In the year when Glasgow became the (official) European Capital of Culture its council advertised a new job: Keeper of Glasgow’s Social History, to control all Glasgow’s local history museums, but especially “the very popular People’s Palace.” Responsible for the appointment was Mr Spalding, the new head of Glasgow’s museum service. When asked if Ms King would not get the job automatically he said, “No jobs for the girls. We must be democrats and make jobs open to all.” He promoted the keeper of the Springburn museum to the job. This shocked those who knew his decision was not democratic. If democracy means a popular choice, Mr Spalding and the keeper of the Burrell Collection were less well known than Elspeth. If a St. Andrews university degree and achievements are a qualification, none are better qualified.
So her supporters thought:– local writers, Socialists (real ones), Tories (Scotland still has Tories), and twenty-one Labour councillors who have been threatened with dismissal from the party if they speak to the press on the matter. Her supporters achieved nothing. After fourteen years as a curator she is now made deputy of a man she once promoted. This is because that, though a member of no party she is keen on the independent traditions of Scottish working-class life, so suspected of wanting Scottish home rule, which the Labour party leaders fear. She dislikes sale of public properties, and the Labour council leaders want to sell much of Glasgow Green near the Palace to a group** that will turn it into a commercial amusement park. Elspeth has no sense of how to promote herself. Hooray for public servants who give the public a superior class of service, and are not political careerists. Scotland is rotten with the other sort.
* Printed in spring 1990 on a folded sheet I posted to folk aware of Glasgow culture and politics. A slightly different version was printed in The Independent.
** This was prevented because that part of the Green was found to have been polluted by industrial waste. Elspeth’s work for the Palace became impossible. She resigned, and has now served the public equally well in Dunfermline and Stirling.
McGrotty and Ludmilla*
ONCE UPON A TIME a producer of television plays planned a series of them based upon the popular nursery tales, but in modern settings. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, for instance, became the story of an innocent young social worker who, on visiting an unemployed family of social security scroungers, hardly escapes with her life. Told of this project by my London literary agent, Francis Head, I imagined the Aladdin story with the hero a junior civil servant, wicked uncle Abanazir a senior one, and the magic lamp a secret government paper which gave whoever held it unlimited powers of blackmail. The television producer rejected the idea so I made of it a radio play which Francis sold to London BBC. Directed by Shaun McLaughlin, McGrotty and Ludmilla, or The Harbinger Report was broadcast on the 18th of July, 1975. I give the date to show that, though a blatant plagiarist, I did not plagiarise Yes Minister, the later TV comedy series with a Westminster setting.
The plot of my romance is from the Arabian Nights but I first discovered the world it shows in But Soft – We Are Observed, a satire on the British state written by Hilaire Belloc, illustrated by G.K. Chesterton, and first published in 1928. Like most political satire, from Aristophanes’ Wasps to Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, it is set ahead of the author’s time. Belloc describes Britain under the premiership of Mary Bull, leader of the Anarchist party. The Anarchists speak out for the freedom of the individual, and are the successors of the Unionists who were previously Conservatives and originally Tories. The official opposition (which speaks for social justice and equality) are the Communists, formerly the Labour party, who succeeded the Liberals who began as Whigs. The leaders of both parties unite to maintain the unearned incomes of the British investing classes, for they belong to them. The government and opposition connive to get profitable contracts for wealthy corporations while pretending in parliament to protect equal freedom and justice for everyone under the rule of law. This means big government transactions are made under a cloak of secrecy, a cloak held in place by magistrates, the police, and various spy networks. These networks, like all unions of cheats and liars, are incompetent and treacherous, but hurt their victims more than their employers.
The hero of the book is a guileless young man and new to London. The secret intelligence agencies (one of them American) mistake him for the emissary of an eastern oil-bearing country, a place whose bandit chiefs will be recognised as a government by other governments as soon as they sell their mineral rights to western corporations. The perplexed hero is swiftly brought to palatial offices and homes where he meets the chief manipulators of British finance, news and politics. Unlike Mungo McGrotty he never understands his false position well enough to exploit it. His ignorance is mistaken for cunning. To stop him dealing with other people he is sent to jail for resisting police harassment, and only released when the real emissary arrives in Britain: a devious Asiatic broker who talks in terms the British chiefs understand perfectly.
When I read this novel in the fifties I thought it a funny but out-of-date caricature of an obsolete system. In the late forties the British Labour party, without violent revolution or dictatorship, had established (I believed) a working alternative to monopoly capitalism. Most education and health care, all broadcasting, most transport, fuel, power and a lot of housing were funded and owned by our local and national governments, who were supposed to prefer the good of all to the profits of some. The British Commonwealth (wealth held in common) was larger, than it had been since the privatisation of the common lands in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The nineteen fifties was a time of full employment, when many of the rich whined publicly about how poor they were. Evelyn Waugh, comparing life in those days with his golden memories or pre-war Britain, said he felt he was living “in an occupied country” – a catch phrase which then meant a country conquered by outsiders. I thought great riches and poverty abolished in Britain: that no important politicians had secrets worth hiding: that most secret agents were inventions of fiction writers. I thought Britain an unusually decent country. I did not know that Britain was in a temporary state of reaction to the huge indecency of the Second World War and that of the Depression which led to it.
National and local British governments have since connived to sell our Commonwealth to private speculators for the profits they will make from them. Our national health and education services have become shabby beggars pleading for alms. Our district councils are no longer funded by a Victorian rates system which taxed richer properties more highly: we have a Hanoverian poll tax to which rich and poor pay the same. At each phase of the Commonwealth sell-off Labour leaders have silenced, or rejected as extremist, those supporters who want public reacquisition put on the party’s programme in terms which would discourage shareholders. These leaders explain that it can only come to power with the help of people the Tory policies have made richer, so the more right-wing the Tory party has become, the more right-wing the Labour party has become. On every major issue which divided the two main British parties (nuclear disarmament, entry into Europe, self-rule for Scotland) the Labour and Tory leaders have been on the same side. The only political fun has been public scandals over our Ministry of Spies. Since the Burgess and Maclean scandal subsequent revelations show that British espionage is larger, richer, more active and incompetent, and in our government’s opinion, more essential to it – not because the government has important secrets to hide from foreign enemies, but because they prevent most British people learning and discussing decisions made, things done for (we are told) our own defence and security.
Orwell’s 1984 made horrid fun of life under any modern dictatorship by caricaturing Britain during the wartime coalition. In But Soft – We Are Observed Belloc caricatured Britain as it usually is: a plutocracy pretending to be a democracy by manipulating a two party parliament which offers voters little to choose between but styles of rhetoric. Indeed, it now looks more like a sober portrait than a caricature. My novella is certainly a c
aricature, though it caricatures nothing but the ability of the British rich to enlist in their ranks awkward, useful or threatening outsiders.
In February 1987, the stage version of McGrotty and Ludmilla was produced by Michael Boyd at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, with this cast:
Mungo McGrotty ........................... Kevin McMonigle
Arthur Shots .................................. Russell Hunter
Ludmilla ........................................ Julia St. John
Miss Panther, Miss Bee, Mary Fox .. Vivienne Dixon
The Minister .................................. Sandy Neilson
Aubrey Rose, American artist ........ Bill Murdoch
Charlie Gold, Harbinger ................ Sean Scanlon
Peter Ling designed the set and the production suggested details for this book. Arthur Shots’ global cocktail cabinet, McGrotty’s bottle of booze brought to the wrong kind of party, Ludmilla’s riding habit and sexual employment of drugs were devised by one of those named above, or by some in conjunction. And McGrotty’s face on the front jacket is copied from Kevin McMonigle in the part.
In Chapter 32 the distortion of Lord Acton’s axiom on power is taken from Pohl and Kornbluth’s fine novel The Space Merchants.
To furnish Chapter 33 I stole a Dutch landscape with cows from Little Dorrit. My heavy villain’s lapse into blank verse when deeply excited is from Thackeray’s The Rose and The Ring. So (I suspect) is my assumption that most very powerful people, like all the rest of us, are moved by the appetites of greedy adolescents, but do more damage with them.
I will look kindly upon the advances of producers who think McGrotty and Ludmilla would make a good television film, but the advances should be made through my present London agent, Xandra Hardie.** Francis Head died of lung cancer in 1978. She smoked a lot. I wish she had not died, but cannot wish she had smoked less. I found her helpful, tolerant, and enjoyable company. Self imposed abstinence might have soured some of that. Goodbye.
* Epilogue to a novella published in 1990, Glasgow by Dog and Bone, a small publishing house started by my friend Angel Mullane and her friends, which lasted for over 2 years, and published with this 2 books of poems, 2 crime thrillers, a recipe book, a spiritual treatise all of which I designed, and 2 joke books which I did not.
** Xandra Hardie stopped being a literary agent for me or anyone else in 2004, in order to write Bertie, May & Mrs Fish, which she published using the name Alexandra Bingley. It is a fine book about her parents which gives private insights into the English officer class, a powerful clan almost invisible to most in Britain of my class.. My literary agents in 2014 (and possibly the rest of my life) are Jenny Brown in Edinburgh, who mainly deals with my non-fiction, and Zoe Waldie of the Rogers, Coleridge and White agency in London, who mainly deals with my fiction.
Jack Withers’ Culture City 1990*
THESE VERSES BY JACK WITHERS crackle and spit with anger at the present state of Glasgow, and at the local governors who helped make it and who give frequent signs of being pleased with themselves. I am acting as a doorman to the book because I think he does well to be angry. Older Glaswegians with some knowledge of their past need no introductions, but Glasgow is less than a fifth of the Scottish people, less than a fiftieth of the English and Welsh. It may help A Real Glasgow Archipelago to travel further east than Baillieston, farther south than Castlemilk if I give context to names like The Bridge to Nowhere, Lally, McFadden, King, Donnelly; and some events during our city’s year as Culture Capital of Europe.
All life depends on cultivation so there is no such thing as a cultureless land, but we only think a place highly cultured when it exports things and ideas to people outside. The high Midwest Scottish culture began in the second half of the eighteenth century when the Glasgow councillors paid to have their river straightened and deepened, because the city could not export before it became a port. Coal and iron were mined under the fields of nearby Lanarkshire, and James Watt conceived the separate steam condensing chamber when working for Glasgow University. For nearly two hundred years Strathclyde exported ships, machines and household goods along with the scientific discoveries and examples of public enterprise which made the material exports possible. By 1859 Glasgow Council had abolished private water companies and turned Loch Katrine into a reservoir supplying water to every class of citizen – thus escaping cholera epidemics which struck other British cities. Our public transport, street-lighting, parks and libraries were emulated by cities in America.
All this had mainly been the work of Liberal businessmen, but by the early twentieth century Clydeside had the best educated skilled workforce of its size in Britain and power passed to the Independent Labour Party who sent into parliament a majority of radical socialist MPs. Their main achievement, the Wheatley Acts, is named after one of them. It allowed local authorities throughout Britain to build good-quality low-rent housing which private landlords could not provide at a profitable rate. The Labour Party has managed Glasgow from that time to this.
But it is important to remember that the Scottish founders of this party were men of truly independent mind who believed in land nationalization, Scottish Home Rule, and opposed the First World War – some had gone to jail rather than fight in it. Some had even helped organise the Clydeside rent strike which made Lloyd George introduce rent control over the whole of Britain. Of course Glasgow was not the only city where folk believed that a people’s government should manage industry and finance to stop the irresponsible wealth and damaging poverty which sprouted in the 1920s and 30s. Between 1939 and 1945 Britain would have collapsed had the government not controlled rents, wages, prices and industry. Boyd Orr was made Minister of Health. When studying medicine in Glasgow University he had seen malnutrition in the slums, and had later jolted the government into giving free school milk and dinners to the children of the poor. Under his guidance the generation who grew up between 1940 and 1945 was the healthiest on record – one reason why the British had very little faith in Tory competition when the War ended, and voted in the Labour Party to maintain the full employment and health care they had enjoyed when at war.
And now I will bring us back to Glasgow here and now by getting personal. Like most middle-class offspring of working-class parents I am a creature of the Welfare State. My birth place was in Riddrie, a Glasgow housing scheme built under the Wheatley Acts, and so posh that I had a feeling of superiority to people who lived elsewhere. A postman, a nurse, printer and tobacconist lived up our close. My father worked a machine which cut the cardboard boxes in Lairds, at Bridgeton. He did unpaid work for the Scottish Youth Hostel Association and the Camping Club of Great Britain. He knew Glasgow’s Deputy Town Clerk, who lived in a semi-detached nearby on the Cumbernauld Road. My mother had been a shop girl who sang in the Glasgow Orpheus Choir. Besides going to the local cinema we went to the Citizens Theatre, the D'oyly Carte Opera Company and any visiting theatre showing the plays of Bernard Shaw.
I therefore knew that Glasgow culture, industry and art were maintained by folk like us in Riddrie. When the National Health Service gave me a course of anti-asthma injections my mother could hardly have afforded; when I discovered that through Glasgow Public Libraries I could order and read any great books I had heard of without paying a penny; when the taxpayers (of whom my father was one) paid my Art School fees and an allowance which he could not, singly, have paid – I did not take this exactly for granted. I knew these good things had been won by hard social struggle and was proud that Glasgow folk had been part of this struggle. But by 1960 the independent radicals who were part of that struggle had died out. They have not been replaced.
Since the Second World War Glasgow councillors have taken no social initiative that was not decided in London, and decided by governments they were elected to oppose. At first their job was to maintain what the liberals had achieved while enlarging the city’s housing stock, and extending motorways according to government policy. Yes, Glasgow urgently needed good n
ew housing, but private firms profited by building them and to keep profits high living space was narrowed and Glasgow put up multi-storey flats when American cities had begun knocking theirs down. To let through the new motorway several local communities and good buildings were destroyed – though Glasgow has fewer car owners per head than any city of equal size in Europe. The original plan was continually changed in ways that left many odd cul-de-sacs. The most obvious was a huge platform of concrete stilts which for twenty years spanned the motorway south of Charing Cross – part of a shopping mall which perhaps materialized in a different form somewhere else.
These mistakes were natural. Glasgow Council was so used to being goverened from London and subsidised through Whitehall that the opinions of their electorate (who did not want to live in tower blocks) seemed unimportant. Especially since the same electorate would never vote Tory. So they employed who they thought were the best people, English architects, planners and associates of international corporations putting up tower blocks from Morocco to Brazil. By the 70s the old Strathclyde industries were subsidiaries of companies who were stripping their assets before shifting them south. Our material exports had shrunk to a trickle, our public welfare was dictated from London.
Yet before the Thatcher era most Glasgow Labour councillors probably thought themselves Socialists. No longer. They too now believe in a world fit for financial houses to prosper in. Shareholders can only keep up profits by claiming new territories. Since Britain, despite its huge armament, has now no territories it can safely conquer outside its borders, the government is helping the profiteers take over the public territories within. The Glasgow Labour government has done its best to help, and was rewarded by being declared Culture Capital of Europe.
Of Me and Others Page 21