It Started in a Cupboard by Kenneth Calman sampler

it started in a cupboard
living at the edge of the city, it didn’t feel like it. They wanted parks
to play in, maybe even with a municipal golf course, pitch and putt
greens and tennis courts attached, with the Campsie Fells on the horizon
and the countryside just an easy walk or cycle-ride away. Most of
all, when they moved out of the inner-city tenements to live there, they
wanted their own patch of land too: a 10ft strip of garden in the front,
with a waist-high hedge or curved iron railings to separate it from the
pavement, and at the back a garden the size of a tennis court.
The estate on which the council built 6,174 houses was carved out
of about four square miles of farmland and disused mining works just
outside what was then the city’s north-western boundary. All the flats
had fitted bathrooms and decent-sized rooms – ‘homes not hutches’
in the words of John Wheatley, Labour’s first Secretary of State for
Health, whose 1924 Housing Act provided the financial guarantees
councils needed to start building. But there was far more to the estate
than that. It had eight churches, because this was still a rigorously
Christian society. My parents were both devout members of the
Church of Scotland and I grew up to share their faith. There were four
shopping centres, each with enough for most families’ daily needs,
and six schools, both primary and secondary. At the end of our street
there was even a library and a community centre.
Knightswood wasn’t just the biggest housing estate Glasgow built
between the wars, but it was arguably the best. On Saturday evenings,
from 1939 to 1953, one of the most popular radio shows on the bbc’s
Scottish Home Service was a radio soap opera called The McFlannels.
It was about a working-class Glasgow family who had originally
lived in Partick tenements. When they moved to a four-room flat in
Knightswood it was made quite clear that they had ‘gone up in the
world’, although some of the characters complained that because it
was so remote, commuting to work took too long.
Where we lived, though, that didn’t seem so much of a problem.
There was a good bus service, Scotstounhill railway station was only
about a quarter of a mile away, and the nearest shipyard on Clyde was
just about the same distance again. And when you reached the river,
whether you looked left or right, for miles in either direction you’d
see shipyards hard at work: great thickets of cranes at Barclay Curle,
Charles Connell, Blythswood, Yarrow, Fairfield, and, a mile or so up
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