It is not surprising that the relations between such an employer and his workmen were something closer than those of the mere hireling. The workmen who had shared in his first efforts in the Castle Hill establishment followed him to Hope Park. Some of them, by their fidelity and skill, contributed to the success of later years; and the veteran survivors of that original staff were regarded by William Nelson to the last as objects of exceptional favour.
Among those who thus migrated from the Castle Hill to Hope Park, one claims special attention as a relic of the original Bowhead establishment. James Peters has already been named. He was a man of good education, and, what was rare in his day, had a familiar knowledge of the French language. He was, moreover, a devout Presbyterian of the early type, eschewing the Covenanting exclusiveness of his old master, and holding faithfully to the National Kirk. His familiarity with the Scriptures was so great that he was accredited with knowing the entire New Testament by heart, and quoting familiarly from much of the Old Testament. He had been the trusted clerk, commercial traveller, and man of all work: the entire staff for a time of the bookselling business under the elder régime; and as the cautious ventures of its founder gave way to the comprehensive schemes of a younger generation, he watched their operations with many misgivings. Old Peters would have furnished a study for Sir Walter Scott fit to have ranked alongside of his Owen and Caleb Balderstone. He moved in all things with the regularity of clockwork, and sternly resented in others the slightest deviation from orderly business procedure or punctuality as to time. Mr. Duncan Keith sums up his own early recollections of him with the remark that “even John Munro, the beadle of Mr. Goold the Covenanting minister’s kirk, stood in awe of him.” One day, contrary to all precedent, he asked leave to go away a little earlier than the usual closing hour. He reappeared next morning, and, addressing William, said, “I wish you would tell your father I got married yesterday.” On inquiry, he stated that he had just wedded the elderly dame with whom he lodged. “It will be cheaper,” he said; “and we’ll get on weel enough thegither. We hae been lang used to each other.” When in early days the plan of book sales was in vogue, he was intrusted with the carrying out of one of the ventures; but his ideas of orderly procedure were wholly at variance with the novel experiment. He abruptly returned home the following day, and would have nothing more to do with such work. His loyalty to his young masters knew no bounds; but he could never quite forget that they had been boys when he had the sole charge of the Bowhead buith, or indeed feel it to be natural to speak of them otherwise than by their Christian names. Duty clearly required him to advise and warn them at every new step, so unlike the prudent thrift of early days. If we could realize all the feelings of a sober old brood-hen when the ducklings that she has hatched take their first plunge into the mill-pond, and in spite of her clucking and pother sail off into the expanse of waters heedless of all remonstrance, we might be better able to sympathize with the worthy old servitor as his young master launched into ever new and more ambitious ventures. He survived his active faculties, and was an object of kindly care and liberality long after he had ceased even to deceive himself with the fancy that he could be of service in the business.
CHAPTER V.
HOPE PARK.
THE premises on the Castle Hill became ere long too limited for the rapidly-growing business. William Nelson had been joined in the enterprise by his younger brother, Thomas; and with their combined energy many novel features were developed and advances made in fresh avenues of trade. The publications of the establishment were attracting attention by their improved typography and tasteful embellishment. Ampler room and greater subdivision of labour had become indispensable. So, looking around for some more suitable locality, their attention was directed to a group of antiquated dwellings at the east end of the Meadows, the remains of one of the suburban villages swallowed up when Old Edinburgh burst its mural barriers and extended over the surrounding heights.
In an address given by William Nelson to those in his employment, at one of his social entertainments, when a building was in progress at Hope Park which he then assumed was to be the final addition to the works, he traced the rise of the firm, interspersing the graver narrative with humorous incidents, and with kindly notices of some whom he referred to as faithful fellow-workers, from the time when he first gathered them around him in the new workrooms on the Castle Hill. One of the reminiscences of their entertainer’s narrative is thus recalled:—When Hope Park grounds were about to be built upon, Mr. Nelson, being curious to explore the place, made a visit to what he described as a wilderness of cabbage gardens, with no end of pig-sties. One grumphy (Anglice, a sow) he noticed in a corner where the joiner’s workshop afterwards stood, which, as he humorously described it, “kept its carriage!” The body of a four-wheeled coach, still in good condition, had been consigned to this novel use. The contrast was striking when, in later years, the smooth grass lawn, with its tasteful array of shrubs and flower-plots, filled the area enclosed on three sides by the Hope Park works.
But the full development of the establishment was the result of years of patient and steady progress, until it grew to proportions adequate for the varied departments embraced in the comprehensive scheme, with all its ingenious improvements in machinery for economizing labour. Its tall chimney showed from afar the scale on which its operations were carried on; though at a later date William Nelson realized very strongly the injury to the amenities of the city, and the obstruction to the magnificent views of the surrounding landscape, occasioned by such adjuncts to its manufactories, and laboured by precept and example to get rid of them. In the later Parkside Works gas-engines are the sole motive power, and their general introduction was advocated by him as a substitute for the unsightly chimney with its obscuring volumes of smoke.
With the numerous workmen that were ultimately engaged in all the varied branches of skilled labour, the Hope Park establishment came to be recognized as one of the most important centres of economic industry in the city; and, so far as printing, publishing, and binding are concerned, is spoken of by Mr. Bremner, in his “Industries of Scotland,” as the most extensive house in Scotland. The new buildings, when completed, formed a stately range of offices enclosing three sides of a square, where, under a well-organized division of labour, with the aid of machinery adapted to its varied operations, the entire work, from the setting of the types to the issue of the bound and illustrated volumes, was done on the premises. Compositors, draughtsmen, photographers, lithographers, steel, copper, and wood engravers, electrotypers, stereotypers, folders, stitchers, and binders, plied their industrious skill. The work-men and women employed on the establishment latterly numbered nearly six hundred; and few centres of industry have been characterized by more harmonious relations between the representatives of capital and labour.
The printing of books has constituted an important branch of Scottish industry from the days of Chepman and Miller, on through Bassendyne, Hart, and Symson, to our own time. The names of Fowlis, Constable, Ballantyne, Cadell, Blackwood, Oliver and Boyd, Chambers, Blackie, Collins, Neill, Black, and Nelson, are all familiarly associated with the literary history of the century; and, with only three exceptions, they belong to Edinburgh. It was fitting, indeed, that Edinburgh should take the lead in developing the typographer’s art, where, in 1507, Walter Chepman set up the first printing-press in Scotland; and where, in the memorable year when “the flowers o’ the forest were a’ wede away” on Flodden Hill, he built the beautiful Chepman Aisle which still adorns the collegiate church of St. Giles, and endowed there a chaplainry at the altar of St. John the Evangelist. Edinburgh, in the days of the Scottish Caxton, was even more noteworthy for its authors than its typographers. Dunbar, Gawain Douglas, and the makers of that brilliant age, were followed by Montgomery, Drummond, Allan Ramsay, and Fergusson; and along with this array of poets, reaching to him whom Burns owned as his master, Hume, Robertson, Mackenzie, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and Walter Scott, combined to transform their old romantic town into the Modern Athens of later years. Their genius was not without its influence on the special aspect of Edinburgh’s industries, including some of the novel forms of periodical literature which have so largely contributed to the culture of the masses.
The social entertainments and lectures provided by William Nelson at an early stage for his employés have already been noticed; but in the spring of 1868 he extended his generous sympathy over an ampler field, and organized a fête for the whole journeymen printers and stereotypers of Edinburgh. The invitation met with a cordial response, and the appearance presented by the assembled guests in the galleries of the Museum of Science and Art was the theme of admiring comment. They were summoned to this novel social gathering by one who justly claimed recognition as an employer “who set a high value upon whatever is calculated to foster kindly feelings between man and man.” The invitation said: “For one evening let us lay aside care or irksome duty, and come out with those we love best, and let us look each other fairly in the face. In the matter of head we do not much differ; at heart we are agreed. We need to have the bow unstrung occasionally. Let us do so in company for once, and see if we can help each other to a happy evening.” The answer to this was the assembly of upwards of a thousand workmen, with their wives and sweethearts, in the Industrial Museum, to listen to a lecture by Mr. W. H. Davenport Adams, on the noble art in the service of which they were enlisted; and to enjoy the humour and pathos of some of Scotland’s choicest national songs, including Burns’s proud protest, which could there be appreciated without any thought of social wrong—“A man’s a man for a’ that!” The Scottish Typographical Circular, in its comments on this unique gathering, remarked: “Here were a thousand men, nearly all in superfine black coats and spotless shirt-fronts; a thousand women in tasteful dresses and bonnets of the latest mode, setting off the comely features of the printers’ wives, or the fresh, pretty faces of their sweethearts; and in all this great mass of the ‘lower orders’ not a word out of joint; not a gesture of impatience; no crowding, jostling, or selfish preferring of one’s own enjoyment; nothing but courtesy and that perfect good breeding which prompts men to give their neighbour’s comfort the precedence of their own convenience.” It was a gathering that Scotland might be proud of, whether we assign to the host or the guests the chief prominence. The matter of dress, to which the critic so specially directed attention, was not unworthy of note as an evidence of provident thrift, and of the self-respect which is nowhere more fitting than in the skilled artisan.
The spirit manifested in gatherings such as this is the best antidote for those conflicts between labour and capital which have proved so detrimental to both. Yet, as will be seen by a letter addressed less than four years later to his former traveller, Mr. James Campbell, he had evidence that a perfect solution of this great social problem has yet to be devised. The letter is dated from Dunkeld, where he had been spending a holiday with his family. In 1851 he had married Miss Catherine Inglis of Kirkmay, Crail; and at the date of the letter he was surrounded by a happy family, consisting of his son Frederick and four daughters, to whom he thus alludes: “The children have enjoyed their stay immensely, and none more than Master Fred, who got capital trout-fishing in the Braan, a tributary of the Tay, and in the Butterstone, a stream about six miles distant.” His greatest happiness was in his own family circle, and surrounded by the friends whom he welcomed to his hospitable home. But the cares inseparable from his extensive commercial transactions could not always be so exorcised; and now a succession of inclement seasons and bad harvests was clouding the prospects of all. “We have had,” he writes, “a most miserable time of it for many months past, as far as weather is concerned. I don’t remember of such a long continuance of wet weather as there has been this year. It has lasted, I may almost say, all summer, up to within the last few days; and the result is that the crops have suffered terribly. As to the potatoes, the disease is everywhere, and potato starch-mills will have full employment this winter. It is a time calling for sympathy and forbearance on all hands. But, in addition, strikes for shorter hours and increase of wages are the order of the day; and it looks as if the words of the song, ‘Hard times come again no more,’ were ere long, as a general rule, not to be suitable for this country, as such times cannot be far distant for both masters and men, if there be not a cessation soon to this war between capital and labour. Things are all quiet at present in the trades of printing and bookbinding, but it is rumoured that heavy demands for both shorter hours and higher wages will be made by the men next month; and it is known that they have been preparing for a struggle by subscribing largely to a strike-fund ever since the beginning of the year, so that there is no doubt coming events are casting their shadows before.