Next door to Jim Cooch Lennox in Bonnyton at 2 Windlaw Road lived his cousin’s widow Mrs Lennox at Parkview, no. 4, whose son Gavin had been apprenticed at Connells’ Smiddy when he was young. One of her daughters became Bel and her sister Mary Crawford’s mother and they were brought up at their mother’s old home - at Grannie Lennox’s Parkview.
But their father’s side of the family is even better known in present-day Carmunnock. The Crawfords were the village’s joiners for three generations, starting with Tom. About 1899 he rebuilt the 18th century cottages at the top of Greenside, using the remaining walls on their foundations. Mr. Tom Crawford of this early generation was joiner, painter, cart-wright and undertaker, but interestingly, he made violins too and some of these are still in the family’s possession.
From among Tom’s children, the eldest Tommy (Bel’s father) became a journalist, Charlie the youngest a schoolmaster and his other son Peter followed him into the joinery trade. Charlie’s son is Mr. Bob Crawford of Craigsheen who can sometimes be persuaded to play his violin at village occasions; and soon after Peter and his wife moved during the 1920s into The Hut on Busby Road, their sons Tommy and Johnnie both became joiners, continuing the business which was later run from their timber and paint sheds beside the old Whinstone Quarry at the coup on the High Green (where Cameron Crescent is now).
Mrs Jean Crawford, widow of Johnnie, continued to live in the Greenside cottage (now all one house). Of their four daughters, Isobel, Mrs McColl, is in Waterside Gardens. Mr. Tommy Crawford, unmarried, lived in Campbell Place until he returned to his family home, namely the cottage-villa on Busby Road known as The Hut. When I talked to Tommy, he surveyed his village, thinking back over the years of his own working life with his father and grandfather, maintaining and modernising many of the buildings, knowledgeable about their structure and their history.
The Grays too were builders and joiners in the village for generations till recently. There are still several members of the family here and Mr. George Gray and his children are in Waterside Road and his sister Moira, Mrs Young, in Fair Oaks, Gallowhill Road.
Still in the 1920s, try to picture the old village before further developments take place and the old one fades. There is the kirkton of old cottages round the church, a forestair on the lands, Pathhead Cottages and at the top of the Ditch, on Waterside Road, is the villa Five Acre Gate on part of the north and south Glebe’s 5 acres. There is Jacksons’ and, after the McNiven family, McChlerys’ cottage on Wellside, The Craigs, Crag Lodge and Craigsheen House at the back; and there’s the fine Georgian Manse beside the old School Loan or Manse Brae cottages. Facing east on to the Low Green are the Smiddy, Connells’ two villas, Jimmock’s old toll-house and lining the north side - Greenside - close to the Weys-box is Sunnybank, then the tenements, Crawfords’ cottages and Strathearns’ big square villa Thorncliffe.
On a bracket attached to the gate-pillar of the church’s wooden gates is an elegant gas lamp, beside the Watch-house built a century earlier to shelter the guards on duty to scare off resurrectionists. Going north along Kirk Road past Maggie Wilson’s cottage in which had been the Post Office, you come to the crossroads. On the right is the tenement known as Drummond Place. It still comprises small houses, but now that the publican Mr. Ferguson has retired and his glamorous daughter has married a baronet and left the district, there is a butchers’ shop in place of The Cathkin Rest. And standing out on its own beyond this is the Craigenputtock Tearoom.
East from Linnbrae on Busby Road, showing Theeeches and crossroads
Between them the little street Rowan Bank passes the Weaver’s Cottage where the Bishop family live and the 2-storey block of four little houses Rowanbank which has taken the location’s name. It cuts through to Torrance’s still thatched old cottage and his motor-servicing area (known later as The Green Garage) where he keeps his bus. Tacked on the east gable of Rowanbank is a half-ruined cottage or outhouse - note the faint outline of its gable on the wall - and across the road is the cottage known as Campbell Place where Archie Tagg’s daughter Augusta still runs a tearoom and sells newspapers, next door to her father’s grocery, Taggs’ village shop in which is the Post Office and telephone.
On the southwest corner of the crossroads is the gable of The Beeches or Helena Place as it’s also known, where the cottages face on to Busby Road. Further down there is the neat cottage-villa The Hut where Peter Crawford and his family now live. Across from The Beeches, Jackson’s Lands or the Barracks are neighboured by the most westerly cottage, in front of which was Cooch Lennox’s pile of timber and his sawpit.
Then there is the block of five houses Sunnyside, and Linnbrae with Miss McVeannie’s cottage in its ground. Bankhead Farm stands back a little up a slope, with its row of bee boles in front of the house, the steadings west of it, a cottage behind these and two improved cottar houses east of it. A little way down Busby Road are the double villas numbered 42, 44 and Brantham at no. 46 with Pedmyre down its lane in the woods behind them, architect-designed Windyriggs near it - and not far from there the new sewage works!
West of Pedmyre Lane, on Busby Road there is Holmglen built 1896 where a member of the Sauchiehall Street department store Pettigrew & Stephens family lives, Milnflat with its handsome dairy building at right-angles to it, beside them the two tiny cottages at the roadside now known as Craigmiln Cottages (yet still housing some of Miss Lily Borland’s workers from nearby Picketlaw Farm), then Craigmiln House itself, home of the elderly Dempsters. Next is the mansion house Carnbooth built in 1900, just west of the 18th century farm of that name, and this big house’s lodge is at the road-end of its long tree-lined drive. Brier Cottage of about 1880 faces west beside the roadside cottage Millhill, c. 1850, and between them there is the lane down to the ancient Kittoch Mill which ceased operating about 1908. On Waterside Road is Waterside House where Mr. Mair is soon to be followed by his son Tom as farmer at Waterside Farm.
Back in the village, north of the crossroads, at the top end of Twaddles’ Lane stands the 3-storey tenement with Miss Lamont’s grocer shop. Next is the tenement where Johnnie Leggat mends shoes, then the one in which is McNivens’ confectionery and there is a garden with a tall ash tree in it before you come to the house Ashtree. By now this is one complete residence belonging to people called Carr, neighboured on its far side by the Castlemilk Hall, Stewarts’ Lands and the Estate cottages beyond at Buchanan or Balwhinnie Corner on Netherton (Glasgow) Road.
Past these, even further along to the north end of the village, are four blocks of good Council houses built in 1922, their fronts and gables of stone. Across the Glasgow road is another similar well-built block, then one at the road’s angle, and on Windlaw Road extending as far as The Studio there are two more substantial mainly stone-built Council blocks, these being the first to go up in this early 1920s period, all of them specially built for the families of men coming home at the end of the 1914-18 war. Note the stone mouldings above doors and the clean-cut facings round these and their windows. Over from the ones on Windlaw Road are Viewfield, the two houses Maryville at no. 6, Parkview at no. 4 and Bonnyton at no. 2.
Continuing south along Main Street towards the Boghead Inn, Gallowhill Farm’s field and an area of garden plots stretch from Bonnyton to the Laird’s War Memorial behind which is Davielea where Stephen Young keeps his motor and bus in the yard’s sheds; then there’s the Inn.
But the green gap just mentioned disappeared in the second half of the decade, and since 1927 there are a group of five more Council house blocks called Hillcrest, this time of brick harled on the outside - two blocks on the main street and three in the in-shot where the field or the garden plots were. (The 1922 Council blocks on Glasgow Road are nowadays also part of the area known as Hillcrest.)
Round the corner from the Inn is the school on Waterside Road, and with its forestair the block of houses. Opposite this is Connells’ Smiddy and next on its west is Harpers’ store with two houses tacked on behind, standing in front of the Clason Memorial Mission Hall’s vestry and main door, their gardens behind a high hedge stretching to the crossroads.
Each year from before and after the turn of the century, a special job was given to the head boy of the village school; every Sunday morning the nervous lad had to climb within reach of the rope to ring the Clason Church’s bell. And for years young men including Tommy Crawford (who became Bel Crawford’s father) took turns of pumping the bellows for the Mission Hall’s harmonium organ.
But those days were ending. In the second of the Rev Dr Henry Hutchison’s two books on Carmunnock Parish Church, we read that from the beginning of the century, the fortunes of the Free Church congregation in the Clason Memorial Mission Hall fell into decline, and in the 1914-18 War services had to be discontinued. Apart from the Band of Hope’s meetings and when it was occasionally hired for such as Silver Weddings, the hall was disused.
By then our parish church was badly in need of a church hall and ultimately the United Free Church Presbytery offered the Clason building to Carmunnock Kirk Session on lease at £5 a year. Much work was needed to repair and refurbish it and much money had to be collected from the congregation. Then, in February 1924 our church hall was opened - the Clason Hall - constantly in use ever since for church affairs, organisations’ meetings and social occasions. Mr. David Craig of Pathhead, church officer at the Parish Church from 1895, was succeeded in 1922 by his son Robert, husband of Mrs Catherine Craig. In addition to serving as beadle and gravedigger, Robert now became caretaker of the Clason Hall; and the village washerwomen took it in turns to keep the hall clean.
Long after official street directories had established place names and addresses in cities and towns throughout the country, a final effort to aid the General Post Office in its mail delivery service was made to classify road, street and location names in villages and more rural areas. Out-of-date colloquial terms for buildings and localised names which no longer applied had prevailed. Blocks of houses where numerous separate families lived had often been known only by the builder-owner’s name, or sometimes by that of one well-known character in the building, or whose name happened to be at the front door. But now each house was numbered; the personalised touches had disappeared; locations and roads were given names with more permanent descriptions.
In Carmunnock, at the top of the road up from Glasgow which was called Netherton Road in earlier years, Waterside Road started at the Castlemilk Hall and the Laird’s War Memorial, continuing on its route past the Boghead Inn, round the corner past the school, the foot of the Greens and the Doo Well, and through the countryside down to the Kittoch Water.
But Main Street changed. From Mrs McNiven’s shop on one side and Harper’s store and the Clason Hall on the other, it became Kirk Road - an extension of the original part south of the crossroads passing the church and going as far as Pathhead. (Years later, in the early 1950s, Kirk Road continued down to the right, thus renaming what had been the Old Mill Lane or lower end of Pathhead Road - the Path - Wellside.) School Loan, long since Manse Row or Manse Brae, became plain Manse Road. And, leading up towards Cathkin Road, the lower part of Cathkin Way (the name found on title deeds), which was also the top part of the old road down to the mills - the Mill Road - had for some time past all become simply Busby Road.
Something of the character of the old village was disappearing; so it is all the more interesting to look back and try to picture it, its people and their way of life in earlier times. One thing that helps to fill in the picture is to note the gaps in the numbering of the houses. Whereas these can indicate that years ago there were additional cottages, various buildings or merely separate plots of land close by, other gaps in house numbers make it clear that some of today’s self-contained residences were at one time whole tenements of separate little homes.
For instance here on Kirk Road, the 18th century cottage-tenement (Johnnie Leggat’s) knocked down in the 1930s between Mrs McNiven’s and the 3-storey building consisted of four houses, and so the District Council noted this by numbering the two houses built in 1982 to replace them as 6A and 6B. And how many houses do we guess 8 and 8A included when it was a tenement? South of the crossroads, the new Kirkgrove block of flats is 5 and 7 Kirk Road, the 18th century house now known as Kirkennan Cottage (the old Post Office) is no. 11 and, passing Snowberry (unnumbered), Wellside Cottage is no. 31. On the other side of the road there are the early cottages at 22, 24 and next to 26 there are the one-time lands at no. 32.
On Busby Road, the long-ago cottages at The Beeches, as well as more recent properties like The Neuk Tearoom, might account for the gap between the doors round Bishop’s Cottage at no. 7 and Laura’s Tearoom and the Post Office at 15-17. Opposite this, perhaps Miss McVeannie’s cottage once-upon-a-time filled the no. 16 gap between Sunnyside’s 14A and Linnbrae at no. 18.
The Statistical Accounts say that about 1927 electric light became available to Carmunnock from a substation at Busby belonging to the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company. Cable was laid up Busby Road and Miss Arthur told us that, after much correspondence, the Company agreed to extend this, in passing, into her father’s house at Lanercost, 84 Busby Road, providing that Mr. Arthur promised to use £20 worth of electric power in a year!
The population of the parish in the Census year 1921 was 835, rising towards 900 by the end of the decade.