Overview
St. Rollox was located in the north of the city in the Springburn area. The area was home of the St Rollox Railway Works, and St Rollox Chemical Works, which was reportedly the largest in Europe. (For more information on these companies, see ‘Caledonian Railway No 21‘ and ‘Chemical Workers‘ on The Glasgow Story website).
There is little currently known about this Burns club. Outside a mention of the group in the Memorial Catalogue of the Burns Exhibition (1898), there is only the club’s listings in the Annual Burns Chronicle and Club Directory. Unfortunately, there are few details given: the names and addresses of the President and Secretary are included in the 1896 directory, and the following year’s directory merely adds the year of the club’s institution (1893).
Date of Existence
1893-1909; 1914-? Federated 1894
Source of Information
1. Memorial Catalogue of the Burns Exhibition. Held in the Galleries of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 175 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, From 15th July till 31st October, 1896 (Glasgow: William Hodge & Company and T. & R. Annan & Sons, 1898), page xvi (MLSC, Mitchell (AL) 14A MEM 472108);
2. ‘Directory of Burns Clubs and Scottish Societies on the Roll of the Burns Federation, 1896’, in BC, ed. by D. M’Naught, No. V (Kilmarnock: Burns Federation, January 1896), p. 136;
3. ‘Directory of Burns Clubs and Scottish Societies on the Roll of the Burns Federation, 1897’, in BC, ed. by D. M’Naught, No. VI (Kilmarnock: Burns Federations, January 1897), p. 155
Repository
Mitchell Library Special Collections (MLSC) (Memorial Catalogue, and Annual Burns Chronicle)
National Library of Scotland (NLS) (Annual Burns Chronicle)
Reference Number
(See Source of Information, and below for Annual Burns Chronicle)
BNS19BUR (MLSC) (Annual Burns Chronicle)
General Reading Room (stored offsite), Y.233, available no. 1-34 25th Jan. 1892-Jan. 1925 (NLS) (Annual Burns Chronicle)
Additional Notes
Where there are breaks in the dates of a club’s existence, it was the case that the directories listed them as ‘dormant’ during the intervening years.
‘BC‘ refers to the Annual Burns Chronicle and Club Directory, which was published yearly since 1892. Copies are available at the Mitchell Library Special Collections and the National Library of Scotland. Many of these have been digitised and are available through the Robert Burns World Federation website: http://www.rbwf.org.uk/digitised-chronicles/.
This list of Burns chronicles as sources of information gives the first year the club was included in the chronicle, and thereafter only for the years where the information is different from the previous year’s listing. In keeping with the scope of this study (1800-1914), only the chronicles published between 1892 and 1914 are included.