To See Ourselves E-Book

Alistair Moffat

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

Seitenzahl: 432

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Since 1945 the world has changed at breakneck speed, and life in post-war Scotland is now entirely different from what it was like when Alistair Moffat grew up in the quiet Border town of Kelso in the 1950s. At that time the rhythms and practicalities of daily life which had remained constant for many generations were about to change in the most unimaginable ways. This is a book about these changes – many of which have been dizzying and disorientating – and how they have affected each and every one of us in all parts of the country. The main themes, such as housing, healthcare, sport, the media, the arts and entertainment, urban and country life, our relationship with the environment, politics, religion and education, are all viewed through the lens of personal experience. Alistair's own recollections of big events and small, together with other eyewitness accounts, bring these decades alive in a way that no ordinary history can with a directness and poignancy that underlines how much has been gained – and how much lost.

Leseprobe

Also by Alistair Moffat

The Borders: A History from Earliest Times

Edinburgh: A New History

The Great Tapestry of Scotland

The Hidden Ways: Scotland’s Forgotten Roads

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland: A New History

Islands of the Evening: Journeys to the Edge of the World

The Reivers: The Sory of the Border Reivers

Scotland’s Forgotten Past: A History of the Mislaid,

Misplaced and Misunderstood

Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

The Secret History of Here: A Year in the Valley

To the Island of Tides: A Journey to Lindisfarne

Tuscany: A History

The Wall: Rome’s Greatest Frontier

War Paths: Walking in the Shadows of the Clans

First published in 2025 byBirlinn Limited

West Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2025

The right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as Author of this workhas 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.

ISBN: 978 1 78027 947 3

ePUB ISBN: 978 1 788857 77 2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

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

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

For my mum, Ellen Irvine

The memory of her smile never fades

Contents

Foreword: Winter Lights

1 Up in a Day

2 Green Grass

3 Breaking Out

4 Show Business

5 The Decline of Hell

6 Shake It Up, Baby

7 The Auld Life

8 Paper Papers

9 The Imperial Cheddar

10 Last Orders

11 Never Up to It, Then Past It

12 A Woman’s Place?

13 Permacrisis

14 To See Ourselves

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Index

Foreword

Winter Lights

Out in the early dark with my little dog in a deep December, rain, snow or moonlight, ice, mud or good footing, the world seems at once vast and formless yet also to stretch no further than the edge of the blackthorn hedge on the other side of the track. When we head up to Windygates, along the ridge above our farm, the vistas lengthen and the valley opens below. Even though all I can make out against the midnight-blue sky are woods and the humps of hills on the horizon, there’s no need to see it. This land lives in my mind’s eye. Its invisible winter rhythms begin the day, begin another cycle, advance the week, the month, the year, laying down the sediment of everyday experience, the stuff, the habits, the base material of history.

On this cloudless morning, the sun is rising over the faraway North Sea. The eastern horizon glows yellow and pale blue, and on the single-track road that snakes along the foot of the valley I watch a car’s headlights flicker behind the wood of sitka spruce and swing into the neighbouring farmstead. I can make out someone in a high-vis jacket moving around, then rows of strip lights begin to flare and fire up in sequence, as hay is pulled out of bales to feed the stabled horses. When Maidie and I turn south down the long track, I look west to the high country, to the wind-scoured uplands of the Scottish Borders. Up on the flanks of Huntly Hill a pinpoint kitchen light clicks on in another farmhouse. I murmur ‘good morning’. Other lives are beginning their day, waking, washing, switching on a kettle. The darkness edges away, the moon sets, another day dawns and another page of Scotland’s story turns.

I walk back, and after boiling my own kettle, sit down at my desk and turn on the Anglepoise lamp. Until I begin writing in the pool of light, or at least make some scribbled notes, I have little idea of what I think: only scraps, adjectives, images, sometimes flashes of colour and atmosphere, occur to me. Until I start to write sentences, always in longhand, with plenty of scoring out, I don’t know what’s in or on my mind. To communicate, even with myself, I need words on paper, the beginnings of a story.

After a series of what feel like episodes – some recent, some remote, some recurring, some fleeting, some like gossamer islands in the distant past – I find myself in the winter of my own life. There will be no second spring. That’s why understanding the last seventy-odd years is so important to me now, this urge to comprehend something of how with dizzying speed the world has changed utterly since I was born in 1950, a war baby, one of the last of the boomers. I want to connect the great sweep of unprecedented societal change with my own half-forgotten experience of it, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, and relate my experience of growing up in a small town to the worlds beyond it. We rarely stop to notice history happening, the wheel of time turning every day, changing, bringing darkness and light like wind-blown clouds scudding up the flanks of the western hills.

What follows is the sum of a process, a mosaic assembled from fragments of a life and the experiences that revolved around it, like standing in the centre of a fairground carousel as the wooden horses spin, bobbing up and down in time with the jaunty oompah music. This is a personal chronicle of the most radical and rapid changes in Scotland’s history, the dizzying and sometimes disorienting changes that have affected every one of us deeply.

The book begins with basics, with shelter: houses, flats, towns and cities, and how the look and nature of the built environment has been profoundly altered. Shopping might seem at first glance a trivial topic, but everyday habits have reshaped our society. Since 1950, education, the greatest gift any community can bestow on young people, has expanded and then contracted; doors have been opened and then firmly closed again. Television began to flicker in the corners of sitting rooms in the late 1950s, and its programmes simultaneously opened our eyes and minds to new worlds and ideas, and introduced new norms, erasing or diminishing parts of our cultural identity. Horizons shrank as an empire disappeared almost overnight off the maps on every schoolroom wall, and the heavens became the sky as the Church of Scotland shrivelled, its influence all but gone. No society devoured daily, evening and weekend newspapers as avidly as the Scots, but readerships once counted in seven figures now barely achieve five. The story of change is long and labyrinthine – and sometimes unnoticed – but as examples are added to the mosaic, a clearer picture emerges, the carousel slows down and we begin to see ourselves.

1

Up in a Day

Against a backdrop of shining white walls with climbing roses and broadleaf trees behind, there are four photographs taken in the densely packed lanes and pathways of the New Jerusalem. Everyone is smiling, their faces radiant in the sunshine, their eyes set on the dawn of a golden future, a better, fairer world, the outset of new lives, the darkness of the past banished behind them.

Photographs sometimes invent memories. Frozen, posed moments, they prompt us to remember before, after and behind; what happened before the shutter clicked and after the camera was put back in its case, sometimes long after. Wherever the people pictured sit or stand, we feel we can inhabit the background, fill out the wider scene, clearly recall the whole house, every corner of the garden, the park, the riverside path, the occasion, whatever it was that caused expensive film to be exposed and the moment captured. In these glossy, precious rectangles, amongst my most prized possessions, it is hope that was captured, the radiant promise of a better future, one that could now include everyone – or everyone who had survived. And yet I have no memory at all of those early days and all that promise, only intuition, only a sense of atmosphere, one that has never left me.

The earliest photograph was taken on a day of high summer, sometime in July 1950. Beside the shiny, corrugated metal wall of an Anderson bomb shelter repurposed as a garden shed, my grannie, Bina Moffat, sits, almost remembering to smile, peering at the camera through the new National Health specs balanced on the end of her nose, her head tilted slightly backwards. To her right stands my big sister, Barbara, four years old at the time, cuddling into Bina, her mouth half open as through she had just spoken. Her hair has been caught up by a broad ribbon tied at the back, and she stands beside a climbing rose, its blooms at their fullest burst. I am cradled in the crook of my grannie’s arm, asleep in the warmth, my left hand reaching out of the baby blanket, my tiny fingers curled inwards. But someone else is there. As we look at these fading, black-and-white memories, inhabiting and investing in them, we often forget the person who took the picture, whose idea it probably was, who sat my grannie down beside the rose, who spoke to Barbara. My mother, Ellen Irvine, almost certainly framed the scene, insisting on smiles from those who were not asleep. It was a good day, one that needed to be captured and remembered.

About a year later, in the summer of 1951, she took her Box Brownie outside once more. Seated on the step of our house, our address in one of the streets of the New Jerusalem, is my dad, like his mother, wearing National Health specs. This time I am awake, much bigger and smiling as he holds me upright. But under a mop of blond hair, I have blinked at the moment the shutter clicked. Barbara, holding my other hand to steady me, is also smiling, a wonderful smile that has never faded. In a third picture, I am in my pram, secured to the sides with reins over my shoulders and a broad, white belt, and my eyes are still closed, blinking at a brilliant sun beating down on a chubby, round, chuckling face browned in the good weather. Barbara has folded her hands on the side of the pram and her forearms are clearly tanned.

The fourth and final photograph was taken in the summer of 1952. This time I am walking, clutching the handle of the pram. There are tall broadleaf trees behind the houses of the New Jerusalem, rows of what those who never experienced the liberating joy of living in them might have dismissed as prefabs. At least 50 of these little houses were built at Inchmyre, on the eastern edge of Kelso, a small market town on the banks of the River Tweed in the Scottish Borders, probably in 1945, the year when a better future began.

In 1944, when it was clear that Germany would be defeated and that the Second World War would soon come to an end, Winston Churchill’s National Government voted through the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act. It promised the rapid production and erection of 300,000 new homes for returning servicemen and the families they would then have. In a twentieth-century version of beating swords into ploughshares, the same factories that had built artillery, tanks and aircraft would adapt their methods to prefabricate houses. One design (christened AIROH after the Architectural Industries Research Organisation on Housing) was designed to use the stockpile of scrap aluminium that had been salvaged from the wrecks of bomber and fighter planes.

In 1944, the Tate Gallery in London mounted an exhibition to show what these little bungalows would look like, what amenities they might have and how they could be constructed very quickly. On a bombsite in Oxford Street, an AIROH was erected in four hours. So that those outside London might also be informed, Pathé News made a feature to show off the new prefabs. The houses were endorsed by a pretty, dark-haired, young woman whose cut-glass accent suggested she might never have cause to actually live in one: ‘I think it is very good indeed, for a small house, for the men who are coming home and the women who have been working hard in the factories and want to get back to family life. I think it is an ideal house.’

Sitting in the darkness of the cinema, my mum must have smiled at the daftness of inviting someone who sounded like Joyce Grenfell to hymn the praises of prefabs (although the dark-haired woman never called them that), but she would have agreed. Those families who moved to Inchmyre in 1946 loved these detached houses, ‘ones you could walk around, with your own front door and back door’. The former Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock lived in an AIROH in Tredegar in South Wales: ‘It had a fitted fridge, a kitchen table that folded into the wall, and a bathroom. Family and friends came visiting to view the wonders. It seemed like living in a spaceship.’

The Ministry of Works took charge of production and paid for its costs while local authorities supplied the sites and installed common services like water and electricity. There were more than 25 different designs of prefabs but each had to have a minimum floor space of 635 square feet and sections (usually each house had been made in the factory in four sections) could be no more than seven and a half feet wide so that the loads of the lorries that delivered them did not project across the white lines of Britain’s road network, such as it was.

The service unit was cleverly designed and exactly the same in all versions of the prefab. It concentrated all the water and waste pipes and the electrical cables in the same place at the back of the house, making construction much easier – and much faster than the traditional method of laying one brick on another. A fitted kitchen with built-in shelving and units that included a cooker and a fridge was backed onto a bathroom with a separate toilet. A coal fire in the sitting room had a boiler behind it that supplied constant hot water and central heating for all the rooms, at least during the day and in the evenings when the fire was burning. Bedrooms had built-in shelving and wardrobes.

When the lorries arrived at sites, a team of builders aimed to erect at least three prefabs in a week, something completely unheard-of in Britain. With wartime efficiency, collapsible gantries or five-ton cranes were waiting to lift each section off the lorries and set them on temporary rails so that they could be moved to the precise place where the prefab was to be put together. It must have been a magical transformation, streets of houses appearing on empty sites within days, often with the future occupants watching. In one of my photographs, taken at the front doorstep, it is possible to make out the three or four courses of brickwork the house was bolted onto. That was the only preparation needed for building and the sole vestige of traditional methods. All the prefabs looked very similar, painted magnolia white inside and out, and with green gloss for the door facings, skirting boards and other wooden trimmings. Some even came with curtains already hung. The speed of production and construction was achieved on a wartime footing, and the Ministry of Works insisted that ‘the [housing] emergency is to be treated as a military evolution handled by the government with private industry harnessed in its service. As much thought will go into the prefabricated housing programme as went into the invasion of Africa.’

What also endeared these little houses to their new occupants was more than the fridge. It was their location. Many people who moved in, like my parents, were raised in tenements, often with no internal water supply, where four or five routinely slept in the same room and had no choice but to use communal toilets. The prefabs were built on greenfield sites at the edges of towns and cities, sometimes even on municipal parks, and they gave the sense of living in the clean, clear air of the countryside and a new start. And unlike the crowded urban tenements, each house had a small garden where vegetables, and climbing roses, could be grown. It was for many the New Jerusalem.

The prefabs were much loved, but their design was by no means perfect. Condensation was the principal difficulty, caused by the use of asbestos and aluminium. My mum remembered the bitter winter of 1947 when snow fell in January and lasted until the end of March. Temperatures plummeted and stayed low. When my mum went to pick up Barbara from her cot on one of those winter mornings, ice had formed on her blankets. The aluminium window frames conducted the cold and caused the condensation on the window panes to freeze in solid sheets that she could not shift without risking breaking the glass.

Almost all of these new clusters of prefabs shared something, an inheritance from the closeness of tenement life: a real sense of community. Occupied by returning servicemen and their wives who began, at last, after five years of war, to create a family life, they blossomed as potatoes and flowers were planted and washing fluttered in the breeze. My photos show how close to each other the prefabs were and how close at hand neighbourly support was. Almost all had young children or babies like me, and the Nisbets next door were very friendly, as were the Ainslies whose garden backed on to ours. In those days, mums were at home and child care was informal: ‘Can you keep an eye on them while I nip down the street for some messages?’ In good weather, neighbours sat outside in the warm evening air, smoking, talking to each other, drinking tea. Over milk and two sugars, problems were aired and shared, and stories told as a better and different future began to unfold.

Designed to have a life of only ten years, the prefabs lasted much longer. Those at Inchmyre were only demolished in the 1960s, and some lasted even longer. There are still pockets of prefabs surviving in the suburbs of Scotland’s cities, all of them spruce, spick and span. And full of memories.

Two years after my parents and my sister moved to the little garden suburb at Inchmyre, another series of photographs was taken. They shone a brilliant, unflinching light on darkness, on lives without hope, on despair and almost unimaginable poverty. In January 1948, in the midst of another bitter winter, Bert Hardy came to Glasgow on an assignment for Picture Post. With a huge circulation that sometimes reached 1.5 million copies each week, the paper carried photographic features that covered news, sport and more general aspects of life in post-war Britain. Before the advent of television documentaries, Picture Postshowed as well as told, using images, captions and articles to tell stories. Bert Hardy’s photographs were by themselves balefully eloquent, scarcely needing the accompanying words by A. L. Lloyd.

Published on 31 January 1948 and headlined ‘The Forgotten Gorbals’, the feature became enormously influential, opening the nation’s eyes to extraordinary deprivation as it documented life in some of Europe’s worst slums. One of the most haunting images is of Mary, a 16-year-old bakery worker. With a life waiting to be lived, it seemed that her dreams could not escape the nightmare of her surroundings. She sits at a table with her chin and cheek resting on her hand, staring at nothing in particular, her eyes dead, her face without expression as futility and frustration stretch out into an inevitable future. Behind Mary, her little brother sleeps in a curtained bed recess, his stockinged feet hanging over the side. Beside her stands another brother, and across a filthy table covered with crockery and a half-eaten loaf of bread is another sister, a toddler. Their mother sits by the table, having just fed a baby wrapped in a blanket. Six people are crammed into a tiny corner of what appears to be a very small room. The woman looks as blank as her oldest daughter. Details leap out of Hardy’s photograph. Shoes have no laces, wallpaper peels, bed clothes are makeshift and rumpled.

In the article that accompanies the photographs, there is shock, even outrage:

They live five and six in a single room that is part of some great slattern of a tenement, with seven or eight people in the room next door, and maybe eight or ten in the rooms above and below.

The windows are often patched with cardboard. The stairs are narrow, dark at all times and befouled not only with mud and rain. Commonly, there is one lavatory for thirty people, and that with the door off . . .

Living as they commonly do, huddled together with adults often in the same bed, youngsters find few mysteries among the facts of life.

By and large, the youngsters have plenty of pride and few illusions. Said one girl, ‘I hate it in the Gorbals. If I meet anyone new, I have to give a false address.’

Another said, ‘We’re eight in one room. We go to bed in relays. My elder brothers walk around the court while we girls undress. Then they come back and kip down on the floor beside us. The cat sleeps with us. If a rat runs over the blankets, he springs out and has it.’

At midnight, if you stand on any of the four bridges that run across the Clyde into the Gorbals, you see the windows still lit – for when the gas goes down, the rats come out in strength.

So the lights burn dimly all night and they shine on the huddled sleepers, on the delicate faces of the girls, on the ravaged faces of the women who once were girls and on the men’s faces that look like the broken slabs of every commandment in the Decalogue.

Let no one think the residents of the Gorbals like the way they live or are apathetic to any agitation for change. They have an unusually deep awareness of their plight and a hot anger for listless authority.

In another of Hardy’s photographs a teenage Madonna sits on a chair in the middle of a small room. On her lap is a baby, a little brother or sister. The girl’s face is streaked with dirt, her hair unkempt, but she looks directly at the camera with a steady, heartbreaking defiance. Aware of her plight even at that age, in her eyes there is a cold anger. More than any of the more documentary pictures, this one seems like a deliberate statement. All the other family members are absent, perhaps behind Hardy and his tripod, and the effect is to make the image, her isolation, even more powerful.

Many families lived in what were known as single-ends, essentially one room, rarely larger than fourteen feet square, often even smaller. Born in the Gorbals in 1938, Frances Walker emigrated with her family to Australia in 1963. Her rage at her early upbringing burned for the rest of her life. Here is an extract from an interview she gave in 1999:

Can I say now that it was hell living in Mathieson Street? My father was in the RAF serving in India but he rarely sent us any money. We were seven in one room. We had one cold water tap when the pipes were not burst and shared one toilet with all of the close. At night when all the beds were down the only things that could move were the rats and, believe me, they ran all over us. The rat-catcher came one night and in our single-end, he caught fourteen. I almost lost my leg in a rat bite. It took months to heal. We never had enough to eat – to be honest, we were starving. I have a few photographs of us slum kids in the back courts – we looked like tinkers.

Bert Hardy’s photographs are not silent freeze-frames, and the testimonies of Frances Walker and others are not full stops but prompts to a wider understanding of what daily – and nightly – life was like. Fourteen rats caught in a small single-end room must have been only a fraction of the population that scratched and snuffled behind skirting boards and in ceiling cavities. The noises of the night must have terrified little ones holding their bedclothes up to their chins. And when Frances Walker’s cat caught a rat, it will have squealed inches from faces as the cat bit it and shook it, its blood spattering on the blankets. Did the cat eat its kill? Food needed for starving children will have been frequently fouled by the swarms of night-time predators and their close and constant presence behind walls, floorboards and in ceilings must have made for a life of constant fear and vigilance.

The stench of poverty, of decaying tenements and their overflowing communal toilets, was another unwelcome constant. John Wotherspoon remembered:

We stayed on a five floor landin’, so that there could be anythin’ up to thirty-five, forty people usin’ that toilet, so you were aye queued up for it, so if you were caught short – and in these days the lack of food and everythin’, it affected your bowels, you know, diarrhoea and such like – you had a terrible job, you know, if you were caught short, somebody in the toilet and you were waiting to get in.

And when you did, it could be very unpleasant. Here is Robert Douglas’s recollection:

Jeez! The place was minging. One of the neighbours must have been in shortly before me. I opened the small, steel, meshcovered window above the toilet. A breeze straight from the Arctic blew in. As I peed, I leaned forward, one hand on the wall, to bring my face near to the window, better freezing than being gassed.

Inside single-ends may not have been much better. In the late 1960s, I worked with a plumbing company renovating old council flats in the Borders. They had been evacuated, but in some of them the strong smell of what one plumber called ‘pishy pyjamas’ had not departed. Young children will have wet the beds they shared with siblings and parents in single-ends and tworoom flats, and without any running water and only the use of a communal washhouse in the back court, it was very difficult to keep anything clean. The photographs of Hardy and others sometimes show families who had all but abandoned any effort at washing themselves, their clothes and sheets or keeping their tiny rooms tidy.

These images of lived experience are startling, but statistics show that they were by no means confined to the Gorbals or to Glasgow, and the deprivation they reveal was not a recent phenomenon. In 1917, the Royal Commission on Housing in Scotland spoke of ‘unspeakably filthy privy-middens in many of the mining areas, badly constructed, incurably damp labourers’ cottages on farms, whole townships unfit for human occupation in the crofting counties and islands . . . groups of lightless and unventilated houses in the older burghs, clotted masses of slums in the great cities.’

In 1936, another survey reckoned that 50 per cent of Scotland’s housing was ‘inadequate’. During the Second World War there was no house building, no repairs or renovation of existing stock and also a good deal of bomb damage. Already extreme, problems in Scotland had become acute by 1945. More than 120,000 houses needed immediate replacement, 200,000 were overcrowded, 64,000 had suffered various degrees of damage during the war, and with the return of servicemen who started families, like my mother and father, a further 134,000 households needed accommodation. In total, half a million new houses were required, and the scale of the problem was almost doubled when 405,000 more, considered ‘unfit for habitation’, were taken into account. These usually had no private toilets or water supply.

In 1950, a survey concluded that across Scotland, 1.4 million people out of a population of just over 5 million were ‘denied a reasonable home life’. Overcrowding was at its worst in Glasgow and the industrial towns of the lower Clyde Valley. The census of 1951 revealed that of all those in Scotland who lived in single-ends, 49 per cent were in Glasgow, while in Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen only 16 per cent of their total population were crammed into one room. For the first time, the census also asked respondents about piped water, baths and toilets, and once again Glasgow found itself pre-eminent – and by some distance. Housing was an enormous problem, a national emergency. While Bert Hardy’s photographs and A. L. Lloyd’s words shocked the rest of Britain – only 5.5 per cent of Londoners were living in one or two rooms compared with 50.5 per cent in Glasgow – the feature can have come as no surprise to Glaswegians who did not live in the Gorbals or the other inner-city slums. In his Scottish Journey, published in 1935, the poet and novelist Edwin Muir related what he saw:

. . . it was several weeks after I came to Glasgow, when I found a post in an office, that I first came into contact with the slums as I walked to and from my work. After that I passed through one of the worst of them twice daily. For it is almost impossible (or was at that time) for anyone working in [central] Glasgow to avoid passing through a slum on his way to and from work, unless he lives in the West End. The people I met did so, for they lived on the South Side, and all the main thoroughfares leading from the town to the South Side were slums or semi-slums.

After the Labour Party landslide in the general election of 1945, political action on housing was rapid and undertaken on a vast scale. In addition to the erection of 32,000 prefabs in Scotland, more than 100,000 new houses had been built by 1950, and the pace of completions was quickening. It had to. With the return of servicemen and the passing of the Family Allowances Act of 1945, the baby boom began. The number of live births in Scotland jumped from 86,924 in that year to 104,413 in 1946 and then to 113,147 in 1947.

In Glasgow, where housing problems remained critical, politics began to interfere. Compiled in 1945/46 by Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Robert H. Matthew, and supported by the Westminster Government, the Clyde Valley Regional Plan proposed radical solutions. New towns would be built to rehouse inner-city populations and thin out the oppressive, unhealthy overcrowding. In the Gorbals, there were 40,000 crammed into a small area, a density of 281 people to the acre. To the south-west, East Kilbride was designated as a new town in 1947. Its streets would be lined with low-rise housing and separated from the city by a green belt where building was forbidden. In Fife, Glenrothes was begun in 1948. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Glaswegians would eventually be rehoused in these and other new towns.

Robert Bruce, Glasgow’s Master of Works and the City Engineer, disagreed. He believed that the 316,000 new houses needed could be built within the city boundaries. Many of these would have to be in the form of high-rise flats in order to accommodate all those who needed urgently to move out of the slums. Those areas would be cleared and new housing built in place of the crumbling, unsanitary tenements. While Bruce and the convener of the city’s housing committee, David Gibson, eventually came to believe that the tower blocks were the best and fastest solution to acute hardship, they were also engaged in a power struggle. The corporation was determined to avoid the loss of a quarter of Glasgow’s population of just over 1 million – and the consequent weakening of political clout – and after 1951, the Labour-controlled administration was forced to deal with Winston Churchill’s re-elected Conservative Government. Friction caused delay and confusion.

In the event, there was no resolution, and both approaches moved forward. New towns were not only established at East Kilbride and Glenrothes; another was designated at Cumbernauld in 1955 and later two more at Livingston (1962) and Irvine (1966).In addition, a series of what were known as overspill agreements were made with 57 towns across Scotland. Families who could not be housed in Glasgow or the satellite new towns would move to places as far apart as Stranraer and Wick. Houses would be built for them by the Scottish Special Housing Association, which had been formed in 1937 to create a programme of social housing across the country. At the same time, Glasgow Corporation began the construction of four huge schemes on the periphery of the city at Pollok, Castlemilk, Drumchapel and Easterhouse.

By the late 1940s, building was well underway at Pollok, to the south-west of the city centre. It had a huge target population of 40,000, approximately the same as the teeming rookeries of the Gorbals, and larger than many Scottish towns. Most homes were not in tower blocks but in three- or four-storey flat-roofed modern tenements. Work was complete by 1951, and the bulk of the new residents came from the Gorbals or Govan. Many had been on council-house waiting lists for years, and one woman later recalled:

We were on the waiting list for over fourteen years. When you were offered a house, you jumped at it.

It was pretty grim and cold when we first arrived in 1947. The gardens were all bare, no street lights and the roads were dirt tracks. But it was great to get away from the smoke of the Gorbals though it took us a while to get used to it out here.

Most important to all who moved were not so much the surroundings but the plumbing:

We moved from a room and kitchen to this four-apartment. It was great to have hot running water and an inside toilet for the first time.

The one thing that stood out was the bathroom. It made a change from having to get washed in an old bathtub.

These early, positive impressions did not persist. By 1962, Glasgow Corporation resolved to speed up the process of house building, and the solution was reckoned to lie in a renewed focus on highrise flats. Industrial building methods were much faster than the laying of traditional bricks and mortar, but the short-term fix this approach promised gave rise to severe longer-term problems. Like the new residents of Pollok, many were delighted to have toilets they did not have to share, hot running water and good waste disposal. But the tower-block estates and low-rise buildings around them had very few amenities for the community, sometimes no shops or local schools. Residents complained that they had to catch a bus into the city centre to get a haircut, and Glasgow Corporation banned the building of public houses on their property until 1969.

As the towers began to age, serious design faults and the results of shoddy, rushed workmanship surfaced. These very tall buildings, often more than 20 storeys, were unsuited to the wind and heavy rain of the West of Scotland’s Atlantic climate. Residents complained that the noise of the howling wind sometimes made it impossible to listen to the radio or the television, or even have a conversation. Rain did not run off the flat roofs of the towers but instead pooled and created reservoirs that seeped down through poorly sealed joints to create damp on walls. External cladding had been fixed by metal pins that rusted badly, and some heavy, half-ton panels were blown off to shatter on the paving hundreds of feet below. Windows with steel frames corroded and leaked, and thin partition walls meant neighbours could clearly hear each other (when it was not windy), while uninsulated outside walls leaked heat. And as buildings aged, lifts often broke down.

By the 1980s, only decades after the first of them had been built, the towers began to fall. Demolition carried on into the 1990s, and the 300 blocks built in Glasgow were thinned out. Perhaps the most notorious were the Red Road Flats. Eight multi-storey towers (the 31-floor point blocks were the tallest buildings in Glasgow at the time) were constructed in the north-east of the city, the first of them completed in 1966. After a bizarre proposition to demolish five of the blocks in ‘a dramatic explosive display’ to celebrate the opening of the 2014 Commonwealth Games was dismissed after an outcry, the Red Road Flats were finally brought down in 2015. Film of this moment shows an eerie, symbolic effect. Explosions near the base of each tower make them seem to sink slowly rather than topple. They disappear from view behind a screen of trees before huge dust clouds billow upwards. It is like watching the simultaneous sinking of several Titanics – and the death of a dream of renewal.

Despite the politics and the rivalries, David Bruce, David Gibson and the town planners across Scotland’s local authorities acted on what seem to me to have been the best of motives. In order to get families out of the rat-infested slums of the Gorbals and elsewhere, they moved quickly and decisively. In 1961, Gibson said:

In the next three years the skyline of Glasgow will become a more attractive one to me because of the likely vision of multi-storey houses rising by the thousand . . . The prospect will be thrilling, I am certain, to the many thousands who are still yearning for a home. It may appear on occasion that I would offend against all good planning principles, against open space and Green Belt principles – if I offend against these it is only in seeking to avoid the continuing and unpardonable offence that bad housing commits against human dignity. A decent home is the cradle of the infant, the seminar of the young and the refuge of the aged.

House completions were like victories, the daily creation of different versions of the New Jerusalem that my family benefited from. Catastrophic mistakes were clearly made and vast amounts of taxpayers’ money wasted. But the memories were by no means all bad. Rose MacLean and her family had been offered a flat in Castlemilk but the duties of child care prevented her from viewing it. Her husband and daughters went to look at it and reported back.

In fact, I didn’t see the house until the night we moved in. When they came back and said the house was on the ground floor I thought I was getting a back and front door you know – but it was a corner house with a big garden in Ardmaleish Road. They talked about the white sink in the kitchen and the BATHROOM – we only had a toilet on the stair. They were all thrilled . . . To this day I’ve been happy and I haven’t regretted moving to Castlemilk.

Between 1945 and 1984 the look of Scotland’s towns and cities changed dramatically. In less than forty years more than a million new houses and flats were built, 76 per cent of them by the public sector, by local authorities and housing associations. Not only were Scottish townscapes transformed, they looked very different to those of the rest of Britain. Most of the new building was concentrated in the Central Belt. And the proportions are startling. More than 80 per cent of the people of Coatbridge, Wishaw, Motherwell, Clydebank and Irvine lived in council houses and flats in the 1980s. In Airdrie, Alloa, Greenock, Falkirk, Hamilton, Kilmarnock, Johnstone, Glenrothes and East Kilbride, it is 70 per cent, and in Glasgow, Dundee, Paisley, Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline 60 per cent.

The density and scale of council-house building has generally made for a monotonous uniformity, a loss of any distinctive local identity, neighbourhoods that could have been anywhere. This huge construction programme was a sustained, massive, even heroic, response to the post-war housing emergency, but its nature – and the way it looked – created problems as well as solving them.

Between 1952 and 1968, when I left home to go to university, I lived on a council estate built, as most were, on the periphery of a town. But it was relatively small, perhaps only 250 low-rise houses in terraces of four and five with front and back gardens. The open countryside was close and so was the town centre and its shops. Transport was not an issue, and most people walked to work or to the shops. In our scheme tenants competed each year for a trophy for the best, most colourful front garden, and almost all grew vegetables in their back plots. I can remember only two problem families, their issues signalled and symbolised by tall weeds and litter instead of primulas, asters or roses at their front door. But my dad and several others had a word, gently suggesting that if they did not wish to grow flowers, then at least they had to tidy up. ‘Just letting the place down,’ I remember him saying. And if there were any drink-fuelled nighttime incidents, fighting or shouting and swearing, the group of vigilantes used less gentle methods.

A smaller scale and amenities close at hand, as well as community continuity, allowed a strong sense of identity and investment in our council estate to grow. Even if no residents owned their houses, they took pride in them.

In the big towns and cities of the Central Belt, it could be very different. Local shops, pubs, schools and, eventually, leisure facilities like swimming pools did appear, but often too late. The schemes were simply too large for any social control to be exerted, too anonymous to allow a positive sense of identity to grow and be reinforced. As a reporter at Scottish Television, I went with a film crew to do a story in the Easterhouse estate on the periphery of Glasgow in 1981. The address I’d been given didn’t exist. All the street names had been removed from the buildings on the corners, and I had not thought to bring a map with me. All I could see were long avenues of identical low-rise flats or rows of terraced houses and very few people to ask for directions. Those I did manage to stop just shook their heads and moved on. It felt – and looked – like comedian Billy Connolly’s famous description of ‘a desert wi’ windaes’.

Like Easterhouse, many schemes were built on greenfield sites on the edge of towns and cities, and this only deepens the sense of colourless anonymity, of living nowhere in particular. The apparently endless duplication of distinctively Scottish pebbledashed weatherproofing and the prevalence of grey made for a monolithic, forbidding look, especially in the winter or bad weather. Even though the vast majority of council housing stock, with the exception of the tower blocks, was initially sound and serviceable, the townscape of Scotland suffered, and was occasionally submerged. A car journey from Wishaw through Motherwell to Bellshill and across the M8 to Coatbridge and Airdrie can be monotonous, even depressing, and it leaves the driver uncertain where one town begins and another ends. Falkirk, Larbert, Stenhousemuir and Bonnybridge all look much the same, and quite different from housing in England and Wales. By 1981, 54.6 per cent of all Scotland’s homes were council houses or flats; in the south that figure drops by half to 26 per cent.

Change came in 1979 with the election of a Conservative Government led by Margaret Thatcher. A year later the Tenants’ Rights, Etc. (Scotland) Act became law. It gave council tenants the option to buy their houses on very favourable terms, and many in Scotland exercised it. It allowed those who had been tenants for three years to buy a house at a 33 per cent discount on the market price (which itself was low because it was without precedent) and a flat at a 44 per cent discount. Tenants of over 20 years’ standing were given a whopping 50 per cent discount. During the 1980s home ownership shot up from 55 per cent to 67 per cent. By the time the scheme was wound up in 2013, 455,000 Scots had bought their council houses. The grey streets brightened as the pebbledash was painted, porches and extensions built and new front doors fitted. But such was the depletion of the council-housing stock, there now exists a chronic shortage, one that will not easily or quickly be made up. Between 1970 and 1980, Westminster Governments financed 34 per cent of the cost of new Scottish council housing, but the Conservatives were determined, on both economic and ideological grounds, to reduce the level of these grants. By 1986, the housing subsidy had collapsed to only 7 per cent, and building programmes consequently shrivelled.

*

In the southern suburbs of Edinburgh, there exists a gigantic time capsule, a social and architectural palimpsest of the history of post-war housing in Scotland. In Craigour Avenue, in Moredun, twelve AIROH prefabs have survived, at least one of them passed on like a family heirloom. The little houses were part of a large estate of 565 prefabs erected on the greenfield site. Alan Bass, whose uncle was the first tenant in 1948, is the current owner-occupier of number 35. Betty Campbell moved to number 76 from the tenements of the inner city and she has golden memories:

I loved it there as it was still countryside at that time. There was a farm behind us where the cows came right up to the fence at the back of our house. The farmer had a pony named Trigger who all us kids loved. When he saw us around, he would come to us for treats.

The prefabs survive in small clusters along the avenue, interspersed with solid, semi-detached council houses built in the 1950s. All have generous front and back gardens, and the planners allowed room for green, open spaces where children could play and the community could breathe. Behind Craigour Avenue rise four tower blocks, each one fourteen storeys high, with wide, sweeping views to the south and the Pentland Hills. To the west of Moredun runs Gilmerton Road and a deposit of ribbon development that predated the flats. It is lined by bungalows built by private companies, one of several developments in the Edinburgh suburbs. When restrictions were lifted in 1954, the likes of Miller Homes and Mactaggart & Mickel began to contribute significantly to townscapes. Initially, their bungalows were not much bigger than council houses. It was the finish that attracted a premium, with central heating, an integral garage and fitted kitchen often standard.

Other deposits of history can be found in Craigour Avenue. All the surviving prefabs had been purchased in the wake of the 1980 Tenants’ Rights Act. The walls of three were still offwhite (or was it magnolia?), while others had been painted in cheery colours. One was a startling midnight blue. Several of the council houses had also been bought by their tenants. Various nonstandard features like new front doors and extensions marked them out.

The chairman of Edinburgh Corporation’s housing committee from 1962 to 1965, Councillor Pat Rogan, declared: ‘It is a magnificent thing to watch, as I did many times, whole streets of slum tenements being demolished, just vanishing into dust and rubble’ and their occupants moved to modern, immeasurably better housing. Craigour Avenue is more than a palimpsest. It is a monument to hope and decades of determination to rid Scotland of the foul stain of slum living. There were of course serious difficulties and many poor policy decisions, but in the prefabs, the council houses and even the high flats, many Scots at last found dignity and a much better life in decent modern homes. When I first walked down Craigour Avenue, it was a sunny spring morning, and I suspect for many of the earliest residents, the sun shone more brightly than it had ever done.

2

Green Grass

Early memories are like pools of sunshine in the dark mists of the past, frozen at first and then suddenly animated by a splash of sound, a shout, a murmur or a snatch of conversation. For me it was a loud bellow, the deep, chesty lowing of cows in the early morning, their udders swinging, bulging with milk, plodding along Inch Road behind our house, sometime in the early 1950s.

Our streets of council houses were completed in 1952, built on the low-lying land to the north of Kelso. Inch Road, Inchmead Drive, where I lived from the age of 2 until I was 18, Inchmead Crescent and Inch Gardens were laid out on an old meadow, an ‘inch’ in Scots, land once flooded by the River Tweed. There were still fields around the houses, and on the other side of Inch Road, three treelined grass parks provided grazing for Sandy Purves’s cows.

Early every morning, I heard them. Sandy walked along the road with his two collie dogs and opened a wide double gate in the wall that bordered the park. Just as much creatures of habit as Sandy, the black-and-white Ayrshire cows were waiting behind it, lowing, snorting plumes of snotty breath in the cold morning air, anxious to be milked. Once the old man had pulled back the pale-blue gates, the cows jostled onto the empty road, the dogs and Sandy’s shepherd’s crook not needed. They knew where they were going. If there was any traffic, it stopped, and Sandy would wave and tap the backside of the hindmost cow with his crook, just to make himself look useful. The collies circled behind, and I walked along the pavement beside this little herd. There might have been a dozen, maybe a few more. I don’t remember ever saying anything to Sandy or him even acknowledging me. Wee boys did things like that in those far-off days, just looked on, hands in pockets, scuffing along on the edges of life.

Back projection might be at work here, but my image of Sandy is that he resembled Wilfred Bramble’s Albert Steptoe, the rag-and-bone man in the BBC comedy series of the 1960s and 70s. Wearing round, rimmed National Health specs, the ones that hooked around the ears with bendy curved legs made from wire, he was small and stooped, probably an old man when I was young. Like every other man in the 1950s and 1960s, he wore a bunnet, a cloth cap pulled tight to the scalp, its brim outshot, pointing the way, and also an old three-piece suit, and to add sound effects, tackety boots that hit the tarmac of Inch Road with a rhythmic clack. Maybe there was the silver chain of a pocket watch across the waistcoat, glinting in the morning sun. Sometimes Sandy answered the cows’ bellows with a throaty grunt and a half-hearted wave of his shepherd’s crook. I suppose it was encouragement for both parties.