This book is described by its author James MacLehose as an account of men who "have given life and light and learning to their city: their genius and skill, their enterprise and daring made it famous, and, combined with their wealth and their worth, have made Glasgow the second city in the empire."
The aim is to tell the story of their lives: what they did and how they did it. It was decided that no man living at the time of publication should be included, and that the men chosen should all have died in the 30 years 1855-1885, thus ensuring that the overall period covered local history from the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was thought that everything would be included that was necessary to make the book representative of the various interests of the city of Glasgow.
The portraits accompanying the text were all engraved specially, taken from pictures provided by representatives of the respective families. Photographs were considered but rejected on the grounds that they were apt to fade. The portraits were produced using what was a new process at the time: engraved on copper, then faced and finished on steel, then printed from the steel plate.
IN June, 1556, in the Taxation Roll of Scotland, then the poorest country in Christendom, Glasgow stands eleventh of the towns, below "Air," "Cowper," and "Striveling," and just above Dumfries. To-day, of the eleven greatest cities of Europe she is not the last in wealth and population: in the United Kingdom she claims the second place: in Scotland she is first with no second: she has over three-quarters of a million of inhabitants, and is the richest part of one of the richest countries in the world.(1)
This is not the outcome of agricultural wealth. The traveller who for the first time approaches Glasgow may well wonder how so many people have come to be here, and how they live. By rail, he will pass over great stretches of dour till, or bleak moor, or at best of upland pasture. By river, he will pass through a strath of fair fertility; but the strath is narrow, and it has been won, as the place-names still tell, by patient labour from swamp and muir and wood.
But agriculture is not the only support of wealth and population, and a glance at the map will show that this district has rare physical advantages. Sheltered from the Atlantic by the huge breakwater of Cantyre, the Firth of Clyde is a great natural harbour; its wide mouth gives a ready entrance in every wind; and it ends in an estuary that cuts deep into the land, piercing almost the North Sea. But the map will not tell all that Nature has done for us. The Firth swarms with herring, and the river once swarmed with salmon: from Ailsa Craig to the Tail of the Bank the Firth is deep, clean water, without a shoal or a rock: the river has no bar, and it reaches as a tidal creek the edge of a great mineral basin. Nature had done her part that somewhere in our valley a city should one day rise, a great seat of commerce and manufactures.
But Glasgow is not the natural site of it. Had Alexander or Seleucus been founding the emporium of the Clyde, he would never have chosen for it a spot where the level space was a marshy strip, and the channel so choked that a canoe could scarcely thread its way to the sea. He would have traced his lines lower down, where the hills drew back and left a broad strath, and where the river was fairly wide and clear.
It was St. Mungo who first broke ground here, but not for 800 years and not then through Church influences was the city of St. Mungo assured even of the supremacy of its own district. We cannot tell what guided the steps of the apostle of Strathclyde,(2) but had he seen in his little mission station the nucleus of a great trading city or even of the capital of Strathclyde, he would certainly not have fixed it in the rocky out-of-the-way glen of the Molendinar. Indeed, the stately cathedral that marks the spot is seen on all our old maps as outside Glasgow, and to this day is on the very rim of it, and rises solitary from its silent graveyard with open ground all round: the great city has rolled away to find a fitting site below.
The munificence of David did, indeed, in pious memory of St. Mungo, establish here a great cathedral and a line of rich and powerful prelates: and one of these set up here the only university in Scotland south of the Forth: and between cathedral and university Glasgow might perhaps have come to rival St. Andrews. More, cathedral and university could not have done for her. The true, though unconscious, founder of the Glasgow that we know was a remote successor of St. Mungo.
Just below the mouth of the Molendinar the Clyde was crossed by two fords, close to each other. A road parallel to the Molendinar led from the cathedral to these fords. At the Bel of the Brae, where this road cut the main street of the little cathedral town, the Market Cross of Glasgow was first set up. At the bottom of the road, in the meadows along the Molendinar, a little colony of fullers lived, and to the west beside the silver Clyde stood a row of fishers' huts. Beside these, and between the two fords, Bishop Rae in 1345 built across Clyde a stately stone bridge of eight arches, and the bridge made Glasgow.(3)
For centuries Glasgow bridge was practically speaking the only bridge across the river: the road over it became necessarily the main thoroughfare across the strath: and the point where the road cut the main thoroughfare up and down the strath became necessarily the centre of the district. To this the Market Cross naturally slipped down from the Bel of the Brae:(4) on this the roads of the district converged: and what trade there was, the "little dues" of corn and and wool and flax and fish, drew to this point. The rest has followed. Infant Glasgow had had to struggle against the jealousies of Rutherglen and Renfrew, royal burghs and riverine ports when Glasgow was a village out of touch with the river.(5) But the bridge that fixed Glasgow as the chef-lieu of the district killed her rivals; for wealth and population draw to the centre and not to the circumference; and to him that hath shall be given. It did not come soon. A nation that is fighting for its life has no time to build cities. But it grew to guerdon after-days, when the English ceased from troubling and the weary Scots had rest, and the splendid natural resources of Strathclyde woke up. It was then seen that the little colonies of fishermen and fullers by the fords of Clyde were the germs, the one of a wide-spread commerce, the other of a great and varied industry; that the emporium of the Clyde was to be Glasgow, that here the forest of masts should grow, here the shuttle should whizz and the anvil ring. Might the music never cease!
But physical advantages of themselves are worth no more than a row of cyphers: the unit that gives them value is the quality of those into whose hands they fall. Let us ask who they are that have turned to such account the natural resources of this district. This book will tell us for the men of our own day. But the question carries us much farther back.
The departure of the Romans from Britain was the signal throughout Roman Britain for a dreadful time of confusion and bloodshed. When the dust of the fight at last settles down, the Saxons are found, broadly speaking, in possession of the east middle and south, and the British, Celts of the Welsh or Cymric branch, are found still holding a wide belt stretching without a break from the Clyde to the Severn. In the main this division of territory still exists. The Saxons have cut swathes here and there through the Welsh belt, and there have been Saxon conquest and copious Saxon immigration in the Welsh reserves, but there has been no wholesale displacement of population. The northern portion of the Welsh belt came to be the kingdom of Scottish Cumbria or Strathclyde. This kingdom varied in extent at different dates. At one time it reached south to the Solway; at another it reached no farther south than the watershed between the Solway and the Clyde, and answered nearly to the shires of Lanark, Renfrew and Ayr. It included the site of Glasgow and the great natural fortress of Alcluid (Petra cloithe or the Rock of Clyde), which as Dumbarton (or Dunbreton) still witnesses to its old British ownership. Parallel to Strathclyde on the east was the Saxon or Teutonic kingdom of Bernicia, possessed by the Angles. These Welsh of Strathclyde and these Angles of Bernicia between them peopled this district.
Both races can be studied to this day in Great Britain. We still have the Welsh in part of the old Welsh belt. Like their Breton cousins across the channel, they are a douce, God-fearing, resolute people, with their full share of the Celtic imagination and fire; and the fire in them flares not up to die as quickly down, but burns with the steady red glow of their own brown coal. On this good Welsh stock an Anglic element was grafted. The Angles we still have in the famous land that takes its name from them - a strong people, curiously wanting in humour and sympathy, but with a genius for subduing the forces of nature and for the conduct of affairs, clear-headed, energetic, strong-willed, self-reliant. When, or how often, the Anglic immigrants came to Strathclyde, in what numbers, whether as conquerors as administrators or as settlers, we cannot tell. But we may be sure it was the best and not the worst of them that came. It is always the eager and able spirits that birse yont; one reason at least of the superiority so often noticed in mixed races.
Out of the actual history of Welsh Strathclyde little can be made but constant fighting with confused noise and garments rolled in blood. But, as far as we can trace the dim outlines, the people did not discredit the race of Caractacus and Boadicea, the race that in the break-up of the Roman Empire offered the stubbornest front to the invader, and they were not unworthy of the proud lines -
From Penryn Wleth to Loch Reon
The Cymry are of one mind, bold heroes.(6)
The later history of the district, when time had welded Welsh and Angles into one, gives no uncertain sound. The people of Strathclyde have given to the annals of Scotland two of the most characteristic chapters. It was among them that Wallace (himself Welsh by name and blood) had his head-quarters. Later on it was they who bore the brunt of the fight for religious freedom. An alien king and an alien church, they, more than other Scots, made impossible.
It was this strong race that peopled Glasgow. (7) Rather, it was the pick of them. Once fixed as the head-quarters of the district, Glasgow needed no conscription to fill her ranks with its best recruits. Her old rival Rutherglen, as Hamilton of Wishaw tells us, "hath had very little trade for some ages past, because Glasgow lyes between it and the sea, and that all marchandizing men of metall goe to dwell there."
The "metall" of the race, their energy and endurance, they had sufficiently shown on many a bloody field and bleak moor. Even there, in the long struggles for freedom, they had shown a curious mixture of perfervidum ingenium and business aptitude. These qualities they brought here to the not less honourable struggles of trade, and out of them developed a singular mercantile faculty.(8) Tucker, Cromwell's Commissioner on Scotch Trade, was struck by this genius loci, asserting itself in spite of miserable mercantile appliances. In his report of 1651 (the earliest account we have of our trade) he tells us - "With the exception of the Colliginors, all the inhabitants are traders. . . . The mercantile genius of the people is strong." William and Mary notice the same "Sett of the Burgh." "Glasgow," as their Royal Charter of 1690 recites, "is among the most considerable of the Royal Burghs within the ancient kingdom of Scotland, both for the number of the inhabitants and their singular fitness and application to trade."
When these words were written, the time was at hand when the natural advantages of Glasgow and the "singular fitness and application to trade" of Glasgow men were at last to have a fair chance. At the date of the Restoration Glasgow, under difficulties of every sort, had struggled up to a population of nearly 15,000, and her local supremacy had long been beyond dispute. In the evil days of Charles and James her population fell back, and it was near half a century of regaining the amount at which the worthy pair had found it. The turning point was now come, but every inch of the way had to be fought.
The Restoration brought Scotland the hope that now men might produce or might save, none making them afraid. The Union brought her the assurance of permanent peace. It did more. It opened up to her the markets of the English colonies; but she had a hard push to force the door, and a hard push then to keep it open. Absolute equality of trade rights between the two kingdoms was an indispensable condition of the Union: English statesmen knew this: but only the dour resistance of Provost Hugh Montgomerie and the other Scotch commissioners overbore the characteristic jealousy of English merchants, and the matter was not ended when the treaty was signed. Glasgow, that had blazed up into furious Anti-Union riots, whose merchants even had presented to Parliament Anti-Union addresses, was the great gainer by the Union. What little foreign trade she had hitherto had, had been with the Continent. She was on the wrong side of the island for this. She was on the right side now, and English merchants trading to the colonies were not long of learning the "metall" of the merchants of the little inland Scotch town, that some of them may now have heard of for the first time.
In those days the chief colonial export was the tobacco of Virginia, and Glasgow was presently carrying off the Continental tobacco trade: she was even underselling English importers in the English markets: and Virginia was like soon to be rather a Scotch than an English plantation. This was not to be borne: it hurt the English pride and the English pocket: and London, Bristol, and other English centres of the American trade set themselves to crush the upstart. They addressed themselves to the Lords of the Treasury: they alleged that the Glasgow trade was carried on by systematic fraud on the revenue: and they urged my Lords to make short work of it. After full investigation the charge was found to be groundless, "begotten of a spirit of envy and not of a regard to the interests of trade or the King's revenue": and yet for years the trade languished under the vexatious restrictions and tedious lawsuits with which our South British friends would have made up for their inferiority as merchants. As late as 1736, McUre speaks of the trade "which Glasgow had, but it is now greatly decayed. The time of its flourishing it paid more revenue to the King than any city in England or Ireland, London and Bristol excepted."
Gradually the Glasgow men fought down their gratuitous difficulties, and they ended by making Glasgow the great depot for the tobacco of Virginia, and the seat of a large and lucrative commerce.(9)
The Virginian innings ended abruptly in 1775 on the revolt of the colonies, and with the ruin of her chief trade and of many of her chief traders, it seemed as if Glasgow must be ruined too. It turned out quite otherwise. The trade had not lasted long, but it had lasted long enough to change the character of the place. Glasgow had learned her way through large and complicated transactions: she had extended her mercantile connections and improved her mercantile appliances: and she had saved some capital from the wreck. Above all, the spirit of her people was unbroken.
They set themselves at once to replace the lost market. Sugar first took the place of tobacco, and the ships that had been built for the James or the Potomac made their way to St. Kitts or Jamaica. But sugar, though still an important import, is now lost in the crowd, and our ships sail every sea.
Commerce is the great quickener of industry. There was already here a stunted undergrowth of manufactures. The demand of the Virginian merchants for what Defoe calls "sortable cargoes" put new life into it. For long the growth was slow: with the old appliances manufactures were bound to be slow growers: and when the Virginian trade was at its height the manufactures of Glasgow of all sorts were valued at less than half a million a year, and the manufactures of Scotland of all sorts supplied only one-fourth of the "sortable cargoes" shipped from the Clyde. But the roots had taken firm hold: our manufactures scarcely felt the blight that for a time nipped our commerce: and the twenty-five years from the Virginian collapse of 1775 to the end of the century wrought an industrial transformation as great as the mercantile transformation of the Virginian epoch.
The great industrial appliance is steam: it was in 1775 that Watt, from the famous Soho works, was first able freely to supply the steam engine.
Our leading industry is shipbuilding: it was in 1775 that the scour from Golborne's 117 jetties first deepened the Clyde, to make ships and shipbuilding possible at Glasgow.
Cotton does not appear in Gibson's list of our imports in 1771, and now it has again disappeared from our Bill of Entry; but for most part of the interval the cotton trade was our staple industry. In 1780 James Monteith set up a web of pure cotton, the first ever woven in Scotland. In 1783 David Dale firmly fixed the trade here by founding the New Lanark mills. Again in 1783 Archibald Shuttleton of Calton (appropriate name) invented the flying shuttle. In 1792 Scott & Stevenson put up at Springfield the first steam engine in a Scotch cotton mill. Again in 1792 William Kelly of New Lanark introduced the mechanically-moved spinning jenny. In 1793 James Louis Robertson introduced the power loom. In 1795 Archibald Buchanan of James Finlay & Co. introduced lighter spinning machinery worked for the first time by women. A few years later James Finlay & Co., with their works at Catrine, Deanston, and Ballindalloch, employing 2,500 workers and equipped with the best appliances for spinning, weaving, bleaching, and finishing, stood at the very head of the cotton trade.
Meantime our miscellaneous industries shot up with equal vigour. In 1770 William Stirling had founded the printing firm of William Stirling & Sons, and at his death in 1777 he left a business that astonished his day and generation as much as the William Stirling & Sons of our day might astonish him. In the same year, 1777, Cooksons of Newcastle, in company with Provost Patrick Colquhoun, opened at "Verreville" the first crystal manufactory in Scotland. Again in 1777 George Macintosh opened at the Ark Lone his "Secret Work" for making cudbear. In 1780 John and Robert Tennent founded Wellpark Brewery. Again in 1780 David Fleming & Co. started card-making. In 1783 David Dale and George Macintosh founded Barrowfield, the first Turkey-red work in Great Britain. In 1786 William Menzies opened in Gorbals the first licensed distillery in Glasgow: there were only three before it in Scotland, Burns's "dear Kilbagie" and two others. In 1789 Thomas Edington founded Clyde Ironworks. In 1794 David Fleming & Co. began the making of files. In 1796 Charles Macintosh founded Hurlet, the first alum work in Scotland.
These same twenty-five years saw equal progress in the means of communication. In 1775, the year when the Clyde was first made navigable, the Forth and Clyde Canal was opened from Stockingfield to Kirkintilloch. In 1784 the Monkland Canal, being brought to the hammer unfinished, was bought by the enterprising "Sons" of William Stirling & Sons, who finished it, and so opened up the Monkland mineral field. In 1790 the Forth and Clyde Canal was at last opened from sea to sea, and the two canals were united by the Cut of Junction. On 7th July of the same year the first direct mail coach from London reached the Saracen's Head, sixty-three hours out. Somewhere about the same date the germ of our railway system saw the light in John Dixon's wooden tramway from Little Govan colliery through the empty land of Gorbals and Tradeston to the Coal Quay at Springfield.
These same twenty-five years saw many improvements in the mechanism of trade. In 1775 the old Ship Bank came to an end, and a new Ship Bank was formed by Robert Carrick, whose genius as a banker did great service to our rising trade. On 17th May, 1780, Glasgow (which had been a creek under Port-Glasgow) became a Port of Entry, and hanselled her new privilege by passing sixty pipes of French brandy, ex "Triton," Thomas Martindale master. In 1781 the new Exchange at the Tontine was opened. In 1783 our friend David Dale opened a branch of the Royal Bank, the first permanent establishment here of any of the old Scotch banks. Again in 1783 the Chamber of Commerce was founded under the presidency of Provost Patrick Colquhoun, and with the active help, once more, of David Dale. In 1788 Provost Patrick Colquhoun was commissioned by the Chamber as the commercial representative of Glasgow in London, and there and in Ostend established agencies for the sale of Scotch manufactures. In 1792 Andrew Stirling, the eldest of the three "Sons," left William Stirling & Sons, and established Stirling Hunter & Co., the first Scotch commission house in London.
Finally in 1800 Charles Tennant (Burns's "Wabster Charlie") wound up the century by founding St. Rollox.
The story of the present century this book will take up. It will tell how commerce and industry have raced each other, pouring through every channel with the force of the Solway in a spring-tide, and how population and wealth have grown with the growth of the tropics.
Cresce diu, felix arbor, semperque vireto!
Oh utinam semper talia poma feras!
The wish, unhappily, is vain. Dangers, imperial political and social, threaten the whole commonwealth: possibly these may pass away. The supremacy of Glasgow as the port of the Clyde is for the first time seriously threatened: perhaps, at ruinous cost to Greenock, it may be maintained. Glasgow has lived through many a trying season, and probably she has still vitality to revive now, when a blight seems to have fallen on every branch and to wither every leaf. But the felix arbor is not sound at the roots. Chicago and Glasgow have been likened to each other for their rapidity of growth. But Chicago depends on wheat, which grows, and Glasgow every year more and more depends on minerals, which do not grow. Here and there grass-grown blocks of slag tell where a great ironwork once blazed, that has blazed its ironstone all away; or a weatherworn heap of shale tells where the panting engine has sent up its last hutch of coal. These are not common sights yet, but they will be commoner as years go on.(10) As the exhaustion of minerals advances, our industry, and with it our commerce, must fall back, and the general suffering can only end when the population shall have shrunk in keeping with the reduced power of production. Let us hope that rich and poor, who have drifted apart in the flood-tide of our fortunes, may once more draw alongside in the shallowing waters, and that the force of character which has carried us to prosperity may carry us through adversity.
One trade, one of our oldest, can be reckoned on to last as long as Glasgow lasts. At "Whitsonday in anno 1638," the magistrates engaged "George Andersone, prenter", to leave Edinburgh and establish himself here. They paid him what he had "debursit in transporting of his geir to this brughe," and they settled on him a "yeir's pensioune of lxvj. li. xiijs. iiijd." George needed it all. So little "prenting" was there here that for ten years after his death in 1648 his prenting geir rusted in idleness; Principal Baillie had to have one of his pamphlets printed in London; and as late as 1713 the University "were obliged to go to Edinburgh in order to get one sheet rightly printed". From this low estate the art rose in the following generation to the highest eminence, and in 1743 the University were able to secure as their printer Robert Foulis, the elder of the famous brothers Robert and Andrew Foulis, whose issues were unsurpassed in Europe for accuracy and beauty. But the Foulis press worked mostly on reprints, and, though there has since been plenty of good printing here, there has not been much publishing of original literature. This book is part of a gallant attempt to make Glasgow a seat of high-class publishing. The attempt, in face of many difficulties, may not come to much. But the book, printed in Glasgow, and written by busy Glasgow men, will at least show that Glasgow has not lost the art of the Foulises, and that the busy hands have not lost all touch of letters.
(1) Glasgow is possibly the seventh or even the sixth city in Europe. The first five (as given by the latest figures before us) are undoubtedly - London, 3,816,483; Paris, 2,269,023; Berlin, 1,122,330; Vienna, 1,103,857; and Petersburg, 876,575. Moscow comes sixth with 750,867, and Constantinople seventh with 600,000. Our census of 1881 (based on parliamentary boundaries), gives Manchester cum Salford, 569,820; Liverpool, 552,508; and Glasgow, 511,532. But, if in each case we allow for increase to date and for suburbs that are practically parts of the cities, Moscow would possibly, and Constantinople would probably, come below Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Which of these three is the "Second City" it is hard to say. Including what are reckoned her suburbs, Glasgow in 1881 had 705,272, and is reckoned now to have 760,307. But then, what are suburbs? Is Garston, or even Birkenhead, not a suburb of Liverpool, Stockport or Ashton a suburb of Manchester, as much as Govan or Maryhill is a suburb of Glasgow? Fortunately the matter is utterly unimportant. The least of the three is too big.
(2) Joceline in his "Vita Kentigerni" has an explanation of St. Mungo's movements. On leaving Culross the saint arrives at villa cui vocabulum est Kernach. This has been variously explained as Carnock (in the Carse of Stirling), Cairnoch (in the parish of St. Ninian's, the property of A. B. McGrigor, LL.D.), and Carnwath. At "Kernach" he finds an old disciple, Fergus, to whom it has been revealed that he shall not see death till he has seen St. Mungo. Forgus forthwith chants the nunc dimittis, and gives up the ghost. St. Mungo lays the body on a new wain, yokes two untamed bulls, and bids them go to the burial place the Lord has appointed. The bulls make by a bee line for Cathures nunce Glasgu vocatur, and pull up beside the Molendinar at a virgin burial ground long before consecrated by St. Ninian. Here St. Mungo buries Fergus, the first citizen of a great City of the Dead; here he fixes his own dwelling; and here to this day, in the cathedral that marks the spot, is "Fergus' ile." Joceline, who lived within 600 years of St. Mungo, ought to know all about him, and the McGrigor "Kernach" at least is on an ancient road straight from the Fords of Forth to Glasgow. But St. Mungo's movements may be more simply explained. In the sixth century the great Roman roads were entire. One of them ran through Clydesdale, and (hodie Dobbie's Lone) crossed the site of Glasgow. It passed by the site of our Cathedral, at which point Roman coins have been found. If St. Mungo, making for Strathclyde, anywhere struck this road, he would be led past this point, and here he would find in a sheltered glen the indispensable spring (still to be seen in St. Mungo's Crypt), and, across the burn, a rocky knowe (our Necropolis) which would give him a wide view of the wild country he was to labour in. This explanation, of course, is pure conjecture, and it must be owned that the Kernach bulls, if unlike other bulls, are quite in keeping with other creatures in the "Vita Kentigerni." We all know about the salmon and the robin: there they are in the Glasgow Arms: but beast, bird, and fish, all alike are at the beck and call of St. Mungo, a man it would seem of extraordinary psychic force.
Sponte ferae celeres variaeque coeli volucres,
Kentigerne, tuum se subdunt praesul in usum.
Of St. Mungo's original settlement David I. found nothing remaining but the site (and the well). In his famous "Inquisitio" of 1116 he says:- "Sancto Kentigerno pluribusque successoribus suis piae religionis perseverantia ad Deum transmigratis, diversae seditiones circumquaque insurgentes non solum ecelesiaim et ejus possessiones destruerunt, verum etiam totam regionem vastantur, ejus habitatores exilio tradiderunt." The exilium probably refers to the exodus named in a later note, and the vastatio was probably confined to the immediate valley of the river, the part most open to attack. We know that the native Welsh people and Welsh speech of the kingdom of Strathclyde survived David. See note 6 below.
(3) The fullers (probably attracted by the green banks and clear pools of the Molendinar) pitched their tubs along the continuation of the High Street south to the Nether Barras Yett. From them this continuation got the name of the Walcargate, that is Walker or Fuller Street, in old charters via fullonum. About the middle of the sixteenth century the name was changed to Saltmarket. The row of fishers' huts stood at the foot of the Stockwell, which was anciently designated the Fishergate, and appears in a charter of 1285 as vicus pischatorum de prope pontem de Clud. This pons de Clud was, of course, an older bridge than Bishop Rae's. In those days a stone bridge over such a river as the Clyde was a very big job, and the older pons de Clud was probably a wooden foot-bridge such as may be seen now beside many a ford. In James Brown's etching of the older bridge the two fords are shown, one above and one below the bridge. The date of this etching is 1775 or thereby. At this date the poor old bridge was condemned for heavy traffic, and accordingly, in the sketch, carts are crossing by the two fords, while an antique chaise and some cavaliers are crossing by the bridge. In 1777 the bridge was repaired and widened, and, to confine the river better, the two northmost arches were built up. Views of the bridge are extant in both forms, with eight arches and with six arches. Bishop Rae's bridge is said to have been the second post-Roman stone bridge in Scotland. The first, we believe, was the bridge built over the Nith by Devorguilla, mother of John Balliol and foundress of Balliol College. This Nith bridge was the making of Dumfries, as Bishop Rae's was the making of Glasgow. In our bridge, too, a woman gave a helping hand. The Lady Lochow, ancestress of the Argylls and the Breadalbanes, built the third arch at the north end. It was she too who founded and endowed the Leper Hospital at the south end of the bridge. When Mr. MacLehose brings out "Glasgow Women," the Lady Lochow should head the list.
(4) The change in the centre of gravity of Glasgow which shifted the Cross to its present site told on the street nomenclature. In an old charter the High Street is described as magnus vicus tendens ab ecclesia cathedrali ad crucem fori. In a later charter of 1433 it is described as "the gat that strekis [the gate or street that stretches] fra the mercat Crose till the He Kirk of Glascu." The tail had now come to wag the head. In the Acts of the Scottish Parliament, anno 1587, there is another curious indication of the same working. There had been a memorial from the dwellers in Greyfriars Wynd of Glasgow reciting the decay of said wynd and of the high town generally, from the sad changes in Church matters and from the removal of the markets to the low town at the Cross. The memorialists prayed for remeid, if only because it was only in the old Cathedral quarter that His Majesty could be properly lodged in Glasgow. A Commission was thereon appointed to see what could be done to arrest the decay of the high town, and it was decided to fetch back the Saltmarket to the Wyndhead. But, anno 1594, it appears that sundry inconveniences had arisen, very naturally, from this dislocation of the salt trade, and a new Commission was ordered to restore the Saltmarket to the auld station where it stood for the common benefit of the haill inhabitants, but at the same time to see if the Commissioners could not raise and lift the bear and malt markets and establish the same abun the Wyndhead. Whether the unfortunate dealers in bear and malt had next to suffer in the interest of the old town does not appear. See Cleland's Annals, II. 325.
(5) Renfrew dates as a royal burgh from 1396, Rutherglen from 1324, and Glasgow only from 1636. Renfrew in the beginning of the seventeenth century was reckoned the chief port on the Clyde, and is said, till last century, still to have had some foreign trade. Rutherglen, Ure says, was probably the chief port on the Clyde in 1324, and till a little before 1793, the date of Ure's History, had gaberts of considerable burden "sailing almost daily from its quay." Renfrew has a ship as its crest, with the motto Deus gubernat navem. Rutherglen on its ancient seal has on the obverse the Virgin and Child, and on the reverse a ship and two ancient mariners, with the motto Signant ista tria rata Navis Nauta Maria. Glasgow has no trace of a port in arms seal or motto. As late as 1449 we find the encroachments of Renfrew and Rutherglen producing an order from James II. "That nane of yhour said burrows na nane utheris cum wythin the barony of Glasgow na wythin ony landis pertenand to Sant Mungois fredome to tak tol or custom be watter or land." Glasgow had afterwards the grim satisfaction of seeing both her old rivals shut out of the game: the branch of the river on which Renfrew stood silted up, and Rutherglen was effectually throttled by the weir at the Broomielaw Bridge.
(6) Cut off by one Saxon swathe from Wales, cut off by another from English Cumbria, reduced by successive conquests to the basin of the Clyde, attacked by Angles, Scots, Picts, and Danes, and defended by no scientific frontier, the little kingdom of Strathclyde still struggled on, and at last yielded to Gaelic Scotland, not altogether through actual conquest, but partly through the accession of a Scoto-British dynasty. Even so, it is said, a band of the men of Strathclyde, unable to brook the loss of independence, left their homes and fought their way to their kindred in Wales, arrived in time to give good help in the Battle of Conway against the hated Saxon, and won for themselves and their descendants to this day a new home in the Vale of Clwyd. To their ears the name of the river might not recall their native Clyde, but on its banks they would at least find the footsteps of St. Mungo thickly marked. The date given for this exodus is 880, but Strathclyde was not actually incorporated in Scotland till after the Battle of Carham in 1018, where Eogan the Bold, King of Strathclyde, fought under Malcolm II. After this Battle of Carham the Lothians and the eastern shires down to the Tweed were finally ceded to Scotland, and after Eogan the Bold Strathclyde lost all semblance of independence. Scotland may thus be said to have acquired her eastern and her western capitals at the same time, and it is a question (not to be settled by statistics) which of the two she could worst have spared. As late as the Battle of the Standard in 1138 the men of Strathclyde are named separately in the mixed multitude that fought under the Scottish King, and as late as 1164 Malcolm IV. addresses a charter to "Normans, Saxons, Scotch, Welsh, and Picts." The old Welsh speech probably lingered even later in parts of Strathclyde, though English had made its way there as early as the eighth century. For the lines "From Penryn Wleth, etc.," see Skene's "Four Ancient Books of Wales" - I. 276; II. 404. Penryn Wleth is Glasgow, and Loch or Lwch Reon is Loch Ryan. Thus at the date of the poem (early in the seventh century) the Welsh ruled unbroken from Glasgow to Loch Ryan. Wleth means dew. Joceline ("Vita Kentigerni," chap. xiv.) describes Kentigern as sitting super lapidem in supercilio montis vocabulo Gulath (or Gwleth). This is the Dew Hill, afterwards mispronounced Doohill, and then translated into Mons Columbarum, and furnished with appropriate dove legends.
(7) Now-a-days, of course, our population is a mixed multitude. As Glasgow has extended her operations, she has had to seek new recruiting ground, especially in the West Highlands. But the character of the place was fixed before any appreciable proportion of the population was drawn from a distance. In 1605 the first burgess-roll was drawn up. It contains 576 burgesses, and nearly all have common this-part names. There are only six Mc.'s. In this year's Directory, besides Buchanans, Stewarts, and other Highland names galore, there are sixty pages of Mc.'s, or nearly one-tenth of the whole. Of the 576 burgesses of 1605 Ninian Hill (of Garrioch) is the only one, as far as we know, who has descendants of his own name in this year's Directory. Laurence Hill, C. E., and William Henry Hill, writer, are his great-great-great-great-great-grandsons. These Hills are representatives of a class that has had no inconsiderable share in the making of Glasgow.
The Scotch divorce between the ownership and the cultivation of the soil is a modern thing. A good deal of Scotland was once held in small properties, and an unusual proportion was so held round Glasgow. The great estates of the Romish Archbishop had been let on easy terms, and mostly in small holdings. In 1590 King James issued to Walter Stewart, Commendator of Blantyre, a Commission "to feu the haill lands of the Lordship and Regalitie of Glasgow without demunition of the Old Rentall, to the effect that the Tenents, being thereby become heretable possessors of their several possessions, might be incouradged by virtue and politie to improve that countrie." The result of this Commission and of the "fixity of tenure" that it gave to the old rentallers, was to surround the city by a ring of landowners, mostly of the bonnet laird class, some of whose properties are to this day in their descendants' hands. The smaller Scotch landowner has never been an entailer, but he has been a pretty strict primogeniturist. He has had no fancy whatever for peasant proprietorship. Sometimes, when his lairdship has happened to be bigger than usual, he has sub-divided: but he will not sub-divide so as to leave a son with less land than will keep a horse, perhaps thinking, from his experience of Scotch soil and climate, that a son who had to live by the spade would have to live on thin brose. Hence his younger sons have mostly had to shift for themselves. In this district they have naturally come here to push their way, and excellent recruits they have been. Like the sons of the manse, they have had a fair education and a hardy up-bringing as capital to start with, and they have been bound to industry under the severe penalty of sinking, else, in the social scale. In some cases the laird has himself come here and engaged in business. In old times, when land was almost the only form of wealth or means of credit, a laird was probably eligible as a moneyed partner. Thus many citizens of credit and renown, now or in old days, have in one form or another come to us from the class of rentallers on the old Archbishopric or the corresponding class of small proprietors outside the old Church lands. Such are the Airds, Bells, Bogles, Brysons, Faries, Gibsons, Hills, Huchesons, Leitches, Lukes, Lyons, Pollocks, Peadies, Tennents, and Woddrops.
(8) At the same time the perfervidum ingenium has survived the depressing atmosphere of a trading town. Besides a catena of riots of which no town need be ashamed, Glasgow has never lost a chance of serious fighting. In 1689 she sent to the defence of the Convention a battalion out of which grew the 26th Regiment, the famous "Cameronians." In 1715 she raised a battalion which was told off to guard the Bridge of Stirling. In 1745 she raised two battalions, one of which at the Battle of Falkirk stood while the English dragoons ran. In 1778, in the American War, she raised the old 83rd Regiment, or "Royal Glasgow Volunteers," and largely recruited the famous 71st, popularly known ever since as the "Glasgow Regiment." In the long French wars no place took up the Volunteer movement more zealously. And no place takes it up more zealously now: our 1st Lanarkshire was the finest corps at the Edinburgh Review in 1882, and contests with the London Scottish and the Robin Hoods to be the finest corps in the country.
(9) In 1772, of a total British import of American tobacco of 90,000 hogsheads, Glasgow's share was 49,000 hogsheads, or nearly 55 per cent. She exported nearly the whole, France being her best customer. This great trade collapsed with the American War, and for long the only tobacco ports worth naming in Britain were Liverpool and London. But Glasgow has of late years been recovering some of her old trade. Out of an average British import for the last seven years of 41,300,000 lbs., Glasgow's share has been 4,453,000 lbs., or nearly 11 per cent. And her share has steadily grown, and new importing firms - tobacco lords on a small scale - have sprung up. In fourteen years, from 1855 to 1869, she received 29,303 casks, of which only 9,816, or 33½ per cent., were direct imports. In fourteen years, from 1870 to 1884, she received 61,471 casks, of which 45,796, or 74½ per cent., were direct imports. Of course, the trade of our day, whether for Great Britain or for Glasgow, contrasts poorly with the trade of a hundred years ago. But in those days, when the American colonies were thirled to the mother country, Great Britain was the depot for the Old World. Now-a-days she hardly imports except for home use. Her annual export is only some 4,000 hogsheads: Glasgow does not export a hogshead. Glasgow's import is now mostly "Stemmed Kentucky." In old days about four-fifths of her import was Virginian, the remaining one-fifth being Maryland with a sprinkling of Carolina: but the Western States are now the great growers. Glasgow takes nothing but American. This tobacco comes to over 75 per cent. of the whole unmanufactured British import. But of other sorts, Java, Japan, etc. (known in the trade as "Substitutes"), Great Britain imports 13 to 14 million lbs. a year. London gets the whole of these, and, all told, is rather our biggest tobacco port. In American, Liverpool is now a long way first, and takes over half of the whole import. (From statistics specially made up from Circulars of Joseph Howard & Co., Liverpool, and Alston Brothers, Glasgow.)
(10) It is well known that already our great iron trade is partly dependent on imported ore; (this port alone received, from all parts, 328,976 tons in the year 1882-3. See Deas' "Clyde," p. 18). But the question of the exhaustion of our coal is often treated as not within the range of practical politics. Is this view correct? Some twenty-five years ago, Great Britain's annual output of coal was 80,000,000 tons. It is now (as Sir Joseph Pease has just told us) 160,000,000 tons. That is, the prosperity (as we like to call it) of the last twenty-five years has been secured at the cost, for one item, of doubling the drain on our coal capital. How much is now left us? Sir Lyon Playfair, in his recent address as President of the British Association, gives us a startling answer. On the high authority of Professor Dewar, he tells us that in less than 200 years our coal will be all gone. But this is not all. The 200 years' stock includes fields and seams of various degrees of workableness, and it is the most workable that are being worked. The others, being dearer to work, must yield a dearer coal. As soon as these are reached the pinch will begin. Professor Dewar estimates that it will begin in 100 years. Of course the rate of exhaustion will then slacken, but only by the slackening of trade. The rise in coal will bring works to a standstill, as many works would have come to a standstill a few years ago had the coal famine lasted. Of course, too, after all our surveys, further surveys may still discover some new coal, and the pinch will for the first time bring into the market some coal already known (thus the fine field under the Green, Vigilance Committees notwithstanding, will be worked when that mysterious fund the "Common Good" has gone to the bad). But these small supplies will not go far. One thing at any rate is certain - we are using up our coal much faster than we are paying up our debt. This was put strongly before Parliament by the late William Graham, M.P., but Parliament has not yet had time to attend to the matter. It will attend to it some day.
About the debt, the common idea is that we are steadily paying it up. The real truth is that we are not paying our way. The Battle of Waterloo left us owing £900,436,845. Before we again owe as little we are like to see the Battle of Armageddon. The "National Debt" has indeed been reduced. In the seventy years since Waterloo we have paid off £154,000,000 of it (less the £8,000,000 which Sir Michael Hicks Beach has just "carried forward"); at this rate we should have it all paid off about the year of grace 2250. But a new form of indebtedness has come into play since Waterloo.
In the return up to the end of 1882 (the last return before us), the "Local Debt" of England and Wales stood at near £152,000,000. If the return were brought down to date, and if the "Local Debts" of Scotland and Ireland were added, the total would certainly exceed the £154,000,000, less Sir Michael Hicks Beach's £8,000,000. We fear it would very greatly exceed it, for this local debt is growing like the Fisherman's Genie in the "Arabian Nights." The £152,000,000 of 1882 had been only £106,000,000 in 1877; that is, in five years had grown by nearly fifty per cent. No doubt this debt mainly represents value received, and some portion of this value, like gas or waterworks, is still marketable. But the bulk of it - new streets, open spaces, better sewers, municipal and school buildings, etc. - is not marketable. Like a doctor's fee, it may have been well worth the money, but the money is gone all the same. And there is no chance of things mending. It has been discovered that civil government has very wide functions. Its garners are to be full, affording all manner of store: there is not only to be no breaking in (of enemies) but no going out (of emigrants): there is to be no complaining in our streets. Happy is that people that is in such a case! But their happiness must be independent of financial equilibrium. These wide functions mean budgets very different from your modest hundred millions or so: and, however loyally the "ransom" taxation be worked against the miscreants who own land or save money, the swag is sure to be short, and the yearly deficiencies (as long as the goose keeps her feet) sure to be "carried forward."
Back to Contents