D. Stewart & Company, Limited

D. STEWART & CO. (Limited), Engineers, Boiler Makers, Machine Makers, &c., London Road Ironworks, Bridgeton, Glasgow.

    In entering upon a more or less exhaustive historical review of the leading industrial and commercial houses of Glasgow and its environs, a prominent place must of course be assigned to the branch of industry only second in local importance to the great Clyde shipbuilding enterprises, namely, the allied branches of Engineering, Machine Making, and Millwrighting.

    Of the higher phases of these important arts, we find a truly first-rate exemplification in the eminent firm designated at the head of this sketch. In its special departments of industrial activity, the firm is locally unsurpassed in the extent of its resources, the quality of its work, and the scientific completeness of its methods. This great firm, which so ably controls the London Road Iron Works at Bridgeton, dates back in its original foundation to the year 1844, the present premises having, from the first, enclosed the active operations of the house, while the present directing and controlling chief’s father laid the nucleus of the now vastly expanded undertaking. The ground occupied by the London Road Iron Works is very spacious, the dimensions hardly being less than three acres. Excellent frontages are presented to Summer Street, William Street, and London Road, while the interior of the establishment, which is typical of all that it should be, is of most perfect construction, and, in equipment, is unsurpassed in the trade or profession of the Engineer and Machinist. The magnitude of the firm’s industrial operations may be conceived from the fact that it has nearly one thousand hands employed in the various departments.

A special feature of Messrs. D. Stewart & Company’s, Limited, manufacture is sugar-refining machinery, a branch of industrial activity in which the firm is generally acknowledged to be universally unrivalled. Other specialties of the house include land and marine engines, pumping machinery of every description, calico printing machinery, dyeing and bleaching apparatus, and hydraulic appliances in great variety. A very considerable importance attaches to the firm’s patented inventions of hydraulic attachments for sugar mills, which are credited with possessing the following specific advantages, namely,— higher percentage of juice ; the power of maintaining this percentage in constancy ; freedom from breakdowns ; less attention required to regular feeding ; and lastly, the power, by such equal crushing, to regulate the boiler furnaces for burning the wet “megass”. So greatly are these attachments valued among sugar refiners everywhere, that Messrs. D. Stewart & Company, Limited, have fitted up mills for sugar extraction in all the West India Islands, Canary Islands, Chile, and all parts of the World, not to mention the many home mills which the firm has equipped.

    In the department of hydraulic machinery, Messrs. D. Stewart & Co., Limited, export large quantities of cotton and jute presses to Calcutta and Bombay, Pumping engines of dimensions suited to the requirements of the largest waterworks are also manufactured, as well as appliances for irrigation, agricultural, and sanitary undertakings. Among the more notable contracts that have been completed by the firm in the department of land and marine engineering must be mentioned the splendid compound horizontal engine made, together with two Lancashire type steel boilers, for the great flax works of Messrs. Ireland Freres, of Houplines, near Armentieres, France, and an engine they made for the Glasgow Cotton Spinning Company, in 1890, to drive their entire works. Marine Engineering is also successfully engaged in, the patrons of the firm being some of the most noted firms of shipbuilders on the Clyde.

    Throughout the entire range of Messrs. D. Stewart & Company’s, Limited, engineering activity, the work supplied is of high-class character, energies of the most commanding order being drawn into the service to ensure the complete appreciation of patrons. A highly commendable spirit permeates the entire establishment, and the life infused into it is mainly due to the repeated exertions of the principal, Mr. Stewart, whose assiduity and steady application to business secure a well-deserved reward in a large and world-wide connection. Mr. Stewart has a personal history at once interesting, instructive, and encouraging. He is not merely a “self-made” man, but he possesses the manly courage. which forbids his being ashamed of his humble industrial antecedents. From an exceptionally early age labour has claimed him for one of her most favoured sons. She has watched unremittingly his industrial efforts ; she has smiled upon the manly energy and determination to succeed which characterised his earlier years. His efforts have been crowned with a triumphal success, and he has now given a large share of his individual success to the world by making, for future time, his artisan employees participators in the fruits of his ably-directed energies and all-reaching pre-vision.

    The London Road Iron Works have been consolidated on a new basis in which his workmen shall be shareholders and profit participators. Mr. Stewart is aided in the enterprise by Mr. Arthur Davey, son of Sir Horace Davey, Q.C., M.P., late Solicitor-General in the last Gladstone Administration, and Mr. W. Graham Loyd, son of the great English Banker of that name. Mr. Duncan Stewart and his capable allies have, we are assured, nothing to fear from this extension of confidence in, and mutual benefit to, a class who have long borne the heat and burden of the day, without a corresponding recognition and recompense on the part of capitalist employers. The at all times cordial relations subsisting between Mr. Stewart and his workmen will be strengthened, if that be possible. In the firm’s proposal we see the bright omen of an order of things which will solve more effectually than volumes of politico-economic platitudes, communistic dogma, and other propaganda, the social issues of the age in their relation to labour.

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