Carnegie (2 page)

It’s a God’s mercy I was born a Scotchman, for I do not see how I could ever have been contented to be anything else. The little dour devil, set in her own ways, and getting them, too, level-headed and shrewed, with an eye to the main chance always and yet so lovingly weak, so fond, so led away by song or story, so easily touched to fine issues, so leal [faithful], so true. Ah! you suit me, Scotia, and proud am I that I am your son.

Our Coaching Trip
, 1882, p. 152

A
ndrew Carnegie created more millionaires than anyone before or since. He sold his business for $480 million and gave away tens of thousands of dollars every day. Newspapers even ran prize competitions to gather suggestions on how best he might spend his money. Today his name remains one of the most famous in the world, and from New York’s Carnegie Hall to the thousands of libraries he endowed, his memorials in stone outstrip all comers. Born in poverty, he walked with kings and statesmen and knew the great and good of his days from Theodore Roosevelt to Rudyard Kipling, from Mark Twain to Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.

But who was Andrew Carnegie? How did he become rich? Many books have been written about Andrew Carnegie, but for many he remains a shadowy figure whose money – he was dubbed ‘the richest man in the world’ – masks what he was really like. He was born into poverty, raised in a small two-roomed Dunfermline cottage and only went to school for four years in his life, but he challenged penury and advanced education through the provision of libraries and colleges as no one before him had done. Carnegie was a complex character; of no religious bent he nevertheless endowed thousands of church organs. He was known as ‘the King of Steel’, but personally he knew little about its actual manufacture. He had no diplomas in management, but succeeded in having hundreds of people working for him. In truth, he never really worked hard in his adult life: instead he travelled and socialised while others made money for him.

Whence did Andrew Carnegie obtain his golden touch, or his restless energy and sleepless ambition? Who influenced his life the most? This book seeks some answers. He admitted that he received his ‘brains’ from his domineering mother, and said that one of the driving forces of his life and spectacular career was his devotion to her. He even promised never to marry while she was alive. But the basis of Andrew Carnegie’s success rested on more than his mother’s character, and we go in search of these other folk and events.

In charting the life of Andrew Carnegie from poor Dunfermline weaver’s boy, through telegraph operator, railway developer, iron and steel manufacturer, oil magnate, banker and miscellaneous entrepreneur, we seek the real man behind the name. But he laid many false trails. He could be capitalist and socialist in the same breath, republican and democrat in the same sentence. Was he the true philanthropist that his remarkable trusts would suggest, or the robber baron of leftist academe? Was his promotion of ‘self-help’ a disguise for his own greed? Was he a naive fool, in self-appointedly pursuing international peace and, as has been pointed out, acting as a blinkered ‘ambassador extraordinary’ for the rapacious Kaiser Wilhelm II before the First World War? Did his competitive spirit only harm the workers he purported to champion? In looking at Andrew Carnegie’s life in new areas, and following different slants and angles, some further answers will be sought. As fellow-Scot Sir James Barrie said in his play
What Every Woman Knows
, ‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.’

A word, a look, an accent, may affect the destiny not only of individuals, but of nations.

Autobiography
, 1920

P
attiesmuir lies on the southern edge of what was the boundary of the old parishes of Dunfermline and Inverkeithing in the Kingdom of Fife.
¹
Today, as when Andrew Carnegie’s forebears lived there, Pattiesmuir – or ‘the hamlet of the muir’ – hardly seems a likely centre of revolutionary thought. Yet two hundred years ago it seethed with secessionism and radicalism.
²
Once a part of the lands of the Benedictine Abbey of Dunfermline, Pattiesmuir fell within the policies of the Earls of Elgin & Kincardine, and it developed in the lee of the hill that slopes southward to the Firth of Forth.

Writing in 1793, the Presbyterian minister of Inverkeithing, Andrew Robertson, commented that the folks hereabouts were in general ‘sober, industrious, and attentive’; he saw them as ‘kind and hospitable’ and ‘much given to company and entertainments in each others houses’. They were, said the Revd Robertson, ‘united in the same political sentiments and views’, but he regretted that, ‘Burgh politics, and the election of members of Parliament, had an unhappy influence upon the morals of the people’. The minister greatly disapproved of the ‘animosity’ engendered at election times.
³

Old Rosyth churchyard contains the unmarked Carnegie graves
⁴
and the burial places of the local folk described by the Revd Robertson, and the whole area, where the King of the Gypsies once had a palace, was later overshadowed by the nearby town and naval base of Rosyth established in 1903–9. Before that no principal highways came directly to Pattiesmuir, although the main route from the Queensferry Passage on the Forth to the north-west was nearby; nevertheless the hamlet enjoyed a vigorous life of its own.

Within this late eighteenth-century weaving society evolved Andrew Carnegie’s paternal roots. The Carnegies were a Lowland family and were property owners in Fife; the county was then called Fifeshire (usually with the suffix NB for North Britain). Their surname was derived from a Gaelic place name –
Caither an eige
, ‘fort at the gap’ – and appears in Fife charters from the late sixteenth century. At that time, one Magister David Carnegie of Kinnaird married Elizabeth Ramsay of Colluthie, in the north Fife parish of Moonzie; his second wife Euphame Wemyss was the mother of David, 1st Earl of Southesk, and John, 1st Earl of Northesk, and of the founders of the principal branches of the Carnegie family in Scotland.
⁵
Nevertheless the not well-off Carnegies of Pattiesmuir asserted no kindred to their wealthy namesakes, nor would they have wished to, although their rich descendant Andrew Carnegie was a friend of the noble Carnegies.

As far as Andrew Carnegie was concerned, his closest ancestor was his great-grandfather, sometime tenant farmer and weaver James Carnegie, who had moved from his ancestral Kincardineshire to set up home at Pattiesmuir around the year 1760, when the Hanoverian Prince William George Frederick, Prince of Wales, ascended the throne of Great Britain as George III. The new king’s Scottish titles included the dukedoms of Rothesay and Edinburgh, and as he got to grips with the reins of government, James Carnegie tackled the problem of earning a living, and married a Fife woman called Charlotte Walker. Records of the Elgin estates show that James Carnegie had the right of ‘turf and divet’ – that is, the right to build for his own use a sod house at Pattiesmuir from local materials.
⁶

Something of a rebel, James Carnegie played a prominent part in the Meal Riots of 1770 and was jailed on a charge of seditious incitement as a result. Nevertheless he earned enough to raise a large family. Customers for his linen came from all classes of society – even Martha, Lady Elgin, wife of the 5th Earl, bought linen from Carnegie.
⁷

James’s eldest son Andrew followed his father’s craft of weaving. Being self-employed and constrained to sell their own wares, the weavers were more mobile than their agricultural neighbours who rarely, if ever, left their home milieux, even in the longest lifetime. So young Andrew – who would be the rich Andrew Carnegie’s grandfather – knew Fife well, from the cobbled wynds of Culross to the old ecclesiastical capital of Scotland at St Andrews. And at nearby Limekilns he would encounter romance.

Limekilns, with its then comparatively new Brucehaven Harbour for the burgeoning trade in coal shipments, was the focus of a variety of industries from brewing to soap-making, and was also the home of the seafaring Thom family. Here Andrew Carnegie’s grandfather met Elizabeth, daughter of the well-heeled ship owner Captain George Thom and his wife Elizabeth Wilkie. To her father’s dismay Elizabeth announced that she would marry the moneyless weaver, and despite the threat of disinheritance marry she did – for love. The Thoms did not attend their daughter’s wedding, and Elizabeth was further shunned when her father decided not to give her a vessel from his fleet as a dowry – which he had done when each of his other daughters married. Historian J.B. Mackie tells the story of how Elizabeth attempted a reconciliation with her family by promising that if she gave birth to a boy it would be given her father’s name or that of one of her sisters if the baby was a girl. A girl duly arrived and at the baptism Elizabeth’s family gathered at Limekilns Secessional Church to hear the child given a Thom family name. To Andrew Carnegie this smacked of bribery, and when the Revd Hadden asked what the child was to be called he declared: ‘She is to be called Ann for my aunt of the same name.’ Out of the church stormed the Thoms and there were no further inter-family exchanges.
⁸

Education had long been held in high esteem in Scotland. After the Reformation had swept away the medieval church, the Scottish Presbyterian movement’s ‘First Book of Discipline’ (1560) set out a determination for ‘one school in every parish’.
⁹
Furthermore, the eighteenth-century education system that creamed off gifted Scots children had opened up many opportunities for the bright within an atmosphere of educational egalitarianism, but many could still not afford the pennies to buy daily formal education for their children, so self-education was popular among the less well off. Not until the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 did the state first assume direct responsibility for the education of children. Yet at Pattiesmuir, Andrew Carnegie was already involved in a form of self-education.

At Pattiesmuir is a building which was known as the ‘college’, where local weavers and agricultural workers met for self-improvement classes in a multitude of subjects from politics and philosophy to economics and theology. Their spiritual father was the working-class hero Robert Burns, whose revelries at the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club in his Ayrshire homeland provided the template for the college. Soon Andrew Carnegie became a self-proclaimed ‘professor’ of this institution, which actually had as much to do with social drinking as self-education.
¹⁰
Local tradition has it that the long-vanished Bull Head Tavern was the main campus of the college. With whatever spare money they had the members subscribed to the
Edinburgh Political & Literary Journal
, which first appeared in 1817 (becoming the
Daily Scotsman
by 1855), and clubbed together for the new Waverley novels produced by Walter Scott from 1814. If there were arguments or running disputes then Grandfather Carnegie was always at their heart. He was very much a man of his time.
¹¹

For decades Dunfermline was renowned, or abhorred, depending on one’s point of view, as the most radical area in Scotland, full of men willing to debate the politics of the day and pursue the philosophies of such men as Rochdale miller turned orator and statesman John Bright, free-trader Richard Cobden and the home-grown Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. They would gather in groups to subscribe to the London broadsheets and listen to lectures by visiting radicals. It was a hothouse of revolutionary thought in which the Carnegies found a niche.

Andrew and Elizabeth’s sixth child William was born on 19 June 1804. He duly became a weaver like his father, but in 1830 he became the first to leave Pattiesmuir for nearby Dunfermline where he could pursue his skills as a damask weaver. Andrew and Elizabeth undoubtedly encouraged their son to move to Dunfermline in an effort to better himself, for in 1826 the Elgin estates factor noted that the Carnegies were unable to pay their rent because they were ‘very poor’.
¹²
At Dunfermline William rented for around £8 per annum,
¹³
paid on the Scottish quarter days of Candlemas, Old Beltane, Lammas and Old Hallowmans, a portion of a cottage at the junction of Priory Lane and Moodie Street. On the ground floor he set up his loom, living in the small attic room above.

On the heights beyond Priory Lane lies Maygate, where lived the prominent Morrison family. William Carnegie became a welcome guest here, for the head of the family Tom Morrison was a fiery radical. William eventually fell for the charms of Morrison’s fourth child Margaret, and in December 1834 they married and set up home together at William’s workshop-lodging. William and Margaret were to become the parents of the famous Andrew Carnegie. Thus history assembled the three great early influences on Andrew Carnegie’s life: his father William, his mother Margaret (by far the greatest influence) and his grandfather Tom, although in his veins also ran the ‘daft’ blood of his eccentric, ebullient and exuberant paternal grandfather Andrew. Of the latter Andrew Carnegie would say: ‘I think my optimistic nature, my ability to shed trouble and laugh through my life . . . must have been inherited from this delightful old masquerading grandfather whose name I proudly bear.’
¹⁴

To assess these influences properly, it is vital to take a closer look at the main characters involved. William Carnegie was a hard worker, but was far more reticent than his effusive father. Family tradition has it that he was a keen reader and a solitary rambler on the roads and moors around Pattiesmuir. His artistic qualities enabled him to graduate from the plain designs of the weavers’ looms to the figured material of damask, which had originally been worked in silk. Dunfermline was the centre of the damask trade.