The Clyde Workers’ Committee and the Dilution Struggle

Abstract

‘Seldom has a prominent politician, a leading representative of the Governing class, been treated with so little respect by a meeting of the workers. It is evident that the feeling of servility towards their masters no longer holds first place in the minds of the Clyde workers.…’¹ This was the revolutionary John Maclean’s comment in his short-lived paper, the Vanguard, on the meeting of 3000 engineers which Lloyd George addressed in the St. Andrew’s Hall, Glasgow, on Christmas Day, 1915. The same dominant emphasis on working-class audacity permeates William Gallacher’s portrayal of the Clydeside unrest of 1915–16.² These judgements seem to catch the authentic tones of Red Clydeside.