Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  * This letter replied to a lady who wrote asking me about the scheme, I forget why.

  New Lanark Craft Community

  In 1975 I was a friend & lodger of Gordon and Pat Lennox, art students. They, a few artist friends and I tried to form this craft community. The article does not tell all the reasons why. The idea of this community came from a Tory councillor with a small craft shop in New Lanark. She thought her shop could sell the community’s products. I and a majority thought nothing wrong with her being a member of the scheme she had imagined. So a Labour councillor encouraged us to write a constitution and generously had it both typed and photocopied for us. There we found Rule 1 was: Only craftspeople can be members. Thus rid of the Tory conceiver of the community, in less than a year Lanark’s Labour council dropped it completely.

  THE AREA:– The Royal Burgh of Lanark is famous for several reasons. The first recorded Scottish Parliament met here in 978, William Wallace began the war of independence here by killing the English sheriff, and for two centuries the town was trusted with the keeping of the nation’s weights and measures. In the 18th century, like many Scottish market towns, it owed its prosperity to the weavers in the back-close sheds. Beyond the county it was chiefly known for the nearby Falls of Clyde. Tourists had always visited the rich cities of Italy and France, but a new taste was developing for wild, wet, craggy places, and from the days of Sam Johnson to Felix Mendelssohn the Scottish tour included a visit to Lanark and a stroll up the wooded glen to the great cataracts of Corra and Bonnington Linn. The tiny cave where Wallace is said to have hidden so impressed William Wordsworth that he wrote a bad poem linking love of liberty with the untamed beauty of the scene. The free powers of nature are more usually admired where it is known how to harness them commercially.

  THE VILLAGE:– In 1784 David Dale took Richard Arkwright to Dundaff Linn where the Clyde spilled from a ravine into a marshy place enclosed by steep, wooded hills. Dale had begun his career with a packhorse peddling cotton to the spinners cottages and yarn to the weavers sheds. As Glasgow grew rich by trade with America, he too became rich as cotton importer and merchant banker. Arkwright’s new spinning frames made the world’s fastest thread. His invention and Dale’s capital could use a Clyde fall to twist American cotton. This is why New Lanark was built. With the Clyde embanked, and a mill-lade tunneled through 300 feet of rock, then mills and a village were built and built well, in elegant, austere Georgian terraces.

  Arkwright was the foremost designer of those dark, satanic mills which throughout the 19th Century showed the factory system at its worst, in England and the west of Scotland. Dale, however, was a kindly man, with a home both in Glasgow and in the factory village where he lived beside his workforce. Many of these were Highlanders expelled from their homes by landlords who found sheep more profitable – this is why one block of houses is called Caithness Row. As was customary, Dale employed child labour, orphans sent to him by local governments who avoided responsibility for them, in return for a promise that they would be fed and housed. These slept in the mill where they laboured, but unlike most employers Dale gave them time and teachers so that they learned reading and writing, singing and the dance.

  By 1800, New Lanark was nearly finished and the mills were the biggest and most productive in Scotland. In that same year Dale, wishing to retire, took his son-in-law Robert Owen into partnership and made him manager.

  MR TOOGOOD:– Owen was a Welshman and an atheist. Hard, determined work changed him from a poor shop assistant to manager, at nineteen, of the Chorlton Twist Mill near Manchester. He had noticed that people work better when not starved or driven to the point of exhaustion, and were usually more trustworthy when less demoralized. From this he drew conclusions which contradicted the religious and economic theory of his day. He thought more happiness would make people behave better towards one another, perhaps even towards their employers; and that basing the prosperity of some on the deprivation of the rest was not only wrong but unnecessary. Thomas Peacock caricatured Owen as Mr. Toogood in the novel Crotchet Castle. “Mr Toogood the co-operationist, who will have neither fighting nor praying; but wants to parcel out the world into squares like a chessboard, with a community on each, raising everything for one another, with a great steam engine to serve them in common for tailor and hosier, kitchen and cook.”

  Owen thought employers should spend profits over 5% on the welfare and education of their workers. He built a nursery, a school and an Institute for the Formation of Character. This last was less frightening than its name. It held a dance-hall, church, adult lecture-theatre and infant school. Like most kind-hearted dictators Owen got on well with the very young, and he angered the churchgoers of Lanark up the hill by making the mill-children’s Sabbath a day of recreation. He organized dancing in the open air and took them on nature-study rambles in the glen. The adults disliked him at first. Working mothers were glad to buy cheap food from the village store and liked having family lunches cooked in the communal kitchen, but they hated having their homes examined for cleanliness, and the men found Owen a stricter manager than Dale. Nevertheless, he gained their respect.

  Owen left New Lanark in 1825 and went to America, where for four years he vainly strove to establish a socialist community at New Harmony, Indiana. When he died, at the ripe old age of 87, having had several fortunes pass through his hands, Mr. Toogood had clearly found the life-struggle more rewarding than most.

  TILL THE ROPEWORKS SHUT:– The village was preserved by less idealistic owners, the only addition being a little Victorian church in 1889. New Lanark was lit by electricity when few other villages had gas. Perhaps to economize on a small generator, perhaps as a relic of Owen’s paternalism, the manager operated the only switch in the village, turning all the lights on at nightfall and off at a reasonable bedtime. This was no hardship to folk who still had the use of oil-lamps and candles, but if a doctor attending a birth in the early hours demanded light, the manager had to be knocked-up and every home flooded with brilliance.

  In 1914 mills and village were acquired by the Gourock Ropeworks. After the Great War the Clyde falls were put in the pipes of a power station, and a historic beauty-spot became a line of pools linked by a thin trickle, but visitors still come down the hill to see New Lanark. A suburb of Lanark reached a hilltop overlooking it, but though only a mile and a half from Lanark’s High Street (as close as many housing schemes to their shopping centre) the village seemed and still seems isolated.

  By 1960 most of the houses in the village had fallen below a tolerable standard. The New Lanark Association was formed and by dint of their hard work and financial aid from interested bodies, Caithness Row and the Nursery Buildings underwent a highly successful renovation. But in 1968, Gourock Ropeworks moved out and the mills were shut at last.

  NOWADAYS:– Families still live in Caithness Row, but most other buildings stand empty. The store still opens and a mail-ordering firm dealing in Scottish crafts is housed in part of the Nursery Buildings. The mill area is used by a scrap metal firm with a handful of local employees. The school roof has fallen in, and the unoccupied buildings are threatened with dilapidation.

  Due to a financial crisis the work of the New Lanark Association came to a halt. Their modernization of the Nursery Buildings received a well-deserved Civic Trust Award. In 1972 the New Lanark Working Party was formed and Provost H. Smith of Lanark was appointed chairman. Their first action was to commission a feasibility study. This decided that every effort must be made to restore the village to life and its essential character must be maintained. Existing buildings without external alteration can be adapted for various uses. Suggestions include a youth hostel, a field study centre for sixth-form and university students, a training centre for young engineers and an industrial museum for Scotland’s most industrialised county. To encourage visitors, a tea-room or restaurant is very necessary.

  The working population would be involved in small home-based industries and much of the residential prop
erty could readily become studio-workshops where craftsmen could live and work. Products could be sold direct to visitors, exhibited at The Present Gallery in Lanark, or, if produced in great enough quantity, marketed through Scotland Direct, the mail-order company. Summer schools staffed by the resident craftspeople would attract visitors who would find accommodation in the youth hostel or in Lanark hotels.

  These activities can only stimulate growth and life, encouraging as they must, an influx of new people and new ideas.

  THE CRAFT COMMUNITY:– Now numbering about thirty members this community was formed by artists and craftsmen coming together with one common aim – to live and work in New Lanark. When premises become available these will be allocated by ballot arranged such that a wide variety of crafts will be represented.

  To become a full member of the community the applicant must be actively practicing his craft in a professional manner or have recently completed a professional training. We are not a commune. Each member is responsible for marketing their own work and payment of their own rents. There will, of course, be regular group exhibitions. Anyone interested in joining should contact the secretary, Miss Sandra Ewing, The Present Gallery, Broomgate, Lanark.

  THIS EXHIBITION:– The purpose of this exhibition is to give the people of Lanark a look at the sort of folk who want to be their neighbours and at the kind of things these neighbours are going to make. We are weavers, embroiderers, silk-screen printers and dressmakers and a painter. We hope to be joined by other craftsmen. The future of New Lanark in the glen and Old Lanark on the hill are now linked, and we newcomers wish to be part of it.

  Writers Groups

  Here follows 2 essays on one subject: being a staff member in The University of Glasgow. The 1st was written in 1974 when I became Writer in Residence, for though I had enjoyed months of being the artist-recorder of Glasgow for its own museum of local history, the wage (paid by Harold Wilson’s Jobs Creation Scheme) was not enough to pay my sons boarding school fees. This new job did. I much enjoyed having a steady wage in return for the easy teaching of willing pupils for only 2 1/2 days a week, letting me work at what I wished for the rest. The second essay was written 6 months after. Some of my later experiences of Glasgow’s great University are described in the introduction to The Knuckle End starting here.

  MOST WRITERS GROUPS HAVE members who like talking about writing more than doing it, but usually the members have written one poem or story or essay about something they deeply feel. Each wants to share that work, that feeling, and in return for some attention will often attend to the work and feeling of others. A writers’ group can thus be an undemanding friendly society, but since clever writers seek ways to improve their work, and nearly all can see flaws in the work of the rest, most groups contain intelligent life. In Britain the most famous groups started casually in public drinking houses; the Mermaid Tavern on the first Friday of every month, and more often, though less regularly, in the Mitre coffee house, Fleet Street. In Italy the groups (called academies) were founded by noblemen, and had written constitutions. Every fine city had one presided over by eminences of church and state. They improved the manners and conversation of people who wanted polite societies, they lasted for centuries and gave dinners to heretical tourists like Milton, but they produced less interesting work than the fleeting English groups, and some French ones which met later in Parisian cafés.

  In that high noon of the British welfare state, the nineteen-sixties, local governments and educational bodies created writers groups by advertising courses of meetings open to all. They also provided a room for them, and paid an usher to open the room, collect fees, arrange readings of members’ work, and conduct discussions. Such groups still exist, with or without an usher, for the usher’s qualification is seldom more than a degree in English or some work in print, so an efficient member can sometimes do that job as well as anybody employed by a local government. The best organizers get copies of work distributed to members a week before the meeting where it is read and discussed. They do this for four reasons.

  1 – It lets work be read more than once, and on a second reading some work seems finer, some poorer.

  2 – It lets each member form an opinion, and find reasons and words for it, apart from members whose opinions might distort or silence theirs.

  3 – It warns away members whose response to a work, even on a second reading, is mere revulsion.

  4 – It is a small form of publication, and so pleases the writer.

  Those who conduct a critical discussion can keep it helpful, and prevent damage to the writer’s self-esteem, by leading the discussion of the work as fulfilment of the writer’s idea. A poem written to convey horror of artificial abortion is not criticized by arguing that most abortions are painless and prevent worse evils. The group should discuss which words and sentences serve the writer’s intention, which contradict it or are superfluous. If it presents logical argument the group should discuss its terms, and discover where they hold together or fall apart. If it presents a description, the group should discuss where and how it convinces, and if not, why not. The discussion should sound like carpenters discussing a table one of them has made: carpenters who feel table-making is important and enjoyable, and that most tables can be made better. If the table is not intended for children, and someone shows the surface is too low for people of normal height, a discussion on how to lengthen the legs need not sound like the reaction of jealous or stupid colleagues, even if the maker wants users to sit cross-legged on floor cushions. The trouble is that writers seldom see their earliest poems and stories as things made out of cheap, easily replaced words, but as small bodies they have given birth to and animated with their blood. The more easily they wrote a thing the more they feel nature or a divine spirit inspired it, and think alteration can only damage. But written work is not natural growth. If we take words from a poem and dislike the result we can restore words and poem exactly to their original state, which cannot be done when petals are taken from a flower or toes from a foot.

  The best writing class I ever attended was run by Philip Hobsbaum on lines I have just described. He began it a year after arriving in Glasgow to work at its oldest university. He did not advertise, but invited local writers who interested him to it, starting with a small core of students, mostly mature ones. He used university facilities to copy and post out the members’ work, but got no pay for what he did, and few thanks, for the Scots are not good at showing gratitude and Philip never invited it. The meetings were in his home. This was fifteen years ago, and there I met many good local writers I had never met before, some of them now my closest friends, and several who (though unpublished then) are not only published now but are well known. One reason why Philip got few thanks was, that though he connected us, we were more consciously influenced by each other than by him, who chiefly functioned as a good chairman: though he sometimes presented his own poetry, and accepted strictures on it as thoughtfully as we came to accept strictures on our writing. We knew we could have met and shared work at the constructive level without him, so forgot that we never would have done. Much later I read an article by Seamus Heaney which dated Ulster as a district of self-aware, self-confident literary production from the arrival of Philip Hobsbaum in Belfast and the writers’ group he created there.

  Most groups exist without a unique person to form them. The members continue learning in these what schools and colleges start to teach and sometimes prevent: how to recognise our thoughts and feelings, and express them, and share them. The value of a writers’ group is in more than the few members who get published and famous. Even Italian academies knew this.

  POSTSCRIPT: FEBRUARY 1974

  A Writer In Residence Reports

  I AM GLAD of this chance to report upon my first six months at Glasgow University. If I do it cunningly I may get new customers. But I will start with a warning and an excuse. The job of creative writer-in-residence is temporary for a good reason. Three of us in Scotland are paid to h
elp students make poems, plays, stories – kinds of fiction their lecturers are paid to explain. Being professional writers we must prefer the literary virtues we want in our own work, so without intending, must be unfair to folk prefering other virtues. I try to make my writing clear and definite, with a smooth and ordinary grammar. Yes, part of the meaning of words is their sound, so I enjoy the moan of doves in immemorial elms, good strong, thick, stupefying incense smoke and jellies soother than the creamy curd. But I agree first with the duchess in Alice in Wonderland: ‘Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves’. I have a cloth ear for the mainly sonorous, so can miss nuances which depend on it. Some student writers will inevitably find my advice discouraging because their talents are struggling in a different direction.

  But a university course lasts four years, no resident writer lasts longer than two, so a student has the chance of more than one professional opinion. And the conditions of my job stop me doing much damage. I have no register and make no official reports. Those who dislike my advice stop seeing me. But since last October I have had over forty student writers, two thirds calling three or four times and a few coming steadily, so I am not too forbidding. I have had writers from the staff as well as students, from the sciences as well as the arts. Some of the best writing is from the science side. On weekdays I am available all Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and the morning of Thursdays. My rooms are on the fourth floor of Humanities, in the south-west corner of the west quadrangle. The outer room has two doors on different corridors, 65 and 67 which are not locked. The inner room is my office. Outside its door hangs a timetable and pencil on a string. Visitors make an appointment by writing their names opposite a blank hour convenient for them. I like to read new work two or three days before discussing it, so slide work under the office door if I’m not in when you call.