Glasgow (20 page)

‘I BELONG TO GLASGOW', 1927
Will Fyffe

The nearest thing the city has to its own anthem, ‘I Belong to Glasgow' was the signature song of the hugely popular music-hall entertainer Will Fyffe. Fyffe always insisted he got the inspiration for it after he
encountered a drunk at Glasgow Central Station. Apparently, the drunk was ‘genial and demonstrative', as such characters often are, and ‘laying off about Karl Marx and John Barleycorn with equal enthusiasm', which may not be quite as common. Engaging him in conversation, Fyffe asked him: ‘Do you belong to Glasgow?', to which the fellow replied: ‘At the moment, Glasgow belongs to me.' Thus was born the song which is still often heard in the wee small hours in the environs of Central Station and elsewhere. Fyffe, who was born in Dundee in 1885, died in 1947 and is buried in Glasgow
.

SPRINGBURN SINNERS,
c
. 1929
Molly Weir

Molly Weir (1910–2004) was for a spell a ubiquitous presence on television. Perky, petite and pretty, she exuded energy. Born in Springburn, she got into acting through amateur dramatics. She is perhaps best remembered for her role as Hazel the McWitch in the BBC series
Rentaghost
(1977–84). During the 1970s and 1980s she became famous for a series of rose-tinted memoirs, including
Shoes Were for Sunday
(1970) and
Best Foot Forward
(1972). She was the sister of stravaiger and broadcaster, Tom Weir (1914–2006), who was rarely seen without his bobble hat
.

As well as the big Church, where we went to Sunday School, and Bible Class, and had our church parades of Girl Guides and the Boys' Brigade, we had the excitement of tent missions coming to Springburn to convert us. We didn't know we were being converted from heathenish ways, we just enjoyed the sight of a huge tent being erected on the piece of waste ground at the end of Gourlay Street, and we begged to be allowed to help to hand out the little leaflets telling all that Jock Troup would be preaching and saving souls that night and all week from 7.30 p.m. As soon as our tea was swallowed, we raced back to get front seats, and the adults crowded in at our backs, greatly entranced to be having hell-fire preached at them inside a tent. Jock was great value, and we all imitated him afterwards, not in any spirit of derision, but in profound admiration. He could make the flames of hell so real, we felt them licking round our feet, and the prospect of heaven so alluring we often stood up to be saved several times during the week, just to see him fall on his knees in thankfulness at having plucked so many brands from the burning. His hymns were different from those in Sunday School and had a sort of music-hall ring to them which we all enjoyed.

One obviously designed to appeal to our Scottish sense of economy went:

We particularly liked ‘Springburn' coming into the hymn, not realising that he just substituted whatever district he happened to be visiting, and we felt he had composed this hymn specially for Springburn sinners.

A CRATE OF APPLES, 1930
Maurice Lindsay

Maurice Lindsay (1918–2009) was the author of more than fifty books. He was also a broadcaster – he presented the first Scottish arts television programme
, Counterpoint
– a poet of note, and Director of the Scottish Civic Trust. Born in Glasgow in a private nursing home, his family was well-to-do; his father was the Scottish manager of a UK insurance company while his mother was ‘a gentle creature'. In
Thank You For Having Me
(1983), he painted a vivid and affectionate portrait of middle-class Glasgow life in the 1920s and 1930s, when the city was ‘already sinking into decline, but somehow mustering enough self-confidence, in what was perhaps by then already non-achievement, still to think of itself as “great”!'

With the family growing up a bigger house was needed. In 1930 we moved to 32 Athole Gardens, an enclosed, hilly U-shaped crescent built in the high Victorian manner of the 1870s round a private fenced common central garden containing a grass tennis court. Early in the summer the pink flambeaux of a horse chestnut tree illuminated the front of our house, its flares of light reflecting on the window-panes. From my high-up back bedroom window, I could see across the roofs-cape at the back of the house a horizon distantly fretted by shipyard cranes.

Although by the early thirties the City's grey and red sandstone buildings had long been darkened by coal-fired industrial and domestic smoke and the dense yellow fogs that licked them every winter, the decay and dilapidation of the post-Second-World-War years had not yet set in. For one thing, the city's wide range of decorated nineteenth-century railings still stood intact. The hasty tearing-down of those practical fringes of Victorian fancy on the orders of Lord Beaverbrook during the 1939 war to be recycled for purposes for which they proved totally unsuitable and could not be used, freely admitted blowing street rubbish and a creeping decline the railings had held trimly at bay. There was no awareness of any concept of conservation in those days, though most of the new buildings put up in the decade before the 1939 war still spoke with a modified version of the Victorian amalgam of earlier styles.

It was not just the buildings in our district that gave it a sense of entity. There was still a sense of community about Hillhead. The Byres Road shopkeepers knew us all by name, and we them. There was Wilkie, the grocer, who sent round a crate of apples at Christmas
in appreciation of our custom; the thirties equivalent, I suppose, of such later devices as selling loss-leaders or giving away trading stamps. The three – or was it four? – Misses Horn kept the dairy, with the cow at one time in a byre behind the shop, though I cannot recall this. They had hands as blue as the Dutch wall-tiles of their shop, due, I used to think, to so much scrubbing, though their hands were not as raw as those of the daughter of Andrews, the fishmonger, whose fingers were forever lifting moist fillets off chipped block ice. Comfortably rounded Mr and Mrs Todd, the fruiters, added their contribution to the Christmas scene with a gift of tangerines to all their ‘regulars'. Tully, the ironmonger, and Bell of the toyshop featured less prominently, being on the more occasionally visited periphery of my childish world of things. Most exotic of all was Henderson's stable, from which issued forth the musty-smelling horse-drawn cabs that conveyed us to children's parties. The cabs had faded yellowish-green seats and were driven by cabbies wearing greenish bowler hats. They stood slapping their arms and blowing in their glove-ends to keep warm which they waited for their winter ‘fares' to materialise from the streets. In time, those cabs gave place to cumbersome-looking limousines which used the same shelter. Cabs and limousines have long since gone, their base now an Underground station.

My mother devoted much time to the ordering of household chores. Our cooks and our parlour-maids usually came from the Highlands, and, like most domestics in these days, spoke Gaelic. To hear them talk in a language incomprehensible to me was my first experience of the Scottish dichotomy. That a dichotomy existed even in the smaller world of the Gael became apparent when frequently they would argue in English, oblivious of my presence, about the meaning or correct pronunciation of a Gaelic word as spoken in Skye, rather than as it was pronounced in Stornoway. From time to time my mother wrote out a daily chart of duties for each of the domestics. For the parlour-maid it went like: Mondays, clean the dining-room silver and polish the glasses; Tuesday, tidy out the kitchen and pantry cupboards; Wednesday, brush and dust the dining-room and parlour; Thursday, brush and dust the drawing-room, the hall stairs and hall landings – and so on. Cook was supplied with the week's menus and instructions on the economics of house-keeping.

There was, of course, in reality a succession of cooks and parlour-maids who came and went for reasons usually unclear to us children. Usually there were mysterious allies, denizens of female warmth in their shining kitchens, where the fire in the cooking-range made the
copper jellypans on the shelves of the dresser glint and glimmer; allies surreptitiously chatable-to when the regime of the nursery occasionally slackened. One Lowland cook of exceptional plainness, for whom Gaelic was simply ‘a wheen o' blethers', ended unfinished every promising confabulation by relaxing her bulk and her perennial problem into the depth of a chair, gasping: ‘Goad! If only ah could get a man!'

A RAZOR ATTACK ON MOSLEY, 1931
Harold Nicolson

In the 1930s Glasgow, like other beleaguered cities in the UK, was not immune to the appeal of fascism but there were always those prepared to oppose it, sometimes violently. Harold Nicolson (1886–1968), who is today best known for his voluminous diaries, was married to poet, novelist and gardener Vita Sackville-West. Well-connected and socially (and sexually) gregarious, he inhabited many milieux and enjoyed all of them. In 1931 he was a supporter of Sir Oswald (‘Tom') Mosley's New Party and the unsuitable editor of its journal
, Action.
By 1932, however, he had distanced himself from the Mosleyites, writing: ‘The difficulty with the New Party is that it is no longer new and no longer a party . . . Now I feel that the New Party as such has become too much identified with Hitlerism
.'

The papers are full of a razor attack made on Tom at Glasgow. On getting to the office I find Peter [Howard, international rugby player, journalist and New Party candidate] back from there. He tells me that the meeting was rather a success. 20,000 people. The speech was got across all right by loud-speakers. During the meeting a note was passed up: ‘Be careful when you go – the Reds have got their razors.' When all the questions had been asked and answered, Tom faced the crowd: called out, ‘now, boys': stepped from the platform and advanced towards the little group of communists who had created the disturbance. They turned and fled. Tom passed through the crowd. The communists formed behind and attacked them from the rear. A stone was thrown and hit Tom lightly on the head. A man attacked him with a life-preserver but was seized in time. Peter Howard was thrown and rose to knock a man down. They escaped to their cars.