by Alan Taylor
But in Glasgow there was neither fight nor rupture; and for the simple reason that there was neither academicism to battle against, nor an opposition, fitly to be called such, to be overcome. And what is more, men, resident in the West of Scotland, had painted pictures in a good tradition, and had thereby created an interest in Art matters, in more ways than one, helpful to the rise of the new movement. But here comes in the difference between Glasgow and, say, the majority of northern and midland cities of England. The Royal Academy of London controls not only the Metropolis, but issues its dictum and influences the Art tendencies of practically the whole of England. In the provincial cities and towns of England, an artist’s success depends, in large measure, upon the annual acceptance or rejection of his works, by the hangers at Burlington House; and he must be a strong man who can evade the test successfully and yet live.
But in Glasgow, on the contrary, there never was, nor at the present moment does there exist, either a controlling power vested in a body of artists, or an indication of opinion arising from a cultured lay community. Artists were, and still are, free to do what they like, as they like, provided always they take the consequences of their own ways and works. The businessman buys what he likes, or is persuaded to like, or because it pleases him; and though the Glasgow artists might possibly wish for a better representation than at present is the case, either in the municipal or in local private galleries, it would be hard to find a city where there are collections of pictures showing greater bravery of purchase.
The very rivalry between the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow serves the purpose of emphasising the position taken up by the Glasgow men. The Royal Scottish Academy is now richer in the possession of strong recruits, which a more enlightened policy has had the wisdom to enrol from among the Glasgow men; but when the movement spoken of began, some ten or twelve years ago, there was practically no representative from Glasgow upon the Royal Scottish Academy roll, and very little inducement offered the young aspirants working in the West to contribute their products to the walls of its annual Exhibition. As for Burlington House, it may be questioned whether, even at the present moment, there is any large number of Glasgow painters affected in their work, either by its dicta or its desires. Certainly the Exhibitions of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts are noticeable by the absence of the works of living Royal Academicians, a position of matters that should cause a little regret, especially when it be considered who some of these Royal Academicians are. But it may broadly be stated, that in Glasgow a man’s success is not dependent upon the judgment passed on his work by the selecting committee of the Royal Academy; and the possibility has been proved of artists working in Glasgow and attaining to a world-wide fame and reputation, without being even regular contributors to the walls of Burlington House. This young body of painters, therefore, working in Glasgow, and now happily – or unhappily – since styled the Glasgow School of Painters, had no cause to complain of their efforts being thwarted, or their aspirations checked by the influence of a power that held possession, and either ruled the market or dictated the taste. The field for their labours was as clear from any cramping or confining influences, as were the very earth and heavens they delighted to depict, and the traditions of a school – which, like bands binding a prisoner, have to be broken before even the blood can quicken the pulses – never even had an existence in the case of the Glasgow men.
1901–1925
FIGHTING WOMEN
THE CITY MAN, 1901
James Hamilton Muir
There was no such person as James Hamilton Muir. He was a composite of three young, mischievous Glaswegians: the artist Muirhead Bone, his brother the journalist James Bone, who later became the London editor of the Manchester Guardian, and the lawyer Archibald Charteris. Together they produced a perceptive book called Glasgow in 1901. Much that they had to say about the city a century and more ago holds true today, such as: ‘The best you can say for football is that it has given the working man a topic of conversation.’ Even then there were signs that shipbuilding was starting to decline. Poor people drank too much, the university lacked focus, and there was too much drinking in public, and not of the wonderful water which arrived largely untreated from Loch Katrine.
Glasgow, like most towns given over to industry and commerce, has no leisured class. Some of the inhabitants do, indeed, contend that the class exists and contains thirty-one persons, who are professors at Gilmorehill. But this is an absurd contention, for if you include professors, how are you to treat the officials of the Board of Trade or of the Custom House, or even lieutenants of the police? No, if the class exists in Glasgow it contains only nine-and-twenty persons, and these are not professors at all, but infantry officers stationed at Maryhill Barracks. And this is why the military man, whom, of a summer afternoon, you recognise by his flannels, his straw hat, and his fox-terrier, has an air so wearied and listless. With the other leisured men in the town he may have dined every night since the regiment came to Maryhill; now, on this pleasant day, he is just a little tired of them and would almost give his dog to any new person of the class who could help him to air it. Think of it! Alone of 750,000 people, he of the straw hat and old flannels has no ‘job’.
No doubt there are others who are leisured against their will; the business of a professional man, for instance, who is still on the stocks, the waiters at Drury Street who are out of work, the student who, as the decades roll over his head, is turning ‘chronic’. But to avoid being stared at, the man of this stamp adopts at the least the habits of the occupied, and then, like the Sergeant at Law –
Nowhere so besy a man as he ther nas,
And yet he seemed besier than he was.
The unashamed leisured are the military man and his rare twin brother the Oxford undergraduate in Glasgow for the vacation.
Now, this character of the Glasgow man as one having a job may be read by him who runs. It affects dress, manners, habits, even expression. Thus, existing more for use than ornament, the Glasgow man has small regard for the delicate niceties of dress. He clothes himself for work, and wears tweeds which have an air of being worth their price. If he should bestow pains on his clothes and do their maker infinite credit, depend upon it, the very rarity of his caprice will earn him the title of ‘Tailor’s Block’. But even the most modest person respects what he has purchased, and thus in our uncertain climate he will wear his trousers turned up and will carry an umbrella, and these two habits are said to be the stigmata of the Glasgow man, revealing his origin even in the Outer Hebrides. Until he has ‘arrived’ he rarely (except to funerals) wears a tall hat, unless indeed he is a professional man, and then if he is a lawyer it may sit on his head more as a badge of his calling than as a harmonious element in his colour scheme. Very often he hangs it in a cupboard before leaving his office, and should he chance to spend the next day a-golfing, his clerks will play charades with it in his private room. It is of a piece with his character that he refuses in business hours to be seen in the street with a stick in his hand. So to be seen would occasion the oddest surmises among his friends, the chief that he was leaving his office for good at a strangely early hour, or that he was a wedding guest. He might even seem to be a stranger passing through Glasgow on his way to the West Highlands. In Edinburgh, on the other hand, where appearance, not time, is money, a stick is carried even by the junior apprentice delivering a letter.
Further, the Glasgow man walks quickly, without attention to gait or carriage. He swings his body, even his arms, and sometimes walks on his heels as being nearest the ground. But no one takes offence at this. People are all too busy, and if our friend has the air of being bound for an appointment of importance, every Glasgow man would congratulate him on having so good a reason for his haste. Be his gait never so crablike, no one will chaff him. Why, after all, should one, if the man gets there? In a metropolis where conventions are inherited it may be different, but here where the people who observe the conventions are those who made the
m, appearances, unless they collide with a reasonable etiquette, matter not one straw.
If now, from clothes and carriage, you pass to faces, your evidence multiplies that the Glasgow man is a man of occupation. The faces are intelligent rather than handsome, alert and intent rather than gay, more conspicuous for character than breeding. Merriment is not common, yet neither is boredom. It is a sedate people that you see, having itself well under control, aware of its aims and pursuing them without swerving. The vagrant eye is not often seen. Our friend knows his town too well to be attracted greatly by what passes in the streets. He has something else to think about. Yet do not imagine that he looks listless or wearied like the military man, and perhaps unhappy into the bargain. He is simply undemonstrative, and having an object and scope for his activity, he depends for his contentment less on his outward impressions than one who has neither.
The typical Glasgow man whom you see in the street uniting all these characteristics in his person is not the merchant prince with sons at Harrow, the professional man, nor the great shipbuilder or engineer, but is a little grey, wiry man in plain clothes and a square felt hat. He has a good-going business, which is the source, if not of a fortune, at least of a competence. He lives in the suburbs, probably in the South Side; his wife is plump and commonplace and cheerful, his daughter quite pretty, his son at college ‘coming out for a doctor’ and writing decadent verses for the magazine. He himself is the salt of the middle-class with all its virtues and limitations. His face is full of the character which brought him success; shrewdness, resolvedness, tenacity, energy, canniness, steadiness, and sobriety – all these are imprinted upon it indelibly. Withal it is a kindly face and belongs to one who is without pretension and deserves the epithet which his friends give him, of a ‘plain, unassuming man’.
GEORGE SQUARE, 1901
James Hamilton Muir
George Square is to Glasgow what Red Square is to Moscow and St Peter’s is to Rome. Situated in the heart of the Merchant City, it is named for George III (1738–1820). Laid out in c.1782, it remained for many years full of filthy water, its banks used for slaughtering horses. Eventually houses were built around its sides and today it is presided over by the City Chambers. It is home to statues of notable worthies, including the first monument ever erected to Walter Scott and one to Robert Burns, which was the first statue to be placed in the Square.
The Londoner who imagines he had turned his back on his city’s sins of arrangement finds them repeated in every provincial town he comes to. And so George Square is Trafalgar Square over again – the same central monument, the same weary desert of paving stones, the same feckless designing of the spaces. The absence of the Landseer lions may be counted to it as a negative virtue, but the Scott monument is as dismal, quite, as Nelson’s. To set a ‘faithful portrait’ of a great writer on a pedestal eighty feet above the street level, surely this is a form of strange torture, survived from the Middle Ages. At the head of the great column only a great symbol – a great gesture – is permissible, although an emperor standing guard over his realm might also be a motive sufficiently dignified. But to hoist to this height a man accustomed in life to walk the streets like any other of us, one to whom close observation of his fellows was a real daily need – this offends against all that is just and appropriate. If it be retorted that the column and its figure are the apotheosis of a great writer, why, in the name of art, was the man not purged of his earthly look and transfigured into a great being, high over the land he made renowned? In cold weather, when we are snugly at home, or in the Young Men’s Christian Association Rooms, he is out in the cold and in danger, and this is the sole thought that the Scott monument stirs in us. It is no simple memorial of ‘sons to a father’, as the Florentine monuments of the Renaissance were. Neither is it a symbol of enduring greatness. It is simply, like Nelson’s, a man on the look-out tied to the mast-head. Burns’s monument is better, because it is nearer the ground; its clumsy, overgrown, earnest figure is truer to the man. Moreover, there is a faint touch of the appropriate in his standing here, for at a window at the south-east corner of the square his Bonnie Lass of Ballochmyle used to sit and see the folk go by when her poet was dead, and she no longer bonnie. But the square looks best when ‘a blast o’ Janwar wind blaws hansel in on Robin’, and brings with it snow. Then the stupid divisions of granolithic pavement from grass plots are blotted out, and the tramways run through lawns of snow, noiseless as sledges. And James Watt on his statue seems, indeed, a philosopher sunk in meditation, and as the snow settles on his head and lap, deeper and deeper seems his meditation. And Sir John Moore looks still and frozen, very like the hero of the ballad, ‘with his martial cloak about him’. The Municipal Buildings, as you view them from the Post Office portico, seem greatly, mysteriously, official, like a facade in Whitehall; the old hotels on the north side are ever so far away, and the statues stand on their white ground like chessmen on their board.
The windows of the General Post Office are the Poor Man’s Club. A man is staring from them, and sees not you, but a cottar’s roof in Morven, and a girl driving kye home at nightfall. An old mechanic ties up a well-thumbed Weekly Mail, and addresses it with a shaking, laborious hand, and drops it among the foreign newspapers, for his son, the engineer, in India.
THE BONE FACTORY, 1901
Edwin Muir
Born the son of a crofter in Orkney, which he thought of as Edenic, Edwin Muir (1887–1959) left the island with his family when he was fourteen. It was the rudest of disruptions and one which left the poet scarred for life. In comparison to Orkney. Glasgow, as he described it in An Autobiography (1954), was everything his birthplace was not: stinking, dirty, coarse, crime-ridden, unbearable, the sort of place you escape from, not volunteer to go to. In another book, Scottish Journey (1935), Muir added to his impressions of Glasgow. It was, he felt, a ‘collapsing city’, beset by slums, a population close to starvation, sectarianism and a sense of hopelessness.
The job I took up in Fairport and kept for two years was a job in a bone factory. This was a place where fresh and decaying bones, gathered from all over Scotland, were flung into furnaces and reduced to charcoal. The charcoal was sold to refineries to purify sugar; the grease was filled into drums and dispatched for some purpose which I no longer remember. The bones, decorated with festoons of slowly writhing, fat yellow maggots, lay in the adjoining railway siding, and were shunted into the factory whenever the furnaces were ready for them. Seagulls, flying up from the estuary, were always about these bones, and the trucks, as they lay in the siding, looked as if they were covered in moving snowdrifts. There were sharp complaints from Glasgow whenever the trucks lay too long in the siding, for the seagulls could gobble up half a hundredweight of maggots in no time, and as the bones had to be paid for by their original weight, and the maggots were part of it, this meant a serious loss to the firm. After one of these complaints the foreman, an Irishman, would go out and let off a few shots at the seagulls, who would rise, suddenly darkening the windows. But in a little while they would be back again.
The bones were yellow and greasy, with little rags of decomposed flesh clinging to them. Raw, they had a strong, sour, penetrating smell. But it was nothing to the stench they gave off when they were shovelled along with the maggots into the furnaces. It was a gentle, clinging, sweet stench, suggesting dissolution and hospitals and slaughter-houses, the odour of drains, and the rancid stink of bad, roasting meat. On hot summer days it stood round the factory like a wall of glass. When the east wind blew it was blown over most of the town. Respectable families sat at their high teas in a well of stink. Many people considered that the smell was good for the health.
‘KATE CRANSTONISH’, c. 1905
Neil Munro
Kate Cranston’s part in the history of Glasgow is significant and enduring. Born in 1849, she opened a tea-room in Argyle Street in 1878, the city’s first. Another followed in nearby Ingram Street. Then, in 1897, she devoted a whole building in Buchana
n Street to a tea-room, drawing on the talents of great exponents of ‘Glasgow Style’ – George Walton and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In 1903 came the famous Willow Tea Rooms in Sauchiehall Street which were designed by Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald. Cranston died in 1934 and, despite a public outcry, the new owner of the Ingram Street tea-room dismantled it completely.
Cranston’s in the Argyle Arcade and Queen Street, and Cooper’s, for a time had been distilling tiny cups of coffee in their windows. The aroma, extending into the streets, appeared to have an irresistible attraction for the ladies, who began to buy their coffee by the ounce as an excuse for more frequent visits to town and the pleasure of free sampling.
From the gratuitous sample-counter quickly developed a sitting-room where coffee could be amply and leisurely enjoyed at a reasonable tariff, and the strain of shopping in town was relieved enormously. The Cranston family had one time been associated with the Crow Hotel, a famous hostelry which stood on the side of the present Merchant’s House in George Square. According to Who’s Who in Glasgow (1909), Miss Catherine Cranston was born there; the place of her retirement is in its immediate vicinity.
Miss Cranston, clever, far-seeing, artistic to her fingertips, and of a high adventurous spirit, was the first to discern in Glasgow that her sex was positively yearning for some kind of afternoon distraction that had not yet been invented. She mapped out a career for herself and became a pioneer in a lunch-tea movement which in a few years made her name a household word. By general consent it was associated with the ideals and triumphs of the ‘Glasgow School’ of artists, then entering on international fame.
At the International Exhibition of 1901 in Kelvingrove her Tea-house and Tea-terrace had architectural and decorative innovations which created a sensation even among continental visitors. It meant the funeral knell of ugly and curly ‘art nouveau’ conventions in domestic decoration, and for the first time introduced a quite original note of surprise and gaiety into the mid-day ‘snack’ and its crockery and cutlery.
