Glasgow's Going Round and Round: Some Recent Scottish Urban History
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Edinburgh Research Explorer Glasgow's going round and round: some recent Scottish urban history Citation for published version: Cameron, E 2003, 'Glasgow's going round and round: some recent Scottish urban history', Journal of Urban History, vol. 30, pp. 276-87. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926803001159 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1017/S0963926803001159 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Published In: Journal of Urban History Publisher Rights Statement: © Cameron, E. (2003). Glasgow's going round and round: some recent Scottish urban history. Journal of Urban History, 30, 276-87doi: 10.1017/S0963926803001159 General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 Urban History, 30, 2 (2003) C 2003 Cambridge University Press Printed in the United Kingdom DOI: 10.1017/S0963926803001159 Glasgow’s going round and round: some recent Scottish urban history∗ EWEN A. CAMERON School of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh, EH8 9LN If a rural historian who has few credentials1 to undertake the current review may begin this essay with a point from his own field of research: there is a view of Scottish rural history which argues that far too much attention has been paid to the Highlands.2 A similar view could be advanced about concentration on Glasgow in Scottish urban history; in addition to the volumes under consideration have been numerous other recent titles.3 As Professor Morris has noted in a recent review article in this journal, however, other Scottish cities, especially Aberdeen and Dundee, have recently been subjected to variants of the ‘urban biography’ approach.4 Aberdeen, in particular, has come under intense scrutiny with a two-volume history sponsored by the local authority and taking advantage of the rich resources of the city archives.5 Edinburgh, by contrast, and notwithstanding the recent culmination of Professor Rodger’s extensive researches, remains the poor relation of Scottish urban history: aside from the classic account of the creation of the New Town by A.J. Youngson ∗ R. Johnston, Clydeside Capital, 1870–1920: A Social History of Employers. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000. ix + 235pp. 13 illustrations. £16.99 pbk. W. Kenefick, ‘Rebellious and Contrary’: The Glasgow Dockers, 1853–1932. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000. xx + 284pp. 16 illustrations. 2 figures. 2 maps. 31 tables. £16.99 pbk. J.J. Smyth, Labour in Glasgow, 1896–1936: Socialism, Suffrage, Sectarianism. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000. 228pp. 6 tables. £16.99 pbk. M. Moss, J. Forbes Munro and R. Trainor, University City and State: The University of Glasgow since 1870. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. xviii + 382pp. 85 illustrations. 11 figures. 2 maps. 23 tables. £38.50 hbk. 1 My only foray into ‘urban history’ has been E. A. Cameron, ‘The construction of Union Street, Inverness, 1863–65’, Scottish Local History Journal, 44 (Winter, 1998), 13–18. 2 R.H. Campbell, ‘Too much on the Highlands: a plea for change’, Scottish Economic and Social History, 14 (1994), 58–76; R. Anthony, Herds and Hinds: Farm Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1900–1939 (East Linton, 1997), 1–3. 3 I. Maver, Glasgow (Edinburgh, 2000); T.M. Devine and G. Jackson (eds.), Glasgow,vol.I: Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester, 1995); W.H. Fraser and I. Maver (eds.), Glasgow, vol. II: 1830–1912 (Manchester, 1996). 4 R.J. Morris, ‘Urban biography: Scotland, 1700–2000’, Urban History, 29, 2 (2002), 276–83; see also D. Reeder, ‘The industrial city in Britain: urban biography in the modern style’, Urban History, 25, 3 (1998), 368–78. 5 E.P. Dennison, D. Ditchburn and M. Lynch (eds.), Aberdeen: Beginnings to 1800 (East Linton, 2002); W. H. Fraser and C. H. Lee (eds.), Aberdeen, 1800–2000. A New History (East Linton, 2000). Glasgow’s going round and round 277 and the late R.Q. Gray’s account of nineteenth-century social history, the existing historiography of Scotland’s capital city remains interred in the pages of unpublished theses and scholarly journals.6 Nevertheless, the volumes under consideration here represent the fruits of yet more labours on the history of Scotland’s largest and, arguably,most diverse city; they do not represent yet more urban biography but are specialized monographs on the history of the Labour movement, the Clydeside dockers, employers in the west of Scotland and the history of the University of Glasgow since 1870 published as part of the celebrations to mark the 550th anniversary of that institution. To return to the opening point, the rural emphasis on the Highlands can be understood with an appreciation of the vivid experiences of clearance, famine and crofting which have drawn successive historians. The case of Glasgow can be seen as similarly attractive: a medieval ecclesiastical burgh with an ancient university which expanded into a crucial port, trading commodities, such as tobacco, across the Atlantic and then, without sacrificing its status as a port, became a massive industrial city with intense concentrations of people, wealth and poverty, and with much greater occupational diversity than other great port cities such as Liverpool. A city which was at once known for the extent of its pollution and the creative exploitation of waste products, such as the piles of ‘blue billy’ which accumulated from the production of sulphuric acid in Charles Tennant’s chemical factories and which became central to the creation of the Steel Company of Scotland, was also noted for its pioneering creation of urban parkland.7 These parks were the site of a series of great exhibitions from the International Exhibitions of 1888 and 1901, the Scottish Exhibition of National History, Art and Industry in Kelvingrove Park in 1911, to the Empire Exhibition in Bellahoustoun Park, south of the river Clyde, in 1938.8 The 1911 exhibition is particularly relevant to this essay as the proceeds were used to endow a chair of Scottish History and Literature at the University of Glasgow.9 These events celebrated Glasgow’s connections with the rest of Scotland but also with the Empire, of which Glasgow liked to think of itself as the ‘Second City’.10 Glasgow’s urbanization and industrialization were so rapid as to be ungovernable 6 R. Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001); A.J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh, 1760–1840 (Edinburgh, 1966); R.Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford, 1976). 7 P.L. Payne, Colvilles and the Scottish Steel Industry (Oxford, 1979), 24; I. Maver, ‘Glasgow’s public parks and the community, 1850–1914: a case study in Scottish civic interventionism’, Urban History, 25 (1998), 323–47. 8 P. Kinchin and J. Kinchin, Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions: 1888, 1901, 1911, 1938, 1988 (Wendlebury, n.d.); G. Eyre Todd, Leaves for the Life of a Scottish Man of Letters (Glasgow, 1934); R.A. Crampsey, The Empire Exhibition of 1938: The Last Durbar (Edinburgh, 1988). 9 R. Campbell, ‘The foundation of a chair’, College Courant, 15 (1962). 10 J.M. Mackenzie, ‘The second city of the Empire: Glasgow – imperial municipality’, in F. Driver and D. Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester, 1999), 215–37. 278 Urban History in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet the complexity of its urban government and the provision of a multiplicity of municipal services – from water and trams to museums – were unrivalled by the late nineteenth century.11 The population was drawn from all corners of Scotland, especially the Highlands, which begin only a short journey in a north-westwards direction from the city. Glasgow’s Highland community has been the subject of some study, although more would be useful, and retained a sufficiently cohesive identity in the 1950s that a Liberal candidate in the Western Isles would place some of his publicity in the ‘Hielandman’s umbrella’, as the railway bridge crossing Argyle Street was known.12 The Irish community of Glasgow has also been subject to concentrated study and is dealt with further by Smyth and Kenefick in books under review here.13 Jim Smyth in his study of Labour politics in Glasgow provides a cogent justification for further Glaswegian urban studies: arguing that it was Scotland’s largest city, a major urban centre of the UK, the ‘capital’ of industrial Scotland and a city with a ‘complex social structure with all classes – from the very poorest to the super rich – living within its boundaries’ (p. 3). Glasgow has produced a rich historiography because it has had a rich history and the challenge for historians of other towns and cities is to demonstrate, as the Aberdonians have, that the material is at hand to produce similarly rich results. Glasgow dockers Glasgow is also part of ‘Clydeside’, and the river forms an important part of the political, commercial and industrial identity of the city. Mostly it has been seen in historical terms in the context of the history of shipbuilding, although Gordon Jackson has drawn attention to the wider role played by the river in the history of the city.14 William Kenefick has produced a highly detailed monograph on the history of the Glasgow dockers in the period from 1853 to 1932.