Page:Cassier's Magazine Volume XV.djvu/15



SIR WILLIAM ARROL.

A Biographical Sketch of the Great Bridge Builder.

By A. S. Biggart.

HE man endowed with sufficient capacity and energy to develop his own natural abilities lives in the influence he wields over others, and endures in the work he leaves behind him. For such a man difficulties form the training-school in which his powers are developed, and in overcoming them he is inspired with zeal for further achievements. When energy and capacity are combined with a well-balanced mind, and with the bearing that attracts the confidence of his fellow men, he creates enthusiasm in others and inspires them as willing agents in carrying out his undertakings. A man's life is made up of character and conduct, but is moulded by experience, and it is upon the school training of experience that future success or failure mainly depends.

To know Sir William Arrol, and his life and work, is to know such a man,—one who has risen from humble beginnings to the highest position in his profession through sheer ability, and persistent effort. Born in the village of Houston, Renfrewshire, in 1839, he is now in his fifty-ninth year. When he was quite a child his family removed to Johnstone, then, as now, one of the engineering centres of Scotland, where his grandfather was the first to introduce gas. His father, starting as a spinner, raised himself to the position of manager of the great thread works of Messrs. J. & P. Coats, of Paisley.

William Arrol had little schooling, for, at the early age of nine years, he began work as a piecer in a Johnstone cotton-mill. Two years later he entered the bobbin-turning works of Messrs. J. & P. Coats, and at the age of fourteen was apprenticed to a Mr. Reid, a blacksmith and general engineer in Paisley. His apprenticeship over, young Arrol found employment in various districts in England and Scotland, before becoming a foreman in the boiler and bridge yard of Messrs. R. Laidlaw & Sons, of Glasgow. He was then twenty-four years of age, and five years later he began business on his own account within a few hundred yards of the present Dalmarnock Iron Works, in the East End of Glasgow.

He began, of course, in a small way, making boilers, girders, and general