William Hammond, Recollections of William Hammond, A Glasgow Hand-Loom Weaver

Abstract

William Hammond was born around 1830 near Stewartstown in County Tyrone to a weaver and a domestic servant, both of whom were Scottish immigrants. He himself emigrated to Glasgow in the 1840s and settled as a pattern weaver in the Calton district, where he quickly became involved in secular education and trade union politics, as the following excerpt from his Recollections makes clear. Elsewhere in his autobiography he records his acquaintanceship with European radicals and revolutionaries who visited mid-Victorian Glasgow, including Garibaldi, Louis Blanc and Lajos Kossuth, and reveals that he was a member of a committee established to help Hungarian refugees who fled the country after the 1849 revolution. Hammond dwells only briefly on his political and trade union activities, however. Most of the book’s 11 chapters are given over to detailed accounts of his walking adventures with the Bridgeton Rambling Club, of which he was the last surviving member. A prefatory note explains that Hammond’s life-story was recorded and edited for publication by one Thomas Lugton, the author himself being too infirm to use a pen in his old age. The book was published under the auspices of the Glasgow Campbell Club, a society established by students of Glasgow University in honour of the poet Thomas Campbell.