The gangs of interwar Glasgow grew where the Depression bit hardest: the East End and south side districts where the yards and works of this site’s industrial pages were laying men off by the street. Young men with no work, fierce local loyalty and the city’s sectarian inheritance organised into territorial armies — and the two most famous made the divide explicit: Bridgeton’s Billy Boys, Protestant, led by the charismatic Billy Fullerton and marching with flute bands, and their Catholic arch-enemies the Norman Conks of Norman Street, whose battles with fists, bottles, hatchets and above all the open razor gave the era its name.
The razor was chosen for what it did: it maimed and marked rather than killed, scarring faces for life while usually keeping its user off the gallows — a calibration of terror that says everything about the gangs’ world. Fights were territorial, tribal and semi-ritual — pitched battles at football matches, marches routed deliberately through enemy streets, protection skimmed from shops and bookies — and while the sectarian banners were real, historians note the gangs fought over territory and pride at least as much as theology; the Religion pages of this site tell the wider story the gangs performed in miniature.
The state’s answer arrived in 1931 in the person of Percy Sillitoe, the new chief constable met on the Victorian Police page. Sillitoe recruited squads of the biggest men he could find — Highlanders and ex-guardsmen the press called Sillitoe’s Cossacks — and met the gangs with their own arithmetic: batons at the flashpoints, surveillance and repeated prosecution of the leaderships, and courts persuaded toward exemplary sentences. Through the mid-1930s the big gangs were systematically broken; Fullerton himself faded into legend, lamppost-lit anecdote and, eventually, a Bridgeton funeral of enormous size.
Then came the book. No Mean City (1935), a Gorbals-set melodrama of razor kings and slum violence, became a bestseller that fixed Glasgow’s international image for half a century — to the fury of a city which knew the book’s square mile was not its sum. The stigma outlived the gangs by generations and attached, with special injustice, to the Gorbals itself, as that district’s page records; Glasgow’s long campaign to shed the razor-city label is part of its modern cultural history.
The razor gangs’ true legacy was a warning the city would need again: that idle young men, tight territory and tribal identity make a standing army waiting for a flag. Thirty years after Sillitoe, in the new schemes’ empty streets, the pattern returned under new names — the next page’s story.