by Alan Taylor
As well as the big Church, where we went to Sunday School, and Bible Class, and had our church parades of Girl Guides and the Boys’ Brigade, we had the excitement of tent missions coming to Springburn to convert us. We didn’t know we were being converted from heathenish ways, we just enjoyed the sight of a huge tent being erected on the piece of waste ground at the end of Gourlay Street, and we begged to be allowed to help to hand out the little leaflets telling all that Jock Troup would be preaching and saving souls that night and all week from 7.30 p.m. As soon as our tea was swallowed, we raced back to get front seats, and the adults crowded in at our backs, greatly entranced to be having hell-fire preached at them inside a tent. Jock was great value, and we all imitated him afterwards, not in any spirit of derision, but in profound admiration. He could make the flames of hell so real, we felt them licking round our feet, and the prospect of heaven so alluring we often stood up to be saved several times during the week, just to see him fall on his knees in thankfulness at having plucked so many brands from the burning. His hymns were different from those in Sunday School and had a sort of music-hall ring to them which we all enjoyed.
One obviously designed to appeal to our Scottish sense of economy went:
‘Nothing to pay, no, nothing to pay,
Straight is the gate, and narrow the way,
Look unto Jesus, start right away,
From Springburn to glory, and nothing to pay.’
We particularly liked ‘Springburn’ coming into the hymn, not realising that he just substituted whatever district he happened to be visiting, and we felt he had composed this hymn specially for Springburn sinners.
A CRATE OF APPLES, 1930
Maurice Lindsay
Maurice Lindsay (1918–2009) was the author of more than fifty books. He was also a broadcaster – he presented the first Scottish arts television programme, Counterpoint – a poet of note, and Director of the Scottish Civic Trust. Born in Glasgow in a private nursing home, his family was well-to-do; his father was the Scottish manager of a UK insurance company while his mother was ‘a gentle creature’. In Thank You For Having Me (1983), he painted a vivid and affectionate portrait of middle-class Glasgow life in the 1920s and 1930s, when the city was ‘already sinking into decline, but somehow mustering enough self-confidence, in what was perhaps by then already non-achievement, still to think of itself as “great”!’
With the family growing up a bigger house was needed. In 1930 we moved to 32 Athole Gardens, an enclosed, hilly U-shaped crescent built in the high Victorian manner of the 1870s round a private fenced common central garden containing a grass tennis court. Early in the summer the pink flambeaux of a horse chestnut tree illuminated the front of our house, its flares of light reflecting on the window-panes. From my high-up back bedroom window, I could see across the roofs-cape at the back of the house a horizon distantly fretted by shipyard cranes.
Although by the early thirties the City’s grey and red sandstone buildings had long been darkened by coal-fired industrial and domestic smoke and the dense yellow fogs that licked them every winter, the decay and dilapidation of the post-Second-World-War years had not yet set in. For one thing, the city’s wide range of decorated nineteenth-century railings still stood intact. The hasty tearing-down of those practical fringes of Victorian fancy on the orders of Lord Beaverbrook during the 1939 war to be recycled for purposes for which they proved totally unsuitable and could not be used, freely admitted blowing street rubbish and a creeping decline the railings had held trimly at bay. There was no awareness of any concept of conservation in those days, though most of the new buildings put up in the decade before the 1939 war still spoke with a modified version of the Victorian amalgam of earlier styles.
It was not just the buildings in our district that gave it a sense of entity. There was still a sense of community about Hillhead. The Byres Road shopkeepers knew us all by name, and we them. There was Wilkie, the grocer, who sent round a crate of apples at Christmas in appreciation of our custom; the thirties equivalent, I suppose, of such later devices as selling loss-leaders or giving away trading stamps. The three – or was it four? – Misses Horn kept the dairy, with the cow at one time in a byre behind the shop, though I cannot recall this. They had hands as blue as the Dutch wall-tiles of their shop, due, I used to think, to so much scrubbing, though their hands were not as raw as those of the daughter of Andrews, the fishmonger, whose fingers were forever lifting moist fillets off chipped block ice. Comfortably rounded Mr and Mrs Todd, the fruiters, added their contribution to the Christmas scene with a gift of tangerines to all their ‘regulars’. Tully, the ironmonger, and Bell of the toyshop featured less prominently, being on the more occasionally visited periphery of my childish world of things. Most exotic of all was Henderson’s stable, from which issued forth the musty-smelling horse-drawn cabs that conveyed us to children’s parties. The cabs had faded yellowish-green seats and were driven by cabbies wearing greenish bowler hats. They stood slapping their arms and blowing in their glove-ends to keep warm which they waited for their winter ‘fares’ to materialise from the streets. In time, those cabs gave place to cumbersome-looking limousines which used the same shelter. Cabs and limousines have long since gone, their base now an Underground station.
My mother devoted much time to the ordering of household chores. Our cooks and our parlour-maids usually came from the Highlands, and, like most domestics in these days, spoke Gaelic. To hear them talk in a language incomprehensible to me was my first experience of the Scottish dichotomy. That a dichotomy existed even in the smaller world of the Gael became apparent when frequently they would argue in English, oblivious of my presence, about the meaning or correct pronunciation of a Gaelic word as spoken in Skye, rather than as it was pronounced in Stornoway. From time to time my mother wrote out a daily chart of duties for each of the domestics. For the parlour-maid it went like: Mondays, clean the dining-room silver and polish the glasses; Tuesday, tidy out the kitchen and pantry cupboards; Wednesday, brush and dust the dining-room and parlour; Thursday, brush and dust the drawing-room, the hall stairs and hall landings – and so on. Cook was supplied with the week’s menus and instructions on the economics of house-keeping.
There was, of course, in reality a succession of cooks and parlour-maids who came and went for reasons usually unclear to us children. Usually there were mysterious allies, denizens of female warmth in their shining kitchens, where the fire in the cooking-range made the copper jellypans on the shelves of the dresser glint and glimmer; allies surreptitiously chatable-to when the regime of the nursery occasionally slackened. One Lowland cook of exceptional plainness, for whom Gaelic was simply ‘a wheen o’ blethers’, ended unfinished every promising confabulation by relaxing her bulk and her perennial problem into the depth of a chair, gasping: ‘Goad! If only ah could get a man!’
A RAZOR ATTACK ON MOSLEY, 1931
Harold Nicolson
In the 1930s Glasgow, like other beleaguered cities in the UK, was not immune to the appeal of fascism but there were always those prepared to oppose it, sometimes violently. Harold Nicolson (1886–1968), who is today best known for his voluminous diaries, was married to poet, novelist and gardener Vita Sackville-West. Well-connected and socially (and sexually) gregarious, he inhabited many milieux and enjoyed all of them. In 1931 he was a supporter of Sir Oswald (‘Tom’) Mosley’s New Party and the unsuitable editor of its journal, Action. By 1932, however, he had distanced himself from the Mosleyites, writing: ‘The difficulty with the New Party is that it is no longer new and no longer a party . . . Now I feel that the New Party as such has become too much identified with Hitlerism.’
The papers are full of a razor attack made on Tom at Glasgow. On getting to the office I find Peter [Howard, international rugby player, journalist and New Party candidate] back from there. He tells me that the meeting was rather a success. 20,000 people. The speech was got across all right by loud-speakers. During the meeting a note was passed up: ‘Be careful when y
ou go – the Reds have got their razors.’ When all the questions had been asked and answered, Tom faced the crowd: called out, ‘now, boys’: stepped from the platform and advanced towards the little group of communists who had created the disturbance. They turned and fled. Tom passed through the crowd. The communists formed behind and attacked them from the rear. A stone was thrown and hit Tom lightly on the head. A man attacked him with a life-preserver but was seized in time. Peter Howard was thrown and rose to knock a man down. They escaped to their cars.
NOT EVEN A SCOTTISH SLUM, 1934
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell (1901–35), ‘my distant cousin’. The son of a farmer, he was born in Aberdeenshire. He worked as a journalist with the Scottish Farmer. When he lost his job he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in the Middle East and elsewhere. From 1928 until his premature death he wrote as one possessed: biography, history, travelogue, polemic, criticism and fiction. In 1932, he published Sunset Song, the first part of the trilogy, A Scots Quair. A friend of Hugh MacDiarmid, he collaborated with him on Scottish Scene (1934) from which the following extract is taken.
Glasgow is one of the few places in Scotland which defy personification. To imagine Edinburgh as a disappointed spinster, with a hare-lip and inhibitions, is at least to approximate as closely to the truth as to imagine the Prime Mover as a Levantine Semite. So with Dundee, a frowsy fisher-wife addicted to gin and infanticide, Aberdeen a thin-lipped peasant-woman who has borne eleven and buried nine. But no Scottish image of personification may display, even distortedly, the essential Glasgow. One might even go further afield, to the tortured imaginings of the Asiatic mind, to find her likeness – many-armed Siva with the waistlet of skulls, of Xipe of Ancient America, whose priest skinned the victim alive, and then clad himself in the victim’s skull . . . But one doubts anthropomorphic representation at all. The monster of Loch Ness is probably the lost soul of Glasgow, in scale and horns, disporting itself in the Highlands after evacuating finally and completely its mother corpse.
One cannot blame it. My distant cousin, Mr. Leslie Mitchell, once described Glasgow in one of his novels as ‘the vomit of a cataleptic commercialism’. But it is more than that. It may be a corpse, but the maggot-swarm upon it is fiercely alive. One cannot watch and hear the long beat of traffic down Sauchiehall, or see it eddy and spume where St. Vincent Street and Renfield Street cross, without realising what excellent grounds the old-fashioned anthropologist appeared to have for believing that man was by nature a brutish savage, a herd-beast delighting in vocal discordance and orgiastic aural abandon.
Loch Lomond lies quite near to Glasgow. Nice Glaswegians motor out there and admire the scenery and calculate its horse-power and drink whisky and chaff one another in genteelly Anglicised Glaswegianisms. After a hasty look at Glasgow the investigator would do well to disguise himself as one of like kind, drive down to Loch Lomondside and stare across its waters at the sailing clouds that crown the Ben, at the flooding of colours changing and darkling and miraculously lighting up and down those misty slopes, where night comes over long mountain leagues that know only of the startled pheasants, silences so deep you can hear the moon come up, mornings so greyly coloured they seem stolen from Norse myth. This is the proper land and stance from which to look at Glasgow, to divest oneself of horror or shame or admiration or – very real – fear, and ask: Why? Why did men ever ally themselves to become enslaved to a thing so obscene and so foul when there was this awaiting them here – hills and the splendours of freedom and silence, the clean splendours of hunger and woe and dread in the winds and rains and famine-times of the earth, hunting and love and the call of the moon? Nothing endured by the primitives who once roamed those hills – nothing of woe or terror – approximated in degree or kind to that life that festers in the courts and wynds and alleys of Camlachie, Govan, the Gorbals.
In Glasgow there are over a hundred and fifty thousand human beings living in conditions as the most bitterly pressed primitive in Tierra del Fuego never visioned. They live five or six to the single room . . . And this requires a mental jerk to realise the quality of that room. It is not a room in a large and airy building; it is not a single-roomed hut on the verge of a hill; it is not a cave driven into free rock, in the sound of the sea-birds, as that old Azilian cave in Argyll: it is a room that is part of some great sloven of tenement – the tenement itself in a line or grouping with hundreds of its fellows, its windows grimed with the unceasing wash and drift of coal-dust, its stairs narrow and befouled and steep, its evening breath like that which might issue from the mouth of a lung-diseased beast. The hundred and fifty thousand eat and sleep and copulate and conceive and crawl into childhood in waste jungles of stench and disease and hopelessness, sub-humans as definitely as the Morlocks of Wells – and without even the consolation of feeding on their oppressors’ flesh.
A hundred and fifty thousand . . . and all very like you or me or my investigator sitting appalled on the banks of Loch Lomond (where he and his true love will never meet again). And they live on food of the quality of offal, ill-cooked, ill-eaten with speedily-diseased teeth for the tending of which they can afford no fees; they work – if they have work – in factories or foundries or the roaring reek of the Docks toilsome and dreary and unimaginative hours – hour on hour, day on day, frittering away tissues of their bodies and the spirit-stuff of their souls; they are workless – great numbers of them – doomed to long days of staring vacuity, of shoelessness, of shivering hidings in this and that mean runway where the landlords’ agents come, of mean and desperate beggings at Labour Exchanges and Public Assistance Committees; their voices are the voices of men and women robbed of manhood and womanhood . . .
It is coming on dark, as they say in the Scotland that is not Glasgow. And out of the beast of the Gorbals arises that foul breath as of a dying beast.
You turn from Glasgow Green with a determination to inspect this Gorbals on your own. It is incredibly un-Scottish. It is lovably and abominably and hideously un-Scottish. It is not even a Scottish slum. Stout men in beards and ringlets and unseemly attire lounge and strut with pointed shoes: Ruth and Naomi go by with downcast Eastern faces, the Lascar rubs shoulder with the Syrian, Harry Lauder is a Baal unkeened to the midnight stars. In the air the stench is of a different quality to Govan’s or Camlachie’s – a better quality. It is haunted by an ancient ghost of goodness and grossness, sun-warmed and ripened under alien suns. It is the most saving slum in Glasgow, and the most abandoned. Emerging from it, the investigator suddenly realises why he sought it in such haste from Glasgow Green: it was in order that he might assure himself there were really and actually other races on the earth apart from Scots!
YOU SAY ‘POLIS’; I SAY ‘POLICE’, 1934
Educational Institute of Scotland
It has long been said that Scottish children speak two languages, one in the playground, the other in the classroom, which this report on ‘Glasgow Speech’ by one of Scotland’s teaching unions seems to confirm.
In most cases Glasgow pupils enter the schools with one language only, the Central Scottish Dialect, and they proceed to learn to write Standard English. As the result of education the vernacular is gradually eliminated from written work, but it persists in colloquial use.
The Central Scottish Dialect is the medium of expression naturally employed by the Glasgow child who may interrogate the teacher during a Dictation lesson with such a question as, ‘Whit cums efter, “after”?’ In the playground children who try to speak Standard English are generally laughed at, whilst in the class-room a lapse into the mother-tongue is greeted with hilarity. Thus, the boy who during the dinner-interval maliciously created a stampede of his classmates by the cry of ‘Polis’, that same afternoon cause much amusement in the school-room by reading, ‘Sir Robert Peel founded the Polis Force’.
NAMING THE YARDS, 1935
George Blake
The Clyde and shipbu
ilding are umbilically linked. The latter dates to the introduction of steam-powered ship propulsion at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the deepening of the river made it possible for ocean-going ships to reach right into the heart of the city. There followed an impressive stream of technical innovations. New materials – iron, then steel – were greedily embraced and major engineering improvements, yielding greater speed and significant fuel economies, were introduced. By 1900 the Clyde had secured pole position in world shipbuilding, producing about half a million tons of shipping annually, approximately a third of world output, occasionally exceeding the combined German and US totals. After the First World War, however, decline was slow but inevitable and by the time George Blake (1893–1961) published his novel, The Shipbuilders, in 1935 yard closures, unemployment and empty order books were increasingly the norm and the end of launches of great ships like the Estramadura was nigh.
It was in a sense a procession that he witnessed, the high tragic pageant of the Clyde. Yard after yard passed by, the berths empty, grass growing about the sinking keel-blocks. He remembered how, in the brave days, there would be scores of ships ready for the launching along this reach, their sterns hanging over the tide, and how the men at work on them on high-stagings would turn from the job and tug off their caps and cheer the new ship setting out to sea. And now only the giant dumb poles and groups of men workless, watching in silence the mocking-passage of the vessel. It was bitter to know that they knew – that almost every man among them was an artist in one of the arts that go to the building of a ship; that every feature of the Estramadura would come under an expert and loving scrutiny, that her passing would remind them of the joy of work, and tell them how many of them would never work again. It appalled Leslie Pagan that not a cheer came from those watching groups.