Tanks on the Streets?

At 12.08pm on Friday 31 January 1919, Margaret Buchanan drives her tram into George Square in Glasgow's city center. She slows down to avoid the youths and men holding their arms up to stop her; some even jump onto the front of her tram. Swirling around her tram is a sea of heavy-coated men who have been on strike since Monday, demanding a reduction to a forty-hour working week. Crucially, the tram workers have not joined the strike; they are being abused as 'scabs'. Constables and officers of Glasgow's police force use their hands to try to part the crowd to allow the tram to proceed, but their efforts fail and batons are drawn.
Within minutes, the violence will have spread across and beyond the Square; men will have been injured; the Sheriff will have read the Riot Act; strike leaders will lie stunned and bleeding inside the City Chambers; policemen and protestors will lie beaten in the streets.
The violence and destruction in the Square, the streets to the north and south, in Glasgow Green and even south of the River Clyde, involves thousands of men. The city authorities believe the situation is beyond the control of the outnumbered police; the Sheriff sends a message to the local army commander requesting assistance.
For the first time in history, tanks will be dispatched as 'military aid to the civil power'. They will be accompanied by 10,000 soldiers. At approximately 12.30pm on Friday 31 January 1919, a century of myth-making commences. Using thousands of pages of court papers, memoirs and news reports, this book is the first attempt to tell the story of what happened in day-by-day detail.

Gordon Barclay graduated in archaeology from Edinburgh University (MA 1976, PhD 2001), and subsequently worked at Historic Scotland, firstly directing excavations and then as a Principal Inspector running the archaeology and scheduling programmes. He retired at the end of 2009 as Head of Policy. He has been editor of Scotland's premier archaeological journal, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and FORT, the journal of the Fortress Studies Group.