Excuse me, where's the Burrell?

 The Burrell collection opened in 1983 in Glasgow, as referenced by Rab C. Nesbitt in the episode 'culture'.
 The collection itself was donated by Sir William Burrell, a philanthropist shipping merchant, born slap-bang in the middle of the Victorian era when Glasgow was undergoing huge architectural and economic change. He became rich by ordering ships when the economy was going bad, and then using them when times were good - buy cheap and sell dear is the limit of my knowledge of business stuff, so that sounds plausible enough.
 Anyway, he was a lifelong collector who bequethed his enormous collection to Glasgow in 1944, with the condition that it be housed somewhere rural, with very specific ToC's. Glasgow is the dear green place, but this was a problem for the post-war Glasgow council, until it acquired Pollock county park (below):

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 So, that's pretty rural. This was another bequeth, given in 1967.
  But even this wasn't quite good enough for the terms and conditions! So, the trustees waived some of the rules to allow it to be used (what with it being perfect an' all). There was then a competition in 1971 to design a building, which was then opened by the queen in 1983.
 The Burrell collection holds a vast amount of art, but that isn't all of the actual Burrell collection. Burrell collected so much that one building isn't enough to store it! It's a vast collection of international art, furniture, medieval weapons, ancient Egyptian artifiacts, and sculputres.

Coatbridge in the past.

 Glasgow is awesome. I say that as a Glaswegian, and as a historian. Glasgow has had a decades-long belief in council-funded museums and arts, so that entrance is free. Now, I know that Coatbridge isn't Glasgow, but it's about five miles outside of Glasgow, and it has an excellent free museum.

 It's the Summerlee Heritage Musuem. I used to go there as a kid, and what's astonishing that - despite cosmetic changes - a lot of the original exhibits from the 1980s are still there! Coatbridge is an ex-mining and steel-making town, that contributed significantly to empire, and in the 19th century saw a massive influx of immigrants looking for work in the mines and steel-mills. It's one of those places where you just know it did a lot of mining - everywhere seems to be built on a hill. Coatbridge suffered heavily from the loss of mining, and the twentieth century saw Coatbridge go into serious decline. But, there are still marks and memorials to its robust past, and this museum is one that's been going for decades.


This is next to the tram stop. Yes, trams! They are so cool. This was taken during a beautiful summer day, when they have the double-decker 1930s tram out. As you can see, it's not 100% authentic - there isn't a smog so bad that you can't see 10 feet in front of you. But it's like a gentrified vrsion of being in the past.








 There are a row of houses, each one showing what a working-class house was like at different periods in history. This is Scotland in the 1960s. The TV is showing an old b/w advert for a washing spin-drier. It was intensely patronising to all women everywhere!





 Scotland in the 1940s. The radio was playing the songs that would've been on in the 1940s, some Judy Garland and Sing Sing Sing, when I was there. No Kenneth Horne, I'm afraid.









 I really like this kind of history, it's a history that is as remote as the famous stuff that happened in the same period, but it feels connected and approachable. It's the history of people who would've laughed that their way of life was of any interest to the people of the future, and it's this lack of inhibition about having an eye on the future that makes their lives and their motivations all the more fascinating. Also, these two houses were from the 1940s and the 1960s, two decades that the British have mythologised, which is why we find things like this quite charming.

 Oh, and two more things about Coatbridge..Madeline Smith's lover Emile L'Angelier spent his last day having a pub lunch in Coatbridge, in an area of Coatbridge called Whifflet. And, in Drumpellier, remains of stone-age settlements were found.

This day in history, 27th Spetember 1938.

 The RMS Queen Elizabeth launches from Glasgow, where it was built at Clydebank (John Brown and Company), named after the queen consort (later to become the Queen Mother). It had an interesting life, serving as a troop carrier during WWII, but really it's an excuse for bringing up the shipping industry of Glasgow. Glasgow built ships for the British empire, profited mightily from the trading opportunities that empire gave, and that's why in the post-war period Glasgow felt the loss of empire sharply. When ship-building was decimated in Glasgow, and not really replaced with anything, that was quite a blow to Glasgow and the west of Scotland, as well as to ship-building - generations of expertise lost.

Isaac Newton - the introduction

 Isaac Newton was born in 1642.
 I've always been in two minds about Newton. He was a brilliant scientist, but he was - by any standards - a loner, eccentric, and at times clearly suffering from a mental disorder. He was, for two centuries, the leading figure of physics, but he could also be ruthless in a way that would surely indicate psychopathology today. He was a historically fascinating man, but someone I definitely would not like to meet.
  This postng is really just a basic cover of the life of Newton - I will be posting more in-depth articles on his life, as there is just way too much to cover in a few paragraphs. He was a brilliant mathematician, a brilliant early physicisist, and he managed to get the problem with forgery in the English economy down at a time when it was threatening to destablise the economy.
 He was born into a time when science was just starting to flourish (Novum organum being published in 1620), Copernicus and Vesalius a century earlier, and these early scientists were getting used to what contemporary scientists take for granted as the scientific method - experimental observation, and using mathematical methods where possible to make a reasoned argument.
 And Newton was a brilliant mathematician - calculus (invented independently by Liebnitz) both differential and integral, infinite series, binomial theorem. His work on gravity and light means that, due to the importance of gravity and light in science, he was regarded as the definitive physicist until Einstein. Principia Mathematica, despite being impenetrable to a contemporary physicist, was pivotal - it gave the first precise deinfitions to mass, weight, force, the laws of motion, and of gravity.
 He was also a rampant egotist. His fight with Robert Hooke is infamous. He hated to tell the world about his results, but also felt the strong urge to get the results out there before someone else took credit for the work. He savaged Liebnitz for having the temerity to invent calculus at the same time. He got rich, became the head of the Royal Society, and was an insane alchemist who did not apply scientific principles to whatever nonsense he read. I mean really insane - some of the instructions for making lead into gold sound like a confused flu-ridden dream. Like Arthur Conan-Doyle, a brilliant man can believe in nonsense and shun the evidence AND be perfectly comfortable with this cognitive dissonance. And was it really cognitive dissonance? To us now, yes, but Newton was dealing with invisible, real forces in his professional life that he could measure. Without knowing that the stuff he was doing with alchemy was most likely impossible, his mind could make the slight leap to other equally invisible stuff - just that the evidence was maddingly elusive.
 Anyway, more on Newton later.

Today in 1580

 Sir Francis Drake completes his circumnavigation of the Earth, in his ship The Golden Hind (initially called The Pelican). It started off as a mission, a fleet of five ships, to raid Spanish holdings on the pacific coast of America, but he lost four ships (two were destroyed on purpose by Drake, as he was worried that they might get seperated from each other, the Marigold was lost with all hands, and the Elizabeth went home early)- he nevertheless carried on, raiding Spanish ships for treasure (which was clearly piracy), as Spanish ships were known to be laden with silver.
 He then sailed the Indian ocean, rounded the cape of good hope, apparently never having watched that episode of Blackadder II where they accidentally do the same, returned to the Atlantic, and then back to England. This took three years, which must have been a relief for a crew that would not have been expecting the mission they ended up doing. In 1581, Queen Elizabeth visited his ship and after dinner knighted him, which frankly must have been odd - the crew not being able to do any work because the court was temporarily having a party in the tiny confines of an Elizabethan boat (and these ships were tiny by todays standards).
 It was a pivotal moment for a fledgling empire. It allowed England to have a more accurate geographic knowledge of the world, which helped bolster it's maritime activities, giving it an advantage over Spain. It also allowed cartogrophers to draw more accurate maps, showing that the American continent was not attached to a Southern continent, and it opened up new previously undiscovered routes.

greed is good - part 1

"Cities obeyed the impersonal law of progress..cities expanded relentlessly year by year; fortunes grew larger; more and more automobiles appeared in the streets; people were wiser and better read than their ancestors – eventually, by automatic stages, we should reach an intolerable utopia of dull citizens, without crime or suffering or drama." - Malcolm Cowley.

In America in the 1920s, there was the illusion of prosperity. Everyone was getting in on it, and there was the very real feeling of having to keep up, or you were a total loser. It didn't help that there were success stories seemingly everywhere. When Ladies Home Journal prints the article 'Everybody ought to be rich", by Jakob Ruskob (in January 1929, just when everybody still in the game was about to lose all their money), you know that the greed has gotten to everybody. No wonder it was called the great depression – for a decade, everyone's hopes were risen, and then brought crashing down. For many, they must have taken it as a sign of personal failure.

Back in the '80s, there was minor obsession with stocks and shares, but this was nothing compared to the 1920s, when it became incredibly fashionable; shares have always been seen as easy money, and never more so than in the '20s. Really bad songs were lapped up (gramaphones, a sign of the times), lucky investors were watched like hawks by the public. The crooked ones weren't, they were too busy manipulating the prices from behind the scenes. A few rich guys got absurdly rich, everything collapsed, people starved, there was global social unrest, and some of the key figures played a huge role in dealing with the economic aftermath.

 I know that it's a cliche that should be avoided at all costs, but history really does repeat itself. On the one hand, this is very depressing. On the other hand, a good historian can see through the mania that's happening around them.

John Anderson - episode IV, a new folk

 John Anderson, founder of my university. Well, alright, he founded Andersons instition (which he never saw, as he bequethed it post-mortem), which then became the Royal Technical College, which then became the University of Strathclyde. And we had John Logie Baird as a pupil..when it was a college. He (John Anderson) is very much under-appreciated as a historical character in the history of Glasgow.
  He was friends with James Watt, and encouraged him in the development of steam power. He knew Benjamin Franklin, and from that worked on his own on electricity at a time when 'working on electricity' was akin to working with uranium in the early twentieth century - nobody really knew what the hell they were doing, but something scientifically interesting was clearly going on. He funded and built a better cannon, tried to sell it to the British - who weren't interested - and ended up selling it to the French!
On that last one, he was a radical, and supported the French revolution. He was radical in other ways too; as a believer in 'useful education' he ran classes for artisans in the evenings, and - and this is the unusual part, for the times - allowed women entry too! At the time, this must've seemed a wee bit mad, so I have nothing but respect for a man who was clearly ahead of the curve in that area.
 Anyway, interesting man in interesting times, with that type of egalitarianism that only really seems to have been fashionable in the 18th century - all humans are equal, should be given every chance to compete equally, and as a result there's no excuse not to make something of yourself. And 18th century Glasgow was cool (not as cool as 19th century Glasgow, though).