Arthur & Company Limited
Messrs. Arthur & Company Limited, Queen Street, and Leeds and Londonderry
The unwritten yet ever intelligible and interesting annals of the
commerce of Great Britain, rich as they are in evidences of the ability and
vigour which have been chief factors in establishing the nations mercantile
greatness, present to our notice few such instances of uninterrupted trade
progress and expansion as that incorporated in the history of the firm of
Messrs. Arthur & Company, Limited, of Glasgow, Leeds, and Londonderry. For many
years the records
of Scottish commercial advancement have been a continuous chronicle of
opportunities not alone grasped, but created and improved by the sturdy
enterprise and quick perception of the countrys merchants ; and during a great
portion of the last half century the eminent house here under notice has been a
landmark of ever-augmenting prominence in the wide area of mercantile influence
instituted and exercised by the business men of Glasgow conjointly with their
trade associates in all parts of the British Isles. The house has worthily
earned its world-wide fame.
Mr. James Arthur was born near Paisley in 1819, coming of a good and respected family, to whose intelligence he owed one of his earliest advantages a sound and thorough education. The commercial faculty was strongly developed in him from the very first, and in 1837, when only eighteen years of age, he opened in business for himself as a retail draper, in High Street, Paisley. There he laid the nucleus of the vast system of trade operations of which he subsequently became the guiding spirit, and there prosperity attended his efforts until 1849, when he personally left Paisley (leaving a partner in control of the original business) and assisted in the foundation of the firm of Messrs. Arthur & Fraser, whose first warehouse was in Buchanan Street.
This firm may be regarded as the
groundwork of the present house, for it was at Buchanan Street that the great
and essentially wholesale trade with which the name of Arthur is identified was
originated, and then steadily developed in premises taken a little later on
in Argyle Street. In 1856 the firm first became associated with the premises now
occupied in Queen Street, and gradual and successive extensions of that
establishment have resulted in the gigantic warehouse which is to-day the
headquarters of the house. The principles governing the development of a great
business were somewhat different in the middle of the present century from what
they now are. Competition, even then, had not strained every commercial energy
of the country to the severest tension, and steady, even slow, advancement was
regarded as the best method of mercantile progression. Such was to a certain
extent the teaching of the time, but Mr. James Arthur was a man in whom nature
was stronger than education. His energy oerleaped the conventional usages of
the age, and as a consequence (natural, perhaps, though vindictive), he was for
a time subjected to considerable obstructions and annoyances by his less rapidly
progressing contemporaries, which amounted to
little short of persecution. Lord Beaconsfield has written that, No
conjunction can possibly occur, however fearful, however tremendous, from which
a man, by his own energy, may not extricate himself, as a mariner by the
rattling of his cannon can dissipate the impending waterspout. By one bold and
decisive action, the only anxious period in the history of the house of Messrs.
Arthur was cleared of every vestige of gloom. Mr. Arthur showed to the nation,
and to the whole world of trade, that the
It is quite beyond the capacity of this necessarily concise sketch to
afford even the vaguest description of Messrs. Arthurs warehouse in Queen
Street, Glasgow, beyond the fact that, structurally, it is one of the lions
of the city, and commercially, an emporium of which the entire community is and
should be proud. There is nothing to be said in these brief pages beyond what
may readily be imagined by one who can conceive, beneath the one great expanse
of roof, an aggregation of no less than fifty trade departments, each of which
is in itself a business, the rearing of whose counterpart has In hundreds of
instances been the work of a lifetime. Messrs. Arthur have two great factories
in Great Britain, one in William Street, Glasgow, and the other at Leeds. They
have a third factory, also, at Londonderry, and their commercial interests are
represented in every trade centre throughout the world. Their trading operations
extend over the British possessions, and there are few places where the name and
principles of their house are not known and esteemed.
The founder and sometime chief of the house is missing now from his accustomed post at the head of the Directorate. Mr. James Arthur died in June, 1885, closing a life of constant and untiring activity at a period in which he had reached the zenith of his mercantile renown. Not alone as a successful and honourable merchant will his name live after him, but the man himself will survive in the memories of those who knew him as one who snatched many an tour from the passing years of a business career to devote alike to the public good and to the welfare of those who were proud to call him friend. He has left his great business in trusty and capable hands the hands of ten qualified by every resource of experience and capacity to perpetuate the success and renown of the house. And for himself, to the one who is privileged to stand in the midst of the Arthur warehouse in Queen Street, there is need only to repeat the substance of the inscription in St. Pauls to the memory of Wren : If you seek his monument look around you.
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