BEFORE we get too nostalgic about the good old days, we should linger over this photograph. It is the Cochrane family in Forbes Street, in Calton in Glasgow’s East End. The picture was taken in April 1949, and says it is for a feature on housing in The Bulletin newspaper, which is no longer with us.

I don’t have The Bulletin to hand, but I can imagine what was written, as after the war attention in Glasgow was focused on the dreadful housing conditions in the city, leading to the rush to build housing schemes on the city’s periphery.

This is the reason why. The Cochranes, with nine children, would have been squeezed into a tenement flat, probably with only two rooms. The furniture would be put in a skip if it was around today, the children’s clothes are torn hand-me-downs and dad is making tea at an open stove.

Mrs Cochrane simply looks knackered.

I find a newspaper feature from the previous year describing similar slum housing just across the Clyde from here in Gorbals. One young girl is quoted: “We’re eight in one room. We go to bed in relays. My elder brothers walk round the court while we girls undress. Then they come back and kip down on the floor beside us.

“The cat sleeps with us. If a rat runs over the blankets, he springs out and has it.”

The Cochranes’ tenement has now been swept away, and Forbes Street is now a row of neat housing. Life for the remaining Cochranes will surely have improved.