Thomson's Custom House works
Small and now done away with
In February 1870, the editor of the Glasgow Herald was feeling particularly disgruntled:
We have a Custom House that has not half the appearance of our second or third-rate warehouses and a Post Office which, to put it very mildly, is a disgrace to the country. It is true that a rather handsome contribution was made towards our new University Buildings, but it was no sooner granted that it was grudged, and, but for the influence of the Government that preceded the reign of candle-ends economy, would probably never have been obtained1.
Two years later, the same complaint was being made.
Glasgow wants a new Custom House. It is both needed and deserved..... The officers employed in Glasgow need more accommodation. Their present premises are notoriously too small. They have to burrow in cellars or be cooped up in attics. They are ‘cribbed, cabined and confined’ in a manner which would be reckoned unfair and disreputable were any private firm to subject those in their employment to such usage. And there is something worse than mere disrepute in the condition of affairs. It amounts to positive hazard2.
The Clyde Trustees were told that
The office to which merchant shippers go to sign the deeds by which they hold their vessels is a garret some 10 feet square; and that the place in which registers themselves are preserved - these registers, be it remarked, constituting the only recognised and valid means for authenticating the proprietorship of shipping - is a wretchedly insecure repository located in the same region.
The problem with John Taylor’s Custom House of 1840 (the terms ‘Custom House’ and ‘Customs House’ appear interchangeable) was that it was a victim of Glasgow’s success: by the 1870s, the Clyde provided the Government with more than half of all duties raised in Scotland. When Taylor’s building was erected, customs duties raised less than £500,000 in a year; thirty years later, they had more than doubled.
Yer Taylor’s building, which cost £13,000 including the price of the land, had been a vast improvement on its predecessors: an 18-ft square basement in Virginia Street in 1797, which by 1815 had grown to a self-contained lodging on the west side of St Enoch’s Square.
The limitations of the Customs House were one thing; the absence of a decent Post Office building reporting directly to London was another. In April 1872, the Trades House agreed to send two Memorials, one to the Postmaster-General proposing that Glasgow be made ‘a distinct and independent district free of Edinburgh surveillance’ and another to the Treasury ‘as to the total inadequacy of the present Custom House building for the city, and to ask for an establishment in keeping with Glasgow and its requirements’3.
Eight months later, the Merchants’ House was also petitioning the Government:
Since the present Custom House was built in 1840 the number of officials requiring to be accommodated in it [has] trebled... the trade of the port, involving a corresponding amount of business to be transacted by the public in the Custom House buildings, [has], so far as indicated by the revenue collected at the port and not withstanding a considerable diminution in certain of the custom duties, been increased twofold; while judged of by the increase in shipping tonnage, the business at the Custom House [has] been multiplied no less than eight times its original amount, and consequently that the accommodation which the present buildings [afford] for the transaction of public business [is] totally inadequate, while the ventilation [is] such as to be detrimental to the health of those necessitated to remain within the buildings4.
The buildings were not the only problem: it was claimed that Glasgow Customs officers were paid £15 less a year than their colleagues in Liverpool, and their incomes had not been increased since 18295.
The Secretary to the Treasury, however, refused to increase the salary for customs offices in Glasgow (even though a general increase had been agreed back in 1868). The salary increase for officers in London and Liverpool had come about as a result of evident overmanning, remedied by reducing the number of officers and paying more to those that remained. A distinction had to be made, he claimed, between men serving as a first-class port like Liverpool and London and men attached to third and fourth-class stations (which class Glasgow was to be found in was not mentioned). Custom house offices at either of those places would be better paid than those at places such as Yarmouth or Wick. The Secretary also employed the slippery slope argument: ‘If Glasgow is to be assimilated to London, then Hull will claim to be assimilated to Glasgow, Yarmouth to Hull, Wick to Yarmouth, and Chepstow to Wick’6.
By April 1873, clerks in Glasgow seeking a salary increase had been joined by those in Greenock, Aberdeen and other Scottish seaports. In July, the matter was raised in the House of Commons, with no result. The following month, when the Duke of Edinburgh’s annuity was discussed in anticipation of his forthcoming marriage, Glasgow MP George Anderson described ‘the inconsistent conduct of a government which with one hand refused a small and just increase of pay to the Custom House clerks, and with the other gave £10,000 additional a year to the Duke of Edinburgh’. Anderson argued:
The Secretary of the Treasury pointed out that in the course of fifteen years the outport Custom House clerks had had their salaries augmented by no less than 44 1/2 per cent.... Here we are proposing in one year to augment the salary of H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh by 66 2/3 percent. More than that, the right hon. gentleman admitted that the outport clerks are doing more work, but His Royal Highness is to do very little more work except to get married7.
By September, in response to the various memorials about the Custom House, as well as meetings in London at the Treasury and Customs Office, the Customs River Surveyor, the Government General Surveyor and the Dublin Customs Surveyor had all visited the site; each had submitted plans for improving their accommodation but no response had come from the government8.
On 4th December, the Collector of Customs in Glasgow finally responded:
Sir, I beg to inform you, in reply to your enquiry of the 3d inst., that the Commissioners of Custom with a view to the enlargement of this Customs House, have directed a plan to be prepared comprising the alterations proposed by them, and estimates to be procured of affecting these alterations, the cost not to exceed £700. All the papers connected with this matter and now in the hands of the architect.
D. Williams, Collector9.
Another of Glasgow’s three MPs, Robert Dalglish, told the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce:
I went down the other day to look at the plan which has been adopted, and I find there is a gangway to be put up across from the large window which lights the stair of the Custom House to a shed on the other side of the courtyard, which would give accommodation for five or six extra clerks. My impression is that the gangway alone would cost half the money they propose for the enlargement of the Custom House.... I understand that since then the plans for the alteration have been sent back, so that I suppose we may look forward to the Government extending the amount of money it is proposed to expend, and give us not a new Custom House, which I think quite unnecessary, but one more suited to the ones of the port.
He offered an alternative to remodelling Taylor’s building: in his view, it could ‘be sold for a price sufficient to defray the whole cost of erecting a new and much more extensive building’10.
Even though the Treasury appeared to accept that the complaints were well-founded, resistance to spending any serious amount of money, the Secretary claimed resistance from the Customs Board in London, In frustration, in February 1873 the Town Council agreed to memorialise the Treasury on the matter:
Their own architect had sent in plans by which, for an outline of about £4000, every accommodation could be got that was really necessary for the interest of the city. But they had taken the opinion of their own Collector, who said that everything could be done for £700. But this would only give a couple of rooms and would be very inferior accommodation11.
By the end of 1873, the Chamber of Commerce, in sending its own memorial to the Treasury, noted that it ‘had elicited the proposal on the part of the authorities that the scheme, involving the outlay of £700, and which was formally objected to as insufficient for the purpose, should be gone on with’12.
In January 1874, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh married the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia. In Glasgow, numerous public buildings commemorated the event with flags and bunting. The Government did manage to pay for the decorations for the Custom House13, and the following month the long-awaited salary increase for Custom House clerks finally came through.
Perhaps with an eye on the forthcoming general election, Gladstone’s Liberal Government was willing to splash out: in February 1874, the Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce reported that
Instructions had come for the alterations of the Custom House, and they have been granted an additional £100. The matter has been remitted to Mr Thomson, the architect. It was certainly about the most meagre accommodation, looking at the commercial community of Glasgow, that he could imagine any Government giving. There was really no additional accommodation given. There was merely a change of rooms14.
The Chairman hoped that a change in Government might bring about a changed approach: ‘They might get from Mr Disraeli what they could not get from Mr Gladstone’.
The following month, the Chamber of Commerce was still anticipating ‘some redress’ leading to ‘a palpable improvement’15 in conditions for staff and customers. In the 1874 general election, Gladstone’s Liberals lost decisively, even though they won a majority of votes cast. The Conservatives, led by Disraeli, won a majority in the House of Commons largely because they won several uncontested seats. It was the first Conservative victory in a general election for more than thirty years, but nothing more seems to have happened to improve working conditions in the Customs House.
Thomson’s work on the Customs House
At £700 (£66,000 today), even with a £100 increase, Thomson’s work at the Customs House was always going to be limited. There is no known later work on the building in the 19th century: probably in connection with the reconstruction of the Glasgow Bridge from 1895, the road and pavement levels were raised, perhaps giving rise to the Buildings of Scotland description of its ‘uncomfortable proportions’; the side elements with their Venetian windows were added in the 20th century.
Apart from any interior work, now lost, Thomson’s addition was probably the northeast sloping block behind the Customs House main building. There was one visible external feature which probably dates to this time, a porch with a simple corner column (below).
This, and the rearward extension, together with the neighbouring rotting mansion at the corner with Dixon Street, its adjacent tenement, and the whole of the former Coopers building (itself a replacement for Thomson’s 1852 warehouse for John Blair), were lost when in the recent Clayton Hotel development (below).
Glasgow Herald, 3 Feb 1870
North British Daily Mail, 10 Apr 1872
North British Daily Mail, 23 Apr 1872
Glasgow Herald, 13 Dec 1872
Glasgow Herald, 13 Dec 1872
Glasgow Herald, 8 Jan 1873
North British Daily Mail, 30 Jul 1873 and 1 Aug 1873; Glasgow Herald, 1 Aug1873
North British Daily Mail, 9 Sep 1873
North British Daily Mail, 11 Dec 1872
Glasgow Herald, 14 Jan 1873
North British Daily Mail, 7 Mar 1873
Glasgow Herald, 9 Dec 1873
North British Daily Mail, 24 Jan 1874
North British Daily Mail, 10 Feb 1874
North British Daily Mail, 31 Mar 1874