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.'