Glasgow (32 page)

In fact, he worked as a bus driver, funeral undertaker, and various other things before he started to draw cartoons in earnest and was invited to join the staff of the
Evening Times
. His daily cartoon wasn't a joke in the sense that any other artist of the time was drawing jokes. It was just a bit of Glasgow, often meaningless on the surface, and whoever on the
Evening Times
first thought of taking him on must have had more perception than most newspaper editors, which wouldn't be hard. He was the first evidence of new indigenous Glasgow humour since J.J. Bell and Neil Munro. After the first jolt of incomprehension, Glaswegians started to tear open the
Evening Times
to gobble the latest Bud Neill titbit, as salty and esoteric and Glasgow as a black puddin' supper. How do you explain the art of a man whose finest product was a squashed drawing of two shapeless things against the background of a square tenement with the caption:

‘Haw Jennifer! Ma kirby's fell doon a stank!'

He was tall and thin, in smart careless clothes with a trace of American accent; a face composed of bold planes of bone under a fine dome head with straight thinning hair; he wore gleaming false teeth and rimless glasses, and could have been a successful salesman from a Frank Capra film.

It's true that he can't draw, in the same way that James Thurber can't draw. The recurrent heroine that waddles through his work is a dream, or a nightmare figure, of the shrewd, sentimental, unlettered Glasgow wifie sunk in thick ankles and clasping hands under sprawling bosom designed for wedging over a windowsill for a good hing, and she rises to the level of poetry when her inarticulate hunger for beauty drives her to sigh: ‘My, ah like rid herr. Rid herr's rerr.'

‘Ach poetry ma bottom,' said Bud when I accused him of it. ‘Honestly, now, don't you think that's
good
?' ‘Well, it's all right, I suppose. Who knows what's good? Still, if you say it's good there must be something in it – something that in my preternatural ignorance, ha, that's good, something that in my preternatural ignorance I have not as yet detected. Detected, is that right? My vocabulary is somewhat inchoate tonight. I must be sober, or something equally horrible.' He leaned back for a better look and glinted joyfully through his Glenn Miller specs.

A CUPBOARD FOR COAL AND MARMALADE, 1959
John Betjeman

Though he is best known as a poet, John Betjeman (1906–84) was also passionate about architecture and was never happier than when discovering new places and new buildings. He travelled widely throughout Britain and brought to bear the eye of an artist on what he witnessed. He visited Glasgow at the behest of the
Daily Telegraph
and he was clearly surprised and inspired by what he saw. Betjeman had been earlier to Edinburgh and could not resist comparing it with its rival. ‘While all praise Edinburgh,' he wrote, ‘there are few to hymn Glasgow. To visit Glasgow after Edinburgh is rather like meeting a red-faced Lord Mayor after a session with a desiccated and long-lineaged Scottish peer. They are both magnificent in their ways, but so different that there is no comparison.'

Though this great city is ancient in origin, most of its buildings of note belong to the last century. Alexander (‘Greek') Thomson produced in Glasgow a simple architecture, solid and so perfectly proportioned that, though none of his buildings are very big, they command a respect which the least observant cannot help giving them. His Presbyterian churches in St Vincent Street and Queen's Park, his terraces – Great Western Terrace and Moray Place, Strathbungo – display a delicacy of detail and a perfection of proportion which are a Greek answer to St Mungo's Cathedral so many centuries earlier.

All over Glasgow there is distinguished cast iron in lamp posts, fences and balcony railings, in conservatories and railway station roofs. Possibly the best example of the last is the great semicircular roof of Queen Street Station.

And then, at the end of the century, to go with the interest in art which the merchant princes of this vigorous city showed, there are both the collections of pictures in the public galleries and the Glasgow School of Art, by some considered the origin of what is today known as ‘contemporary' architecture. The pictures, Italian, Dutch and French Impressionist in the Glasgow Art Gallery, together with the Whistlers in the University, make up what must be our finest collection of paintings outside London.

The Glasgow School of Art (1897–9) designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, is in its delicately mannered simplicity one of the most original buildings in Britain. It is as though Scottish Baronial had been translated into stone and wood and glass by Aubrey Beardsley. Glasgow is rightly proud of Mackintosh, and a dress shop in Sauchiehall Street
still wisely preserves a room for its brides which Mackintosh originally designed for Glaswegians to drink tea in and eat baps and bannocks.

This is the bright side of a great city. But there can be no city in these islands which has darker spots. Out of a population of over a million, about 400,000 are not satisfactorily housed.

At Anderston Cross, built in the middle of the last century, I visited the worst slums I have ever seen. The stone buildings, four and five storeys high, looked solid enough on their street faces. Enter one of the archways to the courtyards which they enclose, and you will see the squalor.

Small children with no park or green space for miles play in rubbish bins with dead cats and mutilated flowers for toys. Spiral stone stairs, up which prams and bicycles have to be carried, lead to two-storey tenements with one lavatory for four families.

One such tenement I saw housed five children and the parents. The coal and the marmalade and bread were in the same cupboard. There was one sink with a single cold tap. There was a hole in the roof and a hole in the wall, and the only heat was from an old-fashioned kitchen range on which was a gas ring for cooking.

Yet these people, though they complained, were not bitter, and I was told there were 150,000 such houses in Glasgow. The Gorbals is by no means Glasgow's worst district. The Corporation has a slum clearance problem far greater and more complicated than that of any other city. Politics no doubt hamper its being carried out. But Christian charity must overrule political expediency.

‘GLASGOW, 1960'
Hugh MacDiarmid

Undeniably a controversial figure, and a professional contrarian, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) must nevertheless be given credit for attempting to drag Scots out of the kailyard and into the modern world. Born in Langholm, he was an autodidact who read his way through all the books in the local library. He did not wear his learning lightly. Rather he shoved it down his readers' throats with a shovel. He was the enemy of parochialism, the scourge of amateurism and the slayer of mediocrity. For him, Scotland was mired in ignorance, anti-intellectualism and smugness, and was over-interested in sport, especially football, which numbed the brain and made individuals part of the herd. He dreamed that things might be different, that instead of
rushing to watch grown men kick a ball Scots would throng to hear what poets such as himself had to say. Such is the stuff of dreams
.

THE ART OF STABBING,
c
. 1962
Jimmy Boyle

In the lore of Glasgow, Jimmy Boyle (1944–) looms large. A convicted murderer, he turned his life around and became a respected author and sculptor. He was born in the Gorbals into a life of crime to which he took with enthusiasm. Shoplifting, vandalism and street-fighting were for him daily occurrences. In his early teens he was sent to a remand home, from which he graduated to borstal and, eventually, Barlinnie Prison, his first experience of which is described below. Dubbed ‘Scotland's Most Violent Man', he was convicted for the murder of Babs Rooney and given a life sentence. In 1973 he was one of the first offenders to participate in Barlinnie Prison Special Unit's innovative rehabilitation programme, which garnered as many bouquets as brickbats. His biography
, A Sense of Freedom,
was published in 1977 and was later adapted for the screen
.

I was in a single cell which had a chamber pot, table, chair, and bed. There was a heavy steel frame with glass panes in it at the window and a set of thick steel bars. The routine in prisons is very rigidly structured
and almost the same in every prison in Scotland. In the morning there is slop out and wash up then breakfast, either in the cell or in a dining hall. Work at 8 a.m. then lunch at noon; after lunch there is an hour's exercise either in the prison yards or round the gallery of the halls if it is raining. Back to work till 4.30 p.m. then evening meal. Lock up at 5 p.m. till the screws go for their tea than slop out at about 6.30 p.m. Those prisoners eligible for recreation are allowed out to the dining halls, which act as the recreation halls for an hour or so, then it is lock up and the screws go away at 9 p.m. The only variation is on Saturdays and Sundays, when the screws go away at 5 p.m. till the following morning, and on both of these days it is lock up most of the time.

The sentence that I was doing was quite big for a guy of my age with no prison sentence before but I wasn't really horrified at it. There was a sort of pride in it as I felt really good to be in beside lots of hard men as I was on the way to being one myself. When we were in cliques it would be all ‘facades' and tough talk, but that wasn't what prison was to me. To me at that time prison was just a hazard of the life I was leading. It was all part of the sub-culture for everyone going about trying to impress everyone else.

I was allowed to write one letter a week to my family and all in-going and out-going mail was censored. The screws were very petty and would concentrate on small things just like the prisoners. They would come in and search your cell and person. You could be put on report for hanging pin-ups on the walls. Some of us serving lengthy sentences would bribe one of the painters (prisoners working as painters) to steal some paint for us and we would paint our cells as they were only painted every seven years by the prison and they were filthy. I lost remission for very petty offences. One day I was walking along in single file with over a hundred others when this screw started shouting at me like I was dirt. Maybe I was, but as far as I was concerned so was he; so I thumped him on the jaw and was dragged off him by some other screws and taken to the bottom flat of the hall and thrown into the punishment cell, after having my clothes and shoes taken from me. I knew that if I did anything back there would be more charges so I more or less took what they gave giving token resistance and they left. Much later I was taken to the hospital in the prison and gave the reason for my injuries as having fallen. The following morning I was taken in front of the Governor and the screw described what had happened and I agreed with it and was sentenced to fourteen days. The fact that I had heavy bruising on one side of my face didn't raise the Governor's curiosity.