In many ways the 1920s and 1930s marked a watershed. The city's dependency on heavy engineering, which had carried it gainfully through the First World War, now became its bane -unemployment in Glasgow doubled from 1928 to 1939. The demands of the Second World War brought some respite but the return of peace saw the terminal withering of its old traditional prosperity base. More and more women began to go out to work, mainly as clerical workers (the era of the male clerk was over), shop assistants and domestic servants, and the family rapidly became less coherent and self-sufficient. The rigid strata of class began to slip somewhat, no doubt helped by thriving newspaper sales. The Daily Record, Glasgow Herald, Bulletin, Evening Citizen, Evening Times and Evening News (all local) were supplemented by popular nationals all intent on bringing news and scandal to the ordinary man and, increasingly, woman. This new "popular press" opened windows on persons, places and things previously unknown.
Thus beleaguered, Glasgow's twenty or so separate villages and the vigorous local societies they had for so many years sustained faded away almost unnoticed - willy-nilly they were all becoming members of a new global villag