“How soft thou glins’st among the trees.
Sweet kissed by ilka morning breeze,
Among thy yellow Autumn leas,
My bonnie, dear Carmunnock.
How soft thou glimmer’st to my een,
Sweet peeping through thy leafy screen,
On thy high rock thou sitt’st a queen,
My bonnie, dear Carmunnock.
And doun by Kittoch’s saft green glen,
Fu’ weel yon mavis seems to ken
That holy ark o’ Spring again
Is floating to Carmunnock.
Then balmy Spring, in a’ her charms,
Lifts thee up gently in her arms;
Green, fragrant trees bud roun’ thy farms
My rural, wee Carmunnock.
When hairst makes a’ yer blossoms fa’,
And apples hing, red-cheekit a’
Like to the bonnie lasses braw
That bide in dear Carmunnock.
Thy we theeked biggins all do shine
Wi’ wild rose and wi’ eglantine,
While ivy roun’ thy kirk does twine
My holy, dear Carmunnock.”
from “Poems”, by Thomas Thorpe.
South from the crossroads.
The village had long been a favourite spot to walk up to from the city. Well-known as a pleasant place to stop for refreshment, it was on many a gladsome rambler’s route between Rutherglen, Cathkin, Busby or even further afield. T. C. Brotchie’s lines in his 1912 Some Sylvan Scenes near Glasgow are suitably descriptive:
“Standing on the crest of a bold ridge at 472 feet above sea level, its streets with the abiding charm of possessing no defined plan, Carmunnock is a very pretty little village, retaining in its main feature the rural atmosphere of long ago. The Kirk which stands on a knoll is curious and comparatively old. Quaint and comfortable hostelries extend a friendly invitation to the traveller on a hot summer’s afternoon”.
Many Carmunnock folk in the present day look back with much happy pleasure to the days of the 1930s - the last decade of an earlier world. They remember the village as a prettier, more natural little place. Additional trees in full fragrant blossom in Springtime stood here and there among the houses, and old perfumed roses grew round cottage doors. These are not merely hackneyed words - old photographs of Carmunnock show a charming picture.
Simple gardens were filled with flowers, well-attended rows of vegetables and fruit bushes. Mr. Carr of Ashtree worked at Glasgow’s Fruit Market selling some of Carmunnock’s produce and along with Trestermyre’s garden and little orchard at its foot, they say that there was enough soft and tree-borne fruit to supply the whole district. Many of the much-treasured interesting and informative photographs of old Carmunnock in a few people’s private possession were taken by Mr. John Barker, father of Mrs Matthews till lately of Hillcrest, developed and printed by himself - young Bessie allowed to help. And Mr. Archibald Tagg of the village shop and Post Office published several, having them printed in Germany. Others were taken by press and postcard publishers from the city.
One thing particularly noticeable in old photographs of the village is that fences and leafy hedges enclosed cottage gardens, giving a softer - if less tidy - effect. Stone or brick walls, a much more costly form of garden enclosure, seem to be a more recent thing - excessively costly in the case of a lady (Mr. Bob Steele’s aunt) who bought the whole Jackson’s Lands buildings for £300, but when for sentimental reasons she had some stones shipped over from the Isle of Arran to include in the garden wall being built in place of the fence and hedge there, she had to pay that amount and more for them alone, making it a very expensive property indeed!
Carmunnock for the most part was still a farming community in the early decades of the 20th century, using horses and much manual labour. Working horses, usually the handsome white-faced Clydesdales, toiled in the fields from ploughing time to harvesting. Patient cart horses drew heavy loads daily for farmers and villagers alike. Well-groomed ones were harnessed in business-like way to passenger conveyances and ponies took traps and their drivers, long waving whip in hand, at spanking trot to village and home again. You had to watch out for yourself, they say, when for instance Stephen Young’s sister Jeannie drove the trap at brisk pace down to Busby.
No petrol fumes or pesticides threatened plant, bird or animal life in those less scientific days when wild flowers grew in abundance along green waysides and the Crystal or Kirstal Burn’s peaceful banks to primrose glen just south of the village.
Looking back more than half a century, the 1930s seem a contented, carefree time, remembered along with childhood and all the experiences and impressions of those years. Captured neatly in the brief words of some Carmunnock schoolchildren of the 1970s imagining times long ago, these lines convey a picture of our village in all the seasons, little different in many ways from the fun and freedom of the young ones’ lives today.
Spring 1900
Flowers growing, crows crowing, School’s out. Hear children shout.
Children playing in the Street
Have a piece with jam to eat.
Autumn 1900
Mother’s making champit tatties
We’re looking for threepenny bits,
Roasting chestnuts.
Hallowe’en’s here.
Summer 1900
Children running with bare feet
Their favourite friends they’re going to meet Mother’s working doing the ironing
Fetching water, scrubbing, scrubbing
Winter 1900
Heavy boots children wear
Running here and running there.
In school beside the nice warm fire.
The church, the organ, the old school bell
The people at the Doo’s Well
The water cart and dirty feet
The roads now do look sweet
The sandy playground
See the people running round.
Children walking, children talking
Bare feet prancing, children dancing,
The toads croaking, the frogs jumping.
Horses gallop, horses trot,
The blacksmith’s horses,
All these horses
Summer
Tar melting
Feet sticky
Water spraying
Over roadside
Beautifully cool for feet.
Winter
Half holiday
For skating
Robin hopping
Children running
To the pond with skates
Tarry feet and laughing wild,
Mother cries or nearby weeps.
She has to clean those tarry feet.
Butter thick and butter thin,
Wipe it on and make them clean
Old ways still blended happily with the new in those days of the 1930s. Just as happily, ordinary village life took a cheerful part in great national occasions. 6th May, 1935 was the Silver Jubilee of the reign of King George V and Queen Mary and once more there were celebrations. A committee with honorary presidents William Stirling Stuart, Esq., Castlemilk, and Robert Robertson, Esq., Carnbooth, was set up, its chairman the Rev John Anderson, secretary George Drummond and treasurer James Arthur.
An attractive printed programme states that after the Parade, led by the Pipe Band of the 118th (Glasgow) Boys’ Brigade, there were sports on Crofthill Field and a presentation at School of prizes and souvenir mugs by Mrs Stevenson (Madam Stuart Stevenson) of Castlemilk - the mugs kindly donated by her father Mr. Stirling Stuart. There was tea in the Castlemilk Hall, an entertainment in the Clason Hall for the parish’s Older Folk, the bonfire was lit at 10 pm and a dance was held in the Castlemilk Hall for the parish’s Younger Folk till 2 am, tickets 1/-d (one shilling). The conveners for all these activities were R. J. McIntyre, Miss Brown, J. Martin, W. R. Dow and John Jamieson.
“For those not eligible for Monday’s entertainments” the programme goes on, celebrations continued on Tuesday 7th May with a Whist Drive in the Castlemilk Hall, and no doubt everyone turned up whether they had joined in Monday’s fun or not. On the following Sunday there was a Service of Thanksgiving in the church.
In 1937 Mr. William Stirling Stuart opened the new Clubhouse (since extended) on Cathkin Braes Golf Course, presenting the Club on the occasion with a very welcome £1000. The first Clubhouse opened in 1888 had stood near what is now the 13th green - the 1st tee then - the site of the ancient Brito-Pictish camp.
Up to the Great War of 1914, Mr. John Wilson who had laid out the golf course greens was clubmaster, head greenkeeper and professional combined. Afterwards and up to the 1939-45 War, still inordinately proud of his work for the golf course, John kept a big urn of tea always ready for golfers coming in out of the wind and rain, and there’s the story of the day one of the golfers remarked that the tea was cold. “How cuid it be cauld?” big John asked gruffly, “It’s bin boilin’ thae last twa ’oors” - unaware that the boiling would ruin the flavour and with certain properties destroyed, the tea would quickly cool.
Best known in the village as Golf Course John, the golfers nicknamed him Noble John. Carmunnock too had its green in the 1930s - although Noble John didn’t lay this one: the neat putting green in front of the newly-built Royal British Legion Hall on Pathhead Road.
Mr. and Mrs Young, their daughter and then their granddaughter Mirren had been followed by Mr. Fairley as proprietor at the Boghead Inn. In 1933, long since under Glasgow Licensing Board, it was taken over by Mr and Mrs MacAulay and their daughter (parents and sister of Mrs Dol Vincent of Waterside Road). Mrs Vincent tells us that in the 1930s when her folk came there, a board on the lobby wall just inside the front entrance showed a painting of the house dated 1755, and wayfarers who by law the MacAulays must accommodate still climbed to their rooms by the outside stair in the one-time farmyard at the back.
All kinds of changes both contrasting and continuing were happening in Carmunnock in the progress of things. By now, horse-drawn vehicles as a means of transport were gradually becoming fewer. Grandfather McNiven the blacksmith, staunch Free Kirker, was long since dead and now, these past several years, old Grannie McNiven too. Many years earlier she had been scored from Carmunnock church’s roll for some reason, and instead had walked down to attend church at Eglinton Street where they had been before. “Aye, Mr —, Y’ might score me aff your roll, but y’ll naiver score me off the next yin!” she had angrily retorted to the church elder here, and now, some would say, her words had come true.
After decades of steady work, trade at Matthew Connell’s (son of Matthew and grandson of old Matt’a) of Carmunnock’s blacksmith’s on Waterside Road was dwindling seriously, and in 1932 the Smiddy there closed. But Matthew continued business on a smaller scale shoeing horses and doing other blacksmithing in a Smiddy he built at Eastfield on Cathkin Road (which became Eastfield Coachworks); in fact horses used for farm and cart-load work, for fetching coal from Busby station yard and delivering it round the district, were to give Matthew business for many years to come. Huge piles of stones, bricks, timber, coal and countless other heavy goods regularly took up ground on Busby Station yard in the days when goods trains did all the carrying. Carts from all round the district would sometimes be seen queuing up to take the stuff to its destinations.
Mr Jim Brown of Bankhead Road who had worked for the Borlands at High Netherton Farm down the Glasgow Road told us that to fetch coal he took his horse and cart across the fields to Pedmyre, passed Windyriggs, trundled across Carnbooth’s drive, bumped down the rough muddy lane to Kittoch Mill and came up the brae to meet Busby Road.
This was at Millhill at the top of the mill’s path where little lame Miss Katie Clark kept a tiny sweetie and lemonade shop in her cottage beside west-facing Brier Cottage. Perfectly situated halfway between Carmunnock and Busby, she sold sweets through an open window at the back, approached from the lane; and if you were privileged enough to be her friends, you could sit at the table in her stone-floored kitchen to drink your lemonade.
Mr Bob Crawford of Craigsheen tells us that Katie did a great trade catching customers who used the old right-of-way path through Kittoch Mill, as well as passers-by on the main road to or from the railway. Some of her most regular clients passing daily were youngsters - like Bob - who travelled to senior school by train, irresistibly in need of refreshment and sustenance for the remainder of the walk home from the station in the evening!
Many years had passed since the pretty Spring day, trees radiant with blossom, when the Browns of The Craigs had sent their carriage to take Bessie their western isles servant girl to her wedding in the church. By now old Mr and Mrs Brown’s son and daughter-in-law the Alexander Ross Browns, living in Crag Lodge, had a car. Coachmen had turned chauffeur or retired. Hands that all their lives had held harness reins were now empty, nostalgia for the old days lingering to the end. In the 1920s and 1930s Mr James Thomson (who died in 1988 aged 94, father of David Thomson of Stuart Road) was chauffeur and valet to Mr Robertson of Carnbooth. Few masters now in their later life had the courage to take up car driving. You hired instead and were driven there “by chaps who knew the mechanics of these terrifying machines”.
Running car hires was now a profitable living.
Keeping his motor in Youngs’ shed, Mr. Sandy Jamieson who used to work on Stephen’s buses had been running his own car-hire business since 1929 - and I am carefully reminded that the word taxi didn’t exist then. Frequently taking the very best of hires to their destinations, on Sundays he drove the Misses Brown, daughters of The Craigs who had formerly ridden in stately fashion in their carriage and pair, to church down at Queen’s Park.
Young’s second Reo bus, a 20-seater bound for Glasgow, about 1929.
At the end of 1935 Sandy and his wife Jessie Baird from Gallowhill Farm - Mr. and Mrs Alex Jamieson - bought the house Ashtree from people called Houston (who had followed the Carrs) a couple who had kept a little shop in the back garden’s garage selling ice-cream brought from town, sweets, lemonade and fresh-fried chips. Soon afterwards, Sandy, a qualified electrical engineer, himself built his motor-repairs shed next to the house, in the garden area in which an ash tree had stood. So now, the big lovingly-polished hiring car was kept in it.
Not until about 1942 did Mr. Jimmy Tait start running his taxis. But another important step in progress had already happened: as the result of many requests, Stephen Young who had begun a regular bus service as far as the Gorbals in the mid-1920s took his new 20-seater Reo bus to Carlton Place about 1929, handy for the suspension bridge to the centre of Glasgow. Now the village folk could widen their scope and seek interests and new opportunities far beyond the immediate vicinity.