Sir Percy Sillitoe

Percy Sillitoe arrived in Glasgow in 1931 with a reputation for breaking gangs, and he left twelve years later as the most famous chief constable the city ever had. He took on the razor gangs that had made Glasgow notorious, modernised a force that still relied on whistles and police boxes, and introduced the black and white chequered cap band, the Sillitoe tartan, that police officers around the world still wear. His legend has grown with the telling, and historians now see the decline of the gangs as the result of more than one man’s toughness. But his impact on Glasgow policing was real and lasting.

From Africa to Sheffield

Sillitoe was born in London on 22 May 1888 and educated at St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School. As a young man he went to southern Africa, joining the British South Africa Police in 1908 and transferring to the Northern Rhodesia Police in 1911. He served in the East African campaign during the First World War and worked as a political officer in Tanganyika before returning to Britain in 1920.

His rise in British policing was rapid. He became Chief Constable of Chesterfield in 1923, of the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1925 and of Sheffield in 1926. Sheffield was then troubled by violent gangs fighting over gambling and protection, and Sillitoe made his name by breaking them, using specially selected squads of officers authorised to use reasonable force. It was this record that brought him to the attention of Glasgow.

Glasgow in 1931

The city Sillitoe took over in 1931 was in the depths of the Depression. Unemployment in the shipyards and engineering works was devastating, and in the autumn of that year cuts to benefits brought marches and riots on Glasgow Green, in the Saltmarket and around Jail Square. In the East End and on the south side, gangs of young men fought over territory, ran protection rackets on shops and street bookmakers and paraded their sectarian loyalties. The Billy Boys of Bridgeton and their rivals the Norman Conks were the most notorious, and the open razor gave the period its name. Glasgow was being described in the British press as the country’s answer to Chicago.

Taking on the gangs

Sillitoe’s approach combined force, intelligence and persistence. He gathered information on the gangs and their leaders, built up networks of informants, and formed squads of the biggest and toughest officers he could find, many of them Highlanders, who were sent to meet trouble head on. The newspapers called them Sillitoe’s Cossacks. Gang fights were broken up with batons, gang leaders were arrested and prosecuted again and again, and the courts were encouraged to pass heavier sentences.

By the late 1930s the great razor gangs were in decline. How much of the credit belongs to Sillitoe has long been debated. The economic recovery brought by rearmament put many young men back to work, the Second World War took many more into the forces, and some gang members drifted into other organisations such as the Orange lodges. But the police campaign undoubtedly broke the confidence of the gangs and their leaders, and in the popular memory the man who beat the razor gangs was Sillitoe.

Modernising the force

Sillitoe’s lasting achievements in Glasgow had as much to do with administration as with batons. He reorganised the City of Glasgow Police and pressed for new technology. In May 1936 Glasgow brought into use its first system of radio-equipped patrol cars, which allowed headquarters to send officers to incidents directly instead of waiting for them to call in from police boxes. He brought civilian staff into roles that had been filled by uniformed officers, and introduced compulsory retirement after thirty years’ service to keep the force fit and to open up promotion.

His most visible legacy was a small one. Looking for a distinctive mark that would make his officers instantly recognisable, he adopted the diced black and white band worn on the bonnets of Scottish regiments and applied it to police caps. The Sillitoe tartan spread first across Scotland, then to the rest of Britain and to police forces from Australia to North America. It remains one of the most widely recognised symbols of policing in the world.

Sillitoe’s critics

Not everyone admired Sillitoe’s methods. His squads were accused of heavy-handedness, and the willingness to meet violence with violence that the press celebrated could fall on the innocent as well as the guilty. Some contemporaries felt that the reputation of the razor gangs, and of the chief constable who defeated them, was inflated for the sake of good stories. Historians have also pointed out that the communities most affected by the gangs were the same communities hardest hit by unemployment, and that policing alone could not solve problems rooted in poverty.

Within the force, his reforms were not always popular either. Compulsory retirement and new working methods upset long-serving officers, and his outsider status as an Englishman with a colonial background marked him out. Yet even his critics generally accepted that he left the City of Glasgow Police better organised, better equipped and more effective than he found it.

After Glasgow

Sillitoe was appointed CBE in 1936 and knighted in the New Year Honours of 1942. In 1943 he left Glasgow to become Chief Constable of Kent, where he expanded the role of women police. In 1946 he was appointed Director General of MI5, the Security Service, an unusual choice for a policeman. His time there was overshadowed by the defection to the Soviet Union in 1951 of the diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, which exposed failures in British security. He retired in 1953, published his memoirs, Cloak Without Dagger, in 1955, and died on 5 April 1962.

Spymaster

Sillitoe’s appointment to MI5 in 1946 by the Labour government of Clement Attlee surprised the intelligence world, which regarded him as an outsider. He brought a policeman’s approach to an organisation that was adjusting from wartime counter-espionage to the new threats of the Cold War. During his time in charge the atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs was exposed as a Soviet spy and convicted in 1950, and Sillitoe travelled to Australia to advise on the creation of its own security service, which was established in 1949.

The defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in May 1951 damaged his reputation badly, since it showed that two Soviet agents had risen high in the Foreign Office without being detected. After retiring from MI5 in 1953 Sillitoe did not stay idle: he led an investigation into the smuggling of diamonds from Africa on behalf of the diamond industry, a final adventure for a man whose career had begun as a trooper in Rhodesia.

Legend and reality

In Glasgow, Sillitoe’s name became shorthand for tough policing, and his era is often contrasted with the city’s later struggles with gangs and knife crime. The contrast is a little too neat. The gangs of the post-war housing schemes, described on our Calton Tongs page, showed that the conditions which produced the razor gangs had not gone away. When Glasgow finally brought its violence down in the early twenty-first century, it did so by treating violence as a public health problem rather than by force alone. Sillitoe’s real legacy is perhaps the idea that policing could be modernised, organised and made more effective, and that a city’s reputation for violence was not its fate.

Timeline