Glasgow (29 page)

THE DOUR DRINKERS OF GLASGOW, 1952
Hugh MacDiarmid

Were drinkers in Glasgow any more dour than those elsewhere? Arguably. There were certainly more drinkers and more places in which to drink. Nor was there much else to do in them. Until fairly recently drinking in Scotland was a serious business which was pursued single-mindedly. Unlike their English counterparts, Scottish pubs did not offer food and very little in the way of diversion. Hugh MacDiarmid knew of course of what he wrote. A thinker and a drinker, he was never more content than when throwing spanners into works and oil upon troubled waters. It was in Glasgow, for example that he dared make a controversial speech about Robert Burns, dismissing him as a voice from the past. Could it have been the drink talking?

I have never been able, despite repeated efforts, to understand the periodicity of complaints against the Scottish pub which have been made during the past half century. Made, I suspect, not by women or clergy-men, either by English visitors or by Scots who, as Sir Walter Scott said, ‘unScotched make damned bad Englishmen'. They are usually accompanied by envious comparisons of English inns, which we are told are far more sociable and cater to family parties in a way Scottish pubs do not. For, in the latter, at their most typical, the rule is ‘men only' and ‘no sitting' – you stand at the counter with your toes in that narrow sawdust-filled trough which serves as a comprehensive combined ashtray, litter-bin, and cuspidor. So it was when I first began to drink nearly fifty years ago; so it still is for the most part. Certainly nowadays, in addition to the common bars and to the jug (or family) departments to which women, mostly of a shawled, slatternly, and extremely subfusc order, still repair with all the ancient furtiveness, there are bright chromium-fitted saloon bars, cocktail bars, and other modern accessories in the more pretentious places. And even in most of the ordinary bars there is now a fair sprinkling of women not only of the ‘lower orders' or elderly at that, but gay young things, merry widows and courtesans. Men (if you can call them that) even take their wives and daughters along with them to these meretricious, de-Scotticised resorts.

Now, I am not a misogynist by any means. I simply believe there is a time and place for everything – and yes, literally,
everything
. And like a high proportion of my country's regular and purposive drinkers I greatly prefer a complete absence of women on occasions of libation. I also prefer a complete absence of music and very little illumination. I am therefore a strong supporter of the lower – or lowest type of ‘dive'
where drinking is the principal purpose and no one wants to be distracted from that absorbing business by music, women, glaring lights, chromium fittings, too many mirrors unless sufficiently fly-spotted and mildewed, or least of all, any fiddling trivialities of
l'art nouveau
. If there are still plenty of pubs in Glasgow which conform to these requirements and remain frowsy and fusty enough to suit my taste and that of my boon companions, in another respect the old order has changed sadly and I fear irreversibly. Our Scottish climate – not to speak of the soot-laden, catarrh-producing atmosphere of Glasgow in particular – makes us traditionally great spirit-drinkers. That has changed. Most of us cannot afford – or at that rate cannot get – much whisky or, for that matter, any other spirit. There are, of course, desperate characters who drink methylated spirits. I have known – and still know – resolute souls partial to a mixture of boot-blacking and ‘meth', and I remember when I was in the Merchant Service during the recent War a few hardy characters who went to the trouble of stealing old compasses off the boats at Greenock (where we had the largest small-boat pool in Europe) in order to extract from them the few drops of spirit (well mixed with crude-oil and verdigris) they contained. But in Glasgow pubs today at least ninety per cent of the drinking is of beer – and mere ‘swipes' at that; ‘beer' that never saw a hop. I can remember the time when it was the other way about. What beer was consumed was used simply as a ‘chaser' to the whisky in precisely the same way as a ‘boilermaker' in New York. For of course you can get drunk quicker on whisky plus water than on neat whisky, and whisky and soda is an English monstrosity no true Scot can countenance at all.

There are other sorry changes in even the lowest-down pubs which in general hold to the grim tradition of the true Scottish ‘boozer'. The question of hours, for example. In London one can still drink legally twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. That is because London is a congeries of different boroughs which have different ‘permitted hours' so that by switching from one borough at closing time it is easy to find another where ‘they' will still be open for an hour or two longer. In Glasgow, moreover, unlike London, there are few facilities for drinking outside the permitted hours. For most people, that is. It will hardly be thought that I am pleading for decreased consumption, but I believe that the same amount of strong drink taken in a leisurely way over a fair number of hours is less harmful than the rush to squeeze in the desired number of drinks in the short time the law allows. Out national poet, Robert Burns, was right when he said: ‘Freedom and whisky gang thegither'. What he meant is precisely what my own motto means: ‘They do not love liberty who fear licence'. I speak for the large body of
my compatriots who uphold this principle and regard respectability and affectations of any kind as our deadliest enemy. There are, of course, clubs and hotels, but the
hoi polloi
have nothing to do with either of these.

Only a few years ago there were also Burns Clubs which took advantage of a loophole in the law and did a roaring trade, especially on Sundays. You did not require to be introduced. You simply paid half-a-crown at the door and automatically became a member for the day. The difficulty – especially for the thirsty stranger within the gates, and indeed for the bulk of the citizens themselves – was to find these places. One heard about them. One heard, indeed, fantastic tales of the alcoholic excess which went on there. But they were exceedingly difficult to find. You had to be ‘in the know'. Suddenly they disappeared entirely. I have never been able to discover why. There was nothing in the press – and I could learn nothing over my private grapevine either – about police action having been taken. They must have been very profitable to those who ran them, and a substantial source of revenue to the ‘liquor trade' generally. They served a very useful purpose since no one not a resident in a hotel and not a member of a club could otherwise get a drink in Glasgow on Sundays. (It was – and still is – jolly difficult to get a meal even.)

ARMAGEDDON IN GEORGE SQUARE, 1953
George Rosie

In his book
Curious Scotland
(2004), the journalist George Rosie (1941–) attempted to answer a number of questions that were haunting him. What became of the sons of Robert Burns? Why do people regularly spit on one particular part of Edinburgh pavement? And, more apocalyptically, what would have happened had an A-Bomb been dropped on George Square in Glasgow? The last-mentioned was in the context of the Cold War, when the world seemed to many to be on the brink of self-destruction. Suffice it to say, Glasgow would have borne the brunt of any nuclear attack on these islands
.

I can never cross George Square without recalling a buff-coloured folder I came across by accident in the Public Record Office in Kew. Official documents are sometimes misleadingly described by journalists as ‘chilling' when ‘mildly worrying' would be more accurate. But this one was a chiller, without a doubt. Commissioned by the Scottish Office
in Edinburgh from the scientists of the Home Office in London, it was an official estimate of what would happen to Glasgow if someone (the Soviets, presumably) detonated an atom bomb over George Square. It had the feeling of worried people trying to come to terms with a real possibility.

There was, I suppose, a lot to worry about in the years of its authorship, 1951 to 1952. The Soviet Union had developed its own atomic weapons. The Chinese People's Army had flooded into North Korea to pursue the war against American-led UN forces that included British troops. The United States was in the grip of what can only be described as paranoia. Two minor Soviet agents – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – had been condemned to death in 1951 for passing on secrets to the Soviet Union and were later (1953) executed. Atomic devices were regularly tested in the Nevada desert. In May 1951, the Americans tested, in the Pacific, the first hydrogen bomb. It was a triumph of nuclear physics that the Soviets and then the British were to repeat. The ‘atomic age' had arrived in earnest.

It was against that background that His Majesty's Government decided to investigate what would happen if a Hiroshima-type atomic device were exploded over the centre of Glasgow. Their calculations are contained in a document marked ‘secret' and wordily entitled
Assessment of the Damage and the Numbers of Casualties and Homeless Likely to Result from an Attack on Glasgow with an Atomic Bomb
. The research was carried out between 1951 and 1952 under the direction of E.C. Allen MSc of the Home Scientific Adviser's Branch. The Scottish Home Department and the Department of Health for Scotland (both branches of the Scottish Office) had commissioned it, and the result was approved by the government's Working Party of the Effects of Air Attack. When the document was printed and circulated in January 1953, it carried with it the warning that ‘the official in possession of the document will be responsible for its safe custody and when not in use it is to be kept under lock and key'.

What Allen and his colleagues postulated was an explosion at 2,000 feet above ground zero by a ‘nominal' nuclear device with the equivalent destructive power of 20,000 tons of TNT (roughly the size of the atomic bomb that destroyed most of Hiroshima in August 1945). Two separate scenarios were explored: one in which the bomb was dropped on Glasgow during the day, the other in which the attack occurred at night. The Home Office men calculated that 932,900 people would be within 2.5 to 3 miles of ground zero during the day, dropping to 854,200 at night. A daytime explosion during the working week was therefore considered to be the greater of the two evils, Glasgow would
be about its business. The factories, shops, warehouses, offices, schools, tramcars and streets would be crowded with people. The Home Office team put the number of daytime casualties at 79,700 dead and 25,900 seriously injured, whereas a night-time bomb would yield 59,700 dead and 19,300 seriously injured.

Blast damage to property was also assessed. Up to 3,000 feet from ground zero the effect on stone-built tenements would be ‘complete collapse'. At 4,000 feet there would be seventy-five per cent collapse. At 5,000 feet twenty-five per cent collapse. At 1.25 miles all pitched roofs would be destroyed. At 1.5 miles the roof damage would make the building uninhabitable. Beyond 2 miles the damage would be ‘superficial'.

Anyone trapped in the rubble of a collapsed Glasgow tenement had little hope of rescue. Lying under two storeys of London or Birmingham brick is one thing. Lying under four or five storeys of Scottish sandstone is something else entirely. This report took this into account and pointed out that the sheer weight of the debris would mean that ‘only a small proportion of the trapped and injured were likely to be saved'. The Glasgow tenement's only – and literally – saving grace was that its thick stone walls offered greater protection against gamma radiation.

The report conceded that official thinking about the consequences of nuclear attack until then had been distinctly Anglocentric. ‘Previous studies of atomic attack on British cities made by the Working Party have been based on the assumption that the bulk of the people live in small terraced or semi-detached brick houses. This assumption clearly could not be applied to either Glasgow or Edinburgh.' Glasgow was extraordinarily vulnerable, with special problems. The report concluded: ‘These special problems result mainly from the density of population in Glasgow, which is greater than that of any British city, but also because much of the population is housed in very large blocks of tenements, some of which are 100 or more years old.'