Famous Glaswegians (and those who became famous in Glasgow)

Charles MacIntosh	Charles Rennie Mackintosh	James Moffat
Robert Owen	Allan Pinkerton	Sir William Ramsay
John Scott Russell	Manny Shinwell	James Y Simpson

Macintosh, Charles

[Born:  December 29, 1766, Glasgow - Died: July 25, 1843, Glasgow]

Charles Macintosh was born in 1766. His father originally came from the Highlands, moving to Glasgow to set up a factory in Dennistoun in 1777 to manufacture a violet-red dying powder made from lichens (cudbear).

Macintosh had a strong interest in chemistry. In 1818, while analysing the by-products of a works making coal gas, he discovered dissolved indiarubber. He joined two sheets of fabric together with this solution, allowed them to dry, and discovered that the new material could not be penetrated by water - the first rainproof cloth!

Together with chemist George Hancock, Macintosh solved many of the problems involved in reliably producing waterproofed sheets and coats.

The material was first introduced in 1824 as Mackintosh (with an additional "k"). Macintosh founded his own waterproofing company in Glasgow in 1834 - mainly because to the opposition he faced from tailors, who wanted nothing to do with his new cloth - but moved to Manchester in 1840 to exploit the material further. The factory is now owned by the Dunlop Rubber Company.

Although Macintosh is best known for his eponymously-titled coats, he was a brilliant chemist with achievements in many different fields. He invented a revolutionary bleaching powder (along with Charles Tennant), devised a way of using car ases to convert malleable iron to steel by a short-cut method, and worked out a hot-blast process with James Neilson to produce high quality cast iron.

Macintosh was also associated with David Dale in the making of turkey-red dyeing in Scotland, and established the first Scottish alum (a double sulphate of aluminium and potassium) works.

Mackintosh, Charles Rennie

[Born:  June 7, 1868, Glasgow - Died: December 10, 1928, London]

Born in Glasgow, the second son in a family of eleven children, his father was a superintendent of police. From an early age he was interested in a career as an architect, and when he was sixteen he was articled in the office of the Glasgow architect John Hutchison, studying at the same time as an evening student at the Glasgow School of Art. Here he came into contact with J. Herbert MacNair and the Macdonald sisters, Frances and Margaret (wham he later married), with whom he was to form the group which became known as the Glasgow Four. They exhibited together on a number of occasions; the work shown at the 1896 Arts and Crafts Exhibition was greeted with incomprehension and distaste.

Meanwhile, in 1889, Mackintosh had joined the firm of Honeyman & Keppie, where he remained until 1913, becoming a partner in 1904. All his most important architectural and decorative work was done during this period, and it is clear that he was allowed a degree of autonomy within the firm, developing his own markedly individual style in a way that is not usually possible for a man without his own independent practice. In 1896 Mackintosh, in his capacity as an assistant at Honeyman & Keppie, won the competition for the building of the new School of Art in Glasgow.

From 1897 until 1906 he was occupied intermittently with designing and furnishing the chain of tea-rooms established in Glasgow by the Misses Cranston as part of a campaign to combat the widespread daytime drunkenness which was a scandal in the city. In spite of the provision of billiard rooms, the original and elegant schemes seem to have done very little to wean the hardened drinkers from their accustomed haunts, but they allowed Mackintosh to experiment with the possibilities of commercial production on a considerable scale. He exhibited, with the other members of the group of the 'Four', a number of times with the Wiener Werkstatte, and found greater acceptance of his ideas on the Continent than in his home town or in London, though he had patrons in Scotland who allowed him a remarkable degree of freedom to pursue his ideas, notably the publisher, Walter Blackie, for whom he built Hill House at Helensburgh. After he left Scotland in 1913 he did very little more work, and in 1920 he gave up architecture and devoted the remainder of his life to painting.

In the pantheon of heroes of the Modern Movement, he has been elevated to a cult figure, such that the importance of his late 19th-century background and training in Glasgow are often overlooked. He studied during a period of great artistic activity in the city that produced the distinctive 'Glasgow Style'. As a follower of A. W. N. Pugin and John Ruskin, he believed in the superiority of Gothic over Classical architecture and by implication that moral integrity in architecture could be achieved only through revealed construction. Although Mackintosh’s buildings refrain from overt classicism, they reflect its inherent discipline. His profound originality was evident by 1895, when he began the designs for the Glasgow School of Art. His decorative schemes, particularly the furniture, also formed an essential element in his buildings. During Mackintosh’s lifetime his influence was chiefly felt in Austria, in the work of such painters as Gustav Klimt and such architects as Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich. The revival of interest in his work was initiated by the publication of monographs by Pevsner (1950) and Howarth (1952). The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society was formed in Glasgow in 1973; it publishes a biannual newsletter, has a reference library and organizes exhibitions. The Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, which opened in 1981, holds the Mackintosh estate of drawings, watercolours and archival material as well as a collection of his furniture; the Glasgow School of Art and the Glasgow Art Gallery also have important collections.

Moffatt, James

[Born:  July 4, 1870, Glasgow - Died: June 27, 1944, New York, USA]

James Moffat was a theologian born in Glasgow in 1870.

A graduate of Glasgow University, James Moffat trained at the Free Church College, Glasgow. He was first a practising Minister before becoming Professor of Greek and New Testament Exegesis at Mansfield College, Oxford in 1911. He returned to Glasgow in 1915 as Professor of Church History at the United Free Church College. From 1927-1939 he was Washburn Professor of Church History, Union Theological Seminary, New York.

Owen, Robert

[Born:  xx, 1771, Newtown, Wales - Died: November 17, 1858, Newtown, Wales]

Owen, Robert (1771-1858), British utopian socialist, generally considered the father of the cooperative movement.

Born on May 14, 1771, in Newtown, Wales, Owen was the youngest son of the village postmaster. At the age of nine he was apprenticed to a draper's shop, and he quickly gained knowledge of fabrics. By the time he was 18 he had managed to save and borrow for investment in the manufacture of textile machinery. Two years later, by bluff and pluck, he obtained the position of manager in a Manchester textile mill. In 1799 he bought factory holdings in New Lanark, Scotland, marrying the seller's daughter in the bargain.

New Lanark gained international fame when Owen's experiments in enhancing his workers' environment resulted in increased productivity and profit. Owen had become convinced that the advancement of humankind could be furthered by the improvement of every individual's personal environment. Character, he reasoned, was moulded by circumstances; improved circumstances would lead to goodness. The environment at New Lanark reflected this philosophy. In 1825, to advance his theories concerning human labour as the “natural standard of value,” he purchased 8100 hectares (20,000 acres) of land in Illinois and Indiana as a site for a model communal village, New Harmony. The volunteer population for this experiment, however, was assembled all too hastily, and despite Owen's periodic visits to restore the initial enthusiasm, adherence to the communal constitution was soon abandoned. By 1828 New Harmony had been reduced to a travesty of its utopian ideal, and Owen sold the land at a loss of four-fifths of his total fortune. Although he later contemplated other such projects, they never came to fruition.

Owen's fame led him to meet many important people. This enabled him to convey his ideas, many of which were viewed with suspicion or indifference, to such personages as Queen Victoria of England, Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, President Antonio López de Santa Anna of Mexico, and President Andrew Jackson of the United States. In later years Owen frequently participated in socialist congresses, and he wrote extensively. His Book of the New Moral World (written in seven parts between 1826 and 1844) contains the most complete statement of his doctrines. In 1833 Owen helped found the first British trade union, which soon failed. His ideas, however, bore fruit in the international cooperative movement, launched at Rochdale, England, in 1844. Owen died on November 17, 1858, in his hometown, Newtown.

Pinkerton, Allan

[Born:  August 25, 1819, Glasgow. - Died: July 1, 1884, Chicago]

Allan Pinkerton, born in Glasgow, on August 25, 1819, founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. But his career as a detective began by chance. After emigrating to the United States in 1842, he established a barrel-making shop in a small town outside of Chicago. Pinkerton was an abolitionist (activist against slavery). His shop functioned as a "station" for escaped slaves travelling the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North. One day while out gathering wood, Pinkerton discovered a gang of counterfeiters making coins in the area.

Assisting in the arrest of these men and another gang led first to Pinkerton's appointment as deputy sheriff of Kane County and, later, as Chicago's first full-time detective. In 1850, Pinkerton left this post to start his own detective agency. One of the first of its kind, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency provided a wide array of private detective services and specialized in the capture of train robbers and counterfeiters. By the 1870s, the agency had the world's largest collection of mug shots and a criminal database. The agency's logo, the All-Seeing Eye, inspired the term "Private Eye."

In 1861, while investigating a railway case, Pinkerton uncovered an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln. The conspirators intended to kill Lincoln in Baltimore during a stop on his way to his inauguration. Pinkerton warned Lincoln of the threat, and the president-elect's itinerary was changed so that he passed through the city secretly at night. Lincoln later hired Pinkerton to organize a "secret service" to obtain military information in the Southern states during the Civil War. In Tennessee, Georgia and Mississippi, he performed his own investigative work and travelled under the pseudonym (false name) "Major E.J. Allen."

After the war, in 1865, Pinkerton resumed management of his detective agency. By this time, the U.S. Secret Service had been established to fight counterfeiting. By 1901, its mission included protecting the president. In the late 1800s, Pinkerton guards and agents played an unpopular role as strike breakers. The agency had a harsh policy toward labour unions. Pinkerton said that he was helping the men by opposing unions. Union activists couldn't disagree more. Confrontations resulted and sometimes became violent. The Secret Service still plays an important role in Washington, D.C., as do detective agencies.

Allan Pinkerton died on July 1, 1884.

Ramsay, Sir William

[Born:  October 2, 1852, Glasgow - Died: July 23, 1916, High Wycombe]

William Ramsay is known for work that established a whole new group in the periodic table—variously called over time inert, rare, or noble gases. In the last decade of the nineteenth century he and the famous physicist Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt, 1842-1919)—already known for his work on sound, light, and other electromagnetic radiation—carried out separate investigations, for which they received Nobel Prizes in 1904, Ramsay in chemistry and Lord Rayleigh in physics.

Ramsay began his studies in his native city of Glasgow and completed a doctorate in chemistry at Tübingen, focusing on organic chemistry. On his return to Great Britain and his appointment to academic posts at the University of Bristol and then at University College, London, he became known for the inventiveness and scrupulousness of his experimental techniques, especially for his methods for determining the molecular weights of substances in the liquid state.

In 1892 Ramsay's curiosity was piqued by Lord Rayleigh's observation that the density of nitrogen extracted from the air was always greater than nitrogen released from various chemical compounds. Ramsay then set about looking for an unknown gas in air of greater density, which—when he found it—he named argon. While investigating for the presence of argon in a uranium-bearing mineral, he instead discovered helium, which since 1868 had been known to exist, but only in the sun. This second discovery led him to suggest the existence of a new group of elements in the periodic table. He and his co-workers quickly isolated neon, krypton, and xenon from the earth's atmosphere.

The remarkable inertness of these elements resulted in their use for special purposes, for example, helium instead of highly flammable hydrogen for lighter-than-air craft and argon to conserve the filaments in light bulbs. Their inertness also contributed to the "octet rule" in the theory of chemical bonding (see G. N. Lewis). But in 1933 Linus Pauling suggested that compounds of the noble gases should be possible. Indeed, in 1962 Neil Bartlett, working at the University of British Columbia and later at Princeton, prepared the first noble gas compound—xenon hexafluoroplatinate, XePtF6. Compounds of most of the noble gases have now been found.

Russell, John Scott

[Born:  May 8, 1808, Glasgow. - Died: June 8, 1882, Isle of Wight]

Engineer and pioneering naval architect. Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Glasgow, Russell was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, aged just 24. He later went on to work in London. He developed an interest in the construction of steam engines for road transport and set up a steam carriage service between Glasgow and Paisley in 1834.

He is noted for his innovative work on ship design. He contributed significantly to the design of Brunel's Great Eastern, launched in 1858. In 1860, he designed HMS Warrior, the world's first ironclad battleship.

While testing a new experimental design on the Union Canal at Hermiston, he observed that a canal boat stopping suddenly gave rise to a solitary wave which travelled down the canal for several miles, without breaking up or losing strength. Russell named this phenomenon the 'soliton'. Russell built at 9.1m (30-foot) long tank at his home in Stafford Street in Edinburgh's New Town to study these waves. Today, similar waves are of key importance in carrying information along optical-fibre communications networks, which are the back-bone of the telecommunications industry and the Internet.

Scott was Secretary to the Great Exhibition held in London in 1851 and founded the Institution of Naval Architects. He published his landmark treatise The Modern System of Naval Architecture in 1865.

In 1995, the aqueduct which carries the Union Canal over the Edinburgh Bypass (A720) was named the Scott Russell Aqueduct in his memory.

Shinwell, Emmanuel (Manny)

[Born:  October 18, 1884, London - Died: May 8, 1986, xx]

Emanuel Shinwell (familiarly known as Manny) was born in London, but moved with his Jewish family to Scotland. He was a Trade Union official and Labour politician and was one of the leading figures of Red Clydeside.

Early career and trade union activities Shinwell began his working life as a machinist in a clothing workshop. In 1903 he became active in the Amalgamated Union of Clothing Operatives, and joined the Glasgow Trades Council in 1906 as a delegate of that union.

In May 1911, he was seconded to help organise the seamen of Glasgow at the request of J. Havelock Wilson of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union (NSFU). He played a prominent role in the six-week Glasgow seamen's strike which began on 14 June and which was part of a nation-wide strike movement. He subsequently became the secretary of the Glasgow branch of the NSFU. In August 1912, he participated in a revolt against the union, which resulted in the Glasgow branch becoming part of the Southampton-based British Seafarers' Union (BSU). He was the local secretary of the BSU until it became part of the Amalgamated Marine Workers' Union (AMWU) in 1922, after which he served as National Organiser of the new organisation.

In 1919, he gained national notoriety through his involvement in the Glasgow 40 Hours' Movement. This movement culminated in clashes between police and protesters in Glasgow's George Square. He was afterwards tried for incitement to riot and was sentenced to five months' imprisonment.

Political career An Independent Labour Party (ILP) member, he became a Member of Parliament in 1922, lost his seat in 1924, but was re-elected to the House of Commons in 1928. He became a critic of Ramsay MacDonald's National Government and in 1931 he lost his seat. He returned to the Commons in 1935, where after he campaigned vigorously, along with left-wingers such as Aneurin Bevan for the United Kingdom to support the Popular Front government in Spain against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He became chairman of the Labour Party in 1942.

He served in Clement Attlee's government after the Labour victory in 1945. As Minister of Fuel and Power, he presided over the nationalisation of the mining industry. In 1947, Britain experienced a severe coal shortage. He was widely criticised for his failure to avert this crisis. Shortly afterards he took up the position of Secretary of State for War which he held until 1950.

Shinwell was made Baron Shinwell in 1970 and died in 1986.

Simpson, Sir James Young

[Born:  June 7, 1811, Bathgate - Died: May 6, 1870, 52, London]

Simpson was the youngest of seven sons born to David Simpson, a village baker, and was supposed to follow the same career. He was therefore apprenticed to his father, but spent his spare time working on scientific matters, and, thanks to a scholarship and help from his elder brother, he entered the arts classes of the University of Edinburgh in 1825, at the age of fourteen, an began the study of medicine in 1827.

He studied under Robert Liston (1794-1847) and received his authorisation to practice medicine – licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh – in 1830. He was then 19 years old and subsequently worked for some time as a village physician in Inverkop on Clyde. Two years later he returned to Edinburgh where he received his medical doctorate in 1832. The professor of pathology, John Thomson (1765-1846) entrusted him with some lectures, and in 1835 he was made senior president of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh.

He was appointed to a Chair of Midwifery at the same institution in 1840, quickly establishing the position of this subject as a popular and essential part of medical education. He was a pioneer in the use of anaesthetics, particularly chloroform, developing its use in surgery and midwifery. He introduced ether to obstetric practice in 1847, but in a search for something better, Simpson tried different anaesthetic agents with his colleagues by inhaling their vapours around the dinner table at his home.

He championed the use of chloroform against medical, moral and religious opposition. It was not until Queen Victoria used this anaesthetic during the birth of Prince Leopold (1853) that its use became generally accepted. Simpson also pioneered obstetric techniques and responsible for much reform of hospital practice while working at the Infirmary in Edinburgh. In 1866 Simpson became the first person to be knighted for services to medicine.

Simpson is buried in Warriston Cemetery (Edinburgh). Around 1700 medical colleagues and public figures joined his funeral procession and more than 100,000 people lined the route to the cemetery. He is remembered by the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion in Edinburgh, together with a statue in Princes Street Gardens and a bust in Westminster Abbey (London).