Honour

Bryant had never been in prison, though he used to pretend that he had to his other Glasgow friends in London. “Aye, Bar-L. Just a two-stretch”, he’d lie, craving their admiration. He doesn’t catch their doubting glances to one another. They already find him an odd duck “Cannae even get stoned wi’ the fucker”.  Self-conscious Bryant makes those around him self-conscious. Wullie O’Marra had broken a wee boy’s leg one time during a wee kick-about on a patch of grass at the edge of the scheme. Hadn’t it been Bryant who had carried the wee lad home to his mother while O’Marra and his cohorts had fled? This act is taken for strangeness. He is ‘other’ than his townies, his fellow Glesgawegians.

“He even fucken talks different”

Bryant was raised in a family in which the dominant force – his father – believed in self-education. He talked about everything from a Marxist, trade unionist, leftist perspective. Bryant and his little brother learned early words like pickets, marches and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. Jimmy Reid was preached more than Jesus Christ then vilified as a class traitor when he started writing for The Daily Mail. 

Boab Bryant had been black-listed from all light-engineering work in the west of Scotland and had been forced down to London to find employment gainful enough to provide for his family (for a time, he was a mayonnaise mixer at the Heinz factory in West London). His trade unionism was political, involving industrial sabotage and wildcat strikes. Shop stewardship was hatred of bosses rather than careful negotio-amelieration and protection of custom and practice. No manager of discontent, he.

Bryant’s mother was told by eager neighbours “Jean, your man’s been sacked” before he’d even walked up the road. He’d called a strike over pay and conditions and his own membership told him to stick it where the sun don’t shine; GMB regional office had torn up his membership card before his very eyes.

Boab was the son of gentle Alan, and everything that Alan was Boab became the opposite. Alan the Rangers man, Boab chose Celtic; Alan the Tory, Boab moved to the extreme left. Alan, aspirant middle-class, Boab the downwardly mobile, eventually achieving the ultimate success of moving his family into a tower block on a Glasgow scheme.

It seemed that Boab Bryant was determined to swim against every tide that rolled before him.

Later as rather a senior Social Worker he fought for women’s refuges, even though the women themselves hadn’t really wanted him too, he fought for those at the very bottom of the socio-economic food chain. He even fought to have a print of Gaugin’s Two Tahitian Women on his office wall despite colleagues calling for its removal as obscene.  Later he was prescient in setting up furniture-sharing schemes and counselling wife-beaters in the wilds of Ayrshire and beyond.

He died, this mental, gentle, damaged man of honour, in the Socialist Burgh of Hackney in 2006. When he took his last desperate croaking breath in that sad but necessary hospice the thunder roared in the high summer sky.