Once Upon A Time in Glasgow

John Watson

• Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781906476571
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A history of the city of Glasgow from its earliest beginnings, presented in episodic format based on a series of articles first published in the "Evening Times" in the 1970s. The contents cover personalities such as Hawkie, who was one of the city's most famous street hawkers and without whom no public hanging would have been complete; Jamie Blue, who took the law into his own hands to defend the rights of Glasgow's citizens, and Blind Alick, who saw everything! Riots and civil disobedience feature strongly as these were sometimes the only ways for the mob to vent their frustration and anger at the city fathers. As well as personalities, there are places and events, disasters and fairs, body snatchers and religion, trams and pubs, royalty and ships, and markets and murders to mention but a few. In short, this is a comprehensive and entertaining insight into Glasgow, its people and its history.

CHAPTER 1

Hawkie – An Old Glasgow Worthy Observed

HAWKIE, Glasgow’s most famous street-crier, orator, beggar and wit, stood beneath the statue of King Billy in the Trongate and surveyed the hurrying crowds with an amused and slightly cynical smile. Four men were about to be hanged – and the rush for prime viewing positions was on.

Three months before these same crowds had poured into the city to see James Wilson hanged and beheaded for treason and had declared their shock and horror at the gruesome sight. And now they were back for more: small wonder Hawkie smiled and shook his head.

Still, the situation pleased him, for the city had been too quiet these past few days and the citizens unusually subdued. But today, Wednesday 18 November, 1820, excitement and anticipation were evident on every passing face. It occurred to Hawkie that there was nothing like a public hanging to bring folk back to life!

His keen and expert eye picked out those on their first visit to the city – a never-to-be-forgotten day as they hurried past the newly opened Buchanan Street with its fine villas and orchards, and on to the Tolbooth Steeple standing like a giant finger beckoning them on.

Coloured pennants fluttering from the steeple turrets created a carnival-like atmosphere, and helped to mask the spikes on which the heads of rebels and Covenanters were once displayed to public view, their lifeless eyes staring blindly beyond the Bell o’ the Brae towards the grey mass of Saint Mungo’s Cathedral.

Along the Gallowgate there was a steady flow of people moving in from the East End, and Glasgow Cross became a heaving mass of humanity as this tide of incomers met a second influx of visitors moving down the High Street from the north. These folk mingled with the farmers who had gathered to buy and sell cattle on this, their traditional market day.

In front of the Tontine Hotel the London coach was preparing to leave on the journey south, and Hawkie watched as the coachman cracked his whip over the heads of the nervous horses and sent them plunging at full force along the Gallowgate, scattering farmers and weavers in angry disarray in their wake and provoking a stream of threats and curses that would accompany the coach on its four-day journey.

This was a scene that Hawkie loved, and on days like this he could almost forget his crippled leg that hung helplessly between the two crutches that he moved into action as he prepared to battle the crowds and fight his way down the Saltmarket.

All morning he had been selling copies of the ‘full, true, and particular details o’ the condemned men’s last speech, confession, and dying declarations’. He now felt morally bound to witness the last moments of these men whose deaths were in some way, he felt, responsible for his own livelihood. Pulling his battered top hat tightly onto his head, he gripped the crutches firmly in his strong, dirty hands, and swung happily into the midst of the passing throng.

Tam Young, the city executioner, ignored the shouts and jeers behind him as he mounted the gallow steps in front of the jail and began to prepare his ropes for the task ahead. There were technical difficulties involved in the hanging of four men and he was more concerned with these than with a jeering rabble whose main concern was in seeing as much as possible of the dying struggles of the condemned men.

Only when he was satisfied that everything was properly prepared did he turn to look at the scene behind him. Across the Saltmarket and over the length and breadth of the Low Green there was a sea of faces, and it seemed impossible that there could be anyone left to carry on the everyday business of the city.

In August there had been an audience of 20,000 when he had ‘thrown-off and topped’ James Wilson – now there appeared to be double that number. His stern gaze swept over the colourful scene and settled on the faces of those nearest him. There were still a number of voices raised in scorn and derision, with vulgar comments being made upon the trade of executioner, but the shouting stopped and faces were averted under the steady, knowing eye of the grim hangman. For a brief moment silence hung over the scene as the man on the gallows faced the surly crowd, and Hawkie, positioned between the two, was aware of the tension and animosity in the atmosphere. Mindful of the number of Irish being hanged for various crimes at that time, he raised his voice in mock despair and cried ‘Hey, Tam … what are we goin’ to do aboot these infernal Irish? They’ll no’ allow us tae have the honest use of our own gallows!’ The crowd, Irish and Scots alike, exploded into laughter, and the tension melted in the cold winter sunshine.

At three o’clock the four men, convicted of assault and robbery upon a widow at her mansion in Crossmyloof, were brought to the gallows and, in the words of the Glasgow Herald, ‘They were thrown-off at fifteen minutes past three and hung forty minutes. They struggled dreadfully’.

Their struggling was to no avail and they found peace only when they were laid to rest in the Gorbals burying ground. With the execution of the unfortunate Irishmen and the removal of their bodies from the gallows the crowds in the Saltmarket began to disperse, and Hawkie retired to his favourite whisky-shop in the Goosedubs where he found himself a quiet corner and proceeded to drink his way through the five shillings he had earned that day.

On his own admission it took 15 pence to get him tipsy – with 60 he could become gloriously drunk and have enough to pay for his lodgings and to purchase another supply of books to be ‘cried’ tomorrow. Not for the first time Hawkie blessed the day his wanderings had led him to settle in the ‘dear green place’ … Glasgow.

BORN WILLIAM CAMERON, in the village of Plean, near Stirling, Hawkie’s right leg had been cruelly injured while still an infant, and his early life had been spent travelling the streets and highways of Scotland and England supported by a pair of crutches, a quick tongue, and a nimble brain.

His parents had struggled to give him an education when education was for the privileged few, and at 12 years of age he had been indentured to a Bannockburn tailor. He soon found that life at a bench in a tiny room was not for him. ‘I am a bird o’ the open air,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘So I laid the whip tae mah stilt [crutch] and took the road hame.’

‘The road hame’ had taken him to every village, town and city in the land, and in and out of a variety of trades. Starting out as a whip-the-cat (a door-to-door tailor) he progressed through toymaker, preacher, actor and schoolteacher. And was, by and large, a failure in all of them. He was at last reduced to the role of beggar and cadger and became such an expert that he felt able to declare Aberdeen as ‘the maist charitable city in Scotland’. With his ability to read and his penchant for acting it was perhaps inevitable that he should become a street-crier and ballad-monger, and join the band of men who made a precarious living by selling directly to the public copies of books, pamphlets, ballads, and epic poems, issued by the printer at two pennies a dozen and sold by the street-crier at a half-penny each.

While the public were anxious enough to purchase these publications they had first of all to be persuaded that they were getting value for money. It was the task of the crier to ‘sell’ the story in the way that advertisers today ‘sell’ washing powders and breakfast cereals.

The better the story was ‘cried’ the more copies were sold and the more profit made. Hawkie raised the business of ‘crying’ to an art form, and more often then not the story he told was better than the story he sold. His exciting and vivid account of the happenings to be found in the booklet ‘The Trial and Burning of Maggie Lang, the Cardonald Witch’ always ensured a large audience and a tidy sale afterwards.

Among the legion of beggars and vagabonds who wandered the countryside in the early 1800s Hawkie had simply been one of many, but when in 1818 his wanderlust led him to Glasgow he automatically became one of the sights and sounds of the expanding city. He wasn’t the only new arrival in Glasgow that year – there was a typhus epidemic that claimed 171 lives, and a great storm that caused much damage; the bowling green in the Candleriggs became the New Bazaar, and the Cattle Market was laid out between Duke Street and the Gallowgate; mansions were built at the western end of Carlton Place, with a white gate erected to seal the area off from the more common folk in Bridge Street.

Hawkie took up residence with the very common folk in the Flea Barracks at the foot of the Old Wynd in the Briggait. This area, once one of the more select in the city, had fallen on bad times and the original inhabitants had moved out to the Gorbals where people of quality could still lead a life of dignity and leisure. The mansions of the departed rich had now given way to whisky-shops, brothels, and vile lodging houses.

Hawkie often told of the time when he lived in Billy Toye’s hotel in the Old Wynd and of how during the night ‘forty to fifty rats would step from the bed-head to my chest and from there to the floor. They became uncommonly impudent’. He also told of the young man who died in the ‘hotel’ and whose body was savaged by rats which had to be fought off with sticks until the body could be carried away on a ‘hurley’ to the Police Office.

Despite the horrors of the old Glasgow lodging houses, however, Hawkie spent the last 33 years of his life entertaining, educating, annoying and infuriating the citizens of his adopted city, where his quick tongue and fertile imagination made him the most successful street-crier of them all.

With the passing of time he became less of a street-crier and more and more of an orator and solver of the burning questions of the day. No subject was too weighty to be tackled and none too trivial to be put under close inspection, and he would be found every night in the Trongate surrounded by hundreds of eager listeners, as he expounded upon the solution to such diverse problems as the Reform Bill, papal aggression, drunken husbands and ill-bred bairns.

He became the most quoted man in Glasgow and his jokes were passed from mouth to mouth around the city and far beyond. Farmers and other country folk who poured into town on market day never missed the opportunity of crowding round the crippled figure who took great delight in upbraiding them as country bumpkins and dull fellows. To be insulted by Hawkie in this fashion was no insult – the retelling of the story would provide amusement for weeks to come and the ‘victim’ would be the centre of attention every time.

‘Bird o’ the open air’ that he was, Hawkie’s days and nights were spent on the streets of the city at all times and in all weather, and by 1840 his health was such that he was taken as an inmate to the Town’s Hospital in Clyde Street where he spent the next 10 years of his life. It was during this time that his friend and admirer, David Robertson, a bookseller in the Trongate, persuaded Hawkie to write his autobiography. He especially asked Hawkie to record his most popular orations and harangues to the public, but received the reply – ‘As for what has taken place between me and my congregation in the street, I am, in general, drunk when they happen, and do not commit them to memory.’

Despite this, Hawkie’s story was eventually written and published under the title The Autobiography of a Gangrel (Gangrel being the old Scots word for vagabond).

Hawkie died on Thursday, 11 September, 1851, in the City Poorhouse, Parliamentary Road. The Glasgow Examiner announced his passing and listed his principal characteristics as ‘strong powers of wit, sarcasm, and a devoted love of whisky’.

CHAPTER 2

Jamie Blue – The Battle of Harvey’s Dyke

JAMIE BLUE, singer and poet, scrambled over the shattered remains of Tam Harvey’s dyke just as the troop of Eniskillin Dragoons came charging along the banks of the Clyde, their sabres drawn and a battle-cry on their lips. The colliers and weavers who had just demolished the hated dyke scattered in every direction before the approaching troops: most of them headed across the open ground towards the Gallowgate, others plunged into the Clyde itself in an endeavour to escape.

Despite these frantic efforts, 30 of the men were captured by the bold Dragoons and marched to the Tolbooth at Glasgow Cross, to be held there and charged with unlawful assembly and rioting. Vast crowds followed them through the city, cheering them every step of the way, and – led on by Jamie – singing at the top of their voices the stirring words of Scots wha hae.

Strangers to the city would have been forgiven for thinking they were witness to the celebration of a mighty national victory over impossible odds, but they would have been astonished to learn that the reason for all the excitement was the knocking down of a wall on the banks of the river Clyde. The wall – 10ft high and four ft thick – belonged to Tam Harvey, and Tam Harvey was the most hated man in Glasgow.

A former carter from Port Dundas, he had amassed a fortune from the sale of whisky and bought for himself the mansion and grounds of West-thorn, on the north bank of the river, a mile or so from the centre of the city. A footpath, much used by the people of the city and the villages around, ran along the bank of the river and past the front of Harvey’s new mansion. The daily procession of strollers enjoying the quiet and beauty of the riverside walk became a source of great irritation to Harvey, and he decided to build a dyke across the footpath and down to the river’s edge.

The outraged villagers of Camlachie and Parkhead quickly demolished the wall, but Harvey replaced it just as quickly with an even bigger one. Another attack by the villagers was repulsed by armed guards and ferocious bulldogs. By then the story of ‘Harvey’s Dyke’ had spread to every part of the city, and a number of prominent city men, concerned that Harvey’s action in cutting off the footpath would be followed by others, decided to take a hand in the affair. A committee was set up to approach Harvey and ask him to remove his dyke, allowing the citizens their age-old right of access to the river banks.

Harvey replied to this request by buying cart loads of broken glass and spreading it – not only along the banks of the river – but into the shallow reaches of the water itself, to prevent children from paddling on hot, summer days. This was, of course, too much to bear, and a great crowd of weavers and colliers, armed with pickaxes and sledgehammers, marched through the streets and down to the detested wall. Harvey’s guards and dogs were quickly put to flight, and the work of levelling the dyke was watched and encouraged by a cheering, singing throng.

The Dragoons, alerted by the worried authorities, arrived almost as the last stone was toppled and smashed. The 30 men charged with destroying the dyke were sentenced to six months imprisonment and only just escaped transportation to the colonies. The committee then decided to take Harvey to law and to fight their case through the courts. Money was raised by the staging of concerts, lectures and exhibitions, while collection boxes were placed at strategic positions around the city.

Everyone was exhorted to contribute to the fund ‘to oil the wheels of the plea, and to make it GANG!’ Harvey, meanwhile, had begun to slide downhill towards ruin and bankruptcy. Not only were his whisky shops being avoided by the drinking public, but other shops were enticing customers in by displaying signs which promised that ‘None of Tam Harvey’s whisky is sold in these premises’.

Coal was discovered on his property but no one would buy it because the message had gone out to one and all: ‘Only Tam Harvey shall burn his fingers on this coal’. But despite these threats and actions by the public Harvey continued his single-minded defence of his ‘right’ to maintain his dyke, and swore that he would spend £20,000 to protect every inch of it. In the end it was to cost him every penny he had ever earned. After bitter arguments that spread over two long years a date for a trial was fixed for 13 January, 1826, in Edinburgh, where the jury found for the citizens of Glasgow and their right to use the riverside path.

When news of the decision reached Glasgow bonfires were lit, crowds of joyous citizens danced and sang in the streets, and Jamie Blue had one of the most profitable days of his life selling ...

Table of contents

• Once Upon a Time in Glasgow
• Title page
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• ONCE UPON A TIME
• 1 HAWKIE – An Old Glasgow Worthy Observed
• 2 JAMIE BLUE – The Battle of Harvey’s Dyke
• 3 BLIND ALICK – Glasgow’s Seeing Eye
• 4 EVERY YEAR FOR EVER – Glasgow Fair
• 5 RIOT AND CIVIL DISTURBANCE
• 6 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
• 7 GLASGOW AND THE CLYDE
• 8 THE DAPHNE DISASTER
• 9 GLASGOW’S BAILIES
• 10 A BISHOP’S MIGHTY DREAM
• 11 THE BISHOP’S PALACE
• 12 WITCHCRAFT
• 13 THE RESURRECTIONISTS
• 14 SOME FAMOUS ‘OLD GLASGOW’ MEN
• 15 UNRELATED PEOPLE AND EVENTS
• 16 FOREIGN PARTS: PARTICK AND GOVAN
• 17 THE RESURRECTION OF MATHEW CLYDESDALE
• 18 LET GLASGOW FLOURISH!
• Copyright Page