EIGHT
Scotland in the Nineteenth Century
Empire and the Scottish Identity
From 1848 until the end of her long reign in 1901, Queen Victoria spent each autumn at Balmoral Castle in the Cairngorms, setting a pattern followed by British monarchs ever since. A piper played beneath her windows each morning and the royal family donned tartan and the kilt, at play in the Highlands.
Nothing underlines more the difference between the position of Scotland in the United Kingdom and that of Ireland. Victoria visited Ireland just four times during her reign. Repression was a constant feature of Irish society and Irish risings against British rule occurred in 1848 and 1867, the latter followed by a Fenian bombing campaign. During the 1870s and ’80s the Land League agitation led to landless labourers and small farmers going on rent strike and taking direct action to win ownership of the land. The latter years of Victoria’s reign were dominated by the Irish question and the issue of whether Britain should grant the island Home Rule. The introduction of two Home Rule bills, in 1886 and 1893, by the government of William Ewart Gladstone divided the Liberals, the dominant party of the British ruling class in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite Gladstone’s time in Downing Street being so much occupied by the Irish Question, the Liberal prime minister visited Ireland only once in his long life. Gladstone was of Scottish descent and represented Midlothian in Parliament.
Ireland was a colony of Britain and was treated as such – during the Great Famine people were left to die, as was the case later in Victorian India. During those same years famine stalked the Highlands, but the British government and landlords acted to prevent deaths there, regarding it as part of Britain.
The Scottish middle and upper classes took to Empire with gusto. The East India Company utilised them in creating its privatised Indian Empire, and when Henry Dundas secured control of its Board of Control, he doled out offices to men whose rapaciousness became legendary. The Hong Kong–based corporation Jardine Matheson and Co. was founded by two Scots, and built its fortune peddling opium to the Chinese.
The two Calvinist churches took over the work of the Scottish missionary David Livingstone in 1873, and for eighty years effectively ran Nyasaland, today’s Malawi. Dundee controlled the global trade in jute and did not just rely on raw material from Bengal but ran the industry that developed there.
As late as 1937, Evgenia Fraser from Broughty Ferry would travel to join her husband on the banks of the Hoogly in Bengal. He was the kerani, the man in charge of a jute mill. Evgania wrote: ‘The keranis of the mills, up and down the river, were young men recruited from Dundee and its district. Most of them had a grammar school background and had served their apprenticeship in the offices of the jute mills and brokers …’ Life was far removed even from the middle-class homes they had left behind in Dundee and Broughty Ferry: ‘The whole compound, including gardens, tennis courts and the swimming pool was looked after by an army of gardeners and workers … It was pleasant to get up in the morning, secure in the knowledge that breakfast was prepared, the beds would be made, the house cleaned, lunch and dinner cooked and served.’ She added: ‘As for the Indians, I don’t ever think we got to know them.’1
The Scottish upper classes were not ‘junior partners’ in Empire, they were at the centre of it. This imperial role shaped the Scotland of the nineteenth century, as did the existence of a Scottish capitalism – something that did not long outlast the turn of the century. Christopher Harvie points out that economic downturns and recession were regular in the nineteenth century but Scottish capitalism was resilient enough to overcome them: ‘… at each crisis it was the Scots who seized on new options and took the initiative: cotton in the 1780s, iron in the 1820s, ships in the 1860s, steel in the 1880s.’2
The nineteenth century shaped Scottish identity and culture in a very specific way. Ray Burnett argues: ‘… much of our shared “British” ideology as it manifests itself in Scotland draws its vigour and strength from a specifically Scottish heritage of myths, prejudices and illusions.’3 The historian Michael Lynch takes up a similar theme: ‘Bourgeois respectability linked arms with the new British state, which had emerged after the Reform Act of 1832 … The concentric loyalties of Victorian Scotland – a new Scottishness, a new Britishness and a revised sense of local pride – were held together by a phenomenon bigger than all of them – a Greater Britain whose stability rested on the Empire.’4
The death of Walter Scott in 1832 is a convenient point to mark the passing of the Enlightenment in Scotland (it remains a work as yet uncompleted). The legacy Scott bequeathed was of a romantic Scotland that would translate into kailyard and kitsch, as Tom Nairn argues: ‘While the Enlightenment was only an episode, Romanticism entered her soul.’5 Elsewhere, Nairn has added that romanticism created a national identity in a distinctive way: ‘But the way in which it did so was markedly different from that of other European nations. Whereas, in Italy or Germany, Romanticism was part of the formation of national identity, in Scotland, particularly in the work of Sir Walter Scott, it acted as another substitute for it.’6
Nevertheless, even this romanticised identity could not quell protest. In 1853, the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights could attract 5,000 people to a public meeting in Glasgow to hear complaints that Ireland received more from government funds than Scotland, it did not have its fair share of MPs and that the Scottish Privy Council should be restored.7 Public subscription in the late 1850s enabled the building of the Wallace Monument overlooking the site of his victory at Stirling Bridge, with the aforementioned National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights being an enthusiastic backer.
Nationalism led to demands for some form of autonomy within the United Kingdom. In the 1880s, the Earl of Roseberry and the Duke of Argyll spearheaded a successful campaign to create the post of Secretary of State for Scotland, and in 1886 the cross-party Scottish Home Rule Association was formed, existing until 1914.8 Yet these, like Walter Scott’s earlier defence of the right of Scottish banks to issue separate notes, were the concern of the middle and upper classes, and remained comfortably within a wider British, imperial identity.
The dominance of the Liberal Party following the 1832 Reform Bill strengthened its hold. There were few outstanding Scottish Liberal MPs, but prominent English ones, including two prime ministers, Gladstone and Asquith, held Scottish seats. All of this was reinforced by the glorification of Scottish militarism in service of Empire, appropriating the dress and pipes of the Highlanders, so recently branded rebels.
Thus, until recently, national identity was still found in the celebration of Ensign Ewart at Waterloo, and the ‘Thin Red Line’ at Balaclava in the Crimea, just as we would be invited to celebrate ‘Mad Mitch’, Lieutenant Colonel Colin Mitchell, for the brutal repression of Yemeni nationalists in Aden.
Following a pitch invasion in 1886 during an FA Cup tie between Queens Park and Preston North End, there was one declaration of independence, with the Scottish Football Association ordering its members to withdraw from that competition, fastening the national identity of the SFA and the game north of the border. Following this, the most obvious celebration of Scottish identity was on the terraces of Hampden Park or, as a similar Scottish Rugby Union emerged, at Murrayfield.
By the close of the nineteenth century, Scottish capital was being invested not in native industry but in overseas development – helping to create a massive problem within a few short years as Scotland’s staple industries failed to modernise. In 1914, UK overseas investment was £4,000 million, an average of £90 per person. Scotland’s share was £500 million, £110 per person.9 Dundee was dependent on Bengal and the jute industry, Glasgow on a narrow base of heavy industry. As industry grew in Bengal, and American and German competitors out-priced Clydeside shipbuilders, the economy suddenly faced trouble.
Industrialisation
In 1842, when Queen Victoria became only the second head of the United Kingdom to visit Scot
land since the Act of Union in 1707, she encountered a divided nation. There was a yawning gap growing between the Highlands and Lowlands. With a population of 2.6 million, the country’s population had doubled since the first accurate count in 1775. The most dramatic change was in the cities. Glasgow was twelve times bigger than it had been sixty-five years before; Dundee had grown by 35 percent. The 1851 census recorded a fall in the Highland population, a product of land clearances and hunger following the failure of the potato crop, and every census for the next century recorded a decrease. The rise of the cities continued throughout the century. Glasgow’s population grew to 784,000, nearly tripling in size from 1841 to 1911. In the same period Edinburgh grew to 401,000, Aberdeen to 164,000 and Dundee to 165,000.10
Glasgow had an economy that bound together shipbuilding, engineering, steel and coal mining. In the 1890s and 1900s there was growth in engineering, tool-making and metalwork, linked to the shipyards. Shipbuilding was the symbol of Scottish industry. Between 1851 and 1870 the Clyde built two-thirds of British shipping.11 Closely connected was the steel industry, which ‘in Scotland in 1873 was capable of producing 1,119 tons of steel … output reached 485,000 tons by 1890’.12
In addition, though in decline, the textile industry still employed 18,000 male workers in 1911, and there were 12,000 male clerks. But seven out of ten male and female workers were skilled, an unusually high proportion. Unskilled workers were 27 percent of the workforce, but of those 44 percent of them were Irish-born males (an even greater percent could claim Irish heritage if the second and third generations of Irish migrant families were included).13
Industrialisation had brought even more spectacular change:
… the iron industry of Lanarkshire doubled the population of Old and New Monkland parishes between 1831 and 1842, and created Airdrie, population 12,400, but attracting another 10,000 on pay nights from the surrounding mining towns to fight and drink. It had the ramshackle and dangerous character of a frontier town, where rival bands of Orange and Green beat one another up outside the pubs (it had one for every twenty males), the truck shops and the towering furnaces.14
The numbers of coal miners increased from 46,900 in 1870 to 147,500 in 1913, with just over half concentrated in the west. Output grew almost threefold in these decades, from 14.9 million to 42.4 million tons.
Scotland Divided
Rapid industrial growth brought huge contrasts between those at the top of Scottish society and those who created their wealth. The concentration of wealth in Edinburgh, ensuring that the Lothians had the highest living standards in the country, was unmatched in any British city except London. Censuses show that those employed in professional work in Edinburgh represented 20.8 percent of its population in 1830 – more than three and a half times the proportion in Glasgow (5.9 percent), and throughout the nineteenth century approximately one male in eight was employed in professional work, far in excess of any other British city.15 Edinburgh was the UK’s third-richest city in 1879, with Glasgow in fifth place.16
Scottish capitalism was in the hands of magnates who held sway during the high tide of the Victorian era. Calculations for the years between 1809 and 1914 show six Scots among the forty richest Britons. One, the third Marquess of Bute, made his money in South Wales; two were Lanarkshire ironmasters, William Baird (died 1864) and William Weir (died 1913); two were Paisley sewing thread manufacturers, Peter and James Couts (both died 1913); and the other was the Glasgow chemical manufacturer Charles Tennant (died 1906). All were worth more than £2 million and all were based on Clydeside.
The grandfather of that Charles Tennant, also named Charles, had established the family fortune through the manufacture of bleaching powder at the St Rollox works in Glasgow. Bleaching powder soon replaced urine, sunlight and other inferior bleaches in the textile industry, and from this base the firm diversified into sulphuric acid, caustic soda and soap manufacture. By the time of his death in 1838, Charles Tennant employed 500 men in his factory, described by the New Statistical Account of the 1840s as ‘the most extensive of any of the kind in Europe. In the furnaces are upwards of 100 furnaces, retorts and fire-places. In this great concern upwards of 600 tons of coal are consumed weekly.’17
Dependent on coal and reliant on the canal owners to supply him with chemicals, Tennant jumped at the chance to build Scotland’s first railway, in 1831, from Glasgow to Garnkirk, connecting the coalfields of Lanarkshire to the St Rollox works. Tennant was a Whig who, when the new industrial capitalist class was excluded from political power, campaigned for political reform and abolition of the Corn Laws, although he showed his disapproval of working-class reformers. He remained radical enough to refuse a peerage when it was offered to him shortly before his death.18
Charles was followed by his son, John, who expanded the firm’s operations to Tyneside, where he established an even bigger factory than the one in St Rollox, and bought the Tharsis mines in Spain, where a Scottish colony of several hundred oversaw mining operations employing 2,000, producing iron ore, copper and sulphur. Like his father, he was a stalwart of the Liberal Party in Glasgow.
The Tyneside plant paid higher wages, John Tennant claimed this was because coal was cheaper there, but the real reason was that in Glasgow there was an abundant supply of cheap labour, with migrants from Ireland and rural areas crowding into slums in Garngad, beside the St Rollox works.
John’s son, Charles Tennant II, took the business to new, giddy heights. His policy was to keep wages at rock bottom, and in Garngad there was a stready supply of cheap unskilled labour to be found. But his Tyneside works were unionised, and so too was Hallside Steel Works in Lanarkshire, and at both he was not always able to pay wages as low as he would have liked. A visitor to the Tennant household in 1897 noted, ‘my host is possessed by an almost maniacal hatred of trades unions and all their works.’19
Despite this, Tennant continued the family’s commitment to the Liberal Party, serving as a Glasgow MP from 1877 to 1880 and then representing Peebles and Selkirk. By the start of the twentieth century, however, he was a Tory in all but name, supporting Joseph Chamberlain’s unsuccessful campaign to end free trade and to impose import controls. This was despite one of his daughters marrying Herbert Asquith, a future Liberal prime minister. His biography mirrored those of much of the British bourgeoisie, worried by the fact Britain had been overtaken industrially by the USA and Germany, and fearful of working-class discontent. He died in 1906 with a fortune of more than £3 million, a half-billionaire in today’s terms.20
Scottish cities were small enough to ensure constant tension. The upper classes, with their servants, inhabited a world of country estates for the very wealthy and seaside homes for the middle classes, a million miles away from the world of the workers, despite living together cheek by jowl in town. Hyndland in the west of Glasgow peered down on Partick and across the river on Govan. In Edinburgh it was a short walk from Morningside or Newington across the Meadows to slum housing, the worst of which was in the Cowgate.
Just how different their lives were was spelled out by a Royal Commission in 1840 that investigated the appalling conditions in Scotland’s pits. Among the places its members visited was Liberton, then a mining village south of Edinburgh, where the commission reported children were working down the mine: Janet Cumming, aged eleven, told how she works ‘with father, have done for two years. Father gangs at two in the morning. I gang with the women at five and come up at five at night, work all night Friday and come away at five in the day.’
For Agnes Reid, aged fourteen, things were still worse: ‘I bear coal on my back. I do not know the exact weight, but it is something more than a hundredweight. It is very sore work and makes me cry and few lassies like it … but I suppose father needs me …’
William Woods at fourteen was probably already falling victim to silicosis: ‘I have been three years below. I gang at three in the morning and return at about six. It is no very good work, and the sore labour makes me feel very ill and fat
igued. It injures my breath.’21
Two years later the Children’s Employment Commission produced a report with interviews it had carried out. At a pit outside Edinburgh a twelve-year-old boy told them:
I have worked two years at Sheriffhall, and go below at two or three in the morning, and hew til six at night; after that I fill and put the carts on the rails to the pit bottom … The pit I work in is very wet; we used to fall asleep; am kept awake now. It is most terrible work; and I am wrought in a thirty inch seam, and am obliged to twist myself up to work on my side; this is every day work except Friday, when I go down at twelve at night, and come up at twelve to noon.22
The Mines Act of 1845, which followed the commission’s work, banned women and girls from underground labour and set an age limit of ten years for boys.
From the 1830s on, Coatbridge in the Monklands was at the centre of the new, hot-blast iron industry, with six ironworks and fifty blast furnaces, reliant on mining coal and ironstone. This ‘black country’ was seen as Scotland’s Wild West. Between 1831 and 1841 the working class in the area doubled to 40,000. The next year, when Lanarkshire coal and ironstone owners tried to impose wage cuts, there were strikes at 140 pits in the Airdrie and Coatbridge area alone, with 8,000 out of 10,000 miners taking part across the county.
The self-taught poet Janet Hamilton wrote this verse, ‘Oor Location’, describing her home town, Coatbridge, in the 1850s:
A hunner funnels bleezin’, reekin’,
A People's History of Scotland Page 14