At the time of Andrew Carnegie’s birth, Peter Chalmers, minister of Dunfermline abbey church, tells us the population of Dunfermline was some 11,500 souls, with 5,044 folk of all ages and both sexes employed in the linen weaving trade.4 As an esteemed craftsman William Carnegie’s finished fine weaves were eagerly sought, and he expanded his two looms at Moodie Street to three. This precipitated a move from the cramped cottage premises to a new home in Edgar Street, near Reid’s Park, with a bigger living area for his family. Thus Andrew Carnegie’s first recollections were of the Edgar Street home.5 William Carnegie continued to expand his business, acquiring a fourth loom and taking on apprentices to tend them.
For a long time Andrew Carnegie lived the life of an only child in and out of his father’s weaving room, fascinated as his busy white-aproned father fired the shuttle from left to right and vigorously pedalled the treadles of the loom. Before the entranced child’s eyes the threads trembled, criss-crossed and melded into the fine figured damask. William Carnegie’s strong tenor voice often accompanied the shuttle’s movement with Scot songs: ‘a very good foundation was laid for my love of sweet sounds in the unsurpassed minstrelsy of my native land as sung by my father,’ wrote Andrew Carnegie. ‘There was scarcely an old Scottish song with which I was not made familiar, both verse and tune.’6
A favourite Scots ballad of Andrew Carnegie’s which he often recited was Fife’s own ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, which begins:
The King sits in Dunfermline towne
Drinking the blude red wine.
Carnegie loved the story of how Sir Patrick was sent from his home at Aberdour, Fife, on a mission by King Alexander III. In the version made famous by Sir Walter Scott the object of the mission was to bring to Scotland Princess Margaret, the Maid of Norway, King Alexander’s granddaughter. The mission was a disaster; the company and the Maid were drowned even though:
Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That ever sailed the sea.
The metre and flow of the ballad appealed to young Carnegie, who lisped the finale to any who would listen:
Half ower, half ower to Aberdour
Full fifty fathoms deep
There lies the gude Sir Patrick Spens
Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.7
During January 1840 Margaret Carnegie gave birth to a daughter, Ann. The child was sickly and died the following year.8 With his father busy at his loom, and his mother increasingly engaged for those worrying months with the sickly new baby, Andrew Carnegie was left to his own devices, exploring alone, or with friends, the graveyard and precincts of the old abbey, the mysteries of Pittencrieff Glen and the banks of the Tower Burn. His guide to the formal history of Dunfermline was his maternal uncle George Lauder, who was married to Margaret’s eldest sister Seaton and owned a grocer’s shop in Dunfermline’s High Street. By this time George Lauder was a widower. He was devoted to his young son George, who often joined Andrew Carnegie as a willing listener to his father’s tales. The two boys gave each other the nicknames Dod9 (George) and Naig, and for many years Andrew called Dod ‘my brother-cousin’.10 Dod’s father, wrote Andrew Carnegie,
possessed an extraordinary gift of dealing with children and taught us many things. Among others I remember how he taught us British history by imagining each of the monarchs in a certain place upon the walls of the room performing the act for which he was well known. Thus for me King John sits to this day above the mantelpiece signing the Magna Carta, and Queen Victoria is on the back of the door with her children on her knees.
It may be taken for granted that the omission [of Cromwell’s name] which, years after, I found in the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey, was fully supplied in our list of monarchs. A slab in a small chapel at Westminster says that the body of Oliver Cromwell was moved from there. In the list of the monarchs which I learned at my uncle’s knee the grand republican monarch appeared writing his message to the Pope in Rome, informing His Holiness that ‘if he did not cease persecuting the Protestants the thunder of Great Britain’s cannon would be heard in the Vatican’.11
Cromwell became a favourite of the two boys, but . . .
It was from my uncle I learned all that I know of the early history of Scotland – of Wallace and Bruce and Burns, of Blind Harry’s history, of Scott, Ramsay, Tannahill, Hogg and Fergusson. I can truly say in the words of Burns that there was then and there created in me a vein of Scottish prejudice (or patriotism) which will cease to exist only with life.12
William Carnegie and his relatives the Morrisons played no role in, nor formed any part of, the Presbyterian congregations in Dunfermline within the Church of Scotland or the breakaway Free Church. Yet William was not without a desire for religious refreshment which he eventually found among the Dunfermline Swedenborgians. This group followed the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish scientist, theologian and mystic. He believed that the universe had a basic spiritual structure and in 1744, after he had a personal vision of Christ, he believed that he had received the call to abandon worldly learning. Thus he spent the rest of his career interpreting the Bible. In essence he believed that the Christian God was the power and life of all living creatures and that the Holy Trinity of old was expressed by the three essential qualities of God – love, wisdom and activity. After his death his followers founded a church in London in 1788 and by 1792 another was organised in Baltimore. This Swedenborgian philosophy appealed to William Carnegie and he took his young son Andrew to their meetings. Margaret Carnegie eschewed joining them; although she did not pursue the active Utilitarianism of the Morrisons, she regularly dipped into the essays and sermons of William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), the Rhode Island-born leader of the Unitarians. Andrew Carnegie said that, while he and his brother were encouraged to attend church and Sunday School, his mother considered the Scriptures ‘as unworthy of divine authorship or of acceptance as authoritative guides for the conduct of life’. Her underlying maxim, he said, was the Confucian saying: ‘To perform the duties of this life well, troubling not about another, is the prime wisdom.’13
Religion thus played little or no part in the early life of young Andrew Carnegie, whose nascent thoughts were moulded by his mother. She did not oppose the ‘New Jerusalem’ of her husband’s religious beliefs, nor the ‘Workers Paradise’ of her radical relatives, but she regarded life’s struggles in practical rather than philosophical terms. Hers was a simple Scottish economic philosophy: ‘Hard work brought siller [money], and siller brought meat [i.e. bread].’ So Andrew Carnegie was shown early in his life that the workings of the market-place were what brought a better life in immediate terms.
Andrew Carnegie’s formal education did not commence until 1843, when he was 8. Although the majority of his young friends had begun their schooling at 5, young Andrew shied away from the classroom saying he was not ready and his parents indulged him. Years passed without Andrew showing any inclination towards education; a situation which worried his by no means illiterate parents. At length they decided on a course of action. They approached Robert Martin (1806–60), a teacher at the school on neighbouring Rolland Street, to see if he would talk to Andrew about the importance of education. Martin was in charge of a school which taught the form of education promoted by the Quaker Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838); herein older children taught the younger after they had been tutored themselves by the schoolmaster. In this way school fees could be kept down, but the system led to a chaotically large number of children being taught in one room. For any progress to be made firm discipline had to be enforced with a hefty dose of the ‘tawse’ – a Scots leather strap with tails which was smacked across the hands. Not far away from Dunfermline was the mining village of Lochgelly, which was to become a centre for the making of these straps. Despite all this, Martin – nicknamed ‘Snuffy’ by his pupils – won the day with Andrew Carnegie, who entered the Rolland Street school soon after the pep talk. Carnegie wrote:
the school was a perfect delight to me
, and if anything occurred which prevented my attendance I was unhappy. This happened every now and then because my morning duty was to bring water from the well at the head of Moodie Street. The supply was scanty and irregular. Sometimes it was not allowed to run until late in the morning and a score of old wives were sitting around, the turn of each having been previously secured through the night by placing a worthless can in the line. This, as might be expected, led to numerous contentions in which I would not be put down even by these venerable dames. I earned the reputation of being ‘an awfu’ laddie’. In this way I probably developed the strain of argumentativeness, or perhaps combativeness, which has always remained with me.14
Carnegie became ‘Martin’s pet’, a nickname which brought him the ‘utmost opprobrium’, yet in later years when writing to his old school chums he would sign himself with the nickname.15 It was through Martin that Andrew Carnegie earned his ‘first penny’,16 by the recitation of a poem written by Robert Burns at the height of his inspiration in the mid-1780s. Entitled ‘Man was Made to Mourne – A Dirge’, it contains the immortal lines:
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
Carnegie recited its eleven stanzas faultlessly for his penny, and retained throughout his life a talent to memorise large chunks of verse which he could declaim at will. It was a trick of memory that he had learned from his uncle Lauder: visualise what is read to fix it in the memory.
Summing up his schooling, Carnegie said: ‘I could read, write and cipher, and had begun the study of Algebra and Latin.’17 But he had also begun to flex his skills for ‘business’. ‘One of the chief enjoyments of my childhood,’ he remembered, ‘was the keeping of pigeons and rabbits.’ But how could he afford to feed them? He hit upon a plan. Each rabbit was given the name of one of his playmates, who fed the rabbit in return.
I treasure the remembrance of this plan as the earliest evidence of organising power upon the development of which my material success in life was hung – a success not to be attributed to what I have known or done myself, but to the faculty of knowing and choosing others who did know better than myself.18
At this time in his childhood Dunfermline was ‘paradise’ for Carnegie. ‘All my recollections of childhood, all I knew of fairyland, clustered around the old Abbey and its curfew bell, which tolled at eight o’clock every evening and was the signal for me to run to bed before it stopped.’19 As he hurried home from his uncle Lauder’s fireside tales he would always avoid the gaslit Maygate and go by the abbey. Often at dusk, when the wind screamed through the old abbey and palace windows high above his head, the spooky story of James VI he had just heard at his uncle’s came alive. Once the king had heard a piercing scream from the nurse attending his son, the future Charles I. The nurse was beside herself: ‘Your Majesty, an old man came creeping into the room and threw his cloak over the cradle and drew it towards him like he was taking the Prince away.’ The king knew well that this was the ‘Curse of the Devil’; an old Scots superstition averred that when such an old man crept into a room and engulfed a child with his cloak, that child was doomed to a life of pain and suffering.20 Carnegie heard such a scream as he passed by, but assured his pals that he was not afraid!
For Scotland in particular the 1840s brought economic depression; unemployment became an increasing blight and strikes began to break out. When the miners in the nearby county of Clackmannan went on strike Carnegie’s uncle Tom Morrison became involved in calls for a creeping general strike and the Dunfermline labour force responded, from coal mines to weaving sheds. The burgh became a hotbed of revolutionary intent. The aim was the enactment of the ‘People’s Charter’ of the Chartists. At the time only 10 per cent of the Scots male population had the franchise, and the People’s Charter clamoured for six main ‘demands’: votes for every male; secret ballots; annual parliaments; equality in electoral districts; payment for MPs; and the abolition of property qualifications for MPs. Already the Charter had been voted down in the House of Commons. But when Sir Robert Peel’s government threw it out again in 1842 the riots and strikes were renewed. Response to the strike call, though, began to weaken as bellies felt the pangs of hunger and families suffered. Government troops arrived in Dunfermline and Tom Morrison and his agitator colleagues were arrested. Morrison was bailed and his case was never brought to trial, and eventually he was elected to the town council.
Men went back to work. All this was another layer of experience never to be forgotten by Andrew Carnegie, who observed at first hand the workers’ agitation going on around him. His hero worship for men like Robert I, the Bruce, and the glories of the Battle of Bannockburn was transferred to his uncle and the Dunfermline men who saw relief in the People’s Charter. At 6 or 7 years old Andrew Carnegie enrolled himself as a knight fighting the dragon of privilege, and at 8 he was a republican. In his autobiography he declared: ‘As a child I could have slain king, duke or lord, and considered their deaths a service to the state and hence a heroic act.’21
Curiously, in these revolutionary times Margaret Carnegie took Andrew and his cousin Dod to a royal Scottish occasion. On Thursday 1 September 1842 Queen Victoria landed at Granton Pier and rode in a barouche to view Edinburgh’s sights for the first time. It was quite a spectacle; there had been no royal visit to Scotland since that of the Queen’s uncle, George IV, in 1822. In her Journal the Queen wrote: ‘The impression Edinburgh has made upon us is very great . . . .’22 Alas, the impression made by the Queen on the two young republicans was not so ‘great’:
‘She’s not sae tall as your mither,’ said Dod.
‘And her dress is nae sae braw [not so fine],’ replied Andrew.23
In 1843 Margaret Carnegie gave birth to her last child, a boy, named Tom after his maternal grandfather and rebellious uncle. But, economically at least, times were deteriorating. One by one the apprentices left, and William Carnegie’s extra looms were disposed of. The Edgar Street premises became too much of an outlay and the family moved back to another cottage on Moodie Street, not far from where they used to live. Here William began work again on his surviving loom, but orders were thin. Margaret supplemented the family finances by selling vegetables and sweetmeats from her front door, and helped her uncle stitch shoes.
If young Andrew Carnegie had not yet fully appreciated poverty, he did now. Years later he remembered:
I began to learn what poverty meant. Dreadful days came when my father took the last of his webs to the great manufacturer, and I saw my mother anxiously awaiting his return to know whether a new web was to be obtained or that a period of idleness was upon us. It was burnt into my heart that my father, though neither ‘abject, mean, nor vile’, as Burns has it, had nevertheless to
‘beg a brother to the earth
To give him leave to toil.’
And then there came the resolve that I would cure that when I got to be a man. We were not, however, reduced to anything like poverty compared with many of our neighbours. I do not know to what lengths of privation my mother would not have gone that she might see her two boys wearing large white collars, and trimly dressed.24
Slowly the power-looms set up at Dunfermline put many of the handloom weavers out of business and William Carnegie was one of the casualties. The Carnegies now relied on what profit could be made out of the provisions sales and shoe work. It was more and more vital to find a way out of that poverty trap. As he sat at his idle loom, contemplating the sale of their household possessions, William Carnegie sang a new song, offering a clue to Andrew and his brother Tom as to where their future might lie:
To the West, to the West, to the land of the free,
Where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea;
Where a man is a man even though he must toil
And the poorest may gather the fruits of the soil.25
Back in 1840 Margaret Carnegie’s younger sister Annie, wife of Andrew Aitken, had joined another sister, Kitty, wife of Thomas Hogan, who had earlier emigr
ated to North America; they settled in Allegheny City at Slabtown, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Andrew Carnegie remembered seeing a map of America being set out on their living-room table before his Aunt Aitken had emigrated; were they now to go too?
Aunts Aitken and Hogan had had an anxious time at first in America because of the poor employment prospects; these were the tempestuous years of Democrat John Tyler’s presidency. Yet by the winter of 1847 life in Scotland looked pretty bleak for the Carnegies, who were now convinced that their future lay in America. A recent letter from Aunt Aitken had strengthened their resolution:
Business here is much better now, as most individuals can find employment, although some are out of a job yet, and the wages are considerably reduced. The spring has been a most favourable one . . . and there is no fear of want throughout the length and breadth of the land. This country is far better for the working man than the old one.26
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