Temple Saw Mill

You'll be familiar with the drive from Anniesland towards Bearsden, passing Morrisons on your right, the Shell garage on the left, then going over the canal bridge (so wide you barely notice it IS a bridge).  So does anything in this photo ring a bell?

Maybe if I show you this comparison?

Or how about the view along the canal:

This was the Temple Saw Mill, opened in 1874.  Wood was brought in by boat along the canal, stored and cut and shaped for onward sale.  It was owned by Robinson, Dunn and Co., established in 1838, and they had another sawmill in Partick - if you came off the Clydeside Expressway to get onto Dumbarton Road you might know there is a Burger King and Starbucks (21st Century landmarks!) - it was facing this on the other side of Castlebank Street.  Around 1932 the company decided to close the Partick mill (in 1933) and build their company office by the Temple mill and this was a building you might recognise:

Here's an advert for their work from the early 1900:

I struggled with the words on the right before realising it was not the Oreosotino Works at Temple but the more-prosaic Creosoting Works!  (Does anyone under the age of 50 know what creosote is?)

By great good fortune, a plane taking photos flew around the saw mil in 1930 and these have been collected on the website Britain from Above. There are six photos in all, of which I think the best two are:

The photo above is taken from above the gasometers looking west.  The houses in the top right are in Maxwell Avenue, the railway cutting nearest to them is the line from Milngavie and Bearsden into Glasgow.  The white building in the middle at the very top of the photo is Netherton Farm.  The David Lloyd Centre is on the land in the bend in the canal this side of the farm.  The saw mill is in the centre of the photo but note the timber yard south of the canal (i.e. on the left of the photo) - all of this was Robinson, Dunn and Co property.

Same day, but taken from a little further north so roughly above Dawsholm looking south-west, the houses of Knightswood at the very top of the photo.  This shows what an industrial area Temple was at the time.

As a result of Professor John Hume's work in recording the industrial archaeology of Glasgow we also have four photos of the way the mill in 1965.  Two of them appeared at the start of the post.  The others are:

The photo above is the south west block seen from the canal footpath, south bank.

this map from the late 1940s shows not only the saw mil but timber yards south of the canal on both sides of Bearsden Road:

 

Unfortunately map-makers in the 20th Century all seemed to put the site on the very edge of the map so it is hard to get an overview!  But we can now see the 1932 head office building on the right side of Bearsden Road and the site south of this which is now occupied by Jewson's.  The railway immediately south of the canal has, of course, been lifted.

In 1893 it was just the saw mill:

The mill was nearly 20 years old at this point.  The original buildings were seriously damaged by a huge fire in 1908 which destroyed £15,000 of timber. (according to the Bank of England inflation calculator, £1.5 million today).  This was covered by the company's insurance and it seems likely the rebuild mainly survived into the 1960s in Hume's photos.

And here is the more tranquil scene in 1860, with the site occupied by the farm of Netherton Paffle:

South of the canal you can see the Temple of Garscube farm, which seems likely to have given the area its name.

As a final comment, my interest in the mill started when I was researching Joseph Young who grew up here as a child because his father had a job as a saw sharpener.  Joseph survived Gallipoli in the First World War but was killed on the first night of the March 1941 Blitz at Glenburn Avenue in Maryhill (link).