From the turn of the century Mr. Ste’en Young, Mirren’s uncle of the Boghead Inn family, a relative of the Davielea Youngs next-door, started up in business carting coal and running a carrier service. Using the Boghead’s old farm buildings as stables and cart sheds, he drove his horse-drawn lorry down the old mill road across Kittoch Bridge (reconstructed 1884) to Busby railway yard and towards Glasgow.
Soon he took on regular weekly runs down to the city. Taking the washerwomen to deliver newly laundered linen to their customers, his lorry was piled high with their huge baskets. On collecting days he made the journey again, returning to Carmunnock with just as many bundles of washing to be done. Uncle Ste’en Young’s carrier became a tremendous asset to Carmunnock’s local industry.
Several times he took young Sandy with him on these journeys just for the ride, when the lad was 9 or 10. Sitting up on the driver’s seat and setting off at a trot down the hill, they crossed open country past a few farms on the way to Cathcart and continued into the city streets. It was a long, long way from their home village. There were deliveries that even took them as far across Glasgow as Great Western Road and it was a very tired wee boy, his mother used to say, who returned home with Uncle Ste’en late in the evening.
The laundry industry flourished. Folk say there were seven main washing-houses in the village at that time and probably there had been more in the previous century. For instance, McNivens’ was at the lands on Kirk Road south of the church, Grannie Craig’s at Pathhead where laundry was done for city restaurants, another was in the cottage on the brae (No. 9) in the Loan, and one or two lining the Burn belonged to the early Schoolhouse and its neighbours; there was a mean, rickety erection at the back of the Misses Coulters’ old thatched house out of whose steam-laden air came the most beautiful clean white linen, Grannie McNiven’s in the fine back garden at Stewarts’ Lands, the substantial specially-built washing-house in Parkview’s back garden on Windlaw Road, those in the villas alongside it and a few others from time to time. (Parkview’s is still there and at the foot of 13 Manse Road’s garden, so is the neat one, survivor of two, once with its slated roof and chimney and now enlarged into a garden shed roofed with corrugated iron.)
Copper boilers gradually replaced the rough iron ones; but still the work was slavery. They say you could always tell which of the villagers were washerwomen: long apron over dark working skirt down to black yardboots, blouse sleeves rolled high above elbows, skin on hands and forearms bleached and pinched-looking, face drawn and tired and hair hanging in wisps. But it was Carmunnock’s livelihood; the work must be done and women were the ones to do it. The story is told of Jimmie Wilson picked up by the Police one night on a charge of drunkenness. Asked next morning in Rutherglen Police Court where he came from, his reply aptly described the unusual state of affairs: “From Carmunnock,” he said, “the place where the women work for the men”.
The Wells and water pumps throughout the village were carefully maintained so that no damage befell them. Nothing must hinder the supply of water for the village’s work. Mischievous boys lingering near them were chased from the spot and strictly disciplined.
People in Carmunnock today still remember washerwomen at the Well on the Low Green, kneeling, bending over, rinsing the clothes in its cold water, gossiping while they worked. It seemed sometimes, our elderly friends tell us, that all the village’s gossip was heard at the Well. The scene there or along the open stretch of the Tammy Linn can be recalled: white linen rinsed, wrung out and laid on clean flag-stones, work-worn hands piling it in baskets and carrying it away.
Everywhere in the village on good days it blew in the fresh air, propped up by highsers or laid on the grass to bleach in gardens and on the Greens. It was a beautiful sight. Older folk today clearly remember the picture with considerable pleasure. No man, woman or child dared walk near it. It was as much as your life was worth! There were the strictest of rules. Worse still, if a dog was as much as seen in the vicinity on washing days, all bedlam broke out and its owner’s ears would burn with the women’s angry words.
Families whose living depended on the safe return of the fresh clean linen to its owners, watched day and night as it dried on the Greens. Loyal villagers took turns of helping and frequently two would sit through dark till daylight guarding it. It is said that back in the 19th century they sometimes sat on the little crosses put there years earlier to commemorate special church services. Washerfolk families could earn up to 8/-d a week (8 shillings).
Even more women worked laboriously at time-consuming ironing and pressing and perhaps still doing a little goffering (or gophering) work, kinking starched frills on women’s dress or blouse collars and cuffs or on bonnets. Grannie Craig, so her daughter-in-law Mrs Kate Craig used to say, often had no less than eight flat irons at work in her kitchen. And at Coulters’ Cottage, it is said that the kitchen walls were quite dark with the heat, the bars in front of the fire worn thin where flat irons and goffering rods had been set against or between them.
In Sandy’s very young years the family lived in the 18th century cottage toll-house north of Boghead Inn (where the War Memorial is now). He remembered his mother and her sister (of the McNivens) ironing countless starched white collars every week, even long into the evenings. No sooner was tea over, he said, than the room was cleared and the work began. And when the family moved across the road into one of the houses in Stewarts’ Lands, his mother worked hard finishing and folding the clean linen ready for return by Uncle Ste’en Young’s horse-drawn lorry to its owners in the city down the hill.
Yet it is interesting that last century’s Census Returns for Carmunnock show surprisingly, disappointingly, few laundresses and ironers. Perhaps some families preferred not to mention their laborious, domestic way of earning a living. Perhaps some husbands didn’t wish it to be known that their wives worked at the washing.
Or was the reason for not declaring it a more political one? Perhaps it was thought unwise to publicise the village’s industry for fear of trouble. It is said that Carmunnock was regarded by some working folk as a plunderer, stealing the city washerfolk’s livelihood. I’m told that there were even fights on the subject before the 1914 War when on one occasion a group of angry people came over the hill from Rutherglen and on another all the way up from Glasgow. They threw stones at the washerfolk’s houses here, shouted at the Carmunnock people and someone in the village got hurt.