The best short account of how this happened is in a novel by a friend of mine who has allowed me to quote it with some very slight changes. It is a dialogue between a London art dealer and Linda, an English art administrator employed by Glasgow District Council.
“Tell me about the European Culture Capital thing,” says the dealer. “Why Glasgow? How has a notoriously filthy hole become a shining light? Is it an advertising stunt?”
“Certainly, but we have something to advertise!” says Linda. “It all began when John Betjeman discovered Glasgow in the sixties and found what nobody had ever suspected. The city centre is a masterpiece of Victorian and Edwardian architecture. But in those days it was under such a thick coating of soot and grime that only the eye of a master could penetrate it. Even more off-putting were the people. In those days most Scottish imports and exports passed through Glasgow, and the good middle bit was squashed up tight against docks and warehouses and the tenements of those who worked in them. What would visitors think of London if Trafalgar Square were on the Isle of Dogs? If every day hordes of horny-handed men in filthy overalls percolated up and down Regent Street and half filled the Fleet Street pubs? But London is vast, so the classes segregate themselves easily and naturally. They couldn’t do that in Glasgow so respectable Londoners passed through it in fear of their lives. It is perhaps not logical for well dressed British people to dread the working classes, but when they flagrantly outnumber us the recoil is instinctive.
“Anyway, nothing could improve Glasgow before all its old industries got taken out, but they have been. And before that happened all the people who worked in them got decanted into big housing schemes on the verge of things. So the middle of Glasgow is clean now and will never be filthy again! The old warehouse and markets and tenements and churches are being turned into luxury flats and shopping malls and a surprising variety of very decent foreign restaurants. Which is where we come in – I mean the English.
“You see Glasgow is in Scotland and from our point of view Scotland is slightly like Rhodesia in the early years of the century. Most British industry and money is in the south of England now, so it’s crowded! But we English detest crowds. At heart each of us wants to be a country squire, with wide-open spaces near our house and grounds, and if possible a village atmosphere where we can relax with a few like-minded friends. But a place like that costs a fortune in England and the nearer London you go the more astronomical the fortune gets. All the nice English villages have been bought. But by selling quite a small property in London you can get enough to buy…”
“Yes yes yes!” says the dealer impatiently, “I know about property development in the north. I own a small tax-avoidance forest near Inverness, but where does the culture come from?”
“From the Thatcher government,” says Linda promptly, “and from Glasgow District Council. Glasgow once had the strongest local government there was, outside London. It owned a huge public transport system, housing schemes, docklands and lots of other things Thatcher is allowing it to sell. Like local governments everywhere it is being steadily abolished, but since the people’s elected representatives usually draw salaries until they die and get all sorts of perks they don’t complain. Maybe they don’t notice! However, they want to show they can do more than just sell public property to private speculators, so they have gone in for culture with a capital C – and tourism. Commercially speaking culture and tourism are the same.
“The European Culture Capital notion was started by Melian Mercouri, the Greek minister for arts. Athens had been stone-cleaned, she wanted the tourists to know it, she suggested to Brussels that Athens be the first culture capital, then other countries could have a shot. Nobody objected. Italy chose Florence; the Netherlands, Amsterdam; Germany, Berlin; France predictably chose Paris. But being culture capital is expensive. You must first advertise yourself. Put on extra shows and concerts. Invite foreign guests. Stage boring receptions. Margaret Thatcher isn’t keen on all that crap; anyway London has enough of it. Like a sensible monetarist she put the job up for grabs and offered it to the lowest bidder. Bath and Edinburgh put in for it, Cardiff, Birmingham and Glasgow. But only Glasgow gave a quiet little promise that if it got the job it would not ask the central government for cash. So Glasgow, which the Labour Party had ruled over for half a century, was given the job by the Tory arts minister who announced that Glasgow had set an example of independent action which should be followed by every local authority in the United Kingdom. We’re funding the enterprise out of the rates and public property sales and sponsorship from banks, oil companies, building societies and whatever we can screw out of Europe.
“And Glasgow deserves the job! It’s the headquarters of Scottish Opera, Scottish Ballet, Scottish National Orchestra, the Burrell Collection, the Citizens Theatre, the Third Eye Centre, and an international drama festival – all of them directed and mostly administered by the English, of course. Sometimes the natives get a bit bolshie about that but I’m very firm with them. I say quietly ‘Listen! You Scots have been exporting your own people to England and everywhere else for centuries, and nobody has complained much about you! Why start howling just because we’re giving you a taste of your own medicine?’ They can’t think of an answer to that one.”
“But surely the natives have some local culture of their own?”
Glasgow indeed had a culture of its own and a local history museum, the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green, which was devoted to it. In charge were two very knowledgeable people, Elspeth King and her assistant Michael Donnelly. And now I will talk personally again.
In 1988 I, Tom Leonard and Philip Hobsbaum were invited to meet the organiser of an exhibition planned for the Glasgow Culture Capital year. Alison Miyauchi was a friendly, intelligent Japanese Canadian who told us that Glasgow, despite the splendid renovations, still had the remains of a bad reputation, and the exhibition was intended to counteract this. It would be financed by Glasgow District Council and be called The Words and the Stones because Glasgow contained so many beautiful buildings and fine writers. Being a stranger to the city she would value our advice. Alas, we had none to give her. I said that Glasgow’s best civic architecture this century had been good pre-war housing schemes built as a result of the Wheatley Acts. How could the District Council celebrate its achievement as a public landlord while selling its best housing stock to private buyers? Tom Leonard said that what outsiders thought of Glasgow was their problem not his. So we had nothing to do with the schedule for the exhibition which appeared some months later. It announced that Glasgow culture would be shown in five historical phases: 1) the Romans to the Norman Conquest 2) the Middle Ages – the Cathedral City 3) the 18th century enlightenment 4) Victorian enterprise 5) the future.
Since the Normans got no foothold in Scotland by conquest the schedule was obviously the work of foreigners, and they clearly wished to celebrate a history quite free of nasty strife. Archbishop Turnbull, who founded the University, might be celebrated, but not Archbishop Wishart, who was William Wallace’s chancellor in the Scottish War of Independence. The Reformation (when Catholics killed Protestants, Episcopalians killed Presbyterians and Catholics, Presbyterians killed Catholics and Episcopalians) would be omitted, with the fact that all three sects had at different times defied the London government. The mercantile Glasgow of Adam Smith and the tobacco lords would be shown, but nothing of Glasgow’s gains from the slave trade. Glasgow shipbuilding would be lauded, but not the great municipal achievements which had been or were about to be privatised, and certainly not the struggles of the political radicals who had put the Glasgow Labour Party in power – the party using the Glasgow people’s money to fund this show.
In 1980 the show opened in the vaults under Glasgow Central Station. To stop The Words and the Stones being shortened to the acronym TWATS the show was renamed Glasgow’s Glasgow. Though intended to pay for itself by the sale of entrance tickets, the District Council have since admitted that it lost £6,000,000. Nor is it stran
ge that a transatlantic lady with an English assistant had been put in charge. The show, like the Culture Capital year itself, was not meant to send Glasgow goods and examples outward, but designed to pull foreigners and their money in. And surely foreigners must know what they want in Scotland better than the natives! During the Year of Culture three other public scandals showed the local government’s contempt for local achievement. The leader of the Glasgow Labour Party and head of the District Council, Mr Patrick Lally, was involved in every one. The deputy leader, Jean McFadden, supported him.
Scandal One. The Elspeth King Affair. The District Council advertised for a new head for the Glasgow People’s Palace. Elspeth King, who had done the job splendidly for twelve years, was told she might apply for it. But it went to a young Irishman she had herself employed two years earlier. She was now his assistant, and to give him a larger office in the same building (for the People’s Palace is not a huge museum) the Glasgow eighteenth century gallery was dismantled. Some Glasgow Labour councillors thought this a scandal, opposed it in the City Chambers, and informed the press. Mr Lally announced that Labour councillors would be dismissed if they talked about such things in public – only the official party spokesman could do that. Michael Donnelly denounced the administration’s action in a Glasgow Herald article and was sacked for it. Elspeth King resigned soon after. (The attendance at the People’s Palace has since shrunk to nearly half its former size).
Scandal Two. The Glasgow Green Affair. While the newspapers were still intensely debating Scandal One, Mr Lally announced plans to sell off a great part of Glasgow Green near the People’s Palace to a set of financiers who would cover it with expensive hotels, restaurants and a commercial pleasure park. (Plans to sell off Glasgow’s oldest, biggest and most central park go back to the nineteenth century when a seam of coal was discovered underneath. Public opposition prevented it. In the 1970s and 80s a ring road extension was planned which would have isolated the park and the People’s Palace. Public protest has again halted the Glasgow Green sell-off, but not parts of Bellahouston and Kelvingrove Park.)
Scandal Three. The International Concert Hall Affair. Mr Lally was chairman of the board which gave Glasgow a grand new concert hall. Strathclyde Regional Council offered to pay for its furnishings and a mural decoration for the foyer. Artists were invited to submit designs and a jury of architects, painters and academics from Edinburgh, besides Glasgow, chose Ian McCulloch, who painted it. At a public banquet celebrating the completion of the hall in the final month of the Culture Capital Year, Mr Lally announced that the mural would be taken down twelve months later. Members of the Strathclyde Regional Council, the jury and Ian McCulloch were all present – only McCulloch walked out in disgust. Later some of the rest made complaining sounds. (Lally got his way. The mural is now crowded into a small vestibule of the Tramway Theatre where it cannot be seen from a distance and where the damp air of a building about to be renovated endangers it.)
Such insults to local artists and historians are worth mentioning as part of much greater insults to the unemployed, poorly paid and badly housed – folk who, if they vote for anyone, vote Labour, but who the Labour party merely pretends to serve. Mr Lally denied that the millions spent or lost on the Culture Year could have been used to make damp proof the public housing in the schemes whose owners will never be able to buy it. The reasons for this are too complicated to give in detail and may be summarized thus. Governments, local and national, must first help the prosperous before they know what is left for the poor, which is why the Labour Council after deploring the Poll Tax worked so hard to collect it.
Yet 1990 and 91 showed that the Labour Party was not quite a sodden firework. In defiance of their councillors and MPs, the branch meetings of Scotland and England set up a resistance which stopped the Poll Tax working; forced a change of law which will make big property owners pay higher taxes than the small. Tommy Sheridan, one of the leaders of this resistance, got jailed for it and has since been elected to the District Council.** He is currently addressing meetings to oppose the sale of Glasgow’s greatest municipal achievement – the waterworks and Loch Katrine which supplies them – to private profiteers. Glasgow District Council has forbidden him the use of schools as meeting places as he may again persuade people to break what is not yet, but may become, a law. This is why Jack Withers does well to be angry.
* Introduction to A Real Glasgow Archipelago, poems by Jack Withers published 1993 by Argyll Publishing, Glendaruel, with woodcuts by Ian McCulloch
** Tommy Sheridan’s career as a politician ended in 2006 after he unwisely hobknobbed with a friendly News of the World journalist, leading to stories about his private life which, however true, are thought irrelevant to the politcs of statesmen in nearly every other nation than the United Kingdom, where broadcasters publicize all unfaithfulness to a puritan code of honour if it is sexual, not financial.
Something Leather*
AFEW YEARS AGO I NOTICED MY stories described men who found life a task they never doubted until an unexpected collision opened their eyes and changed their habits. The collision was usually with a woman, involved swallowing alcohol or worse, and happened in the valley of the shadow of death. I had made novels and stories believing each an adventurous new world. I now saw the same pattern in them all — the longest novel used it thrice. Having discovered how my talent worked it was almost certainly defunct. Imagination will not employ whom it cannot surprise.
I told folk I had no more ideas for stories and did not expect them. I said it to Kathy Acker. Kathy, pointing out a new way, asked if I had thought of writing a story about a woman. I said no, that was impossible because I could not imagine how a woman felt when she was alone. Such announcements were truthful but not honest. I hoped my talent was only as dead as Finnegan, and would leap from the coffin and dance a new jig if the wake got loud enough. Meanwhile I arranged a show of paintings, began a collection of English vernacular prologues, turned old work into film scripts and came to owe the Clydesdale Bank a sum oscillating between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds. This was not poverty. Most professional folk live in debt nowadays. Banks and building societies encourage it because debts make them richer. My state only depressed me because my parents had been working class folk who, though not religious, avoided debt like the devil. I too could have avoided it by renting a smaller flat, using public transport instead of taxis, eating at home instead of restaurants, drinking alcohol four or five times a year instead of nearly every day. Alas, I felt nostalgia but no desire for the decent carefulness which had bred and educated me. I wanted to be a middle-class waster, but a solvent one.
In Queen Street station one morning I glimpsed a girl stepping jauntily through the crowd in high heels and a leather suit which fitted her so snugly in some places, left her so naked in others that it seemed a preliminary to lovemaking. Soon after or soon before I began imagining how a woman might feel when alone. This came from accompanying a friend on a shopping expedition. Some women – even women who know what looks best on them – enjoy a man’s company when buying clothes, though the man stops being a distinct character to them. He becomes an audience, or rather, a small part of a vaster, more satisfying audience in their heads. I penetrated What Every Woman Wants, The House of Fraser, and Chelsea Girl with the guilty reverence I would feel in a mosque, catholic chapel or synagogue, yet the odour was familiar and friendly. I had sniffed it as a small boy in my mother’s wardrobe. I was fascinated by women pondering sombre or vivid or subtly pale colours, fingering husky or frail or soft or sleek fabrics, holding loosely or crisply or tightly tailored second skins to their bodies. I felt a long slow sexual ache in these shops, a sad ache because no earthly coitus could satisfy all the desires and possibilities suggested by the many garments. The ache, of course, was mine, but I was sure many women felt it too and perhaps felt it stronger. Most women have fewer devices than men to divert them from affection. I imagined a woman whose world was full of that ache, whose life was
years of ordinary frustrations patiently endured before a chance suggestion led her further and further away from the familiar things she normally clung to. The woman need not have been beautiful or her adventure perverse, but these notions brought my imagination to life again. While writing the first chapter of this book I enjoyed a prolonged, cold-blooded sexual thrill of a sort common among some writers and all lizards.
At that time I thought One for the Album (then called Something Leather) a short story. On completing it I imagined more adventures for June, but the first episode had internal order and was a thriller of The Pit and the Pendulum sort, ending when the reader was likely to be most intrigued. Believing it could be popular I sent it to a famous London literary agency, suggesting they try selling it to an expensive glossy magazine with a transatlantic circulation: Vogue or Esquire or better still the New Yorker. After a few weeks I learned it had been sent to a couple of British literary magazines whose editors, though friendly acquaintances of mine, had not embraced it with cries of “yes please”.
In 1987 Tom Maschler, the Chairman of Jonathan Cape Ltd, asked if I had started writing fiction again, a question he had asked annually since 1985. I sent him the new story. He liked it, thought it could be the first chapter of a novel, offered money in advance. We haggled. I obtained enough to live without debt for a couple of years while still eating and drinking too much. Only the need to write an unforeseen novel now depressed me. The further adventures I had imagined for June were too few to be a novel. I will describe these adventures, then how the novel I got written in a way which cut most of them out.
First came the orgy with Senga and Donalda (I had not yet thought of Harry) which changed June’s looks and left her nothing to wear but dark glasses, high-heeled shoes and the suit I had glimpsed on the girl in Queen Street station. The wicked thrill of imagining a modest, conventional woman forced to dress like that was followed by speculations on how it might change her behaviour. For the better, I thought, if she had health and vitality. Self-conscious conventionality is bred from vanity and cowardice. It assumes everyone may be watching us closely and must be given no strong reason for finding us attractive or repulsive. I thought of June as very lonely because she has cultivated reticence to compensate for her beauty. She evades or retreats from nearly everything she dislikes, never opposing or changing it. Conventional cowardice has imprisoned her intelligence, so the discovery that her mere appearance disturbs conventional, timid and stupid people feels like release. Stepping jauntily through the streets in her defiantly sexual suit she enjoys a freedom which is far more than sexual. Next day, instead of brooding over Senga and what will happen when they meet at the end of the week, June returns to work as if nothing had happened. Her office job prevents loneliness and earns money, but today she approaches it with a mischievous interest in how her work-mates will cope with her.
Of Me and Others Page 22