They packed their worldly goods on the back of wheelbarrows or the local coal merchant’s horse-drawn cart, carefully binding the horses’ hooves with blankets so they wouldn’t make a sound as they clip-clopped in darkness from the misery of the slums to their new home. 

Awaiting them at the other end were baths and inside toilets, the luxury of a kitchenette with fireclay washtub and sink, a coalbunker and a press. 

For slum dwelling families, new housing schemes in places such as Blackhill were a taste of paradise. 

But as a new book reveals, they were blissfully unaware that they – and generations to come after them – were being condemned to a future of prejudice and stigma, because of city housing officials’ deep-set Victorian attitudes. 

According to new research by former Glasgow corporation housing official and sociologist Séan Damer, a former Glasgow corporation housing official, slum tenants’ futures were doomed by prejudiced attitudes that led to a three-tier “class” system of housing which saw slum dwellers consigned to poorly designed schemes in polluted areas with few facilities. 

In the case of Blackhill, noxious fumes from the nearby gas works and toxic canal water led to early deaths, while the stigma of living in the area followed families for decades.

“Anyone with brains could see Blackhill was saturated with gas fumes when the wind blew from the west,” says Mr Damer, whose new book, Scheming, explores the wheeling, dealing and class snobbery that went on behind the scenes of the city’s slum clearance housing schemes. 

“Anyone could see the chemicals which spewed out toxic waste to the derelict Monklands Canal, that children would make a playground on the canal and some would be drowned there.

“But the scheme was built on what was manifestly a dangerous site.”
While other housing schemes such as Mosspark enjoyed wide roads, landscaped gardens and schools, the lower tier schemes where slum dwellers were placed were bland and monochrome with muddy courtyards. 

They were also and devoid of decent roads, shops, schools or a church. 
And while the more privileged families were able tocalled in favours from well-connected figures of influence to secure homes in first and second-tier areas such as West Drumoyne, those at the bottom of the heap faced humiliating and degrading treatment from housing officials, says Mr Damer. 

Despite the disparity, the horrific conditions of Glasgow’s early 20th century slums at Cowcaddens, Calton, Garngard and Townhead meant post-First World War families were grateful to make the move. 

In 1919, almost half a million Glaswegians were squashed into small rooms and kitchens, most with shared outside toilets or lavatories set up on inside landings, and, in a few startling cases, with as many as 18, even up to 21, children per family. 

In the worst “backlands” slums, the population density reached 400 people per acre – giving Glasgow a dire reputation for more slums and worse conditions than any other city in Britain.

Various housing acts promised vastly improved conditions. 

However, according to Mr Damer, deep-set Victorian attitudes meant there was little sympathy for those surviving in the worst conditions, battling war wounds and TB in densely-packed tenements with little ventilation, sunlight or sanitation. 

“To Victorians, these people were feckless, the great unwashed ‘People of the Abyss’,” he says. 

“There had been a great debate in late Victorian years about what to do with them. 

“There was cholera and typhus in the slums that killed middle-class people and they couldn’t have that.

“Debate raged between those who wanted to rehouse them and those who wanted them to die out. 

“So when the State passed legislation saying local councils had to build housing for working class people, the Corporation was trapped in its whole ideologically; because if the slum dwellers did not deserve good housing they should not get it.

“People were reluctantly rehoused,” he adds.

“And if they were to be rehoused, they were getting the kind of house in the kind of area they deserved.”

A three-tier system was established which meant people considered to be upstanding, clean and capable were given homes in leafy schemes such as Mosspark, while others considered respectable skilled and semi-skilled blue collar workers were handed keys for homes in places like West Drumoyne.

Many climbed the housing ladder after calling in favours from well-connected figures of influence. 

For those at the bottom of the heap, however, the process was much more harshwere treated harshlyfaced humiliating and degrading treatment from corporation staff and they often moved en masse, taking the stigma of the slum with them. 

“Corporation officials treated people in re-housing schemes as a homogeneous bunch of wasters so they treated them in a very authoritarian manner,” adds Mr Damer, who used interviews captured with original slum-dwelling families to create a picture of life in the new schemes.

“In spite of official belief that people are thick, the vast majority of people who moved were so delighted with their new houses that they were clean and well managed.” 

Once consigned to live in a slum-clearance scheme, stigma and prejudice followed families for generations.  

“It was inevitable that this pernicious ideology would overflow into the council housing management practice of Glasgow Corporation,” adds Mr Damer in his 
book.

“Consequently, generations of Glasgow’s council housing managers have been imbued with authoritarian attitudes towards, especially, the tenants of tenemental rehousing schemes.”

Scheming by Séan Damer is published by Edinburgh University Press Ltd.