Marion Hoggan1897-1982

Marion Hoggan was known in the family as Minnie or Min. She became Marion Redmond on her marriage and is known to those of us who remember her as Grandma Redmond.

Marion was born on 7th April 1897 at Muir Cottage, The Loan, Stirlingshire, the home of her Wilson grandparents. She was the eighth of fourteen children of David Hoggan and Allison Wilson.

Marion was educated at Muiravonside Public School. Among her school prizes were prizes for merit in 1905 and 1908 and prizes for attendance in 1906 and 1908. She won at least two Scripture Union prizes, one of them dated 22nd June 1911 and another dated 12th April 1913. She was allowed to stay on at school for an extra year because of her unusual ability and application.

Teenaged Marion and her brother Harry, who later took part in the recovery work after the

1923 Redding Pit Disaster.

The death of her eldest brother Matt in 1906 from rheumatic fever affected her very deeply. She recalled Matt asking her to fetch a jug of water from the nearby well. Although she ran, by the time she got back with the water her brother was dead. Marion’s grandfather Robert Wilson refused to stay at Matt’s bedside while Matt was dying because this meant missing the evening service at the local church. When he returned from the service Matt had died. Marion found this behaviour heartless and she was always critical of people who followed the outward forms of religious observance without the true spirit.

Let Marion tell this story in her own words.

My brother Matthew was the first child– my mother and father were not long married before he was born. Five houses had just been built – five room and kitchen places – in a row opposite a pit at Drumclair and the windows weren’t in and they went there and I think Matt was born there and I think it began with a cold. He had rheumatic fever when he was seven and when he was fourteen. I’ve been told I don’t know if this is exact. It was common to have rheumatic fever. I know two or three cases. But anyway they said if he got over twenty-one he would be all right. He was twenty-one and a half when he died. But I don’t know if he was ever rheumatic to begin with. But anyway he got a job as a fireman and he was not able for that. I’ve seen him after being out on the night shift coming home in the morning and it was when we lived in this double and he would come in and he would just throw himself down on a chair. There was the two fixed-in beds and of course two chairs and he’d collapse in a chair and he’d say “Pull off ma boots” and I’d get down and take them off and he was deid. Jess was to be married at Hogmanay. She was the eldest sister she came after Matt and she was to be married at Hogmanay and they managed to get a house for her. Somebody had died he was a signal man – it wasn’t a railway house – I don’t know who’s house it was – it was on the other side of the estate maybe. They got that – quite a nice house it was – well nice big kitchen and nice big room. Bob Horne – the one that Jess was marrying was a tailor and he had got a big bench put in – you know how tailors sit at a bench. Anyway Jess used to worry about Matt. He wouldn’t be able to dance and he wouldn’t be able to play the fiddle. He was quite musical. He had a fiddle and he had another instrument and then later on my mother got an organ for him – anything to keep him indoors. It was a Sunday he died. On the Friday Jess had realised that he was very ill. She was praying at the fireside and she was crying and Matt just kept cheering her up “I’ll no be able to dance. I’ll see that ye dinna get too much to drink. I’ll keep an eye on you at your wedding.” I must have been about nine. On this Sunday he was terrible ill. They sent for the doctor and the doctor eventually came and gave him something just to finish him – a drug, a jab. Something for pain – cause that’s what it was what he did get. He said “Get me drink o’ the Mair Well water” and it was cold. We used to go there often just for the pleasure of drinking the well water. My mother gave me a pitcher and she said “Run on the road” and I ran on the road and I ran on the road and I was too late. My grandfather had come in on his way to the church – he woundnae miss the church for anything and when he came back Matt was gone. I thought I would never, never laugh again. It was the saddest day.

Her spare time job as a child involved looking after the family’s hens. Later she was employed as a live-in domestic servant to her mother’s parents Robert and Janet Wilson. She did not enjoy this experience and recalled her Wilson grandfather trying to get her to learn the Bible off by heart. For a while she acted as a servant to two of her uncles who were both miners. During the First World War she was a maid to a family called Dimmock in Linlithgow. She then took a job working shifts in Nobel’s munitions factory. The munitions work was highly paid but harsh and tedious.

Marion’s brothers Harry and Dick were called up for the Army during the First World War and served in the Royal Scots Fusiliers as regimental pipers. Because they were coal miners they were conscripted comparatively late in the war. Both came home unscathed. Maybe the common German soldiers’ superstition that it was bad luck to shoot a piper had something to do with it.

Less fortunate were Marion’s first cousins from nearby Causewayend. Two sons of her father David’s younger brother James Hoggan died in the war. Private 2355 Matthew Hoggan of the 4th Battalion Cameron Highlanders died on 17th May 1915 aged 23. His younger brother 43152 Lance Corporal Jimmie Hoggan of the 12th Battalion Royal Scots died on 12th October 1917 aged 21. This may explain why their father James became an alcoholic.

Marion and her brother Dave doing the laundry

Towards the end of the war she met an Irishman called Pat Redmond who was staying at Burnbridge with a family called Taylor while convalescing from an illness. Pat was a platelayer on the railway who was exempt from military service because he had lost the sight of an eye in an industrial accident. Marion appeared confused by what transpired after their meeting but it soon became evident that she was pregnant. She and Pat were married at the Muiravonside Manse on 20th September 1918. George Taylor and Allison Hoggan were witnesses. Pat and Marion’s first child James was born on 8th November 1918 at Burnbridge where she and Pat lived for the first years of their marriage.

Marion and Pat had three further children after James - Allison, David and Eileen.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Marion and Pat moved to Almondbank where they took over the village shop and Post office. Marion bought her stock at the Co-op in Linlithgow and sold items at cost but kept the dividend for herself. She used the money saved to buy a year of post school education for each of her four children. Pat continued working on the railway as a platelayer, but was active in both his trade union and the Labour Party.

Marion was noted for a somewhat strong temper. On one occasion she threw a plate across the dining room table decapitating the oil burning hurricane lamp in the centre of the table. On another occasion she took exception to an air rifle, which Jim had obtained and he came home to find it burning in the fireplace without a word being said. She had not had any kind

of childhood herself and found it difficult to relate to young children, as I was to find out later.

As Marion and Pat’s children grew up the lack of opportunities in the Muiravonside area became more and more apparent. The only jobs were in the mine, the local brickworks or on the railway. Pat went to evening classes to improve his arithmetic in order to get a job in the ticket office at Edinburgh Waverley station. The family passed the shop at Almondbank on to Marion’s sister Annie and spent a year in Battock before obtaining a council house at 56, Carrick Knowe Parkway, Edinburgh.

Marion was an air raid warden during the Second World War. She and Pat stayed in Edinburgh till the 1950s. Their son Jim had taken a liking to Frinton-on-Sea, the Essex coast resort, and Jim and Marion and Pat bought a house there together at 15 Hadleigh Road. Marion and Pat lived there permanently while Jim and his family used it as a holiday home and other family members were frequent visitors.

Marion and Pat were not obviously suited to life by the seaside. They seldom ever went to the beach or even to the Greensward on the cliff top and hardly socialised at all with their neighbours. Pat was a skilled card player who regularly won prizes at Whist Drives, which Marion did not attend. Neither did Marion attend any of the local churches though she continued to receive the Church of Scotland magazine ‘Stedfast’ in the post. She claimed that people in the local shops could not understand her Scottish accent.

The house itself was a tiny terraced house with three small bedrooms upstairs. They had a bathroom added when they moved in. There were two sitting rooms downstairs. Marion and Pat had the front room with the television in it while Jim and his family used the back room. There was a tiny galley kitchen. Pat spent most of his time in the garden, which was entirely given over to fruit, and vegetables, leaving nowhere except a little strip of concrete for us children to play. Marion’s chief preoccupation seemed to be a continual war of extermination with the ants that kept invading the kitchen.

No one who knew Marion would describe her as the easiest of women and she argued endlessly with her son Jim about almost literally anything and everything. Most of the books in the house were Marion’s Edwardian Sunday school prizes, which made for astonishingly dull reading. Nonetheless I found a strong bond developed between her and me as I grew into my teens and became fascinated by her reminiscences of Edwardian Muiravonside and her large family.

At some point in the 1960s Frinton and Walton Council renumbered the streets and the little house became known as 99 Hadleigh Road. Pat became ill after a visit to Ireland. Marion went on one of these trips with him in the 1950s but afterwards refused to accompany him so he went several times on his own. She and Pat had also visited Rome in the 1950s but Marion had little appetite for travel. Pat developed Parkinson’s and became an invalid with Marion acting as his carer. They spent entire days indoors and drank impressive quantities of Co-op 99 tea.

Pat died in Colchester General Hospital on 25th February 1971. Marion refused to allow a mass to be said for him though he had at one time been a Catholic and had reverted to the faith shortly before he died. She continued to live at 99 Hadleigh Road. Her son Jim tired of the cramped claustrophobic atmosphere in the tiny house and bought a larger house called

Toppins at 6 The Close, Frinton. Eventually Marion was prevailed upon to move into Toppins and 99 Hadleigh Road was sold.

Marion’s final years were peaceful and self-contained. She had a good-sized room to herself in Toppins and occupied herself with the large garden – another source of friction between her and Jim. She seldom went out, claiming to have been frightened by some unruly schoolgirls. She was invited to Jim’s knighthood ceremony but did not attend. Her main recreation was to watch the BBC TV religious programme ‘Songs of Praise’ with a couple of elderly neighbours.

On the last occasion that Marion and I met, in July 1982, I recorded about two hours worth of interviews with her where I managed to record some of her extensive reminiscences of her early life. These interviews form the basis of the quotations from her that I have included in this text.

In 1897, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year when Marion was born, the British Empire ruled over 412m people, 23% of the world’s population at that time. Air travel was only possible by balloon or airship. Women could not yet vote and nor could most men. The motorcar was one year old. The whole of Ireland was still part of the UK – her Irish future husband Pat Redmond was not considered an immigrant. Coal mining employed about 600,000 people in the UK and was the country’s principal source of energy.

Marion’s family fetched water from a well and shared an outdoor long drop toilet with neighbouring families.

Marion spent her final years in a centrally heated house, with gas, electricity and hot and cold running water. Jet air travel was commonplace and the first home computers were in the shops. The nationalised coalmines still employed about 196,000 people but the miners’ union was soon to be defeated and most pits closed down for good. Cleaner forms of energy replaced coal.

Marion died peacefully in her sleep on 28th October 1982. She was cremated at Colchester crematorium. There was a rose bush with a plaque to her and Pat in the crematorium grounds for some years before the family erected a permanent memorial to her and Pat in the churchyard back at Muiravonside.

Marion Redmond (nee Hoggan) and her husband Pat endure a rare visit to the beach at Frinton in the mid 1950s. I am enjoying myself in the foreground.

Auntie Aggie

Auntie Aggie as she was known was one of the best loved of Marion’s relatives. Aggie’s start in the world was not an easy one. She was born Agnes Wilson, the illegitimate daughter of Elizabeth Wilson, one of Allison Wilson Hoggan’s sisters and was brought up by her grandparents believing that they were her parents and her mother was actually her elder sister. In reality Aggie was Marion’s first cousin and not, as she had been told, Marion’s aunt.

Donald’s account of the birth of AggieCairniemount, Muiravonside – February 21 1886

Sunday 21 February was a cold, snowy day on the hills south of Falkirk. Nearly six inches of snow lay on the ground outside, and Roberton Cottage with its two rooms and a washhouse was crowded to say the least. In one room, an old man lay dying in a box bed by the heavily curtained window, whilst in the other a young girl of sixteen had just given birth. Between the two rooms and between the two worlds, Janet Brown Wilson raced backwards and forwards, trying to get some control over a situation that would not be controlled.

She entered the room, which had seen the birth, carrying a pail of hot water, and placed it next to a small hillock of towels on a heavy oak table next to her daughter’s bed. Her eldest daughter Alison, safely wed a year before, had come back to help with the birth, and had trudged up through the snow that morning, from the Loan village. In the bed was an exhausted Liz Wilson, now the proud mother of a healthy baby girl. Liz was still sixteen and unwed. Who was the father? Nobody knew and Liz was not saying.

“ I think that we’ll call her Agnes,” said Liz. “Would that be alright?”

“Call her what you like my dear,” said Janet. “ She is your daughter and always will be. But your father and I will find her a home here. I’ll send your father over to speak to Mr Henderson when the weather gets a wee bit better, and he can fill in the forms for you. Mr Henderson is bound to ask for a father’s name………..”

“Well there is none that can be given…….”

“ Not to worry yourself; we’ll take care of everything and bring Agnes up as our own. It’s a year since we had Oswald, and nobody need worry themselves about me having another. You can see her whenever you want – just pop over from Manuel whenever you can.

Liz sunk back into her pillows – maybe there would be hope after the shame and the sorrow of loss. Agnes would be her sister and not her daughter, and two lives would be improved through the loving generosity of her mother.

Just then Henry called through to her mother that his grand father would like some broth. Quickly Janet went through to the other room where a cauldron of soup gently warmed itself on a coal-fired range. Old Henry Wilson was her father-in-law and now over eighty years old. He was slowly dying but not without a struggle. He still had the hands of craftsman for that is what he had been all of his life. Firstly apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in Linlithgow, then a wheelwright, and finally a general-purpose joiner serving the villages west of Linlithgow. His wife, Elizabeth was dead these six years, and he looked forward almost to joining her. It was good of Janet to give him a home, and Robert had always been the favourite of his four sons.He thought of all the furniture he had made, and the wheels he had repaired, and this very bed, which he had made all those years ago.

“Just try to sup some of this Granddad --- please.”

“Go on Father,” said Robert Wilson pausing to peer over the paper which was already three days old. “ The broth will put some meat on your bones.”

The newspaper was already three days old, and on the inside pages, the Editor talked of the coming Irish Home Rule Bill which Gladstone was shortly to try and steer it through Westminster. Robert struggled for a second to consider an Irish parliament, and wondered why there was not also a Scottish one too. It all seemed so far fetched.

Janet looked at her husband and then at his father. She sat down beside the old man and began to spoon the soup into his mouth.

Grandma Redmond tells how Aggy got a plum job as a maid to the Duke of Sutherland.

Aggie in service with the Duke of Sutherland

Aggie–that’s Mrs Mills – you know Ralph Mills’ mother, she had been home on her holidays. She served in Stafford House – she was second housemaid to the Duke of Sutherland. I’m sure now Stafford House is a London Museum. She took me to see it once and to point out the rooms that she remembered. Aggie could have been head housemaid but head housemaids had to look after the Duchess’s rooms and they saw too much and they were never more than a year there. They stayed a year to get a good reference. But the Duke was so good to Aggie and she had his rooms to look after and she just did that and stayed with them. She needed false teeth – like the rest of us we ate too many sweeties. We all needed false teeth. So she thought she would have to leave but no – he sent her to his own dentist and she got the teeth out and the new ones in the same day. I suppose the blood was running over them. But she was never going about the house without teeth. The same thing happened when she needed glasses. She thought ‘Oh they won’t want me here with glasses. She was sent to the Duke’s optician and she got a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez not for dress occasions and others for going about in the day. They had one or two other houses. They had Lillieshall House – somewhere in England – and then they had – Dunrobin Castle. The Duke died up there and he had been given the Order of the Garter. His star had to go up there for his funeral and Aggie was chosen to take it and she never was so glad to get up to Dunrobin Castle, as she was that time carrying that valuable thing with her. Anyway she got it there and they had their own private cemetery. His body was taken there on a hay cart with this star on a cushion on top of the coffin. So Aggie was quite lucky she had a good job. I really don’t know how much would she have been paid.

Aggie’s problems with teeth and eyesight seem to have been shared by many of her and Marion’s contemporaries. The superb Peter Jackson documentary ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ gives striking evidence of how bad the teeth of British soldiers were in the First World War.

Aggie married a fellow servant called Lewis Mills and they settled in North London. My father Jim Redmond stayed with them in their home in Highgate in 1937 when he went to work for the new BBC television service at Alexandra Palace.

Aggie and Lewis’s son Ralph joined the Royal Air Force as an apprentice before World War Two and rose to the rank of Wing Commander. I’m still in touch with him.

The Adamsons

Elizabeth Paton Hoggan, Marion’s elder sister was born on 22nd August 1891. As a small girl she fell from a tree and lost the sight of one eye as a result of damage to the optic nerve.

After leaving Linlithgow Academy and collecting more prizes on the way she took service with the Stirling family at Tarduf House at the west end of Loan village. The Stirling family were the local landowners. They had lost a lot of their money during the American Civil war by investing in a fast merchant ship designed to be used by the breakaway southern Confederacy to break the blockade of southern ports by the United States Navy. When the United States sank this ship the Stirlings lost their investment. In spite of this the family remained wealthy by local standards and employed a fairly large staff.

Elizabeth joined the Stirling household as a maid and rose to become head cook around the beginning of the First World War. She later told her grandson Donald that when she cooked a meal for the household, she always reserved the best food for the servants.

Marion respected the Stirling family. One of the daughters ran local Scripture Union bible classes for local children.

John McLaren Adamson was born in 1886 in Halbeath, Dunfermline and worked as a miner. His aunt lived in the Loan village and it was while on holiday there that John met Elizabeth. They married in Muiravonside church in 1915. Elizabeth left the Stirlings and she and John moved back to Halbeath.

Elizabeth and John Adamson had three sons. The first son Alexander, born 1916, was a joiner who married May Mitchell. Alexander and May had one son, called Brian. The second son David, a railway signalman, married May Mitchell’s sister Cissy. David and Cissy had a daughter called Shona and a son called Iain McLaren Adamson. Alexander and Liz’s third son John was a civil servant. He married Sheila Thomson and they had a son, Donald Adamson, who has given me a lot of help with this narrative of the Hoggans.

Elizabeth Paton Adamson nee Hoggan died in Dunfermline in 1984 aged 92. Her grandson Donald describes her as being a great teller of stories and very much with it till the end.

The Canadian Hoggans

“Not far short of 2 million people emigrated from Scotland overseas between 1830 and 1914, a rate of outward movement that was around one and a half times that of England and Wales. This did not include another 600,000 who moved south of the border. The haemorrhage was so great that it placed Scotland near the top of the European emigration league along with Ireland and Norway. In the years of massive outward movement such as 1904-13, when more than 600,000 people left, Scotland achieved the unenviable position of topping this table, with the highest emigration rate of any country in Europe.” (T. M. Devine The Scottish Nation pp263-4)

It is surprising that only one of Marion’s siblings chose to emigrate. Her brother Richard (or Dick) moved to Ontario in Canada after the end of the First World War and worked in the car plants there.

During the Great War Dick had been a regimental piper in the Royal Scots Fusiliers along with his and Marion’s brother Harry. Dick ran a pipe band in Canada. Harry continued to play after the war in colliery based pipe bands around Stirlingshire, notably with the

Wallacestone Pipe band. Harry is believed to have written a pipe tune called ‘Stirling of Tarduf’ for the Stirling family who lived in the big Tarduf House in Loan village.

Sadly the whole family did not share Dick and Harry’s musical talents. As far as I could tell, Marion’s only interest in music was when she used to watch the hymn singing in ‘Songs of Praise’ on BBC TV on a Sunday evening.

Genealogist Rosemary Hoggan Hague lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her grandfather, Alexander Hoggan, was a great grandson of Robert Hoggan(5) and Jean Horne. Robert(5) and Jean’s son William, Matthew Hay Hoggan’s elder brother was born in 1807 and married Margaret Taylor, William and Margaret’s son John Hoggan was born in 1830 and married Catherine Logan in Denny. John and Catherine’s son, Alexander, was born in Stirlingshire in 1872 and worked as a coal miner. In 1894 he married Christina Hunter. In the same year Alexander and Christina emigrated to Merritt, British Columbia where they opened a hotel known as the Grand. Their son James Alexander Hoggan was born there in 1913. In 1934 James Alexander married Polish born Mary Romaine (originally Romaniuk). Their son, another James, was born in 1935 and Rosemary followed fifteen years later in 1950. Rosemary’s parents were married in the Grand Hotel and ran it for many years.

I will leave it to someone else to work out exactly what kind of cousin Rosemary is to the rest of us.

Rosemary’s web site is a must for anyone with any interest in Hoggan genealogy. It lists 18,549 people, 673 with the surname Hoggan. As far as I can tell we’re all there, but she is very happy to receive additions and corrections if you notice any. Many of the photos will seem familiar, as I’ve sent her quite a few over the years.

https://rosemary2000.tribalpages.com password ‘alexander’

While we’re on the subject of web sites, Donald Adamson’s is also worth checking out. I am indebted to him for much of the material in this account.

https://www.donald-adamson.co.uk/family-history/

Douglas Brown if I can find an address

Ordnance Survey map of Muiravonside in 1899. Marion was born in 1897 in the Loan Village at the eastern end of the row of cottages at the junction leading up to Thorn Cottage. The Hoggans later moved to the south side of Almond next to the canal bridge. Tarduf House is visible west of the Loan. The Muir Wood is referred to as the ’Mair Wood’ by Marion and Almond castle as ‘Haining Castle’. Near Almond Castle is the Manse where Marion was married to Pat Redmond and Muiravonside Churchyard which contains memorials to Marion and Pat, her parents, her children Allison and Jim and many of her siblings and cousins.

The site of the Redding colliery is further north of this map along the canal bank. Redford, Standburn and Slammannan are further west as is the site of Easter Drumclair where Matthew Hay Hoggan had his mines and where Marion’s father David Hoggan was born.

Part of the Hoggan Family Tree

John Hoggan (1)=1580=Bessie Wilson Fife?

John Hoggan (2)=1624=Cicile Glenn Fife|

Robert Hoggan (1)=6.7.1652=Bessie Potter Fife|

George Hoggan=20.7.1686=Katharine Dick left Fife for Bo’ness|

Robert Hoggan (2)=21.4.1709=Agnes Westwater Bo’ness|

Robert Hoggan (3)=1739?=Susanna Lumsdale Bo’ness|

Robert Hoggan (4)=1.7.1758=Mary Love Bo’ness|

Robert Hoggan (5)=1.3.1802=Jean Horne Denny|

Matthew Hay Hoggan=7.9.1844=Elizabeth Paton Slammanan =1.10.1869=Margaret Alexander Gray

|David Hoggan=27.2.1885=Allison Wilson Muiravonside

|Marion Hoggan=20.9.1918=Patrick Redmond Muiravonside,

| Edinburgh, Frinton |

James(1918), Allison(1920), David Hoggan(1925), Eileen Patricia(1932)

This is just a key to the basic narrative. The many missing names from each generation can be found in the text. The complete tree is on Rosemary Hoggan Hague’s web

site.

Marion’s hand-written account of the family naming system