Ships for All Nations: John Brown & Company Clydebank, 1847–1971

By Ian Johnston

“A worthy tribute to the John Brown company and to British shipbuilding . . . a joy to enthusiasts of the great ships of the past.”—Australian Naval Institute
 
The Clydebank shipyard built some of the most famous vessels in maritime history—great transatlantic liners like Lusitania, Queen Mary and QE2, and iconic warships like the battlecruiser Hood, and Britain’s last battleship, HMS Vanguard. Starting life as J & G Thomson in 1847, the business acquired its more famous persona when taken over in 1899 by the Sheffield-based steelmaker John Brown & Co, which enhanced the yard’s existing reputation for turning out first-class products, both naval and mercantile.
 
This book charts the fortunes of the company in terms of its business development, its management and personnel, as well as the great variety of ships it built during the century and a quarter of its existence. It also tells a wider story of the rise to world domination of the British shipbuilding industry and its eventual decline and collapse in the post-war decades, as reflected in the experience of John Brown.
 
Written by an acknowledged authority on Clydeside shipbuilding, the book was originally published in a limited edition in 2000, but this reprint is entirely new and revised, although it retains all the original photographs from the yard’s own unrivaled collection.
 
“Essential to anyone’s maritime collection.”—Sea Breezes
 
“The profusely illustrated, beautifully produced and very detailed story of John Brown & Company.”—Army Rumour Service

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781848322684

Ian Johnston

IAN JOHNSTON was brought up in a shipbuilding family, although his own career was in graphic design. A lifetime’s interest in ships and shipbuilding has borne fruit in a number of publications, including Ships for a Nation, a history of John Brown’s, and Beardmore Built, the story of another great Clydeside yard.

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Introduction

On 26 September 1934, during rain which poured down with arresting determination, the largest assembly of steel in history was launched into the River Clyde at Clydebank near Glasgow. From behind a protective glass canopy, the words of Her Majesty Queen Mary were carried across the shipyard and by radio to the world beyond. The ship was the Cunard liner which bore her name, Queen Mary, afloat at last after her construction had been halted during the Depression. Sixteen years earlier, another vessel, sleeker in form and built for an altogether different purpose, was launched from the same yard. This was the battlecruiser Hood. Both ships were destined to occupy a special place in the minds of British people, representing tangible objects of national achievement.

The events between 1847 and 1972, which form the chronological bookends of this history, witnessed the expansion of the British shipbuilding industry to a position of world leadership. This was sustained for one hundred years, followed by a remarkably sudden decline into statistical irrelevance. As that long period in British industrial history recedes, there is perhaps no better example of the excellence and achievement with which it was associated than with the products of this shipyard, known for the greater part of its life as John Brown & Co Ltd.

Although much of the skill and reputation associated with Clydeside’s heavy industries has been retrospectively focused on John Brown’s, that yard was not an isolated enterprise but part of a remarkable and complex industrial dynamic which overtook the River Clyde, Glasgow and Britain in the nineteenth century. In 1847, shipbuilding in wood was long established in ports around the British Isles. Although Greenock was such a port, the Clyde was not particularly noted for endeavour in this field. That changed with the adaptation of the steam engine to marine propulsion. The revolution in marine transportation which followed had its origins on Clydeside and created a momentum which placed the Clyde and Glasgow at the epicentre of marine engineering and iron shipbuilding.

Two brothers, James and George Thomson, founded the business known in the twentieth century as John Brown & Co, in 1847. As former employees of the pioneering engineer, shipbuilder and entrepreneur Robert Napier, the Thomson brothers were well equipped to enter into the new and advanced technology of designing and building marine steam engines. Recognising that iron and not wood was the future material of ships, the Thomsons expanded their business in 1851 by establishing the Clyde Bank Iron Shipyard at Govan on the south bank of the Clyde. A third brother, Robert, became Samuel Cunard’s first superintendent engineer in the shipping line which Cunard had established in 1839. Thus a link was established between the new firm of engineers and shipbuilders and Cunard that would endure for more than one hundred years.

The business of James and George Thomson was to have its share of peaks and troughs. Initially, the business thrived, building ocean-going ships and river steamers alike. In 1863, James and George, now wealthy men, quarrelled and James resolved to leave the business to establish a rival marine engineering business with his two sons. George continued on his own until 1866, when he died suddenly at the age of 55. The company was plunged into deep crisis and had to be operated by a trust formed of Glasgow businessmen until George’s young sons, confusingly named James and George, became of age.

By now, the remarkable success of Glasgow as a port as well as a shipbuilding, marine engineering and manufacturing centre was well established. The port needed new wharves, sheds and facilities, forcing the relocation of Thomson’s Govan shipyard. This was to prove an acrimonious and protracted procedure which resulted in a poor financial settlement for the Thomsons. Nevertheless, the ambition of young James Rodger Thomson, who assumed control of the business with his brother, George Paul Thomson, in 1874 at the age of 30, ensured that the Clyde Bank Iron Shipyard was moved to a large site on farmland seven miles downriver from Glasgow. With no amenities whatsoever, the new yard had enormous hurdles to overcome before an adequate infrastructure, including homes for working people, could be provided.

Over the course of the 1870s and 1880s, the town of Clydebank, which took its name from the shipyard, was established, recording in the process the highest growth rate for any town in Scotland at that time. Throughout this period, the new works struggled financially, partly as a result of the need to organise 2,000 working people daily to carry on the business of building ships at a yard in the middle of a field. The Union Bank of Scotland became increasingly involved in supporting the company over a long period of time, finally becoming the largest shareholder. The Thomson brothers tested the bank’s patience by proving to be profligate in their pursuit of a lavish lifestyle. Nevertheless, J & G Thomson & Co succeeded in establishing itself as second in importance to that of its great Clydeside rival, John Elder & Co at the Fairfield works. For a time, the battle to take the coveted blue riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing was purely a Clydeside affair between Thomson’s and Elder’s as numerous record-breaking liners left their Clydeside yards. From the mid-1880s onward, warships became the other prestigious and lucrative market for which Clydebank became renowned.

In 1890, the Union Bank of Scotland converted the business to a public company with the ultimate aim of returning it to private ownership. Now highly profitable and with prestigious naval and mercantile contracts, the business attracted the attention of John Brown & Co of Sheffield, a leading manufacturer of armour plate and other steel products. In 1899, John Brown & Co acquired the Clydebank works. James Rodger Thomson and his brother George Paul Thomson were obliged to leave the company in ignominious circumstances, a factor that arguably accounted for their early deaths a few years later.

John Brown’s timing in acquiring the Clydebank works was to prove more apposite than even the most optimistic could have imagined. The backdrop was growing competition and tension with the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II. By the end of the 1890s, the blue riband for speed on the prestigious North Atlantic route was firmly in German hands, while a naval race between Britain and Germany was in the making. The British response was in the form of several remarkable ships: the Cunard liners Lusitania and Mauretania, which reasserted dominance of the North Atlantic; and the revolutionary battleship Dreadnought. John Brown’s won the order for Lusitania and the dreadnought battlecruiser Inflexible. In the years before the First World War, the Brown–Curtis steam turbine, which was particularly suitable for warship propulsion, was developed at Clydebank. This advanced technology proved to be of great interest to the Admiralty, resulting in significant machinery contracts and licence agreements with other British shipbuilders. Completion of the Cunard liner Aquitania in 1914 coincided with the outbreak of war during which time John Brown’s turned out a host of ships including the dreadnoughts Tiger, Barham, Repulse and, after the end of the war, Hood.

The post-war desire to cut defence spending caused the progressive collapse of the armaments industries. This, coupled with the onset of a severe trade depression, resulted in fewer contracts and reduced employment at Clydebank. By the end of the 1920s, the situation had temporarily improved and a succession of elegant liners for Canadian Pacific, including Empress of Britain, was built.

The growth which the shipbuilding and marine engineering industries had known since inception, and which peaked in 1913, had been halted during the 1920s and turned into decline during the early 1930s. The difficulties in which the west of Scotland found itself highlighted an acute overdependence on the heavy industries which had been its making. Efforts were made by shipbuilders to reduce the industry by eliminating redundant yards. In 1930, the adjoining shipyard of William Beardmore at Dalmuir was closed as part of this effort.

The future of John Brown & Co was in the balance. The signing of the high-profile contract in December 1930 for the Cunard liner Queen Mary kept the yard open. However, within a year, elation at winning the contract gave way to abject misery as the ship was suspended as a consequence of the deepening financial chaos internationally and the onset of the Great Depression. Her incomplete hull towering above the yard, visible for miles around, symbolised the deepest crisis of the depression. Dole queues lengthened while the government and Cunard moved slowly towards a settlement which would allow the ship to continue. The resumption of work in April 1934 was interpreted nationally as an end to the worst effects of depression.

The beginning of rearmament in the mid-1930s pulled John Brown and the heavy industries out of recession although many yards had closed permanently with the loss of what would prove to be irreplaceable skilled jobs. By the end of the decade, the order for a second Cunarder ensured full employment. The launch of this ship, Queen Elizabeth, coincided with the Munich crisis of September 1938 and the start of a short timetable to yet another world war. During this conflict, Clydebank paid a cruel price for its association with shipbuilding. The Luftwaffe aerial offensive of March 1941 failed to inflict significant damage on the shipyard, but succeeded in severely damaging the town, claiming 448 lives. Nevertheless, the yard produced a vitally important fleet of warships from battleships to landing craft.

The end of the war brought many orders to replenish the world’s merchant fleets and a period of sustained building which lasted well into the 1950s began. John Brown’s was in a position to pick and choose its orders. The apparent domination of the market by British shipbuilders nevertheless masked the rise of new shipbuilding nations whose yards were established on a more productive basis in terms of plant, practice and labour. By the end of the 1950s, Britain, hitherto the world’s leading shipbuilder, had been overtaken by Japan and Germany. By the early 1960s, the British shipbuilding industry was moving into deep crisis, forcing many yards to close, unable to win orders at remunerative prices. Despite the excellence of John Brown’s product, the company became uncompetitive. Lucrative warship orders dwindled as the Royal Navy adjusted to a greatly reduced strategic role. The yard’s other niche market – passenger liners – declined against steep competition from the passenger airliners of the new jet age. The long-standing relationship with Cunard stalled as the shipping line deliberated over a replacement for Queen Mary. To hold its skilled workforce together, in anticipation of the latter, a ruinous contract was entered into with the Swedish America Line for the intermediate liner Kungsholm. Massive losses on this contract were obscured by the jubilation following the securing of the QE2 contract.

The general concern expressed over the difficulties faced by the shipbuilding industry spurred the government into an interventionist role. The Geddes Committee of Enquiry was established to recommend ways in which the industry could once more be put on a sound footing. In 1966, this committee recommended the formation of shipbuilding groups. Thus Upper Clyde Shipbuilders was formed in 1968 on the upper reaches of the Clyde. John Brown’s became the Clydebank Division, thus relieving the parent John Brown Co of a financially burdensome yard. The brief and troubled history of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders finally tore the heart out of shipbuilding at Clydebank. However, in its final moments, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders put Clydebank in the headlines one more time. This had little to do with ships and everything to do with its fight to retain shipbuilding jobs. After 120 years ranging between the lows of economic depression, the carnage of 1941 and the production of some of the world’s most spectacular ships, the unthinkable had happened – shipbuilding at Clydebank came to an end.

Although hardship often attended shipbuilding, either through grim working conditions or periods of chronic economic depression, many thousands of people acquired, and were able to apply, great skill in building ships. In this respect, society is poorer at the end of the twentieth century than it was at the start. For shipyard workers, there was a clear sense of purpose in constructing products of such obvious utility. To this sense of purpose was added the scale and drama of both the ships and the shipyard environment. Ships were punched, bent and forced into existence out of a reluctant material. The shipyard was the scene of an all-weather elemental confrontation between man and steel. This gave rise to camaraderie in and out of the yard and to the emergence of ‘characters’ who became embedded in the folklore of shipbuilding communities. Although not always admitted, building ships generated tremendous pride. Perhaps overly-focused on the product, shipbuilding has often been portrayed as a romantic activity. Although the reality was very different, there was an indefinable moment at a launch or when a ship sailed away in which the day-to-day issues, disagreements or the fears over job security which beset the company were suspended. As one Clydebank manager succinctly put it: ‘Shipbuilding was a hell of an industry for emotion.’¹

Despite the demise of John Brown & Co and shipbuilding at Clydebank, its story remains a remarkable one of achievement comparable with the best that any industrialised society could hope to recount.

Ian Johnston

July 2000

April 2015 Update

As this book went to press early in 2000 for its first edition, the future of the two companies that occupied the shipbuilding and marine engineering sites of former John Brown & Co Ltd’s Clydebank works looked precarious and over the course of that year both closed. This new edition now covers all the final developments of Clydebank Shipyard.

Ian Johnston

April 2015

A Note on Photographs

The Clydebank photographic collection is now held by the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh where they are being conserved, recatalogued and scanned for posterity. The collection is exceptional in its scale and quality and quite probably the finest depicting shipbuilding anywhere in the UK. Thanks are due to the National Records of Scotland for allowing the use of these images which make this book so visually rich.

Photography became a feature of shipyard life at Clydebank from the mid-1880s onward as a means of recording construction activity in what were termed ‘progress of construction’ photographs. The photographers employed at Clydebank over the decades were often able to transcend mere record photography, producing poignant, beautifully-composed images that capture the sheer scale of the industrial effort as well as the majesty of many of the most important ships ever to be built in the UK. The images they recorded offer a remarkable, detailed and irreplaceable insight into shipbuilding for which the River Clyde was rightly famous.

The use of two cameras at the launch of the cruiser Europa on 23 March 1897 has allowed a rare glimpse of one of the shipyard photographers. By this time, photographs had been taken at Clydebank for ten years.

The events that placed Clydeside in a position of world prominence in marine engineering and shipbuilding were underpinned by interrelated developments. The emergence of the iron industry in the mid-eighteenth century using locally-mined ore served as a starting point. The Carron ironworks near Larbert, established in 1760, is generally regarded as the beginning of the modern Scottish iron industry. In 1782, the Clyde ironworks began production to the northeast of Glasgow. These developments encouraged exploitation of the Lanarkshire coalfields, leading to a significant mining industry. In addition, Glasgow already had an important textile industry first established with flax spinning and then, by the end of the eighteenth century, further consolidated with cotton. By 1840, the population of Glasgow numbered 255,000 and the city rivalled Manchester as a cotton spinning and weaving centre. These industries, of recent introduction in themselves, were soon to be eclipsed by the engineering products of the new iron industries which they had indirectly spawned.

The machinery employed in the textile industry was generally not of local manufacture and this encouraged a number of millwrights and iron founders, working in and around Glasgow, to specialise in the repair and manufacture of spares for these machines. From these modest beginnings, the design and manufacture of textile machinery were undertaken. This had the twin effect of stimulating the growth of iron foundries in the Glasgow area and, at the same time, creating a pool of skilled metalworkers. However, it was the commercial development of steam navigation that provided the impetus for the next series of developments in the growth of engineering.

Comet was launched in 1812 and sailed successfully until wrecked in 1820. She was 42ft long × 11ft beam × 5ft 6in deep and built of wood. Her 3hp engine was constructed by John Robertson and her boiler by David Napier.

In August 1812, when Henry Bell made his historic voyage down the Clyde in the Port Glasgow-built Comet, it was with a steam engine designed and manufactured by John Robertson in Glasgow and a boiler made by David Napier in Glasgow.¹ While others had built steam engines for marine purposes, most notably William Symington with the successful Charlotte Dundas of 1803, it was the Comet and its three-and-a-half-hour pioneering voyage covering only twenty or so miles from Glasgow to Greenock which beckoned new horizons in marine transportation. Steam-powered machinery had made a small but significant impact on the vagaries of sail, wind and tide.

While there was little new about the nature and function of ships, driving them through the seas by mechanical propulsion was novel. By 1816, no fewer than twenty steamboats were plying the Clyde with machinery ranging from 6hp to 30hp.² Of these twenty vessels, five were built at Dumbarton, twelve at Port Glasgow and three at Greenock; all were of wooden construction. The engines for all but two of these vessels were made in Glasgow, and the remaining two were both the product of James Watt’s firm in Birmingham. Although Glasgow had as yet played little part in the construction of vessels, it was through steam propulsion and engine building that the city’s association with shipbuilding was established.

David Napier and his cousin Robert are widely recognised as having laid the foundations of marine engineering and shipbuilding on Clydeside. David Napier, two years older than his cousin, established his first engine works in 1816 at Camlachie in Glasgow. An engineer of considerable talent and ingenuity, he perfected the steeple engine employed in many early steamers. Napier moved from Camlachie and set up new engine works at Lancefield Street, west of the city centre, in 1821, leaving the old works to the equally-talented Robert.³ At this time, David Napier employed John Wood and other shipbuilders in Port Glasgow to build hulls for his engines. By 1835, David had abandoned Clydeside and was running a successful business in London, and Robert had taken over the Lancefield engine works. The success of the marine steam engine in propelling ships soon encouraged others to establish themselves as engineers and engine builders. The role of both David and Robert Napier in training a cadre of talented engineers and shipbuilders in their works at Lancefield and later, at Govan, cannot be underestimated. Distinguished shipbuilders such as David Tod, John McGregor, William Denny, John Elder and of course the subjects of this book James and George Thomson were under the tutelage of Robert Napier at the outset of their careers.

A Navigable Channel

The development of shipbuilding in Glasgow and the upper Clyde was inextricably linked with the development of Glasgow harbour and the River Clyde. In 1800, the upper part of the river was barely navigable by vessels drawing more than 3ft, which effectively prevented ships of any reasonable size sailing to Glasgow. To some, the solution lay in bypassing the Clyde altogether. In 1806, work started on the construction of a canal linking Glasgow to the Ayrshire coast at Ardrossan. By 1810, the money had run out, leaving only an eleven-mile section of canal from Glasgow to Johnstone and the city with no meaningful access to the sea.⁴ It was largely down to the far-sighted efforts of the River Improvement Trust, constituted in 1809 by Act of Parliament, that both widening and deepening operations were carried out over a long period of time with the aim of making Glasgow accessible to ocean-going vessels.⁵ This process made it possible for ships of similar size to be built there. The first builder of ships of a reasonable size in Glasgow was John Barclay, later to become associated with Robert Curle, who established a small slip and yard for building and repairing wooden vessels at Stobcross Pool in 1818.

It was the advent of iron, rolled into flat plates as a shipbuilding material, which distinguished the rise of shipbuilding on the upper part of the Clyde. The realisation that iron would enable ships of much larger dimensions to be constructed, in addition to offering a more rigid structure for steam engines, provided the stimulus for development. Heavy cast-iron engines fitted into wooden hulls, no matter how well built, were a marriage of limited future. It was the combination of iron hull, steam engine and commercial incentive that enabled the Clyde to rise to a position of prominence in marine engineering and shipbuilding.

There were many shipyards throughout the UK building wooden ships, although few had experimented with iron. The first builders of iron ships on a regular basis were not far-seeing builders of wooden vessels but the engine builders who saw hulls constructed of iron as a natural extension of their existing metalworking skills. Among the first to exploit this new development in Glasgow were Tod and McGregor, later described as the ‘originators of iron architecture as applied to the construction of vessels’. In 1839, they set up an iron shipyard at Greenlaw on the south bank of the River Clyde, having previously built a number of small iron vessels at their Clyde foundry on the north side of the river.⁶ Robert Napier, assisted by the talented marine engineer David Elder, entered iron shipbuilding at an early stage, taking over McArthur and Alexander’s shipyard at Govan in 1842. Within a very short space of time, Napier became the most important of the early Clyde shipbuilders. Thus, the second phase in the development of shipbuilding on the upper Clyde began with the evolution of marine engineers into iron shipbuilders. This phase is described by the following comment, which appeared in the North British Daily Mail on 26 March 1853:

Out of a hundred or more vessels now being constructed on the Clyde there are only seven of wood: and of all the rest ninety-four are steamers. There can be little doubt that the time is hastening fast when timber ships will be obsolete, and that the world’s traffic will be conducted mainly by steam as an auxiliary power to the uncertain and precarious winds.

It is a curious phase in the art and mastery of shipbuilding, that hitherto nine tenths of these vessels made of iron have been built by engineers who never studied naval architecture, and all at once took a lead in the art, leaving the professional shipbuilders to jog on at heckmatock and oak, until they were distanced in the race of competition and had to convert their adzes into huge iron shears, and their augers into punching machines, in self defence. And yet it is a study to see how soon carpenters became cunning in bending plates, and shipwrights in fashioning angle iron.

Henry Bell (1767–1830) placed the contract for the steamer Comet with the Port Glasgow shipbuilder John Wood & Co. Bell, a millwright by trade, had Comet built to take passengers from Glasgow to Greenock and Helensburgh three times a week, thus inaugurating the first successful steamship service in Europe.

The first steamship to cross the Atlantic was the wooden-hulled Sirius, which had side-lever paddle engines constructed by Thomas Wingate of Glasgow. As the Clyde emerged as an iron shipbuilding centre, it was by no means the only one of importance. Much of the shipbuilding industry was concentrated on the Thames and for a time, thanks largely to the exertions of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and ships such as Great Britain and Great Western, it seemed as if Bristol might also develop into a major shipbuilding centre.

An early image of industrialisation on the Clyde painted in 1840. It shows the wood shipyard of John Barclay to the west of Finnieston Quay.

There can be little doubt that great excitement must have been generated by the promise of this new industry, the products of which brought far-off places a little closer through reliable, swifter, mechanical propulsion. The creation of engine works, boiler shops, forges, foundries, yards and a host of related industries in its midst set Glasgow on the path to becoming the major centre of heavy industry, which it would remain for more than one hundred years. Of the men who developed this industry, the Mechanics Magazine said in April 1853:

… the employers in nearly all the establishments were working men themselves within the last thirty years. Most of them had attained the period of middle life before they turned their attention to iron boat-building at all. The men are not only the architects of their own fortunes but the creators of a new branch of industry.⁷

Even before it was certain that Clydeside would play a major part in the development of marine engineering and shipbuilding, a Partick grocer named John Thomson sent three of his sons into apprenticeship with a firm of millwrights and engineers in Glasgow.

The Thomson Family

Details of the Thomson family before 1800 are scant. John Thomson was born on 1 December 1768 at Holm of Cathcart on the south side of Glasgow. His wife to be, Jean Paul, was born on 9 April 1777 in the Gorbals, then a rather affluent suburb on the south bank of the Clyde. On 17 October 1800, John married Jean Paul in the parish of Govan, and the first of nine children – three girls and six boys – was born on 9 October 1801. When John Thomson died on 21 January 1837, he was recorded as being a grocer working in Partick: ‘leaving a piece of ground with house thereon in the village of Partick, Glasgow, Lanarkshire’.⁸ However, other accounts attribute John with involvement in ‘smith-work’. Three sons – James born 19 December 1803, Robert born 5 February 1811 and George born 25 March 1815⁹ – were to become involved in the new business of marine engineering. Whatever plans John had for his sons were probably influenced by the excitement surrounding the development of steam navigation, events which were happening on their own doorstep.

James Thomson was the older of the two brothers who started the business of James & George Thomson & Co.

All three brothers were apprenticed to the Partick firm of Graham Wellington & Co, millwrights and engineers. The apprenticeships were as joiners, because engineering in the modern sense was of recent origin and many of the skills and methods associated with metalworking were carried over from woodworking. Certain woodworking trades had a considerable bearing on engineering, especially pattern making, a highly-skilled trade where an understanding of the characteristics of molten iron and of metal in general were a prerequisite for the manufacture of accurate metal castings. It was as pattern makers that both James and George Thomson were later to find employment as journeymen.

James Thomson

On completion of his apprenticeship, James left Glasgow to take employment in Manchester. In 1828, he returned to Glasgow to work for Robert Napier as his leading smith, finisher and turner, at the Vulcan Foundry in Washington Street, Glasgow. Napier’s move from Camlachie to Lancefield was completed in the same year. James Thomson’s return to Glasgow was facilitated by Napier, who paid him the sum of £10 to defray the expense of conveying him from Manchester and a wage of thirty-six shillings per week to be paid fortnightly. Thomson was to work for Napier for almost twenty years, during which time Napier’s reputation as a marine engine builder was firmly established.

In 1838, a new agreement was signed between Robert Napier and James Thomson, who was now an assistant foreman engineer:

It is hereby agreed between James Thomson and Robert Napier that the said James Thomson shall give the whole of his personal services for the term of five years from and after this date. On the other hand Robert Napier to pay the said James Thomson a yearly salary of One Hundred and Twenty Pounds Sterling with a bonus of Five Pounds for every pair of engines that are finished and set agoing from the two works of Vulcan & Lancefield Foundries commencing with the following engines – the Victoria’s, the Fire King’s, Glow Worm’s, Aberdeen Co and Arran companies engines. These bonuses to be paid at the end of each year for all engines set agoing and finished during the preceding year and we agree to put this on stamp paper.¹⁰

On 22 November 1842, the agreement with James was renewed for a further five years with salary fixed at £175 with a bonus of £10 for every pair of engines (meaning an engine with two cylinders) completed at Napier’s works.

On 24 August 1834, James married Grace McIntyre in Govan parish church. Grace was the daughter of John McIntyre, who had prospered as cashier at Robert Napier’s Vulcan Foundry, living at Greenlaw on the south bank of the Clyde. Between 1835 and 1848, James and Grace had six girls and two boys. In 1851, they were living at 13 Kelvin Grove Place, an affluent address in Glasgow.¹¹

Robert Thomson

On completion of his apprenticeship, Robert went to sea. He served as an engineer with the small steamship company G & J Burns, sailing from Glasgow to Liverpool on the steamer Commodore. When, in 1839, George Burns and David McIver decided to put up the capital for Samuel Cunard to realise his ambition of establishing a North Atlantic shipping company, Robert Thomson joined the company in Liverpool and became their first superintendent engineer with responsibility for all machinery in the company’s growing fleet. Robert’s close association with the Cunard Co was fortuitous in light of his brothers’ future aspirations as marine engineers and shipbuilders.

George Thomson

On completion of his apprenticeship, George also went to sea for a brief period before following his brother James into employment with Robert Napier at the Lancefield works in 1835. Robert was evidently impressed by young George and in 1841 entered into a five-year agreement in which George was employed in the capacity of foreman at the ‘Lancefield Foundry and Engineer Works’. George’s salary, to be paid quarterly, was £160 for the first year, £170 for the second, £180 for the third and £200 for the last two years.

On 8 August 1841, George married Elizabeth Rodgers at Gorbals parish church. Between 1842 and 1860, George and Elizabeth had nine children (six girls and three boys). In 1851, the family were living at 8 Royal Terrace, Glasgow, an affluent part of the city in which his brother James lived.

Robert Napier and Samuel Cunard

In 1839, an agreement was struck which did much to consolidate Clydeside’s emerging position in shipbuilding as well as creating an alliance of interests which lasted until the completion of the QE2 in 1968. Samuel Cunard arrived in Britain from Nova Scotia early in February 1839 to try and secure the Admiralty contract for the first Atlantic Mail steamer service. This had been advertised in The Times in November of the previous year. Cunard was not a newcomer to shipping and already owned, through his company Samuel Cunard & Co, more than forty sailing vessels. Cunard’s tender, delivered by 11 February 1839, promised three steamboats each of 300hp and 800 tons, able to carry the mail by May 1840. Cunard was faced with the problem of making the terms of his tender a reality. Through his friend James Melville, secretary of the East India Co, Cunard was directed to Robert Napier and John Wood in the belief that they would be capable of building the ships promised for the Atlantic route. Cunard made the journey north to Glasgow and met Napier at his home, Lancefield House, adjacent to his engine works at Lancefield quay. The meeting went well, and on 18 March Napier signed the contract to build Cunard’s three Atlantic wooden paddle steamers. The Admiralty contract, worth £55,000 per annum, was signed on 4 May 1839.

George Thomson worked for leading engineer and shipbuilder Robert Napier, as did his brother James.

Grace MacIntyre married James Thomson in 1834. Her father was the cashier at Robert Napier’s Vulcan Foundry in Glasgow. Grace provided the funds necessary for her husband and brother-in-law to set up their business.

When Napier advised the construction of larger, stronger vessels, better able to keep to a transatlantic schedule in the face of steep penalties, Cunard was forced to seek additional capital for these costlier vessels. James Melville suggested that Cunard discuss this in another meeting with the Scottish engineer. Napier introduced him to David and Charles McIver and George and James Burns, successful Glasgow shipowners who operated in competition with one another. After some deliberation, David McIver and George Burns agreed to become partners in Cunard’s contract. Thus, the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Co was brought into existence. With such a long designation, it is little wonder that the new company was soon referred to as Cunard’s Co long before being officially titled the Cunard Steam-Ship Co in 1878. While George Burns remained in Glasgow to supervise construction of the ships, David McIver went to Liverpool, from where the new ships would operate. By 1840, the first of four ‘Cunarders’, Britannia, had made a successful crossing of the Atlantic from Liverpool to Halifax. Napier constructed the engines for all four vessels, while the hulls were built by Robert Duncan at his Greenock shipyard. However, Napier clearly saw financial as well as technical advantage in building his own hulls and, in the year 1841, he purchased a shipyard in Govan.¹² The first iron ship built by Napier was the 700-ton Vanguard in 1843. After launching, ships were taken from Govan upriver to a small basin which had been cut into the bank near the engine works at Lancefield, where vessels were completed after having their engines fitted.

David Napier built the boilers for Comet while working in his father’s engineering business. David founded the Camlachie Foundry in 1814 and the Lancefield Foundry in 1824. In 1836, he moved to the Thames to continue his business.

John Robertson, a Glasgow engineer, poses by part of the engine he built to power Henry Bell’s steamship Comet.

Early Steam Engines

Above all, it was the development of the marine engine that acted as the stimulus for the growth of engineering on Clydeside. The necessity to produce engines of greater power coupled with greater economy and yet of minimum size challenged the skill and inventiveness of the most able engineers. For those used to horse and wind as the motive power of the day, the sight of towering steam-driven engines must have been awe-inspiring. Cast in iron, with cranks and beams in rapid motion, these engines filled the inside of cramped machinery spaces, lit only by oil lamps and candles.

The wooden paddle steamship Acadia was one of four designed and engined by Robert Napier for Samuel Cunard in 1840. All four ships were built by John Wood at Port Glasgow, because Napier had yet to start shipbuilding.

In many respects, the first commercially-successful marine steam engines were adapted directly from James Watt’s beam engine, which in turn, stemmed from Newcomen’s engine of the eighteenth century. The 3hp engine built by John Robertson in 1812 for Henry Bell’s Comet was an early version of the side-lever engine which, in essence, provided the pattern for the multiplicity of engine types that followed over the next few decades.

As paddle wheels were then the only method of converting the power of the engine into motion, developments of the side-lever engine were concerned with maximising the relationship between engine and paddle wheel. Largely down to the efforts of David Napier, a series of derivatives based on the side-lever engine was successfully introduced, and his steeple engine, in which the piston operated more directly with fewer parts than the side lever, was widely adopted. This engine also had the added commercial advantage of occupying less horizontal space, thereby enabling more cargo to be carried. The oscillating trunk engine developed by Maudslay on the Thames and improved by Penn during the 1830s also found favour, as did twin-cylinder and direct-acting engines. With the advent of the screw propeller during the 1850s, paddle engines were geared to make the faster revolutions required for efficient operation of the propeller. This arrangement was soon replaced by the direct-acting engine, where horizontal cylinders drove the propeller shaft directly at a higher speed.¹³ As the end of their working relationship with Robert Napier drew closer, the Thomson brothers, both senior employees at his Lancefield foundry, had received first-class experience in the design and building of some of the most notable marine steam engines of the day.

J & G Thomson & Co

On 1 April 1847, James and George took the plunge and went into business under the title J & G Thomson & Co, Engineers. Capital for the new company was provided by James’ wife Grace, who contributed the substantial sum of £4,000. The source of this loan was almost certainly Grace Thomson’s father, John McIntyre.¹⁴

James Lumsden, a former lord provost of Glasgow and founder of the Clydesdale Bank, granted the brothers ground to the value of £4,500 and James Ewing Mathieson gave land to the value of £4,977 on which to erect the works.¹⁵ Although the brothers had contributed considerable sums of money to the business, Lumsden and Mathieson’s support was invaluable.

Robert Napier followed his cousin David into engineering and later started iron shipbuilding. Robert did more than anyone to give momentum to the development of marine engineering and shipbuilding on Clydeside.

Whether Robert Napier’s benevolence in sharing his pioneering expertise extended to encouraging competitors is unknown. His failure to attend George or James’s farewell supper, held in the Crow Hotel, George Square, Glasgow, may provide an indication.

The Thomson brothers built their new engine and boiler shops, which covered an area of two and a half acres in Finnieston Street, in a newly-industrialised part of Glasgow and a short distance from their former employer’s works. The new works were later described as slavish copies of Napier’s Lancefield works:

low in height and dimly lighted, with superimposed shops for finishing and pattern work; the hoisting and handling of the pieces of machinery being performed almost entirely by manual labour, and the haulage of machinery in yard or to the crane by the employment of a large gang of men and boys.¹⁶

Sam Cunard travelled to Glasgow to meet Robert Napier and discuss details for the first ships of the Cunard Line.

A view of the Clyde at Govan, painted by James Adderson in 1839 – the year an iron shipbuilding yard would be established by Thomas Alexander. It would be taken over by Robert Napier in 1841.

James Burns and his brother entered into a financial arrangement with Cunard to support establishment of the latter’s shipping line.

In December 1847, the brothers engaged John Grant as company secretary at a salary of £178, a position he would keep for nearly fifty years. The following year, Andrew Burns was employed as manager at an approximate salary of £150.

The new works were given the name Clyde Bank Foundry, thus bringing into being the name that would subsequently be applied to the town some fifty years later.¹⁷ The first marine engine constructed by the new company was a single steeple engine of 50hp for the iron paddle ship Ben Nevis, later renamed Cygnet. This vessel was built by John Reid at Port Glasgow for the Glasgow shipowners G & J Burns and intended for the Glasgow and Inverness trade through the Crinan and Caledonian canals. The engine had a single cylinder of 41in diameter with a stroke of 42in.¹⁸ The Thomsons had learnt their business well, and plaudits were not long in coming. In October 1850, with the launch of the Bibby Line paddle ship Arno at Wood and Reid’s Port Glasgow yard, it was reported that: ‘Her engines, which are constructed on the direct-acting principle, have been made by Messrs James and George Thomson of Glasgow, whose celebrity as marine engineers is now rapidly extending.’¹⁹

The Thomsons quickly established themselves as builders of land and marine engines as well as cranes and derricks for use on board ships. Some of the orders that the young firm took included the hull of the ship as well as the engines. Initially, the hulls were subcontracted to shipbuilders, principally Wood & Co in Port Glasgow. However, James and George were not slow to recognise the commercial advantages in building their own hulls.

Iron Shipbuilding

In 1851, James and George made the decision to extend the business into iron shipbuilding, following the lead which other marine engineers had successfully taken before them. The site chosen was on the south bank of the Clyde at Govan, about half a mile from their engine works. An article in The Glasgow Herald noted:

As another evidence of the increase of the trade on the River Clyde we may notice that the Messrs Thomson of the Clyde Bank Foundry Finnieston have purchased the property of Cessnock Bank with a view to converting it into a shipbuilding yard. Already a long range of workshops has been built and roofed in, and we are informed that the fine house of Cessnock Bank is doomed to demolition to make way for the keels of iron ships. The widening of the river at this point will enable the builders to launch their vessels from the yard with the utmost facility.

As a matter of course the owners of the five little villas in the neighbourhood will not be very well pleased with their new neighbours, for the riveting of bolts do not produce any very pleasing sounds. The increase in the value of property of late on the margin of our river is really astonishing. We have been informed that not long since the proprietor of Cessnock Bank bought the house and ground attached for less than £3,000. The trustees requiring a strip of it to enable them to widen the river, paid him £1,000 for so much as they needed and now the remainder, purchased as before stated by Messrs Thomson, has brought £7,500.²⁰

An 1860s’ map of the Clyde showing the location of Thomsons’ Clyde Bank works at Finnieston and Clyde Bank iron shipyard at Govan. At this time, the Clyde opposite Thomsons’ yard had not been widened.

What actually happened was slightly different. Two adjoining plots of ground were acquired, Cessnock Bank and Hornbank. As with their engine works, the ground was effectively given free of charge for a period of time.²¹ The total area of both plots was about five acres.²² A public right of way maintained along the river’s edge was removed for launches and reinstated immediately after.²³ At least part of the villa standing at Cessnock Bank was retained and incorporated into the new shipyard office buildings. After a few years, together with the new Govan yard, the Clyde Bank Foundry at Finnieston had a workforce of around 1,500.

The first vessel to be built by J & G Thomson, and thus inaugurate a remarkable series of more than 750 ships, was an inauspicious, small, double-ended paddle tender named Jackal, built to the order of Charles McIver.²⁴ This 165-ton vessel was intended to operate between Cunard’s passenger ships on the Mersey and the quays at Liverpool. The new shipyard was sufficiently complete to permit the keel laying of this vessel on 22 December 1851:

Both ends of the vessel are alike; and in what may be called the deadwood at each end is a rudder. The object of this arrangement is that the vessel may be steered either way without the necessity of turning, each end in turn becoming the stern. The rudders fill the opening in the deadwood in which they work, and the one at the advancing end of the boat is fixed firmly, while the after one is in action to steer by. The paddle boxes are flat on the top, and are on the level of the gunwale, so as to afford facilities for shipping passengers luggage etc. This arrangement will necessitate very small paddles which must be made to rotate more rapidly in consequence. Altogether the tender is worth a visit as exhibiting a judicious adaptation of means to an end irrespective of the conventional rules of marine architecture.²⁵

Other marine engineers were set to follow the Thomsons into shipbuilding in a period of great activity. In June 1852, the North British Daily Mail, took up this point:

The notion that most of our iron steamboat building firms are acquiring rapid fortunes is likely, we hear, to cause a considerable rush into the trade. We are informed that sites for no fewer than four additional building yards have just been secured by different parties on the banks of the river – all within a few miles of the city – with a view to a roaring competition! When the projected establishments are in operation, the Clyde will, if we mistake not, be able to put forth a greater amount of work in this important department of naval architecture than all the rest of the Kingdom put together.²⁶

Two similar-sized vessels followed Jackal: Venus for the Largs Steamboat Co; and Mountaineer for Glasgow owners David Hutcheson & Co. The fourth vessel – Corriere Siciliano for Samuel Howes & Co of Liverpool – was larger and indicative of the type of ship for which the Thomsons would become famous. Of nearly 500 tons, Corriere Siciliano had internal arrangements described as most complete: ‘The saloon is wainscoted with bird’s-eye maple and provided with sleeping berths for 38 first-class passengers. The accommodation in the second cabin is very commodious, 40 berths being fitted up.’²⁷

The direct-acting compound engines for Frankfort constructed in 1851.

The diagonally-opposed geared screw engines for Bordeaux.

A ticket to the soirée for men and women of the Clyde Bank Foundry and Shipyard.

As the engines and boilers intended for these ships were built on the other side of the river and there was, in any case, no crane at the shipyard capable of lifting them, Jackal, and all the other ships to follow from this yard, was taken upriver to have her engines and boilers installed. There were only two cranes in Glasgow capable of doing this work, one at Windmillcroft quay on the south bank and the other at Lancefield quay on the north bank.²⁸

The Australasian built for Cunard in 1857 was the largest ship so far completed by the Thomsons.

The separation of the Thomsons’ principal business assets – engine works at Finnieston and shipyard at Govan – was entirely typical of the early development of this industry on Clydeside. Transporting engines and boilers from the works at Finnieston to the crane at Windmillcroft, as happened frequently during the 1850s, was often a dangerous business as the following contemporary account illustrates:

Steamboat building was never so brisk on the banks of the Clyde as at present: and never were so many large steamers and engines being built. Steam boilers of 20 to 35 tons are put on board ship at the rate of probably one a week. All the large engineering shops where such structures are built are situated on the north side of the river, but the only crane powerful enough to put them on board is situated half a mile down on the south side of the harbour, it having been so placed, as we once heard a waggish official say, ‘because it would be there most out of the way’. All these boilers and other heavy machinery must be therefore conveyed on strong four-wheeled trucks a distance of from one to nearly two miles along our most crowded quays and across our principal bridge, interrupting traffic, endangering life and injuring the causeway. The two boilers dragged to the large crane on Tuesday were from Messrs J & G Thomson’s engine works and are to be put on board the Telegraph iron steamer launched a few days ago from their building yard. There were about 600 men employed in dragging each boiler, and it took nearly two hours to accomplish the distance. The question of erecting a large crane on the north side of the river was lately discussed by the river trustees but we have not heard of any further steps having been taken to obviate the present inconvenient and annoying arrangement.²⁹

The image of massive, riveted, wrought-iron boilers and cast-iron steam engines inert on wooden bogies being dragged through the narrow cobbled streets of Glasgow seems wholly contradictory to their use as sophisticated prime movers in the new age of steam navigation. The reliance on manpower brought with it risks to life and limb:

Yesterday afternoon, as a great many of Messrs Thomson’s workmen were engaged in conveying a truck on which was a large steamboat funnel southward across Jamaica Street Bridge, one of their number named Soper was accidentally forced in upon one of the wheels, the edge of which passed over the fore part of his left foot, bruising it very severely. The poor fellow was carried to the shop of a surgeon, and thence taken home in a cab.³⁰

The integration of shipbuilding and marine engineering facilities was first achieved when John Elder’s new shipyard and engine works opened at Fairfield in 1871. The Thomsons were not to achieve such integration until 1884 on another site at Clydebank. In the short term, the solution to the early difficulties of lifting heavy engines and boilers on to ships in Glasgow harbour was rectified by building a 60-ton crane at Finnieston.

In a diversification of their activities, the Thomsons built this crane for the Clyde Trust in 1855 at a cost of £2,450.³¹ From this time