCTION

1 A Warning to the Curious

The events of George Square were incredibly symbolic, and an important landmark in working class history.

(Neil Davidson, quoted in the Daily Record, 29 January 2014.)

This is not a history of Glasgow in the twentieth century. Nor is it a history of Red Clydeside, nor an account of labour relations in west Scotland; not even a history of the Forty Hours Strike. This book provides sufficient context in the labour and political history of Britain after the First World War, but the reader looking for the continuation of the debate between Iain McLean and John Foster and their adherents as to the nature of the ‘Legend of Red Clydeside’ will be disappointed. To date, that debate has failed to explore in detail the key archival sources in order to present an evidence-based account of what happened on Friday 31 January 1919, in the days before and after, and at the subsequent trial in April; instead, that debate has curated a mythology that began to develop at lunchtime on that very day.

On 31 January 1919 there was a riot in George Square, Glasgow, now most often recalled as ‘the Battle of George Square’. It occurred on the fifth day of the Forty Hours Strike (27 January to 12 February 1919), which was held with the aim of reducing the number of weekly hours worked without any reduction in pay, in order to absorb the vast numbers of working men returning from the Great War.1

The Forty Hours Strike had limited support beyond greater Glasgow, and the city is the scene for most of the action (Maps 1, 2 and 3). The great civic space, George Square, at the heart of the city, is the focus for the most memorable events (Fig. 1.1). The monumental City Chambers, also referred to as the Municipal Buildings both at the time and in this text, dominate the whole of the eastern end of the Square (Map 4, Fig 1.2). Immediately in front of the Chambers, the plinth of the statue of William Gladstone (moved in 1924 to accommodate the Glasgow War Memorial) was used as a speaking platform by some of the main movers of events, who were overlooked from the balconies of the City Chambers by other significant actors.

1.1. Postcard showing George Square, looking from the south-east corner towards the Merchants’ House. First decades of the twentieth century (out of copyright).

Around noon on Friday 31 January, some 20-25,000 strikers arrived in George Square by prior arrangement in a series of processions from different parts of Glasgow, along with an unknown number of onlookers, to hear the outcome of an approach made by the strike leaders via the Lord Provost to the government, seeking intervention in the strike. They were faced initially by around 100 policemen, growing to about 180-200 as policemen accompanying the processions joined their colleagues, and reserves were brought forward from the open quadrangle of the City Chambers (Map 4). The approach to government had emerged from a meeting on Wednesday 29 January between six strikers (a possibly imagined ‘seventh man’ may have been invented to take the blame for some of the more inflammatory contributions), three prominent figures in the strike leadership, the Lord Provost and the Town Clerk. Whatever was said, and this is dealt with in Chapter 7 below, the Provost and Town Clerk left the meeting believing they had heard credible threats of violence, particularly against the tram system and the nonstriking tram workers. The strikers’ anger with the tram staff had been expressed throughout the week by a growing level of barracking of working drivers and conductors, low-level violence and the obstruction of trams by the strikers’ marches. Attempts to block the tram traffic in the south-east corner of George Square on Friday 31 January led to police intervention, a number of baton charges, and violence in the Square directed towards the police and the trams, which spread across the city centre. The Riot Act was read and, fearing the under-strength Glasgow Police might be overwhelmed, the Sheriff called for military aid. Mainly Scottish troops began to arrive late on Friday evening, after most of the trouble had died down. Key members of the strike leadership were tried in April 1919 for incitement to riot and for mobbing and rioting.

1.2. Postcard showing George Square, looking from the west side towards the City Chambers, showing the south-east corner (right). First decades of the twentieth century (out of copyright).

When we have spoken publicly about our research, the description of the Battle of George Square as the most mythologised event in twentieth-century Scottish history has not been challenged. Almost everything widely believed about ‘Bloody Friday’ – its cause and its aftermath – is untrue. In the case of the Battle, history was not ‘written by the victors’ and the narrative established at the time by the authors of the Strike Bulletin, at the trial of the key protagonists and subsequently in the strike leaders’ memoirs has become the dominant one. John Foster has suggested the Crown’s case against the strike leaders has largely ‘entered the history books’; but in reality, it is, if mentioned at all, dismissed.2

The mythology is widespread in popular and academic history, school textbooks, and in political discourse, from Parliament to social media. The myths can be summarised in one sentence:

The police, acting on instructions, attacked a peaceful demonstration of 100,000 people in George Square and Churchill sent the tanks, a howitzer and 12,000 young, inexperienced English troops against them to occupy the city, while Scottish troops were locked up in case they joined the strikers. The crowd routed the police.

Every version of the accepted narrative includes one or more elements of this mythology, but none are supported by the contemporary evidence, or are even directly contradicted by it. Challenging the cherished myths and common beliefs and assumptions – typified by the quotation at the head of this chapter – meets with incomprehension, scorn or even hostility.3 As a consequence, our account of what happened is detailed, as we wish to provide firm foundations in the archival evidence for the narrative we present.

This book sets out to describe what happened over a century ago, and to analyse how the actual events, as evidenced in contemporary sources, have been replaced by an almost wholly mythologised ‘usable history’, in some ways as a reflection of the way people remember, through accidental or deliberate falsification, and through problematic engagement with the story by popular and, more worryingly, by academic history.

Surprisingly, no-one has looked in any detail at these aspects of the Battle of George Square during the past 100 years. The Battle is seen as an iconic moment in the political history of Red Clydeside and Glasgow, but it has never itself been the sole focus of a historical study. Academic historians have discussed it as a coda, crisis or interruption in the wider historical and political narrative of Red Clydeside; as a catalyst for subsequent developments; or, perhaps most often, as a symbol for something important to an individual author – notably, as reflecting the oppressive intent of the government. Sometimes the events of the days on either side of the Battle are dealt with in a few sentences or paragraphs, at most a few pages, before the author hurries on to other parts of the story.

We also look at how the largest single provision of ‘military aid to the civil power’ on the British mainland has been dealt with in writings on the use of the military in the maintenance of order. The deployment has generally been treated as a dramatic interruption to the history of labour relations, requiring no more than a mention.4 The troops simply ‘arrive’, ‘sent by government’, to deal with ‘a Bolshevist rising’, or to ‘crush the strike’, as an agent of oppression. Even historians specialising in the role of the army in supporting the civil power have shown little interest in exploring the detail of the post-Battle deployment, a key example of its use.5 This is explored in Chapter 17.

The history of labour relations in the west of Scotland and the creation of the ‘legend’ of Red Clydeside, Iain McLean’s challenge to it, and the defence mounted by Tony Dickson, John Foster and others, is documented in a rich academic literature. The ‘legend’ has also formed a significant part of a popular historical literature of varied accuracy, in which the ‘legend’ in its most heroic and romantic forms has continued to flourish, relatively undisturbed by reality. In both academic and popular literature, however, the subsidiary ‘legend’ of the Battle of George Square has been transmitted almost wholly unchanged from the narrative published during the strike, in the run-up to and at the trial, and in the writings of Emanuel Shinwell, William Gallacher and others.

When Iain McLean’s The Legend of Red Clydeside (1983) was reprinted in 1999, he added a long introductory chapter, part of which responded to the criticisms of the first edition. McLean summarised the ‘legend’ as established by 1969 as ‘a heroic struggle against both capital and government’.6 He suggested ‘this picture was set out in the many memoirs of participants’, mentioning William Gallacher’s Revolt on the Clyde (1936) whom he considered ‘an untrustworthy witness’, and David Kirkwood’s My Life of Revolt (1935). In considering the criticisms levelled against his work, McLean agreed, inter alia, that he had underestimated ‘the repressive intentions of government’, apparently referring to the government’s ways of dealing with wartime unrest and disruption on the Clyde.7

McLean’s ‘most formidable’ critic, John Foster, has also based his consideration of the Forty Hours Strike on the premise that the government was actively oppressive, and that the deployment of the military in 1919, supposedly by the UK government, was the main symbol of this.8 Foster notes but does not altogether agree with McLean’s view that too much credence has been given to the ‘self-serving accounts of wartime shop stewards’, and suggests that by the late 1970s ‘Clydeside’s revolutionary potential had become sufficiently recognised to be integrated into a larger rewriting of British history’.9 But the main arguments between McLean and Foster are not directly about the Forty Hours Strike, except insofar as its aims and impacts were deliberately or incidentally ‘political’.

Foster has generally written on the premise that the military deployment from 31 January to 17 February was not only instigated by government but represented a deliberate attempt at repression, thus taking issue with the revisionists’ view of it as ‘simply [a] laughable and ill-informed over-reaction’.10 No-one in this debate appears to have taken on board the fact that the army was called for by the Sheriff to assist the city police, not ‘sent by government’.11 Foster has introduced the role of the powerful Engineers’ and Shipbuilders’ Association. The Chief Constable had told the Association that his under-strength force might need military aid for policing the strike. The Association, however, on 30 January, ‘did not view with favour – at least up till now – the bringing in of the Military’. Foster suggests that circumstances then ‘induced the employers to revise their tactics and call for military intervention’.12 But at neither of the employers’ meetings on 31 January or 4 February 1919 was any military intervention requested. Their discussion on 31 January was limited to suggesting that a ‘Civic Guard’ of loyal employees be formed. On 4 February they discussed billeting.13

Many writers have touched on the Battle, and few have resisted the temptation to (over)dramatise their narrative. Some have relished their role as creators of usable pasts for Glasgow’s working class, have ignored or downplayed evidence, or have even changed it or in a few cases invented it, to suit their narrative.14 Richard Evans describes the particular problem of the rise of explicitly committed forms of history written from the point of view of the industrial working class, to recover workers’ history as a means of strengthening their class-consciousness and political commitment – a story of resistance to oppression and the forward march of the organised working class. He believes ‘politically committed history only damages itself if it distorts, manipulates or obscures historical fact in the interests of the cause it claims to represent’.15 This is, unfortunately, evident in much writing about events in Glasgow in January and February 1919. Which, it is argued below, deserve a dispassionate, critical analysis of all the available evidence, and paying attention to all the available voices.

The structure of the book is intended, first, to provide the reader with a basic foundation in the circumstances of 1919. Part I provides some introduction to the aims of the book, and although it has been suggested that this section should focus on individuals (Shinwell, Gallacher et al) whose later careers in British politics cast a retrospective shadow on events, there are other ways to frame the narrative, for example by taking more notice of three institutions than is usual: the War Cabinet, the Glasgow Police and the Tramways Department, which we explore in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 considers the sources available and explores the problems of memory and of reminiscences recorded decades after the event.

The second part of the book sets the scene and takes us to the evening of Thursday 30 January. Chapter 4 provides a brief summary of the situation in Glasgow in its wider context in 1919, compares the Forty Hours Strike in Glasgow with the contemporaneous 44-Hours Strike in Belfast and closes with a summary of events in the week before the strike. In Chapters 5 to 9 the evidence for events in the days leading up to the Battle is set out, highlighting events in George Square and the City Chambers on Monday 27 and Wednesday 29 January, and on the strikers’ growing frustration with the non-striking tram staff. Particular attention is paid to the meeting between the Lord Provost and the strikers on Wednesday, as what happened there – what was said or understood to have been said – led directly to the violence on Friday 31 January, and was subsequently used to try to deflect blame for events. The rioting over Thursday night and Friday morning in Lanarkshire is briefly described. The deliberations of the War Cabinet on Thursday 30 January are also considered.

The third part of the text describes in detail the events of ‘Bloody Friday’.16 Chapters 10 to 15 cover in detail the events in and around the Square: the arrival of the processions; the origins of the violence; the intervention of the police and the first baton charge; the supposed threat to the City Chambers and the second and third charges; the spread of the violence north into Cathedral Street and south to Glasgow Green and over the Clyde. Chapter 15 also deals with the War Cabinet’s deliberations on Friday afternoon. Chapter 16 considers the Sheriff’s decision to call for military aid, how he reached his decision, and how the decision was then and has since been interpreted.

At this point the fourth part of the text leaves the Square to consider, in Chapter 17, the way in which this example of ‘military aid to the civil power’ in the United Kingdom has been dealt with in academic studies.17 This is followed in Chapter 18 by an exploration of the rich mythology that has arisen, expanded and been curated in the last century, which leads on, in Chapter 19, to a consideration of the historiography of the Battle, exploring what has often been a problematic engagement with primary evidence.

The fifth and final part of the text returns, in Chapter 20, to the aftermath of the riot, including the arrest of some of the strike leadership, before dealing with the preparations for the trial in April. Chapters 21 and 22 deal respectively with the trial and the charge to the jury by the judge, summarising the proceedings, and finally the verdicts. Chapter 23 concludes the text.

__________

  1. I. McLean, The Legend of Red Clydeside (John Donald, 1999), chapters 10 and 11.

  2. J. Foster, ‘Strike Action and Working-Class Politics on Clydeside 1914– 1919’, International Review of Social History, 35 (1990), p.30; K. MacAskill, Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside (Biteback, 2019), p.205.

  3. For example, S. Damer, ‘In the Rapids of Revolution?’, Scottish Affairs, 28 (2019), pp.339-48.

  4. For example, M. Pittock, Scottish Nationality (Red Globe Press, 2001), p.103; T. Devine, The Scottish Nation: A Modern History (Penguin, 2012), pp.314-5.

  5. For example, K. Jeffery and P. Hennessy, States of Emergency: British Governments and Strikebreaking since 1919 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p.10; B. Weinberger, Keeping the Peace: Policing Strikes in Britain, 1906-1926 (Berg, 1991), pp.152-62.

  6. McLean, Legend, p.xiv.

  7. McLean, Legend, p.xx.

  8. J. Foster, ‘The 1919 Forty Hours Strike’, Theory and Struggle, 120 (2019), 30-40.

  9. Foster, Strike Action, p.35; Foster, ‘Red Clyde, Red Scotland’, in The Manufacture of Scottish History, eds. I. L. Donnachie and C. A. Whatley (Polygon, 1992), p.121.

10. Foster, Strike Action, p.56.

11. Some have, however, presented any local authority involvement as a mere cloak for government action, although without providing supporting evidence.

12. Foster, Strike Action, pp.54, 56.

13. TD241, ‘Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association, Minute Book’, 1918-19, minutes of 30 and 31 January, 4 February, Glasgow Archives.

14. To be discussed in Chapters 18 and 19.

15. R. Evans, In Defence of History (Granta, 1997), p.252.

16. 31 January 1919 has at various times been termed ‘the Battle of George Square’, ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Bloody Friday’. ‘Black Friday’ is now an online shopping opportunity. ‘Bloody Friday’ is now more often used, with more justification perhaps, to describe the brutal murder of nine people and the serious injury of 130 by the detonation of 20 bombs by the Provisional IRA on 21 July 1972.

17. In 1919 the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ (1801-1922).

2 To Begin

The events in Glasgow and Clydeside of January to April 1919 are usually framed through the personalities, memoirs, later careers and supposed intentions of the strike leaders, within the context of the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC) and a wider ‘Red Clydeside’.1 Rather than focus on the generally better-known personalities in the strike leadership, Emanuel Shinwell, David Kirkwood, William Gallacher, Neil Maclean MP, and others are introduced briefly as they appear.2 The role of three other key institutions is often underplayed in accounts of the Battle: the War Cabinet, Glasgow Police and the Glasgow tram system.

The War Cabinet

The War Cabinet’s role has, in many accounts, been reduced to its alleged role in ‘sending the tanks to Glasgow’ in a panic, or the actions of Winston Churchill, who attended the War Cabinet but was not in fact a member. The War Cabinet and its papers, however, play an important part in this story. Its minutes are available on the website of the National Archives.3 In the period under review, the minutes of some sensitive discussions were typed up and distributed individually, rather than being sent to the unionised printers as was normal practice. No relevant ‘secret minutes’ for January 1919 have been found.4

The War Cabinet was a small executive group of five members, most of whom had no departmental responsibility, formed in December 1916 to streamline decision-making, replacing the full Cabinet of 23 members. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, Andrew Bonar Law and Earl Curzon served until the War Cabinet was discontinued in December 1919.5 In January 1919, the additional members were Austen Chamberlain (served 18 April 1918 to 31 October 1919) and Sir Eric Geddes (10 January to 31 October 1919).6 War Cabinet meetings were attended by relevant members of the full Cabinet, senior military figures and civil servants, who were present to contribute on specific agenda items. Thus Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air, although not a member of the War Cabinet, was present on 28, 30 and 31 January, as the War Cabinet was considering his proposals for a fairer demobilisation system. The War Cabinet, in the days before the strike, was dealing with a wide range of topics apart from Churchill’s proposals: the increased supply of beer; the pay of the armed forces; the threatened police strike; sugar beet cultivation; as well as the agitation for a shorter working week.

The Glasgow Police

The role of the Glasgow police has, in many accounts, been reduced to a cartoonish violent incompetence, the policemen supposedly overawed by the ‘heroic crowd’ in George Square, after ‘running amok’ and making a ‘savage and unprovoked attack’ at the behest of its establishment masters. Since 1857, the City of Glasgow Police Regulations had identified the object of policing as: ‘the prevention of crime, the protection of life and property, and the security, peace and comfort of all citizens’.7 The papers relating to the riot trial in April 1919 contain a list of all the police on duty during the week commencing 27 January 1919.8 It includes the names of 160 men on duty in George Square on Friday 31 January 1919, more than the 140 often quoted, but does not include the names of individual policemen drawn into the violence in Cathedral Street, Trongate or south of the Clyde, who came from other divisions, which would bring the total to between 200 and 220 men.

To understand the decision to call for military aid on 31 January 1919, it is important to understand the particular circumstances obtaining in this city of a million inhabitants just after the end of the war (Map 1). On 31 December 1918, the formal establishment of the Glasgow Police was 1,996 men and one woman.9 The main burden of day-to-day policing on the streets was borne by a nominal 1,638 uniformed constables, 123 sergeants and 72 inspectors – 1,833 men in total. There were 99 men and one woman in the detective staff and fifteen clerical staff. In December 1918 the force was 705 below establishment, with many men still in military service, leaving a total of 1,291 men and one woman in the force.10 The Chief Constable made reference to his force being 600 under strength.11 And at the War Cabinet on 30 January, it was mentioned that approximately 500 of the force were still in the armed forces.12 Some 748 Glasgow police joined the armed forces during the war (145 being killed or missing).13 The disbanding of wartime temporary constables, the semi-mothballing of the Special Constabulary, and a shortage of experienced men meant the Glasgow force frequently had to cancel rest days and to impose compulsory overtime.14 The police worked an eight-hour shift, meaning only about a third of the force was available at any time. In December 1918 there were only 1,138 uniformed men available on the streets, 380 men for each of the three shifts. In time of need the men could move onto a twelve-hour shift pattern and this was implemented on the morning of 31 January.15 Thus, the Glasgow police force that day might have been able to field only about 569 uniformed constables, sergeants and inspectors. The pressure on the force was so great that on one occasion during the rioting on 31 January, a 50-year-old uniformed superintendent – a divisional commander, third in the hierarchy of the force – was with his men in the front line wielding a baton.16

The hyper-masculinity present in Glasgow society was also reflected in ‘a hyper-masculinity that emphasised toughness’ in the police.17 However, Jackson et al’s study of policing in Scotland in the twentieth century relies to a great extent on interviews with living retired officers, who recalled the force and its ethos in and after the period of ‘Sillitoe’s Cossacks’ from 1931, when the force was tackling high levels of street-gang violence. They described a ‘specifically “Glasgow” identity and style of policing’ and a police group identity which was ‘robust’, ‘tough’ and ‘no-nonsense’. It is unclear to what extent the later attitudes already formed part of the force’s character, but constables of the 1930s had learned their profession from an earlier generation. It is therefore not so hard to imagine the description of ‘being firm and holding your own’ with ‘physical restraint or force’ never far from the surface, was also relevant in 1919.18 The average height of the Glasgow policeman in 1920 was approximately 180cm, significantly taller than the average Glaswegian male factory-worker (162cm) or labourer (157cm). The average age of policemen was 34 years.19

Jackson et al note that men were still drilled and marched out from the muster hall to their beats as late as 1960. Reading accounts of police reinforcements being sent to George Square and its environs on 31 January before and during the riot, one should envisage a body of men led by their officers and sergeants moving at a quick march in single file towards the trouble. In the 1930s in Aberdeen, Gordon’s father recalled being one of a dozen constables quick-marched towards two riots (one between fascists and communists, the other outside a brothel) in this way from police headquarters under the command of an inspector.

Jackson reports that ‘some officers sometimes lied in court in the 1960s to provide corroboration’ for events they had not seen, to get a ‘genuine conviction’; and further, lawyers and magistrates knew this happened.20 Analysis of the evidence provided to the trial in 1919 reveals this was nothing new. What has seemingly hitherto not been much explored is that the evidence presented by the defence was just as problematic.

A particular event may have influenced the mood of the Glasgow Police in the first week of the Forty Hours Strike. On Thursday 23 January, four days before the strike began, the funeral of PC James Campbell took place. Campbell had been shot on 20 January by burglars he had disturbed. Over 150 policemen attended his funeral, including the Chief Constable, two Assistant Chief Constables (including Alexander Mennie* who had himself survived being shot on duty in 1888), and the Superintendents of Eastern, Central and St Rollox Districts. Sixty men from Campbell’s Eastern division under the command of Superintendent Samuel and accompanied by the Police Pipe Band marched from the police office to Campbell’s home in Dennistoun and thence to Alexandra Park, whence the small funeral party proceeded by car to Bannockburn for the burial.21 Such significant attendance at Campbell’s funeral demonstrates the cohesion within Glasgow’s police force on the eve of the strike.

The Corporation Trams

The Glasgow tram system, its management and its crews, played a pivotal role in the events of 1919, because the tram staff did not join the strike. James Dalrymple was the general manager of the city’s Tramways Department for over two decades.22 He was the second man in the post, serving from 1904 to 1926. He was a man described as intolerant of ‘slackness or disobedience’ and ‘aloof’.23

After taking over the tram system in 1894, the Glasgow Corporation expanded it by new building and by taking over the systems of burghs well beyond the city’s boundaries, eventually operating over 800 tramcars on 320km of track (Map 1).24 The Corporation built its own power station at Pinkston, separate from the city’s electricity department. By 1914, the tram network was carrying over 900,000 passengers a day.25 It was a model of a large municipal tram system ‘the finest and greatest of its kind’ which managers of other systems came to observe. And it was hugely profitable.26 Its six-storey headquarters building lay at the junction of Bath Street and Renfield Street, a short distance west of George Square (Map 3, no. 4).

The importance of the tram system to the city’s functioning explains why the strike leaders wanted so much to ‘get the cars off the streets’ during the week of 27 January 1919. The city, in the days when few people had their own private transport, relied on the tram system for journeys to work, to visit friends and relatives, to seek entertainment. Stopping the trams would stop the city.27 The service ran 20 hours a day, a ‘two- to three-minute service . . . even on outlying routes’.28 Consequently, certain places in the city could become very congested: the junction of Jamaica Street and Renfrew Street was allegedly the busiest in the world, with 466 cars an hour on weekdays and 516 on Saturdays.29

Municipal tram systems provided many recruits for the armed services, with a national recruitment rate of around 50 per cent of male tram staff compared to a recruitment rate of 25 per cent in engineering.30 Dalrymple opened a recruiting office in the tram headquarters and encouraged his men to enlist. Nearly 1,000 men came forward on one day in September 1914. Of a uniformed tram staff of 3,249 in 1914, 1,902 enlisted. To backfill the gap created by these enlisted men, Glasgow was the first tram system in the United Kingdom to employ women as conductors and later as drivers (‘motresses’), on the same rates of pay as the men (27 shillings for a 51-hour week). A female workforce of over 800 conductors included single women, married women whose husbands were in the forces, and widows.31 By May 1916, 68 women were driving or training to drive.32 In April 1919 the women drivers were stood down, either becoming conductors or facing dismissal. Female drivers were re-engaged in the Second World War, let go at its end, and engaged again in 1950 in the face of labour shortages. In July 1919 the Bridgeton Branch of the Federation of Discharged Soldiers protested against any women being retained and demanded their dismissal.33

2.1. Glasgow women tram driver and conductress around the end of the First World War. The photograph shows how unprotected the driver was from anyone in the street (Trustees of the Imperial War Museum Q 28389; LIC-02166-Y5J9K4).

Excepting the earliest-built cars, the driver stood on a platform behind a glass windscreen. Cars could be driven in either direction and, in the double-decker cars, there were access stairs at both ends with whatever was currently serving as the rear of the tram open for passengers. The driver stood by the forward stairs, with a closed door to separate them from the passengers. They were not, however, protected from the street. Many of the standard cars had an open balcony at both ends of the upper floor, until the last of them were enclosed between the wars. One such balcony played a part in the events of Wednesday 29 January.

These three key institutions play a vital part in what would happen in the week commencing 27 January 1919. Their low profile in so many accounts, in which only the strike leaders seem to have a voice, has helped to mask the complexity of the train of events that led to the violence on Friday 31 January 1919.

__________

  1. See K. MacAskill, Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside (Biteback, 2019), Appendix C, for an example.

  2. Brief pen-portraits are provided as footnotes for a range of men and women who played their part in events, normally, but not always, on their first appearance in the narrative. The names of key protagonists have been spelled in a variety of ways in contemporary and later documents. The variants preferred by the people themselves and their families have been used, and the spelling of names, even in quotations, has been silently corrected to avoid confusion. Except where there might be misunderstanding, individuals are usually referred to by surname after their first appearance. Protagonists’ jobs or other titles are occasionally included and the ranks of policemen are noted. The pen portraits are drawn from the Dictionary of National Biography, W. W. Knox (ed), Scottish Labour Leaders 1918-1939: A Biographical Dictionary (Mainstream, 1984) and a range of online resources.

  3.https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/cabinet-papers-1915-1984/

  4. There is an apparently complete set in Bonar Law’s papers in the Parliamentary Archives, which were consulted by us.

  5. J. P. Mackintosh, The British Cabinet (Stevens, 1977), p.371.

  6.https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/cabinet-gov/davidlloyd-george-1916.htm

  7. L. A. Jackson et al, Police and Community in Twentieth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p.71.

  8. AD15/19/11, ‘Precognitions against Joseph Brennan, Harry Hopkins, David Kirkwood, William Gallacher, Robert Loudon, Daniel Stewert Oliver, George Ebury, Neil Alexander, James Murray, Emanuel Shinwell, David McKenzie, William McCartney for the Crime of Mobbing and Rioting at George Square, Glasgow and Other Locations’ (1919); Document 47, List of defence witnesses – Police. (See p.27, note 24 below.)

  9. Glasgow Police Department, Report of the Chief Constable of the City of Glasgow (1918); A. L. Goldsmith, The Development of the City of Glasgow Police c. 1800-1939, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Strathclyde, 2002), p.88.

10. Glasgow Police Department 1918, Table 14.

11. TD241, ‘Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association, Minute Book’, 1918-19, minutes of 30 and 31 January, Glasgow Archives.

12. CAB23/9/9, War Cabinet Minutes, meeting 522, 30 January 1919.

13. Goldsmith, Glasgow Police, p.88.

14. Goldsmith, Glasgow Police, pp.86-87.

15. Alastair Dinsmor, personal communication, October 2020; AD15/19/11 [A05], J. V. Stevenson, Chief Constable.

16. AD15/19/11 [A82], W. McGowan, Police Lieutenant.

17. L. Heren, Sex and Violence in 1920s Scotland: Incest, Rape, Lewd and Libidinous Practices, 1918-1930 (Bloomsbury, 2024).

18. Jackson et al, Police and Community, pp.55, 60, 64.

19. Goldsmith, Glasgow Police, p.407; Jackson et al, Police and Community, p.57; J. M. Winter, ‘Military Fitness and Civilian Health in Britain During the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 15 (1980), p.237.

20. Jackson et al, Police and Community, p.86.

21.Glasgow Herald, 24 January 1919.

22. D. L. Thomson, A Handbook of Glasgow Tramways (Scottish Tramway Museum Society, 1962), p.7.

23. R. Brash, Glasgow in the Tramway Age (Longman, 1971), p.50.

24. In Glasgow at the time the tramcars were often simply called ‘cars’; we have followed this usage, although we also refer to ‘trams’ or ‘tramcars’, where the system as a whole is implied, or to avoid confusion. We refer to ‘motor cars/motor vehicles’ when such things are mentioned.

25. B. Aspinwall, ‘Glasgow Trams and American Politics 1894-1914’, Scottish Historical Review, 56 (1977), p.65.

26. D. Thomson, Glasgow Tram Services (Venture Publications, 2009), p.5.

27. Thomson, Glasgow Tram Services, p.5.

28. Aspinwall, ‘Glasgow Trams’, p.65.

29. Aspinwall, ‘Glasgow Trams’, p.65.

30. P. E. Dewey, ‘Military Recruiting and the British Labour Force During the First World War’, The Historical Journal, 27 (1984), Table 6.

31. Brash, Glasgow Tramway Age, p.59. J. Dalrymple, ‘Tramway labour Problems Affected by the War’, Tramway and Railway World, 14 October 1915, pp.281-2.

32.Tramway and Railway World, 11 May 1916. p.356.

33.Glasgow Herald, 15 April 1919. C. A. Oakley, The Last Tram (Glasgow Corporation, 1962), pp.68, 98, 100, 104-5. Glasgow Corporation Minutes, 2 July 1919.

* Assistant Chief Constable Alexander Ferguson Mennie (1863-1927). Born East Lothian. Son of a police constable from Aberdeenshire. Joined Glasgow police 1882. By 1886 Mennie was a police detective. Shot and seriously wounded in 1888; he carried the bullet for luck for the rest of his career. Promoted superintendent 1900. In 1913 awarded King’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service. Assistant Chief Constable in charge of the detective department in 1916. Retired 1922 after a period of ill-health.

3 Memory and Sources

Investigators must treat any information gathered from people who have talked to others as not being separate, independent reports.1

This chapter introduces another aspect often overlooked in telling and re-telling the story of the Battle: the nature of remembering, the frailty and vulnerability of memory to subsequent manipulation and distortion especially if recorded long after. These factors have a significant impact on the way the events of 31 January 1919 were reported at the trial in April 1919, and have been ‘remembered’ since, particularly as some authors rely on reminiscences recorded decades later.2

A key element in considering the reliability of witnesses is the way in which people ‘remember’ and retell their memories. If anything has been learned about memory after a century of psychological research, it is that it is fragile and error prone, not an objective record of the past but a reconstructive process replete with distortions and, at times, gross inaccuracies.3 Eyewitness memory is malleable and vulnerable to external influences, including the effects of post-event information or misinformation.4

There are many ways in which a witness to an event can end up having a clear, vivid memory of something they did not see, something different from what they saw, something someone else saw, or something someone else wanted them to remember. This can arise from the individual, from group interactions, and from the processes of gathering evidence. Eyewitnesses are often asked to remember things they saw in extremely stressful circumstances, sometimes long afterwards. People who experience the same event talk to one another, overhear each other talk, or gain access to new information from the print media, interviewers, speeches or statements about the events, film or, nowadays, television or online sources.5 Witnesses may be asked leading questions or face conflicting pressures to be both accurate and helpful to the interviewer. They may be presented with a version of an event by a ‘dominant narrator’ or be offered suggestions about what they saw. They may face social pressures to make their narrative conform to that of a group or feel they need to impress an interviewer with their knowledge.6

Through the contamination of memory, witnesses can develop vividly detailed, emotionally-laden memories of entirely false events or false details of events – what are known as ‘rich false memories’.7 Witnesses can even ‘remember’ seeing things that were merely suggested to them. They may start with very little memory, but after several suggestive interviews filled with misinformation they may ‘recall’ the false events, including details that were only suggested to them, and can express these false memories with confidence and in detail.8

Eyewitnesses tend to talk to other co-witnesses after an incident. Through such acts of social remembering individuals may incorporate details about the past they did not actually experience – the process known as ‘social contagion’. Inaccurate post-event information or misinformation is particularly problematic when introduced to a group of witnesses, because a consensus of witness evidence may be taken by the justice system to be a sign of accuracy and to be corroborative. But an inaccurate consensus may arise because all the witnesses have been misinformed by a single source. What one person says about an event can affect what others will say and hearing about someone else’s report can alter a person’s confidence in their own version. Thus, reports from multiple witnesses who have discussed their memories are not truly independent or corroborative.9

Evidence may be affected by other social dynamics: a witness may decide that the social cost of disagreeing with other witnesses is too high, and so they adjust their reports accordingly. Or through discussing what happened, a witness may come to endorse a version of events different from what they remember, because they believe it to be more accurate than their own memory. Individuals who have authority within a group, or who have a trusted position, who are considered knowledgeable, to have ‘expertise’, may have a particularly powerful role, leading to the listener adopting a shared reality.10 These ‘dominant narrators’ may have a greater impact on shaping the collective memory; they may be better able to craft the storyline than other conversational participants and thus may draw greater attention to what they say.11 ‘Dominant narrators’ may introduce new information into the conversation in the form of unshared memories; these introduced memories may then reshape the memories of other conversational participants.12

Through ‘social contagion’ and with the influence of a ‘dominant narrator’, autobiographical memories will converge; collective memory may be developed. This may help to define and bind together a group, to establish a collective identity.13 With so many participants on both sides precognosced and exposed to newspaper and other reportage, it is certain that testimony about the events of 31 January 1919 was susceptible to these processes.

Being questioned about an event puts considerable pressure on witnesses to recall as much as possible.14 People are particularly prone to having their memories affected by misinformation when it is introduced after the passage of some time and there is less likelihood of a discrepancy being noticed.15 Buckley et al list procedures routinely used in interviewing witnesses, which might be used to, or result in, changing witnesses’ memories of an event or details of an event. Interviewees may be asked to agree or disagree with an item of information they may not have previously known, but which is introduced by the interviewer. Witnesses may face ‘non-coercive challenges’, where once questions have been asked and answered, the answers are rejected, and interviewees are asked to consider whether other answers are correct. This may develop into ‘enforced disagreement’, where, once questions have been asked and answered, the answers are rejected, and interviewees are told their answers are false, possibly on the basis of someone else’s testimony, or through appeal to logic, external authority, common sense, or the assertion that a contrary fact is true. This approach may be backed up by negative or positive social acceptance of the answer – how the witness’s peer group would respond to the witness’s version of events. These processes are certain to have been in play in 1919. Finally, individuals may fill in gaps in their memories of events by guessing what happened in the missing elements because these inventions explain or somehow make sense of what happened.16

Conforming groups within which events and memories may be compared and discussed included: the police, division by division; the strike leadership; strike activists and strikers; tram staff; town councillors, both pro- and anti-strike. The policemen within each division would have discussed the events while on duty, in the muster hall, on meal-breaks and off-duty in the days after 31 January.17 ‘Dominant narrators’ in the form of sergeants, inspectors or more senior figures in the force may have provided information which may have helped guide individuals to ‘make sense’ of what they saw, in particular ways. For example, the police seem to have expected an attack on the City Chambers, and the unintended movement of the crowd after the first baton charge on 31 January may have confirmed their assumption (Chapter 11). The precognoscing process may have steered the evidence further. Finally, as the defence claimed in the closing statements at the trial, the police created versions of events, no doubt partly because of communal memory manipulation, but also, regrettably, as the result of deliberate falsification, to which men swore in court, either to exculpate individuals, for example Sergeant Steele for his assault on David Kirkwood, or to support the prosecution’s line. Police forces in the UK were, in general, hostile to left-wing politics.18

The taking of precognitions for the prosecution adhered to the rules set out in the Procurator Fiscal’s Book of Regulations. Precognitions were to be conducted as soon after the events as possible to avoid the corruption of evidence from other sources. The process is set out precisely, and it is instructed to be unbiased. In her research into sexual offences in the immediate post-war period, Louise gained the impression that Glasgow’s Procurator Fiscal, John Drummond Strathern, who himself took many of the precognitions for the riot trial, not only adhered strictly to the regulations, taking precognitions often with 48 hours of a crime being reported, but he was very much his own man, on occasion prosecuting against the guidance of the Crown. Would he have organised the taking of intentionally biased precognitions under pressure from the Lord Advocate? This is unlikely. No evidence has been found for John Foster’s belief, apparently based solely on the day-by-day newspaper accounts of the trial, not on the precognitions themselves, that ‘we can be fairly sure that the precognition statements represented the narrative which the government wished to project’.19

No defence precognitions survive. Defence witnesses’ testimony is visible in the trial transcript where they fall into a number of subgroups: those close to the central organisation of the strike; those involved in local union or labour organisation; other labour or socialist activists; ordinary strikers; and finally, passers-by.20 The meeting structure of the strike and the holding of many meetings of protest after the Battle provided opportunities for ‘dominant narrators’ to steer the memories of those present in the Square; the strike organisers’ versions had already been presented in the Strike Bulletin editions after the Battle, on 1, 2 and 3 February 1919. As evidenced by the argument in the Strike Bulletin, it is certain the version of events repeated was that of outrage that a peaceful demonstration had been deliberately attacked. In the files of the Glasgow Trades Council there are many motions of censure from labour organisations across Britain, which repeat without question the version of events presented to them. The creation of any defence precognitions, by which time ‘memories’ of the event will have become shared widely and fixed, may have involved some of Buckley et al’s list of procedures described above.

The processes described here are seen in the evidence given at trial, including the deliberate manipulation of memory, and indeed of fabrication. The intervening 100 years of ‘remembering’ the Battle have created a different issue regarding how the events in January 1919 are recalled, retold and explained. For example, there are four recordings made in the 1970s in the William Gallacher Memorial Library, of interviews with Communist Party members, over 50 years after the events. While identifiable events are recalled, albeit in a confused way, other events for which no evidence can be found are described: for example, two Royal Navy destroyers moored in the Clyde at Jamaica Bridge, machine guns from which were mounted on the tops of buildings; many double-decker buses or trams pushed over onto their sides along the streets; a regiment of Gordon or Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders under orders to India refusing to fire on the crowd during the riot and refusing to leave Maryhill Barracks; half a million strikers on the streets.21

3.1. ‘Julian’s Baby’ in a fund-raising parade in January 1919, almost two weeks before the Battle. The image has been passed off, for example in the ‘Age of Tanks’ documentary (Chapter 18), as a tank in Glasgow after the Battle (out of copyright).

One of the abiding myths of the Battle, that there were ‘tanks in the streets’ or even ‘tanks in George Square’ provides a useful example. The tanks that arrived on 3 February 1919 may indeed have driven through the streets, but only a matter of 1,500m from College Goods Station to the Cattle Market (Map 2, nos. 13 and 14). The city, however, had seen ‘tanks in the streets’ only two weeks before the Battle. The Glasgow Herald reported the arrival on 13 January of three tanks: two heavies, known as ‘Haig’ and ‘Beatty’, and a light Whippet type – ‘Julian’s Baby’. Minus the Whippet, which broke down, the tanks drove from College Goods Station to Glasgow Green, where they put on an obstacle-crossing display. Various dignitaries took rides in ‘Haig’ in processions along Queen Street and Argyle Street. Most of the time the tanks were parked outside the City Chambers in George Square to promote the sale of Victory Bonds.22 How many false memories of ‘tanks in George Square’ or ‘tanks in the streets’ stem from these events?

If many accounts of the Battle gathered decades after the events are discounted, what can be relied upon? The sources for a study of the events in Glasgow in 1919 are rich. The War Cabinet minutes have been accessible at the National Archives, Kew since 1969 and are now available online. The pages of the Glasgow Herald and other key newspapers have always been available at the Mitchell Library and other repositories; the Glasgow Herald is now accessible free of charge on Google. Other newspaper archives are accessible online by subscription. One of the most useful illustrated newspapers, however, The Bulletin (not to be confused with the strikers’ Strike Bulletin) is accessible only in hard copy at the Mitchell and the National Library of Scotland and is rarely referenced in other studies. The fourteen-issue run of the Strike Bulletin is accessible in part in three archives.23

The transcript of the trial in April 1919, held in the National Records of Scotland, was available at least as early as the 1990s; Gordon consulted it in 2018. Attempts to revisit it a few months later to conduct further research were prevented by a GDPR sensitivity review, which had extended the closure of all trial papers to 100 years. Under a Freedom of Information request, these and the file of prosecution precognitions were opened a year early for our research. Louise had consulted the precognition papers (AD15 series) in 2012 without restriction; it is understood they had been released in the 1970s. Only later was it discovered that the Glasgow City Archive holds a beautifully bound – and more consistently paginated – copy of the trial transcript. None of this material – the GDPR blip aside – has been sequestered in hard-to-access archives.

For this book all of the available primary source material has been carefully read and much of it transcribed – High Court of Justiciary trial papers, contemporary printed sources, newspapers and other commentaries – before turning to secondary sources – books and articles written by historians and politicians in the intervening century.24