Glasgow was all change during the Radical War

The decade has occasionally been referred to as the last years of the old regime. That is because in Glasgow and across the UK, the demand for change in governance was growing apace.

The Town Council had self-defence as its main priority at the time, though several bailies were prominent in the movement for political change.

The council could be arrogant and ignorant of the real reasons why people wanted change and proved it when they spent £1,000 on transporting themselves to Edinburgh for a week to greet King George IV on his famous jaunt to Scotland in 1822.

Yet they had also commissioned schemes to improve the city and approved the works of many private individuals and companies, many of which were entrusted to the architect David Hamilton, known as the father of the profession in Glasgow.

Trained as a stonemason, he turned to architecture in his thirties and was an immediate success. He designed the Queen Street Theatre and Hutcheson’s Hospital, while probably his most famous early work was the Nelson Monument on Glasgow Green, the first such monument in memory of the great naval commander.

Hamilton was in huge demand for the design of the palatial city homes of merchants, and they and the aristocracy turned to him for the design of their elegant country homes, many of which are still extant.

As we have seen, he was huge influence on the design of the Necropolis while his most successful and influential building was the Royal Exchange, now the Gallery of Modern Art.

Along with Kirkman Finlay, James Cleland and James Ewing, Hamilton was arguably one of the greatest influences on the ‘look’ of Glasgow as it prepared to enter the Victorian age.

Hamilton was also a town councillor, at a time when the Council was either promoting or permitting considerable expansion of the city to accommodate its growing population.

The council needed land for new housing and sought and received an Act of Parliament to bring Blythswood estate into the city’s boundaries and also for the construction of Parliamentary Road – arguably Scotland’s first by-pass as it was built to link the Kirkintilloch Road and Garscube Road to allow travel without going through the city itself.

The city fathers of the time had a straightforward approach to the coming of the railways. When they saw that a rail link was beneficial to Glasgow, such as the proposed Glasgow, Edinburgh and Leith line, they strongly supported it, but when a planned line was seen as enriching people outside Glasgow they equally strongly opposed it.

In the background all the time was the demand for ‘reform’. It is important to note that Glasgow had become a very political society, and not just among the working people where radicalism had taken root.

The middle classes and the merchants, even some of the nobility, were fed up with the fact that Glasgow, as was the case with Manchester and Birmingham, had to share its representation in Parliament with other burghs.

The Town Council had also become a self-electing, self-prolonging oligarchy and that simply was no longer acceptable to the mass of the people.

The advent of a corn famine in 1826 and subsequent outbreaks of cholera and typhus saw the town council having to make arrangements to feed the poor and bury the dead – they bought extra land for makeshift cemeteries.

Hardship was now really driving the cause of reform, and the death of George IV in 1830 brought William IV to the throne and the new king, unlike the old one, was not set against reform as long as it was of a limited kind.

A simple measure might have stopped wholesale reform, but the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, refused to transfer seats in Parliament from the old ‘rotten boroughs’ – so-called because some had only one elector – to the growing cities like Glasgow. He paid for that stance by losing his job in November, 1830, with Earl Grey becoming Prime Minister.

In 1831, Lord John Russell brought the Reform Bill to Parliament which proposed increasing the size of the electorate and a wholesale redistribution of seats to favour the cities.

After the reform-supporting Whigs won the general election that year, reform became inevitable, despite the fierce opposition of the House of Lords.

The spread of pro-reform riots across the UK threatened the complete breakdown of Government. Wellington briefly returned as PM, but agitation across the country saw the King bring back Earl Grey.

In Glasgow, 70,000 people gathered on the Green and acclaimed a reforming memo to the King and Parliament.

In the Loyal Reformers’ Gazette, editor Peter MacKenzie wrote: “Reformers of Glasgow - the Tories, the Anti-Reformers, may regain the ascendancy for a short-lived moment; but the brilliant star of Freedom can never be obscured by them. No, never! But if all should fail—if Anarchy should even overthrow us, we shall not despair.

Yea, though society should be dissolved into its elements, and moral chaos overspread the land, we still believe that God-like Liberty, surmounting all, will change discord into order, divide light from darkness, bid man’s free form arise once more erect, and cause a renovated world to spring from the confusion.”

The threat of Earl Grey to create a whole new House of Lords caused Wellington to drop the Tory opposition and what became known as the Great Reform Act was passed in June, 1832.

Glasgow immediately gained its first two MPs for the city itself. The vastly increased electorate of 7,024 voted in Lord Provost James Ewing and James Oswald, Whigs or Liberals by another name.

In their History of Glasgow, written decades later, Dr Robert Renwick and Sir John Lindsay commented on the Reform Act: “Perhaps its chief merit lies in the fact that if the Government makes mistakes the people have no one to blame but themselves for having placed the power in its hands.

On the other side, it is open to question whether the last word of wisdom really lies with the less tutored and less disciplined multitude.”

I shall just leave that comment hanging out there…