On 31 January 1919, six tanks were deployed in Glasgow city centre. They parked at the cattle market in the East End, out of immediate public view, available if required. Troops arrived by overnight train from England – English troops specifically, the government having decided that Scottish troops could not be relied upon to fire on Scottish workers. The Sheriff of Lanarkshire read the Riot Act to a crowd of around 60,000 people in George Square. Police baton-charged the crowd. Willie Gallacher, one of the leaders of the demonstration, was beaten unconscious on the steps of the City Chambers.
This was the most visible moment of what became known as Red Clydeside: the period of intense labour militancy on Clydeside that ran, in various forms, from the wartime rent strikes of 1915 through to the early 1920s.
The Origins
The Clyde’s engineering and shipbuilding industries had expanded enormously during the First World War. The workforce was large, concentrated, skilled, and increasingly politicised. The wartime restrictions – dilution of skilled labour, restrictions on movement between jobs, the militarism of industrial production – had produced networks of shop stewards who operated independently of the official trade unions. The Clyde Workers Committee, formed in 1915, coordinated industrial action across the major engineering shops.
The rent strikes of 1915, led in significant part by women in the Govan and Partick areas, had won a legislative concession: the Rent Restriction Act, which froze rents at pre-war levels. The direct action had worked. It was a lesson that informed subsequent militancy.
John Maclean
John Maclean was a schoolteacher from Pollokshaws who had been a Marxist organiser since before the war. He ran free economics classes for workers across Clydeside for years, educating tens of thousands in the theory and practice of class conflict. The Russian Bolsheviks regarded him as the leading revolutionary in Britain: Lenin made him Soviet consul in Glasgow in 1918. The British government imprisoned him four times between 1916 and 1921, in conditions that damaged his health permanently. He died in 1923, aged 44.
Maclean was a genuine revolutionary who believed that an independent Scottish workers’ republic was achievable. His analysis was that the revolutionary moment of 1919 was a real possibility that was lost through the caution of the labour leadership – particularly the decision of the Scottish TUC and the Labour Party to channel the movement’s energy into parliamentary politics rather than direct action. The tanks, in his view, were the government’s acknowledgement that they agreed with his assessment.
What It Actually Was
The historical debate about Red Clydeside concerns how revolutionary it actually was. Later historians have argued that the movement was primarily syndicalist rather than Bolshevist – focused on workers’ control of industry rather than the seizure of state power – and that the government’s fear of a Glasgow soviet was somewhat overstated. The 40-hour week demand that triggered the January 1919 demonstration was, after all, a trade union demand, not a call for insurrection.
The tanks were never used. The demonstrators dispersed. Willie Gallacher and David Kirkwood were arrested and imprisoned. The ten Glasgow MPs elected in 1922 – the Red Clydesiders, including James Maxton and David Kirkwood – went to Westminster and worked within the parliamentary system. The revolution did not happen.
What did happen was a sustained period of labour organisation that won real concessions, built institutions, and produced a political culture on Clydeside that remained distinct for generations. John Maclean’s name is on a plaque in George Square. The tanks are not commemorated anywhere.
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