Wullie Baillie

Dalmellington 1910 - 1920

Early days at Burnfoothill and the Peesweep Row.

She was a great mother and she wasn’t in good health; I would have done anything for her. She was a wonderful woman, a wee body not in good health. She would just be in her 20’s.  I was only 8 years old when she died. When they took her away up to her mothers, I’ll always remember when they took her away it was frosty… Just before she died… They wanted somebody to look after her, so they transferred her to her mothers and they took her in an old fashioned chest, they put two stretchers onto it and carried her up… I’ll always mine… the men… everybody wore tackity boots in those days, there were no such thing as shoes; it was all tackity boots and  they put old socks  over there tackity boots because there was ice and snow on the ground. They took her up, so she died and after she died we went and stayed with her mother for a short period till after all the arrangements were made and after everything was squared up. Then we went from there to Burnfoothill and stayed with his father and mother in what the cried the Peeweep Row.  So the Peeweep row sat by itself, it was near what they cry the drumheid,  the Peeweep row sat itself maybe about ½ a mile away or maybe more from the rest of Burnfoothill, the Store and the School. In those days there were no shops bar some woman had a wee sweety shop. It was only company stores; they wouldn’t allow any other body in. There was Lethanhill, Burnfoothill and the Peeweep Row, they were all separate rows. When they sunk a pit in those days, they built the houses near the pits because there was no transport, so the men had to be gotten to be beside their work. Well after she died as I said before she wasn’t in good health and I used to scrub out the floors, there was they 9inch tiles in the scullery, we only had one apartment. I used to scrub out the floors or do the linoleum before I even went to the school in the morning. I would be 7 years old; I was only 8 when she died.  I run everything for her… I’ve always mind to there was a wee shop just along from us that sold sweeties and I was telling somebody about it just the other day… Woodbine was 5 for a penny and this old Mrs Glover, we used to run and do messages for her, she sold her Woodbine at 2 for a halfpenny!  After she died we went to that place: Burnfoothill and the Peeweep Row. It was only about a couple of mile.
What did you do with your furniture? How did you get it across?  
There wouldn’t be much furniture. No. They had what they cry the “Navvies Bogie”  The navvies bogie was a flat bogie on four wheels and they could lift the platform off the wheels and lay it to the side and then they lifted the wheels  and the axle dropped and they put them to the side.   To keep anybody from taking them away, they put a chain and a padlock on them, so the boys couldn’t play on them!  The furniture was taken over in that. Anything going from one place to another was taken on one because there were no roads between to two places.
Did you pull it? 
Aye it was level, the likes of me would be sitting on it and some of the men would be pushing it.

Gardening in a 1910 Miners Row.

At Burnfoothill there would be maybe 20 houses in a row and everybody had gardens. In fact… I used to… there were no lavatory’s, it was dry closets at the foot of the garden. We had dry wooden closets, right away at the foot of the garden and auld Wullie Devoy  was a very keen gardener, there were no manure or anything and there were no artificial fertilisers. So I used to go round the dry closest of them that didn’t use them and some had pails. We brought the pails and we halved the potatoes and they put the dry closet stuff along the trenches and we stuck the half potatoes on the dry closest stuff; that’s how the gardens were manured in those days.  There was an old one. Old Bob Park and he was a keen gardener and he had a wee greenhouse and he went to the flower shows.  Each wee mining village run its own flower show; Benwhat, Burnfoothill, Dalmellington, Waterside, Dunaskin and these places they all had their own wee flower shows. So when it was the like of Waterside or Burnfoothill show, we would set-up ‘til after midnight with Bob Park tying. In those days they showed bouquets, wild bouquets and bouquets of different flowers. Every flower had to have a wire stem on it, so we sat up and tied wire stems onto every flowers so it could be placed in the bouquet. When Bob had his greenhouse he used to grow a few tomatoes and that in his wee greenhouse; it wasn’t a big greenhouse.  There wasn’t such a thing as fumigating in those days, so what we did, they had a tube, a thick tube with a thin tube leading into it and you could pull them apart. Bob Park used to put, maybe, a 1/4/of an ounce of tobacco into the tube and kindle it. His son and I; Robert. The thin tube was put through the keyhole from the inside and we went outside and they shut the door and we blew and blew and blew ‘til it turned to a decent glow and we blew the tobacco fumes into the greenhouse and that fumigated the tomatoes!  So that’s how Bob fumigated his tomatoes. Well I think from that time I took an interest in gardening.  Because whenever I got the chance, I was always into the gardening. Well, after we left there we went to  Dalmellington  and I went to the school at  Dalmellington.  As I said Sannie Devoy worked in one of the local pits at Pennyvennie. That was about 1910 and I was about 10 years old. . He met this… she was a Glasgow woman. We stayed with the granny and Agnes, a sister of his was at home and there was Harry Devoy, Harry was there too. He was one of the Devoy girls boy; Harry was a wee bit older than me. Agnes was three or four years older than me. We stayed there with them and I went to the school at Dalmellington.

Collecting the wages tin at the Mine.

He worked in the local pits and sometimes I would go and lift his pay. Now in those days, they didn’t pay a slip, they gave your money in an ordinary wee tin. When I say tin, do you know they wee tin mugs? You were issued the tin mugs and you counted the money to see if it was alright, it was only the matter of a few shillings. You took the money and you flung the tin into a basket and the wages were all made up in tins. The made the wages up and put them into tins in the managers office. Your name was called out, so you went in and you got it. Sometimes I would go and lift his pay. Well I went to Dalmellington school  and I was only about two or three hundred yards from the school. We used to… I was always pretty good at school, I was always in the 1st three; I was very seldom out of it. There was only one girl who could beat me, a girl by the name of Maggie McKie . Her father was the local cycle shop and her and I run neck and neck usually. Well, I went on with the higher grade there…
What did you get at school in those days? 
I got Latin… Well before I went into what we called the higher grade, I would be getting ordinary schooling, but when I went into the higher grade I took Latin and French. I did 2 years of French and 1 year of Latin: I didn’t like the Latin. Then he apparently met this woman and they got married; I would be 12 years old. I would be going into the 1st year the higher grade, I was only just into it and we sat on a Saturday afternoon for a bursary ; while we were still in 1st year. Now the bursary was for money; it was £8 pounds and £8 pounds was a fortune! £8 a year. It was a fortune in those days. There was a chap beat me, he was in the 2nd year as there were several 2nd year ones and so many first year ones and so many others sat for this bursary. There was a 1st, 2nd and 3rd well this chap beat me and he was in 2nd year and I was 2nd and it worked out at £8 per year for 3 years! It was three years at that a time. After that you had to go to Ayr, to Ayr Academy; well I got that bursary.

I did well at school

There was one Porteus (sic) took maths and Hope and McIntyre. The funny thing was all these three teachers became headmasters at some of the local schools later on. Porteus… I stayed up past his house on the road to the school. Porteus got me to collect a couple of bricks from the coup and drop them off over his gate, he wanted to get a job done and he maybe gave me a tanner now and again.  The cook was killed in the 1914-18 war at the Dardanelles, he was a Colonel in the army. He was in charge of the RSF territorials; you see the RSF was all the territorials in the mining villages. He was killed at the Dardanelles. My french teacher was a woman teacher; I just forget her name… She would be a woman maybe in her 40’s. It was a different teacher that taught us Latin. We got woodwork at the school; we didn’t have a woodwork teacher that was one of the other teachers. Put it this way, you couldn’t have many teachers as it was a small school.  A teacher could maybe do two or three subjects each. The headmaster even taught, he taught too. Smith was his name, James Smith was my headmaster. In fact he had a son and a daughter about my age. Davy was older than me and David was in charge of the county library up until he retired and they were awful good to me The Smiths. In fact I’d seen them taken me in when I was at school and gave me a bowl of soup. Whether or no it was because they knew the circumstances. But I did fairly well at school.  The bursary was different from the bursary you have now: Bursary’s now are given to travel. But the bursary’s were supposed to help.
What did you use it for?
What did you think it would have been used for? It was used in the house, I didn’t use it. It was supposed to be used for books and things to assist. But I think it would be used in the house as the wages were only about £1 or 28 shillings a week. I would have got it to take home that was all. There was no separate school for Catholics but Catholics came to our school. There was a wee catholic school at Waterside but it was only small and only for Waterside but the catholic  children all came to school. The only thing was when we got bible class, the catholic children were kept out while we got bible for about half an hour an hour.  I don’t know how you do now at the school, but after we went into the higher grade as we talked about we did maybe an hour or two hours with this teacher and two hours with that teacher and two hours with another teacher. Well that’s what we did on those days.

Sunday School trips on the train

The only trips we ever had was the Sunday School trip. The Sunday school trips, if you got 12 appearances at the Sunday school and you paid a penny til you had a shilling towards the trip.  They had a trip and it went either to Ayr, Maidens I remember going to Maidens and I mind oh going to Dunure and Prestwick once. They took you to Ayr and it was 15 miles from Dalmellington to Ayr, so we went on the local train. Dalmellington was the terminal for the train; we used to get off at the Station in Ayr and down Millar Road and onto the Low Green, marched up and down with our teacher but if course there was no traffic in those days.  There was a turntable at Dalmellington and two men could turn it, one at each end could turn an engine and tender; it was so well balanced. The trains were turned and went back as it was only single track.   So they had to work with a tablet, a thing like a hook and they had to hand it from one signalman to another and once he got it, he couldn’t let another train onto that line and the engineman or fireman got it as they were passing. There was no heating in the trains, so they used foot-pans and I used to help at the station at Dalmellington with the foot- pans. They stood them in boiling water and they heated them. Before the train went out the station, the porter went down along and put a foot-pan in each compartment, so the folk could sit with warm feet in the compartments. When it come up they took them back out and they had another lot ready. They had two or three big boilers and fire to keep them warm in the winter time. We could go from Dalmellington to Ayr on the show Saturday in those days; 6 pence a return, 15 miles. That was 30 miles you got for your 6 pence. The shows came in for the September meeting, Saturday, show Saturday was the big day we got out of Dalmellington. The Sunday school trip on the Show Saturday, which was the only two days you were out of Dalmellington. You went to the shows on the Saturday and they were in… I forget the name of it… We went to the shows there and then came back home to Dalmellington at night.  That was the only time we were out of Dalmellington. At the shows everything was a penny- a penny for this and penny for that! A bag of chips was a penny; a bottle of lemonade was a penny. When I started work 1st  I got 6 pence pocket money, it was tuppence to go the pictures and then you could buy a bag of chips and a plate of peas or something else and you would have a penny left! That was my pocket money.  There was what they call a traveling Geggie. The traveling Geggie was a long wooden hut, it used to take up its quarters in Dalmellington and there were maybe ½ dozen or a dozen players and they did plays. All the various plays and they sat there during the winter and you got in for a penny or tuppence and people went to plays. Then somebody would come along who would maybe show lantern slides. Of course we had bible classes and one thing and another. There was quite a bit; it was surprising.  

Dalmellington used to freeze up...  

Dalmellington is pretty high up and it used to freeze up and I remember it once froze for weeks and weeks on end. In those days instead of a pond, one of the local gentry… there was a field about three hundred yards from the school and they must have put a dam of turf right across it and the janitor dammed that up and we had a skating pond.  It would maybe only be a foot or a foot and a half deep and we all paid a penny each to the janitor for looking after that. The janitor looked after that and when the blew the whistle they gave you time to come up from that from a winters day to go the school. In those days there was no such thing as…. Any children from the country, they gave tea or cocoa, you paid a halfpenny for a cup of tea or a halfpenny for a cup of cocoa! But nothing to eat, they came round the classroom and say “hands up for tea and hands up for cocoa” and that was for a halfpenny; you just took your piece with you.  
“I remember you saying that you were always asked to go for messages? And I remember you saying that as a boy you would come back home and if you forgot something, what happened?”    
They used to send us away back and we used to take our Cleek and our Gird and run down to Dalmellington and run back and think nothing of it.
“What did you do around Pennyvennie what did you play?”
We went up roundabout the pits and mucked about with hutches and there were a lot of Rats round about, so we would have rat hunts and where the dung middens were round the pits there would usually be rats around them.  I worked about a lot about a farm called Clarfin. When I was still at the schools I was driving horses for Clarfin at that age.  We had them in the hay fields and we went up and mucked about the farm and Mrs Williamson would give you a jeely piece and she ask you to churn the butter. You would churn the butter and she would give you a can of Soor Dook   and on occasions she would take you in and give you your tea. So we wrought a lot about the farm and we used to go out shooting and his son was about a year older than me and he had a .22 rifle and we went out shooting hares and rabbits.

Shooting, Fishing and Poaching.

We used to go beating, we used to beat… there were two big farms; there was Craigengillan and there was another one: the Camlarg  and they had big whigs in them and the had shootings all over.  We used to go out to the beating and they used to give us ½ a crown a day for beating and I’ll always mind there was one….  Oh I forget his name but he was a big whig that had the Camlarg and he got a man who was an ex-army Sergeant Major in the army; Wullie Cowan. And Wullie had 2 or 3 .22 rifles. They had a wee shooting range and targets up the back of the Camlarg and during the summer months this big whig paid Wullie and we went up and every boy that wanted was taught how to shoot. We would go up once maybe twice a week during the summer there was a league play off and we even carried a 6 x 2 carpet  and it was a 25 yard and there were two places. We were that proud  of carrying the rifles; I stayed just beside Wullie and we went up and we carried up the rifles and we were trained during the summer months how to shoot.  It was Thorneycroft, that was the name of the big whig. Thorneycroft paid for all the ammunition and he paid Wullie Cowan for doing it.  At the end of the summer session we had a shootout for the boys who were interested; it was about a mile out of the village and Thorneycroft presented so many prizes. There would maybe be about ½ a dozen prizes and presented them.  Whoever got the highest got 1st pick and I’ll always mind one year I got beat by a chap from one of the local farms and I was 2nd. He beat me to it and it was an air rifle; that was his pick. I got some fishing gear but we were all taught how to shoot and Thorneycroft paid for that. At Dalmellington we hadn’t a burn but we had a guddle… The Salmon came up through Dalmellington, right up through the town in the backend. In fact  we got so much Salmon we used to, we poached them as they went up by, the Salmon we got… we had Salmon for breakfast, Salmon for dinner, for tea! Fresh Salmon, oh I’ve no use for fresh Salmon! I wouldn’t thank you for it. We used to fish up on Loch Doon with Sannie Devoy who was a great fisher, before he was married, during the summer months he went with the boats on Loch Doon and there were big whigs came up, fishers from England and London and they would hire him for a fortnight. I’ve always mind that they got paid 5 shillings a day and their food. They rowed on Loch Doon with these big whigs and they stayed in some of the big houses up there.  He would go away a fortnight at a time. But I used to go and fish all the lochs round about, we knew all the lochs. I used to goup with them when the trout was running, when I say they were running, they were like the Salmon running up into the rivers and burns to spawn. I’ve always mind going up with Sannie Devoy and he had a landing net without a handle and the fish were going up and the rocks were worn into pools and wee falls where the fish would be lying waiting to go up. You just put in this net and you could lift out  a dozen to twenty fish and you just picked out one or two good ones and you took the rest up to the top  and let them go and go back down and picked out a ½ dozen or dozen of the best of them and take them away. But the fish were actually running up, the trout from the loch. Salmon went up into  the loch, there was a Salmon ladder and the Salmon ran up the ladder and went into the loch.  I knew all the lochs round about. We used to go out during the night and he was a great poacher, Wullie Devoy. That was the 1st time I saw what you cry an “Otter” They use them at sea, the  fisherman still use them at sea.  It was a board about ten inches long and about six inches deep and it had lead on one edge of it. When it was in the water it floated and they had a running wire up along it and a line with up to four or five dozen flies on it!  So you went down to the loch  and when you went to walk that way and it took it away out.  So when you turned to come back the line came back to the other end you could walk back. It was illegal but it was done quite regular.  We used to go out night fishing a lot with that.

Starting work down the pit at 14

Well he married and got a house out at Pennyvennie No 4, he got a house and it was a new house. That was the 1st time I’d ever seen electricity in a house! The colliery company, the house was near No 4 Pennyvenie and they generated their own electricity and brought it down into the houses from the pit. The people got their electricity free but they had to pay for their Globes and a globe was about 3 shillings! It was the old Osrams with the wires up and down; 60 watt globes. The company sold you your globes! We went out there and it was two miles from the school and to walk in to the town. He, by that time… she had said before she got married, whenever I was fit to go out and on my own, I would have to get out…. So we wandered from there into the school and again I was still amongst the 1st three of the school. When I turned 14 years old, I was in the second year and I was almost through the 2nd year and I left on April 8th on the Friday and went underground on the Monday, drawing off Sannie Devoy at the Beoch Pit. The Beoch mine was about 2mile away further up to road and we had to walk to that. There was no transport in those days. Oh we did!  They took us maybe about a mile with a pony drawing out 6 or 8 empty tubs, and we sat in the tubs! The pony took us up in the tubs to the other mine. I started and I was drawing off Sannie Devoy at the face on the Monday morning. I drew hutches out onto the haulage road and I would be about a fortnight at the pit, when the manager sent for me and it was the only time I was sacked in my life! The manager said to me “ No more work for you, you’ve to go back down to the school to the leaving date in June!” Now I had to go back to the school, but it had its ways too because when I went back to the school I got my £8 bursary, when I went back to the school at the end of the session. I was a great wee hero, I was a wee pit man and a great wee hero. Well I went back to the school and the I came back into the pit again in June.
I was wanting to ask you about the school… You said you got Latin and French and you would get English and Maths. Did you get music in those days? Did you get music at school?      
We got an hour of singing! The doh ray me’s! We never had PE but the Football field was beside the school. We used to take us out on a summers day and do an hour and something outside. There was no such thing as PE.