WE get nothing for nothing in this world, and our wonderful present prosperity costs us, among more valuable things, many an interesting monument of the past in Glasgow and round Glasgow.
Within the town the flood has almost spent itself. The High Kirk and St. Andrew's Church are not likely to be swept away, nor is the Tolbooth Tower, nor the Tron and Bridgegate Steeples; and of what was worth preserving of old Glasgow not much else is now left us except the College. Its sands, indeed, are nearly run : its grey courts have seen their last of the red gowns : and Professors and Students are moving to abode so much ampler, on a site so much nobler, that the most bigoted antiquary would not hinder them. But pen and pencil and photograph will still preserve every architectural and historical detail of the old home in High Street, and similar records preserve the features and the story of the most important of the other monuments that have disappeared within the town.
But the waters still rise: they overflow their ancient banks, and outside the town are sweeping away our old land-marks, North, South, East, and West. It is the purpose of this book to keep some of these from being forgotten when their places shall know them no more. The pity is that the work was not sooner taken in hand. The flood has risen so fast that some of the houses in the volume are already gone, and we shall turn the leaves over in vain for many a well-remembered residence that can now live only in memory. (1)
For the local antiquary the volume will have a special interest as a memorial of the old Burgher Aristocracy, who built or owned so many of these hundred houses. But it should be of more than mere antiquarian interest. It should be to us like a deep quarry to a geologist, and enable us, as we compare the ancient with the modern mansion (say Rosebank with its stately neighbour Aikenhead), or dissect a house that has been added and added to (like Killermont), to trace in the successive strata the progress of that command over matter and taste for expense that sometimes pass for civilization and refinement.
Certainly these old houses, with their little windows, low roofs, and rough cast walls, and the plat of roses and southernwood in front, would make a poor show beside our great modern mansions, with their plate-glass oriels and polished fronts, their broad terraces and gay conservatories. And the magnates of our Exchange would smile at the sums that used to pass here for fortunes. Even John Glassford, of the number of whose ships and the worth of their cargoes men spoke below their breath, would at most be one of our first rank. But our old merchants had what some of their richer successors would give a good part of their riches for - the distinct position of an aristocracy.
They enjoyed the first condition of an aristocracy, an unquestioned social supremacy, and held the crown of the causeway against all comers. And confessedly they were the only Glasgow folk who had a position outside Glasgow. In Glasgow itself only they and the City Clergy were recognized by the Professors in the College, and by the county residents. (2) It was to them that strangers brought letters. It was they who met the Lords on circuit. Among the lairds at a county meeting they held themselves as erect as on the Plane Stanes at the Cross. In foreign parts they had met Admirals and Governors. As Provosts or Members of Parliament they had waited on Ministers, or even kissed hands at St. James'. And they had substantial power as well as precedence. They or their nominees were Provosts and Deans of Guild and Bailies. They controlled the election of that quarter of a Member that Glasgow then sent to Parliament. They worked the patronage of the place. Even the Banks were in their hands. And, however their fortunes might look now-a-days, wealth is a relative term, and they were certainly the wealthiest people, rather, the only wealthy people, of their day.
Money, to be sure, used not to be the power, even in pure trading communities, that it has since become, and mere money would not have given them their position. But to be a rich merchant was some warrant then for good breeding. This delicate plant, which may be found indigenous in the poorest soil, can be cultivated, but it cannot be forced : and it does not thrive, on either side of the Atlantic, beside a rapid growth of fortune. But with their rude mechanical commercial and financial appliances, the fortunes of our old merchants could only grow slowly. Indeed, they seldom came to much size in one generation.
Now-a-days, when the capable man can so readily get at both information and connection and capital, the best built business can only be kept up by a succession of talent and application not common in rich families. But, in old times, if a position was worse to win, it was the easier to hold, and a good business was almost as good as an entailed estate. And so it was that the Merchant Rank was in great part a hereditary caste, (3) and its members were of good birth, if to come of a line of merchants be to be well-born. All experience shows that this quality of good birth passes current for more than its worth in communities much more democratic than Old Glasgow. But it is worth something. Hereditary opulence does, in the main, soften manners, and the sense of his conspicuous position ought to do good service both in encouraging and in restraining the bearer of a well-known name. "Majorum gloria posteris lumen est : nec bona nec mala in occulto patitur."
We are apt to forget how long some of these old merchants' names had been known. Glasgow looks almost as new as Chicago. But the luxuriant growth hides an ancient stem. Glasgow was a place of trade before Columbus had sighted the new world, and many of our old families could show their burgess tickets, or point to their names in the Civic Fasti for generations and generations. Others had had the Jus Imaginum before they had had anything to do with Glasgow. As long as Scotland has been a trading country, Scotchmen of good family (wiser than their English fellows) have freely engaged in trade, and many of our old merchants were men of gentle, some even of noble, blood. (4)
Whatever the origin of these old Brahmins, the caste exists no longer. Some families have died out : some have gone back in the world and disappeared : others have undergone the inevitable fate of the too prosperous Scot, and sunk into lairds : the few who survive are lost in the crowd. And we would speak gently of the departed. They had their faults, no doubt : they were exclusive and intolerant, they carried things with a high hand, and altogether thought more of themselves than there was any need for. But their recognised position at least freed them from the temptation to a vulgar display of wealth : and, if they had strong prejudices, and were as slow to take in new ideas as to admit outsiders to their circle, at least they had the courage of their opinions, and were outspoken, sometimes too outspoken in expressing them.
Whatever their faults, absenteeism was not one. If Glasgow chanced not to have been their birth-place, it certainly was their home. Even when they came to own their country house, it would be within an easy distance of the Cross, and the town house would be still kept on. (5) They were proud of Glasgow, of its ancient name, and its modern growth, of the High Kirk and the College, the Greens, and the Trongate with its stately Arcades. (6) They were ready to serve the town as Provost, or Dean of Guild, or Bailie. They could be counted on at all times and in all companies to stand up for its rights and its dignities. They knew every body, and every body knew them. Even Burghers and Anti-Burghers and Relievers, whom they heartily despised, they did not ignore. They sent their boys to the Grammar School and the College, and brought up their girls at home.
Now-a-days, our leading merchant has too often ceased to be a citizen. Glasgow is the place where he has his office, and which is always wanting subscriptions from him. But he lives as far from it as he can. He cultivates other society. Outside of his own business the circle of his acquaintance here is gradually narrowing. He would no more mix in municipal matters than Lord Westminster would join the Pimlico Paving Board. If he has himself the misfortune to "speak Glasgow," his sons and his daughters shall escape that unmelodious shibboleth, (7) and they come back from their English schools strangers, knowing nothing and caring nothing about Glasgow or Glasgow folk, and rather ashamed of having anything to do with the big smoky town. They may never have heard the Tolbooth chimes, and could hardly find their way to King William or the Green. They read Burns or Scott, if at all, with a glossary. And they have no idea of the difference between a Free Kirker and a U.P., or any other of those puzzling Scotch sects.
Such observations are not mere antiquarian or dilettanti trilling. The life of a people depends more on its social than on its political conditions, and this disintegration of society, which affects all classes and all places, is bringing about a great revolution. The political machinery that has fallen out of gear with its social system is like a pump that has lost the fang. And the general revolt against aristocracies means not so much that they have ruled badly as that men will not have these strangers to rule over them. We may think "the loons "weel awa'" : we may wish all success to the revolt, and yet regret the cause of it. It may be well that society should tend like a heap of sand to a level, but it must be ill that it should hang as loosely together. How much estrangement and misunderstanding (the very words tell their own tale), how much contempt paid back in hatred, how many of the dangers that threaten the future of our country, would disappear before a better acquaintance of class with class!
There are other old country houses, scattered here and there round Glasgow, that it will never be worth any one's while to photograph, nor to decipher their trifling annals: little old one-storied farm-steadings, of the familiar Scotch type, with a but and a ben, a byre, a stable, may-be a cart-shed, and in the middle a through-gang to the kail-yard behind. They mostly stand alone: sometimes two or three nestle together into a little "town." Labourers, probably Irish, live in them, or they stand, with windows and thatch gone, like deserted shielings in a Highland glen. But a race once lived in them as proud as any Tobacco Lord of them all. For the few acres they laboured were their own, and had belonged to their forebeers for generations back, and they knew that their class had done its full share in the making of Scotland. But the stars in their courses, on both sides of the Tweed, fight against the small proprietor, and, like the Yeomen and Statesmen of England, these Bonnet Lairds are mostly gone - gone and forgotten. (8) Their little freeholds are broken up for villas, or lost in some bigger estate, the very names rubbed off the map. They lie themselves in the old kirk-yard in graves that effeired to their lands, but the lettering has peeled off their headstones, and their names only live in some tattered Wadsett or Disposition buried in a charter chest, or on the fly-leaf of an old Bible, carefully preserved in a Canada log-house or Australian hut.
GLASGOW, 1870
(1) As Enoch Bank, North Park, Woodlands, Old Claremont, Cranstonhill, Gallowknowe, Jeanfield, Scarlet Hall, Barrowfield, &c. Barrowfield, or rather Burrowfield House, or "the Manor Place of Burrowfield," would have been a particularly interesting addition. It was not only owned successively by such well-known Glasgow families as the Huchesones (of the Hospital), the Walkinshaws (see Wolfe's House and Scotstoun, and commemorated in "Walkinshaw" Street), and the Orrs (see Stobcross), but it was one of the many Scotch mansions that claimed connection with Queen Mary. She was said to have once stayed there : to the last there was a "Queen Mary's Bower" in the antique garden : and "Queen Mary" Street intersects the property. This fine old mansion stood in Bridgeton, close to the Camlachie Burn, with an approach from the old Dalmarnock Road. A farmhouse still standing near the site was built from its materials. Hillhead House, so long the property of the Gibsons of Hillhead, who were leading merchants two hundred years ago (Walter Gibson was Provost in 1687), has been unfortunately omitted. It is still standing, but its days are numbered. [Gone, 1878.]
(2) A hundred years ago Glasgow had not grown out of the County Town. The names of a good many Western county people appear in the old directories.
(3) Sir James Lumsden is the solitary instance since the Municipal Reform Bill of a Provost, son of a Provost, and we are likely to have another such Bill before we have another such Provost. But in old lists of Glasgow Dignitaries the Andersons and Bells, the Dunlops and Stirlings, the Murdochs and Bogles and so on, keep turning up as regularly as the old county families in lists of Deputy Lieutenants.
(4) Teste M'Ure, our very first "promoters and propagators of trade" were two brothers of Scotch Lords, Lord Elphinstone and Lord Glammis. The only two of our old merchant families still in the first rank on 'Change that go back to the seventeenth century are the Dunlops and the Stirlings. The Dunlops are cadets of Dunlop of Dunlop, and the Stirlings have a strong claim to represent Stirling of Cadder, with Keir, Kippendavie, Glorat, and all other Stirlings as their cadets.
(5) Thus, in Jones' Directory, Andrew Buchanan of Mount Vernon lives in Adam's Court, second flat, south side Argyle Street; Robert Dreghorn of Rough Hill, in Clyde Street; James Hopkirk of Dalbeth, corner house, east side of Dunlop Street (afterwards the Buck's Head); Andrew Houstoun of Jordanhill, south side of Argyle Street; George Oswald of Scotstoun, in Virginia Street; &c. All these country houses are within three or four miles of the Cross.
The same system lasted down to a much later date. Innumerable instances might be given. Alexander McGrigor, the writer, grandfather of our able and esteemed townsman, Alexander B. McGrigor, LL.D., had his summer quarters at Langside. William Perry, a witness in King v. Watson, (the Anonymous Letters case), gives evidence "Is a Merchant in "Glasgow : lives in Govan in summer." Professor Towers, when the College broke up in May, migrated to the picturesque old cottage that stood till a year or two ago behind Lansdowne Church. Professor Jardine was his neighbour at Hillhead House, which was afterwards William Connal's summer quarters. And John Black oscillated between the Hillington Mansion in Jamaica Street and old Clairmont on the Sauchiehall Road. In 1780 summer lodgings were advertised in the Rottenrow, and no doubt some one took them.
(6) Glasgow once had two Greens, the one we know, and the Old or "Doocat" Green. A hundred years ago, the Old Green, the remains of a much larger open space, stretched along the river from the Town's Hospital to St. Enoch's Burn, and about as far north as the present line of the Union Railway. It had 150 trees growing round it, "pretty large." The Ropewalk of the Glasgow Ropework Company was in it. In 1803 Alexander Oswald of Shield Hall, who had bought up this old Joint Stock Ropery, bought from the Town what was then left of the Old Green, 14,908 sq. yds. Claremont Place, Fox Street, East Howard Street, &c., are built on it.
The famous Arcades or Piazzas lined the four streets that branched from the Cross. They stretched west as far as the Tron Steeple, east about to the Gallowgate Bridge, up High Street to Bell Street, and down Saltmarket to below Princes Street on the west side and to opposite Briggate on the east side. They must have had a very fine effect to anyone looking round him at the Cross : no wonder Defoe, Burt, and others were struck with Glasgow : but they must have sadly spoiled the shops at the back of them. When this book was first published, one unmutilated specimen of them survived in the tenement on the west side of High Street, three doors above the Tolbooth Steeple : the piazza of this tenement and the little low dark shop behind were then, and had long been, occupied by King the cooper : there is a good view of it in Stuart. Traces of the piazzas may still be made out in the tenements adjoining the tenement at the corner of Trongate and Saltmarket : they seem there to have been about 12 feet high and about 8 feet deep.
(7) This is quite a modern product of the organs of speech. Our ancestors spoke good Scotch, West-country, the Tuscan of our various dialects.
(8) These small proprietors were very numerous round this, owing to the feuing out of the Church lands to the then "Rentallers." This happy operation has been one cause of the rise of Glasgow. One cannot go through this book without seeing how many of our "promoters and propagators of trade" were Rentallers or sprung from Rentallers. Another class to which we owe many of our good citizens and of our good families are the sons of the Manse. The times are sadly against both these useful classes.
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