One hundred years ago, on 31 January, 1919, Glasgow’s George Square witnessed one of the most astonishing outbreaks of civic violence in modern history. Tens of thousands of striking workers, many accompanied by their families, were baton-charged by police. A battle erupted, heads were broken and for one of the last times, civic officials read the Riot Act. A panic-stricken cabinet in London sent in troops and tanks, and for a moment revolution looked set to sweep western Scotland.

“The Russian revolution had been an unambiguous demonstration that the forces of reaction could be defeated and the political establishment was very afraid that could happen here,” says the Scottish historian Tom Devine. “They thought a Bolshevik uprising was about to begin in Glasgow.”

In fact, the Battle of George Square was not so much an outburst of revolutionary fervour as the outcome of hostile policing and a loss of nerve by the cabinet. It did not trigger the downfall of UK capitalism – although it did have an impact on the British political landscape. The myth of the Red Clydesider was created that day, and its impact is still felt. So how did the authorities let that happen? What went wrong in George Square a century ago?

Glasgow was at the time a centre for heavy goods manufacture, and demobbed soldiers were returning in search of work. Factory owners wanted to maintain the 47-hour working week, while workers wanted a 40-hour week so that everyone could get a job, says John Foster, an emeritus professor at the University of the West of Scotland. “The factory owners wanted them to do more work so there would be fewer jobs and they would have a permanent unemployed workforce at their beck and call.”

The workers, led by Willie Gallacher, Manny Shinwell, David Kirkwood and others, went on strike on 27 January and asked the city’s lord provost to put their claim to the national government. On the 31st, around 60,000 gathered in George Square, outside the city chambers, to hear his response. The weather was cold and the atmosphere tense. Kirkwood led a delegation to see the lord provost. “Suddenly, without warning, police made a savage, totally unexpected assault on the rear of the meeting, smashing right and left with their batons,” says Gallacher in his autobiography Revolt on the Clyde. “Women and children were in the crowd.”

Gallacher raced into the melee, punched the chief constable and was then battered to the ground. Kirkwood was struck by batons from behind as he ran outside. The striking workers were pushed across the square but rallied. The police retreated – and the authorities decided to read the Riot Act, a formal process giving them rights to unleash martial law, says Devine. “It was an extraordinary development.”

A sheriff began to read the act but it was torn from his hands. A lorry carrying crates of aerated water was overturned and the bottles hurled at police, who scurried back to the city chambers dragging Gallacher and Kirkwood. Outside, there was pandemonium. Civic leaders appealed for peace but failed. In the end, Kirkwood and Gallacher were asked to intervene. Both were wounded, bloodied and under arrest but spoke to the crowd and asked them to leave and march to nearby Glasgow Green. Eventually they did so.

In London, the war cabinet met at 3pm. The Scottish secretary, Robert Munro, claimed a Scottish Bolshevik revolution had begun and it was decided to send in troops from barracks in Scotland and northern England – but not from Glasgow’s own Maryhill barracks because men there might have sided with their embattled neighbours.

Meanwhile the battle continued to rage across Glasgow. “Violence and disorder continued elsewhere in the city centre, as it would through the night. The George Square Riot turned into Bloody Friday,” says Kenny MacAskill in his book Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside. After one skirmish, two policemen were stripped of their uniforms and let loose semi-naked. Trams were vandalised, windows were smashed and looting took place.

Then the troops arrived. Machine gun nests were placed in George Square. Soldiers were sent to protect power stations, and six tanks were stationed in the city’s Cattle Market. By Saturday, the city was under military control. “The city chambers is like an armed camp,” the Observer reported that Sunday. “The quadrangle is full of troops and equipment, including machine guns.”

By Sunday, Glasgow was calm, a fact ruefully acknowledged by Siegfried Sassoon, who came to cover the battle for the Nation but could only report on the dismal weather and the way he had been derided by one woman for his lack of Marxist credentials, says his biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson.

A police officer uses his baton on a striker during the general strike in Glasgow. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Slowly the city returned to normal, and after a couple of weeks the troops departed. Amazingly, there had been no fatalities. The strike leaders were put on trial for inciting riot but were acquitted – except for Gallacher and Shinwell, who got three and five months in jail. Gallacher came to rue the opportunity he believed was lost that day. “Had there been an experienced revolutionary leadership, instead of a march to Glasgow Green there would have been a march to the city’s Maryhill Barracks. There we could easily have persuaded the soldiers to come out, and Glasgow would have been in our hands.”

Most historians now consider these views as wishful thinking. “This was a widely supported trade union dispute but it was a reformist not a revolutionary gathering and it turned into anarchy only because of political nervousness in London and maladroit policing,” says Foster.

Yet it was an extraordinary event and has since acquired mythical status in the city. In his great Glasgow novel Lanark, Alasdair Gray suggests, wrongly, that the army actually sent tanks into George Square that day. (In fact they were confined to the Cattle Market.) “Gray knows this, of course,” says the historian Ewan Gibbs, of the University of the West of Scotland. “He is merely emphasising the battle’s mythical status in Glasgow.”

In the end, the workers lost the strike for a shorter working week although better working hours were slowly introduced by employers. More importantly, at the next general election, in 1922, Red Clydesiders – in the personification of the Independent Labour Party – won 10 out of 15 Glasgow constituencies. The revolution may not have materialised but Clydeside became a powerful socialist base.

“The experience of being harshly treated helps explain the election success of Red Clydesiders,” says Devine. “Shinwell, Kirkwood and others became MPs. Thousands came to see them off to Westminster when they left Glasgow by train, and while I am not suggesting a direct link between the Battle of George Square and this later surge in Labour support, the event certainly had a politicising effect. The George Square factor was not irrelevant and Scotland has been the anchor of the Labour party ever since.”

FATHER FIGURES

Both my parents were Glaswegians. My mother’s father, David Pearson, was a founding member of the Independent Labour Party and was remembered by his children for his intense socialist views. He was in George Square that day and heard the Riot Act being read by the oppressive forces of the law, as he often told his family. My father’s father, John McKie, was more conservative. The two men never met but as John McKie was a police sergeant and might well have been on duty in George Square, it is just possible my grandfathers became fleetingly acquainted that afternoon.

Robin McKie