19th Century - Income and Wealth

The degree of wealth-holding in Scottish society is difficult to measure in the absence of reliable data, but from what research has been carried out into the subject there were some very wealthy Scots in the 19th century and a good deal of prosperous members of the middle classes. Of the forty largest fortunes in Britain in the period 1809-1914, six were Scottish. They included the Lanarkshire ironmasters, William Baird and William Weir, the Paisley thread manufacturers, Peter and James Coats, and Charles Tennant, chemical manufacturer. The only landowner to appear was the third Marquis of Bute. All were worth more than two million pounds when they died. Although on first appearances not as wealthy as some of the industrialists, the landed aristocracy were still fabulously rich compared to most Scots.

 The Duke of Sutherland owned 90.5%, or 1,176,343 acres, of Sutherland in 1874 which yielded him an annual rental of £56,395; while the Duke of Buccleugh owned 37.4%, or 254,179 acres of Dumfries-shire, which gave him an annual rental of £95,239 plus £3,012 from mining. It is obvious that landowners were far more wealthy than estate records showed. In terms of the distribution of income, a study in 1867 showed that less than 1% of the population received a quarter of national income in Scotland, and that just over 8% of the population received 46%. The top 1% of Scottish society enjoyed a personal annual income 200 times that of the lowest 30%. The disparity in the distribution of income can be seen when one compares the estate of the late James Baird, iron master, who died in 1876 leaving £1,190,868, with the annual earnings of a highly skilled compositor in the printing trade. With an annual income of £78 in 1880, the compositor would have to work for over 15,000 years before he could amass the size of Bairds' fortune.

 A further study of wills in 1881 underlined the uneven distribution of income in 19th century Scotland. In that year only 12% of the population who died left an estate worth confirming. Of these the majority (57%) left £100-1,000 on death. Less than 1% of Dundee estates were worth more than £10,000; while in Glasgow 4% of wealth-leavers accounted for 80% of wealth left in that year. The very rich spent their income on supporting a lavish lifestyle which centred on the gentlemanly pursuits of hunting, fishing and shooting and all the social trappings that went with it. Hunting lodges in the Highlands were built for this purpose, costing between £10,000-£70,000 for the best equipped and furnished, and around £3,000-£6,000 for the more modest. To support this growing industry the number of gamekeepers grew from a few in the 1830s to 1,050 in 1868. Half a million grouse were being shot annually in the 1890s.

 Below the fabulously rich came a substantial property-owning and professional middle class. While fewer in number than in England, the extent of their wealthholding can be gathered from the Schedule D income tax assessments. A study of the assessments for the year 1879-80 in provincial towns of over 100,000 inhabitants shows that Edinburgh was the third wealthiest British town paying £21 2s per inhabitant, with Glasgow fifth in the league paying £16 8s per inhabitant. A long way behind came Aberdeen and Dundee, but even here paying £9 6s and £8 8s respectively, they were seen as wealthier than Leeds or Sheffield. For the working classes the situation was somewhat different.

 The study of national income in 1867 showed that 70% of working or 'productive' Scots - young, female and unskilled - had an annual income of less than £30 a year. However, skilled workers might expect to earn between £47 and £50 a year at this time. But how did this compare with other parts of Britain? Research has shown that Scottish wages were low in comparison to English in the first half of the 19th century. But as the 19th century wore on the margin of difference narrowed. In the 1820s and 1830s surveys showed that Scottish wages were often 20-25% lower than identical English trades. By the 1860s they were reckoned to be between 16-19% lower. But much of the evidence was patchy and it Page 5.INCOME was not until the UK wage census of 1886 that more reliable data was forthcoming. Only then could genuine comparisons be made between Scottish and English wages. The 1886 Census provided evidence that the differential between earnings north and south of the border had indeed been narrowing, with Scots earning 94.8% of the English rate. 

However, it must be remembered that the census records are based on wage rates rather than actual earnings. The census did not take into account factors such as the amount of overtime working, the frequency of unemployment, and other influences on the take home pay of a Scottish worker. In the building trades, for example, workers regardless of skill would find employment hard to come by in the months November to February.

Other occupations, too, were also hit hard by seasonal unemployment. It has been estimated that broken time affected the wages of about 1 in 4 of Scottish male workers. Notwithstanding these qualifications, the census data has provided conflicting interpretations. For RH Campbell it proved without a shadow of a doubt that Scotland was a low wage economy; however, EH Hunt was more optimistic, viewing wages in Scotland's central belt as near the national average. In reality both were right.

In certain occupations, such as cotton, shipbuilding, construction and printing, the earnings of Scots workers were significantly below the UK average. In engineering, carpet manufacture, distilling there was little difference, and in coal mining and linen manufacture there was a slight advantage over England. The next wage census was in 1906 which indicated that, with the exception of the cotton industry, there was little or no difference between English and Scottish wages. Scotland had moved from being a low wage region to a high wage one, implying an increase in real wages way above the 80% for Britain as a whole in the second half of the 19th century.

The level of improvement implied in the wage censuses have been greeted with some scepticism by other historians. T.C. Smout suggests that other factors have to be taken into account before drawing the conclusion that Scottish workers on the eve of the 1st World War were enjoying hitherto unknown prosperity. These include the fact that there were substantial numbers of unskilled workers, such as shipbuilding labourers and girls in textiles, who were badly paid by any standard. Employers in the supposedly high waged shipbuilding industry deliberately inflated average earnings of riveters in their evidence to the wage census.

Also the cost of living was higher in Scotland than in England. Rodger points out that for an identical basket of food in 1912 Dundonians paid 10.2%, and Glaswegians 5.7%, more than Mancunians. Again there is the question of regional differences to take into account. Wages tended to be higher in the industrial counties of Scotland than in the rural or semi-rural areas. Glasgow carpenters and joiners averaged 36s 1.5d (£1 81p) a week in the early 1890s compared to only 27s 7.5d (£1 38p) in Aberdeen for a 51 hour week. This also applied to unskilled earnings with building labourers in Aberdeen earning only 21s 3d (£1 6p) a week in 1905 compared to 25s 6d (£1 22p) in Paisley. Similarly, agricultural wages in southern Scotland substantially increased during the 19th century and by 1907 it was one of the four best paid farm areas in Great Britain. But agricultural labour was poorly paid in comparison to industrial workers.

Further north the position was even worse. Agricultural workers in Tayside and Grampian still earned 1% less than the Great British average by 1907, while in the Highlands they were 13% below. Indeed, the crofting counties had the lowest incomes of any region in the Great Britain. Poverty was also experience by homeworkers in sweated trades in urban centres. These workers were mainly married women or widows who endured long hours for little return. In Edinburgh needlewomen were thought to earn 4-5s (20-25p) a week in the mid1840s. By 1906 shirtmakers in Glasgow had a gross income of 8s (40p) a week in exceptional cases, with the average being about 4-5s (20-25p). It was not said for nothing that homeworkers 'slaved in the summer, and starve in the winter'. Thus by the end of the 19th century Scotland had become a more prosperous society and had caught up with some occupations in England, although certain groups of income earners, particularly homeworkers, had failed to keep pace with the rise in living standards.

sources - Statistical Society, Vol LXI 1898 Paterson, A. 'The Poor Law in 19th century Scotland' in The New Poor Law in the 19th century D. Fraser (ed) 1976 Robertson, D J. 'Wages' in The Scottish Economy AJ. Cairncross (ed) Cambridge, 1954 Rodger, R. 'Employment, Wages and Poverty in the Scottish Cities 1841- 1914' in Perspectives of the Scottish Cities G. Gordon (ed) Aberdeen, 1985 25-63 Page 7.INCOME Rubenstein, W D. 'The Victorian Middle Classes: Wealth, Occupation and Geography' in Economic History Review Vol 30 1977 Scott, J. & Hughes, M. The Anatonomy of the Scottish Capital 1980 Smout, T C. A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950 1986 Smout, T C. & Levitt, I. The State of the Scottish Working Class in 1843 (1979) Page 8