CONTENTS Notes from the Chair & Archive

Issue No. 28 April 2010

The King James VI Hospital, Perth.

CONTENTS page

Notes from the Chair & Archive News 2 King James VI Hospital Foundation; the early centuries 5 The Foundation as a property developer in 19thC. Perth 10 Dr Mary Young, 1948—2010 12 800th birthday for Perth’s Charter 14 The William the Lion Charter in Translation 17 Exploring the history of schools in a Perthshire Village 18 Professor Donald McIntyre 1923—2009 19 The Black Art of using Search Engines 20 Worth a look; The Perth Theatre Collection 1935—1938 24 Notes from the Chair

There must be some truth in the saying that time flies when one's enjoying one- self, because it seems no time since our last Newsletter in October!

Our AGM is on Thursday 27 May at 6.30pm. Please do consider in advance of the meeting whether you could make any spare time to contribute to the Friends by serving on the committee. This is particularly important this year, as three slots are becoming free: those of chair- man, secretary and committee member. It goes almost without saying that we cannot manage without a secretary – and Christine will be a hard act to follow! If you feel you might be able to serve as a committee member, do please contact myself or anyone else on the current committee.

One of our Life Members, Dr David Munro Robertson, has just printed his attractively illustrated book on the Highland Perthshire artist, Andrew Scott Rankin. Copies of the book, which involved some research in the Archive reading room, the National Archives of Scotland and Local Studies, are now on sale in the Library and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Alyth oral history project is pro- ceeding slowly but surely, as the Friends interview volunteers about their wartime memories.

Friends who were able to attend Derek Hall's talk in October on Scottish Mo- nastic Landscapes have confirmed how interesting it was. To my knowledge, at least two Friends have subsequently ordered his book on the subject. Curiously, our own Archive contains an 18th century letter detailing medieval ecclesiastical establishments in the South-West of Scotland and Cumbria.

Our first meeting of 2010 concerned a Perthshire "nabob" and Enlightenment Man, Alexander Dow, and his links with well-known smugglers in Berwickshire. Derek Janes, the curator of Gunsgreen House in Eyemouth, described to us

FRIENDS of P&KC ARCHIVE, AK Bell Library, York Place, PERTH PH2 8EP Scottish Registered Charity No. SCO315 Tel: ( 01738 ) 477012 Email: [email protected]. Hon. Presidents; The Provost; Sir Wm. Macpherson of Cluny and Blairgowrie; Mr Donald Abbott Editor: David Wilson

how the smugglers adapted this house with secret hiding places. He is still researching the various characters in his story and hopes to ublish his find- ings by 2012.

We now look forward to Lindsay Farquharson's talk on Wednesday 21 April on Bridging Perthshire's Past, the project she is managing for the Perth & Kinross Heritage Trust. It is hard to imagine Perthshire without the great roads and bridges built by General Wade, his successor Major Caulfield and others, but there are also many overgrown tracks and ruined bridges, now abandoned, which once formed part of the Wade network.

Our AGM will be followed by a talk from another archaeologist, Dr Birgitta Hoffmann on Excavating Perthshire's Landscape – in the Archive. The speaker is very well known as an expert on the Gask Ridge in Roman times, but on this occasion she will be describing her project to reconstruct pre-17th century landscapes by using archival sources.

Looking forward to seeing you on the 21st of April and at the AGM on the 27th of May.

Margaret Borland-Stroyan

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Archive News

Well, the last few weeks have been quite hectic here (so what’s new, I hear you cry). Where shall I start? First, John, our work experience student, has been joined by Zoe, each coming in one day a week to learn the art of archiv- ing while they study for their diploma in Archives and Records Management. Needless to say, they are helping us a great deal as well as gaining invaluable on-the-job training.

Also, we’ve been working on the Heraldry 800 schools project with the Friends, which is proving just a touch more complex than we first thought, but should hopefully prove to be a valuable resource for pupils throughout P&K. Come the summer, we’ll also be partners in another project closely

3 associated with the Perth 800 celebrations – one led by the YMCA, so watch this space for news.

As usual, we’ve been giving talks to local groups (it was one of these that led to the YMCA project), hosting visits to the Archive itself and putting up dis- plays. One of the most rewarding was when we attended the International Women’s Day at the beginning of March with a display board featuring records that related to women over the centuries. The response from attendees was so gratifying, we hope to see a few of them visiting us. Surprisingly, when we were researching the collections for documents, we realized we could have had a much bigger display, there was so much we could have shown. And thanks to the efforts of Hilary, one of our Friends volunteers, who produced the Women’s Sources database, we had a first-rate guide to where to look for material.

But the most exciting news is that our Artist in the Archive project is now complete! Artist Kyra Clegg has produced two amazing multi-media exhibi- tions based on the collections we hold: Archived. Artworks and videos can be seen in both the AK Bell Library and Perth Theatre – and the videos can be viewed on the Archive’s web pages. Just log on to www.pkc.gov.uk/ archives and follow the links. Finally, we’re also continuing to respond to the results of the Preservation Survey we completed, primarily by re-boxing and wrapping items to ensure their longer-term survival. And we’ve been continuing with our daily work as usual, answering enquiries, helping researchers and accepting accessions – including minutes from Perth Lawn Tennis Club, 1882-1904 (ACC10/07). We’ve also managed to list one or two collections, including that of The Indigent Old Women's Society, Perth and Perth Ladies Clothing Society, 1806-1978 c(MS299), which includes some descriptions of living conditions in early 19th century Perth. So, come and have a look at Archived, and for those of you with internet access, also have a look at Perth – a place in history, also on our web pages. I’ll tell you more about this in the next issue, but meanwhile, I’d be in- terested in your thoughts. Jan Merchant

THE KING JAMES VI HOSPITAL FOUNDATION

The handsome four-storey building in Hospital street in Perth is a puz- zle. It is clearly eighteenth century in style, but the inscription on the front says ‘Founded by King James VI in 1587’. In fact the charter setting up the foundation was given to Perth in 1569 (by the Regent Moray; James was two years old at the time). And it was not to be a hospital in our sense; its purpose was to provide relief and ‘hospitality’ for those in need, or in this case, ‘the poor, maimed, weak, distressed persons, orphans and fatherless children within the Burgh of Perth’ in the words of the original charter. So far as is known, it only had a small infirmary section for about fifty years in the late 1700s. Its origins lay in the shattering events in the city ten years earlier. In July 1559, Perth had been the epicentre of the Protestant revolution, in which the city’s three Friaries and its Charterhouse monastery had been destroyed by furious mobs. Was it iconoclastic zeal, righteous anger at ecclesiastical

Perth on the 12th of May 1559; the Sacking of the Friaries and the Monastery ( but Whitefriars, which should be at the far end of the banana-shaped High St., is missing )

Picture courtesy of Local Studies, AK Bell Library 5 luxury, mere delight in licensed mayhem? Or was it set up by the reformers in order to silence powerful opponents in the propaganda wars of that era – the friars’ original vocation being to defend Catholic doctrine by preaching in the marketplace? But from the outset, the truth about what then moved people to act as they did was obscured by partisan polemics (John Knox’s own history being among the least credible). The outcome of these dramatic events was not merely the physical destruc- tion of some renowned buildings and the dispersal of the friars. A vestigial ‘safety net’ for poorer citizens in times of dire need lay buried in the ruins of the friaries that, ironically, they themselves may have helped to destroy. It had long been an article of faith that clergy and laity had a duty to aid ‘poor members of Jesus Christ’ in need. For centuries, friaries had been showered with donations by the faithful for that purpose. Though much of this wealth stayed with the friars themselves, at least a fraction of it used to reach its in- tended recipients. Now even that little was gone, at a time when the poor of the towns were being hurt by rapid money inflation and trade dislocation, and when the climate had quite suddenly worsened, to the point where in some years (most notably in 1563) actual famine stalked the land.

For years, neither the Crown nor the infant Kirk could fill the gap, because the income, whether in money or the produce of the land, was no longer available. The once enormous assets of the church had been rapidly ‘privatised’ by the most astute, the most powerful and the well-connected. At a national level, the winners were the nobility, court favourites, lawyers and the like; at the level of the Burgh, it meant the burgesses, councillors, lawyers and local landowners. And friars and clergy colluded eagerly in the disposing of assets at giveaway rates to secure their own fragile futures.

At this period, the Crown was far too weak to prevent the nobility from get- ting hold the lion’s share of church property after the Kirk had deducted its third share to provide for its ministers. In contrast, the Royal Burghs had to be more subservient to the Crown because their privileges were entirely de- pendent on royal decrees and charters. In a period full of novel dangers, the Regent would have had a strong motive to restore an effective system of poor relief to damp down social unrest or popular disillusionment with the new religious dispensation. During the 1560s therefore, the Crown issued several charters setting up ‘Hospital’ or sometimes ‘Hospitality’ foundations in several large Burghs in aid of the distressed poor, although Perth had to wait until 1569 for its charter.

It was a remarkable document. With few exceptions, it assigned to ‘the poor members of Jesus Christ, now and to come’ the whole of the property and other sources of income that used to belong to the churches, chapels, friaries and monasteries within the Burgh. It was startlingly frank about the frauds and col- lusions that had taken place at the time of the Reformation and after;

“....considering the great fraud openly known of no small numbers of prebendaries, chaplains and friars who, at the time of the reformation of religion gave away to particular persons lands, ground annuals and tenements ....and as divers of our subjects claiming or pretending rights to certain lands and ground annuals and tenements, have been granted feus in them even though they were formerly founded and given to the church, which happened partly by negligence of the officers and masters of our said Burgh, and partly by col- lusion of the aforesaid chaplains, prebendaries and friars,

WE DO UNITE AND INCORPORATE all and hail the foresaid lands, tenements, houses, biggings (buildings) kirks, kirkyards, chaplainries, orchards, yards, crofts, annual rents, ground annuals, farms, fruits, duties, profits, emoluments, alms, silver for the dead, anniversaries, friar’s places or houses, to be called in all time coming our Foundation of the Hospital of our said Burgh.”

So at one comprehensive stroke it overturned each and every misappropriation of rights or property, however legally dressed up, and put everything together in a new foundation to be managed by Masters appointed by the Kirk Session. Pointedly, the local worthies of the Burgh Council were excluded from its management — the Regent presumably knew his men — so ensuring their undying enmity towards the Foundation. But they could bide their time.... It all looked magnificent on parchment, but the reality was very different. Peo- ple were aware that the king was an infant, and that the charter could be re- voked when he came of age, and in the meantime held on to their spoils. The situation improved for a while after the charter was confirmed in 1592, and the Hospital Masters were at last able to make some rudimentary provision of shel- ter for the poor by converting the semi-derelict Our Lady’s Chapel on the North Shore into a house of refuge and a school for needy children. But worse days were to come. The worthies of the town council, slighted by their exclusion, had never accepted the rights of the Foundation to its income from the important Blackfriars and Charterhouse lands, and were determined to get their hands on them again. In 1616 they struck; somehow they had man-

The Macfarlane map of 1792: the great development of the Hospital lands has just started.

8 aged to get their placemen onto the Kirk Session and among the Masters. Now the Kirk Session had to accept the town’s provost as an ex officio member, and the Masters of the Foundation were now obliged to take his advice on all money matters. The outcome was inevitable. The income from Blackfriars and Charterhouse lands now went straight into the Burgh’s coffers, and over the coming years, many Hospital assets ended up in the hands of the Burgh or individuals. It was a turning point for the Foundation; having lost over half its income, it was hard put to carry out its duty to the poor. And what made things worse was the fact that, as the hospital management was now under the Council’s thumb, it would not try very hard to retrieve the alienated lands. It also en- sured that what funds remained would often be used for purposes that had nothing to do with the Foundation, like this payment the managers made in 1624;

“Forasmeikle as John Davidson has had extraordinary pains writing out the deposition of witches last year, the Masters of the Hospital are indebted to discharge him from the annuals of his lands”

This barefaced usurpation by the Burgh was to last from 1616 until 1733 — during which time it paid the Hospital Foundation not a penny towards the maintenance of the poor. Thus, in 1655, when Cromwell demolished the Our Lady’s Chapel to provide stone for his fortress on the South Inch, the Foun- dation was quite unable (or unwilling) to afford a substitute building, and in- credibly, it carried on without one for over a century. It followed that what little income it still had would be used for ‘out relief’’ — small doles to of the poor, aged and infirm. Apart from that, it seems to have spent a century in virtual hibernation.

And then, in the 1730s, an energetic minister gave the Foundation a new lease of life. A long drawn out lawsuit against the Council recovered the lost income from the Charterhouse and Blackfriars feus, and even more remarka- bly, got back some of the 130 years’ of arrears it was owed by the Burgh. For once flush with cash and ambition, the managers and the Kirk Session im- mediately set about designing a new, rather grandiose building (the one that still stands) , which ultimately combined a poorhouse, workshops, an indus- trial school to train needy children in trades, a small infirmary (at last), and,

ominously, a ‘correction house’ or ‘home for vagrants’ for which they re- ceived money from the Justices of the Peace. The poor are clearly no longer “the poor members of Jesus Christ” with certain rights, but becoming an ‘underclass’ to be feared and controlled.

The new house opened in 1752. It was to have an unhappy history, probably because its functions were too disparate for the Masters to successfully manage. In 1786, a committee of the Kirk concluded that the condition of both the eighteen adults and twenty children in the house “was most miserable, and that they had been grossly neglected and wronged.” In 1814, they gave up, rented out most of the building, and reverted to the custom of merely providing rather parsimonious ‘out relief’ for a tithe of the Burgh’s poor. How the Kirk Session and the Masters would carry out the intentions of the infant King James during the next two centuries is the subject of the follow- ing article. David Wilson 10

THE KING JAMES VI HOSPITAL IN THE 19TH CENTURY

Chris Paton

For a recent postgraduate course, I had to come up with a subject of ‘genealogical interest’ for my final year dissertation. With my origins firmly rooted in Perth, I decided to look into the history of an institution that has existed there for 450 years. As I buried myself in the research, I not only uncovered a fascinating aspect of the town’s history, but also made several finds directly related to my own family.

Established in 1569, the Hospital Foundation still exists, but its building in Hospi- tal Street ceased to function for its original purposes in 1814, and has long since been converted into a set of flats. While many of its earliest records are kept in the National Archives of Scotland, the more recent documents are held in private hands. It was from these that I was able to reconstruct the Foundation’s role as a Feudal Superior in the 19th Century. But what was feudalism, and why are its records so illuminating for a researcher?

Feudalism was common in England until the sixteenth century, but in Scotland did not nominally end until the Abolition of Feudal Tenure Act of 2000.

It concerned a series of relationships between ‘vassals’ and ‘superiors’, with the monarch being the highest superior, holding Scotland ‘on behalf of God’. Ar- eas of the country were parcelled out into ‘feus’ to various high-ranking nobles or institutions, who duly became the monarch’s vassals, and who paid a ‘feu duty’ for the privilege. Once the agreement had been recorded in a charter, and various legal processes had been completed, they became ‘infeft.’ In turn, these vassals could then carve the land up further, and become superiors themselves, with their own vassals, and so on. Feus were hereditary, meaning that the land could be passed on to an heir after death, who would continue to pay the feu duty to his or her superior.

To clarify the arrangement between the Hospital Foundation and its members, documents known as ‘charters’ were drawn up, recorded in ledgers called ‘chartularies’, which set out an agreement on how the land should be managed and the annual feu duty payable. ‘Charters of feu ’ were given for newly created feus, whilst ‘charters of confirmation’ were issued to new owners of feus which had been purchased from another of the Hospital’s vassals, rather than

11 from the Hospital itself.

For a researcher, one of the great joys about all these charter types is that they can provide a history of all the previous transactions that affected the land in question right back to the point of the feu’s creation. They also list the surrounding proper- ties and owners in order to fix its location, and give details of the many legal processes and meetings that were held prior to the sale or inheritance. As such, they can be a brilliant but often under-used historical and genealogical resource.

Tracing Perth’s 19th Century Development in Feudal Records

In order to look at the chartularies, I had to seek permission from the National Register of Archives for Scotland to view these ledgers, which not only detailed all the Hospital’s land transactions throughout the nineteenth century, but also held many rental books for the second half of the century. Examining one transaction at a time revealed the pivotal role of the Hospital in Perth’s regeneration in the early 1800s, and the income it earned from it.

As a starting point, I needed to understand the state of the Hospital Foundation in 1800, and so I began by looking at earlier records. Thus I found that in 1760 the hospital managers had conveyed a large area of the town to a Lord John Murray of Pitnacree at a ridiculously de- flated price. These were the Blackfriars lands ( the same ones which only a few decades before, had been wrested back from the Burgh Council). Whilst continuing to pay an annual feu duty to the Hospital, Murray had in turn parcelled up the land further into smaller feus and duly made an enormous profit. By 1793, these lands had come into the posses- sion of a developer called Thomas Anderson, but a new Master and Session demanded a new arrangement, having realised that The Hospital’s Blackfriars Development (from Rapkin’s 1851 Plan) they had been clearly underval- ued some thirty years earlier. 12

Fortunately, Anderson accepted this, and a new agreement was drawn up, with the Hospital also concurring in his development plan to turn the Blackfriars into a major residential area. But five years later, Anderson suddenly went bankrupt, and his creditors sold them back to the Hospital. Wisely opting to continue with the development, the Foundation soon turned a substantial profit on the deal.

The Blackfriars developments were a major success, creating some of the town’s most iconic streets, such as Rose Terrace. It encouraged the managers to try again, and in 1803 it agreed to a development proposal from the Provost of Perth, Thomas Hay Marshall, for the south of the town. A major street plan to the south of the town centre was created, with many new feus identified and put up for sale. Further plans were created from the gardens in 1830 and 1836, and at another area known as Carr’s Croft in 1869.

One of the reasons why the Hospital Foundation kept on releasing new ground throughout the century was because the dues were paid at the rate established in the original charters, but over the years inflation gradually destroyed its purchas- ing power — so that by the year 2000, the cost of collecting the feu duties owed to the Foundation now exceeded the actual amount due to it. But the Foundation still functions, providing low-cost accommodation for Perth citizens in the converted building. To have survived for four-and-a-half centuries while still in some form meeting the founder’s objectives is surely no mean achievement.

A former BBC documentary maker, Chris Paton has a Postgraduate Diploma in Ge- nealogical Studies, and works as a professional in the field, running the Scotland’s Greatest Story family history research service at www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk. He also runs the Scottish Genealogy News and Events blog at www.ScottishAncestry.blogspot.com

Source Materials and Further Reading:

Foundation Charter 1569 and Confirmation Charter 1587, in R. Milne, page li et seq) Ecclesiastical Annals of Perth, R S Fittis 1885 History of the Reformation in Scotland, Book 2, John Knox, 1559 Rental Books of King James VI Hospital, Perth, 1569 to 1668, R. Milne (1891)

Traditions of Perth, Containing Sketches of the Manner and Customs of the Inhabitants, and Notices of Public Occurrences, George Penny (1836) at http://books.google.com

New and Revised Statistical Account of Perth, Rev. William Thomson (1837) at www.edina.ac.uk

13 Notes for Family History Researchers: Whilst many historic documents are held at the National Archives of Scotland, a great deal of Scottish material still remains in private hands. Much of this has been surveyed by the National Register of Ar- chives for Scotland, which can be searched at www.nas.gov.uk/onlineRegister. Whilst many collections are fully catalogued online, some are listed with brief descriptions only, but their full descriptions can be consulted at the NAS, the National Li- brary of Scotland or the National Archives at Kew. Once a collection is identified, you then write to the NRAS, which will forward on your request for access to the owner.

Scottish university and local archive material is not included; for these you will need to consult www.archiveshub.ac.uk or www.scan.org.uk.

Most records for early Scottish poor relief can be found within Kirk Session records at the National Archives of Scotland (www.nas.gov.uk/onlineCatalogue). C. P. Dr Mary Young, 1948-2010

It is with the deepest sadness that I write this obituary for Mary. Not only was she a valued colleague, but also a dear friend. We first met at Dundee Uni- versity Archive in the 1990s, when we were both working there while we studied for our doctorates. Instantly recognising each other as fellow Cumbri- ans (the accent gave us away) our personal and professional bonds grew as we worked together on the Glamis Castle papers and we stayed in close touch over the years. A countrywoman at heart, Mary was also a natural and gifted scholar. Mary’s research focused on rural history, and her PhD thesis on the agricultural development of the Carse of Gowrie was awarded a distinction. She contrib- uted regularly to journals and publications (most recently to Dundee from Renaissance to Enlightenment 1500 – 1820) and was a frequent visitor to the Archive. A driving force with the Abernyte Heritage Group, Mary authored Abernyte – the quiet revolution. Members may remember the oral history presentation that the Group gave, and from which the Friends pinched the idea for our own Alyth Wartime project! Not only was Mary a scholar, she was also a teacher of social history and palaeography (she was very patient with my poor palaeography skills as we deciphered the Glamis papers). Latterly, she had also been employed as Ar- chivist to the Mansfield Muniments and helped the P&KCA slavery project access related Mansfield material. Mary’s intelligence, kindness and dry humour made it a real pleasure to be in her company. She is profoundly missed by all her colleagues and friends. Jan Merchant

The William the Lion Charter of c.1210

The William the Lion charter is actually an early fourteenth century copy of a document dating from c1210. It is our oldest surviving burgh charter, but it was not the first. That was probably granted by King David I in 1127, but, like many historical documents, it has long been lost. There were also subsequent charters, which like the one of c.1210, granted various rights and privileges. These were all confirmed by King James VI in “The Golden Charter” of 1600, in which we find the earliest reference to Perth as a ‘City’. A full list of the charters relating to the burgh can be found in the Archive searchroom.

The William the Lion charter has provided the focal point for the city’s Perth 800 celebrations this year. And to ensure that it will be around for another 800 years or more, staff of the National Archive of Scotland's Conservation Services Unit offered to conserve it.

After treatment, the Unit told us that the fourteenth century copy of the 1210 William the Lion charter is a single sheet membrane, likely to be calf skin, while the writing ink is made of iron gall – both common materials of the period. Conservation of the charter included cleaning the areas of the charter where there was no ink, and repairing two small insect holes with pared,

15 Photos courtesy of NASCSU toned sheepskin parchment. A larger surface loss, probably due to a liquid spill, was repaired with toned calfskin.

The charter's seal had particularly suffered over the centuries. It had become detached from the document, and the seal itself is badly rubbed and chipped, causing a large loss of detail. The seal was cleaned with de-ionised water, and the edges reinforced with natural beeswax before being reattached to the charter. To complete the treatment, NAS staff then placed the Charter in a new custom-made display case.

Like most important early burgh documents, the William the Lion charter is written in Latin. Also, like other charters, it concentrates on trade, the life- blood of every burgh. Signed at Stirling on 10 October, it outlines some of the privileges and regulations of the royal burgh of Perth (see p.17).

Although it doesn’t look much, the William the Lion charter is of great sig- nificance for Perth. It’s normally kept by us here at P&KC Archive, but over the coming months the charter can be viewed as part of Perth Museum’s ex- hibition, ‘Skin and Bone - Life and Death in Medieval Perth’. It’s well worth a visit. Jan Merchant

The Perth Charter of William the Lion, c.1210

William, by the Grace of God King of Scots, to all good men both clergy and laity, greeting. I absolutely forbid any foreign merchant within the sheriffdom of Perth outside my burgh of Perth to sell or buy anything contrary to my prohibition, but a foreign merchant may come with his wares to my burgh of Perth, and there sell them and exchange his money. But if any foreign merchant contrary to this order of mine be found in the sheriffdom of Perth buying or selling anything, he may be arrested till I express my good pleasure in regard to him. Moreover, I absolutely forbid any foreign merchant to cut his cloth for sale in my burgh of Perth except from Ascension Day till the Bonds of St Peter, within which period I will that they themselves cut their cloths for sale in the market-place of Perth and there buy and sell their cloths and other wares in common with my burgesses as my dominican burgesses do ac- cording to my instructions. Moreover, I command that all who reside in my burgh of Perth and wish to trade with my burgesses, trade with them in the market-place with a view to paying my taxes whatever sort of men they may be. Moreover, I forbid anyone to keep a tavern in any town within the sheriffdom of Perth except where a person of knightly degree is lord of the manor and resides in it, and that he shall have only one single tavern. I also grant to my burgesses of Perth permission to have their own merchant guild, except the fullers and the weavers. Moreover, I absolutely forbid anyone residing outwith my burgh of Perth in the sheriffdom of Perth to make dyed or mixed cloth within the sheriffdom of Perth or to cause anyone to make it except my burgesses of Perth who are in the merchant guild, and who share the payment of my taxes with my burgesses, excepting those who have their own charter granting this liberty (thus far). So I absolutely forbid anyone in the sheriffdom of Perth to presume to make dyed or motley cloth under my full forfeiture. But if any dyed or motley cloth be made contrary to this order I instruct my sheriff at Perth to take such cloth, as far as possible, and then act ac- cording to the custom which was in the time of my grandfather King David. I also rightly grant my firm peace to all those who bring to Perth wood and timber. So I forbid anyone to molest them in buying or selling it after they have come within the lined marches of Perth. Moreover, I grant to them these privileges and rights and confirm them by this my charter. Moreover, I absolutely forbid any foreigner without my burgh of Perth to buy or sell hides or wool except in my burgh of Perth.

Witnesses: Earl David, my brother; Philip of Valognes, my chamberlain; Robert of London, my son; William Cumin; William del Bois and Hugh, my clerks of the seal; Alexander, sheriff of Stirling; Henry, son of Earl David; Roger de Mortemer; David Marshall; John of Stirling. At Stirling on the 10th day of October. 17

DUNNING SCHOOLS—AND A WEATHERVANE

(or when all else fails, try the P&KC Archive)

When we came to live in Dunning around two years ago we could see from our kitchen win- dow a weathervane on the roof of what we discovered was Dunning Primary School. Having had a long interest in cast and wrought iron work I thought we would try to find out where the weathervane had been made and to learn more about it. We soon came to understand that at the time of the building of the School (1867) wrought/cast ironwork would be supplied by local village smithies –but they did not appear to keep records.

Having come to an apparent dead end, we decided to investigate the building itself in the hope that there may be a reference to the weathervane in construction notes or invoices covering the building works - if records had been kept. Then a member of Dunning Parish Historical Society pointed out to us that there were three other buildings in Dunning that had been schools and a site within the church- yard where a fifth had stood. Now the search became ‘Dunning Schools’ and we came to the Local History Depart- ment at the AK Bell Library and read old newspapers, gazetteers and statistical accounts gathering notes and hav- Dunning school minus its weathervane; Photo, J.Gale ing our enthusiasm fired. We then moved on into the PKC Archive section and enquired innocently ‘have you anything on Schools in Dunning – please?’

The response was amazing. School Board minute books dating from 1873 and the old School Log Book dating from 1863 were produced by the archivists and we became immersed in a world beyond living memory. The books were written in longhand and between them record a history of every day life during the late nineteenth century. The weather, working conditions, disease and epidemics, it’s all noted. There is something about these books that an electronic archive cannot record and that is the evocative smell of coal fires from the pages and the fact that someone sat and hand wrote the words you are reading.

Long hours over many weeks were spent in the Archive and with the help and encouragement of all the staff there, the history of Dunning schools in the nineteenth century has been gathered

18 and recorded in an article in ‘The Dunningite’ – the magazine of The Dunning Historical Soci- ety— and in the Archive itself.

During 2009 the school in Dunning had a large extension added and the old building was re- furbished. During the restoration work the weathervane was removed and was not refitted on completion. Later it reappeared within the school grounds and was photographed, measured and drawn. It is now in the process of restoration and will be re-sited within the school prem- ises, though not back in the original position on the roof. We still don’t know where it came from but it was instrumental in sending us on an evocative trip into the past and the gathering of important local history.

Something discovered by chance and then confirmed locally was that the writer lives in what was the Smithy, now converted into living accommodation. That weathervane could have been made in our living room! Jim Gale

IN MEMORY OF PROFESSOR DONALD MCINTYRE 15 August 1923—21 October 2009

Quiet, modest, and friendly to everyone he encountered, Donald McIntyre, a life member of the Friends, was an exceptionally gifted and outstandingly clever man. Dux while at Grantown High School, he became a Lecturer in Geology at Edinburgh University at the age of 25, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh at 30 and Professor of Geology at Pomona College, California at 31. During his 25 years in California he gave over 100 public lectures throughout the world, including China, and engaged in a variety of activities, including mastery of the bagpipes. In 1985 he was designated California Professor of the Year. His dedication to his demanding profession was legendary: a fellow climber re- marked that “if Donald ever fell off, he’d lick the stones on the way down in case there was one he hadn’t sampled!”

He was well ahead of the field in applying computers to science, which led to advisory roles to IBM, NASA and several governments. Such was the regard of his American colleagues that Donald was actually presented with a very precious sample of rock taken from the moon which he would occasionally produce from his pocket when giving talks ! Retiring in 1989, Donald and his wife Ann returned to Scotland with their son Ewen, and settled in Perthshire. Here, Donald became involved in many different activities, including the Perth & Kinross Council Archive.

The breadth of Donald's interests and the depth of his learning were exceptional. He was a true polymath. He had energy, enthusiasm and twinkling eyes. He was also a man of great humour, kindness and charm. I feel honoured to have known him.

19 Margaret Borland-Stroyan

The Black Art of Using Search Engines

Alan Kinnaird

I suspect that there is probably a black art to coaxing information out of the internet, as much as you need luck to delve through the mists of time. Both of these can be made easier once you appreciate that the words that you are familiar with may not necessarily be those that are used in old records, and that by using older alter- natives and words you don’t usually use, you can increase your chances. It probably helps if you’re methodical about searching through what you know, creating a base of knowledge before you launch yourself into your quest on the internet, but equally there are those inexplicable days when you wake up with a twinkle in your eye, and for some reason you just manage to pull out all sorts of as- tounding information, that in turn leads to yet more delights. You just need to think of what it is you actually need to search for, and maybe you will search with different key words that take you to something that has eluded you for years. And the great thing is, that you can now do it from anywhere in the country. My quest for historic information on Perthshire families can on occasion take me beyond the county’s boundaries, and recently, much to my amazement I was able to find references to some obscure charters that relate to the ancient barony of Badfodalis in Aberdeenshire. I thought that was pretty good considering that the name is no longer in existence, and most people will never have heard of it. Then I discovered that the spelling of the name of the barony had been changed to Pitfodels, and that there was once a castle of that name. Sadly, it’s long been a ruin which is now in the grounds of a hotel. The various parts of the barony had been ac- quired by another Perthshire family, the Weymes. I captured what I came across that day, and thinking that I had done pretty well, put it to one side, wrongly thinking that I was unlikely to find anything else from the 1300’s and 1400’s. But several months on I found more, much more. A whole sequence of charters had been published by the Spalding Club, and to my delight, I discovered them whilst looking for a family name. What was then amazing was that the quotes were coming from the charter chest of Pitfodels, something that I never imagined existed. The secret of this success is probably partly due to the fact that I decided to use a different search engine, on the grounds that each one is programmed to search dif- ferently, and they do. So it’s possible to find things on one search engine that elude you on another, and what’s worse, you don’t know it exists. So search for the im- possible and you just might find it on the right day, with the right words and the

20 right search engine. That said, I doubt there is such a thing as a right search engine, so try them all, from Google to its rival Microsoft Bing, and see what you find.

Be determined, and be prepared to look at lots of the headings that describe the items found by the search engines. It’s highly unlikely that the obscure thing you are looking for will be on the first page of items that you look at; it might however be on the twelfth or fifteenth—there’s no way of knowing. This occurs because of the way the search engines prioritise websites that are more frequently visited, which generally leaves obscure historical information several pages be- hind. You just have to ignore what is irrelevant, and plough on, knowing that you are going where few people look. I bet most people give up after five pages, and don’t look properly, which to me is one of the differences between who is successful and who isn’t. Another is to continue searching when you are being successful, as it means that you have probably approached the subject in a subtly different manner, and that this is providing results that you might not get another day.

Links to Victorian books, such as those published by historical societies, often prove to be extremely useful, and as more are now being digitised by Google, you stand more chance of finding information. They have the advantage that you can easily search for key words or phrases in them. I found a couple of new references to a friend’s obscure ancestor this week by fol- lowing the method above, although I was looking for one of mine with the same name, Thomas Kinnaird, who’s clearly even more obscure! It was one of those vague links that took me from ‘mortcloth dues’ to parish registers and somehow on to someone’s family website, where he had transcribed a brief extract of births from a parish register. One of the two witnesses was my friend’s ancestor, who had witnessed several of the family’s births, establishing his whereabouts in Fife. This raises the issue of ‘looking again’. Don’t just assume that because you looked once (months ago), that the information is not there, as people are constantly adding information to the internet on a daily basis, from personal transcriptions to corporate book scanning programmes, from individuals to learned institutions and local and national archives. You just have to take the Perth Burgh Burial Registers or Threipland’s People examples. You wouldn’t have found either of them a couple of years ago. So it’s nice to know that the Friends are making a dif- ference, one which is helpful to researchers across the world. Whatever you find worth copying always take a note of where it’s come from, and in addition, right click on the web address in the bar in the search engine, to copy and paste the address after the item you have copied, which enables you or anyone else to go straight to it. It’s good practice, and extremely useful in the future

21 when you forget where a particular quote came from, or if you are emailing someone. The chances are that what you find will bring you back in to the archives or local studies library again, to ask more pertinent questions, and lead to more happy hours searching. But you may have saved yourself a trip across the country to find something obscure which you would never have found without the Internet. Happily the internet doesn’t fulfil all of my needs; I still have to get out in to the country and stand where events took place, or where old set- tlements stood, in order to absorb the atmosphere and understand them, and then try to capture all of it in a photograph. Which reminds me, that as digital photography increases, so does the amount of photos that are available on the internet, which again can be useful if you can’t get to a place. Sites such as Flicker even had photos of the flooding in the Carse of Gowrie in September 2009. Search for all the specific place-names you can find that are associated with your quest, whether it’s for local history or a family, or you could try adding key words such as — Aisle, Altar, Barony, Benefice, Birth, Castle, Chapel, Church, Death, Dowry, Farm, Ferm, Fortalice, Grave, Gravestone, Handfasting, Heir, In- scription, ‘Lands of’, Liferent, Manor, Manoir, Marriage, Monu- mental Inscription, ‘Mort cloth’, Parish, Peel, Pendicle, Relict, Spouce, Tenant, Terce, Tocher, Tower, Toun, Tour. Do try legal terms such as - Charter, Duties, Grant, Indenture, Non- entry, Precept, Sasine, which can be equally rewarding to use. The list is not definitive, it’s just a starting point, from which I hope to inspire you to find your own key words, words that will enable you to successfully delve through the mists of time, and hopefully lead to some successful research in the archive My final thought is - do back up all of your research as you go, even if from your perspective it’s incomplete and you plan to work on it in the near future. It’s easier to back it up now than to try and recover information from a dead PC. And if you are wondering what inspired me to write this article, it was the fact that I had recently managed to find thirty-three pages of information, based on quotes from charters that I didn’t know existed, which had eluded me for over

22 ten years. A few days later, while on the internet, the modem of my main com- puter unexpectedly decided it was going to dial out; it crashed my PC, which didn’t recover! Fortunately my main research is frequently burned onto CD’s, but I lost a lot of small documents, and those little detailed notes that we all write—the sort that represent a lot of time and effort. So I now back up everything on to a ‘Clickfree’ external hard drive, which updates very quickly, and most importantly, without any effort, every time I connect it. And if you are wondering how I got this article back, I have now discovered the black art of coaxing information out of PC by using a programme called ‘Recover My Files,’ to delve through what to most of us would be a permanent digital mist, and pull back those small but important invisible files. Good luck with your research!.

Alan Kinnaird

Lawers in Strathearn

Gentlemen of Honour

The Robertson Williamsons

of Balgray and Lawers

The story of the rise and fall

of a great Scottish estate

Bernard Byrom

This book tells the absorbing story of the closely linked Robertson and William- son families who owned the Lawers estate in Upper Strathearn. It follows their fortunes over several generations, recording triumphs and disas- ters, wisdom and folly, sober achievers and eccentric autocrats, ending in an ex- plosive vendetta between a father and son whom he disowned for becoming a Roman Catholic priest. It ended, tragically for that family if not for their tenants, in the break-up of the estates in the twentieth century. The story fleshes out historical events of the period with carefully researched first-hand accounts. Bernard is no stranger to the Archive, both as a member of the ‘Friends’ and as an assiduous researcher over many years, resulting in several books in the setting of Upper Strathearn. Gentlemen of Honour is on sale at £15 in the Local Studies section of the A K Bell Library, where his earlier books are also available.

Worth a Look... The Perth Theatre Collection

MS8/22 is the collection of Perth Theatre production photographs from 1935 to 1998. They were originally held in boxes of manila envelopes, but are gradually being trans- ferred to inert polyester sleeves in binders, which will protect them better, and also make them much easier to browse.

Perth Theatre has welcomed countless well-known actors to its stage over the years, many of whom also had careers in film and television. Alongside such Perth Theatre stalwarts as David Stuart and Valerie Lush, there are pictures of — Donald Pleasance, Edward Woodward, Alec Guinness, William Gaunt, Russell Hunter, Gordon Jackson, John Gregson, Colin Jeavons, Richard Johnson, Donald Sutherland (spot him below) and many more. And as the collection is re-housed, a list of actors is being compiled as an informal finding aid

But MS8 includes much more than just photographs of actors; it holds records of over sixty years of creative work by talented people; details about individual productions, and interesting ephemera like posters, scrapbooks, programmes – and even prompt scripts. For anyone with an interest in the performing arts, it’s a rewarding experience. You may even find reminders of shows you saw yourself! Jackie Hay

Do you recognise any of these actors?

Twelfth Night

Jane Eyre

Othello poster 24