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Clearances - New Lanark

Cleared families who ended up at New Lanark were extremely fortunate. Robert Owen was one of the few mill owners to provide healthy working and living conditions.The village first rose to fame when Robert Owen was mill manager from 1800-1825. Owen transformed life in New Lanark with ideas and opportunities which were at least a hundred years ahead of their time. Child labour and corporal punishment were abolished, and villagers were provided with decent homes, schools and evening classes, free health care, and affordable food.

Within ten years Dale built a new village, (eventually 2500 people lived and worked there) called New Lanark, centred around his new mill factories. It is difficult to appreciate the impact these must have had at the time; many of the families who worked in them came from the Highlands looking for a better life after the "clearances" and must surely never have seen buildings so large with so many floors.

New Lanark became world renowned as one of the earliest experiments in creating a civilised working environment and improved living conditions for a workforce as part of a large scale mechanised industrial process. Apart from the schools and religious meeting places, comfortable terraced houses were eventually built for the workers and their families, gas lighting was provided, cleanliness encouraged and a village store set up.

In an age when children were often illiterate and exploited he introduced the idea of education for all and the then revolutionary idea that children should not be allowed to work in the mills before the age of ten.


Robert Owen


Mill worker's House
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Dempster
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Spinning dale mill
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The Balenoe, [Gaelic for 'new town'], cotton mill village at Spinningdale, was built along the same philanthropic lines of the now World Heritage Site at New Lanark, by George Dempster MP, of Skibo and Dunnichen. Dempster was the most popular man in Scotland, capable of spontaneously attracting vast crowds.

As a part of supporting his family, Dempster was forced, partly through necessity, and partly from an inquisitive, active 'enlightened' mind set, to raise money from improving his estates. Dempster spurned the traditional easy route of 'rack renting' of his tenants. The first and very profitable land improving action was to drain Loch Dunnichen and sell the lake bed sediments [marl] as a much needed field dressing. The setting up of the new village of Letham on a newly enclosed farm raised the farm income from £5 to £125 per year.

Another innovative act was to resign the feudal rights on his estates, setting up 'feuars' committees of his tenants as at Letham and at Skibo. This gave Dempter's tenants and their families long term security and incentives for the managment and improvement of their grounds, thereby improve their living standards. This act was extremely far seeing and advanced for this time.

In 1776, while traveling to London in his capacity as an MP, Dempster's natural curiosity took him to Sir Richard Arkwright's cotton spinning mills in Derbyshire. Dempster was so struck by Arkwright's mill projects that he became personally and financially involved with three Scottish cotton mills. Initially, there was the New Lanark mills [1784], then at Stanley in Perthshire [1786], both with Arkwright and Dale, and then at Spinningdale on the Skibo estates. All the mills were provided with 'model' villages for their workers. These show piece projects seem to have been intended by Dempster and his partners to show that it was possible to raise the living, educational, moral and aspirational standards of the poor, while this style of active capitalism would benefit its sponsors financially.

In the long term the nation would benefit through taxation on the goods produced and consumed by the owners and staff of these enterprises, and generally by increasing the economic power of the country.