My Family and the Ferry
by Derek Freeman
Genre: Memoir
Swearwords: One mild one only.
Description: How my mother’s family arrived in the Ferry, how she and my father met, and what our family life was like during the last century.
_____________________________________________________________________
Although this account primarily relates to the youth of South Queensferry and their exploits in the late fifties and early sixties, I have opened with a short record of my family history and how my Mother and Father met.
Mary McRae, my great grandmother, originally came from Nairn and John Donaldson, her husband, from Peebles.
It was 7 June 1895, Mary McRae was a twenty-three year old domestic servant when she married John Donaldson at the Station House in Eddleston; a small village four miles north of Peebles. Following their marriage they lived at Skiprig, a lonely, bleak area among the hills two miles north east of Eddleston.
Over a century had passed when I visited Skiprig, but it is now as it was then, except for the occasional bleating sheep, desolate and silent. The small cottage was on 22 June 1898 the birthplace of my grandmother Barbara Donaldson.
Both John Donaldson and his father were employed by the North British Railway Company, John senior as the Station Master at Eddleston and his son as a railway surfaceman. We can only guess as to the reason John Donaldson junior left the railway to become a forester at Skiprig.
However, on the death of his father in 1912, John decided to leave Skiprig with his family and move to the village of Prestonholm by the River South Esk near Cockpen.
The small village of Prestonholm was described by the author David G. Hardie as ‘An old world village set in the stillness and beauty of a little hollow.’
It was there in 1918 that Mr and Mrs Donaldson’s second child, a twenty year old unmarried Barbara Donaldson, became pregnant and on 16 July 1919 in Prestonholm Garden Cottage gave birth to her first illegitimate child, a baby girl she named May, who eventually became my mother.
Have no doubt, the stigma that accompanied such a child would be considerable, not only for the mother, but also her family. In the earlier part of the last century almost all illegitimate children would be offered for adoption, but in this case the baby’s maternal grandparents decided they would raise their granddaughter.
On 13 April 1922 Barbara Donaldson, as yet unmarried, again became a mother and although both of these children had the selfsame father he and Barbara Donaldson would never marry. The second child, also a baby girl, was adopted by her paternal grandparents.
In 1924 John and Mary Donaldson and family left Prestonholm and moved to South Queensferry on the South side of the River Forth.
Home in the Ferry for John and Mary Donaldson and their five year old illegitimate grandchild was a gable end property situated on East Terrace, owned by the late Sir and Lady Stewart Clark of Dundas Castle.
The Ramsay family were the owners of Dalhousie Castle and the land on which Prestonholm stood. They ordered the village to be demolished: the land was sold to the National Coal Board, who in the1930’s used it as a coal waste site and as such nothing now remains. Early in the twentieth century the Ramsay family moved to Brechin Castle, Angus, the seat of the Earl of Dalhousie.
Barbara Donaldson settled at Castle Row in Gorebridge, a mining village in Mid-Lothian and on 8 December 1925 at Cockpen Manse she married Thomas Yorke, a farm grieve twenty-nine years her senior.
It is difficult to say how long this marriage lasted, but twelve years later she married Alexander Richardson a forty-two year old Colliery Winding Engineer employed at the Lady Victoria coal mine in Newtongrange; again Cockpen was the chosen venue.
On this occasion, her first illegitimate child, May Donaldson, now eighteen, was a witness to her mother’s second marriage. Sadly, Alex Richardson died from lung cancer in 1949, aged fifty-three, eleven years after his wedding.
At the start of World War Two, May Donaldson joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). She was stationed in Port Edgar Naval Base in Queensferry. My father served in the Royal Marines and it was during this time they met. I have Adolph Hitler to thank for the union between my mother and father, but the strange thing is my father and Hitler shared a common birth date.
My family lived in a corrugated asbestos clad prefab in Walker Drive, specially constructed for the return of ex-servicemen from World War Two. The only heating was from a coal fire in the living room or a paraffin heater in the kitchen; central heating was barely heard off.
On an exceptionally cold winter’s morning the ice could be scrapped from the inside of our bedroom window and there was always a fight between my younger brother and sister and I as to who would get the best spot in front of the fire.
‘Get your bloody hands washed before he comes in.’ my mother shouted as dinner was prepared. She was referring to my father who had a really bad temper. My younger brother and sister were at the table when I joined them.
‘What’s for dinner mum?’ I asked. ‘Soup and pudding,’ she replied. ‘Wow,’ I exclaimed, ‘two courses again?’ ‘Don’t be so bloody cheeky,’ came the terse reply. This was our usual once a week haute cuisine. I don’t think this was caused by lack of money; it was just she didn’t enjoy cooking and it saved her time and money. The soup usually lasted two days, the strawberry jelly and tin of Carnation Milk only one.
My father was employed by Mackenzie & Moncur, an engineering company in Edinburgh, as a plumber, or as he would rather have it known, a heating engineer. The majority of his working day was spent in or around the capital with the occasional trip further afield.
There was no love lost between my mother and father; there were no loving greetings, no kisses or hugs, just nothing. It was as if he had just come in from the garden. There must have been something between them sometime in the past, but it had long since disappeared.
Never happy with the way he treated my mother, I think that’s why him and I never got on well, especially so the older I became. When I was very young I remember him being a torn-faced old bugger and as the years passed he only got worse. Whether his experiences during the War or his own home life had any bearing on the way he treated us, we would never know.
Apart from weekends, seldom did our father join us at dinner; he was busy working, or passing the time with his workmates in one of the many Edinburgh public houses. It wasn’t the first time he had returned home under the weather.
We had finished our haute cuisine when he came in. Thankfully he was sober and in what could be described as a good mood.
As the years passed he developed an interest in photography and bought himself a camera. This, together with a dark room for developing black and white photographs, was the one thing in his life which brought him some happiness.
He was the youngest from a family of five, and although he did have two brothers and two sisters, they as my grandfather visited Queensferry only once. My father returned to the place of his birth following the death of his mother, but I struggle to remember any further occasion when he returned to Liverpool. From remarks made by one his brothers there were some serious doubts regarding my father’s parentage. This is possibly why he had a chip on his shoulder about life and almost everyone in it, in some ways very much like my mother. It’s such a pity they didn’t understand each other more.
Although he didn’t treat my mum well, everyone thought George Freeman was a great guy, but they never knew the real man and just what a bastard he was to me and my mother.
I met my paternal grandfather when he paid a visit to the Ferry. A tall imposing figure with silver hair is the only memory I have. My father was never in contact with him except on that one occasion. My dad often told me that his father had been a drinker and a gambler and because of this he had lost the family’s grocer shop during a game of cards.
There were no photographs of my supposed grandfather and we have no idea when or where he died.
I was eleven years old when my father decided it was time I learned how too look after myself. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll teach you how to box.’ Following a hard punch on the nose, the lesson in self defence ended with a generous amount of my blood on the floor; that was my first and my last lesson, especially when my good old dad could only laugh. It’s strange how we remember the bad times in life rather than the happy ones.
One day I do remember well was when mum and dad decided we should go to Dunfermline Glen. We left the Ferry in a reasonably happy mood. This was our first visit to Dunfermline; we were excited about boarding a steam train at Dalmeny station and travelling over the Forth Rail Bridge.
We had barely arrived and as usual they started arguing about nothing in particular. It ended with them going their separate ways; we would tag along with my disconsolate mother and head for home.
There were very few happy times I shared with my father, but there are two I remember vividly.
At twelve years old I accompanied him to Ravenscraig Steel works in Motherwell. We travelled from Kirkliston on the back of a lorry with a canvas shelter for protection. I have graphic memories of that day and can still see, in my minds eye, the metal boiling in the furnace and the blocks of white hot steel rolled and cut in the mill.
While we were growing older the Forth Road Bridge was being built. That itself had quite an impact on the Ferry. Houses were knocked down, fields turned into motorways and heavy traffic all became part of life for many years and in one case almost caused serious injury to one of our group.
As the new bridge grew, the Box Beams used in its construction were easing their way across the main road just above Tom Walker’s shop at the Cross Roads. One winter’s evening on returning from Murrayfield Ice Rink, someone suggested that we have a walk out on the Box Beams; it was a game of chicken.
Four of us climbed the steep bank to the road level of the bridge and began the dangerous walk out to the crane three hundred yards away. One hundred and fifty yards later three of us decided to turn back, but Brian carried on out to the crane, then slowly made his way back to join us. To return to the level of the road below, meant running down a forty-five degree angled bank of shale and earth. Jimmy decided to go first and began his headlong run down the steep bank. The lighting was not too good and what Jimmy and the rest of us failed to notice was the gaping hole at the bottom of the bank.
He yelled and cried for help. It was then we knew that although he may be injured he was hopefully not seriously hurt. We carefully made our way down the steep bank towards where Jimmy had disappeared.
We could barely see him. He was completely covered in a thick black oily mud.
During the fifties and sixties it was quite normal to wear a suit with collar and tie when going out and it was no different on this night. ‘Reach up, give us your hands,’ we shouted.
Other than being covered in mud he appeared okay, but the once immaculate suit looked strange as he walked home. The seam of the right trouser leg had opened up from his waist to his ankle and all he could repeat was ‘ I will get a hammering from my mother.’ We could not stop laughing all the way home. Jimmy managed to get his suit cleaned and repaired by his eldest sister and so avoided a good old fashioned Scots hammering.
A couple of years later and the opportunity arose to visit the site of the bridge. We had been invited to take a tour of the partly completed bridge and on a weather-perfect Sunday morning my father and I made our way towards the gleaming silver Tower on the South side of the river.
Following a detailed explanation of the cable anchorages, we walked a few hundred yards to the elevator at the base of the Tower. We stepped out five hundred and twelve feet above the Firth of Forth to what must have been one of the most amazing views in central Scotland. From Stirling to the mountains of Mull in the West, to Edinburgh and beyond in the East, the views were truly fantastic.
Our life of crime came to an end. It was time to settle down and look for employment. I suppose we all enjoyed our time as children, wild or otherwise, and we did what we wanted to do with little or no interference from adults.
Swearwords: One mild one only.
Description: How my mother’s family arrived in the Ferry, how she and my father met, and what our family life was like during the last century.
_____________________________________________________________________
Although this account primarily relates to the youth of South Queensferry and their exploits in the late fifties and early sixties, I have opened with a short record of my family history and how my Mother and Father met.
Mary McRae, my great grandmother, originally came from Nairn and John Donaldson, her husband, from Peebles.
It was 7 June 1895, Mary McRae was a twenty-three year old domestic servant when she married John Donaldson at the Station House in Eddleston; a small village four miles north of Peebles. Following their marriage they lived at Skiprig, a lonely, bleak area among the hills two miles north east of Eddleston.
Over a century had passed when I visited Skiprig, but it is now as it was then, except for the occasional bleating sheep, desolate and silent. The small cottage was on 22 June 1898 the birthplace of my grandmother Barbara Donaldson.
Both John Donaldson and his father were employed by the North British Railway Company, John senior as the Station Master at Eddleston and his son as a railway surfaceman. We can only guess as to the reason John Donaldson junior left the railway to become a forester at Skiprig.
However, on the death of his father in 1912, John decided to leave Skiprig with his family and move to the village of Prestonholm by the River South Esk near Cockpen.
The small village of Prestonholm was described by the author David G. Hardie as ‘An old world village set in the stillness and beauty of a little hollow.’
It was there in 1918 that Mr and Mrs Donaldson’s second child, a twenty year old unmarried Barbara Donaldson, became pregnant and on 16 July 1919 in Prestonholm Garden Cottage gave birth to her first illegitimate child, a baby girl she named May, who eventually became my mother.
Have no doubt, the stigma that accompanied such a child would be considerable, not only for the mother, but also her family. In the earlier part of the last century almost all illegitimate children would be offered for adoption, but in this case the baby’s maternal grandparents decided they would raise their granddaughter.
On 13 April 1922 Barbara Donaldson, as yet unmarried, again became a mother and although both of these children had the selfsame father he and Barbara Donaldson would never marry. The second child, also a baby girl, was adopted by her paternal grandparents.
In 1924 John and Mary Donaldson and family left Prestonholm and moved to South Queensferry on the South side of the River Forth.
Home in the Ferry for John and Mary Donaldson and their five year old illegitimate grandchild was a gable end property situated on East Terrace, owned by the late Sir and Lady Stewart Clark of Dundas Castle.
The Ramsay family were the owners of Dalhousie Castle and the land on which Prestonholm stood. They ordered the village to be demolished: the land was sold to the National Coal Board, who in the1930’s used it as a coal waste site and as such nothing now remains. Early in the twentieth century the Ramsay family moved to Brechin Castle, Angus, the seat of the Earl of Dalhousie.
Barbara Donaldson settled at Castle Row in Gorebridge, a mining village in Mid-Lothian and on 8 December 1925 at Cockpen Manse she married Thomas Yorke, a farm grieve twenty-nine years her senior.
It is difficult to say how long this marriage lasted, but twelve years later she married Alexander Richardson a forty-two year old Colliery Winding Engineer employed at the Lady Victoria coal mine in Newtongrange; again Cockpen was the chosen venue.
On this occasion, her first illegitimate child, May Donaldson, now eighteen, was a witness to her mother’s second marriage. Sadly, Alex Richardson died from lung cancer in 1949, aged fifty-three, eleven years after his wedding.
At the start of World War Two, May Donaldson joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). She was stationed in Port Edgar Naval Base in Queensferry. My father served in the Royal Marines and it was during this time they met. I have Adolph Hitler to thank for the union between my mother and father, but the strange thing is my father and Hitler shared a common birth date.
My family lived in a corrugated asbestos clad prefab in Walker Drive, specially constructed for the return of ex-servicemen from World War Two. The only heating was from a coal fire in the living room or a paraffin heater in the kitchen; central heating was barely heard off.
On an exceptionally cold winter’s morning the ice could be scrapped from the inside of our bedroom window and there was always a fight between my younger brother and sister and I as to who would get the best spot in front of the fire.
‘Get your bloody hands washed before he comes in.’ my mother shouted as dinner was prepared. She was referring to my father who had a really bad temper. My younger brother and sister were at the table when I joined them.
‘What’s for dinner mum?’ I asked. ‘Soup and pudding,’ she replied. ‘Wow,’ I exclaimed, ‘two courses again?’ ‘Don’t be so bloody cheeky,’ came the terse reply. This was our usual once a week haute cuisine. I don’t think this was caused by lack of money; it was just she didn’t enjoy cooking and it saved her time and money. The soup usually lasted two days, the strawberry jelly and tin of Carnation Milk only one.
My father was employed by Mackenzie & Moncur, an engineering company in Edinburgh, as a plumber, or as he would rather have it known, a heating engineer. The majority of his working day was spent in or around the capital with the occasional trip further afield.
There was no love lost between my mother and father; there were no loving greetings, no kisses or hugs, just nothing. It was as if he had just come in from the garden. There must have been something between them sometime in the past, but it had long since disappeared.
Never happy with the way he treated my mother, I think that’s why him and I never got on well, especially so the older I became. When I was very young I remember him being a torn-faced old bugger and as the years passed he only got worse. Whether his experiences during the War or his own home life had any bearing on the way he treated us, we would never know.
Apart from weekends, seldom did our father join us at dinner; he was busy working, or passing the time with his workmates in one of the many Edinburgh public houses. It wasn’t the first time he had returned home under the weather.
We had finished our haute cuisine when he came in. Thankfully he was sober and in what could be described as a good mood.
As the years passed he developed an interest in photography and bought himself a camera. This, together with a dark room for developing black and white photographs, was the one thing in his life which brought him some happiness.
He was the youngest from a family of five, and although he did have two brothers and two sisters, they as my grandfather visited Queensferry only once. My father returned to the place of his birth following the death of his mother, but I struggle to remember any further occasion when he returned to Liverpool. From remarks made by one his brothers there were some serious doubts regarding my father’s parentage. This is possibly why he had a chip on his shoulder about life and almost everyone in it, in some ways very much like my mother. It’s such a pity they didn’t understand each other more.
Although he didn’t treat my mum well, everyone thought George Freeman was a great guy, but they never knew the real man and just what a bastard he was to me and my mother.
I met my paternal grandfather when he paid a visit to the Ferry. A tall imposing figure with silver hair is the only memory I have. My father was never in contact with him except on that one occasion. My dad often told me that his father had been a drinker and a gambler and because of this he had lost the family’s grocer shop during a game of cards.
There were no photographs of my supposed grandfather and we have no idea when or where he died.
I was eleven years old when my father decided it was time I learned how too look after myself. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll teach you how to box.’ Following a hard punch on the nose, the lesson in self defence ended with a generous amount of my blood on the floor; that was my first and my last lesson, especially when my good old dad could only laugh. It’s strange how we remember the bad times in life rather than the happy ones.
One day I do remember well was when mum and dad decided we should go to Dunfermline Glen. We left the Ferry in a reasonably happy mood. This was our first visit to Dunfermline; we were excited about boarding a steam train at Dalmeny station and travelling over the Forth Rail Bridge.
We had barely arrived and as usual they started arguing about nothing in particular. It ended with them going their separate ways; we would tag along with my disconsolate mother and head for home.
There were very few happy times I shared with my father, but there are two I remember vividly.
At twelve years old I accompanied him to Ravenscraig Steel works in Motherwell. We travelled from Kirkliston on the back of a lorry with a canvas shelter for protection. I have graphic memories of that day and can still see, in my minds eye, the metal boiling in the furnace and the blocks of white hot steel rolled and cut in the mill.
While we were growing older the Forth Road Bridge was being built. That itself had quite an impact on the Ferry. Houses were knocked down, fields turned into motorways and heavy traffic all became part of life for many years and in one case almost caused serious injury to one of our group.
As the new bridge grew, the Box Beams used in its construction were easing their way across the main road just above Tom Walker’s shop at the Cross Roads. One winter’s evening on returning from Murrayfield Ice Rink, someone suggested that we have a walk out on the Box Beams; it was a game of chicken.
Four of us climbed the steep bank to the road level of the bridge and began the dangerous walk out to the crane three hundred yards away. One hundred and fifty yards later three of us decided to turn back, but Brian carried on out to the crane, then slowly made his way back to join us. To return to the level of the road below, meant running down a forty-five degree angled bank of shale and earth. Jimmy decided to go first and began his headlong run down the steep bank. The lighting was not too good and what Jimmy and the rest of us failed to notice was the gaping hole at the bottom of the bank.
He yelled and cried for help. It was then we knew that although he may be injured he was hopefully not seriously hurt. We carefully made our way down the steep bank towards where Jimmy had disappeared.
We could barely see him. He was completely covered in a thick black oily mud.
During the fifties and sixties it was quite normal to wear a suit with collar and tie when going out and it was no different on this night. ‘Reach up, give us your hands,’ we shouted.
Other than being covered in mud he appeared okay, but the once immaculate suit looked strange as he walked home. The seam of the right trouser leg had opened up from his waist to his ankle and all he could repeat was ‘ I will get a hammering from my mother.’ We could not stop laughing all the way home. Jimmy managed to get his suit cleaned and repaired by his eldest sister and so avoided a good old fashioned Scots hammering.
A couple of years later and the opportunity arose to visit the site of the bridge. We had been invited to take a tour of the partly completed bridge and on a weather-perfect Sunday morning my father and I made our way towards the gleaming silver Tower on the South side of the river.
Following a detailed explanation of the cable anchorages, we walked a few hundred yards to the elevator at the base of the Tower. We stepped out five hundred and twelve feet above the Firth of Forth to what must have been one of the most amazing views in central Scotland. From Stirling to the mountains of Mull in the West, to Edinburgh and beyond in the East, the views were truly fantastic.
Our life of crime came to an end. It was time to settle down and look for employment. I suppose we all enjoyed our time as children, wild or otherwise, and we did what we wanted to do with little or no interference from adults.
About the Author
Derek Freeman was born in South Queensferry (the Ferry) in the shadow of the Forth Rail Bridge. He now lives in Bo’ness. He has been inspired to write about growing up in the Ferry in the 1950’s and 1960’s. My Family and the Ferry is the latest instalment in his series of memoirs.