ABSTRACT
Violence in Scotland is a chronic problem and in its modern sense can be traced back to the ‘no mean city’ streets of Glasgow in the 1930s. In McArthur and Long’s influential novel No Mean City (1935) the reader is introduced to the vision of endemic poverty, crime, gangs and violence in Glasgow in the decade before the Second World War, which has never diminished and is still regularly popularised in literature (Bryce-Wunder 2003: 112). Earlier reference to ‘gangster activity’ shows that gangs terrorised the citizens of Glasgow as far back as the 1880s. One such gang, the ‘Penny Mob’, got its name from the fact that its members paid a penny per week to cover the cost of fines imposed by the local courts (Grant 1973: 51). By the turn of the twentieth century Glasgow was home to many gangs with innocuous titles – the Hi Hi; the Ping Pong; the San Toy; the Tim Malloy; and the Village Boys (ibid: 52). Gang membership normally consisted of young men in their mid teens to early twenties, who travelled as a large group, intimidating the public and extorting money with violence. Unfortunately, to this day Glasgow retains an image of a city of violence which reflects badly on Scotland. In Davies’s account of street gangs and policing in Glasgow, he focuses on one of the best known of Glasgow’s gangs in the 1930s – the ‘Beehive Boys’ from the Gorbals, who got their name from a local draper’s shop (Davies 1998: 254). At this time working-class districts in the city ‘were partitioned by a vast array of street gangs, each with their own territory. Despite the fact that violence was prevalent in the gang culture, members still had time to rob and steal, extort and intimidate and on some occasions take part in sectarian attacks across the city’ (ibid.: 254–5).
