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The M74 Completion project completes a vital part of the west of Scotland’s motorway network.
It will provide a wide range of benefits from helping to grow Scotland’s economy and bringing new jobs along the route, to reducing road accidents and improving the environment.
The M74 Completion project is a partnership project between Transport Scotland, Glasgow City Council, South Lanarkshire Council and Renfrewshire Council.
Principal Author David Drew
Editors Frank Meddens, Victoria Ridgeway
Design and Layout Cate Davies
Graphics Hayley Baxter, Cate Davies
Reconstructions Leo Delauncey, Jake Lunt-Davies, Paul Wootton
David Drew is a writer, archaeologist and broadcaster. After a first degree in Modern History, he moved into archaeology and worked for many years on an Anglo-Peruvian project in the Andes, taking an MA at the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London. He then spent 10 years at the BBC as a writer, presenter and producer of archaeology and history documentaries for series such as Chronicle and Timewatch, covering topics as diverse as the Norman Conquest, African rock art, the factory reforms of Robert Owen, the political use of architecture in Victorian England and an examination of the British Heritage Industry. He lectures widely and more recently has written books on the Maya and the Incas.
Lord Macfarlane of Bearsden KT
With the commercial success of blockbuster movies such as the Indiana Jones trilogy and the ongoing popularity of television programmes like Channel 4’s Time Team, it is perhaps unsurprising that when you mention the word Archaeology to most people that they instinctively think of Roman Bathhouses and Egyptian Mummies.
The discovery and display of ancient relics from our long-forgotten past is an undoubtedly exciting and popular facet of archaeology, however the glamour that surrounds these exhibitions can often consign the more conventional, and some would say less glamorous aspects of archaeology, to the depths of public consciousness.
When the brief was given to the archaeologists working on the M74 Completion project, they would have known that they were unlikely to have to fend off movie moguls and television producers keen to exploit the archaeological opportunities afforded by the construction of a new motorway.
Instead of being tasked with uncovering medieval burial sites or Bronze Age villages, here the M74 archaeologists were charged with excavating and analysing evidence from our more recent past, predominantly nineteenth and twentieth century industry and housing. Foundries, mills, factories and tenements that typify and tell the story of Glasgow’s rise to prominence as a world centre for trade and industry during that period, a task perhaps lacking in obvious glamour, but nonetheless still an important aspect of the modern day development lifecycle.
What this publication aims to do is explain how the M74 archaeologists managed to piece together and bring to life the stories of those who lived and worked in our communities back then, and explain how their influence has helped to shape the modern Glasgow and South Lanarkshire that we know today.
It tells the stories of not only famous industrialists from that period but also recounts the often contrasting working and living conditions of their employees.
The legacy of the M74 excavations is an integrated and comprehensive archive that documents the development of this area through the ages. It is an archive compiled not only by the traditional archaeological methods of excavation and analysis of the physical traces people have left behind in the landscape, and from the recovery and interrogation of sometimes long-forgotten documentary evidence, but also from the first-hand testimony of people who lived and worked during that period. It is our generation’s contribution to the future generation’s understanding of their past.
The area around Glasgow has attracted settlers from as early as Neolithic times (4500–2500BC), due to its attractive position as the furthest good fordable point downstream on the Clyde. Rather later, in the sixth century AD, St. Mungo reputedly founded a monastery here. In the early twelfth century a bishopric was established, and what was at the time probably no more than a small village, began to grow. Glasgow became a sizeable agricultural centre, which by the end of the twelfth century had established its famous annual fair and possessed the formal, royally appointed status of a ‘burgh’. It grew steadily over the following centuries. In the early eighteenth century Daniel Defoe made his famous, challenging pronouncement that Glasgow, with its striking architecture in warm sandstone, was ‘the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted’.
Major changes were on the way. These would transform what was still a middling-sized town of no more than 20,000 people, with an essentially rural economy supplemented by localised craft working, to an enterprising home for early industry. The Treaty of Union in 1707, combined with Glasgow’s geographical position as a port, created access to a range of world markets and the emerging business community prospered, particularly on the trade with the Americas. By the middle of the eighteenth century Glasgow businessmen had cornered the Virginia and the southern USA tobacco trade and were selling tobacco on to the Continent, creating a wealthy new upper class of Glasgow ‘Tobacco Lords’ in the process.
Glaswegian investors entered the cotton trade and also began to import jute from the Indian sub-continent. Crucially, they then invested the wealth generated in new businesses and in new technologies. From the 1770s until around 1830, the city became a centre for true, factory-based industries. This began slowly with linen production and then quickened with the successful mechanisation of cotton spinning, powered by steam rather than the waters of the Clyde. By the 1820s, cotton manufacturers had become the new commercial aristocracy of Glasgow. The factory-based textile business encouraged, in turn, the growth of engineering and metalworking industries in workshops first established in Glasgow during the later eighteenth century.
Probably the most significant development, however, was in enhancing transport links. Initially access to the sea was improved with the construction of the Forth and Clyde Canal and its branch to Port Dundas on the northern edge of the city. The building of the Monklands canal also provided easy access to Lanarkshire’s vast coal and ironstone reserves. But of greater importance in the long term were the attempts to deepen the Clyde itself so that ocean-going vessels could reach into the heart of the city. Starting in the 1770s, the city council and later the River Improvement Trust deepened the river channel so that by 1812 Glasgow’s trade and industry no longer had to rely solely on the more distant outlets to the sea of Port Glasgow and Greenock.
Along with the opening of a series of local railway systems and the exploitation of seams of coal and iron ore which were available nearby, the city was now equipped for its explosive progress in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Glasgow was to emerge as a powerhouse of heavy industry.
Between 1830 and the First World War, Glasgow developed a host of trades and manufactures serving export markets through-out the world, from pottery production, whisky distilling and brewing to the making of scientific instruments, book production, clay pipe manufacture, the making of biscuits and the blending of tea.
The metalworking industries, for which Glasgow became world-renowned during this second phase of the Industrial Revolution, grew most rapidly and it was for these that Glasgow acquired the epithet of ‘Second City of the British Empire’. From the manufacture of steam engines, iron and brass founding, boiler making and the production of textile machinery, Glasgow quickly became the greatest centre in Britain for shipbuilding and marine engineering.
Locomotive manufacture was another major industry, along with the production of pre-fabricated cast-iron structures and steelwork and particular specialities such as sugar-cane crushing and refining machinery. Even today, in remote outposts of what was once the Empire, from the Indian sub-continent to Central America, the traveller can stumble upon pieces of machinery, most long-abandoned but others still in use, which came originally from the banks of the Clyde and bear the worn, rusted names of Scottish manufacturers such as P & W McOnie or Smith and Watson.
The success of the industrial revolution in Scotland, particularly in Glasgow, depended on a range of factors, such as the individual imagination and ingenuity that brought technological advances, the quality of the Scottish banking and education systems, on improved forms of communication and transport and the availability of essential and high quality raw materials. However, its triumph rested on one overriding aspect – the availability of abundant and cheap human labour.
Defoe reckoned that the population of the spacious, airy town he saw along the Clyde in 1707 was about 20,000 people. By 1770, it was probably still no more than 30,000, but then it began to soar, reaching nearly 150,000 by 1820. Many came from nearby lowland regions, but so great were the demands of industry that textile manufacturers actively recruited labour from the Highlands and Islands. Ulster, with its easy sea crossing, was a natural source and many weavers were attracted to Glasgow before the 1820s. Irish immigration increased considerably in the 1840s at the time of the potato famine. By 1850, when the total population was almost 500,000, 18% of the inhabitants were Irish. Steadily, throughout the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, groups of immigrants came from further afield in search of opportunity. Entrepreneurs, such as the Dixon family from England (discussed later), moved in to set up new businesses. Skilled workers arrived from the English potteries and from the iron-making and coal-mining areas of Wales. Italians came in considerable numbers from the 1860s. Jews emigrating from Germany and Holland built the first synagogue in 1823, though the bulk of Jewish immigrants arrived later in the century, especially fleeing the pogroms in Russia, Poland and Lithuania of the 1890s. By 1911, the city held a million people, 56% of whom had been born somewhere else.
Glasgow had become a truly remarkable city. There was nowhere else that displayed such dynamism, such a wealth of opportunity, but also such contrasts between rich and poor, between different cultures thrust together to work and attempt to better themselves in what a survey of 1902 revealed to be the most overcrowded city in Britain. The M74 archaeological project set out to investigate this fascinating diversity of new Glasgow industries and new people, which had spread rapidly south of the Clyde during the course of the nineteenth century.
The completion of the M74 motorway provided a unique opportunity to carry out an integrated programme of archaeological and historical research into what was once a key industrial area of Glasgow and Lanarkshire. In the 5-mile (8km) long path of the planned motorway, between the Fullarton Junction near to Carmyle in the east, and the M8 west of Kingston Bridge near the centre of Glasgow, lay the hidden remains of iron and brass foundries, textile mills, engineering works and lime kilns, railways, a historic canal and an important Scottish pottery, interspersed with residential sites of tenements, villas and country houses. Dating from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, all were components of the city’s world-famous industrial heritage. Their study offered a fascinating opportunity to understand more about this dynamic, innovative and productive period.
As with most major developments, the M74 Completion project carried out an assessment of the likely impact of the project on both the natural and built environment. A wide-ranging series of evaluations and assessments of sites ensued to review their potential prior to the road-works taking place. This enabled the production of recommendations for the recording of standing remains and for a series of trial archaeological trenches to assess the condition of buried structures. Particularly valuable and potentially interesting sites were recommended for full archaeological excavation. In common with most other cities, urban archaeology in Glasgow had been limited in extent, but the M74 archaeology project was on a huge scale; it represents one of the largest co-ordinated series of excavations ever carried out on the heritage of a major industrial city.
A second phase of work involved a nine month long season of large-scale archaeological excavation at the major and potentially most productive sites, notably a series of industrial and some residential structures in the Tradeston and Port Eglinton areas, the sites of the Govan Iron Works, the Caledonian Pottery and tenements in South Laurieston. It was a huge undertaking, and at its height involved over 100 individuals, working on eight sites across Glasgow and South Lanarkshire, supported by a team of surveyors, pottery, metallurgy and documentary archive specialists.
To the archaeologists involved, the M74 project offered a rare chance to test how archaeological techniques could enhance the picture of Glasgow’s industrial history already provided by documentary records. In fact, for many of the excavated M74 sites, documentary sources for specific buildings or enterprises either had never existed or did not exist anymore. For example, since Hartley, the jam makers, took over the company in 1898 the archives of the original Caledonian Pottery have been lost. The records of the Govan Iron Works and associated businesses, run by the Dixon family and their successors, were very patchy and unsatisfactory. Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, the best known of all Glasgow architects besides Charles Rennie Mackintosh, designed a celebrated block of tenements in the study zone, yet most of his original designs and other forms of documentary evidence have unfortunately disappeared.
Besides its wide scope, the M74 project was also unusual in offering a considerable challenge to popular ideas of what archaeology is all about. The public perception of archaeologists still tends to characterise us as people more concerned with a remote past and who go in search of ancient civilisations. Yet here we were to devote considerable energy and resources to the excavation of sites that seemed unusually modern. Indeed, many of them dated back no earlier than the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Looking at our more recent industrial remains archaeologically presented an opportunity to identify or explain industrial technologies and processes. Excavations revealed how workshops functioned and what the working environment may have been like for an industrial workforce. Similarly, with the structures of tenement, cottage or villa, archaeology could fill out the picture of the domestic environment and provide material evidence for how people ate and slept, and how living standards varied from one kind of domestic setting to another.
A public archaeology programme was a key aspect of the project from the outset involving the local community in the ongoing work, keeping them informed, but also tapping into their knowledge and experiences during the research. The now traditional methods of a web site, interpretive panels and viewing galleries, exhibitions and dig open days were used together with newer, more experimental methods, such as a school drama project, pictured opposite. At one of the open days a medieval kiln was built and pottery fired.
One of the most successful aspects of the project was the oral history programme, which aimed to record the memories of those who had connections with the area. Some had lived and worked in and around the excavated sites, while others brought photographs and the recollections of older family members. The findings were fed back to the archaeologists on site helping interpretation of some of the more puzzling remains.
Analysis of the range of work carried out within this extensive programme of archaeology is ongoing and the results will be reported in detail in a monograph and via papers in a number of academic journals. This publication summarises the work of the M74 project and its contribution to our expanding knowledge of the Glasgow conurbation as a cradle of innovation and new industrial processes. It also focuses on the new understandings the project has gained of the evolving human experience of the city, the lives of the ordinary inhabitants and the eighteenth and nineteenth-century expansion of the population of this great centre of industry and enterprise.
General William Roy’s famous Military Survey map of Scotland shows the ancient burgh of Glasgow on the north bank of the Clyde connected by the old Glasgow Bridge to the Gorbals. The Gorbals grew up in the medieval period as a genuine sub urbs – an unofficial settlement outside the control of the burgh. It remained a separate entity until the mid nineteenth century.
The Gorbals retained much of its independence and remained a village of handloom weavers into the nineteenth century. However, at the turn of the nineteenth century there were major changes as the land on both sides of the Gorbals was developed. To the east, the new Glasgow suburb of Hutchesontown grew up, while to the west James Laurie and his brothers John and David built Laurieston, an area of elegant housing, designed to tempt wealthier Glaswegians to live across the river.
If the Lauries had envisaged the growth of an elegant suburbia south of the Clyde, events overtook them; James Laurie eventually went bankrupt. Further south, in Little Govan and Govanhill, traditional estate lands were being taken over by an Englishman, William Dixon, who had arrived in Glasgow from Northumberland in 1771 at the age of eighteen. Alert to the potential of the local abundance of coal and iron ore, he worked his way up from manager of the Little Govan colliery, to lessee until eventually, by 1820, he had gained control of both the colliery and the large surrounding estate that had previously belonged to the Rae family. Dixon also had a sizeable interest in coalfields and ironworks elsewhere in Scotland. His rise to prominence was the catalyst for rapid industrial change in the area of Govanhill.
In the following years, major centres of industrial advance appeared south of the river – not just at Govanhill, where the Dixon family businesses centrally directed development, but also in other areas, for example at Tradeston, where a more haphazard process saw the appearance of a diversity of independent and often small-scale industrial concerns.
The major industries in the Tradeston/Port Eglinton area over the course of the nineteenth century were initially textile production, and then engineering and iron-founding. These industries developed at different speeds and were never concentrated in specific locations to form anything like craft districts. Instead, they spread out opportunistically along what became rapidly expanding systems of both water and railway transport.
The Glasgow, Paisley and Ardrossan Canal was the first canal constructed south of the Clyde and the third canal in Glasgow after the Forth & Clyde and the Monkland. The 12th Earl of Eglinton proposed and partly funded the canal construction project, the idea being that it would connect Glasgow with his family’s harbour 30 miles away on the coast at Ardrossan. The famous engineer Thomas Telford managed the final stages of the design process and work began in 1807. Four years later the section to Johnstone via Paisley opened, but then funding dried up and that was as far as the canal ever went.
The canal proved very popular to begin with and carried large numbers of passengers in narrow horse-drawn barges that held up to 60 people. However, its freight capacity was of greater significance. The canal brought in raw materials and shipped out from Glasgow a wide range of goods. The advertised price for carrying bricks, tiles, iron and slate, stone, dung and earth, for example, was twopence per mile per ton. To ship coal, coke and lime cost threepence per ton. In 1840, a total of 76,000 tons of freight was carried.
However, if the canal was successful in encouraging industry, this only led to the development of further railway systems, which in the longer term meant its own inevitable demise. After the 1840s, with the opening of the Glasgow and Paisley Joint Railway, use of the canal declined dramatically, a classic example of water giving way to steam. In 1869 another rail company, the Glasgow & South Western Railway, bought the now little used and almost derelict waterway, which was eventually drained, back-filled and converted into the base of a section of railway line between 1881 and 1885.
Archaeological test trenches excavated along the canal and its banks in the Port Eglinton Terminus area in 2008 showed us that the canal here was about 1.3m deep and had vertical sides. The construction of the side wall of the canal, capped with neatly squared and dressed stones, suggested that this was part of the wharf, which was used for the loading and unloading of goods. An interesting detail was the use of timber piles, driven into the ground with the wall constructed on top.
We hoped that we would find silt deposits laid down when the canal was functioning surviving beneath its backfill. Analysis of the silts could have provided information on the immediate environment in the nineteenth century, and on levels of industrial pollution for example. Surprisingly, however, no silts survived and it seems that, in order to provide a dependably firm foundation for the railway, the workers infilling the canal had thoroughly dredged it or dug it out before backfilling it with waste from a nearby foundry.
James Anderson’s view of the Port Eglinton canal terminus from the west dating to 1835 attractively depicts its cranes and docking facilities and gives a good impression of the industrial development that had already taken place by this time. Many of the buildings to the south, on the right, had been there from around 1822, since they feature on a plan of that date. On this plan the name of William Dixon appears close to the terminus, seemingly a reference to the industrialist’s direct right of access to terminus facilities via his Pollok and Govan Railway. Just below, to the south, the plan repeats the name of George Forster, indicating his ownership of Falfield Mill.
James Anderson’s drawing also depicts the Falfield mill complex beneath a large smoking chimney. Much of the mill building was still standing in 2007, a rare survival since most of Glasgow’s spinning and weaving mills had already been demolished.
The founding of Falfield cotton mill around 1821 by George Forster, a merchant who had previously lived and had business interests north of the Clyde, would have been directly related to the existence of the Port Eglinton canal terminus and no doubt to the textile mills at Paisley at the other end of the canal. It seems that Forster very probably lived in a large house close to his mill. His servants’ quarters were to the south. No drawings or engravings of the house are known, but on the 1857–1858 Ordnance Survey map there is the suggestion of a grand façade and excavations confirmed that the building had stepped access through the centre of the façade to an elevated primary floor level. Not surprisingly perhaps, it faced to the west and away from his smoking industrial complex. The Ordnance Survey map also shows formal gardens laid out between the house and the mill. The archaeological evidence shows that before the house and mill were constructed the area was unoccupied farmland.
According to the documentary and cartographic sources, at the time of its foundation the mill complex consisted of a spinning mill driven by a large engine at the north end powered by steam from a boiler house on its north side. A second spinning mill was added around 1830 or even later. The early buildings uncovered in excavation largely bear this out.
It was particularly important to gain archaeological evidence of the engine house and boiler room, since the buildings were considerably altered during the twentieth century and their early features were not visible at the time of the historic building recording. The excavations showed evidence of modifications to the boiler house on several occasions during the nineteenth century to accommodate innovations in the boilers and engines used to power the mill.
George Forster died in 1833 and at some point prior to 1840 ownership of the mill passed to G. L. Walker, power-loom cotton manufacturers. In 1844, a man named John Hendry, probably the manager of the mill, lived in the mill house. The first weaving shed was built sometime before 1858.
Excavations identified remains of the weaving sheds, spinning mills, boiler house and engine house as well as details of George Forster’s house.
The Second Edition Ordnance Survey map of 1892–95 shows a number of changes to the mill complex and the surrounding area. The mill had now expanded dramatically, with new larger weaving sheds extending into the area of the formal gardens to the west, though the house itself survived. Information from excavation and the historic building recording work showed that the buildings utilized innovative off-the-peg cast iron components in what we would today call a ‘modular’ construction. Several small buildings stand along the west wall of the weaving sheds and to the south of the house. To the south-west of the mill and within the boundary of the archaeological site are two more buildings, part of St Mungo’s soap works.
The expansion revealed by the Second Edition Ordnance Survey map and borne out in excavation suggests that Walker and Co. invested heavily in their company, increasing production through the introduction of new power loom machinery. They thus managed to cut costs and sustain the mill’s prosperity, though they may have had to shed many of the work force. Ultimately, it was economic change beyond their control, namely the availability of cheap imported cloth from America, which led to the mill’s rapid decline. It may have closed as early as 1901. The principal Mill buildings then housed a succession of different small businesses throughout the twentieth century.
Falfield Mill was one of the earliest industries to spring up close to the Port Eglinton canal terminus. By the middle of the nineteenth century, 30 years after the foundation of the mill, a broader look at the first Ordnance Survey map reveals Tradeston and Port Eglinton in the process of accelerating industrialisation. Some of the major railway systems are in place and labelled industries such as engine works and foundries have appeared where once there were only fields.
B rick works probably represent a continuation of one of the earliest industrial uses of the area – brickmakers would have stripped all usable superficial clays from the fields before the land was turned over to other industries. Through the Ordnance Survey plan there is a meandering line running roughly from south to north a reminder of the region’s more rural past. This represents the former boundary between Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, but its line follows the route of the Kinning Burn, sometimes known as the Kinning House Burn. This had been a major feature of the earlier, agricultural landscape, joining the Clyde at Springfield Quay. During the early nineteenth century, because of urban development south of the Clyde, the once babbling Kinning House Burn turned into an open sewer, so polluted and filled with waste that in 1849 orders were given that it be ‘enclosed’ or channelled through an underground culvert or drain.
‘Westfield Cottage’ and ‘Dundas Cottage’ as shown on the First Edition Ordnance Survey map appear to represent an early nineteenth-century phase of suburbanisation, an extension of what was going on at the same time in Laurieston, the middle classes moving south of the river and seeking to distance themselves from other urban groups to the north. Unfortunately, perhaps, for the owners of these houses, all that happened in the longer term was that, following the building of the Glasgow and Paisley Joint Railway, factories and tenements followed them. In 1857–58 they are on the edge of the industrialisation process, but at some point later in the century these houses were abandoned and demolished, their owners perhaps moving further south to create new suburbs in Pollokshields and beyond.
The archaeological excavations yielded valuable evidence of the technical operation and development of the industries that flourished in the Tradeston area, in engineering and other very different areas of manufacturing from the 1830s until modern times.
Newton, Bennie & Co. established the Caledonia Foundry in 1835 on what was then the south bank of a westwards sweep of the Kinning Burn, facing the genteel villas to the north. Initially the company produced mainly marine engine castings and machine tools for shipyards, but by the 1860s, the firm, now James Bennie & Co., was described in the trade directories as engineers, iron founders, machinists and tool makers. Iron founding stopped in 1867 as they came to concentrate on machine tool manufacture and after a fire at the works in 1879 the company moved elsewhere.
Excavation confirmed the layout of the works, including the moulding shops with the important evidence of different sized casting pits dug into the floors of structures. Archaeological excavation here revealed significant details of aspects of the technical processes employed, especially valuable since there are few documentary records and the contemporary building control plans, where they exist, are very short on particulars.
Alongside the Caledonia Foundry, eventually occupying premises across the road, were the Scotland Street Engine Works. The family firm of McOnie founded the works in 1840 and controlled them until the early twentieth century. Their international reputation was evidently very high and between 1851 and 1876 this modest-seeming works produced 820 steam engines, 1650 sugar mills, 1200 steam boilers, 117 waterwheels and 160 evaporating pans for export. Surviving records show that McOnie shipped machinery to Brazil, Java, Mauritius and other exotic locations in the Americas and Pacific.
On Thursday 8th September 1881 the ‘Scotsman’ noted that the Scotland Street Engine Works had a famous foreign visitor, King Kalakaua of Hawaii. He arrived from London at 9.00 am on the ‘Midland Express’ and was taken around by the eminent Glaswegian Mr. W. Rennie Watson, who also put the King up for the night. The following year three young Hawaiians came to Glasgow as apprentices to train at the McOnie works.
We were aware of the reputation and global spread of McOnie products, but knew little of the nature of their production processes or of the more detailed technologies employed. Excavations at the Scotland Street Engine Works confirmed the layout and constructional sequence, revealing a number of industrial structures and deposits. These included rows of machine bases within the erecting shop, crucibles for brass founding and a boiler house. The range of features and diverse residues have provided evidence of the castings produced. Slag, which came from a cylindrical furnace known as a ‘cupola’ furnace, showed that coke was used in the production of ‘grey’ cast iron indicating that the iron was very fluid when cast, suggesting complex castings were being produced. Copper debris found at the northern end of the courtyard tells us that leaded gunmetal was used to make small castings.
The Kinning Street Engine Works is depicted on the First Edition Ordnance Survey map with its various departments separately labelled. It is not clear when it was established, but the earliest evidence comes from the 1857–58 Glasgow Post Office Directory which lists the firm of Smith, Brothers and Co. at 32 Kinning Street. The directory describes the owners as ‘millwrights and agricultural machine makers, founders’, which suggests a small engineering works that made specialized machinery to order. This is comparable to other concerns that appeared in Glasgow at this time and is typical of the kind of business that often grew out of a traditional family involvement in blacksmithing. In 1861 they were awarded a prize at the ‘Highland Society’s’ Perth Show, which was reported in the ‘Scotsman’, “We understand that the Society’s premium of three sovereigns for the best machine for raising potatoes… has been awarded to Messrs. Smith, Brothers & Co. Kinning Street, Glasgow”. By 1867 this enterprising concern seems to have moved out of the area. Very little archaeological evidence for the Engine Works survived.
The excavations did reveal details of a very different business that occupied the same spot from at least 1883, the Kingston Biscuit Factory. The layout revealed matched both the Second Edition Ordnance Survey map of 1892–95 and the building control plans. Details were uncovered of the interior arrangement, the chronological development and the functioning of the factory. The base of a boiler, a lift base and a multi-chambered industrial oven with associated flues were amongst the original features.
Since biscuits were such a key part of the naval and maritime diet, biscuit making was one of the first food-making processes to be industrialized on a mass scale. Alongside further documentary research, the recorded remains of the Kingston Biscuit factory, with its well preserved structures and alterations revealed by the archaeologists, offers invaluable physical evidence to contribute to future studies of biscuit-making technology.
The last reference to the ‘Kingston Biscuit factory’ is in 1923. Then, between 1924 and 1930, the post office directories list the site as the ‘Kingston Cake Bakery – special K.C.B. high class biscuits and cakes, 58–90 Kinning Street.’ This may indicate a shift in production, perhaps reflecting changes in consumer demand. However, the phrase ‘Ship’s Cake’ doesn’t have quite the same adventurous, salty dog ring to it as the traditional ‘Ship’s Biscuit’.
Across the road from the Kingston Biscuit Factory was Kingston Lime Works, a business founded by Alexander McAra and operating in Kinning Street by the mid 1870s. Limestone is burned in kilns to produce quick-lime, which is an essential ingredient in mortar, cement and in disinfectant, all commodities that the rapidly expanding Glasgow of the late nineteenth century depended upon.
Archaeologists confirmed the layout of the works and fully excavated two of the circular lime kiln bases. The design of the kilns was unusual, since they did not follow the traditional design seen in most contemporary lime kilns, which are normally bulky rectangular structures built into the hillside near the source of the limestone or fuel. It would appear that McAra’s lime kilns were of an innovative design and the archaeological evidence has thus provided valuable new practical information regarding the development of lime production.
The Second Edition Ordnance Survey map of 1892–95 shows the lime works in useful detail, including the layout of four kilns and other structures arranged around a large courtyard area which fronted onto Kinning Street to the west. The lime kilns were built out of stone and brick, circular in plan and with a large opening at the front. Layers of charcoal and broken up limestone were packed inside the kiln and a fire lit, which was allowed to burn for some time. Once it had gone out, the quicklime was raked out through the arched opening. Working in this industry was dangerous for the people operating the kilns, who could easily be overcome by the fumes, as attested by records of an industrial accident at the McAra works in which three staff lost their lives.
A summary look at the map opposite shows that by the end of the nineteenth century every inch of space in the Tradeston and Port Eglinton area was built on. Construction of the Glasgow and South Western Railway had buried the old canal and terminus. Archaeological excavations enabled us to sample these foundries, engine works and other businesses and to excavate and record what was left of the important remains. This revealed the range of urban industries and their development from the early nineteenth into the twentieth century, some flourishing whilst others fell by the wayside. It also demonstrated the close juxtaposition of domestic and food-related industrial sites with heavy chemical based industry. This impression of Tradeston, with its competing individual enterprises and busy, creative human endeavour, contrasts with the rather different set-up not far away across Eglinton Street and Pollokshaws Road, next to Cathcart Road, the domain of the Dixon family.
On the death of the first William Dixon in 1822, his two sons, John and William Jnr. inherited the Calder Ironworks in Coatbridge and the colliery and properties in Govanhill, the largest single coal and iron concern in Scotland. John had no liking for industry and quickly sold his share in the family businesses to his younger brother, who turned out to be as successful, and ruthless, as his father.
William Dixon Jnr. needed very little sleep and often appeared at the pithead of the Govanhill colliery at six in the morning, ready to descend to the bottom of the mine to check how his workers and his machinery were performing. By 10.00 am, he would be in the accounts office working on new plans for the business and in the afternoon he might turn his mind to how he could outdo his competitors. Determined and stubborn, he was famously fond of litigation and spent vast sums of money on lawyers to take on rival industrialists, canal companies and other innovators such as the inventor J. B. Neilson who survived repeated attempts by Dixon to challenge his patent for the hot blast furnace process. Dixon even took his own wife through the courts.
In 1820 William Dixon Jnr. married Elizabeth Strang, sister of J. D. Strang, another Glasgow notable and a friend and associate of Dixon. The marriage did not last and, in truth, we do not know precisely why. William seems to have initiated the divorce proceedings, though it could not have been easy for Elizabeth as the wife of a combative workaholic like Dixon.
The Scottish National Archives holds copies of more than 160 letters accumulated by Elizabeth between 1820 and 1835. During the course of their legal separation, these were used as evidence in a petition to increase her living allowance. Many are intimate and sad; some mention the premature death of their children. The later ones are written from Rothesay after Elizabeth had left the Govanhill family home of Gallowknowe. Most are from Elizabeth to members of her own family, sometimes to her sisters-in-law who display great sympathy at her plight and tend to take Elizabeth’s side against her husband. Very few are from William himself, though that is perhaps to be expected, and these are mostly short, formally solicitous notes to ‘My dear wee wify’ and signed ‘your affectionate Wm. Dixon’.
The picture Elizabeth’s letters paint is of an unhappy, isolated woman who blames herself for the breakdown of her marriage, however that came about, and who is trying to come to terms with being no longer Mrs. Dixon, a woman of substance in Glasgow society.
Letters written to her brother in August 1829, just before leaving the family home (right), and from Rothesay later in the month (below) illustrate her state of mind.
It is not clear whether he ever did visit her again, but we do know that William and Elizabeth were divorced and that he later married for a second time, to the widow of James Stuart Esq. of Edinburgh. However, it was Elizabeth who bore the two last children of the direct Dixon line – a daughter only known as Miss Dixon, who died unmarried, and a son, William S. Dixon, who took over the business when his father died in 1859. This William Dixon however was a very different man, brought up to enjoy a leisurely life-style. He and his wife spent much of their time in either London or the South of France and even before he died without any heirs in 1880, most of the Dixon family estates and businesses had been formed into a private limited company controlled by managers and trustees.
In 1837 William Dixon Jnr. founded the Govan Iron Works on Cathcart Road next to the Govan colliery. It was the first such works to be set up in Glasgow. By the late nineteenth century, 1,000 people were working here and production continued on this site until the final takeover and closure of the Dixon businesses in the late 1950s.
There were numerous railway lines on the Dixon site. Some were for the movement of coal to customers, some for the transport of both raw materials and finished products and some connected other parts of the Iron Works with the Foundry. Next to the Iron Works were parallel groups of rectangular buildings named on later plans as the ‘Lower English Buildings’, houses provided by the Dixon business for some of their employees. Such an integrated work and living arrangement for the site would have reduced the need for workers to go ‘off site’ and minimised the time spent travelling between work and home. The rest of the Dixon employees would have lived in the streets off Cathcart Road, in other blocks of company housing on Alexander Row and Urries Row, and as far away as Crosshill.
So why did Dixon’s build company housing? The treatment of his workers, according to legal documents and newspaper archives, does not suggest he was particularly concerned with their welfare. The answer may lie in part in the fact that at times Dixon brought in experienced workers from other parts of the country. They would have needed housing at a time when Glasgow suffered from chronic overcrowding and lacked sufficient good quality homes. Being able to offer reasonable accommodation would have made it easier for Dixon to attract the skilled labour he needed. It would potentially also have offered safety to strike breakers if he accommodated them here at times of industrial unrest.
By the 1830s, a complex of structures housed a variety of industrial processes. The functions of the foundry buildings, such as the ‘Moulding Shop’, ‘Boiler Shop’, and ‘Engine House’ were noted on the First Edition Ordnance Survey map. As the M74 excavations progressed, we found that there was a good fit between the excavated structural remains and the historic maps.
Above all, excavation of the Foundry has revealed information about specific industrial processes particularly the use of fuel and exhaust gases. A complex system of flues between buildings moved the gases around the site effectively recycling them, an innovative idea for the time and one with almost ‘green’ credentials.
Although the complex is termed a foundry, most of the excavated part of the site was actually associated with processes other than casting. The fitting shop would have been principally involved with the cold finishing of castings, particularly turning and grinding, whilst the boiler shop and smithy were principally involved with the hot working of iron.
The Second Edition Ordnance Survey plan of 1892–94 reveals that major changes had taken place at the Govan works, with the Foundry demolished and many of the iron works buildings to the north no longer in existence. From this time on, the focus of the works seems to have been on the blast furnaces, which would still have produced ‘pig iron’ and it was their operation, spewing out smoke and fire round the clock, which gave the works its memorable twentieth-century nickname of Dixon’s Blazes.
The excavations revealed the remains of the Lower English Buildings, initially built in the 1830s or 1840s, at or around the same time as the rest of the Govan Iron Works complex was first constructed. We are still unsure how or why the Lower English Buildings got their name, but this could relate to a time when English workers (or at least non-Scottish workers), who may have been provided with this special on-site accommodation were employed here.
Christina Wilson, nee McNair, was born at 24 Lower English Buildings, in 1918. She lived there until the 1930s, the youngest of a family of twelve. Interviewed for the oral history part of the M74 project, her vivid reminiscences and family photographs provide a unique insight into what it was like to live here at that time and provide additional information, which complements the excavations and clarifies some crucial issues. The Lower English Buildings were single storey, each of two main rooms divided up internally, with ‘box beds’. The excavations revealed that a number of outbuildings stood around the main group of houses. Mrs. Wilson explained that these outbuildings were used for a range of purposes, including as stables, a smithy and surprisingly a ‘kippering store’ where residents would smoke their own fish, bought off travelling fishmongers. Mrs. Wilson’s father, with his vegetable garden, chickens and pigeons, was perhaps more enterprising than most.
Christina Wilson’s testimony proved very useful, and from the archeological evidence, we were able to provide a few surprises for Mrs. Wilson, including finding an original piece of 80-year-old linoleum from the buried floor of what had once been the family’s kitchen. However, we have seriously to consider whether the passing of the years might perhaps have softened Mrs. Wilson’s memories of her upbringing. Her niece, Jane Sutherland, remembered her aunt once saying that she had to ‘fight to get washed’ in the morning and that ‘when everybody was in the house sometimes we’d have to sleep across the bed’. Away from the immediate domestic context of the Lower English Buildings, what had life been like for those employed in the Iron Works?
In January 1891 ‘Commercial Glasgow’, a publication financed by Glasgow businessmen, proudly trumpeted the success of the Dixon enterprise:
“The trading and manufacturing operations of the firm of WILLIAM DIXON (LIMITED) have endowed many a Scottish port and burgh with an international celebrity in the commercial world...
The Govan Iron Works ... magnificent hive of busy industrial activity ... it is hardly necessary to remark that the equipment here is of the completest description. There are at the Govan Iron Works six furnaces, all of which are, at the present moment, in blast. Formerly these furnaces and the works generally consumed only the coal brought from the Company’s extensive sources of supply in the neighbourhood, but within the past few years the use of gas has been adopted with great success, and a short time ago the Company, at an enormous expense, completed the erection of a perfect equipment for the production of ammonia out of what had previously been deemed waste material.
An immense staff of employees is engaged in the various departments of the Company’s enterprise and it is gratifying to record the prevalence of those cordial relationships between employers and employed which emphatically declare the liberality and consideration extended by great capitalists to a vast body of arduous toilers.”
There are few surviving records to suggest what working conditions in the Dixons’ pits and foundries were really like for the ‘arduous toilers’ but the Govan works was no benevolent model industrial village, like Robert Owen’s New Lanark, and the Dixons never attempted to project themselves, by word or deed, as high minded, ‘improving’ employers. Illustrations and photographs that survive from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century suggest dangerous levels of local environmental pollution. A pall of smoke from belching chimneys hung above the site and it was the din and the infernal flames that leapt high into the atmosphere that gave the works the memorable local name of ‘Dixon’s Blazes’.
We do know that there were many accidents and incidents, which by the end of the nineteenth century had, by law, to be logged. Some were relatively minor, but others were horrific. Records describe men crushed by runaway wagons or caught up in machinery, losing an arm or a leg. A frequent contributory factor in these kinds of accidents was a lack of appropriate training for the people involved, as well as the absence of any adequate monitoring of ongoing operations. In the very same year, 1891, that the company’s ‘liberality and consideration’ towards its employers was lauded by Commercial Glasgow, there was a very serious and tragic accident.
In February there had been a strike of blast-furnace men over working hours and pay. As a result the furnaces had been shut down and as they were re-lit disaster struck, as reported by the ‘Scotsman’.
“Yesterday forenoon, by an explosion which occurred at the ironworks of Messrs William Dixon (Limited), Cathcart Road, Glasgow, five men lost their lives and great damage was done to property.
... on the strike terminating a week ago, the works of Messrs Dixon again began to assume their former state of activity. There is always a certain danger attached to the relighting of furnaces, but this was proceeding satisfactorily ... when the explosion took place, entirely shattering one of the cylinder condensers or scrubbers ... These chemical condensers are four in number, and are grouped together in a position to the north-east of the blast furnaces ...
Everything was prepared yesterday for the re-starting of the chemical apparatus, and a final examination was being made of the four condensers ... when about eleven o'clock a terrific explosion occurred in No 4 scrubber. When the explosion took place, a huge volume of flame rose high in the air above the cylinders. The force of the explosion completely shattered the condenser, huge pieces of thick sheet iron having been thrown all over the works ... great damage being done also to the houses in the surrounding district.
Immediately after the occurrence the Glasgow Fire Brigade was called out, and it arrived under the charge of Captain Paterson and assisted in the rescue work.
The rescue party had not laboured long before a lad named John Russell (18), employed as a labourer in the yard, was extricated from amongst the wreckage ... his collar bone was broken and he had been badly cut about the head, while his feet were also injured. He was removed to the Victoria Infirmary, having sufficient strength, as he was lifted into the wagon to make the request “Don't tell mother’, to those around.
As the bodies of the men found were taken out they were conveyed to a store house fitted up as a temporary mortuary, and afterwards removed to the houses of the deceased. The following is a list of the dead:-
John S. Mullen (30), manager, married, residing at Dixon Avenue, Crosshill
Robert Guthrie, engineer (body not recovered)
Robert McMillan (30) labourer, married, residing at Lower English Buildings, Cathcart Road
Thomas Guthrie (35), foreman engineer, unmarried, residing at 31 Cathcart Road
Charles Dornen (43), engine fitter, married, residing in Hospital Street”.
Participants in the oral history aspect of the project provided compelling testimony from as late as the 1950s, just before the Works finally closed. By this time it was hard to maintain the machinery, industrial accidents and mishaps were still common, and the work remained unremittingly hard. Gerald Fisher’s father had a hairdressing business nearby and many of his customers worked at Dixon’s Blazes:
“They were more or less crippled working there… the hot furnaces and then coming out into the cold… all sorts of rheumatism and what have you. Big heavy men, furnace men, steel workers, standing crippled at the corner”
During World War II, early in 1942, the Home Guard requisitioned the now abandoned houses of the Lower English Buildings, for use as the ‘Glasgow Area Town Fighting School’, under the command of Chief Instructor Captain J. R. H. Thouron. Despite the availability of large areas of bomb-damaged properties in many British cities, there seems to have been a considerable shortage of suitable training areas for street fighting. Indeed following the Clydebank Blitz of 1941, an area of bombed out streets in the town was requisitioned in order to allow regular forces to be trained in urban warfare. Photographs taken on the 3rd of July 1942, during a staff inspection visit by Major-General Johnson, show that some of the structures of the new Fighting School had acquired a second storey. Presumably, this was to make them more realistic and useful for practicing house-to-house combat.
Home Guard tactics changed over time and the doctrine of so-called ‘static defence’ that had been the orthodoxy was replaced by ‘offensive defence’ which used more mobile battle platoons. The introduction of a new ‘Battle Drill’ led to the establishment of a number of ‘Battle Schools’ at Area (later renamed District) and Sub-Area (Sub-District) level in the first few months of 1943. It appears that these schools (also known as ‘Battle Inoculation Schools’) gradually superseded the majority of the Town Fighting Schools. This led to the eventual closure of the Glasgow Area Town Fighting School in 1944. Indeed, by December 1944 the Glasgow Home Guard battalions, in common with those elsewhere in the UK, had ceased to exist. After this, the Lower English Buildings remained derelict until they were demolished in the 1960s .
The buried remains of the Caledonian Pottery at Rutherglen were on the route of the M74 construction. Normally the preference would be to preserve the site under the new road but here it was felt that the risk of damage to the important archaeology was too great. The resulting excavations proved invaluable, not only in enhancing our understanding of how pottery was produced here but also in helping to explain how and why the production process changed dramatically during the life of the works, before finally ceasing altogether.
Like so many of Glasgow’s great nineteenth-century industries, the Caledonian pottery was a family concern that spanned generations. In a curious parallel with the Dixon dynasty, it also involved a father, son and grandson all called William, though in this case they bore the solid Scottish surname of Murray. The family originally came from Paisley where they were probably involved in the textile industry.
The firm had initially established a factory in 1800 at Garngadhill, the area now called Royston, in north Glasgow. Many of the original workforce came from the great centres of English pottery production in Staffordshire and they made local interpretations of the kind of pottery produced by factories such as Rockingham and Wedgwood. In 1826 the first William Murray and his sons William and Alex bought into the company and began the long family association. They started a clay tobacco pipe factory in 1835 and increased the production of more utilitarian stoneware items - jars, bottles and a whole variety of containers for the growing number of commercial commodities that Glasgow was now producing, such as whisky, soap and tobacco. William Fullarton Murray Jnr. took over from his father in partnership with James Cooper and they traded as Murray & Cooper until 1850, acquiring a reputation as progressive employers.
Air pollution from an adjoining iron works at Garngadhill caused discoloration and damage to the glazes used by the pottery and, in 1872, Murray agreed to sell the site to their polluting neighbours. They then gradually moved personnel and as much equipment as they could to what two years later became a brand new, purpose-built pottery. They constructed the new works on what had been an empty field on the edge of Rutherglen, bought from a sugar refiner from Greenock called Francis Robertson Reid. To fund the construction of the new pottery Murray and McIntyre took out a complex series of loans and mortgages. Financial management was not Murray’s strongest suit and, in the long term, increasing debt would prove a serious problem, but in the early days the pottery proved a great success.
Archaeological excavation not only revealed the bases of the kilns and the elaborate systems of flues, but also uncovered the moulding and drying rooms, the locations where clay was prepared, mixed and refined, some deposits of unused clay as well as the vast dumps of pottery ‘wasters’ and production debris to the east of the works.
These wasters were often the result of accidents or misfirings and also included the remains of saggars, or the vessels used to hold unfired pottery, moulds and other kinds of ephemeral equipment, as well as unsold stock.
Analysis of the stratigraphy (the superimposition of layers of dumped material) revealed that it had been laid down over time and in discrete and regular tipping episodes that seemed to correspond to successive firings of very similar kinds of pottery. This tipping was on an industrial scale. A narrow-gauge wagonway was laid to the end of the waste mound with wagons tipping waste at the end of the line and with rails being added to as material mounded up. For the M74 archaeological project, this proved of considerable assistance in the relative dating of different kinds of ceramics, suggesting, for example, that as fashions amongst consumers changed the product range varied accordingly.
Through archaeological excavation, we have been able to extend the range of known products enormously as well as advancing our knowledge of aspects of the production process . Sales of Caledonian pottery extended beyond the home market. Rutherglen teapots, for example, travelled widely abroad, especially to English-speaking and tea-drinking countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the potteries were exporting other products such as beer bottles, ink pots and elaborate ceramic spirit barrels throughout the British Empire and to other parts of the world including Cuba, Chile, Brazil and India, via agencies set up in Glasgow, London and Dublin.
William Fullarton Murray was without doubt a considerable innovator for his day. In the 1870s he was already devising and patenting devices such as machines that would make complex vessel shapes or secure corks in bottles by ingenious variations in the shape of the rim. He filed three separate patents for the design of teapots. In the late 1880s, with the pottery enjoying considerable success, he turned his mind to bigger things, to what he termed ‘continuously gas-fired kilns’. He secured financial backing for the innovation from his Irish agent John McIntyre and was granted a patent in 1892. The following year he read a paper on the subject to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, which was subsequently published.
The main incentive for the innovation was to increase fuel efficiency. Instead of firing kilns separately by burning coal in furnaces, Murray came up with a system of four connected kilns heated by coal gas. After one kiln had fired its consignment of pottery flues transferred the hot air to the second kiln, where the temperature would then be concentrated and another firing carried out, before the heat was transferred by a series of flues to the next kiln and so on.
By the end of 1892 Murray and McIntyre had formed a new venture: the ‘Murray and McIntyre Patent Gas Kiln Company Ltd’. The company installed new kilns, at considerable cost, and issued shares. However, the new design received neither the interest nor the financial backing that it needed to convert the whole works. By 1895, a dip in the overall market and fierce new competition saw the Caledonian Pottery in considerable financial trouble. Though the revolutionary new kiln technology seems to have been way ahead of its time, it probably contributed to Caledonian’s downfall. McIntyre, in a recently discovered letter, admits that the new company never started full production. He and Murray always seem to have had problems of cash flow and give the impression of being permanently up against it.
By 1897 the company went into liquidation and William Murray may well have been hit hard financially himself. He left the company that year and the 1901 Census records show that Murray was a ‘retired potter’ living modestly with his wife, mother-in-law and one servant on a farm near Kilwinning in Ayrshire.
The archaeological evidence has added significantly to this story by demonstrating that over the short period the gas fired kilns were functioning the technology was constantly being changed, with repeated modifications to the original design. In addition, the apparently ideal site location contributed to the problems faced, since high levels of groundwater appear to have resulted in frequent flooding of the subterranean flues.
The ‘knight in shining armour’ that eventually came to the company’s rescue was the Liverpool jam-making business of W. P. Hartley, who already bought many of the ceramic containers for their products from other potteries in Glasgow. Making their own pots seemed to make sound financial sense and Hartley’s headed up a consortium that was to run the pottery using the old coal-fired technology. They produced many jam jars as well as the traditional range of wares until the final closure of the works in 1929.
One significant result of the M74 excavations concerns the strength and durability of the ceramic building material encountered, in particular the industrial bricks used in the construction of kilns and furnaces, which had to withstand extremely high temperatures. Scottish industrial bricks had a first-rate, worldwide reputation during the nineteenth century and were considered much superior to those made by their competitors. They were so highly thought of that they were exported considerable distances to countries such as Russia, India and Spain and exhibited at trade fairs in Australia, Chile and France.
The high aluminium content of Scottish industrial bricks enabled them to withstand higher temperatures than those produced elsewhere, which meant they could remain in use for longer periods before they needed to be replaced. The clay that formed the raw material for this type of brick occurred alongside coal seams or coal measures and was readily available in the Glasgow environs.
Study of the excavated M74 materials involved detailed recording of manufacturers’ marks and the use of thin-section methods and the latest analytical technology (inductively-coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry) to analyse the chemical composition and mineral structure of different bricks. It confirmed Thomas Thomson’s findings that the Scottish material had a significantly higher aluminium content than contemporary English bricks.
However, the story is even more complex and interesting. Some of the bricks known to have been destined for export had marks that identified them as coming from the most popular Scottish manufacturers. Some of these in fact had relatively low aluminium levels. What this suggests is that some producers were cashing in on the reputation of Scottish bricks by using cheaper clay from inferior seams, with lower levels of aluminium and often raised proportions of iron. They seem to have thought that the more distant the destination of their product, the less likelihood of the customer turning up to complain and ask for his money back. This thinking was not limited to Scottish producers, as demonstrated by the fact that industrial bricks made by a German factory have been found in Russia with fake Scottish makers’ marks.
This very revealing study may well have widespread future application as it shows that this kind of in-depth analysis can throw up results, which have major implications for our understanding of manufacturing history.
Investigations along the M74 project corridor encountered examples of many of the different kinds of houses built in this part of Glasgow over the course of the nineteenth century. These ranged from the grand Neo-Classical mansion belonging to the owner of Falfield Mill and the genteel villas of the early nineteenth-century middle class inhabitants of Tradeston to the very basic, single storey Lower English Buildings, company housing provided by the Dixons for valued members of their labour force.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the sheer speed of industrialisation and the growth of Glasgow’s population from around 147,000 in 1821 to nearly 500,000 in 1850, demanded high rise, high density housing to make the best use of increasingly limited space. The bulk of the population increase was made up of workers in new factories and their families. The answer to the housing crisis was the classic Glaswegian form of industrial era domestic architecture, the tenement. The results of excavation, combined with use of successive Ordnance Survey maps, documentary sources such as newspapers and Glasgow trade directories combined with the memories of informants interviewed as part of the oral history programme, offered new evidence of the crowded, bleak, uncertain and often tough nature of typical tenement life.
The majority of later nineteenth-century tenements were four-storey high blocks of flats, accessed from landings off a common staircase. These were often built side by side forming a continuous street frontage. There could be two, three, or more families on each landing with each flat having between one and five rooms. An average of five people shared each room, and families commonly had less than ten square metres of floor space. This meant very little room for any possessions. Furniture used by day was often converted into sleeping accommodation by night, and recessed or ‘box beds’ would be used, often with mattresses stored beneath, which could be pulled out at night time. Some industrial workers attempted to solve the problem of overcrowding by ‘sharing’ their beds - using them in the same manner in which they worked, in shifts.
Depending on a family’s individual circumstances, many tenants would take in lodgers to help pay the rent. The burden of organising the lives of large families would almost invariably fall upon the central figures in tenement life, women. Men, in search of their own private space after work, would often head out to the local pub. By the 1890s, there were bars on each of the four corners of the tenement blocks around MacKinlay Street – the Devon Bar, the Mill Inn, the Glen and the Gordon. By contrast, a degree of peace and privacy might have been found in church, and here there was also a choice, the Abbotsford Parish Church (of the Church of Scotland), on the corner of Devon and MacKinlay Streets, or the United Presbyterian Church 200 yards away at the other end of MacKinlay Street.
Behind the tenement blocks were the interior areas of back courts. They were a natural place to hang out the washing and for children to play, where parents or older siblings could keep an eye on them. The back courts of the excavated areas of the tenements investigated can be clearly seen on the Second Edition Ordnance Survey map to the rear of the tenement buildings. In more run-down or truly slum blocks of flats it is images of the back courts, with children running about barefoot amongst the outside toilets and accumulated waste, that have given tenements their reputation for poverty and squalor. Undoubtedly there were tenements like this, though here, at least by the end of the nineteenth century, the impression is a different one - of a busy and enterprising back court environment.
The archaeological excavations encountered the remains of a number of outbuildings, stores and workshops that were functioning here by this time. Documentary research has added more detail. Lanes from both Devon Street and the Pollokshaws Road led into what became small-scale industrial yards, which housed a number of businesses. There was a cooperage, where wooden barrels and casks were made, in the back court area between MacKinlay Street and Pollokshaws Road, owned by Mrs. Alice Orr and George W. Orr and Co. at the beginning of the twentieth century. Here we found a sunken cobbled courtyard, some three metres below street level. There were also stables and the premises of D. Currie and Co., coal merchants. These mini industries, all of which moved their products around by horse and cart, added to the lively and pungent atmosphere of the tenement block. Dust from the coal merchants, along with smoke from thousands of coal fires used by individual families for heating and cooking, would have contributed even more to the already high levels of local environmental pollution.
During the course of the nineteenth century, the diet of the Glaswegian industrial working family improved only slowly. Bread and potatoes were the main staples and as late as the middle of the century green vegetables were still rarely eaten. Apart from bacon, meat was scarce. From the 1880s jam and margarine were increasingly consumed, along with growing quantities of tea, often brewed in what we can look back on now as a minor symbol of local identity – a ‘Ru’glen Broon’ teapot. The deficiencies of the diet and cramped living conditions contributed significantly to ill health and the spread of communicable diseases. It didn’t help that the communal usage of back courts, which frequently lacked proper drainage and conveniences, resulted in the accumulation of considerable quantities of domestic midden material and sewage.
In the 1830s Glasgow was considered the least healthy city in Britain in which to live. Epidemics over the ensuing decades, including frequent outbreaks of cholera and typhus, contributed to the city maintaining its unfortunate reputation. In 1841 the average life expectancy of a Glaswegian man was 37 years and that of a woman, 39. The young tended to succumb to infectious diseases such as smallpox, whooping cough and scarlet fever whereas adults died of illnesses associated with the respiratory system: tuberculosis, bronchitis and pneumonia. Reduced sunlight within closely-packed housing contributed to a high incidence of rickets.
Throughout the 1800s there was a general civic determination to improve living conditions. Queen Victoria opened the Loch Katrine waterworks in October 1859 and by 1865 a legal requirement was introduced on proprietors to provide a water supply to the tenements they owned. The 1862 General Police and Improvement Act (Scotland) required, ‘wherever practicable’ for owners to provide water closets. This commonly resulted in the provision of a communal toilet on the stair landings of tenement buildings. Such changes were instituted at the same time as the City Improvement Trust started its campaign to redevelop the ramshackle, overcrowded heart of the Gorbals, much of which still dated back to the seventeenth century. Finally, at the end of the century, the Building Regulation Act of 1889 made the provision of a water supply and mains drainage mandatory.
The archaeological excavations at the South Laurieston tenements found signs of improvements, of variable quality in the form of piped water and gradual modifications to systems of sanitation.
Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson’s imposing series of tenements known as Queen’s Park Terrace stood on the east side of Eglinton Street (numbers 355–429). Originally built between 1856 and 1860 and designed by Glasgow’s, and indeed Scotland’s, most prolific and accomplished nineteenth-century architect, its demolition in 1980 is now much lamented. After his death in 1875, the bulk of his personal and business papers were lost, so very little documentary information about Queen’s Park Terrace survives.
In common with many Glasgow tenements, those at Queen’s Park Terrace were originally aimed at relatively wealthy people, despite the frequent misapprehension that tenements were exclusively for the industrial working class. Thomson designed much of the interior of the flats, including classical plasterwork that survived until demolition. According to those interviewed by the oral history programme who had once lived here, the rooms had carved wooden doors and ‘beautiful’ fireplaces. Over time it appears that flats were divided up into much smaller rooms and catered for larger numbers of less well-off tenants.
During the excavations details of the building’s foundations were discovered. It was evident that much of the back wall of Queen’s Park Terrace had been built on highly unstable landfill, no great compliment to Thomson’s builders. Some have defended the demolition in 1980 because the block was too precarious to be worth saving in the long term.
There once stood a pair of two-storey terraced cottages known as Rosehill, facing onto the Pollokshaws Road, numbered 164 and 160 in the 1950s street plans. The excavations discovered a good deal about their unusual history. The cottages date from around 1820 to 1840, when there was still little in this area apart from suburban villas.
By the time the Second Edition Ordnance Survey map was produced, in 1892–95, they were completely surrounded by tenements, though there was still a large shared yard to the rear and the staircases remain visible. However, having started out as relatively spacious cottages for the middle classes, they were modified in the early twentieth century to become much smaller, two-room flats for less well-off families.
The 1913–14 Glasgow Valuation Roll says that both cottages were owned by a Mrs. Jessie Donald and let out to a number of different people. A few years later Jack Russell and his wife Alice, moved into a flat on the ground floor. Alice’s parents and siblings moved in on the first floor. We know about this in some detail because Jack Russell’s grand-daughter Stephanie was one of those interviewed for the oral history programme. She told the story of her father James Russell, who had himself kept an account of his upbringing. She also had some evocative photographs that illustrate something of the family history. Alice Grant married Jack Russell in 1912.Jack was a tram driver and, very conveniently, his normal route took him down Pollokshaws Road and past their house. Occasionally he would pick up his lunch as he went by. He would then carry on to Eglinton Toll, where Pollokshaws Road and Eglinton Street meet.
Stephanie described some of the incidents and features of her father’s childhood. He told her of the cooperage in the back court, the one owned by the Orr family, and of how he and his brothers would play there and build forts out of the barrels. One day he climbed up onto a milk cart and the horse ran off with him still in the cart. On another occasion he shinned up the front of the cottage and found an old sign saying ‘Rosehill’, which may have been there for almost a century. He said that when the children were small they slept in a ‘hurly’ bed, a drawer full of straw that was pulled out from under their parents’ bed. They were lucky and proud to have an indoor toilet, but they still went through the old routine of the family scrub in a tin bath once a week.
When they were older, they had musical gatherings, since many of them seem to have been talented, self-taught musicians. They were an unusual family. James Russell trained as a watchmaker and then, during the Second World War, he went to London and worked on instruments for aeroplanes. They were brought up as Catholics and James was an altar boy when he was young, though later on he apparently chose Darwin ahead of religion and joined the Communist Party. This part of Glasgow had a reputation for political radicalism and in 1918 Russia’s Bolshevik government appointed John MacLean (1879–1923), a man from the Gorbals, as Consul to Scotland.
James Russell continued to live in London until his death in 1992. The family were back in Glasgow in the early 1980s for a wedding and returned to Pollokshaws Road to see where he had grown up. But by then, Rosehill had been demolished and the only recognisable features were the traces of the cobbled alleyway leading down to the cooperage where he had played as a boy.
Something of the flavour of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Laurieston can be discovered in the pages of contemporary newspapers such as the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman. The most frequent references concern properties to let, the deaths of old people and young children as well as a number of criminal prosecutions and bankruptcies, such as that of John Henderson, Contractor of 180 Pollokshaws in 1875 and James Kerr, potato merchant, of 146 Pollokshaws Road in 1886. In 1888 Alexander Dykes, dairyman and horse trader of 70 Mackinlay Street was arrested for trying to avoid a warrant issued to him following bankruptcy. James Riddel of 425 Eglinton Street was apparently a private detective who went bankrupt in 1890.
Where the deaths of adult men are reported these were often the result of industrial accidents: Patrick Devlin of 212 Pollokshaws Road, fell into a Brewers vat on the 16th of September 1889, and Samuel Wallace of 214 Pollokshaws Road died in 1889 from a fall while emptying hutches of coal into an engine tender.
There are many accounts concerning the evils of drink. Most are similar to the predicament of Elizabeth McLennan of 425 Eglinton Street who was in court in 1900 seeking to divorce her husband who ill-treated her when drunk and went off with other women. More unusual is the case of Mr. Broadfoot of 29 Devon Street who in 1881, in seeking to divorce his wife, stated that soon after they married she began to be unfaithful and took to drink, systematically selling the family furniture for money to buy alcohol.
The papers also report criminal activities. In April 1923 Frederick Farrell from 136 Pollokshaws Road was arrested with two accomplices for the armed robbery of the Corporation Sewage Department and stealing a quantity of explosives (112 sticks of gelignite and an amount of fuse wire).
On the 14th of January 1944, four young men armed with revolvers attempted to rob Alex Munro Ltd, a moneylender of 202 Pollokshaws Road. By dashing into his office, locking the door and phoning the police the moneylender was able to thwart the raiders, who fled. They were subsequently arrested by a policeman who managed to take a gun from the pocket of one of the thieves and then escorted all four to the local police station.
T he oral history programme involved interviewing numerous people who had memories of life in the tenements between Eglinton Street and Pollokshaws Road. Their accounts spanned the 1930s through to the demolition of most of the buildings in the 1970s, which enabled them to describe the changes from gas to electric lighting and from cold to hot running water, though communal toilet facilities remained the norm.
Until the 1960s most regarded basic living standards in the South Laurieston flats as acceptable and compared where they had lived favourably with the standard of tenements in other parts of the Gorbals:
“On the other (eastern) side of Pollokshaws Road, that was where the labourers all stayed and their housing was much poorer”. Charles McLaughlin, 18th February 2008.
Much has been written about the drunkenness, violence and crime, as well as the poverty of tenement life in the Gorbals area. Interviewees were keen to counter that easy impression. The poverty may have been real enough, but they never witnessed much violence or gang-land activity, though it has to be said that these are the recollections of people who were children at the time. Most talked of the sense of close-knit community generated by tenement living and of the great efforts to maintain cleanliness, the care taken to make the environment as acceptable as possible. Each individual tenement was a natural co-operative society where everyone pulled together in the face of considerable hardship.
In 1963 Dr. Ronald Douglas succeeded his father in his general practice in Queen’s Park Terrace, Eglinton Street in the Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson block, above a Chemist’s shop. Surgeries were held twice a day for an hour, between eleven-thirty and twelve-thirty in the morning and five-thirty to six-thirty in the evening. The rest of the time the partners held surgeries at their own homes or were out on call. In the 1960s the surgery looked after more than five thousand patients, split between three doctors. Most patients lived in the nearby tenements.
Talking about those giving birth, Dr. Douglas recalled:
“Home maternity was the norm. If the pregnancy was normal they were expected to have their baby at home. They might be admitted because beds were short - they might be admitted for their first delivery... But if that was okay, unless there was some obvious medical risk, they were expected to have their baby at home….. The houses were basically clean but very small by modern standards, the kind of typical room and kitchen with an outside toilet in many cases, shared on the landing. And the recessed bed which was quite an interesting place to try and deliver a baby. You were poking around in the semi-darkness trying to see what was going on at the back of the bed, with the iron stove boiling up kettles of water and the jawbox, the sink, with cold water. There was no hot running water so water had to be boiled, and oftentimes you would be offered a cup of tea”.
In the twentieth century, the sense of community engendered by tenement life came to embrace other ethnic groups who settled in the area, carrying on the tradition of integration and diversity that had begun in the early nineteenth century with the receipt of immigrants from the rest of Scotland and from Ireland. The Gorbals has always been a welcoming place for new arrivals. In 1885 half the children in the Gorbals primary school were Jewish, their families having recently fled persecution in eastern Europe. In more recent times it became the principal area of settlement for Asian immigrants to Scotland. Disha Parkash, who used to live in Devon Street, remembered her schooldays at the Gorbals Primary School in the 1960s:
‘the teachers were all very sympathetic because at that time there was an influx of immigrants and a lot of people could not speak English. Muslim children, ourselves, a lot of families coming from India. Also at that time I remember them having Asian teachers, at least one in every school, who used to take us aside and give us support in English. Some children got help with their arithmetic, some got help with other things but we got help in learning how to speak English’.
After the Second World War tenements were widely seen as symbolic of the social problems faced by the industrial working class. It is clear enough that by this time many were poorly run and neglected. Tenement had become synonymous with slum and it is not surprising that the government energetically pursued campaigns of slum clearance. However, since the 1970s and the realisation that what was built in their place was often no better, there has been a re-evaluation and more nuanced consideration of how to use this impressive architectural legacy. With the introduction of ‘Housing Action Areas’ in 1973, housing associations began to play a significant role in tenement rehabilitation and conversion for modern living.
When elements of an urban landscape are abandoned and fall into decay, much familiar awareness of the way people used to live and work in that environment goes unrecorded, simply because such knowledge seemed commonplace and was not valued, until too late. Information is lost with the death of the last people to inhabit a particular part of the old fabric of a changing city. It is perhaps comparable to the loss sometimes felt at the passing of a close relative – not simply the sad fact of their death, but the regret that there never seemed time to talk to them about interesting facets of their lives or to go through their collection of old photographs, scribble a few notes and put names to the faces. All that is left is a series of images without context, a fragmentary past.
The instigators of the M74 project were determined that they should not leave the recent past of this important section of industrial Glasgow in disconnected pieces. Given the opportunity offered by the completion of the motorway there was a chance for archaeology to play its part in an interdisciplinary project alongside standing building recording, documentary research and oral history. It was this kind of holistic approach which would further understanding of the technological, environmental and social effects of industrialisation.
The achievements of this project have borne out the hopes of its creators. Archaeological investigation has told us many things. Firstly, and most prosaically, it has answered practical questions to do with the industrial history of Glasgow and notable Scottish innovations, for which the documentary record was often lacking. For example, the Scotland Street Engine works of the McOnie company was known to have exported machinery far and wide, but until the M74 excavations we had little idea of how technically advanced they were for the time, which justifies their having received visits from foreign royalty. From the Glasgow Post Office directories, we knew of the Kingston Lime Works and the name of the owner, Alex McAra, but little more than that until excavation demonstrated the unusual design of their kilns, which clearly contributed to the success of their product. Moving up the scale, work at the Dixon family’s Govan foundry produced valuable information on the use of energy and fuel and technical details of the production of wrought iron. The excavation of the Caledonian Pottery revealed for the first time the remarkable size of the whole enterprise and how every part of the site was used to good effect. In particular, it contributed greatly to our understanding of how William Fullarton Murray’s ground-breaking kiln design actually functioned and the technical problems he faced. It had been thought that he was responsible for considerable innovation, but until recently there was no evidence. It needed archaeological investigation to spell it out on the ground.
Scientific analysis of materials recovered in excavation, an integral aspect of modern archaeology, has been very useful in helping to explain certain industrial advances. Painstaking cataloguing and the minute scanning of the fabric of Scottish industrial bricks served to demonstrate exactly why they were rated so highly in the nineteenth century. It also helped to reveal shady practices carried on by certain distributors of an internationally desirable commodity. The scientific analysis is still ongoing. There are other studies of industrial materials from the excavations which will be published in due course and which underline further how much there is to learn about early industrial technologies and processes. In the future, this kind of science clearly has much to offer in helping us to understand manufacturing history.
From the particular to the more general, archaeological investigation has done more than simply identify and help to elucidate certain technological processes. Its ability to establish chronologies has enabled researchers to understand the often very swift decline and fall of individual businesses as technologies moved on, from water to steam power for example or from one form of kiln or furnace design to another. Thus, as can be seen in the rapid turnover of businesses in the Tradeston area, enterprises were set up and then were taken over, amalgamated or simply went under with frightening speed. The Caledonian Pottery is a larger case in point. It flourished along traditional lines for a period before ground-breaking technologies were introduced. The company did not have the financial muscle to see the Pottery through a trying time of technological change and it was gone, taken over by jam makers from Liverpool. Its enterprising owner and boffin retired to live a more modest lifestyle, in the country with his mother-in-law.
We have not just learnt about science, technology and the cut-throat realities of nineteenth-century capitalism. The multi-disciplinary approach of the project has made it clear how much Glasgow’s reputation for technical advance and productivity owes to the imagination and risk-taking of creative individuals. Characters like George Forster, the owner of Falfield Mill, William Fullarton Murray and William Dixon Jnr. are responsible for shaping the area. The latter is rightly condemned for his neglect of basic safety standards and limited regard for the all-round well-being of his workers; health and safety and the welfare of workers rarely featured highly on the agendas of nineteenth-century Glasgow businesses.
Turning to the domestic context, particularly in the area of the South Laurieston tenements, archaeological excavation revealed much of the changing fortunes of a whole neighbourhood. The physical remains of cottages and tenements were exposed, down to the details of sanitation, the remains of wash-houses, pigeon lofts, the stables and cooperage in a tenement back court, the contents of middens and the construction of privies. Excavators were able to chart in the ground the infrastructure of improvement, as the neglect and lack of services of the earlier nineteenth century gave way to government legislation, which ensured the very basic provision of water and sanitation.
In order to convey the real texture of life as it was lived, archaeological research benefited from the often moving, personal testimony of interviewees from the oral history programme. They contributed both the recounted experiences of elderly or deceased family members and their own memories of childhoods. For many, ‘it all came flooding back’, the considerable hardship but also the community spirit and ‘pulling together’ of the mid twentieth century. Those who were interviewed were particularly pleased to be able to tell their story in a wide public forum to the younger generation, for whom much of their overlooked, more recent past had not been evident.
For the teams of archaeologists involved, one of the most enjoyable aspects of membership of the project was to attend the regular open days and school visits, to have the opportunity to explain their work and what they had found. During one such event, archaeologists showed a group of children a fragmentary spout from a tea-pot. Some were mystified. What was it for? When a whole Rutherglen tea-pot was put in front of them they remained equally non-plussed. The reason, of course, is simple – these days people rarely use tea-pots. Whilst lots of people still drink tea, it is generally made by simply putting a bag in a mug. So, the British institution of the tea-pot is quickly passing out of common consciousness and will soon be little more than a folk memory. Similarly children nowadays often find it difficult to imagine what it is like to have a coal fire and to have to clear out the ashes in the morning, let alone being without hot running water in the house and using an outside toilet.
Much of the benefit of the project has been to collate and retain knowledge, to recapture it from the recent past and ensure that it is not lost to generations in the future. Clearly, it is also important to avoid presenting a romanticised, sanitised picture of the past. The recent history of this part of Glasgow has been full of real hardship and struggle, from the long, back-breaking, boring hours of work in foundry or factory to the overcrowding, adversity and sometimes the crime and genuine squalor of tenement life. It is the facts behind this, the context for this reality that the M74 project has sought to delineate.
In the course of this project, many thousands of people have been involved in investigating, celebrating and helping to preserve the past of this part of Glasgow. It was a communal effort, a true learning experience and cause for pride, finding out in detail about their part of an extraordinary city which, although it lies on the geographical periphery of Europe, played a major, world role in the history of the Industrial Revolution and continues to be a fascinating place of innovation, tolerance and diversity today.
For the archaeologists of the future, Primary School pupils selected a series of items to go into time capsules, which they buried when the excavations had been completed. These included toys, teddy bears, clothes, maps of the area, bus tickets, pictures of Rangers and Celtic footballers, computer games, tea bags, the names of individual children and details about their families. These children have certainly set tomorrow’s archaeologists a challenge – they interred their capsules right under the course of the motorway.
or Farewell to Glasgow
by Jim McLean
Oh where is the Glasgow I used to know
The tenement buildings that let in the snow
Through the cracks in the plaster the cold wind did blow
And the water we washed in was forty below
We read by the gaslight, we had nae T.V.
Hot porridge for breakfast, cold porridge for tea
And some weans had ricketts, some had T.B.
Ay that’s what the Glasgow of old means tae me
Noo the neighbours complained if we played wi’ a ba’
Or ‘Hunch cuddy hunch’ against somebody’s wa’
If we played ‘Kick the can’ we’d tae watch for the law
For the polis made sure we did sweet bugger a’
You’ve heard o’ the closet that stood on the stair
Oors had tae accommodate fifteen or mair
And the wee broken windae let in the fresh air
I sometimes went inside, ay but just for a dare
And we huddled together tae keep warm in bed
We’d nae sheets nor blankets, just old coats instead
And a big balaclava tae cover yer head
And ‘God but it’s cold’ was the only prayer said
Noo there’s some say that tenement living was swell
That’s the wally close toffs who had doors wi’ a bell
Two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom as well
While the rest o’ us lived in a single-end hell
So wipe off that smile when you talk o’ the days
That you lived in the Gorbals or Cowcaddens’ way
Remember the mice and the rats you once chased
For tenement living was a bloody disgrace
The M74 Completion project partners would like to thank the staff of West of Scotland Archaeology Service, in particular Dr. Carol Swanson and Hugh McBrien, for their invaluable support in assisting with Contract preparation, supervising the archaeological investigations and overseeing the post-excavation process.
The generous advice and cooperation from Dr. Noel Fojut and Rod McCullagh of Historic Scotland is gratefully acknowledged, as is the contribution of their now retired colleague, Patrick Ashmore.
The Principal Contractor HAPCA (Headland Archaeology Ltd and Pre-Construct Archaeology) would like to extend a special thank you to Alan Anderson of Glasgow City Council for his contribution to the project, to HAPCA’s Russel Coleman and Peter Moore for managing the fieldwork programme and to Frank Meddens and Andrea Smith for managing the publication programme. HAPCA would also like to thank the author David Drew for taking on this assignment and Victoria Ridgeway and Cate Davies for the production of this publication.
The M74 Completion project partners and HAPCA would also like to thank all those who organised or participated in the public archaeology programme events. There are too many individuals to mention, but special thanks go to the staff of Glasgow Life, Glasgow City Council Development & Regeneration Services, South Lanarkshire Leisure and Culture and Renfrewshire Council Arts and Museums.
We also wish to express our gratitude to all those who dedicated significant time and effort to this project.
Butt, J. 1967. Industrial Archaeology in Scotland.
Dalglish, C., Driscoll, S.T., Maver, I., Shead, N.F. and Shearer, I. 2009. Historic Govan: Archaeology and Development. The Scottish Burgh Survey.
Eunson, E. 1996. The Gorbals, an Illustrated History.
Faley, J. 1990. Up Oor Close, Memories of Domestic Life in Glasgow Tenements, 1910–1945.
Fraser, W. H. and Maver, I. (eds) 1996. Glasgow, Volume II: 1830–1912.
Gibb, A. 1982. Glasgow, The Making of a City.
Hume, J. 1974. The Industrial Archaeology of Glasgow.
Maver, I. 2000. Glasgow.
Reed, P. (ed) 1999. Glasgow, the Forming of the City.
Stamp, G. and McKinstry, S. (ed) 1994. ‘Greek’ Thomson.
Worsdall, F. 1979. The Tenement: A Way of Life: A Social, Historical and Architectural Study of Housing in Glasgow.
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