Glasgow - glory and decline of the major industrial city

Content

A.
Giving a short description of the historical beginnings of Glasgow

B
1. Glory
1.1 Tobacco Lords
1.2 Cotton Kings
1.3 Heavy Industry
2. Decline
2.1 WorldWar I
2.2 The Great Depression
2.3 World War II
3. Conclusion

C
Once, Glasgow sold things. Now it works hard at selling itself

Appendix

Select bibliography

A.:

St. Kentigern, the recognised founder of Glasgow, was the illegitimate son of a princess¹. Thenaw, who had been expelled by her father the King of Northumbria and the Lothians. St. Kentigern was born near the River Forth at Culross around A.D. 518, where, under the guidance of St Serf (also known as St Servanus), he received education and instruction in the Roman Catholic faith. St. Kentigern's other name, St. Mungo, is derived from the Gaelic word Munghu "dear one", which is believed to have been bestowed upon him by St. Serf as a special sign of the regard which the elderly saint had for his pupil. In 543, St. Kentigern built a church on the banks of the Molendinar burn - a tributary of the River Clyde - where Glasgow Cathedral now stands. St. Kentigern had, at one time, been driven out of Glasgow by a pagan prince and the young saint took refuge in Wales, where he founded a bishopric. Later, however, St. Kentigern returned to Glasgow where he was received by a huge, cheering crowd. Delighted with the good-natured reception, St. Kentigern began to preach to the gathering. Unfortunately the multitude was so large that the St. Kentigern could not be seen or heard by the crowd, in response - as legend has it - the ground beneath his feet rose up into a small mound or hillock from which everyone could then see and hear the saint. This miracle is thought to have been the origin of the city's well known motto of "Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the Word".

In 1115, the future King David I re-established the Episcopal see of Glasgow - an event which effectively signifies the true starting point of the history of Glasgow. At that time, however, Glasgow was still a hamlet without a burgh charter - the formal recognition of town status. On the 7th of July 1136, a newly-constructed stone Cathedral was consecrated by John Achaius in the presence of King David on the site of St Kentigern's original wooden, and now very dilapidated, building. The Cathedral was surrounded by the dwellings of the bishop, the clergy, their servants and dependants. At this time Glasgow was the only bishopric south of the River Forth - with the exception of Galloway - in Scotland, and thus the holder of this respected position was seen as a very influential figure in the south of the country. Unfortunately most of the newly-built Cathedral was to be ravaged by fire some fifty years after its construction and what remained was removed to make way for a more elaborate replacement. The building of the another Cathedral, again at the same location as the original St.

Kentigern building, commenced during the reign of William the Lion. Bishop Joceline, who was to oversee the arrangements for the new construction, laid the foundation stone of the new Cathedral in 1181. It had been Bishop Joceline who, in 176, had successfully obtained a charter from King William allowing him to establish a burgh in Glasgow, thus bestowing on the city all the privileges which the King's burghs were granted. William Wallace, who led the Scots to rebellion against a conquering English army, came from Elderslie, near Glasgow. He is reputed to have fought a battle against the incumbent English garrison in Glasgow; however, it was in Glasgow in 1305 that he was betrayed and captured before being taken to London to face torture and execution. In 19th Century the community of Wallace's Well (now Robroyston) funded the construction of a monument to the famous warrior. The importance of Glasgow's premier clergy was elevated when the see of Glasgow was promoted to an archbishopric. Robert Blacader became the first Archbishop of Glasgow in 1492, establishing Glasgow as the second ecclesiastical city in Scotland after St Andrews.

B: In the following text I`m going to analyse precisely the steps of progress Glasgow made since 1700 by emphasizing chronologically the most significant phases the city went through during its development. Although there are plenty of important phases that could be mentioned I concentrate on six aspects that are said to be the most far- reaching ones.

1.1 Tobacco Lords:

In 1707 the Union of the Parliaments gave Scotland access to the English colonies and consequently this year was the beginning of the city`s fortune in the 18th century.²

At first the Glasgow merchants needed to hire ships for the trade from Whitehaven but by 1735 already sixty locally owned ships were in use. Their ships were filled with manufactured goods bought from local shopkeepers to be paid for when the ships returned from Virginia with their cargoes to Port Glasgow. In 1715 Scotland imported about 2.5 million lb. tobacco - virtually all of it shipped to the Clyde. By 1725 the figure was 4 million and by 1728 7.25 million. In 1770 the imports had totalled nearly 39 million and one year later the highest figure of all was reached - 47,268,873 lb. The Clyde was now importing more than half of all tobacco that came to Britain and about 95% was then re- exported by the tobacco merchants to Europe, especially France.

The Glasgow merchants profited most from the trade as it was possible for them to sell the tobacco cheaper than for example merchants in Whitehaven, Lancaster, Liverpool and Bristol, who complained that these cheaper prices were the result of their evasion of costums duties which was rejected by the Lords of Treasury in an official inquiry in 1721 as these complaints arouse "from a spirit of envy, and not from a regard to the interests of trade or of the King`s revenue" <sup>3</sup> . The cheap prices came rather into being by the advantages Daniel Defoe mentions in the following remark: "if on the one hand it be calculated how much sooner the voyage is made from Glasgow to the capes of Virginia, than from London, take it on time with another, the difference will be found in the freight, and in the expence of the ships, and especially in time of war, when the channel is throng`d with enemies ( … );" ⁴

After 1735 the Glasgow merchants came out "on top" - partly due to the French wars which closed the Atlantic off the south-west of England to shipping, and so diverted traffic to the northern ports, partly to the merchant`s trading policy consisting of forming both business and marital partnerships among themselves in such a way as to retain the control of the trade in the hands of a few important merchants which can be described best taking William Cunninghame, one of the most powerful merchants in Glasgow as an example: Three of nine existing partners of William Cunnunghame and Co worked for the company in Virginia as factors and storekeepers to operate the store system to dominate the market.

The Glasgow firms established stores in the colonies to buy the tobacco crops outright from the planters and furthermore provided the growers with imported consumer goods which were sold on credit to keep them selling their tobacco to the company`s factor. This "Glasgow store system" had an advantage over the methods used by English merchants who simply sold the tobacco on behalf of the planters on comission, and was responsible for the outstanding commercial success. Its risks and dangers became obvious when the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775 interrupted the trade with the American colonies and made it impossible to collect their debts from the planters. Negotiations for repayment dragged on long after the war was over, and it was not until 1811 that a proportion was finally repaid as a result of a combination of legal action and diplomatic activity.

Although the tobacco lords contributed little to the rise of the city the colonists` need for manufactured goods was so great and the opportunities were so apparent for filling the holds of vessels returning from the Clyde to America with goods for sale to the colonists that factories were established in Glasgow to manufacture many things, such as furniture, clothing, boots, wrought-iron tools and implements, glassware and pottery. This was the beginning of the industrial revolution.

In the two decades between the War of American Independence in 1775 and the Napeolonic Wars in 1793 the the fortune of the tobacco lords vanished and they faded from scene as they started to invest in many different branches. With the outbreak of the American war the tobacco imports dropped sharply from about 46 million lb. In 1775 to 294,896 lb. in 1777 and altough it picked up in 1778 it never reached anything like the high figures of the early 1770s.

1.2 Cotton Kings:

As the eighteenth century advanced linen and cotton exports grew steadily more important to Glasgow`s ecomomy⁵. At the beginning of the century the Convention appointed a Board of Commissioners to recommend steps, such as providing money to subsidize flax growing, setting up spinning schools - one of the first was set up in Glasgow, providing improved looms and awarding prizes to encourage the industry.

James Monteith discovered in 1780 a cheap method of weaving a good-quality imitation Indian muslin purely out of cotton which also meant a switch from linen to cotton. This revolutionary discovery was copied by other Glasgow linen manufacturers and the consequences were amazing. The misfortunes of the tobacco lords and the trials of the wars were dismissed from the Glasgowegian`s mind and by 1787 nineteen spinning mills had been built alongside Scottish fast-running rivers - to utilize the water power - most of them near Glasgow. The city became the centre of a cotton spinning region and in 1834 a hundred and thirty-four cotton-mills were situated in and around Glasgow. The tobacco lord has given way to the cotton king.

The picture of the city was deeply influenced by the increasing use of steam-engines which allowed the mills to move into the city. The rapid growth of population (appendix page I) depended on a steady flow of immigrants from Ireland and the Scottish Highlands attracted by the prospects of a place of work. This rapid increase produced inevital social consequences. Edwin Chadwick`s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, 1842, described Glasgow as "possibly the filthiest and unhealthinest of all the British towns of this period". Such conditions pushed up infant mortality rates and diseases as cholera and typhus and it was not until 1855 that an Act of Parliament was passed allowing Glasgow to provide for its citizens an adequate water supply.

The American War was indirectly the reason for the cotton industry becoming less important as no ships for trading could be bought in North America and consequently the Glasgowegians started to build ships on their own.

1.3 Heavy Industries:

As the nineteenth century advanced the pace of population growth (appendix page I) was kept up by the development of iron production and the consequent demand for coal and expansion of the Lanarkshire coalfields⁶.

The Scottish production of pig iron from 27 furnaces was 36,500 tons in 1827, out of the British total of 690,000. During the next decades the rise was steep:

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The rapid growth of the Clyde shipyards after 1841 was the result of the adoption of steam propulsion and the increasing use of iron instead of wood. The famous firm of William Denny and Brothers of Dumbarton built the first ocean-going steamer of mild steam, which was another great advance and was soon copied by other Clydeside shipbuilders. Between 1879 and 1889 the tonnage of steel shipping on the Clyde launched from 18,000 to 326,136 and the proportion of steel-built ships rose from 10.3 per cent to 97.2 per cent , a record unmatched anywhere else in the country.

The leadership in steel shipbuilding isn`t only contributed to the growth of steelworks in that area, also the founding of the Steel Company in 1871 and the building two years later of its first open-hearth plant at Hallside speeded up the process.

"O, wonderful city of Glasgow, with your triple expansion engines,

At the making of which your workmen get may singeins." ⁷

This triple engine, McGonagall describes, was associated in the popular mind with the city of Glasgow, as this engine was installed in the Aberdeen, built in 1882, for the first time and was from now on a great feature of Clyde-built ships.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the next significant advance in marine engineering on Clydeside was the development of the steam turbine, which was used in Clyde-built passenger ships.

The volume of shipbuilding on the Clyde grew from about 100,00 tons in the early 1860s to 750,000 in1913. In this year about 60,000 men were employed in Clyde shipyards and marine engineering shops, while the total number of workers dependent on the industry was about 100,000. In 1919 the number employed in the shipyard alone was over 43,000.

Regarding the tonnage of goods being handled by the port the prosperity in that time becomes obvious⁸:

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2.1 World War I:

"No figures can convey anything like an accurate impression of the activity that has prevailed or of the continuity of the process of turning out new ships, while there is no way of tabulating the immense amount of naval repair and overhaul work which has been done", was the qualifying statement of the supplement the Glasgow Herald published in 1918, which gave particulars of the achievements of the shipyards⁹. Altogether thirty Clydeside shipyards and marine engineering works were mentioned that built battleships, battle -cruisers, light cuisers, destroyers, submarines, minesweepers, seaplane carriers and other craft. It can be said that the outcome of the war seemed to hinge on the speed with which the Clyde could turn out new ships. As an impression of the achievements might give the following example:

The Clan Line, the Scottish largest steamship company had 58 vessels of 251,000 tonnage at the outbreak of the war. They lost 28 vessels during the war, but at the end of the war they had 51 vessels of 261,000 tonnage what must be contributed to the Clyde shipyards who managed to undertake repair and replacement.

This great success has to be seen in contrast to the setbacks. Their losses in personnel were heavy, 52 officers and 239 seamen. Three steamers sunk and two further, torpedoed ships managed to reach the port. By 1915 restrictions and other limitations on supplies appeared. The cost of living rose. The public were urged to contribute to war loans and to save coal.

The first intimations of decline produced a wave of unemployment which was contributed to the reduction in the demand for ships - partly because confiscated German ships were being re-sold - and the yards began a programme of "rationalisation". The fact that the control of Scotland`s railways moved south after a series of company mergers affected Glasgow`s locomotive engineering works that is almost as important as shipbuilding to the city.

2.2 The Great Depression:

After a short post-war boom things turned out to be as the statesmen had been worrying since the early eighteen-fifties¹⁰. The shipping needs of the First World War had inflated the shipbuilding capacity of the country as a whole by about one third, and the reduction in the demand for new ships after the war faced the industry with problems that it tried to solve by concentrating its activities in a smaller number of yards to which the best plant of the closed yards was made available. Although this strategy mitigated the disaster in some degree, it did not prevent massive unemployment and growing political bitterness.

The "rationalizing" of shipbuilding in an endeavour to combat depression by increasing efficiency and cutting costs made the situation even worse and hit Glasgow particularly hard. In 1922 there were already more than 80000 and all over Great Britain more than 2,5 million people unemployed. By the end of 1931 the number had risen to almost three million. At no time between 1923 and 1939 was less than ten per cent of the insured population of Scotland unemployed, and in the 1932 period the percentage rose to almost 30.

In 1923 Clyde shipbuilding output was the lowest for several decades, 180,000 tons compared to the peak of 760,000 in 1913. After a short recovery in 1928 in which the amount climbed back to 600,000 and the Clyde building as much as 20 per cent of the world`s new ships the output fell untill 56,000 tons in1933.

Although the economic world was collapsing the post-war generation enjoyed their situation and they desired to leave their memories behind. At that time there was a real "Boom" for dance-halls and cinemas.

Although there were some attempts in the late 1930s to make Glasgow more attractive to firms what indeed brought some factories in that area, more work was brought to Glasgow by rearmament in response to the threat posed by Hitler and the feverish expansion of war production after the actual outbreak of war.

2.3 World War II:

Glasgow got an early taste of disaster when the passenger liner Athenia, a ship from Glasgow on its way to Canada became the first shipping casualty of the war: it was sunk en route to Canada by a German submarine on 3 September 1939¹¹.

The workes survived without loss of morale the heavy and prolonged night raids in the spring of 1941, which were designed to lower the workers` morale seriously by destroying their homes while they were at work. 1,083 people were killed and 1,602 injured in these raids. Only seven houses in Clydebank were left undammaged and of the population of 55,000 all but 2,000 had to leave the town and live where they could. As the southern ports were more vulnerable to the enemy bombing than the port in Glasgow, the Clyde shared with Liverpool the handling of the bulk of merchant shipping coming into wartime Britain. Not only an enormous amount of war material and merchandise was brought into and sent out of the Clyde during the six years of war, about 52 million tons altogether, but also 2.1 million troops were embarked and 2.4 million disembarked.

Although the decade after the Second World War kept the shipyards busy with replacements, the old-fashioned techniques and layouts meant another crisis after the post-war prosperity.

3: The Conclusion isn`t very difficult to describe as it gets clear that the development and the progress of Glasgow is a strictly linear one. From the foundation of until 1929 there is a steady rise visible. Unfortunately the statesmen weren`t aware of the possible risks of the heavy industry and the wars and the economic surrounding did the rest to destroy nearly everything what has been built up for about 2000 years. Finally there is the remaining hope that Glasgow`s history will be as glorious as the period at the turn of the nineteenth century.

C¹²: At the start of the 1980s Glasgow was down, as many investors returned their money but during the 1980s there seemed to be life after moribundity. "The city that refused to die".

Glasgow has come a long way since St. Mungo. From the "dear green place" by the Molendinar Burn to the pretty town admired by Defoe, the bustling commercial city of the tobacco lords, the great industrial city that followed. Throughout all its long history it has never lacked vitality or character. It has been re-made more than once and it will be re-made again.Whatever future brings it is hard to believe that Glasgow will ever lose its characteristic combination of nobility and vulgarity, of friendliness and roughness, of Lowland prudence and Highland recklessness. Regarding today`s Glasgow the rise is palpable: By putting life back to the inner cities, expanding the retail sector within, attracting companies to relocate in Glasgow and finally developing tourism the image of the "Red Clyde" was abandoned.

The facts prove this development as Glasgow was chosen to be the European City of Culture in 1990 and the City of Architecture and Design in 1999. Glasgow`s new motto seems to work:

Once, Glasgow sold things. Now it work s hard at selling itself.

Appendix

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Select Bibliography:

- Baker, Paul, "Once, Glasgow sold things. Now it works hard at selling itself" in the New Statesman ( o.O., 1/22/99), section: Travels
- Brooke, Markus, Glasgow (o.O., 1990, pb.1990)
- Daiches, David, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982)
- Oakley, C.A. The Second City (o.O., 1967, pb. 1946)

[...]

¹ David Daiches, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982), p.1-11 Markus Brooke, Glasgow (o.O., 1990, pb.1990), p.28-36

² David Daiches, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982), chapter 5; C.A. Oakley, The Second City (o.O., 1967, pb. 1946), p.4-7, p.20/21

³ David Daiches, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982), p.55

⁴ David Daiches, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982), p.53

⁵ David Daiches, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982), p.142/143, p.151-153 C.A. Oakley, The Second City (o.O., 1967, pb. 1946), p.23-25, 65/66

⁶ C.A. Oakley, The Second City (o.O., 1967, pb. 1946), p.29/30, p.160 David Daiches, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982), p.151, p.217

⁷ David Daiches, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982), p.215

⁸ C.A. Oakley, The Second City (o.O., 1967, pb. 1946), p.170

⁹ C.A. Oakley, The Second City (o.O., 1967, pb. 1946), p.223-225 Markus Brooke, Glasgow (o.O., 1990, pb.1990), p.58/59

¹⁰ David Daiches, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982), p.218, p.222 C.A. Oakley, The Second City (o.O., 1967, pb. 1946), p.227, p.236

¹¹ David Daiches, Glasgow (o.O., 1977, pb.1982), p.223/224 C.A. Oakley, The Second City (o.O., 1967, pb. 1946), p.247

¹² Paul Baker, "Once, Glasgow sold things. Now it works hard at selling itself" in the New Statesman ( o.O., 1/22/99), section: Travels