Out and about with half-hangit Iain

Had he been alert to bad omens, Iain Gray might have noticed as he arrived in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket yesterday that things were looking bleak.

This was to be the Scottish Labour leader’s final walkabout in the capital and he had chosen to begin it, more or less, by the Last Drop Tavern, a bar sardonically named in honour of those hanged on Edinburgh’s gibbet. And Mr Gray was standing a matter of yards from the former site of the scaffold itself.

Perhaps, at the end of a spectacularly disastrous campaign, it was fitting that he should turn up at a giant symbol of impending doom. The enemies of the People’s Party have hardly had to break into a sweat to rubbish Labour’s efforts to launch a credible assault on power.

What began weeks ago with Mr Gray’s unedifying retreat into a sandwich shop near Glasgow Central has flowered into endless toe-curling embarrassments for the Labour leader. Add the barbs thrown into the policy debate, by senior policemen, prison governers and doctors and his fate seemed sealed long before this latest press call.

Such disasters have apparently gone unnoticed in Scottish Labour’s HQ. Instead, to support their leader for this final day on the stump, his press office had issued a breakdown of his “short campaign”. In the past 43 days, we are told, Mr Gray has met more than one million people and shaken (according to statistics supplied by the relevant commissar) 8,600 hands. To sustain himself through this difficult ordeal, he has consumed 18kg of fruit, and eaten 86 sandwiches, including one from Subway (sources insist this was later regurgitated).

He ate no fruit in the Grassmarket, nor was any thrown at him. But like many a condemned man brought kicking and screaming to this spot Mr Gray revealed he had not slept the previous night. Not, apparently, because he felt any sense of doom, but because he was in the midst of a final 40-hour push for votes, criss-crossing Scotland and meeting the night workers who keep the country’s life blood pumping while the rest sleep soundly.

“That is what we are doing at the end of the campaign as we did at the beginning,” he said. “Through the night I visited a bakery, a couple of distribution centres, a lot of people working doing jobs that matter to everyone else. I think it is right to acknowledge them.”

It’s also probably helpful to hold these daft publicity calls under cover of darkness, because Mr Gray walked off, past Maggie Dickson’s bar (named after “Half-Hangit Maggie”, who survived the gallows) and through gaggles of bemused tourists, with scarcely a voter in sight.

Then, fatefully, he turned briskly left, walking past the largest joke shop in Edinburgh, whose signboard delivered a message of its own: “A ha ha ha”. The cameras clicked around the Labour leader, to record one last humiliation.

Short of leading his followers up to Hooters strip joint, his press call could hardly have been worse.

Finally, he was asked the question: did he have any regrets about this terrible campaign?

“You carry out post mortems after you get the result,” Mr Gray said.

But you just walked past a joke shop, in full view of the cameras. How does that happen? “Post mortems come afterwards, OK?”

All this talk of post mortems. Perhaps, after all, this walkabout by half-hangit Iain had been planned.

* Photo by James Glossop

Pensioners serve up home truths for Clegg

An artful politician usually knows how to work a room, but  yesterday Nick Clegg found to his cost that a coffee lounge-full of quick-witted  pensioners is far less pliable that than a convention of  captains of industry.

Just two hours into his first foray into the Scottish election campaign, it took a 78-year-old widow, in a sheltered housing scheme in Edinbugh, to spell out the simple truth that has kept the Lib Dems bouncing near the bottom of the polls, at about 8 per cent of the vote.

“Getting together, with the Conservatives,” Terry Gillan, told the deputy prime minister, with a sad shake of her head. “You’ve lost a lot of people with that.”

Mr Clegg had been anticipating the point, but  his shimmering sincerity, that worked such wonders over the airwaves in  last year’s television debates, soon lost its sheen at close quarters, among the tea cups and scones. 

“We couldn’t have gone into a coalition with Labour, we didn’t have the votes,” he told Mrs Gillan. “The alternative would have been to throw our hands in the air, the country wouldn’t have a government and we have another election in a few months.

In other words, we had to deal with the Conservatives, for your sake. Mrs Gillan’s stony expression, and those of her senior  comrades, suggested they thought  Mr Clegg had  quite simply chosen the wrong party to play deputy prime minister with: he couldn’t count on their votes. 

Earlier in the morning the Lib Dem leader had  a much easier ride at a business breakfast served up by the Scottish Council for Development and Industry, where the audience at least had more sympathy with his economic arguments. 

 Mr Clegg still came  under pressure, particularly from people with oil interests, appalled by George Osborne’s budgetry raid on their profits.  But in these more comfortable circumstances he was adept enough to acknowledge  concerns, and to justify the government raid - he claimed he had to keep prices down on the forecourt - in terms that had even his critics thoughtfully rubbing their double chins.

Liberal activists in Central Edinburgh had probably reasoned Mr Clegg would receive the same tolerant welcome among the pensioners of  affluent Stockbridge. 

These days, this  urban village is often compared to Chelsea in London, but that discription only tells part of the story.   Not so long ago,  the area was  a good deal dustier and a few veterans of Stockbridge past have found their way into Veitch’s Square housing development.

Mrs Gillan was one - “I wasn’t a redhead for nothing” - but she was far from being the only sceptic in the room. And if these voters harboured any reservations about getting torn into the deputy prime minister, he dispelled them himself by sounding just the weeniest bit patronising in his opening remarks about pensions.

“The pensions minister, someone called Dr Steve Webb, Professor Steve Webb actually, has been working on this idea for ages,”  said Mr Clegg with all the forced delight of a Meals on Wheels worker lifting the lid on a plate of over-cooked sprouts.

From this month, he announced, everyone on state pension who retires will receive up to £15,000 more over their lifetime.

Joyce Bremner found the prospect unappetising. “So if you’re on a pension already,  you won’t get that?” she snapped. “That’s not fair, is it?”

Mr Clegg said he wished he could wave a magic wand (presumably to transport him to a sunny beach in Spain, with his wife, Miriam). Instead he offered a “triple guarantee” of a rising pension in line with inflation or earnings.

Mrs Bremner persisted: “But you’re still discriminating.” No, countered Mr Clegg, the government was sorting things out for “future generations”

“So, it’s to hell with my generation then?” snarled Mrs Bremner.

“Really, that’s not fair,” stammered Mr Clegg.

 Mrs Gillan chipped in with a joke: “What about the £100 we’ve been promised for coming here to talk to you?”

Laugh? Mr Clegg turned a sickly shade of green.  It must have been the scones.

Pic: David Moir/Reuters

Chippy owner's night by the Danube with Liz Taylor

It is Elizabeth Taylor as she has never been seen before. In a plush Budapest hotel. Wearing an expensive party frock. And with a Celtic FC hat upon her film star’s head.

This wonderful image hangs in Toby’s Chip Shop in the village of Thornton, near Kirkcaldy, in Fife. It belongs to Robert “Toby” Delmaestro, who was there by the Danube on the evening in 1972 that the photograph was taken. To cap it all, said Mr Delmaestro, “that’s my hat on her head”.

Football, they say is a funny old game, and Mr Delmaestro’s story proves that old cliché. He had travelled with friends to watch Celtic play Újpest Dózsa in the European Cup quarter-final and found himself among 150 supporters ensconced in one of the best hotels in the country.

Taylor was starring in a film being made in the Hungarian capital and was accompanied by Richard Burton, a notorious drinker who was to lead the couple out on a night that has become the stuff of legend.

"It had been in the papers that Burton was staying in a hotel right by the river, and it turned out to be the one we were in," said Mr Delmaestro.

"A big Glasgow fellow just went up and chapped at the door of his suite. Burton came out and said, ‘What are you after?’ The big man said, ‘I’ve heard you can drink a bit. Well, I’m not bad at drinking either. Do you want to come down?’.”

Burton responded by putting a huge sum behind the bar — £10,000 according to Mr Delmaestro — to cover the bills for all the Celtic fans in the hotel, and saw they were well fed.

Mr Delmaestro, who has haggis puddings and chicken suppers on his chip-shop menu, remembers eating lobster, crayfish and steak; other accounts speak of caviar and champagne being shared among the fans.

Most of all, he remembers talking to Taylor. “She was a rare woman. She said to me, ‘What’s your name?’ and I told her,” said Mr Delmaestro. “She said, ‘That’s a bit of a Gypsy name’. I said, ‘Well I am a bit of a Gypsy, I’ve been travelling in Ireland’. She liked that.”

Not that Mr Delmaestro was flirting. He admired Burton — “a cracking-looking man, a big strong guy”. Burton came over to join his wife and exchanged a few friendly words with Mr Delmaestro. “He was talking to everybody.”

Margaret, Mr Delmaestro’s wife, was not so convinced of her husband’s motives in talking to the film star. “My wife found out that Liz Taylor was there and she phoned me,” he recalled. “She was a bit worried, but there was nothing to worry about.

"It was lovely, a great night. There was not one person there who got overly drunk. They were a few laddies, shouting and singing for Celtic, but people behaved really well.”

Mr Delmaestro, a lifelong Celtic fan, speaks bitterly about the way money has ruined the game. But he soon chuckles again: “That trip was £40, for the flight, the hotel and the match.” A tiny sum to invest in an anecdote to last a lifetime.


Photo by James Glossop. More at Timesonline

V&A at Dundee price shock

It was billed as a new museum to revive the fortunes of an ailing Scottish city — just as a branch of the Guggenheim in Spain has transformed Bilbao — but months after the winning design for the V&A at Dundee was announced, serious doubts have emerged over the final cost of the building.

Experts who have studied drawings produced by Kengo Kuma, the Japanese winner of an international competition, are adamant that the museum could easily double or treble in price, not least because the planned structure is almost twice as big as any building intended for the site. One described the “massive and inevitable hike in cost” as indefensible.

Critics allege that the winning blueprints barely conceal the hidden costs. Two floors shown in cross-section are shaded out, and not included in the cost-per-square-metre price calculation. Nor is a plant room depicted, normally between 15 and 20 per cent of the budget in a building of this type.

The museum’s most striking features are likely to come at a heavy price, say experts, including the dramatic, spaceship-like sloping walls that also increase the volume inside the building. On the exterior, the surface area is huge and Kuma’s striking finish is created from a complex design that will be difficult to construct.

The saving grace for the V&A can be found in a remarkable quirk of the funding package. The world-famous institution is not obliged to meet any of the building costs. Instead, its outpost in Dundee, planned to house 20th century design products, will be funded by £15 million of Scottish government money, supplemented to the tune of £30 million by lottery funds, European grants and commercial sponsorship.

Read more at Timesonline.  Image by James Glossop

"Such horrors will live with me forever"

The Times, March 17, 2011

A British surgeon who spent two weeks working in battlefield hospitals in support of Libyan rebels has returned home with horrifying evidence of the mass killings carried out by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

Abdulmajid Ali worked round the clock as he made his way westwards from Tobruk into the heart of the conflict, treating hundreds of men, women and children who had been attacked by Colonel Gaddafi’s mercenaries with bullets, missiles and anti-aircraft guns.

Last night he called on Britain and the UN to establish a no-fly zone over the country immediately, as he presented evidence, including photographs, of atrocities committed by Colonel Gaddafi’s forces against civilians.

At the town of Beida, the mortuary was full, he said. “Children had been shot as they stood on balconies watching a peaceful demonstration. The snipers were well trained. You can see that all the victims were hit in a vital place: the head, the carotid artery or the chest.”

Some of the victims he encountered, including members of his sister-in-law’s family, are pictured only as assemblages of body parts after they were blown up in an attack by Colonel Gaddafi’s forces on a munitions dump at al-Rajma, near Benghazi.

Dr Ali’s evidence backs reports that anti-aircraft guns were turned on the crowds in Benghazi when protests erupted on the streets of Libya’s second city. The images show human remains, burnt and charred.

“Believe me, as a surgeon, I will never overcome these sights,” Dr Ali said. “I have seen horrors, things I never thought I would live to see. These images will stay with me the rest of my life.”

Read more at  Timesonline.   Picture by James Glossop

It's golf, not Sodom and Gomorrah

The Times, 7 March, 2011

It’s the hypocrisy of the ‘Holy Willies’ that so galls Ken Galloway, the golf club secretary. He remembers the long cold snap at the end of last year. All weekend, every weekend, “the golf course was like the Cresta Run,” he says, with hundreds of people — including fierce Sabbatarians — sledging and skiing over the fairways and across the greens.

“They make us mad by the way they make their argument,” growls Norrie MacDonald, the course record holder, in agreement. “This is golf on the Sabbath. It is not Sodom and Gomorrah. Anything else goes on Sunday, apparently. You can ski, you can take pictures, ride your bicycle. You can fornicate. You’d swear that something in the Bible specifically mentions golf as a sin.”

This take on the Sabbath's last stand  is from today's T2  section of the Times, and appeared alongside a five minute video. You can find more at Timesonline, Sunday on the Isle of Lewis

Germany's soul through a lens

Young farmers stride out to a dance, wearing their hats at a rakish angle. A careworn Jewish woman poses for her identity card. The conscripted soldier and an SS functionary stare into a camera, the former seems uncertain and fearful, the other self-important and secure. 
    What can you really tell from these portraits? Everything, believed August Sander, the great German photographer, because, he maintained, “every person’s story is written plainly on their face”.
    These images and thousands more, captured without clever lighting or the trickery of Photoshop, were catalogued and published as part of Sander’s mighty goal: a portrait of mankind in the 20th century. The remarkable extent to which he achieved his objective is revealed in a moving and evocative display of 170 photographs, opening this month in Edinburgh.
     Nearly 50 years after Sander’s death, no one now doubts his achievement. His influence is shot through the work of other artists. It was Sander’s deeply humane studies of dwarves and blind children, of the dying and the dead, that compelled photographers such as Diane Arbus to follow him to the margins of society for inspiration. In his lifetime, inevitably, the very qualities that attest to his genius would mark Sander out for harassment. At the height of his creative frenzy Hitler came to power and Sander’s work was immediately suppressed.
    For Gerd Sander, 70, the custodian of his grandfather’s archive, the reason for these attacks is clear. Sander “did not show Germans as the Nazis liked them to be seen” and would not pander to the notion of an Aryan ideal.
    Such temerity had consequences. In 1934, Sander’s Face of our Timecollection was destroyed by National Socialist thugs. The same year his beloved son, Erich, Gerd’s uncle, was imprisoned by the Nazis as a communist. He died ten years later in Siegburg prison of an appendix condition that could, and should, have been treated.
    Nor did the end of hostilities bring relief. Any notion that Sander would be lionised by a grateful German people for bravely chronicling the human story through the war years is scotched by Gerd. He grew up with his grandfather and has bitter memories of the manner in which the old man was ostracised as an artist. “Nobody could confiscate anything or smash things up as they had before, but it was not as if he was accepted as someone who had made a record of the period,” Gerd says.
    Then he recalls the praise showered on the film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, whose Triumph of the Will survives only as a chilling reminder of the Nuremberg rallies. “That Nazi bitch,” Gerd snaps. “She was still, until her final days, the great heroine as a photographer. Of course, she denied ever having known about atrocities.
    “Sander, in the late 1940s, included all those people in his work, the Jews, the persecuted. But after the war there were many who still said ‘the Jews are the cause of all the evil that has come down on Germany’. It is a sentiment that has not gone away completely yet.” It may be no surprise that while his grandfather’s archive is held in Germany, Gerd administers it from his home in northern France.
    And what an archive it is. Sheer longevity ensures that Sander’s catalogue delivers a stunning panorama of human history. Born the son of a carpenter in 1876, he acquired his first camera in the 1890s. An early photograph shows him to have been a dapper young man with a pointed moustache, who is pictured playing a lute and sitting alongside his wife Anna. Sander set up his first photography business in Linz, Austria — the town where Hitler was brought up — but left for Cologne in 1910. There, he continued to earn a living through commercial portraiture, but as he toured the countryside around the city, photographing the proud farmers and their stoical wives, the notion of his lifetime’s work was already forming.
    People of the 20th Century finally began to emerge in Weimar Germany of the 1920s. It would be “a physiognomic image of an age”, declared Sander, presenting “all characteristics of the universally human”.
Categorising his subjects under headings and sub-headings, he set about the task with astonishing attention to detail. He recorded every class of person, in any walk of life, from the captains of industry, who happily paid for their portraits, to the pedlars and Gypsies who turned up penniless at the studio door.
    All of human life is here. The loopy grins and gawky stances of his two boxers tell us everything that we need to know about their sporting prowess. We sense the desperation of the Turkish immigrant, eking out a living as a mousetrap salesman in the midst of the Great Depression. The fat, doughy hands of a pastry cook seem swollen with pride, like the rest of his body.
    Few of these people were ever identified in his records by Sander, though some names of famous industrialists and artists were added after 1945. Sander believed that his sitter’s essential humanity would emerge if he was displayed anonymously.
    When a selection of 60 prints was shown in Cologne in 1927, he offered an explanatory note: “If I, as a normal person, can be so immodest as to see things as they are and not as they should or could be, please forgive me, but I cannot do otherwise.”
     The dark pall of Nazism shrouded his achievement until the very last years of his life. In 1958 Sander was made an honorary member of the German Society of Photographers, and received its culture prize in 1961, three years before his death.
     He went to his grave with a secret. A series entitled Political Prisoner, which features a photograph of Erich, his son, and a sequence of portraits from inside Siegburg Prison. It has always been assumed that Sander himself shot these photographs on a visit to the jail, but that was not the case.
     “Erich photographed himself, using time exposure, in his cell,” Gerd explains. “He photographed the other people too. We have about 40 negatives. They were taken for identification purposes. He made copies and a priest smuggled them out.” Sander included them in his catalogue as a statement about victims of political persecution. He then photographed his son’s death mask. It is the last image in the archive.
    “You might ask me, ‘how can you include photographs that he didn’t take?’ My father always said to me before he handed over responsibility of the archive, ‘You will have to explain that one day to the world’. There is nothing to explain. The truth is best. It is an homage to his son. Erich was very important to him, he was always talking about him. August had his portrait of Erich’s death mask on his living-room wall. He didn’t ascribe the pictures to him because he didn’t see the name as being important. They were from the Sander studio, what was important was what they were showing.”
    Gerd first exhibited the images in 1995. “No one asked me how did my grandfather get into a Nazi prison? It’s what he was saying with his work; people don’t think. They see a name on something and assume it’s true. His work wasn’t about photography, that was just the means to express his ideas.”

Artist Rooms: August Sander runs Feb 12 to July 10 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (national galleries.org 0131-624 6200)