Meet the host of the Great May Day Cabaret 2026

Susan Morrison is best known for her razor-sharp wit on Scotland’s stand-up comedy circuit. 

Less well known is passionate interest in and deep knowledge of Scottish history.

Until recently she  hosted a regular podcast, Time Travels, with all 44 episodes still available on BBC iPlayer including intriguing  tales of pirates in the Solway Firth, the ‘Fair Amazonians’ of the Dundee Jute Mills, Glasgow’s  lost rag trade, and shotgun weddings in the 1970s. 

She has even been awarded an honorary doctorate by Edinburgh’s Napier University for helping academics mentoring communicate complex ideas with clarity and humour.

Although she is often described as a historian, she spurns that label. “I’m just a gadfly,  an enthusiastic amateur –  not in their league,” she insists. 

She grew up in a working-class shipbuilding family and vividly remembers attending the  momentous launch of the QE2, which her father had helped to build. Because of that background, she makes no pretence of objective impartiality when it comes to history. She takes sides.

“It’s the history of the lesser known, the working class, that fascinates me. It’s not just riots and rebellions I’m interested in. It’s only when the working class are rioting that we get noticed,  but  there’s a lot more going on. I’ve always wanted to know who’s been here before us. What did they do? How did they live? What were their daily lives like? What are their stories?”

Her passion for history even survived brain-numbing school lessons on crop rotation and Roman Emperors. “Even if you went to school in Glasgow – or even in the Calton – you’d never have been taught about the Calton Weavers” she says. “Not so long such  stories were not considered a fit and proper subject for historians.

“Thankfully, that’s changing. History is literally at our fingertips. Its great that people can now discover these stories on their phones rather than searching through library bookshelves. Its’ making people more aware of their history. In a lot of communities and online forums, people are now searching for their own local history.”

She is a huge supporter of the Calton Weavers Commemoration Committee. “It’s wonderful when a small group of people – and it was small group of people but its growing all the time – drag these stories out of the graveyard and into the living local area. A little local pride can go a long way and the guys on the ground have done a tremendous job on bringing the memory of the Calton Weavers back to life”

“These were to first to face the guns. The men fell, but even though they fell, the march for workers’ rights continued and grew stronger. Their struggle took place at the dawn of the age of revolution. It came not after the American and shortly before the French Revolution. This was the age of Thomas Muir of Hunterhill and Robert Burns, and the start of the struggle for democracy in Scotland and across Britain.”

In England the Tolpuddle Martyrs – transported to Australia for forming a trade union nearly half a century after the Calton Weavers massacre have long been commemorated in an annual festival in the Dorset village. So why are the Calton Weavers only now starting to get the recognition they deserve in their native city?

 Susan has an astute explanation. “Remember that these events took place just as mass industrialisation was about to arrive in Glasgow with an almighty bang. The Calton and other working-class districts in and around the city  became a magnet for people fleeing rural starvation in  Ireland, the Highlands and elsewhere to work in the factories, foundries, mines and mills. The people moving in knew little of the areas they were moving into, so local history became submerged in the wider social upheaval of these decades.”

 The comparison with Tolpuddle is stark. By 1850, Glasgow had population density of 14,000 people per square kilometre. Even today the county of Dorset has a population density of just 150 per square  kilometre and the village of Tolpuddle still has fewer than 400 residents. In sparsely populated rural areas, from the Highlands of Scotland to the south coast of England, community cohesion and collective memory is stronger than in major conurbations.

“History doesn’t repeat itself – but it does create patterns,” says Susan. “In 1787, the Calton were confronted, not by a Dad’s Army militia  deployed by the Town Hall, but by the might of the 39^th – a professional army regiment which had served in India. It doesn’t take much of a leap to jump from that to the Peterloo Massacre in in 1819, when eighteen unarmed protesters were killed and seven hundred wounded in Manchester by a cavalry charge by the 15^th King’s Hussars with sabres drawn.

“And nor does it take too much of a leap to see the connection between the Calton Weavers Massacre, the Peterloo massacres or the gunning down of unarmed protesters in American cities in 2026.”

• • Susan Morrison will be hosting the Great May Day Cabaret 2026 in the Stand Comedy Club, Glasgow on Monday 4 May at 7.00 pm. Get your tickets here.