My cottage in Colonel Street, Portpatrick will be two hundred years old next year. It has been a holiday residence for nearly sixty years, but before that it was home to a succession of occupants. And for a hundred-year period, from the 1860s to the 1960s, it was lived in by single women. Some had never married, some were widowed, and one had been deserted by her husband. In this article, I will tell the stories of these women, and their remarkable and sometimes difficult lives. The article summarises my researches into my cottage’s history, complementing some of the other articles in this blog, and adds some new information.
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| "The Cottage" |
Single Women in the 19th and early 20th Centuries
During this period, there were considerably more females than males in the British population. The reasons for this demographic fact are clear. Firstly, males were more likely than females to die in infancy and childhood. Secondly, adult men tended to die earlier than women, sometimes through ‘violent’ causes such as work-based accidents, suicide, the effects of alcohol abuse and, of course, warfare. The imbalance of males and females became particularly marked in the decades after the First World War, with 1.75 million more women than men in the UK. Thirdly, during the 19th century, young men were more likely than other groups to emigrate to the colonies (Australia, Canada, South Africa), leading to a preponderance of males in the immigrant population in those countries. This gender imbalance meant that during the second half of the 19th century, around a third of British women aged between 20 and 40 were unmarried.
These demographic factors tended to be more pronounced in areas of lower prosperity, which included Portpatrick in the second half of the 19th century. Following the abandonment of the port for Ireland, Portpatrick went into economic decline, with an overall loss of population. Neil Tranter tells us that during these years, the death rate for boys under the age of ten rose markedly, compared with that for girls, and young men often left the village to find employment elsewhere. By 1891, females made up 57.5% of the population of the town, with a consequent drop in the number of married women.
Some women, of course, chose to be single, or perhaps put higher priority on family commitments than on marriage. But single women during this period could experience social and financial difficulties. ‘Spinster’ and ‘Old Maid’ were pejorative terms, and particularly after WWI, commentators wrote about the ‘problem’ of surplus (or superfluous) women. Undoubtedly, many such women would have liked to have married for its own sake, not just to reduce social stigma.
Single women also needed an income. War widows received a pension, but before the introduction of state support, those widowed otherwise had to manage the best they could. Employment opportunities for women were limited, and for working-class women in rural areas such as Portpatrick they were largely confined to domestic service, farm work, taking in laundry and needlework. None of these occupations paid well, and limited where single women could afford to live. In Scotland they often occupied just one or two rooms, in cottages or apartment buildings. My holiday cottage, with a living room/kitchen, scullery, large bedroom and patch of garden would have been relatively luxurious, though at different times it had to house several people at once, and was sometimes a place of work as well.
At the same time, owning and managing property was one way that single women could boost their income. Three of the women who lived in my cottage were owner-occupiers, and other women in Portpatrick owned property that they rented out. As Portpatrick became a holiday resort in the latter 19th century, some single women managed holiday houses to rent, or became boarding house keepers, sometimes assisted by unmarried daughters.
Of course, being married was not always better for women. A married woman in the 19th and early 20th centuries had to rely on her husband, and Emma Griffin reminds us that not all husbands treated their wives well. Wives were expected to carry out all domestic chores, while raising often large families of children. This meant that women had no time for paid work, and were reliant on their husband’s income, which might not be great and which was sometimes frittered away. Domestic violence, drunkenness and desertion were sometimes the lot of married women.
Having given an overview of the position of working class women in the 19th and early 20th centuries, we will now focus on those women who lived in (and sometimes owned) the cottage that is now a holiday home for my own family.
Agnes Shearer (Lived in Cottage – LIC – 1824 – 1853)
As I relate in my previous article about the history of the cottage, it was built in 1824, by a mason named Robert Shearer. He almost certainly fashioned it out of part of a longer building that was originally constructed in 1811, along the western side of Colonel Street. It was built for himself, his wife and his eldest daughter, Agnes, who had been born in Portpatrick in 1794 and was 30 years old when the family moved into the cottage. Agnes never married, and her occupation was given as ‘domestic servant’.
In 1835, Robert, now 71 and widowed, passed ownership of the cottage to Agnes, but continued to live there with her for another 18 years, dying in 1853 aged 89. Presumably Agnes’s main role during this period was to care for her ageing father.
Following Robert’s death, Agnes, now approaching her 60s, rented out the cottage and became a live-in servant to one of Portpatrick’s most notable residents, Miss Susan Jane Minot. Miss Minot came to Portpatrick in the early 1850s along with her sister Mary, who had married the village’s Free Church minister, Rev. Andrew Urquhart. Mary and Susan had been born in Jamaica, where their father, John Sutton Minot, owned a sugar plantation known as Passley Gardens, which was worked by up to 130 slaves. According to a former overseer at Passley Gardens, Benjamin McMahon, under Minot’s ownership the estate suffered as slaves were “exceedingly ill-treated to the extent that they were highly unproductive which seemed to only perpetuate the squalid conditions of starvation and poverty”.
John Sutton Minot died in 1830, and three years later slavery was abolished in the British colonies. Compensation was however paid to former slave owners, which following their father’s death, included Mary and Susan, who received over £2,000 each. Census returns throughout Susan Minot’s long life described her an an ‘annuitant’, or ‘living on own means’, giving no indication that a source of her wealth was slavery.
We cannot know how Susan Minot felt about her legacy (she was just 15 when her father died and the plantation was soon sold by the Trustees), still less what Agnes Shearer felt about being employed by a one-time slave-owner. But Susan Minot devoted her long life to charitable works, including supporting those in poverty in Portpatrick. She died at the age of 101, in 1916.
Agnes Shearer, Margaret and Maggie Cosh (LIC 1867 – 1884)
In the mid-1860s, Agnes Shearer left Susan Minot’s employment and returned to live in the cottage. She also passed on the ownership of the cottage to three of her nieces, Margaret, Agnes and Jane Cosh, daughters of her younger sister Margaret, who married John Cosh and moved to Donaghadee, across the North Channel in Ireland. One of those nieces, Margaret Cosh, then aged 32 and unmarried, came to live with Agnes in the cottage – bringing her illegitimate daughter, Maggie, aged five. We can only guess at the intense family discussions that led to Margaret and her young daughter crossing the sea to live with her 73-year-old retired aunt. It was clearly an arrangement that worked however, as the three of them lived together in the cottage for 17 years, until Agnes’s death in 1884, aged 89. Margaret earned money as a dressmaker, and when Maggie was old enough she did so too.
Following Agnes’s death, Margaret and Maggie returned to Donaghadee, where Maggie married a grocer. Margaret and her sisters retained ownership of the cottage until 1895, renting it to another single woman, Jane (Jeannie) Laing.
Jane Laing (LIC >1885 – <1905)
I have written a longer article about Jane Laing’s colourful life, and will summarise it here. She was born Jane Stewart around 1844 at High Ardwell farm, Stoneykirk Parish, where her father Andrew was a labourer. Following his death in 1855, Jane and her mother (also Jane) went to live and work at the Logan estate; Jane senior looking after the poultry at Logan Home Farm and Jane herself becoming a domestic servant at Logan House, the seat of the local Lairds, the McDouall family. There, in 1864 at the age of 20, Jane had an illegitimate daughter, named Annie, the identity of the father not recorded. Annie features later in the story of the cottage.
In 1867, Jane married Peter Laing, a groom at Logan House, and they quickly had two sons, John and William. However, by the time of William’s birth in 1870, Peter Laing had left his wife, who moved with her mother back to High Ardwell farm. Peter apparently left the country, but may have continued to support Jane financially, while moving up the domestic service ladder to valet and later butler.
Following her mother’s death in 1879, Jane moved with John and William to Portpatrick (Annie had by now left home, presumably to work in domestic service). They lived at a couple of addresses in the village, and in 1883, at the age of 40, Jane gave birth to her fourth child, a daughter named Maggie. Peter Laing was named as Jane’s husband on Maggie’s birth certificate, but the registrar blandly wrote that Jane, “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”. As with Annie, the identity of Maggie’s father was not recorded. As Jane did not tell the registrar the circumstances of Maggie’s birth, we cannot know them either.
Sometime after 1885, when Margaret and Maggie Cosh moved back to Donaghadee, Jane and her family moved into my cottage. It is interesting that one single woman with an illegitimate daughter was replaced in the cottage by another. By 1891, John and William had left home (William will also reappear later in this article) and Jane was living in the cottage with Maggie and was working as a laundress – either the financial support she had received from Peter had dried up or with just Maggie to look after, she had time to earn money herself. Jane and Maggie lived in the cottage for over ten years, and perhaps nearly twenty years (during which time the Cosh sisters sold the cottage to a Portpatrick joiner, John McDowall, who subsequently sold it to his son Andrew, a railway telegraph clerk who lived in Carstairs). By 1905, however, they had moved to South Crescent. In 1907 Maggie married an Ayrshire mason, Robert Mochan. Her mother lived the rest of her long and eventful life in the Lighthouse Cottage on the sea front, dying in 1929, aged 85.
Jane Smith (LIC <1905 – 1918)
Another article in this blog details the seafaring Smith family of Portpatrick in the 19th century. Jane Smith was born in Portpatrick in 1839, her father a seaman on the packet service between Portpatrick and Donaghadee. In around 1846, he died, leaving his wife Mary with five children under the age of 10. Mary made ends meet by working as a ‘flourer of muslin’, a needlewoman working from home making Ayrshire Whitework, a lace-like material used for collars, cuffs, babies’ bonnets, etc. In the mid-19th century, over 200,000 women worked at this craft, mostly in Western Scotland and Northern Ireland. As soon as she was old enough, Jane joined her mother as a flourer. Jane never married, and lived with her mother at various addresses in Portpatrick until Mary’s death in 1878. Her four brothers all married, and all made their living from the sea: John, James and David as Portpatrick fishermen and Hugh as a ship’s carpenter.
By the 1890s, the Ayrshire Whitework trade had virtually disappeared due to changing fashion tastes, and Jane, still needing to support herself financially, became a laundress. Sometime before 1905, she succeeded her fellow laundress Jane Laing in my cottage, and lived there until her death in 1918. For a couple of years, her widowed brother David lived with her in the cottage, David dying there in 1913.
Initially, Jane was a tenant of Andrew McDowall, but in 1908, aged 69, she inherited a sum of money from her mother’s late brother John McKie, a farmer from Wigtown. Jane used her windfall to retire from laundry work and to buy the cottage, subsequently enjoying ten years of retirement and ownership before her death aged 79. In her will, she left the cottage to Samuel Balfour, an engine-driver living in Stranraer and the husband of her niece Mary. Samuel owned the cottage for twelve years and it apparently had just one tenant during that time.
Isabella Munro Anderson (LIC 1918 – 1929)
Isabella Munro Ferguson was born in Oban, Argyleshire, in 1888, daughter of a joiner. She became a domestic servant and in 1911, aged 23, she was living in Edinburgh, in the household of George Dalzeil, a ‘Writer to the Signet’ – a Scottish legal term for a senior solicitor. Later that year, however, she married Andrew Anderson, a gamekeeper at the Glenapp estate near Ballantrae, Ayrshire, which was owned by the 1st Earl of Inchcape. Andrew had been born at Auchtremaken farm, on the Dunskey estate at Portpatrick, where his father was a shepherd. In 1912, their daughter Catherine was born at Glenapp.
When the Great War broke out, Andrew enlisted in the Ayrshire Yeomanry. This was a reserve regiment, and at first he remained at home. His and Isabella’s second daughter, Isabella Jane, was born in February 1915. Later that year, Andrew transferred to the Wiltshire Regiment, which was posted abroad, initially to France, but after a few months to northern Greece, where it was engaged in a little-known campaign against Bulgaria, an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The Macedonian Front, as it was known, involved trench warfare, but in extreme Balkan weather. The Bulgarians proved to be obdurate opponents and several inconclusive battles were fought before they finally surrendered in 1918. Sadly, Andrew Anderson did not see the end of the campaign, as he was killed in action on 10th February 1917. He is buried at a War Graves cemetery at Doiran,Greece, near the border with North Macedonia.
In 1918, Isabella, aged 30, and her daughters, aged 7 and 3, moved to the cottage, with Samuel Balfour as their landlord. They presumably lived on Isabella’s war widow pension. In 1929, they left the cottage; valuation rolls suggest that Isabella may have become owner-occupier of a house in Wigtown. We must wait until the release of the 1931 Scottish census (happily not destroyed by fire, as happened to that year’s English and Welsh censuses) to confirm this. She never remarried. In a strong field, Isabella proved to be the longest lived of the cottage’s occupants, dying in Forfar in 1979, aged 91.
Annie McMurray (LIC 1930 – 1954)
In 1929 and 1930, a sequence of events changed the cottage’s direction. In 1929, Isabella and her family moved out, and in the same year, the cottage’s former occupant Jane Laing died, aged 85. After Isabella Anderson and her family left, Samuel Balfour sold the cottage. It was bought by Margaret Laing, wife of Jane Laing’s son William, then living in Perth and working as a railway telegraph inspector. Margaret Laing installed a new tenant, a 66 year old widow named Annie McMurray. We have met her already, as she was born Annie Stewart, the illegitimate eldest daughter of Jane Laing, and therefore Margaret Laing’s sister-in-law. From this distance we cannot know how these events were related to each other within the tiny social world of Portpatrick.
Details of Annie McMurray’s earlier life are scanty, but as previously mentioned she was born in 1864 while Jane and her mother were living and working at Logan House. Jane was unmarried at the time, and Annie’s father was not named on her birth certificate. By the time that Jane Laing moved to Portpatrick in the 1880s Annie had left home, presumably to work as a domestic servant as her mother had originally done. At some point she married James McMurray, a ship’s engineer from Glasgow and in 1901 they were living in the centre of that city. They apparently had no children.
In early 1914, some months before the outbreak of the Great War, James McMurray set sail from Glasgow as Chief Engineer of the tramp steamer Strathspey, on a voyage to the Far East, and then back through the Suez canal, destination New York. The newspaper report of the voyage, written when the Strathspey reached New York, would be comic if it was not laced with tragedy. On the outward journey, a Chinese stoker was killed by falling into the hold and the ship drifted for three days as the remaining stokers were too frightened of his ghost to enter the hold themselves. In Canton, a port worker was killed by a blow to the head from a large chain while loading the ship. And en route to New York, the Strathspey was assailed, according to reports from the crew, by a great green sea serpent that raised itself several feet above the water, scorched all around with its hot breath, bit off the lifeboat’s rudder and then made off at a rate of 50 knots.
Even the report of what happened to James McMurray has tragi-comic overtones. He was described as “over 60 years of age and very melancholy” (he was actually 49), but very attached to the ship’s parrot, Toko. But after talking to Toko one morning, off the coast of Malta, he suddenly jumped overboard. Toko set up a repeated alarm call of “Eight bells, eight bells”, alerting the crew. The ship was halted and a search was made, but McMurray was never found.
So Annie McMurray’s husband committed suicide while at sea. The circumstances of her life following this tragedy, up until the time she came to live in the cottage, are not known. But perhaps Margaret Laing’s purchase of the cottage and installation of Annie as her tenant was an act of rescue. It certainly gave Annie a long-term home, as she lived there for twenty-four years, until her death in 1954, aged 89.
Following Annie’s death, Margaret Laing, now in her 80s and herself widowed, and living in the seaside town of Largs, sold the cottage. In Portpatrick cemetery there is a memorial to Jane, William and Margaret Laing and Annie McMurray, presumably erected after Margaret’s death in 1966 by William and Margaret’s children. The cottage was purchased by a Portpatrick joiner, Allan Auld Rankin, who undertook extensive renovations and sold it a year later (at 100% profit) to Mrs Margaret Fraser, then living in Port Logan schoolhouse, possibly as a holiday let. However, Mrs Fraser owned the cottage for less than a year before moving away from Port Logan and selling it to its final full-time occupant, my great-aunt Elsie Dicks. Again, Elsie’s story is told in greater detail in another article in this blog and is summarised below.
Elsie Dicks (LIC 1956-1966)
When Elsie Dicks bought the cottage, she was 67 years old and had been widowed for nine years. She had been born Elsie Maud Winter in Kent in 1889, daughter of a Commercial Clerk. Her presence in Wigtownshire was due to her husband, my mother’s uncle Valentine Frank Dicks (1889-1947). He had been born in South London, but for unknown reasons had moved to Edinburgh in his early twenties, and when the Great War broke out in 1914 was working as a clerk in the Princes Street branch of Thomas Cook, the travel agents. He did not rush to join up, and when conscription was introduced in 1916 applied for exemption as a conscientious objector. Like many of my family, he was a member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, and his objection to military service was on religious grounds (although the New Church as a whole was not pacifist). Like many others at that stage of the war, his application was approved, but he was still obliged to join the army, being allocated to the ‘Non-combatant Corps’. Again, like many others, he refused to do so and was imprisoned for 118 days. Following his release, (and a change of official policy) he spent the rest of the war in a labour camp set up in Dartmoor prison, carrying out “work of national importance”, which was mainly standard prison fare such as sewing mailbags or breaking rocks.
Following the war, Frank returned to his job at Thomas Cook, but transferred to the office in Stranraer, probably to avoid stigma and tensions with his former workmates. In 1919 he married Elsie, his childhood sweetheart and she moved to Stranraer with him. In 1923, their only child, a son named Peter, was born.
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| Elsie Dicks and her new-born son Peter in 1923 |
Frank left Thomas Cook and took on a general store in Hanover Street, Stranraer. In the 1930s he tried a more ambitious business venture, opening a restaurant and nightclub, ambitiously named the Ritz and unpromisingly sited in a former reform school on Dalrymple Street. This business soon failed, and Uncle Frank was declared bankrupt. Following this setback, Elsie helped keep the family’s head above water, and eventually Frank set up a new business selling and installing fireplaces, with Peter joining him in this trade.
When World War Two broke out, Peter was keen to join up, and trained as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. We do not know what his father, the former conscientious objector, thought of this. Peter was allocated to 831 squadron, flying Fairey Barracuda torpedo bombers and based on the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious, on active service in the Indian Ocean. On 4th August 1944, Peter flew in to make his first landing on the deck of the carrier, but the landing gear designed to catch the aircraft apparently failed and the plane, unable to stop, fell over the side. By tragic irony, twenty eight years after his father was imprisoned as a conscientious objector and on his first operational flight, Peter Dicks became the only member of my family to be killed serving in WW2. He is buried in Trincomalee military cemetery, Sri Lanka.
Frank Dicks died in 1947 aged 58, following a stroke. Perhaps his health had been affected by the loss of his son. At some point (the records are ambiguous) Elsie went to live in a cottage in Larbrax Bay, north of Killantringan, before purchasing and moving to the cottage in Portpatrick in 1956.
Although hundreds of miles from the rest of her family, Elsie kept in touch and some came to stay with her for holidays, including her niece, my late aunt Barbara Nicholls. Following Elsie’s death in 1966, aged 77, Barbara Nicholls bought the cottage from her estate. Thus began the next stage of its existence, as a holiday home for Aunt Barbara, and later for me and my family.
Conclusion
There is of course nothing unusual about this history of the women who lived in my cottage. The large numbers of single women in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries means that similar tales could be told about countless cottages across the country. But what general points can we glean from this snapshot of one humble cottage in Portpatrick?
One striking feature is how long-lived its residents were. At a time when life expectancy was much lower than today, all six principal occupants of the cottage lived to ripe old ages (Agnes Shearer: 89; Jane Laing: 85; Jane Smith: 79; Isabella Anderson: 91; Annie McMurray: 89; Elsie Dicks: 77). Of course, we cannot attribute their longevity to the cottage; stronger factors were likely to be a healthy plain diet, lots of physical activity, and avoidance of the (sometimes self-inflicted) misfortunes that could befall men in this period.
This leads on to a second point, that these women’s lives were ultimately determined by men. None made a great personal mark; those that worked did so in the restricted range of occupations that working-class women could pursue (domestic service, needlework, laundry work). Men, or their absence, ultimately decided their fates. Agnes Shearer, as an unmarried daughter, took on the role of caring for her aged father. The early death of Jane Smith’s father meant that she needed to devote her life to supporting her mother (and later her brothers). Jane Laing, Isabella Anderson and Annie McMurray’s lives were all tainted by the loss of their husbands, through desertion, death in battle or suicide. Elsie Dicks took herself away from her South London family to support Uncle Frank in his ventures in a small Scottish town. Furthermore, Jane Laing and Margaret Cosh had to cope with the stigma of bearing illegitimate children, and bringing them up without male support. The story of the cottage is in large part a story of the constraints that women often labour under.
But ultimately, we cannot really know how these women felt about their situations, or how they went about their daily lives. The bland data of title deeds, statutory records, census returns and valuation rolls throw up tantalising hints, but cannot answer the fundamental question: what were these women like? The only one I had personal acquaintance with was Elsie Dicks, who I met as a child when she was visiting her sister in Anerley, South London. Neither of us had any idea that nearly sixty years later I would own her cottage and would be trying to research her life. The passing of my parents’ generation means that even Elsie’s story is fading from living memory.
So we cannot know how these women coped with their lot, or about the cottage that they passed on to each other. But all made it their home for a considerable length of time. None lived there for less than ten years and Agnes Shearer’s association with it, as resident or owner, spanned sixty years. I hope that they found the cottage a haven in their sometimes difficult lives, and could appreciate the unique atmosphere of Portpatrick as much as I and my family do.
Sources Used
Census
returns, valuation rolls and birth, marriage and death certificates available
at Scotland’s People
Newspaper articles available at the British Newspaper Archive
Griffin E (2020) Bread Winner: An intimate history of the Victorian Economy. Yale Univeesity Press
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