Gangs of Glasgow by Robert Jeffrey

Author:Robert Jeffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845025687
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2012-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

8

EXPERIMENT IN EASTERHOUSE

In the fifties and sixties memories of the war began to recede and people were starting to enjoy a better lifestyle. But there seemed to be no end to the recurrent cycles of crime wave, period of calm, crime wave. It was as if the newspapers and commentators kept the phrase in a mental drawer ready to be pulled out and used again and again.

It surfaced with particular reference to the east end post-war scheme of Easterhouse in the late sixties. There was a more than usually violent outbreak of gang activity in the housing scheme, a classic Glasgow “outer circle” estate where thousands of folk had been decanted from inner city slums to bright new housing in areas with no recreational facilities for young or old. The bleakness of such places is hard to imagine for those who have not experienced it. The streets in such schemes tend to be long and featureless, the windows of flats offering no heart lifting views of greenery or countryside, merely endless vistas of rubbish-strewn pavements. The cheeriest sound is the chimes of the occasional ice cream van – though in Glasgow even these vans were often selling more than lemonade and ice cream to folk desperate to ease the pain of their existence. Children looked in vain for play parks or games fields. The open areas left to them by accident rather than design, often at the end of one street and the beginning of another, were littered with old furniture, broken bottles, waste paper. And shops provided soon became mini-fortresses, the windows boarded up or covered in graffiti-splashed corrugated iron as defence against the frequent attacks. The sheer dispiriting feel of such an area was remarkable. At times the whole scheme felt soaked in a despair that affected visitors as well as residents. These were the areas society seemed to have forgotten. Easterhouse had, however, a visitor, from Liverpool of all places, who although shocked by what he saw and heard talking to locals, young and old, was not paralysed into acceptance of the status quo by the surroundings. This was at the height of warfare between teenage gangs in the scheme. He decided to do something about it.

The unlikely visitor was one of Britain’s top entertainers, Frankie Vaughan, a song and dance man who was playing the old Alhambra. This was in the days before TV killed stage variety, and the headlines in the Glasgow papers caught the attention of the touring troubadour. With the help of others, local politicians, ministers and folk who just felt something had to be done about the mess the place was in, he helped start what was to become known as the Easterhouse Project. This blatantly obviously well-meaning move was not without its critics. The Glasgow head-in-the-sand attitude surfaced again and there were claims that highlighting the problems to the world just made things worse. Shades of the thinking of decades ago. There was also some legitimate concern about glorifying gang leaders.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.