1 10 4 https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/20c88e402542cd0d1d8d8abccc0b7cf0.jpg 2e375135098855cbb0afccf6c189e77b Exhibition Item Category Metal Wares Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museum Scotland Description A photographic portrait of Robert Davidson (1845-1921), master blacksmith at Woodfoot, near Hawick, Roxburghshire with his second daughter, Mary, stood outside the lodge house and gate entrance to Stobs Castle, dated 1887 according to record, but, from the costume worn by the woman, probably a decade later. Robert Davidson is dressed in his working clothes of heavy stripped collarless cotton shirt and waistcoat, with flat peaked cap and leather blacksmith’s apron over trousers and sturdy but dusty boots. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to the elbows and he strikes a pose typically seen among men involved in the physically demanding metal and building trades, with brawny arms crossed high on his chest and a penetrating stare. The full beard and walrus-styled moustache, though fashionable at the time, add a patriarchal air. His daughter is stylishly dressed in a bell shaped walking skirt and matching jacket, with gigot sleeves, tight waist and a flared peplum. She has a white shirt with stand-up collar and tie. This ensemble along with the flat straw hat is characteristic of the style of dress adopted by the later nineteenth century ‘new woman’. Robert was descended from a long line of Roxburghshire blacksmiths. His grandfather, father and elder brother, all named Walter, were the blacksmiths who occupied the Newmill-on-Teviot smithy a few miles south of Hawick for most of the nineteenth century. A country blacksmith such as Robert Davidson would turn his hand to many different activities, such as shoeing horses, mending and making farm or local workshop equipment and fashioning tools for use by other craftsmen, such as hammers, knives, files and chisels. The Stobs Castle estate, from which he rented the cottage and workshop attached to the castle lodge would have generated much of his work. Though the name of the photographer is unrecorded, he was probably an amateur who enjoyed taking photographs of local people and scenes and was possibly connected to the gentry family who lived in Stobs Castle. Craft portraits of the period showing artisans in their places of work with well-dressed female family members included in the composition are common, but the men are normally also in their Sunday-best, with aprons over good trousers and smart shoes. What is unusual in this image is the contrast between the smart young woman, proud of her fashionable costume and her equally proud and dignified father in the ordinary working clothes of the master blacksmith. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Robert Davidson, Blacksmith and his Daughter, Roxburghshire ca. 1897 amateur blacksmiths dressmakers Hawick joiners photographers Roxburghshire https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/1477ce33b84747a7a1c56bd1d676ad3f.jpg eaa36f24fb878109da53a496ec9eb97d Exhibition Item Category Buildings Image copyright Aberdeen City Council Item Location Aberdeen Maritime Museum Description Traditional skills were mobilised in the service of new industries as well as old ones. This photograph shows a group of the woodworkers and metalworkers employed at the Sandliands Chemical Works near Aberdeen. The range of tools suggests that the men and their apprentices were responsible for maintenance as well as running the factory’s machines. At the centre of the photograph is a blacksmith’s anvil and the boy to the right holds an elaborate bellows. A cooper stands to the left of the photograph next to a group of stacked barrels, while other men hold hammers, specially adapted wrenches or traditional woodworking tools. Sandilands Chemical Works opened in 1848 to process the bi-products of the adjacent Aberdeen Gas Works, though by the end of the century it had diversified into the production of various organic chemicals. The works was owned and run by John Miller, one of three l brothers who were influential in Scotland’s early chemical industries. George Miller & Co ran the Rumford Street Oil Works in Glasgow, and James Miller the Forth and Clyde Oil Works also in Glasgow. All their businesses were dependent on local supplies of coal or gas and the availability of a capable workforce. In 1892 The Scotsman estimated that 1000 to 1300 men worked in the principal branches of Scotland’s chemical industries across five major works and that 220 men worked in the Clydesdale district alone. Yet, much of the workforce was itinerant or temporary with young men forced by circumstances from Ireland making up an estimated 75% of Scotland’s chemical workers and only 5% of the workforce coming from the Scottish Highlands (11th May 1892, p.11). The Sandilands works was known locally as ‘Stinky Millers’ probably due its more noxious products which included asphalt, distilled coal-tar, naptha, benzole, vitriole, manure, sulphuric acid and ammonia. Chemicals were important to the development of several Scottish industries, as components in fertiliser (ammonia water), as a solvent used in the rubber industry (naptha), or in the development of new textile dyes or processes in clothing manufacture. The bitumen, a form of semi-liquid petroleum, produced at Sandilands was used to seal the surfaces of Scotland roads and railways. The skilled artisans in this photograph probably enjoyed better working conditions than those employed as general labourers at the works. Chemicals were a new industry where twelve hour working across seven days was common practice. A witness reporting an 1862 Labour Commission enquiry noted ‘that the only men exempt from Sunday work were joiners, plumbers, coopers and engineers’ (The Scotsman, 11th May 1892). Poor ventilation, inadequate protection and dangerous conditions were common hazards for chemical workers, one man was killed and two were injured in an accident installing an elevated water tank at Sandilands in 1915. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Workers at the Sandilands Chemical Works, ca.1910 apprentices blacksmiths coopers engineers joiners new industries railways textiles https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/e0976010d7379a0a792aed43645f6f10.jpg 3231c3097fd7a30fab43ede69f873b69 Exhibition Item Category Metal Wares Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Description This image shows the ‘pattern shop’ and foundry at the agricultural implement making firm of Alexander Jack & Sons of Maybole in Ayrshire in the mid 1880s. It is one of a series of photograph of the different departments of the firm, which employed up to a 150 men at its height in the first decade of the twentieth century, many of them skilled craftsmen. In the foreground are some of the molding boxes, blocks and sand that are used for making metal castings, with a wide variety of patterns and models stored and displayed along the walls. Castings were made here in both iron and brass, with some of great weight, hence the iron rig and pulley system for lifting that is seen in the middle of the image. The rotund figure facing the camera is probably the foreman, who would have been a skilled blacksmith or iron founder and there are another eleven men at work in the image. Though this was a workshop on a large scale with some mechanisation, according to local report ‘old craft and new machines work hand-in-hand.’ The firm was founded by small-town craftsman, Alexander Jack, who started as a joiner and cabinet maker in a business that soon failed. But ever the entrepreneur, from 1852, with only limited capital, Jack began making small tools for other craftsmen and soon expanded into agricultural implements and vehicles making, taking advantage of the local demand from farming and the nearby railway line for transport to markets beyond Ayrshire. Jack’s business partner and successor was John Marshall, an engineer, who also became Provost of Maybole and served as President of the Society of Scottish Agricultural Engineers. The firm, which gained many prizes at exhibitions, survived to 1966. The craft communities that were supported in Scotland’s small towns were a significant feature of the nineteenth century. Maybole was a long-established market town at the heart of agricultural south-west Scotland, just a few miles south of the port of Ayr. Bartholomew’s 1887 Gazetteer of the British Isles gave a population of 6,623 and identified the main employments as boot and shoe making, leather tanning and agricultural implement making. The weaving trade, which had once been important, had much declined from its peak in the 1820s. However, textiles still flourished, with women in the town and in the countryside beyond extensively employed in the home-based Ayrshire whitework embroidery industry, making finely ‘flowered’ cottons mainly for use in baby christening gowns. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Alexander Jack & Sons, Agricultural Implement Maker, ca. 1885 Ayrshire blacksmiths Brass cabinet maker embroiderers engineers exhibitions foundry iron joiners patterns photographers shoemakers textiles weavers https://www.artisansinscotland.shca.ed.ac.uk/files/original/763c535c233ca86370d19258428c8529.jpg f33226a1d1fb81978948173b21a78f8b Exhibition Item Category Wood Image copyright National Museums Scotland Item Location National Museums Scotland Description This wheelwright’s workshop in the hamlet of Fala Dam in a rich agricultural area about twelve miles south of Edinburgh, is a stone-built, pan-tiled structure on two floors with a cottage at one end. It is part of a terrace of cottages, shops and workshops. The roof tiles suggest it was constructed in the later eighteenth century. The wide central entrance and opening above reveal the building’s specialist functions for storing the wood and components of carts and other related goods (such as wheel barrows), with the yard in front given over to the construction or repair, as here, of large wheeled vehicles. There would have been a forge nearby for making the iron components and tyres. Three men are visible in this image, which seems to have been taken in high summer. Another photograph of the same workshop a few years earlier has four men posing outside holding their wood working tools, with rolled-up sleeves and aprons. A great deal of the work undertaken was probably out-of-doors. Indeed, the dismantled cart that dominates this image is so large it could only have been built in a yard. The range of skills practiced in the Fala Dam workshop were the subject of one of the most famous accounts of the life of a late nineteenth-century rural artisan. This was George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop, published in 1923 but referring to the years from 1884-91 when George and his brother ran a wheelwright business in Farnham in Surrey that had been in family ownership since 1810. In an elegiac account, influenced by Ruskin’s ideas of the moral authority of craftwork, Sturt detailed the techniques employed in making wheels before mechanisation, from the curing of the wood to the selection of the right timbers for strength and durability, to sawing with hand tools and the making and fitting of iron tyres. This is one of several photographs of the workshop that was taken in the late nineteenth century, with variations in the extent of the foliage growing on the building and on the wooden railings suggesting a wide span of years. A photographic postcard from the 1930s also shows the same row of quaint cottages, with the workshop still visible, in a hamlet that was clearly attractive to tourists. Some of the contents of the joiner’s house were donated to the National Museums of Scotland in the 1960s. The buildings still exist today, though are now all converted into smart houses. Though only a small hamlet, the local Post Office directory records that Fala accommodated a range of craft workers in the 1890s, including a cobbler, joiner, builder, thatcher, blacksmith and wright, Walter Stoddart, who is probably one of the men depicted in this photograph. There was also a dressmaker, two grocers, a baker and a butcher, along with a photographer, Robert Lothian, who may have taken this image. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Wheelwright’s Workshop, Fala Dam, Midlothian, ca. 1890 blacksmiths Edinburgh iron joiners photographers postcard tools tourist industry Wheelwright wood