They were imaginative ideas in their day, those better-class council
housing schemes set in some nice areas. But there are sad lessons to be
learned from the story of places like Glasgow's Merrylee. GLASGOW was
early in municipal housing: it had to be. Glasgow's housing crisis had
existed for more than 50 years. By the early 1930s the imaginative plans
for municipal housing which the then Glasgow Corporation entertained
were in force. The result was Mosspark, Knightswood, some isolated areas
in small pockets elsewhere.
They were models for other local authorities' endeavours. They weren't
exactly Hampstead Garden Suburb. They weren't even Welwyn Garden City.
They most certainly weren't up-market and they weren't bought houses
either. The estates concerned were in hitherto greenfield sites and the
houses had inside lavatories and baths, and were ideal for the
better-off working classes who could afford the rates but who, in their
own tradition, did not buy houses but rented.
Glasgow's experiment was echoed elsewhere in Scotland, most noticeably
in Ayrshire, where the local hegemony of the Socialists ensured that a
housing boom took place with very low rents indeed.
But the real housing crisis which Scotland and especially Glasgow
faced came after the Second World War. Part of the very idea of crisis
originated down south in Coventry and London and any place in which the
bombing had obliterated the old areas.
Glasgow even then had priority because the Second City had housing
stock which was impossible -- the worst slums, it was considered, in
Europe. Glasgow was, then, the third world. And after the war housing
became paramount in the minds of the political parties, Tory or Labour
or other.
There is still no excuse for the dreadful ''schemes'' which the
councils all over Scotland built, nor for the virtual destruction of the
communities which then existed, and architects and planners who
collaborated in the disgrace of that building programme have no right to
complain of the calumnies which have since been showered upon them.
But there was one Glasgow ''scheme'', plan, call it what you will,
which focused on the political considerations of that time. The scheme
was called Merrylee.
Merrylee was planned in an area of Glasgow which bordered on the douce
and respectable area of Cathcart, and on the very well-set area of
Newlands. Further out were Clarkston and Whitecraigs, Netherlee,
Giffnock, Newton Mearns. The last thing the local residents wanted was a
housing scheme, with ''workies'' coming in, and their families. Bad
enough it was that there was the daytime presence of the proletariat in
the nearby Weir's Works. To live cheek by jowl with the lower orders was
an outrage.
It was 1950 and the heroes had just returned from a war, but devil the
bit that the same warriors should be shovelling their coal into their
baths next door to you. Glasgow Corporation at that time had a Tory --
then called, euphemistically, Progressive and Moderate -- council. In
all, 622 houses were to be built, by the Direct Labour Department, in
this leafy area of the south-side of Glasgow and in 1951 housing
convener McPherson Raitt, a Conservative, proposed that the houses
should be sold, not rented. It was reckoned that Glasgow at that time
had 48,000 homeless. Said a local baillie, Jimmy Duncan: ''If the
homeless in Glasgow marched three abreast, and a yard interval between
ranks, they would stretch five-and-a-half miles long.''
In well-off Newlands lived the Forsyth family, with their department
stores, the Cochrane family with their grocer's shops throughout the
country. The big houses had wealthy stockbrokers, lawyers, businessmen.
The workers who were to build the houses in this pleasant backwater in
the city were to be, initially, denied a place in the very buildings
they erected.
The houses were to be sold off, for profit surely, but for more too.
To keep the workers out. If the residences -- and they were not very
prepossessing at that, grey, harled, boxes with three bedrooms at the
most -- were to be built at all in that salubrious area where the toffs
lived then they would go to lowly clerks or grubby shopkeepers. Bought
houses would house, at the end of the day, bought people.
But the lower orders didn't see the situation that way and indeed
there was a marching, for the Merrylee ''scandal'' brought about massive
demonstrations on the streets of Glasgow. ''Strikes, mass agitation,
deputations, constant press publicity, and the eventual toppling of a
Tory-controlled town council''. Thus a very recent pamphlet, Sell And Be
Damned, in which Ned Donaldson and Les Forster, two life-long Labour
activists involved in the Merrylee situation itself, described the
furore which broke over the heads of the 1951 Tory Glasgow Corporation.
It was perhaps hardly as dramatic as they suggest. But one thing is
true: it brought down the Progressive-Moderates and ensconced a Labour
administration in Glasgow for -- what seems like forever.
There were indeed delegations from Harland's Clyde Foundry in Govan
and work stopped there. Maryhill, Possilpark, Weirs of Cathcart workers
themselves, all turned out in their droves. The building trade threw
down the tools. It is difficult today to comprehend the anger which
arose throughout the labour and trade union movement.
John Smith's Labour Party objectives are a far cry from what the then
socialist movement saw as the right to housing -- free (sort of),
low-rented, open to all, sanitary, healthy, but above all, available.
None of the above factors would be argued against by even the most
vociferous right-winger today. Then it was different. Homelessness was
widespread and many Glaswegians lived in conditions which would pass for
those of refugee camps. There were of course Displaced Persons
throughout Europe then and Glasgow could match the despair of those
unfortunates.
But there was a corollary to that. The first one was that the
demonstrators and activists won their battle. Merrylee houses were not
sold off: they were allocated to those eligible for council house
tenancy. The bourgeoisie lost the fight to retain their ghetto
existence. The Labour Party romped home in the May, 1952 elections and
have retained control ever since.
Some individual defeats occurred. Ned Donaldson, a legendary and
doughty fighter for workers' rights and other issues dear to an old
socialist warhorse's heart, was sacked from his job. So was Les Forster.
Jimmy Lamb, a prominent activist of that time, was paid off. All are
still around and they bear their grievances lightly and with dignity.
But the result of the triumphant fight against the sale of houses at a
time when a housing shortage was truly critical has been rather
different from the triumph which it was then seen to be, or perhaps
should have been.
Today Merrylee is quiet. As they say in the cowboy films: too quiet.
Today's Merrylee came out of the tenants who first peopled it: the
labour aristocracy itself. For the middle classes who had so vehemently
opposed the building of the houses from the start, and tried to sell
them off to bank clerks and poujadiste shopkeepers and minor librarians
and such like, got their own way, even with a Labour council, for, to
assuage the fears of the powerful haute-bourgeoisie of Glasgow, the
Labour administration embarked on an even more demanding set of rules
for tenancy than they had in the other good council estates such as
Knightswood or Mosspark. They simply invented new ground rules.
Desirable tenants. And desirable tenants were subject to criteria so
Byzantine for what constituted, in Socialist and Tory parlance alike,
''Decent People'', that it was impenetrable to the majority of homeless
Glaswegians. Labrynthine questionnaires were sent out. If you had
children who had ''stayed on'' at school it was in your favour: a child
at university put you on the list in seconds. A skilled job, and you
were quids in. Not just a record of no rent arrears to your previous
landlord was needed. Inspections of your existing house would reveal
whether or not you kept a clean close, washed and red-leaded. Neighbours
were sounded out.
It could have come from a play by Gogol. And it was to have lasting
effects on tenancy policy. For worst of all, it was an underground,
secret and secretive, policy.
The tenants of Merrylee were good tenants, no doubt about it. Their
children did stay on at school. This very newspaper is full of people
who indeed washed in the Blood of the Holy Lamb of Merrylee Meritocracy.
I know. My father was the Merrylee Primary School janitor, remembered
yet by the Merrylee people. But that was many years ago.
Merrylee Primary now houses pupils from all walks of life but
especially the middle-class walk of it. The locals prefer to send their
children there before putting them into Hutchie or Park School for Girls
or wherever you send your children when the time comes to put an end to
meritocracy itself: this is Socialism with a pragmatic face.
Merrylee headmistress Jean Symington is a well-respected headteacher
of the school, and so she should be, but it is a far cry from teaching
in Balornock Primary where she started off; my late mother was the
secretary there. Balornock these many years ago was a far cry from what
it is today, with all the problems of the deprived areas they were not
meant to be, a different place from long back. The difficulty is that
Merrylee is not: it has not changed at all. Still the same Labour
aristocracy-middle-class enclave it was 40 years ago when it first
started and what of that? A lot really.
When I visited the area recently, many years after I once lived there,
it was not the lively place I recollect at all. Lively? It is old and
the tenants are old, all of them. When I lived there children thronged
the streets. Football was endemic. One of the footballers in fact was
Kenny Dalglish: he is a Merrylee boy. Sandy Fraser, social work supremo,
lived next door. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, this blatt's travel
correspondent himself, came from this hotbed of working class
achievement. Today's Merrylee is different. There is no football in the
streets: there is nothing on the street, not even people.
TODAY Merrylee is falling apart. The dreadful problems, societal and
otherwise, of Pollok, Nitshill, Possil, Castlemilk, Easterhouse, The
Drum, have been highlighted, and millions have been spent on
refurbishment in a perhaps forlorn hope that the people there will
behave themselves.
In Knightswood, Mosspark, Merrylee, people behave impeccably. The
result is that there is no investment in such areas at all. The houses
are unpainted, the railings and fences are untouched. The gardens are
not even noticed by the Parks Department and the people are too old --
for nobody ever leaves Merrylee until they shuffle off the mortal coil
-- to look after the ever-burgeoning hedges, blades of grass, untended
flower-beds.
Merrylee is old: the old people are incapable of replenishing the
scheme itself for the socialist dream of a new society has produced that
new society: the ageing population has sons and daughters who have gone
on to what they see as better things; on to big bought houses, far away
from Merrylee. In short, this was an experiment which worked too well.
This was the Brave New World really, the one my father thought would
change us all. It has changed us all, too. Sadly this half-world of old
houses, old people, old dreams, is a testament to what visions are made
of; how they eventually turn out.
I have no answer to old dreams and the tousled greying realities which
places like Merrylee represent. I shall be old myself, soon. But I still
don't want to go home in the dark.
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