Scotland and the Sea. Nick Robins
were described as labourers. Emigration progressively attracted the urban population, and ability and skills largely determined the destination of the emigrant. Unskilled labourers tended to go for Canada and Australia, while South Africa and the United States attracted craftsmen and other skilled workers.
Knox concluded:
The outflow of people was made easier by the revolution in transport. The steamship did not dramatically alter the cost of passage from Scotland to the USA, but it did reduce greatly the travelling time. In the 1850s it took around six weeks to cross the Atlantic; in 1914 it took only a week. The reduction in travelling time allowed for temporary migration as well as permanent; something unthinkable in the days of sailing ships. Also if things did not work out in the New World then the price of a steamship ticket brought you back to your native land in a week. Emigration seemed less risky in the age of the steamship.
The movement of Scots continued well into the 20th century. In fact, until 1989–1990 there had been only one year (1932–1933) in which Scotland experienced a greater inflow than outflow of people. Taking the twentieth century as a whole, Scotland … experienced a net loss through emigration of around 2 million people. During the 1920s and 1930s the principal aim of the emigrants was to find work and wages and escape mass unemployment at home. Age-wise this has generally most affected the age group 16–29; in terms of occupation, skilled rather than unskilled workers; and in terms of sex, men rather than women. Although most of the emigrants were able to make a better life for themselves and their families abroad, the impact on Scotland has been less favourable. Many of the most productive and talented Scots have left their birthplace to enrich, both economically and culturally, other countries at the expense of their own.
Scotland’s loss, it seems, was the receiving countries’ gain, but it was this gain that was so crucial to the development of trade and wealth creation. Chapter 8 describes the entrepreneurial, investment and creativity of the expatriate Scot, many of whom became leading merchants and businessmen in Liverpool and London as well as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But it was by no means all bad news for Scotland. The emigrants sailed from their homeland in Scottish-owned ships promoting Scotland as an important focus of shipowning, and once established overseas, the expatriate migrant promoted agriculture and developed trade and merchanting that required a maritime network to export and deliver produce back to the UK. Of course, it was Scottish-owned and managed shipping companies that were preferred for this trade. The deep-sea fleet required servicing and maintaining whilst it was in foreign ports and it was often Scots’ enterprise and know-how that developed the engineering facilities to provide these services.
The Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company in February 1956 with British India Line’s Sangola (1947) under refit. (P&O)
One of the more remarkable examples of success in the engineering field is that of the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company which illustrates how the skills of the Clyde, Aberdeen and other Scottish ports were propagated around the world. John Lamont was an early European settler in Hong Kong who was to become one of the foremost entrepreneurs of the new colony. He was a skilled carpenter and shipbuilder who had left Tiree in search of better reward for his services overseas and arrived in Hong Kong in his mid-thirties. The Chinese ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain in 1842 following their defeat in the Opium Wars. Within a year Lamont had set up a repair yard and slipway at East Point under the sponsorship of Jardine Matheson & Company to service that company’s sailing barques (see chapter 4). Lamont often had a queue of ships awaiting attention, but still managed to build small vessels, including the first foreign ship to be constructed in Hong Kong, the 80-ton schooner Celeste, which he completed as early as February 1843. Ten years later, in 1853, John Lamont built Hong Kong’s first steamship, the wooden-hulled Queen, which had been ordered by local businessman, and fellow Scot, Douglas Lapraik.
In 1859 John Lamont built Hong Kong’s first dry dock, the Lamont Dock, at his yard in Aberdeen (a district on the south side of the colony, named after the British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the Earl of Aberdeen).
John Lamont placed the following advertisement for his dry dock in a local newspaper in April 1861:
It is 335 feet long with a breadth inside the coping stone of 78 feet and a depth of 22 feet. At spring tides the depth of water at the sill of the dock is 18 to 18½ feet and at neap tides from 15 to 16 feet. Attached to the dock are engineering workshops with lathes of all sizes, planing, punching and shearing machines of the best description, a large foundry, saw mills with both vertical and circular saws, a powerful steam hammer, and every requisite and appliance for the repair of vessels both of wood and iron – the whole under the superintendence of European foremen. For particulars regarding docking and other charges, apply at East Point or at Aberdeen.
Lamont was also an innovator, and proposed lining dry docks with rubber, then a new product.
Encouraged by the success of Lamont Dock, he went into partnership with Douglas Lapraik, to construct a larger dock. The British government gave them a grant of £3,000, as there was then no facility in the region that could accommodate the larger British warships of the day. Lamont added yet another dry dock to his enterprise, the Hope Dock, but all this expansion was attracting the attention of the big boys, and in 1865 a consortium formed by P&O, Jardine Matheson and Douglas Lapraik purchased Lamont’s interests to create the Hong Kong, Canton & Whampoa Dock Company.
The Nautical Magazine and Journal of the Royal Naval Reserve, 36, 1867, reported:
On the 15 June, the new dock at Aberdeen belonging to the Hong Kong, Canton, and Whampoa Dock Company, was opened in the presence of the Governor and a large party of invited guests. The dock is, of course, constructed with the intention of accommodating either the ironclad Warrior or Black Prince (for draught of water), or the Pacific Mail Company’s steamer the Great Republic (for breadth of beam) … Under these circumstances, it would not be surprising if Her Majesty’s huge ironclads be sent out to the China station, for the existence of this magnificent dock now opened in Aberdeen Bay, Hong Kong, removes what would otherwise be an insuperable objection to their presence – namely, the impossibility of dock repair in the event of an accident.
A contemporary report, quoted in the Tiree journal Sìl Eòlais, 24, November 2011, described John Lamont:
Slim and bronzed, with humorous grey eyes, Lamont always wore at least one item of Scottish tartan, and spoke such broad Scot that no one understood him when he first arrived. He, like Douglas Lapraik, had settled in Hong Kong with a Chinese ‘Protected Woman’. He was also one of those rare men who were able to move in any society and seemed equally at home whoever he happened to be with … One must admire such a man who could overcome all obstacles, get on with everybody and create for himself a happy home life with his two young boys and their Chinese mother.
Tiree Gaelic would have been Lamont’s first language and he probably learnt most of his English at sea. He was proud of his Scottish identity, and despite the Dress Act which prohibited the personal wearing of tartan from 1746, Lamont sent out a strong message of its nonsense before it was repealed in 1782. Europeans were strongly discouraged from marrying local girls, but Lamont settled down with Awa Moy, and had two sons, Charles in 1847, and Archibald in 1851. The boys were both baptised in 1852 and were sent to a small private school in Peebles and later to Eton. They both settled in Scotland.
John Lamont also returned on a visit to Scotland, and died in Aberdeen in August 1866 at the age of sixty-two. He had certainly done well in his adopted country. He left £1,000 (the equivalent today of £80,000) to his eight Tiree nephews and nieces, and an allowance of £400 a year (the equivalent today of £30,000) to his sons until they reached the age of thirty, when they received their full inheritance. Matheson was his executor.
The Hong Kong and Whampoa Docks were heavily bombed by the Japanese before their invasion of Hong Kong in 1941, but remained operational. The assets of the yard were transferred to the Tsing Yi site of the Hong Kong United Dockyards in the 1970s. In 1985 the area was redeveloped and Lamont’s docks now lie beneath the second largest private housing