In 2020, sometime in the midst of the first lockdown, I finally finished editing Let Us Act for Ourselves: selected works of Freddy Anderson—a small publication I’d been working on for a number of years.[1] Freddy Anderson (1922–2001), originally from County Monaghan, lived for most of his life in Greater Easterhouse. He was a poet, playwright, pamphleteer and balladeer, amongst many other things; a committed socialist and republican whose activities touched most aspects of the city’s working class political and cultural worlds in the second half of the 20th century, from the Unity Theatre of the 1940s to the Workers City group in the 1990s. I first became involved in politics a couple of years after Freddy died, at the time of the anti-war movement. My political education included Matt McGinn, Brendan Behan, Hamish Henderson, James Kelman and John Maclean, all figures that Freddy knew personally or wrote about extensively. But it wasn’t until many years later that I ever heard about Anderson himself, and that by chance, through meeting an old friend of his, Willie Gallagher, at an event in the Mitchell Library about popular political theatre in Scotland.
Over the next few years, I became interested in the man’s life and work, but also how the transmission belt of memory can so easily be disrupted, even within a socialist movement as tight-knit and in hock to tradition as Glasgow’s. I slowly gathered material, some from archives and libraries, but mainly through running into people and asking around in pubs, political meetings, community centres, poetry events, funerals, buses and on the street. In the course of collecting material, I ended up meeting an entire generation of working-class intellectuals who Anderson had been connected to and who shared with me their personal archives, unpublished manuscripts, posters, playscripts, essays, books and letters to use.
By the time I finally put it all together, or not long after, many of those who helped me out had passed away: Tom Leonard, Cathy McCormack, Janette McGinn, Jim Friel, Brendan McLaughlin, Willie Gallagher, Kenny Campbell, Robert Knox; more recently, John Couzins. It’s an extraordinary loss; an extraordinary collection of hard, interesting lives, products and producers of a particular constellation of politics and culture that remained oppositional to the end, with all that entailed. The last time I saw Tom Leonard give a reading, not long before he died, he was selling copies of Outside the Narrative: poems 1965–2009, a collection he published himself. The last time I saw Cathy McCormack in her flat in Wellhouse, she was still fighting the council to deal with the smell emanating from some ancient, long-buried midden nearby whose ancient spirits had been disturbed. Anderson never received a penny from the Scottish cultural establishment in funding and the Scottish Poetry Library still refuses to count him in its collections.
It feels, in some ways, a crucial inflection point in the history of the city, at least for those involved in radical politics. In his essay ‘The Culture of Glasgow’ (1989), Freddy Anderson wrote that it was not from teachers or journalists that folk learned to seek out the memorial to the martyrs of the 1820 rising in Sighthill Cemetery or the graves of the Calton weavers on Abercrombie Street, but from “their grannies and father and mothers, their cousins and aunts.”[2] But there are less and less of them around. And in places like Sighthill, the privatisation and demolition of former public housing, the transformation of the landscape and displacement of residents is making it harder than ever to retain the histories these places once contained. In her review of Let Us Act for Ourselves, the historian Erin Farley admits to being “only vaguely aware that Freddy Anderson existed.” This despite having heard, and read a lot about, many of his friends and contemporaries, people like Hamish Henderson and Matt McGinn, and having spent years re-contextualising the vast working class poetic heritage of industrial Scotland. “On reading through the rich selection of Freddy’s work”, she comments “I wondered on many occasions—‘why did I not know about this man?’”[3]
It is not an academic question. In 2016, Frank McAveety, then Labour-leader of Glasgow City Council, announced plans to “transform Easterhouse into a fantastic retail, cultural and leisure destination.”[4] These visions are inevitably built on the assumption that people are incapable of producing their own transformations or culture, and in the case of Easterhouse, on suppressing the history of Freddy Anderson and Cathy McCormack, the Easterhouse Festival Society, the Voice newspaper, the Garthamlock Tenants and Easthall Residents associations, the protests, strikes, poetry, plays and occupations against housing sell offs, welfare cuts, unemployment, rent increases, mould, dampness, and the denial of a dignified life for all. As Farley says:
As part of tradition, these works become more alive and gather deeper resonance the longer they are around. And there is still power in knowing what has been done before. As Anderson says of the radical voices gone before–if once, why not again?[5]
In The Glasgow Novel: A Complete Guide, published by Moira Burgess in 1999, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark unsurprisingly occupies an important place. However, in his foreword to Burgess’s work, Douglas Gifford notes that one of her principal achievements is to successfully challenge Thaw’s famous observation that Glasgow wasn’t a place its inhabitants had imagined living in, and that it had produced but a bad few novels. He cites Burgess’s rediscoveries, from Sarah Tyler’s St Mungo’s City (1885) through to the almost totally forgotten industrial realism of John Blair’s Jean (1906) and her discussion of neglected masterpieces such as Catherine Carswell’s Open the Door! (1920). These works, Gifford says,
consistently suggest that the problem about Glasgow fiction–and perhaps culture generally–isn’t so much that it hasn’t existed until recently, but that it just hasn’t been recorded and transmitted. So novelists like Edward Gaitens in Dance of the Apprentices in 1948 or Archie Hind in The Dear Green Place in 1966–and Gray himself in Lanark–suggest the fundamental loneliness of the creative spirit in a wasteland west of Scotland. Their feeling of isolation may be true for them, but from Burgess’s account it would seem that, if their society had only enabled them to know, they aren’t alone in their dystopian imaginings.[6]
How culture, and working class culture in particular, is not only created but recorded and transmitted, what each new generation comes to know, and what society enables us to know: all of these questions were a crucial motivating factor in the founding of the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive (GHSA) by myself and other Living Rent tenant union members in 2020. As we grappled with new forms of organising amidst unprecedented new conditions, we wanted to find a way to share and learn from our city’s long tradition of tenant organising, as well as document and record our own involvement in that history.
The idea of the GHSA emerged from a course on post-war housing struggles in Glasgow developed for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) during the first lockdown. With libraries and archives shut, I pulled materials together from books on the shelves of friends and comrades, things available online from Workers City and the Spirit of Revolt collections, journal articles provided by sympathetic scholars, previous Living Rent reading groups, Glasgow Corporation documentaries and other films available on YouTube and, most significantly, Charles Johnstone’s 1992 PhD thesis The tenants’ movement and housing struggles in Glasgow 1945–1990.[7] What became clear was that documented history of working-class organising for housing in the city existed, but that it was not especially easy to get at, scattered across time, space and long out of print books. As we struggled in Living Rent to find new ways of organising in conditions of lockdown, Covid, rent racketeering and evictions, we needed more than ever to learn from that history. The GHSA emerged as a way of collating, gathering and sharing it in a way that those involved in contemporary housing fights could access and use more easily. The transmission of that knowledge is far from guaranteed. It requires an active effort, and often from outside the major institutions of either higher education or the trade unions.
The most famous example of housing struggle in British history, the Clydeside rent strikes of 1915, is a case in point. The Sheffield Film Coop’s documentary Red Skirts on Clydeside (1984) contains a scene filmed in the Marx Memorial Library that serves as a clear metaphor for the status of housing history, especially that made by working-class women, even within the labour movement itself. The camera pans across shelves stacked with archival boxes denoting various moments of trade union history, strikes and workplace organising. It eventually lands on a box on a forgotten top shelf marked ‘miscellaneous.’ It is here that the events of the 1915 rent strikes are stored, forgotten and gathering dust. Through archival research and interviews with women who took part in the movement or remembered those who did, the marginalisation of that history is consciously challenged. Famously, the autobiographies of the Red Clydesiders made scant reference to the 1915 rent strikes, while the single book dedicated to a serious analysis of the movement, Joseph Melling’s Rent Strike: people’s struggle for housing in West of Scotland 1880–1916 (published in 1983), remains long out of print, together with Sean Damer’s Rent Strike! The Clydebank rent struggles of the 1920s (1982). The story has undoubtedly been passed on through the generations, but only very recently, with the publication of Neil Gray’s collection Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle (2018), together with the work of the historians Pam Currie, Annmarie Hughes and Valerie Wright, has a true reassessment of 1915 and its aftermaths been undertaken. The Remember Mary Barbour committee finally succeeded in erecting a memorial to Mary Barbour, a key protagonist, at Govan Cross in 2018.
In his wide-ranging introduction to Hugh Savage’s Born Up a Close: Memoirs of a Brigton Boy, echoing Freddy Anderson, James Kelman provides a crucial insight into these never-ending processes of transmission:
Each generation of working class activists has had to learn mainly through its own experience and by what it is passed on by ‘tradition bearers’–older activists, unembittered parents and grandparents. Any learning to be done takes place as a personal or community project.[8]
As that generation of tradition bearers in Glasgow passes, the conception of learning as an active, autonomous project, often driven by dedicated individuals and small collectives, assumes a new and urgent importance. The Friends of the People’s Palace and Winter Gardens Campaign has waged a long battle, but there is no equivalent in Glasgow to, say the People’s History Museum or Working Class Movement Library in Manchester and Salford, or even online resources like the website of the Manchester Radical History Collective or ‘From There…To Here’, a brilliant site documenting the social history of Wester Hailes in Edinburgh.[9] In the past five years, alongside the GHSA, other important projects have emerged to try to create an alternative infrastructure of solidarity to play this role, including Radical Glasgow Tours, the Red Sunday School, the Workers’ Stories Project, Glasgow Trades Council’s May Day Programme and the events around the John Maclean centenary celebrations, all building on the longstanding work of the Spirit of Revolt archive.
What connects these different projects is partly a desire to reject the stagnant reproduction of ossified markers of left-wing history, together with a personal frustration with narrow conceptions of political organising and activism, with which many of us have at some point been involved. By reaching back into history and the culture of the socialist movement in its broadest sense, these projects have undoubtedly given some new energy to people organising in Glasgow, a willingness to experiment and get things off the ground, to find the money and space to get things done, whether through artsorganisations, universities, trade unions, whatever is needed. In this we are following in the footsteps of some of those older, independent “tradition bearers”, like Hugh Savage, Les Forster and Ned Donaldson, who did so much of the work of “reclaiming history, exhibiting the radical tradition.” As Kelman has commented, “they were most excited by the unknown or forgotten names; and not only did they have a deep knowledge of Glasgow’s radical tradition, but also a keen grasp of its political significance.” Although Hugh Savage “was an activist first, and the writing came down the list, he was always working on something.”[10]
The Strickland Distribution’s project to archive the productions of the Workers City group—and The Glasgow Keelie, a related news sheet—emerged from a year-long series of projects collected under the umbrella of knowledge is never neutral, undertaken with Transmission Gallery “in a contemporary context where culture is ubiquitously wedded to gentrification strategies.”[11] Recent PhDs by younger historians such as Kate Wilson and Rosie Hampton, respectively on community writing in Glasgow 1967–90 and the spatial politics of the left in 1980s Scotland, point to an entire world of literary production, radical education, unemployed workers centres and community newspapers that was built up (and subsequently) lost in schemes and working-class areas of Glasgow, pointing towards new possibilities today.
Recent years have also seen new generations of activists, organisers and artists connect with the life and work of Cathy McCormack, the legendary anti-poverty campaigner from Easterhouse. To the very end she continued to share her knowledge and experience. Her well-organised archive was donated to the Glasgow Women’s Library to be used a resource for the fights to come and in 2022 myself and the artist Keira McLean worked with her to bring elements of it to the Platform arts space in Easterhouse as part of Mining Seams and Drawing Wells, project looking at the area’s radical history. Living Rent branches in the East End have organised reading groups around her autobiography The Wee Yellow Butterfly as well as screenings of War Without Bullets (1995), a film she made for the United Nations 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing.[12] On launching a campaign against damp and mould in Glasgow Housing Association properties in 2024, union organisers studied the tactics McCormack and other tenants had used in the anti-dampness campaigns of the 1980s and 90s.[13] This included the Easthall Theatre Group’s play Dampbusters (1990), a brilliant piece of agitprop satire that toured working-class areas across the city, a recording of which has now been digitised and made public by the artist Winnie Herbstein.[14] The publicity for the play included the slogan “there’s a lot of culture growing on”, an explicit riposte to the PR surrounding Glasgow’s status as European City of Culture at the time. A stained-glass window commemorating McCormack, Anderson and Easterhouse’s long history of struggle, designed by Keira Mclean alongside the local community, will be unveiled at Platform later this year.
Through this work it is clear that nothing is ever settled, there is always more to be re-discovered, and our approach to history, our failure to engage in the full breadth of working class struggle, can have direct political implications. In his personal account of the anti-dampness campaign organised by tenants in the Gorbals between 1975 and 1981, Richard Bryant begins by reflecting on canonical housing events like the 1915 rent strikes, quoting the conclusion of one left historian that a rent strike can only be effective if backed by industrial action. “For tenants’ leaders and community workers,” he comments, “these historical experiences can be a source of inspiration but, at the same time, they can also be a powerful source of political self-paralysis when it comes to responding to immediate housing problems.” For Bryant and other community workers, a rent strike seemed an unworkable tactic in the context of the Gorbals campaign, localised as it was, and lacking the support of the trade union movement. Yet a handful of tenants began to withhold rent on an individual basis, including some of the families most severely affected by dampness, and in the end a generalised rent strike successfully won major concessions from the council alongside a host of other tactics. As Brecht said, not much knowledge leads to power, but there is plenty of knowledge to which only power can lead.[15] The practical experience of the Gorbals tenants led to a new understanding of the rent strike as a historical weapon. Similarly, the growth of Living Rent, the practical experience of struggle, and the stitching together of the political, organisational and cultural forms necessary to confront the tyranny of rent, has provided a new context within which to understand our own history.
The Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive has been conceived of as a contribution to that process: a self-reflexive centring of the role of housing in the history of the city’s working class movements, constantly reassessed in the active attempt to build such a movement today. The archiving of that ‘history-in-the-making’, of the history of Living Rent itself, through oral history, tracing the development of campaigns, strategies and tactics and sharing victories, is a crucial part of the GHSA’s project. Not only to memorialise the past or provide a future record, but as a space for members of Living Rent to critically reflect on, and take ownership over, the development of the union in the present.
One of the first pieces of work I wanted to do through the GHSA was to republish Sell and Be Damned! The Great Merrylee Housing Scandal of 1951 by Ned Donaldson and Les Forster. The successful campaign to prevent the sell off of council houses in Merrylee was a momentous episode in the city’s history of class struggle. In recalling the great demonstration that shook George Square on December 6th, 1951, one woman recalled:
talk about storming the Bastille, we nearly stormed the City Chambers that day… These wimmin were incensed with the idea of selling houses at that particular time, when there was such a need and such a demand for new housing. Any mention of selling houses was anathema to the people who were desperate to get oot o’ the horrible conditions they were livin in…I have never been in a demonstration like it, and I’ve been in a lot of demonstrations…[16]
I had vaguely heard about the campaign over the years but knew little about it until I read Charlie Johnstone’s PhD, which contains a detailed account, including primary research and oral history interviews with those involved. As I was preparing material for the WEA course, I tried to find a copy of Sell and Be Damned, which Johnstone had referenced frequently. Les and Ned were both building workers and Communist Party members who played a leading role in the campaign alongside other labourers working on the Merrylee site. In the 1990s, with the support of Transmission gallery, they pulled together notes and materials for the publication, many held in the Les Forster collection at the Spirit of Revolt archive, but the pamphlet itself was out of print and hard to get hold of. A link to an online copy on the old Scottish Tenants Organisation (STO) website was long dead. I was interested in trying to republish it through the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive, but the archivist Paula Larkin put me in touch with Ned’s daughter, the historian Anni Donaldson, who was already in the process of doing so. In 2022, a new edition of Sell and Be Damned! with an introduction by James Kelman was published by the Scottish Labour History Society, with the proceeds of sales going to support Living Rent’s tenant organisation across Scotland today.
It’s just a small episode, but a good indication of how different strands of political organising, publishing and history are converging from different starting points and reinforcing one another. Over the past two years, the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive has gathered a core collective around the historian Kate Wilson, the sociologist Kirsteen Paton, the art historian Kirsten Lloyd and myself, bringing together disparate specialities and common principles of struggle and involvement in housing politics. We have organised workshops for trade unionists and tenant union members in oral history, digitisation and cataloguing, worked with volunteers from the Spirit of Revolt, MayDay Rooms and Glasgow Zine Library, held talks and workshops with the Govanhill Baths Community Trust, The Sociological Review, and at Living Rent AGMs, taken part in exhibitions such as Life Support: forms of care in art and activism at the Glasgow Women’s Library and the Travelling Gallery’s Resistance in Residence, and interviewed tenant organisers from the Barcelona Tenants Union, LA Tenants Union, ACORN and Living Rent to reflect on the lessons of recent campaigns.
There is much still to be done and the GHSA is at the very beginning of building its collections. But housing will remain at the forefront of class politics and glimpses of the past continue to provide possibilities for new ways forward, often from unlikely sources. Just recently I found a BBC Scotland TV documentary from 1972, uploaded to the Craigmillar Gold YouTube site, that sympathetically connects the plight of residents in Maryhill, Glasgow with that of the south Edinburgh pit village of Newcraighall as both fight the bureaucratic violence of eviction and demolition waged by their respective city authorities. We are shown Corporation housing visitor forms judging the ‘type of people’ in a flat based on a visit of a few brief minutes (‘very good/good/medium/fair/poor’), with the same categories used to determine what type of property they should be removed to, the stratification of the working class playing out in real time. Tenants give voice to the contempt with which they’ve been treated while contemptuous, red-faced politicians are repeatedly caught in sham denials. The film finishes with the besuited BBC presenter brimming with understated fury:
Of course it doesn’t have to be done this way. Frustration, anger, uncertainty, no participation, no consultation, virtually no information. Just the big push from the powers that be. Old ladies in tears, communities shattered and scattered. It sounds more like the Highland Clearances 150 years ago than slum clearance in Scotland today…[17]
In both communities, despite their different histories and geographies, tenants work to expose the machinations behind the obfuscation and determine to stay put until their needs are met. The documentary does the political work of placing these seemingly isolated struggles into a common context and ranges them against a common enemy. To not only reveal the cycles of history, but the possibility of breaking them, by drawing together the threads of class struggle across time and space, remains the central task of housing activists, organisers and scholars today. It is up to us to continue that endless learning project, and to do our best to stay unembittered.
Freddy Anderson, Let Us Act for Ourselves: selected works of Freddy Anderson, ed. Joey Simons (Glasgow: Platform, 2020) ↑
Ibid., 25 ↑
Erin Farley, ‘“If once, why not again?” Rediscovering Freddy Anderson’, September 30, 2020, https://scottishcriticalheritage.wordpress.com/2020/09/30/if-once-why-not-again-rediscovering-freddy-anderson/ (accessed April 12, 2025) ↑
Frank McAveety, ‘Council report outlines exciting vision of the future transformation of Easterhouse, September 27, 2016, https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/article/8836/Council-report-outlines-exciting-vision-of-the-future-transformation-of-Easterhouse (accessed April 12, 2025) ↑
Farley, ‘If once, why not again?’ ↑
Douglas Gifford, foreword to Imagine a city: Glasgow in fiction by Moira Burgess (Glendaruel: Argyll Publishing, 1998), 11 – 12 ↑
Charles Johnstone, “The tenants’ movement and housing struggles in Glasgow, 1945-1990” (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 1992), http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3487/ ↑
James Kelman, introduction to Born up a close: memoirs of a Brigton Boy by Hugh Savage (Glendaruel: Argyll Publishing, 2006), 41 ↑
https://hailesmatters.wordpress.com ↑
James Kelman, introduction to Born up a close, 16-17 ↑
Strickland Distribution were formed by Simon Yuill, Anna McLauchlan and three members of the editorial collective of Variant Volume II: Leigh French, Neil Gray and Gesa Helms. Quote from ‘ Comment by members of The Strickland Distribution’ . https://workerscity.org/comment.html ↑
“War Without Bullets (1995)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHGujyyiBX0 ↑
https://www.livingrent.org/report_your_mould_and_damp ↑
“Dampbusters (1990)” https://cca-annex.net/entry/dampbusters-1990/ ↑
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction’, Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1964), 72 ↑
Taped interview with Mrs. R. in Johnstone, The tenants’ movement, 203 ↑
“1972–– Newcraighall and Maryhill Forced Evictions”, uploaded on April 9, 2014 by Craigmillar Archives Trust, YouTube video, https://www.youtu.be/PLH9jw0RAN4 ↑