Jeanie Laing: a Victorian Single Mother in the Rhins of Galloway

When I was no but sweet sixteen

With beauty just a-blooming-o

It’s little little did I think

At nineteen I'd be greeting-o

         

For the ploughboy lads they're gey braw lads

But they're false and they're deceiving-o

For they'll take your all and they'll gang awa

And leave their lasses grieving-o

(Scottish Folk Song)

Last year, our cottage in Colonel Street, Portpatrick celebrated (if that’s the right word) 50 years as a holiday home, having been bought for that purpose by my Aunt in 1966. Before then, however, it was a real home to many people for nearly 150 years. In this article, I will tell the tale of Jane (Jeanie) Laing, who lived in the cottage for over 10 years in the 1890s and 1900s. It is a notable story of a woman making her way in the very different environment of 19^th century rural Scotland.

Jeanie was born Jane Stewart, sometime around 1844 at High Ardwell farm, Stoneykirk parish. There is no official record of her birthdate; prior to 1855, recording births was optional in Scotland and many parents did not do so. Jeanie's parents, Andrew and Jane Stewart, were agricultural workers, living in a cottage on the farm. If the records can be believed, Andrew was 74 when Jeanie was born. Her mother was Andrew’s second wife; he had had six children by his late first wife and had survived most of them. Jeanie’s mother, who was around 34 when Jane was born, had another daughter by Andrew: Mary, who was three years older than Jeanie.

Andrew Stewart had been born in Portpatrick parish but had lived for over 40 years in Stoneykirk. As a long established and experienced farm worker, Andrew is likely to have been a “benefit man”, better paid and more secure than a day labourer (who on the Rhinns were often Irish immigrants), but lower in the hierarchy than ploughmen or shepherds. The author of the 1845 New Statistical Account for the neighbouring parish of Kirkmaiden listed the annual rewards that a married benefit man received:

“L9 of money; 5 Galloway bolls of potatoes and two bushels planted; 52 stones of 17lb oatmeal; 2 tons or 48 cwt of coals, with house and garden”.

Andrew’s wife also worked on the farm as an “in and out worker”, carrying out tasks in the farmhouse or outdoors as needed. Then as now, mixed farming was practiced in the area, with wheat, oats, potatoes and turnips grown alongside the pasturing of livestock. Jeanie and Mary would have also been called upon to help out from a young age.

High Ardwell farm, where Jeanie Laing was born in 1844

High Ardwell farm is now a rather isolated place, largely off the tourist track. When Jeanie was growing up, however, the population in the area was higher than today and there would have been a thriving local community. The village of Clachanmore was half a mile away and in the 19^th century had a school, general store, smithy and joiner’s shop (all long gone).

 

Clachanmore isn't very village-like today as its shops and facilities are gone and the school (on the left of the picture) is a private house. Jeanie wouldn't have gone to school in this building, as it wasn't built until the 1870s. However, there had previously been an estate school established by the Laird of Ardwell and Jeanie learnt to read and write there

Andrew Stewart died in 1855, apparently at the age of 85; again there is no record of his birth to confirm his age. Several of the characters in this story and in my other accounts of the Rhins in the19^th century lived, like Andrew, to a ripe old age. At that time, longevity was largely a matter of surviving childhood (and for women surviving childbirth) and in adulthood avoiding infections and accidents. The Rhinns lifestyle, with a diet based on oats and herrings and plenty of physical exercise, may well have protected people from modern “degenerative” conditions such as cancer and cardio-vascular disease.

Sometime after Andrew Stewart’s death, his widow and daughter Jeanie went to work at the Logan estate, the country residence of the local landowners, the McDouall family (Jeanie’s elder sister Mary had left home and was a domestic servant in Stoneykirk village). Jane Stewart became the Logan estate’s hen keeper and Jeanie a laundrymaid at Logan House. They lived together in Hen Knowe, a cottage in the grounds of the estate.

 

Logan House, where Jeanie worked in the 1860s and where she married Peter Laing

The McDouall family had been Lairds of that part of the Rhins since the 13^th century. The Laird at the time was Colonel James McDouall. Like many 19^th century country houses, Logan estate was a virtually self-sufficient community, with the adjacent Mains farm providing the big house with food. In 1861, when Jeanie and her mother were living on the estate, the staff at Logan House included a butler, housekeeper, coachman and a lady’s companion for the Laird’s 82 year old mother, along with a number of domestic servants. On the Mains, overseen by the Laird’s Landservant, lived a gamekeeper, blacksmiths, gardeners, ploughmen and dairymaids and a troop of agricultural labourers. While many who lived on the estate were born locally, not all were and there was likely to be a continual level of turnover of staff.

In this rather campus-like environment it was inevitable that relationships were formed and in 1864, at the age of 20, Jeanie Stewart fell pregnant. Her daughter Annie was born on 19^th December. Jeanie may well have known who Annie’s father was and may well have wanted his name to be recorded on her birth certificate, but the law prevented this from happening. In a classic example of male-centredness, in 19^th century Scotland the name of the father of an illegitimate child could only be recorded if the father agreed and signed the register in person, or if he was named in a paternity suit. Unsurprisingly, the majority of illegitimate children at that time had no father named.

Jeanie was by no means unique in rural Galloway in having an illegitimate child. In the 19^th century, Galloway had one of the highest illegitimacy rates in Scotland, close to the highest in Europe (a distinction shared with north-east Scotland, a similar mixed-farming area). Illegitimacy was most common among farm workers and domestic servants, who, like the lads and lassies on Logan estate, were often young and working away from home. Whether Annie’s father was a “ploughboy lad” as in the song we will never know, but Jeanie had another characteristic of local mothers of illegitimate children: her own mother, with whom she still lived, was available to help bring Annie up. Many a Galloway household listed “grandchildren” on census returns, youngsters being brought up by older grandparents while their single mothers returned to domestic service.

For middle and upper class women during the Victorian era, an illegitimate child almost invariably meant social ruin and it would be rare for the mother to subsequently marry. It was of course different for middle-class men, who were allowed to be sexually experienced at marriage and would sometimes, if available, resort to prostitutes to achieve this (Stranraer was at the time one of the few country towns in Scotland to have a substantial number of prostitutes, due to its status as a transit port for Ireland). Different attitudes tended to prevail among the rural working class and in 1867, Jeanie, now 22, married Peter Laing, an 18 year old groom at Logan House. Jeanie was, however, four months pregnant with Peter’s child.

The ceremony was conducted at Logan House and one of the witnesses was James McDouall, possibly the Laird himself, but more likely his son, who was to inherit the estate on his father’s death. The younger James’s wife Agnes, whom he married in 1869, greatly modernised both the house and the grounds and their sons, Kenneth and Douglas, established the exotic gardens that are now a tourist attraction.

Jeanie and Peter’s first son John was born at Logan House in 1868 and two years later they had another son, William. By the time of William’s birth, however, their marriage had effectively ended, as Jeanie and her mother had returned without Peter to High Ardwell farm, where William was born on 31^st December 1870. Peter had not been born locally and he left the district before William’s birth. I have not been able to trace his subsequent movements, but it seems that he continued to work as a gentleman’s servant and apparently supported Jeanie and his sons financially, as in several subsequent census entries Jeanie did not have an occupation but called herself “a domestic servant’s wife”.

By 1871, Jeanie, her mother and Jeanie’s three young children had moved down the road to Low Ardwell farm, near Clachanmore village. In practice, it is likely that Jeanie and her mother raised the children between them while both carrying out farm work. This arrangement continued until Jane Stewart’s death at the age of 79 at Kirkmabreck, another local farm, in 1879.

 

Low Ardwell farm, on the edge of Clachanmore village

Following her mother’s death, Jeanie moved to Portpatrick. In 1881 she was living in a flat in Colonel Street (not at our cottage at this stage), with John, 13 and William, 10, Annie having left home. She described herself as a “valet’s wife”. She was living in this flat when, in 1882, at the age of 40, she became pregnant again, her fourth child Maggie being born on 18^th March 1883. Peter Laing was named as Jeanie’s husband on Maggie’s birth certificate, but the registrar blandly wrote that Jeanie, “declares that he is not the father of the child, and farther, that she has had no personal communication with him for several years past”. The identity of Maggie’s father was not recorded.

Sometime after this, Jeanie took on her first paid occupation since her days at Logan House, as by 1891 she had moved into our cottage and was working as a laundress. Maggie, 8 years old, was with her, but John and William had now moved away. We can only speculate as to why, in her 40s, she needed to earn her own living. She still described herself as married in the 1891 census return, but perhaps her supply of money from Peter had run dry – could the arrival of Maggie have been a factor?

Her choice of occupation was understandable given her circumstances. Laundry work was one of the few occupations open to working-class women in the Victorian era and it had the advantage for a single mother that it could be carried out at home. It was not, however an easy option. The reason why those who could afford to paid others to do their washing was that in the era before automatic washing machines, laundry was time consuming, strenuous and took up a lot of space. A large load of washing could take several days to wash, rinse, dry, starch and iron. Our cottage was however an ideal home for a professional laundress, as it had a separate scullery to keep the washing equipment in and a small garden for drying clothes and linen.

 

This rusty old flatiron has served as a doorstop in our cottage for many years - could it have been there since Jeanie's time?

In Victorian England, laundresses were often married women, supplementing their husbands’ income (or providing an income that feckless husbands did not), but in Portpatrick, laundresses, like Jeanie, tended to be single. Married or single, laundresses did not have a high reputation. They were often portrayed as dishevelled, rough in habits, uneducated and poor. Did Jeanie conform to this stereotype?

It is not clear who her customers were. Portpatrick did not have an extensive middle class, but hard-pressed poor families, often living in one or two rooms, would sometimes save themselves further trouble by paying others to do their washing. It is also possible that Jeanie got business from the “boarding houses” (guest houses) that were appearing in Portpatrick as it began to become a holiday resort. Whoever her customers were, Jeanie would not have made a lot of money from her labours as laundry work was notoriously ill-paid.

Prior to Jeanie moving in, as I have related in another article, our cottage had been home for some 18 years to its owner Agnes Shearer, who inherited it from her mason father. She shared the cottage with her niece Margaret Cosh and Margaret’s daughter, Margaret junior, who like Maggie Laing, was illegitimate. It is interesting to know that our holiday home was formerly a haven for fallen women! Following Agnes’s death in 1887, Margaret Cosh, now joint owner of the cottage with her Irish-based sisters, moved to Ireland herself, renting the cottage to Jeanie Laing.

Jeanie and Maggie were still living in the cottage in 1901, Jeanie continuing to work as a laundress and Maggie presumably assisting her. A few years after, they moved to South Crescent and then to the former lighthouse keeper’s cottage on the pier (now a holiday home next to the Lighthouse Pottery), where Jeanie spent the rest of her life. In 1907 Maggie married Robert Mochan, a journeyman mason from Ayrshire and moved there with him. Sadly, she was to die before her mother, succumbing to tuberculosis in 1922, aged 39. On her death certificate, Peter Laing was named as her father.

Lighthouse Cottage (the whitewashed building on the right), where Jeannie Laing lived for the final 25 years of her long life

Peter Laing had himself died by 1911, having apparently reached the rank of butler. Jeanie lived on in Lighthouse Cottage for another 18 years until her death in 1929 at the age of 85.

So ended Jeanie Laing’s long and remarkable life. However, this is not yet the end of our story, or of the Laings’ connection with our cottage in Colonel Street. Jeannie’s second son, William had done well for himself. He had moved to Glasgow and worked as a telegraph lineman on the railways. He married Margaret Hamilton from Stranraer in 1911 and by the time of his mother’s death they were living in Perth with their three daughters and William had risen to be a railway telegraph inspector. Then in 1930, the year after Jeanie’s death, Margaret Hamilton Laing made a “buy to let” purchase of a cottage in Portpatrick – none other than 3 Colonel Street, Jeanie’s former base for her laundry work and now our holiday home. And she had a specific tenant in mind: Annie McMurray, the 64 year old widow of Samuel McMurray, a marine engineer. She had been born Annie Stewart – Jeanie’s eldest daughter and Margaret Hamilton Laing’s sister-in-law.

If Margaret thought that this would be a short-term arrangement she was mistaken, for Annie McMurray lived in the cottage for 24 years, until her death in 1954 at the age of 88. William Laing died that same year, aged 84 and Margaret Hamilton Laing, now living in retirement in Largs, sold the cottage. Two years later it first came into my family, bought by my great aunt Elsie Dicks (I have told the tale of the Dicks family in another article).

So Jeanie Laing and her family had links with our cottage for a total of at least 35 years. But, with her colourful history, what kind of a person was Jeanie? Was she a feckless good-time girl, the epitome of the rough and uncivilised washer woman (in the 19th century, laundry work was sometimes a cover for prostitution, and Stranraer had a thriving red light district due to being a port for Ireland), or a strong and independent woman who lived life her own way and did the best for her children? I suspect the latter. Her long life and its relative comfort in her later years suggests that she looked after herself and her money. Her younger son made a good career and her daughters made good marriages (I don’t know what became of her older son, John). And her family seem to have regarded her fondly. In Portpatrick cemetery there is a memorial to Jeanie, William and Margaret and Annie McMurray, presumably erected after Margaret’s death in 1966 by William and Margaret’s children. The legend reads, “The Lord is my Shepherd” – perhaps an unconscious reference to Jeanie’s beginnings on a windswept farm in Ardwell, 120 years previously.

Sources & Further Reading

Census returns, valuation rolls and birth, marriage and death certificates available at Scotland’s People

The New Statistical Account ofKirkmaiden, by the Rev. John Lamb

Dumfries & Galloway Libraries, Information & Archives (1998) Through the lens: Glimpses of old South Rhinns.

Griffiths T & Morton G (eds) (2010) A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1800 – 1900. Edinburgh University Press.

Malcolmson P (1986) English Laundresses, a Social History 1850 -1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Smout TC (1986) A Century of the Scottish People, 1830 – 1950. London: Collins.

The Smith Family – Just about managing on land and sea in 19th Century Portpatrick

Back in 1978, Neil Tranter, a lecturer at the University of Stirling, published one of the few academic articles on the history of Portpatrick. Pithily entitled “The demographic impact of economic growth and decline, Portpatrick 1821-1890”, Tranter’s paper compared the demographics of the village in the first half of the 19^th century with its characteristics in the second half. In the 1820s and 1830s, Portpatrick was an economic boom town, due to the optimism surrounding its development as a port, with hopes that it would become the principal gateway to Ireland. Its population expanded rapidly, with much new building and the establishment of service industries. The optimism was however misplaced and the planned harbour was never completed. The savage weather of the North Channel defeated the civil engineers, leading to the harbour being destroyed as it was being built and even if it had been successfully completed, it would have been too small for the new steamships that were coming into service. The second half of the century, Tranter found, was a time of economic decline for Portpatrick, reflected in its demographics. The population declined, due to a falling birth-rate as villagers married later and had fewer children; an increased death rate among children (especially boys) and in particular, migration to more prosperous towns and cities.

So Portpatrick in the latter 19^th and early 20^th centuries became a sleepy and rather run-down place, with a relatively ageing population as many younger people moved away. But what of those who, through choice or necessity, continued to live in the village? In this article I will consider the lot of Portpatrick’s “just about managing” (to use a recent phrase) during that period, through telling the story of Jane Smith (1839-1918) and her extended family. The Smiths carved out a living from the sea, as fishermen and sailors, while Jane supported herself through needlework and later, laundry work. My personal connection with Jane and her family is that for the last 13 years of her long life she lived in my holiday cottage in Colonel Street.

The Smith Family: Sailors and Fishermen

Jane Smith’s father John was a seaman, who worked on the packet boats that in the first half of the century ran daily between Portpatrick and Donaghadee. The packet boat service carried the mail between Britain and Ireland. The service was managed by the Admiralty, and like today’s ferries, the packet boats also carried passengers and goods; the short sea crossing providing one of the principal means of transport at that time between the mainland and Ireland.

In 1841, according to that year’s census return, John Smith was 60, his wife Mary, a farmer’s daughter was 26, and they lived in Blair Street with Jane, aged two, and her four-year old brother, another John. If Jane’s father’s listed age is correct, he will have begun his working life on sailing boats, but by the 1840s the packet service used two paddle steamers, the Asp and the Pike, both of which had a crew of around ten sailors. John’s working life would have been dominated by the daily return journey to Donaghadee, the rest of his time being taken up with carrying out maintenance on the boats. During the 1840s, John and Mary Smith had three more children, David (born 1841), Hugh (born 1844) and James (born 1845).

By 1851 John Smith was dead. According to the family tombstone in Portpatrick Churchyard he died in Donaghadee, though we do not know the exact date or cause. Presumably his death was sudden and unexpected, but was it from natural causes or an accident related to his work on the packet boat? Whatever the story behind his death, he will have left his young family in straightened circumstances. With no pension or state benefits, his wife Mary had to earn income from needlework and Jane and her brothers had to find employment as soon as they were able.

All four sons made their living from the sea. Hugh became a ship’s carpenter. On the wooden sailing vessels that still made up a large proportion of the merchant fleet, the carpenter was an important member of the crew, responsible for keeping the ship seaworthy. Visit the tall ship Glenlee at the Riverside museum, Glasgow, to see a fine reconstruction of a 19^th century ship’s carpenter’s shop. Hugh married, but it is unclear whether he had any children. He lived away from Portpatrick until his last years, dying in Colonel Steet in 1895, aged just 51.

The remaining three sons, John, David and James all became fishermen, earning their living fishing for cod off the coast of Portpatrick. Despite the reportedly good fish stocks in the North Channel, commercial fishing has had an up and down history in the area. From 1813 there was a reasonably thriving herring fishing industry in Portpatrick, fuelled by a government “bounty” (subsidy) on the catch. This bounty was withdrawn in 1821 and herring fishing ceased, to be replaced by commercial fishing for cod.

In the 19^th century, cod were fished by the “longline” method. The fishermen went out in rowing boats which had a three-man crew. The fishing grounds were two to three miles from the coast. Cod is a “demersal” (bottom feeding) fish and to catch them, the fishermen laid a line several thousand feet long on the bottom of the sea, each end of the line being weighed down by a large stone and marked by a buoy on the surface. At regular intervals, short lines came off the main line with hooks attached to them, which were baited with “buckies” (buccinum undantum), a species of shellfish. These had themselves to be caught in waters nearer the coast, lured into baskets baited with dead fish. The lines were left on the sea bed for a day or two and then drawn up, the fishermen retrieving any cod that were of a suitable size.

Diagrammatic representation of longline fishing for cod. Adapted from Marine Conservancy Society

The boat owners were self-employed and employed their own crew members. The whole family would be involved in the enterprise. The fisherman’s wife and daughters would take on the intricate task of baiting and winding the line prior to a trip. Teenaged sons often acted as crew members for their fathers and some female relatives worked as fish cleaners. The cod fishing season lasted from November until April and in the summer months some at least of the fishermen worked as sailors on private yachts.

Opinions vary as to the economic importance of Portpatrick’s cod fishing industry. Neil Tranter dismissed it as “a handful of fishermen”. R.R. Cunningham, on the other hand, claimed that following the arrival of the railway, in the latter 19^th century Portpatrick became one of the biggest providers of cod to London, where it was prized for its quality. In 1845, the author of the New Statistical Account, the Rev. Andrew Urquhart, wrote that there were 10 three-man boats based in Portpatrick and later census returns suggest that a similar number were active at the turn of the 20^th century.

Apart for short periods in their late teens and early twenties, John, David and James Smith lived and worked as fishermen in Portpatrick. They all married; John and James married twice, their first wives dying young. David may not have had any children, but John and James both had large families, bucking the trend noted by Neil Tranter. The Smiths were not very imaginative in their choice of names and their extended family includes many more Johns, James’s and Davids, along with several Marys and Margarets. I will use the term “senior” for the sons of John and Mary Smith, to attempt to distinguish them from their own sons – the outline family tree will hopefully offer some clarification!

For over twenty years John and James senior and their families lived as near neighbours in Blair Street. They had the relative comfort of three or four rooms each; still cramped given the number of children they both had, but better than the two (or even one) rooms that many Scottish families lived in at the time. James’s children seem to have all joined the exodus from Portpatrick noted by Tranter, but John’s three sons stayed in the village and became fishermen like their father.

For John senior’s youngest son, this led to tragedy. On 30^th October 1887 David junior, aged 16, went out to sea in a boat owned by Stephen Biggam, with John Shaw as the third crewman, to check their lines following a heavy storm. The boat failed to return, and despite a search by Portpatrick lifeboat, the three men were never found, though the boat was subsequently washed ashore in Knock Bay, near Killantringan. We can only guess at John senior’s feelings as he signed the statutory record of his son’s death, in a thin but accurate hand. We do know, however, that in later years John named his fishing boat, the David. In 1905, John senior was to die in his boat just off Portpatrick harbour, apparently of a heart attack, at the age of 70.

According to the report of the accident in the Wigtownshire Free Press, young David had been an active member of the Portpatrick Artillery Volunteer Company (PAVC). This was an activity that he shared with several other of the village’s fishermen. Local volunteer forces were 19^th century precursors of the Territorial Army. The PAVC was formed in 1861 and members wore a uniform, drilled and undertook gunnery and rifle practice. They used the former quarry at the south end of the village as a rifle range and set up two cannon on the shore, near to “Dasher’s Den”, with which they carried out target practice, firing at a barrel moored in the sea. Their drill hall was originally in the former barracks building in Barracks Street, but later a purpose-built drill hall was built off South Crescent (for many years this building has been an amusement arcade). The PAVC and the other volunteer companies were disbanded when the Territorial Army was established in 1908.

John senior’s other sons, named – you guessed it – James and John, were active in another Portpatrick institution, the lifeboat sevice. The first lifeboat was stationed in Portpatrick in 1877 and fishermen formed the bulk of its crew. It is likely that James and John junior were in the crew that searched in vain for their younger brother David and his crewmates. Indeed, the owner of that boat, Stephen Biggam, was himself deputy coxswain of the lifeboat.

James junior was a member of the lifeboat crew for 44 years and coxswain for 17 years. In 1931 he was presented with a commemorative certificate by the Duke of Montrose, at a naming ceremony for a new lifeboat. His finest moment came in 1913, when he coxed the lifeboat to rescue the crew of the steamship Dunira, which was being dashed onto rocks near Dunskey Castle in heavy seas. For his bravery, James was presented with the RNLI’s silver medal (and a monetary award).

The present Portpatrick lifeboat is a far cry from the prosaically named Civil Service no. 3, a rowing boat that was the first lifeboat in the harbour in 1877

By 1900 Portpatrick was beginning to find a new role as a holiday resort. The then Laird, C.L.Orr-Ewing, MP for Ayr Burghs, sought to encourage this development by making a number of improvements to the village, including building the Portpatrick Hotel. Another enterprise was to rebuild the houses in Blair Street, renaming the road Blair Terrace. This meant that the Smith families had to leave their dwellings in Blair Street – willingly or unwillingly, we don’t know. Mr Orr-Ewing built new apartment buildings in Hill Street and John and James junior and their families moved there. Their flats only had two rooms each, despite the size of their families and we can speculate whether the Smiths regarded the moves as an improvement in their circumstances. They were still living in the flats in the late 1920s and a 20-year old fisherman, named (inevitably) John Smith was living in one of the same flats in 1946.

These rather unprepossessing apartment buildings in Hill Street were built by C.L. Orr-Ewing M.P. in 1902 to replace the houses in Blair Street that were demolished to build the rather fancier Blair Terrace. James and John Smith junior lived in these flats for around 30 years

By this time, cod fishing in Portpatrick had ceased. Traditional longline fishing had continued until the 1920s, but was then rendered obsolete by the advent of trawlers based elsewhere. Herring fishing returned for a while but drastically declined from the 1960s, due to overfishing, technological advances that reduced the numbers of boats and changes in dietary fashion. Nowadays, commercial cod and herring fishing have both ceased in the North Channel and fishing as an occupation is almost unknown in Portpatrick, save for a few crab and lobster creel fishermen. As evidence that these supply the local market, I offer the following anecdote. A few years ago, we were having lunch in a Portpatrick pub on a stormy day. A rather haughty English couple came in and the lady ordered a crab salad. The barman (also a member of the lifeboat crew) told her that crab salad was off today. Rather affronted, she said, “Oh, why is that?” “Well, do you want to go out in this to catch it?” was the reply.

Mary and Jane Smith: Flourers of Muslin

While the senior male members of the Smith family sought a living from the sea, their mother Mary and sister Jane also had to provide for themselves and did so through the time-honoured female occupation of needlework. Mary did not remarry following her husband’s death and Jane never married. This might have been her choice, but it may also have reflected another effect of Portpatrick’s economic decline noted by Neil Tranter, a high proportion of females in its population, due to high childhood mortality among boys and migration from the village by young men. Mary and Jane lived together until Mary’s death in 1878. Jane Smith lived all her long life in Portpatrick, but like others of limited means, she moved house frequently, living in at least six different places before ending her days in our holiday cottage in Colonel Street. Presumably the moves were prompted by changing economic circumstances.

Jane and her mother were “flourers [flowerers] of muslin”. This meant that they earned their living making “Ayrshire Whitework”. This was muslin embroidered with intricate patterns that gave it the appearance of lace, but at a fraction of the cost. It was used for accessories that decorated ladies’ dresses, such as collars and cuffs and also for babies’ bonnets and christening robes. Virtually forgotten today, Ayrshire Whitework production was a major home-based industry in the nineteenth century and its products were exported across the world.

Sally Tuckett has recently described the rise and fall of Ayrshire Whitework. Its origins are surrounded by legend, but it seems to have been developed by needlewomen in Ayr in the early nineteenth century, including a Mrs Jamieson, who established a needlework business in the town. As it grew in popularity, its production came under the control of large Glasgow-based firms, who employed thousands of home workers in south-west Scotland and in Ireland. At its peak in the mid-1850s the industry employed 25,000 women in Scotland and 200,000 in Ireland. Ayrshire remained the centre of production in Scotland however; Portpatrick was on the periphery of its catchment area.

Although it was always home-based, Ayrshire Whitework production had all the hallmarks of 19^th century industrial manufacture. The Glasgow firms employed thousands in warehouses and offices in the city as well as their armies of homeworkers. The needlewomen worked to set patterns created by the firms’ designers, many of whom trained at the prestigious Glasgow School of Design. The patterns were printed onto the muslin for the needlewomen to follow (the ink was washed out afterwards) and a set amount of time was allocated for each piece. Flourers of Muslin were paid piecework and payment varied according to market forces; a reason why the majority of workers were based in Ireland was that labour costs were cheaper there. Many of the needlewomen were in their teens or twenties (presumably most gave up working when they had families) and a proportion were children. An adult worker was expected to work for up to sixteen hours a day and a child for ten hours. In some areas, needlework schools were set up to teach children the techniques, but many would have learnt the skills from older relatives.

In 1851, the widowed Mary Smith was living in South Crescent with her five children and earning her living in the Ayrshire Whitework trade. Jane, aged 12, had already joined her. We don’t know how Mary Smith learnt to be a “flourer” but it seems likely that she taught Jane the skills. As they were both single, they had the time (and need) to continue to work and both pursued the trade for many years. This was despite the fact that by the late 1850s demand for Ayrshire Whitework had drastically declined. Fashions in womenswear changed and lacy collars and cuffs became regarded as outdated. In addition there was an economic slump in 1857 that highlighted over-production in the industry. From a peak of 25,000 in the mid-1850s, the number of workers in Scotland fell by 1871 to below 1,000, the majority, like Mary and Jane, older women.

The sudden decline in the industry in the late 1850s and the consequent reduction in available work can be seen reflected in Mary and Jane’s living arrangements. In 1861 they were living in a two-room apartment in a house in Colonel Street (not in our cottage at this stage), but were sub-letting one of the rooms to two families of Irish labourers who were working on the construction of the railway line to Stranraer. “Just about managing” in Victorian times could mean drastic measures.

By 1871 their fortunes had improved somewhat as they now lived in two whole rooms in a cottage in Dinvin Street. Mary died in 1878 and Jane then lived alone. In 1881 she was still a flourer of muslin, but by 1891 she had given up the trade. By this time there were only a few hundred flourers left in Scotland, and Ayrshire Whitework production was largely for the “heritage” market. Jane may have given up for economic reasons, or the years of delicate work, often by the light of oil lamps may have damaged her eyes, a common complaint among needlewomen.

Now in her early 50s, Jane still had to earn her living and she turned to the classic fall-back occupation for working-class women and became a laundress. For over ten years she lived and worked in Cock Street (now Hill Street) but some time before 1905 she moved to our holiday cottage in Colonel Street, renting it from its then owner, Andrew McDowall, a railway telegraph clerk living in Carstairs and son of a Portpatrick joiner. Jane took it over from another laundress, Jeanie Laing, of whom I have written in another article.

So Jane Smith spent over sixty years living in cramped accommodation, moving frequently and working long hours to earn her living, a lot she shared with many other working class women and men in 19^th century Scotland. But in 1908, at the age of 69, her fortunes changed, for she came into an inheritance. Her benefactor was her uncle, her mother’s brother John McKie, a Wigtown farmer who died at the age of 88. He was widowed and had no children and left his not inconsiderable estate to various female relatives.

The bald legal prose of John McKie’s will hinted at family tubulance. At the time of his death, he had moved from his house in Stranraer, where he had been living in retirement and was living in Leswalt, where he was being looked after by another of his nieces, Elizabeth McKie. Did Elizabeth know, as she ministered to her old and ailing uncle, that a few years previously he had made a codicil to his will that revoked the legacy he had previously proposed to give her and had correspondingly increased the amount that Jane Smith would inherit? Perhaps fortunately, the circumstances of that decision and its consequences for the family are lost to us.

Jane Smith used her windfall to retire from laundry work and to become a home owner, buying our cottage from Andrew McDowall. Despite being nearly 70 when she received her inheritance, she was able to enjoy her well-earned retirement in her own cottage for a further ten years. For a few of those years, she was joined in the cottage by her brother David senior, who had moved about Portpatrick over the years, working as a fisherman and sailor and was now widowed. David died in the cottage in 1913, aged 70.

The Smith Family in World War One

Portpatrick’s war memorial lists three John Smiths who lost their lives during the First World War. All were great-nephews of Jane Smith. First to die was the 25 year old son of James Smith junior, coxswain of Portpatrick’s lifeboat. John was killed on 22^nd September 1914, just two months after the start of the war. He was a stoker on the cruiser H.M.S. Cressy, which was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-Boat with the loss of 560 lives. Just over a year later, on 22^nd October 1915, his cousin John was killed. This John was son of James junior’s sister Violet. He had been born illegitimate, but Violet had subsequently married Samuel McJury, the son of another Portpatrick fisherman and himself a seaman. Violet’s son John was however in the army, a private in the 9^th Battalion Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) and was killed in the aftermath of the battle of Loos in France. Ironically, he survived the battle itself, which ended on 13^th October but was likely killed by subsequent artillery or sniper fire.

A lifebelt from H.M.S. Cressy, on display at the Imperial War Museum North. Stoker John Smith died when the cruiser was torpedoed in October 1914

The third John Smith to die did not actually see action. The 18 year old son of James and Violet’s brother, John junior, he was a member of 3^rd Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers, a reserve unit stationed at Greenock. He actually died after the end of the war, on 28^th May 1919, possibly a victim of the flu pandemic that killed 50-100 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1920. No doubt his grieving father ensured that his name was added to the war memorial along with his cousins.

Portpatrick War Memorial. The legend at the foot reads, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori", a sentiment with which the war poet Wilfred Owen did not agree

Jane Smith’s Legacy

Jane Smith did not live to see the end of World War One, dying in her cottage on 7^th April 1918. Uniquely among the occupants of our cottage, she left a will, in which she sought to benefit members of her extended family. Her nephews James and John junior did best, receiving annuities worth £150 each, a tidy sum for the time. Her younger brother James senior, who was still fishing and living in a flat at the other end of Colonel Street received £25. Annuities worth £50 were given to Violet Smith McJury and to John junior’s daughter Maggie Hunter Smith. The cottage was bequeathed to Samuel Balfour, an engine driver living in Stranraer and husband of another of Jane’s nieces, Mary, daughter of her brother James senior. We do not know, of course, why Jane chose to benefit these particular nephews and nieces out of her extensive family but we are sure that they will have been gratified by their gifts.

So ends our everyday story of working folk in 19^th and early 20^th century Portpatrick. James senior outlived his sister by five years, dying in 1923. Samuel Balfour owned and rented out the cottage until 1930, when he sold it to Margaret Hamilton Laing, daughter-in-law of Jane Smith’s predecessor Jeanie Laing. Members of the Smith family continued to live and work as fishermen in Portpatrick until at least the middle of the 20^th century and for all I know, they may be there still!

Sources & Further Reading

Census returns, Valuation Rolls and Wills and Testaments available at Scotland’s People

Forces WarRecords 

Articles from The Dumfries and Galloway Standard available at the British Newspaper Archive

The NewStatistical Account of Portpatrick, by the Rev. Andrew Urquhart

Cunningham R (2004) Portpatrick through the Ages. Wigtown Free Press.

McKenzie J & Cunningham R (1997) Old Portpatrick. Stenlake Publishing.

Tranter N (1978) The demographic impact of economic growth and decline, Portpatrick 1821-1890. The Scottish Historical Review 57(163): 87-105

Tuckett S (2016) “Needle Crusaders”: The 19^th Century Ayrshire Whitework Industry. Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 36(1): 60-80