Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  I have no space to describe my delight in the sarcophagi, ornaments, carvings and models of the Egyptian gallery – the splendid model samurai seated in full armour before the ethnography gallery with its richly-carved furniture, weapons and canoe prow from Oceania and Africa – the gallery full of large perfectly detailed models of the greatest ships built on Clydeside. The ground floor displays assured me that the world had been, and still was, full of more wonderful things than I could imagine for myself.

  After these wonders the long uncluttered floors of upstairs picture galleries were a satisfying change. I was too young to enjoy looking at many pictures. Realistic ones seemed a waste of time – the world is full of mothers and children, pompous adults, bowls of fruit and vases of flowers, flayed and limbless cattle hanging in butchers’ shops – why stare at paintings of them? But I loved the two huge Salvator Rosa landscapes. I imagined climbing into them, paddling through the pools of what seemed shallow rivers, passing the small figures of John the Baptist, Jesus and Disciples and making secret dens for myself in the hollow trees and cavernous rocks. I also enjoyed, as all children can and many adults do, Noel Paton’s Fairy Raid, that moonlit wood full of amazing supernaturals. Only as I aged and matured did I come to appreciate Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox, Turner’s Modern Italy, Whistler’s Carlyle and many more of Kelvingrove’s great paintings.

  I had become intimate with the galleries in the last days of Tom Honeyman’s audacious curatorship. More important than his acquisition of Dali’s Crucifixion was the other modern art he brought to Glasgow – his shows of work by Picasso, Matisse and Van Gogh raised storms of publicity. When taking my private unofficial stroll through the upper galleries one morning I found three were hung with all Edvard Munch’s greatest paintings and prints. It was a maturing experience. Before then I had been mainly excited by views of the fantastic, erotic heavens and hells in books of pictures by Blake, Aubrey Beardsley and Bosch. I wanted to make my life exciting by painting catastrophic biblical events in modern Glasgow settings – the deluge, for instance, flooding Kelvingrove Park up to the level of Park Circus. Munch painted hell in the rooms and streets of Oslo, a city not unlike Glasgow, and he was a realist! His white suburban villa with scarlet Virginia creeper, shown at night by street lighting, was creepy and sinister but not fantastic. Munch, like adolescent me, was obsessed with loneliness, sex and death – his people look lonely, all his women are victims or vampires. He showed me great art can be made out of common people and things viewed through personal emotion.

  Apart from temporary shows like Munch’s the main Kelvingrove displays were almost unchanged for most of my life, apart from the model ships being shifted to the Transport Museum when it opened in the sixties. They were replaced by weapons, armour and military uniforms. I think the main arrangement had been achieved between the two world wars and maintained because no curator – not even audacious Honeyman – thought of a better one. In more than fifty years of visiting I always found something new and interesting among displays and paintings I had seen before. When Kelvingrove shut for renovation in 2003 I feared what change might bring, being an old-fashioned Socialist with conservative instincts who has disliked some renovations.

  For over two centuries Glasgow had a culture of scientific discovery, industrial production and radical politics. Its municipal water supply, street lighting, parks and public transport made it a pioneer among modern cities. Municipal housing schemes (Riddrie was one) had replaced the terrible housing of its working classes. But by 1990 the big industries had gone, a Tory government with Labour connivance had privatised public services and property, so the town council, having power to do hardly anything else, decided to renovate Glasgow by attracting property developers and tourists. Glasgow was declared Europe’s Culture Capital so the Council brought in culture managers to promote the city as just a nice place to be. This meant ignoring Glasgow’s great industrial and municipal Socialist past. A new head of art galleries and museums made only one lasting change to Kelvingrove — paintings usually kept in store were hung on the walls of corridors, close together and high up, like stamps in an album. He also demoted Elspeth King, acting curator of the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green. She had enriched this local history museum, at hardly any cost to the Council, with good displays of Glasgow’s past that some Labour councillors wished to forget from the vandalism of the Reformation to Billy Connolly’s welly boots. Elspeth has been my friend since she employed me as Glasgow’s city recorder in 1977, so I was prejudiced against the 1990s renovation of Glasgow and against Julian Spalding who, by not leaving well enough alone, had harmed a museum. So I also feared for the Kelvingrove renovation.

  But when shown round it last week before the official opening I was delighted at first. The basement has been splendidly renovated. Stores, workshops and offices it once contained are now in Nitshill, and the floor space given to a gallery shop, restaurant, rooms for visiting parties of schoolchildren and spaces for visiting exhibitions. There is a wall of ceramic tiles each made from pictures by children in Glasgow primary schools. The basement is at ground level on the river side of the building, allowing a new easier entrance from which public lifts now rise to the upper floors. This is all good.

  I first noticed on the ground floor how the carved stone walls and gilded ceilings are now free of industrial grime I had thought their normal colour, and how displays are completely rearranged. Some paintings had been brought down from the sky-lit galleries because (I was told) it was found fewer folk went up there. If we ignore a minority who could not face stairs before public lifts were installed, this must be because many – like me as a boy – are bored by paintings. So why not surprise them by showing some with museum displays? On the ground floor are more good paintings by John Quentin Pringle than I knew the gallery owned, well displayed beside Rennie Mackintosh furniture. Pringle and Mackintosh were contemporaries, so why separate them from Glasgow artists in upstairs gallery? Many foreign tourists are interested in Mary Queen of Scots – why not group paintings of her downstairs with a doll in the kind of clothes she wore? There is still one painting of her upstairs in an exhibition about Scottish History – or was it Scottish Character? Many labels had still to be put in place, but perhaps my memory is at fault. Everything I saw was entertaining but confusing. I forget where I saw my old friends the spider crab, also the Irish elk whose skull is now mounted on a complete skeleton.

  Nearly all I remember is now recombined unexpectedly with new acquisitions. A Glasgow squadron Spitfire hangs above the hall where the large animals had been. It would have been conventional to arrange the weapons, armour and uniforms under it, so elephant, bear, turtle, etcetera are now in the middle of the floor with no indication of their former habitats, though a label tells the elephant’s sad story from circus days to when he went mad and was shot in a zoo. A gull also hung below the Spitfire and a low case contained many different, beautifully-coloured butterflies. Labelling was not complete when I was there so later visitors may read explanations that link Spitfire, exotic big animals, gull and butterflies.

  Weapons and armour now appear among horned and tusked beasts with overhead shark in a display called CONFLICT AND CONSEQUENCES suggesting (despite what labels say) that men dress to kill as naturally as other species grow spikes and shells. Hedgehog, wasp, jellyfish, cactus could be added, tortoise, snail, oyster and much of the old natural history collections which must now be in store. Elsewhere a display named STYLE had a 1920s Anderson racing car, its bonnet surrounded by dummies wearing Victorian crinolines and 18th century panniered gowns. The granite sarcophagus could have been there to show the style of Egyptian coffins, but I am glad to say most Egyptian things have been kept together, with some overcrowding.

  In the top galleries national schools of painting – Italian, Dutch, French, Scottish – have not been mixed together because someone thought traditional groupings dull. Standing display panels now break up the floors, letting more works be shown, but depriving them of
spaciousness, because visitors must constantly turn corners. Most large paintings here are now not so easily seen from a distance, the Salvator Rosas had to leave their Italian chums and now hang below, each on a separate stair. Where once pictures appeared with only a tiny label giving the painter’s name we now have big explanatory notices with distracting, superfluous colour photos showing parts of paintings beside them. Between other paintings are conspicuous metal brackets to hold pages of information about the painter’s work. Pictures I love now seem owned by a domineering teacher who thinks nobody can enjoy pictures without being insistently lectured.

  But there is now room for a display about the Holocaust, with small pictures recalling Belsen experiences by a lady artist who survived them and came to Glasgow. A Koran once looted by a Scottish soldier in the far east reminds us of Scotland’s part in founding the British Empire. Another small display proves all Scottish soldiers were not nasty: it shows three Catholic devotional panels painted by Italian prisoners of war for their chapel in a British prison camp, and given in gratitude to the officer commanding the camp. All this is politically correct.

  I am tempted to sum up my response to the new Kelvingrove in the words of an ancient muppet: "Very in — ter — est — ing... but stupid!”. Unfair and untrue. From being a sequence of large, sensibly linked exhibitions, Kelvingrove is now a chaos of displays, mostly clever, some daft, all amusing, apart from the paintings upstairs that I think horribly displayed. The general style proclaims that the world exists for smart folk who can rearrange it as they like. In one word Kelvingrove is now post-modern, the highest and most insulting compliment I can pay. Children, tourists and even some who remember what it was will find it fun. My regrets are those of any old man who believes things were once better ordered.

  * Most of this was published as an article in The Herald 2006, and its material was partly used in Chapter 3 of my Life in Pictures published by Canongate in 2010.

  London Won’t Let Us*

  SCOTS ARE TIRED of talk about Scots independence. Yes, Scotland’s industries have declined as the Westminster government’s power has increased. Some of us have grown used to it, some think it cannot be changed, some are comfortable enough to think the matter unimportant. Let me just entertain you with old stories from my days with the BBC.

  When my first TV play was accepted by a London producer in 1966, he asked what actors I would like in the main parts. I knew too few to say, but the play was about three Scots in London so I suggested Scots actors should play those parts. In London for the rehearsals I learned Corin Redgrave would play Kelvin Walker (the hero), another English actor would play Sir Hector McKellor, and an Irishman would play Kelvin’s father. This was because the producer knew no suitable Scots actors in London, and had decided to please me with at least one Scottish actor by choosing from an actors directory one whose second name began with Mac, on the assumption that he must be Scottish. It turned out that the English actors could play totally convincing Scottish parts, but the Mac was from Northern Ireland and could only sound like a dour Ulsterman. His small, crucial part had to be cut shorter. The Fall of Kelvin Walker was broadcast in 1968 and a letter from an English viewer asked why I had ruined a good play with an unconvincing end.

  Despite the spoiled end of that play, it led to another about the love of a woman, a son and his dad.

  Early in the 1970s Cecil Taylor and Tom Gallagher founded the Scottish Society of Playwrights, a union of dramatists who found it hard to get work produced north of the Tweed. One of our members was Eddie Boyd who wrote the earliest and best episodes of The View from Daniel Pike, a networked crime series with a Glasgow setting. London BBC producers soon dropped Eddie, commissioned scripts from writers who mainly knew Scotland from books, after which the series was discontinued. The Society arranged a meeting of its members with Alasdair Milne, controller of BBC Scotland who would eventually become the BBC’s Director-General. This honest man explained the BBC had no single national drama office to which playwrights could send work, and the best way to interest more producers in it was by hobnobbing socially with them, in London.

  I was then having short radio plays with Scottish settings produced by Stewart Conn, then head of Scottish BBC radio drama. In 1975 I sent him Near the Driver, a conversation between folk on a future London-to-Scotland express train. Here they meet a polite official called “the driver” who explains that the train is remotely controlled by a computer in the Midlands, and his main job is to announce price increases – soon, after the train leaves Euston, inflation raises the cost of tea and coffee by 50%. Later still he announces that the train is on the same track as one coming the opposite way and will collide with it in ten minutes. He tells them that there is no cause for alarm, gets them strapped to their seats with safety belts that will not unfasten, and before steel shutters cover the windows to protect them from broken glass, retires to the guards’ van to ensure that he, at least, survives to attend an official enquiry into the disaster. The play ends with a vast explosion.

  In the late 1970s I was writer-in-residence at Glasgow University, an experience that suggested my story Five Letters from an Eastern Empire. It is told in the first person by the poet laureate of a vast nation who finds the highly cultured head masters employing him are not benign, but murderously selfish. Roger Scrutton, the Conservative critic, praised it as a satire ‘on Soviet Russia or China’, and I thought it had much in common with western nations. In 1983 I discussed broadcasting it with Michael Goldberg, a Scottish radio talks producer. He had been an adviser on science broadcasting in London until 1977 (he told me) when a referendum looked like giving Scotland its own parliament. This would have enlarged the scope of Scottish broadcasting so he had been sent North to manage some of it; but a last minute clause to the referendum bill resulted in the majority who voted for a Scottish parliament not getting it. Mr Goldberg had to go on working for BBC Scotland in ways he had not at first expected.

  A year later (1985) my novel The Fall of Kelvin Walker was published and I met Tom Kinninmont, a BBC Scotland producer, who thought it could be turned into a great TV play with Bill Paterson in the title role. He did not know it had been broadcast by London BBC seventeen years earlier. I showed him the original script and, suddenly glum, he said “London’s done it already? Oh dear, it won’t let us do it again!”

  I asked why? The first production had been spoiled by a producer who did not know enough Scots actors to play Scottish parts, so it could now be done again better, especially as I had improved the end when writing a theatre version taken on tour by the short-lived Scottish Stage Company. Also, hardly any viewers in Britain would remember the play now. But Tom Kinninmont told me that when he referred the matter to London, London refused him permission. He certainly told me so. The playwright Peter McDougall tells me he knew a Scottish producer who said he had referred a matter to London, but Peter found he had never done so, in case London said no. This self-censorship is common where local bosses kow-tow to bosses in a foreign government. In Britain local chiefs afraid to take local initiatives are not held back by fear of arrest, show-trials or physical punishment. They are made timid by fear of somehow damaging their careers.

  I believe many people in Scottish industry, law, medicine, local government and politics find they cannot do some things because “London” really will forbid them. I believe there will be many others who avoid local initiatives because they think “London” dislikes these. The Scottish Labour Party contains many such folk who like this situation. They are able to draw bigger and bigger salaries while doing less and less local good, while implementing London policies.** No wonder they dread a degree of self-govermnent that would force them to support independent local action, and help poorer workers the Labour party was created to represent.

  * Despite the opening disclaimer, this was written about 2007 as part of a debate on our need for a truly independent Scots Parliament. It was not published.

  ** It has long been notorious that
many Scots MPs in London seldom voice an opinion while steadily voting as their party chiefs demand. In the early 1960s, when Glasgow was still a productive industrial city ruled absolutely by the Labour party, a folk-singer came up with a song whose first verse is

  I am a Scottish MP

  from a city grey and black

  and I shut my mouth when I’m in the south

  in case they send me back.

  Of Archie Hind*

  IN 1928 ARCHIE HIND WAS BORN in Dalmarnock, an industrial part of east Glasgow. His father, a stoker on locomotive engines, worked for fifty-one years on the railways, with an interval as a soldier in World War One. Though liked by workmates and friends he was so bad a husband that when her son Archie was seven and older brother nine their mother left home with her two-year-old daughter. Ten years later the parents were reconciled; meanwhile the boys lived with their father and his widowed mother. The home Mrs Hind had abandoned, while decent and clean, was like most tenement homes in Glasgow between the wars, a room and kitchen with communal lavatory on an outside landing. Baths had to be taken in public bathhouses and Archie sometimes used these less than he wished, to stop people seeing bruises from his father’s beatings. These stopped when he and his brother grew strong enough to hit back.

  The brutal part of his upbringing was not the most formative part and has no place in his novel The Dear Green Place, where the hero’s father is based on a more representative Glasgow dad, a tolerant, intelligent Marxist uncle. The main-stream of working-class thought and culture in Glasgow was the Socialism of the Independent Labour Party, the party George Orwell most favoured, and which returned seven Scottish MPs to Westminster before World War Two. After 1946 the best of these died or joined the Parliamentary Labour Party. Like most Socialists between the two great wars Archie’s people had been hopeful about the Russian Revolution and would have distrusted the U.S.S.R. more if the British government had not been so friendly to Fascist Italy, Germany and Spain.