Elizabeth Sutherland Marshall, lived in Baillieston for ten years when her husband was rector of St. John's church. She is a writer and decided to write something about the history of her surroundings. So in early 1980 she contacted the editor of The Scots Magazine (oldest published magazine in the world) and told him she felt they only published storys about "pretty country places" and challenged him to publish an article about a not so pretty one. To his credit, the then editor Maurice Fleming published the following article about Baillieston. Elizabeth does not claim it to be a definitive historical account but a human interst story within an historical context. Elizabeth is to be admired for putting Baillieston in a respected publication that has a worldwide circulation. Baillieston.net thought it would be a valuable contribution to the Historical Accounts and that it deserved exposure on the Internet. Elizabeth quickly replied to our letter and kindly gave permission for us to publish.
When, six years ago, we told our friends in the Black Isle we were moving from Fortrose – one of the prettiest and most historic royal burghs in the north – to Baillieston on the eastern edge of Glasgow, one said, “Baillieston? Where’s that ?” and another cried “but Baillieston’s just a place to go through to get somewhere else!”
Scenery, amenities and history are – like poverty – comparative, and only the other day a woman living in the top flat of a condemned close in Garthamlock said to me wistfully, “I’d like fine to get a hoose in Baillieston. Baillieston’s beautiful, so it is”
In June, when after 61 years, Baillieston Juniors took the Scottish Junior Cup by beating Central League rivals, Benburb, 2-0 in an exciting replay at Hampden, the words on everyone’s lips were, “Baillieston’s brilliant!”
Yet as recently as 1795, Baillieston was no more than the name of a mansion house once owned by the Baillies of Provan, Prebendaries of Glasgow Cathedral. Set in marshy farming country between the tiny hamlets of Swinton, Crosshill, Bargeddie and Barrachnie, the house had magnificent, unbroken views over the Clyde Valley to the south, the Campsies to the north and the peaks of Arran and Ben Lomond to the west.
Owned at one time by the monks of Newbattle – hence the name of the parish Old or West Monklands – the district contained no more than 200 souls living in the angle between two important lines of communication from Glasgow east to Edinburgh and south to the Clyde Valley. The tollgate was situated to catch three-way traffic in what is now the heart of Baillieston’s Main Street. In those days it was certainly a place most people went through without stopping.
Now barely 200 years later, it is the centre of a densely populated area of over 15,000 inhabitants. So what put Baillieston on the map ?
To find out, I called on Miss Mary Robertson who had just celebrated her 80th. Birthday. Mary who lives in Swinton, is a local historian of repute with a prodigious memory and a vital sense of fun. A few years back she was a regular contributor to the Easterhouse newspaper The Voice. Her column, “Village Memories” was written to give newcomers to the vast housing estate just north of Baillieston a sense of the history and background of their new home.
Mary had told me it was the hand loom industry that gave Baillieston and the surrounding hamlets their start. In West Maryston, known as “The Hole” where she was born, there was the Dandy Row, and in Baillieston, society and Pender’s Rows. Rent was a shilling a week and the weavers toiled from six in the morning till ten at night for small recompense.
When the lower roller which received the cloth was full, the weaver shouldered it to the nearest market to exchange for much needed cash. The coming of the power-looms gradually finished the hand-loom industry and by 1893 the last of the weavers had gone.
What really caused the villages to expand was the opening of the Monkland Canal in 1790 and at the same time the sinking of the first pits along its banks. James Watt supervised the the construction of the canal and it was his steam powered pump which made it possible to mine coal at hitherto untried depths.
By 1832 the demand for coal was so great that pits were opened farthewr afield and therefore the first railways of the district were laid down, not as passenger lines but as an ancillary service to the canal. The station at Easterhouse, though greatly altered in appearance, is the only left from anetwork of lines that criss-crossed the area.
In its heyday the canal crowded with barges travelling bow to stern, carrying not only coal but iron ore out to the blast furnaces at Gartsherrie and returning with loads of pig-iron to the city. Timber, too, much of it from the Highlands, was delivered to Smellie's DSawmill which once stood on the present site of Inshaw's Tube Works at Easterhouse. The timber was made into cart wheels, furniture and "pit lids" to insert at the top of the props to keep them firmly in position. Smellie's also provided much of the wood to build Quarrier's Homes.
By the middle of this century the canal had declined into a silted, rubbish filled breeding ground for mosquitos, but in April, 1980, it underwent a strange resurrection when the final section of the Monkland Motorway was opened by George Younger, Secretary of State for Scotland. This marvelous feat of engineering is as busy and necessary to the industrial life of Glasgow as its predecessor used to be. Baillieston Interchange, with its soaring bridges and curving sliproads, is an imposing gateway to the city and the whole of the West of Scotland.
But it was coal mining that dominated the development of Baillieston and changed its country face into a bing scarred industrial site. Miners were imported from as far away as Ireland and England to man the pits and in the 40 years between 1851 and 1891 the population doubled from 1,943 to 3,636.
At one time there were at least 32 pits in the area. Some of them had bye-names. There was the Juck Pit, the Monkey, the Sandpit, Jessie and the Whusky, so called because of its proximity to a public house and the engineman's habit of winding the cage over the "horrals" when he had taken a "wee swallow".
The early miners were rough, tough men. They had to be. The hours of work were long, the wages niggardly. In the very early days they were thirled to their pits and wore collars riveted to their necks stamped with the coal owner's name. They could not leave their pit no matter what their grievance might be. While they cut the coal, their wives and children carried it to the surface. It took two Acts of Parliament to restore them their full freedom. The women carried the heavy baskets on their backs with straps round their chins which altered and distorted their features. Within living memory, women were still working at the pit head.
The rapid increase in population, the poor wages and appallling housing conditions in "raws" with open drains were responsible for three cholera epidemics, the third and most serious occuring in 1879. Local joiners became coffin makers and the bodies were buried in trenches at Crosshill and Old Monkland Churchyards under tar.
Of the 32 deaths recorded in St.John's Church records in 1853 only two in their forties. The majority under thirty were either killed in the pits or died as infants from teething, croup or convulsions. A child's diet consisted of soup, potatoes, sour milk, vegetables, bread and porridge with perhalps the top of an egg at Easter and a scrap of meat on holidays.
Those were hard times indeed that persisted well into the 20th.century when practically the only employment for men was in the pits and for women in the weaving industry at Shettleston or as farm or domestic servants locally. But at least there was work to be had. A fifteen year old girl said to me last week, "I'm dreadin' leaving the school wi' nae' job to go tae'"
