A Grim Almanac of Glasgow

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following organisations for their assistance:

The National Library of Scotland

The British Library

The Scotsman

Glasgow Herald

The National Archives of Scotland

The Scottish Prison Service

With additional thanks to: The British Library for the use of the Illustrated Police News images, Transport Scotland for the use of the Dixon’s No. 5 Coal Pit image, Ben Brooksbank for the use of the image looking westwards down the Broomielaw and to Dave Hitchbourne for the use of the image of a Victorian prison cell.

All other images used in this book are either copyright free or are from the author’s own collection.

CONTENTS

TITLE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

The City of Glasgow, known as the ‘Second City of the Empire’ for much of the Victorian era, grew as a centre of Scotland’s transatlantic trade with the Industrial Revolution making the city well known for its shipbuilding and heavy industry. At this time, Glasgow was described as ‘one of the finest and richest cities in Europe’ and was thought to be a great example of an industrial society. Additionally, the city flourished with great museums, galleries, parks and libraries.

Today, Glasgow remains a vibrant, cosmopolitan city filled with culture and visited by people from all over the world. However, things were not always this way, as Glasgow, like most other cities, had its dark and difficult beginnings. In the 1820s and 1830s, a rapid increase in population created social difficulties with housing conditions becoming cramped and epidemics of cholera and typhus rife among the Glasgow people. From the squalid lodging houses shared by several families, hotbeds of poverty, crime and destitution grew. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought more mechanisation to the workplace, replacing many workers with machines, and adding to the existing problem of unemployment. This was highlighted in an article in the Glasgow Herald at the time:

Work cannot be found for many thousands who have been tempted to leave the rural districts, and as a consequence there is misery, crime, disease and poverty in its most helpless form. The first great cause is the miserably low rate of wages paid in the rural districts, where men are quite unable to buy more than the barest necessities of life for their families. The poor hear that better money may be earned in towns, and without knowing anything of the increased expense of living in large cities – an expense which often more than outweighs any increase of wages – they flock in to swell the already over-charged congregation of labour. The railways are greatly responsible for this, as they have done more than anything else to drain the rural districts to keep up their supplies of guards, signalmen and porters. It is not however, in this respect that the mischief is done as in the congregating together of herds of unskilled men who can do nothing more that dig with a spade of carry bricks up a ladder. So much is now done by machinery that was formerly done by hand that there is not sufficient work to employ the excessive crowd. As a consequence, they starve. Their homes have been broken up and they cannot return to the country, and they remain a disgrace and a danger to the city they have chosen as their habitation.

Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow.

These conditions were not alleviated quickly, and as the population of Glasgow grew to over one million during the Victorian era, crime, suicide and poverty existed alongside the booming industrial wealth and reputation of the city. At this time, many Irish immigrants settled in Glasgow to find work in the growing industries. With immigrants from both Southern Ireland and Ulster, there were inevitably clashes between people of Catholic and Protestant faiths, often involving men from different factions getting into fights, particularly when they were under the influence of alcohol.

The link between alcohol abuse and crime in general was a subject often debated in the newspapers throughout this time, with the following letter to the editor of the Caledonian Mercury newspaper appearing in 1845, from a Glasgow resident, on the subject of those sent to prison for crimes relating to drunkenness:

Very many of those persons committed for drunkenness are heads of families, and not a few of them very young – sometimes mere children; and any one at all capable of reflecting, may easily conceive that a fearful amount of sin, of moral degradation, and of physical suffering and ruin of all kinds, must be the result of such habits. Many a distressing scene takes place here by ragged, miserable, starving and worse that orphan children, coming to ask after and clamour for their drunken and depraved parents, and by many a weeping and heart broken wife following her wretched partner to the gates. I fear that nothing like an extensive and moral renovation of society can be reasonably expected whilst the facilities for intemperance are so great.

Some social improvements were starting to show in the late nineteenth century and, with the demand for labour outstripping supply and many workers were able to negotiate better working conditions. The first medical officer of health was also appointed in 1862 and a slum clearance began under the City Improvement Act of 1866. Other benefits to the city were also in place by the start of the twentieth century with the introduction of a gas supply, electricity and tramways.

Advances were also evident in the way crime was dealt with in Glasgow, with the Glasgow Police Act coming into force in 1800. For most of the Georgian period, watchmen had been used to guard the streets at night, but the new act established the ‘City of Glasgow Police’, described as the first municipal police force, with the first ‘criminal officer’ or detective, being appointed in 1819. The Glasgow Police originally looked after the city centre only until 1846 when they merged with the Gorbals, Calton and Anderston Burgh Police. Continual expansion of the city boundaries meant that more and more areas were coming under the control of the Glasgow Police, culminating in a merger with Govan and Partick Burgh Police in 1919.

The remit of the early police also extended to maintaining sanitary conditions, and police duties included: ‘Watching, Lighting, Cleansing, Regulation of the Keeping of Pigs, Asses, Dogs, and other inferior animals; Regulation of the lodging houses for the poorer classes; and preventing the undue accumulation of filth or manure’. The job of police constable was not a well-paid position, and, with the long working hours, the police force in the early part of Victoria’s reign often consisted of recruits who were less than suitable; and it was not uncommon to see constables appearing in court for crimes they themselves had committed.

Sauchihall Street.

Municipal Buildings, George Square.

The Glasgow courts, like all courts in Scotland, dealt separately with Summary offences and Indictable offences. Summary offences were dealt with either by the Police (or Burgh) Court or the Sheriff Court. These ranged from the more petty offences to assaults. Indictable offences were dealt with by the Sheriff and Jury Court or the Circuit Court of Justiciary. As the only High Court of Justiciary for Scotland was in Edinburgh, the Circuit Court would come to other cities routinely to hear the more serious cases, typically serious assaults, fraud or murder, until such time as Glasgow had its own permanent High Court. It was not unusual at this time to receive a fairly lengthy prison sentence for crimes which we would probably describe as ‘petty’ today; however, it was also common for fairly serious assaults to receive a comparatively lenient sentence, with crimes of theft being seen, particularly in the Victorian period, as one of the worst offences against a person.

Many people ended up in the justice system – from those who stole food in a desperate attempt to feed their families and keep them out of the workhouse, to violent people often under the influence of alcohol, assaulting their spouses or associates. A lack of proper treatment and understanding of mental illness, would also result in some unfortunate characters ending up in the justice system.

For ‘capital’ crimes such as murder and rape during the Georgian and Victorian periods, the sentence which normally resulted was that of death. Almost every society has used the sentence of capital punishment at one time and in Britain it became a cause for concern that juries may be acquitting criminals, rather than convict them knowing they would face execution. Public hangings, which had been the norm in Glasgow, were eventually replaced by executions inside the prisons in 1868. These public executions tended to draw large crowds of spectators, and were seen by some as entertainment. There were many who were critical of these public executions. On 9 May 1838, an article appeared in the Edinburgh Evening Courant, on ‘The Punishment of Death’, which described the practice as a ‘hideous spectacle’ designed to let the public ‘feed upon the agony of the wretch’, and also highlighted that murders were less frequent in the countries where the punishment of death did not exist. It was also noticed that violent crime seemed to increase around the time of executions. With public hangings, scaffolds with platforms were erected in towns, to which the criminal would be brought to face their punishment. The criminal would have a hood placed over their head and the noose would be placed around the neck. The prisoner would then indicate that they were ready by dropping a handkerchief. With the long drop hanging, the neck would be dislocated and the spinal cord snapped, causing an instant death if done properly. This was thought to be a more humane method than the shorter drop, in which death was caused by suffocation from the noose round the neck. When hangings began taking place within the prisons instead, a black flag was raised to let the public know that the execution had been carried out.

A nineteenth-century hanging.

Hungry children – desperate times called for desperate thefts. (From London Illustrated News)

The Tolbooth Steeple, all that remains today of the Tolbooth Prison.

At one time in Glasgow there were eight prisons, with the oldest being the Tolbooth, at Glasgow Cross, the steeple of which remains today. All of these prisons had closed by 1840 except the North Prison or Bridewell at Duke Street and the Burgh Prison at Glasgow Green. Due to overcrowding in these two Glasgow prisons, Barlinnie Prison was built in 1880, which is still in place today.

One of the main concerns with prisons in the nineteenth century was the association of criminals, and it was decided that the less association they had together, the less chance there was of prisons becoming a training ground in all aspects of criminality. There were also growing concerns during this time as to the number of children serving prison sentences. Captain Kincaid, an Inspector of Prisons, highlighted this in 1849 in his report on Scottish Prisons, in which he spoke of the ‘defective state of the laws of Scotland in their provisions for the punishment of juvenile offences’. Captain Kincaid expressed concern over several cases he had become aware of where children had been committed to prison for very trivial acts, such as one child who served fourteen days for stealing apples. It was recognised at the time that juvenile offenders were often neglected children with no one to protect or care for them, and Kincaid thought that a better system would be to place these children in a reformatory school. This, he believed, would educate them and provide them with trades, skills and discipline so that they might go on to lead a more productive life. The cost of providing these schools was more cost effective in the long run if the children could be reformed, instead of becoming habitual criminals and having to be maintained by the public for life. Kincaid also observed that more had to be done in communities, to make ‘worthless parents do their duty’. This idea of reformatory schools was a popular one and in 1850, following the report of a Parliamentary Committee on Criminal and Destitute Children, a bill was introduced ‘for the better care and reformation of juvenile offenders’, by establishing reformatory schools for young people, under sixteen years of age, convicted of offences under Summary Procedure.

A drawing depicting child labour from 1913.

The connection between poverty and crime, and debate on the ways to break this cycle, have been explored throughout the ages and appeared as the subject of an article in a newspaper in 1874:

Workhouses, gaols and penitentiaries are somehow, in this age of advanced civilisation, prominent and most unpleasant ‘institutions’… Charity and compassion are all very well in their place; but you may so overdose a people with institutions for their assistance, as to entirely take out of them the spirit of self reliance and energy; and you may go on to such a pitch with reformation schemes as to induce the belief in the lower classes that everything for their welfare depends upon other people, that no responsibility whatever rests upon themselves, and that whilst even being improved they ought to be supported at the expense of society.

However, crime, poverty and suicides were not the only grim aspects of Glasgow’s past. Like any emerging city, Glasgow had its share of accidents, particularly industrial accidents. For most of the working classes, work was a significant hazard, and long hours, tiredness and a lack of any regard to safety by often unscrupulous employers resulted in horrific accidents in the workplace. Children in particular were at risk, as due to their small size they were used, particularly in the Victorian era, to clean inside machinery, often with disastrous consequences. Child labour in general was a practice many social reformers of the time wanted to see end, such as the writer of the following letter to the editor of the Glasgow Herald in 1872, speaking out against objections to the Factory Act which aimed to prevent a child under thirteen years of age from working more that six and a half hours a day. The particular example this local resident gives is of children working in printworks:

To take a child of eight years out of its warm bed at six o’clock in the morning and make it hang over a colour tub till six o’clock in the evening and they say it is not unhealthy work, is to say the least of it, sad ignorance. No one will welcome the new Act more joyfully than the poor children; and God knows it is them who need their hours of labour shortened instead of their (too often) lazy fathers. Many at their early age sow the seeds of disease they never throw off, and drop into an early grave. I know what it is, and to this day feel its consequences.

In this book, grim events from the Georgian era right through to the Edwardian era give us an insight into the darker side of the past of this great city. From murder most foul to terrible accidents along with tales of execution, poverty, crime and other macabre events, this book contains all things ‘grim’ about Glasgow’s past.

Lynne Wilson, 2012

JANUARY

Sauchiehall Street in winter.

1 JANUARY

1861  The trial of a young man named John McFadyen was heard. McFadyen, who was described as having ‘a dull, stupid-looking expression’, was accused of having stripped a two-and-a-half-year-old boy named Alexander Shields of his clothes, thrown him into the deep water of the River Clyde and held him under the water with a long stick until he died. From the evidence given, it appeared that the child had left his parents’ house for the purpose of meeting his father on his way home for dinner. When he did not return, a search was made and the grim events uncovered. McFadyen had met the child in Commercial Road, Hutchesontown, lifted him in his arms and carried him to the river side, opposite Clydevale Works. There, he stripped off the boy’s clothes, threw him into the