Born in Springburn on 19th September 1837, into a family of stone masons, Peter McLean was named after his grandfather, and was the son of sculptor Alexander McLean (1810-53), whose workshop he succeeded to after his father’s death.

This was situated in Kirk Lane, to the immediate west of the Necropolis Superintendent’s House, on a site now occupied by modern housing, where it can be seen in contemporary photographs and postcards crowded with new monuments and the crane to lift them.

First appearing in the Glasgow POD for 1853, Clubb & McLean advertised themselves as the successors to the late Alexander McLean.

In 1853, McLean lived at 43 Castle Street, and at 30 Drygate in 1854, which was the last year that he is listed in the Glasgow Post Office Directory. He and his brother John erected a granite obelisk over their father's grave in the Necropolis in 1853 (Section: Eta).

Sculptor Alexander Clubb was born in or near Dunoon in 1806, and lived in Glasgow (in 1851) at 97 Carrick Street, Springburn, with his wife and son, Alexander (born c. 1844).

Clubb continued to trade under the firm’s name until 1872, when he eventually returned to Dunoon, where he died at Sandbank on 6th December 1873, of a diseased liver and an acute attack of brain disease. Clubb was buried in Glasgow Cathedral’s New Burial Ground.

Working in sandstone, the firm produced a significant number of impressive sculptural monuments for the Necropolis and Glasgow’s other cemeteries, often to the designs of prominent city architects.

These include the finely detailed monuments in the Necropolis to Robert Stewart, of Omoa, designed by architect James Brown (c.1854, Omega, signed: McLean); the bookseller David Robertson, designed by James Hamilton II, with a stone portrait relief (1856, Epsilon, signed Clubb & McLean); John Miller, of Muirshields, by James Hamilton II (1856, Epsilon, signed: Clubb & McLean); and the Classical monument to William Harper Minnoch (c. 1863, Mnema, signed Clubb & McLean).

The Miller of Muirshields monument is the firm’s most impressive work in the Necropolis, and was discussed, and its sculptors identified, in an article published in the Glasgow Herald on 10th September 1856:

“A beautiful monument has just been erected on the summit of the Necropolis to the memory of John Miller of Muirshields…it consists of a highly ornate sarcophagus resting on a massive oblong pedestal, the base and cornice of which are enriched with Roman Doric mouldings, and each of its corners at the top with graceful consols (sic)…the sarcophagus…may be regarded as a mixture of the Greek and Elizabethan styles.

In alto relievo on each side are carved pairs of inverted torches, crosswise, and bound at the point of junction with laurel wreaths. The pedestal itself is a sarcophagus formed exactly on the model of Scipio’s tent in Rome. [The sculptors are] Clubb & McLean. It stands in the farthest eastern terrace”.

The Harper Minnoch monument tenuously links the sculptors to one of Glasgow's most notorious characters, Madeleine Smith, who was tried for the murder of her lover, Pierre Emile L'Angelier with cups of cocoa laced with arsenic, while being engaged to Minnoch in 1857.

Clubb and McLean would have followed the developments of the trial as avidly as the rest of the scandalised public, not least the press accounts of Minnoch's testimony, but also because Madeleine's father, James Smith, was one of Glasgow's most prominent architects; little knowing that in time, they would be carving themselves a niche in the story by virtue of their eventually sculpting Minnoch's monument after he died on 6 June, 1863.

Outwith Glasgow, a good example of Clubb & McLean's work is the white marble wall monument commemorating Rev. John Reid in Old Kilpatrick Bowling Church (1867).

Sources:

• PODs : 1853-72;
• Gifford & Walker (2002), p.626;
• GH : 10 Sept 1856;
• Blair, p.140;
• Caroline Gerard: e-mails re Census returns;
• Ruth Johnston (2006) Glasgow Necropolis (ill.)
• Scott (2005) Death By Design, pp. 106-8 (ill.);