Shuttle Row

“The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

— Psalm 16:6, ASV

A Room Above the Clyde

David Livingstone was born on 19 March 1813 at Blantyre Works, a cotton-spinning village on the south bank of the River Clyde, about eight miles south-east of Glasgow. The mills had been built in the 1780s by the Glasgow merchant David Dale, with the help of the inventor Richard Arkwright, and by Livingstone’s childhood they belonged to the firm of Henry Monteith and Company. The village was a company village. The mill owned the houses, ran a school, and employed whole families, children included.

The Livingstones lived in Shuttle Row, a three-storey tenement built for the mill workers. Like most of its families, they had a single room. In it the parents slept, cooked, ate, read and prayed, and in it they raised their children. The room survives, as part of the David Livingstone Birthplace museum, and visitors are usually surprised by how small it is. It was a crowded, clean, disciplined home, and those who knew the family remembered it for its order.

David was the second of seven children born to Neil Livingstone and Agnes Hunter. Two of them died young. The survivors were John, the eldest, then David, then Janet, Charles and Agnes. Charles, eight years younger than David, would one day join him on the Zambezi. John emigrated to Canada. The two sisters, Janet and Agnes, never married, and in later years they kept house for their mother and looked after David’s children while he was in Africa.

Ulva and Culloden

When Livingstone came to write his first book, he began it with an apology. He would rather, he said, write about Africa than about himself, and his own inclination was to say as little as possible about himself. But he gave his readers a few pages on his family, and they show what he was proud of.

The Livingstones came from the island of Ulva, off the west coast of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides. He wrote that his great-grandfather had fallen at the battle of Culloden, fighting for the old line of kings, and that his grandfather had been a small farmer in Ulva, where his father was born. Like thousands of Highlanders in the hard years at the end of the eighteenth century, the grandfather left the land and came south to find work. He was employed at the Blantyre mill, where the owners valued him as an honest man, and his sons grew up in the Lowlands.

Livingstone remembered his grandfather as a storehouse of Highland tradition, full of legends, songs and family history. One family story he cherished above all the others. An ancestor in Ulva, renowned in the island for wisdom, had called his children around him on his deathbed and told them that he had searched through all the traditions of the family and had never found a dishonest man among their forefathers. If any of them took to dishonest ways, it would not be because it ran in their blood. The old man left them, as Livingstone told it, a single precept: to be honest.

It is the kind of story families keep because it tells them who they are. Livingstone kept it. Of all the family traditions, he wrote, this was the only point he felt proud of. He was a man who would be accused, later in life, of many things, of harshness and stubbornness and of telling the story of his journeys too kindly to himself. He was very rarely accused of dishonesty about money, and he carried the old Highland pride in plain dealing to the end.

Neil Livingstone

His father, Neil Livingstone, had been apprenticed as a tailor but disliked the trade, and for most of David’s childhood he made a small living as a travelling tea dealer, going from house to house with packets of tea. It was a poor living. It suited him, his son thought, because it gave him the chance to leave tracts at the doors where he called. Neil Livingstone was a serious, devout and somewhat stern man, a total abstainer at a time when drink was the ruin of many working families, a Sunday-school teacher, and an eager reader of theology and missionary magazines.

He was strict about books. He believed that novels and light reading wasted time and endangered the soul, and he wanted his children to read religious works. David, who loved books about travel and science, resisted, and the result was a long quiet struggle in the house. Livingstone recalled, years later, that the last time his father beat him was for refusing to read Wilberforce’s Practical Christianity, a book that he found dull and that seemed to him to set religion against the study of nature. The father won the argument about the beating and lost the argument about books. Science and travel would be the son’s lifelong passion.

Yet Livingstone wrote of his father with deep respect. He thanked him for setting before his children, from their infancy, a consistent example of piety, of the kind Robert Burns had drawn in The Cotter’s Saturday Night, the poem in which a poor Scottish father gathers his family at the end of the week to read the Bible and pray. That was the kind of home Shuttle Row was. Neil Livingstone died in February 1856, while his son was still in Africa, on the last stage of his crossing of the continent, and David learned of it only on his voyage home. He had been looking forward to telling his father the story of the journey. It was one of the griefs of his life that he never could.

Later, when Neil Livingstone left the Church of Scotland for an Independent congregation in Hamilton, his son went with him. It was through that Independent church, and its connection with the London Missionary Society, that David would eventually go to Africa. The Society was not a denominational body. It was supported mainly by Congregationalists, and it had a rule, which Livingstone liked, of sending out missionaries to preach the gospel without imposing any particular form of church government on the people who received it.

Agnes Hunter

His mother, Agnes Hunter, came from a family of small tradespeople in the district, and from a line of Scottish Presbyterians who remembered the persecuted Covenanters of the seventeenth century with pride. Those who knew her described her as a small, neat, cheerful woman, careful with every penny, devoted to her husband and children. The order of the one-room home was hers. It was she who kept the family respectable on a tea seller’s income, who cooked and mended and saved, and who sometimes, when David was older, came and took the book out of his hands at midnight so that he would go to bed.

She lived until 1865, long enough to see her son famous and to see him leave for Africa for the last time. Livingstone loved her deeply, and his letters to her, plain and affectionate, are some of the most unguarded things he wrote. His elder daughter was named after her. When he was dragging out his last years in the interior, he sometimes wrote in his journal about his mother and father, and about Blantyre, as a man thinks about home when he does not expect to see it again.

A Goodly Heritage

It would be easy to make this sound idyllic, and it was not. The mill village was a place of long hours, crowded rooms, hard discipline and frequent death. Children worked in the mill from the age of ten or younger. Two of Neil and Agnes Livingstone’s own children did not survive. The family was poor even by the standards of the village, because the father’s tea round brought in less than the mill. When David went into the factory, it was because the family needed his wages.

But the psalm at the head of this chapter is not about wealth. “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places,” the psalmist says, and he means the boundary lines of his inheritance, the portion of land that was his. His real portion, he says a verse earlier, is God himself: “Jehovah is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup” (Psalm 16:5, ASV). Livingstone inherited no land and no money. He inherited a Highland pride in honesty, a father’s stern faith, a mother’s cheerful thrift, and a house where the Bible was read every day and missionaries were spoken of with admiration. He also inherited, from both parents, an extraordinary capacity for hard work.

Some of what he inherited was less helpful. He grew up in a family that held firm opinions and did not easily change them, and in a tradition that valued duty above feeling. He learned early to keep his own counsel, to distrust idleness in others, and to judge harshly those who did not work as hard as he did. Those habits served him well in a mill and in the African interior. They served him much less well as a husband, a father and a leader of other men.

The Victorian biographers liked to draw a straight line from Shuttle Row to Westminster Abbey: the poor boy who rose by industry and faith. The line is real, but it is not straight. The boy from the single room carried his upbringing with him everywhere, for good and ill, and much of the story that follows is the story of how God used, and sometimes had to break, the man that Blantyre made.

The Village and the World

One more thing about Blantyre deserves notice. The mill that employed the Livingstone family spun cotton, and much of the raw cotton that came up the Clyde to the Scottish mills in those years had been grown by enslaved people in the American South. Britain had abolished the slave trade in its empire in 1807, six years before Livingstone was born, and would abolish slavery itself in its colonies in 1833, when he was twenty. But the textile industry of Lancashire and Lanarkshire still depended heavily on slave-grown cotton from the United States.

Livingstone did not write about this as a boy, and there is no sign that it troubled him then. But later in life he became convinced that if Africans could grow cotton and other crops for sale to British merchants, the demand for enslaved labour in Africa would fall, and the trade would wither. He imagined African cotton feeding the very mills he had worked in. That idea, of fighting the slave trade with honest commerce, would shape his greatest journeys and his greatest failure. It had its roots, in part, in the village where he was born, where the whole of life turned on the price of cotton.