UPON the final clearing away of the
Jacobite menace, after the battle of Culloden in 1746, Glasgow found
prosperity flowing upon it in a rising tide. One of the most
significant evidences of this development was the establishing of
the joint-stock banks, which began in the year 1750. Previously the
working of finance in Scotland had been rather a cumbrous business.
Down to the time of George Hutcheson, the Glasgow notary, money
could only be borrowed on the security of actual property—wadsets or
bonds upon landed estates, or the deposit of jewels and other
valuables. In The Fortunes of Nigel Sir Walter Scott gives a fair
picture of the latter process in the dealings of King James VI. with
the Edinburgh goldsmith and money-lender, George Heriot. George
Hutcheson introduced the less cumbrous method of lending money upon
the personal security of responsible guarantors, and sixty years
later the Darien Company carried matters further when it granted
loans to its subscribers on the security of their holdings of its
own shares. Edinburgh led the way in the setting up of regular
joint-stock banks in Scotland. The Bank of England had been founded
in 1694 on the plan of the Dumfriesshire farmer's son and West
Indian merchant, William Paterson, and, following its example, the
Bank of Scotland had been incorporated in the following year. Its
capital to begin with was £100,000, the amount called up £10,000,
and its business limited to the advancing of money on bills and
bonds by the issue of notes for sums of £5, £10, £50, and £100
sterling. A second company, the Royal Bank of Scotland, was
established by charter in 1727 with, for its capital, a large part
of the debentures, amounting to £248,550, which had been issued in
payment of the Scottish national debts, and upon which interest of
£10,000 per annum was to be paid out of the Scottish customs and
excise. Little more than a fourth part of the capital of this
company was held in Scotland, so the Royal had only a branch office
in Edinburgh, but its first governor was Archibald, Earl of Ilay,
afterwards third Duke of Argyll. [Hist. of Royal Bank of Scotland,
by Neil Munro, p. 34.] One of
the difficulties of these early banks is illustrated by an incident
which took place on 27th March, 1728. On that day Andrew Cochrane,
Provost of Glasgow, presented at the office of the Bank of Scotland
£900 of its notes for change into coin of the realm. There was none
to give him. Two-thirds of the capital of the bank and all its notes
had been lent out on heritable and personal bonds, which could not
be immediately turned into cash, and already there had been a run on
the bank for the cashing of its notes, engineered, it was suspected,
by the rival Royal Bank, which had emptied the till. The bank
claimed the privilege of deferring payment of cash, and promised
interest until payment was made. The Court of Session upheld this
claim, but Provost Cochrane carried the case to the House of Lords,
which reversed that decision and declared that banks must meet their
promises to pay in the same manner as private individuals. [Ibid. p.
60.] In this matter the stout Glasgow provost vindicated the
principle upon which the entire integrity and success of the
Scottish banking system since then have been based.
The banking experience of the western
city itself had been suggestive enough. In 1696, the year after its
foundation in Edinburgh, and again in 1731, the Bank of Scotland had
opened branch offices in Glasgow, but had closed them after a short
experience. The reason usually given
for this want of success is that the bank would not deal in bills of
exchange. [Buchanan's Ranking in Glasgow during the Olden Time.]
There is room, however, to surmise that the enterprise laboured in
Glasgow under the prevalent feeling that the promoters of the Bank
of Scotland were more or less Jacobite in sentiment. Its Tory
directors had opposed the Treaty of Union, its treasurer was a
Jacobite, and the Government was known to suspect its political
sympathies. [Hist. Royal Bank, p. 52.] On the other hand the Royal
Bank was notedly Hanoverian in sympathies. Its governor and the most
active members of its staff were Campbells, and it was known to have
the warm support of the Duke of Argyll, the victor of Sheriffmuir.
It was significant that when the Government granted compensation to
the city for its losses on account of the Jacobite visitation of
1745, the money was paid through the Royal Bank, [Burgh Records, 8th
Nov. 1749.] and when in the year of the great frost Glasgow found it
necessary to borrow a large sum for the feeding of the poor, it was
from the Royal Bank that the money was obtained. [Hist. Royal Bank,
p. 86.] But the Royal had no branch in the western city till 1783,
when the famous Glasgow citizen, David Dale, was appointed joint
agent there.
Meanwhile in Glasgow a considerable
banking business was carried on by private traders. In the Edinburgh
Evening Courant in July, 1730, James Blair, merchant, at the head of
Saltmarket, advertised that, at his shop there, "all persons who
have occasion to buy or sell bills of exchange, or want money to
borrow, or have money to lend on interest, etc., may deliver their
demands." It was not till 1750 that the hour struck when Glasgow was
to have a bank of its own. At that time the largest banking business
in the city was probably being done by the Glasgow Tanwork Company,
which carried on its ordinary operations, with tanning pits and
other appurtenances, beside the Molendinar, near the Gallowgate.
Among its patrons were Provost Andrew Cochrane and many other
notable merchants. Fifteen years later, in 1765, its deposits
amounted to no less than £40,000. [The Tanwork Company was entrusted
with large deposits from many parts of Scotland, on which it paid
interest at 4½ and 5 per cent. A list of the depositors and the sums
at their credit is given by Senex in Old Glasgow and its Environs,
p. 123.] It was in January,1750, that the first regular Glasgow bank
began business in a small office in the old dwelling of the Coulters
at the south corner of Briggate and Saltmarket. [Photograph in The
Old Ludgings of Glasgow, p. 58.] Its partners were William McDowall
of Castle Semple, Andrew Buchanan of Drumpellier, Allan Dreghorn of
Ruchill, Robert Dunlop, merchant, Colin Dunlop of Carmyle, and
Alexander Houston of Jordanhill, all men of wealth and high standing
in the city. It was known as the Ship Bank, and its operations were
carried on under the firm name of Colin Dunlop, Alexander Houston &
Co. It owed its success largely to the unremitting labours of the
famous Robin Carrick, its manager for a long lifetime. "Sicker,
far-seeing, resolute, passionless, spending his days in the dingy
Bank parlour, and his lonely, joyless evenings in the old flat
above, he died there on 20th June, 1821. [Mitchell, Old Glasgow
Essays, p. 21. There remained, nevertheless, one grain of sentiment
under the hard crust of the grim old banker's nature. George
Buchanan, the great Tobacco Lord, builder of the famous Virginia
Mansion, when at the height of his fortunes had employed a divinity
student as a tutor for his family, and afterwards got him inducted
as parish minister of Houston. Later, when George Buchanan's son,
Provost Andrew Buchanan, was helping to found the Ship Bank, he got
his old tutor's son, Robin Carrick, then about fourteen, a place as
message boy in the establishment. When the crash came to the tobacco
trade, with the revolt of the American colonies, the Buchanans were
ruined. But Provost Andrew's brother, David, when the war was over,
went to the United States, and recovered enough of the family
fortunes to return and purchase again his grandfather's estate of
Drumpellier. He was again on the verge of ruin through a law plea in
America, when Robin Carrick died, and it was found that he had left
nearly his whole fortune to the son of his father's old patron. From
that circumstance the Buchanans of Drumpellier took the name of
Carrick-Buchanan. Curiosities of Glasgow Citizenship, p. 25.
Mitchell, Old Glasgow Papers, p. 164.] He was eighty-one years of
age, and left about a million sterling Not to be outdone by their
rivals in business, another group of Glasgow merchants, with Andrew
Cochrane at their head, started the Glasgow Arms Bank in November of
the year in which the Ship Bank opened its doors. There were
twenty-six partners, and the office was a small place up a narrow
stair, also in that fashionable business quarter, the Briggate. It
carried on business under the name of Andrew Cochrane, John Murdoch
& Company.
The procedure adopted by these banks
and the others that followed them was to lodge in the hands of the
Town Clerk bonds signed by all their partners guaranteeing payment
of their notes. In their case a "seal of cause," such as the
Magistrates and Town Council granted to the various crafts and
incorporations to enable them to sue and be sued and to hold
property as corporate bodies, was not required, but the joint
guarantee of all the partners, thus duly registered, served a not
less important purpose.
Threatened with this rivalry in the
western city, the two Edinburgh banks joined forces in a rather
ungenerous attempt to put the Glasgow banks out of business. For
this purpose they employed a rather despicable individual. Alexander
Trotter, an Edinburgh accountant, who had been an early partner in
the afterwards great banking firm of Coutts & Company, was sent to
Glasgow. There he set about the business of embarrassing the new
private banks by collecting their notes, and then presenting them in
large amounts and demanding payment in cash. The Glasgow bankers met
the attacks by paying out the money in sixpences, a device which had
been adopted by the Edinburgh banks themselves in a similar
emergency. On one occasion a whole forenoon was taken to make a
payment of, and the total amount thus cashed in thirty-four business
days was £2893. Trotter, on 23rd January 1759, made a formal
protest, then brought an action in the Court of Session against the
Glasgow Arms Bank for payment of the notes which he held, amounting
to X3447, with interest from the date of his protest, as well as 600
damages. He also asked it to be declared that the bank had no powers
to limit its hours of business, but must cash its notes on demand at
any time between seven in the morning and ten at night. The case
drifted on for four years, and was in the end taken out of Court on
the bank paying Trotter £600. The amount probably did no more than
cover his expenses, and the Glasgow Arms Bank had secured the
purpose of its defence. [The Scotsman, 5th April, 1826. Forbes,
Memoirs of a Banking House, 2nd ed., p. 5. Reproductions of the
notes of some of these old Glasgow banks, with interesting details
regarding their signatories, are printed in Frazer's Making of
Buchanan Street, pp. 5-8.]
During the next half-century a number
of other private banking companies were established in Glasgow. In
1761 the Thistle Bank was set up by Sir Walter Maxwell of Pollok and
partners; in 1769 the Merchant Banking Company by a number of small
traders in the Saltmarket ; in 1785 Thomson's Bank, by a father and
two sons of that name; and in 1809 the Glasgow Bank, at the
south-west corner of Montrose and Ingram Streets, was founded and
managed by James Dennis-ton of Golfhill. [Glasgow Past and Present,
p. 462; Curiosities of Citizenship, p. 141.] At a later day the
oldest and the latest of these banks united to become the Glasgow
and Ship Bank, and later still, along with the Thistle Bank, were
embodied in the Union Bank of Scotland. The Glasgow Arms Bank and
the Merchant Banking Company stopped payment during the crisis of
the French Revolution, but paid their creditors in full. [Hist.
Royal Bank, p. 156.]
It cannot be doubted that the credits
and other facilities afforded by these banks played a large part in
developing the trade and industry of Glasgow in the second half of
the eighteenth century. Nor was the Town Council slow to avail
itself of the financial convenience which the banks afforded.
In 1754, when considerable expense
fell to be incurred in improving certain turnpike roads leading into
the city—the Renfrew and Three Mile House roads, and the road from
Gorbals by Paisley Loan to Govan—it was arranged to take credit
"from any of the banks in the city" to defray the cost, till this
could be recovered out of the tolls. And a few months later it was
agreed to open an account with the "new bank company," otherwise the
Glasgow Arms Bank, upon which the Provost was empowered to draw sums
for the town's use up to a total amount of £1000. [Burgh Records,
16th April, 26th Sept. 1754.]
Another enterprise which the rising
trade of Glasgow quickened with astonishing effect was the deepening
and improvement of the harbour. Again and again in the two hundred
years since it became a self-governing community the city had made
efforts to secure its passage to the open sea. As long ago as the
year 1566 it had joined with the burghs of Renfrew and Dunbarton in
an attempt to deepen the channel at Dumbuck, [Cleland's Annals,
1817, p. 371.] and again in 1611, after securing from James VI. the
freedom of the river "from the Clochstane to the Brig of Glasgow,"
it had sought the advice of Henry Crawfurd, the Culross engineer,
and under his direction had again attacked the obstruction at
Dumbuck with chains, ropes, hogsheads, and other apparatus. [Burgle
Records, i. 329.] But these efforts still left the river little more
than a shallow salmon stream. Over a hundred years had elapsed since
William Simpson, that native of St. Andrews whom McUre describes as
"a great projector" of Glasgow trade, "built two ships at the
Bremmylaw, and brought them down the river the time of a great
flood." When the first Glasgow vessel to trade with Virginia, a
craft of sixty tons, was built on the Clyde in 1716, the work had to
be done at Crawford's-dyke, between Port-Glasgow and Greenock, as no
natural flood would have been great enough to float her down the
river. Port-Glasgow, it is true, in the fifty years of its history
had thoroughly justified its existence, but the conveyance of the
transhipped cargoes between that seaport and the parent city still
presented serious difficulties by reason of the sandbanks, islands,
and shallow channel of the Clyde. Notwithstanding these hindrances,
the extension of trade made it necessary in 1723 to enlarge the quay
at the Broomielaw, and the Town Council, the Trades House, and
probably the Merchants House, spent I833 6s. 8d. sterling in
extending it as far as "St. Tennochis burn foot, opposite to the
Dowcat Green"—that is, about the present Dixon Street, where the
Dowcat or Old Green began. [Burgh Records, 22nd June, 1722; 12th
Nov. 1724.] Regarding the harbour, as thus improved, McUre, a few
years later, indulged in one of his bursts of eloquence. "There is
not," he says," such a fresh water harbour to be seen in any place
in Britain. It is strangely fenced with beams of oak, fastened with
iron bolts within the wall thereof, that the great boards of ice in
time of thaw may not offend it ; and it is so large that a regiment
of horse may be exercised thereupon." [Hist. Glasg., 1830 ed., p.
231, append. 347.]
McUre's remarks may have helped to
stimulate further enterprise, for in 1736, the year in which his
History was published, the Town Council ordered an inspection to be
made of the sandbanks in the river below the Broomielaw, and agreed
to expend £20 sterling "for an experiment upon one of the sandbanks
for clearing the river." [Burgh Records, 2nd July, 1736.] In this
small and tentative fashion was begun again the great engineering
achievement which in two hundred years has made the Clyde at Glasgow
one of the most commodious harbours in the world.
Four years later another effort was
made to remove the sandbanks below the Broomielaw. The magistrates
were empowered to "go the length of £100 sterling of charges
thereupon," and to build a flat-bottomed boat "for carrying off the
sand and shingle from the banks." [Ibid. 8th May, 1740. Instead of
building a new boat the magistrates requisitioned and repaired "the
Port Glasgow dirt boat."—Ibid. 29th Aug. 1740.]
Just then the success of the rising
harbour town of Greenock may have given a spur to the efforts of
Glasgow. Under the energetic guidance of its superior, Sir John
Shaw, that place had developed into a thriving port, and secured the
charter of a royal burgh, and in 1740 had repaid all the capital
expended upon its harbour, and realized a surplus of 27,000 merks or
£1500 sterling. Its customs realized over £15,000 per annum. [Weir's
Hist. of Greenock, p. 42. Williamson's Old Greenock, p. 75.]
Greenock clearly was a possible rival by no means to be despised.
In 1743 came a petition from the
shipmasters of Glasgow and the Clyde ports for the setting up of a
lighthouse on the Little Cumbrae, already referred to, though an Act
of Parliament for the purpose was not secured till 1756. [Burgh
Records, 17th Feb. 1743; 16th June, 1756.] A similar petition was
received in 1751 from the merchants and feuars in Port-Glasgow,
offering to supervise the marking of the channel with buoys and
perches, and asking that the "mud boat" be constantly employed in
cleaning the harbour there. To these proposals the Magistrates and
Council promptly agreed. [Ibid. 22nd Jan. 1751.]
For the interests of Glasgow itself,
however, the improvement of the channel of the upper river was a
matter of more vital and immediate importance. Upon this subject the
Town Council again proceeded to seek the best expert advice. James
Stirling, manager of the Scots mining company's works at Leadhills,
was a noted mathematician and engineer. One of his numerous papers
contributed to the Transactions of the Philosophical Society
described "A Machine to Blow Fire by the Fall of Water." [Stirling's
career forms the subject of an article in Mitchell's Old Glasgow
Essays. Third son of Alexander Stirling of Garden, he was expelled
from Oxford because of his Jacobite connection, lived as a professor
of mathematics at Venice for some years, but, having discovered the
secret of plate-glass making, had to flee for his life in 1725. For
ten years he taught mathematics in London, enjoying the friendship
of Newton and other men of science, till in 1735 he was appointed
manager of the mines at Leadhills.] His idea was to make Glasgow
accessible to vessels of larger size by the building of locks on the
river. "For his service, pains, and trouble in surveying Clyde,
towards the deepening thereof by locks," the Town Council presented
him with a silver tea-kettle and lamp, engraved with the city arms,
at a cost of £28 4s. 4d. sterling. [Burgh Records, i. July, 1752.]
Fortunately Stirling's
recommendations were not carried out, nor were those, three years
later, of John Smeaton, engineer of the Eddystone Lighthouse and of
the Forth and Clyde Canal. Between Glasgow Bridge and Renfrew
Smeaton found twelve shoals, four of which had no more than eighteen
inches depth at low water and one, some four hundred yards below the
bridge, only fifteen inches. His proposal was that a weir and lock
should be constructed at Marling Ford, about four miles below the
bridge, to allow vessels seventy-six feet long and of
four-and-a-half feet draught to pass up to the Broomielaw at all
states of the tide. Had these recommendations been carried out they
might have restricted the possibilities of the harbour of Glasgow
for all time. But Smeaton was paid twenty guineas for his advice and
the Merchants House and the Trades House proceeded to urge the Town
Council to apply to Parliament for authority to proceed with the
work. They declared themselves willing to pay such dues on all
vessels passing through the locks as would recoup the city for the
expense entailed. [Burgh Records, 5th Aug. 1757; 13th March and 11th
April, 1758.] Smeaton was accordingly invited, in 1758, to elaborate
the details of his scheme. At the same time Alexander Wilson, the
famous typefounder, was employed to
make a survey of the river.
Parliament was approached, and in due course an Act was secured—the
first of the Clyde Navigation Acts—empowering the Town Council to
carry out the enterprise. [George II. C. 62. Burgh Records, 13th
March, 1758; 9th Jan. 1759; 31st May, 1759.] The Act empowered the
Town Council to deepen the river from Dumbuck Ford to Glasgow
Bridge, to make locks and weirs, and to carry out other necessary
works. To this end £3200 were borrowed, and preparations were made
for the construction of a lock, but on account of the difficulties
encountered the scheme was in the end abandoned. [Burgh Records,
10th Aug. 1759. For details of the various schemes to improve the
harbour see The River Clyde, by James Deas, engineer to the Clyde
Navigation Trust, 1876. A contract was actually made with Smeaton to
construct a lock and dam at the Marlingford, and in 1762 the work
was going on (Burgh Records, 24th Nov. 1760; 25th Jan. 1762).
Shortly afterwards, however, it was stopped, and Freebairn, an
Edinburgh architect, who had been appointed master of works, made a
claim for his broken engagement (Ibid. 3rd Jan., 13th May, 1763).
Smeaton's tavern bill at the Exchange coffee-house while he was
making his plan amounted to £18 10s. (Ibid. 26th Jan. 1761).]
In 1764 another suggestion was made
which may have afforded the idea for the plan which was actually
carried out. At the desire of several of the merchants one Dr. Wark
submitted a proposal for deepening the river by means of its own
current. His idea was to confine the current by means of a whin or
furze dyke two or three yards broad. The difficulty in this case
seems to have been to secure a sufficient supply of furze, and,
probably for this reason, nothing more was done with the proposal.
[Ibid. 26th April, 1764.]
It was not till 1768 that the project
was taken up again. The Town Council then consulted John Golborne of
Chester, and in the following year, on his recommendation,
supplemented his report with one from James Watt, who was just then
coming into repute through his improvements upon the steam-engine.
Golborne's opinion was that it was "extremely practicable" to deepen
the river up to the Broomielaw. By banking, straightening, and
dredging he thought it possible to secure a depth of six feet of
water there at neap tides and nine feet at spring tides, and the
cost he estimated at £8640 or perhaps £10,000 sterling. [Burgh
Records, 5th Jan. 1769.] Another Act of Parliament was then
obtained, and Golborne and his nephew were employed to proceed with
the work at a yearly salary of £220 sterling. [Ibid. 3rd Jan. 1771.]
Golborne's plan was to use the current of the river itself as far as
possible for the deepening of the channel. Thus the current at
Dumbuck Ford was to be thrown into a single channel instead of two,
and by means of jetties and banks the flow of the tides was made to
clear away the sand from the river bed. Golborne was afterwards
engaged to secure a channel six feet deep from Dumbuck lower beacon
to Longloch Point, [Ibid. 2nd Nov. 1772.] and so well were the city
fathers pleased with his work that they presented him with a silver
cup engraved with the city arms. [Ibid. 25th Oct. 1775. The cup cost
£35 8s.] Two months later, having ascertained by soundings that by
Golborne's labours the channel from the Broomielaw to Dumbuck had
been made actually seven feet ten inches deep, the Town Council, on
the suggestion of the Trades and the Merchants Houses, gave Golborne
a gratuity of £1500 sterling, with £100 to his nephew for
supervising the work. [Ibid, 10th Dec. 1775.]
Almost immediately, it is true, the
Town Council received complaints from Lord Blantyre and the burgh of
Renfrew of damage entailed by Golborne's labours. Lord Blantyre
complained that the jetties on each side of his ferry quay at
Erskine had brought about an accumulation of sand which prevented
the ferry boat approaching the quay, and the burgh of Renfrew
alleged that the works had hurt its salmon fishery in the river. But
his lordship was satisfied with the provision of thirty or forty
pontoon loads of stone for the lengthening of his ferry quay, and
Renfrew with a money payment which continues to be made annually
till the present day. [Ibid. 2nd and 20th March, 1777; 3rd July, 5th
Oct. 1787 ; 26th May, 1779. This was only the first of many claims
made by the Lords Blantyre against the deepeners of the Clyde (ibid.
16th June, 1784, etc.), 5th Feb. 1784.] A similar claim was made by
Paisley, a few years later, for the silting up of the mouth of the
Cart, and was satisfied with a payment of £150. These, however, were
insignificant drawbacks to the fact that the real and permanent
development of the great harbour of Glasgow had been begun on
practical lines. |