by Alan Taylor
There was, I suppose, a lot to worry about in the years of its authorship, 1951 to 1952. The Soviet Union had developed its own atomic weapons. The Chinese People’s Army had flooded into North Korea to pursue the war against American-led UN forces that included British troops. The United States was in the grip of what can only be described as paranoia. Two minor Soviet agents – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – had been condemned to death in 1951 for passing on secrets to the Soviet Union and were later (1953) executed. Atomic devices were regularly tested in the Nevada desert. In May 1951, the Americans tested, in the Pacific, the first hydrogen bomb. It was a triumph of nuclear physics that the Soviets and then the British were to repeat. The ‘atomic age’ had arrived in earnest.
It was against that background that His Majesty’s Government decided to investigate what would happen if a Hiroshima-type atomic device were exploded over the centre of Glasgow. Their calculations are contained in a document marked ‘secret’ and wordily entitled Assessment of the Damage and the Numbers of Casualties and Homeless Likely to Result from an Attack on Glasgow with an Atomic Bomb. The research was carried out between 1951 and 1952 under the direction of E.C. Allen MSc of the Home Scientific Adviser’s Branch. The Scottish Home Department and the Department of Health for Scotland (both branches of the Scottish Office) had commissioned it, and the result was approved by the government’s Working Party of the Effects of Air Attack. When the document was printed and circulated in January 1953, it carried with it the warning that ‘the official in possession of the document will be responsible for its safe custody and when not in use it is to be kept under lock and key’.
What Allen and his colleagues postulated was an explosion at 2,000 feet above ground zero by a ‘nominal’ nuclear device with the equivalent destructive power of 20,000 tons of TNT (roughly the size of the atomic bomb that destroyed most of Hiroshima in August 1945). Two separate scenarios were explored: one in which the bomb was dropped on Glasgow during the day, the other in which the attack occurred at night. The Home Office men calculated that 932,900 people would be within 2.5 to 3 miles of ground zero during the day, dropping to 854,200 at night. A daytime explosion during the working week was therefore considered to be the greater of the two evils, Glasgow would be about its business. The factories, shops, warehouses, offices, schools, tramcars and streets would be crowded with people. The Home Office team put the number of daytime casualties at 79,700 dead and 25,900 seriously injured, whereas a night-time bomb would yield 59,700 dead and 19,300 seriously injured.
Blast damage to property was also assessed. Up to 3,000 feet from ground zero the effect on stone-built tenements would be ‘complete collapse’. At 4,000 feet there would be seventy-five per cent collapse. At 5,000 feet twenty-five per cent collapse. At 1.25 miles all pitched roofs would be destroyed. At 1.5 miles the roof damage would make the building uninhabitable. Beyond 2 miles the damage would be ‘superficial’.
Anyone trapped in the rubble of a collapsed Glasgow tenement had little hope of rescue. Lying under two storeys of London or Birmingham brick is one thing. Lying under four or five storeys of Scottish sandstone is something else entirely. This report took this into account and pointed out that the sheer weight of the debris would mean that ‘only a small proportion of the trapped and injured were likely to be saved’. The Glasgow tenement’s only – and literally – saving grace was that its thick stone walls offered greater protection against gamma radiation.
The report conceded that official thinking about the consequences of nuclear attack until then had been distinctly Anglocentric. ‘Previous studies of atomic attack on British cities made by the Working Party have been based on the assumption that the bulk of the people live in small terraced or semi-detached brick houses. This assumption clearly could not be applied to either Glasgow or Edinburgh.’ Glasgow was extraordinarily vulnerable, with special problems. The report concluded: ‘These special problems result mainly from the density of population in Glasgow, which is greater than that of any British city, but also because much of the population is housed in very large blocks of tenements, some of which are 100 or more years old.’
In other words, no city in Britain would have suffered more grievously than Glasgow in the event of a nuclear attack. So, with these facts and figures at their fingertips, what did the British government do? Ten years later it gave Holy Loch to the US navy as a forward base for its nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered submarines. Soon after it made two more of the Clyde’s sea lochs – Loch Long and the Gare Loch – into the base for the Royal Navy’s new nuclear submarine fleet. Both bases were prime targets for the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles and bombs. Both lay (and in the Royal Navy’s case still lie) fewer than thirty miles from George Square and the heart of Glasgow.
LEARNING ABOUT COLOURS, 1953
Alan Spence
Glasgow is a divided city in many ways but the most obvious is religion. It is embodied in two football clubs, Rangers and Celtic. The former are the standard bearers of native Scottish Protestants who in the late nineteenth century feared an influx of Irish Catholic immigrants who gave their support to the latter. Each side is as distinctive as night and day. Rangers wear blue while Celtic favour green. But as Alan Spence (1947–) recalls, things are more complicated than that.
The earliest holiday I remember was for the Coronation. Every child received a tin of sweets with the Queen’s portrait on the lid. I went with my mother to visit my aunt, one of the first people in the area, perhaps in the whole of Glasgow, to have a television set. The set was tiny, with a nine-inch screen, and the house was full of neighbours, crowding round to watch. Afterwards, in the back court, somebody gave a party for all the local children, with crisps and ice-lollies and paper hats, party-games and songs and jokes. It was a great, great day. God save the Queen!
The Queen was a Protestant. My uncle had told me that. My uncle was in the Orange Lodge, and had undertaken my education in such matters. He and my father had already taken me to see Rangers play at Ibrox. I had felt the elation at their victory, the depression at their defeat; I had been initiated. Emotionally now I could feel the connections; the Queen and the Union Jack, being a Protestant and following Rangers; it was all noble and good, all part of some glorious heritage that was mine. And the opposite of all this was Catholic, was darkness, was bad and in some way a threat.
I remember one day my uncle teaching me about colours. I was wearing a blue jersey and he said it was good, was a fine colour.
How about orange, I asked, was that a good colour? The best, he said.
Purple? That was good too.
Red was fine.
Black and white were OK, not good, not bad.
But green was bad. The worst.
I thought of the green park where we went on those summer evenings, and how beautiful it was. But no. It was the colour of Celtic, of the Catholics. They had made it their own, had made it bad.
I was eating further of the tree of knowledge.
My uncle said I was growing into a good Protestant. He said when I was a little older he would get me into the Juvenile Orange Lodge. The thought excited me.
I could march in a parade, perhaps even learn to play flute or drum in a band. But my mother said no. They were all mad she said, just making people hate each other all the more, and for nothing.
Reality was growing more complex and confusing. Nothing, it seemed, was clear cut.
At school I was making progress. The ogre of a teacher was replaced by another, much milder, and I began to flower. From the age of six on, through my whole time at the school, I came top in every exam, won first prize every year. Teachers made much of me. My drawings and handwriting were often on display. I was granted little privileges, like being sent on errands, minutes of glorious freedom from the class. I developed a certain smugness, a pride in my own abilities, a sense that I was special, unique. And to those teachers I suppose I was. Ours was one of the rougher schools in a rough part of the city.
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p; Unemployment was high, there was real poverty, and much small-scale crime. The school itself had some reputation – it was overcrowded, and many of the children were ‘problem-cases’.
To the teachers, my little bright spark of intelligence would be something that had to be nurtured and encouraged to grow. One teacher in particular had great hopes for me. She suggested that when I reached the right age, I should try for the scholarship exam for a high school in the city centre. The school was fee-paying, but a small number of bursaries were awarded each year, on the basis of a competitive exam. This teacher encouraged me to read more widely, sometimes gave me extra work, to prepare me. I liked her better than any of the other teachers.
One morning, I was about eight at the time, she came in raging and started to rant at us about the prime minister, Anthony Eden. He had sent bombers to Suez, she said, while at the same time the British government was condemning Russia for invading Hungary. We listened, amazed. These were things we heard about from the world of newspapers, of the radio, but it was beyond all our comprehension. And here was our teacher, turning on its head the way we had come to see things, where the British, which was us, were always in the right. Reality was becoming complex indeed. There was a whole big world out there, full of contradictions.
And how did I fit into it? How was my definition of myself shaping up? Well, I was a Protestant, I knew that. I also knew that I was Scottish. Scotland was my country, Glasgow my city. Sometimes being Scottish meant being British, sometimes British just meant English. But then sometimes Scottish and English were opposed, as in football internationals, as in great battles from the past. My idea of what British meant came originally from war films I had seen. British were soldiers who wore a certain shape of helmet. The other kinds were American, Germans and Japs. British and American were always good, the others were bad. But in Korean War films, the Americans were fighting communists, and my father said my teacher was a communist. It was all too confusing.
RITE OF PASSAGE, c. 1953
Tom Gallacher
All workplaces have their rituals, some of which are more tolerable than others. That described here is from Apprentice (1983), a novel by Tom Gallacher (1932–2001). Born in Alexandria, West Dunbartonshire, he trained as a draughtsman and worked at Denny’s shipyard in Dumbarton, which experience provided him with much material for his fiction. Apprentice’s narrator, sixteen-year-old Billy Thompson, has attended a Sussex public school and, in the 1950s, has come north to serve his apprenticeship as his successful father did before him.
Like all closed societies, the world of engineering has its own initiation ceremony. Before he is fully admitted, the apprentice has to be ‘greased’. What horrified me was where he had to be greased. In the shipyards where I had served my time, there was an adamant preference for the genitals. Since I’d come directly from a minor English public school, that should not have surprised me. And, given the mechanical parallels of piston-rod and regulator-valve, it might even have seemed apt. Nevertheless, I was determined that nobody was going to do that to me. Thinking of it now, the whole business is fairly amusing, but then, when I was seventeen, the prospect of such abject humiliation was terrifying. For a few months I was successful in avoiding any group of my fellows which wore that menacing, collective smirk and as I got used to the place I persuaded myself that they’d forgotten I hadn’t been ‘done’. I’d reckoned without the lack of supervision when, during roof repairs, we had to work on the night-shift.
Bent at my lathe in the Light Machine Shop, I realised that Frank, my only reliable friend, was smiling over my head.
I looked around but could see nothing unusual. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothin’!’ But he smiled even more broadly.
The distraction was fatal to the gunmetal valve I was turning. The tool dug under the centre-line and the whole piece rocketed out of the chuck, smashed the machine-lamp and fell with a denouncing clang in the sump. I fished it out and revealed the deep gash in the valve face.
‘What shall I do?’
‘Whi’ everbody else does,’ said Frank, unperturbed. ‘Dump it in the Dock Burn an’ steal another yin fae the store.’
‘I’d better wrap it up in something.’
‘Wait tae ye finished the shift. The wey you’re gaun, there’s likely tae be mair.’ But again, he was looking behind me and this time I turned quickly enough to see the advance of four or five older apprentices – one of them carrying a large can of axle-tallow.
Frank said, ‘Ye cannae dodge it this time Billy. Ye’re gonnae get greased.’
‘I won’t let them.’
‘Ye cannae stop them.’
‘Will you help me?’
‘Naw. But I’ll no’ help them.’
The long gallery of the machine shop was lit only by the individual machine lights and, since the light on mine had just been shattered, the area around me was practically dark. Frank, who had undergone the business with perfect composure more than six months before, moved away. I gripped the damaged valve tight in my hand and waited. I heard Jock Turnbull’s deep laugh and I turned to face that way, but immediately I heard from the opposite direction the creak of the long footboard as someone stepped from the concrete floor onto it. Then they were all on top of me. My wrist was caught and banged against the tail-stock so that the valve dropped again loudly in the sump. I struggled as hard as I could – trying to wrestle my way under the machine. They gripped my legs and pulled me back on the footboard. Staring up I saw the repair tarpaulin on the roof flapping against the dark sky before faces and shoulders and arms blotted that out. And I could smell the sickly, thick tallow. My head was pulled up by the hair so that they could start stripping off the one-piece suit of dungarees under which I was wearing shirt and trousers.
PARAFFIN DRESSING, 1956
Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long
If ever a novel can be said to define a place then No Mean City (1956), co-authored by A. McArthur and H. Kingsley Long, did just that for Glasgow. Though dismissed as turgid and unreadable by literary critics it struck a chord with the wider reading public, who were in turn engrossed and appalled by its portrayal of razor gangs, hooliganism and hard drinking. But as one commentator grudgingly conceded ‘it has become the Glasgow novel’ and has been constantly in print since its first appearance. Its hero, if such he may be called, is Johnnie Stark, ‘a product of the Gorbals’, who behaves like an animal in the jungle where only the fittest have the chance to survive.
Just across the Clyde from the Gorbals lies Glasgow Green, the city’s most frequented park. There, in a triangular patch of the river between King’s Street and St Andrew’s bridges, is an open-air gymnasium much frequented by the youth of the slums and, occasionally, the battle ground of conflicting gangs.
Johnnie Stark was exercising on the parallel bars. He sank his body until the shoulder blades met and only the elbows and heels were above the bars. Slowly and smoothly he raised himself to rigid, full arms’ length. He rose and sank again and again, counting silently until he reached his regulation fifty movements. Then his feet swung free of the bars and he vaulted cleanly to the ground. There were several other young men there of about his own age. They watched him respectfully as he resumed his neat blue jacket. He flung a nod at them and walked away with a little swagger.
Vanity is as much a dominant motive in the slums as outside them. Johnnie had little to be proud of except his strong body and reckless spirit. He spent a lot of his leisure at the Green Gym, and much of his money on clothes. He was not ill-looking and in the Gorbals men and women too are very much judged by their appearance. A good suit of clothes wins a certain respect for the wearer. Johnnie wore ‘a whole suit’ – that is to say, the coat and trousers were of the same navy blue cloth and had been sold together as a suit. His shoes were well polished, a bright ‘tony-red’. In the language of the Gorbals, he was ‘well put on’ and proud of his ‘paraffin’. There was actually a paraffin dressing on his sleek black ha
ir, and perhaps there may have been some association of ideas between slumland’s passion for smoothed and glistening crops and its general term for a smart appearance.
But Johnnie would never have worried his head about the derivation of words. At school he had not even secured his ‘merit certificate’, that minimum standard of education which the council had set. His failure to do so meant thirty evenings at night school when, by reason of his age, his normal ‘schuling’ was at an end. Even a diligent lad can’t contrive to learn a great deal in thirty evenings. Johnnie, utterly bored, endured the night school as so much detention and learned nothing at all. He could read the racing papers and the football reports and he could do simple sums and he was satisfied that this was an adequate equipment for all practical purposes.
ARE YE DANCING? 1958
Jack House
To Presbyterians of yore, dancing was tantamount to devil worship. Why Glaswegians paid no heed to such nonsense ought perhaps to be the subject of deeper study. The influx of the Irish – whose feet can never be nailed down when a band begins to play – may have something to do with it. Historians of the city know that Glasgow’s love of dancing is by no means recent. On the contrary, it has played an intrinsic part in its development. In the 1950s, while many took to the Great Outdoors an even greater number preferred the Great Indoors. As one keen tangoist recalled: ‘Many young men pass through a phase which has often been described by their parents and friends and sometimes even by themselves as “dancing mad” . . . the search for a mate and dancing go hand in hand.’
Dancing is tremendously popular in Glasgow and there is a higher proportion of dance halls to the population than anywhere else in the British Isles. The standard of dancing was considered, up till 1940, the best in Britain. Experts now say that the standard has deteriorated because of such ‘foreign’ influences as the arrival of American soldiers and sailors. Although the standard may have deteriorated, the number of dancers is still enormous, and many of the patrons of the big ball-rooms attend four or five times a week. In a recent broadcast from Barrowland Dance Hall in the Gallowgate, a girl said that she danced seven nights a week – six nights at Barrowland and Sunday night at a special dance club.
