00:00I'm Alastair Dalton, the Scotsman's transport correspondent among the beautifully colourful
00:05classic buses here at the Glasgow Vintage Vehicle Trust at Bridgeton in the east end of Glasgow.
00:12I'm here to talk to Hugh Doherty, an author and former conductor and bus driver, who's written
00:18about the extraordinary connection between Glasgow and Donegal in the northwest of Ireland,
00:23where many people came over in the 19th century to join Glasgow's expanding transport system
00:30and work on its trams, buses and the subway.
00:33The connection between Donegal and Glasgow stretches back to the early years of the 19th century.
00:39Yes, it does. In 1817, a steamboat began to run between Derry and Glasgow. If you were in Derry,
00:45it was the Scots boat, and if you were in Glasgow, it was the Derry boat. And after the famine of 1848,
00:51and got a more of the great hunger. 50,000 Donegal people came to Glasgow looking for work,
00:59looking for sustenance and looking to have a new life. Glasgow horse trams began in 1872
01:05with a company running them, and in 1894, Glasgow Corporation took them over. Now, both the company
01:11and Glasgow Corporation needed people who understood horses, and who better than country lads from Donegal
01:17who knew them at home. And that is really how they began to get involved in public transport in Glasgow.
01:23Well, it was prestigious. It was regular. It paid fairly well. There was a free uniform.
01:30And other jobs Catholics couldn't get into. The railways, for example, did not take on Catholics.
01:36They were very Masonic. They were family-run. One family would come, father and son,
01:42and so on through the generations. Whereas Glasgow Corporation, from its earliest days,
01:46was an equal opportunity employer. And it employed Catholics as conductors, drivers,
01:52and also in its car works, where it built the trams, working the tracks as well.
01:57Any job in Glasgow Corporation tramways was open to Catholics.
02:00Driving a bus or tram would be quite a prestigious occupation for these people coming over.
02:06Yes, it was, because most people didn't drive anything. Whereas if you were at the controls
02:10of a Glasgow Corporation tram, and it was highly regarded in the city. You were somebody.
02:15You had your uniform. It was a disciplined service. You had status. But most of all,
02:21you could go faster than anything on the road. And that was looked on as a very desirable job.
02:27And one of the things that comes out of looking into this is that many, many people who came
02:33from Donegal did stay here. And they made a career in public transport. And thanks to that,
02:39their children were able to go on and access free education, the 60s and the 70s. And you get the
02:47production, basically, of a professional class, very largely, very much based on the stability that
02:54that job gave to people. People came from rural places in Donegal, where there wasn't a lot of time,
03:01there wasn't a lot of discipline. And they came to work in this highly disciplined service,
03:05and they did it really well. But if you ran early, if you didn't collect the fares,
03:11if you allowed too many people to stand, it was five downstairs and none on top. Then if an inspector
03:16came on, you would be booked, you'd be suspended, and you might actually be sacked. So people had to be
03:22on their toes all the time. It really peaked in the 1950s and the 60s. There was terrible poverty in
03:29Donegal, especially in the west of the county at that time. So coming to Glasgow was very attractive.
03:35And at that time, the job itself had become less attractive to people living here. So there were
03:43plenty of vacancies. And Glasgow Corporation goes out of its way to attract Irish workers, but also
03:49Sikh workers. And the very first Pakistani and Indians came in as well. So by 1960s, the job was looked on
03:58as not as prestigious. And in 1962, the very last Glasgow tram ran, and things were never the same
04:05again. And you have a kind of decline in public transport right into the 70s. And Glasgow Corporation
04:11stopped running the buses in 1973. So the peak years would be the 50s and the 60s, when there were a lot
04:18of people. Some stayed, some went home. But a lot of them who stayed for a short time also sent money
04:24back to Donegal. So Glasgow Corporation Transport was actually helping alleviate poverty back home.
04:31Basically, there was a lot of advertising appeared in the press, appeared that the buses themselves
04:37would have an advert up saying, security is what you want. And it gave the rates of pay. It told you
04:43about three weeks holiday, which was good holidays in the 50s and the 60s, and free uniform. And word got
04:49round the Donegal diaspora. And once the first Asian lads came on, more came. And everybody got
04:57on very well indeed. In fact, the subway was known jokingly, without a hint of racism, as the Donegal
05:03and Bengal Railway, because it was either Donegal driver or somebody from India and Pakistan who was
05:09driving at that time. So multiculturalism definitely becomes a feature of working on the buses, the trams,
05:18and the trolley buses. The trolley buses had a famous garage called Hamden, which was right behind
05:24Hamden Park, the famous football ground. And it was known as a left foot garage. A left footer in Glasgow
05:32is one of the Catholic faith. And trolley buses were controlled with your left foot. The accelerator was
05:38on the left. So there was a double joke about a left foot garage because it was also full of Donegal crews.
05:44And many of them met conductors there and got married and stayed their whole life in Glasgow.
05:50So there's a whole aspect of people settling and using the job as a bridge to be accepted in the
05:58society they'd come into. When the trams went off in 1962, so horrified were some of the proud motor men,
06:06as we call them, and motor women, because Glasgow employed women tram drivers. They in fact decided
06:12to respond to an advert from Melbourne and they went to drive trams in Melbourne. And when I was there
06:18about 10 years ago, I was talking to the women driver and she said, oh yes, I remember the man who taught
06:25me was a Glasgow driver. We thought a great deal of them. He was an instructor. He'd come from Donegal
06:31originally. And he taught me everything I know. And I'm very proud to tell me that. So there's, yes,
06:38they went there. Others went down to the subway where they could drive electric vehicles. They didn't
06:43want to go on the diesel bus, which they saw as inferior to the tram or the electric vehicle.
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