river+banks

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Educated at Dumbarton Grammar School, Robert Napier had been destined for the Church but persuaded his father to let him serve an apprenticeship as a blacksmith under him. For a while he worked in Edinburgh, but then in 1815 he commenced business in Glasgow, the city that he served for the rest of his life. Initially his workshop was in Camlachie, but it was moved in 1836 to a riverside factory site at Lancefield in the heart of the City and again in 1841 to the Old Shipyard in the Burgh of Govan (then independent of the City of Glasgow). The business expanded through his preparedness to build steam machinery, beginning in 1823 with the engines for the paddle steamer Leven, still to be seen a few hundred metres from Napier's grave in Dumbarton. His name assured owners of quality, and business expanded after two key orders: one in 1836 for the Honourable East India Company; and the second two years later for the Royal Navy, hitherto the preserve of the Royal Dockyards and of the shipbuilders of south-east England. Napier's shipyard and engine shops, then known as Robert Napier and Sons, were to be awarded sixty Admiralty contracts in his lifetime, with a profound influence on ship and engine procurement for the Navy and on foreign governments, which for the first time placed substantial work in the United Kingdom.

Having had problems with hull subcontractors and also with the installation of machinery in wooden hulls, in 1843 Napier ventured into shipbuilding with the paddle steamer Vanguard, which was built of iron. The following year the Royal Navy took delivery of the iron-hulled Jackall, enabling Napier to secure the contract for the Black Prince, Britain's second ironclad and sister ship to HMS Warrior now preserved at Portsmouth. With so much work in iron Napier instigated studies into metallurgy, and the published work of David Kirkaldy bears witness to his open-handedness in assisting the industry. This service to industry was even more apparent in 1866 when the company laid out the Skelmorlie Measured Mile on the Firth of Clyde for ship testing, a mile still in use by ships of all nations.

The greatest legacy of Robert Napier was his training of young engineers, shipbuilders and naval architects. Almost every major Scottish shipyard, and some English too, was influenced by him and many of his early foremen left to set up rival establishments along the banks of the River Clyde. His close association with Samuel Cunard led to the setting up of the company now known as the Cunard Line. Napier designed and engined the first four ships, subcontracting the hulls of this historic quartet to other shipbuilders on the river. While he contributed only 2 per cent to the equity of the shipping line, they came back to him for many more vessels, including the magnificent paddle ship Persia, of 1855.

It is an old tradition on the Clyde that the smokestacks of ships are made by the enginebuilders. The Cunard Line still uses red funnels with black bands, Napier's trademark, in honour of the engineer who set them going.

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See also: Fairbairn, William; Thomson, Sir William

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Textiles

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Titus Salt arrived in Bradford with his father, who was a wool merchant in the town, in 1822. He soon set up his own company and it was there that he experimented with the textile worsted. Alpaca wool comes from an animal of the camel family that resembles the llama, and flocks of domesticated breeds of the animal had been raised in the high Andes since the days of the Incas. The wool was introduced into Europe via Spain and, later, Germany and France. The first attempts to spin and weave the yarn in England were made in 1808, but despite experimentation over the years the material was difficult to work. It was in 1836 that Salt evolved his method of utilizing a cotton warp with part alpaca weft. The method proved a great success and Bradford gained a reputation as a manufacturing centre for alpaca wool, exporting both yarn and cloth in quantity, especially to the USA. By 1850 Salt, who owned six mills, was Bradford's biggest employer and was certainly its richest citizen. He decided to move out of the city and built a new mill works, the architects of which were Lockwood and Mawson, on the banks of the River Aire a few miles from the city. Around the works, between 1851 and 1871, he built houses, a hospital, library, church, institute and almshouses for his workers. The buildings were solid, good-standard structures of local stone and the houses were pleasantly situated, with their amenities making them seem palaces compared to the slums in which other Bradford textile workers lived at the time. The collection of buildings was the first example in Britain of a "model new town", and was, indeed still is, a remarkable prototype of its kind. Apart from being a philanthropist and social reformer, Salt was also concerned with taking advantage of the technical developments of his time. His mill works, which eventually covered ten acres of land, was of fashionably Italianate architectural style (its chimney even a copy of the campanile of the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa in Venice), although its structure was of iron framing. The weaving shed held 1,200 looms and had capacity for 3,000 workers, who produced 30,000 yards of cloth per day. Water from the river was used to produce steam to power the matchinery used in the manufacturing processes of scouring, dyeing and finishing. For the export of goods, the nearby Leeds-Liverpool Canal linked the works to Britain's chief ports, and the Midland Railway (an extension of the LeedsBradford line which opened in 1846) was of great use for the same purpose.

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"1. (river, etc.) which has overflowed its banks. 2. markedly unrestrained; rowdy, boisterous; impetuous; excessively exuberant. 3. psych. manic, affected with mania. 4. inundation, flood. - yatağı geog. floodplain (of a river)."