Read Goodmans of Glassford Street Online
Authors: Margaret Thomson Davis
Goodmans of Glassford Street
I dedicate this book to my dear friends Ann Maclaren
and Sharon Mail in appreciation of all their great
kindness to me.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to everyone who helped me with the research for this book.
Tommy Freeland was once manager of Birrs of Partick and he gave me invaluable information on how a family department store was run. Margaret Burkhill spent twenty years working as a store detective and she told me fascinating stories of her work experiences. Tommy and Margaret spent many hours talking on to my tape recorder and I thank them for their generous help.
Many thanks also to Margaret Lumsden, who told me of her experiences working in Goldbergs and what excellent employers she thought they were.
Ian Sword runs The Granary in Glassford Street and was most helpful.
Then, for the scenes in the Scottish Parliament, I owe a debt of gratitude to Green Party’s Chris Ballance, who was most kind and helpful in showing me around. Diane Barr was also very generous in the help she gave me. My sincere thanks to them both.
I am grateful to Adam McNaughton for permission to reproduce the words of his creation, ‘The Jeely Piece Song’.
My sincere thanks to my grandson, Martin Baillie, who was extremely generous in the time he spent with me explaining some of the beliefs and views of the Scottish National Party.
My son, Kenneth Baillie Davis, as always, has been a great help and support, especially with the karate scenes in the book.
Wowee-ee, Horatio! There he was, in
CSI: Miami
, tall and slender, his jacket open, one hand hooked in his belt, the other peeling off his shades. He hadn’t a conventionally handsome face and she’d never liked men with ginger hair. But Horatio had charisma. His face was creased with caring and she needed caring right now. His eyes narrowed with intense tenderness. And she needed that too. He would lean slightly forward, his head a little to one side, accentuating his caring concentration. But, when necessary, he could suddenly pull out a gun and be determined and ruthless.
She needed that ruthlessness too. She could do without the gun. Though there were times, especially recently, that she felt like killing her son-in-law. Douglas Benson was trying to oust her from her beloved department store, Goodmans of Glassford Street, which had belonged to her late husband. They’d run it together for a lifetime, a happy lifetime. Now that he was gone and she was in her late fifties, Douglas wanted her to retire and give over the business to her daughter, Minna. Of course, that would mean handing it on a plate to him. Poor Minna adored Douglas and was completely under his thumb.
But not Abigail Goodman. Douglas Benson was finding that she was not a soft mark like her daughter. If she ever gave the business over to anyone, it would be to her son, John. At the moment, however, he didn’t want the place. John was a Member of the Scottish Parliament and a fervent Scottish Nationalist. He had a flat in the Royal Mile and only visited Glasgow very occasionally to see her. More often than not, she went through to Edinburgh to see him.
John couldn’t stand Douglas Benson, and was encouraging her to hang on in there and keep the family business going, and in the same so-called old-fashioned way.
‘That’s the special charm of it, Mum,’ he’d say. ‘It’s a Scottish family store where the staff are well looked after and they in turn look after the customers. That’s why it’s still doing so well. Customers nowadays seldom get such personal and caring attention. It typifies all that’s good and valuable in Scottish culture – something that Douglas Benson will never understand.’
No, Douglas Benson wanted to change everything inside and out. He wanted to gut the store and completely modernise it. That meant doing away with counters and cutting down on the staff, apparently. He wanted to deal more with England too, buy stores there and God knew where else. He was like a thorn in her side. Continually irritating her. Goodmans of Glassford Street had been running successfully since it first opened its doors way back before the Second World War. Her husband, Tom, had taken over from his father. She had worked in the haberdashery department then. She had come to Tom’s particular attention when she’d dressed the haberdashery window one day when one of the window dressers was off sick.
She had been enjoying doing something different and artistic with packets of insoles, safety pins and coat hangers. She hadn’t noticed that a little crowd of people had gathered outside to watch her unusual efforts. Tom had been arriving for work and had seen them. Afterwards, he’d summoned her to his office and asked her if she’d like to be a window dresser. She told him honestly that she’d never thought about it because she enjoyed working at the haberdashery counter. She was proud, for instance, that when serving reels of thread, she could immediately select an exact match for any coloured cloth a customer showed her.
Nevertheless, Tom had persuaded her to give the window dressing a try. There were the in-store displays too, and Joyce, the head window dresser, was getting on in years and could do with a bit more help.
She’d helped Joyce for a while and Tom often stopped to admire and comment on her work. Eventually he asked her out and within a year they’d been married.
After she’d had Minna and John, she couldn’t settle in the house. There was a very capable nanny to see to their every need. She had become just an entertainer for the children. She’d tell them stories and do puppet shows and make them laugh. Then when the nanny left and the children started nursery school, she decided to go back to work – part-time at first, and then, once the children were older and settled in regular school, she began working full-time. During the part-time period, she made sure she gained experience in all the departments, from the boys’ department and the hosiery department, to millinery. She’d even worked in the carpet department for a while.
Once she was full-time, she was helping Tom to run the whole store. She was his partner in every sense of the word. She still missed him. She missed his companionship, missed the business talks and plans they had. Not for expanding, or purchasing other stores. They had several departments in Goodmans on four floors. The basement was used by the workmen and joiners and so on, and for storage. Goodmans sold everything from needles to double beds, but they were always planning to improve the premises and the stock and the conditions for the staff. Like Marks & Spencer’s, their philosophy had been that their staff was their greatest asset. Like Marks & Spencer’s too, they provided every facility and help for the staff. An excellent canteen, a hairdresser and a chiropodist.
She, often Tom as well, regularly visited the staff facilities – the canteen, the cloakroom, even the lavatories, all of which were on the fourth floor. As bosses, they had a private lavatory outside their office, but if they found on inspection that the staff facilities were not up to their standards, they immediately ordered improvements.
Douglas Benson wanted to do away with all that. But she was not going to let him. Now he was trying to make out that she was senile, losing the place, incapable. She was not going to let him get away with that either. There were times now, though, that she needed the comfort and reassurance that Tom used to give her. She saw in Horatio’s eyes what she used to see in Tom’s. Oh, how she missed him. For sex too. He had been a sexually active man right to the end. Horatio awakened these feelings in her every time she saw him on
CSI: Miami
. What would Douglas Benson think of that, eh? He’d be more convinced than ever that she’d gone ga-ga – completely lost the plot.
One of these days, she might write to David Caruso, who acted the part of Horatio so well, and tell him how important he was in her life, how she never missed one of his performances. So far, she’d never even confessed this to John. Nor had she told him about how Douglas was trying to make out that she was becoming more than just old and forgetful. She was losing her mind. He didn’t come right out and accuse her of going mad, of course, but that was what he was hinting at. She didn’t want to cause more bad feeling than there already was in the family. John would be furious if he knew.
Not long ago, he’d had to be held back from physically attacking Douglas when Douglas had sneered that the Scottish National Party wasn’t a political party at all, and Scotland wasn’t even entitled to be called a country. It was all ‘up in the air’ – nothing but mountains and a strip of land. And if they ever reviewed a Scottish fleet, it would only amount to a couple of rowing boats.
Talk about her wanting to kill Douglas? John would have killed him if he hadn’t been held back until he calmed down. As he said, it might have been different if Douglas had been English, or of any other nationality, but for a Scotsman to be so disloyal to his own country was absolutely despicable.
Douglas just flung John an impatient look before swaggering away. He wasn’t tall like John. He was stockily built and muscular, thanks to his regular workouts in the gym.
‘Scotland’s constantly being put down,’ John said. ‘Scotland can’t make it alone, Scotland’s too poor, too stupid, etcetera. The danger is that people will begin to believe it’s true. Whereas we could be like other small European countries – full of confidence and with a belief in what we can achieve ourselves. That’s something that independence would give Scotland.’
Confidence and enthusiasm brimmed from every bone of John’s tall body and from every hair on his tousled head. She was very proud of him. She didn’t go along with everything he said, of course – about the architecture of the Scottish Parliament, for instance. When John’s lean face lit up with enthusiasm and his eyes widened and his voice became breathless with eagerness, she never had the heart to tell him she thought the Scottish Parliament looked a monstrosity, especially from the outside. She preferred more traditional architecture. If the Parliament had been situated up on the hill on its own, it would have looked far better, more striking. John admitted that what he would have preferred, and in fact fought for, was putting it up on Calton Hill, but he and the Scottish National Party had been defeated. Building the Parliament crushed in beside beautiful old buildings on the Royal Mile had been a mistake, they both agreed.
She usually smiled and nodded and went along with everything John said. She remembered what an enthusiastic and excitable child he’d been. Nowadays she worried in case other MSPs might be nasty to him and speak to him as Douglas often did. But to give John his due, although he was provocative and often stirred up lively debates, he never lost his temper in Parliament. At least, not in any debates she’d heard, and she’d sat in the gallery of the debating chamber and listened to quite a few.
Douglas and Minna’s latest ploy was to keep asking her if she’d babysit her grandchildren, Emily and three-year-old twins, Ann and Garry. Not only babysit in the evening but during the day – especially during the day when she was busy attending to business mail or inspecting new stock. They couldn’t get their nanny to put in all the hours necessary, they said. She was sure they were lying and they purposely engineered it so that they could say that the children needed her. They knew she would find it difficult to refuse the children anything.