How one woman took on Glasgow’s museum establishment in her fight to preserve the social history of Glasgow’s women and its working-class communities – a tale with echoes for today
Elspeth King (left) with Dr Anni Donaldson, speaking at the 2023 Govanhill Festival and Carnival on ‘Women, activism, archives and heritage’. Pic via Dr Donaldson.
‘Elspeth King – a coalminer’s daughter with a first-class honours degree; a woman; a Scot; the wrong class, the wrong sex, and she does not toe the Establishment line.’
Written in The Herald in 1990, the quote above described a woman, who, by the time of her sudden death in November 2025, was recognised as one of the foremost social history curators and historians of her time. She was a remarkable woman, fiercely knowledgeable with a determination and strength behind her gentle, quiet-spoken manner.
Born in Fife, Dr Elspeth King studied medieval history at St Andrews. A museum curator to trade, she became Curator of Glasgow’s People’s Palace Museum and Winter Gardens in 1974.
I first met her during all the kerfuffle over her not getting the Head Curator of Social History job at Glasgow Museums in 1990. She was extremely well qualified and had been doing that job all along. Why didn’t she get it? See above. The issue became very public, personal and political as Glasgow Museums’ recruitment policy landed them in a fierce culture war. The city’s ruling Labour administration clashed with left-wing activists including the Workers’ City Group, to which I was connected, over whose culture was to be celebrated during Glasgow’s European City of Culture in 1990. It was a perfect storm of class, gender, politics, ideology, culture and social history. Aye, those were the days!
What Glasgow’s museum hierarchy thought worth collecting and preserving merged with the city fathers’ dreams of a city swept of its murky past.
The vanishing stories of the working class
Redevelopment and depopulation had laid waste to Glasgow’s working-class communities, their artefacts, their rich mix of customs, religions, traditions and cultures as the buildings vanished. Elspeth toed nobody’s line in her collection policy as she and her staff scoured the Barras Market, demolition sites, auction houses, skips and middens searching for stained glass, ceramics, architectural salvage and church fittings in a race to gather up and preserve the city’s heritage before it was lost forever. Elspeth and her Assistant and partner Michael Donnelly succeeded in growing the People’s Palace Museum collection, transforming it into an important and well-loved museum – the city’s social history WAS worth preserving and people came in their droves.
Described as a “powerhouse”, Elspeth held no quarter in her determination to preserve Glasgow’s rich social history: of working-class communities, women, women’s guilds, community groups, sports clubs, industries, crafts, protest movements, hospitals, radicals, trade unions, orange lodges, theatres, churches and faiths. And that’s the moment her work clashed with the city fathers’ and the museum hierarchy’s priorities.
As she reflected in 2025 on Glasgow’s 850th birthday, ‘For the last 170 years, Glasgow has operated in the belief that culture is a commodity which comes from elsewhere and local history does not matter. That the city could and should be shaped by culture comprising works of art from elsewhere, to eliminate the perceived negative culture of Glasgow, the dirty place with polluting industries, poor health, and housing and dangerous, dangerous left-wing politics, especially the politics which would frighten the tourists and the investors’.
It all mattered very much to Elspeth.
Honouring protest
She was passionate about collecting and curating Glasgow’s radical history of protest. In 2023, she co-authored a history of the Calton Weavers’ strike of 1787. Six men were shot by troops during the strike – Scotland’s first working class martyrs – and she was heavily involved in locating and preserving their burial ground.
She despaired that the Palace’s large collection of trade union banners would never see the light of day. While London, Manchester and Edinburgh’s museums have published splendid books on their trade union banner collections, Glasgow’s are in storage under wraps.
Elspeth was a feminist; women’s struggles and women’s history mattered very much to her. In her work on the movement for women’s suffrage, she wrote about the role of Scottish working- and middle-class women in the fight for women’s suffrage which had been under-represented in the movement’s documented history.
In 1993, she published her most important book, The THENEW Factor, The Hidden History of Glasgow’s Women. It was the first comprehensive history of the city’s women. Women’s history, in a field dominated by men, was then still relatively underexplored – hidden. Her meticulous research uncovered the stories of women in Glasgow from medieval times to the twentieth century. The title, The THENEW Factor, beautifully illustrates her argument right up front.
St Thenew, the daughter of a sixth century Scottish Pagan king, became the mother of Glasgow’s patron saint, St Mungo. Persecuted for her Christian beliefs, hers is a story of forced marriage, rape, pregnancy, attempted femicide, exile and single motherhood; timeless stories of women’s lives even now. She survived drowning and her son became the first Bishop of Glasgow, she was beatified, became the first ‘named’ Glaswegian and lived out her days peacefully with her lad.
Renamed St Enoch after the Reformation, everyone thought she was a man and she became ‘invisible’ until Elspeth revived her story. Thenew’s forgotten history symbolised a gap in Glasgow’s history where women ought to be. A gap Elspeth King began filling with histories of many fascinating, important, ordinary, forgotten Glasgow women and girls. I was given the book as a present in 1993. It transformed this history woman into a feminist history woman. I’m not the only one. The book is now out of print and should be republished as a fitting memorial to a brilliant woman, feminist, activist, social historian, writer, curator.