Times Past: Rise of Glasgow industry before brutal 1782 winter

There was a wide variety of products made in Glasgow just before the American Revolution which showed the change that was occurring in the city over the space of 30 years.

Alexander ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle wrote in his famous memoirs that in the year 1744: “There were not manufacturers sufficient,” either there or at Paisley, to supply an outward-bound cargo for Virginia. 

Times Past: How the American Revolutionary War was disaster for Glasgow - and how the city came back

He added: “The Glasgow traders were obliged to have recourse to Manchester.

"Manufactures were in their infancy. About this time the inkle manufactory was first begun by Ingram & Glassford, and was shewn to strangers as a great curiosity. But the merchants had industry and stock, and the habits of business, and were ready to seize with eagerness, and prosecute with vigour, every new object in commerce or manufactures that promised success.”

The Bishop of Meath in Ireland, Richard Pocock, was one of the first to chronicle the changes in Glasgow which was to make it a giant of manufacturing. In 1760 he visited Glasgow and wrote: “The city has above all others felt the advantages of the Union, by the West India trade which they enjoy, which is very great, especially in tobacco, indigoes, and sugar. 

The first is a great trade in time of war; as they send the tobacco by land to the ports of the Frith of Forth, almost as far as Hopton, and supply France. They have sugar houses, and make what is called Scotch indigo, which is composed with starch, so as to make a fine light blue. In order to carry on this trade properly they have gone into a great variety of manufactures, to have sortments of goods to be exported, as all the inkle (linen tape)  smallwares, linens of all kinds, small ironwares, glass bottles, and earthenwares, which latter they make in great perfection.”

By 1777, however, the situation had changed utterly. In that year, merchant John Gibson published his book ‘The History of Glasgow: From the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time; with an Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State, of the Different Branches of Commerce and Manufactures Now Carried on in the City of Glasgow.’ As the title suggests it was a comprehensive account of Glasgow’s beginnings and its rise in the 18th century, and remains an important source book for anyone studying the history of the city.

Modern day Buchanan Street, named after Tobacco Lord Andrew Buchanan of Drumpellier

Gibson noted that in that decade, Glasgow was producing ale, books, coal, cordage, glass, hats, linen handkerchiefs, wrought iron, tanned leather, sail-cloth, soap, candles, woollens, and herring. The latter were salted for export to England and elsewhere. There was a roaring trade with Ireland, and the quality of Glasgow goods was much praised.

New industries were coming on stream right through the second half of the 18th century with James Watt’s steam engines providing the motor for expansion. The Ingram family, as well as being involved in the tobacco trade, started up and controlled one of Glasgow’s great industries of that era, namely calico printing. Archibald Ingram, who was Lord Provost from 1762 to 1764 and after whom Ingram Street is named, invested his profits from tobacco into cloth production and dyeing and is known as the father of the calico printing industry in Scotland. 

Printed calico was the missing link in the tobacco trade – it was exported to the American colonies on the ships which brought tobacco to the Clyde. It made Ingram very rich, and the industry lasted long after his death in 1770. At one time the Pollokshaws Calico Printing Company had 30 acres of bleaching fields in the city.

Another great family, the Stirlings, brought the dyeing industry to Glasgow. We’ll find out more about their extraordinary contribution to the city and the west of Scotland next week, because in a sense the Stirling family are the exemplars of Glasgow’s entrepreneurship and growth. 

Proof of how the city was developing industry and retailing came in 1783 when the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce was founded, the first in Britain and the oldest Chamber in the English-speaking world with continuous records.

Again it was a development caused by American independence. Glasgow had gone from importing 75% of all Virginia tobacco consumed in Europe to having virtually nil imports.

The merchants decided to pool their expertise and resources, and promote their interests in the city and elsewhere.

The Chamber’s own history described how it all began: “Patrick Colquhoun, Glasgow’s Lord Provost, drafted a constitution and rules and – at a meeting in The Town House on 1 January 1783 – the Chamber was established. Later that year a Royal Charter was granted by King George III – a document still displayed in the Chamber’s Board Room.

“The Chamber’s early priorities were to raise the quality of goods produced and to lobby the Government to lower taxes, reduce tariffs and abolish smuggling. The Chamber also fiercely opposed the East India Company’s trade monopoly with India and all territories beyond the Cape.”

READ MORE: Remembering a boomtown Glasgow in the early 1700s

That same year of 1783 saw the first printing of a new newspaper called the Glasgow Advertiser, published by an Edinburgh-born printer John Mennons. The Advertiser would later become the Glasgow Herald, and is now the Glasgow Times’ sister paper The Herald. Mennons scooped the world in his very first edition, Lord Provost Colquhoun tipping him off about the signing of the treaties with France and Spain that would eventually lead to the Peace of Paris.

It was not all progress, however. The winter of 1782-83 was brutal and led to the failure of harvests across the British Isles. There was famine in Glasgow, but the town council and the major landowners and merchants combined with the Kirk to start a famine relief operation with grain being imported by canal to feed the hungry poor.       

Not for the first or last time, the citizens of Glasgow pulled together in a crisis.