Glasgow: A New History E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 260

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Scotland's largest city has always been one of the most vibrant, varied and fascinating places in the country. This new history of Glasgow begins with the river, for the Clyde made the city flourish. From prehistory to the Romans, to Mungo and the kingdom of Strathclyde, it's a rich, quirky and moving story that remembers the foundation of the burgh by the bishops and moves rapidly to the Union of 1707, when Edinburgh lost a parliament and Glasgow gained access to an empire and business boomed. Immigrants began to arrive: Highlanders, Irish families fleeing the famine, Jews fleeing persecution and lately Asians who transformed tastes. Britain's favourite dish, chicken tikka masala, was invented in the city. Football, architecture, heavy industry, politics and a distinctive sense of humour are all celebrated. Glasgow has never hesitated to reinvent itself – because its greatest resource has always been its people. They belong to Glasgow and Glasgow belongs to them. This is their story.

Leseprobe

Glasgow

A New History

Front endpaper: Plan of the City of Glasgow and its environs (1828) by David Smith (National Library of Scotland)

Back endpaper: W. and A.K. Johnston’s Map of Glasgow (1927) drawn by A. Wilson (National Library of Scotland)

Glasgow

A New History

ALISTAIR MOFFAT

First published in 2025 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2025

The right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher. No part may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. This work is reserved from text and data mining (Article 4(3) Directive (EU) 2019/790.

ISBN: 978 1 78027 958 9

eBook ISBN: 978 1 78885 805 2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Map by Helen Stirling

Papers used by Birlinn Ltd are from well-managed forests and other responsible sources

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

For George Rosie

Contents

Map

1 The Mother City

2 The Song of the Clyde

3 The Pioneers, the Deep World and the Wall

4 Mungo, Enoch and the Molendinar Burn

5 The Rock of the Clyde

6 The King-Bishops

7 The Two Roberts

8 Glasgow and the Godly Commonwealth

9 Glasgow and the Union

10 The Glasgow Enlightenment

11 New Glasgow

12 Clyde Goes Forth

13 Drouthy City

14 The Polis

15 Seawards the Great Ships

16 They Belong to Glasgow

17 Rail, Steam and Speed

18 Thomson and Toshie

19 Fitba

20 Glasgow Fly Men

21 The Clockwork Orange

22 The Collectors

23 The Glasgow Boys and Girls

24 Glasgow at War: the Home Front

25 Glasgow at War: the Front

26 You’ll Have Had Your Tea

27 The Papers

28 Doon the Watter

29 Red Clydeside

30 The Clydebank Blitz

31 The Dock and the Firth

32 Gorbals No More

33 Palaces of Dreams

34 What’s on Channel 10, Hen?

35 The World’s Most Famous Glaswegian

36 Miles Better

37 Honoured Servants of the People

38 Nova Glasgow

39 Envoi

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Index

Map

1

The Mother City

On the afternoon of 30 June 2007, outside Terminal One at Glasgow Airport, a baggage handler was on a fly cigarette break when a Jeep Cherokee sped towards the main entrance and smashed into the security bollards. It looked like some sort of crazy ram-raid. After the two occupants emerged from the vehicle one was swiftly tackled by the police while the other presented a terrifying spectacle. The driver, Kafeel Ahmed, had doused his head and body with petrol and set himself alight. Because he had taken a great deal of morphine, the burning man felt little pain from the flames ablaze on his hair, skin and clothes. He rushed to attack the police. A taxi driver, Alex McIlveen, who had just dropped off his fare, kicked Ahmed so hard in the balls that he tore a ligament in his foot (which still hasn’t healed). Another man had his leg broken in the scuffle as the terrorists fought on and attempted to get to the boot of the car to ignite the contents. The baggage handler, John Smeaton, rushed forward and kicked Ahmed hard before pulling the man with the broken leg to safety. Stephen Clarkson, who was picking up family members just back from a holiday in Benidorm, felled the burning man with a forearm smash.

It was the busiest day of the year, and there were at least 4,000 people in the terminal at that moment. All the while the Jeep was a bomb waiting to go off. The boot had been filled with containers of petrol, propane gas canisters and nails that would have acted like deadly shrapnel. Part of it appeared to be on fire. An off-duty policeman grabbed a fire extinguisher, managed to soak the car to make it safe and drenched Kaleef Ahmed. After the incident, John Smeaton was interviewed on television. Still wearing his yellow highvis jacket, with adrenaline still surging, he was emphatic: ‘They can try and come to Britain . . . you can come to Glasgow. But Glasgow disnae accept this. This is Glasgow. We’ll set aboot ye. That’s it.’

It was not only the instinctive courage of all the men who happened to be there at the time that ricocheted around the world’s media. Smeaton’s interview played from Austria to Alaska and most points between. It was also their powerful sense of themselves as citizens that resonated deeply with communities living in fear of terrorist attacks in the wake of 9/11. At that terrifying moment these men were Glasgow – and Glasgow disnae accept this. Representatives of a community with a distinct identity, they tackled the terrorists. That was it. The chest of every Glaswegian swelled with pride at the defiance of a taxi driver, a baggage handler, a groundsman, an off-duty policeman and several airport workers who got stuck in. But few were surprised. Their city, their people, needed at that moment to be defended, and they did not hesitate. ‘I come from Glasgow’ has always been more than a statement – and much, much more than an address.

Twenty years earlier Michael Marra composed a song that captured some of the reasons for all that unhesitating heroism. In ‘Mother Glasgow’ he sang of a maternal city that nurtures her weans, that nestles the Billy and the Tim, both Protestants and Catholics, and riffed on a dander, an imaginary walk with St Mungo, Glasgow’s founder and the icon who gave the city its coat of arms and motto. A version recorded by Hue and Cry, Pat and Greg Kane, has become an informal anthem for the city.

Unlike other great cities, those perhaps more steeped, even stuck, in the past, Glasgow has no history of hesitation. It is constantly changing, moving forward. By 1980, when the A8 from Edinburgh had been upgraded to the M8, the motorway did not go around the outskirts as in other British conurbations. It pierced straight through the heart of the city like an American expressway and swept all before it.

After the Second World War, Glasgow Corporation did not hesitate to act in dealing with the housing crisis. Slum clearance in the city centre was radical as entire densely populated neighbourhoods were quickly levelled and replaced with high-rise tower blocks and peripheral housing estates. With their inside toilets, hot and cold running water and modern conveniences now taken for granted, the new council housing was generally welcomed. But it also became the butt of Glasgow’s particular brand of humour. In 1967, Adam McNaughton wrote ‘The Jeely Piece Song’. It mourned the passing of the three- and four-storey tenements of Govan and the Gorbals where jam sandwiches could be flung by mothers out of windows and caught by hungry weans playing in the streets and drying greens below. From the twenty-storey high-rise flats of Castlemilk, piece-flinging didn’t work. Pieces went up rather than down, becoming a hazard to passing aircraft or even going into space to orbit the Earth as tiny satellites. McNaughton advocated a campaign to prevent more housing being built that was over piece-flinging height. It was a perfect example of how Glaswegians combine humour with criticism of their city and its people, criticism only they are allowed or qualified to air.

Mother Glasgow’s nestling of the Billy and the Tim is only one of many paradoxes wrapped up in Glaswegian identity. In the past two centuries, the city has become increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan with successive waves of Highland, Irish, Jewish and Asian immigration. Sharp edges and unwelcome prejudices have sometimes flared into conflict, but there has also been a growth of great cultural richness. Perhaps one of the most memorable, surprising and quirky examples is the invention of Britain’s favourite national dish in Glasgow. Chicken tikka masala was created by a Bangladeshi chef in response to a diner’s preferences. And emblematic of a peculiarly Glaswegian cocktail of diversity is the career of the actor and writer, Sanjeev Kohli. He was educated at St Aloysius College, a Roman Catholic school in the city centre, took a first class honours degree in mathematics at Glasgow University, played an Asian shopkeeper in the hit TV series Still Game (itself a cultural icon centred around the lives of Jack and Victor, two pensioners who live in a block of high-rise flats at Osprey Heights), supports the Scotland football team, wears a kilt to formal occasions and made a very successful, and very funny, advertisement for the national soft drink, Barr’s Irn-Bru. Kohli had no hesitation in becoming involved with the life of the city and embracing its collective identity. His is a uniquely Glaswegian story.

For stories, true, false or imagined, are the basis of the city’s sense of itself. The civic coat of arms is almost entirely mythic. Unlike the solidity of Edinburgh’s mighty castle, the heraldry of Glasgow shows a mitred saint holding a crozier in one hand and conferring a blessing with the other. He is St Mungo, or Kentigern, a holy man who may have lived in the sixth or seventh century and about whom almost nothing is known for certain. Below him two salmon make an unlikely leap upwards, each with a ring in its mouth. Within the outline of a shield stands an oak tree, and perched on its top is a robin. Beside the tree is a bell, and below both another salmon. All of these are visual references to events that almost certainly never took place, miracles performed by St Mungo. Below the shield is something he might have said, and ‘Let Glasgow Flourish’ has become the oft-quoted motto of the city.

Glasgow is built on stories, words and ideas, some true, some false, all of them informative, and what follows is a compendium of more words, more stories, that help define the Mother City.

2

The Song of the Clyde

Beneath the high, wind-scoured moors of the Lowther Hills, where the peat hags are punctuated by stunted, gnarled thorn trees and sheep graze where they can amongst the gorse and the heather, the story of Glasgow begins.

Where Hirstane Rig and Scaw’d Law glower over a pitiless landscape, secret streams and springs search for each other. Trickling into the bowl of the plateau, they come together to form the silver thread of the Potrail Water. Out of the northern flanks of Wedder Law, the Daer Water rises and also flows north, its course shouldered and shaped by the ranges of low, pillowy hills. At the village of Watermeetings, the Potrail and the Daer become one, and the Goddess is born. She is Clutha, the mother of the Mother City, and she gave her name to the Clyde. And without the great river, without the Clyde, Glasgow would not exist and would not have flourished. Clutha’s name is ancient, from the dialects of Old Welsh or Brittonic that were spoken in Scotland long before Gaelic came from Ireland or a version of English arrived from the south. In the valleys between these bleak hill ranges, amongst those who spoke Old Welsh, the tongue of the kingdom of Strathclyde, the people known as the British as late as the eleventh century, the name of Clutha, the name of the Clyde, was venerated. It means the Holy Cleanser.

At first the young river tumbles down from the high country and flows northeast before it turns to the west below Carnwath. Then it begins a long meander, circling around the woods, fields and orchards south of Lanark. In a rare moment of drama, hedged by trees, the river roars over the double-spill of the Falls of Clyde before more lazy loops between Motherwell and Hamilton. Then it is restrained, canalised, before it runs through the heart of the city to meet the sea at the Tidal Weir next to Glasgow Green. There the freshwater is held back to prevent the upstream riverbanks from drying out, crumbling or even collapsing. Below the weir was where the meander became a working river, where it was dredged and deepened, and where quays were raised and hammers ding-donged and welding sparked in the great shipyards, and where ‘Clydebuilt’ became a synonym for quality, strength and durability.

In 1854 the steamship Glasgow rounded Gourock Bay, entered the mouth of the River Clyde and ran aground near Renfrew. Its hull was badly holed by a huge rock thought at first to be a singular boulder. The Elderslie Rock turned out to be a geological dyke of hard whinstone that was 900 feet long and 300 feet wide, running under the muddy bed of the Clyde. It was blasted by underwater charges and 110,000 tons of rock removed. At that moment, the river became a great conduit, a safe and direct link between the fast-growing, vibrant city and the markets of the world beyond the Firth of Clyde.

Elsewhere, geology let Glasgow flourish. Hundreds of millions of years ago what is now the Central Belt of Scotland and Ayrshire was covered by dense tropical forests. As trees fell and the crust of the Earth convulsed and shifted, strata – seams – of coal began to form in three low-lying basins. These eventually became the coalfields of Central Scotland, Ayrshire and the Douglas Valley, what would be mined to fire Glasgow’s industries from the eighteenth century onwards. More geology helped build the burgeoning city. Not only coal was laid down in the Carboniferous Period; there were also many deposits of sandstone near the surface. As Glasgow expanded, these were quarried, the stone cut and dressed, and magnificent buildings rose on the banks of the river.

Much more recently, the ice helped the city flourish. During the last Ice Age, ending only 10,000 years ago, a huge ice dome formed over Ben Lomond. Perfectly symmetrical and made smooth by the incessant hurricanes that whipped around its flanks, the ice mountain at first crushed the land underneath, and then formed it. When temperatures rose, the dome groaned and cracked and glaciers began to rumble slowly across the frozen landscape. Like giant sheets of geological sandpaper, they scarted and shaped the land on which Glasgow was to be built. North and south of the Clyde, scores of small hills known as drumlins were formed by the ice. Composed of boulder clay, bits of rock and other glacial debris, they were moulded into rounded shapes. Their location shows that the glacier flowed eastward north of the river and southeastward to the south. Modern place-names mark their location: Maryhill, Firhill, Jordanhill, Ruchill, Hillhead, Dowanhill and many others. At one time, there were no fewer than sixteen Hill Streets in Glasgow.

The city was built and grew on another set of geological consequences. It lies close to the Highland Boundary Fault that runs from Stonehaven in the North East to the southern end of Loch Lomond, no more than twenty miles from Glasgow. Beyond the Fault is another country, the Highlands, and while its proximity certainly shaped the city culturally, its nature also supplied much of the necessary raw material for expansion, especially timber and slate. To the south, east and west, and especially in the Clyde Valley, the fertile farmlands of the Lowlands would feed the growing population of the city.

The barley, oats and potatoes and lush grazing are watered by a maritime climate with moderate temperatures and frequent rain. Most days are cloudy, and sunshine is seen as a gift. When the world’s most famous Glaswegian, Billy Connolly, was asked about the weather, he replied that there were only two seasons, June and winter. But despite the drizzle and the damp, the city has been blessed in all sorts of ways. For 10,000 years and long before, Clutha, the Mother Goddess has smiled on Glasgow’s weans.

3

The Pioneers, the Deep World and the Wall

As well as making it, cities obliterate history. In the millennia after the ice, pioneers came north into a virgin landscape, almost certainly paddling curraghs, boats made from animal hide. The first men and women to see the Clyde after the retreat of the glaciers will have thought its banks a good place to live. Fish swam in the river and prey animals such as deer could be hunted or trapped in the wildwood of the interior. Fruits, berries, nuts and roots could be gathered, and some, like hazelnuts, roasted and ground into a nutritious paste that would keep through the hungry months of the winter. But as they flitted through the shadows under the trees, these people left only gossamer traces. At Cramond, near the shores of the Forth west of Edinburgh, the holes made by wooden rods, the framework that supported a shelter, perhaps shaped like a bender tent, were found. Near them were the remains of a hearth that could be carbon-dated to around 8,500 BC. Nothing similar has been discovered close to Glasgow.

To the northeast of the city, however, one tantalising discovery was made, a hint of the archaeological richness that almost certainly lies hidden under its streets and squares. Near Cochno Farm, north of Duntocher, not far from the A82, an outcrop of rock art was unearthed in 2016. Measuring forty-three by twenty-six feet, the biggest panel, the Cochno Stone, was described as ‘the most important Neolithic art panel in Europe’. On its surface are carved a series of what are known as cup and ring marks, mysterious, swirling designs pecked out with a chisel fashioned from harder stone. Their meaning is stubbornly obscure. They may have been boundary markers, or the shallow cups and rings might have been filled with milk, mead or some other liquid, or coloured with red or yellow ochre in what could have been religious ceremonies of some unknowable sort. The Cochno Stone was first discovered in 1885 by the Reverend James Harvey, who sketched it and published his findings; in 1964 it was reburied by archaeologists to protect it from graffiti and vandalism, and then reassessed by archaeologists in 2016. It hints at a rich but now long-lost prehistoric culture in and around Glasgow.

In 150 AD, a Greek-speaking geographer known as Claudius Ptolemy made the first surviving map of Scotland. Working in Alexandria, perhaps using what remained of the famous library at the mouth of the Nile, he probably depended on military intelligence as a major source of information. Seventy years before Ptolemy began to draw an outline of the coasts of Scotland, Roman legions had invaded, attempting to extend the province of Britannia as far north as possible. As the army tramped over the Cheviot Hills and crossed the Forth, it was shadowed by the Classis Britannica, the Roman naval fleet based in Britain. Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the governor of the province and the commanding general, almost certainly sent ships to circumnavigate Scotland and report back on what they found. Now lost, this important record was probably the source of Ptolemy’s information, especially the names of the different kindreds who controlled each region. Some appeared to bear the names of their totem animals: the Venicones of Fife were the Kindred Hounds, the Lugi of the Moray Firth, the Creones of the Inner Hebrides and the Epidii of Kintyre were the Horse Lords. When Roman ships first sailed into the Firth of Clyde, c. 81 AD, their captains asked what the name of the local kindred was. Something like ‘Damnonii’ was the reply, the Damnonians.

Not a totem name, it is likely to be a reference to what these people did, which distinguished them from the other kindreds around the coasts of Scotland. Derived from Old Welsh, Damnonii means ‘the people of the Deep World’ or ‘the Deepeners’, ‘the Diggers’. A very similar name appears elsewhere on Ptolemy’s map. Devon, or Devonshire, derives from Damnonii and is probably a reference to the prehistoric tin-mining industry. Since deposits are rare in Western Europe and tin was needed to make the alloy of bronze or brass, it was much prized. Large quantities of tin ingots were smelted in Devon and exported to Europe. In the Clyde Valley and in Ayrshire, the Damnonii dug in the deep world of the coal heughs, the seams exposed on the surface. Some were very large, others narrow, and all were in danger of collapse. It has been estimated that more than a hundred major heughs in the region had been completely worked out by the early eighteenth century. The Deepeners also dug for iron ore, and there were rich, accessible deposits at Muirkirk near Cumnock, at Cambuslang and in Monklands. The close proximity of coal and iron created an industry that lasted for thousands of years, ending with the closure of Ravenscraig Steel Mills in 1992. The demolition of the familiar blue gasometer towers four years later took six seconds. Even in prehistory, the process of smelting and forging iron and steel will have been spectacular and the skills of smiths mysterious, even magical. It was an impression that endured. When Robert Burns was refused entry to the Carron Iron Works at Falkirk, because the processes were secret, he wrote:

We cam na here to view your warks,

In hopes to be mair wise,

But only, lest we gang to Hell,

It may be nae surprise.

But when we tirl’d at your door

The porter dought na bear us:

Sae may, should we to Hell’s yetts come,

Your billie Satan sair us.

Only a short distance south of the site of the Cochno Stone lie the remains of another ancient monument: a frontier, the limits of ambition, a product of imperial politics, perhaps even of vanity. In 122 AD, the Roman emperor Hadrian arrived at the mouth of the Tyne to oversee the initial construction of the wall that would bear his name, the largest Roman monument in the world. Before he died in 138, this far-travelled soldier-emperor anointed Antoninus Pius as his successor. And like all successors to the imperial purple, he needed an opening blaze of prestige to establish his authority. But he did not want to leave Rome either, to abandon the city to the influence of potential conspirators. And so he wrote to the governor of Britannia, Quintus Lollius Urbicus, ordering him to march the legions north and bring southern Scotland into the empire. And to demonstrate an achievement even greater than Hadrian’s, Antoninus also ordered the building of another wall – and quickly. This time it would be made from slabs of turf topped with a wooden breastwork and walkway, with a series of forts strung out along its length. Behind it ran a road, and in front a deep ditch was dug, making the rampart seem higher to any who dared to approach it.

Rising up from the eastern coastal plain at Bo’ness on the Forth shore, the line of the Antonine Wall quickly finds the high country to the south of the River Carron. Always seeking clear vistas to the north, it moves west from Croy Hill and Bar Hill before running along the southern side of the valley of the River Kelvin. At Balmuildy the line of the wall turns sharply northwest for a few hundred yards and then strikes through what is now the Glasgow suburb of Bearsden before reaching its terminus at Old Kilpatrick on the northern bank of the Clyde. Only the ford at Bowling lay beyond the end of the wall; all of the others were upstream and behind it.

Property prices in Bearsden might be thought to benefit from the presence of Roman remains. History on a doorstep adds a certain cachet. Less appealing to estate agents might be the fact that one of the most interesting and revealing finds at Bearsden’s Roman fort was the effluent from a latrine. The sewage drained into the ditches beyond the rampart, where it was covered with water (and preserved in the anaerobic mud), and so probably did not smell, except perhaps on warm summer days. Analysis of the effluent has revealed a largely vegetarian diet for the average Roman soldier: oat-based cereal supplemented by wild fruits and nuts such as raspberries, brambles and hazelnuts, probably foraged in the woodland to the north and south. Nutritional habits seem to have come full circle. Two thousand years after the last soldier nipped to the loo, many breakfasts in Bearsden now contain oatmeal and fruits, berries and nuts foraged from the nearby Waitrose on Glasgow Road.

4

Mungo, Enoch and the Molendinar Burn

Rather surprisingly, suspicions of sexual misbehaviour surround the story of Mungo. He was said to have been the son of Princess Teneu, the daughter of King Lot of the Gododdin who ruled over and gave his name to the Lothians. Possibly. Legend has it that she became pregnant after being raped by the Welsh prince Owain mab Urien, who later became king of Rheged, ruling over Galloway and Cumbria. Maybe. He is one of the few actors in these tales who has a faint but genuine historical profile. As a punishment for her ‘sins’, somewhat unfairly, Teneu was thrown off the cliffs of Traprain Law in East Lothian, a citadel of the kings of the Gododdin. But she miraculously survived the fall and made her way, adrift in a coracle, to Culross in Fife, where she was cared for by St Serf. Very unlikely. There, sometime in the early decades of the sixth century, she gave birth to Mungo, also known as Kentigern. Teneu herself was canonised (a much more informal and local process in the early church) and her name, sometimes rendered as Tannoch, eventually meant that she was known as St Enoch. And she had a subway station named after her.

As Mungo grew up at Culross, it became clear that he was different, capable of miraculous acts like his mother, something that continued all his exemplary life. Four of his miracles are depicted in Glasgow’s coat of arms, and an oft-quoted verse, which is included in Michael Marra’s song, ‘Mother Glasgow’, goes as follows:

Here is the tree that never grewHere is the bird that never flewHere is the fish that never swamHere is the bell that never rang.

The bird that sits on the tree was a pet robin cruelly killed by Mungo’s classmates at the monastery at Culross and brought back to life by him. The presence of a sturdy oak tree, apart from being a handy perch for the robin, is harder to understand. Mungo had fallen asleep in front of a fire at the monastery and let it go out. To rekindle it, he went outside and found a hazel branch. And that’s it. Not much of a miracle, not like raising the dead or, much more impressive, turning water into wine.

The three fish in the coat of arms refer to the tallest and most convoluted tale of them all. Mungo had moved from Culross close to Dumbarton Rock, known as the Rock of the Clyde and the fortress of another king with a faint historical profile. Rhydderch Hael was one of the early rulers of Alt Clut, the old kingdom of Strathclyde that lasted until the eleventh century. He was a suspicious and jealous man. Having given a ring to his queen, Languoreth, he saw it not on her finger but on that of a handsome young knight, probably her lover. As the man slept in the woods on a hunting expedition, Rhydderch slipped it off his finger and threw it in the Clyde. Later, the king asked Languoreth if he might see the ring he gave her. The punishment for such infidelity was death, and the terrified queen begged the holy man, Mungo, for help. Perhaps he remembered what had happened to his mother. In any case, Mungo sent someone to fish in the Clyde, and when they pulled out what on the coat of arms looks like a salmon, the ring was found inside the fish. All of which is clearly tosh, and also not very original. A similar story was told of King Maelgwyn of Gwynedd in Wales, in the Greek tale of Polycrates, in a Sanskrit drama and in the Talmudic tale of Solomon. The most famous variant will be familiar to many because it appears in the New Testament as the story of the tribute money. Jesus directed Peter to find a coin in the mouth of a fish so that the temple tax could be paid.

The line about the bell is also odd. It looks genuine, a reference to the sort of handbell rung by missionaries and early preachers to summon a congregation before there were churches with bell towers. So it was certainly rung. Apparently, Mungo picked it up on a visit to Rome. Not likely.

Perhaps the sole authentic item on the arms of Glasgow is the motto at the bottom. Mungo may well have said something like ‘Let Glasgow flourish – by the preaching of the Word [of God]’ in one of his sermons.

Later history and politics explain much about the promotion and acceptance of this unlikely mixture of mythology and miracles. In the second half of the twelfth century, Glasgow badly needed a saint, a very Scottish saint of its own.

On a reckless foray into Northumberland and a siege of Alnwick Castle, King William the Lion was captured in 1174 after an ill-advised solo charge on English troops. A year later, the Scottish king was forced by Henry II of England to agree to the terms of the Treaty of Falaise. It compelled William to become a vassal, to acknowledge the English king as his feudal superior and also to agree that the Church in Scotland should be subordinate to the Church in England and its archbishops of York and Canterbury. Recently appointed as Bishop of Glasgow, Jocelin had been Abbot of Melrose, having been a novice when the great monastery had been in the care of the charismatic Waltheof of Northampton. He was believed by many to have been a saintly man, but in 1159 the Pope in Rome had claimed the exclusive right of canonisation. Since the days of Columba, Aidan and Cuthbert, sainthood had been a matter of local acclamation often reinforced by a vita, a life of the holy man that listed the necessary conditions for canonisation, including a series of miracles. As Abbot of Melrose, Jocelin commissioned the hagiographer Jocelyn of Furness to write a vita of Waltheof, and it had the desired effect.