The Ruthven Section

The name Ruthven is a very old important name in Scottish history with the Ruthvens having been involved in many royal stories, but I have found no link with these. Our family were cow feeders, then fleshers (butchers) who, as far back as I have gone, 1800, lived and worked in Dundee for five generations (apart from a very brief stay in Blairgowrie).

In the 1880s they moved 20 miles west to Perth following huge financial problems with the Shambles (the old word meaning a place where meat is butchered and sold) which the fleshers themselves owned. According to the Dundee records and an article by Innes Duffus, Archivist to the Nine Incorporated Trades of Dundee (www.standrewschurch.btinternet.co.uk):

"[t]he Fleshers, however, were totally obsessed with owning their own property, which overcame any financial know-how they possessed and caused them to become bankrupt and several times be insolvent. They were only saved by the particular loyalty of their masters who, time and time again, came to the rescue and gave personal guarantees for debts. These guarantees were regularly lost when the debts were called in. More than once the Trade bought totally unsuitable property. In 1826 they bought premises between the Overgate and the Ward burn. These were sold at a loss when they realised that they were totally unsuitable. In 1828 they bought and sold another site in Long Wynd. In 1835 they bought the old Dundee Soap Works in Chapelshade and converted it for their own use. Once again they had not considered the large number of possible objectors and the Sheriff declared against them. The cost of this fiasco was over £2100, which was not cleared for some forty years. In 1839 the Trade was bankrupt, paying out only 8/- in the pound. The soapworks was paid to clear its debts, making little over half the asking price, but no lesson was learned. A few months later they borrowed more money, bought the Dudhope Nursery in Douglas Street, and built a slaughterhouse. All their efforts were spent trying to keep their heads above water, and this left little energy or time for any other involvement in the community. The Trade moved banks regularly in an effort to borrow more money and to control their debts, to very little avail. Again personal guarantees were lost and eventually, in 1877, the Dundee Police Commission recommended that the Shambles be taken over".

Like the generations before him, my grandfather, David, (1886-1928) ran a butcher's shop. He continued to did this all throughout WW1 as he was unable to fight having lost the sight in one eye when he had run into a knife in his father's or grandfather's shop in the Kirkgate, Perth when he was only 8 years old. Then towards the end of the war, in 1917, he moved his new wife and young family to Alexandria, Dunbartonshire, where he worked variously as a butcher, a machineman, and (according to his son) a postman. They lived on the 3rd floor of a tenement that faced directly north up the whole length of Loch Lomond and had superb views of Ben Lomond. But in 1928 for some reason they moved back to Perth. Sadly David died that year, aged only 42, leaving is wife to bring up the three surviving children.

The tradition of working in the butchering trade ended in 1928 with his death only 12 years after he had married Henrietta Davidson. His two remaining sons later chose to be a train driver and a grocer, while his daughter Susannah emigrated to Australia in 1953 with her husband and three daughters. However, David's brother Edwin did carry on the tradition and had a butcher's shop in Perth until the 1960s, but he died childless in 1984.