''If, in the highlands the people were trying to exist upon a diet of boiled grass and nettles, the case was even worse in the City wynds. Within a circle of 12 miles of Glasgow there were 10,000 paupers receiving, on an average, not more than 1/6' per week.''- Part 1 tomorrow

The child serfs in the West of Scotland bleachfields were being worked from eleven to eighteen hours daily, in stoves heated from eighty to one hundred degrees; at Pollockshaws, children were occasionally worked two and three days and nights consecutively.

The whig Act of 1851 regulating magisterial punishment of young children allowed a sentence of thirty six lashes.

The census returns for 1861 showed that one-third of the population of Scotland lived in single-roomed houses and 7,964 of these houses had no windows.

In port Glasgow, a stable had been converted into a dwelling-house and during the whole summer, that stable contained 83 persons, besides a horse.

In Glasgow 50% of children died under five years of age.

In the first 40 years of the 19th century some 350,000 strangers were suddenly huddled on the banks of the Clyde, where they suffered periodical decimation by typhus

The Rev. Dr Lee testified that he had never seen such misery as in his parish, where the people were often without furniture, without everything, two married couples often sharing one room. In a single day he had visited seven homes in which there was not a bed, in some, not

even a heap of straw. Old people of 80 yrs slept on the board floor, nearly all slept in their day clothes.

In the spring circuit court in Glasgow, 1864, Hugh Gray, for stealing a woollen skin, gets 8 yrs penal servitude. Mary Love, for stealing three yards of drugget (a coarse woven fabric used to make floor coverings) from a hedge, gets 6 yrs. A man, Dogherty, by name, gets 3 yrs

for stealing a cloth cap from a shop door-way. Jane Campbell steals fourpence-ha'penny in copper and gets 15 months but Alexander Still, for killing a man with a poker, gets six months prison time.
.
Property was sacred, not life.

part 2 tomorrow

Cobbett said that the agricultural labourer is wholly at the mercy of his master ''the man is a negro slave'', sheer hunger abode with the Scots miner in 1877. Wages were 2/6' to 3 shillings a day for two and three days per week and the Fife and

Clackmannan miners were locked-out altogether for six months rather than submit to a 10% reduction in wages. In 1840 children of 11 yrs worked from 5am to 5pm. A girl, Ellison Jack of Loanhead Colliery, began at the age of 8 to work from 2am til 2pm - '' I go tae bed at 6 tae

be ready fur work next morn. I've hud the strap when ah dinna dae ma biddin'. Ah'm gled when ma task is wrought as it sair fatigues''

The pit bottoms are like common sewers, slush and water with an inclination of one in three and along these common sewers, the women, half naked, crawl on their hands and knees, harnessed like horses, to their bogies of coal. Little boys, aged 4 or 5, sit all day in the darkness

at the trap-doors, cold and shivering, begging for a candle-end for light.

more tomorrow

These quotations are taken from Mr Thomas Johnston's History of the Working Classes in Scotland; a very valuable and extremely unpleasant book. It is, indeed, not so much a book as a literary machine-gun. Every sentence is a bullet aimed at capitalism through the ages;

and being thoroughly authenticated, the bullets find their mark. It is a work that not merely convinces one of the reality of the Class War in the Nineteenth Century, but enlists its readers on the side of the workers with irresistible compulsion.

The person of average intelligence, reading history for his own information and entertainment, is inevitably puzzled when he tries to envisage, in hues of their own perception, the life of the labouring classes during otherwise well-documented periods.

Contemporary standards and current sensibility will incline him to the suspicion that life, for the great majority of people, has rarely been much more than an endurance test.

So gloomy an interpretation, however, would be quite unwarranted, for there is a kind of intrinsic philosophy in man, that fits him to encounter all but the most intemperate of climates and the most hostile environments.

It is, perhaps, a sort of psychological gear-box that enables the trawl- fisherman, the factory-hand, and the millionaire of to-day to meet and survive, with organs of approximately the same specification but circumstances so widely different.

And in the course of a couple of thousand years mankind’s psychological gear-box has certainly included many other speeds than those now fitted: speeds, for instance, that enabled it to deal with famines and the Inquisition, with service in the galleys and the burning

of witches; speeds, beyond question, that gave him many sensations of happiness on ground that would appear impossible to us.

-more later-

(Sources - Sheriff Brown’s Strictures and Remarks .
Hugh Miller. McKenzie’s Highland Clearances.
History of the Working Classes in Scotland
Midnight scenes and social photograph)

1848 Glasgow - legions of unemployed Glaswegians dependend on soup kitchens. Huge crowds gathered on the Green. Harangued by Chartists, part of the multitudemarched on the City's East End gas works to cut off the supply to the Town. Others smashed plate glass windows in

exclusive Buchanan street. Fire-arms were removed from gun-smith shops. In Bridgeton, the gas works contingent were met by the 'enrolled pensioners' A corps of ex-soldiers. The pensioners, some sporting Waterloo medals

, charged with bayonets but couldn't dispersethe mob. The veterans fired volleys at point blank range, into the unemployed. David Carruth, a weaver, was shot dead, several were wounded.

But there were certain periods in history when the psychological gear-box was too severely taxed, when life really did become intolerable, and before all other noise, the sounds of wrath and weeping were significant.

In the Nineteenth Century a new age of slavery came to Britain, and beneath the high-piled pomp and pride of industrial wealth there lived in squalid misery a more numerous multitude than ever before, verminous in the filthy tenements of industry, tortured and mis-shapen

by fantastic toil, and starved by a ravenous and hypocritical tyranny. To Scotland the Industrial Revolution came with singular violence, and its attendant atrocities were aggravated not only by its geographical concentration, but by that headstrong rage

which ever and again appears in Scotland, and by an hereditary sadism that was the product of our two misconceptions: patriotism-as-hatred, and religion-as-hatred.

The poor people of Scotland suffered at the hands of their fellow Scots: that cannot be denied. But both rich and poor were governed by parliaments in Westminster—parliaments predominantly English—and as those parliaments were responsible for the welfare and behaviour

of the whole people, so were they culpable for the misery of the serfs and the crimes of their masters. The obligations of authority are more numerous than its privileges.

1850 Glasgow - A new 'Ragged School' a neat castellated structure, was being built at Rottenrow. It was designed to accommodate hundreds of destitute children, described as '' the Arabs of the City ''.

more later

It may be said that the English parliaments, being so far from Scotland, were ignorant of conditions there. That is not unlikely. And the moral is that authority, to be effective, must have its seat in the country it controls.

But squalor and wretchedness in the towns is only one side of a bad penny. On the other side is the savage picture of the Highland Clearances. The story of this fantastic experiment in hellishness has never been properly told, and we have little chance

of ever reading an adequate history of it. For something like the strong grace of Theocritus would be needed to show the noble freedom and simplicity of the pastoral life the clansmen had led, and all the indignation of Swift could hardly describe the tortured penury

they fell to, raking for shell-fish on a forbidden shore, or packed like felons in plague-ridden ships and sent without hope or provender to a cold and foreign land.

Goya’s pencil could draw the grotesque perversions of their oppressors, and Daumier depict the grinning hypocrisy of the parish ministers who defended the evictions as an act of God.

Pope might rip to pieces the seamy pretensions to benevolence with which brutality was obligingly veneered; and someone like Marston, with an appetite for filth and Elizabethan vituperation, could deal with the factors who so diligently served their absent lords.

But a coalition of Swift and Marston and Theocritus, of Goya and Pope and Daumier, is hardly likely, so figures must serve for the story: figures against a
background of burning cottages, the sorrow of a noble people, and the damnable prosperity of oppression.

1851 An explosion in the Victoria Pit, Nitshill, killed more than 60 miners including a number of young boys.

more later

1855-A young highland servant girl, newly engaged by a family in the Kingston district of Glasgow, at a monthly wage of 10 bob, was summarily dismissed late one night ' without being in possession of a farthing or knowing a friend to whom she could apply for a night's lodging '

In the first half-dozen years of the Nineteenth Century some ten thousand people were driven out of the Western Highlands and Islands. Between 1811 and 1820, fifteen thousand were evicted from Sutherlandshire.

Between 1831 and 1881 half the rural population of Argyllshire thirty-nine thousand eight hundred and ninety-two victims were turned out of their homes. In the same period, MacLeod evicted two thousand of his people from Skye, the Duke of Sutherland continued to depopulate

his many acres, eighteen thousand crofters and their dependants were cleared out of Inverness-shire, the population of Ross-shire diminished by more than three thousand, Lochiel and Clanranald banished hundreds of their clansmen, and the long island of Lewis was lightened of

two thousand four hundred and sixty souls. Elsewhere, on the Borders as well as in the Highlands, uncountable families were driven from their native soil by evictions more piecemeal but as cruelly persistent.

more later

And the reason for this wholesale misanthropy? A sudden affection for sheep. Humanity had depreciated, but wethers were rising in price. The old system of agriculture, under which the primary function of the soil was to support those who worked it, no longer seemed desirable

when the landlords made the triple discovery that life in London, or even in Edinburgh, offered social amenities superior to any they had encountered on their estates; that these new-found pleasures were expensive; and that their cost might be met by breeding sheep instead

of peasants. For England’s wars with France and the growth of Britain’s industrial population had conveniently raised prices, and a protectionist policy that excluded aU foreign cattle and sheep maintained them at an agreeable level.

True, there came an appalling slump when Napoleon was at last disposed of, but in slumping times a Ram can be made to do the work of two if fresh pastures are procured for the lambs he gets; and fresh pasture easily found by evicting the people who tilled it.

There was a certain amount of rioting, notably in Ross-shire and the Islands, when some of the crofters had the audacity to defend their property. There were unpleasant tales of starvation, of old men and children with no roof but the rain, and pregnant women with no bed

but a ditch. There were stories of stinking emigrant ships that carried, willy-nilly and without provision for the future, unhappy people who had no English to a distant land that spoke no Gaelic.

more later

1859 - Amid angry protests, Glasgow Town Council proposed to let coal mining right on Glasgow Green, councillors saw no problem with ensuing subsidence. As the green sank,it ''could be filled with rubbish.''

William McCulloch, Calton, unemployed for 16 weeks, died from starvation.

1862 - Glasgow. Destitute boys rioted in the house of Refuge, Duke street. The ' arabs' broke into a storeroom, ' seized mops, scrubing brushes and other articles...and demolished every pane of glass within their reach '

There was evidence that a people who had been proud and
gracious and kindly and strong were now broken alike in spirit and in body. But despite these unpleasant circumstances the Highland landlords did very well out of their evictions till it became apparent that the earth

will not for ever give its fruits without husbandry, and that other countries than Scotland were able to breed sheep. The grazing-grounds, to which centuries of labour had given sweetness and riches, turned sour under their countless seasons, and

weeds and bracken overgrew the grass. And competitive mutton was brought in from oversea.

1863- Helen Campbell, a prostitute, was found dead in a sitting position, leaning against a wall in Oswald Street. Death was attributed to ' exposure ' .

1864- The American civil war was raging. The Misses Smith, 60 St Vincent Crescent launched an appeal for medical supplies and comforts for the hospitals of the Hard-pressed Confederacy.

more later

(Sources - Sheriff Brown’s Strictures and Remarks .
Hugh Miller. McKenzie’s Highland Clearances.
History of the Working Classes in Scotland.
The Lion and the Unicorn. Linklater
They belong to Glasgow.Kenna
Midnight scenes and social photograph)

A life of self-indulgence is for us, A life of self-denial is for them; For us the streets, broad-built and populous. For them unhealthy comers, garrets dim, And cellars where the water- rats may swim ! For us green paths, refreshed by fragrant rain ; For them dark alleys

where the dust lies grim !
Not doomed by us to this appointed pain- God made us— rich and poor — of what do these complain ?

1858-''In no town or city in Scotland is the Sabbath more rigidly observed than in Glasgow, especially amongst the middle and higher classes of society.''
The moral tempest of Saturday evening has passed away, to be succeeded by the calm and sacred sunshine of the Sabbath morn..

Here follows a first hand account (1858) '' A Visit to the Bridgegate with a Member of the Society of Friends from England '' (!)

more to follow.

'' We visit the occupants of the low closes and the wynds.

It is about twelve o'clock in the day. The first entered is situated in a long narrow close. The lofty old houses on either side cast their cold deep shade on all beneath, reminding us of some dark ravine into

which the kindly rays of the sun never penetrate. On the right is one of those little tributaries to the Clyde, a stream of the grossest impurities. In the close, about the doors, are groups of idle people, women with their arms folded, and men, minus their coats and

jackets, leaning with their backs upon the wall, smoking short black pipes. They are engaged apparently in pleasant chat. Before approaching them, our attention is taken up with an object of rather singular interest. On the right is a sort of hole in the wall,

which turns out to be the miniature home of a smart little woman in respectable attire.Her eye beams with a genial intelligence. She is engaged in cooking. On one side of her is a neat little fireplace, the "cheeks" beautifully whitened, and the little grate bars shine.

At the other extremity of the apartment is a small bed in a recess. The rest of the "make-up'' of the household furniture consists of two stools, a table, and a few articles of crockery. "You have a very small place here," we say, as we lean upon the lower division of a door,

divided across the centre, to answer the purpose of a window for the admission of light and air "Aye, it is, sir, a wee place,'' she replies, with a smile of happy contentment, and yet with a feeling of shame, at occupying so mean an apartment.

"Well, but you have it tidy and clean." "Oh aye, we- aye manage that, if naething else; my husband is a carter, an' he hasna' been in work for a long time but if he didna drink, we wudna need to be here." " Dear me, how do you live in it?" we inquire, as a more

minute glance is taken at the four corners of the room. Being granted liberty to measure the place, we here put the right heel against the toe of the left shoe, and find that six shoe-lengths determine the breadth, and between eight and nine the length, from the bed

to the fire-place. The height of the room scarcely allows us to stand upright.
In this hole the husband and wife have lived for one or two years, and until lately, two children ; the youngest of the latter having been only some weeks dead of measles, after five months' illness.

A shilling a-week is paid for the apartment. Both parents are Irish, but speak in the Scottish dialect ; the young wife supports her partner and child by work in a factory. Before we leave, the husband enters, a short stout looking man, about twenty-five or thirty years of

age, dressed in dirty corduroys, beard unshaved, and smells of whisky. Taking us,to belong to the missionary craft, he says, " You missionaries ay tell us that carters 'n' factory lassies hae souls as weel as ither folk. For my pairt I aye thocht they had, — why is it man,

you canna tell us something we dinna ken ? " Explaining that we have no connection with the missionaries, he again remarks, "Weel, whether or no, mind dinna bring your tracts here, for we dinna want them." Leaving, we saunter forth into the street, by this time

dotted all over with little groups of labouring men, lounging about in their week-day clothes, with the addition of a clean shirt and neckerchief, just enough to remind them that it is Sabbath-day.''

''In almost all the other places visited, the children are playing about

in back courts and at the bottom of stairs. In few of the houses are the beds entirely unoccupied. Some of the men are smoking by the fire or reading a penny newspaper. The women, are engaged in cooking. Out of the whole of the families called on, not one of the number, so far

as we can learn, has been at church, or is accustomed to attend; the usual excuse being the want of decent apparel**.
In many instances, the filthy and crowded state of the apartments is simply indescribable, — there being as many as three and four beds in one room, meant

to accommodate male and female, old and young, the sick and the healthy, the living and the dead.''

** Although by the census of 1851, it was found that Glasgow possessed. 129 places of worship (which have since(1858),by the way, considerably increased)) and 100,754

sittings, and although the number of attendants at public worship on the Census Sabbath was, in the morning 70,381, afternoon 62,075, evening 15,047, making an aggregate of 147,603, or 98,335 individual attendants, the melancholy fact was nevertheless ascertained beyond even

the shadow of a doubt, that there were upwards of 132,000 who absented themselves from ordinances on the first day of the week. The number of the latter must of course, in proportion to the increasing population, have received during the last seven years an enormous addition,

since in the districts visited by the City Missionaries alone there are 15,676 families, or 67,925 individuals who go to no place of worship.

pause here for a moment....returning to the Highlands - When sheep grew unprofitable, sheep-runs dexterously became deer-forests, and deer, because of the pleasure people derived from shooting them, continued to pay the rent. Between 1883 and 1908 deer-forests in the five

crofting counties increased their size by one and
a quarter million acres, and Highland rent was paid
by English brewers, Indian princes, American millionaires, Argentine ranchers, and international picklemanufacturers. A sufficient number of the native population was retained

to minister to cosmopolitan pleasure, to assist the strangers down steep places, to carry their guns and rifles, and to put their rods together.

1819 - Finding the dead body of a new born child on the banks of the Clyde, near Calton Place, the authorities of Gorbals offered a reward of 5 guineas for information leading to the discovery of the ' un-natural mother '

-more later-

Enlightened observers, especially in Scotland, began
to detect a certain menial quality, a taint of the lackey,
in our remnant Highlanders and to comment un
favourably upon them. It was whispered they had
lost their independence. It was said they were lazy,
and would rather

live on charity than work for their bread. Self-righteous and prosperous Lowlanders shook their bald heads over the Highlands. But in all conscience is it not a sign of indefeasible strength that one decent man or woman should still be able to live in a country that has

been so treated? Is it not a proof of grace invincible that in remote comers of the Highlands you will still find bravery and exquisite manners and a great love of music ? I say nothing of quotidian virtues—they are more common
in the Highlands than in most places—but

that people so long tortured and abominably oppressed should still retain some of the graces of life, is proof that in the time of their happiness their life was endowed
with virtue and beauty and dignity. And despite the
deer and the grouse and the enforced servility, that

life is not yet wholly extinct. A little flame remains,
and could be blown upon. The deer-forests that once
were sheep-runs, and before that were tilled with
rude and primitive implements, could be reclaimed
and again support such men as

Chatham found ‘ upon the mountains of Caledonia, a race of heroes.’

1820 - Soldiers arrested 27 radical society delegates'' in full conclave '' at a Gallowgate Tavern.Sympathisers pelted the troops with stone and bricks. Gilbert McLeod, printer and editor of a Glasgow Radical paper called ' The spirit of the Union ' appeared at the high court

in Edinburgh. He was found guilty of sedition and transported for 5 years.

1800 - ' Seditious hand bills ' printed by William Paton, Saltmarket, called on Glaswegians to protest against the high price of food.

Speaking of the Salmarket, let us move forward in time, once more, to 1858 and pick-up where we left off

with our ' friends from England ' who are here to record ' social life in the slums of Glasgow '

- more later -

'' Of the six or eight families we visit, each occupies but one apartment, in size about 8 feet by 12, containing from four to five inmates, without any regard to age or sex. The bedding, placed in a corner of the room, usually consists of a little straw, and the bed-clothes

of a few old rags. In two cases only do we see a chair — a stool, or some other article is used. Among the exceptions is a poor dying woman. Her small but neat room in the attics bears evidence of the virtues which we attiibute to her. Her eyes are slightly sunk, and a

hectic flush at intervals plays upon her cheek. She is far gone in consumption. She lies in agony, panting for breath. In her hand is a small utensil, with lung expec- torations. At her back, in a deep sleep, is a rosy-cheeked child. On each side of her is an open window,

a sort of loop- hole, just enough to admit the air and light . In this cutting draught the poor creature lies covered with perspiration. Her husband, an Irishman,from accident also an invalid, kindly ministers to her wants. He is a labourer, but has been unable to work

for the last few weeks. Both are Roman Catholics, and are frequently visited by the priest.

1820 - Three girls, ' who for some time had partly lived by charity and partly by gathering bones ' were found guilty of theft and transported for 7 years.

1857 - In the City Hall, a grand concertwas held in aid of ' unemployed sewing girls ' .There were fears that the girls desperate plight would force them into prostitution.

Thank you for reading my tweets.

- END -