dumbarton 18th cent glass works

May 26, 2018 by Alexander Meldrum

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The History of Glass Making in Dumbarton This oil painting of the town of Dumbarton in west-central Scotland, taken from the west bank of the River Leven, is dominated by the three distinctive cones of the Dumbarton Glassworks. At the time the landscape was painted the town, of ancient foundation, had a population of c.3,500 people. The glass works, founded in 1777, was owned for most of its history by the Dixon family, who were local gentry landowners. They dominated the politics of Dumbarton, with several serving as Lord Provost. The glass works were located in Dumbarton because of the proximity to coal and sources of kelp from the Highlands (an ash derived from burned seaweed), which with sand formed the key ingredients of glass making. The firm was notable for two types of product – glass bottles and ‘crown glass’, the latter its main claim to distinction, giving employment to many skilled craftsmen. At its height, c. 1800-1830, the company supplied most of the high-quality glass used in Scotland, with a focus on the Edinburgh market where it maintained an agent and warehouse. Crown glass was used as window glass and having highly reflective qualities is still made today using similar craft techniques for historic building conservation projects. Crown glass was first perfected in late seventeenth-century London and remained the main form of window glass through to the mid - nineteenth century. It was made using a blowpipe technique, with the glass spun rapidly until a disk has been formed that was then cut into panes for astragal windows. The workshop, with its ovens for melting the glass, was a difficult place to work. Machine rolled plate glass replaced hand-blown crown glass from ca.1840. In charting the rise and fall of a glass making community in Dumbarton, the first Statistical Account in the 1790s referred to a ‘considerable crown and bottle glass manufactory, which employs 130 hands’. The town was also notable for employment in the nearby cotton dyeing and printing fields that were then developing along the banks of the Leven. Employment in shipping was also noted. The ‘glass-house men’ were said to earn up to 25s a week, which put them on a par with other local craftsmen such as carpenters. Skilled glass workers in Dumbarton were largely attracted from other places, such as Lancashire or London, where glass making flourished. The unskilled were locally born. At its height, the glassworks employed about 300 men, who, with their wives and children comprised about a third of the local population. Many of the women who lived in the town worked in the home-based muslin embroidery industry. The second Statistical Account for the late 1830s noted the end of the industry, which ceased trading in 1832 following the death, in quick succession, of two owners. Most of the workers and their families left the town to seek employment elsewhere, mainly in England. By this stage in the history of Dumbarton another industry, shipbuilding, was starting to take shape and the cotton printing industry in the Vale of Leven was also in the ascendant, both associated with a different range of skilled trades and communities, attracting workers from Glasgow and as far afield as Ireland. Although briefly revived in the 1840s, Dumbarton-made glass could no longer compete with production in Edinburgh or England and the Dumbarton Glassworks was finally discontinued in 1850 when the brick-built cones that dominated the skyline were dismantled and the premises, with its river-frontage, were given over to a shipyard. The site on which the first Dumbarton glassworks was founded on the banks of the River Leven was known as ‘the Artisan’ long after the works had gone. In 1973 a new river crossing was named the Artisan Bridge. The artist responsible for this painting was Alexander Brown, born in Dumbarton in 1792 but little known beyond his hometown.

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