The Glasgow tearaways who became an iconic work of art

Pat Samson’s ginger hair needs a good brush and there’s a squint in her right eye. She’s smiling, bouncy almost, sitting with her hands in her lap, wearing a red frock and a pink cardigan. Beside her is her sister Ann, who looks more sombre, her lips closed over buck teeth. She’s in a white dress with yellow flowers. The pair, wearing clothes kept in a box by the woman painting them, are captured shoulder to shoulder, close – just as they are today.

Pat and Ann Samson are two of a family of 12 children who became subjects for the painter Joan Eardley, now recognised as one of the great talents of 20th-century Scottish art. Drawn to Glasgow’s Townhead area, and especially Rottenrow, where soot-covered, often overcrowded tenement buildings were awaiting demolition, Eardley found first a studio and then her subjects, the sparky “weans” who clattered round the streets and closes. These included the Samsons: seven boys and five girls.

For Eardley, this was “the living part of Glasgow”, where there was not much traffic but “lots of people doing things; busy and kids all around”. It was the late 1950s and early 60s and the buildings were earmarked to come down to make way for an inner ring road motorway. In one painting, called Glasgow Street, Rottenrow, 1955-56, children are playing peever – hopscotch – on the road. There’s a pram, a child sitting in the doorway of a sweet shop, adults standing outside a pub. This is where the Samson children lived until they were moved out to new housing.

“We were like urchins,” says Ann, “running about the streets, snottery-nosed, manky.” Pat chimes in: “It was pure poverty. We had nothing. It was ‘first up, best dressed’ – whether it was boys’ or lassies’ clothes, we just wore them.”

I tracked Pat and Ann down to make The Girls in the Picture, a Radio 4 documentary in which they tell me, among other things, that they now live in Ruchill, another deprived area of Glasgow. But both remember their childhood with joy. When I ask them to name their brothers and sisters, they reel off a list like a rap, then quibble over who got them in the right order. They tell me of the siblings who are no longer here, and those that are, and how it all began with the oldest, Andrew. While sketching in the street, Eardley would set her easel up on a child’s pushchair. Andrew, then 12, cheekily asked: “Do you want to paint me missus?” And she did.

Ann remembers: “My mum said to Andrew, ‘I want to know where you’re going after school.’ And he said, ‘I am going to a woman’s house.’ She got him by the scruff of the neck and marched him right down to Joan’s. She said, ‘I’m just painting him’, and my ma said, ‘I’ve got 12 weans if you want to paint them.’”

The children were drawn to the warmth of the fire in the studio, as well as cheese and treacle sandwiches and thruppenny bits. In an interview, Eardley said: “This particular family, they amuse me – just the fact that they hardly notice me when they come in. They’re full of what they’ve been doing in a day, and who’s gone to jail today, and who’s broken into what shop, and who’s flung a pie in whose face, and so on. But they’re only talking to themselves as much as to me. They’re just really letting out all their energy that they haven’t been able to let out in school, because they’ve been told to keep quiet, and they just go on and on, and I watch them and I try to paint them or think about them.”

The children would “run amok” until they were told to “sit at peace” for a portrait. In one, Little Girl with a Squint, Pat is in a blue dress and red cardigan. Her fingers are in her mouth. Her skinny legs are in white ankle socks, ending in a wee pair of sandals. She’s standing against the tenement wall and there’s a collage of newspaper and chalk graffiti.

“I had a face round like a turnip, carrot-red hair and violent squints,” says Pat. “I had two bad squints in my eyes and sometimes I think that’s what attracted Joan. The squints and the colour of the hair.”

Pat’s squints were fixed although, as she has aged, the turn in one eye has come back. And the soul Eardley captured so sublimely is still there. It can be awkward, sometimes, when people recognise her from her portraits. But comforting too. The sisters remember taking sketches home from the studio and making paper aeroplanes or their mum using them to light a fire. They could kick themselves now, of course: they can barely afford to turn the heating on, or fill the fridge, and those sketches would now sell for thousands.

Eardley was born on a dairy farm in Sussex in 1921. Her father suffered severe trauma after the first world war and killed himself when she was eight. In January 1940, Eardley, her mother, grandmother and sister sought safety from air raids by moving to Bearsden, outside Glasgow. Eardley studied at Glasgow School of Art. She would eventually work between Townhead and a rough-and-tumble cottage up in Catterline, a fishing village near Stonehaven, an equally harsh environment where vast waves crashed against the cliffs and into her paintings. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and died in 1963 aged just 42.

“One time,” says Ann, “we went to her door and she told us to go away and not come back. We ended up greeting [crying] and my ma said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ And I said, ‘Joan says we’ve not to go back to her door again.’ My mum knew there was something wrong and went down to ask. Joan said, ‘I’ve got cancer and I know I’m going to die.’ My mum came and told us Joan was going to Catterline and wouldn’t be coming back. We thought she was going to be here for ever with us. She was just like part of our family.”

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