Music was the food of love between Hannah and Alf’s father, James, who was more than the ‘ship plater’ he entered as his occupation on official documents. Despite losing an index finger in a youthful accident, James Wight was an accomplished pianist who played the organ in services at the Primitive Methodist Chapel on Williamson Terrace. Along with other manufacturing centres in the North, Sunderland had long been a centre of the evangelical, revivalist brand of John Wesley’s creed, and James Wight must have been accustomed to formidable females like Hannah Bell; the Primitive Methodists had allowed women as preachers for 50 years.
As well as sitting at the organ in the plain brick chapel on Williamson Terrace, Jim Wight played piano and organ in the local cinemas. To perk up the new fangled silent ‘flickers’, film distributors sent ‘cue sheets’ out to cinemas containing lists of scenes and suggested pieces or styles of music to be played alongside them; The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s 1916 big-budget melodrama set in the American Civil War, even had a specially composed full score (by Joseph Carl Breil). But cue sheet or score, there was always ample opportunity for the cinema pianist to improvise, because the projectors broke down with audience-dismaying frequency. If the film caught fire or the projector bulb blew, the pianist filled in the unofficial interlude with a happy tune to distract the booing crowd in the stalls.
Someone like James Wight, dressed in a black dinner suit, playing a grand piano was the minimum musical staff in a cinema in 1916; bigger theatres had orchestras. Since films were on their way to becoming the entertainment medium of the people, cinemas were on their way to being the main employers of musicians. The pay for ‘tinkling the old Joanna’ in a cinema was £3 for a full week, but many musicians, like James Wight, were moonlighting from other jobs.
Until cinemas could be built or converted from existing buildings, films were shown in theatres. In Sunderland, the first sole-purpose cinemas were Monkwearmouth Picture Hall (a refitted chapel), the West End Electric Cinema, the Theatre de Luxe Cinema and the 2000-seat Havelock Cinema on the High Street. At the Sunderland Empire, the town’s grandest venue, with its baroque 90-foot tower topped by a revolving steel globe bearing the figure of Terpsicore, seats in the stalls were 2d, and for 7/6d you could be the little emperor of all you surveyed from a box.
Aside from Birth of a Nation, the big film doing the rounds in 1916 was the British documentary about the death of a generation, The Battle of the Somme, the official record of the great advance, which sold twenty million tickets within six weeks of its release on 21 August. When it was shown to soldiers on rest, their chief complaint was that it lacked the furious noise of combat. Not even low-end ‘Agitato Heavy’ from Jim Wight’s keyboard could simulate that.
Making music was the utter counterpoint to the work Jim Wight did in the shipyards, since few jobs in shipbuilding were more physically gruelling than plating. ‘Ironfighters’ was the suitable colloquialism for steel-trades workers like platers. A plater cut the steel plates that made up the ship’s hull to rough size, trimmed them, and then curved them to perfection with hard, exquisite blows from a sledgehammer. Every job in shipbuilding had its noise, from the fusillade of the riveters to the splash of the welders; the noise of plating was barbaric gonging. No-one had ear protection; men went gradually deaf by the day.
After pounding the hull plates into shape, the plater’s gang drilled lines of rivet holes with pointed steel rods, before ‘shouldering’ the plates from the ‘shop’ (a shed) to the hull on the open slipway, where the plates were hung ready for the riveters. Whether it was summer or winter, the job produced a blinding sweat under the ubiquitous flat tweed cap.
The work required strength, but also skill. Platers were artisans, men who took pride in their product. They could always be distinguished from the mass going through the yard gates by their metal tool-box. Inside were the tools of their trade: a hammer, centre punch, set square, protractor and level. Platers were trained to read the drawings coming out of the office. One fine day, James Wight himself would move from open yard to shipbuilder’s office.
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The plain brick chapel on Williamson Terrace where James played the organ was built in 1881; as John Betjeman wrote, such Nonconformist architecture showed ‘more surely than any Victorian Established church … what was the true architecture of the people. Not since medieval days had the people clubbed together to adorn a place of worship and this time it was not a shrine but a preaching house.’
Methodists ‘clubbing together’ to build a chapel was just one form of the self-organization beloved of the Victorian working-class into which Jim Wight and Hannah Bell were born. It is significant that Hannah’s father, Robert Bell, and his wife Jane, owned rather than rented Fashoda; in the phrase beloved of Edwardian social commentators, the Bells were ‘respectable working class’; the emphasis was, in the mind of the commentators, on ‘respectable’, but it should be on ‘working’, because there was no respectability without work. The Bells worked – and had worked upwards socially – with an ethic a Protestant would understand. Theirs was a world of friendly societies, Sunday schools, Mechanics’ Institutes, reading rooms, trades unions. At Boldon, a mile or so away from Roker, the miners had a library funded from their own thin pockets, where the shelves boasted Walter Scott, Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible, the Brontës, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and George Eliot.
Sober, unpretentious, hard-working, auto-didactic, self-improving, cultured – small wonder that the British working class of the Victorian and Edwardian periods was the envy of the world. Alf Wight’s parents would migrate from Methodism and even from their ‘birth class’, but they would not leave the moral and spiritual values learned there.
Hannah Bell and James Henry Wight were married on 17 July 1915 in that same Methodist chapel. There is a photograph of the wedding party, all suits, button-holes and bouquets: the Wights, as well as the Bells, were eminently respectable Wearside working class. But Hannah and Jim had dreams beyond Sunderland and the social rung on the ladder that birth had allotted them. They wanted careers in music.
It was Hannah who was the driver in the marriage, the glint of determination and focus there in the eyes in every monochrome snap. Jim was always the picture of gentle, open-faced amiability. Some of Hannah’s relatives nicknamed her ‘Duchess’ for her airs and aspirations. It wasn’t meant cruelly; the Bells, like the Wights, were a tight-knit supportive clan. It was just that Hannah wanted to go further up in the world, to improve herself.
If you are from the north of England in the second decade of the twentieth century, where do you go for the bright lights of a career in music? Across Britain stretches an invisible cultural barrier, and its line of latitude is just below Sunderland. A Hadrian’s Wall of the mind. Above it is ‘the North’, below it ‘the South’. When Scottish music-hall comics go on tour, they don’t venture south of Wearside because nobody understands their humour or accents.
So, if you are from Sunderland in the 1910s and you want a career in music, you go to Glasgow, the Second City of the British Empire. Before they married, Hannah seems to have sent Jim off as a pathfinder to Glasgow, a city that had the advantage of offering both entertainment opportunities galore, plus the bread-and-butter of work in shipbuilding. In October 1914, Jim wrote to Hannah from Glasgow on a postcard:
I arrived here 10.10 today. Made tracks for Yarrows at once. Everything proved satisfactory.
Yarrows was a shipyard on the Clyde. Everything must indeed have proved satisfactory because Hannah and Jim moved to Glasgow immediately after their marriage. She only returned to Sunderland in October 1916 to have her baby in the cradle of her family.
Three weeks after Alf’s birth, Hannah headed north again to where she and Jim had settled in Yoker, on Glasgow’s north-west edge. From Roker to Yoker was a distance of 170 miles. It was there, in what he called ‘dear old Glasgow town’, that Alf Wight spent the first 24 years of his life.
SECOND CITY OF EMPIRE
Alf Wight, letter to his parents, November 1941, aged 25
WHEN THREE-WEEK-OLD ALF WIGHT arrived at the vaulting, glass-roofed Central Station in Glasgow in October 1916, he entered a metropolis like nowhere else in Britain. A clamouring city of 800,000 people, Glasgow was already showing, beneath the wartime spirit of unity, the split personality that would characterize it through the twentieth century. On the one hand it was the booming ‘Second City of Empire’, boasting the high culture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, shipbuilding barons, and stylish Buchanan Street; on the other hand, street gangs like the Redskins were turning it into ‘razor city’, the Glasgow of blackened Gorbals tenements, Red Clydesiders and the variety-hall turns of Harry Lauder. The duality of Glasgow extended to its name because Glaswegians could not agree on its meaning. Some insisted that Glasgow meant ‘dear green place’, from the Celtic glas (green) and cu (dear); James Cleland, writing in The Annals of Glasgow, was equally adamant that the name meant ‘dark glen’. Even Glasgow’s patron saint has two names – Mungo and Kentigern.
This split personality, though, marked an important truth about the place. The spectrum of human experience within its streets was broad, if not boundless. And Glasgow was dynamic. So dynamic, indeed, that in the early 1900s, many commentators queried whether Glasgow was truly a British city. With its confident, high Victorian buildings, its grid of ruler-straight central streets, its brash manners and confidence, its brownstone tenement blocks, its ‘subway’ underground railway, its plethora of cinemas, its poor and huddled refugees from Ireland (more than 40 per cent of Glaswegians could claim roots in the Emerald Isle), Glasgow seemed American. When that inveterate explorer of Britain, H. V. Morton, reached Glasgow in 1912, he likened the city to Chicago; 20 years later, on his Scottish Journey, Edwin Muir was convinced that, ‘In its combination of riches and tastlessness, upper-class Glasgow is very like the United States.’
The comparison with America is apt because modern Glasgow, like so many American cities, grew rapidly, a stone-and-mortar Topsy. Until the 1700s, if people in Scotland, let alone in Britain, knew of Glasgow, they knew of it as a slumbering ecclesiastical town, whose first wooden church had been established in 525 by Mungo on the banks of the Molendinar Burn (a tributary of the Clyde that the Victorians turned into a sewer), and of its cathedral begun by Bishop John Achaius in 1114. In 1451, King James II had accorded the town a ‘grant of regality’ and solicited a Papal Bull to found the University of Glasgow, the fourth oldest university in Great Britain. Medieval Glasgow’s population rose to around 4000, which crowded into timber and thatch houses around the cathedral, with some sprawl down to the shallow Clyde, with its thriving salmon fishing.
For three hundred years, Glasgow slept, until some enterprising merchants purchased 13 acres at Newark out in the Firth of Clyde and established Port Glasgow. Tobacco was the imported stuff on which Glasgow’s rise to power was based; at Trongate in the city centre, the ‘tobacco lords’ had pavements exclusively for their own use. ‘They were princes,’ wrote chronicler John Strang, who
distinguished themselves by a particular garb, being attired, like their Venetian and Genovese predecessors, in scarlet cloaks, curled wigs, cocked hats, and bearing gold-headed canes.
So was born the Glasgow habit of ostentation. So too the Glasgow habit of drinking. The nouveau riche tobacco merchants drank claret and whiskey in their clubs, coffee houses and homes (some employed servants specially to loosen the cravats of drunken guests, so they would not choke) while their lowly workers drank in taverns, or ‘drinking shops’, the back rooms of grocery stores.
The reign of the tobacco lords was brief; in 1786 David Dale brought mechanized weaving to the Clyde Valley, and cotton became king. Within a decade, Glasgow went from Daniel Defoe’s ‘cleanest and beautifullest, and best-built city in Britain, London excepted’ to an industrial city where, one commentator observed in 1792, ‘The traveller approaching this city, beholds before him, nothing but spires, buildings and smoke.’
Glasgow had entered the Industrial Revolution. Its population exploded: in 1801 Glasgow had 77,000 residents; by 1830 the population had nearly tripled to 201,000; and in 1901 Glasgow had 784,496 citizens within its burgeoning borders and was the most populous place in the kingdom, London excepted. It was also the ‘Workshop of the World’, because all the ingredients for heavy industry were to be miraculously found on the city’s doorstep. In Lanarkshire there was iron ore and there was coal; there was also a ready supply of cheap labour in the shape of crofters cleared from the Highlands by ‘improving’ estate owners. These were joined by hungry Irish immigrants driven across the sea by the potato famines. The last ingredient necessary for Glasgow’s rise to become ‘Second City of Empire’ was liquid. The water of the Clyde.
As the saying goes, ‘Glasgow made the Clyde, the Clyde made Glasgow.’ To deepen the Clyde so that bigger draught ships could reach right up into the city – the Port of Glasgow was always a halfway house sort of compromise – an English civil engineer, John Golborne, dreamed up a scheme in 1768 to dredge the sandbanks and narrow the river by means of jetties. Golbourne’s plan was entirely successful; within a decade, coasting vessels were able to discharge Irish oatmeal at Broomielaw Quay in the heart of the city. A grateful town council gave Golbourne the Sassenach a present of £1,500 and a silver cup. However, the channel was still not deep enough to allow foreign-going vessels into Glasgow. Step forward the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford, who advised joining up the end of Golbourne’s projecting groynes, and by 1818 transatlantic ships were regularly sailing up to the Broomielaw, turning Glasgow into a deep-water port. The river that runs through the city’s heart is a canal, as artificial as Suez and Panama.
A deepened Clyde was more than a watery highway for trade; in 1812 the Comet was launched on the river, a little wooden steam paddleboat, which started up the holiday habit of taking a trip ‘doon the watter’. So fantastically popular was the Comet that more steam ships were built in its wake. Shipbuilding was a new Glasgow craft, completely contingent on the newly deepened Clyde. In the sixteenth century, the town had boasted one boat builder. By the 1870s, the Clyde was building one-third of all British tonnage. And it had not nearly reached its ascendancy. The yards began to spread downstream, along the banks of the Clyde, from Govan (where Robert Napier had established the first yard to make hulls from steel instead of wood) to Partick, Whiteinch, Scotstoun … and Yoker.
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Until 1877 Yoker was an inconsequential country village, whose singular point of interest was its distillery – cruelly hit by a Luftwaffe bomb in the Second World War, sending up a million pounds’ worth of whiskey in flames – but in that year Govan shipbuilders, Messrs. Napier Shanks and Bell took over farmland with river frontage at the west end of the village. Other shipbuilding and repairing firms also found the greenfield sites of Yoker attractive, and John Shearer & Son, Barclay Curle & Co., J. & G. Thomson and John Brown & Co. all built yards on the river at Yoker. In 1906, the specialist warship builders Yarrow moved from the Thames to the eastern end of Yoker village, because as Alfred Yarrow observed, ‘When you want apples, you go to Covent Garden, for meat to a meat market, and for ships you go to the North.’ When James Wight wanted work in 1914, he was of the same mind as Alfred Yarrow, and went north, to Yoker on Glasgow’s edge, to work in Yarrow’s own yard.
A rented ground floor flat at number 2172 Dumbarton Road, Yoker, a four-storey red sandstone tenement block, was Alf’s first home in Glasgow. Dumbarton Road is one of the major arteries of Glasgow, running west to Dumbarton itself and so long that it was the first road in Britain to need quadruple digits for addresses. Number 2172 is still there. Tenement buildings do not stand alone, but are joined to others, to cliff-wall pavements for six hundred yards with an overpowering solidity. All flats
in a block have the same windows (an angular outward bay in the case of Dumbarton Road) and entrances; only the occasional small shop let into the ground floor disrupts the clone-like repetition of the tenements running down a road. The shops in the tenements next door to 2172 are now shuttered up, save for one convenience store with a bright yellow Paypoint sign.
Opposite 2172 is the site of the yard of the once mighty Barclay Curle, Scotland’s main ship repairer, now gone. Three hundred yards downstream to the east, a grey Royal Navy warship peers from behind a line of new housing. Currently owned by BAE Systems, the Yarrow yard on Yoker’s edge is one of the handful of Clydeside yards still living. Even so, there is only the faintest tinnitus of industry in Yoker on a workday in the twenty-first century.
In 1916, the riverfront of Yoker was alive with hammering, grinding, ships’ horns sounding, cranes creaking, men shouting and trains running alongside Dumbarton Road to service the yards. So close were the gargantuan metal skeletons of the ships that they loomed over the wide cobbled road, blocking out the view from the tenements.
The sky over Yoker’s Dumbarton Road was netted with wires to power tram ‘caurs’ running up and down the road, these emblazoned with the patriotic advice: ‘To shave the boys at the Front, hand your old razors to the conductresses.’ Or the patriotic plea: ‘Bantams for the Front: 3,000 Wanted: Apply at Once 46 Bath Street.’ Trams were also festooned with commercial advertisements for Fry’s Pure Concentrated Cocoa, Colman’s Mustard, Pear’s Soap and Nestles’ Milk. At night, the street flickered with gaslight, or at least it did until 12 o’clock. In response to possible Zeppelin raids, much of Glasgow’s street lighting was extinguished from midnight and heavy curtains pulled over windows.
Young James Herriot Page 2