The Second City
I
am fortunate that my occupation has gained me access to many of Glasgow’s finer
buildings over the years. One place which I always enjoy visiting is the City
Chambers in the centre of Glasgow; from stunning marble staircases to the
splendour of the great banqueting hall, it really a sight worth seeing. The
building was inaugurated by Queen Victoria in 1888 and was a statement of
confidence and wealth in a city which had grown from 200,000 inhabitants to
750,000 in Victoria’s reign alone. Perhaps Glasgow’s rapid growth during the
industrial revolution led to some of the social problems which blighted the
lives of so many but as the ‘great and
the good’ fawned over Victoria in 1888 another Glasgow with a very
different face existed just a mile away from the Carara marble and gold leafed
splendour of the new city chambers.
In
the Wynds and closes of the High Street and the Saltmarket a perfect storm of
circumstances arose which made it a deadly place to live for so many. Rapacious
landlords gleefully sub-dived small flats until whole families were living in
one room. The influx of highlanders thrown off the land and impoverished Irish
migrants flooding into Glasgow looking for work meant they always had takers
for their ramshackle slums. Dr James Young delivered a lecture in Glasgow in
1888 and said of the one roomed slums in the poorer quarters….
‘It is those small
houses which produce the high death-rate of Glasgow. It is those small houses
which give to that death-rate the striking characteristics of an enormous
proportion of deaths in childhood, and of deaths from diseases of the lungs at
all ages. Their exhausted air and poor and perverse feeding fill our streets
with bandy-legged children. Of all the children who die in Glasgow before they complete
their fifth year, 32 per cent die in houses of one apartment; and under 2 per
cent, in houses of five apartments and upwards. There they die, and their
little bodies are laid on a table or on the dresser, so as to be somewhat out
of the way of their brothers and sisters, who play and sleep and eat in their
ghastly company. From beginning to rapid ending the lives of these children are
short parts in a continuous tragedy. A large proportion enter life by the
side-door of illegitimacy and one in every five of all who are born there will never
see the end of their first year. Of those who so prematurely die, a third will have
never been seen in their sickness by any doctor.’
That was the reality of life
in the ‘Second City’ of the Empire in
the late Victorian era; one in five children born in the impoverished parts of
the city didn’t live to see their first birthday. For those who did survive
there was a harsh life of poverty, exploitation and illness ahead. Fredrich Engels travelled north and wrote
of the slums of Glasgow…
"I have seen human degradation
in some of its worst phases, both in England and abroad, but I can advisedly
say, that I did not believe, until I visited the wynds of Glasgow, that so
large an amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed in one spot in any
civilised country.
Glasgow University stood on the east side of
the High Street for 400 years but the rapid overcrowding and ‘slumming’
of the area in the 19th century saw this august institution flee
west to a green field site at Gilmorehill in 1870. As the wealthy fled to the
west of the city the east end struggled on in a city that was growing too fast.
In 1811 Glasgow’s population reached 100,000. By 1840 it had tripled to
300,000. The drive for industrialisation required a pool of cheap, exploitable
labour and was drawing people into the great cities to work in the burgeoning
factories and docks. The Irish community made up 20% of the population of the
city by 1850 and usually took the more demanding physical jobs building roads,
canals and railways. Their efforts and contribution to industrialisation and
the building of Scotland’s infra-structure have never really been recognised.
Imagine if you will the modern Celtic Park
packed to capacity. That was the number of Irish migrants who arrived in
Glasgow in the year 1851. That is to say 60,000 new arrivals in one year: on average 5000 arrived each month or around 1250
each week, often with little more than the clothes they wore to their name.
They came from a land wracked by famine and eviction and it says much about
conditions in Ireland that many thought the slums of Glasgow offered better
prospects. Of course there is much evidence that they were not welcomed with
open arms. There was no council housing, no NHS, no social security and most
could expect nothing but a hard life of toil.
The majority of these migrants were Catholic
and they were coming to the country which had perhaps adopted the reformed
faith more completely than any country in Europe. Tensions and old hatreds were
always likely to arise and some of those attitudes echo down the years to
today. The Irish were derided as ignorant, drunken and carriers of disease but
in reality the squalor in which they and many native Scots found themselves
living in was to blame for much of their behaviour. As Victor Hugo wrote in
Les Miserables; ‘If the soul is left in darkness then sins will be committed.
The guilty one is not he who commits the sins but he who creates the darkness.’
The journey from the degradation of the past
was a long one and it took long years of struggle and organising to make it.
The fight for better housing and working conditions, the trade union movement,
the arrival of the NHS and of course the proper education of all the nation’s
children helped. Many born into poverty didn’t accept that this was the way
things had to be and Scotland produced working class activists such as John MacLean,
Mary Barbour, Willie Gallacher and James Connolly fought for the ordinary people
of Scotland. They organised, led strikes, refused to pay rent to landlords
exploiting the people and helped form the Labour Party to challenge the
existing order.
Celtic Football Club was one example of a
community trying to help itself in those hard times. It was formed with words
known to every Celtic supporter; ‘A football club shall be formed to
maintain dinner tables for the poor children and unemployed.’ Of course a
football club could never cure all the ills of society but it did demonstrate
that people yearned for things to be better and that altruism and a willingness
to work for a better tomorrow for their children existed among the poor.
Glasgow today still has the lowest life
expectancy in the UK and great disparity in wealth and health but things have
improved enormously since the dark days of the industrial revolution. Those
changes often had to be fought for and every change which benefitted the poor
from the NHS to better working conditions and pay was resisted by those in
charge. The slums may be gone but the poverty, the food banks, the appalling attrition of drug misuse still exist. The journey to a better life for all is far from complete though and
much remains to be done but the ‘second city’ has come a long way.
So if you ever find yourself on the tour of
the ornate and beautiful Glasgow City Chambers and the guide uses the phrase ‘the
second city of the Empire’ try to think of it as I do; not in terms of second
only to London in terms of industrial output but in terms of that ‘second’
Glasgow which existed less than a mile from the marble halls of the City
Chambers. That place where one in five children never saw their first birthday.
Some may choose to remember Victoria in all her splendour or the great
industrialists with their wealth built on exploitation but I’ll remember the
suffering poor who fought a long and bitter struggle for better lives for us
all.
Let Glasgow flourish for all its children.
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