Here is a review by David Betteridge of a book of memoirs, WINDOWS TO OUR PAST. It was written and published by the Social History Group of Royston Wardieburn Community Centre, Edinburgh (March, 2025), funded by City of Edinburgh North West Community Grants Fund, and supported by Royston Wardieburn Community Centre Management Committee, with Lynn McCabe, Development Officer.
The book was edited by Jim Aitken, tutor to the Social History Group.
The past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.
– WILLIAM MORRIS
A fruitful collaboration
Windows to Our Past is a convivial book. Open it, and you feel that you have entered a cheerful and welcoming place, namely the Royston Wardieburn Community Centre in North Edinburgh. Your welcomers are the twelve authors of the book, who worked on it collaboratively here in the Centre, and published it in March, 2025. They are Pat Gilhooly, Bill and Greta McPhail, Cathie Umobi, David Norcliffe, Helen McRae, Winnie Burke, Liz Hiddleston, Karen Soso, Billy Kilpatrick, Irene Muir, and Anna Hutchison.
These twelve constitute a Social History Group, with Jim Aitken, serving as their convener, secretary and editor. Readers of Culture Matters will recognise Jim as being one of CM’s associate editors, as well as being a frequent reviewer and contributor to the website. He is one of socialism’s and Scotland’s best poets and dramatists.
In reading Windows to Our Past, we get to share its authors’ memories of life in North Edinburgh, to compare notes with them, and so to arrive at conclusions regarding past, present and future concerns. It is a compelling read. Clearly, a lot of careful and loving work went into the book’s compilation, as also into its production. The designer, Veronica Ferguson, working with Heedi Design, has used a glorious mix of photographs and drawings and text, in colour as well as black-and-white, to good effect.
The book’s subtitle is “A Collection of Stories from North Edinburgh”, and sure enough the authors recount events and experiences from both their individual memories and from their collective store; but they give us much more than narrative. They give us description and explanation and analysis as well, alternating skilfully and frequently between the particular (people, places, activities, etc.) and the general, and between the personal and the impersonal.
Perhaps “essays” would be a better term than “stories” for the subtitle. These are essays of the mixed-forms kind that the late John Berger wrote. They entail the authors thinking things through together, and feeling them through, as if hammering hot metal on an anvil, and so getting the book’s final form just so for publication, and doing so as a group. This holds true both in the case of essays signed by an individual author and in the case of those signed by several. All have the ring of fruitful collaboration.
If my term “hammering” makes the enterprise sound heavy or grim, then the choice of metaphor is a bad one. Jim Aitken confirms in his Foreword that the Social History Group’s weekly sessions frequently erupted into laughter, not the laughter of mockery, but of shared delight:
There was much laughter and humour during the sessions. What laughter there was – and there was a great deal of it – was always with and never at anyone. It made a serious project an awful lot easier to get going.
We had community then…
As we read, we get a strong sense of the group’s creative laughter, and it makes us want to join in. It runs like a silver thread through the whole book, especially to the fore in those essays dealing with the authors’ old recreational pursuits, as in “When Children Played in the Streets, When There Was Community”, “A Match Made on… Silverknowes Beach” and “Going to the Pictures and the Dancing”.
The first of these essays was authored by Helen McRae, Bill and Greta McPhail, Billy Fitzpatrick, Winnie Burke and Liz Hiddleston. Delving back in time to their childhood, they treat us (and themselves) to a delicious litany of sweeties that they remember spending their pennies on:
A penny dainty was a favourite to chew, along with gobstoppers, sherbet dabs, Five Boys chocolate bars, Duncan’s hazelnut chocolate bars, lucky bags, McCowan’s Highland toffee bars, mojos, soor plooms, Coulter’s candy, lucky tatties and Cremola foam…
They also mention the games that they played, the girls skipping and singing and bouncing balls off a wall, the boys playing football, often ranging over areas of play different from the standard pitch, and following ad hoc rules. The authors observe that:
You didn’t need expensive presents and toys because you used your mind to make up all kinds of games…
Then, in one of many thought-provoking shifts of mood that characterise this book, the authors reflect maturely on that past era of sweeties-guzzling and games-playing:
We had community back then. We all looked out for each other until Thatcher created the dog-eat-dog world we have today…
Interestingly, and not surprisingly, Margaret Thatcher’s name crops up several times in the course of the book’s survey of past decades. She serves – or rather her three terms of office serve – as a bitter landmark in the lived experience of our authors. Here she is again, in “A Match Made on…Silverknowes Beach”, by Bill and Greta McPhail, the match being their own. It is a love story told through anecdote, place names, and the citation of fondly remembered songs:
For Bill and Greta McPhail, the music was in the air the day they met on Silverknowes beach…
They were married in 1970 in the Old Kirk on Pennywell Road by the Rev Tom Gordon… He must have sprinkled their marriage with good fortune for they are still together some fifty-four years later…
The best-selling album in 1970 was ‘Let It Be’ by the Beatles … For Bill and Greta, a new house also beckoned on Fidra Court in Muirhouse. Three children were born to them – Hugh in 1973, Sarah in 1974, and Robert arrived in 1984 when Mrs Thatcher was applying deep economic surgery to the country which seemed to leave many of the nation’s patients in even worse health…
In “Going to the Pictures and the Dancing”, by David Norcliffe, Anna Hutchison, Helen McRae, Pat Gilhooly, Cathie Umobi, Winnie Burke and Irene Muir, we are reminded of how important communal pleasures were – and always will be – in a society that seeks to divide and rule by class, race, religion, sex and gender, etc., subverting any happier notions of a united “us”:
As well as enjoying going to the pictures, there were plenty of trips to the dancing at weekends usually… The dancing was much more formal than today, with everyone all dressed up… Like cinemas that once existed, there were so many dance venues to attend.
The authors fondly list their favourite former haunts, then, as has been noted earlier, they change their focus to make a general point:
… these cinemas have gone and have been replaced by anonymous multiplex cinemas that have little in the way of character…
There is also a plan for the people of Portobello to have a community buyout for the George. It is scandalous that such a grand building is just left to rot. Edinburgh is good at that when you consider how long the old Royal High on Regent Road has been allowed to remain inactive.
We fought the class war for our culture
The further we delve into the riches of this book, the more we sense the lineaments of a strong set of values emerging – a set of values that that is part of a counter-culture struggling for dear life against the dominant culture of our epoch, that is to say the capitalist one.
While Windows to Our Past celebrates the sharing of good times and good things, and the battles that we fight against the odds to secure and defend them, on the other side the dominant culture celebrates such things as bullying, scrambling up ladders of supposed merit, mocking “losers”, and beggaring your neighbour.
While Windows to Our Past sums up our way of living in such typical turns of speech as Hold On, and Try Again, and Stand Together, and, as in the title of an earlier project which documented the history of activism in North Edinburgh, Never Give Up, on the other side the dominant culture lauds such false ideals as The Sovereign Individual, that being the title of a book by the absurd Tory reactionary, William Rees-Mogg. Not for us the sort of rituals by which some of the dominant culture’s elites are initiated, that call for a pig’s severed head, for example, or the bloody stump of a poor fox’s brush.
Several of the essays deal head-on with the interplay of these opposing cultures, counter and dominant, identifying their root cause, which is the historic and intensifying war of class on class. In “Working with Scottish Gas at Granton”, for example, Winnie Burke reflects on the worsening of her work experience that occurred when Thatcherite policies were imposed:
[The year I started work, 1972, was] the year of Watergate, Bloody Sunday in Derry, the year Asians were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, the year Nixon visited China, and the year when Roberta Flack brought out her version of Ewan MacColl’s love song, ‘The first time ever I saw your face’.
This all changed with the arrival of Mrs Thatcher. She culled jobs and replaced the work with call centres. These places did not have the good wages and conditions we had and there were no trade unions either. I remember Alex Salmond coming to speak to the staff at Marine Drive against the privatisation. Scottish Gas had been a Scottish-based company registered in George Street. It would now become part of British Gas registered in Windsor. Last year the bosses of this company were paid £8.2 million in salaries while people froze to death from hypothermia.
In “Tales of the Tawse”, by Bill and Greta McPhail, Helen McRae, Winnie Burke, David Norcliffe, Pat Gilhooley and Liz Hiddleston, these authors reflect on the almost ubiquitous experience of corporal punishment inflicted on pupils in Scottish schools, until it was outlawed under the provisions of the Children (Equal Protection from Assault) (Scotland) Act 2019, with earlier partial bans dating back to the 1980s. The authors see in the frequent classroom beltings the hand of more than authoritarian teachers, but also the hand of an authoritarian state:
In Scotland you could be belted for using Scots words like aye or naw, and in the Highlands and Islands you would be belted if teachers heard you talking in Gaelic. This was nothing short of being a colonial linguistic policy making English the language of the oppressor and, in turn, creating a Scottish sense of cultural inferiority.
In Anna Hutchison’s “Socialism with a Passion for Celtic”, our counter-culture finds explicitly socialist expression. Here she introduces the name and legacy of the great John Maclean. He constitutes a fine counterblast to Thatcher and all her sort, past, present and future:
My dad was a socialist steeped in Red Clydeside. He sent me to the Socialist Sunday School in a hall in Springburn. My uncle told me about John Maclean. The Socialist Sunday School would be led by a trade unionist usually and we would always end each session singing the Red Flag. When I moved to Edinburgh, I went to the Socialist Sunday School at Logie Green Road in a hall that was opposite Duncan’s chocolate factory. Socialism was seen as the antidote to all the evils of capitalism and this, for me, is as true today as it was before.
I stand loyal to the class which creates the wealth throughout the whole of the world. We are out for life and all that life can give us.
– – JOHN MACLEAN
We worked in fellowship and solidarity
As noted earlier, it is the collaborative nature of our twelve authors’ writing that accounts for their essays being so richly supercharged. There is a multiplier effect at work here, or in fact two multipliers: first, the special effect of the Social History Group itself, thinking and feeling and sharing and encouraging and inspiring one another; and second, the common effect of the hundreds, if not thousands, of other people acting on each of the twelve from their early years on, laying down layer upon layer of significant experience, and helping to shape it for them, in a phrase, cultural transmission.
The culture being transmitted by all these people ranges from the local and topical to the world-wide. It includes both the recreational and the work-related, all of the arts, potentially, and all of the sciences. It includes the ways in which people think and feel about things, and the ways in which they represent them, whether in writing or in some other medium. It includes the ways in which we act, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. This is to use the term “culture” in an elastic sense, stretching it way beyond its most common usage, which is to indicate a narrow range of creative processes and products, often with the implication that they are hifalutin’.
Readers will quickly appreciate that Windows to Our Past is dedicated to the “elastic” view of culture. It “contains multitudes”, to borrow a picturesque phrase from one of Walt Whitman’s multitudinous poems. It stretches from going to the pictures and the dancing to world politics, with all manner of riches in between, as already sampled above.
There is a lovely song by Matt McGinn that glories in these riches that our twelve authors and indeed all of us contain, and carry with us: “Deep in my breast / Lies a treasure chest… a big world that’s inside me.” He called this song “Depth of my Ego”. At first sight, it may seem an incongruous notion that a culture common to communities and class can at the same time be sited in that most individual of things, an ego; but yes, we all bring to the commonality our own associations and our own interpretations. Our culture is variegated as well as multitudinous. If that is a paradox, it is a normal one.
Jim Aitken examines some of the dimensions of this variety as it is made manifest in Windows. In the Foreword he notes that:
While the majority of the participants have all been based in North Edinburgh, it was good to have members who had previous lives in Glasgow and Dundee. It gave the project a welcome range and diversity.
And in the case of one author, Cathie Umobi, Jim notes that her range and diversity of experience extends overseas. In her essay, “Some Places I Have Been”, she tells of her travels in Kenya, the US, Mexico, Holland, India and China. She tells us that “to take in another culture and a totally different lifestyle was terrific”, while commenting on some interesting historical and political parallels with Scotland, for example Geronimo and William Wallace.
“Some Places I Have Been” is one of ten essays in Windows that present a group member’s singular experience told from within the group’s collective space. We have already quoted from Winnie Burke’s “Working with Scottish Gas at Ganton” and Anna Hutchison’s “Socialism with a Passion for Celtic”.
Here (below) are some more soloists “taking it away”, as musicians in a band might do, and doing so “with feeling”, as it should always be done. Without feeling, there can be no fellowship. Without fellowship, there can be no solidarity. Without solidarity, there can be no hope for our counterculture ever out-classing the enemy’s dominant culture, as it must.
First, here is Karen Soso, in her solo essay “Not Disabled but Independent”:
I am now identified by my wheelchair but don’t ever call me disabled because that is not who I am… So long as I have a tongue in my mouth that still works, I will remain independent…I love dancing in my chair and talking to folk I meet along the way. So far, I have not been done for speeding, but I am working on getting a ticket just for the fun of it….
Second (below) is David Norcliffe writing about his time as a school janitor, emphasising the community aspects of the job:
When a school sets out to serve as a community hub, and a community resource, as it should, and so opens its door to its community, it is the jannie who actually does the door-opening, and keeps the place functioning, and closes the door at the end of the day, or often well into the night, in fact…
Third (below) is Billy Fitzpatrick showing a strong sense of history and his own life’s embeddedness in it. In his “Councillor Kidnaps Bairns”, he recounts an episode in his service as a local councillor, dating from 1999, but first he sketches in its political and cultural context:
The Scottish Parliament met for the first time at The General Assembly and Donald Dewar became Scotland’s first First Minister. It was also the year the Scottish miner’s leader, Mick McGahey, died. It was the year when the Euro was first introduced, though not here in the UK. The media was getting everyone scared about the Millennium Bug and all our computers crashing as the bells for 2000 rang…
This strong sense of embeddedness is emphasised in the Foreword by Jim Aitken. “Memory is important,” he says; then he continues as follows:
There are those who would wish us to forget what we know. This is because memory can always bear witness to past injustices that were once enacted upon us…
Building on this idea, and looking to the future, a number of authors from within the group consider the way in which a continuity of thinking and feeling and acting – of culture and class struggle – can be achieved. In their essay “Our Changing City”, Anna Hutchison, Irene Muir, Helen McRae, Bill McPhail, David Norcliffe, Winnie Burke, Liz Hiddleston and Cathie Umobi write:
Edinburgh is changing and with current trends continuing, the future looks more demanding for our children and grand-children. Unless, of course, they fight back. All the struggles we thought we had won will have to be re-fought and re-won in a future that can often look precarious….
We’ll continue the struggle….
Yes, the struggle continues, and must continue, as so many predecessors have concluded, in their own times, in their own parts of the world, in their own words. “A luta continua”, sang Miriam Makeba, in a song written by her daughter Bongi, building on words by Mozambique’s first President, Samora Machel. Closer to home, an hour’s journey from Edinburgh, Matt McGinn (already mentioned) wrote a great song about the building of a great ship on the Clyde, “The Ballad of the Q4”. This is a hymn of praise to one of Scotland’s iconic industries and its workforce, but also, if we interpret it as a metaphor, it is also a hymn of praise to our collective building of a better society:
Thank you, Dad, for all your skill
But the Clyde is a river that’ll no stand still.
You did gey well, but we’ll do more.
Make way for the finest of them all, Q4.
We’ll burn and cut and shape and bend,
We’ll be welding and riveting, and in the end,
When the painter’s dabbed his final coat,
We’ll be launching the finest ever ship afloat.
MATT McGINN
William Morris, too, thought a lot about societal change – in fact, about socialist change – and the long, hard process that getting there entails, and will always entail. In his Preface to Robert Steele’s Medieval Lore (cited earlier), Morris wrote:
… history, the new sense of modern times, the great compensation for the losses of the centuries, is now teaching us worthily, and making us feel that the past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.
And in Windows, in a lovely, gentle elegy at the end of the book, some of our book’s authors give their own memorable thoughts on this notion of continuity of struggle across the generations, naming the names of comrades lost, and honouring them. “Some We Remember” is the title of this elegy, by Pat Gilhooly, Bill and Greta McPhail, Cathie Umobi, David Norcliffe, Helen McRae, Winnie Burke and Liz Hiddleston:
In the grounds of Royston Wardieburn Community Centre, we have a cherry blossom tree which was donated by Roberta Blaikie. Roberta wanted this tree to commemorate all the activists from the past, the present and the future who contributed in some way to their community.
Sadly, we have lost many good people over the last
few years but we are hopeful that a new generation of activists will
pick up the baton and continue the fight…
The Social History Group would like to remember some people who are no longer with us and those who are unable to continue their work in the community due to ill-health. They are remembered with fondness as stalwarts and campaigners…
All those unnamed are thanked equally for their contributions…
…..will you?
Tony Kearney made a documentary film, Priest School, in which we see the late Pope Francis meeting with some Scottish student priests at an event in the Apostolic Palace. They presented him with a bottle of Oban malt, which he took in both hands eagerly, and lifted it up admiringly, saying with great warmth, “Questa e la vera acqua santa” – that is to say, “This is the real holy water”. In a similar spirit, we might say of Windows to Our Past that it is the real uisge-beatha. It is a high-proof distillation, redolent of history and careful crafting. It is mature and strong. It is to be savoured.
But more than that: it is to regarded, I believe, as a model for the kinds of community-based and collaborative projects that other groups should undertake, as a matter of urgency, as part of our counter-culture’s fight-back against the barrage of reactionary stuff that Elon Musk, to name just one great enemy, is pouring into the minds and social spaces of young and old alike. Thousands of Windows-type projects will help to redress the balance, or imbalance, rather, joining all the other weapons in the struggle that are being deployed against capitalism’s influencers, this Culture Matters website being one.
To quote from Jim Aitken’s Foreword one last time:
Those who took part in this project have not been bystanders in their past or present, they have been fully engaged participants to their times. Their opinions are important as they view the future with concern…
‘Windows to our Past’ an important record. It provides an insight into another world while also revealing a degree of apprehension about the new one emerging…It deserves the fullest exposure it can get.
