FEATURE Our heritage
THE WEAVERS THAT WOVE THE WAY
Remembering Glasgow’s Calton Weavers
Unite members in Glasgow held an annual commemoration event raising awareness of one of the important events in British labour history this summer.
Every year trade union activists and local people join together in the city's East End at the Calton Burial Ground on Abercromby Street, to remember six weavers murdered for standing up against wage cuts and an oppressive ruling class. It is the earliest major industrial dispute in Scottish history, and the spark that lit the Scottish labour movement.
At the end of the 18th century handweavers in Calton, then outside the city boundaries of Glasgow, faced attacks on their pay that would force many into working long hours on subsistence pay.
The East India Company had begun importing large quantities of cheap muslins, resulting in the price falling across the country. In the summer of 1787 the handweavers of Calton felt they had no alternative but to strike after being told their wages would be cut by 20 per cent.
Weavers were highly skilled and well-educated as well as being class- conscious and progressive in their politics, with Calton being a hotbed of democratic radicalism at the time.
Though trade unions were then illegal, direct action by weavers had worked before during a strike in nearby Paisley over a decade earlier. A mass meeting was soon set up on Glasgow Green a mere five minutes from Calton.
Throughout the summer weavers took a stance of non violence, organising processions through the centre of Glasgow, and seized “webs” - the fabric being woven on the looms - returning them to the manufacturers unfinished.
However this began to change as Elspeth King describes in her book on the strike, saying that “As the strike lengthened, the weavers became more desperate, and there were outbreaks of violence against strike breakers, and the public destruction of webs.”
The strike came to a bloody conclusion on 3rd September 1787.
That day, city magistrates and officers went to Calton to try to break up an assembly of striking workers who were processing through the streets with webs taken from strike beakers.
The Calton strikers drove the officials from their streets. This sparked larger demonstrations and more webs were seized and set fire to, resulting in a detachment of the 39th Regiment being sent to Calton to “intimidate the rioters”.
The appearance of the militia saw exchanges between the two sides, which according to the Scots Magazine, reproduced in Elspeth King's book, led to “orders were given to the soldiers to fire, when three persons were killed, three mortally wounded and several slightly.”
Handloom weaving in 1747, from William Hogarth's Industry and Idleness 30 uniteLANDWORKER Spring 2026
This dispersed the crowd, but riots and web burning continued the following day. After the massacre more troops were brought in and the strike subsided.
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