Tea at Miss Cranston’s: Century of Glasgow Memories

This book is based on extensive interviews which the author conducted with the older citizens of Glasgow. They reminisced happily about their childhood and youth in the main. The oldest was almost 100, so first-hand memories go back to almost 1890, but those who were children in the 1890’s remember also tales of their grandparents and so, here and there, glimpses of much older times emerge. Few of the recollections are later than the end of the World War II. The material has been arranged by subject matter rather than chronologically, and Anna Blair has attempted to link the passages in an informative and interesting way. Tea at Miss Cranston’s was one of the many pleasures of that bygone age, and if nostalgia includes remembering also harsher times of poverty and war, or even the down-to-earth reality that made it cost a penny to hire a whitewash brush from a painter and decorator (with a ha’penny refund if it was taken back cleaned), then this book is nostalgic.