MUCH is made of the Red Clydesiders and their leaders, but very few histories ever show just what odds they were up against, including the might of the entire British State and the leaders of the boss class who, even if they accepted the existence of trade unions, did everything they could to smash them.

It always takes two to make a fight, and during the bitter industrial strife on Clydeside during the First World War, it is just too simple to say that two opposing sides were the bosses and the workers.

Undoubtedly the bosses and boss class were on one side, and the workers through their trade unions and workers’ committees formed the other side, but the intervention of the British State and revolutions elsewhere all played their part in what become a massive struggle that defined Red Clydeside. To keep things simple, however, we will refer to bosses and workers.

Each had their champions. We saw last week how John Maclean played his part in educating and leading the workers, and he paid dearly for doing so with terms of imprisonment, forced feeding and a truncated life.

Yet he was far from the only leading figure on the workers’ side to be jailed and mistreated, as we shall see.

For the bosses, there were any number of leading industrialists ready to step up to be the figurehead of the constant battle to keep the workers under control, but William Douglas Weir, the 1st Viscount Weir, is as good a choice to be examined as any of the leaders of the boss class.

Weir would go on to do many fine things in his life, and the company that bears his family’s name, Weir Group, remains a colossal presence in Scottish industry. Yet during the First World War, “Weirie” Weir, as the Red Clydesiders call him, was the epitome of a union-bashing boss.

G and J Weir had been founded in 1871, and William became managing director in 1902 and also chairman in 1910, a post he would retain until 1953. He resigned as MD in 1915 to become the director of munitions for Scotland, appointed by David Lloyd George who was then Minister for Munitions but would become Secretary of State for War and Prime Minister the following year.

The Weir engineering company in Cathcart had transformed into a powerhouse making artillery shells and aircraft and William had already shown his willingness to override what few rights the workers had to increase production. Weir was thus seen by Lloyd George as the man to make sure that the Munitions of War Act, passed in July 1915, was used to full effect in and around Glasgow. It didn’t take long for Weir, who became Scottish Director of Munitions days after the Act was passed, to start his propaganda that the Act was “good” for workers, because it gave them statutory rights for the first time.

The Munitions Act, however, was a law utterly detested by the workers, because it forbade a worker from leaving his job for another place of work without the consent of his employer. Nor could a worker refuse to do overtime, even if it was unpaid. Striking was declared unlawful. There were tribunals put in place to check on such cases, but they were staffed with boss class people and their sympathisers.

The Clyde Workers Committee, originally called the Labour Withholding Committee (LWC), was founded by trade unionists – who had fallen out with their union leaders who were all pro-war to a man – and political agitators to oppose the Act. The LWC, it should be said, had already had a run-in with Weir when his company brought in American workers earlier in 1915 and paid them more than their Scottish employees – not a clever move by Weir as within days, workers at 25 factories across central Scotland were on strike.

All this was happening against the background of the 1915 rents strike in Glasgow and the anti-war campaigning of John Maclean, Willie Gallacher and others. Gallacher was the son of an Irish father and Scottish mother who had been born in Paisley on Christmas Day 1881. He had worked as a steward on liners going to and from the USA before he found a job in the Albion Motor Works in Scotstoun. Influenced by Maclean and others, Gallacher educated himself as a socialist and became the first chairman of the Clyde Workers Committee when it was re-named in October 1915 – unlike other workers’ leaders, he never renounced his anti-war views.

Neither did Weir renounce his pro-war views. In an infamous memorandum he wrote: “Every workman in this country is a citizen first, with a citizen’s responsibility, and the country will back up anyone who proceeds with a policy based on this assumption … the responsibility and duty of a workman as a citizen of the state is incompatible with his duty as a trade unionist.”

He also proposed that trade union activity should cease for the period of the war, though to be fair he also slated the failure to give workers proper rates of pay for the increased work he knew they would have to do.

The National:

When three shipwrights from Fairfield’s yard in Govan were jailed for a month in October 1915 for refusing to pay a fine after they went on strike, the LWC told the government in London that if they were not released within three days, war production on the whole of Clydeside and the central belt would be halted by a strike. Some people still believe that official trade union leaders paid the men’s fines, but the fact is they were released three days later.

The so-called “dilution policy” of Lloyd George was also detested by the workers – they could not abide seeing unskilled male and female workers coming into their workplaces as determined by the Government to keep up production. Lloyd George himself came to Glasgow in December 1915 to see if he could persuade the workers to accept the Munitions Act – he was roundly jeered and catcalled and the Welsh Wizard’s usual magic utterly failed.

Into this volatile mix the CWC’s leaders, who by now were at all-out war with the main union leaders, threw a couple of verbal bombs.

Davie Kirkwood, who we will learn more about next week, gave a speech at Beardmore’s Parkhead Works against the Munitions Act which has gone down in trade union history.

He said: “Fellow engineers, the country is at war. The country must win. In order to win, we must throw our whole soul into the production of munitions. Now we come to the point of difference. The government and its supporters think that to get the best out of us, they must take away our liberty. So we are deprived of the chief thing that distinguishes free men from slaves, the right to leave a master when we wish to. If I work in Beardmore’s I am as much his property as if he had branded a B on my brow.

“They have us and they know it. Mr Lloyd George claims that all this is necessary in order to win the war. It is a strange doctrine. It amounts to this, that slaves are better than free men. I deny it. I maintain that for peace or war free men are better than slaves. We are willing, as we have always been, to do our bit, but we object to slavery.”

It was clarion call that hit home, and Maclean, as we saw last week, was then arrested for making anti-war speeches and sent to jail. Gallacher went further with his anti-war calls in The Worker newspaper.

The government had introduced conscription and the workers bitterly opposed it. The state then felt it had to act against the Clyde Workers Committee and it had the Defence of the Realm Act 1915’s draconian laws to use. As well as Maclean being jailed, so, too, were Gallacher, The Worker editor John Muir, and its printer Tom Bell.

The National:

Worse was to come. After a public meeting against conscription on Glasgow Green, James Maxton of the Independent Labour Party, socialist activist and Maclean acolyte James MacDougall and Jack Smith, a self-avowed anarchist, were jailed for a year. David Kirkwood was “merely” deported to Edinburgh and banned from returning to Glasgow until late 1917.

The Clyde Workers Committee all but ceased activities. But the Russian Revolution in October 1917 gave hope to all workers and their leaders everywhere, and after the war Clydeside was once again a scene of agitation and unrest.

It culminated in the Battle of George Square, better known by the workers who took part in it as Bloody or Black Friday. It grew out of the 40 Hours Movement, which was led by the resurgent Clyde Workers Committee who rejected the 47-hour week negotiated nationally by trade unions and managements and called a strike across Clydeside.

The strike was well organised and in the last week of January attracted up to 70,000 workers on to the streets where trams were running only a skeleton service after tram lines were targeted by strikers. On January 29, a large crowd of strikers went to George Square in Glasgow for a rally while a deputation led by Davie Kirkwood and Emanuel Shinwell – more about him next week – went into the City Chambers to press their case with Lord Provost Sir James Stewart. He asked them to return two days later and he promised to contact the government down south and ask them to intervene on the strikers’ behalf.

WHEN the deputation returned the crowd outside was even bigger, perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 strikers and protesters in all, and before the committee men could relay the Lord Provost’s message – it was a “no”, funnily enough – violence broke out, apparently after two vehicles struck members of the crowd but more probably because under-pressure police overreacted to their own loss of crowd control and drew their batons and began to use them indiscriminately. Sheriff McKenzie came from the nearby Sheriff Court to read the Riot Act, but it was ripped out of his hands.

Kirkwood and Shinwell ran out to try and pacify the crowd, and the former was batonned to the ground while the latter was later arrested.

Fighting between police and strikers/protesters went on for hours all around the city centre, and the government was convinced that Glasgow had become the centre of a new “Bolshevist Uprising”, especially when former soldiers and sailors joined the strikers on Glasgow Green and repelled police baton charges with railings.

Press reports of the time confirm that troops were urgently summoned to quell the trouble, backed by six tanks. They camped in and around Glasgow for many days afterwards.

It is not known how many of the troops were from English regiments, but reinforcements were certainly and hurriedly sent north from England, though the city was quiet by the Sunday. The press, it should be said, deprecated the strikers’ actions.

For a brief few hours, Glasgow was the centre of a potential British revolution and the state wasn’t having it – their clampdown was brutal and extensive as we will see next week when I will show how the Battle of George Square led directly to Red Clydeside’s finest hour and changed Scottish politics forever.