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Balfour, Robert; West of Scotland Furniture Manufacturing Co. (1870-1893)

Balfour, Robert; West of Scotland Furniture Manufacturing Co.

West of Scotland Works, Beith & Wellington Street, Glasgow, Scotland; wholesale chair & couch manufacturer, wholesale furniture manufacturer & upholsterer (fl.1870-93)

Robert Balfour from Glasgow bought the original premises of John and Matthew Pollock, Bark Mill, just outside Beith, c. 1870. Two years later he moved his manufacturing business to a site beside the new terminal connecting Beith to Glasgow. Graham Gadd Archive. © National Museums Scotland.

Image
Robert Balfour - Gadd archive
Copyright (Attribution/Credit)
NMS
Graham Gadd Archive. © National Museums Scotland.

A billhead (above), dated 1878, for Robert Balfour, cabinet and chair manufacturer of 81 and 85 Maxwell Street and East Howard Street, Glasgow, the factory The West of Scotland Cabinet and Chair Works, Beith, is included in the Graham Gadd Archive (NMS).   

The West of Scotland Furniture Manufacturing Company was recorded in The Furniture Gazette from 1880 and the issue of 1 September 1883 reported that Balfour had appointed J. W. Small, (an architect in Edinburgh) to act as designer and to superintend his cabinet works at Beith.

Listed in The Furniture Gazette: Classified List of the Furniture, Upholstery, and Allied Trades (1886) with the additional address of 9 & 11 Wellington Street, Glasgow and by early 1886 the business had the telegraphic address of ‘Balfour, Beith or London’ [The Furniture Gazette, 1 January 1886]. The firm was recorded in The Furniture Gazette (1 August 1888) as participating in the Glasgow International Exhibition (illustrated). 

Cabinet Maker & Art Furnisher, March 1893, recorded that as well as the "commonplace class", the firm was producing furniture in the Jacobean style in dark oak 'freed from unnecessary heaviness to make it more in accord with modern ideas and requirements'.

Balfour died in 1924; his obituary in Cabinet Maker noted he was 'the first to apply machinery to the making of carcase work....[and] therefore, the pioneer of the wholesale trade as we know it'.

Source: Graham Gadd Archive (NMS).