by Roy Jenkins
On the whole I think not, although I do believe that the style of capital cities affects the style of the governments that operate within them. Thus I think it no accident that the three most centralized countries in Europe - Britain, France and Spain - are the three in which the governments operate from ‘hub of the country’ capitals - London, Paris and Madrid - which are the dominant cities, politically, socially, culturally, commercially. (It should be noted, however, that France and Spain are currently making strenuous efforts to decentralize themselves, whereas no such effort is visible in the British Government.) It is also noticeable that post-war Germany, when Berlin was split, operated with no city showing even a ‘conurbation’ population of two million, no city in other words amongst the first sixty or seventy in the world. The Federal Republic has been the most important and richest country but the one with the least big single city of the five big states of the European Community.
This fits in appropriately with the recent revaluation of fashion against excessive size in cities. And with the prestige of size so has its precision disappeared. An encyclopaedia published in the early 1920s, to the study of which I devoted many childhood hours, gave with complete confidence the exact population of every major city down to the last digit. I can still remember many of them. Glasgow then scored 1,111,428, as opposed, say, to 648,000 for Madrid, which now rates four and a half million, or 412,000 for São Paolo, Brazil, which now rates twelve and a half million. Modern editions of encyclopaedias are much more uncertain. They give alternatives - within the city limits and within the conurbations, and conurbations are rather vague concepts. But what is more significant is that nobody is now proud of being big. London and New York used to compete with each other for first place like two Atlantic liners passing and re-passing each other in bids for the blue riband of the fastest crossing. Now both competitions are as out of date as are the liners. New York and London have dropped far behind, being overtaken by Tokyo and Shanghai, and Calcutta and Bombay, and Seoul and Cairo, and Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, and maybe Teheran, and above all Mexico City. But Mexico City, far from being proud of its pre-eminence, keeps its monstrous size and rate of growth as quiet as any ageing beauty used to do with her age, and hopes that it can escape too much obloquy for further engulfing the country and polluting the sky.
Glasgow has therefore chosen its time to shrink with great skill. The days when the claim to be ‘the second city of the Empire’ was a proud boast are as far past as is the Empire itself. And although the claim had a certain essential truth, as was symbolized by those great exhibitions of 1888, 1901, 1911 and 1938 in the parks of first Kelvingrove and then Bellahouston, I wonder how statistically accurate it was unless the population of Calcutta was calculated on the basis that you needed several Bengalis to count as the equivalent of one Scotsman.
In those days, however, it would have been a tragedy to have gone down in population from 1,100,000 to the present 750,000 (although of course the Clydeside conurbation remains much more like two and a half million). Now it does not matter in the least from a prestige point of view. Indeed, it is if anything an advantage, and excites the greater admiration that Glasgow’s cultural impact, which I regard as comparable with that of Chicago, has been achieved on a population, city for city, of a fifth the size, and conurbation for conurbation, of a third the size.
There is only one word of warning that I must give to Glasgow. Glasgow has ridden high on a mounting wave of fashion in the 1980s. It amuses me to look back over the change in the outside perception of Glasgow during the period that I have been closely associated with the city. When I became Member of Parliament for Hillhead in 1982 I derived a lot of pleasure from surprising people all over the world with the wholly accurate information that my Glasgow constituency was, according to the census, the most highly educated in the whole of the United Kingdom. And I added for good measure that, while it was geographically only one-eleventh of the City of Glasgow, it contained at least fifteen institutions or monuments of major cultural, intellectual or architectural fame. That was all in the days before the Burrell Collection was open. The Burrell (not in Hillhead but three miles away on the South Side), while it is a fine heterogeneous collection, housed in perhaps the best building for a gallery created anywhere in the past quarter century, adds to what was previously in the Kelvinside Gallery and other Glasgow collections before but does not qualitatively change it. 1982 was also at the beginning of the ‘Glasgow’s miles better’ slogan, and before there was much thought of Glasgow being either an important centre of aesthetic tourism or the European City of Culture.
What has changed since then has been that for three or four years everybody has come to accept these earlier facts without the previous surprise, while for me the sad fact amongst them is that Hillhead has ceased to be my constituency. (But if it no longer enables me to sit in the House of Commons it is at least now part of the name under which I sit in the House of Lords.) My warning is that fashion is a fickle jade. Glasgow has been tremendously à la mode for the past five years. But la mode, by its very nature, cannot remain constant. Last week, for the first time in my experience, someone said to me that he thought Glasgow had recently achieved an exaggerated reputation, and went on to add that he thought Edinburgh - admittedly he lived there - was the cultural as well as the political capital of Scotland. I rocked on my heels in amazement. No one had said such a thing to me for years.
I do not happen to believe that it is true. Edinburgh has of course great cultural assets, the Festival, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Portrait Gallery, and the copyright library, but they are none of them strictly indigenous. They come from outside or by virtue of capital city status rather than arise out of the life and work of the inhabitants of the city itself as is the case here. None the less, I think Glasgow must be prepared for the going to be a little harder in future. Having caught and mounted the horse of fashion in the early eighties and dashingly ridden it for seven years or so, Glasgow must be ready for its vagaries soon to take the horse veering off in another direction.
Glasgow can, I think, sustain this. It has almost indestructible advantages that should be immune to gusts of fashion. First the site, which is God-given in both the literal and the figurative senses of the phrase, and which helps to make Glasgow an exceptionally vivid city visually, and one to which a strong painting tradition is peculiarly appropriate. The city itself is finely placed with the hills rising on either side of the river in just the right places. Beyond that the estuary of the Clyde, with its associated inlets, islands and mountains, constitutes the most dramatic piece of seascape at the gates of a major city to be found anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Vancouver Sounds and the Bosphorus. There are I believe equally memorable natural formations amongst the fjords of Norway, or on the western coast of Greenland or on the shores of Antarctica, but they are all wastelands so far as human population is concerned.
Glasgow’s industry also had a peculiar vividness, which is retained by such of it as remains. The cranes of Govan, seen on the drive in from the airport, proclaim that this is Glasgow as emphatically as, and more authentically than, the Eiffel Tower identifies Paris, or the bridge and the opera house do Sydney.
Second, there is the solid base of Glasgow’s educational strength. It is a remarkable double that a century after the narrow strips of flat land along the banks of the Clyde became the greatest industrial focus of the world, the hills behind the riverside on the north side should now have become, with the exception almost only of the banks of the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the most concentrated educational areas: two universities, the 439-year-old eagle of Glasgow perched on its Gilmorehill eyrie and the enthusiastic young pouter pigeon of Strathclyde a couple of miles to the east and hatched only a quarter of a century ago out of a College of Technology; Jordanhill College of Education; four teaching hospitals; three units of the Medical Research Council; a number of specialized institutions of
which the Glasgow School of Art is the most famous; all this, plus a clutch of four or five high schools or academies of note, is by any standards an extraordinary cluster and one which, as I believe the Massachusetts experience has shown, is of great economic value in the modern world.
Third, there is the quality of the human resources. Glasgow has its well-known warmth, but that is something on which in my view it is possible to talk a good deal of sententious nonsense. Glasgow people are capable of being very friendly, and they are almost invariably polite, but they are also capable, as are all people of discrimination, of being appropriately chilling when they think it is deserved. When in 1982 I first came to know Glasgow well, and in particular its West End, what most struck me was not so much the warmth as the quiet self-confidence. It was not a complacent or narrow or inward-looking self-confidence. It was not based on a desire to keep strangers out, or I would not have been made nearly so welcome. What it was based on was a consciousness of the contribution which this strip of river and hills had made to the advancement of civilization throughout and beyond Britain, and on a feeling that while it was desirable to go outside the West End from time to time it was as good a place to live as anywhere in the world. It was based neither on complacency nor on any sense of compensating for inferiority, but, as true self-confidence always is, on a desire to learn of outside things accompanied by a contentment within one’s own skin. That is the dominant impression that I retain of Hillhead and of Glasgow as a whole.
So I have no hesitation about putting Glasgow amongst the great cities of the world, and far higher than population alone would entitle it to be. I do so upon grounds of site, metropolitan atmosphere, industrial history, visual impact, educational and cultural resources, and the self-confidence of its inhabitants, powerfully expressed in the architecture of its industrial heyday a hundred years ago, almost equally well exemplified by the City Chambers, the Kelvingrove Gallery and the Central Hotel, the self-confidence always there if sometimes as nearly hidden as the River Kelvin is within its gorges, but strongly resurfacing within the last decade.
The renaissance of Glasgow has become a byword. The English city most like Glasgow is Liverpool, by virtue of its geography, the composition of its population, the historic nature of its trade, the eminence of its pre-1914 position (’Liverpool gentlemen and Manchester men’ was the catchphrase) and the grandeur of its Victorian public buildings. The trough into which it descended was deeper than anything that has ever beset Glasgow. But when I went there two weeks ago I was struck by the fact that it seemed to have experienced an upturn in the past year or so. And the suggestion that aroused the greatest enthusiasm was that they might be following in Glasgow’s path. At a time when cities as big as Calcutta, as rich as Cleveland, as beautiful as Florence, decline more easily than they revive, Glasgow’s experience of the 1980s, admittedly building on a very good base, but after a period of foolish disregard, may stand out as the epitome of recovery through quality and effort.
High Victorian Trollope
An introduction to The Duke’s Children
The Last of the six political novels and the penultimate book of Trollope’s life, The Duke’s Children is a classical and perfectly matured example of his style and method. It is the apotheosis of his chronicles of the unending and fluctuating war between love and property. Although this is a campaign unmitigated by any hope of complete victory for either side, it is in general one in which, under Trollope’s guidance, the strictest rules of civilized warfare apply.
There is no place for methods of barbarism in Trollope. And this is particularly true of The Duke’s Children. The commanders on both sides are of the highest possible rank, Napoleon and Wellington, as it were, and do everything at the right time, in a predictable way, which leads to a satisfactory conclusion after eighty chapters of easy-flowing narrative that are also a compendious and reliable guide to the high Whig world (with a few Tories allowed in) of 125 years ago.
‘The Duke’, who combines an almost sacerdotal respect for aristocracy with firm attachment to moderate Liberalism, and great wealth with distaste for self-indulgence, is of course our old friend Plantagenet Palliser, who a million words and twenty years after grappling with decimal currency and marrying Lady Glencora MacCluskie, is Duke of Omnium and a former Prime Minister of a brief-lived coalition government. On the first page of this book Trollope kills off Duchess Glencora, a little cursorily considering how much spirit she had infused into the earlier political novels. I think his motive was probably the same as that which makes many writers of detective stories kill the corpse before the reader has a chance of identifying with it. Trollope, who always operated on tight emotional rations, wished to get on as quickly as possible to the Duke’s problem of being left with three more-or-less grown-up children, for dealing with whom his combination of gruff affection and stubborn censoriousness was peculiarly inappropriate, without diverting the reader’s sympathy on to a character who was inessential to this story.
The three were the twenty-two-year-old Earl of Silverbridge, the nineteen-year-old Lady Mary Palliser and the eighteen-year-old Lord Gerald Palliser. The third never presumes to attract more of the reader’s attention than is appropriate to a younger son, and confines himself to a few horse-racing and card-playing scrapes which are suitable to anyone called Lord Gerald and sufficient to get him sent down from Trinity College, Cambridge. The story centres around the other two and their inappropriate if wholly uxoriously directed amours.
Lady Mary falls determinedly in love with another younger son who is more presumptuous than her brother Gerald, particularly as he is the younger son not of a Whig duke but of a Cornish Tory squire, and who is adequately in love with her. Frank Tregear is a little two-dimensional but he is neither an upstart nor an adventurer, unlike Burgo Fitzgerald who in the dim and distant past had excited the emotions, but not, fortunately, the matrimonial determination, of Lady Glencora MacCluskie. He is indisputably if almost too resolutely a gentleman, the closest friend of Lord Silverbridge (which is considered in no way inappropriate), with whom he was at Eton and Christ Church. His family is said to be more ancient than the Pallisers, but he is not considered by the Duke, nor indeed by Silverbridge, who is devoted to him in every other way, to have sufficient substance to aspire to the hand of Lady Mary. This is despite the fact that the one thing Lady Mary does not need is substance, for the Duke, who has far more money than he thinks it decent to spend on himself or than is good for Silverbridge and Gerald, could provide for them many times over.
This provokes some fine animadversions on gentlemanliness and who is and who is not appropriate to marry a duke’s daughter:
‘He is a gentleman, papa.’
‘So is my private secretary. There is not a clerk in one of our public offices who does not consider himself to be a gentleman. The curate of the parish is a gentleman, and the medical man who comes here from Bradstock. The word is too vague to carry with it any meaning that ought to be serviceable to you in thinking of such a matter.’
‘I do not know any other way of dividing people,’ said she …
Tregear then somewhat improves his position in the Duke’s eyes by becoming a Member of Parliament, even if as a Tory, a party which the Duke, rather ahead of his time in this respect, regarded as socially as well as ideologically inferior. This, it might have been thought, would make Tregear’s financial position more not less precarious, but this was never the core of the objection, and is more than compensated for by an increase of status and by the fact that it gives him some claim to have an occupation even if not a profession (although what profession would the Duke have wished him to follow?). More important than Tregear’s advancement, however, is the Duke’s softening under the unrelenting determination of Lady Mary, accompanied by the unanimous advice of all the duennas in sight that the alternative to allowing her to marry Tregear is to see her grow into a sour old maid.
Meanwhile, Silverbridge’s affairs, assisted by his much greater f
reedom than that of his sister (‘How I do wish I were a man,’ she said to him in his private hansom cab, ‘… I’d have a hansom of my own and go where I pleased’), developed in a more complicated way. He too was an MP for the wrong party although for the right place, the borough of Silverbridge (everything is almost too perfectly matched in The Duke’s Children). He entered into a racing partnership with Major Tifto which led to his losing £70,000 on the St Leger, which was a lot of Victorian money even for the Omnium estates. (It was in fact exactly the sum which Trollope earned from his forty-seven novels.) He moved from one girl to another. The first was Lady Mabel Grex, the daughter of a Tory earl of impeccable lineage, strained resources and mildly reprobate tastes, who was just respectable enough to have acquired a Garter. Lady Mab was pretty (in a way that sounded healthy rather than romantic), pert, self-confident, and to begin with a good sort, thoroughly prepared to marry Silverbridge, although in love not with him but with her cousin, the ubiquitous although self-controlled heart-throb Tregear. In addition she was thoroughly acceptable to the Duke.
She made the mistake of treating Silverbridge as though he were an immature boy, which he was. But that may well have made no difference, for he soon met the American Isabel Boncassen, whom Trollope comes very near to describing as the greatest beauty in the world. She was certainly a real girl of the golden west, or at least as far west as Fifth Avenue. She was on a long visit to Europe with her parents and seemed quite disposed to see it extended into permanence by a grand English marriage. The 1870s were the early days of the infusion of American blood and money into the upper ranks of the peerage, and Trollope was very à la mode in making this a central feature of the last of his political novels. In the earlier ones, around a decade earlier, ‘foreigners’ were more typically represented by Madam Max Goesler, the lady of Austrian property who became Mrs Phineas Finn, or Ferdinand Lopez, the dago adventurer who ended by throwing himself under a train at Willesden Junction.
