Castlehead - Prominent Residents and Buildings

Prominent Residents and Buildings

By the time Castlehead was being established, most of the J. & P. Coats textiles family already had country estates far more imposing than anything the new Paisley development could offer. And while none of the new residents could match the Coats for wealth, they were among the wealthiest and most influential families in town and were not slow to put something back into the town that had made them prosperous.

Archibald Craig of Belmont, managing director of A F Craig, a major Paisley engineering company, owned the town’s first Rolls-Royce (XS 6), and was the first of three Castlehead residents to give large sums towards the restoration of Paisley Abbey.

The magnificent building as we know it today only began to emerge from its Reformation ruins in the 1850s with the restoration of the nave and transepts. Then, in the 1890s, work began on restoring the cloisters. The financial backing for this came from Craig and it was his wife who laid the foundation stone. The work was completed in 1915, and by that time another Castlehead resident was financing an equally ambitious renewal project.

Robert Allison, of Rosemount (18 Main Road), started off in Love Street with a timber business. By the 1890s his company, Allison Cousland, had diversified into shipping, timber and insurance brokerage and had offices in St Vincent Street, Glasgow. He had no children and dispensed much of his considerable wealth on the fabric and welfare of Paisley. In 1912 he gave £8000, an enormous sum in those days, to the Abbey to complete the building of the tower from roof-level up. His gift is commemorated in stone above the tower door.

The work was postponed by the outbreak of war and when it resumed in 1922 inflation had produced a £6000 shortfall. Robert Allison stepped in again. Until his death in 1926 he also gave large sums to the ongoing clearance of the warren of slums around the Abbey and the reclamation of the grounds and graveyard.

Another important gift to the Abbey came from Castlehead when, in the 1950s, James W Begbie, of Southdene (36 Main Road) put up the money for the gates between the Abbey and St Mirin’s Chapel.

Many years earlier, in 1891, Robert Allison had funded the building of Greenlaw Church’s Arthur Allison Memorial Hall at Whitehaugh in memory of a brother. That project was a classic example of the Castlehead Mafia in action. He and a third brother, William, provided the timber, T.G. Abercrombie (Redholme, 5 Main Road)) was the architect, William Taylor was the stonemason and builder, John F Baird supplied the bricks and mortar, George G Kirk was the glass merchant. It is a fairly safe bet that at least one of Castlehead’s army of solicitors, writers and notaries public handled the legal niceties.

The Russell Institute, the children’s clinic at the corner of New Street and Causeyside, is another Castlehead legacy to the town. It was the gift of Miss Agnes Russell, of Muirfield, (32 Main Road) in memory of her brothers, Robert (also of Muirfield) and Thomas Russell, partners in the legal firm R & T Russell.

When she first came up with the scheme, Miss Russell went to her Castlehead neighbour, the architect T.G. Abercrombie. That was in 1923, but Abercrombie died in 1925 and the completed building is usually attributed to the man who had become his partner – J Steel Maitland. It seems unlikely that the prolific Abercrombie did not contribute at the planning stage of what is generally believed to be the first building in the West of Scotland with a reinforced concrete frame. The institute was opened by the Princess Royal in 1927.

Thomas Rowat of Warriston was already a wealthy man by 1870 from his family’s Thibet shawl and textile finishing company. By 1890, he was a major figure in Howard, Houlder and Malcolm, steamship and insurance brokers of 111 Union Street Glasgow and part of the Liverpool-based Houlder Line.

Warriston (16 Main Road) was one of the biggest and most imposing residences in Castlehead, which was just as well, because Rowat had nine children. He had married Margaret Greenlees, of the textiles and shipping family, in 1856. Twenty-five years later both families were in Castlehead and Thomas and Margaret had produced an impressive brood, even by Victorian standards. There were four sons. Robert had his own shipping company, with offices in Wellington Street, Glasgow. This enterprise was eventually merged with the Greenlees interests. Thomas became a broker in London. Matthew became a tea planter in India and Claude a stockbroker in Glasgow. His company had become C.W Rowat and Millar by 1925.

Of the five Rowat daughters, three were married – Isa to Robert Wylie Hill of the Glasgow department store – but two, Mary and Lucy, did not marry and lived at Warriston until after the Second World War.

Castlehead continues to be the home of a number of prominent Paisley residents, including singer-songwriter Paulo Nutini and sculptor Alexander Stoddart.