Sheena Peters second volume of “Bearsden in Old Picture Postcards” contains some amazing photos, including this one taken from the tower of Buchanan Retreat (now Boclair House Hotel) on Milngavie Road, looking to Schaw Convalescent Home.
The road junction in the bottom left corner is where Roman Road meets Milngavie Road (which is just out of shot at the bottom on the photo. I think the chimney and roof just visible in the bottom right is number 1 Boclair Road, then known as Atherstone.
Looking along Roman Road, there is a single building on the right hand side, which was built as semi-detached homes, numbered 67 and 65 today. On the left of the road is a building set a little back – this is Ferguston (see below). Just past it you can see the railway bridge as it is today and you might be able to make out the railway line. Across the bridge you can see two cottages to the right of the road – these are todays’ 51 and 49; there is no Roman Drive (the extension of Roman Road that comes out further up Milngavie Road).
Other big houses can be seen on Roman Road, amid the trees. To the right you can see the big houses on Grange Road and Manse Road. Bearsden Cross is mainly hidden by the trees to the left of the photo. Looking just above that, you can see a white building on a hill – this is Thorn Farm.
This map was published in 1898 but surveyed in 1896:
I’ve marked a short red line in the bottom right to show the direction the camera is looking in.
I am not so sure about Sheena Peters’ firm date of 1895. According to the excellent This is My Glasgow Facebook page, Buchanan Retreat was built in stages between 1861 and 1899 (link but please check out the other posts on there). Numbers 67 and 65 Roman Road are not in the 1895 Valuation Roll or on the 1896 survey for the map, but they are present at the time of the 1901 Census.
There are six houses on Roman Road between the railway bridge and Milngavie Road, those on each end being split into semi-detached properties to make eight dwellings. They were originally called Ferguston Villas and numbered 1 to 8 starting at the railway bridge end, so as we can see from the photo numbers 7 and 8 were built first, presumably because the site closest to Milngavie Road was expected to sell more easily.
The name Ferguston comes from the building on the opposite side of the road, which was a farm house (“Rambles Round Glasgow” by Hugh Macdonald, in Milngavie and Bearsden Herald 28th July 1905):
You might remember the poetic description of the path from Canniesburn the next time you are sitting in traffic on Milngavie Road! The site of Ferguston is now the site of Douglas Gardens.
The photo at the start of this post captures a moment in time (no earlier than 1896 and no later than 1900) when building was about to start on the first detached house, 6 Ferguston Villas, Bearsden. The rest of the post is about the people who lived in this house from 1901 to 1940; I have the current owners’ permission to post this, based on material I collected to answer a question they sent to me.
There were at least six owners during this time:
- William Barbour Shaw (1901 Census)
- Alexander Waugh (1905 VR and 1911 Census)
- James Alexander (1915 and 1920 VRs)
- William Scott Lawson (1925 VR)
- Margaret Russell Gibson (1930 and 1935 VRs)
- David Kirkwood (1940 VR but known to have died in 1955 still with Karleen as his address)
I say ‘at least’ because, of course, we just have snapshots of ownership so if Lawson sold to someone else in 1926 and they sold to Gibson in 1928 the records on the Scotland’s People website that I am using would not cover this (the VR is online for every 5 years 1915-1940).
Owner 1: William Barbour Shaw
Born 13th September 1868 at Wester Common, which is now an area just north of Speirs Wharf (there’s a big Jewson’s there!) but at the time it would have been on the edge of Glasgow and probably would have been a reasonably big house. William’s father was the manager of a sugar refinery – quite possibly the northern end of the buildings at Speirs Wharf. If correct, the neighbouring business at Speirs Wharf was the flour milling business managed by Willaim Dishington’s father (link).
William was the third of three children (although his elder brother died aged 16) and was educated at Gordon’s College in Aberdeen – maybe this is where he met his future wife? He went into training as a civil engineer and worked on various water and sewage schemes around Scotland but had an interest in railway works, including having been the resident engineer on the northern section of the West Highland Line.
Adeline, William’s wife, was from Fordyce which is between Lossiemouth and Peterhead. In the 1901 Census William’s salary was enough to afford two live-in servants, one a nurse to help with the children and one general servant. The servants were both from Banffshire as well, so presumably known to Adeline or her parents.
William and Adeline moved to Bearsden from Langside, the birth place of their two older children. Baby Violet was born in Bearsden nine months earlier and checking the records, she was born at the new house (Cruach) at thirteen minutes to midnight on 22nd June 1900:
Note the address is given as Roman Road. You can see William’s signature in the top right corner.
When the family left 63 Roman Road, they named their new house Cruach as well; in modern terms this is 11 Ledcameroch Road and the gate post still bears the name:
After his time at 63 Roman Road, William set up his own engineering practice in Glasgow and later went into partnership.
In the First World War he joined the London staff of the Ministry of Munitions as Deputy Director of Factory Construction, so building factories to make artillery shells – the director was another Glasgow engineer, John Hunter, managing director of William Arroll & Co. I assume William Shaw was Mr Hunter’s choice based on personal knowledge.
William succeeded John Hunter as director of the department. This was an absolutely key department for Britain’s war effort as infantry attacks became increasingly dependent on having huge amounts of artillery with copious supplies of shells (link).
Here’s an example of a factory built on Hackney Marsh in London, from scratch (photo credit Historic England Archive):
A former cotton mill in Bridgeton was another example – see this link for some amazing maps and photos; the building is still there today.
Given his responsibilities, William would have frequently met with the government minister responsible for the department – you may have heard of David Lloyd George (who went from this post to become Prime Minister in 1916) and a certain Winston Churchill (1917-1919). I do fear he did not have much time in Bearsden with his family.
In January 1919 he was awarded the CBE for this work. After the war he went back into private practice (Babtie, Shaw and Morgan, link)
William died suddenly at this address in 1930. His obituary in the Milngavie & Bearsden Herald of 11th April:
His wife, Adeline, died in 1936. William, their eldest son, may have been in Europe when the Second World War started and was interned. He died in 1941 in a prison-fortress called Weissenberg in Bavaria.
Their older daughter, Adelina Anna Barton, known as Ada, travelled in Burma and India where she was married. Her family settled in Surrey, then Sussex where she died in 1980.
Violet Elizabeth Shaw was born at 63 Roman Road, of course. She married Kennedy White on 24th September 1926 at New Kilpatrick Parish Church. They moved to Wallasey on Merseyside and had two boys, Kelvin and Matthew Kennedy White. Violet died in 1979.
Owner 2: Alexander Waugh
Alexander was born about 1859 in Labert. He married Mary Jollie Parker in 1882, and they had three sons, Robert, Joseph and Alexander.
Mary died on 13th April 1906; the cause was uterine fibroids and septic absorption (the fibroids became infected, causing systemic sepsis). She died at 172 Renfrew Street, which may have been St Elizabeth’s Nursing Home.
Alexander married 18 months later, to Elizabeth Begg.
In 1911 Alexander described himself as a manufacturing chemist and the industry he worked in as “spice merchant”; he was an employer.
The Glasgow Post Office Directory 1911 shows his business was based at 1 Castlebank Street in Partick. It’s quite difficult to guess exactly where this would have been:
Of the children Robert probably only lived at number 63 for a year, before leaving for Canada where he married in Montreal and settled, dying in 1950. Joseph also left for Canada before 1914, returning to Europe to fight as part of the Canadian Army. In 1916 he married while in Kent. He returned to Canada with his wife after the war ended and died there in 1969. Alexander also went to Canada after the First World War but settled in Australia and died in 1968.
Owner 3: James Alexander
James was born on 10th July 1886, elder brother to Walter. His father was a writer, which I believe to be the equivalent of a solicitor. The family moved to Bearsden and lived at Dunmyat, Ralston Road (which is number 9). On leaving school James became a chartered accountant and married Mary Forsyth on 29th June 1915. They must have moved to 63 Roman Road, which they renamed St Omer, after the wedding.
In 1924 James’s father died and James, Mary and their young family (William and Douglas) moved from St Omer into Dunmyat.
Their younger son, Douglas, was killed in the Second World War and is named on the war memorial at Bearsden Cross. He was an officer in a tank regiment, who won the Military Cross during the North African campaign, but was shot on D-Day, 6th June 1944 just inland from the invasion beach. You can read his story at this link.
Owner 4: William Scott Lawson
William was born 31st October 1893 in Stirling. He was in the armed forces in the First World War, initially as an infantry officer but joining the RAF and flying in 53 Squadron in the last few months of the war.
After the war he became the managing director of a car company. He married Lina Pianta, herself a Scot but daughter of a Swiss father, on 15th April 1925 at Hyndland Parish Church; I imagine they bought number 63 as their first marital home.
He died in Stirling in 1962, Lina in 1988.
Ferguston Villas, aka 53 to 67 Roman Road, in 1928 (photo credit Britain from Above)
Owner 5: Margaret Russell Gibson
Margaret Eliza Murray Russell was born on 5th May 1869 in the Blythswood area. Her father was a property and insurance agent.
She married Arthur Wallace Gibson (manager of a hosiery manufacturer). In the 1911 Census she uses the name Marguerite Russell-Gibson. With Arthur, she lived at 30 Vernon Gardens, Edgbaston, an affluent suburb of Birmingham.
Arthur died soon after, probably in 1918, and Margaret returned to Scotland. When she moved to 63 Roman Road she called it Edgbaston, in memory (I assume) of happy times with her husband.
After leaving 63 Roman Road she moved close by, to 6 Boclair Gardens where she died on 2nd July 1945.
Owner 6: the Right Honourable David Kirkwood MP
Simply typing “David Kirkwood MP” into a search engine gives ample opportunity to find out more about this famous “Red Clydesider”, although surprisingly there does not seem to be a biography of him. David’s autobiography, A Life in Revolt, is free to read online at this link (written before he moved to Bearsden).
Born in 1872 in the east end of Glasgow, David was involved in trade union affairs from an early age and by 1914 was a senior figure in the Scottish trade union movement as the leader of engineering workers. Government anxiety about the supply of munitions was such that new laws were passed, for example, it was made illegal for workers in munitions factories to leave without their employer’s permission. The minister, Lloyd George, came to Glasgow to try to persuade union leaders to accept these as necessary temporary wartime restrictions, but the leaders refused to back down. As Kirkwood later admitted, in some semi-totalitarian countries he would have been more or less quietly ‘bumped off’, but in Scotland he was arrested, taken to Edinburgh and told not to come back.
He did return, to work as a foreman in one of William Barbour Shaw’s munitions factories in Bridgeton (at Mile End). But 1919 brought more confrontation over the length of the working week. After a rally in George Square turned into a riot, which infamously led to tanks being sent into the streets of Glasgow, David and others were charged with incitement but acquitted.
He was elected as MP for Dumbartonshire in 1922, on the left of the Labour Party but never extreme enough to split with it entirely, he was seen as working hard for his constituents and being an effective questioner of ministers.
In The Great Depression of the early 1930s he is credited with persuading Cunard to restart the building of the liner the Queen Mary at John Brown’s in Clydebank, getting thousands of men back into work (helped by a government loan to Cunard of nearly £10m, a huge sum at the time). He wrote his autobiography in 1935 and it includes a Foreword by Winston Churchill.
Around 1940 he moved to 63 Roman Road. He was an MP through the Second World War and became a privy councillor (and hence The Right Honourable) in 1948. In 1949 David and his wife, Elizabeth, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary (Milngavie and Bearsden Herald 2nd July 1949):
He ended his career as an MP in 1951 and was created Baron Kirkwood of Bearsden. These photos carry a company ‘waterprint’ which is annoying but as it costs £135 per photo to remove it, I prefer to suffer it:
David and Elizabeth being presented with a television by the Secretary of State for Scotland on his retirement as an MP, 1951. The other photos look to have been taken at the same time:
To finish, here is Number 63 in 1955, around the time of David Kirkwood’s death (photo credit Britain from Above):
There is a certain irony that the first owner, William Shaw, worked for Lloyd George and Winston Churchills as Ministers for Munitions, building factories, and the sixth owner, David Kirkwood, stood up to their policies but ended up with Churchill writing the foreword to his autobiography and living in Shaw’s house!
Appendix: Census and Valuation Roll evidence
These houses are not in the 1895 Valuation Roll; the first mention in an online resource is in the 1901 Census where the future number 63 appears under the name Cruach:
I’ve reproduced the whole page so we can compare number 3 (Marathon, in modern terms 57 Roman Road)), number 4 (number 59 today), number 5 (Sunnybank, number 61) and number 6 (Cruach, number 63). Their neighbours included an auctioneer, a retired commercial traveller and an assistant inspector of the poor.
By the time of the 1905 Valuation Roll (the register of people eligible to pay local tax), the Shaws had moved on:
The house was now called Maypark and the owner was “Alexander Waugh, merchant”. You can also see the Ferguston Villas numbers sometimes in use (for numbers 5 and 6) but not for other dwellings; as we go forward you will see these numbers appear and disappear with no clear rationale.
The next record is the 1915 VR and the Waughs have moved on. The house had a new name (St Omer) and a new owner, James Alexander:
And he was still there in 1920:
In the 1925 VR, the house was still called St Omer, but the Alexanders have moved on and the new owner was William Scott Lawson:
1930 is the next VR online:
Now the house was named Edgbaston and the owner is Mrs Margaret Russell Gibson. She is still there in 1935:
And the final online record I have is from 1940 when the house is called Karleen and there is a new owner:
