Interviews

One interviewee even remembered how the village boys would wait for someone to head out to the outside toilet before peppering the roof with stones. They made their own entertainment in the good old days right enough. Modern plumbing and sanitation, though, made a huge change to people’s lives in the 1960s and 1970s. And I’m not just saying that because I am the son of a plumber.

The Galloway Glens is largely a rural area. Many people grew up on farms or in farm cottages. Others, like myself, in small villages. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s, many of these villages which are “quiet” now were busy hubs for the local area. My father, who was born in 1931, listed several businesses in the Rhonehouse he grew up in: a blacksmith, a cobbler, a tailor, a builder and a market gardener among others.

Holidays abroad or at least some distance away from home are now commonplace, but in the past holidays were often a week staying with relatives who might be just a bus ride away. Or much longer bus ride away.

As well as the shops and a visit to the nearest “toon”, the villages were well-served by vans that sold everything from luxuries like ice-cream to necessities like brushes, dusters and cleaning stuffs. In the 1970s, Iain Murray’s fish and chip van made the rounds. The modern equivalent is a pizza wagon. Culinary taste, as well as plumbing, changes over time. There was a butcher’s van, a baker’s van, a fish van, while a wider selection of foodstuffs could be had from Lipton’s van or Coopers’ van. A fortnightly visit by the library van kept villagers supplied with reading material.

Most people I spoke to seem to have enjoyed school. This was probably because, as Anne Howie who grew up on a farm near Ringford pointed out, school was where you met your pals who might live some distance from you. Time out of school was mostly spent at home, either working, doing chores, or playing with your siblings. Children generally walked to school. Agnes McQueen remembers walking four miles a day from High Banks to school in Kirkcudbright. “The belt”, applied to a child’s outstretched hands, was a regular feature of school life for most of the last century. Use of a leather strap or “tawse” to encourage students to improve their spelling or help with their “sums” was only made illegal in 1987.

Hilda McAdam remembered the good old days when teachers were also adept at throwing wooden-backed blackboard dusters across a classroom to help students pay attention. People remembered lessons in science, in cooking, in “sums”, P.E. or “drill” as it was known. Teachers themselves were recalled, some of them with fondness. Others not quite so much! Kate Kaye, herself now a Nursery teacher, waxed lyrical about the shoes one of her teachers wore. When she described them to me it was if she could still see them in her mind’s eye all those years later. And while you are smiling at that, I bet you can probably remember similar details about your own teachers’ dress-sense just as much as the Maths or English they taught you.

When “the happiest days of your life” were over, generally at thirteen or fifteen, remember, it was time to enter the world of work. Nowadays many young people stay on at school and study to get into college or university. There are many more opportunities for them and one of the problems in the Glens area is hanging on to its young people who often have to move away for work or further education. When Agnes McQueen left school she was, she said, more or less expected to work on the farm “for nothing” as she put it. She would have loved to have trained as a nurse but that course wasn’t open to her in the 1930s. She did, eventually, find work with a local vet where she helped with work around the home and learned how to answer the new-fangled telephone and speak to the public on behalf of the vet. She learned a whole new set of social skills.

Before the increased mechanisation of farming following World War Two, many people worked on the land as people had done here for centuries. In the agricultural economy right up to the 1970s there was a very definite sense of what work happened at a particular time.

Despite that he does recognise that some things have actually changed; dipping is now completely different from his own day when, after clipping, the sheep were pushed through the dip then out into a cement-floored stone bucht before being released into freedom while any excess dip flowed back out of the “dreeper” into the dipping bath.

The job would have been carried out by several people. Now his son does it by himself. The other great change, of course, concerns the economic viability of small hill farms. David himself thinks that when his son retires most of the land will become forested as the forestry industry expands more and more into this century.

For Tommy Thomson, the biggest changes in farming have come as a result of BSE then the Foot and Mouth epidemic of the early 2000s. Despite these changes and shifts in land-use, opened up work opportunities for others. John McCubbing worked in the forestry for many years and enjoyed the hard but rewarding work.

But work, as we know, is not everything, and many people described leisure activities that were common in the Glens over the years. Some of these are still around, some have disappeared.

I can remember building tunnels and walls with newly-cut grass on the Rhonis Hill when I was a boy. So it wasn’t just the girls who made wee hooses and dens though I don’t know if there was that much interaction between the sexes. We also built wooden huts from cast-off bits of wood and sacking. The Rhonis boys, the big boys, had a famous tree hut in the early 1960s in the Knackery Wuid. The nailed-on ladder for climbing up deliberately, and frustratingly, started beyond the reach of us smaller boys.

Hilda McAdam remembered that in the summer time, “parents came out at night” and there would be games of rounders, something that Kate Kaye also remembered from Crossmichael. Football was a great sport for boys especially. It might be a rowdy kick-a-bout with ever-changing personnel as various players were called in for their tea or because it was their bed-time. Teams could be well over the official eleven a side and the game would be played until darkness made it impossible to continue. There might be goalposts or there might just be jerseys laid down as goalposts. Adults, though, also played, and many villages had their own official teams who competed against each other. During the war there were several women’s teams too, and nowadays many girls also play football.

Games would be watched by most of the villagers who would gather for a blether even if they weren’t all that bothered about the sport itself. These were great times for children who could stay up late and basically have fun listening in to adult conversations they weren’t supposed to hear, or just having a good “cairry-on”. The same was true of quoiting matches though both football and quoiting seem to have died out in the early 1960s, at least in terms of whole-village participation .

In Rhonehouse the quoiting green, which is now a car park, was a great hub of activity for children and adults alike during the long light nights of summer. For the adults (men) the game consisted of throwing heavy iron rings or quoits for twenty-two yards to land on or near an iron pin in a clay bed. Tournaments went on for hours and it was not uncommon for scraps of paper to be placed beside the pin so the whiteness of the paper might help the quoiter’s aim in the failing light. If the light got really bad these scraps of paper were sometimes set alight. Children delighted in being party to these adult goings-on.

Kick-the-can and rounders were also favourite games with parents sometimes joining in with the children, Hilda McAdam remembers. John McCubbing also remembers inter-village sports.

John McCubbing also remembers a lot of tree climbing and playing in the burn. In winter he remembered a curling pond. In Rhonehouse a small hollow in a field froze over each winter, and “Meekie’s Pond” became a skating rink for a few days. Not everyone had skates but we could all skite across the ice, hoping it wasn’t going to give way. Even if it had, it wasn’t very deep so it was a safe place for children to play. Years later, reading the skating episode in Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem The Prelude at Edinburgh University I was assailed by memories of Meekie’s Pond, and the icy slides we made on the hill behind the village school. These were simple, almost visceral pleasures which helped children develop balance, strength and confidence. John McCubbing commented that the games he played outside were very different from the indoor computer games children play now. He is not decrying the computer, which was a great boon to him during the Covid pandemic, but simply pointing out that as a child his reality was physical rather than virtual.

The “boolin” (bowls) was also a popular game for adults, outside on the boolin green in the summer then indoors as carpet bowls in the winter, a tradition that still continues in many places. Village halls were hotbeds of badminton too until very recently though with the advent of gyms and games halls and modern facilities (including showers for instance) that tradition is perhaps dying out. The women of the villages and surrounding areas also went to “the Rural”, or the Women’s Rural Institute, once a month. In many communities institutions like The Rural or the Church Guild provided places where people could meet, chat, and discuss local and national issues. The community aspect of these gatherings was important in countering that social isolation which is now being recognised as a very serious social problem. Following the Covid-19 pandemic and the restrictions around people meeting together many such organisations have either ceased to exist or are having difficulty finding members as people are less inclined to gather socially in halls or meeting rooms.

Andy Campbell remembers the beginnings of the Stewartry Rugby Club in the early 1970s. He was a keen player himself, having played while studying at Loughborough College then as a much-travelled player for Langholm. In helping to get the Stewartry club going he remembers the hard work and input of local farmer Mungo Bryson and many members of the local Young Farmers’ Club. The club has now become part of the fabric of Stewartry life and while in the early days it was very much a male preserve, it now boasts women’s and girls’ teams.

As children grew older their minds turned to other things and many of my interviewees spoke of the excitement of going to dances where they could meet other young people and possibly life partners. The bicycle was a great help in this as before people had cars transport was limited to buses which might not always run at the right time for the dances. So many of them, male and female, took to their bikes. In my own day there was a lot of walking and hitching lifts to get to dances in different towns and village halls in the Stewartry. Hilda McAdam remembers riding as a pillion passenger on a motor bike to dances in places like Moniaive, over the hill from Dalry. David Wallace used his Norton Dominator motor bike to travel from the Glenkens to Cumnock to see his girlfriend, Frances, who later became his wife.

The dances at The Whinnieliggate seem to have been very popular and Knockvennie Hall was mentioned too. “Coortin”, though, was a topic many of my interviewees were reticent about but I did discover that there is a “kissing tree” in New Galloway. Going to “the pictures” was a favourite outing for courting couples. Sitting side by side in the double seats at the back of the cinema was much more comfortable and much warmer than trysting outside.

Scottish country dance band music was all the rage until replaced by jiving, twisting and less structured modern styles.

Personally I don’t remember singing in my own family but I do remember visitors and relatives telling stories round the fire at night. Sometimes there might even be some poetry. The stories would often be reminiscences of people long gone or daft things people in the family or village had done. This habit gradually declined after the coming of television. It still exists though in a much simpler fashion. The habit of “comin in for a bit crack” was very common here before it became a buzz-word which now has to spelled the Irish way as “craic”. Michty me, how things have changed.

Several people made it very clear that the changing of the seasons made a big difference to people’s recreational activities. Andy Campbell even pointed out that there were seasonal changes in the games children played. Extra cover of darkness made it ideal for certain activities requiring one not to be seen, eg. by those whose doors you had ”chapped” before running away. It seems an obvious point but I think it is worth recording because it shows that, as we might expect, rural people tend to be more aware of the passing of the seasons than city-dwellers but it also shows that this awareness gave an underlying framework to their lives. For better or for worse, there was a pattern to the way people lived. And in a new time of automated working, travelling to another town or even country to work, and now with a great number of people working from home with the help of the internet and the mobile phone this pattern is much less obvious. Changes in farming methods and the effects of climate change have also blurred the outlines of this pattern.

The recorded interviews will be archived by Galloway Glens and include : “potted biographies” of people from different walks of life; information about changes in land-use and farming; comments on environmental change, and comments on our changing way of life in the area covered by the Galloway Glens project. They include different speakers speaking in their own unique voices, revealing the humour and humanity that is a striking feature of these voices from the glen.

I’d like to leave you with two very different clips that might suggest something of the variety of voices and subject matter in the recordings.