A Glasgow Mosaic

IAN R MITCHELL was born in Aberdeen, spending his first 25 years in Torry and Kincorth. He graduated in History from Aberdeen University in 1973, following a couple of years working as a paper mill labourer and engineering machinist, and subsequently moved to Glasgow. Ian taught History at Clydebank College for over twenty years and whilst there wrote a standard textbook on Bismarck and the Development of Germany. He has written several books on mountaineering including the classic Mountain Days & Bothy Nights (1987), and A View from the Ridge (1991) (both co-authored with Dave Brown), the latter of which won the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. More recently he has developed an interest in urban heritage and walking, and the recent fruits of this were This City Now: Glasgow and its Working Class Past (2005) and Clydeside: Red, Orange and Green (2009).

By the same Author

NON-FICTION

Mountain Days & Bothy Nights (1987) with Dave Brown

A View from the Ridge (1991, re-issued 2007) also with Dave Brown

Scotland’s Mountains before the Mountaineers (1998)

On the Trail of Queen Victoria in the Highlands (2001)

Walking through Scotland’s History (2000, re-issued 2007)

This City Now: Glasgow and its Working Class Past (2005)

Clydeside: Red, Orange and Green (2009)

Aberdeen Beyond the Granite (2010)

Prelude to Everest: Alexander Kellas, Himalayan Mountaineer (2011) with George W. Rodway

FICTION

Mountain Outlaw: Ewan MacPhee (2003)

Winter in Berlin, or The Mitropa Smile (2009)

A Glasgow Mosaic

Explorations Around the City’s Urban Icons

IAN R MITCHELL

Luath Press Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2013

eBook 2013

ISBN (print): 978-1-908373-66-3

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-909912-73-1

The publishers acknowledge the support of Creative Scotland towards the publication of this volume.

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Ian R Mitchell 2013

I would like to dedicate this book to Ann Laird of the Friends of Glasgow West, and to Hunter Reid of the Maryhill Burgh Halls Trust, two people who in their different ways have made a solid contribution to Glasgow’s Renaissance.

Contents

Pre-Amble

CHAPTER ONE Glasgow: Cinema City Reborn?

CHAPTER TWO The Fabulous Factories File

CHAPTER THREE Glasgow’s Square Mile of Science

CHAPTER FOUR A Measured Mile of Art

CHAPTER FIVE Artistic Representations of Labour in Glasgow

CHAPTER SIX Joan Eardley’s Townhead

CHAPTER SEVEN North Woodside: Iconography of a Forgotten Quarter

CHAPTER EIGHT The Maryhill Panels: Stephen Adam’s Stained Glass Workers

CHAPTER NINE The Rise and Fall of the Old Govan Club: 1914–39

CHAPTER TEN The Heart of Govan Beats Again

CHAPTER ELEVEN Alex Ferguson’s Govan

CHAPTER TWELVE Metal Memorials: The Socialist City Centre

CHAPTER THIRTEEN A Night at the Opry: an Evening Doon the Watter

Picture Section

Pre-Amble

THIS BOOK COMPLETES a trilogy of works begun in 2005 with This City Now: Glasgow and its Working Class Past, and continuing with Clydeside: Red Orange and Green, published in 2010. The three books have all had basically similar aims in trying to raise the profile of forgotten or neglected areas and aspects of Glasgow’s and wider Clydeside’s history – especially working class history – and thus in a small way to try and boost the esteem of the people who live in the locales covered, as well as to combat any possibly negative images held of these districts by outsiders. None of these books aim to be walking guidebooks, though to varying degrees in each chapter of each book there are enough directions and signposts for the reader to find his or her way around should they choose, as I hope they might, to leave their armchairs and exchange a virtual tour for the real thing. And neither are these essays meant to be, impossible anyway in the space given, full histories of these neglected districts. Rather, they represent my own personal encounters with the areas, enlivened and enriched, I hope, by my knowledge of the history they had undergone before I encountered them.

I have been wandering Glasgow’s streets for over 40 years. Initially the aim I had was to inform myself about the city in which I had come to live and to educate myself by finding my way about its uncharted territories. As the years passed I realised I was living through a time of great and irreversible change in the city, and was witnessing the ultimate stages of its de-industrialisation, with the attendant social and economic issues raised by that process. I began to record this transformation in notes and images for myself. Then, as the city began its renaissance as a City of Culture, and interest in its present and past increased, I thought it would be useful to write about Glasgow, about its history and about my own personal encounters with that history for any others who wished to actually go walkabout, on virtual or real journeys, off its beaten tracks and rat runs.

It was only later that I realised I was following a trodden path, and that there was a long tradition of urban walking stretching back to those who explored the London streets from the late 18th century onwards, writers such as Blake, De Quincey and Stevenson. As cities grew in size in the 19th century, they became unfamiliar wildernesses, peopled by dangerous tribes (the Parisian underclass were designated ‘Apaches’). The city became a new frontier, and, as the French poet Charles Baudelaire said, ‘what are the dangers of the forest and the prairie, compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilisation’. In Paris Spleen, Baudelaire imagined the urban wanderer as follows:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of the birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for a passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heat of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world…

Paris especially became the urban walker’s homeland, with such writers as André Breton and the exiled German thinker Walter Benjamin roaming its streets, the latter theorising in Reflections, about the meaning of the urban landscape:

Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal… But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. The signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks or bars, must speak to the wanderer like the cracking twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre. Paris taught me this art of straying.

Between them these quotations illustrate respectively the learning process undergone by the urban walker – who has to know where to look and what to look for – and the intense pleasure such an activity brings to the engaged and informed observer. And you can experience this learning, and this pleasure in any large city, not just London – or Paris.

Over the past decade or more there has been an explosion of writing and theorising about this phenomenon of urban walking which has emerged as the subject of a new academic discipline, taking on the name psychogeography – a phrase coined by the French writer Guy Debord half a century ago. There are writing careers and academic posts in psychogeography now. But in this process urban walking appears to me to have lost a little of its edge, and to have headed towards a certain narcissism. Many studies from this school of thought appear to indicate that their authors spent their time not actually on the streets, but in libraries and archives reading other psychogeographers past and present, and addressing their written productions not towards a wider audience, but towards these, their peers. The books produced are often more about what is going on inside the head of the observer than outside of it in the social streetscape.

In trying to avoid this pitfall, I am pleased that through the writing of these books I have come involved in giving talks to, and leading walks for, both local people and visitors, in many of the areas concerned. I have also been involved in a modest way in helping with various social, community and heritage projects in Maryhill, Govan and elsewhere in the city. More than with any other works I have written, these books of urban wanderings have made a modest connection with their audience in a practical and interactive way, which is deeply gratifying.

A century ago, Glasgow was one of the ten largest cities in Europe, the only non-capital city (apart from Naples) which had over 1,000,000 people. In keeping with this, it has built a legacy which the authoritative The Buildings of Scotland: Glasgow by Elizabeth Williamson, Anne Riches and Malcolm Higgs (2005), describes as follows:

A visitor with time to spare will find that the city centre is rich with remarkable buildings from the height of its industrial prosperity and that the grandest suburbs are planned on a scale comparable with many European capitals.

That much is now widely accepted, but the claim to greatness of the city goes further than its built heritage, encompassing as it does a much broader range of creative output. When we compare its contribution with that of other non-capital cities of a similar built size with regard to historical-cultural legacy, we can see that Glasgow has punched far above its relative weight. No city of comparable dimension has had a world impact of comparable measure, in economic, social and artistic terms, Looking at possible rivals, where is Glasgow’s peer? Birmingham? Lyon? Turin? Hamburg? Posing the question answers it.

Barcelona may have its Gaudi to rival Mackintosh, but where is its Watt, is Kelvin? Outside of the capital cities – and not all of these – nowhere suggested can match the overall rounded contribution to ‘culture’ in its broadest sense, that Glasgow has had in the past two centuries or more. To try and demonstrate this was one of the aims I had in writing this book. The gauntlet is on the ground, I would be interested to see who attempts to pick it up.

Ian Mitchell, 2013

CHAPTER ONE

Glasgow: Cinema City Reborn?

IT IS SOMETIMES said that if an Edinburgher has a pound, he or she will save it, but that if a Glaswegian has a pound, they will go out and spend it. When one looks at the vast crowds in Glasgow that patronise football matches, or went to the dancing in its heyday, there would appear to be at least a grain of truth in this statement. It is given further credence by the statistics of cinema attendance in its classic period 1920–60, when the term ‘Cinema City’ was often applied to Glasgow due to the huge number of cinemas located there and the large audiences they boasted. In 1950 the district of Govan alone had nine cinemas, one more than the entire city of Aberdeen, which was home to twice Govan’s population.

During this classic period of cinema, Glasgow itself hardly featured on the silver screen, except in a few documentaries such as the 1960 Seawards the Great Ships, directed by Hilary Harris. This was written by John Grierson and Cliff Hanley and showed the Clyde shipyards at the height of their post-war reconstruction boom. It was the first Scottish film to be awarded an Oscar. But now the reel appears to have come full circle, and Cinema City has been re-born as a place where, increasingly, feature films are actually made. Glasgow itself has become a movie star. The city’s universities now have prestigious Film Studies courses on offer, and the facilities for making movies in the city are world class, such as the Film City unit located in the former Govan Town Hall. In recognition of this, the City Council has created a dedicated Film Office to promote the use of Glasgow as a film location. Whilst it is not yet Hollywood on the Clyde, the film industry is one of the growing economic sectors in the Glasgow region, worth an estimated £25 million a year.

Many of these recent films have featured Glasgow as Elsewhere. In Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth, the city doubled for late-19th-century New York, with the tenements of Hillhead and Woodlands acting as stand-ins for those of the Lower East Side a century before, and Alexander Thomson’s Great Western Terrace doubling as the homes of the New York plutocracy. The city’s Moss Heights housing project has been Moscow, Rome has been recreated with the City Chambers as the Vatican, and the steep streets of Partick have doubled as those of San Francisco. The great variety of architectural styles in Glasgow allows this transformation to happen. Few places have such an eclectic built environment within so manageable an area; it is, for obvious reasons, a director’s delight. A recent example of Glasgow as Elsewhere was the filming of World War Z, starring Brad Pitt, with Glasgow serving as Philadelphia facing a zombie invasion.

Because Glasgow can be Elsewhere, it can also be Nowhere. It is not a city in which you might consider setting an urban version of Brigadoon. It has, at times, a stark grimness, and this allows it to be used as an imaginary place and the setting for dystopian studies of urban and social breakdown, such as in Death Watch. This is my favourite film set in Glasgow, indeed one of my all-time favourite films, which I saw on its first release over 30 years ago. Then it was a total flop, despite boasting an A-List cast which included Harvey Keitel and Romy Schneider, but it has just been re-released to what I am certain will be a much better reception. Bertrand Tavernier, Death Watch’s director, came to the Glasgow Film Festival in 2012 to launch its re-release. Tavernier described how he fell in love with Glasgow and its people back in the 1970s, and how he has been here many times since. He talked of the filming of Death Watch (despite the warnings he had had that the film crews would be robbed and mugged) as the easiest shoot he has ever done,