The Manchester and Glasgow Road, Volume 2 (of 2) / This Way to Gretna Green

by Charles G. Harper

THE “SARACEN’S HEAD”

It stood hard by where the East Port in the Gallowgate marked the ancient limits of the city in that direction, and owed its origin to the expansion of Glasgow following upon the more settled times that ensued after the suppression of “the Forty-five.” The Glasgow magistrates caused the old Gallowgate Port to be removed in 1749, and, in their zeal for extending the city, spared nothing; demolishing the neighbouring fourteenth-century Archbishop’s Palace, and desecrating the chapel and kirkyard of St. Mungo without the walls. In 1754 they advertised their readiness to sell the old kirkyard for feuing, and offered especial inducements to any speculative person who would undertake the establishment of an hotel, then felt to be greatly needed in Glasgow; where, up to that period, only inns of a doubtful character, and of an insanitary condition that admitted of no doubts whatever, existed. The speculator was duly forthcoming, in the person of Robert Tennent, landlord at the time of the “White Hart” inn, in the Gallowgate, who on November 24th, 1754, purchased the land of the kirkyard, on the understanding that he built an hotel according to plans to be agreed upon. As an extra inducement, the vendors threw into the bargain the stones of the demolished Archbishop’s Palace, and from them the “Saracen’s Head” was accordingly built.

Tennent immediately began to build, and reared his hotel on the site of the kirkyard; grubbing up and destroying without scruple the gravestones of the old burgesses of two hundred years earlier. By December 1755 he had completed the building and removed from the “White Hart”: advertising in the Edinburgh Courant of December 18th that his new house was a “convenient and handsome new inn,” built by himself at the request of the magistrates of Glasgow. He took the opportunity of acquainting “all Ladies and Gentlemen” that he had “36 Fire Rooms now fit to receive lodgers. The Bed-chambers are all separate, none of them entering through another, and are so contrived that there is no need of going out of Doors to get to them. The Beds are all very good, clean, and free from Bugs”—which obviously was not commonly the case, or there would have been no need for him to lay stress upon the fact.

Notwithstanding the peculiar advantages of his house—its independence of Keating or his predecessors, and the convenience of guests not being obliged to walk out of doors to reach their bed-rooms—Tennent’s speculation was a failure, and on February 3rd, 1757, he died, heavily in debt. His creditors, at a loss what to do with the house, let it to his widow at a rent of £50 a year. When she died, in 1768, it was sold to James Graham, of the “Black Bull,” who carried it on, with much success, until his death in 1777. But although he was so successful with the “Saracen’s Head,” he was unfortunate in other directions and died bankrupt. He was succeeded by his widow, who in 1791 married one Buchanan, who seems to have been rather a wild person, and indeed himself went bankrupt in 1791, dying two years later.

In 1792 the “Saracen’s Head” was purchased by William Miller; who, later, converted it into shops and tenements.

The sign of the house was an enormous half-length picture of a turbaned Saracen, with goggling eyes, represented as fiercely drawing his scimitar, and habited in a claret-coloured gown, decorated with a red sash.

This house was exceptionally famous as a literary landmark. In October 1773, Johnson and Boswell stayed two nights, on their return from the Hebrides; the poet Gray is thought to have met the brothers Foulis, the famous Glasgow printers, and to have concluded arrangements here for their edition of his poems, including the famous Elegy; Dorothy Wordsworth, in her “Journal,” under August 22nd, 1803, tells how pleased she and her brother were at last to leave the weary coach and find themselves in “the quiet little back parlour” of the “Saracen’s Head.”

The magistrates, in that age a convivial set of men, delighted to assemble in the “Magistrates’ Room,” and their capacity for drinking deep may be judged from the size of the famous punch-bowl of the establishment, which held five gallons. Adorned with the City arms, it was usually brought in, shoulder-high, by the landlord himself, and with great ceremony placed before the Chairman and the magistrates, who were probably themselves carried home at a later stage of the session, or left sleeping off the effects under the table. The bowl has for many years been lost sight of. Last seen in 1860, it is believed to be no longer in existence.

The “Saracen’s Head” building finally disappeared in 1904.

The “Black Bull,” second only to the “Saracen’s Head,” was built close by the West Port, in Argyle Street, in 1758, and took its name from an old inn on the opposite side of the road, kept at that time by James Graham, who afterwards acquired the “Saracen’s Head.” The building of the “Black Bull” was a shrewd speculation of the Highland Society, which in 1757 purchased the freehold site for £260 11s. 6d. It contained twenty-three bedrooms, and six reception rooms, and was provided with an ample sufficiency of cellars: six in number. For a number of years the rent appears to have been £100 per annum. By 1788, it had risen to £140, and under a nineteen-years’ lease from 1789 to 1808 was £245. In 1825, when shops were made on the ground-floor, the combined rental of shops and hotel had risen to £1,168; by which it would appear that the Highland Society had secured full measure and brimming over from its investment of £260 in 1757.