In this blog post, our EERC colleague Kenneth Veitch reflects on the written sources gathered during the Dumfries & Galloway Study. These can be accessed in full on the Study website
Account
books, diaries, journals, letters and other personal documents are a rich
source of material for ethnologists, historians and others interested in
studying everyday life. Separately, they provide first-hand, detailed
information about individuals, communities and occupations rarely found in
other historical sources, and offer an opportunity to investigate life at the
level of the parish, town, workplace or family. Collectively, they show the
great variety of everyday life and how its rhythms, forms and customs differed
not only across time and place, but also between occupations, social groups and
genders. They are particularly useful for studying the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, a period that lies beyond the reach of first-hand oral
reminiscences but when increasing levels of literacy meant that a wide
assortment of people were recording their daily affairs. The founder of the
EERC, Professor Sandy Fenton, recognised their value for ethnological research
and in 1994 launched the Sources in Local
History series to promote them more widely. This endeavour has found new
purpose in the EERC’s Regional Ethnology
of Scotland project, one of the main aims of which is to collect and
publish new primary source material. The results from the first of the
project’s regional studies, which took Dumfries and Galloway as its focus, were
extremely encouraging, with volunteers from across the region and beyond
identifying and transcribing a wide range of documents. As the EERC turns its
attention to elsewhere in Scotland, it is timely to provide a brief overview of
the transcriptions that have been uploaded to the project’s website so far.
The Minute Book of the Lochmaben
Curling Society, 1823-1863, edited by Lynne J M Longmore
Societies were a
prominent feature of local life in nineteenth-century Scotland, and catered for
a wide range of cultural, political, religious and social interests. An
increasing number of sporting societies were also established over the century,
not least for curling, which for a time was played by more people in Scotland
than any other sport. It was particularly popular in the south west, and in
places such as Lochmaben the curling society became an integral part of parish
life and identity. The Minute Book of the
Lochmaben Curling Society records the early years of one of the burgh’s two
societies and, as would be expected, there is much in it to interest historians
of the sport. Its carefully set out minutes and regulations, for instance, show
the extent to which societies organised and formalised the local game in the
early nineteenth century, while details such as the decision of the Lochmaben
curlers to incorporate their rules with those of the Duddingston Curling
Society highlight how societies also helped to create both an awareness among
their members of curling as a national game, and the organisational framework
for it. That the curlers of Lochmaben repeatedly voted against adopting the two
stone rule is a reminder that the creation of a uniform, national game was
nonetheless a gradual process, with regional variations persisting even after
the founding of the Grand Caledonian Curling Club in 1838. Indeed, the minute
book reveals that at the beginning of the 1860s the rinks from the neighbouring
parishes of Lochmaben and Dryfesdale were playing different forms of the game.
There is much here to interest ethnologists as well. The extent to which local
societies helped to shape and promote communal identity in the nineteenth
century, for example, is evident in the preamble, with its list of opponents
vanquished, recollection of local curling worthies and invocation of the
‘Invincibles of Old Margery’. The tone turns martial when an account is given
of the spiels with Lochmaben’s greatest rival, Closeburn:
The curlers of Closeburn, as renowned upon the banks of the Nith for
their prowess upon ice, as those of Lochmaben upon the banks of the Annan,
resolved during the ice campaign 1819-20 to try which party should bear the
palm, accordingly they sent a challenge, which being cordially accepted of, the
combatants to the number of eighty met upon the Kirk Loch and after a keen
battle the game stood as follows – victory remaining with Lochmaben.
Ethnologists interested in charting the gradual shift from communal to
civil society in nineteenth-century Scotland will likewise find evidence for
the intermediate stage in this process in the Society’s constitution and rules,
which characteristically formalised and regulated a well-established activity.
Insights into the fraternal ethos of the Society, and how the conduct of its
members were guided, are offered by the regulations of the curling court, the
rules and rituals of which can be compared with those of the many other mock
serious courts that appeared in various settings in Scotland during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The custom of giving nicknames not only to
notable curlers (here ‘Bonaparte’ and ‘the Tutor’ stand out), but also to
memorable stones is in evidence. To the curlers of Lochmaben, the names
‘Wallace’, ‘the Hen’ and ‘the Craig’ would have evoked heroic feats on the ice
and prompted the retelling of well-known anecdotes. To later generations, they
would have recalled an age when the highly individual ‘channel stane’,
sometimes of prodigious size, had yet to give way to the standardised round
stone.
The
Chronicles of Muckledale, being the Memoirs of Thomas Beattie of Muckledale,
1736-1827, edited by Edward J Cowan
Thomas Beattie, a
successful sheep farmer in and around the parish of Ewes, began his memoir in
1788, at the age of fifty-two, and updated it intermittently thereafter. It
provides a detailed and highly personal account of one man’s life from
childhood to old age, and is a mine of information about life in a close-knit
rural community at a time of notable economic, political and social change.
That community is shown to be more complex and varied than statistical accounts
and similar surveys suggest, with Beattie describing dances, livestock sales,
political meetings, public beddings, trials and more, and recording encounters
not just with fellow farmers, shepherds, dealers, ministers and schoolmasters,
but also with butchers, fiddlers, lawyers, servants, soldiers, quacks, and
numerous robbers, confidence tricksters and other rogues. Among the latter was
Annie Greg, a notorious pickpocket ‘descended from a hardy and handy race of
thieves’, one of a number of women in the memoir who managed to relieve Beattie
of his money in one way or another. Candid pen portraits of those closest to
him bring individuals into even sharper focus, and populate the landscape with
recognisable faces. Beattie’s description of his mother reads:
She
was a woman about middle size, had as fine a foot and handsome leg as I think I
ever saw, yet altogether she was not handsome as she was broad shouldered and
short neckd, her features were large and rather masculine, yet she had a
composed, sober, grave look. Her hair was black and she had two large very
expressive eyes, dark grey, inclining to black. Her speech and manner was slow,
sober and grave, her voice clear and strong. She never read anything but
Divinity and upon that she poured very often …
The
two other women closest to Beattie are shown to have led unhappy lives: his
sister was shamefully mistreated by a drunken and brutish husband; and his wife
suffered from regular bouts of insanity. Interestingly, the nature of his
wife’s delusions was sometimes influenced by her reading habits, with the Arabian Nights and the Book of
Revelations inducing the ‘most extraordinary notions’. Beattie’s decision to
write his memoirs was prompted by further personal tragedy, the death of his
daughter, his moving account of which contradicts the assumption that
people of earlier ages were habituated to child mortality and somehow less
distressed by it:
All
the time of her sickness I was in anxiety and distress ineffable. After I saw
her in strong convulsions my only hope and wish was a quiet passage for her to
the Grave [but] even that was denied. After her death I was insensible for some
time of any pleasure or even satisfaction in anything; my wish was to ly
interred by her, often even in company I could not refrain from tears when I
thought of her.
Amidst
its hardships and daily toil, Beattie’s life was not without its diversions.
Memorable among them was a staging of Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd in the yard of the George Inn, Langholm, the
proceeds of which went to funding a local lad’s studies at Edinburgh
University. Beattie provided the prologue, which he modestly noted ‘was
received with such applause as perfectly astonished me’. The memoirs are also
important for showing how national and international events impacted on local
society. Beattie records, for instance, the support that the French Revolution
gained among ‘the Lower Classes of the community’ and its consequences:
Langholm
was so deeply tainted with this mania that upon some accounts arriving of the
success of the French arms, a great number of republicans assembled at the
Cross and lighted a great bonfire and drank a great many republican toasts with
repeated Huzzas, such as ‘liberty and equality’, ‘the sons of freedom’ (meaning
the French), ‘George 3rd and last’ (for there was to be no more Kings), ‘the
rights of man’ and many more. They likewise despatched a number of boys and
blackguards to compel people to illuminate their houses and whoever would not,
they were ordered to break their windows.
Beattie
was among the local justices who sentenced the leaders to up to six months
confinement in the town’s tollbooth, which, he laconically noted, ‘rather
abated the spirit of the Republicans a little’.
Sir William Burrell’s Northern Tour, 1758, edited by John G Dunbar
William Burrell, a member of a prominent landed and mercantile family
from the south east of England, travelled through Dumfries and Galloway as part
of a wider tour of Scotland in 1758. Like many English travellers, he was vexed
by the state of Scottish inns, expressing particular dismay at the dirty and
flea-ridden room he was offered in Newton Stewart: ‘It was our dineing room and
bedchamber and probably at other times performed the office of stable and
hogstye conjointly’. He escaped the fleas only to be annoyed ‘by a greater and
more savage beast, the landlord, who cheated us most enormously’. Elsewhere,
his sensibilities were further affronted by a ‘Scotch chicken broth’ that he
was obliged to taste. For many of the people Burrell encountered in the south
west, such a dish would have been a rare treat, and his comments are a reminder
that many travellers at this time judged local conditions by the standards of
their own class. Even so, these and other observations often preserve details
about daily life that locals would have considered too mundane to be worth
recording, but which are now of great interest to ethnologists and historians.
In Burrell’s case, this included mentioning ‘an odd custom peculiar to that
part of the country of bringing boyled eggs and Cheshire cheese to accompany
tea at breakfast’. He also observed that the houses of the rural poor were ‘built
entirely of mud, without chimneys or windows, unless holes in the wall deserve
the appelation’, and that ‘the inhabitants scorn the confinement of shoes and
stockings and therefore go without either’. He further remarked that the
crossing to Ireland from Port Patrick was both quicker and safer than that from
Holyhead in Wales, but that travellers chose to use the latter due to the poor
accommodation and roads in Galloway. Similar comments provide the opportunity
for comparing conditions in the south west to those elsewhere in Scotland. In
Ayr, for example, he ‘observed more people of the poorer sort with shoes and
stockings … than in any other part of Scotland I had yet seen’; and if natives
of Newton Stewart are offended by his description of their town’s historical
hospitality, then at least it was spared the indignity of his description of
Kelso: ‘The streets are filled with human excrement from one end to the other,
which renders walking unsafe and disagreable’.
A Letter from a Kirkcudbright Grocer, 1814, edited by Peter
Didsbury
In May 1814, James
Caven of Kirkcudbright wrote a letter to an acquaintance in Dumfries apprising
him of ‘the provincial news’. As its editor, Peter Didsbury, remarks, ‘it
affords … an interesting insight into the milieu of a small-town tradesman in
south-west Scotland two hundred years ago’. Among other things, we learn that a
D. Sharp has returned from Edinburgh ‘a little proud and selfish’, and that
Caven attended the ‘hearty wedding’ of Captain Conning and Jean Wilson. Caven
does not refer to the recent improvements to Kirkcudbright, which included the
construction of new roads and houses, but the burgh’s growing reputation for
gentility is confirmed by his mention of a dancing school and a singing school,
although he admits to being ‘quite ignorant of both these polite
accomplishments’. His letter ends on a melancholy note, with a list of those
who had recently died in the town and its neighbourhood, which, he stated,
‘will farther evince you of our transitory and uncertain state here’.
The Pocket-Books of a Dumfriesshire Drover, edited by Willie Waugh
By the end of the
eighteenth century, the cattle trade with England was a well-established and
important sector of the Scottish economy, with an estimated 100,000 beasts
being sent across the border every year. As well as encouraging the spread of
commercial cattle rearing throughout the pastoral regions of Scotland, it had
given rise to a new professional class of drovers. Not content with simply
driving other people’s cattle, they also bought and sold on their own account,
recording their day-to-day transactions in pocket-books. Two such books
belonging to John Waugh, a drover from Dumfriesshire, are reproduced in The Pocket-Books of a Dumfriesshire Drover,
which provides a rare and valuable insight into the cattle trade and its place
in the economic and social life of the south west of Scotland. They reveal that
Waugh dealt extensively with local farmers and graziers, and that he bought
their cattle for particular droves. After gathering at Dumfries, these droves mostly
headed south to St Faith’s, Hempton Green or one of the other major English
cattle fairs. One drove mentioned by Waugh, however, was bound for Dornoch, a
reminder that Galloways were sent north for breeding as well as south for beef.
Lowland dealers also obtained Highland cattle in bulk at the great cattle
trysts held at Falkirk, and Waugh can be found there in October 1809 buying
fifty-nine beasts at a cost of £275 13s. He listed the expenses he incurred
bringing them home from Falkirk, which included fees for watchmen and numerous
tolls. He also appears to have hired experienced Highland drovers at Falkirk to
help transfer the cattle home, a common practice among Lowland dealers. Whether
Waugh is roughly jotting down in pencil the purchases he has just made at
Falkirk, or carefully recording in pen a financial agreement newly reached in a
Dumfries coffee-house, there is an appealing immediacy to the entries in his
pocket-books. Some afford a glimpse of his wider world and outlook: a
tantalising fragment of an account of a journey north shows that an
appreciation of Highland scenery was not confined at this time to the
Wordsworths and other tourists seeking the picturesque; a list of fish brought
to Dalswinton reveals that the local diet, which would have consisted mainly of
oatmeal, was enlivened and enriched with salmon and perhaps trout; while a
half-remembered snatch of a Psalm is a reminder of the central part that the
Christian faith played in the everyday life of Scots.
The Journal of Robert Heron, 1789-1798, edited by Edward J Cowan
Edward Cowan’s second contribution to the
series finds a Galloway man at large in Scotland’s capital, participating in and
being shaped by the Enlightenment. A native of New Galloway, Heron was in
Edinburgh studying for the ministry but the journal reveals that much of his
time was spent on various literary projects, most notably contributing articles
to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For
this, he studied a wide range of scholarly texts and these he duly noted in his
journal along with the other books he was reading, including fashionable novels
such as Moore’s Zeluco, making it a
valuable source of information about reading habits. He also recorded his other
daily activities, and while we often find him at his desk, we also meet him
reading the newspaper in a coffee-house, buying quills from a stationer in
Parliament Square, borrowing books from Sibbald’s Library, reading Rousseau on
Blackford Hill, preaching at Ratho, and enjoying (or not) the company of his
friends. Among the latter was the Reverend Dr Thomas Blacklock, a distinguished
poet from Annan and an advocate for the education of his fellow blind, with
whom he would regularly drink tea or walk around the Meadows. The entry for 22
July 1790 suggests a liking for simple pleasures – ‘Supped on turnips, and a tumbler of
rum and water’ – but Heron had extravagant tastes and frequently spent money he
did not have, and during his journal he was thrown into jail for an unpaid
debt. Heron was all too aware of his faults. Indeed, the reason why he
started the journal was so he could ‘review my conduct with a stricter eye’. As
such it provides a compelling insight into his inner life. Self-loathing and
self-doubt were to the fore, often expressed in the ‘man of feeling’
confessional style currently in vogue, but underpinned by a persistent
Calvinist fear of damnation. His entry for 6 February 1790 was typical:
… have told
many lies, uttered many oaths and obscene expressions, and committed various
acts of unchastity since discontinuing my journal. My levity and folly have
also arisen to a greater pitch than before. I am approaching nearer to death,
and becoming less prepared to meet it.
His
inner torment continued, and the journal ends with a simple, but heartfelt: ‘God
pity and help me!’.
The volunteers
who have transcribed these and other manuscripts for the Regional Ethnology of Scotland project are to be congratulated on
their endeavours and thanked for giving so generously of their time and
expertise. More material from Dumfries and Galloway will be uploaded in the
coming months, to be joined in time by examples from throughout the rest of
Scotland. Proposals for additions to the series are most welcome, especially
from the project’s next destinations, East Lothian and the Borders. For more
information, please contact: kenneth.veitch@ed.ac.uk.
