Riot Act Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
Note: Scotland is produced and designed to be heard, not read. We encourage you, if you are able, to listen to the audio, which provides insight which is significantly different to how it appears on the page. Transcripts are generated from the original scripts of the episodes. They may be slightly different to the corresponding audio and may contain errors.
MICHAEL PARK: We’ve made it a year and this episode marks Scotland’s first birthday. When I started making this show I hadn’t expected to get to work with some of the brilliant people I’ve been able to work with and I never imagined for a second that I would end up collaborating with Mitch Bain to make original scores for each episode of the show.
The first episode of Scotland was titled Riot Act and was an experiment in telling a short story from Scottish history to hopefully inspire whoever listened to go and find out more about it. It was a wee bit ropey sound-wise, it was really ropey writing-wise (aren’t they all?) and I spliced in whatever free music I could find to make it sound roughly the way I wanted it to.
To celebrate our birthday, Mitch and I have gone back through the original script to Riot Act and completely rewritten it, adding a new score and a wee bit of a different direction.
We’ll be replacing the original Riot Act episode with this one in a couple of weeks, just in case you want to compare.
Anyway, without any more havering from me, here’s Riot Act - rewritten and rerecorded as a thank you to every single person who has taken the time to listen to the show. We appreciate each and every one of you.
SCOTLAND - A SCOTTISH HISTORY PODCAST
EPISODE 1 - RIOT ACT
It is the 1st February 1919. Saturday morning.
You’re disturbed from your sleep by heavy rain. The pattering on the window sounds like a distant army marching in your mind - you’re sure you can hear someone practicing the bagpipes somewhere too. Your eyes open heavily as the rain gets louder, and louder, and louder until the sound of the distant army marching on your window is the sound of actual boots on the actual street and you pull the yellowed netting aside to see hundreds, maybe even thousands of troops marching toward the city centre.
As many as 10,000 troops are in Glasgow to quell Bolshevik violence. Somewhere in Whitehall, someone is terrified of a Communist revolution.
In the streets barbed wire is being laid, sandbags are being thrown down, machine gun nests are set up. Six tanks are on their way from England. On that cold Saturday, Glasgow doesn’t look much different to the war-shattered towns that many Glaswegian men would have left behind in France just a few months ago.
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
It is 20th October 1714. It is King George the First’s Coronation day, and His Majesty has got the fear. Word has reached him that there are riots in towns throughout England, on what should be a day of national rejoicing. Unfortunately for George, not everyone’s mad keen on having a Hanoverian, protestant king and the Tories have been whipping up trouble for him and his Whig government since it was decided that he’d take the throne in 1710.
There had been five years of riots in the lead up and this was the last straw. You see, there wasn’t much you could do when a menacing group of twelve or more people kicked up a rammy. It was almost impossible to prosecute them all and if you couldn’t do that then it might make your life difficult if they kicked up a rammy somewhere else later. What a good authoritarian ruler needed was a way to make being part of a riot punishable by immediate death.
So pretty much the first thing the king and his ministers did was get the quill out and write ‘an Act for Preventing Tumults and Riotous Assemblies’. The law was passed in 1714 and came into effect less than a year later in 1715. The idea was pretty simple. If a town official thought a group of people might be preparing for a spot of organised lairiness then that official could read a proclamation that, if they read it out, made the gathering illegal and absolved the government and town officials of blame for the consequences if the crowd didn’t disperse.
Smart thinking.
THE ACT: “Our sovereign lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.”
The pains were injury or death.
THE ACT: “..and that if the persons so unlawfully, riotously and tumultuously assembled, or any of them, shall happen to be killed, maimed or hurt, in the dispersing, seizing or apprehending, or endeavouring to disperse, seize or apprehend them, that then every such justice of the peace, sheriff, under-sheriff, mayor, bailiff, head-officer, high or petty constable, or other peace-officer, and all and singular persons, being aiding and assisting to them, or any of them, shall be free, discharged and indemnified, as well against the King's majesty, his heirs and successors, as against all and every other person or persons so unlawfully, riotously and tumultuously assembled, that shall happen to be so killed, maimed or hurt, as aforesaid.”
Go home, or we’ll batter you in the name of the King… or Queen.
Whoever read it had to follow the exact wording of the proclamation in the act. Several convictions that took place after the Riot Act had been read were later overturned because some part or other of the Proclamation had been missed out. It was usually ‘God Save the King’.
It is Friday 31st January 1919. Lunchtime, for what it matters since most of the city is out on a General Strike.
A colleague will later describe Sheriff McKenzie as being in a ‘highly excitable state’ as he looks out at more than 20,000 people rammed into Glasgow’s George Square. The newspapers said there were more than 70,000 people total out on strike across the city and everyone in the City Chambers was feeling pretty jumpy.
Two leaders of the striking workers, Neil MacLean MP and Davie Kirkwood are inside the City Chambers hearing the response to the workers’ petition for a shorter working week. The others, Manny Shinwell and Willie Gallacher, are outside addressing the assembled masses in the square. as a tram rolls in, trying to keep to its route, but 25,000 people… ish… no-one was doing a headcount… blocked its path. Its bell sounded above the tumultuous crowd and furious people, angry at the sudden introduction of a giant electric bus into an already crowded situation lost the heid a wee bit and began trying to impede its progress. That’s when things kicked off.
The Police, there were only about 200 of them, charged the crowd and began indiscriminately beating people with their truncheons. The crowd fought back, pushing the outnumbered police back.
Sheriff McKenzie was out like a shot, with the Riot Act clutched in his hand. This was his moment to impose law and order on the huddled masses of the Glaswegian working class. This would put them in their place.
He stormed onto the steps and proudly unfurled the paper.
THE ACT: “Our sovereign lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.”
If you throw a bottle just the right way, it whistles a wee bit as it flies through the air. If you aim it right, you might even hit the Sheriff of Glasgow, sending him to the deck and the Riot Act to the wind.
Things had been tense for months.
During the First World War, the banks of the River Clyde were a cacophony of industry as men and women worked around the clock to churn out the unfathomable amounts of munitions needed to fight a mechanised war.
But after the war ended in November 1918, men coming home from the front were unable to find work, while those who had found employment on the Clyde during the war years - were irked at still having to work a fifty seven hour week after the insatiable demand for killing machines had disappeared.
The Clyde Workers Committee, a group of Shop Stewards who stood up for workers’ rights on Clydeside - and the Clydeside Independent Labour Party, saw the solution as being a forty hour working week. That would provide a better standard of living for those in work, and enough hours to provide jobs for those returning from the Front.
The Captains of Industry didn’t agree.
The CWC called a strike, demanding a change to a 40-hour week for all workers on the Clyde. 70,000 people joined a four-day strike and the CWC and ILP submitted a petition to the Council with their demands.
On 29th January, representatives of the Clyde Workers Committee met with the Lord Provost, asking him to deliver their message to Parliament. They informed the Provost that “drastic action” would be taken if their demands were not heard.
This was not barricade-building talk. They planned more widespread picketing.
‘If the strike has not settled by the end of this week we would not hesitate to stop every tramcar, shut off every light and generally paralyse the business of the city.’
That’s what brought 25,000 to the steps of the City Chambers on that Friday lunchtime. A petition, a request, asking for fairer working conditions and hours for people who had given their youth and their innocence on the battlefields of Belgium and France in the name of the King. Or something.
Many of Glasgow’s police force were still called up to the army, and still on active military duty. They weren’t an effective deterrent to anyone trying to start a riot. By the time the fighting started and the iron railings that were once on George Square were being pulled up to make makeshift defences against police baton charges, the powers that be weren’t thinking about the King.
They were thinking about his Russian cousin who had been shot in a basement by Communist revolutionaries less than two years earlier. The establishment were jumpy. A bolshevik uprising could happen here. It could be happening right this second.
MacLean and Gallacher are arrested, but are allowed to try and disperse the crowd. It works. For a bit.
The pitched battles spread out across the city for the rest of the day and through the night. There’s looting, there are significant injuries and Glasgow erupts with the same chaotic energy that many of the unemployed returning from France would have known all-too well.
The War Cabinet were notified the second fighting kicked off, but in truth they’d known for days that the Lord Provost might request military assistance. The troops came North to protect infrastructure and keep things running, supplementing the emergency services which were depleted by the war. They would also scare the rioters off the streets. That was just a nice side-effect for the powers that be.
The only way they could actively engage with the populace was if the War Cabinet declared Martial Law. They hadn’t. They wouldn’t. They didn’t even discuss it.
It is Saturday morning, and you weave your way through troops on the streets of Glasgow. As you get closer to the centre, some of them are warming their hands by fires, others are playing cards and some are even posing for photographs.
Tanks would arrive on the Monday, but they would be stationed in the Cattle Market and never brought into the streets.
The rioting was over, but the army remained until the end of the General Strike. They were gone two weeks later.
People will romanticise the story for a century, embellishing the tale with their own details and flourishes, but Bloody Friday, the Battle of George Square, whatever you want to call it, was a ‘police riot’, not a military intervention. The official statistics list 19 police officers and 34 strikers injured - there were no fatalities.
The leaders of the movement and eight others were put on trial for their supposed role in inciting a riot. Only Manny Shinwell and Willie Gallacher were convicted - Shinwell got six weeks and Gallacher received five months.
Willie Gallacher went on to serve as the Communist MP for West Fife from 1935-1950, Shinwell went onto become a minister in Labour and wartime coalition governments before eventually accepting a peerage and becoming active in the House of Lords before his death in 1986 at the age of 101.
The Riot Act was only repealed in 1973, 259 years after it was first passed. Since rioting itself was no longer punishable by death, it made the whole thing a bit redundant since the idea of a speedy and effectual punishment for rioters is to fix bayonets, draw rapiers, or load machine guns, and send them to meet their maker.
The 70,000 workers who had come out on strike eventually agreed to a concession which would see them work 47 hours per week. A bloody communist uprising in Glasgow was a very real threat to the establishment, but really all the workers wanted were fair hours and security for their families.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland. It was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
Thank you to Doctor Gordon Barclay and Sarah Kelly for their support on this episode.
The human Fialka cipher Mitch Bain makes the music for every episode of Scotland and you can check out more of his work, by searching out Mitch Bain Music on Facebook.
Andy Stewart was reading the Riot Act.
You can find out more about the show on our website, thisisscotland.co and on twitter, facebook and instagram by searching Scotland - Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.