The search starts with just a name, “Malcolm Ross”. The war memorial also lists then men who died the First World War and the Second World War separately so we know he died in the former.
The librarians in East Dunbartonshire have listed all the men wounded or killed in this war in the pages of the Milngavie and Bearsden Herald, but Malcolm was not one of them. The next search is in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission list of those who were killed. I feared this would list a large number of men with this name but there were only two.
Clicking on the ‘More Details’ option showed me one man came from Edinburgh and one in Glasgow. Obviously, I investigated the Glasgow links first:
Blythswood Drive was renamed Woodlands Drive and runs from Maryhill Road to Garscube Road just south of Queens Cross.
I now had three names to search on, Malcolm, Isabella and Hugh. Using the Scotland’s People website, I looked for people called Ross living in the New Kilpatrick parish of Dunbartonshire (i.e. Bearsden and immediately surrounding areas) in the 1911 Census:
There was only one person called Malcolm Ross and he was 27 in 1911, which fits with his age of death of 34 in 1918 from the CWGC record. I retrieved the Census page:
And we have Malcolm living with his widowed mother, Isabella, at a villa called Silverstream on Glenburn Road in Bearsden. Malcolm’s occupation is “Woollen warehouseman” (he is a worker as opposed to an employer). Isabella lists her occupation as “Private means” which indicates she was not in paid employment but was living off of savings, money from bank account interest (they used to have this in the olden days …), etc. Finally we can see that Malcolm was born in Glasgow and Isabella was born in Stepps.
I’ll investigate each piece of information starting from the left of the page, starting with: where is Silverstream on Glenburn Road? I have not studied this carefully but up until the 1920s, houses in Bearsden had a name but no street number. When a house was sold, the new owners could change the name or retain the old one. The first online record that has villa names AND street numbers is the 1940 Valuation Roll (the basis for the old system of collecting local government taxes). In this case we are in luck, because the 1911 house name was reatined in 1940:
So Silverstream is Number 2 Glenburn Road, which is on the right as you start from Drymen Road, immediately behind the church. This is from Google Street View:
The next thing to investigate is Malcolm’s birth. If he was 27 in 1911, that suggests he was born in either 1883 or 1884. I feared this would identify a large number of babies with this name, but again I was lucky as there were only two:
As Flotta is in the Orkneys, this suggested the Milton baby was the right Malcolm and here is his record:
I don’t know how easy this is for you to read but he was born on a Friday, at 7am on the 26th October 1883 at 32 Gladstone Street, Glasgow. The record confirms his parents were Hugh and Isabella (maiden name Cross), who married on 12th December 1877 and his father’s occupation was “Umbrella Maker (Master)”. His proud father’s signature appears on the record.
Gladstone Street in Glasgow still exists today, very close to St George’s Cross. I used the National Library of Scotland online maps and the closest date match to 1883 was this map from 1894, published in 1896:
Gladstone Street is ringed in red. You can see the great junction, St George’s Cross just below it and to the left; this is where St George’s Road, New City Road, Great Western Road and Maryhill Road all met and so would have been a thriving and busy area, much more impressive then than it is today. No online map has street numbers until 1950 at which time number 32 was halfway along on the north side.
Next, we saw Malcolm’s job was as a woollen warehouseman. It is surprisingly challenging to find information online about what many jobs involved, My understanding of a Victorian/Edwardian warehouse is that it was a store of goods of a particular type for wholesale supply to shops, but it had some of the features of a shop in its own right because members of the public could come in and see samples to buy from the stock. To facilitate this, they could be located at city centre sites. Possibly the nearest modern equivalent is Costco, but in this case for woollen goods. Whether Malcolm was in sales, stock control or was a porter, we cannot tell from his job title which only seems to distinguish him from warehouse boy.
I wanted to know more about Malcolm’s early life and the best (only?) sources are the 10-year Census records for 1891 and 1901. Finding these on Scotland’s People was straightforward; here is the 1891 record:
The handwriting is more challenging, but the family was at 32 Gladstone Street, which we can now see from the right-hand column had three rooms. The other new piece of information is that Malcolm had two older sisters, Isabella and Jeanie.
I wanted to see Gladstone Street as it was then but the best I can do is from the Britain from Above website so, as the sanem suggest it is a section of a bigger aerial photo and comes from 1937:
The view is from above the city centre, looking west. 32 Gladstone Street is ringed in red, the building at the junction of Maryhill Road and Great Western Road (“the Massey’s Building”) is ringed in orange. The building just above the red ring and slightly to the right is the Metropole Theatre on St George’s Road.
Moving on to the 1901 Census, the family is now at Silverstream on Glenburn Road:
What luxury for the hard-working Ross’s, because they have moved from a three-room flat to a nine-room detached house! The eldest daughter, Isa, appears to help her mother run the house. It’s notable they do not have a servant, unlike the Baillie’s across the road who employ 24-year old Jessie Goodfellow as a general domestic servant. The second daughter, Jeanie, works with father making umbrellas. Malcolm (aged 17) is a clothier. I believe this implies he worked for someone who ran a wholesale cloth business, possibly with a shop – it’s a good fit with his 1911 Census occupation
Sadly, that’s all I can find about Malcolm. I tried the local newspaper but he did not do anything that caught their attention. The only other point of interest was to check the 1895 Valuation Roll to see when the family moved to Bearsden, but there are no properties listed for Glenburn Road. This suggests Silverstream was built between 1895 and 1901 and makes it likely (although not certain) the Ross family were the first occupants.
Later in 1901 Isa was married, to Robert Penman, who lived Bengain, Bearsden (5 Glenburn Road). He gave his occupation as clothier on the marriage record. In the 1911 Census they lived at Whittinghame, (which is now 30 Thorn Road) where they had an 8-year old son, William Norval Penman. Robert was now an employer.
On 10th January 1910, Malcolm’s father, Hugh, died at Silverstream of chronic respiratory disease.
Age 60 and the son of a tailor, his work as an umbrella maker transformed the type of house and location his family could live in. I had seen a reference to a shop at 141 New City Road and wondered how the profits from that could have funded such a change. I had underestimated Hugh, as I found when I typed his name and the New City Road address into the British Newspaper Archives website. The first result this returned was an advert from the Govan Press newspaper of 15th December 1888:
So my vision of Hugh, assisted in later years by his daughter Jeanie, working alone in a small shop was totally confounded. First, there is the eye to marketing – Hugh is The Umbrella King. Second, his main premises are at 60 Argyle Street in Glasgow (14,500 square feet of floor space). Third, he employs 350 people! Fourth, the detailed description of the process by which an old umbrella is recovered in 35 minutes.
I was able to confirm the address from the 1885 Valuation Roll (hard to read but see yellow highlighting):
This is also mysterious because 60 Argyle Street is a shop – there is no indication 350 were employed there. Looking at the 1893 map (from National Library of Scotland website), it’s difficult to orientate yourself because the scale is so big but argyle Street at the bottom on the left and the roads running north are (from left to right) Queen Street, Miller Street and Virginia Street). Number 60 was on the north side of Argyle Street, between Queen Street and Miller Street:
Hugh’s advert of 14,500 square feet of commercial space is approximately 40 yards by 40 yards (or 35 metres squared) so there’s no way it is in this space.
Checking the 1895 Valuation Roll shows an interesting development:
The shop at number 60 is now let to ALEXANDER Ross, umbrella manufacturer. We know Hugh did not have a son called Alexander, so a brother seemed likely. To check this I went to the genealogy website, Ancestry, and typed in Hugh’s details. (As a side-note, persistence pays off – I initially typed in “Hugh Kelly, born 1849-1850, died 1910” and it said no records matched my search. I tried again after deleting the date of death and got matches to 14 existing family tress created by other people and featuring Hugh.) The trees showed Hugh was born in 1849 and he had a brother, Alexander, born in 1850. (It also showed me Hugh named his only son Malcolm after his own father.) Checking what Alexander did in the 1881 Census gave me this record:
You will notice the final row, Alexander was an umbrella manufacturer employing 23 people. He lived at 84 Cathedral Street, which was on the corner of Weaver Street, but on checking the Valuation Roll this was a tenement so still did not tell me where the factory was. I tried again, typing Alexander Ross in Glasgow into the 1885 Valuation Roll and got 35 ‘hits’. Of these 32 were domestic addresses, one was a hotel and one was a cooperage; the 35th was a warehouse. I clicked on this and sure enugh it was Alexander Ross, umbrella manufacturer, occupying a warehouse:
As I mentioned before, older Ordnance Survey maps do not have street numbers and we have to go to a 1951 map to work out where 85 Maxwell Street is located:
It seems to be on the upper floors of the building between Howard and Fox Streets, just off of Clyde Street (that’s the river in the bottom left corner). If you walked north along Maxwell Street, through a subway under the platforms of St Enoch’s Station), you would come out on Argyle Street a few yards east of Hugh’s shop at Number 60 (it ran up the west side of the old Lewis’s/Debenhams department store).
Sadly number 85 has been demolished, but it can still be glimpsed in this 1964 photo:
The bus is turning right on to Clyde Street, St Enoch’s is in the background (in its final two years of life) and number 85 would have been on the upper floors of the building on the right.
The relationship between the brothers is a little murky. Hugh was renting two shops but described himself as an umbrella manufacturer. He advertised under his own name, rather than “Ross Brothers” so it seems to have worked separately. But Alexander took over Hugh’s shop, possibly bought him out, possibly paying for the purchase of Silverstream.
Before returning to Malcolm Ross, there are two other newspaper cuttings to share about his uncle, Alexander. The first is from 1888 (Edinburgh Evening Despatch of 16th January):
Alexander was prosecuted under the Factory and Workshop Act 1878. According to another news report on the case, the offence was NOT making the women work 15 hours in a day but not giving them adequate noticed that he required them to do so. Welcome to Capitalist Glasgow.
The other relates to events on 27th February 1909:
Seven months after her father’s death, Jeanie was married on 17th August 1910. This took place at Silverstream; Isa had been married at the Windsor Hotel on St Vincent Street. (A revelation of researching this period is how few people were married in church at the time.)
Jeanie moved into William’s house, Earnbank, which is is the houses then known as Courthill on Drymen Road (not the modern build) – this house is now 194 Drymen Road (thanks to David Houston for help with the numbering). I don’t think they had any children.
It was now time to find out about Malcolm’s military service. The Ancestry website includes online records of First World War soldiers but with the significant issue that around two-thirds of records were destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. By good fortune, Malcolm’s records have survived but they are in a bad way – all pages have significant areas torn (burned?) off and the ink used to complete the form is often illegible (to me at least) possibly due to water damage from fighting the fire. This example is not too bad:
From this and other pages I can tell he joined-up aged 32 years and 2 months on the 8th December 1915, but he was not mobilised until 22nd August 1916 as part of the 9th Battalion, Highland Light Infantry. He was 5 feet, 5 inches tall, and his chest was 36 inches.
He crossed to France on 3rd January 1917 and on 7th June he was appointed acting lance corporal (unpaid). Sadly, a lot of detail is lost – this page is more complete but the ink has faded or been water-damaged:
On 27th September 1917 he was wounded in the right leg and possibly in the shoulder, He was treated at the 10th Casualty Clearing Station, then admitted to 1st Canadian General Hospital, Etaples, until 15th October. Then “Kingswood PR”, possibly a convalescent hospital in Dulwich, London to 28th December 1917.
On 30th March 1918 he went back to France, in desperate times. The Germans had launched a massive offensive and the British were being pushed back. Reserves were running out and every soldier was being sent to the front. We don’t know if Malcolm was fit enough to return but that didn’t matter. He would surely have been hoping to rejoin his old unit but he was transferred to the 12th Battalion, the Royal Scots, on 2nd April 1918.
There is an excellent website for those interested in the history of the First World War, called The Great War Forum. I was in luck and found a discussion had already taken place on what happened to the 12th Royal Scots in April – if you want to see more detail, the link is by clicking here. I am particularly indebted to Tom Lang for posting a transcript of the battalion’s war diary.
On the evening of the 9th April, C and D companies (abbreviated as Coys, there were four companies to a battalion) were sent to a camp near Vierstraat to collect reinforcements and refit. It seems reasonable to suppose Malcolm was one of them. It looks like the companies with the new men went into the frontline on the 18th and they were there continuously until the 25th. Here is where they were positioned:
The war diary tells what happened:
At the roll call, there were 88 survivors, 57 known to be wounded or killed and 501 missing, swallowed up in the great German advance. The frontline companies were surrounded and either killed or captured.
His mother would have received news that Malcolm was missing. There would have been a long wait, with days stretching into weeks, hoping there would be news via the Red Cross that he was a prisoner. The German advance was halted, reversed and the Allies advanced back across France until the war ended seven months later. still there was no news and we know Isabella enquired whether Malcolm was among wounded men repatriated from German hospitals. Most likely Malcolm died that morning, but any burial of his body was not recorded. He has no known grave and is listed on the Tyne Cot memorial where over 8000 men are buried without a name.
