There comes times when my direct ancestors are sucked into the maelstrom of modernity.
My stories converge into a narrow band of rapidly industrialising settlements along the South side of the Clyde during the middle decades of the 19th Century. Cleared or evicted from precarious tenancies in Scotland and Ireland, these strands, like fungal hyphae, find their ways, as day labourers, to new centres along a narrow coal belt from Johnstone in the West to Cambuslang in the East.
Arrivals 1810-1875 : OS Six Inch 1846 NLS
Dispossessed by proprietors of whatever place they once felt they had a right to, the men and women who brought their young families to Central Scotland had been reduced to day labourers, just as J. A. MacDonald had recommended in his General Survey of Agriculture in the Hebrides. Deprived of independent means of subsistence, and decoupled from place (and therefore proprietor), they had adopted the precarious existence of proletarians, forced to live by the ‘strength of their arms’.[1]
They came in waves, a few before an Gorta Mor, others as a result of the Clearances that followed from it. The last strand to ‘arrive’ was Caistriona McLeod, finally dislodged from Scoraig peninsula by changes in the North Sea fisheries in the 1870s.
On arrival, they clustered around ‘work’ – sources of employment, however casual, in the nodes of industry in Paisley, Glasgow, Cambuslang. Each centre – like the rural communities they had been displaced from, had its own distinctive character and social dynamic.
Like any event-horizon, some slip first and some later, but by 1820 the artisans and peasant who feature in my ancestral line are dispossessed, disenfranchised and disempowered. From tenants, farmers, fisher and artisans they become, over the long 19th century, wage slaves and mechanics without electoral agency or rights.
This, more than ‘the Enlightenment’, is the melting pot of Scottish society: the smelting of a diverse and, relatively, self-sufficient populace into a deracinated commodity: labour.
Despite my indirect ancestors complicity in the colonial project – and many uncles, aunts and cousins did seek different futures in North America, Southern Africa and Australasia – my ‘line’ followed the default trajectory of ‘British’ capitalism. A trajectory grounded on the principles that gender and property conferred political entitlement.
In these pages, I draw together the shared and inter-leaving experiences of gaels, irish and scots into the becoming – and eventual dissolution – of proletarian identity in Inverclyde.
©John Bolland 2026