[Scenario Seeds] The Dear Green Place.

[Catsmate]

The Dear Green Place¹

Recently grinch posted the story of The Gurning Man of Glasgow, one of the odd folk stories of that city, which reminded me of the equally odd story of the Gorbals Vampire Scare of 1954, where hundreds of Glaswegian schoolchildren armed themselves against a “iron toothed vampire” and spent three nights stalking the supposed monster through the city’s Southern Necropolis.

So, what other weird stuff can Glasgow offer us?


The Satanic Cult.
The then venerable Tron Street Church was destroyed by fire in the early hours of 15FEB1793. Curiously the fire was blamed on the antics of a Hell-Fire Club. This group allegedly mixed conventional debauchery, satanism and the works of the revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine. There were stories, probably exagerated, of orgies and black masses.

Anyway, on the night in question the group was returning from their evening's entertainment, around 4AM, when they entered the presbytery of the church. Now in additional to it's usual functions the church acted as the meeting place for the Presbytery (senior church leaders) of Glasgow, a store for records but also a 'session house' for the night guard of the city, a group of burgesses² who patrolled the streets after dark.They'd departed on their rounds at about 3AM leaving a fire banked for their return.

The would-be revolutionaries were drunk and built up the fire, daring each other to endure the heat, until, inevitable the fire spread and the church and hall were destroyed. There was an investigation and one member of the 'cult', who failed to flee the city, was hanged.


The Subway.
The construction of the Glasgow Subway, between 1891 and 1896, offers opportunities for various oddities to be dug up; preserved Silurians, crashed alien spacecraft, et cetera.
You could easily relocate The Iytean Menace to Glasgow in this period.


Resurrectionists I.
Glasgow University was, and is, noted for the medical school; the Doctor studied there under Lister³.
While Edinburch is better know for grave robbery (it had Burke, Hare and Knox after all) there were certainly some such thefts in Glasgow. One noted case was the prosecution of the surgeon Granville Sharp Pattison, accused of the theft of a corpse from the Ramshorn Kirk graveyard. Despite his home being found to be stuffed with various body parts he was acquitted as none of these could be shown to be from the missing corpse.
Public anger followed Pattison and he was forced to leave Glasgow, and later London. He eventually emigrated to the United States where he fought a pistol duel with Thomas McCall Cadwalader, seriously injuring the latter⁴.


Resurrectionists II.
Linked to Pattison is the name of Doctor Andrew Ure, a true Renaissance Man. In addition to anatomy and medicine, Ure researched fields as disparate as astronomy (he helped found the Garnet Hill Observatory⁵), chemistry (especially ‘practical’ or applied chemistry and industrial uses), optics (he designed the primary reflecting telescope for the observatory) geology, and business theory.
He acted as an expert witness and became Britain’s first consultant chemist, helped form the Pharmaceutical Society, served on numerous government panels and commissions, designed the bi-metallic thermostat and compiled numerous reference books. He also divorced his wife, a scandalous mater in 1819, after her affair with Pattison.

However Doctor Ure is most remembered today for the "Scottish Frankenstein" experiment her performed at Glasgow University in 1818. Ure used a battery to attempt to bring the corpse of a hanged criminal, named Matthew Clydesdale, back to life.
The incident became notorious following the publication of a dramatic (and highly inaccurate( contemporary account of the event by journalist Peter Mackenzie, who claimed that the corpse had risen from his chair, causing watching students to faint on the spot⁶.
Ure published his own account of the attempt, and claimed that he might have succeeded in performing a Frankenstein-style resurrection, if the corpse had not been drained of blood.



So, does anyone else have any Glasgow related ideas? Things for Torchwood Two to meddle in?





NOTES
1.The nickname for the city of Glasgow, comes from the multitude of parks in the city. Though in Taggart they only seem to appear as places for bodies to be found...

2. Citizens and freemen of the city.

3. Referenced in The Moonbase.

4. Local histories describe Pattison as a "local surgeon of ill character".

5. AT the time second only to Greenwich in repute.

6. Not true. Except stranger things have happened in the Whoniverse.....

[grinch]

From what I’ve looked up, aside from The Gurning Man Glasgow has its fair share of hauntings. Much like London, I suppose that’s part and parcel when you live in an old city. I could actually imagine a lot of hauntings rather than being tangible entities merely being recordings of the past ala The Stone Tape.

Doctor Andrew Ure sounds like a fascinating figure. Especially if someone managed to help make his resurrection scheme a success. Perhaps his mysterious benefactor is watching from the shadows come the time of the experiment. I could imagine one of Mortimus’s’ more morally unscrupulous past incarnations seeing the benefits of helping the good doctor succeed. (Perhaps his War incarnation before he was captured by the Time Lords?) Not to mention, humanity conquering death by the early 19th century would have drastic changes to the timeline going forward.

[Catsmate]

A few more from my notes. Comments and suggestions are most welcome.



The Glasgow Sharpshooters
In 1803, during the wars with France that dragged on for many years, Glasgow raised three volunteer military forces. Probably the most unusual of these was called the Glasgow Sharpshooters, the all-volunteer force was raised by the Highland Society in Glasgow. Amongst those involved was the newspaper editor Samuel Hunter, another member was the gunsmith (and marksman) John Ingram and a third was the sugar magnate Alexander Campbell (a man heavily involved in the Atlantic slave trade and slave plantations in the Caribbean; link)

Probably their most notorious action was years after the defeat of Napoleon; in 1820 they were involved in the Radical War, the violent suppression of those calling for political reform in Scotland (the year after the Peterloo Massacre). At this time the unit was led by Hunter, now a magistrate and politician.

Known for wearing elegant dark jackets, the book notes how they took part in a masonic procession in the 1820s which saw them walk from Glasgow Cathedral to lay the foundation stone for London Street, now London Road.


The Barrlyght Oscillator
This is a MacGuffin that pops up occasionally in my campaigns. Named after a 1900s Scottish inventor, who wasn’t the first to develop the machine but gets the 'credit' due to the degree of trouble he caused¹.

The Barrlyght oscillator is loosely described as a Temporal Standing Wave generator; loosely it creates temporal energy and feeds it into the local area, which can have a number of effects. The device can be used to stabilise an area subject to unusual temporal flow, negating most time travel techniques or preserving an object or volume from alterations in the past, allowing a paradoxial object to continue to exist².

Of course it can also be used for other purposes; creating a stasis field that isolates the area from the outside world, breaking a time loop, as a weapon that ages an enemy to destruction, or even a (dangerous) method of travel through time. One known side effect is the standing wave becoming self-sustaining, generally to the detriment of life, sanity and reality.
The device is well known in the time travelling community and generally avoided³, especially by sensible people⁴.

The source of energy for the oscillator can, in theory, be almost anything. Barrlyght's original design was decidedly Steampunk; a compact, liquid fuelled⁵, steam engine that rotated a series of concentric arms within a structure that resembled an Armillary Sphere. The arms were fitted with small chronon crystals intermixed with permanent magnets.
All made from polished brass. This model took a few minutes to start up, and more time to shut down safely a fact that cost Barrlyght his life. Probably⁶.

More advanced models use electricity, either mechanically or via direct electrical stimulation of the crystals.


The Great Gorbals Whisky Flood.
It's curious how the production of whisk(e)y and other distilled spirits has led to so many disasters⁷.
Glasgow's entry occurred early in the morning of November 21st 1906 at the Loch Katrine (later Adelphi) Distillery,  situated in Muirhead Street in the Gorbals district.
One of the distillery’s massive washback [fermentation] vats collapsed, releasing a vast amount of hot whisky precursor (around a quarter million litres). The vat was situated on the top floor of the building and it's destruction carried away two more similar vats of wash⁸. This added another half-million litres of whisky to the flood that coursed down through the building into the basement.
In the basement was another part of the process,the draff house where the refuse from the malt [germinated barley] was stored; outside several farm workers waited with carts to pick up the draff for cattle feed. The tidal wave of hot liquor smashed into them, throwing men, carts and horses across the street where they struggled waist deep in the alcoholic mixture that now resembled glue.

Thankfully there was only one fatality, a man named James Ballantyne, a worker from Hyndland Farm in Busby who suffered severe internal injuries and died within hours at the GRI. Several others were injured by the flood, and the debris it carried along, or burned by the hot liquid.




1. There are parts of his original laboratory and test area that still experiencing yesterday.

2. Yes this means it can indefinitely keep someone safe from alterations in their past. This is, of course, dangerous

3. Constructing, experimenting or even possessing one that is assembled is banned in the Hourglass Club.

4. There are, however, unfortunately many rather irresponsible time travellers.

5. Distilled alcohol or methylated spirits. 

6. No remains were, or have been, found.

7. Not including the loss of the spirit itself.

8. 'Wash' is a precursor to whisk(e)y, an alcoholic liquid of around 5% strength that has fermented but not yes distilled to spirit.






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