Red Clydeside

Timeline of events

The rent strikes: what the commission may do

Huts in open spaces for the convicted

23 Oct 1915

The first major statutory interventions in the contractual relationship between landlord and tenant occurred during the first world war and centred on events on Clydeside. Shortages of urban housing in key munitions districts enabled landlords to significantly increase rents. While this might have been an economically logical response to the demand for housing, it created severe political problems for the wartime government of Lloyd George.

Women began to organise tenants' strike committees in those munitions areas where landlords had increased rents. These committees, inspired by a strong sense of injustice, helped to organise a campaign of nonpayment of rent and brought the issue of fair rent into the national political arena.

With the threat of strike action by munitions workers, with no alternative sources of available social housing, and with no scheme for providing public subsidies to assist meeting housing costs, the government's only practical option was to introduce legislation to restrict the right of landlords to set or alter rent levels.

Source: Gallacher Memorial Library, Glasgow Caledonian University Special Collections and Archives