Scottish homes & schools (page 2)
THE pressure on population came both with industry and with the displacement of country people from the Highlands and later from Ireland. The Irish peasantry lived on a staple diet of potatoes, and in the 1840s — the Hungry Forties — a mysterious blight wiped out the crops. Emigration and death from starvation reduced the population by millions, and there was a mass movement to the nearest British towns and cities, Liverpool and the Clyde.
The influx of these strangers, from the North and from across the Irish Sea, shaped the character of the Glaswegian, a powerful blend of the new invaders — tall, blond and redhaired Highlanders, dark-haired Highlanders, dark Irish and the original Scottish Lowlander descended from Pictish strains. The Picts were small and dark with long heads, and the type can still be seen in the city at any football match.
The city that greeted the incomers, often with suspicion of their strange manners and their foreign tongues, was soon in the throes of a dramatic expansion, and its housing development was designed to cram the maximum number of families into the least possible area. The new form of dwelling was the Glasgow tenement, and many of them have survived,
Tenement buildings are usually three or four storey's high, with each block built as a hollow rectangle enclosing an open space. On the ground floor, entries known as closes lead from the street outside to the court behind, and a stone staircase leads off the middle of the close to the landings above.
Tenements varied widely in quality and amenity. All had running cold water. A small proportion had baths. Some had indoor toilets. In many, the families on each landing shared a toilet. In the more spacious, and expensive, there were two, or three, family houses on each landing; but four and more houses per landing were common.
There was a wide distribution of houses containing a kitchen and one other room, and an enormous number consisting of nothing but a kitchen, ‘single ends’ as they were known. (The word ‘end’ used to mean a room, can still be heard in Glasgow.) The standard sleeping arrangement was the set-in bed, an alcove in the wall accommodating a mattress, and the standard length of the mattress was 4 feet 8 inches or 1.4 metres. Most kitchens had two, some more.And into these tiny apartments came the new industrial working classes, to live and increase. Families of ten or fifteen were commonplace, and death was commonplace too.
The mechanism of infection was not yet understood. There was a general feeling, in fact, that overcrowding made life cosier. Typhus was endemic in the cities, and there were periodic outbreaks of cholera and smallpox. One child in twenty died in infancy.
