Shipbuilding has a long history on the Clyde with its banks, at the turn of the twentieth century, having yards side by side for seven miles. Such was its capacity that it produced getting on for one half of the world's shipping. As elsewhere, it began with wood and sail and then progressed to iron, steel and steam, although its clippers would be launched until the 1890s given the need for steam ships to carry massive quantities of coal. Fuel consumption improved as advances in the use of steam made engines more efficient and the days of sail became restricted to yachts, a major pastime of wealthy Glaswegians although they too were increasingly steam powered.
I tend to think of shipping as ocean going; for Glasgow and the Clyde a good deal was for more local transport with paddle steamers making their way up and down the river and as far as Fort William and even Ireland. The city has entrepreneurs such as John Bell and David MacBrain to thank for this. The canals too helped with communication, linking East to West.
Coal mining was huge and large quantities were exported as well as being used to produce pig iron from local ore. This was a low value bulk industry. Glasgow came into its own when the technical skills of its men were brought into focus.
Ships built of iron on the Clyde look to Robert Napier and the Parkside Iron Works. Shipbuilding was seen as a logical extension to iron and steel making and so John Brown of Sheffield bought the J & G Thompson Yard on the Clyde and later built the Queen Mary and both Queens Elizabeth along with many others. Among the other great yards were Yarrow and Fairfield.
William Beardmore probably stands out as the most ambitious and entrepreneurial of the Clyde shipbuilders. At the turn of the twentieth century the British government increased its demands for naval vessels most particularly for the giant Dreadnaught class battleships. These would require much larger births than were generally available and so Beardmore set about building a truly giant yard in Clydebank. Financed in part by Vickers, Beardmore bought first the Parkside Iron Works and then went on to build a state of the art production facility for naval vessels at Dalmuir on Clydebank. It had a fitting out basin of 7.5 acres and had a massive hammer head crane capable of lowering boilers and engines into the ships. I noted that the crane was German made, but that British manufacturers followed its design for similar cranes in other yards. Guns for both the navy and army were made by Beardmore and I wrote of this in Ordnance, my book on how the army was supplied for the Great War. They also produced aero engines during the First World War and went on to design and manufacture their own aircraft. One prewar project was for an early aircraft carrier which never became a reality; another was for airships which were produced. The ravages of the twenties sounded the death knoll for Beardmore much as they inflicted pain on so many others - unemployment reached 30% at one point.
The site was repurposed as a Royal Ordnance engineering factory in the Second World War. At Cardonald another Royal Ordnance factory produced three and a half million 25lb shells and many thousands of heavy bombs. A Rolls-Royce shadow factory at Hillington manufactured Merlin engines. The Albion Motor Company made trucks. West of Glasgow is the village of Bishopton where a Royal Ordnance factory made munitions; it is now run by BAE Systems. The Clyde dockyards, which had survived the depression, produced many tons of shipping. BAE Systems now build naval ships at their yards at Scotstoun and Govan. Alongside all this production, machine tools companies gravitated to Johnstone and contributed greatly to the war effort.
Railways came first to Glasgow in short runs from the coal fields, but then linked East to West, ventured further north and crucially linked the two countries. The Caledonia Works at nearby Kilmarnock built many railway locomotives. Beardsmore too at one time tried its hand at locomotive manufacture.
It wasn't only iron, steel and ships, like the north west of England, Scotland and Glasgow in particular produced linen from locally grown flax and then adapted those skills to the spinning and weaving of cotton. In 1860 there were 20,000 looms being operated in the city. The New Lanark mill run by Robert Owen set an example of rare good employment practices. It was possibly the cotton industry which attracted the American Singer to build his British sewing machine factory on the Clyde. Castle Precision Engineering offers a wonderful story of the history of manufacturing in this great city. Its founder was Polish from Krakow, born in 1921 Jack Tiefenbrun arrived in 1938 and studied engineering. His first job was in the textile industry, maintaining machinery. In 1951 he set up his own company, Textile Engineering Company whose major customer was Singer Sewing Machines.
Charles Tennant's Rollox St bleaching agent factory was the largest in Europe, at the same time polluting the surrounding area. The far less polluting Solvay method was better suited to the minerals of Cheshire and the Glasgow factory eventually shut. Also in Glasgow, Charles Macintosh discovered a way of using rubber to provide waterproofing which resulted in the garment that bares his name; the company later moved to Manchester and became part of Dunlop.
Glasgow was known as the second city of the Empire and boasted buildings that spoke clearly of its civic pride. Like all cities of the industrial revolution, the living and working conditions for most of its population were dire and only started to improve as the nineteenth century drew to a close.
Glasgow remains home to BAE Systems shipbuilding but then has more of a focus on the service and financial sector.
Further reading:
- Maurice Lindsay, Glasgow: Fabric of a City (London: Robert Hale, 2001)
- Ian Johnson, Beardmore Built: The Rise and Fall of a Clydeside Shipyard)
- You can read more in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines
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