The war’s end threw the Clyde a brutal question: as munitions work stopped and demobilised men flooded home, where would the jobs come from? The unions’ answer was to share the work by cutting hours, and in late January 1919 a general strike across Clydeside demanded a forty-hour week. On Friday 31 January — ‘Bloody Friday’ — the strike committee brought its supporters to George Square to hear the Lord Provost relay the government’s response: a crowd of many tens of thousands, filling the square and the streets around, with the red flag raised over it.
What followed remains contested in detail and vivid in outline. Scuffles — around a blocked tramcar, by most accounts — brought a police baton charge into the packed crowd, striking down demonstrators and bystanders alike; the sheriff began reading the Riot Act, the strikers’ leaders were batoned or arrested at the City Chambers’ doors, and running fights spread through the surrounding streets and on to Glasgow Green. Among the injured was David Kirkwood, clubbed down — photographed prone — as he came out to calm the crowd; Willie Gallacher and Manny Shinwell were among those arrested.
It was the government’s reaction that made the day historic. A cabinet fresh from watching revolutions across Europe concluded — in the Scottish Secretary’s recorded words — that this was a ‘Bolshevist rising’, and treated it as one: troops were moved into the city that night, machine-gun posts and howitzers were positioned, and six tanks arrived by rail to wait in the Cattle Market. The famous details have grown legends around them — claims that only English troops were used, or that Glasgow’s own garrison was locked in Maryhill Barracks, run ahead of the firm evidence, and this site tells them as the traditions they are — but the core is documented and extraordinary: field weapons of war, deployed against a British industrial dispute.
The confrontation itself ended without deaths. The strike wound down within days — won nothing on paper, the forty-seven-hour week arriving by negotiation instead — and the trials that followed jailed Gallacher and Shinwell briefly while acquitting most. Revolution, if it was ever in the square, went home for its tea.
But 31 January 1919 fixed itself in the national memory as the day the state showed Glasgow what it thought of it — and Glasgow returned the compliment three years later through the ballot box, as the Red Clydeside page tells. The photographs — the flag over the ocean of bunnets, the tank in the Saltmarket — remain the most extraordinary images ever taken in the city’s civic heart.