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?