General Strike: Nine days in May that brought Glasgow to a standstill in 1926

The General Strike - called by the TUC in support of the miners - was on its way. The miners had been in dispute with the colliery owners, who wanted to reduce wages. The miners fought the move under the slogan, 'Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day'. But they had been locked out of their mines.

After peace talks broke down, trade union executives approved plans for a 'national' strike in defence of the miners. And at midnight on May 3, 1926, more than two million workers nationwide downed their tools.

The industries that were called out included public transport, the printing trades, iron and steel, building trades, and electricity and gas. Trams and trains were badly affected. Newspapers failed to appear. Special arrangements were put into place to guarantee supplies of milk and food.

Ordinary Britons put up with the inconvenience as best they could.

But for a number of ministers in the government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the strike held out the prospect of revolt. The Russian Revolution had taken place just nine years earlier.

In the words of Andrew Marr (in his book on the Queen, who was born just days before the strike), “many thought it would be the start of a socialist or communist revolution of the kind that had swept away some of the [royal] baby’s relatives in Europe nine years before.”

So the strike got underway - the initial response of workers delighted the TUC. But across the country, volunteers flocked in their thousands to join organisations to help provide essential services. The officially recognised body in Glasgow, the Roll of Voluntary Workers, opened a recruiting office in Granville Street at the St Andrew’s Halls.

Faced with not being able to publish because their printers were now on strike, The Evening Times, the Glasgow Herald and four other newspapers came together to establish a news-sheet, the Emergency Press, which was generally anti-strike.

One woman, Elizabeth Cassels, of Pollokshaws, interviewed by The Herald in 1976, recalled being in Buchanan Street in 1926, watching a group of strikers trying to prevent the distribution of the Emergency Press. ''When the first worker appeared with parcels of the newspaper, a man leaped forward and tried to grab them. Policemen, who had been standing in the crowd, moved forward and I saw one hit the striker across the head with his baton.

''The man fell to the ground with his face covered in blood. There were angry shouts and, as we ran for cover, we saw policemen and the crowd clashing. On the way home, we saw a group of about 20 women stopping a tram and pulling the student ''volunteer'' driver on to the road. Each woman had a bag of flour and they burst them over the young man.''

The newssheet reported any weakening on strike numbers as well as incidents of riots, disturbances and arrests.

In one disturbance, some 500 miners from Newtown and Cambuslang marched into Glasgow to assist tramway pickets at the depot in Ruby Street, off Dalmarnock Road. A rumour had spread that student volunteers were sleeping in the depot prior to driving trams. Police dispersed the strikers “after a fierce struggle”. Later that day there was further trouble in Ruby Street, which spread to other streets. In the evening, the Emergency Press reported, rioters threw stones at police.

Many of the Glaswegians arrested during the strike received sentences of up to three months' hard labour.

The Emergency Press also reported trouble in Glasgow's Hope Street and in Maryhill, as well as in Edinburgh and Tranent.

By contrast, The Scottish Worker, an STUC publication which, like the Emergency Press is held in the Mitchell Library, took a more upbeat view of the strike. Its stories were a useful counterpoint to the stories carried in the Emergency Press.

Most of the people arrested during the repeated disturbances in Glasgow, it said, were “irresponsible youths … in no way connected with the strike.”

“The People are With Us!” ran the headline on May 11 over a story that said, “We enter to-day upon the second week of our struggle. The past week has been one of intense excitement … The tremendous response of the workers to the call of the General Council took our opponents by surprise … the volunteer service cannot cope with the situation.” The simple truth, it added, “is that the great mass of the people are with the men on strike … Never before in any great dispute have the public been so entirely with the strikers. That is an ominous sign for the government.”

The paper urged strikers not to encourage “inflammatory propagandists: they may be in the enemy’s service.”

As things turned out, the General Strike lasted just nine days, being called off by the TUC on Wednesday, May 12. Anti-strike newspapers had for a few days been reporting that some strikers had been drifting back to work.

At midday on Wednesday, the TUC general council told Baldwin that the strike was over, putting forward a memorandum proposed by Sir Herbert Samuel, who the previous year had chaired a royal commission into the coal industry. Many strikers felt a sense of “shock and betrayal” when they realised how little had been achieved by the ending of the strike.

But the miners resolutely refused to either accept Samuel’s solution or to return to work. They stayed out. Months later, as the Labour MP Willie Hamilton, who was eight in 1926, would put it in his memoirs, "the miners were literally starved into submission."

The TUC Online History pages say the nine-day strike had highlighted the innate strength of working-class solidarity.

But in its wake it witnessed a "crushing defeat" for the mass movement from which it took at least a decade to recover. Apart from the crushing blow to the miners there was widespread victimisation in many industries especially printing and railways.

The Government also rushed through Parliament the Trades Disputes and Trades Union Act in 1927 by which general strikes and most sympathy strikes became illegal.