ALEXANDER TOUGH (b. 1770) AND THE CLYDE ROPEWORKS

I am part of the diaspora of the Tough family. In various spellings and pronunciations, the name comes reputedly from Norman knights called De Touche who fought alongside William the Conqueror. The name may have been given to the knights by their English opponents – one source suggests it comes from an Old English word “toh,” meaning “vigorous, steadfast or stubborn.” I’m proud to be toh.

By the fourteenth century their descendants had settled in the northeast of Scotland around Aberdeen. It was there, at Kirkton of Tough, that Aberdeen Angus beef cattle were first raised. Through time my ancestors began to spread southwards in search of work, and my own direct line echoes the experience of working men and women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Kirkton of Tough, near Alford, Aberdeenshire

First they became tenant farmers in the fertile plains of Stirlingshire. Later they adopted the new technologies of the industrial revolution, becoming roadside blacksmiths, enginemen and ironworkers. As education spread among the working classes, so my great grandfather John Scott Tough became a clerk in the ironworks instead of a manual worker. And his son Jack became a doctor, a pioneering plastic surgeon.

Other branches of my Tough ancestry acquired new trades. The family of the surgeon’s cousins moved into the city of Glasgow and pursued a related career, as butchers! Residents of Clydebank still remember the slogan over the shop door on Kilbowie Road – “If it’s Tough’s, it’s Tender!” And of course they sold Aberdeen Angus beef.

Tough’s the butcher was on Kilbowie Road in Clydebank near the Singer railway station (which is on the left in this 1930s view) – perhaps it was that striped awning on the right

Tough is a great name for a slogan in some businesses, perhaps not others. The butcher turned it to his advantage; and for Alexander Tough & Co, of the Clyde Ropeworks in Greenock (opposite Clydebank across the River Clyde) it should have been a positive boon to its advertising. In fact the family firm, founded by Alexander Tough in 1796, seems only to have woken up to the fact in 1961, the year they changed their name to Tough Ropes.

By the time Tough Ropes closed down in 1979, it was the last firm in Scotland making ropes for marine and land-based industry. It remained in Tough family ownership throughout its 183 year history, surviving and adapting to the changing demands of the shipping world. In its lifetime it saw high-rigged sailing ships vanish in favour of steam; coastal shipping decline with the advent of trains and motor cars; hemp give way to nylon; and wars once fought by navies being conducted by air forces.

Clyde Ropeworks were one of several along the Clyde estuary which grew to serve the ship-building industry there – these ones were at neighbouring Gourock

The Second World War was perhaps its finest hour. By then Alexander Tough’s great great grandson George Hughes Tough was at the helm. The demand for naval rope was at its highest, while the supply of raw materials from the Far East was disrupted. The Clyde estuary was a frequent target of German air raids and both Greenock and Clydebank suffered enormously from blitz bombardment. The Clyde Ropeworks were themselves damaged in May 1941 (and elsewhere their London office and their Cardiff stores were completely destroyed). But within two days they were back in production, using substitute materials when imported ones were no longer available and – their justifiably proud boast – meeting every order placed with them, with not a single coil of rope rejected. Toh indeed!

JOHN TOUGH (b. 1849) AND THE TRIPS ABROAD

For at least five generations, the Tough family lived and worked in the tiny triangle of Scotland defined by Larbert, Falkirk and the village of Dunipace. They were blacksmiths and joiners, skills very much in demand at the largest local employer, the giant Carron Ironworks. Directly or indirectly the works sustained a massive and thriving economy in the densely populated central belt of Scotland, driving the emerging industrial revolution. There was work and opportunity for all.

You would think there was no incentive to travel out of the area, but my great great grandfather John Tough was out of the country at least twice. The first time was without his consent or knowledge! John’s father (also John) was a roadside blacksmith, and for a few years in the 1840s he found himself working 250 miles away “down south,” in Staffordshire.

I don’t know what took him there. It’s very tempting to imagine that it was in some way connected with that English cradle of the industrial revolution, Coalbrookdale, home of Abraham Darby’s ironworks just over the county border in Shropshire. Darby’s pioneering techniques had inspired the founders of Carron.

Certainly it was a Shropshire barmaid, Betsy Vaughan, who caught John Senior’s eye and who fell for his Scottish charm. They married, and their first three children, including John Junior, were born in Staffordshire. So by the time the family returned to Dunipace (in time for the 1851 census) John was already well travelled.

By 1861, at the tender age of 12, John and his 9-year old brother David were in harness as footservants for the rather grander Gilchrist family up the road in Airth. But as soon as he was old enough and strong enough for hard manual work he started at the local sawmill – first, stoking the steam-driven engines which hauled the logs and drove the circular saws, and later operating the machines himself.

It was responsible and relatively well paid work. In time John married Grace, a girl from nearby Grangemouth, and raised his own family (including my great grandfather, another John). He could afford little luxuries and even save a little money for special occasions; and in the 1890s he took the family away on holiday, to Northern Ireland.

The cross-channel steamer from Glasgow arriving in Portrush (1904)

Although excursions had been growing in popularity and availability since their introduction by Thomas Cook in 1841, a journey from Dunipace to the Giant’s Causeway was still quite an undertaking. Those less well-off would settle for the daytrip “doon the watter” by paddle steamer from Glasgow to Dunoon.

The Giant’s Causeway Electric Tramway passing Dunluce Castle (1890)

But until the First World War a steamer service carried more affluent Scottish holidaymakers direct from Glasgow to Portrush, the resort town for the Giant’s Causeway. In the last two years of the service, 25,000 passengers travelled in each direction. John would have had a journey of several trains to take him as far as Glasgow, and a tramline from Portrush Railway Station ferried holidaymakers to the Causeway itself.

John Tough (b. 1849) seated, his son John (b. 1879) standing

and a daughter (probably either Grace or Bessie)

– Giant’s Causeway, 1890s

However well travelled my great great grandfather was, it must have been the holiday of a lifetime.

JOHN TOUGH (c1879-1944) AND THE CARRON IRON WORKS

John Tough was my great grandfather. Until recently, when I found some thorough work posted by someone else on the internet which pushed them back another three generations to the end of the eighteenth century, he was as far back as we went in the Tough line. (Tough, by the way, used to be pronounced “Tooch” rather than “Tuff.” It still is, by some surviving older members of the family.)

John Tough (c1879-1944)

Even at that short ancestral distance, we didn’t have much to go on. We knew little about him except his address, in Falkirk in Central Scotland, and his place of work. He was employed at the nearby Carron Iron Works, a company founded in 1759 which was a pioneer at the forefront of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

The factory took advantage of locally abundant iron ore and coal and the plentiful water of the River Carron. By adopting the more efficient techniques newly developed at Coalbrookdale in England it became a powerful force in the market, winning lucrative contracts to supply armaments to British and foreign armed forces – both sides fought with Carron weapons in the Anglo-American War of 1812.

A carronade,

displayed in the Maritime Museum Daenholm, Germany

Its big seller was a short-barrelled, close-range cannonade devised by one of its partners and which came to be known as the Carronade. That weapon remained in production for almost eighty years until the 1850s, its sales undoubtedly boosted by the Duke of Wellington’s insistence, also in 1812, that only carronades be supplied to his army fighting the Peninsular War. Carron also manufactured armaments in both the world wars of the twentieth century.

One of the factory’s earliest products had been a cast iron stove so popular that it became common to refer to any such stove as a Carron – Janet Schaw, the ‘Lady of Quality’ who in 1776 met my ancestor John Halliday (see earlier post), wrote that on her arrival in North Carolina her host “received us into a hall which tho’ not very orderly had a cheerful look to which a large Carron stove filled with Scotch coals not a little contributed.”

Edinburgh New Town railings

The company’s non-military products included cast iron bath tubs and metal railings. The astonishing uniformity of Edinburgh’s New Town development (from 1765-1850) was supported in no small measure by the use throughout many of its buildings of Carron railings.

Its work remains highly visible in many parts of Britain because it was one of several foundries producing the ubiquitous red pillar boxes and telephone boxes, so much a part of British street furniture for most of the twentieth century. (Despite their Scottish origins, several of those sited in Scotland were blown up in the 1950s by Scottish protesters when they were cast with the insignia of Queen Elizabeth the Second – Elizabeth is only the first monarch of that name to rule Scotland!)

Iron two, made in Scotland – from girders

(It’s a Scottish joke …)

By the time of John Tough’s death the company had been successful for 185 years. It would survive another 38, but it struggled in the post-war years to compete with  foreign production costs and closed in 1982. It had been, in 1814, the largest iron works in Europe. For 223 years it was the dominant employer in the area and as I now know, my great grandfather was at least the fourth generation of Toughs to work there.