Walking Through Glasgow's Industrial Past E-Book

Ian R Mitchell

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 344

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Walking Through Glasgow's Industrial Past sets out to retrieve the hidden architectural, cultural and historical riches of some of Glasgow's industrial and working-class districts. Many who enjoy the fruits of Glasgow's recent gentrification may be surprised and delighted by the gems which Ian Mitchell has uncovered beyond the usual haunts.

Leseprobe

IAN R MITCHELL taught for over 20 years at Clydebank College but gave up teaching to devote himself to writing full time, and has now published many titles and won both the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and the Outdoor Writers’ Guild Award for Excellence. He is the author of a standard textbook on Bismarck and has authored several books on mountaineering, including the classic Mountain Days and Bothy Nights (with Dave Brown, 1987) and Scotland’s Mountains Before the Mountaineers (1998, rev. edn 2013). A native of Aberdeen, and author of Aberdeen Beyond the Granite (2010), Ian has lived in Glasgow since 1973, and has written widely about his adoptive city, most recently A Glasgow Mosaic: Explorations Around the City’s Urban Icons (2013).

By the same author

Bismarck and the Development of Germany (1980)

Mountain Days and Bothy Nights (1987) with Dave Brown

A View from the Ridge (1991, 2007) with Dave Brown

Scotland’s Mountains Before the Mountaineers (1998; Revised and reset edition 2013)

On the Trail of Queen Victoria in the Highlands (2000)

Walking Through Scotland’s History (2001, 2007)

This City Now: Glasgow and its Working Class Past (2005)

Clydeside, Red Orange and Green (2009)

Aberdeen Beyond the Granite (2010)

Alexander Kellas, Himalayan Mountaineer (2011) (with George Rodway)

Encounters in the American Mountain West: A Sinner Amongst the Latter-Day Saints (2012)

A Glasgow Mosaic: Explorations Around the City’s Urban Icons (2013)

Wee Scotch Whisky Tales (2015)

First published 2005 as This City Now.

This new, revised and updated edition published 2015

Reprinted 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-910324-10-3

Extracts from Edwin Morgan’s poem King Billy from New Selected Poems (2000), and from Hugh MacDiarmid’s poems Second Hymn to Lenin, Third Hymn to Lenin and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle from Complete Poems (1993), reproduced by kind permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

Extracts from Dorothy Paul’s Dorothy: Revelations of a Rejected Soprano and John Cairney’s East End to West End: First Steps in an Autobiographical Journey reproduced by kind permission of Mainstream Publishing/Random House.

Extracts from Ralph Glasser’s Growing Up in the Gorbals reproduced by kind permission of Pan MacMillan.

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon

by 3btype.com

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Maps © Jim Lewis, 2015

© Ian R Mitchell 2005, 2015

To Mungo’s Bairns

Spirit of Lenin, light on this city now!

Light up this city now!

HUGH MACDIARMID, ‘Third Hymn to Lenin’

Contents

Foreword to the 2015 Edition: This City Now… and Then

Introduction: Glasgow Despite Them

CHAPTER ONE

John Maclean’s Pollokshaws

CHAPTER TWO

Govanhill Retro

CHAPTER THREE

Gorbals: A New Glasgow Suburb

CHAPTER FOUR

The Glories of Govan

CHAPTER FIVE

Clydebank: A Cut Above

CHAPTER SIX

Yoker and Scotstoun: Siamese Twins

CHAPTER SEVEN

Partick: Glasgow’s Girnal No More

CHAPTER EIGHT

Anderston: Glasgow’s Barometer

CHAPTER NINE

Maryhill Unlocked

CHAPTER TEN

Possil: Potemkin Village

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Springburn: Rome of the North

CHAPTER TWELVE

Dennistoun: No Mean Streets

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Parkhead: Paradise Lost

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rutherglen Regained

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Around Bridgeton Cross

Foreword to the 2015 Edition

This City Now… and Then

AS A WRITER I have two passions that inform and inspire my work: mountains and cities. Unlike mountains, cities do not stand still and this is very true of Glasgow in the ten years since I wrote This City Now, published in 2005. In that decade it has become evident that the book has become This City Then, and is in need of a thorough reworking.

In this new edition I have taken the opportunity to update the book as regards the physical and social developments that have taken place in the various areas covered. I have also sought to infill any omissions from the previous version, and to correct any errors I have discovered or which readers have been kind enough to point out to me.

The decade has been one of kaleidoscopic change for the city, with its profile being increasingly raised and its achievements recognised at a wider level. One can mention it being awarded the Glasgow City of Music title by UNESCO, Pollok Park being named Best Park in Britain in 2007 and Europe’s Best Park in 2008, or the Riverside Museum being chosen as European Museum of the Year in 2013. The Academy of Urbanism named Glasgow European City of the Year in 2011 and has twice (with the Merchant City and the West End) granted the title of Neighbourhood of the Year to areas of Glasgow, albeit not ones which feature in this book. The 2014 Commonwealth Games both recognised and raised the status of the city internationally. Though not yet universally acknowledged as the first Second City in Europe in social and cultural terms, a status that I have elsewhere claimed for it, Glasgow is on its way in that respect.

Over the last ten years there has been a marked improvement in the appearance and condition of much of the built fabric of a city that increasingly depends on its past to underwrite its present, and recognises this fact. Thirty years ago, the idea of tourism as Glasgow’s second industry would have seemed mad; today it is a fact. Change has been uneven it the city, though. There are some areas which have been much improved, largely for the benefit of the inhabitants, but some which have changed more as a process of gentrification and social cleansing. There are some districts wherein little has changed in ten years, while some others have been transformed almost beyond recognition, either socially or architecturally, during the same timeframe. Regrettably, due to a general increase in poverty in the city in the last five years, there are some areas of Glasgow which have declined further into ghettoisation and marginalisation since this book was first published.

The reasons for this are obvious. In the first place the economic crisis unleashed in 2008 by the collapse of the banking system has put into reverse many of the minimal gains previously made in the fight against poverty. And year on year the madness of the attempt to manufacture a counterfeit property-owning democracy through home ownership is leading to an increase in homelessness and a marked decrease in the quality of the private housing stock in certain areas. The ending of the Right to Buy social housing scheme and the increase in the rented social housing stock can help in this regard.

There is only limited scope for Glasgow City Council to counter these tendencies, but one thing that would help is the gaining of metropolitan status for Glasgow and the extension of the city’s boundaries to include its contiguous areas and dormitory towns. Contrary to the stereotyped image of it as a parasitic city with its population living on benefits, Glasgow gives more, much more, to the rest of the Scottish and UK economy than it gets back financially. Glasgow’s contribution to Scotland’s business rates pool is much greater than it in turn receives back: it is subsidising the rest of Scotland in that regard. It is also subsidising the leafy suburbs that surround it: 50 per cent of Glasgow’s workplaces are occupied by these people, and their wages go outwith the city to be spent. The increase in revenue the city would gain from including within its boundaries the rich suburbs – and their council tax base – would be one step in the right direction. I have suggested that Clydebank and Rutherglen should be part of Glasgow; so too should East Dunbartonshire and East Renfrewshire, two of the richest parts of Scotland. This would create a city of about one million people, which would be able to deal better with its social problems than at present, and would also be a much bigger hitter for its interests on the national and international stage.

In his book The Tenement: A Way of Life (1979), Frank Worsdall suggested that Glasgow was, ‘a city of desolation, devoid of [the] community spirit which used to be so strong, but above all a city devoid of pride’. Worsdall was a man who did much in the campaign against the wanton destruction of Glasgow’s built heritage, seeing the link between physical environment and community, and his impact has been great and beneficial. But I doubt that his picture of a Glasgow devoid of community spirit and pride was true then, and it is certainly not true three-and-a-half decades later.

Attitudes as well as buildings have improved in the last decade or more, as the incredible success of the initially modest Doors Open Day shows. Started as a minor event where one could see inside certain iconic Glasgow buildings, it has grown into a major weeklong festival with associated walks and talks. The great improvement in facilities, such as walking and cycle tracks, and the publication by the City Council – and other organisations – of a whole stream of heritage trails is also testimony to an increased interest, and pride, in Glasgow’s history and heritage. When I initially wrote this book, I hoped it would encourage the more adventurous to explore what might be termed the more abrasive areas of the city, though I realised that for most readers the book would represent an armchair journey only. But people are increasingly to be found wandering in Govan, Bridgeton and the other areas described in this book, and some have noted – and remarked to me – that wandering about with fingers and thumbs in various pages was a nuisance. I have therefore summarized ‘Suggested Walks’ at the end of each chapter so that, after reading, the explorer has a helpful précis to follow.

The aim of this book, as with the other urban works I have written, is not only to inform and interest readers and potential explorers, but to raise the profile of areas that are in danger of being forgotten as more salubrious parts of Glasgow receive all the attention – areas often dismissed as being of little interest and with little worth saving. Also, I have given myself the role of Old Mortality of the working class, trying to help keep alive the memory of the martyrs who in the past fought for a better society. They lost their battle, that cannot be denied, but an updated version of their message and ideals is increasingly important in a world that appears, lemming-like, to be wedded to a now twice-failed philosophy of free-marketeering that is leading us, not into the 21st century, but back to the worst excesses of the 19th.

Ian R Mitchell

April 2015

INTRODUCTION

Glasgow Despite Them

AS MOUNTAINS CAN be seen as the supreme work of nature, so is the city the greatest work of human geology, the high point of social and cultural evolution. For the Greeks and Romans the polis was the social ideal and the citizen its representative. For the early and later Christians, Heaven was a city, and in the Renaissance the city-state embodied the humanistic strivings of the era. For the Victorians too, despite the development of rural romanticism, civic pride was a central driving force in their achievements.

A great city (the Germans use the term Weltstadt) is qualitatively different from a small one: a critical mass is needed to transform the parochial into the cosmopolitan – though other things are needed too. Not every big city is a Weltstadt, indeed most are not. A Weltstadt is one which has had a clear impact on world history, and where the main issues of its epoch – intellectual, social and political – have been posed. James Watt’s invention here of the steam engine and the launching of the industrialisation and urbanisation of the Western world alone would make Glasgow a Weltstadt. But we should not forget that, though now small on the city scale, at the beginning of the 20th century, when it produced two British Prime Ministers (Bonar Law and Campbell-Bannerman), Glasgow was in the top ten metropolises in Europe. Over one million people then lived in the Second City of the Empire. The former Second City may now only be fourth in the United Kingdom after Birmingham and Manchester; but they were never world cities. Edinburgh, however, was – though that was back in the 18th century.

I appreciated Glasgow – though not uncritically – before it was Miles Better. I moved here over 40 years ago when it appeared as if the city was dying. Deindustrialisation had begun, as had depopulation. The city had a very negative image and even amongst its own population low civic esteem was prevalent. The buildings were still being indiscriminately flattened and I recall that there were only a handful of them being stone-cleaned and restored. The architecture (mainly in its Victorian expressions) fascinated me. The city’s skyline against the ever-varying cloud patterns of its dominant southwesterlies created drama that constantly drew me onto the city street. I grew to appreciate the blue-black sky against the multistorey blocks of the Red Road, dawn emerging behind the Necropolis in winter, and Park Circus glowing on a summer’s evening, as much as I did a Cuillin sunset, or morning on the winter plateau of the Cairngorms.

The culture of Glasgow also attracted me, and not just in the availability of theatre and art, things belatedly recognised when Glasgow became European City of Culture in 1990 and City of Architecture in 1999. Glasgow is probably the only place in Britain where, even imperfectly, there is a working-class cultural dominance, which constantly refers back to itself and its own history rather than to the rural hinterland of its origins, as the working-class culture of Aberdeen, for example, tends to do. This is not to exaggerate and elevate the consciousness of the Glasgow workers to something greater than it is or was, but still this is a city dominated by its working class and the history of their organisations and struggles. Often this is forgotten and sterrheid schmaltz is passed off as Glasgow working-class culture.

‘The glory of Glasgow is in what the unknown working-class districts contain,’ said James Hamilton Muir in Glasgow in 1901, written to mark the Empire Exhibition of that year, when the city was at its apogee. Although that book did not quite live up to its promise of revealing these glories, I take its comment as my starting point.

Walking Through Glasgow’s Industrial Past looks at the development of some of the main working-class areas of Glasgow from their origins till the time when Glasgow was a world city, and follows their subsequent evolution. Most of these areas were independent communities, swallowed up by Glasgow’s growth and to some extent left behind by its decline, and to the familiar pattern of inner-city decay. Most, too, still retain their local identities. I have chosen areas that have a story to tell in relation to the history of the Glasgow working class; its industries, struggles, organisations and notable personalities. In addition I am convinced that the social significance of areas like Govan, Bridgeton and Springburn, along with the other inner-city districts treated in this work, is in many cases matched by their little-known historical and architectural heritage.

The experience of urban rambling is sadly underrated, and mainly limited to the obvious tourist cities. This was not always the case: before 1950, exploration in our industrial cities was more widespread. In Glasgow, for example, there are many books from half a century ago and more, giving its inhabitants tips about, and guides to, places to walk. James Cowan’s From Glasgow’s Treasure Chest (1933) is an example of a genre that goes back at least to John Tweed’s Guide to Glasgow and the Clyde of 1872. However, the rise of the motor car – and possibly the decline of civic pride in our industrial cities which have undergone painful transformation in the last half century as industry and population moved out – seemed to have all but killed off this tradition of urban walking, and writing about urban walking. With the urban renaissance going on around us in our increasingly post-industrial cities, including Glasgow, there are signs of a welcome reinvention of this tradition.

Glasgow, like many big cities, resembles a series of medium-sized towns, whose inhabitants overlap in the city centre, or in places such as football grounds. Even more so in the days when industries were identified with areas, and inhabitants of specific areas tended to work locally. This multiplicity of apparent parochialisms is overlain, however, with a very strong sense of city identity. Whether from Park-head or Partick, the ruling motto is ‘Glasgow belongs to me’ – and there are no no-go areas for the Glasgow working class. In Edinburgh, on the other hand, the city centre belongs to the middle classes and to the tourists, the working class remaining ghettoed in the outer districts. I recall being in Rogano’s, one of Glasgow’s top restaurants, when a punter entered, and, on discovering the establishment did not sell Tennents lager, left, but with the dismissive comment to the waiter that ‘Ye could dae wi a band in here, son, tae liven things up’. The restaurant was at fault, not him.

Dr Johnson, when he visited Scotland in the mid-18th century, said that most Scots knew as little of the Highlands as they did of Borneo. The same might be said today about Glasgow, not only of Glasgow’s increasing tourist traffic, but of many of its own inhabitants – especially its suburban ones. They may well be familiar with the West End, or the city centre and Merchant City, but with little else. The city limits are the new Borneo, ignored, or driven through at speed. Johnson also said of the Highlanders, ‘All they have left is their language and their poverty,’ and many might be tempted to repeat this of Govan or Bridgeton today. It was not true for the Highlanders 200 years ago, but Johnson’s intellectual limitations prevented him seeing this, and neither is it true for the inhabitants of Glasgow’s Victorian and Edwardian industrial areas today. TC Smout, a historian I admire, could print a photograph of Ibrox Stadium in 1921 in his Century ofthe Scottish People, and caption it ‘Ibrox in its Urban Desert’. One would have to enquire what Smout knew of Govan when he wrote this. He was clearly ignorant of Govan’s Gaelic Choir, its 250-yearold Govan Fair, or its unique collection of incised medieval sculpture in Govan Old Kirk. Govan, or Bridgeton, or Springburn – all these working-class areas had choirs, clubs, bands, societies and a richer cultural life, one would say without hesitation, than many a suburban development.

Finding this world can be adventurous. While much can be assimilated from reading, it is by wandering around on foot you get a feel for a place. Walter Benjamin wrote of his urban rambles in inter-war Paris that he was ‘botanising the asphalt’. I see my urban walking as ‘politicising the pavements’. There is an undeniable edge to walking in Glasgow because of the proximity of different social classes in certain borderlands. There are places where you can turn left or right from pub, shop, café – even a tenement close – and find yourself in a seemingly different world. In one direction you can be somewhere where apartments cost £500,000 and in another direction, within a few steps, nothing seems to cost more than £1. Redevelopment has created areas where the two worlds are intermingled, without apparently fusing, as for example in Calton. It is in areas like this that you realise the accuracy of what Baudelaire, a dedicated urban walker, said: ‘What are the dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilisation?’ In an age of increasing painting-by-numbers travel, the urban edge has a claim to being one of the remaining frontiers.

In most areas though, urban geography separates, rather than mingles, social classes. Walking about, you see how urban planners and consumer ‘choice’ have largely segregated working-class from middle-class areas by a series of rivers, canals, railways (hence the phrase ‘wrong side of the tracks’) and larger roads, almost as complete as any apartheid. Parks also tend to enforce social segregation, establishing an acceptable physical distance between high- and low-income social groups. Working-class areas, however, tend to flow more into one another, do not tend to be so brutally divided from each other as they are from the middle-class areas, but pounding the asphalt you soon realise that districts that appear to coalesce are sharply defined, in a way that driving or going by bus does not reveal.

The identity of specific areas is created in many ways. Of course, there is the labeling established by libraries, post offices, street names, names of parks and schools, which tells you that you are in Govan or Gorbals. Wall murals and gang slogans are another way of defining territory. People meeting in cafés, pubs and shops define a geosocial nexus, as did, in the past, local workplaces. The physical and the mental combine to produce definite quartiers. People know where they are. Everyone will tell you that the railway at Bellgrove station divides Dennistoun from the Gallowgate. I stood on one side of the road photographing the high flats of Pollokshaws on the other, and was informed by someone that where I was standing wasn’t the Shaws – though I was only across the road from what I photographed. At meetings I attended over the restoration of Maryhill Burgh Halls, the locals discoursed intensely over not only what was Maryhill, but of the boundaries of its subdivisions, Gairbraid, Wyndford and Cadder.

I have been discovering this city for 40 years. William Faulkner, the Mississippi novelist, said he would never exhaust his postage stamp of southern soil; I feel it would take several lifetimes to exhaust Glasgow, which still surprises, amazes, delights and angers in turn. These are all emotions I would wish to hold on to and which are stimulated by residence here.

In 1951 Glasgow (or ‘The Dear Green Place,’ according to a possible translation of its original Gaelic name of Cathures) still had over a million people. Since the 1960s Glasgow has hemorrhaged population: today there are around 600,000 inhabitants. Over a period of four decades Glasgow has lost population at a rate of almost 10,000 a year. Put another way, that means that in each decade since 1970, Glasgow lost more of its population than the entire Highlands during the Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries. There are signs, however, that this fall is bottoming out: 2003 was the first year for over three decades in which the city’s population did not decline.1 We get volumes of poetry about the Highland Clearances; but where are the sonnets to the silent stones of Springburn? True, the population of Springburn or Govan or Bridgeton was not forced onto boats and didn’t have their roofs burned over their heads, but for most there was no alternative to leaving. If all had stayed, today Glasgow’s unemployment rate would be on the levels of Calcutta or Cairo.

Much of the skilled working class was forced to leave the city to find work in other parts of Scotland or abroad, but much of the upper and middle classes left by choice. Unwilling to pay Glasgow’s rates, and later council tax, and unwilling to have their children mix with Mungo’s bairns, these people moved out to the suburbs, through still parasiting on the city. Half of Glasgow’s working population live outwith the city boundaries, many are actually employed by the City Council, and these middle classes are disproportionate users of the city’s cultural and other facilities. Today Glasgow is a city of lower professionals such as teachers, social workers and other intellectual and cultural workers, and of unskilled workers and the increasingly hereditary underclass. Its industrial base has declined to about 30,000 employees and its industrial glory has gone forever. It is a Naples of the North.

Despite being abandoned by its own bourgeoisie and middle class (with the exception of its intellectual sector, which embraces working-class cultural and political values to a great extent), and despite the machinations of the Edinburgh establishment in issues like boundary revisions, Glasgow has come through a period of economic decline alive and moderately kicking. Glasgow may not have flourished, but it has survived – despite them, and at least in part because of the resilience bred of its working-class culture. I said previously that the silent stones of Springburn have not inspired any sonnets, but they and the others of this city have inspired this book. I hope it will light up this city now, and open many eyes to its limitless and unending fascination.

1 Note to the 2015 Edition

This trend has continued. The census of 2011 showed the first rise in Glasgow’s population since 1951, of about 25,000 people, half of whom were immigrants to what has always been a city of immigrants. However, the main strategy to be pursued to increasing the city’s resident population should be that of incorporating the contiguous urban districts in a Metropolitan Glasgow.

CHAPTER ONE

John Maclean’s Pollokshaws

ON 1 DECEMBER 1923, 5,000 people marched four miles south from Eglinton Toll in Glasgow to Eastwood cemetery, passing through the district of Pollokshaws. Possibly the most loved – and probably also the most hated – man in Scotland, John Maclean, had died. Another 10,000 lined the streets to pay tribute to a person whose life ended prematurely at 44 from overwork, the effects of imprisonment and – eventually – from near-starvation. Fifty years thereafter, in 1973, a memorial was erected near the Old Town House of Pollokshaws, to the district’s most famous son, which stated simply:

In Memory of John Maclean

Born in Pollokshaws on 24 August 1879

Died 30 November 1923

Famous pioneer of working class education he forged the Scottish link in the golden chain of world socialism.

When Maclean was born, Pollokshaws was a village, though an expanding one, still outwith Glasgow’s city boundaries: in fact it was in the Eastwood district of Renfrewshire. Though its origins go back to medieval times, it began to assume importance in the later 18th century as a textile-weaving town, using the waterpower of the River Cart and its subsidiary, the Auldhouse Burn. By the mid-19th century, several weaving factories had been established in the village as well as print and dye works, the Auldhouse and Cart often running red with the dyes poured into them. It was never a classic tenement area, but a mix of pre- and post-industrial and semirural buildings, many of which were in worse condition than the tenements of areas like Govan and Bridgeton.

John MacLean’s funeral, 1923: This picture shows part of the huge crowd that gathered to pay their respects to Maclean. The coffin is leaving Auldhouse Road and one of the pallbearers was James Maxton.

Pollokshaws

Pollokshaws Route Summary

1Take a train to Pollokshaws West.

2Walk down Pollokshaws Road to the Round Toll.

3Walk up Shawbridge Street to Christian Street (Sir John Maxwell Primary School and the Burgh Hall).

4Proceed past the library to the Maclean memorial and the Old Town House.

5Walk up Shawhill Road to the four multi-storey flats to take in the fine view, before heading to Pollokshaws East station, or go back to Pollokshaws Road, to Pollok Country Park (The Burrell Collection, Pollok House).

Approximate route time: 1.5 hours

The main landed family in this area were the Maxwells of Pollok, whose mansion house lay in what is now Pollok Park to the west of ‘the Shaws’. Though landed proprietors, the Maxwells, like many others of their class, eventually became more dependent on their industrial than their agricultural wealth, and they opened or leased many coal mines on their lands and took an active part in developing the textile industries of Pollokshaws itself. When Maclean was born the Maxwells still wielded enormous power in the burgh as employers, kirk patrons and as office-bearers on the burgh council and its various agencies. This only really began to decline when the Shaws was annexed to Glasgow in 1912. The Maxwell family on their adjoining estate lived on almost exactly the same amount of land as was occupied by the 12,000 people of the Shaws: such was the wealth gap in Victorian Britain. Incidentally, Maclean approved of the annexation of the Shaws by Glasgow. Indeed, one of his constant political demands was the extension of the city boundaries to include its contiguous urban areas: a demand as relevant today as it was 100 years ago.

Maclean was born at 59 King Street, just south of the Shawbrig over the Cart, and a street now subsumed by Shawbridge Road. His parents were both immigrants to Pollokshaws, and both victims of the process of clearance and famine that drove many Highlanders to come to Glasgow in the mid-19th century. His father, Daniel, was a potter who came to Glasgow from Mull, after a spell working at Bo’ness. He worked in the Victoria Pottery of Lockhart and Sons in Cogan Street, a couple of minutes walk from King Street: the works opened in 1855 and finally closed in 1952. Daniel died in 1888 from silicosis (‘potter’s lung’). The Victoria Pottery occupied the land now given over to the car park of the Auldhouse Retail Park.

Daniel’s death left John’s mother, Anne, to look after four children. Anne had married Daniel at the nearby mining village of Nitshill in 1867. As a child Anne had walked with her mother, neither speaking a word of English, from Corpach (near Fort William) to join her own father working as a quarryman in Paisley. She had been a weaver before marriage and resumed this trade as a widow at the Auldfield Mill, which lay just across the road in Cogan Street from where her husband Daniel had worked. The mill was opened by John Cogan in 1851, and occupied the present vacant lot next to the Comet store car park. The village character of the Shaws at this time was emphasised by the fact that the Macleans’ Church, the Original Secession Church, lay just round the corner from Cogan Street, in Shawbridge Street. The building is presently the parish kirk of Pollokshaws. The Shaws was a small world in those days, with the part south of the Shawbrig where the Macleans lived, worked and prayed being almost a village within a village.

Religion played a far greater part in Victorian working-class life than it subsequently has, and in the Shaws there were ten churches, a Catholic one, and the others representing every variety of Protestant denomination: Established Kirk, Free Kirk, various Secession Churches and even a Methodist chapel. The 1895 street map of the burgh also shows a dozen public houses in the short stretch between the Old Town House and the Shawbrig, and the pub was the other pole of working-class life to the kirk in the years before 1900. Maclean was to become a fierce opponent both of religion and of alcohol (though he was never a campaigning teetotaler, seeing drunkenness as the result, not the cause, of working-class misery). He looked to provide the working man with better fare for mind and body – working-class education in Marxist political and economic principles – and Maclean spent his free time not in the kirk or the pub but in Pollokshaws Public Library. Though his boyhood Calvinism lapsed, his associated belief in the overriding importance of education never waned. Calvinists believed a study of the Bible must lead to God; with equal fervour Maclean believed the study of Marx must lead to socialism. Maclean is often portrayed as a violent revolutionary. In fact he believed that Marxist education would eventually lead to a peaceful triumph for socialism at the ballot box, and that violence need only be used in self-defence.

Maclean’s own education was interesting. He first attended Pollok Academy, which had been established as an elementary school through the efforts of the Burgh council and Sir John Maxwell, 8th Bart. This was built in 1856 and was part designed by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson. It lay on Pollokshaws Road, just opposite the present entrance to Pollok Park, on the presently vacant site south of the Burgh Hall. It was later converted to a secondary school, and eventually demolished in the 1960s. This school was again only a couple of minutes from the Macleans’ King Street home – though for his secondary education John had to leave the Shaws and go to Queens Park Secondary. But this did not end his connection with the schools and schoolmasters of Pollokshaws.

Maclean undertook his teacher’s training at the Free Kirk Seminary at Trinity in Glasgow’s Park Circus area from 1898–1900; he walked from the Shaws to Trinity every day, a round distance of ten miles. Later he did his MA via evening classes at Glasgow University, again using shanks’ pony, apparently in a deliberate attempt to maintain his fitness, as well as to save cash. His father’s death and his brother’s developing tuberculosis had a deep effect on him. He worked as a message boy for various shops in the Shaws and also as a caddie on the nearby Thornliebank Golf Course, which doubtless developed his pedestrian abilities, as did his postie round on student holidays. Maclean was a typical lapsed Calvinist in that he could not be idle; he always had to be doing something. On the few short holidays he took in his life, he usually fretted to return to his propaganda work in Glasgow.

Subsequent to his father’s death, followed by the marriage of his sisters and his brother’s emigration to South Africa, Maclean moved with his mother to Low Cartcraigs in the Shaws. This was a small cluster of pre-industrial housing and workshops, such as a smiddy, which lay across Pollokshaws Road (between the road and the railway) from the Old Toll House. Anne had given up work in the mill, and took in a lodger as well as having John’s earnings once he became a teacher.

Low Cartcraigs is now occupied by the western portion of the Pollokshaws Road dual carriageway, but the Old Toll House dating from around 1800 still stands. It was occupied as a dwelling house till the late 1950s. It lost its original function with the abolition of road tolls and became a public house, serving the horse races, which were held nearby till 1838. These races led to a poem from a mother warning her son against temptation:

Said she, ‘Ye may be trod to death

Beneath the horses’ paws

And mind ye, lad, the sayin’s true

There’s queer folk i’ the Shaws.’

Many of the good folk of the Shaws around 1900 would probably have recalled that saying as their village was assailed by the preaching of a new set of queer folk – the socialists. Indeed, Maclean’s conversion to socialism took place largely within the intellectual structures of his native Shaws – and surprisingly active and varied these were, too.

In 1900 Maclean joined the Progressive Union in Pollokshaws, an organisation that discussed issues such as socialism, anarchism, the natural sciences and social problems generally. Its main aim was the criticism of organised religion, and its members attacked the churches and their teachings at open-air meetings on Sunday afternoons. It is difficult for us to imagine the street culture of politics a century ago: with little bar kirk and pub to entertain them, people flocked to open-air meetings of religious revivalists, temperance campaigners and political agitators, often for the entertainment value. The two most popular open-air stances in the Shaws were Shawbrig itself and the Old Town House, whose steeple still remains today. Hundreds came to listen and to heckle at these meetings. These meetings were covered in the Pollokshaws News, which reported in 1901 that Maclean had said socialism would reduce drunkenness, ‘and the diminution of drunkenness would result in the diminution of crime’. A lively correspondence ensued from these coverages, to which Maclean himself contributed. Friend and foe alike agreed that Maclean was an electrifying speaker.

The Labour Representation Committee (LRC – soon to become the Labour Party) had just been formed as a federation of trades unions, Co-ops and socialist organisations. The most left wing of the latter was the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), which was avowedly Marxist and which Maclean joined in 1903, setting up the Pollokshaws branch at an open-air meeting outside the Old Burgh Hall in 1906. Local members established a broadsheet, The Pollokshaws Review, which was widely distributed, and also distributed leaflets and held many street corner meetings. The branch had about 100 members: ‘Not bad for a small town,’ commented Maclean. Lecturers from outside were invited, speaking at the new Burgh Hall, the pride of the Shaws, designed by Rowand Anderson and erected in 1898. Here, too, Maclean and the SDF would gather to hear the results of their participation in local elections, which were generally disappointing. The SDF won no council seats in the Shaws or in Glasgow, though the more moderate Independent Labour Party did, preparing the way for its staggering success of gaining ten of Glasgow’s 15 parliamentary seats in 1922, with 51 per cent of all votes cast.

Greater success was had, however, by the SDF with the rapidly expanding Co-operative movement. Pollokshaws Co-op lay just south of the present library in Shawbridge Road, and more or less over the dyke of the Sir John Maxwell School – again emphasising the ‘village’ character of the Shaws at this time. Maclean was an active member of the Pollokshaws Co-operative Society and like others of the SDF argued for a more socialist orientation in the organisation, and he gave lectures to members organised by the Co-operative Educational Committee. Maclean was also elected to represent the Shaws at the national Co-op conference in 1905. Another area of activity was the Eastwood School Board, for which the SDF stood candidates demanding radical education reforms, and where two SDF members were elected in 1908–9. The SDF members called for free, non-denominational education, the raising of the school leaving age to 16 and bursaries for further education.

Maclean and his comrades were also involved in the industrial disputes of the time. One of these took place in the village of Neilston, at the thread mills, where hundreds of girls struck for better wages and a trades union. Some of them lived in the village of Nitshill near the Shaws, and they contacted Maclean and his associates, who gave the girls their support. A march was organised from Neilston to the manager’s house at Pollokshields in Glasgow, carrying effigies of the manager to be burnt. One participant recalled:

Maclean was equal to anything of this kind. He was full of fun and chaff, and so took the hearts of the girls that they would have done anything for him.

The march with a great banging of tin cans and shouting and singing pursued its noisy way from Neilston to Pollokshields, where the respectable inhabitants were thoroughly disturbed. The meeting was held in a field adjacent to the manager’s house. The wage demands were won. The whole of the girls in the factory were organised.

As a schoolteacher Maclean worked in various parts of the South Side of Glasgow; in Polmadie, in Strathbungo and in Kinning Park, but he also taught in Pollokshaws. In 1854, Sir John Maxwell, 8th Bart, had set up an industrial school in the village, training boys for useful trades. This was rebuilt in a new site at Christian Street in 1907 by a partnership between the Burgh council and Sir John Maxwell, 10th Bart – and the school was named after him. The SDF members of the School Board proposed, and got, Maclean a night school job at the John Maxwell School.

From 1908 to 1915 (when he was sacked by the School Board from his day and evening classes for his agitation against the First World War), Maclean taught industrial history and economics to classes of industrial workers, using Karl Marx’s Capital as the main textbook. Hundreds of workers passed through these classes, their fees paid by their trade unions or by local authority grants. The school continued to operate for many decades as the Shaws primary, and as my son attended it, I often had cause to be there. Maclean’s classes must have been held in the gymnasium, as no classroom would have been big enough for the numbers attending.

Many of the shop stewards who attended Maclean’s classes became prominent in the industrial unrest (Red Clydeside) during and after the First World War. What is astonishing is that the East-wood School Board initially paid Maclean to give these classes, and that Sir John Maxwell himself was a member of the board. The village atmosphere of the Shaws at this time is further emphasised by the fact that one of Maclean’s assistants at his evening classes was another Shaws boy whom he had converted to socialism, James Maxton (later MP for Bridgeton 1922–46). Maxton’s own father had taught at Pollok Academy when Maclean was a pupil.