ON the first Saturday of spring, Lanark was jumping with dancing children. When I tried a door by Greyfriars Parish Church hoping to view the kirk’s Gothic interior, I caught sight of dozens of kids in a musical theatre session of the Fever Pitch Academy. A moment later, on the sunny high street, I passed a trio of girls tripping along with Dance Rite Academy, a Lanark-based dance and cheer club, emblazoned on their T-shirts.
The children of Lanark first had dance academies more than two centuries ago. At New Lanark in 1816, the utopian mill owner Robert Owen established one of Britain’s first schools for infants, and dancing was on the curriculum. Some of Owen’s shareholders and critics did not approve.
The journalist Robert Southey witnessed a dance show accompanied by”‘six little pipers”. “There was too much of all this,” he grumbled, “But the children seemed to like it.” Afterwards, he softened as he watched the children playing and making “a glorious noise”.
When Kirk fathers controlled most schools and children worked in cruel conditions, those with dance classes were the lucky ones. Then as now, music and dancing bring old Presbyterian towns to life. In early February, in another market town at the opposite end of the country from Lanark, some friends and I came across a local radio station blaring tunes from a van. We began to dance and locals soon joined us, including an infant who jived infectiously. Inspired, a gang of us now take music into public spaces in the capital and invite passers-by to dance. Adults and children join these Contemporary Outdoor Dance Sessions (Cods), and they seem to like them.
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A stifling culture makes childhood stiff and dismal. A few miles up the Clyde from Lanark, near Carstairs, stands Monteith House. Once a country seat, and now Clyde Valley Care Home, it was from 1925 to 1983 an institution for “mentally defective Catholic children”, in the words of the Archdiocese. I circuited the building then peeked into the entrance hall adorned with the motto: HONOS INDUSTRIÆ PREMIUM – honour the reward of industry. Two staff appeared at another door and were happy to chat about the building. One told me her mother and grandmother had both worked at the Catholic home. Every weekend, Janice said, she had played with the children whose families could not support them and were “pooh-poohed” by their communities. The Daughters of Charity were harsh to the children, but Janice and her friends had fun along the river banks.
Further up the Clyde, at Lampits near Carstairs, I found the site of an old labour camp. In the 1920s and 30s men left their families to take up heavy labour here in the hope that they would gain the skills to migrate to the colonies. Lampits was opposed by communists on the grounds of being a kind of bondage, but some trades unionists and Labour Party intellectuals were keen. The hard labour sometimes had no use apart from to keep the men busy and fit, and sometimes they went on strike.
Little remains of the site.
A local farmer told me he had never heard of it. I thanked him and headed up a track through a stubble field. Five minutes later he shouted across it that I was not allowed to be there. Despite the charms of the Clyde twisting beside it, this large dairy farm felt barren and bereft of life.
In Lanarkshire as elsewhere, large-scale farming presents few opportunities for land work. This is an old problem, which Robert Owen addressed in his 1820 Report to the County of Lanark.
He set out to demonstrate how there could be “permanent, productive employment” on the land for the next generation. In his eyes the answer lay in introducing smaller-scale agriculture, ensuring that all produce could be sold immediately, giving every worker “a fair and fixed proportion of all the wealth which he creates”, and rolling out education reforms across the country. The local gentry did not welcome Owen’s plan, and today’s landowners are unfriendly towards similar schemes now.
A 2017 report for South Lanarkshire Council on employability declared there were “no specific projects targeting the agricultural sector”, due to “the limited number of positive outcomes ie those securing jobs [sic]”. ‘Anecdotally employer engagement has found few opportunities’, and “job sustainability tended to be poor”. Some organisations, such as the Landworkers’ Alliance, still advocate small-scale farming, but they have the National Union of Farmers to contend with.
Dancing Lesson at the Robert Owen's Foundation New Lanark, 1823
Still, the council makes half-hearted efforts. From my lunch spot in Lanark’s Clydesdale Inn,
I could see the shopfront of a Skills Exchange office. Its shop name reads, “Looking for work? We can help” and its window advertises “employability support. Vocational skills”, and something called the “Rural Academy”. This academy educates for work not play.
While children dance, local authorities are nervous about job prospects in a post-pandemic world of rising prices. More families are now under pressure to send children to earn. Parents are struggling to afford the treats and recreation their children want.
Westminster-funded employability charities advertise minimum-wage retail jobs and cleaning positions where workers must buy their own safety boots. Scotland’s Rural College showcases engineering apprentices who talk about pressure they are under to win awards. Meanwhile, the Clydesdale Inn displays adverts for children’s parties at special prices.
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As day turned to dusk I walked along the sun-dappled southern side of the river, passing the regimented sandstone homes and workshops of New Lanark and reaching the glorious Falls of Clyde.
I thought about the young folk, stuck inside for two years, who now must lose their spring Saturdays to work. But on my way back, I heard laughing and music and looked across the Clyde to see 25 or 30 teenagers. A few stoked a fire, some sat on logs, others shimmied to beats. However tough the working life that many weans face in Lanarkshire, they certainly know how to dance.
Attractions
- The Clydesdale Inn was visited by Samuel Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and was once Robert Owen’s home. Lively by noon, it retains imprints of its Wetherspoons past. ‘The Clydesdale’, a simple burger, £7.95
- New Lanark is well worth visiting time and again. Learn about children’s life there in the spooky Annie McLeod Experience Ride, open Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays from 11am-4pm. See newlanark.org.
- For good views of New Lanark and the Falls of Clyde, follow the river path from Kirkfieldbank to Bonnington Weir. Make a detour to the tranquil garden of the Corra sea glass and craft shop
Photos
1 and 2: Lampits, the site of a labour camp in the 1920s
3: Monteith House, now Clyde Valley Care Home
4: The shed at Monteith House which served as the residents’ school
5: New Lanark
6: The Falls of Clyde
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