By Ged O’Brien, Dr Fiona Skillen and Ingrid Shearer

GLASGOW GREEN: THE HOME OF FOOTBALL

99% of the world’s population think that football was invented in England. The modern international game was invented by the Scots. Its home is our Dear Green Place. Let me be specific: Glasgow Green and its surrounding areas provided many of the pitches and the people who turned the Scottish Game, into the World Game.

Long before the 20^th century, it was played in the streets and on the grassed areas of a city huddled on the north bank of the Clyde. But how do we learn the story of a sport, which was played by people who did not write down their lives? Here is where we can turn for help, to Thomas Sulman.

The Sulman Map was published in 1864, just as football was about to explode. Though he did not mean it, Sulman performed a great service. He included, three areas known to the history of the game: 1) Glasgow Green; 2) Glasgow University and 3) Glasgow Barracks. 

THE PERFECT SPOT

It might seem obvious, but the Green was ideal for football. It was flat, it had areas which were about the size of a modern football pitch and it was close to the houses of the people. Over the centuries, the Green was improved. The Camlachie Burn was culverted and marshy areas drained, until it was completely fit for modern football, by the 1850s. 

We know, from Andrew McGeorge, that Glasgow Magistrates ‘encouraged and promoted’ football. It was regard as ‘innocent recreation’. The Burgh Minutes from 1575 record the price of a football a two pence. They were made by the Cordiners (leather workers) of the City.

Between 1450 and 1792, Glaswegians had a chance to play on the Green. In 1792, Flesher’s Haugh, just to the south east of Sulman’s map, became a part of the Green. In the 1860s, clubs sprung up and disappeared again and again. It is recorded that Eastern beat Celtic 4-0 on Flesher’s Haugh 25^th January 1873. Not the current Celtic, of course. There were more than a dozen attempts to create a football club for the Irish immigrants, huddled around the Calton. The ‘new’ Celtic of 1887 was the one which took hold and prospered.

A HOME FOR ALL

The Green drew in both migrants and immigrants. Two years after Sulman, we know that Orkney exiles played a game on Glasgow Green 12^th January, 1866. One of the first opponents of the Queen’s Park FC of Glasgow, founded 1867, was the Drummond Club. They were Perthshire migrants, who wore Clan Drummond Tartan caps and had a connection to the Glasgow Perthshire Society. Their ‘headquarters’ were on Glasgow Green. Though they are long gone, the link remains in the Glasgow Perthshire Junior FC: founded 1890.

The author of the first book on Queen’s Park, published 1919, said that Drummond ‘played a roughish game; tripping and charging were their strong points’. Like hundreds of Glasgow clubs, the Drummond FC lasted a few years. In fact, when it played the Spiders, on Queen’s Park Rec., two pupils from the Deaf and Dumb Institution (the old Langside College) had to help them out. 

The Thistle Club Glasgow Green team are famous, because they are also recorded as playing Queen’s Park. I will bet that most towns in Scotland had a Thistle FC, at some point, in the 19^th century. They challenged QPFC in July 1868 and lost 2-0. It seems that they were dead by 1873 and had merged into the Eastern Club. Just to confuse you, another Thistle appeared at the same time, on Glasgow Green. They had moved to a pitch on Dalmarnock Road, by 1875.

The Green was the place for Glasgow football. Rangers were founded in 1872. They played their first game against Callander. One of the first of the Rangers’ greats was Tom Vallance, from Cardross. He came to football via the Clyde Rowing Club. He was also in the Clydesdale Harriers. Their headquarters were on Dundas Street. His pals were the McNeil brothers. Henry played for Queen’s Park. Moses and Peter founded Rangers. The Harriers also contained the Maley brothers: Willie and Tom. They co-founded Celtic, in 1887.

THE PEOPLE’S GAME

Glasgow Green would have had scores of teams, getting in one another’s way and fighting for space. The ambitious clubs like Rangers, quickly found other places to play. Glasgow University Old College, was lucky, in this respect. It was a few hundred metres north of Glasgow Green. It had a large area for a football pitch, known as the College Green. David Murray, co-founder of McLay, Murray and Spens noted that Robert Smith Candlish, the famous Free Church leader played on that pitch, in 1822. 

In the 1860s, with football becoming more official, the University built a ‘shed’ under which fans could shelter. It can be seen in a photo of the pitch, in front of the Hunterian Museum. The spoil in the picture is from the demolition. The stand is possibly the world’s oldest known image of a football building.

The other patch of green on Sulman, which deserves a mention, is Glasgow Barracks. It is immediately to the east of the Old College and north of Glasgow Green. There are Drill Grounds, on which you can see soldiers marching. On the west gable of the Barracks, there is a Handball court. It is reasonable to assume that both cricket and football were played on these areas. In 1848 Clydesdale CC were founded by Archibald Campbell, with players from Glasgow Green teams. Clydesdale were the losing side in the first ever Scottish Cup Final, in 1874, at the First Hampden Park. Campbell became the first President of the Scottish FA.

Football was truly the people’s game and the people of Glasgow loved it. Murray said that golf and football were equally popular ‘amongst all classes – men and women, boys and girls’. We still have people who hold that football is not a sport for women. They have been playing it in Glasgow, for centuries. 

Think of the young Thomas Lipton. He studied at St. Andrew’s Parish School, on Greendyke St, between 1853 and 1863. He will have crossed the street to play football on Glasgow Green. In his adult life, as the Lipton Tea and coffee empire grew, he never missed a chance to spread football around the world. He helped found Uruguayan and Argentine football with his Copa Lipton.

As we saw in our previous blog, no rules or threats would stop Glasgow’s citizens from using Glasgow Green, as their football home.

References 

G O’Brien, Played in Glasgow, (Malavan Media, 2010).

R. McBrearty, Glasgow Before The Explosion: the role of migration and immigration in the development of football cultures in the city prior to 1873, https://tinyurl.com/29e56byh

Ged O’Brien is the founder of the Scottish Football Museum at Hampden Park. He is the discoverer of Andrew Watson: the world’s most influential player of colour. He is the author of ‘Played in Glasgow’ and is currently writing ‘The Scottish Game: How Scotland invented Modern World Football’.

Dr Fiona Skillen is a senior lecturer in History in the Department of Social Sciences, in the School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University. Her research interests concern modern history, in particular aspects of sport, gender and popular culture. She is particularly interested in women’s sport during the late 19th and 20th centuries and has published extensively in this area including her monograph Sport, Women and Modernity in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). She is a former Chair of British Society of Sport History, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an editor of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Ingrid Shearer is Heritage Engagement Officer for Glasgow Building Preservation Trust, a charity that rescues, repairs and repurposes historic buildings for the benefit of their communities. A former archaeologist, she has worked in the heritage sector for over 25 years. Her practice is embedded in the principle that heritage matters and has the potential to change people’s lives in a positive way.

WANT TO KNOW MORE? 

• Part three of this series explores the use of the River for sport around the Green.
• Join us for our online talk, ‘Glasgow: The Home of Modern World Football’ by Ged O’Brien on Wednesday 16th March
• Check out our Gallus Glasgow map and explore more stories of the Victorian city. Once there, why not add a few stories of your own?
• Prints of the map are available to buy in our online shop

By Dr Fiona Skillen, Ingrid Shearer and Ged O’Brien

THE OLDEST PARK IN THE CITY

Nestled in the bottom right of Sulman’s map of Glasgow is a vast expanse of open land, encroached on three sides by Glasgow’s urban sprawl and on its final side bounded by the River Clyde. The open land is better known as Glasgow Green, which is the oldest park in the city of Glasgow, established in 1450 when King James II granted 56 acres of Parkland to Bishop William Turnbull and the people of Glasgow. Glasgow Green is one of the most significant parks in Scotland, being one of, if not the oldest urban parkland space in continuous use. This green space, which was increased to its current size of 136 acres in 1792, has never been an ornamental park given over to formal gardens, rather it has been a place of activity, being an important site of leisure and sport for the citizens of Glasgow. As one journalist noted in 1893 when giving a history of the early Green, ‘a property which is common to all the citizens for the grazing of their cattle and for the less lucrative but not less needful purpose of washing and drying clothes it is to be expected that little interest would be taken in the ornamentation and beautifying of such a tract of land’ Glasgow Herald Oct 1893

In this blog, and our two subsequent blogs, we will be exploring various sporting uses of the Green and the river alongside the Green during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Over the course of its history the Green has had many practical functions, its large open air spaces provided important space in an otherwise overcrowded city, for drying fishing nets, for bleaching linen, drying washing and for public gatherings. It also provided an important space for public events.

A SPACE FOR ENTERTAINMENT AND EVENTS

We often think of Glasgow Green now as a space for entertainment and events but has it always been like this? The best known event held at the Green was the Glasgow Fair, yearly week-long celebrations in July when the Green would play host to traders eager to sell their wares and animals. But the Green would also be filled with many types of entertainment from circuses and curiosity shows to boxing booths and theatres, alongside stalls selling all sorts of goods, as well as food and alcohol. For that week the Green became the focus of entertainment and escapism for the city. But the space was also used for other types of events such as sports events, military parades and training and political meetings. Records of the Glasgow City Corporation show that Glasgow citizens often complained that the Green was being used for public events such as the fair days and that the use of the grounds for those purposes was to the detriment of other citizens because of the disruption or damage caused by hosting these events. This is something that we see mirrored in the contemporary use of the Green for events such as the TRNSMT music festival. 

But it is the Green’s rich sporting heritage that we will be exploring in our next few blogs. Let’s start by briefly exploring some of the popular activities that were played during the early history of the Green.

GOLF, SHINTY, AND AN OUTDOOR GYMNASIUM

Golf

Glasgow’s earliest known, and oldest surviving, golf club was formed on Glasgow Green in 1787. The game is likely to have been played on the Green for many years before this, but it was formalised with the establishment of a club in 1787. The members of this early club are likely to have been merchants and other well regarded men in the city. Research suggests that by 1800 membership included solicitors, tailors and even the City Chamberlain (Played in Glasgow p28). By 1870 the club had relocated to Queens Park (Played in Glasgow p28) beginning it’s nomadic existence moving around various open spaces in and around the city. It’s likely that the club moved away from the Green due to a number of factors such as having to compete for space against other events and recreations, whilst the increased pollution generated by rapid industrialisation within the city, would all have made the Green less appealing.

Other Sports

Open space within the city was limited so the open space of the Green provided the ideal playing area for a number of sports. Highlanders were often seen playing games such as shinty on the grass. The Glasgow Cowal Shinty Club is one of the best known shinty clubs to have played on Glasgow Green.  The Club was formed in 1876 by players originating from the Cowal peninsula in the Highlands. The club was one of the most successful in Glasgow, winning the Glasgow Celtic Society Cup four times. The club was disbanded in the mid-1920s.

Another interesting sporting feature of the Green is the outside gymnasium. The gym was presented to the city by Glaswegian D.G. Fleming at a cost of £300 in 1860. The gym was introduced to provide ‘much amusement and healthful recreation to large numbers of boys and young men’ and was only outside gym of its type in Glasgow. The opening of the gym was a magnificent affair with local dignitaries in attendance for speeches and a display of the equipment. The structures itself was complex as this description highlights.

The frame of the gymnasium can still be seen on the Green today.

NO BALL GAMES?

In 1814 a ranger was appointed to attempt to stop the use of the green for games and sports and 1819 because it introduced the complete ban all golf, cricket, shinty, football and any other ball games. The introduction of the Glasgow Public Parks Act in 1878 saw funding increased for the Green which in turn led to improvements in its layout and maintenance. Over the years as the space became more formalised various local regulations were introduced to try and limit how the Green was used, with varying success. In the 1890s when cycling had become hugely popular across the country Glasgow’s cyclists were so frustrated by the Glasgow Green regulations that they regularly complained in the press. 

‘Our city fathers seem dead set against cycling … they have decided we can only mount our machines at the Humane Society House, and ride from that to Montieth Row. Now, I consider this a great hardship on Glasgow Cyclists that are trying to get into form’ Glasgow Evening Post, Aug 1889

Of course the introduction of such bye laws were rarely successful at stopping people from playing their sports on the Green and it continues to be an important site for sport and leisure today.

References 

G O’Brien, Played in Glasgow, (Malavan Media, 2010).

MacGregor, George, The History of Glasgow from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. (Thomas D. Morison, 1881)

Hugh Dan McLennan, Shinty’s Place in the World, https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/maclennan_shintysplace.pdf

Dr Fiona Skillen is a senior lecturer in History in the Department of Social Sciences, in the School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University. Her research interests concern modern history, in particular aspects of sport, gender and popular culture. She is particularly interested in women’s sport during the late 19th and 20th centuries and has published extensively in this area including her monograph Sport, Women and Modernity in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). She is a former Chair of British Society of Sport History, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an editor of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Ingrid Shearer is Heritage Engagement Officer for Glasgow Building Preservation Trust, a charity that rescues, repairs and repurposes historic buildings for the benefit of their communities. A former archaeologist, she has worked in the heritage sector for over 25 years. Her practice is embedded in the principle that heritage matters and has the potential to change people’s lives in a positive way.

Ged O’Brien is the founder of the Scottish Football Museum at Hampden Park. He is the discoverer of Andrew Watson: the world’s most influential player of colour. He is the author of ‘Played in Glasgow’ and is currently writing ‘The Scottish Game: How Scotland invented Modern World Football’.

WANT TO KNOW MORE? 

• Part two of this series explores the important role the Green played in the development of football in Scotland.
• Join us for our online talk, ‘Glasgow: The Home of Modern World Football’ by Ged O’Brien on Wednesday 16th March
• Check out our Gallus Glasgow map and explore more stories of the Victorian city. Once there, why not add a few stories of your own?
• Prints of the map are available to buy in our online shop

By Anna Forrest

No. 41 ROTTENROW

The building at No. 41 Rottenrow was the Glasgow Lock Hospital for Unfortunate Females. The name “Lock” comes from the Old English “loke” for a leper house.  The first Lock Hospital in Britain was established in London and built on the site of a former leper house.

The female inmates of the Lock Hospital were not locked in or restrained. This was Glasgow’s first and only provision for women afflicted by venereal disease, believed to be the penalty for their evil ways. Glasgow’s population had exploded in these years with Irish immigrants and those displaced from the Highland areas, fleeing famine and poverty. There were also numbers of  military preparing for and retuning from combat abroad, carrying their own injuries and diseases.  These were also the typhus and cholera years. 

TREATMENT, KNOWLEDGE, REFORMATION

The new, purpose-built Lock Hospital at No 41 opened its doors in 1845-46 and was overwhelmed by numbers of diseased females whose only other recourse was to die in the streets and slums of this squalid area.  The building had 7 wards with provision for 80 beds and medical staff mainly living in.

The legend over the entrance read “Treatment, Knowledge, Reformation”, and a most curious thing, it was built to look like a tenement, sitting with the many verminous tenements that surrounded it. Rottenrow with its many wynds and vennels, was the least salubrious part of Glasgow.  Brothels and shebeens abounded in the tenements serving the music halls, variety theatres and attractions of every kind.

THE FIRST TEN YEARS

The Lock’s Annual Report for the first 10 years of it’s services indicates thousands of women and young girls, abandoned and desperate, applying for shelter and treatment. They are listed as mill girls, domestic servants, widows, actresses or ballet girls, and sadly, schoolgirls. They were cited in their diseased state by codewords and terms such as ‘newly fallen’ or ‘hardened’. 

Many came from nearby establishments such as The Magdalene Asylum for Fallen Women and Girls and from the Police Courts via Duke Street Jail. Once arrested, they would be stripped and examined and if signs of syphilis were obvious, then manacled and marched to the Lock for treatment.  This would be a terrifying ordeal as it was common knowledge that  few survived the Lock.  These measures were designed to control the behaviour of poor and vulnerable women.

REFORMATORY CONDITIONS

Although not legally restrained, the women were kept in reformatory conditions. Admissions had their heads shaved, were deloused and disinfected with 3% carbolic solution.  They wore regulation brown drawers and smocks, and worked in the basement laundry and mortuary.  Average stay in the Lock was 29 nights. Diet was basic, porridge, milk, bread and broth, and small beer. 

The medical treatments were more experimental than effective.  Preparations such as, ointments, pills, salivations, poultices and mercury vapour baths were used.  Horrific though it appeared, regular food and shelter were often preferred to dying on filthy streets. Weathy, middle-class and respectable women were treated privately at home by their physicians.

From the earliest times finding cures for these diseases were rudimentary and superstition-ridden. Any  effective treatments would ultimately be used for the benefit of men, the unfortunate recipients of conditions caused and spread by women.  At this time fighting forces were of paramount importance. Barracks and garrisons opened their own hospitals only for the treatment of men. Ports and cities, such as Glasgow, operated police controls for the apprehension and detention of known prostitutes and women on the streets with no visible means of support. The closing and control of brothels and other draconian measures were enforced to curb a condition which was reaching epidemic proportions.

The Lock established classes given by worthy wives and mothers in Christian instruction and domestic duties to give the female inmates a glimpse of decency and cleanliness.  Social Hygiene Committees, Lady Child Savers, Street Mission work and charities abounded in these years, working to clear the Second City of the Empire of squalor and sin.

Anna Forrest has carried out extensive research on the Glasgow Lock Hospital. Her interest began whilst she was working as a Librarian at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, which features a ‘Lock Room’ containing records relating to the hospital. Over many years Anna pieced together the history of the hospital, which she had originally been told didn’t exist, with the aim of making sure the public knew the stories of  the women and girls treated there. 

WANT TO KNOW MORE? 

• Our Gallus Glasgow animation follows a day in the life of Elizabeth and her family in 1864, the year Sulman created his ‘Bird’s Eye View’ of the city. Working as a domestic in the West End, Elizabeth has heard stories of girls sacked for minor misdemeanours who have then ended up in the Lock. Read her story here.
• Check out our Gallus Glasgow map and explore more stories of the Victorian city. Once there, why not add a few stories of your own?
• Prints of the map are available to buy in our online shop

By Sara Sheridan

Glasgow is great at claiming people as its own – so I’ve chosen women who contributed to the life of the city, who lived there but weren’t necessarily born there. That’s Glasgow.  

1 Agnes Dollan (1887–1966), became Lady Dollan in 1946. She was an activist and speaker for the Women’s Social and Political Union, the Women’s Labour League and the Independent Labour Party and was jailed for a short time in 1917 for protesting the council’s rent rises. Lady Dollan also helped to organise the infamous Glasgow rent strike alongside Mary Barbour and Helen Crawfurd. The first female Labour candidate to stand for election to Glasgow City Council, she remained in office for a decade. 

2 Catherine Carswell (1847–1946) was fired from the Glasgow Herald for an unsanctioned review of DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow (which had been banned under the Obscene Publications Act.) Carswell corresponded with Lawrence who mentored her when she was writing her autobiographical novel, Open The Door!, which won the Melrose Prize. She also received death threats for writing the first warts & all biography of Burns, refusing to gloss over Burns’s sexual misdemeanours and his heavy drinking. Carswell was also a victim of marital domestic abuse and her marriage was annulled on grounds of her husband’s insanity in a groundbreaking legal case. 

3 Glaswegian Surgeon, Katherine MacPhail (1887–1974) ran hospitals in Serbia during the First World War after being refused permission to serve on the Western Front by the War Office. She contracted typhus and nearly died but stayed on to found the country’s first children’s hospital and as a result she was interned during the Second World War and repatriated. In 1945 she returned to Belgrade with the first relief units to go into the country. 

4 Dot Allan (1886–1964) was a successful Glasgow writer during the 1920s and 30s. Her work was misidentified by the Times Literary Supplement as being by a man because she didn’t write about domestic situations, focussing instead on politics, class and gender issues. She wrote ten novels set in Glasgow and also worked as a freelance arts journalist, interviewing internationally famous actress  Sarah Bernhardt when she played the Pavilion Theatre. 

5 Agnes Hardie (1874–1951) was a stalwart of Scottish Labour. Hardie was a talented platform speaker. She was the first female member of the Glasgow Trades Council and sat on the Glasgow School Board as well as being Women’s Organiser of the Labour Party for five years at the end of the First World War. In 1937 she became an MP. A pacifist, she opposed conscription during the Second World War and was nicknamed the ‘housewife’s MP’ because she frequently spoke out at Westminster about food shortages and rationing. 

6  Born in Helensburgh, portrait artist and Glasgow Girl Norah Neilson Grey (1882–1931) served as a nurse during the First World War in the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and sketched what was going on around her in her spare time. There were hardly any war correspondents during the first war so women who wrote and drew what was happening are now important historical resources. She sat on the hanging committee of the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts after the war and her work won a silver medal at the Paris Salon in 1923, where she often exhibited. Today her paintings are in several national collections.

7 Marie Loftus (1857–1940) became one of Britain’s best-paid music hall performers, earning £100 a week in the 1890s. She toured the USA and South Africa. She worked with her daughter Cissie (1876 – 1943) who was a mimic, actress and music hall performer. It was said that ‘Glasgow never had a greater favourite.’

8 Born in Paisley, Jessie Newbery (1864 – 1948) was a Glasgow Girl who taught embroidery at the Glasgow School of Art, pioneering the first needlework classes at the school in 1894. She frequently used the suffragette colours in her work – a mark of her support of the cause. She also helped to make suffragette banners for marches. Her work also included the stylised rose motif which became one of the symbols of the Glasgow style. Newbery painted as well as stitching and supported women throughout her life, often providing exhibition and studio space for other female artists. 

9 Catherine Taylor (1868–1930) was a  Gorbals cinema cashier who is said to have firebombed Ayr Racecourse in 1913 in support of the campaign for women’s suffrage. Her involvement was kept secret by her family until after her death. 

10 Eunice Murray (1878–1960) was a writer, campaigner and Scottish President of the Women’s Freedom League (which operated offices and a tearoom on Sauchiehall Street). In 1913 a letter printed in the Glasgow Herald declared that if more people could hear Eunice speak, the ‘vote would be won without delay’. During the First World War she worked in a munitions factory and was involved in what she mysteriously termed ‘confidential business’. After women got the vote in 1918, Murray was the first Scottish woman to stand for Parliament that year (in Bridgeton), though she did not win the seat. Passionate about women’s history, she wrote Scottish Women of Bygone Days and headed a campaign for the creation of a Scottish folk museum, which came into being in the 1930s. 

11 Jessie Russell (1850–1881) was a poet and dressmaker whose feminist work ‘Woman’s Rights vs Woman’s Wrongs’ was published in the Glasgow Weekly. 

12 Helen Macfarlane (1818–1860) from Barrhead wrote the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto. The daughter of a wealthy mill owner, Macfarlane’s story is memorialised in the play Rare Birds by Penny Cole.

Writer and activist Sara Sheridan writes about women’s history in both fiction and non-fiction. Her 2019 book Where are the Women? remaps Scotland as if women’s achievements were memorialised in our built and rural landscape in the same way as men’s are. This alternative guidebook was chosen by the David Hume Institute for the First Minister’s Summer Reading List. She is currently writing a novel set in 1846 in Glasgow.

WANT TO KNOW MORE? 

• Book a ticket for our evening talk ‘Where are the women?’ with Sara Sheridan, Wednesday 9th February at 7.30pm.
• Check out our Gallus Glasgow map and explore more stories of the Victorian city. Once there, why not add a few stories of your own?
• Prints of the map are available to buy in our online shop

By Dr. Karen Malley-Watt

WOMEN’S RIGHTS, DICKENS & DRESSMAKING

What links Charles Dickens, women’s rights activists, dressmaking and the Glasgow Chess Club? No, this isn’t a bad Christmas cracker joke but an important piece of Glasgow history. The Glasgow Athenaeum, now The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, has played an important role in helping to shape Glasgow’s cultural training and commercial output. It is noted that the Glasgow Athenaeum’s origins lie with James Provan who was handed a leaflet for the ‘Glasgow Educational Association’ after attending a chemistry lecture (James Lauder, ‘The Glasgow Athenaeum: A Sketch of Fifty Years’ Work (1847-1897)). Through this interaction the Glasgow Commercial College (later the Glasgow Athenaeum) was born, holding its first public meeting on the 3^rd December 1845 where they appointed 12 (all-male) Directors with Robert Reid as President.

GROWING DEMAND

Over the next few years the Board raised funds to secure rooms at the Robert Adam designed Assembly Rooms in Ingram Street and celebrated by holding a ‘first soiree’ in December 1847 with nearly 3000 people in attendance. The halls were richly decorated with banners, floral wreaths, evergreens and painted ‘devices’ which included a suspended emblematic painting representing Time showing to Britannia science, art, fame and literature. The evening was accompanied by music, drinks and speeches. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was the main event of the night. The Fife Herald noted that the demand to hear Mr Dickens was so great that the Directors were forced to create a temporary gallery the length of the north side of the hall to accommodate 500 people! 

By the 1880s the demand for classes and an increase in space to house training facilities and classrooms had grown. The new Athenaeum building, designed by Messrs John Burnet, Son & Campbell, opened on the 25^th January 1888. Located between the Faculty Hall and the Liberal Club, the building was designed in a ‘classic style of architecture’ and was described in amazingly vivid detail by The Glasgow Herald  just one day after the opening. The article on the 26^th January 1888 takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the building providing floor dimensions, departments, facilities and investigations of the rooms held over the three storeys. It even highlights where the lavatories were situated (at the ‘entresol’ at each end of the building if you’re curious). Other features mentioned include electric lighting, two sets of statues by John Mossman, and heated water throughout for the radiators. The article even claims that the building was designed to be ‘practically fireproof’. What a claim!

A NEW BUILDING

The new building housed separate ladies and gentlemen’s departments, a centralised library, writing rooms, a restaurant, a newsroom, several recreation rooms (one of which was often occupied by The Glasgow Chess Club) and a college which consisted of eight classrooms which were ‘all large airy, and well ventilated’. The institution offered a variety of classes available for both men and women including languages, painting, drawing, dramatics, music and composition and dressmaking. The new building also allowed for recreational activities to take place and the space was used by a ladies’ choir, a dramatic club, a Spanish club and a gymnastics club.  

Organisations could book space to use the various rooms associated with the Athenaeum including the theatre. As such, more research is required to discover how deep the support for the suffrage cause ran in regards to the Glasgow Athenaeum. However, the building’s active connection with providing a platform for the women’s movement, via speakers and events, has been greatly overlooked. 

This has been a very short and brief tour of the spaces and associated events which took place in the spaces associated with the Glasgow Athenaeum. There is still so much more to discover regarding these important Glasgow buildings and the people associated with them!

Dr Karen Mailley-Watt is a Glaswegian historian who has a passion for rediscovering Glasgow’s radical and cultural histories in relation to the built environment. She is one half of the History Girls Frae Scotland.

Twitter: @mailley_watt

Instagram: @scottishwomenartists

• See if you can spot The Athenaeum on our Gallus Glasgow map
• Once there, why not explore the map and add a few stories of your own?
• Prints of the map are available to buy in our online shop