Dramatic discoveries
Amazing finds in the archive plots the story of famous arts academy
Its list of famous alumni across the worlds of art and entertainment is almost as historic as the institution itself.
John Cairney, Bill Paterson, Karen Cargill, Patrick Doyle, Maureen Beattie, Jack Lowden, James McAvoy, Elaine C Smith, Ruby Wax, Svetlina Stoyanova, David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa are just a few of the graduates of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Founded in 1847, on Wednesday a celebration will be held at the Scottish Parliament to mark the school’s 175th anniversary. We were allowed to delve into the archives in Glasgow as Stuart Harris-Logan, the Conservatoire’s keeper of archives and collections, invited The Sunday Post for a browse through almost two centuries of dramatic twists and turns.
With every flip of a box lid the unremarkable-looking room quickly reveals itself to be a treasure trove.
Glancing out to the glorious sixth-floor views over the Forth and Clyde Canal and the city beyond, Harris-Logan explains why The Whisky Bond – a former warehouse for Highland Distilleries and now repurposed for the arts community
– is the perfect location for archives that are individually worth somewhere between eye-wateringly expensive and priceless.
“It’s bombproof and doesn’t have sprinklers, which is a good thing, as I’ve seen what water damage looks like,” says the expert archivist.
A former ballet dancer, Harris-Logan was working in the library of Glasgow University when a similar position came up at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2009 and, after joining, he was tasked with looking through the numerous cupboards and external store rooms to formulate whether there were enough items for an archive, which had been long talked-about among the institution’s upper management.
He said: “I was finding things all over, like an autographed score by Paul Hindemith down the back of a filing cabinet. No one had been taking a curating eye to things; items were randomly shoved and stored.”
Originally based in the Conservatoire’s main building on Renfrew Street, Harris-Logan’s discoveries meant the archives quickly needed their own premises.
He said: “We moved here nearly 10 years ago. It’s all my fault, is how I’d describe it. I have a brilliant volunteer who is here two days a month but thereafter the sorting, cataloguing and arranging is down to me. It has exponentially grown. Six years after we founded, we were the busiest conservatoire archive in the UK and have been ever since. It speaks of the unity of the collections for both specialists and members of the public who want to come in and see Jimmy Logan’s scripts or Erik Chisholm’s unperformed opera.”
With more than one million items – and with at least 70 boxes still to be opened, not to mention the external collections regularly being donated
– a history rich in detail is being pieced together by Harris-Logan, who has also written a book to mark the Conservatoire’s landmark anniversary.
“A group of men met at Steel’s Coffee House on Argyle Street on January 18, 1847. At that time, coffee houses were hotbeds of intellectual thought and activity, and on this day they were there to discuss the founding of an athenaeum,” he explained. “There were already athenaeums in places like Manchester, London and Liverpool – private members’ clubs.
“For Glasgow, the price of an annual subscription was the equivalent of £30 today, so it wasn’t expensive. It was supposed to be for all. That included women, who were admitted as members from day one, which wasn’t normal elsewhere.
“In fact, the Conservatoire has a number of UK firsts – like the first woman to be appointed a professor, the first drama school with a broadcast-specification TV studio, the first purpose-built opera school, and the first conservatoire to have its own degree-awarding powers.
“We are also the only conservatoire in the UK to teach every performing arts specialism. In London, it was so expensive and you required two nominations to be given a membership. It was an old boys’ network, which Glasgow never was.”
Based at the Assembly Rooms, the Glasgow Athenaeum was forced to move in the 1880s when the general post office was expanding its premises. The arch from the front door lives on, now in place at the west entrance of Glasgow Green, while part of the wall can be found a stone’s throw from the park, in The Briggait.
The Athenaeum moved to St George’s Place (now Nelson Mandela Place) and to the building now occupied by the Hard Rock Café, before moving to its current premises 35 years ago.
There were name changes along the way and for many years it was known as the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama before it took its current moniker in 2011.
Harris-Logan added: “Creating an archive from scratch is a rare thing to be able to do. It’s an incredible privilege.”