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The Life and Legend of James Watt

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The Life and Legend of James Watt One The Making of a Scottish Improver z z z he port of Greenock, where James Watt took his first salt- laden breath on T January 19, 1736, was then a small coastal town but very much on the rise. Located on the southern bank of the mouth of the River Clyde, twenty- five miles west of Glasgow, Greenock was in fact a recent settlement, with a population of about three thousand in 1741, rising sixfold by the end of the century. It was one of those towns created by landowners granting charters by which a group of local wor- thies could form a burgh council and raise taxes to develop the town. The local land- owner in this case was Sir John Schaw. The granting of charters in this way indicated that landowners were seeking to turn their estates to business and profit rather than, as in the past, to military power and authority. The improving impulse that was to be so important in Watt’s life came from the top of his local community.1 The development of the town, the building of its docks and harbors, churches, schools, and civic buildings, occurred in the decades around Watt’s birth. His grand- father and father played an active role in this development. Greenock grew on ac- count of trade, partly in agricultural products and linen (mainly with England) but increasingly, and rapidly from the 1740s, through the import of tobacco from the American colonies. By 1769 Greenock, Port Glasgow, and Glasgow handled the bulk of the Scottish tobacco trade, which in turn accounted for 52 percent of the total British trade in that commodity. The American colonies received in return a vari- 3 © 2019 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. ety of basic needs channeled into Greenock by local industry and launched from its docks.2 Between 1730 and 1750 Glasgow’s colonial traders invested heavily in other manufacturing enterprises, including leather production and boot and shoe making. Textiles were another key area, especially the finishing processes such as bleaching fields and textile print- works, which required significant injections of capital. This expansion as well as trade in iron products made possible key initiatives in iron pro- duction, notably the Carron Iron Works, established in 1759 near Falkirk in Stir- lingshire. Both the investors in those works and the skilled workmen often imported from England to establish and operate them represented links between Scottish eco- nomic development and the industry of the English Midlands that were to be import- ant in Watt’s life trajectory. Twenty years before Watt’s birth (in 1715) and again when he was nine years old (in 1745), the political settlement on which the prosperity of Greenock and Scotland was being built was challenged. The Jacobite rebellions of those years challenged the political and economic union between Scotland and England that had been sealed in the Act of Union of 1707. The Watt family, like other enterprising inhabitants of Greenock, were firm in their political, economic, and religious support of the Union. For them the Jacobites threatened a return to a less prosperous and less promising past. The future, as they saw it, lay with expanding trade and industry, enterprise and thrift. The politics of the Union, and the philosophy of “improvement” and Pres- byterian accountability, ran deep in Watt’s background.3 They were thoroughly in- grained in the lives his family led and the futures they imagined for themselves. Watt’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Watt (1642–1734) was an import to Crawfordsdyke near Greenock in its early days, coming from Aberdeenshire and carrying skills as a teacher of mathematics, or “professor” of the subject as he was sometimes styled. His skills were valuable in a town with an economy based on shipping, trade, and construction.4 Whether teaching basic mensuration or high astronomical and naviga- tional skills, Thomas Watt found a strong demand for his services. He had a house in Crawfordsdyke, then a separate burgh but subsequently part of Greenock. The fact that he owned another house besides his family residence evidences his prosperity. He had been an elder of West Parish of Greenock since 1685 and was for several years Baron Bailie (or chief magistrate) of Crawfordsdyke, denoting authority in the community as well as prosperity. Thomas Watt married Margaret Shearer in 1679, and they had six children, only two of whom reached maturity. One of these was Thomas’s elder son, John (1694–1737), who was also a teacher of mathematics and had been educated as a mathematician and surveyor. He produced a survey and map 4 z The Life and Legend of James Watt © 2019 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. of the Clyde that was later published by the other surviving child, his younger broth- er James (1699–1782), the father of our protagonist. James Watt Sr. was trained as a “wright,” or house carpenter, having been ap- prenticed to a John McAlpine. He married Agnes Muirhead in 1729, and between 1730 and 1734 two sons and a daughter were born, but all died in infancy; James, also a sickly child, arrived two years later. Tragedy in the loss of children in infan- cy and childhood haunted generations of Watts, as was common in those days even though mortality rates were improving. Amid all this, Watt Sr. became a prosperous builder. He was engaged by Sir John Schaw to extend his Greenock mansion house. Since Watt Sr. would have required financial reserves and access to credit to under- take that venture, we can conclude that he was a man of some substance. Watt Sr. also went into business as a ships’ chandler, which involved him in fitting out ships and carving their figure heads, as well as attending to the working of their instruments, compasses, and quadrants. This suggests that the family decision in 1756 to have Watt train with an instrument maker was perhaps not unrelated to the requirements and possibilities of his father’s business. Like his father before him, Watt Sr. was an important figure in the community. In fact, he was one of a select few who were entrusted with the funds raised by the community for public improvements. Thus in 1741, under the charter of the town issued by Sir John Schaw, Watt Sr. was one of nine residents selected to manage the funds raised by a tax on the malt ground in the mills west of Greenock. Ten years later, Sir John and the inhabitants of Greenock applied to the British Parliament for an act to levy a duty on every pint of ale and beer brewed, brought into, or sold in Greenock. The funds raised were to be applied to harbor repairs and to the construction of a new church, poor house, school house, marketplaces, and a public clock. Watt Sr. was one of the trustees of this fund. He also held a number of other public offices in later years. On a tombstone erected long after his death by his son, Watt Sr. was described as a “benevolent and ingenious man, and a zealous promoter of the improvements of the Town.”5 The Watts were Presbyterians, adherents of the Church of Scotland. Watt Sr. was buried not in the grounds of the church that he helped to construct but in those of the Old West Kirk that dated back to 1591 and of which his father, Thomas, had been an elder.6 We know little about the family’s religious observances, though it seems likely that their enthusiasm for the Kirk declined over the generations. Watt was to attend Kirk when in Glasgow; his payment for a pew there seems to be evidence of that. He also on one occasion told a business partner that he would be happy to exper- iment with him but would prefer to avoid sacrament days, “as we cannot decently The Making of a Scottish Improver z 5 © 2019 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. try any experiment upon them.”7 After moving to Birmingham, Watt made public his Presbyterian religion seemingly only on convenient occasions, attaching himself, by all appearances, to the Church of England.8 But the old family pew, for which Watt continued to pay rent after his father’s death, was abandoned only in the early nine- teenth century along with other property in Greenock.9 In a cultural sense, the fam- ily’s Presbyterianism died hard, and it left an important and lasting mark on Watt’s life and work through the moral precepts it supplied. The harsh Calvinism of seventeenth- century Scotland softened in the early eigh- teenth century, rendering it reconcilable for many with thrusting commerce and, later, moderate Enlightenment views.10 Presbyterianism supported commercial ac- tivity in various ways in Scotland during the period of Watt’s youth. Not the least of the supports was the impulse that it provided to order and accountability. The inordinate influence of Scottish accounting texts in the eighteenth century has been noted. So too have the high levels of financial literacy in the population, especially among those of the “middling sort.”11 There was a related strong commercial aspect to school education. Accountability practices were central to the Scottish Presbyte- rian churches in their forms of governance but also, crucially, formative of individual behaviors that the church encouraged, notably confessional diaries. Also part of such individual behaviors was the careful, routine, and accurate keeping of business and personal accounts, the latter in particular as a form of moral discipline inculcated by habitual personal practices.12 This accounting habit was impressed upon Watt as a child and young man, and he in turn impressed it upon his children.
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