Night brought little relaxing silence to tenement dwellers. Although the broad streets were deserted, inside the tenement buildings were sick children crying, people arguing, someone using the landing closet and at weekends, parties.
Day or night, the air of Yoker was always tinged with the sulphurous smell of coal from the thousands of domestic ‘ranges’ (stoves) and fires in the tenements, from Yoker power station, from the Drysdale engineering works and from the shipyards themselves.
The tenement building in which the Wights lived was owned by a Mrs Isabell Jones of Golfhill Drive, Dennistoun. Like the other tenements in Yoker, it was purpose-built, either by the shipbuilding firms or by speculators. Since town councils did not then have the power to build houses, housing was a matter for private enterprise; because a thousand pounds spent on a tenement block could garner more in rents than a thousand pounds in a bank account could accrue in interest, the savvy and monied from all Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire invested in red stone Yoker tenements.
Glasgow was the most densely populated city in Europe. When Alf was a boy in the Second City, three-quarters of his fellow citizens lived in tenements, and three-quarters of all tenement flats were either single rooms (‘single-ends’) or two rooms (‘room and kitchen’). Flats like the Wights’, with two rooms and a kitchen/sitting room, were for the slightly better off, costing about £12 a year in rent. Simply by walking past, you could tell that the Wights’ tenement block was for the ‘respectable working class’, with its brown ceramic tiles in the entrance, and shoulder height green, black and yellow border. A ‘wally close’ it was called – ‘close’ being the communal doorway and ‘wally’ the Glaswegian vernacular for tiles. Among the Wights’ neighbours were an engineer, Alex Turnbull, and his wife, Gavin Brand, also an engineer, and William Carruthers, an engineering draughtsman, and his wife Eliza.
Not all were as lucky as the Wights. Across Glasgow to the east and south were the slums of the Gorbals, Plantation and Bridgeton, where the tenements were largely single rooms in ‘made-down’ (subdivided) grand houses. It was not uncommon for whole families, plus lodgers, to live in a single-end, eleven to the room. Living conditions in a ‘made-down’ tenement were graphically described by William Bolitho, a South African journalist working for the Guardian:
We enter the Close. On each landing opens the water-closet, which the municipality installed thirty years ago. This is clean – the municipal are vigilant; but on average twenty-five persons share its use. In some houses this number is nearer fifty. On the other side of the tiny landing opens a long, impenetrably black gulf; the central corridor of five homes. We feel our way, knock at a door and enter, calling out ‘Sanitary’. A small room, one side of which is taken up by the Scots’ fireplaces, like an enclosed iron altar, with two hobs on which the teapot is kept everlastingly on the boil. The floor is worn wood, there are irregular square inches of frayed oilcloth. An enormous drabbled woman, who is dressed in dish clothes which do not show the dirt so plainly, however, as her face, explains the arrangement… She has five children, and the gas is kept burning all day at the glimmer. The elements are simple and human. There is the bed, set into a niche, deep, evil-smelling, strewed with heaps of the same material as her dress…
The shared lavatory was sometimes outside on the back court. An 1892 Act was supposed to force landlords to install indoor water closets but was not exactly successful: some tenement flats had outside loos as late as the 1960s.
The Gorbals, Glasgow’s most famous slum, did not start out poor; initially the Gorbals – the name is thought to derive from the Gaelic ‘gort an bhaile’, meaning the town’s field – was thoroughly middle class, but its elegance faded when the Irish, Highland and European migrants moved in. It was five minutes’ walk from the wealth of the city centre – the Argyll galleria with its diamond merchants, Sauchiehall Street with its department stores – but in the Gorbals children went barefoot, and porage and broth were the principal meals. Bandy-legged rickets was the result. By the time of the First World War, the east and south side slums of Glasgow were already locked in a cycle of deprivation. As A. MacArthur and H. Kingsley Long observed in No Mean City, their classic novel of Glasgow life:
…the lads and lasses alike are driven to marriage in the slums by sheer disgust of their own homes and desire to start afresh in a ‘hoose’ of their own, roomy enough, though it be no better than a ‘single end’. Married, they have babies in steady succession. If times are hard, they soon have to take in a lodger or two. In any event, before a dozen years have passed they have set up a home no whit different from the ones their parents made and soon their children begin to think of a similar escape from it.
Buildings in the Gorbals, as in much of Glasgow, were uniformly black over yellow or red stone; before the Clean Air Act, the only time you could see the hills from the city centre was in July during the annual Fair Holiday, when the factories closed. Sometimes the smog was so thick that the unwary walked into the Clyde and drowned.
Yoker was not the Gorbals. Yoker still had a green lung along its northern, non-riverside edge. And when the baby Alf Wight moved into the two-room ground floor flat at 2172 Dumbarton Road, the Gorbals had already been abandoned by money, which was following the spread of the shipyards west along the Clyde. Partick, Whiteinch, Scotstoun and Yoker were all booming. When novelist John Buchan wanted to prove the wartime bustle of Glasgow in Mr Standfast, where did he send hero Richard Hannay? Where else but Dumbarton Road? There Hannay was ‘amazed at the number of able bodied fellows about, considering that you couldn’t stir a mile on any British front without bumping up against a Glasgow battalion.
‘Then I realised that there were such things as munitions and ships, and I wondered no more.’
During the Great War there was always a ship to build for the Royal Navy or for the merchant fleet being depleted by the Kaiser’s U-boats only 40 miles away in the Western Approaches of the Atlantic; between 1914 and 1918 Yarrow’s yard built no less than 47 warships for the Admiralty. It was the highwater of shipbuilding on the Clyde, and platers like Jim Wight, the aristocrats of the yards, were taking home as much as £4/18s for a 50-hour week. Yarrow fed the stomach, but the Wights had moved to Glasgow for the good of their souls, to further their careers in music. And Glasgow was entertainment city.
If Glasgow ever dominated a branch of entertainment, it was music hall. Neil Kenyon, Jack Buchanan and Nellie Wallace all belonged to Glasgow, and Edinburgh boy Sir Harry Lauder was adopted by Mungo’s city (or he adopted it) and he was the most popular vaudeville comedian in the world. When Sir Harry Lauder appeared in Glasgow, people queued for hours to hear him sing ‘I Love a Lassie’, ‘Stop Yer Ticklin, Jock’, ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’, ‘Donald Where’s Yer Trewsers’ and, of course, ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, with its famous chorus:
I belong to Glasgow, Dear old Glasgow town;
But what’s the matter wi’ Glasgow,
For it’s goin’ roun and roun!
I’m only a common old working chap,
As anyone here can see,
But when I get a couple of drinks on a Saturday,
Glasgow belongs to me.
Music hall’s lofty peak was 1916. The Empire Theatre (showing ‘Shell Out – The Wonderful Revue’) was the largest hall outside London’s Savoy, and the Alhambra, the Coliseum, the Palace in the Gorbals and the Olympia in Bridgeton were all packing them in. At rough establishments like Pickard’s Panopticon Music Hall on Trongate – no longer the playground of merchants – where Stan Laurel made his debut, punters chucked rivets at the artistes they did nae like. Such was the penalty of a poor performance in a shipbuilding town.
There were also a hundred cinemas in Glasgow by 1917, the highest percentage per head of population of anywhere in Britain. Anywhere in the world outside America, come to that. The first building to open exclusively for the showing of films was Pringle’s in Sauchiehall Street in 1907 with 200 seats, but quickly the trend for cinemas became
for palace-sized establishments with a touch of luxury. So, the Picture House had a goldfish pool and cages of singing birds, and La Scala offered fish teas and afternoon teas. ‘If it’s Good it is Green’s’ was the slogan of George Green, the Lancashire circus-owner who morphed into the city’s movie-house mogul, and whose Green’s Playhouse was the biggest cinema in Europe, seating 4368 in velvety comfort.
George Green employed James Wight as a pianist at his 1100-seat Picturedrome cinema at 21 Govan Street (now Ballater Street) in the Gorbals. It was a four-mile tram journey there and back in the evening. There were picture houses much closer, such as the Paladium and Victoria in Scotstoun so presumably, Green was offering top pounds, or the Gorbals job was a foot in the orchestra pit of the Green empire. Or perhaps Hannah, under her stage name of ‘Anna Bell’, had the opportunity of singing in the intervals. Whatever, Jim along with all the rest of the male world travelling on the clattering double-deck tram ‘caurs’ would have wondered at the new breed of person clipping the tickets. With so many of its male employees away at the war, Glasgow Tramways enrolled 700 female conductresses, dressing them out in green straw hats and long Black Watch tartan skirts.
It was becoming a strangely female world. Scotstoun, next door to Yoker, had started the phenomenon of woman ‘posties’; the Grand Central, a restaurant ‘de luxe’, now featured the Belgian Ladies Band from the Liège Conservatoire; a Scottish training school for women police officers had opened in Charing Cross, the graduates of which were kept busy arresting illegal distillers; the ‘shebeeners’ included women too, such as Govan’s Sarah Gillam, who copped a £30 fine from the city’s court for half a bottle of home-made whiskey. Meanwhile, women war workers – ‘the shell belles’ – were earning a whacking £3/5s a week and, to the bemusement of the city’s burghers, had taken to frequenting the best emporia on the grand streets of the city centre, which were thronged with people, trams and horse-drawn carriages in these days of money. There was perhaps always a tempting of fate in the way that Glasgow threw money around during the Great War. Certainly the boom went bust.
When Jim Wight had walked through the dock gates of Yarrow’s yard in 1914 and was signed on by a foreman, he was one of 60,000 men working in the Clyde’s shipyards and marine engineering shops. But the war had artificially inflated the order book – of Yarrow’s in particular. Cancellation of Admiralty work was met with protests in the Yarrow’s yard. To no avail. In 1919, one year after the war’s end, the number of men employed in the Clyde yards was 43,000. One after the other, the yards on the Clyde ceased production, as did all the engineering shops and steel foundries dependent on them. Yarrow’s itself closed temporarily, and was only reborn by some sporadic Admiralty orders and a diversification into the making of land boilers.
Jim Wight was among those laid off, leaving him to join the throngs of shipyard workers standing at six o’clock each morning outside the gates, hoping to catch the attention of one of the ‘bastards in bowlers’ – the foremen. One retired shipyard worker from Browns told Alan McKinlay, the editor of the Clydebank oral history project Making Ships, Making Men:
If you were a riveter or whatever, you used to go down in the morning and wait outside the foreman’s office and he would say ‘you, you and you’ and give you a start. Sometimes the foreman would walk up and down the lines of men waiting for work without saying a word, not even a grunt – which most of them were capable of. That meant there was no work for you that day. They were just reminding you that they had all the power and you had none.
If there was no work, men signed on at the ‘Buroo’ (Bureau) for their ‘dole’ three times a week. Unemployment in Glasgow rocketed; in 1921 unemployment grew in the city by 1000 a day, and the sight of people digging in the abandoned coal bins on the city’s edge and men lounging listlessly on street corners became seared in the city’s memory. For something to do, the so-called ‘gentry of the corner’ would go singing in the back courts of the tenements. One of their ditties began:
Winter is coming, the night is beastly derk
The erc lights are fizzing in the West End Perk
All of the erc lights fizz like gingerade
End aih’m beneath your window
With this chairming serenade.
If they were lucky, someone would throw down a ha’pence. To make them go away.
It was against this background of economic ruination that the legend of ‘Red Clydeside’ was born. Although the Great War had seen strikes in the shipyards, including Yarrow’s, the real trouble came in 1919 with a demand for a 40-hour week, which the employers refused. At a massive demonstration in Glasgow’s George Square on 31 January 1919 in support of the shipyard workers, the Red Flag was unfurled. Police and trade unionists fought a pitched battle in which 53 people were injured. The Liberal Coalition Government sent in armed soldiers and tanks, and for a brief, panicky moment, class warriors on both sides thought that the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 was near to being repeated on ‘Black Friday’ in Glasgow. The strike was almost immediately called off, but the fear of its consequences remained. The Times of London reported:
Thousands of soldiers wearing steel helmets and full service kit were brought into Glasgow yesterday morning, and the hooligan element responsible for the bottle-throwing, window-smashing and looting on Friday has disappeared from the streets. I do not think there will be any recurrence of disorder. Those who now speak for the strikers [Emmanuel] Shinwell has been arrested at his home in Govan, and with [David] Kirkwood and [William] Gallagher is detained under remand at Duke Street prison – instead of talking of unconstitutional methods are asking the authorities to prove one instance of illegal conduct by the men. In their paper the Strike Bulletin, today they say – ‘It seems as if the Government want an opportunity to use arms against the workers on the Clyde, but we can assure them the workers have no desire or intention of providing such an opportunity. The workers are well aware of what the Government want and are not so foolish as to fall into the trap set so carefully to ensnare them.’
This is ingenious, but it may serve the purpose of restraining young hotheads from rash action. The looters, who serve one purpose of the revolutionary movement behind the strike itself, may be trusted to keep in hiding while the troops guard the city.
Clydeside’s reputation for being ‘Red’ extended to politics. In the general election of 1922, ten of Glasgow’s seats were won by the Independent Labour Party, under the leadership of James Maxton and John Wheatley. An enormous demonstration in St Enoch Square saw the successful ILP members off on the night train for London. But their noble manifesto, dedicated to the ‘unity of the nations of the world … happiness of the people of these islands’, was soon to come under pressure of the realpolitik practised at Westminster. Unable to deliver on its rosy promises, the ILP lost members right (Labour Party) and left (the Communist Party).
Yet Glasgow was never as politically red as it was painted. During the early years of Alf’s life in the Second City, Glasgow’s problem wasn’t wee red men; it was the wee hard men – and women – taking to drink to drown their sorrows about the Depression. A popular children’s skipping song of the time asked the question:
Does yer maw drink wine?
Does she drink it a’ the time?
Does she ever get the feelin’?
That she’s gonni hit the ceilin’?
Does yer maw drink wine?
Does yer maw drink gin?
Does she drink it oot a tin?
Does she ever get the feelin’
That she’s gonni hit the ceilin’?
Does yer maw drink gin?
One particular drink was the curse of the Glasgow unemployed classes: a cheap red wine laced with methylated spirits known as ‘Red Biddy’, ‘Johnny Jump Up’ or ‘Jake’. So toxic was the cocktail that the injurious effects of the drink were brought to the attention of the House of Commons more than once. Red Biddy cost 7d a bottle. In the depression-blighted East End, unemployed
men were reported to be addicted to another drink in the Twenties, meths boiled with brown vinegar, which was consumed by Glaswegians at 1s a gill.
‘Most of my boyhood companions finished up as wine drinkers,’ recalled Eddie Straiton, who would join Alf as a teenage student at Glasgow Veterinary College and be a fixture in Alf’s life for over fifty years. ‘If they didn’t have at least average intelligence, they simply had no chance. There was absolutely no future. With parents on the dole, their only prospects when they left school were endless days of lounging around street corners and billiard rooms until they were old enough to sign on at the “buroo” – the unemployment exchange. Inevitably many, like their parents, turned to drink.’
As a student, Alf would have to hide the smell of drink on his breath from his Temperance-inclined mother. But many a Glaswegian boy would have preferred a Maw who was a Methodist to a Maw who was drinking Red Biddy.
* * *
Glasgow spawned gangs: the Duke Street Boys, Baltic Fleet, the Nunnies, the San Tong, the Beehives, the Calton Entry, the Bingo Boys, the Govan Team, the South Side Stickers, the Cheeky 40, the Kent Stars, the Coburg Erin, the Romeo Boys, the Dirty Dozen, the Lollipops, the Savoy Arcadians, the Billy Boys, the Norman Conks … all had their nasty, brutish and short reigns of infamy on the streets of the East End and the South Side.
Some gangs owed their allegiance to a particular stretch of cobbles – the Nunnies were from Nuneaton Street – others to a faith. This was Glasgow, after all, sectarian city of Orange, sectarian city of Green. Of the city’s two most infamous gangs of the inter-war era, the Billy Boys and the Norman Conks, one was Proddy and one was Papist. The battle cry of the Billy Boys was:
Young James Herriot Page 3