GLASGOW’S most prominent newspaper writers said farewell to one of their own when the death of Jack House was announced in April, 1991, just a few weeks before his 85th birthday.
Jack, for decades a key part of the reason for the success of the Evening Times, was known as Mr Glasgow. What he didn’t know about the city and its history could have been written on the back of an exceptionally small stamp. In an interview in 1989 he declared, ‘’I’m the only man who’s walked round the perimeter of Glasgow twice”.
He wrote several dozen books, the best-known of which was Square Mile of Murder.
Jack did not have a car, so he travelled widely by bus. “Indeed”, wrote Jack Webster in the Herald on the morning after his colleague’s death, “his public travelling contributed to the fact that he was such a kenspeckle figure in his native city. Bus conductors knew him, newsvendors hailed him. Aristocrats were given no more acknowledgement.
“For he was the people’s man, Mister Glasgow himself, widely recognised for the prominent teeth and lazy eye which so often indicate a gentle personality. He was a celebrity journalist, finding it hard to refuse an invitation, especially to eat. And when he sang for his supper it was with the eloquence of a man who felt deeply about his subject. His knowledge was encyclopaedic”.
Webster had begun his tribute with these words: “He may have had English-born parents but Jack House, author, journalist and broadcaster, became the most committed Glaswegian of all -- the very heart and soul and voice of his beloved city. That city, in turn, bestowed its greatest honours upon him”.
The Herald’s Jack McLean recalled that his parents had been in a Glasgow restaurant, just after the war, arguing who should have the steak and who the Welsh rarebit,”because funds could not extend to two steaks. The argument was resolved by having two escalopes delivered by the waiter. At which point a well-known Glasgow character with sticky-out teeth passed by their table saying: ‘I noticed your dilemma and have wanted to say this all my life. This,’ he said with a toothy grin, ‘is on The House’.”
House had started his journalistic career on the Glasgow Evening Citizen. On his first day there, he was sent to Glasgow University to interview John Logie Baird. “It was soon after breakfast”, Jack would later say, “and what I still recall is the inventor had egg on his chin”.
Cliff Hanley was a cub reporter at the time. “His exuberant articles in the Evening Citizen were among my big events,” he wrote. “He had a marvellous way of seeing the mundane aspects of the city from angles nobody had ever thought of and turning them into marvels”.
People’s Palace curator Elspeth King said: “Jack was a living reference book on Glasgow. His knowledge was indispensable. Perhaps his greatest contribution was his fight to preserve the city’s old buildings in the days before that was fashionable”.
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