by Alan Taylor
What follows is an impassioned analysis of why Glasgow is not comparable to great cultural centres such as Florence, Paris, London and New York, to all of which strangers can relate because they’ve ‘already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films’. In contrast, Glasgow is by and large invisible, existing only as a music-hall song – presumably the drunks’ anthem, ‘I belong to Glasgow’ – and a few bad novels, one of which is doubtless No Mean City. ‘What is Glasgow to most of us?’ asks Thaw/Gray. ‘A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all. No, I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and library.’
The period in which this scene is set is the mid-1950s, when Glasgow was undoubtedly in the doldrums and suffering from what looked like terminal decay. What used to be the place which made anything that was required to carry you from cradle to grave was so no longer, as cheap goods from the Far East saturated the market and caused local companies to bring down the shutters. Thaw’s mission, and that of Gray, his creator, is through paint and print ‘to give Glasgow a more imaginative life’. The irony was that when Lanark appeared many of the sentiments expressed in its pages were interpreted as a comment on the city as it stood at that moment. And to a degree that was understandable. Glasgow had yet to export a positive identity; it was still mired in many observers’ minds in a macho past where brawn triumphed over brain. It was of course a highly misleading image, but it persisted and proved remarkably durable. Tourists were few and many of those who did come arrived with their prejudices as part of their luggage.
One welcome counterpoint to the prevailing view was offered in 1983 by the acerbic American novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, whom few tourist boards would adopt as a copywriter. Ostensibly following Britain’s coastline, he alighted in Glasgow after sojourning in Troubles-torn Belfast, an experience he was relieved to put behind him. In contrast, Theroux, much to his surprise, found Glasgow ‘peaceful, even pretty’. ‘The slums were gone, the buildings washed of their soot; the city looked dignified – no barricades, no scorchings. Well, I had just struggled ashore from that island of antiquated passions.’ Coincidentally, 1983 proved to be an annus mirabilis for the city, for it was in that year that the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign was launched. Inspired by ‘I ♥ New York’, dreamed up six years earlier to encourage tourists to visit the Big Apple, which had become a muggers’ playground, it was initially greeted with scepticism by many wags who asked, ‘Miles better than what?’ What Glasgow has never lacked, however, are people to hymn it and the slights and criticisms were brushed off with the contempt a heifer shows to ticks. The slogan soon entered the bloodstream and there was a discernible improvement in the mood of the natives and a measurable influx of visitors keen to see what all the fuss was about.
High on the list of the attractions they wanted to visit was the Burrell Collection, which opened the same year. It had been amassed by Sir William Burrell, scion of a family whose business was in shipping. When his father, also named William, died, William Junior and his brother George took over. Through astute buying and selling of their merchant fleets, the brothers amassed considerable fortunes. When in 1916 they finally disposed of their assets, Sir William was able to devote himself to building up his art collection, filling his Berwickshire castle with an extraordinary collection of paintings, sculptures, ceramics, carpets, tapestries, glassware, needlework and artefacts from around the globe. In the 1930s, he decided that he would like it all to be housed under one roof held in public ownership. It is said that he first offered it to the Tate Gallery, London, but it spurned the opportunity for lack of space. In 1944, Burrell handed it over to Glasgow. But worried about the damaging effects of the former Dear Green Place’s polluted air on his precious objects he quixotically stipulated that it must be housed on a site not less than sixteen miles from Wellington’s statue – the one invariably decorated with a traffic cone – in Royal Exchange Square, and not more than four miles from Killearn, Stirlingshire. In 1963, five years after their benefactor’s death, the Burrell trustees agreed to allow the collection to be housed in a building within the Pollok estate, a mere three miles south of the city centre. An international competition was announced to find architects to design a building specifically to contain Burrell’s gallimaufry. It was finally opened by the Queen in 1983 to a thunderclap of applause.
The Burrell was a signal that Glasgow was emerging from its begrimed past. Another was the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988. The words ‘garden’ and ‘Glasgow’, like ‘cuisine’ and ‘Mexico’, had rarely been spied in the same sentence. Yet again this was a travesty of the truth, for where else is called the Dear Green Place? Indeed, Glasgow has what might be termed an embarrassment of parks and gardens, including Kelvingrove Park, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hosted three major exhibitions, and the Botanic Gardens, among whose treasures is a fine collection of exotic orchids. The Garden Festival, however, was located not in a park but on a 100-acre site in what had been Prince’s Dock on the south bank of the Clyde. Nearly four and a half million people attended its attractions. Two years thereafter came Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture, the third such place, after Athens and Florence no less, to hold that title. Even ten years earlier that would have been – pace Gray’s Lanark – unthinkable and to many observers, especially residents of Edinburgh, the ‘Festival City’, it still was. Though some criticised the organisers for paying too little attention to Glasgow’s indigenous art and artists, there is no doubt that its tenure as City of Culture raised its profile and radically altered attitudes towards it. ‘Glasgow used to be perceived as a violent post-industrial city and now it is celebrated as a creative and cultural centre of European importance,’ was the judgement of Robert Palmer, who orchestrated the year-long programme of events. His assertion is borne out by many studies which have all shown that Glasgow 1990 had a dramatic impact in building city confidence. Moreover, had it not happened it is unlikely that the 2014 Commonwealth Games would have been given to Glasgow.
But the resilience of an unsavoury image – however misrepresentative – ought not to be underestimated. Nor is there any point in drawing curtains on a past that was undoubtedly grim. Countless impoverished Glaswegians lived in squalid, overcrowded, insanitary conditions and were as a consequence thrust into behaviour which we now deem antisocial. Infant mortality rates were on a par with those in the Third World and any men who reached three score and ten years, as the psalmist insisted was the norm, must have been fitness fanatics or have led very careful and prosperous lives. Districts like the Gorbals and Townhead were barely fit for human habitation and those who had the wherewithal escaped as fast as they could.
One such was Ralph Glasser. The son of immigrant Jews from Russia, Glasser grew up in the Gorbals between the wars. After years of night study, he won a scholarship to Oxford, to take up which he had to cycle hundreds of miles. When I met him many years later, he looked what he was: an eminent scholar and author, a psychologist and an economist. But as he spoke I could tell by his accent immediately where he came from. In his book Growing Up in the Gorbals, an unvarnished account of his childhood first published in 1986, Glasser relates how he left school when he was about eleven to work in a garment factory. His ‘only true home’ was the Mitchell Library, which allowed him to read the gamut of literature or philosophy and to dream of a brighter future. Yet as his career developed, and as he travelled around the world, he knew that while he might have ‘escaped’ the Gorbals and Glasgow, he was not free of them, and never would be. As a young man he was desperate to leave but as he grew older he began to appreciate the ‘presiding genius’ of his birthplace and that to have thought of it as a ‘malign influence’ was wrong.
In any case, on revisiting the city, Glasser soon discovered that it had changed utterly. In A Gorbals Legacy (2000), he wrote,
Now, even the physical Gorbals I knew has been destroyed, including much of
the old street plan. When I go back it is almost impossible to identify the ground where former landmarks stood – Gorbals Cross and the darkly sculptured monument named after it, bearing under a clock the City of Glasgow arms and the motto ‘Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word’, and stone benches on its walls where men in mufflers and cloth caps gathered on Saturday mornings to smoke and talk about the world; Cumberland Street railway bridge with its broad arches, workshop caverns for upholsterers, metal workers, machine shops; and the old Main Street library. On a visit to Glasgow a few years ago, when journalists wanted to have me photographed at Gorbals Cross, we drove round fruitlessly till I realised that these Glasgow men were lost. I got out of my car, stood on an unknown pavement and, helped by a sighting on the steeple of a surviving church, led them to where Gorbals Cross had stood. I was photographed standing on a windy piece of wilderness, Gorbals Cross. The true Gorbals is in the heart. Its demons will probably stay there forever, waiting to receive their quittance.
This is a reminder that Glasgow, like all cities, is inchoate. As a former Lord Provost told me, it will never be finished; change is the one thing of which you can be certain. Even in the short time I’ve known it Glasgow has undergone a spectacular transformation. The Merchant City, where I live, is unrecognisable from the area I used to walk through to get to the Herald. People, too, come and go, as they must, memory of them kept alive in the names of streets, buildings, institutions, shops: Archibald Ingram, John Glassford of Dougalston, John Anderson, Kate Cranston, George Hutcheson and many, many others. Glasgow: The Autobiography is an attempt to tell the city’s story through the words of those who witnessed it happening. By its very nature it is incomplete and subjective, but I hope that what emerges as one year succeeds another is a portrait that is sympathetic and true to its subject. With that uppermost in mind, I have selected material from diverse sources, including memoirs, newspapers and journals, historical documents, dictionaries, encyclopedias, travelogues, poetry and fiction, official reports and evidence given in court. The authors come from near and far. Many were born and bred in Glasgow, and were disinclined ever to leave. Others came and went in a day and were glad to see the back of it. It is often said of cities that they are characters in their own right. Glasgow’s character, readers will find, is much more complex than the stereotype. It envelops you in its embrace, it doesn’t attempt to be other than what it is, it loves to put on a show, it is resilient, optimistic, kindly, ambitious, it likes a good time, it won’t be put down or put upon, it is inferior to nowhere. There is, too, an edge to it which may be a legacy of its history of dissent and the championing of the underdog, of Red Clydeside and the World War One rent strikes and the award to Nelson Mandela of the ‘Freedom of the City’ when he was still incarcerated on Robben Island. It was encapsulated by Billy Connolly, without doubt the greatest comedian ever to come out of Anderston, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport in 2007. It was in part thwarted by a baggage handler called John Smeaton who, spotting what was going on while puffing on a cigarette, leapt into action and set about one of the suicide bombers even as he attempted to blow himself up. ‘What were they thinking about, bringing terror to Glasgow?’ said Connolly, barely able to speak for laughing. It was one of those moments, added the Big Yin, that makes you swell with pride, that makes you want to tell the world you are a Glaswegian. ‘I come from there. That’s where I come from. Don’t you forget it.’ Expletives have been deleted to protect readers of a sensitive nature.
PROLOGUE
GLASGOW GOT ITS NAME
John and Julia Keay
How did Glasgow come to be called Glasgow? The likelihood, as John and Julia Keay point out below, is that it is Celtic in origin and probably Gaelic. Over the years its spelling has become anglicised but its pronunciation by locals often depends on which social class they belong to. ‘Glesca’ is preferred by those who do not wish to appear pretentious while those who dwell in rather more refined areas – Bearsden, Milngavie, Kelvingrove, etc – are apt to opt for ‘Glass-go’. Scots language experts suggest that ‘folk in the wast o Scotland ken it as Glesga or Glesca, and folk fae the east maistly caw it Glesga or Glesgae’. All of which may prove mystifying to visitors to the city who are often bamboozled by the native speakers. Not for nothing has Glaswegian been called the most impenetrable dialect in the United Kingdom. The story of the city’s origins is similarly obscure and freighted with myth.
The etymology of the name of Scotland’s largest city is warmly disputed. Its derivation is surely Celtic and probably Gaelic, but with anglicised spellings varying widely from glas-chu to glas-cun, the component words are uncertain, let alone their precise meaning. In the heyday of the 19th-century industrialisation glas was taken to mean ‘grey’, leading to such seemingly appropriate translations as ‘the grey blacksmith’ (‘gow’ suggesting gobha, a smith) or ‘the grey hound ferry’ cu, a dog). Currently the favoured derivations are more pastoral and cultural, with glas taken to indicate ‘green’ or ‘church’. Hence the popular ‘dear green place’, ‘green hollow’, ‘dear stream’, ‘green cloister’, ‘dear cloister’, ‘church within the enclosed space’, ‘church of Cun(tigernus) [Kentigern]’, etc.
A gift to the image-makers, such uncertainty accords well with the city’s occasional need to reinvent itself.
1597–1700
AN ARCHBISHOP’S SEAT
WITCHCRAFT, 1597
John Spottiswoode
The first recorded witchcraft cases in Glasgow date from 1597 and were described by John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St Andrews (1565–1639), in his History of the Church and State of Scotland, published in 1655. In 1563, an Act regarding ‘witchcraft, sorcery and necromancy’ was passed by the Scottish Parliament. These were punishable by death and judges were expected to be unsparing of those who practised them. The goal was to eradicate evil in all its supposed forms. Around 80 per cent of the victims of witchcraft accusations and trials were women. It is estimated that there were 1,337 executions for witchcraft in Scotland. The last execution for this crime was that of Janet Horne in Dornoch in 1727.
This summer there was a great business for the trial of witches. Amongst others one Margaret Atkin [the great witch of Balwearie], being apprehended upon suspicion, and threatened with torture, did confess herself guilty. Being examined touching her associates in that trade, she named a few, and perceiving her dilations find credit, made offer to detect all of that sort, and to purge the country of them, so she might have her life granted. For the reason of her knowledge, she said, ‘That they had a secret mark all of that sort, in their eyes, whereby she could surely tell, how soon she looked upon any, whether they were witches or not’ and in this way she was so readily believed, that for the space of three or four months she was carried from town to town to make discoveries of that kind. Many were brought in question by her dilations, especially at Glasgow, where divers innocent women, through the credulity of the minister, Mr John Cowper, were condemned and put to death. In the end she was found to be a mere deceiver . . . and was sent back to Fife.
HEAD COVERING, 1604
Glasgow Kirk Session
The influence of the Church of Scotland – the Kirk – has been incalculable and far-reaching. John Knox (1513–72) is often believed to have been at the root of much misogyny, famously inveighing against ‘the monstrous regiment [rule] of women’. Whether he is deserving of the considerable opprobrium that has been heaped upon him is debateable. What is clear, however, is that the history of Presbyterianism – like that of virtually all religions – has been male-dominated and that many of its more oppressive, and ridiculous, edicts have been directed at women.
No woman, married or unmarried, come within kirk doors, to preachings or prayers, with their plaids about their heads . . . The session considering that great disorder hath been in the kirk, by women sitting with their heads covered in time of sermon, sleeping that way, ordains intimation to be made that none sit with their he
ads covered with plaid in time of sermon.
A CLOSET LINED WITH IRON, 1 JULY, 1636
Sir William Brereton
An English writer and politician, Sir William Brereton (1604–61) was a commander in the Parliamentary army in the English Civil war. Born in Manchester, he studied at Oxford. Interested in field sports, he built a duck decoy at Dodleston, Cheshire, which proved to be something of a commercial success. In 1636, he travelled through north-eastern England and lowland Scotland and thereafter to Ireland, recording his impressions as he went.
We came to the city of Glasgow, which is thirty-six miles from Edinburgh, eighteen from Failkirke. This is an archbishop’s seat, an ancient university, one only college consisting of about one hundred and twenty students, wherein are four schools, one principal, four regents. There are about six or seven hundred communicants, and about twenty thousand persons in the town, which is famous for the church, which is fairest and stateliest in Scotland, for the Toll-boothe and Bridge.
The church I viewed this day, and found it a brave and ancient piece. It was said, in this church this day, that there was a contribution throughout Europe (even Rome itself contributed) towards the building thereof. There is a great partition or wall ’twixt the body of the church and the chancel; there is no use of the body of the church, only divine service and sermon is used and performed in the quire or chancel, which is built and framed church-wise; and under this quire there is also another church, which carries the same proportion under this, wherein also there is two sermons every Lord’s day.
