At the Coast
By D. W. BROGAN
WE are " at the Coast," which, it is probably necessary to explain, is not the same as being "doon the Water." For going " doon the Water " is a journey, preferably from the Broomielaw, the heart of Glasgow, past the docks and the shipyards and Ben Lomond to the Firth of Clyde. Anything beyond the Tail of the Bank, where the River Clyde becomes the Firth (giving Craigendoran the benefit of the doubt) is " doon the water," but Helensburgh, I hold, is not " at the Coast." That agreeable monument to the town- planning of the Colquhoun family is a Glasgow suburb, one of the more remote suburbs, but a suburb all the same. But Gourock, on the north shore and almost opposite, is " at the Coast," although it is a Glasgow (and Greenock) suburb as well. For with its swimming-pool, its lighted front, its municipal entertainments, it caters for the visitor who comes for a month or so, and that is the character of being " at the Coast." Did not Gourock, in the remote days before 1914, boast of a Kursaal, a vast barn that provided for roller-skating or what- ever the crazes of the day were ? And to clinch Gourock's claims, it is the uncontested G.H.Q. of the Clycle steamers, as Mr. George Blake has pointed out.* Wemyss Bay is too recent, too artificial; Craigendoran too far upstream. From Gourock the steamers, large and small, even the motor-vessels and the private-enterprise ferries, ply the Firth.
A holiday " at the Coast " was one mark of the Glasgow family. I rather question Mr. Blake's view that it was a purely middle-class affair. Many working-class families lived for a week (Glasgow Fair, Paisley Fair) in incredibly cramped quarters, but it is true that the economic basis of the coast- towns was the Glasgow middle-class summer visitor. Of course, many Glasgow families kept coast-houses which they used at week-ends, at the Spring Holiday (known as Easter in Eng- land), even at New Year. But more houses were let in the summer (their owners off on a jaunt elsewhere, to England even), and the shops and the -municipalities catered for the visitors—solid family parties, with a high proportion of children of school-age; for, alas, as the young began to make trial flights, foreign parts beckoned; Blackpool, Dinard, Ostend, Southend had the notorious effect of faraway hills, and Largs and Dunoon- and Troon were left to the children and their parents. Nothing is as it was, and the Coast is no exception. The economic basis of the little towns is now much more the boarding-house or hotel than the " let house." It was not the first or second war that wrought the change. It was the internal-combustion engine. The motor-car and the motor- coach both made movement from one spot to another easier and the Imitations of the towns on the north shore of 'the Clyde more evident; still more evident were the limitations of the islands. What use was a car on Bute, that hasn't even a • The Firth of Clyde. by George Blake. Collins 16s. bad toad round the island ? Not much more can be done with a car on Arran, and on the Great Cumbrae it only takes you six or seven minutes to drive right round the island. (This has not prevented some idle or ostentatious visitor from re- cently bringing a car to Cumbrae, to the rightful indignation of a resident.) Like the Bahamas (or is it Bermuda ?) Cumbrae can do without cars. -But on the mainland, even on the north shore, riven with the fiords of the lochs, the car and, still more the bus, make movement easy, and the thought of staying on one spot outrageous to the modern mind. So the buses are there; from Glasgow, Kilmarnock, Lennoxtown, from Dar- lington, \from Leeds. And so shops and restaurants, even public houses, cater to the transients. I have just seen darts being played in a very typical, grim Scottish pub. But the three players were all foreigners; one American, two English, indulging in their antics under the eyes of natives, silent and philosophical over what is still called, for historical reasons, strong ale."
The weather has been bad, and that has forced the visitors, shuddering in the cold rain, to take refuge, and some have been forced to take refuge in the pubs. What would a foreigner think of these austere shrines ? Some of them advertise snacks, but none are on sale or on view. (I think nostalgically of the speak-easy I once visited, which had a magnificent free-lunch counter, really free, in the building that also housed the police headquarters.) I have known Englishwomen startled at being herded into a little wooden horsebox. Some chromium has come in, and with it permission for mixed drinking, but brewer's Georgian is still rare. I can, however, confidently commend to Messrs. Betjeman and Lancaster the bar on " The Duchess of Hamilton." No pains have been spared to make one think that one is in the bar of an Olde Worlde pub on the road to London Airport or, for that matter, in a B.O.A.C. coaching- inn air-liner.
It is not only the pubs, moreover, that remind one that this is Scotland, not England. There are, for example, the churches.
The hard-headed Scots spent money like water in the nine- teenth century on church-building.. Not only a desire to glorify God accounts for this. The national passion for schism helped even more. That great, heroic but not totally beneficent event, the Disruption of 1843, meant that a Free Kirk was put down beside every parish 'church. And as the industrial towns grew (and with them, The satellites like " the Coast "), so did the need for new quoad sacra parishes. In brisk competition with each other, the churches proliferated. And on Sunday (erro- neously called the Sabbath by the more Judaically-minded zealots) they had no competition.
They have plenty now. And the reunion of the two great branches of the national Church has made many a kirk redundant. You can see it in the villages where, naturally and rightly, the parish church has been kept and the old U.F. church turned into a store-house or into an incipient ruin. This sacrifice has provoked a good deal of bad feeling and odium ecclesiasticum, as the correspond- ence columns of the Glasgow Herald show. And it is sad to see the heroic founding year, say 1846, on the lintel of a church now thoroughly disaffected—to borrow a word from the French, who have had so much need of it. But in the towns, even in the small towns, most churches are still in commission. In the town where we are, " at the Coast," there are many more churches in proportion to population than in Rome, and few bear much comparison in architectural interest. Firm among them is the citadel of the " Wee Frees," who have given to the word Protestant a meaning that Worms or Geneva did not know.
Of great emotional and practical importance to the Coast, to the north shore anyway, is the steamer question. Some readers of the Spectator may remember the wail of indignation that was aroused when British Railways threatened to cut down the Clyde shipping services. The bigger towns saw them- selves crippled, the smaller ones stranded. The authorities have retreated a bit, and there can be no busier pnblic-relations officers than those who have to defend every device of the railways to make one ship do what two or three did before. Some of the grievances are, perhaps, mere-1y a matter of pride. To have known- service with a real steamer that could race its rivals, and to have to put up with a little motor-vessel more fit for the Forth-and-Clyde Canal than for one of the great water- ways of the world, is hard indeed. " The Countess of Breadal- bane " is a trim little craft, but its home port should be Kirkin- tilloch or, possibly, Fort Augustus. The railway executive, if that is the ruling authority, shows, however, a fine sense of hierarchy. For The Countess of Breadalbane " is much smaller' than " The Marchioness of Lome," which, in turn, is much smaller than the " Duchesses " (of Hamilton and Mont- rose). There may be more than mere rank in the peerage involved, for both Breadalbane and Lorne are Campbell titles, and the two Duchesses recall to the genealogically minded the transfer of lordship over Arran, from Hamilton to Graham, which death and marriage brought in the not distant past. But I think British Railways missed a chance in not building three " Duchesses," or in not giving one of them three titles. What if one could say to the English visitor, " That's ' The Duchess of Hamilton, Brandon and Chatellerault ' coming up to the pier " ?
But it is the motor vessels, more fit for Sir Alan Herbert's Thames than for the Firth of Clyde, that rouse the praefer- vidum ingenium Scotorum. Who could bear to travel in a boat named " The Wee Cumbrae " ? In wet weather (of which there is lots) and in stormy weather (of which there is some) it must be highly uncomfortable. And, in any case, why " Wee Cumbrae ' ? Does B.R. think that the pet name will distract attention from the cockle-shell character of the craft serving the river that builds the largest ships in the world ? In any case, has anyone ever heard the Lesser Cumbrae called " wee ? Is this worthy of an archipelago where, if Sir Walter Scott is to be believed, the parish minister, a century and more ago, magnanimously prayed for " the Greater and Lesser Cumbrae and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland " ?
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