| St.John’s Church 125th.Anniversary 1850-1975 A short history and the changing scene A hundred and twenty-five years ago Baillieston village was the centre of an expanding mining industry. The pits brought prosperity to a few, but offered lives of degrading poverty to the majority of the 4,000 inhabitants who worked the coal at Swinton, West Merryston, Provanhall, Barrachnie, Springhill, Mount Vernon, Bredisholm, Ellismuir, Easterhouse, Broomhouse, Calderbank, Clydeside and Daldowie. Not so long before, miners had been "Thirled" like serfs to their pits and wore balloon riveted to their necks and stamped with the coalowners name. By 1850 conditions ware only slightly improved and whole families including the women and children worked load hours down the black shafts for a pitiful wage. To man the expanding industry, labourers were imported from Ireland and England into the Glasgow district - 359,000 in the year 1851 came and many were directed into the Baillieston district. Coal owners although criminally careless of the physical well-being of their employees had a somewhat condescending concern for their spiritual welfare. There it was that in 1850 certain coal owners; "In consideration of the favour and ward which they had to the Scottish Episcopal Church" and for other good causes disposed to Bishop John Thower “the lands of Broadlees” together with the chapel erected thereon cheifly for the benefit of the miners of Baillieston and the surrounding villages. The chief benefactors were Andrew Buchanan of Mount Vernon,who gave the land; James Hamilton Lawson coal master of Edinburgh and Robert Ramsay, coal master of Wellhouse, the only one who, as a member at the Episcopal Church was eligible to become one of the first Trustees. These men raised by public subscription about £1,000 to build the church, also the money to build the parsonage as the rectory was then called and which was completed in 1858 and the hall dated 1863. The church is dedicated to St. John the Evangelist on December 27, 1850, and consecrated on August 5th 1851. A generous gesture? Certainly. Unfortunately, St John's Church was built literally on sand with no drainage. No provision was made for the maintenance of the Ministry nor for the upkeep of the buildings, so right from the start the congregation of impoverished colliers with a handful of gentry were faced with what was to be a continual double anxiety; lack of funds; and insufficient membership. The first rector was the Rev. James Watson-Reid later to become Dean of the diocese. Little is known of his four-year, ministry except that during that time he baptised 61 souls. His first recorded funeral was that of a young collier aged 14 who was killed in a pit fire and not long after, a baby of 2 years died or cholera. This plague was to be the cause of many deaths in Baillieston. During an epidemic bodies were buried where a wall now stands between the churchyard and the Edinburgh Road. Of the 32 deaths recorded between 1853 and 1855, only two were in their forties, the majority under thirty killed in the pits or dying as infants from teething, croup and convulsions. The first recorded weddings were also of colliers. The font at the back of the church was given by all those who had been baptised during the first fifty years up to 1901. Although between 1850 and 1870 the records only show that services were held on feast days and major festival it is fairly certain that services were held regularly and that they were reasonably well attended. No financial records were kept until during the Rev. William Hay's incumbency when in 1861 the first constitution was approved and the first vestry elected. During his twenty year ministry, Mr Hay and his three leading laymen were often at loggerheads over financial problems. | 
