by Alan Taylor
This was a very decent interview. It sounded like two old friends chatting about the hospital, the changes they had seen. The patient had been in the hospital longer than MacNiven, had been there in the time of D.K. Henderson, later Professor of Psychiatry at Edinburgh University and co-author of a book that became the standard text in British psychiatry. The patient claimed to have been mentioned in despatches, as it were, in that book for calling D.K. Henderson ‘the Kaiser’, which was cited as an example of paranoid delusion. After a lifetime of social catastrophes in states of manic excitement he had settled in a room in Gentlemen’s West Wing, the paying part of the hospital, where most of the time he lived quietly in a state of indefatigable good humour.
RIVETING STUFF, 1946
V.S. Pritchett
Riveting was one of the most skilled jobs in the shipyards and the best riveters were highly prized and generally well-paid. V.S. Pritchett (1900–97) was a novelist, critic, short story writer and memoirist, who was always interested in what people did to earn a living. The following is extracted from Build the Ships, published by HMSO.
The riveter is a member of the ‘black squad’ – a gang of four who turn up to the job with the misleading nonchalance of a family of jugglers. They are the riveter, the holder-up, the heater, and a boy. A speechless quartet, or almost speechless: ‘Where’s that boy?’ is about their only sentence. The ‘black squad’ can set up shop anywhere and begin performing their hot-chestnut act. You see one swung over the ship’s side. He stands on his plank waiting with the pneumatic instrument in his gloved hands. On the other side of the plate, inside the ship, is the heater with his smoking brazier – a blue coke haze is always rising over the ship: he plucks a rivet out of the fire with his tongs, a ‘boy’ (nowadays it is often a girl in dungarees) catches the rivet in another pair of tongs and steps quickly with it to the holder-up, who puts it through the proper holes at the junction of the plates. As the pink nub of the rivet comes through, the pneumatic striker comes down on it, roaring out blows at the rate of about 700 hits a minute, and squeezes it flat.
One of the curiosities of the ship’s side – it is also one of those accidental beauties of line which are sought by modern artists – is the white chalk mark which the rivet counter ticks across each rivet, showing how many the riveter has done in the shift. One sees half a dozen plates cross-hatched in this way by the errant human touch, and a list of figures like a darts score is totted up beside them. Paid by the hundred, the riveter is keeping his accounts. He will average up to thirty-seven in an hour.
THE LOWEST OF THE LOW ON THE GLASGOW HERALD, 1946
Peregrine Worsthorne
The Glasgow Herald – now called the Herald – is the longest-running extant daily national newspaper in the world. The Times, for example, is two years younger. As such, it has a fabled history and has employed many distinguished journalists and writers. One such was George MacDonald Fraser, author of the bestselling Flashman novels, who in the 1960s was its deputy editor. Peregrine Worsthorne’s sojourn with the paper was, as he relates, less stellar. In the 1940s, when Worsthorne joined it, it was edited by Sir William B. Robieson, who regularly denounced the policy of appeasing Hitler. His shift ended at 2.00 a.m. when, in order to return to his bedsit in Kew Terrace, he had to run the gauntlet of drunks and prostitutes in Sauchiehall Street. On more than one occasion the tram in which he was travelling had to be stopped and the police called. As he recalled in his autobiography, Tricks of Memory (1993), such encounters with the city’s low life amused his colleagues and endeared him to them. ‘Instead of being resented as a privileged English high-flyer I was soon taken pity on as a persecuted species in need of protection.’ On leaving Glasgow Worsthorne had spells at The Times and the Daily Telegraph and from 1986 to 1989 was editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
Every detail of that interview is embedded in the memory. At no other time in my life have I ever so completely got hold of the wrong end of the stick. As I understood it Sir William [Robieson, editor of the Glasgow Herald] was offering me the deputy editorship of his paper. This quite took my breath away. There I was without any journalistic experience or even ambition being offered this lofty position on a plate. True, the salary mentioned was pretty measly, only £6 a week. But one couldn’t have everything – a top job and a high salary. Needless to say, I accepted with alacrity and promised to come north without delay.
In the event the post turned out to be sub-editor, not deputy editor, and apprentice sub-editor at that, the lowest of the low. In keeping with my imagined status – but not my actual salary – I had booked myself in at the Central Hotel, Glasgow’s grandest, which was only a stone’s throw from the Herald office in Buchanan Street, where I presented myself at the appointed time, 6.00 p.m. on Monday. Finding the main door on Buchanan Street shut I went round to the back of the building, where there was a squalid entrance guarded by a very surly porter sitting behind a glass panel. ‘I am the new deputy editor, could you please show me to my office,’ I said politely, only to receive a response which, although incomprehensible, so thick was the accent, did not sound in the least friendly or welcoming, let alone respectful. When eventually I found the sub-editor’s room the full extent of my misunderstanding was immediately apparent. My job, as was swiftly made clear, was to make the tea for the other sub-editors. After about three months of doing nothing much more than this, I was put in charge of sub-editing the Radio Times, which meant marking up the hours of the programme for the printer; the livestock prices and then, after about six months, the most humdrum news stories – fires, burglaries and so on. At first I thought there must be some mistake and that at any moment Sir William Robieson would summon me to higher things. But months and then two years went by and the summons never came. The great man would occasionally wish me a good morning, but that was all. Of writing opportunities there were none; not even really of rewriting since none of the big stories ever came my way or not until the very end of two years. What I did not know at the time, and only learned later, was that I was a guinea-pig being used in an experiment.
THE QUEST FOR WOODBINES, 1948
Mary Rose Liverani
Mary Rose Liverani grew up in Govan in the 1950s in a large but poor family which – in the days when the Clyde was as red as a field of poppies – was politically vocal and active. They emigrated to Australia when she was thirteen. ‘As a kid I found everything really exciting,’ she said. ‘People used to crowd into our house, everybody was talking politics and my sister and I used to sit under the table and listen.’ Her book, The Winter Sparrows (1976), is her fond remembrance of times past, not the least of which was her mother’s constant demand for Wills’s Woodbine cigarettes, nicknamed ‘Gaspers’ because smokers new to the habit found them difficult to inhale.
I longed for a country where there were no pawnshops and where tobacco companies were doomed to grind out forever and a day nothing but Wills’s Woodbines. Turkish Pasha were the only cigarettes freely available in the post-war cigarette market in Scotland. My mother loathed them and refused to smoke them.
‘Woodbines, I must have my Woodbines,’ she would tell me, counting out the coppers into my reluctant grip. ‘Go and get Woodbines and don’t come back without them.’
‘But where shall I find them?’ I would wail despairingly. ‘Everybody wants them and there aren’t any around. And they don’t give them to wee people any way.’
‘Get out, get out,’ my mother would yell at me, throwing the door open and leaping at me with her right arm raised in a violent gesture, ‘get out that bloody door and look for these cigarettes. If ye come back without them I’ll lay ye in your own blood.’
Wills’s Woodbines were advertised on every imaginable available space in Glasgow, but the little green and gold boxes themselves were never on display. Why the firm sought to stimulate demand for its product when the supply never approached being adequate was one of the seven wonders of my world. Another was why my mother didn’t adapt herself to Pas
has that she could have smoked night and day in perpetual motion instead of suffering long smokeless hours for a few minutes spiced with the unique savour of Wills’s fretted amber. They must be wicked, that firm, I thought, to make people long for their cigarettes and then make only a few.
And so, oscillating between recognition and impotent fury, I would set off on my near-daily odyssey through Glasgow to hunt out minuscule hoards of Woodbines from newsagents, and cafes and small corner shops through Plantation and Govan and Elder Park and sometimes over the river to Anderston. My first stop was always at the papershop of the two spinsters, the Misses Alexander, Sara and Susan. ‘The cinnamon sticks’, I called them, because their tall, skeletal structures were generally covered by drab brown frocks, unrelieved by buttons or belts. Never once did these women sell me the Woodbines and they never would, I knew, for they believed that I smoked them myself. Still, it was part of the ritual to ask them. Then I could add them to my list of places attempted, of dangers faced in the quest for Woodbines. As usual they smiled thinly and said in a prissy duet:
‘No Woodbines today, only Pasha and Turf.’
I hesitated. Turf was sometimes acceptable to my mother depending on how desperate or amenable she was. There was no doubt today, however, that she was in a pretty bad mood. My father had lost time again this week and there would be no overtime at the weekend to make up for it. So I nodded curtly to the two miserly women and went out. What a waste. They had all these Woodbines stashed away under the counter, I was sure of it. They didn’t smoke anyway. Probably had lungs like punctured bladders and couldn’t draw enough breath.
In the cafes and corner shops I wasted no time.
‘Got any Woodbines?’
‘No Woodbines.’
‘Got any Woodbines?’
‘None.’
‘Got any Woodbines by chance?’
‘By no chance.’
Outside the newspaper shops, however, I always hung around till two or three people had gone inside and then while they were waiting or absorbing the newsagent’s attention, I could quickly scan the latest editions of the comics.
‘Here you, are ye wanting tae buy these comics?’
‘No, I was wondering if you had any Woodbines?’
‘Fine well, ye know I havenae any, you cheeky thing. You asked me yesterday. Next time I catch ye going through these comics I’ll make ye pay for them.’
A small packet of Woodbines was always worth a pat on the head and other fleeting expressions of gratitude from my mother. I never took any lasting delight in these, however, for circumstances forced upon her two roles: she was the grateful princess who acclaimed the hero returning with tokens of mighty deeds but she was also the villainous king, the princess’s father, who insisted on still more and more quests and combats. The endless peregrinations around the city, prompted by the need for either cigarettes or money, fell to me as the eldest because my mother was continually immobolised by pregnancies that she rushed into to avoid cancer of the breast in old age. A Catholic doctor, observing that my mother had successfully practised birth control for three years after her first two pregnancies, warned her that she might thereby bring damage upon her breasts, such as they were, and so for the next six years her womb laboured almost without rest. This relentless procreating ceased only after a Presbyterian doctor hinted at disastrous consequences for the womb, should the routine continue undisturbed. From then on, contraception became the order of the night.
HORSING AROUND, c. 1948
Jack House
Who but the Tollcross-born journalist Jack House (1906–91) would have as his lifelong ambition to play the hind legs of a horse in a pantomime? The Queen’s Theatre was to pantomime what Lords is to cricket. Situated near Glasgow Green, the Queen’s was known in an earlier incarnation as the People’s Palace, where folk from the east end went to let off steam. Its performances were described as ‘not for the faint-hearted’. Many scripts were written by Frank Droy, husband of the below-mentioned Doris, in broad, and bawdy, Glaswegian, which audiences lapped up. The Queen’s was destroyed by fire in 1952.
I had a great affection for the Queen’s Theatre, for it was there that I achieved one of my great ambitions. I appeared as the hind legs of a horse in the pantomime. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the pantomime, but it was the one in which Doris Droy appeared as a woman carter who had taken over her husband’s job during the war. Naturally, she had to have a horse with her. The horse was played by a married couple named Carr and Vonnie (Vonnie was Mrs Carr). They appeared on Scottish music-hall stages for many years, but now Vonnie is dead and Jimmy Carr has retired.
The management of the Queen’s agreed that I should appear as the hind legs (Vonnie’s part) for one performance only. So I went along to the Gallowgate to rehearse. You may not realise it, but pantomime horses are customarily performed by either acrobats or tap-dancers. Carr and Vonnie were tap-dancers, and the whole routine was built on tap-dancing. I am neither an acrobat nor a tap-dancer, and the routine had to be simplified extremely for me. Fortunately, when you are appearing as the hind legs of a pantomime horse, you can see the front legs through a sort of window in the soft under-belly of the horse. The theory is that whatever the front legs are doing you will do the same.
We rehearsed for a whole afternoon. I found that the front legs wore a heavy belt so that, as the hind legs, I bent over and grasped this belt. That kept us in cohesion. Mr Carr said to me: ‘See that bit where we fall down on the stage? For heaven’s sake don’t get the body of the horse twisted. If you do, you won’t be able to get up on your feet again, and I’ll have to drag you off.’
I promised to do my best, but I can tell you that I felt very worried and excited as I got into the horse’s costume in the wings. The entire cast of the Queen’s Theatre pantomime were there to see me make my debut. Came the cue, and on we trotted. All went well. We fell down but the body wasn’t twisted. We got up again and finished by carrying Doris Droy off on my back. Then we took off the top part of the costume and went on to the stage to take our bow and show that we were really men all the time.
THE CITIZENS’ THEATRE, 1948
James Bridie
Based in the heart of the Gorbals, the Citizens’ Theatre – the ‘Citz’ as it is familiarly known – was established in 1945. After its initial success it lost its way for a while. Directors came and went like football managers and audiences evaporated. This all changed in 1969 when Giles Havergal rode from Edinburgh to its rescue. Ably abetted by designer Philip Price, Havergal staged as his first production an all-male Hamlet. Later he was joined as director by Philip Prowse and Robert David Macdonald and the Citz’s reputation burgeoned both nationally and internationally. Here playwright James Bridie (1888–1951), the pen-name of O.H. Mavor, whose original idea it was, recalls its formative years.
After Artemus Ward’s hero had languished in prison for several years, a happy thought struck him. He opened the window and got out. Starting a theatre is as easy as that.
For years and years those of us who wanted a resident theatre in Glasgow had dug tunnels with rusty screwnails, had tamed mice and taught them to carry messages, had tried to saw through iron bars with dog-biscuits, had written our biographies on our shirts with blood, had implored the immortal gods – all to little or no purpose. Then six of us suddenly sat round a table and found it was quite easy. We asked a few other people for a little money and began.
We took the little Athenaeum for a thirty weeks’ season and looked around for a producer. We were given a guarantee by C.E.M.A. [Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts] to meet what we thought was an inevitable loss. It was war time. Actors were hard to come by and so was material. The theatre had a comfortable auditorium, but few other modern amenities. But two boards and a passion were enough. We broke even in our first year and made a four-figure profit in our second. We did twenty plays and took two of them through Scotland to places ill-supplied with Drama. We hit a remark
ably high standard of acting and production and chose no catchpenny plays.
When I say ‘we’ all did this, I mean that Mr Eric Capon did it, with the exception of three productions by Miss Jennifer Sounes. Mr and Mrs McCrone, Miss Savile and Mr Gorrie looked after the business side and our Secretaries kept our finances straight. A loyal and clever company worked hard and their efforts were supplemented by such distinguished visitors as Ernest Milton, Jay Laurier, Morland Graham and James Woodburn.
Then Harry McKelvie offered us the Princess’s on most generous terms and we crossed the river. Mr Matthew Forsyth, who had a long and distinguished career as an actor, a producer and a manager, took the wheel from Eric Capon and we began on a much bigger scale.
The same people who told us that it was hopeless to start a theatre in the midst of a war and that, anyhow, the Athenaeum was no good, were vocal once more. Nobody would cross the river to the Gorbals to see high-brow plays. Highbrows, apparently, inhabit exclusively the northern bank. Well, highbrow or lowbrow, North, South, East or West, they have come.
To those who have come, we have presented plays that would not, for the most part, be seen otherwise in Scotland. We have rehearsed them with the same time and care and mounted them with the same elaboration as if we had been in holy Shaftesbury Avenue itself. We have provided the most comfortable theatre in Glasgow for our audience. We have kept open for eleven months of the year. We have taken the risk of presenting a higher proportion of new plays than any repertory theatre outside of London has ever dared to do; and most of these plays have been by Scots.
We have taken another risk by keeping our prices down to the minimum. We, as a strictly non-profit-making company, are relieved of entertainment tax and we have handed every penny of it we could spare back to the audience. If we ever return to the days when the customer demands his money’s worth, it may interest some of us to consider how much the half crown we pay for a seat is spent directly on providing entertainment and how much goes to gentlemen who are in the business purely for their health and who neither act, dance nor sing. In the Citizens’ Theatre the proportion spent on entertainment is something like two and threepence. I understand that this is not so in the cinema.