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Today marks the centenary of the Battle of George Square and the violent suppression of protesting workers dubbed “Bloody Friday”.

On January 31, 1919, about 50,000 workers were striking to demand a reduction of the working week and were met with police batons.

It was 82 days after the end of World War I and the men had returned from the trenches to find their loyalty to empire rewarded with poverty.

(Image: Daily Record)

About 100,000 demobilised men came home to a Scotland of unemployment, exploitation and slum housing.

The Scottish TUC and Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC) sought to increase the number of jobs open to demobilised soldiers by reducing the working week.

The protesters were in George Square to hear the Lord Provost’s reply to a workers’ request for a 40-hour week instead of the average 57 hours.

As they waited for the delegates to return from meeting the Lord Provost, Glasgow City police launched a vicious and unprovoked attack on the workers.

They beat men, women and children to the ground.

At the request of the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, troops were deployed on the night of the riot and arrived after its dispersal.

Tanks were despatched but there remains contention over whether they rolled into George Square that day.

Some academics contest that an iconic photograph associated with the event was actually taken a few days earlier at a parade.

Certainly, tanks were deployed and 10,000 soldiers from Scotland and the north of England were despatched, with machine nests set up in George Square.

In the immediate aftermath of the riot, the joint Strike Committee of the 40 Hours Movement called for workers across Britain to rally.

The leaflet read: “The organised workers of Scotland put forward an orderly and legitimate demand for the Forty Hours. The government’s reply is bludgeons, machineguns, bayonets and tanks. The institution of a reign of terror.”

They called on other UK workers to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the Clyde to “prove that organised labour is a force to be reckoned with, not something to be despised and broken”.

The riot had come against a backdrop of unrest, strikes, the rise of the labour movement and the Russian revolution.

The liberal government of Lloyd George was unnerved and the Secretary of State for Scotland condemned the 40-hour movement as a “ Bolshevist uprising”.

The disturbance in Glasgow was soon followed by others in South Shields, Salford, London, Hull, Liverpool, Newport, Cardiff and Barry.

Some historians say the UK was on the cusp of a revolution, which failed to materialise.

Today, the centenary will be marked in a number of events including a theatrical re-enactment of the “battle” at East Kilbride Arts Centre.

(Image: Daily Record)

But largely absent from the narrative of this tumultuous period is how racism came to the fore.

Race riots broke out in Glasgow eight days before the Battle of George Square but the event is largely ignored, in a Scotland which perpetuates the myth “we are all Jock Tamsin’s bairns”.

African and Asian workers, veterans of World War I and frequently also patriots of the British Empire, were targeted by white workers, whipped into a fury by the unions themselves.

It was a shameful moment for unions, that, instead of preaching solidarity, scapegoated black workers, demonising them for stealing white British jobs.

Acknowledging this dark period is all the more pertinent amid the xenophobic rhetoric and scare-mongering of a modern Britain now locked in the uncivil war of Brexit.

In 1919, a letter to the press by the African Races Association of Glasgow outlined the injustice.

It said: “Did not some of these men fight on the same battlefields with white men to defeat the enemy and make secure the British Empire? Why can’t they work now in the same factories with white men?”

The Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights said that to forget the race riots is to ignore how empire and the left exploited the economic recession to pit black against white.

Three people were seriously injured.Police removed 30 black sailors into “protective custody” and were subsequently charged with riot and weapons offences.

They were released but none of the large crowd of white rioters was arrested.

Two white sailors were hurt – Duncan Cowan was shot and Thomas Carlin was stabbed. Tom Johnson, a sailor from Sierra Leone, was also stabbed. Cowan and Carlin were taken to hospital but Johnson, despite his wounds, went to the magistrates.

Emanuel Shinwell, leader of the British Seafarers’ Union, and Willie Gallacher, a communist activist, played major roles in the strike campaign and were culpable in inciting racist fervour.

Shinwell addressed a meeting of more than 600 sailors at the mercantile marine yard a few hours before the riot broke out.

But a section of the union movement campaigned for a “colour bar” to prevent black sailors being members of the trade union and demanded an end to the employment of African and Asian sailors.

The Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights said Scotland must recognise the racism of the past if it is to tackle the prejudices of today.

It wrote: “While the media, political, cultural and education institutions continue to dismiss and ignore these important events in Scotland’s history, race, and more importantly structural racism, continues to be used as a tool to divide our society.

“Just as our institutions divided the white and the black workers in 1919, silence on racism allows people to be pitched against each other without challenging the engine that drives the oppression.”