$CV SHS^ fSa CcM ■^oas SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY FOURTH SERIES VOLUME 14 Scottish Industrial History A Miscellany Scottish Industrial History A Miscellany ★ ★ EDINBURGH printed for the Scottish History Society by T. AND A. CONSTABLE LTD 1978 © Scottish History Society 1978 vs 0 °S is/3 £ ISBN o 906245 001 Printed in Great Britain CONTENTS Introductory Essay by Professor R. H. Campbell vii Journal of Henry Kalmeter’s travels in Scotland, 1719-1720 edited by T. C. Smout, ph D 1 Journal of Henry Brown, Woollen manufacturer, Galashiels, 1828-1829 edited by C. Gulvin, ph d 53 The North British Railway inquiry of 1866 edited by W. Vamplew, ph d 137 The Beginning and the End of the Lewis Chemical Works, 1857-1874 by D. Morison edited by T. I. Rae, ph D 181 indexes 213 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY by Professor R. H. Campbell1 most accounts of the industrial history of Scotland concentrate on the leading textile and heavy industries of the last two hundred years and centre geographically on the life of west-central Scotland. Documentary deficiencies lead to further concentration on the activities of large and successful firms. Lack of an analysis of the defects of Scottish industry, of failure as well as of success, of decline as well as of growth, and in places and industries other than the great staples of the central belt, is characteristic of the historio- graphy of Scottish industry, even in the increased work on Scottish industrial history of recent years. The miscellany is a timely corrective to this failure. Its diverse documents show industrial ventures operating in remote parts of the country and not only in west-central Scotland; an interest in mineral deposits now largely forgotten; commercial links stretching directly even to London from a minor woollen enterprise in the Borders; activities, such as the railways, which, while ruinous to individuals even in years of general industrial prosperity in Scotland, were beneficial to society in the long run. The documents do more than provide evidence of industrial activities which contrast sharply with many accounts, for all Scottish industry, leading sectors or not, had to tackle similar problems. The experience of even the unconventional is instructive because the study of Scottish industrial history requires less attention to an examination of aspects of the well-known outline of industrial growth and more to an investiga- 1 I much appreciate help given to me in writing this introduction from the four contributors to the miscellany and from colleagues in the University of Stirling. VU1 SCOTTISH INDUSTRIAL HISTORY tion of the nature of the transformation, of why Scotland changed in a century and a half from an agrarian economy to an acknowledged industrial leader, and also why Scotland failed to maintain the lead. * Industrial enterprises were not uncommon in Scotland before the birth of the modern industrial structure in the later eighteenth century, but the influence of many was limited, and restricted by isolation to local, frequently closely knit communities. Subordina- tion to agricultural or commercial enterprises with which they were closely integrated restricted the influence even of wider industrial progress, as with industrial projects of enterprising landowners, whose activities have to be viewed as one aspect of plans to exploit the full resources of their estates, and as with early industrial concerns brought into being in Glasgow to supply the needs of the city’s growing overseas trade. Such isolated and subordinate ventures, however successful individually, did not represent the industrial society which Scotland was to become. Increased specialisation was a necessary prelude for industrial transformation and with it the isolated nature of many enterprises gave way to an integrated industrial economy which affected all Scottish society. Population grew and its distribution was altered. The balance between agriculture and industry changed. As industry came to depend on world markets, and the standard of living on the imports paid for by the exports, Scottish economic life was part of a world- wide mechanism of trade and industry. In these conditions the typical Scot was not a rural but an urban worker, often of non- Scottish birth or descent, his life moulded by industry in a pattern shared with those in industrial areas elsewhere in Britain. The foundations for industrial growth were formed over many years; its acceleration was more rapid, but precise dating is a matter of controversy. ‘For those who like to be precise in such matters’ the date of the lighting of the first blast furnace at Carron has been suggested as the beginning of the industrial revolution in Scotland,1 but even those who do not seek such precision do not make a 1 as T.1 January S. Ashton, 1760. The It wasIndustrial 26 December Revolution 1759. (Oxford, 1948), 65. Ashton gives the date INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ix common choice. The choice may fall earlier in the eighteenth century,1 with a case based on an expansion of trade, most dramatic- ally of Glasgow’s tobacco trade, of which the ‘heroic age’2 had begun by 1741, or as late as the earlier nineteenth century, with a case based on the growth of fixed capital formation on the scale required by some modem expositors of the stages of economic growth and reached only in the railway age or later.3 An inter- mediate date is the last years of the eighteenth century, from the later 1780s, with a case based on the emergence of the cotton industry, its 19 spinning mills of 1787 increasing to 91 in 1795, and distributed throughout Scotland in those years before the supplant- ing of water by steam power led to increased concentration around Glasgow. The case for the cotton industry as the leading sector in promoting industrial growth lies more in the nature than in the scale of its contribution to industrialisation.4 Since its links with the older linen industry were many, its growth followed the stimulus to linen production in the mid-eighteenth century, but the cotton industry’s spinning mills marked the most striking introduction of new forms of industrial organisation and new patterns of industrial location which led ultimately to the urbanisation of the population of modem Scotland. By the middle of the nineteenth century the change to the new pattern of living was evident. Rural depopulation was a harsh fact: three Scottish counties recorded their peak population in 1831, one in 1841, four in 1851, five in 1861. In 1851 only a little over a quarter of Scotland’s working population was engaged in the primary industries of agriculture, fishing and forestry; a slightly larger proportion was in the textile and allied trades, over- 1 H. Hamilton, ‘Economic Growth in Scotland, 1720-1770’, Scottish Journal of Political2 Economy, vi (1959), 85-96. Mary J. M. Quarterly, Price, ‘The third Rise series, of Glasgow xi (1954), in the reprinted Chesapeake in P. Tobacco L. Payne Trade’, (ed.). William Studies and in Scottish Business History (London, 1967), 300. See also H. Hamilton, An Economic 8History of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1963), 256. ed., P. 1969),Deane 260-1,and W. 266. A. P.Cole, Deane British and Economic H. J. Habakkuk, Growth, 1688-1959‘The Take-Off (Cambridge, in Britain’, second in W. W. Rostow, The Economics of Take-Off into Sustained Growth (London, 1963), 474-75- Deane and Habakkuk, op. cit.: 76. S. D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1972), 68 SCOTTISH INDUSTRIAL HISTORY shadowed only by those in the service trades, including building. By the middle of the nineteenth century further change in the industrial structure was imminent. The cotton industry passed its zenith in the boom of 1825 and from the same time the iron industry began a phase of growth comparable to that of cotton less than half a century earlier. Twenty-seven blast furnaces in 1830 increased to 143 in 1850. After the financial crisis of 1857 and the cotton famine of the 1860s, the cotton industry declined until its final virtual extinction between the wars, with only a residual, specialised textile legacy remaining - jute in Dundee, thread in Paisley - employing in 1951 only 8 per cent of the labour force. By contrast, the heavy industries prospered from the mid-nineteenth century. The proportion of the labour force employed in mining, quarrying and the metal trades doubled to 17*8 per cent in the half-century to 1901 and rose to 20*7 per cent in 1951, about one-third of all those employed in manufacturing industry. * The textile industries of wool and linen shared the hazards in the path of industrial growth in the early eighteenth century. As befitted a largely pastoral agrarian economy, the woollen industry was of long standing throughout Scotland. Before the union of parliaments in 1707 several legislative enactments aimed at building up fine cloth manufacture, hoping to rival established English success, and to be markedly different from the more traditional manufacture of coarse woollens. The ventures failed even before the freeing of trade after 1707 finally made them impracticable. Before 1707 even the export trade in coarse woollens, which had expanded in the seventeenth century, was in decline. The barriers to be overcome were too great. The Scottish wool crop was of poor quality and most of the finer grades had to be imported, while low levels of skill ensured poor manufacture. In these circumstances complete commercial integration after the Union of 1707 threatened the livelihood of growers and manufacturers alike. The Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures, instituted to administer some of the funds granted to Scotland as compensation for higher taxation after the Union, and charged with the management of INTRODUCTORY ESSAY xi Scottish economic life, by precept, by the provision of superior knowledge, and by finance, gave only ‘niggardly and in some ways ill-directed’ aid, so the mere survival of the woollen industry in the competition after 1707 was an achievement in itself.1 The Border counties did more than survive.