TWO MILESTONES

"So - the Mull of Kintyre has caught up with you - my family want to know where you have been for the past 20 years! I guess it seems odd because the events of 1978 were so much a part of our lives. I shall give you a little of this story, but am sending you (by "pigeon post") some very old printouts from our local newspaper of the time, which I have kept in my scrap book. Please excuse the quality, but it gives you some idea of what was going on. Firstly, a "mull" is the end of a peninsula, and there are hundreds of them all round the Scottish coast. Kintyre was our bit of Argyll, and Campbeltown the nearest town to the mull. We lived on a hillside overlooking the loch, and in the 1970s Paul McCartney bought an old farmhouse across another hill at the back of our house. He converted some of the out buildings into a recording studio, and when he married Linda they did up the house and employed a farm manager to run the estate properly. They used to spend every summer up there when the children were small, saying it was the one place in the world they could feel free to "be themselves". Our eldest daughter Kate used to collect for the local Lifeboat, and she and a friend would walk over the fields to collect a contribution, and have coffee in the kitchen with Linda. (It was a very long walk round on the road.) Paul was always very generous to local charities. The idea of the "Mull of Kintyre" came to him on a walk by the sea - and the mist really does come rolling in from the sea! He got the local Pipe Band together for a backing session and had a great barbecue on the beach after the recording had been made. We knew it was good, but it was a surprise that it became the longest running Hit Single in British history! It is interesting that we heard it several times a day at the time, and were fed up with it, but Alison said when she heard it many years later on a hot day in Florida, she was crying buckets! Paul still owns the farm, which is managed for him, but I don't think he has been there since Linda died. All the best for now (bright and sunny on the south coast of UK!)

It is not often that we can find records which tell us much about the day to day lives of our ancestors but fortunately a few years ago a merchant’s ledger surfaced in Canada which provides us with new insights into the lives of these early Gaels. The owner of the ledger, a merchant, owned a trading vessel and he sold his goods from Charlottetown, PEI to St John’s Newfoundland from 1812-1829. The ledger entries parallel the pattern of Highland Catholic settlement in the colony first in Tracadie in the west and then gradually eastward as new waves of immigrants arrived.

By far the greatest amount of purchases were for rum. Some accounts included nothing else. One author (Morris) states, "If judged by this ledger, the Island was awash with it." In a letter to Scotland Captain John Mac Donald, Lord of Glenaladale, observed, "Half of the cattle shipped to Newfoundland is brought back in rum. Every three miles you meet with a hogshead of rum on the tap at which the Highlanders guzzle." John Mac Gregor writing in 1828 had this to say,"The low price of rum and the number of houses along the roads which retail it form the most baneful evil connected with the country and is the grand cause of any wickedness that may be met with."

An article entitled Tales from a Ledger by Dorothy Morris presents information from the ledger in tabular format for the benefit of family historians. Page twenty-three of the ledger contains the account of Duncan Gillis for the years 1813-1815. Duncan.who is mentioned elsewhere in this Newsletter, was my third great granduncle (great great great) and the brother of my third great grandfather, Donald.Duncan’s ledger entry reads thusly:

" Duncan Gillis, St Peters, Account Page 27, 1813-1815

Account mostly for rum-----and mostly for Donald, also one quair of paper, powder and shot; muslim for Mary; Little John 60 pounds iron; sundries to Mary and Made; silk and muslim to Kity; 6 1/4 printed coten and thread. It was paid by hay shipt on board vessel, cash from Catrina your daughter, cash by Mary, Cash by Kity, hay pasturing oxen, 54 bushels of oats, a wether, hay for horse, and by cash from Donald Mac Donald, James, son and John Robinson"

Of the forty six purchases listed over a fourteen month period for Duncan, thirty two of them were for rum and mostly for Donald. Payment for goods was most often accomplished through bargaining items such as oats, barley, wheat, hay, sheep, or even labor.

The author of Tales from a Ledger provides us with the entries exactly as they were written and clarifies the entries by stating, "The exact spelling used in the accounts for names and places is reproduced here. If spelling seems odd one must remember that the Highlanders were still speaking Gaelic and writing English phonetically."