ABSTRACT
SCOTLAND’S INDUSTRY MOVED FROM cotton to iron, and then to shipbuilding, in the central decades of the nineteenth century. Cotton ceased to expand, and later declined. The new techniques of smelting the black band ironstone came just in time, in 1828, for the coming of railways in the 1830s would otherwise have submerged the Scottish iron industry with English products. But the new iron industry was a Lanarkshire possession, and the shipbuilding that followed was mainly based on the inventiveness of Clydeside in marine engineering. Together they brought to the fore on the Clyde the problems of modern Scotland. People flowed in to all the large towns of Scotland, overwhelming their rudimentary social administration. Population was growing fast on a national scale but the need for rural labour did not expand, so families moved to the towns, and it was on the Clyde that the concentration of human beings was densest. This was the land of industrial opportunity. It was also easily accessible to Ireland and to the Highlands, which manifestly had little
opportunity to offer. The Irish would accept low wages rather than stay at home to starve. In the central decades of the nineteenth century several hundred thousand of them entered Scotland. They created a new phenomenon in Scotland, the secular expression of cultural and economic rivalry that picked on religious difference as its nominal cause. The Irish enhanced poverty and overcrowding and contributed to the social evils that arose from these features, drunkenness and crime, to such an extent that Protestant antagonism to this influx was able to disguise itself as a concern for law and order. The masses of the new urban areas lived hemmed together in tall and crowded tenements put up with enormous solidity of masonry but with no regard for amenity, inside or out. A report on Edinburgh in 1838 describes the common stairs of these tenements as ‘little streets carried perpendicularly upwards’ and instanced one on which there were fifty-nine rooms, almost all separate ‘houses’ in the Scottish sense of separate dwellings, containing fifty-six families and two hundred and forty-eight people, without a water supply of any kind. By 1861 a third of Scotland’s population of something over three million was living in oneroomed ‘houses’, and nearly 8,000 of these ‘houses’ were rooms with no window. Into these fortresses came a population from the country, from Ireland, or from elsewhere within the towns. The movement of the population and the big scale of the towns broke the bonds that hold a man into society, his local community, the widespread kinship, the religious congregation, even the band of regulars at an alehouse, and it was only slowly that these would be reformed.
