BY HILL AND SHORE
Angus Martin
Continued..
We also got talking of ‘London’ Kate McCorkindale, whom George recalled, from his boyhood at Glenramskill in the late 1950s, as having occupied wooden huts near Kilmaree - ‘Kate’s Kitchen’, as Agnes Stewart recalls hearing them referred to. Kate also, however, had the use of High Glenramskill Cottage as a (mainly summer) residence and lived there prior to occupation of the huts. Kate was a real character and is worthy of a brief memoir. Her brother-in-law, Donald, no less a character, was well-known among the ‘Coasting’ fraternity which frequented the bays and coves of the Learside.
I’ve been collecting anecdotes about Kate for many years and most of them concern her stewardship of the bus office in Main Street. She was very authoritarian, and the late Mrs Dorothy Stalker recalled, in 1995, a wartime incident. A Naval officer refused, in defiance of Kate’s instructions, to place his luggage in the line of bags and cases laid out on the pavement, for which insubordination he was forcefully reminded by her: ‘I’m the captain of this ship!’
The late Hector MacNeill, Davaar House, was able to tell me, in 1981, something I hadn’t known about Kate - she had Gaelic. Hector knew, because he himself was a Gaelic-speaker. Passengers would start coming into the waiting-room about 6.40 to catch the bus at 7, and one morning some children were running about shouting and having tremendous fun; but it all ended in tears, which prompted from Kate the observation: Cha robh gaoth mhor raimh, gun uisg’ as a’ deidh (‘There was never a big wind without rain after it’). On another occasion, a teenage girl came into the waiting-room made up with lipstick and mascara, etc, and Kate got on to her. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t be painting your face. My Grandmother used to say: “Everything young is lovely, even a young pig.”’ That saying, too, would have been from Gaelic, but translated for the young girl’s benefit. Hector remarked that Kate regulated the bus queues with great authority. ‘No one,’ he said, ‘would dare try to jump the queue with her there.’
Margaret Macaulay - nee MacDougall - was a schoolgirl in Campbeltown during the War. ‘I certainly,’ she writes, ‘remember her in charge of the departure of MacBrayne’s bus from the bus office in Main Street at 7 am. I can still see her, dressed in black with a long skirt. I thought she was like a witch. She was certainly a martinet who decided which seat you could have on the bus. I was a poor traveller and wanted to sit at the front, but my mother - no match for London Kate - told me that Kate had her favourites. Certainly, the Naval officers (all smoking, of course) got the front seats, and the rest of us were despatched to the back, amid the smoke. Hell on wheels, that bus!’ Davie Stalker recollected that it wasn’t unknown for bus passengers to have to stand all the way to Glasgow.
Kate was apparently very acquisitive and did some dealing. She would often return from jumble-sales and the like loaded with old stuff. The late John Russell, Kilmaree, remembered seeing Donald, who lived with Kate, shouldering an immense cast-iron flower-pot on the track up to High Glenramskill. A gust of wind caught the pot and blew it off Donald’s shoulder and it rolled down into the burn and smashed.
Dr Gavin Ralston, Kilmarnock, has
written with his memories of Kate. ‘I met her only on one occasion and that was
in the spring of 1920 when she called on my mother at Barbreck Cottage soon
after we moved in - she had been for a short time a tenant in the house. I
cannot remember very much about her except that she talked a lot and smiled a
lot. She wore a necklace of very large beads.
‘My next memory of her was when she lived at High Glenramskill. I used to see
her and Donald going to the town in the morning and back in the evening. They
walked the old road (now a track) which led through Kilkerran Farm to a crossing
of the Rocky Burn. Kate always had a walking stick or a long umbrella. She
always led, with Donald - in Duke of Edinburgh mode - two paces behind. On the
homeward journey Donald carried a black bag of “messages”.’
A comprehensive obituary of Kate appeared in the Courier of 18/1/1962 and is so vivid as to merit quotation in full.
‘By the death in Calton Hospital last week of Mrs Catherine McCorkindale, Campbeltown has lost one of its best loved characters. Mrs McCorkindale, who would have been 94 in March, was known by her fellow citizens as “London Kate”.
‘Formerly Miss Catherine Stalker, she was born at the Point Gamekeeper’s Cottage in Southend, where her father was postman. Tragedy struck her family when Mrs McCorkindale was still a child. Her father, who delivered mail on horseback, was killed when he was thrown from his horse. Her mother died when she was three and she then went to live with her grandmother at the Flush.
‘She was educated at Millknowe School and later at Campbeltown Grammar School, and was said to be “a very bright pupil”.
‘At the age of 18, she travelled to London to find work - and it was this sojourn in the capital which earned her the sobriquet of “London Kate”. She went into domestic service and was employed at Kent House. At this then well-known mansion - Queen Victoria was born there - she became an upper house maid before she left to take up another post as cook.
‘“Kate” returned to Campbeltown in the early 1920s and in 1924 married John McCorkindale who was time-keeper at the Trench Point Shipyard. Their first home was in Burnside Street.
‘After the closure of the shipyard, Mr McCorkindale found work at Campbeltown harbour. The couple moved from Burnside to Barochan Place and then to Barbreck Cottage before setting up home in Main Street above the bus office of Messrs A. & P. McConnachie Ltd.
‘For a time Mrs McCorkindale ran a small tearoom in Main Street - on the site where Lipton Ltd. now have their shop [McKellar’s shop now - Ed] - and it was while engaged in this little business that Mrs McCorkindale became known to the whole community, and established her reputation among young and old as a “local worthy”.
‘One of her great loves was furniture sales and she was a familiar figure at these events throughout her life. She was considered to be something of a judge of furnishings and her advice was often sought in this connection.
‘Mr McCorkindale died in 1942 and Mrs McCorkindale was then appointed to take charge of McBrayne’s bus office, a job which she held until she was 80 years of age.
‘One of the characteristics of “London Kate” was her interest in local government. She was always first to vote at an election and would be at the polling booth before 7 am to be sure that she would be first to cast her vote.
‘She was taken ill some three years ago and admitted to the Calton Hospital. Although her health steadily failed, her mind was bright and active until the last.
‘Mrs McCorkindale’s only sister Mary emigrated to Vancouver where she died some years ago but Mrs McCorkindale is survived by her nephews and nieces in Canada. She also has cousins in Campbeltown.’
The 1881 Census shows her, at the age of 13, living at Flush with her grandparents - 80-year-old Donald Stalker, ‘crofter’, and Cathrine Stalker, aged 66 - and an aunt, Cathrine McKenzie and her three children, Donald (6), Duncan (4) and Cathrine (1). Donald Stalker had a stone erected in Kilkerran, but, curiously, all that it says is: ‘1879/ Erected by/ Donald Stalker/ Flush’ - the rest is blank and lichen-covered.
Donald McCorkindale’s obituary in the Courier of 28 September, 1961, described him as ‘the last surviving member of the family of the late Mr and Mrs John McCorkindale of 77 Longrow, Campbeltown’. He started work in the Post Office in 1888 as a messenger and remained in the postal service until he retired, a term of employment interrupted only when, in 1915, he was called up to serve with the Royal Engineers. After he retired, in 1937, he went out to New Zealand to visit his sister, a Mrs McCallum, returning to Campbeltown in 1940 to find that ‘with the outbreak of the second world war there was a shortage of postmen. He was approached and asked if he would help out. And for a time he again donned his postman’s uniform’.
Still with Glenramskill, Bella and I met retired fisherman, Duncan McArthur, one night in March near the ‘Paddling Pool’, and he enquired about an artillery piece he remembered playing on, as of boy of about 10 years, in the mid-1930s. He remembered, too, the finely-constructed brick-walled pit in which the gun sat. I helped George McSporran - who remembers the pit, but not the gun - locate the brickwork last spring, but the structure has been entirely filled in with stones. Duncan wonders where the gun came from and where it went. Can any reader help?
On 1 March, my daughter Bella and I enjoyed a wood-gathering night-walk along the back of Trench Point to Porter’s Glen, noticing, as we walked, a strip of jet-trail in the east somehow suffused with muted light. Shortly afterwards, a glow over the south end of Arran disclosed the source of the light. The moon was rising, and when it cleared the island it appeared immense. I cast about in my own vocabulary for a word to define its colour, and, having failed, asked Bella’s advice. She suggested ‘amber’ and it was the right word. On our way back - after drinking hot chocolate, seated on a fish-box in the shelter of a rock outcrop - as we passed Seaside Cottage, we heard weird calls from a bonfire at the back of the garden. John Brodie had seen us and he hastened to the road to catch up. We talked for a while, and he pointed out, in the clear starry sky, Arcturus in the north - a red giant, 100 times brighter than the Sun - and the ‘Winter Triangle’ of equidistant brilliant stars, Betelgeuse, Procyon and - at the inverted apex - Sirius.
That spectacular moonrise brought to mind the ‘Dalintober Moon’, which was the autumnal ‘Harvest Moon’. Tommy Ralston recalls playing, as a boy, outside Gayfield Place - demolished some 30 years ago - and, ‘looking east down High Street, right at the moon, it seems, in my memory, to have been so large as to have almost filled the eastern sky, and certainly it was as bright as many a day’.
I don’t think ‘Dalintober Gaelic’
has ever been documented either. I heard my father talk of it, and talk in it a
little, but can’t recall any examples of the lingo, which was a kind of private
language, now almost forgotten outwith a dwindling number of initiates. Tommy
Ralston explains that the ‘Gaelic’ - which it certainly wasn’t - involved
‘taking the latter part of a word (ordwo) and putting it at the beginning - with
wee bits added!’ ‘It was,’ he continues, ‘in everyday use in my young days when
my aunts and uncles were talking of things that they didn’t want children to
understand. For example, “Ay-thay eetie-swees ur on op-taw o the ardrup-waa.”
This in translation meant that sweets were hidden on top of the wardrobe! It
comes readily to me still, and my wife Ina now understands it ... She wondered,
she tells me, just what she had got herself into when first she heard me use it
with my mother and aunts. To a non-Campbeltonian, it will be completely
unintelligible when delivered in a broad Campbeltown accent. “Who is that nice
girl?” would come out as, “Oo-hoo’s at-tha ile-wie ice-nie assil-lah?” “Err-wher
ye aan-gaa ee-thee-orra-maw?” translates as, “Where are you going tomorrow?” It
all looks very complicated, but it becomes simple with use.’
More next time
No 52 Autumn 2002