Glasgow (2 page)

In the second part of Spence's book, however, adult life intrudes and the innocence and unquestioning of youth gives way to aspects of ‘adult' life – an Orange walk, a wedding, violence at a dance-hall, an old woman living alone in a tower block, an old man who seeks refuge and warmth in the Kibble Palace. In the story that gives the collection its title, the main character, Billy, is preparing for ‘the Walk', which is always held on the Saturday nearest the 12th of July, the anniversary of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, which was won by William of Orange, aka King Billy. Spence writes,

This is what Billy might call a celebration of tradition, a remembrance of a glorious past, keeping a flame alive. For others though, the Orange Parades, with their flute bands, Lambeg drums and banners, are provocative and intimidating, evidence of an aspect of Glasgow life they would rather was swept away. What cannot be denied, however, is that without them Glasgow would be a little less, well, Glaswegian. Of all the cities I have visited, none is as immediately characterful as Glasgow, as sure of itself, and at one with itself. You can be standing in a supermarket queue and chances are the person behind you will comment on the contents of your basket. In a pub, it is by no means unusual for a total stranger to offer to buy you a drink. This happened to me not so long ago and when I politely declined, my would-be benefactor asked ‘Whit's wrang wi' yi?', in the tone of an aggressive doctor attempting to get to the bottom of a nasty stomach bug. In an
attempt to divert the conversation, I said that I was from Edinburgh. ‘That explains everythin',' said the stranger, turning his attention elsewhere. On another occasion, early in my acquaintance with Glasgow, I was in the Horseshoe Bar in Drury Street in whose Gents I was approached by a man in a flat cap who, apropos nothing in particular, asked if I knew how many wonders in the world there are. I hazarded seven and started to list them. I got as far the Hanging Gardens of Babylon when I was imperiously interrupted. ‘Naw,' said Mr Flat Cap contemptuously, ‘there's eight.' ‘Really. What's the eighth?' I asked. ‘That's for me to know and you to find out,' he said with a wink, and was gone before I could quiz him further.

Such encounters added to the frisson whenever I visited Glasgow, which I did more often after I started writing for the
Herald
. Back then, it was based in Albion Street, in the heart of the Merchant City. The HQ was a brutalist block which, in an earlier era, had housed the
Scottish Daily Express
, which in its pomp, so legend had it, was able in pursuit of a hot story to put more planes in the air than the Luftwaffe. On the ground level was the no-frills Press Bar. Once I was bidden there by my editor, a fellow who was so tall that when he stood next to me I couldn't see where he stopped. As we got down to business one of the worse-for-wear regulars inveigled himself into our colloquy and was decked for his impertinence. The editor carried on talking as if nothing untoward had happened. When I pointed out that there was a barely conscious fellow lying on the floor he said, ‘He shouldn't have interrupted me when I was talking.' In the toilet there was another regular who appeared to have passed out mid-micturition. Concerned for his wellbeing I informed a barman who gave me a ‘what am I supposed to do about it' shrug and continued polishing a glass. Throughout the afternoon people came and went as their duties demanded. A fêted contributor studied his watch, drained his nip, donned his fedora and breezed out the door. Apparently, he had a column to write. Less than an hour later he reappeared, having met his deadline, and resumed where he had left off.

In those days, as we entered the 1980s, Glasgow was a byword for decline. Many of the industries from which its grandeur had sprung were on their uppers and there was a feeling that its future was bleak. It was in a dark, dank, menacing place which the rain, which seemed to start as soon as you reached Harthill, midpoint on the M8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow, did nothing to temper. The news was full of strikes and closures, empty order books and unemployment. The Clyde, which had been as noisy as a nursery, fell quiet as one yard after another shut its gates. The Tories, led by Margaret Thatcher, were in power and impervious to the protests of left-leaning Scots. (Consequently, when Thatcher
died in 2013 some Glaswegians regretted no statue had been erected to her so that they could tear it down, while others held street parties.) In 1981 I attended the launch for a novel at the Third Eye Centre – the predecessor of the Centre for Contemporary Arts – in Sauchiehall Street. The novel was
Lanark
by Alasdair Gray. In hindsight, it was one of those rare moments when a work of art is the agent for change. Ten years and more in the writing, it marked Gray's debut. Part of
Lanark
is autobiographical, following its author's upbringing in the 1930s and 1940s initially in a tenement in Bridgeton then in Riddrie, part of the first tier of what's known as the three-tiered Addison Act. Unlike the two tiers that were to follow it, people were not piled on top of one another but were placed in low-density, semi-detached houses with gardens.

Duncan Thaw, Gray's hero, progresses through school to art college, where he encounters a fellow student called Kenneth McAlpin, who has a moustache – a sure sign of social superiority – and lives in Bearsden, which is as alien to Duncan as Marseilles. On a morning ramble he and McAlpin venture into Cowcaddens to do some drawing. At the top of a hill they look across the city.

What follows is an impassioned analysis of why Glasgow is not comparable to great cultural centres such as Florence, Paris, London and New York, to all of which strangers can relate because they've ‘already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films'. In contrast, Glasgow is by and large invisible, existing only as a music-hall song – presumably the drunks' anthem, ‘I belong to Glasgow' – and a few bad novels, one of which is doubtless
No Mean City
. ‘What is Glasgow to most of us?' asks Thaw/Gray. ‘A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That's all. No, I'm wrong, there's also the cinema and library.'

The period in which this scene is set is the mid-1950s, when Glasgow was undoubtedly in the doldrums and suffering from what looked like terminal decay. What used to be the place which made anything that was required to carry you from cradle to grave was so no longer, as cheap goods from the Far East saturated the market and caused local
companies to bring down the shutters. Thaw's mission, and that of Gray, his creator, is through paint and print ‘to give Glasgow a more imaginative life'. The irony was that when
Lanark
appeared many of the sentiments expressed in its pages were interpreted as a comment on the city as it stood at that moment. And to a degree that was understandable. Glasgow had yet to export a positive identity; it was still mired in many observers' minds in a macho past where brawn triumphed over brain. It was of course a highly misleading image, but it persisted and proved remarkably durable. Tourists were few and many of those who did come arrived with their prejudices as part of their luggage.

One welcome counterpoint to the prevailing view was offered in 1983 by the acerbic American novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, whom few tourist boards would adopt as a copywriter. Ostensibly following Britain's coastline, he alighted in Glasgow after sojourning in Troubles-torn Belfast, an experience he was relieved to put behind him. In contrast, Theroux, much to his surprise, found Glasgow ‘peaceful, even pretty'. ‘The slums were gone, the buildings washed of their soot; the city looked dignified – no barricades, no scorchings. Well, I had just struggled ashore from that island of antiquated passions.' Coincidentally, 1983 proved to be an
annus mirabilis
for the city, for it was in that year that the ‘Glasgow's Miles Better' campaign was launched. Inspired by ‘I ♥ New York', dreamed up six years earlier to encourage tourists to visit the Big Apple, which had become a muggers' playground, it was initially greeted with scepticism by many wags who asked, ‘Miles better than what?' What Glasgow has never lacked, however, are people to hymn it and the slights and criticisms were brushed off with the contempt a heifer shows to ticks. The slogan soon entered the bloodstream and there was a discernible improvement in the mood of the natives and a measurable influx of visitors keen to see what all the fuss was about.

High on the list of the attractions they wanted to visit was the Burrell Collection, which opened the same year. It had been amassed by Sir William Burrell, scion of a family whose business was in shipping. When his father, also named William, died, William Junior and his brother George took over. Through astute buying and selling of their merchant fleets, the brothers amassed considerable fortunes. When in 1916 they finally disposed of their assets, Sir William was able to devote himself to building up his art collection, filling his Berwickshire castle with an extraordinary collection of paintings, sculptures, ceramics, carpets, tapestries, glassware, needlework and artefacts from around the globe. In the 1930s, he decided that he would like it all to be housed under one roof held in public ownership. It is said that he first offered it to the Tate Gallery, London, but it spurned the opportunity for lack of space. In 1944, Burrell handed it over to Glasgow.
But worried about the damaging effects of the former Dear Green Place's polluted air on his precious objects he quixotically stipulated that it must be housed on a site not less than sixteen miles from Wellington's statue – the one invariably decorated with a traffic cone – in Royal Exchange Square, and not more than four miles from Killearn, Stirlingshire. In 1963, five years after their benefactor's death, the Burrell trustees agreed to allow the collection to be housed in a building within the Pollok estate, a mere three miles south of the city centre. An international competition was announced to find architects to design a building specifically to contain Burrell's gallimaufry. It was finally opened by the Queen in 1983 to a thunderclap of applause.

The Burrell was a signal that Glasgow was emerging from its begrimed past. Another was the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988. The words ‘garden' and ‘Glasgow', like ‘cuisine' and ‘Mexico', had rarely been spied in the same sentence. Yet again this was a travesty of the truth, for where else is called the Dear Green Place? Indeed, Glasgow has what might be termed an embarrassment of parks and gardens, including Kelvingrove Park, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hosted three major exhibitions, and the Botanic Gardens, among whose treasures is a fine collection of exotic orchids. The Garden Festival, however, was located not in a park but on a 100-acre site in what had been Prince's Dock on the south bank of the Clyde. Nearly four and a half million people attended its attractions. Two years thereafter came Glasgow's reign as European City of Culture, the third such place, after Athens and Florence no less, to hold that title. Even ten years earlier that would have been –
pace
Gray's
Lanark
– unthinkable and to many observers, especially residents of Edinburgh, the ‘Festival City', it still was. Though some criticised the organisers for paying too little attention to Glasgow's indigenous art and artists, there is no doubt that its tenure as City of Culture raised its profile and radically altered attitudes towards it. ‘Glasgow used to be perceived as a violent post-industrial city and now it is celebrated as a creative and cultural centre of European importance,' was the judgement of Robert Palmer, who orchestrated the year-long programme of events. His assertion is borne out by many studies which have all shown that Glasgow 1990 had a dramatic impact in building city confidence. Moreover, had it not happened it is unlikely that the 2014 Commonwealth Games would have been given to Glasgow.

But the resilience of an unsavoury image – however misrepresentative – ought not to be underestimated. Nor is there any point in drawing curtains on a past that was undoubtedly grim. Countless impoverished Glaswegians lived in squalid, overcrowded, insanitary conditions and were as a consequence thrust into behaviour which we now deem
antisocial. Infant mortality rates were on a par with those in the Third World and any men who reached three score and ten years, as the psalmist insisted was the norm, must have been fitness fanatics or have led very careful and prosperous lives. Districts like the Gorbals and Townhead were barely fit for human habitation and those who had the wherewithal escaped as fast as they could.

One such was Ralph Glasser. The son of immigrant Jews from Russia, Glasser grew up in the Gorbals between the wars. After years of night study, he won a scholarship to Oxford, to take up which he had to cycle hundreds of miles. When I met him many years later, he looked what he was: an eminent scholar and author, a psychologist and an economist. But as he spoke I could tell by his accent immediately where he came from. In his book
Growing Up in the Gorbals
, an unvarnished account of his childhood first published in 1986, Glasser relates how he left school when he was about eleven to work in a garment factory. His ‘only true home' was the Mitchell Library, which allowed him to read the gamut of literature or philosophy and to dream of a brighter future. Yet as his career developed, and as he travelled around the world, he knew that while he might have ‘escaped' the Gorbals and Glasgow, he was not free of them, and never would be. As a young man he was desperate to leave but as he grew older he began to appreciate the ‘presiding genius' of his birthplace and that to have thought of it as a ‘malign influence' was wrong.