Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors by Ian Maxwell

Author:Ian Maxwell [Maxwell, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844686780
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2012-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

Steam boat on the Clyde near Dumbarton. From William Daniell, Voyage Round Great Britain, 1820.

The development of the railways brought about a second Industrial Revolution in Scotland. Edinburgh and Glasgow were linked by rail by 1842, and spur lines ran from the cities to the smaller towns in their areas. Railway connections with the south were established with the foundation in 1845 of the Caledonian Railway which linked Glasgow with the North Western Railway at Carlisle, and then to London. The social consequences were spectacular. The railway network integrated the country as never before, as travel was now possible for people with little leisure and no private transport. For the fortunate, railways made it possible to live at a distance from the place of employment, and suburbs arose around the cities, providing more work for architects, masons, builders, carpenters and slaters, plumbers and painters. Industrial costs were dramatically lowered and profits accordingly soared. Production of coal and iron (and steel) was greatly increased demand and new jobs at all levels were provided – labourers to lay the tracks and civil engineers to plan them; mechanical engineers to design locomotives; labourers to smelt the iron-ore; platers and riveters to build them; drivers and firemen to crew the engines, and signalmen and surfacemen to see to the safe scheduled running of the trains.

By the second half of the nineteenth century the iron industry with its attendants, coal-mining and engineering challenged the predominance of textiles in Scotland. In the final decades of that century ship-building and steel manufacture took the place of the iron industry. The central belt of Scotland had by that time become the most intensively industrialized regions in the world. By 1913, Glasgow, claiming for herself the title of ‘Second City of the Empire’, made, with her satellite towns, one-fifth of the steel, one-third of the railway locomotives and rolling stock, one-third of the shipping tonnage and one -half of the marine-engine horsepower in the United Kingdom.

The development of the heavy industries brought about an enormous change in the landscape of many parts of Scotland. With the spread of coalming and ironworking came the bings, the pit-shafts with their desolate buildings and coke-ovens, the criss-cross of mineral railways. In some parishes, notably the Monklands, existing hamlets grew rapidly and towns, such as Coatbridge, appeared from nothing. Those parts of the towns which had once been occupied by weavers were not interspersed by Victorian tenements while Irish and Highland immigration frequently brought in a rapid increase in Chapels. In such areas, especially in parts of north Lanarkshire and north Ayrshire, the harshness of life was evident. To Thomas Tancred, visiting Monklands parishes in 1842, it seemed that:

Everything that meets the eye or ear tells of slavish labour united to brutal intemperance. At night, ascending to the hill on which the Established Church stands, the groups of blast-furnaces on all sides might be imagined to be blazing volcanoes, at most of which the smelting is continued Sundays and week-days, by day and night, without intermission.

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