Glasgow was the industrial engine of the war machine

In 1916, five Glaswegian trade unionists were legally deported from Glasgow and sent, not to Australia or any of the penal colonies. No, it was much worse than that. They were exiled to Edinburgh.

It was the middle of the Great War and Glasgow was the industrial engine of the war machine. The demand for shells, munitions and ships was so great that the city was going to have to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week in order to meet it.

There was also huge demand for the human capital of war – fit young men to populate the killing fields of France. Glasgow in particular (as anyone who has stood in front of the war memorial in George Square will know), provided more than its fair share.

But Glasgow was home to a politicised engineering workforce whose leaders believed that this was a capitalist war in which the owners of industry (the bosses) would be the ultimate victors. The trade unions were in a powerful position. Skills were short, demand was high and the price of failure to produce finished goods was unthinkable.

William Weir, a leading munitions employer called for engineering workers to be conscripted in the same way as soldiers, with a wage freeze and the end of all bargaining rights:

“the existing skilled men, organised as trade unionists, are uncontrollable by employers, and the state therefore should take on the employers' disciplinary functions itself.”

The governments' preferred weapon was not direct confrontation, but legislation. In 1915, in response to serious industrial disruption in Glasgow, the government, in co-operation with moderate trade unions, passed the Munitions Act. The Act, which came to be known as the “Treasury Agreement”, made strikes in war-related industries illegal and imposed compulsory arbitration in all disputes. It empowered employers to cut wages and raise production targets without negotiation. They could also fine or sack employees who resisted.

Female "dilutees" operate a milling machine in 1916

But the real purpose of the Act was “dilution”. Dilution was the only way that the government could achieve its dual requirements of increased military production and a steady flow of cannon fodder for the front line.

Dilution was the massive expansion of the workforce in munitions and other engineering workplaces. And the expansion was through the wholesale use of unskilled labour, both male and female, into industrial workplaces where the unions were fiercely protective of their time-served skills and of the hard-won marginal benefits these skills afforded them.

And opposition to dilution would be illegal, as the union leaders at Beardmores munitions plant were about to find out.

They had called a strike to protest at the restrictions being placed on their activities. A three-o-clock in the morning police raid to their homes saw Davie Kirkwood, one of the strike leaders, and five other union officials arrested. They were put in police custody to await military instructions.

The bad news when it came was that the men were to be internally deported. The good news was that they could choose between Kelso and Edinburgh. All five chose Edinburgh.

There was no charge, no trial, no judge and no appeal.

Davie Kirkwood later became a Westminster Member of Parliament for Dumbarton and thereafter a peer of the realm.

While the men were in exile, the full power of the state was meanwhile being unleashed in Glasgow. The national newspapers such as the Glasgow Herald were instructed to desist reporting on industrial conflicts and the printing presses of the alternative radical press were smashed. More union leaders were arrested and internally exiled and journalists on the radical “The Worker” were given goal sentences.

By the time Davie Kirkwood and his associates returned to Glasgow, after some five months exile, the power of the unions had been smashed and dilution was a fait accompli.

However, some good may have come from the men's exile in Edinburgh, in particular, for Davie Kirkwood. He would later become a Member of Parliament for Dumbarton and thereafter a peer of the realm in the House of Lords.

Could it be that Edinburgh's genteel and civilised ways were the defining moment in these men's lives and that forever more the beacon of the East would guide their behaviour?

FirstFoot would certainly not wish to take sides in the debate.