Robert - Blood on the Streets: The A-Z of Glasgow Crime

I would like to acknowledge the assistance in the production of this book of Marie Jeffrey, Ian Watson and the library staff of Newsquest Ltd, Glasgow (Publishers of The Herald, The Sunday Herald and the Evening Times), the librarians of the Glasgow Room in the Mitchell Library, Catherine Torretti of the Daily Record, Stroma Fraser, Dr Grant Jeffrey, Dr Stuart Jeffrey, Rod Ramsay, Robert Kinnear, Samantha Boyd, John Watson, Walter Norval.

RJ

Carradale, Argyll

For hundreds of years, blood has been spilled on the streets of Glasgow from the beer and bread riots of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the gang wars of the 1920s and 1930s and on into the twenty-first century with its dangerous upsurge in the culture of knife-carrying and the disturbing rise in the number of murders. The gangs are still with us, albeit in a different form. The Redskins, the Norman Conks, the Billy Boys and their ilk have been replaced by drug gang-lords and mindless youngsters ready to fight over territory or to kill, assault or maim simply for the hell of it.

This book tells the story of some of the villainous happenings in the city. Here, youll read about murders, bank robberies, poisonings and street fights involving gangs comprised of hundreds of armed men. Some of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice that form a blot on our legal and policing systems are chronicled too. Also spotlighted is the succession of hard chief constables and brave men on the beat who have fought the evil-doers down the years.

According to clich, newspapers are the first draft of history. And, in its newspapers, Glasgow has followed the deeds of the wrongdoers in detail, day after day, in millions of words. The criminal archives are bulging. Yet, today, Glasgow is enjoying a renaissance in arts and culture. A city has many faces. Wars against crime have been won and lost. There will be more. Blood on the Streets recalls just some of the countless stories that form a significant part of Glasgows history.

Every cop on the beat carried the tools of the trade a notebook, a pen, handcuffs, a baton and his trusty Acme Thunderer, a heavy-duty police whistle which, when used by a constable with a healthy pair of lungs, could produce an extremely piercing sound. It was said that the whistle was so powerful that, in the right conditions, it could be heard as far away as 500 yards, even in busy streets. For many a young thief and gangster the noise of the whistle was background music to an ill-spent youth, a sort of criminal coda leading to the cuffs being snapped on and a night or two in the cells.

Anyone who ever doubted the role played by the demon drink in Glasgow and the citys association worldwide with crime and gangs should spend a little time in the city courts listening to the defenders pleading. In case after case, from the dawn of justice to this day, the time-honoured phrase drink was a factor and its many variants come into play. Indeed, the phrase has crept into the public consciousness in such a fashion that it is used routinely by many Glaswegians to explain unacceptable behaviour and not just of the criminal kind.

The Glasgow hard man may have moved from a hauf and a hauf pint in some shady sawdust-floored drinking den to Bacardi Breezers, vodka and exotic cocktails in a chrome-plated, minimalist, trendy and highly expensive watering hole. But the booze still plays an important role even in these days when chemical refreshment is a creeping danger in the planning of law breaking. Down the years, the pub has played a pivotal role for those hell-bent on nefarious business of all sorts. In the heyday of the old-fashioned gangs in the 1930s, licensed premises often exacerbated the religious divide the Catholic gangs had their favourites, the Protestants had theirs and it was dangerous to drink in the wrong pub. These pubs had none of the cosy cheeriness of TVs Cheers but they were the sort of places where everybody did, indeed, know your name. And, in an era of damp, unheated and unwelcoming housing with tenement stairs to be climbed and outside toilets, the pubs provided some warmth and comfort.

As well as acting as a stimulant for criminal adventures, booze rubbed off some of the rough edges of life in a hard city. The shipbuilders had their favourite bars, as did the dockers and the foundrymen. In this, usually, all-male environment, it was easy for gangs of like-minded and often wrong-minded men to bond into groupings and teams. It was also easy for friends and acquaintances to fall out and for weapons and bottles to be used. Drink was the cause of many of the chib-marked faces in the tougher bars. One solution to the smashing of glasses on to the table and hence in to the face of an enemy might, at one stage, have been plastic bottles and glasses when they became available. Much stitching by surgeons in the citys hospital emergency departments could have been avoided. But, even in the twenty-first century, that particular solution is still largely just a talking point.

One legendarily infamous place where drink was a factor in the plotting of much villainy no longer exists, having been bull-dozed in mysterious circumstances. The Caravel was a pub in BARLANARK and it is believed by some to be the reason for Tam McGraw acquiring the sobriquet The Licensee in the underworld, even though it was his wife who was the actual owner of the establishment.

An alternative explanation of the nickname is that it came about because McGraw was licensed by the cops in some of his activities as payback for tip offs on the underworld action. This was not an explanation much used in the press when McGraw was alive, such was his fearsome reputation, but on his death some writers began to find the courage to make that allegation.

The chat across this particular bar seldom concerned the latest hot tickets in the art world and nor would there be much polite discussion of cultural events like the reviews that fill so much space in the papers these days. In the Caravel, crime, gambling and serious drinking were the things that mattered. Indeed, during the investigation into the murder of Arthur Thompson Jnr, underworld sources suggested to the police that the bar had played a role in the murders of Joe Bananas Hanlon and Bobby Glover, who were suspected of being involved in the killing of Thompson Jnr, who was usually known as The Fat Boy. But there was to be no forensic examination of the site. Before the police moved in to search for clues at the pub, a significant east-end landmark, it was demolished in sudden and unexplained circumstances.

Too many pubs in an area can cause problems but, paradoxically, there is also a theory that the lack of pubs contributed to crime in the huge housing schemes. Licensed premises, like other amenities such as swimming pools and libraries, were few and far between in the huge post-war housing schemes that sprung up around the city. Those that did exist attracted any desperate hard tickets in the area, which made such hostelries far from the family-friendly, food-serving bars that are so commonplace now.

Mind you, the old crime-ridden inner-city areas certainly could not complain of a lack of watering holes. Although there were plenty of them, many became known as what the locals call stab inns. Walter Norval, infamous as the citys first Godfather, remembers growing up in the GARSCUBE ROAD in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Norval actually lived over a pub Duffys and, within a few hundred yards of his home, there were around fourteen pubs. The pubs recalled by Norval are: Round Toll Bar, Milestone, Duffys, Ventner and Barges, Woodside Bar, Number Ones, Jacks Bar, the Bears Paw, Wangie, Tam OShanter, Griffens, Scotts, Fallons, Glen Lyon. He recalls looking out from his tenement flat windows across the road to Scotts pub and watching the blood being spilled. As Friday and Saturday nights drew to a close, violence would erupt as customers fought with each other, mostly with their bare fists. But the bottle and the tumbler also came into play regularly and the scarred faces of fighting men caused little comment among their mates or their women. Scars or Mars Bars as some called them were a fact of life. On the subject of scars there is the chilling story of a youngster who allegedly slashed a girl with an open razor. The accused claimed in court that the victim had asked him to do it in order to scar her and make her look like a hard case.