Читать книгу: «Tommy’s War: A First World War Diary 1913–1918»

Foreword

A small man in a badly made suit, a hat jammed on his head and an empty pipe between his lips, is walking down the street towards the tram, with a small boy attached to one hand, in turn clutching a mouth organ. Around him are men in uniform, loud gossipy women on the corner, the rattle of horse-drawn carts, the smells of sulphur, oil, coal and sweat. On the walls as he passes, lurid recruiting posters urge him to join the lads in France, to fight to save his women from the Hun, or simply exclaim that his country needs him. Head down, fingering his last stiff collar, he disappears into the crowd gathering by the tram stop. The streets are shabby and the war news is terrible. There is a faint sound of the mouth organ being played. Who is he, this man? What does he do? Does he have a wife at home, her hands coarsened with heavy washing and scouring, but her bread smelling sweet? Will he soon be wearing a khaki uniform, and die choking in French mud thinking of the small boy; or will he survive this so-called Great War? Does he like cards? What does he think of Germans, and this throbbing, clattering city where he has spent his life? But he has gone, vanished into time like the millions upon millions who lived through momentous times but who were not Lloyd George, or Haig, or even Harry Lauder.

Well, by extraordinary luck and chance, he has not gone. Back from the dead, Thomas Cairns Livingstone of Rutherglen, a clerk, married to Agnes, who was often ill, and the proud father of Wee Tommy, is returned to life through handwritten diaries and drawings discovered in an auction in Northumberland in 2005 and bought for £300. So now we know what he thought, who he was and what happened to him later. It is a story extraordinary in its ordinariness; it is good to have him back. For in general, history is owned by those who record it. Only a handful of truly powerful people were recorded by others at the time. Mostly, historians have depended on autobiographies, property records, diaries, letters, newspapers and account books. So ‘history’ has too often been that of those at the top of the pile, the politicians, writers and professional leaders; and it has been a hard task to disinter the lives of millions who left no written trace. It was not until 1937 that ‘Mass Observation’ began to accumulate the diaries and thoughts of ordinary Britons. Before that, the voices of the majority had been heard through snippets in newspapers, court reports or in rare sociological exercises, like Charles Booth’s studies of the London poor. There were a few memoirs by people further down the tree, clerks and governesses; some of the working-class Suffragettes and trade unionists left written records, for instance. There was the knowledgeable mimicking of working-class and lower-middle-class life by novelists – the clerks and shopkeepers of H. G. Wells, or the miners of D. H. Lawrence. But the material was always scanty.

During the First World War there was much recording of the lives and heroism of the men at the front, who wrote letters back home. Some retold their stories much later to historians. Little by comparison was written about the home front, where, of course, the vast majority of British people were living their lives. Oral historians like Richard van Emden and Steve Humphries have done much to salvage material from those they could find who were still alive; numerous local historical societies have done the same. But the diary of Thomas Livingstone is a rare thing. Here is the Great War as it was seen by an ordinary man, no hero, living in the backstreets of Glasgow. You might call him a Scottish Pooter, except that his drawings and humour are more self-knowing. He was no special rebel, indeed no special anything. But that is the point. As with family history, the stories of plain people upend and challenge the stories told by historians. For instance, I had no idea just how near the trenches seemed until learning that my family, also from Glasgow, got laundry back from sons in the trenches every week, and sent the clean underclothes back, along with cakes, chocolate and tobacco. The fast train service made Flanders seem very close. Thomas’ story is family history, except that his immediate family has long gone and it has been returned as a family story for all of us.

These were momentous times, and Glasgow in 1913—18 was a city at the edge of turmoil, seen by some as the next Bolshevik Petrograd. Yet as Auden famously pointed out while contemplating a painting of the fall of Icarus, great events take place in the middle of ordinary ones, ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. Tommy’s War is a war in a world of dull work, shortages, crying children and everyday diseases. He is not much concerned with high politics, though he has a shrewd and cynical take on government and its wartime propaganda: ‘This is SOS Week in Glasgow. Save our souls. Sink or swim. Stew or sausages. Steal or starve. Save or starve. Sew our shirts. Have your choice …’ He has a rebellious streak, but his rebellion is more directed at the hated factor, or rent-collector, than the government itself. In that, as in so much, he was pretty typical. The revolt which is remembered as ‘Red Clydeside’ was a series of disputes, starting with one over rent controls. The vast majority of Glaswegians rented their homes and when 20,000 munitions workers arrived in the city, the shortage of rooms was quickly exploited by the private landlords. Rents went up by more than a fifth. Factors were attacked by women, pelted in the street and went in fear. People refused to move or pay up. Placards reading ‘Rent Strike’ and ‘We are Fighting Landlord Huns’ went up in the windows and when, by May 1915, around 25,000 tenants were refusing to pay, ministers started to panic. Thomas, surely, would have sympathised but at the time he was much more interested in a huge rail crash at Gretna, which killed around 227 people but which has been largely forgotten by history. And this, too, is part of the appeal. The ‘story’ of those times that has been smoothed into predictability by historians is constantly disrupted by small surprises.

Thomas had no desire to be a soldier. In that, too, he was typical. After the great torrents of excited volunteers in the early days of the war, when patriotic enthusiasm had been dampened by stories of the reality of trench warfare, millions of men tried very hard not to serve their country, at least not in France or in khaki. We remember the ‘white feather’ campaigns and the famous Kitchener recruitment posters, and indeed huge citizen armies were created. But the feathers and the posters were needed because of widespread reluctance, particularly as a sense of the length and grimness of the fighting settled in people’s minds. As the war advanced, reflected in newspaper stories about victories and defeats, the pressure piled on. Like Thomas, it became impossible to be both patriotic and a quiet civilian. He is darkly humorous about his dilemma. When the Derby scheme was announced, offering men the chance of volunteering in return for a delay in being actually called up, he reports, ‘Got a love letter from Lord Derby egging me on to enlist before they make me.’ And later: ‘Recruiting sergeant up at night to assist me in making up my mind. I did not go away with him.’ Finally, on a snowy December night in 1915, he gives way: ‘Could resist no longer. Joined the army today … God save the King.’ In fact, Thomas never did have to become a soldier. For him the war is always just off-stage, as in a classical tragedy, a succession of liners and battleships being sunk, poison gas used, terrible losses reported, revolutions erupting and aircraft raiding. We must remember, this is how most people would have experienced it. And most, too, would have been more immediately concerned, as Thomas was, with the small things of life – rain, wind, coughs, shortages, chores, food and family.

As with Pepys or Boswell (admittedly, greater diarists) we enjoy the constant rub of the ordinary against the ‘historic’. Given that some historians have insisted the general public was fairly ignorant of the war it is interesting that Thomas, from his Glasgow flat, pretty accurately records each major event as it happens. Thus he is fully aware of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, even recording that it started ‘at 7.30 a.m. today’. But with 67,000 British casualties on the first day alone, a third of them killed, he quickly moves on, so that two days later, his main worry is that his young son Tommy is being teased by another boy: ‘Nice warm day. Tommy getting abused by the young microbe next door called Alec Gray. So I spoke severely to the aforesaid young microbe surnamed Gray. His ma then abuses Agnes.’ It is a moment to be compared with Pepys’ worries about the fate of a cheese during the Great Fire of London. Sometimes the juxtapositions are cheerily surreal: ‘The King doing Glasgow this week and round about. I saw him today. Agnes made plum jam at night.’ Or, from 16 March 1917: ‘Doctor up in the forenoon. Tommy has the German measles. Doctor says it is a mild case … Revolution in Russia. Czar dethroned. The Duma are in full power. The Czar and Czarina are prisoners.’ This, we all know, is how things are, the pattern of life. Great events occur. We note them. Meanwhile we have to cope with German measles, or a local lout.

Thomas is not given to rhetorical flourish or overstatement. He is a brisk, tart, dryish writer, who presents himself as put-upon and henpecked and whose drolleries are the more striking for their rarity. Yet he is, in his way, a good writer, too: he has a distinct voice and it is impossible to spend an hour with his diaries without having a clear impression of the man. No diarist who is disagreeable will keep our attention long: Thomas Livingstone is, we come to understand, a thoroughly likeable man whose love for his wife and son and growing horror at the scale of the slaughter shine through the laconic and self-mocking entries. What I find makes this book particularly touching are the illustrations, the quick pen-and-ink sketches, carefully coloured, of Thomas and the cast of characters, wife, son, recruiting sergeant, chimney-sweep, soldiers and the rest. They have a humorous immediacy and artlessness which is very winning, and go perfectly with the tone of the written diary. In the end, the best test of a book like this is whether one wants any more of it or not: I for one ended it in 1918 with a feeling of frustration. If the diaries continue to 1933, what happens next? Let us hope we find out, but meanwhile a little more about the city where Thomas lived, and the times he lived through, may be helpful.

Glasgow is special, was special and always will be. I should know. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my family were solidly Glasgow. They were of a higher social class than Thomas, though they yo-yoed with the fortunes of the city itself. Various branches went from farm labourers to quarrymen to quarry owners during the great days of the Victorian expansion; the owners of floridly posh new houses – a window for every day of the year in one of them, apparently – and proud members of the middle-class clubs and societies. One was a Unionist Lord Provost, the last of his political line. Others became losers in the years of depression that followed the Great War, when a pie factory, for instance, lost its shipyard worker customers. But they all belonged to the tight, self-confident world of the Second City of the Empire, remembering its glory days when much of the world’s shipping tonnage had been built on the Clyde, and further back when the ‘tobacco lords’ who had established the wealth of the new trading city were laying out grand new squares and crescents. It was a city, like Chamberlain’s Birmingham or the ‘Cottonopolis’ of Manchester, with a very strong sense of itself and its history, utterly unconnected to the airs of the formal capital, London. My own father vividly remembers being shown by his father the sight of the Queen Mary lying half-built and silent in the yards when bad times had arrived; and the veteran soldiers, with waxed ‘Kitchener’ moustaches and empty sleeves or trouser legs pinned up, employed to brush clean the points for Glasgow’s famous trams.

His city, and that of his forebears, was based on technological experiment, audacity in business and a ready supply of cheap labour, coal, steel and water. In 1840, Glasgow was a textile town of some 250,000 people, a vast increase on the previous decades. But by 1900 she was more than three times as big, and surrounded by booming satellite towns. Iron smelting and steel-making combined with the deep estuary connected to the booming Atlantic and imperial trade routes made Glasgow a perfect industrial revolutionary capital. Steamships were built on the Clyde from mid-Victorian times but the rival yards produced competitive pressure which gave Glasgow a world lead in techniques such as screw propulsion, triple and quadruple expansion, high-pressure boilers, turbines and diesel engines. For a century, ‘Clyde-built’ was a global byword for reliability and skill – a memory which lingered on long enough for the engineer on the Starship Enterprise to be ‘Scotty’. This expertise in turn led to other engineering successes, from locomotives and machine tools to sewing machines, bicycles and cars: in the pre-1914 Glasgow of Thomas’ world, the Singer factories were world innovators and the Argyll Motor Works was turning out cars which seemed as likely to dominate world markets as anything made in America. Glasgow was an innovative, aggressive, roiling and cocky place, thick with smoke, noise, the smell of oil and the raucous boasts of chisel-faced city fathers in their stock exchange and their new, grandly built churches. Govanhill, his part of the city, around a mile south of the centre, was one of the poorer districts but far from slum-ridden. Its industry included important locomotive and iron works and its red sandstone apartments were by Edwardian standards relatively spacious as working-class housing. It boasted a fine new Carnegie Library and much admired public baths.

This is not surprising. Glasgow industry sustained a cultural and intellectual self-confidence that has been all but forgotten. Glasgow has always felt oddly American, in the heavy, steel-framed structures and the shape of its public buildings – and still does. The revival churches of ‘Greek’ Thomson are one thing, but the greatest glories of the city for anyone with a taste for the daring are the buildings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the nearest Britain has ever had to a Gaudí, and a man who made corners of Glasgow as exotic as Gaudí’s Barcelona. Glasgow University never achieved quite the Enlightenment status of Edinburgh but it was a close thing. Glasgow was ancient enough, dating back to a college founded in 1451, and the city had a formidable roll-call of philosophers, scientists, doctors and religious scholars. By the early twentieth century, bright Glasgow students would no more have thought of going south to Oxbridge for their learning than of sailing to Mars. Glasgow, with her Gilbert Scott spire rising high, was as exciting a university as any in the country. Then there were the great institutions, the Mitchell Library and the riotously Spanish Baroque Kelvingrove Art Gallery. The ‘Glasgow Boys’ were a school of painters unlike any group elsewhere; and they were followed by Colourists who brought the brightness of the French Fauves to the north, as no English painters of the time quite achieved. All this was going on around Thomas, a mile or two to the west, the cultural life of a city which allowed him, at least, to visit art galleries and carefully laid-out public gardens. Among the smoke and the dirt, there were bright things gleaming.

Glasgow had her own novelists, her own songs, her own orchestral and music-hall traditions, her own favoured holiday resorts, in the southern Highlands or ‘doon the watter’ on the banks of the Clyde estuary. She had her famous and excellent High School for the middle classes and distinctive political traditions. These included, sadly, a vicious sectarianism. For Glasgow was a migrants’ city. She had been little more than a large village before Atlantic trade, and then shipbuilding caused mushrooming growth; so almost every Glaswegian had come from somewhere else. Many, of course, had arrived from other parts of the Scottish lowlands, from labouring, merchant or professional families established earlier in Edinburgh, or the smaller burghs of the country. They would be overwhelmingly Presbyterian, either loyal members of the national Church of Scotland, or members of rival churches which had broken away during the great disruptions of the mid-nineteenth century. Their traditions of serious book-learning and disputation would feed many later politicians, including some of the Marxists for which Glasgow also became famous. Another great migration came from the Highlands, the ‘Teuchters’ much ridiculed by city humorists and on music-hall stages, though the mockery was intermingled with sentimental claims about Hielan’ hames and aboriginal ‘but-and-bens’ (small cottages) in songs by the likes of Harry Lauder. These Highlanders, Macleans, Camerons, MacDonalds and Campbells, were again mostly Protestant but included a sprinkling of Roman Catholics from those islands and small outcrops which had stayed with the old faith.

The third great migration, however, was Irish, mostly Catholic but including – as with Thomas’ family – Protestants who had been ‘settled’ in the north of Ireland but who had returned. Thomas’ father was from Lurgan, not far from Belfast, and he carried his sectarianism to Glasgow where he worked as a railway clerk. He joined a Loyal Orange Lodge. His views are not hard to guess. For the Protestant majority in Glasgow, of all classes, the Catholics were seen as credulous Papist peasants, ‘bog-trotters’ whose loyalty to Scotland or the Empire could never be assumed and whose priests, taking their orders from the Vatican, led them by their whisky-inflamed noses. The ‘Papes’ did not use proper lavatories, had recklessly large families which they could not feed, and were in general treated as a lesser breed. This sectarianism was as poisonous as anything expressed by apartheid-era Boers for black Africans, and just as sharp-edged as the near-identical feelings in Ireland itself. There were Orange Order marches, complete with bowler hats and gloating banners, well into the sixties. In return, the Catholic migrants forged and defended a militant identity of their own, initially based in poor enclaves such as Cowcaddens and Maryhill, with their own football club (Glasgow Celtic was founded in 1887), a disciplined church structure and increasingly assertive membership of the trade union movement. They tended to regard their Protestant fellow workers as deferential fools, dupes of the ruling order, and terminally dull.

So Glasgow was a city divided by religion, as it still is, though less violently these days. It was also, of course, a city divided by class and wealth. The great engineering and factory-owning dynasties, plus their lawyers, doctors and stockbrokers, lived in genuinely grand style in the West End. A mile or two to the east were scattered some of the foulest slums in Europe. The world is still thus divided, but while today’s hedge fund managers, city stars and footballing plutocrats live behind high walls, or in country estates, then Glasgow’s rich and poor literally rubbed shoulders in the streets, cramming the city centre where most of the business was done, and the gossip passed on. It was not the grand terraces, though, but the Glasgow slums, especially the tenement flats of the Gorbals, that have been remembered. In many ways rightly so: these were the dark and dangerous cave-dwellings of razor-wielding gangs and heroically drunken drunks. In fact, the tenement was a sensible and popular style of housing and is still used across much of Scotland. With between three and four storeys, a common stair and flatted apartments, it offered warmth and communal living with enough space for family privacy – well suited to the wet climate and long winters of the country. A good tenement is as intelligent a housing style as a terrace, or a row of semis. What made the Glasgow tenements notorious was simply lack of hygiene and intense overcrowding as the city expanded. Conditions by the mid-nineteenth century were terrible, though no different from the slums of Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds or Birmingham. Yet the large immigrant families, working in industries with terrible safety records, and against the hard-drinking, heavy-smoking culture of the Scots and Irish, resulted in child and adult mortality rates which were shocking even by Victorian and Edwardian standards.

Out of this grew a militant socialism which touches Thomas’ life at key moments, not least when he witnesses the Marxist agitator John Maclean, a man admired by Lenin and made a Communist commissar, returning in triumph from prison. Being Thomas, he is not, of course, much impressed: ‘Saw a most unholy mob of Bolsheviks in town today. It was a procession of some of our enlightened citizens welcoming home [Maclean] (from jail). He is standing for Parliament for the Gorbals. Heaven help us all!’ Most historians believe the stories of Red Clydeside have been exaggerated by later socialists with pickaxes to grind, and it is surely true that Glasgow was never really on the edge of social revolution. But at the time, it was taken very seriously: the war-leader Lloyd George was famously heckled and abused when he addressed trade unionists about letting in less well-qualified labour. Maclean, and some others, had openly opposed the war and been removed from the city to prisons in the east of Scotland. After the war was over, troops and tanks were indeed ordered north at a time when Westminster was jittery about the prospect of British Bolshevism.

Yet the biggest story of Glasgow during the war was the recruitment, maiming and deaths of huge numbers of her citizens. Scots volunteered quickly and in great numbers: Edwardian Scotland was still a comparatively militarised country, with strong regimental traditions and a general pride in the record of Scottish soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. As a result, with some crack regiments, Scotland lost a disproportionately large number of her men. By one estimate she lost 110,000 in all, a fifth of total British losses, rather than an eighth, as her size by population would have suggested. Glasgow herself lost 20,000 men, often soldiers from the slums who formed much of the Highland Light Infantry, though nearby coal-mining and rural areas suffered even more. As in England, the upper and middle classes volunteered early and were cut down early too: Glasgow University lost one in six of her graduates. The pressure on Thomas must have been intense. Yet it was quickly realised that if Britain was to fight and win a long war, she needed her mines and industries, shipyards and offices, to continue to function and a complicated system designed to keep vital workers in place was established. Armbands and badges were provided for key employees so that they would not be harassed in the streets by women bearing white feathers; other badges were produced for those (like Thomas) who had offered to fight but were not yet needed. It was a time of sidelong glances and offensive muttering about slackers and cowards: for Thomas it was a matter of some importance that ‘I have now got my khaki armlet to let folk know I have attested and await the call.’

Unlike the Second World War, this was not really a people’s war – not at least for the British, though it was for many Russians and Germans. The Zeppelin and Gotha raids and the occasional bombardments by German warships against east coast towns are recorded by Thomas but direct danger reached little of the civilian population. In this war, only around 850 civilians died in Britain, as compared to 60,000 in the later conflict. Yet the war affected Thomas and his family, and every other family, in multiple less dramatic ways. It was not simply the friends who left for the fighting, or the growing evidence that the Empire was not performing as well as people had expected. Britain herself rapidly became shabbier, duller and hungrier. Famously, Lloyd George insisted on weaker, more watery beer and introduced tough pub licensing hours to try to deal with the (very real) problem of low productivity caused by drunkenness. Tobacco, as Thomas finds, becomes harder to obtain. Unlike the later world war, this one passed mostly without rationing. Until halfway through it, the Liberal government remained wedded to small-state, free market beliefs and tried hard not to interfere too much. The result was a life of unpredictable shortages, fast rising prices and adulterated food, which provoked riots in some parts of Britain, though not Glasgow.

Yet when Thomas notes in the spring of 1917 that the Germans are trying to starve Britain he is quite right: he may not have known just how close they were coming to success. The U-boat campaigns in the Atlantic had been devastating and Britain came within weeks of having to sue for peace simply for lack of food and oil. It was only a late directive to try the convoy system which saved the day. Meanwhile government action would eventually result in rationing by 1918, while strenuous efforts were made to increase agricultural production at home. In the country, people turned back to snaring rabbits, raiding birds’ nests and growing their own vegetables but in the towns the population struggled with meagre, dull diets featuring the much-hated National Loaf, a soggy, greyish concoction which nevertheless contained more nutrition and fibre than the white loaf everyone preferred. Shortages were everywhere, from coal to clothing. To save energy, street lighting was conserved, theatres closed early and entertainment much restricted; it is notable that Thomas’ most frequent references to entertainment seem to be dubious books from the library, games of cards and walks in the park, rather than nights out in bars or at the cinema.

Women, meanwhile, got their first chance to break into male trades, whether they were the tartan-uniformed bus conductors on the Glasgow trams, or women police officers patrolling parks in search of vice, or female munitions workers. This clearly affects Thomas, as it did most traditionally minded men, though he rarely voices derision and seems to accept that the world is changing fast around him. His wife is often sick, as is his son, and he clearly has few domestic skills, but it is a small, tight, traditional family in which he does his best. Glasgow was notorious for its drunkenness and domestic violence, and indeed across Britain battered women rarely complained to the police about drunken husbands: when they did, they got little sympathy. By those admittedly low standards, Thomas seems to have been a good husband. His wife Agnes’ ill health was again typical. Ill health and medicines, mostly ineffective still, feature heavily in these diaries. Mortality rates, particularly in urban Scotland, were shocking. The ravages of so-called Spanish Flu, which took a huge toll of the world just after the war, are well known; but it was a time still when less exotic infections, from measles to whooping cough, killed many. Agnes struggles with mysterious internal pains, lumbago and toothache so excruciating that she talks of killing herself. That was life – sorer, rougher and more dangerous by a country mile than it is today. Thomas notes her troubles and does the heavy lifting, and the cleaning, and does not complain. He is hardly romantic or gushing in his descriptions of Agnes but that is not his style. It is eloquent that his diary suddenly ceased when she died. These were two undemonstrative people who needed and loved one another very much.

So here is a slice of Britain from below, during some of her darkest years, and seen through the prism of the empire’s Second City, and the pen of one of the countless millions who mostly went unrecorded, unsung and unremembered. The message is an individual, human one, the more moving and memorable because it does not fit neatly into a historian’s grand narrative. Here, amid the malfunctioning chimneys, boat excursions, bad food and worse news, the little domestic feuds and distant echoes of hectoring from politicians, is the story of one undistinguished, shrugging, perky, rather loveable man who just wanted to get on with his life, be kind to those around him and – if pushed – ‘do his bit for the Flag’ but please, not something too dangerous and please, not quite yet. Here clear and unmistakable is the voice of that fabled abstraction, the man on the street – not the man on the Clapham Omnibus, as it happens, but the mannie on the Kelvingrove Tram. He isn’t easily taken in. He is only a little sorry for himself. He is not noticeably religious or political. He stands aside from the great enthusiasms and lunacies around him; in his sensible, defiant ordinariness, he is almost Charlie Chaplin-esque. He is the man the rest of them are fighting for. And, luckily perhaps, I for one closed his diary realising that I liked him rather a lot.

Andrew Marr, June 2008

People and Places

Thomas Cairns Livingstone had a wide social circle and spent many of his evenings and holidays in the company of relatives, friends and neighbours. As well as writing about them by name, Thomas often uses their location as a shorthand way of referring to them. This guide to the people and places in Thomas’ diary should help untangle Ina from Isa, and Lily from Wee Lily.

200 Main Street, Rutherglen

Thomas lived here before he was married. During the years of the diary it was the home of Thomas’ Uncle Willie.

Alexander Baxter

Proprietor of Paterson, Baxter and Company, which employs Thomas. Their premises were at 170 Ingram Street, in the warehouse district of central Glasgow. They had other offices in Leeds, London, Cape Town, Oslo and Copenhagen.

Mary Carlyle (née Livingstone)

Sister of Thomas, born in Balmoral Terrace, Hill Street, Lurgan, County Armagh, in the north of Ireland, on 27 September 1884. Her mother died two weeks after her birth. Mary married Thomas Carlyle on 16 July 1904; he was 34, some 14 years older than her. He was a shirt-cutter, she was a shirt-fitter. None of the family witnessed the marriage, and the couple moved to Edinburgh shortly afterwards. They had four children: Thomas, Helen (or Ella), Jane (or Jean) Weir, and Dorothy. We know from Ella’s recollections that Mary and her family remained relatively close to their Glasgow relations well into Tommy Livingstone Junior’s adulthood.

Mr and Mrs Carmichael

Neighbours of Thomas and Agnes at 14 Morgan Street.

Clydebank

Home of Jenny Roxburgh and her family.

Coatbridge

Home of Agnes’ family, and also of the Crozier family.

Henrietta (‘Hetty’) Cook

Cousin of Agnes. She married Gordon Mossman in Glasgow on 18 December 1918 at the age of 23 (he was 26). They were married ‘by declaration’ (a civil ceremony) in front of witnesses, and by warrant issued by the Sheriff Substitute of Lanarkshire, a form peculiar to Scotland, regulated by the Marriage (Scotland) Act 1916. She was described on her marriage certificate as an engineer’s ‘clerkess’, living at 11 Leven Street, Glasgow. She was usually known as Hetty.

James Cook

Nephew or cousin of Agnes. Shot in the hand during the First World War, and nursed in the Victoria Hospital, a military hospital in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow. He was a witness to the marriage of Hetty Cook in December 1918, described on the certificate as ‘mercantile clerk; sapper, Royal Engineers’.

James Crichton

Private James Crichton (41152) of the Scottish Rifles, Cameronians was killed in action on 21 March 1918. He was aged 21 and buried in the Poziers graveyard. James worked with Thomas at Paterson and Baxter and was one of the first of the company to join up. Thomas would have read the account of his death through the Glasgow newspapers as they usually printed Rolls of Honour about four weeks after the death.

The Crozier Family

Agnes’ Aunt Agnes married Robert Chapman Crozier in 1881. The Crozier family lived in the Blairhill area of Coatbridge. Robert or ‘Uncle Bob’ ran a grocers and spirit shop at 142 Bank Street, Coatbridge and then moved into the hotel trade, managing the Royal Hotel in Coatbridge after the war until his death in 1921. Robert and Agnes had four daughters, Margaret (possibly known as Daisy), Mary (May), Jeanie (Jean) and Henrietta (Hetty). Sadly, May died whilst on holiday at Rothesay from the Spanish ‘flu in 1918 at only 24.

Donald Ferguson

Married to Josephine, Thomas’ sister. He died of epilepsy and heart failure on 19 October 1916, at Beracah, Paisley Road, Barrhead, in what was probably a private nursing home, although his usual residence was 3 Greenlodge Terrace. On his death certificate, the occupation of his late father Samuel is given as ‘shepherd’.

Isabella McArthur Ferguson

Daughter of Donald and Josephine Ferguson. Thomas’ niece. Born 20 October 1900 at 204 French Street, Bridgeton, Glasgow. Also known as Isa.

Josephine Ferguson (née Livingstone)

Sister of Thomas, born in Silverwood, near Lurgan, on 13 August 1874. First born of Joseph’s children with Mary Cairns. First worked as a shirt-maker. Married Donald Ferguson in Glasgow on 10 June 1898 and honeymooned in Belfast. At the time of their marriage, Donald was living at 175 Gallowgate, Glasgow, and Josephine at 10 India Street, Rutherglen. Both Josephine and her husband worked in a grocery shop, possibly the Bridgeton branch of Cochrane’s, a Glasgow chain. They had three children, Isabella, Lily and Jack. Donald died of epilepsy in 1916, and Josephine continued working in the grocery business.

Jack Ferguson

Son of Donald and Josephine Ferguson. Thomas’ nephew.

Lily Florence Livingstone Ferguson

Daughter of Donald and Josephine Ferguson. Thomas’ niece. Born 4 May 1899 at 204 French Street, Bridgeton, Glasgow. Worked as a clerkess. Also known as Wee Lily.

The Gordons

Relatives of Agnes living in the Ibrox area of Glasgow.

Greenlodge

Thomas’ father Joseph lived at 3 Greenlodge Terrace, Greenlodge Street, Bridgeton, Glasgow. His daughter Josephine and her husband Donald Ferguson also lived there with their children, a fairly usual arrangement at the time.

Andrew Hamilton

Former office boy in Paterson and Baxter. Married Nellie Pettigrew in July 1915, lived in Hickman Street in Govanhill, and had a son in 1918.

Ibrox

Home of Agnes’ family, and also of the Gordons, close family friends to Thomas and Agnes.

Agnes Smart Livingstone (née Cook)

Born in Braid Street, Glasgow (near St George’s Cross) on 10 November 1879 to James and Agnes Cook (née Henderson). Her parents were married on 7 November 1879 (three days before she was born) in the St Rollox district of Glasgow. Her father was a lithographer, and Agnes herself was a cardboard cutter at the time of her marriage to Thomas in 1910.

Duncan Graham Livingstone

Brother of Thomas, born in Balmoral Terrace, Lurgan, on 2 June 1880. Worked for Anchor Line Cruises and sailed the Glasgow-New York route aboard the TSS (twin-screw steamship) Columbia from 1908 to 1910. Fought in the Army Service Corps from 1918 to 1919. Lived between Belfast and Glasgow.

Joseph Livingstone

Father of Thomas, born in 1847 in Lurgan, County Armagh, in the north of Ireland, the son of John Livingstone, a teacher of English, and Mary Ann Livingstone (née Hare, she died near Rutherglen in March 1881). Lurgan is 19 miles south-west of Belfast, and was known as a centre of the linen industry. He was married three times: to Sarah Gilpin in 1867 in Seagoe Parish Church (she died in January 1873); to Mary Cairns on 3 October 1873; and to Jane Weir in January 1885 (she died in 1909). All of his children were with Mary Cairns, whom he married in Maralin (or Magheralin) in County Down in the north of Ireland. She had previously been married to a Mr McKinlay. She died in October 1884 shortly after the birth of her youngest daugher, Mary Livingstone, while still at the Lurgan residence of her father, Thomas Cairns.

Joseph Livingstone worked as a clerk for the Caledonian Railway Company from 1876, and later as a mercantile clerk. He moved to 10 India Street, Rutherglen, in the 1880s, then lived at 3 Greenlodge Terrace, Bridgeton, Glasgow. He was a member of the Ancient Order of Foresters, a friendly society, and the Carnbroe Loyal Orange Lodge, a Loyalist and Unionist ‘secret society’ with its origins in the north of Ireland. Carnbroe is a village to the south of Coatbridge.

Josephine Livingstone

Daughter of Samuel and Nellie Livingstone. Thomas’ niece. Born 28 April 1902 in Glasgow. Also known as Ina.

Mary Ann Livingstone (née Hare)

Mother of Joseph and paternal grandmother of Thomas. Died of chronic bronchitis on 7 March 1881 at 3 George Gray Street, Eastfield, Rutherglen.

Nellie Livingstone (née Muir Meikleham)

Married to Samuel, Thomas’ brother. Her parents were James Meikleham and Elizabeth Meikleham (née Muir).

Samuel John Livingstone

Brother of Joseph and uncle of Thomas. Born 1856 and worked as a railway clerk and as a coal merchant. He was married to Mary Elizabeth McColl, a draper’s assistant, in 1883 by a Church of Scotland minister at their home at 543 Dalmarnock Road, Glasgow.

Samuel John Livingstone

Brother of Thomas, born in Balmoral Terrace, Lurgan, in 1878. Worked as a grocer’s assistant, then a grocer’s manager, in a branch of Cochrane’s. He was married to Nellie Muir Meikleham on 28 January 1902 at 217 Broad Street, Mile-End, Glasgow by a minister of the United Free Church. They had two children, Josephine (also known as Ina) in 1902 and Samuel John, in 1919.

Samuel Livingstone Junior

Son of Samuel and Nellie Livingstone. Thomas’ nephew. Born 1919.

Thomas Cairns Livingstone

Born 4 June 1882 at 10 India Street, Rutherglen, the only one of six children of Joseph and Mary Livingstone to be born in Glasgow. Josephine, Lily, Duncan, Samuel and Mary were born in Lurgan, County Armagh, in the north of Ireland. Thomas’ mother died in 1884 when Thomas was aged two, and he was raised by his father, his older siblings and his step-mother Jane. The family moved to 4 French Street, Bridgeton around 1900. He was schooled in Rutherglen and took extra classes in English and French.

Thomas started work in 1895 and began courting Agnes Smart Cook in 1903. They were engaged on 19 December 1908 and married on 10 June 1910 in Agnes’ home at 37 Whitefield Road, Ibrox, by the Reverend John Tarish of the Tron United Free Church.

Their first home was at 20 Morgan Street in Govanhill, where their son Thomas Cairns Livingstone Junior was born in 1911. They moved to a tenement house at 14 Morgan Street in 1913.

Thomas worked as a mercantile clerk at 170 Ingram Street in central Glasgow in the offices of the firm of Paterson, Baxter and Company, which manufactured linen and sailcloth. Given that this address was in the heart of the warehouse district of the city, manufacturing may have taken place at different premises.

Thomas Cairns Livingstone Junior

Born on 9 August 1911, the only child of Thomas and Agnes. Attended Victoria Primary School in Batson Street, Govanhill. At the time of his birth, it was the custom in Scotland to give a first son his paternal grandfather’s first name and his mother’s maiden name as his middle name. This happened with Thomas Senior in 1882, but when it came for him to name his son, he broke with tradition, choosing to continue his own mother’s maiden name rather than that of Agnes’ mother. Generally known in the diaries as Wee Tommy.

Claude Maxwell

Brother of Miss Maxwell, Wee Tommy’ teacher in Victoria Primary School. He joined the Royal Highland Regiment (the Black Watch) as a Private and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Durham Light Infantry. He was wounded but served the full term of the First World War.

Jenny and Kate Roxburgh

Sisters who lived in Radnor Street, Clydebank. Agnes probably knew Jenny through her earlier employment as they were both in the stationery trade, Agnes a cardboard cutter and Jenny as a stationery assistant. Later Jenny worked as a nurse on Maryhill.

Ruglen

The local pronunciation of Rutherglen.

John White

Married to Lily, Thomas’ sister. A telegraphist, he worked for the General Post Office.

Lily Florence White (née Livingstone)

Sister of Thomas, born in Hill Street, Lurgan, on 15 May 1878. She worked as a power loom weaver and on 9 November 1911 was married in Trinity Church, Anderston, Glasgow to John White. At the time, her address was 3 Greenlodge Terrace, his was 1054 Argyle Street, both Glasgow. She died on 28 October 1914 of uterine septicaemia, pleurisy and pneumonia, at her father’s home on Greenlodge Terrace, although her married residence was 44 Clincarthill Road, Rutherglen.¹ She was buried in Rutherglen Cemetery.

1 Lily’s death certificate lists three causes of death, in order of likelihood. Doctors at the time tended to do this in the absence of a post mortem examination.

1913

The great War may have begun with ‘the shot heard around the world’ when the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 28 June 1914, but the roots of the conflict lay in the previous century. In broad terms, its origins involved the national politics, culture and economies of the combatant states, and a web of alliances struck between the leading European nations during the nineteenth century, following the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815 and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–5. In response to the murder, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia on 28 July, which put into action a web of treaties that brought Germany and the Ottoman Empire into the war on the side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and France, Belgium, Britain, Russia and Japan behind Serbia.

In 1913, when Thomas’ diaries begin, there were clear signs that the great European powers were preparing for war. In April he saw ‘the Great Territorial March Out’ and on 5 May he noted that Earl Roberts of Kandahar, a distinguished former military commander, was on a recruiting visit to Glasgow. The Territorial Force was formed on 1 April 1908, with a strength of around 269,000 men organised into 14 infantry divisions and 14 mounted yeomanry brigades. The force was set up by Secretary of State for War, Richard Burdon Haldane, under the terms of the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907.

Wednesday, 1 January

Got 11.29 train from Glasgow Cross to Langloan¹ and spent the day in the bosom of the Crozier family. Very nice day. We went out for a walk in the afternoon. Jean, Hetty, Meg, Agnes, Baby and I.² Hetty and Meg saw us off by 10.9 train (Caledonian). Were home at 11 p.m. Some little showers fell but on the whole good weather.

Sunday, 5 January

Fine day though dull. After dinner I took car to Cathcart and walked from there to Clarkston and on to Giffnock, through by the quarries to Cathcart again and car home.³ Wee man sneezing all day. Agnes not well at all. Wee man very cross in morning. Did not go to church.

Monday, 6 January

Cleaned the range tonight, including the flues. Dirty job. Agnes washed the floor after. Wee man still sneezing. Wee man got a new frock.⁴

Tuesday, 7 January

Lit the kitchen fire this morning, but it was a failure. Called at the factor and cussed him, so the men put a new ‘whirly’ on today.⁵ 13 public houses in Ward 21 (Govanhill).⁶ 19 licensed grocers.⁷ Population 35,082. Municipal electors 7,813.⁸

Wednesday, 8 January

Knocked the kitchen blind down, so had to knock it back up again. We are going to flit.⁹

Thursday, 9 January

Agnes out in forenoon looking for a new house. Out again after tea time to see one in 14 Morgan Street. I was not out. Agnes doing a washing tonight. I minded wee Magintey.¹⁰

Friday, 10 January

Cold east wind today. Factor here in afternoon to see about a house we wanted. Agnes ironed tonight, I cleaned the brass rail and jelly pan.

Saturday, 11 JANUARY

Cold disman day of sleet and rain. We went househunting in afternoon but didn’t find a good enough house.

Sunday, 12 January

Rain and snow all day long. Went and saw Dr Gardiner at 5 p.m. and made him my doctor, to fulfil the requirements of the law.¹¹ Agnes not very well today.

Monday, 13 January

Went and saw the factor at 5.30 and booked a new house at 14 Morgan Street, 2 up left.¹² Got my boots mended today for a bob. Nobody came tonight to cheer our loneliness.

Tuesday, 14 January

Horrid cold frosty day. Not out at night. Youth up today putting a board up at our window.¹³

Anderston Library reading room.

Wednesday, 15 January

Went to library tonight for my usual volume of sermons.¹⁴

Friday, 17 January

Lifted the room carpet tonight and the waxcloth around thereof.¹⁵ Agnes did a big ironing.

Tuesday, 21 January

Agnes met me at 170 Ingram Street¹⁶ and we went to Brig’ton.¹⁷ Sam and Nellie and the weans¹⁸ there. Got home at 11.40. Got the keys to our new house in the letter box.

Thomas and his family – and indeed everyone in the United Kingdom until 14 February 1971 – used a monetary system based on pounds, shillings and pence. A pound was worth 20 shillings, and a shilling or ‘bob’ was worth 12 pence. The sum of one pound, three shillings and sixpence was written as £1 3s 6d, with the letters ‘s’ and ‘d’ derived from Latin. Sums of money were also given in shillings, with a ‘solidus’ (forward slash) after the number of shillings, such as 3/6 (three shillings and sixpence) or 30/- (thirty shillings, with the hyphen used to indicate that there were no pennies).

Thomas’ wallet and Agnes’ purse would have held farthings (there were four farthings to a penny), half-pennies, pennies, three-penny bits, sixpences or ‘tanners’, shillings, florins (two-shilling pieces) and half-crowns (worth 2/6). They would also have notes valued at 10/- and £1 and, on rare occasions, £5 and £10. In broad terms, we can multiply any prices mentioned by Thomas by 83 to arrive at a modern equivalent.

Wednesday, 22 January

Took a turn up to our new house in the morning. Mr Gordon up at night and fitted up kitchen and room gas in our new mansion.¹⁹ All the Ibrox crowd up. Mr McCort did the whitewashing for 30 pennies.²⁰ Bought three new mantles for 9 pence. Heavy snow at night.

Thursday, 23 January

Got away today at 11 a.m. to flit myself and family. Called in at Bow’s Emporium²¹ and arranged for a man to fit in the room grate. Went up to the new house in afternoon and whitewashed the kitchen press and bunker. The flitting starts tonight. To help we had Sam and Donald, Mr McCort, Mrs and Miss Gordon and Josephine.²² We ceased operations at 10.30 and had supper.

Friday, 24 January

Putrid wet day. Man came up and fitted in room grate. It was a hard job and he lost his chisel, so Agnes gave him a ‘tanner’. Cost of grate fitted in was 4/6. The piano was removed for 4/-. The plaster men [came] in the morning. Man up to measure us for a gas stove. Agnes got a gas stove from her aunt.

Saturday, 25 January

Agnes at the painter in the forenoon arranging about our kitchen. Went up to the old house in the afternoon and took off the Yale lock, name plate and letter box. Man here sorting the kitchen gas. At night whitewashed ceiling and walls of the closet and put up the kitchen pulley.

Saturday, 1 March

Out at the Barrows²³ before tea and bought an awl and a wee wally bow-wow²⁴ for the cherub.

Wednesday, 12 March

Today’s advertisement: ‘Children’s Fancy Dress Ball. Mr J. B. McEwen’s Juvenile Pupils, St Andrew’s Halls, Granville St, at 5p.m. Carriages at 9.30 p.m. Spectators’ tickets 1/6. Tickets to be had at 29 St Vincent Crescent.’²⁵ I did not manage to the above.

Monday, 24 March

‘Men must either be the slaves of duty or of force.’ (Or the wife.)

Tuesday, 25 March

Was at library at night for my usual good moral book.

Monday, 14 April

Cold, wet day. National strike started in Belgium today.²⁶ King of Spain shot at yesterday.²⁷ He was not hurt.

Wednesday, 16 April

Got a note from the factor. Cuss him that the rent is raised 22/- in the year. Now we’ll starve.

Monday, 21 April

Telephoned the factor about the rent and found to my delirious joy it was only advanced 4/- in the year, to wit £3 15s 3d per quarter.²⁸

Friday, 25 April

Fresh sort of day. National strike in Belgium fizzled out. Agnes still got toothache. Poor Agnes. Her bottom teeth are up the pole.²⁹

Saturday, 26 April

Very cold and windy. Wet. In the afternoon I went to the Stirling’s Library³⁰ and on my way back saw the start of the Great Territorial March Out. I went into a doorway and saw it all. Rain coming down in buckets. Poor ‘sojers’. They were wet.

Monday, 5 May

Lord ‘Bobs’ in Glasgow today to make us all ‘sojers’.³¹

Wednesday, 7 May

Paid the cussed factor his cussed rent. Cussed cold and cussed windy.

Saturday, 10 May

Took the wife of my bosom and my son also heir out for a walk by Hangingshaws and back by Mount Florida. Saw the Boys’ Brigade inspection on our way home.

Friday, 16 May

Beautiful summer day. Took the wee man a walk to Queen’s Park at night. Agnes met us there. Saw the recruits drilling in the recreation grounds.

Sunday, 18 May

Played hymns on the piano and amused our good selves in divers ways.

Sunday, 25 May

Broke the clasp of my wally teeth today.³²

Tuesday, 3 June

I went straight from my work to the man who pulls teeth and got my renovated set. Seeing it was my first offence he charged me nothing. I did not press the good man.

Wednesday, 4 June

Lost my usual bob on the Derby.³³ Got my hair cut. This is my birthday.

Thursday, 5 June

‘Every step of life shows how much caution is required.’

Tuesday, 10 June

This is the anniversary. ‘Marriage notice. 10 June 1910. At 39 Whitefield Road was spliced Agnes Smart Cook, spinster, to Thomas Cairns Livingstone, bachelor. MOSC.56 SCA. 7,053. God save the King. Ora Pro Nobis. Let Glasgow Flourish.’³⁴

Thursday, 26 June

[On holiday in Rothesay.] We saw two blessed warships, one of which anchored in Sweet Rothesay Bay.³⁵

As well as the war clouds gathering over Europe, in 1913 there was another battle raging in Britain as the supporters of equal votes for women staged spectacular protests to win publicity for their cause. On Wednesday 2 June, Emily Wilding Davison ran onto the racecourse at Epsom during the Derby and was struck by Anmer, King George V’s horse, and its jockey Herbert Jones. The seasoned campaigner may have intended simply to disrupt the race and to unfurl the banner of the Women’s Social and Political Union, but she died of her injuries and became a Suffragette martyr.

Friday, 27 June

Rothesay’s full of sailormen now.

Saturday, 12 July

This is the Glorious 12th.³⁶

Saturday, 9 August

The wee man’s birthday. Two years old now, bless his little heart.

Thursday, 14 August

Dull sort of a day, cooler.

Not out a night. Agnes’ eyes annoying her. Gave my music stand a coat of varnish.

Thursday, 21 August

Wet all day and extra special wet at night. The doctor got paid tonight (12/-).³⁷ Got myself a new pair of boots today (10/6).

Monday, 25 August

Bought a book tonight called The Evolution of Man for some deep study.³⁸

Friday, 24 October

Got a notice from our beloved factor raising our rent 6/- in the year. Heard two revolver shots about 11.30 p.m. A man round the corner shot his girl and then committed suicide. Foolish fellow.