Hector Smith

Send us Fan MailA gang turns up at a Glasgow tenement and demands £10 a week for “UDA protection”. Hours later, Hector Smith is dead on his living room floor, shot at point-blank range after refusing to be threatened. We follow the chain of events that begins with Brian Hosey, a violent National Front activist desperate to look like a loyalist hard man, and ends with a family shattered on Arlington Street in Woodlands. What makes this story linger is not a whodunnit. Police move fast, the case is open and shut, and yet the meaning of what happened gets blurred by the noise around it. We talk through the fake paramilitary fundraising pitch, the way intimidation feeds on symbols and rumours, and the racist contempt that surfaces plainly when the gun goes off. We also step into a startling moment of 1970s Glasgow history: a late-licensed gay disco at Woodside Halls, the raid that follows, and officers lining men up to check their arms for a King William tattoo while a murderer slips away. From there we zoom out to the courtroom and the headlines. The press fixates on Hosey’s appearance and supposed paramilitary aura, while Hector Smith, a Jamaican-born father of three and one of a small Caribbean community in Scotland at the time, is granted far less space as a full person. We wrestle with what it means when racism is present but treated as marginal, and why some murders become enduring folklore while others barely survive an online search. If you care about Glasgow true crime, Scottish history, the National Front, loyalist paramilitaries, or how cities choose what to remember, listen now. Subscribe, share the episode with someone who cares about Glasgow’s past, and leave us a review. What should Hector Smith’s place in the city’s story be?