When they tried to ban raucous fun of Glasgow’s Fair holiday
“Barefooted match sellers and stair sleepers of the city... and the artful dodgers, the thieves” were all to be found, writes Alison Campsie
It became a heady brew of travelling showmen, oddball entertainment, plenty of drink and thousands of Glasgow workers free from the daily grind for a full blessed fortnight.
But the tone of the Glasgow Fair, traditionally the July fortnight when normal business was suspended across the city, led to calls for the holiday – or at least the shows which took root on Glasgow Green for its duration – to be banned. The Magdalene Institution of Glasgow, which ‘reformed’ prostitutes and other ‘fallen women’, campaigned for its abolition in the mid 1800s due its so-called corrupting influence.
Newspapers also took a rather snobbish stance on the gatherings on the green where hundreds of entertainers and a myriad of travelling show people sprung up for the holiday - along with certain “rascal” elements of the city.
In 1864, institute directors met with the Provost and city magistrates to push for its abolition.
Together, the holiday and the show ground had multiplied the “incentives of evil and the victims of crime,” it claimed.
An annual report added: “It has subjected the youth of the country to corrupting influences and increased the demoralisation of the city,” it added.
While the Glasgow Fair was first observed in the 12th Century, there was nothing to connect the holiday with the show ground that aided “degrading excesses” and offered “debasing exhibitions,” its annual report said. Typical acts of the day included the Bosjesmans, described in newspaper reports as “strange little folk from the remote wilds of Africa.
Another star draw was a “great fat man” with too many fingers and toes; a mummy from the island of Ichaboe, the skeleton of an immense whale and a celebrated Welsh teenager called Thomas Jones.
“His principle merit lies in his body being partly covered with scales like the armadillo,” a report in the Glasgow Herald said.
In 1847, the newspaper took a dim view of the quality of attractions on offer, describing them “as the “most contemptible kind” with the publication also clear in its condemnation of some of the revellers.
They included “barefooted match sellers and stair sleepers of the city .... and the artful dodgers, the thieves, loose women and dangerous scum of Glasgow some five years hence.”
Rather than go to Glasgow Green,workers were encouraged by the newspaper to adventure to the city and the coast. A trip “doon the watter” to places such as Dunnoon and Rothesay became synonymous with the Glasgow Fair.
The Teetotal Society were among those offering good value trips out of the city. On the first Saturday of the fair in 1855, a total of 41 steamers left the Broomielaw with an estimated 14,350 people leaving the city via the Clyde alone.
A further 26,000 people took a train out of Glasgow that day although many thousands more came in from towns such as Barrhead and Hamilton to go to the green.
It added: “Every large city, however, is polluted by the presence of a number of degraded beings, who will get drunk whenever liquor is to be had, although they should perish in the drinking of it.” Eventually, in 1871, The Glasgow Fair shows were moved from Glasgow Green to a patch of land at Crown Point, near where the Forge Shopping Centre stands today.
It added: “If any hoped for that the removal of the shows from the position they so long occupied would lead to their abolition, these hopes have assuredly been disappointed, but the effect of the change cannot fail to be beneficial.
“It leaves the Green to be devoted to its legitimate purpose without exposing visitors to the pernicious influence of the shows, and to contact with the concentrated rascality of the city.”