A Highland Family Saga

A Highland Family Saga

Introduction

I recently published a blog about my great grand uncle – Dugald McFarlane and how he was, by necessity, forced to emigrate to Victoria in Southern Australia on an assisted passage .It is often assumed that the terrible potato famine which hit Ireland in the late 1840s was a comparatively localised happening . Not so – the blight that hit the potato crop extended throughout much of Northern Europe. Scotland – and the Highlands in particular , had been subject to a string of disasters affecting many of its inhabitants ever since the cessation of the Jacobite Uprising (or the ’45 as it was generally known ). The virtual genocide instigated by Cumberland was both savage , merciless and a vicious over reaction against a Clan system which was an integral part of everyday life . This was followed by the Clearances - when sheep became more relevant than their two legged fellow occupants of the Gàidhealtachd. The Famine of the 1840s was the culmination of those difficult times. Mass emigration to the Canadas, Australia, New Zealand and other developing countries was for many families the escape hatch to a new existence .

This tale concerns one family who were forced to up roots and move on . On this occasion it was not a move across the oceans but up the River Clyde to the burgeoning City of Glasgow . Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the mid 19^th Century, Glasgow’s population had exploded from some 100 000 to 500 000 . Many of these incomers came from Ireland where one could sail from Dublin to the Broomielaw in the heart of the City for a mere 6d steerage – the equivalent of some 3 pence in current currency !

Colin Lamont had been born on the farm of Stuck in North Bute near the small town of Port Bannatyne and overlooking the Kyles of Bute and its scenic grandeur. He became a herring fisherman and in 1840 married Catherine Cameron whose mother’s maiden name was Lamont although she was not directly related to Colin . As we discussed in a previous Blog , one of the problems that arose in the 1840s was that in addition to the blight of the potato crop , the herring which in most cases provide an important supplement to family diet , decided to swim into far distant waters. This acerbated the crisis and fishermen and crofters found themselves in an ever increasing crisis. Colin and Catherine had already four children by 1846- John , Mary , Duncan and Catherine and it was decided to head for the booming city of Glasgow. It is probable with hind sight to deduce that Colin had in probability, failing health.

A New Life

He settled with his young family in the Gorbals area of Glasgow which at that time was transforming itself from a small village on the south bank of the Clyde into a growing suburban settlement . In May 1849 a fifth child was born . Sadly Margaret died in infancy and the family moved across the river to Graeme Street just north of Trongate and a heavily populated quarter . For a herring fisherman in industrial Glasgow employment must have been somewhat different to that which he had been accustomed to in Bute. Colin was now a venetian blind painter ! In the 1851 Census we find however that he is not listed but his wife Catherine is listed as being “ head of the household “with three children living with her – John ( 10 ) , Mary ( 8 ) and Duncan (6 ) . Where was Colin ? Circumstantial evidence would suggest that he could have been perhaps in a hospital or somewhere similar receiving treatment for an ongoing illness . Sadly he died some two years later . The family had to move yet again . This time it was to 230 Holmes Street near Waterloo Street in a commercial part of the growing city . Colin died of stomach cancer aged 51 . The strain on his wife Catherine must have been immense . Not only had Colin died at a young age but he had left behind 6 children all living at the Holmes Street address . On top of this , she was pregnant with a seventh child , to be named Colin , who would not be born until some six months later . This was a Victorian Britain which was rapidly painting the Globe a bright red with colonial annexation and making a lot of money for a comparatively small number of people . It was a Glasgow lining its pockets on the backs of the profits of the slave trade and tobacco .

Over crowded Glasgow
It was time when there was no family allowance , no pensions , no free medical care nor indeed unemployment benefit . For the Lamonts it was ,theoretically, a time of anxiety . For Catherine she had to turn to her family. You will recall in my recent tale concerning Dugald McFarlane from Kintyre , he had taken himself off to Victoria in South Australia and had found himself involved in the Balarat Gold Rush . Incredibly , four of Catherine’s Cameron siblings had also ended up over there in Oz chasing that great golden nugget ! The fifth sibling ,her young brother Daniel , had also moved to Glasgow and had established himself a s a successful tailor living and working out of 9 Oxford Street in the Gorbals district of the City . To the Victorians , death had a strange significance . Departure from this mortal coil was often an elaborate performance and cemeteries in a rapidly expanding city were expensive places for final interment . It was Daniel who stepped into the breach and afforded Colin his brother in law a respectable burial in the quite amazing Southern Necropolis in the Gorbals where the Lamont had first settled on arrival from Bute . The Interment Book quotes thus :

“ Number 800 : Colin Lamont aged 51 years, painter of 230 Holme Street on the 24 of June 1853 of cancer in stumuck (sic). Brother in law of the proprietor.

Number of the lair 12289, price of lair 21/-. Funeral 29 June,Wednesday,1853 at 1 o'clock. "

The Celestial City

Southern Necropolis Glasgow

John Lamont, the oldest of Colin’s children was twelve years of age when his father died. It would appear that when he left school he was apprenticed to a tailor and it is logical although we do not know for certainty , that he did this under the watchful eye of his uncle . By 1861, the Lamonts had moved to 99 Waterloo Street – a more up market residential area than their previous accommodation. There is an apparent anomaly in this situation. With the father of the household now deceased, how could Catherine afford the rental in this more salubrious of residences? I can recall a number of years ago deciding to visit Waterloo Street and have a good look at where they had lived. Alas – it was no more – having been demolished to make way for a multi storey car park! I looked at the Census return for that period. It had four rooms excluding kitchen and bathroom. This was well above what the average incomer could afford in a city where one bed room apartments were in the majority. Catherine , it transpired , had rented out accommodation to two Highland lads, listed as “ lodgers “ whilst John aged 20 was now a qualified tailor , brother Duncan aged 16 was a carrier ,and sister Catherine aged 14 was a straw hat maker .

John Lamont

The thread of this tale has laid the emphasis on the difficulties large Highland families had to face due to the 1840s Famine and the subsequent forced exodus , which for many had to be to the big metropolis of Glasgow. The Lamonts were indeed atypical of the Highland family in those prevailing circumstances. I will now switch my examinations to John Lamont, my maternal great grandfather. John had become a tailor in a city where fashion and wealth were permeating much of society as the money generated by shipbuilding, steel manufacturing, coal mining and railway construction fuelled the rapidly expanding economy.

John died long before I was born. I do not have any pictures of him and knew little of his life story until I started to research him in depth. It is clear he had more than a little aptitude for his chosen profession and appears to have a latent ability to be in the right place at the right time .He also had a particularly close affinity to the lands and tales of his antecedents . Argyll, particularly the Cowal region, and Bute were strong in his heart and this indeed manifested itself in a somewhat unusual way! In 1867, aged 26 , he married Margaret Kirkwood Nicol , daughter of a Stirling builder , who lived nearby in Pitt Street . Margaret was a dress maker and may have worked for him although that cannot be proved .

The marriage did not take place in Glasgow but in the Free Church of Scotland at Roseneath Kilcreggan in the County of Dumbarton and looking across the Clyde to Dunoon in Cowal . By the National Census date in 1871 , we find John , aged 30 , living at 455 St Vincent Street Glasgow and employing 8 men , 1 woman and a boy . John and Margaret had two sons Robert ( known as Bob ) and Colin ( my maternal grandfather ) . Margaret was born in 1875 but sadly died in infancy of hydro cephalous or water on the brain, a disease which often has genetic connections . The Lamonts had now moved to 4 Washington Street not far from John’s old home at 99 Waterloo Street .It was here that John W Graham Nicol Lamont was born in 1878 and became known as Johnny .In the 1881 Census it is clear that the Lamont family are indeed prospering . John now employs 6 men and 11 women in his tailoring business. They now have a summer residence in Dunoon at Glassary House in Hillfoot Street .Changed days from the trials and tribulations of life in Port Bannatyne back in the 1840s !

I pause at this stage in my tale to ask a pertinent question !

Why was John Lamont so infatuated in the Dunoon area? He had been married just across the Firth of Clyde in Kilcreggan and now had a summer residence in the heart of this picturesque little town. With hind sight, the answer is quite clear. John’s maternal Lamont ancestors had been born and brought up at Hafton on the banks of the nearby Holy Loch. His great grandfather also named John, was a herring curer who lived at Hafton with his wife Catherine (nee Buchanan) and their large family. Catherine was descended from the eminent scholar George Buchanan who had numerous claims to fame, including being the tutor to Mary Queen of Scots. John and his brother Neil were Seceders from the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland and this amongst other things caused them to be evicted from their crofts and set off over the hills towards Colintraive and thence to Port Bannatyne where the settled down .

I digress! The somewhat salubrious life of the Lamonts was however to change when in 1885 Margaret Kirkwood Nicol died at Glassary House Dunoon of “ convulsions after 10 days confinement “ . Their sons were 17, 16 and 7 years old respectively . John remained a widower for less than two years when he married Isabell Gibson Nairn . She had been born in Redruth Cornwall. Her mother was Cornish but her father had been born and brought up in Whithorn in Wigtownshire. She like Margaret Nicol before her was a dress maker by profession . She was 23 years younger than John. In 1888 twin children were born in Glassary House Dunoon and thus commenced a very particular naming pattern which was conspicuous to every child that was born . The usage by John and Isabella of names of a very particular Highland nature is unusual . One asks why those by his first wife were very much run of the mill ! It would be pure conjecture to assume that it was Isabel who was behind this because after all she had an English ( or Cornish ! ) mother and her father hailed from the deep south of Scotland well away from the influence of the tartan and heather ! The twins were named Hafton Gibson Lamont ( a girl|) and Ivan Cameron Lamont (a boy ) . Sadly Hafton died in infancy and the cause was again hydro cephalous which had taken her half sister Margaret some thirteen years earlier . Interestingly , the name Hafton is the birth place of John’s great grand parents John Lamont and Catherine Buchannan. There has been much written about them over the years particularly concerning John’s rescue of the Baptist preacher MacArthur who had been wrongly impressed into the Navy at the onset of the Napoleonic Wars. I was never told of this by my mother who presumably did not know a great deal about her ancestral past !

The other children who arrived on the scene all had distinctive names indicating mostly parts of Argyll with family connections : Ailsa Lochiel- Athol Davar – Cona Glencoe- Alistair Glenstrae –Nora Ardine and Angus St Blane !

Athol Davaar Lamont

Much can be written about John Lamont’s children. He had after all some twelve in total between two spouses . I am now going to look at one whose story and appendages are quite incredible . Athol Davaar Lamont was the fourth child to the marriage with Isabell Nairn . His name indeed follows precedent - Athol taken from that area of Perthshire controlled by the powerful Murray Clan and whose Chieftain, the Duke of Athol, even to this day , is the only person in these isles to have a private army ! Davaar is a small island off Kintyre in Argyll at the mouth of Campbeltown Loch . Born in December 1891 in 4c Washington Street Glasgow , Athol was a school boy in the 1901 Census and now living at 20 Campbell Street in the Maryhill District of Glasgow .

It is understandable that Athol would in probability end up at sea bearing in mind his background . His paternal grandfather , Colin Lamont was a herring fisher and his maternal grand father Duncan Cameron was a merchant seaman. By 1911 the family had moved to Govan Glasgow the home of a variety of ship yards and ancillary industries. Athol was listed in the Census of that year as being an engineer in an engineering works . On war breaking out in 1914 , Athol enlisted in the Royal Navy as a sub mariner . He found himself based at Blyth in Northumberland which at that time was an important submarine base By the time the War was in its last stages , Athol had married a local girl , Jean Walker . The Royal Navy was developing a super sub which in size was well above the norm in service . Athol Lamont was appointed to serve on the J6 and on October 1918 , as the War drew to a close , it sailed out of Blyth Harbour into the North Sea.

This was the last Jean Lamont saw or heard of Athol . She received formal information that the J6 had been torpedoed and sunk . No further information was forthcoming . It was as if the powers that be , including the Navy itself , wished to draw a veil over the whole incident . Jean was fraught . She was pregnant with his child and in 1919 a male child was born . He was named after his deceased father - Athol Davaar Lamont . Jean remarried in the early 1920s and her new husband ,Joseph Walton , accepted young Athol as his own . Another child was born a half-brother to Athol . The Second World War brought trials and tribulation to families world wide . Young Athol signed up for military service and by genetic demand became a seaman . Athol served on the HMS Daring. He was killed in action aboard HMS Daring which was sunk by a German U boat .HMS Daring was D Class Destroyer of 1 360 tons ( standard displacement ) and had a complement of 138 sailors . It had 4 X 4.7 in guns ( 4 X 1 ) , 8 torpedo tubes and depth charge throwers . maximum speed was 35 knots . These nine vessels were built in 1932 , and participated in normal fleet duties and convoy protection . Of these nine ships only HMS Duncan and HMS Kootenay survived the war.

Athol Davaar Lamont Jr

HMS DARING

Jean Walton was bereft having lost both a husband and a son in conflict . The death of her husband still was something of a mystery . The Government applied the 100 years rule to protect the release of information . They were unrelenting in this archaic of archaic legislation. Jean was always concerned that she had not been given details of Athol’s death . She asked her son to attempt to find out more .Sadly she passed away in 1954 before any further information had been ascertained. Time moved on and still there seemed little progress in adding substance to this family tragedy . In 2012 , an incredible story appeared in the specialist magazine “ Diver “ . It related how a team of divers had been investigating a wreck on the seabed off Seahouses which was thought to be that of a cargo ship .Visibility was quite clear on the initial dive and to their astonishment they found not a cargo ship but an intact submarine . Closer examination revealed that the telegraph of the ship next to the conning tower had writing in English on it and that it had three propellers instead of the normal two . This discovery resulted in close examination of the records available . Eventually the pieces of the jig saw began to fit . A British sub , the J6 had disappeared towards the end of World War l .It had been built at the Portsmouth Dockyard and was launched on the 9 September 1915 . For her day she was enormous being 274 feet long and armed with six 18” torpedo tubes and a 4” gun. She was capable of a maximum speed of 19.5 knots on the surface and 9.5 knots submerged. The J6 Class sub was the only British naval vessel to have three propellers! Now the basic facts of the sinking could be revealed as the story was published and relatives of those lost got in touch.

Divers discover the J6

On the 15^th October 1918, HMS Cymric, a British Q- ship was patrolling near the submarine base at Blyth in Northumberland. There had been a report of a German U boat in the area and the crew were on high alert. At 4 pm they thought they had found her .They thought that there was a “U “on the conning tower and this led them to conclude that this was the U6. What they had seen was later believed to be something hanging on the tower next to the “J” to complete the “U”. The Cymric opened fire, and the very first shell hit its target. An officer tried to fire a signal grenade but he was killed. One seaman did manage to wave a table cloth and the Cymric ceased fire. The J6 headed into a fog bank and the Cymric’s Captain reckoned he had been fooled and opened fire again. J6 was now sinking and the Cymric moved to pick up the “enemy “.It was then that they realised their tragic mistake- they had sunk their own sub . Less than a month later WW l was over and a “100 year Top Secret Classification” was placed on the file. Relatives were simply informed that there was a collision. Only 15 out of the 34 on board survived - crew who were in the engine room, artificers and the likes, just did not get out. Survivors were prevented to say what had actually happened .

Portsmouth Naval Memorial

Crew of HMS J6

Nearly one hundred years later, in May 2017, I was contacted through “Facebook “by an Athol Walton. Athol transpired was the grandson of Jean Walker (Lamont / Walton) who had married Athol Davaar Lamont in 1918. Having taught genealogy as a subject to Further Education students over many years , I had in the course of time placed much of my own family tree on various web sites as a means of preserving our treasured past . Athol had at the behest of his family gone looking for fellow descendants of ADL and found me in the heart of Perthshire! It transpired that he had been instrumental in ensuring the naval records were correct in relation to those poor guys who perished so tragically as the War was in its last stages and that all were aware that it was as a result of friendly fire and not enemy action . A somewhat special occasion occurred as the divers returned to J6. It was a calm, peaceful day and a small ceremony was held as a poppy wreath was carefully placed on the water above the sunken sub and resting place of those brave men. Rest in Peace Athol Davaar Lamont and your fellow shipmates. You are not forgotten.