Glasgow (16 page)

Further, the Glasgow man walks quickly, without attention to gait or carriage. He swings his body, even his arms, and sometimes walks on his heels as being nearest the ground. But no one takes offence at this. People are all too busy, and if our friend has the air of being bound for an appointment of importance, every Glasgow man would congratulate
him on having so good a reason for his haste. Be his gait never so crablike, no one will chaff him. Why, after all, should one, if the man gets there? In a metropolis where conventions are inherited it may be different, but here where the people who observe the conventions are those who made them, appearances, unless they collide with a reasonable etiquette, matter not one straw.

If now, from clothes and carriage, you pass to faces, your evidence multiplies that the Glasgow man is a man of occupation. The faces are intelligent rather than handsome, alert and intent rather than gay, more conspicuous for character than breeding. Merriment is not common, yet neither is boredom. It is a sedate people that you see, having itself well under control, aware of its aims and pursuing them without swerving. The vagrant eye is not often seen. Our friend knows his town too well to be attracted greatly by what passes in the streets. He has something else to think about. Yet do not imagine that he looks listless or wearied like the military man, and perhaps unhappy into the bargain. He is simply undemonstrative, and having an object and scope for his activity, he depends for his contentment less on his outward impressions than one who has neither.

The typical Glasgow man whom you see in the street uniting all these characteristics in his person is not the merchant prince with sons at Harrow, the professional man, nor the great shipbuilder or engineer, but is a little grey, wiry man in plain clothes and a square felt hat. He has a good-going business, which is the source, if not of a fortune, at least of a competence. He lives in the suburbs, probably in the South Side; his wife is plump and commonplace and cheerful, his daughter quite pretty, his son at college ‘coming out for a doctor' and writing decadent verses for the magazine. He himself is the salt of the middle-class with all its virtues and limitations. His face is full of the character which brought him success; shrewdness, resolvedness, tenacity, energy, canniness, steadiness, and sobriety – all these are imprinted upon it indelibly. Withal it is a kindly face and belongs to one who is without pretension and deserves the epithet which his friends give him, of a ‘plain, unassuming man'.

GEORGE SQUARE, 1901
James Hamilton Muir

George Square is to Glasgow what Red Square is to Moscow and St Peter's is to Rome. Situated in the heart of the Merchant City, it is named for George III (1738–1820). Laid out in c.1782, it remained for
many years full of filthy water, its banks used for slaughtering horses. Eventually houses were built around its sides and today it is presided over by the City Chambers. It is home to statues of notable worthies, including the first monument ever erected to Walter Scott and one to Robert Burns, which was the first statue to be placed in the Square
.

The Londoner who imagines he had turned his back on his city's sins of arrangement finds them repeated in every provincial town he comes to. And so George Square is Trafalgar Square over again – the same central monument, the same weary desert of paving stones, the same feckless designing of the spaces. The absence of the Landseer lions may be counted to it as a negative virtue, but the Scott monument is as dismal, quite, as Nelson's. To set a ‘faithful portrait' of a great writer on a pedestal eighty feet above the street level, surely this is a form of strange torture, survived from the Middle Ages. At the head of the great column only a great symbol – a great gesture – is permissible, although an emperor standing guard over his realm might also be a motive sufficiently dignified. But to hoist to this height a man accustomed in life to walk the streets like any other of us, one to whom close observation of his fellows was a real daily need – this offends against all that is just and appropriate. If it be retorted that the column and its figure are the apotheosis of a great writer, why, in the name of art, was the man not purged of his earthly look and transfigured into a great being, high over the land he made renowned? In cold weather, when we are snugly at home, or in the Young Men's Christian Association Rooms, he is out in the cold and in danger, and this is the sole thought that the Scott monument stirs in us. It is no simple memorial of ‘sons to a father', as the Florentine monuments of the Renaissance were. Neither is it a symbol of enduring greatness. It is simply, like Nelson's, a man on the look-out tied to the mast-head. Burns's monument is better, because it is nearer the ground; its clumsy, overgrown, earnest figure is truer to the man. Moreover, there is a faint touch of the appropriate in his standing here, for at a window at the south-east corner of the square his Bonnie Lass of Ballochmyle used to sit and see the folk go by when her poet was dead, and she no longer bonnie. But the square looks best when ‘a blast o' Janwar wind blaws hansel in on Robin', and brings with it snow. Then the stupid divisions of granolithic pavement from grass plots are blotted out, and the tramways run through lawns of snow, noiseless as sledges. And James Watt on his statue seems, indeed, a philosopher sunk in meditation, and as the snow settles on his head and lap, deeper and deeper seems his meditation. And Sir John Moore looks still and frozen, very like the hero of the ballad, ‘with his martial cloak about
him'. The Municipal Buildings, as you view them from the Post Office portico, seem greatly, mysteriously, official, like a facade in Whitehall; the old hotels on the north side are ever so far away, and the statues stand on their white ground like chessmen on their board.

The windows of the General Post Office are the Poor Man's Club. A man is staring from them, and sees not you, but a cottar's roof in Morven, and a girl driving kye home at nightfall. An old mechanic ties up a well-thumbed
Weekly Mail
, and addresses it with a shaking, laborious hand, and drops it among the foreign newspapers, for his son, the engineer, in India.

THE BONE FACTORY, 1901
Edwin Muir

Born the son of a crofter in Orkney, which he thought of as Edenic, Edwin Muir (1887–1959) left the island with his family when he was fourteen. It was the rudest of disruptions and one which left the poet scarred for life. In comparison to Orkney. Glasgow, as he described it in
An Autobiography
(1954), was everything his birthplace was not: stinking, dirty, coarse, crime-ridden, unbearable, the sort of place you escape from, not volunteer to go to. In another book
, Scottish Journey
(1935), Muir added to his impressions of Glasgow. It was, he felt, a ‘collapsing city', beset by slums, a population close to starvation, sectarianism and a sense of hopelessness
.

The job I took up in Fairport and kept for two years was a job in a bone factory. This was a place where fresh and decaying bones, gathered from all over Scotland, were flung into furnaces and reduced to charcoal. The charcoal was sold to refineries to purify sugar; the grease was filled into drums and dispatched for some purpose which I no longer remember. The bones, decorated with festoons of slowly writhing, fat yellow maggots, lay in the adjoining railway siding, and were shunted into the factory whenever the furnaces were ready for them. Seagulls, flying up from the estuary, were always about these bones, and the trucks, as they lay in the siding, looked as if they were covered in moving snowdrifts. There were sharp complaints from Glasgow whenever the trucks lay too long in the siding, for the seagulls could gobble up half a hundredweight of maggots in no time, and as the bones had to be paid for by their original weight, and the maggots were part of it, this meant a serious loss to the firm. After one of these complaints the foreman, an
Irishman, would go out and let off a few shots at the seagulls, who would rise, suddenly darkening the windows. But in a little while they would be back again.

The bones were yellow and greasy, with little rags of decomposed flesh clinging to them. Raw, they had a strong, sour, penetrating smell. But it was nothing to the stench they gave off when they were shovelled along with the maggots into the furnaces. It was a gentle, clinging, sweet stench, suggesting dissolution and hospitals and slaughter-houses, the odour of drains, and the rancid stink of bad, roasting meat. On hot summer days it stood round the factory like a wall of glass. When the east wind blew it was blown over most of the town. Respectable families sat at their high teas in a well of stink. Many people considered that the smell was good for the health.

‘KATE CRANSTONISH',
c
. 1905
Neil Munro

Kate Cranston's part in the history of Glasgow is significant and enduring. Born in 1849, she opened a tea-room in Argyle Street in 1878, the city's first. Another followed in nearby Ingram Street. Then, in 1897, she devoted a whole building in Buchanan Street to a tea-room, drawing on the talents of great exponents of ‘Glasgow Style' – George Walton and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In 1903 came the famous Willow Tea Rooms in Sauchiehall Street which were designed by Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald. Cranston died in 1934 and, despite a public outcry, the new owner of the Ingram Street tea-room dismantled it completely
.

Cranston's in the Argyle Arcade and Queen Street, and Cooper's, for a time had been distilling tiny cups of coffee in their windows. The aroma, extending into the streets, appeared to have an irresistible attraction for the ladies, who began to buy their coffee by the ounce as an excuse for more frequent visits to town and the pleasure of free sampling.

From the gratuitous sample-counter quickly developed a sitting-room where coffee could be amply and leisurely enjoyed at a reasonable tariff, and the strain of shopping in town was relieved enormously. The Cranston family had one time been associated with the Crow Hotel, a famous hostelry which stood on the side of the present Merchant's House in George Square. According to
Who's Who in Glasgow
(1909),
Miss Catherine Cranston was born there; the place of her retirement is in its immediate vicinity.

Miss Cranston, clever, far-seeing, artistic to her fingertips, and of a high adventurous spirit, was the first to discern in Glasgow that her sex was positively yearning for some kind of afternoon distraction that had not yet been invented. She mapped out a career for herself and became a pioneer in a lunch-tea movement which in a few years made her name a household word. By general consent it was associated with the ideals and triumphs of the ‘Glasgow School' of artists, then entering on international fame.

At the International Exhibition of 1901 in Kelvingrove her Tea-house and Tea-terrace had architectural and decorative innovations which created a sensation even among continental visitors. It meant the funeral knell of ugly and curly ‘art nouveau' conventions in domestic decoration, and for the first time introduced a quite original note of surprise and gaiety into the mid-day ‘snack' and its crockery and cutlery.