Davidsons & Christies of Perth

Susannah Christie was my great-grandmother and she was born over 150 years ago in 1850 in Perth. She was the daughter of James Christie (1826 – 1892), a cabinet maker who came from a local family and Susannah McCormack whose father John and grandfather Cornelius had come over from Ireland to work in Perth as rope makers.

When she was 17 months old she was living in the High Street in Perth and it was in St Paul’s Church in that street that she was christened by the catholic priest, Rev McCorrey, Her elder brother John had drowned in the Tay when he was 9 (1846-1855) and elder sister Elizabeth (1848) had died as a baby but she was brought up with five younger sisters, Margaret (1852) Mary (1854); Ann (1859); Jemima (1862); and Joan (1865), and a younger brother James (1857).

In 1870 Susannah was working as a framer when on Boxing Day she married a shoemaker called John Galloway at a house at 148 South Street where she then went to live. Although she had been christened a Catholic her wedding was “according to the forms of the Church of Scotland”. A few months later she gave birth to the first of nine children, a baby girl called Ann Brough Galloway, and there is a picture of Ann as an old lady at my father’s wedding below. In the following years Susannah must have suffered horrendously. She gave birth to twin boys, John and James, but they died of marasmus (malnutrition) at only 17 and 21 days. Then the next child, John, also died in childhood. Then there was some joy when in 1876 a third boy, Christie, was born in Dundee and survived into adulthood. However, more misfortune followed when her husband died when she was only 28 and her son Christie was still only two.

For the next nine years Susannah continued to work away as a silk finisher while bringing up what was left of her family of Ann and Christie. Then in 1887 she met and married a widower called Henry Davidson. By this time she was 37 and Henry was 48.

Henry was a steam engine fitter in a Perth dye works, probably Pullars, all his life. He was first married, aged 22, to Margaret Halley and when he married for the second time he brought with him five children: Margaret (1866); John (1868); Henry (1870); David (1874) and Mary (1878), and then the family grew bigger with the birth of four more children: Agnes (1888); my father’s mother – Henrietta (1891); George (1892); and Susannah (1893). The family lived in Bridge Lane, Perth for the next nine years until Henry’s death in 1902 when Susannah moved in with her daughter Ann who had married a glass blower called David Wallace and was staying at 36 Princes Street. This is where she stayed for a long 24 years until her death in 1926 at the age of 76. She disappeared from her home and her body was later found in the River Tay at Orchard Neuk after being missing for a day. According to my father she had been blind and had lost her way.

At this time, another daughter, my grandmother Henrietta Davidson, who had given up her job as a hat blocker in Pullars had married a butcher called David Ruthven and was living in Balloch, Dumbartonshire with their four children. Again we can see how horrendous their lives could be in those times when Henrietta, as well as losing her baby son in March 1926 lost her mother in October that year, then moved back to Perth where her ailing husband died at the end of 1928 of cardiac asthma.

According to my father, Henrietta was a ‘tom boy’ and would ‘wipe the floor with anybody’. I think that living through WWI, having one of your baby sons die, being widowed at 37 and struggling to bring up three children during The Depression in the 1930s would make anyone tough. She worked as an office cleaner in Dewars to help make ends meet. She was central to a long-lasting quarrel with her in-laws, the Ruthvens, eventually resorting to taking them to court over a will. Whatever the reasons behind it, Henrietta Davidson had no time for her mother-in-law, Isabella Stewart, and referred to her as “Old Riven”.

During WWII, she lived in Ruthven Avenue with her daughter Cissie and her granddaughter while her two sons were at the war. And it was in this house too that I lived when I was born in 1948 (rumour has it that I slept in a drawer there).

My grandmother died in 1949 and is buried in Jeanfield cemetery. These photographs show her in the 1940s – the first with her first granddaughter and the third with me. The middle photograph was taken on 26 September 1947 at my Mum & Dad's wedding wedding and she is wearing the fur coat that my Dad had given her when he returned from five years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ober Silesia. The older lady with her is her half-sister, the 76 year old Ann Brough Wallace (nee Galloway).