Glasgow’s British Imperiorium

 “Glasgow,” I said one day, “I am going to have a look at you.” I got up early and set out from our hotel, intent on seeing one of the six attractions a woman in a gift shop had jawed about while taking half an hour to wrap my book. On this occasion it was to be Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

It took me about an hour to walk there, giving me plenty of time to soak up the atmosphere.

Standing at a lookout at the end of Hill Street (situated on a hill), I got a good view. It was drizzling and the tall row houses had chimneys all crowded, crooked and irregular sizes like a mouth full of pre-orthodonture teeth. Beyond the row houses, silhouetted roofs and steeples stretched into in the misty haze. A tall smokestack or two poured out billowing white steam into the cold air.

Architecturally, this is a city that exploded with activity in the Industrial Revolution, then sort of sank in on itself. Arguably, it was Ground Zero of the Industrial Revolution. Glasgow University was the meeting point of three of the main architects of the Industrial Age: Adam Smith (economist and father of capitalism), Joseph Black (physicist and chemist who discovered carbon dioxide) and James Watt (perfector of the steam engine).

One aspect of this industrial history is that Glasgow has long been peopled by scrappy workers. Its history of labor organizing goes back to the eighteenth century. In 1789, handweavers from the community of Calton marched through the streets to protest a 25 percent wage cut and lockout. The dispute went on for several weeks, ending with a pitched battle between the strikers and British infantry on Duke Street. A volley of musket fire killed three strikers outright and fatally wounded three others, creating Scotland’s first working-class martyrs.

Kelvingrove Park

To reach the museum, I had to walk through Kelvingrove Park, 34 acres of parkland straddling the river Kelvin, a tributary of the Clyde and flanked on one side by the university. The park is a pleasant green space replete with knolls, bosky groves, fountains and statuary in honor of the city’s most famous sons.

One so honored is the physicist William Thomson, 1^st Baron Kelvin (1824-1907). The first scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords, his title refers to the river that flowed past his laboratory at Glasgow University, where he worked for 53 years. Absolute temperatures are measured using the Kelvin scale, which is named in his honor. Interestingly, Queen Victoria knighted him not only for his services to science but also for his vocal and extremely energetic opposition to Irish Home Rule.

There is also one of Lord Joseph Lister (1827-1912), the pioneer of antiseptic surgery. He did a lot of impressive research but maybe his most important contribution to medicine is that it’s thanks to him that surgeons wash their hands and sterilize things. He lived in Glasgow from 1860 to 1869 teaching at the university.

Thomas Carlyle was another statue. Queen Victoria described him in her journal as “Mr. Carlyle, the historian, a strange-looking eccentric old Scotchman, who holds forth, in a drawling melancholy voice, with a broad Scotch accent, upon Scotland and upon the utter degeneration of everything.” In his last years, Carlyle organized the Eyre Defence Committee to protect Jamaica’s colonial governor Edward Eyre, who brutally suppressed the Morant Bay Rebellion (11 October 1865). His troops killed more than 400 people, including women and children were killed and then arrested 300 more people, many of whom were subsequently executed, whipped or imprisoned. George William George Gordon, a mixed-race member of the Jamaican House of Assembly, was executed. It was the most severe suppression of unrest in the British West Indies, horrendous enough to spur some Britons to form the Jamaica Committee, which called Eyre to be tried for mass murder. Carlyle lead the opposition to this, supporting Eyre. Eyre was exonerated of all blame, the British Government paid his legal expenses and granted him the pension of a retired colonial governor.

Speaking of rebellions, another statue in Kelvingrove Park is of Field Marshall Frederick Sleigh Roberts or ‘Bobs’ to his friends and admirers. I saw from his plinth that he fought in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, an uprising against the East India Company. This was a conflict I knew about from Radio War Nerd, the podcast my husband runs with Mark Ames. In one memorable episode they spoke with Indian-American scholar Aditya Velivelli about exactly what the East India Company was doing in India and why the locals might have cause to be upset. Here’s an excerpt from their introduction to the interview:

Mark: Any time you dig into what the British did in India—not even talking about China here—and the British East India Corporation, I almost find myself wishing I could read about the Nazis because at least everyone knows about the Nazis and everyone agrees it was horrible and evil. And we just don’t know anything about the British and what they did in their colonies and in India, and it’s just…overwhelming. It’s so brutal.

John: Yeah, there’s a massive memory hole and it’s not an accident. I mean, I know I’ve used the term omertà, the silence unto death, to describe the way the custodians of the Empire see their responsibility in keeping things quiet. But I’m starting to think that might be literal, there might be conscious, there might be people striving to keep things quiet.

Bobs saw action in the Relief of Lucknow, where the 93^rd Regiment of Scottish Highlanders and the 4^th Punjabi Infantry Regiment stormed Secunder Bagh, a high walled garden that the mutineers were using as a stronghold. By the time British troops left, nearly 2,000 mutineers were dead inside the walls. The savagery of this attack was stimulated in part by the memory of the Bibighar Massacre in Cawnpore, where sepoys killed 120 British women and children. When the Highlanders rushed into Secunder Bagh, their cry was “Remember Cawnpore!”

The Bibighar Massacre and other attacks became the excuse an excuse for cruel and unusual reprisals. Lieutenant Colonel James George Smith Neil ordered British troops to burn all villages by the Grand Trunk Road and to hang all the inhabitants. Mutineers were tortured by being forced to eat beef or pork (according to whether or not it was an abomination), and by licking the blood of murder victims. Hundreds of them were bayoneted or blown from cannons while still alive.

Bobs also fought in Afghanistan, bringing the second Anglo-Afghan War to an end by defeating Ayub Khan in the Battle of Kandahar. He led the army on a 320-mile march from Kabul to get there–a feat of endurance that his fans would not shut up about. Later on in his career, he took overall command of British forces in the Second Boer War and helped the British cause by burning Boer farms and setting up concentration camps. By the end of the war, 26,370 women and children had died in the squalid camps.

For all this destruction, Britain adored him. He was the Empire’s ultimate enforcer. Kipling wrote at least one poem about him that was simply titled ‘Bobs’. Here are the first two stanzas:

There’s a little red-faced man,

Which is Bobs,

Rides the tallest ‘orse ‘e can-

Our Bobs.

If it bucks or kicks or rears,

‘E can sit for twenty years

With a smile round both ‘is ears-

Can’t yer, Bobs?

Then ‘ere’s to Bobs Bahadur –

little Bobs, Bobs, Bobs!

E’s our pukka Kandahader-

Fightin’ Bobs, Bobs, Bobs!

E’s the Dook of Aggy Chel;

E’s the man that done us well,

An’ we’ll follow ‘im to ‘ell

Won’t we, Bobs?

Kelvingrove Museum

The museum itself is a huge, gaudy orange building in the Spanish Baroque style. The first thing I saw when I went in was the café because I have a talent for finding out where food is. The second thing I saw was a large standing sign entitled ‘Museum of Empire’:

“Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is a museum of empire. The original museum was housed in the former home of Lord Provost Patrick Colquhoun, a tobacco merchant who was involved in the enslavement of African people. Wealthy individuals who made their money as a result of British colonialism donated artworks to the collection. For example, Still Life: Herring, Cherries and Glassware, which you can see in the Dutch Art gallery was one of those given by Cecilia Douglas. Her family owned plantations in the Caribbean that were worked by enslaved people. Some other objects were looted by the armed forces of the British Empire. But there are few objects or artworks depicting Black, Asian and other minoritized people.

Glasgow Museum is exploring how Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum can better address the legacies of transatlantic slavery and the British Empire. We want to spark discussions around these legacies, to help shape future displays in Kelvingrove. Throughout the galleries you’ll see that we’ve highlighted some of the untold stories behind the collections. However, there are many more stories to tell and we’re working towards better understanding how these histories can be told.”

So far, so good. Admittedly, even before I got to the museum I’d been looking at some of the figures in Kelvingrove park thinking that the recent statue-toppling trend had not gone nearly far enough.

Glaswegian Art

One thing that I hadn’t known before arriving in Scotland was that Glasgow’s School of Art is locally a big deal. The building (now unfortunately badly damaged by fire) was designed by one of Scotland’s most famous architects Charles Rennie McKintosh. He and three other students, known as ‘The Glasgow Four’ became famous internationally in the 1890s for their distinctive designs on posters, craftwork and furniture.

The Glasgow School of Art was famous for one particularly enthusiastic and encouraging figure named Fra Newberry. Under his leadership, thanks to the artists whose talents he nourished, the school became internationally recognized. Among other things, he welcomed women as students and teachers.

In the nineteenth-century people loved nothing better than getting together and forming an art movement. In Florence it was the Macchiaoli (I’ll talk about them soon); in Pont-Ave it was the Pont-Ave school; in New York it was the Hudson River Gang. Here, it was the Glasgow Boys. They drew on French Realism, Celtic mythology, Japanese art. Overall, they liked to paint young women, though one of them preferred muscular young soldiers. They often worked outdoors or, in fancy speak, en plein air to paint rural Scottish scenes. I particularly liked “The Druids: Bringing in the Mistletoe” (1890), a collaboration between George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel.

Art in the First World War

Moving on in the gallery, I stumbled on an exhibition devoted to artwork made during World War I. The one I remember best is “The Belgian Refugee” (1915) by Norah Neilson Gray, who attended the Glasgow School of Art from 1901-1906. Part of the reason I remember it is because Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot was also a Belgian refugee with impressive moustaches. He first appeared in print in 1920, soon after the war and it must have had something to do with the way the plight of the Belgians had captured the British imagination.

The Photography of Eric Watt

Another interesting exhibition was of the photography of local artist Eric Watt (1934-2005). As it says on the introductory sign, he documented life in Glasgow from the 1950s onwards, showing how the city has changed over time. For copyright reasons I am not going to post any of his photos here but you can find a selection of them online. For an introduction to his life and work, see this video about his work. A book of his work has been published as Coming Into View: Eric Watt’s Photographs of Glasgow. His life is summed up in this review of his book:

“A quiet man, for most of his working life, he taught science at Woodfarm High School in Thornliebank on Glasgow’s south side and lived in the family flat in Pollokshields. He never married or had a family of his own. All his free time was spent taking photographs around the city. From 1958 onwards, he was an active member of Queens Park Camera Club, one of many such clubs around Scotland. Well-known on the amateur photography circuit, he gave around 1000 talks on his archive to camera clubs and historical societies before he died at the age of 71 in 2005.”

Kelvingrove Museum

I knew I only had a certain amount of energy left at this point, so decided it was time to see the museum. I hurried through the Natural History hall holding my breath trying not to think about all the stuffed corpses populating the room and climbed the stairs to see the war room.

The Loot Room

Just in front of the door to the War Display was a small bronze statue by David McFall (1958). This gnome Winston was guarding the door like a troll under the bridge.

There were a few objects of interest: samurai’s armor, a helmet from the film Willow (I don’t know why, it wasn’t a good helmet), a wooden statue of a grieving Belgian woman. But the real focus of the hall was a shrine to Victorian wars. There was a display for each war together with a little ‘explanation’ of what happened and a piece of loot taken from the battlefield.

When I saw the objects proudly on display…wow. It was kind of jaw dropping. Suddenly I realized that the sign at the entrance about ‘Empire’ was meant to be an anticipatory defense for this. It was like a serial killer inviting you in to see his controversial art collection and realizing that he’s talking about a pile of body parts.

Here’s an example:

The piece of loot taken from Ghana was a stool. To someone who isn’t from Ghana, this might not seem like such a big deal. But to the Asanti, this sort of stool was where the owner’s soul resided. It has a sacred meaning. In fact, the fifth Asanti-English War was fought over the Golden Stool, the royal and divine throne of kings and the ultimate symbol of power. Such is its significance that it is believed to house the spirit of the Asanti nation—living, dead and yet to be born. The British Governor of the Gold Coast Sir Frederick Mitchell Hodgson made a gross political error by ordering that the Golden Stool be produced so he could sit on it, sparking a war that resulted in 3,000 people losing their lives.

From the Battle of Omdurman there is a banner carried into battle by the Sudanese Mahdist army on which is written a declaration of faith and allegiance to Allah. From Kabul there is an exquisite Quran. From the Second Opium Wars (in which Lord Elgin ordered the Summer Palace to be torched) there is a silk cloak belonging to a member of the Emperor’s court. The explanation the sign gives for the conflict is “British and French forces destroyed the Emperor’s Summer Palace after a dispute over trade in the drug opium.”

There were two Chinese tourists in front of me. I heard them muttering to each other furiously in their language and though I don’t understand Mandarin or Cantonese, I think I could guess what they were saying. Anyone who wants a rundown of what really happened could do worse than listen to Carl Zha (host of the Silk and Steel podcast) describe it in this interview.

From the Indian Mutiny, there is a pair of women’s trousers, stained with something that looks like dried blood.

After seeing the Lucknow trousers, I decided that I’d probably seen enough.