This week I return to the land of dynamite, Stevenson in Ayrshire, where the Nicol family, my wife’s maternal line of ancestry, had established themselves and created a dynasty of workers associated directly or by marriage, with the Nobel Dynamite Factory on the Ardeer peninsula.
Peter and Elizabeth Nicol, you might recall in earlier posts, had arrived in Ayrshire from Aberdeenshire in the latter part of the 19th Century to find a better way of life than the agricultural labouring and domestic service life that they had started out on. After working in the iron ore mines of the Garnock valley, Peter and Elizabeth moved to Stevenson and found work with Alfred Nobel’s new dynamite factory. In fact, I get the impression that Peter was one of the initial intake of employees with Nobel. His first post was that of a Police Officer, but not a public policeman. Nobel had to provide his own policing under legislation with regards to the manufacture of explosives. Peter would have been responsible for the security of the property which was a large extant of land on a peninsula reaching from Stevenson to Irvine, surrounded by sea and river. He would have ensured that no workers entered the site with matches and no one, of course, left the site with explosives.
Peter and Elizabeth settled in what was probably rented property in buildings and roads that were also probably developed by Nobel. This was the start of their new generation that had its roots almost entirely in the development of the Dynamite factory. They had eight children.
Their fourth child, and first daughter, was named after her mother, Elizabeth, and she was born in 1886. This is based upon her marriage and death records because I cannot find any record for her birth. There could be a few reasons for this including a lost or damaged register, or name spelling. I am surprised, if it is for the latter reason, that nobody else on the usual search sites that I also use has not discovered her birth certificate.
However, I am certain that she was born in Stevenson because that was where the family were living and settled. There is nothing that I know of about her childhood. In adulthood she was a worker in the Nobel factory. Her marriage certificate in 1910 tells us much about the family. Her father, Peter, was then a Magazine Keeper in the dynamite factory. There were several of these, storage bunkers made of brick and covered in turf, to keep the dynamite safe before being exported by ship to wherever it was going to in the world. Elizabeth herself was a Dynamite Worker. She would have spent her working day in a wooden building sited in an excavated bunker with banks of about five or six metres high. In this hut she would be packing tubes with the dynamite and packing them in boxes ready for transport on the Factory site’s own mini railway system that would take the completed explosives to one of the magazines. The design of the bunkers, and there were several of of them, were such that if there was an explosion then it would be contained. There were explosions but to its health and safety record credit, there were only about 100 deaths in the 90 years of its active life. There were at its peak about 15000 workers in the factory.
Elizabeth Nicol aged 24, probably on or after her wedding day, a studio picture which shows her wedding ring. (photo via Ancestry.co.uk.)
On the 31st December 1909, Elizabeth married Hugh Smith. Hugh had nothing to do with the factory, but his father was a Dynamite Worker. Hugh was a Commercial Clerk. This might be of some relief to the family because Elizabeth would be safe from any accidental explosion. The expectation would be that she would give up work and and become a housekeeper for her husband. Just writing that sentence shows how much the world has changed in one hundred and fifteen years. The marriage was a few years before the First World War and years away from the Second.
I’m interested in the date. Choosing to marry on Hogmanay, an unusual choice. They were married in the Stevenson Parish Church Hall. This was a cheaper way than organising a Church wedding and also meant that the hall was possibly used for the reception after.
One of the witnesses was Elizabeth’s sister Jane who was recorded as Jeanie Nicol. The other was John Murray. Jeanie and John later were married.
Co-incidentally, the wedding was on the same day as the official opening of the Manhattan Bridge in New York.
Hugh Smith was born in Kilmaurs in 1886. Kilmaurs was a village a short distance from Kilmarnock. His father Thomas was at that time a Dairyman. At some point before the marriage, the family had moved to Stevenson and Thomas had changed his job.
There is little or no information that I have about Elizabeth and Hugh other than they had a son, Thomas. There is one of those remarkable headstones in New Stevenston Cemetery, that records the Smiths in such detail to make life very easy for family history researchers. It looks as if it is in need of cleaning and grass clearing. I spotted it on another researchers page on Ancestry, originating from Find a Grave. This then led me to someone else researching the Smith family in Stevenson and I discovered this photograph.
The Smith family outside their house in Lundholm Road, Stevenson. To the far left is Elizabeth, the two women with bicycles are unnamed but the small toddler on the saddle is Ethel. To the far right is Hugh Smith and in front are Peter to the left of Thomas. (photo via Ancestry.co.uk)
The three children are named and this photo confirms that the Smiths did in fact have three children.
Thomas was born in 1910 and at this time his father Hugh was still a clerk. A year later Peter Smith was born, possibly named after his grandfather, but now in his birth certificate we can see that Hugh had joined the Nobel Dynamite Factory and was working as an Assistant Magazine Keeper. In 1913 Ethel was born and there is one change in the Smith’s circumstances. Hugh was now described as a Check Weigher. What this was and what it entailed I have no knowledge of but my guess is that the answer is in the description, he checked the weight of the completed explosives for either quality control or for export purposes.
As far as I know, this is the complete Smith family of my wife’s Great Aunt Elizabeth.
Hugh died at an early age of 43, of TB which according to the registry entry, he had suffered for 3 years. A common ailment with no medical cure until 1947 onwards. At the time of his death, he was described as a Motor Driver. The informant was young Thomas who was aged just 19.
Elizabeth died in 1963, her headstone giving a lot of family detail of the Smith family.
I shall pause the story here because there is more research to do now that I have discovered her own family members. I would also like to return to Stevenson to do a bit of headstone cleaning, and to acknowledge these past members of the Stevenson community, one of the roots of my wife’s family.
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