Last year, in March 2024, I went down to Stevenston in Ayrshire to search the headstones in the New Street Cemetery. I wrote a post about this trip that gave some background to the relevance of this interesting burial place. It is where my wife’s great grandparents Peter and Elizabeth Nicol, have a headstone, alongside which I found a small cherub statue which was a memorial to Wee Pete, the son of Peter’s eldest son, also called Peter, who died in the Transvaal in South Africa in infancy.
I remember that visit well. It was not raining but it was cold and still coming to the end of winter. There was no growth on the trees or shrubs, but the headstones and paths looked neglected after another hard winter. I know that councils all over Scotland are struggling with income and therefore old cemeteries such as New Street might get the occasional grass cutting in the summer but other than that, my guess is that it is down to the relatives of those who are buried there to do any maintenance.
The Nicols, you may have read in previous posts, were a generation that grew up in Stevenston during the dynamite years of Alfred Nobel. His large factory site based on the Ardeer Peninsula, gave employment for up to 15000 during its peak years of the 20th Century. Peter and his sons and daughters were able to benefit from the security of employment there for several decades.
Recent research into Elizabeth Nicol, the eldest daughter, has given me a lot of information about her life and marriage to Hugh Smith. One insight was a photograph of the Smith family gravestone in the New Street Cemetery. It was looking a bit rough around the edges with overgrow grass and looked as if it needed some care and attention. This was an opportunity for me to take my wife down to Stevenston to discover the burial place of some of her relatives.
Visiting church yards and cemeteries is an interesting hobby. It requires a bit of research in advance to ensure that who you are looking for is buried or remembered there. It is never just a few burial places or headstones but usually lots more than you imagined. The wonderful thing about my partner is that she can find exactly who we are searching for with minutes of arrival, or certainly before me. There was one occasion about seven years ago when we found her great grandmother’s memorial stone that she had arranged to be erected when she died that detailed the lives of those who had predeceased her. This was in the large churchyard of a small village in Galloway, hidden in the corner of the extensive graveyard. On another occasion she easily spotted the headstone of my great great grandfather in West Norwood, London in a necropolis the size of that village in Galloway. Searching for her great aunt, looking for a flat stone overgrown with grass around the edges should therefore be easy on this occasion.
It was.
New Street is not the biggest of cemeteries, but it has hosted a lot of burials. There are no new burials there, many families have had names added to the stones by masons to ensure that their family history is recorded and written in stone. There is a new cemetery up on the high road of Stevenston along from the entrance of Morrisons. For the past 50 years most Stevenstonians would have been buried there if they had not chosen cremation.
It was the start of a blazing hot day in Ayrshire, and it was the perfect part of the day to search the site. There are several stones that indicate a family connection with Ardeer, as it should do given that most household in the small town would have had employment in the Nobel factory. However, the Nicol and Smith families don’t give this away on their stones, other than Wee Pete. More of that later.
It took only a quarter of an hour for my wife to find her great aunt’s stone. It was a wonderful example of a family grave stone remembering the family line of three generations of the Smith family that Elizabeth Nicol had married into.
At the head of the stone, which lies flat on the ground, is a marble slab that on first sight might have been mistaken for a small seat. Looking closer, it was the base for either a statue or a vase for flowers. The ground beneath it had eroded showing the bricks which it was resting on.
We had brough some small hand tools to clean the area around the stone and we set to work.
We then sat and read the story on the stone.
Erected by Thomas Smith in loving memory of his wife Marion Roe, Died 19th Sept 1915 Aged 51; Also their sons Thomas and James who died in infancy; The above Thomas Smith, Died 22nd June 1925, aged 65; Hugh Smith, Beloved husband of Elizabeth Nicol, who died 23rd Sept 1929, aged 43; The Above Elizabeth Nicol, Died 24th October 1963, Aged 77; Also their son, Thomas Smith, Died25th August 1982 Aged 72.
In his book, The Hidden Ways (2017), Alistair Moffat writes:
“In a modern culture where many can scarcely recall the names of all four of their grandparents, a sense of importance – and the power of ancestors has been all but lost.”
The Scottish custom of listing the generations on their stones helps to maintain the tradition of remembering our ancestry. It keeps our family alive with stories, if not memories.
After cleaning the stone and surrounding area we walked across to the Nicols and Wee Pete.
Their stones were in slow decay. The Nicols headstone had an interesting method of raised lettering that was made of a composite stone material and then set in place with tiny pins. Some of the letters were disappearing with time but the words could still be clearly read. I can only assume it was an innovative method that had been introduced in the 1920’s when the Nicols had the stone erected. Next to their stone, the cherub on top of Wee Pete’s stone memorial had lost its head.
There was little to do around the headstone but Wee Pete’s memorial needed some earth scraped away from the base so that we could read the story, or clues to his story.
Wee Pete was the son of Peter Nicol who was born in 1881 while his parents were living in Seaside Cottages adjacent to the School House in Stevenston. According to the Scottish Census of that year, his father, also Peter Nicol, was working as a Private Police Officer at the Dynamite Factory that had recently opened. It was a legal requirement for munitions and explosive manufacturing factories to have their own policing system.
In 1891 the Nicol family, with Peter now a scholar at the age of 10, had moved to Lucknow Cottages in Dynamite Road. This is how quickly the Nobel factory was developing, building its own housing to bring in more workers. Lucknow Cottages had nothing to do with India but was the name of a local coal mine that had ceased operations by then.
The 1901 Census, on Scotland’s People, shows that Peter had left home. I have found him in the return for Bothwell where he is recorded as a boarder and working as a Joiner. From here the records in Scotland are non-existent. However, I am beginning to piece together a story about his life. There are passenger records available online that show that he travelled from South Africa as a lone passenger. He also travelled to South Africa in 1922 where in the passenger list he was described as a Contractor aged 43. Wee Pete was born and died in Transvaal.
A quick search online to find more information about Modderfontein in Transvaal, the place where Wee Pete died, came up with this fascinating account of how this town was developed under the direction of a member of Alfred Nobel’s company. Peter Nicol who had started out in life as a Joiner had now become a Contractor and I am getting the feeling that he was an important part of the development of the Explosives factory and accompanying houses, in Modderfontein. Yet another avenue of research to follow.
Before leaving New Street Cemetery we had a quick look at another monument that was impressive by its design and size relating to someone else who was connected to Nobel’s factory.
It was now too hot to carry on and we were thirsty and hungry. After 90 minutes of searching, cleaning, learning and discovering we were happy with our findings and the new information that we were gathering for future stories.
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