EVEN before the end of the 1938 Empire Exhibition, calls were being made for it to be repeated at Bellahouston Park the following summer.
Sir William Crawford, a prominent London publicist, said the exhibition had put Scotland on the map and the country would lose much if it were brought to a permanent halt. Some of the “less interesting” exhibits could be removed for a Bellahouston re-run in 1939, he added.
But Sir Cecil M. Weir, chairman of the Administrative Committee, said the exhibition had always been seen as a one-off. It wasn’t practicable for it to be reopened in its present form – though, he conceded, there was something to be said for part of it to be retained for display by Scottish councils and industrial bodies, together with the cultural exhibits at Bellahouston.
The exhibition closed at midnight on Saturday, October 29. The last-day attendance was 364,092, a new day-record. Rain - the exhibition’s greatest enemy all summer - fell incessantly in the last three hours. Between 8pm and 9pm, despite the downpour, it was impossible to walk with freedom in any part of the park.
“No disorder of any kind marked the closing stages,” this paper observed. “The inevitable hilarity and exuberance were kept within bounds, and damage done in the park was comparatively slight”.
The total attendance over the six-month run was 12.59 million. People had come from far and wide. Many celebrities, too, had visited, and seen for themselves the elegant lay-out, the pavilions and the palaces (among them, the Glasgow Herald pavilion, on the right, just behind the British Railways one).
There were many exotic attractions to be seen. Exotic people, too, including the so-called “giraffe-necked” women from Burma, one of whom is seen above, cradling her newborn after giving birth in Glasgow. “When we arrived at the exhibition we were met with these tribal giraffe brass-necked women, we stood staring at them and a little frightened by their stretched neck”, runs a recollection by Margaret Nicol, quoted in an 2017 exhibition staged by the Ibrox Writers’ Group at the House for an Art Lover.
As with the Garden Festival half a century later, there was a sense of loss once the Empire Exhibition shut. Many Glaswegians longed for it to return.
One London newspaper said the exhibition had been a success despite being staged “in a remote ... corner of the Empire”.
This was too good an opening for our Editorial Diary to resist: “So Glasgow”, it said, “shares with the Solomon Islands and the wilds of North Borneo the distinction of being an outpost of Empire, and the gentlemen of England who sit at home in ease must often tremble for the handful of brave white men ruling in daily peril of their lives the bold and savage tribes of the far-distant North”.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here