Married to Mary Simms from Shetland Islands, children Robert, Martin, and Jean'\[\;
Burial in row 45 No. 10;
Robert and Jean live in Austraila, Martin in England
Jean has one child about 2000, lives in Albany.GLASGOW's earliest history, like so much else in this surprisinglyromantic city, is obscured in a swirl of myth. The city's name is said toderive from the Celtic Glas-cu, which loosely translates as "the dear,green place" a tag that the tourist board are keen to exploit as anantidote to the sooty images of popular imagination. It is generallyagreed that the first settlers arrived in the sixth century to joinChristian missionary Kentigern later to become St Mungo in his newlyfounded monastery on the banks of the tiny Molendinar Burn.
William the Lionheart gave the town an official charter in 1175, afterwhich it continued to grow in importance, peaking in the mid-fifteenthcentury when the university was founded on Kentigern's site the second inScotland after St Andrews. This led to the establishment of anarchbishopric, and hence city status, in 1492, and, due to its situationon a large, navigable river, Glasgow soon expanded into a majorindustrial port. The first cargo of tobacco from Virginia offloaded inGlasgow in 1674, and led to a boom in trade with the colonies untilAmerican independence. Following the Industrial Revolution and JamesWatt's innovations in steam power, coal from the abundant seams ofLanarkshire fuelled the ironworks all around the Clyde, worked by thecheap hands of the Highlanders and, later, those fleeing the Irish potatofamine of the 1840s.
The Victorian age transformed Glasgow beyond recognition. The populationboomed from 77,000 in 1801 to nearly 800,000 at the end of the century,and new tenement blocks swept into the suburbs in an attempt to cope withthe choking influxes of people. At this time Glasgow became known as the"Second City of the Empire" a curious epithet for a place that todayrarely acknowledges second place in anything.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Glasgow's industries had been honedinto one massive shipbuilding culture. Everything from tugboats totransatlantic liners was fashioned out of sheet metal in the yards thatstraddled the Clyde. In the harsh economic climate of the 1930s, however,unemployment spiraled, and Glasgow could do little to counter its popularimage as a city dominated by inebriate violence and having absorbed vastnumbers of Irish emigrants, sectarian tensions.
Shipbuilding, and many associated industries, died away almost completelyin the 1960s and 1970s, leaving the city depressed, jobless anddirectionless. Then, in the 1980s, the self-promotion campaign began,snowballing towards the 1988 Garden Festival and year-long party asEuropean City of Culture in 1990. More recently, Glasgow was UK City ofArchitecture and Design in 1999, an event which strove valiantly toshowcase the city's rich architectural heritage.