Glasgow’s answer to 1914 was immediate and communal. The city raised three ‘Pals’ battalions for the Highland Light Infantry, each built from a single institution: the 15th from the Corporation Tramways — over a thousand tramwaymen enlisted together in a legendary sixteen hours — the 16th from former members of the Boys’ Brigade, born in Glasgow a generation before, and the 17th from the Chamber of Commerce’s clerks and businessmen. Tens of thousands more followed through every regiment in Scotland.
The Pals system’s cruelty was its arithmetic: communities that enlisted together died together. Glasgow’s battalions were devoured in the great offensives — the 15th, 16th and 17th HLI all suffered terribly on the Somme, the Boys’ Brigade battalion’s losses at Beaumont Hamel entering the city’s folklore — and by the Armistice Glasgow’s dead numbered around eighteen thousand, remembered now at the Cenotaph raised before the City Chambers in 1924.
At home the war turned Glasgow into an arsenal. The Clyde built and repaired the fleets, as this site’s shipbuilding pages tell; huge munitions plants rose, and ‘dilution’ — the drafting of unskilled workers, above all women, into engineering — brought tens of thousands of women into shell shops, factories and the trams, changing the city’s working world for good even where the change was later clawed back.
War also made Glasgow’s tenements a front. With munitions workers flooding in, landlords raised rents on the families of serving men — and the women of Govan and Partick answered with the great Rent Strike of 1915, Mary Barbour’s legions turning out to block evictions until the government capitulated with the Rent Restriction Act. That victory, and the industrial battles of the Clyde Workers’ Committee alongside it, opened the era of Red Clydeside whose full story belongs to the Politics & Social History section — and whose climax, the George Square confrontation of 1919, followed the peace by weeks.
The city that emerged in 1918 was mourning on a scale never known, organised as never before, and changed in who worked, who voted and who expected what: the First World War is where modern Glasgow’s politics, and much of its self-image, begin.