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Clydeside: When the Workshop of the World Shut Up Shop |
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What the Church had protested about was a new cultural characteristic in post-war working class life. Despite the abject poverty of the masses, people were less subservient to the moral authority of church and state, and were more interested in leisure. Despite the Church’s warnings, and efforts to blame the phenomena on ‘alien’ cultural tendencies, Glaswegians still scraped together enough cash to go to ‘the dancing’ in their droves on a Saturday night, with 156 dancehalls existing in Glasgow during the early 30s.
Dancehall, Glasgow
© Scran |
The same Glasgow also boosted 100 cinemas, and films from America showed people a lifestyle and attitude that they had never experienced before. Football also became more popular than ever, with over a 100,000 attending Rangers and Celtic derbies. Unemployment and poverty couldn’t contain people’s aspirations. The Victorian age and its values were truly finished.
All of these tendencies during the inter-war years in Glasgow demonstrated a deep cultural shift in the mindset of people living in and around Clydeside, and, in turn, Scotland as a whole. Despite a Victorian, industrial infrastructure that could no longer supply enough jobs for the population, despite decrepit Victorian housing and terrible standards of public health, and despite the Church and the State nostalgically pining for a golden age of very British order and rigid class stratification, the people of Clydeside could not be prevented from arriving on the doorstep of modernity.
It would take several more generations, however, until Clydeside fully awoke from its Victorian dream. The Second World War would start the wheels turning again, artificially sustaining the heavy industries for a few decades more, and artificially delaying the inevitable final slump. Consequently the slump of the Clyde’s once great industrial power was drawn out for most of the 20th Century, and the attendant social problems accompanied its ill-fated journey every step of the way.
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