Masons in Erran Granite Works, Aberdeen, ca. 1890

Masons in Erran Granite Works, Aberdeen, ca. 1890

Metal Wares

This photograph of stonemasons at work in the Erran Granite Works in Canal Street, Aberdeen, shows them working in an open-top shed equipped with a pulley but no other machinery. The men hold various hand tools including granite picks and bush hammers used for texturing the surfaces of stone. Almost all the masons are in shirt sleeves and wear aprons, though some have hung jackets on the long hooks leaning against the left wall in an attempt to keep them clean from the dust generated from dressing the granite slabs, seen here supported on stone pedestals.

Aberdeen and its districts are geologically rich in granite and were at the centre of Scottish stone quarrying and finishing in the late nineteenth century. More than 20 granite merchants are listed in the Aberdeen Post Office directory for 1890. They supplied the stone for major building works but also for subsidiary trades such as stonecutting and polishing. The Erran Works was in Canal Street to the east end of the city where at the peak of production there were more than forty-six granite firms. Proximity to the harbour was convenient for receiving stone from quarries in Scotland and England and also for dispatching finished stonework by sea.

Aberdeen expanded throughout the nineteenth century though the prosperity of the granite industry was determined by the highs and lows of the building industries in Scotland, London and America. Monuments and memorials were the key areas of business until the 1880s and from mid-century there was national demand for granite to build harbours and railway bridges. After 1880 a building boom led to the establishment of numerous small firms though these struggled to survive with the collapse of the American market in the 1890s. The absence of machinery in the Erran Works photograph suggests it may have been a relatively modest concern producing smaller stones for the American market. Scotland’s masons and sett-makers were an elite workforce trained through apprenticeships of five years or more, and in Aberdeen their vocational training was supplemented with evening classes in granite carving at Grays School of Art, established in1885.

Changing fortunes in the early years of the twentieth century undermined the Aberdeen granite industry’s late nineteenth-century boom. In 1906 The Scotsman reported that 300 fewer men were engaged than the previous year and that ‘the ranks of masons in this district have been reduced by between 600 and 700. The great majority of these having gone to America’ (December 22, 1906). America had long been a customer and a training ground for Scottish masons but increases in mechanisation at home and abroad led to a scaling down of the Aberdeen granite industry and its ultimate decline.

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