Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

I take out the Magical Memory Box once again and find some holiday snaps in my mother’s photo album where she has written a note saying, “West Ferry – 1953”. If it wasn’t for this piece of information, I wouldn’t have been able to place the photos in a geographical or time framework. 

It brought me back to the times when we had summer holidays of a least one week’s duration in the North of England, Scotland, or Wales. We sometimes rented a holiday cottage from the National Trust, which we booked well in advance – so it required a lot of planning. At other times we rented a caravan – this had the advantage that you could tour around. 

In this West Ferry holiday in 1953, when I must have been about four years old, we are staying in a caravan, which seems to be a stationary one. The name ‘West Ferry’ in itself is confusing, as there is more than one ‘West Ferry’ in Scotland. However, these photos are not of West Ferry, Dundee, but the smaller place, ‘West Ferry’ facing Dumbarton Castle across the Clyde. This becomes evident due to the unmistakeable ‘Dumbarton Rock’⁴⁸ in one of the photos, despite it being misty.  

This holiday was perhaps in July-August 1953 since I remember that the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place in 2 June 1953; that means we were living at 3 York Avenue in Culcheth, Lancashire. If that was the case, it probably involved quite a long trek in the old Wolseley 12 from Culcheth to West Ferry (over 200 miles!). This makes it quite possible that we had camped in tents on the road to West Ferry. Regardless, the details are really vague here.  

Comment: I won’t delve into the psychology of childhood memory – but common sense tells us that we remember very little before the age of three, and that memories between the ages of three and nine are at best vague.  

My parents probably took the opportunity to visit my Auntie Violet in Glasgow (about 20 miles to the east of West Ferry) which wasn’t too far away; or also took the opportunity to visit Dunoon (about 30 miles to the north-west), where my family had lived before.  Despite the haziness of my memory (well – I was only three-four years’ old!), I still remember it ‘bodily’; this holiday, like others, was a time when we always had a good time (which wasn’t always the case with home life). So I include the photos here and let them speak for themselves. Moreover, my father’s Kodak camera has a better ‘memory’ than me. 

My mother and father — affectionate in the ‘early’ days of marriage.

Brothers not so affectionate! Maybe I’m at the bottom!

Sandy and Stuart in sleeping bags (perhaps it was chilly).
My brothers slept in the tent, while my parents slept in the caravan. 

Perhaps me and Alistair slept in the caravan.

My father dressed in colonial style ‘camping’ clothes; Dumbarton Rock in the background. 

My mother in ‘non-camping’ full length summer dress. 

You can check more of her fashionable dresses in my post: Rhoda’s Fashion in the 1950s

Fuzzy picture of Dumbarton Rock as seen from West Ferry across the Clyde. 

⁴⁸ Dumbarton Rock is a hill in Scotland and has an elevation of 135 feet. It is situated nearby to Dumbarton Castle. It is a geological formation known as a “volcanic plug”, formed by prehistoric build-up of igneous basalt.