Glasgow has a tough reputation. Sectarian violence, gangs, and knife crime have ebbed and flowed with time, but they are a constant feature of the cityâs modern history, to the extent that they are embedded into its social fabric (Fraser, 2015). Living in the post-industrial city during the 1990s and early 2000s was like navigating a minefield for many young, white working-class boys. Conflicts unresolved and frustrations primed to explode lay hidden beneath the surface of every housing scheme. There was an inevitable loss of innocence. Children, ground into the mould were on high alert for someone or something out of place. They traversed âinvisibleâ borders by a combination of gut and luck (Pickering, Kintrea, & Bannister, 2012), adhering to unwritten rules about what words to speak, what clothes to wear, and what side of the street to walk on. When they were asked, âwhere you from mate?â, âyou smoke?â, or âcould you tap me a pound?â, the questions were loaded and the answers could, in some cases, dictate who lived or died that day. Fights with bats, bottles, bricks, and blades were routine, so much so that adults and passers-by would barely blink at groups of young boys, some as young as 10, bathed in blood, lashing out at one another in a busy city centre during business hours.
Around the turn of the Millennium, Glasgowâs violent crime rate was three times greater than Londonâs (Deuchar, 2013). By 2005, the city had six times as many gangs as the English capital, despite the population of London dwarfing that of the whole of Scotland (Adam, 2018). Gang youth were fighting over turf and, in some cases, drug markets, but for the most part they were fighting just because. A United Nations report said Scotland was the most violent country in the developed world (UNODC, 2005). Scotland endured an unprecedented 137 homicides that year and in Glasgow, which was shamefully named the murder capital of Europe by the World Health Organisation, there were 40 cases alone,1 double the national rate (Adam, 2018). Almost half of the murders were committed by people under the influence of drink or drugs.
What was it like for a young person living in Glasgow and in a gang at this time? What was it like to be so immersed in drugs, crime and violence, a life less ordinary, yet apparently so common? Was there any rhyme or reason for it? Any humanity in that âsolitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and shortâ (Hobbes, 1651, pp. xiiiâxiv) state of nature? These are just some of the questions this book tries to answer because if one wants to understand gang membership in Scotland, one needs to understand gang membership in the Glasgow conurbation. First, therefore, we must put all this in its appropriate context, with a brief history of gangs and gang research in Glasgow.
A Brief History of Gangs and Gang Research in Glasgow
Glasgow has long been synonymous with gangs, with the tradition said to date back to the 1880s (King, 2011). In 1935, H. Kingsley Long and Alexander McArthur published the novel, No Mean City, an account of life in the Gorbals, a rundown tenement slum, which introduced Glasgowâs street-fighting hard men and ârazor gangsâ to the world. Although criticised for its sensationalism, no book is more associated with the city. No Mean City (McArthur & Kingsley Long, 1956) foreshadowed modern works exploring the darker corners of Scottish society, like Irvine Welshâs (1993) Trainspotting (and Danny Boyleâs 1996 film of the same name), and helped make Glasgow, a city divided by religious sectarianism, the âcity of gangsâ (Davies, 2013).
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland, but not its capital, and in the 1930s it was a city devoid of the spirit of industry that had once seen it crowned the Second City of the British Empire (Gray, 1989). It took the brunt of the depression and the Roman Catholic Irish immigrants who had settled there when Clydeside was still one of the worldâs pre-eminent centres for chemicals, textiles, shipbuilding, and engineering were unduly blamed for rising unemployment and âtaking jobsâ from the majority Protestant population (Devine, 1991). Hostilities eventually boiled over into pitched battles, where gangs armed with razors, hammers, broken bottles, and chains would fill idle time fighting for pride and supremacy over the corpse of an industrial city (Davies, 2013; Humphries, 1981). The most famous gang in âScottish Chicagoâ (Davies, 2007) was the staunchly protestant Billy Boys, named for William of Orange (King Billy), whose victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 secured protestant rule in England, Scotland, and Ireland. As well as engaging in religious fuelled hatred expressed via gang violence, The Billy Boys ran illegal scams and protection rackets from the neighbourhood of Bridgeton, and feature in the fifth series of the hit BBC TV series, Peaky Blinders.
The Second World War, as well as a police crackdown (Sillitoe, 1955), brought the first chapter of Glasgowâs hard-knuckled gang culture to an end, but by the late 1960s there was rising concern about a younger, more violent, successor to the razor gangs of the interwar years (Bartie, 2010; McLean, Densley, & Deuchar, 2018). Such gangs were first documented by sociologist James Patrick (a pseudonym), who in 1966, infiltrated himself into a gang in Maryhill, one of many outlying public housing schemes built after Glasgowâs overcrowded inner housing districts were demolished in the 1950s.2 Patrick, a 26-year-old schoolmaster at a Scottish reformatory school, spent four months as a gang member, observing their behaviour, but was forced to withdraw from the field and live in hiding after being drawn deeper into escalating violence (Patrick, 1973, pp. 135â139). Patrickâs (1973) classic, A Glasgow Gang Observed, is notable because it is one of the only empirical studies of a structured, territorial, youth group equivalent to an âAmerican gangâ in Great Britain before the 1990s (Campbell & Muncer, 1989).
Many of the factors that Patrick identified as contributing to the growth of gangs, namely crushing poverty and aspirations failure, only intensified in the years following the publication of A Glasgow Gang Observed. Industrial disputes in the early 1970s preceded two international oil crises (the Arab Oil Embargo of OAPEC caused the first in 1973, and the Iranian Revolution caused the second in 1979) and a period of deep economic recession. By the time Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, lowering inflation was paramount, achieved only th...