Glasgow

by Alan Taylor

  There are more than 30 licensed dance halls in Glasgow and a large number of small halls where dances, as distinct from ‘dancing’, are held. No dance hall in Glasgow is licensed for the sale of alcohol, and trouble is sometimes caused by young men bringing in bottles secretly and drinking from them in the lavatory. This is sternly discouraged. The occasional fights, followed by police court appearances, on Friday and Saturday nights are most often caused because doorkeepers will not allow ‘drunks’ to enter.

  Dennistoun Palais holds 1,700 dancers and is the biggest dance hall in Glasgow. The Plaza is renowned as the place where family parties go, particularly for twenty-first birthday celebrations. ‘Jiving’ is not encouraged in any of the big dance halls but one, the Locarno, has experimented in having a special place for ‘jivers’.

  Many private and club dances are held in Glasgow, in hotels, Masonic halls, community centres and church halls. Less than 30 years ago most churches would not countenance dances, and church youth clubs held what were euphemistically called ‘socials’. At some of these the number of dances was restricted to, say, four. But there was no restriction on ‘games’, so the organisers would include The Grand Old Duke of York, the Eightsome Reel and items of a similar nature as games. Each of the four dances lasted for at least a quarter of an hour. Nowadays church youth clubs are, in the main, unrestricted, and no longer have to call their dances ‘socials’.

  NORTH AND SOUTH OF THE RIVER, 1958

  Jack House

  Like most big cities, Glasgow is a patchwork of communities, some more distinct and protective of their identity than others. Jack House (1906–91), one of Glasgow’s lustiest psalmists, was well aware of the offence he was likely to cause when, in his book The Heart of Glasgow, he ran out of space to cover south of the Clyde. Nor, he admitted, had he been able to deal with the ‘villages’ of Glasgow. ‘But what can I do?’ he wrote, as if pleading for mercy. And well he might for Glaswegians are forthright in asserting where exactly they come from and why it is a better place to live than elsewhere. Thus you will still find East Enders who talk of the West End as if it were Timbuctoo and vice versa and South Siders who refer to the North Side as if it were beyond Aberdeen. Which, of course, in their minds it is.

  Glasgow may not be the closely-knit city it was in 1901, but there is still a decided difference between the North and South sides of Glasgow – though it may not be as easy to distinguish between a Northerner from a Southerner as it was fifty or more years ago.

  Outwardly the inhabitants of both sides of the River Clyde look the same. But most of them say flatly that they would not want to live on the other side of the river. There are numerous cases of South Side families who, for various reasons, have to ‘flit’ to the North Side, but are soon complaining about their new surroundings and often arranging to go back to the other side of the Clyde. This applies to all classes of Glaswegians. South Siders, in particular, attach some sort of magic to living south of the Clyde. Several South Siders, interviewed when they had returned to the south after a short sojourn in the north, complained about the ‘different air’ on the north of the Clyde. A middle-class house-wife confessed she felt ‘unwell’ all the time she was living in North Kelvinside. When she returned to Pollokshields, her health improved immediately. A Glasgow journalist, accustomed to living in Ibrox, said that he was ‘unsettled’ when he had to reside in Hillhead.

  The North Siders do not seem to worry so much about the change of air. Few North Siders have had to make the change to the South Side. The North Siders’ attitude, however, is well exemplified in the case of the Citizens’ Theatre. Most of the entertainment of Glasgow is situated north of the river. The only theatre on the other side is the Citizens’. Many North Siders say they will not go to the Citizens’ Theatre because ‘it’s so far away’. In actual fact, it is just across the Clyde and is well served by bus routes from the north and the west. From the centre of the city – Central Station, for example – the Citizens’ Theatre takes less than a minute longer to reach than the King’s Theatre, near Charing Cross. And you can get to the Citizens’ Theatre more quickly than you can reach the Empress Theatre at St George’s Cross. This has been pointed out many times to North Siders, particularly by the management of the Citizens’ Theatre, but they still talk about the ‘distance’ to the theatre, and the ‘difficulty’ of getting there. South Siders, in the main, must cross the river to get their entertainment, and they do not appear to object to this. North Siders make exceptions, by the way, of the Plaza Palais de Danse and Crossmyloof Ice Rink. They never refer to ‘difficulties’ with getting to these two places.

  In Glasgow there is the customary feeling between East Enders and West Enders, but it is by no means as strong as the ‘differences’ felt by South Siders and North Siders. This is partly because Glasgow originally spread to the East. The move to the West did not take place until nearly half way through the nineteenth century. By that time there were many well-established district communities in the East. The result is that, though, very broadly speaking, the West End is ‘well off’ and the East End is ‘working class’, the East Enders do not envy or look up to the Glaswegians of the West. It is in the East End particularly that the vestigial remains of ‘village’ life are still to be found. Most of the districts of Glasgow that existed up to the First World War retain an independent ambience. In the East End, for example, inhabitants of adjacent districts like Shettleston and Tollcross are annoyed if outsiders mix them up. Two brothers, well known Motor Rally drivers in Britain and on the Continent, expressed their exasperation at being referred to in newspaper reports as ‘Andy and Chris Neil of Shettleston’. They pointed out in the strongest terms that they did not come from Shettleston. They came from Tollcross.

  BUD NEILL, 1958

  Clifford Hanley

  Originally from Partick, William ‘Bud’ Neill (1911–70) moved in infancy with his family to Ayrshire, where he grew up. He first began to draw cartoons while working as a bus driver in Glasgow. In 1944, he started contributing to the Evening Times. His subject was Glasgow in all its mad and perverse idiosyncrasy. Neill’s most famous character, and the one with whom his name is inextricably linked, Lobey Dosser, made his debut in 1949 in the Evening Times. A Lobey Dosser in the Glasgow patois is a lodger who, not having the wherewithal to rent a room, must sleep in the ‘lobey’, i.e. the lobby or hallway. Lobey is the bearded Sheriff of Calton Creek who strives to maintain law and order against the forces of evil, in particular ‘Rank Bajin’. There is a bronze statue of Lobey Dosser in Woodlands Road across from the Halt Bar, featuring Lobey and Rank astride El Fideldo, who is to Lobey what Rocinante is to Don Quixote.

  Bud Neill came of a comfortable Ayrshire family, but according to various stories he told me in my cups, he spent the first seven years of his life in Tibet, as a husky dog. Later, when doubts were cast on his ability to pull a sledge, he left Lhasa in a fit of pique, fitted with a two-stroke engine, and crossed the Sahara Desert in a cement-mixer.

  ‘That was before I joined the Record,’ he explained. ‘From the Dalai Lama to the Dalai Record, ha! You didn’t know that, boy, did you?’

  ‘I did,’ I muttered thickly. ‘I was the second dog on the left.’

  ‘That’s ma boay!’ he shouted.

  I met Bud while I was writing an unsuccessful radio series for Stewart and Mathew, the husband-and-wife comedy dancing act who graced the old Dave Willis Half-past-eight shows at the King’s Theatre and are stars with the famous Fol-de-Rols. Charlie Stewart was a boyhood friend of Bud Neill, and also incidentally of Eric D. Clarke, another Ayrshire character who came to Glasgow to do his comic artist turn and has been doing it and getting more and more boyish with it for over twenty years. Bud turned up in the King’s Arms one afternoon when I was having a drink with my stars and mulling over the murderous notices we were getting in the Evening News. The artist was already a kind of cult among all social and intellectual strata in Glasgow.

  In fact, he worked as a
bus driver, funeral undertaker, and various other things before he started to draw cartoons in earnest and was invited to join the staff of the Evening Times. His daily cartoon wasn’t a joke in the sense that any other artist of the time was drawing jokes. It was just a bit of Glasgow, often meaningless on the surface, and whoever on the Evening Times first thought of taking him on must have had more perception than most newspaper editors, which wouldn’t be hard. He was the first evidence of new indigenous Glasgow humour since J.J. Bell and Neil Munro. After the first jolt of incomprehension, Glaswegians started to tear open the Evening Times to gobble the latest Bud Neill titbit, as salty and esoteric and Glasgow as a black puddin’ supper. How do you explain the art of a man whose finest product was a squashed drawing of two shapeless things against the background of a square tenement with the caption:

  ‘Haw Jennifer! Ma kirby’s fell doon a stank!’

  He was tall and thin, in smart careless clothes with a trace of American accent; a face composed of bold planes of bone under a fine dome head with straight thinning hair; he wore gleaming false teeth and rimless glasses, and could have been a successful salesman from a Frank Capra film.

  It’s true that he can’t draw, in the same way that James Thurber can’t draw. The recurrent heroine that waddles through his work is a dream, or a nightmare figure, of the shrewd, sentimental, unlettered Glasgow wifie sunk in thick ankles and clasping hands under sprawling bosom designed for wedging over a windowsill for a good hing, and she rises to the level of poetry when her inarticulate hunger for beauty drives her to sigh: ‘My, ah like rid herr. Rid herr’s rerr.’

  ‘Ach poetry ma bottom,’ said Bud when I accused him of it. ‘Honestly, now, don’t you think that’s good?’ ‘Well, it’s all right, I suppose. Who knows what’s good? Still, if you say it’s good there must be something in it – something that in my preternatural ignorance, ha, that’s good, something that in my preternatural ignorance I have not as yet detected. Detected, is that right? My vocabulary is somewhat inchoate tonight. I must be sober, or something equally horrible.’ He leaned back for a better look and glinted joyfully through his Glenn Miller specs.

  A CUPBOARD FOR COAL AND MARMALADE, 1959

  John Betjeman

  Though he is best known as a poet, John Betjeman (1906–84) was also passionate about architecture and was never happier than when discovering new places and new buildings. He travelled widely throughout Britain and brought to bear the eye of an artist on what he witnessed. He visited Glasgow at the behest of the Daily Telegraph and he was clearly surprised and inspired by what he saw. Betjeman had been earlier to Edinburgh and could not resist comparing it with its rival. ‘While all praise Edinburgh,’ he wrote, ‘there are few to hymn Glasgow. To visit Glasgow after Edinburgh is rather like meeting a red-faced Lord Mayor after a session with a desiccated and long-lineaged Scottish peer. They are both magnificent in their ways, but so different that there is no comparison.’

  Though this great city is ancient in origin, most of its buildings of note belong to the last century. Alexander (‘Greek’) Thomson produced in Glasgow a simple architecture, solid and so perfectly proportioned that, though none of his buildings are very big, they command a respect which the least observant cannot help giving them. His Presbyterian churches in St Vincent Street and Queen’s Park, his terraces – Great Western Terrace and Moray Place, Strathbungo – display a delicacy of detail and a perfection of proportion which are a Greek answer to St Mungo’s Cathedral so many centuries earlier.

  All over Glasgow there is distinguished cast iron in lamp posts, fences and balcony railings, in conservatories and railway station roofs. Possibly the best example of the last is the great semicircular roof of Queen Street Station.

  And then, at the end of the century, to go with the interest in art which the merchant princes of this vigorous city showed, there are both the collections of pictures in the public galleries and the Glasgow School of Art, by some considered the origin of what is today known as ‘contemporary’ architecture. The pictures, Italian, Dutch and French Impressionist in the Glasgow Art Gallery, together with the Whistlers in the University, make up what must be our finest collection of paintings outside London.

  The Glasgow School of Art (1897–9) designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, is in its delicately mannered simplicity one of the most original buildings in Britain. It is as though Scottish Baronial had been translated into stone and wood and glass by Aubrey Beardsley. Glasgow is rightly proud of Mackintosh, and a dress shop in Sauchiehall Street still wisely preserves a room for its brides which Mackintosh originally designed for Glaswegians to drink tea in and eat baps and bannocks.

  This is the bright side of a great city. But there can be no city in these islands which has darker spots. Out of a population of over a million, about 400,000 are not satisfactorily housed.

  At Anderston Cross, built in the middle of the last century, I visited the worst slums I have ever seen. The stone buildings, four and five storeys high, looked solid enough on their street faces. Enter one of the archways to the courtyards which they enclose, and you will see the squalor.

  Small children with no park or green space for miles play in rubbish bins with dead cats and mutilated flowers for toys. Spiral stone stairs, up which prams and bicycles have to be carried, lead to two-storey tenements with one lavatory for four families.

  One such tenement I saw housed five children and the parents. The coal and the marmalade and bread were in the same cupboard. There was one sink with a single cold tap. There was a hole in the roof and a hole in the wall, and the only heat was from an old-fashioned kitchen range on which was a gas ring for cooking.

  Yet these people, though they complained, were not bitter, and I was told there were 150,000 such houses in Glasgow. The Gorbals is by no means Glasgow’s worst district. The Corporation has a slum clearance problem far greater and more complicated than that of any other city. Politics no doubt hamper its being carried out. But Christian charity must overrule political expediency.

  ‘GLASGOW, 1960’

  Hugh MacDiarmid

  Undeniably a controversial figure, and a professional contrarian, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) must nevertheless be given credit for attempting to drag Scots out of the kailyard and into the modern world. Born in Langholm, he was an autodidact who read his way through all the books in the local library. He did not wear his learning lightly. Rather he shoved it down his readers’ throats with a shovel. He was the enemy of parochialism, the scourge of amateurism and the slayer of mediocrity. For him, Scotland was mired in ignorance, anti-intellectualism and smugness, and was over-interested in sport, especially football, which numbed the brain and made individuals part of the herd. He dreamed that things might be different, that instead of rushing to watch grown men kick a ball Scots would throng to hear what poets such as himself had to say. Such is the stuff of dreams.

  Returning to Glasgow after long exile

  Nothing seemed to me to have changed its style.

  Buses and trams all labelled ‘To Ibrox’

  Swung past packed tight as they’d hold with folks.

  Football match, I concluded, but just to make sure

  I asked; and the man looked at me fell dour,

  Then said, ‘Where in God’s name are you frae, sir?

  It’ll be a record gate, but the cause o’ the stir

  Is a debate on ‘la loi de l’effort converti’

  Between Professor MacFadyen and a Spainish pairty.’

  I gasped. The newsboys came running along,

  ‘Special! Turkish Poet’s Abstruse New Song.

  Scottish Authors’ Opinions’ – and, holy snakes,

  I saw the edition sell like hot cakes!

  THE ART OF STABBING, c. 1962

  Jimmy Boyle

  In the lore of Glasgow, Jimmy Boyle (1944–) looms large. A convicted murderer, he turned his life around and became a respected author and sculptor. He was born in the Gorbals into a life of cri
me to which he took with enthusiasm. Shoplifting, vandalism and street-fighting were for him daily occurrences. In his early teens he was sent to a remand home, from which he graduated to borstal and, eventually, Barlinnie Prison, his first experience of which is described below. Dubbed ‘Scotland’s Most Violent Man’, he was convicted for the murder of Babs Rooney and given a life sentence. In 1973 he was one of the first offenders to participate in Barlinnie Prison Special Unit’s innovative rehabilitation programme, which garnered as many bouquets as brickbats. His biography, A Sense of Freedom, was published in 1977 and was later adapted for the screen.

  I was in a single cell which had a chamber pot, table, chair, and bed. There was a heavy steel frame with glass panes in it at the window and a set of thick steel bars. The routine in prisons is very rigidly structured and almost the same in every prison in Scotland. In the morning there is slop out and wash up then breakfast, either in the cell or in a dining hall. Work at 8 a.m. then lunch at noon; after lunch there is an hour’s exercise either in the prison yards or round the gallery of the halls if it is raining. Back to work till 4.30 p.m. then evening meal. Lock up at 5 p.m. till the screws go for their tea than slop out at about 6.30 p.m. Those prisoners eligible for recreation are allowed out to the dining halls, which act as the recreation halls for an hour or so, then it is lock up and the screws go away at 9 p.m. The only variation is on Saturdays and Sundays, when the screws go away at 5 p.m. till the following morning, and on both of these days it is lock up most of the time.