# Transcript

A point worth making is that deviant labels, albeit of dangerous people or dangerous places, frequently bear little relationship to the truth. Deviant labels are ideological formulations. That is to say, they carry and signify what we might call 'commonsense' versions of the truth, formulations which 'everybody knows' are the case. They are shorthand, often stereotypical, representations of an infinitely more complex truth which purport to explain away that complexity. They do not constitute truth; they are refractions of truth. But labels still have very real effects. So for Glasgow in 1919 it did not matter that there was no organised conspiracy whatsoever to cause a revolution. It was portrayed ideologically as in a revolutionary ferment, the deviant label of political militancy stuck, and the whole city was damned as a hotbed of militant British Bolshevism.

Within three years there was a very important amplification of that deviant label. In 1922 Glasgow elected ten Independent Labour Party M.P.s including John Wheatley, David Kirkwood and James Maxton. Their disruptive tactics in the House of Commons gained them the label 'the wild men of the Clyde'. Again we have to remember the contemporary resonance of that label. It comes from the term 'the wild man of Borneo' meaning some kind of atavistic savage. The term was meant to deny rationality to these socialist M.Ps whose · tactics by today's standards were rather well-behaved. It served its purpose: Glasgow and its people were thoroughly damned. The level of deviance attributed to the city is captured in the following quotation from ·a 1924 book about Glasgow called "Cancer of Empire".

"The Red Clyde, the smouldering danger ofrevolution in Glasgow, owing to the swift development of political affairs in Britain, has ceased to be a local anxiety, and become an interest and an alarm to the whole civilised world. The mainspring of the trouble, the root grievance of the Clyde, is Housing. This is a simple term for a cancerous condition which, starting from the lack of space and light in the homes of the workers, festers and complicates itself, in numberless vicious circles, feeding on their Scottish vigour of character, their education, their stony wills; has developed into a political movement, quite apart from Marxianism, which threatens to harden into almost as rigorous an extremism as Leninism itself."

SEANDAMER

This language managed to do something very clever. It conflated the alleged Bolshevism of Glasgow with its slums. The deviant slum image of the middle of the nineteenth century had been resuscitated, amplified, and was to have a long history. As the 1920s persisted the image of Glasgow became steadily worse. The new horror story was gang warfare. A combination of heavy policing and heavier sentencing broke the back of these fighting gangs by the start of the 1930s. But then, in 1936 came the event which totally damned Glasgow. And that was the publication of the novel "No Mean City". Listen to this.

MICHAEL PERCEVAL-MAXWELL (from "No Mean City", chop/er XI. poges /21-/23, wrillen by Alexander McArthur ond H. Kingsley Long, pub: London, Corgi 1978; Dural/on: I '28" (copyright permission for use from Jane Miller, The C. W. Daniel Company Lid., Saffron Walden, Essex) "A crowd numbering close upon a thousand assembled on Glasgow Green to watch the fight between Razor King and big McLatchie. The seconds sprang back into a wall of spectators and the fight was on with no mockery of a handshake. Razor King, bullet head tucked into his chest, rushed in to the attack. McLatchie, with some notions of"boxing", gave ground, careful to guard his body, waiting for a chance to use his left.

Johnnie had no science; he relied on his strength and ferocity and great capacity to take punishment. He got in with two lightning-quick jabs to McLatchie's body, left himself wide open, and received a smashing blow to the nose that set the blood flowing freely.

His left fist landed another punch to the head. Johnnie gave a bellow oflaughter, rushed furiously into fists that flailed like a windmill, shot out a dexterous foot, and tripped McLatchie so that the big red-head fell backwards like a log. In an instant, while the shout that greeted that fall was still ringing, Razor King raised his right foot and brought the boot down hard on McLatchie's face between the eyes.

"Take that, yah red swine!" he roared. McLatchie was out.

There is no appeal to Caesar in these gladiatorial combats. Johnnie took no chances. He kicked furiously at the fallen man's body and McLatchie's eyes closed in his mangled face."

SEANDAMER

It would be hard to over-estimate the damage done to Glasgow's image by this book. It was written by an unemployed baker called Alexander McArthur who lived in Waddell Street in the Gorbals. It was unpublishable in the form in which it was originally written but the publishers, Longmans, were impressed enough with the raw material to employ a professional journalist, H. Kingsley Long, to rewrite McArthur's material. The book was published in both their names and was all about violent gangs. Such descriptions of physical violence were nowhere near as common in the 1930s as they are now, so it is hardly surprising that ''No Mean City" made some impact. I am not denying that there was sectarianism,or gangs, or violence. All of these things existed. But they also existed in London and Manchester and Liverpool. How many of you would know that there were razor gangs in Sheffield in the 1930s? The point is that whatever the truth, the whole city of Glasgow had been successfully labelled as dangerous by 1939. The question we have to ask here is why Glasgow? Why not Sheffield? Or Liverpool? My own feeling is that through the Tory press the State ensured that Glasgow was punished for its radical socialism, that British citizens, especially south of the Border, were constantly reminded that the wages of socialism and the Red Clyde was mindless violence. Some of you may feel that this is too much of a conspiracy theory. Well, I would point out that the Town Councillors on the Corporation of Glasgow in the 1920s and 30s recognised only too well that the city's external image was a violent and dangerous one and were never done complaining bitterly about it. They actually banned "No Mean City" from Glasgow's public libraries. While precise figures have never been kept, my own estimate is that this novel sold some 16,000 copies before the start of the Second World War - and it is still in print. Corgi acquired the paperback rights in l 9S7 and has printed 27 impressions, selling a total of nearly 600,000 copies. It still sells about 3000 copies every year. In any event, McArthur's book served to rubbish Glasgow completely. It had become "Violent City", the most dangerous place in Britain. Successful sculptor and writer Jimmy Boyle is a graduate of Barlinnie Prison's famous Special Unit. His book, "A Sense of Freedom" catalogues a youthful life of violent crime in Glasgow. Jimmy, as someone who knows his subject, what were these gangs all about?

JIMMY BOYLE

There was a common thread that run through it all, in the sixties, and that was about people getting a reputation, you know. lfyou looked at each of these characters they would all be people who were like me, no different, you know, dunces at school, failure in life and the only way they ever got any kudos was through warfare in the streets. You inevitably got sucked into those gangs and I can say to you I can remember feeling that I was a fighter. In fact I can always remember being very, very scared and to just put that into context, I can remember this guy Mard Oni, and you know there'd always be a lot of girls hanging around him, there were these boys and he said, look there's a gang coming from over Bridgetown to fight so we need as many handers as we can get, and all of this is taking place ten yards from the police station so you couldn't refuse Oni because he was completely nuts and so we said, we don't really know how to fight, you know, and there was maybe about twelve ofus and there was maybe about twenty of them, and then there was all these girls hanging around the periphery and I can remember them getting a cache of weapons and giving us weapons and they gave me a knuckleduster and then, he says, well I'm going to teach you how to fight. I tell you, I was absolutely terrified and he says, right, you come and I'll show you and everybody'd gathered around so I was obviously really crapping myself and he went for me and (finger snap) in a moment I lashed out with the knuckleduster and burst his head and in that moment everything changed, everything changed, and that's, and so it was all that instinctual sort of fear-ridden way that you get drawn, and he looked at me and thought, well, you're crazy, because everybody just believed in, in, in the name Mard Oni and nobody had really put it to the test in any real way and here it was and suddenly I became the hero. It suddenly gave you an aura, · an, an a sort of feeling of, I wouldna' say power but it made you somebody and it was so important so going to fight with other gangs was very important and fighting with other guys and a lot of them were, you know, there was different gangs in, say, the Gorbals, where I was from. There was the Hammer four streets away, and yet there was the Cumbi, it was as, and then there was other gangs, the Dixie which was up at Cally Road, so there was all of these gangs and there was lots of friction between them and rivalry and we sort of fought between each other. Our gang became considerably different from all the previous ones in the sense that the leaders of the Govan team, the leaders of the Partick team, the leader of the Black Hill team and the Gorbals, we all came together and there was a different things, and that became a bit more professional, you know, but the very early part of that was, was all to do with, you know, I'm somebody and I'm going to fight you and beat people up and slash people and that was about reputation. It was definitely not about money.