CHAIRMAN of Glasgow Parish Council for three terms, Mr.
George Dott presided over one of the most important bodies of the kind in the
country. Controlling the affairs of the combined Barony and City Parishes, it
has charge of a vast array of poorhouses, hospitals, asylums, and sanatoria, and
disposes of a revenue of nearly half a million sterling annually. Its offices in
George Street are among the most handsome recent additions to the architecture
of the city, and among its pioneer efforts may be cited the successful sanatoria
for insane consumptive cases, in connection with Woodilee and Gartloch Asylums,
which are the first institutions of the kind in Scotland.
Not a little of the success of the Council of the united parishes is owed to its
recent chairman, Mr. Dott, Born at Ballgreen, Edinburgh, in 1855, and educated
at Newington Public School, he began work at the age of eleven, migrated to
Glasgow in 1874, and began business as a retail stationer in Anderston. The
business is now both retail and wholesale, and holds the agency for the Glasgow
Evening News in the district. On the formation of a Newsagents and Stationers
Union in Glasgow, Mr. Dott was first a member of committee and was afterwards on
successive occasions elected president. He was also the first retail agent in
Scotland to be elected to the management committee in London of the Newsvendors'
Benevolent Institution, of which Lord Roseberry is patron. He has always taken a
part in the local affairs of Anderston and Sandyford, and was for a time
chairman of Sandyford Municipal Ward Committee. In 1890 he was unanimously
elected to the Barony Parochial Board, on which he acted as Convener of the
Medical and House Committees. On the union of the Barony and City Parishes he
became Chairman of the Combined Poorhouse Committee, and in 1903 he was elected
Chairman of the Parish Council for the third time. He was Chairman as well of
the District Lunacy Board, which has charge of Gartloch and Woodilee Asylums.
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Index of Glasgow Men (1909)