Gangland UK by Christopher Berry-Dee

Author:Christopher Berry-Dee [Christopher Berry-Dee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843586913
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2011-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

6

Thomas ‘Tam’ McGraw and the Scottish Gangs

‘McGraw became one of the most powerful gangsters in Britain, certainly in Glasgow, and he earned a great deal of that power by trading information with the police.’

AUTHOR REG MCKAY

The ‘Penny Mobs’ was a name used by the press to describe the early street gangs in Glasgow during the early 1870s. Local kids were fined a penny if they stepped out of line, then released back on to the streets. The Penny Mobs, like their New York City counterparts, were among the many gangs which formed following a large-scale migration of Irish immigrants fleeing Ireland during the potato famines of the 1840s and 1850s. One of these gangs, the Ribbon Men, were reported to have blown up a gasometer in Tradeston in 1833.

In Scotland and Ireland, the name Penny Mobs still lived on through to the twentieth century, a period that gave rise to prominent gangs such as the Tongs, the Toils, the Govans, the Powery Gang, the Soo Spiders, the Billy Boys, the Norman Conks, the Rednecks, the Baltic Fleet, the Black Diamond Gang, the Black Hands, the Nudes, the Ruchill Boys and the Monks.

Glasgow was known as the ‘second city of the Empire’ and everything was covered in a fine layer of black soot. For their part, the Billy Boys had 800 members at its height during the 1920s and 1930s, then a time when Oswald Mosely’s British Facists started a Glasgow branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

Today, the gangs are still around, now populated by Neds, Chavs, Chags, Kevs, Scallies, Spides or White Trash – a very eloquent lot who have their own vernacular that produces some of the ‘finest poetry’ in the world: ‘Ode to me Ma… Slashin’ jaws, lickin’ baws, punin’ jellies, and stabbin’ bellies.’ Wordsworth, it’s not, but there’s a certain street dynamism about it that can’t be denied.

The Glasgow district of Barlanark was developed in response to the city’s post-war housing need – over 2,300 four- and five-apartment tenements characterised by brick balconies, at that time under local council control. And almost from the day the first families moved in, the place became a breeding ground for crime, the area becoming steeped in violence and gang culture.

Perhaps the most infamous of these gangs was the BAR-L Team, made up of members from Barlanark and the surrounding areas, and one of the toughest was Tam ‘The Licensee’ McGraw. Barlanark was to become part of the bloody Glasgow Ice Cream Wars of the 1980s.

Tam McGraw owned the Caravel public house on Hallhill Road, and it was a well-known meeting place for Glasgow underworld figures. Apart from general revelry, the place that also saw more than its fair share of violence and was subject to drive-by shootings as well as grenades being thrown through the windows. In 1991, the pub was burned to the ground following the alleged retribution murder, in September 1991, of Bobby Glover and Joe ‘Bananas’ Hanlon, by the crime lord Arthur ‘The Godfather’ Thompson for the killing of his son, Arthur ‘Fat Boy’ Thompson Jr.

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