The Clyde shipbuilding yards are to-day the first in the world, and the riverside, from Glasgow city to Port Glasgow and Greenock, rings with the clang of the hammers and the noise of the riveters busily adding to the maritime tonnage of the nation.
North of the Cathedral is the more than usually unlovely district of Port Dundas, where, beside the two canals that give the neighbourhood the rather magnificent name of “Port,” are all manner of warehouses and manufactories. This also is the St. Rollox district. I do not know who St. Rollox was, but his name suggest as canonised boating champion. The place is notable for the tall chimney of Townsend’s chemical works: “St. Rollox’s big stalk,” 489 feet in height, said to be the tallest chimney in the world. In a furious gale it sways like a flagstaff. After an existence of fifty years, the lofty chimney was being repointed in August 1907 when John Goldie, a steeplejack, fell from the summit and was of course killed, every bone in his body being broken.
DIXON’S BLAZES.
“DIXON’S BLAZES”
The south, as well as the north, has its industrial sights. Across the river in Hutchesontown, is the well-known “Dixon’s Blazes”: great ironworks that shed an infernal glow by night over the street and the tramcars that run by. No Glaswegian ever willingly allows the stranger to depart without seeing “Dixon’s Blazes”: but, after all, Middlesbrough can show bigger sights in that kind.
After all, the most instructive views are Glasgow on a Saturday night and the same place (but so changed that you ask yourself, Can it be the same?) on Sunday. At midnight on Saturday, Glasgow is roaring drunk and the neighbourhoods of the Trongate and the Central Station are veritable pandemoniums: but on Sunday those not thoughtful enough to have laid in a private store of alcoholic liquor must needs go thirsty, for Scotland is the land of rigorous Sunday closing. The only way to circumvent this barbarous observance is to arm one’s self with a prescription from a complaisant medical practitioner, indicating the following:
Sp. Vini. Gall. oz. i
Aqua Sodæ Effervesc. oz. iv