In 1915 Orlando Young of Davielea died and for a time the business fell idle. Then after the War his younger brother Stephen - not to be confused with Uncle Ste’en Young of the Boghead Inn who ran the carrier service - took up hiring again, doing the runs to Busby and Cathcart with the pony and trap and his new waggonette.
For some in Carmunnock, their only annual holiday was an occasional summer outing in Orlando or Stephen Young’s trap or waggonette. A day up in Eaglesham, for instance, driven there in the morning and collected in late afternoon or evening, was looked forward to for months, a pleasant change from laundering or shopkeeping. Sometimes if Mr. Young didn’t have a busy day, he too would spend the day in Eaglesham, letting his pony graze on the Green there to its heart’s content until it was time to go home.
But Carmunnock itself had for some time been quite a holiday place. On the braes the air was a bracing change from the damper districts down near the River Clyde. Well away from city smoke and fog, in a village where the spring water was famed for its pureness, a number of Carmunnock’s cottages were rented to holiday visitors and several of the villas let some of their rooms.
Miss Georgina MacGregor of Viewfield on Windlaw Road told me that her grandmother had a cottage at Sunnybank late in the 19th century so that her family could come on holiday from Pollokshields. Carrying a lantern, they walked the long way up the hill on Eastertime evenings whenever the coldest of the winter was over, and stayed at the house on the Green. They came regularly after that. Years later, when Grandmother’s daughter got married, the young couple settled in Carmunnock and most of their children - Miss MacGregor and her brothers and sisters - were born here.
The village attracted people whose health benefited from its good air. TB sufferers and other patients were often sent up to Carmunnock by their doctors to recuperate or convalesce. Some families even moved here for health reasons.
It’s interesting too that the district round Carmunnock was well-known as a botanist’s paradise. Mrs Christine McPhail of Bankhead Road tells me that her father Mr. Burnett, a lecturer in Botany at Glasgow’s Agricultural College, regularly brought his students up to the village and walked them round the fields.
Not only are the views good from Carmunnock’s position on the hillside, but the village itself is attractive, and not surprisingly it was a favourite place for artists to live. Around 1910 William Petrie lived in The Studio on Windlaw Road - thus the name Petrie’s Path for the track running from the back of The Studio (where Scrimgeours’ new house at no. 17 is now) through to the Glasgow road - all that is left of what, till 50 years ago, was a continuation of Gallowhill Road. Petrie’s wife Elizabeth whom he had met at Glasgow’s School of Art was also a painter.
About 1920, John Ednie, the well-known architect and interior designer, had a studio (near Pedmyre) at Windyriggs. John Lawson, widely-known artist and landscape painter, was born in 1863 and a commemorative stone placed by his artist colleagues at his death in 1909, is on the far west side of Carmunnock churchyard.
There was the Dutch artist in het huisje, the little late 19th century house on Busby Road, although sadly, nothing is known of his work. And unfortunately, all too little is known about J. H. Leat of Leats’ art-goods shop above The Cathkin Rest on Kirk Road (there until the 1920s), painter and etcher some of whose fine works were done in Carmunnock. His gravestone, 1924, is in the churchyard. Interestingly, a Jimmie Leat who formed quite a well-known musical group in the 1950s called The Organolians is thought to have been his young relative.
Best known artist of all in Carmunnock is Norman Macleod Macdougall who, when he came home from London to work in Glasgow, lived for some years in one of the Sunnybank cottages on Greenside. He was the designer of the two stained-glass windows in the church, one on either side of the pulpit. These were dedicated in April 1922 as a public War Memorial and the names of the village’s fallen in the 1914-18 War are engraved in alphabetical order at the foot of each window. It’s said that to draw the hands of the figure presenting the sword, he used his grandson Jack Martin’s hands as models. (Mr. Jack Martin lived till lately in Gallowhill Road.)
As well as this very fine work which was done at the suggestion of the Kirk Session heritors, there are a number of delightful paintings by him of the village and landscapes in the district. Perhaps the most familiar hangs in the Castlemilk Hall - his painting of Carmunnock’s Main Street in the 1920s. Norman Macleod Macdougall died in 1937 aged 87 and his grave, marked by a modest headstone, is in the south-east corner of the churchyard.
117 men from this parish went to fight in the First World War - their names are on the framed Roll of Honour which hangs beneath the organ gallery in the church - and 13 died. Some time after the church’s memorial windows were installed and dedicated, Laird William Stirling Stuart had a War Memorial built on Waterside Road opposite the Castlemilk Hall, on the site of the 18th century toll-house taken down a few years before. And at a solemn service in the presence of the families and friends of the dead, the Memorial was dedicated.
This time the names were in chronological order, starting with the Laird’s son Lt. James Stirling Stuart, killed in 1914. The metal bowl of the Memorial (nowadays an earth-filled garden plot) was a horse-trough in memory of the Lieutenant’s love of horses and folk say that the Laird’s sad eyes filled with tears every time he saw it there, remembering his son’s boyhood. Water for the trough and the two drinking cups at that time on each side of the Memorial came from the old toll-house’s spring.
A verse from Robert Lawrence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen, inscribed above the names, reminds us of their brave sacrifice far from home:
“O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame
Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.”
1914 - James Stirling Stuart, Lieut, Scots Guards.
1915 - David Young, L Cpl, 3rd Cameron Highlanders; William Young, Tpr, 1st Lanarkshire Yeomanry.
1916 - John Little, Pte, 5th Scottish Rifles; Peter Miller, Pte, 5th Scottish Rifles; James Warnock, Sig, 17th Highland Light Infantry.
1917 - Robert Dick Fleming, Cpl, Royal Air Force; John Gray, Pte, 5th Cameron Highlanders; Archibald McIntyre, Pte, Army Service Corps; James Twaddle, Pte, 12th Black Watch.
1918 - Harry Fairley, Pte, 14th Hussars; Charles Macdougall, Pte, 1st Highland Light Infantry; David Scott, Pte, 12th Royal Scots Fusiliers.
Across from the War Memorial, the early divided cottage which stood next to Stewarts’ Lands until 1955 (on the area in front of the Jet Garage’s forecourt) was known long ago as Balwhinnie or B’whinnie or Buchanan Corner. This was one of several grand-sounding names given in the past to areas of quiet little Carmunnock. The idea was probably either the builders’ or the householders’, but it is also known that Laird James Stirling Stuart of Castlemilk, master of the district from 1828-87, said to have been very fond of his village, gave his blessing to the suggestion of naming the places.
Other names, for instance, were Campbell Place for the 18th century cottage (2 Busby Road) next to what became Taggs’ village shop and the Post Office, named this by the Campbells of Thorncliffe whose daughter was Archie Tagg’s second wife; and Helena Place appears to have been the 17th century cottage building called The Beeches at the crossroads on Busby Road (where the Tea Room and Post Office are now).
Drummond Place was the name of the 1855 tenement building at the corner of Kirk Road and the little street known as Rowan Bank, namely the tenement in which, with Leats’ art-goods shop above it, the pub The Cathkin Rest on the ground floor (where no. 1 in the Kirkgrove flats is now) did a regular trade until the end of 1918.