Gaining Experience

After losing my job at Caird & Son in 1899 due to a missing hyphen I had a few days at home in Lochwinnoch. Then I had no difficulty in finding another job as a mechanical engineering draughtsman. There always seemed to be a demand for draughtsmen. I was fortunate that way. I tried a few months with a company at Old Kilpatrick near Clydesbank, on the north side of the Clyde that manufactured laundry machinery. I think Kilbowie was the name of the place. It was close to the immense Singer Sewing Machine works. I was there for a few months but did not find much to interest me in laundry machinery or the small engines for driving them. In fact, I cannot remember the name of the firm at all.

I had lodgings just the other side of the street from Kilbowie Station on the North British Railway. There were several sidings where goods trains were shunting about all night and most of the day. This meant that I did not get a good night’s sleep sometimes. My lodgings then were with a working-class family. The man was a foreman joiner and he often brought me drawings so that I could explain them to him. He could not grasp what they were all about sometimes. They were honest people and I got on fine with them.

I saw an ad in the Glasgow Herald for a draughtsman for High-Speed Engine Work at Alley & McLellan’s on the south side of Glasgow in a suburb called Polmadie. This firm had a good name and was of high standing. So, I went to see the Chief Draughtsman and got the job right away.

This meant moving to new lodgings at Crosshill, Glasgow where I had lived as a schoolboy. This was close to the classrooms where I taught evening classes. I worked for Alley & McLellans for nearly three years staying in lodgings for seven months of the year while my classes were running. The other five months I would dwell in Lochwinnoch and commute to work on the train with a season ticket. This was during the years 1899 to 1902. I had different lodgings each winter. The first winter was with a working-class family on _______ Street, Crosshill. The old lady of the family attended to me fairly well but a grownup daughter of the family had a bad habit of entertaining her boyfriends in my room when I was out at my evening classes. The smell of 2^nd hand tobacco smoke was strong when I got back in the evening. I complained sometimes but the mother passed it off with an apologetic manner and gave me extra good meals for the following day, sometimes an apple dumpling to keep me sweet. So, I stayed on. And I only caught the culprit once when I came home half an hour earlier than usual for some reason. I found the daughter and a young man with their arms around each other on the sofa and a magazine of mine in their free hands. They left in a very sheepish manner and never a word spoken. Next day I got a fine apple dumpling to make up for it.

The next winter I lodged on Victoria Road with a maiden lady who did not really need to keep lodgers for she evidently had income of her own. She told me that she liked to have a man in the house because it made her feel safer. She seemed to have a horror of burglers. She wasn’t a very good cook and was very prim and standoffish but it was the softest bed I had ever been in and the room was well furnished and kept very clean. She did not make me a lunch. I had to find that in a restaurant and on the least excuse she would say, “I am not feeling well enough to attend to you today. Would you please take meals outside.” She would always deduct a good amount from the weekly fee when that happened. My mother came to look me up after I had been there a few months and had a chat with my aristocratic landlady. After that things improved a bit. My mother seems to have made a good impression but early in the spring my landlady took it into her head to move to her summer quarters at Bridge of Allen. So, I had to look for other lodgings and remembered that my old friends the Grieves were nearby. I had not called on them for a while. I found Tom Grieve married and living in the flat below Mrs. Grieve, his aunt and Nellie his sister. When I mentioned I was looking for lodgings Nellie said, “We’ll put you up, Tom. We have a vacant room.” So, that solved the difficulty. There were no more meals at restaurants. Nellie had got quite stout and still limped about on her wooden leg but it was her aunt who attended to my wants usually. Nellie had continued sewing and that would keep her occupied.

I went to Lochwinnoch for the summer but the Grieves kept my room to return to in September. Tom Grieve had an occasional bridge party to which I was often invited but I had few evenings free. I remember one extra big party that we had. My old school companion Jimmy Lamb was there. I hadn’t seen him for some years and there was a good crowd of young folk. Tom Grieve had a good position in a dry goods business on Sauchiehill Street. It was the first party where I had ever seen kissing games. Although there was an absence of wine or drink the fun got fast and furious and went into the wee hours. I was rather glad in the end when Nellie Grieve proposed that we go home upstairs where her aunt had been since midnight. At this time the South African war with the Boers had begun and we heard that Bob Boa another Biggar chum of James Lamb and I was in it. He had been one of the pipers who had played Lord Roberts into Pretoria.

My work with Alley & McLellan was involved with the design of their high speed, vertical steam engines. Most of them were built to drive electric

motors which were just coming into general use. It was a small office looking out into the foundry yard with a larger drawing office for other work on the opposite side. After I had been six months there an old school friend, John Sloan, came in as a draughtsman to the same office. He had taken his BSc. degree at Glasgow College by that time and I think that this was his first office job. There was another draughtsman there as a specialist in steam lorries. He was designing the Sentinel Steam Lorry or as the American’s would say, a steam truck. The Sentinel Steam Wagon was a standard make of power wagon for many years in Scotland and it gave Alley & McLellan a good name for itself for bringing it into production. They were economical to run but required more frequent repairs than the gasoline wagons that came into use later. The boilers were the weak spot.

Jim Haythorne was his name and I got to know him better than the others. He had a small room to himself and I often went in there in my spare time as his work interested me. I found that Jim was the son of a Haythorne who ran a small boiler works that built boilers that adopted the Haythorne Tubular Boiler patents, a well-known special type of steam boiler fabricated in Pollockshaws District.

I found out that Jim Haythorne had a liking for photography as a hobby. I invited him out to Lochwinnoch to take photos of Calder Glen and Castle Simple Loch. He brought his full plate camera with him and we had several weekends together. We were even up calling on Aunt Orr at the Kaim. Jim made a great collection of negatives and I got several prints to put into an album.

I got invited for occasional evenings to his father’s house in a suburb south of Pollockshaws. I have forgotten the name (Newlands? correct). They lived in a nice stone villa with lawns in front and orchard behind. There were three daughters and another son and old Haythorne kept good style although there was no maid in the kitchen. The two younger daughters were teachers and I liked the one called Nellie quite well but she was a little too short and bulky for my taste at the time.  I found out that they attended gymnasium class at the same Y.M.C.A. that I was teaching in so I saw them occasionally. There was another young lady at that gymnasium class who I met at the Haythorne’s later. Jim became engaged to her and the marriage followed. I was invited to the wedding. The last I heard of Jim Haythorne he had moved to a good position in England.

I did fairly well as a draughtsman at Alley & Mclellan’s but I might have done better if my teaching in the evenings had not taken up so much of my energy. There was another young man named Morrison who came in after I had been there a year. He had all of the energy that I somehow lacked and he gradually pushed his way into the notice of the heads of the firm and he got himself appointed assistant to the chief draughtsman. This in spite of the fact that I had more or less shown him the ropes. I got on well enough with him for a year or so and then I decided to look around and try for a better paying position elsewhere.

I found one at Dumbarton, of all places, at a firm that built pumps and marine machinery, that is, auxiliary machinery for ships, Matthew Paul & Co. (~1902). It was not a very good move as the company was old-fashioned and not in very good standing. There were six draughtsmen in a very fine office but the Chief Draughtsman was an old batchelor who was behind the times professionally.

The office looked out on the River Leven just about opposite to the big Denny Brothers Shipyards about a half mile up river from the historic Dumbarton Rock and castle which reared up at the east side of the junction of the Leven with the Clyde. I think it was the nearness of the River Leven to our office windows and the sight of the sailing yachts anchored in the river that put the notion in my head to buy a small sailing yacht to have some fun at sailing. I said to myself that my nose had been at the grindstone for several years without much play. I had given up my evening classes shortly after moving to Dumbarton. I had taught them for five years.

I wasn’t making much progress with Matthew Paul & Co.  and the new horseless carriages were coming into use. I thought that there might be better prospects in that new line for a draughtsman. I answered an ad in the Glasgow Herald for a draughtsman wanted by the Arrol Johnstone Co. of Paisley and was told to come and see them. I got the job right away after an interview with a Mr. Napier who was general manager of the company. The fact that I had been a draughtsman with Alley & McLellan in High-Speed Engine work seemed to impress them.