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?

The Mitchell Library... Part Two, 'Too many damned books! How can you find something to read?'

'Now where did I leave ma fags?'

To get back to the Mitchell’s phenomenal number of 1,213,000. That’s nothing compared to the British library which has an estimated 170-200 million items, not all in English. As a legal deposit library, it receives copies of all books published in the United Kingdom, which amounts to approximately 8,000 each day. Each year 9.6km of new shelf space is required. Compared to that, the Mitchell seems modest in comparison. I once had a first edition of the collected essays of Thomas De Quincy which I bought from Voltaire & Rousseau at what was for me, then, the expensive amount of £7.50. In one of the essays, De Quincy notes that during an idle moment it occurred to him to calculate how many books he might be able to read in a life-time. The answer, he says, plunged him into a profound melancholy. If he did nothing else but read, he calculated, he would still only be able to get through a miniscule portion of the great works which he knew to be available. It pained him to consider the great volumes which would be left unread at his death. I wonder how many of the 200 million items in the British Library are worth reading? Incidentally, I don’t have the De Quincey book anymore. My brother was ‘tidying up’ and threw it out – it was old, he reasoned, and probably not worth keeping. I later discovered it was worth at least £500.

I wonder if De Quincey ever read Sir Thomas Browne. Browne, writing in 1643, complained of their being too many books in the world. In his Religio medici, he wrote:

            ‘I have heard some with deep sighs lament the lost lines of Cicero; others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the Library of Alexandria; for my own part, I think there be too many [books] in the World… ‘Tis not a melancholy Ultinam of my own, but the desire of better heads, that there were a general Synod… for the benefit of learning, to reduce it as it lay at first, in a few, and solid Authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms & millions of Rhapsodies begotten only… to maintain the trade and mystery of Typographers.’

            What a bonfire Browne might have had of 200 million books.

Sir Thomas Browne

Allo, allo! No! Not that Remy...

           

A more recent author, relatively speaking, was inclined to agree with Browne. Remy de Gourmont was of the opinion that if you devoted two hours a day to systematic reading you would exhaust the National Library of France, or its equivalent, in ten years. You would in fact, in that two hours, multiplied by ten years, have covered all the fields of human knowledge. How is that possible? Because, he said, the books are so repetitive. Every author will copy from one another to the point where whole sections of the universe of published books are useless and entire areas of the continent formed by this immense library, with its millions and millions of volumes, collapse when you poke a hole in them with the obstinacy and appetite of an intelligent worm.

It’s a pity Remy de Gormont came along too late to tell Thomas De Quincy of his theory. So upsetting did De Quincey find his calculations that he couldn’t read a word for three weeks, thus lessening the total amount he might complete in his lifetime.  

            An old shipmate of mine believed there could never be too many books and to preserve only the so-called best would do a great disservice to literature and human learning. He told me it was the ‘lesser’ volumes he preferred over the ‘classics’ which have been pondered over, annotated, analysed and explicated by scholars for centuries. He treasured the obscure authors, the neglected, the forgotten, the never remembered, the authors chanced upon while browsing in some musty old bookshop or among the remnants of a bric-a-brac stall. There is a freshness to them, he said, because of their unknown quality, a vitality, a liveliness that the canonised authors seem to have lost. They haven’t been ossified as museum pieces pored over and picked apart by generations of academics and students. Their story is new. You don’t come to them with any preconceptions. Theirs is an encounter of unknown opportunity and potential. There are no sign-posts to prepare the way for you. They are like the old sailors found in out-of-the-way ports and pubs who look dishevelled, grubby, down on their luck, maybe even a little senile. Are they talking to you in the hope of a free drink? You wonder, ashamedly, if their conversation is worthwhile, and then... they beguile you with a story that haunts your dreams – day and night dreams – and remains with you as long as your memory persists.

            For a period of around a year in the mid-90s I was in the habit of visiting the Mitchell on an almost daily basis. At that time, they had the only copies I could get my hands on of Louis Ferdinand Céline and Blaise Cendrars whose books were mostly out-of-print. It wasn’t until the late-90s that Céline’s books began to be reprinted by the Dalkey Archive press. Despite the fact that even his detractors agreed he was a great writer, Céline had committed the near fatal mistake – literally – of siding with the Vichy government during the German occupation of France and writing three anti-Semitic pamphlets. After the war he fled North with Marshall Petain until he found himself in Denmark. Back in France, he was tried in his absence and sentenced to death. He spent several years in and out of Danish prison and finally returned to France after his sentence was commuted and he was allowed his freedom due to the prison time he had spent in exile. His books were out of fashion and some people believed he should never be published again, which is very short-sighted. Some of the greatest writers in the history of literature have had very questionable attitudes on any number of subjects. Because an artist does not meet the moral criteria of one age, or place, or people, does not diminish the quality of their work. If Savonarola had his way most of the great works of the early Renaissance would have been consigned to the flames in his bonfire of the vanities.

Louis Ferdinand Céline

Cendrars is a writer who is not very well known to English speaking readers. He was born in Switzerland and wrote in French, living much of his adult life in France when he wasn’t travelling. His mother was Scottish and all of the translated books of his in the Mitchell library bare a stamp from the Swiss embassy noting that they were gifted to the library as a token of Swiss-Scottish cordiality due to his Cendrars' mother’s nationality.

Blaise McCendrars

When you visit a library on a regular basis you discover something which I have found to be true in every library I have ever frequented – libraries attract oddballs of every description. You have readers for purpose and readers for pleasure, the curious, the idle, those dedicated to one subject or genre, the dilatants - among whose number I include myself, the casual, the careless, the careful, the confused, happiness hunters, truth hunters and mystery hunters. And then… there are the others, who might ungenerously be called, the nutters. The last time I was in the Mitchell I saw an Indian man who, by his appearance, looked to be a down-and-out who had gone into the Library to keep warm – it was a wet afternoon in late November. Before him he had a pile of books open as though he was in the process of researching and cross-referencing something important to him. To one side, he had small squares of paper which he was writing on in a minute handwriting – taking notes, apparently. I was curious. I passed by slowly, wondering what books he was studying. I was surprised to notice that the books had nothing in common with one another. They appeared to have been picked up at random. The paper he was using for his notes was the cardboard of cereal packets which he had roughly torn into small rectangles. As for his notes, he was scribbling small lines with a blue ball-point pen over and over again until the grey of the cardboard was completely covered in blue ink and then he would exchange it for another card. What was going on? It was as if, by his actions, he was mimicking someone studying without quite understanding what they were doing. Had he been a scholar who had lost his mind and was now going through the motions out of some dim recollection of what he had previously done? I once knew of an orchestra conductor who had suffered severe brain damage when a slate flew off of a roof in a strong wind and embedded itself in his head. He would wander the streets muttering to himself and whenever he passed a tree with birds twittering and whistling, he would stop and ‘conduct’ them as though compelled through some instinct of his former life. Perhaps the destitute scholar was in a similar situation. He certainly approached his task with absolute dedication and seriousness of purpose. When I left a couple of hours later, he was still there, still scribbling away, the rectangles of cardboard piling up by his side. In London, I was in the habit of visiting a library in Crouch End. I had been in the library two days when I discovered the most obvious resident. He was relatively young, around thirty years old, dishevelled and, for the duration of my time there, wearing the same clothes every day. Perhaps he slept in them. He would walk up to the desk, repeat the same phrase to whoever was there, then make a tour of the library. His route followed the same path every day without deviation. He wold stop at the same sections, pick out the same books, flick through them in the same manner for approximately the same amount of time, replace them, then continue on his way. When his circuit was complete, he would sit in a red-leather armchair in an out-of-the-way corner of the library for fifteen minutes before leaving. On my fifth day there, my imp-of-the-perverse got the better of me. I sat in the red chair. His red chair. He followed his usual routine until it came to the moment when he sat in the chair. He turned the corner of a bookshelf which had hidden me from his sight, saw me in the chair and froze. I wondered if he’d ever come across anybody sitting in the chair before. He stood staring at me as though he had no idea how to process this information. Finally, he stepped back behind the bookshelves. Every thirty seconds his head would pop out to see if I was still there. After fifteen minutes the cruelty of what I was doing occurred to me. I was mocking the afflicted. I stood up and left. He stepped forward towards the empty chair, stopped, watched me for a moment as if to make sure I wasn’t playing some trick on him, then… he sat. And that was all he ever did on the chair – sit. There were many other empty chairs around but that seemed to be his chair. Why? Who knows?

What will the nutters and oddballs do if the libraries should ever close down? But I don’t think they will. I have nothing against e-readers. I have three of them which I take with me whenever I travel. But there is a tactile, sensual experience in books. As well as the feel on the book in your hand, there is the smell of old books. The distinctive smell of old books is lignin which is present in all wood-based paper. It is closely related to vanilla and the smell is released as the books age and the lignin breaks down. It is for some, mouth watering. Old libraries and bookshops are suffused with the scent, but sometimes it is hard to detect if the books were formerly owned by smokers or were kept in a room with a coal fire. Then the books have the scent of old tobacco, which can be pleasant or unpleasant depending on whether the owner was a Capstan A smoker or smoked a pipe full of an exotic blend. The books kept in rooms with open fires also hold their smoky-scent which may be of plane coal or, if you are lucky, peat. I’ve often found old books which sat directly on shelving above the fire place and whose covers and spines were so blackened by smoke and soot that you had to open them to discover what they were.

Books have many attractions other than the text. All sorts of books are often found on ships, left behind by previous crew-members who have picked them up in far off and out of the way ports. Mostly the books are old and tattered and were probably like that when the previous crewman bought them anyway. The make for a strange and eclectic library, ranging from garishly-covered paperbacks of sensational novels to the most beautifully bound copies of old and obsolete philosophies. What I find peculiarly interesting about them is the little stamps and stickers that are often found inside the covers, telling of the various bookshops at various locations where the books were found. The practice is now obsolete which is a pity. Perhaps applying a small sticker or stamp with the bookseller’s name and address on the inside cover was an easier thing to do when bookshops were small independent affairs rather than the big chains they became. These markings chart the exotic route of a book the way destination stickers once did on old travel trunks. A book can be followed from Purdy’s in Charing Cross, to Mitchell’s in Buenos Aires, via Delgado’s in Lisbon. Some of the books have wandered the oceans for fifty years or more – and were second or third-hand even then. Some bare the markings of previous owners which are illegible in the margins, the sea-air having gotten to the old ink. Others, in pencil, are barely legible as the pages have yellowed and warped for the same reason. And, of course, there are the little finds between the pages which have been used as bookmarks – stamps, postcards, bus-tickets, tram-tickets, train-tickets, flight-tickets and, occasionally, the odd photograph, usually of a woman - mothers, wives or girlfriends, a reminder of their ties onshore and, perhaps, a safety line that allows them to roam far and wide. And all of this only hinting at the lives of the previous readers. We read them and leave them behind for the next reader.

Which leads me to a secret I discovered when I was a regular at the Mitchell all those years ago, a secret which I was surprised to find not all the staff knew of. In those days, and I imagine it is still the same, you would find the book you were looking for on the computer, fill in a slip of paper with the details, take it to the desk and a member of staff would find it for you a few minutes later. The book I was after was called The Wanderings and Homes of Old Manuscripts by Montague Rhodes James, better known as M.R. James, the famous author of ghost stories which the BBC filmed as A Ghost Story for Christmas in the 60s and 70s. James was an academic and antiquarian and his normal line of work involved writing scholarly articles and books on such topics as the Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament, and the book I was after which was designed to encourage students in the searching and finding of old manuscripts. The book is brief, a little under sixty pages and I was returning it to the desk when the man who had brought it up for me asked how I had liked it. I liked it very much. ‘Interested in old manuscripts?’ he asked. I wasn’t. I had read James’s ghost stories and I was curious to know what his academic work was like which was the only reason why I had asked for the book. But for some reason I didn’t want to tell the old man that. So... I said I was. He asked me if I knew of the Mitchell's collection of old manuscripts. I didn’t. Would I like to see them? Of course I would. He told me to wait a few minutes.

A little later, he led me behind the desk and through a glass panelled office to a side door. Once through the door we were in the main storage area of the library, but that wasn’t where we were headed. We went up one floor, along a corridor, turned left and came to a small room. In the room was what looked like a cupboard door. It was locked and the old man had the key. I was surprised when he opened the door and showed me the collection. It wasn’t what I expected. I had expected a large room with walls lined with shelves and manuscripts. But there was only one bookcase and it contained the entire collection of manuscripts which numbered around 136. The cupboard was temperature and humidity controlled. He took one or two volumes out, seemingly at random, and placed them on a nearby desk for me to look through. He told me the one I had before me was known as the Gigas, or Devil’s Bible, originally from Prague and of which only one other was known and was in the National Library of Sweden. It was large and heavy and had been made in the 13^th century in what was then Bohemia. The old librarian pointed out to me some significant marks on the manuscripts which helped determine where the books had originally come from, who owned them, and, occasionally, who made them. He also told me that anyone researching old manuscripts should not only be on the look-out for what is there but also for what is not there – that is, signs of erasure, especially on the margins of the first leaf and on the fly-leaves at either end. Here, the owner’s name was usually written. But often, the owner’s name was accompanied by a curse on the wrongful possessor and, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, there were many wrongful possessors. Whether the curse troubled them or whether they wanted to sell the book on and did not want to upset possible buyers, it was often attempted to remove the curse and the name. But vellum is a difficult surface to remove all trace of previous markings from. What was once there can be recovered by dabbing the area with ammonium bisulphide which does not stain the page. Dabbed on the surface with a soft paintbrush and dried off at once with blotting paper, it makes the old markings leap to light with astonishing clarity, sometimes slowly, so that the letters cannot be read until the next day. It is, though, of no use to apply it to writing that was red… and its smell is overpowering, overpowering but the elixir of palaeographers. Some manuscripts though, the old man sighed, preserve an obstinate silence. They have been rebound and have lost their fly-leaves in the process, or, worse than that, their first and last quires have dropped away. In such cases only those with great experience may be able to tell the date and country of origin. He showed me another manuscript which he said was in Anglo-Saxon and was on the Acts of St. Andrew in the land of the Anthropophagi which no longer existed in Latin. Another which no longer existed in Latin was a poem on the adventures of St. Thomas in India. The Mitchell, he said, was fortunate enough to have The Book of Jannes and Jambres and a Book of Enoch in Latin, another rarity, he assured me. Another was the curiously titled Red Book of Eye which was a copy of the Gospels which St. Felix of Burgundy brought with him to Britain in the seventh century. It’s curious title, he explained, was due its being kept at the priory at Eye at Suffolk.

It was a month or two later that I asked one of the librarians if I might see the old manuscripts again. Given how casually the old librarian had shown me the collection I assumed it was open to the public on request. But the librarian I asked had never heard of the manuscript collection. He called over another librarian and she had never heard of it either. The old librarian was on holiday at that stage and couldn’t be asked. A week later I was in Rotterdam. I have never seen the manuscript room since and I expect the librarian, old as he was, is, more than likely, dead by now. If you are curios enough to look at it, I was taken to it from the 4th floor so it must be on the floor above, not the main floor of the library but the floor of the interior which means, I imagine, it is somewhere between the official 4th and 5th floors.

Speaking of libraries, a few years ago I saw the greatest library I have ever come across, not in terms of number of volumes but in terms of dedication to the cause of libraries. I had found myself wandering through Central and South America, meeting many odd characters along the way but one of the most remarkable we met was an old Englishman who lived in an isolated and undeveloped portion of north-western Brazil, on the border with Honduras, and who scraped out a living from the remnants of a former gold-mine. The nearest village, which was little more than a few huts around a trading post, was thirty long miles away. The man had lived at this isolated outpost for over 30 years and had never used the internet or a mobile phone. The only concession to the modern world he had in his home was an old radio which picked up, infrequently and irregularly, a bizarre range of signals from all over the world. In fact, he would often receive a clearer signal from somewhere in Europe that he would from Rio or Santos or anywhere else in South America.

He lived in the remnants of the mine’s headquarters, a two-storied building which had held the manager’s home on the top floor while the ground floor contained a storeroom, kitchen, office and an all-purpose area where the miners would meet, eat, drink and socialise. It was a spacious building but too large for the man who only occupied two rooms on the ground floor, one of which was the kitchen. His power came from a generator and his only contact with other humans was his once-every-six-weeks trip to the trading store for fuel and supplies.

It was in one of the ‘spare’ rooms of his home that we made our magical discovery. In the former social room of the miners the man had built a library. It was, we discovered, a library of the imagination. He had constructed a series of bookshelves around the walls and had filled the shelves with books of his own making – cardboard facsimiles of real books. The titles of the books and the authors’ names had been carefully painted on the decorated spines to resemble leather with gilt lettering. His library was subdivided into sections and the two largest sections were labelled African Exploration – which contained works by and about Sir Richard Burton, Mungo Park, Livingston, General Gordon, Stanley, Speke and many others – and South American Exploration – with books on and by Colonel Fawcett, Bernal Diaz, Prescott, Van Hagen, etc. The other sections were suitable arranged: Botany of… Geology of… Mineral distribution of… He had books on undersea exploration, on cosmology, astronomy and astrology, art, literature, history, philosophy, theology, alchemy, magic, and numerous anthropological studies. Not all of the books were of the imaginative variety. Some had materialised. Every time he obtained a tangible copy of a book, he would replace the painted copy on his shelves. The beginning of his collection had come from a complete volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of the 1950s he had discovered in the former manager’s old rooms. Over many nights he had flicked through it, noting down the names of interesting volumes mentioned, hoping one day to read them. Other titles and authors he had discovered in various magazines and newspapers which had come into his hands over the years from God-knows where. What a wonderful thing it would be, he had thought, to sit surrounded by his volumes, always able to reach out and lift something of interest. And he had built his library.

The man’s main pastime after a day of scraping for gold was to sit in his library, flicking through his Britannica, surrounded by all the book, or rather, the titles, he one day hoped to read. He seemed content with his life and said he did not miss human companionship.