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| 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.
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| Nietzsche's moustache. |
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| 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.
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.'
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.
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 18th and early 19th 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.
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| 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.'
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| 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
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.
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| 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 18th and early 19th 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.
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| 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.
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| 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 19th
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.
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| 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)
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)
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