Engagement from the Inside

ROBERT LIVINGSTON recalls the most important formative experience in his career in the arts at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre, and ponders the lessons to be learned from its fascinating legacy.

ALAN BENNETT once wrote that, when he was growing up in Leeds, he felt that his every need was being catered for, in a kind of benign paternalism, by Leeds Corporation. The Corporation crest was on his school jotters and his library books. It was emblazoned on the sides of buses and at the entrance to the City Art Gallery.

Although I’m almost a generation younger than Bennett, I had much the same sense, growing up in Glasgow in the 1960s and early 70s. My local library, in Dennistoun, housed in a handsome Edwardian building with an Italian Renaissance façade, was like a never-empty Horn of Plenty of wonderful books of all sorts, and I soon realised that if there was anything I couldn’t find there, mysterious forces would conjure it up for me from hidden vaults elsewhere in the City.

At primary school my class would be taken, by special bus, once a fortnight, halfway across the city, for lectures and film shows in the wonderful enchanted palace that is Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. As I got older, I discovered the pleasures of orchestral concerts in the City Hall, and operas in the King’s Theatre—both, of course, owned and managed by the Corporation (as it was still called).

Then there was the delicious pleasure of venturing into the wasteland of the Gorbals to the Citizens Theatre under Giles Havergal’s regime, never knowing whether what one was about to see would be thrilling, shocking, or downright awful. The Citz may have been independent, but everyone knew it couldn’t operate without Corporation support.

Once, on Parkinson, Jimmy Reid, made famous by his role at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, lamented his deprived Glasgow upbringing. His curious example was the lack of access to tennis courts. I was outraged. Every Glasgow city park – and there is a great number of them – had a public tennis court, open to anyone with sixpence.

What Reid was really describing was not a lack of opportunity, but a failure of the imagination – his own, and that of his class. Even though I was growing up in Glasgow’s East End (decades before the influx of artists started to make it fashionable), and as an only child, and bookish at that, I was often lonely, I never felt deprived. …

(The full text of Robert Livingston’s essay can be downloaded as a pdf file – see below)

© Robert Livingston, 2007

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