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Clydeside: When the Workshop of the World Shut Up Shop |
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Riot in George Square, 1919
© Scran |
The political and social consequences of these events were enormous. Glasgow, and indeed the rest of industrial Scotland, was a completely different society. The city became notorious for revolutionary fervour, industrial action, civil unrest, poverty, gang violence and sectarianism. The government feared a Bolshevist rising, and sent the troops in on more than one occasion.
However, the events that would earn the area the title of Red Clydeside started during the First World War, when there was full employment, and the Clyde accepted a new influx of unskilled labour in order to supply huge amounts of munitions required for the war effort. There was more than pure poverty at play; Red Clydeside had other aspects. Perhaps exploitation and poverty simply wasn’t as acceptable when people became aware of the carnage taking place in the trenches.
At the war’s beginning in 1914, most working class areas responded patriotically and men enlisted in their droves, with active encouragement from their employers (in some cases with the threat of dismissal for those who refused to enlist). But by May Day 1918 over 100,000 Glaswegians stopped work and took to the street to demand peace. Well over 200,000 Scots soldiers were dead or seriously wounded, and the body count had changed the way that people thought about their country and the way it was governed. At this time, the Labour Party made huge gains all over Britain, but Clydeside was seen as Bolshevist bomb ready to explode.
As early as 1915, the trouble was brewing, when in February engineering workers held a strike lasting two weeks to protest at the higher wages paid to American workers brought in to eleviate a labour shortage.
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