DO YOU remember when the lamplighters walked Glasgow’s streets?

You could set your clock by them, these men employed by the Corporation to light up the city streets each evening as dusk fell.

Glasgow Times:

In the late 19th century, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky/It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by/For every night at teatime and before you take your seat/With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street..”

Leeries – or lamplighters – continued to be a feature of Glasgow’s streets until the 1970s, by which time electricity was replacing gas, and it was time for them to hang up their lighting poles. (Although they did continue to work as public lighting maintenance engineers, looking after the gas and electric stair lamps in the city closes.)

Glasgow Times:

Sir Donald Liddle, the then Lord Provost, performed the final lamplighting ceremony on September 1, 1971, in North Portland Street, watched by 12 long-serving lamplighters with a combined service of 356 years.

“It was a nostalgic occasion tinged with sadness,” said our sister newspaper The Herald. “No one would want to return to the days of the gas lamos which, placed at lengthy intervals in city streets, merely cast a shadow and gave rise to the cry frequently heard many years ago, ‘tis dark as pitch, ‘tis dark as pitch’.

“Nevertheless, the complete change from gas to electricity also means that the once familiar figure of the lamplighter …will no longer be seen.

“The leeries of course had their problems, particularly with unruly boys who used to taunt them knowing that the lamplighter, burdened with his ladder and pole, could not chase them. A favourite game was to wait for him to light the lamps in one street then shin up the lampposts and blow the lights out…..”

Glasgow Times:

Glasgow’s first street gas lamp was installed in 1818 – previously, there had been oil lamps between the Tron Steeple and Stockwell Street as far back as 1780.

In 1819, the Glasgow Board of Police Commissioners decided to convert all street lighting to gas. Electric street lights were introduced in February 1893.