SCOTLAND in the nineteenth century had an economy and a society subject to one of the most rapid early transformations in industrial experience of any country in the Western world.1 Unique among the smaller European countries with peasant-based local economies surviving well into the nineteenth century, though as yet subject to little comparative analysis, Scotland’s dramatic shift from a mostly underdeveloped, rural backwater in the mid-eighteenth century to one of the key industrial hubs of the British empire by the mid-nineteenth century, was largely orchestrated from above, by government and its agencies, and by wealthy landowners.2 The impact of rapid industrialization on the workplace, on conditions of life, and on Scottish culture was profound, though not as profound, sudden, or damaging as late nineteenth-century changes in Germany or Russia, or even in smaller industrial regions such as Catalonia in northern Spain, a comparison with Scotland that would merit further scrutiny.
There is a popular characterization of nineteenth-century Scotland as a country defined by heavy industry. It arises out of end-of-century structural change and the politicization of sectors such as shipbuilding that employed well paid and vociferous male workers in large workplace units. It is also a consequence of economic data, such as output figures.3 Yet industrial output as a technical measure tells us little about the actual lives of people. In Glasgow, that most industrial of cities, with over two-thirds of its male and female workforce employed in industry through much of the century, the numbers engaged in engineering, tool making and metal working only exceeded those in textiles and clothing in 1911. Shipbuilding around 1900, at just 2 per cent of the employed workforce in Glasgow, was equalled by printing and publishing and was about half the size, in terms of numbers employed, of furniture making and woodworking, a flourishing industry here as in Edinburgh or Aberdeen, associated with skilled male workers based in numerous small workshops.4 Industrial employment was shaped by the manufacture of consumer goods, much of it undertaken using craft techniques to supply local demand. Family-based production flourished in nineteenth-century Scotland, but some consumer-oriented family firms, such as Keiller of Dundee, were major undertakings.5 The Keiller family firm was founded in the early nineteenth century in an area of Scotland that then as now produced outstanding soft fruits. Soft fruit does not travel well, but sugar does and hence a jam-making industry developed close to the source of the fruit. Turning raspberries into jam was a seasonal, kitchen-stove enterprise that expanded into confectionery and then marmalade using imported raw materials. By mid-century, Keiller had factories in the Channel Islands to avoid sugar duties and facilitate access to Mediterranean oranges, and by 1890 it owned a massive manufacturing complex close to the Victoria Docks in London. London and Empire were Keiller’s main markets. It was a bigger company than Rowntree’s of York or Cadbury’s of Birmingham, whose importance for Dundee is still celebrated in the aphorism ‘city of jam, jute and journalism’.
Urban history has shaped our understanding of Scottish industry and its often negative social consequences.6 Yet the big-city perspective obscures the fact that many of those who worked in industry were found in villages and small towns the length of the country, from the fish-processing, coalmining, and quarrying centres of Caithness to the Borders tweed burghs. Moreover, engagement in industrial entrepreneurship was not just the preserve of the self-made businessmen of Glasgow or Dundee who attract scholarly attention.7 In Scotland, more than in England, much rural industrial employment was promoted by aristocrats, such as the Dukes of Sutherland with their flourishing coal and textile village at Brora in the far north-east; or the Earls of Breadalbane, who owned and developed slate quarries at Easdale in Argyll; or the Dukes of Buccleuch and Lords Lothian, who owned much of the extensive coal industry south of Edinburgh, a large part of the so-called ‘eastern district’ which by mid-century employed more miners and produced more coal than the better-known ‘western district’ focused on Lanarkshire.8 The impact of Scotland’s great aristocratic estates on Scottish industrial experience is still little known, though research on the Sutherland estates offers insights.9
Industrial employment only exceeded agriculture in the second half of the century, but industry touched most lives. It was a more intensely present phenomenon in Scotland than in England, because the small size of the country and the wide distribution of industry meant that even those parts of the population that were not involved in industrial work saw it close at hand. There was no such phenomenon in Scotland, even in remote areas, of disconnection from the experience of industry—as there was in England, where industry and its attendant problems were in the ‘north’ and alien to much of the rich and powerful in the ‘south’. In Scotland, the rich and the powerful, and they did not come more rich or powerful than the great Scottish aristocrats, were intimately connected with industry. And even in Edinburgh, with its ‘douce’ professional and gentrified culture, the bulk of the working population was industrial by the mid-nineteenth century.10
So what lay behind the rapid transformation of Scotland’s industrial sector, and how were these forces connected to the social and cultural experience of Scotland’s people? Geography was clearly important, for it allowed merchants in the west to take advantage of Atlantic trading routes to develop a flourishing cotton industry, the driving force behind the ‘first’ industrial revolution. Geological endowments were also fortunate, for it was cheap and easily accessed coal and iron that shaped the rise of the heavy industries which formed the ‘second’ industrial revolution of the later nineteenth century.11 Geography and geology were significant in another sense, for they determined the character of agriculture, forcing men and women off an abundance of unproductive land to seek opportunities elsewhere, thereby providing a steady supply of cheap labour, which was one of Scotland’s key competitive advantages. When connected with the politics of Empire, population movement also ensured the supply from overseas of crucial raw materials and the government-protected markets on which much of Scotland’s industry relied. But of equal importance was the impact of the Enlightenment in Scotland, which witnessed a transformation in ways of thinking that underpinned the transformation of industry.12 Focused on what has been termed the ‘rich-country: poor-country debate’—that is, why are some countries rich, and what do poor countries have to do to become rich in their turn—there were three key themes in Scotland’s Enlightenment.13 How does trade operate and how can it be encouraged? How can ingenuity and invention be stimulated? And what role should governments take in the management of commerce and invention? Change was embraced, and in an age when economic, moral, and social concerns were viewed as a whole, some cautioned against the damaging social effects of modernization. It was a warning, famously illustrated by Adam Smith in the 1770s, that many seemed to forget in the nineteenth century.
The pace of change was swift in Scotland when compared with other places, but in lived experience it was charted more slowly, as illustrated in John Galt’s novel Annals of the Parish, first published in 1821 and thought by many early readers to be fact not fiction.14 Set in rural Ayrshire between 1760 and 1810, and described through the experience and opinions of the local minister, the Annals shows the transformation of a community as agriculture and the rhythm of the seasons give way to industry and commerce. New coalmines are established from the 1760s, and ‘truly, it is very wonderful to see how things come round; when the talk was about the shanking of thir heughs, and a paper to get folk to take shares in them …’.15 Itinerant Irishmen drift through the parish in the 1780s, looking for work but soon moving on to Glasgow, to the relief of local housewives mindful of their vegetable gardens and chickens. Old gentry families die out, or move to Edinburgh, and their property is bought by the new commercial elites, chief among them Mr Cayenne, a Virginia merchant, who with business partners from Glasgow builds a cotton mill in the parish and a new town for the workers and gets a community of muslin weavers established there, and ‘brought women all the way from the neighbourhood of Manchester in England, to tech the lassie bairns in our old clachan tamouring [embroidering fine muslin]’.16
Industrial expansion impressed but troubled the local observers in this fictional distillation of experiences that were echoed in fact, parish by parish, in the Statistical Accounts of Scotland. For Galt’s minister, ‘the minds of men were excited to new enterprizes; a new genius, as it were, had descended upon the earth.’ But there were problems threatening in the ‘signs of decay in the wonted simplicity of our country ways’ and in the broken health and psychological dislocation of the industrial workers, who were mostly poor migrants from other parts of the country.17 Radical politics, workplace protests, and the tragic suicide of a factory overseer and his wife, ruined in the cotton bankruptcies of 1808, illustrated for a popular audience some of the social consequences of industrialization. Gains in wealth, expanded horizons, and new opportunities were contrasted with the plight of the victims of change. Indeed, the sense of cultural loss that came with modernization remained a theme of commentaries on the subject, be they fiction or fact, throughout the century.
One of the immediate impacts of industrialization in Scotland, and the subject of many historical studies since the first flowering of Scottish economic and social history in the 1960s, was seen in changes in the workplace, as work moved indoors and towards geographies of concentration, initially in industrial villages and then gravitating towards the bigger towns and cities. On the surface, indoor manufacturing seems preferable to outdoor farming in Scotland’s often harsh climate. But indoor work was associated with new and punishing employment regimes defined by the clock and facilitated by new sources of artificial lighting—gas was used for lighting in factories long before it was domesticated—that led to longer hours, shift systems, and night-time working.
Early industrial workplaces in cottages or workshops were better, particularly for those such as the fine handloom weavers of Paisley, who worked relatively short hours for good pay during the ‘golden age’ and had time for leisure and a rich cultural life. But domestic weaving frames got bigger and noisier, and the handloom weavers’ hours of work grew as their rates of pay fell with competitive undercutting by merchants and skill displacement, first by home-based female and child labour and then by factory weaving.18 Manufacturing processes ultimately compromised the homes of hand-based industrial workers and family life suffered. Family finances were also compromised by the need of home-based workers to pay for their own machinery, be it the weaving frames which locked them into punitive loan or rental arrangements with the merchants they supplied, or the later sewing machines that from the 1860s were ‘hire purchased’ in their tens of thousands by home-based female workers engaged in the sweated clothing industries.
By 1850, industry was decisively separated from the domestic sphere for most workers, and some of the best paid in the later nineteenth century could support comfortable homes in new model tenements in industrial suburbs like Dalry in Edinburgh or Partick in Glasgow.19 But in the early phase of rural industrialization, when factory workers, often youths and children, were brought in from elsewhere, accommodation was part of the deal, and it was subject to overseer scrutiny and policing on a scale unseen in previous work regimes. Food provision also commonly came through shops run by early factory owners, offering significant scope for exploitation of the workforce. These problems, which were particularly acute in smaller and remote factories and in the mining and quarrying industry, were not unique to Scotland; but in Scotland compared with the north of England, work opportunities were fewer and factory workers, including many Gaelic-speaking highlanders and Irish poor, were often compliant.
Arising out of these concerns and informed by late Enlightenment debates, the imposition of factory regulation, focused on hours of work, particularly for children, and the parallel provision of factory-based education, was a cornerstone of growing government intervention in the industrial economy. In Scotland, however, with its abundant cheap labour, when the rules were applied, factory owners often simply dismissed their child workers rather than support the costs of a time-restricted workforce to be educated at the employer’s expense, and the system of factory inspection seems to have favoured business. Indeed, Leonard Horner, the Factory Inspector for Scotland in the 1830s, declared himself ‘against the proposed introduction of a minimum working week of 48 hours for children between twelve and thirteen years of age as he thought it would cause hardship and inconvenience to both workers and owners’.20 And of Horner’s successor, James Stuart, it was said, ‘during his inspections he had found under age children concealed in the mills, one behind baskets and another in a privy, but these and other offences Mr Stuart had failed to prosecute’.21
The movement of the Scottish population towards industrial employment, which was also characterized by a growing bias in the occupied workforce towards male workers (the male to female worker ratio was 2/1 in 1841 and 2.5/1 in 1911), was accompanied by a general increase in hours of work. It is difficult to estimate the hours of work of the agricultural workforce, and farming often disguised structural underemployment, which contributed to low incomes. Attempts were made to restrict the hours of vulnerable industrial workers, but the forty-eight-hour minimum working week suggested for twelve-year-olds in the 1830s textile industry, normally worked over six days with Sunday free, is telling. In 1834, a time of full employment but low pay, Glasgow hand-loom weavers reported a thirteen-hour working day.22 Hours of work continued high to the 1890s, when the introduction of the half-day Saturday holiday heralded the start of a fall. Yet there was massive variation. Of the well paid and skilled male workforce, such as those in the closely regulated gas industry, it was reported in the 1890s that over the previous sixty years, wages had risen by 125 per cent and working hours had fallen by an average of one hour per day.23 But skilled male workers still worked an average week of over fifty-four hours.24 These adult men were mostly involved in full-time, regular employment. Many industrial workers were not so lucky. In Glasgow’s late nineteenth-century female unskilled labour market, the working day was shorter, but payments, earned by the hour or piece, were commensurately low, and underemployment and poverty were commonplace.25
Changes in work regimes and payment were paralleled by changes in the gendering of work, which was also shaped by technological innovation. Industrial ingenuity, another key theme of Scotland’s practical Enlightenment, was applied to production processes to increase efficiency and profit for entrepreneurs, and one of the primary mechanisms whereby this was achieved was through reducing the skill of the workers involved.26 Unskilled or semi-skilled factory work, and in particular that associated with the textile industry, was dominated by women and girls. Commercial specialization meant that certain towns, such as Dundee or Dunfermline, had remarkable concentrations of female industrial workers by mid-century, a phenomenon that has been well described by historians, though the mechanisms whereby these localized labour markets operated are, as yet, little understood.27 Other places, dominated by skilled men, such as the Clyde shipbuilding towns of the later nineteenth century, had less employment for women. Sectoral concentration inevitably introduced another new phenomenon, the experience of mass unemployment arising out of the fluctuations in the international economy, to which Scottish industry was increasingly vulnerable. Yet concentration, in good times or bad, also generated a sense of popular unity and fuelled calls for industrial reform.
The Scottish labour movement was powerful where skills and wages were high, and it is not surprising that calls for reform were related to the physical dangers that industry represented. Iron making was a dangerous employment and so too was coalmining. The journalist David Bremner, in the first comprehensive survey of Scottish industry undertaken initially for The Scotsman newspaper and published as a book in 1869, provided details on the dangers of coalmining, an area of intense cultural unity and workplace power. Yet Scottish mines were not as dangerous as those in England, mainly due to the absence of ‘fire-damp’, which caused explosions, and most of the men and boys who died in Scottish mines were killed by falls of coal.28 The lead industry, which had major works in and around Glasgow to supply the growing demand for lead roofs, pipes for water and gas, and type for the printing industry, was particularly damaging to health.29 By the late nineteenth century, industrial inspectors had made detailed recommendations on protective clothing, respirators, prescribed drinks, and regular medical inspection, and there was legislation prohibiting women under the age of twenty from working with white lead, which was known to damage female fertility.30 Explosives were also manufactured in Scotland for use in the building and railway industries, both famously dangerous to life and limb. Explosives factories were hazardous places for the mainly female workforces, as was recorded in a report to the Secretary of State for the Home Department in 1884 following an accident in a cartridge factory owned by the Nobel Explosive Company at Ardeer in Ayrshire, which killed ten teenage girls and injured four others.31 Moreover, visitors to industrial sites, attracted by the spectacle and excitement of industry, were sometimes the unfortunate victims of the noxious materials that industry employed, as in September 1886 in the picturesque setting of Inverary in Argyll, as recorded by the Scottish Inspector of Explosives, a government post usually held by retired military men:
Messrs. William Sim and Co., who leased Crarae Quarry, were contractors for supplying paving stones for the city of Glasgow. The streets were paved under the direction of the Police and Statue Labour Committee of the Town Council. In 1886, the Committee had been in existence for 50 years, so a ‘monster blast’ was undertaken at Crarae in commemoration of the foundation of the Committee. The steamer ‘Lord of the Isles’, which sailed each day from the Clyde to Inveraray, brought visitors to Loch Fyne to see the ‘monster blast’. Any visitors who wished to do so were invited to land at Crarae pier and inspect the quarry after the explosion. Many of the visitors were overcome by the fumes of the gunpowder and seven people died from the effects of the poisonous gases.32
Some areas of work were injurious to health, but the greater threat, resulting in significant rises in the death rate and a fall in life expectancy in Scotland, was born out of overcrowding in industrial cities.33 Contemporary statistics revealed Glasgow housing to be among the worst in Britain, though no British city could match the horrors of industrial northern Europe, in St Petersburg or Berlin, and Glasgow’s problems also stimulated local-government intervention. But the impact of housing and sanitation reform on the experience of industrial Scots was limited before 1914. The urban industrial workforce was one in which harsh work regimes, low or irregular wages, and poor housing were painfully obvious in the physical appearance of children and adults. The stunted growth of children meant that the poorer classes of industrial workers were three inches shorter than those of the better paid, and Scots, on average, were smaller in the nineteenth century than in the century before.34 Textile workers were notoriously unhealthy in appearance, the result of often impoverished rural backgrounds and long hours from childhood spent bent over machinery, causing deformities of the spine. Home-based female industrial workers, again due to hours spent in fixed positions, suffered badly in their health and also in their capability to undertake the other types of unpaid work on which their families relied. The embroidered muslin industry, employing about ten thousand women in the Glasgow area through much of the nineteenth century, was typical. It was described in the 1830s as ‘an employment which, in most instances, unfits women for other occupations, and, besides, it frequently injures their health, and leaves them very helpless, when they get houses of their own, as to the management of their domestic concerns’.35 This highlights one of the common characteristics of the Scottish industrial scene, and a cause of growing concern among social commentators and reformers at the time, and among historians subsequently—the impact of industry on families.
Men and youths dominated industrial work in the late nineteenth century. Legislation and regulation, family pressures, and employer preferences had gradually driven out adult women. Early industrial workplaces commonly employed whole families in mutually dependent units that reproduced some aspects of what was traditionally seen in agriculture. But changes in business organization towards larger, specialized units—and Scotland was particularly associated with very large industrial workplaces—coupled with employment regulation to exclude women from physically dangerous or morally problematic working situations, as seen, for instance, in the mining industry where heat underground resulted in the near-nakedness of workers, undermined this early family dimension. There was a trend towards gender and age segregation in industry that reinforced the patriarchal character of family relations in working-class communities. The more skilled an industrial male worker, the less likely it was that his wife and adult daughters worked outside the home. Moreover, in those workforces that were dominated by adult women, as in the Dundee or Dunfermline textile industries of the later nineteenth century, there was considerable philanthropic effort to ‘domesticate’ the women involved into the traditional home-focused skills of cooking, sewing, and childcare.36
Working-class status hierarchies, the subject of critical scrutiny by historians of class in the 1980s, were reinforced among skilled workers in western Scotland’s metal and engineering sector by privilege systems of apprenticeship and employment that favoured the sons of men already established in the industry.37 Industrial-worker patriarchy, which mirrored the lives and rhetoric of many of the great industrialists themselves, was reproduced in conservative patterns of marriage and family formation. Men mostly married women with similar family backgrounds to their own and skilled men did not choose their marriage partners from among women who had worked in industry. One of the consequences of this structuring of the industrial workforce by mid-century was that working-class men and women lived entirely separate lives, with men outside the home and in male company, either at work or in work-related leisure facilities such as the pub or football ground, for most of their waking hours. Women were based in the home with their large families, for couples of this sort did not engage in the family-limitation practices seen in other groups of Scots from the later decades of the nineteenth century, and lived narrow and culturally impoverished existences.38 Some industries were dominated by a female workforce, and women in some towns brought in the largest share of the family wage, but in these areas of manufacturing, seen typically in the linen, jute, and woollen districts, patriarchy was reproduced in employee hierarchies, with male overseers and foremen controlling the work regimes of even the most skilled of women. It was difficult for single adult women to get by on their own, so in towns like Dundee, there were many all-female households composed of unmarried sisters, or mother and daughters, who remained together for mutual support. In these communities, marriage opportunities for women were few in a country where high male emigration had also generated a ‘spinster problem’. The separation of the sexes, the financial dependence of women, and conflict over family access to male-earned wages resulted in high levels of domestic violence in Scotland, a subject noted by a few but, as with many areas of women’s history, still awaiting detailed comparative study.39
The social consequences of industrial work were deleterious to many conditions of life in Scotland, but the movement of a mostly rural population from low-paid agricultural employment to better-paid industrial and urban work had, on balance, a positive impact on the circumstances of many people’s lives, a fact that econometricians have demonstrated, but which runs counter to much popular history and many scholarly studies of industrial suffering.40 The impact of better industrial earnings was accentuated by the changing character of industrial work with the growth of the new working-class elite and the expansion of industrial bureaucracies towards the end of the century, which saw the well-educated sons and sometimes the daughters of the labour aristocracy move from manual work to white-collar office work.41 Industrialization made Scotland richer than ever before, as economists and business historians have shown, and was for many ordinary families a real opportunity for upward social mobility.
Industrial expansion was relentless in Scotland and it was commonly resisted because of its encroachment on the environment, a subject that exercised many contemporaries but, other than in the work of T. C. Smout, has been little studied.42 Attempts by Glasgow manufacturers to colonize the open spaces of Glasgow Green for their bleach fields, or to block the public footpaths along the banks of the Clyde with their factory buildings, were vigorously resisted from the early nineteenth century. Moves in the 1820s to develop coalmining in central Glasgow were also overturned by those elements of the community who sought to protect the fast-vanishing amenity of a city that had boasted, as late as 1800, of its salmon fishing at Glasgow Bridge and the great crops of honey from beehives on the roofs of tenement buildings.
One of the major polluters was the paper-making industry of rural eastern Scotland, whose waste chemicals and refuse discharged into rivers killed fish and were ‘unpleasant to the nostrils, if not pernicious to the health of the people dwelling on the banks of the polluted waters’.43 Cases in law, particularly those taken by local proprietors against the paper-makers on the River Esk—which forced the introduction of waste recycling—Acts of Parliament, and newspaper campaigns were frequent by the 1870s as industry spread to new locations. A Scotsman editorial of 1880, prompted by attempts from manufacturers to revoke anti-pollution legislation, captured the popular mood in a country where many still had rural roots:
Contemplation of the Clyde or the Kelvin at Glasgow, the Cart at Paisley, or the Irwell at Manchester, is sufficient to make any observer possessed of the sense of smell resolve to do all in his power to prevent other rivers, such as the Tweed, the Ness, and the Tay, from being brought into the same abominable state. People who have had the good fortune to have been brought up in the country beside a running stream are apt, without being at all sentimental, to take up the matter much more keenly. It is a personal injury that the burn which has been their friend and companion should be soiled and polluted almost beyond recognition; and for its sake they are sharply set against the fouling of streams anywhere and for anything.44
Attempts to protect the countryside were shaped by revulsion at the impact of intensive industry on the urban environment. Francis Groome, author of one of the finest gazetteers of late nineteenth-century Scotland, describing the Bridgeton area of east Glasgow, was struck by the elegance of Bridgeton Cross, ‘a decagonal, cast-iron pavilion, with surmounting clock tower 50 feet high’ which had been erected in 1875, but also remarked that the area ‘contains many cotton factories and other public works [and] presents, in general, a dingy, murky appearance’.45 Even the private houses of the business elite were compromised by industrial expansion. These included the house of Cowlairs, a fine detached mansion in extensive grounds about two miles north of central Glasgow, built as a ‘charming country retreat’ in the second half of the eighteenth century and considerably extended in 1824 by John Gourlay, a Glasgow distiller. But though still in Gourlay family ownership when the house was described in 1878, it was long abandoned as a family residence since ‘the N. B. Railway cut the property in two between the house and the offices, and what amenity was left has been destroyed by their great engine works and by the spread of the city’.46
Yet despite the well-known negative impact of industry through water pollution and noise and choking atmospheres, it was also associated with spectacle and entertainment, a subject that historians of tourism have explored. The Carron Ironworks near Falkirk was a visitor attraction from its first foundation in the late eighteenth century, the great blazing furnaces at night being an awesome sight for those seekers after the sublime who found within the Scottish landscape evidence of both the might of God in the mountains and torrents, and of man and science through industry. Armchair tourists were aware of this spectacle through the popular guides to Scotland. Even Robert Burns was moved by the infernal reputation of the place to write the following verse on the window at an inn at Carron, having tried and failed to be admitted to view the ironworks as a tourist:
We cam na here to view your warks
In hopes to be mair wise,
But only, lest we gang to hell,
It may be nae surprise …47
A visit to Carron en route to the Highlands featured in all tourist itineraries around 1800. Another famous ‘must do’ was a visit to Robert Owen’s New Lanark, which had vast machinery and buildings, the beautiful Falls of Clyde nearby, and the spectacle of large numbers of children engaged in industrial work and education in a model regime. Visits to notable factories remained popular and, as the century advanced, many industrialists sought to represent the spectacle and achievement of industry not only through machines and power and size, but also through spectacular architecture and design. So the Bridgeton area of Glasgow might have struck the visitor with its ‘dingy’ and ‘murky’ appearance, but it was also where James Templeton & Sons chose to build their iconic carpet factory in the late 1880s, designed in a Venetian Gothic style based on the Doge’s Palace in Venice, and grafted onto an older cotton works on the same site. Employing many hundreds of workers making carpets using the chenille Axminster process (patented by Templeton in 1839), the facade of red, green, and yellow glazed brick was a marvellous sight.48
Templeton’s sense of style was also displayed for a mass audience through a series of international exhibitions held in Glasgow. At the first in 1888, which ran for six months and was attended by almost six million visitors, James Templeton & Sons mounted a vast display of woollen upholstery and carpets in the Grand Hall, where, alongside a giant statue of Burns, there were daily concerts and organ recitals. At the second exhibition in 1901, the firm constructed a colourful ‘mosque-style’ pavilion between the Industrial Hall and the Art Galleries, which featured considerably in the photographic record and tourist memorabilia that marked the event.49 The second exhibition, held, like the first one, in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park, was attended by over eleven million visitors, and as with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London on which it was modelled—whose profits were invested in the creation of the Victoria and Albert Museum—it led to the founding of a permanent art gallery and museum for Glasgow. Edinburgh also had a publicly funded museum of science and industry.
The relationship between industry and art, science and design, was celebrated and rewarded (for prizes were normally given for the best-manufactured items on display) through highly visible and popular spectacles both large and small. Dundee had an ‘Exhibition of Industry’ in the town’s Drill Hall, the largest available indoor space, between December 1887 and January 1888. It was sponsored by the Dundee and District United Trades Council, with patrons including the local Members of Parliament and the Earl of Strathmore. The exhibits, for which prizes were awarded for workmen, apprentices, and scholars, were divided into three sections—‘industrial and domestic work, hand done’, ‘trades and manufactures’, and ‘art’. There was also an exhibition of local natural history—indeed, the Dundee Naturalist’s Society was one of the event’s sponsors, an incongruous relationship perhaps given the damage inflicted by industry on nature, but not unexpected since naturalist societies flourished in industrial places because they offered working men an avenue for study and leisure away from the environments in which they worked.50 The presence of hand-worked goods at the Dundee exhibition is a telling inclusion, for the making of fine, predominantly textile goods by highly skilled women was still a major employment in the town. However, the largest section was the second, which incorporated twenty-two distinct classes of manufacture and design ranging from ‘scientific and mechanical inventions’ to ‘baking and confectionery work’. One category, reflecting the reforming purposes of the exhibition, was for ‘architectural drawings; plans for working men’s houses etc’. Profits from the event, which proved a popular success, were donated to Dundee’s Royal Infirmary.51
Industry had a further impact, for it gave rise to a new pantheon of national heroes, celebrated through popular biography and iconography.52 The first to achieve recognition were the inventors, particularly James Watt (1736–1819), scientist and developer of the steam engine, who was also a mathematical instrument maker and surveyor. Indeed, the William Wallace National Monument near Stirling, opened in 1869 with an audience of over seventy thousand in attendance, included a ‘Hall of Heroes’ comprising sixteen busts of well-known modern Scots, three of them inventors—Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), scientist and optical innovator; William Murdock (1754–1839), pioneer of gas lighting; and, of course, James Watt. Watt also dominated a popular engraving and accompanying volume of memoirs titled ‘Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain living in 1807–8’, which was published in London in the 1860s by William Walker, son of a Musselburgh salt manufacturer. The imaginary scene, set in the library of the Royal Institution and dominated by Scots, marked the centenary of the Act of Union and was a celebration of the ‘inestimable benefits which have resulted to mankind from the labours of these gifted men … the Grand Main-Springs of our National Wealth and Enterprise’.53
Not only the wonders of industry in the hands of inventors but the popular evocation of the celebrated businessman as social benefactor came to mark this new industrial hagiography. Schools, public libraries, and art galleries, concert halls and parks, were all endowed by industrialists, some of them, like Andrew Carnegie, having made their industrial fortunes overseas. In most cases, the buildings that housed these institutions preserved the names of the benefactors long after the demise of the industries from which they took their wealth. Who, for instance, in the streets of Kirkcaldy today could tell you anything of the three men called Michael Nairn, father, son, and grandson, whose wealth generated through the manufacture of floor cloths and linoleum—with factories in Fife, the United States, France, and Germany, and warehouses in London and Paris as well as Glasgow and Manchester—was gifted to the town to build a hospital in 1890, a new high school in 1894, a YMCA in 1895, and a public park in 1927? The monumental buildings and open spaces bequeathed to local communities such as those in Kirkcaldy, where Michael Nairn & Co. was the largest employer, made a lasting contribution to the Scottish townscape.
A popular narrative that suggested public-spirited men of industry and invention were role models for the working population was widely articulated through magazines like The British Workman (first published in 1855) and through the pen of Samuel Smiles (1812–1906), doctor and newspaper editor from Haddington (present-day East Lothian), who made his career in Leeds, and specialized in industrial biographies with such edifying titles as Self-Help (1859), Character (1871), and Thrift (1875). An account of Britain and of Scotland that privileged the contributions of industrialists was also sealed at the end of the century with the first publication of the Dictionary of National Biography, in which big science and heavy engineering dominated and men associated with the ‘technological icons of imperialism’—railways, shipping, and the arms industry—were disproportionately represented. Through Crown-bestowed honours, the state, in a mirror to popular culture, created a new national elite of its industrialists, though many of the richest had left Scotland and day-to-day involvement in businesses to enter national political life in London by the turn of the century. We know much about the lives and achievements of such men, though less about their failures or comparative performance with business elites in other industrial regions of Britain or Europe.
Some industrial workers were elevated to national celebrity status. The Paisley weaver poet and songwriter Robert Tannahill (1774–1810), who reputedly composed at his handloom, was one of the sixteen Scots whose busts were placed in the William Wallace National Monument ‘Hall of Heroes’. Working men who made their mark through the labour movement were famous by the end of the nineteenth century, such as miner James Keir Hardie (1856–1915), who honed his skills in the temperance movement and in popular journalism before winning a seat in Parliament in 1892, where he caused a sensation by deliberately wearing working men’s clothing.54 There were even a few working women from industrial backgrounds who mainly through local politics achieved popular distinction in the eyes of fellow Scots. They include Mary Barbour (1878–1958), the daughter of a Renfrewshire carpet weaver, who worked as a carpet printer, before marrying an engineer at Fairfield’s shipyards and settling to married life in Govan. Though her celebrity was forged during the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915 and she was the first woman to serve on Glasgow’s town council following election in 1920, her political career in the Labour Party and commitment to social reform was schooled in the 1890s through the Kinning Park Co-Operative Guild, the first such organization in Scotland.55
The growing presence of industrial entrepreneurs and workers in national affairs was a mirror to the role of industry in shaping Scottish cultural life and identity. There was celebration to be sure, but there was also an inevitable rejection by many of an industrial reality that was brutal in its impacts. From the Owenite socialists of the 1820s, who sought to recreate a pastoral and moral ideal in utopian communities, to the arts and crafts movement of the later nineteenth century, which focused on hand-crafted manufacture and backward-referencing, organic ideals of modernism, Scots were locked into an ambiguous relationship with their own experience of rapid economic change.56 The basic problem was that industrial life and industrial organization ran counter to the fundamental nature of Scottish moral community. Galt had highlighted this in his novel, Annals of the Parish, and it was echoed in powerful but backward-looking Victorian highlandism. The dislocation caused by industry was condemned by evangelical religious leaders such as Thomas Chalmers, with his experiments in parish poor-law reform in 1820s Glasgow, and by numerous city and factory missionary groups.57 It was reflected in the movement for factory schooling and in later nineteenth-century endeavours to create rational leisure facilities for industrial workers. Scottish clergy were vigorously engaged with industrial problems, often mediating in workplace disputes. Yet popular religious magazines, such as the Reverend Norman Macleod’s Good Words, hardly ever mentioned Scotland’s industrial reality.
The ambiguous nature of Scottish industrial experience, a product of the collective psychological trauma inflicted by rapid change, is striking and merits further study. And yet there is still further ambiguity in the characterization of Scotland as a country of coal and iron, metal and engineering, which masks that other side of Scottish cultural and creative endeavour that was given over to consumer and fashion goods, where beauty and design were the primary considerations. Design was initially sponsored by the Board of Trustees for Manufactures through prizes offered for the best-manufactured items and through the founding of schools of drawing and design, initially in Edinburgh from the 1760s, with a branch in Dunfermline by the 1830s, and in Glasgow from 1845, with a branch in Paisley. The intention of these schools, which were open to talented youths and later girls, was to produce designers for industry.58 In 1849 there were 362 students at the Glasgow School of Design, with many finding employment in calico printing and fine-muslin manufacture.59 The later development of this school as a centre of arts and crafts design particularly associated with Charles Rennie Macintosh, who represents a peculiarly Scottish, organic, and iconic response to modernism, could not have happened without the earlier foundation in industry.
The uniting of art and industry was seen particularly strongly in Dunfermline, where there was an early design school serving linen manufacture in the production of fine-patterned damask tableware. Initially a hand-based industry, steam-driven Jacquard looms were introduced from 1849 and by the 1870s there were eleven factories in the town employing a workforce of over six thousand. One of the largest works, built in 1851 and employing fifteen hundred women by 1870, was owned by Erskine Beveridge, who began his career as a draper’s apprentice and was later a major sponsor of the direct railway link between Edinburgh and Dunfermline.60 Beveridge commissioned the finest designers for his fashionable napery, including such local talent as Joseph Paton, father of Sir Noel Paton the artist, and the celebrated Italian artist and designer Agostino Aglio, who mainly worked for the Manchester textile industry.61 One of the factories in Dunfermline was that of Messrs D. Dewar & Sons of London, which, with an eye to the contemporary fashion market, produced the celebrated ‘Crimean Hero Tablecloth’, ‘inspected and greatly admired by the Queen and Prince Albert at Balmoral’ and a bestseller. It comprised a border of twenty-four ‘faithful portraits’ of national and international military heroes and royals, with armorial bearings and leafy scrollwork.62 It was prize-winning artefacts like this, for a prosperous consumer market, that dominated the output of much of Scottish industry, yet the Dunfermline fine-damask industry, like many others which fell victim to changing fashions, disappeared with barely a whimper after the First World War and has never been studied.
The son of Erskine Beveridge was a pioneer in industrial and engineering design and expanded his business in the 1890s to new factories in Cowdenbeath, Ladybank, and Dunshalt. But for Erskine Beveridge junior, like many second- and third-generation manufacturers, his principal love lay elsewhere. A notable antiquarian collector, he is remembered today as a photographer of quaint rural scenes, an heir to those many cultural commentators who in words or images saw the essence of Scotland in small, traditional communities. From Allan Ramsay’s verse play The Gentle Shepherd, published in 1725 and popular through the eighteenth century and beyond, to J. M. Barrie’s best-selling novel and play The Little Minister, published in 1891, Scottish poets and novelists viewed rural simplicity as exemplifying a moral ideal. These vastly influential writers, the Edinburgh-based pastoral poet and the London-based leader of the sentimental ‘kailyard’ school, were born into industrial communities, the first in the mining village of Leadhills, the second to a family of Kirriemuir weavers, but their creative impulse came from the land and nature and tradition, real or invented. Industry, during the age when Scotland was a great industrial country, offered nothing equivalent other than through industrial design, an area that is barely recognized today. Indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of Scottish cultural life that the flowering of creativity in literature or art in response to this greatest of transformations in the history of the country, only took place in the twentieth century when industry began its slow and painful decline.63
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