Hullo, Hullo
We are the Billy Boys
Hullo, Hullo
You’ll know us by our noise
We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood
Surrender or you’ll die
For we are
The Brigton Derry Boys
Brigton was the local spelling of Bridgeton. A version of the song became the anthem of Glasgow Rangers Football Club until in 2006 UEFA instructed the club to make public announcements prohibiting its singing. Elsewhere in Britain, football was a cohering celebration of working-class life; in disintegrating, deprived Glasgow it was something to be fought over between the Protestant fans of Rangers and the Catholic fans of Celtic, the matches between them ending in bloody, kicking trouble with monotonous frequency.
The Billy Boys’ leader in the Thirties was Billy Fullerton, one of Glasgow’s ‘razor kings’, so named for their proclivity in using a cut-throat razor on their enemies. A fellow ‘razor king’, John Ross, was taken before the judge in 1931, where The Scotsman reported:
Amazing sidelights regarding the gang problem in Glasgow were given when a 22-year-old youth, known to his associates as the ‘razor king’ appeared before Lord Anderson in the North Court for sentence on a charge of assault. Accused was John Ross, stated to be a section leader of the ‘Billy Boys’ gang, and he pleaded guilty to a charge of having on November 27, while acting in concert with a number of unknown men in James Street, Bridgeton, assaulted William Rankin of 125 Main Street, struck him on the face, knocked him down and kicked him, in consequence of which he was severely injured.
Moving for sentence, Mr Taylor said that [the] accused was known as the ‘razor king’ and he was a leader of one of the gangs of brutal and cowardly hooligans who infested certain districts of the city. The gang was known as the ‘Billy Boys’ and a short time ago it was 800-strong. It had now been reduced to about 400 … Outlining the circumstances of the case, Mr Taylor explained that the assaulted man was in a picture house when some small quarrel arose between him and a girl, whose seat he was supposed to have occupied. The girl was apparently connected with the gang, and when the picture house was closed and the people were coming out, she passed the word to those members of the gang who were available. When Rankin went out he was pushed down the steps, struck from behind and knocked down by members of the gang.
While Rankin was lying on the ground he was kicked and assaulted. Indeed, at one time it looked as if he might be kicked to death, and a girl who was in the crowd, thinking he would be killed, very pluckily threw herself upon him as he lay on the ground and endeavoured to protect him as best she could until the arrival of the police. Rankin’s injuries were fairly serious and he was taken to the Royal Infirmary for treatment … Continuing, Mr Taylor said the two previous convictions admitted by the accused arose out of his activities as a gangster. The first one was one of assault by stabbing, and the second, which was a common assault, was committed on one of the female members of the gang, who had mislaid one of the razors from which he derived his name of the ‘razor king’.
His Lordship sentenced Ross to 18 months’ imprisonment.
Fullerton and Ross were the real-life models on which Johnnie Stark, the protagonist of No Mean City, was based. No Mean City began as a rambling story from the typewriter of an alcoholic Gorbals baker, Alexander McArthur, who lived on Waddell Street, close to the Southern Necropolis. In 1934, McArthur sent off the manuscript to Longman’s, the publishers. Longman’s saw nothing impressive in the writing or the plot but was so mesmerized by McArthur’s revelations about the Gorbals’ razor gangs, prostitutes, tenements and bedbugs that the company asked H. Kingsley Long, one of its professional readers, to look at the manuscript. A journalist on The People, Kingsley Long immediately packed his bag and went up to Glasgow to collaborate with McArthur on what would become No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums, the red-raw story of ‘bullet-headed’ Johnnie Stark, son of a violent father and downtrodden mother, who becomes the local ‘Razor King’. Long chose the novel’s title from the King James Bible, Acts 21:39, ‘I am … a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city.’
No Mean City outraged decent Glasgow with its docu-drama depictions of sex and violence. Libraries were forbidden to stock it. The Glasgow Evening Times refused to review it. Even so, people read it – its total sales are estimated at about 750,000 – and those who did were shocked, not just by the character’s amorality, but by the pervading sense of hopelessness. No matter what route the characters took to escape the slum, be it Johnnie’s violence, his brother’s espousal of the class struggle, his friend’s dancing, no-one did. The slum reclaimed them all. In a terrible case of life imitating art, McArthur, unable to repeat the success of No Mean City, sank into alcoholism and eventually took his own life in 1947, downing a bottle of disinfectant, throwing himself off a bridge into the Clyde to crawl out on the towpath and lie like a beached fish. Two people attended his funeral, both journalists.
The gangs were clustered in the East End and South Side, but there were gangs reported in Cowcaddens, Maryhill and Anderston, and Partick. Occasionally, though, the gangs erupted out of their slums to brawl in the city’s palais de danse and cinemas. Some of the ‘rammies’ were arranged like a mass duel. After one running street war in June 1931, the Glasgow Evening Times reported:
The spear of a swordfish and a wicked-looking Gurkha knife were among the number of weapons taken possession of by the police following an alleged gang fight in Kerr Street, Bridgeton, yesterday afternoon. The ‘battlefield’ was strewn with weapons after the fight … a piece of copper tubing … a brass-headed poker … a cudgel two feet long with a knob of wood as thick as the head of a drumstick … a wooden baton … an axe weighing 1½ lb … a steel file two feet long … a bayonet-like knife … and an iron rod three feet long, with a hook at each end.
It was widely and popularly believed that the gangs existed merely to fight their like and they never harassed ‘ordinary’ Glaswegians, they loved their Maws, and one could leave the door of the ‘hoose’ open in a street ‘owned’ by the gang because a larcenous thought never passed through their scarred heads. Actually, the gangs may not have been composed of Mister Big criminal masterminds, but all ran low-level felonious ‘enterprises’, chiefly protection rackets, whereby corner shopkeepers paid a ‘pension’ or got their windaes smashed. There was no honour among the gangs. If one of their number was fined or needed bailing, his fellows demanded money from householders, local businessmen and passersby.
Nobody in Twenties and Thirties Glasgow walked the streets without some fear of gang boys or ‘neds’. When Alf was studying at Glasgow Veterinary College in 1934, a running gang fight in neighbouring Cowcaddens forced pedestrians to take shelter in shops and closes. Eventually, the city’s authorities decided that the reign of the wee hard men must be ended and in 1931 recruited Percy Sillitoe as Chief Constable. The philosophy of Sillitoe, who had previously ‘busted’ the gangs of Sheffield, was simple: ‘There is only one way to deal with the gangster mentality. You must not show you are afraid.’ Sillitoe recruited to the city’s police force – at 1500 strong the second biggest in Britain – Highlanders and rural men of imposing size (most famously Olympic wrestler Archie MacDonald), and kitted them out with batons and a distinctive diced black-and-white cap band, ‘Sillitoe tartan’ as it became known. Percy Sillitoe’s Braveheart constables then proceeded to wade into the gangs at every opportunity, with the Chief Constable ensuring that judges passed hefty sentences on anybody apprehended. He also got rid of corrupt magistrates. The tipping point came in the late Thirties when Billy Fullerton was arrested in the middle of a melee and convicted of being drunk in charge of a child. Ten months in Barlinnie Prison ensued. With Fullerton gone, the Billy Boys lost their aura of invulnerability, and the era of gang rule was soon over. Sir Percy Sillitoe left Glasgow with the unofficial title of ‘Hammer of the Gangs’ and ended up as Director General of MI5.
It
was as these storm clouds of economic depression gathered over Glasgow that the education of Alf began. On 30 August 1921, when Alf was two months shy of his fifth birthday, he passed his first day at Yoker Primary School. A hop-skip-and-jump along Dumbarton Road from 2172, and past the Auld Hoose pub, Yoker Primary, founded in 1876, was a low, stone Victorian building cornering Kelso Street. Boys entered through one gate, girls through another. Alf’s seven years at the school were under the tutelage of William Malcolm MA, who was nicknamed ‘Beery’ by his charges on account of his florid visage, suggestive that its owner was partial to a pint of ‘heavy’. But then nearly every schoolchild in Glasgow was convinced his or her headmaster drank. As the children’s rhyme had it:
Oor wee school’s the best wee school,
The best wee school in Glesca.
The only thing that’s wrang wi’ it
Is the baldy-heided maister.
He goes tae the pub on a Setterday night,
He goes tae church on Sunday,
An’ prays tae God tae gie him strength
Tae belt the weans on Monday.
Alf’s favourite subjects at Yoker Primary were English and History, the latter taught by the inspirational Mr Paterson, who liked to reenact British history’s best moments, from chopping off the ‘heid’ of Charles I to chopping off the ‘heids’ of the Sassenachs at Bannockburn, using his cane for a sword. History and English would long remain Alf’s favourite subjects. (His worst subject at Yoker, as in life, was Maths.) The school day was from 8.45 am until 4pm, with an hour for lunch. In the yard at break times, Alf played football, ‘British bulldogs’, ‘cuddie hunch’, ‘spin the pirie’ and Bools (marbles). He also met the boy from Kelso Street called Alex Taylor who would become a friend for life. Indeed, so close was the friendship between Alf and Alex – widely known as Sandy, appropriately enough given his beach-blond hair – that 60 years hence Alex and his wife would retire to Yorkshire to live near Alf and his wife. Alex would even be godfather to Alf’s son.
Like the primary school, Yoker Church belonged to the building boom that came to Yoker with the Victorian expansion of the shipyards, when the village’s population shot up from 535 in 1871 to about 20,000 in 1903. The foundation stone of Yoker Church was laid in 1897, and for most of Alf’s childhood the Reverend William Walls was the minister there, his 14-year incumbency beginning in 1921. By the account of Both Sides of the Burn, the local history of Yoker, Walls ‘worked tirelessly among the people of the parish’ during the Depression, and the church congregation was at full capacity. Among those sitting on the bare oak pews on Sundays were Alf and his parents; although Hannah and Jim were born and bred Methodists, in Yoker they attended the Presbyterian services of Yoker Church and Alf, according to his daughter Rosie Page, ‘thought of himself as being brought up a Presbyterian’. Why did the Wights take the Presbyterian option? Aside from its convenience to 2172, Yoker Church was likely more to Hannah’s social taste: there was a different class of person at prayer than at chapel. It was more middle class.
Whatever class a man was, he prayed for work whilst sitting on the pews of Yoker Church. During the early 1920s, ‘Pop’, as Alf called his father, was ‘bouncing in and out of jobs’. Laid off from the yards – a blow for a proud man – he always found something, though. In 1926, the year of the General Strike, another fractious episode in Glasgow’s history, he seems to have finally given up being a plater, entering his occupation on the city returns as a joiner.
He was fortunate, of course, to have that musical string to his bow, to be able to play music for money. Aside from leading the orchestra at the Govan Picturedrome, he played with the ‘Glenafton Singers’ and with the Glasgow Society of Musicians he performed all over the city. When the talkies, beginning with Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer in 1927, looked set to kill live music in the cinemas, he played during the intervals, entertaining the punters as they queued for their ice-creams from the girl with the tray hanging from her neck.
Then there were the dances. After being music hall city, and cinema city, Glasgow became dance city. To put the Slump behind them, even if only for a brief hour, the people of Glasgow swung it out to the latest hot stuff coming in from America: the Tango, the Black Bottom and the Charleston. Whether it was in pub back rooms or in elaborate palais de danse ballrooms such as the Plaza at Eglinton Toll (multi-coloured lighting system, steel-sprung floors), dances needed someone on the piano, as well as the trombone and sax. By 1930, Glasgow (population 1 million) had 59 dances halls, while London (population 8 million) had 260.
The Wights’ family finances, however, were not just a matter of Pop’s efforts. In the dead economic years of the Twenties, Hannah sang for the family’s suppers. She also began dressmaking, at which she excelled – and at which she made considerably more than pin money. Indeed, she soon had a veritable industry on her skilled hands, requiring several seamstresses and a maid, Sadie. Hannah’s clients included the Glasgow great and good, such as Lady Ernest Field. Not many houses on Dumbarton Road would have enjoyed a maid, and a Christmas-card list that included the titled.
As a result, Alf was almost unscathed by the Depression, cocooned by his parents’ love and hard work. When the Wights did not have work, they worked at getting work.
There is a photograph of Alf at Yoker Primary aged nine. He is smiling, and radiates self-assurance. He is conspicuously well turned out in a jacket, shirt and tie (as is Alex Taylor, resplendent in a sailor suit) and wears the look of someone who expects good things to happen in life. There are others in the photograph who, judging by their faces and apparel, do not.
In the same year, 1925, that Alf was snapped smiling in the yard at Yoker Primary, ‘TV vet’ Eddie Straiton started his first job, delivering milk with Jock the milkman at Clydebank for the princely weekly wage of threepence. Straiton was aged eight. The job began at four in the morning:
My bare feet beat a tattoo on the pavement in an effort to keep warm and the ice-cold gusts of wet wind searched rudely under my short kilt. Goose pimples ribbed my rump like rough sandpaper. The oil lamps of the milk float loomed out of the dark and the old mare slowed down to big Jock’s suppressed ‘Whoaa lass’, while I swung myself on to the tattered sacking that provided a seat beside the milkman’s massive form. He reeked of sour milk and cow dung.
‘Rest yer arse there, laddie, and we’ll dae Rannoch Street first.’ Rannoch Street was only slightly less poverty-stricken than Sloan Avenue, which housed myself and many similar urchins, all of whom constantly sought the very scarce part-time jobs as a vital economic necessity. I was lucky; Jock’s regular helper had been sacked for ‘drinkin’ the mulk’.
In ten-gallon churns at the rear of the float slopped the cargo of milk, and rattling in front was a pile of milk cans with long handles. It was pitch dark but I knew they were there. I had passed Jock’s milk cart nearly every day since toddling to school.
The work was hard, especially on an empty stomach. My puny arms ached with the effort of carrying a full half-gallon can up a ‘close’ – three flights of stairs. Most families lived in three-storey stone-built tenements, three houses on each floor. The tenants left money in jugs or cups outside their doors, one penny for a pint, a ha’penny for a half and a farthing for a teacupful.
After only three closes, Straiton found his heart breaking for the poverty of the people. When he reached the McCaffertys’ in Glenville Street he could bear it no more: the father, broken by years of poverty, had drowned himself in the canal a month before, leaving Mrs McCafferty with eight children. ‘I stared at the empty half-pint jug,’ remembered Straiton. ‘Inside there was no money, no note – nothing.’ He secretly paid for Mrs McCafferty’s milk himself, dropping his ha’penny Christmas present in Jock’s money bag.
He then went to school.
* * *
Outside school, Alf enjoyed an early childhood almost scripted from the pages of Boy’s Own Paper. Yoker might have been a shipbuilding village, but it was a shipbuilding vi
llage on Glasgow’s absolute edge. (In fact, Yoker wasn’t officially incorporated into Glasgow until 1926.) Beyond Kelso Street, five hundred yards from Alf’s tenement, lay open country, and during Alf’s first years in Yoker cows still wandered on to Dumbarton Road. He played ‘Moshie’ (flicking marbles into holes), kicked a football around on the fields and raced around on his Colson ‘Fairycycle’, after Pop helped him learn to ride. A ‘Fairycycle’ was a small-wheeled safety bicycle that was the object of green-eyed envy. Colson’s advertisements declared:
Happy are the owners of Fairy Bikes – Velocipedes, Scooters, Tricycles, Coasters – each ride so gracefully, speedily and safely. Only Fairy Bikes are made exactly like you want them and last the way your parents hope they will.
Playtime is always joytime on a Fairy. What fun you can have! Out in the glorious sun, riding here and there in the fresh air, building strong, healthy bodies.
Owning a bike was a sure-fire way of getting sweets from other kids, because the city-wide standard bribe for a go on a bike was ‘I’ll give ye a sweetie for a shot on yer scooter.’
With a penny, rather than a sweetie, clutched in his hand he went to the Saturday matinees at the cinema, of which there were three close by: the Gaiety, the Empire and the Pavilion. On Saturday afternoons in winter, Alf stood with his father at Holm Park on Dock Street and shouted for the local football team, Yoker Athletic FC. Throughout the Twenties and Thirties, Yoker Athletic scored success after success in the junior division, winning the Scottish Intermediate Cup, the League Championship, the Glasgow Charity Cup, the Elder Cup and in 1932–3, glory of glories, the Scottish Junior Cup. (‘Whe Ho’, as Yoker Athletic supporters say.)
Young James Herriot Page 4