In the middle of the eighteenth century, traders and merchants who travelled through Glasgow would refer to it as the pretty village, which lay on the south bank of the river Clyde. Later, in the nineteenth century it became a hub of industry, which attracted thousands of people looking for work and prosperity, but soon became overcrowded by Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Italy as well as Jewish people from central and Eastern Europe all looking to build a new life in the thriving city of Glasgow around the sparkling clear water of the river Clyde. By the twentieth century; it is said that the small area of the Gorbals on the south side of the river Clyde was populated by more than ninety thousand people and due to the decay in industry at that time it became the heart centre of poverty in Scotland's largest city. The Gorbals was fast becoming known as a grim and dangerous place, full of crime and alcohol, violent thugs and razor gangs. In 1935, the novel by H. Kingsley Long called, No Mean City, he painted the Gorbals as a run-down slum dominated by hard fighting men and criminals. Sadly, that is how the small area of south Glasgow has been perceived for the years, which followed, but if you ask any true resident of the Gorbals what it was like growing up in No Mean City, they will play you a very different tune. Gorbals people are tough, yet fair.

They are also very generous and giving to people that have less than themselves. They are the type of people who survive and grow through adversity because they are real and streetwise and no matter what they accomplish or however well they achieve in their life, they will always carry a little part of the Gorbals streets inside of them, and many a great thing grew out of the streets in the Gorbals over the years. One such person from the Gorbals who fits all of the afore mentioned was my older brother Tommy, or "Tam," as most people outwith our family came to know him. He was a wee boy from the Gorbals whose soul was steeped in his surroundings. It just so happened, from a very early age he loved to draw. He loved to draw with chalk on the old sandstones walls of the tenement buildings he grew up in. He drew what he saw on any surface he could find. All he required was a discarded chalk ornament from someone's dustbin to etch with and the walls and pavements of the Gorbals would be transformed into frescos and cartoons based on anything he witnessed in the busy streets of the early 1950s south-side.

Tommy drew so much that he became good at it and people liked what he drew, even as a little boy his drawings on the old dark-stained-sandstone walls amused the passers by who would often laugh at his images and some even threw the odd penny his way for his efforts and that I believe is really the moment, which caused him to earn the title of 'Gorbals Artist,' Tam Smith.As a boy, I would hear my older relatives laugh about Tommy and how he caused people to stop and stair at his childlike sketches and caricatures. I would say that his early art could stop traffic, but there wasn't much of that in those days, never the less, that image of him as a small boy truly focussed on creating images, drawing whatever came to him for people passing through his street is how I still think of my older brother when I imagine him as a child in the Gorbals. I also believe that a part of him never really grew up, that his imagination remained through his life in a fun-loving, almost childlike way.