ALICE MAY MORRISON TAYLOR. IT WAS hard to credit that my scary grandmother owned a maiden name of such glorious abundance. Until I saw her name written down in its entirety—at which time I was seized with the compulsion to read each word out loud, as if it were a poem—she had only ever been Granny, or, much later, the posthumous Alice Lloyd, with its three paltry syllables. But Alice May Morrison Taylor: the syllables, clustered in ones, twos and threes, had the gravitas of a complex chord played with two hands.
Alice was born on 8 July 1895, the second-oldest of five children born to Charlotte and James Taylor of 370 Dumbarton Road, Partick, in the west end of Glasgow. Home was one level in a three-storey tenement of sooty blonde sandstone, one of many rows of such housing built for the workers who had flooded into the city during the nineteenth century to work in its mills and shipyards. James Taylor worked for Denny’s Shipyard, which sat at the mouth of the River Leven where it met the Clyde, just below Dumbarton Rock. Denny’s was as famous as Charles Dickens.
The Taylors’ firstborn, Anne, was named after her mother’s mother, according to Scottish convention. But everyone knew her as Nance and the pretty one. In quick succession Alice gained three brothers—Vincent, Stephen and James—so that five children learned to squeeze into two bedrooms.
When I imagine how Alice recalled her childhood, I suspect it was the noise that first came to mind. Home was an incessant din of her brothers running after each other and yelling out until their mother’s even louder rebukes quieted them. A constant scraping of chairs against cold stone and threadbare carpet, of knives and forks on chipped dinner plates, the heavy thud of her father’s boots announcing the end of another long day’s work.
In the year of Alice’s birth, Glasgow was the fourth-largest port in Europe, and so important economically it was known as the second city of the British Empire. Positioned at the head of the Clyde, Glasgow conveniently faced the Americas, and the influence of that invisible shore rippled from the docks into every working-class home. By that time, shipbuilding had replaced the trade in cotton and tobacco, which had fuelled Glasgow’s furnace for almost two hundred years. Shipbuilding companies flourished on the banks of the Clyde, and gradually the industry became the greatest in the world when Britannia ruled the waves. And the heartland of shipbuilding in Glasgow, which reached its peak just before World War I, was Partick. Between the censuses of 1881 and 1891, Partick’s population rose more than 33 per cent from 27,396 to 36,538.24
On his certificate of marriage to Charlotte Speed on 3 March 1883, James Taylor’s profession is listed as ‘riveter and journeyman’. To be a journeyman meant that James had completed his apprenticeship and was employed by someone else, while riveting was one of those very specific, highly skilled trades that are both crucial and totally invisible. As with so many specialist occupations—air traffic controller, radiation oncologist, concert pianist—riveter didn’t emerge as an apprenticed role until the technology developed that enabled and required it. Necessity may be invention’s mother, but invention in turn can give birth to peculiar children; in the case of James’s profession, the steel industry was the necessary precursor to the rise of specialist riveters.
The one photograph I have of Alice’s father reveals a heavy-set man with a white handlebar moustache, wearing a grey wool suit with matching waistcoat, a beret and a bemused expression. I imagine James Taylor standing a few feet from the roaring cauldron where he works ten-hour days with his team driving blue-hot metal into pre-prepared holes in a sheet of steel. He’s known these men since he was old enough to form memories. In and out of each other’s houses along the streets they still live in, the same tenements his mother and father expired in when their shifts were through. The men are together at St Mary’s Old Masonic Bar—a short walk along Dumbarton Road to number 165—and at Dowanhill Church, and here at the open mouth of the furnace, where the months have turned into years without their noticing. It’s only sometimes, when he peels off his battered boots at the end of a long day and looks around at those familiar faces who depend on him, at the worn carpet and the tobacco-stained walls that feel sometimes as if they’re closing in, or when one of his children is saying grace, that he’s struck by how many years have floated away with the ships they’ve built.
Now James waits until the furnace operator determines the rivets are as hot as they can get; then, with one rivet glowing with pure heat on the end of his tongs, the operator throws it to his catcher man, standing by the joints that need riveting. The catcher pops the rivet into the hole and turns back to field the next one out of the oven, while James and his mate work together to set the rivet in place. One of them clasps its domed head in a purpose-built vice while the other hammers the unformed tail of the rivet so it mushrooms against the joint. In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the rivet is already beginning to cool, contracting against the joint. The force of pressure causing restriction, tightening; a metallic microcosm of the journeyman’s life. James has inserted thousands of these things over the years to build the ships that float about the empire, but he still can’t help but admire the unyielding perfection of a row of riveted joints.
The P&O passenger liner SS Berrima, on which Alice would eventually sail to the other side of the world, was one of about 370 Clydebuilt ships completed in 1913. The others were purpose-built for battle. The name Clydebuilt was synonymous not only with quality, but also with travel—whether for leisure or war.
There’s no such thing as a riveter anymore, Rosie. These days steel rivets have been replaced by supremely strong bolts, and only two of those bustling Clydebuilt shipyards remain. The jagged polished chrome of the Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport—designed by Zaha Hadid, no less—opened in 2011 on the site of a former shipyard. The shipwrights’ labour has been commodified into a nostalgic tourist spectacle. The latest edition of the industry bible of specifications for steel construction includes no reference to steel rivets at all. In true 21st-century style, both the training and the tradesmen it took to install rivets in a single joint are redundant: instead of four skilled riveters, the new high-strength bolts require just two workers to install them.
As the shipping industry has gone the way of the British Empire, so Alice’s high-street location has given over to conspicuous consumption. Today the entrance to 370 Dumbarton Road is squeezed between a Boots pharmacy and a Card Factory, one unassuming door in a long line of retail outlets in the tenements stretching along Dumbarton Road from Peel Street to Hamilton Crescent, which was renamed in 1931 as Fortrose Street. Being just across from the Merkland Street entrance to Partick train station, there’s now a post office and a bank in the same block. If this were Monopoly, the Taylors would have hit the jackpot with such a prime location—except that ownership was beyond their means. The Taylors’ landlord was the one sitting on a small fortune. The most valuable object in their house was the family piano.
The Taylors weren’t the only ones on Dumbarton Road with a piano in their living room, though the instruments were still far from common in Partick parish. Reflecting the instrument’s increasing accessibility to the lower rungs of the social ladder, piano sales grew much faster than the population. Between 1851 and 1910, piano production in Great Britain tripled from 25,000 to 75,000 units, while the population grew 66 per cent.25
How the Taylors came by their piano is lost to history, but probability suggests that they inherited it from a relative. Neither Charlotte nor James was musical, but they would have welcomed the gift and made room for it in their cramped home for the possibility of one of their children taking it up. Nance, as the older sister, would have had first dibs, though there was no money to pay for lessons. I picture Alice bringing the pale tip of her index finger to the surface of a yellowed key and looking along the keyboard, wondering what paths her fingers might travel once she knew how to play. I’m certain that as soon as she was old enough to know what the piano was, she wanted desperately to be able to play it. But as with everything else—her clothes, her chores, her side of the bed—time alone at the piano was something she would have to wait for until Nance tired of it.
To sit still and be able to touch the keys must have appealed to Alice on many levels. At the most practical level, playing the piano was the opposite of chores—it was a private world where there were no brothers, no jobs to do, no prettier sister to be compared to, no surveillance by Mother, or God. I like to imagine Alice sitting up as tall as she could make herself, her back straight and her arms relaxed. Did she dream of having lessons? Of playing for the church choir? She would need to wait until she was old enough to get a job so she could pay for a teacher.