This plaque in the southern wall of the Necropolis is not a grave marker. It’s the remnant of a property dispute from the early days of the cemetery and, as such things often do, it offers a glimpse of the city’s growth and the squabbling over land and resources that went with it.

The plaque asserting the right of Merchants’ House to reopen the entrance at this point, dated May 1835.

Up to the late eighteenth century, the Cathedral marked the north-east corner of Glasgow. Immediately to the east lay the dolomite sill of Wester Craigs, one of the many promontories of hard volcanic rock that puncture the sandstones of the Midland Valley. The Molendinar Burn made a tight curve around the foot of the hill, cutting a small gorge between it and the Cathedral, before wandering south to join the Clyde. To the north of the Craigs lay the town lands of Easter Common, a region of rough land pitted with occasional quarries.

The region around the Cathedral and Fir Park, in McArthur’s town plan (1778). [National Library of Scotland]

In 1650, the Merchants’ House of Glasgow purchased the lands of Wester Craigs from an impoverished landowner, Sir Ludovick Stewart of Minto, for just under £1300 sterling. The Merchants’ House, which effectively divided control of the city with the Trades House, was among other things a mutual insurance scheme for its members and their dependents, and land was a safe investment. Over the years they feued various portions of the estate, but the rocky height of what became known as Fir Park remained largely undeveloped, apart from a quarry nibbling away at the southern side. The hard volcanic whinstone was cut into setts for local streets, and later used in broken form as metal for the new macadamised roads.

It was only in the 1820s that another use emerged for Fir Park. The city’s old cemeteries were becoming overcrowded, a fact that was driven home both by the realignment of the Ramshorn kirkyard in 1825-6 and by the perpetual cases and rumours of grave-robbing that swirled around the medical schools.

Cartoon about the Ramshorn improvements in the Glasgow Looking Glass, 1 June 1825. [The Glasgow Story]

Extra urgency was added by the cholera epidemic of 1831-32, and a new municipal cemetery on Castle Street was opened in 1832, but there was an appetite for something grander. Glasgow merchants looked to models such as Père Lachaise and visualised a garden paradise in which justified Presbyterian capitalists could await the Judgement in splendid pagan tombs. It was not lost on the Merchants’ House that, with suitable pricing of lairs, this paradise could also turn a profit.

The first hint of this scheme seems to have been in the Northern Looking Glass in 1825; perhaps not by coincidence, the Looking Glass had extracted copy from both the Ramshorn project and the open secret of body-snatching. By 1828 it was being discussed within the Merchants’ House; 1831 saw public exhibitions of the plans and the publication of John Strang’s Necropolis Glasguensis; the first interment took place in 1832, and the Necropolis officially opened in 1833.

Proposal for the new cemetery, in the Northern Looking Glass (9 July 1825).

At first, interments were on the east side and the centre of the site, where the most impressive monuments are today. As more lairs were sold, however, the scheme worked its way southward. Conflict was inevitable, because to the south of Fir Park lay the territory of an ambitious and pugnacious clan: the Tennents.

The Tennents were a dynasty of maltsters, gardeners, and innkeepers. Their geneaology in the Incorporation of Maltmen went back to one Patrick Tennent, who had married into the Craft in 1687. They included Hugh Tennent I, a luminary in the Gardeners who in 1755 had taken the lands of the Easter Common just north of Wester Craigs, where he grew barley and engaged in a celebrated lawsuit over quarry access with his neighbours to the north at Petershill. It also included Robert Tennent, founder of the famous Saracen Inn on Gallowgate, who in 1747 had fought an unsuccessful battle with the Maltmen over his right to brew without their licence.

In about 1777, Hugh’s sons John and Robert established a brewery on Drygate, the ancient street that ran eastward from the top of the High Street. They were following a trend, as brewing became increasingly industrialised and profit shifted from the once-mighty maltmen to the brewers. The brothers’ was originally a small operation, but they soon merged it with another brewery, Maclehose’s, and in 1793 they shifted production down the road to Wellpark.

The Wellpark site at the bottom of Drygate, on Fleming’s map of 1807. [National Library of Scotland]

Wellpark was part of the lands of Wester Craigs; it had been feued from the Merchants’ House in 1757 by William and Robert Donaldson for £9 10s. As the name suggests, it had a rich water supply, and the feu included rights “to collect the springs, with open or close drains, from the other lands of the Wester Craigs to the said Wellpark or five acre parke, without molestation or hindrance for ever”. Originally it had been a bleaching green, but John and Robert Tennent saw other potentials.

The firm of J. & R. Tennents grew, though it seems not to have been at the cutting edge — it was the Anderston and Gallowgate Breweries, for example, that first attempted to corner the new market in porter. Tennents’ growth spurt would come after 1827, when John Tennent died and Robert’s son Hugh took control of the firm.

Hugh Tennent II had started in business as a cotton importer and manufacturer, trading to the West Indies in partnership with William Middleton. (They seem to have been complicit with enslavement mostly at one remove, though it is possible that Middleton enslaved at least one person in Jamaica.) This business met with indifferent success, but when Hugh took over the brewery he had big ideas. Hitherto it had supplied only the local area; now, with Middleton’s assistance, they targeted the export market, and growth.

Hugh was a formidable individual, happy to throw his weight around in and out of court. In 1831 the tenant of the bleaching green went bankrupt, leaving a complicated tangle of liabilities which Tennent pursued as far as the House of Lords. In 1855, when his own son Gilbert speculated his way into debt, Hugh and his younger son Charles bailed the delinquent out — at the price of his share in the business. The business was valued at £214 000; Gilbert got only £35 000 including the settlement of his debts; but the deal was stitched up so tightly that Gilbert’s lawsuits couldn’t break it. Family was all very well, but no Tennent would leave his business to a fool.

At the same time, Hugh was a keen evangelical Presbyterian, who would later become an enthusiastic member of the Free Kirk; a Liberal politician who would be among the first town councillors elected after the passing of the Reform Act; and in his later life a supporter and patron of Garibaldi. He was a man of parts, and none of those parts were to be messed with.

The first brush with the Merchants occurred over access to Fir Park. Before the Bridge of Sighs was opened in 1834, the only official entry to the site was from a lane off Forefield Road; even once the bridge was in place, forming a ceremonial link between High Kirk and Necropolis, it was clearly unsuited for quarry traffic. In 1832 the Merchants negotiated with Hugh Tennent to open a new road, called St Anne’s Street, across Wellpark; Tennent charged them a hefty servitude of £150 to permit this, and the road itself cost £350. Although the brewery has long since swallowed the site, St Anne’s Street still survives in the layout of the plant.

The Wellpark brewery on the OS map of 1857 (left) and modern satellite imagery (right). Map pins in each mark the approximate position of the plaque (left) and the end of St Anne’s Street (right).

The more serious conflict began in 1835. The Merchants proposed to open the southern side of the Necropolis for interments, while displacing quarrying eastward. Worse, the swathe along the boundary with Wellpark was earmarked for plebian lairs rather than a handful of stately mausoleums. The ancient Lady Well just to the west had been shut in 1833 over fears that it would be contaminated by nearby burials; Tennent, with his eye to water rights, now cried foul and lawyered up.

It’s not clear how sound Tennent’s objection was in hydrological terms, and how much it was about appearances. The Lady Well was shallow, only five feet deep. In contrast, Wellpark had access to much deeper water, drawn from sandstone layers a hundred feet or more below the surface which both filtered it and gave it a characteristic mineral content — a fact on which the brewery would come to insist strongly. However, the drinking public were not hydrologists. Brewing had a long history of adulteration and contamination scares, and corpses were news. If the idea developed that Tennent was flavouring his beer with eau de cadavre, sales would suffer and his growing export operation could be crippled.

After a legal battle which lasted until September 1837, Tennent and the Merchants settled out of court. The deal looks distinctly favourable to Tennent: he was paid £350 for the effect on his springs (which must surely have covered the cost of a few new, deeper wells) and the Merchants agreed that only properly spaced, prosperous tombs would be placed along the boundary — it was not to be used for “promiscuous interments”. It is presumably during this stushie that the Merchants put up their plaque, asserting to no great effect their rights over the site. At the end of the day, Tennent represented the rising class of industrialists who would dominate Victorian Glasgow; the Merchants, after two centuries and despite their lingering role in the Council, were a fading power.

The Wellpark brewery continued to grow. Hugh retired from business in 1855; his son Charles ran the firm until both Hugh and Charles died in 1864, leaving Charles’s sons in their infancy. One of these sons, Hugh Tennent Tennent, was raised in the business, and when he came of age in 1884 he bought out his brother to take full control.

By this stage, Wellpark was Glasgow’s dominant brewery, combining practically the entire production process on one site:

But it is not only a brewery, it is a maltster’s, a cooperage, an engineer’s shop, a printing office, a wright’s yard, a saw mill, a carriers’ quarter, for nearly everything required in the business, except the bottles, is made on the premises, which extend to over ten acres. Then there is a stud of forty pure Clydesdales, the best that knowledge can find and that money can buy.

“Hugh Tennent”, in One Hundred Glasgow Men (1885)

It was Hugh Tennent Tennent who spotted the potential of a new drink, which was being popularised by the Germans who led the fashion in Glasgow catering: lager beer. He seems to have begun his experiments in 1885 after a visit to Germany, and Tennents’ Excelsior Lager was launched, successfully, in 1889.

Advert from the Glasgow Herald, 8 May 1889, which is the earliest publicity I can find for Tennent’s Lager.

Hugh Tennent Tennent died, at the age of 27 and unmarried, during the influenza of 1890, and the family’s direct involvement with the brewery ended there. He was buried, alongside his father Charles and his grandfather Hugh, in their family plot. It’s on that disputed south side of the Necropolis, up against the back wall of the old quarry and facing the Wellpark Brewery.

The Tennent graves in the Necropolis.

Sometimes, in the grass about the base, you will find a discarded lager can.

Main sources

The definitive work on the establishment of the Necropolis is Ronald D. Scott, The Cemetery and the City: The Origins of the Glasgow Necropolis, 1825-1857 (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005), from which I got most of the information about the lawsuit of 1835-37. Ronnie Scott’s guide to the Necropolis, Death by Design (Black & White, 2005) is also well worth a read.

Details about the Tennent family come largely from Iain F. Russell’s entry in the ODNB (2007), as well as from their entries in One Hundred Glasgow Men (1885) and Curiosities of Old Glasgow Citizenship (1881). I’ve also used contemporary records from the Court of Session and House of Lords.

Background on Wester Craigs and Easter Common comes from the usual antiquarian sources, in particular Senex’s Glasgow Past & Present. Geological background, including borehole data, comes from the British Geological Survey; the depth of the Lady Well is from the meticulous James Cleland.

Corrections are welcome, and further details of anything are available on request.

Postscript. One puzzle remains: I have no idea why the short-lived St Anne’s Street was called that. There’s no obvious family or local connection to the name, and a dedication to an extra-Biblical saint seems odd on the lands of a devout Presbyterian. If you have any thoughts, please let me know.

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