Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

Before I return to the photos and events in my parents’ life around 1940, I’d like to take the time to introduce some of my mother’s friends and members from the wider family around that time. I have done the same about my father’s family in this separate post.

There is an irony here. My mother was a keeper of records. She also kept the old photos of my father’s extended family, yet only had a few photographs of her parents, most of her mother, and none of her grandparents. On the other hand, my father had more photos. 

As discussed elsewhere, my mother was mainly from a working-class background. My father had more pretensions to be middle class or the very least, lower middle class. In other words, if you were middle-class, you could document your family history by taking photos. Unlike today, photography was an expensive pastime in the past and often beyond the reach of most working-class families. Thus, the irony here is that although my father was not that interested in documenting his family history (as opposed to my mother, who was), I actually have more evidence of my father’s life than of my mother due to the various ‘vague’ photos, as well as military records, employment testimonials of my father, and so on.

Of course, another thought here is that my mother had four siblings – so it is likely that they have many documents and photos – as they were still living together with their parents (my grandparents) after my mother married in 1940. On the other hand, my father was an only child, so he ended up with all the family’s memorabilia. Why was he the only child? This was unusual at the time. But this is another mystery that will go unanswered. 

Visiting Eigg

When I visited Eigg in 2006 and then in 2007, I went to the schoolhouse to look at the Isle of Eigg Photo Archive.¹ However, without a guide, it was difficult to understand the stories behind the photos. I was able to look through some of them, but didn’t have enough time to examine them closely.

I didn’t come across any photographs of my mother in the Eigg photo archive; this could be due in part to the fact that she only visited Eigg perhaps once after getting married. The family had already moved away from Scotland after a few years.

Despite not finding photos of my mother in the Eigg photo archive, I was surprised to find old photographs of my aunts and uncle. My mother has four siblings: the eldest, Alick, her younger sister Flora, the fourth child called Donald, and the youngest named Violet. Some of the photos show Violet, Donald and Flora (the K & D MacKinnon Collection and the M & C Campbell collection).

The pictures in this section are from around the time of my parents’ wedding in 1940. However, I don’t know the exact dates of the Eigg Archive photos, except for two pictures from Auntie Flora’s wedding. Nevertheless, I’ve included them in this section for thematic reasons.

Alick MacGillivray (1919)

My mother stayed in contact with all of her siblings, but she perhaps had the least contact with Alick. I don’t know an awful lot about Alick, apart from the fact that he spent his entire life in Glasgow or the surrounding area. He worked as a clerk and was married to Margaret Marshall. He died in 1990 at the age of 70. According to my younger brother Gavin, he was injured in the last week of World War II, and the injury plagued him for the rest of his life. He was a lance corporal and served in the “Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders”.

 Flora MacNaughton MacGillivray (Born 1926)

The photo shows Flora around the age of 16, so it must have been taken during the Second World War.

Flora’s wedding will be discussed briefly in Volume II, but I will include some ‘compressed’ photos here. Of course,  it was also no surprise that the K & D MacKinnon collection includes photos from Flora’s wedding in Glasgow. Not only were Katie MacKinnon and Flora cousins, but Flora was also her best friend and bridesmaid at her wedding.²

In other words, K & D MacKinnon’s collection included Flora’s wedding photos either because Flora mailed Katie the photos, or because Katie was simply there together with the other relatives. I think I even attended the wedding, but I don’t remember it because I was only two or three years old at the time. Auntie Violet was also shown here as a bridesmaid.

 In fact, one of the wedding photos shows Katie’s younger sister Morag at the wedding, so it’s a safe bet that Katie also attended the wedding as well. However, there is also another explanation. Morag worked as a matron at the Ophthalmic Institute in Glasgow (Communn Eachdraidh Eige, p. 47), and she stayed at my mother’s family’s house in Glasgow (although I’m unsure of the dates here).

My mother also received a much better-quality photo of their wedding (than the Eigg archive).  From the left it shows my mother, Rhoda, Uncle Alick, Auntie Violet, Robert Ralston (the groom), and Flora (the bride); the people to the right of Flora in the photo must be Robert Ralston’s family.

Uncle Donald (Born 1927)

There appears to be a photo of Uncle Donald³ as a young man with Dugald MacKinnon from the K & D MacKinnon collection. The copy of the photo is not very good, as I had to improvise and didn’t have an adequate camera and equipment at the time. But the photo clearly shows Campbell’s (MacKinnon’s) ‘trademark’, a wild shock of curly black hair! He looks to be about 20 years old or older in the photo, so it was probably taken sometime after the end of WWII.

Violet MacGillivray (born 1932)

My mother was closest to her youngest sister, Violet. The girls in the photo look like they are twelve or thirteen years old; this photo was probably taken sometime during the Second World War. Violet is the girl on the left. 

The other photos showing Auntie Violet also seem to be from sometime after the end of the Second World War because she looks about sixteen or older. These photos were from the M & C Campbell collection.  She probably traveled with her brother Donald to visit their Campbell and MacKinnon relatives on the island. 

¹ Eigg Photo Archive. The Isle of Eigg History Society has a collection of about 3,000 old photographs. 

² Harkness, Ian. The Isle of Eigg and the Story of Some of its People. 2008 and 2022 (2nd edition).

³ Donald MacGillivray (Born: 26 March 1927 at 12 Vulcan Street, Springburn, Glasgow).