The other good thing about the Gorbals at the time of Charlie’s birth and early childhood was that it was definitely multi-racial and multi-ethnic with people of Irish, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, Italian and Jewish extraction all living there in reasonable social harmony. The Clyde with all its jobs had meant that Glasgow, even as early as the 18th century had been a cosmopolitan city. It was to Scotland’s credit that there has never been documented any large scale or organised persecution of its Jewish minority – and that could not be said of very many European countries – but of course the two historical events that caused the massive population invasions of Glasgow were the Highland Clearances of the 1820s and the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.
The Potato Famine in Ireland was a catastrophe of unimaginable magnitude and severity. And yet, although the actual disease of the potatoes could not have been foreseen or forestalled, its consequences could have been greatly lessened if prompt and effective action had been taken by the two bodies to whom the Irish would have reasonably looked to for succour, coincidentally the two richest organisations on earth at the time, the British Empire and the Roman Catholic Church.
Little if anything was forthcoming from the Vatican, and the Great Britain (of which Ireland was a part since the Act of Union in 1801) saw only a belated and half-hearted effort by Prime Minister Robert Peel (a man with some sort of conscience) who repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 but was thrown out of office by his own party for so doing!
As large areas of west Ireland, particularly Donegal, starved, the Irish had little recourse other than emigration. Some tried the long and dangerous crossing of the Atlantic, a few even went further to Australia, (some, like the fictitious Michael in The Fields of Athenry were forced to go there!) but many came to Liverpool, London and Glasgow. There was usually a job for them in Scotland – ill-paid, filthy, difficult jobs in Scotland’s burgeoning Industrial Revolution for which they had been ill-prepared by their agricultural background in Ireland – but it was at least a job, and provided some kind or relief from starvation. Many of them found a home of sorts in the Gorbals.
Their religion, that of the Roman Catholic Church, set them apart of course to a certain extent but there were some benefits of living in Scotland and Glasgow. Scotland had always been strong on education and children usually went to some kind of school even before 1872 when the Education Act made it compulsory, and thus illiteracy was gradually addressed.
And of course from 1888, they had their own football time to provide a rallying point for the community and to give them something to cheer about. Frequently they needed it, for as late as 1900 we find an outbreak of medieval plague in the Gorbals! In the same year, large numbers of young men would try to enlist for service in the Boer War, but were rejected simply because they were not fit enough or well enough fed! Such was the malnutrition and lack of proper nourishment in many areas of Glasgow.
Charlie grew up in Salisbury Street with loads of people of Irish descent around him. The Second World War was obviously a difficult time for anyone, with an added dimension for the Irish, who had only recently, 20 years ago and as a by-product of another war, gained some sort of independence in the Irish Free State which defied Great Britain in 1939 and announced its neutrality.
It is to the credit of De Valera that he managed to do that without provoking a violent reaction from either the Allies or the Axis powers. In particular, he might have been tempted to follow the old adage of “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” and to make an ill-advised attempt to seize the Six Counties while Britain was otherwise engaged, but he resisted that as well. Indeed, on two occasions, De Valera was, if we may believe some historians and biographers, offered the Six Counties by Churchill in return for full participation in the Second World War.
The second such offer was accompanied by the emotive phrase “a nation once again” and was made in the wake of the entry of the USA into the war in December 1941, something that would have struck a personal chord with De Valera, for he himself had been born in the USA. (Indeed some think that he owed his reprieve from execution in 1916 to this very fact.) But De Valera would not take the bait, and continued to stay neutral during what was known in Ireland as “the emergency”.
For the Irish community in Glasgow and indeed throughout the Irish diaspora, it was of course very tempting to “enjoy” the discomfiture of Great Britain, so often the tyrants and bullies in Ireland. On the other hand, there could be little doubt that in comparison with the odious Adolf Hitler and his grizzly henchmen, Winston Churchill and the British Empire were undeniably the lesser of the two evils. Support for the British war effort may have been grudging in the Glasgow Irish community, but it was real. I
n Dublin, de Valera himself had come to the same conclusion that he wanted the Allies to win, but he did not announce it publicly until the war was virtually over. Even then he tried to sign a Book of Condolences at the death of Adolf Hitler! Indeed, historians are often surprised at the lack of any opposition to the Second World War in Glasgow – something that was in stark contrast to the Great War where there had been a Rent Strike, many labour problems on the Clyde (“Red Clydeside” as it was called) involving men like John McLean, Jimmy Maxton and Manny Shinwell, l and of course a major disturbance in George Square in January 1919. The Second World War contained very little of this, possibly for two main reasons – one was that the Labour Party happily in 1940 joined Churchill’s coalition government, and the other was that everyone realised that the Nazis were irreconcilably evil and simply had to be removed from the face of the earth, no matter what the cost would be.
Glaswegians, of course, are famously cheerful and supportive people. They helped each other get through it all. And in addition, the horrors of war with its rationing, the nightly fear of aerial bombing (although Glasgow itself escaped virtually unscathed) and the depressing news of casualties were alleviated to a certain extent by the three traditional Glasgow forms of entertainment – dancing, cinema and football.
Charlie recalls that even from an early age he played football in the streets and the backyards of the Gorbals. Every boy loved football. It had the great advantage of not being too difficult to organise as long as one had a ball. Goalposts, pitch markings, referees were all superfluous luxuries which one might graduate to at a later stage, and even injuries were things to be despised. Anyone who didn’t want to play because of a “sore leg” or some weak excuse like that would be rightly mocked and scoffed at. Scottish football never has been a place for softies and certainly was not in Glasgow in the 1940s.
