Glasgow’s Iron Industry

For a few blazing decades, Glasgow and the Monklands to its east were the iron capital of the world. A local curiosity — a coal-bearing ironstone that most of the trade had dismissed as worthless — was turned, by one Glasgow engineer’s invention, into treasure; and the country east of the city became the Black Country of Scotland, its night sky red enough to read a newspaper by. The iron it poured built the railways and bridges of half the world, made a handful of farming families into some of the richest men in Britain, and laid the foundation on which the shipyards of the Clyde would rise.

This page tells that story: the invention that lit the boom, the Iron Burgh it created, the dynasties it enriched, the furnaces that lit the Glasgow sky, the forges and foundries around them, the workers who fed them, and the way iron gave way, in the end, to steel.

Hot blast & blackband

The west of Scotland sat on an unusual mineral gift. Early in the nineteenth century the geologist David Mushet identified a local ‘blackband’ ironstone — an ore so mixed with coal that it would almost smelt itself — lying, conveniently, in the same measures as the region’s hard ‘splint’ coal. For years the iron trade distrusted it, and it was worked at only a few furnaces; before the hot blast Scotland made little iron of its own, the Carron ironworks near Falkirk — famous across Europe for its cannon — being the great exception. What unlocked it was an invention of 1828. James Beaumont Neilson, manager of the Glasgow gasworks, discovered that blowing hot air rather than cold into a blast furnace transformed its efficiency — and his hot blast, first applied at the Clyde Iron Works, cut the fuel needed to make a ton of iron by as much as two-thirds, and made it possible to smelt the local blackband with raw splint coal, without first turning it to coke.

The effect was explosive. Suddenly the Monklands, which held ironstone, splint coal, limestone and fireclay all together in the ground, could make iron more cheaply than almost anywhere on earth. Furnaces multiplied across the district, and by the mid-1840s nearly every blast furnace in Scotland had adopted the hot blast. Neilson’s patent made him a fortune of its own: when the Bairds and others used the process without paying for it, he sued, and won the enormous sum of £160,000 — a judgment the ironmasters could well afford, from the wealth the invention was pouring into their hands.

The Iron Burgh

The heart of the boom was Coatbridge and the Monklands, a few miles east of Glasgow and linked to it by the Monkland Canal, along which the coal and ore had long moved. Within a generation this quiet farming district became one of the most intensely industrial landscapes in the world — a forest of blast furnaces whose flames turned night into a lurid day, and whose smoke and grime earned it the name of the ‘Black Country of Scotland’. Coatbridge itself was known simply as the Iron Burgh. Around it clustered a roll-call of great works — Calder, the district’s first; then Gartsherrie, Summerlee, Dundyvan, Langloan, Carnbroe and more — and from their furnaces poured pig iron in quantities that astonished the age. The boom was not confined to the Monklands, for a second great iron district grew up in Ayrshire, around ironworks such as Glengarnock; but the Monklands remained its heart. At the height of the boom Scotland was making a large share of all the pig iron in Britain, the overwhelming bulk of it smelted in the blast furnaces within a day’s cart of Glasgow.

The Bairds of Gartsherrie

The lords of this new world were the Bairds of Gartsherrie. A Monklands farming family who had already grown wealthy mining coal on their lands, the Bairds formalised William Baird & Company in 1830 and lit their first Gartsherrie furnace on the fourth of May that year. Under the hard-driving management of James Baird, the works grew at extraordinary speed: by 1843 sixteen furnaces stood in two long rows on either side of a branch of the Monkland Canal, pouring some hundred thousand tons of iron a year, and Gartsherrie had become the largest pig-iron works in the world. The Bairds controlled the lion’s share of the splint coal and blackband ore that fed the district, and the fortune they made was colossal — enough, in a single lifetime, to raise a family of small farmers into landed magnates with estates across Scotland, a baronetcy, and the means to give half a million pounds to the Church of Scotland. Contemporaries ranked them beside the Guests and Crawshays, the iron kings of South Wales.

Dixon’s Blazes

Glasgow itself smelted too, and gave the city one of its best-loved sights. From 1839 the Dixon family — ironmasters who had cut their teeth on the Monklands works — ran the Govan Iron Works on the south side of the city, hard by the Gorbals, and for the better part of a hundred and twenty years its furnaces poured without cease. The great glare they threw into the night sky — ‘Dixon’s Blazes’ — became a permanent feature of Glasgow life, a red aurora over the tenements by which generations of southsiders found their way home in the dark. Few landmarks were more familiar, or more missed when the fires finally went out.

Forge & foundry

Smelting pig iron was only the beginning. Around the furnaces grew a vast secondary industry of forges and foundries that worked the metal into finished goods, and in this the Glasgow district led the world. In its malleable-iron works the brittle pig iron was refined by puddling into tough wrought iron, turned out by the ton; its tube works made Glasgow a world supplier of the gas and water pipes that plumbed the growing cities of the age; and the city became the greatest centre of ornamental cast iron on earth, its foundries — Walter Macfarlane’s Saracen Foundry above all — casting the fountains, bandstands, railings, staircases and whole building fronts that were shipped in pieces to cities across the Empire. Its great forges hammered out the heaviest work of all, chief among them William Beardmore’s Parkhead Forge in the east end, which grew into one of the largest steel and armaments works in Britain, forging armour plate, gun barrels and the massive shafts and castings the shipyards needed. Iron made in the Monklands was worked up, in the forges and foundries of Glasgow, into the machinery of an industrial world.

The men of iron

All of it was won by hard human labour. The furnaces and the ironstone pits drew in workers by the tens of thousands — from the Highlands, from Wales and England, and above all from Ireland, whose migrants arrived in flood during and after the Great Famine to take the hottest and most dangerous work in the district. They lived in company rows thrown up beside the works, in overcrowded and insanitary conditions that bred disease and fed the epidemics of the century; and their labour, their grievances and their solidarities helped shape the industrial politics that would later find their fullest expression in Red Clydeside. The wealth of the ironmasters and the hardship of the ironworkers were struck from the same furnace.

From iron to steel

The iron age carried the seed of its own passing. From the 1870s the blackband seams that had made the region’s fortune began to thin and fail, and ore increasingly had to be imported; at the same time a new metal came of age. Steel — stronger, more uniform, and increasingly demanded by the shipbuilders who would no longer build in iron — overtook its parent, and the centre of gravity of the industry shifted a little further east and south, to the great steelworks of the Motherwell and Clydebridge district — Dalzell, Clydebridge and the works of David Colville & Sons foremost among them — where Bessemer converters and open-hearth furnaces made the steel plate that fed the Clyde. Pig-iron smelting dwindled through the early twentieth century, and at last, in the 1950s, Dixon’s Blazes themselves went dark. The iron era’s legacy was everywhere and nowhere: in the capital it had pumped into the shipyards and railways, in the immigrant communities it had planted around the city, and in the scarred, bing-strewn moonscape east of Glasgow that a later age would at last green over.

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