When the Clyde Ran Red

by Maggie Craig

  Johnston’s sarcasm grew savage when he researched and wrote The History of the Working Classes in Scotland and Our Scots Noble Families. Often referred to more simply as Our Noble Families, this was published in 1909, when Johnston was 28 years old. One of his targets was the Sutherland family, notorious for the role they played in the Highland Clearances. He fired his first shot at one of their forebears:

  I began to be interested in this Hugo. He floats about in the dawn of the land history of Scotland, murdering, massacring, laying waste and settling the conquered lands on his offspring.

  Rooted in theft (for as every legal authority admits, the clan, or children of the soil, were the only proprietors), casting every canon of morality to the winds, this family has waxed fat on misery, and, finally, less than 100 years ago, perpetrated such abominable cruelties on the tenantry as aroused the disgust and anger of the whole civilised world.

  Forward soon attracted an impressive array of writers. H.G. Wells allowed the paper to carry one of his novels as a serial. Ramsay MacDonald wrote for it, as did suffragette leader Mrs Pankhurst. James Connolly was also a contributor. Born in Edinburgh of Irish parents, Connolly was a revolutionary socialist and Irish nationalist, shot by firing squad after the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. The socialist newspaper also benefited from the skill of artist Robins Millar, who drew many cartoons for it. A man of many talents, Millar went on to become a playwright and the doyen of Glasgow’s theatre critics.

  Trying to cover all bases, the young editor was sincere in his views but very astute. One of the contributors he commissioned to write articles for the Forward was John Wheatley, a committed socialist and devout Catholic. Wheatley attracted readers with the same deep religious faith as himself, helping many of them realize it was possible to be both a Catholic and a socialist. That took some doing. When Wheatley first declared himself to be a socialist his local priest and some members of the congregation were so horrified that they made an effigy of him and burned it at his front gate. Wheatley opened the door of his house, stood there with his wife and smiled at them. The next Sunday morning, he went to Mass, as he usually did, and the fuss soon died down.

  The eldest of ten children, John Wheatley was born in County Waterford, in Ireland, in 1869. Taking the path of many with Irish roots who feature in the story of Red Clydeside, his family came to Scotland when John was eight or nine years old. The Wheatleys settled in Bargeddie, then known as Braehead, at Coatbridge. At 14, John followed in his father’s footsteps and started working as a coalminer in a pit in Baillieston.

  Wheatley was a miner for well over 20 years, during which time he educated himself and became involved in politics, another path many Red Clydesiders followed. In his late 30s Wheatley set up a printing firm and joined the ILP. Two years later he was elected a county councillor. He was in his early 50s when he too became one of the 1922 intake of Labour MPs, sitting for Shettleston.

  Wheatley was much respected by his younger colleagues, especially James Maxton, who admired his intellect and organizational abilities. Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour prime minister, saw Wheatley’s abilities too, appointing him minister for health in the first Labour government of 1924.

  Another writer in the Forward stable was a coalminer from Baillieston who, under a pseudonym, specialized in laying into the coal owners and the vast profits they made at the expense of the miners who worked for them. Patrick Joseph Dollan later became lord provost of Glasgow.

  The Red Clydesiders were always passionate about children, education, health and housing. Look at the Glasgow of the early 1900s and it’s not hard to see why.

  Yet this was a city which presented many different faces to the world.

  2

  The Tokio of Tea Rooms

  Very Kate Cranstonish.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, Glasgow was the Second City of the Empire and the Workshop of the World. Scotland’s largest city and its surrounding towns of Clydebank, Motherwell, Paisley and Greenock blazed with foundries and factories, locomotive works, shipyards, steel mills, textile mills, rope works and sugar refineries. This was the time when the North British Locomotive Works at Springburn produced railway engines which were exported to every continent on Earth and shipbuilding on the Clyde was at its peak. The proud boast was that more than half the world’s merchant fleet was Clydebuilt.

  In 1907 John Brown’s at Clydebank launched the Lusitania, a Cunard liner destined for the North Atlantic run. The Aquitania was to follow in 1914. Before the Second World War came two of the most famous ocean liners of all, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth. The names of these Cunarders are redolent with the elegance of a bygone age.

  Glasgow was elegant too. Talented architects such as Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson and John Thomas Rochead, who also designed the Wallace Monument at Stirling, had fashioned a cityscape of infinite variety. The Mossmans, a family of sculptors, had adorned a huge number of Glasgow’s buildings with beautiful life-size stone figures often inspired by the mythology of Ancient Greece and Rome. These included the caryatids which decorate what is now the entrance to the Mitchell Theatre and Library in Granville Street, formerly the entrance to St Andrew’s Halls. When the Halls burned down in 1962 only the façade was saved. So many of the dramas of Red Clydeside were played out here, in what is now the Mitchell Library’s café and computer hall.

  In 1909 Charles Rennie Mackintosh finished the second phase of the project which gave the city and the world the Glasgow School of Art in Renfrew Street. Five years before that he and his wife and artistic partner, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, had created the Willow Tea Rooms in Sauchiehall Street for Mackintosh’s patron, highly successful Glasgow businesswoman Miss Kate Cranston.

  Along in the West End stood the extravagant red sandstone of the new Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Completed in 1901, it has been known and loved by generations of Glaswegians ever since simply as ‘the Art Galleries’, even if the young man about town who wrote it up in a guidebook called Glasgow in 1901 had fun describing it as ‘architecture looking worried in a hundred different ways’. In 1911 the builders were once again busy at Kelvingrove. Glasgow was looking forward to the third great exhibition to be held there: the Scottish Exhibition of National History, Art and Industry was scheduled to open at the beginning of May.

  The gorgeously Italianate City Chambers dominated George Square, a physical manifestation of Glasgow’s good conceit of itself. In his studio on the corner of North Frederick Street and Cathedral Street John Mossman created some of the figures which decorate it. On the other side of the square rose the dignified and rather more subtly ornamented Merchants’ House. Designed by John Burnet senior, it had additions by his son and namesake. John Burnet junior crowned the highest point of the building with a model of the globe, on top of which a sailing ship still rides the waves.

  The Bonny Nancy belonged to Mr Glassford, one of Glasgow’s powerful eighteenth-century tobacco lords. She’s a reminder that the city’s fortunes were founded on trade and the enterprise of her traders. Those convivial gentlemen used to raise their glasses of Glasgow Punch – take about a dozen lemons, add sugar, Jamaica rum, ice-cold spring water and the juice of a few cut limes – in a confident and cheerful toast: ‘The trade of Glasgow and the outward bound!’

  Work had to be done on Glasgow’s route to the sea before that trade could develop. People had first settled by the Clyde because the shallow river gave them fresh water and abundant fish and was easy to ford. As ships grew larger, the lack of depth became a problem. Goods had to be brought overland from Port Glasgow, causing delays and extra expense. Early civil engineering works such as the Lang Dyke, off Langbank, forced the Clyde into a narrower channel. Routine dredging also began, rendering the river navigable all the way up from Port Glasgow and the Tail of the Bank to the heart of Glasgow.

  The ‘cleanest and beautifullest and best built city in Britain, London excepted,’ which Daniel Defoe had so admired in the eigh
teenth century could now grow into one of the world’s busiest ports. The deepened river also made shipbuilding possible. The Clyde made Glasgow and Glasgow made the Clyde.

  The Anchor Line was one of many shipping companies operating out of Glasgow in the early 1900s. Its impressive headquarters in St Vincent Place just west of George Square was faced with white tiles from which the grime of an industrial city could more easily be cleaned. And Glasgow was dirty. Soot-blackened. Buildings of honey-coloured sandstone took only a few years to become as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat. Anyone who lived in Glasgow or Clydebank before the Clean Air Act of the early 1960s will remember the choking yellow fogs of winter. They owed as much to what was streaming out of factory chimneys as they did to the damp climate of the west of Scotland.

  There were few controls on pollution in the early 1900s. Factories, foundries and shipyards were risky places. The people who worked in them took their chances, no other choice being available. In this city of nearly a million and a half souls life for the majority was about economic survival. Over the course of the nineteenth century people in search of work and – just maybe, if the fates allowed – a better life for themselves and their families flooded into Glasgow. Most came from the Highlands and from Ireland, some from further afield. Traditionally a first settling point for new immigrants, the Gorbals became a predominantly Jewish area, many of those Jews fleeing persecution in Poland and Russia.

  Meanwhile, as electric trams took over from horse-drawn ones and local rail links improved, comfortably off Glaswegians decamped to developing suburbs like Bearsden and Pollokshields. What they sought and found there were lawned gardens, woods, open spaces and plenty of fresh air. In suburbs north and south of the Clyde laid out with wide avenues and parks filled with trees, boating ponds, tennis courts and putting greens, families enjoyed life. The lucky few lived in spacious, high-ceilinged villas designed by some of those great Glasgow architects, others in solid tenement flats of warm red and honey sandstone. Out in the suburbs the stone had more chance of retaining its light colour.

  Tradesmen who had worked their way up also moved out, taking their families to new houses built on old farmland which aimed to achieve a village-by-the-city feel. The dream of living in a country cottage where your children could play in a flower-filled garden with vegetables growing outside the kitchen door is an old and powerful one. It was shared by the socialists of Red Clydeside.

  John Wheatley came up with the idea of the £8 cottage, so called because that was what the yearly rent would be. A drawing by Robins Millar in the Forward in 1911 shows Father coming home from his work to be greeted by his young son and daughter running eagerly towards him. His wife stands behind the low fence which surrounds the neat, well-tended garden behind them, the baby in her arms. The first development in this style in Scotland was started before the First World War and finished after it by a housing co-operative of working-class families chaired by Sir John Stirling-Maxwell of Pollok. Lying between the modern-day Switchback Road and the Forth and Clyde Canal, the original name, Westerton Garden Suburb, makes the aspiration clear. It’s now simply Westerton, but its residents continue to refer to it as ‘the Village’.

  Westerton had a railway station, a school, a village hall, a post office and shops. With its grocery and drapery, Westerton Garden Suburb Co-operative Society was an offshoot of the larger Clydebank Co-op. If you wanted the bright lights of the city, they were on your doorstep, a short journey away by train, tram or bus. Step off onto Sauchiehall Street or Buchanan Street and you would find wonderfully opulent shops like Treron’s, Daly’s, Copland & Lye’s, Wylie & Lochhead’s, Pettigrew & Stephens’ and the jewellers of the Argyll Arcade, each offering all manner of delights: glittering gems, bracelets and necklaces, perfume, lace wraps and handkerchiefs, kid gloves, fox furs and the latest fashions from Paris.

  The wives and daughters of Glasgow’s industrialists, shipowners and businessmen could wander freely through this enchanted forest of gleaming wood and shining glass counters. Department stores were a transatlantic import which proved wildly popular in Glasgow. After the shopping was done, it would be up in the ornate brass lift to the restaurant to sip coffee while a pianist played discreetly in the background. Or you could go to one of the city’s fashionable tea rooms. Glasgow made two indispensable contributions to the popularity of the cup that cheers: Sir Thomas Lipton, the man whose name is still synonymous with tea around the world, was born in the Gorbals; Glasgow also invented the tea room.

  It was not the famous Miss Cranston who originally came up with the idea but her brother Stuart. A tea merchant who was an evangelist for the quality of his goods, he offered his customers a tasting before they made a purchase. In 1875 he moved to new premises on the corner of Argyle Street and Queen Street, put out a few tables and chairs, offered some fancy baking to go with the tea and started a trend.

  Tea rooms were tailor-made for Glasgow’s ladies of leisure. Their husbands and sons could go into pubs and chop-houses. In 1875 the department store hadn’t quite arrived and there were few places where respectable women could go unchaperoned. Tea rooms allowed them to meet up with their friends for a chat in safe and pleasant surroundings.

  Kate Cranston raised the tea room to an art form. She owned and managed four in Glasgow, in Ingram Street, Argyle Street, Buchanan Street and, most famously of all, the Willow Tea Rooms in Sauchiehall Street. In her patronage of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, his artist wife Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and their equally talented friends, Miss Cranston gave what became known as the Glasgow Style a stage on which it could flourish and grow. She was very much identified with this achingly fashionable and very modern look. Soon everything influenced by it, be that furniture, home decor or the crockery with which you set your table, was described not only as ‘artistic’ but also as ‘very Kate Cranstonish’.

  Oddly enough, although she was happy to give young designers such as Mackintosh and George Walton carte blanche to be as modern as they liked, Miss Cranston never updated her own personal style. Born in 1849, she wore the long, full skirts and extravagant flounces of the Victorian era until she died in 1933. Her only bizarre variation was to sport a cloak and sombrero.

  Once the Cranstons had thought up the idea, tea rooms sprouted all over Glasgow and beyond. By 1921 the well-known City Bakeries had dozens of branches and was running a profit-sharing scheme with its bakers and waitresses. The 1930s saw the establishment of Wendy’s Tea Rooms. They offered the homely atmosphere of the country in the bustle and smoke of the big city: back to the rural idyll.

  Reid’s in Gordon Street gave men the chance to meet their friends over coffee and a cigarette, in separate smoking rooms, of course. Miss Cranston also provided those to her gentlemen customers at the Willow Tea Rooms, along with billiard rooms. These male preserves occupied the second floor. The Room de Luxe, with its high-backed silver-painted chairs designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was on the first.

  In 1915 John Anderson’s Royal Polytechnic in Argyle Street, advertising itself, as it was always known to Glaswegians, as ‘the Poly’, offered ‘A Restful Den for Business Men’ in its Byzantine Hall. The delights of ‘Glasgow’s Grandest Smoke Room’ encompassed ‘fragrant coffees, delicious teas, telephones, magazines and all the leading newspapers’.

  In 1916 Stuart Cranston opened a new tea room in Renfield Street which included a cinema. This tea room became a popular gathering place for members of the ILP. During the First World War Renfield Street itself became a focus for regular Sunday-afternoon open-air meetings opposing the war.

  Tea rooms appealed to men as well as women, particularly those who supported the temperance movement. This included the majority of the socialists of Red Clydeside, who had too often seen the damage alcohol could do. Willie Gallacher, a key figure in the story of Red Clydeside, grew up in poverty in Paisley in the 1880s and ’90s, the son of an Irish father and a Highland mother. He was only 14 when he joined the temperance movement, having v
ery personal reasons to hate alcohol. Gallacher’s father was a good husband and an affectionate parent but his dependence on drink blighted family life. As Gallacher later said:

  I was still very young when my father died, but my eldest brother was already a young man. He was my mother’s favourite child. She was fond of all of us, but how she adored the oldest boy! When he developed a weakness for alcohol it almost drove her crazy. Her suffering was so acute that I used to clench my boyish fists in rage every time I passed by a pub.

  Many men, particularly young ones living what could be a lonely life between work in a Glasgow office and lodgings, went to tea rooms to enjoy the company of the waitresses. The book which poked fun at the architecture of the Art Galleries waxed lyrical on the subject. Glasgow in 1901 was written by three young men as a kind of guidebook advising visitors who would be in the city for the exhibition of that year on local ways of going about things.

  Describing Glasgow as ‘a very Tokio for tea rooms’, Archibald Charteris found it a great delight that tea room waitresses were Glasgow girls who spoke with a warm Glasgow accent, ‘the most accessible well of local English’. Describing what could happen after a young woman started working at a particular tea room, he was at pains to point out that she and her colleagues were highly respectable young ladies:

  Once installed, she may discover that a covey of young gentlemen wait daily for her ministrations, and will even have the loyalty to follow her should she change her employer. This is the only point in which she resembles a barmaid, from whom in all others she must be carefully distinguished.

  To other people she has a more human interest, and to a young man coming without friends and introductions from the country, she may be a little tender. For it is not impossible that, his landlady apart, she is the only petticoated being with whom he can converse without shame. So the smile which greets him (even if it is readily given to any other) is sweet to the lonely soul, and a friendly word from her seems a message from the blessed damosel.