This was ‘us’ – Protestant and Catholic, Scots and Irish, council tenants and wage slaves – aa Jock Tamson’s bairns. Fractious, jealous and belonging. Though we wouldn’t have framed it in quite those terms at the time, we all knew we had no time for was ‘the bourgeoisie’ or, as my mother called them, ‘folk that think they are better than us’.
Apart from doctors on house-calls, ‘folk that thought they were better than us’ had no reason to set foot on the scheme – and, generally, they didn’t. Except for two rash sub-cultures who occasionally came too close.
The first were members of Elderslie Golf Club.
The 9th tee was located just across the fence from the lock-ups. From the 9th, golfers would occasionally slice a golf-ball over the chain-link fence and through the front windows of our flat, showering everyone inside with broken glass.
Elderslie was a private, members-only course. [i]
Members, and their guests, progressed in a polite, stately manner, in two or four-balls typically, from green to tee to green, uphill behind the Newton Woods then downhill ‘under the guns’ of the Rivers Estate. The stretch from the ninth to the tenth was particularly exposed.
My father played golf – a lot – and occasionally as a guest of the Elderslie green keeper, Bob Scott. But my father’s infrequent presence did not prevent the regular harrying of Elderslie golfers as they ran the gauntlet between the 9th and the 10th.
Once the chain-link fence had been breached – and it had to be again and again – local weans would secret themselves in the long grass on the scheme-side of the fairway. When the last ball of a four-ball had cracked off of the tee and down the fairway, kids would race down across the fairway, spotting and scooping up bright, white, shiny Uniroyals, Penfolds and Dunlop 65s and carrying on, across the burn, into the bracken on the edge of Newton Woods.
Encumbered by sets of clubs and golf-shoes, the golfers could not pursue. Could only play a new ball from the fairway close to where they (mutually) agreed a ball had dropped.
And repeat.
The resulting hoards were sold around the doors of the scheme to men who played on municipal courses. My father, despite his friendship with Bob, was often tempted as a customer. Contraband golf balls sat in the heavy crystal ashtray at the centre of our glass coffee-table.. Sometime the balls were reset, sometime they were a filial gesture.
If harassing golfers was a mischievous element of the scheme’s grey economy, the inhabitants attitude to the Elderslie Hunt was considerably less jocular.
On occasion, the hunt, in full regalia, pursued a fox down Spey Avenue from land to the North and West of the golf course. Caught up in the thrill of the chase – or the fug of entitlement – the hunters and their mutts seemed not to sense that the boundary of the scheme represented sanctuary for the fox.
After coursing across open fields, their horses now clattered down tarmac roads onto pavements, oblivious to traffic regulation. On a few occasions, they strayed onto the cinder apron, between the burnt out cars, on the ground between our tenement and the lock-up.
Those of us on the ground cheered the fox on, ran interference on the hounds. When a young woman’s horse reared and she fell backwards into a deep puddle on the cinder, no one came forward to help her up.
I recall watching, from our kitchen window, as a grown man, in pinks, white trousers and jackboots, drove his perplexed horse at the many interlocking fences of our back-greens. The quadrangle behind the tenements was subdivided into nine lots with three-wire fence-lines, none much more that forty-feet apart. Whilst the fox scooted off in the direction of Don Drive, the doomed rider wallowed in a maze of fence lines, washing lines and damp laundry. The horse was either too confused or too exhausted to escape. No one helped the rider out, though I felt pity for the horse. Despite being council tenants, these were our backdoors, hung with our washing lines and laundry. One rider struck my brother, Raymond, with a crop. ‘They’ had no right of trespass. I feel the anger and outrage even now. For the fox. For us.
The other unwelcome intruders were the police. They cruised the scheme in panda-cars and Marias, hassling us as we climbed the hawthorn tree by the lock-up, wanting to know where we were from or what we were doing in our own neighbourhood. None of them got out of their cars. No one had any illusions that a beating lay inside the back doors of their Marias. Although, unlike neighbouring Feegie, Foxbar never became a no-go zone for the police, there was never any feeling that they were on ‘our side’.
*
I was among the last in my generation streamed at 12 (though I was still only 11[ii]) between Senior[iii] and Junior Secondaries based on the results of IQ tests[iv].
Those selected for the Senior Secondary were assessed as being among the ‘top-quartile’ – based on intellectual ability – and destined for academic and professional careers. Those not selected were destined for a ‘vocational’ education in some useful trade. No one ever asked me what I’d prefer. I probably wouldn’t have understood the question.
The IQ test itself (I was 9) was an unexplained mystery to me. It happened in a ground floor class-room. I sat at the desk and looked at this weird exam that had no apparent link to facts or the 4Rs. The paper presented me with a set of stupid puzzles…which were only puzzles! I mean, why were they asking these questions?! I sat till the end, despondent. I was sure I had ‘failed’. Apparently I hadn’t.
St. Mirin’s Academy was a Catholic Senior Secondary, pressed hard up against the Burgh boundary with Renfrew and miles away from Foxbar on the other side of Paisley. Those of us with the requisite academic potential (and therefore potential future influence) were apparently worth the investment in the cost of school buses.
It was said, later, that the function of schools like St. Mirin’s was to ensure that, with Catholics well ensconced in medicine and the law in Inverclyde, a woman couldn’t get an abortion in Glasgow.
To reinforce patriarchal norms (and exacerbate misogyny), boys and girls who had been educated together up until this age, were segregated.
‘Clever’ girls were sent to St. Margaret’s Convent. ‘Clever’ boys to St. Mirin’s.
The two schools faced off against each other across a dual carriageway. Every morning, at 8 a.m. a bus came to the scheme for the boys and a bus came for the girls. Every day, at 4 pm, a bus came for the girls and a bus came for the boys. We stood at separate bus-stops on the St. Margaret’s side of the road, yards apart, with the occasional nun policing the space to ensure no mixing.
On the positive side, boys progressing to secondary were allowed to wear long trousers whereas the girls were still restricted to skirts.
So: long trousers, blazer, national health spectacles, greasy hair, a long bus-ride away from the scheme, my circle of male friends & enemies culled by 75% and none of my new friends living close to my home – my female allies completely eliminated. First day of a whole new nightmare.
The separation of classes by sex & putative intelligence disrupted friendships and support networks. My brothers, two of whom were already at St. Paul’s were sent to St. Aeldred’s due to the shift in the rules. For four years, I was on my own in the chaos of the school-bus and the raucous desert of the school yard.
Streaming into classes, initially alphabetically, further separated us. There were six classes in my year for a cohort of around two hundred – a process of instrumental deracination and isolation even before further segregation and restreaming based on academic ‘promise’ happened at the end of second year.
And then there were the teachers.
There were old teachers and young teachers. In the beginning, most wore gowns and carried Loch Gelly tawses in their sleeves. They were, with few exceptions, white males. (The exceptions were white females.)
The oldest teachers, the Boss and Wee Jazza, who seemed decrepit, appeared separated from the purpose of the school except in the matter of enforcing discipline and exhorting us to ‘self-respect’ – which was usually an admonition about recent anti-social behaviour.
The youngest teachers were barely older than the oldest pupils, fresh from teacher training college, some returning to the school at which they had been taught. There were a group of brothers – the Connollys, who taught Sciences – and Paddy Maguire (whose first name was actually Brendan) who taught Latin. Young men, still finding their way in work and in life, attempting to teach us Latin, Geography, Physics.
In between, there were the middle-aged men, modestly ambitious to improve their incomes by inching up the hierarchy as Assistant Principals, Principals. Timid often bespectacled, men in dark suits who taught (or not) English, Classics, Mathematics, French.
Finally, there were the men on the make: Charlie Fagan and Johnny Clews, deputy heads : demented, angry men from a war-time generation, agitated, like dogs chasing their own tails, always ready with sarcasm followed by blows.
“Me no speak-um Cherokee English!” Fagan would shriek in response to any mumbled utterance or broad Scots before smacking one of us over the head with the loaded sleeve of his gown.
*
By 1970, enthusiasm for Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ was cooling.
In Linwood, the Fordist realities of production line working clashed with the craft-based culture of the workforce, especially the men drafted from the ship-yards where a culture of independence and shopfloor negotiation was long established.
The inter-dependence of the government-subsidised Rootes’ supply chain meant that any stoppage in any single element of the workflow quickly put a stop to production overall. This feature was exacerbated by Rootes’ irrational decision to separate assembly (in Linwood) from engine manufacture (in Coventry), leaving the enterprise susceptible to rail industry disputes as well as internal conflicts of interest.
A short ‘wild-cat’ strike, a well-established tactic in ship-yard negotiation, had an immediate ripple effect on the thousands of fellow workers both in Linwood – where the workforce had risen to 8000 women and men – and Coventry. And, of course, on the proprietor’s bottom line.
Eventually, unable to manage their relations with their workforce, this game had become too rich for Rootes: the factories were bought by Chrysler in 1967[v].
Chrysler’s UK management immediately outdid Rootes in alienating their Linwood employees. Whereas local negotiation had, up to date, been based on short-sharp local wild-cat stoppage of around four-hours (half a shift), under the Chrysler management regime workers stayed out for a month over a disputed productivity plan[vi].
Although the press promoted the car industry as a symbol of Scottish industrial regeneration, the Linwood plant was losing £2.5m a year. Sales were sluggish and the supporting investment promised by the US manufacturer in the Chrysler take-over never materialised[vii].
Despite this, in October 1969, assembly of all Rootes medium range cars was transferred to Linwood.
John was a maintenance plumber and, therefore, EEPTU[viii]. He was not a production line worker and, though necessarily a Union member, not an activist. His maintenance role did buffer the family (a bit) from disruption on the production line, since rust never sleeps and down-time might present occasions for opportunity maintenance[ix].
As a child, gloom turned to dread and would eventually become bouts of genuine hunger as the ‘70s progressed. The regular lay-offs, many of which may have been orchestrated between Chrysler management and amenable or gullible shop-stewards[x], turned ‘affluent working class’ to ‘living beyond their means’: household income was as precarious as the shipyards had been before their decline[xi].
The liberalisation measures of the Wilson governments of the 1960s were invisible from my perspective of a boy in a Paisley housing scheme. Foxbar was, so far as I can recall, a ‘lily-white’ scheme. I had no conception what homosexuality ‘meant’ (though I knew ‘Poof’ was a term of abuse). The only censorship I recall was Mary switching off a Panorama programme about abortion (“Ye shouldnae be watching that!”). Divorce was something that happened in America.[xii]
I was aware, however, of the betrayal of ‘socialist principles’ represented by ‘In Place of Strife’. The class war was, self-evidently, not over, and certainly not won, and the view from the scheme (I felt) was that strife was how ‘we’ negotiated with Capital.
In the evenings, Mary fretted about income and continuity (and her need to go to Arran in the summer). In the morning, John brought home news of some new act of oppression or stimulated grievance that one shop or another was resisting by withholding their labour. For a boy, even at that age, resistance seemed more heroic than compromise and far more heroic than capitulation: at the very least, squeeze a few more shekels out of them as the price of capitulation.
I decoded Labour’s technocratic programme to enhance Britain’s ‘productivity’ and ‘long-term economic prospects’ as ‘you lot need to work harder and give us less lip’. In hindsight, I suspect that analysis was correct. Labour had forgotten what it was ‘for’. That amnesia persists. [xiii]
It is an interesting foretaste of future psychology that it was definitely Barbara Castle (not Harold Wilson) who I blamed for that betrayal.
In my very early teens I loathed the Minister for Employment and Productivity, regarding her as the origin of all of my and my family’s woes. It was she who escalated the cheerful blood sport of wild-cat strikes (where, despite the bother, the wheels stayed on) to the grinding attrition of walk-outs, lock-outs, power-cuts and hunger. Despite the roles, now partially understood, of Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Joe Gormley, Roy Jenkins and Jack Jones (to name but a few) – and despite the fact the it was Edward Heath’s Tory Government that actually passed and implemented the Industrial Relations Act(1971) – Barbara got the blame.
Psychodrama or what?!
*
Mary went back to work after Raymond was born. She worked as a floor-walker in Woolworths on the High Street.[xiv] Some years she worked at the Ferguslie Mill (which she loathed) and occasional took on cleaning jobs. By the time Raymond was at school (1972), we were fully-fledged latch-key children.
Mary’s elder sister, Chrissie, once told me “Your mother couldn’t see green cheese but she wanted it.” This was after Mary death yet still tinged with a degree of bitterness. Mary’s chronic dissatisfaction tainted the upstairs flat in Tay Avenue like a bad smell. I blamed her for that pervasive stench.
But she was mother to four boys in a time before fridges, washing machines or dishwashers. John worked constant night shift. Mary increasingly worked dayshifts. Although, as I grew older, I would be ordered to go to the shops or take in the washing (and perforce learned to cook, i.e. heat up, food for my brothers, the notion of my brothers or my father embarking on any significant domestic chores was inconceivable.
Men cut the grass and papered the house (albeit reluctantly). My father would, occasionally, tidy up after we had left for school. John’s culinary repertoire extended to bacon rolls and no further.
Laundry, food shopping, making beds, hoovering, cleaning the bath, paying the insurance man (or the bills generally): all women’s work which it felt demeaning to a boy if asked (or told).
Worst of all, for Mary, was the close. Mary had a dust allergy. Every few weeks it was our turn to ‘do the close’, (i.e. her’s). The passageways and stairs had to be swept – raising clouds of cement dust and wind-blow detritus – then mopped. The dust raised closed her windpipe, she retched and wraxed for breath despite the lone-ranger bandana covering her nose and mouth as she swept the close. She retched and wraxed all evening and into the next day. But the bobbin came back around with relentless frequency.
Laundry was probably the first domestic workflow to grind inexorably to a halt.
The Tay Avenue flats had been furnished with twin Belfast sinks with lugs between them on which the wringer could be fixed. The galley kitchenette had no space for anything like a washing machine (though it did have a pulley that hung above where we stored the unused drop leaf table). By the time we moved up to top-floor left ‘we’ had acquired a single tub washing machine second hand. The machine had to be filled with hot water and its agitator would then stir the laundry around. The unit had no spinner so the soaking roasting clothes, sheets and towels had to be manually dragged into the first sink then laboriously fed through the ringer to end up merely damp in the second sink. I did serve in the evenings turning the handle of the wringer as Mary cautiously fed the thick wet cloots between the double rubber rollers. Sometimes her fingers were drawn into the gap with the washing which crushed and broke them and I had to reverse the turn of the handle to release her.
Then the wet washing was hung out on the line in the backdoor – territorial agreements defined wash days and drying allowances. In winter, when it was already dark by the time I came home from school, the wet washing had frozen corrugated hard. Mary or I unpinned with frozen fingers and brought the frosted laundry inside to thaw until we could hang what we could on the pulley or the clothes horses.
If and when it dried, the clothes went into the ironing pile: the world (and certainly the schools) still expected ironing in those days – who had the space to drip-dry? Of course, the ironing goes first, the pile, just inside the door of the kitchenette grew decades high and never cleared.
The respiration of two adults and 4 growing boys, the boil wash and the near constant requirement to dry clothes in the flat quickly proved why ‘the Steamie’ had been a good idea in previous decades. Our self-contained, self-reliant modern lifestyle was damp. Black moulds oozed for the bedroom wallpaper and thick ropes of ice formed on the inside of windows. In winter, those icicle-scapes didn’t melt for weeks or months on end, fusing the windows shut, sealing in the breath and steam to cool and thicken the ice still further. Only the single heated living room (upgraded to a five-bar gas fire) and the kitchenette were warm enough to escape this misery.
We settled into a dreadful pattern in those years. Mary out to work before John came home. My brothers heading to school within minutes of John returning.
When he wasn’t on strike or laid off, John was already sleeping when we arrived home at the other end of the school day. As the eldest, I knew to try to keep my brothers quiet until Mary got back from work.
“Shh, Dad’s sleeping.”
He slept in the bedroom just off the lobby, to the front of the flat, always dark and full of guff – the bed he and Mary shared – but never, often, at the same time.[xv]
It must have been a thick, grudged sleep. I tried to keep the noise down, supress our exuberance, turn down the television, avoid fighting until it was eight o’clock again and time to get him up for work.
When I failed – or my guard slipped and I joined in the game – he roused himself, mad with frustration. It was always me who got thrashed, sometimes with the thick leather strap we used to bind-up the trunk when we went on holiday. I remember cringing against that same close-door I had chapped on for Mr. Thomson years earlier. I remember the blows beating down.
Later, after I had fed my siblings Heinz tomato soup and Ambrosia creamed rice or, occasionally, corned beef hash (with Smash) and Instant Whip, Mary came home, skulked in the kitchen then made John’s piece and cooked John’s dinner.
Mary’s cooking, when she cooked, involved either prolonged boiling or open-hearth frying over gas. Her response to the occasional chip-pan fire was to launch the burning pot out of the top-floor window into the back-green. She did sustain burns to her arms but, luckily, no one was hanging out their washing on any of these occasions.
And then, at 8 o’clock, the dreaded, “Tell your father it’s time for him to get up for work.”
There was no time for exercise (or play): so many of those domestic demands could only be satisfied, if they were satisfied, in the weekend and besides, unless you crossed ‘the fence’ where was there to go?
The only time I had ever saw Mary willingly take a walk in Foxbar was when she abandoned us. It happened a few times in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. Mary packed her bags as John was sleeping off a ‘night-shift’. She picked me out to say she was away.
“Tell yer faither when he gets up.”
Three times she pulled that stunt.
My brothers always got upset. She would walk her suitcase round a block or two and then slink back. It became a pattern. Another tick. Like that thing she did with her dentures. Maybe easing something in her. That was her for walking. Maybe she got as far as the bus-stop once. I hope she did. But she always turned around.
On the third occasion I grew tired of the farce. My two youngest siblings were desperately distraught, not having cottoned on to the futility of it all. My favourite, febrile sibling – Charles – was prone to tantrums: he screamed and screamed at the end of the lobby. John didn’t stir. Desperate to silence Charles – and not have to pass on Mary’s message – I choked my brother till he fell silent. Choked him till he went limp and fell to the floor. I would have killed him if I had to.
Notes:
[i] Unlike Corporation Courses such as Barshaw
[ii] They moved me on to Senior Secondary directly from room 11.
[iii] AKA Grammar Schools.
[iv] During the 1960s, the last vestiges of post-war socialist idealism were pushing for an end to selective education – based on intelligence or attainment or ‘class’. But ‘comprehensive’ education had not yet embedded itself in Renfrewshire and anyway, practices of streaming continued in the soon-to-be established senior(academic) & junior (vocational) secondaries.
[v] Again with substantial Government subsidies and guarantees.
[vi] ‘The rights and wrongs of the present dispute have become almost impenetrable,’ an editorial acknowledged. ‘But the details are less important than the persisting lack of responsibility shown by Rootes workers towards their industry, which in Scotland is a frail plant. If the growing spirit of nationalism is to have a positive content and lead to political self-government, it must include a realisation that industrial democracy (and profitability) are as important as a parliament in Edinburgh. Opposition for the sake of disruption, a refusal to attend a meeting because it involves crossing a road in the rain – that kind of destructive obtuseness widely shown would put Scotland beyond redemption by its own parliament or anything else.’
[vii] We only ever read the Daily Record and the Sunday Express so our window on the world was limited.
[viii] Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union
[ix] But this would, in some instances, involve crossing picket lines which was, of course, beneath a man’s dignity.
[x] It was cheaper for Chrysler if men walked out than had to be laid off due to supply/demand imbalances.
[xi] This is also the period of UCS
[xii] Equally, I was unaware of the Wilson government’s role in arming the Nigerian State against the Biafrans or keeping British troops (mostly) out of Vietnam.
[xiii] When Castle did come to look at the reform of industrial relations, there were two broad models available to her. The first, Fair Deal at Work drew heavily from the submission to Donovan by the Inns of Court Conservative and Unionist Society, proposals that began from the premise that a clear legal framework was an essential prerequisite for effective industrial relations. The detailed proposals focused on two main issues, the rising number of short unofficial strikes, and strikes, both official and unofficial, that were considered to be against the national interest. [Victims of our history”, the Labour Party and In Place of Strife, 1968 ]
1969: Tyler, Richard John]
[xiv] She was signed-on most autumns and quit before when the schools broke up each summer
[xv] Once, slightly older, when I was bullying him out of bed, a used condom emerged from under the pillow. I remember being amazed and surprised.