The Times Great Scottish Lives: Obituaries of Scotland’s Finest

From the cotton mill Andrew passed to a small factory where he fed the furnace in the cellar and tended the engine. That was all the manual work he ever did, for he was soon taken into the office. Next, by the patronage of a Dunfermline man who knew his father, he became a telegraph messenger under the Ohio Telegraph Company. He mastered the code, risked taking a message against rules, and was rewarded by being made operator at £60 a year. Then by the help of Colonel T. A. Scott he passed to the telegraphic service of the Pennsylvania Railroad, with another rise of salary.

He remained for 11 years in the employ of the railway company and got together a small capital by engaging in modest commercial enterprises more or less connected with the railway and under the benevolent advice of Colonel Scott, to whom he became private secretary. The whole region was humming with activity. There were oil companies, manufacturing enterprises, railways, and banks, and Carnegie, who was put in charge of important works during the Civil War, and became superintendent of the line in 1863, acquired friends and business experience, as well as money.

Carnegie thus was ready for the vast expansion of the iron and steel production which began about 1864. The protective tariff of 1861 was the general background; the local factors were the development of the Pennsylvania coalfields near Pittsburg, the substitution of coal and coke for charcoal in producing pig iron, the opening up of the Lake Superior iron ore deposits, the development of transport by rail and water, and the introduction of the Bessemer steel process.

Carnegie was responsible for none of these, but took advantage of all of them. He was neither inventor nor creator, like Krupp or Armstrong or Westinghouse, but a manipulator with a quick eye for opportunities and a rare sagacity in utilizing men. He used men of all sorts, raw youths or those of standing and influence, to their advantage when it served his purpose. He made many millionaires, but there is no record of those that he exploited and cast adrift.

In 1864 Carnegie bought his first interest in iron works, forming with his younger brother, old companions of his boyhood, and a German named Kloman, who had technical knowledge, the Union Iron Mills Company. Soon afterwards he secured the backing of the president and vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the greatest local magnates, for a new venture the Keystone Bridge Company. He resigned his railway appointment and devoted himself entirely to his private interests.

The Union Mills Company was not very successful, but Carnegie showed tenacity in holding on, and astuteness in buying out his senior partner when things were at their worst. His own part was to run about and get orders while the partners ran the works and the local business. He maintained this division of labour throughout his career, in all the successive enterprises being the travelling and publicity manager, but insisting on constant reports and keeping a firm grip on the actual works.

In 1873 he went into the steel business, employing as capital £50,000 which he had earned as commissions from Colonel Scott for placing the stock of a new railway on the European market. This was his share in the new company of Carnegie, McCandless, and Co., the total capital of which was £140,000. There were 11 partners. Twenty-six year later, when the business was sold for over £90,000,000, all Carnegie’s partners save one had died or gone out, and Carnegie’s personal share was more than one-half of the colossal total.

The story of the fortunes of the company is long and tortuous. It involved many commercial transactions of a mysterious nature. But the amassing of this portentous wealth is a most remarkable achievement. He went through no long-drawn struggle against adversity, nor is his story one of incessant toil and application. He escaped the daily grind and left it to others. The secret of his success in great measure lay in his withdrawal from the daily worries that beset the men on the spot and his consequent leisure to see the large movement of affairs and steer his course accordingly.

But he was a thorn in the flesh to his partners and the working officials, continually goading them to further efforts, playing off the output of one furnace or mill against that of another. He was insatiable. Even when in 1889 the profits rose to £4,000,000 the effect on him was determination to have them doubled next year. But this was not greed, but a love of winning the game, a game in which the measure of success was money.

Carnegie’s naturally kind and generous disposition and the memories and traditions of his Dunfermline proletariat days came into conflict with his consuming ambition. The business side always won. He would pay large wages because that paid him, but otherwise he was a relentless and unthinking employer. Notwithstanding the views in his book, Triumphant Labour, he fought strikes with bitterness, and in the great Homestead strike of 1892, the cause of which was the determination of the masters to force a return to the killing double shift, he was entirely against the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Encouraged by Carnegie’s benevolent theories, the association had come to interfere more and more with the management of the works. Carnegie insisted, even against his partner, Mr. Frick, on making it a fight to a finish. After the most sanguinary of all labour conflicts, amounting to civil war on a small scale, in which in one day 10 men were killed and over 60 wounded, Carnegie won. He fought, however, from the safe distance of Atlantic City, leaving to his partners and managers the dangers of the battle.

In his “Gospel of Wealth” Mr. Carnegie stated his opinion that “surplus wealth was a sacred trust which its possessor was bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community”. How far he succeeded in divesting himself is not yet known, but the total amount of his benefactions is prodigious. In 1908 it was estimated that he had given over £57,000,000 in America, over £7,000,000 in Great Britain, and £1,000,000 in Europe. Education, public libraries, organs, peace movements, and the Hero Funds were the best known of his objects. The two conspicuous omissions from a set of objects thought out with much care were hospitals and churches.

There has been much difference of opinion as to the utility of his beneficence. His endowment of the Scottish universities, in particular, has been singled out for adverse comment. But it is to be remembered that the introduction of the system of options and several other important changes, such as the reflex effect of the endowments on secondary schools, were the work of the Carnegie Trustees and their advisers, rather than of Carnegie.

From boyhood Carnegie was a reader, and in middle age he developed an inclination to write. His first two books, An American Four-in-Hand in Great Britain and Round the World, were very obvious descriptions of luxurious travel. Triumphant Democracy, published in 1886, was an echo of political ideas imbibed in boyhood and a scream of eulogy of American democratic institutions, to the disparagement of his native country. Wealth, published in 1886, and The Empire of Business, which appeared in 1902, contained naïve but rather engaging egotism mingled with his philanthropic aspirations. Problems of To-day, published in 1908, is his best book. It consists of nine social-economic essays on wealth and labour, informed with his own experience and written from an anti-Socialistic point of view.

Carnegie’s private life was simple, wholesome, and unostentatious. He had no vices and eschewed luxury and display. He was a bachelor until he was 50, when he married Miss Whitfield, of New York. Thereafter he never wearied of extolling domestic life. He has one child, a daughter, whose recent marriage was one of the great events of American life.

His principal amusements were entertaining, fishing, and golf. There were few distinguished persons whose acquaintance he did not make, and no one could come in contact with him without being impressed by the strong and shrewd character underlying a superficial but real good nature.

In later life he lived chiefly at Skibo Castle in Sutherlandshire, and his early detestation of British institutions could not be maintained when he voluntarily made his residence there. One of his dreams was the union of Great Britain and the United States. The other great dream, the abolition of war, received a great shock in 1914. During the conflict he relapsed into complete silence and seclusion.

Alexander Graham Bell

Inventor of the telephone, whose interest was the mechanism of speech

3 August 1922

The whole world owes a great debt to Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, whose death is announced on another page, for his invention of the telephone as it exists to-day. He will assuredly be remembered among the great inventors whose pioneer work has profoundly affected the daily life of all civilised peoples.

The telephone is an electrical instrument, but Bell was not an electrician nor primarily even a physicist, but rather a physiologist whose interest centred on speech and the mechanism of speech. This interest offers a remarkable example of heredity, for his father, Alexander Melville Bell, was an authority on physiological phonetics, and his grandfather, Alexander Bell, one on phonetics and defective speech. Both of them were Scotsmen, and he himself was born in Edinburgh, on March 3, 1847, and was educated at the High School and University of that city. When quite a young man he removed across the Atlantic with his father, and he was only twenty-five when he was appointed professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. The germ of the great invention with which his name is associated came to life white he was at Brantford, in Canada, and his first instrument was made at Boston, though it was descended, perhaps a little irregularly, from observations he had made when he was a pupil teacher in Elgin, Scotland.

At Brantford, in the middle of 1874, he was working on a tuned system of multiple telegraphy, and had attained the conception of an undulatory current, realizing that speech could be transmitted if an armature could be moved as the air is moved during the passage of a sound. At the same time he was studying, by means of a dead man’s ear, the movements of the air during the utterance of a sound, and it struck him that as the small membrane that forms the ear drum can move the comparatively heavy chain of bones in the ear, a larger membrane ought to be able to move an iron armature. By the linking up of these two branches of inquiry the telephone was evolved.

Bell made his first rough speaking telephone in 1875, and the first long-distance transmission of speech dates from August, 1876, when the Dominion Telegraph Company lent him their wires for experiments, the transmitting apparatus being in Paris, Ontario, and the receiver in Brantford, eight miles away. At first transmission was in one direction only, but a few months later, after his return to Boston, reciprocal conversations were carried on between two persons at a distance from each other.

To begin with, the invention was received with a certain amount of incredulity, which on some occasions was perhaps not entirely unjustified. There is a story that when Sir William Preece, at the Royal Institution, was exhibiting some of the earliest specimens brought to this country, he arranged for a wire to Southampton, where he stationed a man with a cornet, who was to play during the lecture. Members of the audience in London were invited to listen to the strains from Southampton, and a little doubtfully admitted that they heard them, but it was afterwards found that the cornet-player had mistaken the day. Even when it was beyond doubt that the apparatus would work, there were shrewd financiers who missed fortunes through regarding it as a mere toy, and Bell told how, in the early days of the commercial exploitation of the telephone, he “created a great smile” by outlining the central exchange system which exists to-day.

Bell was also the inventor of the photo-phone and the graphophone, and he made some experiments in artificial flight. He served as president of the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, and was the author of a memoir on the formation of a deaf variety in the human race, and of the census report on the deaf of the United States, 1906. He held various honorary degrees, and was the recipient of the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in 1902, and of the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1918. The freedom of his native city was conferred on him during a visit he paid to this country at the end of 1920.

It was during that visit also that he gave to The Times an interesting account of the romance of the telephone, which appeared on November 25 in that year. He then made the following comment when asked what he thought of the British telephone system: −

I do not want to say too much about it. I think you do very well, but you do not compare well with the United States, and I think recent history in the United States reveals the cause. We had the best system of telephony in the world before the war in the United States. Then we came into the war, the telephone was taken out of the hands of private companies and run by the Government. Immediately the efficiency of the service fell. Now the control has been returned to the companies, and I hope the efficiency will improve. The decrease in efficiency in consequence of Government ownership is found elsewhere. I visited Australia some years ago, and the telephone system, which was in the hands of the Government, could not be compared to ours in America. I am afraid that the comparatively low state of efficiency in this country as compared with our system in the United States must be attributed to Government ownership. Government ownership aims at cheapness, and cheapness does not necessarily mean efficiency.

Our experience in the United States, now that the control has been returned to the private companies, will form a good test of the value of private ownership. We have hardly a house without the telephone, but in Scotland a few days ago, looking through the telephone lists in our large cities, I was struck by the small number of private individuals with telephones. The telephone certainly has not gone into the homes here as it has in the United States. We do not mind paying for a good service, but we certainly object to pay a big price for a poor service.

Bell married in 1877 Mabel Gardiner, daughter of D. D. Hubbard, by whom he had two daughters.

Andrew Bonar Law

‘One of the best-loved figures in our parliamentary history’

31 October 1923

The death of Mr. Bonar Law removes from the political stage, if not one of the greatest, certainly one of the best-loved figures in our Parliamentary history. As Prime Minister, he held office for only a few months, but the House of Commons has had few more successful leaders, and he will be remembered not so much for his brief career as Prime Minister as for the important part he played as a member of the Cabinet during and after the Great War. He was the first Prime Minister, as Mr. Baldwin was the second, who had the qualification of a career in business.

His active life may be divided into three unequal periods. The first is that of the forty-two years which separated his birth, in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1858, from his entry into Parliament in 1900. The second was spent in the House of Commons as a follower and then a colleague of Mr. Balfour in his Ministry, and subsequently in Opposition. The third dates from November 13, 1911, when on the retirement of Mr. Balfour he was unanimously elected leader of the Unionist Party in the House of Commons; and was concluded by his resignation of the Premiership on May 21, 1923.

Andrew Bonar Law was not born to hereditary wealth, like so many of our Prime Ministers, nor was he, like all of them before Disraeli, brought up in contact with the great political world, and in full view of its activities and ambitions. He had neither family connexions nor Eton friendships nor Oxford distinctions to smooth his path to political success. Nor had he the literary and social genius which made Disraeli well known when he was little more than a boy.

Young Law, the son of a Presbyterian minister and a Glasgow mother, spent his earliest years in Canada, but was soon sent to the High School in Glasgow, and, when school-days were over, placed in business with a Glasgow firm of iron merchants, who were of a family related to his own. He had a marked success as a man of business, and, if that had been his ambition, he might no doubt have become one of the magnates of the industries of the Clyde.

Like Joseph Chamberlain, with whom he was soon to be so closely connected, he decided, comparatively early in life, that he had made as much money as he needed, and that it was time to gratify the political ambitions which he had entertained from boyhood. The result was that in 1900 he retired from business and entered Parliament as Conservative member for the Blackfriars Division of Glasgow.

Few men have made their mark more quickly. His first speech, a reply to an attack by Mr. Lloyd George on the conduct of the South African War, attracted attention, not only by its argumentative power, but by its exhibition of his extraordinary gift, conspicuous throughout his career, for dealing with a complicated series of facts and arguments without the assistance of a single note. This speech won for him the warm congratulations of his leaders and the admiration of the House. But the Press Gallery was not equally complimentary; and in later years he would tell the story of his disappointment when, conscious of his success, he looked to see what the newspapers would say of him, and got no better reward for his trouble than the remark that “the debate was continued with characteristic dullness by Mr. Bonar Law.” To the very end his great qualities were far more clearly perceived and appreciated by members of Parliament than they were by the world outside.

He became Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Trade in 1902, and when, during the following year, Chamberlain proposed the policy of Tariff Reform and resigned in order to preach it, Bonar Law was perhaps his most active, convinced, and convincing supporter.

The country, however, did not respond to the appeals either of Chamberlain or of Bonar Law. Mr. Balfour, who struck an uncertain note, resigned, and the Unionist Party was routed at the General Election which followed in January, 1906. Bonar Law lost his seat, but soon returned to Parliament as member for Dulwich. The failure of Chamberlain’s health increased Bonar Law’s importance among Tariff Reformers, who saw in him the ablest exponent of their views.

At the second General Election of 1910, Bonar Law, abandoning his safe seat, came near to victory in a gallant fight in North-West Manchester. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party grew more and more dissatisfied with Mr. Balfour’s leadership, and he resigned in the autumn of 1911. The Conservative members of Parliament seemed almost equally divided between the claims of Mr. Long and Mr. Austen Chamberlain to the succession. All but those who were very much behind the scenes were surprised when the difficulty was solved by the retirement of both in favour of Mr. Bonar Law, who had returned to the House as member for Bootle. One of the reasons in his favour was, no doubt, that, though at least as convinced a Tariff Reformer as Mr. Austen Chamberlain, he had a name less alarming to those who did not love that policy. The rest was done by his ability in debate, and by the general liking which his unpretentious kindliness, simplicity, and common sense had won from his party, and, indeed, from the House as a whole.

Bonar Law held the Leadership for over nine years, and the first three and a half of these were spent in Opposition. Naturally enough, having come in to make good what was considered Mr. Balfour’s weakness, he was more tempted to exhibit the opposite fault. No leader of Opposition has ever taken up a more uncompromising attitude than Bonar Law assumed as against all the policies of the Asquith Ministry. No doubt he was fortified by the probably well-founded conviction that not one of these policies would have been ratified by the electorate if it could have been submitted as a single issue. It was with this feeling that he declared that a meaner Bill, or one brought forward by meaner methods, than the Welsh Disestablishment Bill had never been introduced into Parliament.

On the Irish question, no prominent Conservative, except Sir Edward Carson, went further than the Leader of the party in uncompromising resistance to the proposals of the Ministry. He went over to Belfast, and at a great demonstration of Ulstermen advised them to trust to themselves, prophesying that if they did so they would save themselves by their exertions and save the Empire by their example. And in July, 1912, he said, in a speech at Blenheim, that he could imagine no lengths of resistance to which the Ulstermen might go in which he would not be prepared to support them, subsequently declaring in Parliament that these words were deliberate and had been written down beforehand.

There is this at least to be said with confidence about his Irish attitude. He fixed his attention on what the history of the next ten years proved to have been the real point, though Mr. Asquith’s Government attempted to ignore it till their blindness had led the country to the verge of civil war. The World War prevented the possibility of the Irish war, but when the question again became alive it had become clear to all that Bonar Law had been right in always regarding the problem of Ulster as the vital one.

The moment it became obvious that the risk of war was acute and immediate, Bonar Law gave an assurance of Opposition support to Mr. Asquith. And the promise was more than fulfilled. All that a leader of Opposition could do to encourage the King’s Government and strengthen its hands was done by Bonar Law from the eve of the declaration of war.

Ten months later, he and his friends were invited by Mr. Asquith to share the responsibilities of office. The post which Bonar Law took was that of Colonial Secretary but his most important work as a Minister was not departmental. He showed admirable loyalty to the Prime Minister, as Mr. Asquith frequently testified.

But he became gradually dissatisfied with a certain lack of vigour in the conduct of the war, and in December, 1916, he supported Mr. Lloyd George in his demand that it should be entirely entrusted to a Committee of four, of whom the Prime Minister was not one. The strangest thing about this strange proposal is that Mr. Asquith considered accepting a slight modification of it. It was made on December 1. By the 5th Mr. Asquith had definitely rejected it, and first Mr. Lloyd George and then Mr. Asquith resigned.

The King naturally invited Mr. Bonar Law to form a Ministry, but Mr. Lloyd George was plainly the man of the moment, and he became Prime Minister on December 7. He formed a War Cabinet of five, of whom, of course, one was Bonar Law, who, taking the lead of the House of Commons, was not expected to attend the Cabinet as regularly as the other four, but was effectively Leader of the House of Commons, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a member of the War Cabinet.

In this third capacity he played a less conspicuous part; but he knew what he wanted and meant to get it. “We are fighting for peace now,” he told the Pacifists, “and for security for peace in the time to come; you cannot get that by treaty. There can be no peace till the Germans are beaten and know that they are beaten.”

The Ministry decided to appeal to the country directly after the Armistice, and to make their appeal as a Coalition, though most of the Labour Ministers resigned and the Labour Party had their separate election programme. Bonar Law, who was himself returned for Central Glasgow, a seat which he held till his death, joined with the Prime Minister in issuing a manifesto to the electors which was completely successful in winning the election, but had disastrous results when it was won.