The Herald - The Herald Magazine
The Clyde river rescuer
GEORGE PARSONAGE HAS DEVOTED DECADES TO RIVER RESCUES BUT THERE IS ANOTHER SIDE TO HIM, AS JAN PATIENCE DISCOVERS
GEORGE Parsonage looks like he has been carved out of granite. A stocky bear of a man with powerful rower’s shoulders, strong hands and a wide-eyed, uncompromising yet kindly gaze, his shock of unruly white hair gives him the appearance of a startled albino porcupine.
A riverman to his stout bootstraps, Parsonage, 76, is most at home on Glasgow’s River Clyde. He was born in the Parsonage family home on Glasgow Green just yards from the Glasgow Humane Society lifeboat station and boat house on October 15, 1943. The youngest of four children, his father, Ben Parsonage, was the Society’s chief officer and his mother Sarah, a loyal first mate to her husband. Parsonage went on to break countless records for rowing, including a world record for the Clyde
Scullers Head of the River Race, which he still holds.
He followed his father into the family “business” after Ben’s death in 1979 and today, Parsonage is best known as the riverman who – like his father before him – has pulled more than 1,500 bodies from the murky depths of the River Clyde and rescued countless more.
WHAT many people don’t know is that Parsonage is also a trained artist who studied sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art from 1962 to 1967. In his final year, he was awarded the Benno Schotz drawing prize and a Keppie Henderson travelling scholarship, which allowed him to study in Venice, a maritime city which suited the young rower to a tee.
After art school, he toyed with the idea of being a professional artist, but instead – as advised by his father – he chose the “belt and braces” approach of teaching art. For the next 14 years, he combined teaching, firstly at his old school, Whitehill Secondary School in Dennistoun and then at Hutchesons’ Grammar in Glasgow’s south side with being on call “for the river”.
Even though he moved from teaching into being a full-time officer for the Glasgow Humane Society on the death of his father, Parsonage never entirely jettisoned art. Since the 1970s, he has created “junk sculpture” in his boatyard studio using the flotsam and jetsam he finds washed up along the riverbank.
The studio is crammed with sculpture. Much of it reflects his twin passions of rowing and music. In this cluttered space, the walls of which are lined by his own paintings, a drum kit has been fashioned from old pots and pans; a bird made from pieces of scaffolding and bits of old lawn mower dives down to get a fish; and in a corner, a garden of alliums springs; the flower heads made of bicycle cogs and the stalks from old music stands. There is even a sculpture made from old pieces of stainless steel pipes which, he says, loosely depicts his wife Stephanie playing the bassoon.
Parsonage recently hit the headlines when it emerged that he was stepping down from his role with the Glasgow Humane Society. On the day we meet in his house on
Glasgow Green, Parsonage is still bemused at the idea of his not-so-early “retiral” attracted such a lot of attention.
“I really didn’t think it was such a big story”, he shrugs, “but there you have it. There is a problem with insurance now after the age of 76 so there are practical reasons.” His day-to-day duties for the Humane Society have been taken up by ex-soldier, William Graham. The family will remain in their home, with Parsonage taking on an advisory role.
Parsonage’s father, Ben, who he describes as an excellent draughtsman and boat builder (his lifeboat, “Bennie” is in the nearby Riverside Museum), made his first rescue on the Clyde in 1919 while still in his teens. He became chief officer of the Glasgow Humane Society in 1928. All four of his children helped in the “family business”.
Parsonage shows me a photograph in which his mother is making up a bed in a room in their house. “They had these two beds for people who were rescued from the river,” he explains.
“The one she is making up had a rubber sheet because the people we rescued were generally soaked through having been in the river. After they were stripped and put in warm clothes, mum would transfer them to the dry bed.”
It was George – the youngest – who ended up taking over from his father. “That’s just what you do,” says Parsonage as we sit chatting over tea in the study below the bedroom where he was born.
“You just pull together. I’d been helping my father for years by the time he died. My brother had been in the RAF and was not at home, and me and two sisters had to rally round our mum who was in a wheelchair for the last 24 years of her life.”
Set up in 1790, the society’s “principal objective of preventing accidents in and around the waterways of Glasgow and the surrounding areas” has never wavered, although health and safety rules have been transformed since the 18th century.
In 2005, following changes in the way emergency services dealt with safety in major waterways, Strathclyde Police took the responsibility for rescues in the Clyde from the Humane Society and handed it to the fire service.
It is now Police Scotland’s responsibility to oversee the rescue and recovery of bodies with fire and rescue services entering the water, but the Society, a charity, receives funding from Glasgow City Council. It still has a key role in promoting safety on the Clyde.
IT is hard to imagine Glasgow without Parsonage patrolling the Clyde as his name is synonymous with the river. I must be one of the few journalists of a certain age from the west of Scotland who has never met him – until today. Working in newsrooms in Glasgow in the late 1980s and 1990s, most reporters I knew had Parsonage’s number in their contact book. If a body was fished out of the Clyde then invariably, he was involved. He has received several honours for his service with the Society, including an MBE in 1999.
Parsonage has even appeared on the small screen, playing himself, in the 1989 BBC crime thriller, The Justice Game, starring Denis Lawson and Diana Quick, and in Your Cheatin’ Heart, the John Byrnepenned black comedy made in 1990 which starred a young Tilda Swinton and John Gordon Sinclair.
“In Your Cheatin’ Heart, I appeared right at the beginning pulling a body out of the Clyde,” he says. “I remember John Byrne from art school. He was a few years ahead of me. What a talent. He always stood out.”
Parsonage lives with his microbiologist wife, Stephanie, a former international rower, whom he met when she capsized while training on the Clyde, with their two student sons, Ben, 24 and Christopher, 21. Both boys are keen rowers, competing at a national level.
The house, which was built six years before he was born in 1943, sits close to the Victorian suspension bridge on the north bank of the Clyde. There is no doubt