Red 23... the Locarno, Tiffany's, the casino and Cooper & Co.

            In 1953, the Chinese population of Glasgow was all of three families. They were soon to be joined by more Chinese in the 50s and 60s, most of whom were from Hong Kong which was then, of course, a Crown Colony. The Imperial Act of 1914 declared that everyone born within the allegiance of the Crown in any part of the Empire was a British subject and, as such, had the right to freedom of movement to other parts of the Empire. The benefit of this to England meant a great many more people would be available to fight in the First World War.

            Hong Kong had been a British Colony since 1841 following the Opium War, when Britain enforced concessions on China. Selling opium from India to China was a lucrative business and when the Chinese tried to end the trade the British acted like any other drug-dealer whose income is threated and used force – gun-boat diplomacy.

            The 1950s and 60s was a prosperous time for Britain. With more money to spend people began to treat themselves and the number of restaurants increased, including Chinese restaurants which became very popular and were usually staffed by migrants from Hong Kong. The popularity of Chinese food was such that Chinese families with less money to invest came to Britain to open take-away restaurants as these required less capital to operate. The Chinese, as the earliest Jews had done, established their community in Garnethill. By the early 1990s there was around 3000 Chinese in Glasgow. Their numbers increased due to variety of political events in China and also prior to the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. In recent years the Chinese population of Glasgow has dramatically increased with the influx of students to the city, 1,500 studying at Glasgow University alone and living, mostly, within the west end. The resident Chinese population of Glasgow is now estimated to be around 10,000.

            Let’s talk about gambling. The Chinese have always been famous for a love of gambling. A Chinese man I once met at the horse-racing in South Korea told me there was a Chinese saying: If you don’t gamble, you don’t know how lucky you are. I watched him pass a stack of ten-thousand won notes the size and thickness of a brick to the woman behind the counter who used a machine to count them. As he watched the race he was perfectly placid and by the expression on his face I couldn’t tell if he had won or lost until I asked him. He had lost. He took another brick of notes out of his bag and went back to the counter. The Chinese have a strong and ancient belief in luck, fate, fortune and numerology, and, as a result, winning and losing can be seen as a reflection on the self – a person lucky in gambling is considered to be blessed by the gods. Just as important though, is the fact that in China gambling is seen as a social activity far more than it is in the west where gambling, unless it is around a card table, is a far more solitary and furtive affair as though there were something shameful and secretive about it – like wanking. I’ve been in a lot of bookmakers but very seldom had a conversation with anyone in there. They are there to gamble, not to talk. An Asian-American psychologist, Dr. Timothy Fong, is of the opinion that migrants are more likely to gamble than non-migrants because to move hundreds or thousands of miles from home is in itself one of the biggest gambles a person might make and any person willing to take such risks is more psychologically more predisposed to gambling than the stay-at-homes might be. He admits he can’t prove this and has no statistical backing to support his hunch but is convinced of his theory given the patients he has treated for problem gambling, who are predominantly Asian-American.

In the 1980s, my father had a Chinese friend who owned the Amber restaurant on Byres Rd. One weekend, he no longer owned the restaurant. He had lost it in a game of cards. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told my father. ‘I’ll get it back soon.’ And he did. The head waiter in the restaurant was also a very heavy gambler… and I’ve known a few heavy gamblers. On occasions, he lost not only his money but his car and his home. He would win them back again only to lose them a few weeks later before winning them back again and… the cycle continued. In the early 90s I was in the habit of visiting a casino on Sauchiehall St. Given its proximity to Garnethill, it was popular with the Chinese community and probably still is. If you were to visit the place in the late afternoon or early evening you saw an odd sight. Any Chinese there were predominantly women. After the women left, the men came in. It seemed to be an arrangement they had between them. After the casino I’d often visit the Canton Express, a Chinese restaurant on Sauchiehall Street. Anyone who was a regular at the Canton was accustomed to it changing ownership on a regular basis, and often the staff changed with the owner, as did the quality of the food. A delicious dish you had the week before was entirely different under the new owner and cook. The Canton is now gone, converted into a bookmakers, appropriately enough, but the casino is still there and one of the croupiers told me it is very popular with Chinese students.

A couple of years ago, a Chinese journalist, named Yang Hu, wrote concerning the problems of Chinese students coming to Glasgow. They were, he said, unprepared for the culture-shock of arriving to study in a country thousands of miles from home. Their English lessons in China, while providing them with a qualification, was examination-orientated and did little to prepare them for conversational English. Chinese students, he wrote, not only had difficulty speaking English to other students but could barely follow their lecturers. As a consequence, the students found their studies far more demanding than they had expected and had difficulty socialising, all of which led to feelings of alienation and loneliness. The author quotes a Chinese sociology student: ‘We like to socialise in restaurants, at karaoke, or through late-night snacks, while Westerners mostly socialise in bars.’ Lacking the confidence and experience to visit a bar, and at a loose end, many students start gambling to fill a void in their lives. There is no language barrier in gambling. Casino gambling is illegal in mainland China and, typical of a forbidden fruit, is growing very popular with Chinese students in Britain. One student who lost £20,000 in a night said he just did not know what to do with his spare time. He went to the casino out of curiosity, not even intending to gamble, but after watching his friends he found it ‘wonderful’.

The bug had bitten.

"D'ye want a pickle wi' yer sandwich, Mr Bond?"

The casino on Sauchiehall Street has had a number of names over the years but the building it is located in was once the Charing Cross Electric Theatre, Glasgow's first purpose built cinema, opened in 1910 in what had previously been commercial premises. In 1926 it became the Locarno Ballroom. The Locarno remained a ballroom for many years, popular during the Second World War with American servicemen who were billeted at the nearby Beresford Hotel. In the 1960s it changed name to Tiffany's before being converted to a casino in the 1980s.

The building was constructed in 1898 and designed by Robert Duncan. It is now listed Category B. It is constructed of cast-iron with ashlar dressings and cladding, ashlar being finely worked stone. Duncan was born in 1840 and died in 1928. A number of tenements designed and co-designed by Duncan still stand in Pollokshields at Melville St, Kenmure St, and Albert Rd.


The Charing Cross Electric Theatre was converted to a ballroom in 1926 named the Locarno after a Swiss town in which the European powers had signed a peace treaty the year before, securing everlasting peace in Europe of course. It had a sprung Canadian maple dancefloor, balcony café, revolving stage, showgirls and live bands. Despite its popularity, it was closed between 1929 and 1934. I suspect this was due to the Wall Street crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression. It was revived in 1934 and during the Second World War became very popular with American servicemen who were billeted in the nearby Beresford hotel. The GI’s, though, were not dancing the foxtrot or the waltzes that had been popular in the 20s. For them it was the Jitterbug and the Jive. An incidental piece of social history that you don’t often hear mentioned concerns why such incredibly fast dance music became popular at the time. The GIs, particularly airmen, were being handed out little white pills to give them energy and keep them alert - it also had the militarily-wonderful side-effect of making them aggressive. It was an early form of amphetamine. Many GIs saved up their rations for a night out and the music and dancing evolved in speed and style to reflect their manic mood. Much of the music of the Jitterbug period was faster in tempo than the dance music of the 80s and 90s ecstasy scene. You can’t beat Government Issue industrial strength speed. Also, the GIs noticed that the little white pills caused them to grind their teeth a lot so they all made sure they had a ready supply of gum, hence the stereotype of the gun-chewing GI.

'Are ye dancing'?'... 'Naw. Am aff ma tits oan speed!'

And you thought your granny had led a quiet life.


In the 60s, the Locarno was looking old and tired and underwent a major refurbishment to become Tiffany’s, a dance hall and a venue for bands such as U2. In the 80s it changed name yet again to the Zanzi-bar disco. That phase lasted a few years and it has been a casino ever since.

Another of his building's is Cooper's corner at the junction of Bank Street and Great Western Road. Cooper & Co. was Scotland's leading grocery shop and founded in 1871 by Thomas Bishop. The building was constructed in 1886 and noted for its French Renaissance façade and clock tower and its beautiful fixtures and fittings. It closed in the 1980s to be converted into a pub.

Not your average grocery shop.

The interior.

Are you a pole-vaulter?... No, I'm German... but how did you know my name was Walter?

When I was a boy, being Catholic, we attended mass at St. Simon’s at Partick. A mass for the Polish community - in Polish - would have just finished before the mass in English would begin. The men leaving the Polish mass would light their first cigarettes after having gone without for half-an-hour while the men waiting for the mass in English would be having their last before their enforced abstinence. My father would often stand there puffing away like a condemned man before his execution while talking to a Polish friend of his, who would be, very leisurely, smoking a pipe.

St. Simon's

The Polish man’s father had come to Scotland at the beginning of the Second World War to serve with the Polish troops, as did many of the Poles who now live in Glasgow. Many of the Poles were Catholic and St Simon’s was their chapel and Father Marian Lekawa their priest. Father Marian was a great help to Father Patrick Tierney, the old Glasgow priest who would otherwise be alone at St Simon’s.

At that time, there was only one Polish mass but three English masses and Father Marian, although his English wasn’t great, would often conduct the evening mass to give Father Tierney a break. I was an alter-boy at the time and Father Marion would go through the readings with me having underlined any word he was uncertain of, asking me what it meant and how it was pronounced. He would rehearse it a few times and then write it phonetically in his missal. Those were different times and when Father Marion invited me and one of the other alter-boys to watch wrestling at the Kelvin Hall nobody would have been suspicious of his motives as they might these days. Father Marion’s intentions were pure. He only wanted to see the wrestling. He was disappointed. The wrestling we saw was of the fairground variety that was popular on TV at the time, with a good guy and a villain to be hissed at and booed by the audience who seemed to be made up mostly of crazy old woman who took it all very seriously. Every now and again Father Marion would shake his head and mutter, ‘This is not wrestling.’ He had expected something like the Greco-Roman variety he was familiar with back home. But he saw how much we were enjoying the show and stayed till the end. On the way home he was at pains to explain to us what real wrestling was.

St. Simon's, the third oldest Catholic church in Glasgow, was founded by Father Daniel Gallagher, a priest famous for having taught David Livingstone Latin which allowed Livingstone to qualify in medicine at Glasgow University. It was built in 1858 and originally called St. Peter's, and renovated in 1956 by architects Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, and again refurbished in 2005-2008 for its 150th anniversary. It is a listed Category B building. St Simon's is a small building and by 1903 it was too small for the ever-growing population of dockers and their families who were mostly Irish Catholic migrants and a new church was built on Highland St. From then on St. Simon's served as an extension known as the Bridge St Chapel until the Second World War when it was used as a church for the Polish serviceman stationed at Yorkhill Barracks. In 1945, with the increase in the city's population it became an official parish church and took the name St. Simon's. In 2004, the parish priest of St. Simon's became also the parish priest of St. Peter's, restoring, once again, the situation which had  existed between 1903 and 1945. The reason for the this was that St Simon's was too small to accommodate the large number of Polish migrants to the city following Poland's entry into the EU the year previously and services were provided for them at the Highland St church, which, of course, had been built originally to serve the increased number of Catholic migrants who were, at that time, Irish. This situation existed until 2011 when St. Anne's in Dennistoun was allocated to the Polish community and St Simon's became independent of St Peter's yet again. St. Simon's still has services in Polish.     

            Scotland’s connection with Poland goes back long before the Second World War. In the 14^th and 15^th centuries Scottish merchants and mercenary soldiers made their way to Poland and, of course, many stayed. In fact, a Scot named Andrew Chalmers was, during this period, appointed the Mayor of Warsaw, the Polish capital, three times. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries a great many Scots emigrated to Poland. At the beginning of the 17^th century 30,000 Scottish families were recorded as living in Poland, and that is families, not individuals. Modestly estimating a family at four to five individuals that would equate to a Scottish population in Poland of between 120,000 to 150,000. The situation changed in the 18^th century when Poland became the scene, as Norman Davies says, of ‘endless wars, risings, invasions, famines and epidemics.’ At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Polish territory, including Warsaw, was ceded to Russia. In 1830 there was an uprising in the Polish army. It was crushed in 1831 and many involved had to flee for their lives and came to Scotland. The first Scottish-Polish Society was founded in the 1830s. Following another rising against Russia in 1863 which was, again, violently crushed, the name of Poland was abolished. Many in Scotland saw similarities in the plight of the Poles attempting to resist a far larger, stronger and belligerent neighbour with the situation between Scotland and England. In 1914 the country was divided and Poles found themselves fighting for Russia, Germany and Austria. When the Germans invaded Poland from the west in 1939, the Russians invaded from the east as part of the Soviet-Nazi pact. The Polish government-in-exile was set up in London while the Polish First Army Corps was set up in Scotland with 40,000 men. Following the war, when it was clear that Russia intended to occupy Poland, many Poles decided to stay in Scotland. As around 80 per cent were Roman Catholic they inevitably mixed with and married into the Catholic community of Scotland.

            Following Poland’s entry into the EU in 2003 and with the freedom of movement for workers in the EU, a number of Poles again made the move to Scotland. In 2015, it was estimated that 86,000 Polish born individuals were resident in Scotland, and were, in fact, the largest migrant group in Scotland. The Conservative government under Boris Johnson intends to end free movement ‘as soon as possible’ after Britain leaves the EU. Maybe Johnson forgets that his great-grandfather on his mother’s side was Turkish while his other great-grandfather on his mother’s side was a Russian-Jewish immigrant and his father’s family is German and French. But then, Boris only has objections to migrants who aren't as rich as his family were.

A shit in human form.

 Since writing this blog, St Simon's Chapel has been burnt down in an act of arson. A 24 year old has been arrested.

An Irishman and a Jew go for a pint... wait... is this a joke?

One of the major immigrant groups to Glasgow was, and still is, the Irish. The 1991 census recorded 10,000 people in Glasgow who were born in Ireland. As of 2016, the total of Irish born (that’s Republic of Ireland) in Scotland was 26,000. More than a few of them, I'd guess, were in Glasgow. Incidentally, the number of Polish-born in Scotland was 81,000. The Irish have been coming to Glasgow for a long time. In 1689 the Committee of Glasgow Churches complained of the numbers arriving and at the end of the 1700s ministers complained of the flood of poor Irish, with their ‘superstitious religion and alien customs’.

Many of Ireland’s problems which resulted in immigration were rooted in history. As early as the 12^th century much of the country was under the foreign rule of an English king, Henry II. Religion wasn’t a problem then as every Christian was Catholic, but after the Reformation, Protestant rule was introduced in the north of Ireland and Protestants from Scotland and England were encouraged to settle in Ulster. It has been said that this was the beginning of two Irelands, when Ulster was settled by English speaking Protestants, leaving the rest of the country Gaelic speaking and Catholic. When the Irish rebelled in 1798 there was a bloody repression. The English decided to punish the populace by suppressing them politically, educationally and economically. Catholics were kept out of Parliament, not allowed to vote, hold public office or attend university. Also, Ireland was not allowed to trade with the overseas colonies and missed out on the wealth which this brought to places such as Glasgow. During the Anglo-French wars, landowners sub-let most of their land for growing corn for which they charged high-rents. The poorer people who could not afford the rents were driven out. Ireland then suffered its own version of the Highland Clearances when the peasantry were driven off the land in favour of cattle-breeding to feed the growing population of industrial England. By 1831, it was estimated there were over 35,000 Irish in Glasgow. Even the Highlanders, who had experienced their own harsh treatment, resented their presence.

Glasgow was becoming dangerously overcrowded. Between 1818 and 1852, Glasgow had five outbreaks of typhus fever, as well as the usual diseases of TB, diphtheria and smallpox. In 1832 and 1848-49 there were outbreaks of cholera with the rapidity of the spread due to slum-housing and inadequate water supplies. The estimated mortality rate for 1849 was one in seven. An investigation by the city’s Superintendent of Police in 1841 recorded that in seven adjacent closes in High Street alone there were 65 households. A total of 192 people lived there, just over 27 people per flat, all in one room dwellings usually smaller than 14 feet by 14 feet. One woman lived in a room the size of a large cupboard measuring 10 by 8 foot with her six children. Her husband had deserted her. I wonder why?

And then came the potato famine.

It is inadequately estimated that one million people emigrated from Ireland during the famine while another million died from famine and fever. Following the famine the population of Ireland was 50 per cent what it had previously been. The famine only affected the poor whose survival depended on the potato. There was plenty of food in the country. When the famine was at its worst millions of pounds worth of farm produce was exported to England. During the Irish famine, London sent a man who can best be described as nothing other than a psychopath to oversee relief work. Charles Trevelyan believed the famine was God’s way of punishing the lazy Irish. He refused to hand out food to the Irish because he was a devotee of Adam Smith and felt that Government should never interfere in market forces. And, of course, England has maintained such a lofty matter of principle ever since and never interfered with market-forces – except when the banks crashed in 2007 due to shoddy loan practices and then they were bailed out to the amount of £136.6 billion rather than be allowed to fail as they deserved and as the supposedly irrefutable market forces dictated. But they were not starving peasants but wealthy bankers, most of whom had relations in government who also had shares in the banks.

The Honourable Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, KCB, psychopath, sociopath, genocidal racist

"The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people".

In Ireland, Trevelyan instituted a works programme that forced starving people into hard labour building pointless roads to nowhere for no traffic in order that they might buy grain with the pittance they were paid for such efforts. But because he would not interfere with market forces he refused to control the price of grain - prices sky-rocketed to such an extent that the labourers still could not afford it. Trevelyan was later honoured for his relief work.

At the peak of the Irish famine around 8000 people a week were arriving in Glasgow. Those who came to Glasgow were the ones who couldn’t afford to go to America, and they were not only poor but on the verge of starvation when they arrived. Many found they had to put their young children to work in factories and mills. In fact, the factories depended on their cheap labour and dexterously small hands. Those going to America didn't have it much easier. As many as 50,000 were said to have died crossing the Atlantic in one year alone, many of them dying of disease or malnutrition on the way. Sea-sickness killed many who were already weakened by starvation. The bodies were dumped overboard because there was nothing else to do with them. Even if they made it to America, many of the immigrants died, frail as they were. Herman Melville describes the conditions on board the immigrant ships. He said the Irish were ‘packed like slaves in a slave ship’.

After the famine, a great many of those who had found work in the cotton mills found themselves unemployed when the American Civil War cut off cotton supplies in the 1860s. Out of work, the Irish depended on charity and the hostility against them increased. ‘Hunting the Barney’ was considered good sport during the Glasgow Fair. Groups set off to find an Irishman who, once caught, was treated like a human piñata. This came to an end when there was enough Irishmen to fight back. It’s no fun when the fox bites the hounds.

Skibbereen famine pit with an estimated 10,000 bodies.

The Irish in Glasgow saw their next upsurge when the First World War demanded an increased labour force. When the first census after the war was taken in 1921, there were around 66,000 people of Irish birth in Glasgow. After the war, jobs became fewer, and the old animosities resurfaced. In 1923 a Report to the Church of Scotland openly published a paper headlined; The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality. By that stage Glasgow’s overcrowding was, if anything, worse. A Royal Commission report several years earlier described Glasgow as a ‘clotted mass of slums’. Due to the overcrowding and insanitary conditions, Glasgow was allocated another title, ‘Cancer of Empire’, to go with the many it has had over the centuries – Second City of Empire, European City of Culture, Drug-death Capital of Europe, etc



            I had a great-uncle who had some odd ideas. One of them, and the one that most affected his life, was the notion that sleep was our natural condition which wakefulness interrupted. As a consequence, he slept as often and as long as possible. It was his good-fortune to have indulgent relatives who humoured his eccentricities. He was, they said euphemistically, ‘a wee bit touched’. They only time he woke was to eat or go to the toilet. Eating seemed to use up all his energy. After a meal, the longest he could stay awake would be half-an-hour to an hour. I mentioned him once to an old friend of mine who had done three years at medical school. Perhaps, he suggested, my great uncle had Coeliac disease. Coeliac disease, he told me, is more prevalent in the Irish and those of Irish decent. Celiac disease (gluten sensitive enteropathy) is a condition affecting the small bowel, characterized by permanent intolerance to dietary gluten, and giving rise to varying degrees of malabsorption and diarrhoea. With the advent of sensitive screening tests, the condition is being increasingly diagnosed. Gluten is found in wheat, rye, barley and oats. When a person with the disease eats gluten their immune system responds by damaging the small intestine and, as such, the disease is considered an auto-immune disorder. Sometimes the disease is triggered after surgery, pregnancy, childbirth, viral infection or severe emotional distress. One of the symptoms of Coeliac is severe lethargy. The only treatment for coeliac disease is to avoid foods that contain gluten. For most people this will stop symptoms, heal intestinal damage and prevent further damage. Improvements are seen within days of starting the gluten-free diet and the small intestine is usually healed in three to six months.

            But why is it so frequent among the Irish?

           
The Irish diet was, historically, very low in gluten. Ireland was first settled 9,000 years ago and farming was introduced 6,000 years ago. Irish agriculture became dominated by pasture. Milk products were central to the Irish diet. Although cereal was eaten, it was largely in the form of oats. Ireland's basic human genetic stock was established 5,000 years ago and has remained relatively homogenous and distinct ever since but when the English moved into Ireland in the 16th and 17th century, their diet was cereal based. The native Irish were thrown off the good land and given poor land were tillage was difficult. With commercial farming, dairy products and oats became more expensive and the poor stopped eating them. The potato became their main source of sustenance. Before the famine, oats were the only source of cereal eaten. It was only after the famine that such things as wheaten bread became a staple of the Irish diet. It was following this change in the diet that the Irish began to display their intolerance of a food-type which their digestive tracts had been so unused to for thousands of years and the effects of which are still seen. Coeliac disease was first recognised in 1887 and treated with dietary changes but it wasn’t until after the Second World War and the reintroduction of bread into Holland after the war’s shortages that wheat’s role as a cause in some health problems became apparent. It was only in the 1970s that more subtle presentations of the disease began to be realised. It is now suggested that Coeliac disease was the underlying cause of many of John F Kennedy’s medical problems.

            Not a lot was known about Coeliac disease when my great-uncle may or may not have had it. I imagine he examined his symptoms and came to his own conclusions, idiosyncratic as they were. He lived his sedentary live for up to ten years before dying of a heart-attack… in his sleep. He reminds me of the Koala bear. Because their eucalyptus diet has limited notational content, Koalas sleep for up to 20 hours a day. Koalas are not actually bears but marsupials whose nearest living relative is the wombat. I only know this because my great-uncle became fascinated by Koalas and the only thing I ever knew him to read in his brief moments of waking was a book on Koalas. Koalas are in danger due to their highly specialised diet. They are as dependent on the eucalyptus plant as the Irish were on the potato. The biggest threat to them is a loss of habit due to agriculture and urbanisation. Unlike the Koala, the Panda is a bear, but like the Koala it also is in danger due to its overly-specialised diet, of which bamboo makes up 99 per cent. Because of the limited amount of nutritional value in bamboo a Panda has to eat up to 14kg of the stuff a day. One side-effect of this is that it has to shit up to 40 times a day. The Panda’s diet has also affected its behaviour in other ways. It greatly limits its activity, avoids socialising and stays away from steep terrain. The moral of this story is, I suppose, two-fold; specialisation would appear to be undesirable in nature and, we are what we eat, something the ancients knew all about as Will Durant observed in his Story of Civilization. Early man ate his enemies because, by doing so, he believed he acquired their strength and power. And since he...
        'believed that he acquired the powers of whatever organism he consumed, he came naturally to           the conception of eating the god. In many cases he ate the flesh and drank the blood of the                   human god whom he had deified and fattened for the sacrifice. When, through increased                     continuity in the food-supply, he became more humane, he substituted images for the victim, and         was content to eat these... and the priest turned the image into the god by the power of magic               formulas.' (The Story of Civilization. Vol I.)

Ach, it's been a long day.

The first recorded Jewish resident in Glasgow is Isaac Cohen in 1812. He was a hatter and described as ‘the man who introduced the silk hat to Scotland’. To be able to trade in Glasgow at that time required a ‘burgess certificate’ which was intended to stop anyone trading who was not a member of the official church and required an oath to renounce Roman Catholicism. ‘No problem,’ said Isaac. ‘Where do I sign?’

Following Isaac, the first Jews in Glasgow were mainly German or Dutch merchants leaving Europe because of the Napoleonic Wars. By 1823, there were enough Jews in Glasgow to form a synagogue which was just a room and kitchen on the High Street. By 1831, the Glasgow census included 47 Jews. By 1850, the number was estimated to be around 200 and a new synagogue was set up in Candleriggs. As some Jews became wealthy they began to help those who were poorer and when a young boy from a poor family showed academic promise his education was paid for. Asher Asher became the first Jewish student to qualify at Glasgow and the first Jewish doctor.

Looking for relatives amidst victims of the pogroms.

In 1881, Alexander II of Russia was assassinated and the Jews were blamed. Many were forcibly expelled from the country and many more left voluntarily to escape the extreme violence against them. Between 1881 and 1930, 4 million Jews left Eastern Europe, most headed for America. In order to reach America, they had to pass through Britain and some stayed. After the long sea voyage they had undergone, many, it is said, thought they were already in America. By that stage, most of the Jews who were in the city lived at Garnethill where a synagogue had been built in 1879. The new arrivals, being poor, could only find accommodation in areas such as the Gorbals where a large community of Jews became established. By 1885, more than half the pupils in Gorbals Primary were Jewish and Hebrew lessons and prayers were given separately. By 1895 the first religious school was opened which the Jewish children had to attend after normal school. How happy they must have been.

Garnethill Synagogue. 

The new generations born and growing up in Glasgow tended not to speak the Yiddish of their parents and, in an attempt to save the language, the first Jewish newspaper in Scotland. The Jewish Voice was printed in 1914, becoming the Jewish Echo in 1928 which was printed until 1992. At the peak of Jewish life in the Gorbals the area had five large synagogues and several smaller ones. From the early 1900s, there was even an all-Jewish pipe-band – wearing kilts, said to be the only one in the world and which had been formed from members of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade.

Pipe band of the Jewish Lads and Girls Brigade, 1973

In the 1930s the old Jewish families were financially able to move out of the Gorbals but were soon replaced by a fresh wave of Jews leaving Europe again as war threatened. On the whole, the Jews of the Gorbals got on very amicably with their Irish and Highland Catholic neighbours and were, in fact, treated better by the established authorities of Glasgow than were the Catholics. But there were still instances of anti-Semitism. In 1939 Jewish shops were damaged with anti-Jewish slogans and around 20 windows were smashed while another 80 were damaged with swastikas being scratched into them. Most of the shops affected were on Sauchihall Street, although shops on Argyle Street and Stockwell Street were also damaged. In a 1938 speech on the ‘Jewish problem’, Church of Scotland minister, the Rev. James Black, wrote; ‘There are only two ways to treat the Jews, and these are either to fight them or convert them… Herr Hitler is only imitating others…’

One of the most famous of Glasgow Jews was Emmanuel Shinwell – ‘Manny’ Shinwell. He was a labour politician and Red Clydesider who died in 1986 aged 101 years, having spent his adult life campaigning for the rites of all working people. Shinwell was born in London and moved to Glasgow when aged 11. He had twelve younger brothers and sisters. Shinwell said his education came from the public library and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The only formal education he had lasted until he was 11 when he began working with his father who owned a small clothing shop. From 1903, he became involved with the work of various labour unions. Shinwell achieved a degree of notoriety in 1919 when he became involved with the Glasgow campaign for a 40 hour-week. A rally was organised in George Square which was attended by around 90,000 people. The gathering descended into what officialdom called a riot and the Riot Act was read. It had only been 14 months since the Russian Revolution and a revolution in Germany was still in progress. Fearing for the status quo, the government panicked. The local troops were confined to barracks at Maryhill while troops and tanks from elsewhere were sent for. No troops from Glasgow were allowed to participate for fear they would side with the strikers. Following the affair, Shinwell was arrested and imprisoned for five months. By 1922, he was a Labour MP. He held junior office in the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929. Between 1945-47 he was Minister for Fuel and Power of the Attlee government and presided over the nationalisation of coal-mining in 1946. He was Secretary of State for War, then Minister of Defence during 1950-51. In May 1940, he had refused a position in Churchill’s Coalition Government with the Ministry of Food. Perhaps he remembered Churchill advocating that the RAF be used to bomb working class areas in Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester during the General Strike of 1926. Throughout the war he was a vociferous critic of Churchill. Shinwell stepped down from the shadow-cabinet in 1955 and continued as a backbencher until the 1970s when he was given a life peerage. From then until his death he became an active member in the House of Lords.

George Square 1919.

'Which wan's ma Granda?' 'The wan wi' the cap oan.'

The University Café... sin and the Highland Clearances...

I had an odd experience in the University Café once. Although I have spent a lot of years away from Glasgow I often go there in my dreams. I see people, places, buildings, that no longer exist. I remember much more in my dreams than I would while awake. In one dream, I visited my grandparents' old home in Partick. I saw wallpaper, pictures, ornaments, furniture, and linoleum on the kitchen floor that I had completely forgotten. In my garndmother’s home it is always the mid to late-seventies. Somewhere in my mind, it would seem, whatever ‘mind’ is, there is a perfect facsimile of her flat dressed by an expert set-designer to all the specifics of the period, with everything suitably aged as it was in reality. The same is true of buildings which have been knocked down or put to a different use. As for the people, they are suspended in my dreams as I saw them then – an old teacher who is forever sixty years old or thereabouts, a next door neighbour in her mid-fifties, an old Irishman who looked a lot like an elderly Jimmy Cagney and who gave me cryptic advice on women the meaning of which I only realised thirty years later when it was too late to help me.
    And then there is the University Café.
    I have a recurring dream. In the dream, I am eating ice-cream from the Uni café. I'm not always in Glasgow. Sometimes a man brings it to me in America, Germany, London. When I taste it in these places, I'm always surprised, amazed, and then ecstatic. Whenever I am in the café in my dreams it is always Gino who serves me, and his mother and father are there, his father in the dark blue overall that he always wore, and his mother walking in and out of the kitchen in her white overall. Gino’s ice-cream is the only food I dream of eating on a regular basis. That isn’t the odd experience I had in the café though. I’ll get to that.

There is a theory that we remember everything we have ever done, seen, read, heard, thought. In patients undergoing brain surgery who were awake during the procedure, sections of their brains were stimulated by electrodes and they suddenly recalled events in complete detail as though they were happing at that very moment. Not only sights and sounds were reported but scents. One woman also heard an orchestra playing at a concert she had attended. Is complete recall possible? The actress Marilu Henner is said to have hyperthymesia, meaning she can recall what she was doing at any time on any day. For someone experiencing hyperthymesia, the information is specifically related to their lives and they tend only to remember public events if the public event had a specific meaning for them. It’s not all good. The constant stream of irresistible, irrepressible memories can seriously disrupt a person’s life. One woman described the ability as an ‘affliction’ and a ‘burden’. She said she lived her life in the past with one memory setting off a chain-event of memories making it difficult for her to concentrate on what was happening in her present. Younger people with the condition often do badly in school-work because they remember everything but the school work - a teenager's priorities are not geography, history and maths. There are theorists of the future who speculate that some day we will be able to download our memories and play them back as we might a video.

I wouldn’t like total-recall. There is a lot I would like to forget and a lot I prefer to mis-remember rather than remember as it actually happened.

There is also the condition known as false memory syndrome where an individual believes that something which did not happen did and no amount of evidence to the contrary can convince them otherwise. It is not recognised as a psychiatric illness. The notion of false memory syndrome began to be popularised in the early 1990s when it was discovered that a lot of people who had undergone ‘recovered memory therapy’ had ‘recovered’ memories of events which didn’t happen. A large number of therapists, having been inspired by Freud, were of the opinion that a great many common problems such as anxiety, depression, amnesia and eating disorders, were due to repressed memories of a sexually abusive nature. They decided to recover these memories through hypnosis and other methods. Of course, if you set out to discover repressed memories of a sexually abusive nature you’ll find memories of a sexually abusive nature - whether they happened or not. For some patients it was 'useful' to find repressed memories of abuse because then they could take their ‘abuser’ to court and sue them. For others, though, the belief in the memory was perfectly genuine and not of malicious intent. Subsequent research discovered that as much as a third of experimental subjects could become convinced of the reality of having experienced something impossible. What is the difference between a false memory and a delusion?

            I have a friend who has been diagnosed as schizophrenic. I dispute the diagnosis but that's beside the point. I listened one day as he elaborated in great detail the circumstances which had led to his being sectioned in Gartnavel Mental Hospital. It was clear from the start of his story that what he remembered as having happened couldn’t possibly have happened. For a start, everyone in Scotland would have had to be involved - an unlikely situation, he agreed, but that didn’t stop him from being absolutely certain it happened. I won’t go into all the details but the gist of the matter was that his activities were being broadcast nationwide on radio and television. Every person in Scotland was aware of this and playing their part in determining what made him ‘high’ or ‘low’. Until he began explaining to me what had happened, he had been making perfect sense. We had been wandering around Partick and Byres Road, talking of all sorts of things, and had stopped off at the University Café on Byres Road for an ice-cream and a coffee. It was then, as he told me what happened – the first time he had told me in any detail about his breakdown, that he started to become agitated. The more I tried to point out how irrational, how ‘unreal’, the circumstances which had led to his breakdown were, the more agitated, and angry he became. Finally, he leaned over the small table very aggressively. He demanded to know if I was now trying to convince him ‘it’ didn’t happen because I had taken part in the event. There was nothing to be said or done. I dropped the argument and, after a while, he was back to normal. To this day, he is convinced that what happened all those years ago ‘did’ happen. Whenever the subject is brought up it is soon dropped again.

The warm, welcoming façade of Gartnavel Royal. A home from home... 'Medication time!'

The only reason I mention my friend's delusion is because, apart from taking place at the University Café, it gave rise to the notion that if this blog were a novel I might imagine the search for a dead man becoming the plot which drives a theme on the subject of memory. The dénouement is when the searcher discovers that the person whose activities he has been following is himself. He has suffered from amnesia and, in an attempt to help him recover his 'lost self', his relatives have given him the task in the hope it might activate his lost memories. It’s a plot that has been used before. In the novel and film Angel Heart. Johnny Angel is hired by Lou Cypher – the devil – to find the whereabouts of a once famous crooner. The more Angel investigates, the more bodies turn up. He comes to realise that he is investigating his own past and ‘clearing up’ the evidence. It has a similar plot to Orson Welles’ Confidential Agent. A man is hired to investigate the history of a very wealthy man. Everyone the detective tracks down and speaks to ends up dead. The man who has hired the detective is the wealthy man himself, who is disposing of his past. Welles’ seems to have been fond of the device. He used it in Citizen Kane. A reporter investigates the life of the dead Kane, trying to piece together the secret of who he was from interviews with those who new him. Before making Kane, Welles had been preparing to make Conrad's Heart of Darkness - later filmed as Apocalypse Now. Heart of Darkness has a similar set up. Marlowe is sent to Africa to find out what has happened to Kurtz. As he travels he pieces Kurtz's story together, of who he was, what he experienced, and what he became. All of the stories are an attempt to reconstruct a personality from the memories of those who knew him. I suppose all biography is the same – an attempt to get at the key, the secret of who the man or woman really was. I suppose Proust was the ultimate investigator of personality, memory and time, and, in a very French fashion, he took himself as subject, as did Montaigne, Rousseau and Cendrars. Hemingway, of course, was his own subject but he never admitted it. Everything Hemingway wrote was about Hemingway. The same can be said of Malcolm Lowry. There are no characters in a Malcolm Lowry novel, only Malcolm Lowry. Lowry has the self-focused solipsism of most alcoholics I’ve known. Hemingway denied on numerous occasions that he was an alcoholic, all evidence to the contrary. But let's get to the café...

            The University Café has been on Byres Road since 1918. It is believed that the first Italians who settled in Glasgow did so on their way to the United States. They arrived in Glasgow, ran out of money, or decided to increase their savings while they were waiting to catch a ship and started doing whatever they could. Many of the poorer Italians sang songs on the streets, an exotic sight in the late 1800s. In the summer, the singers sold ice-creams. The ice-creams were popular. A fledgling Italian society helped immigrants start up business and among the members of the society was  Leopoldo Guiliano, who arrived in Glasgow in the 1880s, eventually owning around 60 café and shops, making him a very wealthy man, which seems fitting as he would appear to be named after Leopoldo Guiliano de’Midici who co-ruled Florence with his brother Lorenzo the Magnificent... but not for long. At the age of twenty-five he was assassinated by sword-blow to the head before being stabbed 19 times. Leopoldo Guiliano of Glasgow was born in Barga in Tuscany. He had travelled to Chicago as a boy and lived there for some time before returning to Europe to establish a plaster figure making business in Glasgow around 1881 before branching into the café and catering business. Six other family members were involved with his business including his brother Raffaele. His first business address in Glasgow was at 26 South Wellington Street, which is now a non-descript building across from the Waterloo Bar – said to be Scotland’s oldest gay-bar. I doubt that. It is probably the oldest openly gay bar.

A favourite with Glasgow firemen.

            With the help of Leopoldo Guiliano and the Societá di Mutuo Soccorso, ice-cream parlours began being opened all over Glasgow, at first in the poorer areas where the immigrants lived and later in the city-centre with more luxurious establishments. The sharp increase in ice-cream parlours wasn’t popular among that off-shoot of life-hating puritans, the Presbyterians. They worried what would happen to the morals of the youth who frequented such a place where sensual pleasure of the oral and alimentary variety was so conspicuously on offer - and by foreigners with their dark eyes and their lascivious ways! Ice-cream parlours were even described in a Parliamentary Committee on Sunday Opening as ‘one of the evils of Glasgow.’ Ice-cream. Given the fact that there was already so many pubs available in Glasgow it seems odd that the 300 or so ice-cream cafés should have felt the full force of the moral-minority, who went so far as to say the ice-cream parlour was ‘ten time worse than the evils of the public house’. But then puritans of whatever variety are always hypocrites. Part of the objection, of course, was that the cafés were owned and staffed, not just by foreigners, but by Roman Catholics. They also sold an unnecessary product which was described as ‘epitomizing the evil of luxury being smuggled into the souls of Glaswegians’. There was no stopping the population, though. They were hell-bent on enjoying themselves.

You'll go to hell! For God's sake, think of the children!

The Italians weren’t the first or last to arrive in what was or became Glasgow, nor the first to receive resentment purely on religious grounds. Their ancestral countrymen, the Romans had made it as far as what became Glasgow. Before them, of course, came the Celts, and after them the Vikings. When the Romans left there were five ethnic groups in North Britain; the Picts, the Britons or Brithons, the Angles, the Scots – who were from Ireland originally, and Scandinavians. Each held a distinct territory with their own language traditions and religious beliefs and practices. There was conflict to begin with but gradually they came to form a loose alliance. The Norman invasion of England was also felt in Scotland. Robert the Bruce was of Norman ancestry and the common Scottish names Bruce and Sinclair are of Norman origin. It was, in a sense, repeated attacks by the English which encouraged the diverse elements in Scotland to begin to form a common identity. With the Union came commerce with the Americas and great wealth, for some, which was added to by the Industrial Revolution. In 1801 the population of Glasgow was estimated to be 7,000. By 1901 it was around 800,000. Glasgow had already begun to swallow up outlying areas like the Gorbals and Anderston (both incorporated in 1846) as it would incorporate areas like Partick in later years (1912). In the 1930s, the population of the Gorbals alone was estimated at 90,000. Not all of the increase in population was accounted for by the incorporation of outlying areas into Glasgow. Many had moved into the city, either by chance or plan, and most were escaping poverty, prosecution and famine.

In 1727, the Glasgow Highland Society was founded to raise funds for Highlanders relocating to Glasgow, which gives an idea of the numbers which must have been arriving. The money was used to educate the younger members and for apprenticeships. In 1767 the first church conducting services in Gaelic was opened in Queen Street. There were a number of reasons for the relocation of the Highlanders to Glasgow. By the mid-1700s, it was clear the old agricultural methods, which included dividing land with each generation, could  not support an increasing population and many left for the growing cities. Following the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion, which sought to put a Roman Catholic Stewart back on the throne in a predominantly Protestant country, the government at Westminster was determined to subjugate the Highlanders who had supported Charles Edward Stewart – Bonnie Prince Charlie. Those who ran Glasgow were not interested in the Stewart cause and happy to see the Jacobites defeated. Glasgow was doing very well under its predominantly Presbyterian guardianship and becoming very wealthy with the trade brought about by the Union, especially with North America. More Highlanders made their way south when the harvest failed in 1789. One group were headed to America when their ship was wrecked and they landed in Glasgow completely destitute. They were fortunate enough to have an energetic and resourceful priest with them, Father MacDonnell, who managed to find work for 600 of them. Later, with Britain at war with France the export trade was interrupted and many of them were put them out of work. Father MacDonnell persuaded the government to grant land in Canada to whoever went there to claim it. Many went and the Canadian settlement of Glengarry County in Ontario was founded. But many chose to stay in Glasgow.

In the early 19^th century, the Highlanders had no choice and were forced to leave. The war with France had meant wool was a very profitable product. The landowners, who were mostly absentee, living in London in the expensive style of English aristocrats, saw the opportunity to make great sums of money. The only thing standing in the way was the people who had lived and worked on the land for centuries. The Highland Clearances began. The people were moved out, the sheep moved in. For the Highlanders who moved to Glasgow, work meant employment in one of the factories, a situation they were completely unused to. A great many of them went into the cotton mills. When the American War of Independence put an end to the tobacco trade the Glasgow merchants had invested in cotton and the constant flow of migrants from the Highlands and Ireland provided the workforce for the mills. By 1831 there was estimated to be around 40,000 Highlanders in Glasgow. Not all the Highlanders could resign themselves to work in the factories and mills and this resulted in a curious situation that was still evident in Glasgow when I was a teenager – the ‘Teuchter polis’, or the Highland policeman.

Glaschu polis

            I met a ‘Teuchter polis’ once. I had a friend who came from the islands originally and whose family had decided to return when he was around sixteen or so. The following summer I went up to visit him with another friend. We had arrived that day after a long trip by train and ferry and were sitting in his living room when someone knocked on the door. A tall, gaunt man in his early fifties came in. While my friend made him tea, he began to question us – which is the only way I can describe it. ‘Where are you from in Glasgow? How long are you here for? How long have you known Ronald? What are your plans while you’re here?’ It was after he left that we learned his story. He had been a cop in Glasgow and been badly injured in a street fight in the Gorbals. Due to the severity of his head injuries he was retired from the force. He had returned to the islands and ran a mini-bus/taxi service with his elderly father. That wasn’t all he did. There was a small airport on the island with irregular services from the mainland. The former cop was known to sit on the high ground overlooking the runway with a pair of high-powered binoculars. He would take notes of the passengers arriving and departing, of who was known to him and who wasn’t. He was also a regular at the harbour making notes of the ferry arrivals with the same purpose. His cover as the island mini bus/taxi driver was the perfect opportunity for him to question new comers. The island, it seemed, was a major transit point for enemy agents making their way to and from the mainland. It was also where highly sensitive information was exchanged. He was compiling a dossier to send to the secret services to whom he also made weekly reports, sending them off in brown envelops marked Top Secret from the only Post Office on the island. He was living in a John le Carré world of secret agents and espionage, of clandestine operations and covert meetings, where matters of international importance hung in the balance and his diligence was necessary to maintaining world peace. He was not a forgotten man in an isolated outpost. The island was a major hub of activity and he was its sentinel.

The Highlanders faced a lot of resentment when they arrived in Glasgow, most of it of the predictable variety - that they were taking jobs from Glasgow workers, despite the fact that the factories were short of labour and advertising in the Highlands and Ireland. The Highlanders were also resented because they stuck together, spoke a strange language, had strange customs and manners and, of course, more than a few of them were Roman Catholic. The Scotsman newspaper described them in 1846 as: ‘… morally and intellectually… an inferior race to the Lowland Saxon.’ Jokes portrayed them as stupid and slow, their accents bizarre, their wonder and astonishment at the sites of Glasgow comical. Even into the late 70’s, Billy Connelly had a feature in his act on the Teuchter’s arrival into Glasgow. ‘Look! A hoose wi’ wheels!’ ‘Naw, that’s a bus.’ ‘Is that a skyscraper?’ ‘Naw. That’s a pillar-box. The skyscraper’s doon the road.’

For some social life with their own folk, the Highlanders would meet on a Sunday at the bottom of Jamaica Street and catch up with friends who came from their own island or village. By the 1930s the location had changed to beneath the Central Station bridge at Argyle Street, still called by many the ‘Hielanman’s Umbrella’. How long will it be called the ‘Hielanman’s Umbrella’? Who knows. 

Is it raining?