 |
| Victoria Park. Whiteinch |
There is park named Victoria
Park to the west of Glasgow in an area called Whiteinch. As the name
indicates, the park was built in the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1887. The park is designed very much in the orderly layout of Victorian
parks – nature tamed. When you enter it from the east there is a large
tree-lined avenue (above) with what were once football pitches to the left and a green
field to the right.
The football pitches were laid in the mid-20th
century using a material which I think is peculiar to Glasgow, consisting as it
does of a pinkish-orange-red gravel which is referred to as red-blaes. I think
a letter ‘d’ is missing from the name because the pink-red stuff is as lethal as
miniature blades. It is the most unsuitable material for a football pitch. The
shards of gravel are like slivers of glass and even the slightest fall on them will lacerate
the skin, as thousands of schoolboys have found out over the decades. Perhaps the redness of the
gravel is based on the same principle as the red-coats the English Army once
wore – to hide the blood. I read recently that Glasgow intends to replace these
pitches with grass and artificial turf. I’ll be sorry to see it go. But not for footballing reasons. Purely for aesthetic reasons. In evenings
of low-sunlight the peculiar red colour of the blaes is reminiscent of the flat
sepia landscapes disappearing into infinity that de Chrico painted and Dali
copied.
Past the football pitches there are
some bowling greens and tennis courts which also double as basketball courts.
Beyond this is a large field used for either rugby or cricket. It might seem
odd that cricket is played in Glasgow but the park borders and separates the
old working-class area of Whiteinch from the well-off suburb of Jordanhill
and it is the residents of Jordanhill who use the rugby and cricket field. To
the south is a boating pond which is separated from the playing fields by an
island of smaller ponds for ducks and moor hens to sleep safely, surrounded by willow
trees, cherry blossoms and other shrubbery. This small bird-sanctuary of an island
is encircled by typical iron railings of the Victoria era. Inside this island
is a clock.
The clock looks as though it might belong in a railway station.
The base is an ornate, four-footed cast iron pedestal. The four feet are
moulded in the shape of the paws and claws of some mythical beast, but you
would only know this if you climbed the fence and moved the thick shrubbery
that conceals the base. From the base, a cast-iron pole in municipal green
extends about eight or nine feet and supports the heavy casing of the clock
faces. There are four of them. Beneath the clock faces, a linear structure
branches out and is decorated with leaves as though it were a branch. At either
end of this branch are what look like candle-stick holders designed to resemble
the base of budding flowers. I suspect gas-jets once rose from these to light
the clock faces in the darkness. A man called William Gordon Oswald paid for
the clock to be installed in the park in 1888 and the clock is listed as a
Category C building for preservation purposes.
Who was William Gordon Oswald?
Old
Country Houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry, published by Maclehouse in 1778 will
tell you that William Gordon Oswald was the descendent of Richard and Alexander
Oswald who bought the Scotstoun Estate in 1751. The Scotstoun Estate stretched
from the Clyde to what is now Great Western Road, comprising around 1000 acres. Richard and Alexander were the sons of an Episcopal minister and were both shipowners and very wealthy merchants. They were
puritanical bachelors and both died unmarried and childless. Perhaps making money took up too much
of their time.
Being childless, the estate passed to George Oswald, their second cousin and son
of a Presbyterian minister. George was a tobacco merchant and a partner in the
Old Ship Bank. His son James inherited the estate when he died in 1822. James
was a Captain in the Royal Navy, a confirmed bachelor, and childless. In these
more open – and suspicious – times we might wonder if there is a gay element in
the make-up of the Oswald family with so many childless bachelors - and childless
spinsters, as I was to discover. The estate passed to his sister Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, who lived till she was 98, was known as Old Miss Oswald. She
had no children and the estate passed to the grandson of her sister. Her sister
had one married daughter who had one son, James Gordon Oswald. He was the last owner of the estate and had
started selling it off for housing at the end of the 1800s. He died in San
Remo, Italy, comforted by his personal assistant and companion of many years,
known simply as Norman. It is rumoured that James Gordon Oswald’s wife
especially disliked Norman, motivating the move to Italy. Apparently she said, 'Either Norman goes or I go.' 'Goodbye, dear,' said her husband, and he left with Norman.
Not much else is known
about James except that when he sold the land for housing he stipulated that it be alcohol free - a 'dry area’ as a later date would have it. In the words of James
Gordon Oswald, that meant ‘the trafficking or selling of spiritous or fermented
liquors is forever prohibited’. No booze, no bars. He was the man who sold the land to the
Partick Municipal Authorities for the building of the park to commemorate Queen
Victoria’s Jubilee. The park was opened in 1887. It was his son, William Gordon
Oswald, who donated the clock.
For as long as I can remember the clock
faces have all stopped at twenty-three minutes to eleven. Local legend states
that the clock stopped at this time one morning in 1933 when William Gordon
Oswald died and the Oswald line came to an end. I'd like this to be a true story but I suspect it to be an
embellishment. I have read of plans to repair the clock and restore it to its former glory. I hope they never
happen. I like the fact that time is frozen on the clock. The four clock faces
have roman numerals, a white background faded to a dirty-cream and are enclosed in a
large bevelled-glass case. I once pointed out the clock to a woman in her
seventies who was surprised to see it and claimed never to have noticed it
before despite the innumerable times she had passed through the park. There is
something unobtrusive about the clock, as though it is hiding on the island. I
like to think the clock stopped deliberately, feeling that time was an
unsociable imposition on the people enjoying the park and something that should
be forgotten about during their visit, especially as so many other aspects of
their industrious Victorian lives were ruled by the clock.
I
think the clock, in itself and situated where it is, has a strange enigmatic
beauty. Like so much else in this small park it would not be out of place in a
Surrealist painting or, more particularly, a painting by de Chirico, one of
whose paintings ends this section. Just past the cricket and rugby fields
there is a low hill. On the side of the hill there is a bench overlooking an
ornamental garden beneath. Then comes the island where the clock sits, and the boating
pond. Past the boating pond and outside the park there was, until recently, a red chimney belonging to Whiteinch Public Baths – the steamie. The baths consisted of a
public laundry, a large and small swimming pool, and baths for the workers who,
at the time of construction, would have had no bathrooms in their homes. The chimney
is gone now and the public baths have been converted into flats. It seems the
remnants of utilitarian architecture are not worth listing. I’m sad to see it
go. From the bench on the low hill the red chimney in the far distance was a
perfect accompaniment to the clock in the middle distance. They were seen at
their best in the low sunlight of autumn which lit them with an oblique light
which cast all sorts of wonderful shadows in the park, especially on the red-blaes
pitches.
 |
| View from the bench on the hill overlooking the ornamental gardens. |
There is another reminder of time of a different sort in the park and it is this element the park is famous for, if it is famous at all.
Part of the land the park sits on was
once a quarry and it was in the quarry that an incredible discovery was made.
In preparation for the construction of the park in 1887, a channel was cut
through the old stone quarry to make a road and the workers uncovered the
fossilised stumps and roots of eleven Lepidodendron trees, the remains
of an extensive ancient forest which existed during the Carboniferous period
when Scotland would have been situated near the equator. The shale and
sandstone around the fossilised trees contain the imprints of various plant
remains. The strata were deposited approximately 325 million years ago, give or
take. The fossils have been enclosed in a building in a small ornamental garden
with winding paths and can be visited during the afternoon between April and
September. One of the fossilised trunks was damaged during the Second World War
by a stray bomb intended for the nearby shipyards.
 |
| Fossil enclosure. |
Perhaps the clock felt that, with
such an indication of the immensity of time in the same vicinity, to remind
people of the passing minutes and hours was just fussy and pedantic, and
possibly a cruel mockery. So, time on the clock is suspended and it is forever
23 minutes to eleven, whether or not that was the moment William Gordon Oswald
died.
To
the south of the park there are several blocks of small cottage-like buildings
which, these days, front onto the busy Dumbarton Road. The cottages were built
for estate workers when the land was still owned by the Oswalds. Across from the cottages are typical Glasgow tenements
which were built for workers at the shipyards on the nearby river. Before the
tenements were built the land contained the estate orchards.
 |
| Anybody fancy a kick-about? |
No comments:
Post a Comment