City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster by Andrew Davies

Author:Andrew Davies [Davies, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2013-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

From their point of view, the Billies were being persecuted for their patriotic loyalty.

Perceptions of judicial bias in the Traquair case fed upon this prior sense of grievance. In any case, Ratcliffe no doubt felt a more tangible obligation to the Bridgeton Billy Boys, whose members had acted as stewards for SPL election meetings.

The extent of Ratcliffe’s links with the Billy Boys is difficult to discern. However, he expressed sympathy for another ‘gang’ founded by Billy Fullerton during the early 1930s, which styled itself the ‘KKK’. As Fullerton revealed in an interview with the Evening Citizen in 1955, this short-lived body held its meetings in the Foundry Boys’ Hall in London Road in Bridgeton. Its aims, according to Fullerton, were identical to those of the ‘senior’ Billy Boys: loyalty to King, constitution and fellow Protestants. Most of its 200 members already belonged to the Billies; now they wore black and white ties and small brass ‘K’ badges on their lapels. In an article published in the SPL’s paper, the Vanguard, in November 1933, Ratcliffe pointed out with some pride that: ‘Glasgow is the only place in Britain where there is a Ku Klux Klan.’ (Strictly speaking, he pointed out, in Glasgow ‘KKK’ stood for ‘Knights of Kaledonia Klan’.)

Under the auspices of the SPL, Ratcliffe organised meetings across Glasgow in support of Traquair over a period of three weeks. The petition was submitted to the Secretary of State for Scotland in June, with 40,000 signatures gathered throughout Scotland and Northern Ireland, and a promise of support from James Maxton, Independent Labour MP for Bridgeton. The sheer scale of popular support for Traquair indicated that he was no pariah among militant Protestants, whatever his previous record of violence. However, the petition received short shrift from the Secretary of State, who saw no grounds to commute Traquair’s sentence.

Despite the failure of the criminal appeal and petition alike, for a brief period in the summer of 1934, John Traquair was championed as a martyr among militant Protestants both in Scotland and in Northern Ireland.

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