Clydeside E-Book

Ian R Mitchell

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Ian R. Mitchell takes the reader on an urban promenade along the Clyde and finds its character is created from far more than the remnants of shipbuilding. "Clydeside" relates stories of conflicts, people and communities, while incorporating present-day walks in these oft-forgotten areas, to allow the reader to fully appreciate the culture and history. Exploring more than just Glasgow itself, the book meanders from Coatbridge to Cathcart, Garngad to Greencock. Proving there's far more to Paisley than a deceased weaving industry, more to Shettleston than the old mining days and more to Dumbarton than the Black Death, Mitchell depicts a largely unseen side to the diverse towns and villages along the Clyde. From Robert Owen's New Lanark utopian experiment to the fascinating architecture of 'Greek' Thomson, here is a working-class history rich in political and industrial venture.

Leseprobe

IAN R. MITCHELL was born in Aberdeen, spending his first 25 years in Torry and Kincorth. He graduated in History from Aberdeen University in 1973, after a couple of drop-out years working as a paper mill labourer and engineering machinist, and subsequently moved to Glasgow. Ian taught History at Clydebank College for over 20 years and whilst there wrote a standard textbook on Bismarck and the Development of Germany. He has written several books on mountaineering including Mountain Days and Bothy Nights (1987), and A View from the Ridge (both co-written with Dave Brown), which won the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1991. More recently he has developed an interest in urban heritage and walking, which led to This City Now: Glasgow and its Working Class Past (2005), the prototype for Clydeside: Red, Orange and Green.

Other works by Ian R. Mitchell published by Luath Press

Non-Fiction

Mountain Days and Bothy Nights (1987) with Dave Brown

A View from the Ridge (1991, re-issued 2007) also with Dave Brown

Scotland’s Mountains before the Mountaineers (1998)

On the Trail of Queen Victoria in the Highlands (2001)

Walking through Scotland’s History (2000, re-issued 2007)

This City Now: Glasgow and its Working Class Past (2005)

Fiction

Mountain Outlaw: Ewan MacPhee (2003)

Winter in Berlin, or The Mitropa Smile (2009)

First published 2010

eISBN: 978-1-913025-78-6

The publishers acknowledge the support of

towards the publication of this volume.

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is elemental chlorine free (ECF) and manufactured from sustainable wood pulp forests, This paper and its manufacture are approved by the National Association of Paper Merchants (NAPM), working towards a more sustainable future.

Printed and bound by

Thomson Litho, East Kilbride

Typeset in 11 point Sabon

by 3btype.com

© Ian R. Mitchell 2010

Contents

Maps

Foreword

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 New Lanark: A New View of Society

CHAPTER 2 Motherwell: Bibliopolis, Steelopolis

CHAPTER 3 Coatbrig’: ‘The Strugglin’, Toilin’ Masses’

CHAPTER 4 Life and Death in Shettleston

CHAPTER 5 Easterhouse: Altered Images

CHAPTER 6 The Garngad: Heaven and Hell

CHAPTER 7 Cathcart: Red Clyde Tributary

CHAPTER 8 Atlantis: Kingston and Kinning Park

CHAPTER 9 Paisley: The Poverty of Philanthropy

CHAPTER 10 Port Glasgow Resurrection?

CHAPTER 11 Greenock: Escaping the Second Division

CHAPTER 12 Dumbarton: From Alcluith to Denny’s Town

CHAPTER 13 The Vale: Turkey Red to Moscow Red

Conclusion

Foreword

IN THE PREFACE to the first German edition of his seminal study The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels bemoans the paucity of studies of the conditions in which ordinary working people live and work. We have, of course, come a long way since Engels penned those comments in 1845, but it still seems fair to complain that the majority of books on Glasgow and the West of Scotland fail to give due heed to the working-class past that shapes their social – and physical – geography. Ian R. Mitchell’s excellent volume, This City Now: Glasgow and its Working Class Past (Luath Press, 2005), did much to address this complaint, and in his present book, Clydeside: Red, Orange and Green, Ian now broadens his canvas by looking at other working-class districts in Glasgow and by stepping further afield to take in neighbouring areas along the banks of the River Clyde.

Like its predecessor, Clydeside is a revelation, and will provide much stimulus for those who believe that they already know Clydeside well to get on their walking shoes and really get to know it better. I myself was born in Dumbarton, and spent the first 22 years of my life in Clydebank and Glasgow. I thought I knew the city and its environs well, but although I have heard of all 13 areas covered in this book, I have in fact only very briefly visited Dumbarton, Greenock and Paisley. Thanks to Ian’s work, I now have good reason to return to those areas, and to make maiden visits to the others, well equipped by Clydeside to appreciate their history and social geography from the viewpoint of the working people who made – and make – them what they are.

I think that Ian’s remarks on the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) in Chapter 8 are somewhat harsh. Far from being politically ineffective in the Holyrood Parliament between 2003 and 2007, the SSP exerted genuine political pressure on the (then) Labour Executive – forcing them, for example, to make concessions on prescription charges in the NHS in Scotland.

From Robert Owen’s utopian socialist project in New Lanark to Engels Street in Balloch on the shores of Loch Lomond, Ian is an affable and entertaining guide with an eye for the street theatre and an ear for the banter – and, most importantly of all, a deep empathy with the working-class inhabitants, both past and present, of the areas he covers. Whether you are a newcomer, a long-standing resident, or an ex-pat, Ian R. Mitchell’s Clydeside will give you insight, enlightenment and pleasure.

Alex Miller

Professor of Philosophy

University of Birmingham

Introduction

A River Runs Through It

CLYDESIDE. What does the word evoke?

Despite the fact that the River Clyde runs though a hundred miles of what is some of the loveliest and most historically rich countryside in Scotland, the term Clydeside does not convey images of the Falls of Clyde, Bothwell Castle and Dun Breatainn to most.

Instead, it conveys images of heavy industry, of coal mines and steel works and shipyards and engineering, and it conveys images of technological innovation in these fields. It also conjures up images of human suffering, of appalling housing and working conditions. It conveys images of struggle, of the birth of the labour movement, of strikes, of political conflict. It conveys in many ways what the word ‘Glasgow’ does itself, but on a larger geographical canvas.

The publication of my book on Glasgow’s working-class past, This City Now, was greeted with reviews that were encouragingly positive. More important to me, it led to a whole series of outlets in the form of talks that I gave on the book, walks that I conducted based around its chapters, and even to a course taught at Glasgow University’s Department of Adult and Continuing Education. Through these activities I met many of the sort of people I had written the book for, and of whom it was about.

A follow-up seemed a fruitful project, and for a while I meditated a second book on Glasgow, having realised that there were several areas I had neglected in This City Now, but which nonetheless merited attention. Rather than do this, though, I decided that it would be better to use these new chapters on Glasgow as a link, a halfway house, between other studies that I had been undertaking of various towns on the Lower Clyde, with forays that I had always promised myself into the lesser-known lands of Lanarkshire.

I felt justified in this not only by the fact that the river could give the geographical unity to a collection of separate profiles of Clydeside towns, in a similar way to that which Glasgow itself had given to This City Now, but also that economically and culturally, the Clyde composed a unity. Lanark may be (almost) as near to Edinburgh as it is to Glasgow, but the capital could as well be on the moon for Lanark, whilst Glasgow is the sun which holds it in its gravity. Greenock is the same distance from Glasgow as Kilmarnock. Whilst the latter is outwith Glasgow’s ambiance, the former is like a satellite of the city.

And yet, despite these similarities, the towns of Clydeside give such an enormous variety of working-class experiences – industrially, in housing, in politics and in other areas, as well as having such varied built environments, and having produced widely differing political figures, that I felt there was no chance of an endless repetition, in any attempt to treat the settlements between Lanark and Greenock as a unity. Clydeside is all the things the name conjures up but much more – as I hope to show, it is a ‘River City’, joined together by much more than the river running through it.

Most of all, it is welded together by two centuries of working-class history.

CHAPTER 1

New Lanark: A New View of Society

THE RIVER CLYDE rises obscurely in the rounded hills of the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire, to the south-east of the town of Lanark. Here is a somewhat bleak landscape, of moorland plateau with few trees. Today, this is a thinly populated region containing a small portion of Lanarkshire’s 600,000 people. But in the past it was an area of importance, focused on the former county town of Lanark, previously the seat of local administration and justice. Though industrial development was to move the locus of population, wealth and power up the River Clyde, most noticeably to Glasgow itself, 35 miles away, events of significance to the history of the working class were to take place in this peripheral region – despite the Upper Ward remaining predominantly agricultural. Indeed, as well as the source of the River Clyde, the region has a claim to being a source of the idea of socialism itself, through its association with the life and ideas of Robert Owen and the New Lanark cotton mills. Owen was the first to coin the term ‘socialism’, though what was meant by the word is subject to some dispute.

The Upper Ward was no stranger to rebelliousness and heretical ideas. This was one of the main power bases of the Covenanting movement in Scotland in the 17th century. Readers of Walter Scott’s Old Mortality will know the story of how the Lanarkshire and Ayrshire peasantries supplied the bulk of the supporters of the ill-fated rebellion of 1685, which started victoriously at the battle of Drumclog near Lanark, and ended disastrously at Bothwell Brig.

ROBERT OWEN c.1800

A man sure of himself

Craignethan Castle, which lies in Upper Clydesdale, features in Scott’s great novel as ‘Tillietudlem’. And in 1688–9 the Upper Ward was to provide the recruitment base for the Cameronian forces that defeated the first Jacobite rebellion at the Battle of Dunkeld. Even further back, in 1297, it was in Lanark that William Wallace was reputed to have raised the standard of rebellion against English rule.

At the time of the Radical War of 1820, the town of Strathaven, near Lanark, provided an early working-class martyr in James Wilson, executed in Glasgow for treason at the age of 60. Twenty-thousand people watched his funeral, in sympathy rather than vengeance, and cries of ‘Shame!’ greeted his execution. Wilson was one of the leaders of the armed rebellion undertaken in protest against living conditions after the Napoleonic wars and especially against the hated Corn Laws of 1815. He was one of the 600 weavers in Strathaven who were facing increasingly hard times. The aims of the Radicals, in the village and elsewhere, were for political reform and votes for working men. They armed, made bullets and drilled, but were tricked into a premature uprising, 50 of them marching to the Cathkin Braes outside Glasgow, only to find the expected support from elsewhere had not materialised. Dispersal saved the others, but not Wilson.

Robert Owen’s socialism

Robert Owen probably knew nothing about the Covenanters and their local traditions. If he had, he would doubtless have seen their struggle as an example of the pernicious effects of that religious fanaticism which he resolutely opposed. For Owen was probably the first crusading atheist in the UK, actively opposed to all religions and their works. Though he did not comment on the Radical War, or on James Wilson’s fate, Owen was certainly aware of the unrest among the working class after 1815, in Scotland and throughout Britain. He was firmly opposed, however, not only to the idea of taking violent action against political injustice but also to the whole idea of political reform itself, which he saw as a diversion. In his Address to the Working Classes, published in 1819, Owen argued that economic and social reform, not political action and change, were the solution to the issues facing them.

Robert Owen was born in Wales in 1771. He was a prodigy, self educating himself to an intellectual atheist position by the age of 10. He entered the developing textile industry and by the time he was 20 he was managing a mill in Manchester. Coming to Glasgow on business, he fell in love with the daughter of David Dale, one of Scotland’s leading textile entrepreneurs, and visited the mills that Dale had set up in 1785 with Richard Arkwright at New Lanark. These works utilised the plentiful water below the Falls of Clyde, and employed 1,500 people. In 1799 Owen married Dale’s daughter in her father’s Glasgow mansion at Charlotte Street, and on 1 January 1800 he took over the management of the New Lanark cotton mills.

Dale was, for that period, quite an enlightened employer, though his many mills prevented close attention to any single one. At New Lanark housing and working conditions were above the (admittedly) awful standards of the time; nevertheless, Dale employed 500 pauper children in the works. He did, however, provide a school and limited social facilities. Owen liked to portray New Lanark as utterly depraved when he first arrived there, though the truth is that his own social experiments built on those of Dale. Initially, Owen was little more than a ruthless, efficient enlightened despot, and there is no suggestion of his later ideas in his early activities.

Owen shortened the working day at New Lanark and reduced the incidence of child labour, as had other employers who had found out that this improved productivity. He overhauled the inefficient company store which sold poor overpriced goods, and by a system of bulk buying and supplying the store from the company’s own farms, provided the workers with better and cheaper food. This was so successful that people from Lanark came to shop in the New Lanark store. But this was still a company store, not a co-operative, and the profits were used to offset the costs to Owen and the company of the factory school. Owen also introduced what appears to be an example of village democracy, where neighbourhood ‘divisions’ within the company’s housing chose ‘principals’, who then selected 12 ‘jurors’ to run communal affairs for a year. However, this was really a conveyor belt for company discipline, ensuring that houses were cleaned and middens removed, that alcohol was not circulating and that the company ethos was imposed – with fines for those who transgressed.

Within the factory rigid discipline was imposed, with wage deductions and dismissal for lateness, pilfering and undue levity. Owen did not invent the ‘silent monitor’, where a coloured device hung above a person’s workplace showing how well they had performed and shaming them if they fell below par, but it was typical of the kind of discipline he enforced. When he wrote his first major work, A New View of Society, in 1813, Owen was still no more than an enlightened capitalist, who felt that a patriarchal social discipline was not only good for the workforce but produced higher profits. At this time, the mill paid 12 per cent annually on investments, and by 1813 Owen himself was a millionaire several times over in today’s terms. Though social conditions were, in all probability, better at New Lanark than in most, if not all, cotton mills, wages were low – lower than in urban mills in Glasgow, and much lower than in the Lancashire mills. The top-paid male workers earned 10 shillings (50p) a week, and for the females and children it was on a sliding scale downwards from that. Owen was not trusted at all by working-class radicals at this time, and the newspaper Black Dwarf criticised his ideas as aiming ‘to turn the nation into a workhouse and rear up a community of slaves’.

Following his early conversion to atheism, Owen’s second conversion came in the years between 1813 and 1818, during which he met William Godwin many times. Godwin was a reformer whose Political Justice is one of the founding texts of anarchist thinking, and under Godwin’s influence Owen moved towards the idea of self-governing communities as the solution to the ills of emerging industrial society.

NEW LANARK TICKET FOR WAGES

Allowing workers to purchase cut-price goods at the village store (half a crown was equivalent to 12.5 pence)

Like Godwin, Owen was a rationalist and believed that ideas were right or wrong and truth could be appreciated by anybody. Thus, while he did propagate to the working classes, he devoted more time and effort spreading his ideas to those with their hands on the levers of power, such as the textile magnate and Tory politician Robert Peel. He expended much energy trying to convince capitalists, politicians and even rulers to adopt his ideas. He visited Aix la Chappelle in 1818 in an attempt to convert the Russian Czar to Owenism, but was rudely rejected. On this occasion he met the aide of Metternich, another reactionary he hoped to influence, and was told, ‘We do not want the masses to become wealthy and independent. How could we govern them if they were?’. Owen was even introduced to Queen Victoria in 1839 by the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, having been given an opportunity to explain his ideas.

By the early 1820s, Owen had become a socialist. He believed now that the exploitation labour was the source of society’s increasing wealth, not ‘the productivity of capital’, and in his Report to the County of Lanark of 1821 (again delivered to an audience of the power-brokers in the county, not the workers) Owen announced his vision of a society based on ‘the principle of united labour, expenditure and property, and equal privileges’, which he was to increasingly describe as ‘socialism’. The tactics to establishing such a society were propaganda and example, not class struggle.

The activities which Owen became involved in were to set up communist colonies, which would be self-sufficient and combine both industrial and agricultural manual labour with intellectual activity. He spent much of his time in the United States, which he saw as more open to his ideas, and much of his money on the New Harmony experiment of 1825–7 in that country. It is not part of our remit here to describe the fate of New Harmony, or of the later attempts at establishing communist colonies that Owen was involved with in England. These failed, partly since the methods Owen had learned in running New Lanark were not the same as those needed for New Harmony. Interestingly, Owen’s son, Robert Dale, who was born in Glasgow, stayed in the United States and became a slavery abolitionist, whose pamphlet The Policy of Emancipation (1863) greatly influenced Abraham Lincoln.

Enlightenment was Owen’s other weapon and he established various organisations, the most influential of which was the Rational Society in the 1840s, which, at its height, had a newspaper with a circulation of 40,000 and organised well-attended meetings at its branches countrywide. One of the audience members at the Rational Society’s meetings in Manchester was the young German philosopher Friedrich Engels, who was greatly influenced by Owen some years before he met Marx. But Engels could discern the failings in Owen’s approach, which was totally divorced from the class struggle of the workers that Engels saw under his eyes in Manchester, and wrote about in his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Engels could also see that Owen’s opposition to political reform, including his hostility to the ‘rage’ of the Chartist movement of the 1840s, turned his group into a sect. Later, Engels was to describe people like Owen in his pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific as those who tried to impose their vision on social reality by example and propaganda, rather than seeing the seeds of social transformation in the struggle taking place before their eyes.

Owen did have an effect on the emerging working-class movement, but it was incidental. While he was in the United States, absent from New Lanark, many people, inspired by his ideas, had set up co-operative stores. The co-operative movement began to spread throughout the UK, but Owen had little real part in the growth of this authentic expression of working-class aspirations. With his hostility to class struggle he was also hostile to strikes, and it is rather surprising that briefly, in 1834, he was involved in the attempt to establish a national trades union movement in the UK, though it is incorrect to see, as many commentators do, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU), which claimed 500,000 members at its peak, as Owen’s creation. But the collapse of the GNCTU, through lock-outs and the victimisation of groups such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, ended this brief and exceptional involvement by Owen in real working-class politics.

Meanwhile, what of New Lanark? It would be wrong to suggest that with Owen’s conversion to socialism nothing changed at New Lanark. The establishment of the Institute for the Formation of Character in 1816 expanded education, including nursery and primary education, and along the most advanced principles. Physical punishment was banned (as it was in the factory) and children were given dancing and music instruction and a wide variety of interesting lessons. People flocked to New Lanark to view the ‘experiment’: 2,000 visitors a year from 1815 to 1825, when Owen’s involvement ended after a quarter of a century. Most were of the upper and middle classes, and most were tremendously impressed at what they saw. They perceived not only that the workforce was generally well fed and cared for by the standards of the first quarter of the 19th century, but also that here the labouring classes were subject to an enviable degree of social control, which reduced their ‘dangerous’ tendencies to almost zero. There was no policeman in the village, because there was no crime. One critic, however, was the poet Robert Southey, who observed that Owen ‘keeps out of sight from others, and perhaps from himself, that his system, instead of aiming at perfect freedom, can only be kept in play by absolute power’. Even the village shop only became a co-operative store under the control of the inhabitants, after Owen had left New Lanark behind.

For there was no intention of trying (even if his partners would have allowed it) to turn New Lanark into a New Harmony; the workers in the village remained subordinate and low paid. In 1825, frustrated with increasing pressures from his partners and from the local presbytery to include religious education in the school curriculum at New Lanark, and preoccupied with other projects under way across the Atlantic, Owen sold out his share of the works for £40,000 to the Walkers, one of his partners. The Walkers were Quakers and, according to the Factory Inspector of 1833, the mill was still then run ‘under the same excellent management and with a view to health, education and general comfort of the workers’, as had been the case under Dale and Owen. But the Walkers ran down the mill, and had not even installed ancillary steam power until 1873, which meant the mill was frequently under-powered.

By 1833, the mill employed only 1,000 workers as the Scottish textile industry began to contract under Lancashire competition. Robert Owen had left cotton production at a good time. New Lanark’s population had peaked at 2,300 in 1821, and had fallen to 700 by 1891, many of whom did not work in the mill itself. By the latter date, the factory was owned by the Birkmyres of the Gourock Rope Company and had survived by specialising in net and heavy sailcloth manufacture. The works continued to employ about 300 people until it was finally closed in 1968. It was in the wrong place, under-capitalised and unprofitable. The Gourock Rope Company was also unable to financially entertain the prospect of maintaining the social fabric of the village, much of which was unoccupied, as its international importance became more and more recognised. Indeed, the transformation of the mill and factory workers’ housing, with the ancillary buildings, into a UNESCO World Heritage Site, took 20 years and the expenditure of well over £10 million. When visiting, it is worth remembering that, whilst Owen does have a claim to be one of the founding fathers of socialism, New Lanark itself was in no way an experiment in support of that idea.

Lanark today

Lanark as a town has suffered from a deficiency of admirers. In the 1720s Daniel Defoe described it as ‘but a very indifferent place’, and a century later the ever-critical Dorothy Wordsworth commented, ‘the doors and windows are dirty, the shops dull’ though she thought the marketplace ‘decent’. I like Lanark, though it lacks the picturesque affluence of the other Upper Ward towns such as Strathaven and Biggar, and rather exudes something of the demotic grubbiness of Clydeside generally.

Exiting from the station, on the right the way will take you to Lanark’s impressive market stance, where 10 fairs a year were held in the 1790s. Today, the Lanimer Fair still takes place in early June, and the Whuppity Scourie on 1 March. Here, too, is a fine statue of William Wallace at the Parish Kirk of St Nicholas, recalling the role of the town as the cradle of his rebellion. The traditional village is well worth a visit and a stroll, but New Lanark lies in the other direction.

The way to ‘Owenville’ from Lanark station (it is all well signposted) follows South Vennel, and then Wellgatehead, before dropping down Braxfield Road to a set of gatehouses. From there it is a toddle downhill along New Lanark Road to the mill and village, fine views of which appear before it is reached. It is a stunning sight, in its stark simplicity, especially if the sun is shining on the light sandstone. It is not my place here to give a guide to the UNESCO site; the visitor should simply make his or her way around the village, allowing a few hours for the experience. One of the mills has been converted into a hotel, whilst some of the former workers’ rows have become a youth hostel. Many of the other houses have been restored and amalgamated as dwellings for residents and commuters, but a central block contains a fine series of examples of workers’ housing from the time of Owen through to the 1950s. As you visit the earlier examples, it is worth noting that Owen’s provision in terms of housing was little more generous than that of the other capitalists of his period. Sanitation was inadequate, and outbreaks of typhus took place here, as well as cholera, under Owen’s rule.

Two villas stand outside the mill, one Dale’s house and one Owen’s. Again, though this was only an occasional residence for Owen, it is a world apart from the conditions in which the workers lived. As I said previously, New Lanark was not New Harmony, nor did it ever intend to be. A visit to the mill buildings, where some machinery has been restored, gives an example of working conditions 200 years ago. But the jewel in the crown of any visit must be the Institute for the Formation of Character itself, an institution a century or more ahead of its time. Despite some (nowadays alas inevitable) heritage tackiness, a visit to New Lanark is a very valuable experience, though some may feel that Owen’s saintliness is overplayed and his failings minimised in the picture of the history here presented.

People came here to see New Lanark in their thousands, but they also came to see the marvellous Falls of Clyde, and so should any visitor today. You leave the mills by following the path alongside the mill lade, which provided water for its huge cast iron mill wheels, and come to a gate beside the small power station, which supplied steam power from the 1870s. An excellent path then goes along the banks of the Clyde past Bonnington Power Station, the construction of which in the 1920s sadly reduced the fall of water on this part of the river, though on certain days the full force is allowed through. Beyond the station, amid scenery of great beauty, is Corra Linn, the largest of the falls, and here we are following in the steps of Wordsworth, Turner, Burns and many others. From here, most retrace their path, but carrying on another half-mile or so is visually rewarding and leads to Bonnington Linn, where a bridge crosses the Clyde. It is now possible to follow a path on the west side of the river, past the ruins of Corra Castle, and from here you get the best views of New Lanark itself. Carrying on downstream, you come to a view of Braxfield Park, where stood the main residence occupied by Owen and his family during his New Lanark years. This mansion was rented from the McQueen family, whose most famous member was the infamous Lord Braxfield, the ‘hanging judge’ in the trials of many Radicals in the 1790s, including those of Muir and Palmer, whom he sentenced to transportation. The path then goes on to Kirkfieldbank and the Clydeholm Bridge, dating from the 1690s, and from there it is ‘a lang pech up the brae’ back to Lanark village, and then to the station.

New Lanark was always an exception in the Upper Ward, the only large-scale industrial enterprise in an agricultural region that was initially dominated by fruit-farming dependent on migrant Irish labour, and nowadays is focused on garden centres relying on Polish immigrants. And New Lanark is also exceptional in British industrial and social history as a unique laboratory of social ideas from the early period of the Industrial Revolution.

CHAPTER 2

Motherwell: Bibliopolis, Steelopolis

COMMUNISM CAME TWICE to Motherwell. In 1825 – led by Abram Coke, with the support of a local radical landowner, Archibald Hamilton – the co-operative living and working settlement known as Orbiston was established. Inspired by the ideas of Robert Owen and aiming at self-sufficiency and equality, the experiment at Orbiston lasted two years before breaking up after Coke’s death. Just under a century later, Motherwell created a national sensation by electing Britain’s first Communist MP, Walton Newbold, and in Moscow Lenin declared, somewhat optimistically, that ‘The steel town Motherwell has been won for communism’.