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