Lawson & Co.
Joiners
The firm of Lawson & Co., wrights and builders, of Park Saw Mills, 260 West Scotland Street, Glasgow, was founded by David Lawson in 1894–5. Lawson came from a farming family in Maryculter, near Aberdeen, but by the 1870s he was working in Glasgow as a joiner. He appears in the Glasgow Post Office Directory from the mid-1880s as a builder's manager with Anderson & Henderson, box makers, timber merchants and saw-millers at Kinning Park Saw Mills. 1
His former employers' nearby premises were destroyed by fire in 1897, shortly afterwards Lawson had set up his own business as 'building contractors, vat- and tun-builders [and] packing-case makers'. 2 His sons, David Junior (born c. 1872) and James (born c. 1876), respectively a joiner and a measurer (quantity surveyor), appear as part of 'Lawson & Co., wrights', from 1899. 3 In 1902–3 the firm relocated its workshops and saw mill from Kinning Park to a site farther west, in Albion Street, Govan. It continued until 1947, when it laid off 30 joiners and went into liquidation, having been sold to the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society. 4
Notes:
1: Glasgow Post Office directories 1884–96; census information, www.ancestry.co.uk [accessed 25 June 2012].
2: Glasgow Herald, 27 April 1897, p. 7.
3: Census information, www.ancestry.co.uk [accessed 25 June 2012]; Glasgow Post Office directories 1898–1903.
4: Scotsman, 11 February 1947, p. 3.
