by Maggie Craig
All over the country, thousands of women made sure they weren’t at home or anywhere else they could be counted. Some wrote comments on the census form before they disappeared for the night in this mass act of civil disobedience. As one English suffragette put it, ‘If I am intelligent enough to fill in this paper, I am intelligent enough to put a cross on a voting form.’
Refusing to be counted in the census was against the law, punishable by a fine of £5, but it was a peaceful and non-violent way of expressing strong feelings. So that the protest would have maximum impact, suffragettes made sure the press and the census enumerators knew well in advance what they intended to do. The enumerators were confident they could winkle them out, as the Glasgow News reported the day before the count was made:
The services of the police will be requisitioned in the work. Tomorrow night they will make search for the homeless. They will keep an eye on the
Nooks and Crannies
of the city, where the waifs and strays seek nightly shelter. They must also be accounted for in the Census.
The crews of ships on the Clyde would be counted by officers of HM Customs and the soldiers at Maryhill Barracks would be easy to count, as would visitors staying overnight at Glasgow’s hotels. Then came the stern warning:
It is just possible that some trouble may be occasioned by the
More Militant Members
of the suffragette movement in the way of withholding information. The officials, however, are prepared for any difficulty that may arise in this way, and arrangements made accordingly.
Bit of an unconvincing threat, that. What were these vague ‘arrangements’? If you couldn’t find ’em, you couldn’t count ’em. How many women did take themselves off to some nook or cranny where even those wily census enumerators wouldn’t find them, or concealed themselves at home, is not known.
The official census website for England and Wales, where the 1911 results have been available since 2009, estimates that several thousand women may have boycotted the 1911 count. At the time of writing this book, the 1911 census results for Scotland had not yet been made available, and Helen Crawfurd makes no mention of the 1911 census in her memoirs.
The Glasgow branch of the Women’s Freedom League certainly held a wee soirée on the Saturday after the census where war stories were exchanged, as the Glasgow News reported: ‘A number of ladies gave their Census experiences, which were of an amusing and entertaining character.’ Then they don’t give any details of those amusing stories. Damn their eyes.
The popular view in Glasgow in 1911 seems to have been that many suffragettes had gone into hiding for the night. A cartoon in the Glasgow News shows Mary Ann, a domestic servant of mature years, entertaining a beaming policeman friend in a cosy kitchen while a black cat with a jaunty bow tied around its neck looks on: ‘Ye needna hurry. The missis is yin o’ them that’s no fur fillin’ in her census paper. She’s below the bed up the stairs. She’ll no come oot as lang’s ye’re here.’
The point had been made, and in Glasgow attention turned to the next big thing.
7
The Picturesque & Historic Past: The Scottish National Exhibition of 1911
Various Highland crafts will be engaged in by native dwellers during their residence.
The bitter March strike at Singer’s gave way to the summer of the Scottish Exhibition. This was the third in a line of such events held at Kelvingrove in Glasgow’s West End. The first was in 1888 and the second in 1901, when the beautiful red sandstone building we know today as Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was opened, providing a grand new home for Glasgow’s civic art collection.
The full title of the 1911 extravaganza was the Scottish Exhibition of National History, Art and Industry. As the Daily Record wrote at the time, its purpose was ‘to bind Scotland more closely to the glories and victories of its past’. One of the concrete aims of the exhibition was to raise money to fund a chair of Scottish history and literature at nearby Glasgow University, which it successfully did.
Rather unwisely for an Englishman in Scotland, the existing professor of modern history at the university up on Gilmorehill overlooking Kelvingrove had given voice to his opinion that there was no such thing as ‘Scottish history’. Perhaps Dudley Medley – inevitably known by the nickname ‘Deadley Mudley’ – was just trying to provoke debate. Or perhaps, as eminent history professors have been known to do, he set out to cause a stushie in the hope of getting his name in the papers.
The organizers of the 1911 exhibition set out to prove that Scotland had a very rich history indeed. Visiting the exhibition on the press preview day, Monday, 1 May 1911, the Glasgow Herald’s reporter had a bit of fun with that. As was usual at the time, there was no byline, so we don’t know who he, or maybe she, was. There had been ‘lady reporters’ for quite some time by then. Allowed almost a full broadsheet page to record first impressions and describe the different exhibits, the reporter begins by quoting Huckleberry Finn, who ‘has declared that the world has no need of dead persons’. Or, as Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, father of the assembly line and big fan of Scientific Management put it, ‘History is bunk.’
Having repeated Huck Finn’s uncompromising view on the importance of living in the present, shared by many in the excitingly new twentieth century, the reporter then has his or her cake and eats it. Full credit is given to the Scottish Exhibition for having balanced ‘the priceless heritage of Scottish history and art with exhibits demonstrating the achievements of modern Scotland in industry, science and entertainment’.
As the reporter waxes lyrical about the exhibition’s Palace of History, an interesting contradiction and a cautious rebuke surfaces. Although the Scotland of 1911 feels itself closer to the days of Bruce and Wallace than we, a mere century on, might have thought, perhaps people don’t care enough about those stirring times:
The Scotch [sic] War of Independence is not yet remote enough to have become clustered with myth, and the fame of Wallace and Bruce has not yet suffered seriously from the attack of the historic iconoclast. Of the plain hero and the heroic king there are many relics. Save among members of the Scottish Patriotic Association the tragedy of Wallace and the triumph of Bannockburn do not now arouse rage or joy, which perhaps is not as it ought to be. The records here should stimulate a large national memory.
On somewhat safer ground, the Herald reporter has absolutely no doubt that ‘the romance of the Stuart dynasty retains its glamour’, even if Bonnie Prince Charlie is dismissed as his father’s ‘futile son’. Was a fine line being trod here?
There’s a sense at points in this long article of a tension between the political opinions of the journalist and those of the newspaper and its owners for which he or she wrote. Not an uncommon story then or now, but even more of a dilemma back in the days when bosses were all-powerful and would have no compunction about blacklisting you to other potential employers if you stepped over onto the wrong side of that line.
Home Rule for Scotland was a hot topic in 1911, the idea gathering increasing support and momentum. Many of the socialists of Red Clydeside were passionately in favour. Other Scots of all political hues were opposed. Across the board, however, sentimental Scottishness of a type which tends to make modern Scots cringe seems to have been quite acceptable.
The crowds which flocked to Kelvingrove during the fine summer of 1911 loved the historical exhibits, and flock they did. More than nine million visits were made to the exhibition, which spread itself lavishly out over the eastern end of Kelvingrove Park, the part which lies on the other side of Kelvin Way from the Art Galleries.
One of the most popular sections was the ‘Auld Toun’, with its ‘Auld Scotch [sic] Street’. Although a few Home Rulers and patriotic Scots had been objecting for a generation and more to the use of the word ‘Scotch’ rather than ‘Scots’ other than for broth, shortbread and whisky, the word seems to have raised few hackles in 1911. The Glasgow Herald reporter again:
T
o step from thoroughfares lined with palaces and pleasure-haunts into the quaint courtyard of ‘the Auld Toun’ is like a piece of travel. There is, it is true, an admirable consonancy in the architecture of the entire Exhibition, but this quiet, old-world nook, with its towering turrets, its crow steps and its toppling chimneys, just so much awry as to accentuate the verisimilitude of it all, is a place apart, a spot to which one may retire from the din and ecstacy [sic] of the coming summer nights and recall the picturesque and historic past.
There were living exhibits too. The Highland Clachan spread over three acres along the banks of the Kelvin, stretching back to the Gibson Street entrance to the park:
. . . here and there are sprinkled the thatched cottages which are to be inhabited during the summer by native Highlanders. Various Highland arts and crafts will be engaged in by native dwellers during their residence, and all the attendants will be garbed in the ‘Earasaid,’ the ancient and becoming costume having been presented by the Marchioness of Bute.
Well, at least the Clachan was being run on commercial lines and they were hoping to make a profit to be donated to An Comunn Gàidhealach and the Co-operative Council of Highland Home Industries. There was a village hall too, Talla mhor a’ Chlachain in the Gaelic, where audiences of up to 350 people could enjoy musical events and entertainments in both English and the language of the Garden of Eden.
If the attitude towards the ‘native Highlanders’ sounds just a wee touch patronizing, they weren’t the only people who spent the summer of 1911 being gawped at as quaint aborigines. Close by the Highland Village sat the Equatorial Colony, or West African Village. There were about a hundred adults and children there, kindly requested to demonstrate their traditional way of life in a corner of a Glasgow park. They included musicians and dancers. Lest any visitors to the exhibition had any trepidation about that, reassurance was offered in advance that ‘decency is maintained throughout’.
Not far from the West African Village was the Arctic Camp, where a group of Laplanders, complete with reindeer, had been persuaded to spend several months for ‘as much milk as they could drink’, a statement which raises the art of patronizing people of other cultures to a whole new level. Or lowers it to a whole new depth.
More sophisticated refreshment was available for the exhibition’s visitors. As might be expected, the famous Miss Cranston ran two such establishments.One was the White Cockade, whose name fits in perfectly with the historic theme of the exhibition, referring as it does to the symbol adopted by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite army. Yet Miss Cranston’s tea rooms at the Scottish Exhibition were bang up to date too, as she so much liked to be. She commissioned Charles Rennie Mackintosh to design the inside of the White Cockade and Margaret Macdonald to create the menu cards. The Willow Tea Rooms on which they had worked together in 1904 were just a short tram ride away from Kelvingrove.
Examples of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s menu cards survive, very dramatic in white on black. Other than a glimpse of a spacious and airy balcony, there are no known photographs of the interiors of the White Cockade or Miss Cranston’s other tea room at the exhibition. She gave the commission for that to Frances Macdonald, Margaret’s sister.
The blend of old and new was mirrored elsewhere. The Palace of History was the main building, designed to look like Falkland Palace in Fife. A modern concert hall could seat 3,000 people and pageants and musical events were staged there, the inaugural concert given by Sir Henry Wood, knighted that same year, and his Queen’s Hall Orchestra. A pageant on the life of Robert Burns caused controversy by pulling no punches on the bard’s fondness for a dram.
In the design of its exterior, the Palace of Industries followed the unifying historic style. Inside, as befitted Glasgow’s proud boast to be both the Second City of the Empire and the Workshop of the World, it was crammed with displays on all types of industrial endeavour. It showcased examples from home and abroad, including what was being produced in Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, Holland, Denmark and those countries then known as the Colonies.
The Palace of Industries had its own spacious quadrangle with ‘bandstand, tearooms, verandahs, and promenades – an exhibition in itself’. There was a 500-seat conference hall, plus the exhibition’s offices, dedicated post office and telephone exchange.
In the lee of the beautiful Victorian and Edwardian houses up on Park Circus, the Garden Club provided exclusive accommodation for a thousand or so of the more well-heeled visitors to the exhibition. They paid a membership fee for the whole summer of two guineas apiece. The site as a whole being open to all, there had been some concern about the possibility of what was referred to as ‘rowdyism’. You never knew what might happen when the working classes set out to enjoy themselves.
Back in 1901 there had been hopes that the Kelvingrove exhibition of that year might leave behind it permanent improvements in both Glasgow and the lives of the working-class people who formed the bulk of the city’s population. Bemoaning the fact that the Clyde and the Kelvin were polluted and that ‘amid the blankness, uniformity and greyness, exasperated nerves find but one outlet – in drink’, the hopeful young authors of Glasgow in 1901 called for the city to solve the problem of ‘how the lives of its workers may be made a little more gracious and tolerable and sweet’:
That the Exhibition will leave behind it a humanising influence we know. It will hasten the coming of our clean rivers, our flowers and trees, and help to rend that intolerable blanket of smoke which, while it keeps out the sun, is not even proof against rain. We want some ‘niceness’ in the condition of our citizens’ lives, and justice done to our city’s looks that we may love her in the sight of men as we have loved her shamefacedly and in secret . . .
Ten years on all that was still only a hope. None of the buildings of the 1911 exhibition were permanent, all of them designed to be dismantled after the show was over, although everyone agreed they did look very solid. Given that this was supposed to be a celebration of Scotland’s history, it seems a pity that the remains of the old Kelvingrove Mansion, around which the Palace of History had been built, were completely swept away after the exhibition closed in November. Then again, as the old saying had it, the greatest vandals in Glasgow were always Glasgow Corporation. Off with the old, on with the new: that’s always been the Glasgow way.
The aerial railway was absolutely part of the Modern Age. This thrilling form of transport allowed visitors to fly across the site, over the Highland Village and the Kelvin to the grounds of the university. An artist’s impression and a surviving photograph show women in big hats, boys in sailor suits and girls in pinafores looking admiringly up at it. Other visitors to the exhibition are seen riding in the metal, cage-style gondola. This was suspended under a cigar-shaped machinery room running along electric cables fixed to high pylons at either end of the aerial railway’s track.
The Scottish Exhibition opened on 2 May 1911, six weeks before the coronation in London of King George V and Queen Mary. Another of the reasons for holding the exhibition had been to celebrate this royal event, London having its Festival of Empire in the same year. In the run-up to the coronation Borwick’s Baking Powder took adverts in the Glasgow papers announcing a competition to win 20 free trips to London so their customers could be in the cheering crowds when Their Majesties travelled by coach to Westminster Abbey:
Each Trip will consist of:
(1) A return railway ticket to London from any part of Scotland.
(2) First-rate hotel accommodation and board for 3 clear days.
(3) A good seat to view the procession.
Full particulars of the Competitions and Coupons will be found in the
6d., 1s., and 2s. 6d. tins of Borwick’s Baking Powder sold in Scotland.
The Bonanza in Argyle Street, ‘the largest millinery business in Scotland’, was rewarding its customers with free admission to the Scottish Exhibition ‘with every pound’s worth of goods bought for cash in one day’s shopping’. You’d have had t
o buy at least two of the ‘New American Sailors and Mushrooms’ to be able to get one of those free tickets. Tragically for fashionistas, the advert shows no pictures of these creations.
Other than requesting its readers visiting Glasgow for the Scottish Exhibition to patronize its advertisers, the Forward took little interest in what was going on at Kelvingrove and declared the coronation to be ‘neither here nor there’. They were more interested in the suffragettes’ protest during the census and in what else was going on in the Scotland of 1911. Keir Hardie said it would be remembered as a year of strikes.
As well as the confrontation at Singer’s, 1911 saw a UK-wide railway strike and stoppages in the Welsh coalfields. There were also strikes at the dye works of the United Turkey Red Company in the Vale of Leven, on Glasgow’s trams and among the carters, known in local parlance as cairters. Forerunners of today’s ‘White Van Man’, this army of men in old tweed suits and flat-cap bunnets worn at a rakish angle drove their horses and carts around Scotland’s cities, transporting all manner of goods. Many of them were directly employed by town councils.
Socialists were clear as to why there were so many strikes. The cost of living was rising and wages weren’t keeping pace. In its last edition of the year, Saturday, 30 December 1911, the Forward’s front-page leading article was entitled ‘The Struggle in Scotland during 1911 for a Living Wage’. Their round-up of the year’s news included one shocking statistic they had published earlier in the year, that 17,000 women in Glasgow made their living by walking the streets as prostitutes. The socialist newspaper was scathing about how long it had taken the press and the Kirk to wake up to this.
