William Harley y Arthur Davidson, 1914.

Uno de los secretos del éxito de Harley-Davidson es su fiel legión de seguidores.
La marca creó en 1983 un club oficial de moteros, conocido como HOG (Harley Owner Group).

En la actualidad cuenta con casi un millón y medio de miembros de todo el mundo que realizan concentraciones para pasear con sus motos.

#harleydavidson #williamharley #arthurdavidson #moteros #harleyownergroup

Council juice: Glasgow’s public water. Part II: the Water Companies

[An updated version of this post is available on my new site.]

In Part I we followed the story of Glasgow’s water from the earliest wells until the start of the nineteenth century, when the wells were struggling to supply a growing population. The process of finding a replacement for the wells would start in the 1760s and continue for almost a century. It’s a very familiar story about local government, lack of capital, and relying on private enterprise for a public good.

As it became clear the wells weren’t coping, the Council snapped into action and did what local government does best: they employed consultants to write reports. The first committee to investigate means of bringing water to the town was formed in 1769; in 1770 it paid £12 12s to two Edinburgh plumbers, Elias and William Scot, for a scoping and mapping exercise, and at this point the scheme lapsed.

In 1775 an engineer, Robert McKell, was employed to “enquire and search for fountains, springs, and water of good quality in the contiguity of the city of Glasgow”. The following year, Dr Irvine, lecturer in chemistry at the University, was brought into this enquiry, receiving 8 guineas for his trouble. Nothing happened.

Around 1780 Henry Bell, later famous as the owner of the Comet, proposed a plan to tap the Clyde above the Falls. This didn’t happen either. In 1783, David Young laid a scheme before the Council to bring water from the still incomplete Forth & Clyde Canal. Involving a reservoir and many thousands of yards of pipe, this carried an estimated cost of just over £7000 (equivalent to about £12 million in modern labour value). It came to nothing.

In 1788 the Council commissioned the architect James Gordon of Edinburgh to revisit the question. He rubbished the Forth & Clyde proposal on the ground that

The navigation upon the canal of sloops, passage-boats &c. is so considerable that the water must be polluted with filth of the most nauseous kind.

Instead, Gordon proposed to draw water from the Garngad Burn near Whitehill, with the Monkland Canal serving as back-up. (The levels of nauseous filth in the Monkland were, apparently, acceptable.) Even with some optimistic profit projections dangled in front of them, the Council dithered for four years and eventually deferred it indefinitely.

The Monkland scheme never quite went away, though, and it was revived as late as 1804 by the lawyer and historian James Denholm. Part of the appeal was the canal’s elevation, which would provide enough head to drive water to the upper storeys of every building in Glasgow. This is probably why someone bothered to record the fact that

The Gilt Ball under the Cock of the Steeple at the Cross, is on a level with the surface of the water in the Canal at Port-Dundas.

James Cleland, Annals of Glasgow (1816)

Progress in a small way occurred in 1795, when the contractor for the new barracks laid pipes to bring in water from Dunchattan. Prompted by local residents who offered to pay the cost, the Council persuaded the contractor to increase the width of these pipes, and from 1797 Dunchattan helped supply the thirsty burghers of Gallowgate.

The Forth & Clyde scheme was revived in 1796, but it seems to have been lured into a subcommittee and quietly strangled. A further committee was formed in 1798, after a public meeting was held to press for action. (The movers seem to have been a group of local magnates: James Stirling; Thomas Hopkirk; and Henry Glassford, son of the infamous tobacco lord.) According to James Marwick,

a committee was appointed to confer with the committee of inhabitants, and to report the results from time to time.

Had the population been able to drink committees, they would have been well supplied. This committee did at least get as far as commissioning the most thorough study yet. In 1800, the surveyor and engineer Bryce Macquiston submitted a letter describing five different schemes, all pumping from the Clyde, and was duly paid a £21 fee. The construction costs ranged from £5688 to £13977, not indlucing reservoirs (estimated at £5000) or the network of pipes throughout the city; the annual running costs ranged from £988 to £1799. Again, unsurprisingly, Macquiston’s proposals went nowhere.

There were two main barriers to all these schemes: law and money. Works on this scale needed powers that only Parliament could grant, with the costs and complications attendant on steering a bill through Westminster. Even once that was completed, capital investment would be needed: Macquiston had estimated that subscriptions of £15000 to £20000 would have to be raised. There was by now plenty of wealth in the city, based increasingly on the global textile trade that drew its raw materials from slave-worked plantations across the Atlantic and exported its products to India, but this wealth was volatile and in private hands. As with other improvement schemes of the era, including canals and roads, the way forward could only be through private companies, supported but not controlled by government.

By 1803 two rival companies had been formed and were working to raise capital and prepare schemes for Parliament. Before either could pump their first drop of water, though, they had been outpaced by a versatile entrepreneur.

Originally from Glendevon, William Harley had moved to Glasgow in 1789 to become a textile manufacturer, a trade which he originally considered beneath him. He turned out to be rather good at it, and made his fortune by introducing Turkey-red checked gingham to an eager world. In 1802 he bought the small estate of Saughy Hall (also known as Saughy Haugh, and anglicised to Willowbank) and took the lead in the development of Blythswood.

As part of this development, Harley had a bridge constructed across the St Enoch Burn, and built ice-houses in the arches of the bridge. From here he supplied Glasgow’s cooling and refrigeration needs, thereby becoming the city’s first fridge magnate.

Harley’s property near the burn became the nucleus of further projects, and is where he enters our story. Saughy Hall had a spring on the grounds, and Harley realised its potential. He ran pipes to a reservoir near Enochbank, and from there sent out a fleet of water carts. Harley’s carts travelled the streets of Glasgow, selling water at a halfpenny per stoup. These halfpennies added up quickly: it was claimed that he made as much as £4000 in a year.

Harley’s water carts operated for only a few years, after which he turned his attention and his pipes to other projects: first the baths which gave their name to Bath Street, then the bakery and the ultra-modern dairy on hygenic principles which joined them on the site. The dairy would be his final scheme: he died in 1829 in London, en route to St Petersburg where he planned to introduce the Harleian dairy system to the Tsar.

For the next fifty years, the city’s water supply would be dominated by the Water Companies.

The Glasgow Water Works was the first of the Companies to get its Act, in 1806; the Cranstonhill Water Works followed in 1808. The Glasgow Water Works was effectively a public-private partnership, led by the Town Council. The Council purchased only £1000 of the stock (out of a maximum of £100 000 authorised by the Act) but had ex officio involvement in the management; in addition, several of the major investors — including the East India profiteer Kirkman Finlay and the omnipresent James Cleland — were also members of the Council. The Cranstonhill company was smaller, with its capital originally capped at £30 000, and entirely private. It was founded, notionally, with the noble aim of giving Glasgow’s citizens the benefits of competition, and not merely with an eye to profits in the expanding suburbs.

The Glasgow Water Works built its pumping station on the north bank of the Clyde at Dalmarnock, where the water was to be passed through filter beds and then pumped to reservoirs in the town. The main reservoir was on Sydney Street, north of Gallowgate; from here water was pumped further to smaller reservoirs on Drygate and on the ridge of Rottenrow.

The Dalmarnock filter beds soon proved inadequate, and in 1810 attention shifted to the left bank of the river. Here, a meander had formed a peninsula — now the site of the Cuningar Loop — composed largely of fine sand. The plan was to use this as a natural filter: a leaky brick tunnel was constructed beneath the sand, and water was drawn directly from this tunnel.

The pipe that carried the water over the riverbed to the pumping station was of an ingenious design by James Watt, with jointed sections apparently inspired by a lobster’s tail. (A section of this pipe reappeared in 2014 as the athletes’ village for the Commonwealth Games was being built on the site of the waterworks.) Watt had a double interest in the scheme: not only was he a consultant, but the steam engines were, naturally, of Boulton & Watt’s design. They had plenty of work to do: by 1820 there were three engines at Dalmarnock and a further two raising the water from Sydney Street to Rottenrow, and the Company was drawing about 8000 tonnes of water daily.

The Cranstonhill company built their reservoir west of the city near Anderston, on the south side of what’s now Houldsworth Street. Water was again drawn from filtering tunnels, this time run along the riverbank. There were obvious drawbacks to this location, and at least one local watercourse was diverted to discharge further downriver and prevent the company’s pipes being “impregnated with the filth which is brought down by the said stream”. Unfortunately it turned out in 1811 that, filthy or not, that watercourse marked the official boundary of the city, and steps had to be taken to restore the line.

Despite Cranstonhill’s location downstream of a sewage-laden city, its water at first had a better reputation than Dalmarnock’s, which became heavily charged with lime and iron when the river was low. Nevertheless, either was an improvement on water drawn from the Clyde elsewhere.

By 1813 the Council were debating the state of the washing-house on the Green, supplied by wooden pipes from the Clyde, “which sewer is full of mineral water, that the clothes washes were greatly destroyed and exhibited a yellow colour”. James Cleland proposed a Council waterworks to remedy this, but instead a deal was made with the Glasgow Water Works to supply a pipe from the south end of Charlotte Street, for £75 per year. Cleland’s putative waterworks would resurface periodically whenever the Council wanted to clip the Water Companies’ wings, but it was always an empty threat given the expense. In 1816 the Companies agreed to supply water for free to the jail, slaughterhouses and other public offices, but this bargain lasted only a few years and by 1821 the Council had agreed to pay £15 per year for this water — back-dated by two years.

The Cranstonhill company, less well capitalised than the Glasgow company and with a more awkward site, struggled to make money. In 1819, with their water developing a bad name for pollution, they made a bold move and shifted their pumping station to Dalmarnock, one bend downstream of the Glasgow works.

From the two pumping stations ran two independent systems of pipes, often passing in parallel down the same streets and supplying water at the same mandated rates. As with more modern utilities, the efficiency of the private sector was sometimes hard to see.

In principle, the Water Companies did not hold a duopoly. Each was obliged to connect any householder who wished to receive their water, and to supply them at set rates; no householder was obliged to use their supply. In practice, there was not much choice. The public wells, already inadequate, deteriorated: some were removed entirely, and there were recurrent pleas from residents to set old wells in order. Effectively, a two-tier system developed in which wells were good enough for the slums and everyone else had water, literally, on tap. Glasgow had major cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1848; it makes for grim speculation what role the water supply played.

Even though the Council were part-owners of one Water Company, there were perpetual tensions between companies and city. Some problems were predictable, such as the recurrent excavation of streets; by 1820, the Glasgow company alone had laid “28 miles and 3 furlongs of cast iron pipes in the streets”, as the investor Cleland proudly reported. Other issues centred around the tidal weir which maintained the level of the river, protecting both the Companies’ supply and those lobster-like pipes across the riverbed.

The most bizarre dispute, which came to a head in 1829, concerned fire-fighting. Under the Acts which established the Companies, they were obliged to supply water for this purpose, and stopcocks had been placed along the pipes at intervals. However, the Companies had developed the frugal habit of switching off their pumps overnight, meaning not only that houses were unsupplied but that there was no water in the pipes should anyone be foolish enough to catch fire. Summoned to explain themselves, company representatives explained blandly that they were only obliged to let the pipes be tapped, not to ensure that there was water in them at the time. This proved legally correct, and remained the case until new legislation was passed in 1838.

Even after their move upriver, the Cranstonhill company struggled to turn a profit. The first scheme to merge it with the Glasgow company was proposed in 1833 but was successfully opposed by the Council, who simultaneously argued that it would decrease competition and brought in a counter-proposal to take both Companies into public control. In an awkward truce, both sides agreed to drop their proposals. The Companies, however, renewed their plan in 1838, and drove it through Parliament in the teeth of public and municipal opposition. (It was about this point that the Council resumed its search for alternatives, but that’s a story for next time.)

The united Glasgow Water Works was a formidable operation. By the 1850s it was operating thirteen pumping engines, totalling nearly 900 horsepower. The two largest, at 180 horsepower each, were at Dalmarnock: “Samson” drove around three million gallons per day to the higher regions of the city, and “Goliath” drove five and a half million to the lower regions. A reservoir at Garnethill had joined those at Cranstonhill, Drygate and Rottenrow.

The poorer quarters were still supplied either by wells or by common taps, such as the one that can be glimpsed in William Simpson’s painting of Fiddler’s Close. There were evidently difficulties in collecting rates for these supplies, and in 1848 the Company announced that

In consequence of the Non-payment of Water Rates by Persons who at present derive their Supply of Water from Street Wells, or Fountains, or Common Taps, the COMPANY of PROPRIETORS of the GLASGOW WATER WORKS have resolved to alter the mode of Supply by DISCONTINUING such Wells, &c.; but, in order to give time to Consumers to provide themselves with Service Pipes, they hereby intimate that the Wells, or Fountains, and Common Taps will be allowed to remain until MARTINMAS next.

North British Daily Mail, 13 May 1848

(Martinmas is in November; this helpful contribution to public health must have been enacted just in time for the cholera.)

In any case, despite the scale and sophistication of the Water Company and its vigorous efforts to enforce payment, it was struggling in terms of both quantity and quality. As the historian John Burnet would note,

The Clyde, as the source of supply, was sometimes pretty free from objection, and in the ordinary state of the river it was a good soft water, not unpleasant to the taste when properly filtered; but during floods it was much discoloured by clay, and in certain seasons deeply stained with peat. Larger subsiding reservoirs and more effective filtration would have removed to a great extent this colouring matter, but there never were filters sufficiently extensive to pass the large quantity of water required by the city. In some states of the river, indeed, nearly one-half of the whole quantity supplied from the Dalmarnock Works was pumped into the city direct from the river, without any filtration whatever. The constantly increasing number and extension of manufactories and dye works on the banks of the river, no doubt, also contributed considerably to affect injuriously the quality of the water.

John Burnet, History of the Water Supply to Glasgow (1869)

With the city’s pipes now delivering a broth of industrial and human effluent, something had to be done — but what? The answer would involve much Council dithering, a dose of Southside separatism, and an expensive legal battle; we’ll come to all that in Part III.

Main sources

• James Denholm, The History of the City of Glasgow (3rd ed., 1804)
• James Cleland, Annals of Glasgow (1816) and Rise and Progress of the City of Glasgow (1820)
• William Harley, The Harleian Dairy System (1829)
• John Burnet, History of the Water Supply to Glasgow (1869)
• James D. Marwick, Glasgow: the Water Supply of the City (1901)
• George Eyre-Todd, History of Glasgow (Jackson, Wylie & Co, 1934), Volume 3, chapter XLV

I’ve also used various passages from the Burgh Records and from the newspapers of the day; details available on request.

#cranstonhillWaterWorks #glasgowWaterWorks #water #waterCompanies #williamHarley