Barclay / Heren The Battle for George Square 1919

Myth, Memory and the Military in Red Clydeside
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78885-851-9
Verlag: John Donald
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

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.

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. His main research interests lie in the misuse of the past for political ends.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barclay, Gordon

Heren, Louise

Leseproben

1 A Warning to the Curious

(Neil Davidson, quoted in the , 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.

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.

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 , 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 (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 (1936) whom he...