ABSTRACT
I’d never had such a culture shock in my life. It was terrible. Picture it, there were very few motor cars, you cycled everywhere in Donegal in 1956. Maybe one or two cars were about the place and maybe one of them would be the local taxi and things like that. And I came over here and stayed in Hayfield Street. The Co-operative had their garage there and all their lorries, and their workers, I think they started at bloody one o’clock in the morning. At the time I was going to sleep they started up and you were shooting up in bed, Christ! From the tranquillity of the countryside where you only hear cows lowing or something like that or people shouting, to suddenly hearing all these engines firing up in the wee small hours. And then it was all the tram cars. I could hear them clattering down early in the morning. Oh aye I was scared. (Interviewee 30)
In contrast to ‘traditional Ireland’, ‘modern Scotland’ offered economic opportunity and security, modern, world leading and technologically advanced industries, laterally spacious houses in vast planned estates with modern amenities and utilities, a growing and exciting metropolis with a strong civic culture and modern transport infrastructure, and an expanding welfare state that provided tertiary as well as secondary education, free health care, pensions and unemployment insurance and recreational and library facilities. What were migrant encounters with Scotland’s comparative modernity like? Interviewee 23’s mother died in 1979 at the age of 97. Aged 19, she had moved to Glasgow in 1901 from County Down. Prior to her death, Interviewee 23 secretly recorded her mother as she told stories about her early years in Glasgow. Amalgamating hours of tape, she produced an edited summary. Although deeply personal, Interviewee 23 generously agreed to share these recordings with the author. In the words of her mother, it is possible to see a vivid account of what early twentieth Glasgow must have seemed like to a young Irish woman:
When I was about nineteen years of age, my mother and father decided to close up the house and come to Glasgow for a better chance for the family to get on. My father came to Glasgow a few weeks ahead of us and had a nice house for us all to live in. I remember when I arrived in Glasgow Central Station I was astonished at all the din and noise. We got out on to Union Street and went down and crossed Jamaica Bridge. That was a wonderful bridge. It was very nice indeed to go down Nelson Street and come to Dale Street where my father had a house for us. The house was up a close and was very nice indeed; two stairs up above people. I never saw anything like it before. Neighbours would run up and down and pass you on the stairs just like they would in the street. The sitting room looked out on to Nelson Street and it was really very nice, with all the horse drawn cars.
