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

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            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...