A Visit to The People's Palace
Glasgow trip - part 3
At the beginning of October, I went to Glasgow on a research trip for my book about Helen Crawfurd, a Scottish Suffragette whose name is not as well-known as it ought to be. Born in 1877 in Glasgow, Helen lived through one of the most turbulent times in world history and was right in the thick of much of it, from the struggle for women’s right to vote through two world wars which she vehemently disagreed with and the question of Home Rule for Ireland which provoked strong feelings and violent action on both sides. One of the main reasons that I feel a connection with Helen is because I was also born in Glasgow, albeit nearly 100 years later. I was not there long, but it’s a city I feel a strong connection to, so visiting to learn more about Helen’s story also meant a visit to where my own life began.
One of the places I visited in Glasgow was the People’s Palace. This is now a social history museum, three floors of history covering Glasgow from its beginnings in 1750 through a population explosion in the 19th and 20th centuries right up to present day.
The People’s Palace, situated in Glasgow Green, was opened in 1898 right in the heart of Glasgow’s East End, which was severely overcrowded with people suffering from the disease of poverty. Lord Rosebery, who opened the building declared that it would be a place of pleasure and imagination for the people of Glasgow, to be open to the people ‘for ever and ever’. There is a glasshouse at the rear of the building which isn’t open to the public currently because it has been deemed unsafe for the public. When it was first opened, the ground floor held reading and recreation rooms, with a museum on the middle floor and a picture gallery on the third floor. In the 1940’s it became a social history museum, with each floor telling different parts of the Glasgow story. The displays reflect life in an ever changing city, and the different experiences of Glaswegians. In fact, it is the latter which really comes through in the exhibitions: ordinary Glaswegians telling their stories is a strong theme of all the displays I saw whilst there, as you can see in the image below which gives the information about caesarean sections followed by quotes from people.
In the early 1800’s Glasgow’s population was 770,000. By 1912 it was 1 million. This explosion of people was happening during Helen’s lifetime. Glasgow was the second city of the Empire, and people flocked to be part of the economic boom happening in and around the city. But though people were working, they were paid a pittance and poorly housed.
The city had to do something to house all these people who had flooded into the city, so they built ‘tenement’ housing, blocks of rooms which were divided up into different sized homes. Many working-class tenements had only two rooms, known as a ‘room and kitchen’ or one room, a ‘single end’. A single-end was essentially a kitchen with a recess bed but often housed a large family. There’s a display of this at the People’s Palace which you can see in the video below, which I’ve edited down (I’m a total novice at video editing so please excuse it!!). The audio is telling the story of living in a single-end like this one.
In areas such as the High Street or the Gorbals, the area where Helen was born, overcrowding was common and water and sewage facilities were poor. A single room could be shared by as may as 8 family members, with 30 residents sharing a toilet. In one tenement near Glasgow Cross, over 500 people claimed to live in one close.
It is actually unlikely that Helen’s family lived in a single-end but her memoir doesn’t give the reader much detail about the places she lived in. Of her birth she tells us that she was born around tea-time on 9th November 1877, 146 years ago! Her father asked her mother if he could bring someone home for tea, “only to be told that the nurse and doctor had been sent for, and that visitors would hardly be welcomed”, in her customary dry humour. She also tells us that she was the fourth child of seven, though we know that Elisabeth, who must have been born before Helen, did not survive. Her Father, William, had come from a family of ‘smiddy’s, (Blacksmiths) but he had been brought up from a young age by his uncle who was a baker. So, William Jack became a Master Baker, likely to be considered more middle-class by the standards of the day.
At the People’s Palace I learned about what Glasgow would have felt like to a young girl like Helen. Up until the 1950’s most tenements were owned by private landlords who employed ‘Factors’ to extract their rent money.
Not many tenants would have known who their landlord was, but everyone knew who the Factor was. Even when people got sick or injured, they were still expected to pay their rent, it was a very unstable and unhealthy set up. Even as recently as the 1990’s, 60% of children in Glasgow were eligible for a clothing grant and over 30% of Glaswegians lived below the poverty line. One especially interesting fact I learned was that poverty had such a signifcant impact on pregnancy and labour, with women and babies dying in childbirth due to malnutrition and lack of vitamin D. This led to the pioneering of Caesarean sections in Glasgow in the 1880’s!
It is no wonder that a woman like Helen, who refused to become hardened or acquiesce that life was hard for many and unfair for the majority, continued her struggle for fairer treatment of those at the very edges of society. As an adolescent girl, with all the high passion and beliefs that the world can be a better place, it is no wonder that she felt battered and bruised by life in Glasgow. To be surrounded by the harsh reality of life in this city at the time, must have felt like an assault on the senses.
I found this website, which shows us some of the oldest photographic depictions of the tenement housing in Glasgow. The images are really evocative, giving the observer a keen insight into this life.
The People’s Palace does a good job of showing how people were living hand to mouth, telling visitors about mothers having to waylay their husbands on a Friday after work to prevent him from spending all his wages in the pub. Life was hard for many, alcohol provided an escape, though we know that alcoholism has always been a public health issue in Glasgow. Temperance Societies sprang up all over the city, offering an alternative to the pub and other alcohol fuelled activities.
Keir Hardie, the man much admired by Helen who founded the Independent Labour Party of which Helen became a member, was himself a member of the Temperance Society which makes a lot of sense against this backdrop. They provided many young people with opportunities to socialise without alcohol, including dance halls. I wondered if Helen’s family might have been involved, but her memoir makes it clear that although she would have loved to learn to dance, her Mother in particular denounced dancing as a work of the devil, and so she did not frequent any of these ‘frivolous’ and ‘dangerous’ places. Her parents were devout Christians, which explains how they began to frequent Brownfield Church, where the Rev Crawfurd expounded the imminence of the second coming, and of the End Times which it was believed (and still is in many Christian circles) would herald the return of Jesus.
It was another fascinating day out and one I would recommend to anyone interested in the history of the city. I had one more day in Glasgow, when I visited The Tenement House Museum, where I learned more about the different types of tenement houses, which was also really fascinating.
More on that next time!
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