DOWN TO THE PRETTY-GRITTY
NEW BOOK SAYS GLASGOW’S NOT AS MEAN A CITY AS IT LIKES TO MAKE OUT NOT AS MEAN A CITY AS IT LIKES TO MAKE OUT
MICHAEL Fry is a jovial chap in a comfortable jumper. He lives in the west end of Edinburgh, writes learned history books and erudite articles. In the 1999 elections to the Scottish Parliament, he was the Conservative candidate for Maryhill.
All of this, he argues, make him brilliantly qualified to write a history of Glasgow.
Michael said: “Up until now, there have only been two kinds of history of the city.
“One is the collections of couthy anecdotes, of which there are a great number. The others are the pontificating arid statistics where people don’t really interest the writer, it’s only socio-economic data.”
Michael, in his Celts-to-Celtic study of the city, wanted to do something different, to take Glasgow’s pulse by looking at everything from the Corn Laws to the Communist Party.
He added: “I wanted to get the essence of the city and it’s an advantage to do that from the outside. The majority of people who are inside the city don’t see it as clearly as an outsider can.”
For those whose local history begins and ends with the tobacco barons, Michael begins in the 12th century when King David I granted a royal charter to the trading port that is now Glasgow.
He also puts the city in the national and international context of the time – and continues to do so throughout the book.
Michael has never been afraid to voice a controversial opinion. Elsewhere, he thinks the Highland Clearances have been romanticised and would have happened anyway. Gaelic is, he insists, a dying language that should be left to wither rather than being propped up with subsidies.
So it’s not a surprise that in this book, he unpicks some of Glaswegians’ dearly-held beliefs – and finds them to be baseless.
The city’s radical tradition, for example, has been exaggerated.
He said: “There has been a lot of attention to the working class history of Glasgow. I don’t accept that these interpretations work.
“Before the 20th century there weren’t all that many strikes and there wasn’t that much industrial unrest.
“The main aim of the working class in the 19th century was respectability. They wanted to work their way up in society: learn a trade, establish a secure family and home. These people were often regular churchgoers.
“There were rigid demarcations against the great unwashed – it took an apprenticeship of several years to be accepted into the craft. It was all an industrial and social structure that established respectability.”
Michael dutifully charts the city’s left wing life, from Keir Hardie standing in Mid-Lanarkshire in 1888 to Labour’s painful loss of every parliamentary seat in the city in 2015. But his historian’s eye sees a bigger pattern at work.
He said: “The working class Tory vote lasted in Glasgow until the 1950s, a sign of that older tradition. Govan had a Tory MP in 1955.”
He also observes that this drive for betterment and respectability has worked to the city’s disadvantage.
“All cities have a leading cast of people. What is remarkable in Glasgow is the way the old leading class of the 19th century faded out, or moved beyond the city boundaries.
“They all moved to Bearsden or Eastwood.”
“The complete absence of that old ruling group does make the city unusual. It has been trying to rediscover a new ruling group ever since.
“The Labour Party tried to play its part but we all know that party in Glasgow had certain drawbacks.
“Now it’s the Labour establishment that’s been thrown out. We need to see if a new ruling group is able to form. So far the
signs are not particularly good but the revolution has been quite recent.”
The city’s relentless pursuit of respectability is something that surprised Michael during his two years of research.
“We think of Glasgow as being a more raffish kind of city than Edinburgh, but Edinburgh’s always been very liberal about sex. It has had licensed brothels until the middle ages, and still has today.
“Glasgow was, in the old days a very puritanical city. The industrial revolution brought a lot of fallen women, but Glasgow never got used to the idea. It still keeps the girls on the streets where they freeze, while waiting for customers and are occasionally murdered.
“All sorts of efforts were made to suppress prostitution, there were quite detailed investigations, but they never succeeded.” He sees echoes of the Repressive Committee, which “rescued” fallen women among the amusements of the Glasgow Fair, in today’s city fathers.
“Glasgow still won’t countenance legalised brothels. It’s evidence of a continuing puritanical mindset, a frozen attitude from the past. In a city like Glasgow, which is very much given up to pleasures, I find it very strange this relic persists.”
Sex workers were not the only women who had a tough time in the city. The redoubtable Miss Cranston, of tearoom fame, was the first female entrepreneur Michael could find.
He said: “The Glasgow business world was very much maledominated. It was men in clubs smoking cigars and doing their deals, it was very hard to break in. Glasgow has always been a male chauvinist city.”
Michael used the resources of Glasgow Women’s Library while researching the book – and says that this unique organisation is a great example of Glaswegian resourcefulness.
He added: “It shows the city is capable of innovation, constant cultural renewal in new and unexpected forms.”
Having looked at the city’s past, Michael turned his attention to the future.
“In the 19th century, Glasgow was run by extremely wealthy men. The evidence is the city’s great Victorian architecture. What legacy is today’s Glasgow going to leave to the rest of the world. What difference would it make if these people had never existed?”
His conclusion is that the city’s collected literary works are its greatest achievement, adding: “Glasgow is the only city in the world which specialises in the proletarian novel. Los Angeles has films, New Orleans has jazz, Amsterdam has paintings, Paris has architecture, Glasgow has the proletarian novel.”
Booker prize winner James Kelman and the late William McIlvanney, followed by Denise Mina Louise Welsh are, he says, Glasgow’s “contribution to global culture”.
Thanks to Glasgow there is, he adds, “a whole genre of literature” that would never otherwise have existed: “All over the world, literature is dominated by the bourgeoisie. How many proletarian novels are written in England? Saturday Night Saturday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner were written half a century ago. Literature in England is now all about adultery in Weybridge. In Glasgow, it’s all about adultery in Govan.” ● Glasgow: A History of the City is published by Head of Zeus, £25
Glasgow won’t countenance legalised brothels due to a puritanical mindset MICHAEL FRY