Sugar, Enslavement, and Glasgow’s Southside
This article explores Glasgow’s Golden Age of Sugar and how it affected our area. It was written by the team at the South Glasgow Heritage and Environment Trust in anticipation of the their upcoming talk on this topic during Govanhill International Festival and Carnival.
Content warning: Enslavement, racism and sexual violence
Pollok House, the former home of the Stirling Maxwells. Photograph: Graham Campbell.
By Saskia McCracken
South Glasgow Heritage and Environment Trust are dedicated to the history of south Glasgow. This includes researching and writing about how South Glasgow’s heritage sites – or crime scenes as Councillor Graham Campbell puts it – were shaped by powerful families involved in the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. It is important to understand this aspect of our history if we are going to come to terms with the racial violence underpinning Scotland’s cultural heritage.
The Stirling Maxwells of Pollok were one of the most eminent families in South Glasgow. Pollok House opened in 1752. Sir John Stirling Maxwell, 10th Baronet, opened the estate to the public in 1911, and also gifted land that now contains Maxwell Park and Pollokshields Burgh Hall to the burgh of Pollokshields in 1887. After he died in 1956, his daughter Anne gifted Pollok House, his vast art collection, library, and 361 acres of surrounding land, to the City of Glasgow. The wealth of these philanthropists, and others in the Southside, came in part from Glasgow’s Golden Age of Sugar and the transatlantic trade.
Archibald Stirling the elder (1710-83), from the Stirling side of the family tree, made his fortune in Jamaica. The 1750 mortgage for one of his estates includes a list of enslaved people. Archibald Stirling the younger (1768-1847) was also a planter on these estates and was awarded £12,517 in compensation (up to over £57 million today) for 690 enslaved people after the abolition of slavery. He returned to Scotland and married Elizabeth Maxwell of Pollok, who was descended from St. Kitts plantation overseer Sir James Maxwell of Pollok (1735-1785). One of their sons became William Stirling Maxwell (1818-1878), 9th baronet of Pollok, the University of Glasgow’s Dean and Chancellor, whose £3000 bequest is detailed in the university’s report on enslavement. Archibald Stirling the younger, however, also had six illegitimate children. We know little about them, but one, called Edward Stirling, had a mother who was a creole woman of colour, possibly called Jeanne. It is likely that these illegitimate children were the result of Stirling raping enslaved women, and that these children were denied the profits made through the labour of their enslaved ancestors. The history of the Stirling Maxwells, then, is bound up in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.
Henry Edward Clifford (1851-1932), who designed Pollokshields Burgh Hall in Maxwell Park, was born in Trinidad to a father who supervised a sugar plantation. After the father’s death the family moved to Pollokshields, where they lived on Nithsdale Road, and then at 12 Moray Place. He named two of his buildings Woodbrook House after the Trinidad estate (one on Elphinstone Road, Whitecraigs, the other at Reigate).
Cathkin House, in the Rutherglen area, was designed by architect James Ramsay and built in 1799 for Jamaica sugar merchant Walter Ewing Maclae. His brother, James Ewing was considered one of the founders of Glasgow’s West India trade. Humphrey Ewing Maclae, who inherited Cathkin House and the Jamaica estates, was also named as a factor of a Jamaica ‘slave ship’ in 1801. He was awarded £8,375 (over £40 million today) in compensation for the freedom of 449 enslaved people.
Bellahouston Park is known for Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover. The park was once farmland on the Maxwell Estate (which included Pollok Park). In 1824, Moses Steven of Polmadie bought the Bellahouston estate. Steven was a partner of Buchanan Steven & Co., a West Indies firm. His son, also Moses, inherited the estate, bought Dumbreck House, and renamed it Bellahouston House. His sisters inherited the estate and sold part of it in 1892 to Glasgow Corporation for Bellahouston Park. When they died the Bellahouston Bequest was granted to organisations including the University of Glasgow, and Glasgow Museums, which holds Steven’s portrait.
Orbiston House in Bellshill belonged to Gilbert Douglas (1749-1807), owner of the Mount Pleasant sugar plantation and the Fairfield cotton estate in St. Vincent. From 1800-1801 he bought land at Douglas Park and on the banks of the South Calder Water – this became Douglas Park and Boggs estate. He built a mansion on the site of Old Orbiston House. His widow Cecilia Douglas inherited the estate and plantations and was compensated £6,027 for 231 enslaved people (over £7 million today). Her art collection now belongs to Glasgow Museums. You can see the stained-glass window memorialising the Douglas family in Glasgow Cathedral. Orbiston House was damaged by a fire in 1919 and demolished in 1931. Much of the estate land is now part of Strathclyde Country Park.
The Semple Estate, including Semple Castle, at the edge of Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park, was demolished and rebuilt by West Indies planter William McDowell (~1727). He also transported and sold Africans into slavery. He held at least one enslaved person at Semple estate. A notice was published in the Glasgow Courant (1 Feb 1748), offered ‘sufficient reward’ for capturing a runaway called Cato. Let us not forget that South Glasgow’s prosperity came, in great part, from the forced labour of enslaved individuals like Cato.
Scotland’s historic involvement in the transatlantic trade of enslaved people can be traced to a range of heritage sites, powerful families, and individual merchants (many of whom have been remembered as philanthropists) who significantly shaped South Glasgow through the development of businesses, estates, and more. We can learn about the legacies of enslavement in the southside by paying attention to these sites and people which played such a great part in making the area what it is today. You can find out more, or propose a guest blog, by contacting info@sghet.com or @SGHETorg.