Shipbuilding ambitions were setting sail in city
THOUGH their considerable wealth enriched Glasgow in the 18th century, by the second quarter of the 19th century the tobacco lords with their fortunes built on the backs of slaves were already a fading memory, albeit they left behind many fine buildings and streets named after them.
Instead, a new generation of entrepreneurs and industrialists were boosting Glasgow.
The tobacco lords had made their riches from importing the crop, but they either switched to tobacco manufacture or transformed their business to become the cotton kings, and by 1837 there were no fewer than 134 cotton mills in and around the city, all dependent on importation of cotton which was then spun into cloth, while dyeing of that cloth became a huge industry.
Nor should we ignore the fact that the production of spun wool and woollen goods was a major industry in Glasgow as linen production had been
Tobacco products remained an important manufacturing industry employing thousands across the city, and millions upon millions of cigarettes went from Glasgow across the world and did so well into the 20th century.
One of the greatest of the later tobacco entrepreneurs was Stephen Mitchell, and I will devote a whole future column to his great legacy to Glasgow, namely the Mitchell Library. Yet his career is an example of what happened when tobacco importation changed to manufacture of tobacco goods, because he actually made more money from investing in railways.
With the abundance of coal and iron ore in Lanarkshire and elsewhere, and with its growing rail network, Glasgow was ideally placed to exploit these resources and the primary industries of mining an iron making supported the growth of the textile industry and then the heavy industries in which Glasgow and Clydeside became predominant, most notably shipbuilding.
James Beaumont Neilson’s development of the hot-blast process in the late 1820s had given Glasgow the lead in iron smelting, and it was innovation and invention which drove Glasgow onwards from the 1850s, most notably in shipbuilding. The River Clyde itself was blasted and dredged so that ships could venture into the city as far as the Broomielaw.
We have seen how Robert Napier, pictured, led the way in making
Glasgow a shipbuilding centre of excellence, and the second half of the 19th century generally was an incredible boom time for the city.
Scotland’s leading historian Prof Sir Tom Devine sums up that period in his book The Scottish Nation A Modern History: “What happened after 1830, and more especially in the second half of the 19th century, was a truly massive increase in the scale of development.
“Cotton spinning may not have been quite as dynamic, but there was energetic diversification across the whole range of other textile trades.
“Even more fundamentally, coal, iron, steel, shipbuilding and engineering took off and transformed Scotland into a manufacturer for the world. All these sectors and others were emphatically committed to the export market.”
That commitment was massive, and came at a time when global trade was developing, leading to hugely increased demand for ships and railway engines, in which Glasgow was already the leading centre in Britain if not Europe.
We will see later in this series just how Glasgow and its surrounding towns came to dominate certain industries, but from the 1850s, the city first had to suffer setbacks in what had been arguably its main industry, cotton spinning, the first great ‘leader’ of the Industrial Revolution.
The simple fact is that from 1850 or so, manufacturers elsewhere were producing the goods cheaper, and the industry began to collapse in the second half of the century. Prof Devine points the blame at those cotton kings and their failure to “maintain earlier patterns of innovation.”
It was innovation which drove the advances in shipbuilding that had started with Robert Wilson’s construction of the first iron ship, the Vulcan, for the Forth and Clyde Canal, in 1818.
The city was being changed for good by the industry
Robert and David Napier and Henry Bell were the true fathers of Clyde shipbuilding and many of those who had been trained at Napier’s went off to either start or work at other yards on the Clyde.
Innovations included different types of paddles which in turn were replaced by screw propellors developed on the Clyde.
Napier’s famous engines powered many of the first iron ships which in turn were replaced by steel, again pioneered on the Clyde, with almost all iron ships constructed in Britain in the 1840s being Clydebuilt – the marque which guaranteed quality ships well into the 20th century.
In his 1869 work The Industries of Scotland, historian David Bremner includes some fascinating facts and figures to show how the Clyde was transforming through shipbuilding: “During the seven years from 1846 till 1852 inclusive, the number of steam-vessels built on the Clyde was 14 with wood hulls, 233 with iron hulls—total, 247; of which 141 were paddles, and 106 screws. The tonnage of the wooden steamers amounted to 18,331, and of the iron to 129,273; the horsepower of the engines in the wooden hulls was 6739, and in the iron hulls 31,593. The total value
Strolling through the Botanic Gardens, in the West End, in 1930 of the vessels and their engines was £4,331,362, which gives an average of £618,766 a-year for this branch of trade alone.
“In 1861, 81 steamers were built, the aggregate tonnage of which was 60,185; and the horse power of the engines 12,493; value of hull and fittings, £1,252,300; value of engines, £456,800. The number of vessels of all sorts built in the following year was 122, with a tonnage of 69,969.
“The following are the figures for the six succeeding years: 1863170 ships, 124,000 tons; 1864-220 ships, 184,000 tons; 1865-267 ships, 153,300 tons; 1866-247 ships, 129,989 tons; 1867-241 ships, 114,598 tons; 1868-227 ships, 174,978 tons. At the close of 1868 there were orders in hand for 123 ships of 129,400 tons.”
Now consider that Vulcan had only been built in 1818 and was a small canal-going vessel, while by 1868 the average size of a ship built on the Clyde was more than 1,000 tons.
Next week we’ll see how industries such as iron and steel making grew up to support this expansion in shipbuilding and we’ll also look at another heavy industry in which Glasgow became a leader, the building of railway engines.