[BITList] Stray thoughts

[HUGH]

Saturday,

The other night, BBC had the last of a short series that covered one leg of Michael Portillo's UK-wide Railway Journeys.  The leg took him from Brighton to Cromer, and in Norwich he commented on the failure of Gurney's Bank in 1856, caused (he said) by the bursting of the Railway Bubble.  A number of UK banks failed 1856-57, with dire consequences, and Portillo's comments reminded me that, but for one such failure in 1857, I wouldn't exist.

My great great grandparents, James Adam and Elizabeth Robb, had moved to the village of Elderslie from Paisley around 1840.  James was a handloom weaver, producing plain shawls at home for the Ronald Brothers printworks in the village along with a hundred or so other weavers.  These shawls were printed as imitation Paisley Shawls for the London market.  Elderslie was where William Wallace was born, and where, in 1843, my great grandmother, Agnes Adam, was born in 1843.  In 1857 the Western Bank of Scotland failed and took down a number of businesses, including the Ronald Brothers printworks.  Result : a hundred or so handloom weavers with no outlet for their work.  The story goes that James wove blankets and sold them round the doors, but that wouldn't feed 9 children.  So fate stepped in, in the person of a relation of Elizabeth who was a partner in the Brown & Stewart paper mill high on the hills above Greenock, at Overton. The family moved to Greenock and got a cottage at the mill plus jobs for the father and the children who were of employable age.  Agnes in due course went into service down the hill in Greenock, where she met William, her husband to be, himself an incomer from Stirling. They married in 1871, and eventually I came along.  However, had the family followed great grandfather William to Australia in the late 1880s, would I still have happened?

Hugh.




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