He was Glasgow’s original “community champion”, a former shipbroking apprentice who became Lord Provost.
Daniel Macaulay Stevenson believed that a city should provide for all of its citizens, in a multitude of ways, and “make life more liveable for the working classes.”
Some of the innovations he oversaw as Lord Provost included free Corporation libraries, Sunday openings for museums and galleries, and municipalisation of transport, telephone systems, licensing laws, and gas and electricity.
In this week’s column from Glasgow City Archives, archivist Kate Guariento looks into the life and work of the Hutchesontown-born businessman who believed that a society which took care of everyone was a stronger and more stable one.
In his preface to the 1914 publication Municipal Glasgow, Daniel Macaulay Stevenson recounts his experience at the 1900 International Congress on Workmen’s dwellings in Paris.
During the event, which he attended in his role as councillor for Woodside, Stevenson was dismayed to hear various speakers emphasise “the impracticability” of worker’s housing being provided by the local authority.
Stevenson pointed out to his international counterparts that, “far from being impractical, it had actually been carried on in Glasgow for twenty-nine years.” He continued: “The Corporation also supplied water, gas, electricity and tramways.”
In response, the other delegates declared “that this was nothing short of rank socialism.”
Stevenson, a dedicated “municipal socialist”, was unperturbed by this label. Indeed, writing in 1914 in his role as Lord Provost, Stevenson expressed his opinion that the city should go even further.
“I have no doubt that some of my colleagues will live to see the milk supply municipalised – a supply of pure milk being as essential to the population of a great city, and particularly to the children, as pure water,” he said.
For Stevenson, it was uncontroversial that the role of municipal government should be to improve the lives of ordinary citizens, and to “make life more liveable for the working classes.”
Daniel Macaulay Stevenson was born in Hutchesontown in 1851, during a period of massive change in the city. In the second half of the 19th century, Glasgow underwent an industrial revolution which catapulted it to the status of “the second city of Empire.”
This transformation was, in large part, fuelled by the wealth amassed from enslaved labour on sugar and tobacco plantations in the 18th century, and sustained in the 19th century by the imperial trade connections which encouraged the flourishing of heavy industry on the Clyde.
Between 1861 and 1901, Glasgow’s population nearly doubled, through a combination of migration and the expansion of the city’s municipal boundaries.
Macaulay Stevenson came from a prominent Liberal family – Stevenson’s grandfather, Daniel Macaulay, was a trade unionist in the early 19th century, and editor of publications such as The Liberator.
Stevenson’s father, John Stevenson, was an engineer, with a keen commitment to social causes. Robert, Stevenson’s younger brother, would go on to become an artist, most notably associated with the radical collective of painters known as the Glasgow Boys.
Stevenson started work at the age of 16 as an apprentice at a shipbroking firm. In 1879, riding the wave of Glasgow’s industrial boom, he founded DM Stevenson & Co, a coal export business which would go on to become the largest coal export and shipbroking firm in Scotland.
While Stevenson benefitted from Glasgow’s industrial expansion, thousands of ordinary Glaswegians were suffering from the byproducts of the city’s explosive growth. Much of the city’s working-class population were forced to live in overcrowded, dilapidated and unsanitary accommodation, where disease was rife.
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Stevenson’s political career began in 1892, when he was elected as a Liberal councillor for the Woodside ward.
His firm commitment to public utilities being run for the common good drove several of his achievements during his time in local government.
In 1894, after “strong representations” by Stevenson, among others, the tramways were brought under municipal control. In 1899, Stevenson spearheaded the introduction of the city’s free library service, having only the year before achieved the Sunday opening of museums and galleries.
In 1911, after a period in the role of City Treasurer, Stevenson was elected Lord Provost of Glasgow, a position which he held for three years.
On retirement from municipal politics in 1914, Stevenson turned his attention to the University of Glasgow. Over the course of the 1920s, Stevenson funded chairs in Spanish and Italian, established several exchange programmes, and donated significant sums to the University’s engineering department.
A lifelong lover of music, Stevenson played a key role in the formation of the Royal Scottish National Academy of Music in 1929, which today lives on as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
In recognition of his many contributions to the University of Glasgow, Stevenson was elected Chancellor of the University in 1934, a position he held until his death in 1944.
In a lengthy obituary published in the Glasgow Herald on the 12 July 1944, Sir Hector Hetherington wrote that, above all else, Daniel Macaulay Stevenson was “devoted to good citizenship.”
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