The curious case of the vampire hunters in the night-time

Glasgow necropolis

 In 1954, PC Alex Deeprose was called out to the Southern Necropolis in Glasgow. He was expecting it to be vandalism. What he found instead was going to cause a worldwide moral panic and the introduction of new censorship laws in Britain.

He found the bizarre sight of hundreds of children, some as young as four and others as old as 14, armed with knives and sticks. They were patrolling the graveyard. For seven-foot tall vampires.

I'm exaggerating. They were looking for a seven-foot tall vampire. According to the children, he had iron teeth and had kidnapped and eaten two local boys.

This legend had grown, and been given a name. The Gorbals vampire, it was called. Some of the parents of the children had been unnerved by the urban myth, and were actively seeking reassurances from the police that it was bogus.

So, the authorities reassured. A local headmaster, at a time when the authority of a school headmaster carried some weight in the community, stated in the local paper that there was nothing to the rumour. The police were adamant that no children had been reported missing, never mind any mysterious deaths were the victim had two bite marks on the neck and no blood left in the body – if that had happened, PC Alex Deeprose wouldn't have gone out to check for vandals that night, the entire Glasgow police force would be doing double shifts, and the papers would have been carrying public warnings.

However, the children weren't so easily assured. The following night, this army of Buffy the vampire slayers was out again on patrol. Then the following night.

In the 1950s, there was less sources of information to your average person. This rumour was spread by Chinese whispers essentially, and given a boost by its coverage in the papers. Which is understandable. It can either be interpreted by the reader as collective hysteria (in the old-fashioned medical understanding of the word), or it can push fear buttons in the psyche that maybe there is a vampire somewhere. For a newspaper, then and indeed now, it would be too good a story to pass up.

Was he in Glasgow in the 50s? No.

Of course, most parents could see it for what it was – a story that got out of control. Humans are social animals, and we are born with the instinct to follow the crowd no matter how mad the purpose of the crowd is. As a person grows into an adult they usually learn to have a degree of independence, to break away from the comfort of letting the crowd make the decisions for you, but a child hasn't made that difficult journey yet. To say no to your peers on this matter would require a high degree of scepticism, to point out the multitude of flaws in the story, and to do something that for a time at least seperates you from the crowd. This can be very dangerous when you're a child, it could easily get you bullied. So, just better to go along with the whole thing.

Needless to say, no vampires were found. So, where did it come from?

There was a lot of debate. In the bible, Daniel 7.7, talked about a monster with iron teeth. There was also a poem taught in Glasgow schools at the time about a monster with iron teeth.

Except, to the adults of 1950s Glasgow, this couldn't be right. Those things had been around for ages, and hadn't made them go hunting for vampires when they were kids. So what else could it be?

Comic books. They were new, filled with disturbing violence and horror, and they were foreign – American youth culture was radically displacing British youth culture at this time, a new sensation to the 1950s.

They were new, so new that most parents had never read them. When parents looked at them, there would have been a sense of alienation, of a disconnect from youth culture. Comic books were so unlike the Beano or the Dandy, the exciting new comics of their generation. So not only did these comic books ever so slightly make parents feel their age, but also because they had not immersed themselves in American comic book culture at all there was no sophisticated understanding of the medium.

There was also a strong sense of anti-Americanism in Britain at the time. America had been allies in the second world war, but unlike the rest of Europe we had received an interest-based loan to reconstruct with. Not only that, but it was clear that Britain was on the decline and America and the USSR were ascendent. Of course, kids were mainly oblivious to this and they loved American pop culture. To the generation of parents back then, however, this jarred with their sensibilities. There was almost a crusade against the corrupting influence of American culture, and the Gorbals vampire was the perfect scapegoat for these crusaders.

Of course, some eggheads always want to ruin a good prejudice. Academics who had studied the things pointed out that there was no mention of a creature matching the descriptions of the Gorbal vampire, in any of the comic books available at the time (Which was a lot more limited than it is today). They also pointed out the bible reference, and the poem reference, two sources that the children will almost certainly have encountered. There was also that parents would sometimes threaten their children with "the iron man" (the Boogeyman, in other words) if they didn't do what they were told.

Something else that should have been remembered is that the Necropolis contains a quarter of a million dead people. Noise and light from the nearby ironworks at the time cast mysterious shadows everywhere. If you live anywhere near somewhere like that as a kid, it's going to spook you out. Children create ghost stories all the time, so you would expect those kids to invent a supernatural narrative that involves the graveyard in some way.

However, reason didn't stop..well, anyone. To blame the bible and a poem in a school-book, and geographic location, would have felt wrong. No-one even thought yet to criticise tv - the media hysteria over the corrupting influence of television was a decade away, to describe 1950s British tv as toothless doesn't do the word justice, and most of these kids wouldn't have had a television set anyway.

The media started calling for, and it was adopted by the political classes, young minds to stop being "polluted" by the "terrifying and corrupt" comic books. Censorship.

This led to the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 which, for the first time, specifically banned the sale of magazines and comics portraying "incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature" to minors.

Remember, despite the even-handed language, this was created to stop comic books. Given that this was the 50s, people were a bit more delicate. So, comic books with titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, with the 50s schlock images that were only a couple of steps up from a penny dreadful, were now banned (in America, something similar had been going on with congressional hearings on the matter, causing a clampdown on the industry).

In Britain, there were no actual prosecutions for the act in that decade, or indeed until 1970. Cases were brought, but the Attorney general refused the majority of them.

So has anything changed since then? I would argue that they haven't. Across time, the parental generation panics when a new medium appears that children collectively enjoy. In the 50s, comic books. In the 60s, television and pop music that wasn't polite to its elders. This goes back as far as mankind: in ancient Greece, Greek plays were denounced for the effect they were having on the young.

Looking back, these scares are ridiculous. Most parents today would be glad if their child studied ancient Greek plays, or listened to the pop music from their youth. And yet, we do have similar scares today. Video games are routinely denounced for their corrupting influence, in spite of the fact that as video game violence has been increasing violent crime overall has been decreasing. But video game culture is constantly renewing itself, lots of kids (and adults, it should be pointed out) play them, game culture is a culture that can't be viewed from the outside, so there is plenty of scope for parents to feel alienated.

So, things haven't changed. But then, they never will. Children will always have their own culture, and that will always worry their parents.

Whig propaganda, part 1

 Here is the first in a series of articles on Whig propoganda, by guest writer Christopher Whitelaw:

 Propaganda is defined in the oxford dictionary as, “information, ideas, opinions or images, often only giving one part of an argument, which are broadcast, published or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people's opinions.” In the case of Whig propaganda the information, ideas and opinions were propagated through, pamphlets, plays, show trials, speeches, political literature and other methods. They gave one side of an argument - the other side was Jacobitism.

 The philosopher Jacques Ellul describes two types of propaganda, of which Whigs utilised before, during and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89.

 The first was of agitation, used to incite revolution or undermine an existing regime; secondly - propaganda of integration, used to promote acceptance and support amongst its citizens for that system. To justify the changes of 1688, the Whigs propagated the image that is known traditionally as the Glorious Revolution and became the main exponent against Jacobitism.

 The Whig ideology or perhaps, to an extent - the Whig illusion - did not occur immediately and has received several interpretations. Steve Pincus, in a non-Whig perspective, renamed the Revolution of 1688, the First Modern Revolution and argued that it was violent, divisive and popular. 

 In 1848 Thomas Babington Macaulay, with his History of England, laid out the classic Whig statement, that unlike other revolutions, the events of 1688-89 were bloodless, consensual, aristocratic and sensible; and identified the Stuarts with the evils of absolutism and Roman Catholicism - the antithesis of the Whig mantra of Protestantism, progress and property. It is also worth noting the context of his work, which was written during the peak of the Chartist movement during a period when revolution was breaking across Europe and the danger of revolution occurring in Britain very real. Macaulay was suggesting England already had its revolution, playing down the need for revolution, and was unlike the bloody revolutions experienced in Europe (for example in France in 1789) implying the bloodless and sensible English revolution was original to England and that revolution, which was a natural occurrence and inevitable for all other countries, had already happened - a theory the Whigs of the Jacobite period would have certainly subscribed to.

 The Glorious revolution was far from bloodless; in England there was the threat of, and actual violence

against property and people. In Scotland, John Graham of Claverhouse raised the Stuart standard in April 1689 and began the first Jacobite rebellion leading a small band of professional cavalry from the Scottish army and died in battle at Killiecrankie. In March 1690, James invaded Ireland to reclaim his crown - his plan was to use Ireland as an entry point to attack England and Scotland. On the July 1 1690 at the river Boyne, James’s army was defeated by English forces. Contrary to the so called bloodless revolution, blood was shed; however, the Glorious Revolution was used again to highlight the cultural and social changes that had been occurring in England prior to the revolution. The rapid improvements of arts and manufactures, and the correspondent extension of commerce, followed the clear and accurate limitation of the

prerogative. These produced a degree of wealth and affluence which diffused a feeling of independence and a high spirit of liberty through the great body of people.

 

Haggis!

 In every country, there's a strange need to make up stuff for the unwary foreigner. In Scotland it's the Wild Haggis!
 Haggis is sheeps heart and liver and lungs wrapped in spices and oatmeal and its stomach, and then boiled. Personally I don't like the taste, but it's the food most associated with Scotland, and traditionally it gets served on Burns night.
 Is Haggis Scottish? Certainly, we've taken it as our own. However, like everything else it has a complicated history.

The use and vertues of these two severall kinds of Oate-meales in maintaining the Family, they are so many (according to the many customes of many Nations) that it is almost impossible to recken all;” and then proceeds to give a description of “oat-meale mixed with blood, and the Liver of either Sheepe, Calfe or Swine, maketh that pudding which is called the Haggas or Haggus, of whose goodnesse it is in vaine to boast, because there is hardly to be found a man that doth not affect them

— Gervase Markham, The English Huswife (1615), England.

Which is pretty early. But...

Thy fowll front had, and he that Bartilmo flaid; The gallowis gaipis eftir thy graceles gruntill, As thow wald for ane haggeis, hungry gled.

— William Dunbar, Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (circa 1520), Scotland.

So, we're still in the lead (so to speak). But...

For hagese'.

Þe hert of schepe, þe nere þou take,

Þo bowel noght þou shalle forsake,

On þe turbilen made, and boyled wele,

Hacke alle togeder with gode persole,

                                          — Liber Cure Cocorum, circa 1430, England.

 From all this, it's impossible to say who actually invented Haggis. England and Scotland are neighbours, so historically it's easy enough for ideas to be transmitted frequently between the two. Haggis is a food that pretty much uses the whole of the ship in as efficient a manner as possible. It would be strange if haggis hadn't evolved independently amongst agricultural peoples over the whole of human history. Just like porridge, a high-energy food that's incredibly easy to produce.
 So, historians have argued that haggis is in fact much, much, older than England or Scotland. It's been argued that the ancient romans were aware of it, that the Scandanavians brought it over in their longboats, that it was even referenced in Homers The Odyssey. I think there probably is a grain of truth in this. Food evolves, ideas evolve. Rarely in human history does an idea spring forth without antecendant. Haggis is Scottish, inasmuch as we still eat it and it's culturally associated with us, but at the same time it almost certainly has wider historical implications.

It's where Listerine comes from.

 Glasgow has a good reputation for medical research normally, but in the last few months, Glasgow has been producing some really amazing medical science. At the beginning of the year, creating a 3D map of a cancer protein, in April building and developing a fabricator that can make drugs on demand, and last week a therapy for stroke patients that's had modest success.
 This isn't anything unusual, given that this is the city Joseph Lister did his pioneering work in antisceptics. The Hunterian museum at Glasgow univeristy has some of his medical props behind a glass case that you can go and see, if you can navigate your way through the byzantine cloisters of Glasgow university, and I would recommend it; Glasgow university is where sanitation in the hospital theatre got down to business.

Joseph Lister.

 Joseph Lister was born into a Quaker family in Upton, Essex, 5th April 1827. As a Quaker, he suffered institutional prejudice, and following a good educational display in maths,  science, and languages, went on to do art at the University of London (one of the few places he was allowed to go to). By the end, he came out with an Honours in Medecine and entered the Royal college of Surgeons aged 26. In 1854, he became friend and assistant to James Syme of the Edinburgh Royal infirmary.
 So, he essentially had an extensive apprenticeship in the world of surgery. In time, he became professor of Surgery at Glasgow university, and what struck him most was 'ward fever' - patients dying not from the trauma of surgery (no anaesthetic), but from something else.
 Like all good scientists, he didn't work in isolation. Others had noticed. Florence Nightingale famously made a connection between bad hygiene and mortality rates. However, less known to history was the work by a Hungarian doctor called Ignaz Semmelweiss. He argued that if a doctor went from one patient to another after doing surgery, that doctor would pass on to the next visited patient a disease. He recommended washing hands in Calcium Chloride between each patient. He was virtually ignored, and tragically died of blood poisoning in 1865. However, he had been on the right track and under his watch mortality rates dropped from 12% to 1%.
 At this time, Louis Pasteur and John Snow had developed the idea that bacteria were the cause of diseases, and these bacteria could be spread through the air or by liquid. It didn't take much of a leap for Lister to conclude that the deaths in hospitals were being caused by the transmission of bacteria to a body weakened by surgery. He concluded that the wound itself had to be cleansed. He covered the wound with a piece of lint covered in carbolic acid. He used this on patients who had a compound fracture. This is where the broken bone had penetrated the skin, leaving an exposed wound. This usually lead to gangrene and then death. Lister covered the wound made with lint soaked in carbolic acid, severely reducing deaths from this.
 Lister then invented a machine, which you can see in the Hunterian, that would spray a fine mist of carbolic acid around during surgery, and he became famous for reducing post-surgery deaths overall.
 The old, decaying, relics at the Hunterian just look like any other Victorian mad-scientist equipment, but they aren't. It's countless how many people were saved by this machine and its descendents. It's people like Joseph Lister who took a conservative, ossified, important branch of medicine kicking and screaming into a new mindset, where high levels of avoidable death just weren't acceptable anymore. The Victorians were both cool and weird - that the establishment fought against progress like this, in the face of good scientific evidence, shows how cliquey they were, even though they purported to be objective rationalists.
 Joseph Lister died on the 10th February 1912, leaving the world a much better place than when he came into it, and for that his memory is honoured, and why Glasgow loves to claim him as one of our own.

Deep-fried anything.

 As a Glaswegian, I have never seen a deep-fried mars bar. Honest. Friends from outside Scotland find this hard to believe, as it's one of the things we're famous for. It does sound like I'm lying to protect the reputation of the city (and, by extension, my own), but I'm really not. However our chip-shops do deep-fry pizzas, which they do put on the menu, so it's hard to believe that it's an urban myth.

It looks like something that normally lives fifteen fathoms down.

 According to a 2004 study by the NHS, 22% of Scottish takeaways did them. I've been in many takeaways, usually drunk, and I've never seen it on the menu anywhere. According to some fairly solid classroom rumour when I was at uni, you have to "ask" for it and provide your own Mars bar (it's like everyone involved knows, deep down, that it's not something to advertise), or any sweets that you bring with you. For example, at Easter they will apparently deep fry a cadburys cream egg.
 And that's the limit of my knowledge; a deep-fried Mars bar is one of those things I could never bring myself to ask for. In terms of health, it can't be as bad as deep-fried pizza or the bio-hazard they call British takeaway kebabs, but it's like Buckfast wine (a brand of caffeinated fortified wine). There's so many negative connotations that it would feel wrong to publicly purchase.
 Although deep-fried mars bars have yet to be linked to street violence, they symbolise our historically bad health record, and they are historical. When a foodstuff gets linked with a place, and it becomes famous, even when the foodstuff disappears from widespread use it can stay associated with that place. Whilst I'm not saying that Burns suppers a century from now will have the ceremonial deep-fried confectionary dish, I do think that they will be associated with Glasgow for at least a few decades more (the first one was reportedly sold in 1995 in Stonehaven, Aberdeen, but it almost certainly dates earlier). Like Chicken Tikka Massala, for better or worse, it's now forever a classic Glasgow dish.

Super Trouping for Glaswegians.

 Super Trooper, the ABBA song. It's one I, like everyone else, have heard many times. I vaguely knew the lyrics, but I was totally oblivious that Glasgow appears in them!




"Super Trouper beams are gonna blind me
But I won't feel blue
Like I always do
'Cause somewhere in the crowd there's you

I was sick and tired of everything
When I called you last night from Glasgow
All I do is eat and sleep and sing..."

 I've re-read the lyrics to try and find some meaning, but can't. I think our proud city was just used randomly, because it had enough syllables to fit into the tune. Which on the one hand is good as it papers over Glasgow's problems circa 1980, but on the other hand it's not easy to make out - I've heard that song a fair few times, and I had no idea. BBC4 are repeating every top of the pops from the 70s onwards, Super Trooper was on for weeks recently, and I still didn't hear it! It could be subliminal advertising, but Glasgow City Council have never been that devious or influential.

Glasgow, city of culture

 In 1990, Glasgow was the European city of culture.
 This was the culmination of a reinvention of Glasgows image. In the postwar period, Glasgow had suffered terribly from the effects of the loss of Empire. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Glasgow was popularly associated with violence and poverty, razor gangs, and drunkenness. Although Glasgow had always suffered from this image problem, it had been balanced by the sheer energy of the city that had at varying times made it the second city of the empire.
 Glasgow went through a malaise, where it lost its way and stopped being the wealthy, vibrant city it had been in the Victorian era. We were left with the ghost of better times, buildings funded by the tobacco lords and spice lords who had made their fortunes in the empire, some of the most famous scientists and engineers and politicians looking down from their plinths in George Square. This damage was building on itself; tourism was obviously low, and business was down as well. Glasgow needed to do something to get out of this terminal decline.

Gallery of modern art

 Starting from the early 80s, Glasgow city council went on a PR offensive. They ran a campaign, Glasgow's Miles Better, that was quite popular, to try and introduce some positive connotations with the city in peoples heads. Mr Happy from the mr men books was used as the cartoon character, and the ads painted Glasgow as a cultural centre that was also friendly to business.
 They dusted down Glasgows long-standing policy of making high culture freely available to everyone, and successfully worked a series of ambitious projects. The Burell collection, which had been lying dormant for decades, had a palace built for it and was opened in 1983. The SECC (Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre) was built in 1985; it looks like a cheap rip-off of the Sydney Opera House, and maybe it was, but having a generalised venue for culture and conferences and science exhibitions was good for business and for the local and international organisations to have somewhere safe and reliable they could use.

Burell collection

The big thing at the time was the Glasgow Garden festival 1988. This was a copy of two earlier ones in Liverpool and Stoke-on-Trent, which had been very successful. It was really a way to jolly people into not feeling embarassed or defensive about their city, that with some energy we could do the high-cultured stuff. In Thatchers Britain, although Thatcher was despised in Glasgow, it was good to say to the world that Glasgow was a place that could make money through business.
 At the same time, widespread attempts were being made to try and change the culture of violence, sectarianism and alcoholism that Glasgow had become notorious for. Projects to stamp them out, enforce laws, and to make them socially unacceptable were started in this time.
 All this paid off, as in 1990 Glasgow became the European city of culture, the same year that the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall was opened). By 1990, the big works had largely been done, but this synergistic approach had changed something. Of course, Glasgow did and still does have many problems. But the culture of Glasgow and the west of Scotland had changed for the better, the worst excesses of a decade ago were now not only unacceptable but could be changed.
 Glasgow in this period was an experiment, an attempt to use culture as a means of urban regeneration. It was a success, so it's been copied around the world.