Allan Glen's School, Glasgow

I started at Allan Glen's School Glasgow,where the seeds of revolution were sown and nurtured within me, on 23rd August 1963. That day, in the large red sandstone building on the left in the picture, I - a shy but brilliant boy from Castlemilk, one of Glasgow's notorious Housing Schemes - was initiated into the Victorian Public School System, id est the Middle Class! A mutant, displaying skills and intelligence not expected to appear amongst the progeny of the Working Class.

Looking at this photograph (wonderfully available to me after all these years thanks to Glasgow's Virtual Mitchell Library) I recall in vivid detail the many experiences of adolescence and indoctrination in and around that old building, which was demolished in 1965, since we had moved into the glittering new building on the right. It was the most expensive school building in Scotland, and the first ever installed with lifts, which started my lifelong fascination for exploring large buildings. Eventually I would learn, with my brother Alistair, how to open lift doors manually from inside or out, stop it in-midflight, take a trip on the roof of the lift with my buddy inside pressing the buttons. I was almost expelled when suspected responsible of leaving the lift jammed between floors with the doors open.
It has always been my ambition, since reading "Tom Brown's Schooldays", to write a memoir of my time at this school. For example, I was lucky to evade being selected as a "fag". The School Prefects - or Police Force - each had their red-faced boy with breaking voice to run errands, fetching food from the canteen tuck shop or coal from the cellar, toasting their scones for them on the fire in the Prefects Room between the ground and first floors. For all I know they were submitted to enforced buggery - at least that's what I heard from Churches, a boy in my form who also escaped fag duty. After all, as Churches and I discovered in our extra-curricular research at the city's Reference Library, under Stirling's Library in Royal Exchange Square, "faggotry" was slang for homesexuality, according to the huge 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary - full of such knowledge formerly inaccessible to one from my scoial background. By the age of 14 I was making frequent use of dozens of words my Dad wouldn't have understood if he encountered them. How shocked I was to discover what a "bugger" was. When my mother was angry with us, particularly when at that age she couldn't catch up with us to land her leather strap, she used to scream at "Ya perr o' buggers!" Oh well, education and learning can be painful and embarrassing, especially when you realise how ignorant you formerly were!

I want to continue a memoir about that part of my life, which is why I have left space "earlier" in this blog (ie:entries with no content prior to this date, which can be edited and given new content after this date. I can insert material later as it comes to me, yet it will be available for the reader in the same sequence as that in which I wrote it! Brilliant, or what? Poverty is the mother of Ingenuity. (I just can't afford a web-page like "everybody else" which displays material in the order you put it in.)

At Allan Glen's I first shone out as a brilliant pupil, becoming Dux of the Junior School in my 3rd year. I then became a rebel - encouraged by Dylan, The Beatles and others to fight and break down the oppressive system enforcing itself upon us. My brother and I obtained a copy of The Little Red Schoolbook, through the revolutionary "Underground Press" in London. We committed many acts of non-violent anarchy (later called "terrorism") around the school, culminating in the Founder's Day Riot of 1968. Which I will enjoy filling you in on later but right now Old McGandalf has got lots of work to attend to on other fronts.

Hey, if anyone ever reads this give me some feedback (Comments). I'll be grateful for your time, even if it's just to tell me to "give it up!".