A MACNEILAGE FAMILY OF CAMPBELTOWN
Enid Gauldie
My father ran away to sea when he was 15 and travelled most of the world, but when in his 80s he remembered very clearly his boyhood in Campbeltown and was able to tell me about it. Like everyone else, I wish I had asked more questions while he was alive. Because our family stretches back a very long way in only two generations, the Campbeltown he remembered was the Campbeltown of the 1880s.
William Macneilage, my father, was born in 1878. My grandfather, David Macneilage, was born in 1840. David’s parents were Archibald Macneilage and Catherine McIntosh, both born in Campbeltown. I have found it very difficult to take the family tree back with any certainty, not because I couldn’t trace any earlier Macneilages in Campbeltown, but because there were far too many. So it was quite a disappointment for me to find that there was no one of that name left in the town.
Archibald was a tailor. The average wage of a tailor in Campbeltown in the 1840s was nine shillings a week. Of the offspring, I know about one - Malcolm became a coppersmith, a trade for which the 20 or so distilleries then operating in the town presumably provided plenty of work. The other - my grandfather, David - became a doctor. It is not difficult to understand why he should have chosen medicine. Because it was a busy seaport, with visiting sailors carrying infection from other parts of the world, and perhaps because it was overcrowded, the population having doubled between 1775 and 1841, Campbeltown suffered from waves of epidemic fevers. There were many families in need of medical help. What is harder to explain is how a poor tailor could afford to educate a son for the length of time needed to qualify as a doctor.
David attended the Andersonian College of Medicine in Glasgow and from there went as clinical assistant to the Glasgow Lock Hospital. From Glasgow he went first to Newcastle to work in the Eye Hospital there and then to County Durham, where he bought a small practice in Bishop Aukland. He had married, before leaving Glasgow, a girl of Highland origin called Agnes Maria McAdam.
My father, William, was born in County Durham. He told me that he was one of 13 children. He had two older brothers that I know of, Archibald and David, and two older sisters, Helen and Queenie, who was christened Mary Stuart. Their mother Agnes died when my father was a very small child, so I think the other eight must have been step-siblings.
After his first wife’s death, Dr David married again and moved to a more prosperous practice in Manchester. I do not yet know whether the marriage preceded or followed that move. Nor do I know what prompted him to leave Manchester and move his family to his home town of Campbeltown in 1886.
My father’s boyhood, then, was spent in the home of his ancestors. He and his brothers and sisters had to accustom themselves, after the laxer air of the north of England, to the then extreme, restrictive, religious beliefs of Kintyre: church three times on Sundays and no running or whistling on that day. His stories of Campbeltown are a mixture of misery softened by delight in his natural surroundings. The beach, the harbour, the surrounding moorland made wonderful playgrounds for young boys. But the family were very much restricted to their own company because many of the local children - even their own cousins - were Gaelic-speaking and their father had not passed on to them his own native tongue.
They were very unhappy at home too. The second marriage was not a happy one. Their stepmother was quick-tempered and cruel and knew no kind of discipline except blows. Now, of course, I can see that she must have been tried beyond her strength, perpetually pregnant and with a first wife’s children to look after as well as her own. But she leaves behind only a memory of cruelty.
Archie, William and David often ran away after she had hit them, and spent whole hungry days away from school and home. On at least one occasion they made a serious attempt to get away, but, after walking for hours across the heather, they were recognised as ‘the doctor’s laddies’ by a farmer passing with cart and pony and were bundled home for another thrashing.
They became clever at finding free food to eat: nuts and berries, young hawthorn leaves, seaweed, sorrel and a kind of root, called ‘earth-nuts’, which they dug out of the ground.
To add to their troubles, their father’s attempt to set up practice in his home town was not financially successful. There were plenty of patients, plenty of poor people needing a doctor’s help, but not many of them who could afford to pay a doctor’s fees. My father remembered seeing his father standing in the kitchen tearing up old unpaid bills and feeding them into the kitchen range and consoling himself from the greybeard of whisky kept under the kitchen table. He knew there was no way of wringing money out of people whose pride would certainly have driven them to pay if they had the means. All the diseases of poverty were common. David Macneilage attended Agnes Galbraith, the wife of his own younger brother, Malcolm, when she lay dying of tuberculosis at the age of 24.
Eventually he had to admit the impossibility of maintaining his own large family off what he could earn in Scotland. He returned to Manchester, where he seems to have prospered, earning some distinction in his own profession and sending his boys to Manchester Grammar School. He died in Manchester in 1907. As far as I know, none of his children ever returned to Campbeltown. I would be very happy to be proved wrong.
No. 51 Spring 2002
Wee Drams E-mails, comments, queries and enlightenment from around the world
Page 2: A History of the Gilchrists...............continued
Page 3: McEwings and McPhails of Kintyre and Ontario
Page 4: Tragedy in Archangel: The Killing of J.A. Watson
Page 5: The Campbeltown Book
Page 6: A MacNeilage Family of Campbeltown
Page 7: By Hill and Shore - Angus Martin
Page 8: 'Arichonan - A Highland Clearance Recorded' - A new book by Heather McFarlane