Sunday Herald Online - April 15, 2007
Tales of the riverman
Fancy flats, designer bridges ... the 21st century Clyde may look benign. But Glasgow’s river remains a treacherous place. Just ask the man who has rescued 1500 souls from its depths. By William McIlvanney
GEORGE PARSONAGE, Officer of the Glasgow Humane Society and popularly known as the Riverman, is rowing on the Clyde. This is something he has been doing since he could barely walk. It shows. The arms powering the oars could stand in for pit props. The handsome, clear-eyed face above them glows with health, often showing a smile that could light up a small town. The close-cropped grey hair looks more like a whimsical choice than the effect of ageing. He is 63 but it isn't easy to believe that when faced with his energy.
The impression of remarkable fitness is effortlessly confirmed by the fact that while he talks and rows - and he does talk a lot - his breathing doesn't miss a beat. He could be speaking from an armchair. I could get tired just watching him, but not from listening to him. As he takes us up and down a small stretch of the Clyde upriver from the weir, an odd thing happens. The more he tells me about the river from his encyclopaedic awareness of it, the stranger the river seems. Perhaps the more you know about something, then the more you honestly realise how much you don't know and, therefore, the more mysterious it becomes. Certainly, Parsonage's own experience hasn't made him think he knows all there is to know.
"You should always be a bit afraid of the river," he says. "It's moody. You get careless with it, it can make you pay."
That idea has more resonance when you're not looking down on the river from a bridge or from one of its banks but resting on its surface in the stern of a rowing-boat. For one thing, at this level the river looks much wider. You don't see it foreshortened from above. For another, you can feel its undulating depth beneath you, the wilfulness of its currents, its sheen of coldness. It displaces you. You may still be able to see familiar landmarks but, since you have no idea where you are in relation to them and since in any case that relationship is constantly shifting, those landmarks disorientate you rather than fixing your position. The sense of the river as domesticated adjunct to the city dissipates. You feel that, no matter the uses to which we put the river, it retains its own dynamic. You realise that the city didn't make the river, the river made the city.
That awareness of the river as a wilful and sometimes dangerous entity within the city has been the central theme of George Parsonage's life. It's an awareness that also created the organisation for which he works. In 1790, a time when the ferment of the French Revolution was brewing a recognition of the rights of the individual all over Europe, the Humane Society of Glasgow came into being in the Tontine Hotel. It was funded from £200 left by the merchant James Coulter "for the rescue and recovery of drowning persons". From 1859, when the first full-time Humane Society Officer was appointed, until now, only four men have been chiefly responsible for the society's efforts in rescue and recovery: George Geddes Senior (1859-1889); George Geddes Junior (1889-1932), who drowned while attempting to save a man who jumped from the Saint Andrew's Suspension Bridge on Glasgow Green; Ben Parsonage (1932-1979) and his son George, who took over in 1979.
They represent an astonishing continuity of commitment among four men across 150 years of dramatic social change. The young George Geddes learned from his father, Ben Parsonage worked for four years with the younger Geddes until the latter's death and George Parsonage learned from his youth to assist his father. He retains a huge affection for that father, having written a book celebrating his life: Rescue His Business, The Clyde His Life (Glasgow City Libraries, 1990).
"He wasn't just my father. He was my friend, my best mate. We depended on each other in dangerous situations. That makes for a special bond."
The fathers and sons of these two families were like a four-man guild, connecting the dead members with the living ones and maintaininganunbrokentraditionof humanitarian action. Unfortunately, that guild is now dissolved. George Parsonage is the last of them. Rescue and recovery have been taken over by bigger organisations. He is no longer on call for such emergencies.
Perhaps the end could have been foreseen in the difference between his career with the Glasgow Humane Society and those of his predecessors. They were full-time operatives, he was not. Part-time can lead very easily to no-time. For 26 years, he combined his work for the society with being an art teacher at Whitehill Secondary School. He carried a pager with him at all times in the classroom. If it went off during a class, he would deputise a pupil to go and tell the headmaster that he was gone. Time in the river goes fast for someone in trouble. There is no space for niceties. He says that he found his pupils were respectful of his other life, sometimes running after him to his car with a briefcase he might need.
You can see why pupils might have respected the double identity he inhabited. They maybe felt they had an art master like something out of Marvel comics. A mild-mannered teacher by day (well, perhaps not so mild-mannered) until his pager sounds. Suddenly, he spins three times and turns into: Riverman! And he is off to rescue something from the water.
Alas, no more. He is not only no longer on call, he has left teaching. Two of the main props of his life are gone. It seemed like a good time to talk. Dramatic change in your life is conducive to reflection.
After coming off the water and berthing the boat, we go to the Glasgow Humane Society house on the north side of the river. This is where Ben and Sarah Parsonage brought up their four children - Ann, Elizabeth, Ben and George. Inside, its comfortable homeliness is redolent of the past they shared there. The mementoes relate especially to their father Ben, who was a Glasgow legend of commitment to the rescue of the living and retrieval of the dead. Ann now lives in Kinning Park, Elizabeth in Blairgowrie. Ben is in England. But George has lived in this same house his entire life.
I Wonder about that as we sit at the dining table, talking. Gifts come at a price. Part of the price he has paid has been the geographical narrowing of his life. If your great talent is to know the reaches of a specific river, its moods and its bad places, it follows that this ability is not transportable. It nails you to one location. Leave the place behind and your gift goes with it. I suppose that could make you conscious not just of what your particular skills have achieved but of what they have denied you, leaving you haunted by the possibilities on which your chosen expertise has locked the door.
The thought is no stranger to him. He admitshistimesofself-doubtand moments of depression. But he made a choice, as you have to, and he can live with it. It is, he points out, the kind of choice everybody has to make in one form or another.
Maybe one reason why he is so comfortable with the limits his maverick preoccupation with the river has put upon him is that life has contrived to bring to him the kind of experience he most values, without his having to go too far to look for it. When he was around 50, he met Stephanie Dancer, an English doctor, who was in her 30s. She was, as might have been imagined, a champion oarswoman. Their interest in rowing became an interest in each other. After Stephanie took a job in an Edinburgh hospital, he proposed to her. They married 12 years ago and have two sons, Benjamin who is 11 and Christopher who is eight. As you might expect in a household so steeped in tradition, the boys have the names of their grandfathers.
His joy in his family is obvious as he talks about them. But even without this late-blooming pleasure I suspect that his ability to make peace with his past and enjoy the life he has made for himself would have survived. He has had plenty of practice in coping with dark things without letting them overwhelm him. His memory holds many instances of the fragility of life.
"We found a blind man lying drowned at the edge of the river one day, with his white stick beside him. And up above him was a broken bit of fence, where some neds had ripped away a piece of railing. That man used to tap his way along the fencing every night on his way home. He knew that the first opening was the bridge, and he would cross there. But it wasn't that night.
"In one of the clubhouses one day during a regatta they didn't close a gate, which they usually don't at a regatta. There are people coming and going all the time. But there was a young woman passing. This was in the early 1950s and I was too young to realise the full significance of it at the time. She turned in at the gate and left the pram facing the river. She thought she had put the brake on. And she turned to talk to someone. The baby was strapped in. And the pram ran down the hill, past all the rowers, down the stairs and bounced about 20 feet into the river, and sank. My father went up straight away and used his grappling irons. He immediately recovered the child but he couldn't bring it round. I will always remember him crying his heart out."
A moment later he adds: "That's why I'm paranoid now about telling people to close gates." The intensity with which he delivers the afterthought is a clue to one way in which he has always managed to put a salve on the bleakness of things. He gives them a purpose. He turns past misfortune into present awareness.If it often seems almost visibly easy to lose a life, he doesn't see that as a reason to feel contempt for life itself but as a motivating factor in trying more determinedly to protect it. Its vulnerability doesn't make it pointless, just more precious.
It is presumably that pragmatism, that habit of turning a bad event into a lesson against itself, which has enabled George Parsonage to work among the drowned debris of so many lives without going under with them. He's not just enduring them, he'slearningfromthem.Henever confuses caring with sentimentality. He does what he can in practical terms and leaves it at that. And, to add to his resilience in the face of bad experiences, he practises that old Glaswegian art of finding laughter in the dark.
"There was this woman on the quay wall. Going to jump. And she sees me waiting below her in the boat. (I've sometimes sat below a bridge for seven or eight hours). And she shouts, Hey, you, ya so-and-so. Are you that Parsonage boay?' I shouts, Aye.' And she climbed back over the railings and held her hands out for the policeman to cuff her. She's shouting, Nae point o' me jumpin'. His faither saved ma maw.'"
Sometimes failure runs in the family.
As we laugh, I realise that this meeting has been dramatically different from what I expected it to be. Given the circumstances, I had thought it was bound to have an element of elegy to it. After all, this was a man who might be feeling that his life's work has effectively come to an end. The reality in front of me is hearteningly different. This man isn't easily diverted from what he wants to do.
An incident with a concrete block showed that. At about the time his first son was born, Parsonage was out alone sculling on the river when he approached a bridge. Being an inveterate checker of the situation behind him when he's rowing, he noticed that the bridge appeared to be empty. But as he came under it a group of youths who must have been hiding there dropped a slab of concrete on him. It struck his head, splitting it open.
"But it was lucky in a way," he says, suggesting an interesting interpretation of luck. "I managed to fall forward over the oars. Backwards, I would've capsized. And I wouldn't have fancied my chances in the water in that state."
He remained sufficiently conscious to realise that the youths were still up there, trying to hit him with more masonry. He managed to stay under the bridge but the boat was gathering a worrying amount of blood. Fortunately, two off-duty policemen who were rowing on the river had seen what happened and their shouts scared off the happy bombers. Parsonage was taken to hospital, had his head stitched and was out the same night.
It's not just his physical recovery that was remarkable but his psychological one as well. He retained no desire to find out who the youths were or to get retribution. He had a life to get on with and he would do that.
The same attitude applies to his current situation. His duties may be diminished but he is not. He may not be on call officially but he will always be on call in his own head, devising ways to outwit people's acts of folly against themselves.
He has collected accolades in his time. The most recent unofficial one is to have his alias of the Riverman used as the title of Alex Gray's latest detective novel, which is dedicated to him and his father. He even has a bit part in the book. But it's hard to imagine him contentedly mulling over his many awards, including an MBE. He has too much still to do. He can't retire from his benign obsession with protecting people from themselves.
He's a proselytiser for that cause, as I discover when I have a cup of tea in the boathouse with him and two young men, Eddie McGowan and Tony Coia. Tony Coia is a council lifeguard at Tollcross swimming pool who comes here on his days off to learn more about George Parsonage's business, without pay. Eddie McGowan is another officer of the Glasgow Humane Society who, as I leave, hands me a clutch of small cards for distribution, like bible tracts. They are reminders to Glaswegians of their civic duties. It's nice to know that the Prophet of Safety has his disciples.
As I'm leaving I pause outside to take my farewell of Lucky and even in him I see a small symbol of the delicate balance GeorgeParsonagemaintainsbetween dealing with the bad stuff and not letting it invade his life. Lucky is a cat who has the run of the Green and the yard and the garden. But he isn't allowed into the family home, because he's feral and he's trouble. He's a feline hooligan. He just slouches around all day in that self-absorbed way cats have of inhabiting a parallel universe where humans are just visiting aliens. His coat hangs roughly on him, looking as if he hasn't licked it for a week. His favourite activity is attacking dogs. Even as I stroke him goodbye, he shoots out of my hand as if it had been a catapult, to put the frighteners on a labrador, which disappears into the distance. Watching him, I see the wisdom in George Parsonage's approach to life:youmustlearntoco-existwith trouble, which will always be there, but you don't have to bring it into the house with you.
William McIlvanney's latest novel, Weekend, is published by Sceptre, £16.99, and from May 31, in paperback priced £7.99.
The Riverman, by Alex Gray, is published by Sphere, £18.99