Glasgow Razor Gangs | UK True Crime Documentary

Glasgow Razor Gangs | UK True Crime Documentary

Glasgow was once the proud “Second City of the Empire,” its River Clyde building a fifth of the world’s ships. But behind the industry and wealth, the city’s overcrowded tenements bred poverty, sectarian hatred, and violence that would erupt into some of the most feared gangs in Britain.

This video dives into the brutal rise of Glasgow’s gangs, from the Penny Mobs of the 1870s to the razor wielding terror of the 1930s Billy Boys. It explores shocking acts of violence like the “Glasgow Smile,” the reign of Billy Fullerton, and the bloody street battles that turned neighborhoods into war zones.

We’ll uncover how police chief Percy Sillitoe fought back with ruthless tactics, how post war housing schemes created new breeding grounds for gangs, and how sectarian hatred continued to fuel violence for decades. This is the dark story of Glasgow’s underworld, a chilling reminder of how poverty and division can forge generations of violence.

⚠️ Viewer discretion advised: this video contains disturbing details.

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Glasgow, the 1920s and 30s, a city of industry and shadow of sprawling slums and deep poverty. On the streets, an army was rising. They didn’t wear military uniforms. They wore sharp suits and blood cups and they carried a terrifying weapon of choice, the open razor. Hundreds of men marching like soldiers fighting territorial battles with brutal weapons. They were the Glasgow raider bands. How did a city become a battleground for such violent legions? What turned ordinary unemployed men into figures of terror? And who was the one man who dared to declare that his gang was bigger than theirs? To help us continue making sure their stories are heard, please like and subscribe. Let’s dive right into it. In the late 1800s, Glasgow was a titan of industry, the proud second city of the empire. Its river Clyde was a forest of steel skeletons with an estimated 40 shipyards hammering and riveting the iron hulls that would carry the British Empire across the globe. A fifth of all ships launched in the world were born there, crowned with the proud term Clyde built. But beneath this veneer of industrial might, a different kind of society was being forged in the city’s sprawling, impoverished tenementss. The boom in industry brought a surge in population, including a large influx of Irish Catholic immigrants seeking work. They settled in densely populated areas like the Gorbles, where elegant mansions once built for the Protestant middle class were carved up into squalid, overcrowded slums. By the 1930s, the population density in the Gorbles would reach levels that ranked among the highest in the world. This migration sparked a fierce sectarian backlash from a Protestant population that blamed the newcomers for rising unemployment and social decay. This was the fertile ground from which Glasgow’s gangs would grow. The first of these were the penny mobs of the 1870s. Their motivations were simple and brutal. Recreational violence often aimed along religious lines. Their name came from a pragmatic system of mutual support. When a member was arrested for some petty act of violence, they were often given a choice. A harsh jail sentence or a large fine. To avoid prison, each member of the gang would contribute a penny towards the legal fees, spreading the cost and keeping their soldiers on the streets. The court system eventually caught on and stopped offering fines, but the foundation of organized street violence had been laid. This early violence was raw and unpredictable. In September of 1880, a young Protestant boy named William Kerr was playing a game with his friends in Cathedral Square when he was confronted by James McMahon, a key member of a Catholic penny mob known as the Mulun Gang. McMahon asked the boy a question that would echo through Glasgow’s streets for a century. What are you? Before Kerr could even answer, McMahon plunged a knife into his chest, puncturing a lung. Miraculously, William Kerr survived. James McMahon was sentenced to just 3 months in prison. The violence escalated. In January of 1883, two massive explosions tore through a gas works in trades ton. An attack linked to a Catholic movement called ribbonism. These gangs were becoming more than just street brawlers. They were organized and ideologically driven with Catholic groups aligned with ribbonism and Protestant groups following the orange order. The battle lines were being drawn, not on a distant field, but in the closes and cobbled streets of Glasgow. By the early 1900s, these gangs had grown in size and notoriety. The Hihis, named for the cry they used to assemble their members, were estimated to have up to 300 members. Another, the Santos, was a mixed Catholic and Protestant gang that boasted between 400 and 500 members. Their primary focus remained what police called recreational violence, a chillingly casual term for the brutal reality of their existence. After the First World War, Glasgow was a city on its knees. The Great Depression hit hard, and by the early 1930s, the unemployment rate hovered between 25 and 33%. For tens of thousands of young men with no work and no prospects, the gangs offered a sense of belonging, structure, and self-respect that society denied them. The violence that had simmered for decades was about to boil over into a full-blown reign of terror. This was the era of the razor gangs. Their weapon of choice was the cutthroat or straight razor. It was an item every young man owned, often a gift from his father upon reaching manhood. It was light, easily concealed, and terrifyingly sharp. The intent was not always to kill. It was to disfigure, to leave a permanent mark of dominance. The most infamous of these marks was the Glasgow smile, a vicious slash from the corner of the mouth to the ear, leaving the victim with a grotesque, lifelong grin. But they were not limited to razors. Gang members fought with a terrifying arsenal of hatchets, swords, machetes, knives, sharpened bicycle chains, and broken bottles. Blades were even stitched into the peaks of their flat caps and the lapels of their jackets. The two most infamous gangs were the Protestant Bridgeon Billy Boys and their Catholic rivals, the Norman Conch. The Billy Boys, based in the East End, were the largest and most powerful gang in the city. Their territory at Bridgeton Cross was only half a kilometer from the Norman Conch turf on Norman Street, a proximity that ensured constant bloody conflict. The Billy Boys were led by a charismatic and brutal figure named Billy Fitin. Fitin was not, as legend often claimed, the gang’s founder. He joined in his youth, seeking protection after being targeted by rivals. But his natural leadership and reputation for violence quickly saw him rise to the top. Under his command, the Billy Boys became a paramilitary force. They had their own flute band, wore uniforms of assort, and marched to pre-arranged battles like an army. They had a junior wing, the Dairy Boys, to train up the next generation. Membership required a weekly subscription of a 6 pence or a shilling. funds used to pay legal fees and support members just released from prison. Fitton boasted that the gang had up to £300, a some equivalent to £20,000 today, in a bank account in Bridgton. Their income wasn’t just from membership dues. They ran extensive protection and extortion rackets, terrorizing local shopkeepers into paying for protection from other gangs. In a remarkable newspaper interview in 1932, Fulletin himself described the gang’s business-like approach. He recounted being hired by a legitimate businessman to assault a competitor. Fitton took the two fee, but instead of carrying out the attack, he went to the target and explained the situation. The man paid him another2 to be left alone. The supposed victim then simply wore sticking plasters on his face for a few weeks to complete the illusion. Fitin and his men walked away with £4, having played both sides. The line between the criminal underworld and the respectable world of Glasgow business had collapsed. The gang’s violence was audacious. Fitton would deliberately march his flute band through Catholic strongholds like the Colton and the Gorbles, knowing it would end in a riot. On the afternoon of Saturday, March 3rd, 1934, a group of 500 Ranger supporters, including a hardcore of Billy Boys, gathered at Bridgton Cross Station. When a train carrying Celtic supporters pulled in, a Billy Boy member named John Traqua, stormed the carriage, slashing one man with a razor and punching another. The police crackdown was swift. Traqua was charged with mobbing, assault, and rioting. And in a sign of the changing times, he was handed a sentence of 4 years in prison. A punishment that shocked a city used to leniency for Protestant gang members. The city’s reputation for violence was spreading. In 1934, the novel No Mean City was published. Though fictional, its graphic tale of a gang leader’s bloody rise to become Razer King was drawn straight from the streets. The book was banned in Glasgow, but became a national bestseller, cementing the image of the Glasgow hard man in the public imagination. By 1931, the Glasgow Corporation knew it had to act. The city was being defined by its gangs. They took the unprecedented step of hiring an Englishman to be their new chief constable, Percy Citto. Salto was a tough, experienced officer who had served in colonial police forces in Africa and had successfully broken the gangs of Sheffield using what was politely called reasonable force. He was exactly what Glasgow needed. Upon his arrival on December 22nd, 1931, Selto assessed the situation and made a declaration that would become legendary. We are the biggest gang in Glasgow. He immediately set about modernizing and toughening up his force. He recruited the biggest, strongest men he could find, many from the Highlands and Islands, who held a natural disdain for the city’s so-called hard men. He established the UK’s first police flying squad, giving planelo detectives fast cars equipped with wireless radios, allowing them to respond to outbreaks of violence in minutes. He ordered the construction of police boxes throughout the city and created a modern fingerprint and photographic department. He even designed the iconic black and white checkered cap band. now known as the Salto Tartan to help his officers identify each other during riots. Celito’s tactics were as brutal as the gangs they targeted. His mounted police, nicknamed Celito’s Cossacks, would charge into street battles, scattering gang members with long batons. His officers often employed a strategic patience, waiting for rival gangs to wear each other down in a fight before wading in to sweep up the injured and exhausted survivors. Salto also allegedly used his influence with the courts to have convicted gang leaders committed to mental institutions where they could be held long after their sentences were served. He targeted the gang leaders directly. He knew that arresting Billy Fitin for violence was difficult as witnesses were too terrified to testify, so he went after him another way. He had Fulletton arrested for being drunk while in charge of a child. More devastatingly, he used the law to confiscate the £600 from the Billy Boy’s bank account, draining the financial lifeblood of the organization. The combination of Solito’s ruthless policing and the outbreak of the Second World War, which saw many gang members drafted into the military finally broke the power of the original Razer gangs. Sir Percy Citto was kned in 1942 and left Glasgow the following year, his job done. But the culture of violence was not so easily erased. In the 1950s, a new wave of gang activity was met with famously severe sentences from a city judge named Lord Carmmont. So harsh that being sentenced by him became known as coping a Carmont. At the same time, the city began a massive program of slum clearance. Over a quarter of a million people were moved from the old tenementss to vast new housing estates or schemes on the city’s outskirts like Easter House. These schemes were built with better housing, but with almost no amenities, no pubs, no cinemas, no community centers, and few jobs. They were sprawling concrete deserts of alienation and boredom, and they became the new breeding grounds for Glasgow’s gangs. By the 1960s, a new moral panic swept the city as a younger, more nihilistic generation of gangs emerged. A television documentary from the era captured the chilling new face of this violence. The crew interviewed Joe Develin, the 16-year-old leader of the Shamrock gang. He spoke with a cold, detached heir about the reality of his life. When an interviewer asked if he fought with his fists, Develin replied softly, “No, we’ll use hatchets and that, you know, or any kind of weapons.” He described what happened after a fight. See a bloke’s lying and screaming. As long as he’s still screaming, it’s okay. You know, if he doesn’t scream, just phone for the ambulance right away. asked how he felt when he heard someone had died in a fight. His response was utterly devoid of emotion. Well, I can get a good night’s sleep after it. I don’t bother. Not everyone believed force was the only answer. The English entertainer Frankie Vaughn, familiar with gangs from his own upbringing, visited the Easter House estate. He held a weapons amnesty where blades and hatchets were handed in, and he campaigned tirelessly for the construction of a youth center to give the local kids something to do other than fight. The shadow of the old gangs, however, was long. The Billy Boy’s Youth Wing, the Young Bridgton Derry, had become a powerful gang in its own right. One of its former members, William Big Bill Campbell, would go on to become a leader of the Olter Volunteer Force in Scotland and was convicted in the 1970s for his role in a sectarian bombing campaign. The most shocking legacy of this ingrained hatred came on a single day in 1995. Jason Campbell, the nephew of Big Bill, saw a 16-year-old boy named Mark Scott walking through Bridgton on his way to a football match. Mark Scott’s only crime was that he was wearing a Celtic scarf. For this, Jason Campbell murdered him in a senseless, unprovoked attack. Unlike the gang violence of the past, which was sometimes perversely glamorized, this act horrified the community of Bridgetton. It was a brutal wakeup call, a tipping point that exposed the mindless, tragic cost of the sectarianism that had fueled the gangs for generations. By 2002, the World Health Organization had declared Glasgow the murder capital of Europe. The cycle of violence seemed unbreakable. But in the years that followed, a new approach pioneered by the Strathclide Police’s violence reduction unit began to treat violence not as a crime problem, but as a public health epidemic. Through community engagement, intervention, and support, they achieved what decades of batons and prison sentences could not. By the late 2010s, gang fighting had fallen by over 70%. The era of hundreds of men battling in the streets with open razors is over. The gangs of today are smaller, their territories more localized. But the story of the Glasgow razor gangs is a stark reminder of how poverty, sectarian division, and a lack of hope can forge an army of dispossessed young men who find their identity and purpose in the brutal theater of the street. When we look back at the Glasgow razor gangs, it is easy to see them as simple street brawlers, hooligans motivated only by territorial pride and sectarian hatred. But this view misses a crucial part of the story. The historian under Davis has done extensive research into this era using police files, court records and newspaper archives. He paints a much more complex picture. Davis argues that this were not just spontaneous mobs. They were highly organized hybrid groups. They combined public spectacle with thematic business. The mass street fights and flute band parades were about building a reputation. There were rituals to establish dominance and control. But behind the violence was an economic engine. Davis research shows that many guns operated like a business. They collected weekly subscriptions from their own members. This money was used to pay court fines and support the families of those in jail. It was a system of mutual aid that created loyalty. More than that, they ran protection rackets. Local shopkeepers and businesses would be forced to pay a fee. A fee for peace. a fee to avoid having their windows smashed or their customers attacked. Violence for the gangs was also a tool to secure an income. This is what made them so powerful. They were just on the margins of society. They were embedded within the local economy, creating their own system of order and terror. This also helps explain why the police response under Percy Silito was so effective. Silito didn’t just meet force with force. His strategy was smarter. By introducing radio cars and better communication, he made the police faster and more organized. But crucially, he attacked their finances. When Celito’s officer arrested gang leaders on minor charms like Billy Fullerton being drunk, they also use the law to seize the gang’s money. By cutting off their cash flow, they crippled the gang’s ability to operate as a business. They dismantles the engine that run on both violence and money. The story of the Glasco Razor Gangs is more than just a tale of street fighting. It is a lesson in how poverty, unemployment, and social division can create the perfect environment for organized crime to flourish. The gangs provided what society would not a sense of belonging, a source of income, and a brutal form of power. They were a dark mirror reflecting the deep fractures and the cities they terrorized. Thank you for watching and remember to like and subscribe. [Music]