by Alan Taylor
We did know the river farther down where it grew salt and turned into the lochs upon which we spent part of our summer holidays, and we saw it farther up. The Clyde in Glasgow itself we scarcely thought about.
Money was a subject I never remember as a topic of conversation at home during my youth. Such things as the rent of our town house or the cost of country lodgings for holidays, or even the prices of clothes, food or household articles never came up in talk. Father, of course, went off on foot each morning (after kissing us all round the breakfast table and being assisted with his coat and hat in the lobby and waved out of sight) to ‘make money’ for us; and he returned each evening a little tired after having presumably made enough for our needs. He came home also for a midday meal, after which he lay down on the long red-leather-covered sofa where, covered by us with a huge tartan shawl and undisturbed by the continued family life about him he immediately slept. After some twenty minutes he sprang up refreshed and fit for a renewal of his money-making.
The building where these daily efforts were made bore an appropriate resemblance to a money-box – one of those early money-boxes that were known as ‘savings banks’. These were of cast metal painted black, square in shape, elaborately corniced with a slot in the roof for the entrance of pennies. It was in West Regent Street, and we entered it only on special occasions. As we drew near to its pseudo-Gothic portals we became silent: as we ascended the wide but dirty stone staircase awe fell upon us. My father was, I believe, a commission agent. He negotiated in particular the shipping and sale of textiles to the West Indies. Some of the ships concerned were built for, and for a time at least owned by, him. One of these, a steamship named the Claudine, I launched from its slips on the Clyde when I was perhaps thirteen years old, and we all took part proprietorially in her trial down the river. Another of his ships, the Collossie – a sailing vessel named after the village where part of his childhood was spent – my sister Fanny launched. The Claudine was wrecked on her first voyage, the Collossie, under a diferent name, came to figure in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale The Wrecker. It would seem that father was not lucky with ships, and looking back I seem to know now what was then never apparent to me, that he was frequently unlucky in business undertakings, which were much in the nature of commercial gambling. I remember once his bringing home to show us a yard or two of printed cotton – yellow corn stalks in full ear effectively set against a background of turkey red. Some of this, he told us, had been sent ‘on spec’ to the Sandwich Islands, and it had so pleased the islanders that the more prosperous took to riding about on horseback with streamers of the fabric fluttering from their shoulders. To such a pitch did this emulation in display develop that he had a request for a repeat order of many bales – possibly the hold of the Claudine was full of them.
But such exotic hints had little or no connexion in my mind with the making of money by my father. I had a vague idea that consequent upon certain mysterious ceremonies enacted before his large desk, of which he was the sole master, coins in sufficient quantity insinuated themselves through a hole in the office roof. I have said we were awed when we were there. Father in these surroundings became for us a different being – more distant and impressive because of the numerous underlings through whom we had to pass to reach him.
Of the money father made we each had a penny a week in pocket money. Much thought and choice was expended each Saturday on the laying out of this penny that father had made and given us. In those days, a penny seemed to go a very long way. You could buy a wooden box of sherbet for a halfpenny (with a wooden spoon in it to eat from delicately) and the other halfpenny could be laid out in a more permanent possession, such as a rubber balloon, or one of those contraptions at the end of a long string, which by a process of suction could fish up something desirable from the deepest street area, if lowered between the iron bars on pavement level. I have even on occasion fished up another penny, thus increasing my weekly allowance by 100 per cent. At a more advanced age we began to receive a threepenny piece each Saturday and when this was raised to sixpence, maturity was announced.
Coins counted to us, not money. This persists with me even now. With a half-crown to finger in my pocket, I feel far removed from destitution. As a petty trader I take some beating. But money in its larger sense has always remained a mystery, with me as an uncomprehending outsider. It is something that is made in larger or smaller quantities. If I were to pick up piles of stones in his field for a farmer I should demand and value the sixpence paid for each pile. But I cannot see myself as ‘earning’ money.
With guidance and encouragement I should have made a good counterfeit coiner.
‘GLASGOW’, 1890
William Topaz McGonagall
Long after his death William McGonagall’s position as the world’s worst poet remains unchallenged. Born in Edinburgh, which is not something the capital likes to boast about, McGonagall (1830–1902) was of Irish stock. He spent part of his childhood on Orkney before settling in Dundee. Drawn to the boards, he did some acting but it was as a poet, and a woeful one at that, that he was to achieve fame. In 1878 he published his first collection of poetry, which included his ‘master-piece’, ‘The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay’. Cursed with what’s been described as a ‘calypso-like disregard for metre’ and a tin ear for rhyme, he went on his way regardless of the brickbats thrown at him. What can be said of his paean to Glasgow? That it could not have been written by anyone else?
Beautiful city of Glasgow, with your streets so neat and clean,
Your stately mansions, and beautiful Green!
Likewise your beautiful bridges across the River Clyde,
And on your bonnie banks I would like to reside.
Chorus:
Then away to the West – the beautiful West!
To the fair city of Glasgow that I like the best,
Where the River Clyde rolls on to the sea,
And the lark and blackbird whistle with glee.
’Tis beautiful to see the ships passing to and fro,
Laden with goods for the high and the low;
So let the beautiful city of Glasgow flourish,
And may the inhabitants always find food their bodies to nourish.
The statue of the Prince of Orange is very grand,
Looking terror to the foe, with a truncheon in his hand,
And well mounted on a noble steed, which stands in the Trongate,
And holding up its foreleg, I’m sure it looks first-rate.
Then there’s the Duke of Wellington’s statue in Royal Exchange Square –
It is a beautiful statue I without fear declare,
Besides inspiring and most magnificent to view,
Because he made the French fly at the battle of Waterloo.
And as for the statue of Sir Walter Scott that stands in George’s Square,
It is a handsome statue – few can with it compare,
And most elegant to be seen,
And close behind it stands the statue of Her Majesty the Queen.
Then there’s the statue of Robert Burns in George Square,
And the treatment he received when living was very unfair;
Now, when he’s dead, Scotland’s sons for him do mourn,
But, alas! unto them he can never return.
Then as for Kelvin Grove, it is most lovely to be seen
With its beautiful flowers and trees so green.
And a magnificent water-fountain spouting up very high,
Where people can quench their thirst when they feel dry.
Beautiful city of Glasgow, I now conclude my muse,
And to write in praise of thee my pen does not refuse;
And, without fear of contradiction, I will venture to say
You are the second grandest city in Scotland at the present day!
A MINOR EPISODE, c. 1892
John Buchan
Perth-born John Buchan (1875–1940) was the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister. He wa
s educated at Hutchesons’ Grammar School and between 1892 and 1895 at the University of Glasgow. Thereafter he juggled several careers, in all of which he shone. Today he is best known as a writer of fiction and will forever be associated with The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), in which he introduced the character of Richard Hannay. Between 1922 and 1936 he wrote a thriller a year. Despite accusations of racism, anti-semitism and snobbishness, his reputation has endured, not least because of the power of his story-telling. In 1935 he was appointed Governor-General of Canada, taking the title Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield.
I never went to school in the conventional sense, for a boarding school was beyond the narrow means of my family, but I had many academies. The first was a dame’s school, where I learned to knit, and was expelled for upsetting a broth pot on the kitchen fire. The next was a board school in the same Fife village. Then came the burgh school of the neighbouring town, which meant a daily tramp of six miles. There followed the high school of the same town, a famous institution in which I believe Thomas Carlyle once taught. When we migrated to Glasgow I attended for several years an ancient grammar school on the south side of the river, from which, at the age of seventeen, I passed to Glasgow University.
I found my first real intellectual interest in the Latin and Greek classics. For the next three years I was a most diligent student, mediaeval in my austerity. Things have changed now, but in my day a Scottish university still smacked of the Middle Ages. The undergraduates lived in lodgings in the city and most of them cultivated the Muses on a slender allowance of oatmeal. The session ran from October to April, and every morning I had to walk four miles to the eight o’clock class through a variety of the winter weather with which Glasgow fortifies her children. My road lay through the south side of the city, across the Clyde, and so to the slopes of Gilmorehill. Most of that road is as ugly as anything you can find in Scotland, but to me in the retrospect it was all a changing panorama of romance. There was the weather – fog-like soup, drenching rains, winds that swirled down the cavernous streets, mornings that dawned bright and clear over snow. There was the sight of humanity going to work and the signs of awakening industry. There was the bridge with the river starred with strange lights, the lit shipping at the Broomielaw, and odours which even at their worst spoke of the sea. There was the occasional lift in the London train, which could be caught at a suburban station, and which for a few minutes brought one into the frowst of a third-class carriage full of sleepy travellers from the remote and unvisited realm of England. And at the end there were the gaunt walls of the college often seen in the glow of a West Highland sunrise.
As a student I was wholly obscure. I made few friends; I attended infrequently one or other of the numerous societies, but I never spoke in a debate; and I acquired the corporate spirit only at a rectorial election, when, though a professed Tory, I chose to support the Liberal candidate, Mr Asquith, and almost came by my end at the hands of a red-haired savage, one Robert Horne, who has since been Chancellor of the Exchequer. My summers were spent in blessed idleness, fishing, tramping and bicycling up and down the Lowlands. But my winters were periods of beaver-like toil and monkish seclusion. I returned home early each afternoon and was thereafter at my books until midnight.
STEEL DROPS, c. 1895
J.J. Bell
There is nothing particularly modern about quack medicines and ersatz remedies for common complaints. Nor has there ever been a dearth of snake oil salesmen eager to off-load them on to gullible hypochondriacs. J.J. Bell, the author of the pawky novel Wee Macgreegor (1902), about a small boy and his adventures in Glasgow, also wrote two volumes of memoirs about his early life in Glasgow, I Remember (1932) and Do You Remember? (1934).
I forbear to give a list of medicines which, however pleasingly reminiscent to my contemporaries, would probably be as sound and fury, signifying nothing to my younger readers. But I should like to mention Steel Drops, one of the favourite tonics, ere yet the days of hypophosphites and glycerophosphates have dawned. Steel Drops, though the name is suggestive of small shot or ball-bearings, are a yellow-brown ferruginous liquid, and, preparatory to becoming stronger, you let fall so many drops into so much water, three times a day, before (or possibly after) meals. The only drawback to the Drops is that you have to purchase also a glass tube, so that you may imbibe the strength-giving fluid without spoiling your teeth. Of course, you may already have a tube at home, having been a partaker of Steel Drops those many years, though as yet the bloom of health has not become apparent.
One druggist sells a goodly quantity of Flowers of Sulphur, especially in the Spring, for many people still believe in Mr. Squeer’s mixture of brimstone and treacle; and other people buy chunks of rock variety, as I believe they yet do, to put in their doggie’s water, all with the same touching faith that inspired the old lady to place a bright screw nail in her canary’s seed. The only popular disinfectant, I think, apart from carbolic, is Condy’s Fluid. Pears’ Soap has lately arrived, and in a few years half the population, with an air of originality, will be saying ‘Good-morning!’ and asking the other half if they have used it. ‘Worth a guinea a box’ has not yet appeared on the hoardings. There is little, if anything, in the shop that has come from America, apart from Florida Water, in tall slim bottles, with its crude, quaint floral label, as now.
GLASGOW BOYS, 1897
Francis ‘Fra’ Newbery
Over a period of twenty years at the end of the nineteenth century, a group of young painters based in Glasgow, but working across Scotland, established an international reputation for realism and plein-air painting. Among the most prominent were James Guthrie, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, George Henry and E.A. Hornel. Known collectively as ‘the Glasgow Boys’, they shared an enthusiasm for naturalistic subject matter and strong, clean, fresh colours, as well as a willingness to range widely from the east coast of Scotland to France, the Mediterranean and the Middle East in search of subjects, settings and inspiration. Another unifying factor was their dislike of the Scottish artistic establishment, embodied in the Edinburgh-based painters who dominated the Royal Scottish Academy. ‘Fra’ Newberry was Director of the Glasgow School of Art from 1885 to 1917.
It is curious to note how most of the great triumphs of Art have been won in cities, and in cities, too, whose life was oftentimes of the busiest and most complex description. Rome, with its subtle life of political ecclesiasticism, though never of herself producing an artist, yet, by her attraction of men, dominated in the sixteenth century, the Art of the Italian Renaissance; and Paris to-day is the hub of the Art Universe, because of the blood and brains of men, brought from the outermost confines of France. A civic life would seem to knock fire out of me, like the sparks evolved from the contact of flint and steel.
And at this end of the nineteenth century, in the midst of one of the busiest, noisiest, smokiest cities, that, with its like fellows, make up the sum-total of the greatness of Britain’s commercial position, there is a movement existing, and a compelling force behind it, whose value we cannot yet rightly appraise or whose influence is not yet bounded, but which, both movement and movers, may yet, perhaps, put Glasgow on the Clyde into the hands of the future historian of Art, on much the same grounds as those on which Bruges, Venice, and Amsterdam find themselves in the book of the life of the world. And in making such a statement and in advancing such a claim, it were well to guard against either exaggeration of language or an extravagant dealing with facts. All work that is being accomplished, and all effort that has reached a certain present finality, are, on account of their nearness to the onlooker, entirely out of perspective, and have oftentimes a worth that is purely fictitious, and an estimate which bears no relation to the real value.
And in this present instance, dealing with this movement now existing an influence in and from the city of Glasgow, it should be borne in mind that neither revolution nor revelation is being attempted, nor are the minds of the workers bent upon much else than that of doing a day’s work with th
e best possible credit to themselves. These Scottish artists desire to be neither prophets nor preachers, nor do they attempt that which Art should ever have left to the pulpit – namely, the task of conversion. Furthermore, it is extremely unlikely that any such result is to follow from their efforts as was the outcome of the discovery of the Van Eycks; nor are their works likely to displace the treasures the Old Masters have left to us. One thing, however, is certain. The Glasgow portraits and landscapes will never have the sky line at future permanent exhibitions; and the future New-Zealander, after visiting the ruins of St Paul’s, may possibly propose to himself a pilgrimage to the city of Glasgow, in order to see the pictures produced by the later nineteenth-century artists who worked within her boundaries.
Now, it may safely be taken that most movements, whether artistic or political or under any other heading, are protests against tradition, as then received. Men think about matters, and some of the clearer among them begin to see there is something wrong in, say, a certain state of affairs. Gaining in strength of thought these men protest, and then and there begins the inception of a movement.
About the time the younger Glasgow men were bestirring themselves, the Association of Painters in London, known as the New English Art Club, was making its assault upon the citadel of academicism, and was endeavouring to throw down the walls of that artistic Jericho, into which they and their works were equally forbidden, then, to enter. In Paris the fight against the tradition of the State school and of the strong man who ran the atelier, resulted in the separation from the old ideals of a body of artists who now find room for their pictures on the walls of the Salôn Champ de Mars . . . In Paris the struggle is going on to-day, and will probably continue so long as a complaisant Minister for the Fine Arts finds room for the two opposing bodies in which to exhibit their trophies.