This is a continuation of my stories about the history of 7 Earlspark Avenue in Glasgow. It had nine owners but changed hands only seven times because it was inherited by a brother or a spouse. I and my wife are the seventh owners.
This week I have come to the tail end of ownership from 1961 to 1987. It was a sensitive time to research, those tail end owners and their children may still be alive and as I have always tried to do, I only write about people who are no longer alive. So, it feels like a cursory ending of my research and the end of this section of my blog, unless fascinating new stories come to my attention.
The house, No.7, in Earlspark Avenue, changed hands three times during the 1960’s. Up until 1962 it had been in the hands of only two house owners. A clerk and his sister and then a manufacturer of lady’s mantles.
Given the size of the houses and the new suburban housing stock that was built along the length of a suburban railway line, a commuter’s paradise, one would have thought that houses would change ownership less frequently.
I presume that it is about changes in occupation and the death of an owner that would be the main causes for selling up and moving on.
A quick recap. George Anderson built this house and the entire length of Earlspark Avenue, other than what are known as the ‘new houses’ built in 1971 on the site of the old Papermill Farm. George sold it to its first set of residents Miss Agnes Scott and her brother George. After 45 years of the Scott’s, the house was sold to James Hepburn who lived here for 6 years until 1961.
The next owner was George Wallace and his wife Jeanette. According to a disposition of the property, George was a Schoolmaster who had previously been living in Kings Park, another nearby suburb of Glasgow. I can find no information about the Wallace’s other than that.
George and his wife lived here for the next three years until he sold it to John Robertson and his wife Dorothy, in 1964 for the sum of £3600. John was described as a Medical Practitioner, which means that he could have been a doctor, a surgeon, or a consultant. He had moved to this house from 245 Kilmarnock Road, which is a short walk from Earlspark Avenue. It was a tenement flat above some shops in Shawlands. So, this was probably an upwardly mobile move. John and Dorothy did not stay around for too long and soon, in 1966, they sold the house to Stanley Andrews, a Clerk. Stanley and his wife Annabella had been living at 5 Rhannon Terrace in Cathcart, just down the road. This intrigues me because that address was probably as nice as this one in Earlspark Avenue, and possibly the same size of house. The close proximity to Langside Station would have been an attraction, especially if Stanley and Annabella were still working and based in the city. Stanley and Annabella had no children and according to his will Stanley left all the property to Annabella, which is why the dispositions about the sale of the house are about the transfer of the property to her in her name.
Annabella remained at No 7 until 1979 and so that was a thirteen-year length of stay. It was then sold to the Meechan family who remained here until July 1987 when I and my wife and son moved in.
We had lived in Sydenham, London, for four years after we had married and we moved to Glasgow for family and work reasons. Which I suppose is the reason why most people move from one location to another, one house to another. Our length of stay has been 38 years so far, but the Scott family outlived us here by a few more years than that. It has always been our forever house. It saw the birth of our second child, our daughter. We are connected to so much around us that reflects the history that I have been writing about. The railway station, the new houses, Albert Park (or Weirs Recreation Park as it was originally called). The schools that our children attended, and the people that we have known since moving here, or those who have arrived since. All these are reference points to the history of No. 7 Earlspark Avenue. We have had the roof re-slated, made major and minor renovations, but have made no significant changes to the house since we moved in. Previous owners have had the interior modernised, removed the box bed in the back parlour, turned the scullery into a kitchen.
I’m sure that if the previous six owners returned, they would recognise much of the house that they had lived in.
Over the past two years I have been writing posts about my research into the house history of 7 Earlspark Avenue in Glasgow. It was built in 1910 and so 115 years is not a lengthy time for a house. It has given an opportunity to examine many things. The ancient Feu rights that land owners could extract for rent from new houses built on land that they had sold to a developer, the change in fashions for domestic life, the occupations and trades of the people who lived in the house, the development of the street as the decades went by, the value of the house as it changed hands and not least the complicated legal method of disposition or conveyancing, when the house was sold and bought, without the latter, and access to all the legal paperwork that was accrued in 115 years, it would have been a more complicated task.
My research took me initially to the Mitchell Library and the Glasgow Archives. The archivists there were eager to help me and I have enormous regard for this service especially when I requested to see the Feu registers for the Nether Pollok Estates which had to be fetched from the basement and brought to me, five floors up. They were enormous and dusty tombs.
The Electoral registers and the Valuation records, all available in the Mitchell Library, were an important source for confirming much of the detail that helped me with accuracy of dates and names.
I accessed the legal documents when I realised that, since Land Registration in the 1980’s, when the writing of dispositions and making of searches of all the previous legal documents were no longer necessary, that eight decades of documents were being stored somewhere in Glasgow for no particular reason. When my wife and I had engaged a solicitor to prepare our wills, I discussed this with her. She traced them and brought them to me. This has led to my realisation that that in basements and vaults, all across Glasgow, there are thousands of of packages of these documents, all waiting to be discovered and researched. These documents belong to the house, although not required for legal purposes, and will be handed to the next owners, when the time comes.
I know only what I have researched. However, there was an occasion when I was gardening in the front of the house when a young father with his son came by. I heard him on the pavement telling his son that this was the house that he grew up in. He was the son of the previous owner. I invited him and his son to come into the back garden to see where he had played. He remembered a rowan tree that he had memories of climbing and swinging on. It had died a few years previously from canker disease.
My own memories will always be associated with No. 7 being the framework for my family to grow and live here. The stories I have unfolded about the previous owners are the ghosts of its past.
You can read all my posts on this house history by finding the category House History on the home page.
Leave a Reply