What Was Red Clydeside?

‘Red Clydeside’ is the name given to a period of intense working-class political activism in Glasgow and the industrial towns around it, running roughly from the 1910s to the early 1930s. It took in the 1915 rent strikes, mass anti-war and labour agitation, the Battle of George Square in 1919, and the election of a wave of socialist MPs in 1922. For a generation it made the Clyde a byword for the radical left. Our Red Clydeside page tells the fuller story.

The rent strikes of 1915

The first great episode came in wartime. With munitions workers pouring into the city and almost no new housing being built, landlords put up rents sharply, and the tenants fought back. The resistance was led by women, above all Mary Barbour and the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association, whose supporters became known as ‘Mrs Barbour’s Army’. By November 1915 some twenty thousand tenants were refusing to pay, and the government was forced to pass an act freezing rents at pre-war levels. It was a famous victory for the city’s politics of the street.

War, work and John Maclean

The war years also brought fierce industrial struggle, organised through the Clyde Workers’ Committee and driven by anger at wartime controls on labour. Its most uncompromising figure was the revolutionary Marxist John Maclean, who was jailed repeatedly for his anti-war campaigning and was appointed Bolshevik consul for Scotland by Lenin himself. The story runs alongside the wider history of trade unionism in the city.

The Battle of George Square

Matters came to a head on Friday 31 January 1919, remembered as ‘Bloody Friday’. Tens of thousands gathered in George Square in support of a strike for a forty-hour week, and a red flag was raised. When the police baton-charged the crowd, rioting broke out. Alarmed by the recent revolution in Russia, the government rushed troops and six tanks to Glasgow. The strike leaders, among them Willie Gallacher, Manny Shinwell and David Kirkwood, were arrested.

From the streets to Westminster

Red Clydeside’s lasting mark was made not at the barricades but at the ballot box. At the 1922 general election Labour won ten of Glasgow’s fifteen seats, and the ‘Red Clydesiders’, among them James Maxton, John Wheatley and David Kirkwood, went off to Parliament to great crowds. Wheatley’s Housing Act of 1924 delivered a wave of council homes across Britain. The movement turned Glasgow into a Labour stronghold for generations, though historians still debate how close it ever truly came to revolution. Some of these figures appear among our famous people of Glasgow.