by Trevor Royle
Other heavy industries also suffered from the slump, with production at the North British Locomotive Company dropping off by two-thirds during the same period due to falling orders and a lack of confidence in the world markets.4 The railway company mergers of 1923 also affected the industry when the London Midland and Scottish railway absorbed the Caledonian and Glasgow and South-Western, while the London and North-Eastern took over the North British and its subsidiary companies. Direction of both new companies was moved to London, and there was a resultant scaling down of engineering work in Glasgow and Kilmarnock. In the steel industry the huge conglomerate Stewarts & Lloyds relocated from Lanarkshire to Corby in Northamptonshire in 1932, forcing large numbers of the workforce to migrate south; its departure left a huge vacuum in the Clyde’s industrial heartlands. But perhaps the most telling symbol of the decline was the looming bulk of Order Number 534 which occupied Number 4 berth at John Brown’s shipyard at Clydebank. Work on the giant Cunard liner had been suspended on 11 December 1931 and for almost three years the gaunt, unfinished hull had been a sorry symbol of the economic decline and the consequent loss of almost 5,000 jobs. When work was resumed in the spring of 1934 it was greeted with wild enthusiasm, and the eventual launch of the 35,500-ton liner Queen Mary two years later seemed to herald a turnabout in the fortunes of the Clyde’s shipbuilding industry. In the autumn of 1936 the keel was laid for another Cunarder, the Queen Elizabeth, and orders were received for the construction of twenty-two warships including the King George V class battleship Duke of York. Suddenly the good times seemed to have returned, as Clydebank prospered from the rapid re-armament of the Royal Navy with Admiralty work on hand in 1938 reaching 164,911 tons – almost as high as it had been in 1913.5
Other factors affected the decision to mount the exhibition. A new king, Edward VIII had come to the throne in 1936 and Cecil M. Weir, convenor of the Exhibition Committee and a leading banker, argued that ‘coming so early in the reign of the King-Emperor it [the exhibition] would be a fine gesture to the world of the peaceful industrial confidence of the United Kingdom and the Empire overseas and of the undiminished courage, enterprise and resource of the Scottish people’6 Although the country was shaken by the king’s abdication later in the year and his succession by his brother, who reigned as King George VI, there was no slackening of enthusiasm or lack of optimism amongst the exhibition’s organising committee. On the contrary, matters proceeded quickly and smoothly. Following a good deal of discussion and canvassing about the best location in Glasgow, Bellahouston Park was chosen as the venue as it was larger than Kelvingrove and enjoyed reasonable transport links with the city centre two miles away. (Against that, as the exhibition’s historian has noted, ‘the drive out through Tradeston and Plantation would bring the overseas visitor in the closest of contact with some of the worst housing in the Western world.’)7
Despite the recent economic problems, money to fund the exhibition turned out not to be a major issue and in addition to civic contributions from Glasgow and Edinburgh, several Scottish firms proved to be equally generous, with five-figure sums from ICI, the engineering group G. & J. Weir, thread manufacturers J. & P. Coats of Paisley, Fairfield Shipping Company and the Distillers Company. By the time the appeal was launched on 20 October the committee had already raised £100,000, 20 per cent of its target.
From then onwards the planning proceeded apace. Thomas Tait, the designer of Sydney Harbour Bridge and St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh, was appointed lead architect. He proved to be an inspired choice. Quite apart from his leadership qualities, he is best remembered for the construction of the great 300-foot-high Tower of Empire which dominated the park and which was known affectionately as ‘Tait’s Tower’. He also received unstinting support from a large team of young and up-and-coming architects which included Jack Coia, Basil Spence and Esmé Gordon. Throughout the project the idea was to showcase the best of Scottish industry and to produce a vision of what the future might hold for the country. All the buildings were unusually well designed and constructed (even though all of them, bar the Palace of Art, were destined to be temporary structures): there was a concert hall with universally admired acoustics, an Atlantic Restaurant which mirrored an ocean liner and had a menu (plus prices) to match, an amusement park with futuristic rides and even a clachan or model Highland village to hark back to a fondly imagined past. Glasgow city council also took the unprecedented step of allowing licences for the sale of alcohol during the exhibition, although this met with opposition from the Scottish Temperance Alliance which feared a mass outbreak of inebriation, ‘a menace not only to the Exhibition but also the community’.
Equally noteworthy was the speed with which the project progressed. The Countess of Elgin formally turned the first sod in the spring of 1937, and just over a year later, on 3 May 1938, the exhibition was opened by King George VI at nearby Ibrox Stadium. From the outset the exhibition lived up to Lord Elgin’s hope that it would represent ‘Scotland at home to the Empire’. Visitors marvelled at the sweeping clean lines of the main pavilions, the bold use of glass and steel, the open avenues which added to the feeling of spaciousness and innovation. In later life the poet Maurice Lindsay, then a boy, remembered ‘the shimmering cascades of floodlit water’ and catching a glimpse of Mary, the Queen Mother, ‘powdery and frail-looking as an Oscar Wilde heroine’ as she made one of many visits to the event.8 Three types of pavilion were on display – those devoted to the Dominions, those centred on various industrial activities and those mounted by private companies – and there were two distinctly Scottish pavilions which acted as showcases for the country. Fittingly for the west of Scotland, the largest and perhaps the most popular pavilion was the Palace of Engineering which contained large models of the ships which had made the Clyde famous. Pavilions were also given over to the BBC, the Post Office, the Glasgow Herald and The Times.
Even before the exhibition opened, 120,000 season tickets had been sold through a system of purchase by instalment, and by 14 May 1938 one million visitors had made their way to Bellahouston Park. Perhaps the most popular feature, because it was the most fun, was the amusement park which was run under the direction of Billy Butlin, a young Canadian impresario who had opened his first holiday camp at Skegness two years earlier. Here were gathered together the usual type of fairground attractions plus a variety of modern, even futuristic, rides such as a scenic railway with a top speed of 60 m.p.h., a Stratoplane and a huge dodgem track. For many visitors, including this correspondent from the Evening Citizen, the showground was what made the exhibition worthwhile: ‘Everywhere were gadgets for turning you upside down, rolling you round and round, shaking your liver, in short, putting you in any position other than the normal one. Here man (and that means woman too) is twisted, thrown, bumped and shaken, and he likes it. If you doubt me go for yourself. Watch him come off the most fearsome-looking machine smiling and happy, and asking for more and getting it. No wonder that poets sing of the wonderful Spirit of Man.’9
For everyone who made the journey to the exhibition site it proved to be a time out of life which they would never forget, above all the floodlit edifice of Tait’s Tower which seemed to symbolise the optimism which had prompted the event in the first place. But inevitably there were problems. The main drawback was the unseasonable weather; the rainfall was the highest for thirty-five years, and only three summer Saturdays were free of downpours. As a result, attendances fell off with only 71,000 visitors on the last Saturday in July when 200,000 had been expected. Towards the end of the exhibition it was decided to open the exhibition to the unemployed free of charge, but the final tally was disappointing – 12,593,232 – and the event made a loss, which necessitated the making good of financial guarantees (three shillings and five pence in the pound). Other factors also explained the shortfall. Despite the best intentions of the organisers the exhibition was viewed outside Scotland as a purely local affair. There was little mention of it in the English or national press, and further af
ield it received hardly any notice at all. In its leader of 31 October, at the conclusion of the exhibition, the Glasgow Herald commented somewhat sourly on the ‘half-hearted support that was given by some of the Colonial Governments’ and the lacklustre backing from London and Whitehall.10
Then there was the alarming and rapidly deteriorating international situation which contrasted uneasily with the innocent pleasures to be found inside Bellahouston Park. While thousands of people made their way to celebrate the British Empire and to gaze at its myriad wonders, things were beginning to fall apart in Europe; Nazi Germany had been threatening continental stability ever since Adolf Hitler had assumed the presidency on 2 August 1934, backed by the support of the country’s rapidly expanding armed forces. A rash of sabre-rattling had quickly followed. The existence of the German air force (Luftwaffe) was announced in March 1935; the Rhineland was re-occupied in March 1936, thereby breaking the terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919; and later that year Germany entered into treaties of friendship with Italy and Japan, the countries which would eventually form the wartime Axis powers.
But it was in 1938, the year of the Empire Exhibition, that Hitler’s aggression increased with alarming intensity and rapidity. On 11 March German forces moved into neighbouring Austria to complete the Anschluss, a political union which was expressly forbidden by Versailles but one which Hitler declared to be a natural and popular fait accompli. Emboldened by the lack of any opposition from the other western powers, Hitler orchestrated another crisis in the summer by exploiting the demands of German-speaking Sudetens to cede from Czechoslovakia and to join the German Reich, as Germany had become. On 12 August the German Army was mobilised as Hitler demanded that the annexation should be allowed, claiming in passing that it would be his last territorial claim in Europe. For a while it seemed that a conflict was inevitable. It was what Hitler wanted, a limited military operation against the Czechs both to test his armed forces and to make good his intentions to dominate middle and eastern Europe, but against expectation Britain suddenly intervened in the crisis.
At the time Britain had no obligation to defend Czechoslovakia. It was not part of its sphere of interest, there was no treaty with the country and the prime minister Neville Chamberlain told parliament that there was no point in going to war against Germany ‘unless we had a reasonable prospect of being able to beat her to her knees in a reasonable time and of that he could see no sign’. He knew that the re-armament programme begun in the previous year was not complete and he understood, too, that the country had no appetite for the kind of intervention that had taken Britain to war in 1914. But the claims of realpolitik also had to be addressed. France was in alliance with Czechoslovakia and would have to be supported if a wider European conflict broke out. As the situation deteriorated and became more precarious, Chamberlain decided to regain the initiative by flying to Germany to meet Hitler face-to-face at his summer retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps.
It was a parlous mission and it turned September into a worrying month for the people of Britain, who still had vivid memories of the previous conflict and were desperately anxious to avoid going to war again. As it turned out, it took two further meetings at Bad Godesburg and Munich for Chamberlain to come to an agreement which forced Hitler to back down. At a meeting on 29 September attended by delegates from Britain, France, Italy and Germany (but not Czechoslovakia) the Sudeten Germans were given self-determination within agreed boundaries, and for the moment the crisis was over. It was a triumph for democratic principles over the threat of force, and Chamberlain was judged to be its architect. History’s verdict has been less kind. Appeasement gradually became a dirty word and Chamberlain has been blamed for being naïve when he stated in the House of Commons on 3 October that ‘under the new system of guarantees the new Czechoslovakia will find a greater security than she has ever enjoyed in the past’. That turned out to be wishful thinking, but Chamberlain did at least buy much-needed breathing space at a time when Britain was not in any position to wage a continental war. The overwhelming emotion was one of relief, and even his political opponents were grateful. During the same parliamentary session James Maxton, MP for Bridgeton, rose to thank the prime minister for doing ‘something that the mass of common people of the country wanted done’. Earlier in his career Maxton had been one of the ‘Red Clydesiders’ and an ardent conscientious objector who spent time in prison in 1916 after being found guilty of sedition.
In September 1938 others felt the same way as Maxton did and many of those who trooped into Bellahouston Park also recalled the widespread relief that war had been averted. Even so, the tensions of Munich impinged on the event’s dying days. Before the exhibition finally closed the army put on display some of its most modern military equipment and there was a mock bombing raid carried out by three RAF Hawker Hind light bombers of 603 Squadron from RAF Turnhouse near Edinburgh. With the defending searchlights and anti-aircraft artillery beating off the attackers it gave spectators a thrilling show, but it was also an eerie preview of things to come.
To the very end the rain was an ever-present theme and the 364,092 visitors on the last day, 29 October, were treated to relentless showers which failed to dampen their spirits. At midnight it was all over, and almost immediately the builders moved in again to begin the task of dismantling the pavilions and the buildings which had given so much pleasure to so many people. Some of the structures survived in other guises. The Palace of Engineering was moved to Prestwick airport where it is still in use; the South African pavilion was purchased by ICI for use at their works at Ardeer; and the Empire Cinema, designed by Alister MacDonald, son of former prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, was moved to Lochgilphead where it later became a travel lodge. The Highland clachan was shipped across the Atlantic to resurface in San Francisco. Most of the lumber and the remaining materials were simply auctioned off. As for Tait’s Tower, the stately edifice which epitomised the exhibition and which could be seen from at least a hundred miles away, it was kept in place and was intended to remain as a memorial to the enterprise. However, it was not to be as the costs of maintaining the edifice eventually proved to be prohibitive, and although a few seaside towns offered unsuccessfully to purchase the tower it was demolished the following summer. Persistent rumours claimed that Tait’s Tower was removed because it could have offered a navigational aid to enemy bombers, but that seems unlikely as the demolition took place in July 1939 before war had broken out. Today, only the 3,000-ton concrete base remains to show where the futuristic structure once stood on the ridge above the park.
And so it was all over. Scotland had enjoyed a long summer in which it had been at the centre of the empire, so to speak, and the visitors to the exhibition had been given a glimpse of what the future world might hold for them with broad open avenues and elegant visionary buildings constructed in concrete, steel and glass. For a brief few months it seemed that the future had arrived and that Scotland would prosper as a result, but ten months later the country and its empire were at war again, fighting for their survival. As for Bellahouston Park, it was quickly put on a war footing and became a temporary barracks for Polish troops who fled to Scotland after the Nazi invasion of their country in September 1939 (see Chapter 9). With the park covered in tents and huts, it was as if the exhibition and all its high ideals had never been.
1 Here We Go Again
In the summer of 1933 the poet Edwin Muir returned to Scotland with his wife Willa Anderson to spend some time in Orkney where he had been born on 15 May 1887 on the island of Wyre. It was a poignant moment. Ever since leaving the islands during his early teenage years, Orkney had transmogrified in his mind into a Paradise Lost, his childhood a Golden Age to which he could never return. To Muir’s way of thinking it was little sort of banishment, and the change in his fortunes could not have been more dramatic. From the bucolic calm of a farming background he was plunged into grinding poverty in Glasgow where his parents and two brothers died and he was forced to work in a
rendering factory, an experience which left deep mental scars. Absolution arrived when he married and escaped from Glasgow to live in Europe where he built up an enviable reputation as translator of writers such as Franz Kafka and Heinrich Mann, but always in his mind’s eye he had been in exile from a remote but kindly world which had helped to fashion his poetry and the man he had become. Work was another impetus; he was after all a professional writer. Not only did the Orkney visit rekindle his love for the place of his birth and give him the opportunity to recapture the echoes of the past through his poetry, it also produced the impetus for writing Scottish Journey, an account of a personal peregrination through a country which he thought he knew intimately but by the mid-1930s he discovered that he hardly knew at all.
When Muir had left Scotland in 1919 the economy was still reasonably buoyant thanks to the artificial post-war boom which had benefited the shipbuilding and heavy industries in the west, and the resilience of coal in Lanarkshire and in the Lothian and Fife fields. As it turned out, though, the initial optimism of that first year of peace was mirage, and by the middle of the next decade and into the 1930s Scotland had entered a difficult and challenging period. The official statistics provide stark evidence of a sharp economic decline: within the twenty years between 1913 and 1933 shipbuilding on the Clyde had fallen from a record 757,000 tons to a meagre 56,000 tons; the production of steel had fallen from 20 per cent of the UK output to 11.5 per cent; pig iron from 13.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent; and the fishing industry had seen its numbers fall from 33,283 fishermen to 26,344.1 There had also been a worrying reduction in the numbers of people working on the land: in 1921 the census carried out by the Board of Agriculture showed that the number of male workers had dropped from 175,651 in 1911 to 169,984 ten years later.2
