TIMES Glasgow expands as plan to deepen Clyde begins FROM OUR PICTURE ARCHIVE
GLASGOW in the second half of the 18th century was Scotland’s ‘happening’ place to be. Old gateways were demolished, new bridges were built, and the city generally improved its infrastructure, powered by the growing wealth of the ‘tobacco lords’ in particular.
In the space of 30 years from 1750, the population doubled to around 42,000, and many of the incomers were Highlanders displaced by the post-1745 crushing of the clans by the British state.
They were attracted to the city by the promise of work in numerous industries – tobacco processing, sugar refining, linen weaving, coal mining in numerous pits around Glasgow, construction of roads and houses, and service on board the growing fleet operating out of the city.
Merchant prosperity showed in the building of larger and finer stone houses, and the University thrived with no fewer than 14 professors by 1760, one of whom, Joseph Black, formulated in 1761 the theory of latent heat that marked the beginning of the science of thermodynamics.
Four years previously, Black had met a brilliant 21-year-old instrument maker called James Watt. Originally from Greenock, Watt’s genius showed in his ability to manufacture and repair medical and astronomical instruments – his work on the latter was so impressive that Black encouraged a professor friend of his to support Watt with his own laboratory at the University.
That second professor was none other than Adam Smith, the University’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, and they were joined in supporting Watt by the scientist Professor John Anderson, Professor of Natural Philosophy after whom Anderson’s Institution, one of the forerunners of Strathclyde University, was named.
So at that one time in Glasgow, the University had under its roof the author of Wealth of Nations, the greatest chemist of the age, a formidable scientist and the inventor of working steam powered engines – and they were all pals.
Others at the University in the 1750s and 1760s included the influential Alexander Wilson, who in 1760 became Glasgow’s first professor of astronomy, who was able to use the Macfarlane Observatory – the first purpose-built university observatory in Britain – to observe the night skies. When Adam Smith went off to a highly-paid tutorship in 1764, he was replaced as Professor of
Moral Philosophy by Thomas Reid, inset, who was even more famous in his day than Smith as he founded the philosophical Scottish school of common sense and, like Smith, is now recognised as one of the great figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.
It wasn’t all about the city accumulating wealth and intellectual prowess.
The people were catered for by a proliferation of inns, an Assembly Hall which hosted dances, a golf course on Glasgow Green and even a theatre. The first theatre building was nothing bigger than a lean-to hut erected in 1752 and was burned to the ground a year later by a mob of strict Presbyterians.
The same fate awaited a second theatre, intended to be permanent, on the site of what is now Glasgow Central Station. It was burned down by a rampaging mob on its opening night in 1764. It would be 40 years later before Glasgow acquired a ‘proper’ theatre in Queen Street.
For proof of the growing popularity of inns, you need only say the name of the Saracen Head, the ‘sarry heid’, built in 1755 by Robert Tennent, owner of the existing White Hart Inn.
The Saracen Head in Gallowgate had 36 bedrooms – ‘free of bugs’ as the advertisements of the day said – and stabling for 60 horses, plus a school for cooks.
It was the location for the famous meeting in 1773 of Professor Thomas Reid and Dr Samuel Johnson, which apparently ended in a swearing match.
It was that earlier meeting between Reid and Watt which had much greater effect on Glasgow. Encouraged by the professor, Watt was already experimenting with steam power, and while walking on Glasgow Green he had the spark of inspiration – the steam condenser – that led him to vastly
It was burned down by a rampaging mob
improve Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine. It would take many years but eventually Watt’s steam engines would power the world.
In the meantime, in the 1760s he was employed as a surveyor to work out the routes, designs and methods of construction for two huge developments that greatly boosted the wealth of Glasgow – the Forth and Clyde Canal and the Monklands Canal.
They were both risky businesses and the construction of the latter canal halted when the original £10,000 investment ran out.
It was eventually completed and is said to have been the single biggest driver of Glasgow’s expansion in the late 18th century as cheap and plentiful coal was carried on barges from Monklands into the heart of the city.
Watt then turned his attention to the River Clyde itself. The shallowness in places of the Clyde had long been a bar to navigation in the city and as far back as 1556, Glasgow’s council had experimented with dredging.
The construction of Port Glasgow had been necessary to keep the city’s trade going – Watt himself designed the new dock in Port Glasgow in 1761 and deepened its harbour 10 years later – but it had been recognised over many decades that allowing ships to go up the Clyde into the city was the real way forward.
In 1768, John Golborne, a canal builder from Cheshire, came to Glasgow with a plan to deepen the Clyde permanently all the way from the Broomielaw down the river.
He wrote to the council:
“I shall proceed on these principles of assisting nature when she cannot do her own work, by removing the stones and hard gravel from the bottom of the river where it is shallow, and by contracting the channel where it is worn too wide.”
It was Watt, however, who made the clinching argument in his report of 1769.
He surveyed the river and found that in some parts it was just 18 inches deep.
He also approved the science of Golborne’s plan which was in effect to build 100 lateral jetties on both banks that would narrow the river channel and use the power of the river’s flow to scour out the silting bottom.
It worked. By 1772, the river depth was five feet minimum at high tide and navigation into Glasgow was possible. We’ll see the effect of that next week.