Williamina

A Welsh Family Post

There is little to know about Williamina. Not one of her descendants known to me who are living in Scotland have any real knowledge of her. She has left neither footprint of her life that I can find, nor any photos. We know her parents, her brothers and sisters, her nephews and nieces but nothing about her that can tell us her story. Other than three facts. She left Scotland to live in Australia, she married in Australia, she had a son. Everything else seems to be anecdotal.

I am of course, writing about Williamina Welsh who was my wife’s great Aunt.

Williamina’s name is remembered by my wife’s sister as Aunt Mina and her anecdote is that when she was a young woman, living in Saltcoats, she met and fell in love with a man who was a Roman Catholic. This was a cultural anathema in this Ayrshire, mainly Presbyterian, community, and Williamina was banished, according to the story. To where, nobody knows. It would seem a bit strange to be banished to Australia for falling in love with a man of a different religion.

Sectarianism in Scotland has a long and challenging history which was frequently entwined with industry, employment and the Irish connection. I shared this anecdote regarding Williamina with a good friend who also is a Roman Catholic and a Glaswegian and asked him if he could throw any light on the idea that a small Ayrshire coastal town might have such views about the two religions inter marrying and causing someone to leave their community. From his memory of the Govan shipyards there might have been a closed shop when it came to religion, but he could not recall any stories about mixed marriages between Protestants and Catholics being a cause for being regarded as outcasts.

Starting from the beginning I was easily able to find Williamina’s birth registration. Like many of her siblings, she was born in Raise Street, on 8 July 1898. Her father, Martin Welsh, was present and signed the register.

She was born at 7.45 in the morning. I wonder if Martin was expected to go to work that day, which was a Friday. There were no financial securities for absence in those days, and he would have lost pay for not being at work.

Williamina appears in the 1901 Census return, aged 2 years (she would be 3 later that year) along with her four siblings and a stepsister. One of her siblings was Rachel, my wife’s grandmother. For some reason, there seems to be no record of the Welshes in the 1911 Census return. This could be for several reasons that we shall never know, damaged archives or missing pages perhaps. Williamina would have been 13 years old and a scholar. Luckily, she was still living at home in 1921 because she was listed in that years Census return, living in the family home at Raise Street, Saltcoats with her parents and two younger brothers, Robert and Archibald. Those two brothers were working for the Post Office, Robert as a Postman and Archibald as a Telegram Messenger Boy. Williamina was nearly 23 that year and working for the firm of J.C.Robertson Ltd in Saltcoats. It is difficult to transcribe and be sure, but it looks like she is a Pressure Maker, whatever that is. I have searched various records and newspapers for reference to J.C.Robertson Ltd but I am not coming up with anything. I think I must put a plea out to a Facebook group to see if local historians can help me further.

Three Towns Explored is an excellent Facebook page dedicated to being a museum of photos and images of the three towns of Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston. A direct message to the owner of that page gave me the answer to my problem about Williamina’s employment. I was led to a page in Grace’s Guide, a free online compilation of British Industrial History. It appears that J.C.Robertson Ltd was a new company in Saltcoats.

1920 John C. Robertson (Saltcoats) Limited was incorporated as a private company, with capital of £5,000, to carry on the business of manufacturers of jam, marmalade, jellies, and confectionery.

The handwriting in the 1921 Census return was disguising the fact that Williamina was a Preserve Maker and not some form of engineering operative as I was beginning to think. John C. Robertson Ltd was in business from 1920 until 1927 when the company went into liquidation shortly after losing a court case regarding the quantity of fruit in the jam. The factory was just around the corner from Raise Street where Williamina lived in Factory Lane, now called Factory Place, in Saltcoats.

So, Williamina was still a resident in Saltcoats, with her parents and brothers in Raise Street in 1921. Later that year on 26 November, she was listed as a passenger on the SS Orsova sailing to Melbourne via Sydney and Fremantle. This ship was owned by the Orient line and sailed regularly between London and Australia until 1936.

Passenger list for SS Orsova, November 1921 (from Ancestry.co.uk)

She was listed alone, although if she was sailing with another person they might not be on the same sheet. Just suppose that Williamina was running away, or being sent away because of a relationship with someone she was not supposed to be in love with? Would it not be more shocking to sail together?

This set me on the path of searching the passenger lists for Adam Bann.

Adam Bann may have been born in County Antrim. He may have been a passenger on a ship that sailed from London in 1920 and arrived in Fremantle in 1921. A year later Williamina sailed on the Orsova and arrive maybe 5 or 6 weeks later in 1922. There was no information about him on the passenger list and so I cannot verify that Adam Bann was the man Williamina later married and had a son with.

I had come across Adam Bann in other peoples searches on Ancestry. Later, I came across photos of memorial stones to Adam Bann and Williamina Bann, Adam died in 1963 and Williamina in 1986.

I do not believe this was a banishment mainly because Adam left a whole year before Williamina. The Adam I found in a passenger list may not have been the same man she married. Williamina may have met her husband in Australia. On her passenger list she was described as a Domestic Servant. I also don’t think she had to leave suddenly. This voyage would have been meticulously planned. Williamina would have had to save a considerable amount for her third-class ticket for a voyage that might have taken 5 or 6 weeks depending upon weather and other circumstances. She and her mother would have been doing a lot of preparation to make leaving home and starting a new life be as successful as it could be.

It is this process of leaving Scotland and for what reason that is a missing link. What is not missing is that Williamina and Adam were a couple and living in Fish Creek in Gippsland South, Victoria. The photographs of this location show a beautiful dairy farming valley with lush pasture. The electoral rolls and other listings show that Adam was a road labourer.

There is a record showing that Adam Bann served in the Royal Australian Air Force during the second world war and it is from that record that I discovered that he had a son called Martin Daniel Bann. Williamina named him after her father.

I have met Martin.

In 1986 John McKie died. He was my father-in-law and his death was sudden. During 1986, Martin Bann had travelled to the UK to watch some of the sports in the Commonwealth Games and had arranged to visit John and Agnes McKie who lived in Bishopbriggs, north of Glasgow. He was present at John’s funeral that year. I have very little memory of him, and I would not have known anything about the family history that I now write about to be able to speak to him about his family.

Martin Bann’s mother died the same year, 1986 aged 88, and Martin himself died in 2011.

There is no doubt that Williamina kept in touch with her family. Martin Bann would not have visited Scotland unless Agnes Mckie, Williamina’s great niece, was in contact with her at Christmas and other important occasions.

Having to leave because of a relationship with a man from another religion – or leaving for a new life and an adventure in a new continent, as did many people in Britain at that time in history between the Wars. That is the unanswered question.

At the beginning of this piece there was little to know about Williamina. There is a little bit more knowledge now.

Post Script

During the research for this post I came across other Ancestry members who had been searching for their ancestors, not necessarily Williamina and her family, and I came across records from Ireland showing Adam Bann from County Antrim and relating him to Williamina by marriage. What is noticeable is that his religion is recorded as Church of Ireland. If this is Williamina’s husband then it demolishes the idea that she had a relationship with a Roman Catholic and had to leave her community. The absence of any other records for someone called Adam Bann leads me firmly to believe that he was Williamina’s husband.