SCOTLAND: Symbol of Unity

The drab, run-down streets of industrial Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, were face-lifted with banners & bunting last week as their Majesties, King George VI and his Scottish Queen, Elizabeth, arrived to open officially Glasgow’s $50,000,000 Empire Exhibition. Glasgow citizens, 50,000 of whom are still unemployed despite the Clydebank’s shipbuilding and rearmament boom, lined the streets and cheered lustily as the royal couple, riding in an open landau drawn by spanking Windsor greys, jogged out to the exhibition site, wooded Bellahouston Park. There in the neighboring Ibrox soccer stadium before 60,000 cheering Scots, King George acclaimed the exposition “a symbol of unity of the empire, the hallmark of this commonwealth of nations.”

Compared to the much-postponed Paris Exposition of last year, the Glasgow fair set a record by being 98% ready on opening day. By week’s end well over half a million visitors had entered the gates of the 175-acre park. Entirely a “family affair” designed to further British Empire trade relations, the exhibition is made up of pavilions representing the Home Country, the Dominions, various Crown colonies and two special halls showing off Scotland to the empire.

The arts exhibit features “the only representative collection of Scottish Old Masters ever assembled under one roof.” When a Scot commissioned such painters as Sir John Lavery, Sir David Cameron, Allan Ramsay or Alexander Eraser to do his portrait or a bit of native scenery, his heirs somehow managed to keep the picture in the family and few have had to be sold to buyers like Sir Joseph Duveen or Sotheby’s of London. The canny private owners were induced to loosen up and loan their paintings for this year’s display.

Most picturesque exhibit is a full-scale Highland clachan squat in the middle of the fair’s modernistic, pastel-shaded buildings. Like a Rob Roy setting, complete with the chief’s castle, a smithy, an old fashioned inn, a bubbling burn and a 1150-ft. loch, the little village is peopled with tartan-clad Highlanders who obligingly raise a “hooech” and a skirl on the pipes for the wide-eyed visitors.

The exhibition’s managers have been beset with protests since the fair was planned. Built in the midst of a Glasgow local option “dry” area, it took a special act of Parliament to insure thirsty Scots of a “wee deoch an’ doris” on the grounds. Strait-laced Scots, who are now righteously demanding that the grounds be closed on Sundays, last week objected to three classic statues of nude women. The canny Scottish exhibitors, not wishing to spoil the commercial attraction of the statues, temporarily solved the problem— they “clothed” the nudes by pasting pieces of paper on the glass screens in front of the statues.