Polmont North Parish Church

1844 to 1969

The Next 100 Years
We have seen that by around 1740 Polmont had its own status as a parish, its own board of Heritors, minister and Kirk Session; and its own school and schoolmaster.

Over the next Century or so the parish changed, at first very slowly, but then at a gathering rate. The old-fashioned community of a few landowners and 1000 or so tenant farmers, labourers, local artisans and their families, so typical of lowland Scotland, saw little movement until the later 18th. Century. Then the new improved farming methods started to have their effect on the productivity and value of the land and on the prosperity of the community.

Elsewhere in the parish and its vicinity, the various forms of industry began to grow, albeit with rudimentary working conditions and - to 20th. Century eyes at least - spectacularly low wages: for repair work to the church and schoolhouse buildings in 1757, general labourers George Baird and James Johnston were paid at the rate of 6d (2.5p.) per day; mason's labourer William Duncanson at 7d. per day; joiner Robert Frazer at 1s. (5p.); and Robert Heart, stonemason, at 1s. 1 /3d. (approx. 51/2) per day.

The great Carron Iron Works started up in 1759; coalmining in the area spread from the pits at Bo'ness and the Callendar estate first to Shieldhill, then Redding and Maddiston; and freestone quarries opened up, at Brightons, Wallacestone and Maddiston also. All these developments contributed to population growth in the parish, to "about 1,400", as reported by the Reverend Wm. Finlay in the "First Statistical Account" of 1791, but it is important to note that the second biggest occupation employing some 200 people was domestic service.

By that date, Mr Finlay reported that there were only a few houses near the church of Polmont, but that some 50 families now lived along the turnpike road, i.e. Main Street. The rest of the population was spread over quite an area, therefore - apart from small concentrations near the coal-pits - for the parish at that time extended from the Forth, on the north side, to Shieldhill on the south.

As already suggested, Polmont parish progressed like much of lowland Scotland in proportion as the agrarian and industrial revolutions changed the face of the country and its communities (although it experienced nothing like the population explosion seen in towns and cities in the 19th. Century). The new farming methods were introduced apace, fields were drained, limed and enclosed, crops were regularly rotated in well-fertilised soil, and new ones like potatoes and turnips introduced; and the new, lighter, horse-drawn plough made of steel, and the new threshing machines had a growing impact on farm productivity. Polmont was undoubtedly caught up in these improvements, and the big estates and farms evidently prospered.

The new turnpike road from Falkirk through Polmont and Linlithgow to Edinburgh made a big difference to travel and communications, and the opening of the Union Canal in 1822 tied the parish into the growing industrial network. As mining, quarrying, farming and now canal-navigating grew, so these activities required more skills and labour, and a concomitant need arose for more local artisans (joiners, masons, painters, shoemakers, tailors); so that the growing population reached 3,107 by December, 1835. This meant, in brief terms, that the parish church, built to accommodate 607 worshippers, now simply couldn't cope with a congregation of over 2000.

As far as the work of the church was concerned, the first minister, Mr Bennet, passed on on 12 April, 1783. He was succeeded by the Rev. William Finlay (1784-1800), Rev. Dykes Smith (1800-09), the Rev. Patrick McFarlan (1810-24); and the Rev. John Wightman Ker. Mr Ker, son of the provost of Peebles, came to Polmont in April, 1825, and in October, 1839, married Margaret Logan, daughter of distinguished solicitor and Writer to the Signet William Logan of Clarkstone (Avondale).

Schoolmaster Mr Montgomery had died in post, in February, 1789, and was succeeded by another stalwart, Glaswegian Mr Thomas Girdwood. Mr Girdwood was selected as the best of 4 candidates ( again based on prowess in the key subjects of Latin & English), on 15 April, 1789 and was appointed on 24 April, with the recommendation that he improve himself in Navigation and Church Music. He undertook all the duties of his predecessor, plus in later years that of census enumerator too, for the next 59 years.

In the national context, much water had flowed under the Scottish, and British, bridges since the Kirk of Polmont was founded. There had been much local excitement when, in January, 1746, the Rev. Mr Bennet went so far as to give advice and assistance to Lt.-Gen. Henry Hawley, commanding the Government troops in pursuit of the rebel army of the Young Pretender. (It must be remembered that, whatever romantic aura Prince Charles Edward Stewart has gained over the past 250 years, he was not received gladly by the great majority of Presbyterians of lowland Scotland, including Polmont. And so Mr Bennet helped the Government troops to get forage for their horses, and gave Gen. Hawley his best advice about the lie of the land around Falkirk - to no avail, Hawley's reported over-confidence and complacency seeing him and his troops quickly defeated and chased from the field, which was on high ground above Bantaskine.)

But since then things had very much settled down, and the next 100 years or so were ones of gradual improvement in the lives of ordinary folk, although times were still very hard. For the prosperous few - of whom there were perhaps a dozen or so families in Polmont - life was in material terms very comfortable indeed, as will be seen.

In the British context, George II, III and IV, then William IV, all came and went, and the 18-year old Victoria became Queen in 1837; the national panics about invasion in Napoleonic times, not dispelled even by the destruction of the French and Spanish navies at Trafalgar in 1805, had finally been banished by the tremendous victory of Waterloo in 1815.

By 1841 Scotland was a country of 2.6 million people, half of whom now lived in the central belt from the Clyde to the Forth and Tay. The agrarian revolution was well under way, as we have seen, and the phenomenal growth in the railways started in the 1830's. Added to this, the headlong expansion of heavy industry was unleashed by the patenting, in 1828, of the hot-blast iron smelting process invented by James B. Neilson of Govan, which enabled Scottish industry to use the country's enormous reserves of black-band ironstone. Scotland's economy and business became increasingly dominated by working-class men, born without rank or privilege, who rose to positions of great eminence as engineer / inventors, merchants and industrialists: James Watt, Henry Bell, James Smeaton, Thomas Telford, John Rennie, John L. Macadam, Charles Mackintosh, Charles Tennant, James and William Baird, Robert Napier, David Dale, Robert Owen, William Dixon, John Glassford - the list is almost endless.

But these names, and their fortunes, were not made without cost. Although during the continental wars and upheavals from 1790 to 1815 business and industry boomed and wages increased greatly, depressions occurred regularly thereafter (especially in 1841-43) and unemployment and poverty, alongside brutal and unprotected working conditions, were still a normal feature of life for the working class. Women and children still worked underground in the pits, even after the passing of the Mines Act of 1842 because it was a financial necessity for families; and when a miner was injured, or lost his strength, he was quite literally finished.

More than ever, in industrial / urban communities particularly, life boiled down to the survival of the fittest: poor sanitation, water supply and diet, allied to cramped, overcrowded and damp housing, brought regular epidemics of cholera (two cases in Polmont in 1832, devotedly cared for by the village doctor Dr Scrimgeour ), typhus, diphtheria, "consumption" (TB) and, still, smallpox. Added to all this, the potato crops on which most of the people of the Western Isles, some parts of the west of Scotland, and all of Ireland had become dependent for food, became infected by blight and began to fail in the late 1830's.

Religious life in Scotland too had experienced change. As early as 1740 the Rev. Ebenezer Erskine, minister of Stirling, in effect forced the General Assembly to expel him and four other ministers. This was because he, and they, were entirely opposed to the Patronage Act of 1712, which gave Heritors the legal right to appoint, and dismiss, ministers without reference to Kirk Session or congregation. And this small secession eventually caused four other secessions from the Kirk. Without going into much confusing detail, these breakaways - Old - and New Licht Burghers, and Old - and New Licht Anti-Burghers - were all concerned with the lawfulness of taking oaths to the civil authorities and whether the historic Covenants were binding for all time. These and other differences produced the Relief Church and, in 1820, the United Secession Church of no fewer than 280 congregations. Secession was, therefore, nothing new to the Church of Scotland.

The Parish of Polmont could not, of course, remain unaffected by these national movements and changes, placed as it was right in the middle of the Central Lowlands. Agricultural reform and improvement affected directly the working of the farms in the parish, and local men certainly fought in the Napoleonic Wars. Roughly a third of the population, in the upper (southern) part, were dependent on the mines at Redding, Shieldhill and, perhaps Maddiston; but the giant of Scottish industry, the spinning and weaving of cotton textiles, had no impact on the parish; and other manufacturing industries passed the district by, for all that they were all around, in Falkirk, Bathgate, Bo'ness.

In church matters, it appears that the Heritors of Polmont had a very strong influence, not to say grip, on the life and management of the Kirk. They were after all major employers in the district, either of workers on their farms or of domestic servants; it was they who paid for the upkeep of the church; and it was they who made all important decisions, not only about finances and fabric, but on all appointments - minister, schoolmaster, beadle, gravedigger. And nowhere in any of the Heritors' records or Kirk Session minutes is there any evidence that the great issues of the times - religious or political - were even debated at any of their respective meetings. (This must not be taken to mean that the Heritors were uncaring about their responsibilities. Far from it: at their meeting on Saturday 20 May, 1775* they highlighted their concern for the poor of the parish by agreeing to assess themselves at the rate of 2/- (10p) each for every £100 of valued rent, thus donating £40 in total to the poor; and "Intimation to be made to-morrow that no begging poor are to be allowed to go after this day as the poor in this Parish are to be provided for in their own houses."

*Attended by " John Livingston of Parkhall (Parkhill), Alexander Livingstone of Westquarter, Rev. Mr Patrick Bennet (son), John Watt of Oldwalls, Patrick Hodge portioner of Bearcrofts (Beancross), John Robertson of Candie, John Gibb of Loanhead, John Kincaid of Saltcoats, and Messrs. Nimmo, McLearie, Bachop (2), McVey, Brown, Frazer and Watt." Sir Lawrence Dundas of Kerse, whose grandson became Earl of Zetland in 1838, was not present at this meeting.)

Notwithstanding the lack of evidence in the records of the church, Polmont was of course affected by the disastrous Disruption of the Kirk, in which Dr Thomas Chalmers, the dominant personality of the church, led 474 of its ministers - nearly 2/5 of the total - out of the General Assembly of May, 1843, to form the Free Church of Scotland. This was again over the vexed question of patronage, and around 200 of Polmont's congregation left to form what is now Brightons Parish Church. Significantly, perhaps, the response of the Heritors of Polmont Parish was to build a new Polmont Kirk twice the size of the old one.

Despite all the problems of housing, health, working conditions and religious turbulence we have referred to, those in work in 1840 were much better off than their counterparts of 100 years earlier, to the extent that working-class people had started to take their first steps towards the formation of trade unions, and to involve themselves in politics. Although the great reform Act of 1832 had extended the franchise of voting rights, the vast majority of men (and all women) were still excluded from participation in elections to Parliament; and so, on 14 June, 1839, a petition bearing 1,200,000 signatures from all over Britain (the signatories subsequently being known as "Chartists") was presented to the House of Commons and requesting universal voting rights, abolition of property qualifications (for voting), equal electoral districts, secret ballots, annual parliaments, and the payment of M. P.'s. All of these measures have since come to pass, but in 1839 they were rejected with contempt, and moves to form trade unions were opposed with brutal repression.

There is no doubt that life for the working people of Polmont Parish was still very hard despite a Century of progress. But at least they had the time now, and the modest means, to turn their attention in part towards gentler pursuits, albeit led and encouraged by the more enlightened of the Heritors of the parish, - to bowling, curling and, as we shall see in the next chapter, gardening.