Murder, riots, and the missing tenement: hidden story of Byres Road 

But before we go and see the building, we’re starting near the top of the street, on the corner of Vinicombe Street, at the tenement that should be there but isn’t. It’s Numbers 374 – 388, which were among the first to be built in the mid-19th century. Before that, the old Byres Road was little more than a dirt track that went from Partick village to the paper mills on the River Kelvin. Even by the mid-1870s, much of the area was still open countryside.

Byres Road in Glasgow's West End (Image: Colin Mearns) We know for sure that the tenements on the corner at 374-388 were among the first to be constructed because they were made from blonde sandstone. By the time they got to the bottom of the street, the flats were much smaller and were being made from cheaper red sandstone from Dumfriesshire. It’s one of the reasons many used to consider the bottom of the street the less salubrious end (some still do). Barclay remembers Partick being pretty rough when he was growing up in the 50s and his mother telling him never to go south of Lawrence Street because who knows what might happen.

So the tenements at 374-388 were definitely at the posher end. The problem was, like a lot of other buildings in Glasgow, they stood on old mine workings. By the 1970s, the building had been declared unsafe and when the Coal Board refused to accept responsibility, the shop owners on the ground floor bought out the flats and had them demolished. Hence the unusual one-storey and the missing tenement.

Barclay tells me that he didn’t know much of any of this when he started researching his new book, although he did know a little about the violent history of the area because he’d experienced it himself.

“You think of gangs as an east end thing,” he says, “but the gangs came here. I was in the Rock pub one day, in the 60s, and these two guys came up and asked us about a party. One of my friends said ‘bugger off’ and the guy drew a hatchet out of his jacket and we ran for it. Who carries a hatchet? It was nothing like the east end gangs, but there was a lot of violence.”

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Like other parts of Glasgow, the violence stemmed from the loyalty people felt for their areas, particularly Maryhill and Partick, and the building we’ve reached further down the road is a good example: the Curlers Rest. Built in the 1840s, it’s one of the oldest buildings on the street (who hasn’t been stocious in here at least once?) But the pub was sometimes the scene of clashes between the gangs of the West End.

“In the mid-60s,” says Barclay, “Curlers was the starting point for a major brawl. Two of the Mod gangs, the Maryhill Fleet and the Partick Cross Boys, arrived to discover the Rockers’ gang, the Blue Angels, drinking there.”

Barclay’s book quotes what happens next: “The mods ran in, slashing with their razors and the Blue Angels retaliated with their flick knives, switchblades, and tyre levers; guys were slashed and stabbed and several guys collapsed with weapon wounds. Soon the police arrived in droves and waded into all and sundry, making no distinctions.”

Archive pictures from A History of Byres Road (Image: Archive pictures from A History of Byres Road)

It was not the first time Curlers had been the centre of disorder. Check out this report of a riot in 1855: “A group of colliers and bricklayers were in the tavern and after partaking of some liquor they exhibited a disposition to wanton mischief. As is usual among small neighbouring towns, a spirit of jealousy prevails between the inhabitants of Partick and those of Maryhill.

“In a very short time, a riotous mob assembled to the number of almost 2,000. The men hastily armed themselves with pickaxes, shovels, brickbats and paling posts – and even females rushed into the melee with the ferocity of harpies.

“After fighting for about half an hour, the police saw that it was hopeless and betook themselves to places of concealment.” The report goes on to say that the warring parties eventually dispersed. The following year, the burgh advertised for more policemen, at 18s a week.

Byres Road has seen many changes (Image: Colin Mearns)

Continuing our walk down the street towards Barclay’s old house, he tells me about some of the other violent events in the history of Byres Road. Such as the murder of George Riddoch in January 1912. He was walking home from the offices of the Scottish Aeronautical Society in Ashton Lane when he was set upon by a man. A woman nearby heard his screams and shouted at the attacker who ran away. In spite of an extensive police investigation, it remains one of the city’s unsolved murders.

But we’ve arrived now, at the place where Barclay grew up, just off Byres Road in Ruthven Lane, and I ask him what he remembers from his childhood, in the 50s. He points to the Bothy restaurant. “That was Mrs McGrelis’s house,” he says, “She used to have cows here until at least the 1920s.” He also points up to the tenement where his best friend lived; it was later made famous as the tenement in Avril Paton’s painting Windows in the West.

But it’s the big building at the end of the lane, now home to some small shops, that really gets the memories going because for the first 22 years of his life, this was Barclay’s home. “I have happy memories of this place,” he says. He points up to a window above the door. “That was my bedroom.” He also remembers playing badminton in the courtyard, where his father had a garage and stored hundreds of cars.

The University Cafe on Byres Road today (Image: Colin Mearns) He shows me a picture of his great-grandfather Joseph Price, looking important in a very tall top hat. It was Joseph who bought the land here when it was open countryside and established stables where people would store their horses and carriages. By the early 20th century, many people were swapping their horses for cars so Barclay’s family adapted and started garaging cars instead. At one point, the business was storing around 150 vehicles here.

In many ways, the place hasn’t changed much since Barclay’s childhood. One of the tenements on the corner has gone – a victim of subsidence, like the one at Vinicombe Street – but apart from that, Barclay’s father Willie would still recognise the place. He was the latest in the line to run the family business but as people stopped keeping their cars in separate garages and the business rates went up, he sold up in the late 1960s and went to live in Australia. There was also never a prospect of Barclay taking over the business; he went to live in London and got into the arts, raising money for major projects. “I’m the end of the line,” he says.

He's not maudlin about this place though – he has happy memories but he accepts things change – so it’s back to our walk down Byres Road to uncover more of its history. He points out some of the interesting shops. Iceland on the corner of Ashton Lane which was the site of the first supermarket on Byres Road in 1962: Cooper’s Fine Fare. A little further down, he also points out the site of the newsagent Bensons at No 104 whose window was full for decades of small ads for flats to share. It was where thousands of people (including me) found their first flat in Glasgow.

But now we’re walking a bit further down, past the University Cafe (the oldest café in the street, established 1918) to Edward Graham Hairdressers (the oldest family business in the street, established 1915). It’s still in the family even now and is run by Edward’s granddaughter Elizabeth who shows us round the place. She points out the pictures of her ancestors on the wall, all handsome moustachioed men posing at the door in aprons and smiles. “I am very proud of our history,” she says. Fact: her dad Colin used to do the hair of Billy Connolly’s dad, and the boys from Simple Minds.

Elizabeth Graham on Byres Road in Glasgow's West End (Image: Colin Mearns) She says a lot hasn’t changed about her business in a hundred years – the layout is basically the same – but it wasn’t particularly easy when she first joined the family firm. “They still had condom machines in here – ‘something for the weekend’ – and when I first started, my dad’s customers said ‘how could you bring a woman in here?’”

Elizabeth was eventually accepted by her customers, and treasured, but she knows that the end is coming. “I’ve been here been 25 years,” she says. “And we have very loyal customers who come from all over the place to get their hair cut. But I’m 63 now and my daughter works in medicine. It stops with me.”

Outside again in the sun (not always a feature of Byres Road) we check out the site of the old Western Infirmary buildings which have been demolished to create a fine new view of Kelvingrove Museum. We then head up the road where Barclay points out the Aragon pub where Billy Connolly and Tam Harvey, the original Humblebums, signed their first professional contract in the 1960s.

Further up, on the corner of Highburgh Road, is another of the street’s most famous pubs, Tennents, but it’s a pub that almost didn’t happen thanks to that fracas we talked about at Curlers.

Archive pictures from A History of Byres Road (Image: Archive pictures from A History of Byres Road)

In 1881, when an application was made to open a pub on the corner of Great George Street, an objector remembered the Curlers riot and said a new pub would “bring up the most disorderly portion of Partick a little nearer the West End of Glasgow”. And when Hugh Tennent applied for permission for his pub in 1886, among the objectors was the senior staff at Glasgow University who said the granting of a licence would be “fraught with danger to the students … some are sure to be easily led away”. The licence was granted anyway.

Further up is a much newer drinking establishment: Oran Mor. Until the late 1970s, it was Kelvinside Church, then a bible school, before being converted into the bar and arts centre in 2004. Barclay stops outside the old church and tells me the story of Jyoti Hazra and Helen Leathem.

“Jyoti came to Glasgow from Calcutta in 1952 to study at Glasgow University. He and other Indian students decided that to meet and socialise with Scottish people, they should learn to dance but at the dance halls almost all of the women refused to dance with him.”

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Barclay explains what happens next in his book by quoting Jyoti: “One day, I and three other Indian students decided to go to a church on the corner of Byres Road and Great Western Road where we discovered that free tea, coffee and sandwiches were served at an international evening. There was dancing and I asked one of the young women if she would partner me, but then discovered it was the Gay Gordons. She said ‘just follow me’.” He and Helen married in 1957 and were together for 59 years.

There are other notable folk connected with Byres Road we should mention. Such as Roy Douglas Harvey who was working in his father’s grocery shop when he was conscripted into the 5th/6th Royal Scots in 1917. He died at Amiens in 1918 and it was Roy’s story that the poet laureate Andrew Motion chose when asked to write a poem to mark the centenary of the Armistice. “Think of Private Roy Douglas Harvey,” he wrote, “who was killed a reserved and thoughtful schoolboy from Hillhead.”

And Percy and Ella Pilcher also deserve a credit, for what might have been. They rented rooms in Byres Road but more importantly they started to build a glider and tested it in 1895 and because Ella flew in it for a few seconds, she became the first woman to fly in Britain. Sadly in 1899, Percy was killed in a demonstration of the machine in Leicestershire and it was four years later that the Wright brothers made history when they flew their plane in North Carolina.

All of this history - the people, the places, the memories - is pressing in on us as our walk comes to an end, back where we started at the top of the street. I ask Barclay if he’s happy with the changes he’s seen on Byres Road and he say it’s fine by him; there are no tears in his eye when he thinks of the past, he says. He can get nostalgic like anyone else of course, and remembers trudging up Great George Street thousands of times on his way to school at Hillhead High, and buying gobstoppers and Wizard For Boys at Murray’s the newsagent. But Byres Road is a happy place for him now, as it was a happy place for him then.

Time to crack on, he says, and heads off down the road.

A History of Glasgow's Byres Road by Barclay Price is published by Stenlake and is available at stenlake.co.uk or from bookshops