Radio listener

My Edinburgh-born parents used to tell me how, when they were small and fractious, their elders would threaten them with a bogeyman – bogeywoman, to be precise – known as "Jenny with the Iron Teeth".

It's intriguing, therefore, to discover, along with crime writer Louise Welsh, that Jenny cast her long and fearsome shadow in Glasgow as well. In THE GORBALS VAMPIRE, Welsh investigates an extraordinary incident in the early 1950s when two beat bobbies were called to Glasgow's Southern Necropolis to find it overrun with children armed with kitchen knives and sharpened sticks who said they were hunting down "a vampire with iron teeth" that had allegedly devoured two local lads.

The crowd of juvenile Van Helsings was promptly dispersed and it was established that there were no missing boys, but the press had a field day and blame was laid at the door of lurid American comics which were then starting to flood the British market. None of these publications actually featured a monster with iron teeth (although there's apparently one in the Old Testament book of Daniel), but comics became the scapegoat as politicians grabbed the moral high ground. The Gorbals Vampire's only real victim was the newsagents, as the case was cited in the Commons when the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 was passed, banning the sale of magazines depicting "incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature" to impressionable (and possibly knife and stake-wielding) youngsters.

The Dear Green Place, mercifully vampire-free, also comes under the spotlight in the sUNDAY FEATURE as author and comedian AL Kennedy looks back a century to the emergence of the Glasgow Boys, the group of painters who helped revolutionise Scottish art and transform the cultural standing of the Second City of the Empire, hitherto regarded as an industrial powerhouse but little else.

Anticipating the major exhibition of the Boys' work opening at Kelvingrove next month, Kennedy speaks to experts, including someone else who has helped define Glasgow's cultural standing: the inimitable painter and novelist Alasdair Gray.

THE GORBALS VAMPIRE

Tuesday, Radio 4, 11pm

SUNDAY FEATURE: GLASGOW BOYS

Tomorrow, 10pm, Radio 3

• This Article was first published in The Scotsman on Saturday March 27, 2010