Alexander Crawford Lamb

Mr Alexander Crawford Lamb was a native of Dundee, and was born on 21st February 1843. The son of the late Mr Thomas Lamb, a notable personage in the annals of the city, and founder of Lamb’s Temperance Hotel, he was educated at the High School, and thereafter, being destined for a commercial career, placed in a position to acquire a thoroughly practical knowledge of the baking and confectionery trade. On the completion of his apprenticeship he went to Liverpool, Manchester, and to Edinburgh for the purpose of being initiated in the details of hotel management. The experience gained in these cities stood him in good stead in after years. As is well known, Lamb’s Hotel is not only one of the most reputable but one of the largest establishments of the kind in the country, and the control and management of its affairs call for no ordinary business aptitude and knowledge. Soon after returning to Dundee, and while still a young man, Mr Lamb’s possession of these qualities was put to the test. Assuming first the charge of the working department – that is the baking and confectionery branches - he succeeded so well that by and by he became right-hand man to his father, then advanced in years, but still vigorous, enterprising and resourceful. The Murraygate hotel, which was first acquired and run on temperance principles about 1828, was for a time conducted along with the branch establishment in Reform Street; but by and by the former was given up, and sole attention bestowed on the Reform Street property. The present splendid building was erected and inaugurated shortly before the visit of the British Association to the city in 1867, and two years thereafter Mr Thomas Lamb, the father, died. Practically the sole responsibility of the conducting of the extensive establishment then devolved upon Mr A. C. Lamb, although he was ably seconded by his mother, his sister (both since dead), and his younger brother. In the subsequent period the hotel and its connections have steadily progressed in public favour, and at the present time no better or more widely known hotel exists in the country. As a caterer and purveyor, the position occupied by Mr Lamb was unique. Soirees and conversaziones in the winter, and picnics in the summer months, were supplied to the number sometimes of a dozen daily, and as these required personal attendance and supervision some idea of the demand made on Mr Lamb’s time and energies may be obtained. However, he was a born organiser, a master of details; and engagements which, owing to their number and complexity, would have caused dismay to a less equable tempered and administrative mind, were accomplished promptly and satisfactorily.

Thus actively and apparently wholly immersed in business matters, it was remarkable how Mr Lamb found time to devote to literary and antiquarian pursuits. And yet it is by the work which he was able to achieve in this direction that his name and reputation were made. Early in life Mr Lamb’s artistic taste and love of research into the old and historically interesting conspicuously showed themselves, and with rare discretion he began to gather together a collection of modern pictures which in course of years became of considerable value. Conjointly with the pursuit of this hobby he evinced a keen appreciation of rare literary works, and as a persistent hunter and purchaser of these his name was known far and wide among the bibliophiles of the past and present generation. The walls of his house was adorned by numerous valuable paintings, while in his private library his shelves were enriched by several unique quarto and folio Shakespeare’s, a complete copy of the first Kilmarnock edition of Burns’ poems, and many first prints of the works of Scott, Dickens, and Ruskin. Other volumes representative of all that is best in British and foreign literature found their way into Mr Lamb’s possession, and testified to the catholicity of his taste. Nor in the ownership of these literary and art treasures did he display any selfish or narrow spirit. To Exhibitions held in our midst he was ever a ready and prominent contributor; and it may be remembered that at the recent Burns Exhibition in Glasgow, in the promotion of which he took a leading part, his specimens of the ploughman bard attracted the notice of book-lovers far and near.

What he did to keep alive in the recollection of an age too apt to forget such things the honoured traditions of Dundee is of so recent date that it need hardly be mentioned. Many years have elapsed since he first realised that, owing to the zeal of the municipal rulers for improvements in the interests of public health, there was danger that, in the clearance, traces of the old burgh and the records of other days would be irretrievably lost. No one seemed disposed to make any effort to preserve these memorials. Mr Lamb accordingly remedied the deficiency - filled the breach as it were - and, learning the use of the camera, he began with his usual enthusiasm to photograph some of the older structures that were doomed, and to collect from every available source drawings of buildings that had already been laid low. In this way was started what in result turned out to be a collection of local antiquities of great importance. Views of old buildings, examples of early and recent typography, consecutive specimens of Dundee journalism, coins, medals, and tokens connected with the ancient Royalty, and relics of almost every conceivable kind illustrative of the evolution of the city’s trade and commerce, were obtained, carefully stored, and zealously guarded. This in due time led Mr Lamb to entertain the project of holding an exhibition of “Old Dundee” curiosities. When he ultimately brought the idea before the community it was taken up with great heartiness, and from all quarters articles having a direct relation to the town as it existed in early times were forwarded. Mr Lamb exerted himself night and day in arranging and cataloguing the exhibits, his own stack of rarities was largely drawn upon, and, was to be expected, the show, which remained open for public inspection for fully four months, proved a decided success. For his labours and interest on that occasion Mr Lamb was made the recipient of an album containing a series of photographs of the exhibition from various points of view, along with an address. The terms of the address were as follows:- “Presented to Alexander C. Lamb, Esq., by the Hon. the Lord Provost, on behalf of the citizens of Dundee, in grateful acknowledgement of the successful projection and organisation in 1892-93 of the “Old Dundee” Exhibition, and also invaluable service, involving much patient labour, rendered during a period of upwards of 20 years in the elucidation of the ancient history of Dundee, and the acquisition at great personal expense of a marvellous collection - pictorial, typographical, and industria l- illustrating its history, which in all probability would otherwise have been lost, and which, with much public-spiritedness, he has always readily placed at the service of his fellow-citizens.”

No sooner was this event past than another and greater - the chef-d’ouevre, indeed, of Mr lamb’s life - speedily followed. This was the publication of “Dundee: Its Quaint and Historic Buildings”- a work on which he had been engaged for many years, on which he bestowed enormous time and trouble, and which entailed upon him the expenditure of a large sum of money. The book consists of numerous plates of antique and picturesque buildings, drawn by Mr William Gibb, the well-known Edinburgh artist; early maps, dating from the thirteenth century to the present day, in which Dundee is named; and plans of the burgh in olden time. Extended letterpress descriptions, forming a valuable condensed history of the progress of the town, were also given. When the monumental work saw the light of day it was hailed with unqualified terms of praise, not only locally, but all over the country. Eulogistic reviews of it appeared in the principal newspapers, and Her Majesty the Queen, to whom the work was dedicated, and who accepted a specially-prepared copy, showed a personal interest which must have been as gratifying to the author as it was a source of pride to the community. The book was readily subscribed for, and the limited number of copies issued were soon all taken up. The Town Council entered upon their minutes their appreciation of Mr lamb’s services on this occasion. Sir James Low, the then Lord Provost, voiced the feeling of his colleagues and the citizens generally when, in words of warm eulogy, he said Mr Lamb had by his labours placed his native city under a deep debt of gratitude to him.

Mr Lamb’s latest enterprise was the holding of an Exhibition, consisting of his collection of MSS., rare editions, and engravings illustrative of the works of Burns, Scott and Shakespeare. The exhibits numbered over 1000, and were of unique interest. At the opening ceremony due recognition was made of the generosity and public spirit which had led Mr lamb to again open his treasures to the inspection of his fellow-citizens. The Rev. Dr Campbell, Sir John Leng - who had suggested the Exhibition - and others warmly eulogised Mr Lamb’s generous and indefatigable labours in connection with the Exhibition, which was largely visited by all classes, especially during the New Year’s holidays.

In 1878, Mr Lamb was elected a member of the Society of Antiquaries, and when Dundee was raised to the dignity of a county he was made a Justice of the Peace. As a member of the Fine Art Committee, of the Graphic Arts Association, of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, and kindred Societies, he ever displayed a warm and practical interest in art, and counted among his personal friends some of the most distinguished painters of the day. He was associated with several of the literary organisations in the town, and acted as Treasurer of the recently formed Burns Society. Mr Lamb’s personal character earned for him hosts of friends. Of a genial disposition, ever ready to oblige and further any laudable object, he was of the type of citizen whose loss to the community it would be impossible to over-estimate. Mr Lamb, who was 54 years of age, leaves a widow and a family of two sons and four daughters.

MR A. C. LAMB AS AN ART AND BOOK COLLECTOR

The name of A. C. Lamb was well known in both artistic and literary circles as that of a collector of more than average discretion. Many years ago he devoted his attention to works of art, and he formed a cabinet of rare and excellent examples of modern pictures. He was catholic in his artistic tastes, and did not make the collecting of pictures by one artist the ‘fad’ which it has become with many collectors. He had amongst his most valued pictorial possessions works by artists so widely apart as Edouard Frewe and H. Stacey Marks, and he had as fine a selection of pencil-sketches and pictures by Sam Bough as could readily be found in Scotland. The collecting of rare old engravings was also one of his delights. Though not a practical artist he had keen artistic instincts, and could pick out the beauties and the blemishes in picture, sketch, or engraving with ease and certainty. In the course of years of patient collecting he brought together a vast number of engravings of the last century - line engravings, Bartolozzi prints, and mezzotints, many of which are of great rarity and value. A short time ago he made an exhibition of these in the Victoria Art Galleries, and had such a display been made in London the metropolitan press would have been loud in its praise. The interest which Mr Lamb took in this department of art naturally led him to direct his notice to art books. He thus became known to the principal London dealers in antique books with rare illustrations. There was recently shown in Dundee his “Graingerised” edition of Sir Walter Scott’s works with thousands of interpolated pictures - a series that is quite unique and of considerable value. Many illustrated works of equal rarity were collected by him from numerous sources. First editions of such works were, of course, least readily obtainable, but the very existence of this difficulty only made it an additional incentive to secure the prize. Thus he was gradually brought to look for rare first editions of printed books, even without illustrations. He took up the subject of Burns, for instance, and by patience and discretion he brought together one of the finest Burns collections in the possession of any private person in Scotland. Amongst the special editions of Burns which he had there was a unique copy of the first Kilmarnock edition, in the original binding, and in perfect condition, some of the leaves having been unopened, thus proving its rarity and perfect state. The gathering together of rare editions of Shakespeare arose out of his devotion to Burns. The numerous visitors to the Burns-Shakespeare-Scott exhibition, recently held by Mr Lamb in Dundee, have only to look at the printed catalogue of that exhibition to find how valuable were the works exhibited. The folio editions of Shakespeare in the collection included copies of some of the very rarest, apart from the extremely rare first folio. Another department of antique art and letters which Mr lamb cultivated was that of illuminated missals of the fifteenth sixteenth centuries, and not a few valuable specimens are in the collection. Whatever Mr Lamb undertook in this way was done thoroughly. When he took up a subject, he spared no pains to get the best that bore upon it. Thus when he began to collect portraits of Admiral Duncan, he gradually weeded out the commoner engravings which he first collected, and replaced them by rarer specimens. But it is in connection with the history of Dundee that Mr Lamb’s name deserves most to be held in remembrance. Beginning with the gathering together of sketches of old quarters of the city that had been removed during the alterations carried out under the Improvement Act, he gradually extended his ideas regarding the subject. He began to collect documents bearing upon the history of the ancient buildings, and was very successful in forming a reference collection of these which has no parallel in Dundee. Every department of municipal life came under his notice. Annual reports of Religious, Social, Literary, and Musical Associations that are long since extinct were acquired by him whenever they came in his way, and the result is that the veritable annals of these Societies may be easily made out from the systematic arrangement by which the reports are classified. It will be a grave misfortune for Dundee if this collection, the labour of many years, should be dispersed. It is clearly the duty of the community to acquire these for public preservation, and this form of commemorating Mr Lamb’s name as a devoted citizen of Dundee commends itself as appropriate. The magnificent volume of “Dundee: Its Quaint and Historic Buildings,” will serve to keep his name in memory throughout the country for many years and it will still further realise the idea which he had preserving all that could be gathered bearing upon the past and present history of Dundee.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS (BY ONE WHO KNEW HIM)

Few citizens there are who did not feel on hearing the sad news of Mr Lamb’s unexpected death that his loss was, in the fullest sense, a civic one, and one which has left Dundee a much poorer town than it was before. But, widespread as this feeling will be, it is only those who knew Mr Lamb most intimately who will be able to altogether realise the magnitude of the loss to Dundee. He was certainly her most enthusiastic and devoted son, and to justify - for he would have repudiated the word “glorify” - to justly vindicate her position among the cities of Scotland had long been the engrossing object of his existence. To accomplish this he had devoted most of his life since the attainment of manhood, and for this object he grudged neither time nor money. Not that he was at all a man of one idea, for one of wider sympathies and greater public spirit did not exist. Few indeed were the public interests for which he did not care, or the philanthropic causes to which he did not open his purse; but still these, frequently recurring as they did, were but the incidents which interrupted for a moment, but did not divert, the main purpose of a life devoted to one ideal. He frequently told the writer of the circumstances under which, when quite a young man, he made the first purchase of an object illustrative of the history of his native city, little realising at the time that this was the vital turning-point of his career, and that for a quarter of a century such purchases were to increase until they formed a gigantic and unrivalled collection. To the formation of this he devoted the unwearied patience to which most things ultimately come, the most courteous and consummate tact, and an unerring instinct amounting to positive genius in discovering in places at once unlikely an obscure rare valuable example, for the acquisition of which his generosity of disposition never allowed expense to stand in the way. Not that he could not estimate clearly the real money value of any article bargained for; a thorough business man, he could when occasion demanded negotiate such matters in a strictly business manner, but these coveted specimens were very largely in the possession of old Dundee persons and families, many of whom had fallen into rather necessitous circumstances, and in such cases he was generous to a fault. In this manner were acquired pictures, prints, coins, medals, manuscripts, books, and innumerable other publications printed in the city, with a wealth of antiquarian relics of all kinds throwing light on the development of Dundee. When he began to purchase in early youth he had no special object in his mind beyond that of acquiring - for he was a born collector - but as the collection grew in size his ideas also enlarged, and for many years his definite object was to utilise his collection and the results of his researches in the production of a work illustrating the ancient history of Dundee. When this idea had clearly shaped itself in his mind he devoted himself to its accomplishment with characteristic vigour and self-sacrifice. His first special endeavour was to obtain reliable illustrations of the older and quainter portions of the city - .then fast disappearing before the exertions of the sanitary reformer. Although not a day too soon, in this he achieved great success, and whilst the greatness of the idea grew upon him, and the artistic merits of the first sketches made ceased to satisfy him, yet the main object had been accomplished, and reliable drawings from the veritable old streets and houses had been obtained before these were demolished. At very considerable expense, the genuine features of these original drawings, unaltered in any way, were rendered with greater artistic beauty by the British artists of highest distinction in this department of art, and the result may be seen in the Book.

Then on the historical and literary side of the work more than a dozen years were spent in patient and exhaustive examination of national and municipal archives and private title deeds and papers. Even the ‘Old Dundee’ Exhibition, of the Sub-Committee of which Mr Lamb was Convenor, was practically an incident in the production of the Book. Large as Mr Lamb’s own collection was, it was understood that there were many interesting and valuable paintings, books, and other relics in the possession of old Dundee families, and these the Exhibition brought into the light of day. Highly successful as an Exhibition, it showed, however, how valuable and full was Mr Lamb’s collection, and, although its financial non-success rather disappointed him, he consoled himself when it was found that even in the great metropolis of the West the “Old Glasgow” Exhibition which followed ours has a still worse experience, as had also the magnificent Glasgow Burns Exhibition of last year. The explanation seems to be that to such exhibitions one or more visits seem to suffice, whilst Fine Arts Exhibitions attract visitors again and again.

But the ‘Old Dundee’ Exhibition was valuable also in effectively displaying the richness of the material available for a proper history of Dundee, and so paved the way for the appearance 2 years later of Mr Lamb’s monumental work, “Dundee: its Quaint and Historic Buildings.” It is unnecessary to repeat here what has already been said in our columns illustrative of the magnificence of that book, alike in its literary, artistic, and typographical aspects. Few citizens there are who have not seen the work and felt proud of it and of the ancient city of which it is the grandest monument. That such legitimate pride did not arise from mere natural civic partiality was proved by the cordial reception the book met with from the most exacting critics of the principal literary reviews in Great Britain, and from the great national libraries of this country and France. This latter recognition was the only one which seemed to gratify Mr Lamb - he experienced the feeling which all skilled craftsmen realise when those competent to judge approve of their work. As for the work itself, he always spoke of it as a duty -he had done it all for the sake of dear old Dundee, and if her beauty and her dignified historic past were only generally recognised he felt more than repaid.

But, as we have already said, large as was the space which his Dundee work occupied in the life of Mr Lamb, it did not entirely occupy it to the exclusion of everything else. He was an all-round collector, with all the most typical characteristics of the race, and his fellow - citizens benefited from his exertions in other fields besides that of the antiquary. Two winters ago he covered the walls of one of the Victoria Galleries with a most beautiful collection of rare engravings and etchings, all from his own collection, and valuable not merely financially and artistically, but also exceedingly precious as constituting a pictorial history of that delightful art from its discovery nearly five centuries ago. The same gallery was filled during the past winter with, if possible, a still more interesting Exhibition - a splendid collection of the works of Shakespeare, Burns, and Scott, with numerous portraits and illustrations of those giants of literature. Both these Exhibitions attracted troops of visitors, and the recent one proved so successful that it was arranged to reopen it during the summer months for the benefit of the large number of strangers who then visit the city. But even these large and valuable collections by no means exhausted the literary, artistic, and antiquarian repositories of Mr Lamb.

A member of the Victoria Galleries Fine Art Committee for 20 years, he was also personally a liberal and discriminating patron of Art - possessing a fine collection of paintings, in which may distinguished names are represented - his examples of the renowned painter Sam Bough being remarkably fine. He also possessed a large and valuable numismatic collection, had formed a charming one of rare china and porcelain, and had many fine ivories, rare flint implements, and other articles fancied by collation of literary treasures besides those relating to Dundee and to Shakespeare, Burns, and Scott. All these he held - as genuine public-spirited collectors always do hold them - not to be jealously kept for his own exclusive gratification, but in trust for his less fortunate fellow-citizens. To them, and even to strangers, his rich and varied collections were always open, and much of his time was occupied in antiquarian and family searches on behalf of inquirers from all parts of the world. Yet, wide as was the range of his collections, and wider still as were his sympathies, it is as the unique Dundee collector and chronicler that he will be, as he desired to be, remembered, and that, we may safely assert, will be as long as Dundee survives as a city, or even as a name.

And now in the hour of his sudden removal from the wife and children to whom he was so tenderly attached, and from the citizens who so deeply valued and respected him, is it not possible to find one consolatory feature? - the consciousness that, although leaving us at so comparatively early an age, he had yet been spared to do his great work, to accomplish with a success acknowledged by all men the special work his hands had found to do. This work had his unselfish devotion to a high ideal are our valuable possessions still - richly valuable in themselves, and still more in teaching to an age so much given to personal aims and aggrandisement the much-needed lesson of unselfish devotion to the public weal.

Lamb Collection

© 2003 Local Studies Department, Central Library, Dundee