Glasgow by Michael Fry

Author:Michael Fry [Fry, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784975814
Publisher: Head of Zeus

7

Patricians: ‘Model municipality’

ON OCTOBER 8, 1856, the lord provost of Glasgow, Andrew Orr, had a pleasant public duty to perform at the inauguration of the new deacon convener of the trades, James Wilson. As part of the ceremony, amid the classical elegance of Robert Adam’s Trades Hall in Glassford Street, Orr gave a speech on behalf of the town council welcoming Wilson to his duties. It was tactful for the lord provost to gloss over the fact that these duties amounted to a good deal less than in former times. After the municipal reform of 1833, the original duopoly of merchants and tradesmen in the government of the royal burgh had ended, with their authority passing instead to a general body of voters. The process left for Trades Hall only a residue of charitable functions: helping orphans to get an education, promoting best practice in apprenticeships and generally succouring the needy round the city. Orr, not therefore having much by way of practical business to dwell on, made his speech more inspiring with a vision of things to come, as foreseen by him and his colleagues on the council. It turned into a classic statement of what Victorian Glasgow was all about.

There is nothing Glaswegians love so much as praise of their own city, but Orr went further with the ideal he held out of a ‘model municipality’. It was already being realized in some essentials: ‘We now have all the powers and privileges, with a larger population and a great amount of territory, than is embraced in the municipal bounds in any other city in Great Britain.’ Life here had grown so alluring that lesser places clamoured to share in it:

We are envied, not only by other cities, but by our immediate neighbours. We have a large and efficient police force to keep peace within our boundaries, but still all our citizens are not satisfied to remain within our circle. They are building villas beyond our limits, and inviting our police protection to follow them there. At Govan, Maryhill and Partick, and other places, they are looking to us to extend to them police protection, and to incorporate them; and I believe that nothing would be more beneficial than to amalgamate the four parishes in and around Glasgow into one great municipality; and thus including, as it would, parochial, municipal, statute labour and police matters in one system, Glasgow would be pointed to as a perfect model of a great city governing itself… Here we have 400,000 citizens following every industrial and other pursuits, accumulating wealth, properly using their political privileges, and governing themselves so as not to require a single officer of the imperial government to care for or look after them. I ask, is this not one of the most beautiful examples of self-government which it is possible to conceive? 1

National sentiment was starting to stir again in Scotland, but Orr’s patriotism seems to have been local. In some ways Glasgow had by now little in common with the rest of the country, its old-fashioned cities, small burghs or emptying hills and glens.

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