I am a schemie. Just like my mother.
I spent the first two years of my life on North Street, only a few hundred yards from where my first migrant Ó Beólláins ancestor lived, 100 years before, in backlands on New Sneddon St.
The rest of my childhood and adolescence were spent in Foxbar: a scheme which had not existed in 1950.
In England, such arid residential mono-cultures were called ‘estates’ – since ideas of aristocratic land-ownership are still deemed prestigious there[i]. In the USA they are termed ‘Projects’ – a more explicit acknowledgement that housing for the under-class is a problem to be solved, not an organic element of society as a whole. The adoption of the term ‘Scheme’ in Scotland carries with it echoes of a plan, a conspiracy, a blue-print. Schemes are always a work in progress, as are the lives of those sequestered within them.
Sean Damer[ii] has written of how the urban renewal plans of the 20th century in the West of Scotland ‘reified’ a Victorian Class structure, stripping the urban poor out of the city and isolating them on the periphery, in uniform, council-owned rental accommodation with few amenities or opportunities and intensely vulnerable to economic shocks.
That was Foxbar, on the South West outskirts of Paisley, a housing scheme conceived shortly after World War 2 and built between 1952 and 1965 on the North slope of the Gleniffer Braes.[iii]
Paisley had, through the 19th century and into the 20th century, been one of the epicentres of Scottish industrialisation.
The textiles industry, built on the backss of the slave-economies of the Caribbean and Southern USA, lay at the root of the Industrial Revolution everywhere in Great Britain but Paisley specialised in textiles to an extraordinary extent, first linen, then silk and finally and especially cotton. In the course of the 19th century, Paisley became a paradigm for large-scale, steam-driven manufactories using low-paid migrant labour (predominantly female) including generations of Bollands, Easdons, Kiddies and McDades. The cotton-oligarchs of Paisley – the Clarks, Coats and Patons – were immensely wealthy and exported both product and factories across the globe, establishing mills in New England and India. The cheapness of labour and still cheaper housing earned the town a reputation for being one of the unhealthiest in Great Britain.
The first Ó Beólláins arrived from Sligo in the late 1830s. For the next 130 years, the family and their in-laws flitted from one rented room or apartment to another within an area of about one square mile.
National Librabr of Scotland – OS Map
At the end of World War 2, Paisley’s housing problems were recognised as amongst the worst in the country, at a time when many major cities and towns were suffering from an unmanageable density and increased numbers of people.
Under the terms of the Scottish Housing Act 1946, the Paisley town boundaries were extended, enabling the council to build new housing estates on what was formerly rural land on the periphery. Foxbar was one of the four main estates conceived, designed and built during this period. Depending on your point of reference, Foxbar is about 2 miles from Paisley town centre. By the late 1960s it had a population of around 6000, a little less than 7% of Paisley’s total population at that time. This population was served by 2 bus routes[iv] –– 3 rows of 5 shops[v], 1 chip shop, 1 pub, 1 library and 3 primary schools[vi] – and 2 churches[vii]. Green spaces were strictly ‘Ball-games prohibited’ – an ordinance universally ignored.
Our new tenement, at 7 Tay Avenue, was located at the extreme Western edge of the scheme. A seven foot chain-link fence, topped with three rows of barbed wire, ran directly in-front of our close mouth. The pavement and a narrow slope of grass, which became our natural football pitch, separated the tenement from the fence.[viii] On the other side of the fence was Elderslie.
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Mary was two-months pregnant with her second child, Brian, when my father got a start at the Pressed Steel in Linwood in December 1959. Shortly after that, we moved to Foxbar. New job, new home, new life: a view across a barbed-wire fence onto a golf-course.[ix]
Our new accommodation – ground floor right – was ‘all mod cons’, a three apartment built to a standard design (and budget) in a pebble-dashed, three-storey tenement.
Layout of Ground Floor Right.
The flat was spacious and brand-new: true to form they were still finishing the paths and roadways by the time we, eagerly, moved in. The flat had electricity AND gas, hot and cold running water, an inside toilet and an enamel bath, a patch of garden to the front and a share of the back green. Heating was from a single, three-panel gas fire in the living room. The Elderslie fence was the view from our front windows.[x]
Despite the luxury of our new council flat, that fence sliced my childhood in two, as surely as a scalpel blade. To add to the sense of menace, a string of pylons ran down the fence-line, on the Elderslie side, great loping giant space-frames with barbed wire around their mezzanines and slouching cables that buzzed in the rain. On occasion, a small helicopter would fly by (on the Elderslie side) at about eye-level to inspect the lines.
I assume the fence-line was part of the original development plan when the scheme was first laid out – a chain-link fence to keep the scruff off of the bourgeois leisure-sphere. Elderslie Golf Course, constructed fifty years before on land owned by Elderslie Estates and beyond the (then) Burgh boundary, was set in lush parkland with a large variety of trees. Members and their guests followed a route from the 3rd tee to the 13th green round the Newton Woods which grew opposite our Tay Avenue flat.
From the outset, the inhabitants of Foxbar were unimpressed by the well-thought-out patterns of footpaths and green-spaces. Footpaths skirted around green-spaces, ignoring the straightest line to school or to the shops. For every two footpaths there was at least one dubby trail across the green, sometimes more depending on the strategic significance of the location.
Still, over time, as in any urban (or sub-urban) lifeway, the design of the scheme began to shape our experience of being. From any address, there were preferred routes – to school, to church, to the shops, to the library. By the time I was in school, a stravaig from, say, the Rivers to Amochrie, was an adventure… not in a good way. There were territories and no-go zones, though hostilities tended to be fiercest in the tightly constrained spaces closer to home. It was risky to venture to Annan Drive from Tay Avenue, reckless to set foot in Forth Avenue directly next door[xi].
That chain-link fence was a premonition of historical developments. Despite the post-war egalitarian vision, an internal structure quickly developed within the scheme.
The lowest lying segment – almost all tenements – lay North of the Brediland Road and would, subsequently, be formally reclassified as ‘The Rivers’, differentiating it from the rest of the scheme due to its high levels of multiple deprivation. To the east, around Meikleriggs and nearest the town, there were a plethora of own-door, privately-owned dwellings known in the scheme as Spam-Valley. At the highest part of the scheme, backing onto the Gleniffer Braes, were better quality, own-door council houses along the old Foxbar Road and, between these two zones, was Amochrie, a mixed estate of own door properties, tenements and five tower blocks known as ‘the high-flats’.
The streets, drives, crescents and avenues (often cul-de-sacs) of the Rivers were named Tay, Forth, Dee, Don, Deveron, Spey, Nith, Esk, Afton, Gryffe , Orchy, Annan. Rivers which most of the tenants would never have the opportunity to see.[xii]
The psychic geography of my child-o-sphere is lumpy and granular, therefore.
In the centre of that world – its omphalos – was the close, of course. A three-storey tenement with painted walls, three flights of bare concrete stair, with a wee step-up at each turn. Six dunnies in the back close. A porch leading onto the shared back green, a midden with six bins on your right as you emerged. Six plots of garden, differently shaped but probably of equal area.[xiii]
My Child-o-sphere
Commitment to gardening varied from tenant to tenant. Some were never more than overgrown patches of docks and grasses. Others – I remember ours (at first) and the Thompson’s – tended with a bit more care[xiv]. The Thompsons had a clump of geraniums where you could catch bees in a jam-jar. Lupins, tea-roses and snap-dragons featured strongly, at least in the beginning.
Beyond the garden patches, a narrow footpath with a single tall concrete lamp-post directly opposite the close-mouth[xv]. Beyond the footpath, the strip of slightly sloping grass was often rank with dog-shit, especially when the green Corporation gang-mower came past, mashing grass, shit and sweetie papers into damp pulp.
Dogs were not walked then. Dogs were let out. Mostly they came back. They formed more or less sociable packs wandering the immediate vicinity. Just like the children.
To the right of the tenement, grass sloped away past Tay and Annan towards the Canyon.
To the left, the perilous path led past Forth Avenue to the dump, the lock-ups and, eventually, the shops.
Each riverine avenue was, of course, a cul-de-sac.
The other ‘children’ in the close at that time were older than me and mostly girls. The Thomsons’ eldest boy was already away at sea and their youngest, Elizabeth much older. Janice Crombie and Kenneth Smith were closer to my age[xvi]
In our isolated position, against the fence and between cul-de-sacs, it was permissible to make friends with children in Tay Avenue: even Protestants[xvii]. I have never been good at making friends but, outwith school, any friendship had to derive from that pool of talent. Brain and Raymond, my brothers, were very successful at this. Their concept of play evolved, appropriately, over time, from kick-the-can and hide-and-seek, tig and Cowboys and Indians – best-man-falls – to football and wenching. I got stuck at the Cowboys & Indians/Best Man Falls stage – violent and pathetic fantasies: so I had few friends.
There were seasonal truces between avenues, however.
Within the bounds of the scheme, children, as a community, needed somewhere to build bonfires every November, play football against one another or, recklessly, try our hands at golf.
Sledging (illicitly) down the Elderslie fairway was obviously on neutral ground: it wasn’t ‘our’ turf anyway. Snowball fights benefitted from inter-avenue rivalry. And stravaiging at Halloween, in little clumps of cowboys, fairies, pirates and cereal packets, was tolerated: We all realised that a territorial approach would limit our access to apples, sweets and monkey nuts.
Bonfire nights and begging for pennies (for the Guy) to buy fireworks, (over the counter at Robertsons paper-shop, no questions asked) were territorial: though raiding other territories was practiced to filch wood and other combustibles from dunnies or rival bonfires. Children protected their avenue’s bonfire on a rota basis, well into the night. I recall clambering over fences in the back-greens of Morar Drive stealing wood – a ridiculous distance to raid across. Someone, not me, must have known the wood was there for the taking: a cousin’s place perhaps?
Bonfire nights, themselves, were communal and chaotic, not least due to the random targeting of squibs. Huge pyres consumed an effigy of Guido Fox on every Drive’s or Avenue’s nearest public green. Potatoes were roasted in the embers. Sparklers drew retinal patterns on the darkness. Roman candles, jumping jacks and Catherine wheels whizzed and spluttered light and we unleashed an indiscriminate bombardment on ourselves, squibs set in milk bottles fired over roofs and hither and yon into the night sky. Light the blue touch paper and stand well back. Hope it wouldn’t fizzle out and give you a showing up. My father being on constant night-shift, we stepped up to our arsonous responsibilities at a relatively young age. My mother stayed in the flat with the quivering dog.[xviii]
And bangers: bangers up closes, bangers under cars, bangers prodded into the holes in the uprights of the chain link fence so they fired off into the crowd. Mad malicious mayhem.
In the morning after, the smell of smoke. The damp cardboard shells of spent fireworks in the mud and a renewal – for it was a renewal – of the big black smudge of cinder and ash in the middle of the green, a scorch mark that would persist through to the next Autumn. The distance from the fire site to the nearest tenement was typically fifty feet.
As well as communal times there were also common spaces. The Dump, a steep slope down to the Elderslie fence, where residents fly-tipped non-domestic trash, was reasonably neutral as a small child and, when older, the spaces between the three sets of lock-up garages were OK.
My own first kiss apart, the lock-ups tended to be teenage spaces. Catherine Mary Renee Dailly and I were six when she insisted on that kiss. She lived nearby on Spey Avenue. She had already announced her intention to marry me. So that was OK.
To the North of the scheme, the Canyon was also neutral once you had, furtively, passed the end of Lexwell Drive, remembering to keep a respectful distance. We did, once, stray too near and had a tense encounter with a couple of boys from Lexwell who were lurking among the dried willowherb stalks. We were all of an age and of similar numbers but the balance of power was tipped by the fact that the Lexwell boys had a hatchet. And they knew they had a hatchet.
Just another stand-off, like millions of stand-offs since the beginnings of human society. Memorable. Interesting. Instructive.[xix]
Yet for all these internal territorial constraints, Foxbar stood on the very edge of the town-limits and abutted directly onto farmland and the golf course.
As the children of Foxbar’s first tenants grew, the fence became less and less of a deterrent. Footballs, from our prohibited games, strayed across the fence and had to be retrieved. Small children – the smaller the better – learned to squeeze gingerly between the first and second strand of barbed wire and climb down into the brambles on the other side. Older children learned to brace a foot on the top-strand and leap, but getting back was trickier because of the overhang. Eventually, we discovered bolt cutters, filched, at least temporarily, from someone’s dunny and put to good use cutting portals in the chain link.
Once installed, these gateways made the regular task of retrieving balls much easier whilst freeing the way for mass escapes, across the seventh fairway and into the Newton Woods where William Wallace had reputedly hidden up a tree from Edward Longshanks goons (again).
The Rivers, where I lived until I was 20, is gone now.
By 1979, the sixties generation and its housing stock were aging and the social aspirations of the schemes had proven vacuous. At the end of the 1970s, Paisley’s industrial base collapsed.
There was no industry in Foxbar – everyone had to travel somewhere to work – but in 1979, 900 lost their jobs at Prestcold in Hillington. During December of 1980 alone, Paisley lost 1,500 jobs at CPC[xx], Ciba-Geigy and the Mills. In May of 1981, the car-plant at Linwood closed. 7000 more men and women on the dole, many, especially in Linwood and the Mills, residents of Foxbar. The scheme, and the town itself, were economically gutted.
In the late 1970s, Labour party regarded schemes like Foxbar as a safe wards and constituencies, even in the face of social and economic unravelling. This allowed the SNP to create a foothold in the scheme, challenging Labour for not acting in the interests of the people. There was in-fighting and scandal in the local Labour party and a suspicion of corrupt dealings at council level.
In the absence of a legitimate economic base, a grey and a black economy developed. Although the epicentre of the Paisley drug business centred around Ferguslie Park[xxi], the drug business was competitive and schemes like Foxbar were ideal ground for ‘farming’ prescription drugs such as Temazepam for sale on the black market. Tenants sought and were prescribed drugs such as Temazepam which were sold on in closes and so into a wider market. By 1995 it was estimated that there were around 10,000 folk with problematic substance use[xxii] in Glasgow, of whom two-thirds were believed to be addicted to Temazepam AKA Jellies[xxiii].
In Paisley, markets were enforced with violence and assassinations. Turf-wars broke out. My youngest brother was almost shot in a case of mistaken identity. Meanwhile, random acts of arson and vandalism burned out many of the increasingly vacant and boarded up tenement flats. The Rivers, unlike the rest of the scheme, became a site of intense multiple deprivation and was described as the ‘Beirut of Europe’ in the mainstream press.
The sitting Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher sent Lord James Douglas Hamilton on a walk-about in 1991, surrounded by goons and trailed by local residents, many pushing prams, demanding action.
The action was the demolition of most of the Rivers scheme in the early 90s.
I left Foxbar in 1979, slamming the door behind me. It wasn’t the scheme but my family circumstances that provoked me to leave and I still dream (in my chronic, labyrinthine nightmares) of moving back to that precise point, inhabiting, in their current incarnation, a new apartment complex built of the site.
My youngest brother, Raymond, moved out in 1985 at the same time as Mary left to follow John to Arran.
The tenements were bulldozed. Some areas were redeveloped by private developers – perhaps that had been the plan all along – but not the core of the scheme, around Tay Avenue, where the lots remain wasteland to this day. My child-o-sphere obliterated. Nothing to see here.
The Rivers c 1960 vs the Present
In 2010, I attended the funeral of an aunt in Paisley and, swept up by the mood of funerals and the fact I had already driven so far, I made the journey back to the scheme. Tay Avenue, and the tenement I grew up in, are no longer there. Forth Avenue has been redeveloped into neat, if densely packed, owner-occupier semi-detached housing.
The fence is still there and the pylons. And the golf-course. If anything, the houses are pressed even closer to the fence – maximising the return on the asset, land. The golf course and the Newton Woods still out there in the darkness.
I stood in the smirr, listening to the buzz of the powerlines. Maybe I was too close to the lad’s white van. Either-way, one of the residents near the cul-de-sac – neighbourhood watching – came out onto the street.
“What you doing here?” he asked.
I was dressed for a funeral. White shirt, black tie, cashmere coat.
“I used to live here,” I said. “My tenement was just…there,” I said, pointing beyond his rooftop.
“Aye,” he said. “Of course. OK.”
[i] In Scotland, estates are places rich folk slaughter defenceless animals having cleared the previous inhabitants.
[ii] Scheming: A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919-1956
[iii] It was one of a number of post-war housing developments – Glenburn, Ferguslie Park, Hunterhill – built on the periphery of the town to address over-crowding and slum conditions in the town.
[iv] Brediland Road. and Morar Drive
[v] At Spey Avenue, Amochrie Road and Foxbar Road including one sub-post office (Amochrie).
[vi] St. Paul’s (Roman Catholic), Brediland and Amochrie
[vii] St. Paul’s – Roman Catholic – and St. Columba’s – Church of Scotland
[viii] The fence ran from the top of the hill on Spey Avenue, where the footpaths of Leven Way met the road, down and down the hill, past Forth & Tay Avenues, Annan and Lexwell Drives and beyond, closing off access to the golf course as far as the Railway Bridge at the foot of the Chain Road.
[ix] My Aunt May insisted, later in life, that I was weaned too soon – or more specifically ‘abandoned to my own devices’ – when Brian was born. By four years old, I was wary of ‘new arrivals’.
[x] My first real – and vivid – memory was of the morning my second brother, Charles, was born. Unlike Brian’s and my own deliveries, it was a home-birth with my maternal grandmother in attendance. Gran Elliott woke Brian and I and ushered us up the lobby of the flat early in the morning. My father was already back from work and lurking. My grandmother encouraged us towards the bedroom door at the far end of the lobby. The door opened and there was Mary, sitting up in bed, a newborn in her arms.
I clearly recall the thought: “This is not a good idea.”
I took Brian by the hand and we bolted.
[xi] It was understood to be impossible to make friends with any child living in Forth Avenue. My mother used to do home perms for some women on our end of the Avenue, women she knew from the mill. But I was probably in my teens before I felt secure enough to take that as a direct route home from the Spey Avenue bus-stop.
[xii] Their equivalents in Amochrie were named after characters in the novels of Walter Scott – Talisman, Oliphant, Ivanhoe, Heriot.
[xiii] Because Number 7 stood alone, tenants had more garden space than similar tenements that stood in rows in the adjacent avenues.
[xiv] Coming from a generation who still recalled the council factor could evict tenants for poor housekeeping or low standards of maintyenace.
[xv] Shinning up the lamp post was arduous and precarious, uncontrolled descent was painfully abrasive especially in shorts.
[xvi] All of them would move out and away by about 1966.
[xvii] In fact, my brother, Brian, eventually married one.
[xviii] I did, once, get struck by a burning squib on re-entry. The fragment burned through my sweater and shirt and into my neck.
[xix] I think I started carrying a knife about age twelve. I continued to do so into my fifties.
[xx] Brown & Poulsons
[xxi] And the security company that Stewart Boyd had set up allegedly with the support of senior Labour figures.
[xxii] Presumably excluding alcohol
[xxiii] Temazepam is a benzodiazepine which was commonly prescribed as sleeping pills in the late 80s. It is rapidly absorbed and its hypnotic effects are, consequently, fast-acting. Because temazepam was dispensed in gel-capsules, the ‘jelly’ was extracted and self-injected, often in combination with heroin. Temezapam on its own is highly addictive, even more so in combination with other drugs, and it quickly became the most widely abused prescription drug and the cause of many drug deaths in the early 90s.