Helen Crawfurd in her unpublished memoir recounts how during the rent-strike factors would try to collect the rental increases by resorting to the blackmail of social humiliation. The ploy was to dupe individual household tenants into believing that everyone else in the close had paid up. Upon one of these occasions Barbour drafted in men from Govan's shipyards, led them to the factor's office and demanded the amount of the increase be returned. 'Faced with thousands of black-faced workers the factor handed over the money' Crawfurd recalls.