Glasgow (17 page)

Miss Cranston's ‘Groveries' establishment was, of course, only a temporary affair, which closed at the end of autumn, when the Exhibition itself ended, but by that time any lunch tea-room of hers was assured of permanent popularity. She opened glorious ones in Sauchiehall Street and Buchanan Street, Argyle Street and Ingram Street, designed externally to attract the eye by architectural novelty, yet restrained and elegant.

They were deliberately conceived as houses of light refreshment most obviously for the pleasure of women and run wholly on ‘temperance' lines. Even had the cocktail been in fashion at the time, it would have been unprocurable in any of the Cranston's shops, which far more than made up for the absence of alcohol by features peculiar to themselves.

That wonderful woman appeared to have in view her own aesthetic gratification more than the rapid accumulation of a fortune on conventional restaurant lines. She was, herself, unique, vivacious, elegant, always with something of the
fête champêtre
in her costume, and the maids who served her tables took their note from her.

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 novelties in buildings and decorations not otherwise easy to define.

BAIRD REMEMBERS REITH, 1906
John Logie Baird

By extraordinary coincidence two of the most inspirational and influential figures in the development of television, John Logie Baird (1888–1946) and John Reith (1889–1971) were Scottish and students contemporaneously at Glasgow Technical College (now the University of Strathclyde). Baird is regarded as the inventor of television while Reith is revered as the founder of the BBC. Reith's time at the College was not a happy one: he remembered it as ‘something of a nightmare'. If he had any recollection of Baird there, he made no record of it. Later, in the 1930s, the men's paths crossed again when the BBC decided not to adopt Baird's system, which may well have coloured Baird's view of his fellow Scot
.

There were, however, a few exceptions, gentlemen's sons, well off and with real anxiety as to their future. Among these was a tall, well-built youth, the son of the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, by name, John Reith. I met him for the first time in rather unfavourable circumstances. I was, and still am, very short-sighted and, at the beginning of one of those classes, the Professor asked if those who were short-sighted and wanted front seats, would hand in their names. When I went up to the platform to give him my name, three large impressive students were talking to him. They talked in terms of equality; in fact there was a distinct aroma of patronage. The young gentlemen were of the type we would today call ‘heavies', and they boomed with heavy joviality at the poor little Professor, who was distinctly embarrassed and ill-at-ease. I interrupted, timidly, and handed him a piece of paper with my name on it. As I did so, the heaviest and most overpowering of the three ‘heavies' turned round and boomed at me. ‘Ha! What is the matter with you? Are you deaf or blind?' I simpered something in inaudible embarrassment, and he turned his back on me, and the three ‘heavies' walked out of the classroom booming portentously to each other.

This was the first time I saw Reith. I did not see him again for twenty years. Reith did not distinguish himself in examinations; he was worse than I was without the excuse of ill-health, but now we see him as a Cabinet Minister and a national figure while those who soared above him at College are lost in obscurity, little provincial professorlings, draughtsmen, petty departmental chiefs and the like, hewers of wood and drawers of water. The examiners awarded no marks for impressive appearances, no marks for oracular booming voices, no marks for
influential relatives. To the examiners an overpowering ‘heavy' and a lean rat-faced little cad were all alike.

AT THE PICKSHERS,
c
. 1908
Jim Phelan

Addicted to ‘the dream-drift of the road', Irish-born Jim Phelan (1895–1966) was ‘a tramp at heart, an opportunist by inclination, a beggar boy by philosophy'. At the age of eleven he left school with little formal education to run wild amidst the ‘beggars, slum women, racecourse drifters . . . ballad singers, rag-pickers, apple-women, and all the colourful, raucous, roaring denizens' of Dublin's netherworld. An incorrigible, and doubtless unreliable teller of tales, he travelled relentlessly and did whatever it took to survive, in the course of which he was twice sentenced to death and encountered the writers Liam O'Flaherty and H.G. Wells. Eventually, Phelan turned to writing himself and became a regular contributor to radio. In
The Name's Phelan
(1948), the first part of his autobiography, he told how, like countless of his fellow country-folk, he found his way to Glasgow
.

To me Glasgow looked, smelt, and sounded like a dream-town. Now this was a real foreign city at last. I could not understand one word of the speech. Heaven!

After the first couple of hours' wandering. I drifted away from the city centre and the shops. Something like the Combe district in Dublin, I judged the place where I found myself. (Later I learnt to call it the Gallowgate.) From some ragged boys I learnt about lodgings – share of a slum room cost fourpence, and two of the boys lived there. Carefully, almost religiously, I set myself up to imitate their speech.

Years later I knew a wealthy and cultured young Frenchman who, having had the misfortune to slay someone during his first few hours in England, found himself in prison for years. Promptly and of necessity he learnt English – in Dartmoor and similar places.

It was vastly funny to hear him break from the French equivalent of an Oxford accent into, ‘I ups and ses to 'im, I ses, “Look 'ere,” I ses, “wotcha tike me for?” I ses.' He told me, often, that the English language sounded marvellous to him. That was the way I learnt to speak Scotch, in the Gallowgate.

Sometimes, with other slum boys, I went to beg from the workmen who came from Park Head Forge. One caught glimpses of great
flashing fires, heard the thumping of mighty hammers somewhere. Then the crowds of men came out, on their way home.

The begging was very simple. Many of the men would carry home part of their midday meal, uneaten. We stood, in a little crowd, and repeated continually, ‘Any bread? Any bread?' The men gave us much more than we could eat.

(Almost I had forgotten! Our chorus was ‘Onny br-raid? Onny br-raid?' My own accent was the thickest and most raucous of the group.)

Most of my days were spent in prowling, in the neighbourhood of the docks for preference. But the riverside was not at all like Dublin's. Big warehouses, dead walls, locked gates, hostile men with notebooks, came between the prowler and – whatever it was I looked at. All I remember is a meaningless list of ships and ports.

My companions were far too practical for any such occupation, and again I began to feel over-shy and reserved, something from which I had known blessed freedom for a few weeks. Gradually I came to dislike the boys, discovering them as clumsy, foolish liars
who could not even tell lies
. The end came one evening at the ‘pickshers'.

A sailor had given me a shilling, and although penniless except for the solitary coin, I had spent eightpence on taking a boy to the cinema, retaining only the vital fourpence ‘stall'.

The pictures cannot have been very enthralling (it was 1908), for the other boy and I talked most of the time. A slum-boy with one leg, a drifter like myself, he lived at my lodgings, had no family as far as I knew. That evening he told about having escaped from a reformatory.

I had read about Glencree near Dublin, knew of reformatories by hearsay only. But after the first few minutes I had picked a hundred holes in the story. These were the silliest lies I had ever heard. And this one-legged boy, fourteen or so, was the leader and most experienced of all. The Gallowgate was beginning to let me down.

The most thrilling part of the escape story ended with the loss of my boy-friend's leg. How, I enquired. Shot off, he explained. He carried a pair of crutches, got about with ease, had no wound or bandage. Yet his leg had been ‘shot off' some seven weeks earlier. My Gallowgate dream-world was beginning to fall apart.

Outside the cinema I simply walked away. Although it was evening and I still clutched the fourpence in my trouser pocket, I did not go near the lodging-house, went prowling aimlessly along the river. Tomorrow I would find another stall; I was never going back with that crowd any more. Shot off!

A ROOM AND KITCHEN IN SPRINGBURN,
c
. 1914
Marion Smith

Marion Smith lived in a room-and-kitchen tenement house from 1914 until her marriage in 1927. Her mother had ten children. Her father was a brass worker at a locomotive works. The couple were dedicated to raising their family as well as possible on a very limited income, and instilled in their children strong moral values and a sense of their own worth. Marion was the eldest daughter and shared with her mother the responsibility of looking after the younger children. The kitchen here described was typical of countless others
.

All my childhood days were in Springburn. Our first house was a single-end, but when another baby put in an appearance, we moved into a room and kitchen in the same close. We had been away from Springburn for a spell through Dad chasing work again, to the Carron Ironworks. The First World War had started and there was now no shortage of work, so we came to, where else, Springburn.

Our house had a coal fire in a stove, which had to be blackened with a paste mixed up in an old saucer, and then buffed up, and finally shone to a gleaming finish. There was a piece of velvet kept for the purpose. The steel trimmings were shined with emery cloth. As my father was a brass moulder, the mantelpiece, above the stove, was gleaming with brass ornaments, all made in the works. This was one of the perks of the trade. Everybody made things in the works. We had brass iron stands, brass candlesticks, a little brass anvil, a watch stand, which was in the form of an angel's head with outstretched wings. Your pocket watch was taken off and hung there when you went to bed, presumably watched over by an angel. Other brass items I remember – a shoehorn in the shape of a lady's leg, very daring! A small brass stool with a slot in it, which said, ‘Our wee girl is no fool, she puts her pennies in a stool.' We had a solid brass poker, and on the hearth, a solid brass stool intricately patterned, about eighteen inches high. It was called a toddy stool, and was supposed to hold the kettle of hot water at your side, to make your hot toddy with whisky and sugar and lemon. This despite my dad being a teetotaller!

There was linoleum on the floor, which was polished, and a small hearth rug in front of the fireplace. The kitchen chairs were wooden, and the kitchen table was covered with a sort of oilcloth so that it would be wiped with a damp cloth. At each corner of the table there was a cornerpiece with a horseshoe on it bearing the words, ‘Good luck'. This held the oilcloth in place and presumably blessed us with good luck whenever we sat at the table.