Jeffrey Meek

Boarding and lodging practices in early twentieth-century Scotland

The social and economic position of lodgers in Europe and North America has attracted considerable scholarship, yet the financial and interpersonal relationships between lodgers and boarders and their hosts in working-class homes is somewhat underdeveloped. This article examines patterns of lodging and boarding in working-class homes in Scotland between 1861 and 1911, focusing upon multiple layers of connection between paying guests and householders. This article demonstrates that connections had national and ethnic roots, and that taking in lodgers and boarders was of prime cultural and economic importance for many. The ability to offer space played a crucial role in the social and economic status of single, separated and widowed women, and this article offers an insight into the sometimes troubled relationships between landladies and their tenants.

State Regulation, Family Breakdown, and Lone Motherhood: The Hidden Costs of World War I in Scotland.

Using a range of parish records, records from the Registrar General of Scotland, charity organizations, and media reports, this article contributes to the historiography which evaluates the effects of World War I in Britain as well as the history of lone mothers and their children. It highlights how during the war, women, especially lone mothers, made significant gains through the welfare system, changing approaches to illegitimacy and the plentiful nature of women’s work but also how in doing so this brought them under greater surveillance by the state, local parishes, and charity organizations. Moreover, as this article will demonstrate, many of the gains made by women were short-lived and in fact the war contributed to high levels of family breakdown and gendered and intergenerational poverty endured by lone mothers and their children.

From Sodomy to Same-Sex Desire

There has been little written about Scotland’s queer history, which is the result not of a lack of interest but of the difficulty in finding the necessary sources from which to chart the nation’s queer past. Although there is a relative paucity of material relating to homosexuality in Scotland prior to the nineteenth century, a variety of discussions do exist, generally related to Scots Law. These sources may not offer us much of an insight into popular attitudes to same-sex desire in Scotland’s past but they do enable an understanding of how legal authorities and prominent personalities viewed homosexual acts. What becomes apparent is that homosexuality was not viewed as a major problem in Scotland during the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, yet it was troublesome enough to agitate Scottish legal luminaries.

Wolfenden and Scotland

The publication of the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (hereafter the Wolfenden Report) in 1957 was the first major investigation by any national authority in Britain into homosexual behaviour. The report was indicative of reformist principles within government during the post-war period,1 and, as historians have argued, prompted the birth of gay liberation movements in Britain.2 The recommendations of the report, namely to decriminalise homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, were implemented in the Sexual Offences Act in 1967 but, significantly, only in England and Wales. The debates ignited by the Wolfenden Report continued for over a further decade in relation to Scotland. This chapter explores the main reasons why the introduction of more permissive legislation was delayed or prevented in Scotland, focusing on debates held in the Houses of Parliament, newspaper discussions on homosexuality and the law in Scotland, and the experiences of gay and bisexual men (GBM) who lived during this period.

In Sickness and in Health

The Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations that the law should no longer interfere in the private sexual lives of homosexual men helped remove the state regulation of non-heterosexual citizens’ intimate lives. However, as shown in Chapter 3, those recommendations did not result in immediate action: it was a decade before legal restrictions were partially lifted in England and Wales and 13 years before similar action was taken in Scotland. The removal of state regulation was not the result of a surge of enlightened thinking, nor did it mean a broader acceptance of homosexuality. Rather, from the 1950s to the 1970s, one sees a shift in viewing of homosexual offences from a legal gaze to a medical one. During this period, medicine was being proffered as a discipline which might replace the law in governing responses to deviant sexualities. The Wolfenden Report itself addressed this tendency: a section of Chapter VI is devoted to consideration of the medical treatment possibilities for homosexual offenders.1 This discussion was limited and the committee were unconvinced of the merits of medical intervention into human sexuality. Nonetheless, debates within and beyond the medical community on treating homosexuality medically were little affected by this lack of political endorsement.

God, Sin and Sodomy: Reconciling Religious Identities and Sexual Identities

The Scottish Minorities Group (SMG), from its inception, had identified working with Scotland’s major religious institutions as instrumental in the push for homosexual law reform in Scotland. This could be viewed as giving such organisations undue prominence in matters of sexual morality; after all, Scotland’s largest church — the Protestant Church of Scotland — had not sent a delegation to report to the Wolfenden Committee. The church’s public proclamations during the 1950s and 1960s that homosexuality was both disordered and immoral would have offered non-heterosexual men of faith little hope that a sea change in opinion from Scotland’s religious orders might be forthcoming. The recommendations of the Wolfenden Report would only apply to England and Wales and this has led some to believe that the objections of Scotland’s main church played a significant part in preventing decriminalisation north of the border. However, this would be an over-simplistic analysis of events, as has been discussed. While James Adair’s role in preventing legal equity between Scotland and its neighbours has been overstated, the Church of Scotland’s apparent intransigence belied a fair degree of organisational ambivalence over the legal status of Scottish homosexuals. Adair’s objections were, initially, shared by the Church of Scotland and his minority report certainly accorded with the position of the institution during the 1950s and 1960s, but the fact that this church had undertaken a notable change of direction by the 1970s suggests that opinions were much less rigid than its public proclamations suggested.

Non-Heterosexual Men, Scotland and Homosexual Law Reform

In this book I have sought to detail a history of male homosexuality in Scotland during the twentieth century. This endeavour was undertaken to offer a Scottish perspective to research which has to date focused chiefly on England. What emerges is that there existed legal and cultural peculiarities in Scotland, which have impacted upon the experiences of gay and bisexual men (GBM). One of the most significant peculiarities of this period relates to why Scotland was excluded from the Sexual Offences Act 1967 which brought about the limited decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting male adults in England and Wales. Various reasons have been forwarded, mostly in relation to Scotland’s independent legal and religious systems and their open hostility to homosexual law reform.

From Crime to Community

In Scotland during the period prior to the limited legalisation of adult, consensual homosexual acts in 1980 there was a general absence of positive, accrediting discourses of homosexuality within the public sphere. As has been detailed this led to periods of intense personal conflict for many gay and bisexual men (GBM) in Scotland. Growing up within a society where same-sex intimacies were decried by legal, religious and educational institutions might have had a powerful effect on the development of sexual identities in adulthood. If the majority of non-heterosexual Scots were exposed to similar discourses regarding homosexuality during adolescence and then during adulthood, it could be argued that they might develop similar attitudes towards their sexuality. One of the first writers to engage with ‘generational theory’ was Karl Mannheim whose essay ‘The Problem of Generations’ was published in 1923.1 Mannheim located generation within historical and social contexts and identified it as ‘a key aspect of the existential determination of knowledge’.2 Mannheim was attempting to explain why members of similar generational cohorts quite often had similar weltanschauung3 (viewpoints).

Moments in Time: Growing up Queer in Post-War Scotland

Growing up within an environment where hostile and discrediting discourses of homosexuality operate can have a negative impact upon the self-concept of non-heterosexuals.1 In Scotland, during the first three quarters of the twentieth century social and institutional attitudes to homosexuality were largely discrediting; therefore, it is important to establish just what influence these discourses had on gay and bisexual men (GBM) during their formative years. Additionally, it is also relevant to examine how processes of identity formation in adolescence impact upon self-identity schemas among GBM in adulthood.

The Scottish Minorities Group

An organised homosexual rights group did not appear in Scotland until 1969, a decade after the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) began its work in England. The Minorities Research Group (MRG) followed the HLRS a few years later; across the Atlantic, North American activists had formed the Mattachine Society in 1951.1 In 1969 in Scotland, a group of men came together to form the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG), which had as its aim a desire to bring gay men and women into the public eye and integrate them into civil society.2 Early members of the Scottish movement were concerned that after 1967 the country’s non-heterosexual population had been abandoned. Walter, one of the founding members of the group, explained: ‘The HLRS did very little for Scotland. I knew somebody later who went down to London and he’d been introduced to [members of HLRS] and they were absolutely hopeless when it came to organising any form of contact between people in Scotland’.3