# Transcript

SEANDAMER

Hello. This is audio cassette 1, side 2, for the D315 course. I'm Dr. Sean Darner of the Sociology Department at the University of Glasgow and a D315 course tutor. Chapter 4 ofBook I, "The Problem of Crime", focusses on the city as a dangerous place. It raises general themes of order and disorder, the way these are represented or signified, and the place of crime in these representations. From the nineteenth century onwards the city has been consistently perceived as a place containing dangerous classes of people living in dangerous places. These people and these places are not only dangerous, they are. or are at least potentially, criminal. They represent the dark forces of disorder which threaten the day-to-day order of the city. In this discussion I would like to suggest that not only can neighbourhoods within the city be represented as dangerous but, indeed, whole cities can be so represented. And I will take my city, the city of Glasgow, as an example.

In 1999 the external image of Glasgow is by-and-large positive. It is perceived as being a warm, friendly, dynamic city full of gallus punters who all talk like Billy Connolly. But this image is relatively recent, in fact, barely ten years old. A historical perspective shows that over the last two hundred years or so the image of Glasgow has undergone a dramatic series of changes. When I say 'image' I am referring to the external general perception of the city, in other words, the mental picture of Glasgow entertained by non-Glaswegians, particularly those from south of the Border. This alerts us to the fact that the city's image is something which is socially constructed. And, like all social constructions, it is contested. So what does the trajectory of Glasgow's image look like in historical terms? Before even answering this question, think about what kind of data we would look for in methodological terms that would tell us something about external perceptions of Glasgow. A key source would have to be literary representations of Glasgow, in both fictional and non-fictional forms.

In 1799 Glasgow was perceived as a thriving town dominated by the textile industry. It was a prosperous town of considerable architectural elegance. William and Dorothy Wordsworth visited it in 1803 and observed:- MICHAEL PERCEY AL-MAXWELL (source: WIiiiam and Dorothy Wordsworth, out of copyright: Duration: 19 '7 "The Trongate, an old street, is very picturesque - high houses, with an intennixture of gable fronts towards the street. The New Town is built of fine stone, in the best style of the very best London streets at the west end of the town, but, not being of brick, they are greatly superior."

SEANDAMER

But within fifty years this image had been utterly transfonned. Here is a description of the city in 1849. MICHAEL PERCEY AL-MAXWELL (from "Glasgow Observed", page 86, edited by Simon Berry and Hamish Whyte, pub: /987 Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers ltd; original source unknown, Dural/on: 56'7 "It is in those frightti.d abodes of human wretchedness which lay along the High Street, Saltmarket, and Briggate, and constitute the bulk of that district known as the 'Wynds and Closes of Glasgow', that all sanitary evils exist in perfection. They consist of ranges of narrow closes, only some four or five feet in width, and of great length. The houses are so lofty that the direct light of the sky never reaches a large proportion of the dwellings. There is no drainage in these neighbourhoods, except in a few cases; and from the want of any means of flushing the sewers, where they do exists, are extended cesspools polluting the air. So little is house drainage in use, that on one occasion I saw the entire surface of a back yard covered for several inches with green putrid water, although there was a sewer in the close within a few feet into which it might have been drained away."

SEANDAMER

What was responsible for the dramatic change in imagery in such a short space of time? There were two reasons. The first was the industrial explosion 9f Glasgow; the second was the population explosion. The availability of coal and iron-ore, on the one hand, and the River Clyde, facing towards America on the other, meant that Glasgow was wide open to industrial expansion. It needed only labour power to fuel such expansion. And that was not long in coming. Glasgow was invaded in the first half of the nineteenth century initially by Highlanders fleeing the Clearances, and latterly by Irish fleeing the Famine.

By the end of the nineteenth century the population of Greater Glasgow was well over a million people. Three-quarters of this population - working-class people - lived in grossly overcrowded 'single-ends' or 'rooms-and-kitchens' - that is, single-roomed or two-room small tenement houses, most with outside toilets. Within the city the sheer scale of the public health problems associated with such over-crowding forced the Corporation to take on more and more municipal powers fired by a Presbyterian zeal that cleanliness was indeed next to Godliness. This phenomenon came to be known as municipal socialism although there was not much that was socialist about it. The historian T.C. Smout sums this up wittily.

MICHAEL PERCEVAL-MAXWELL (from "Glasgow: Going For A Song", page I I 2. written by Sean Domer, pub: London: Lawrence&: Wishart, 1990; original source unknown; Dura/ion: 33'') "In Glasgow a citizen may live in a municipal house: he may walk along the municipal street, or ride on the municipal tramcar and watch the municipal dust-cart collecting the refuse which is to be used to fertilise the municipal fann. Then he may tum into the municipal market, buy a steak from an animal killed in the municipal slaughterhouse, and cook it by the municipal gas stove. For his recreation he can choose among municipal libraries, municipal art galleries and municipal music in municipal parks ... "

SEANDAMER

But in spite of its slum housing problems the industrial growth continued apace. Glasgow's heavy engineering and ship and locomotive building output was so massive that by the third quarter of the nineteenth century it had developed a new, highly positive image as the second city of empire and the workshop of the world. Delegations came from North American cities like Chicago, New York and Philadelphia to inspect Glasgow's colossal shipyards and foundries and marvel at the scale of its municipal enterprises. The self-confidence of the city was clearly signified by its external image and was also reflected in its literature. Moira Burgess is the pre-eminent bibliographer of Glasgow and analyst of Glasgow in fiction. Moira, to what extent was this commercial and industrial self-confidence reflected in the contemporary Glasgow novel?

MOIRA BURGESS

Well, there's a lively picture of a self-confident, mercantile Glasgow in a Victorian novel called "Saint Mungo's City" published in 1884. The author Sarah Tytler, in fact, came from Fife and moved to London when she became well-known as a writer. To that extent this is an outsider's view. There is a slightly convoluted plot about a disputed inheritance but probably the main interest to us is this picture of a bustling, enthusiastic, attractively naive nineteenth century Glasgow. We meet a young English visitor who's delighted with Glasgow life, its powerful vitality, innumerable lights and shades and the magnitude of its achievements which is rather a nice summing up of Glasgow's image at that time. A few years later we find another loving depiction of the commercial world in Frederick Niven's "Justice of the Peace" published in 1914 but describing things as they were a few years before around the tum of the century. Niven knew this world well. He'd been an apprentice in a soft goods warehouse for some years though his heart wasn't really in it. The main character is Ebenezer Moir, the warehouseman and Justice of the Peace. He's shown as a most appealing man, kind and vulnerable for all his business skills. Niven, who also studied art at one time, has an artist's eye for his city - the streets, the buildings, the effect oflight - and his Glasgow is a beautiful place as well as a prosperous one.

SEANDAMER

The events of the First World War were to change all that. The emergence ofa genuinely national British press in the nineteenth century was vital in this process. For it was the Victorian media which was critically responsible for the social construction of urban myths such as the legendary competition between Edinburgh and Glasgow, for example, or the tightfistedness of Aberdonians.

By 1919 Glasgow was damned thoroughly as the 'Red Clyde'. A leader in the London Times of that year coined the phrase which was to last right up until the present day. The trouble started with the labour militancy ofthe wartime years, with flashpoints in 1915 during the famous Glasgow Rent Strike, in 1916 with the Sedition trial of John Maclean and other working-class leaders, in 1918 with yet more trials, and ended with the 40 Hours Strike, and pitched fighting on the streets on "Bloody Friday", January 31" 1919. The image of the city was now one of a place full of belligerent communists and socialists hell-bent on turning Glasgow into Britain's St. Petersburg. The image was conveyed in striking newspaper photographs of helmeted troops patrolling with fixed bayonets, tanks in the city's cattle market, and machine-gun posts on the roofs overlooking George Square. If it all sounds a bit dramatic now we should not forget that 1919 was the year of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and that the British bourgeoisie was not alone in being alarmed about the intentions of the local working-class movement.