Why are paisley people called buddies

The adjacent Place ie Palace of Paisley survived the Reformation and was a mansion house and then a slum dwelling, and for a while public house, before restoration. In this restoration streets of densely packed slums, which had blocked out the abbey, were demolished to create the open vista of today. Though founded as an ecclesiastical centre, it was the development of the textile industry in the eighteenth and even more nineteenth centuries, that made Paisley world famous and for a while Scotland's third largest centre of population after Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Just south of the Abbey at the Hammills waterfall on the Cart, stands the imposing bulk of one of Paisley's former mills, now sympathetically converted into flats. This was the Anchor Mill, which was founded in by the Clark family, to harness the power of the Cart and the mill underwent continuing expansion for almost a century. Here was first produced thread wound on wooden spools, of the kind which I can still remember from my childhood days.

These spools or bobbins were recyclable, and when returned brought a halfpenny off the price of a new reel of cotton thread. By Paisley was described as "the dirtiest and most unhealthy town in Scotland" and rather more favourably another observer commented, "The town was full of smoky grime and industrial vigour, drunker squalour and puritanical religion. But it was poor. Just west of the Abbey is found the Clark Town Hall, which must be the most imposing example of such a structure of any town in Scotland.

Fitting indeed, though since continually failing in its efforts to become a city, Paisley is Scotland's largest town. The burgh's population peaked at around at 90,, but like other industrial towns in recent decades, has lost population, and now has 75, inhabitants. Further marble busts of members of the Clark family are found at the entrance to the Town Hall.

It was not just money these entrepreneurs were after, but immortality! And in the days before death duty and inheritance tax, such sums were petty cash. Still in use for social functions, the Clark Town Hall's role has been transferred to the quite ghastly Renfrew Council Offices to the east of the Abbey.

Around the area of the Town Hall and Cross are what must stand as the largest collection of public sculptures in Scotland outside of Glasgow and Edinburgh city centres. As well as those of the Clarks mentioned, are the statues of luminaries of the Coats dynasty by Rhind at the northern end of Dunn Square, as well as the obligatory one of Queen Victoria in the square itself.

An excellent short leaflet is available on these, and the other public sculptures of Paisley, from the Tourist Information Office in Gilmour Street. But the Buddies have not neglected recognition for their town's less affluent citizens. In Abbey Close Paisley's greatest weaver poet Robert Tannahill is commemorated in this open air sculpture park, as is the less well known Alexander Wilson. Less well known in Scotland that is, than in the USA, where the self-educated weaver emigrated and became regarded as the founder of North American ornithology.

A memorial frieze commemorates Wilson's childhood playground at the Hammills. Tannahill's fate was less happy. He killed himself when his poetry failed to extricate him for the drudgery of the loom.

The melancholy cast of his mind is evident in many of his poems. Keen blaws the wind o'er the braes o' Gleniffer The auld castle's turrets are covered wi' snaw How changed fae the time when I met wi' my lover Amang the brume bushes by Stanely green shaw. His cottage lies a little to the west of the town centre, on Queen Street, a place of pilgrimage for his devotees, as well as the meeting place of the Paisley Burns Club, which Tannahill founded in Formerly "thackit" the cottage is now slated.

Tannahill's best known poem is probably, "Will ye go, lassie, go? Before the coming of factory methods of production, Paisley was a centre of hand loom weaving.

Versatile, the "wabsters" could turn their hand to linen, silk, or cotton. Their fame was recorded by Burns, when he dressed the graveyard temptress in Tam o Shanter in "Her cutty sark, o Paisley harn". Like many of their bretheren, the Paisley weavers were radicals in politics and religion, but to an even greater extent, were given to composing poetry.

Radicalism and Paisley went together: possibly because Paisley remained, until comparatively recently, one of the poorest towns in Scotland. Poverty maybe also the source of the Buddies alleged meanness. As one local rhymster put it,.

Paisley's name is widely spread And history doth show it's Been famed alike for shawls and thread, For poverty and poets. The Paisley weavers were a radical lot, given to strikes and rioting in defense of their wages long before the ideas of the ideas of French Revolution came along.

The weavers, educated and intelligent, adopted those ideas to a man. As Alexander Wilson put it,. Wilson escaped to America when powerful local dignitaries were offended by his writings, and also escaped from the loom, which he did not love. One book of his poems was called Groans from the Loom. In there was a week's rioting in Paisley High Street as the authorities tried to suppress demonstrations in favour of parliamentary reform, and in the Radical War of nowhere was more radical than Paisley, when thousands of local workers went on strike and some went as far as to take up arms for political reform.

In a series of treason trials in that year in the town, the defendants were acquitted. Paisley's radicalism continued into the Chartist period in the s and 40s, when a surprising local leader of the agitation to gain working men the vote was the Rev.

Partick Brewster. His denunciations of the rich and powerful at a time when poverty was endemic and cholera rampant, meant he was passed over for the post of main minister at the Abbey when it became vacant. The weaving part of Paisley's industrial history is commemorated in the Sma' Shot Cottages in Shuttle Street, just a short walk from the Town Hall, which show how the weavers lived and worked.

At the entry to New Street it is worth stopping to admire the Russell Institute, another charitable endowment "to buddies from a buddy"- one Mrs Russell. Built in as a child clinic by local architect James Maitland, it is probably Paisley's greatest twentieth century building.

Dawson's sculptures of mothers and children complement this Beaux Art masterpiece. Today it is a family planning centre. No such social welfare was available for the weavers in the sma' shot cottages, whose lives can be relived on Wednesdays and Saturdays afternoons in the summer months. In their restored form these are very picturesque buildings, but the life of the weaver became harder and harder as the nineteenth century progressed. Faced with the competition from factory production and power driven Jaquard looms from the s, the hand-loom weaver worked longer and longer hours for less and less pay.

In Cobbet said "the weavers of Paisley are covered in rags and half-starved. This was the Paisley charge of John Witherspoon before he went to America and became the principal of Princeton Presbyterian College in Witherspoon is more famous as being the only clergyman to sign the US Declaration of independence, in Though he was not a Buddy by birth, Paisley is milking Witherspoon for all his worth, and a huge statue of the theologian has recently been erected outside Paisley University, which has established links with Princeton University through the Witherspoon connection.

Witherspoon Street takes you to Storie Street and then a left turn along Wellmeadow Street lands you in front of the imposing bronze cast monument to Paisley's adoptive son.

Executed by Alexander Stoddart, Paisley cunningly gifted a copy of the sculpture to Princeton. Who says Buddies are mean? Interestingly, Witherspoon left Paisley after his attempts to reform the morals of the population had largely failed, and even landed him in court on a libel charge. Gallacher was born in Paisley, but spent most of his life in political struggles in Glasgow, where he was a prominent figure in the Clyde Workers Committee and the strikes during World War One, and thereafter his work amongst the Fife miners resulted in his becoming their MP in Though spending most of his active life away from Paisley, Gallacher returned to the town, and died in a council flat in Forty thousand people followed his coffin, draped in the red flag to Woodside Crematorium.

Stoddart has also been commissioned to commemorate another local Buddy, Thomas Tait the architect, and one of Britain's foremost in the 20th century.

But to return to our promenade. On the other side of Wellmeadow Street from Witherspoon's statue, we can see more examples of Paisley philanthropy, rather than Paisley parsimony. The Museum and Art Gallery, funded by contributions from the town's wealthy textile capitalists, especially the Coats, lies across from the University, as does the Thomas Coats Memorial Church of , paid for by the family and notable more for its vast bulk - the size of many a cathedral - rather than any great architectural quality, in my opinion.

But it made sure that the Buddies would never forget the Coats. Thomas Coats died in , and was followed by his great rival John Clark in Competition between the firms gave way to price fixing as time went by and then came amalgamation, when Coats swallowed up the Clarks concern in The Coats had a mansion in Ferguslie, an estate at Glentanar on Deeside, and a collection of yachts, one a ft steam driven one. But what about the workers, I hear you ask? News Guardian. Recent queries.

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