Clydeside: When the Workshop of the World Shut Up Shop
This was boom time for the Clyde: an age of industrial growth that would remain in the cultural consciousness of the Scotland for a long time after the capital that sustained it had gone; however, it would be false to assume that the average worker on Clydeside was wealthy in any way. Glasgow was still plagued by poverty, poor public health and terrible housing, and although these problems were more intensive in Glasgow where industry was concentrated, it was by no means a trend confined to Clydeside.
In 1911 up to 50% of the whole Scottish population lived in 1 or 2 roomed accommodation; comparatively, the figure was as low as 7% in England. This wasn’t merely because there was a shortage of housing, because in Glasgow just before the outbreak of the Great War a 10th of the city’s houses were empty, it was because many couldn’t afford the rent.
However, Scottish unemployment rates stood at only 1.8% the year before the First World War broke out in 1913, and although wages were often very low in real terms, at least most families had a regular wage coming into the household. By 1923 Scottish unemployment stood at 14.3%, and this was much worse on Clydeside – the shipyards had lost more than half of their workers.
By 1932, the average male rate of unemployment in Scotland was a little under 30%; in shipbuilding and mining areas this climbed to over 50%. The social and political effects of Clydeside’s great industrial slump were huge, and would change the cultural face of the whole of Scotland forever. So what exactly happened?
By the time the recession had fully set into 1920s society, the pre-war period was looked on with nostalgia. But it was Glasgow’s great, Victorian, industrial success and Clydeside’s specialism in heavy industries that contained the very seeds of the depression that would take hold of the region and never really leave again except when the war-machine required extra services.
The Scottish economy was over reliant on these industries; and areas in the South of England, which had diversified enough to bolster employment in the service sector and through catering for the needs a gradually awakening consumer society, recovered from the recession more readily than industry-dependent areas in the north of Britain. Glasgow and its surrounding area were looking at long-term unemployment, and this in itself stunted the growth of consumer society and produced a self-sustaining cycle of poverty.
But why did Clydeside fail so spectacularly in rediscovering its industrial glories after the war? Certainly many employers expected continued success, if not only to replace the shipping that was lost during the war. Full employment during the war was followed by the short post-war boom of 1919-1920, and even when the economy slumped in 1920-21, many employers tried to keep the backbone of their labour force in the hope that trade would resume as normal. However, competitors from the USA, Japan, Scandinavia and Holland had similar ideas, and for Clydeside the trade did not return.
To compound the problems, Clydeside took the brunt of the macro-economic decisions taken by successive governments to fight the Depression of the 1920s and 30s. In order to attract investment, primarily from rich American bankers, and stabilise Sterling, it was deemed necessary to rationalise British industry. This happened initially through wage cuts and downsizing of industrial capacity, and most of the Clyde’s industrialists supported the Bank of England’s decision to force cuts in order to deal with inflation.
By the early 1930s, Sir James Lithgow, with the backing of the Bank, bought up and then closed a third of British shipbuilding in order to rationalise the industry. The Clyde was not the only victim; Yarrow on Tyneside, for example, lost both its yards and the virtually whole town lost their jobs.
The political and social consequences of these events were enormous. Glasgow, and indeed the rest of industrial Scotland, was a completely different society. The city became notorious for revolutionary fervour, industrial action, civil unrest, poverty, gang violence and sectarianism. The government feared a Bolshevist rising, and sent the troops in on more than one occasion.
However, the events that would earn the area the title of Red Clydeside started during the First World War, when there was full employment, and the Clyde accepted a new influx of unskilled labour in order to supply huge amounts of munitions required for the war effort. There was more than pure poverty at play; Red Clydeside had other aspects. Perhaps exploitation and poverty simply wasn’t as acceptable when people became aware of the carnage taking place in the trenches.
At the war’s beginning in 1914, most working class areas responded patriotically and men enlisted in their droves, with active encouragement from their employers (in some cases with the threat of dismissal for those who refused to enlist). But by May Day 1918 over 100,000 Glaswegians stopped work and took to the street to demand peace. Well over 200,000 Scots soldiers were dead or seriously wounded, and the body count had changed the way that people thought about their country and the way it was governed. At this time, the Labour Party made huge gains all over Britain, but Clydeside was seen as Bolshevist bomb ready to explode.
As early as 1915, the trouble was brewing, when in February engineering workers held a strike lasting two weeks to protest at the higher wages paid to American workers brought in to eleviate a labour shortage.
Dilution of skilled labour by female and unskilled male workers became a serious issue with the highly skilled Clydeside workforce. Also, full employment and increased demand for housing increased rents dramatically, and this was seriously resented, especially given that the housing stock was in such poor condition.
Outrage ensued when rent rose by over 20% in Govan, and landlords were portrayed as unpatriotic villains, preying on poor women who not only worked in the factories but also brought up families by themselves whilst their men were away dying for their country in the trenches. By the winter of 1915, 25,000 tenants were refusing to pay rent at all. The largely female-instigated protest was only subdued by a government-enforced freeze on house rents. It was a taste of what working class solidarity could achieve.
When the remaining troops returned to a land that was hardly fit for heroes, the legend of Red Clyde was sealed. In 1919, 100,000 people protested in George Square, and the Red Flag was raised in the midst of a riot. The government ordered troops into Glasgow, who opened fire on men who had been part of the British Army a year before. The Scottish Secretary, Robert Munro, described the whole event as a ‘Bolshevist Rising.’
The whole political landscape had changed dramatically since the pre-war days of Liberal-dominated Scotland. In 1906, Scotland elected only 2 Labour MPs, against 56 Liberal and 12 Conservative/Unionist MPs. By 1922, there were 30 Labour MPs, against only 16 Liberals, with 15 seats going to the Conservatives and 12 going to the Liberal Unionists. In Glasgow alone, Labour held 10 of the city’s 15 seats.
This trend was no doubt assisted by The Representation of the People Act of 1918, which more than doubled the Scottish electorate and hugely increased the influence of the working classes on British politics in general. The Labour vote was also bolstered by the support of the Catholic Irish, of whom there were many in Glasgow, when they transferred their voting sympathies from Liberal to Labour as the issues surrounding Irish Home Rule became less relevant during the 1920s with the realisation of the Irish Free State.
The Liberals were the real losers of the political polarisation that followed the War. Just as the working class realised a new class-consciousness in way never experienced before, the Scottish middle classes, with the real fear of an imminent Bolshevist rising, swung their support towards the Conservatives and the Unionists.
This political bias would last the whole of the 20th century, and there was very little middle ground for the Liberals to inhabit. In the early 1920’s, the Liberals lost not only the support of the Free Church to the Tories, but also the support of the Daily Record, which until 1924 had been the party’s main supporter in the Scottish press.
In Glasgow, groups such as the Middle Class Union and the People’s League were formed in response to the Bolshevist threat, and these groups, along with students from Glasgow University, volunteered as blackleg labour to break strikes and keep essential transport services running- the blacklegs were crucial in keeping the trains running during the General Strike of 1926.
Many of country’s most powerful institutions looked for scapegoats for the industrial crisis, and in Glasgow the Catholic Irish were targeted. In 1923, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, then an extremely powerful force in political and social life, issued a report accusing not only Irish but Catholic immigrants in general for having a negative effect on the Scottish cultural identity.
The proclivity for hard liquor and bookmakers that accompanied urban industrial life was blamed on Catholic Irish immigrants; and the general dilution of traditional, hardworking, Presbyterian, Scottish culture by loose-living immigrants was seen as being at the heart of the problem.
However, despite Labour’s new alliance with the Catholic Church, working class Protestant communities in and around Glasgow didn’t necessarily swing towards the Tories as a result, and in fact the Orange Order formally broke from the Conservatives in 1922.
The Scottish Protestant League, despite its anti-Catholic sentiments, and despite encouraging sectarianism in the labour market, laid the blame for mass unemployment firmly at the feet of the middle class Moderates within Glasgow’s council who failed to deliver welfare for the struggling, Protestant working class masses.
Despite heavily influencing local elections in the early 1930s, and being fuelled by the Church of Scotland, sectarianism failed to have any major impact on the main political parties, who were reluctant to get involved in a brand of politics that was viewed as extremist and quite often parochial. However, the long traditions of sectarianism that have plagued modern Scotland were at their worst in the 1920s and 30s.
What the Church had protested about was a new cultural characteristic in post-war working class life. Despite the abject poverty of the masses, people were less subservient to the moral authority of church and state, and were more interested in leisure. Despite the Church’s warnings, and efforts to blame the phenomena on ‘alien’ cultural tendencies, Glaswegians still scraped together enough cash to go to ‘the dancing’ in their droves on a Saturday night, with 156 dancehalls existing in Glasgow during the early 30s.
The same Glasgow also boosted 100 cinemas, and films from America showed people a lifestyle and attitude that they had never experienced before. Football also became more popular than ever, with over a 100,000 attending Rangers and Celtic derbies. Unemployment and poverty couldn’t contain people’s aspirations. The Victorian age and its values were truly finished.
All of these tendencies during the inter-war years in Glasgow demonstrated a deep cultural shift in the mindset of people living in and around Clydeside, and, in turn, Scotland as a whole. Despite a Victorian, industrial infrastructure that could no longer supply enough jobs for the population, despite decrepit Victorian housing and terrible standards of public health, and despite the Church and the State nostalgically pining for a golden age of very British order and rigid class stratification, the people of Clydeside could not be prevented from arriving on the doorstep of modernity.
It would take several more generations, however, until Clydeside fully awoke from its Victorian dream. The Second World War would start the wheels turning again, artificially sustaining the heavy industries for a few decades more, and artificially delaying the inevitable final slump. Consequently the slump of the Clyde’s once great industrial power was drawn out for most of the 20th Century, and the attendant social problems accompanied its ill-fated journey every step of the way.
