Sir William Arrol

Sir William Arrol rose from a cotton mill to become the greatest bridge builder of the Victorian age. From his works in the East End of Glasgow, his firm built the Forth Bridge, the steelwork of London’s Tower Bridge and the mighty Titan Crane at Clydebank, feats of engineering that still stand today.

From the mill to the forge

Arrol was born in the village of Houston in Renfrewshire in 1839, the son of a cotton spinner. He went to work in a cotton mill at the age of nine. He trained as a blacksmith, taught himself mechanics and hydraulics at night school, and worked his way up as a boilermaker and engineer, a self-made man in the great tradition of Glasgow’s industry.

The Dalmarnock Iron Works

In 1863 Arrol came to Glasgow to join a bridge-building firm, and in 1872 he set up on his own at the Dalmarnock Iron Works in the East End of the city. From this base his company, Sir William Arrol & Co, grew into the foremost bridge-building and structural-steel firm in Britain. One of his early works was the Caledonian Railway Bridge across the River Clyde in the very heart of Glasgow.

The Forth Bridge

In 1882, in the aftermath of the Tay Bridge Disaster, Arrol was given the contracts both to rebuild the Tay Bridge and to build a new bridge across the Firth of Forth. The Forth Bridge, completed in 1890, was the first great bridge built entirely of steel, a cantilever colossus that became one of the wonders of the age and is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The achievement won him a knighthood, a monument to the engineering that made Glasgow the Second City of the Empire.

Tower Bridge and the Titan

His firm went on to erect the steel skeleton of London’s Tower Bridge, opened in 1894, and to build bridges as far afield as Egypt and Australia. In Glasgow it raised the Titan Crane at Clydebank in 1907, a giant cantilever crane that towered over the yards and still stands, and the vast gantry in Belfast beneath which the Titanic was built. His works served the Clyde’s shipbuilding and engineering at its very height, the age of the great Clyde-built ships.

A Victorian giant

Arrol was Liberal Member of Parliament for South Ayrshire from 1895 to 1906, and he helped to finance the early Scottish motor industry. He died in 1913, aged seventy-four. His firm outlived him by more than half a century, and his bridges remain among the proudest achievements of Glasgow engineering.