12. Ebenezer McKinlay

Ebenezer McKinlay - Mill Manager

The owners of the cotton mills in Glasgow usually employed managers to attend to the daily running of the mills. It was the manager who usually had to deal with problems such as had occurred at Dennistoun's mill in Calton, and who was usually blamed for any poor conditions or ill treatment of workers, as the 1833 Factory Commission found out.

One of the many mill managers was Ebenezer McKinlay, who lived with his wife, Mary Walker , and their family, at 64 South Wellington Street, Hutchesontown during the late 1850s. Other families living in the building in 1859 included James McLelland, David Peacock, Mrs Denholm, Mrs Gunn, Robert Gilmour, and the Butlers . A few doors down the street at number 84 lived Duncan Wilkie, a grocer .

South Wellington Street was parallel to the Clyde on the south bank of the river, opposite Glasgow Green. It was about half a mile from William and Janet Wilkie's home in James Street, Calton. A small footbridge crossed the Clyde between the Green and South Wellington Street.

Ebenezer McKinlay was manager of the New Adelphi Mill (also known as John and Robert Cogan's Mills) at 23 Govan Street. Govan Street was parallel to South Wellington Street, about three hundred yards further south of the Clyde.

On 9 June 1859, at their home at 64 South Wellington Street, Ebenezer and Mary Mckinlay's twenty-year-old daughter, Janet Walker McKinlay, was married to William Wilkie the Second, the thirty two year old son of William and Janet Wilkie . Witnesses to the marriage were William’s brother, Conal Alexander Wilkie, and a friend, Janet Gatheral .