I recently completed my first large scale mural in Glasgow. Commissioned by Thenue Housing Association, I painted a tribute to Thenue, now known more commonly as St.Enoch who was the mother of St.Mungo, Glasgow’s patron saint. The mural is just off London Road facing up Abercromby street in Bridgeton, Glasgow.
The mural Illustrates St. Thenue being guided across the Firth of Forth by a Shoal of trout. The patterned shawl she wears features 29 motifs. These motifs are a tribute to the 29 Women who died in the 1889 Templeton factory disaster in which a wall collapsed onto a weaving shed. The workforce was composed almost entirely of East End Glasgow women and many were buried in the ruins.
Quote from The Hidden History of Glasgow's Women: The Thenew Factor by Elspeth King (pp. 15-18)
The Historical Thenue -mother of St Mungo and the first named Glasgow woman - was a daughter of Loth, a sixth century pagan king of the Lothians, who wanted her to marry the son of the King of Cumbria. A convert to Christianity, she refused. Her father was so angry that she banished her from his court, to live among swineherds.
As she was tarrying in solitude among the swineherds, a certain beardless young man clothed in virgin’s apparel, who was won’t without suspicion of guile to inspect her fathers fields, violated her in this female dress, and impregnated her.
And she, constant to her former purpose, dared not divulge to anyone the issue of the affair; but to her father, nevertheless, it was communicated she had become pregnant. Then, in his zeal for justice, he along with his nobles, adjudged her to be a strumpet and a deceitful transgressor of the paternal law; and the condemned her to be stoned to death. At length she was delivered to executioners, who set her, in a cart, on top of a mountain. Anyone hurled thence on the stoned as they rushed furiously down, was devoted to a direful death. But she, trusting in the Lord, because though her body had been defiled her her mind had always remained clear and steadfast towards God, and so continuing resolute in her purpose, the executioners cruelly precipitated the cart from the summit of the steep rock; but while it plunged violently down, the young woman remained safe and unhurt.
The king, the father of the young woman, was made acquired with premises, but being enraged, he affirmed she should not suffer punishment; and he commanded her to be put to death. Then she was sent away in a shallop made of pitch and osiers, and covered with hides; altogether destitute of rudder, sail, or rower; to be straightaway swallowed up by the dreadful and unfathomed ocean. But, upheld by the divine support, she was wafter to the island of May; and thence, at the pleasure of Him who rules and governs all things - tossed by the waves of the sea - sustained by a prodigious attendant shoal of fishes - against the stream, moreover, which is worthy of great admiration - she was conducted in safety to culross, where from her own bowels she brought forth into the world her son, a holy man and most strictly devoted to God, the blessed Kentigern.
