The Gorbals

So, who am I? I am the younger of two sons of John and Kay Crichton. I was born in 1951 in Glasgow in the Rotten Row hospital. Now there’s a name that gets your attention. When I first heard that name I thought it was joke, but that’s what it was called. The first few years of my life were spent in one of the rougher parts of Glasgow: The Gorbals. By all accounts this district has undergone some striking changes over the years, with one of my relatives remarking that the only noteworthy thing about that place today is an improved road system through it. When I was there it was full of dirty black tenement buildings. Slums. Stories of gangland warfare and violence are found in many cities, but for Glasgow in those days the Gorbals was a magnet for crime and violence like no other. It was not the sort of place where you would want to be alone at night. You could get knifed for looking at someone the wrong way, and we lived at 189 Gorbals Street, Gorbals, no less. It wasn’t the suburb of choice of my mother and she was anxious to get out. She also hated the dirtiness of the place.

My father related an experience of being harassed (mugged) by someone on the street. He was being held at knife point, and feared for his life. During the commotion, he spotted a familiar face across the street, and called for help. As it happened, this man knew my father’s attacker, and was able to help out with a simple and authoritative, “Leave him alone. He’s a’right. I know ’im.” He was convinced that if it wasn’t for this chance rescue he would have been left as a bleeding heap on the ground. There was a roughness to parts of Glasgow that I recall as a child. It was commonplace to see drunks lying on the pavement, or leaning against bus stops. This no doubt reflected the level of poverty in the city with alcohol (including meths) being an easy escape from their problems.

Pollution was a problem for people living in industrialised cities. I recall the experiences of various members of my family relating their experiences of getting caught in smog (fog mixed with smoke), particularly at night. On occasion, the smog would be so heavy it would sometimes bring transport to a halt. Bus conductors would walk a few paces in front of the bus, when conditions were bad, guiding the bus by looking out for obstacles and leading the driver with hand signals. June said, when the smog was heavy, you could barely see your arm held in front of your face, and when you eventually got indoors, you were smeared in a streaky mess of dirt on your skin and clothes from the smog. I recall another of my relatives saying he had to touch the walls of buildings, feeling his way along the street, to avoid getting lost. In fact, Peter Stanley later took up employment as a Smoke Control Officer; industry was encouraged to change its practices and reduce the levels of pollution, and householders were persuaded to change their method of heating from coal fires to an alternative fuel.

Before I started school we had moved to the country, but after only a few years we were off again in the early 1960s joining many of the others who were migrating to other parts of the world, and for us the £fare took us to Adelaide, South Australia.

My parents met in Glasgow at a Lithuanian club dance. My mother loved dancing and she used to tell with pride how she had danced to the music of the ‘big bands’ of the time. She had good rhythm, and my father would have cramped her style. He could never have been described as a ‘dancer’, and certainly not then. So, with all those other men who could actually dance, I wonder what she saw in him. Like a lot of men, he went to the clubs to meet a woman, and he found my mother. Maybe she liked a bit of rough. She was later to discover what he really thought of her going dancing. My mother had both John and me in Glasgow. They eventually took their young family to live in Oakley, Fife. This was a small town in a rural area. My father had been a coal miner in his youth. There were two pits nearby, Comrie and Valley field, and he returned to the coal mines in Fife. A certain amount of shift work was required, but he welcomed the salary loading it brought. That left my mother alone with two young children. In the early years it kept her house bound, but things changed. With her two young sons going off to school she had more time to herself, and she joined some clubs in Oakley. She joined the Lawn Bowls Club, and won a few trophies for her efforts, but never liked bowls. She said she just went for the company. She then discovered Scottish Country Dancing, and took to it with a vengeance. Of course, dancing had always been one of her loves, having danced to the music of Joe Loss and other big bands. The accordion of Jimmy Shand blasting from an old record player wouldn’t quite match the sound of live music in a dance hall, but it provided an opportunity to get out of the house and meet other people. I loved those nights, because my brother and I could stay up late watching telly, and we were well supplied with sweets for the night to keep us distracted. She didn’t mention to my father she had joined the Scottish Country Dance club. She just went along and joined in the fun at a local community club. When he found out, there was a hell of a row. No doubt he was thinking of the reasons he had gone dancing himself in the first place: to pull a bird. So, here she was going dancing again, and by herself into the bargain. In his mind, that was something that was inviting trouble and just not on. “You can come too if you want,” she no doubt suggested. “No way,” he would have said. He wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like that. It probably got to be quite a spicy argument, but he would have caved in when he realised it was mostly women who went. My mother continued her interest in Scottish country dancing very soon after arriving in Australia. My father remained steadfastly against it, and refused to go. He was perfectly willing for her to go, and week after week she would get him to drive her into the city to the club, drop her off, and go back home. Three hours later he would get back in the car, drive back in to town, and pick her up again. Whether it was the tedium of all the driving that was getting him down, or whether he just summoned up the courage to try it I don’t really know, but after a few weeks trying some of the dances at the club he became a keen advocate and would join in the dancing at every opportunity.

Gorbals Cross looking west to Norfolk Street, September 1930
The Cross was remodelled by the City Improvement Trust after 1872 to create a broad public space at the junction of four important thoroughfares. The drinking fountain and cast-iron clock, centre, were erected in 1878.


School holidays in the Gorbals, August 1926
Three boys, two of them barefoot, appear to be playing a game of "bools" (marbles) in the backcourt at 13 Hospital Street. A girl and boy look on curiously from a nearby roof.


A young woman at a communal sink, Gorbals, c 1925
A backcourt at 50 Crown Street, Gorbals. The door behind the woman appears to be that of the toilet. Outside toilets were a common feature of Glasgow tenements until the late 19th century. Subsequently tenements were built with or renovated to include a shared water closet on each stair landing. Refuse can be seen piled up in the "midgie" (midden) at the rear.


Small children by midden in back court, Gorbals, in 1912
The backcourt at 76 Crown Street, Gorbals. The brick-built midden was the area in which tenement families disposed of their household waste. A high proportion of the waste consisted of ashes, as most food scraps and flammable rubbish was thrown on the kitchen fire and cinders from burnt-out coal were constantly re-cycled.


Abraham Links’ drapery shop, Main Street Gorbals, 1907
The top left hand window has lettering in Yiddish while the bottom right window has a similar message in English. Abraham Links (1886-1953) was a leading figure in the Zionist movement in Glasgow. He was involved in setting up the first Glasgow office of the Jewish National Fund in Dixon Street in 1935, building on the success of the JNF's Glasgow Committee which had been founded in 1901 to raise funds to buy land in Palestine for the creation of a Jewish homeland. Links also supported Hebrew language teaching for Jewish children and the establishment of a Zionist-oriented Jewish day school in the Gorbals. The first step was the creation in 1911 of the Hebrew Higher Grade School at 124 South Portland Street, which offered after-school classes for children and evening classes for adults.