Meet the woman behind Glasgow's most famous tearooms

1 Kate Cranston, one of Scotland’s earliest female entrepreneurs, was born in Glasgow in 1849. Her older brother Stuart became a tea dealer when Glasgow’s temperance movement was in full swing and tea, previously a luxury, was being seen as a desirable alternative to alcohol for the working classes.

2 Her first tearoom, the Crown Luncheon Room on Argyle Street, was all about elegance, cleanliness and quality, with the aim of providing a pleasant place for the city’s most fashionable diners. Ingram Street, Buchanan Street and the Willow Tea Rooms in Sauchiehall Street followed. Kate’s tearooms were the first places women socialised outside of the home without male company, laying the groundwork for a cultural shift.

3 Kate was keen to support local design talent such as designer Margaret Macdonald and her husband, the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. When she commissioned Mackintosh to create the interiors and exteriors of some of her tearooms, she helped him become one of the most famous and well-loved designers of all time.

4 In business, Kate was ahead of her time, particularly when it came to workers’ wellbeing. She was strict about training and high standards of service, but she was also a compassionate employer who visited the waitresses – many of whom came from poor, large families – at home to ensure they ate three meals a day.

5 After the death of her husband in 1917, Kate sold her tea rooms and withdrew from public life. She had no children and after her death in 1934, it emerged she had left almost all of her estate to the poor of Glasgow. Her influence is still rightly celebrated – the original Willow Tea Rooms have recently been restored in a £10m project and the Oak Room interior from her Ingram Street tearoom is on display at the new V&A musuem in Dundee.