‘I was invited to royal things but this means so much more because it’s given to me by Glasgow’: Elaine C Smith on being honoured with Freedom of the City

When Elaine C Smith was a teenager, she had no idea what happened inside Glasgow City Chambers.

“I started at drama school in the Old Athenaeum on Buchanan Street when I was 17,” said the Lanarkshire-born actor. “I walked past George Square and the City Chambers on my way in and I had no idea what it was.

“I used to think, ‘I wonder what happens in there?’ And I think a lot of people still wonder.”

This week, she’ll find out.

On Friday, Elaine will become only the fifth woman in Glasgow’s 850-year history to be given the Freedom of the City at a gala dinner in the chambers.

Freedom of the City

“It means that if I get arrested at any point, I have the right to have a cell to myself,” she said of the accolade, which has been given to Sir Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalglish, Marie Curie, Nelson Mandela and Sir Billy Connolly – none of whom spent any time in a Glesga clink afterwards.

A cell to hersel’ isn’t the only perk. She also reserves the right to move livestock to, and hang a washing on, Glasgow Green. But only on a good drying day, obviously.

“Very rarely do I hang a washing,” she said. “My whirligig is gone. We’ve been getting some building work done in the back garden.”

© Andrew Cawley

Elaine will also be the first woman since Dame Anna Maxwell MacDonald (who gave Pollok House to the city) in 1969 to receive this honour.

The city cooncil’s publicity machine can be forgiven for thinking about the photo op, but in these enlightened times – and well before them – Elaine C Smith hasn’t been one for playing up to gender stereotypes.

“When it was suggested I might want to go down to Glasgow Green to hang a washing out, I asked them if they asked Billy Connolly to hang a washing out on Glasgow Green when they gave him the Freedom of the City,” she said. “I think given this will be the first time it’s been given to a woman in years that maybe it’s slightly reductive to have me hanging a washing. So let’s have me grazing sheep. When this was first invented women weren’t even allowed to own sheep. So that’s progress.”

‘I burst into tears’

When she received the letter from Glasgow City Council at the tail end of 2024 telling her she was to be anointed, she thought it was about the bins. “I was rehearsing panto and when I came home my husband Bob said there was a letter from me that had come from the council,” she said.

“He’d opened it. He thought it was a bill. It was on beautiful notepaper and when I started to read it I had to get up and go out the room. I burst into tears. I’ve been up for honours before, but I have no interest in them. They’re too political.

“Good luck to folk who take them. But I couldn’t take them, certainly nothing with ‘British Empire’ at the end of it. Maybe a Scottish honour. I’ve been invited to various royal things, but I don’t do it. This is so much more meaningful to me because it’s been given to me by this city.

“And what has been wonderful is the reaction from people going, ‘brilliant’.”

© BBC

But maybe not everyone thought it was pure dead brilliant, to coin a phrase associated with her character Marydoll Nesbitt in Iain Pattison’s Govan comedy series Rab C Nesbitt.

“Apparently one councillor enquired why it was me and not Lulu, because I’d supported independence,” she said with a laugh. “But that point was voted down. I know there’ll be some folk asking what I’m getting this for. The same ones who ask what Billy Connolly’s ever done for Glasgow.”

She is, she says, also taking the gong for the women who never got one. Housing campaigner Mary Barbour, influential politicians Maria Fyfe and Margot MacDonald, her old pal Janey Godley. She’s named the tables at her gala do on Friday – International Women’s Day – for international women she respects. “It’s like organising a bloody wedding,” she said, wielding a table plan of big names and old aunties and women from round the corner, fished from her handbag.

Elaine belongs to Glasgow

Although hers is a life of showbiz success, no one can argue about Elaine’s impact on the city she took as her home, having grown up in the Lanarkshire town of Newarthill.

Aside from Nesbitt, she featured in the 1980s sketch shows Laugh??? I Nearly Paid My Licence Fee and Naked Video, which gave rise not only to Gregor Fisher’s titular Nesbitt, but also the belief that Scotland, and Glasgow, could make cutting-edge comedy that would get on the telly for the rest of Britain to laugh with, not at.

Add to that her era-spanning career as the city’s doyenne of pantomime – her last turn at the King’s Theatre saw her literally flying over the stalls, aged 66 – and being given the role-of-a-lifetime that was Christine O’Neill in Two Doors Down.

She’s been as much a part of the city’s story of the past 40 years as Wellington’s cone.

The award won’t buy-off her critical eye. She’s campaigned in the past on thorny issues in the city like domestic violence, and supported the family of murder victim Moira Jones by helping establish a fund in her name.

She’s critical about the lack of vision for the city’s waterfront, laments its apparent neglect of its built heritage and despairs of its worsening poverty.

We meet in Launch Cafe in Princes Square, not by accident. It’s a social enterprise whose aim is to tackle child poverty, and she’s become a chief advocate. “It’s an absolute disgrace that there are kids going to school in this city in this day and age who haven’t eaten anything,” she said.

But as Maggie Bell sang in the theme to that other city institution Taggart, which rose on the Clydeside the same time as Elaine’s career did, “good or bad, it’s hard to love another”.

She said: “I’m not from here. Glasgow was the metropolis when I was growing up. It took us ages on the bus from Lanarkshire. My dad would take us to the Barras, and I’d hear them playing Patsy Cline, and he’d buy a bag of whelks.

“I remember when I got older and saw Byres Road and the Grosvenor Hotel for the first time, I thought I was in London. I’d never seen anything like it.

“This place has given me so much. And it’s in my veins now.”