Incoming: a longish thread featuring armed insurrection, Council meetings, tea, a library, a street name, and acts of trespass in a Glasgow park.

If that's your sort of thing then let's start here.
It's April 1820, and revolution's in the air in Glasgow. Amid rumours of a rising backed by French troops, two weavers and ex-soldiers, Andrew Hardie and John Baird, lead a party to seize the armoury at the Carron ironworks.

It's a set-up, of course.
A troop of Hussars are waiting for the weavers, and after a short battle they're captured and tried for high treason.

Hardie and Baird are both executed [ http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/14670/transcript/1]; twenty of their comrades see their sentences commuted to transportation.

So ends the Radical War.
A troop of Hussars are waiting for the weavers, and after a short battle they're captured and tried for high treason.Hardie and Baird are both executed [ http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/14670/transcript/1]; twenty of their comrades see their sentences commuted to transportation.So ends the Radical War.
A troop of Hussars are waiting for the weavers, and after a short battle they're captured and tried for high treason.Hardie and Baird are both executed [ http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/14670/transcript/1]; twenty of their comrades see their sentences commuted to transportation.So ends the Radical War.
Sidenote: the ship that carries the transportees to Australia also carries the Māori rangatira Hongi Hika and the missionary / translator / arms dealer Thomas Kendall, whose return to Aotearoa will supercharge the Musket Wars.

Empires are never only up to one thing at a time.
With a changing political climate the transportees are pardoned in 1835, and in 1847 grudging permission is given to rebury Baird and Hardie in Sighthill Cemetery.

We know it's grudging because the Martyrs' Monument records the correspondence.
Among the transportees is Benjamin Moir, a labourer, born in 1784 [ https://convictrecords.com.au/convicts/moir/benjamin/80710].

Benjamin has a much younger brother, James, who at the time of the uprising is fourteen and apprenticed to a tea merchant in Glasgow.
By the late 1820s, James has set himself up in trade on the Gallowgate.

He's just in time to catch the start of Glasgow's first tea boom, partly powered by the temperance movement. A generation before the famous tea houses, the city is one of Britain's major importing centres.
Moir's affairs prosper. At the same time, perhaps with one eye on his brother's fate, he's moving in respectable trouble-making circles.

He's a reformer and a Chartist, and also marries into the family of the philanthropist and bigot William M'Gavin [ https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/M%27Gavin,_William].
Chartism is a major movement in Glasgow, with 150 000 people attending an event in 1838, and James Moir becomes known as a "spouter" in the cause.

By 1848 he's an elected member of the Parochial Board for the Poor, but he has an eye on higher targets.
In November 1848, Moir stands for the Town Council in the Second (Calton) Ward. Among his opponents is Alexander Hastie, the sitting Lord Provost and MP for Glasgow.

To the horror of respectable Glasgow, still reeling from the unemployment riots of March 1848, Moir unseats him.
Moir's first act as a Councillor is to challenge the procedure for electing the Police Committee.

Thus begins his career of over twenty years as nuisance-in-residence to the City authorities [ https://www.theglasgowstory.com/image/?inum=TGSA00004].
Among the highlights, Moir opposes the election of one Lord Provost on the grounds that he's been rude about the plebs, and another on the grounds that he's a bit thick.

He gets into a fight with a Renfrewshire JP, and uses a Council meeting to challenge him to a square-go.
When the magistrates ban walking on the grass in the West End parks, Moir gathers a gang of street urchins and leads a trespass — on a Sunday afternoon, no less.

When they won't appoint *him* as a magistrate, he throws a hissy fit.
When the magistrates ban walking on the grass in the West End parks, Moir gathers a gang of street urchins and leads a trespass — on a Sunday afternoon, no less.When they won't appoint *him* as a magistrate, he throws a hissy fit.
When the magistrates ban walking on the grass in the West End parks, Moir gathers a gang of street urchins and leads a trespass — on a Sunday afternoon, no less.When they won't appoint *him* as a magistrate, he throws a hissy fit.
At the same time, he's quietly taking on duties on the committees that deal with Watching & Fire Engines; Lighting & Cleansing; Water; Smoke; Statute Labour; Sewage; the House of Refuge; Libraries; the Board of Police; and the Bazaar & City Hall, Clocks, Bells &c...
Outside the Council he remains active in radical and reform causes.

In 1866 he becomes President of the Scottish National Reform League, a short-lived and uneasy alliance between Liberal and working-class forces that presses for expanded male suffrage.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, he recognises that the same principles apply to women's suffrage, and he will be gently mocked in his obituary for this.
Moir achieves a stamp of respectability in 1871 when he is appointed for a three-year term as magistrate, though not without a little controversy.

(Tell us what you really think, James!)
He dies in 1880, and the Councillors attend his funeral — possibly, in some cases, to make sure he's gone.
The Glasgow Herald bites its tongue to admit that he "was often found in opposition, but never in obstruction. The truth is, James Moir was very often right and the majority wrong, and he lived to see many of his advanced opinions carried into action."

[ https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=GGgVawPscysC&dat=18801202&printsec=frontpage&hl=en]
Dying childless and a widower, he leaves to the Mitchell Library his collection of over 3000 books and 1000 pamphlets, representing a lifetime of solid self-improvement.

He also leaves £12K (worth about £1.2M in today's money) to buy more.
Dying childless and a widower, he leaves to the Mitchell Library his collection of over 3000 books and 1000 pamphlets, representing a lifetime of solid self-improvement. He also leaves £12K (worth about £1.2M in today's money) to buy more.
Dying childless and a widower, he leaves to the Mitchell Library his collection of over 3000 books and 1000 pamphlets, representing a lifetime of solid self-improvement. He also leaves £12K (worth about £1.2M in today's money) to buy more.
Shortly after Moir's death, a new street appears in the rapidly modernising landscape of the East End. It continues the line of Spoutmouth between Gallowgate and London Road.

It is called Moir Street, and it is very close to the site of his old tea shop at 174 Gallowgate.
Next time you pass Moir St, or the Moir Hall at the Mitchell, recall both brothers.

Was one a failure and one a success? One a martyr and one a sell-out? One tricked by the system and one swallowed by it?

Is there a story of progress that has space for them both?
Next time you pass Moir St, or the Moir Hall at the Mitchell, recall both brothers.Was one a failure and one a success? One a martyr and one a sell-out? One tricked by the system and one swallowed by it?Is there a story of progress that has space for them both?
Next time you pass Moir St, or the Moir Hall at the Mitchell, recall both brothers.Was one a failure and one a success? One a martyr and one a sell-out? One tricked by the system and one swallowed by it?Is there a story of progress that has space for them both?
Two sources, besides the obvious:

"Biographical Sketches of the Lord Provosts of Glasgow" (1883) [ https://www.tradeshouselibrary.org/uploads/4/7/7/2/47723681/small_~_biography_of_the_lord_provosts_of_glasgow_1883.pdf] is a mine of details about mid C19th municipal politics.

The PO Directories [ https://digital.nls.uk/directories/ ] are, as ever, indispensible.
This congestion in your TL is inadvertently the fault of @LiberalDespot, who introduced me to the Moir monument in Sighthill Cemetery.

As ever, if you know more or have spotted errors, please let me know...
You can follow @ncdominie.
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