Alf Wight, letter to his parents, November 1941, aged 25
WHEN THREE-WEEK-OLD ALF WIGHT arrived at the vaulting, glass-roofed Central Station in Glasgow in October 1916, he entered a metropolis like nowhere else in Britain. A clamouring city of 800,000 people, Glasgow was already showing, beneath the wartime spirit of unity, the split personality that would characterize it through the twentieth century. On the one hand it was the booming ‘Second City of Empire’, boasting the high culture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, shipbuilding barons, and stylish Buchanan Street; on the other hand, street gangs like the Redskins were turning it into ‘razor city’, the Glasgow of blackened Gorbals tenements, Red Clydesiders and the variety-hall turns of Harry Lauder. The duality of Glasgow extended to its name because Glaswegians could not agree on its meaning. Some insisted that Glasgow meant ‘dear green place’, from the Celtic glas (green) and cu (dear); James Cleland, writing in The Annals of Glasgow, was equally adamant that the name meant ‘dark glen’. Even Glasgow’s patron saint has two names – Mungo and Kentigern.
This split personality, though, marked an important truth about the place. The spectrum of human experience within its streets was broad, if not boundless. And Glasgow was dynamic. So dynamic, indeed, that in the early 1900s, many commentators queried whether Glasgow was truly a British city. With its confident, high Victorian buildings, its grid of ruler-straight central streets, its brash manners and confidence, its brownstone tenement blocks, its ‘subway’ underground railway, its plethora of cinemas, its poor and huddled refugees from Ireland (more than 40 per cent of Glaswegians could claim roots in the Emerald Isle), Glasgow seemed American. When that inveterate explorer of Britain, H. V. Morton, reached Glasgow in 1912, he likened the city to Chicago; 20 years later, on his Scottish Journey, Edwin Muir was convinced that, ‘In its combination of riches and tastlessness, upper-class Glasgow is very like the United States.’
The comparison with America is apt because modern Glasgow, like so many American cities, grew rapidly, a stone-and-mortar Topsy. Until the 1700s, if people in Scotland, let alone in Britain, knew of Glasgow, they knew of it as a slumbering ecclesiastical town, whose first wooden church had been established in 525 by Mungo on the banks of the Molendinar Burn (a tributary of the Clyde that the Victorians turned into a sewer), and of its cathedral begun by Bishop John Achaius in 1114. In 1451, King James II had accorded the town a ‘grant of regality’ and solicited a Papal Bull to found the University of Glasgow, the fourth oldest university in Great Britain. Medieval Glasgow’s population rose to around 4000, which crowded into timber and thatch houses around the cathedral, with some sprawl down to the shallow Clyde, with its thriving salmon fishing.
For three hundred years, Glasgow slept, until some enterprising merchants purchased 13 acres at Newark out in the Firth of Clyde and established Port Glasgow. Tobacco was the imported stuff on which Glasgow’s rise to power was based; at Trongate in the city centre, the ‘tobacco lords’ had pavements exclusively for their own use. ‘They were princes,’ wrote chronicler John Strang, who
distinguished themselves by a particular garb, being attired, like their Venetian and Genovese predecessors, in scarlet cloaks, curled wigs, cocked hats, and bearing gold-headed canes.
So was born the Glasgow habit of ostentation. So too the Glasgow habit of drinking. The nouveau riche tobacco merchants drank claret and whiskey in their clubs, coffee houses and homes (some employed servants specially to loosen the cravats of drunken guests, so they would not choke) while their lowly workers drank in taverns, or ‘drinking shops’, the back rooms of grocery stores.
The reign of the tobacco lords was brief; in 1786 David Dale brought mechanized weaving to the Clyde Valley, and cotton became king. Within a decade, Glasgow went from Daniel Defoe’s ‘cleanest and beautifullest, and best-built city in Britain, London excepted’ to an industrial city where, one commentator observed in 1792, ‘The traveller approaching this city, beholds before him, nothing but spires, buildings and smoke.’
Glasgow had entered the Industrial Revolution. Its population exploded: in 1801 Glasgow had 77,000 residents; by 1830 the population had nearly tripled to 201,000; and in 1901 Glasgow had 784,496 citizens within its burgeoning borders and was the most populous place in the kingdom, London excepted. It was also the ‘Workshop of the World’, because all the ingredients for heavy industry were to be miraculously found on the city’s doorstep. In Lanarkshire there was iron ore and there was coal; there was also a ready supply of cheap labour in the shape of crofters cleared from the Highlands by ‘improving’ estate owners. These were joined by hungry Irish immigrants driven across the sea by the potato famines. The last ingredient necessary for Glasgow’s rise to become ‘Second City of Empire’ was liquid. The water of the Clyde.
As the saying goes, ‘Glasgow made the Clyde, the Clyde made Glasgow.’ To deepen the Clyde so that bigger draught ships could reach right up into the city – the Port of Glasgow was always a halfway house sort of compromise – an English civil engineer, John Golborne, dreamed up a scheme in 1768 to dredge the sandbanks and narrow the river by means of jetties. Golbourne’s plan was entirely successful; within a decade, coasting vessels were able to discharge Irish oatmeal at Broomielaw Quay in the heart of the city. A grateful town council gave Golbourne the Sassenach a present of £1,500 and a silver cup. However, the channel was still not deep enough to allow foreign-going vessels into Glasgow. Step forward the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford, who advised joining up the end of Golbourne’s projecting groynes, and by 1818 transatlantic ships were regularly sailing up to the Broomielaw, turning Glasgow into a deep-water port. The river that runs through the city’s heart is a canal, as artificial as Suez and Panama.
A deepened Clyde was more than a watery highway for trade; in 1812 the Comet was launched on the river, a little wooden steam paddleboat, which started up the holiday habit of taking a trip ‘doon the watter’. So fantastically popular was the Comet that more steam ships were built in its wake. Shipbuilding was a new Glasgow craft, completely contingent on the newly deepened Clyde. In the sixteenth century, the town had boasted one boat builder. By the 1870s, the Clyde was building one-third of all British tonnage. And it had not nearly reached its ascendancy. The yards began to spread downstream, along the banks of the Clyde, from Govan (where Robert Napier had established the first yard to make hulls from steel instead of wood) to Partick, Whiteinch, Scotstoun … and Yoker.
Until 1877 Yoker was an inconsequential country village, whose singular point of interest was its distillery – cruelly hit by a Luftwaffe bomb in the Second World War, sending up a million pounds’ worth of whiskey in flames – but in that year Govan shipbuilders, Messrs. Napier Shanks and Bell took over farmland with river frontage at the west end of the village. Other shipbuilding and repairing firms also found the greenfield sites of Yoker attractive, and John Shearer & Son, Barclay Curle & Co., J. & G. Thomson and John Brown & Co. all built yards on the river at Yoker. In 1906, the specialist warship builders Yarrow moved from the Thames to the eastern end of Yoker village, because as Alfred Yarrow observed, ‘When you want apples, you go to Covent Garden, for meat to a meat market, and for ships you go to the North.’ When James Wight wanted work in 1914, he was of the same mind as Alfred Yarrow, and went north, to Yoker on Glasgow’s edge, to work in Yarrow’s own yard.
A rented ground floor flat at number 2172 Dumbarton Road, Yoker, a four-storey red sandstone tenement block, was Alf’s first home in Glasgow. Dumbarton Road is one of the major arteries of Glasgow, running west to Dumbarton itself and so long that it was the first road in Britain to need quadruple digits for addresses. Number 2172 is still there. Tenement buildings do not stand alone, but are joined to others, to cliff-wall pavements for six hundred yards with an overpowering solidity. All flats in a block have the same windows (an angular outward bay in the case of Dumbarton Road) and entrances; only the occasional small shop let into the ground floor disrupts the clone-like repetition of the tenements running down a road. The shops in the tenements next door to 2172 are now shuttered up, save for one convenience store with a bright yellow Paypoint sign.
Opposite 2172 is the site of the yard of the once mighty Barclay Curle, Scotland’s main ship repairer, now gone. Three hundred yards downstream to the east, a grey Royal Navy warship peers from behind a line of new housing. Currently owned by BAE Systems, the Yarrow yard on Yoker’s edge is one of the handful of Clydeside yards still living. Even so, there is only the faintest tinnitus of industry in Yoker on a workday in the twenty-first century.
In 1916, the riverfront of Yoker was alive with hammering, grinding, ships’ horns sounding, cranes creaking, men shouting and trains running alongside Dumbarton Road to service the yards. So close were the gargantuan metal skeletons of the ships that they loomed over the wide cobbled road, blocking out the view from the tenements.
The sky over Yoker’s Dumbarton Road was netted with wires to power tram ‘caurs’ running up and down the road, these emblazoned with the patriotic advice: ‘To shave the boys at the Front, hand your old razors to the conductresses.’ Or the patriotic plea: ‘Bantams for the Front: 3,000 Wanted: Apply at Once 46 Bath Street.’ Trams were also festooned with commercial advertisements for Fry’s Pure Concentrated Cocoa, Colman’s Mustard, Pear’s Soap and Nestles’ Milk. At night, the street flickered with gaslight, or at least it did until 12 o’clock. In response to possible Zeppelin raids, much of Glasgow’s street lighting was extinguished from midnight and heavy curtains pulled over windows.
Night brought little relaxing silence to tenement dwellers. Although the broad streets were deserted, inside the tenement buildings were sick children crying, people arguing, someone using the landing closet and at weekends, parties.
Day or night, the air of Yoker was always tinged with the sulphurous smell of coal from the thousands of domestic ‘ranges’ (stoves) and fires in the tenements, from Yoker power station, from the Drysdale engineering works and from the shipyards themselves.
The tenement building in which the Wights lived was owned by a Mrs Isabell Jones of Golfhill Drive, Dennistoun. Like the other tenements in Yoker, it was purpose-built, either by the shipbuilding firms or by speculators. Since town councils did not then have the power to build houses, housing was a matter for private enterprise; because a thousand pounds spent on a tenement block could garner more in rents than a thousand pounds in a bank account could accrue in interest, the savvy and monied from all Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire invested in red stone Yoker tenements.
Glasgow was the most densely populated city in Europe. When Alf was a boy in the Second City, three-quarters of his fellow citizens lived in tenements, and three-quarters of all tenement flats were either single rooms (‘single-ends’) or two rooms (‘room and kitchen’). Flats like the Wights’, with two rooms and a kitchen/sitting room, were for the slightly better off, costing about £12 a year in rent. Simply by walking past, you could tell that the Wights’ tenement block was for the ‘respectable working class’, with its brown ceramic tiles in the entrance, and shoulder height green, black and yellow border. A ‘wally close’ it was called – ‘close’ being the communal doorway and ‘wally’ the Glaswegian vernacular for tiles. Among the Wights’ neighbours were an engineer, Alex Turnbull, and his wife, Gavin Brand, also an engineer, and William Carruthers, an engineering draughtsman, and his wife Eliza.
Not all were as lucky as the Wights. Across Glasgow to the east and south were the slums of the Gorbals, Plantation and Bridgeton, where the tenements were largely single rooms in ‘made-down’ (subdivided) grand houses. It was not uncommon for whole families, plus lodgers, to live in a single-end, eleven to the room. Living conditions in a ‘made-down’ tenement were graphically described by William Bolitho, a South African journalist working for the Guardian:
We enter the Close. On each landing opens the water-closet, which the municipality installed thirty years ago. This is clean – the municipal are vigilant; but on average twenty-five persons share its use. In some houses this number is nearer fifty. On the other side of the tiny landing opens a long, impenetrably black gulf; the central corridor of five homes. We feel our way, knock at a door and enter, calling out ‘Sanitary’. A small room, one side of which is taken up by the Scots’ fireplaces, like an enclosed iron altar, with two hobs on which the teapot is kept everlastingly on the boil. The floor is worn wood, there are irregular square inches of frayed oilcloth. An enormous drabbled woman, who is dressed in dish clothes which do not show the dirt so plainly, however, as her face, explains the arrangement… She has five children, and the gas is kept burning all day at the glimmer. The elements are simple and human. There is the bed, set into a niche, deep, evil-smelling, strewed with heaps of the same material as her dress…
The shared lavatory was sometimes outside on the back court. An 1892 Act was supposed to force landlords to install indoor water closets but was not exactly successful: some tenement flats had outside loos as late as the 1960s.
The Gorbals, Glasgow’s most famous slum, did not start out poor; initially the Gorbals – the name is thought to derive from the Gaelic ‘gort an bhaile’, meaning the town’s field – was thoroughly middle class, but its elegance faded when the Irish, Highland and European migrants moved in. It was five minutes’ walk from the wealth of the city centre – the Argyll galleria with its diamond merchants, Sauchiehall Street with its department stores – but in the Gorbals children went barefoot, and porage and broth were the principal meals. Bandy-legged rickets was the result. By the time of the First World War, the east and south side slums of Glasgow were already locked in a cycle of deprivation. As A. MacArthur and H. Kingsley Long observed in No Mean City, their classic novel of Glasgow life:
…the lads and lasses alike are driven to marriage in the slums by sheer disgust of their own homes and desire to start afresh in a ‘hoose’ of their own, roomy enough, though it be no better than a ‘single end’. Married, they have babies in steady succession. If times are hard, they soon have to take in a lodger or two. In any event, before a dozen years have passed they have set up a home no whit different from the ones their parents made and soon their children begin to think of a similar escape from it.
Buildings in the Gorbals, as in much of Glasgow, were uniformly black over yellow or red stone; before the Clean Air Act, the only time you could see the hills from the city centre was in July during the annual Fair Holiday, when the factories closed. Sometimes the smog was so thick that the unwary walked into the Clyde and drowned.
Yoker was not the Gorbals. Yoker still had a green lung along its northern, non-riverside edge. And when the baby Alf Wight moved into the two-room ground floor flat at 2172 Dumbarton Road, the Gorbals had already been abandoned by money, which was following the spread of the shipyards west along the Clyde. Partick, Whiteinch, Scotstoun and Yoker were all booming. When novelist John Buchan wanted to prove the wartime bustle of Glasgow in Mr Standfast, where did he send hero Richard Hannay? Where else but Dumbarton Road? There Hannay was ‘amazed at the number of able bodied fellows about, considering that you couldn’t stir a mile on any British front without bumping up against a Glasgow battalion.
‘Then I realised that there were such things as munitions and ships, and I wondered no more.’
During the Great War there was always a ship to build for the Royal Navy or for the merchant fleet being depleted by the Kaiser’s U-boats only 40 miles away in the Western Approaches of the Atlantic; between 1914 and 1918 Yarrow’s yard built no less than 47 warships for the Admiralty. It was the highwater of shipbuilding on the Clyde, and platers like Jim Wight, the aristocrats of the yards, were taking home as much as £4/18s for a 50-hour week. Yarrow fed the stomach, but the Wights had moved to Glasgow for the good of their souls, to further their careers in music. And Glasgow was entertainment city.
If Glasgow ever dominated a branch of entertainment, it was music hall. Neil Kenyon, Jack Buchanan and Nellie Wallace all belonged to Glasgow, and Edinburgh boy Sir Harry Lauder was adopted by Mungo’s city (or he adopted it) and he was the most popular vaudeville comedian in the world. When Sir Harry Lauder appeared in Glasgow, people queued for hours to hear him sing ‘I Love a Lassie’, ‘Stop Yer Ticklin, Jock’, ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’, ‘Donald Where’s Yer Trewsers’ and, of course, ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, with its famous chorus:
I belong to Glasgow, Dear old Glasgow town;
But what’s the matter wi’ Glasgow,
For it’s goin’ roun and roun!
I’m only a common old working chap,
As anyone here can see,
But when I get a couple of drinks on a Saturday,
Glasgow belongs to me.
Music hall’s lofty peak was 1916. The Empire Theatre (showing ‘Shell Out – The Wonderful Revue’) was the largest hall outside London’s Savoy, and the Alhambra, the Coliseum, the Palace in the Gorbals and the Olympia in Bridgeton were all packing them in. At rough establishments like Pickard’s Panopticon Music Hall on Trongate – no longer the playground of merchants – where Stan Laurel made his debut, punters chucked rivets at the artistes they did nae like. Such was the penalty of a poor performance in a shipbuilding town.
There were also a hundred cinemas in Glasgow by 1917, the highest percentage per head of population of anywhere in Britain. Anywhere in the world outside America, come to that. The first building to open exclusively for the showing of films was Pringle’s in Sauchiehall Street in 1907 with 200 seats, but quickly the trend for cinemas became for palace-sized establishments with a touch of luxury. So, the Picture House had a goldfish pool and cages of singing birds, and La Scala offered fish teas and afternoon teas. ‘If it’s Good it is Green’s’ was the slogan of George Green, the Lancashire circus-owner who morphed into the city’s movie-house mogul, and whose Green’s Playhouse was the biggest cinema in Europe, seating 4368 in velvety comfort.
George Green employed James Wight as a pianist at his 1100-seat Picturedrome cinema at 21 Govan Street (now Ballater Street) in the Gorbals. It was a four-mile tram journey there and back in the evening. There were picture houses much closer, such as the Paladium and Victoria in Scotstoun so presumably, Green was offering top pounds, or the Gorbals job was a foot in the orchestra pit of the Green empire. Or perhaps Hannah, under her stage name of ‘Anna Bell’, had the opportunity of singing in the intervals. Whatever, Jim along with all the rest of the male world travelling on the clattering double-deck tram ‘caurs’ would have wondered at the new breed of person clipping the tickets. With so many of its male employees away at the war, Glasgow Tramways enrolled 700 female conductresses, dressing them out in green straw hats and long Black Watch tartan skirts.
It was becoming a strangely female world. Scotstoun, next door to Yoker, had started the phenomenon of woman ‘posties’; the Grand Central, a restaurant ‘de luxe’, now featured the Belgian Ladies Band from the Liège Conservatoire; a Scottish training school for women police officers had opened in Charing Cross, the graduates of which were kept busy arresting illegal distillers; the ‘shebeeners’ included women too, such as Govan’s Sarah Gillam, who copped a £30 fine from the city’s court for half a bottle of home-made whiskey. Meanwhile, women war workers – ‘the shell belles’ – were earning a whacking £3/5s a week and, to the bemusement of the city’s burghers, had taken to frequenting the best emporia on the grand streets of the city centre, which were thronged with people, trams and horse-drawn carriages in these days of money. There was perhaps always a tempting of fate in the way that Glasgow threw money around during the Great War. Certainly the boom went bust.
When Jim Wight had walked through the dock gates of Yarrow’s yard in 1914 and was signed on by a foreman, he was one of 60,000 men working in the Clyde’s shipyards and marine engineering shops. But the war had artificially inflated the order book – of Yarrow’s in particular. Cancellation of Admiralty work was met with protests in the Yarrow’s yard. To no avail. In 1919, one year after the war’s end, the number of men employed in the Clyde yards was 43,000. One after the other, the yards on the Clyde ceased production, as did all the engineering shops and steel foundries dependent on them. Yarrow’s itself closed temporarily, and was only reborn by some sporadic Admiralty orders and a diversification into the making of land boilers.
Jim Wight was among those laid off, leaving him to join the throngs of shipyard workers standing at six o’clock each morning outside the gates, hoping to catch the attention of one of the ‘bastards in bowlers’ – the foremen. One retired shipyard worker from Browns told Alan McKinlay, the editor of the Clydebank oral history project Making Ships, Making Men:
If you were a riveter or whatever, you used to go down in the morning and wait outside the foreman’s office and he would say ‘you, you and you’ and give you a start. Sometimes the foreman would walk up and down the lines of men waiting for work without saying a word, not even a grunt – which most of them were capable of. That meant there was no work for you that day. They were just reminding you that they had all the power and you had none.
If there was no work, men signed on at the ‘Buroo’ (Bureau) for their ‘dole’ three times a week. Unemployment in Glasgow rocketed; in 1921 unemployment grew in the city by 1000 a day, and the sight of people digging in the abandoned coal bins on the city’s edge and men lounging listlessly on street corners became seared in the city’s memory. For something to do, the so-called ‘gentry of the corner’ would go singing in the back courts of the tenements. One of their ditties began:
Winter is coming, the night is beastly derk
The erc lights are fizzing in the West End Perk
All of the erc lights fizz like gingerade
End aih’m beneath your window
With this chairming serenade.
If they were lucky, someone would throw down a ha’pence. To make them go away.
It was against this background of economic ruination that the legend of ‘Red Clydeside’ was born. Although the Great War had seen strikes in the shipyards, including Yarrow’s, the real trouble came in 1919 with a demand for a 40-hour week, which the employers refused. At a massive demonstration in Glasgow’s George Square on 31 January 1919 in support of the shipyard workers, the Red Flag was unfurled. Police and trade unionists fought a pitched battle in which 53 people were injured. The Liberal Coalition Government sent in armed soldiers and tanks, and for a brief, panicky moment, class warriors on both sides thought that the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 was near to being repeated on ‘Black Friday’ in Glasgow. The strike was almost immediately called off, but the fear of its consequences remained. The Times of London reported:
Thousands of soldiers wearing steel helmets and full service kit were brought into Glasgow yesterday morning, and the hooligan element responsible for the bottle-throwing, window-smashing and looting on Friday has disappeared from the streets. I do not think there will be any recurrence of disorder. Those who now speak for the strikers [Emmanuel] Shinwell has been arrested at his home in Govan, and with [David] Kirkwood and [William] Gallagher is detained under remand at Duke Street prison – instead of talking of unconstitutional methods are asking the authorities to prove one instance of illegal conduct by the men. In their paper the Strike Bulletin, today they say – ‘It seems as if the Government want an opportunity to use arms against the workers on the Clyde, but we can assure them the workers have no desire or intention of providing such an opportunity. The workers are well aware of what the Government want and are not so foolish as to fall into the trap set so carefully to ensnare them.’
This is ingenious, but it may serve the purpose of restraining young hotheads from rash action. The looters, who serve one purpose of the revolutionary movement behind the strike itself, may be trusted to keep in hiding while the troops guard the city.
Clydeside’s reputation for being ‘Red’ extended to politics. In the general election of 1922, ten of Glasgow’s seats were won by the Independent Labour Party, under the leadership of James Maxton and John Wheatley. An enormous demonstration in St Enoch Square saw the successful ILP members off on the night train for London. But their noble manifesto, dedicated to the ‘unity of the nations of the world … happiness of the people of these islands’, was soon to come under pressure of the realpolitik practised at Westminster. Unable to deliver on its rosy promises, the ILP lost members right (Labour Party) and left (the Communist Party).
Yet Glasgow was never as politically red as it was painted. During the early years of Alf’s life in the Second City, Glasgow’s problem wasn’t wee red men; it was the wee hard men – and women – taking to drink to drown their sorrows about the Depression. A popular children’s skipping song of the time asked the question:
Does yer maw drink wine?
Does she drink it a’ the time?
Does she ever get the feelin’?
That she’s gonni hit the ceilin’?
Does yer maw drink wine?
Does yer maw drink gin?
Does she drink it oot a tin?
Does she ever get the feelin’
That she’s gonni hit the ceilin’?
Does yer maw drink gin?
One particular drink was the curse of the Glasgow unemployed classes: a cheap red wine laced with methylated spirits known as ‘Red Biddy’, ‘Johnny Jump Up’ or ‘Jake’. So toxic was the cocktail that the injurious effects of the drink were brought to the attention of the House of Commons more than once. Red Biddy cost 7d a bottle. In the depression-blighted East End, unemployed men were reported to be addicted to another drink in the Twenties, meths boiled with brown vinegar, which was consumed by Glaswegians at 1s a gill.
‘Most of my boyhood companions finished up as wine drinkers,’ recalled Eddie Straiton, who would join Alf as a teenage student at Glasgow Veterinary College and be a fixture in Alf’s life for over fifty years. ‘If they didn’t have at least average intelligence, they simply had no chance. There was absolutely no future. With parents on the dole, their only prospects when they left school were endless days of lounging around street corners and billiard rooms until they were old enough to sign on at the “buroo” – the unemployment exchange. Inevitably many, like their parents, turned to drink.’
As a student, Alf would have to hide the smell of drink on his breath from his Temperance-inclined mother. But many a Glaswegian boy would have preferred a Maw who was a Methodist to a Maw who was drinking Red Biddy.
Glasgow spawned gangs: the Duke Street Boys, Baltic Fleet, the Nunnies, the San Tong, the Beehives, the Calton Entry, the Bingo Boys, the Govan Team, the South Side Stickers, the Cheeky 40, the Kent Stars, the Coburg Erin, the Romeo Boys, the Dirty Dozen, the Lollipops, the Savoy Arcadians, the Billy Boys, the Norman Conks … all had their nasty, brutish and short reigns of infamy on the streets of the East End and the South Side.
Some gangs owed their allegiance to a particular stretch of cobbles – the Nunnies were from Nuneaton Street – others to a faith. This was Glasgow, after all, sectarian city of Orange, sectarian city of Green. Of the city’s two most infamous gangs of the inter-war era, the Billy Boys and the Norman Conks, one was Proddy and one was Papist. The battle cry of the Billy Boys was:
Hullo, Hullo
We are the Billy Boys
Hullo, Hullo
You’ll know us by our noise
We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood
Surrender or you’ll die
For we are
The Brigton Derry Boys
Brigton was the local spelling of Bridgeton. A version of the song became the anthem of Glasgow Rangers Football Club until in 2006 UEFA instructed the club to make public announcements prohibiting its singing. Elsewhere in Britain, football was a cohering celebration of working-class life; in disintegrating, deprived Glasgow it was something to be fought over between the Protestant fans of Rangers and the Catholic fans of Celtic, the matches between them ending in bloody, kicking trouble with monotonous frequency.
The Billy Boys’ leader in the Thirties was Billy Fullerton, one of Glasgow’s ‘razor kings’, so named for their proclivity in using a cut-throat razor on their enemies. A fellow ‘razor king’, John Ross, was taken before the judge in 1931, where The Scotsman reported:
Amazing sidelights regarding the gang problem in Glasgow were given when a 22-year-old youth, known to his associates as the ‘razor king’ appeared before Lord Anderson in the North Court for sentence on a charge of assault. Accused was John Ross, stated to be a section leader of the ‘Billy Boys’ gang, and he pleaded guilty to a charge of having on November 27, while acting in concert with a number of unknown men in James Street, Bridgeton, assaulted William Rankin of 125 Main Street, struck him on the face, knocked him down and kicked him, in consequence of which he was severely injured.
Moving for sentence, Mr Taylor said that [the] accused was known as the ‘razor king’ and he was a leader of one of the gangs of brutal and cowardly hooligans who infested certain districts of the city. The gang was known as the ‘Billy Boys’ and a short time ago it was 800-strong. It had now been reduced to about 400 … Outlining the circumstances of the case, Mr Taylor explained that the assaulted man was in a picture house when some small quarrel arose between him and a girl, whose seat he was supposed to have occupied. The girl was apparently connected with the gang, and when the picture house was closed and the people were coming out, she passed the word to those members of the gang who were available. When Rankin went out he was pushed down the steps, struck from behind and knocked down by members of the gang.
While Rankin was lying on the ground he was kicked and assaulted. Indeed, at one time it looked as if he might be kicked to death, and a girl who was in the crowd, thinking he would be killed, very pluckily threw herself upon him as he lay on the ground and endeavoured to protect him as best she could until the arrival of the police. Rankin’s injuries were fairly serious and he was taken to the Royal Infirmary for treatment … Continuing, Mr Taylor said the two previous convictions admitted by the accused arose out of his activities as a gangster. The first one was one of assault by stabbing, and the second, which was a common assault, was committed on one of the female members of the gang, who had mislaid one of the razors from which he derived his name of the ‘razor king’.
His Lordship sentenced Ross to 18 months’ imprisonment.
Fullerton and Ross were the real-life models on which Johnnie Stark, the protagonist of No Mean City, was based. No Mean City began as a rambling story from the typewriter of an alcoholic Gorbals baker, Alexander McArthur, who lived on Waddell Street, close to the Southern Necropolis. In 1934, McArthur sent off the manuscript to Longman’s, the publishers. Longman’s saw nothing impressive in the writing or the plot but was so mesmerized by McArthur’s revelations about the Gorbals’ razor gangs, prostitutes, tenements and bedbugs that the company asked H. Kingsley Long, one of its professional readers, to look at the manuscript. A journalist on The People, Kingsley Long immediately packed his bag and went up to Glasgow to collaborate with McArthur on what would become No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums, the red-raw story of ‘bullet-headed’ Johnnie Stark, son of a violent father and downtrodden mother, who becomes the local ‘Razor King’. Long chose the novel’s title from the King James Bible, Acts 21:39, ‘I am … a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city.’
No Mean City outraged decent Glasgow with its docu-drama depictions of sex and violence. Libraries were forbidden to stock it. The Glasgow Evening Times refused to review it. Even so, people read it – its total sales are estimated at about 750,000 – and those who did were shocked, not just by the character’s amorality, but by the pervading sense of hopelessness. No matter what route the characters took to escape the slum, be it Johnnie’s violence, his brother’s espousal of the class struggle, his friend’s dancing, no-one did. The slum reclaimed them all. In a terrible case of life imitating art, McArthur, unable to repeat the success of No Mean City, sank into alcoholism and eventually took his own life in 1947, downing a bottle of disinfectant, throwing himself off a bridge into the Clyde to crawl out on the towpath and lie like a beached fish. Two people attended his funeral, both journalists.
The gangs were clustered in the East End and South Side, but there were gangs reported in Cowcaddens, Maryhill and Anderston, and Partick. Occasionally, though, the gangs erupted out of their slums to brawl in the city’s palais de danse and cinemas. Some of the ‘rammies’ were arranged like a mass duel. After one running street war in June 1931, the Glasgow Evening Times reported:
The spear of a swordfish and a wicked-looking Gurkha knife were among the number of weapons taken possession of by the police following an alleged gang fight in Kerr Street, Bridgeton, yesterday afternoon. The ‘battlefield’ was strewn with weapons after the fight … a piece of copper tubing … a brass-headed poker … a cudgel two feet long with a knob of wood as thick as the head of a drumstick … a wooden baton … an axe weighing 1½ lb … a steel file two feet long … a bayonet-like knife … and an iron rod three feet long, with a hook at each end.
It was widely and popularly believed that the gangs existed merely to fight their like and they never harassed ‘ordinary’ Glaswegians, they loved their Maws, and one could leave the door of the ‘hoose’ open in a street ‘owned’ by the gang because a larcenous thought never passed through their scarred heads. Actually, the gangs may not have been composed of Mister Big criminal masterminds, but all ran low-level felonious ‘enterprises’, chiefly protection rackets, whereby corner shopkeepers paid a ‘pension’ or got their windaes smashed. There was no honour among the gangs. If one of their number was fined or needed bailing, his fellows demanded money from householders, local businessmen and passersby.
Nobody in Twenties and Thirties Glasgow walked the streets without some fear of gang boys or ‘neds’. When Alf was studying at Glasgow Veterinary College in 1934, a running gang fight in neighbouring Cowcaddens forced pedestrians to take shelter in shops and closes. Eventually, the city’s authorities decided that the reign of the wee hard men must be ended and in 1931 recruited Percy Sillitoe as Chief Constable. The philosophy of Sillitoe, who had previously ‘busted’ the gangs of Sheffield, was simple: ‘There is only one way to deal with the gangster mentality. You must not show you are afraid.’ Sillitoe recruited to the city’s police force – at 1500 strong the second biggest in Britain – Highlanders and rural men of imposing size (most famously Olympic wrestler Archie MacDonald), and kitted them out with batons and a distinctive diced black-and-white cap band, ‘Sillitoe tartan’ as it became known. Percy Sillitoe’s Braveheart constables then proceeded to wade into the gangs at every opportunity, with the Chief Constable ensuring that judges passed hefty sentences on anybody apprehended. He also got rid of corrupt magistrates. The tipping point came in the late Thirties when Billy Fullerton was arrested in the middle of a melee and convicted of being drunk in charge of a child. Ten months in Barlinnie Prison ensued. With Fullerton gone, the Billy Boys lost their aura of invulnerability, and the era of gang rule was soon over. Sir Percy Sillitoe left Glasgow with the unofficial title of ‘Hammer of the Gangs’ and ended up as Director General of MI5.
It was as these storm clouds of economic depression gathered over Glasgow that the education of Alf began. On 30 August 1921, when Alf was two months shy of his fifth birthday, he passed his first day at Yoker Primary School. A hop-skip-and-jump along Dumbarton Road from 2172, and past the Auld Hoose pub, Yoker Primary, founded in 1876, was a low, stone Victorian building cornering Kelso Street. Boys entered through one gate, girls through another. Alf’s seven years at the school were under the tutelage of William Malcolm MA, who was nicknamed ‘Beery’ by his charges on account of his florid visage, suggestive that its owner was partial to a pint of ‘heavy’. But then nearly every schoolchild in Glasgow was convinced his or her headmaster drank. As the children’s rhyme had it:
Oor wee school’s the best wee school,
The best wee school in Glesca.
The only thing that’s wrang wi’ it
Is the baldy-heided maister.
He goes tae the pub on a Setterday night,
He goes tae church on Sunday,
An’ prays tae God tae gie him strength
Tae belt the weans on Monday.
Alf’s favourite subjects at Yoker Primary were English and History, the latter taught by the inspirational Mr Paterson, who liked to reenact British history’s best moments, from chopping off the ‘heid’ of Charles I to chopping off the ‘heids’ of the Sassenachs at Bannockburn, using his cane for a sword. History and English would long remain Alf’s favourite subjects. (His worst subject at Yoker, as in life, was Maths.) The school day was from 8.45 am until 4pm, with an hour for lunch. In the yard at break times, Alf played football, ‘British bulldogs’, ‘cuddie hunch’, ‘spin the pirie’ and Bools (marbles). He also met the boy from Kelso Street called Alex Taylor who would become a friend for life. Indeed, so close was the friendship between Alf and Alex – widely known as Sandy, appropriately enough given his beach-blond hair – that 60 years hence Alex and his wife would retire to Yorkshire to live near Alf and his wife. Alex would even be godfather to Alf’s son.
Like the primary school, Yoker Church belonged to the building boom that came to Yoker with the Victorian expansion of the shipyards, when the village’s population shot up from 535 in 1871 to about 20,000 in 1903. The foundation stone of Yoker Church was laid in 1897, and for most of Alf’s childhood the Reverend William Walls was the minister there, his 14-year incumbency beginning in 1921. By the account of Both Sides of the Burn, the local history of Yoker, Walls ‘worked tirelessly among the people of the parish’ during the Depression, and the church congregation was at full capacity. Among those sitting on the bare oak pews on Sundays were Alf and his parents; although Hannah and Jim were born and bred Methodists, in Yoker they attended the Presbyterian services of Yoker Church and Alf, according to his daughter Rosie Page, ‘thought of himself as being brought up a Presbyterian’. Why did the Wights take the Presbyterian option? Aside from its convenience to 2172, Yoker Church was likely more to Hannah’s social taste: there was a different class of person at prayer than at chapel. It was more middle class.
Whatever class a man was, he prayed for work whilst sitting on the pews of Yoker Church. During the early 1920s, ‘Pop’, as Alf called his father, was ‘bouncing in and out of jobs’. Laid off from the yards – a blow for a proud man – he always found something, though. In 1926, the year of the General Strike, another fractious episode in Glasgow’s history, he seems to have finally given up being a plater, entering his occupation on the city returns as a joiner.
He was fortunate, of course, to have that musical string to his bow, to be able to play music for money. Aside from leading the orchestra at the Govan Picturedrome, he played with the ‘Glenafton Singers’ and with the Glasgow Society of Musicians he performed all over the city. When the talkies, beginning with Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer in 1927, looked set to kill live music in the cinemas, he played during the intervals, entertaining the punters as they queued for their ice-creams from the girl with the tray hanging from her neck.
Then there were the dances. After being music hall city, and cinema city, Glasgow became dance city. To put the Slump behind them, even if only for a brief hour, the people of Glasgow swung it out to the latest hot stuff coming in from America: the Tango, the Black Bottom and the Charleston. Whether it was in pub back rooms or in elaborate palais de danse ballrooms such as the Plaza at Eglinton Toll (multi-coloured lighting system, steel-sprung floors), dances needed someone on the piano, as well as the trombone and sax. By 1930, Glasgow (population 1 million) had 59 dances halls, while London (population 8 million) had 260.
The Wights’ family finances, however, were not just a matter of Pop’s efforts. In the dead economic years of the Twenties, Hannah sang for the family’s suppers. She also began dressmaking, at which she excelled – and at which she made considerably more than pin money. Indeed, she soon had a veritable industry on her skilled hands, requiring several seamstresses and a maid, Sadie. Hannah’s clients included the Glasgow great and good, such as Lady Ernest Field. Not many houses on Dumbarton Road would have enjoyed a maid, and a Christmas-card list that included the titled.
As a result, Alf was almost unscathed by the Depression, cocooned by his parents’ love and hard work. When the Wights did not have work, they worked at getting work.
There is a photograph of Alf at Yoker Primary aged nine. He is smiling, and radiates self-assurance. He is conspicuously well turned out in a jacket, shirt and tie (as is Alex Taylor, resplendent in a sailor suit) and wears the look of someone who expects good things to happen in life. There are others in the photograph who, judging by their faces and apparel, do not.
In the same year, 1925, that Alf was snapped smiling in the yard at Yoker Primary, ‘TV vet’ Eddie Straiton started his first job, delivering milk with Jock the milkman at Clydebank for the princely weekly wage of threepence. Straiton was aged eight. The job began at four in the morning:
My bare feet beat a tattoo on the pavement in an effort to keep warm and the ice-cold gusts of wet wind searched rudely under my short kilt. Goose pimples ribbed my rump like rough sandpaper. The oil lamps of the milk float loomed out of the dark and the old mare slowed down to big Jock’s suppressed ‘Whoaa lass’, while I swung myself on to the tattered sacking that provided a seat beside the milkman’s massive form. He reeked of sour milk and cow dung.
‘Rest yer arse there, laddie, and we’ll dae Rannoch Street first.’ Rannoch Street was only slightly less poverty-stricken than Sloan Avenue, which housed myself and many similar urchins, all of whom constantly sought the very scarce part-time jobs as a vital economic necessity. I was lucky; Jock’s regular helper had been sacked for ‘drinkin’ the mulk’.
In ten-gallon churns at the rear of the float slopped the cargo of milk, and rattling in front was a pile of milk cans with long handles. It was pitch dark but I knew they were there. I had passed Jock’s milk cart nearly every day since toddling to school.
The work was hard, especially on an empty stomach. My puny arms ached with the effort of carrying a full half-gallon can up a ‘close’ – three flights of stairs. Most families lived in three-storey stone-built tenements, three houses on each floor. The tenants left money in jugs or cups outside their doors, one penny for a pint, a ha’penny for a half and a farthing for a teacupful.
After only three closes, Straiton found his heart breaking for the poverty of the people. When he reached the McCaffertys’ in Glenville Street he could bear it no more: the father, broken by years of poverty, had drowned himself in the canal a month before, leaving Mrs McCafferty with eight children. ‘I stared at the empty half-pint jug,’ remembered Straiton. ‘Inside there was no money, no note – nothing.’ He secretly paid for Mrs McCafferty’s milk himself, dropping his ha’penny Christmas present in Jock’s money bag.
He then went to school.
Outside school, Alf enjoyed an early childhood almost scripted from the pages of Boy’s Own Paper. Yoker might have been a shipbuilding village, but it was a shipbuilding village on Glasgow’s absolute edge. (In fact, Yoker wasn’t officially incorporated into Glasgow until 1926.) Beyond Kelso Street, five hundred yards from Alf’s tenement, lay open country, and during Alf’s first years in Yoker cows still wandered on to Dumbarton Road. He played ‘Moshie’ (flicking marbles into holes), kicked a football around on the fields and raced around on his Colson ‘Fairycycle’, after Pop helped him learn to ride. A ‘Fairycycle’ was a small-wheeled safety bicycle that was the object of green-eyed envy. Colson’s advertisements declared:
Happy are the owners of Fairy Bikes – Velocipedes, Scooters, Tricycles, Coasters – each ride so gracefully, speedily and safely. Only Fairy Bikes are made exactly like you want them and last the way your parents hope they will.
Playtime is always joytime on a Fairy. What fun you can have! Out in the glorious sun, riding here and there in the fresh air, building strong, healthy bodies.
Owning a bike was a sure-fire way of getting sweets from other kids, because the city-wide standard bribe for a go on a bike was ‘I’ll give ye a sweetie for a shot on yer scooter.’
With a penny, rather than a sweetie, clutched in his hand he went to the Saturday matinees at the cinema, of which there were three close by: the Gaiety, the Empire and the Pavilion. On Saturday afternoons in winter, Alf stood with his father at Holm Park on Dock Street and shouted for the local football team, Yoker Athletic FC. Throughout the Twenties and Thirties, Yoker Athletic scored success after success in the junior division, winning the Scottish Intermediate Cup, the League Championship, the Glasgow Charity Cup, the Elder Cup and in 1932–3, glory of glories, the Scottish Junior Cup. (‘Whe Ho’, as Yoker Athletic supporters say.)
Some of the notables in ‘the Athletic’ teams included Bobby Finan (later Blackpool and Scotland) and Sam English (Rangers and Northern Ireland). Jim would also take Alf to see Partick Thistle – just down the road – where one day Alf’s Yoker schoolmate, Jackie Husband, played and eventually managed. There were also excursions to Rangers at Ibrox and Celtic at Hampden Park.
Inside the high-roomed flat at 2172, switching on the science-fiction phenomenon of electric lights, Alf played with Meccano and read books. Charles Alden Selzer’s Wild West novel “Drag” Harlan, about a vigilante cowboy with ‘the snakiest gun hand’, was an early favourite to read by himself. And, of course, while Alf read, there would be the sound of music. Jim liked classical music, but also jazz and popular tunes (‘Life on the Ocean Wave’, ‘Meet Me on the Back Porch’), which he would play on the grand piano he had shipped from Sunderland. There was also a wind-up gramophone in the kitchen-cum-sitting-room at 2172 Dumbarton Road, and on the turntable Jim would lay thick 78s of Caruso singing ‘Vesti la Giubba’ from I Pagliacci and listen again and again to the great tenor’s voice ringing out through the ear-shaped speaker. When the player ran down, he would leap up to crank the handle. Not for Jim a raucous evening in the bar of the Auld Hoose pub getting ‘legless’; instead he sat before the piano and gramophone, losing himself in music. Mrs Wight’s musical tastes were no less deep, but they were more austere; she liked classical music and hymns. Together the Wights would attend musical concerts far and wide, the boy in tow (‘Mother carting me in a shawl through railway barriers so that I could go for less fare’).
From the age of six Alf had piano lessons – from his father, alas, which proved a rare source of friction between them. Alf failed to practise regularly and Pop set high standards, making the boy play Scarlatti’s sonatas. Indeed, Pop hoped that Alf might make the grade as a professional musician.
At the age of 13, J. A. Wight made his debut as concert pianist, playing at the Clydebank Town Hall. The piece performed was ‘Polish Dance No. 1’ in E-flat minor by the Polish-German composer Xavier Schwarenka. It was the beginning … and also the end. Alf never again performed on such a grand stage, his father apparently giving up the struggle with the lesson-resistant teenager. However, Alf carried on playing the piano for his own amusement, and music would interest him for the rest of his life. One consequence of growing up in a house of music was Alf’s exotic choice of the pseudonyms Siegfried and Tristan for the Sinclair brothers in the Herriot books. In If Only They Could Talk, Alf surely writes with his own father in mind when he attributes the names to the pater’s love of Wagner. Alf also betrays the home-steeping in Wagner by his ability to make the knock-on jokes about Wagnerian names:
‘Anyway, it could have been worse. Wotan, for instance.’
‘Or Pogner.’
One day during Alf’s boyhood in Glasgow, his cousin Stan Wilkins from Sunderland came to visit, and to see the sights of Glasgow town. Alf recalled:
…in the afternoon we paid a visit to the art galleries and had a most enjoyable time. After that we had tea at Cranstons and then we popped into the Playhouse. We saw an excellent show and got home about ten o’clock.
Alf’s day out says everything about the fine face of Glasgow and a great deal about the Wight family. The ‘art galleries’ were the Hunterian and the Kelvingrove, astride Kelvingrove Park. Aside from being two of the buildings that led John Betjeman (with his architecture-critic hat on) to describe Glasgow as ‘the greatest Victorian city in Europe’), they also housed between them a world-class art collection. ‘Cranstons’ was a Glasgow institution, being one of the avant-garde ‘art tea-rooms’ of Miss Kate Cranston that she had decorated by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Neil Munro (1863–1930), creator of ‘Para Handy’, was a journalist before he was a short-story writer. About Cranston’s tea-rooms he wrote:
They were deliberately conceived as houses of light refreshment most obviously for the pleasure of women and run wholly on ‘temperance’ lines…
Miss Cranston brought to light the genius of a Glasgow architect, Charles Mackintosh, who died only in recent years and was the inspiring influence of a group of Glasgow artists, men and women, who made her tea-rooms homogeneous in structure, decoration and furnishing. They were strangely beautiful the Cranston tea-rooms; women loved them, and ‘Kate Cranstonish’ became a term with Glasgow people in general to indicate domestic novelties in buildings and decorations not otherwise easy to define.
The top note in Miss Cranston’s lunch-tea-room was struck by the one in Sauciehall Street, which was popularly known as ‘the room de luxe’ from the chamber which was its most admired and exciting feature. There, even the cutlery and glassware had a character of their own, and thirty years ago no children’s visit to the Circus was complete without a meal in this entrancing room de luxe, where everything was ‘different’ and the whole atmosphere was one of gay adventure.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s ‘Room de Luxe’ for the Willow tea-rooms in Sauchiehall Street was inspired by a Rossetti poem, ‘O, Ye, all ye that walk in Willow wood!’
A visit to art galleries, high tea at Kate Cranston’s, an evening at the cinema. Only in dear old Glasgow town.
Taking tea at Kate Cranston’s was also a middle-class rite of passage. Very few working-class people in Glasgow would have had either the money or the gall to visit such a bastion of the bourgeoisie. The Wights were socially aspirant. And, as parents, they also wanted the very best for Alf. Aspiration and devotion came together in their choice of secondary school for their much loved and only child.
Alf Wight left Yoker Primary in the summer of 1928. Nearly all his friends, among them Alex Taylor, went to the local state school, Victoria Drive Higher Grade School, but Alf went elsewhere. He had sat and passed the stiff entrance exams for Hillhead High School. A fee-paying co-educational school in the city’s West End.