Tea at Miss Cranston's E-Book

Anna Blair

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 353

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In Tea at Miss Cranston's Anna Blair recreates a bygone era through the recollections of countless Glaswegians who shared their memories with her during extensive interviews. Nostalgic, yet never rose-tinted or bitter, they offer a candid picture of the joys and hardships - as well as of the mundane and everyday occurrences - of past times. This omnibus edition of her much acclaimed books is a feast of history and together provide a fascinating glimpse into the vibrant and intimate insides of a great city in years gone by.

Leseprobe

This eBook edition published in 2013 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 1985 by Shepheard-Walwyn Ltd, London This edition first published in 2013 by Birlinn Ltd

Copyright © Anna Blair, 1985

The moral right of Anna Blair to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her 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.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-593-2 Print ISBN: 978-1-78027-112-5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction and Historical Note

Tea at Miss Cranston’s

1. Upstairs had a Gasogene

2. Daisies Round My Hat

3. No Hoovers nor Nothing

4. A Penny-farden for a One-inch Link

5. Wages for Principle

6. Lum Hats and Leg O’Muttons

7. Do You Mind of Hengler’s Circus?

8. There Was a Slitter in Every Close

9. Looking for a Click

10. Wee Man Round the Corner

11. Slotted into Pews

12. Tam Tunnock did the Purvey

13. Three Miles Was Nothing wi’ Your Gird

14. Chores and No Chores

15. Their Weans Would Never Be

16. Shrivelled Livers and Live Worms

17. Boiler, Steamie and Green Soft Soap

18. Rothesay Was the Big-time

19. Doin’ Business with our Scraps

20. I Got Ecclefechan Right

21. Cadgers and Hurlie Men

22. Don’t Call Me Wonderful

23. Medals Dinnae Compensate

24. All Flags and Bunting

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful, not only to those who shared with me their recollections and agreed to be named in the text, but also to those who preferred to blush unseen under the nome de mémoire selected for them.

I dedicate this book to them and also to Patricia who died during the writing and who, at nineteen had not lived long enough to have a great store of memories, but who left glorious ones to herself for her friend to carry into their old age . . . also to Margaret and John for long friendship and, in the year of her ninety-fifth birthday, to Connie who first called me a writer.

Anna Blair

INTRODUCTION AND HISTORICAL NOTE

There are some periods which become associated with the name of a feature, a movement or a person dominant during its lifespan – the Churchill Era, the Iron Age, the Thatcher Years, the Enlightenment.

On a more domestic scale, when one speaks of the days of the Glasgow Tearooms, the name of Kate Cranston springs to mind, that lady presiding, as it were, over the civic teacups and cakes. She conjures up a vision of part of the city’s lifestyle from the 1890s to the middle years of the twentieth century.

This book is not about Kate Cranston: its pages are simply meant to convey a picture of those years in Glasgow when tearooms were in their heyday, when tramcars clanged and shipyard hooters counded, when some children ran barefoot and others walked the west-end parks with nursemaids, when music-halls were popular and pavements were checkered with peever beds. In short, what it contains are the recollections of elderly Glasgow men and women, of many aspects of their lives: at home, at school and on occasion (just one memory among a host of others) of being taken, as a treat, for Tea at Miss Cranston’s.

Nevertheless, since her name is in the title, let’s set the scene with a word or two about that doyenne of the city’s tea-shops, where she catered for grandmothers in bonnets or cloches, little girls in trubenized collars and, in the early days, for small boys in velvet suits and crocheted collars. An early twentieth-century girl remembers:

When I went for tea at Miss Cranston’s my mother would be wearing a long dress with a nipped-in waist and brush-braid round the hem to stop it getting tattered on the pavement. It was always long dresses. D’you know that when I was a wee thing, of all of my mother I could only ever see her feet . . . and her face. Nothing between the two. I only knew she wore knickers because I saw them on the kitchen pulley.

Kate Cranston’s lifetime spanned all those changing fashions. She was born in 1849, the daughter of the owners of the Crow Hotel in George Square. Little is recorded of her young life, but by the 1870s, seeing her tea-merchant brother Stuart offering tastes of his different blends to his lady-customers at his Argyle Street premises she was inspired to go a step further and open her own place below Arthur’s Hotel at 114, Argyle Street, providing not only the tea but also dainty snacks and cakes, and a pleasant room in which to linger over them. The enterprise prospered and expanded when, as a wedding present in 1892, she was given the whole of the Arthur Hotel building to develop, Argyle Street at the time being the main shopping area of the city with the elegant Daly’s store there.

At forty-three Kate married John Cochrane, a Barrhead man of thirty-five who had the wealth to allow them to move in musical and artistic circles, where they met Alexander Reid, who had lodged for a time with Van Gogh and been painted by him. They knew the Walton brothers artists and the young architect-designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Kate was also now in a position to indulge her ideas for the fine furbishing of her home and tearooms.

The couple settled first at East Park in Carlibar Road, Barrhead, a roomy semi-detached house which Kate invited George Walton’s company to decorate. After a century, the hand of his associate Mackintosh is still to be seen in the elegant and gracious drawing-room, which generations of occupiers have appreciated sufficiently to keep almost exactly as it was originally, with slender white columns, trellis work and stained-glass featuring in the oriel window area, seating still upholstered in Art Nouveau fabric, a fine fireplace and overmantel and handsome plaster-work on ceiling and frieze.

Kate was into her stride now. She opened a chain of tearooms, and, having found the style of Rennie Mackintosh in total sympathy with her own discerning taste, commissioned him to design the interiors of other strategically placed establishments like The Willow in Sauchiehall Street and those in Ingram Street, Buchanan Street, Argyle Street and Renfield Street. Glasgow was in its great tearoom period and Cranston’s egalitarian doors were open alike to suburban ladies, working-class sweethearts and maids on half-days off, all enjoying their favourite rooms – the White, the Blue, the Dutch etc – in the different restaurants.

By now Kate and John Cochrane had taken on the more imposing mansion of Househill on the bank of the Levern, where they employed indoor and outdoor staff and also, once again, the talents of their protégé Rennie Mackintosh. ‘Hoosel’, as local people called the place, became a prime example of the designer’s unique spatial, slender-lined and light-filled style.

There are still those in Barrhead who carry mind-pictures of Kate, living and entertaining as ‘the lady of the Big House’, and setting off for Glasgow of a morning with her husband in carriage-and-pair. Somewhere on the journey, it’s said, she shed the persona of Mrs Cochrane and became Kate Cranston.

Quite a wee madam she was s’posed to be at the tearooms . . . strict but fair’ they said she was . . . went round her places every day and made her staff hold out their hands for her to inspect. People said she had her kitchens white-washed every week. And there was a notice in the Ladies’ Room . . . ‘Would ladies please refrain from combing out their hair, as there have been complaints of hair being carried away on people’s skirts’. Must have been quite an operation to take down long hair, comb it out and put it up again!

Tea at Miss Cranston’s in Mackintosh surroundings was the great treat for upwards of half a century in the city. John Cochrane, whose circumstances had allowed this social flowering and artistic patronage to take off, died in 1917. Kate herself lived to be eighty-five and died in 1934, the very year that fire swept through the grand Mackintosh masterpiece at Househill. Her grave is in Neilston Cemetery.

Present generations can be grateful not only that they can eat in the restored versions of The Willow Tearooms, but to Kate Cranston for encouraging the genius of Rennie Mackintosh, allowing it to emerge as part of the distinctive Glasgow Style, an enduring part of European artistic history.

Having sketched something of the life of Miss Cranston, we can now turn our attention to the many other facets of vibrant life, not only in the city, but in the wider world of the days when she was Queen of the Tearooms.

The days of George III and Robert Burns seem astonishingly close when one hears a man of ninety-five speak with a clear memory of a loved grandfather born in 1797. In this book there are a few such memories, but for the most part it contains personal recollections of events and lifestyles from about 1890 onwards. Focussing mainly on the Glasgow of the first half of the twentieth century, recollections are spiced with the older memories of one or two who are, as one 88-year-old put it, ‘a kick out of the nineteenth’!

Before the turn of the twentieth century, Glasgow was enjoying an industrial and a social boom in a wide variety of fields. Its wealthy merchants lived in mansions on the outskirts of the city, its middle classes in spacious stone tenements of several apartments, and its poor, whose mass employment produced the goods for the prosperous, were herded into homes of one or two apartments without bathrooms, and with only a shared outside WC. These warrens gave children either clean, decent and virtuous backgrounds, or little chance of any worthwhile future, depending almost entirely on the smeddum, health and energy, or lack of them, in their mothers.

After the first year of the new century, Queen Victoria was dead and, with her, a social and moral way of life which had been on its way out for fifteen years. The cheerful and indecorous prime of the Prince of Wales had had its heyday during that tailing-off period and Edward was into his declining years even by the time of his own coronation. In Glasgow, although theatres and music-halls were still popular, there were other preoccupations. There was a lively new interest in political matters. The Irish question was burning in a city with large numbers of Irish immigrants, so also were those of women’s suffrage and the conditions of the working man and his family. There was also, the new film craze which swept Glasgow, bringing over 100 cinemas to the city. But the second decade of the century belongs, without question, to the 1914–18 war. Before it, crowds gathered outside newspaper offices to hear news of its approach. After it, a generation of girls was left mourning the dead boys they might have married. During the war everything that happened was in aid of it, in spite of it, or because of it.

The armistice brought unbelievable relief and the certainty that the ordinary man, as well as his officer comrade, was now surely worth the dignity of a decent standard of living. But the euphoria was short-lived. The 1920s and 1930s brought disillusion and depression to all except a relatively small number who were able to carve out careers and establish business. While their ladies chatted in Glasgow’s tearooms, maids tidied up for them at home. In the years between 1923 and 1938 there was never less than ten per cent of the available workforce of the city unemployed. The day of the Red Clydesiders had arrived.

The picture was not of unrelieved gloom, even in the General Strike of 1926. The traditional humour of Glasgow may have become wry and pungent but it was never totally lost. These were also years of the Charleston and the Black Bottom, the Big Bands and the barely affordable ballroom dancing lessons at the McEwans’ studio.

There were social improvements too, wider suffrage, improved housing and better provision for the needy, with the children who had shivered into the 1930s barefoot trudging out of them in decent boots or shoes. Other events marked the 1930s; two to sadden, four to cheer. There were the launching of the 534 as the new Queen Mary and the celebrations in 1935 to mark King Geroge V’s Silver Jubilee. There was his death a year later and, after the trauma of the abdication of a king well-known and loved in Glasgow, his quiet brother’s coronation. As a final fling before the next war, came the defiantly brave Empire Exhibition of 1938.

As the teen years of the century belong to the First World War, so the 1940s belong to the Second World War and its demands on civilians. Employment was full and the clang of hammers was heard again on the Clyde. Life on the home front was brisk and busy. This time people set about their war more soberly, better aware of what fighting men were facing, with air raids overhead and radio war correspondents bringing reality into the living room. Civilians served as air raid wardens, fire-watchers and home guards, and women who had been ‘silver-served’ a year before in Cranston’s or Miss Buick’s tearooms now rolled up their own sleeves to serve meals in station canteens and church halls. Indeed, perhaps the most enduring memory of war-time Glasgow to overseas visitors was the huge reputation the city enjoyed for hospitality.

The end of that war saw the beginning of great changes in Glasgow. In spite of continuing rationing and shortage, long-awaited national reforms brought dramatic improvements to the physical wellbeing of children in a city which had long been a health blackspot. A restructuring of education opened doors to an entirely new stratum of society and threw some of the old social groupings into the melting pot. Massive housing programmes transplanted people from decaying tenements to new homes with modern amenities, although these were often set in soulless wildernesses with none of the old ‘heart’ in them.

More recently there have been efforts to reinstate community spirit by providing centres, halls and corner shops, in what should have been maturing districts. But the 1960s and 1970s are not really the stuff of this book. The soaring beauty of fine bridges, road patterns and cleaned stone belong to an era that will be remembered by the elderly of the future. Besides, in spite of the great swings of mood and economic circumstance there was, until the mid-1960s, an underlying unity of outlook and a common acceptance of what constituted the ‘right and proper’ throughout the century. When new freedoms lessened certainties, there came to be as many views of life as there were people to hold them.

Many books have been written about the great men of Glasgow, magnates and merchants. This one tells not of their achievements, but of how their nightshirts were washed, which games their children played in the street, how their labourers lived with eight children in an single room, and how their wives bathed such families with kettles of water in zinc tubs in front of the kitchen fire. Much of it is told in the words of those very washerwomen, labourers, or game-playing children who splashed in the tubs, all of whom have delighted in dredging back to mind the days of starched pinafores, top-hatted schoolmasters, young laughter in tenement closes and even the tender memories of two generations of ‘lost boys’.

So, with Kate Cranston lending her name to the teapot and cake-stand period in what was the Second City of Empire, let us turn to the recollections of those whose lives overlapped with hers.

1

UPSTAIRS HAD A GASOGENE

It is over 200 years since tenement Glasgow first began to rise to house the influx of country folk abandoning the quiet plod of life in clachan and hamlet, bent on finding their fortunes in the new manufactories on the banks of the Clyde. These houses supplied a want then, and have done ever since, for even today you would be hard put to it to find a Glasgow man or woman over fifty who has never lived ‘up a close’ in a city tenement. Certainly, of the army of raconteurs for this book, life in so many rooms-and-kitchen was a mystery to very few.

The house where Mr James Shaw was born in 1895 had stood for a quarter of a century before that, and he has made his forays into a long life full of variety and interest from one or other of four tenement homes since then . . . the third generation of his family to occupy such a house.

My grandpa used to point out to me where he’d lived near Glasgow Green, two stairs up, five houses to the landing, one room to a house. I’ve aye lived in tenements mysel’ but no’ a single-end like him.

Mr Jim Lillie, although on the other hand long-since transplanted to the suburbs, remembers his city-centre origins too, and his playing days there.

I lived as a wee boy up behind Sauchiehall Street, where the Rennie Mackintosh Art School is now . . . played moshie there.

Whatever else has often had to be said about them, and how ever scunnered some of their tenants may at times have been, they were, and are, versatile houses and whether single-end or one, two, three, or more rooms-and-kitchen, they could absorb great spawns of mixed offspring.

The eight of us in our family lived in a room-and-kitchen till I was fourteen, and never a day passed but my mother talked about the big house we were to get some day . . . maybe a three-apartment!

I. THE KITCHEN OF THE SINGLE END

The basic unit of the tenement was the kitchen, the single-end. This ‘solo studio’ of the nineteenth century was one apartment, with a four-by-six-foot recessed sleeping area where much of the family store of worldly goods was stuffed under the bed. The rest of the apartment served as kitchen, dining-room, parlour, playroom; and workshop for whatever activities any of the tribe might enjoy.

There was Mother, Faither, mysel’, Willie and the wean in our house before we flitted to the room-and-kitchen. Me an’ Willie slep’ on the wheelie bed you hurled out from under the big bed at night. The wean (that would be our Annie) was in a wooden crib, there was a kitchen table and just the two chairs an’ a bench . . . there was a dresser wi’ a bunker, a press in the corner and a pulley.

Whatever of their possessions were not under the bed were arranged on and under the shelf running along above the dresser . . . crockery, ashets, jelly pan, bowls, string-box and tea-caddy.

Then moving round the room, Jack Wilson’s memory reached washing and cooking arrangements . . .

The cold tap . . . just cold mind . . . was on the jaw-box (that’s the sink). We washed at the jaw-box with water out the kettles at the fire. We’d no range, just an open fire, but wi’ hobs. For lightin’ we’d gas jets and mantles.

Most rememberers though were brought up with ranges, a luxury in the 1880s but, for perhaps eighty years after that, the heart of home for generations of folk. They were simple at first with a basket-fire and side-ovens heated from the coals.

Later you got them with a water compartment that you drew your hot water from, by a wee brass tap. And I mind our last one about 1920 had a black iron hob-top that hinged up and down from the wall alongside. That was called a lifter and it had gas burners and a grill on it and a tap-nozzle for the gas-iron.

And back now to Jack Wilson’s memories of his single-end home off Cumberland Street.

There was no bathroom in that place mind . . . and all the families shared the landin’ cludgey.

Few houses in the city’s working heartland had inside WCs and where there were, they could be primitive and quaint.

My aunt in Monteith Row had a queer WC. It flushed when you pulled up a lever from the side. Then the handle just sank when you let go. There was no wash-basin in that wee closet and no light.

Whether the WC was out on the landing or squeezed into some small dark cubby in a tiny lobby, that, with the kitchen, was the whole extent of the single-end.

II. THE ROOM-AND-KITCHEN

That kitchen of the single-end, with an extra foot or two and some additional refinements, was common to all tenement homes however many more rooms it boasted. So in the room-and-kitchen . . .

The kitchen was still the place you really lived in.

The second apartment was the Room, and as well as being a sitting parlour for Sunday visitors it slept the children, whatever the mix or age-range.

Mother and Faither slept in the kitchen bed. The three of us girls slept in the old brass bed behind the room door and the three boys in the recess bed that was in the big cupboard in that room too.

For its role as parlour, the furnishing about 1910 in most homes was horse-hair upholstery and Spanish mahogany with maybe a good table at the window with a chenille cover to save it from sunlight and hullarackit children.

I mind yon horse-hair that prickled your bottom, and that you pulled out the wee wiry curls from. My auntie had green velvet on hers but it was rough and sore, no’ like a dress . . . oh aye, and we had an aspidistra on a green wally pedestal and veloury curtains hangin’ from rings on a pole.

In winter at weekends there was usually a fire lit in the tiled grate with its surround and over-mantel.

No’ carved mahogany like in bigger houses, just maybe painted wood wi’ a wee bit design. But we’d a brass fender and fire-irons ben the room. Just for show right enough. It was the black ones from the kitchen that actu’lly got used.

Chairs, settee, table, cake stand, cupboard bed, with what one lady calls their ‘chiffoneer’; and maybe in a high-falutin’ parlour, even a piano and stool . . . all of them sat on, or around, a square of carpet over dark-stained floorboards. And that was the Room.

III. THE TWO-ROOMS-AND-KITCHEN

Upmarket a little, but perhaps in the same street and at an annual rent of £26 10s. in the late 1920s, came the seemly two-rooms-and-kitchen houses. They had virtually three apartments and room for gracious living . . . most children of such homes, where the parlour was the holy of holies, remember it best as the scene of their mother’s tightly regulated ‘At Homes’ for her friends.

Talk about the Japanese tea ceremony, I doubt there was any more ritual about that than about afternoon tea parties at our house around 1910. Everything was re-dusted (for never a day passed but it was dusted anyway), the fire and the gasolier-jets got lit and a white lace-edged cloth got thrown over the chenille on the big table. And d’you mind épèrgnes? We’d a ruby glass one that was one of my mother’s precious treasures. It went on the table wi’ a sprig or two artificial flowers in it.

And there was the best china, the silver tea-pot, cream jug, bowl of sugar lumps and tongs, and perhaps even a spirit-kettle keeping water hot on that ‘chiffoneer’. Where the visited and the visiting had aspirations to real refinement there would be a small tray in the lobby for the leaving of the visiting cards.

What I thought was real funny was the way the ladies kep’ on their hats when they were at their wee bits of shortbread, or their cherry cake out the cake basket.

So such a house made it possible to entertain with a little style, with the children perhaps brought in to play a piece on the piano and, forbye the chamber-music and afternoon teas, maybe with a glass of limeade from the gasogene.

D’you mind gasogenes? Upstairs had one when I was wee and I thought they must be quite rich. It was a syphon kind of thing in a wire-mesh casing and their papa made soda water in it on Sundays (though mind he was a kirk elder). Then he put in Rose’s Lime or lemon juice. That was it ready and he used to say, if you were there, ‘Come on and get a drink of gasogene, Hen.’

The main delight of the two-rooms-and-kitchen was having the bedroom . . . the separate bedroom, with its privacy and its wee gas fire with the fire-clay pretzels, its starched bed-pawns and its substantial furniture. A woman (no, a lady now) could fair fancy herself furnishing a bedroom.

In our mamma’s bedroom there was a wash-stand with the ewer and basin, soap stands, tooth mugs and all . . . everything matchin’ in all flowery china . . . even the chantie in the cupboard below. She used to do a funny wee thing, Mamma, she used to save any feathers that came out the pillows when she was whacking them into place with her walking stick, and she saved the feathers in the toothbrush-rack till she’d a wee bundle to put back into the pillow ticking . . . very thrifty Mamma was.

That wash-stand was marble with the back-splash inlaid with coloured bird tiles. There were towel-rails at the ends and a small drawer where Mamma kept a little store of ‘braw’ soap hardening, to make it last when it was in use.

We had a bathroom an’ all mind, but when my granny or someone came to stay, they didnae have to join in the stramash for washing in the bathroom. But what I mind best about that big flowery basin was the fruit steepin’ in it come July, when the jam got made.

Dorothy Laurie was born in 1899 and from the days around 1906 remembers the honey-coloured walnut of her mother’s bedroom furniture, the wardrobe heavily carved and big enough to hide in, the free-standing brass bedstead.

And Mrs Helen Stewart recalls the trim of their brass and lacquer bed . . .

wi’ white frilly material and pawns of hand-crochet tied to wee balls along the bed-rail.

Another down-to-earth lady debunks a favourite myth of later years.

Oh aye, bed pawns. I mind them. You hear folk say nowadays that people in olden times covered up the legs of their furniture for modesty. I never heard such blethers. Half of Glasgow had to strip and dress and maybe bath, boys and girls in the one room. The furniture leg-covers wasnae modesty at all. It was just they liked the frills, and forbye crochet was all the rage. My ma would’ve put wee dabbie-douces of crochet on anything!

IV. MORE ROOMS-AND-KITCHEN

When a family reached the dizzy heights of tenancy with more than one bedroom, and roamed about in four or more apartments, anything was possible in those airy and spacious houses with their fine plaster cornices and good woodwork. There social life could really ripen. Miss Nancy Reid enjoyed her childhood in a roomy city-centre home in Chisholm Street.

We’d a great big hall in our house, big enough for two sets of eightsome reels. What lovely parties we had in that place. I lived there until I was married.

Such lobbies are still unbelievably big, certainly to those who live now in ‘little boxes made of ticky-tacky’. One young mother recently measured her tenement flat hallway for floor covering and took her gizinties to a carpet store. The salesman shook his head.

Away home Hen, you’ve mishured wrong, that’s twice the size of my lounge!

By the time you were into this rent-bracket, zinc baths in the kitchen had been left far behind. The name ‘bathroom’ seems to have had status enough, for in the early days they were scarcely the havens of steam, hot towels and perfume of even thirty years later. Mrs May Milree was fascinated by one she knew as a child in the 1890s.

I had four maiden aunts who lived near Abbotsford Place. The whole house was pretty old-fashioned and gloomy (though Abbotsford Place was a good address then). But it’s the bathroom I mind . . . oh my, that bathroom! It was just a black dark cell place with no light, no gas, no nothing to brighten it except by a wee grille-thing from the close-wall outside. No wash-basin, just a WC and a queer old bath, half built into the wall . . . just a cold tap and a plug. You’d to carry the water in jugs from the kitchen and you’d to take a candle in with you!

And toast yourself off its flame, after the bath, perhaps.

So from one apartment to seven or eight and lobby, that has been the stone, mortar and remembered furbishing of tenement Glasgow for the greater part of 100 years.

V. THE OUTDWELLERS

Not all good folk who brushed out closes, lit wash-house fires and ran down to back greens with baikies of ashes spent their entire lives in tenement communities. Some came in to them from other kinds of house, and some went out from them, when the new suburban semis began to barnacle the countryside round Glasgow between the wars, and from the later 1950s. Maggie Anderson was one who lived her young life in one of the city’s outskirt villages.

It was right country in Uddingston then. We had a grand garden wi’ chrysanthemums and wi’ roses growin’ up the wall. And we’d a kind of ramblin’ fruit orchard for gooseberries and blackcurrants, plums . . . aye and strawberries . . . and there was an apple-tree by the kitchen door. My mother made a lot of preserves and jam.

I left all that when I got wed to Davie and came to live in a tenement. My, some change! But it was my own wee place and I loved it . . . and I knew I was well off by some, at having an outside toilet that was ours alone.

And from six miles to the south side of the river another bride left a country girlhood:

My wife’s family lived in a white but ’n’ ben cottage at the Mearns. There was other low whitewashed houses there and milk floats came in from the farms to the Mearns Cross. Now it’s a big-big shopping centre and a garage out there.

These came new to tenement life and liked it well enough, but others, to whom it was old, left with little regret.

When we had our room-and-kitchen it was aye a pipe-dream that we were to get a big house some day . . . maybe a two-rooms-and-kitchen. Pie in the sky! When it actually happened we couldnae credit it!

When the day of the move came, young Nellie Edgar, fourteen at the time, went off to her work at the weaving-mill from the old house in Wodrow Street . . .

My mother didnae let any of us see the new Corporation house at the Wellmeadow until the day of the flitting. It was her big thing, so’s that when we came home that night from the mill or the school, it was to the new place . . . seeing it for the first time. Well see! I walked in that door and there on the floor were beautiful Congoleum squares . . . pink in the girls’ room . . . the girls’ room! And kind of blue for the boys’ room. Printed waxcloth it would be without a border, just a square laid in the middle, the way you’d a carpet later on.

And of all wonderful things, a wooden bed, after years in an old brass thing!

(Ah Nellie! The world would beat a path now to Wodrow Street for that scorned ‘brass thing’.)

. . . and forbye the wooden bed there was a dressing-table and a wardrobe wi’ a mirror and a lovely new bedspread. My parents’ room was the parlour too, so they had their bed in it and a three-piece suite. Forbye that we’d a real living-room, separate from the kitchen, and a bathroom. No more tin tubs. And there was the garden.

So some moved in and some moved out. But some remained faithful and, when they flitted, just moved from close to close round their own hub. James McClelland was one of the aptly cried ‘flitters’.

I lived in seven houses, all in Bridgeton, between 1918 and 1939. We were aye on the move, sometimes to better houses, sometimes not so good, depending on how we were doing at the time. Mother loved flittin’ and she had it down to a fine art. We were in Silvergrove Street, two houses in Muslin Street and four in Greenhead Street. I doubt she would’ve stopped at that but the war came and she couldnae very well change after that. I mind the landlady arranging about that last house.

‘I’ll put in hot water and maybe make a bathroom in the attic, and put in the electric an’ all, if you’ll take it,’ says she. It was £26 10s. the year, the rent there, in 1938.

By two years later there wasn’t a To Let board to be seen for an unfurnished house in Glasgow, nor has there been since.

Of all the rememberers born before 1940, only two sisters are still part of that tenement world. The rest are surrounded by gardens or landscaped estates.

But the tenements are not empty, for their children and grandchildren have flocked back to redd them up and make their own first homes there . . . all part of the tide of Glasgow folk that ebbs and flows to and from the tenements that have always been the city’s heart.

2

DAISIES ROUND MY HAT

The photographer of the 1880s swoops under his dark velvet cloth and snaps his fingers at the family group. Breaths are held and, as the cliché says, a moment in time is captured for ever, and with it an array of that era’s fashion from infants’ to grandparents’. Repeat the process every decade and you have a century of change from bonnet to princess of Wales’ feather, button boot to pink sneaker. Well . . . you’d have the gamut right enough, as far as the bien-provided were concerned, but for much of that hundred years there was a broad swathe of Glasgow folk a world away from wool and velvet and starched pinafores.

I was reared up in Eglinton Street in the 1920s and it was hard-goin’ to get claddin’ for the five of us weans. Ma went round the toff houses wi’ her bundle and if you were lucky she maybe got a pair of boots your size. Other than that, it was barefoot until you got a pair off the parish.

And another glimpse of garb that was a far cry from fancy pin-tucks or feather boas . . .

I mind my mother goin’ her shoppin’ wi’ the wean in her shawl (there was aye a wean) and I mind the way she swep’ the end of the shawl round the baby and tucked it in . . . She never wore a man’s bunnet the way some did, all the same.

So for sure, you didn’t run barefoot in Eglinton Street or carry your wean in a shawl and then find yourself in a photographic studio all doodied up for a family group. And for the eighty-year span of our direct recollections here, there are brought to mind not only the changes in family fashion, where clothes were bought new or made-up from materials fresh-scissored from the bolt, but also the make-dos and hand-me-downs that came home in the old-clo’es wife’s bundle. To march them all past for inspection would take a volume in itself and so a chapter can do no more than flicker through the memories and frame some of the most vivid. In this one it will be enough to glance at children’s clothing.

The very earliest picture then is second-hand, and certainly not one captured by the camera. It comes through the diary of Mr Walter Freer and by word of mouth from him to his grandson.

When I was a lad going to work at eleven year old in the 1860s I had one patched suit and one shirt to wash out at night for the next day, and I had to mend my own boots with scraps of leather found at a cobbler’s workshop.

The earliest first-hand memories are those of Maggie Anderson’s childhood days around 1892.

I went to school in Uddingston and I mind my button-hookin’ boots and a wee dress down to my ankles. You wore a white pinafore wi’ frills . . . a peenie you ken . . . you’d always a peenie. And I had a cloth tammy wi’ a button-up coat. Then of course you were right dressed up on the Sunday. ‘Every day braw, Sunday a-daw’ my mother used to say.

Mrs May Milree has wistful memories of her pinnies too.

I used to watch my friend Mary Aitken playin’ peever in her lovely pinafores and wonder how it was that hers were all crisp and stiff compared to mine. Then I found out her father had a laundry.

But the lady who had been little May, of the limp and second-rate pinnies, did not say whether the beauty of Mary Aitken’s pinafores came from constant laundering or maybe from getting the choice of the best that came in for treatment.

The button boots of Maggie Anderson’s schooldays were not confined to the pavements of Uddingston and her namesake Mrs Cathie Anderson has a recollection of hers that still draws an ‘ouch’ in the telling.

I’ve still got my button-hook I had when I was a girl, and I can feel yon wee tweaky feeling yet, when you nipped your leg getting hold of the button.

But, better than the outer garments, others remember the simmits and chemises that went under the wincey-frocks and peenies. And the next-to-skin garb most universally loathed was undoubtedly combinations. Miss Nancy Wall speaks for generations of the tormented, buttoned into combies,

I hated them . . . all tight and sore between your legs.

And hated they were, for forty years before and after that. But they were only the first of the several layers deemed essential to hap the kidneys and loins.

We wore drawers . . . just the two legs joined with no middle bit and tied at the waist . . . then top of that umpteen pettis . . . a red flannel one first, with maybe a wee tate black embroidery to it. Then a plain one like enough, and a red-and-white striped one over that. Then we’d bodices with bones in them to support our wee bosoms. Mother thought we’d go to seed without these corset things.

Cathie McMillan confirms that fellow-sufferer’s testimony, and still shudders at an imposition she and her sisters had to bear.

Mother made us knitted petticoats that we called the nightmares. She was great on keeping us warm and she didn’t care tuppence that we looked all bumfly in them.

A unisex outfit of the early century and before, was the sailor suit in varying degrees of chic. Around 1905 or 1906 most girls had those or kilted fisher-wife costumes, but the boys were thirled to the fashion for over twenty years. Two school-class photographs, fourteen years apart, show eight of sixteen boys in one, and twelve of seventeen boys in the other, wearing sailor suits in one form or another, and the unworthy thought occurs that the boys were arranged for the photo by Miss Whatever, so that the lower halves of the suits in cheap and wrinkled cotton ‘stuff’ were hidden by the shoulders of well-put-on wee lads in decent sturdy wool with polished boots and braw-knit stockings. There were accessories too.

I had a whistle on a cord wi’ my first sailor suit, and once, when I was a wee soul, I blew it out loud in the kirk. I got a skelpit leatherin’ for that and they took the pea out my birll!

Older boys at posh schools in the city favoured the sailing theme too in the summer months, and wore high-buttoning blazers and panama boaters with school hat-bands. But three miles from such academies, in the old ‘country’ borough of Pollokshaws, the rugged little Willie Stevenson might have spurned the sailor suit or boater-and-blazer outfits as ‘cissy’.

When I went to the school in 1902 I mind of wearin’ wide trousers down over my knees, and stockin’s . . . and you’d yer jaicket. No school cap nor nothing . . . just a big bunnet wi’ a button.

Sundays went on being ‘a-daw’ well into the middle of this century and never-a-one of the rememberers but drew a sigh at the recollection of Sunday bests.

We always had on Sabbath clothes and when I was fourteen I got a nice fur set to go with my mixed-tweed coat . . . a fur pull-through tie, a muff and a little fur hat with red cherries. I boasted to all my friends in the Bible class that I had all this new for the next Sabbath, and when I came down that Sunday morning in my squirrels Pa was sitting at one side of the fire and Ma the other. I bounced in, ‘My, aren’t the girls all just going to be jealous of me!’

Pa looked at me. ‘If that’s the way of it just you get back up the stairs and change into what you wore last week and see if the girls are jealous of that.’

And the black-burning shame of turning up at the church hall without the new braws is as sore after eighty years as it was that Sunday morning.

They certainly had their specials for Sunday, and Cathie McMillan’s ‘specials’ were hats.