[Updated 9th July 2018 for Ewan & Maggie’s visit to Dunblane]
A request from Ewan through Shells for information on the McKay and Ross lines of the family tree led me to collate stuff that I could remember and share with him some old photos I’d scanned. I thought it might be of value also to other grandchildren, and indeed the children of nieces and nephews in the future so I thought I’d write it up here as a post and allow Jane to add to it if she wished, or correct my memory!
[Don’t miss the last section even if you don’t want to read the text – it’s a link to some photos!]
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Her dad, Johnny, was the village postman (or postie). Dunblane although a city (because it had a cathedral) was very small. When I went there, as a boy, it’s population was only 3,500 (it’s grown quite a bit since then) and so he was known by all the people of the town. His parents were from Dunblane and his mother was a McKenzie – just like you Ewan! The McKays originally came from Perth, and before that Killin. The McKenzies were a long-established Dunblane family, so if you visit there and meet anyone with either the surname Stirling, or McKenzie, you’re probably related to them – distantly. I believe he played bowls down on the green beside the River Allan when he wasn’t working for his aunt (a McKenzie, or Stirling relative) who was Dunblane’s first post-mistress. The post office was opposite the station. I remember the wonderful red sandstone building well. He had an impish grin, which you can see on all the photographs of him, and he led a very full, but relatively short life – dying from pneumonia after he went outside from bed when he had a cold without properly dressing against the cold winter. I think (and you can check this of course) that he was 72. As a young man he’d joined the army and we have a picture of him astride a camel, somewhere near the pyramids, so he saw a bit of the world.
The thing the family is most proud of is the Certificate and Medal which he was awarded by the Royal Humane Society for jumping into the River Allan in Dunblane, which was in spate (flood) and saving the life of a young boy. I have the certificate and citation, my cousin Ross – the last McKay, has the medal (or should have!). A newspaper cutting from the time too is below the certificate.
Her mum, Catherine, came from a long-lived line of Highlanders who settled in the Black Isle near Inverness. She was one of a very large number of children in the family who nearly all left home to find fortunes elsewhere as their lives would have been hard, but healthy, but not rich in a monetary sense. She went into service looking after a little boy called Douglas Pattison-Knight who rose in later life in the Foreign Office I believe, but who never failed to keep in touch with his “Kate” until the day she died. So along with three of her sisters (two of whom also went into service) they moved down to Dunblane where she met Johnny.
I’m adding a map of Dunblane from 1932 which I’ve annotated with a few marks and pointers …
… click on it and you should be able to get a bigger version.
They set up house in Springfield Terrace (see on the map above), where their three children John, Mamie and Eunice were born, before moving in 1926 just round the corner to The Old Doune Road where they lived in Dunearn for the rest of their lives.
Next door “over the wall”, lived her sister Annie, and I well remember being told to take the eggs over to Aunt Annie which I did by way of a set of steps that my Grandad (Johnny) had constructed to go over the solid wall and down a steep drop to Annie’s back door. She was older than Kate and bedridden by then but I remember she had a motorised invalid carriage which she kept in a sort of mini-garage at the front of the house.
Emily (Bobbie Crow’s mother) lived in the top flat in a house near the top of Bridgend – shown on the map. I always remember her flat, going up the stairs, which was rather dark and not very welcoming. Jane and I didn’t enjoy going to see her much!
So you can tell from that they kept hens in the back garden! My sister (Jane) and I were given the task when staying with our grandparents of collecting the eggs, until they stopped keeping them and turned the hen shed into a playhouse – principally for Jane. Kate was a lovely, kind warm person; she must have been a wonderful mother to Eunice and it must have broken her heart when my mother went away first to work in Edinburgh and then to join the WRAF. She never returned home to live. So Eunice would only see her mother once a year when we all journeyed off to Scotland (Dunblane) to stay with her for a fortnight. She and Johnny did come and visit us in Brighton, but most memorably, after Johnny died, she flew down to Cornwall to visit us when we were living in Penzance.
On the right-hand side of the map – beside what is now a roundabout on the by-pass – is St Mary’s Church. Behind the church and towards the top right-hand corner of it are the gravestones of John and Catherine McKay, beside that gravestone is the one for Catherine’s sisters – Annie Ross and Emily Crow.
The stone markers for Mamie and Bobbie are beside the church in a section reserved for cremated ashes.
At the bottom of Bridgend is the horseshoe on the wall, placed there by my Great Great Grandfather James McKenzie, a Blacksmith who, legend has it, “shoed the Queen’s Horse” when Queen Victoria was passing through Dunblane. He probably had his smithy at the bottom of Bridgend by the Bridge over the River Allan.
Just up from the Bridge – you can reach the spot from a path at the top of Bridgend – on the banks of the Allan is where my Grandpa jumped into the river to save the boy from drowning. There used to be a plaque on the wall, but I’m afraid that seems to have disappeared some time ago. In the picture below. it would have just been round the bend of the river to the left – the houses weren’t there then!!
Dunblane was at this time, and even up to the time we visited, an important railway junction with lots of sidings which must have been used to bring wool down to the mill that was beside the Laighills. It was the owner of this mill that took my mother and a friend (Jill Waddle/Hinchcliff) to Switzerland before the Second World War. Here’s a picture of the Fairy Bridge and the Mill at the Laighills.
From Dunblane the line spurred off to Calendar – where my mother went to school, and then on to Oban – where my parents spent their honeymoon. That’s the line going off to the left; the other line goes on to Perth and Inverness.
==== Shells commented on the fact the Ross family didn’t just move to Dunblane, so I replied …
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