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Apollo wrote:John 10:
27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.
28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.
Low Waters was a village in its own right until it was incorporated into the burgh in 1878, when it would have been nothing more than a row of houses. In 1862 Cadzow Colliery was sunk there, and at eight hundred feet was thought to be one of the deepest pits in the Clyde Valley. It was owned by the Cadzow Coal Company who reputedly had Keir Hardie as an employee at one point - although other mines have made similar claims.
Giving evidence at the trial if the notorious Jessie McLachlan in 1862 one of the witnesses had this to say "Low Waters is not a large village. It is a row of houses 200 or 300 yards along the roadside".
In 1831 there had been 9,513 people living in the parish, by 1881 there were 26,231. This explosion of the town, involving as it did massive immigration of thousands of people from all over Scotland, Ireland and England put an immense strain on existing amenities of Hamilton such as houses, streets, water supply, sanitation, education, poor relief and the maintenance of law and order. The town spread out to absorb surrounding villages like Burnbank, Low Waters and Ferniegair. The characteristic miners rows appeared near most of the collieries hurriedly built to house the hurriedly recruited labour force. The railway came to Hamilton in the early [18] sixties and branch lines leading to most of the collieries. At nights, if the 'Hamilton Advertiser' is to be believed, the streets of the town rang to the shouting, swearing and fighting of numbers of the newcomers and although trade and commerce prospered, especially the spirit trade, there must have been many older inhabitants who shared the 'Advertiser's' concern about what Hamilton was coming to.
This was a traumatic period for the town, not least for the newcomers, uprooted, no sense of 'belonging', housed in conditions which were often cramped and dirty yet dependent on the boss for the house (long before the days of council housing), working or dependent upon someone working in dangerous and degrading work and with few sources of reassurance or consolation. Religion offered reassurance to a young Low Waters miner, J. Keir Hardie, in the form of the Order of Good Templars. But Hardie was exceptional especially among Protestant miners for the mining population was never known for its zealous support of the Church of Scotland. Drink offered an easier solace to many of the alienated, troubled people of the town.
Molendinar wrote:
From "Old Hamilton" by Rhona Wilson;Low Waters was a village in its own right until it was incorporated into the burgh in 1878, when it would have been nothing more than a row of houses. In 1862 Cadzow Colliery was sunk there, and at eight hundred feet was thought to be one of the deepest pits in the Clyde Valley. It was owned by the Cadzow Coal Company who reputedly had Keir Hardie as an employee at one point - although other mines have made similar claims.
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