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Bow, McLachlan and Company

Scottish marine engineering and shipbuilding company that traded between 1872 and 1932

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 22, 2022
Entity authorityQ4950597 ↗
Source-derived summary

Bow, McLachlan and Company was a Scottish marine engineering and shipbuilding company that traded between 1872 and 1932.

History

1872–1914

In 1872 William Bow and John McLachlan founded the company at Abbotsinch, Renfrewshire, where it made steering gear and light marine steam engines. In 1900 the company expanded into the building of small ships by taking over J. McArthur & Co's Thistle Works and shipyard at Paisley, also in Renfrewshire. The expanded undertaking became a limited liability company at the same time.

Bow, McLachlan & Co. entered the specialist market for "knock down" vessels. These were bolted together at the shipyard, all the parts marked with numbers, disassembled into many hundreds of parts and transported in kit form for final reassembly with rivets. This elaborate method of construction was used to provide inland shipping for export, or for lakes that had no navigable link with the open sea. The company supplied a number of "knock down" ships to the Uganda Railway for service on Lake Victoria, including the passenger and cargo sister ships Sybil and Winifred (1901), the larger Clement Hill (1905) and cargo ship Nyanza (1907).

Bow, McLachlan developed a good reputation for building tugs, such as Hallgarth (1901), Samson (1903), Roca (1904) and Admiralty paddle tug HMS Robust (1907).

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Bow, McLachlan and Company” is scottish marine engineering and shipbuilding company that traded between 1872 and 1932. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through McLachlan, Company and Scottish, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA strong contextual entry point for chronology, institutions and public events when official records are distinguished from later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1872, 1932, 1914, 1900—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, McLachlan, Company and Scottish is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “scottish marine engineering and shipbuilding company that traded between 1872 and 1932” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2022. The linked authority identifier is Q4950597. Authority coordinates are 55.867, -4.422. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1872, 1932, 1914 and 1900.

Critical limits

Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Bow, McLachlan and Company”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Bow, McLachlan and Company primary sources, Bow, McLachlan and Company archive and McLachlan research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Bow, McLachlan and Company”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Bow, McLachlan and Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.