How Mary Barbour took on the landlords in Glasgow

With the massive mobilisation of 1914-15 underway, many women in and around Glasgow also found themselves in employment for the first time. No longer were women expected to stay at home and raise children, though a great many did.

Instead, women stepped into the plethora of roles vacated by men going off to fight. Putting women into male jobs was not a totally popular choice in Glasgow and on Clydeside, but the naysayers were soon silenced when it quickly emerged that women could do even heavy manufacturing jobs just as well as men – some reported they were even better.

One of the first employers in Glasgow to bring women onto their staff was the Glasgow Corporation Tramways. James Dalrymple, manager of the Tramways, had personally recruited 4000 men for service in the Army and now he set about getting them replaced with women. He recruited hundreds of women to act as conductresses, the famous ‘clippies’, and while there were fewer women drivers, they still made up a vital part of the workforce.

Dalrymple even ordered new green uniforms with smart long skirts for his new raft of employees, while other employers soon began to recruit women, even in shipyards.  

Among those on Clydeside who had initially protested against the war were a great many women, and it is a fact that after August 1914, the suffragette movement split between those who opposed the war and those who supported it, many of the movement’s leaders speculating that women would play a huge role in a society changed by the war, which in turn would make it very much more difficult for the ruling class to deny women the vote.

Women came to the fore in Glasgow in 1915, when frankly disgusting landlords started to capitalise on the demand for housing from workers migrating to the shipyards and factories to take the places of men who had volunteered for ­service.

Some 16,000 arrived to work in the munitions factories in the city, and landlords felt justified in raising rents, the inevitable law of supply and demand ensuring they could do so almost with impunity.

Though the women of Glasgow had formidable leadership from the likes of Helen Crawfurd, one woman’s name has come to symbolise the female forces who took on the landlords and won a ­famous victory in 1915.

Mary Barbour

Mary Barbour was born Mary Rough in Kilbarchan in Renfrewshire on February 20, 1875. After leaving school, where she was noted for her voracious reading, she worked as a carpet printer before she met and married an engineer, David Barbour, and moved with him to Dumbarton where they suffered the tragic loss of their infant son to bacterial meningitis. The couple would go on to have two more sons, and David Barbour relocated his family to Govan where he was employed in Fairfield’s shipyard.

Perhaps it was the loss of her son that made Mary an increasingly political person. The Scottish Co-operative Women’s Guild had been founded in Kinning Park in 1890, and Mary joined up.

She was also recruited into the Socialist Sunday Schools which preached social reform by teaching children the causes and consequences of poverty’. Finally, she joined the Independent Labour Party and met the leaders of what would become the main force for ­socialism in the city.

It was her role in the South Govan Housing Association which would make her famous. She had become friends with Helen Crawfurd and a leading suffragette, Agnes Dollan, and together with the local Labour Party, they founded the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association with Mary becoming the leader of the South Govan association.

Her tactics were simple – the members would take direct action against landlords who increased rents for houses, most of which were already overcrowded due to the failure in past years of builders to provide houses. Just 1500 housing units had been built in the city in 1911.

When landlords tried their worst to force higher rents on occupiers, Mary and her friends came up with the tactic of a rent strike, and when the landlords threaten non-payers with eviction, she organised local defence groups that would rush to prevent people from being forced out of their homes. The strike soon spread and by the autumn of 1915, some 20,000 households were refusing to pay increased rents.

Crawfurd recalled many years later: “The Glasgow Women’s Housing Association took up this issue, and in the working-class districts committees were formed to resist these increases in rents. Cards, oblong in shape, were printed with the words ‘RENT STRIKE. WE ARE NOT REMOVING’ and placed in the windows of the houses where rent increases were demanded.”

Crawfurd praised Mary Barbour’s role: “In Govan, on one occasion, where a woman had been ­persuaded by the house factor to pay the increase, having been told that the other tenants had paid, Mrs Barbour got the men from the shipyards in Govan to come out on to the street where the house factor’s office was, and then went up with the women and demanded a return of the money. On the factor being shown the thousands of black-faced workers crowding the street, he handed it over.”

A trip back to 1931 with the printing presses

When landlords took rent strikers to court, Barbour organised a protest. The Govan Press reported: “Headed by a band of improvised instruments, including tin whistles, hooters, and a huge drum, the procession aroused a good deal of interest. The majority carried large placards with the words: ‘Rent Strikers. We’re not Removing’.”

As I wrote on the centenary of the occasion, Barbour was then ­involved in organising a huge demonstration in George Square on November 17, 1915.

Trade unions from the shipyards and elsewhere joined in, and they made their point spectacularly – the Secretary of State for Scotland, McKinnon Wood, realised the danger to war production and on Christmas Day, 1915, Mary Barbour and her strikers got the best possible present when the ­Government rushed through an Act freezing rent and mortgage payments at the levels they were at the start of the war. For once, the women and the workers had won.

Mary Barbour would go on to be a councillor and leading figure on Red Clydeside, not least because of the Women’s Peace Conference of 1916 which features in a future ­column.