by Alan Taylor
The Isle of Arran attracted then, as it attracts now, but, more than any other place on the Firth, it expected to be loved for itself alone. There was a certain sense of adventure in the voyage beyond the Cumbraes and Bute, or even from Ardrossan in the old Brodick Castle, with her pair of black and white funnels set close together, and a certain romance in the island’s isolation and wildness, also the wonder of freedom, which did not apply to places on the inner Firth. But for those delights there was a price, however cheerfully it might be paid.
Fascination was the word for it. Glasgow people accustomed to abundant space and every comfort packed themselves gladly into cottages in a way that is best described by the sanitary inspector’s word ‘overcrowding’. The cottages were without water supply; the rooms were small, the ceilings low, the windows sometimes so tiny that the ventilation was almost negligible; and after a stewing hot night one had a real need of all the fresh air the hills and glens and sea could give. In such a night, unable to sleep, I lit a candle in order to read and, lo, the wall-paper was swarming with wood-lice! But was I ‘scunnered’ at Arran? A thousand times no!
Yet I have since wondered how my mother tholed it. Seven of a family, maybe a visitor or two, the father bringing another at the weekend, and all the difficulties of catering at the head of a glen, maids raging at the small open fire, every pint of water to be carried in from a spring – not much of a holiday for her. Perhaps she was leal to Arran, as well as faithful to her motherhood, for as a girl she had tasted of its delights, without the responsibilities.
KENNEDY JONES, c. 1885
Neil Munro
Born in Glasgow, ‘K.J.’ (1865–1921) as he was known, was educated at the High School before embarking at sixteen on a career in journalism. He worked as a reporter for several local papers before moving south, where he fell under the influence of Alfred Harmsworth. Always entrepreneurial, he returned to Glasgow in 1895 and acquired the Daily Record. Though not titularly its editor, ‘K.J.’ determined its style and content, increasing sales from 100,000 to half a million within three years of its launch. Here he is recalled by the journalist and novelist Neil Munro (1864–1930), author of the sublime Para Handy tales.
In the middle ’eighties a young Glasgow lad, living with his parents in Crown Street, Gorbals, started on a Press career, which terminated in London about the year 1921, when he retired, reputedly a millionaire.
He had begun as acting editor of a boys’ paper, and so made certain of having his own contributions accepted. He finished as a partner of the late Lord Northcliffe, whom he was largely instrumental in launching into daily journalism.
In his retirement he occupied his time by keeping a stud of racing horses, and, as a director of Waring and Gillow, took an active interest in Mr. Donald Matheson’s preliminary schemes for what was to be the grandest hotel in Scotland, possibly Britain – Gleneagles. But the war intervened; all work on Gleneagles was suspended for some years, and he did not live to see it finished. His last work was to write a volume dealing with his own part in the development of the ‘new journalism’.
For a certain number of years the destiny of The Times itself had been to no little extent in the hands of Mr. Kennedy Jones, the lad from Gorbals.
The first time I met Kennedy Jones was on a Monday night in the stalls of the Princess’s Theatre, Glasgow, where I had gone to write a notice of The Shaughraun, as played by Hubert O’Grady’s touring company. There was a sparse audience, which doubtless accounted for Mr. O’Grady’s bad temper that night.
Sitting next to me was a remarkably precocious young fellow I had never seen before, or heard of, who took an early opportunity to let me know he was editor of a new weekly called The Detective, which I had not yet seen. It appeared that The Detective specialised in short stories of crime and its nemesis, mainly written by himself, and in guinea competitions.
The previous week he had offered a guinea for the best short contribution dealing with the stage, and written by a professional actor. The guinea had been won by an actor in Hubert O’Grady’s company, to whom he was going to present it personally at the end of the performance.
I accepted an invitation to go behind the scenes with him to witness this important ceremony, and we found the successful and highly delighted prize-winner alone in a dressing-room washing off his grease-paint. The presentation was hardly finished and the actor still in his under-pants when a stage hand came into the room with Mr. O’Grady’s compliments and the information that we must leave immediately, as visitors in the dressing-rooms were strictly prohibited. Young Mr. Jones had no plausible locus standi, but I thought to establish one by sending a messenger back to O’Grady explaining that we represented the Press.
In the messenger’s absence the young actor explained that the insult was directed exclusively at himself, as there was a violent feud between him and O’Grady. Two minutes later O’Grady came into the dressing-room, profoundly apologetic. He was in a state of deshabille, without coat or waistcoat; one suspender inadequately holding up his breeches; his unbuttoned shirt revealing the hairiest of chests; and his face all streaked with paint.
‘I didn’t undershtand ye were pressmen, boys,’ he said. ‘The Press is always welcome. What paper do ye represint?’
‘The Evening News,’ I informed him, quite unaware that a colleague of mine (‘Lorgnette’) that very afternoon had cruelly written of O’Grady’s own plays, as apart from Boucicault’s, as of no dramatic value.
Fifteen minutes later, Kennedy Jones and I were contumely ejected into Main Street, Gorbals, accompanied by our friend, the young literary actor, who had there and then thrown up his engagement with the Shaughraun company. A painful scene, in which Madame O’Grady, also in deshabille, joined her husband and helped him to express his sentiments about us where his own pretty extensive vocabulary fell short!
The Detective soon lost the clue to fortune, died soon after, and Kennedy Jones transferred his talents to a more orthodox Glasgow weekly paper, The Scottish People, in which he began a sensational story, entitled, The Golden Cross. The plot of it had been suggested to him by the editor, Mr. Andrew Dewar Willock, and its publication began in the paper when only the second instalment had been written. To advertise the new serial, tiny placards three inches square, and gummed on the back, were printed off in thousands for distribution by the newsagents.
Very late one night – or, rather, early in the morning – the author of The Golden Cross, on his way home to Crown Street over a deserted Jamaica Bridge, bethought him that here was an opportunity to stimulate the sale of good literature. He had with him a pocketful of the little placards exhorting the public to ‘Read The Golden Cross, by Kennedy Jones’, which he began to moisten in the natural way upon the back, and stick at intervals all along one parapet of the bridge. Unobserved by him, another belated citizen, a baker, was crossing the bridge behind him, and was intensely interested in this new development in publicity – obviously contrary to police regulations.
The stranger overtook ‘K.J.’ at the south end of the bridge where he was at the moment sticking on his final placard; watching him gravely for a moment under the lamplight, and then asked, ‘Are you by any chance Kennedy Jones, the author of this story?’ Jones admitted that he was.
‘I thought so!’ said the baker. ‘I hope they pay you well for working on the night shift’, and having so revealed a fraternal interest in the hardships of the humblest of the working classes, passed on into the darkness.
Each week’s instalment of his serial, however, came later and later to the printer’s hands, till finally he was being sent for to Green’s Billiard Room in Drury Street on the day before going to press that he might come across to the office and provide ‘copy’ for the following day.
The story ultimately became so hopelessly entangled, and ‘K.J.’ looked so unlikely to finish it within a year, while still its denouement was undecided, that Mr. Willock, the editor, adopted the drastic and traditional old method of dealing w
ith such circumstances, and wrote the final instalment himself. I forget exactly how he disposed of all the surviving characters, but I have the impression that he drowned the villainous ones in a shipwreck and abruptly married off the hero and heroine. So ended ‘K.J.s’ career in fiction.
BRIEF LIVES, 1888
Dr J.B. Russell
Appointed Glasgow’s second Medical Officer of Health in 1872, Dr Russell made many speeches with titles such as ‘Life in One Room’ and ‘The Children of the City’, designed to prick the consciences of the powers-that-be. One paragraph illustrates the point he was trying to make.
Of all the children who die in Glasgow before they complete their fifth year, 32 per cent die in houses of one apartment; and not 2 per cent in houses of five apartments and upwards. There they die, and their little bodies are laid on a table or on the dresser, so as to be somewhat out of the way of their brothers and sisters who play and sleep and eat in their ghastly company. One in every five of all who are born there never see the end of their first year.
A VEXED QUESTION IN SANITATION, 4 AUGUST 1888
The Builder
The phenomenal success of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London spurred other European cities to emulate it. Somewhat belatedly, Glasgow entered the fray, but when it did it was with uncommon enthusiasm, with three exhibitions in twenty-three years. The first, in 1888, was held in West End Park. Its aim was ‘to promote and foster the sciences and arts, and to stimulate commercial enterprise’. Any profits were to go towards setting up a new art gallery, museum and school of art. Although it was supposedly international in nature, there were very few exhibits from foreign parts, though the Empire was well represented. The Glasgow International Exhibition was opened on 8 May by the Prince of Wales and closed on 10 November, by when it had welcomed 5,748,379 visitors and made a surplus of around £46,000. Not everyone, however, was wholly impressed by the experience . . .
This enterprise has just completed the third month of its appointed career, and of success, in the purely business sense of the term, there has hitherto been no lack. The sum of the attendance has been more than respectable, although the form in which the figures, through the medium of the local press, find their way from time to time to the public is hardly a straightforward or rational one. There is no excuse for ranking mere stall assistants as visitors; yet this is done, and not only so, but each entrance is made to count, and an attendant whose exceptional requirements take him in and out twelve times a day, swells the figures by twelve accordingly. There is not the same strength of exception taken to the mixing up of season ticket-holders and complimentary visitors with those who pay at the turnstiles (the only unerring criterion), but it would certainly be more candid to keep the two tables of figures entirely separate. Ticket-holders for the most past reside, or at least pursue their daily calling, within a short distance of the building; many of them make several visits daily, and in doing so contribute (innocently enough of course) to the swelling of these same somewhat deceptive attendance returns.
Since the opening, on the 8th May, a certain degree of change has been going on amongst the general exhibits, chiefly at the fancy of sundry exhibitors who were unable to open with a full show, or who had afterthoughts as to additions which appeared to them desirable. There has been a gradual process of accretion due to this influence, and there are cases, perhaps, in which it has gone too far. Pottery, earthenware and glass goods have been added to very appreciably, and to the extent, possibly, of somewhat seriously upsetting the general balance or proportion of the Exhibition. These fragile goods are found, not only in set places, but everywhere, and are come upon incessantly by the examiner, at the imminent risk of suggestion iteration in an offensive degree. Many of the specimens are of undoubted excellence of manufacture and of some artistic merit, but many are only moderately endowed with good qualities of any kind. This department of the Exhibition is decidedly overdone, and a ton or two of this class of goods might be carted away, not only with safety, but to the general advantage.
On the other hand, there are sections which would bear some augmentation in the interests of this same balance and proportion. Models from the pattern-rooms of shipbuilding yards are present in a force which more than satiates; but although the Kelvin flows immediately under the north façade of the building, and, by special deepening operations, has been purposely made navigable to a practicable extent, there is nothing on its bosom save a mooring-buoy, a gondola, and two or three craft of the small launch order, only one of these – a new lifeboat deck seat – presenting features at all out of the common. More might have been made of it than this.
The Kelvin itself, however, forms an instructive exhibit, although to one or two of the senses in some sort an objectionable one. Its presence here as an inclosed and thoroughly domestic feature of an institution destined within a brief space to be visited by two or three millions of people, many of them of high initiative rank, may exert an after influence on a still unsolved problem – the prevention of the pollution of rivers. This inconsiderable stream rises in the heart of the Scottish midlands, at a point fully half-way across to the Firth of Forth, thence flowing picturesquely through the valley to which it gives a name, on to the confluence with the Clyde at Glasgow, about half a mile below the Exhibition. It has many polluting factories on its banks, and receives several tributaries subject to similar befouling influences, besides carrying away the sewage of a good many towns and villages – none of a very large extent, however. Up to within a few months ago a considerable portion of western Glasgow drained into it under the grounds of the park, just at the site of the Exhibition, and it still receives the household impurities of those suburbs of Glasgow which fringe the opposite or right bank of the river. Of late years, during the heats and droughts of summer, the Kelvin at this point has emitted a stench past all bearing, quite outdoing the larger-volumed and more fully-diluted Clyde in that respect; but it has been partially relieved by recent deepening and cleansing operations, and it will certainly prove less obnoxious this year. Yet, at this point, even now, it is not a considerable remove above the grade of a very badly outraged stream as regards the sewage and manufacturing refuse still permitted to drain into it. As nearly every visitor will cross and recross it, its condition is bound to attract attention; and, as a kind of impromptu exhibit, in this sense it may help towards the solution of a vexed question in sanitation.
DRINK-SODDEN, 1889
Sir John Hammerton
Born in Alexandria, Dunbartonshire, Sir John Hammerton (1871–1949) was credited by the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘the most successful creator of large-scale works of reference that Britain has known’, i.e, Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopaedia. His description of the drunken antics of some Glaswegians is confirmed by others. In the mid-nineteenth century there were pubs in Glasgow and Edinburgh for every 130 people. But they were outdone by the likes of Tranent and Dunbar in East Lothian where, respectively, there were 52 pubs (one for every 76 inhabitants) and 53 (one for every 83 inhabitants). As the historian T.C. Smout has remarked: ‘Nowhere else was as sodden as that.’
In 1889, Glasgow was probably the most drink-sodden city in Great Britain. The Trongate and Argyle Street, and worst of all, the High Street, were scenes of disgusting debauchery. Many of the younger generation thought it manly to get ‘paralytic’ and ‘dead to the world’; at least on Saturday there was a lot of tipsy rowdyism in the genteel promenade in Sauchiehall Street, but nothing to compare with the degrading spectacles of other thoroughfares, where there were drunken brawls at every corner and a high proportion of passers-by were reeling drunk. At the corners of the dark side streets the reek of vomit befouled the evening air, never very salubrious. Jollity was everywhere absent: sheer loathesome, swinish inebriation prevailed.
UNLUCKY WITH SHIPS, c. 1890
Catherine Carswell
The daughter of a merchant involved in shipping, Catherine Carswell (1879–1946) grew up in middle-class Glasgo
w where she attended Park School. Music was her first love but she was eclectic in her artistic tastes and lectured for a spell on art. In 1907 she became drama critic of the Glasgow Herald, but lost her job when she reviewed D.H. Lawrence’s banned novel The Rainbow. Following the death of her mother in 1912 she left Glasgow for London. Her first, well-received novel, Open the Door! (1920) is transparently autobiographical. Its successor, The Camomile: an Invention (1922) was less successful. However, it is for her controversial Life of Robert Burns (1930) that she is best remembered. Bardolaters, aggrieved at her portrayal of their hero, heaped abuse on her and even sent her death threats. The following passage is taken from Carswell’s autobiography, Lying Awake (1950).
There are two rivers in the city where I was born. One is a romantically genteel stream with high banks along which nursemaids wheel prams. Upon the other – of which this stream [the Kelvin] is a feeder – the prosperity of the place has been built up. Poems and songs – none of them good – have been written about the stream, none, so far as I know, about the river. Our living was derived from the river, whence my father sent ships and merchandise to the West Indies, but we rarely saw it. We lived – latterly – on the banks of the stream and in the region to which it gave its name.
