Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History by Devine T. M.; Wormald Jenny;

Author:Devine, T. M.; Wormald, Jenny;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

INDUSTRIAL HEROES

Industry had a further impact, for it gave rise to a new pantheon of national heroes, celebrated through popular biography and iconography.52 The first to achieve recognition were the inventors, particularly James Watt (1736–1819), scientist and developer of the steam engine, who was also a mathematical instrument maker and surveyor. Indeed, the William Wallace National Monument near Stirling, opened in 1869 with an audience of over seventy thousand in attendance, included a ‘Hall of Heroes’ comprising sixteen busts of well-known modern Scots, three of them inventors—Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), scientist and optical innovator; William Murdock (1754–1839), pioneer of gas lighting; and, of course, James Watt. Watt also dominated a popular engraving and accompanying volume of memoirs titled ‘Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain living in 1807–8’, which was published in London in the 1860s by William Walker, son of a Musselburgh salt manufacturer. The imaginary scene, set in the library of the Royal Institution and dominated by Scots, marked the centenary of the Act of Union and was a celebration of the ‘inestimable benefits which have resulted to mankind from the labours of these gifted men … the Grand Main-Springs of our National Wealth and Enterprise’.53

Not only the wonders of industry in the hands of inventors but the popular evocation of the celebrated businessman as social benefactor came to mark this new industrial hagiography. Schools, public libraries, and art galleries, concert halls and parks, were all endowed by industrialists, some of them, like Andrew Carnegie, having made their industrial fortunes overseas. In most cases, the buildings that housed these institutions preserved the names of the benefactors long after the demise of the industries from which they took their wealth. Who, for instance, in the streets of Kirkcaldy today could tell you anything of the three men called Michael Nairn, father, son, and grandson, whose wealth generated through the manufacture of floor cloths and linoleum—with factories in Fife, the United States, France, and Germany, and warehouses in London and Paris as well as Glasgow and Manchester—was gifted to the town to build a hospital in 1890, a new high school in 1894, a YMCA in 1895, and a public park in 1927? The monumental buildings and open spaces bequeathed to local communities such as those in Kirkcaldy, where Michael Nairn & Co. was the largest employer, made a lasting contribution to the Scottish townscape.

A popular narrative that suggested public-spirited men of industry and invention were role models for the working population was widely articulated through magazines like The British Workman (first published in 1855) and through the pen of Samuel Smiles (1812–1906), doctor and newspaper editor from Haddington (present-day East Lothian), who made his career in Leeds, and specialized in industrial biographies with such edifying titles as Self-Help (1859), Character (1871), and Thrift (1875). An account of Britain and of Scotland that privileged the contributions of industrialists was also sealed at the end of the century with the first publication of the Dictionary of National Biography, in which big

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