Tongland, gang

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Tongland could also refer to a village in Dumfries and Galloway

Tongland was a local nickname for the area of Calton, Glasgow controlled in the 1960s by a violent Scottish teenage gang called the Tongs.

Tongland appears in Gillies MacKinnon's 1995 movie Small Faces, set in the 1960s.^[1]. The Tongs' and other gangs' power over the area and their decline in the 1970s is described in Janey Godley's 2005 autobiography Handstands in the Dark.^[2]

The phrase and widespread local graffiti "Tongs Ya Bass" arguably became Glasgow’s unofficial motto in the Sixties and Seventies.^[3] The word "bass" was not an abbreviation of "bastard", but a corruption of the ancient Scottish Gaelic expression for "battle and die".^[3]

[edit] The gang

The Tongs started in Easterhouse. They took their name from the secret societies active in China, Vietnam, Singapore and the United States. The most famous Glasgow Tong was the "San Toy" named after a battle between the French and the Chinese in Vietnam. The Tongs financed themselves by levying protection money on local shops. They would mark out their territories with graffiti such as "San Toy Ya Bass".

However the original Tongs have given way to a succession of Glasgow gangs who identify themselves as Tongs. An example of this would be the AYT, as featured on 'Colin and Justin', who call themselves, Arden Young Toon, also known as the Arden Toon Tongs another example would be the Ibrox Tongs or IBT, who operate in the Govan area of Glasgow. The ' Tongs Ya Bass' slogan in Glasgow is being succeeded by the slogan of ' Yung Team ', which has now become a much more common suffix for Glasgow gangs and also used as a 'battle cry' as 'Tongs Ya Bass' once was.

[edit] References

^ British Film Institute page on 'Small Faces'.
^ "Handstands in the Dark", pub 2005, Chapter 10
^ ^a ^b The Scotsman, 2nd September, 2004.

____The Calton Tongs adopted the title 'Tongs" after some of the local Calton youths attended a movie called 'Terror of the Tongs ' in a picture hall near Fielden Street in the East End of Glasgow During the 1960s' ..The first person to shout 'Tongs ya Bas' was 'Terror McCabe' who had been in attendance at the movie 'Terror of the Tongs , he also adopted the name 'Terror ' from the movie......... During the late 1970s ,early 1980s the prefix 'Real' was added to the 'Calton Tongs' title...as a sort of registered trademark...