Complete New Tales of Para Handy Page 12

  “Ass weel ass a wheen o’ Bruttish gentry there’s a couple o’ Princes frae Chermany or somewhere. Every carriage and trap in the coonty seems to have been hired to meet the steamer and take them ower to the West Loch chust after breakfast, and auld McSporran’s up to high doh aboot the whole thing.”

  “Iss that so indeed,” said Hurricane Jack. “Well, well” — and he drained his glass. “Boys, I think we should awa’ and have a considered word with our colleagues at the Coal Pier…”

  Anyone up and about in Tarbert at three o’clock the following morning would have been aware of mysterious goings-on in the darkness of the harbour. The silhouettes of the steam-lighters moored at the Coal Pier seemed to be moving, though the engines were silent. Closer examination would have revealed that the dinghy of each puffer had been lowered into the water and, with two men heaving at the oars, was painfully towing its parent puffer across the water — apparently toward the steamer pier a couple of hundred yards away.

  When McSporran strode onto the pier just after eight o’clock to inspect the arrangements for the arrival of the Duchess of Fife and her very special passengers, he could not believe his eyes.

  Its entire length was occupied by a row of five puffers moored stem to stern. A skiff could not have been manoeuvred in to the jetty.

  As for the expected steamer…

  McSporran spent 30 frantic minutes trying to get the puffers shifted. But the crews had all mysteriously disappeared and, though he could cast off the mooring lines, he could do nothing to move the boats for not only were their anchors down (but no steam up to allow them to be raised again), they were also chained tightly together.

  “It’s naethin’ to do wi’ me, Mr McSporran,” said the Tarbert policeman to whom the piermaster had appealed for help. “The boats iss chust berthed: they’re no’ breaking ony law that I’m aware of.”

  At nine o’clock, with the Duchess of Fife due in just 15 minutes, he admitted defeat.

  The waiting conveyances were moved round to the only available berth in the harbour.

  The coal pier.

  From their vantage point on a hill above the town, the crews of the five puffers watched with some considerable relish as the chartered paddler approached the steamer pier, her captain plainly in ill-humour as he leaned from the wing of the bridge to hear a shouted apology from McSporran, and his instructions about berthing against the tiny, grimy puffer quay.

  They watched the dozens of gentry on their way to Islay pick their way down the gangways and across the littered, coal-rimed jetty towards the waiting carriages.

  They watched the retinues of servants who followed with all the massed paraphernalia of an Edwardian shooting-party at its grandest.

  And, above all, they watched the mortification, embarrassment and humiliation of the snobbiest piermaster on the whole of the Firth.

  “Weel, that’s set his gas at a peep” said Hurricane Jack with some satisfaction. “I think it’ll be some time afore McSporran kicks the Tuscan — or any ither puffer come tae that — from its berth again!”

  FACTNOTE

  The Glasgow to Ardrishaig service was jealously guarded and promoted by David MacBrayne as the paramount Clyde route, as indeed it was. An end in itself for round-trip passengers on a day excursion, it was much more than that. It was the major water-borne through-route to the Western and Northern Highlands and Islands and many of its patrons were the wealthy landowners and gentry (and their guests) who lived most of the year in city homes — in London as often as Glasgow — but spent much of the summer months on the Highland estates.

  THE OVERLAND CONNECTION — Although the town was very much the crossroads for passengers going west and north, there never were any scheduled steamer services from Tarbert to Campbeltown and intending passengers faced an uncomfortable, clattering coach journey over much of the length of the Kintyre peninsula. The 40-mile trip would have taken almost a whole day by horse-drawn omnibus. The first motor buses appeared in the area in 1907 — needless to say in MacBrayne livery!

  It truly was an express service. Despite requiring to make nine intermediate stops, Columba reached Tarbert after a 90-mile passage from Glasgow in less than five hours and arrived at her terminus and turning point, Ardrishaig, 40 minutes later.

  Those bound for Islay or Jura disembarked at Tarbert while those headed further North or West — to Oban or Mull, Inverness or Skye — stayed on board till Ardrishaig and then transferred to the Crinan Canal packet.

  The dovetailing with MacBrayne’s West Highland fleets meant that a passenger leaving London on the overnight train could be in Islay in time for tea the next afternoon, a time-scale only possible today by air. Those travelling north from Ardrishaig could reach Oban for high tea, Fort William for dinner.

  Excursionists were an increasingly important market and it can be said that David MacBrayne almost invented the concept of the inclusive tour — and assiduously promoted it. The full day trip from Glasgow to Ardrishaig and return cost in 1899 only 12/- (60p!) in first class and 7/-(35p) in second: both inclusive of a meals package consisting of breakfast, lunch and tea!

  Demand on the route was such that as well as Columba’s daily service there was an additional sailing in the peak months by her consort Iona, which left Glasgow at 1.30 p.m. and reached Ardrishaig at 7.15: here she lay overnight before returning to Glasgow first thing the following morning.

  Sadly, there were harbours where the puffers and their ilk were treated very much as poor relations, with their own designated berths in some hidden corner, and with officials anxious to keep the main pier as the preserve of the steamers, the yachts and the occasional scheduled cargo service.

  One has the distinct impression that Para Handy and his crew were always happier in the smaller communities where they were assured of a warm welcome at any time of the year!

  16

  The March of the Women

  Para Handy consulted the tin alarm clock which hung on a string from a nail driven into the fo’c’sle bulkhead. “Nearly six o’clock: Jeck iss late,” he announced. It was a Saturday afternoon in August and the Vital Spark was lying at Anderston Quay, loaded to the plimsoll line with steel plates for the shipyard at Campbeltown.

  She was ready to sail and, indeed, Para Handy had planned to be half way to Greenock by this time. But Hurricane Jack, learning on their arrival in Glasgow the previous evening that his old command — the clipper Port Jackson — was docked at Leith, had taken the train to Edinburgh then and there to see his former colleagues, with the promise to return by early afternoon the following day.

  “Ye cannae trust that man at all,” said Macphail with some asperity, “he’s a mountebank! We’ve missed the tide noo and we micht as weel wait till the morn’.”

  Before the Captain could leap to the defence of his oldest friend there came the clatter of boots on the deck overhead and the man himself came bursting down into the fo’c’sle.

  “Sorry, shipmates,” he said, “but it’s chust been wan o’ those days and my head’s aal spinnin’ wi’ the stramash of it aal.”

  “Wass it a heavy night wi’ your friends, then, Jeck?” asked the Captain solicitously. “Jum will run up to the dairy and get a bottle o’ milk to settle you.”

  “It iss not last night that is the problem,” replied Jack with great vehemence, “and my head iss fine, thank you.

  “No, I got back to Glasgow as planned, just before dinner time. The trouble started when I came oot o’ Queen Street Station.”

  “Trouble?” Dougie put in anxiously. “What trouble?”

  “He’ll hae met a friend that owed him and they’ve been on the ran-dan for the last five hoors,” chipped in the Engineer with rancour.

  “Pay no attention, Jeck,” soothed Para Handy. “Chust tak’ your time and tell us exactly what went wrong and where, and whether you want anything done about it.”

  “George Square, my boys,” said Jack, “that’s where it’s aal happening: but nothing went wrong
! Everything went right! When I came doon the steps from the Station, the Square was chust packed wi’ wummin: nothin’ but wummin and gyurls ass far ass the eye could see!

  “There wass some sort of a wudden platform put up at the far end o’ the square, chust in front o’ the Toon Hall, and there wass a wheen o’ older wummin stood on it, wi’ wan o’ them aye rantin’ on aboot somethin’. I wisna’ much carin’, so I paid no attention to yon.

  “But aal the pavements at the station end o’ the square wass chust choc-a-bloc wi’ gyurls: red-heads and brunettes and fair haired gyurls that would stop a tram in its trecks they wass that bonnie.” He sighed with pleasure at the memory. “Dozens o’ them! Hundreds o’ them! I have never in aal my life seen sich a tempting array o’ feminine beauty aal in the wan place at the wan time!”

  Macphail the misogynist snorted: “And Ah’m sure you made their day too, and they wis jist speechless wi’ excitement at seein’ you,” he said dismissively, “bein’ the fine figure o’ a man you maybe used tae be — aboot 20 years ago. Your courtin’ days is done, Maclachlan, and it’s high time you admutted it and acted your age!”

  “Pay no attention, Jeck,” said the Captain. “He is chust jealous. Go on! Who were they aal?”

  “Suffry-jets,” said Jack. “Ye’ll have read aboot them. Gyurls and wummin wantin’ the vote.”

  “Wantin’ the vote?” said Sunny Jim incredulously. “Whitever will they think o’ next. Votes for wummin? Fat chance!”

  That dyed-in-the-wool anti-feminist, the Engineer, nodded in vigorous agreement.

  “Well, I don’t know,” began the Mate, who was notoriously (and unceasingly) henpecked. “Maybe they have a point…”

  “When are you goin’ tae hae the courage tae start wearin’ the breeks in your ain hoose?” demanded Macphail truculently and it was only the Captain’s timely intervention that prevented a trading of insults between the two.

  “Go on Jeck,” he repeated firmly: “and tell us aal aboot these suffry-jets.”

  The suffragette movement, till now largely directed towards the thinking women of the London area, had embarked on promoting a more national support, and Hurricane Jack had by chance debouched onto George Square in the midst of their first ever rally in Glasgow. There had been a considerable degree of local interest generated by the placing of a series of advertisements in local papers, bills posted everywhere proclaiming the place and time of the event, and a discreet but fervent word-of-mouth campaign.

  Holding the rally on a Saturday had been something of a stroke of genius since it made it possible for the factory girls of Glasgow to attend in droves, alongside the middle-class women who had been the main target of much suffragette proselytising till then.

  While most of the Glaswegian males who came upon the scene passed by, as it were, very firmly indeed on the other side, it was not in Jack’s character as a devoted ladies’ man of many decades devotion to pass up the opportunity to mingle with such a vast number of members of the opposite sex.

  So, setting his cap at a jaunty angle, and regretting bitterly that he lacked a brass-mounted telescope tucked authoritatively under one arm, he had infiltrated the crowds of young girls on the square opposite the station.

  After so many rebuffs, and frequent rudenesses, from the male sex, the young ladies surged eagerly and winningly around their new-found supporter and soon Jack was in his element.

  He accepted the leaflets they thrust into his hands: “I have aalways had a very high opeenion o’ gyurls chenerally,” said he gallantly: “and I wush you every success in your endeavours. I chust wush I wass able to be of some help…” and he bowed and touched his cap to every side.

  “We are planning to demonstrate forcibly, Mr MacLachlan,” cried one particularly stunning red-haired girl with a wide-brimmed white hat and an enormous parasol, “we will show our sisters in London that we are prepared to follow their example.”

  There was a chorus of approval.

  “We would be chaining ourselves to the very buffers of the trains,” she continued, “but they will not even let us into the station. Or to the railings of the City Chambers: but the Council has placed guards in front of them.”

  Once they had established that Jack was a seafaring man, they showed particular interest in his ship and the unfortunate Hurricane, carried away somewhat by the heady glamour of his surroundings, gave into the temptation of gilding the lily somewhat both in his description of the puffer: and in regard to his position on board her.

  “The finest vessel on the Firth,” he said firmly, with a pride and enthusiasm of which Para Handy would have most thoroughly approved, “sailing tonight for distant seas and far horizons under the command of yours truly.”

  And when, reluctantly, he dragged himself from their midst on the plea that he must return to his ship, the red-haired girl insisted on walking with him to Anderston Quay.

  “Not as big as I would have wished,” she said mysteriously when they reached the Vital Spark at her berth. “But she will do.” And resisting Jack’s clumsy attempt to place a farewell kiss on her cheek she jumped nimbly aboard a city-bound tram and waved him goodbye from its upper, open deck.

  “So there you have it, shipmates,” said Jack, beaming on the company. “Bonnie gyurls and a friendly atmosphere! D’ye think they wud have me for a suffry-jet for I would enlist tomorrow chust for the sake of the cheneral frivolity?”

  “You’re some man for the high jinks,” said Para Handy enviously and the crew climbed on deck and started to prepare for their delayed departure.

  Macphail scurried into his den to stoke up the boiler fires and Sunny Jim and Dougie lashed the puffer’s dinghy firmly across the hatch of the hold.

  As Para Handy, Hurricane Jack just behind him, opened the door of the wheelhouse, they were all suddenly aware of the music of a brass band a few streets away — but coming rapidly nearer. It sounded too as if a crowd was singing along with the playing of the band, and there were periodic excited whoops and cries.

  Then the clash and crash of the band and its followers became overwhelming, as the head of a substantial procession appeared round the corner of one of the warehouses and headed straight towards the Vital Spark.

  There were several hundred women trailing the band, singing enthusiastically at the tops of their voices, and a handful, all bearing suffragette placards, heading it. In the very van was a tall, red-haired girl wearing a broad-brimmed white hat and twirling a parasol on her shoulder.

  The song died away as the band came to a halt on the dockside immediately alongside the puffer. The marchers massed behind it in a semi-circle and a repeated staccato chant went up: “Votes For Women! Votes For Women! Votes For Women!”

  With a smile and a wave to the perplexed Hurricane Jack, the red-haired girl and two others stepped forwards and suddenly producing sets of hand-cuffs from, it seemed, thin air, they attached themselves to the hawsers holding the puffer fore and aft onto the quayside and threw the keys into the water.

  “Jum,” said Para Handy glumly, “wull ye go an’ tell Macphail he needna bother gettin’ up steam: and Jeck, seein’ you got us into aal this, wull you go and fetch a polisman? You know where I’ll be if you need me.”

  And, turning his back on the triumphant, chanting crowd, he made his way slowly along the deck and vanished down into the fo’c’sle.

  FACTNOTE

  Glasgow’s George Square has for generations been ‘centre stage’ for rallies, protests and public meetings ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. It thankfully escaped the worst ravages of the city’s postwar architectural vandalism and is still overlooked by the magnificent Victorian facades of the City Chambers, the General Post Office, and other properties in keeping with its scale and character: but one doesn’t need to look further than the adjacent skyline to see the philistine treatment which parts of the city received in the fifties and sixties.

  The Queen Street and Central Stations have survived more or less intact but long
gone, and much lamented, are the more modest but characterful Buchanan Street: and the most imposing of them all, St Enoch’s, with its sweeping carriageway and the towering gothic frontage of its integral hotel.

  A FORMIDABLE MATRIARCHY — The sole man in this family group looks appropriately worried about the encroaching feminism! Victorians were still getting used to the whole idea of photography and the only member of this particular group who looks at all happy about having a picture taken is the dog!

  The Suffragette Movement was at its zenith in the first decade of the century, spurred on by the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst. As well as political protest and pressure, it relied on less peaceful means of promoting the cause and what we would now call publicity stunts ranged from the relative innocence of protestors chaining themselves to railings at the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace or anywhere else where they felt attention would be focussed upon them: to the tragedy of the Derby of 1912, at which the Suffragette Emily Davidson threw herself under the hooves of King George V’s horse, brought it down, and was herself trampled to death.

  Many historians feel that the public revulsion stimulated by such activities was counter-productive to the cause, and that what in a sense ‘saved’ the Movement was the First World War, in which women played an incalculably valuable role. Indeed some commentators see the easing of suffrage restrictions which followed that holocaust as the country’s way of recognising the service of the nation’s womanhood.

  One of the more colourful, though less high-profile, supporters of the Movement was the composer Ethel Smyth, who joined the suffragettes in 1911 and in the same year composed for them what became their battle hymn — the splendidly up-beat and instantly memorable ‘March of the Women’.

  It is one of the few of her compositions recorded and marketed today. But she merits a much wider audience for such stirring programme music as the overture to her opera The Wreckers and above all for her magnificent and moving mass, written in 1891 and first performed in 1893 — but not heard again for more than 30 years. Now available on CD it memorably deserves acclaim and recognition.