A selection of reviews of City of Gangs, Andrew Davies’ history of the Glasgow gangs of  the 1920s and 1930s.

Daily Record, 10 August 2013:

Sectarianism. Crime. Unemployment. Poverty. Overcrowding. Notoriety. Protection rackets. Molls. Jail. Welcome to the world of the Glasgow gangs, tooled up and taking no prisoners, as the aggressors gathered on the smog-polluted street corners of the 1920s and 1930s.
Using trial transcripts, newspaper articles and police reports, Davies deftly explores the characters and crimes that defined this pivotal era in the evolution of groups such as the South Side Stickers, Liberty Boys, Kent Star, San Toy and the Brigton Billy Boys. Meticulously researched, this is a comprehensive, compelling account of the gang culture that saw the gutters of this Dear Green Place run red with the blood of a violent underworld steeped in bigotry, hate and violence.

The Times, 10 August 2013:
Blood on the Clyde.
As another wave of violence swept through the east end of Glasgow, a local newspaper sadly noted: “The gangs have always been with us.” That lament might have been written at almost any time in the city’s recent history: last week, last month, 150 years ago. The date in fact was 1930, when every hopeless neighbourhood in Glasgow had its gang of loafing teenagers and young men. In Bridgeton the Billy Boys held sway, 500 strong … Other groups were smaller, but as court records make clear, no less violent: the South Side Stickers, the Norman Conks, the Kent Stars. To exasperated law officers, the list seemed endless.
This was Scotland’s Chicago but these men were not the glamorous gangsters of Hollywood talkies, as Andrew Davies makes clear in this brilliant study. True, some violence was almost choreographed. More often, it flared up in street beatings and drunken brawls. The weapon of choice was the razor, held in a concealed grip, to wound but not kill – but wooden clubs, iron bars and stones would suffice.
Glasgow thuggery thrived among an underclass but was never as corrosive to the city establishment as its American equivalent. When No Mean City, a novel about Johnnie Stark, the “Razor King”, was published in North America, the New York Times critic declared: “His story is small-time – amateurish and aimless.”
City of Gangs‘ success lies in its compelling detail. Every other page can turn up a surprise; if not a delight, then at least an occasional grim smile. A vivid account of the Tower ballroom in Cowcaddens is supplied by George Chisholm, the jazz trombonist, who recalled Friday nights when, with “sickening regularity … all hell would break loose.” Chisholm went on: “There’d be bodies everywhere … Once the hooligan element had exhausted themselves and each other, they’d be ejected down some steps and a little self-appointed MC in a muffler and cloth cap would come on and say ‘Carry on dancing, please’ in a brisk and jovial way that’d almost have you believing you’d dreamt the carnage of a few seconds before.”
Davies points up the politics of the gangs, as much as they existed, homing in on the Billy Boys’ support for the Unionist Party (as the Conservatives were known). This led to some embarrassing headlines: “GANGSTERS AS TORY STEWARDS.” Billy Fullerton, occasionally compared with Al Capone by overheated feature writers, took his politics to the extreme, founding a branch of the KKK, though he conceded his Knights of Kaledonia Klan played by its own rules.
An anti-hero emerges, Chief Constable Percy Sillitoe. He believed in strong-arm tactics … Sillitoe would go on to become the director-general of MI5. His autobiography, Cloak Without Dagger, contained what became the definitive account of Glasgow’s gangs of the era. Davies demonstrates that it was self-serving and had errors of chronology but the chief constable’s approach, “giving the gangs a taste of their own medicine”, was widely praised.
Did it work? Davies prefers to highlight the work of clergymen who set up clubs as a counterweight to gang culture. They recruited hundreds of youngsters in poor districts, offering sport as an alternative to mooching about on street corners.
Nothing changes. Today, every six hours, someone in Glasgow receives a grievous knife injury. The root problem, now as then, is endemic poverty and the ever-expanding distance between rich and poor. As Davies grimly concludes, so long as gaping inequalities persist, gangsters will remain part of Glasgow’s story.’ [BY MIKE WADE]