Glasgow

by Alan Taylor

  Then, on the pavement before me, chalked in large letters, I see this rhyme:

  I am a mole

  and live in a hole

  Along Hill Street, then down on to Woodlands Road, then finally I’m in Otago Lane North, at the edge of the River Kelvin, just under the flashing advert for Red Hackle Whisky. I stand there in the out-and-in flashing light, and watch its reflection on the dirty old Kelvin. I stand there for a long while, then I begin to do a bit of a dance, all on my oney-o, singing to myself:

  Let the Midnight Special shine her light on me.

  Let the Midnight Special shine her ever-lovin light on me . . .

  * * *

  I continue flinging crazily about the city.

  Today, fog and drizzle. A smoky, leaden indistinguishable mass, the river a wide, misty, empty-looking expanse.

  Saturday – I’ve been through the markets of Shipbank Lane. The Bonanza, Paddy’s, The Popular, The Jolly, The Cosy, The Super . . . In the lane, on the cobbles running with dirt, a fire is burning.

  I go over the bridge into South Portland Street: dark-grey tenements lining a wide, empty roadway: thousands of uniform windows bare or with a dismal rag of curtain – pale faces behind them. Also dark faces. For many Pakistanis live here – witness the Kashmir Butcher, the Pak Store, the Ravi Traders, the Wali Dairy.

  South Portland Street continues into Abbotsford Place, in the middle of which is a pub called The Rising Sun and at the end of which, in Turriff Street, is the Glasgow Talmud Society, and the Glasgow Maccabi Association.

  Other institutions of the area: The Medical Missionaries, The Muslim Mission, The Church of Baptised Believers.

  The Gorbals. Ancestral grounds. All the ghosts.

  I find myself in Portugal Street.

  There’s a play park there, a monstrosity of a play park. A pond, full of bricks and old plaster. An underground cavern of brick, on the outside of which, painted with whitewash, you can read: ‘Paddy, you mancit bastard. Buddha. Itali.’ There are thick poles too, with a conglomeration of dirty, frayed rope festooned around them. The ground is beaten earth, uneven, strewn with bricks and bottles. The whole surrounded by a high wire fence.

  The building opposite deserted – all the windows smashed, except three, in which there is a pale light shining.

  It’s half past two. Time for ‘Bright Hour’ at the Medical Missionaries.

  I go into the Oriental Cafe, round from Kidston Street. When I was a kid, if I remember rightly, this cafe was called Joe’s. The Gorbals have been orientalised.

  I drink a coffee, eat a chocolate biscuit; and then start walking again – up the Gushetfaulds, then down into Eglinton Street . . . I’m still walking when night falls.

  THE ROAD TO WEMBLEY, 1967

  William McIlvanney

  For football fans, the England-Scotland match at Wembley, which happened every second year, was not to be missed. Some did miss it, though, invariably because – as novelist William McIlvanney (1936–2015) intimates – of over-indulgence en route. Incidentally, in 1967 Scotland beat England, newly crowned as World Cup winners, 3–2, after which the players were dubbed the ‘Wembley Wizards’.

  The scene is the compartment of a Wembley Football Special from Glasgow. Slumped in one of the window-seats is a man in his 30s. He is ruminatively drunk. Every so often his eyes rake the other passengers. But there’s no cause for alarm. He is merely flexing his malice for London.

  His mate comes in and sits beside him.

  ‘Aye then.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Whaur i’ the rest o’ the boays then?’ the man at the window asks.

  ‘Faurer up the train. They’ve flaked oot like. The beer’s a’ by. It couldny last forever, eh? Only twa dizzen cans.’

  ‘Aye. Right enough.’

  The man at the window wipes the misted pane with his hand, peers out.

  ‘Whaur’s this we’re gawn through onywey?’ he asks.

  ‘Crossmyloof.’

  ‘JOHN, YOU’RE IMMORTAL’, 25 MAY 1967

  Hugh McIlvanney

  When Celtic won the European Cup by beating the mighty Inter Milan 2–1 in the final it was the first time this had ever been achieved by a British club. It was seen as a triumph not only for manager Jock Stein and the players, but also vindication of a style of play that depended more on attack than defence, on flair rather than negativity. Remarkably, the Lisbon Lions, as the eleven heroes came to be known, were all born within a 30-mile radius of Glasgow. A few days later Rangers narrowly lost the European Cup Winners’ Cup Final to Bayern Munich, further confirmation of Glasgow’s pre-eminence in the beautiful game.

  Today Lisbon is almost, but not quite, back in Portuguese hands at the end of the most hysterically exuberant occupation any city has ever known. Pockets of Celtic supporters are holding out in unlikely corners, noisily defending their own carnival atmosphere against the returning tide of normality, determined to preserve the moment, to make the party go on and on.

  They emerge with a sudden flood of Glasgow accents from taxis or cafes, or let their voices carry with an irresistible aggregate of decibels across hotel lounges. Always, even among the refugees who turn up at the British Embassy bereft of everything but the rumpled clothes they stand in, the talk is of that magical hour-and-a-half under the hot sun on Thursday in the breathtaking, tree-fringed amphitheatre of the national stadium.

  At the airport, the impression is of a Dunkirk with happiness. The discomforts of mass evacuation are tolerable when your team have just won the greatest victory yet achieved by a British football club, and completed a clean sweep of the trophies available to them that has never been equalled anywhere in the world.

  They even cheered Helenio Herrera and his shattered Inter when the Italians left for Milan yesterday evening. ‘Inter, Inter, Inter.’ The chant resounded convincingly through the departure lounge, but no one was misled. In that mood, overflowing with conquerors’ magnanimity they might have given Scot Symon [the manager of Rangers] a round of applause.

  Typically, within a minute the same happily dishevelled groups were singing: ‘Ee Aye Addio, Herrera’s on the Buroo.’ The suggestion that the most highly paid manager in Europe is likely to be queueing at the Labour Exchange is rather wild but the comment emphasised that even the least analytical fan had seen through the hectic excitement of a unique performance to the essential meaning of the event.

  Mundo Desportivo of Lisbon put it another way: ‘It was inevitable. Sooner or later the Inter of Herrera, the Inter of catenaccio, of negative football, of marginal victories, had to pay for their refusal to play entertaining football.’ The Portuguese rejoiced over the magnificent style in which Celtic had taken retribution on behalf of the entire game.

  A few of us condemned Herrera unequivocally two years ago after Inter had won the European Cup at their own San Siro Stadium by defending with neurotic caution to protect a luckily gained one-goal lead against a Benfica side with only nine fit men. But he continued to receive around £30,000 a year for stifling the flair, imagination, boldness and spontaneity that make football what it is. And he was still held in awe by people who felt that the statistics of his record justified the sterility of his methods.

  Now, however, nearly everyone appreciates the dangers of his influence. The twelfth European Cup final showed how shabbily his philosophy compares with the dynamically positive thinking of Jock Stein. Before the match Stein told me: ‘Inter will play it defensively. That’s their way and it’s their business. But we feel we have a duty to play the game our way, and our way is to attack. Win or lose, we want to make the game worth remembering. Just to be involved in an occasion like this is a tremendous honour and we think it puts an obligation on us. We can be as hard and professional as anybody, but I mean it when I say that we don’t just want to win this cup. We want to win it playing good football, to make neutrals glad we’ve done it, glad to remember how we did it.’

  The effects of such thinking, and of Stein’s geni
us for giving it practical expression, were there for all the football world to see on Thursday. Of course, he has wonderful players, a team without a serious weakness and with tremendous strengths in vital positions. But when one had eulogised the exhilarating speed and the bewildering variety of skills that destroyed Inter – the unshakable assurance of Clark, the murderously swift overlapping of the full-backs, the creative energy of Auld in midfield, the endlessly astonishing virtuosity of Johnstone, the intelligent and ceaseless running of Chalmers – even with all this, ultimately the element that impressed most profoundly was the massive heart of this Celtic side.

  Nothing symbolised it more vividly than the incredible display of Gemmell. He was almost on his knees with fatigue before scoring that minute but somehow his courage forced him to go on dredging up the strength to continue with the exhausting runs along the left wing that did more than any other single factor to demoralise Inter.

  Gemmell has the same aggressive pride, the same contempt for any thought of defeat, that emanates from Auld. Before the game Auld cut short a discussion about the possible ill-effects of the heat and the firm ground with a blunt declaration that they would lick the Italians in any conditions.

  When he had been rescued from the delirious crowd and was walking back to the dressing rooms after Celtic had overcome all the bad breaks to vindicate his confidence Auld – naked to the waist except for an Inter shirt knotted round his neck like a scarf – suddenly stopped in his tracks and shouted to Ronnie Simpson, who was walking ahead:

  ‘Hey, Ronnie Simpson, what are we? What are we, son?’ He stood there sweating, showing his white teeth between parched lips flecked with saliva. Then he answered his own question with a belligerent roar. ‘We’re the greatest. That’s what we are. The greatest.’ Simpson came running back and they embraced for a full minute.

  In the dressing room, as the other players unashamedly sang their supporters’ songs in the showers and drank champagne from the huge Cup (‘Have you had a bevy out of this?’), Auld leaned forward to Sean Fallon, the trainer, and asked with mock seriousness: ‘Would you say I was the best? Was I your best man?’

  ‘They’ve all got Stein’s heart,’ said a Glasgow colleague. ‘There’s a bit of the big man in all of them.’ Certainly the preparation for this final and the winning of it were impregnated with Stein’s personality. Whether warning the players against exposing themselves to the sun (“I don’t even want you near the windows in your rooms. If there’s as much as a freckle on any man’s arm he’s for home”) or joking with reporters beside the hotel swimming pool in Estoril, his was the all-pervading influence.

  Despite the extreme tension he must have felt, he never lost the bantering humour that keeps the morale of his expeditions unfailingly high. The impact of the Celtic invasion on the local Catholic churches was a rewarding theme for him. “They’re getting some gates since we came. The nine o’clock and ten o’clock Masses were all-ticket. They’ve had to get extra plates. How do they divide the takings here? Is it fifty-fifty or in favour of the home club?”

  It was hard work appearing so relaxed and the effort eventually took its toll on Stein when he made a dive for the dressing rooms a minute before the end of the game, unable to stand any more. When we reached him there, he kept muttering: ‘What a performance. What a performance.’

  It was left to Bill Shankly, the Scottish manager of Liverpool (and the only English club manager present), to supply the summing-up quote. ‘John,’ Shankly said with the solemnity of a man to whom football is a religion, ‘you’re immortal.’

  An elderly Portuguese official cornered Stein and delivered ecstatic praise of Celtic’s adventurous approach. ‘This attacking play, this is the real meaning of football. This is the true game.’ Stein slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Go on, I could listen to you all night.’ Then, turning to the rest of us, ‘Fancy anybody saying that about a Scottish team.’

  There is good reason to hope that people will say such things about Scottish and English clubs with increasing frequency in the near future. Now that the Continental monopoly of the European Cup has been broken, British football is poised for a period of domination.

  Glasgow Rangers can strike the next blow when they meet Bayern Munich in the final of the European Cup for Cup Winners at Nurnberg next Wednesday. Scot Symon has rebuilt his Rangers team with patient thoroughness this season, and their thrilling draw with Celtic at Ibrox three weeks ago confirmed how far they have come. Spurred by their great rivals’ achievement, they will not be easily denied.

  Continental clubs can expect no respite next season when the powerful challenge from Scotland will be backed by the presence of Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur in the two major competitions. It seems unlikely that anything short of the personal intervention of De Gaulle can prevent us from being in among the European prizes again.

  WEE TAM’S BREAKFAST, 1967

  Jack McLean

  Decked out in a fedora and the finest, flashiest suit on Ralph Slater’s racks, Jack McLean cut a raffish figure as he flâneured around Glasgow’s byways and boulevards. Having attended Edinburgh College of Art he spent sundry years at the chalk face. His true métier, though, was journalism. He first surfaced in the 1970s at The Scotsman, then edited by Arnold Kemp and his deputy, Harry Reid. When the pair of them moved to the then Glasgow Herald they took the man now dubbed ‘the Urban Voltaire’ with them. His subject was Glasgow and its garrulous denizens and seedy dens. It was as if Damon Runyon had been transplanted to the South Side, fag in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other.

  I was twenty-five when I first stayed in a hotel. And I stayed in it courtesy of the National Union of Students, for whom I was an Executive Member with, as my ex-NUS colleagues tartly recall, irresponsibility for everything. I remember though that I managed to persuade a young female student politician to come up to my room. Once there I thought hard. What does one do in a position like this in a hotel? I mean there must be something a little more plutocratic in hotels. So I picked up the ’phone and rang the night desk. ‘Night Clerk?’ I asked, ‘Send up a bottle of bourbon!’ I pronounced the last as ‘BURBAN’. I was entirely unprepared for the answer. ‘F*** off,’ the night clerk said. I’ll bet that never happened to Humphrey Bogart.

  The idea of hotels really gets to me though. As a matter of fact I regularly take morning and afternoon coffee in Glasgow’s Central Hotel. Considering that you can get three cups of coffee out of a pot for 50p, and can sit in peace and quiet in old leather armchairs and sleep off the lunchtime booze, it is surely just ignorance that causes people to go to bakery chain teashops. In earlier days I was filled with dread that they would know. ‘They’ were the snooty waiters who I thought would recognise real money when they saw it, and they would recognise me as bloody riff-raff the moment they clapped eyes on me, and have me ejected. Funny how you don’t mind the bum’s rush out of a scabby wee bar, but the thought of having your collar felt by a hotel flunkey makes the blood run cold.

  Actually I got over that a long time ago, ever since I worked in hotels myself, not as a college job you understand, but as a fully paid-up flunkey, all white jacket, bow-tie, and posh accent upstairs, and bevy, oaths, and larceny downstairs. When I lived in London I used to regularly don the one suit I possessed and go and look at the Rich in the Hilton Hotel lounge bar. By then the feeling of dread had almost subsided. But if I had been Wee Tam, and I had experienced his sordid little saga, it would have taken somewhat longer for my embarrassment to fade away.

  When Wee Tam was a lad of seventeen, he was apprenticed to a firm of insurance brokers. This was in the days when you could get a clerical job without having a PhD, and Tam was being groomed, at his tender age, for stardom. Accordingly, he was sent up from Glasgow with two elder colleagues, and they all booked into the Station Hotel in Aberdeen. Not only was this the first time that Tam had been in a hotel, but it was the first time he’d drunk a bottle of wine with his dinner, followed by brandy and liqueurs, and wh
isky in the hotel lounge. It was therefore a befuddled Tam who fell into his bed that night. It was a hot summer night, and Tam began to sweat horribly. He hauled off the quilt, then a blanket, then two more, and, to cut it short, Tam finally wrenched off his pyjamas, and lay there naked on top of an equally naked mattress.

  Tam had ordered a cup of tea and a Glasgow Herald for 7.30 the next morning. It was now 7.30 and Tam did not hear the chambermaid’s knock on the door. It is a peculiarity of British hotels that the staff want you out of the room as quickly as possible, and indeed would greatly prefer you to give them a cheque and then spend the night somewhere else and not mess up the beds. The chambermaid of course walked in on young Tam, who being only seventeen was, shall we say, not only naked but er . . . rigid. ‘Your tea and paper, Sir,’ said the chambermaid. Almost immediately realising his predicament Tam emitted a scream and, hurling the bedsheets about him like Ava Gardner in the movies, he promptly upset tea all over the bed. ‘Dinnae worry, Sir,’ said the chambermaid patronisingly. ‘Ye’d be surprised what we see every day in hotels.’

  Now if you add an early morning occurrence like that to a hangover you can understand that Wee Tam was not as perky as he might have been as he hurried downstairs, already late for his breakfast with his two superiors. It was bright in the breakfast room, with the crisp white tablecloths glaring in the sunlight. Tam’s bosses looked ruddy and fresh, in contrast to Tam’s uneasy pallor. ‘How do you feel this morning Tom?’ asked one of them, to which Tam replied that he felt fine. The two were insufferable that morning, rubbing their hands together jocularly, slapping their palms, talking loudly, clanking teaspoons against a cup, which by the sound of it to Tam’s ears may well have been the bell that deafened Quasimodo. The waitress appeared at the table and Tam was handed the menu. ‘Remember,’ said the manager cheerily, ‘The Company is paying for this, Tom. Get a good breakfast inside you. Have the lot.’