ON the evening of Tuesday, the 10th of April 1878, as at the close of many a previous day, the hundreds of industrious workers in the Hope Park establishment welcomed the return of the hour of rest. The whirr of the busy machinery was stilled, and the buildings were left untenanted till the toilers with brain and hand should resume the work of a new day. The site to which the works had been transferred from the Castle Hill thirty-five years before was now crowded to its utmost limits with the warehouses, engine and work rooms of the prosperous firm. Everything seemed to give assurance of continuous success. Yet the workers were then leaving for the last time. Within a few hours the building was a pile of smoking ruins. The circumstances of this calamitous event were thus concisely narrated by William Nelson in response to a letter of sympathy: “In reference to the destruction of our printing and publishing works at Hope Park, never did fire do its work more speedily or more thoroughly. It broke out about three o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, the 10th inst., and in little more than an hour the whole building was in flames. I was aroused about a quarter past four, and I hurried as fast as I could to the scene; but I found when I arrived that the roof all round had fallen in, and that flames were bursting forth from all the windows in the very front of the building. The fire broke out somewhere in the back part of it; there was a strong east wind blowing at the time, and this fanned the flames and made them rush along the various flats as they successively caught fire with extraordinary rapidity. Not a book or sheet of printed paper was saved!”
The calamity seemed to be overwhelming. The splendid results of intelligent industry and rare aptitude for business had vanished, like the gourd of Jonah, in a night. The insurance on the buildings was trifling compared with the amount of property destroyed. But his brother’s comment on being shown the above letter reveals a characteristic trait of William’s sympathetic and unselfish nature. “Willie’s letter about the fire recalls very distinctly that terrible morning. Poor fellow! it was most touching to see him come up to me before all the people and hold out his hand and say, ‘O Tom, I am so sorry for you.’ He did not speak or seem to think of himself at all.”
An onlooker has preserved this little, appreciative incident: “A few of the girls who worked in the establishment were noticed standing together and weeping bitterly, when one of them, looking up, was overheard to say, as she saw Mr. William Nelson surveying the conflagration, ‘Eh, there’s our dear maister. I’m thinking he’ll be thinking mair o’ us the day than o’ himsel’.’ ” The remark was abundantly justified; for a friend who was near him noted that his first thoughts were of sympathy for the work-people who would be thrown out of employment; and the feeling found practical form in his exertions on their behalf. This was characteristic of the spirit that animated him in all his relations with his work-people, and which helped to make of him an example of the very highest type of the true captains of industry. “The liberal deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things shall he stand.”
The Rev. Dr. Alison, the clergyman of Newington parish, in which the Hope Park works were situated, remarked, when paying a just tribute to his memory: “I have often had occasion to remark, in visiting employés of the firm pastorally, as well as in my intercourse with heads of departments, how beautifully the idea of the Christian employer seemed to have been realized in him. The affectionate terms in which he was always spoken of were obviously the natural return for the fairness, consideration, and generosity for which he had become known. Being more than a payer of wages, he got more than hirelings’ service. He was a member of another outward communion; but there is a unity of spiritual life that ignores outward separations. There is a Church which includes the faithful of all churches.” To one so unselfish, it was almost inevitable that he should realize keenly the sufferings which his own great loss must inflict on others; and this very sympathy was his own best protection against the blow. Nevertheless, the equanimity displayed under such trying circumstances was peculiarly notable in one whose emotional sensibilities were intense. The same calm composure was characteristic of him under any imposition or personal wrong, if practised on him by a stranger. It was indeed a common saying that nothing could anger him. One who knew him well writes: “He had a rare power of keeping his temper. I never saw him angry. I never heard him utter a harsh word, except to reprobate some mean or unworthy action. The only hard words I can recall were in denouncing the conduct of one whom he had regarded as a friend, and who had grossly abused his misplaced confidence.” But his equanimity gave way when during the conflagration, in which it seemed as if the work of a life-time was being destroyed, some one asked him if he did not suspect it to be the work of an incendiary. The passionate emotion with which he resented the suggestion showed how keenly he was moved by the possibility that any one could be found capable of entertaining the thought of such a dastardly purpose.
The loss which the fire involved amounted to little short of £100,000; but Mr. Nelson, in describing the event in a letter to a friend, added: “I am happy, however, to state that our stereotype plates and our wood-cuts and electrotypes are all to the fore, they having been in two strong stone-built safes alongside a part of the back wall of the building, and though covered with masses of burning timber, etc., they escaped quite uninjured. With all this valuable property intact, and it forming the back-bone of our business, we will ere long be able to rear our heads again as publishers; there being no difficulty in getting all the printing and bookbinding done that we will require in various offices in town here and in London. In the meantime the débris of the old building is being cleared away rapidly, and a new Hope Park will by-and-by appear on the site of the old one.”
The new Hope Park did not, however, rise from the ashes of the old. The energy of its originators was indeed unabated. While William Nelson was contemplating, amid its smoking ruins, the suffering to be entailed on their hundreds of work-people, his brother was telegraphing to London, Paris, and other centres of industry, ordering fresh printing-presses and all other newest machinery to replace what had perished. By the favour of the city authorities temporary buildings were erected on the neighbouring Meadows. As the new machinery arrived it was set up under what was designed for mere temporary shelter at Parkside, on the outskirts of St. Leonard’s Hill. But speedily the superior advantages of the new site, and the arrangement of the works over an extended area, instead of occupying successive floors of a quadrangle, became so manifest that the Parkside Works were completed, with an effective architectural façade in the favourite Scottish style of the sixteenth century. Hope Park was accordingly finally abandoned; but a graceful memorial of the old works remains. When bidding good-bye to the site, two beautiful pillars—the one surmounted by the lion and the other by the unicorn—were erected at the cost of the two brothers, at the eastern entrance to the Meadows, as their acknowledgment to the city of the timely favour extended to them in their hour of need.
It was while the prosperous career of the great publishing firm was arrested by this disastrous event that a more dire calamity extended its effects far and wide. A leading Edinburgh publisher, writing to me shortly after the death of William Nelson, remarked: “I need not say to you what a true, large-hearted man he was. Do you remember when their printing-house was totally destroyed, and one would have thought his own immense losses would have frozen his sympathy for other sufferers? Yet he was one of the earliest subscribers of £1,000 to the victims of the Glasgow Bank; and so far did his kindly nature long to help them, he even refused at first to discountenance the project of a state lottery on their behalf!” Their sufferings had been brought home to him in the most moving form. A letter found among his papers after his death, endorsed in touching simplicity, “Poor fellow!” is the plea of an old schoolmate for failing to appear at a High School anniversary dinner. “I have to ask you to accept my apology,” he writes, “which you will readily do when I mention that I am one of the unfortunate victims of the City of Glasgow Bank; and to-day I have received the liquidator’s final call for payment on the 22nd inst., which, I fear, will be total ruin to me.”
William Nelson’s local associations were strong; they attached him with passionate love to his native city. Its very stones were dear to him. Every nook and corner of it associated with his own early years, with school and schoolmates, or with the later incidents of his business career, retained a hold on his sympathies. “I send you a photograph of Edinburgh from the Castle,” he writes to an old friend beyond the Atlantic, “that it may keep you in mind of the dear old city.” Hence the abrupt close of the Hope Park epoch, and the transfer to the new quarters at Parkside, awoke feelings wholly apart from those which the pecuniary loss involved. The sense of strangeness in the new locality is noticeable in more than one of his private memoranda, as in the following record of time and place: “This is the first memorandum I have written in the new room in Parkside. I came to it at a quarter to eleven o’clock on Friday, July 16, 1880. Dr. and Mrs. Wilson are at present staying with us.” Curiously, it is not till upwards of two years later that the memorandum occurs of the kindling of the Parkside hearth, thus: “Fire lighted in grate in my room here for the first time, November 13, 1882.”
There Mr. Nelson had to be visited to see how promptly and skilfully he administered the affairs of the great printing and publishing business which he had developed into such proportions; and, happily, notes furnished by an authoress, who did considerable literary work for the firm in those later years, enable us to catch a glimpse of him in business hours. “My first visit to his office,” she writes, “was, I think, in the spring of 1883. Several persons were in attendance, waiting for orders or interviews. Owing to this circumstance, and my having formed the impression that Mr. Nelson was a very formidable sort of a man to approach, I made my proposals in an abrupt and hurried manner. I was by no means surprised at a hasty, ‘No, no; quite unnecessary at present,’ and made my retreat at once. But as I was passing out, he turned from another to whom he had given some instructions in an equally concise fashion, and rising suddenly from his chair with some apologetic words, he inquired what I had published, and then said, ‘I have been wishing to see you.’ After this we had a long, pleasant chat, and he at once explained to me certain literary work that he wished me to undertake. This was my introduction to him. I went to him a stranger, but though my acquaintance with him was only of some four years’ duration, and was mostly a business acquaintance, I soon learned to regard him as a friend. The kindness and encouragement he gave helped me greatly, because it was not the mere kindness of a ‘big’ publisher to a ‘little’ author. He was always business-like in insisting that the work done should be just as he liked it. There could be no ‘scamping’ work under his keen eyes. But he took infinite trouble in procuring books of reference and helping my work, and was most generous in all his dealings. On one occasion, after having undertaken some work, and having given him much trouble regarding books of reference, I found the task beyond me, and had to tell him so. I expected a scolding, and instead received a cheque ‘in payment for what you have done of the book.’ What I had done was merely to indicate the lines upon which the book might run. A fortnight before his death he sent me a copy of the book I ‘was to have written,’ with a very kind note, which I value much. The publisher’s office is a terrible place to a not-confident lady-writer. Sometimes I have had to wait while Mr. Nelson was ‘interviewing,’ directing, correcting, and so forth; and my courage has not been strengthened by the spectacle of faulty work being overhauled in a most careful manner, and ruthlessly condemned or sharply criticised. Yet I have always gone out of that office with a light heart. Some kindly word about my children or my old home, some chat about the foreign lands he had visited, the gift of a book, a fatherly caution ‘not to work too much’—these made me feel that Mr. Nelson took his large heart into the publisher’s office. Would that all publishers did like him.”
But the critical sharpness, and the abrupt manner of the man of business, preoccupied with the responsibilities of so large an establishment with endless claims on its directing head, all disappeared so soon as he had satisfied himself that his instructions were being rightly carried out. The new Parkside Works were within easy distance of Salisbury Green; and the claimants on his ever-ready charity speedily learned to know the time when he could be waylaid in his walk to or from the counting-room, and beguiled with a piteous tale. Mr. Gray, for many years the faithful head of the financial department, thus writes: “To old servants in the works he opened his purse freely. Women who had been employed in early days at the Castle Hill were held by him in special favour, and I have often seen him give them a pound note, sometimes when it was doubtful if they would make the best use of it. The plea that they had worked at one time at Hope Park was a frequent claim of beggars; and many is the silver piece that has been given away to such folks. One adept at begging came to him, her tatters soaked and leaky slippers dripping with rain. She told a piteous tale, and pleaded she was the widow of a machineman in the firm’s employment thirty years before. The plea was irresistible; but the voluble manner in which the woman overacted her part aroused his suspicions after he had responded to her appeal. ‘What sort of a man was your husband?’ asked he. ‘Oh, a good, a very good man!’ ‘Ay; was he tall or short?—as tall as that man?’ pointing to a man about six feet high who had just entered. ‘Yes!’ responded the woman, ‘he was a braw, tall man.’ ‘Give me back the money!’ he exclaimed with unwonted severity of tone, as he recalled the fact that the old machinist was much below the ordinary stature; and the impostor was ordered to the door.”