Glasgow (21 page)

NOT EVEN A SCOTTISH SLUM, 1934
Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell (1901–35), ‘my distant cousin'. The son of a farmer, he was born in Aberdeenshire. He worked as a journalist with the
Scottish Farmer.
When he lost his job he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in the Middle East and elsewhere. From 1928 until his premature death he wrote as one possessed: biography, history, travelogue, polemic, criticism and fiction. In 1932, he published
Sunset Song,
the first part of the trilogy
, A Scots Quair.
A friend of Hugh MacDiarmid, he collaborated with him on
Scottish Scene
(1934) from which the following extract is taken
.

Glasgow is one of the few places in Scotland which defy personification. To imagine Edinburgh as a disappointed spinster, with a hare-lip and inhibitions, is at least to approximate as closely to the truth as to imagine the Prime Mover as a Levantine Semite. So with Dundee, a frowsy fisher-wife addicted to gin and infanticide, Aberdeen a thin-lipped peasant-woman who has borne eleven and buried nine. But no Scottish image of personification may display, even distortedly, the essential Glasgow. One might even go further afield, to the tortured imaginings of the Asiatic mind, to find her likeness – many-armed Siva with the waistlet of skulls, of Xipe of Ancient America, whose priest skinned the victim alive, and then clad himself in the victim's skull . . . But one doubts anthropomorphic representation at all. The monster of Loch Ness is probably the lost soul of Glasgow, in scale and horns, disporting itself in the Highlands after evacuating finally and completely its mother corpse.

One cannot blame it. My distant cousin, Mr. Leslie Mitchell, once described Glasgow in one of his novels as ‘the vomit of a cataleptic commercialism'. But it is more than that. It may be a corpse, but the maggot-swarm upon it is fiercely alive. One cannot watch and hear the long beat of traffic down Sauchiehall, or see it eddy and spume where St. Vincent Street and Renfield Street cross, without realising what excellent grounds the old-fashioned anthropologist appeared to have for believing that man was by nature a brutish savage, a herd-beast delighting in vocal discordance and orgiastic aural abandon.

Loch Lomond lies quite near to Glasgow. Nice Glaswegians motor out there and admire the scenery and calculate its horse-power and drink whisky and chaff one another in genteelly Anglicised Glaswegianisms. After a hasty look at Glasgow the investigator
would do well to disguise himself as one of like kind, drive down to Loch Lomondside and stare across its waters at the sailing clouds that crown the Ben, at the flooding of colours changing and darkling and miraculously lighting up and down those misty slopes, where night comes over long mountain leagues that know only of the startled pheasants, silences so deep you can hear the moon come up, mornings so greyly coloured they seem stolen from Norse myth. This is the proper land and stance from which to look at Glasgow, to divest oneself of horror or shame or admiration or – very real – fear, and ask: Why? Why did men ever ally themselves to become enslaved to a thing so obscene and so foul when there was
this
awaiting them here – hills and the splendours of freedom and silence, the clean splendours of hunger and woe and dread in the winds and rains and famine-times of the earth, hunting and love and the call of the moon? Nothing endured by the primitives who once roamed those hills – nothing of woe or terror – approximated in degree or kind to that life that festers in the courts and wynds and alleys of Camlachie, Govan, the Gorbals.

In Glasgow there are over a hundred and fifty thousand human beings living in conditions as the most bitterly pressed primitive in Tierra del Fuego never visioned. They live five or six to the single room . . . And this requires a mental jerk to realise the quality of that room. It is not a room in a large and airy building; it is not a single-roomed hut on the verge of a hill; it is not a cave driven into free rock, in the sound of the sea-birds, as that old Azilian cave in Argyll: it is a room that is part of some great sloven of tenement – the tenement itself in a line or grouping with hundreds of its fellows, its windows grimed with the unceasing wash and drift of coal-dust, its stairs narrow and befouled and steep, its evening breath like that which might issue from the mouth of a lung-diseased beast. The hundred and fifty thousand eat and sleep and copulate and conceive and crawl into childhood in waste jungles of stench and disease and hopelessness, sub-humans as definitely as the Morlocks of Wells – and without even the consolation of feeding on their oppressors' flesh.

A hundred and fifty thousand . . . and all very like you or me or my investigator sitting appalled on the banks of Loch Lomond (where he and his true love will never meet again). And they live on food of the quality of offal, ill-cooked, ill-eaten with speedily-diseased teeth for the tending of which they can afford no fees; they work – if they have work – in factories or foundries or the roaring reek of the Docks toilsome and dreary and unimaginative hours – hour on hour, day on day, frittering away tissues of their bodies and the spirit-stuff of their souls; they are
workless – great numbers of them – doomed to long days of staring vacuity, of shoelessness, of shivering hidings in this and that mean runway where the landlords' agents come, of mean and desperate beggings at Labour Exchanges and Public Assistance Committees; their voices are the voices of men and women robbed of manhood and womanhood . . .

It is coming on dark, as they say in the Scotland that is not Glasgow. And out of the beast of the Gorbals arises that foul breath as of a dying beast.

You turn from Glasgow Green with a determination to inspect this Gorbals on your own. It is incredibly un-Scottish. It is lovably and abominably and hideously un-Scottish. It is not even a Scottish slum. Stout men in beards and ringlets and unseemly attire lounge and strut with pointed shoes: Ruth and Naomi go by with downcast Eastern faces, the Lascar rubs shoulder with the Syrian, Harry Lauder is a Baal unkeened to the midnight stars. In the air the stench is of a different quality to Govan's or Camlachie's – a better quality. It is haunted by an ancient ghost of goodness and grossness, sun-warmed and ripened under alien suns. It is the most saving slum in Glasgow, and the most abandoned. Emerging from it, the investigator suddenly realises why he sought it in such haste from Glasgow Green: it was in order that he might assure himself there were really and actually other races on the earth apart from Scots!

YOU SAY ‘POLIS'; I SAY ‘POLICE', 1934
Educational Institute of Scotland

It has long been said that Scottish children speak two languages, one in the playground, the other in the classroom, which this report on ‘Glasgow Speech' by one of Scotland's teaching unions seems to confirm
.

In most cases Glasgow pupils enter the schools with one language only, the Central Scottish Dialect, and they proceed to learn to write Standard English. As the result of education the vernacular is gradually eliminated from written work, but it persists in colloquial use.

The Central Scottish Dialect is the medium of expression naturally employed by the Glasgow child who may interrogate the teacher during a Dictation lesson with such a question as, ‘Whit cums efter, “after”?' In the playground children who try to speak Standard English are generally laughed at, whilst in the class-room a lapse into the mother-tongue
is greeted with hilarity. Thus, the boy who during the dinner-interval maliciously created a stampede of his classmates by the cry of ‘Polis', that same afternoon cause much amusement in the school-room by reading, ‘Sir Robert Peel founded the
Polis
Force'.

NAMING THE YARDS, 1935
George Blake

The Clyde and shipbuilding are umbilically linked. The latter dates to the introduction of steam-powered ship propulsion at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the deepening of the river made it possible for ocean-going ships to reach right into the heart of the city. There followed an impressive stream of technical innovations. New materials – iron, then steel – were greedily embraced and major engineering improvements, yielding greater speed and significant fuel economies, were introduced. By 1900 the Clyde had secured pole position in world shipbuilding, producing about half a million tons of shipping annually, approximately a third of world output, occasionally exceeding the combined German and US totals. After the First World War, however, decline was slow but inevitable and by the time George Blake (1893–1961) published his novel
, The Shipbuilders,
in 1935 yard closures, unemployment and empty order books were increasingly the norm and the end of launches of great ships like the
Estramadura
was nigh
.

It was in a sense a procession that he witnessed, the high tragic pageant of the Clyde. Yard after yard passed by, the berths empty, grass growing about the sinking keel-blocks. He remembered how, in the brave days, there would be scores of ships ready for the launching along this reach, their sterns hanging over the tide, and how the men at work on them on high-stagings would turn from the job and tug off their caps and cheer the new ship setting out to sea. And now only the giant dumb poles and groups of men workless, watching in silence the mocking-passage of the vessel. It was bitter to know that they knew – that almost every man among them was an artist in one of the arts that go to the building of a ship; that every feature of the
Estramadura
would come under an expert and loving scrutiny, that her passing would remind them of the joy of work, and tell them how many of them would never work again. It appalled Leslie Pagan that not a cheer came from those watching groups.

It was a tragedy beyond economics. It was not that so many homes
lacked bread and butter. It was that a tradition, a skill, a glory, a passion, was visibly in decay, and all the acquired and inherited loveliness of artistry rotting along the banks of the stream.

Into himself he counted and named the yards they passed. The number and variety stirred him to wonder, now that he had ceased to take them for granted. His mental eye moving backwards up the river, he saw the historic place of Govan, Henderson's of Meadowside at the mouth of the Kelvin, and the long stretch of Fairfield on the southern bank opposite. There came Stephen's of Linthouse next, and Clydeholm facing it across the narrow yellow ditch of the ship-channel. From thence down river the range along the northern bank was almost continuous for miles – Connell, Inglis, Blythswood and the rest: so many that he could hardly remember their order. He was distracted for a moment to professionalism by the lean grey forms of destroyers building for a foreign power in the sheds of a yard that had dramatically deserted Thames for Clyde. Then he lost himself again in the grim majesty of the parade. There came John Brown's, stretching along half a mile of waterfront at Clydebank, the monstrous red hull of Number 534 looming in its abandonment like a monument to the glory departed; as if shipbuilding man had tried to do too much and been defeated by the mightiness of his own conception. Then came, seeming to point the moral, the vast desolation of Beardmore's at Dalmuir, cradle of the mightiest battleships and now a scrap-heap, empty and silent forever, the great gantry over the basin proclaiming stagnation and an end.