Edward Clarke (1892 - 1961)[]
Name variations[]
- Eddie Clarke
Vital statistics[]
at Calton, Glasgow (76 Abercrombie Street)
- Died: October 14, 1961
at Belvedere Hospital Glasgow at age 69
- Interment: month d, 1960 at St Peter’s Cemetery, Dalbeth, Glasgow
- Height: 5ft 8in
- Weight: 13 stone
- Hair color: grey
- Eye color:
Ancestors[]
Parents[]
Edward Clarke was the son of Michael Andrew Clarke (1862-1940), Brickfield Labourer, and Elizabeth Manning (1871 - 1935), Carpet Weaver, who were married at St Mary’ Chapel, Calton December 31, 1889, after banns according to the forms of the Roman Catholic Church.
Grandparents[]
His grandparents were
- Edward Clarke (1840? - ??), Farmer in Bohola, County Mayo, Ireland and Margaret Kennedy (1840?- ??), also of County Mayo
- Thomas Manning (1842 - ??), Iron Dresser, born in Ireland and Elizabeth Crossan (1845 - ??), Domestic Servant, born in Glasgow, who were married St Mary's Chapel, Calton on April 26, 1865
Great-grandparents[]
His great-grandparents were
- John Manning (1820? - ??) of Ireland and Ann Rogers (1822? - ??) also of Ireland
- Charles Crossan (1810? - ??), Coal Agent, of Ireland or/and later Glasgow and Elizabeth McCrossan 91810? - ??) born Calton, Glasgow, who were married about 1834, possibly in St Andrew’s Church, now cathedral,Glasgow
- Unknown Clarkes in County Mayo
- Unknown Kennedys in County Mayo
Great-great-grandparents[]
Hir great-great-grandparents were
- Unknown
Siblings[]
- Elizabeth Clarke (1891 - ??)
- Thomas Clarke (1895 - ??)
- Margaret Clarke (1897 - ??)
- John Clarke (1899-??)
Spouses (2)[]
- 1. Abigail Mullin (?? - ??), whom he married in in St Mary's Church, Calton, Glasgow in 1915. She died of cancer in ??
- 2. Jeanie Ferguson Linton (1910 - 1987), widow of Thomas Totten (1908? - 1938), whom he married in the Registry Office in Shettleson, Glasgow on July 2, 1943
Offspring[]
By Abigail
- Edward Clarke
- Francis Clarke
- James Mullin Clarke
- Winifred Clarke
- Abigail Clarke
- Thomas Clarke
- Andrew Michael Clarke
- John Clarke
- Mary Theresa Clarke
- Margaret Clarke
- Elizabeth Manning Clarke
- Rose Clarke
By Margaret Wallace (wife of James McNeill Wallace)
- Cecilia Clarke (later Harrity, married name Handley)
- Frances McGuire Clarke (1945 - ), moved to London in 1966?. Accountant married to Clinton Hibbert
- Dennis McGuire Clarke (1947 - ), married to Jeanette, Materials Manager, living in Ayr
- Edward Anthony Clarke (1949 - ), Retired manager, living near Glasgow
- William Linton Clarke (1950 - ) - emigrated to Melbourne Australia 1971 after marrying Susan Cook.
Biography[]
Camlachie and Calcutta
In the late 19th Century Glasgow was the second city of the British Empire, and, with the possible exception of Calcutta, the most overcrowded. Over 60% of the population lived in “single-ends“ (one room) or, if lucky, a room-and-kitchen. According to the 1891 Census, twenty-five people lived in the five “houses” of the tenement at 76 Abercromby Street, Camlachie, Glasgow. These included a Police Sergeant, tobacco pipe-maker, a tinsmith and gas fitter, dressmaker, and three railway yardsmen. Ten of the twenty had been born in Ireland but had come to bustling Glasgow in search of work. They also found wives and most of those in the tenement who had been born in Scotland were their children.
A close-knit community
One Irish immigrant in the close was Thomas Manning. He was a “steel dresser”. He worked in the local iron foundry and his job was to set up, operate, or tend grinding and related tools that removed excess material or burrs from surfaces, sharpened edges or corners, or buffed, honed, or polished metal workpieces. Probably because he was relatively well-paid, he lived in a room-and-kitchen with his wife and four children. These were all Scottish-born, but Elizabeth Crossan, his wife, had an Irish immigrant father. There was a pattern of Scottish-born daughters of Irish immigrants marrying more recent immigrants. This, along with the prejudices of the host community, helped form a close-knit Catholic community, with a strong Irish identity, centred on St Mary’s Roman Catholic Chapel, a few steps away in Abercromby Street, the site of endless baptisms, first-communions, marriages and funerals. It stands to this day, plain outside but exuberantly beautiful inside.
Lizzie Manning gives birth to Michael Andrew’s son
One of their children, Lizzie Manning had married another Irish immigrant, Michael Andrew Clarke in this chapel a couple of years previously, when she was seventeen and he ten years older. Michael Andrew came from the Gaelic-speaking West of Ireland where his father Edward Clarke was a peasant farmer, barely scraping a subsistence from the boggy, hilly country around Bohola in County Mayo. Michael had no special skill or trade, but his peasant’s muscles made possible a lifetime working in various labouring jobs, living until he was seventy-nine. He lived with Lizzie and their not quite two-year-old daughter Elizabeth not far away from Abercromby Street in Wesleyan Street. It was probably traditional to get your mother’s help in giving birth but 76 Abercromby also offered a bit more space so that is where Lizzie headed when the time came to bring her first son into this world, to be named Edward after his Gaelic-speaking, peasant grandfather bak in Ireland. This she finally did at 10.30 at night on the 18th of April 1892.
Dangerous surroundings
Surviving childhood was not guaranteed in the unhealthy, overcrowded tenements of Camlachie. His young sister Mary died of scarlet fever aged seven, Winifred, also seven, died of tubercular meningitis and Annie was only fourteen months when she died of measles. This was all happening in the single room where Edward was growing up. Others of his siblings were luckier. His older sister Elizabeth survived and lived to eighty-six and his younger sister Margaret to almost a hundred. Eddie survived and perhaps the experience in that single room gave him the stoicism to deal with similar tragedies later in his own married life.
Education (and thwarted love) at St Mary’s
Edward, like everyone else in the Catholic community, was baptised in St Mary’s. Next to the Chapel was St Mary’s School, a charity school that taught Catholic children the three R’s - reading, writing and reckoning, and a great deal of religion. It was not part of the state system. It was supported by the parish but also got some grant from the Local Authority and pupils were expected to bring “a penny for the teacher”. It was all the formal education Eddie would get, as there was no free secondary education. Nevertheless it taught him to write clearly in ink in an elegant cursive hand. The poems he later wrote for his wife Jean show him writing confidently and imaginatively in vibrant English. In one of the poems he reveals that his interest in the opposite sex began in St Mary’s, though it was thwarted by an over-vigilant teacher. He probably finished his education at about twelve and started to earn a living.
Finding a job - and a mate’s odd background
Probably with the help of his grandfather Manning he was fully trained as a steel dresser (that is, he was a “journeyman”) and worked in local foundries for the next thirty years. Meanwhile, he claimed to have had a lot of girlfriends in his teenage years, none too serious and all good fun, giving him experience enough to choose a mate for life. This turned out to be Abigail Mullin, who was twenty years old when she married the twenty-two year old Eddie in St Mary’s Chapel on the 31st of December 1914.
She was staying, perhaps not untypically, at the same address as Eddie, 64 Abercrombie Street, at the time of the wedding.
Although she had an Irish name and background she was not part of the Catholic community.
Her parents were married in the Free Church of Scotland and her grandparents in a Wesleyan or Methodist church. This probably caused some tensions in both families. Her father Henry Mullin was a handloom weaver, a precarious profession in an age of steam looms, and her grandfather Thomas Mullin was described as a pottery painter or even pottery designer.
Abigail’s family - reconciliation and tragedy
Abigail gave Eddie a happy married life (and twelve children) but her parents were not so happily married. They split up and both remarried. There was some reconciliation with her mother Margaret Kelly (by then Mrs George Docherty). Her last address before dying of cancer in hospital in 1937 was Abigail and Eddie’s married home at 85 Methven Street. It was Abigail who registered the death.
We don’t know if there was any reconciliation with her father, Henry Mullin, before he hanged himself in 1947. He was 76 and living in Whiteinch with Jean, his unmarried daughter by his second wife, Margaret McColl.
Jail with hard labour
Meanwhile, the First World War had broken out and compulsory military service had been introduced for Great Britain in 1915, shortly after Eddie’s marriage. He refused to be called up and went before a Military Service Appeals Tribunal to be excused on the grounds of conscientious objection to the war. We don’t know his reasons for refusing to serve. He was a socialist and may have considered it a Boss’s War. He considered himself Irish and wouldn’t want to fight for the British Empire. (Conscription was not in force in Ireland). He may have had pacifist beliefs, objecting to all war. None of his arguments, however, convinced the Tribunal and he was condemned to prison with hard labour, digging and repairing roads in his case. Conscientious objectors were not well-regarded during or after the War because so many others had lost fathers, husbands and sons. The bomb-shattered bodies of Eddie’s teenage younger brothers Thomas and Francis, for example, were still lost, mouldering somewhere in the muddy Flanders Fields. We can only guess what his father Michael Andrew thought about this.
Death in one room
Whatever difficulties he faced because of his stance with regard to the War, the 1921 Census records him still in work as a steel dresser, though this time ten miles away in Clydebank, about an hour each way by tram. His young family, consisting of himself (29), wife Abigail, (24) sons Edward (5) and Andrew (4) together with daughter Abigail (3) lived in a single room at 5 Comelypark Terrace, Camlachie. The surrounding rooms and tenements were similarly crammed with people old and young from all over Britain and Ireland. Abigail had already lost her 18 month old baby James to meningitis and eleven-week old Francis to bronchitis. Andrew would survive these appalling conditions to lead a full life. His brother and sister, and his mother, and several others not yet born, would not be so lucky.
Homes for heroes
The appalling housing conditions of the working classes had become a major political issue even during the war. There were major disturbances everywhere and the Government feared a revolution, such as had happened in Russia and the defeated countries. The Prime Minister Lloyd-George promised “homes fit for heroes”. Local Authorities were required to survey conditions and produce plans for addressing the issues in their areas. The reports for Glasgow were appalling but Glasgow Corporation had ambitious plans, limited only by financial constraints. They built a range of cottage-style houses at Mosspark, but the rents were so high that only Corporation office workers, teachers and medical personnel could afford them. It became an exclusive area, barred even to Catholics. A modified version of new housing of four-in-a-block with garden could be afforded by skilled tradesmen but the rents were beyond the reach of the common labourer.
Slum-clearance and the reinvention of the tenement
It was much cheaper to go back to the old tenement model. This was six flats on three landings with a common entrance close and backyard for drying clothes. The buildings were of light-grey blocks of composite and had black-tiled roofs. There was not much decoration but this gave the buildings a vaguely “modern” look. Equally modern was the provision of electric lighting and an inside toilet and bathroom for each flat. There was a boiler, a mangle between two sinks for washing in the kitchen, a pulley for drying clothes, a gas cooking range and an oven which worked back-to-back to the coal fire in the main room next door. In addition there could be anything from two to five living and sleeping “apartments” in the flat. This was the model used for Glasgow Corporation’s ambitious “rehousing”, or slum-clearance schemes of the 1930’s. Most importantly, a labourer could afford the (unsubsidised) rent. It was not the exclusive Mosspark, or even Drumoyne, but from the perspective of a single-end in Camlachie it looked like paradise. A family would now has a private, inside toilet, a bathroom for washing, a kitchen for cooking and clothes washing and a drying green outside. They also would also have separate, spacious bedrooms for the parents, daughters and sons. It was truly a new world.
Lilybank
The Lilybank scheme was built along these lines especially to house tenants cleared from the slums of Camlachie, Townhead and Garngad. The open land at the eastern border of the city was purchased from Lanarkshire County Council. There was already a small boiler maker’s works there. It was called after the street in the Gorbals where the company was originally founded - Lilybank Road, off Eglinton Street. The new scheme took its name from William Wilson Boilers (Lilybank Works) Ltd. The proprietor owned a huge Lilybank Villa in Albert Road, Crosshill. There was also a a Lilybank cottage on the grounds of the boiler works.
A stable community
The eleven Clarkes were the first tenants of the ground-floor four-apartment flat at 85 Methven Street, Lilybank. They moved in in 1933 or 1934. Other neighbours in the close according to the 1935 Valuation Roll were the M’Laughlins, McColls, Connors, Gormans and Hendersons. There was a carter among them, a tubeworker, riveter, miner, labourer, and one “clerk”. Apparently Eddie had changed his profession as well as his location.
A very large family
His first-born son Edward had died of pleurisy and pneumonia in 1930 aged fourteen, while working as a newsagent’s assistant in Govan, but the family had grown to include Eddie senior, his wife Abigail, and nine children, aged from two to sixteen, that is, three sons - Andrew, Thomas and John, and six daughters - Elizabeth, Margaret, Rose, Mary Theresa, Winifred and Abigail. This was a big family, even by the standards of the time. Most neighbouring families in the 1921 Census in Camlachie were five or six people, though one had a total of eight. Counting the children who died (and possible stillbirths) it looks as if Abigail was pregnant or nursing a baby every year of her marriage. In his poem, Eddie says he never forced himself on anyone, but he also obviously never felt the need to hold himself back. We don’t know what Abigail thought of this.
Moving to Methven Street
All eleven of them had lived in one room at 5 Comelypark Terrace, with no room for much privacy, even for the most intimate of activities. They would now be able to spread out to four spacious rooms in the new flat with all its modern conveniences. How they physically made the move from Camlachie we don’t know. They hadn’t much furnishing, or much spare money for transport or anything new, and anyway were not allowed to take bedding, for fear of bringing infection from the slums. The Corporation could supply new beds, to be repaid at one shilling a week on the rent, but somehow they furnished the large new flat. Their neighbours all came from similar backgrounds, and faced similar new problems so they settled down relatively quickly to form a remarkably stable, friendly and safe community. The future seemed incredibly bright.
Deaths and the War
The first resident of the new flat to die was fifteen-year old Winifred. She died of lung disease in Ruchill Hospital on 11 March 1936. The following year Abigail’s mother, Margaret Kelly, spent her last days in 85 Methven Street before dying in the Royal Cancer Hospital. Abigail herself died of acute bronchitis at home in March 1940. This was a serious blow to Eddie, especially as his father Michael had died in Camlachie the previous month. Eddie drowned his sorrows in whisky, as he admits in his poem. The following year his twenty-year old daughter died there too, this time of tuberculosis, a disease that would take away a second daughter, Margaret, at twenty-one (in 1951). Abigail was a young widow, having married a soldier, William Boon, who had departed with the army for France, never to make it back to Dunkirk. It’s likely that Eddie’s eldest son Andy was called up too, as he was twenty-two at the start of the war, but there are no war memories in the family. Tommy might have avoided this, as he was only thirteen in 1939 when the war started (but reached conscription age before the war ended in 1945). The youngest of the family, John was fourteen when the war ended, so definitely escaped conscription.
What’s to be done with Cecilia?
John was the last child Eddie had with Abigail. He was born in 1931, when she was thirty-seven. Maybe she had reached the natural end of her fecundity, or perhaps it was related to her increasingly poor health. Perhaps the increased space in Methven Street somehow gave Abigail more control over these matters. Whatever the reason, no new children were born to her in the ten years she lived there. Eddie had not lost interest in these matters, as became clear with the birth of a daughter, Cecilia on the 1st of December 1938 in Duke Street Hospital. Her mother was Margaret Gilkison Fraser, the wife of Neil Mackay Wallace, a steelworker whom she had married “by declaration” in 1929. Margaret was fifteen years younger than Eddie, a trend he would continue with his second wife, and lived some way away in Plant Street, Dennistoun. Near Camlachie, in fact.
We can only speculate on the nature and extent (even the locale) of the relationship. We do know that Cecilia Clarke was given over to Eddie’s married sister, Margaret Harrity, who brought her up in a rehousing scheme in Maryhill, similar to Lilybank. We don’t know of any contribution, financial or emotional, that Eddie gave to his seventh daughter, but it’s interesting that when Cecilia married in 1957 she gave her maiden name as “Cecilia Harrity, formerly Clarke”.
A change of occupation
As mentioned above, Eddie had worked for thirty years as a steeldresser but the 1935 Valuation Roll for 85 Methven Street records him as a clerk. Other documents of the 40’s and 50’s describe him variously as clerk, law clerk and Secretary, Housing Association. Eddie was very active in the Labour Party, even the radical Independent Labour Party. He was very interested in housing issues, helping tenants in disputes with landlords over rents, maintenance and other matters. The Housing Association was a tenants association and Eddie attended the Small Debt Court most days in its name to advise and speak for tenants who had fallen behind with their rent, for example. This was in the days before legal aid. He was a unique sight in Lilybank, leaving for court (and almost everywhere else) in a suit, collar and tie and felt hat. He was well-known at the court and well-respected even by the authorities. He managed to get his two elder sons jobs as Court Officers. Tommy eventually became Office Keeper of the Sheriff Court. He and his family had a flat above the premises and when the court moved to new buildings on the Clydeside he got a flat in splendid red-sandstone buildings (complete with the corporation coat of arms) on Hope Street, opposite the Theatre Royal. He ended his days there. Andy had a similar flat in the High Street associated with his job.
Despair and joy in time of war
Eddie describes difficult, dark lonely times in the early 1940’s, following the deaths of his father, wife and daughters, the pains deadened only by whisky. “But then a transformation scene/ I looked around and there was Jean!”. The scene was the Small Debt Court and Jean was a young widow whose husband, Robert Totten, had died of lung cancer about the same time as Abigail Clarke, leaving her alone with five young children. It was now 1943 and in March of that year her ten-year old son Samuel, had drowned in a quarry pit near his home. Jean lived several miles away from Lil in an almost identical rehousing scheme in Blackhill. She was obviously having difficulty adjusting to life without a breadwinner or income. In the poem, which was written later and addressed to her as she lay with tuberculosis in nearby Belvidere Hospital, Eddie describes his attraction to Jean in very physical terms. She is after all a healthy young woman in her early thirties and he is in his early fifties. In the same poem he admits his susceptibility to female charms, but insists he never pushes his case where it is not wanted. Jean’s memory is that he was very insistent, indeed pesky, in asking for dates, and, very quickly, marriage.
Two families in one house
In any event, they were married in July of that year. They did not marry in the traditional St Mary’s, probably because Jean, like Abigail, was a Protestant, and this time with Protestant children, so they married in Shettleston Registry Office. The witnesses were his daughter Mamie and her fiancé Charlie Robertson, also a Protestant. They themselves were married in the same Registry Office in December of that year. Jean’s eldest son, Tommy Totten, was thirteen, and preferred to stay with his Linton grandparents in Baillieston, but Jean abandoned her flat in Blackhill and brought her other three children, Jean, 11, Robert, 5, and Jim, 2, to join the Clarkes in Methven Street.
The Camlachie Clarkes begin to move out
We have already seen that Mamie got married and moved out in December 1943. Andrew got married in 1945, but was living at the time with his widowed grandmother Lizzie Clarke, who was dying of cancer, at 540 Gallowgate. Perhaps he had come back from the war and, at 28, found a new young stepmother (and step sister and brothers) hard to take.
Tommy married in 1949, but there is no memory of him being in the house in Methven Street before that. Perhaps he too served some time in the army and preferred to live elsewhere when he was demobbed.
John married in 1953, when he was twenty-two. No-one remembers him living in Methven Street. He married in Provan, near his generous auntie Margaret, so that might be a clue.
His own sister Margaret stayed on in Methven Street, but died there in 1951 of tuberculosis, nursed by Jean, who caught the disease.
Betty stayed (she was godmother to Frances) and later married a soldier in Edinburgh in 1961, but perhaps she had left to stay with her sister Mamie in Easterhouse before then.
The last mention of Rose is as a witness to Mamie’s wedding in December 1943. The talk is that she worked in the NAAFI during the War, where she met and married a soldier and moved with him to Scunthorpe. But she remains a mystery.
Yet more children for Eddie
Meanwhile, Eddie started a new family with Jean. The first baby was unfortunately stillborn but a daughter Frances arrived in 1945 followed by sons Denis (1947), another Edward (1949) and William (1950). They joined the remaining Clarkes and the Tottens, so there were probably eleven or twelve people living in the flat in the early 1950’s. There were the occasional serious arguments between Jean and Eddie. On at least one occasion she was packed and ready to leave him but finally ceded to the anguished cries of her children. Whether the cause of this argument was money, his constant absence in the pub of an evening, another woman or something more banal we just don’t know. There is no memory of strife between the different families in Methven Street, so perhaps people just moved out in the natural course of time. This is what happened eventually with the new Clarkes and the Tottens. The original, Camlachie Clarkes were after all well used to up to a dozen people sharing a life in one room.
A scare
Eddie’s wife Jean helped to nurse his daughter Margaret as she was dying of tuberculosis. She died in the Methven Street flat in 1951. Shortly afterwards Jean too developed tuberculosis and by the mid-50’s she was hospitalised in Belvidere Hospital. To make breathing easier her bed was sometimes moved to a veranda. This was visible from nearby Westthorn Park, from where her children could wave to her. Whether Eddie could not cope with the children, or for some other reason, they were taken into care, Frances in Maybole and the boys in Langbank. It was a pleasant enough time and Eddie was able to visit them occasionally. It was a very scary and emotional time for Eddie. This is clear from the heartfelt poems he wrote to and about Jean at the time. Apart from anything else they are very honest about his attachment to whisky and women. The illness did not kill Jean as feared, but she lost an infected lung and suffered from the loss for the rest of her life.
Court work, whisky and Celtic
During the 50’s Eddie carried on with his court work in the mornings, spending every evening in the pub, and the day studying form for small bets on the horses, or working out the best permutations for the football pools. He had a passion for Celtic Football Club, but never took his children to a match, claiming he did not want them infected with sectarianism. The result was that none of his sons inherited that passion. He did take his sons occasionally to the court, but none was inspired to become a lawyer, though, as indicated above two became court officers. Jean’s sole occupation was looking after the house, home and children with whatever money was left. This she did so well that her children only found out they were deprived much later from sociology books.
Eddie’s only contribution to household chores was occasionally to make soup on Sunday. This was a bit greasier than Jean’s version, but it was more or less edible.
The last rites
Eddie inherited his Catholic faith, but did not practise it very religiously. He did send the children to the local Good Shepherd RC Primary School. He also made sure they went to Sunday Mass, even accompanying them, at least until they were twelve, when they could make up their own minds. He did not have much time for priests, especially if they made anti-socialist remarks, which they did occasionally. The Catholic Church was at the time under pressure from the Communist regimes that had taken over Eastern Europe after the War, including Poland, Hungary and other Catholic countries. Priests warned against “extreme socialism”.
He seemed to accept his last illness (bronchial cancer) with some resignation, though once, near the end, he was seen in bed following Mass on the television, silently making all the appropriate gestures and responses.
He died a few minutes walk from Methven Street, in Belvidere Hospital at 2.20 in the afternoon on the 14th of October 1961 in his 70th year. His wife Jean and daughter Francis were present.
He is buried in St Peter’s Cemetery, Dalbeth, Glasgow
Contributors[]
Sources[]
- Registrar General for Scotland
- family tradition
External links[]
- [[1]]