The Govan Collieries 1804-1805 1

In 1793 the ‘respectable inhabitants’ who prepared the section on the City of Glasgow for Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland rightly emphasised that ‘The fossil to which this city owes its greatest advantage is COAL’. ² Almost certainly the largest and most important of the undertakings exploiting what became known as ‘the Glasgow Coal Fields’ was the Govan Collieries. ³ Situated on the south bank of the Clyde in the Gorbals — a parish which, it is said, veritably ‘abounds with coal’ ⁴ — directly opposite Glasgow Green, these collieries were but a mile from the Old Bridge that gave access to the city. ⁵ These collieries had been extensively worked since the time of the Restoration ⁶ and, in the period 1714 to 1731 (when they belonged to the Town, the Trade’s House and Hutcheson’s Hospital) Robert Dreghorn, tacksman of the colliery, was putting out almost 20,000 loads of coal annually. ⁷ By the end of the century the Govan Colliery was leased by two directors of Alexander Houston & Co., ⁸ Houston Rae and Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Houston, and so rich were the three seams worked — ‘the undermost of which was 14 feet thick’ — that contemporaries believed that the Colliery could ‘of itself serve the City of Glasgow for 100 years to come’. ⁹ In the last three years of the century the partners’ total profits were £10,166 9s. The lease was valued by William Dixon, the manager, and John Boyd, the book-keeper as some £30,000, being ‘from eight to ten years purchase’, the usual basis for valuations of this kind. ¹⁰