THE IMPORTANCE OF DUMBARTON – A Plea for a Community
All babies feel they are the centre of the world, and slowly learn to share it with parents, neighbours, a locality and, as teenagers, perhaps a whole town. By then schools, newspapers and broadcasts are suggesting that only a few cities (London, New York, Washington) are IMPORTANT places where decisions are made bringing war and peace, work or unemployment. Many come to feel their home town is central to nothing much. I am glad that a kindly decision by a Justice Secretary has made Scotland a centre of global interest. Edinburgh is no longer negligible since noisy people in the USA and England loudly condemn the government there. Outside Edinburgh more local history is needed for us to know that where we live important decisions have been made, so should be made again. Consider Dumbarton.
The town takes its name from a great rock which is also a peninsula on the Firth of Clyde’s north shore, one of four volcanic plugs which, being easily fortified, became the capitals of nations sharing Scotland before it was unified. Dunadd in Argyll belonged to the Scots tribe that finally gave the whole land its name. Craig Phadraig in Inverness belonged to the Picts, Edinburgh Rock to the partly Anglo-Saxon Lothians. Dumbarton, the town now surrounding the rock, was once Dun Briton, meaning fort of the Britons. It was capital of Strathclyde, a west coast kingdom whose people kept the name given to their ancestors by the Romans, though the English came to call them Welsh. Two counties take their name from the town while keeping the old Dun instead of Dum. East Dunbartonshire is the posher county. It contains Bearsden, Milngavie, other commuter towns serving Glasgow and a few former mining towns. West Dunbartonshire along the Clyde’s northern shore is most densely populated. It contains Clydebank, Old Kilpatrick, Bowling, Dumbarton, Cardross, Helensburgh and Faslane; also the Vale of Leven, a river flowing from Loch Lomond past Alexandria and Renton before joining the Clyde at the Rock. If East and West Dunbartonshire combined and opted for independence they could claim, on verbal grounds at least, to be the last existing British nation.
Later history can only be hinted here in a few anecdotes. Dumbarton was the Clyde’s main port long before Glasgow. William Wallace was jailed in the castle before being shipped south for trial and execution, and his sword kept for centuries in the officers mess where it was used to poke the fire. When Robert the Bruce had no more wars to fight he retired to Dumbarton. From here the infant Mary Queen of Scots embarked for France and her first unlucky marriage. Dumbarton Academy is one of Britain’s oldest schools – in the 17th century several students went to see one of the last inter-clan battles in Glen Fruin, and were massacred by the winners. Cromwell destroyed the castle when adding Scotland to his Commonwealth. The Hanoverian government rebuilt it as a garrison of defence against the Highland clans and gave it two features visible from miles away: a flagpole on the most pointed summit, and on the dome-shaped lower summit, a battlement with a pepperpot turret. Doctor Johnson and Boswell visited the rock on their journey to the Highlands. Johnson, a very big man, climbed into that turret and stuck. A worried guide wanted to assist his struggles to get out by pulling, but Boswell whispered that the Doctor would find this unforgivable. In a building between the summits captured French soldiers were jailed during the Napoleonic wars. After Waterloo the British government discussed jailing Napoleon there also too, then decided Saint Helena was safer.
But in the 19th and 20th century the county to which Dumbarton gave its name flourished, like the rest of the Scottish lowlands, by big new industries. Europe’s first passenger steamboats sailed from Bowling, the Charlotte Dundas along the Forth and Clyde canal, Bell’s Comet up river to Glasgow. In a shipyard at the mouth of the Leven William Denny in 1914 built the first steamship to cross the English channel. Before closing in 1963 Denny’s firm built over fifteen hundred vessels including the first steel merchant ship, the first commercial turbine steamer, the first all-welded diesel-electric car ferry. Villages along the Leven where linen was bleached became mill towns that printed and dyed calico, and where the Argyll Motor Works became Scotland’s first car factory. Singers built Europe’s biggest sewing machine factory in Clydebank, and the richest man in Dumbarton was James White, owner of a Glasgow chemical business. His family home, Overtoun House, still overlooks Dumbarton. He took its name when made Lord Overtoun for donating money to charities and church-building, though Keir Hardie called him “a whited sepulchre” (meaning white-washed coffin house) because he paid the lowest possible wages to workers who contracted cancer in his poisonous factory.
Two world wars and the following depressions boosted and damaged the county’s local industries. Skilled workforces with strong trade unions grew more militant and left wing. Between the Great Wars Dumbarton became a Labour stronghold and even elected a Communist councillor. When Fascist Germany and Italy helped Franco destroy the Spanish Republic, Dumbarton men were in the high proportion of Scots who defied the London government and fought for the Republic by joining the International Brigade. The Spanish ambassador must have known this when he left London for Dumbarton in 1938 for the unveiling of a monument at the foot of Castle Hill, the supposed site of the Bruce’s last home. These words were carved on it: ROBERT BONTINE CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM 1852-1936 - FAMOUS AUTHOR – TRAVELLER AND HORSEMAN – PATRIOTIC SCOT AND CITIZEN OF THE WORLD – AS BETOKENED BY THE STONES ABOVE. DIED IN ARGENTINA, INTERRED IN INCHMAHOME – HE WAS A MASTER OF LIFE – A KING AMONG MEN. At that time Logie Baird from Helensburgh was successfully demonstrating the world’s earliest television sets, so Graham was only one of Dunbartonshire’s remarkable men, but he was certainly the least probable.
This descendent of Scottish and Spanish aristocrats lived at Ardoch between Cardross and Helensburgh, and when young had been a South American gaucho. In Victorian days membership of more than one political party was possible. Graham became Liberal M.P. for Lanarkshire, in all industrial matters that came before Parliament sided with the workers, declared himself a Socialist and helped Keir Hardie found the Independent Labour Party. Its programme was an eight hour working day for all, nationalisation of land and coal mines, Irish and Scottish home rule. Graham took part in the great 1887 Trafalgar Square rally which journalists called Bloody Sunday, so violently did the police break it up with military backing. Graham was bludgeoned, arrested and jailed for six weeks. When the Labour Party dropped home rule from its programme in 1928 he became founder of the Scottish National Party, but never lost his links with South America where he was still known as Don Roberto. Friends in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay sent over the stones for his Dumbarton monument at Castle Hill, the site perhaps chosen because Graham was a descendent of the Bruce. The reason for so much about this man and monument will appear later.
Local businesses mostly prospered during World War Two. Clydeside shipyards built over twice as many vessels as the U.S.A. Industries did not at once start failing afterwards, but a big housing shortage followed demobilisation. Some overcame it by asserting squatters rights. A big empty shed near Dennys’ Shipyard was occupied by homeless families who divided the space into private rooms with ceiling-to-floor curtains. In 1949 my future wife Morag lived there with her sister and parents, after her birth in Overtoun House which the newly made National Health Service then used as a maternity hospital. Meanwhile local governments everywhere were building new houses, especially in the Scottish west where overcrowded, insanitary housing had been notorious for nearly a century. Before the age of one, Morag moved with her family to a new housing estate on Castle Hill. She grew up here, playing with school friends beside what they called The Mony – a space among trees surrounding the Graham monument. (Youngsters similarly shortened Brucehill, another nearby estate, to Brazil.) She became a student of Dumbarton Academy, for further education went to Glasgow and found work there.
In 1959 the American nuclear submarine base came to the Holy Loch, then Faslane was made Britain’s nuclear submarine base, and Dennys’ Shipyard closed after developing but not completing the first hovercraft. Then, faster and faster, other Scottish businesses were closed and asset-stripped. Over the next fifty years the connection between loss of Scottish industry and Scotland as Britain’s nuclear arsenal – so first target in the event of nuclear war – was denied or ignored by our politicians. In the housing estates so hopefully built and occupied after the 2nd World War, unemployment, crime and drug taking steadily increased. In the 1980s Morag, then living in Glasgow, revisited her old home and was shocked to find the Mony not there. It had been saved from vandalism by removal to Gartmore, a Stirlingshire village where Graham’s family once lived. The monument of South American stone with its bold inscription and handsome man’s profile in bronze had reminded Morag of Graham, the kingly revolutionary whose stories she knew, also the Spanish Civil War in which two of her uncles had fought. Later youngsters in Brucehill and Castle Hill thought he was someone like the teachers and police who inhibited their enjoyment of television, video games and drugs. Also his brand of Socialism was no longer liked by the local government. In 1997 Labour’s power in Scotland was so great that she had no Tory M.P.s, the Scottish National Party was becoming Labour’s main opposition, and Tony Blair gave Scotland a proportional representation parliament to limit Scottish independence, not because Labour was returning to one of its earliest aims.
Since Margaret Thatcher declared that there was no such thing as society, Labour had spoken in defence of communities. In the 1980s local Dumbarton folk met to create a community farm, and West Dunbarton Council helped them by leasing to them Knowetop, on the summit of Castle Hill, rent free for 25 years. I knew of towns in Britain and North America with show-place farms where children could see some of the animals and planting which feed us. I did not know Dumbarton had one until five weeks ago when a Herald article announced that it was threatened with closure. Knowetop is mostly run by voluntary helpers, but they depend on a full-time staff of three whose funding from several sources plus the Lottery Fund was coming to an end and was unlikely to be renewed because of the trade recession. Unless new funds were found all wages would stop in September (yes, this month) when the farm would have to close. Meetings were called by Knowetop’s management and staff to which all friendly visitors were welcome.
On a sunny evening Morag and I were driven to the farm through Castle Hill, where bright council houses with mostly well kept gardens proved that those who give districts a bad name are always a minority. The farm’s store, shop, meeting room and offices are clean single story buildings around a small square. Behind them a partly floral, partly market garden shares a back fence with back gardens of the housing estate: on the other side ponies, goats, sheep and pigs browse or snuffle in fields sloping down toward the Clyde Firth and Argyle mountains – a reminder of Dumbarton’s very beautiful surroundings. A friend who lives nearby regrets that so few in Brucehill and other estates take so little pleasure in their surroundings, but the pleasures of hill walking, camping, cycling, nature study and fishing (where that is legal) only come easily to youngsters when shown them by someone older. In streets where older folk do not know these things the young often form gangs led by the most daring into drug use and violence. Knowetop has a youth club where adolescents do learn something about open air pleasure. Not being surrounded by a high security fence it was often damaged by vandals before a youth club was started there, since when vandalism has gone down. Parents bring children here. Many differently disabled volunteers have found peace of mind and usefulness by helping to make the farm productive. We learned this at the first meeting held in the Knowetop café.
It was chaired by Rose Harvie who, without being dictatorial, was so efficient, knew the problems facing Knowetop so well, and was so eager for it to continue that I assumed she was a salaried employee. She is in fact a 68 year old volunteer, mother of a Green MSP, and works at the farm five days a week. Present at this and a later meeting was a Labour M.S.P. and a Socialist Councillor for Renton. Volunteer workers and friends offered suggestions. Could the many thousands who visit the farm annually be charged admission fees? Rose Harvie said this would reduce the visitors because the district was one of the three most financially deprived in Scotland, and would need someone extra to work as gatekeeper and accountant. Could raffles, bring-and-buy and car boot sales raise more money? Or local donations? A man on a bus had recently thrust a ten pound note on a member of the board of management. Could part of the farm be turned to allotments, for which there was a demand. I said my wife and I would donate a steady monthly sum by standing order, and I would publicise Knowetop’s problems in an article. None of these projects would pay the wages of three essential full-time workers from September onward. Jackie Baillie the M.S.P. and James Bollan the Renton Councillor told us that West Dunbartonshire had a Common Good Fund to help worthy causes, and surely the farm was one? Both meetings came to the general conclusion that an appeal to this fund was the likeliest way forward. The views of the local Labour councillor might have been helpful, but we heard that at both these important meetings he had been busy somewhere else.
The councillor for Renton also told us that for the past 8 years West Dunbartonshire has given £50,000 a year to the Antonine Leisure Centre in Clydebank, a private commercial business whose sport and games facilities compete with the dilapidated ones West Dunbartonshire still owns. This queer set-up comes from the 1980s, when auditors in London’s Civil Service began to channel money out of public welfare into private investment. The Labour Party has never reversed this policy, perhaps because they are paid more than ever while becoming publicly responsible for less and less, so no wonder Mrs Thatcher called Tony Blair one of her disciples. The channelling has partly been done through QUANGOs, initials for Quasi-Autonomous-National-Government-Organisations, or else Quasi-Autonomous-Non-Government-Organisations – each Quango can choose what the acronym stands for. All are more or less funded by the tax payer, and do important work that our elected governments and their civil services find too difficult. Nobody suggested one of these might help Knowetop.
That is how matters stood when Morag and I last visited the farm, except that now we pay it a small amount monthly by standing order. Anyone wishing to do the same can arrange it, for Knowetop’s Community Farm account is with the Bank of Scotland, sort code 80-20-60, account number 06127744. Any steady sum will help, large or small.
On the 3rd of September I heard from Rose Harvie that new donations will pay the full time workers’ salaries until December or the New Year. People who want to remain anonymous at present are considering a new deal for Knowetop. This may give it steadier funding in return for some modernisation and extended land-use, without departing from the Community’s original aims. I pray to God, Cunninghame Graham and Keir Hardie that Knowetop Community Farm will go on enriching the quality of Dumbarton peoples lives without becoming a source of profit for some who do not live here. May it become an example of work by local people for each other, and example of which they are proud.
The town takes its name from a great rock which is also a peninsula on the Firth of Clyde’s north shore, one of four volcanic plugs which, being easily fortified, became the capitals of nations sharing Scotland before it was unified. Dunadd in Argyll belonged to the Scots tribe that finally gave the whole land its name. Craig Phadraig in Inverness belonged to the Picts, Edinburgh Rock to the partly Anglo-Saxon Lothians. Dumbarton, the town now surrounding the rock, was once Dun Briton, meaning fort of the Britons. It was capital of Strathclyde, a west coast kingdom whose people kept the name given to their ancestors by the Romans, though the English came to call them Welsh. Two counties take their name from the town while keeping the old Dun instead of Dum. East Dunbartonshire is the posher county. It contains Bearsden, Milngavie, other commuter towns serving Glasgow and a few former mining towns. West Dunbartonshire along the Clyde’s northern shore is most densely populated. It contains Clydebank, Old Kilpatrick, Bowling, Dumbarton, Cardross, Helensburgh and Faslane; also the Vale of Leven, a river flowing from Loch Lomond past Alexandria and Renton before joining the Clyde at the Rock. If East and West Dunbartonshire combined and opted for independence they could claim, on verbal grounds at least, to be the last existing British nation.
Later history can only be hinted here in a few anecdotes. Dumbarton was the Clyde’s main port long before Glasgow. William Wallace was jailed in the castle before being shipped south for trial and execution, and his sword kept for centuries in the officers mess where it was used to poke the fire. When Robert the Bruce had no more wars to fight he retired to Dumbarton. From here the infant Mary Queen of Scots embarked for France and her first unlucky marriage. Dumbarton Academy is one of Britain’s oldest schools – in the 17th century several students went to see one of the last inter-clan battles in Glen Fruin, and were massacred by the winners. Cromwell destroyed the castle when adding Scotland to his Commonwealth. The Hanoverian government rebuilt it as a garrison of defence against the Highland clans and gave it two features visible from miles away: a flagpole on the most pointed summit, and on the dome-shaped lower summit, a battlement with a pepperpot turret. Doctor Johnson and Boswell visited the rock on their journey to the Highlands. Johnson, a very big man, climbed into that turret and stuck. A worried guide wanted to assist his struggles to get out by pulling, but Boswell whispered that the Doctor would find this unforgivable. In a building between the summits captured French soldiers were jailed during the Napoleonic wars. After Waterloo the British government discussed jailing Napoleon there also too, then decided Saint Helena was safer.
But in the 19th and 20th century the county to which Dumbarton gave its name flourished, like the rest of the Scottish lowlands, by big new industries. Europe’s first passenger steamboats sailed from Bowling, the Charlotte Dundas along the Forth and Clyde canal, Bell’s Comet up river to Glasgow. In a shipyard at the mouth of the Leven William Denny in 1914 built the first steamship to cross the English channel. Before closing in 1963 Denny’s firm built over fifteen hundred vessels including the first steel merchant ship, the first commercial turbine steamer, the first all-welded diesel-electric car ferry. Villages along the Leven where linen was bleached became mill towns that printed and dyed calico, and where the Argyll Motor Works became Scotland’s first car factory. Singers built Europe’s biggest sewing machine factory in Clydebank, and the richest man in Dumbarton was James White, owner of a Glasgow chemical business. His family home, Overtoun House, still overlooks Dumbarton. He took its name when made Lord Overtoun for donating money to charities and church-building, though Keir Hardie called him “a whited sepulchre” (meaning white-washed coffin house) because he paid the lowest possible wages to workers who contracted cancer in his poisonous factory.
Two world wars and the following depressions boosted and damaged the county’s local industries. Skilled workforces with strong trade unions grew more militant and left wing. Between the Great Wars Dumbarton became a Labour stronghold and even elected a Communist councillor. When Fascist Germany and Italy helped Franco destroy the Spanish Republic, Dumbarton men were in the high proportion of Scots who defied the London government and fought for the Republic by joining the International Brigade. The Spanish ambassador must have known this when he left London for Dumbarton in 1938 for the unveiling of a monument at the foot of Castle Hill, the supposed site of the Bruce’s last home. These words were carved on it: ROBERT BONTINE CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM 1852-1936 - FAMOUS AUTHOR – TRAVELLER AND HORSEMAN – PATRIOTIC SCOT AND CITIZEN OF THE WORLD – AS BETOKENED BY THE STONES ABOVE. DIED IN ARGENTINA, INTERRED IN INCHMAHOME – HE WAS A MASTER OF LIFE – A KING AMONG MEN. At that time Logie Baird from Helensburgh was successfully demonstrating the world’s earliest television sets, so Graham was only one of Dunbartonshire’s remarkable men, but he was certainly the least probable.
This descendent of Scottish and Spanish aristocrats lived at Ardoch between Cardross and Helensburgh, and when young had been a South American gaucho. In Victorian days membership of more than one political party was possible. Graham became Liberal M.P. for Lanarkshire, in all industrial matters that came before Parliament sided with the workers, declared himself a Socialist and helped Keir Hardie found the Independent Labour Party. Its programme was an eight hour working day for all, nationalisation of land and coal mines, Irish and Scottish home rule. Graham took part in the great 1887 Trafalgar Square rally which journalists called Bloody Sunday, so violently did the police break it up with military backing. Graham was bludgeoned, arrested and jailed for six weeks. When the Labour Party dropped home rule from its programme in 1928 he became founder of the Scottish National Party, but never lost his links with South America where he was still known as Don Roberto. Friends in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay sent over the stones for his Dumbarton monument at Castle Hill, the site perhaps chosen because Graham was a descendent of the Bruce. The reason for so much about this man and monument will appear later.
Local businesses mostly prospered during World War Two. Clydeside shipyards built over twice as many vessels as the U.S.A. Industries did not at once start failing afterwards, but a big housing shortage followed demobilisation. Some overcame it by asserting squatters rights. A big empty shed near Dennys’ Shipyard was occupied by homeless families who divided the space into private rooms with ceiling-to-floor curtains. In 1949 my future wife Morag lived there with her sister and parents, after her birth in Overtoun House which the newly made National Health Service then used as a maternity hospital. Meanwhile local governments everywhere were building new houses, especially in the Scottish west where overcrowded, insanitary housing had been notorious for nearly a century. Before the age of one, Morag moved with her family to a new housing estate on Castle Hill. She grew up here, playing with school friends beside what they called The Mony – a space among trees surrounding the Graham monument. (Youngsters similarly shortened Brucehill, another nearby estate, to Brazil.) She became a student of Dumbarton Academy, for further education went to Glasgow and found work there.
In 1959 the American nuclear submarine base came to the Holy Loch, then Faslane was made Britain’s nuclear submarine base, and Dennys’ Shipyard closed after developing but not completing the first hovercraft. Then, faster and faster, other Scottish businesses were closed and asset-stripped. Over the next fifty years the connection between loss of Scottish industry and Scotland as Britain’s nuclear arsenal – so first target in the event of nuclear war – was denied or ignored by our politicians. In the housing estates so hopefully built and occupied after the 2nd World War, unemployment, crime and drug taking steadily increased. In the 1980s Morag, then living in Glasgow, revisited her old home and was shocked to find the Mony not there. It had been saved from vandalism by removal to Gartmore, a Stirlingshire village where Graham’s family once lived. The monument of South American stone with its bold inscription and handsome man’s profile in bronze had reminded Morag of Graham, the kingly revolutionary whose stories she knew, also the Spanish Civil War in which two of her uncles had fought. Later youngsters in Brucehill and Castle Hill thought he was someone like the teachers and police who inhibited their enjoyment of television, video games and drugs. Also his brand of Socialism was no longer liked by the local government. In 1997 Labour’s power in Scotland was so great that she had no Tory M.P.s, the Scottish National Party was becoming Labour’s main opposition, and Tony Blair gave Scotland a proportional representation parliament to limit Scottish independence, not because Labour was returning to one of its earliest aims.
Since Margaret Thatcher declared that there was no such thing as society, Labour had spoken in defence of communities. In the 1980s local Dumbarton folk met to create a community farm, and West Dunbarton Council helped them by leasing to them Knowetop, on the summit of Castle Hill, rent free for 25 years. I knew of towns in Britain and North America with show-place farms where children could see some of the animals and planting which feed us. I did not know Dumbarton had one until five weeks ago when a Herald article announced that it was threatened with closure. Knowetop is mostly run by voluntary helpers, but they depend on a full-time staff of three whose funding from several sources plus the Lottery Fund was coming to an end and was unlikely to be renewed because of the trade recession. Unless new funds were found all wages would stop in September (yes, this month) when the farm would have to close. Meetings were called by Knowetop’s management and staff to which all friendly visitors were welcome.
On a sunny evening Morag and I were driven to the farm through Castle Hill, where bright council houses with mostly well kept gardens proved that those who give districts a bad name are always a minority. The farm’s store, shop, meeting room and offices are clean single story buildings around a small square. Behind them a partly floral, partly market garden shares a back fence with back gardens of the housing estate: on the other side ponies, goats, sheep and pigs browse or snuffle in fields sloping down toward the Clyde Firth and Argyle mountains – a reminder of Dumbarton’s very beautiful surroundings. A friend who lives nearby regrets that so few in Brucehill and other estates take so little pleasure in their surroundings, but the pleasures of hill walking, camping, cycling, nature study and fishing (where that is legal) only come easily to youngsters when shown them by someone older. In streets where older folk do not know these things the young often form gangs led by the most daring into drug use and violence. Knowetop has a youth club where adolescents do learn something about open air pleasure. Not being surrounded by a high security fence it was often damaged by vandals before a youth club was started there, since when vandalism has gone down. Parents bring children here. Many differently disabled volunteers have found peace of mind and usefulness by helping to make the farm productive. We learned this at the first meeting held in the Knowetop café.
It was chaired by Rose Harvie who, without being dictatorial, was so efficient, knew the problems facing Knowetop so well, and was so eager for it to continue that I assumed she was a salaried employee. She is in fact a 68 year old volunteer, mother of a Green MSP, and works at the farm five days a week. Present at this and a later meeting was a Labour M.S.P. and a Socialist Councillor for Renton. Volunteer workers and friends offered suggestions. Could the many thousands who visit the farm annually be charged admission fees? Rose Harvie said this would reduce the visitors because the district was one of the three most financially deprived in Scotland, and would need someone extra to work as gatekeeper and accountant. Could raffles, bring-and-buy and car boot sales raise more money? Or local donations? A man on a bus had recently thrust a ten pound note on a member of the board of management. Could part of the farm be turned to allotments, for which there was a demand. I said my wife and I would donate a steady monthly sum by standing order, and I would publicise Knowetop’s problems in an article. None of these projects would pay the wages of three essential full-time workers from September onward. Jackie Baillie the M.S.P. and James Bollan the Renton Councillor told us that West Dunbartonshire had a Common Good Fund to help worthy causes, and surely the farm was one? Both meetings came to the general conclusion that an appeal to this fund was the likeliest way forward. The views of the local Labour councillor might have been helpful, but we heard that at both these important meetings he had been busy somewhere else.
The councillor for Renton also told us that for the past 8 years West Dunbartonshire has given £50,000 a year to the Antonine Leisure Centre in Clydebank, a private commercial business whose sport and games facilities compete with the dilapidated ones West Dunbartonshire still owns. This queer set-up comes from the 1980s, when auditors in London’s Civil Service began to channel money out of public welfare into private investment. The Labour Party has never reversed this policy, perhaps because they are paid more than ever while becoming publicly responsible for less and less, so no wonder Mrs Thatcher called Tony Blair one of her disciples. The channelling has partly been done through QUANGOs, initials for Quasi-Autonomous-National-Government-Organisations, or else Quasi-Autonomous-Non-Government-Organisations – each Quango can choose what the acronym stands for. All are more or less funded by the tax payer, and do important work that our elected governments and their civil services find too difficult. Nobody suggested one of these might help Knowetop.
That is how matters stood when Morag and I last visited the farm, except that now we pay it a small amount monthly by standing order. Anyone wishing to do the same can arrange it, for Knowetop’s Community Farm account is with the Bank of Scotland, sort code 80-20-60, account number 06127744. Any steady sum will help, large or small.
On the 3rd of September I heard from Rose Harvie that new donations will pay the full time workers’ salaries until December or the New Year. People who want to remain anonymous at present are considering a new deal for Knowetop. This may give it steadier funding in return for some modernisation and extended land-use, without departing from the Community’s original aims. I pray to God, Cunninghame Graham and Keir Hardie that Knowetop Community Farm will go on enriching the quality of Dumbarton peoples lives without becoming a source of profit for some who do not live here. May it become an example of work by local people for each other, and example of which they are proud.
Alasdair Gray, September 2009
posted by Alasdair Gray at Tuesday, February 16, 2010
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