the 1970s

The 1970s are the book’s point of departure for a story about Glasgow’s changing landscape and the fragile survival of its records. Recalled from the perspective of 1990, the decade links the work of preserving local history to Michael Donnelly’s discovery of Archibald McCandless’s manuscript and to a continuing dispute over how its claims should be read.

A city in transition

The introduction describes the 1970s as an exciting period in Glasgow, even as the city’s older industries were closing and moving south. At the same time, its elected governors were buying multistorey housing blocks and extending the motorway system. The account sets those large-scale changes against the fate of local evidence: buildings were being cleared, and the material of the city’s past risked being swept away with them.

Since the First World War, the City Council had provided no funds for new acquisitions at the People’s Palace, Glasgow’s local history museum. Its curator, Elspeth King, and her helper, Michael Donnelly, therefore sought objects and documents largely from buildings scheduled for demolition. Their salvage work took place amid industrial closures and redevelopment, making preservation a practical race against the removal of the places and collections that recorded local culture.

The People’s Palace and Donnelly’s work

Donnelly and King worked overtime to acquire and preserve the material. King sometimes helped Donnelly himself, while the rest of her staff were attendants sent by the head of the city art gallery in Kelvingrove and were not paid to retrieve objects from dirty, unsafe buildings. The exhibitions the two organized were successful, yet cost the City Council little or nothing; their work depended on their own effort rather than a funded collecting program.

The material they rescued ranged from stained-glass windows, ceramic tiles, theatre posters and banners of disbanded trade unions to historical documents. Donnelly stored some of it in a rented space at Templeton’s carpet factory, itself soon to close. The factory’s impending closure echoes the wider industrial changes described in the introduction: even a temporary refuge for the city’s salvaged past stood inside a disappearing industrial landscape.

A meeting remembered from 1977

The editor places the beginning of a personal connection to Donnelly in 1977, when Elspeth King employed the editor as an artist-recorder at the People’s Palace. This remembered meeting anchors the later account of the manuscript in the decade’s museum work: the editor encountered Donnelly not first as the finder of an unusual book, but as a colleague engaged in preserving Glasgow’s material history.

The time gap matters to the framing. Donnelly contacted the editor again in the autumn of 1990, when the editor had become a self-employed writer. He lent the book, which he considered a lost masterpiece, and asked that it be brought into print. The manuscript’s passage from a museum worker’s discovery to a proposed publication thus crosses from the 1970s into a later period of editorial and historical argument.

From recovered papers to disputed history

The archive that Donnelly found included a sealed packet marked for a descendant of Victoria McCandless after August 1974; a later hand had crossed out the instruction and added that there were no surviving descendants. The packet contained a book and letter, carelessly returned after someone had opened it. These details place a date and a trace of later handling inside the documentary chain that the introduction reconstructs, while leaving the packet’s history visibly incomplete.

The editor and Donnelly disagree over what the recovered book represents. Donnelly regards it as blackly humorous fiction interwoven with real experiences and historical facts; the editor argues that it is a loving portrait and claims that six months of archival research established the McCandless account as a tissue of facts. Donnelly remains unconvinced without official certificates and newspaper copies. The editor’s later account of the period therefore does more than recall museum work: it makes the preservation of evidence, and the question of whether evidence can settle a story’s status, part of the book’s subject.