by Maggie Craig
Kate Cranston did not escape the censure of the Red Clydesiders. An article published in the Forward on Saturday, 15 July 1911 was headed ‘How Miss Cranston Treats Her Workers’, with a subtitle of ‘The Limit of Tea Room Generosity’. The piece was based on a set of typewritten ‘Rules for Girls’, so presumably one of those girls had made a copy of the rules and smuggled it out. Did Miss Cranston investigate afterwards to try to establish who the culprit was?
Hours were long. Six days a week, Miss Cranston’s waitresses worked from seven in the morning till eight at night. On Saturdays, they worked until five o’clock, except at the Willow Tea Rooms, which stayed open until eight o’clock on Saturdays too. Hours for girls under 18 were ‘not to exceed 74 per week’. Unless you were working the extra hours required at the Willow, you were working 74 hours a week anyway. Maybe the breaks weren’t counted, although these were not very generous. The Forward drew particular attention to the lunch break of ten minutes, during which each girl was provided with a cup of cocoa or a glass of hot milk and a biscuit.
In 1920 discontent among the waitresses who worked in Kerr’s Cafés boiled over into a strike. Their boss was William Kerr, who advertised himself as ‘the military caterer’. If his management style followed military lines that may well have been part of the problem. A leaflet was printed to alert the people of Glasgow to the conditions under which the waitresses in his cafés worked:
Sweated Workers in Glasgow
STRIKE OF WAITRESSES AT KERR’S CAFES
Citizens of Glasgow, your attention is drawn to the conditions which prevail at above establishments:
12/- per week for 12 hours per day
1/- deducted if girl breaks a plate
9d deducted if girl breaks a cup
6d deducted if girl breaks a saucer
2/- deducted if girl breaks a wineglass
3d deducted for being late in morning
The Girls decided to join the Union, with the result that the Shop Steward was dismissed, which is quite evidently an attempt to undermine the Girls’ Union.
Previous to joining the Union, the minimum wage of restaurant workers was 10/- per week, and they had to purchase uniform from the firm.
We are asking the public to
SUPPORT THE GIRLS
Some of Kerr’s Cafés stayed open till quarter to eleven at night for late suppers, so presumably being late for work the following morning was a not uncommon occurrence. The strike lasted less than a month, and during it most of the waitresses at Kerr’s voted with their feet and went looking for work elsewhere.
Harry McShane, Red Clydesider and Marxist, described the wages earned by the waitresses at Kerr’s as pitiful. Yet away from the clinking of china cups, cake stands piled high with scones, shortbread and chocolate eclairs and the stylish decor of Miss Cranston’s artistic tea rooms, there were plenty of Glaswegians who would have leapt at the chance to earn even those pitiful few shillings.
3
Earth’s Nearest Suburb to Hell
A whole world of sacrifice and effort.
Helen Jack, who became better known under her married name of Helen Crawfurd, was born in 1877 in Glasgow’s Gorbals, where her father was a master baker. In her unpublished memoirs she neatly summed up the character of her birthplace as a Jewish working-class district.
Her father William Jack had an open-minded attitude not always usual among Gentiles at that time towards his many Jewish neighbours, now and again attending services at his local synagogue. He also had a highly developed social conscience in respect of the poorer families among whom he and his more well-off family lived. He and his wife brought their children up to have a strong religious faith and this Christian family practised what it preached.
When times were especially hard in the Gorbals during a strike, William Jack set up a soup kitchen in his bakery for those struggling to feed themselves and their families. As Helen later remembered, even as a master and a man who voted Conservative, his sympathies were always with the workers. As committed as he was to helping their fellow men and women, Helen’s mother and grandmother ran the soup kitchen. Identify the problem, work out what you can do about it and then do it: the example set was to form the pattern for Helen Crawfurd’s life.
Mrs Jack, also Helen, helped foster that social conscience in her children by what she read to them. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a favourite. Her daughter remembered that she and her brothers and sisters would call to their mother not to start reading until they had fetched their hankies, because they knew they would not be able to hold back the tears when they heard ‘this tragic story of negro suffering’.
Helen junior saw suffering in Glasgow too, and with fresh eyes when the Jack family returned to the city after some years living in gentler surroundings near Ipswich in England. By now 16 years old, the maturing young woman was horrified by the Glasgow of the 1890s:
I was appalled by the dirt, poverty and ugliness I saw all around in Glasgow. I felt that other women along with myself must feel the same resentment and indignation. I watched the faces of the workers in tramcars and buses. They were worn with worry. I do not think any city had more people with bad teeth. In my young days orthopaedic surgery was in its infancy, and a great many people in Glasgow had bandy or bow legs and were undersized. The women carried their children in shawls, and the soft bones became bent. It has been stated that Glasgow’s water supply then lacked certain lime essential for bone building. To-day it is unusual to see these deformed people, but in my youth they were very common. The housing conditions and the death rate of infants were appalling.
One statistic in particular struck her. Occupied by large families though they were, forty thousand of Glasgow’s tenement flats consisted of only one room and a kitchen. She wrote with feeling of how, when a member of the family died, the living had to share that one room with the body of their loved one till the day of the funeral. That loved one would too often have been a baby. Infant mortality rates in late nineteenth-century Glasgow were indeed appalling, and the grim statistics were to grow even worse. In the years immediately following the First World War 40 per cent more babies died in infancy in Glasgow than in the rest of Britain as a whole. One in every seven children in the city did not reach his or her first birthday.
The difference within Glasgow was also appalling, as statistics from 1911 show. That 29 babies in every 1,000 in middle-class Kelvinside died in infancy might shock and sadden us, but down in the working-class Broomielaw the figure was even worse, standing at an horrific 234. In the Gorbals there were 145 infant deaths per 1,000 births, in Springburn 117.
The Red Clydesider who described Glasgow as ‘Earth’s nearest suburb to hell’ was James Stewart, better known as Jimmy. Another of those Labour MPs who were to triumphantly enter Parliament in 1922, he knew what he was talking about. A hairdresser to trade, he kept the patients at Glasgow Royal Infirmary neat and tidy. Diphtheria, scarlet fever, pneumonia: all these diseases were rife. The great scourge was tuberculosis, also known as consumption or phthisis. TB claimed a thousand lives in Glasgow each year and its favoured victims were young adults. Spreading as it did where people lived on top of one another in overcrowded and unhygienic tenements, it was considered a disease of the poor and the feckless. There was shame attached to contracting TB.
The tenement is a distinctive form of architecture. It provided many Glaswegians with elegant, spacious and comfortable homes, others with less grand but no less substantial and respectable ones – and then there were the slums. As bare of comfort inside as they were rundown outside, many of these grimy grey tenements pressed hard against the city centre, well within walking distance of Glasgow’s great public buildings or elegant shopping streets.
That so many well-off Glaswegians made their homes to the west of the city was no accident. That move had begun in Victorian times, when the university, always known as the Old College, left its mediaeval home in the High Street in 1870. This took the students away from the beating hea
rt of the old city but also from dingy closes packed tightly with slums which were breeding grounds for crime, violence and disease.
The Victorian city fathers commissioned photographer Thomas Annan to record the slums of old Glasgow for posterity, the wynds and vennels crammed in behind the High Street and around the Briggait, south of Glasgow Cross. Staring back at the photographer, barefoot children and women in shawls stand under washing dangling from high poles sticking out across the narrow closes and alleyways of these shadowy spaces.
Up on Gilmorehill in the West End the students were now able to breathe clean air. Like the well-off Glaswegians who were lucky enough to live in the gracious Edwardian townhouses of Park Circus, they could trust the prevailing westerly winds of the British Isles to blow any pollution or nasty smells back across to the East End. Over there the cholera and typhus which attacked Glaswegians in their thousands during the epidemics of the nineteenth century might have been swept away with the old slums. Plenty of diseases were left to incubate in the new slums which rose to take their place. Those who did not have to endure such awful living conditions could still manage to turn a blind eye to them.
There were others who found them impossible to ignore, people like James Maxton and Helen Crawfurd. Driven by the same passionate social conscience, another was Margaret Irwin. Among the many achievements of her long life, she was the driving force behind the establishment of the Scottish Trades Union Congress in 1897, a body which has always been completely independent of its English counterpart. Never a member of a trade union herself, Margaret Irwin was the STUC’s secretary for the first three years of its existence. Women might not yet have had the vote but that didn’t mean they couldn’t play an active role in public life.
The daughter of a ship’s captain, Margaret Hardinge Irwin was born in 1858 ‘somewhere in the China Seas’ on board a ship called the Lord Hardinge, After this romantic start to her life, she grew up in Broughty Ferry, near Dundee. Her father valued education and encouraged and supported his only child while she attended St Andrew’s University, from which she graduated in 1880 with a degree in German, French and English Literature.
In her early 30s Margaret Irwin moved to Glasgow, where she took classes at Glasgow School of Art and, in political economy, at Queen Margaret College, newly established for female students within Glasgow University. From then on she dedicated her life to investigating and improving living and working conditions for poor women and their families. She became a recognized and respected authority on the subject. Coming as she did from Broughty Ferry, next door to Dundee and its jute mills where an army of women toiled to ‘keep the bairns o’ Dundee fed’, this may be where her interest in the difficulties facing the working classes started.
For 44 years she was secretary of the Scottish Council for Women’s Trades. As an assistant commissioner to the Royal Commission on Labour she compiled many reports on working conditions in laundries, shops, sweatshops and among homeworkers. These housewives struggling to make ends meet had even less protection from unscrupulous employers than women in factories, and earned ludicrously low wages.
Audrey Canning, librarian of the Gallacher Memorial Library at Glasgow Caledonian University, describes Margaret Irwin as being like a modern-day investigative journalist, ‘toiling alone up dilapidated tenement stairs to discover the slum housing conditions of women working for a pittance’. Her investigations and reports paint a vivid picture of just how bad those conditions could be.
Shortly before Christmas 1901 she gave a paper on The Problem of Home Work at a Saturday conference in Paisley organized by the Renfrewshire Co-operative Association:
Frequently one finds the home worker occupying an attic room at the top of a five-storeyed building, the ascent to which is by a dismal and dilapidated staircase, infested by rats or haunted by that most pitiable of four-footed creatures, the slum cat. The landings are foul with all manner of stale débris; and the atmosphere is merely a congestion of evil odours. At every storey narrow, grimy passages stretch to right and left, on either side, close packed, is a row of ‘ticketed houses’ . . .
On every landing there is a water tap and sink, both the common property of the tenants, and the latter usually emitting frightful effluvia. Probably the sink represents the entire sanitary system of the landing.
Armed with a box of matches and a taper and battling with the almost solid smells of the place, one finally reaches the top, and on being admitted, finds, perhaps, a room almost destitute of furniture, the work lying in piles on the dirty floor or doing duty as bed clothes for a bed-ridden invalid and the members of the family generally.
Glasgow started ticketing houses in the 1860s in the hope of reducing overcrowding in the city’s slums. Every house of fewer than three rooms was measured and it was calculated that each occupant required three hundred cubic feet of living and sleeping space. A metal ticket was then fixed to the front door, stating how many people could legally occupy the house. This was enforced by midnight visits from the sanitary inspectors.
By the 1880s the city had over 23,000 ticketed homes. These housed three-quarters of Glasgow’s population, probably rather more than that once the sanitary inspectors had finished their rounds for the night. People were so desperate for a place to lay their heads that the ticketing rules were often flouted. Their unlikely landlords and landladies were in their turn so desperate to make a few extra pence or shillings that they were prepared to squeeze in what Margaret Irwin called ‘that unknown and highly elastic quantity, the lodger’. The number of ticketed houses in Glasgow just before the First World War was not much lower than in the 1880s, around 22,000.
While many Glaswegians have fond memories of the camaraderie and warmth of life in the old tenements, and of mothers who kept their homes as neat and clean as a new pin and their children well scrubbed and well turned-out, there is no doubt that thousands who lived in the Second City of the Empire did so in poverty and squalor. The record is there, in photographs and written accounts.
There were always those who managed to rise above their circumstances. After describing the flat ‘almost destitute of furniture’, Margaret Irwin wrote, ‘However, side by side with the worst of these one finds a little room exquisitely neat and clean and representing a whole world of sacrifice and effort.’ It must have been heartbreaking, hard to witness, but this woman who could have enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life had set herself a task, and she would not flinch from it. She was well aware that many of the haves saw no reason why they should worry about the have-nots: ‘It is often said that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives. It might be said, perhaps with equal truth, that one half does not care to know.’
As Audrey Canning emphasizes, Margaret Irwin did care to know. Determined that everyone else should too, she was prepared to shout her findings from the rooftops. Her voice reached the legislators at Westminster, helping bring about reforms which made a difference to the lives of thousands. Speaking to the second reading of the Seats for Shop Assistants Bill in 1899 the Duke of Westminster quoted from a report Margaret Irwin had made on shop assistants in Glasgow:
My attention has been directed by several medical men of standing and experience, and also by numerous grave complaints from the women assistants themselves, to two causes which, in addition to long hours and close confinement, operate against the health and comfort of women employed in shops. These are – want of seats, and the absence of, or defective, sanitary provisions.
In other words, they wanted a few seats where they could sit down for a rest now and again, plus a proper toilet. Margaret Irwin recorded a pathetic plea: ‘As has been more than once said to me, “If they would only allow us a ledge to rest upon for a minute or two we would be thankful even for that.”’
Nor was there any entitlement to meal breaks, shop assistants having to snatch a bite to eat if and when they could. Hours were long, work starting first thing in the morning and lasting until nine or even ten o’clock
at night. On average, shop assistants in Glasgow and Scotland’s other cities at the turn of the twentieth century worked between 80 and 90 hours in return for wages of 10 shillings per week. So the waitresses at Kerr’s Cafés working in excess of 70 hours for 12 shillings per week some 20 years later really were in a pitiful situation, one which had seen no real improvement.
Margaret Irwin was scathing too about how much less women were paid compared with men, firing off a few salvos in what might be described as a hundred-years war:
Now, it seems reasonable to expect that when there are large discrepancies in the wages of the worker, a corresponding difference would be found in the prices charged to the public for the goods made by the respective sexes. So far as I am aware, however, the difference stops short at the pay-books of the worker, and the vest and cigarette made by the women has the same value put upon it when it goes into the market as that made by the man. If, however, any gentleman present can inform me of a reduction made in his tailor’s or tobacconist’s bill because of the goods being supplied being the product of women’s labour, I shall be glad to note the fact for future reference.
How the shop assistants of the 1890s managed without a toilet is probably best left to the imagination. That Victorian shopkeepers, with that era’s outward prudery and respectability, had to be forced by law into supplying this most basic of facilities to their predominantly young female workforce is a telling illustration of their lack of humanity and lack of respect towards the people who made their profits for them. The working classes were there to be worked, and if that took them through humiliation to the brink of exhaustion then so be it.