Also on This Day: Hogmanay, Greenock, 1873

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Photo of the laying of the foundation stone, Albert Harbour Greenock Illustrated London News 23 August 1862

There are a few places where my in-laws’ history and my own research findings overlap. Glasgow is one of them, and Greenock is another. I know the stories of three mid-nineteenth century Greenock boys, all with family connections to shipping on the River Clyde: I encountered two of them whilst researching Scottish music publishers, but the other one is indirectly linked to me by marriage. 

Allan Macbeth (1856-1910): Athenaeum School of Music Principal

Allan Macbeth was born in Greenock in 1856 to an eminent artist.  After the family had moved to Edinburgh, he had two spells studying music in Germany, but he did return to Scotland.  He married the daughter of a Greenock builder, ships carpenter, timber-merchant and saw-miller.  Between 1880-7, he conducted Glasgow Choral Union.

Between 1890 -1902, he was Principal of Glasgow’s Athenaeum School of Music, building it up to a size barely imagined by the early directors.  In 1902, he left to open his own Glasgow College of Music in India Street, taking umbrage after the Athenaeum directors decided they didn’t want a Principal who also taught classes.  His own college appears to have died with him when he died in 1910. 

Technically capable, in terms of musicianship, he wrote a quantity of lightweight music, eg his Forget me Not intermezzo and Love in Idleness serenata, both of which were subsequently re-arranged for different instrumentations, shortly after his death. Barely any of his music was published in Scotland – It was almost all published in England by a mixture of big and very small names. 

Macbeth was one of the arrangers of James Wood and Learmont Drysdale’s Song Gems (Scots) Dunedin Collection, published in 1908 both in London and Boston, Massachusetts. Indeed, my own copy came from Boston, though there had also been an Edinburgh distributor.  His Scottish song arrangements were typically late Romantic in style.  The collection was aimed at a musically and culturally educated middling class, knowledgeable about Scottish poetry of earlier times.  For example, his setting of Walter Scott’s ‘The Maid of Neidpath’ was set to an earlier tune by Natale Corri – hardly of Scottish origin! – with lush harmonies.  I wrote about the collection in my A Social History of Amateur Music Making and Scottish National Identity (Routledge, 2025).

Macbeth’s son, Allan Ramsay Macbeth, briefly attended Glasgow School of Art (GSA) as an architectural apprentice before leaving to become an actor, and one of his cousins, Ann Macbeth, became head of embroidery there.

James [Hamish] MacCunn (1868-1916)

Twelve years after Macbeth’s birth, a second musical boy was born in 1868, this time to a wealthy ship-owning family in Greenock. The family firm later went bankrupt, but not before James MacCunn had benefited from a composition scholarship to the newly established Royal College of Music in London at a very young age.  Like Macbeth, he left Scotland to further his musical education.  He styled himself Hamish to suit his ostentatiously Scottish persona, and spent the rest of his life in England, determined to live in the style to which he had become accustomed.  His compositions were on a decidedly larger and more ambitious scale than Macbeth’s, but he perhaps didn’t live up to his early adult promise, and his insistence on flaunting his Celtic origins may ultimately have gone against him. He too gets a mention towards the end of my Social History of Amateur Music Making.

McAulay (McAuley, MacAulay) Hogmanay, 1873

Also in the 1860s, my grandfather-in-law was born in Greenock to a much lowlier family, in 1866.  (If you’re trying to calculate how my grandfather-in-law was born 159 years ago, shall we just say that age-gaps account for a lot.) This baby was the second Hugh born in the family, after the first one died of teething.  Life wasn’t easy for the illiterate working-class poor; this family had already moved from Ballymoney on the north coast of Ireland, in pursuit of work on the Clyde.  His father Alexander worked in the shipyards as a hammerman until his untimely demise one Hogmanay.  Last seen on 31 December 1873, Alexander drowned in Albert Harbour and was found a month later. Did he jump, or was he pushed? We’ll never know!

My husband’s grandfather Hugh was later to move his young family to Tyneside in pursuit of work as a ship’s carpenter.  Family mythology has various spellings of our name – but since our immigrant Irish McAulays were illiterate, there is no correct spelling. It was spelled however the registrar, or newspaper editor, chose to spell it. There was an embroidered family tale about my Great-Grandfather-in-Law, erasing the embarrassing Hogmanay drowning – and another story about Grandpa-in-Law’s move to Tyneside after a dispute with his foreman (which has every chance of being equally inaccurate).

I can’t help comparing how different were the lives of the two promising young musicians, and the Clydeside then Tyneside shipyard worker who was to thrive on tonic sol-fa, and whose adult family were to make up at least half of their Presbyterian church choir!

Image: Photo of the laying of the foundation stone, Albert Harbour Greenock, from the Illustrated London News 23 August 1862, p. 9 (British Newspaper Archive)

Postcards from the Past

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Old postcards of Jamaica Bridge and Glasgow docks

As I pursued my research for my latest book, I accumulated quite a few postcards and other ephemera which might not, at first sight, appear to have had much to do with the subject in hand.  Indeed, when I decided to sort out my box file, I was initially a bit surprised just how much of this stuff I had acquired!  However, much of the work was done during the pandemic, when eBay was actually a very sensible way of getting hold of things … and you could argue (hark at me, justifying myself) that I spent less on those postcards than two or three hot drinks at the RCS café-bar each day I’m on site!

Did Mozart Allan use printers Aird & Coghill? They printed a lot of music in Glasgow!

Sifting through my treasure-trove was so enjoyable that I eventually realised I wasn’t in the least bit ashamed of my guilty secret.  I have a contemporary postcard of the very respectable-looking Glasgow street where James S. Kerr first lived.  (The neighbourhood is less upmarket now, and both his first home AND his shop are now gone.)  And there’s a postcard of the shop that Frank Simpson had on the corner of Sauchiehall Street before the shop and adjacent church were knocked down to make room for British Home Stores.  I also have a card of the view Mozart Allan would have seen every time he stepped outside his shop.  (HIS shop building is still standing, just along from the Courts, beside the River Clyde.) 

Pretty much the view from the shop doorstep!

I have pictures of the docks, as they were then, conveniently close for Kerr and Mozart Allan’s trading activities, and a picture of the boat on which Kerr’s successor sailed to America on one occasion.  I like to be able to imagine what a place was like when the person I’m writing about, actually lived there.

I’ve also got odd bits of commercial ephemera – an advertising brochure; a business postcard; a couple of letters.  The business postcard set me on the track of the individidual who took over Kerr’s business after Mrs Kerr died.  It was only last weekend, long after I’d acquired it, that I realised there was a woman’s name written across the top left corner.  A colloquial diminutive for the new owner’s wife’s first name, in fact.  So – maybe she worked in the shop, too?  It’s not musicological research, but I would like to find out.  I enjoy finding women working in the music publishing/retail business, in eras when fewer women worked outside the home.

Another bunch of postcards trace the tartan-mania which spilled over from cards to coffee-table song-books and miniature souvenir books.  Talking of souvenirs, I have travel guides, maps, an embroidery canvas of a commemorative map of the British Isles – it was unworked, but I’ve since done the stitching and had it framed – and a reproduction of an early PanAm poster.  I’ve written quite a bit about Scottish songs in the memory of expats, both overseas and over here.

And there are a few photos of children having music lessons; of women sitting at the piano; a magic lantern slide; a stereoscope of (apparently) happy workers on a cotton plantation – in my book, I’ve written about the racism in plantation songs.

A whole load of sol-fa booklets of various kinds.  They have a wee box of their own.

There’s also a photo of an Edinburgh railway bridge.  Why?  I was hunting down a particular song-book editor, and a musician with the right name lived just beside that bridge.  I don’t think it was the right man, but it’s a nice photo, so I’ve kept it anyway!