by Alan Taylor
GLASGOW
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
First published in 2016 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
Introductory material copyright © Alan Taylor 2016
A full list of copyright permissions appears on p. 265
Whilst every effort had been made to contact copyright holders, it has not been possible to do so in every case. The editor and publisher would be happy to rectify any omissions in future editions.
ISBN 978 1 78027 353 2
eISBN 978 0 85790 918 3
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prologue
1597–1700 An Archbishop’s Seat
1701–1750 Pretending To Be Gentlemen
1751–1800 What To Do with Dung
1801–1850 Haunts of Vagrancy
1851–1900 City of Merchants
1901–1925 Fighting Women
1926–1950 Canoodling
1951–1975 Hello, Dali
1976–2000 Deserts wi’ Windaes
2001– Blow Up
Bibliography
Sources and Permissions
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Whoever it was who said that of the making of books there is no end had a point. The existence of Glasgow: The Autobiography is dependent on countless other books, most of which one trusts are cited in the endmatter. I am grateful to their authors who have added to the ever-growing cairn of knowledge about this rambunctious city. Anyone who aspires to study Glasgow must urgently make acquaintance with the Mitchell Library, one of Scotland’s great municipal institutions, and in particular the Glasgow Room. Its staff personify why public libraries are rightly revered and must be protected from those who either through ignorance, ideology or incompetence would do them harm.
Two other libraries deserve also be hymned. The first is Edinburgh Central Library where in the reference library I spent the best part of a decade as a research assistant. Working on this book I often haunted the Scottish Department, grateful to be allowed to borrow items I needed to spend more time with. The second is the National Library of Scotland wherein is contained our collective memory. Its staff have been unfailingly helpful and patient, not least when guiding this techno-naif through fields pocked with mines that may not lead to physical impairment but which can surely scar one mentally. The NLS’s café deserves special mention for it is here that twenty-first century men (and women) of genius are to be found daily hunched over a steaming bowl of lentil soup and putting the world to rights, among them historian and Hibs supporter Ian S. Wood, architectural expert David Black and Mario Relich, poet and sage.
It is a privilege to have Birlinn as the publisher of Glasgow: The Autobiography. Its venerable HQ, in Newington, Edinburgh, within a stone’s throw of Arthur’s Seat, not only accommodates a thrum of employees but appears also to function as a B&B for writers who for whatever reason – better not to speculate – find themselves in need of a bed for the night. Hugh Andrew runs the show with the air of a man who in an earlier incarnation must have been a spinner of plates. Like me, my editor, Andrew Simmons, is an Italophile, which has added to the pleasure of us working together. My gratitude to Andrew is on a par with that of Pavarotti’s to his favourite pizza chef. Finally, I am indebted beyond measure to my wife, Rosemary Goring, who, when the going got tough – I’m referring specifically to the index – dragged me rejoicing over the finishing line.
Alan Taylor
15 July 2016
INTRODUCTION
In the considered and utterly impartial opinion of the blithe souls who live there, Glasgow is without doubt the greatest city in the universe. It must be said at the outset that the evidence offered for this is more heart-felt than empirical. Glaswegians, however, are unshakeable in their view that they reside in a northern Shangri-la, albeit a rain-soaked, pewter-clouded version, and are amazed and outraged when anyone dares question the obviousness of this assumption. In Glasgow, its champions point out, you will find spectacular architecture, verdant gardens, high culture, sensational shopping, buskers galore, peerless panhandlers and all human life rubbing along more or less harmoniously. ‘For me,’ as Jack House, one of several contenders for the title ‘Mr Glasgow’, wrote, ‘Glasgow was the greatest town in the world from the moment I realised I was seeing it.’
As the mantra goes, people are what make Glasgow. Humour is the glue that binds them. Even in the worst of times, of which there have been a few, Glaswegians are not inclined to take themselves too seriously and accept whatever unjust gods throw at them with the forbearance of an audience tortured by the routine of a comedian who has forgotten his punchline. They know that Glasgow has a reputation as a place where such performers have been known to die an embarrassing and excruciating death and, to a degree, they are happy to play along with it, because it would be unmannerly to do otherwise. ‘What do I have to do to make you laugh?’ asked one frustrated comedian of the po-faced rabble in the stalls. ‘Try cracking a joke!’ cried a clown in the front row.
It sometimes seems there are as many Glasgows as there are Glaswegians, and I do not mean those towns called Glasgow in Kentucky, Montana and goodness knows where else. In the beginning was the Dear Green Place, which took its name from the Gaelic, Gles Chu. Or so we have been led to believe. Glasgow then was little more than a sylvan hamlet situated at the point where the Molendinar burn flowed into the River Clyde, hence the saw: ‘The Clyde made Glasgow and Glasgow made the Clyde.’ Why the Clyde is so called is another mystery the solution to which may be also be found in Gaeldom. There is, for example, the Gaelic name Cluaidh, but what it means seems to have confounded toponymists, etymologists, lexicographers and anyone else with a fancy handle. Was there a woad-smeared, cudgel-bearing chiel from the isles called Cluaidh? Perhaps. But if there was he is yet to poke his head above the parapet. Just as plausible, however, is the theory that the Clyde is derived from ‘clut’, which among the ancient Celts meant ‘the cleansing one’.
There is no lack of other theories, none any less valid – or more verifiable – than those already mentioned. What we can be certain of is that the Dear Green Place owes its primacy to a fine novel of the same name by Archie Hind which appeared as recently as 1966. In it, the author repeats the legend of St Mungo, Glasgow’s patron saint, recovering from the waters of the Molendinar a lost ring from the belly of a salmon. But even as we savour that magical image, Hind reminds us this was all in the distant past and that, ‘The little valley of the Molendinar is now stopped with two centuries of refuse – soap, tallow, cotton waste, slag, soda, bits of leather, broken pottery, tar and caoutchouc – the waste products of a dozen industries and a million lives, and it is built over with slums, yards, streets and factories.’
This is a description of the Glasgow that grew out of the Industrial Revolution, which led to it being titled the Second City of Empire. It was a dirty, teeming, pulsating, enterprising, inventive, unequal metropolis into which poured immigrants from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland. Meanwhile other Glasgows continued to emerge. The aforementioned Mr House recalled that it had been dubbed – by a Russian grand duke no less – ‘the centre of intelligence of Europe’, but no reliable source has been found for this extravagance. Then there is, in novelist William McIlvanney’s felicitous phrase, the ‘city of the stare’ where you have no idea where the next assault on
your privateness is coming from. This is a place that ‘in spite of its wide vistas and areas of dereliction often seemed as spacious as a rush-hour bus’. No Mean City is yet another label which has attached itself, leech-like, to Glasgow. It, too, is indebted to a novel. First published in 1935, and reprinted frequently thereafter, No Mean City (from the Bible in which the apostle Paul announces: ‘I am a Jew of Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city . . .’) was a collaborative effort by a journalist, Herbert Kingsley Long, and an unemployed worker, Alexander McArthur. Set in the slum underworld where razor gangs ran amok, it made such an impression that eight decades later Glasgow is still bedevilled by its legacy.
Growing up in the douce east, I knew of this Glasgow only by its fearsome reputation. Untempered by personal knowledge, a teacher said that should we ever feel the need to go west we ought to be aware that we would be unlikely to return in one piece and that if we did we could expect to have scars of which a musketeer would have been proud. Glasgow, she added, in the superior tone of Jean Brodie, was an uncivilised, uncouth backwater where violence was by and large the norm and unchecked by the forces of law and order. In my young mind’s eye, it was Dodge City incarnate. It took no great leap of the imagination to picture bandy-legged loons bursting into saloons, demanding whisky and rye and eager to engage in fisticuffs. Moreover, it was where things were made. Furnaces burned round the clock and chimney stacks rose high into the sky belching acrid, asphyxiating smoke. Dickens’s Coketown, with its vile-smelling river, black and thick with dye, was how I saw it. There, runty men with no teeth and a fag stuck behind an ear got their hands dirty so that we, in Scotland’s pen-pushing, paper-driven, white-collar capital, didn’t have to.
I was so in thrall to what my teacher told me that when finally I left school and was offered a job in Glasgow I didn’t give it a second’s serious thought. For all I knew it was no more safe than a war zone, which was exactly how it was invariably portrayed by the ever-evil media. It was an untamed territory divided by unswerving loyalty to football teams: Rangers and Celtic, blue and green, Protestant and Catholic, Huns and Tims, who year in, year out cleared the trophy board much to the chagrin to those of us whose sympathies lay with less successful teams. It was said that if you dared to wear the wrong colour in the wrong part of the city you could expect terrible retribution. What, I wondered, if you happened to be colour blind? Would you be spared? Nor was it wise to park a green car in the vicinity of Ibrox, Rangers’ ground, or a blue one near Parkhead, Celtic’s home turf, for they would surely be vandalised.
This was alien to those of us who grew up in the environs of Edinburgh where class, not religion, was what divided society. It was not until 1977, when Alan Spence’s epiphanic collection of short stories, Its Colours They Are Fine, was published, that I began to comprehend the depth to which sectarianism influenced the lives of countless Glaswegians. Spence took his title from ‘The Sash’, the rousing Protestant anthem. Born in Glasgow in 1947, he wrote about a childhood that was primitive in its richness and roughness. ‘Gypsies ur worse than cathlicks!’ says Aleck, a young Protestant boy, adding: ‘Nae kiddin. They havnae a fuckin clue.’ Such pronouncements come naturally to Aleck, who has grown up in the kind of culture that is manna to anthropologists. The way Aleck speaks (‘’Mon wull go up tae mah hoose’n clean it aff’), what he eats (sausages and egg and fried bread is a favourite meal), what he reads (Oor Wullie, The Broons, Merry Mac’s Fun Parade), where he plays (waste ground, tenement closes, back streets), all contribute to a sense of otherness. Little wonder, therefore, that when visitors arrived in Glasgow they often reacted as if they had travelled deep into the Amazonian jungle and encountered a lost tribe speaking in a tongue they struggled to comprehend and enjoying rituals fathomable only to initiates.
In the second part of Spence’s book, however, adult life intrudes and the innocence and unquestioning of youth gives way to aspects of ‘adult’ life – an Orange walk, a wedding, violence at a dance-hall, an old woman living alone in a tower block, an old man who seeks refuge and warmth in the Kibble Palace. In the story that gives the collection its title, the main character, Billy, is preparing for ‘the Walk’, which is always held on the Saturday nearest the 12th of July, the anniversary of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, which was won by William of Orange, aka King Billy. Spence writes,
Billy’s own walk was a combination of John Wayne and numberless lumbering cinema-screen heavies. He’d always been Big Billy, even as a child. Marching in the Walk was like being part of a liberating army. Triumph. Drums throbbing. Stirring inside. He remembered newsreel films of the Allies marching into Paris. At that time he’d been working in the shipyards and his was a reserved occupation, ‘vital to the war effort’, which meant that he couldn’t join up. But he had marched in imagination through scores of Hollywood films. From the sands of Iwo Jima to the beachheads of Normandy. But now it was real, and instead of ‘The Shores of Tripoli’, it was ‘The Sash My Father Wore’.
This is what Billy might call a celebration of tradition, a remembrance of a glorious past, keeping a flame alive. For others though, the Orange Parades, with their flute bands, Lambeg drums and banners, are provocative and intimidating, evidence of an aspect of Glasgow life they would rather was swept away. What cannot be denied, however, is that without them Glasgow would be a little less, well, Glaswegian. Of all the cities I have visited, none is as immediately characterful as Glasgow, as sure of itself, and at one with itself. You can be standing in a supermarket queue and chances are the person behind you will comment on the contents of your basket. In a pub, it is by no means unusual for a total stranger to offer to buy you a drink. This happened to me not so long ago and when I politely declined, my would-be benefactor asked ‘Whit’s wrang wi’ yi?’, in the tone of an aggressive doctor attempting to get to the bottom of a nasty stomach bug. In an attempt to divert the conversation, I said that I was from Edinburgh. ‘That explains everythin’,’ said the stranger, turning his attention elsewhere. On another occasion, early in my acquaintance with Glasgow, I was in the Horseshoe Bar in Drury Street in whose Gents I was approached by a man in a flat cap who, apropos nothing in particular, asked if I knew how many wonders in the world there are. I hazarded seven and started to list them. I got as far the Hanging Gardens of Babylon when I was imperiously interrupted. ‘Naw,’ said Mr Flat Cap contemptuously, ‘there’s eight.’ ‘Really. What’s the eighth?’ I asked. ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ he said with a wink, and was gone before I could quiz him further.
Such encounters added to the frisson whenever I visited Glasgow, which I did more often after I started writing for the Herald. Back then, it was based in Albion Street, in the heart of the Merchant City. The HQ was a brutalist block which, in an earlier era, had housed the Scottish Daily Express, which in its pomp, so legend had it, was able in pursuit of a hot story to put more planes in the air than the Luftwaffe. On the ground level was the no-frills Press Bar. Once I was bidden there by my editor, a fellow who was so tall that when he stood next to me I couldn’t see where he stopped. As we got down to business one of the worse-for-wear regulars inveigled himself into our colloquy and was decked for his impertinence. The editor carried on talking as if nothing untoward had happened. When I pointed out that there was a barely conscious fellow lying on the floor he said, ‘He shouldn’t have interrupted me when I was talking.’ In the toilet there was another regular who appeared to have passed out mid-micturition. Concerned for his wellbeing I informed a barman who gave me a ‘what am I supposed to do about it’ shrug and continued polishing a glass. Throughout the afternoon people came and went as their duties demanded. A fêted contributor studied his watch, drained his nip, donned his fedora and breezed out the door. Apparently, he had a column to write. Less than an hour later he reappeared, having met his deadline, and resumed where he had left off.
In those days, as we entered the 1980s, Glasgow was a byword for decline. Many of the industries from which its grandeu
r had sprung were on their uppers and there was a feeling that its future was bleak. It was in a dark, dank, menacing place which the rain, which seemed to start as soon as you reached Harthill, midpoint on the M8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow, did nothing to temper. The news was full of strikes and closures, empty order books and unemployment. The Clyde, which had been as noisy as a nursery, fell quiet as one yard after another shut its gates. The Tories, led by Margaret Thatcher, were in power and impervious to the protests of left-leaning Scots. (Consequently, when Thatcher died in 2013 some Glaswegians regretted no statue had been erected to her so that they could tear it down, while others held street parties.) In 1981 I attended the launch for a novel at the Third Eye Centre – the predecessor of the Centre for Contemporary Arts – in Sauchiehall Street. The novel was Lanark by Alasdair Gray. In hindsight, it was one of those rare moments when a work of art is the agent for change. Ten years and more in the writing, it marked Gray’s debut. Part of Lanark is autobiographical, following its author’s upbringing in the 1930s and 1940s initially in a tenement in Bridgeton then in Riddrie, part of the first tier of what’s known as the three-tiered Addison Act. Unlike the two tiers that were to follow it, people were not piled on top of one another but were placed in low-density, semi-detached houses with gardens.
Duncan Thaw, Gray’s hero, progresses through school to art college, where he encounters a fellow student called Kenneth McAlpin, who has a moustache – a sure sign of social superiority – and lives in Bearsden, which is as alien to Duncan as Marseilles. On a morning ramble he and McAlpin venture into Cowcaddens to do some drawing. At the top of a hill they look across the city.
Travelling patches of sunlight went from ridge to ridge, making a hump of tenements gleam against the dark towers of the city chambers, silhouetting the cupolas of the Royal Infirmary against the tomb-glittering spine of the Necropolis. ‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ said McAlpin. ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ ‘Because nobody imagines living here,’ said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, ‘If you want to explain that I’ll certainly listen.’
