Red Clydeside: A history of the labour movement in Glasgow 1910-1932

Events

Recollections of a Clydeside Striker

Personal memories of the 1926 General Strike by Mr. Bill Cowe, member of the National Union of Railwaymen, Chairman of Rutherglen Trades Council. Recorded in 1970.

The central strike committees and the councils of action were twenty-four hours a day in session. They had their own transport; they stopped all other forms of transport but they had their own courier system to carry messages because there was no such thing as postal services, no such thing as the press. The press had turned in 100% and stopped all the papers, and so the council of action had to carry out its work by getting bicycles, old and new, motor cycles, old vans - anything that could run on wheels was used by the couriers and also to take leaders in the strike to certain fronts in the strike. I had a bicycle because I had to have some means of transport from Rutherglen into the Central Strike Committee every day to get my instructions, because very often we were involved in mass picketing. For instance, I had to carry through picketing at Polmadie Engine and Traffic Centre. It's still there yet. We had to carry through a mass picket there in order to stop some blacklegs. Well; at the same time when I was not on NUR strike committee duties I was on picket duties or other kind of duties in Rutherglen trying to stop blacklegs, which were few and far between.

There was a conservative element among the railwayman, nevertheless, during the General Strike, when the call was made, I couldn't fault any of these railwaymen: they stood 100%. There was only one blackleg railwayman in Rutherglen and we tried to stop him. A yard foreman and me organised two mass demonstrations and police constables escorted him back home through the streets of Rutherglen still shouting….

It was interesting, the springing into life of the councils of action, the rapidity with which organisational problems were solved, the control of their own transport and, of course, assistance came from the cooperative societies. It may be strange in this day and age to look upon cooperative societies as class weapons, working class weapons, but they truly and genuinely were in 1926. Cooperative retail societies sent their representatives on to councils of action, and these societies offered all sorts of financial help as well as rendering much of the material that was necessary to feed the miners, soup kitchens etc. The Coop societies played a tremendous part.

So here we had the Labour Party, we had the trade unions, we had the Coop movement - the three big wings of the labour movement - and, of course the Communists played a part in each of them. Of course we had in Scotland what was known as the parish councils at that time. These Parish councils were very local councils and because they were nearer to the working class and because of the job they had to do in distributing poor relief, these councils, before 1926, were captured by Labour Party candidates and were in the hands of Labour councillors. Labour parish councils helped a lot and this was part of the government structure that helped in the development of the struggle in the nine days of the general strike.

The strike was tremendously successful, the solidarity, the united determination of the working class. I've never seen it before or since, and as a young man it's always recorded in my memory as being the most outstanding example of how unity in action can bring a government to its knees, and it's the only power... the united power of the working class based on industry and the political core of the movement... that can bring down a government. That's the kind of effect it's had on my mind. To witness the mass pickets alone. The police tried to provoke people and the only way the councils of action and the leaders of the strike committees could fathom to contend with the police provocation and intimidation, was to turn out mass pickets - not a group of workers watching a gate but every picket became a mass action and the police were unable to deal with the mass character of the pickets that took place. This was deliberately done in order to counter the action the police would take in protecting the employers and the Tories against the action of the working class.

In Glasgow the Glasgow University students were arraigned by the working class as being the defenders of property and Toryism because the Glasgow students tried to break the General Strike. The young students, they drove tramcars in Glasgow that led to battles in the Glasgow streets where these trams were wrecked and students were manhandled because every action was a mass action and immediately a tramcar was surrounded by a mass of strikers the police could do nothing. The students foolish enough to do this job really let themselves in for a lot of trouble.To this day you'll get amongst good trade unionists an aversion to university students. There was spontaneous support from those not organised in trade unions. Women in the street were encouraging their menfolk to really injure the students.

Then came the betrayal on the 13 May; in the midst of all this enthusiasm and activity it came out that the strike was off. Nobody at first would believe that the strike was off but the strike was off and it came as a stunning blow to the whole of the working class. You can imagine the enthusiasm, the unity that existed and then to be told it was off without the miners getting any serious consideration and that really caused havoc in the working class. The strike was off - it was a stunning treacherous blow by the right-wing controlled General Council of the TUC who in conjunction with the employers and the Tory government brought this off.

Why did they do it? People don't act treacherously deliberately. The right wing brought off the strike and betrayed all those millions of people because those millions of people, the mass, actually had taken over. Discipline, order by the councils of action, the mass activity and the tremendous unity was too much for them. The right wing had lost control and that's how they looked at it and in order to reassert their authority in the trade union movement, they could think of nothing else but to call off the strike and so bring about, as they thought, confusion, disillusionment and division in the working class.