Friendly Aliens on the Home Front: Migrants, Refugees and Colonial Workers in Scotland During and After the First World War

At the outset of the First World War central government issued the Aliens Restriction Act designed to place limitations on the movement and access to jobs of enemy aliens. This article will consider the extension of wartime aliens’ restrictions policy to people living in Scotland who were from friendly nations. In order to explore how far government wartime actions affected these groups, and using a range of archival resources, the article will discuss the process of arrival, access to employment and the post-war repatriation from Scotland of migrants and refugees from Lithuania and Belgium and colonial Britons from Africa and the Caribbean

Refugees Welcome Here: Caring for Belgian refugees in the First World War

Jacqueline Jenkinson uncovers the fascinating story of how Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, responded to the influx during the First World War of Belgian refugees, thousands of whom came to Britain in order to escape German occupation of their homeland

A "crutch to assist in gaining an honest living": Dispensary shopkeeping by Scottish general practitioners and the responses of the British medical elite, ca. 1852-1911

This article examines the practice among general practitioners in Scotland of keeping shops for dispensary and retail purposes in the late nineteenth century. It demonstrates that while doctors kept such open shops in these areas in order to subsidize their income in a crowded medical market, they argued that shopkeeping allowed them to provide medical care in communities where the population was otherwise too poor to pay for such care. The article compares shopkeeping to medical "covering" and assesses the medical hierarchy's reactions to shopkeeping doctors via disciplinary actions taken against some of these doctors by the General Medical Council (GMC). These actions provoked an organized protest among hundreds of doctors (some of it channeled through the British Medical Association), which challenged the methods of the GMC in determining acceptable professional medical standards

Black Sailors on Red Clydeside: Rioting, Reactionary Trade Unionism and Conflicting Notions of 'Britishness' Following the First World War

This article considers the outbreak of the seaport riot in Glasgow in January 1919 against the background of Red Clydeside trade union activity. The riot at Glasgow harbour was the first in a wave of rioting around Britain's ports in 1919. Violence was triggered by increased job competition in the merchant navy at the end of the war. Seamen’s unions' fuelled animosity between competing groups as they sought to protect white British access to jobs by imposing a 'colour' bar on sailors from racialised ethnic minorities. Many of the seamen targeted in this way were British colonial subjects from Africa and the Caribbean. Black colonial sailors in Glasgow resisted attacks by white rioters and asserted their rights to employment as British subjects. The riot was connected to wider industrial unrest on Clydeside as leaders of the union campaign for a reduced working week to maintain full employment following demobilisation, brought unskilled labour, including merchant seamen, into a general strike alongside skilled workers. Strike leaders, including Shinwell and Gallacher, linked the 40-hours movement to the seamen’s unions’ protests against overseas labour by stressing the common interests of both in preserving the job prospects of (white) labour. The campaigns proved unsuccessful in the face of government fears over the revolutionary potential of the general strike and as the merchant shipping industry slid in to depression

Midwifery in Scotland: A History

Output Type: Book Revie

Financing medicine: the British experience since 1750

Output Type: Book Revie

"Assisting in many other ways": An Examination of the Work Undertaken by Scottish Women Humanitarians in Support of Belgian Refugees in the

Belgian people displaced following the German invasion of their country in 1914 were supported, supervised, and medically treated by female health care professionals, humanitarian volunteers, and ladies' refugee committee members during their wartime stay in Scotland. This article focuses on the exercise of "soft power" while supporting Belgian refugees by these middle-class female care givers who were all associated with the Glasgow Corporation Belgian Refugee Committee (GCBRC). Additionally, the actions of the women here considered form part of what Gatrell has described as a constructed "refugee regime" organized by local and nationwide relief providers. Although the women here assessed delivered crucial everyday support for displaced Belgians, including children, their role was underreported and marginalized in the contemporary record of First World War humanitarian aid in Scotland, and more widely, Great Britain.Output Status: Forthcomin

War Trauma among Belgian Refugee Women in Scotland in the First World War

This article analyses the evidence for war trauma suffered by First World War Belgian female refugee civilians using a range of primary sources which describe the period of their residence in Scotland. Evidence of such war trauma is explored by analysing the descriptions of symptoms and applicant behaviour for a cohort of case studies of women (and several children and men) which have been constructed from the detailed personal information provided in Poor Law admission registers and patient case notes from psychiatric and general hospital stays. The individual case histories discussed are considered in relation to internationally recognised definitions of war trauma. The article places the original primary source findings in the context of the vast traditional historiography on ‘shell shock’ and the more recent writing on female civilians in war. This article sheds fresh light on historical debates about human security in the First World War, gender issues in war, understandings of war trauma, and family life on the home front