Otago Lane... Voltaire and Rousseau, Hepburn & Ross whisky, Great George Street and Bank Street...

           

Voltaire on the right, Rousseau on the left.

If you're in the West End and you like books visit Otago Lane off Otago Street. Or, I should say, the Otago Lane nearest Gibson street because there are three lanes in Otago Street and they are all called Otago lane. In the first Otago Lane from Gibson Street is Voltaire and Rousseau’s second hand bookshop. The bookshop has been there since 1972. I first went there 34 years ago which I find hard to believe. It is to Glasgow what the Bouquinistes are to Paris. There are other second hand book shops in Glasgow but Voltaire and Rousseau’s is, by far, the best, and one of the best I have found all over the world, and that includes London, Liverpool, Manchester, Dublin, Belfast, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., and anywhere else I’ve forgotten.

Voltaire and Rousseau is a real second-hand bookshop, and one of the few left. The stock is loosely, very loosely, grouped by subject and one of these days I expect to find the books have spilled out onto the Lane. The walking space is ever diminishing as the books pile further to the ceiling. It is a book-browser’s heaven. If you can’t find a book that interests you in there you might as well give up reading – it is not for you. The shop is owned by a man called Joe McGonegal and run by his brother Eddie. I hope Mr McGonegal lives till he's at least two hundred and the shop never changes. One of the things I love about the shop is that although I have been going there for 34 years the most I get by way of recognition is a quiet nod. I’m sure if I wanted to chat they would be happy to oblige but I am left to my own devices and that is the way I like it. Over the years I’ve seen various people come and go who sat behind the desk as they took turns looking after the place. I remember one man in particularly who had a large black dog which seemed to be as old and decrepit as he was. While he sat in the chair the dog sprawled in front of the gas-heater. He had a moustache like Nietzsche’s drooping over his top lip (the man that is, not the dog), and smoked an exotic brand of cigarette which I heard a customer once ask the name of as the smell was so intriguing. He told her it was a blend of his own devising, which may or may not have been true. He smoked them incessantly and had the kind of heavy smoker’s cough that would made a doctor cringe and an undertaker rub his hands. He told me he was writing a book on the history of ceramics. He had been writing the book as long as I knew him and probably had been since long before. One year I returned after an absence and he was gone, to that undiscovered country, I suspect, from which no traveller returns. I never did see him again. I wonder if he ever finished his book.

Nietzsche's moustache.

I once met a woman in the shop, a relative of the owner, who told me she was determined to ‘clean it up’, to put the books in some sort of order. She was afraid a pile would fall onto somebody someday and a search party would have to be called in to dig them out. 'They might sue!' she said. Her plans disturbed me and I prayed to whatever gods look after book shops that if anybody might die under the rubble it would be her as punishment for her planned desecration. I don’t know if I believe in the efficacy of prayer but I got a partial answer to my wish. She didn’t die a death-by-book, but she realised her intentions were overly ambitious, not to say arrogantly hubristic, a task worthy of Sisyphus, as her brother kept bringing more and more boxes in and… she gave up. 'It's a waste of time!' she told me. I nodded my head sympathetically, but inside I was grinning. I’m happy to say things haven’t changed. While I was in there recently I rooted around for some books on the history of Glasgow’s development from a village to a city, the history of its place names, street names, famous families, infamous occurrences and anything else I found that took my fancy.

Help... can anybody hear me?... Please help... please... I've been here for months...

One of the books I bought was The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. In 1802 she made a tour of Scotland with her brother and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here's a sample of what she wrote.

'Wearied completely, we at last reached the town (Glasgow), and were glad to walk, leading the car to the first decent inn...; it proved quiet and tolerably cheap, a new building - The Saracen's Head.... with my first pleasant sensations also came the feeling that we were not in an English inn - partly from its half-unfurnished appearance, which is common in Scotland... and partly from the dirtiness of the floors.' Often in the journals, William and Coleridge are mysteriously 'unwell', especially after a night at an inn, which makes me suspect 'unwell' was her euphemism for hungover. She doesn't mention if they were unwell after a night at the Saracen's Head, but the next morning it's only Dorothy and William who manage to make it to Glasgow Green to watch the 'hundreds' of women bleaching their linen. Maybe Sam had too many pints of 'shammy' the night before.

Coleridge on the left, 'napping', William on the right, looking for his loose change.

After Glasgow Green, they visited the Trongate, which Dorothy described as an old street, 'very picturesque'. The city to the west she described as the New Town, 'built of fine stone, in the best style of the very best London streets at the west end of town, but, not being of bricks, they are greatly superior.' She did note, though, 'a want of cleanliness in the appearance of the lower orders.'

Dorothy! Save some for Sam!... Ah, Christ... cannae take her anywhere...

Another of Wordsworth's posse who was familiar with Glasgow was Thomas De Quincey. In 1841 he went to Glasgow to escape his debts in England. By February of that year he was living with John Pringle Nicol, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. After Nicol received new instruments which took up a lot of space, De Quincey left to stay with Edward Law Lushington, a Professor of Greek at Glasgow. A couple of days later, De Quincey took a trip to Edinburgh where he was arrested for an old debt and only just managed to escape prison. He soon moved out of Lushington's home to lodgings on the High Street of Glasgow and, before long, his old problems resurfaced. He was skint again. Any money he made from his writing was sent by his publisher to his wife and children and to Edinburgh to pay outstanding debts. But without money, his drinking was brought under control... or so he claimed. He moved again, to Renfield Street, where he rented two

rooms from a college officer named Youille. Then he received a visit from his son, Horace, who was off to join the Army. Horace was in debt too. With De Quincey and son both disappearing to escape their debts, his daughter had to deal with the creditors demanding payment and under the strain, she suffered two near fatal haemorrhages. It was expected a third would kill her. It didn't. She recovered. Most of De Quincey's creditors lost touch of him in Glasgow but one former landlady was very persistent. She chased him from one lodgings to another, waiting until he was at home before getting into his rooms. De Quincey told Professor Nicol she was in love with him, that she was - to use a modern phrase -  a stalker.

Towards the end of the year in Glasgow, and into the new year, he was ill, mostly due to the side-effects of his opium addiction. In order to relieve his chronic constipation, he asked his publisher to send him some laxatives which he knew to be very effective. They were. Now, instead of constipation, he had diarrhoea, and he was living in a close on Renfield Street with one shared toilet on the ground floor for the use of everyone. As he says in a letter; 'Now imagine... a man thither thro' 8 and 10 hours successively. Such a man becomes himself a public nuisance, and is in some danger of being removed by assassination.' Meanwhile, he was now overdue with his rent and towards the end of 1842 his son Horace was reported as have died in Hong Kong. De Quincey was ill again for the next few months but by the late spring of 1843 he was well enough to write articles and visit Glasgow's new Observatory with Professor Nicol's son John, who would go on to become Professor of English Literature at Glasgow. But he was still in debt and Mr Youille finally lost patience and asked either for the money or for De Quincey to leave. De Quincey left. He had been with the Youilles for two years.

A few years later, De Quincey returned to Glasgow, staying again with Professor Nicol at the new Observatory. Nicol invited him to stay for a week. He stayed for five months. De Quincey's opium addiction was at full strength during this time. Nicol's son described him to the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins and Hopkins took notes. He would wake in the morning blue and trembling, wrote Hopkins, asking a servant to pour out some black mixture from a bottle nearby. 'After this he would revive.'

When Tait's magazine was sold and its headquarters moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow, De Quincey was encouraged to move to Glasgow again to help secure the magazine's reputation under the new owners. He would only do so if lodgings where found for him at the most northern section of the city because he claimed he was 'victimised to within an inch of my life' by the fumes from the works at Townhead. A top-floor flat was found for him at 112 Rottenrow Street but he left shortly afterwards when his landlady's grandson came down with Scarlet Fever. He moved to the Royal Hotel at George Square but, by some means, came to an arrangement with Mr Youille and moved back into his old rooms at Renfield Street. Now that De Quincey had, more or less, got himself out of debt, he was able to move around Glasgow much more freely than he had done during his previous stay. Charles Mackay of the Glasgow Argus newspaper noted that De Quincey was a fairly frequent visitor who would finish his visit by borrowing some money to buy laudanum, 'a whole wine-glass of which he was accustomed to drink with as little compunction as if it had been claret'. At the end of the year, De Quincey left Glasgow after an argument with his editor. He was invited to a party at the Glasgow Athenaeum on the 28th of December but was too ill to attend. If he had, he would have met Dickens who, it seems, had a wonderful time.

Rottenrow seen from Albion Street, 1955.

When I first went to Voltaire and Rousseau, there was a red building where the newer flats stand. The red building was for a long time sealed off, any windows or entrances boarded up, and finally a wire grill put in place around it before it was demolished to make way for the flats. It had once been a garage and a bakery. The bakery went by the name of Hubbard’s, which, someone told me, had been situated where it was on the banks of the Kelvin because it had its own water-powered mill to the rear. I don't know if that's true but it sounds plausible enough. The garage had replaced a livery stable which had sat on the same spot since before Glasgow had reached Kelvinbridge.
Further down Otago Street is what looks like a building lost in time and place, a cottage more suitable to the country than to Kelvinbridge. This is Janefield Cottage and dates from around 1840 and is technically known as a cottage ornée. Cottage ornées are a rare building type in Scotland and were, more often, village houses or estate buildings popular in England and the United States. They are a consequence of a rustic style which became fashionable in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries due to the Romantic movement, so I suppose it’s quite appropriate that it's only a short walk away from a bookshop named after Rousseau. The Janefield Cottage is one of the oldest surviving buildings in Hillhead. Two other cottages, known as Kelvinside Cottage and Rose Cottage, had been built at the same time as Janefield but these are now gone. James Gibson – whose name is remembered in Gibson Street – had once owned Hillhead Estate and his architect, David Smith, owned some land within the estate and Otago Street had, in fact, previously been called Smith Street. Smith was Glasgow’s leading surveyor and mapmaker at the time and he may have been the architect of Janefield Cottage, designing it with the aid of pattern books or from John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia. Janefield Cottage is now a category C listed building. I’ve never met the owners. Like the Kelvingrove Gallery and Museum, the cottage seems to turn its back to the world. The 'front' has an entrance door but the lower window is hidden by foliage while two small upper windows look like an afterthought. The 'back', though, has large bay windows looking out on the river.

Janefield Cottage ornée, back and front.

There’s another remnant of old Glasgow between Bank Street and Otago Street. In fact, two. The building at the corner of Great George Street and Otago Street was once a Merchant’s Mansion, as was an identical building at the corner of Great George Street and Bank Street. The mansion abutting Bank Street was, from 1971 up until 2008, a Hindu Mandir temple, but, the last time I saw it, it was surrounded by fencing. Both of the buildings are considered ‘At Risk’. They are estimated to have been built in 1852. The former temple was taken over by developers who applied for permission to convert it to a guest house. Permission was granted, work begun, and then stalled. The work which was begun and then abandoned left the building in a worse condition that it had been in previously, with only tarpaulin covering the roof. It’s impossible not to suspect that the developers are hoping the building might deteriorate so badly that it will be condemned, torn down, and a new building can be put up, which, at the moment, wouldn’t be allowed to happen as both buildings are Grade B Listed.

Dr. Hepburn's old house.

The other mansion at the corner of Great George Street and Otago Street is called Parkview and was the home of Dr C.A. Hepburn who co-founded Hepburn and Ross Whisky Blending. Hepburn and Ross owned the large warehouse further up Otago Street which has a famous Glasgow music shop on the lower ground floor while the upper floors, which were once used for auction rooms, are now used for various purposes including a Sikh temple. Charles Hepburn (the Doctorate is in Law and honorary from Glasgow University) and Herbert Ross had served with the Black Watch during the First World War and set up the whisky blend afterwards, exclusively employing, for a time, former servicemen. Red Hackle was their primary blend and was very popular in the United States. The whisky took its name from the feather worn in the cap of the Black Watch. The warehouse on Otago Street still has the ghost of sign on its gable end.

In 1957 Herbert Ross died and his partner sold the company and brand two years later, following the death of his wife, to Robertson and Baxter. In retirement, Charles Hepburn became a noted philanthropist and made contributions to Glasgow University, Glasgow Zoo, and paid for the installation of underground heating at Murrayfield stadium, making it the first such stadium to have the facility. He also sponsored the College of Piping which still sits on Otago Street across from Hepburn and Ross’s former warehouse. Red Hackle whisky is still produced in Glasgow by parent company, Edrington, which has its premises on Great Western Road, in fact, less than ten minutes’ walk from the site of the Knappers Quarry dig.

Dr Hepburn was a book lover. Following his death in 1971 he bequeathed around 300 rare books and manuscripts to Glasgow University – his speciality was first editions of 19^th century English literature. He was also interested in Mary Queen of Scots and his donation of volumes concerning her cause is said to have filled in some important gaps in the fields of Scottish history and literature. The University’s History of Art department is also housed in a building he donated. A curious detail concerning Dr Hepburn’s collection of art and artefacts is that he owned what is known as the Coronation Carpet, a large ornate rug said to have been woven in the royal Persian city of Isfahan sometime in the early 1700s. In 1902 it was placed under the throne on which Edward VII was crowned at Westminster Cathedral. It was also used for the coronation of George V in 1911 and for the marriage of Princess Mary in 1922. Incidentally, the former Hepburn and Ross warehouse already mentioned is now home to Rug Rooms - a flooring company.

The Hepburn Coronation Carpet.

I once read the memoirs of a Scottish sailor by the name of Jack McGrory. In the 1920s, after prohibition was declared in the puritanical United States, he worked as a Rum-Runner. The rum-runners would stock up on cargo of various whiskies and sail from Glasgow. Among the whiskies he mentions as being popular in the States are White & McKay, Dewer's, Johhny Walker and Red Hackle. The smugglers would buy their cargo direct from the source then sail for America. So long as they never went inside the twelve-mile limit they might be within hailing distance of the coastguard yet not be arrested. Of course, if they were within hailing distance of the coastguard that meant they would have no customers. The customers would come out to the cargo ship in smaller, faster vessels (sometimes, sometimes not, sometimes they used rowing boats of whatever else they might be able to get their hands on), and would risk the run ashore avoiding coastguard patrol boats and customs men on land. The risk for people like Jack McGrory was of a different sort. Attempts were often made to rob or even hi-jack the rum-runners. For this reason, most of them carried surplus weapons from World War I aboard, including machine guns. Another risk was that the customer might pay in forged currency or try to leave without paying at all. McGrory's memoirs deal with all aspects of his career as a seaman, including his service in the merchant navy on the Atlantic Cargo runs during the Second World War. A book exclusively about the rum-runners, and again beginning in Glasgow, is Diary of a Rum Runner by Alastair Moray. But Moray doesn't mention Red Hackle, nor does Moray mention much about his life outside of smuggling. McGrory, though, mentions that he lived on Purdon Street in Partick and later in Dowanhill Street in Partick. Number 7, for anybody interested. Incidentally, the President of the Confederate States of America once stayed in the Dowanhill area of Glasgow after the Civil War - though I doubt in Partick - when he was meeting various merchants to arrange desperately needed trade links for the defeated and impoverished Southern States.

There is a blog of Glasgow by 'Glasgow Punter' at https://glasgowpunter.blogspot.com/search?q=ghost+signs. He has a wonderful section on 'ghost signs' of old Glasgow, such as that of the Red Hackle, barely discernible on the gabble-end of the old warehouse. A lot of the old signs have been revealed as the premises have been put to new use. Rather than cover them again it has become fashionable to leave them on view. The same, I've noticed, is being done in London. The original signs have become old enough to be of historical interest just as an old non-descript black and white photograph of no artistic quality might ne of interest solely due to its age, but they are very fragile, exposed as they now are to the weather and pollution and considering many of them were hand-painted. Oddly enough, it was the fact that they have been covered for so long which has protected them. Old street signs, often with different names, are also visible, and generally far more ornate than their modern equivalent, painted in 3-D and with gilding added. I suppose the signage became less decorative and more utilitarian when their creation stopped being the work of one man and became machine produced. A similar effect seems to have taken place with the street-names over the years, which have lost their individuality and become more general - such as all the separate areas along Sauchiehall Street which were once named differently and are now uniformly called 'Sauchiehall Street'. At least we never went as far as the Americans who adopted the ultimate utility of just giving streets numbers or letters - N Street in Washington D.C., for instance, where I lived once, just above M Street where the steps in The Exorcist are found... M, N, O, P... it might make it easier to navigate an unfamiliar city but it lends a certain tedium to the prospect, rather than names suggestive of place, time, people, events - Sauchiehall Street, Mandela Square, Buchanan Street, Battlefield Road. Some of the poetry has also been lost in the name changes, as 'Glasgow Punter' points out, with the former Edelweiss Terrace now called Partickhill Road.



(Details of De Quincey's stay in Glasgow and quotes from: The English Opium Eater; Robert Morrison: Pheonix 2009)

A swell-looking babe... Langside, Battlefield Road, Red Road flats...

A swell looking babe...?

            I’ll begin this section with something which might interest collectors of the curious. Yesterday, that was Wednesday the 16^th July 2019, I wrote about Ludovic MacLellan Mann’s Earliest Glasgow; A Temple of the Moon. Then, around nine that evening, I was lazing about listening to some music when I noticed the moon low on the horizon, looking very odd. It's colour was of a strange orange shade, like a blood-stain which has been partially washed-out. I put it down to atmospheric light-refraction due to the moon being so low on the horizon, which also made it look larger than normal - a common optical illusion. But it also had an odd shaped shadow across it, unlike the usual line separating the light from the dark-side. It then occurred to me that, the night before, the moon had been close to full. I looked at it with a pair of binoculars. The line of the dark of the moon was irregular, far less sharp than it usually appears. This morning, I found out that I had been watching a partial eclipse... after I’d been writing of Glasgow as a centre on moon worship. Not only that, it had also been the 50^th anniversary of the first moon landings. Cosmic, man.

Did they or didn't they?

I don't know if it's art, but...

So far, we've been wandering the West End and City Centre. Let's step over the river, to Langside, to an art-deco building which is just off Battlefield Road at 15 Millbrae Road. These days, it is a Tesco Express, but it has been a number of things since it was built in 1937, such as a restaurant, a pub, and offices. It was originally designed as a divisional control station for Glasgow Corporation Lighting Department. The architect was Sam Bunton who played an important part in the post-war redevelopment of Glasgow, and who was the architect behind the infamous Red Road Housing scheme, recently demolished. Critics of the Red Road Scheme accused Bunton of pushing forward the estate as a vanity project. He was well-known as an advocate of high-rise housing and had designed similar multi-storey estates around the city. He was said, critically, of having a dream of ‘building a Manhattan-style skyscraper’ in Glasgow. If he had built them to the same quality as Manhattan skyscrapers, structurally as well as architecturally, they might still be standing. It was because of the height of his buildings, not only the highest in Glasgow but said to be the highest in Europe at the time, that the use of steel-frame-construction was used. This was one of the factors that led to the demolition of the buildings as steel construction had to be fire-proofed and the only way to do so at the time was with asbestos. Within 20 years of their construction it became widely known how dangerous asbestos was to the health of those working and living with it, but asbestos was integral to the structure of the flats and the internal asbestos could not be removed until the buildings were demolished. The asbestos which covered the exteriors of the flats was covered in metal cladding.

By the 1970s the Red Road Scheme was synonymous with crime. Objects were thrown from the roofs and, if they landed near you, you were lucky if it was only a brown paper bag filled with shit. Even a penny coin can do a lot of damage if it hits you after falling 30 stories. The flats were also subject to frequent burglaries. The flats weren’t just a problem for the residents. For non-residents who lived within sight of them - and they could be seen a long way off - there was something depressingly menacing about the ‘looming’ ambience of the blocks. Not only were they, on average, 25 storeys high but they were also 328 feet wide - almost 100 metres. In 1977, a fire started deliberately in an empty flat caused the death of a young boy and the evacuation of many residents who refused to return. In the 1980s, the scheme was a major crime-hot spot with frequent muggings, gang-fights, and drug-dealing. The flats had also become the favoured stepping off point for suicides. Now, as well as looking out for bags of shit dropping from the sky, you had to watch out for falling bodies too.

Is it a man, or a bag o' shite?

In the 1990s the flats were used to house refugees from the Kosovo war and, later, other refugees from conflicts in Africa, Asia and other parts of Europe. The estate made the news again when a number of the refugees said they had felt safer in the war-zones they had left than on the estate. The policy of housing refugees and asylum seekers in the flats continued into the next century when, in 2010, a family of three asylum seekers jumped to their deaths from one of the towers.

Red Road flats; an urban Utopia with a view.

I’ve often thought that the architects of such schemes as the Red Road flats and the Gorbals Hutchison E estates should be told they’ll have to live in them for ten years at least after completion. But unfortunately, these places are designed by people who never have to live in them and who know nothing of the needs, interests or expectations of the people who will have to live in them.

All of the Red Road flats had been demolished by 2015. I had a friend who lived in one of the flats. He said he liked living there. But then he seldom left the flats. He was a morphine addict and what he liked about it particularly was the view. From his flat on the 20^th floor he could see all the way from the Campsie Fells to Ben Lomond and the Arrochar Alps. He also liked living there as the flats were the only place for miles around from which he couldn't see the flats, much as Guy de Maupassant ate lunch at the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower everyday because, 'inside the restaurant was one of the few places where I could sit and not actually see the Tower!' My friend was also an amateur astronomer and the pride of his possessions, few as they were, was a telescope with which he viewed the night-sky and the distant hills - until it was stolen in a burglary on one of the rare occasions when he was out picking up his morphine.

Red Road flats looking up... or is it down?

By an odd coincidence – the more you look, the more you find – Bunton’s mother's name was Margaret Mann; no relation to Ludovic MacLellan Mann unfortunately... too much to ask, I suppose. His father was Samuel Bunton, an officer with the Ministry of Labour, and Sam was born in 1908. In the 1930s he specialised in art-deco design. After the war his work consisted largely of housing schemes for which he designed the sewers, services, and road layouts, as well as the buildings.

I know the Tesco art-deco building on Millbrae Road because I had a friend who lived in Shawlands and, when I used to visit, I took a bus to and from the stop outside the Victoria hospital at the foot of the hill. Bunton’s building is noticeable because it is one of the few buildings in that area not of the usual Victorian design. Millbrae Road is just to the left of the Langside monument as you walk down Battlefield Road. The name of the road and the monument commemorate the Battle of Langside, fought between Mary Queen of Scots and Regent Moray on 13^th May, 1568. It was the Queen’s final defeat in Scotland.

For anyone unfamiliar with Mary’s story, I’ll quickly outline it – it reads like a script for EastEnders.

Mary was the only surviving child of James V of Scotland. When her father died, she was only six days old – but she was Queen. She was brought up in France and her first language was French which is why a great many Scottish words have a French origin such as marmalade – when Mary was ill her French servants often took her a preserve, saying ‘Marie est malade’. The Scottish servants thought the nutritious preserve full of vitamins was called marmalade. This etymology is said to be apocryphal. If it isn’t true it should be true.

While Mary was in France, Scotland was ruled by regents. At the age of sixteen, she married the Dauphin of France, Francis, who was aged fourteen. He died two years later and Mary returned to Scotland. The cause of Francis’s death is uncertain. Many in France suspect he was poisoned. Four years later, Mary married her half-cousin, Lord Darnley, and they had a son named James - later James VI of Scotland, James I of England. Early the next year, Darnley was found murdered in his garden. The prime-suspect was the Earl of Bothwell, but he was acquitted and the following month he married Mary – after raping her.
A number of prominent people were unhappy about this situation and Mary was forced to abdicate in favour of her son who was one-year-old, meaning, of course, that another series of regents would run the show until he was of age. After an unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne she made a break for it, heading south of the border like all good outlaws, where she asked her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, for protection. But many English Catholics saw Mary as the legitimate heir to the English throne and, as such, she was a threat to Elizabeth. Mary was confined for over eighteen years and after being found guilty of a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, was beheaded.

It was when Mary had been forced to abdicate that Moray was made regent on behalf of his nephew, James (Mary's son, if you remember). Moray was Mary’s Protestant half-brother. Not everyone was happy with Mary’s abdication, including Protestant members of the nobility. They still saw her as the rightful Queen whose abdication had been extorted under threat of death. Mary had hoped to avoid battle with Moray and retired to the impregnable position of Dumbarton Castle. From there, she then made a circuitous route around Glasgow, gathering more troops, with the intention of returning to Dumbarton. But, on the way, Moray drew up his army near the village of Langside.

Mary’s army had taken up position of what is now the site of Langside College. Moray had the right wing of his army on the higher ground with the left wing at what is now Queen’s Park. There is a boating pond in the park which was a marsh at the time of the battle and it is where some of the bodies where buried, its clay being easily dug. For centuries the site was known as the Devil’s Kirkyard and when the pond was being built in the late 1800s the remains of soldiers and their weapons were found. There are a number of burial grounds in the area for those killed in the battle, including the Wellcroft Bowling Club nearby. The memorial as it stands today was built on the central site of the battle, where Moray’s troops were entrenched. Mary’s infantry, impetuously, it is said, charged up the hill. Never a good idea, especially as it was a scorching hot day. Mary’s vanguard was to be backed by cavalry but they were turned back by archers and the opposition cavalry. The vanguard was left on its own to fight it out. The Queen’s troops, though, were doing well and looked like they might win the day. Moray’s commander saw the danger, gathered unused troops to the left wing and attacked. The vanguard broke and flew, along with the rest of the Queen’s army. Not as many were killed as might have been because Moray said this was a civil war, Scot against Scot, and he called on his charging forces to 'save, not to slay'.

Many of the names of the streets nearby derive from those who led the forces on both sides: Darnley Road – from Henry Lord Darnley; Grange Road – named for Sir William Kirkcaldy’s country estate; Hamilton Avenue – after the Hamiltons who led the vanguard; Herries Road – after the 4^th Lord Herries’ wife; Killiegrew Road – after Sir Henry Killiegrew; Kirkcaldy Road – after Sir William Kirkcaldy; Moray Drive – after the Regent Moray; Morton Gardens  - after James Douglas, 4^th Earl of Morton; and Terregles Avenue – after Sir John Maxwell of Terregles.

Other than the fact that this battle was, in effect, a family squabble, there was one aspect of the battle in particular I find surprising. The total number of casualties involved was little over a hundred men. Only one of Moray's troops was killed. In retrospect, and considering that the outcome changed the course of Scottish, and English, history, it seems a relatively small price - unless you're one of the dead - in relation to the magnitude of the consequences. 

Charge!

Earliest Glasgow... Ludovic MacLellan Mann, Knappers Quarry, the Cochno Stone...

As found on Top 40 Glasgow blogs at https://blog.feedspot.com/glasgow_blogs/

L.M. Mann... as dapper as Errol Flynn. 

In 1938, Glasgow’s Great Western Road was being extended towards Clydebank when diggers came across some strange archaeology at Knappers Quarry. There was a great deal of speculation and excitement as to what the site might have been and Ludovic MacLellan Mann came up with a possibility that caught everybody’s imagination. He suggested it was a prehistoric druid’s complex where ritual sacrifices might have taken place. It was certainly a Bronze Age timber monument, but, Glasgow Council being Glasgow Council they treated the find with the same sensitivity with which they usually treat finds and buildings of archaeological and architectural significance - it was obliterated by high-rise flats before it could be completely studied. In fact, almost all of Glasgow’s prehistoric sites have been destroyed by urban development. To take one example, in Boydstone Road in 1973 a standing stone was removed so that the road might be widened. The artefacts were found at Knappers and two other sites relatively nearby – Kilbowie and West Dunbartonshire - were aged between 4000 to 750 B.C.

Drawing by Mann.

   The more I find out about Ludovic MacLellan Mann the more I want to find out. I would love to read a detailed and serious biography of him but, as far as I can find, there is  none. His own books are unavailable to buy even on ebay and Amazon. Most of the information I have on Mann I found at the Mitchell Library and on various internet sites, the two best being by Michael Berand at https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/index.html and Kenny Brophy at the https://theurbanprehistorian.wordpress.com.

    Any errors in the retelling are mine.

    The Berand site contains a number of Mann’s booklets, including Earliest Glasgow; A Temple of the Moon.

            In 1930, Mann published a book named Craftsmen’s Measures in Prehistoric Times, which he followed up in 1938 with Ancient Measures; Their Origin and Meaning in answer to critics of the previous work. Mann believed he had discovered two units of length whose use in artefacts was universal. The implications of such a discovery, if true, would be incredible. Mann investigated drawings, carvings, objects fashioned from bone, antler, stone, baked clay, glass, vitreous paste and metal – prehistoric, proto-historic and early historic – and all had been made by craftsmen strictly, he believed, to an unalterable unit of length. ‘To the enormous range of the system in time must be added its surprisingly wide range in territory,’ he wrote. 

            The objects measured came from major museums in Britain, Europe and America and the ‘universal’ measurement was found to have its equivalent in other measurements as diverse as Phoenician, French, Danish, English, Scottish, Austrian, Chinese and Oceanic. It was later found to have an equivalent in South America also. Mann concluded that; ‘Prehistoric man had obviously to follow the dictates of a law stringently impressed upon the world.’ The obvious question is, if this law was stringently impressed, who might the impresser be?

            After a lecture in March 1933, Mann immediately had his enemies, principally Professor J.B. Bailey of Glasgow University, who more or less dismissed Mann’s findings without following Mann's procedures for his measurements.

            A very important part of Mann’s theory, if not the most important, was that the measures of length he believed he had discovered symbolised measures of time and was derived from the length of the year and other astronomical measurements.

            Many people know of Alfred Watkins’ The Old Straight Track, which points out the interrelationship of ancient sites on the British landscape. Watkins book was published in 1925 but Mann had written of such things as early as 1914. The problem with Mann was that many of his projects were ‘left for another occasion’. Archaeologist Graham Ritchie said of Mann, he ‘had a tendency towards losing interest in a project before bringing them to conclusion’. In reading Mann’s Earliest Glasgow it’s impossible not to detect a certain impatience in his style of writing, as if he’s gone over the facts in his mind so many times that he can’t be bothered going over his working-out for the sake of the first time reader. Earliest Glasgow is not even a book but more of a booklet at only 38 pages. It feels, at times, like reading an abbreviated form of notes which haven’t been elaborated, or prose poetry where all inessentials are dispensed with. Mann’s suggestions are very poetic. I’ll quote at length from Earliest Glasgow.

            First of all, names; Glasgow and the Clyde.

‘Glasgow is rich in places named after the Moon divinity; an association of ideas suggested by the bend in the Clyde... indicating prolonged periods during which lunar worship was carried on.

‘At Glasgow the lunar temple was placed on the rising ground nearest to the apex on the river’s bend and above the flood plain... Its strength lay in its sanctity... The suffix in the word Glasgow, “gow or cu” and its variants, is said to signify “dog,” and also “smith,” but it was moreover one of the names given to the Moon Deity.

‘It may be recalled that the Celtic word “Glas” which prefixes “cu” to give the name Glasgow, means a soft, yet bright grey colour. It thus fairly well describes the mellow glow of the moon, so different from the blinding glare of the sun.

‘The Moon God, Clot, gave his name to the river, the Clota or Clyde, because the stream at Glasgow made a magnificent sweep in its course, imitative of the new moon.

‘A ridge at Glasgow, described as Drummothar in 1682 and 1785, may be Druim-mo-dir, “the ridge of the Moon Deity.” Of like genesis may be one of the oldest streets in Glasgow, the Dry-gait and the Pol-drait close to it.  Bal-der-nock, close to Glasgow, seems to enshrine the same meaning.'
    And now for social planning Neolithic-style, according to Mann.

    ‘The Neolithic philosopher and astronomer laid out the Glasgow area on a plan similar to that of a clock-face and like a gigantic spider’s web, but rigorously geometrical.

‘A picture of the heavens was sketched by means of earthworks over large areas suitably situated like the area whereon Glasgow is now placed. Photostat copies of the Garth surrounding Glasgow Cathedral, on a large scale, have recently been published to demonstrate the astronomical lay-out of the kernel of the area of Glasgow.’

    To say that Mann was obsessed with the past of Glasgow is an understatement. He believed in an intelligent, artistic, philosophical pagan ancestry for Glasgow and believed he had discovered the occult framework of the city in the obscure origins of roads, church, cemeteries and place name. It was psychogeography before the word was invented.

And more than that.

A photo taken by Mann of the stone looks like graffiti of a not-too sophisticated type; linear spirals, circles with dots at their centres, wavy lines, all in white on a rough stone background. The Cochno Stone was a Bronze Age stone first documented in 1887 by Reverend James Harvey, John Bruce, and William Donnelly. It has over one hundred carved indentation on its surface and is considered to be one of the finest sets of petroglyphs in Scotland. In 1937 Mann decided to paint the markings in order to make them more legible and the site became a tourist attraction.

Mann's picture is in black and white but when he painted the stone he had used yellow, blue and red. The popularity of the stone led to its partial destruction – or desecration. Names, initials, dates and the usual array of graffiti were scratched onto its surface until the Ancient Monuments Board decided to protect it in 1965 – by burying it.

According to Kenny Brophy;

‘Mann took an interest in the esoteric patterns he saw on this rock – spirals, weird symbols, crosses, and stars. In order for visitors to better appreciate the stone in 1937 Mann painted the symbols… Overlain on the prehistoric markings was a measured and complex grid system of his own devising which helped him interpret the code. Mann was by now obsessed with the mathematical and astronomical properties of such symbols and it is almost certain many of the shapes he painted on the stone were fantasies of his own construction. He began to find what he wanted to find.’

The Mann himself (right) and the Cochno Stone.

Getting back on track... The Variety bar, the King's Theatre, The Beresford Hotel, Amalfi's...

As found on Top 40 Glasgow blogs at https://blog.feedspot.com/glasgow_blogs/

            In following Jack House’s Square Mile of Murder I’ve wandered off the trail. I've gone into House’s book at such length to satisfy my own curiosity and because of something a man once told me concerning the Square Mile of Murder.

The Variety Bar, Sauchiehall St, Elmbank St.

            Not far from Charing Cross there is a pub at the corner of Elmbank Street and Sauchiehall Street called the Variety. It is called the Variety because one block further down is the King’s Theatre, a variety theatre which has stood where it stands since 1904. The King's was designed by the architect Frank Matcham. Matcham was something of a specialist in theatre design. He designed over ninety theatres in a forty-year career and redesigned at least eighty more. Some of the theatres he designed are very famous – London’s Hippodrome, the Hackney Empire, the London Coliseum and, probably most famous of all, the London Palladium. Outside of London, he also designed the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, and the Grand Theatre, Blackpool. The façade of the King's Theatre on Bath Street is in Matcham’s typical mix of styles, with influences of Baroque and Art Nouveau in red sandstone. But Matcham became the chosen-man of theatre design not for his exteriors but for his interiors. They were perfectly designed to give all audience members, no matter where they were seated, a clear view of the stage with no supporting structures obscuring the spectacle.

Interior of the King's Theatre.

           

    The King’s Theatre was not among the photographer’s 101 Views and if anyone wants to know more about the building they might like to visit http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Glasgow/Kings.htm

    Over the century, many stars have appeared at the King’s Theatre and a number of them stayed at what was once the Beresford Hotel on Sauchiehall Street, across from the Variety. Among the 101 views, there was a picture of the Beresford.

    The Beresford is now private flats. Prior to its conversion, it was a Hall of Residence for students of the University of Strathclyde. Before that, and after a decline in the need for hotel accommodation, it had been used for offices. The Beresford though, started life in 1938 as a grand hotel for visitors attending Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition and was described as the city’s first skyscraper. It is only ten stories high but was tall for its time and is an example of Art Deco-Streamline Modern architecture. The architect was William Beresford Inglis and, as his name implies, he also owned the hotel and was its managing director. During the Second World War it was requisitioned to house American servicemen. The hotel originally had a garage, parking space, and service vehicle entrance by the right of the building, a cocktail bar accessible from Sauchiehall Street, and an area on the roof for exercising pets. Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Errol Flynn are said to have stayed there. Which brings me back to the Variety.

The Beresford, as is.

The Beresford, as was.

            Errol Flynn is said to have dropped into what became the Variety for a drink. It’s a plausible story. If he was appearing at the King’s he would have passed the Variety on the way to the Beresford. Why not stop in for a drink? Unfortunately, the corner of Elmbank Street and Sauchiehall Street never had a pub at that time. There are, though, a number of places in Glasgow which have had their array of famous customers, especially the Amalfi, a small family-run Italian restaurant which has been in place since 1943 and was originally called the Lido Café. The Empire theatre, which closed in 1963, was just across the way from the Amalfi on Sauchiehall Street and many stars ate there, including Errol Flynn, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Danny Kaye (who was a great favourite at the Empire), Bette Davis, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Among others who appeared at the Empire and may or may not have visited the Amalfi were Lilly Langtry, Laurel & Hardy, Sir Harry Lauder, Will Fyffe, Andy Stewart, the Logan family, the Andrews Sisters, Fats Waller, Tony Bennett, Johnnie Ray, Frankie Lane, Connie Francis, Eartha Kitt, Howard Keel, Mel Tormé, Liberace, Bob Hope, Judy Garland and Jack Benny.

Errol! Is it a Tennant's for you?

    

    Before the Variety became the Variety in 1970 it was the King’s Arms, and before that the Norsk Inn. Before then it was Carswell’s, ‘The Modern Man’s Shop’ – a men’s clothing shop, which explains the smallness of the pub. It would have been Carswell’s that Errol Flynn popped into, but only if he wanted a tie or socks. And it was that peculiar name which had sent the imagination of one of the Variety's regulars into overdrive.

    The customer - we’ll call him Neil Doyle - had a wonderful knack for clearing space around a bar, and any other place people might gather. He was - and probably still is - the most boring, long-winded and dogmatic bastard you might have the misfortune to meet. I had known him once, long before, when his madness was in embryo-form.

Many people considered Neil a crank and avoided him. But I have a weakness for odd theories. His latest obsession was the black-magic history of Glasgow which I had never heard of. Was there a black magic history of Glasgow? Not only was there a black-magic history of Glasgow but we were only a few minutes from its very epicentre and where in fact standing in – or rather above – what had been the home of one of its branches.

    The Variety?

    Not the Variety but it's basement.

    In the days before the Variety became the Variety, the basement had been a snug, snug being the appropriate word because it was a very small place. It was where a man took a woman for a drink in the 60s and 70s and which sold half-pints for women, which the bar upstairs didn’t. The snug had been closed down, so Neil told me, and converted into an office because it made people uncomfortable to sit there too long. Why, I wondered? Because it was claustrophobic and dark? No. Because when the pub had been Carswell’s it had been used as the venue for black masses. The name gave it away, said Neil. Did it? Karswell, with a K, was the name of the alchemist and occultist in the M.R. James story Casting the Ruins. The shop had been named after him but, to make the association less obvious, the K had been changed to a C.

Hmmm.

Some people might have been tempted to leave then, but I was curious.

His theory, as succinctly as I can put it, and without the aid of a few drinks to make it bearable, was that this area of land, that is central Glasgow and its environs, had been the pre-Roman location of a Celtic tribe whose priests and bards were famous throughout the ancient world for the strength of their magic. In fact, their bards were said to be so powerful that they could rhyme a man to death. Chieftains from all over Celtic Europe sent their druids and bards to this area to learn from these masters. Of course, being the pre-Christian era, their magic was neither evil nor Satanic. It was natural magic. It was only with the introduction of Christianity that the early Christian fathers attempted to overcome their influence by giving them all sorts of unsavoury labels and persuading the people that consorting with them led to eternal damnation.

The bards and priests, according to Neil, took a long-term view of things. They had sat-out the invasion of the barbarian Romans and now they would lay-low until this alien life-hating monstrosity of a distorted faith, a faith in death rather than life, had withered and died as it surely would, for who could follow for long such a masochistic and life-denying religion? Through their means and methods, the bards and priests created sites of special power in and around what became Glasgow in order that their descendants might be empowered by the ways of the old religion. These were the sites others came across in a later age and, having no frame of reference but Christianity to understand them, considered them sites of Satanic significance, attempting to utilise the power which adhered to these places for their own ends. Naturally, disaster followed. They had activated a force which they had completely misinterpreted and could not control. Had I heard of Jack House’s Square Mile of Murder? asked Neil.

House had been working along the right lines, according to Neil, but he had his measurements wrong. The actual epicentre of the Square Mile of Murder – and it was greater than a square mile - was not, as he thought, Charing Cross, but slightly further west, its location being the north bound lanes of the M8. It was, in fact, not to solve Glasgow’s congestion problems that this section of the city was dug up in the 1960s, said Neil. Ha! Who ever heard of anything so ridiculous as a City Council digging through one of the most historic and architecturally significant, not to say beautiful, parts of a city to lay down a motorway? It was nonsense. No city in the world, other than Glasgow, has a motorway running through its heart. This, surely, should have aroused suspicions in those clear-sighted enough and with the historical knowledge to realise what was going on. The members of the Council, as it was then, and all those who previously and subsequently had tried to utilise the power, had learned of the enormous forces to be tapped in this area, but failed to recognise the true significance of the force and had intended to use it for their own selfish and petty ends.

Neil gave me a history lesson. The situation developed shortly after the extension of Glasgow to the West. For a long time previously, it had looked as if Glasgow would expand to the East but then suddenly, in the mid-19^th century, the developers switched their attentions. That alone was suspicious, according to Neil, and indicated that the architects of the rapidly growing Glasgow were looking for more than suitable real-estate. Through their network of affiliations with secret societies which had passed down in distorted form the secret teachings of the bards and druids, through the masons and illuminati, they knew of the altars and areas of linked power which had lain dormant under their feet for centuries. They were seeking the source.

Neil had suddenly stopped. There was an alternative theory, he told me, that it wasn’t they who were seeking the source voluntarily, but the power of the source which was compelling them to discover it, to free it from its centuries old slumber – to allow it to exert its power of place. The permutations of such a theory were too complex to consider – so he didn’t. The power was first disturbed in the mid-19^th century, which was also when the murders began to happen, and they progressed in a linear fashion along with the developments, first Madeleine Smith at Blythswood Square, then Old Fleming at Sandyford Place, then Pritchard just around the corner at Berkeley Street. Pritchard, of course, continued his murders on Sauchiehall Street but by then he had been infected and carried the power within him. The last, of course, was the murder of Miss Gilchrist at the furthest extremities of the square mile. But what of the epicentre of the square-mile, the source of power which was disturbed at its resting-site where the M8 now runs in the mid-to-late 60s? What powers were unleashed then? Weren’t the late 60s the most momentous post-war years in the West with its social and cultural revolutions, riots in France, the United States and Eastern Europe, in fact the greatest challenge to the status quo in history, inaugurating a new period of liberation from the Anglo-Saxon puritanical restrictions on sexuality and personal freedoms, including the free-choice of drug-use? 

All this because of the M8 motorway?

Of course! And consider where the main force of revolutionary fervour was felt in Europe. France! A Gallic nation still subconsciously in touch with its ancient, magical, mystical, and subliminal inheritance. And what of those at the forefront of the revolution in puritanical America? Consider their surnames. Timothy Leary, Marshall McLuhan, Neal Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, Terrence McKenna. Such people, because of their Celtic heritage, were attuned to the energies radiating from the source.

The M8 at Charing Cross?

Yes.

There’s something wonderful and inspiring about the self-confidence of nutters. Any oppositional argument merely reinforces them in their theories and reassures their opinion of themselves as one of the enlightened standing against the gullible, conventional opinions of the masses of misinformed humanity. Reality may be the consensus of opinion of any given era but they are determined to convert the masses, with or without proof.

I asked the owner of the Variety, a man named Fergus, if anything mysterious had even happened to him in the office downstairs. Yes, he said, he had been mysteriously locked in once. Ha! said his girlfriend. According to her there was nothing mysterious about it. He'd gone downstairs drunk, shut the door behind him, forgetting that he’d left his keys and phone upstairs. But worse than having to spend his night in a cold office with nothing to eat but crisps was what happened to the fish. Fergus had an aquarium upstairs. When he’d tried to force open the office door, the alarm, designed to shut off the electricity in case of a break-in, did what it was supposed to do. When the cleaner arrived next morning, the fish were floating on the surface. With the electricity off, the oxygenator in the aquarium upstairs had ceased working.

           When Neil Doyle heard what had happened, he saw a certain significance in the death of the fish. Weren’t fish the ancient symbol of Christ? As I said, nutters find patterns to confirm their theories in the most mundane of events.

    That afternoon at the bar, Neil borrowed a pen, dug up a piece of paper from somewhere and began to draw something for me...