Glasgow (19 page)

A victory at football, draughts, or chess is the result of many moves and counter-moves. We do not lie down and cry when our side loses a goal. No. We buckle up our sleeves and spit on our hands, determined to get two more goals in return, or more. So it is in the game of life. Let us be up and doing all the time, never giving the enemy time to settle down to a peaceful enjoyment of victorious plunder. Prepare, then, for the enemy's counter-stroke to our victory on the rent question!

DOCTORING IN THE GORBALS, 1925
George Gladstone Robertson, M.D
.

The connection between poverty and ill-health has long beset Glasgow. Few have documented the conditions as pungently as George Gladstone Robertson. Born in Shanghai, China, Robertson was a son of the manse. After his father's death in 1904, the family returned to Scotland and he was educated at Hutcheson's Grammar School and Glasgow University. Gifted athletically as well as academically, he represented Britain in swimming at the 1920 Olympics at Antwerp. Graduating in 1923, he entered a GP practice in the Gorbals, which was fast falling into decline, having previously been regarded as a place of fashionable elegance. His
book
, Gorbals Doctor,
published in 1970, six years before his death, makes grim if fascinating reading
.

The tenements in which these people lived, or in many cases, simply existed, were almost universally four storeys high. A great number had been built initially as large houses, but were now divided up into tiny apartments. One of the most squalid blocks was at 197 Centre Street. On each landing a passage went to right and left and four homes were entered from each narrow corridor. A small gas jet beside the stairway provided the only means of lighting this stench-laden cavern and as I climbed the worn steps, usually to answer some calls in the hollow early hours of a long dark winter's night, I would creep through the shadows and hear the sound of snoring, children crying or screaming; the never-ending squabbling between husbands and wives. In this building there was a fifth level of attics, making about thirty-six houses in all. Over two hundred people were crowded together in this miserable and hellish tenement.

The eerie sounds and the flickering shadows of the gas light were only minor obstacles with which I had to contend on my night visits. Men, and sometimes women, too drunk to crawl through their own doorways, lay in the passages. Some I managed to avoid, but more often than not, I would stumble and trip over a sprawling figure to be greeted on some occasions by a stream of oaths from the body I had jerked back into consciousness. This was humanity living at its lowest level and the drunks strewn in untidy heaps, many of them lying in their own vomit, would soon become a shameful symbol of the Gorbals and bring a stigma on Glasgow which the city would find difficult to erase.

In many cases the total possessions of a family would be worth little more than a five-pound note, and sometimes a father, mother and six children would all be living, cramped together, in a single apartment. The birth-rate was high, but so, too, was the incidence of death, especially among the very young. However, despite the squalor and the utter state of hopelessness which stared thousands of people directly in the face, the enlarging of families went on as baby after baby was born into a life surrounded by misery and perpetual torment.

In one three-apartment flat in another part of Centre Street I delivered a woman of her twenty-second child. She was married to her second husband and on the second or third day after the birth of a child she was always up and about and out to work in a greengrocer's shop as if nothing untoward had happened. Even after her twenty-second baby she rose from her bed on the third day and went back to work. In all she had twenty-six pregnancies – there were four miscarriages. To
her, childbearing and the ultimate delivery were no joyous and wondrous occasions. They were merely mechanical happenings, bereft of love; duties which she, as a woman, was called upon to perform.

The proportion of late or night calls was always high; not because the baby or child had turned ill at night, but because it was then that the parent became worried or developed a bad conscience over previous neglect during the day. In many cases a husband would arrive home about 11 p.m. after an evening's hard drinking. His wife would immediately set about upbraiding him for wasting his time and neglecting the children. In order to hammer home her feelings she would point to the baby, who, due to the surrounding row, would almost certainly be awake and crying through fright and the pain of teething troubles. This provided a cue for the husband that he would ‘bloody soon get her a doctor' and off he would stumble to the nearest phone.

If, in answering the phone, I protested that he should have sent his request earlier or added that he had not yet paid for the last call I had made to his house, I would normally be subjected to a stream of obscenities along with threats of complaints being made to medical executive bodies, the police or the Press – sometimes all three.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS,
c
. 1925
Edward Gaitens

The McDonnels, whose family fortunes are followed in
Dance of the Apprentices,
the 1948 novel by Edward Gaitens (1897–1966), live on the south side of Glasgow. Caught in a melting-pot of social injustice, revolution, war and pacifism, Mrs McDonnel struggles to lift her family and ambitious husband out of slum life. The book's ‘apprentices' are inspired by Nietzsche and other European thinkers. In Gaitens' vision, the Gorbals is full of talented people who have few outlets to realise themselves. Sport was one of them, crime another. The close was at the heart of community, a space at once public and private, looking, as Gaitens so brilliantly put it, ‘like tunnels cut through solid cliffs of masonry'
.

The close known as 150 South Wellington Street was like thousands of other Glasgow slum closes, a short, narrow walled-in passage leading up to three landings and through to a grassless earthen or broken-bricked backcourt, with its small, mean communal washhouse and open, insanitary midden. In such backcourts the women of the
tenements, after taking their weekly turn in the washhouse, hang out the family washing and take it in dried with sunshine or strong seawind and half-dirtied with industrial smoke and grime. They are the only playground of many thousands of the city's children, where the youngsters play football and children's games, climb on the midden and wash-house roofs and escape death or injury from the perilous traffic of the streets.

They look like tunnels cut through solid cliffs of masonry, these closes, and in the slums are decorated in the crudest style. Halfway up their walls are painted a stone or chocolate colour which is separated from whitewash by a stencilled border of another shade. There are often great holes in the walls of these closes, left unplastered or, if filled in, left unpainted and presenting unsightly daubs or crudely plastered cement. As the walls are for long periods unrefreshed with new paint, the old paint cracks and peels and the dingy whitewash flakes and falls before factors will spend money on property renovation. Many tenement dwellers live indifferent to all this ugliness and those with some spirit, who are angered by it all, lose heart in their long, unequal struggle against the tight-fistedness of factors, and live in and die in homes too narrow for fuller life, from which it seems there is no escape. These closes, badly lit, with their dangerous broken-stepped stairs, often filthy and malodorous, smelling of catspiss and drunkards' spew, have been for generations of Glaswegians the favourite, and for thousands, the only courting-place, and many hurried, unhappy marriages have originated there. ‘Stonin' at the close' or ‘closemooth' is a social habit of tenement dwellers and at all hours lone individuals lounge, staring vacantly.

1926–1950

CANOODLING

BUILT BY THE PICTS?
c
. 1926
Clifford Hanley

Tenements were not unique to Glasgow but they have come to define it. Much that has been written about them has been negative but there were, as Clifford ‘Cliff' Hanley (1922–99) reminds us, much that was good about them too. For a start they were solidly built and, for children at least, offered a ready-made playground which, with imagination, could be adapted to accommodate countless scenarios
. . .

It is so ludicrous to imagine anybody actually building the things that I have always assumed that Glasgow's tenements have just always been there. Nobody could have put them up deliberately. When I first read about the ancient Picts running about in woad and scaring the life out of Caesar's legions, I took it for granted that they did their running about through the closes and back courts of Gallowgate where I was born.

The tenements are built extravagantly of good sandstone, so that they have out-lasted all those generations of Picts and are still there, and there doesn't seem anything anybody can do about them. It's true that in George Street and over in Govan, on the south side of the Clyde, some of them have started falling down spontaneously during the past ten years, but this is probably because people left them and they got lonely, and not through any constitutional weakness.

Most of them run to four storeys, built in rectangles to enclose the back courts. The back courts are divided by brick walls and brick-built wash-houses built for climbing over. It was on one of these that I made my first acquaintance with the terror that lurks in the big city. I would be four years old at the time, a perilous age in Glasgow because in order to live a full rich life at four, you have to attach yourself to the bigger fry and they can always run faster and jump higher than you can. So I was at the tail end of the line one night on the run along the top of the back court wall in Gallowgate and on to the high wash-houses of Cubie
Street, and I was good and far behind when I arrived at one of the obstacles of the course.

There was a turn in the wall, and in order to finish the run you had to dreep to the ground, stand on a dustbin to get astride the next bit of wall and then home to the roofs. The instant I lowered myself to dreep I knew it was too far. It was too dark to see the ground below, but I had heard enough about people breaking both legs. I had heard practically nothing else, in fact, from the time I could walk. But by this time I was hanging by my fingers and I couldn't climb back up either. I shouted, but nothing happened, so I screamed, and I had a good vibrant scream in those days. A Glasgow back court on a dark Tuesday night is the loneliest place in the world.

Some time later my sister Johanne, sitting in the house a hundred yards away and two storeys up, recognised the screams and bolted out to save me. She had to prise my fingers off the top of the wall before she could pick me down.

Danger and death were always familiar acquaintances. A few weeks later the boy downstairs, Tommy Mulholland, was playing on his rocking-horse on the first floor landing when the whole thing overturned and carried him down a flight in a oner. It never seemed to cure him of riding facing the stairs, though it may seem odd that he was riding a rocking-horse on the landing at all.

The explanation is that the close in Glasgow is not just a hole in a building but a way of life. The close leads directly from the street to the back court, and the staircase to the flats above starts in the middle of it; and there is always something going on – somebody is always washing it or writing on the walls or hiding in it or giving a yell to test the echo.

After they wash it, the women give the stone flags a finish of wet pipeclay that dries bold and white and shows every footprint. Then, round the edges, they add a freehand border design drawn in pipeclay; sometimes a running loop like blanket-stitch, sometimes more tortuous key patterns, always mathematically accurate. It's a symptom of the unquenchable folk memory, or something from long-buried Celtic eternity and fertility symbols.