Sir William Arrol & Co.

The Company was founded by William Arrol, born in Houston, Renfrewshire in 1839, the fourth child of Thomas Arrol, a cotton spinner. He started work at the age of nine in a cotton mill, having passed himself off as thirteen. In 1850, the family moved to Paisley and William found work at Coats’s Cotton Thread Manufacturing making bobbins. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a blacksmith at Paisley, supplementing his practical education with night school classes and the purchase of books on engineering.

At end of his apprenticeship William Arrol worked as a journeyman blacksmith with mixed success. Work was not easy to find and in 1858, now aged nineteen, he took a job at Ker’s factory at Paisley. Eventually he was engaged as a foreman at Laidlaw’s Engineering Works in Glasgow. Here he was entrusted with his first bridges: the Greenock and Ayrshire Railway at Greenock in 1865 and the West Pier at Brighton 1866. After two years, Arrol had saved enough money to set up with a friend as boiler and girder makers. However, they incurred heavy losses through non-payment by customers and the partnership was dissolved. On his own again with his small works in Glasgow, in 1871 he was given the construction of railway bridges on the Balerno line in Edinburgh.

In 1872, now in his early thirties, Arrol left his old works and moved to Dalmarnock in south Glasgow. His first important contract was for a bridge over the Clyde at Bothwell for the North British Railway. This bridge, which was 120 feet above the water, was notable for Arrol’s introduction of the idea of building the girders on land and rolling them out pier to pier. In

1875 he built the first of the two great bridges for the Caledonian Railway over the Clyde. Faced by a strike by the riveters he invented a hydraulic riveting machine, later to enjoy widespread use in the shipbuilding industry.

The company was acquired by Clarke Chapman in 1969 and the Dalmarnock Works were closed in 1986.