Welcome, James

After 44 years the Scott family had left number 7, Earlspark Avenue. Agnes,senior, died there; Agnes junior, died there, and George retired and left there for the Isle of Bute.

The Scott family laid the foundations for the bulk of the legal documents that became the cornerstone of proof of ownership of the property. This included the Feu contract that the builder, George Anderson signed to receive the land from the Maxwell Stirling family. It included several legal documents that showed that Agnes Scott needed to mortgage the property several years after purchasing it. It included the holograph of her will that she hand wrote on a piece of paper, that had to be proven at court for her brother George to be able to have the property transferred to his name. All these documents were, in the early days, handwritten, and then the typewriter became the scribe of choice. All of them bear legal stamps and evidence of being recorded in law offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Renfrew. The legal industry seemed to be awash with clerks writing, completing, sealing, swearing and recording documents. Many with red and blue tape.

Each time the house was sold and bought, searches had to be made by the conveyancing lawyers to ensure that there was no impediment to the purchase being completed. This does not take as long as it used to because, since the 1990’s, all property had to be registered with the Land Registry, it is not necessary to prove with historical documentation when one record exists in a central Register.

Image from the last official search for incumbrances 1980 (from the author’s collection)

Luckily, I have all these documents secure in my possession. The last full, legally documented search of number 7, with the grand title of ‘Search for Incumbrances over subjects – 7 Earlspark Avenue, Newlands, Glasgow’, was in 1980. It was the first because there had been no sale of the property since Agnes Scott purchased it. It was then added to as each subsequent sale took place, up until my family moved in. This landmark document is the only, and the last, search document. The property has now become registered and all that is needed is evidence from the Land Registry.

For 1980, it is a remarkably stuffy document, harking back to the earlier part of the 20^th Century. But it does give a precise list of ownership and documentation since the property was built.

From this I can see that the house was transferred from George Scott in 1955 to James Whyte Hepburn. I have no idea what his wife or parents or friends called him. Jim? Jamie? Or perhaps always James. So, welcome James.

James took out a mortgage with the Leeds Permanent Building Society to purchase the house. It was for £1150, which in 2024 was probably worth £37,000. So, I think that may have been the full purchase price.

Photo of the mortgage document between James Hepburn and the Leeds Building Society (photo by the author)

James was young enough for me to be able to research a bit of his background.

He was born in 1891, the son of William Whyte Hepburn and Margaret Lyle. They were living in Dennistoun, in the east end of Glasgow, at Roslea Drive. At this point James had not been given his father’s middle name. He adopted that later. The mortgage document is the first time that I have found him using that name.

William Hepburn was a Woollen Warehouseman. I’m uncertain what that entailed and who he worked for. He was renting a tenement flat in Dennistoun at the time of his son’s birth and remained there until the turn of the century when he moved to the southside of Glasgow. The Hepburn family moved into Millbrae Crescent, to another, although smaller, tenement building, number 13.

Millbrae Crescent is quite a beautiful road to move into. It is famous for its curved terrace of houses built by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, which line the Crescent on the opposite side to number 13.

I had the opportunity to speak to the owner of number 11 who explained to me the layout of the building. Numbers 11,13 and 15 are one building containing 6 flats. This doesn’t look very big from the outside, but it is the depth of the building that gives the individual flats the space to be almost like the layout of a small house. So, number 11 and 15 are separate flats with their own front doors. Number 13, where the Hepburn family moved to had a common entrance leading to what residents in Glasgow call a ‘close’ with stairs leading to the four flats above.

The discovery of the Hepburn’s addresses came from searching the Post Office directories on the National Library of Scotland website. This then helped with other searches on Scotland’s People and Ancestry.com.

The move to Millbrae Crescent was an upwardly mobile activity. The Hepburn’s had enough room in their flat for James, his older and younger sisters, plus a living in servant girl. She probably had the box bed that would have been in the kitchen/dining area, and would have been responsible for getting the fires lit and the cooking and cleaning.

An image of a typical kitchen arrangement. The box bed can be seen in the background. In number 7 it had a wooden framework and probably had a curtain to draw over it. The kitchen range would have been similar to the one in this photo. (Photo sourced from SecretScotland.org.uk)

Ten years later, the 1911 Census return shows that the Hepburn family have moved round the corner to a spacious terraced house at 2, Ailsa Drive.

As we move through the Hepburn family history, it is not long before I find other directory records that show that William Hepburn has started a Lady’s Mantle Manufacturing business. He is the co-director of a company, Hepburn and Smith Limited, based in Queen Street, Glasgow. The emphasis is on manufacture, and I don’t think it was a shop. From being a woollen warehouseman, William Hepburn has joined forces with a partner to start what was to become a substantial family business.

Queen Street during the first half of the 20^th Century was a hive of industry relating to the manufacture of woollen and linen garments. Lady’s mantles were clothing worn over the shoulders as an outer garment. They could be fashionable or domestically utilitarian. What the Hepburn’s market in this line was I cannot find at this point. Today, there is very little that I can find to show for this area of work.

Moving on a further ten years and the 1921 Census return shows that James was married.

On the 5^th December 1916, James and Jane Brown were married according to the rites of the United Free Church at the Douglas Hotel in Blythswood. James was 25 and described as a mercantile clerk, while Jane, aged 27 was described as a lady’s mantle saleswoman. Let us assume that James was working for Hepburn and Smith, following his father’s footsteps and meeting Jane on a fairly regularly basis during their work.

James and Jane started their married life in Battlefield, an area on the south side of the city, not far from Earlspark Avenue. Their address was 39 Lochleven Road. This is a four storey tenement building, probably similar to the one he was brought up in, in Dennistoun.

Lochleven Road was close to shops and transport. It was a developing area of the city and popular with commuters to the city centre and local factories. At the time of the Hepburn’s marriage, there were two very large factories on the side of the River Cart at the end of their road. One of them was a lady’s glove factory which, shortly after 1916, was commandeered to make military uniforms for the forces during the First World War. During the war there was a lot of dissatisfaction by the workers over their wages. One of the factories, Weirs Pumps (still in operation today under a different name), would not agree on a wage increase but they did try to ameliorate the dispute by purchasing farmland leading down to the river from Earlspark Avenue and turning it into a landscaped sports field with pavilions and fields for tennis, bowls and cricket. It was formally called Albert Park. It remains fully in use to this day although it is now a community sports charity.

The question arises about Jame’s life during the war. At the age of 26, two years after the outbreak of the war, was he excused from service, and on what grounds? By the time of the 1921 Census return, James and Jane had a daughter, also named Jane, and she was nearly four years old. James was clearly described as a Bookkeeper with Hepburn and Smith.

From here the life and times of James and his family goes cold and there is little that I could discover other than his move to 7 Earlspark Avenue in 1955, and then finally his death in 1978.

I have no sense of the life of the Hepburn family in my house. If George Scott had not modernised it, I wonder what James moved into. The same, original layout with the box bed in the back room and the cooking range perhaps. What we now use as the kitchen used to be the scullery with its own coal fired boiler, Belfast sink and scullery floor drain. Was that the case in 1955 when the Hepburns arrived? I also have to wonder how many Hepburns there were because James would have been 64 years old and and if not retired, not far off it.

In 1962, seven years after moving in, the Hepburns left and sold the house to George Wallace, a schoolmaster. Where James and Jean went, and why, I have not found. They had not lived here for very long, just seven years. Sixteen years later James had died.

 It has whetted my appetite to find out more about James and Jean.