| Our Glasgow. - Piers Dudgeon. |
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An irresistible title, but is Our Glasgow my Glasgow? That to which, as in the famed song, I belong? References to this lyric occasioned a few irritations: no Clydesider ever claimed to belong tae “Glesgae”, a pronunciation peculiar to Lothian folk and English comics.
And had the song’s author been a 19th-century comedian, would I have seen him on stage several times in the 1940s? At the time of his death, having already filmed alongside Alan Ladd and Fairbanks Junior, Will Fyffe had begun work on Korda’s ill-fated Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Elsewhere, having unearthed painstaking detail anent work in “the yairds”, author Piers Dudgeon goes on to write of “another major dock at Rothesay, just beyond the city boundary”. Hardly sounds like “Scotland’s Madeira”.Yet, so enjoyable is this work that it seems churlish to list these slips and I found no fault with anything else penned here.
The place-names Springburn and Govan loup off the page. Born in the latter, I never actually dwelt there, spending my first decade in Springburn before moving to rural parts south of the city, seeing this as a happy escape. Educational demands, though, soon saw me travelling daily to Govan, and I was grateful that the city could be that possessive. At home, trudging up the Fereneze Braes, I readily acknowledged that, like the man in the famed song, I still belonged to that conurbation filling much of the level ground between me and the Campsie Fells.
Increasingly though, my schoolmates were undergoing a similar experience thanks to the diaspora brought about by the post-war redevelopment and rehousing outwith Glasgow. But, once in Easterhouse or Drumchapel, where were the Senior Secondaries, and where, for that matter, were the shops and other amenities? A generation of pupils became commuters which merely reinforced that already strong link.
Inconvenient, aye, but I rarely resented the travel, for as is pointed out on the jacket of this book, “If you sat next to someone on a tram, it was considered manners to talk to them.”
If it’s “home” to the Rab C. Nesbitts, there remains something of the fierce gratitude of Neil Munro’s “droll friend” Erchie in just living in Glasgow, and while I’ve had fun with the more raffish, ribald ”Any time ye like, Pal” images of Mungo’s city, that’s my Glasgow — friendly, funny, doggedly decent.
This “daicent side” has attracted some deservedly fine writing in recent years. With passion to match his perception, Ian R. Mitchell is analytical, but affectionate.
Actor Bill Paterson’s memoir emphasises that tenements were not synonymous with slums, while Robert Douglas whose young life was touched by trauma and tragedy, has still left us a portrait of likeable folk struggling to manage that “decent life”. These, and so many more, receive deserved, if brief, mention in Piers Dudgeon’s 370 fascinating pages.
These “memories of an almost vanished world” recorded with no moist-eyed sentimentality for the “lavvy on the stair” era of the demoralising “call on” that saw men turn up at dock or shipyard uncertain whether they would be allotted a day’s work. They still capture, though, wistful memories of generations who knew a sense of community that triumphed over privation and poverty, and there’s perhaps overdue recognition of the women, the managers and minor-miracle workers who implemented and maintained this vital spirit. |
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